Chap. Summary: Lying in bed with entirely too much time on one's hands is not an appealing prospect.

Rating: It you must rate it, this chapter probably drifts towards pg13/Teen/equivalent, though it's only because Dick's now too tired and sick to keep control of his thoughts.

Warnings: Fairly sensitive subject matter. Do not read the opening few pages if you're already depressed; I don't want to be held responsible.

Time: It starts roughly eighteen hours after the last chapter, that is, in the morning of the next day.

Notes:
Unlike High Noon, this story is not going to be shorter chapters of a minute-by-minute recount of what happens. I can't write that many chapters. Instead, I'm going for a series of inter-connected vignettes to tell the greater overall story. Confused yet? Don't worry; so am I. It'll make sense as the story unfolds. I hope.
And yes, this is a shorter installment than the first one. Blame two six-day migraines, plus the start of university, where I'm a full-time engineering student. And my mum going to hospital. Three times in a month, then diagnosed with a disease that can kill her within the year. I'm not up to writing anything longer or more in-depth. Nor, can I promise when the next one will be. It hasn't been written yet, while these first two chapters were. And I need some time to refocus.



CALL OF DUTY
Obstacle Course

2. Collateral Damage


Man, the air-conditioning in this place was cool. Cold, really. And the linen cupboard that I knew held the other blanket for the bed was on the other side of the room. Which was real smart. Whose bright idea was that, anyway? What was the point in putting a cupboard all the way over there instead of being nice and close and convenient for the poor shivering patient on the bed who wasn't allowed to walk?

And while we were on questions like that, who designed this room anyway? I'd bet that they'd never heard of originality. I could have sworn that it was the same room I'd woken up from the coma in, all those weeks ago, if I hadn't known that I was not only in a completely different hospital, but in another city entirely. Wouldn't have known it for looking around, though. There was the same nauseating taupe-beige paint on the walls – nauseating since it reminded me of all the times I'd seen someone's insides on their outsides. The bed also had the same lumps in the same places, and even the blankets were worn in identical patterns. (Trust me, I checked.) Even the furniture all looked the same. In short, my surroundings looked like they were was all stamped out of the same monotonous mold, just like each and every one of the innumerable hospital rooms I'd had the dubious pleasure of staying in over the years.

Which was a number entirely too high to count.

And what was the deal with that, anyway? There had to be some reason why I kept ending up in hospital, and I knew it wasn't me and my skills. Was it something I'd done? Had I massively ticked Somebody off without knowing it, so that they kept sending these things my way? Was there some kind of invisible sign on me somewhere advertising that I was simply some poor sap just waiting to get into trouble, so I could end up in another room just like this one? What was it about me that kept landing me in rooms just like this – and, if there was something, how the hell did I fix it?

Well, that last one was easy to answer, at least. I might not have known how to fix this (short of discovering time travel in my current abundance of spare time), but I did know why it happened. Or rather, I knew how it happened, which I supposed was pretty much the same thing at this point. It happened because I'd been the only one in the area who was also willing to do anything, that day in Blüdhaven when one Diablo Simmons decided to spice up his life by firing into the sidewalk's lunchtime crowds. Hadn't exactly been his brightest idea, seeing as he didn't have much of a life anymore, now that he was in custody and awaiting his trial.

More to the point, it wasn't his brightest idea to do it in my city, during my lunchbreak on what had already been a very long and frustrating day. I was sure that there was a moral about that, somewhere in all this. Probably something along the lines of not getting between a tired and frustrated cop and his lunch without being willing to pay the consequences.

'Hmph.' He was just lucky that he wasn't stopping me from having a cup of coffee. Then he really would've been in trouble.

You know, speaking of food, I never did get my lunch that day. Heck, I haven't even been back to that little Korean deli in the days since, although that's hardly been my fault. No, the blame for that lies squarely with Diablo, not with me. I certainly wasn't the one who shot me twice with another cop's gun; I may be a world class acrobat, but not even I could contort myself like that, nor would I want to. Besides, if I were really going to shoot myself, I wouldn't shoot myself in the leg and in the chest. No, if I was that determined to put pellets of lead in my body, I'd go for a more permanent method and location.

