Malik makes eggs and sausage bits, and immediately scarfs down her own portion. Adam barely touches his, though he at least makes an attempt at thanking her for the food. Not a good one, but it's the thought that counts.
She takes a plate of it to Vaclav too, certain that he'll be hungry and by the time he even notices the food it'll be a few hours later anyway.
"Hey kid, brought you something to eat."
He doesn't look up from his tinkering, and she steps closer to see what he's working on. Oddly enough, it looks like a neural chip.
"Is that what I think it is?" she asks, setting the plate to the side of his arm where he won't knock it off the table – yes, this was a pattern that she had learned to get used to adjusting for – and leaning over the work surface.
"Neural chip, yes. Vaclav Koller brand. Immune to hacking of any kind, except perhaps my own." A sly grin, and that much of an answer while he's this focused means he's been waiting to tell her. "Your assassin can't sleep. I don't blame him. But if he wants, I'm happy to give him a chip like the three of us have, that can't be taken over by a fuckin' broadcast frequency." The tight line of his lips tells her he's far more furious about this than he acts. That augs as a whole were so easily abused.
"I think he'll appreciate that. Don't forget to get some rest, though, too." Her tone edges toward chiding, and he raises a hand to wave her off.
"Sleep is for the weak, mom."
"Well, I'm going to go be weak then. Eat that before it gets moldy, thanks." She has a feeling that as soon as she's gone his brain will fully register the plate of warm, home-cooked food and be unable to resist.
Adam is still in the kitchen when she passes, working on his food. She has a feeling he normally doesn't take his time with food. She doesn't usually, either. Just gives him a tired wave as she makes for her room.
Malik makes good on her plan, getting all her clothes off with the least amount of pain possible and pulling Vaclav's loose and soft shirt back on, curling under the blankets and feeling. Bone-tired and aching.
Sleep comes easy.
Waking comes in agony.
There's a fire in her leg and Malik's eye snaps open with a groan-turned-shout, voice hoarse as she curls hard, barely noticing the pain in her ribs as she does so. She's still half asleep and far, far too awake.
Everything is chased away in the blinding, shaking clatter of pain. What feels like a stake in her head pounds hard, like someone is driving it in with a hammer, beat after beat. She doesn't know if she should dig her hands into her leg, just above where the flesh of it ends, or into her forehead. Feels dizzy and nauseous and she's not even moving, she doesn't think-
The door slams open and she barely registers that, eye trained on how her aug leg shakes and twitches, how everything feels too sharp and-
"Malik-" hands, cold and metal, grip her arms, shifting her. Pulling covers away and trying to see what's hurt her. "Faridah-"
She moans at the movement, but it's enough to dislodge one of her hands from her leg and bury it into her forehead instead. Maybe if that stopped driving a damn nail into her brain the other pain would stop too.
"Koller!" Louder now, and if everything else didn't hurt so damn much she thinks that might have added to the pain. As it is, she's pretty sure it can't get any worse.
There's a distant clatter, a jumble of noise getting closer, and the mechanic careens into the room, clearly startled by the assassin calling for him, and apparently already awake. "What-"
"You said your chips couldn't be hacked, that this couldn't happen. You have to override it." Firm, furious.
"That's not- ohhh fuck. Fuck!" Vaclav pivots and runs.
"Koller-!" The hands leave her for a second, and some noise must make it past her lips – she'd been trying hard to keep them down, to focus on the pressure of her hands and not make any noise – because they come back suddenly. Cool and unyielding, and the sweet relief lasts barely a heartbeat at all.
Each inhale she takes is too deep, she can feel it in the ache that grows sharp with every breath drawn, but none of them have enough oxygen, enough anything.
Vaclav is running back a moment later, calling "hold her down flat-" as he slides through the doorway on one socked foot, almost eating shit into the wall.
The hands turn her, and she makes some noise of complaint, some desperate 'pleasedon'tmoveme' even though words won't come through the haze of it all.
