"– You could try another hospital? It's not even that late, really, it'd be open – ish – at night and there might be someone?"

"It sounds like a good idea, yeah."

"You guys up to sitting in the car for another – what, like, forty minutes to get there, probably?"

"No. Please no. Spare us from the horrible torture of forty minutes in the car to save someone's life. The horror."

"Right but it doesn't actually save the life just having you in the car, and I could go there after dropping two of you off or something." Shrug. "Whatever."

"Yes but we want to ride the rush, too."

"So it's forty minutes there and forty minutes back in the car to ride the rush, and I'm just checking you're all okay with that."

He starts driving anyway. Convenient to have looked at a local map since he died and woke up, isn't it.

"Also to be around in case anything goes pearshaped, maybe this time I could, like, go with you after you scouted the place like we planned?"

"– I wasn't going to feed my blood to them straight away? I was scouting for candidates as well as security and stuff."

"Oh. I thought you were gonna do it in parts."

"You did ask me if I'd made any daring rescues." Shrug.

"Because you'd taken so long!"

"What, like a minute? If that?"

"More like three!"

"Uh-huh."

"So that's the plan, then? In, scope, out, carry me, then save someone?"

"Yeah, and 'scope' doesn't involve scoping out the ER? Just looking at where it is?"

"I dunno, I mean, the point of having me around is making sure you won't be suddenly overcome with desire for someone's neck in an uncontrolled situation."

"I mean, I'm not sure there's much more risk of that 'walking around in the ER' than 'running around in the corridors', except for the open wounds but they're not all that much of a problem…"

"You could just not breathe."

"I could! That's true. Which then, I think, further reduces the need for someone to be along with me while I'm scoping the place out?"

"Do you know whether the sound of heartbeats or something also affects you?"

"– In the sense that if I'm hungry and looking for something to bite I'll be able to use heartbeats for it, yes? But they don't make me hungrier or lose control all by themselves, whereas breathing can do that."

"Okay."

"That still sounds like there should be someone there…"