singillatim | Я вернулся в деревню

She's panting, doubled over a little as she catches her breath. Grateful that the door was open, unlocked, but a little worried that someone else is occupying the space. It takes her a moment to register what he's saying and then she looks up, blinking.

"We should cover the door," she says, taking off her tattered backpack and digging through it to find a spare sweater to block the cracks in the frame.

"Here." Lalo goes over, and breathlessly hands her some duct tape. He coughs again. "Use this." But the windows still need sealing, too.

She's just going to tape them in.

Great.

She takes the duct tape and pulls it off, placing it against the door, sucking in a breath and holding it while she does.

"There," she breathes, scrambling backwards.

The window is finally taped up too! Lalo coughs again, throat burning. Despite this, he grins, and turns to offer Sveta a high five and a big smile. "We did it!"

Edited 2024-05-05 01:45 (UTC)

She stares at the high five with a blink and then hesitantly reaches up to return it.

"We did?"

She coughs into her elbow and then turns her attention back to him. "Are you alright? Did it burn you anywhere?"

"Good job!" Lalo says encouragingly, when she touches her hand to his. "That's called a 'high-five'. You do it to celebrate!"

Then, there's the question of his well-being...

Lalo rubs his throat, and coughs. "I think it burned my throat. It's okay. I'll get over it. I did last time."

"I'm not a child," she says with a wrinkle of her nose, but the second statement worries her.

"Last time? What happened?"

"Neither am I!" Debatable. "You can still have fun! What do they do in Russia to celebrate a job well done? We could do that instead. You could teach me. Believe me, I have a lot to learn."

He exhales loudly when she asks about 'last time'. His ears turn red when he thinks about it. That had been the time that he and Chloe had... uh. "Last time I got some on my skin." He pauses. "You know, it's weird. Somebody got stuck in here with me then too, actually."

He takes a deep breath, and starts to cough again. He coughs into his sleeve out of politeness, practically hacking up a lung. "Sorry," he says again, sheepishly, in a raspy voice when he finally stops. Maybe he should get this looked at, after all.

"Someone?"

Oh no.

Oh no. Is this the man that Chloe talked about? Her eyes widen slightly and she tucks a strand of hair behind her ears, nervous.

Fortunately, that cough takes all of her attention.

"Sit down," she tells him gently. "Let me listen to you." She realizes half a second later that she should explain. "I'm a doctor."

Lalo's ears get redder. He's so embarrassed. It's one thing to half-fake brag to a bunch of other guys, but she seems like a nice girl, and he's never met her before. And remembering what happened with Chloe is enough to get his blood pumping again, tinges of longing mingling with the shame of the memory. Sveta might notice the way he avoids eye contact with her.

He's as grateful as she is when she tells him to sit down, and he's doing so even before she explains, simply glad to have a change in the topic, happy to be able to look her in the eye again. There's a squeak against his tile floor as he pulls out one of the wooden dining room chairs in front of the table, and he waits obediently for her to tell him what to do next.

"A doctor? Really? That's amazing. I've always wondered what it would be like to be a doctor. I thought about going to medical school," he babbles. "But I don't think I'm smart enough-- so I went to business school instead-- but we need doctors more than businessmen." Another cough. Another throat clear. "What is it that you need me to do? Cough for you?"

Edited 2024-05-07 14:46 (UTC)

Oblivious to how this might come across, she kneels down in front of him, letting him babble as she listens to his breathing, to the cough. "No," she says with a laugh. "I need you to be quiet. I'm going to listen to your lungs. Your throat may hurt, but I want to check your lungs. So - just breathe."

She leans in, pressing her ear against his chest.

Unlike Svetlana, Lalo isn't oblivious, but under normal circumstances, it wouldn't bother him, and it'd be easy enough to ignore that it was happening. He understands the necessity for medical intervention, after all, and there's a time and a place for the juvenile humor.

But right now, after being reminded of what happened with Chloe, he can't help but feel his ears turn even redder, some of the color leaking into his cheeks even. He fights the urge to squirm, doing his best to be a well-behaved patient.

That is, until she presses her ear against his chest. It tickles slightly, and there's a slight bump up and down of his chest as he suppresses a laugh that never makes out of his mouth. But then he's still.

