2019-08-07 - Too Damn Pretty To Die

The hospital room where Isabella and Ruiz have been jointly stationed, at least for the short term, is a sterile room composed of two beds, two patients, and an impressive amount of medical equipment designed to make sure they both stay alive. Isabella seems to have fared a little better than the captain, though gained the dubious honour of being the vehicle of the sheriff's wrath. Ruiz, on the other hand, simply took too much fire from too many corners; being built like a brick shithouse will only get you so far, and then it's a numbers game.

Y luego ser nada, he'd told her at the firing range that drizzly evening. And then be nothing. Nothing, indeed.

He's resting, currently; eyes open a sliver to watch the door while he's treated to a heady cocktail of morphine, sedatives, and fluids being pumped through the IV slid into his arm. Sprawled in that hospital bed, his powerful frame bruised and bloodied and a testament to just how much punishment he took, it's hard to picture the stern police captain that usually inhabits his broken body.

You're also not alone.

She did not dismiss those words when they had been spoken to her. The first thing she did after ending that call was drive to Addington Memorial Hospital, to update her medical records there, and include a new name on her list of emergency contacts in the event that something happened to her. She was never good with emotions - to her, it is a constant struggle to acknowledge anything visibly outside of joy and anger. But she often elects to show these unspoken tokens in other ways - in this instance, the choice to believe Alexander Clayton when he had said that.

It was probably apparent, to even those who know her casually, that Isabella Reede's temper was similar in nature to the rampaging cyclones that tended to build over the oceans of the world; simply too furious, too large, to be contained by its more fragile and feminine human shell. A few hours of emergency surgery after being shot five times in the chest has landed her here in the intensive care unit next to Captain Javier Ruiz de la Vega, her fellow survivor of the evening's strange events. She is still unconscious when Ruiz manages to crack open his eyes; ever watchful, ever wary. Were she awake, she would appreciate her earlier words about him even more - that she has been around military men all of her life.

I know a warrior when I see one, she had said.

She is in a hospital gown, dark brown hair framing her face in chaotic swirls, the vibrant hue of those green-gold eyes nowhere in sight. Intravenous fluids pass through the thin tube threading her arm into the bag situated somewhere above her head. She stirs occasionally in her sleep - shot in the chest so many times, even in this strange town, doctors are baffled that a body that doesn't look as hardy as the captain's has managed to cling to life. But she does; tenaciously, fiercely - a testament to just how endless the fight in her truly is. She is not an idle creature even when her body is forced to sleep, fingers curling in her sheets now and then.

"Hgh..." she breathes, her head rolling over on one side.

Her belongings are on the table next to her, to be moved once she gets her own recovery room - the first twenty-four hours are always crucial, much like missing persons cases. Folded in plastic were her valuables, her clothes cut from her when she had been brought in. They had been disposed of, but the important personal effects have been kept in a bag; her wallet, her phone, a set of keys, and the moonstone pendant she is never without, its beautiful color marred by splashes of coagulated blood.

Wakefulness is a fleeting thing when one's drugged up on as much sedative as they are. The man in the other bed has been splitting his attention between the door and Isabella's bed, while he swims in and out of consciousness. The pain is manageable, but the sensation of his body hooked up to all this machinery; the loss of control. The loss of control.

His heart rate spikes, causing one of the monitors to start bleating in warning. Minutes later, a nurse sweeps in to check on him.. and finds him having dozed off again. She fusses for a few moments, smoothes the blanket over his lap, checks the IV in his inked arm. Then bustles over to Isabella's bed to do much the same. Satisfied that both of their vitals are strong, the nurse slips back out again, and the room is plunged into an uneasy silence punctuated by the beep.. beep.. beep of the captain's heart, translated from electrical impulses into digital background noise as the dusk fades to night.

It's hours before he wakes again, thrust into a state of partial lucidity with a rough murmur of, "Karin." Whoever the hell that is.

It's the beeping that finally wakes her.

