2021-01-18 - Head Wounds

Ravn Abildgaard headed home after the ... incident ... at the precinct. Head pounding and face feeling like it was on fire after a cop in riot gear punched him in the face with the very same pair of scissors he was trying to stab that very same cop with, it wasn't so much the punch itself -- but his trigeminus nerve telling him that actually, he no longer had a face. He knew it wasn't true, but nonetheless, all he wanted to do was curl up on his bed and whimper softly until the pain subsided.

It did, after an hour or two. At which point the Dane inspected his actual face in the mirror and reached the conclusion that it wasn't all just his nerve system playing tricks on him. That there was definitely a broken nose looking back at him.

He pulled his jacket back on and, after ingesting a substantial amount of over the counter painkilllers, headed for the ER where a helpful doctor inspected his face, twisted his nose in ways that made him bite the inside of his cheek in order not to scream, and declared that it'd heal. And that if he's lucky, there might not even be anything to see after a couple of weeks. Just put ice on the swelling and be happy that it's just the cartilege. This is how come he happened to be standing around with an ice pack on his face at a time where a man might overhear medical staff talking about the green-haired Jane Doe.

Gray Harbor does not have a substantial amount of green-haired women, and certainly not green-haired women who were also present at the unfortunate lock-down a few hours earlier. The Dane wanders over to the nurse in question and tells her, "I think I know that girl, actually. Mid-twenties, bright green braid, kind of smallish? I was there when she got hurt."

There’s a look that Ravn receives when he ventures his introduction, the type of judgemental assessment shift nurses were quite known for, at least around here. The nurse tells him to wait and goes to consult a doctor. Ravn receives a second silent assessment from around a corner down a hall, almost sitcom level. Whatever the conversation, there seems to be some connection decided on, perhaps weird hair for weird wardrobe choices. It’s a tenuous enough thread for them to allow Ravn in.

A nurse tries very covertly to observe from outside the window. Abitha’s green eyes were groggy, peering out the window at the dark early morning light.

The slashed jacket sleeve probably doesn't lend Ravn much respectability, either. He holds the ice pack to his nose and decides to just ignore the audience; after all, for all the nurses know, he's the one who gave the green-haired girl that bruise on her forehead. One might certainly make a case for them just being responsible care-givers and doing their job, and he's not going to argue about it.

He walks over to the bed, picking up on the fact that the otherwise usually highly alert gamer girl does not seem to really pay much attention; that glazed expression that hints of strong medication and possibly, shock. Keeping his hands in plain sight -- mostly for the benefit of the nurse observer, embodiment of discretion that she thinks she is, he settles on the chair next to the bed and says softly, "How's the head?"

The bruise was quite spectacular, and coming closer, the other side of her face could be seen to be pretty swollen, though both eyes were visible. Ravn’s assessment was quite correct. The only time he’d ever see her vision move so slow was the last time they’d gotten totally blitzed at the Pourhouse together. They sweep in his direction, but they don’t rise to meet his eyes, then slide back out the window. Could she have just identified him by voice and clothing? Probably. But eye contact was never something Abitha had a problem with before unless she was distracted by a screen.

“Everywhere.”

Ravn can sense the nurse disappears immediately, probably returning a few moments later with the doctor so they can both cartoonishly observe through the window.

"They're trying to find out who you are. Guess you haven't felt much like talking." Ravn's voice is a little nasal, his accent a little more pronounced, as he tries to breathe through his mouth. His injuries are nowhere on level with Mac's but he's still going to be sporting a nice red Rudolph the Reindeer look for a few days.

"I guess that someone'll want our statements sometime. Or maybe not, given where we were. Never thought I'd end up trying to stab a policeman with a pair of scissors." He keeps his voice low enough for the little audience outside to maybe not overhear that one. "You got any idea what that was all about? Even here, cops trying to take each other down with firearms at the station has to be... out of the ordinary."

Statements. She’d have to write it, or describe it. There’s a moment Ravn sees her eyes react, searching the floor, or something. She was starting to tense. Her eyes shut then. They squeeze shut. A hand is lifted, a fist pressed over her eye opposite the head wound. She breaths hard. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t make any noise other than the deep breaths associated with trauma and the need for oxygen to combat it. If Ravn wanted commentary on it, he wasn’t getting it from her. It was too fresh. She tries changing the subject.

