2019-08-10 - Winners Go Home & F*ck the Prom Queen

The door to motel room 14 sits underneath a gently buzzing porch light. The curtains are closed on the singular window but a light can be seen from within, muted greatly by the dark maroon curtains. The door, painted in a slightly dark red that shows signs of flaking paint and possibly regret for what it's done to the wood beneath, oddly, is unlocked.

Inside, Carver is asleep. He rests; shirtless, chest bandaged with something that might resemble skill if you squint, atop the bed. A sea of white towels stretches out around his dozing form, with more and more of the fabric the closer in proximity they are to his torso stained with a telltale mark that Sutton knows only too well.

The room itself is spartan. A chest of drawers, the bedside tables, one lamp and a coffee maker are about all the amenities. There was a chair and a table, but those are currently covered in discarded clothes, including his old coat. A door to the back of the room leads to a small bathroom, although the interior remains concealed behind the closed wood.

Sutton shows up sometime around three in the morning with a cross-body bag on, her hands in the pockets of her cargo pants, the ones she wears to work, her belt, her rubber flip flops, and a pink v-neck tee, that reads, in grey letters:

you can't buy
H A P P I N E S S
but you can buy
G I N
which is the same thing

She stands out in a light drizzle, the shoulder-length blonde hair on her head slowly taking on a mist of water to loosen the even waves into smaller curls. It's barely a drizzle really, more of a misting. It'll probably lead to a good fog earlier, as the temperature changes.

She raises a hand and raps lightly on 14. Then she reaches for the handle to see if it's open. Which it is. Ok then, she pushes her way in, and lets the door fall closed behind her. She stands there on the threshold of the room, taking in the surroundings. So this is where he sleeps sometimes. And then she looks at Carver on the bed, asleep, having doctored himself all back alley. On towels. Alseep. With no friends around to make sure he doesn't die in the night. "For fucks sake."

She moves over to the bed spinning her bag around to unzip it and pull supplies. She has a pretty sizable pile going by the time she starts bitching out loud again. "What the fuck, Alistair." He might want to remain sleeping, because what comes next is her removing his bandages to see the damage. She even pulls on some non-latex gloves first. Lucky lad.

All Sutton's shifting of the bed, unpacking and movement does is... summon a noise from Carver.

It's not even an angry noise. It's the sound someone makes when they're starting to wake up right before that early morning alarm goes off. The slight confusion, the argument without knowing a cause or solution. It's just that. A noise. Shit, he doesn't even move. Not to shift, not to adjust, not to bat away her hands when they reach out for the bandages.

Which come away wet, the wounds beneath showing the ragged flesh of hundreds of mauling teeth that runs in a gentle arc from his right collarbone down to his sternum. Hey, at least he's still got a nipple. They're rips and tears in tiny little chomped gouged as opposed to cuts or slices, not deep enough to hit bone, but the tissue beneath alternating between starched white of minimal damage and the deep color of exposed muscle.

It doesn't seem to be bleeding anywhere near as much as it should. And smells slightly of... mint?

Okay, that's just all manner of fucked up. It's really probably the mint that's getting to her. That, above all, is the weird bit. She's not even going to consider what might have been there. She just stares for a moment, then shakes her head, and pulls a few more items out. Tears are one thing. Gouges missing are another. She stops wasting time and pulls out an antibiotic, which he's probably going to feel going on. He's going to feel it either way. Hopefully this doesn't hurt him too much. If it does? Sorry, Carver, it's happening. "Stay still." He's going to come awake one way or the other, right?

Her touch is as light as it can possibly be. She doesn't gag because she's a professional, but it definitely pains her to see him hurt like this. And whatever's left of the other scars on his body.

Of the other scars? That circular wound on his abdomen is just.. a scar, now. There's a little blackening around the edge, but that might just be the skin there contrasting hard against the undamaged flesh next to it.

And Carver's asleep, lady. He's away and lowercase 'd' dreaming about fields. Actually, no, let's make it nicer for him. Pubs. Old and smokey, the building they're in built before America was but a twinkle in any white person's eye. A pint. People yelling over the dartboards. Antibiotics hitting his torn fl-

Carver wakes up, eyes snapping open and a hand instinctively moving to knock away the thing causing such discomfort. Which would be great if he wasn't working with the strength of a puppy right about now. "Go'ome." The voice is raspy and quiet, even though he's been taking in enough actual fluids to keep him hydrated and his throat fine. The eyes blink, focusing on her face for a second before closing once more. "Don'gotta."

"Shut the fuck up unless you got something to say I'm going to want to hear." Sutton's reply is surprisingly sharp considering he's probably both out of it because of sleep and blood loss and alcohol. He has been dr — "Did you pour peppermint schnapps on this to disinfect it?" Just a shot in the fucking dark. He better not say yes.

"You know, I do this for a living. It's my fucking calling. How dare your dumb ass do some fucked up motel room trauma response when you had the balls to text me, fuck around in my apartment, and not stay. Even when I told you you could stay." She's a little upset. A little bit. The fact that she's this upset but still holding it together is a testament to her willpower when she's doing medical shit.

