Description: After finding his sister pierced nearly to death by Kula, K' is confronted with the stark reality of potentially losing Whip so soon after finding her again. Hours in the hospital pass, and Whip comes out of her coma; the two then exchange a few choice words about Whip's willingness to give up her life protecting her brother.
The doctors say that whoever exposed her to that miraculous heat saved her life. But for how long.
Whip (under the guise of one of many of her alternate fake identities) arrived to them dying. Her body was punctured clean through three times and losing blood, the worst of it her left lung that would have succumbed the girl to a slow, painful death by internal drowning had it not collapsed. That sucking chest wound was half of what was keeping her alive. The other half were her sheeted burn marks cauterizing would have otherwise bled her to death before she even reached the hospital doors. She was rushed into surgery, and spent ten hours in there, as sad-eyed nurses occasionally passed by the boy who had brought her in, their faces teemed with pity.
After the hours rolled past, so many of them that they seemed to bleed together into a looping infinity, the lead surgeon arrived, and the look on his face did most of the talking for him. It wasn't good. He was quick to assure that the surgery was successful, and that they managed to save all of her internal organs and get a control on the arterial damage... Yet there was a shadowed look in his eyes. 'But,' they said. But, he eventually spoke out loud, she is suffering extensive nerve damage, she's still bleeding internally, and her system has suffered such an immense degree of hypovolaemic shock that she's not expected to survive.
And that is how Whip spent her next forty-eight hours, hooked up to a battery of loud, hissing machines that did the living for her: one for her blood transfusion, one for her shock hydration, one to drain the water and blood out of her pleural cavity, and one to keep her breathing. While the hospital staff were doing all that they possibly could, that same knowing look reflected off each of their faces. They'd seen people like her hundreds of time on any given night. She was C.T.D, and they were waiting for her to die. At night was the worst time to be alone in her room, when the only surrounding sound on the quiet, vacant floor were the dull, sparse beeps of her faint pulse, and the constant gravelly, mechanical hiss of the machine that breathed for the broken girl.
It kept getting worse and worse. She kept growing weaker and weaker. It was moving past possibility into eventuality that this young woman was not healing, and would not survive off life support. The hour hit that the prevailing doctor, after spending a long time preparing himself to confront this volatile boy, approached K' to discuss taking her off the machines... letting nature complete its work.
Then, without warning, the tide changed. The last internal examination brought surprising, if not impossible news, as the medical staff discovered that her internal bleeding... stopped. Within the next twenty-four hours, her body was stabilizing itself with seamless accuracy, her pulse and body temperature returned to near-normal rates, and her broken lung on its way to mending. After great deliberation, and when they were absolutely sure her body no longer required it, the entire station held a collective breath as they removed the unconscious girl off her machines. She breathed and lived effortlessly without them.
Her condition was downgraded from life-threatening to critical, and while the visibly-shaken doctors were unsure of how it exactly occurred, they weren't quick to wave the victory flags yet. She had undergone such shock that there was the possibility she would never fully recover. There was brain damage to match the nerve damage in her body, and K' was told, very gravely, to prepare for the chance that she may never wake up. Her body may fully restore itself back to health, but consciousness may not be so quick to follow. She could remain in a coma for a long time.
Now it is those dark, lonely hours before twilight, and the pervasive darkness fills whatever it can find. The only light left in her small, hushed hospital room is what slants through the window from the moon outside. The bleachy blue light stretches across the floor and over the bed, crossing over the face and closed eyes of the sleeping girl. She does not respond to it, otherwise unresposive to that and the rest of the world. Looking gaunt and hollowed out by moonlight, Whip looks tiny in her hospital bed and skinny in her hospital gown; not like a soldier but just some sad little girl who got in way over her head. Stitched up and bandaged to the point of premature mummification, a chest drain bag still filling patiently at her side, and with countless wires stapled into the arm and hand what used to hold her favourite whip, she rests inside a sleep from which she cannot be awakened.
Those careful cauterizations, the doctors noted wonderingly, had saved her life; and the boy responsible for them had simply twitched a hollow, haunted sort of smile, one rife with irony. K' was so far from being any kind of healer or preserver of life, having been created for the exact opposite... but as if determined to be contrary to NESTS in all ways possible, he'd long ago learned to use his killing fire to save as well as destroy. Even if most of the time all he'd had to practice on was himself.
He'd never burned a wound shut so carefully, so gently, as he had the three uncontrollably-bleeding holes punched through his sister's body.
For the entire ten hours Whip was in surgery, K' had lurked in the hallway just outside, pacing restlessly: wracked by some unknown source of profound guilt. No one had had the heart-- or the courage-- to try to remove him. In the last two hours exhaustion had finally forced him to sit down, and he'd spent that time hunched over miserably on a bench, his elbows braced on his knees and his lowered head held in his hands. Pity was thrown his way in spades, and he neither noticed nor cared.
When the lead surgeon came out to talk to him, K' had stared through the man with the uncomprehending, tired look of someone who cared nothing for the explanation and only wanted to hear the conclusion. But the conclusion he was ultimately given was not the one he wanted to hear.
The hospital staff had seen a lot of lost tempers in their day... a lot of disbelieving frenzies. But most of them had to admit K''s was one of the worst. For a moment he seemed fit to kill the surgeon who'd brought him the news, and when a terrified team of hospital staff finally managed to calm him sufficiently to prevent murder being done, he'd shut himself away for hours on end. They let him have an empty room to himself, if only to keep him from burning the entire place down, and those who passed by the door heard either echoing silence, or the extremely faint, stifled sounds of grieving: something K' would never have permitted himself to engage in where anyone might possibly see.
Nobody had wanted to discuss taking Whip off life support with K', after that. But for the sake of legalities, it had to be done. As before, K' had simply not understood what was being said to him for the first few moments... and once he did, his only response had been to snarl that the man had better get out of his sight before he lost control and did something he'd regret.
It was, the shaken doctor noted later on his charts, an unequivocal "no."
Now, with the final consensus heading towards "stable but comatose," K' has finally been allowed into the room to sit by his sister: and he's been left largely undisturbed, to wait by her side for god knows what. He's been here verging on two hours, now, and utter exhaustion has finally taken its toll. He's dead asleep at her bedside, his wracked body leaned forward, one hand bracing his tired head up and his fingers spidered through his hair.
There's no warning. There's no preamble. One moment there is nothing. The next... consciousness.
Whip's eyes flutter open, blinking automatically until her pupils focus and adjust to the dark. She's not too sure how long she spends staring blearily at someone's dark ceiling, watching the way light spreads across it between the window blinds in long rectangular slits. Sometimes they flicker when something moves on the street far below. The movement seems to wake the brain behind her eyes, and blinking a few times more, she narrows them, turning a widening glance throughout the rest of the room. She doesn't recognize it. She doesn't know where she is.