No sense in doing things halfway, and all that.

Although, to be fair, if I were that determined to off myself, I wouldn't be using a gun. It's too messy, for one thing, and the bullets usually do too much unnecessary damage that gets in the way of killing yourself – my current situation being a case in point. Besides, I didn't think I could stand the taste of the metal long enough to actually pull the trigger. I was fussy that way.

Then there was my whole reluctance to pulling the trigger to begin with to consider, thanks to Bruce.

And while I'd seen enough to know that men prefer to use hanging and shooting themselves as their preferred methods of suicide, well, that simply wasn't me. Guns were definitely out. And while hanging might once have had its appeal...well, certain boyhood memories had a way of rearing up when I least expected them. So, no, no thank-you. Not for this little black vigilante.

No, if I was really that determined to end it all, I was pretty sure that I'd use pills...or a drug of some kind. They were easy enough to obtain, even through the more legal channels. One of the few advantages of having money is that you could pick and choose your doctors, and whoever you picked has to take your word for what medications you were on and why. Which was also one of the few times that being a cop actually comes in handy – doctors are more likely to take your word for it when you tell them you needed the meds for the aftermath of a hard case after you flash your badge.

But when I did it – if I was going to do it – I wouldn't do it in public. If I was going to check out that way, I'd want to do it in private. But I still wouldn't use my apartment. For one thing, it wouldn't be fair on the next landlord. It was so hard to rent out or sell an apartment where someone committed suicide.

And that brought my throughts round to my own landlord mess. When I got out of here, I really needed to find someone willing to take over ownership of my apartment building in case something like that happened to me. Not that I really planned to die that way in the future, but, well, it always helped to have contingency plans in place and all that – especially if someone decided to that kind of thing to me for me, like Diablo tried to. I had to put it in my will or something – that is, if I had one. Off the top of my head, I couldn't recall actually sitting down and making one, but then I'd make it a pretty fair bet that there was one floating around somewhere. I knew myself well enough to know that.

Be prepared for everything, and all that.

I just hoped I'd kept it up to date.

Personally, I'd probably hand most of my holdings over to Bruce, or maybe even Lucius, if I was that desperate to off myself – with the exception of a few personal items for the Titans, Bruce, Tim, and for Barbara. No matter how depressed I'd ever gotten, and I'd certainly had my moments, I could never see myself as that bad, leaving Clancy and Aaron and everybody else who depended on me in the lurch like that.

At least that way I wouldn't be there to see the fallout when everyone found out that I'd been the mysterious owner of the building virtually from the start. That had got to be a benefit of kicking off. Although...on the other hand, there was also the drawback that I wouldn't see Clancy's face when they told her. Oh, to be a proverbial fly on the wall at that moment... which would be possible, I supposed, if I believed in reincarnation. Which I don't, by the way. Unless I get to believe that the Joker comes back as a cockroach.

But that's digressing, isn't it?

Where was I again?

Ah, yes, the methodology of doing myself in.

So, like I was saying, pills would win hands down. Mainly because they were tidy and easy, and if I was that desperate to die, I wouldn't want it to be as hard as living. And you didn't really have to psyche yourself up to it either. Just swallow them, wash them down with some alcohol, go to sleep, and off you go. Out of all the ways to kill yourself, or try to, using pills was definitely the shortest, sweetest and most painless method. (Cyanide, for the record, is not as quick or as painless as the movies make it look.) Trust me on that. I'd seen almost all the ways to do the deed. And I'd done a few of them myself too. Technically. Bad undercover jobs, for the most part. Long stories, all of them.

And no, before you ask, my throwing myself off buildings every night didn't count in that tally of the things I'd seen and done. Never had, despite what people might tell you, and never would. That was fun, not suicide.

