Priorities

[realworldweirdo]

Jonathon carried Gene bodily into the building, despite his arguments that such obviously necessary support was unnecessary. The Haven Crest professional building was imposing, especially at night. Jessica had told him that the owner was a particularly devious vampire, but the building had none of the usual signs. It was brightly, almost brilliantly, lit. The landscaping was precise and orderly, and everything gave the impression that not only was it squeaky clean, but it was incapable of becoming soiled.

On his way to the door, he reached out with a foot and tapped the handicap access button located on a post by a too-perfectly-square hedge. The two layers broad glass doors swung open immediately and held there with absolute silence. He ignored the sculptures in the foyer as he strode up to the directory to find the urgent care\'s location. Not only were they irrelevant, but when he automatically noticed them, they were so bland as to be offensive.

"How are you holding up?" he asked nervously, despite the fact that he hadn\'t jostled Gene in the slightest during all his moving. Another trait shared by all vampires; an excellent sense of balance. "We\'ve got to go to the second floor."

Who the fuck makes you go upstairs when you\'re hurt?

[Saccharin]

Gene had been to places he didn\'t belong before, but never had it been so glaringly obvious to him as it was now. He felt like his mere presence was dirtying the crisp interior of the building that supposedly held a doctor willing to see him at such a late hour. Well, late for him. The night was still young for Orias.

  He looked up too quickly after the question was posed, and frowned as his brain slushed about and tried to tell him that Orias\' face was really shifting back and forth, round and about, like the walls did when he was drunk. He was also fuzzy around the edges. Gene blinked, but the perimeter of his visual field was growing dark. "Good. You look funny though," he said, his voice sounding far away to his own ears. They were ringing, buzzing really. Like a little bee stuck in head. Bzzzz. He giggled breathily.

  The blood that had brought him back to awareness had run its course, and he wondered briefly if he was going to pass out again. That\'d be no good. He clutched at Orias\' shirt with his good hand and rested his cheek on his shoulder, hoping it would pass.

[realworldweirdo]

Usually, he would have been glad to hear Gene laugh. This time, though, it was a disturbingly hazy giggle. Gene wasn\'t in the habit of giggling. Orias feared he would pass out and not wake up.

"We\'re almost there," he said, firmly, trying to keep him alert. The sound of his own voice, authoritative even with the edge of nerves, was comforting. "Don\'t fall asleep. You have to stay awake, do you hear me?"

He was already moving to the end of the left hand hall, faster than a human carrying a full grown man should be able to, and not caring who saw. Within a few seconds, they were at the elevator and it was opening with an offensively pleasant ping!

The smooth ride to the second floor was interminable. After what seemed like an eternity, the doors opened with another infuriating ping! and he rushed out, stepping sideways to get through the doors before they were completely open. The smell of stale blood was alarming to him, but at least there wasn\'t any fresh blood to be detected. Halfway down the hall, a frosted glass door with black letters announced itself to be the Downtown General Practice Offices & Urgent Care Center, Dr Franklin Dougherty, MD; Dr Caroline Sullivan, MD.

Excessively long bullshit, in Orias\' current opinion. He lifted the handle enough to open the door with a knee and shot inside like a bullet.

"This man\'s been attacked," he barked at the startled receptionist with uncharacteristic heat. "He needs immediate attention!"

[Saccharin]

By a bee, Gene wanted to say, but he couldn\'t make his lips move to properly shape the words. Maybe the doctor would hear it buzzing too, and they\'d do their very best to remove it from his head. Stupid bee.

  The receptionist didn\'t take long at all to locate the doctor on duty, and in short order, they had taken Gene back to patch him up.

When a nurse entered the reception area nearly an hour later, she was stifling a laugh. "I can take you back if you\'d like to see him," she said, smiling and tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear.

The reason for her amusement was at the center of the room she led Orias to, attached to an IV and prodding suspiciously at the new stitches that adorned the inside of one of his wrists. He guiltily returned the bandage that had covered it when he spied the nurse, and then smiled brightly at Orias when he spotted the man behind her.

"I can\'t feel my face," he announced. "It\'s still there, though, right?" he asked, pinching at his cheeks.

