Description: K' and Whip prove themselves to be a little too good at leaving important things unsaid.
After witnessing such a fit of mingled anger and hysteria from their patient, the nurses had finally decided to just sedate K' so that his ravaged body could finally escape the dictates of its mind and settle in to repair itself. It had taken quite a bit of sedative-- even injured and weak, conventional tranquilizer wasn't going to adequately keep him under-- but they managed to keep him asleep for about twenty-four hours before wakefulness began to press its fingers inevitably on the backs of his lids.
He stirs, eventually. The young man rouses visibly under his sheets, turning his head slightly to one side in a listless way. He's clearly awake, but also clearly trying to shut out the world around him. The line of his brow is troubled.
Usually, K''s swift to rouse to consciousness, but not this time. Most of the reason for this is because he simply doesn't want to wake up. Now that the anger has passed, the misery has set in. He doesn't want to open his eyes and not see his sister there. He doesn't want to think about what happened the last time he was awake. He lost his temper, and she's probably gone. He couldn't be what she built him up in her mind to be, and now she's going to go find someone better.
Whip has been the only real moral compass he's ever had. To expect him to be as moralistic as she is, when he doesn't even know the meaning of morals? To want him to instinctively know the difference between right and wrong, before he ever had a chance to really be taught it? When NESTS wired, trained, -programmed- him specifically to strip away his sense of right and wrong? It's a lot to ask. It's debatable if he even knew what she was talking about half the time.
Equally infuriating to him was her casual dismissal of the difficulty inherent in escaping Geese's aegis. Fuck, K' more than anyone is unsympathetic to people crying about the difficulty of getting out; he escaped from the Cartel and all its obsessive monitoring, after all, and continues to evade them: a feat that should be impossible. But this is different. Back when he was fresh out of NESTS-- back when he inked this deal with Howard to start with-- he had had literally nothing he cared about that could be leveraged against him. He could decide to run at any time and not be weighed by worrying about somebody else. Running was easy back then. It was just a matter of choosing when.
The point he so badly wanted her to recognize was that in this instance... there was NO choice. There is never a choice for him when it's her life at risk; he stopped being able to run once he started caring too much to see her hurt. But his sister didn't even seem to listen: not even to disagree. It would enrage him, if he had the strength to be angry; especially if he ever found out that just a day or two previous, Whip herself had felt as trapped as he did. Trapped enough to think she had no option but to find Ryouhara and nearly let him kill her in exchange for K''s revival. To be THAT desperate, and then the very next day turn around and tell him "there's always a choice"? Oh, he would cry hypocrisy then.
But he doesn't know that. And so, anger loses out to fear. Fear that this is it. She's given up on him because of this one mistake. She'll just make her assumptions and throw him away, like everyone else in his life has. NESTS threw him away for being a mistake. Geese threw him away for making one. K' has never experienced a second chance; he doesn't expect to see Whip giving him one.
Time creeps through the hospital room in perfect silence. The only sounds are lonely ones; he can hear the flat, toneless beeps and clicks from the machines that busily script the meter of his pulse or count the drips of intervenous water. There is nothing else.
It will take K' opening his eyes to realize he's not alone. He need only do that, and glance listlessly to one side, and Whip will simply be there, with her same brown eyes, her same stitched, bruised face, her same bandaged hands, and her same bemused frowning, occupying that same solitary chair in the corner of the room and looking as though she's sat unmoving for the last few hours. Possibly since the very minute when he was sedated and treated, and she was allowed back into the room.
Even though he may offer some initial, frank signs that he's reawakened, she doesn't immediately notice her brother rousing once more, standing a different kind of vigil that looks prepared to border total sleeplessness. She's positioned almost deliberately, with one ear to the closed window, no doubt a testament to the deliberate set of her attention. She's got less attention on K' himself and more fastened towards the city outside that may be prepared to deal him more harm. She's protecting him, in her silent, efficient way. She's also reading an old, pleated newspaper in the dark, slanting it to pick up the little light from the hallway and straining her eyes if it means giving K' a more peaceful sleep. Her head nestled against one hand, her eyes hooded with a patience that's prepared to wait days at his bedside, she boredly scans headline after headline, the furrow dug between her eyebrows evidence that she's thinking more than reading.
With her presence so passive that it does not even make a sound, the young woman does little else. But, most importantly, she doesn't seem inclined to be going anywhere fast.
