multiversallogs | closed; this is after you stopped on a bridge by a statue to admire her hands

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closed; this is after you stopped on a bridge by a statue to admire her hands

Who: 'Dr Vanessza Bernát' & Spike Spiegel
What: Removing his stitches and checking in.
Where: Benny's Syriac Well home
When: Newdi!
Notes: Obligatory polyvore.
Warnings: Medical nonsense; anything else will be added as relevant.

The next time Spike arrives at Vanessza's split-level apartment (on his own two feet this time, and everything), it's a little different to last time - the furniture is all where it's actually meant to be and the sofas are uncovered, for starters. The glass doors out onto her patio are closed, and there's a dog sleeping beside it, where light comes down into the room. (Rigel; she's picking up new tags for him with her name and CiD number later. Practicalities.) The room smells of French perfume and a local blend of tea, instead of antiseptic, and it doesn't look like the kind of place that was chosen with makeshift operating rooms in mind.

At the door, Benevenuta smiles, very slightly.

“Come in. My usual home office is upstairs.”

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It's rare for Spike to show up to an appointment without some resistance. (Nothing personal against the doctors themselves, he just has a particular hatred for being poked and prodded.) Yet he does show up to this one, all on his own. The added arrival of Julia changed a lot of his priorities -- namely, the importance of staying alive and as alert as possible. He hadn't brought up the meeting with Julia herself, but he feels confident that he'll be able to get it taken care of and come back before she starts to wonder where he is.

When Benevenuta answers the door, he returns her smile with the same amount of energy. He does look healthier than he has since well before the riots, even if his posture hasn't improved. That quiet expression stays with him as he enters. If it hadn't already occurred to him, Spike makes a mental note once inside that her services are definitely out of his price range.

"You've fixed up the place," he mentions, simply to be polite. It would look different to him even if it she hadn't; it was a little foggy the last time he was here.

“A sufficiently open space is not difficult to tidy,” she says, deprecatingly, as she ushers him toward the stairs and the second floor; the office she keeps here for the patients who are paying her for her discretion is the door nearest, unremarkable from the rest of the apartment until one steps inside. Another side-effect of the recent absences from the city is the fact that she's got slightly less casual about who does and does not pay her for her services - but she's making an undiscussed exception for everyone who crossed her threshold because of the rioting.

Whether or not she can afford to do this is debatable - Irene is no longer paying her bills, after all, even if she's been careful to build up as substantial a savings as she could manage and even if it will hopefully keep her solvent until she can come up with a workable long-term alternative - but she's willfully ignoring that in favour of the logic that she'd received more than enough medical supplies to cover her needs during the riot itself and thus the care she provided was already covered.

(Dubious logic that doesn't actually extend to follow up appointments, but every bleeding heart has their willful blind spot.)

The way she talks only drives the point home. Professional enough that nobody would even suspect that she had any dealings with the unsavory people who were just as likely to wind up in a gutter somewhere. It fits in with Spike's usual dealings with doctors. She never asked him more than his name, and that's all he gave. Her involvement might have been entirely coincidental, and Spike allows her that assumption. From what he can tell, she's treating him entirely off the books, so he owes her the same extension of privacy.

"It'd have to be. I'm sure you get a lot of business." Just as casually, as he walks up the stairs. He has a feeling that small talk isn't necessary, but when someone becomes intimately familiar with his insides, he likes to stay on their good side.

The office she shows him into is a small, sterile and monochrome space with a desk, cabinet storage, two chairs and a raised examination bed that she directs him to take a seat on. Beside the exam bed, there's a screen, and a little incongruously, what look like they must have been mirrors have been painted over with abstract murals; a big mirror is not really ideal, in Baedal, when you never know what might be behind it, about to slip through into this plane of reality.

Benevenuta's very small smile is probably a little like that.

“Not so much surgical work, presently, although I remain available to the Glory Shada in an emergency. They were an excellent employer when I first arrived here - trauma surgery.” Surprise. “Open your shirt, please.”

There's only a slight hesitation on Spike's part before taking a seat that he passes for taking a cursory glance around the rest of the room. He's given more than a few doctors a hard time when they get too clinical for his comfort. But that's the price he pays for allowing himself to get shot up in the first place, so he's not in any position to complain. Sort of the thing he'd have to expect when he agreed to come here anyway.

He nods at her polite instructions and does as he's told, with less effort than it may have taken a few days before, which he's counting on to make this seem like a final examination. The conversation stop there.

Benevenuta slips into gloves while he's unbuttoning - her hands are cold, when she attends to the examination, but she takes care not to produce more discomfort in the process than is actually necessary, so there's that. (She's been doing this a little longer than it looks.)

