Affirmation – Villainous – Dr Flug, Black Hat

[thecrazyalaskan]

Title: Affirmation
Author: TheCrazyAlaskan
Fandom / Setting: Villainous
Characters / Pairings: Dr Thomas Flug, Black hat (implied / squinty Paperhat)
Word Count: 765
Rating: T
Warnings / Notes: Written for Round 8 of the Hurt / Comfort Bingo: Surgery
Summary: Flug and Black Hat have a conversation.

The last thing Flug remembered was counting backwards and being somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty-seven. The first thing he felt now was, in a word, confusion. Working backwards to gather enough pieces for proper context took several minutes—operating theater, checking in at the front, driving over, the date on the calendar—

Bottom surgery was written in the cell, all caps and a few stars doodled around it. That was today—!

"And good morning to you too."

He jumped, the heart monitor to which he was attached beeping a little more insistently as he turned. Seated in a cheap plastic chair was his boss, idly flipping through the evening paper. "Ahh… I wasn't expecting you to still be here, sir," he admitted.

"The options were to keep your unconscious body company," Black Hat noted, his gaze only briefly straying from the newsprint, "or sit in a waiting room for twelve hours. Rather have some privacy for that."

Mmm, hard to blame him there—Black Hat was not the person one would think of when it came to sitting in a hospital waiting room. "Wait… Have I really been out that long?"

"Eight hours in surgery—out for another four." He glanced at the clock hanging on the wall opposite Flug's bed. "Almost midnight."

Somehow, the fact that Black Hat had stayed throughout the entire surgery and long enough for Flug to come out from under anesthesia was almost… nice. "So…" He picked at the blanket. "Everything went okay?"

This made Black Hat lower the paper. "You're alive to ask the question, yeah?"

He had a point there, and Flug simply hmmed in thought before curiosity—strike that, before cautious enthusiasm got the better of him. Moving slowly to avoid disturbing the IV and finger monitor, he lifted the blanket and peeled back part of the surgical gown. Gauze covered where the graft had come from, which meant, if he investigated a little farther—

Seeing his body—his entire body finally in sync with him emotionally and mentally was thrilling for a few moments before finally… He felt oddly peaceful, and it took a moment to realize that the feeling was simply contentment. Maybe the magnitude of everything—the hormones, the therapy, the legal hoops, the multiple surgeries culminating in this—had yet to fully sink in, but for now—"God, I feel so much better now."

The newspaper rustled in reply.

Flug settled back against the pillows, feeling comfortable in his own skin for the first time in… hell, at least twenty-someodd years. The relative silence, save for the beeps and clicks of the post-surgical monitors around him, was oddly soothing. "Is my phone over there?" he asked, too comfortable (or perhaps still shaking off the anesthesia) to lift his head to look for it himself.

Grumbling something that sounded suspiciously like (or what Flug strongly suspected was) "'m not your servant," Black Hat dropped the requested device on the bed, just within his reach.

Moving gingerly, he picked up the phone and unlocked it. "I want to see if they took the payment yet," he said, half to himself and half in explanation, as he tapped through to his online banking. "Gotta get used to not seeing five figures in… What the hell?"

He squinted accusatorially at the screen—there were still five figures. Not an entirely unwelcome surprise, but a surprise all the same, and a puzzling one at that. "Guess they didn't process the payment yet."

Black Hat, in wordless reply, laid a credit card (sleek, black, and no doubt with an impossibly high credit limit) on the bedside table. It wasn't the business card Flug recognized, but what he could only assume was—

No way. It was too nice even for a normal person, but the question popped out before he could reel it back—"Sir, did you—?"

The slight shift in his seat was Black hat's equivalent of a shrug. "Consider it your holiday bonus."

The fact that he had, and the fact that it was an impossibly thoughtful gesture for someone who wasn't in the line of work they were in, made Flug's chest tighten in the best way possible. "Thank you—sir, I don't know if I can thank you en—"

This made Black Hat look up from the paper, looking almost miffed at the thought of dealing with human emotion. "Don't get soft on me, Flug."

"Understood, sir." His boss' reservations aside, he couldn't stop himself from feeling utter delight all the same.