Buckley's Chance_Level 3

On the whole, I hadn't expected it get this organized.  Generally, when I had crazy ideas like this, aided and buffed by a friend or not, it blew over in a couple of hours, often because I'd completed it.  This was a larger undertaking than seeing if I could write a random insult generator.  That was a solo job, for one, unless you were really ambitious or really slow.

Now I was sitting at the kitchen table with darker bags under my eyes, clutching a cup of coffee and looking around at the people that I mostly didn't know.  The coffee reminded me that Jussi hadn't come around, which didn't give me the prim trickle of haha-so-there that I would have anticipated.

The kid with the red and white Mario mushroom on the chest of his hoodie seemed to be used to late nights, and the really young kid with awesome hair had obviously gone to bed at a reasonable hour and woken up at an equally reasonable hour—although judging by the grayness of his complexion and his thin shaky hands, he never slept well.

But Riley was beginning to show the strain.  She was talking slower than she had been most of the night, which meant she was a speed one could safely call Normal.  Of course, she didn't give in to exhaustion as dramatically as I did.  She just looked tired.  I looked happily close to transforming into a zombie.

With that in mind, I grinned at all three of them and slumped further in my chair.  "I think we've really got a chance with this."

Squid—whose hair really was awesome, blue with a few streaks of darker blue that may have just been a happy accident—sat up straighter, as if my slumping made him mindful of his own posture.  He hadn't had a chance to contribute much on purpose, but he'd only been there long enough to hear us explain the whole deal as it had become.  It does sound like it'll work out…  But I still don't understand what you guys think I can do to help."

It wasn't false modesty.  This kid was either genuinely humble or a little stepped on.  I hoped I hadn't added to it, I tended to do things like that when I wasn't paying sufficient attention.  In case I had, I mimed his excellent posture and attempted to smile at him through my sleep deprivation headache.  "Riley said you have a strong background in illustrating realistic landscapes and interior scenes."

He nodded, a bit distractedly.  "I used to want to be an architect—but it was a long time ago."

"Still, I'm sure you can draw an isometric interior of a chiropractic office."  Maybe it was arrogant to sound so confident in his talent, since I hadn't seen it at all yet, and I didn't have any in that department.  Oh well.  Kid looked like he could do with some compliments, no matter how watery.

Hat Boy, An, stepped in, giving me a chance to gently attack my coffee.  "The sketch can be as rough or as finished as you like.  If you guys want to end up with a complete pixel-art interface, I'll have to redo everything anyway."

"Then why do you need me to sketch anything?"  Poor little guy.  Squid looked like a third grader lost in a department store.  "I've seen you sketch—"

"For one, it'd be quicker, and two, you're better at practical architecture.  It would cut a step out of my process.  You could probably even help come up with the character designs."  An chugged his coffee, earning a whistle from me.  Even though he made a bit of a face as he set it down.  "What was in that?"

"I have no idea," I admitted.  "My mother buys this sort of hippie no cruelty coffee."

"Do they usually put cruelty in coffee?" he asked, looking vaguely curious in a horrified way.  It was impossible to tell if he was asking seriously or not.

I reached over and nudged Riley awake with my elbow.  "I guess.  If they do, it takes better with than without."

"Without what?"  Riley sat up, rubbing her eyes and trying not to yawn.  But I was saved from having to answer the question by a knock at the door.  The chair fell back and smacked the floor in my uninterrupted yet casual rush to the front room.  I yanked the door open and saw Jussi standing there, nothing in hand.

He always had something, even if it was just coffee.  He said coffee was unhealthy and never drank it himself, but he always brought me a cup.  "What, you're not going to damn me today?"

"I'm not hungover enough to damn you."

One eyebrow raised, allowing the connected dark blue eye to open wider.  "Does that mean you like me today?"  The ghost of a smile started to tug at his mouth, but I couldn't let him do that.

I stepped on his foot—which I soon realized was stupid, because it meant I was touching him, and it couldn't even hurt.  He was wearing brown oxfords, which were notoriously impervious to attacks from bare feet, even with the heel pointed viciously downwards.  It was also annoying to be reminded of how much bigger than me he was.  Taller, bigger feet, and he was definitely wider.  I glared up at him, forgetting to step back.

"It's probably safe to assume the answer is no."