In the end, it's not sound that rouses K'. Whip doesn't move enough for that. It's that sixth sense he's always had when it comes to her. That thing colloquialism likes to call twintuition. It tells him he's not alone, and it prompts him to finally crack open his eyes. He watches her blankly a few moments, as if he can't quite figure out what she's doing there.
His gaze soon cuts away. K' turns his head from her, not caring to look anymore, as he starts to force himself to sit up. He's still angry, but the anger mingles with uncertainty and nervousness. He can't tell what she's thinking or what she's going to do. He doesn't know how much has changed or how irrevocable the change is, or even how he should behave. Sure, she doesn't look like she's going anywhere. But then again, she doesn't look like she'll be going back to the way she used to be.
The most frustrating part of it all, to him, is losing something entirely due to the fixed opinion of another. Being condemned solely based upon somebody else's beliefs and experiences, with no chance to even try to change or fix himself. That kind of thing has happened to him far too much. He never thought the latest person to do it to him would be his own sister. That she would punish him for doing what he'd -thought- was the right thing: protecting his sister and Shurui from the backlash of his mistake.
It takes him a while, but he eventually gets to some semblance of a seated position. Leaned back against the pillows, he rubs persistently at an eye. It's possibly the most childish motion he's ever allowed himself to show in front of his sister. The back of his hand quickens erratically as his movements start to resemble a nervous twitch more than anything else; with a final spasm of sudden self-consciousness, he jerks his hand down and twists his head to one side. He avoids her eyes like an animal.
Shuddering out an irregular breath that shivers his sloped shoulders, he visibly tries to pull up his usual cold defense mechanisms, clearly preparing to protect himself the way an approached lab rat might brace for the electric shock. He's silent a long time, still not looking at her, his right hand flexing nervously in his lap. And then he finally asks, his tense voice sudden and sharp as a gunshot grazing past the face, "What are you doing here...?"
Regular as clockwork, his progressive movements skim past his sister's peripherals and immediately earn her eyes. The muscle in her shoulders tenses, a preprogrammed switch flicked in her head that puts her instantly on guard.. She's more attentive than she looks. Nevertheless, realizing it's only her wayward brother reawakening, and not some unexpected reprisal from his old employer, Whip relaxes back into the chair. Her legs remain crossed. Her hands keep her newspaper open. She looks overtly committed to do nothing but read, but her attention remains palpably fixed elsewhere.
She's watching K', quietly and non-invasively as he appears to rouse his way back into the world, and she's keeping a particular eye that he's not trying to rip the cords from his arms a petulant second time. When it becomes certain he will not do that, besides being aware that he isn't paying her a remarkable amount of attention, Whip begins glancing away, retreating back mentally to allow him his relative privacy and quiet, rare as is for a man like him. Looking slightly askance, she reluctantly looks back on her reading material.
Whip's biting her lip and not yet realizing she's been reading the same headline over and over, not yet able to split her attention between the newspaper and twin brother, who she's finding it hard to dismiss. His movements skate across her peripherals and wear on her. His nervousness is making her nervous. Her bandaged hands tense.
But Whip isn't trying once to make her presence known, to look at him, to speak to him, to interrupt whatever thoughts may be going on in K''s head. He's the one who has to speak up first.
When he does, she merely glances up automatically, the expression on her face both surprised to hear him speak and expecting him to. His anger and uncertainty goes unmirrored. On the contraty, when she finally parses her brother's strange question, the young woman can only look confused. Her brows furrow like she's not sure what to say, so she answers him reflexively in all honesty. "I'm reading?"
Whip is giving K' a strange, bewildered look, though the tension on her face warns of something lurking very close -- the hurt. Does he sound like he wasn't expecting her to be here at all...?
The expression on K''s face almost goes a little helpless when Whip provides no answer other than the most obvious. The wind a little bit taken out of his sails, he just sits there as if hoping she'll have something else to say that can guide him through this minefield. Evidence enough of just how unsocialized he is comes when one watches the mistakes he makes trying to deal with this. He isn't even looking at her to try to read her expressions; his gaze is still turned away unhelpfully.
One hand twists into the sheets a bit anxiously. K' wants to ask her something, if only to clarify what he should do, but not only does he not know what to say, he's afraid whatever he does say will somehow trigger off that mysterious emotionality of hers that makes her do such unpredictable things. While he knows there is such a thing as being loyal even when you're pissed off-- he made Whip a promise just like that, in fact-- he'd just never really thought himself to be worth the same kind of treatment. Especially after the other night, when Whip had told him how big a disappointment he'd been to her.
It was that statement, really, which had hurt the worst. Because all K' has ever really wanted is to be right. To live up to expectations. To not be a mistake anymore.
