2020-01-16 - Get well soon. Or don't.

Anne's got herself a private room here in Addington Memorial Hospital. It's not quite as nice as a suite at Four Seasons, but she's got some fancy machinery hooked up to her that goes beep-beep-beep and a bed that goes up and down, so she's got that going for her. It's fair to say that she's not the prettiest that she could be in the moment, either. Her forehead has a big bruise on it, and then there's the ill-fitting hospital gown and the bandages. She's gone from a ten to an easy seven; but Enzo's probably gone from a ten to a two, so she's way better off.

Anyway, there was probably some fussing about Patrick coming to visit because he's not family, but his name is on the hospital so they can go right the fuck off. Anne's undoubtedly been on a hefty amount of drugs since they brought her in, so we'll go with her having been sleeping for awhile.

Somewhere between the number of lawsuits they will be wading through and the fact that it says ADDINGTON on their goddamn paychecks, Patrick manages to allude to the throwing of money at the problem enough that some bone-weary nurse finally relents in his favor. He had a far easier time getting in to have a look at Enzo, so he's already crossed that off his to-do-list by the time Anne's settled into the arms of Prince Painkiller.

There's a vase of obnoxiously cheerful flowers on Anne's side-table now (no orchids, all sunflowers and daisies and chrysanthemums with brightly-colored filler bullshit in there). And Patrick has elected to wait out the drugs in one of those chairs placed in rooms like this for people to keep vigil. He's dragged it over to the window and is sitting forward in it, apparently glued to whatever is going on in the parking lot. Because just sitting and staring at a sleeping Anne would be weirdly creepy. The nurse that let him in sticks her head in briefly, makes sure Anne isn't dead, and moves on with a reminder, "You're not supposed to be here." Without turning, Patrick just sort of waves his hand at her - move along, minion - and continues watching the parking lot.

He's clearly deeply concerned for Anne.

The parking lot proves to be far more entertaining than Anne is at the moment. Down there, Patrick can see the hearse that pulls up at the same time a nurse wheels an old man out through the front lobby. It's impossible to hear the words from up here, but the sudden burst of activity is hard to miss: the nurse parks the wheelchair on the curb beside the hearse, the old man in the gown freaks out, and he explodes out of the wheelchair to take off barefoot down the sidewalk, the back of his gown opening up so that every wrinkle of his saggy, bare naked ass can be seen while he books it outta here.

It's somewhere in the midst of all this commotion that Anne stirs from the warm embrace of Prince Painkiller. There's a hoarse groan as she awakens to cotton mouth and chapped lips and oh, she still has her arm but it hurts, and what is this godawful sunburst of color on the table beside her? And this is all before she sees the (clearly deeply concerned) back of Patrick's head as she tries to sit up, fails, tries to open her eyes fully and fails at that too, and eventually just relents to staying stuck on her pillow, squinting in his general direction. "... Patrick?" just in case it's not him. She sounds as bad as she looks.

Patrick makes a mental note to suggest tazers be issued to all members of hospital staff. Then remembers how many arms he twisted over the last few hours. And erases that mental note.

This transpires in the moments between the old man's escape and Anne's awakening, leaving him leaning a hand against the window pane, pitched forward in an effort to see the end of the doings below. In fact, were it not for that froggy uttering of his name, he'd have figured out the latch on the window and opened it to lean out the damn thing already. Instead, he hears Anne, shakes his head faintly, and answers as if pleasantly, "God no, Patrick has no tolerance for this nonsense and has opted to stay home." Which means, "You're just very high, dear."

"Oh," it's a quiet utterance, only in part due to the raw scratchiness of her voice. It's an 'oh' of disappointment, of pain and of guilt, an 'oh' of believe because she really was just very high. "That makes sense," follows as a frown twitches at the corners of her mouth, and she lolls her head to the side to take her attention off of the not-Patrick by the window and instead focus in on the color of the blooms close by. With her eyes mostly shut, it comes in blends of vibrant yellows and oranges, no real form, just colors. "Still no orchids," she murmurs to herself - it's not critical, just an observation. "Did Izzy send the flowers?" She doesn't mean these, which is why there's follow-up, "The carnations and the roses. The ones that mean.." mumble mumble.

