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Malory settled into his seat next to...Eles, lounging so bonelessly that he made the chairs seem misleadingly comfortable. He didn't bother being subtle as he looked over the other's shoulder, idly noting his pronouns and all the little no's that trailed after. "Well, it'll be exciting to see if you have any allergies, now won't it?"

He very nearly offered his own information as an emergency contact but left the offer unspoken in the end. Malory vastly preferred for others to come to him, not for others to expect him to go to them at need.

Watching the interaction with the reception desk, Malory lifted his eyebrows as Eles very obviously looked around for a last name. With barely suppressed laughter as the other returned, he leaned in to whisper, "What name did you pick?"

He hadn't thought about allergies before. Seemed an obvious thing to consider now. More inconveniencing than exciting, he signed back. Exciting might be the right word for Malory, though.

A strange fellow to get mixed up with after waking up, he supposed. ******** knows what the boy was doing in that graveyard, talking to himself by lantern light. ******** knows what he would've done with his eve if Eles hadn't happened on him. And ******** knows what Eles would be doing right now if he hadn't trespassed on that graveyard looking for someone to help him. Groundskeeper or no, he got exactly what he deserved out of that encounter, didn't he?

Eles sighed through his nose, though he couldn't help himself for wanting that touch of closeness. A mistake. Hell if he even remembered how to spell it now. But they wanted something.

They got something, certainly. Something as unpronounceable as it looked, if the nurse reading his name off was any indication.

He hardly felt the perk he would've expected at hearing a name that belonged to him. Eles rose nonetheless, glancing at Malory in an unspoken invitation to come along. He wasn't sure if he could be the liar that Malory was. He hadn't tried; it didn't occur to him, even when Malory did his own thing in the car with that driver.

And looking at the nurse, he wasn't sure he'd get any enjoyment out of it. She looked tired, but good-natured. Hair was combed, scrubs were clean. She wore that sort of warmth around her that suggested caretaker, with a cute little smile that probably put kids at ease. He followed her instruction, though he spared a look back at the lobby to see if any kids were there. He spotted one huddled in a chair, hand on his cheek. Maybe the nurse — Orah Gowan — wanted to get him out of the way first.

He gave her a shy wave, then followed her through a short corridor to the exam room. Putting weight on his ankle still caused him to limp slightly, but he wore a brave face about it. Kept his coat slung under one arm as he took a seat on the papered exam chair.

Eles looked exhausted under the fluorescent lights. Gravel had dug into his face, leaving pockmarks and scraping it where he must have hit the ground. His head felt particularly swollen toward the back of his skull, where some of his normally tousled and loosely curly hair had matted up into blackened, wet wefts. A knee was scrapped, his leggings torn. Palms must have taken the brunt of the damage. His knuckles were bruised. Ankle was swollen, too.

He hoped this wouldn't take long.

Orah did not miss the bruises and scrapes as she led the two back into one of the private rooms. She noted what she could see in her own mental log book as she ushered them into chairs next to the small corner desk.

“Its no problem at all! It certainly looks like a rough night… can you tell me what happened?” She said as she opened the waiting laptop, pulling up the chart for his young man. Her fingers poised over the keys, ready to take notes.

It was always hard, in instances like this… battered, yes, but that did not always mean the altercation had been with a magical person. The injuries were both less and more than she would expect… and the young man with the slender frame and lost expression did not have the sort of lethargy she’d seen in most who had been drained for their energy. And his friend had no signs what-so-ever of conflict… which rather hinted this was probably more mundane mischief than magical. Maybe even a dare gone wrong?

Somehow, the dark-eyed friend struck her as the type to dare others to foolishness for his amusement, but that was just guessing on her part. He was just… rather cheerful, for how damaged his friend looked.

"He asked me to explain for him," Malory explained, "...and so let me tell you!" A tone as if he was ready to start gossiping with his bestie about the latest interfriend drama. "We were just leaving the club, it was a pretty late one because the DJ was really great and kept giving, you know, signals. So Eles and I were waiting out back for him to finish packing up, and then suddenly there was this whole..." Malory spread his hands, fingers wriggling energetically.

"...fight?" Inhaling as if about to go on, he paused, then gave a little huff of exhale with a laugh, "It was definitely a fight, but it was so strange!"

And here he looked at Eles with the humor and disbelief of it all, but there was also a thin crack in the expression, the brightness in his eyes a little too bright, as if the stress of it was only just starting to set in and take its toll. "There was...I think somebody from the military? But maybe not, maybe it was a costume, but they suddenly appeared out of nowhere! They must have been hiding behind a dumpster? Or jumped from the fire escape?"

He had to give his head a little shake before the tangent completely took over, "But he suddenly showed up and had a knife. A knife!" Malory held his hand out as if brandishing one himself. "And then, another guy did jump down, like it was literally raining men."

He looked over again at Eles, this time with a smile of expectation that his friend would laugh a little at that, then a pause, another little exhale. "Well, the new guys was extremely tall and handsome, but weird. Really weird in some kind of...fantasy warrior type clothes? Including little horns! And furry ears!"

The boy's eyes had gone a little distant at that, a bit of a blush rising on his cheeks, "I couldn't understand what he was shouting, but suddenly, out of nowhere! Several eggplants of all things were shooting around like..like...torpedoes! The first one shattered a stack of pallets!"

