She awoke sometime later in one of the recover rooms, slightly dazed from the drugs, but for the most part awake. She found one of her legs in a cast, and smiled, knowing that the idiots here could at least do something right, even if it was something as small as get a cast on correctly. She hated it already, finding it to itch like crazy, but it was better than going around with an open fracture. She tried to sit up, but found it to be hard, and painful.

Her legs hurt from the burns, and she grimaced. It wasn't her fault that the Cessna she had been flying had hit a patch of turbulence. She kicked herself for wrecking the five thousand dollar plane. It was a piece of junk as far as planes went, but it was still an expensive piece of junk. She found the bald doctor, the one who hadn't been in charge of her, doing rounds of the ER patients that had been admitted, making sure that his staff had done their jobs.

"Yo! Baldy!" He turned around and stared at her, obviously enraged.

"What did you just call me?" he sounded somewhat incredulous, amazed and appalled that anyone would dare to call him that.

"Baldy. Would you prefer midget?" His eyes met hers, and something, they were both unsure of what, passed between them. It was hatred, it was anger, but there were the seeds of friendship in there, there was mutual feelings, and similar personalities. They both hated each other, but from the few brief moments they had shared, they both looked to the other as a sparring partner, someone to trade insults with.

"Well, well, well, I see our local royalty has awoken." He had recovered quickly, and injected his last phrase with all the sarcasm he could, turning the phrase into a rude jab. But all the girl on the bed did was smirk.

"Bow down and kiss the gurney. You're on hallowed ground right now Demi Doc." The look on his face at that comment was priceless. He was shocked and obviously angered at the underhanded jab at him. "what? You're half the size of a normal man, and you appear to only have not even half the soul of one. If you're half a man, then you're half a doctor." He turned around to walk away before he did something he'd regret dearly, but she called after him again.

"Doc!" He turned slowly, and glared at her. "Who are you?"

"Someone who's leaving."

"No, seriously, what's your name, I missed when Smitty there was busy wrecking my leg." He thought about it for a moment. It was a simple question, but he had to fight the urge to make something up off the top of his head. He couldn't even remember if he had even told the girl his name.

"Romano. Now I have a question for you." It was something he had been pondering since she had come in on the ambulance.

"Shoot."

"Why do you call him Smitty?" She laughed out loud at his question, and kept going for a short while before composing herself again.

"It's his name." Romano's eyebrows raised in slight confusing.

"Kovac, it means blacksmith, or to make it shorter, Smith." Romano nodded. "Now another for you." Romano glared at her, but made no move to leave. "When do I get out of here? I've got a nice little cast on, can I go now?" Romano walked over to the foot of the bed and removed the chart from it's holder.

"Not yet, you've got some bad burns and you're going to need some physical therapy."

"Can't I get that back home?"

"Where's home?"

"New York." She had the look of someone who had been cooped up in someplace for way too long. She never could handle sitting still for very long, she was naturally antsy and impatient, always on the move, always running around like a chicken with it's head chopped off.

"Probably not for a while." She looked disappointed, and somewhat scared at that. He looked at her for a long minute before he spoke again. "The Hapsburgs were German, weren't they?" She looked puzzled for a minute at the sudden shift of the topic before she spoke.

"Originally, yes, but they ruled the entire Holy Roman Empire for a few centuries, half a millennium almost."

"Which is why you know Croatian?"

"Hungarian." She shrugged. "Close enough." He seemed somewhat impressed at her language skills.

"You speak Hungarian?"

"And French, and the new English, Spanish." If he wasn't impressed before, he was now. "Hey, don't look so shocked, I get bored easily, I lack an attention span."

"So you taught yourself other languages?"

"when it's all you have in your house, you make do with what you've got." She shrugged as if it was something common. He could speak French, but that was the extent of his literary capabilities. "Now, can you see exactly how long I'm going to be stuck here shorty?"

"If you call me that, you'll get nowhere."

"I don't care." He looked at her for another minute, before going off to find Luka, to dump his patient back onto him.