**Chapter 2- Love's Awakening**
"Oh, God...get her in here, quick!"
"What happened?!"
"Snimon attack. One of the ferals, we think. It was stopped by our team on the way to Yolei's apartment."
"Was anyone else hurt?"
"Not to our knowledge. It hit Hida's dorm first, but luckily it was the middle of a class and no one was there. The dorm was trashed, though, and they'll want an explanation."
She drifted back into consciousness slowly, gradually becoming aware of a flurry of activity. *Where...am I? Shouldn't I be dead?*
"Let them make up their own. They'll probably call it a sorority prank, or something like that. Iori might figure it out, but he won't spill." The voice was distracted, and oddly familiar. Sora frowned, or tried to frown, but her face wouldn't respond... "Get her clothes off."
"What?"
"Do you want her to die? The immersion has to be complete, or she's not going to pull through this!"
"Oh, God... You're serious, aren't you."
"Would I kid about something like this?"
Sora tried to move again, but her limbs were like lead. Her eyes were closed, but these voices...she knew them! Who...
She felt herself lifted in strong arms, and being carried somewhere. That familiar voice was talking again.
"You're going to be okay now. You're safe here."
She trusted this person, somehow.
"She can't hear you, you know."
"How do you know that? Maybe it'll help, somehow, if she hears a voice she knows. It'd sure make me feel a lot better."
She was being lowered into something, now. Whatever it was felt like a warm bath, sort of...but different...
"You're grasping at straws. You realize that, don't you?"
"Nobody asked *you*. Besides, what else am I supposed to do?!" The voice broke on those last words. A pause, and several deep breaths, as though the speaker was struggling against losing it. "I'm getting out of here..."
The arms let go of her; she wanted to catch hold of them and plead with this person not to leave her alone here, but she still couldn't move. Footsteps hurried out of the room, and she heard a door close.
"Leave him alone. He's scared senseless for her, can't you tell?"
"He's acting like a moron. She'll be fine."
"We don't know that."
"What?"
"She's got some bad internal damage, and she's lost a lot of blood. He's got good reason to be worried sick. I'm giving her a transfusion along with the immersion therapy, but I don't know if it'll be enough to save her..."
"But...that's the best we've got!"
"I know..."
Silence for a long time. Then...
"You know, sometimes I think you haven't grown up at all from when we were all kids in the Digiworld."
The other person didn't reply, and Sora felt herself slipping away again. She wondered who this `he' was, and why he cared...
*I'll make it, don't worry. I'm a fighter...*
The sounds and sensations faded, as she drifted away again.
Her return to consciousness was gradual and piecemeal. She slowly became aware of the fact that she didn't hurt anymore, and then of the fact that she was floating...suspended in some kind of liquid. She also realized that she was wearing a mask of some sort, probably to allow her to breathe, and that there was a tube leading to a needle in her arm. It didn't hurt, but it was one of the weirder sensations she'd felt in her life. She was also not wearing anything besides this equipment, as far as she could tell. So far, she hadn't heard anyone nearby, so this didn't bother her.
*Where am I, anyway?* She'd never heard of a hospital that floated people in bathtubs of warm Jell-O, which was about the consistency of this stuff she was in. She frowned, and this time she succeeded in making her face move. Heartened by this discovery, she tried wiggling a finger. The finger responded perfectly.
*Oh, very good. Now let's try a hand.* She clenched and unclenched her fist, then both fists. The needle moved in her arm, which was an even weirder sensation than having it there in the first place, but both hands worked nicely. Her legs and arms all proved fully mobile, as well. With motor movement all sorted out, she began to explore her `residence'.
Her first impression of a `bathtub' turned out to be pretty close to the mark; she was in a metal and rubber tank of some sort, of about the size and shape, at least internally, of a large bathtub. A soft hum of machinery came from someplace behind the wall near her head, and there were pipes with wire-mesh covers blocking their mouths leading into the tank here and there, as well as a series of filters, or so she guessed them to be by the flow of the Jell-O stuff into and out of them, down by her feet.
Reaching up with her free, un-needled arm, she discovered that the Jell-O stuff had a surface about a foot above her, and that there was a lid over the top of the tank about eight inches above that surface, metal from the feel of it, with a `glass' window above her face. She doubted it was real glass, or anything that would shatter and hurt her.
