What's terrible but strangely impressive is how intimately she knows the ups and downs of the chems at work, and how efficiently she uses that knowledge, riding different highs as needed to keep herself on a functional level until a medic can arrive to flush them out of her system entirely. That medical background at work, he figures.
The withdrawal makes her too hurt and too tired to bathe, so she takes jet to balance out the lethargy (at his skeptical look, she tells him it's the only one she hasn't been using religiously) long enough to get her cuts rinsed out and the filth and stink of the Pitt off her skin. Without clothes of her own -- as soon as he hears her step into water on the other side of the door, he's handing off the slave getup to an embarrassed Paladin to throw in the nearest trashcan fire, and it's been a long time since Three Dog's even had time for the kind of dalliances that leave him with spare ladies' clothes lying around his pad -- she winds up dressed in one of his too-wide-for-her shirts, which for him is a barely-suppressed heart attack all its own. Getting proper food into her stomach requires a dose of psycho to put her metabolism on an overdrive that can counteract the debilitating nausea, and an hour later when the twitch of the psycho is ebbing off and the food has settled a few quick shots of whiskey taken with the straightest face he's ever seen help her finally conk out on his bed.
Three Dog spends part of the next day shooing Brotherhood messengers out of his studio. They know she's back, they know she's here, and they're anxious to get their team mascot, the face of good the wastes know and love, out on the front lines and fighting their battles for them again. Short of kiting them back to his room to show them the shivering, sweating, whimpering pile of raw nerves under a tall pile of blankets (which she tells him with surprising force through chittering teeth and a yawning, muddled grumble that as few people as possible need to see, lest she be forced to kill him the next time he sleeps) he does his level best to tell them to go fuck themselves for the day. As charmingly as he can manage.
Much as he loves the good fight, much as he knows she'd be down for it if she weren't such a mess, he's not having any of it. Still, he has a station to run and a trembling teenage girl to constantly check on, and precious little time between to brow-beat men twice his size and with military training to boot. Luckily the dog, clever mutt that he is, picks up on the idea and takes up a guard position at the bottom of the steps. No amount of steel and wires between the Pallies' skin and his teeth can make them feel better about about the way he growls and glares them down.
It's almost noon when the medic Three Dog had sent for arrives and asks him direct and uncomfortable questions in clipped tones the whole way from the studio door to the bedroom door, then pointedly closes that one behind her so she can privately stick 101 with every kind of needle and dump about a half dozen colorful IV bags of mystery fluid into her abused veins. When she leaves, he peeks in to find the girl looking magically more worse for wear, but sleeping more peacefully than she'd managed the whole night before. And he hasn't slept at all, but that's nothing new.
A dozen cups of coffee, half so many beers, and a mind-numbingly slow newsday later, he's glaring at his watch to find it's 1 AM and he's as beat as he can remember ever being. He can't help feeling a little emasculated at how easily a day and a half of sitting on his ass has done him in like the week or more of torment and trauma it took to get 101 even halfway as run-down. He tries his best not to think of it as him getting old.
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timeasmymeasure
Since When, 3a/3
Date: 2012-06-18 07:09 pm (UTC)The withdrawal makes her too hurt and too tired to bathe, so she takes jet to balance out the lethargy (at his skeptical look, she tells him it's the only one she hasn't been using religiously) long enough to get her cuts rinsed out and the filth and stink of the Pitt off her skin. Without clothes of her own -- as soon as he hears her step into water on the other side of the door, he's handing off the slave getup to an embarrassed Paladin to throw in the nearest trashcan fire, and it's been a long time since Three Dog's even had time for the kind of dalliances that leave him with spare ladies' clothes lying around his pad -- she winds up dressed in one of his too-wide-for-her shirts, which for him is a barely-suppressed heart attack all its own. Getting proper food into her stomach requires a dose of psycho to put her metabolism on an overdrive that can counteract the debilitating nausea, and an hour later when the twitch of the psycho is ebbing off and the food has settled a few quick shots of whiskey taken with the straightest face he's ever seen help her finally conk out on his bed.
Three Dog spends part of the next day shooing Brotherhood messengers out of his studio. They know she's back, they know she's here, and they're anxious to get their team mascot, the face of good the wastes know and love, out on the front lines and fighting their battles for them again. Short of kiting them back to his room to show them the shivering, sweating, whimpering pile of raw nerves under a tall pile of blankets (which she tells him with surprising force through chittering teeth and a yawning, muddled grumble that as few people as possible need to see, lest she be forced to kill him the next time he sleeps) he does his level best to tell them to go fuck themselves for the day. As charmingly as he can manage.
Much as he loves the good fight, much as he knows she'd be down for it if she weren't such a mess, he's not having any of it. Still, he has a station to run and a trembling teenage girl to constantly check on, and precious little time between to brow-beat men twice his size and with military training to boot. Luckily the dog, clever mutt that he is, picks up on the idea and takes up a guard position at the bottom of the steps. No amount of steel and wires between the Pallies' skin and his teeth can make them feel better about about the way he growls and glares them down.
It's almost noon when the medic Three Dog had sent for arrives and asks him direct and uncomfortable questions in clipped tones the whole way from the studio door to the bedroom door, then pointedly closes that one behind her so she can privately stick 101 with every kind of needle and dump about a half dozen colorful IV bags of mystery fluid into her abused veins. When she leaves, he peeks in to find the girl looking magically more worse for wear, but sleeping more peacefully than she'd managed the whole night before. And he hasn't slept at all, but that's nothing new.
A dozen cups of coffee, half so many beers, and a mind-numbingly slow newsday later, he's glaring at his watch to find it's 1 AM and he's as beat as he can remember ever being. He can't help feeling a little emasculated at how easily a day and a half of sitting on his ass has done him in like the week or more of torment and trauma it took to get 101 even halfway as run-down. He tries his best not to think of it as him getting old.