In the parking lot below, the old man is being chased around the circular parking lot by three orderlies. He's fast, and there's shouting, but he's got both his hands up with his middle fingers in the air. Fuck the police.

She's not making any sense about the flowers, and Patrick is not currently inclined to help that conversation along. The exact same bat of his fingers that shooed the nurse away now indicates the brightly-colored flowers on the table next to Anne's bed. "I'm sure there's a card." For the purposes of later, there is a card, but it is blank.

Now that he doesn't need his hand to be dismissive, he tries to figure out the lock on the window, and this is when Patrick learns that the window opens in such a way as to, say, prevent someone from deciding to jump out of it and splat onto the pavement below. Which also means he can't lean out of it as far as he really wants to. Irritably, "You may have orchids when you're not trying to get your hand cut off. Until then," she gets cheerful get-well-soon bullshit flowers.

"I'm sure," Anne agrees about the card, and then her eyes slip closed so that she misses all the dismissive waves of his hand. It might seem like she's gone and slipped back into unconsciousness, but there's a noticeable sniffle that comes on the tail-end of his talk of her trying to get her hand cut off. There's also a noticeable delay in the response, about thirty seconds before the defensiveness kicks in: "I wasn't trying to get hurt. We were just there to look."

In the parking lot, the old man's made a full circle around the parking lot and grabs hold of his wheelchair. He pushes it in the direction of the orderlies coming up behind them, like he's bowling for nurses. The chair hits one in the shin, and she falls off the curb onto the hood of the hearse. The old man laughs, waves his fist in the air, and makes some lewd gestures with his hips ... which apparently is his undoing, considering he gets extraordinarily stiff like he threw his hips out of alignment, and promptly falls over.

In the bed, Anne starts to shift around again, an elbow pushing into the mattress like she was trying to sit herself up. "I should go and see Enzo," she decides.

Patrick leaves the window open, despite the fact that the free show is drawing to its conclusion. He quietly hopes they stuff the old man into the hearse just to fuck with him after all that, but he doesn't stick around for the after-credits sequence to find out. Instead, he turns to look at Anne with an expression just a few degrees chillier than the January air making its way in through the window. The amount of angry that he is at her for not trying to get hurt stuffs itself into the dullness of his reply. "I hope it was worth it."

But really he doesn't.

Arms folding, he nods to this idea that she should go and see Enzo. He'll just watch, counting on the fact that, if she gets too far, a nurse will come along and put a stop to it.

Anne makes it as far as sitting up in the bed and pushing the thin hospital blankets down her legs before he turns from the window and the wintry chill from the window and his expression stops her dead. She lifts a look from the bandages on her arm to the wrappings on her foot, and then braves a look upward into his eyes. There's no pleasure in her sunken eyes and bruised face, not even the slimmest glimmer of anything beyond what she was too tired not to express: immeasurable guilt, sorrow. Pain. "It really wasn't," she replies, her voice cracking, and she slumps forward and drops her eyes to look somberly back at her bandaged arm.

Red roses and white carnations means never having to say your sorry. Anne doesn't have either of those, though, so all she can do is apologize. "I'm sorry," it's so heartfully whispered, but she's probably sorry for the wrong things. "I shouldn't have asked Enzo to come. We were just supposed to look at the carousel."

It takes Patrick exactly no time to settle on the very worst thing he can answer for her apologies. "I don't care. What you were supposed to do, what you were trying to do, whatever your goal was," he finishes the list of things about which he doesn't care with a shake of his head. There is no heat behind his voice, just a cool dismissiveness of Anne's entire agenda.

He looks her over from there, following along the bruises and bandages until he manages to attach his eyes to Anne's. Holding them, he takes the two steps necessary to leave the open window and land at the bedside, bending to drop a kiss to Anne's forehead. Honestly, as much as it pains him to say it, he breathes into the press of his lips to her skin, "I can't." Care, he means, referring back to that opening salvo.