Vaclav is suddenly leaning over her, his hand gently, hurriedly turning her chin to the side and pressing something against her throat. It pricks sudden, and she wonders distantly why this is a pain she notices, as he depresses the plunger and something cold sinks in. "Firebird why didn't you tell me you know I have this stuff-" he's saying as he injects, pulling the needle away immediately and throwing it over his shoulder. Both hands on her face, now, turning her eye to look at him.
She feels like she's gotten her lungs back, and then, slowly, her leg. Her head comes last, and she lets out a shaky exhale when it does, when the pain sets in to a duller ache. Carefully, cautiously uncurling from the tight ball she'd found herself in.
And realizes the two men are looming over her – though Adam a few steps further back – watching.
"Fuuck, Mal. How many days has it been since your last nupoz dose?"
Oh. Huh.
Shit.
"w's supposed to-" her voice cracks, dry in her throat and stuck. "night before the Incident." How long had it been since? Four days, five? Nearly two weeks without neuropozyne, and it was no wonder. She'd never gone so long before.
She slumps, wrung out and sweat-soaked from the adrenaline and all her old aches make a home in her again, no longer chased out by something worse. Groans, closing her eye and throwing an arm over her face.
The darkness is punctuated by the sound of quiet footsteps away. She lifts her arm, opens her eye a bit, but Vaclav is still there.
Ah.
"I need a shower," she manages. She certainly wouldn't be falling asleep like this. She can't remember the last time she had one, and the fact that this is only just now being realized tells her more than enough.
"I'll have to re-wrap your ribs and find you something waterproof for your side, hang on-" Vaclav leaves her bedside, moving for the main bathroom in the apartment. Malik works on sitting up, her hand shooting to her side and she glances down- the bandage is spotting red. She might have torn her stitches just then. Oops.
She sighs, hears quiet murmuring in the hall outside. Vaclav's voice saying "heyy, it's fine. I meant it," she has to strain to hear the next bit, and even then she's not sure she hears correctly. "Like I said, they're unhackable. Got one for you too, if you want it." There's no answer, not an audible one, anyway.
Vaclav is back just as quickly, and she hasn't even gotten herself off the bed yet. Step one, then two. If she thinks of the shower as step one she'll never get there. First, feet on the ground. Second, stand. Above all else, the Phoenix persevered.
Even when the unobtainable goal is just a shower.
The mechanic keeps his hands off her, but follows a step behind, ready to catch her if she should need it. She at least manages that much. Gets to the bathroom and sets to peeling the flannel off, undoing button by button. Rolling her neck, noticing in the mirror the small bead of blood at the injection site.
Vaclav steps in behind her, closing the door most of the way. If she wasn't sure he was into augs and guys – and mainly augs on guys – she might have been worried, but she knows Vaclav better than that.
He makes some displeased noise when she finally pulls off the shirt, and she glances in the mirror, sees his gaze caught on her side. "You just had to tear your stitches too, didn't you?"
She at least has the grace to look sheepish. "I don't do anything by halves, you know."
"I'll fix that after you shower." He sounds tired, and she's willing to bet he hasn't gotten any rest since she last saw him.
"You sure? I think I could…not make it worse by morning."
The look he gives her makes her think he's been taking notes from her and practicing.
"Alright, alright. Bring on the needle. I'm just gonna get clean first." She takes the waterproof covering from him, plastering it to her side and taping it down with the medical tape he hands her. "Shoo."
Vaclav holds his hands up in surrender and goes. She starts the water and unwraps her chest while it warms up. Glances at herself in the mirror and winces. Her chest is a bruised mess, mottled purple. She'd almost think it looks worse than it feels, but it definitely feels that bad, especially with the deep, pained breaths she'd been taking earlier.
Her eye is drawn again to the bloody spot on her neck and she leans in close suddenly. Notices a faint outline, red and just the lightest tinge of bruise that is….vaguely in the shape of a hand.
Right, that had happened.
She gingerly puts her hand over the mark, lining her fingers up with the points where his had been. Notes the difference in size between her hand and his, the length of his fingers, the width of his palm. Almost catches herself wondering if this was the only way she'd know how his hand compared to hers.