“I... wasn’t green... the last time I was here.” That must explain it. Gray Harbor wasn’t a large town, so surely one of the nurses would remember how badly behaved Abitha had been the last time she was here, or maybe how strange it was that one visit from an Addington had the nerd ready to return home the next morning.

"I can tell them who you are," the Dane offers, keeping his voice quiet and his body language calm (and his hands visible and nowhere near the younger woman). "Make a few phone calls if you need. Just tell me what you need." For someone who claims to struggle with social anxieties he's handling this whole mess surprisingly well -- or at least managing to keep his proverbial manure together, a skill that might have come in handy on occasion while living on the streets.

(TXT to Ravn Abitha) Alexander : Hello. Everyone still alive?

(TXT to Alexander) Ravn : More or less. Mac's in hospital. I'm here with her. She's not looking too great. 😕

(TXT to Ravn) Alexander : Why is she in the hospital? Do you need anything? I can bring something.

(TXT to Alexander) Ravn : Bring yourself, maybe, I think she needs her tribe. There was a shoot-out at the precinct. We both got caught in the crossfire.

(TXT to Ravn) Alexander : I'm a part of a tribe? I'll be right over. And I'll bring something. I heard about the shoot-out. I didn't know you were there. I'm sorry.

A starkly strange occurrence, the sound of some Greek words mumble from a cabinet nearby, the place clothes and belongings of patients are usually stored. When Ravn texts Alexander a response, there’s a quite manly voice, circa an Old Spice commercial muffling through, “I’m on a horse.”

Abitha doesn’t react, and given the sounds that means she was sitting in a bed listlessly without her smartphone nearby. If anyone needed more indication she was broken, there it was.

“Thanks.” To telling them who she was. “No.” To needing to make calls.

"Clayton's coming over," Ravn murmurs, looking up from the sparkly bright pink casing of his cell phone, clashing horrifically with his otherwise black on black ensemble. "Anything you want me to tell him to bring?"

He studies the green-haired woman not very much on the sly. The folklorist is by no means a psychiatrist, but he's spent a substantial amount of time working with students suffering from severe PTSD. He knows what disassociation means. He's got a few strokes of the brush himself courtesy of severe social anxieties; reality is a frail and slippery stretch sometimes, harder to cling to than you'd think. "Hey. Don't check out on me, Shoe Girl," he says softly. "Whatever happened back there, it wasn't your doing."

“Tell him to stay home.” Abitha mutters quietly, regardless of the face she doubted Ravn was going to tell him, or that Alexander would even listen. Her hand was still securely planted against her eye socket. As if pressure could push the images out, the death, the anger, the darkness.

But there Ravn goes again, telling her it wasn’t her doing, the things back there. It was a reminder, it was unbidden memory recall. She didn’t want to think about it, to remember. They were fresh, open, gaping wounds. Her voice is choked to a squeaking pitch, her neck and jaw muscles gripping in the strain of holding it back.

“Don’t.”

"All right. Just stay with me, okay? Planet Earth sucks sometimes, but it's better than outer space. Trust me, I've been there." Ravn speaks quietly, patiently -- and he's probably not suggesting that he's travelled with Cavanaugh on the space shuttle. He makes no move to take his phone back out and text anyone, though.

Alexander is not a welcome visitor at the hospital. He has a reputation as a bad guest and a worse patient, so when he shuffles in through the doors in hobo chic, a couple of nurses audibly groan. And it gets worse when he asks for Abitha's room and gets a blank look. There's some mutual staring, and then he asks for the room where the tall, handsome guy with the European accent went. One of the nurses sighs, and mutters that she saw that guy on this floor.

So here he is. With a small paper bag, peeking in through the door. "I was already downtown," he says with a frown at the room and the people in it. "Hello."

Another person. Another person in the room. Someone she knew, someone... She’d begun to shake in earnest this time as soon as Alexander had entered the room. Her other hand comes up now, clutching at her wounded head, fingers clawing into her scalp through her wild green tresses, the strands starting to lift. Cloth becomes sticky around her, and the screens on the monitors near her start to change color, the clear indication of some sort of EMF interference, the round arc of gradation making a clear indicator where the origination point was. She was starting to curl her body inward as she rolled away from the doorway, moving toward the fetal position. Her words were still tiny.