Pushing herself up onto her elbows, cautiously so as not to disturb the needle, she let as much of her head as would fit, surface, and balanced on one elbow while she reached up to wipe the goo out of her eyes with the other hand. Blinking in the light, she opened her eyes and looked up through the `glass' at the room outside.
Her first impression was decidedly unsatisfying. All she could see was a white ceiling and an electric light fixture; hardly what she would call a view. It certainly didn't tell her anything about where she was.
"Um, hello?" she said awkwardly into the mask, feeling sheepish and silly. Who was going to hear her with this stupid thing on, even if anyone was there? "Hello..." she tried again anyway, feeling that at least she was *doing* something that might get her noticed. "Ah, is anybody there? Where am I? What happened...?" She sighed. No one was there. She was stuck here indefinitely, until somebody came to check on her...assuming that anyone even would.
*This sucks...*
A bespectacled face suddenly popped into sight in the glass window, grinning cheerfully and taking her completely by surprise.
"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty."
"AAAAAGGHHH!"
The face frowned, then suddenly looked embarrassed.
"Oh...sorry..." His voice was a bit muffled by the layer of `glass', but very audible all the same.
"Good God, Joe, don't *do* that to me!" she yelled, then did a comical double take. "Joe?!"
"In the flesh," Joe said with a smile. "I'm guessing from your lungpower that you're feeling a bit better. Would you mind toning it down a little? This is a ward, you know; there are people trying to sleep."
"I'm sorry," she said more quietly. "I didn't realize...a ward? Where? What are you doing here? What am *I* doing here?! How-"
"Okay, a little slower please. Take a few deep breaths and calm down," Joe said gently. "You're not quite better yet. That Snimon carved you up pretty good, you know."
"Pretty well," she automatically corrected, then blinked. "Snimon? Is that what that thing was?"
"I'm afraid so," Joe said. "One of the feral ones."
"The what now?"
He sighed. "Nevermind. Here, I'll explain later. For now, I'll stick to your other questions. This is a ward in the Project headquarters. I can't tell you where; I'm not even sure where we are exactly, geographically that is. It's classified information, and they haven't given it to us yet. I'm here because I volunteered, and I'm the head of this particular ward. You're here because our team that was following the rogue Snimon found you half-dead in your garage and brought you here. And you are one lucky woman; if they hadn't acted quickly, you'd be in extremely bad shape right now."
Sora frowned, trying to take all this in. "So...you saved me?"
"I, and the team that found you, and my `assistants' did. You can thank us later; for now, I bet you want to get out of that tank, and according to the readouts I'm getting, you're ready to finish healing on your own."
Suddenly remembering exactly how much she was wearing, Sora blushed.
"Uh...how exactly do I get out?" she said awkwardly. Joe realized what was bugging her and blushed a little himself.
"Don't worry, the window just shows you from the shoulders up. I'll unlatch the lid and leave you some clothes; you can take off the mask on your own. It was just to let you breathe in the immersion tank solution. I'll take care of the needle once you're changed."
Sora sighed with relief. "Sounds reasonable to me. How soon can you do all this?"
"Right now," Joe said, holding up a bundle and then disappearing from sight. A click at the side of the lid told her it was probably unlocked; she waited a few minutes, then reached up and pushed the lid open. It opened easily, and she sat up, pulling off the mask and hanging it by its tubes over the side of the tank, and scanned the room.
Joe was nowhere in sight. The white bundle lay on a little table by the tank, and she figured it was a medical gown or something that wouldn't be ruined by the translucent goop that still clung to her skin in a film. The room was small and white-walled, and hers was the only tank in it. She wondered idly what Joe had meant by `people are trying to sleep', and was about to climb out of the tank when a small sound caught her ear. She turned to look...and almost fainted right back into the tank again.
A male form was curled up on a low sofa against the opposite wall, obviously fast asleep. Since his eyes were closed, that wasn't what shocked her.
What *did* stun her was the unforgettable dandelion-poof of brown hair and the familiar lines of the sleeping face.
"Tai...?" she whispered, not sure if she believed her eyes. He stirred a little at the sound of her voice, but didn't wake up.