She moves her left hand, and the sudden sting makes her breath catch. That hurts even worse, a new and different kind of agony searing straight like a hot knife into the flesh of her lungs. Each breath of air feels like she's inhaling handfuls of broken glass.
And that's when she remembers everything that happened. The pain is so sudden and so awful, and there's little she can do than squeeze her eyes shut and grit her teeth until the stinging dulls into an agonized pulse. She confronted Kula Diamond. She'd gone up against that girl in hopes to kill her. She didn't win that fight. She...
Whip moves her hand again, taking in a deep breath and holding it before she tests the entire arm. It hurts a little less than before, but the burning hot pain is enough to convince her she's not dead. Still, ever one to look for infalliable proof, she pulls her left hand up to her body, her fingers feeling through the thin, thready material of her hospital gown. She doesn't need to search long. She can feel the ribsy outlines of suture through her clothing and all her bandaging, a familiar sensation to a soldier's fingertips. Her hand drops. Not dead. Not yet.
Her eyes close, and the girl calms herself down, quickly learning that slow, shallow breaths hurt less. She swallows against her dry, burning throat, ignoring the way her eyes are watering and trying to focus her thoughts into a straight line. She needs to remember everything. Kula Diamond was still standing, Whip knows this. She's sure of it. It means she lost. But she's not dead. How is she still alive? The room smells like hospital.
Her eyes open again.
Do NESTS have her? Is she alive because they... is she...
The rest of her clear thinking drowns under a sudden flash flood of fear. Whip has to get up. It's all she can think about. She's not too sure what she'll do after, but for now, she has to get up.
There's a faint rustle of movement, like the clothy sounds of bedsheets pulling against a mattress. This sound is the first in hours, inside a room that's been quieter than corpses. And should K' awaken, he'll be greeted by the same dark walls, the same shadowed machines, the same white noise click of an interveneous line counting drops of water, and... his sister, sitting up in bed.
It's fortunate K' is too exhausted for dreams, else he'd probably have been roused a lot earlier than now from vague nightmares and lingering fears. As it is, he's so tired and emotionally that even the uncomfortable chair can't wake him. As such, Whip gets a few minutes uninterrupted in order to sit up, take stock of her surroundings, and... to see her brother by the bedside, looking wracked and weighted down even in sleep. He looks like hell.
But soon enough, the faint rustling finally works its way into his dozing perceptions. Something pings off in his mind as 'not quite right.' Slowly, agonizingly, he rouses, and several things hit him all at once. The first is the realization of where he is... the second, a sudden sharp pain in his neck from having slept awkwardly. The third, when he finally cracks open a sleepy yellow eye, is the fact that his sister's sitting up.
First comes the flood of complete and utter relief. K' starts up out of his tired slump so fast he pulls another muscle, jerking upright and staring at Whip in silence. He just looks at her a few moments, quiet and intense, something close to actual happiness-- so rare in his life, sadly enough-- starting to creep into his gaze...
...and then, perhaps unsettled by that unusual sensation and wanting to retreat back into more familiar waters, K' quickly finds something to be angry about.
His expression twitches from that momentary relieved joy into angry indignation. In what's likely a return to familiar ground for both of them, K' makes the first thing he tells his sister a strict demand. "What the hell do you think you're doing?! Lie back down." And he looks prone to push her right back down if she doesn't comply, too... or at least, he would if he weren't afraid of damaging her even further.
Sitting up is a mistake. Broken under a sudden wave of dizziness, Whip can do little but hunch, her head lolled forward and feeling too heavy for her shoulders. She moves one foot, flexing her toes, grateful to feel them. Even if they do hurt. Bending up one leg, she braces her stooping weight against her own knee, every little pull and pain calmly and carefully breathed through. Swallowing thickly, she lifts her head, turning her attention back on the room around her. She pulls on both arms, finding one tethered with cords and decorated with needles, and the other free to drape in her lap. She uses the back of her wrist to rub the bleariness out of her eyes, then flexes her fingers to work the numbness out. She rubs her blunted fingernails through her hair, turning her head and -- pausing.
Whip's eyes widen momentarily, and then, after a surprised blink, her eyelids lowering, her expression softening.
She's not thinking about NESTS any more. She's too busy watching her brother as he sleeps at her bedside. How did he get there? How did he know to find her?
How long has he been there?
He looks terrible.
For an instant, she feels a brief pang of guilt, but it soon subsides, replaced with a more virulent sensation of relief. She remembers every one of her morbid thoughts while on the battlefield opposite of Kula. She never thought she'd see him. She was sure she was going to leave him for dead. He looks like shit, but he's alive.
When he awakens, his sister is sitting up, and even though her face is masked in darkness, she's watching him. She doesn't move when he finally deigns to speak, filling the silent room with his sudden, hot demands. She also doesn't comply to them. Whip just breathes in and out, very slowly, her respiration making the barest of rattles.
Then she shifts, leaning slowly to one side and closer to him. Her face moves into the moonlight, not unlike the first time he ever glimpsed her under the canopy of South America's jungles. And also not unlike that time, she's crying. Saying nothing, and smiling weakly, Whip just reaches out to try to brush the hair out of her brother's eyes.
Whip doesn't comply with his sharp words, and after a few moments K''s mood loses its scolding edge. Tiredness seeps back into him, that exhaustion reclaiming his limbs, taking the assertive steel out of his backbone and bringing down the defensive shells with which he usually tries to ward off the world. Whip just sits there, breathing evenly, looking at him, and her lack of response takes the wind out of his sails. He says nothing further, perhaps stymied by her lack of reaction.
She leans closer, and K' almost flinches back from the sudden motion before he catches himself. Once he's realized what she's doing, he actually leans in towards his sister, his trust in letting her touch him such a rare thing: a concession given to nobody else in the world.
His eyes half-lid when her fingertips brush his temple, K' absently leaning into the touch with the complacency of a cat. He lets her do what she likes with his hair a few moments, blinking as the strands slip clear of his eyes... and then a sudden resurgence of his usual intensity-- a sudden reemergence of the fear that had wracked him ever since he found her-- flickers in his gaze. His left hand, the one that's not caught up in cold metal, lifts and closes around her wrist in a spasmodic, desperate motion that simultaneously seeks to reassure itself she's real and alive... and admits to needing her. It admits to being afraid: something he'd never have conceded anyone else.
