Well. Chapter Fourteen, holy cow. This is turning into a seriously long fic - I should have wrote the whole darn thing before posting it, because I can't go back and edit/take out/replace what I've already got posted, not without changing the whole thread of the fic and confusing the heck out of my readers. Which is you. Now, I know where I'm going with this, but I like to have feedback, so please, review! I've been known to add readers' plot points in the past, you guys are pretty great with that, and I find fics are far more interesting with reader involvement. Usually that sort of thing comes naturally, but with Some Kind of Mojo, I seem to have the same number of dedicated followers, but none of them are the reviewing type. xD That's fine, of course, I'm not a reviewmonger. It does turn this into a writing-in-a-vacuum sort of deal, though, so if something occurs to you - i.e. wow, I'd really love to see some of this, some of that, or maybe "why hasn't this happened yet?" - it helps me to gauge the speed with which to deliver plot points and what to emphasize.
Ooh, this is turning into a long-winded lecture. I really didn't mean it to be, I just wanted to express that when I'm writing a series, I tend to do it more for the readers than for anything else, and it becomes an exercise in guessing when I have no idea what my audience is like. xD Okay, okay, enough whining. I'm off to write a chapter that's actually got some fun in it for once. This fic is so dark sometimes!
There were some twenty-five people sitting in the waiting room. A couple people were bleeding, but most were coughing or snuffling or burying their faces in buckets. One person was cradling a crooked arm. But all of them, without fail, were wearing expressions of identical horror.
Three men had come in through the sliding glass doors, one of whom, the tallest, was carrying a woman. One little boy tugged at his mother's jacket, mouth hanging open, and she hastily turned his head away, slipping her fingers down over his eyes. He complained loudly into the silence.
The nurses reacted before they even had a chance to come two steps. They came running out of the back, and behind them came a stretcher.
"Oh, no one needs that," Jordan complained, holding on tighter to Sam's neck. "He's only carrying me because I cut up my feet."
"Patient is responsive," someone said, and Jordan said over the noise, irate, "I'm fine, I just need some stitches!"
"Ma'am, please settle down," one nurse said brusquely. "Sir, put her on the gurney, please."
"No, no, don't you dare!" Jordan cried. "I don't need to be put on a gurney, I'm not dead! I'm just bleeding!"
"Jordan," said Dean, his voice a low growl, "let go of Sam and get on the damned gurney."
Jordan's face was pink with rage, but she let go, and Sam sat her down on the stretcher; the nurses immediately began wheeling her away. Sam, Dean and Bobby immediately made as if to follow, but a tall male nurse blocked their way.
"Sorry," he said. "Family only."
The boys exchanged a look. "We're her brothers," they said, together, even as Bobby said, "I'm her father, you idjit, can't you tell?"
They were allowed to sit in the hallway while Jordan was cleaned up, and so heard, with perfect clarity, when the doctor came in to talk to her. "The nurses tell me you haven't given us a full name. That true?"
"My name's Jordan," was Jordan's reply, a bit glumly, as she was being bandaged up as they spoke.
"What's your surname, Jordan?"
"Winchester," said Jordan, and Sam, who'd been taking a sip of the coffee Dean had gotten him, coughed and spewed it all over a passing nurse, who shrieked.
"Excellent, thank you," said the doctor, and scribbled it down. "Now, Miss Winchester, I'm here to tell you that we're going to have to keep you overnight, maybe even for a couple of days. You're dangerously malnourished and dehydrated, too. That combined with the level of injury you suffered—you really need to stay overnight."
"Like hell!" Jordan said, appalled. "That malnourished thing, I can take care of that with a hamburger—"
"No, Miss Winchester, I'm afraid not," interrupted the doctor. "You're extremely low on all essential nutrients, with the possible exception of sugar—the levels are just about normal."
There was a brief silence, and then Jordan shouted, "I thought that damned thing was feeding me protein bars! When I get my hands on you, your sadistic creep, I will wring your foul neck!"