Although, to be fair, there might be a few suicide methods out there that I hadn't seen yet...but I doubted it. After all, there were only so many ways to do yourself enough damage that your body would voluntarily choose dying over living. Because, let's face it, it would have to take something pretty major to convince the body to give up its addiction to living.

Unfortunately, even before I became a cop, I'd seen plenty of ways to make the body do just that. After I became a cop, of course, I saw even more. We got called out, usually, with the homicide detectives so that we could guard the crime scene, keep the chain of evidence clear, et cetera. Like they say, it was a dirty job but someone had to do it. And lately, it had been me and my partner, Sergeant Rohrbach, or me and Officer Gannon if she was busy.

It was great.

It meant I could usually gather a little evidence of my own on the more unusual cases. There were usually plenty of those. This was Blüdhaven, after all. The unusual was practically a weekly occurrence.

At least, it had been great, before I got injured. I didn't know who was doing that sort of work now. Probably Kelly Chavez and his partner, Domingo Alvarez, if I had to guess. They were right above Amy and I on the "dirty job" roster, followed by pretty much every other member of the small number of clean cops in the BPD. Then came the rookies, and then whoever had managed to annoy our lovely "Inspector" Arnot that week.

Welcome to the reality of the BPD's pecking order.

'Damn.' Wish I knew who it was. Sure, they might have been clean as a whistle, but some officers on that list couldn't gather evidence if it was presented to them on a silver platter. Heck, I was pretty sure that they wouldn't recognise decent evidence if it hit them in the face. They were good cops and all, but...well, I wouldn't want them at my crime scene if I was a detective. Three city blocks away should be far enough away for comfort. Maybe more on a bad day.

Actually, at the moment, I'd settle for finding out what a fly was doing in Blüdhaven. I didn't really know who was doing squat there anymore, except for what I could wring out of Tim and Cass when they stopped by. Even if they never seemed to call in enough, nor know what I really wanted to know about -- they didn't exactly have an insider line to the BPD's inner sanctum, or Blockbuster's for that matter. And they didn't know who to go to in order to get that. I did. On all counts.

And for the record, it wasn't my idea that those two take care of the Haven for me. It just seemed to happen that way, courtesy of Batman. If it'd been up to me, well, I don't know who I'd have picked; hell, for all I know, I might've even suggested that it be Robin and Batgirl to take over looking out for that hellhole I call home.

Yeah, well, then again, I probably wouldn't have picked those two anyway. While I didn't doubt their skills and abilities, the 'Haven could be a brutal place even for me at times, and I was pretty much used to the place and what it threw at me. And those two were still young enough that they deserved to have some kind of childhood. Besides, the things I wanted kept tabs on, well, they were not places 'kids' deserved to be, whether they wore a mask or not. So of course I was pressing them, if only to make sure they stayed away from those places.

Come to think of it, that was probably why they didn't visit too much anymore. Donna did warn me about that, that I was probably pressing them too hard for information.

But what else could they expect? I'd already been stuck in bed for far too long, and, if Leslie was to be believed, it looked like it was only going to get worse. There just wasn't much you could do when your butt was forced to spend weeks parked firmly on a bed and you didn't want to move too much. I swear, I'd already counted the hospital's ceiling tiles so often that I was seeing them in my dreams. Plus I'd read all the books that Alfred would allow me access to. Twice over, and that was only counting the last few days. Week before that, I'd gone through them even more frequently.

Which simply showed how desperate I was getting for something to occupy my time, especially since been trained to remember all the details after reading something through once. It comes under 'Cruel And Unusual Punishment', for a man to be forced to read a book when he already knows exactly how it's going to end.

Actually, at this point, I didn't need to turn a page to know what the words were be. I already had them all written out in my head. Word for word. Page for page. From the first letter right down to the very last period at the end of the final sentence.

Damn. I was digressing again. Or was that ranting?

Whatever.

Anyway.

