A Different Kind Of Sample
Quinn carries her into the Chop Shop with a look so obvious he may as well piss on his territory and get it over with. It's not a look Barrows appreciates—he's a doctor, goddamnit, he has morals—and he'd say as much if the kid weren't currently bleeding all over his nice clean floor. Instead he takes her from Quinn and lifts her onto the exam table as painlessly as he can manage, which isn't saying much. She's bleeding from more places than Barrows can count, swimming in and out of consciousness, one hand fluttering for her gun.
Quinn stands as close to her as he can without getting in the way, fists clenching and unclenching at his side. And he's paler than Barrows has ever seen him, but after his not-so-subtle warning he's not about to win any sympathy points.
"Has she got the caps?" he asks as he strips away as much of her armor as he can without doing more damage, finding a sort of glowing satisfaction in the way Quinn's jaw clenches. Barrows isn't an idiot. He knows Quinn would like nothing better than to feed him to the knuckle-draggers outside, but just because he's a doctor doesn't mean he won't stoop to pushing buttons.
"Look, she saved my life out there, okay?" Quinn growls. "Hell, she saved the whole damn caravan. I'll pay."
Barrows shrugs and jerks his head towards Nurse Graves. She'll have to deal with the finances today. Hell, she always does eventually and he needs Quinn occupied and elsewhere if he's going to patch this strange-ass smoothskin up.
She'd taken a bullet for a Ghoul. What was the world coming to these days?
*
She doesn't make a sound when she wakes and it's not until she manages to catch his hand as he passes that he even realizes she's awake. Her hand is smooth and cool in his and Barrows only just manages not to jerk away like he's been burnt.
"Could I have a med-x?" she manages, her voice barely more than a whisper. "If my bag's around here, I can pay you."
And Barrows really isn't sure what to think of her now. The fact that she'd saved Quinn's ass was strange enough without adding unwarranted touching into the mix. Never mind the fact that of all the smoothskins he's been around to patch up, none of them have been exactly civil. Barrows knows that he should probably check for a concussion now, but it's hard to concentrate with her fingers twined in his.
"Don't worry about it, kid," he tells her gently, pulling a syringe from the bag on his hip to free his hand. "Quinn's got it covered."
"Quinn?"
And there's a genuine question in her voice when she asks which knocks Barrows even farther of his high, prejudiced horse.
She risked her life for a Ghoul she'd never met.
*
It takes Barrows a week to realize just how nervous she makes him. Because his personal space is a good mile across and somehow she just doesn't get it. It was all well and good when she was sleeping where he could keep an eye on her but now she's trying to walk again—idiotic in itself with all those stitches in her stomach—and somehow it involves constant touching.
And it's nothing inappropriate—he's a doctor after all—but she puts her hand on his shoulder when she greets him in the morning or brushes past him when she hobbles off to do whatever the hell it is she does when she's not asking him questions about himself he'd rather not answer. Now that he thinks of it, Barrows wonders if Quinn wasn't trying to warn him of something else all together. Because unnerving as she is, he finds he… misses her when she wanders off and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to spell trouble.
Sometimes Barrows wonders if all the radiation isn't getting to him.
*
"So I heard you need samples," she says as she eases back into bed one night. "Nobody would tell me what kind though."
Barrows doesn't want to talk about this. Not with her. Because he knows her well enough by now to know she'll offer to help and while he'd probably kill for a decent chunk of flesh, getting too close to her is out of the question.
"Human flesh," he tells her, trying to make it as blunt and disgusting as he can. "We need untainted samples to figure out the ghoulification process."
But she only smiles, looking up at him with those big brown eyes that do absolutely nothing for his resolve and asks, "Does it hurt?"
"Yes," he says and tries to tell himself its not lying. "Horribly."
*
She leaves not long after with Quinn tagging after her and rumor says—or Crowley after a few drinks, anyway—that they're sleeping together. Rumor also says he'd like a piece of that ass if she's offering Barrows is utterly disgusted to find he'd like nothing better than to deck Crowley for saying it.
And even more appalled to find he agrees.
*
Another week passes and Barrows isn't pining.
Or sulking, or mooning, or moping, or anything Nurse Graves has been accusing him of without any sort of proof or logic whatsoever. He does not miss the strange smoothskin. There's a twinge of guilt maybe that he's let her go out to shoot at mutants when the gaping holes in her stomach have barely closed over but other than that he couldn't care less.
It absolutely does not bother him that she's out there trying to kill herself in the wastes. Nor does it bother him that she's fucking Quinn's brains out every night with wild abandon when everybody knows he's a disease infested asshole who'll fuck anything with skin and doesn't give a flying fuck if she knows her way around a med-lab or that she can string an intelligent sentence together worth listening to.
Nurse Graves is smirking at him again from her seat at the terminal.
Barrows tries his best to ignore it, watching the two glowing Ghouls in his observation cell instead. There's incredibly important research to be done—research their lives all depend on—and she's at the computer giggling at his expense.
Days like this, Barrows wonders why he ever hired her.
*
"Kid, Barrows is good, but I don't think he can fix that," Winthrop's voice filters down into the Chop Shop and Barrows pulls himself up from where he'd fallen asleep on the desk to listen.
"It's a present," a woman says and suddenly he's damn glad Nurse Graves had somewhere else to be because he can't help grinning like an idiot at hearing his strange smoothskin outside. "Is he awake, do you think?"
"I'm not sure he ever sleeps. He's always—oh. Lights are off."
"Yeah. And I'm not sure my boy here will keep; it's fucking miserable outside. Kudos for getting the air conditioner up and running, by the way."
Winthrop chuckles and says something Barrows can't hear over the sound of his chair scraping backwards. He can't remember the last time he actually slept in an honest to god bed, but his smoothskin's back and he'd like to—
…since when was she his?
Barrows stops halfway to the door, but it's already swinging open, the kid coming in ass first, streaking blood across his nice clean floor with a dead Talon merc. She stops when she sees him and grins like Christmas came early, leaving a smudge of something he hopes is dirt across her face when she sweeps her hair from her face in something like nerves.
"How's this for a sample?"
Barrows stares at her for a long moment, vaguely aware that coherent thought has disconnected and that his mile-wide bubble of personal space is dissolving at an alarming rate. He crosses the room before he realizes it, cupping her cheek in his palm as he waits for her to pull away. But apparently no one ever told her how to act around a Ghoul because she leans in instead of getting the hell away from him, her lips brushing a soft question against his own. And Barrows can't help but wrench her closer with the arm not stroking patterns on her neck, kissing her like he hasn't been able to kiss anyone in far too goddamn long.
"Why, Doctor Barrows," she laughs when they part, breathless, a flush riding high on her cheeks. "If I'd have known you were after that kind of sample, I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of dragging that asshole home."
Doubly glad Nurse Graves isn't here to giggle at him with that goddamn knowing look of hers, Barrows grins and pulls her towards the bed.
"Actually, I've got an experiment in mind I think you can help me with."
"Oh?" she asks and smirks, lifting off the strap that keeps his meds at his hip. "Does it hurt?"
Barrows meets her eyes with something of a challenge, pulling his bloodstained shirt—the cleanest he has—over his head.
"Let's find out."