His movement reminded her of the potential situation should he wake up suddenly before she made use of the bundle on the table, and she turned back to it and opened it, her body working on autopilot in a sense of self-preservation while her mind whirled.
*Tai? Here? Well, of course he's here; he agreed to come, didn't he? He went, and I didn't, and that's all there is to it. Three years is a long time...* The bundle turned out to be not a hospital gown, but a towel, a pullover white top, and a pair of blue-gray pants that reminded her of leggings, as well as undergarments. The part of her mind that wasn't incoherent with surprise at that point was pleased. She toweled most of the goo off and put the clothes on (the shirt was a little awkward, thanks to the needle, but the rest was fine), then, fully dressed, turned back to the silent form on the sofa.
Sitting down on the edge of the tank, she watched his sleeping face. Curled up like that, he looked innocent, almost childlike; he was hardly the angry twenty-two-year-old that she remembered from the last time she'd spoken to him.
*The last time I thought I'd ever speak to him,* she thought, half in irony, half in wonder. *And there he is...and three years isn't so long after all. At least, not anymore.* It had seemed like forever while it was happening, but now?
*Now, I just get to wonder if he's going to agree with me...or just slam the door in my face again.* She sighed and put her face in her hands.
"I'm here, okay?" she murmured to the oblivious Taichi. "That's what you wanted, isn't it? I'm here, and I don't know how to leave, and I hope you're happy, so can we please call it pax?"
"I see you're dressed," Joe's voice came from the doorway. Sora's head whipped around in surprise, and she glared at the hapless bluenette.
"Will you quit doing that? Some people might be having private conversations!"
"That's a pretty one-sided conversation, if you ask me," Joe said, looking critically at the soundly sleeping Tai. He ignored the redoubled poisonous look Sora gave him, and held up a hand. "I'm going to make a doctor's order now. Two, in fact."
"I'm listening," Sora said uncertainly.
"One, I know you won't like it, but you need to stay here until you're completely healed. If you have complications from something we didn't find and take care of the first time, this is the best place you can possibly be to be treated. We have technology here that isn't going to be released to the general public for years to come. The best hospital in the world couldn't keep up with us, and you are too valuable to take chances with on this."
Sora gave him a confused look, and he shrugged. "That was a direct quote to me from Command. Don't ask me what it means. Anyway, on to point two. He," Joe gestured towards Tai, "has not gotten a wink of sleep in the last two-and-a-half days."
"I've been here for three days...?" Sora said incredulously. Joe nodded.
"He's been burning the midnight oil `standing watch' over you, even though we have instruments that were doing it much better than he could. I gave up trying to talk him out of it by the first day, but now that he's finally dropped off, and now that you're stable, I'd like to request that you let him sleep as long as he needs. And he needs hours."
"When did he fall asleep?" Sora said, in a quieter tone than the one she'd been using. She was touched by the show of devotion. *Maybe I don't need to worry after all... Still, I'm not assuming anything until I get a chance to talk to him. It'd be too easy to get hurt if I'm wrong.*
"He dozed off about four hours ago," Joe said, reaching for the needle in her arm. Before she could react, he did something with it and then gave it a sort of twisting tug, and it slid out neatly.
"Ow!" Sora yelped. It hadn't hurt a lot, but it had stung. "Warn me next time!"
"If I had, you would have been nervous and you might have messed me up somehow," Joe said with impeccable reason, taking the needle and the attached tube over to a sink and throwing it away. He pressed one of a bank of buttons on a console on the wall, and then rummaged in a drawer before coming back with a band-aid. "Here. That's going to feel kind of weird for a while...have you ever had blood drawn?"
"Yeah..." Sora giggled in spite of herself at the Muppets print on the band-aid. *Like I was a kid again,* she thought.
"Well, it's going to feel kind of like that. We've improved on the needles used by modern hospitals in many ways, but not in that area."
"Oh, swell," Sora muttered, remembering the achy, itchy feeling she'd had around the place where the needle had been. It was pretty annoying...but not really a major problem. Joe handed her a pair of shoes.
"Here, I'm running you a bath. You'll want to get that muck off of you." He sighed. "Sorry about that. I've improved on the original a lot, but I can't seem to get rid of the tendency to cling to the skin."
"You invented this?" Sora said, stunned. Joe grinned.