How could he say things like that and smile as if he'd just gotten a big compliment?  It was clinically insane.  I had to be getting him closer to the point where he would just haul off and sock me, but there was always this troubling notion that the conditions keeping him from doing that weren't very susceptible to change…

For one thing, my stupid smallness.

"Aren't you going to ask me what I had for breakfast?"  I managed to step off his foot and back into some personal space.

He shook his head and held out an impertinent hand that was entirely too much representation of his honest Boy Scout attitude.  "Actually, I wanted to take you out for breakfast."

I bit my lip.  This was new.  As aggravating as he was, Jussi had always been a little predictable.  I'd known him since I was about fifteen, almost four and a half years now, and although it wouldn't be fair if I said he was boring, he did have set parameters for himself.  He didn't step beyond those boundaries, even when I did my best to piss him off.  It was a kind of being careful that made master jewel thieves look like they didn't know how to take their time.  "Wh-what?"

Oh, well done, Ando.  Talk about parameters and then go on and bust your own.  Bravo.

A river of chestnut brown hair swung into the room.  Riley had poked her head in, hanging onto the doorjamb and tilting herself, trying to keep most of what wasn't her arm or her head in the other room.  "Are you—oh, I'm sorry."  She blushed, God only knew why, then disappeared, possibly retreating to the kitchen.

Jussi's face went a little red, which happened a lot, usually for reasons I had no idea how to begin to pinpoint, and he shuffled his feet.  "Oh, you have… company."

I rolled my eyes at him.  "Please.  Don't assume things like that—she's too female for me.  I've just got a, um, a few friends over."  For some reason, I didn't want to drag Jussi into the whole game idea.  Not that I didn't think he could contribute, hell, he could be a great first round beta tester and throw in opinions wherever they were needed, but…  I just didn't want him to be here when they were.  I couldn't even tell myself why that was.

"No, of course not," he said, relaxing a little.  Too much to think he wasn't still uncomfortable.  Come to think of it, he hadn't met any of my friends, as few as they were.  I knew a lot of his, but I only really liked Caj.  Mostly if Jussi and I did anything together, it was just the two of us.

It was too hot in the front room, my hands felt like I'd pushed them into a furnace.  I pulled some of the blinds to keep the sun out, then turned back to Jussi.  "Can—can I get a rain check?"  I couldn't look at him, I didn't want to see that Boy Scout face all genuinely pleased.  He was way too easy to please, this guy.

But then I had to look up, because he was nodding.  And he wouldn't stop until I looked up at him, the jerk.  Once I had, he said, "Sure.  See you tomorrow."

I could have just kicked him out the door and let him take a hint.  Or I could have been a tad nicer and explained that we'd be busy for the next few days, late nights and all that.  He was used to me and my late nights, though; he always came over around the same time anyway, even if it ended up meaning a late morning of chasing off another hangover.

Thinking that way must have made me head go soft and squishy, because what I actually did was push him gently out the door and say, "Yeah.  I'll see you then."

He actually turned back a few times and waved once before reaching his car.  He looked kind of worried, even from this distance.  I couldn't see if he was doing that thing with his face, letting a small grimace sort of grow onto it like very patient mold, but he did have his hands in his pockets.  He even forgot to take them out to get in the car, if only for a few seconds.

I waited for him to drive off, then returned to the kitchen, still shaking off the weird "Everything is going to be alright" feeling that Jussi sort of gave to people, like a plague.

~+~

While Ando was talking to his friend, we got down to business.  Sort of half-heartedly, since it felt weird to hold even a discussion without him, but we had an armful of random scrappy ideas collecting in the middle of the table.  Most of them were written on pages torn out of an old notebook I'd found in Ando's basement, but we were starting to run out of those.

Squid was about to start drawing on the back of his hand, but I gave him the last sheet of notebook paper and made him use it.  "No sense you getting your mom on your case because of a little ink on your hands," I said, watching his face very carefully.  Squid was a little strange about his family, and he looked so fragile sometimes, I didn't want to say something wrong.

He grinned though, which always looked a little sad on him, as if he felt guilty for being happy, which struck me as fundamentally wrong.  He didn't catch my frown though, he'd already lowered his head to start scratching out another design for the main office setting.