Steady, like the rhythm of one's heart - which she discovers upon her gradual float back to the waking world isn't all that far from the truth. Isabella dreams, of course, her mother had been fond of saying that all Reedes Dream of water, so it probably isn't surprising that no matter how horrifying the delusion, how intense the nightmare, the way she rises back to the surface is always a calm and gentle thing. She was a diver, a proud carrier of a master's certificate, has been exploring the ocean depths since she was but a girl - she knows how perilous it truly is to rise too fast, too quickly.

Not that it's stopped anyone. After all, they're just dreams.

Right?

"Captain...?"

He'd hear her in the darkness, her voice a quiet whisper - so soft that when he finds her eyes in the darkness, hooded and watching him from where she lies, that the hitched vulnerability stitched in those syllables belies the life he manages to find. Blazing, brilliant green, twin solar flares under the shaft of moonlight streaking through the windows by her bed where it slants across her eyes and leaving her partially illuminated, the shape of her cheek and the curve of one shoulder.

He's alive.

Lashes slip closed again. "Thank god," she murmurs, the words somewhat absent, somewhat dreamy.

"Miss Reede." It takes him a while to pluck her name out of the jumble of his mind's drug-addled workings, and longer still to make his mouth work well enough to offer it.

The man has been awake for a while by the time Isabella speaks to him, though surely his condition is even more dire than hers. He looks out of place here, like a predatorial animal caught in a leg trap intended for another. Agitated, watchful of his surroundings. Aggression smoothed away under all those sedatives and painkillers they're pumping through his system. He'd been watching the window - what time is it? what day? - but shifts his dark eyes to the woman reclined in the bed across from him, and skims her cheek and shoulder half illuminated by ambient moonlight.

"How are you feeling? I was worried about you." His voice is scratchy from having something, likely a breathing tube, shoved down his throat at some point.

I was worried about you.

The frank admission catches her by surprise and for a moment, her drug-addled senses can't comprehend what he's saying, or why. But she manages to part the foggy veils of her own consciousness enough to be able to accept the words for what they are. Her expression softens considerably, if that were even possible - the green-eyed archaeologist's expression is locked in that dreamy-pained state, as if someone had unexpectedly driven a knife through the softest parts of her.

"Me?" she whispers, not without good humor, though her own voice is hoarse, its normal contralto cracked and frayed on the edges. "Captain, I saw you fall...I thought you were..."

Even the post-op painkillers aren't enough, in the end, to prevent a sudden hot wash of fury; her body can't contain it at the moment and for a breathless second or two, he'd find her stare burning in the darkness, so luminous at the memory of her mother's killer orchestrating events to take another life she is connected to once more that her rage renders her eyes more gold than green, amber shards lit like distant suns.

But something hurts and she slowly curls into herself, groaning softly.

"I'm happy you're alive," she says instead - words she wouldn't normally say, but her relief and the influence of the painkillers lubricate them enough that they slip past her lips with barely a hitch. They are somewhat muffled by her pillow, but after a blink, she manages to find his profile in the darkness of his side of the room.

"Are you alright...?" she ventures hesitantly. "...you were calling for someone. It woke me."

Dead? He's pretty sure that's what she means, though he doesn't voice it. They've got him partially reclined by this point, so he has a relatively unimpeded view of the woman across from him, and each shift and nuance of her current state. "There is a button to your left. If you need more painkillers." His voice is quiet, and threaded with that accent that sometimes seems more or less prominent than others. Tonight, is speech is drenched with it.

"I am not easy to kill, Miss Reede," he offers after a while, with some wry amusement. Even when I might wish otherwise. Does she see it in his eyes, or is she too blinded by her own discomfort?

And, "Was I?" His brows knit a touch. "I'm sorry."

I am not easy to kill.

Isabella refrains from the button and the painkillers - she's a prideful creature and perhaps some part of her feels as if she deserves the pain. Memories of the night feel distant, far away, but what does feel close is the fact that her mother's killer had been within breathing distance, and she was unable to do anything - not shake him for answers, not strangle him with her bare hands. It was a glimpse of the past, a re-enactment of things that have already happened, and perhaps with some embellishments and other tricks that Gray Harbor tends to inject in the proceedings. But she is in mourning, chafing under the weight of a few significant failures, and even in spite of the desire to do the right thing, and keep her head...