"I thought..." K' hesitates, wondering if he should even say anything. It seems to be things only get worse when he does. He waffles visibly, his eyes finally tracking over to watch her in an apprehensive sort of way. The look on his face is guarded, like he expects her to go off on him again and wants to be ready for it. There is a lot of history visible in the way he looks at her. It's the look of a lab rat that has been discarded too many times in the past. "...people I disappoint never really let me stick around," he finally opts to say instead. A wry note twists up his voice. "Or they throw me out a window."
He just shrugs a little, his gaze cutting away again. Something that might almost be a laugh escapes him. Desperation and anxiety triggered by the odd, unreadable look building in her expression spurs him to stumble on. "I put up with so much shit from Geese, just to keep him from getting mad. Looking at who I might care about. I made the mistake... I tried to fix it. Didn't work quite how I wanted it to."
Whip, having long forgotten the newspaper that's still gripped inside her hands, is that unnerving kind of quiet. She doesn't make a move to speak a word, or to ask any of those questions haunting her thoughts. She simply sits there, stunned, watching her bedridden brother as she ruminates over the idea that he didn't expect her to stay. She knows they fought bitterly... but doesn't he trust her at all? Especially at a time as dangerous as this, when it really counts?
The grave hurt is beginning to spread across her face like an infection; K' is wise to eventually speak up when he does. His silence, if held out any longer, would have given his sister's famous self-deprecation a full acceleration. Whip only gets the time to glance shyly away, begin awkwardly folding the newspaper up into her hands -- as she's doing with her very presence; folding it up, packing herself away, getting ready to linger -- before she's forced to listen. She does so with a painful intensity, with more feelings on the line than she'd ever admit.
K''s remark returns the confusion briefly across Whip's face, before she ultimately relaxes back into the chair. Glancing down at her lap, feigning interest in the copiously-folded newspaper, she almost shyly replies, "I'm... sticking around." And his bleak humour only makes her frown, the young woman only looking burdened by that mental image.
"Listen... I'm not sorry for being angry at you. It's because I can't be sorry for having high expectations for you, K'. That's not ever going to change." She pauses briefly, and that familiar burn of determination begins to rise in her voice: "I refuse to believe--"
But Whip, realizing her own misplaced passion, cuts herself off like a repentant alcoholic. "It can wait, OK? First thing is getting you out of Southtown."
Whip is probably the person K' trusts most. But his insecurity makes complete trust a very difficult thing. While he trusts his sister, he does not trust himself to be able to keep her. To not drive her away. At this stage, he might well be justified in that fear, oblivious as he is as to how to treat others. When he speaks, it's not because of any awareness that he needs to head off her hurt at the pass; it's because his own discomfort is mounting too high for him to stay quiet.
It's her quiet admission she'll stay that finally salves some of the uncontrollable anxiety welling up in him. K' casts Whip a sudden, direct look, searching her eyes, before he abruptly relaxes. Visibly relieved, salved of his immediate worry, he can't even really find it in himself to be too upset when she tells him she'll never be sorry for being angry with him. This time, it's really enough she seems to be giving him another chance. A chance to make the right choices... now that he actually has a better idea what the right choices -are-.
Whatever the case, K' doesn't try to push it. He doesn't try to get her to finish her sentence. Nor does he try to say anything himself. He doesn't really want to talk about it further right now, not when things still feel so volatile and he's still not exactly sure what he should do. He's trying to be whatever it is normal people are, whatever it is she wants him to be, but he just doesn't quite know how to get there. All he knows is how to use others... how to be used.
And so instead of pressing the subject, he just heaves a sigh, pushing a hand through his hair, ignoring the sting of pain in his torso as he shifts restlessly. "...You don't have to worry about Shurui," he eventually says. "Already arranged for her to have someplace to go. She can stay with Hotaru Futaba." A hint of that old smirk almost threatens his mouth, but never quite makes it beyond a mere tired quirk of the mouth, as he adds cryptically, "Hotaru owes me anyway."
Whip remains silent as she stares down at her lap. Her jaw keeps tensing more and more as the seconds tick by, and the weight of an encroaching frown thins and burdens her lips. She almost looks troubled beneath all of her mysterious bruises, staring off in detachment as she decides whether or not to say what she needs to. She has to.
