ArchivedLogs:Visiting Hours

Visiting Hours
Dramatis Personae Hive, Flicker, Spencer, B, Tian-shin, Tag, Steve, Jax, Horus, Ion, Isra, Shane
In Absentia	21-23 November 2015 (Part of Flu Season TP.)
Location <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - Harlem
On the cutting edge of many medical technologies, Mount Sinai Hospital is often ranked as one of the nation's best hospitals. The medical school attached is one of the best in the world, meaning that even your med students know what they are doing. Chin up, then -- when you come in here badly mutilated after the latest terrible catastrophe in Times Square, you're in good hands. The Intensive Care Unit has remained steadily full these last few weeks, and charged with a growing tension almost palpable. The security personnel stationed in the hallways look haggard, and the nurses and techs go about their duties with frequent nervous sidelong glances. 4:13. Saturday. They're just wheeling the bed down, transferring the quiet still form in fresh out of surgery. There's a battery of machines to hook him up to, which the nurse goes about with crisp efficiency, talking her way through the steps though Joshua does not stir. Something else stirs in the room, though -- silent and unfelt by the nurse. A whisper of mental touch, gliding through the minds at the hospital first and then settling, careful and gentle, around Joshua's. Wrapping there, nestling close, undaunted by the lack of response from the man. << (not alone.) >> 7:15. Saturday. It's a long trip up from the Lower East Side -- longer still when the subway isn't running and there are packs of zombies blocking several of the streets. It's a very bedraggled Flicker that trudges in to Joshua's room -- the blood speckled across his green and silver arm hasn't even yet dried, and he's only just wiping his crowbar with a paper towel and slinging it once more across his back. He settles himself into a chair by Joshua's bed. Sets a single wood-carved dahlia on a table by the medic's bedside. "You know," there's a /determined/ levity in his tone that doesn't quite make it through to the very decidedly up-all-night sleepless exhaustion in his eyes, the small tremor in the hand that reaches for the other man's, "it /is/ long past time you took a vacation, man." 8:21. Saturday. It wouldn't be surprising to Joshua even if he were awake -- but his roommate, at least, startles up with a snarl when Spencer just /appears/ in the room. Spence squeaks, backs up closer to Joshua's bed with a hastily signed apology -- not that Joshua's roommate is /going/ anywhere, already cuffed into bed with thick restraints from previous attempts to bite at his nurses. 'Sorry sorry sorry sorry,' the tiny teleporter is saying, scurrying closer to Joshua's bed and drawing the curtain. "Oops," he whispers, leaning in close to Joshua. "This was just quicker I wanted to come before /anyone else/ -- Oh!" His eyes widen as he looks at the bedside table, narrowing his eyes on the flower there. "Oh he /beat/ me, /cheater/." 14:58. Saturday. A number more cards, mostly handwritten, have appeared to scatter themselves across the windowsill and table. B adds hir own small trinket as she comes clomping in -- one gauntleted hand cupped carefully around the small box and the other rested on the hilt of a short sword at her side. She props the lid of the box open, leaving the tiny statuette inside, a slender tern sculpted in delicate slivers of bone. She doesn't say anything. Just nestles herself into a chair by Joshua's bed, setting a pair of small jewel-toned beetle statues on the table nearby the medic to start playing quiet music. 21:13. Saturday. Tian-shin's eyes keep drifting shut, her head nodding and then jerking upright again. She sits in a visitor's chair beside the bed, a beige hospital blanket draped around her and a bag of trail mix in her lap. Her hair hangs loose, long glossy black tresses spilling over her shoulders and over the sword she holds across her chest as one might a stuffed animal. Across from her, Tag's very colorful laptop sits open on another chair, playing Steven Universe ("Sworn to the Sword" has just begun) with subtitles and no sound. Tag is curled up on the floor beside Tian-shin’s chair in a nest of blankets, his head resting on her knee. He reaches up now and then for handfuls of trail mix, which he devours kind of perfunctorily. /His/ eyes are wide open, his shoulder tense, and his foot bouncing under the blanket. He hums the Jam Song very quietly to Steven and Connie’s silent dance on the screen. There’s a knock at the door, which then opens just enough to admit the head and torso of a nurse. "{Visiting hours are over...