"I sure did! I was the head of the board of physicians on the project. It was my idea."
"It's genius," Sora said with an appreciative smile.
"Yeah, but there's still the stickiness factor, and...people who've used it complain about an aftertaste in their mouths. They say it tastes like-"
"Like hazelnuts, only nasty?" Sora finished. She'd noticed the taste, but hadn't thought it had anything to do with the tank. Joe nodded.
"Sorry about that, too. Here, I'll show you to that bath. We've got a bunch of little attached bathrooms around here. And I'll get you some real clothes." Without bothering to explain what he meant by that, he led her off into the hallway.
*Hm...`real' clothes?* Both Joe and Tai were wearing similar outfits, now that she thought about it; blue-gray uniform-type things, with colored bands at the wrists and neck. Tai's had had orange bands, and Joe's were navy blue. Joe wore a white lab-coat sort of deal over his `uniform'. Before she had a chance to ponder the significance of the clothes further, they had reached a row of numbered doors and Joe was opening one and leading her inside.
"I got the bath running a few minutes ago, so it should be full," Joe said. Sora remembered him hitting a button when he went to get her band-aid and blinked.
*Man, this place is technology central! No wonder Izzy decided to come...*
Then her thoughts were captured by the sight of a large bathtub, a real one this time, very full and topped with a thick layer of luxurious-looking foam.
"You know, I think I like this place," she announced. Joe laughed.
"I thought you might. Here, I'll go get those clothes, and someone to instruct you in putting them on. They're a little confusing if you don't know how they work. See you later," he said, and was gone before she could return the goodbye.
*If I don't know how they work? Huh... Well, he's as frenetic as ever,* Sora thought with a wry smile. *I wonder if the others have changed any?* The idea that she could idly speculate about what the `others' would be like when she saw them again filled her with a pleasant warmth. *I'm going to see them again! I really am!* Grinning, she headed for the bath.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Okay, now comes the oh-so-familiar rant...two reviews?!! *Two* measly reviews, for my darling Taiora baby?!!!! *sobs*
Please, people, have a heart and take pity on a starving artist! Onegai! (please!) Review! Thankies... -O_o bandit
"Oh, God...get her in here, quick!"
"What happened?!"
"Snimon attack. One of the ferals, we think. It was stopped by our team on the way to Yolei's apartment."
"Was anyone else hurt?"
"Not to our knowledge. It hit Hida's dorm first, but luckily it was the middle of a class and no one was there. The dorm was trashed, though, and they'll want an explanation."
She drifted back into consciousness slowly, gradually becoming aware of a flurry of activity. *Where...am I? Shouldn't I be dead?*
"Let them make up their own. They'll probably call it a sorority prank, or something like that. Iori might figure it out, but he won't spill." The voice was distracted, and oddly familiar. Sora frowned, or tried to frown, but her face wouldn't respond... "Get her clothes off."
"What?"
"Do you want her to die? The immersion has to be complete, or she's not going to pull through this!"
"Oh, God... You're serious, aren't you."
"Would I kid about something like this?"
Sora tried to move again, but her limbs were like lead. Her eyes were closed, but these voices...she knew them! Who...
She felt herself lifted in strong arms, and being carried somewhere. That familiar voice was talking again.
"You're going to be okay now. You're safe here."
She trusted this person, somehow.
"She can't hear you, you know."
"How do you know that? Maybe it'll help, somehow, if she hears a voice she knows. It'd sure make me feel a lot better."
She was being lowered into something, now. Whatever it was felt like a warm bath, sort of...but different...
"You're grasping at straws. You realize that, don't you?"
"Nobody asked *you*. Besides, what else am I supposed to do?!" The voice broke on those last words. A pause, and several deep breaths, as though the speaker was struggling against losing it. "I'm getting out of here..."
The arms let go of her; she wanted to catch hold of them and plead with this person not to leave her alone here, but she still couldn't move. Footsteps hurried out of the room, and she heard a door close.
"Leave him alone. He's scared senseless for her, can't you tell?"
"He's acting like a moron. She'll be fine."
"We don't know that."
"What?"
"She's got some bad internal damage, and she's lost a lot of blood. He's got good reason to be worried sick. I'm giving her a transfusion along with the immersion therapy, but I don't know if it'll be enough to save her..."
