It was the fifth time in as many days that I had ended up nearly bleeding out on Worth's doorstep. Hammering on the door maybe a little too hard, I couldn't help but smile in relief when he finally opened up. From my position down on the ground he was even taller than usual. It was kind of daunting, especially when coupled with the fact that he looked angry enough to consider murder.

"Hanna, it is four in the fuckin' morning,"

"But you're still awake so that's okay, isn't it?" I tried my best to look fragile and worthy of Worth's pity. He didn't buy it.

"I'm only up because m' aunt just called fr'm fuckin' Australia," Worth said, narrowing his eyes further. "Looks like she ain't the only one who f'rgets 'bout time-zones, yer just about living in one all ta yerself."

"It's not my fault! Seriously! I can't help that the only time supernatural beasties come out is in the middle of the night,"

"You can help by not chasing after them all the time," relaxing into the door frame, apparently unconcerned with the fact that my leg was churning blood across his threshold, Worth pulled out a pack of cigarettes and began to light one. "So, d' Monty setcha up with this job, or did ya actually find one on your own f'r once?"

"Lamont. Told me a friend of his had gone missing and he wanted me to investigate and then pointed me in the direction of some of her friends. Her 'friends' turned out to be a couple of mages. I may have accidentally called one a hack for thinking he could use a laser rune to set something on fire," I motioned to the gash in my thigh. "Turns out the reason they were so bad at runes was because they were more the 'ritualistic sacrifice and divination' kind of mages. They slashed me with a massive knife."

"Goddamnit, Hanna,"

"Hey, it could've been worse! I mean, I escaped before they could offer me to like, cthulhu or whatever so—"

"But ya still got a fuckin' machete through ya," not quite—it was actually just a meat cleaver. But I didn't tell him that. "Augh. C'mon in. S'not like yer goin' anywhere with yer leg like that, anyway." Tucking the cigarette packet back into his pocket, Worth offered me a hand. Taking it, I made the painful climb into a standing position, and then, with Worth helping me, staggered into his dodgy little office. Kicking the door shut behind him with an almighty slam, Worth lead me gently to his desk. I sat down.

"Put that leg up on the table—I'll be back in a sec. Jes gotta get my equipment," Worth called at me, walking out of the room and around into the back of his office, which he had taken to calling the 'surgery room' a while back. I used the term loosely mostly because I don't think that a room that just happens to have a operating table and some scalpels in it can be called a surgery room, but hey, Worth begs to differ—and while it doesn't always seem like it, I dislike crossing him. There was an incident with lemon juice and something a bit bigger than a paper cut back in our history that kind of made me hesitant to do anything too annoying.

After a little while twiddling my thumbs and getting pissed off about how I'd have to throw away my third favorite pair of pants, Worth came back into the room, with a bag in one hand and a roll of bandages in the other. Pulling his chair around to where I was sitting, he slumped down into it and glared at me.

"Got s'm scissors here. Now either ya take the jeans off, or we cut away the leg of them. I can't get a look at yer wound otherwise," in the hope of maybe being able to rescue my pants with enough bleach, I chose the former option. Getting off the table for a moment, undoing my belt and pulling my jeans off, I left them lying in a heap on the floor. No biggie. Worth'd seen my Batman boxers just a few weeks back, in a similar accident involving Lamont and a troll.

"That okay?"

"Yer," I hopped back up into the same spot I'd been sitting in. Worth opened up his bag, and pulled out some gloves, which he put on with a cartoonish snap. Huh. I didn't even know he owned gloves. "So, what're ya gonna pay me with this time?"

"I can teach you a rune that prevents you from sleeping for a whole day after it's drawn on,"

"And wha' use would tha' be ta me?" Producing some kind of cloth, he began to clean away the blood from around the tear in my skin. The bleeding had slowed almost to a stop. While the cut was big, it hadn't gone very deep—lucky, because I didn't want to imagine how hard it would've been to get over here with an artery ripped open. Enjoy the little things, am I right? "I like my beauty sleep, if ya haven't noticed."

"You could… torture Lamont?"

"Jes gimme another option,"

"Uhm. I'm running a little short on ideas right now. I mean, I wouldn't feel comfortable teaching you how to electrocute things with magic, but we're getting to the point that the only runes I haven't taught you are the combat ones," I looked at Worth cautiously. "Unless you want to learn a rune that lets you make flowers bloom where you write it?"

