So now here I am updating this story. :) For those of you who aren't reading my other little Knight Rider series, here's the deal about this thing: Unfortunately, my only existing complete copy of this story went POOF! in a blaze of power-surge-zapped external hard drive. So, I'm forced to reconstruct it. Fortunately, I do have a number of older versions of parts of the story on other computers that didn't get themselves zapped, plus I have a pretty good memory of the story stored in the not-yet-senile sectors of Brain's hard drive. So, the task is not as daunting as it might have been. Still, it is unfortunately a time-consuming task, and right now, my work that I'm actually paid for is keeping me very busy. (Which is, of course, a good thing. Income is nice.) The upshot is that I'm doing the best I can, all while recovering from very unexpected surgery, on top of everything else. That's a process that's taking a lot longer than I expected, probably because I'm not as young as I used to be. It really does all fall apart after you hit 45. *sigh*
But anyway, here's the next part of this story. The first little bit of it finally introduces, sort of, the villains, and it perhaps hints at their true purpose. Because, yes, there are villains in this story. *laughs* It just took 'em a while to show up…and now they'll promptly disappear again. For a little while, anyway. But in any case, here you go. I hope that this (and the rest of the story, as it arrives) will be worth the wait.
"We aren't receiving telemetry anymore."
Hearing the words, even as softly spoken as they had been, the older woman looked up sharply from what she had been doing and speared the younger woman who had spoken with an intensely expectant gaze. Her short, perfectly-coiffed hair was a bright, brittle silver, her face thin, with cavernous hollows under her cheekbones. Beneath a layer of artfully applied makeup, her skin was lined, pale, thin, and she was dressed in black, as always. Always funereal black, as if her entire world was dead and she was always, eternally, mourning it. Her body, beneath its swathe of stark, harsh black, was not as rounded and soft and womanly as it had once been. It was all hard, knife-sharp, forbidding angles of bone and sinew under a paper-thin veneer of skin.
She was wasting away, slowly. Her purpose, her sole mission in life now, was all that was sustaining her, was all that was still yoking her to the living world.
But her eyes… Her dark eyes were still very much alive. They blazed with a focused and manically determined fire that was not hot but that was instead intensely, hatefully cold. Cold enough to burn to a pile of frozen ashes anyone or anything they touched, if she so desired.
The younger woman shuddered slightly, reflexively, as that frigidly burning gaze leveled on her and then focused intensely on her as she hovered in the doorway almost nervously; she suddenly had no desire to be in the same room as the other woman. She added, almost hesitantly, "At least, we haven't received any telemetry in the past several hours."
"And that means?" the older woman sharply, crisply demanded, her voice as dangerous, as silkily, quietly powerful as it had ever been. Just like the blazing, determined, devouring eyes.
The younger woman bit her lip uncertainly and then quietly answered, "Most likely, it means that they've moved the AI out of the car."
And the older woman smiled, slowly and triumphantly, at the younger woman's words. It was a terrifying expression to behold because the smile didn't serve to warm or animate her face at all. It only made her eyes blaze more frigidly, making her seem colder still. More remote. Deader, even, as if the smile was not a smile at all but rather a death rictus that suddenly transformed her once-lovely face into a grinning skull. The younger woman had to fight not to cringe, not to back away, under its onslaught, but if the older woman noticed her growing unease at all, she obviously felt no need to acknowledge it.
"That is welcome news, my dear," the older woman answered approvingly. "You've done very well. I was beginning to have my doubts, so I'm relieved that you were right after all."
The compliment, and even the sudden flush of warmth in the older woman's voice that went along with it, did nothing to reassure the younger woman. If anything, it only increased her disquiet, which only increased further still as the older woman blinked, slowly. Her gaze abruptly lost its terrifying, piercing focus and then inevitably strayed, as always, to the photograph held in the ornate, silver-gilt frame that was sitting on the heavy, dark wood desk in front of her. She reached out to run long, skeletal fingers along the edges of the frame, the gesture a disconcertingly loving one.
The younger woman had never seen the image that the frame held, had never wanted to see it. Because she didn't need to see it. She knew what it was, and she knew exactly what it meant. She swallowed uneasily at the thought, and then she slipped away, undismissed and quickly, retreating down the same claustrophobic hallway through which she'd arrived.
