It's a lil cold here innit?

Doctorscootie

(Part 2 of Coffee)

His mornings, unlike some or maybe most would think , were not of routine type of nature. Hans of course loved routine; he loved knowing what was to come and have everything perfectly planned but he could not fight his own unpredictable nature. He was meticulous in work, but in all aspects was always incredibly and passionately a creature of impulse.

Today, he woke up on the ground beside his bed, the blankets tousled and wildly splayed everywhere around him like a giant nest. The ground was warm from the long period he had been there asleep. He was sure the reason as to why he was there was because he had obviously moved and tumbled down in his sleep.

Hans was a deep sleeper and so it didn’t surprise him in the slightest to find himself there on the wooden floor with eyes staring up at a morning sunlit ceiling. He lay there for a few minutes, watching the shadows bounce across the white canopy above. They peeked and darted from behind the blinds of his windows. Hans preferred the winters when the mornings weren’t so bright but since it was spring with summer just dancing around the corner, the mornings were becoming brighter and brighter earlier and earlier.

It was about half past six that he decided to get up and instead of taking a shower first he trudged in his striped red and white pajamas to the kitchen and ate a breakfast consisting of toast and partially burnt scrambled eggs while standing up, propped up beside an open window. He scattered some scraps of bread along the windowsill, pitching himself out to birds flying by and being coldly rejected. Wild birds were harder to gain the trust of and so far Hans had not been successful in the least bit these last couple months.

When he was finished he put the plate into the sink for later and went to take a shower. The steam warmed his pale skin but the hot water, near scalding, sank deeper than that and colored his flesh pink with life. It was one of the few moments that made him realize he was alive. Then it would be gone and he’d start humming an old Austrian tune he had heard a lifetime ago in the streets of Vienna.

Clean, black slacks, white dress shirt, and a red tie later he was ready to head out. The ground was cold asphalt beneath his shoes. He could not feel it but looking at it glisten in the sun chilled him deeply. It was raining by the time he got to the clinic. The employees saw him there as a proper, but eccentric man. The employers saw him as a valuable asset for the underground service they offered and of course still eccentric. But what could he say? He enjoyed his job. Well, mostly when it wasn’t boring which was perhaps 50% of the time.

The weather changed so quickly. Clear skies turned to grey, blending and looking like dirty smudges along an empty canvas. Hans adored the rain though and so he didn’t mind it much as he swiftly arrived at the clinic. The clinic was almost like a hospital. Almost as big but not so much compared to the real thing. They were much like an urgent care, an emergency clinic in a low grade area that couldn’t afford a real hospital. Hans stopped by the reception desk, greeting his favorite person in the whole rotten clean white establishment.

With her short, white curling hair, tiny glinting green eyes and thin mouth; Hans could have fallen in love for this sweet old woman with a small smile and wrinkles that had been etched into her visage by the hardships of her life. She was a small Welsh woman. Her accent was soft and tender, much like a song of made of falling mist it often caressed Hans’ temper and calmed him. He pressed his hand against the hard counter, leaning over to peek at the logs she was sorting through. In boxes she often places a precise check, sometimes now and then turning her wrist in short, graceful motions when she wrote some minor detail.

“Dorothy,” Hans greeted, smiling widely. He watched her smile but not look at him and he felt warmed by the subtle acknowledgement. “Am I late?”

She promptly tilted her pen toward the clock behind her, a curl of snow shifting in the whole. “A whole minute, Mr. Meisner,” she replied, tapping her pen against the counter. “You should feel terrible.” Hans laughed and leaned farther over the counter until Dorothy had to smack him in the cheek with the butt of the pen, pushing firmly his face away. “The boss wanted to see you upstairs,” Dorothy informed, smiling smugly now. Her mask of apathy was broken now and she as open as a book. He knew she was laughing. He could see it in her eyes.

“Bah. How much do you want to bet that he’ll let me brush him off?” he asked, his perkiness deflating now. She flashed him an unimpressed look. “No money at all.” Hans groaned. Yeah, he’s not getting out of this one.

————-

“I need ya to run an errand,” the boss in his sometimes hard to understand Brooklyn accent spoke, tossing Hans a thick file. Great. More paperwork to go through. “And what is that?” he asked, unable to keep the annoyance out of his voice. It often made his own accent thicker and voice to come more from the nose.

His boss, an older man in his late sixties stood hunched over his gold club. Looked like he had planned to go golfing but now with this weather he had settled in making his office into his own little gold course. Hans had to step around things and avoid the ball trying to kill him by darting between his feet whenever he walked. He swore that the Boss was doing it on purpose.

“I don’t have to test the temperature of your bathtub do I?”

The ball rebounded off the side of Hans’ shoe. Yeah, he was doing it on purpose.

