2019-10-16 - Unfulfilled

You know what kicks ass about fuzzy time? We can pretend this scene takes place whenever we want. 😃 For example... On the day Hailey and Harvey were supposed to go apple-picking (as a pretense to finally bang, jesus guys, what's taking so long?!), Harvey's getting himself a text.

Which leads into, like, six straight days of just I'm alive, are you? with some sort of affirmative response. Until those nightmares, when it's sometime in the middle of the night, so maybe it doesn't get seen until morning?

To anyone who wasn't aware what they were going through, it would probably be odd that Harvey's response doesn't come until the following evening, considering how diligently he'd been texting before. But maybe Hailey would understand?

Accessing the loft above the gun shop is as easy as coming in through the stock room, accessible from the alley. Harvey got her that far, and it is in fact Harvey the dog that lets Hailey inside. Though, not really. The big lump that is the dog just sprawls out in front of the door that the human Harvey had to drag himself up off the couch to open, even though he had perfectly good mind powers a week ago. Whatever. At least the whole 'this place looks like a crime scene' thing is overrated. Sure, there's a pile of bloody napkins in the kitchen trash, but the rest of the apartment looks relatively clean. At least, it doesn't look like anybody got murdered up in here.

Harvey, on the other hand, looks like someone tried to murder him and was only almost successful. Much like the dog, he's currently a lump on the sofa in a pair of (clean) boxers and a black cotton t-shirt, applying pressure to the gauze bandage on his forehead. He wasn't kidding about the 'bruised and bloodied' either - he looks like he got run over by a car. There's a huge bruise forming on his leg, a lot of smaller ones on his arms, and scratches that've been cleaned up and bandaged.

Hailey is faring better. She washes her hands a lot, and she's been HEAVILY drugged for several days, so - excepting when she's being run ragged by the baddies - she's probably been mostly unconscious, abiding by her own strict regimen: rest, Tylenol, juice. So she arrives looking less dead than Harvey (either the dog or the man), just pale with big shadows under her eyes. She's also wearing actual clothes, not just her underwear, but it's all of t-shirt-and-jeans and pony-tail.

So she pets the dog - pat-pat, good boy, don't get up, she can let herself in, weak chuckle - and she knock-knocks from the threshold, putting her head in through the open door to get this eyeful of someone that used to be Harvey. The, "Wow," that comes out of her is not the fainting-with-desire kind, alas. Sympathetically but honestly, "You've looked better, Harvey. Can I come in and douse you in rubbing alcohol?"

There's no recognition from dog or human regarding Hailey's entrance into the apartment, the dog can barely be fucked to lift its head to accept the pets. He does wag his tail, but there's minimal effort in the action. Harvey-the-human was half asleep, thus the extremely attractive snort-cough-"huh?" combination that is the response to her 'wow'. He peels open one eye, squints it to the door, and manages a weak smile that shows a promise of dimples but doesn't deliver. "You're like a walking dream," he remarks in a groggy voice, then adds clarification: "But the good kind, not the torture-porn kind."

He grunts as he pulls himself up, and he might be in his underwear but it's his good underwear, so at least there's no holes or anything gross. See the lengths he goes through for you, Hailey?! Puttin' on his good drawers! "You can come in, but I'm kinda iffy on the rubbing alcohol considering I just said you're not the torture-porn kinda dream."

"You say that," the dream-bit, "but give it a few minutes. For all you know, I'm about to morph into my final form and finish you." Hailey does not morph into anything (but you never know) when she crosses the room, just drops her backpack onto whatever convenient surface is nearby, promptly rummaging therein. She takes out a pair of latex gloves, but only puts on the one for now, too busy surveying the damage to bother with the other yet. "So what am I looking at here, Harvey? What put all these holes in you?" She turns his chin up with cold fingers, looks at the left side of his face, looks at the right side of his face, looks sadly at him, and gingerly peels back the head-gauze.

In a confiding whisper, "If anything terrifying climbs out of your skull, this is definitely over." Twisted-smile. "Or, I guess, unstarted."