K' maintains that grasp like a lifeline, his eyes burning resolute holes in hers. He doesn't know how to articulate positive emotions-- he barely even knows how to feel them-- and the struggle he's undergoing just to try to express anything he's thinking or feeling is written clearly in the momentarily-troubled lines of his expression. He seems like he wants to say something, but can't figure how to do it; and in the end, he just settles for clinging to her wrist, keeping her hand close by his face.
When he finally does talk, his voice is harsh and his chosen words are abrupt commands. He hasn't learned how to temper his tone to be kind, and he hasn't learned how not to impose his will upon everybody he encounters. A hint of that familiar anger might even be heard under the iron of his voice. "Don't. Do that to me again." He's not talking about the touch.
At first, she looks inclined to let her light, grazing touch fall away... but Whip stops when she feels her wrist grabbed. Her eyes widen again, then crease in a sad way. Her arm relaxes inside his grasp, tiredly, trustingly, and she opens her hand to rest against his face, her palm cradling his cheekbone.
Whip's fingers are numbed, and feel freezing cold against K''s permanently warmed skin. The only warm thing about her is that look on her face, staring out at K' through her watery eyes and that half-smiling, half-anguished slant of her lips. Happy to be alive. Happy to see him alive. Miserable to know she has failed. Miserable to know that he's going to ask her to promise something she cannot. For now, she tilts her head to one side, and indulges herself in slow, methodic sweeps of her thumb against his temple, hoping that the touch is soothing him as much as it is her. She looks down at him tenderly, indulgently, until the time comes that their quiet moment must be broken.
She lifts her head when K' inevitably speaks, his words carving into her like a forth blade of ice to join her three sisters of puncture wounds. She can't look away from his eyes. She has to eventually turn her entire head to do so, tipping it downward, tucking her chin and staring a burning hole down into her lap. Her papery breathing hitches audibly. Soon enough, her own voice comes back to life... or what's left of it. Her punctured lung has snuffed her voice into the tiniest, grainiest of sounds, no more than a weak croak pushed past all the pain. But, despite all the damage done upon her body, Whip says, "...I have to."
K' quiets under Whip's touch, his perpetual searing heat providing instant relief to her cold hand. He stills, effectively tamed for the time being, Whip accomplishing with a single touch something that no one else could: short of shooting the boy with enough tranquilizer to down a tiger, anyway. His tired eyes nearly shut.
For a long time, K' could barely even look at himself in a mirror, because the person he'd seen there was a complete stranger-- no, less than that, a -thing-. Some empty, nameless, entity that had been thrown out like trash. It was because of Whip that he started to feel like an actual person: someone with a real past and a future, someone -deserving- of things, someone meriting the same sort of happiness other people have handed to them in life. Whip is all he's got tying him to his real life, all he's got that he really cares about, and that is the reason he can't let her go.
That's the reason Whip's simple reply garners such a pointed, angry look. K' pulls back, the moment lost.
Were K' a more articulate boy, he'd have told her that her need to throw herself, -alone-, at anything that threatened him did him no favors, and in fact did him a huge disservice. It implied he couldn't handle himself. It put her in danger of getting herself killed and leaving him alone. It implied that, for all her pretty words and promises, she wasn't really telling him the truth after all when she said they'd handle things together.
But he isn't articulate. He isn't sophisticated enough to argue like that. So all he says in reply, his eyes whittling dangerously close to a break in his famous temper, is an abrupt, "Why?"
With one hand bound by all her cords and needles, and the other trapped by a paranoid twin brother, Whip remains effectively trapped on her hospital bed -- both tethers reminding her of how vulnerable and how mortal she really is. She merely sags on the spot, too tired and too docile to pull her hand away from either. The girl merely sits up in bed, hunched forward slightly, her messy, unkempt brunette hair falling into her face.
But he finally pulls back, and her hand falls away, giving no fight to him and his volatile reactions. There's so little strength in her. And it seems to dispell away all the more when K' questions her quiet explanations, the inevitable bite of an argument starting to surface inside his tone. Whip just sags all the more, barely able to slip him a momentary glance out her peripherals, her eyes feeling hot and wet when they turn away. Even in the darkness, it's hard to look at his face. More tears roll down her cheeks. For a moment, she feels too shy to reply him.
Then a burning resolve seizes her, spine-first. It straightens imperceptively. Her shoulders push back. Whip turns her head and finally looks back on K', a new strength awakened on her teary face. It must be a new world record; she's just minutes conscious out of nearly, barely dying, and she's already got that stubborn look of hers back on. That frown smeared across her mouth. "I love you, K'," Whip rasps back, forcing an emotion into her broken voice that sounds like it hurts. She coughs hoarsely, the sound heavy and wet, followed with a grainy, aggravated, "I /have/ to."
In all honesty, Whip cuts a fairly pathetic picture right about now: beaten, bruised, and sitting exhausted on a hospital bed with tears streaming down her face. The image would have wrung pity and a tacit decision to go just a little bit easier from just about anyone. K', however, is not moved. Now that the sheer relief has come and gone, now that he's assured she'll live, that familiar severity has come back to him.
He's doubly determined to hold onto her now. Even if he has to protect her, against her will, every step of the way.
Perhaps sensing that inevitable decision of his, Whip finds a resolve of her own. She turns that familiar stubborn look on him, the one that says K''s going to have a headache in the next ten seconds, and she says-- something he completely doesn't expect. He actually flinches at the words, as if they were corporeal and they just hit him in the face. Puzzled, he stares at her, a frown starting to claim his features.
"If you really did," he starts raspily, unable to repeat the word but sure as hell able to use it in a magnificent guilt trip, "you wouldn't go get yourself killed because of me. You die trying to protect me, and I got to live the rest of my life with it being my fault."
Whip reacts visibly to that shot like she did Kula's blades of ice. Only those she could pull out after they had gouged into her. These words are worse; they stick in with invisible barbs.
She has a bag of blood hooked into one arm, but she seems to have well enough of her own in stock to flush angrily in the face, stung, feeling her own temper stoked that any doctor would advise against. How dare he. How dare he say that. Whip takes in a deep breath, her age old remedy when it comes to calming down, but immediately regrets it. Her torn lung burns something awful, and feeling all the more aggravated, she pushes her aching, dizzy body to sit up straighter. If K' still has a hold on her narrowed wrist, his sister is angrily trying to pull it free, the fight finally coming back to her. Not even three serrated blades of ice pushed through her body could bleed that instinct out of Whip.
