Panacea | Bobby & (open)
He loved summer, but not like this; Apollo would have enjoyed it more. His shirt stuck to his back uncomfortably in patches, and his feet were weighed down by the humidity. The town was sweat-slick and burning - it glimmered with the uncertainty of a battle that was still fresh, as if girding itself for further chaos to come. People held their breath as they passed toppled, crumbling buildings, the only victims that remained visible. Bobby held their gaze when they met his, searching for an explanation - for answers, for truth. You won’t find it here, he wanted to scream, He’s gone. And he’d left Bobby empty, exhausted.
Still he walked to the Memorial University Medical Center, because it was better than spending a Saturday alone in a house that had yet to feel like home - or worse (or better), in Bea’s company. He had first visited on Apollo’s suggestion, and perhaps it was testament to how well the god knew his nature - that first taste of delivering sickness and health, of exerting his control over the lives of anonymous faces, had consumed him with curiosity. Weekends at the hospitals around Savannah became a habit, even while the war broke out. The nurses might have suspected Bobby, a familiar face loitering in the waiting room for too long, with too little reason. But he had a kindly smile, a sweet word, and twinkling, knowing eyes that set them at ease (a hard thing to come by as a battle raged outside the hospital’s doors).
A jet of cold air rushed him as he entered, but it was a brief reprieve, for the hospital’s interior was equally stuffy. It was twisted, as things always were, that the hospital had become a sanctuary when it was where the casualties of the war struggled against their own wounds, against the onset of an eternal sleep - rage, rage against the dying of the light - almost always futile. Apollo could not heal wounds, but Bobby had felt them anyway, as if they rubbed against his skin, edges frayed and decaying.
Now he lacked even that - now he was numb, and the wards of the upper floors were closed off to his powers. A hospital full of people, of sickness-sound and sickness-smell, from the pained cries of the injured to the professional, low whispers of doctors - they amounted to nothing if Bobby could not feel along the scrubbed walls for the strains of disease that ought to poison the air, thick and heavy as the air outside, but not with summer’s heat. Nothing, nothing, and it hurt more than it should have, for Bobby had felt Apollo’s growing presence and shifted to accommodate it, and now there was a shadow where he had once lived.
He sank into a chair in the waiting room, watching a couple of nurses wheel a gurney past him, and down the hallway, rattling and squeaking as they went. Placing his hands in his lap, palms up, Bobby yearned for anything but this helplessness, this stasis. He glanced at the other person in the room. “You ever wish you had the power to fix anything?” He kept his voice cool, even a little wry, as he dropped his gaze to his hands once more. “A panacea, you know? Wish I had one of those. Do me a favour, would you?”
Bobby dusted his palms off and rose from his seat. “Can I, uh.” He shrugged carelessly, affecting a sheepish smile to mask his desperation, because it had been weeks since he had last felt skin against his palm, because Bea had not been available for this experiment for reasons of her (and his) own, because he had to know for certain if every last vestige of Apollo was gone. “Can I touch your forehead?”