Matteo's emergence back to the waking world was unmarred by the nightmare that sank into his subconcious far more quickly thans his mind returned into conciousness and the starkness of reality. Once again the feeling of being watched sends shivers down his spine and he turns his head towards where the sense of being watched emanated, sleep stroked eyes only slightly open.
"Dai-urgk-muh!" Eyes widening in suprise and blinking owlishly at the other person sitting not four feet away, Matteo finds himself wide awake, the effect of this person's presence instead of Daisy's akin to a barrel of freezing cold water being thrown over him.
The difference between Daisy and this female were like night and day. The being who filled the hospital chair to almost overflowing looked neither lithe nor would be anytime within the next century; only the skeletal hand of death would reduce her bulk to thus. She looked such that her girth matched her length. It wasn't fat that induced her impressive proportions, she was blessed (or cursed, depends who you talked to) with a mass of muscle, the fleshy mounds indicating breasts placed on as an almost afterthought of an absent-minded god. The colour of her long, braided hair, thick eyebrows and well-tended beard were the colour of rust, flecks of darker brown and blond strewn liberally throughout. Within her beard were tiny braids, interspersed with beads of gold, silver and semi-precious stones. Her suit and matching boots are a blinding, pearlized white, the wide lapels of the jacket showing a leaning to the 70's, the lacey boustiere underneath the only true piece of femininity on this female.
At his gawky stuttering, the 'woman' raises an impressively furry eyebrow, lines creasing and cracking through her darkly-hued skin with the movement, like a chisel through virgin stone. She moves off the chair in an easy movement, its frame trembling in her wake, bent at odd angles. Her voice is husky in the sort of sense that a room full of teething babies is somewhat noisy; any sense of femininity in that harsh sound would be found only after a throrough, if somewhat futilely optimistic search.
"That's DagMAR you over-pumped, under-brained hick." There is no rancor in her raspy voice, the words coming as if by rote and repitition. When she comes to his side, her shoulders on equal to the mattress he lay upon, a smile creases her face, striations slicing through skin and muscle, "You must have been hit harder than I thought, if your verbal skills have sunk that low. Then again ... maybe not."
"Dagmuh-"
"You're an idiot?" The smile dissappears from her face, leaving it as seamless as a block of newly shorn obsidion. "After all the work and money I place into you and you screw it up trying to play hero?"
The questions are most definitely rhetorical and Matteo presses a little further back into the mattress, a look of uncomfortable understanding crossing his face. He was in for a lecture and the only thing that he could hold onto was the fact that she was less likely to toss things around in her fury if she was in a hospital .. less likely, sure.
"I pump you up as Romero, 'perfection by nature not by knife' and now what? You think you can dance with the scars that you're sure to have? Sure, a little plastic surgery and you are good as new, but your edge has been lost, trademark useless." She grunts at that, the noise of nightmares, "We can cash on you as a hero, but that'll fade in time and memory. Females are notoriously fickle, this I know."
She pauses in her diatribe to scowl, deep crevices burrowing through forehead and sides of her lips, at the offending male as he makes a movement as if to reach for the button to call the nurse, her hand reaching for and tightening on the bar surrounding his bed, metal groaning under the pressure of her thick fingers.
Sighing, he gives up on that tactic, gazing back evenly at dark, jade-green eyes which held righteous fury, lips curving at the scowl as black as thunder, "I missed yuh too."
"Shut-up. By the gods you are exasperating! I'd smack some sense into you if I thought it would do any good, which by the looks of things, certainly hadn't as yet." Her momentum lost, Dagmar continues to scowl at Matteo, knowing her words had less of an effect on him than she wished. And he has to lay there, grinning at her like a mupple headed lurghpy, as if she has nothing better to do with her time than coddle him.
"What, on the ever slime-filled plane of dank despair, were you thinking about? Thinking? Oh wait what am I saying?" She rolls her eyes at that, giving the bar one last squeeze, then releasing it before the squeal of metal being crushed could bring about a curious nurse.
His voice quiet, he answers in a steady voice, "Who. Not whut." No arguements on his intellect or lack of, just a simple statement of fact.