Shuts that down before it could go anywhere. If anyone had ever sent clearer signals they weren't interested, she hadn't seen them. Adam was making it pretty damn clear he didn't want to be any sort of…well, anything, with her. She wonders why he's still here, if that's the case. He was very obviously not being paid what his time was worth to be working for someone he could barely stand.
Steam starts to float out from the shower, and she pulls her hand from her throat, turns away from the mirror and all the revelations it held, and steps into the shower.
The sound that slips from her lips when the warm water hits her shoulders is loud and definitely obscene.
It feels like heaven.
Vaclav patches her up and gives her a sleepy wave as he heads back to his workshop, or, hopefully, his room. Malik feels better after that shower than she has since before she left on that godforsaken raid, and that's really quite unfortunate, isn't it?
She might get some nice sleep now, though. Something very important would have to be happening for her to get up at any reasonable hour, she decides then and there.
Bed forever. Now.
She stretches out a little more this time, faintly aware of how tight her muscles still feel from curling so hard around herself. Too sudden and sharp and she would kill for a massage. If it didn't hurt to move she'd knead herself out.
It'll have to wait, she supposes, eyes closed and already drifting.
True to her plan, she doesn't wake until late the next afternoon. That probably says something for just how much she'd run herself ragged, when her trained pilot-schedule failed her and she slept a whole nine hours later.
She gets up slowly, carefully, making sure not to pull anything unduly. Finds a pair of shorts this time, and goes to wash her face. Well, half of her face. She's reminded then that she needs to change the wrapping on her eye. Wonders if she wants to see it. She can just ask Vaclav to do it, but.
That feels too much like running away.
She pulls at the tape, unsticking it from itself and unwrapping it from around her head. A soft exhale, bracing herself. She doesn't actually know what she's going to find, here. Vaclav hadn't said anything besides waiting for it to heal before actually putting the eye in. Something about pressure and a moving eyeball would only exacerbate healing injuries.
Malik finds herself closing her eye as she pulls the gauze off – her hand was in the way, of course – and takes another slow breath. Opens her eye and looks into the mirror.
The gaping space where an eye should be is jarring, and she finds her breath catching in her throat on its way out. Alloy struts and a plate shine through under the red angry skin. A bundle of alloy cabling sticks out of her eye like it had been stabbed in. Consciously, she knows that it's just the connector for where her eye will go. Subconsciously, she immediately thinks it's the reason she lost her eye, that it had been stabbed in.
Breathe in and out. This was temporary. She'd have an eye again soon, despite everything else in the world. The Phoenix could always find an aug when she needed it. And she already had it. It would be that same grey-gold Icarus had, and she wonders what the contrast will look like next to her natural brown one.
She wonders how much will heal, and how much alloy will peek out around her eye, struts and supports and everything Vaclav had had to put in on the fly.
She really owes the kid some kind of apology – this is two traumatic augmentation surgeries she's shoved on him in a short period, and even though this one was better in that she wasn't outright dying, it still can't have been pleasant. He had it hard enough without one of his few friends – she knew, no matter how he tried to hide it and pretend he was fine – up and almost dying on him. Putting her life in his hands.
Malik sighs soft, digs into the kit Vaclav had left last night and pulls out new tape and a few gauze pads to wipe down with. Wets one and gently pushes against the injury, cleaning soft and hissing through her teeth at the prodding burn.
Lets it air dry for a bit. Staring into it, contemplating.
Really, if she thought about it, she'd gotten fucking lucky. She should be dead. A millisecond sooner, the slightest hesitation in her reaction, Adam not fighting the control as hard, any single one of those would have ended with her brains on the street.
Instead, all she lost was an eye.
Not so bad, when she put it that way.
When it's dry enough, she puts a clean gauze pad over it, tapes it on, and realizes she probably could have brushed her teeth while she was waiting for it to dry. Sets to rectifying that, before going out to go find some kind of breakfast.
There's no one in the hallway, or the kitchen, and the door to Adam's room was open. Nothing there, either.
Malik wonders if she should worry.
"Vaclav?" she calls softly, heading towards his side of the house, hoping to find him in bed. He's not, of course, hunched over the chair in his workshop, and he doesn't look up when she walks in.
Because he has Icarus on the chair, and is in the process of cutting into his forehead.
