Dastardos suddenly shot awake, gasping a deep breath, as if he hadn't breathed in a while. He probably hadn't.
His head hurt... Badly.
As his mind caught up with what his horrible eyes were seeing he realised that Doc Patch was right there, staring jaw-dropped at him and holding his wrist, almost as if checking for a pulse.
Dastardos scowled and yanked his hand back, immediately on the defensive. Why the hell was Patch here?! Did he get dragged back to the clinic?! Seeing his nemesis' face first thing after waking up was NOT what he wanted to happen today. Or ever!
"What are you doing?" He hissed venomously, and the already nervous doctor flinched back. Good.
"I-I was helping you..." Patch defended, his panicked expression dropping into a concerned frown, "are you o-okay? When I checked your pulse-"
Dastardos cut him off. "I don't need help!"
The snap caused Patch flinch again and Dastardos took that as his cue to leave, he was sick of this place already. But a mittened hand pushed him back down onto the tiny clinic's single bed. Dastardos tried to phase through Patch's hand, but only flickered before he lost concentration.
"W-Wait! You can't leave y-yet, I haven't even treated your w-wound!" the doctor protested, getting even more... well, just plain irritating!
Dastardos just glared at him as he tried again to phase, successfully turning transparent with only a small wince, and tried getting up again. He phased right through Patch's arm, who gasped at the sensation and pulled back his hand.
As soon as he was upright though, a sharper pain shot through his already aching skull, and his vision clouded as he started to feel lightheaded. Fuck, he was really injured this time, huh?
He must have stumbled because Patch reached out to steady him. He tried to slap his hand away but this time the doctor wasn't deterred and managed to gently push him back down.
"There, s-see? You're in n-no st-state to go flying off!" Patch said with a worried smile. a pitying smile.
Dastardos was FURIOUS. First that annoying fizzlybear kid knocks him out with one of those shovels, and then Patch pities him, so he gets stuck at his stupid little clinic?! No doubt this'll become the village's next big thing to gossip about too...
Patch had moved to gather some things from around the room but Dastardos could easily tell the doctor was glancing at him every few seconds. He huffed.
...What was that Patch said about his pulse earlier?... Dastardos listened for his own heartbeat and couldn't hear it. Shit... It made no difference to him what his heart did, but if Patch didn't hear it... Thankfully he didn't seem to have realised the implications.
He looked up again when Patch started to come back. Dastardos saw what looked like a damp cloth, a roll of bandages, and a small bottle of something that he assumed was some kind of disinfectant. Patch must be planning to clean and bandage his head wound...
"Don't you dare!" he growled when Patch reached out, and he stopped moving, but annoyingly didn't back off. Since when was this wimp so stubborn?
"B-But you're still bleeding..." Patch weakly pointed out, before cautiously reaching for his skull again, slowly this time, as if Dastardos were a feral piñata that could attack at any moment... Which, he could.
But the reaper just glared at him as he considered his options. Patch took his silence as an invitation instead of a warning however, and moved even closer, about to pull his mess of hair away from the injury.
Dastardos reflexively grabbed his wrist the moment the gloved hand touched his hair, holding it in place with impossible strength, his grip so tight that Patch whimpered in pain.
"Don't. You. Dare." He growled again, more intensely than before.
"B-but-"
"It'll heal quickly on it's own anyway!" He added without thinking, and very nearly regretted it. Dastardos didn't want Patch to know anything about his accelerated healing! but if it got him to leave him alone...
Patch paused, frowning as he thought about what he'd just said... Dastardos hoped he would actually listen this time, he preferred Patch when he was a pushover! Did he just not fear him as much after seeing him so helpless? Ugh, another reason to escape as soon as possible.
"W-well... I can still make you m-more comfortable-" Dastardos scoffed "-while you h-heal at least!" Patch eventually said, backing off with a wide, nervous smile.
"D-do you need anything? A blanket? An e-extra pillow? Food? Water?" Patch froze."W-Water! I'll get you a glass of water." And before Dastardos could even process everything he'd said, Patch left the room, and he could hear running tap water a moment later.
"Finally..." Dastardos muttered, ignoring the pain and dizziness as he forced himself to float up out of the bed, and turned himself transparent before he could clumsily knock half the rooms medical equipment over. Instead just clumsily floating through the various equipment.
And as soon as his vision cleared enough to see, he was out through the closest wall...
Patch sighed as he put down the glass of water, taking deep breaths trying to calm himself down.
Of course Dastardos would disappear the second he looked away, what was he thinking? Was he even thinking? He was still feeling the adrenaline rush from Dastardos scaring him...
