2019-07-24 - Opposites Repel

It would be understandable to someone who has endured what Alexander Clayton has in the last forty-eight hours that he would be drifting in and out of unconsciousness; with a body ravaged by shock, followed by a not-insignificant surgery, the demands of recuperation and the effects of painkillers alone should guarantee him at least three days' worth of unconsciousness.

It is that expectation that allows Isabella Reede to return to some semblance of a normal routine - she is worried, yes, and her apprehensions about his condition have occupied her thoughts more than once, but she is pragmatic enough, also, to realize that there is no point waiting in the hospital when she wouldn't be allowed to see him, or silently flagellate her beleaguered conscience with the sight of him battered and bloodied, unable to move or even speak. Typical of her usual spirit, she whiles away the hours in her research, diving into a treasure hunt over a different kind and allowing herself some semblance of relief that her clarity of mind has returned - after all, without it, who is she? What is she? Whatever Alexander had sacrificed for her and those others affected by the ring, she had figured to herself that the best way to honor it is not to squander it by wringing her hands uselessly and pacing around in the hospital lobby, waiting to be let in like a desperate debutante outside of a hot nightclub.

That has not stopped her, however, from sweet-talking a male nurse assigned to his ward to call her once his situation changes.

And so it happens that in one of these intermittent spurts of half-lucidity, he would find her on the chair next to his bed, her shoes off and her legs curled up, stockinged feet tucked on the edge of the cushion and knees turned sideways. The book she has open is not in any means light reading, a hefty treatise on the recent unearthing of ancient Greek naval bases in what was once the city of Piraeus - a key point and the site of one of the most famous battles of the Peloponnesian War. There's a yellow highlighter clutched in between deft, delicate fingers, spinning the tool lazily as she reads with the quiet, contemplative look of a born-and-bred academic.

A day or two since the curse's breaking had not been enough to completely eradicate its aftereffects on her person; she has lost weight and her lids carry the weighted look of marrow-deep exhaustion, yet despite these signs, he would find that she is a thousand times more radiant and alive than she had been the last week. Her emerald-gold eyes are as sharp as a hawk's and as clear as mirrors, the bronze and copper highlights of her predominantly dark hair catching stray wisps of sunlight streaming in from the nearby window - another clear Summer's day in Gray Harbor beckoning outside. She's dressed to match its warmth, a pair of shorts and a tanktop with a button-down shirt with three-quarters sleeves half-undone on top of it. Bare legs are kept modest by black thigh-highs that match her shorts.

She makes noises now and then as she reads, though it's difficult to discern whether these passages hold opinions she agrees with, but she highlights a sentence or two before she moves on, but the unmistakable air of expectation, of waiting, pulses from her otherwise focused and studious aura.

On the bedside table next to him is a blue French press, simple and masculine in design and wrought from sturdy, dyed metal and reinforced glass. It has a bow on it.

Alexander is awake, at least for the moment. His body seems to have decided that since he's forced to be in a bed, the least he can do is try to catch up on all the missed sleep. No one, absolutely no one, looks good in a hospital bed, and he is no exception - still pale from blood loss, his hair a sticky mess, but he's sitting mostly up, and when his eyes open, she's there. Reading. His eyes have that slightly glassed, out of focus suggestion that means he's on the Good Drugs. "Miss Reede?" It's tentative. "Are you real?" Because that seems like a pertinent question at this particular moment.

"Yep," Isabella confirms, looking up from her book and flashing him a smile filled with rue. "As real as your prevailing caffeine addiction and as whole as you can manage given the circumstances."

She is, as ever, quick with her quips, closing her heavy text and situates it next to the French press she bought for him, standing up from the chair to venture closer to the edge of his hospital bed. Easing her much more negligible weight on its edge, perching right along it, she watches him with her intense, but ultimately inscrutable look. Compared to him, she is a glaring study in contrasts - what makes her unreadable isn't the lack of expression, but the opposite; a cornucopia of muddled emotions that are in open war to determine dominance. Something flickers past her eyes at examining his face, the grievous injury done to his leg. How pale he was, how tired; a soldier returned from war, from the things that make Gray Harbor so dangerous.

She elects to say nothing; she was never good at that - she isn't Byron, who somehow knows what to say in any situation, always. But gestures often speak louder, and are more emphatic than anything she could ever articulate. It is rare for her to touch someone on her own accord to dispense some manner of comfort and she does this time. Fingers hover over his skin without touching it, the very tips of them easing back a lock of dark matted hair. Her jaw works quietly on the hinges, but she is silent still.