"It's -- not your fault," she hisses back, her voice broken with the smallest of hitches, sounding hurt in more ways than the obvious. Her trembling arm lifts briefly to rub her eyes against the bone in her wrist, hating her perpetual tears for always showing when she doesn't want them. Whip is so angry. She's mostly angry at herself. But it's easier to be angry at K'. Her burning eyes turn away from him, preferring to burn holes at things that don't hurt her heart to look at. She has to stay angry. She can't even think for one second that he could be right. If she really had died, he would have gone on believing that? "It... it was my choice," she seethes out, a short cough breaking her words. Her injuries seem to irritate her all the more. That's when she starts moving to pull the tubes out of her right arm. "Fuck off, K'."
If K' found her earlier affectionate declarations mildly bewildering, that's nothing to how confused he gets over her reaction to his words. Of course, in his eyes, he wasn't doing anything but stating the obvious, and he doesn't see why she has to get so worked up over simple, plain truths.
He'd long since released her wrist, letting it go in the wake of her first declaration that she 'had to.' Slumped back in his seat, he's left to simply stare narrowly at her as she angrily lifts her hand to rub her tears out on its back. It's not your fault, she insists, and K' remains unmoved. How could it be anything but his fault if she gets herself killed because of him?
Of course, then she goes and explains it with that one word the both of them have harped at Kula time and again: choice. It's not his fault because she would have chosen to do it. Somehow, K' doesn't look convinced by this argument. "Your choice?" He sounds incredulous, and in spite of himself he's letting some of his sharpness return: as evidenced by what he says next. "Your choice to do what? Get yourself killed and leave me behind?"
His hand shifts to shut around her wrist, trying to stop her pulling out those tubes. His intended grasp is gentle, but with a backbone of steeled strength. "I -told- you you couldn't kill her. It'd have been a stupid waste if you died there. And you almost did. I got there just when she was about to finish the job." Poor Kula. So misconstrued.
It is a testament not to Whip's training, not her resolve, but the years of manipulation NESTS have done to her on a genetic level that she remains sitting up. A lesser person would be dead from her injuries, or at least confined to an unconscious, unresposive state, much less be conscious, sitting up, and having enough strength to get fiercely angry at her twin brother. She's had five minutes of being awake and crippled in a hospital bed, and she's already had enough. Each cord in her arm is reminding her further of her failure, a physicality that backs up each of K''s angry claims, and she wants to pull them out.
His hand around her wrist stops her, and automatically Whip's head lifts to lock eyes on him, the look in them as murderous as they are miserable, her look of searing rage having difficulty wading past all the tears. Stubbornly she tries to pull her hand out of his grip, her strength flimsy but still surprising for someone in her state. "My choice," she retorts whisperingly, hating that her voice can't possibly match his in strength, especially if their argument one destined to get loud, "to -- /protect/ you." Pushing those words out with as much force as she'd intended hurts. Whip coughs dryly after that point gets made, gritting her teeth in aggravation.
"It wasn't a waste," she continues, with an angry resolve buried in those dangerous words, every bit of her outraged for her decision, her supposed sacrifice getting marginalized by the very person her life intended to protect. If she hadn't survived that, she knows that she wouldn't have had a single regret. She was finally doing the right thing. But he's telling her it wasn't. Whip tries to yank her arm away again, her anger only building, her tears only getting worse.
"She -- wants -- to kill you. I can't -- I can't let that. K', I can't," Whip pleads haltingly, the frustration knotting her face as her words get more and more difficult to push out. But she forces them to. She has to say this. "I won't let you! Dying to save my brother -- m-my family! It's not stupid, and it's not a waste! And I would do it again! And again, and again, and ag--" Whip's voice breaks down long before her resolve ever does, the words splintering from the excessive force on her lungs.
It's remarkable how expressionless K' can stay in the face of Whip's pleading, wrenching words. If those words have touched him, it's something that remains hidden carefully beneath the surface. Outwardly, he does little but tighten his grip on her wrist in a silencing gesture. The pressure verges right on the edge of painful. "Shut up," he says, a little shortly-- but not really coldly. There's more of a tired tone to his voice than a mean one. "You're gonna break your wounds open again."
A few moments pass. Then, with a long sigh, K' relents. He lets go her wrist, his hand stapling to his temple in a sure sign of impending migraine, the gruff and emotionally-restricted young man somehow finding it within himself to be moved by her wrenching admissions. "I know you would," he eventually says, long after her voice sputters out: a faint waspish tone to that admission. "You don't have to run out and -prove- it to me. You're forgetting you only got one life to spend."
He leans back heavily in his chair, right arm dropping to loll on the rest, looking exhausted. "Did you even think you were gonna win?" His left hand lifts to his lowered head, covering his eyes as if to ward off headache. "Cause if you didn't, I don't care what you say. It's a waste. Dying for me... it's -selfish-. You die happy, knowing you did something great or noble or whatever..." One shoulder lifts in a shrug. "I get to lose my sister again."
His hand twitches, tightening over his eyes. The line of his jaw is pained. "You really want to save me, you'd have the decency to stay the fuck alive..."
Her wrist released, Whip's angry tearing at her own tubes and needles stops, her hand returned to rest uselessly in her lap and the fight kicked out of her. She looks away, trying to focus her eyes on one dead dark wall, or the harmless way the closed door looks; anything that could help center herself. It's harder than it looks, even for someone as naturally temperate as her. K' has a superhuman ability when it comes to bringing out the temper in people. Even his own sister. Especially his own sister.
The rage returns so quickly, so profusely, that it feels like it's metastized in her throat, making a hard, painful lump that makes it momentarily impossible to breathe. All she can feel is her own hurt anger. Even the pain of a collapsed lung -- among other puncture wounds -- are starting to take a sorry second. She turns on him, looking gutted. More gutted. "I wasn't -- proving -- anything!" she grates back, her fury bringing actual sound back to her raspy voice. Her breathing deepens, and the rattling gets worse. Whip doesn't seem to notice. She's too busy trying to stare a hole through K' with eyes that won't stop crying. "You think I was -- I was trying to prove -- it's my job...! It's what I'm supposed to --"
Did she think she was going to win? Whip looks like she's been punched right in the gut. Did she? Yes. No. The fact remains that she found Kula without caring what that answer was. Her expression switches off from angry to pleading, and she tries to vocalize that very thought, but her voice decides to stall like an old car, her desperate words no more than the sound of quiet breathing. And K' continues to speak, covering her eyes and unable to see the next expression that spreads across her face.
It's for the best.
For an instant, Whip looks like she's just going to pull up her knees, and bury her face into them to cry. But then she reflexively tightens one hand into a fist, and the familiar action centers her instead of all those dart walls.