But as she left, before she was completely out of earshot, she heard the older woman speak softly, and she knew that she was speaking to the photograph. Her voice was almost a coo, the kind of voice that one might use to soothe a squalling infant.
"It won't be long now," she said. "Not long at all."
Michael experienced a flash of muzzy confusion when he awoke. The clock on the bedside table showed almost exactly the same time that he remembered it showing the last time he'd looked at it, just before he'd finally fallen asleep after a few hours spent tossing and turning despite overwhelming physical and mental exhaustion. He had been too tired to sleep, too keyed-up, drowning in too much in anxious anticipation of someone knocking on his door to deliver some very bad news to him. But that hadn't happened, and he'd finally managed to sleep.
Now, as he awoke, the clock's hands hadn't seemed to have moved much, and the light level in the room seemed to be about the same as he remembered it being just before exhausted sleep had finally staked its claim on him. It was deeply puzzling. But then, as his brain started to clear out, a process that took a lot longer than it usually took, he realized what the difference was. He'd finally fallen asleep around 6:00PM; it was now 6:07AM the next morning. He'd slept like a rock, dreamlessly, perhaps even motionlessly, never once awakening during the evening and then through the entire night, so it was almost as if time had not passed at all, from his point of view.
Michael realized, dimly, that he'd likely awakened at all only because his bladder was suffering from the inevitable effects of the gallons of coffee that he'd drunk over the past few days. But he didn't want to get out of bed just yet. Instead, he rolled heavily onto his back, staring up at the ceiling while he swallowed rapidly a few times, trying to coax some moisture back into a mouth that felt like it was filled with cotton balls and that tasted like three-day-old coffee. At about the same time, he realized that his entire right arm was completely numb. He must have slept on it in a way that had cut off his circulation. He did not look forward to its eventual awakening. Grimacing at all of it, Michael threw off the bedcovers with the arm that wasn't numb, rolled out of bed, and then staggered to the bathroom.
He emerged from the bathroom about a half-hour later. He'd showered, awkwardly shaved and brushed his teeth with his not-tingling, not-half-numb left hand, and then dressed, and he felt marginally like himself. And then, without further thought, he headed downstairs, taking the grand staircase, once he reached it, three or four leaping steps at a time and then heading for a part of the mansion that he rarely visited because it was, in a word, creepy.
For one thing, he hated hospitals and hospital-like places, in general, but what contributed the most to the creep factor was that the room that he was approaching had been the site of his own transformation not so very long ago in the grand scheme of things. In retrospect, all of that had been one of the better things that had happened to him over the course of his lifetime to date…but there were still bad memories associated with that time. And that room. And now, if things weren't going well, he might be acquiring even more bad memories to add to his little collection.
Determinedly, Michael shoved such thoughts out of his mind; positive thoughts were what he needed to be thinking.
There was a comfortable little sitting area outside of another room, which had once been a large storage room, but that, years before, had been converted into a rather well equipped operating room. The waiting area was cheerfully lit by a large window set into one of its wall, and there was a television, a full bookshelf, and a number of mismatched end tables, chairs, and overstuffed sofas scattered around. They were comfortable chairs, even, seating that could be occupied for long stretches of time – even slept on – with no ill effects on the occupant. It occurred to Michael that actual hospitals would do well to learn from this little waiting area's example. He'd never understood why hospital waiting rooms tended to have the most uncomfortable chairs that it was humanly possible to find, as if someone deliberately went out on a quest for seating that only Torquemada could love.
And Michael wasn't at all surprised to find Devon Miles occupying one of the little sitting room's comfortable chairs. He did wonder how long Devon had been sitting there, however, because he couldn't remember ever seeing the man looking quite so rumpled. His hair was mussed, as if he'd been running his hands through it often. There was grizzled stubble sprouting along his jaw line. He wasn't wearing a jacket. He wasn't wearing a tie. His shirt was still neatly tucked in, but its sleeves were unbuttoned and rolled up almost to his elbows, and its top two buttons were undone as well. He was sitting with his fingertips steepled against each other and then resting in turn against his chin, and he was staring meditatively out of the window. He appeared to be watching the sun slowly claw its way ever higher above the red-orange horizon, but Michael realized that he was actually millions of miles away when he was able to approach the chair that Devon was sitting in without the older man noticing. He even jumped as Michael gently laid a hand on his shoulder to get his attention.
