A/N: Less than three weeks before I leave for Africa!!!
---
An hour later, Lisa was resting comfortably in a bed at Metropolitan Hospital, focused more on the snow outside than the people in the room with her. Augustine was gone, taking the subway back to Jane Street to meet the kids at home, and her parents were of course there talking to the doctors, but nothing interested Lisa until she smelled an extremely familiar perfume. A little smile came over her face and she turned to look at the door as Lyna walked in.
'Hey,' she said, her voice raspy.
'Hello Lisa,' Lyna said, strolling to the chair by the window. 'I heard about what happened with Rippner.'
Lisa didn't answer, instead watching Lyna pull over the chair.
'It is fortuitous I was called here,' she said, leaning closer to the pregnant woman. 'I just happened to see a woman on a respirator in the intensive care unit. She looked quite familiar to me, and I realised that it was Eleni.'
Lisa tried to sit up and get out of the bed, suddenly angered, but Lyna managed to keep her down, pressing on her shoulders.
'Keep your mind on what is important, Lisa,' said Lyna, looking at Lisa through thickly rimmed glasses. 'And you know what I am talking about.'
'Lisa,' came Joe's voice from the corner of the room. 'The doctors would like to take some x-rays, do a few ultrasounds, and probably do a CT scan.'
Lyna looked at Lisa again. 'Finish all your tests and I will take care of Eleni. I will see you in a few hours.'
---
Eleni Petalas was definitely in her own little world. From the words around her, she could only assume that she was, in fact, going to die, but no one bothered to tell her when. Hell, they hadn't even told he where she was. The nurses came and went, squirting morphine into her IV, but otherwise leaving her alone, so when a person stopped by her bed for more than a few seconds, she was curious. Forcing one of her eyes open, she looked at the woman beside her, the look on her face immediately going dour. To anyone else, the woman would have looked like any nurse dressed in light blue scrubs, her dark hair tied back and glasses perched on her nose, but Eleni knew differently.
'I see you are intubated,' Lyna said, towering over the Grecian woman's bed and injecting a syringe into the port atop the IV in her hand. 'Let us wake you up a little, but I suppose we will have to keep this to yes and no questions.'
Eleni glared at her, looking quite defiant despite having one eye swollen shut and the other one red with a broken capillary.
'I want to know what you did to him,' said Lyna, picking up Eleni's patient chart and flipping through it. 'His wife is very upset after being attacked by him at the Manhattan Centre.'
Even through the large apparatus taped to her face, Lyna could see Eleni grin triumphantly. Looking over the clipboard, she clicked her tongue.
'Will I have to extubate you and force you to speak?'
The grin immediately fell from the other woman's face and she pressed back against the pillow.
'Looks like Watson got you good before you killed her,' said Lyna, slipping the clipboard back into the container at the foot of the bed. 'All right, let us start this.'
Walking to the other side of Eleni, Lyna flipped open a notepad and set it on the woman's thigh next to her amazingly uninjured right hand. She crammed a pen into Eleni's hand and set it atop the pad.
'I will try for yes or no, but some things you will need to tell me,' said Lyna, leaning over the other woman. 'For yes, raise your index finger. For no, keep it down. Do you understand?'
After a moment, Eleni raised her index finger.
'Good,' replied Lyna. 'Did your commands come from Matthias Poulain?'
Yes.
'Did you manipulate Jackson Rippner medically prior to his disappearance?'
No.
'Did you manipulate Jackson Rippner medically after his disappearance?'
Yes.
'As described in your thesis?'
Yes.
'Was Poulain trying to bring Jackson back into the Society?'
A long pause, and her finger did not raise. Lyna raised an eyebrow.
'Did you hear me? Was Poulain trying to bring Jackson back into the Society?'
Eleni gave her as angry of a face as she could and still didn't raise her finger.
'Then... why did he do this?' Lyna asked, stunned.
Slowly, Eleni began to scrawl messily on the pad of paper. Lyna watched intently, trying to read the word through her hand before the other woman moved her hand back, which knocked the pad onto the floor. Lyna immediately dove after the pad, flipping it over to look at what she'd written.
'Abreaction,' Lyna murmured, staring at the word for a moment. 'For who? Jackson?'
No.
'Poulain?'
Yes.
'He needed to see Jackson again for closure?'
Eleni raised her finger up and down as though having difficultly deciding.
'He needed Jackson to provide closure for him?'
Yes.
Keeping her eyes on Eleni, Lyna flipped the page and set it back on her leg.
'Is that why all of the regional heads have been killed?'