"What are you doing?" she asks, stepping closer. It was fifty-fifty on whether he'd answer, like this. Either he'd start unconsciously rambling to her to help himself focus, or he wouldn't even notice she had come in, even hours later.
Today is the latter flavor, it seems, as he hunches over and reaches in with a pair of forceps, pulling up- ah, his old biochip. She sees the new one on the side table, then. So Vaclav had managed to convince Adam to get one of his own upgrades. That was a feat on its own – most didn't trust non-branded tech, and she'd assumed Adam was one who liked that even less than others.
The procedure would take a while longer, and hopefully Vaclav would make Adam sleep longer yet, so she leaves him to it and wanders back to the kitchen. Starts a pot of coffee so she can take a mug to the kid while he made sure everything worked – neural implants were serious business, and even more so on a patient who had as many augs as Adam did. The mechanic could use any energy boost he could get his hands on, she was sure of that.
Malik brings him the cup of coffee before fixing herself food, and only goes to see how the implantation is going after her stomach is no longer reminding her of its existence, loudly and insistently.
By the time she goes back, Vaclav's done, cleaning up and gulping down the coffee she'd brought him far faster than anyone should drink anything. She just holds her coffee close, inhaling the warmth.
"How'd it go?" she asks, leaning against the doorframe.
"Perfectly fine, I think. Booted fine, and I'm getting readings on all his augs-" a low whistle, at that, scrolling through datasets. "And boy, does he have some nice ones all hidden in there. Everything's integrated alright, for the most part. A few things in there I need to patch for – I don't…recognize them?" his voice lilts high at that, in confusion.
Augs that even Vaclav hadn't seen? Color the Phoenix curious. She'd have to ask him sometime, though she'd bet that he'd need to be drunk before speaking at any sort of length about his augmentations.
"Good work on that. You made that chip even faster than you made mine. You're getting better at it." A small smile at the corner of her lips. The kid was a genius, and he deserved to be told so by someone who wasn't actively trying to get something from him.
"You flatter. If I didn't know you, I'd say you were trying to get an eye out of me." He grins crookedly at her over his tablet, and that's exactly the reason she'd said anything at all.
"Nah, no eye. Eyepatch though?" she says this over the lip of her own coffee mug, and Vaclav is actually surprised enough to look up from his work.
"What, you lost a leg and then an eye and figured you'd go all-in on the pirate theme?" he asks, incredulously.
"Yeah, why not?" she laughs, soft. "Make it see-through on my end and I'll be one real badass pirate pilot. I already steal for a living, anyway," she adds, drinking to stop herself from laughing. No laughing if she could help it, her ribs remind her.
"I'll see what I can do for you, Madame Phoenix," he finally says. He looks lighter, then, a little less exhausted. Good.
"Only on the condition that you get some sleep," she threatens.
"Can't leave a patient to wake up on their own," Vaclav fires back, as if that's the only reason he hasn't slept yet.
Malik almost quirks her eyebrow at him, but catches herself this time. She might need to evaluate just how much she relied on that expression to cow Vaclav.
Or she could just ignore it and wait to get her eye back. No big deal, and then she could go back to terrorizing Vaclav with that disbelieving look all she liked.
"If you say so." A small smile. "There's food in the fridge if you're hungry." She turns to leave, thinks a little reading might do her some good. Maybe sit in the window, and if she was feeling really extravagant, open the blinds to get a look outside. Icarus might yell at her later for it, but she might not even care.
Malik refills her coffee in the kitchen, grabs whatever book she'd been reading the last time she was here and had abandoned by the couch, and curls up in the window seat to read.
She feels hands on her, shifting her, makes some noise of complaint. There's an answering hush, and the hands on her feel enough like home that she doesn't bother rousing the energy to protest, to fight. She registers soft footsteps for a short while before she's set down, and something is pulled over her. Warmer, then, her feet curling up to get some warmth back, and she drifts again.
She dreams of falling, of fire and slamming impacts loud and agonizing. Of running and heat licking from explosions from flames. Of Icarus, his chest torn open and instead of the sentinel missing it's his entire heart-
Malik wakes with a choked "Adam-" her hand instinctively reaching out and snapping closed over…an arm.