"Miss Winchester, please," murmured the doctor, sounding a little frightened.
"You're telling me all I've had to eat is sugar," groused Jordan. "How bad is it? Is it really bad?"
"Another day or two, and you would have been in dire straits," the doctor replied. "As it is, I'm concerned about your ability to heal from your injuries. Malnutrition like this can result in any number of things, and one of them is extremely slow healing."
"Which is why you want me to stay."
"Correct."
Jordan sucked in a long breath. "Fine. But if you come near me with catheter, I will personally rip the nose off your face."
The doctor, when she left, looked as if she couldn't decide if Jordan was joking or not. Sam couldn't blame her; when Jordan used that tone of face, you started to think maybe she could throw mountains down on your head if she wanted to. The doctor paused just beside them.
"You're her family?" she asked.
"Yes ma'am," said Dean.
"Father," said Bobby, unnecessarily, jerking a thumb at his chest.
"You heard what I said?" the doctor asked, and they all bobbed their heads. "I'm going to ask you to try and calm her down. She sounded okay, and if I'd just been looking at her, I wouldn't have noticed a thing, but her heart rate was sky high."
"Yes ma'am," said Dean, again, and the doctor walked off. Jordan's voice sounded from inside. "Ow—I'm not scared—I said ow, that hurts—I just don't like being strapped down! Lady, you are butchering my arm!"
They filed into her room, standing to one side of her bed while the nurse, her hair beginning to come loose of her bun and her face covered in beaded sweat, struggled to sew up the myriad of slashes up and down Jordan's arm. Jordan wasn't making it easy on her; she was continuously tugging the straps over her arms and fumbling at the buckles.
"Stop it," said Sam, but she just glared at him and wiggled her shoulder until she was at a better angle to unlock the buckle.
"Jordan!" barked Dean, making the nurse jump and nearly stab Jordan. Jordan stared at him. "Quit moving!"
Her chin stuck out in her most mulish expression, but she stopped fidgeting. Every so often she'd twitch her toes rebelliously, though, just to make a point. The nurse calmed down enough to do the last stitches evenly.
"What'd you listen to him for?" Sam demanded. "I'm your boyfriend."
For a moment, no one moved, not even the nurse. Then—slowly—one of Jordan's eyebrows began to raise, and in a dangerously calm voice, she said, "You want to be really careful about where you go with this one, lover boy."
"Need help extracting that sasquatch-sized foot out of your sasquatch-sized mouth?" Bobby asked, folding his arms across his chest and staring Sam down.
"What?" Sam demanded. He looked from Dean to Bobby and back again. "What?"
Dean looked as perplexed as he did, but seeing the way Jordan's eyes were beginning to narrow, hastily arranged his face into an expression of supreme disgust and said haughtily, "Apologize, dude, you're being a dick."
Sam looked thoroughly taken aback. Dean gave him an apologetic shrug, being just as clueless, and abruptly the nurse stood up, penciled eyebrows raised halfway up her forehead. "Okay, mister, you listen to me," she said, her voice suddenly devoid of the brusque medical practitioner accent, and replaced instead by something vaguely reminiscent of spandex and hoop earrings. "In no universe is it incumbent upon a girl to obey," she said it like it was a filthy word, "her man. You keep saying shit like that and I guarantee you, honey, she will be walking into the sunset with the milkman. Though personally," and here she looked at Jordan, "man with an ass like that, maybe you let it go every now and again, if you know what I mean."
Jordan muttered something under her breath that may or may not have been "what do think I've been doing?" No one had a chance to comment on this, however, as this was when Castiel chose to show up, appearing squarely in the middle of the room. The nurse screamed.
"Do not fear me," he rumbled. "I am an angel of the Lord."
There was no hint of disbelief in her face. She was prostrate on the floor in under a second, shouting incoherently into her blouse. Such was the noise that two of the other nurses rushed in, one of them still clutching a clipboard. One of them, a pretty redhead, asked the room in general, "What happened?"