Let's blame Anne's reaction to all the things that Patrick doesn't care about on the painkillers; if they'd been working strong at the time rather than weaning off, maybe it would've numbed her enough to the dismissiveness. Instead, she wears her emotion front and center for once, all that pain and guilt in the crumple of her forehead, in the way her eyes start to well with tears. She's all emotion to his own lack of it, but she doesn't really start crying until he lays the kiss on her forehead and utters those last two words.

"You can't what?" the blur of her vision was worse with the tears swimming in those blue eyes and falling down over her cheeks. She leans back to stare at him anyway, "You can't care? About me, or about what happened? Because it's the same goddamn thing," she uses her good hand to scrub at her cheeks, trying to stubbornly brush the tears away. "Why? Tell me that. Why don't you care? Why can't you care, Patrick?"

"Stop it." Patrick impatiently reaches across to find the box of scratchy hospital tissues and put it on the edge of Anne's bed for her, as good an excuse as any to straighten up and step back from the bed at that point. From the moment Alexander Clayton called him (which was absurd enough in and of itself, tyvm!) until that old man collapsed in the parking lot, he's been hardening his heart against precisely this exchange. It's how he's capable of looking directly into her watery blue eyes and saying crisply, "Because I don't feel like it."

He is a convincing asshole today, who simply can't want to care. Good for him.

There's no need to roll composure for Anne because she has none in the moment, not when he's capable of looking her in the eyes and saying stuff like that without even a hint of emotion. And since he's looking her directly in the eyes, he gets a front row viewing to her heartbreak, because she doesn't just hear him, she believes him. Her breath hitches and then there's the choke of a sob before she snatches a handful of tissues out of the box, hitting it with the back of her hand to knock it off the bed afterward. "Then why the fuck are you here? Just to tell me you don't care? And what about the snow globe and the note and the past couple of weeks and the PAST TEN GODDAMN YEARS?!" Her voice cracks as it rises, that burst at the end likely loud enough to be heard out in the hall. She shoves tissues in her face, angrily wiping away the tears, before she's looking back into his eyes. "What about me, Patrick? Because I care, because the only thing I was more worried about when I thought I was going to die was how you were going to take it, because I was scared and I just wanted to see you again but YOU DON'T CARE!"

She cares and he puts a palm over his heart. "Oh, well. That changes everything, doesn't it. You care. Tell me how much, dear? Tell me how hard it was to go anyway, knowing that you could simply vanish, and I would never know what happened to you. It must have been awful for you, so awful that it only stands to reason you would make it worse by bringing my cousin with you. Who, let me remind you, is one of the few members of my family that I genuinely like." Having dialogued all that conversationally, Patrick tilts his head to a listening slant, widens his eyes attentively, and concludes, "So, let's talk about how much you care. I'm all ears."

At least his ire has momentarily suspended the realization that he has no answer for why the fuck he's here, and so he should really just leave now. He's on the verge of it, though, conveyed in the impatience and that undefinable sense a person has about them when they're preparing to leave.

Anne leans back stiffly into the pillows, the sting from his words even more painful than when he said he didn't care about her, if only because of how goddamn awful she feels about Enzo. She should tell him that he doesn't get to do this, that he doesn't get to tell her he doesn't care and then turn it back around on her; instead, she she drops her gaze to her bandaged arm and slumps forward, shoulders shaking as she tries to keep herself from just completely breaking apart right then. "If you don't think it was hard, then you don't know me at all," she utters hoarsely, those few shouts having killed what's left of her voice. "If you don't think you were the first and last thing on my mind, Patrick, that you've always been the first and last thing on my mind.. And I'm sorry I brought Enzo," there's firm sorrow in those words. "But I thought I'd find something there. Something that explains all this, something that would let us end all this."

She sounds so defeated. She doesn't look at him again, just keeping him in her peripheral, knowing he was on the verge of leaving and feeling absolutely useless in preventing that from happening. "I'm just so tired of living like this, of seeing people leave and forget or vanish and never come back. Of just waiting for you to get tired of this place and go, and maybe this time you'll forget about me entirely and I'll call and you'll have changed your number," she's crying again, fresh tears tumbling down her cheeks, her eyes red rimmed when she looks back at him, all that pain and anguish so very visible. "I don't exist to them, Patrick. My mom, my brothers. They didn't care and they left and I don't exist to them. And I keep thinking I can find a way to fix this, that there's some mystery there that we just need to find, so I can change it. Because I want to exist to them. Because I don't ever want to not exist to you."