}" he says in soft, Puerto Rican Spanish. But then he looks at Tian-shin’s sword, then looks past the Huas to the curtain that conceals Joshua’s roommate, blessedly asleep for now. He just nods and ducks back out, closing the door gently behind him. 08:56. Sunday. Steve stands at the foot of the bed, sets his duffle bag down as the Hua siblings depart in a sleepy tumble to forage for breakfast. He's wearing a brown leather jacket, dark blue jeans, and black combat boots, all of which could use a good cleaning but none of which is completely filthy. The shield hanging from his back has some new scuffs in its paint job, though it’s been cleaned and buffed to a shine all the same. "{I not find flowers, or cards. But have this...}" He digs a pack of Newports from a pocket of his jacket and sets it on the nightstand. "{Maybe when you better, I tell you how I found. Very strange story.}" He slumps into the chair Tian-shin recently vacated, pulling the shield from his back and setting it down beside him. "{Hope you don’t mind, I rest here for a while.}" 12:23. Sunday. Jax's church clothes these days don't look all that churchy. Gore-spattered hiking boots, black corduroys, a black sweatshirt pulled over a polo shirt. He is toying restlessly with a glass flower of no actual earthly provenance, gleaming and swirled with flecks of gold among its red and purple blossom. It takes a bit for him to find a secure place to nestle it among the rest of the gifts. For a while he paces, tidying, straightening the cards and flowers and gifts into neater rows, picking up a couple where they've fallen and finding new homes for them. Eventually he returns to Joshua's bedside, though, sitting down in it and taking out a book -- Martin Espada's /The Republic of Poetry/. Though his heavy drawl is soft, it sounds louder in the still room as he begins to read. 15:19. Sunday. There's a frantic taptaptaptaptap of large beak at the window. Horus doesn't /stay/ long enough to actually come in, nervously skittering back and forth at the window ledge at the sight of all that HOSPITAL beyond the glass. But he /does/ stay long enough to /thrust/ his delivery towards whichever Hua sibling gets to the window first -- one more addition to the stuffed toys flooding the room, a small and very soft plush Smurf. 22:27. Sunday. "{-- /shit/ dog they trying tell me some /bullshit/ about visiting hours -- holy /crap/ it looks like a fucking Hallmark store in here.}" Ion pauses halfway in to Joshua's room, clapping his hands together in delight at the mess of flowers and cards, stuffed animals, balloons, boxes of chocolate (a few of /these/ have vanished), other trinkets flourishing around his bedside. "{Man I gotta get /me/ laid up Christmas coming early for you, boy.}" He has his own gift to add to the mix -- a gleaming golden case for Joshua's phone, crusted ostentatiously with gems, diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires mosaic'd into the pattern of a grinning sugar skull. He tucks the case into the arms of a teddy bear, snuggling it behind the plush GET WELL SOON heart it holds, before leaning in to press a FIRM kiss to the other man's forehead. "{Now you do your smashing up in /proper/ style, yeah? Hell-fucking-yeah.}" 11:21. Monday. Isra pushes the door open with one immense, icy-white wing. Dressed in a black tunic dress with handkerchief hems and bell sleeves, she looks neither dirty nor exhausted. A sturdy leather harness strapped to her chest holds a pile of blankets from which two small clawed hands protrude. She carries a black mirrorwork satchel over one shoulder, from which she withdraws a small packet of seeds. "{Not flowers yet,}" her words come low and resonant, the accent of her Spanish heavily Argentinian. "{But maybe soon.}" Leaving the seeds nestled amongst the other flowers, cards, plush animals, and the like, she lingers a moment longer before turning and departing. 17:27. Monday. Shane looks like he hasn't /slept/ since the battle, steps dragging, skin spiderwebbed with faint cracks, the bags under his eyes dark almost to black. He's jittery, taking a seat and then getting out of it, pacing to the window, pacing back to the bed. "{You know, I've really been hoping -- I miss -- I don't think we can --}" His Spanish isn't halting so much as jittery as well. Though these words break off as he passes by one stuffed bear, surveying the glittering phone case in its arms with an increasing widening of eyes. His webbed hands spread. He turns a /Look/ towards Joshua. "{... oh my /god/. If you get better for anything, dude, it's gotta be for Ion's -- oh my /god/.}"