Her eyes close briefly, but even when they open again, they are still unable to quite look at K'. "About a week ago..." Whip begins, taking a chance while she's afforded some silence, "Commander Heidern issued me orders to return to HQ." Her eyebrows furrow. "Orders that... cannot be disputed. I've been trying to work up the nerve to tell you, but now it seems both our plans have changed. I still intend to return..." she declares, and finally raises her eyes to meet those of her brother's. "--But I want you to come with me. It'll be a safe place. And beyond that, I think... it's about time I introduce you to that part of my life. Once we're out of town, I'll be arranging for you to meet my commander."
'But...' the question haunts Whip's face, though she dares not voice it. It doesn't take a sixth sense for him to wonder what she's thinking about. It's Shurui. It's the life she's been building for herself these past eight months. Whip, who has been taught never to question an order from a superior officer, definitely looks reticent. It's like a punch to the gut for her to consider leaving that little girl behind, one she's come to love, but what else is there to do? She has a life here, a job, school, friends. Roots. She's a civilian. She can't hide at a military base... she shouldn't have to hide at all.
It's only fortunate that K' finally expresses what she's finding hard to say. Her attention sharpens when he mentions Shurui, and the look on her face seems like it can't decide whether to be surprised, confused, or relieved. It ends up with a cluttered mix of all three. "--You did?" she asks, sounding like she's trying to mentally reconcile how he was able to do this around all his injuries and traumatic brain injury. "Hotaru? It'll be OK?"
K' watches Whip in level silence as she explains her orders. Even if she can't look him in the eye, he can sure as hell look her in hers. He's quiet a few more moments after she finishes talking, before a completely toneless, unemotional scoff escapes him. Her admission that she intends him to come along with her that makes him stay his tongue from sharper words, but it can't stop him from remarking acerbically, "Glad you finally decided to tell me about that."
The implication shouldn't be too hard to pick up-- well, looks like I wasn't the only one neglecting to talk about something-- but K' doesn't try to push that angle. Not now. Instead, he just says, "Not like I got anywhere else to go. Any place without you," and glances away. He's thinking about how close she was to just walking out, leaving him behind-- how her phrasing means that it's only by circumstance she's even letting him come with her now-- and for a moment the hurt of it is clear on his face.
It's quick to disappear. Something cold threatens his eyes when he looks back at her, his gaze sharpening with sudden distrust and his back straightening: something reminiscent of the young man he was when Whip first met him. It looks almost like he's in danger of switching back to the guarded, reserved creature he was, even with his sister, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that this close brush with her walking out has made him reconsider how he should approach things.
"Hotaru already offered to put her up in one of her rooms," he replies Whip's relief, that same coldness frosting the edges of his voice. "I ran into her about a week ago. She wanted to do something for me anyway, so I figure she can do that." A hint of disgruntlement creeps into his voice as he recalls Hotaru's awkward desire to repay him. "Better than her trying to get me a gift basket or something."
Whip doesn't catch the brief gunshot of hurt that wounds her brother's face. Stung by his first remark, she's most assuredly not looking up from her lap. It's a safe place; safe as it gets. But she promised him a long time ago that she would remain honest with him, however delayed it may get, or however the sorts of consequences she may reap in the process. It's not an oath that's going to get rewarded.
It isn't this time alround. She's reminded of why she was having so much trouble telling him.
She doesn't say much in return. She's not even trying to look at him. Whip remains that tired, impartial young woman who's been sitting in that chair dispiritedly since the first moment K' opened his eyes. Her exhaustion hollows her out into nothing but her lingering bout of shyness, something that brings her to seem almost close to dismissive. Without question she should hear the coldness in his voice, and without question she should realize the disturbing change threatening her brother's very behaviour. But she doesn't seem to notice much at all. Or she doesn't care.
"Oh," she eventually replies at length, at a lack for anything more meaningful or useful to say. Whip scratches absently at the bandaged stitches across her temple. She continues lamely, "That's good. Then she'll be safe."
Instead of looking relieved, Whip just seems to accelerate farther into exhaustion. After wasting a strange, near-awkward moment in silent staring at anywhere but her brother in his bed, she eventually pulls herself back to her feet. Very much unlike herself, she's not questioning where and with whom the logistics of Shurui's new residence; either she's placing implicit trust in her brother to dismiss the details, or the entire circumstance she's finding too difficult to discuss. Either way, she looks non-plussed. "Then it's settled. It's OK if I disappear for a bit? I have to go make some phone calls... get the original arrangements in place."
After a short pause, Whip glances at K'. She smiles briefly at him. Then, without any further preamble, she's moving out the door.
Log created on 17:18:26 01/07/2009 by K', and last modified on 23:06:37 01/18/2009.