"Michael," Devon said mildly, once he'd settled back into his skin. "You look much better," he observed as he blinked and squinted up at Michael.
"Sleep helps," Michael answered with a one-shouldered shrug. He gave Devon a meaningful look and said, "You oughta try it sometime."
Devon half-smiled, ruefully, and said, "Oh, I intend to. When this is all over."
Michael sighed and then nodded, understanding Devon's position all too well. If he hadn't already been awake for the better part of almost two weeks, only snatching relatively brief naps here and there whenever he could manage to do so during that entire stretch of time, he would have pulled a useless all-night vigil right alongside Devon.
"There's been no word?" Michael asked quietly as he busied himself with pulling over a particularly comfortable-looking chair, sitting it next to the one that Devon was occupying. He settled himself into the chair with a long sigh.
"Not so much as a peep," Devon answered somberly. "At least, not since Dr. Lane left, and that was…" He frowned as he noticed for the first time the sunrise that had bloomed outside. He blinked at it, his expression rendering surprise, and then he lifted his left arm with effort, as if it suddenly weighed a ton. Squinting at his watch, he finished, "Good Lord. That was almost eleven hours ago now. He said that his part in the process had gone well, so…"
Michael sighed again as Devon's voice trailed off into a shrug. He slumped farther into his chair, stretching his legs out in front of him and then lifting both arms in order to lace his fingers behind his head.
"Well," he said, "hopefully no news is good news."
"Hopefully so," Devon quietly agreed.
Michael opened his mouth to say something else, but that was about when the door that led into the operating room smacked open and a white-faced Bonnie staggered out. She stopped a few paces into the little waiting area, looked around dazedly, and then changed course and ended up heavily leaning against the nearest wall, as if it was suddenly the only thing in the world that could possibly keep her upright. Instantly, an alarmed Michael was leaping to his feet and approaching her. He wrapped a supportive arm around her waist and then led her insistently to the closest couch, gently settling her into it and then sitting down next to her. A second later, Bonnie managed to wax even paler than she already was, becoming even whiter than the scrubs that she wore. Sweat burst out on her face, her eyes flying wide, and then she suddenly leaned over to put her head down between her knees. Michael frowned, concerned, and reached out to run one hand up and down her back comfortingly, not knowing what else to do.
"You all right, Bon?" he asked her quietly, solicitously, a moment later, watching her take in huge, shuddering lungfuls of air.
"I will be," she managed to answer, weakly, raggedly.
"It must've been pretty…nasty?" Michael hesitantly surmised.
Bonnie took one last deep breath and then slowly, carefully, experimentally, she sat upright again. When she experienced no light-headedness and no tidal wave of nausea as a result, she heaved a relieved sigh and then slumped back against the back of the couch. She turned her head to look at Michael then, still pale-faced and with huge dark circles under her eyes. She smiled at him wanly.
"Actually," she answered, her voice hoarse with overwhelming weariness, "it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. It was even kind of…fascinating. Or it would have been, I think, under different circumstances. So I guess it really is true that you can get used to just about anything…"
Michael frowned at that, finding himself a bit confused. He'd figured that the experience of witnessing, of assisting with, brain surgery had made Bonnie understandably ill. But then a horrible thought occurred to him, another valid reason for Bonnie to have nearly passed out.
"Kitt…?" he ventured uncertainly.
"He's all right," Bonnie immediately assured him quietly, reaching over to lay a hand over one of Michael's and then patting it reassuringly. "Now," she added significantly, swallowing rapidly a few times as her stomach fought to settle while a heavy dose of terrified adrenaline left her system.
"Now?" Devon echoed, immediately concerned, and Bonnie blinked blearily at him, only just then realizing that the older man was there at all. He'd scooted his chair closer to the couch that she and Michael were occupying, and he was leaning forward almost anxiously, toward Bonnie, his elbows resting on his knees.
Bonnie nodded and then explained, "Jessica and I installed the hardware, and that all went well. Slowly but well. Really well, actually. Surprisingly well. And then I transferred Kitt to the new hardware, and that seemed to go surprisingly well, too…until everything seemed to just…crash all of a sudden and then… And then his heart stopped. It all happened so fast, out of nowhere, just like that…"
She snapped her fingers to demonstrate while Michael and Devon exchanged an uneasy look.