“Get out.”

Ravn opens his mouth and then glances at the monitors; that's not how this is supposed to be working, not at all. He glances to Clayton and raises his eyebrows in an unspoken question, then looks back at Mac and the monitors. Then he gets to his feet because this is the kind of current in a room that belongs in a cheap horror flick or in Gray Harbor, and as fate would have it, he's currently in the latter (and possibly the former too, it can be a little hard to tell sometimes). He drops the ice pack as he stands, letting it fall to the ground, not so worried at the moment about keeping his broken nose from swelling.

Alexander freezes as soon as Abitha starts to shake. A flick of his eyes to Ravn, then back to Abitha. Sloooowly, his hand comes out, the one with the bag, and he leans forward in slow motion to put it on the nearest flat surface. "I brought ice cream. But I don't have to stay. I'm sorry. Did I do something wrong?"

Poor Alexander probably won't get any assurances that he absolutely did nothing wrong from the trembling mass of nerd. That nerd very much looks like she might be about to draw blood with how hard she was digging nails into her own head. No, Abitha couldn't tell herself anything positive, let alone anyone else.

The spread of discoloration continues across the screens, and now the florescent bulbs above her bed had begun to yellow as well, the introduction of strange currents making the lit diode seem to flicker and crawl, casting odd shapes on the wall behind her. She was louder this time, but her voice had a weeping quality to it.

"Get... Out."

"I don't think this is about you or me," Ravn murmurs very softly and glances at the monitors again. Heart rate and blood pressure up, sure, that's to be expected. EMF interference and the resulting static -- not so much. Lights going cheap horror movie? Definitely not normal. He edges towards the door and Alexander but hesitates; walking away from someone in a situation like that goes against his fundamental ideas of team play and having each other's backs. "I think something else is up."

"Oh." Alexander blinks. "Good." He looks up at the flourescents as they start to flow in ways that things should not flow. "Miss Machinae? You're leaking," he says, gently. His hand comes up and the power of his own mind flows outward. He's not trying to trap her in her mind or clamp down on her power, but his eyes narrow just a little as he soothes the electrical currents. He steps inside the room, fully, and closes the door behind him. The feeling of his mind fills the room, a sense of black space and sharp edges directed with a surgeon's delicacy. "You're safe here," he says, glancing at Ravn like is this the right thing to say?

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" She blurts, Abitha's voice still muddled by her defensive curl. Alexander can feel the moment, like pushing on a closed door when it suddenly gives way. He had normalized her current, then she had suddenly just stopped. But then it was back again, and he has still having to gently calm the wild energies her parapsyche was pushing into the air. She was struggling to hold it back.

Meanwhile all she could repeat over and over, her speech clipped, panicked, were alternating and interwoven 'sorry's and 'get out's.

Ravn nods firmly at Alexander and tries to mouth something along the lines of it got bad, real bad. Because that's an explanation too -- 'bad' covers most of what goes down in this town. He steps up to the foot end of the bed, not quite reaching out -- because flailing woman is the last thing a guy with his physical disability wants to get too up and personal with -- but strongly trying to signal that he is there. "We're your friends, Mac. We're not leaving you to deal on your own. No one's alone in this."

"There's nothing to apologize for," Alexander says, less kind and more blunt. "I'm trespassing." But he doesn't actually STOP trespassing. He just makes his way into the room and finds a seat, his mind busily occupied in heading off all the little storms coming off of her. His hands twitch as Ravn mouth's those words, and his lips press together, tightly. He doesn't try to restrain her, but just repeats, "You're among friends. I'm told we're your tribe. No apologies needed."

“No. No.” Some new words join the fray, Abitha refusing to leave her self created forest as she continues to hide within her curled limbs and hair. The shaking was accompanied by rises and falls as her words were slowly devolving into sobs.

“I’ll kill you.” Is something else that slides out between unarticulated wails of mental pain. Likely, if nurses had already given Alexander some odd looks just for walking in, he’d better hope he shut that door, because correlation is not necessarily causation, but Alexander walked in and now the previously catatonic patient was having a Mental breakdown. (See what I did there?)