Getting back to who should be taking care of Blüdhaven, did I mention that it was Batman who decided it? That was right, Batman, not Bruce. He'd 'informed' me of his decision two hours ago, during one of the lulls between all the tests, just before I got sentenced to this room. And even then, he'd made it pretty clear that I'd only found out because Alfred had been badgering him for days to tell me at all. But, as annoying as that was, that wasn't what really got to me – and still was getting to me – about the whole thing.

No, what was ticking me off was something far simpler. I simply wished that a certain someone – heck, anyone – had actually asked me what I thought. Even if it wouldn't have affected what the final decision was going to be – and I knew damn well, better than most, that it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Especially with Batman around. I knew full well my having any say in the proceedings would've only been a delusion. But at least it still would have made another bitter pill in my life that little bit easier to swallow.

Because it was still my city, dammit, whether I was stuck in this damn hospital bed or not. The person looking after it in my absence should have been my choice. And that was the crux of it. I didn't get to choose. Period.

Still, now that Tim and Cassie were there, they'd better have been taking very good care of the 'Haven. I didn't want to find out that I had to clean that place up from the beginning once I finally got back on my feet and got out there again, whether it was as a cop or as Nightwing.

Whenever that would be.

If there'd be anything left for me to go back to.

That, I think, was always one of the hardest parts about being injured: having to let other people take over the cases I'd been working on, and then watching from the sidelines as the cases broke and credit was taken. It just stung something awful, to have put so much time and effort into solving those cases, and then have someone else tidy them all up and get the final credit.

But what hurt even more was to have to admit that I couldn't do it. Not physically anyway. Mentally, well, that was another matter entirely. At least, it would be, if Leslie wouldn't keep pumping enough drugs into my system to turn even my brain to mush. Which probably wasn't saying all that much right now.

Ah, right on cue. Think of the devil and here she was.

I nodded my head in greeting to Leslie as she came into my room, but didn't say anything. Didn't trust myself to, honestly. I might be in too foul a mood for niceties, but I was still on the ball enough to know that there was no way I wanted to alienate my only ally in this place. Sometimes, discretion really was the better part of valour.

Leslie, for her part, obviously had no idea what she was walking into. If she had, there was absolutely no way she would've smiled at me and asked so cheerily, "How are we doing today, Dick?"

It might have been me and this dark, foul mood I seemed to be in, but that cheerfulness grated on me even more than the generic 'we' did. She had no right to be so damn...upbeat. It certainly grated on me enough to make me lose the hold on the tongue that I'd been so determined to keep just a few seconds ago. "We both know how I'm doing, Doc," I retorted testily, then managed to re-clench my jaw again to prevent anything else from coming out. 'G-d, I hate my mouth sometimes.'

To her credit, Leslie's reaction to my shortness and tone of voice was simply an Alfred-level pointed look and one raised eyebrow. Kind of made me wonder whether Alfred taught her that trick, or whether it was the other way around. With those two, you could never tell. 'Ah, whatever.' All I knew was that it still worked a treat on me.

I sighed, slumped back in the hospital bed, and stared at the generic yellow cotton blanket I'd long ago pulled up to the neck to protect me from the cold air-conditioning. Anything to avoid that look. "Sorry, Doc," I murmured, managing to force down the irritation and inject at least a little sincerity into my voice. At least it wasn't too forced an apology. Well, I was apologetic for taking my feelings out on her, but that was about it.

Leslie's expression immediately softened, her aged eyes crinkling at me kindly. "That's okay, son. How's your day been then?"

'Boring,' was the obvious answer. As were a few more colourful adjectives. Instead I opted for silence and a one-armed shrug. It was so much safer and easier. When I get into moods like this, the less I opened my mouth, the less I offended people, and the less trouble I tended to find myself in as a result. Which meant that even one-word answers were out. Especially given my present mood, since my reply was likely to be a swear word for which Alfred would've had me eating soap for days for even thinking.