Finally, she sighs, head hanging slightly. "You know," she remarks, that old spark of humor flaring over the line of her mouth. "When I said 'don't die', I meant it."

"It's not an addiction," Alexander mumbles, a touch indignantly. "I consider it a self-prescribed necessity." His nose twitches at the thought of coffee. He's not picky - the hospital coffee has been consumed just as readily as anything else, as if he's simply never had the luxury of developing a sense of good coffee. He watches her with considerably less intensity. His usual rude, focused stare is replaced by - not a vacant expression, but a distant one. Like he's halfway to somewhere else.

He does focus when her fingers come forward, shrinking back into the pillows away from the touch, or what he thinks might become a touch. His stare is wild and wary for a moment, like a caged animal, before her fingers stroke just the hair. He still doesn't relax until the hand is withdrawn entirely. But he musters up a rusty, pained chuckle. "I'm not dead. Mission accomplished."

"I've heard that before," Isabella returns, her tone light and her sideways glance indicative of her usual, irrepressible mischief. "From habitual gamblers. But I'm not judging."

It's the wild and wary stare that has her situating her hand away from him after removing those sticky encumbrances so she could view the state of his eyes more clearly, draped on her lap after legs cross at the knees. The hoarse, amused sound that rumbles out of him, however, is encouraging enough - it has the double-sided effect of twisting her insides and filling her with relief.

To her credit, she knows better than to get him to question the fact that he's alive; he's drugged, God knows what he's willing to believe in the state he's in.

"You did," she allows, eyes gravitating to the fingers splayed on her thigh, examining her clear nail polish. "You did accomplish your mission. Quickly, too. If I'd only known the fastest way to get the malady lifted was to make your life while living with me as untenable as possible, I would have done more to infuriate you. Short-sheet the couch, throw out all the coffee in the houseboat..." She manages to keep a straight face, but is unable to help the way the corners of her mouth twitch upwards in an effort to quell a grin.

After a moment, her eyes lift again to fix on his face. "What happened out there?" she asks.

"The time table wasn't mine," Alexander points out, quietly. His eyes drift closed, although his posture remains alert. His brow furrows as he tries to remember back. "I tried to bait Thorne out of hiding. Suggested I could find Miss Winslow faster, and that if I did it alone, I'd just go ahead and deal with the ring myself. Hoped it would bring him out, get him to attack me. Didn't. So tracked her, instead. Got there. Not quick enough. Two men on the bridge. They jumped. Couldn't stop them." His fists clench, slowly. "Thorne had a gun. Winslow had a noose around her neck. It all went to hell, but the Jones kid showed up. She handled Winslow, I got Thorne. We all got hurt. But not dead. Except the two on the bridge. The ring...gone."

"Time table?" Isabella wonders, attempting to wrack her brain as to what that could reference, but inasmuch as she remembers certain things about his wardenship of her with surefire clarity, there have been times when she was sedated. What she remembers might not be accurate at all.

There's a grim twist to her lips when he mentions the two men jumping; she had read about it in the morning's Gazette. "Right, the prior owner of the ring and...Lilith's father." Hank Winslow wasn't exactly Father of the Year, but she's been out in the world long enough to know that rumors and gossip barely touch the reality of a home, and the fact that it happened while the woman was there to witness it was...

She observes the fingers clenching in silence - but only a heartbeat or two. "You did what you could," she says, pitching her voice quietly. "I know it's not much of a comfort, but if it weren't for you and Magnolia, Lilith or Byron probably wouldn't have made it." She tilts her head back, dark hair spilling over her shoulder as she fixes her eyes on the ceiling. "And I might've spent the rest of my life in an asylum, without the one thing that makes me, me."

"Time table," Alexander agrees, tipping his head forward in a nod. "Never quite runs the right way. Wrong legs for it?" It could be a joke, except that his face is scrunched up with very serious thought. At least, for the moment.

Then it fades, his focus returning as she names one of the dead. "Is that who that was? Knew the Winslow, didn't know the other." His eyes flutter open again. "You're right. It's not much of a comfort." His non-IVed hand rubs at his face, scratching the itchy stubble that's grown up on his jaw. "If it'd been someone who knew more. About the ring. Even about Thorne or Winslow, it might have ended better." There's no real heat to the observation, it's just a weary recitation of facts as he sees them.