The human body, genetically modified or not, can demonstrate remarkable resilience when it is truly tested. It is a truly remarkable design built to be strong, surviving, and infinitely enduring. Whip displays that now, when she moves despite all trauma, despite all pain, to swing her legs over one side of the bed and turn her back on K'. She moves both arms, reaching her fumbling hands to steal clumsy, but furious grips on the pole of her intravenous bags, using it as a crutch to pull and stand her wobbly body up. It is against all medical advice, all common sense, all earthly logic, but Whip doesn't care. She's too hurt, too outraged, and too enraged to even want to stay in the same room as him. She also doesn't want him to see her crying.
"You're not -supposed- to go out LOOKING to kill yourself for me." K' sounds like he's struggling to understand what Whip's even trying to say or what she's thinking... and he sounds like he's failing. His head shakes, his face sinking even deeper into the palm of his hand, frustration clear in the way his fingers tighten. "You could have taken someone else to help. You could have taken -me-. You could have-- I don't -want- you to--"
His hand finally drops away from his eyes, and K' levels the most aggravated stare ever on his errant sister. His irritation only deepens when he sees the slapped, hurt look on her face that, apparently, was engendered by his words. What the hell did he even say? His eyes shut in frustration. "I just don't -get- what your problem is!"
And that, it seems, is the last straw for Whip. The sudden creak of the hospital bed alerts K', and he cracks open his eyes in time to see Whip trying to drag herself out of bed and right out the door.
In an instant K' is on his feet, reaching out firmly to stop Whip and put her right back where she belongs: flat on her back on the hospital bed. And afterwards, his hands staple to the bed on either side of her, K' leaning over her to keep her from attempting to vacate again and aiming a furious stare down at his sister.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" He's genuinely confused. "You act like it's wrong of me not to want you to throw away your life on something that's not going to change anything." If only he knew Kula really -had- been touched by the gesture.
For an instant, it looks like Whip intends to put up a fight. Her raw eyes narrow, her teeth grit down, and she plants both hands against K''ss shoulders, angrily trying to keep him at arm's length. But she could only hope to match her brother's strength when perfectly healthy; injured, weak, and suffering a near-terminal blood loss, the Ikari hasn't a hope in hell.
A split second later, and with an angry, half-choked huff, she finds herself back in the hospital bed, now complete with an angry twin brother accessory that looms inhospitably from above. With her black-ringed eyes and split lip, she glares and frowns back up, meeting K' dead in the eyes with that stubborn, argumentive intensity only seen in blood relatives. Her angry expression only flickers when K' leans in with an honest question, Whip forced to hear it out with him bearing down on her. He really doesn't know why she did that? He really doesn't understand?
Whip spends a couple moments of silent, empty staring, both trying to think of the right words to say and to find what's left of her voice to express them. She closes her eyes and forces her breathing to slow, and soon enough, her splintery voice returns in its purposeful whisper. "What would you do?" she asks, her dark eyes opening again to fix K' with a serious, desperate look. "What -- what if it were me... and you knew someone was out there, and the only task they had was to kill me." Her left hand, the one not tied with needles and tubes, lifts weakly to snag his sleeve with her fingers. "And they were built by our very enemy just to kill me. And you knew they were in town, and... and they were alone, and they wouldn't be expecting you." Her eyes narrow. "And you knew that you had a good shot to take them out. What would you do, K'?" Whip sounds like she honestly wants to know. It's not a test. It's not rhetorical. Her voice cracks, "You /honestly/ tell me what you'd do."
Lack of comprehension is written in K''s yellow eyes, but it might not entirely be for reasons Whip expects. He knows what it is to want to protect someone at all cost. How could he not? He has a veritable doctorate in overprotectiveness. What he doesn't know is why she didn't, in his eyes, plan this better. Why she went alone. Why she elected to rush into something she didn't have much of a chance in winning.
It's hypocritical, sure. K' himself still is, in many ways, a reckless fool prone to throwing himself impulsively into things, thinking he can handle them himself. But in K''s defense, he HAS been far more discerning as of late than he was in the past, the realities of the world-- and countless savage beatings by men far stronger than him-- having revealed to him how short his lifespan would be if he continued to impatiently charge things and try to blow them up without a second thought. On top of that, the influence of a certain man whose style epitomizes the cold, cunning wait has also tempered him...
Whip tries to fight him, but she wouldn't have had much of a chance even when healthy: when injured, it takes him almost no effort to hold her down. He even leans down further, pressing harder, when she quiets and starts trying to explain things in terms he'll understand. His pinning hands weight on her shoulders like the talons of some roosting bird, his heavy presence making his disapproval an almost corporeal thing. She frames it to him in a different light, and he frowns through it all.
"You want to know?" It's a rhetorical question. Of course she does. His eyes narrow, the line of his mouth hardening pitilessly. "I'd make -sure-," he eventually says-- very slow, very methodical, and very cold-- "that they died. Dead fucking sure. I wouldn't leave any part of it to chance. I wouldn't leave room for failure. You should have thought about what'd happen if you failed, Whip."
And Whip just frowns back up to K', looking angry with him, miserable with herself, and frustrated with the rest of it. It bothers her that he can't -- or refuses to -- understand what she wants to say. She waits there, both held hostage to his explanation and needing to hear it for herself. She wants him to confirm what she did was right. She wants to know that she was being a good sister to him. Because as long as Whip has known she's had a brother, and as long as she dedicated herself to finding him, she has no idea how to be a sister to anyone. She has only her own instinct to guide her, and it seems happiest throwing caution to the wind to ensure he is safe.
But not everything is so simple. K' gives her an explanation, one she does and does not want to hear. It speaks clearly to the analytical side of her, the patient assassin and reproachful soldier that she's been for many years. But it doesn't quiet make it to the other side, that is still accustomed to having a family and feeling a part of anything. If it was part of his intention for his frosty answer to make her feel guilty, her brother wins. Whip's face sobers of its stubborn hostility, and she only looks stung, her feelings hurt for a reason she's not even entirely sure. She swallows thickly, mediating the air that flows in and out of her burning lungs, her dark eyes intent and watchful of K''s looming face. After a pause, she replies very quietly, very honestly, "I wasn't thinking about that." Her eyes focus. Her frowning deepens. "I was too busy thinking about what'd happen if I did nothing."
Her shoulders go limp under his pressing hands. Then Whip lets her brown eyes fall away, even turning her head tiredly to face away from her brother. She stares off at something else as she finally admits it: "I'm sorry." There's the slighest of pauses. Then her grainy voice continues. "I'm sorry for a lot of things. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I'm sorry you had to go through this... have to see me like this. I'm sorry I'm not strong enough. But... but I can't be sorry for doing it. I couldn't sit back and do nothing. I didn't know what else to do."