Looking chagrined and a little uncertain, he gave Orah a look, as if to make sure she wasn't about to start calling him crazy or a liar.. Relieved with whatever he saw, Malory went on, "So that was scary! And then knife guy suddenly appeared in front of us! But didn't do anything to us? Maybe he was going to...but then there was another shout and more flying vegetables! DO you think this was some kind of farmer's market street war? Anyway, knife guy disappeared again, and one of those eggplants was going right for my face! I thought I might actually die? So like...weirdly and stupidly? But then Eles," an adoring gaze landed on the injured boy, "..pushed me out of the way. He took that eggplant right to the back of his head."

Was there a bit of wetness in his eyes? A certain thickness entering into his voice. "He got hit and fell pretty badly. The two guys ran off. To finish their feud I guess, I don't know." With a deep sigh, he looked at his own hands, pristine and uninjured. "We couldn't find a ride that late in that part of town, so poor Eles had to walk with me forever basically. It was a little scary, I kept telling him not to fall asleep, because you can like, die right? If you have a concussion and go to sleep? Or is that hypothermia..."

The newness of it all started to settle in around him. It overlaid the cupboards, the shadows, the circles under the nurse's eyes. Both palpable and imperceptible. As Eles's grip tightened on the edge of his seat, he understood that he didn't recognize

Orange eyes fell on Malory at once, who so quickly and fantastically launched into a story that initially had Eles's brows furrowing in confusion. Maybe a touch of marvel, too, for how well this boy could lie. Like truth and fiction were two names for the same phenomenon and the only measure that lent them their worth was how the bearer of truth (or fiction) felt about it in the moment. And Eles thought Malory felt about it in quite a few different ways.

But Eles could only maintain wonder as bare as it was honest for a short stint of the explanation. Quickly enough, it launched straight into the preposterous, unabashedly so, and Eles choked on a wretched laugh like he hadn't done such a thing in his entire life.

The story devolved into the bizarre, the absurd, and Eles barely held his hand up as if to ask the boy to stop. Keep going and I'll die, he warned. I'll ******** die.

He could hardly catch his breath. And what a pain it was, to feel his sides so suddenly clamping down. To feel his stomach turn as such a foreign sensation. Eles chomped the webbing of his own hand. It was enough. He could breathe again, for now.

Taking a few steady breaths, Eles wiped the burgeoning tears from his eyes. The nurse, he saw, wasn't laughing at all. Didn't find any mirth in it. Piqued, he watched her reassure Malory. Then, just as quickly, Eles was struck by pure wonder that she could sign.

Two people in one night. What were the odds?

With a little burst of energy, Eles signed back in kind. Have a headache that keeps throbbing. No nausea or vision problems. No weakness. Got some bleeding in the back of my head, though. Got hit pretty hard. By an eggplant, evidently. Eles's stomach seized as he tried to hem in his laughter. Think I must have twisted my ankle. I get these shocks of pain when I walk on it at certain angles. And I skinned my hands, too. Holding his arms up, the telltale scrape of gravel and inertia was plain and newly reddened.

If the fantastical way Malory told his story wasn't a hint, the fact that Eles looked ready to cry from laughing would have tipped Orah in on some joke the two were playing on her. Well. It didn't really matter, did it? Their story had enough details right that she could tell something was going on. Malory, at least, had seen powered people fighting before, if not precisely this instance. Good info to have in her back pocket, so to speak, and she would still note it down in the records.

She was still curious how the two knew each other, since that had as much ring-of-truth as anything else the boy had said.

Dutifully, she noted down all the symptoms that were presented to her, then finally pushed away from the desk, reaching to pull on a pair of sterile blue gloves. Signing as she spoke, she pulled out a pen light and tested Eles's pupils, her fingers light under his chin.

"The doctor might want some scans to make sure you don't have internal damage, with the headache. But I can get the other wounds cleaned up. We'll see if they also want to scan your ankle or not." Orah said. Tucking the pen light into her scrubs, she took Eles's hands in gentle fingers and set to work on them, cleaning out the scrapes and bandaging them, moving to the knees when those were done.

"I can give you a copy of our notes when we're done, if you want to take them to file a police report. I know, in DC, that it might not feel like it does much, but it would still be good to have it reported." She said and signed, gentle but efficient with her words and actions. Boring, perhaps, next to Malory's flamboyance, but well... her job was to be efficient and boring, wasn't it?

For Eles's benefit, she listed out the usual instructions... keeping the bandages on, and clean and dry, for so many days, and then washing them gently with unscented soap and re-bandaging them until they had healed.

The answer had Malory's eyes widening in surprise, a flush creeping over his cheeks and the smile went beyond hopeful. Fidgeting with the the hem of his shirt, he suddenly had trouble maintaining eye-contact with either of the rooms other occupants, but still canted his head toward Nurse Orah as she spoke.

He nodded to show he was listening, right up until she mentioned the police report. The boy's head shot up to glance at Eles, expressional turned apologetic and conflicted. "You won't have to if you don't want to," he assured Eles while a little panicked himself, as if the other boy might be on the verge of some kind of upset, maybe even bolting out of the room.

Turning that apology toward the nurse, he explained, "There's some history."