Title: Organic Dementia
Summary: Experience is the only way to gain knowledge, and you get that from just living. An AU, short, one-shot based in the nineteen-nineties. Implications of slash, but only when paying close attention.
Disclaimer: Standard disclaimer applies that I have no claim or stake of financial gain in this.
Dedication: To DarkAngel048, because, well, it was asked of me and I delivered. It's not much, rather it is to a certain extent pathetic, but it's something.
Seventeen straight and finite long hours of listening that that wretched surgeon Hotep explain the intricacies and dangers included in performing a bowel resection left Moses—first year student nurse and former English interpreter at the Egyptian Museum of Natural Artifacts—more than a little exhausted and want to just go to his small flat in the city and sleep forever, but, he had his weekly appointment to keep.
He had not bothered to change out of his peach—yes, the doctors kept telling them that was the actual title color when they ordered them on the internet, when in fact they were pink—scrubs, and simply grabbed his yellow frayed, leather satchel at his locker, got two steaming, gloriously hot cups of black coffee and walked up the path from the main hospital he was working at as an intern and over to the building adjacent for in-patient care. Within the walls of that building and probably awake by now and wandering around his room thinking about some intricacies of his new novel—despite the sun only having just risen to bathe Egypt in fine golden light—was his brother, the genius writer suffering from advanced Syphilis.
Entering the ward, giving the nurse at the desk—Tzipporah, he was sure her name was, though only because he had read his brother's chart so many times—a light, charming smile that was barely visible through the scruff inhabiting his face because he had not been able to shave in three days, Moses knocked once, twice, three times on his brother's door and then entered without waiting. He could hear Rameses speaking quietly to himself anyway.
Careful to close the door silently, even though the wooden frame had glanced a blow against the repulsively yellow wallpaper and hard stone wall hiding beneath it (probably, Rameses has theorized when it was decided he would stay in the hospital until the person who gave him Syphilis was located, the hospital wall was ashamed of the wallpaper put upon it by foolish human hand and would say it was so if only it could speak) Moses found his brother sitting on the open windowsill, talking to a pair of silently croaking crows sitting in the tree across the way. It was not dangerous for Rameses to be sitting in the frame—they were only on the ground floor—but it left Moses looking at him as though he had gotten worse over the night, despite the doctors telling the younger brother that he was getting better with the affects of the Penicillin and another set of chemical cocktails.
"….so, then, we are in agreement that it was either Aaron or that silly Median girl that gave me my current medical problems, yes?" Was the fishtail end of the conversation Moses caught Rameses speaking with the bigger, more aggressive appearing crow. The crow itself answered Rameses's question by turning to its friend and pecking it square in the chest.
Moses had heard this same theory before and had exhausted the probability that Rameses had indeed slept with his older brother Aaron—Moses' blood brother that had gone missing in Cambodia while stationed with some Americans during some sort of political coup just before Moses turned seventeen—and it was not entirely out of the question that Aaron could have given Rameses Syphilis, but Moses seriously doubted it, considering their sister Miriam—Moses and Aaron's older sister that was also dead, but had died in a car crash, rather than gone missing under secretive, militia circumstances; may she rest in peace—had been a sort of warning from the health department in and of herself. Miriam had also, expressly, told Aaron, Moses and even Rameses, that if they were going to have sex of any kind, that they take every precaution. Not that their lots adoptive parents weren't ones to ride them in this way as well—may they also rest in peace—but Miriam was better at it, and drove it home far better.
The nursing Intern thought it was a better chance that Rameses got his strain of Syphilis from the Median woman he mentioned on occasion, but could never remember her name. Anonymous sex was far more likely to be a cause of an STD.
"Hello, brother," Moses finally said, taking a seat at the end of the bed Rameses so often occupied during the day, but rarely at night, as he was more prone to wander around the hospital (much to Tzipporah's chagrin), "I brought you your coffee. And better company. I thought you said that the crows were rude?"
Rameses blinked once, watching the big and then the little crow fly away and hover in a circle above where the medical helicopter landed, and then he turned to smile at his younger brother, hopping off of the sill to take perch on the squeaky, wheeled chair he often sat in across from the desk with all of his writing utensils and papers scattered about, save for the papers that were complete and in a wire mesh box Moses recalled seeing his teachers use when he was still in college.
"They are, Moses, but I have to talk to someone, and that woman out at the desk isn't much better to talk to than that vulture that slept on the roof two nights ago. Crows, at least, have the decency to pay attention when they can recall that I've fed them more times from my lunch and breakfast than I care to remember."
Moses gave his brother a sour look, and got more comfortable on the bed, setting both coffees on the little table that could be moved out of the way if Rameses went into some kind of arrest and they didn't want to get the food or drink on the electric paddles the doctors used to jolt people back into consciousness, and they nestled into the pillows that smelled of Rameses, answering to the best of his exhausted capabilities, "I suppose that's true, but do you have to be so mean to the nurse?"
"No, but I keep hoping to get a better rise out of her so I can press her for more information about the Chief of Medicine that you work for over in that other building."
"You want to know about Jethro? Why?"
Rameses raised a brow, but knew well enough to Moses couldn't see it as his shift at the hospital was catching up to him and his dark eyes were shut off to images, lids too heavy to keep raised, "Well, if I know about him, I'll know about you, won't I? He's your boss."
"He's everyone's boss," Moses replied, feeling and hearing Rameses get off the chair to move aside the table with their coffee so he could lie down on the other side of the bed; possibly tucking his arms behind his head like he did when they were little and stood out on the hills at night watching stars, "And anyway…we're looked over by…attending…physician…"
The elder of the two of them, despite having an eternal headache from the drugs he received and the light damage to his brain from his disease, smiled to himself as the words died on his little brother's lips to be replaced slowly, slowly, slowly with breathy snoring.
"I know that," Rameses grinned, lifting himself up to pull at the covers at the end of the bed and pull them over the both of them; white starched fabric covering up the hideous pink scrubs Moses wore and the gross periwinkle blue hospital gown (that showed his ass if he didn't tie it properly) Rameses wore, that kept them warm against the air-conditioning all the rooms in this building came with, "But, I like to draw out your embarrassment."
They would continue their conversation later. For now, with the sun rising in its annoying yellows and oranges reflecting off of the molecules of the desert beyond the city they resided in, they would sleep after seventeen hours for Moses and thirteen for Rameses; one in work and the other in…a kind of work that only came from the medicine wearing out of his system and him keeping it a secret from the nurses until he completed another chapter of his novel.
Sleep was always better when they shared the same bed and both were too drained to hog the covers or accidently kick the other out.