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Hospitals were already highly uncomfortable places to be in, and there were a thousand quotations about places of rest and recovery feeling like stark, sterile purgatories that covered the general concept of it. Oh, the irony. Oh, the tension in the air, dozens of people in wards on the brink of life or death -- if any hospital in the world really was a purgatory, it was Destiny City Memorial, which over the past year had made a routine out of turning over its rotation of comatose patients, who always "lived" a few days to a few weeks before their hollow bodies gave and they flatlined entirely.

At first there had been a rush of talking about it, what could have caused it: some new drug on the street, but then they turned up their first innocent schoolgirl. Some new type of infection, maybe some undiscovered relative of Naegleria fowleri, but autopsies and brain scans turned up nothing. Destiny City's water supply had been tested a hundred different times by a hundred different professional groups but there were no allergens, no notable concentration of contaminants. Some people theorized undetectable alien devices plugging them into some alien Matrix. There were a thousand theories, some bold individuals tried to connect it to the strangely clad terrorists running through the city. Many sighed and shook their heads and resigned themselves to thought it was that way just because it was.

Too many families had become acquainted to the hospital staff, the quirky charisma of Gene Baskov and the stern bluntness of Laurence Fitzpatrick, Lorelei Fitzpatrick's wistful whimsy and Allan Rasmussen's charm.

This was that atmosphere times a thousand.

Hospital cots were spilling out into the hallways, there was some half-botched attempt at making a grid out of it so visitors could still navigate through it all -- the place was thick with a stark, robotic-bird-flock chorus of clicks and beeps of monitoring equipment, footsteps shuffling and clacking over the scuffed linoleum floors. It was disconcerting at best to have to weave your way through all those beds, the close-eyed blank faces of people you didn't know -- or worse, people you met briefly once or twice, and only just remembered today.

Simon Ferris had navigated his gangly-tall frame through all the white sheets draped over metal frames a few times, noting with some dread in the pit of his stomach over a few familiar faces while on the way to his destinations. Jesse Alvarez, who was kind of jarring to see without his typical look of grouchy aggression. Marlo Xanis. Apparently Dylan Rasmussen was in the ICU, and he also caught sight of Parker Damnhait, who he had a class or two with but never talked to. There were a couple of kids from theater he knew. Too many people.

He stopped by all of them, briefly and sort of awkwardly. He sat at the bedside of Alba Gale Delores a few times, left her a card, tried to talk to her but felt entirely uncomfortable with it; he really had no clue how other people did it. It felt strange, sort of invasive, as if their peace was at all disturbable. Would talking to them even do anything, did she even hear his hushed hellos and trailed-off starts about how he and Carter and Damian were doing?

So, like many other visitors, often times he just came to those he wanted to see and sat by them for a little while. Looked at them, looked at his hands, sighed a little. Rinse and repeat.

There was one person for which the sitting part of the equation never followed through, though, and there he hovered, standing and fidgeting at a safe distance, waiting. Trying not to pay too much attention to the girl occupying the chair, a book splayed open in her lap: she was reading to him, he'd noticed, after catching himself watching for more than three seconds and putting two and two together with the sound of her voice and her eyes focused on the page. Once he had fluttered away, perhaps a bit too quickly, when he'd seen her seeing him, and the couple other times he came to visit he wondered if she knew he was there.

Except this time, not so much.

This time, he'd come by to see that the chair was empty.

And so he approached, a little slowly, veering his gaze around as if expecting a trap to go off or the girl to drop down the ceiling the moment he got to close. But nothing of the sort happened, and so he sat. Sighed a little, wrung his hands a bit.

Charys's voice surprised him, clambered up his spine like a cold set of fingers and made him jolt a little. Simon cringed for a second, his fingers curling into little knots in his lap, waiting for the girl to start voicing her protests or thrash him with that chair or something. Instead she stalked over to the opposite side of Charlie's bed and set the chair down, and slumped in it like she was trying to conform the curve of her spine to its shape.

She was talking to him over Charlie's still and sleeping form. That would take a bit of getting used to; Simon couldn't help his gaze drifting down to the improptu human centerpiece of their meeting once or twice. There was a bit of a brooding tinge present on his face, as if he was able to Disapprove Of This Situation even though he wasn't aware of it, or even conscious.

"Hi," he stammered, fidgeting a bit. "S-simon Ferris. Sorry I took your seat."