Idle words may have cost lives elsewhere, but it was working out for us.  Ando had taken the concept of chiropractic care as a service industry to a level that ended up looking like an assembly line of a sort.  "It varies, but chiropractic appointments run along a logical chain of events," I said, just to talk.

It did make sense, even if it was a little on the cynical side.  You walked in for an appointment, got adjusted by the doctor, and then went on to do whatever treatments you needed—like flexion distraction or time on a roller table—before paying for your appointment and making another.  Both our game-savvy people said it was the same as the existing Dash games we were going to stand alongside, just a different logic chain and setting.

An handed me back a piece of paper.  "How's that for a menu?  We still need a title so I can do the logo, and a playable character or two, but these could work for the buttons and the background—and there should probably be little fiddly bits here, here, and there."  He poked at several elements on the paper with the eraser end of his mechanical pencil.  "But what do the right fiddly bits look like?  I mean, you're the one who knows about all this chiro-pa-thingy stuff."

He looked different when he was working like this.  Sort of… less aimless than I 'd seen him yesterday.  Brighter.  I leaned closer to the paper to better pretend I knew what I was talking about.  "I like the buttons, and the background, but…  What are fiddly bits?"

The pencil was flying again, on another half-used sheet of paper.  I'd have to ask Ando where we could get some more.  This was the third menu design An had served up, and I could see Squid finishing up his second office sketch.  There was a thick tap as An set the pencil down.

He passed me the sheet of paper, which was covered in small pictures of offhand items, mostly food, but also household things like toothbrushes and a backpack.  "They're sort of like kids' stickers, stuck strategically around so things won't look too boring.  But they need to fit the whole theme or they're just like… what kids do with stickers.  Random and out of place."

That made me think of Kevin's door.  When he was nine, he'd pasted it with stickers from all sorts of things.  Pocket Monsters, X-Men, whatever people would give him.  It all went on his door, and it was a permanent mess.  He seemed to like it that way, even now that he was fifteen years old.  "I dunno, kids like that."

An stared at me for a second, then just laughed.  "Maybe you have a point.  But if we want to get a distributer, we'll have to get it past them before any kids see it."  He pushed the mouth of his hat out of his eyes with the heel of his hand.  "So what are some appropriate fiddly bits for chiro-pa-whatsit?"

It had been a while since I'd seen a chiropractor, and that had only been when I'd taken my dad for an appointment when he'd hurt his back.  "If our character is going to be the assistant, then there should probably be some clipboards and flyers.  Maybe X-rays…"

Squid's head popped up.  "Don't they have ropes and weird-looking pillows?"

I blinked at him.  "Maybe…  How do you know?"

He blushed, which wasn't at all surprising, although the fact that he answered was more of a shock than the actual answer.  "My dad used to have problems with his knees.  Now he goes in every week to make sure he doesn't end up with carpal tunnel."

"Perfect!  You just got yourself a new job."  Ando's arrival made Squid and me jump, but An just kept drawing.  It looked like he'd gotten another idea—he was drawing a different menu on the back of the last one.

Squid looked up at Ando, his expression beginning to match the one on his shirt's alien.  It had only one eye, and no other features, but it still matched up disturbingly well.  "Um, what new job?"

"Scout, unless you can think of a less stupid title for it."  Ando was grinning broadly, but his eyes looked a bit glassy.  As though his mind was anywhere but on what he was saying.  I'd never seen him look like that, and I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from asking if his friend had upset him.  I'd ask him as soon as I could get a private moment with him.

Meanwhile, Squid's face had lit up so much it was blinding.  It was one of the nicest things I'd seen all morning.  Good thing I'd called him…  If he'd started the morning badly enough to run into the closet with the phone, then the rest of the day probably deserved an early rescue.  He pulled his satchel out from under the table and pulled the flap open, then pulled out a legal pad and a cheap-looking sketchbook and set them on the table.  "Here, looks like we're out of the other stuff…"

An looked up long enough to make a face at him.  "You were holding out on us."

"Sorry…  I didn't think of it until just now."

"What made you think of it?"

Squid looked back at Ando, his face a little bit on the doting side.  He had a gently droopy face to begin with, big eyes, a wide mouth, and a tendency to look terrified, but this was fairly pronounced.

Oh dear.

I kept my mouth shut and met his eye—he was looking at me and doing his best to talk above his normal soft tone.  "I thought I could drive out to the chiropractor my dad sees.  I-if I can just borrow your keys, Riley?"