He sat down, quite unprofessionally, on an empty counter, closed his eyes and tried to remember the soothing words of his yoga instructor. Inhale... Exhale...
Patch had gotten used to Dastardos scaring him over the past two years, but this was different, he hadn't even been conscious. Or breathing. That was the really scary part - especially when Patch checked for Dastardos' pulse and couldn't feel a thing.
Just when Patch was thinking about grabbing his stethoscope just to make sure, Dastardos had startled him again.
Dastardos suddenly sitting up in the bed with a big, horrible gasp as he'd started breathing again had made Patch jump... But that wasn't as bad a scare as before, in fact it was more relieving than anything. He was awake again! And breathing! Thank goodness... Patch has never lost a patient before, (when he got there first,) especially not a human one...
Not that Dastardos seemed happy to be awake, and especially not happy to see him... He just immediately went back to being cold towards him...
(Cold... That was another scary thing, just how cold Dastardos' skin had felt!)
But now the reaper was gone, the only things left in his wake being the scattered spots of his fascinatingly black coloured blood and the stench of sourness still clinging to the air. The latter of which, was making it extremely hard for Patch to do his breathing excercise without feeling the need to cough.
...Huh, the smell was stronger here than his brief experiences with Ruffian blood...
He opened his eyes, peeking through his hair at the spots of blood leading from his car to the bed.
It was the wrong colour as well. Ruffian blood was green. But then, Dastardos had the wrong eyes to be any sort of ruffian anyway, so looking back he should have guessed that his blood wouldn't be the same...
What was he?
Patch sighed and tried to clear away the bubbling questions in his mind before he could get carried away. If this morning had taught him anything, it was that Dastardos wouldn't accept his help anytime soon...
Mind made up, he got off the counter and went straight to his cleaning supplies closet. He couldn't just leave all this blood everywhere, it was a safety hazard! And he could be called out to leave for a job anytime!
Not to mention the possibility of his little sister looking for him and finding all this... She couldn't handle normal blood, let alone this.
Equipped with cleaning supplies (along with extra protection, just in case the substance was toxic! Sour things often were...) he reached to begin whiping the spots of blood from his floor, but something stopped him.
He stared down at the tar-like blood, frowning behind his hair. He thought about seeing Dastardos knocked out and bleeding, of him having something wrong with his heart...
He thought of him being not... quite... human...
As soon as Dastardos pulled open the curtains in the entrance to his tree and floated inside, he was greeted by a loud, excited mess of green eyes and red paper fur.
Floating past the crowd of excited sour piñata trying to get his attention, he went to a set of shelves carved into the inner tree wall next to his fireplace and cauldron.
Getting back home had been a pain. His already bad vision kept swimming and he was floating unsteadily. He could have sworn that awful Laura had given him weird looks... He made a mental note to get revenge later.
The sours calmed down a bit as he began rummaging through a shelf of bottled potions, recognising that he was busy. Though some were still whining for attention, and he had to swat away a particularly rowdy sherbat.
Dastardos quickly found the potion he was looking for and pulled the cork out before drinking the whole thing at once. Almost instantly, he no longer felt dizzy. Heh, he'd like to see Patch's medicine do that!
His head still hurt though, and he could still feel his tarlike blood oozing down his neck, but that problem was nothing some time and some rest couldn't fix.
Turning around, Dastardos saw a few of the sours had laid down to rest in a pile on the floor.
He did have a tattered hammock hanging high above him, which he usually settled in to sleep, but the pile sounded like a much better idea right now.
As he practically collapsed on top of a snoring mallowolf, the rest of the sours decided that whatever he was doing, they wanted to do too, and before he knew it he was completely surrounded by piñata settling down to rest with him.
Shifting so he was more comfortable, he pulled a sweet out of his pocket, the buzzenge life sweet he'd taken from his neighbour's garden earlier.
He unwrapped it, and had to push away a greedy macaraccoon trying to sniff it over his shoulder before popping the sweet in his mouth.
He savoured the flavour. It was like a lozenge that, with that medicinal cough sweet effect and a taste of dry, sunny skies.
Dastardos didn't eat, not normally at least... He wasn't like Pester, he didn't do what he did out of greed... But being whatever-he-was he needed a very particular diet.
And life sweets had a magic that nothing else did, after all.
He kept his eating habits a secret. He didn't want any gardeners knowing any more of his weaknesses... Or Patch, for that matter.
Rolling over as he chewed the sweet, Dastardos closed his eyes. As he started to fall asleep he absentmindedly noticed that he'd stopped bleeding, and that the pain in his head was getting smaller and smaller...