"She's amazing, though," Bonnie was saying, meanwhile, shaking her head in wonder. "Jess, I mean. His heart stopped and do you know what she said? She said 'Whoopsie,'" Bonnie answered herself before either of the men could say anything. "Seriously, she said, 'Whoopsie!' I mean, can you imagine being able to be so calm in that kind of situation? But apparently, cardiac arrest is not an entirely uncommon occurrence after brain surgery, especially not after something as…radical…as this was. So, they got him going again pretty quickly, just calm as you please. She and the anesthesiologist and the surgical nurse…all of them just la-dee-dah. I swear, they were chatting at the same time that they were…"
"Well, that's…good," Michael murmured hesitantly as Bonnie's voice trailed off. "I mean, that they got him going again, not that they were chatting, necessarily." He shrugged uneasily and added, "But I guess it's something they deal with a lot, so..."
"Yeah," Bonnie answered, nodding absently. "Yeah, I guess if you have to resuscitate people practically every day, it does become sort of routine. But then his heart stopped again, a couple of minutes later. And they were all more concerned that time, and there was no chatting. And it took them a lot longer to get him going again, too..."
"But they did, obviously," Devon prompted as Bonnie's voice trailed off again.
"They did, yes," Bonnie confirmed nodding her head against the back of the couch again. "But then it happened again, maybe five minutes later. And we were all worried. Definitely no chatting. Well, OK, I was beyond worried. I was absolutely terrified, but there was nothing I could do except just stand there and…and watch. And I thought that was it, that this whole thing just wasn't going to work at all, that it had all been for nothing, and that he was going to…to…" She bit down hard into her lower lip then, almost hard enough to break the delicate skin and draw blood, as she stared fixedly up at the ceiling.
"But he's all right?" Michael asked anxiously when she didn't say anything else for a long moment.
Bonnie turned her head and blinked dully at him a few times.
"The third time's the charm, I guess," she said, swallowing hard. She lifted a hand to wave weakly at the operating room doors and added, "That was about forty-five minutes ago, and now they're in there…um, stapling his skull back together. That was kind of gross, so between the grossness and the adrenaline rush suddenly leaving…I just had to get out of there."
"That's understandable," Devon murmured.
"I'm sure Jess'll be out in a little bit, once she gets him…situated," Bonnie finished.
Sure enough, Jessica appeared about twenty minutes later, only to find herself being stared at expectantly by three sets of eyes.
"Hi," she said to them.
"Hello," Devon answered her while Michael and Bonnie continued to just stare at her.
Jessica pointed at Bonnie and asked, "Did she tell you?"
"About his heart stopping three times?" Michael asked in return. "She did," he confirmed. "And?"
Jessica nodded and said, "And right now, he's doing fine. His vitals are good, for the most part. No more hiccups."
"Is that what you call them?" Devon asked dubiously, raising an eyebrow at her.
"It's as good a layman's term as any," Jessica quietly answered, with a tired shrug. And then she walked over to a chair and collapsed bonelessly into it. She heaved a blissful sigh as she did so, insanely happy to be off her feet. "And for the moment," she said once she'd squirmed around a bit to settle herself comfortably, "that's about all that I can tell you." She gestured with her chin at Bonnie and added, "Bonnie says that the…technology…is working as it should, and since she's the expert on that stuff, we all just have to take her word for it. And as for his current non-technological…um, half…and how well the two halves are getting along with each other and all that… Well, I'll know a lot more about that when he's closer to being conscious."
"And that will be when?" Michael prompted.
Jessica smiled wearily at him and answered, "Not for quite a while yet. I'm going to keep him under for at least the next two or three days. Possibly more, if I decide that he needs it," she warned. "He needs the time," she said in answer to the question that immediately bloomed on Michael's face, before he had the chance to voice it. "Because besides the trauma of radical neurosurgery, that body needs time to get back up to speed before he can be conscious again. That can't be rushed or else it might decide to just go off and crash from shock again. Plus, I need to get him off that damned ventilator, and that can't be rushed, either, not after he's been on it for so long…"
Her voice trailed off then and she closed her eyes as she rubbed wearily at her forehead and then reached back to unclip the barrette that was holding the front of her hair out of her face. She let the strip of metal and plastic slip from her fingers and down onto the floor as she shook her head sharply to redistribute her hair's heavy weight. She hoped that doing so would help to head off the headache that was rapidly forming, even though she knew that its real cause was abysmally low blood sugar. Sighing, she opened her eyes again a moment later to find both Michael and Devon staring at her anxiously. Bonnie was merely watching her sympathetically, blearily, her own eyes clouded with the exhaustion that was evident on her face and in her slumped posture. She was visibly listing against the back of the couch now, and Jessica was fairly certain that if Michael didn't move, Bonnie would be using him as a pillow in the very near future.