"You're not killing anybody," Ravn says quietly, but bluntly. "That guy in the riot gear? He killed people. Not you. I was there, Mac, I watched it happen. I tried to stab him in the face, for fuck's sake."

He glances back to Alexander, debating how much he wants to say right now; not so much a matter of keeping secrets as not setting their mutual friend off screaming. As a sort of explanation he murmurs, "Two people were killed. Lots of power flying around."

Alexander opens his mouth, closes it, then looks down at his hands. "You might," he tells her, solemnly. And before Ravn can hit him, he continues, "but I don't think you want to, and I'm willing to trust that when you have to, you can stop from doing so." A nod to Ravn's information. "People tried to kill you, and...you fought back? Did you hurt someone, Miss Machinae?" He sounds curious, head cocking to one side.

"You don't fucking get it!" was almost certainly a volume near screaming, Abitha finally snapping her arms away and pushing herself upright. She was crying openly, but her face was a mask of irrational rage.

"I have!" Almost certainly an answer to Alexander's question. She holds up her hand, curling it into a claw that she usually did when lightning would issue from it. "And that's back when I had to touch someone to do it! Now?" She throws up her hands, then throws one at Alexander as if making an example, and perhaps the best one given the similarities in their powers.

"Now, the only reason I didn't kill that guy was because he sh-..." Her throat seems to close on its own, like she'd choked on something. Her hands take a prayer-like steeple as they clamp over her mouth and nose, her eyes squeezing shut again. She begins to curl forward as she son's once more

"Because he shot himself," Ravn finishes that sentence for her. "Mac, those guys killed the receptionist because they thought she was noisy. They were there to kill somebody in that room, probably Thorne. Whoever they did come for, they didn't intend to leave witnesses. If you had killed him? Somebody ought to give you a bloody medal."

So much for the pacifist, we're all on Team Humanity attitude. Or maybe that's it exactly -- as far as the folklorist is concerned, those men were the enemy. He tries to not add to the gamer girl's distress, but these are the hard facts. "They were there to kill us. You defended yourself."

Alexander recoils from the scream, his head ducking down into his shoulders like he expects something to be flung at it. His hands come up, instinctively showing 'hey, not armed' - although, of course, he is. And the cringe doesn't stop him from glancing at the door as it opens, and a nurse looks in, wide-eyed. She frowns at the men, and says, "If you boys wake up the patient, visiting hours are over." And then she closes the door again, having clearly seen nothing out of the ordinary.

Alexander reaches up to rub at his temple, wincing, before turning back to the other two. "That's not the point," he says, quietly, to Ravn. "When you hurt someone - really hurt them. Or kill them. It's not about what they were doing to you, or might have done to you. It's about what you did, or could have done, to them. It's hard. To look at a living human being and know that you can turn them to a dead one. And that you're willing to." A long pause. "I cried for days when I killed someone, and I hated them, and they were trying to feed me to the Shadows. They were awful. I still cried."

All that could be seen of the geeks eyes were tears before she draws her knees up and buries her face in them, crying. She didn’t have this, she didn’t have the strength to bounce back on this in one night. “It wasn’t defense! He wasn’t even- He was giving up! I’m a monster! A Murderous Fucking MONSTER!”

Alexander’s abilities were being put to the test as the end was nearly a shriek, but the current hospital staff weren’t all that strong of mind anyhow. Abitha’s hands were very nearly digging furrows out of her scalp again, as if she needed to pull the blood that had been shed out of her own flesh. “He knew... He knew and that’s why... he...” Yes, Ravn had had to finish the last one, but anyone could see what she had meant, could see the shaking, sobbing emotion the thought of the night’s events brought her.

"I get it," Ravn murmurs softly. "Even if it was awful, it was not your fault, Mac. You're allowed to feel terrible about it, but you're not a monster. The monster is the guy who made it happen. The guy who killed the receptionist. He's the one who killed your guy too, even if he didn't pull the trigger. Him, not you."

He glances at Alexander and at the door and nods slightly; it's a good thing that the other man can distract nurses and calm gamer girls because Ravn is about as useful as your average wet brick when it comes to either. His idea of distraction would involve going out there and causing enough of a racket to keep attention on himself, and this method is certainly more efficient.

