[Termitaria] Shooting the Messenger [OPEN]

"Andrew, could you please make sure I remembered to sign the patient records for today?" Evelyn asked, pulling the last syringe vials out of the hot, soapy sink and drying them off with a towel. "I'm think I did, but - oh, and also, we need a new shipment of salicylic acid. We were short last week because of that fungal outbreak. Mr. Rivers is still having heart problems and I really don't want to have to shortchange his dose."

She struggled a bit to push the towel inside one of the vials - just a tremor, she usually got them around this time - but managed, quickly drying it out and setting it to the side before she had a chance to accidentally drop the thing. They didn't have the same sort of funding the hospitals got, and she wasn't ready to deal with another form requesting more supplies outside of her budget range. Things just - didn't matter as much, this far down. She understood why, but that didn't make it any less frustrating.

The sound of nearby shouts, followed by scuffled footsteps, sounded through the open window of the clinic. A thunk - a scream. Evelyn moved to the window, first, trying to make out the scene outside through the metal bars, then hurried to the front door, hesitating, before undoing the latch with jittering hands and throwing it open to the dim-lit street. Above, the electric lights hummed at half-capacity, casting the nighttime scene below in sharp, shadowed relief.

"Is everything alright?" she called out to the few people milling about - and to the group of yellowjackets outside. They were already beginning to move again as their target - a moth with a bloodied leg - started running again.

Ugh.

This place was a shithole, and there was someone bleeding all over it, as usual. Fury stepped out of one alley into something that people liked to pretend wasn't just another alley, stopping immediately and assessing the situation, which was worse than she expected for this time of day in a place like this. Marginally worse. The place was still a shithole, just not quite as bad as the one she'd grown up in. Situation assessments came easy - she had to be good at them. Out in the field, a second's delay could mean death. She'd seen it happen. There weren't any Corrupted here, though - just a bunch of idiots. As usual.

Idiot with a bloody leg and a letter. Idiots with stingers chasing the first idiot. Idiot standing there without a stinger, having thrown it at the first idiot. Idiot without a clue - scratch that, two idiots without a clue.

Perfect.

If she'd been in her Shell, she'd have turned around and gone a different way and ignored this mess entirely, but that would mean walking farther, and her leg was bothering her. Again. Probably because she lived in a shithole - by which she meant Hiveholm in its entirety, not this specific part of it. She needed to get out again.

Soon. Soon. She was on the roster for two days from now. She could hold out that long. Numb everything for a while, get decently drunk, take the edge off until she got back into her Shell and things didn't suck quite so much. Soon.

But doing that meant going through this hallway and everything that entailed - which led her to her first analytical point: Ugh.

She stepped out into the alley anyway, arrhythmically, her cane leaving a mark in a splash of blood on the floor. Fury glanced to the assembly, unimpressed, and let her eyes drift to the bleeding asshole. She paused for a moment, then shrugged. Sympathy was wasted on... anyone, really.

"Walk it off."

It was as good a suggestion as anything anyone else was offering, anyway.

"Oh, dear," Evelyn muttered, moving out of the stoop of her clinic and into the street. She wrung her shivering hands, glancing between the group of yellow jackets, their target, the armored hornet, and the newcomer moth who seemed to be - some kind of accomplice? - to the other one. Two more bystanders had approached as well, though they seemed detached from the foray - a curious butterfly and an uncaring ant.

Evelyn paid the last two little mind, though the moths' interaction did pique her curiosity. Pests of a wing often cling, or however that saying went. Not that she believed the sort! She knew many upstanding moths, loyal to the hive and the queen and their duties as well. Still, it was a little odd that the newcomer moth's first words were to compliment an obvious criminal.

Well - not her place to judge. There was an injured man on her doorstep and, criminal or not, she had a duty to uphold. Her mandibles slid tight over her face from the slits in her jaw, sealing tightly around her nose and mouth.

"Andrew, please prepare a table. We're going to be working a little later than expected," she called over her shoulder. Then, she moved between the criminal and the jackets, careful to bow her head and not turn her back on either.

"Thank you for your service, sirs," she said with a nod to the officers. Up close, now, she realized there was a bee among them. A frazzled looking bee, but a bee nonetheless, holding himself in the way bees often did. Her attention immediately snapped to him. The jackets were irrelevant, here. He was the person she needed to address.

"If it's alright, I would be able to tend to this man's injury before you take him into your custody. It would make your duty easier, I think, sir, if he weren't bleeding and moaning all the way back to your station."

"What a fucking moron."

That seemed to sum it up pretty well, really - although Fury supposed that it could be a matter of some debate just which fucking moron she was referring to. There were a number to choose from, after all. The specific instance that had brought the comment out, though, was the moth running down the alley with the letter.

In most cases, Fury would have been perfectly happy to stand aside and let him get what was coming to him, but this wasn't just any moth. This was...

She didn't know what the hell his name was. But he was a fucking moron. And there were a lot of people who owed that fucking moron their lives - and she might be one of them. He'd been there, after all, that day seven years ago that she wasn't fortunate enough to forget. She remembered him - younger then, still a fucking moron, but just barely Chrystened and tossing off some sort of spell that had stopped the Corrupted for at least a moment. Given everything that had been going on, every moment counted.

So maybe she owed him, a little. Fury wasn't some sort of altruist, or anything, but she didn't like owing people. That was why she stepped out from the alley - a halting step, really, supporting some of her weight on a stick. Her leg had never been quite right, after...

That didn't matter now.

She turned her utterly uncaring gaze to the hornets. "Sorry about him. He's a fucking moron. Not right in the head, though, after the..." She had expected to fake it, the hitch in the voice, the sudden trailing off. When she got there, though, she found she didn't need to fake it at all. "Fuck. Seven years. Fucking moron. I'll go after him. Probably good not to scare him off. He might do something stupid." Fury considered the situation again. "Stupider."

She moved forward with all the fucking confidence of someone who knows that no asshole hornet is going to stop her, because she's a fucking legend even if she's not in her goddamn Shell right now, even if her steps are uneven and twisted. Even if she was walking through a puddle of blood without a care in the world, because she'd seen worse, and blood was just one more thing that happened in this cesspit of a bug.

At least she wouldn't have any trouble finding him, given everything that he'd knocked over. "Hey! Moron! Slow your stupid self down!"