"Really, he's all right," Jessica reassured the two men in particular as she tried to blink the grit out of her eyes. "I swear. And Raf'll be keeping a constant and very close eye on him for at least the next eight hours or so, until I feel comfortable enough to move him away from close proximity to an OR."
"Raf?" Devon echoed, raising his eyebrows questioningly.
"Rafael Espinoza. My favorite nurse ever," Jessica answered with a fond smile. "I don't operate without him, not if I can help it, because there's hardly anything that I can do that he can't do. Really, Kitt couldn't be in better hands," she assured them. "S'why I'm gonna be keeping Raf here for…a while. Until I'm sure Kitt's gonna be OK, at least. Probably until he's up and about, even…"
Her voice trailed off again, this time into a mumble, and her eyes drifted slowly closed again. They did so completely against her will, but she found that there was suddenly little she could do about it. She was pushing forty-eight hours of wakefulness again. Surgery always kept her awake, alert, and focused, especially such highly technical microsurgery as she had just performed, but once it was over, she tended to crash very quickly.
But she gasped and her eyes snapped open again when Michael quietly but decisively announced, "I want to see him."
Jessica frowned at him and answered, "I'm not sure that's a good idea, Michael."
"I don't care," Michael insisted, his voice flat, brooking no argument. "I want to see him," he repeated.
"He's not the prettiest sight in the world," Jessica warned, still frowning.
"Jess, I don't care if his insides are on the outside," Michael insisted again. "Just…please."
Jessica sighed…and then she melted under the assault of the baby blue puppy-dog eyes that Michael was leveling at her and that were made even more devastatingly blue by the fact that he was wearing a light blue shirt.
"All right, all right," she relented. "I'll give y'all a few minutes. But that's all you get." She pointed and then waved a warning finger at him and added, very seriously, "And no arguing with me when I say that time's up, do you understand me?"
Michael nodded, mollified.
"I understand," he confirmed, agreeing to her terms.
Jessica heaved a resigned sigh and then pushed herself up out of her chair. Michael rose from the couch he'd been sitting on at the same time, and as if that was some kind of trigger, Bonnie finally slumped sideways, slipping slowly down against the back of the couch as she succumbed to sleep. Michael smiled affectionately down at her, at her uncomfortable-looking position, and then made a move to tend to her. But Devon pushed himself out of his chair then in order to intervene.
"I'll take care of her," he assured Michael. He exchanged a glance with Jessica, smiled at her, and then added, "Go. Before Jessica exercises her woman's prerogative and changes her mind."
At the back of the operating room was a pair of doors that led to a small recovery room. Jessica led Michael into it, and the first thing that he saw was another man. He was short, compact, Hispanic, maybe in his mid-40s, and he was wearing scrubs. Michael deduced that the man must be the Rafael of which Jessica had spoken.
"Rafael," she said, confirming Michael's deduction, "this is Michael Knight. Michael, Rafael Espinoza."
As they shook hands, Michael said, "I hear that you're the best."
Rafael shrugged dismissively and answered, "Hey, if you suck up to Mac enough, she'll occasionally say something nice about you."
As Michael chuckled at that and answered, "I'll keep that in mind," Jessica playfully kicked Rafael's shin.
"Kook," she muttered under her breath. And then she asked Rafael, "How's it going?"
Rafael gave her a thumbs-up and cheerfully answered, "Good. A-OK."
His answer was much too cheerful, in Jessica's estimation, but since she suspected that the answer was more for Michael's benefit than for her own, anyway, she let it go. For the moment. But once Michael had turned away, she gave the nurse an inquisitive "Later for you" look before her gaze slid back to Michael. She watched him take a few tentative steps toward the bed where Kitt was lying before following in his wake.