Leslie nodded anyway with a satisfied air, as if I'd just delivered some kind of supremely eloquent speech on how I'd spent my latest batch of hours of endless boredom. Well, here was a news flash for you. There weren't nothing in this room to do but count ceiling tiles and watch re-runs of shows that were old when Bruce and Alfred first took me in. So, no, I didn't need a thousand words to describe my day. Hell, I didn't even need five.

I was bored. Period.

I was also rather ticked off, but we'd already covered that.

"I've gotten back the results on your latest round of tests," Leslie told me, breaking into my wandering thoughts as she came into the room and settled the edge of the bed, my chart clasped tightly in one hand. At least the chart looked official now. Back at the Manor, it had been a hastily-clipped-together sheath of papers.

I nodded mutely and pasted an inquisitive look on my face, or as close to it as I could get. Actually, it was probably more frustration than anything, seeing as I couldn't read the writing on the chart despite the fact that it was facing me. And since it was upside-down too, well...reading that way was always even faster than reading the right way right way up for me. Much to Batman's chagrin, who'd really had to train himself in this area. Still, not even that kind of ability could stand up to the handwriting of whoever had last scrawled on my chart. At least not without a PhD in cryptography.

Leslie sighed softly, her eyes once more warming as they rested on me. "What do you want first? The good or the bad?"

'You mean I actually have a choice Pretending to consider the options for a moment, I settled for another one-armed shrug. Truth be told, I didn't care either way. News was news, and that was all there was to it. What difference did the order make? Either way, I was still going to find out what was going on. Finally.

"Right," Leslie sighed, blowing out a hard breath, probably in frustration at me and my attitude. I didn't blame her one bit. "I'll give you both at once then. The good news is that I'm pretty certain that I now know why your leg's been giving you so much grief. The bad news is that, if I'm right, we still need to do a bone biopsy and an MRI, and then you'll have to spend the next few weeks on an IV and lying quietly on a bed."

I stared at her, thoughts swirling in my head as I struggled to understand exactly what she was telling me – or not telling me. While I was definitely no doctor, since living with Bruce I had seen them often enough to know what certain things meant. "Let me guess," I muttered unhappily, clenching my good hand into a fist under the blanket, "all that equates to more hospital time."

Leslie nodded and seemed to brace herself. "I wanted you in a hospital so that we can keep monitoring you to make sure we're avoiding some of the more unpleasant complications. Two to three weeks of intravenous medication is the usual standard, and then you can take the rest of the antibiotics orally for the same amount of time. We'll probably be splinting or casting your leg for a few weeks while you're on the IV. We need to immobilise it and reduce the trauma and stress on your bone and muscles, and to give the limb a chance to recover from the infection."

I scowled at the blankets at that. Aside from the obvious prospects of extra hospital time – which I'd sorta expected anyway – and immobilisation for the leg – joy oh joy – I was still hearing other things, unexpected things, which I liked even less. "Wait just a minute. Did you say antibiotics? You mean to say that I somehow have a bacterial problem with my leg?" It had to be bacterial, because antibiotics didn't work on viruses. Nothing worked on a viral infection. Been there, done that, paid my pints of blood in full, and had absolutely no desire to go back there, thank-you very much.

She nodded at me, relaxing only slightly. "That's what everything's pointing towards – a bacterial infection. We'll need the MRI to determine its extent and the biopsy to figure out exactly which pathogen is involved so we'll know what antibiotic you need, but that's the most likely diagnosis at this point." She paused for a moment to take a deep breath. "The MRI results will also tell us more conclusively if I need to schedule you for surgery."

'What, now I'm up for surgery too?' I leaned back onto the pillows supporting me, wondering for a moment just how everything had gone to hell so quickly. It was only a few days ago that the physical therapist had finally declared me fit enough to start incorporating the leg's exercises into the daily therapy sessions. Of course, my one and only such therapy session ended rather disastrously, but that was hardly my fault. At least I now recalled enough of it that I know that I did try to warn Bruce before it all went south. Damn Bat didn't listen to me though. As usual.

And now I was facing weeks of hospital time, casts, and surgery. Joy. "So why wasn't it picked up earlier?" I prodded, doing my best not to let my lingering irritation show. I wasn't sure how successful I was.