No, seriously. "For Christ's sake," rabble. "Stop it." Patrick just said that about the crying, and there she goes again. He bends to catch the fallen tissue box with the ends of his fingers, bobbles it once or twice on the way up, but manages to get it to land back on the edge of the bed again. It helps with his playing of whack-a-mole with sympathy right now, a little distraction that allows him not to want to yield to the very human desire to comfort someone in need, especially someone that matters.

So, instead of saying something to make her feel better, he promises, "If you die on the other side, I will make it my life's mission to eradicate any trace that you ever existed." Like Hatshepsut, he'll just go around, erasing 'Anne Washburn' from history. It would hardly be the first time an Addington wiped someone from the record books, hum de dum, so while it might be an empty threat, it's not one without precedence!

"I'm so goddamn sorry," about the crying, maybe; the words come out a little sharply as she snatches the tissue box from him, and more tears start spilling. It becomes a flood that these scratchy thin tissues can't keep up with, they basically disintegrate from all the salty wetness as she scrubs at her cheeks. "I can't help it, okay? My arm hurts and my foot hurts and I hurt and I just want you to say something, anything, that isn't this hateful shit you keep spewing at me, Patrick, please." She turns those watery blue eyes up to him, and she's far too proud to beg for the comfort that she needs so badly, but it's there in her eyes. She didn't need just someone in the moment, she needs him.

"You know, it's really kind of funny. Why do they need to keep punishing us when we do so well at punishing one another?" There's no humor in the realization, just the sad truth. She drops her focus down away from him, to the box of tissues as she pulls out another, twisting it through her fingers. The heat dissipates, raw emotion left. "I get it if you honestly don't care and you just want to go. But I.." a tear drips off her chin and onto the tissue, she sniffles and wipes the scratchy paper across her cheek. ".. but I really want you to stay."

The response to 'i hurt' probably shouldn't be, "Good. I'm glad." But there it is. Patrick is going to get this out there before Anne becomes too pitiful to be hateful toward, his eyes on hers even while she's still crying even though he keeps saying not to WHY DOES SHE NEVER LISTEN TO HIM!!! "I hope it leaves marks," in a low voice, nearly a whisper, like that's the prayer he's sending from his lips to the ears of God. Sooooo, with his having said that, does the 'really want him to stay' still stand? Because he hasn't just walked out, but his ability to sit a sympathetic vigil has just been canonized as a big ol' NOPE.

The cringe from his words makes it seem far more like he hit her rather than just said something cruel to her, but she says nothing back to him. Really, she had no doubt about this leaving marks - he's done a really good job at making sure of that. She finishes cleaning herself up, maybe so the tears have a clean spot to fall and sets the tissues aside. Then she wets her lips and turns her head to look back at the cheerfully too bright flowers on the table. She doesn't ask him to stay again, but she doesn't tell him to leave either; she just wordlessly moves to the far side of the bed, so there's an empty spot beside her that's just big enough for him.

It doesn't matter if he sits beside her, or takes back his chair by the window, or walks right out of the room. The only thing she has left to say is spoken plainly, clearly, in a coarse voice rubbed raw, but the sincerity is there all the same: "I'm sorry."

Patrick doesn't sit in the space she's provided. There's a perfectly good chair here, so he sits in that, pulling it along to the bedside before his weight settles it to the floor. He collects her good hand in his, folding her arm up and out of the way so that he can lean forward, turning his head down so his cheek rests in the spot that was supposed to be where he sat. Thus situated, he unbends her arm for her, smoothing his hand across the back of hers so his eyes can close beneath her palm. It is not a pretty way to sit, but it must be accomplishing something for him, or he wouldn't be doing it.

For a long time, the last words in the room are going to be her apology. He needs, like, at least an hour of argument-free silence before anything not-hateful is going to occur to him. Or else he may just nod off like that.