"But...that's the best we've got!"
"I know..."
Silence for a long time. Then...
"You know, sometimes I think you haven't grown up at all from when we were all kids in the Digiworld."
The other person didn't reply, and Sora felt herself slipping away again. She wondered who this `he' was, and why he cared...
*I'll make it, don't worry. I'm a fighter...*
The sounds and sensations faded, as she drifted away again.
Her return to consciousness was gradual and piecemeal. She slowly became aware of the fact that she didn't hurt anymore, and then of the fact that she was floating...suspended in some kind of liquid. She also realized that she was wearing a mask of some sort, probably to allow her to breathe, and that there was a tube leading to a needle in her arm. It didn't hurt, but it was one of the weirder sensations she'd felt in her life. She was also not wearing anything besides this equipment, as far as she could tell. So far, she hadn't heard anyone nearby, so this didn't bother her.
*Where am I, anyway?* She'd never heard of a hospital that floated people in bathtubs of warm Jell-O, which was about the consistency of this stuff she was in. She frowned, and this time she succeeded in making her face move. Heartened by this discovery, she tried wiggling a finger. The finger responded perfectly.
*Oh, very good. Now let's try a hand.* She clenched and unclenched her fist, then both fists. The needle moved in her arm, which was an even weirder sensation than having it there in the first place, but both hands worked nicely. Her legs and arms all proved fully mobile, as well. With motor movement all sorted out, she began to explore her `residence'.
Her first impression of a `bathtub' turned out to be pretty close to the mark; she was in a metal and rubber tank of some sort, of about the size and shape, at least internally, of a large bathtub. A soft hum of machinery came from someplace behind the wall near her head, and there were pipes with wire-mesh covers blocking their mouths leading into the tank here and there, as well as a series of filters, or so she guessed them to be by the flow of the Jell-O stuff into and out of them, down by her feet.
Reaching up with her free, un-needled arm, she discovered that the Jell-O stuff had a surface about a foot above her, and that there was a lid over the top of the tank about eight inches above that surface, metal from the feel of it, with a `glass' window above her face. She doubted it was real glass, or anything that would shatter and hurt her.
Pushing herself up onto her elbows, cautiously so as not to disturb the needle, she let as much of her head as would fit, surface, and balanced on one elbow while she reached up to wipe the goo out of her eyes with the other hand. Blinking in the light, she opened her eyes and looked up through the `glass' at the room outside.
Her first impression was decidedly unsatisfying. All she could see was a white ceiling and an electric light fixture; hardly what she would call a view. It certainly didn't tell her anything about where she was.
"Um, hello?" she said awkwardly into the mask, feeling sheepish and silly. Who was going to hear her with this stupid thing on, even if anyone was there? "Hello..." she tried again anyway, feeling that at least she was *doing* something that might get her noticed. "Ah, is anybody there? Where am I? What happened...?" She sighed. No one was there. She was stuck here indefinitely, until somebody came to check on her...assuming that anyone even would.
*This sucks...*
A bespectacled face suddenly popped into sight in the glass window, grinning cheerfully and taking her completely by surprise.
"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty."
"AAAAAGGHHH!"
The face frowned, then suddenly looked embarrassed.
"Oh...sorry..." His voice was a bit muffled by the layer of `glass', but very audible all the same.
"Good God, Joe, don't *do* that to me!" she yelled, then did a comical double take. "Joe?!"
"In the flesh," Joe said with a smile. "I'm guessing from your lungpower that you're feeling a bit better. Would you mind toning it down a little? This is a ward, you know; there are people trying to sleep."
"I'm sorry," she said more quietly. "I didn't realize...a ward? Where? What are you doing here? What am *I* doing here?! How-"
"Okay, a little slower please. Take a few deep breaths and calm down," Joe said gently. "You're not quite better yet. That Snimon carved you up pretty good, you know."
"Pretty well," she automatically corrected, then blinked. "Snimon? Is that what that thing was?"
"I'm afraid so," Joe said. "One of the feral ones."
"The what now?"