The joke about finishing him makes Harvey snort back a laugh that immediately morphs into a low groan, because laughing hurts Hailey. "There are sooo many jokes I should be making right now," but he's in soooo much pain. He swings his legs around to drop his bare feet to the floor, allowing him to sit up a little straighter while she puts on her glove and touches his face with her cold fingers. He's a trooper though, he barely even grimaces, leaning his chin more firmly into her fingers while she peels off the gauze to reveal a rather gnarly gash that is, at the very least, no longer weeping blood. But he definitely needs stitches.

"If anything terrifying climbs out of my skull, just end me," he requests, flashing her a half-smile, before he reaches up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. It's really just a lame excuse to sweep a quick-touch across her cheek, though. "Is it bad, doc?" he asks of his wound, deftly maneuvering around the question of what put all the holes in him. And by 'deftly maneuvering', I mean he just flat out ignores the question.

Sooo many jokes. "I know. I'm just soft-balling them in there for you." Case in point. Hard to say if she's aware of the particular joke she just made, since Hailey seems pretty well focused on the gash, not the humor. The already used gauze gets employed to wipe away some of the blood from the hollow of Harvey's cheek before she throws it off toward the trash. Cleaning up messes is not part of her job. <.< Then she looks at him and answers truthfully, "I've seen worse. Do you want a scar?" Like he gets the option.

More rummaging, more medical supplies, she's making a mess out of his coffee table. "So, if you don't want to tell me the details, at least give me the overview? Otherwise, I'm going to start poking you in ways that are going to get awkward. Are we talking like... got hit by a bus made out of lobster-shells, or got attacked by a rabid monkey-dog wearing a fedora?" This while she starts cleaning up that head-wound. It stings, but she's doing a marginally good job of minimizing the pain .

HAPPY NOW?!

"Yanno, usually I don't have a problem with soft-balling around you," Blue-balling is another story. "I guess I'm just off my game. I blame your roommate," since this is all obviously Abby's fault, considering she was the last sick person he came in contact with. "Or the hospital as a whole, maybe. They should dip the entire building in bleach." But the more important question (do you want a scar?) is answered with an equally important question: "Do you think forehead scars are sexy?" Because whether or not he wants one really hinges on the answer there.

"I thought I was supposed to do the awkward poking," he points out, but his lips draw down into a frown. It's kind of hard to balance humor with the darkness of what he woke up to, so enjoy the awkward squirming on the sofa. At least he settles just in time to feel the burn. "My uh.. dad died. Awhile ago. Car accident," it's not an explanation on the Dream, but it's as much required backstory as he feels comfortable giving. "It gets pretty fucked up, you know? Like somebody's in your head, pulling out all the shit you don't want to remember. Making you relive the shit you weren't even around to live in the first place," he shrugs, looking down at her chin to focus on something. "I'd take the monkey in the fedora any day of the week. Is that the sorta shit you go through?"

Hey, you know who also doesn't have to answer all the questions? "Sometimes," Hailey thinks forehead scars are sexy. Whether or not this is one of those times... She's already setting stitches ('cause otherwise this will take forever to pose through), so her half-chuckle is distracted with focus when she starts awkwardly poking him in the head with a needle. There's a quiet, "Sit still," for the squirming, and she just takes it upon herself to sternly hold his chin when he's all 'dad died in a car crash' and she leans back, looking at him.

For reals, "I'm so sorry." Then redoubles her effort to focus on this cut, pulling thread through it, adding simply, "So did mine." One last stitch, thread snipped, and she's nodding about how fucked up it is. "I - yes, with the fedora-monkey. Pancake people. An infinite number of locked doors, and a key that doesn't fit any of them." She makes a face, probably about the conversation but it's while she's looking at the stitches.

"It's working. Super sexy." Two gloved-thumbs up. "Leg, please."

Harvey sits still. Maybe it's the way that she sternly takes his chin, or maybe it's because he's terrified of her with a needle after she clearly injected him with the Most Awful Flu Ever virus that day he was in the hospital. Or maybe because the conversation's put a real somber cloud over this whole affair, and being still is just the way he can cope in the moment. Either way, he doesn't flinch or scream or pout when she starts to poke him with the needle, and manages not to furrow his brows when she apologizes and 'dittos' on the dad dying. "I'm sorry for you, too," he says sincerely, quietly, the last syllable following through with a low grunt when she begins again.