"Sure."  I handed them over, very careful not to stare too hard at him.  He looked slightly less prone to crumbling now, though.  I hoped it wasn't because of what I suspected.  That would end very, very badly.

As soon as he was out the door, I glanced over An's shoulder to see what he was so quietly geeking out on.   It was incredibly fun to watch him do it and not know what it was—his tongue peeked out of his mouth, pressed between his teeth, and his hand moved around the paper in a series of strokes, differing the lengths and the curves.  It was almost a pity to look closely, but I really wanted to see it before I pulled Ando aside.

He moved his arm out of the way and sat back in the chair, motioning Ando over as well.  "What do you think?  I mean, when you mentioned clipboards, it sounded like a perfect gimmick.  We don't even need fiddly bits—not for the main menu, anyway.  Fiddly bits might still be necessary for the options dialog box."

The new menu design was a clipboard, slightly at an angle, with three sheets clipped to it, the least visible sheets suggested by sticking out near the corner and right side of the top sheet.  On the top sheet, there was a box for patient information left blank, and under that was a basic anatomy diagram, one from the front, and another from the back.

The front-facing diagram had the head, shoulders, lower back, and knees circled, but instead of indicating pain, An had written menu functions in the circles.  New Game, Load Game, Options, and Credits, all in a legible parody of a doctor's scrawl.  The back-facing diagram was circled in other places, with notes on pain written in a more cramped hand.  Beneath the diagram were fields for a date and signature, partially obscured by a pen.

"Oh wow…"  I echoed Ando's soft exclamation almost before he was done saying it.  He leaned on the table, his elbow squeaking slightly on the polished wood.  "I think it's as perfect as we're allowed to have."

An grinned, then turned to me.  I nodded, then looked at the design again.  "That looks just like…"

"I know, I saw some paperwork once, on a stock image site.  Never thought it'd be more than useless information stored in my head."  He tapped the side of his head, and I honestly expected his hat to make a little growling noise.  It didn't, but it would have suited him.  "We still need our scout, though.  I only saw this one sheet of paperwork, so I can't make you any other detailed mockups—and I'll need him to get me some photos of the equipment, if I can't Google it."

"Still, that's amazing."  I patted his shoulder, then spun around to grab Ando.  "Can you work on the options dialog thingy?  We're going to pick up lunch.  Two person job."

An nodded and waved as I dragged Ando out of the room.

~+~

That was odd.  I watched them go, then slumped in the chair, contemplating.  She'd been impressed, and that was a good sign, but then, she wasn't hard to impress.  It was sort of like the way she was nice absolutely everyone.  It made me like her more, but it made it not as awesome when was just as nice to someone I didn't know as she was to me.  At least I didn't have to worry about that Ando guy making a play for her.

And it would have worried me, otherwise.  He wasn't a magazine model, but he didn't look like he needed to be.  It was all in the attitude, and boy did the guy have it.

But Riley had called me, way before she'd called Squid.  It also helped that she'd called Squid instead of someone else.  We both knew a few other artists—apparently not as good as he was, judging by his sketches, but still—and she'd picked him.  Squid was about as threatening as… well, calamari.

"Let's get vaguely organized," I said to myself, stacking papers and categorizing them into two piles, art and planning.  I could have separated them further into subcategories, but I had a Task.

Putting it that way made me feel less left behind, so don't take it from me until I'm done or they come back, thank you, Self.

I glared pejoratively at the accepted menu design, daring it to release an idea for what would basically be its babies.  They'd ghost over it, as well as the gameplay—well, some of them would.  At least one.  The options dialog box was an obvious must, but there should at least be a box for first-time player name entry.  And a screen to manage player profiles.

I got to work, jotting down my usual color notes on a separate sheet of paper so I wouldn't get in my own way.  This was already looking like a Photoshop job, which made me a little giddy.  I didn't always pull out the ol' PS 7 for all pixel work, but this was going to be really major project.

Granted, I'd known that from the start, the first time Riley had summarized the idea in one sentence.  And there was still the danger that it might collapse after the sometimes inevitable punches of "So-and-So got bored" and "That Guy doesn't have the time anymore", but these guys didn't look like washouts or we t blankets.

