? [Completed]

[walking_complex]

Characters: Hojo and Miles
Content: Hojo wants to go to sleep. Miles wants to interrogate him instead.
Setting: Morem o Lisboa
Time: V. V. early Saturday
Warning: NONE. MUAHAHAHA.

Comments

[i_hate_quakes]

Edgeworth sat down at the edge of the bed closest to where Hojo was messing with the coffee pot, wrinkling his brow in confusion and wondering just what the hell the scientist was doing.

"Are you really that addicted to coffee, Doctor?"

[walking_complex]

"If you failed to notice, there's no coffee in the room," Hojo said, without turning around. "Though that is a shame, that's not what I need this for right now. I've got no other means of cleaning the bullet wound at this time, and though it's probably already infected heated water is still the best thing to use in the absence of anything that will effectively sterilize." Obviously.

[i_hate_quakes]

Miles thinned his lips irritably at Hojo, offended that the taller man would think him to be such an idiot. He opened his mouth to object, but at Hojo's mention of the bullet wound, he paled slightly. What if the wound were infected and Hojo ended up having to get his arm amputated?

Well, that would most definately limit his ability to experiment, which may or may not be a good thing, but Miles most certainly didn't want to be the one responsible for that...

"Are you... okay?" he asked softly. Somehow, it seemed odd to ask that of someone who tried to kill you just a few hours before.

[walking_complex]

"Hn." Hojo glanced over his shoulder. "Surprisingly so, considering I can't currently use my right arm and at least two ribs are broken. So long as it gets taken care of soon I doubt I'll lose the arm." Okay, so the last bit was mostly said to make Miles feel more guilty. Hojo wasn't above underhanded insults, after all.

[i_hate_quakes]

And Miles was always quick to guilt.

He furrowed his brow and brought a hand to his shoulder, clenching onto the fabric and gritting his teeth... that same wave of sickness from the lab overwhelming him once again. He dug his fingers deeper into his shoulder, trying to gain control of himself.

"I'm..."

Miles's voice was barely above a whisper. He cleared his throat and straightened up.

"I'm sorry, Doctor," he said. "For everything."

Well. Now he felt foolish, like he was the one in the wrong. That simply wouldn't do... after all, he wasn't the one kidnapping little girls, now was he?"

"But... It's not as though it were uncalled for."

[walking_complex]

"Of course not," the scientist said, moving over to the bathroom to get a wash cloth now that the coffee pot was full of rather scalding water. "The creature that you shot was incapable of responding to anything besides pain. You were quite justified."

Referring to the monster as a separate entity helped keep it separate from him, something Hojo thought wholly appropriate. That thing hadn't been him. He walked back over to the counter, removing his tie and unbuttoning his shirt with his good hand as he went.

"Although, I do appreciate not being shot in a fatal location, though I'm sure you know that." Hojo dipped the cloth into the water and pressed it to the wound in his shoulder, hissing sharply through his teeth.

[i_hate_quakes]

"That's what I wanted to speak with you about, Doctor," Miles said, uncrossing his legs and rising to his feet, crossing his arms over his chest as Hojo worked on exposing the wound so that he could begin treatment. The white shirt he wore looked pretty bloodied, but underneath... the shirt was only opened slightly, but Miles could see that Hojo was very badly banged up.

He sighed and took a step forward, uncrossing his arms and looking at Hojo in the mirror. Now wasn't exactly the time to be questioning the witness, now was it?

The lawyer held his hands over Hojo's shoulders, looking as though he were going to pull off the shirt.

"Did you want help?"

[walking_complex]

"If I wanted help I would have asked for it," Hojo said curtly, working on cleaning the old blood off his shoulder. It had never dried properly, since he'd been stuck in the rain, so now it was just half-gelatinous and gross and not conducive at all to a clean healing.

"Ask whatever it is you want to ask, please." The last word was punctuated like an order rather than any sort of real pleasantry. The sooner they got this over with the sooner he could go to sleep.

[i_hate_quakes]

Miles hid a cringe at the scientist's snippy response, spreading his fingers in surrender before balling his hands up into fists and crossing his arms once again.

"All right, then," he said, adopting the tone he commonly used at work. "First of all, what... how did you manage to pull of that transformation?"

[walking_complex]

Hojo sighed. He should have been expecting that.

"I didn't 'pull off' anything," he said with a shrug of his uninjured shoulder. "It just happened. There was obviously a catalyst, but I don't know what it was. Yet." That was first on his list of things to do once he was set up in a new laboratory. Because he WOULD find another one; there were too many unanswered questions to give up now.