The plea went ignored for the moment, as Eridan paused to watch the gears click in Eddie's head. It wasn't that cavalry couldn't come later - a hospital stay, reconstructive surgery, Eridan Ampora seething behind bars. It was that maybe Eddie didn't want it to. Eridan had gambled on the man's sense of image, the cost of publicity and lost face too terrible to pay, and for the moment, it seemed like it had paid off.

The last person Eddie had called for when in such a heavily compromised state had ended with Eridan getting bitten. He supposed it made sense, in a full circle kind of way, that he had no one to lean on here and now.

"Then how I see it, you got two options. One," Eridan began, pausing in his ministrations to slap his scalpel down in his palm, for emphasis, "I dump you out somewhere and you hope for the best. You die, probably. Or two, you text Felicia you're gonna be out tonight, and we hawe ourselwes a fuckin' slumber jam. Maybe I patch you up myself and you riddle up some crazy fuckin' reasonin' away a these new battle scars a yours. I dunno. Thing is, that second one has a kinda cost to it, if you get me. Nothin' big. You don't ewen hawe to get up out of your chair."

Here Eridan stood again, drifting off to a point in the kitchen just adjacent to Eddie's seat. Something glinted back behind his set of obnoxiously fancy Swedish knives.

A video camera.

"All you gotta do is smile."

He tapped his cheek, smiling a rictus.