2019-10-03 - Blood and Borrowed Jackets

When Lilith calls the Captain, she sounds like it's a huge emergency and notifies him she's stalling calling the ambulance until after he gets a head-start. She manages with pressure on Katy's flayed open arms til then. And wouldn't you know, she's wearing his jacket when he walks into a mess of a scene. Somehow, it's escaped blood, she's taken the time to push up the sleeves while tending and was behind the shop girl when her arms came flying bloodily open at the seams.

There's a bunch of fallen shelving and junk by the door where one of the shelves seems to have broken and tumbled, the middle aged woman who was buried and hit by debris seated to one side jarred and staring at Lilith tending all the blood and the girl. Thankfully there's not anymore screaming, pain and shock and blood loss has her slumped woozy in a chair behind the messy counter and the floor is slick with crimson spills on both sides where it's all ran.

It took a little while for de la Vega to turn up, so he doesn't quite manage to beat the ambulance over. He's also technically not on duty; the past week and a half has seen him down for the count with that flu that's been plaguing everyone and their dog, though rumours also abound that his girlfriend chained him to the bathroom sink of his hotel room at some point. Something to do with not being in his right mind.

He pulls up in that beast of a Charger, kills the engine and climbs out. And he's armed, of course, once he makes it up to the shop. Holstered sig sauer, dark tee shirt, worn jeans and motorcycle-style boots; his dark eyes scan the damage, and observe the paramedics filing in to do their job before his focus shifts to Lilith herself. A silent question in his eyes: what's going on?

Lilith presses her lips into a flat line and stares right at Ruiz with slow steps backwards to put herself away from Katy and out from behind the counter so the paramedics can take over and start tending to the bloody gashed open forearms. The girl is quite pale and though it looks like a sloppy vertical suicide attempt given two antique daggers on the counter, the fact that something like that would actually happen right there behind the counter on the shop floor? It's odd. But people go a little crazy sometimes.

Lilith goes a little crazy sometimes too. Especially when touched by the Ghoul on the sly.

The middle aged woman is talking about her heart condition and lawyers and damages while being helped up by another paramedic to walk out and have a seat in the ambulance, away from the scene. She's probably fine, but people are people. Lilith shoots her a glower when she moves out, pacing quickly to where the Captain is to meet as if conferring or being interviewed. Her voice is probably purposefully pitched high enough for the paramedics to hear, "She... might have tried to kill herself."

Then again, the tone in Lilith's voice says 'maybe she didn't' and it backburner conveys to the guy that she's waiting for the room to clear out before telling him what really happened. Katy sure isn't in any way to talk about it and she was very confused and leaning by knives and she has no shine at all, which means she really won't be able to explain a damn thing anyway. Poor girl is going to have to spend a little time with psych help, though, Lilith labeling it what she is to the attendees.

Once he's taken stock of the shop and the current situation, Ruiz pushes his hands into his jeans pockets and prowls on over to where Lilith's retreated. The paramedic who's assisting the other, more ambulatory woman out, greets the captain by name on his way by. It's returned with a flickered smile and a slow slide of his gaze over the woman, before his attention returns to Lilith. Once the others are gone, he asks in a low voice, "Are you all right?" The question suggests a little more than the obvious, are you injured? He's curious what happened. He knows Winslow is somehow involved. He can still taste Gohl's influence over her, as she can likely feel it on him. Palpable.

"Yeah... yeah." Lilith tells the Captain after staring at the doorway another moment with residual glower for the lady talking about lawyers and her heart condition in the same breath. For just a flicker of time, it looks like she's going to lash out in some way, but after blowing out a breath and looking at the paramedics taking a shellshocked and bloody pale Katy out too, she doesn't. She just breathes for a minute and puts a palm flat against her forehead with press, the skin still a bit feverish to the touch.