…Okay, so Squid was sort of wet, but in a kind of weird, endearing way.  And he was obviously the kind of person who could run on excitement.  Riley was too stubborn to give up on anything, especially when she thought she was responsible, which she usually did.  Definitely in this case.

I pulled on knee up to hold my head up, pausing to get a better angle on the page.  This was the perfect chance, if no one ruined it.  We'd get to work closely together, and I could drop hints, play it like a total prince.  And then she would fall in love with me and everything would be superlative.

But first I had to finish the menus.

They settled into a coherent style on the second try—the name entry menu was easy, I just made up my own slightly altered version of a Hello My Name Is tag.  The options was a little harder, but I settled on a door and its frame, slightly open so that speech bubbles with an option title in each of them, any relevant checkboxes or sliders with their own individual mini backdrops resembling paper scraps.  It was a little all-inclusive, a design that could go dozens of other places, but it worked.

A creak startled me into dropping my pencil, which also reminded me of why I had stopped using any pencil you had to sharpen with a blade.  When the protracted lead of a mechanical pencil broke, you just pressed a button and refreshed the dang thing.

"It's not really like that—"

"Fine, fine, I believe you.  For now."  Riley cut herself off and dashed into the room, carrying a big bag.  She set it on the table, then reached into it and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in pinkish Saran wrap.  "Here, An, I know you like tuna."

Ando sat across from me and pulled over the roughs I'd just finished.  "Wow, guy.  No wonder Riley called you up as soon as she thought of you.  These are exactly what we need."

Thinking back to last night, I dredged up the word 'abrasive'.  Either Ando chose his moody times, or he knew how to deal with people.  The latter was less likely, if he was really the kind of guy who just did and said whatever he wanted without thinking about anyone else.  That was the kind of guy I thought of when the description given was 'abrasive' or any less or more polite synonyms.  Not someone you would expect to understand people enough to even be manipulative.

So I was just going to keep wondering about him.  He was a scrawny enigma, but I didn't know if he was worth figuring out.  Right now he looked a little like the Gordian knot.  I unwrapped my sandwich and turned to Riley.  She seemed a bit on edge, but she had a locked gate on whatever was bothering her.

I sighed and tucked in.  There was mustard in the tuna, which was either part of the being nice thing or something I would rather it be.

Crash!  "Oh damn…"

Ando stood at the sink, blood racing down his elbow and dripping onto his sock. Cursing under my breath, I beat Riley to him, snatching a towel up and then using it to staunch the bleeding.  "What happened?!"

He gestured to the sink with his head, then stared at the pink swirling into the drain.  "I guess I was—it just exploded…"

"Let me see."  Riley nudged me aside and lifted the towel.  "This looks bad.  Come on, I'm driving you to the hospital."

"Damn, damn, damn…"

I half-carried him to the door, then knelt down to guide his feet into a pair of slippers.  Anywhere else, anyone else, I would have just picked him up and carried him to the nearest car, but I didn't know him well enough to know for sure if he'd let me do that, or if he'd just kick me.  And there were a lot of rocks and things to step on or stumble over on the way to his car.

He was really pale.

I bit my lip and rushed him through the door, letting Riley do all the comforting "Stay calm," talk.  I wasn't any good at it, and he seemed to relax at just the sound of her voice.  "Really, I'm fine," he insisted weakly.  He didn't fight me, though.

A car crunched up through the grass and dirt, coming to a stop not too far away from us.  It was Riley's car.  Squid popped his head out through the open window and shouted, "What's wrong?"

He was closer, and the engine was only idling, he could take off immediately.  "Don't kick me," I said, then lifted Ando off the ground.  It was frighteningly easy, he weighed so little… but he also didn't kick me.

He fit in the backseat okay, but there was a lot of Riley's stuff in the front passenger's seat.  No room for either of us, not unless we took the time to move it.  And who knew if we had the time?  I shut the backseat door and then backed off, pulling Riley with me.  "He cut his hand, Squid—get him to the hospital as fast as you can."

After that, I had to tug Riley out of any possible path the car might take.  Squid was a good guy in an emergency, apparently.  I nearly whistled as he peeled off, faster than I had actually expected.  It was a good thing the car was too small for Ando to move around much.

Riley was holding her elbow in one hand, picking at the skin and biting her fingernails.  When I got an arm around her to pull her back to the house, I realized she was shaking.  "Is he going to be alright?" she whispered.

