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“Rich! Got somewhere to hide these?”
Virg shoves a bundle of clothing at him, hushed and furtive. A familiar bundle of clothing. (Richie would know, he made it after all.)
“You brought your outfit?!” he asks, scandalized. He keeps his voice just as hushed, and avoids the right words, but he’s frustrated nevertheless. “Virg!”
“Not so much brought,” Virgil says, “as, y’know, didn’t have time to…” he trails off with a shrug, eyes darting out of the closet.
Right. They don’t have much time before someone wonders where they went, then tracks them down and wonders why they’re hiding in the coat closet. Virgil has appearances to keep up, and professors who are suspicious enough already. Still, the realizations click into place in Richie’s head.
“You went out?” he hisses, still frustrated, and frustrated more by needing to talk around things with doublespeak – which is the exact reason why this wasn’t supposed to be happening! They’d talked about this, they’d agreed to lay low for a while.
Virgil just claps a hand on his shoulder, offering him a tight grin. “Knew you could handle it, thanks bro.” His eyes dance a little, amused by Richie’s affront, but the rest of him is tense and well aware of the situation. He’s apologetic, but not really, which is the first hint Richie gets that his patrol wasn’t just a lazy circuit around the city or a chance to blow off some steam.
His second hint is when he catches the sweat beading on Virgil’s brow, despite the air conditioned building (and room) they’re huddling in. He rolls his eyes, exasperated but long since resigned to Virgil’s heroic side.
“I may have a hiding space I can use,” he admits, underplaying things in a way Virgil is familiar with. (He’d memorized blueprints for all campus buildings in the first two weeks, then managed to find hidden holes and spaces between walls and closed off maintenance tunnels for all of them by the end of the first semester. You know, just in case.)
“Great,” Virgil says. “Gotta run, thanks for stalling!” He doesn’t give Richie a chance to question him on the patrol that he’s now starting to think was more serious than not before he hurries out of the room, which is hint number three. They don’t much keep secrets from each other these days. For Virgil to not even drop a throwaway line about the state of the city isn’t normal.
As the door shuts behind his best friend, Richie forces his brain to slow down and take a deep breath. He sets aside reason, and logic, which are not always the primary decision makers for most humans, and refocuses on emotion. V’s tired, and in a hurry. He probably wore himself out with patrol, lost track of time, and plans to fill Richie in later. It’s the most logical explanation, given how well he knows his friend.
Then he unfurls the wadded-up costume in his hands, planning to fold it to squeeze it into a small space better, and gets hint number four.
No, hint is the wrong word here. A hint implies a suggestion, an indirect clue, an indication, a trace of evidence. This isn’t a hint. This is a flashing neon sign screaming out the answer to the universe.
There’s blood on Virgil’s costume. A lot of blood, soaking the right thigh of his pant leg, staining the center of his chest, flaking over the sleeves of his coat. It’s not easy to spot, in the dark fabric of this iteration of his costume (which, was part of the reason they chose the color; no need to worry civilians over minor wounds, or their own blood getting on their rescuer), but Richie has a lot of experience. Plus, while the blood is mostly dried, it’s fresh enough – and there’s enough of it – that it’s still sticky in places.
Richie almost, almost, recoils. He doesn’t though, because he’s been here before, he’s scrubbed the blood from his and Virgil’s costumes, and seen Virgil do the same for him. They’ve been in a few scrapes over the years. The thing is, though, those have become fewer and fewer. Virgil’s latest costume (and his, when he does field work) is a thin Kevlar weave. Not thick enough to become truly bullet-proof, but more protection than the t-shirt V had started out with. Richie hadn’t made it too thick though, because he’d thought he didn’t have to – Virgil’s become an expert at those electromagnetic shields of his; rare is the bullet he doesn’t stop in midair. Scratch that: rare is the bullet that gets fired these days, V is that good.
Threats to him these days are mostly other metahumans, people who can get in close with powers that Virgil can’t immediately counter. Which means, Richie realizes, still processing at lightning speed, that it’s highly possible that all this blood isn’t even Virgil’s. He’s getting ahead of himself, could be coming to completely the wrong conclusion here.
Carefully, methodically, Richie slows his breathing, which had picked up to near panic-attack levels of hyperventilation when he’d taken in all the blood. He casts a look at the door, but there are no sounds from the hallway that he’s going to get them caught from his delay, and, anyway, Backpack’s feed to his glasses should alert him if anyone approaches while he has the costume in hand.
He goes over the coat first, searching every inch for a tear or hole that could indicate a wound, and then, finding none, carefully folds it up tight to be cleaned later. The pants get the same treatment next, and despite the blood on the thigh, there aren’t any rips there either, which suggests he was right. Not all of the blood is Virgil’s.
Some of it is though, some of it must be, because there’s a slice just under where Virgil’s right ribs would be which must have led to the blood staining his chest. Richie swallows, reminds himself that Virgil had been up and moving and cheerful, if a bit stressed out, then carefully folds the last article of the costume. He ducks over to the back corner of the large closet, climbs up on the chair stored there, shifts a ceiling tile, and tucks Virgil’s bloody costume out of sight.
He goes to the bathroom next, washes his hands, and carefully doesn’t think about checking the news. Virgil will tell him; there just hadn’t been time. He’d given him his costume, hadn’t he? It wasn’t like he was trying to hide it.
