#ghostfoster

Which is why she’s now in the Director’s office in the middle of the night, taking matters into her own hands. The Director’s office isn’t as big as the training rooms or the sleeping bay, but it’s still enormous for just one person. At the back, there’s a shelf with several packages of cookies, all but one open, and the crumbs littering the Director’s desk say that the operatives aren’t the only ones who eat them. A filing cabinet sits in the opposite corner behind the desk, and Foster knows that the bottom drawer holds things that have nothing to do with the Director’s paperwork.

But that isn’t where the whiskey lives.

Foster knows by now how to apply the right amount of pressure to the desk drawer to make it pop open without breaking it (she’s made that mistake before). Inside is a collection of snacks and knick knacks, but Foster digs for the panel beneath it all, lifting it to reveal the glass bottle half full of amber liquid laid on its side.

She pulls it out and sets it on the desk where she’s laid out the rest of the ingredients. She’s pretty sure she got them all, based on how she saw the Director make this last winter. And anything is better than letting 22 suffer.

She managed to steal a glass from the kitchen along with the lemon, honey, and cinnamon. She’ll get the water on the way back, from one of the water fountains. As she sets it and her ingredients on the Director’s desk, preparing to make her concoction, she realizes she’s run into a problem. While she knows what goes into the drink, she has no idea how much of anything to put in.

It doesn’t matter, she decides in the end. She’ll figure it out.

She uncaps the whiskey and pours it into the glass until it’s about half full. Then, she tears the lemon in half and squeezes it into the glass. The honey is a bit more difficult, owing to the fact that she forgot to steal a spoon, and she doesn’t have time to rummage through the Director’s desk to find another. So she tips the jar, partway full with partially crystallized honey, on its side, waiting for the sticky substance to creep close enough to the opening that she can scoop it out with her fingers. She licks them afterward, savoring the intense sweetness on her tongue as she stirs the mixture with a cinnamon stick.

Distant footsteps reach her ears from down the hall, which means her time is just about up. She knows the security route by now, and she’ll have about five minutes after the guard passes by the door to get herself from the Director’s office back to the sleeping quarters. The timing doesn’t worry her, but she still has to clean up, rubbing away all the lemon juice that missed the glass and mopping up a few drops of spilled whiskey with her sleeve.

She shoves the bottle back into the secret compartment and jams the panel down over it before cramming the remaining ingredients into her pockets, just in case she needs them again later. Before she leaves the office, she leans over the glass to smell it, making a face when the sour bitterness sits at the back of her sinuses.

But last year, the Director had said this helped, and Foster would give 22 her own lungs if they were any less shitty than his. If a gross drink would help him, then she would make sure he fucking drank it.

On her way back, she stops at one of the water fountains to fill the glass the rest of the way. It doesn’t help the smell, and Foster doesn’t dare sample the drink herself. She doesn’t want to have to lie to 22, to tell him it doesn’t taste that bad if she knows it does.

As she slips back into the big room with all their cots lined up, she hears him cough again, a horrible, barking sound that feels like it lasts forever as Foster makes her way across the tile. Soft snores drift from Ayres’s cot—he’s the only one who could possibly sleep through this—along with rustling from Salazar’s, no doubt to make a point rather than to get comfortable. And finally, Foster reaches 22, across from her own bed, huddled beneath the blanket like the room is any colder than it ever is. When she touches his skin, it feels hot, and he jumps as if he hadn’t heard her coming.

“Hey, it’s just me,” she whispers, crouching down beside the bed. “I brought you something.”

22 opens his eyes, and they’re glassy even in the dark. His breathing sounds ragged and shallow, and Foster once again curses the Medical staff for not fixing him. But at least she can keep an eye on him herself now.

He doesn’t say anything, so Foster raises the glass in front of his face. “Here,” she says, offering it to him. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.”

22 pushes himself up into a sitting position, muffling a few more coughs into his sleeve. Foster moves to sit on the mattress beside him and hands him the drink. She’s grateful he can’t smell right now because if he could, he wouldn’t take the first sip.

When he does, he looks like he might spit it right back into the glass. “This is gross,” he rasps with a grimace.

“Yeah, it’s like medicine,” Foster says. “I saw the Director drink it before when she was sick. Just try it.”

“I don’t want it,” 22 says, holding the glass out for Foster to take. She pushes it back toward him.

“No way,” she says. “You have to drink it if you wanna get better.”

22 gives her another skeptical look, but he’s too feverish and exhausted to argue. Instead, he tips the glass back, brow furrowing through another series of swallows until he has to stop to cough again. By the time it’s gone, he looks like he might be sick.

“What was that?” he asks, and Foster is pleased when his voice comes out a little stronger.

“A hot toddy,” she proclaims, taking the glass back to hide under her cot until she can return it to the kitchens. “Did it help?”

“It wasn’t even hot,” he grumbles, burrowing back beneath his blanket with a shiver that ripples through the mattress so that Foster feels it, too. But he doesn’t cough again, and in the time it takes Foster to walk to her own bed, retrieve her blanket, and drape it over him, he’s fallen asleep.