She blinks, digesting that and then, like a person trapped in a small space with rapidly rising water, her face shows her dawning knowledge of what kind of 'who' he was talking about. "Ah .. damnit. Not again."
Matteo only has the briefest of moments to think of a come-back to that, before she cuts off his concentration.
"Is she at least human this time?" The tartness of the question belied the concern held underneath. It was only after the words left her lips, the query floating between them, that the tension between the two immediately signaling hurt given and received.
Lips compressing to a thin if jagged line, Dagmar offers no apology for her ill-timed and tactless words. It is only after the tenseness leaves Matteo's body and his eyes no longer hold that darker hue of painful memories, that the woman relaxes.
His easy shrug and muttered, "Don' know fuh shoo'uh." is enough to send her back to her crippled chair, sighing in resignation, the sound like the rasp of steel against steel. If the chair seems to tremble with fear at her approach, it is only because of the resonance of her footsteps .. perhaps. She sits in the groaning chair in total confidence and ease of movement, not seeming to be aware of how close it was to breaking under her bulk.
"She wuz s'pozed ta be he'uh." His words are laced with confusion. The handsome man knew, in his heart, that Daisy was going to there when he woke up. His memories after being taken to the medics were a little hazy and certainly suspect, what with visions of angels and mermaids and such. Still, Matteo had been absolutely certain and it had shocked him to heck when she wasn't there when he first awoke.
His hand subconciously raising to his chest, the first thing Matteo notices is the pain and snatches his offending hand away. The next thing he notices, curiousity chasing away pain, is the piece of jewelry dangling from his wrist. "Did ya-?"
Dagmar immediately cuts him off, "No and don't even ask if I've checked it out. After having to write out your medical information in triplicate, having some nunnery nurse tell me in detail about your biological functions and be pressed into nursemaiding you; I didn't want to find out anything else about you that might take up more of my time. Time is money you know."
At his frown, the squat woman shrugs, her jacket scritching with the movement, "Your contract allowed me as executor in case of accident or death. If you'd bother to read the fine print, you'd know these things." Her tone indicates her disdain and resignation about his lack of business finesse.
His attention back on the necklace, he twists the mirror back and forth in front of his eyes, not seeming hurt or truely surprised in anyway by her phrasing. The handsome man speaks without heat, still seemingly engrossed with jewelry, "Slave contract."
"I prefer the title, Indentured Servent." Again the words are spoken as if by rote and repitition, made all the more certain by Matteo's easy grin flashed in her direction.
He pulls his gaze away from the charming necklace, his usual amusement once more lightening his face as he stares at Dagmar, slowly twisting and turning the mirror back and forth.
A frown once more crackling through her dark face, fissures zig zagging through toughened tissue, Dagmar gazes back in stubborn refusal, "I am not going to go looking for someone for information on that bauble."
A fault-line breaks across her forehead as he only grins wider, the man blinking in an exagerratedly innocent and pleading fashion. Her voice deepens, the sound of earthquakes and horror, "I will _not_ be asking about your lady friend."
"But Dagmuh-"
"Shut up." And it would have ended there, if he had not known her so well, irritatingly perceptive man that he was.
Daisy pulls back her mass of hair neatly, snapping the rubber band against her fingers a few times. She sighs, glancing down at the mess of papers scattered over her work table; half-finished drawings, several blue prints, a small ceramic cup holding a crushed together mass of pencils and pens, various scales and slides and rulers, and a small, hairless beast resembling something like a shaved cat sitting primly on the far corner.
"Who is it today...oh, Cestmir Dvorak. Lovely...I'm never going to be done with this, and Vladi's breathing down my neck." She sighs, dropping into her chair, and absently scratching the gargoyle on her desk behind the ears. It lets out a strange little squeak, leaning into her hand, and slitting its golden eyes closed.
Taking up a pencil and absently chewing on the eraser, she rolls out one of the pieces of paper scattered over her desk. The lay-out for an odd sort of maze is tentatively sketched in, some parts drawn in more boldly, but mostly unfinished. "I don't know how I'm going to get these walls to move here without upsetting the whole structure of the east wing," she mutters to herself fitfully, staring down at the plans.