Bridgette, according to her name badge, fought back a smile and turned to Orias. "He didn\'t lose enough blood to justify a transfusion, so we\'ve got him hooked up to a saline mixture and some pretty powerful pain meds," she said, hooking her thumbs in the pockets of her pants. "His arm was fractured in a few places, so we had to get a cast on it, and we had to stitch up his wrist and neck where the bites were the deepest, but beyond that, he\'s fine."

  "Am not," Gene protested. "They took my clothes, Orias. They took them and then they put me in a dress. A dress! It doesn\'t even cover my ass." He glared at the nurse. "You just wanted to see it, didn\'t you?"  

She half-turned to look at him, her mouth ajar.

"Yeah, I knew it," he crowed. "\'S fine, you can look, but only one touching it is him." He pointed at Orias, in case it wasn\'t clear who he was talking about.

  "So... Yeah," she said, giving her attention to Orias again. "We\'d like to keep him on the IV overnight, replenish some of the fluid he lost."

[realworldweirdo]

"That\'s fine," he agreed, trying his hardest not to laugh at Gene after the stress and torment of waiting. If he started laughing, he\'d probably end up getting slap happy and that wouldn\'t be good for anyone. "I\'ll let you know if we need anything.... can we have a minute alone?"

He was most assuredly going to let Gene know his face was still there.

[Saccharin]

"Of course," she said, backing toward the door. "Just hit the red button on the remote if you do." And then she was gone, closing the door after her.

Gene had the aforementioned object in his hand, and he had discovered that pushing the up and down arrows moved the upper portion of his bed accordingly. He held down the upper button until he was sitting up, and grinned triumphantly at Orias before lowering his head again to poke at the other buttons adorning the remote. The TV in the corner, adjacent to a couch that possessed a pullout bed, flickered to life.

"Faaaancy," Gene remarked, his accent particularly noticeable in the drawn out word.

[realworldweirdo]

"Yes," Orias said shakily, staring somewhat glassy-eyed at his stoned lover. "Very fancy."

Then he moved with what supernatural speed he had to a spot immediately beside Gene\'s head and began smothering him in a flurry of gentle kisses.

"You might not feel it, but your face is still here, and I\'m going to kiss every spot on it before I\'m through," he announced in a relieved tone. "I might just keep it up until you can feel it."

His arms wound their way around Gene insofar as he didn\'t think he\'d hurt him, trying to hold him and not move him all at once while he butterfly kissed every square inch of unharmed skin he could find.

[Saccharin]

He gave off a short burst of surprised laughter when Orias started lightly kissing him. Okay, so his face wasn\'t entirely numb. He could still tell where the other man\'s lips were landing, and he appreciated the attention he was getting. Not that getting mauled by a hungry vampire was the best way to go about it.

"I can feel it," he admitted, "but you don\'t have to stop." He smiled lopsidedly and tried his best to hold Orias in return, but the best he managed was a sort of one-armed hug.

"Sorry I made you worry," he said, his voice suddenly subdued. The pain medicine, though it\'d addled his mind severely, didn\'t stop him from feeling guilty for not having waited till they got home to get his stupid root beer.

[realworldweirdo]

Orias tried to position himself so that their awkward embrace worked, but it was a doomed attempt from the start. He withdrew a little, leaving a trail of kisses across Gene\'s jaw as he went. He still had that clean, raw man scent that Orias loved about him. Somehow.

At Gene\'s apology, Orias blinked and stared at him for a moment. "You shouldn\'t be sorry. You wanted a drink, and something bad happened. It wasn\'t your fault, and you couldn\'t have known. I\'m the one who\'s sorry. I shouldn\'t have let you go alone. I should have been faster, or been able to dominate his mind, or something to keep you safe. This is my fault."

The built up frustration was thickening his accent again, but he tried to keep it in check. For Gene\'s sake, he tried to make it sound like he didn\'t mean it as much as he did, but it was a bad job. Somehow, he had to find a way to protect the man he loved. There was no way he could let this happen to Gene again.

[Saccharin]

He groped until his calloused fingers found Orias\', and he squeezed them with all the force he could muster (which wasn\'t much, so it ended up being a very gentle squeeze). "If it\'s not my fault, it\'s not yours. May as well blame the soda machine for being where it was." Still holding the vampire\'s cool hand, he let his head fall back until it sunk into the fluffy white marshmallow of a pillow that\'d been stuffed under his neck.