"It's not that surprising, really," she shrugged. "The original infection was probably in the soft tissues beside the bone, and it likely took a while to reach the bone's center by travelling along the path where the bullet nicked you. More to the point, this kind of infection doesn't show up on X-rays for at least 10 days after ir sets in. By the time it would've been detectable by standard radiology tests, you were already long since out of the hospital and back at the Manor."

Only to end up back in the hospital shortly thereafter. In that light, maybe wondering how it had all gone to hell in a hand-basket so quickly wasn't such a bad question to be asking. "Where'd the infection in the tissue come from then?"

"Hard to say, at this point. With the timeline we're looking at, I don't think it was the bullet. Not even your immune system can fight off this kind of infection for so long without some symptoms appearing earlier, or without it being detected in the tests and surgery they did after you woke up."

Yeah, okay, that made sense. I could still remember how...thorough...the tests were that she spoke of, even as drugged up as I'd been at the time. They'd been so thorough that drugs hadn't been enough. "What other options are there?"

Leslie sighed and shrugged her shoulders. Her expression became troubled. "I...I don't know, honestly. The timeline points to the hospital as the site of the original infection, but Rabe Memorial isn't on the alert list as a hospital that is a carrier for the kind of bacteria we're looking at."

"So, the timeline's definite but the hospital's wrong?" I prompted, trying to clarify the situation, to make sure I'd been hearing everything correctly, that I hadn't missed anything. The machine in my head was already working on overdrive on this – it had been as bored as the rest of me. Finally, I had a problem to work on besides how many times I could count the ceiling tiles in an hour. Or how many times I could charm the female nurses in that hour, seeing as we all knew it wasn't going to go anywhere. Not with Barbara around to keep me honest.

Leslie nodded, her troubled look deepening into frustration. "Yep. It's not on the lists, be it officially or unofficially. Not yet, anyway."

Which said a lot, especially if it wasn't even on the unofficial list. If anyone were going to know, the unofficial doctor grapevine should have been one of the first. Actually, come to think of it, I was pretty sure I would've also been among the first to know too, given the number and nature of the connections I'd cultivated in Blüdhaven recently. At least, I had been cultivating them up until I got injured.

And anyway, Rabe Memorial isn't the kind of hospital that would have those kinds of problems in the first place. The usual Blüdhaven mire and corruption aside, the Rabe Memorial hospital wasn't all that bad. From the patient's standpoint, it's obvious that the doctors and nurses care a lot about their patients, despite some lingering rottenness in the higher-ups. And everyone knows that its the doctors and nurses who carry the weight of the hospital, no matter what the admin think.

"I suppose," Leslie continued, "it's possible that there've been some undocumented cases and you're only the first I've encountered, but I highly doubt it. And besides, I was there every time someone went anywhere near your wounds."

The words struck an immediate chord of memory deep within me, but not the way that I'd expected. While my memory might not have been the best since I woke up from the coma, and there was an awful lot I didn't remember about those hellish two weeks I spent in hospital after waking up, I just knew that there was something about that time, or something about the phrasing Leslie had just used, that bothered me...but what? I frowned then, not sure what my instincts were telling me. Was it something I'd done? Something I'd seen without realizing what it meant at the time? Or was it something else entirely? What was that pointy thing poking at me from the back of my mind?

Well, whatever it was, one thing was for sure: it wasn't coming into proper focus like my hunches usually did. No matter how hard I thought about it, the answer eluded me. I just knew that something didn't sit right about this. It was almost as if I was missing some vital pieces of the puzzle that would let everything fall into place, however crookedly.

Blowing out a hard breath, I forced my brain to set the matter aside. For the moment. Given some time to think, my subconscious would probably come up with something more definite. And if it didn't, well, there was a first time for everything, right?

"So," I began, "this is changing the subject a little, but what's the current official verdict?"