"It's dead ends for me. Endless dead ends, over and over. Here, over there, it doesn't fucking matter," there's a note of bitterness there, but he shakes it off, shifting to pull his leg up and drop his foot onto the coffee table. "Sorry," he says after. "We always seem to take it dark, don't we?" There's a rueful smile to go with it.

"It's okay," Hailey answers to his apology, finding a shrug while she shoves some of her kit out of the way, giving herself a place to perch on the table next to his foot. "I knew I was walking into a plague house, so it's not like I was expecting sunshine and daisies." She wiggles a couple of toes for him, humming about little piggies under her breath while she inspects this leg injury.

"When you're all better, we can compare scars. It'll be hot." Mostly, she's just saying that to convince herself that this isn't as doomed as it starts to seem. But also because it's something he can think about other than the prodding she's doing to his leg, pokey fingertips pushing bits of muscle around, wiggling bones in ways they don't normally wiggle. "You want the good news, or the bad news?"

Hold on. She looks up and over at him, smile suddenly brightening. "I guess you'd want all the news, huh?" NEWSpaper, guy.

Compare scars, ehhhh? Harvey tips his head this way and that, focusing on her while she focuses on his leg. He doesn't say it aloud, but his thoughts right now? 'If that means I get you naked, we can compare whatever you want'. Aww yiss. Ahem. "Sure," on comparing scars, the mischief in his twisted smile dampening at one particular touch of his toe. "Ouch," he winces, wiggling his toes against her fingers, before he goes still so she can poke and/or prod to her little heart's content.

The sudden brightening of her smile makes his own widen even if her joke is terrible, dimples displaying as he chuckles under his breath. "You get me," he remarks, leaning forward towards his knees. "Give it to me straight, doc. Am I gonna make it through the night?" There's a pause, before he adds: "'Cause if I'm not, you gotta promise to stay with me 'til the end." It's kind of romantic, right?!

"Really? Ouch?" Hailey frowns and does it some more. You know that joke where the guy tells the doctor that it hurts when he does this and the doctor's like then don't do that? She's the opposite of that doctor right now, and bends his toes with the flat of her palm in a way that's probably a lot less brutal when a person is in a hospital bed, full of dope. "Welp. The bad news is, you probably broke something just a tiny, tiny bit." This toe in particular, this one she keeps fucking with, that's the one he broke.

She's going to clean up his leg kinda like she did his head, just without the stitches. Alcohol wipes for days! "The good news is, it'll heal on its own, and you won't even have to wear a cast." Though don't think it didn't occur to the player to be like LOL NOW YOU GET A CAST SUCKER!!! "And I'll stay a while just to make sure you're really out of the woods." It hurts her heart to add, "You really got beat up pretty badly, Harvey."

"Ahhh - seriously, ow," Harvey wasn't panicking, but the continue wiggling of his potentially broken toe was not making him feel comfortable. "Or at least hook me up with some drugs and then play with my feet. Please?" He flutters his lashes and everything, cringing until she lets go in order to clean up his leg. "I guess it's not as bad as it could be, yeah? Could've broke the whole foot," and then we'd have 'how's Harvey's foot?' jokes for days! DAYS! Obviously you done fucked up. There was maybe more, but she's promising to stay awhile, and that last part makes him kinda slump into the couch.

"Dead ends hurt like a bitch when you keep running into 'em, apparently," he murmurs under his breath, pushing himself back up off the couch to lean forward,reaching for her hand. He's gonna pull her towards him, off the coffee table and hopefully onto the couch (though, you know, his lap's right there), his fingers wrapping around her own. "Hey, I'm okay," he says that quietly, insistently. "I got a real good doctor taking care of me."

Hailey lifts the backpack, drops it on the couch next to Harvey when he talks about getting drugged. "Knock yourself out." With Nyquil and juice-boxes and Tylenol; so she means that LITERALLY. None of the good stuff in there, but he's free to paw around and entertain himself while she finishes what she's doing to his leg / bending his broken toe. She's done presently, and there's no arm-twisting in their collective future: the pull on her hands serves its purpose, and his lap's right there, so that's where she drops herself.

Just making sure she doesn't fuck up all that doctoring and kick him in the leg or punch him in the stitches or whatever.