Michael hadn't had much of an opportunity to spend time with the body into which they were going to move Kitt. He hadn't cared to, really, because the overriding concept of what they were planning to do had, in Michael's opinion, a fairly high creepiness quotient. Of course, he was entirely willing to deal with the creepiness, for Kitt's sake, but on the other hand, he'd been quite happy to spend more of his time out on the road instead, trying to first find the person to do the actual moving and then to help convince them of the necessity of doing so. And once that had been accomplished, he'd been happy to spend all of his time, literally every waking moment and even most of his sleeping moments, with Kitt, keeping him company, keeping him distracted, keeping him entertained as much as possible, given the situation. Still, Michael did know that the body was young, and he vaguely remembered black hair. Lots of shaggy, overgrown black hair.
The body was indeed young, so he saw now, but there was no hair anymore. Instead, his head was studded with an array of electroencephalograph electrodes and, worse, further marred with a disturbingly large and vicious-looking oval of thick, evenly-spaced metal staples in its right side. The entire circle was encrusted with goopy-looking scabs of dried and congealing blood, and the pillow behind his head was liberally stained with still more dark spatters and smears of blood, too. All of it stopped Michael in his tracks, and he sensed more than saw Jessica pause as well, just a step or two behind him.
"Not the prettiest sight in the world," he murmured.
"I did warn you," Jessica murmured back.
Michael swallowed hard, blanched, and asked, tentatively, "Aren't there usually…Oh, I dunno… Bandages?"
Jessica smiled tiredly up at him and answered, "Until I'm sure that I won't have to go right back in there? No, not yet. And you're seeing him long before you're really supposed to be seeing him, you know."
Michael swallowed again, glanced over his shoulder at her for a moment, and interpreted, "In other words...I asked for this, and you're giving me a visual 'I told you so.'"
"In other words…Yeah, exactly that," Jessica confirmed with a sage little nod and a smirky little smile.
"God, no wonder you get along so well with Kitt," Michael muttered grumpily.
Jessica chuckled quietly.
"C'mon," she said as she reached out to wrap a small hand around Michael's forearm, scooted around him, and then yanked on the arm she had in her grasp to lead him over to the bed. "I'm not going to give y'all much time, so you'd best make the most of it," she was saying.
Unfortunately, the view didn't get any better at closer range. This, Michael discovered as he came to a halt at the side of the bed.
They had the head of the bed raised, probably to help with swelling. The bed was surrounded by equipment that Michael had no hope of understanding and that, really, he didn't want to understand. Some of it was beeping quietly away; some of it was silent. Some of it had monitors attached that glowed and displayed cryptic, continuously changing graphical read-outs or just continuously running lines of mysterious numbers and text. And all of the equipment, of course, was attached in some way to the deathly pale, emaciated, frail-looking body that was currently housing his partner. The ventilator was still attached, accessing his trachea directly through a hole just above the hollow of his throat that at least wasn't plainly visible. It was still quietly whooshing away, making his thin chest rhythmically rise and fall with mechanical precision. And there were almost more wires attached to him and tubes inserted into him in various locations than Michael could count, and many of them were large and looked distinctly painful. Especially the really big and nasty-looking one that stabbed deeply into the meager flesh just below his exposed left collarbone. And that was just the parts of his body that were visible; Michael really didn't want to think about what he couldn't see.
He swallowed again, distastefully, but he still didn't regret the request that he'd made. He'd had to see Kitt for himself. He wasn't entirely sure why, but it had been an overwhelmingly strong imperative. It was almost as if he couldn't or wouldn't believe that Kitt was really, truly alive until he actually saw him, or at least saw the body into which he'd been integrated, until he saw that it was breathing and had a heartbeat. But now that he had seen Kitt…he still wasn't sure that he was actually alive. Perhaps he wouldn't really, truly believe that Kitt was alive until he heard him speak, until he could talk to him, until he could trade a reassuringly caustic quip or five with him…
"God, buddy," Michael murmured more to himself than to anyone else. He ran both hands through his hair as he added, "What have we done to you?"
"What we had to do," Jessica answered him quietly, giving his arm that she still had a hold of a reassuring pat. Then she turned away and pulled a chair over to the bedside. "Sit down, Michael," she said gently to him. "Talk to him."
Michael frowned up at her questioningly as he sat down and said, "He can't hear me." His frown deepened as he added an almost hopeful, "Can he?"
Jessica shrugged as she answered, "Most likely not. On the other hand, given what he is…Who knows?"
