Chapter Text
It’s morning, and Alvina tip toes down the steps to prepare breakfast for the three of them. As she passes the couch, she observes the interviewer’s sleeping form: clearly uncomfortable, but, somehow, it was working. She quickly roots through the kitchen and is surprised to find all the ingredients for pancakes. She lights up the stove and gets to work.
Over on the couch, the interviewer pretends to be asleep. Not because he’s that interested in what Alvina’s doing in the kitchen, but because he was much too uncomfortable for proper sleep. And he felt dirty. He really needed a shower.
A door opens upstairs, and Amelia noisily rushes down the stairs.
“What’s cooking?” she asks.
“Shhh!”
Alvina puts a finger over her lips and then gestures to the interviewer’s makeshift bed. He rolls his eyes. Of course, they can’t see this.
“Oh shit, sorry.” whispers Amelia.
She softly pads over to Alvina.
“It’s pancakes” says Alvina.
“Perfect.”
Amelia grabs the bag of flour and begins to help prepare them. The interviewer decides that around now is the best time to stop pretending to be asleep.
“Can you put blueberries in mine?” he asks.
Alvina jumps out of her sandals. The flour spills and Amelia huffs in annoyance.
“You could have told us you were awake the normal way.” Says Amelia.
“Well, it’s less fun that way.” He says.
“There are no blueberries. Are chocolate chips alright?” asks Alvina.
“I think you know the answer.”
It’s true. She did. She dumped the bag of chocolate chips into the batter and continued stirring. Amelia walks over to the interviewer, who now attempts to sit up. Amelia tries to help but he quickly shoes her away with his right hand. His left cradles his stomach. After a moment, he’s fully sat up, but exhausted. He wanted a shower but that seems like an impossible feat at this point.
Amelia takes this pause in movement to undo his shirt once again and check the wrappings. It’s better than the night before, but still bleeding through. He groans in annoyance.
“Why can’t it just be fixed? I don’t want to do this the long way.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not how the human body works. And, no matter how different you may be, your body doesn’t function in any other way.” Says Amelia. “Now, bathroom?”
He nods his head slowly, and then glances to the stairs. They’re steep and narrow. Two attributes that he would much rather not encounter in a staircase when he is the way that he is now. He closes his eyes and exhales.
“Pancakes first?”
“Whatever you say.”
---
After about fifteen minutes of mixing, flipping, and scooping, Alvina and Amelia have successfully made a full stack of pancakes. They bring them over with a container of syrup to the couch and place them on the coffee table. Alvina takes the foot of the couch where the interviewer’s form does not occupy it and Amelia chooses the floor. She insists it’s more comfortable this way and there isn’t too much complaining from the other two.
To the girls’ dismay, the interviewer only has a few bites. Immediately after his first enthusiastic bite, he immediately felt nauseous and opted to not have much more. His goal was to postpone his trek to the bathroom for as long as possible. This proved to be successful for about 30 minutes. The women made small talk while he just sat back and listened, actively enjoying their company and taking his mind off of his own personal pain.
He didn’t even notice when it died down. They had been talking about other potential safe houses and mapping a route home and he must have dozed off. He closed his eyes for a moment and suddenly Amelia’s hand was waving in front of his face. He startles awake and swats the hand away, annoyed.
“What are you, an airport runway marshal?” he asks.
Amelia takes a step back. “Just trying to keep you awake. We really need to get you cleaned up.”
He groans and shoves his face into the couch pillow. He felt sick and miserable and hot…which all were probably bad signs…which means that Amelia was right as always, however, he would never let her know that.
Alvina chimes in.
“Please just let us help you upstairs? You’ll feel better afterwards, I promise.”
He takes his face out of the pillow, glares at both of them, and then subtly nods. Amelia rolls his eyes and together with Alvina, they get to work.
It was a slow start. His arms were wrapped around both women’s necks and his weight was clearly dragging them down. At this point, the interviewer was actively loathing the incompetent architect who designed this safe house. The fact that there is only one bathroom and that it’s on the second floor? It’s almost as if it were intentionally built to cause him unnecessary amounts of pain.
A particularly wobbly step leaves the interviewer splayed halfway up the stairs.
“I can’t do it.”
“C’mon we’re almost there!” comes Amelia.
“We can take a break if you need it?” says Alvina.
The Interviewer groans. “Please! Just let me die down here Alvina!”
The two women reach down and once again the three are trudging their way up the stairs.
To Amelia’s dismay, he’s bleeding again when they get to the bathroom. It had either happened gradually over the past day or when he had fallen on the way up. Either way, she had to redo his stitches for a third time and neither party was happy about it.
The sound of plastic peeling draws the Interviewer out of his lull.
“Plastic wrap? I thought you were joking!”
“Afraid not” responds Alvina.
“Can I at least do it myself?”
“The wrap or the shower?”
“Well, I was hoping both.”
“If you think you can manage by yourself, be my guest. I do have a question for you, though. Can you stand up? By yourself? Right now?”
An uncomfortable silence sits over the three of them.
“Fine. Let’s just…get this over with.”
---
The shower was…a sloppy affair. The interviewer squirmed uncomfortably the whole time and in the end…sure. He was in theory cleaner than before but not the cleanest he would have liked to have been.
By the time he made it into one of the upstairs bedrooms he could barely keep his eyes open. He was wearing a new set of sweatpants and a loose cotton shirt and the still cooling water in his hair was hypnotizing. He was out before he hit the pillow.
Alvina and Amelia share a look as they gaze over his sleeping form. They’re both exhausted and decide not to do any planning that night. They look at each other.
“Netflix?”
“Netflix.”
---
When he wakes, he’s certain that the prison drugs have 100% worn off. His body was riddled with pain, aches, bruises, and more pain. He tries to sit up but a sharp and painful twinge rockets up from his stomach wound. He groans. It’s too much, especially this early in the morning. Talk about a bad start to a day.
He must have been making far more sounds than he realized because Alvina lightly knocks on his door and enters.
She looks terrible. Bags under her eyes, hair disheveled, pale, the classic morning look but if she was also the physical interpretation of the grim reaper.
“Everything okay? It’s awful early.”
The interviewer squeezes his eyes shut and curls into himself as much as he can, much like he had done just a day or two ago. To be honest, he had lost track of time all together.
“Hurts.” He mutters. “a lot.”
He hears Alvina walk towards him and sit on the edge of the bed.
“Can I look?”
He doesn’t really answer, but he does unfold himself to give her access. A hiss-like sound comes from her then. Bad news, probably.
“Am I dying?”
“Uh, hopefully not. Let me just, get Amelia.”
“I think I need to vomit”
“Just—wait, okay?”
Through the pain, the interviewer scoffs. Bold of Alvina to assume he had any control over his bodily functions at this point in time. Especially when his stomach felt like it was being torn apart from the inside and the outside at the same time.
She stands up and goes to the downstairs living room to get Amelia, who had conked out in the middle of The Great British Bake-off the night before. The two of them return in a minute. Amelia sits down next to him and has a similar reaction to Alvina’s when she sees the skin around his shank wound.
“It’s inflamed, and red, and, does it hurt here-“
He grits his teeth to prevent a scream. That’s a yes then.
“Ooookay.” Says Amelia. “I think we may need some back up. You need a hospital, and since we can’t go to a hospital, we’ll need the next best thing.”
The three look at each other.
“Kozlowski.”