After about half an hour of setting down a few more lines, chewing again on the pencil, and petting the gargoyle, she finally gives it up for a bad job and allows herself to gaze out the window. The chaotic landscape of shadows that is Nightmare roils restlessly beneath her gaze, but the sight does not soothe her as usual.
"I wonder what Matteo's doing..."
The ever present beeping and white noise of the machines in the room was a distraction, sometimes welcome, most times not and at the moment, Matteo could have done without them. They had moved him to a much smaller room, if something barely bigger than a bread box could be considered small, and the noise tended to echo throughout even with the buffer of a proliferation of flowers and cards.
He had his meditations, that was true, but he found himself thinking more and more about Daisy when he should have been thinking of the purity of a single drop of water or the ripples in sand or just the pleasure of 'being'. And the thought of her disturbed him from his peaceful meditations; he found himself missing her more than he expected. As he pulls the necklace off of the table to further contemplate the mirror and its significance, a visitor pushes open the door with a mighty shove.
"What, by curdled tongue of Hathgort, do you want?!"
"Y'know Dagmuh-"
"Shut up." And with that command she stomps into the room, casting a look about for another chair that she could torture into a shape more pleasing to her physique. Finding none, she simply turns to the man sitting up in the bed and crosses her arms, her face like a blank piece of slate.
The handsome man simply smiles, amusement flooding into his eyes as he gazes back on the perturbed female standing like a boulder in amongst a garden. Today she was wearing a creamsicle orange suit, with a splotchy design of ice-cream white adorning her arms and pants. It was like painting a nuclear warhead a soft, pleasing shade of pink; the camouflage wasn't fooling anyone.
"Well?" A word like a crack of thunder, breaking through the silence.
"Um, I need yuh help."
The answer was quiet, like the distant rumblings of an oncoming avalanche. "No."
Dagmar knows that helping him was going to cost her and she'd be damned if she was going to be pulled into that again. Oh she had found out that it was his Daisy who had wrapped the necklace around his wrist, but he had also charmed a nurse into giving him the information. When she found that out, it was all she could do to not wrap that necklace around his neck ... tightly. Her hand tightens into a fist with that memory and somewhere within the confines of the hospital, a lone chair shudders.
"Puhlease?"
"No." The word fell like the first of many boulders that would be dropping upon his unprotected body.
"I'll pay yuh." _That_ got her attention, just like Matteo knew it would. It may have been a mistake to appeal to her sense of friendship and goodwill, but he, being the optimistic fool he was, couldn't help himself.
Face crumpling in suspicion like asphalt under a jackhammer, the stout woman mutters, "Pay me with what, your good nature?" Fuzzy eyebrows lift, pulling flesh with them, smoothing out the cracks and fissures, "You'd dip into your fund-"
"No." The amusement is wiped clean, the tone of finality echoed by the tenseness in his posture.
Eyeing the younger man, Dagmar speaks in a tone of voice as one who knows the answer, but is masochistic enough to speak anyways, "It will never be one hundred percent-"
"No! It haz tuh be poifect. Haz tuh be ..." Matteo's voice falls away as he turns from the pity filling her face.
"So. How are you going to pay me? Or were you just teasing this old rock hound?" Her voice is gentler than her original spat out question, yet there was gleam in her eyes, like the glint of gold embedded within.
That got him out of his funk and he turns to look at her, confidence and amusement once more shining through, "T'ought we cud renugoteeate muh contract."
The initial bark of laughter which blows through the air like an air raid siren causes Matteo to lay back in his bed with a sigh. As the laughter continues, spilling out into the hall, frightening young children, the good-looking man drapes an arm over his eyes, knowing this was going to be a long day and wondering where he could get some aspirin.
Daisy yawns and stretches, thoroughly tired of plotting out load-bearing walls and hidden cupolas. She snags her package of cigarettes from her desk and ducks outside for a smoke, sparing a quick glance for the roiling landscape of nightmare.