"It's okay to feel that way," Alexander says. A pause. "No. It's awful to feel that way, Mac. But it's understandable. You don't have to be okay." He opens his mouth, glances at Ravn, closes it again. He winces at the shriek, and his fingers rub more at his temple. "You don't have to be okay. And we like you anyway." He looks a little helpless, then says, "Do...you want me to help?" He taps where he was rubbing on his temple.

Both men could tell words were a bit of a lost cause here. Even if none of it was Abitha’s fault, she was on a pretty bad downward spiral, where everything was her fault or adjacent to it. You couldn’t reason someone out of a stance they didn’t reason themself into. And Abitha was anything but reasonable at the moment.

“Go ahead!” Abitha blurts at Alexander, freeing her face to look at him, still a mess of crying and pain. Her hands ball into fists that curl around the sparse hospital blankets covering her legs, “Better keep me fucking docile or maybe I just kill a fucking nurse when I get scared!”

There was just more crying. There would be more crying for a good stretch.

Ravn nods with a trace of relief; he's been on the receiving end of that mental treatment a couple of times and he knows that it works. A bit disturbing to have one's autonomy affected in such a fashion, definitely -- but infinitely preferable to the feeling that the planet is falling out from under one's feet and one is floating into the void of space where no one can indeed hear you scream.

"Staff wants to know who she is and how she ended up here," he murmurs softly towards Alexander. "Why don't I go and deal with all the paperwork and keep them out of your hair so you don't need to focus on doing two things at once?"

The Dane slips out the door quietly, determinedly. He's going to do exactly that: Give the hospital Mac's details, but also make certain that she and Alexander are left alone. He's good at distractions. Almost as bad as he is at dealing with crying and upset women -- and the last thing Mac needs right now is to pick up on the fact that her fear in turn is terrifying him. There's only so much mind-Xanax to go around.

That's...sort of like permission. "I will keep you from killing anyone," Alexander assures her, quite seriously. He blinks at Ravn, and there's a sudden panicked look, like - oh god, you're leaving me here alone and she's crying what I am supposed to do - but then he tries to remember that he's almost ten years older than anyone else in the room, and nods. Like a grownup. Ignore his audible swallow. "All right." He reaches out with his mind, trying to project calm, trying to soothe away the wild spikes and emotional storm that is clearly there - but her instinctive defenses are strong, and he winces as he tries to break through them, the 'touch' skittering off and around her.

It was the same mark of the strange rise and fall of the electrical interference of the room. Was she trying to use her powers? Not likely. Did she try to resist? Not consciously. She was turmoil. She was pain. When Alexander’s face seems pained, though, that part of her that knew they were friends, that knew he wasn’t trying to hurt her overwhelmed the sparking sprite of her angry resistance. She met him halfway, opened the door, and the effect was almost a transformation. Calm washed over her, smoothing her face, though it was still wet with tears, and she felt herself slowly tipping backward into the bed with an audible, “Oh.”

Calm beget the opportunity for her body to catch up with the hormones and anxieties that had run off with the controls. She blinks slowly, like she were trying to fight off sleep.

Alexander lets out a huff of breath as the mental resistance he feels breaks, and she allows the calm into her mind. There's relief in that, a little; relief that she let him in and he didn't have to try and break in. A fleeting glimpse of his mindscape - a star studded abyss stretching to infinity, filled with glass stars reflecting light from some unseen sun - before he pulls back and just feeds her the calm in a slow, controlled trickle. He stands, and moves to the seat Ravn left, flumphing gracelessly into it. "Hey," he says, with a slight smile.

From the surface of a planet made of circuitry and energy, a single, ghostly, green-eyed sprite looks up at that night sky. Pillars and columns rise all around her, filled with information, and though the sprite’s feet float above the ground, there’s a sense it can never rise to the pedestals these towers of experience create. The solar panels that soaked up the negative found their source blotted out by the starscape.

Their minds part, and Abitha breaths easier, “Now I see why August was helped by this...” Tentative fingers lift toward her head, gently probing, the calm allowing her to inspect her wounds, self-inflicted or not with a detached curiosity. They don’t come back bloody, so that was a plus.