If there had been anyone else -- literally, on God's green Earth, absolutely anyone else listening to Charys Murphy at that moment, the conversation would have taken a sudden and terrible downturn and docked a few points off of the integrity of both Charlie Boyle and those sitting beside him. It sounded like she was slantly referring to some odd underground teen prostitution ring.

Simon blinked once or twice in confusion, trying to parse what Charys was saying until she mentioned involves cats, then it sort of clicked into place. "Yeah, I guess," he mumbled in reply, fiddling a bit with a small frayed patch in his jeans that looked like it would be becoming a full-fledged hole before too long. At least it had gotten warm enough lately that he wouldn't have to worry about it too much. "I don't know why he'd ever say I did anything to help him out, though. He always did all the work."

He was talking in a sort of resigned, passive manner that made it seem like he should have been kickswinging his legs back and forth under the chair -- but his legs were entirely too long for that, shoes firmly planted on the linoleum, so he was just bouncing one knee on the sole of his foot.

So that was just how he was then, apparently. With a walker or a baseball bat, or an umbrella -- or a crowbar. Simon realized, a bit bemusedly, that he still owed Charlie a crowbar and a flashlight. That had been back in... it must have been November, and he wondered if he remembered, or that if he remembered, if he still cared. He imagined Charlie would have huffed and puffed and bought himself a replacement crowbar-and-flashlight by this point if he'd needed one. Maybe there was some black mark by Simon's name in his mental recordbook, all does not replace missing or broken tools in a timely fashion.

"I'm probably worse," replied Simon confidantly, leaning downward to nest his chin in a set of bunched up fingers (Charys could only imagine someone shouting Timber! and the lurching sound of wood giving way before his head finally crashed into his hand, killing some unfortunate family of bunnies who didn't understand lumberjackese). "I spent the first couple weeks waiting for them to take the pen back and tell me they made a mistake."

Asking Simon how he met Charlie had not been the best conversation choice. His bottlegreen eyes immediately snapped open in the classic deer-in-headlights look, elbow slipping off his leg and his head whiplashedly jerking back a nanosecond later -- his hair was a natural, flippy mess, like he was some sort of humanized fledgeling bird. That comparison could pretty much be applied to the rest of him, really.

He continued looking like he was waiting for a fender to shatter his ribs as he tried, somewhat vainly to pull together a reply. This involved a lot of false starts, a few apologies for his false starting, a bit of imagining Charlie might be getting annoyed enough to wake up and exasperatedly advise Simon to stop his gatling gun of sorries before poor Charys was reduced to Swiss cheese. Sadly, that part of the equation remained very imaginary.

"We met once at the park," he finally started, "but that was only for a little bit and before -- before I got the pen."

"It was winter," Simon awkwardly replied at the jogging shorts question, wearing the sort of baffled and blank look of someone trying to reassess the state of their nerves and realizing he had just spent several seconds looking silly. There was also the fact that some crazy people did wear jogging shorts during the winter, and so there was also the hint of bashful awareness he had just said something a bit unintelligent.

He wondered, in spite of himself, what it was that made Charlie's jogging shorts "epic." Maybe they were whimsically patterned or something -- but that was incredibly hard to imagine. He would probably glare off any tiny pineapples that attempted to grace his clothing.

Then, a bit more intelligently, he said, "I guess we hung out a bit," and then there was that momentary pause of reflection, Simon's eyes flicking for a split second over Charlie's face before retreating to some spot on the floor. A bit. Some henshined-up patrols, a handful of awkward coffees and stilted conversations, some hours altogether worth of uncomfortable silences. "It was mostly... work, though."

Simon blinked again and his brow furrowed a bit, a corner of his mouth twitching once as he looked over again at Charys folded up in the chair. "I didn't mean to say I didn't like him or anything," he said, stammering again. "Is that what it sounded like? I'm sorry." He chewed away at his lip, and muttered another apology while worrying away at the frayed bit of denim over his knee.

"I just don't get why he puts up with me, I guess. I'm a bit of a screwup." He was looking at the floor again, his jaw clenching a bit. "He's already had to save my life -- twice."

Well, that was one hell of a question. The floor was, it seemed, becoming increasingly interesting to this taller Hillworth boy -- where Charys seemed to have no problem looking at her fallen comrade, Simon's gaze was much more avoidant. He practically flinched a tiny bit whenever Charlie's face accidentally entered his peripheral vision.

Awkward. They were always so damn awkward.

"I dunno," he said simply. The king of obvious question-dodging answers. Simon sort of wanted a place to hide.