Bandages come next. She bandages him up like a motherfucker. So when the banana bag comes out of her pack, that should come as no surprise. She loops a hair elastic in the little hanging ring and then secures it on the wall-mounted bedside lamp knob. The sharp scent of alcohol is briefly caught, and then the cold packet hits his arm. "If you move, I'm just going to stab you six times out of spite."

To say Carver had been drinking would be an... overstatement?

Sure, there was some scotch to dull some pain, but that's only because he decided to weigh up the pros and cons of A double of Scotch vs more aspirin pills than anyone really needs, and figured certain aspects of aspirin would make that really, really bad for his future life expectancy. So then he went and pissed off Sutton, instead. Which right now doesn't look like it's going to have a much better prognosis.

He's not really responding to much. His brain's taken him at least partially somewhere else. Where he doesn't have to worry so much about the rolling feel of knives over part of his chest. Really, his only consolation prize here is that the last wound he got to his torso was cold. Remarkably cold. Horrifically cold. The burning warmth of this one is almost pleasant, in comparison. When she moves him, he moves. When she re-positions him, he re-positions.

His eyes open for a little moment, looking at her face. Looking at the anger.

"Your eyes are lighter when you're mad."

It takes her a long moment to find a vein. She ties him off with a nitrile tourniquet and tries to bounce her fingers along his veins. "How long were you bleeding, you ass?" She thought she was mad before. Her bedside manner is amazing. It could be the stress of everything the last three days has thrown at her face finally rolling down to rest on her shoulders now that most of the sundry crisis — crises? have been averted. Nope, just when she thought it was safe to go home, blood, blood, bandages, aspirin, blood.

"My men are idiots." All of them, right now, are just... spectacular decision makers. She comes down off an epic riling after a moment of searching for a vein in all that pale skin. When she thinks she has one, she goes in at a low angle, waits to see blood pull through, then connects the tubing after pulling the central needle from the vinyl that stays in his arm. She tapes it down, well, and loops it lightly to tape that down too, so he won't just roll over and pull it out. "I know. They pull green when I have a headache." She sits on the edge of the bed.

She pulls off the gloves and tosses them onto the bedside table. "You can't leave a trail of blood and disappear." That last is said much more softly than the rest.

Carver replies, quickly when asked, that he had been bleeding for soft mumble amount of time.

Which is good, really. Mumbling means he can't go through a long winded explanation about how everything the last three days has thrown at her is the reason he didn't want her help. He meant to clean her apartment. Completely. He fully intended to. And at the start, he did. When stress and fatigue started slipping into his system, a few things slipped through the cracks. When the shock wore off and the pain really started kicking in? He just needed to get out.

His eyes flutter back open from another bout of sliding shut, watching her as she slips the feed to the banana bag in, finding a vein quicker than he ever did when he was looking to forget.

They close again only when she tosses the gloves. "I didn't want to."

And he didn't. He hoped not to leave a trail of blood at all.

"Yeah, wanting to clean it up so I wouldn't know is not the point, Alistair." Sutton's giving him shit he probably won't remember later. She opens up the IV to run fluid faster, having no idea how much blood he's lost. He's fairly out of it, and she's not sure which thing is causing that.

She sighs. "Look, I'm not going home. Elias is still mad about your swinging cod, as he put it, and I'm not into listening to my brother talk about dick anymore. God love him, he won't shut up now that..." She can see him. Which is funny, since all she wanted was to see him. The confluence of events is too much this week on top of most of her closest people being all fucked up over a shooting or whatever Carver's gotten into. "I'll do my best to be sure you wake up tomorrow. Do you want a painkiller?"

"Heeeeeey."

The tone in his voice is pretty similar to the time his head bounced off of a wall in her apartment, and before he finds himself drifting away to sleep, shaking his head ever-so-softly at the offer of a painkiller, Carver finds himself not lying.

He wishes he were. God, everything in him wishes that he were. That this wasn't what, somewhere down there, he'd actually wanted all along.

But no. Carver, as is his way, curses himself with an easy smile. "You can see him. I'm glad, pet."

Sutton seems to take his no for a yes, because she uncaps a syringe without needle, twists it into the IV, and dispenses about half of whatever liquid that is, caps it, and tosses it into her bag, along with all the old gauze and paper leavings into a little plastic bag which is also jammed into it. She clears off the other half of the bed and curls up on it with her phone.

"Yeah." I'm glad you can see him. The yeah doesn't sound super enthusiastic, but it's been a long few days. The mattress barely shifts when she gets onto the bed, curls up on her side facing Carver so she can watch him. She doesn't even suggest he go to the hospital, which has to be a first. There are more things fucked in this town, Horatio, and all that. Philosophy or something.

"Go to sleep." She pulls up Candy Crush on her phone and turns off the sound. This game is a nightmare.

Incongruously, she asks, "When was the last time you did laundry?" That's probably a rhetorical question.