At least you're on top of the world [Evelynn]

[Matthias Walker]

He has been in Boston longer than he has stayed anywhere for five years.

It is not a difficult record to break, with the frequency of his traveling, but it is, nonetheless, laced with an ironic peculiarity that Matthias almost resents. He comes to Boston to protect its people, and Boston hands him werewolves, makes them smart and attractive and appealing enough that he learns to like their company before everything gets fucked to hell. There are still monsters lurking in the shadows, he knows—ones that prey on people, if carefully and deliberately to erase the signs of their existence—and he should stay, but if Boston is very good at anything it is draining his motivation to choose: To decide if the something that he maybe has that might become friendship is worth staying for, or if hunting is the be all end all of it.

And Nate and Silas—well, there is no doubting they would be better off without him, but Matthias is nothing if not selfish: If he is going he wants to leave something to remember him by other than the sex, the coffee cup visits and the faux hospital trips.

For Silas. An apology, because if there is anything he is bad at it is apologizing, and because Silas deserves something more than throwaway words that lose meaning with time. And since it was at the hospital where Matthias grew to like Silas, it is to the hospital that he returns; for all that Silas grumbles he must be on decent terms with someone that he works with that has nothing against Matthias already. So he lets himself into the entrance, waves at the receptionist—he has been coming with such regularity that she has started to recognize him, and it does not, apparently, occur to her to stop him even though Silas is not working—and slips into the labyrinth of hallways.

He picks one at random: Without the pull of finding Silas, Matthias has no idea of where anything is in the hospital, and he wanders until he finds himself somewhere he is obviously not supposed to be, if the mildly surprised, disapproving look he gets from a man in scrubs is anything to go.

“I think I’m lost,” Matthias tries helpfully. “I’m looking for—oh, look!” He has no idea who the girl he sees is, but he is comfortable with the fact that he is completely shallow and that at least from behind she looks like she’ll make for much more appealing company than the aging doctor who is squinting at him suspiciously through pebbly glasses, so he throws caution to the wind and slides right on past, “Sorry, I’m just gonna—bye, Doc! Hey—hey,” as he reaches the girl—woman? Can’t be a girl if she’s a doctor but maybe she’s a nurse, who knows—and intercepts her neatly.

Neatly in the sense that he nearly slides himself straight into the opposing wall, but still.

Neatly.

“Sorry to bother you,” he offers, even if the crooked grin speaks nothing of apology at all, “You wouldn’t happen to know Silas, would you? Dr. Vincent? I’m a friend, I was hoping someone could help me out with a surprise?”

[Evelynn]

It is the blare of her alarm clock, partnered with the excessively loud ring of her phone, that wakes Lynn up at five-thirty AM. Lynn desperately tries to hold onto what is left of her sleep, pulling her blanket over her head while simultaneously hitting the nightstand repeatedly until she achieves her desired results. The damn thing silences itself, and ignoring her phone, the tired woman rolls out of bed after a laughable five hours of sleep to sustain her for the next sixteen. The morning progresses with the ungraceful stumble to the shower, pulling carefully hung scrubs out of the closet to drag them onto her body with little enthusiasm, and drinking more coffee than any human should within a short hour’s time. After quickly throwing her hair back, and making herself look mildly presentable, the doctor is out of the door, exhausted and less than excited for the grueling shift ahead of her.

Business as usual.

She had never quite seen anything there for her in Boston—a big city with big people, bustling with more activity than what she’s used to. Moving is quick and easy, but adjusting is another thing, and she finds the anxiety of facing the unfamiliar setting in again. Werewolves. Probably tons of them, in a place like this. It had taken a few white lies and some creative use of language to convince her bosses that there was a serious reason that she couldn’t come in to work on the full moon. Ultimately, it had resulted in Lynn biting the bullet, stuffing her pride down and making a false admission that she couldn’t handle the craziness that always seems to explode in any ER on the full moon. Those particular times of the month are the least favorite for any emergency professional, and apparently she had been convincing enough to get away with it. And now, all there’s left to do… is settle.

