simplestgift | Fifteen Bells: [ACTION/WRITTEN]

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Fifteen Bells: [ACTION/WRITTEN]

[Archie woke up yesterday. How is this new? Well, after getting some fairly critical stab wounds from Grell, he was put on a ventilator and kept under sedation for a few days. The ventilator was exchanged for a less impressive-looking concentrator yesterday and he was taken off sedation. He spent yesterday sleeping anyway, since anesthesia doesn't generally leave you bright-eyed immediately afterward.

This morning, he is talking and eating Jell-o, which is a new experience. The most important bit comes written on the journal network in wobbly handwriting courtesy of the heart monitor clipped on his finger.]

I have been informed that I may have visitors. I'd like to know everyone is all right.

Kennedy

[Anyone who comes in will find him looking predictably weak and pale but lucid and in good spirits, or possibly catnapping after a dose of painkillers.

OOC: Purely for the sake of mercy, Archie is unaffected by the event.]

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When Kennedy's message came over the journals, Jack was still out at the seaside, drawing up a list of supplies he would need to maintain the Joanna Joyce.

The written entry nearly jarred him into dropping the journal and he stared very hard at the message there for a rather long time.

Then, tucking his journal into his pack, Jack turned his steps north to the transporter and then west toward the battle dome. It's a visit he has been postponing since the day after the attack, mostly for the very simple reason that ill people made him nervous. When he finally pokes his head in the door, Jack plasters a cheerful smile on his face.

"Up and about I see, Mister Kennedy?"

Archie is awake but still abed, and Jack's announcement nearly makes him jump. He turns his head to size him up for a few seconds, then settles back into his pillow. "Not quite."

He doesn't smile.

"Not quite but soon, strapping strong lad like yourself."

Normally Jack would never describe Kennedy as either "strapping" or "strong," and even now the adjectives sounded lame on his lips. He took up position just beside the door, unwilling to walk further into the room.

"Bonesy took good care of you I see."

"Excellent care. No need of salamanders at all, in fact." A little smile, now, but it was short-lived. He nodded toward the door. "Come inside and close the door."

He wasn't sure what he was going to say, but he knew they had to talk. It didn't occur to him that now wasn't necessarily the best time.

The pirate complied with this invitation, shutting the door quietly behind him, but not moving that much further into the sickroom.

Jack Sparrow hated sickrooms almost as much as he hated prisons and brigs and courtrooms and the like.

"Pity; and here I'd gathered some new specimens during the draft. Your Horatio's gone home?"

"Hopefully getting some rest." A deep breath. "He tells me Grell confessed."

Sparrow hadn't been QUITE ready to get on the subject of Grell. There was far more small talk to be made, he'd decided. They could discuss the weather or the war or the boat or the state of Dawn or Buffy Summers or poetry or why McCoy was being such a prat.

He began picking away at a loose bit of paint on the doorframe as Archie spoke her name.

"Aye. Grell did indeed confess it, man. It's been...we never thought she'd target yourself that way."

There was a long pause. No, it wasn't Jack's fault. Jack may have broken his word to a death god, but he'd also warned them all that she might come after them.

"I was the one who assumed I was safe." A quiet sigh. "She said to tell you--"

His defenses slammed against this. No. He did not want to be the messenger-boy of some tyrant. In spite of his good spirits, he also found he did not want to recall this many details about that night. Later. Maybe.

"It's alright, Kennedy," Jack reassured him after a pause to let him finish if he wished. "I've been apprised of everything, at this point. Or nearly everything. We can let it lie, boy. Erm..."

He glanced around, even though they were the only ones in the room. Then he slipped a flask from his pocket and tossed it on the bed.

"Scotch."

As one arm was in a sling and the other had things attached to it, Kennedy had an interesting time picking up the flask and trying to open it. "Not sure I'm supposed to have this when I've more morphine than blood in my veins, but a little can't hurt. What shall be done about her?"

"Sorry----what should be done about whom?" Never before had a paint chip been more fascinating to a pirate. Ever.