"Anyway. I\'m okay now. Don\'t you worry." He tried to smile bravely at Orias, but all he succeeded in doing was looking sloppy drunk and ready to pass out. The initial high he\'d felt after the pain medicine had been administered into his IV had passed, and now all he wanted to do was sleep. "Vampire ain\'t gonna stop me, I\'m tough. Jus\' gotta sleep a little after, is all. Then I\'ll be right as rain, you wait and see."

[realworldweirdo]

"You\'re almost okay," Orias corrected lovingly, with a thin smile. It bothered him that he hadn\'t been able to deal with the attacker more easily. He should be able to find some way to protect Gene, but his speed and mental abilities seemed to refuse to improve. He\'d spent a significant amount of time trying to increase them at one point, but no amount of coaching or practice had seemed to work.

He was also unpleasantly aware that he needed to feed. Gene was in no condition for a nibble, and it was too short notice to call any of his friends who might be interested in a bite. He\'d have to go to Risk tonight or tomorrow, although that would mean leaving Gene with a friend. After the danger Gene had been exposed to tonight, that seemed definitely unappealing.

Risk. The tattoo. It wouldn\'t protect him from everything, but it would be a huge step in the right direction. Unfortunately, getting the tattoo involved spending a lot of time at the club. A lot of time and a lot of intimacy with strange vampires. Still, if it meant that Gene would be safer...

"When you\'re better, you should start going to Risk with me," he suggested, seemingly at random. He was still leaning close to Gene\'s face, dropping kisses into his hair and onto his cheek. "If you can get one of their tattoos, you\'d be safer."

He did not anticipate a welcoming reaction to his idea, practical though it was, so he withdrew slightly to gauge Gene\'s reaction.

[Saccharin]

He turned his head to look at Orias after he pulled back. He was confused, and every line on his face made that clear; his eyebrows were drawn, his nostrils pinched and his lips pressed together thinly.

  "You know I don\'t like clubs," he said. The first and last time they\'d been to one had... well, come to think of it, that\'d been the first night he\'d even met Orias, and he\'d been dragged off to that god-awful place of loud music and expensive drinks. He couldn\'t justify spending what Orias had on a couple shots of whiskey when he could just buy a whole bottle outright with the same amount of money. Risk was an entirely different beast. Not only would there be loud music and expensive drinks, but there\'d be vampires. Lots of vampires.

  "Wouldn\'t I have to let \'em drink my blood?" He liked when Orias did it (because goddamn, it made sex incredible), but it made his stomach twist just thinking about getting that personal with strangers. Especially since he considered himself committed to the very man that was suggesting he go to Risk to begin with.

He frowned deeply.

[realworldweirdo]

"I don\'t like it either," Orias admitted. "But the humans who go to Risk frequently get a tattoo on their wrist, a really small one, that means death to any vampire that kills them. A lot of vampires won\'t even touch a human with the tattoo outside the club."

Part of him really wanted Gene to get a Risk tattoo, but a bigger part of him wanted Gene to tell him he was being a moron and that he could shove this crazy idea up his cold dead ass. The part in favor of the tattoo was bound and determined, though.

"If you had the tattoo, tonight might not have even happened, and then you\'d have your root beer instead of an IV," he finished morosely. Or if Gene had picked a more powerful vampire to love.

[Saccharin]

Gene yawned noisily (almost pointedly). "Can we talk about it later? I\'m really tired." He hoped Orias would forget about the suggestion by the time he woke up.

[realworldweirdo]

Orias moved with the tilting bed as much as he could, but eventually had to take his arms off Gene and resettle himself when his love was flat. In the meantime he reached around and twitched the hospital gown fussily so it was arranged more modestly. Finding himself with nothing to do, he looked around for a blanket to lay over Gene\'s thinly clad body; being cold was bad for humans with blood loss, and he saw goose bumps on Gene\'s legs. Not seeing one, he sighed and shucked off his casual button-down shirt he was wearing over a tight gray tshirt and arranged it so it covered Gene as much as possible.

"Not a word of complaint," he muttered, pointing sternly at Gene. "You let me take care of you just a little bit, all right? I need to."

Without waiting for Gene\'s agreement or any other type of response, he settled himself down by the head of the bed, squatting on his heels, and listened motionless to Gene\'s breathing as he fell asleep. Another benefit to being a creature of the night; he could hold this position and not stir from Gene\'s side for hours.

He stayed there until Gene was released in the morning.