There's a sudden brightness to Alexander's smile, and he breathes out, "You have a fascinating mind. Intricate. Interesting." He nods at the last. "Yes. Sometimes it helps, if you're at the point where you can't calm yourself down. Interrupt the circuit, let the system recover." A crooked smile. "I try not to do it unless people ask, though. It's too easy to decide that you know what other people should feel." He studies her. "Do you want to talk about what happened? Or have ice cream? I brought ice cream. You can do both. If you want."

The calm meant Abitha had some logical faculties back. Her hands descended to her face, gingerly pressing palms against cheekbones and cleaning away her tears. She noted in a detached manner that was because they'd removed her makeup when they'd cleaned off the blood. "Yours is as well, because I feel like it lends more to a mindset that believes in infinite possibilities, but you seem to love to always find an explanation." She blinks a few times to get the grimy feeling out of her eyes, then looks to the bag, then to Alexander, "Yeah, I should eat something... Um... One of the cops that worked for Reyes... Well, a bunch of them, I guess, let me start there. They basically tried to stage a coup at the station? It went bad. Mike Cohen shot himself just before I tried to fry him." Yeah, Abitha actually knew his name. She had done her research afterall. She knew the men at the precinct, she worked with them everyday. It was a terrifying thought to understand all these things so clearly and the pain and anxiety not to resruface. She reflects...

"Yeah, that's a solid warning about this."

"Looking for an explanation without being willing to consider and weigh infinite possibilities just leads to self-delusion. Self-delusion doesn't go anywhere fun," Alexander mutters, but he looks briefly pleased as he rises from his seat, and goes to get the bag. He pulls out a pint of Rocky Road and a plastic spoon/napkin combo in its plastic wrapper. "I didn't know what kind you really liked," he adds, apologetically, as he places them on the table over the bed and retakes his seat. He listens, leaning forward to lean his elbows on his knees while he watches her. It's not a look that's filled with comfort; it's like it's trying to get inside her head, even though his actual mind isn't pressing on hers. "I saw the news. I didn't know you were there until Ravn mentioned it. I'm sorry that happened. And that the two of you got caught up in it."

Abitha folds her knees into a lotus beneath the blanket, accepting the ice cream with a slightly sleepy smile, hands moving to the top and bottom of the carton so neither her nor Alexander are made to suffer physical contact that neither enjoys. She reads the flavor and shrugs, "Rocky Road checks a lot of the boxes of good ice cream. No complaints. Mint Chocolate is usually my go-to." Beat. "Thank you." Because actual thanks needed to be made.

"Honestly, I thought it was a planning meeting to make a move on Reyes. I haven't gotten to see Javier pretty much at all since I opened my shop, I was gonna finally hand in my resignation in person... I thought he deserved that..." She pauses in thought, then looks out the window to the room, "Ravn is hurt. Has anyone checked on him?"

"Mint chocolate chip. I'll remember." Alexander smiles. "No thanks. I hate gratitude. We're friends." He frowns, and nods, slowly. "Maybe Reyes' people in the force found out about it, thought they had to make a move to shut it down. I think things are...progressing, and people might be starting to panic. Starting a firefight in the department was a," he sighs, "bold move. Dangerous. I'm sorry you were there." He glances back towards the door when she mentions Ravn. "If at least three nurses aren't fluttering their eyes at him and cooing over his wounds while he remains largely oblivious, I'd be somewhat surprised. I'll check in with him, but I think he's okay." His gaze shifts back to her. "You got hurt. How?"

"Hating gratitude is a weird hill to die on when you insist on apologizing to someone who hates useless ones." Abitha asserts calmly. It was a weird amount of serenity in her voice, but also a tad bit of distraction, as if she were holding a conversation, but there was another thread of her mind pursuing another line of logic. Nothing she was unable to do. "And he is plenty capable of batting away nurses that think he's cute, and is just the type of stubborn to think he'll be fine. He's a step below you on wanting to be touched, he just fakes it by having the gloves and shit." She had the ice cream open now. Calm or not, her grip was still shakey, more muscle fatigue from all the adrenal struggling she'd just done than a true marking of returning symptoms. She starts to dig in, a hand habitually blocking talking while she had food in her mouth.