His hand falls slowly away. "I'm glad. You're feeling better."

"I think so. I think I recognized the name in the paper from the meeting Byron held at Lilith's pawn shop when we saw the ring for the first time."

A visible frown turns down Isabella's mouth at the weary observation. "If there had been," she rebuts. "But there wasn't. Just you and Magnolia. Sometimes, the circumstances have no choice as to which Good Samaritan gets to save a life, or solve a problem. But it would have to be enough that one exists as the alternative could have been so much worse."

When his attention shifts to her state, however, her smile returns faintly. "I have you to thank," she tells him, her own certain recitation of the facts as she sees them. "You could have chosen to leave me to my own devices, but you didn't. You saved me from myself, and then you went off and helped reclaim my mind. It's..." She pauses, teeth clutching faintly at her lower lip, drawing a flush of color from the dew-clung curve. "...I don't know what I'm going to do to make up for it, but I'll do my best. And you're going to have to let me, I hate owing someone."

"Where did it ultimately come from, though? Why were those thugs after it? What was its purpose? Who builds a thing like that just to drive people to jump off a damn bridge and hang themselves?" Alexander's voice vibrates rough with frustration. "There must be sense to it. But it eludes me."

To the rest, he makes that noise again. The 'you have said words' one. "You don't owe me anything, and I don't want any sort of gratitude from you," he says, looking away towards the door to the room. A twitch in his body, as if he would like to leap up and run away. But since he can't, he just bends his head and sighs. "I just want to go home, say hello to my bird, change into clean clothes, and lay down on my own bed. I don't want things made up for. I just want to get back to my work."

"Don't know, but you were right that it was built...and probably deliberately." Isabella turns her eyes back to look over at him. "The stones were old, but the band was newer - a double-headed snake, and Zodiac symbols embossed on the metal...I'm not a hundred percent certain about it, but while the scaraboei's probably around 18th Dynasty during the time of the Ancient Egyptians, the setting was sixteenth century, and the main gem itself was impossible for me to track. The two-headed snake has different meanings across different cultures, not just the Egyptian guardian of the gates of Duat - it could be an alchemical reference, it could be occult. It's almost like someone went through the considerable effort to piece the thing together from different eras, cultures and principles to produce the desired effect. My only question in the end, other than the why, is who would have that kind of know-how."

With her mind her own again, she's able to collect her thoughts and present them this way; in many ways, that's relieving, too.

The familiar, passive aggressive noise earns him a long look, a flash of frustration in her green-and-gold eyes. She's about to protest and really, by the way that expressive face twists, he can practically anticipate the heated volley of several words, the urge to return merciless fire even as his own stubbornness blasts against the carefully constructed vaults of her. It could be the way he looks longingly at the door, or the palpable sense of wanting to get away from her. But she gets it.

She gets it loud and clear.

She slips from the edge of the bed at that, moving over to the bedside table to pick up her book and cram it into the satchel she brought. "I'm sure if you're good and if you don't aggravate your injury, you'll be out of here in no time," she tells him, tucking her feet into her shoes.

Surely he's interested. Alexander has SAID as much, just a moment ago. He's expressed his interest in historic objects before, and there's no way the dude isn't a complete geek over occult symbology. Just no way. But his jaw sets in a stubborn refusal to engage with the fascinating details she's sharing, his gaze remaining averted, shoulders hunching as it looks like she might be preparing to square off for verbal battle. Cranky, miserable, and reeling from the last few days, he just pushes her away with every bit of nonverbal language he has. A short, sharp nod at her words. "I can hope." Now would be a good time for something to soften the rejection, but he just closes his eyes and tries to pretend she's already gone away.

There's really no surprise that nearly every relationship this man has ever had has ended with people screaming, throwing things at his head, and walking out.

It would be a good time, but there's clearly no expectation of it from Isabella, and while it's probably not surprising that his relationships tend to go that way, it's equally unsurprising for her not to endure taking any serious shit from anyone in the best of times, much less fresh from coming out of their worst. Too prideful, in the end, to impose herself on anyone.

With his eyes already closing, she doesn't say anything else, nor does she make a move to injure him further in any sense.

Instead, sandaled feet can be heard taking up those same, businesslike steps out through the door and down the hall, with a few orderlies - undoubtedly catching the look on her face - giving her a wide berth.