"It's not like she said I couldn't have it…"

He was pouting and he knew it, but he couldn't help himself. Janet Fraiser had come and gone, but she'd made it perfectly clear to her young patient that she was not happy with him – for eating something that he knew she wouldn't approve of and for not telling her who had smuggled the food to him – without so many words. Of course, he didn't need words.

The first thing she'd done was changed the bandages on his stomach, shoulder and chest. While the inside of him was no longer damaged, the outside was, and Ian had his first look at the gunshot wounds while she cleaned the wounds with antiseptic that hurt worse on contact than the actual gunshots had.

"Are you using sandpaper?" he'd asked her, biting back yet another curse as a stabbing pain coursed through him from the general direction of his chest.

She'd simply given him a less than sympathetic look and dabbed the antiseptic on another spot.

"Do you want an infection?"

"Will it hurt less than the stuff you're using to prevent it?"

That little comment had been a mistake and he'd known it immediately. The next bandage she'd taken off had been fairly ripped off – along with what felt like every inch of skin on his shoulder.

"Holy shit…"

He hadn't been able to bite that one back, but Janet had only raised an eyebrow at the curse and started dabbing the antiseptic on. This time Ian hadn't made any comment about just how bad the shit hurt going on. He could count, after all, and there were still four bandages for her to change – and one of them was on his lower belly, which was the one spot on his chest and stomach that actually had little hairs, and he wanted them to be there when she was finished.

Fraiser wasn't finished with her lesson, though, Ian found out.

After she was finished redressing his wounds – and Jesus he was aching by the time she was done, although it wasn't anything permanent – she'd given him a lecture on just how many side effects there were to the various medications he was being given. And she hadn't allowed him a chance to pretend he was falling asleep through it so he could avoid it, because every time he closed his eyes, she mentioned taking blood for some test or another to see if the medication or the injuries were making him anemic and causing him to fall asleep.

Which of course had forced him to open his eyes and listen to her lecture. Damn it. There had to be some kind of regulation against treating patients like this. He'd have to take a look at the Air Force medical journals or whatever held the rules the doctors were supposed to live by. Just plain cruel. Not at all like her sweet daughter. Of course, Sam had mentioned in passing that Cassie was adopted, so that explained the difference.

Once Fraiser was done with the lecture – and the satisfied look in her expression plainly told him that she knew it had been boring and long – she'd mentioned that he probably wanted something to keep him from becoming bored since he didn't look at all sleepy now, so she'd flipped on the TV and left it on the Spanish speaking network, and pocketed the remote control, almost absently – although Ian knew better.

"I'll be back to check on you in a bit," she told him. "Try to behave, okay?"

He'd scowled, and had bitten back a comment that probably would have made her start changing bandages again – Ian wasn't stupid, after all – and Janet had left, humming to herself, leaving him with an aching body and a Spanish soap opera. And a less than sunny disposition.

"Stupid Big Mac…"

He pulled out the bag from under the pillow, double-checked to make sure there wasn't another burger in there (wishful thinking, he knew, but it didn't hurt to hope, right?) crumbled it up and tossed it into the garbage can on the other side of the room and settled in to watch the soap opera.

OOOOOOOOO

The soap opera actually wasn't that bad. Janet couldn't have known it, of course, but Ian spoke fluent Spanish – as well as several other languages. With his memory, learning languages was a snap – especially since many were fairly well related anyways, so once he'd learned the sentence structure and verbiages, it was simply a matter of learning vocabulary. And that was no problem.

By the time Fraiser had returned, ready to change the channel for him, Ian was fairly well glued to the TV, caught up in Maria's pregnancy by Jaime, who wasn't willing to marry her until she admitted to him that she'd slept with Raul – even though Ian personally thought the guy was a bastard and Maria could do better.

Shescowled when she realized that Ian didn't look anywhere near as miserable as she'd expected him to. In fact, he didn't look miserable at all.

He looked over at her when she walked in, and she looked over to make sure he hadn't somehow changed the channel – which would have really pissed her off, because that would have meant he'd somehow gotten out of bed. Which really would have earned him an ass-chewing. It was still on the Spanish channel.

"Got any popcorn?" Ian asked, unable to hide a grin when he saw a vein actually pop up in her forehead at the question.

Hah.

OOOOOOOO

"It was an innocent question…" he mumbled grumpily to himself minutes later, rubbing his aching arm.

She hadn't found it at all innocent, and Janet had turned off the TV, taken blood from two different places – to make sure he was stable for the morning transfer, she told him – and had turned off the light as she'd left him alone, telling him to go to sleep or she'd dope him up so badly he wouldn't even be able to spell popcorn. Then she'd closed the door, leaving him in the dark, aching just a bit, and with absolutely nothing to preoccupy him.

Some people had no sense of humor…