K' was engineered to be able to do a lot of things. Feeling pity was never one of them. The misery, frustration, and upset is clear to see in Whip's face, but K' doesn't let it move him. He leans in, says what he has to say with incisive deliberateness, and leans back; oblivious to the very likely scenario that, somewhere down the line, he's going to end up making an enormous hypocrite of himself when a threat rears its head at Whip.
It's her apology that finally gets to him. His cold look flickers, some of its frostiness flaking away, the expression almost daring to soften at the edges. It goes from severe to just plain thoughtful, the boy studying his sister's face as if unsure what to make of her contrition.
Eventually, K''s tensed arms relax. He sits himself on the edge of her bed, his hands dropping away from her shoulders... but only so they can slip under her back and pull her up against his chest in an awkward gesture that could almost be deemed an embrace. It's rough while it lasts-- desperate, clinging, and above all glad of the continued life in the body it holds-- but it lets go quick, K' pulling away rapidly soon afterwards.
He stands up, working the stiffness out of his shoulders, gruffly turning his back on her as he paces a few steps away. Bracing a hand against the windowframe, K' stares at the shut blinds without really seeing them. A familiar irritation is still gnawing at the back of his mind. The last person who'd undertaken a beating to protect an unknowing K' was Kentou... and K' had torn the unfortunate boy a new one for-- as K' perceived it-- not letting him handle his own problems.
"Don't apologize to me," he finally says, his low voice mixing seamlessly into the dark pervading the room. "Just stop trying to do everything for me, alone. I thought you -wanted- to handle things together."
Whip has done a lot, seen a lot, and survived a lot. There's not much left in the world that should really surprise her.
Except for hugs. Especially those that come from distant, reticent estranged brothers who have been conditioned since the first moment of existence to be a cold killing machine. Her eyes flick back when she can feel K''s hands settle under her shoulder blades, and his sister has only the shortest of instants to flare him a confused glance before she's pushed up against his chest and trapped there. Her dark eyes blink rapidly, flickering back and forth like a surprised and somewhat uncertain cat clock. And, nestling her chin on her brother's shoulder, Whip stares helplessly up at the ceiling, her face colouring with a faint flush. Eventually, her surprise fades. Almost out of nowhere, she feels touched, truly human, and nearly wanting to cry again, bringing her own arms around to--
Then it ends, simple as that, and Whip ends up back in her hospital bed, still mentally trying to process K''s momentary gesture. In the end, it just makes her smile, faintly, her dark eyes slanting with an affectionate resignation. She exhales wearily, lifting on hand to brush back her dark hair as her eyes follow K''s retreat across the room. She stares at his turned back, then finally looks away and down at her hands.
Within a minute, the hospital bed and all its inviting softness is getting to her, Whip already revealing herself as that stubborn sort who cannot bear feeling useless. The action pulls at her sutures, but she sits back up to how he'd first found her, preferring that to the certain indignity of having to lie back in a bed and remain very still. She scratches annoyedly at the I.V tube taped into her right hand, then settles well enough for someone who seems to hate every inch of this place, slouching on the spot.
K''s voice reaches across the room to her. Whip looks over at her brother when he speaks, his words weighing her expression down. She frowns automatically, her face torn between stubbornness and shame. It settles on a little of both. "I did," she replies in earnest. "I meant that. I was just scared. I mean... everything you feel, I feel it too. If you were killed, K', it..." Whip picks at the tape on her right hand. "There'd be nothing left."
It's not the first time K' has embraced Whip. But it's the first time he did it while she was conscious. Up until he saw her bleeding on the ground, not more than twenty-four hours or so ago, he'd kept a discreet distance even from his long-lost sister: the painful experimentation he'd endured having largely destroyed the pleasure of spontaneous physical contact for him. Whenever the two touched, it had usually been Whip initiating the contact, and K' hesitantly permitting it.
But after the first time K' hugged his sister to him, subsequent embraces got easier... especially since the first time involved Whip bleeding all over him and on the verge of death. Things could only go uphill from -there-.
But the fact remains that K' just isn't wired for easy affection anymore. His circuitry gears him towards murder, not tenderness. The gesture is brief, stiff, a little hollow; as if it resulted more from K' imitating what he's seen other people do than from anything else. Nonetheless, the sentiment is there... even if K' pulls away before Whip can really return it.
K' doesn't look at her again for a little while, seeming content to keep a shoulder turned towards Whip. A troubled look hides under his lashes as Whip replies him. He doesn't have to reply or address the fact that she was frightened, that she feels as he does; both of them know already their feelings regarding one another are essentially the same. Instead, he lets the silence string on, the lack of words itself a tacit acknowledgement that he's heard and understood her, before he turns to a far more familiar topic.
"I should have killed her." There's not too much question as to who he's talking about.
Now that draws a lengthy pause from Whip, her mood souring on the spot. She was sure she's been nursing a throbbing, pulsing headache since the moment she woke up, and it's taken until now for her to truly notice it. She hadn't even had a chance to really think about Kula Diamond. Certainly she had researched everything she could have about the girl, ascertaining her position for the most effective interception, but she never truly allowed herself to consider Kula as a human being; only a creation of NESTS and a hostile operative that means to take her brother away. Even on the battle field she had to carefully chill any sort of inflection about the girl -- that little girl -- because only further personalizing her could mean a mistake when time and accuracy are of the essence.
Even now, Whip's better programming resists thinking deeply about Kula Diamond, because it's easier and it's smarter to remain cold and impassive about it if the girl intends to remain a threat. It's still hard for her to reconcile the girl's young, innocent face with cold-hearted murder, especially because Whip swears she remembers the girl looking so expressive... even afraid. But it must be an extension of NESTS' trickery. Right? According to her own brother, the NESTS agent was within moments of taking her life. But that also means--
It hits Whip then, and she glances up and sees her brother in a whole new light. He saw her fight with Kula? He saw her take that last hit? Was he the one that rescued her on the spot -- not just find her later in some hospital?
She rubs unsurely at her face, that headache growing. She slowly turns her gaze back on K'.
"Don't say that," she says, a reluctant order couched in her raspy voice. It sounds too much like a potential for him to blame himself. "But," Whip continues, very carefully, her voice halting not because it hurts to speak but because she's taking time to choose her words. "If you want to engage her first... find her before she finds you... I want to be with you, K'."
Oddly enough, it was K' who first considered Kula as a human... who had first been able to understand the girl as something other than a data set or a faceless adversary. The first reaction he'd had to the girl had, in fact, been a vague sense of discomfiture and responsibility, due to the fact that she was a little life literally born of his choice to run from NESTS. A little life with a mind of her own, or so he was convinced; she'd let him run the first time they fought, he knew it. That-- coupled with his ability to understand her wretched position, being that he'd experienced it firsthand-- was enough for him to let her live the first time he'd had a chance to kill her.