“No. I need you to over see a shipment of antibiotics and some other things. The address should be inside the folder, second paper in.”

Another ball smacked against his shoe and rolled off to the side, bouncing off the wall and into the opening of a cup laid down on its side. Hans raised a brow. He didn’t know whether to congratulate the Boss on the shot of ask what ‘other things’ entailed. The little stiff, white mustache on the Boss’ lip twitched as Hans made a move to open his mouth, beating him promptly in time.

“That’s all. You should hurry on your way. You don’t have much time to dally.” The Boss waved his hand dismissively and Hans rolled his eyes as he turned to leave. He could hear the phone ring behind him as he closed the door, taking a step toward the stairs. Hans couldn’t catch what was being said but he supposed it was just more ‘business’. Though the Boss would constantly ruin his fun, he had to admit he was growing fond of him and Dorothy. Perhaps his hidden thirst for something more would diminish in time. Maybe he was doomed to this almost civilian life.

As he went down the main stairs he spied Dorothy walking toward him with small, solid steps. She held a cup of coffee in her hand.

“There’s donuts in the lounge as well if you want,” she said, offering him the cup. He had the thought to tell her he preferred water instead and paused, remembering something he had forgotten. She continued, “Also the Boss just called down. He wants you to forget about the job he gave you. Said to send you back up because he wants you to meet someone coming in.”

As if waiting for the cue Hans caught sight of a dark presence disrupting the whiteness of the place, a splotch of undisguised trouble rising like a great shadow at the corner of his eyes. Hans saw him saunter in, walking with great confidence but fluidity that made him appear sly with that half smile on his smug face.

Hans lifted his fingers to Dorothy, smiling. The room seemed to have melted into white, the only two real things in the world was him and Hans. “No thank you, dear heart,” Hans spoke.

He met the obscured gaze behind tinted blue lenses.

By The Masked Arzt 

 The dim lights of the subway had winked in the comfortable darkness. It was a late night for Medic. There was snow on the breath of the sky and by early morning it would probably snow in moderation and melt by midday. He drew into himself as he waited for the train to pull in. His coat was thick around his body and the platform was as lifeless as the small clinic he worked in. New York was his haven after the dissolution of the Red mercs. This was the place he had first come to when he first immigrated to the States. Ellis Island had been a terrible experience and he was glad that ordeal was over with. He remembered seeing Lady Liberty for the first time and joking with a Lithuanian that she could have gotten a better hat.

It was Medic’s habit to do paperwork while waiting for the train. He’d have everything organized in a neat file in his lap as he sat quietly and focused on a cold, hard bench. Hunger and weariness gnawed at the corners of his consciousness. He didn’t usually eat until about 1 or 2 when he got back to the small, roomy apartment at the far east side of the city. He had made enough money from the job back with the industries that he could live comfortably but he was never one to just sit back on his wealth and do nothing. He needed something to do with his hands, something to make him think.

Medic, before joining the Gravel Wars, had been an underground doctor here in New York and he had gotten handsomely paid to keep criminal secrets and gang members alive with his ‘magic touch’. He had left without a word and coming back to the scene now was a bit of a rough transition. He hand much more restrictions here and Medic found himself missing the times he could preform live surgery with a conscious patient under cherry red fumes. He got so much interesting data from his experiments in Red and he had, regrettably found a place he felt most comfortable with. A place where he wasn’t alone in the pool of quirkiness. 

Medic swiped at his cold nose, ungloved fingers for a moment warming the cold, pinkish flesh. The train should be coming soon; he hoped. He wanted a good meal, a hard drink, and a warm bed to sleep in.

He was as alone here as he had initially thought. Some couple people were standing around, eyes glued to clocks snapped on their wrists or along the walls. Every tick was an eternity added on to the time til they could tuck themselves into their warm beds or drown in their liquid sorrows. A young woman stood by herself near the tracks, fingers playing a nervous beat against her cuff, eyes downcast. Office women were now more and more common in this modern society but that didn’t change the fact that they were still women in the eyes of law and men who sought to still belittle them. Medic had a fantastic habit of not caring about the gender of his coworkers as long as work got done and he got results. 

Then there was a man several benches away from Medic. Older and with a grey turtle neck fitted beneath a worn, black wool coat. He described him as older but Medic was old himself, almost in his fifties in another year and that man couldn’t be anymore than his mid-sixties with short peppered hair and generous sideburns. Medic didn’t pay enough attention to actually try to figure out his age but it did serve as something nice to pass the time.

The man wandered off somewhere Medic couldn’t see and so he was left with staring blankly at his files with a bored expression as he tried to keep his mind off the annoying cold that was seeping into his body. He had forgotten his gloves at home; dammit.