...she is only human. And one with a temper.

"I know," she murmurs, with all the certainty of a career Navy man's child, her smile faint and commiserating. "And you're just too damn pretty to die."

...it's the drugs. Right?

It's the levity she tends to grasp, even in the state she's in, because she can see the man's dark eyes and what they hold; an expression she knows well, because she has seen it before. On her father's face after his accident, torn forcibly out of a career he loved. Her mother's face, when she lost her only son.

Her own, when she lost her twin - the other half of her heart and soul, his loss carrying with it what she considers to be the very best parts of her; bound to him in ways that not many would be able to understand.

"Don't be," she says softly, her hand lifting as if by instinct, to reach out for him - but her pupils shrink, addled by the pain of every movement and her fingers drop on the bed. A quiet silence descends, punctuated occasionally by the clicks and whirs of diagnostic equipment - his and hers.

Finally: "I don't...it's not in me to impose myself on anyone," she begins quietly. "And I'm not so conceited that I think that I'd be able to help you in any practical or tangible way, if I offered it." She cannot help but fail when it truly matters after all; the bitter sensation of it ripples over her stomach, leaving her sick. "But if there's anything you think I can render assistance, even in some small way, I hope you won't hesitate to ask."

Something she says causes him to chuckle. Which he immediately regrets, on account of the fact that the very act of breathing is more painful than he'd care to admit. He is, perhaps, as prideful as she - with the added burden of an image of enduring strength to uphold. To his unit, before he was discharged from the military. To his family, when he had one. To his men at the precinct, assuming he still has a job once he gets out of here.

"I think you've either lost your mind, or your sight." Pretty? Him? He has the look of a brute or a warlord on a good day. The blood of Spanish conquistadors and Aztec Cuauhocelotl runs deep in his veins.

That silence, broken by the mechanical sounds of clicking, whirring and steady beeping, settles in between them for a time. And then he offers quietly, "I'm curious what makes you think I am in need of assistance." He drinks in her mourning, unmarked as it is now by the ribbon she had around her wrist. Not that she needs it, for her anguish to be plain as day to one such as he, who can taste her torment as surely as if it were his own. "Do you think it will.. assuage your own pain?" It takes him a moment to think of the word.

I think you either lost your mind, or your sight.

"Maybe both," Isabella murmurs, her smile an easy and casual thing; her humor largely operates as her armor in the best of times, let alone her worst - her closest associates know this well about her, and Ruiz is about to be introduced to it also. "I'm still not convinced I'm not dreaming, somehow. For all you know, you look completely different to me right now than you do in the real world. Maybe right now you're blonde and with a jaw that can open canned goods."

His query is a good one, and she isn't inclined to line. Lashes drape heavily over her eyes, darkening their more vibrant color. "A friend said that you might be in trouble," she murmurs. "I told him that you might be more inclined to let him in once in a while if he just said that his door is open instead of bulling through yours all the time. I thought...I would take my own advice."

She mourns, yes, but she smothers it with the same, defiant and ferocious way of hers, but it is difficult to hide when the other person is so inured to loss that he can taste it in the air and knows its scent anywhere. The Trickster in her steps back into the shadows and after several heartbeats, she does nothing but watch him - perhaps because she is attempting to find the words. She was never good with emotions, not really. In that regard, Alexander was more functional than her.

"No," she tells him quietly. "I don't think it'll ever go away. But I think you and I are the same, so I'm hoping that you would at least consider the possibility that whatever you're struggling with, I would be able to understand." She isn't even sure if what she was told and the name he called out in his sleep are related. But they have to be, aren't they? Tragedy begets tragedy, an endless wheel that turns and turns until someone decides to outright grab it by the spokes and shatters it on the ground, and says 'no more.'

