Pacifier

🌿Della🌹

The hospital was cold. That or we'd been sitting still for too long.

It had that sterile chill, a draft flowing like a free current from the automatic doors which opened and closed constantly. Steady as the stream of injured and ill.

There was a tension rising. Quiet and subtle but a tension all the same.
It was there in the looks passed between us and the doctors who passed, the nurses and the receptionists. The words they exchanged in hushed tones,the glances cast in our direction. The two teenagers covered in blood. Straight out of no man's land shadowy kids with nothing in their eyes but the knowing glow of danger. A danger they'd escaped and a danger they could feel creeping ever closer once again.

Their glances, always hesitant, always glimmering with a fearful kind of curiosity, ilicited power in me but they shouldn't have.

We were vulnerable, me and Sam. Sitting there. Waiting in that hospital kept us vulnerable. He could feel it and that was why he sat so tense and so still. So rigid. That was why he held the gaze of those who dared linger on us. The fugitives in the waiting room.

He was waiting for someone to recognise me. To realise the names we'd given were fake. He was waiting for the police to turn up, or worse, for some Reid who'd been missed. Someone who knew our names were worth more than just money if they could wipe us out.

Still every time I caught the eyes of a stranger lingering on me, that morbid curiosity lighting up their eyes, not fear or concern, something darker than that which left them lingering, I felt a flicker of power in me. Like I was a wanted girl and they didnt even recognise me. I was dangerous and they were wary. They wouldn't hold my gaze and I liked it that way. I liked the fear I could sense bristling between them and me. They wanted to look, wanted to know. They'd linger on Sam and when he smiled at them they'd flinch, avert their eyes, almost blushing with the embarrassment of being caught. 

But I could tell Sam didn't like it the way I liked it. I could tell it didn't make him feel powerful, only made him feel like we were pushing our luck. The longer we lingered, the more time we spent with their eyes on us, being studied, being questioned, the longer we gave them to realise who they were really talking to. Who that girl stained with blood in their waiting room really was. 

I knew that by tomorrow morning the police would come sniffing around. I knew we were lucky they hadn't already, knew that it wasn't really luck and perhaps just the lines they wouldn't cross. The pigs don't get involved with Bottlemen warfare, to them we're less than a life, we do it to ourselves, we create the danger, we know the risks we're taking. And I couldn't really blame them, I wouldn't have risked myself for a Reid and my own family had left me in the hands of a stranger. Our world wasn't like the real world, it was morbid and dark and numb. The feds wouldn't touch our shit with a barge pole, wouldn't come sniffing around us if their lives depended on it. They wouldn't turn up for Johnny and Camille, they wouldn't turn up for Bottlemen, but Sam was just a lad to them, Sam wasn't one of them. I wasn't one of them for as long as no one recognised me. 

So they wouldn't turn up for a bottleman but if a lonely looking teenage girl lingered long enough, stained with blood, tired, grey circles under her dark eyes. They might come sniffing round her. 

"I'm sorry," I whispered, eyes not on Sam but on the girl behind the reception desk who had been watching me and Sam since she'd clocked on that afternoon. 

"Its reet," shrugged Sam, making another effort to get comfortable, leanin back in his chair, legs stretched out in front of us, hands behind his head. He flashed the girl behind reception a smile and when she blushed, when her eyes averted, lashes fluttering when she returned her attention to the computer, I smirked.