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Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 5:23 am
Angus Cowden was not a small man. He stood a bit under six feet; in high school and college, he'd been built like an ox. Not so much now, though: every year he got past fifty left him thinner, grayer, and hunched just the slightest. His only child falling ill with the mysterious sleeping sickness did nothing but compound this: he looked tired.
Angus didn't sleep much lately. He wasn't at her bedside all the time, but he worked for a medical supply company (regional manager! Any other time, he would brag about this), and the epidemic had sent their orders through the roof. This, and they were short-staffed. Half of accounting was in a coma. He put in long, thankless hours at the office doing jobs that weren't his, and he'd never tell Nellie that it was to avoid going home to a house that was too quiet without their daughter.
But it was.
He knew what every one of the machines hooked up to Tallulah did. At one point or another, they'd all passed through his office. You had to keep up with the literature, see what the major hospitals were ordering, and make the connections to bring it in- but the heart rate monitors and IV fluids and brain scanners couldn't bring his daughter out of her coma. That would happen on its own, if it happened at all.
Tallulah was popular, Angus guessed from the bouquets and stuffed animals that vied for space on her bedside table. But the flowers were wilting now...
There was a cautious knock on the doorframe. Angus looked up to see Jaimie, carrying a fresh bunch of daisies.
"You can come in," he said quietly.
The atmosphere was like at a funeral, he reflected darkly.
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Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 5:37 am
Jaimie Leontyne didn't like to admit that certain people intimidated him. Especially not if they were 'normal' people.
Angus Cowden intimidated him. Irrationally so. He shuffled his feet slightly in the doorway, as though he were preparing to enter the pen with an large, aggressive bull instead of a man who he could probably easily outdistance and at minimum, go toe to toe with without bothering to henshin up, and stepped inside.
"...I brought flowers..." He noted, unnecessarily, and obviously. He'd brought a fair number of flowers, and plush animals, like they were magical charms to ward off the funeral atmosphere. Rituals to hold the death-vibe of the hospital wing and it's beeping machines at bay, only they were petals and acrylic fur instead of chants and incense. Chants and Incense might have been at least as effective, which was to say, not especially effective at all.
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Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 5:50 am
Angus nodded and awkwardly pushed the most wilted vase of flowers to the back of the table to make space. The nurses would take them away later, when they weren't there to see it. He knew this instinctively, the same way anyone who has ever watched a relative slowly die knew it. For someone employed in a medical field, Angus hated hospitals.
"You..." he began, and realized he wasn't sure what he meant to say.
Angus cleared his throat.
"You're here often?" The nurses wouldn't tell him who visited.
By some combination of luck and the grace of god, Tallulah had been brought in early enough to be given a private room in the children's hospital, so it wasn't like people visiting this room weren't there for her.
He glanced over at the night table again. "You bring all this junk?" he asked.
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Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2010 5:00 am
The word Junk earned the flash of a scowl, though it flickered quickly across the young man's face before he forced it back into a mask of semi politeness. Junk indeed.
He studied the toes of his shoes as he deliberately took long enough to set up the Daisys, pushing back a bouquet that was beginning to wilt slightly, and arranging a plush of an orange kitten nearby.
Tallulah was a wildflower sort of girl, not exotic orchids and oriental lily's. He made his flower choices accordingly.
"Some of it." He answered, defensively, as though challenging to see if the man had a problem with it. "Not the balloons."
Mylar in the oceans, being eaten by sea creatures and all that. He'd even tried a vegetarian burger for her. It still made him wonder why if vegetarians enjoyed vegetables so much, they went through such lengths to pretend they were still eating meat. "It's something that people can actually -do-. Makes people feel better to do something." He offered out, limply.
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Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2010 6:09 am
Angus grunted gruffly, dismissing the notion. He'd never seen why people brought flowers to hospitals - it wasn't like the ill would enjoy them, or at least not someone in a coma. He was being sort of fatalistic about this whole thing, but Angus was a pessimist by nature, and when you were sour about things, it was easier to be happy when they turned about well.
Not that they necessarily would - it was just a principle. He gestured vaguely to the balloons. "I think one of her friends brought those," he said. "The one with the pink eyes-"
What was her name? She was here a lot and somehow Angus had never caught her name. Did anyone know her name? "The nurses say some of the kids never get visitors," he said, feeling at a loss for words. No, he didn't dislike Jaimie... but it was important to not be too friendly. This was his little girl's honor at stake.
A few more moments of Jaimie futzing with the arrangement of gifts passed. Angus looked over at him. "For god's sake, stop messing with that thing and sit down," he declared grouchily. "The nurses are just going to move it all later."
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Posted: Sat Jun 19, 2010 5:20 pm
"Their friends are probably in coma's too." Jaimie noted, his expression turning bitter and dark, as though some of his general exhaustion and lack of sleep had been filled to overflowing and sloshed out. He looked for a second as though he might be tempted to pick up one of the stuffed animals and throw it across the room, but dropped it instead and wandered over to lean against the wall instead of taking a seat.