“All right,” she says, seeming satisfied, “I think we are ready for those to come out, yes? This will be a little uncomfortable - tell me if it hurts beyond what it should.”

She has a suspicion that he has a certain degree of familiarity with the experience, and the remark is as much intended to gauge how correct she is as it is intended to give him an opportunity to tap out if he needs her to stop for a moment.

As much as Spike hates the whole process, she's right in assuming he knows what to expect. Now that the wound is healing, she might even be able to make out the scar that runs so close to where he was shot, it almost seems to blend into it. Fortunately, most of his scars can be easily covered up, or they might get in the way of his charming first impressions.

"I can stand a little pain," he responds with a small measure of humor. There's nothing he can't fake. Besides, taking them out is the easier part.

“I have noticed that about you,” she says, with a faint, amused smile that doesn't merit looking up from what she's doing - tweezers, scissors, antiseptic, steady hands. Other people's scar tissue is fascinating to her in a way that she suppresses during professional hours; marks like that never linger on her skin, the one exception to the rule something she doesn't consider comparable. “You've had no problems, since I last saw you?”

Health problems, presumably.

(Presumably.)

Well, he isn't about to bring up his bright idea of mixing her pain killers with alcohol in what could be viewed as a passive suicide attempt -- not by him, but other people might make that leap. And he doubts she wants to hear about his apartment hunting or the way his previous life is blending into whatever he has here. Life problems. Ironic as that is.

He would shrug, but he doesn't want to make her slip while she's got the scissors in her hand. "Just the usual." Then he thinks a moment and adds, "What about you?"

For Spike, the question is more along the lines of the trouble someone might get into for being a sympathetic heart, but he'll leave it as implied.

“Little unexpected.” ...and to be fair, it's incredibly difficult to tell, with her, whether that means that things have trucked along agreeably (unlikely) or whether it is she'd just anticipated the crises and isn't inclined to complain. At least; it's hard to tell by inflection. Observation of the woman in question, her habits and her temperament, do always tend to suggest something beyond the placidity with which she approaches nearly everything in her life. “Absences, mostly professional.”

But, Rigel's sleeping form suggests, not only.

"It's hard to find people you can rely on." Which is a strange statement coming from him, but she doesn't know him well enough to catch it. "Especially when times get tough."

He's quiet again after that, letting her work while focusing on her face for any signs of what they aren't bringing up. He'll leave it up to her if she wants to stay in that vein or not.

“We are a strangely transient population, our cohort.” A stream of pleasant, modulated chatter seems habitual - accustomed as she is to providing a mental distraction from whatever it is she's doing with her hands at a given moment. General anesthetic is just not always an option, after all, as much as she's discovered some people really wish she'd supply it for the damnedest things. “For a city that wishes to keep hold, so many of us seem to slip through its fingers, if you pardon my, ah- to personify?”

The English term for the concept of anthropomorphism is probably not something that's come up often; she can probably be forgiven for not knowing it offhand.

“So it goes.” Her mother is among the more personal, but Ayse's absence disturbs her less than others; their longevity, Ayse's previous history in Baedal and the decades they've spent apart in the past conspire to create an ease that mirrors the way she hadn't worried about never seeing her father again, either. In this city or another - she will, in time. If there's anything Benevenuta has an excess of, it's time, after all. Ayse and Matej are constants in her life of a sort few of their kind can count on.

She misses Tom. Lucius. Irene. She worries, a little, about Lucius; less about Irene, who can take care of herself and almost certainly anyone who has a problem with her. She mourns Tom from the same understanding distance that she'd known him. And- so it goes.

"How do you mean?" From the way she talks, it sounds like she's referring to something that's common knowledge. Something she likely didn't expect to get his attention, but he finds himself fixating on that one specific word. Transient... He arrived in this city after he thought he was dead -- part of him still suspects that wasn't far off -- so what comes after this?

A few weeks ago he may not have cared one way or another. Funny how time changes things.

That does warrant a glance up, surprised, albeit only for a moment. “None of us leave by choice,” she says, finally, which doesn't mean none of them want to go. “But, some do leave. A citizen who dies, their CiD is still functional; but one who disappears, who is no longer in the city at all, theirs shuts down.”

Given the Militia control over the CiD network, it's disquieting information - she presents it matter of fact, with no more than surface examination, but it suggests some unsettling things. How easy it would be for the Militia to ensure no questions be asked about certain absences... so many people are gone, in the wake of the riots.

She isn't as certain as she'd like that all of them are gone.

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closed; this is after you stopped on a bridge by a statue to admire her hands

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I'm sorry;; so late...

ALL IS FORGIVEN

:)

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