Genuinely, she looks at him and asks, "Are you okay? Like, really? Hold on." She still has gloves on. She takes them off and throws them on the coffee table with the rest of the medical waste. There, now she can at least run fingers through this side of his hair (the side without stitches) without it snagging on the gloves, after she tap-taps his temple to indicate what the 'like, really?' meant: he's not about to crack, right?

Oh, hey! Goodie bag! He totally would go digging to find something to knock himself out with if his plan hadn't worked perfectly, and there she goes dropping into his lap. The wide eyes suggests he hadn't expected to go this way, but he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. So long as said gift horse doesn't like, accidentally knee him in the soft-balls or something.

"Huh?" Excuse Harvey, he's a little day-dreamy, he didn't quite catch her question 'cuz he was sort of busy letting his eyes roam while he rests a hand on her hip. Surely, it's the concussion talking. But she removes her glove and slips her fingers through his hair, the temple-tap putting some clarity on the question she was asking. "I'm good," real good. Here, he's just gonna shift, keeping his hand on her hip to hold her steady while he swings his legs up onto the couch after tossing her bag somewhere. Stretch and sprawl, much better. "Seriously though. I'm fine. This helps," not her on his lap (though that helps too); her in general. He reaches up to touch her chin, his smile soft. "Having somebody here that gets it, you know? I didn't have anybody that understood it before."

Oh yeah. Hailey was supposed to make sure he didn't have a concussion. Whatever, she probably did that before she started stabbing him. If he has one, he'll probably be dead in a day or two, so no one has to know about her negligence. The shifting kinda does things to her stomach, so hold on, she's gonna close her eyes a second and weather that with some good, deep breaths - "So at least the worst of the nausea seems to be over," she deduces with a weak laugh. "But let's don't get too excited, probably."

Remind her she said that when she gets too excited. It's bound to happen. Especially when Harvey's all sweet and vulnerable, her poor heartstrings sing like a violin for the guy. "Your family's... not? They're normal people?" He's supposed to answer while she kisses his soft smile. Good luck figuring out how.

Harvey's brows go up as her eyes close shut, though the expression immediately smooths out considering the stitches. Still, the concern is there in his eyes, okay?! Until, of course, she doesn't actually throw up all over his face or something. "Right, right. I got you, I'll make sure you don't get too excited," he promises while simultaneously wiggling his fingers under the hem of her shirt at her back, to brush against her skin there. He's a terrible person. But look at that smile! It's so sweet.

And speaking of being terrible, she should really figure out how to better ask questions she wants answers to. Doing so while kissing him is not the best way to get a response - unless the response she wants is more kissing. 'Cause that's the direction he's going - the kissing direction, just a slow exploratory sort of touch of his lips against her own while he draws random shapes against her lower back; you know, so she doesn't get too excited, probably.

Unlike some people, Hailey's not all up in everyone's business. So if Harvey would rather not answer because he's busy, she's okay with that! She can accept it and move on with her life. Right now, the direction her life is taking her is nowhere else, just small, safe kisses that don't make anyone sick. If one of them happens to on an adventure from the corner of his mouth to the tip of his ear? At least they place nicely while they're there, making friends with his earlobe and the pulse-point on the side of his neck.

It's a weird-ass time to be like, "Do you want some apple juice?" But she might be a weird-ass person, because she breathes that right into his skin like ear-nips and juice-boxes always follow one after the other.

Harvey is absolutely too busy to answer her questions right now; sorry not sorry, try again another day. Her life direction takes her lips over to his ear, and he finds a new direction for his own life, breezing kisses against her cheek, her jaw, wherever he could effectively reach without interfering with her mission. At some point, probably before she asks the weird question about the juice, he nuzzles his nose into her hair and takes in a breath of her that manages not to turn his stomach, and the fact that he could do that without immediately wanting to run to the bathroom leaves him grinning against her. His hand rides up her back, lifting her shirt as he goes, though whatever he's attempting to do here stalls out when she's asking about juice.

"Uh, no," it's a knee-jerk answer, his breath a little quickened, and he tries to divert her attention away from apple juice and back to this whole kissing thing they were doing by tilting his head and following the line of her jaw with his lips, busy little kisses. Except, it occurs to him: "Unless juice means something else entirely in this situation and then fuck yes, I want all the juice."