Remembering himself, Medic noticed the approach of the man from before. A cup of coffee was thrust ungracefully in front of him and Medic gaped up at the man above. He spoke in a rumbling fashion, voice low that spoke with a melody of shaven vanilla and whiskey. Medic was instantly drawn.

“You look half dead,” the man said, darkened mahogany eyes gazing coolly at Medic as if he were trying not to see him but seeing him. “Drink it.” His eyes focused this time on Medic with an intensity that almost made his breath catch. He could have understood then why the man didn’t look directly at him but that was just something stirring fancifully in his own mind.

The man offered him the cup again and this time, Medic speechlessly took it. His fingers were instantly warmed, almost too quickly that it came close to nearly scolding his hands through the thin white paper cup. Medic adjusted his hands then his glasses, stumbling upon his words and his evident accent.

“Ah, dank- I mean thank you,” he said, dipping his head forward as if to try to hide himself from the sudden kindness of the stranger. He felt a vague feeling of familiarity from this situation and he couldn’t place his finger on what it was. It seemed to have come upon the stranger that he was open to take a seat beside Medic. He kept a polite distance from Medic. His large hands encased his own cup easily and it appeared that he had no discomfort from the hotness of the beverage as he drank deeply from the cup.

Medic stared at his hands without meaning to. The man stirred, and Medic believed it to almost sound like the rustle of leaves in autumn. “Something wrong?” he asked gruffly, a hint of amusement in the way he tilted his words. Medic smiled a toothy smile, tucking the loose papers in his lap together in its file. “I was just admiring your hands,” he said cheerfully. One habit he had was examining the hands of people. It could tell a lot about a person, but of course the minimal things and that was always enough.

“Oh?” he asked, eyes shifting to his hands then back to Medic’s gleaming expression. Medic chuckled and set the cup of coffee down by the foot of the bench, out of the way of any threat to being knocked over. His hands were warm now and he pointed to the stranger’s large ones.

“Your grip,” he began.

“My grip..?”

Medic grinned. “It’s firm, a sort of gripping style that shows power or possessiveness. Then the callouses,” Medic drew a finger close to his hand that had relaxed its grip on the cup now to see what Medic was getting at. He pointed down across the small scars on the fingertips and the along the toughened skin along the man’s palm. “I’d say you do a lot of work with your hands.” He was polite in retaining the rest of what he thought. After all most people didn’t like someone they just met telling them what they are.

He was pleasantly surprised though that the stranger wasn’t in the least bit weirded out by his little talk that he had just been going off on. In fact he laughed once he finished and drank the rest of his coffee. He crumpled the paper cup in his hand and threw it with pinpoint accuracy into a trashcan nearby. “What are you, some kind of hand specialist?” he asked, thumb brushing across the tip of his nose.

Medic lifted two fingers in the air, shaking his head and laughing once more. “Close enough. I’m a doctor. And you?”The stranger smiled, all teeth and dark eyes. “That’s a secret.” Medic waved his hands. 

“Oh, that’s just unfair now,” he complained, leaning forward and picking up his cup. The coffee was lukewarm now but he didn’t have the intent of drinking it in the first place.

“Is it?”

“Absolutely!”

“Then how about-”

A man rushed down the subway steps, head whipping about wildly that Medic thought it might snap off his head. He spied the two of them and waved his hands in a similar fashion as to Medic’s, jogging over to them.

“Boss!”

Medic’s eyes narrowed for a moment, the blue of the man’s uniform drawing alarms to echo in his mind. He glanced at the man beside him. “Greg,” his companion greeted, standing up now. He turned to Medic who had gotten past the point of being tense now for the sake of appearances. “What’s the name of where you work? I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather so I think I might schedule an appointment.” His voice was still like honeyed whiskey but Medic could hear the danger in it, the razor sharp blades that if provoked could tear the him apart and Medic was thrilled.

“Hudson Hill,” he said truthfully, knowing the trouble he could get from letting a merc, a blu one at that, know where he worked. If he digged deep enough, and Medic was sure he could; that man would know exactly who he was talking to. Perhaps he knew even now. The mere thought of this danger, this challenge to evade and perhaps have a little taste of that old world sent his mind racing and he could see his demise in this man with large, callous hands.

“You’ll find me under Hans Meisner,” Medic said just as the large merc began to leave with his teammate.

“Marcus,” came the gruff, but amused reply whispering of promises of later meetings. He could hear it as if it were in his ear and the echo of Marcus’ laughter filled his mind louder than the incoming train that was pulling just in from the comfortable darkness.

.

Welcome to Foxy’s sfm commissions! I’m trying to make a few keys to try to finish buying something special for a dear friend of mine and I’m almost there!

Each poster = 1 key (you may ask for whatever you like. We can always discuss the details on either steam or here.)