Cocking her head to the side slightly, Leslie suddenly grinned at me, eyes dancing in a burst of amusement. At what, I had no idea. I just hoped it wasn't about me. "Do you want the medicalese version or the layman's one?" she asked.

"Does it matter?" I shrugged carelessly, using both shoulders this time and noting absently the lack of pain in my left shoulder. 'Hmph.' The bullet graze there must've finally healed. 'About time something went my way.'

"No, I guess not," the gentle doctor replied, pursuing her lips for a moment. "I can't say for certain without the tests, of course, but I'm ninety-nine percent positive that you've got what we call osteomyelitis, an inflammation and infection in the bone's central tissue. It seems to be in the acute form at the moment, so this is one of the better forms of bone infection to have, actually. It'll be harder on you in the short-term, but you'll have a better chance of leading your usual more...active life once we can remove the infection," she told me, coaching her words delicately. Me, I didn't know why she bothered. It wasn't like there was anyone else in the room besides the two of us.

"The treatment," Leslie continued, "involves rehydrating you with fluids and electrolytes, and then getting you started on an antibiotic regime once we've confirmed the identity of the pathogen and the extent of the infection from the test results. We'll know from that if surgery is required." She paused a moment then, and I swear, I caught a glimpse of a shadow or something flicker through her expression. Almost too fast for me, but not enough for me to dismiss so easily. Once again, I was pretty sure that there was something here she wasn't telling me.

She flicked through a few pages on my chart, found something, then sighed and met my eyes again. "On the other hand, we don't know when you contracted the infection, so we have no real guarantee that we've caught it in time to prevent the more serious side-effects. I won't lie to you, Dick," she promised gently, her voice and face radiating conviction and compassion. "All going well, we've hopefully caught it early enough that the infection won't have spread too far. But if we haven't, we might be facing a secondary infection, most likely in your knee. A more immediate concern is that if you don't respond to the antibiotics within thirty-six hours. That would mean that the infection is more major than we think and surgery will be necessary to remove what we can of the infection." She sighed and rubbed her temples as if she had a headache coming. "I'm praying it won't come to that, though."

I simply nodded at all this and said nothing. What could I say? It was a lot to take in. I'd never had this osteomyelithingy before. I didn't know what to expect. All I had to go on was what our family doctor was saying, which I already knew wasn't the whole story. Her body language told me that. She was still hiding something, something I'd no doubt need to know at some point...but I didn't pursue it. Couldn't. Wouldn't. I didn't need yet another mess added to my pile while I was still struggling to assimilate what she'd told me.

Leslie smiled at me then, no doubt guessing at what I was feeling, but the smile didn't reach her eyes. "Now, before I tell you anything else, we need to do the biopsy and send you for that MRI. Do you want someone with you during the procedures?"

I shrugged once more, feeling vaguely numb about it all. Too much to take in all at once, I supposed. "Who's out there?"

"Bruce, Alfred, Tim, Donna, and Roy," she told me, ticking the names off her fingers.

All I could think was that there was one person on that list who wouldn't be shaken by my reactions if it hurt too much while also having hands that I could squeeze without always having to hold back. "Donna, then." Besides, I didn't want Bruce anywhere near me right now. Nor did I want to give Roy any extra ammunition if I could help it. And I didn't know how I felt about Alfred right now, and didn't really want to know until I had more time to sort things out with Bruce. But if it was going to be as bad as Leslie's body language seemed to be indicating, then I didn't want Tim anywhere near this. Which left Donna anyway.

"Right. I'll get everything set up and come back in a few minutes with Donna to start the ball rolling." Giving my good leg a few compassionate pats through the blankets, she took her leave.

Breathing out hard and welcoming the expected complaint from the healing broken ribs, I slumped back on the hospital bed and did my best not to think too much while I waited for Donna.

I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't all that successful in the not-thinking bit. I kept coming back to the same two questions. First, how would this infection thing affect my chances of going back to my two jobs of cop and vigilante? A major can of worms in and of itself that I didn't want to open, even if only my thoughts, Even so, it was still a nicer item of contemplation than my second thought: 'Why?'