Then when they're alone with the blood and mess and low hum of the radio station playing some indie rock over the store speaker system for ambiance, Lilith wets her lips and finally looks back at her remaining company. After swallowing down visibly, she slips from his jacket she's wearing with drop of hand from her head, pulls her phone from the pocket, then puts it in her lounge pants pocket while handing the previously borrowed garment over. Eventually, after taking a beat, she explains.

"... I might have a problem. I got mad." It's a pretty calm and simple explanation, but the tone is weighted serious and contemplative, as if she's trying to figure out how much it really was her fault. For a moment, her fine brows knit down, "I don't feel bad. She's been awful all week and I was on the phone mad at someone else, and..." She studies de la Vega standing there for a couple of heartbeats before asking, "... it's hard to tell if it was an accident or on purpose. But I don't... feel bad. Have you been having problems more than usual?"

For someone that almost probably killed someone by flaying them open and unluckily blew up a shelf on a customer, she's seriously pretty calm. It's not like the horrified guilt that the man felt coming off of her at the hospital last time she was possessed and ripped into people, but... then again, the impairing ring was curse-broken from her at that point. Now? Hmm. She hasn't quite made the connection, but looking at the man, she seems to be trying to figure it out. How much of that was her and how much wasn't?

Does it matter? Bitch had it coming.

Lilith then murmurs something about needing a lawyer and gets out her phone to send off a quick text as rational afterthought after all that contemplative expression.

He doesn't really need to use that keen, sharply honed mind of his to stitch his way in between her unspoken words and unearth the truth of them. Does he? Even a blind man can see that there's something Not Right about her, being so calm in the face of what's just happened. That girl with her arms flayed open, being rolled past him on a stretcher, and he felt the horror rolling off her in waves. So much so that he had to wall himself off before it could bleed through and agitate his own frangible mental state.

There's a residual unevenness, a flicker of it in his dark eyes when he regards Lilith, and accepts the jacket held out to him. "Do you think that you should?" Feel badly. He pushes his arms through the sleeves one at a time, then shrugs the jacket over his shoulders, swallowing up the ink scrawled densely along both arms. Has he been having problems? Well, the nasty looking gouges along his right inner forearm might have spoken to that. And the various cuts and bruises that are clearing up here and there. His jaw sets, but he doesn't answer that question. "And have you had any other instances of this happening?"

Should Lilith feel bad? After her brief survey of the guy once she's made phone exchange, she stops to think about it instead of automatically finishing the shrug of her narrow shoulders in the black tank she's wearing with black lounge pants and flip flops. After batting her lashes a couple of times, she nods a little bit at the Captain with answering to the first piece, her brows knitting back down. And while she doesn't sound like she feels badly, because honestly, she still thinks that Katy shouldn't have helped push her to that point, she knows that's also a little off for her and the general situation was awful. She knows that rationally, clearly, because slowly, she says, "I mean. I'm not a sociopath, generally, and it doesn't usually feel good to rip into whole people after the fact. It's..."

Her teeth set on edge with a confused little 'tch' before her head shakes some, explaining to de la Vega with a hand kind of lifting toward the back of the shop and the staircase. Her eyes are still kind of red-rimmed with residual mild fever and fatigue, but she apparently was trying to join the land of the living today, with taper down of symptoms after days, "I haven't been around anyone else for this to happen. I've been sick and upstairs pretty much... since that night at Erin's. Byron came and stayed once early in, but we just slept and then he left in the morning, we were both sick and have only been texting since. You in the dream, that's all I've... and we had other concerns..."

Then she looks confused, "I wasn't even at the exorcism. And I'm not Gohl blooded like Alexander. People were talking about him being touched and ragey, but... maybe the illness is just... I-- she'd been awful and useless all week and calling all hours over anything and everything while I was sick and Katy was just there when it finally... mmnnm."

The Captain gets a call he has to take and leaves the Pawn after the both of them agree she should maybe stay upstairs for her sake and maybe the sake of everyone else.