Her eye is open but it takes her a second to register that she's caught his arm, and his shades aren't on and he looks as startled as she feels. She wonders what he's doing here, and her gaze follows his hand to the nightstand, where he'd just set down a piece of paper, carefully unfolded.
The gears in her brain slam to a halt right there, because if there was any paper she'd ever recognize on sight, it's this one.
She recoils as if burned, immediately letting go of him and drawing back, tearing her eyes away from the contract he'd set down to look at him. To try and figure out what the fuck this meant, because she was not awake nor here enough to parse it out on her own.
"I'm-" he starts.
"Leaving." She doesn't want to hear him say it. Something cold settles in her chest, deep and curling around her heart and it's suddenly a little harder to breathe.
Well. She supposes that answered the question of why he'd stuck around this long. He wanted Vaclav's neural implant, and he – maybe rightfully – thought she wouldn't let him have it if he didn't work for her. For him, she would've made an exception, she thinks.
"Tell me," she says, her voice soft, barely hoarse from just waking. "Is your name even Adam?"
He recoils this time, she notes with some small amount of satisfaction. Let him feel what she was feeling, then. If he even cared enough.
"What?" Like he can't even follow where she might have gotten that question.
She pushes herself upright, because she'd at least like to not be saying this laying down. She might even get to her feet.
"You know, at this point, I'm starting to be fairly sure that I've just hallucinated all those times you cared, at all, because you sure as hell act like you don't when I'm anything close to lucid. I'm not even sure I know your name, because as it stands, it makes more sense that I just made one up for you while I was bleeding out and flying myself home and you just ran with it. So tell me." Ah, she has made it to her feet, stepping forward and into his space. Too close to the hell she'd woken up from to give a single fuck about what she's doing here, now that she's awake. "Is your name even Adam?"
He's looking down at her in what could only be described as pained shock, but at least he has the decency to keep his shades off. She can see his jaw working as he swallows hard, as he seems to come to terms with something.
It feels like an eternity before he speaks.
"It is."
This almost confuses her more. It means she hasn't imagined all those times, that he told her his name, that he carried her gently and carefully out of a hell many didn't make it out of, that he had pulled her close and given her something to hold onto when she'd woken up mid-procedure. And at the same time, he'd turned around and acted like her very existence had been an annoyance, the epitome of an insufferable client he couldn't wait to be rid of.
She can't reconcile the two.
"So go." Those two words hurt worse than getting her leg shotgunned off had. "If you're sick of me, or you want nothing to do with me, leave. If you'd rather be doing other work, fine." She takes a deep breath despite the ache in her ribs, despite the knowledge that their contract had said he could do other work whenever he pleased, and does her best to keep her voice steady. "But if this is about my eye-"
The way he stills tells her more than words ever could.
She is furious, suddenly. Her hands fist in the edges of his coat, and she pulls him down sharply so that he is eye to eye with her.
"Then don't fucking run from it. I'm not some goddamn fragile fucking flower who's going to crumble and wilt from a single bullet." She is certain that her remaining eye is alight with fury, any traces of sleep long gone. "It'll take far more than your half-assed attempt to kill me, and every time I get hurt I come back stronger, as a Phoenix is fucking meant to."
He almost looks afraid of her.
Good.
"We've already been through this fucking song and dance before. I blamed myself for your Sentinel."
He opens his mouth, like he's going to say something. She doesn't let him.
"Enough. Enough running." It hadn't worked the last time. He'd come back, and she doesn't want to know how much more time it would take for that to happen again. It wasn't worth it. Not the last time, and not this time either.
He's looking at her in some mixture of awe and guilt- is that guilt? This is the longest she's ever had the luxury of looking into his eyes, and at any other moment she'd take advantage of it and burn them into her memory. As it stands now, she just wants him to get the message.
"Okay."
That's all he says, but his hands raise slowly, move for hers. She thinks he's about to pull her hands off his coat, but all he does is cover them. Carefully, gently, he untangles her fingers from the fabric and just. Holds them.
"Okay."