It's one of those days where it really sucks to not have a car. One of the many things I need to do is get chicken feed. My poor girls have been all out since yesterday, and while I let them scavenge the whole backyard, what's to find in wet, snow speckled lawn? I have to get to my aunt's in Orem (two hours away) to help her, meds, etc. Ugh...

And dishes. Every freaking dish in my house is dirt and I have no dishwasher. All by hand. Gonna need some really good anime to distract me...*whine*

Oh well. It'll all work out, right?

19

"I had a friend who more or less demanded she be with me after she heard of my suicidal episode. I would have much rather been alone, and she wasn't the most comforting of presences, but I understood that I had scared her and that she needed it more than I. So, I ignored the anxiety she brought and let her sit there while I played video games. It brought home to me how careful I had to be to not hurt others."

I woke up hurting.

"What the…"

The ceiling was industrial rectangles, the kind we would throw pencils at in choir to see if they'd stick, and some had. I didn't like it. It was distant, professional, and ugly. Then I got to look around and see the rest of what could have only been a hospital room, with me resident number one in bed with my arms bandaged half way up my upper arm. The moment I tried to bend one, pain spiked so hard and quick, I got black dots across my eyes. Also, because of this, I did notice that my IV had been stuck into my foot, which had been padded about with what could have only been heating pads. Good thing, because my other, none IV foot was freezing. I didn't understand how I could have slept through all this, but, then, blacking out is a different story, isn't it?

I wasn't sitting alone for long. A nurse came in, dressed in green scrubs and with her thick blond hair tied to the back of her head. She beamed on meeting my gaze.

"Good to see you're awake," she went to the computer at my bedside, which had its wires in all sorts of machines to monitor me. "Are you hungry? Can I get you something?"

"Maybe a break. What the heck am I doing here?"

Her typing paused and she gave e a sympathetic look, the kind that was quietly calculating in the back of how bad of shape you really were even as they felt sorry for you.

"You don't remember?"

I scrunched up my face. Why would I even ask if I hadn't? Though, now that I was thinking on it with my tired brain, I remembered a calming darkness and itchy arms. But I couldn't see how mere scratching could have caused my arms to become immobile.

"We had to give you a skin graph. Almost forty percent of the skin on your arms had been peeled off."

I jumped. "Huh?"

"Oh dear, this really must be a shock to you," she wrote down some numbers, now purposely not looking at me. "Let me go get the doctor. While he visits with you, I'll go find you something nice to eat. Any requests?"

Kind of hard to think of food when you were just told your arms were skinless and you couldn't remember why.

She seemed to get that well enough and left without needing a word from me.

Not soon after she left, a figure dressed in blackety black walked in, the only real blackety black black in the universe it seemed, and stopped at the foot of my bed.

"I heard you don't remember," he said in his usual flat, dry tone. The kind that made him sound chronically unimpressed with the world.

"I remember wanting to be in the attic and my arms getting itchy…this is a dream, right?"

"I'd imagine the pain is pretty real."

I tried to move my arms again and got a reminder that nearly blacked me out again.

And for some stupid reason, the only thing I could think was, "I'm not going to be able to do my homework like this."

"I'm told after a few days you'll be able to bend your arms without much pain, and your hands and fingers are unscathed." He gave his straight-lipped smiled. "If you thought you were going to be lucky on your essays and reports, you're out of luck."

I stared at him for a long moment, waiting for him to say something else. But he just looked back at me with those blue eyes, shockingly bright amidst so much black hair and clothing. I was forgetting something else. Something important. My whole mind was off duty and floating somewhere up with the stars.

So, unimportant facts got fed to me instead.

"You don't wear black all the time because you're goth or emo," I said.

He shook his head.

"Then, it's for Gene?"

He nodded.

And for some reason, thinking about his dead brother made me remember the other person who had stood next to him.

"Lin?" I asked.

"Alive," he said, carefully. "In a word. He's broken his neck and damaged a good deal of his nervous system. The fact he isn't paralyzed from the neck down is a miracle, but it's like he has advanced Parkison's."

I blinked, my eyes suddenly hurting. Burning.

"And…me?" My voice pitched a bit.

He ducked his chin down to give me something of a gentle look.

"You're going to be alright."

My jaw jittered and my throat tightened. "I…I'll get my arms again?"

"You have them now," he said. "They just need to heal." Then the softness vanished to something even colder than his usual. "The spirits of that house did a number on…us."

Oh yeah. That's what we had been doing. "What are you going to tell the clients?"

"To have every inch of the place exorcized or to burn it all down," though the way he said it, he preferred the later. "Like hell they could use that for marketing."

"It's a beautiful house," I said, not quite in defense. "It would be wonderful to live in one like that someday. I…I dreamed about it…that dream that made me cry."

He cocked his head to the side. "Why would a house make you cry? Did you use to live in one when your parents were alive?"

I shook my head. "No. I just like old fashioned, beautiful things. Things nowadays look like they don't get half as much time or care in their creation. No, I…I thought of how nice it would be to have a big house full of people who love me." I tried a smile, knowing it was weak. "How narcissistic is that?"

"I'd say it's rather human. You want a house full of family."

I shivered. "Is that…is that what family is like?"

"The healthy ones, yeah."

And then I was crying. It had been one kind of pain thinking it could never happen and I had just imagined it, it was a completely new pain to know it actually existed. Maybe even commonly so.

His eyes jumped about my face, tears streaming, probably getting a bit of snot going down my nose.

"Hard to miss what you don't know or remember," he said softly.

For a few very awkward, very unpleasant minutes, he just stood there and watched me sob out loud into my poor bandaged arms. Then, I heard the creak of the bedsprings and a warm, clothed arm wrapped about my shoulders. His other hand brushed aside my messy bangs before grabbing and dropping a small box of tissues on my lap.

"I'm not good at this," he said, in a soft, measured way that made him sound totally unlike his cool, confident self. "But you'll have a family someday. Maybe even soon. You are all grown up now."

"Stop making it sound like I'm ten."

"You have to be at least 16 and with guardian's permission to marry."

"Then just say get married, have babies, be happy."

He hefted a sigh. "Whatever. Just blow your nose already and stop sniffing it back. It's making me cringe."

I did so. After blowing the horn several times and breathing deep, his arm slipped away from my shoulders.

"Like Takigawa said," he said. "You're not hopelessly ugly. You have a chance."

I let out a short, wet laugh. "I don't know whether it's so hard for you to call me cute or accuse you of ugly shaming. Ugly people need love too."

"Fine. You're marital material, happy?"

I blinked. "How do you know?"

He threw his arms in the air. "Again with the flirting—"

"It's a legitimate question! I'm the one in the throws of misery here, give me a break!"

That did make him pause a bit longer before getting up off the bed, black sleeved arms crossed and expression default once more. He didn't look at me.

"You are adorable, Mai. You're one of the few people besides Gene who can make me laugh. I figured that's what most guys wanted. Cute girl who makes them laugh."

And probably because he'd start changing colors soon, he crossed the space between him and his long coat draped over the visitor's seats in one swift stride.

"I'll see if I can catch the doctor, get an estimate on when we can move out of here." He scowled. "It would be ridiculously expensive to have to leave you here and fly you over later. I'd rather we just all left in the van."

And with that, he left, not leaving me a moment to get a word in edgewise.