"Fuck would I wanna make flowers for?"

"Like I said, I'm running out of options here," putting down the cloth, Worth moved on to disinfectant. "Errr… I know a rune that you can write on things that burns anyone other than you who touches them?"

"Hmph, better than flowers or insomnia, I guess," I gave a tiny wince as Worth pressed too hard on my wound. He smirked. "Get better runes for next time, though. Or I might accidentally forget to sew your wounds shut."

"Fair enough. I mean, it's kind of awesome that you do all this for no real pay, anyway," finally Worth pulled out a syringe. I gave a worried smile his way. "I'm so not gonna be able to walk home on this, am I?"

"Ya can sleep here. Should be a blanket somewhere 'round—just crash in the back room,"

"You're a saint,"

"And yer a pain in my ass, Cross. Yer jes lucky I got a soft spot fer yer dumb mug," if Worth had been a bit more fatherly toward me than he was, that sentence would've been punctuated with a ruffle of my hair and a mocking smile, but hey—Worth. You take the kindness you can get. "'Sides. It's mostly Monty's fault ya keep getting torn up by these things. He should know better than to sic ya on… what was it last time? A wood elf?"

"Something like that. All I really figured out was that it had pointy ears and it hit me hard," which could basically be said for ninety percent of the things that had broke my fingers in the past. I shuffled a bit. Worth stuck me with the syringe, and my leg began to go pleasantly numb. "You know, I bet if real people started giving me work instead of just Lamont, I'd be facing down a lot less angry supernatural beings. I'm pretty sure no-one else can piss faeries off better than him, after all."

"Eh, a'tually, faeries were my fault," Worth confessed, producing a needle and some thread. I didn't want to think where the thread had been, considering there were black patches all over it, but hey—it wouldn't be the dirtiest thing I'd had sewn into me by him. "Still haven't found my legit doctor-y needles, but eh, yeh'll live."

"And if I don't, I'll come back and haunt you!"

"Fuck. Don't bring ghosts up. Yeh know my feelins 'bout ghosts,"

"Hey, I never said I'd be a ghost. I could be a zombie. I would be an awesome zombie," Worth threaded the needle and dove it down through my skin, then pulled it up again—rinse and repeat. His stitches were clean, professional, and neat; unlike the rest of his work. I was pretty sure he was meant to be using a needle holder, after all, and that thread… "I still haven't run into one of those, actually."

"Prolly fer the best. If ya found one, I'd peg it as a sign of the apocalypse,"

"Hey, it might turn out that real zombies aren't like fiction at all. They might be nice. They might just be dead people," unlikely, though, considering how a consistent trait among all the paranormal creatures I'd fought was the fact that they were easily angered and very dangerous. "I mean, Lamont says vampires are pretty cool."

"Tha's jes 'cause 'e keeps winnin' good money off one of 'em in poker," Worth said, and shot a glance over at the borderline-archaic phone sitting on one of his shelving units. "Tch. Wonder when that fat bastard's gonna come collect debts off me."

"And you say I'm bad at paying people back for things," I smirked at Worth, who responded by pulling the next stitch through very quickly and very firmly, startling me. I let out a yelp of surprise, which Worth chuckled at—loud and low.

"Hey, I'd be able to pay Monty if someone—" another tug, though this one was less jarring "—stopped using all my medical supplies, and then not showin' me a dime fer it."

"Someone also happens to be an old friend who doesn't even know anyone else to come crawling to," Worth was coming to the end of the stitching. "Someone would not get a good response if he turned up at the hospital with a torso full of staples."

"It was that someone's own fault that the staples got in there in the first place," knotting his work, Worth cut away the needle. Looking proudly down at the near-flawless sewing, he checked everything over again, and then pulled out the bandage. "Chrissake, Hanna. S'metimes I wonder why the hell ya keep doin' what yer doin'." My breath caught.

"… C'mon Worth. You know why,"

"'Cause ya wanna flaunt yer chivalry, issat righ'? Protect the innocent? Save the world from all the things tha' go bump in the night?" Worth spat. "Fuckin' hell, Hanna. Kid. Ya try anything and ya get ya leg sliced up like Christmas ham." He paused in applying the bandage.