This was not a situation where a shrug could ever be appropriate.  Hell, I wanted to bite my nails too, but if she was doing that, then I had to be the one who pretended to be on top of everything.  …Almost everything.  I automatically did what I did for my mom when she was scared—I grabbed her hand and squeezed gently.

As soon as I realized I'd done it, my inner self gave me a sharp kick in the face and started cursing at me in fluent gibberish.  I opened my mouth to apologize, but the look on Riley's face shut me up.

Her eyes were way too bright, and she was biting her lip, but she was smiling too.  She looked kind of relieved.  My mouth did a good thing and shut itself, preventing me from babbling some very idiotic syllables.

"Come on," she said, squeezing my hand back.  "Ando usually keeps his car keys hanging in the kitchen.  We should be able to find them, and then we can take the car."

"I-I thought you already had his keys."  If not, then why the hell had we run straight outside?!

She tucked a massive lock of hair behind her ear, although most of it stayed in front of her.  "No, he had his keys.  There's more than one car in the garage."

"Oh."  I let go of her hand, hiding most and maybe all of my reluctance, then started searching the kitchen for places to hang things.  Mostly the things that were hanging were pots and other such items.

The search was probably not going to be a terribly quick one.

~+~

Okay…  Everything was fine, I was doing this right, Ando wasn't going to die…!  I took advantage of a long stretch of road to step harder on the gas and bite my knuckles.  My brain was shooting off in every irrelevant direction it could find, but a few mental sparks did their job.  "Talk to me, Ando," I said, shocked at how calm I sounded.

He laughed.  He actually chuckled at me, as if he weren't in the backseat holding a damp towel to his obviously bloody hand.  I tried not to look at him in the rearview mirror, but it was like trying not to think of a Technicolor chicken.  "What do you want to talk about, kiddo?  I'd rather listen to you."

My ears started turning pink in spite of me.  "W-why?  I'm not vv-v-very interesting."

That was a snort.  He was bleeding like crazy and he'd just snorted.  "I don't know about interesting, but you're new.  That makes you interesting until you prove you're dull."  The seat creaked as he moved forward.  I slowed down for the upcoming turn.  "And I don't think you'll end up proving that anyway."

Right.  He was just saying that to make me go red, I knew it, but…  It sounded like a nice thing to say.  Sort of.  My heartbeat decided that half of its previous pace was acceptable, now that buildings bigger than a house were in view.  "Thank you," I said, then felt like an idiot.

Ando didn't say anything about it, though.  "Tell me why you always look like you think someone's going to put a mouse in your underwear."

My jaw dropped.  "I look like what?"

"Oops."  He was laughing again, leaning farther forward, too.  I slowed the car more, then pushed him back a little.  We'd be there soon, and he'd be okay.  "Guess I shouldn't have put it like that."

"Tell me what you meant."  I was gritting my teeth, which made me sound annoyed, even though I wasn't.  He had probably been entirely accurate…

I heard him scoot back in the seat, and hopefully he was making himself comfortable.  Almost there.  "It's just that you look really worried.  I can't say I've known you long, but so far, you look like that almost all the time."

"Heh.  Only almost?"  We'd be there in two minutes.  I stepped on the gas again.

Ando tossed a wad of paper at me.  Presumably, he found it in the backseat, but I didn't think to ask.  "You were happy for a little while.  I liked it."

Fwoosh went my ears.  And every part of my face.  Dear God, my eyelids were blushing—I didn't know they could do that…!  Somehow I managed to park superhumanly close to the emergency room entrance.  I nearly rolled out of the car, kicked the door shut, then yanked the backseat door open.

"Hi."  Ando waved to me, then let me help him up out of the seat.  There was a lot of blood…  None of it had gotten on the car, but that only meant it was all over Ando.  A lot of his shirt was soaked and sticky, and it had even gotten on his leg somehow.

I picked him up and carried him, barely remembering to shut the car and lock the doors.  He laid his head on my shoulder and made a sound like a discontented cat.  "Hang on," I whispered, walking as fast as I could without tripping over my own feet.

"My head feels stupid," he whined.

An apology automatically formed on my tongue, but I swallowed it.  "Keep talking."

"I don't want to.  Let me go to sleep."

"No don't do that!!"