"I see," he muses quietly, distinct amusement in the captain's tone now. "So you like blondes with killer jaws. Voy a tener esto en cuenta. Unfortunately, I think you are stuck with me, for now." A man twenty years her senior with a greying beard and dozen or so shell casings recently extracted from his body. He probably more closely resembles swiss cheese than man right now.

Something else she says causes him to squint slightly, and something akin to reticence flickers across his eyes. "A friend." Said he might be in trouble. "Is this friend's last name Clayton, by any chance?" Call him suspicious, but he has reason to believe that it is. "No, Miss Reede. I assure you I don' t require any assistance." He watches her back, but gives very little; his is a cultivated distance, honed over years of needing, for various reasons, to appear impenetrable. Capable.

It's only after he's been quiet for a time, that she might notice he's started to doze back off again. The sedatives only afford so much.

So you like blondes with killer jaws.

The return fire comes out of left field and Isabella can't help but stare at Ruiz for a moment before she slowly rolls on her back. She tries not to laugh, but she gives up - it sounds hoarse, thready, in desperate need for water. And it hurts - javelins of pain carve up her ribs, but she embraces the pain. She was never afraid of it, and lips part to spill these croaking mirthful notes in the quiet of their recovery room. Eyes glisten with hints of unshed tears, because it hurts to laugh, but they are as stubborn as she is - they do not fall.

"No, I just went with a stereotypical image," she confesses. "At the end of the day, I'd prefer to be with someone who could make me laugh and who could keep up with me. Dark hair is a plus." Her lashes flutter. "So in the end, I'm quite fortunate, Captain." And she gives him a sidelong glance, the devil in her, exhausted by there, hinted at her visible eye. "You've got two out of the three boxes pegged."

The suspicious look earns him a mildly amused and exasperated one. "Mmhm. That's what I thought you'd say." Her tone is laden with a total lack of surprise.

Her eyes move over to the ceiling. "Earlier, you said you were worried about me," she murmurs, before lashes fall to kiss her cheeks. "Is it alright to worry about you also?"

The captain, of course, is an incorrigible flirt. So it may, or it may not be surprising at all when he asks softly on the heels of that hoarse, thready laughter, "Which two?" He's fading, slipping in and out of that grey place between wakefulness and slumber as the sedatives weave through his consciousness and draw him in deeper. The pain is intense, and he too is far too proud to push that button.

Her sidelong glance is met with dark eyes under darker lashes. The irises vary from green to grey to near-black; tonight they're the latter, almost completely consumed by blown pupil. "I can't stop you," he tells her in that same low, smoke-roughened murmur. "But I'd rather you didn't."

Which two?

Isabella smiles; he'd be able to see it clearly, how the pliant line of her mouth lifts at the corners, when she is situated in the lighted side of the room, half of her bathed by the Summer moon's bluish-white glow. He'd be able to see her eyes, how her earlier release of humor keeps them ablaze, glowing like green embers. But she does not tell him - she is either cognizant of the fact that he is well on his way to sleep, or she is simply being her impossible self. Even battered and half-dead, her impish nature is impossible to suppress.

He is right, though. He can't stop her. Because once she decides to do something, no force on the planet could - she will try. Perhaps she'll fail, but she will keep trying.

After a few quiet, labored breaths, she speaks again, a little more serious this time: "You can't tell me that after all the things you've told me," she murmurs. "The times you went out of your way to look after me. You never had to do any of it, but you did it anyway. I'm..." Her features soften under the gleaming lunar spill from the outside world. "...I don't know what I've done to inspire it in you, or to deserve it. But I hope I prove to be worthy of it, some day."

Her eyes close completely then, a pained breath escaping her.

"Goodnight, Captain. Thank you for today. I'm glad..." And her lips quirk upwards again. "..that you're too damn pretty to die."

He's already dozed off, though, by the time she tells him good night. The lure of sleep has finally won out over the desire to know precisely which two traits he embodies in her trifecta, and she may never find out what she's done to inspire his kindness.

Maybe, just maybe, it is in atonement for his sins. Which she can rest assured are many.