doctor's orders - sousa

[womanofvalue]

Peggy suspects that jumping right to dinner with Daniel might be a little too much for them, but there's nothing against lunch. Certainly, not when Peggy is also trying to avoid certain appointments so that she's not told something that she already knows -- she's healing slowly because she's pushing too fast and it will never fully feel the way it used to. Still, with her phone on the table, she gives Daniel a brief smile as she excuses herself from the table to freshen up, once she's finished eating. "Order me a tea, please," she says. "Tell them it's for me, they'll prepare it right."

She slides away, but leaves her purse and phone with the knowledge that Daniel will keep them safe. There are still the case files she'd brought for them to discuss and she has high faith that he won't simply leave.

However, what she hadn't anticipated was a very irate nurse sending Peggy a text to the number on file with a very curt message: Ms. Carter, you have missed two appointments. Please be at our offices for 2PM today for your follow up. The tone is angry enough, but the two follow up messages reminding her are no less firm, the last giving a long (as long as possible) explanation of the complications that might arise.

Peggy returns, blissfully unaware, and settles back in her spot. "Did they come by to take the order?" she asks hopefully.

Comments

[ssrsousa]

He hadn't exactly expected to be urged to his feet and nearly pushed out the door in what had seemed like the middle of a conversation, but fortunately he'd had his hand in his crutch already and was able to keep up. Once they were in the corridor outside the room, he glanced over at Peggy with a little smirk.

"Never thought I'd meet anyone who liked doctors less than I do."

[womanofvalue]

"Yes, well, I was perfectly capable of working with the pain, I don't see why a doctor has to prod and poke me," she says, her guilt in this matter worsened by the fact that she's fine but for the pain. No internal organs damaged, no reproductive issues. Peggy can't say the same for poor Ana Jarvis, who will never have children because of a situation Peggy had orchestrated.

She gives an impatient, dubious look. "Would you like to go back? We always could."

[ssrsousa]

"Because pain usually means something isn't healed yet, at least for most injuries," he pointed out a little irritably. She knew that and she still wasn't taking care of herself and it made him worry about her. Some things always hurt, but this wound probably wasn't supposed to be one of them.

"Let's go see when they want you to come in for your X-ray. I'm not gonna drag you, but I will remind you."

[womanofvalue]

"It is a fairly large wound through my body. Even if it were all the way healed, I imagine I might get the ghost of pain every now and again," she retorts, sighing as she concedes to him with a nod. "Only if you consent to coming back for your own follow-up to see if they've got a better prosthetic for you." Her negotiation skills aren't really rusty, exactly, but Peggy is always grateful for the chance to use them.

[ssrsousa]

He didn't actually want to come back and be poked and prodded any more than Peggy had wanted to be, nor did he want to go through the whole chain of events that had led to him having half a leg and sometimes feeling like half a man. If he didn't agree, though, Peggy probably wouldn't agree to go to her appointment, and they both knew that.

"Only if you agree to make your appointment on the same day as mine so I can be sure you're actually going," he replied, which he thought was a pretty good upping of the ante.

[womanofvalue]

He plays a mean game of poker, she sometimes forgets, what with him calling her bluff like this and making it so that she's going to have to go to her appointment in order to make sure he went to his. Reaching out a hand, she offers it to him to shake, even though she knows that she doubts that she's going to like it, but knows that he won't like it any more than her. "Fine," she allows. "You've got yourself a deal."

"Both on the injured list, so it's a good thing Thompson isn't here to lord it over us," she notes wryly.

[ssrsousa]

Daniel shook Peggy's hand and managed not to look satisfied or smug about making sure she took care of herself. It meant he had to do the same, but he'd deal with that. He let go of her hand and continued down the hall back to the front of the clinic. Every medical office or hospital was a warren of rooms no matter where he went, apparently. He wasn't sure whether that was comforting or not.

"You remember what I said right after that stuff hit the theater and everyone went nuts?" he asked. It wasn't long ago for him, but it was for Peggy. She might have forgotten what he'd said about Thompson.

[womanofvalue]

"I'm afraid I don't," she confesses bluntly, as it's been a great deal of time for her between her time in Darrow and in Los Angeles, not to mention all the intervening events. "You'll have to remind me," she says as she slides her coat back on, gently adjusting so that she doesn't appear to be walking with any particular trouble or concession to her wound being poked and prodded at.

[ssrsousa]

It was probably a good thing she didn't remember, because that had not been one of his better nights. He'd woken up shackled to a hospital bed, wearing only his undershirt, with Peggy staring at him. He'd hit her that night, which he still felt bad about sometimes.

"I'd come down from whatever was in that canister and you asked if I was feeling more like myself. So I told you I still wanted to kill Thompson, but no more than usual," he reminded her wryly.

[womanofvalue]

Peggy smiles ruefully at Daniel as they walk. "I don't know if I should tell you this or not, but in the course of an investigation, we brought in Dottie Underwood through lack of any other choice and at one point in the evening, it was all the both of us could do just to scream at her not to kill Jack. I'm afraid he turned out to be a rather good ally," she notes, even if that's not the word she'd give to Jack so easily.

"With his own troubles and frustrating qualities, of course. You can't stop him being Jack Thompson, it turns out."

[ssrsousa]

That must have been one hell of a choice, if they'd willingly let Dottie Underwood out. This conversation was leaving him with more questions than answers, but he had a feeling most of his conversations were going to do that for awhile.

"I don't think you can stop anyone from being themselves, not long term anyway," he agreed. "Thompson's not really a bad person, all things considered. I hope we convinced her not to kill him."