"Yer gonna get killed if ya keep messin' with the supernatural,"

"I can handle it. I've come up against a lot worse than a few mages before,"

"I can't keep treatin' these wounds,"

"Yes you can. You have to,"

"Shit, Hanna. Jes 'cause I'm a sadist don't mean I enjoy seein' ya get hurt out there,"

"Oh?" My voice grew barbs and thorns. "If you're so against me getting cut up, then why were you tugging on my stitches like that before?"

"Muckin' around like that is different. It's one thing to joke with s'me kid's cuts. It's another entirely to go hackin' him up in the first place,"

"Nice to know you've got a moral code there, Doc'. Shouldn't that mean you understand the fact that I have one, too? Why don't you get that I want to help people?" Worth paid little attention to his work and more to the glimpses of staples that he could see under the neck of my shirt. His mouth split into a slight grimace.

"I get it. Christ, why would I be a doctor if I didn't 'get' wanting to help people?" I shifted slightly as he spoke. Things were feeling a bit uncomfortable. "Look. Protectin' people is one thing, but getting yerself killed doin' it's another." Pulling out a safety pin from his bag, Worth stuck it through my bandage to hold it in place.

"I'm not gonna tell ya how ta do yer job, or not ta do it, but I am gonna tell ya this: I'm not keen on patchin' ya up every night fer the rest of ya life,"

"I'll bear that in mind," Worth moved back, allowing me to get off his desk and stand up. I picked my jeans off the floor, but I didn't put them back on—they'd be awkward to sleep in, after all.

"Gonna hit the sack?" Worth asked.

"You got it," I made for the door to his back room. "Don't worry about the blanket. It's not a cold night anyway." Shutting myself off from Worth, I went to lie down on the gurney, chillier than I wanted to be and in more pain than I would admit. My scar was sore. My resolve was damaged—and more than a little. What the hell was I doing, throwing myself at trolls and werewolves and necromancers whenever I got the chance? Worth was right, but he was wrong too.

I couldn't keep on going like I was, but I had to keep going somehow. As much as I needed to save people from the creatures of the night, at that moment, I needed someone to save me from them too. No-one could do the 'paranormal investigator' thing alone—I knew that. Harry Dresden had Murphy, and Mouse. Ghostbusters? They were a team too. And then you had Mulder and Scully. As much as fiction wasn't a good basis for the 'monsters' side of what I was dealing with, it did provide some grain of truth about how to do the job.

You couldn't go snooping around in the darkness by yourself. I'd tried it too often and it had never worked. I needed help. Fast.

XXX

When I woke up, my head was spinning from the pain in my leg. The anesthetic had worn off, and I was left to try and stagger through to the front room to beg some painkillers off Worth. Once I had complained enough, he tossed a packet of codeine to me.

"Swallow two and don't choke," were his instructions, and even though I tried not to fail at following them—I really did, seriously!—I managed to start hacking after the second pill went down. Not a good start to things. Once I'd coughed almost enough to make Worth start worrying, I managed to get back to normal, and so I limped back through into the other room. I found my jeans, which I'd dropped on the ground again, and pulled them on. When I returned to where Worth was, he'd lit up a cigarette and started puffing away at it.

"Guess I should head home, right Worth?" I asked, a grin spreading across my face.

"Yeh. Get yer dumb mug outta here Hanna," he smirked and stabbed a finger towards the door. "And don't even bother sayin' goodbye, we both know ya'll be back here t'night, if ya and Monty have yer way."

"Haha, yeah. See you later, Worth!" He was right; and I couldn't be bothered talking back. Strolling out, I felt marginally relieved when I realized that my leg was already starting to become less painful to walk on. Given a few minutes more, it'd be pretty much fine—and even if it wasn't I was good at coping with pain. A few stitches in my leg were nothing.

The walk from Worth's office to my apartment was about twenty to thirty minutes long, depending on traffic lights and how injured I was at any given time. It took about twenty five that day, mostly because of my leg, but also because there were road-works that blocked off one of the streets I usually walked down. Damn road-works: always where you need them the least!

When I got back in, I was horrified to discover Queen of Nightmare Landowners, Mrs. Ellie Blaney, standing in the foyer of the building. She stared at me with the sort of intensity she usually reserved for people keeping pet dogs in their rooms, and Darren in 305 who never pays his rent.