Standing outside, she lights up quickly, sucking in the bitter smoke as she leans against a wall in the time-honored tradition of smokers everywhere. A tall, thin man in a top hat, ragged tails from a tuxedo, and black-and-white striped trousers approaches. His face is horribly distorted, as though stretched out in a silent scream that twisted his flesh, and his arms are too long for the rest of his body. He pulls a packet of cigarettes from his jacket and Daisy offers him the glowing tip of her own to light his. He puffs away in a companionable manner.
"Daisy."
"Eddy. You want to put on your everday face, then?"
He nods agreeably, and relaxes and shifts the bones of his face, revealing a pleasant-looking young man with brown eyes and a messy thatch of dyed black hair. The two smoke next to each other in easy silence for awhile.
"So where's the Old Man Who Peers In Windows?" Daisy asks after awhile, and Eddy the bogeyman shrugs narrows shoulders.
"On a job, I think," he answers in a thick Bristolian accent that turned his 'th's into 'f's. She nods thoughtfully as she pulls out another cigarette. "Hear you went out into the waking world," he continues, glancing down at her out of the corner of one eye.
"Yeah." She continues to smoke, and he elbows her in a friendly manner.
"You going to tell, luv?"
"What's there to tell? Waking people are the same as ever... some smart, some stupid, most somewhere in between." She stares out blankly into the dancing shadows.
"Yeah, but what _I_ heard," Eddy says in a conspiratorial manner, "Is that you found yourself a pretty, and that's why you were late back. Had to hitch a ride on a sleeper, hm?"
She rolls her eyes and smiles warily. "A pretty?"
"You know, a pretty boy," he snorts, dropping the butt of his cigarette and grinding it out under the heels of his well-worn boots.
"Yeah, he was alright."
"That's not what _I_ heard."
"Jesus, where do you find out this stuff? Yeah, okay, he was pretty fucking gorgeous. Knockout, in fact." She sighs, dropping the cigarette from her lips and holding it limply, forgotten. "Sweet, too."
Eddy chuckles. "Sweet, too? This, from the architect of sorrows? You must have it bad."
"_Souls_, Eddy, architect of _souls_."
"Souls, sorrow, same thing in the end, innit? So you gonna tell me about this bloke, or do I have to go plug back in to the grapevine?" The younger man laughs again, a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard and Daisy grins up at him.
"You're persistent." He nods, still looking at her expectantly. "Okay, okay," she relents, and he smiles predatorily in the anticipation of good gossip. "His name is Matteo, he's got a really thick accent, he's a stripper, and he's about the most sexy thing I've ever seen."
"What kind of accent?"
"I'm actually not sure...I never was good at those things. Not American. British Isles. You'd know."
"And?"
"And? Well, he's sweet, and gentlemanly, and unaccountably brave. And in the hospital, last I checked. Also, wears tacky shirts."
"Sounds like a catch."
"He is." She sighs, brushing some of her hair out of her face. Eddy watches her in sympathy.
"We'll keep an eye out for him, luv, alright?"
"Yeah, thanks Eddy."
Staring up at the black marbleized ceiling, Matteo wonders, not for the first time, on whether it was actual rock or not. Idly he reminds himself to ask Dagmar about it when she came back in. The spacious, if sparsely decorated office he was in, came in three colours, black, white and various shades of red. If it hadn't been for her large collection of manacles along one wall, one could almost call it contemporary.
It had been an amusing morning, following a somewhat painful night of getting down to the business of renegotiating his contract. They had known for quite some time that his contract was up for renegotiation or perhaps even him leaving her employ altogether. Both had been quite happy to leave things the way they were, neither of them willing to be the one to initiate either a split or something equally nasty, as in bringing in a change of job venue; meaning time and money being spent by both. One thing Dagmar did not like to do was to spend more money than needed and as long as Matteo continued to dance, the money would keep rolling in. And Matteo, for his part, was reluctant to stop the money from dropping in his coffers, bringing him closer to the finalization of his personal quest.