Now, he's regretting it. The fact that Kula's simply under orders-- that she's simply acting reactively-- doesn't matter to him now. He has no pity or patience for those who simply follow orders. She nearly killed Whip, and she's going to die for it; unless the girl can bring him a convincing case why he -shouldn't- simply kill her.
Of course, were he less wracked by panic at the time, he might have noticed that when Kula reached out to touch his sister's shoulder, it had been completely gentle, nonviolent-- even repentant. He might have noticed that Kula's stammered attempts to explain-- to excuse-- what she'd done were uncharacteristic of a girl who wanted to kill. But he'd been too focused on Whip to see any of that... and what he -had- heard of her attempts to disavow fault he'd simply assumed to be the panicked attempts of a child to escape punishment. Pure fear of him and what he'd do.
Whip's attempt to tell him not to say that-- to get him not to blame himself-- is futile. He's already put the blame solidly on his own shoulders. If he'd done what he should have done and killed Kula when he had the chance, none of this would have happened. He'd have regretted bringing the girl into the world only to take her right back out of it again... but in a choice between Kula and Whip...
K' shakes his head hard, prematurely-whitened hair ruffling, his hand lifting again to scrub across his face in a tired and aggravated gesture. He says nothing at first, his shoulders slumping and a sigh pushing out of his chest. "...Fine," he finally concedes, the word sounding like it's pulled out of him. He's probably figured out that if he doesn't bring Whip along, she'll probably just pull something like this again. "Have a better chance with both of us anyway."
Whip relaxes at K''s very reluctant agreement, letting go the breath she's been holding. She wonders briefly whether he's complied because he feels badgered by her own stubbornness or because he honestly believes she could assist him as a competent fighter... but the Ikari soldier doesn't accomodate the question for long, mainly because she knows the truth for herself. She vows she'll prove to him, someday, that she's his equal and not some blood-tied charge he's obligated to protect.
She arranges herself delicately on the bed, careful of all her pulling sutures and stinging pains, bending up her legs and pulling them close. She drapes one arm across her knees, trying her very best to get comfortable on a hospital bed. Whip is having a hard time of it. She hates hospitals. She managed to stay out of one for so long. The last time was... it was a NESTS facility. Krizalid and his men had found her after Schugerg's attack. The Ikari can barely disguise her own flinch against that memory.
After a pause, she raises her dark eyes on K', and awkwardly motions her brother with a slight tilt of her head. "Come here," Whip entreats suddenly, moving her feet aside to make room on her hospital bed. "Sit down. You look like hell, K'. How long since you slept?" Her grating voice regrows its nagging slant. However, Whip's admonishing is not entirely selfless; she feels nervous in this place and she wants her brother closer. She feels moe at ease with him at arm's length. She's no sure why, but the girl supposes it's all she has left. Where others have their memories, she has buried, half-forgotten instincts, and she should stop ignoring their existence.
She pauses shortly, building up the nerve and the physical strength to go on and ask the question she wants to. "Did you find me out there?"
As always, K' doesn't elaborate on the reasoning behind any of his decisions. They're simply things to be handed down, to be complied with... or else defied, at the defying party's own risk. By now, Whip's learned to foment her rebellions in secret, keeping her own decisions to herself. None the wiser to her internal thoughts, K' simply exhales a breath and braces his hands against the windowframe, leaning against it in a moody, tense stance.
His absolute, brooding stillness stands in stark contrast to her restlessness. She shifts about, rustling her sheets, and K' never so much as twitches a lash. It's not until Whip breaks the silence, asking him to come over, that he finally rouses and casts a yellow eye over at her. He considers a moment, before he huffs a breath and straightens up, stalking over with a gruff compliance.
"Since you woke me up," K' replies grumpily, a waspish wryness edging his words as he flops onto the foot of the bed and lets his head drop into a hand. "Before that... don't know. Thirty, forty hours." He doesn't look like he's up to doing the precise math; he falls silent after throwing out those ballpark figures, his eyes drifting shut. He doesn't seem aware of the fact that his proximity calms her, and were she to tell him so, the fact would baffle him. Nobody ever enjoyed his company -that- much before.
Silence. K' nearly dozes while Whip works up the courage to ask her real question. When it comes, K' rouses slowly, blinking sleepily as the meaning filters into his mind. "...Yeah," he answers eventually, not seeing anything wrong with being forthright about it.
Whip isn't sure what compels her; she hasn't a sure thought in her head when she reaches for her brother's hand to hold inside hers. In all the time she's known him, she's never really had a good chance to look at K'. Half the time she refused to give him a steady eye, feeling doing so would hurt her decision that she should keep him at arm's length, thinking that their friendship would only come to harm them both. Then she discovered that he was actually her brother, her own blood and flesh, and it has all been so quick, so insane she hasn't been able to sit and think. He got his chance to study her, when he'd knocked her unconscious himself, having inadvertantly stopped, even saved Whip from marching into the eye of NESTS for her pound of flesh.
And now it's her turn. She steals her brother's ungloved hand for now, holding it gently as though she were afraid of inadvertantly doing him harm. She looks at the shape of his fingernails, the way his knuckles callus, and follows the long lines of his palm with her fingertips, her eyes making them out tiredly in the dark. She lets one hand go and settles it beside his, her assessment eventually becoming a comparison, one that is trying very hard to find the similarities between his hand and hers. His skin is so dark. Hers is so pale. The world couldn't make better opposites.
"I'm sorry," Whip tells her brother as she studies his hand, her eyes lowered, her face twisted into an unreadable expression. But she sounds like she means it. Through all her stubbornness, she forces herself to remember her empathy. If it were her, and if she were to find him like how he must have found her... if she had to deal with him bleeding and doing nothing else? Her broken, raspy voice continues in a tired, sad whisper, "I'll be telling you everything for now on. I want you to be sleeping better for having me in your life, and not the other way."
K' doesn't notice Whip's reaching for him until he feels his hand stolen by hers. The sudden contact startles him, and he stiffens and looks up sharply, his hand tightening momentarily, long fingers twitching inside her grasp before they cautiously relax. Confused, he watches her go over it as if she's never seen it before, and a brief pang of self-consciousness hits him like a shot.
He pushes the feeling aside. It's silly. As if Whip could know what that hand has done-- as if she would even care if she did, considering she's as much made to kill as he is. But there are other things it's now making possible, though... things he -does- want to hide from her. Things he's not sure she's approve, knowing what the Ikari are about as he does. He's about to pull his hand back, but then she lets it go of her own volition.