"You know who I mean, Jack. Horatio said nothing had been done."

...Horatio. His eyes slid closed and he released a sigh. "Dear God, Horatio."

"What shall be done, Archie, is nothing. Nothing shall be done, and no one else gets hurt. That were the accord reached between...between Buffy and Grell."

It still freaked him out no small amount that Buffy had gone alone to speak with the death god. Able and capable and competent as she was, he knew Grell and her brand of madness. The evidence of it was sitting before him in this hospital bed, for God's sake.

"Horatio should not face her."

Archie looked away, saying nothing for some time. When he spoke, his voice was low. "No. He should not. But someone should."

"Did you not hear me, lieutenant?" Jack's voice was soft, but heavy with authority. "No one. That was the agreement. No one."

Buffy had called it a "stalemate." And what was Luceti, really, but one great stalemate?

Not a stalemate at all. "Then she's won."

She won, and Kennedy was the reason. That, he could not bear.

The pirate instantly regretted rising into this conversation. They'd meant to discuss it later, as a group---Buffy's solution to such problems, of course. Jack was simply used to giving orders, the more reasonable and acceptable and enticing to his men, the better.

"What mean you, 'she's won'? If anything she has lost, son. Any attack on ours means an instant curtailing of her precious social life here."

"She attacked and is getting away with it. She knows now she can do it again." He sounded tired--this is a game he played in the past and he does not want to begin it all over again. "And if she can, she will, and Horatio knows it. He'll try something--he can't stop himself, not when there's a tyrant abroad. And he'll fail."

Because Horatio couldn't kill in cold blood. He never could.

"No, lad---listen, we discuss this later, savvy? You're not well enough for it now, Archie. She won't do it again."

What did Buffy say? She had "bought them time." Jack had no idea whether he was lying or not. He did not want to mention that Grell had made an allowance for Horatio's revenge. Jack found the whole thing rather odd: why allow one man the freedom for taking revenge? Perhaps simply because Grell knew that Horatio was not nearly a match for her. Perhaps out of some sense of good form...Grell played by a set of inscrutable rules, truly. Or maybe, as he feared, because she wanted to add a third sailor to her list of Men Nearly Killed.

"She can and she will." Jack was right--Archie was tiring himself. "She said she did it bec--" The line on the heart monitor went slightly nuts. "Because you told us. About her, you told us--and enough know now that more might be told, might have already been told. What's to keep what happened to you from happening to someone else?"

"Archie? Lieutenant? You will cease this, now, and rest. Savvy?"

The heart monitor was causing Jack no small case of the wiggins. "You don't know what you're talking about. Buffy's set it for us. It's...it's not a perfect solution, but it might very well be the best we can hope for."

"Perhaps. But only until we think of a better one. I won't be the reason we bow to her, Jack. You can't ask me to bear that."

"You won't be the..."

What the devil was Kennedy going on about? "Bowing" to her?

"I'm not asking you to bear anything. It's all on me, mate. I've already told your Horatio, I assume full responsibility for this." A wave of disgust at the contraptions supplying the wounded young sailor with his medicines.

"I erred. I didn't read her movements aright. You've nothing to bear, do you understand me?"

"You can try and take the blame all you like, Jack, but there were only two people there that night." It was spoken matter-of-factly, because this was how it was: Kennedy turned his back on a known dangerous person. He was stupid, and then he was cowardly, begging for his life. Frustrated, he seized the button wired to his IV and hit it hard, releasing drugs ahead of his pain. He couldn't think about this.

The pirate turned toward the door. He couldn't talk to Kennedy when the other man was in this stubborn frame of mind. Sick men were often difficult to talk to; illogical.

He smirked, slightly, thinking of McCoy.

"Later? We shall discuss this with clearer heads and hopefully a bottle between us. Right now, lad, you've got to get better---for your Dawn and your Horatio, if no other reason."

Fifteen Bells: [ACTION/WRITTEN]

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