Wincing as his thumb dug into his chest with his unconscious gesture, Matteo grins ruefully as carefully places his errant hand on his belly, well away from the throbbing in his chest. His days of dancing as 'perfection by nature' were over and done with. Soon enough, he would be on to a new job track; though by all accounts, it may not be all that different from the old. The grin fades slightly as remembers exactly what he had to sign to in order to get the extra money and Dagmar's cooperation. She may be little better than a loanshark to some people, but she is _his_ loanshark and paid when a bank wouldn't or would hold his carefully stashed away fund as collateral. Still, she drove a vicious bargain.
Getting him out of the hospital, after the contract had been finalized had been the amusing part. After signing Matteo out from the hospital, in triplicate, she had practically gagged when finding out she had to promise to look after him, considering the chance for infection and whatnot. The nuns were not at all happy to see him leave so soon after surgery. So now he was laying in her office after an uncomfortable night on her stunty pull-out bed, legs dangling over the edge of her black leather loveseat, feet brushing the thick shag carpeting and staring up at the ceiling, awaiting his implantation.
"And here's your patient, Matteo. Matteo, this is Mablevi."
The crackling voice was Matteo's first indication that Dagmar had arrived with her surgeon in tow. The handsome man looks over at the slender being tip-toeing behind Dagmar in pearlescent-white suite. Worm-like hair twitching spasmodically with each step, the being placed hooves delicately upon the ground as if afraid to lose footing within the thick carpet, to be torn to pieces by some horrible monster lurking within its depths. An assortment of straps tightened the white toga-like covering to its body, bunching material out in odd clumps and tightening the material to almost see-through stretchiness in others. It pulls behind it a medium-sized, hard piece of luggage on wheels, which to Matteo's surprise and amusement, had the name Samsonite etched onto the handle.
//Looks like a Einstein mixed with a gazelle.// Not sure if the nervousness he senses in the being is real or imagined, Matteo smiles reassuringly at the gazelle-like creature, even though the thought of being operated on by this being is making him uneasy, "Hullo Mablevi, how awe ya?"
Mablevi minces a little with his voice, gazing uncertainly at Matteo for a moment, before replying, "I am well."
Clapping her hands together, the sound like the sharp bark of a rifle, making Mablevi jump about four feet to the side, Dagmar says in a hearty voice, "Let's get this show on the road, time's a wasting and time is money."
Eyeballing the antsy Mablevi as it starts to unpack some rather odd looking devices from it's luggage, Matteo quickly gestures for Dagmar to come closer, ignoring her look of annoyance.
"What?"
His voice in a low whisper, "I don' tink dis is a good idea. Looks a bit... noivous."
"Oh for ..." a sound comes from her throat, as if she just gargled a handful of tacks, "it's not brain surgery Hickboy."
"Brain?!" Both Matteo and Dagmar look over in surprise at the bleat of panic. Matteo watches in bemusement as the deer-being quickly repacks the little bit of equipment it had brought out, it's worm like hair sticking out at all angles from its head. "No, no, no brain, no .. no .."
"Wait a minute." Dagmar starts towards the frantically packing would-be surgeon, her arms outstretched in a motion of confusion and supplication. Another, higher bleat of fear and Mablevi was leaping for the door, the Samsonite bouncing crazily behind it and in a few bounds it was gone from sight. The stout woman stands with her arms outstretched for a long moment, head cocked to one side with a 'what the hell?' expression engraved upon her face, before dropping them to her sides with a snort of disgust. "Teach me to hire a herbivore."
Hearing his soft chuckles, she whirls on the still prone Matteo, pointing a sausage finger at him and telling him to, "Shut up." Then as suddenly she turned on him, she stomps out of the room, the floor vibrating with each step, her raspy cursing only cut off by the slam of the thick door.
Knowing it wouldn't be too long before she would be back with another person to poke and prod him, Matteo carefully and slowly gets up, moving towards the phone on the huge rosewood desk. He knew someone who may be of help in his search for Daisy, or at least help assuage his curiousity about the necklace Daisy left with him.
Do not copy or quote the above material without the expressed consent of the owner of this page.