Michael smiled at that, one of his wide, sweet smiles that made his eyes twinkle. This smile was made even sweeter by its complete lack of deliberately charming artifice. Jessica smiled back at him and gave his shoulder a gentle, encouraging pat as Michael turned back to Kitt and, doing as he was told, started talking.
Meanwhile, Jessica sidled up to Rafael and asked, quietly enough so that Michael wouldn't hear, "OK, so how's it really going?"
Rafael bit down on his lower lip, shook his head slightly, and then equally quietly answered, "He's still v-taching, and his BP is correspondingly unstable. About ten minutes ago, it all started going a little scary again, so I went ahead and gave him a push of lidocaine into the subclavian line. It seems to have helped, so I'm thinking that we should probably go ahead and add it to his drip."
Jessica nodded and rubbed briskly at her face with both hands in an attempt to stave off a strong urge to fall asleep where she stood. She answered with a sigh, "I'm hoping that this little issue he's having will clear up once his neurotransmitter levels stabilize, but for now…Yes, I agree. Do we have bags here?"
"Nope," Rafael replied with a shake of his head. "But we've got enough for pushes for a couple of days."
"Well, I'll just put it on the old shopping list, then," Jessica said with a weary sigh, this time pressing the heel of a slightly trembling hand against her forehead as her blood sugar headache intensified. "In the meantime, keep giving him a CV push every ninety minutes. And let me know if there's anything else we're going to need that I didn't anticipate."
"I will," Rafael confirmed. "Oh, and everything else is looking good so far. For real," he added quietly, with a white-toothed smile.
"Good," Jessica answered, nodding. "Keep on top of it, will you?"
"You know I will," Rafael answered with a confident nod of his own. He paused, frowning thoughtfully at his patient for a long moment, and then he lowered his voice still further, leaned a bit closer to Jessica, and said, "You know, Mac… I've seen you do some amazing things, some crazy things, and even some downright miraculous things over the years, but this…This takes the cake, on all three counts."
Jessica smiled and answered tiredly, "Yeah, I know. But it wasn't just me this time, Raf. In fact, in some ways, mine was the easy part. And really, if y'all want truly amazing, crazy, and miraculous…Well, just wait until you actually meet him." She gestured at Kitt's still form with her chin then, smiling at him and Michael almost maternally.
"I'll look forward to it," Rafael softly answered while Jessica turned toward him in order to slip a piece of paper into the breast pocket of his scrub shirt.
"My pager number," she explained to him as he frowned down at her. "Page me when you need to be relieved, all right? Or if something too scary to handle alone happens, of course." As Rafael nodded, Jessica shifted her gaze toward Michael. "Time's up, Michael," she said to him quietly, and when Michael looked up at her, his eyes somewhat haunted, she added, "Look, I need food before I go crash for a while. Join me?"
Michael quirked a smile at her and teased, "For the food or the crashing?"
Jessica snorted and answered, "Both, if you like. But mostly for the food."
"You know," Michael further teased, "your capacity to eat right after poking around in someone's brain never ceases to amaze me."
Jessica smiled back, folding her arms over her chest as she answered, "Yeah, well, I must've been a zombie in a previous life because brains make me hungry."
"Weirdo," Michael accused, chuckling despite himself.
"Guilty as charged," Jessica immediately shot back. "C'mon," she added, jerking her head toward the door. And as Michael glanced uncertainly down at Kitt, she gently and very seriously added, "He'll be all right, Michael. I promise."
And as Jessica smiled at him sincerely, the teasing gone for the moment, Michael was somehow, suddenly, certain that she was right. He pushed himself to his feet then, nodded at her, and then followed in her wake out through the operating room and its little waiting room, where Bonnie was comfortably curled up on the couch. She had a cushy pillow tucked under her head, and she was covered with a soft blanket that had been carefully tucked in around her shoulders, both of which Devon must have been responsible for. Michael couldn't help smiling at her as he and Jessica moved onward, headed for the kitchen. And as they did so, Michael felt, for the first time in what felt like forever, a tiny flare of incongruous, cautious optimism.
Next time: Wakey wakies! ;)
Annnnnd…This is where I usually put review replies. But it's been so long since I updated this story that doing that just seems…weird. (Although I do of course very much appreciate those that have been left for the last few chapters! Like every other attention-whoring fanfic author out there, I do love comments, good or bad.) So…We'll just start fresh, yes? Leave me a review, if you like, and I'll talk back at ya next time. :) Until then…Later, my pretties.