"Are you sure? It's organic." Hold on, Hailey hooks her back-pack with her sneaker and pulls it on up here, trailing stuff out of it as it goes. Band-aids and cotton balls and there goes the NyQuil, good thing she closed the bottle, but then she gets the thing on her lap (on Harvey's lap), and shows him a juice-box. Right here, it says 'organic,' she points to it, see? And then explains hurriedly, distractedly, "So, I told myself I was going to come over here and make you drink some juice and take some Tylenol and stitch you up and make sure you got some rest. So drink this, and take two of these." Tylenol. She gets that out of the bag, too.

"And then you're already stitched up. So I'll have dispatched my duty, and then we can do something else entirely." His words. She nods a bunch, very much on-board as long as all the boxes get ticked.

The Dream definitely did not make Harvey crack up, but Hailey was about to. He leans his head back to stare up at her, trying to fit this whole 'it's organic' comment into the thoughts crowding his brain. It was like a round hole meets square peg sort of scenario, these two things were just not fitting together. "This is the weirdest.." he starts, and then she's dragging the backpack over, and oh. She wasn't talking about sex after all. "Oh. You're actually talking about apple juice," it's suddenly dawned on him, and his stitched up forehead creases 'cuz see: earlier conversation about all those blue balls.

But wait! There's a silver lining, and she's about to watch Harvey pound these two Tylenol and squirt as mouthful of apple juice into his mouth as quick as can be. The remaining box of juice - now somewhat crushed - is tossed to the coffee table and he opens his mouth after he swallows to prove that it's empty. "See? Duty dispatched!" There's a big grin, dimples and all, before he hooks his arms around her and bodily drags her down to kiss him again. Nothing can stop him now from doing something else entirely~

.. Nothing can stop him. Except fate, apparently. He gets his lips all up on her and then his stomach does a somersault - and where he was pulling her down on him before? Now he's shoving her back. Sorry for the whiplash, Hailey. "Move," he says sternly. The green around his gills should suggest why.

If his peg turns out to be square...

Hailey's really confused by how confused he is about the apple juice, leaning toward him and squinting in the way of someone paying super-extra-careful attention. Then the penny drops for Harvey, and she goes, "Oh!" right back at him. Nodding, she's very happy that he figured out she wasn't talking about sex all by himself, that's very smart of him; she's glad because she'd still bang him if he was stupid but probably not more than a couple times.

And DEFINITELY not if he throws up on her, they're just not to that phase yet. She moves hurriedly, falling off into the corner of the sofa and pulling her knees up toward her chin to keep her legs out of the way. "That's why I said we shouldn't get excited!" she calls after him, sighing the sort of huge sigh that people are only allowed to do when they're all by themselves (and the person whose pants they were trying to get into just ran off and threw up). Oh well. She cleans up her stuff so his house will look roughly the same as she found it when she goes home. UnfulFILLed.

Look, Harvey's not stupid. He just, on occasion - and particularly his occasions with her - thinks with his dick. But right now, he was thinking with his guts in the toilet, having race-limped on a gimp ass foot that-a-way so he doesn't throw up in her face. Since they weren't there yet~

Anyway, once he's done, he uses the entire bottle of mouthwash, vigorously brushes his teeth three times .. and returns to the living room defeated, looking refreshed and like death warmed over. "You were right," said no man ever. She was unfulFILLed and he was unfulfilling, and incredibly miserable. But he flashes her the dimples anyway, hooking a thumb to the door. Not the front door though. His bedroom door. "You wanna Netflix and chill? But emphasis on the Netflix," he flashes her puppy dog eyes with the dimples, how can she resist?! "I'll let you pick."

No. That's the opposite of what Hailey wants. But the best-LAID plans of mice and men and these two characters often go awry. So she nods, kicks her shoes off, leaves all the rest of her clothes on, and spends a while being enlightened by the things Netflix thinks Harvey would enjoy + things in his watchlist. It's cuddly, but careful-cuddly.

She goes home eventually, leaving Harvey with a forehead kiss and some juice-boxes and the STERN WARNING to get some rest. "You have to get better. I can't go on like this much longer," is her parting admonition.