"Falk," she said, stepping closer to me. "I was hoping I'd see you." Reasons that she could have wanted to talk: me not paying my rent (which I had), me breaking the hallway light (I swear it was an accident), me burning a hole in my floor (laser runes! I can actually use them!). So, yeah, I wasn't eager to stick around and chat—but that's the thing about Blaney, she's got some magic power to make you talk to her even if you don't want to.

"Really?" I tried my best not to look nervous, because showing signs of weakness would just make this more awkward. She was one of those people who looked for your moments of uncertainty, took them, played with them, and then reduced you to a nervous wreck: she was a demon in human skin.

"Some guy was knocking on your door yesterday. I bumped into him and told him you were out, so he should come back tomorrow. Keep your eye out for him, maybe?" I nodded, and Blaney smiled—slightly condescending, but not quite as much as usual. "Don't forget your rent's due Thursday."

"I won't,"

"See you 'round, Falk," I nodded again, and then walked off—as fast as I could without seeming suspicious. Reaching the staircase, I sprinted up it like running was going out of fashion. I'd do anything to put distance between myself and the nightmare. Opening the door to the third floor hallway, I slid in, and then continued to walk briskly to my apartment door. It wasn't until I'd locked myself inside that I felt the panic from meeting my demon landlady fade away.

Screw fighting elves or vampires or whatever else—Blaney was one of the real monsters of this world. I tried to shut her out of my mind, and collapsed on my bed (which wasn't so much a bed as a mattress with a blanket on it, but whatever). Getting comfy, I stretched out, and gave a yawn. Regardless of the fact I'd slept in for the better part of twelve hours, I was still tired, and my leg was still bothering me, even if it didn't flat-out hurt. The cut in the thigh of my jeans was going to be a problem, too. It wasn't near enough to the knee to be fashionable, so I'd have to patch it up sometime and hope it didn't look too stupid.

I must've lain on the mattress for over ten minutes, just thinking about all the things I was supposed to be doing with my day, before I got up and did anything remotely proactive. First thing was first: I got changed into clothes that weren't falling apart. Sort of. There was a cross-shaped patch on one shin of my new pants, but at least that looked cool and possibly intentional. It was pointless to get annoyed at pants with holes in them, anyway, since most of mine did by then, with all sorts of inventive ways of hiding that fact getting put into practice.

Following that, I realized that maybe eating food would be a good idea, and so I sauntered over to my kitchenette and went rummaging in the fridge for lunch-dinner. Potatoes, sour cream, cheese, several cans of beer, some chocolate, a tub of yoghurt, and a few other things were spotted around the mostly barren landscape inside. I pulled out a big potato, the sour cream and the cheese, and resolved to make a baked potato. About an hour later, I'd created a semblance of one, and started to eat it. 'Semblance' was a good word to describe the cooking attempt. Who knew that potatoes could be so complex?

Basic human needs out of the way, I collapsed on my mattress again: this time, though, I brought a few of my books out to join me. I didn't own many, but the ones I did have were of the dog-eared well-loved variety, and included such brilliant works as the complete hardcover Harry Potter series, and books one to twelve of The Dresden Files. Fantasy nerd? You betcha.

Needing a little inspiration for the 'paranormal investigator' thing at that moment, I'd pulled out bits of the latter series, and so I spent a while flicking between them—reading about everything from a zombified T-rex ploughing through Chicago, to an entire species of vampires being obliterated in the span of a few seconds. Overarching theme: the importance of family and friends when pursuing a career in monster-smiting. It was kind of depressing.

I mean—I wasn't alone because I wanted to be. Who the hell really wants to do stuff alone, anyway? I mean, it's kind of nice to be deciding everything for yourself and just doing what the hell you want without the pitfalls of teamwork, but when you get down to it, having companionship for stuff is way cooler. It pissed me off and upset me that even after five years of living in that area, the only friends I had were still, really, just Lamont and Worth. I was stuck on my own. That sucked. That sucked a lot. But I couldn't change it.

At least not until I got distracted from my reading by a loud knock at the door; three hits, pretty strong. I jumped up to go answer it, completely aware that I looked really tired, really angry, and just generally fed up with the world. Whoever it was would just have to deal with that. Hopefully it wasn't Blaney coming to harass me more.

"… 'Lo?"