When he rejoins the party (social mixer, networking event – whatever you want to call it), Virgil is eagerly chatting up the professor he wants to work for as an undergraduate researcher. At first glance he looks perfectly fine. Anyone else’s first glance, that is, anyone who hasn’t been training as a hero for half a decade, anyone who hasn’t known Virgil forever, anyone who hasn’t had to watch Virgil be a hero for even longer. Richie’s first glance, on the other hand…
Virgil isn’t standing as straight as he normally does, just barely. Could be an attempt to make himself not stand out so much, stick to the background, which is what Richie told him he should do after the last lab incident, but he doubts it. The other man’s shoulders are hunched a little, curled inward, like he’s protecting his ribs, his chest.
His fingers are also flexing at his side, moving through the motions of making a fist, then expanding outward, then back into a fist. It’s sporadic, without any kind of rhythm to it, which suggests Virgil is trying to stop himself, but it’s something he does when he’s in pain. He says digging his fingernails into his palm (not too hard, never enough to leave marks, or draw blood, but just enough) distracts him from other injuries.
And then there’s the sweat on his brow, which Richie had already noted and points to some combination of blood loss and exhaustion, instead of just the exhaustion he’d honed in on earlier.
Part of Richie is regretting that he hadn’t checked the news, so he has a better idea of just how badly Virgil is injured. Then he reminds himself that the injury probably just happened, maybe no more than an hour ago, so the idea that anyone’s written up a news story on it is highly improbable. Their exploits sometimes get live coverage, but usually only when they’re arriving on the scene of a crime in progress, or if it’s an aerial battle, neither of which are too common.
Virg is acting like everything is normal. Richie should too. He steps into the room properly, chats with a fellow undergrad who laments under his breath how boring networking is, makes his rounds to a few of the professors in the department, and, finally, reaches Virgil’s conversation, now having grown to include two of the professor’s grad students. They’re in the midst of describing his research, though they all notice him wander up. When Virgil’s eyes flash his way, Richie sends him a covert signal with his left hand, out of sight of everyone else.
Virgil’s right hand, likewise out of view, flashes out the corresponding “I’m fine”. It’s kind of a crap hand signal system. Virgil isn’t fine, and he knows it, and now he knows that Richie knows it, but there’s no hand signal to say that. They don’t go into too much detail, with their single-hand signs. These are in case of emergency, and Virgil’s reassuring him that there is no emergency. Richie doesn’t like it, but he has to accept that Virgil knows what he’s doing.
It's easy enough to join the conversation anyway; his brain’s gotten very good at compartmentalizing, with the sheer amount of data he absorbs on the regular. Keeping an eye on Virgil and an ear on the current topic isn’t even close to the most stressful thing he’s done before. (The human brain can’t technically multi-task, but, a) he doesn’t have a standard human’s brain anymore and, b) he can task-switch very, very quickly, so it works out.)
Eventually the professor gets pulled away to talk to another student, and Virgil shakes his hand and happily continues talking to the one of his grad students who stuck around. She seems bored and more than happy to have a conversational partner. Time passes. Richie even steps away for two minutes to grab a drink and force a cup of water into Virgil’s hand. It’s been twenty-three minutes (and some seconds, but who’s counting) since Richie rejoined the conversation when Virgil turns to wave high to someone who said his name (he’s very popular with his class), twists his torso to do so, and lets out a small, breathless gasp even as he follows through and waves back.
Right. That’s Richie’s signal. “Hey, V,” he says, since the conversations already been interrupted. “Remember you said you would help me with that assignment?”
Virgil frowns at him, probably still a little muddied from the pain and blood loss, but trust is woven deeply into the relationship between them. He shrugs, smaller than normal. “Yeah, sure.” He grins, nudging Richie with his elbow. “Getting bored already?”
Playing into the role, Richie rolls his eyes. “We’re sophomores,” he says. “We have time to network.” Virgil had thought about trying to graduate in three years instead of four, and probably could have done it, too, but he’d chosen otherwise to keep a bit more time for heroics.
Virgil lets out a laugh, genuine, and turns to the grad student. “Great to chat with you,” he says. “Another time?”
“Anytime,” she agrees, grinning at the two of them. “See you around.”
Richie lets Virgil say his farewells, including pausing to chat with another professor for another minute, then, as soon as their out of sight of the departmental offices, hustles him over to the elevator.
“What -? I thought we were leaving?”
“I’ve got a first aid kit stashed on the third-floor bathroom, and no one’ll be up there at this hour,” Richie counters. Well, maybe a grad student or two, but they shouldn’t be interrupted.
“I already –”
Richie cuts him off with a pointed look at his shirt. Virgil looks down.
“Oh.”
Oh indeed. There’s a small dark stain on Virgil’s t-shirt. The shirt’s already dark, so it could be easy enough to pass off as some spilled water, but Richie knows better. However well Virgil bandaged his wound, it hadn’t been enough, or he’d carelessly re-opened it by trying to appear normal. Richie knows which option he’s voting for.
“Shut up and tell me what happened,” he says, as the elevator doors open and Richie pushes Virgil out onto the empty third floor.
Virgil chuckles. “That’s, uh, contradictory commands there, Rich.”
Richie rolls his eyes. “Not in the mood, V.”
Virgil’s grin softens. “Right,” he says.
“At least tell me it was worth it, and you weren’t just doing something stupid?”
Virgil softens even further. “It’s always worth it. You know that, Rich.”
Richie has to look away at the conviction in his voice. He does. Doesn’t make moments like these any easier, but he does. He knows, too, that it’s a fundamental part of who Virgil is, and always would be, and that he wouldn’t ask his friend to change that for anything. That doesn’t make moments like these any easier either.
Doesn’t matter. If moments like these are what Virgil needs from him, he’ll be there, every step of the way.
“Tell me what happened,” he says again, locking the bathroom behind them.
Virgil does.