He sighed. "Nevermind. Here, I'll explain later. For now, I'll stick to your other questions. This is a ward in the Project headquarters. I can't tell you where; I'm not even sure where we are exactly, geographically that is. It's classified information, and they haven't given it to us yet. I'm here because I volunteered, and I'm the head of this particular ward. You're here because our team that was following the rogue Snimon found you half-dead in your garage and brought you here. And you are one lucky woman; if they hadn't acted quickly, you'd be in extremely bad shape right now."
Sora frowned, trying to take all this in. "So...you saved me?"
"I, and the team that found you, and my `assistants' did. You can thank us later; for now, I bet you want to get out of that tank, and according to the readouts I'm getting, you're ready to finish healing on your own."
Suddenly remembering exactly how much she was wearing, Sora blushed.
"Uh...how exactly do I get out?" she said awkwardly. Joe realized what was bugging her and blushed a little himself.
"Don't worry, the window just shows you from the shoulders up. I'll unlatch the lid and leave you some clothes; you can take off the mask on your own. It was just to let you breathe in the immersion tank solution. I'll take care of the needle once you're changed."
Sora sighed with relief. "Sounds reasonable to me. How soon can you do all this?"
"Right now," Joe said, holding up a bundle and then disappearing from sight. A click at the side of the lid told her it was probably unlocked; she waited a few minutes, then reached up and pushed the lid open. It opened easily, and she sat up, pulling off the mask and hanging it by its tubes over the side of the tank, and scanned the room.
Joe was nowhere in sight. The white bundle lay on a little table by the tank, and she figured it was a medical gown or something that wouldn't be ruined by the translucent goop that still clung to her skin in a film. The room was small and white-walled, and hers was the only tank in it. She wondered idly what Joe had meant by `people are trying to sleep', and was about to climb out of the tank when a small sound caught her ear. She turned to look...and almost fainted right back into the tank again.
A male form was curled up on a low sofa against the opposite wall, obviously fast asleep. Since his eyes were closed, that wasn't what shocked her.
What *did* stun her was the unforgettable dandelion-poof of brown hair and the familiar lines of the sleeping face.
"Tai...?" she whispered, not sure if she believed her eyes. He stirred a little at the sound of her voice, but didn't wake up.
His movement reminded her of the potential situation should he wake up suddenly before she made use of the bundle on the table, and she turned back to it and opened it, her body working on autopilot in a sense of self-preservation while her mind whirled.
*Tai? Here? Well, of course he's here; he agreed to come, didn't he? He went, and I didn't, and that's all there is to it. Three years is a long time...* The bundle turned out to be not a hospital gown, but a towel, a pullover white top, and a pair of blue-gray pants that reminded her of leggings, as well as undergarments. The part of her mind that wasn't incoherent with surprise at that point was pleased. She toweled most of the goo off and put the clothes on (the shirt was a little awkward, thanks to the needle, but the rest was fine), then, fully dressed, turned back to the silent form on the sofa.
Sitting down on the edge of the tank, she watched his sleeping face. Curled up like that, he looked innocent, almost childlike; he was hardly the angry twenty-two-year-old that she remembered from the last time she'd spoken to him.
*The last time I thought I'd ever speak to him,* she thought, half in irony, half in wonder. *And there he is...and three years isn't so long after all. At least, not anymore.* It had seemed like forever while it was happening, but now?
*Now, I just get to wonder if he's going to agree with me...or just slam the door in my face again.* She sighed and put her face in her hands.
"I'm here, okay?" she murmured to the oblivious Taichi. "That's what you wanted, isn't it? I'm here, and I don't know how to leave, and I hope you're happy, so can we please call it pax?"
"I see you're dressed," Joe's voice came from the doorway. Sora's head whipped around in surprise, and she glared at the hapless bluenette.
"Will you quit doing that? Some people might be having private conversations!"
"That's a pretty one-sided conversation, if you ask me," Joe said, looking critically at the soundly sleeping Tai. He ignored the redoubled poisonous look Sora gave him, and held up a hand. "I'm going to make a doctor's order now. Two, in fact."
"I'm listening," Sora said uncertainly.
"One, I know you won't like it, but you need to stay here until you're completely healed. If you have complications from something we didn't find and take care of the first time, this is the best place you can possibly be to be treated. We have technology here that isn't going to be released to the general public for years to come. The best hospital in the world couldn't keep up with us, and you are too valuable to take chances with on this."
