Scent of Iron

The nasty trick about Emil's own disease was that he couldn't wait until he started feeling unwell. By the time he started having side effects, it meant he was already suffering from organ damage. He needed to stay ahead of the curve, donating regularly to keep it from building up too much.

He hadn't given much thought to donating blood when he'd first arrived. He'd done only a single donation (at a blood drive after a serious accident), and he was terribly overdue. He was lucky though, because someone had pointed him towards the answer to his problems - a blood bar.

A literal blood bar, that took actual blood donations, and even better: Paid for them. Emil didn't have any moral qualms about donating blood to people who were going to drink it, considering that if he didn't donate blood regularly it would actually be healthier for him to injure himself until he wasn't about to burst from iron buildup, and the idea of getting actual money for it was... appealing. It wasn't like he was desperate for cash, but a bit more spending money was always nice. He lived modestly, and he could think of a few places where a few hundred dollars would help.

He'd found the building easily enough (although he wished it was a bit farther from the underground), and the strong scent of blood made his nose wrinkle. He was familiar enough with it, but it didn't mean he liked it, and he had to focus on being polite to resist pinching his nose as he stepped inside, glancing around.

Emil wasn't a complete idiot - he hadn't come in blind. Even so, he'd come in knowing he was going to have to talk at least a bit, and he'd stood in front of the mirror, practicing what he was planning to say. Just as long as he could stay on script, he'd be fine, but he was very nearly knocked off kilter by the appearance of a woman - a woman with wings. She was tall, but it was the wings that caught his attention, and he ended up sharing for several moments before he brought his attention back to his carefully prepared lines.

"I hear you pay for blood donations?" He didn't wait for a reply - just carried on, because he knew she would say 'yes' - that was why he was there, after all. "I have type-two haemochromatosis - I have to donate a usual amount once a month, although I'm currently two months overdue." And at risk of damaging his organs if he put it off any longer, all the worse.

He paused, fishing in his pocket and withdrawing what was undeniably a pamphlet printed off the internet - a pamphlet explaining the basics of his disease, which he handed over, just in case she was unfamiliar.

Emil had been running into a lot of talkative people. At work, on the job, and just going about his daily life, he seemed to constantly be put in situations where people wanted him to talk. It was refreshing to have someone who seemed to want very little from him, at least verbally. The winged woman seemed far more interested in his blood than his words, and Emil was surprisingly fine with that. He was entirely used to the process of giving blood, so unless she pulled something weird on him... well, it should be business as usual.

"Emil Virtanen." He offered, following her closely up the stairs. He wasn't quite sure what to make of the wings, but he supposed he was okay with them as long as she didn't start zipping around. That was... well, he hadn't been on the island quite long enough for that sort of thing to be usual for him.

He was, whether he'd admit it or not, rather curious about the blood bar. The only creatures he knew of that drank blood were vampires - so was it really just a vampire bar?

Ahh, forms. He was good at forms. He'd filled out a lot of forms after the last few years, and he vastly preferred forms to talking. Forms were not ambiguous. They were clear, and didn't involve him tripping over his words or stopping mid-sentence. He knew all the answers to this one, largely due to his extensive time at the hospital, and had filled it out in record time. He only had one disease, which he'd already alerted them to, and actually had an extremely solid idea of just what he did or didn't have thanks to all the medical tasting he'd done.

He was done before she was even off the phone, his writing small and neat. He was a precise sort of person, and he'd been told that his handwriting suited him on more than one occasion.

He wasn't sure if he was supposed to stay seated, but after a moment's thought he decided he probably was - so he stayed where he was, sliding the three sheets over to the edge of the little table.

For some reason, he had thought the winged woman would be doing it. That said, it was a silly thought. There was no reason she'd do her own work. You didn't expect CEOs to file their own tax returns, after all.

Blood donation was old hat to him. He'd been donating blood for more than half his life, and he honestly could have done it in his sleep. At one point - before he'd ever been kidnapped - he'd even tried to convince his father to let him do it himself. No such luck - his father insisted the blood be donated, and that meant doing it properly.

He leaned back in the chair, left arm held out. He waited for the man to have his focus, and then tapped his vein of choice - the one he basically got half his donations from. Thankfully, he had excellent veins. If he hadn't, donating would have been far more pain than it was. He nodded to the woman, and while he'd originally chosen the place for the cheque, he was simply happy that he was getting rid of the excess iron. Having it there just made him worried. There was no way for him to know how bad it was getting until it was already too late.