sharp_as_knives | Phoenix Place, Wednesday evening

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Current Location: Phoenix Place
Current Music: Rob Dougan

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Phoenix Place, Wednesday evening

Hannibal's throat was nearly healed, just a faint shadow of bruising and a very slight hoarseness left. He was feeling much better overall, thanks to friends who insisted upon doing whatever they could. His wrists were still a mess, but only time would heal that.

More importantly, his kitchen was nearly completed! After far too many false starts and reorders of things, all that was left was the center island counter, which was still bare wood. If he was careful and his knives were sharp (they always were), he could finally manage to cook again.

The dining room was still waiting on paneling, plants, and a table, but he wasn't too proud to eat elsewhere.

So he was sitting on the sofa with his plate on one of the end tables, eating and listening to some of the Rob Dougan that Jono had left for him. It wasn't a bad evening.

[OOC: Open post!]

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"It sounds rather unpleasant," Hannibal noted. He took a few more stitches and tied it off, then came back around to the front. "How are you feeling now? Ready to get that coat off?"

Nick considered for a moment, and then gave a small, kind of uncoordinated nod. Yes. Yes, that seemed like a pretty good plan.

"Yeah, I think so, Doc. It's not getting any better the longer I sit here, and I'm... well, not feeling no pain, but pretty damn well on the way there."

Hannibal nodded. "Let me move your arm; don't try to help," he instructed. "We want to keep further damage minimal if at all possible." He thought about it for a moment, assessed Nick's level of coherence, then leaned down to look him in the face. "Stay loose and don't move."

"Don't move," Nick echoed, "stay loose. Pretty sure I can handle that."

Really, Nick could probably handle another kick to the shoulder, at this point. Whatever Hannibal wanted. Bring it.

Which was good, because what he was going to get probably wasn't going to be far off. But first, Hannibal gathered up the folds of the coat and pulled them as far over as he could without jostling Nick's bad arm, then kept one hand on his shoulder to feel the dislocation as he moved it just enough to pull it off.

The coat, not his arm.

Nick appreciated that. He still had high hopes of using that arm again. Fighting crime with it. Lifting weights with it. Et cetera.

"Aaand off it - fff - goes."

Okay, maybe he wasn't quite feeling no pain.

Hannibal folded the coat over a nearby chair and turned back to Nick's shoulder, running his hands along it and pressing just enough to feel where the bones were. "I'm going to administer a local anesthetic and muscle relaxer; those should take care of most of the pain. You can let me know if you need more valium."

"Oh, trust me, I will let you know," Nick said, as though there was any sort of doubt. Really, the verbal filter was starting to drift away, and mostly it was just leaving Nikolai happy and drowsy. Hurting, hell yes, but not terribly concerned about that either way. "Good night for valium. And anestha-an-ana- fuck, painkillers. Goddamn, words should not be this hard."

Concussion. Valium. Dislocated shoulder. Honestly, Nick. Honestly.

Hannibal chuckled as he gave Nick the next two injections. "Better for that than for getting beaten up," he prompted smoothly. "A kevlar vest doesn't protect you from a brick to the head."

"Yeah, an' usually I have my helmet on, but it was too damn hot out tonight for that so I left it with my bike. Not makin' that mistake again."

Whoa there, Nick. Slow down, man.

"Your bike?" Hannibal frowned at him. "And how did you get here?"

He had a sinking feeling.

Even with the valium, Nikolai at least had the good sense to look sheepish.

"I was doing plenty better than I am now," he attempted. "Anyway, couldn't go to one of the hospitals on the mainland. That'd end bad. Figured I'd, you know, I'd get to the clinic, only then there were gremlins."

A beat.

"Little green shitheads."

"Some of the hospitals on the mainland are quite competent, you know," Hannibal noted, half in exasperation and half fishing.

"Too competent," Nick agreed. "That's the problem."

He reached his good arm up to straighten his shades on his face, partly just making sure that they were still there. Of course they were. Hannibal wasn't unconscious on the floor.

"Can't let myself be out of my own damn head at a mainland hospital. I'd leave worse off than I came in, they'd fucking... vivisect me or something. That'd be fun."

"Why on earth would they do that?" Hannibal feigned astonishment. He was certain there was something interesting going on here.

All things considered, that was probably a pretty safe bet, yeah. Nick took stock of the look on Hannibal's face, and met it with a wry grin and a slow shake of his head.

"S'what they do, isn't it? You see it all the time in the goddamn movies. Something fucked-up and new comes around and the... the government gets all paranoid about it and the movie ends with the whole fucking army outside some hazmat area all because of some ugly little wrinkled thing that the kid made friends with..." A beat. "Only I'm not an alien. I don't think. I don't fucking know."

"One would think that would be the sort of thing you would know," Hannibal pointed out as he checked for the pulse in Nick's wrist.

Nick huffed a bit of a chuckle at that.

"Yeah, yeah, you got me, Doc. Not an alien," he replied. "But shit, like I know anyway. It's fucked up enough that I'd rather not have it go on my official medical record off-island, you know? Better to get it looked at by Fandom people. People who see, like, guys with wings or who breathe fire or whatever the fuck else all the time. People on the mainland, they're not gonna get it. At best, I get hurt. At worst, someone else does."

"Is there anything I should know before I continue?" Hannibal asked, frowning. "I should hate to put either of us in danger."

There was a long silence while Nick tried to focus enough to seriously consider an answer to that question.

"You're a doctor. Goes without saying you don't get my blood in you," he noted, careful to pronounce every word clearly, as though his drugged mumbling would somehow make what he was saying any less credible. "One ground rule. Just one. My shades stay on. I pass out or something and they skew, don't look me in the eye. Just don't look me in the goddamn eye."

Well, that was certainly interesting. "If you pass out, I doubt your eyes will be open," Hannibal pointed out. "However, I should at least check your pupils; we want to rule out brain damage."

"No," Nick said firmly, and there was very little of that valium-induced serenity in his tone, then. "If I'm not conscious and you open my eye, you will die. You will look me in the fucking eye, and neither one of us will be able to break that eye contact, and when I come to again, you will still be locked there, stone fucking dead. I'll chance the brain damage, if it's all the same to you."

Hannibal paused. "Perhaps you'd better explain." So much for being subtle, but if Nick was in a mood to talk...

He pressed on each of his fingers, checking the blood flow. "Any numbness or tingling?"

Nick was rarely in a mood to talk, but given the likelihood that he would pass out here, the idea of waking up to Hannibal's corpse didn't exactly appeal to him, for whatever reason.

"Bit numb," he mumbled, closing his eyes and sighing. Holding his focus for long enough to get that last bit out was exhausting all on its own. "Anyway, doesn't matter so long as you don't try it. Some kind of fucked-up Greek life-energy vampire death-eyes bullshit, hell if I even know what I'm supposed to be, anymore. Gave up trying to figure it out and it's not like I'm rushing back to Kalymnos to ask. I'll come stumbling back with snakes for hair next or something."

"I think I can get your vest off myself; may I cut the shirt?" Hannibal asked. Nick's revelation he took in, then cocked his head as he thought about it. "You're referring to the gorgon Medusa. Do you know the story of how Perseus defeated her?"

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