Or, more specifically, why me? And why now?

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Outside...

Long years of regulation and self-discipline were all that allowed Dr. Leslie Thompkins to hold herself back until she got out of the room and away from her patient. It was only when she was outside and the door safely shut behind her that she allowed herself to stop, lean back against the door, and let loose the curses that she'd wanted to let loose earlier. Holding a conversation with Dick these days was like trying to walk on eggshells; she never knew when she'd put a foot wrong until she did, and he reacted. Most notably when she'd first entered the room. Whatever he'd been thinking about before she came, it surely had him riled.

Enough so that it seemed to go beyond the irritation that was a usual symptom of osteomyelitis. Because she'd seen Dick irritated before. Heck, she'd seen him in most emotional states over the years. It came part-and-parcel with the job. But this...this seemed to reach levels beyond mere irritation.

If she didn't know better, she'd say Dick was actually angry.

Now that was a fearsome thought.

In all of the close to fifteen years she'd been around Dick, she'd seen his anger exactly once. And that once had been more than enough. His true anger was the slow burning kind, the kind that could burn for years and years before the explosion that gave vent to it. Drawn out, yes, but no less passionate for it. If anything, she'd venture to say that it was worse. When Dick got angry with someone, you knew that when (and that was 'when', not an 'if') he chose to act on it, well, it wasn't pretty. It reminded her of magma, truth be told. Slow moving it might seem to some, yeah, but it came with a burn all of its own...and woe betide those who were stuck in its path.

But that wasn't the only thing that worried her. There were other things that she'd picked up during the conversation that had set off her mental alarm bells. The way he was huddled under the blanket even though she'd specifically asked the hospital staff to keep the a/c in his room a little lower than normal. There was the way he seemed to blank out on her for just a moment before he'd give her an answer, as if his thoughts had wandered...or worse. And she hadn't missed that he'd been having some memory problems since waking up from his coma, even though the tests she'd insisted on since had seemed to clear him of any brain damage.

Then there was there was something that was...almost off, if that was the word for it,...about the way he was acting. That wasn't normal for him. It wasn't anything she could definitively put her finger on and point it out to others, but she could sense it. She knew him too well not to.

But how much of his condition was due to lingering problems from the coma, and how much to the osteomyelitis? Or was it simply due to an active mind forced to spend too much time doing nothing and was thus quietly going nuts?

Or was there something else she was overlooking that might explain why he was healing so slowly? Not even osteomyelitis, at this early stage, could've slowed his healing down as much as it seemed to have. She just had to be missing something, she could feel it. But what?

She pinched the bridge of her nose in attempt to stave off the headache she could feel threatening behind her eyeballs. 'I swear, one of these days, trying to treat this family and their injuries is going to break me...'

It was already bad enough that they refused to listen to Alfred's and her own repeated appeals to stop doing this vigilante business night after night. Bad enough that they didn't seem to have one single speck of self-preservation in their bodies, seeing as how often they came to her for treatment. Bad enough that they couldn't simply stop, slow down, and take some time off for themselves, not even for. One. Single. Night.

So why couldn't they have an injuries that were either easy to treat or non-life-threatening? You know, just something simple to treat and not threatening either their lives or her skill? Something that would make up for everything else she had to put up with? Oh, that's right, she'd forgotten: this was Batman and his adoptive family that she was treating; of course nothing was going to be simple. It was just as much a given that nothing was ever going be easy as it was that they'd be out there on the rooftops the moment they were out of her reach.

'Although, if I wanted things to be simple and easy, I never would've become a doctor...'

And then who would've treated them?

Who else would've been willing to put up with all of this?

Sighing to herself one final time, she strode off down the hall to see about arranging the tests Dick needed and talking to Donna and everyone else...and then finding herself a couple of aspirin tablets. 'I just know that today's going to be one of those days...'


Next up/Teaser:Tests and discoveries and explanations while they prepare for treatment.