"I think I've seen her." He noted, but couldn't summon the girls name either. "...I don't think she ever stuck around long enough to get introduced."
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Posted: Sat Jun 19, 2010 7:59 pm
Angus nodded. "No, I don't think I ever caught it, either," he agreed, which was strange. Tallulah had been friends with this girl for how long and he had never thought to find out her name? He'd always liked to think he was close with his daughter, but this coma was making him suddenly question how much he actually knew her.
The man frowned and steepled his fingers. He was quiet, contemplating Tallulah's slow, steady breathing and mulling over a question that had been bothering him from the beginning of this whole ordeal. "They found her-" he said, and paused, clearly struggling to articulate the words.
His eyes found Jaimie's, making uncomfortable contact. For Jaimie, it was probably like staring down a confused bull, not sure if the animal might charge or back off any second.
"What would she have been doing in an alley downtown, with that little gay kid she's always hanging out with?" After a moment, he clarified, with a grunt. "You know, Pasha."
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Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2010 7:17 am
Jaimie felt the pit of his stomach sink further than he thought was possible, having, in fact, a damn good idea exactly what Tallulah had been doing in that alley, and for a second, he felt less like Sleep deprived, distressed Jaimie Leontyne, and more like Regulus, Senshi of Pride, wearing a normal person's skin.
He wondered if it showed.
"...Tal was interested in trying to track things going on around the city. Pasha and some of the rest of us were trying to put together what we could find out, see if we could put together the pieces since it's people our age who were the most involved. We thought maybe we'd spot something that an adult might dismiss as signs of a fad and not a signal of something larger."
It was less difficult to construct this half truth than he would have liked to admit to Tallulah. In fact it was mostly truth, with holes cut out, but he did his best to not let the gaps show. He was a showman, how much different was it than putting on heels and a scarf to cover up his Adams Apple?
He'd been thinking of suggesting Tal and he could go as Bond and a Bond Girl for Halloween, just to make light of her knowing about him and Cee dressing up in each others clothes.
"We went out in pairs if we went at all, because it was safer..." But whatever had happened, it hadn't been safer this time.
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Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2010 8:02 am
Angus ruminated on this for a moment. It was possible, even, to see the gears turning and twisting behind his eyes. "So you mean to tell me," he said, a quiet rage slipping into his voice, "that my daughter is in the hospital... because a bunch of kids were running around playing Encyclopedia Brown?"
He had known it wasn't a school project. He had told Nellie it couldn't possibly be a school project, because one of the girls had shown up in a Crystal uniform and he knew for a fact that Jaimie, and possibly the loud tall one as well, both went to Hillworth. Nellie hadn't believed him, but now Angus's face was crossed by a mixture of smug self-satisfaction and anger.
However, he decided, it would be unwise to lash out at Jaimie here. Knowing Tallulah, it had probably all been her idea. And it certainly explained things.
"These... investigations," he said tensely. "Is this what she was sneaking out to do? When she got all those bruises?"
That part still didn't fit, and Tallulah had never confessed to whatever it was that had caused her so many injuries.
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Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2010 9:07 am
"I'm not sure -what- happened." Regulus... no... Jaimie's voice, flashed a bit hotly on it's own. He felt...
He felt -old-. "And I don't think 'Encyclopedia Brown' put a huge area of the city in a coma! It's like someone put a pin in the map and drew a circle!"
He slammed his jaws shut, not wanting to say more, but the position of the ones he'd known had certainly indicated something that felt sort of like a blast radius, like the tiny scorch marks made when 'claws' briefly impacted something flammable. "I don't think it was her fault. I just wish I'd been there."
If he had, he'd probably have been unconscious too, but at least he'd -know-. "...probably." He added, stubbornly. Not very helpfully. "But these days you could get killed just going out for a pack of gum it seems like."
He thought about the dream of school... with the guns... and then crammed it into as remote a corner of his thoughts as he could with an skin crawling sensation of horror.
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Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2010 10:26 am
"Damn terrorists," growled Angus, seeming to agree with Jaimie although he was still undeniably pissed about the whole thing. He wasn't a paranoid man by nature, but living in Destiny City in times like these, you naturally made the association. Trouble and terrorists both started with a T.
He leaned forward and brushed a few stray strands of hair away from his daughter's face. "Bet it was some kind of biological attack," he continued, grumbling. "Course the government doesn't care, just quarantines the city and makes it into someone else's problem..."
Where the ******** was the government?
"I've lived in Destiny City almost my whole life," he proclaimed. "Grew up here, moved away for a few years, and then moved back. Used to be, it was a nice place to live. Somewhere you could raise your kids and not worry about them being abducted off the streets."
Or put in comas. But not anymore.
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