"She thought she saw an angel," said Jordan, affecting a horrified expression and pressing a hand to her heart. "She was giving me stitches and then—wham!"
"Lord God in Heaven!" shouted the nurse, who was being lifted bodily and taken away. "Ooh, Lord! Lord my God!"
Castiel raised a hand. "Your prayers will be answer," he said, just before she turned the corner, and her jubilant hallelujahs could be heard echoing all the way down the hall.
"Why do you do that, Cas?" Dean demanded, and there was a twitch at the corners of Castiel's mouth like he was trying to smile.
"Believers make me happy," he said.
"I believe," Jordan said, and when he turned to look at her, there was a real smile starting to crinkle his eyes. "You finally joining the party, Cas?"
"Actually," he said, "I did not know there was a party to which I might attend. I had had no luck in finding you and sought out Sam and Dean to see what progress they had made. And I found them here. With you."
"You still can't see her?" Sam asked, sounding worried.
Castiel shook his head. "I can see her, but I cannot feel her."
"Sounds dirty," quipped Jordan, earning her a scathing look from Sam. "Sorry. Why can't you find me?"
"Some kind of mojo whammy the baykok put on you, we think," said Dean.
Jordan's expression went from amused to frightened in a split second. "It put mojo on me? No, nix that, there's still mojo on me? What's stopping it from just—just following me here?"
"Nothing," said Castiel, and Dean punched him in the arm so hard Castiel fell back a step. Cas looked at him askance, rubbing his arm.
"Us," corrected Dean.
Instead of comforting her, this seemed instead to terrify her; she abruptly began ripping the lines out of her arm and had swung her legs off the bed before anyone had a chance to protest.
"Whoa," said Sam, reaching out. "Jordan, stop. You heard what the doctor said—"
Jordan was already on her feet, though. There was a whiteness to her lips that said it had hurt her to do it. "Dean, get the car," she said, and when Dean looked as if he wanted to argue, said again, savagely, "Get the car, Dean!"
He gave his brother one despairing look before leaving. Apparently, Sam thought, the obeying thing went both ways with them. Jordan had picked up her mangled clothing from where it'd been neatly stacked, looked at it for a moment, and then dropped it. The pile hit the ground with a dull smack. They were covered in blood and sweat and had more holes than Swiss cheese—she couldn't wear them. Wouldn't wear them.
"Give me your shirt," she said, and anticipating what her response would be if he argued, Sam took off his jacket and obligingly stripped off his shirt. When he put his jacket back on, it was hard to tell that he was only wearing an undershirt. Jordan wrapped herself up in it and used her belt to cinch the waist in place, and although it was short, it covered all the important bits.
Her leg ached; it and the worst bits on her arms and shoulders had been the only things to be stitched before the nurse's little episode. It would have to do. Once they were far enough away, she'd make Dean do the rest, which was what she'd intended in the first place, before the boys had started griping about taking her to ER.
People stared as she walked out, barefoot and wearing only a shirt. A few nurses tried to stop her—"This is my boyfriend, and he has a gun," was her response—and she rebuffed all of Sam's attempts to convince her that he'd carry her the rest of the way. He had a terrible memory of opening the bathroom door to see her sitting against the far wall, legs stuck out, feet bleeding all over the tile like she'd been chewed on.
"We're getting away from here," Jordan told them, as Dean pulled up in the Impala. "As far away from here as humanly possible, do you understand?"
"Jordan—" Sam began, protesting, although what he was protesting he wasn't sure. Her escape from the hospital, definitely. Running away?—perhaps.
"Keep your head screwed on," interrupted Bobby, who had watched all the goings on with what he felt was a reasonable state of calm. "We'll go to my place. There's clothes there, for one thing."
Jordan glowered at him.
"I'm being sensible and you know it," snapped Bobby. "If you want to fly to the moon afterwards, fine. I'm sure Castiel would oblige you. In the meantime, we're going home, okay?"
Jordan blew him a raspberry.