He jumped, nearly hitting his head on someone's elbow.  Then he swore, but I didn't have a free hand to cover his mouth or a free anything else to give him something else to say.  A nurse ran over and found me a place to do paperwork, while an orderly forced me to give him Ando.

"Come visit," Ando sang as they carted him away.  He even waved.

The nurse handed me a clipboard and gently insisted that I find somewhere to sit and fill it in.  She was a small, if wide, lady, with straight brown hair and Buddy Holly glasses.  I stared at her for a second, then stumbled over to the stationary marching line of hard plastic red chairs against the wall.  I tried not to sit next to anyone, especially the people who were crying or holding ice packs to various body parts.  I needed to think, and I didn't want to bother anyone.

I stared at the clipboard the nurse had given me and felt nauseous.  Partial relief and a noxious amount of anxiety were making my limbs feel like noodles, and I didn't know any of this stuff.  I sat and blinked at it until it started to blur, then bit the inside of my cheek and stood up.  I'd have to say I didn't know, or—or call Riley.

"Squid!"

Oh.  Maybe I'd just called her psychically.  She ran over, An following close behind, and then squeezed my shoulders in place of a hug.  I didn't realize it hurt until she let me go.  I'd really needed that.  "Um.  I don't…  I don't know," I said softly, handing her the clipboard and feeling like a jerk.

She took it from me, patted my head, then started walking shakily to the chairs.  "You should go clean up—you're covered in blood."  Her voice was stronger than her knees appeared to be, and something in me connected to it and used it for support.

"Right."  I looked at An, then tried to smile, as if I was fine.  Everything was fine.  We'd gotten here, and no one had fallen apart.  Especially not Ando.  He hadn't seemed worried at all.  I started to walk to the restrooms, then turned back to An.  "Will you come with me?"

He nodded, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and walked next to me until we reached the door.  I reached for the handle, then looked at my hand.  It was mostly clean, but my arm was red and sticky.  I dropped my hand and started shaking.

An tugged the heavy door open.  "Come on, Squid," he said, pushing me into the bathroom.

I thought I was babbling something, but he didn't act as if I was talking at all.  He just took me by the arm that was less bloody and steered me over to the sink.  When we reached it, my hands moved automatically.  I turned the faucet, pushed the soap dispenser button, and started scrubbing.

As the color started to disappear into the sink in a rich sea of suds, I felt my own color returning, with a little too much interest.  "Do you think he'll be okay?" I asked, my throat tightening so much it threatened to choke me.

"I know you did good getting him here in time," An said, smiling at me with all the confidence I wished I could have.  He handed me a towel, then ripped another one out of the dispenser and started dampening it.  "Hold still, though.  I'm gonna help you get your neck clean."

The color in my face vanished again.  I looked in the mirror and nearly fell backwards.  My shirt was rumpled and covered in red and brown smeared spots, and my face had gone deathly pale.  This was a particularly bad thing when combined with the splotch of bright red clinging to the left side of my neck.

I looked like I'd just stepped out of a really good vampire movie.  My hair was even beginning to matte itself to my head, darker and lankier with sweat.  "Oh crap," I mumbled.  My mom was going to have kittens.

"Don't worry about it," An said, handing me the damp paper towel.  "Just get the worst of the blood off, and then I'll drive you over to my folks' place.  You can borrow the shower, and I'll let you borrow some of my old clothes while I wash your stuff."

My stomach ignored all this rational talk and told me that it was going to leave.  I gritted my teeth and pressed my lips tightly together, but my stomach was a stubborn thing.  I barely made it into a stall to let my stomach have its stupid selfish way.

…I had to admit, though, it helped.  My throat burned, my eyes were watering, and my nose was all stopped up, but I felt more capable for some reason.  I walked back to An, took the towel from him with a barely audible thank you, then started scrubbing at my neck.  It itched, and the blood didn't come off easily, but I was able to get myself clean to the point that no one would scream when they saw me in the street.

At least, no one with a decently strong constitution.  I hoped we wouldn't pass any old ladies with heart problems.  The last thing I needed was to become an indirect murderer.  "You really d-don't mind if I—"

"No way.  My parents aren't home right now anyway, so don't worry about them."  An winked, but it was mostly lost on me.  "After you've cleaned up, they'll be fine with whatever.  Just… nobody likes to see a bloody guest, you know."

I just nodded.