AN: Gosh guys, I am so sorry for the loooooooooong wait. Was on holidays and thought I would have plenty of time for writing but alas… I was wrong. But I am back home and so new chapters will start popping up frequently. I hope you haven't lost interest and this is worth the wait.

Chapter 12

He looks through the stuff he is taking to the hospital as he starts packing it all into his backpack. He got his camera, though she still isn't up for posing much, despite the fact that her face is almost completely back to normal, if one ignores the bluish hue of the bruises, that is. He also got the pictures he wanted to show her, he has been snapping pictures of stuff she is missing as she is still tied to that hospital bed and he has a little highlight today; he went past her billboard yesterday as a big bunch of people were admiring it and got a snapshot of the group staring at it. He got the bag of sweets he has been smuggling in daily on her request and a little present, a set of colorful pens for the sketchbook he brought her last week. And so he sets off for his daily, on weekends even twice daily, visit.

She is so bored. The doctor said she could go home soon, but he had said that twice before and it never happened. Once she got a fever and they ran a hundred tests to decide in the end that it was an "unexplained fever" and once she bled a little from the wound in her side and they decided to take some stitches out and restitch it up. She gets visits from everybody and their uncle in the afternoon and evening, but during school hours nobody but her mom comes. And hours upon hours of her mom sitting next to her fussing over this and that ("Don't touch your IV!" "Stop playing with that scab" "Don't scratch your face" "Stop holding your breath, you know the machine will just beep!") don't exactly make for very fun times, so when her mother said she needed to run some errands today, Bay wasn't exactly upset. But now she is bored. They wake her up at 6 am to get her temperature and her blood pressure measured and to help her slowly make her way to the bathroom and she rarely manages to fall back asleep afterwards, so she has been lying here, watching the ceiling for nearly 10 hours now. Internet doesn't work in this hospital and the TV is coin operated, so she listens to her iPod for a while but she knows every single sings by heart by now and so she does what she does many hours every day, she stares up at the ceiling and just waits. Emmett will come and visit soon she thinks and a smile spreads across her face like morning sunshine. He has come every single day, but they don't get alone time very often. Daphne is there most days and they agreed that in her presence all cuddling should be kept to an absolute minimum, so chaste kisses on cheek and a rare handholding is all she can really hope for. And to be honest, she should be thankful for this, huge upgrade from what was going on just a few weeks ago. Just as she ponders this lack of passion she hears a knock and there he is, cute as always (even cuter she thinks, this tender look he has when he visits her, becomes him) and, thank goodness, alone. She sits up and ignores the sharp pain in her side, signs "finally" and then reaches out to grab his hand. He sits down next to her and without a word just leans in, kisses her, hard and fast, making up for the last 5 days in which they didn't exchange anything but a little peck goodbye on the forehead. She is so ready to go home and do this for hours on end.

He feels like it has been months since they had some time alone. He loves Daphne and is really growing to like the extended Vazquez-Kennish clan, they have been anything but kind to him and never ask him to leave or seem bothered by his presence, but their constant buzzing around Bay and therefore, by association, him, is getting a bit much. He can't wait for her to be all well, to go back to days like that almost forgotten picnic the first time, well actually the second time, they kissed. He wants to take her out for rides on his bike, wants to go to a game with her, take her to the Christmas ball at his school. Actually he hasn't told her about this, because he wants to make sure she will be all well for it and also maybe a little bit because he is a bit nervous… he doesn't really know how to ask, the ball is in less than a month though and he is getting quite excited. He has never gone to a ball with a girl before, other than Daphne that is, but it was as friends, this time he will be able to pick her up in his tux and take pictures on the porch and slow-dance with someone who cares for him the way he cares for her. He tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear as she signs about how bored she is, and he grins and signs back "once you are out of here, I won't allow you to be bored ever again". Then he reaches down to his backpack to take his pictures out, to show her what he brought. She laughs and scoots over a little bit more so he can sit down next to her more comfortably and they look at pictures or rather she looks at the pictures and he looks at her looking at them.

A nurse comes in and talks quickly and while she moves around touching this and that and he doesn't catch a word of what she is saying, Bay is not very good at interpreting yet and so he waits, sees Bay nod in excitement and turn to him, her eyebrows lifted and her smile sparkling. He nods in assent and wonders what he just agreed to, when he sees the nurse bring in a wheelchair and they help her out of bed and into the chair, attach that bag, that has grown to be like a third arm sprouting out of Bay's hand, to the chair and then he pushes her down the corridor towards the elevator. He knows exactly where he is taking her. A week or so ago, she fell asleep and her parents were there and so he went for a little tour of the hospital and found this garden. It is small and the average age of the people in it seems to be 97 years, but it is outdoors and there is sunshine and even a bird or two picking away on some crumbs one of the really old ladies is making while trying to gnaw on a cracker. Once they are outside she looks at him and her face is so full of glee he can't believe it didn't occur to him earlier to ask if he could take her out. Maybe this would be the perfect time and place to ask her about that ball he thinks and starts preparing himself mentally to be possibly shot down. She may not want to go to a ball at an all deaf school, she may think it even silly to have such a thing, she may not want to meet his friends. Or maybe she will, he just needs to ask and he sees a little bench and steers towards it, he can hardly push her chair and sign at the same time. She looks at him, ready to say something, he sees something flit across her eyes (maybe doubt he thinks, maybe she doesn't know the signs for the words she wants to say) and then she smiles and signs "this is perfect".

She has not been outside since she had the accident and this feels like a rebirth. The birds are chirping, the winds breezes in and out between the foliage of the few trees and her hair and somewhere in the little garden there is a wind chime that makes sounds so soft they are almost magical. She is going to tell Emmett that she has missed this, the sound of outside, of nature, rather than the constant beeping of machines when she realizes he can't hear it, he won't be able to share this and she stops herself, just signs "thank you, this is perfect". The thought that he has never heard a bird chirp bothers her though, she just can't imagine it. As he parks her by a bench she keeps thinking, these past few weeks in the hospital she has become more aware of all the little noises around her probably because usually she doesn't spend days on end lying in bed staring at the ceiling and just listening to her surroundings. These noises, some comforting, like the sound of her mother humming a lullaby, some annoying like that phone that keeps ringing every single evening when the nurses are changing shifts and can't get to it, some so common, like the sound of water pouring into a cup, of the footsteps of a child skipping, an old man coughing, all of them are completely foreign to Emmett. She had never thought of deafness in these terms, to her it had always just been something that made communicating harder for them until she mastered signing, but now she is suddenly sad for him. He doesn't look sad at all though, in fact he looks a little bit nervous.

"What is it?" she signs and says and he breathes deeply, scaring her for about half a second and then signs very, very slowly, mouthing clearly, like her does when he wants a point to come across without a doubt. "Will you come to the Christmas ball with me? At my school?" A little butterfly awakens in her belly and she giggles involuntarily as she grabs his hand and entwines her fingers with his. He was nervous to ask her that? Did he honestly believe she would say no? She grins at him and says, not bothering to sign, because he will understand this, "Of course, I would love to!", then she grabs the neck of his t shirt and pulls him down to meet his lips with hers.