Based on the sound of his breathing, Svetlana can probably detect something that sounds like minor bronchitis. It's hard to tell without a stethoscope, but it doesn't sound all too serious -- noticeable, though, and he should probably be resting. That's not all, though. She might notice Lalo has a slightly rapid heartbeat, possibly simply due to recent exertion, although it could be consistent with high blood pressure as well.

It's a little endearing, the laugh, and she manages to suppress most of her smile at it. She mutters a soft apology, closing her eyes to focus on the breathing itself.

It doesn't sound - terrible, but it's not great, either. The soft sound of wheezing whistles through, but there's no rattle of pneumonia that would send her worrying. No fever, either, though she is worried about his heart rate.

She stays for longer than necessary, waiting for it to settle after what they went through.

"What have you been doing since the last time you encountered the fog?" she asks, sitting back on her heels and looking up to him.

That's a good question! Lalo blinks. He's been busy.

"Oh, the usual. I've been traveling back and forth between Milton and Lakeside, I went hunting a few times, I've been to the General Store, I brought food down to the Community Hall, I've been renovating" -- improving the traps on -- "the front of my house, shoving the snow off the path leading up here..."

Lalo ticks off each event on his fingers, listing them one by one.

"So, not a whole lot! Why?"

Edited 2024-05-10 06:52 (UTC)

She tsks softly and sits back. "You might have bronchitis," she explains. "And if you don't want it to turn into pneumonia or something else, then you need to be resting. Sitting. Not moving. Letting someone else take care of you."

She stands and puts her hand on her hip. "You cannot be working as hard as you have been."

"Bro---" Lalo interrupts her explanation with another bout of coughing. He clears his throat, trying to get himself back under control. He looks up at her, still sitting. The scolding tone and the hand on her hip are enough to tell him she meets business.

"Let someone else take care of me?" A foreign concept to Lalo. "Ah... c'mon! It can't be that bad, can it? I've been through worse. I'll be fine!" Lalo smiles up at her, trying to convince Sveta of how 'fine' he will be. Somehow, though, he doesn't think she's likely to budge. She strikes him as someone surprisingly formidable, when she wants to me.

Or maybe not 'surprisingly'. Maybe there's nothing surprising about it.

Sveta stands up. She is not tall, not in any way intimidating except for the way that her eyes narrow and she points a finger at him. "If you let this linger, you will develop pneumonia," she tells him. "Do you know what pneumonia will do to you out here where I may not have the right antibiotics and you are not resting?"

She puts her other hand on her hip. "You will rest and you will settle, and you will wait for that cough to subside. Two days."

...well. Even Lalo can't argue with that. She might not be tall, but it's clear the blonde woman standing in front of him is not to be taken lightly. He coughs again, shoulders briefly moving up and down.

But then Lalo looks up at her and smiles. "Svetlana," he tells her. "You are a force to be reckoned with. All right, all right. Two days. I'll rest."

Then he can run around like a crazy man again, right?

She nods. Of course she is. But that does soften her slightly and she relaxes her shoulders, going to the window to look out into the bleakness of the forest.

"I will come to check on you once this - this damned fog has gone."

"Ah, yeah. It's a nightmare, that fog."

Lalo coughs a little, covering his mouth with a fist, and looks at her as she does to the window. "For now, come. Here. Sit with me. I'd like to get to know you better."

She looks back but doesn't sit quite yet. "What would you like to know?" she wonders, cautious. There's so much she's hiding from people that it's difficult to remember where the lies end and the truth begins. Getting tangled in it starts like this.

"Oh, whatever you want to tell me. Can you blame me for being curious about such a beautiful woman?"

"Do you say that to every woman you're stuck in a home with?" she wonders, smiling as she returns her gaze to the window.

Lalo thinks about Chloe, and snorts. "Not exactly," he says. He would've never used that line on her. He stays relaxing in his chair, watching her look out the window before he speaks again.

"I can go first, if you want. I'm from Mexico."

Not exactly. And Chloe is the first person Svetlana thinks of, too. She can't help but wonder how that happened.

"Is that where you were born or where you live?"

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