With the company’s decision to transfer her to another, supposedly somewhat lacking hospital, Lynn is met with nothing particularly new. She has more unfamiliar faces to become friendly with, a new map to memorize, and an even bigger workload in her lap—and the only thing that she is given for the extra effort (and the longer drive) is a new design for her scrubs. So, by the time that the afternoon comes, the day finds a very tired Dr. Black strolling the floors of the hospital. As she makes her way out of a scanning room, a folder rests open in her arms, both eyes glued to one paper on top of four others. She’s no Radiologist, and she does not aspire to become one, but she cannot help but look over the results again just to make sure that nothing was missed—that nothing could have been read wrong. And she’s almost done re-reading (for the fourth time) when she hears a voice behind her, something about being lost, swiftly followed by the shape of an unfamiliar man moving quickly into her peripheral vision.

And when she lifts her head to look, her eyes first meet the chest of the man in question, which in turn makes her stop dead in her tracks and literally look up to meet his eyes. She’s silent while he apologizes—and though that lopsided smile of his makes her quite sure that he’s not sorry at all, she nods after a moment and greets him with a bright smile of her own. “Doctor Vincent—Can’t say that I know him,” She pauses momentarily to close the patient file and tuck it safely between her arm and her side. “And unless he works in Radiology, I don’t think you’ll find him here.” Doctors down her would come and go, re-read their own patients scans as she had been doing moments before. She can’t remember a Silas Vincent back there—and she can’t imagine why this one would be down here.

“Aaaand I don’t think you’re supposed to be down here,” she adds on quickly, “Come on.” Picking her pace back into a brisk walk. “What kind of a surprise are we talkin’ about, here?” Oh well, curiosity killed the cat.

[Matthias Walker]

She’s surprisingly young, and pretty: Matthias has always pegged being a doctor as something you don’t get to actually do until well into middle age, and as much as he teases Silas about being an old man, the fact that the man is thirty and a neurosurgeon is pretty damn impressive in and of itself. But then again, perhaps this hospital simply runs on the young and ingenious; the girl looks right around his own age, give or take a couple years, and Matthias’s grin widens another notch at her returning smile. This is something he is comfortable with, something he is familiar with, albeit in much more sterile and pristine conditions than your typical grubby bar or dance club.

“Really?” His sigh is one of self-deprecating resignation—from what he has seen, Silas’s relationship with even his nurses is only as close as necessity demands, and it should not be a surprise that the man is not well known interdepartmentally, but it’s still a shame. And Matthias is unwilling to give up when he’s been lucky enough to run into someone young, attractive, cheerful—not when the alternative is the other doctor still squinting suspiciously at him from down the hallway as he moves to follow her obediently.

“I mean, I’m not looking for him,” he explains, in lieu of diving immediately into the surprise bit, because he really isn’t sure how he wants to go about that. “I just thought between the predisposition for grumbling and his eyebrows he’d be pretty famous—really, are you sure you don’t know him by the eyebrows? They’re like—” and while he is twenty-five and in a hospital Matthias pauses to contort his own eyebrows into an exaggerated mimicry of the other man’s; if it makes him look clinically insane then Matthias figures the impression will be fairly accurate, and shame has very little place with him anyway.

“—and,” he continues, because making faces is perfectly normal for him and is hardly a reason to break off his thread of thought, “I’m not from Boston but he’s been putting up with me, and I’m going to be heading out pretty soon, so I thought I’d get him a present or something—like, ‘Thank You For Not Murdering Me On Sight’ or ‘Sorry for Stealing Your Hoodie, You’re Not Getting it Back’? I just thought—he spends so much time here, I figured somebody would have a clue of what he’d like.” The chances are seeming gradually more slim as they move through the hospital, though; in retrospect the idea of asking Silas’s coworkers seems about as bright as asking his mailbox—the man is simply not social and it makes buying for him extraordinarily difficult.

“Matthias, by the way.” It is a belated formality as his eyes catch on the stitched name on the woman’s scrubs, and Matthias tilts his head at her, his smile genuinely apologetic and still crooked with light humor as he offers her his hand. “Sorry—kinda distracted, and I haven’t got the convenient nametag going on. Evelynn?”