Sybil gets her revenge at last ;o)

October 25—"Scarecrow"

"'Morning!" Sybil warmly greeted her fellow nurses as she entered the locker room on Tuesday morning.

"See that you recovered," one of them teased, referring to Thomas' party from several nights ago.

"I was here yesterday too," Sybil defended.

"Aye, we all were, but that doesn't mean we had recovered by then," the other nurse chuckled.

Sybil joined in their laughter, then started to look around. "Speaking of 'recovery', has Thomas returned to work yet?" He had taken the previous day off, the excuse being that he would still be cleaning up from his party on Monday. Everybody else knew that what he really meant was that he very well would still be hungover.

A great loud yawn was heard from the doorway and all the nurses present turned to see the very man enter the locker room. "Speak of the devil…" someone murmured, which naturally led to a few more giggles.

Sybil smiled pleasantly at her friend. "Good morning, Thomas."

"Meh," Thomas answered. He was wearing dark sunglasses and still looked rather disheveled.

"Everything all cleaned up?" Sybil innocently asked, earning a few more giggles from her fellow nurses, as well as a mock laugh from her friend.

"For the most part," he muttered. "Although if you're volunteering on coming over and helping…"

"Oh, I wouldn't want to take away your fun," Sybil teased.

Thomas snorted and turned to his locker, only to pause at the sight of…something…hanging on it.

"What's this?"

Sybil looked over at Thomas and followed his fingers to the locker door. "Oh! Suzy drew that for you," she giggled.

Thomas raised his eyebrows. "Well, that was sweet…" he squinted at the picture from beneath his sunglasses. "…What is it?"

Sybil giggled and sighed. While her daughter had a love for art, she was by no means a Rembrandt. "It's meant to be a scarecrow," she explained.

Thomas frowned. "A scarecrow?"

Sybil nodded. "That's what she said."

Thomas still looked puzzled. "Well…again, that's rather sweet, but…why?"

Sybil looked up at him, sharing in his confused expression. "Why what?"

"Why a picture of a scarecrow?"

Sybil shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know, she just told me to give you the picture. I brought it yesterday, but you weren't here, so I thought I would just tape it to your locker."

Thomas turned back to gaze at the picture, and a smile finally broke across his lips. "Well, please tell little Miss Suzy that I thank her for my…scarecrow."

Sybil nodded her head and went back to putting her things away in her locker. Thomas gazed at the drawing one more time, before turning his lock and opening the locker…and freezing in place at the sight that greeted him.

"What the…" he turned his head at the sound of feminine giggles and narrowed his eyes when he saw Sybil's laughing face. "Oh I see...that's nice, Crawley, REALLY nice," Thomas muttered.

A few of the other nurses looked over to see what Thomas was talking about, and a few gasped at the sight of a plastic coffin, filling a majority of the space in his locker.

"I'm not even going to ask how you got in," he snarled.

"Probably the same way you got into mine," Sybil hauntingly retorted.

Thomas removed his sunglasses. "So that lovely picture your daughter drew, assuming she drew it, was just a ploy to get me to 'relax', let my defenses down, before springing whatever your trick coffin holds into my face?"

"You seemed to have a great deal of fun playing your prank on me, isn't it fair to play one on you?"

Thomas rolled his eyes. "Some prank," he muttered. "If something was supposed to 'burst out' when I opened my locker, it didn't work." He peered at the coffin and shook his head. "Hope you saved your receipt, Crawley, because I think you were sold a faulty piece of merchandise."

Sybil lifted an eyebrow. "Maybe my prank was simply putting the coffin into your locker?"

"Pfft," Thomas snorted. "You're a terrible liar, Crawley. So what's inside? Surely not another skeleton, no, you'd want to be different. Let me guess…rubber spiders and rats? The ones that look real upon first glance?"

Sybil shut her own locker and turned on her heel, not bothering to answer him. Thomas clearly took this as her refusing to admit that he was right.

"Aww, don't walk away!" he called after her. "Look, I'll open it now and pretend to be scared, since you went through all this trouble!"

Sybil paused at the doorway that led out of the locker and watched as Thomas pulled at the coffin door. "What's behind mystery door #1?" he asked in a mocking "gameshow host" voice. The door opened…and Thomas gasped and then sputtered as a giant pile of straw and dirt tumbled out of the locker, onto the floor, burying him up to his knees from where he stood. "WHAT THE…!?"

Laughter filled the air and Thomas, still sputtering from the (literal) "dirty" surprise, lifted his eyes and glared back at Sybil.

"I know it's by no means as 'refined' as your skeleton, but knowing how you are about 'the great outdoors', especially farms—"

"FARMS!?" Thomas gasped, leaping as best he could out of the mound of dirt and straw, coughing as the smell filled his nostrils. While Thomas had been born and lived his childhood in the Yorkshire countryside, he despised it, and was by no means an "outdoorsman", much less a farmer.

"Yes, my brother-in-law, Kieran—they have a little farm just outside of Dublin; he helped me the other day with filling that…as well as dismantling an old scarecrow that was falling apart. Oh, best watch out for worms and maggots."

Thomas let out a screech and began to leap up and down, trying to shake every bit of dirt and straw from his shoes, clothes, and skin. Sybil laughed as several other nurses lifted their phones and quickly started to record Thomas' antics. There weren't really any worms or maggots, but she wasn't going to reveal that, at least not yet.

"Happy Halloween, Barrow," Sybil sweetly murmured, blowing her friend a kiss, before turning on her heel and practically skipping away. Ah, sweet revenge…

To be continued...