Again, a raised finger.
'It is all for a purge?'
Yes.
Lyna knit her brow. 'He ruined Jackson's life to purge his Society? After all that Jackson's been through, all that Jackson's wife has been through, he destroyed a man just to get revenge on a bunch of people? Could he not have used an active manager?'
No.
'Why use Jackson?'
After yet another pause, Eleni began to write on the pad of paper, Lyna sounding out the word as she wrote.
'Ob-lig-ations,' Lyna said in a choked voice. 'No. All of his obligations to the Society stopped once he quit.'
Eleni grinned again.
'Great,' hissed Lyna. 'So he was still under contract?'
No.
Lyna slumped her shoulders, rolling her eyes. 'You are saying that even though Jackson is not under contract, Poulain wanted him to participate in this purge?'
Yes.
Again, knit brows. 'Why?'
Lyna looked down, expecting to see Eleni write something, but instead, the woman's arm jerked, throwing the pen onto the floor. The Ukrainian bent down to pick up the pad and pen and was about to shove it back into her hand when she looked up and noticed that Eleni's eyes had rolled back in her head as she went into spasm.
'We have a code blue!' screamed a nurse who happened to be walking by. 'Multiple organ failure!'
Holding the paper and pen to her chest, Lyna backed up as a team descended on Eleni. There was a huge scurry of movement as they worked on pulling non-essentials from her chest to clear it off before smearing conductive gel on it. One of the nurses picked up the defibrillator and set it on Eleni's chest.
'Clear!' she said, and everyone took their hands off the woman before there was a loud thunk and whirring.
Backing up more, Lyna slipped to the wall and across to the door. The mêlée continued as she walked out the door, the last thing she heard being the telltale sound of the heart monitor going flat without the sound of the paddles charging once more.
---
By the time Lyna made it back to Lisa's room, Joe and Carol had left to go deal with their grandchildren at home, both hoping to make the adjustment of missing both parents as smooth as possible. An ultrasonographer had rolled in an ultrasound machine and was watching it warm up as Lisa lay back on the bed looking up at the ceiling. When Lyna walked in, Lisa turned and gave her an odd look.
'Scrubs?' she asked quietly and a bit roughly before continuing. 'Did you find anything out?'
'A little,' Lyna said, focusing more on the lubricant the ultrasonographer was squirting onto Lisa's stomach than Lisa's face. She scrunched up her nose. 'I have a place to start at least.'
Lisa made a little approving noise before turning to watch the screen of the ultrasound machine. Lyna watched the probe of the machine move across Lisa's stomach with a raised eyebrow.
'Do those red marks not hurt?'
'Hm?' asked Lisa, turning back to Lyna.
'Are they lesions?'
The ultrasonographer laughed a little before putting the back of his gloved hand to his mouth and clearing his throat. Lisa smiled knowingly at him.
'They're stretch marks,' Lisa explained softly. 'New skin created because my stomach isn't usually big enough to occupy these two.'
'Ah,' said Lyna, trying to seem nonchalant. 'This seems like a very inhumane process, and I believe that considering how difficult your Jonathan is, it is not worth it.'
Taking a chair and pulling it closer, Lyna sat down next to the bed.
'Eleni did not bring on the fugue, but she did support it with medication after it happened,' Lyna said, leaning back in the chair and watching the computer screen on the ultrasound machine. 'She used the techniques put forward in her doctoral thesis. So that is a picture of the babies?'
The ultrasonographer, looking at the 3-D image, answered as he pointed. 'There's baby one, the girl, and baby two, the boy.'
'In her thesis, did she happen to mention how to fix him?' asked Lisa dryly.
'No,' Lyna said with a bit of a grin. 'The amnesia was supported by diazepam injections, and my best guess by looking at the date on her chart was that Jackson wandered around for a couple of days before the diazepam flushed out of his system and his brain had a chance to reset.'
'Then how did he have all that blood on him when he came home?'
The ultrasonographer tried to avoid making eye contact with either of them, but both women could tell he suddenly got very uncomfortable. Lyna, however, did not care in the least. 'Well, was it fresh?'
Lisa didn't answer out of concern for the ultrasonographer, who grew tenser. 'Does everything look okay with the babies?'
He looked at her with a relieved smile, seeing his chance to exit. 'They look just fine, a little big for their age, but I'm sure you already knew that.'
'I had a general idea,' Lisa replied as he shut off the machine and began wiping the gel off of her abdomen.
The two women watched the ultrasonographer gather his things and leave, and it was silent until the door clicked behind him.
'Dried, now that you mention it.'