Her cursory inspection would reveal similarities enough. Their hands both show calluses patterned after their preferred method of killing. They're both built the same, the bone structure showing an uncanny likeness under the different colors of their skin. But there's something odd about his hand. It's irregular, alternately sheeted with scars and unnaturally smooth: the pattern the obvious result of countless healed burns from his own uncontrollable, unwanted fire.
He pulls it in a little awkwardly once she's released it, retreating. His eyes turn away, the lines of him going as unreadable as her expression. This time he doesn't tell her not to be sorry, because the time she spent nearly dead in this hospital bed -was- the worst period of time in his life he can remember. "You had better," he eventually replies, a little gruffly. And for a moment, he looks like he wants to say more-- something to address her last sentence-- but either he decides against it, or he can't figure how to phrase it, because the words never come.
While Whip is the farthest thing from a social creature that's finely fluent in body language, she's starting to get an idea of K''s distinct dialect. She's accustomed to his flinches and tensing, and she ignores them just as well. She knows those wary reflexes are a product of NESTS and their existence only encourages her all the more. She would love nothing more than to slowly break her brother of his nervousness over how it could take her, but she knows in her heart something like that isn't so easily whelped. But she can still try. She's his family and it's her job to reacquaint him to the world as much as it is her job to protect him from it.
She can sense the uncertainty when he finally draws his hand back, the movement of the gesture itself hitting a strange note in her, even with her own senses dulled by her injuries. Is he feeling conscious of his scars? But she has so many of her own, her body a factory of them... and she's just added three more serious trauma scars to her gross product. Yet as Whip allows K' to take back his stolen hand, she's not so generous to let the rest of him go, his awkwardness only replied by her further encouragements. She reaches out to him again, her left hand squeezing gently on his nearest shoulder. Her grasp is so flimsy it's laughable, but then again... Whip was having machines breathe for her forty-eight hours ago.
"Speaking of," she carries on kindly, her hitched voice hurting itself a little in its attempt to sound reassuring. "Go home, K'. Get some sleep. I'll be fine here."
For all the life he can remember, K' was only ever touched to be injected, or studied, or subjected to testing. By now, it's become second nature to flinch and pull away whenever he feels someone sneaking contact on him. It's something that'll take a long time to break, if it ever can be broken... but if anyone could do it, it's the girl sitting by his side right now. As it is, right now she's the only one he even -allows- to touch him, or to see this side of him at all.
Signs of how he's becoming accustomed to her tendency to reach out and touch him are evident in how that instinctive flinch doesn't manifest when she steals his shoulder in her grasp. Her first touch on his hand prepared him, it seems, for all subsequent others she might see fit to lay upon him while he's sitting within reach. His shoulder is tense under her fingers, that intense heat of his quick to beat against her palm. It's enough to make one wonder how K' bears it, having that eternal fire under his skin.
The frailty of her grasp troubles him. Perhaps it's part of the reason, when she tells him to go home, K''s expression locks back into that willful stubbornness. The look might be familiar to Whip. It's what she sees every time she looks in a mirror. "I can sleep fine here," K' decides, standing impatiently and flopping back into his chair. A hint of his trademark mean smirk starts to edge along his mouth. "They're too scared to throw me out anyway." K', what did you do to the poor staff.
Whip may not know K' for very long, despite their deep-running blood ties, but she knows that look on his face better than the back of her own hand. She doesn't need to hear what he's going to say. She knows what it'll be.
"I don't even wanna know," she deadpans back, her airy, grindy voice finding the strength to sound resigned. But a smile slants over her mouth, Whip not having quite enough blood back in her body to feel anything but an exhausted amusement. Her dark eyes follow K' as he retreats back to that chair, and she tries to ignore the grateful way her chest tightens at seeing him there. Despite what she said, she feels relieved to know he'll be in the room with her. It means she'll be able to sleep. Really sleep.
Moving slowly and handling herself very gingerly, if just for her audience's sake, Whip straightens her body back in her hospital bed, pausing as she perches over her own pillows. Her unwired arm reaches around, and somewhat weakly, she pitches one of her two pillows at her brother's lap. If he insists on sleeping in a chair in a hospital room, then he'll have to do it in style. She lowers herself down to the remaining pillow, exhaling a very relieved sound to be lying flat on her back. All at once the exhaustion weighs her. With her breathing naturally slowing, with her voice no longer pulling at the pain in her lungs, with gravity no longer aggravating her sutured wounds, the girl starts feeling immediately relaxed -- or at least the closest to relaxed she's been, aside from unconscious.
She watches him a few moments more, her tired eyes hooded with a pensive, patient look. But even Whip can't keep up with her own patience. Soon enough, her eyes close.
The pillow flops into K''s lap. He looks at it, surprised, and then just lets it lie. His gaze travels back to his sister, and he watches her carefully as she settles herself down. Her tired look goes returned for only a few moments before his eyes avert, and he watches the monitors until he hears Whip's breathing stabilize into the regularity of sleep.
Once she's asleep, he lets go a long sigh and picks the pillow up out of his lap, looking at the thing briefly before he settles it behind his complaining back. He leans back heavily, dropping his head to lean his cheekbone tiredly against his knuckles, the excitement of relief finally seeping away into a resurgence of exhaustion.
His gaze turns back to Whip, consideringly. For a moment, he looks deeply troubled at how attached he's let himself get to the girl. The hours where he thought she was dead were the most painful of his short life, and all that pain could have been avoided if he'd simply cared less. If he'd held her at arm's length, the way he does the rest of the world. He's never cared about anything except himself before, and there was no reason for him to start now. Why was he letting himself cling to something so easily lost?
The answer comes soon enough, smoothing some of the sad wonderment out of his face. It relaxes him enough that his eyes even soften a little on Whip: an evanescent and subtle expression of affection given before they ultimately shut. He's doing this because he deserves some joy in his life. He may never get another chance at it.
Back when he thought he was nothing but a failure-- a mere product of some vast assembly line-- he hadn't thought himself deserving of -anything-. He had viewed himself as a thing, apart from others, existing as a tool. But now he's found his sister, he knows he's a person. He's someone. Shouldn't he deserve the kind of life he sees everyone around him taking for granted, every day?
He can't live in self-deprivation any longer. He spent enough of his life having nothing, having lost everything; and now, even if it hurts-- even if so many things are transient-- he wants to spend the rest of it, long or short as it may be, in reclamation instead.
Log created on 18:26:46 06/20/2008 by K', and last modified on 18:27:33 06/22/2008.