Sora gave him a confused look, and he shrugged. "That was a direct quote to me from Command. Don't ask me what it means. Anyway, on to point two. He," Joe gestured towards Tai, "has not gotten a wink of sleep in the last two-and-a-half days."
"I've been here for three days...?" Sora said incredulously. Joe nodded.
"He's been burning the midnight oil `standing watch' over you, even though we have instruments that were doing it much better than he could. I gave up trying to talk him out of it by the first day, but now that he's finally dropped off, and now that you're stable, I'd like to request that you let him sleep as long as he needs. And he needs hours."
"When did he fall asleep?" Sora said, in a quieter tone than the one she'd been using. She was touched by the show of devotion. *Maybe I don't need to worry after all... Still, I'm not assuming anything until I get a chance to talk to him. It'd be too easy to get hurt if I'm wrong.*
"He dozed off about four hours ago," Joe said, reaching for the needle in her arm. Before she could react, he did something with it and then gave it a sort of twisting tug, and it slid out neatly.
"Ow!" Sora yelped. It hadn't hurt a lot, but it had stung. "Warn me next time!"
"If I had, you would have been nervous and you might have messed me up somehow," Joe said with impeccable reason, taking the needle and the attached tube over to a sink and throwing it away. He pressed one of a bank of buttons on a console on the wall, and then rummaged in a drawer before coming back with a band-aid. "Here. That's going to feel kind of weird for a while...have you ever had blood drawn?"
"Yeah..." Sora giggled in spite of herself at the Muppets print on the band-aid. *Like I was a kid again,* she thought.
"Well, it's going to feel kind of like that. We've improved on the needles used by modern hospitals in many ways, but not in that area."
"Oh, swell," Sora muttered, remembering the achy, itchy feeling she'd had around the place where the needle had been. It was pretty annoying...but not really a major problem. Joe handed her a pair of shoes.
"Here, I'm running you a bath. You'll want to get that muck off of you." He sighed. "Sorry about that. I've improved on the original a lot, but I can't seem to get rid of the tendency to cling to the skin."
"You invented this?" Sora said, stunned. Joe grinned.
"I sure did! I was the head of the board of physicians on the project. It was my idea."
"It's genius," Sora said with an appreciative smile.
"Yeah, but there's still the stickiness factor, and...people who've used it complain about an aftertaste in their mouths. They say it tastes like-"
"Like hazelnuts, only nasty?" Sora finished. She'd noticed the taste, but hadn't thought it had anything to do with the tank. Joe nodded.
"Sorry about that, too. Here, I'll show you to that bath. We've got a bunch of little attached bathrooms around here. And I'll get you some real clothes." Without bothering to explain what he meant by that, he led her off into the hallway.
*Hm...`real' clothes?* Both Joe and Tai were wearing similar outfits, now that she thought about it; blue-gray uniform-type things, with colored bands at the wrists and neck. Tai's had had orange bands, and Joe's were navy blue. Joe wore a white lab-coat sort of deal over his `uniform'. Before she had a chance to ponder the significance of the clothes further, they had reached a row of numbered doors and Joe was opening one and leading her inside.
"I got the bath running a few minutes ago, so it should be full," Joe said. Sora remembered him hitting a button when he went to get her band-aid and blinked.
*Man, this place is technology central! No wonder Izzy decided to come...*
Then her thoughts were captured by the sight of a large bathtub, a real one this time, very full and topped with a thick layer of luxurious-looking foam.
"You know, I think I like this place," she announced. Joe laughed.
"I thought you might. Here, I'll go get those clothes, and someone to instruct you in putting them on. They're a little confusing if you don't know how they work. See you later," he said, and was gone before she could return the goodbye.
*If I don't know how they work? Huh... Well, he's as frenetic as ever,* Sora thought with a wry smile. *I wonder if the others have changed any?* The idea that she could idly speculate about what the `others' would be like when she saw them again filled her with a pleasant warmth. *I'm going to see them again! I really am!* Grinning, she headed for the bath.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Okay, now comes the oh-so-familiar rant...two reviews?!! *Two* measly reviews, for my darling Taiora baby?!!!! *sobs*
Please, people, have a heart and take pity on a starving artist! Onegai! (please!) Review! Thankies... -O_o bandit