really got this death thing down

4

chapter four: trauma! in your magic clarinet dad's nondescript apartment

*

Ruby wakes slowly to a still, dark room and a faint, extremely familiar sound that she can't quite place coming from a few rooms over. She rests there for a moment or two – not doing anything, just luxuriating in the feeling of still being alive and not having to run for her life immediately upon waking up.

She remembers what had happened vaguely. But the vague bits are still pretty clear in her mind – aw man, had she actually fainted? There's nothing more embarrassing than that, there really isn't. She'd actually done the whole 'swooning and passing out from sheer bloodloss' thing. That's not going to be great for her image as a terrifying unstoppable necromancer.

Froghorn was there. He witnessed that. He witnessed her fainting. God. She's never going to live this down.

She blinks up at the ceiling, and it's blurry and out of focus. No glasses. Hm. The bed feels too big for her, and also far too neat and pristine considering that – she licks her lips experimentally to check, and yes – she's still kind of covered in blood. It's one of those big queen-sized beds with luxurious soft blankets and a lot of pillows piled up at the headboard.

As she sits up, curling her legs underneath her, she notices that her arm, the cursed one – it's bandaged up neatly. Like, it's still bleeding, but at least the bleeding isn't going to get everywhere, and she might not actually die of it.

Ruby looks over, and the vague shape of her guitar is propped up on its side, flush with the wall. There's a chair pulled up right at the bedside that's unoccupied, but as far as she can tell, her stolen jacket is folded neatly on it with her mask on top. She makes a grab for the mask, and manages it second try. She pulls it over her eyes and is relieved to find that the vision charm is still active.

She takes stock of herself briefly. Rule fifteen, again. She's getting a lot of mileage out of that one, maybe she should reorder the list and bump that one up a bit higher. She feels fine, actually – not, like, perfectly well and healthy, her shoulder still stings and there's the whole blood all over her thing, but at least she can try to stand up.

She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and tries to stand up. Her vision swims, and she's briefly extremely dizzy, but she waits it out and when she's feeling steadier, goes to grab the jacket. She pulls out everything from the pockets – sigil-paper, small amount of money, note from 'BB' – and transfers it to her jeans, and then goes looking around the room.

There's a small slide-out cupboard that just has about twenty identical suits hanging in it, which solves the question of 'whose room is this' pretty neatly. There's also not very much else. It's a spare sort of room – clean and tidy, but ultimately impersonal. The sole window looks out onto some sort of back alley.

But the faint, familiar sound is still audible, and with all this information at her disposal, it's not hard to work out what it is.

She pushes open the door, and cautiously works her way through the small apartment until she comes to where the sound of the clarinet is coming from. It's a familiar sort of song – one of the old healing ones, she thinks. She doesn't know exactly; traditional healing magic had never really been something she'd ever had time for.

The living room she ends up in is just about as sparse and minimal as the bedroom had been.

Hitch is sitting on a couch near one of the front windows, looking out on the mid-morning scene of what Ruby recognizes as Chatterbird Square as he plays. It's a familiar sight, although the location is new. This isn't his flat, but then again – it wouldn't be, would it? Because his flat had been in her house, and when she'd died –