[womanofvalue]

"She didn't," Peggy assures, "The last I saw of Jack, he was hopping back on a flight to New York to be a pain for all the agents there," she says, with the sweet relish of someone who was about to lose that pain in her own arse for a little while, something that she couldn't help feeling rather good about, no matter how much he had been as asset. His personality isn't one that Peggy found easy to deal with at the best of times and her constant mistrust had kept her guessing.

"Unfortunately," Peggy notes darkly, "Dottie escaped in the confusion of chaos at a scene. That will rest on my conscience forever."

[ssrsousa]

That worried him almost as much as it clearly worried Peggy. Dottie Underwood was not someone Daniel wanted wandering around any city. But there was nothing he or she could do about that now, unfortunately, except for being aware that if he could come here, so could Dottie.

"You can't be everywhere at once or do everything at once, Peggy," he reminded her. "And not everything's your fault or something you have to do yourself."

He'd had to learn that one the hard way.

[womanofvalue]

"It was my forethought to let her out, my plan that allowed her to be there, and yes, in this case, my utter responsibility," she says as they finally depart the hospital, Peggy tugging her collar higher to protect herself from the elements. "I'm afraid that this one is absolutely on me and I can't be so quick to deny it," she says, frowning enough to make the little lines on her forehead appear in quick succession.

[ssrsousa]

"And who was the boss when you did that?" he asked, because he knew the answer was him. He wouldn't have gone along with the plan if it hadn't been either a damn good one or the only option they had. He knew how dangerous Dottie was and he was pretty sure the future version of him hadn't suddenly lost half his brain to go with half his leg. So if they did that, they had a good reason.

He paused in the doorway to button his coat one-handed. It'd been early summer in New York, but it definitely wasn't summer here.

[womanofvalue]

She gives him a pursed look, knowing that he'd bring that up, but no happier for it. It's certainly not his fault for authorizing it, especially not with that abysmal shape that he'd been in and she'd been no better. They had been a window and they had taken it, only to have it come back and bite them in their behinds.

"Here," Peggy says, stopping to help him with his coat, a body's space between them as she buttons him up. "We had no other option and a very slim window," she says. "I keep saying that to myself, like it will make what happened better. It doesn't," she says, aware that it never will be.

[ssrsousa]

He could button his coat two handed with the crutch, but he'd taught himself to do it one-handed just in case. Rehab had taught him how to do a lot of things in a different way than he'd done it. Driving had been an adventure and a half.

Still, Peggy was trying to help, so he didn't object to her buttoning his coat, even if it kind of made him feel like he was six years old again. Instead he focused on what she said.

"It probably won't," he agreed. "But we make the calls with the information we have. Can't do any better than that, unless you were planning on Howard Stark inventing a time machine."

[womanofvalue]

Peggy finishes with the last and makes sure it's properly buttoned up before she steps back. "Oh, don't tempt him, even from a dimension away," she warns, all too aware of the marvelous things that Howard could do, both in terms of innovation, but also in terms of taking something perfectly normal and making it rather demonic, if Dooley is anything to go by.

"I'll call, about my follow up," she confirms, because it's easier to do that than sit at the desk. "I will also insist that I will not be seen unless Daniel Sousa is scheduled in the same day."

[ssrsousa]

"Wouldn't dare. I sort of like having gravity working," he chuckled. Especially with his son in the city already, if Howard came here there was no telling what would be invented. Time machines would be just the beginning.

"And the prescription for the medication you're probably not gonna take?"

[womanofvalue]

For every good invention of Howard's, she's had to deal with the other five nightmares behind them, making her suitably wary of the man's genius, she feels. "The pills make me woozy," she confesses, knowing that it's an old excuse and that many people have used it, but it's still true. She doesn't like to cede control like that, not ever.

"Perhaps I'll take them when the pain is worst," she says, "it often bothers me when I sleep."

[ssrsousa]

"They do that. You really wanna feel weird, try being on a morphine drip. Woozy doesn't even begin to describe it. I was seeing pink elephants," he said lightly. The first few days after he'd been hit were still a little fuzzy for him, and he wasn't sure they'd ever not be. On the other hand, maybe he didn't want to remember those days very well.

"I'm not gonna hold you down and make you do anything. I don't think anyone could. You take the pills when you think you need them. But I will suggest that you at least fill the prescription."

[womanofvalue]

"I've had one, and I don't mean to repeat the experience," she says, given that when she had the rebar injury the first time, Jarvis had been a wonder at procuring her enough medicine to make her momentarily forget that she had a hole through her body. "I'll call the prescription in," she promises with a reassuring squeeze to his upper arm, a way to hide that she's also guiding him back towards hers.

"You can do that now, you know." she teases, fishing out her phone in order to start working on precisely that. "Did the pink elephants dance?" she wonders.

[ssrsousa]

He frowned a little again at her reference to what was hopefully the rebar injury. She could have had others, probably had if those two little scars on the back of her shoulder were any clue, but he still hoped she'd had as few as possible.

"I don't really remember, but I wouldn't want to repeat it either," he admitted. He didn't move away from her yet, although part of that was so he could watch her use her little telephone.

[womanofvalue]

"No, let's not do that," she says, a protective edge in her words, seeing as she doesn't like to think about Daniel injured. She suppresses the shiver that goes through her, that panicked memory of watching him drifting into that portal against his will. Absently, she finishes with a text to the pharmacy to fill the prescription, using her task to hide her face before glancing up. "There we are, tomorrow it will be ready."

"Now you know about the hole in my midsection," she allows, "and you know about Whitney Frost. Are there any other puzzle pieces you'd like me to assemble?"

[ssrsousa]

"Well, you haven't told me the end of the story," he pointed out. Apparently everything could be done on those things, including sending prescriptions to a pharmacy. It was convenient, but it also explained why he saw so many people staring at their telephones instead of the rest of the world. He wasn't sure he wanted to get there.

"Did we stop Whitney Frost from using that nuclear warhead?"