"I was hiding under Wilkerson's desk as soon as people started pulling out guns. I tried to keep the bad guys' guns from firing, but Mike spotted me and slammed one of the drawers in my face." This was all a very clinical, calm way to state it. The problematic addition was, "Shoulda done everyone a favor and shoved a little harder."

"You may have noticed that I'm filled with weird hills, Miss...Mac." At least he caught himself this time, and made himself say it. He still grimaces, then pours himself a teeny tiny plastic cup of water from the ubiquitous hospital room pitcher. He takes a sip while he listens. "Either way, he'll be fine," he assures her. There's even a flash of amusement there, perhaps imagining Ravn tangling with his eternal nemesis: the nurse. He doesn't offer to help her with the ice cream. Just watches and listens, his head bobbing as she relates the events oh-so-calmly. The last sentence does make him pause. "Why? What favor would that have done anyone?"

Abitha turns her head to point to the abrasive bandage and the general target the redness and swelling had painted on her head, "Well, you know..." She starts, then swallows her current bite of ice cream, "He already hit me pretty much square in the temple. Any more force, and he would have cracked my skull and severed the artery there." She waves a spoon to stop any questions on the matter, explaining, but perhaps to the wrong question, "Heard the doctor say that when he checked me out."

Alexander winces, staring at her bandage. When he speaks, his voice is low, and a bit rough. "Yes. All right. But that doesn't answer my question. Why do you think you should be dead?"

"Because I'm a monster." Abitha states calmly, looking at Alexander blankly, like she had no reason to have the point argued. "And I would have been the one to kill him if he hadn't shot himself in the head."

"Oh." Alexander considers that, thoughtfully. "Sometimes I don't understand things that other people do. So you'll have to explain it to me. Why are you a monster, exactly?" He stares at her with reptilian eyes, something cold and blank there as he assesses her.

"Because my instinctive response when I'm afraid is to use my powers." She takes another bite of ice cream, chewing a nut with a crunch, then covering her mouth to continue, "I permanently maimed a person before I came to Gray Harbor. I've only gotten more powerful since. I'm going to kill people in the future. Objectively, it's a high probability."

Alexander falls silent. "Okay," he says, at last. He takes another sip of his drink. "Then I'm a monster, too." He looks down at his hands, then up at her. "What happened, before? When you maimed someone."

"I mean, if so, that's on you. I think it's proven I'm not some sort of hero or authority." More ice cream, the spoon flipped as Abitha licks it clean. She closes it and sets it aside. "Back when my stream was getting big. Everyone knew I was in Seattle. Some guy tracked me down." She unfolds her legs, adjusting herself so she was laying more on her side, facing Alexander, "He grabbed me. I shocked him unconscious. He has to have a pacemaker the rest of his life. First time I used my powers." She was drowsy before, but the change in position was only exacerbating it, her eyes half-lidded. "Lethal from the start, right?"

Alexander tilts his head to one side, then the other. "Would you be a monster if you'd had a taser and had defended yourself with it? Did you enjoy his pain?" The questions are fired with an almost clinical detachment, but his eyes never waver from her face, even as she adjusts on the bed. He huffs out a breath. "You're dangerous. You're not a monster. They are different."

"It's one thing if... It's you." There's a long pause where Abitha takes a yawning breath mid sentence, lifting a hand to knuckle her eye. "You've been at this how long? You have control... You're dangerous." Each blink seemed slower and slower, the day she had only making them heavier. "I'm a kid that got handed an assault rifle..." She trails off, but her eyes were slightly open. She may have very well just forgot where she was going with that statement. After a moment, she just pipes up sleepily, "Columbine."

"I was a fucking mess most of my life, and arguably still one now. You don't get a chance to learn control unless you live. Survival is the first imperative." But Alexander can see that she's sliding into sleep, and so he sighs. Leans close enough to ensure he's heard, but not close enough to startle. "If you want to learn control. I'll do my best to teach. But don't say you're something you're not. It's a lie, and I don't like lies." Then he stands up. "Sleep well, Mac."

"You too." The words are sleep-slurred, the haze of mid to unconsciousness draining reason from Abitha words. She drifts, and he can almost watch the tension pass out of her as muscles need no longer support an upright state.

She would wake again hours later, and it would likely be bad again, but for now, she rested.

And maybe she healed.