Chapter Five: Set Me Free (Casting Crowns)
Author note: I have no idea if Judge Judy is shown in Canada, but for this story, she is.
The jubilant news ended up being the core part of Lou's next update to Alanna's tech-side support team. As with his first update, he printed out his tech-side updates and passed the printout to Roy; Roy in turn gave it to Giles, little suspecting that the office gossips were ever so discreetly taking peeks and photos of the printout that Roy left in plain sight on his desk.
The office gossips were delighted with the news that Alanna was talking again; they regarded such news as fair game to spread as they liked. Of course, any setbacks would also be spread, but much more…discreetly…or so they fancied.
The little family wasn't out of the woods yet, though. Not by a long shot. Alanna was so exhausted and worn out that she had to be coaxed to eat…and could only manage a small portion of what she was fed at first. And, despite her full sentence response to the doctor, she was usually too tired for more than a word or two of communication. Still, it only took a few tries for her to communicate that she A) wanted her tablet and B) she wanted her favorite radio station.
Instead of making her wait for either one, Greg called in his reinforcements. Spike showed up less than an hour later with Alanna's boombox and tablet in tow. To Greg's puzzlement, the tech had also carted along a small laptop. "Spike, I don't think she's up for the laptop," he informed his teammate.
Alanna craned her head to look at Spike, but clearly agreed with her uncle's assessment as she dropped her head back onto the pillows. "Nah, it's not for her, Boss," Spike replied. "I, um, I'm not sure if the boombox can get a signal from in here." Oh. Greg took the tablet and charging cord that Spike thrust at him; Spike commandeered one of the room's rolling tables and set up the boombox first. Sadly, he proved to be correct that the boombox simply wasn't powerful enough to pick up Alanna's radio station from inside the hospital. All they heard was static; Alanna's shoulders slumped in clear disappointment.
But Spike hadn't given up. Instead, he turned to the little laptop and had it up and humming in what seemed like no time flat. Again, Greg questioned, "Spike?"
The tech smirked, just a bit. "Come on, Sarge; if this were a hot call, we'd just find another way in, right?" Without waiting for a reply, he answered his own question, "Right. So, I was thinking…it might be a long shot, but her station might, might be online." Spike worked at the laptop for several minutes, but his face fell farther and farther the longer he worked. Glum, he finally gave the verdict. "Sorry, Boss. I'm not seein' her station online."
Greg considered the matter himself. "Maybe another station?" he offered. "With the same type of music?"
The tech came close to facepalming. "Thanks, Sarge," he threw out as the keys clicked furiously. Less than a minute later, music came from the speakers; all the proof needed that Spike had finally succeeded.
Spike grinned and picked up Alanna's boombox to return it to its home; Greg, out of the corner of his eye, spotted Alanna trying to get Spike's attention. Softly, he said, "Spike," and gestured towards his niece as Spike looked over.
The bomb tech hustled to Alanna's side as the girl rested one hand on the siderail of her bed. "Yeah?" he asked, leaning close to hear her better.
"Thanks, Uncle Spike," Alanna whispered.
Spike beamed at her. "Anytime, kiddo. You just get better, understood?"
A spark entered violet eyes. "Copy," she agreed.
Before Spike left, he sidled close to his boss. "Don't know 'bout you, Boss, but I think she's gonna be all right."
"That's what I keep telling myself," Greg admitted, just as quiet.
Jules was hard pressed to keep from laughing when Alanna refused to let her exhaustion or, indeed, anything else, keep her from her daily dose of Judge Judy. Even better was the look on Ed's face the first time the redhead turned on The Judge, as Alanna and her brother occasionally referred to the daytime TV small claims court judge. The commercials were swiftly muted by Alanna…unless she'd lost her remote or was trying to avoid bending her elbow and setting off the blood pressure alarm as the cuff on her arm inflated automatically.
Once Alanna actually started responding – and Team One would take the fact that their Boss cried when he told them to their graves – her recovery seemed to be by leaps and bounds. It took perhaps two days for her appetite to come all the way back…assisted by the fact that Rush blew the usual wives' tales about hospital food to heck and gone. The sagging of one side of the teen's face took longer to fade, but, by the time Jules and Ed were 'on' again, it was mostly gone. Sick of the bed, Alanna was taking a trip to the sofa here, a vacation to the recliner there, and had been taken on an excursion around her hospital floor by the physical therapist. She still had the IV dogging her every step, but she was at least moving around.
Her tablet was her near constant companion and, when not in use, was being charged to keep the battery up. Wordy had brought the teen's Kindle along for his shift, ensuring Alanna had entertainment when her tablet was charging and The Judge wasn't on.
And if the entire team was carefully ignoring the stuffed timber wolf that little Ally Wordsworth had insisted her father bring to Alanna and which Alanna had latched onto and refused to let go of, well, it wasn't hurting anything.
Bored. Well, tired too, but also bored. The view was great and the bed wasn't too terribad for a hospital bed, but it took forever to get to sleep and, when she inevitably woke up or was woken up by nurses doing a night check, it was nearly impossible to go back to sleep. So she'd end up lying awake as dawn peeked over the horizon and whoever was watching her that night woke up. Even worse, breakfast didn't arrive until seven AM at the earliest. Even if it arrived promptly, she was always starving by the time she actually got it.
Today was the day when they changed her IV port…a process that she intellectually understood, but was, in practicality, an exercise in torture as they removed the outdated IV and found a spot for the new IV. Removing the old inevitably meant a great deal of pulling at the tape on her skin and the new meant gritting her teeth as they poked her with a needle, adjusted the IV just so and taped it down after flushing it. Plus, the IV usually got in her way as she tried to eat…or read…or do much of anything else.
At least they didn't have to change the bandaging around the hole in her head today; she hated that even more than the IV. Whenever she put her hand up there, she could feel the specks of dried blood, the stickiness of the tape holding the drain thing in, and how tangled and wild her hair was getting. When they took the old bandaging off, it always, always, pulled at her hair something awful and hurt, as if she was getting her hair pulled by a particularly nasty schoolyard bully. Again, just because she knew it was necessary, didn't make it any better.
If the IV and the drain were exercises in pain tolerance, the blood pressure cuff was an exercise in how to keep its alarm from going off. If she had her elbow bent, if she tried to use her arm at all as the cuff inflated, it would sound a piercing alarm that she'd quickly come to loathe. Her hearing might not be as sensitive as her uncle's – or her brother's – but it was still more sensitive than most people's. As such, she preferred quieter atmospheres…which the blood pressure cuff alarm most decidedly was not.
Alanna inspected her room's white board, relieved that the nurse she'd had yesterday had moved onto other things…she hadn't appreciated being micromanaged and talked down to. Fortunately, that nurse had been the exception, with almost all of the other nurses as friendly and kind as one could wish. From them, she'd found out that she was the youngest – by far – patient that any of them had ever seen in the neuro-ICU.
Now, if only they could take the stupid drip attached to her head – and hair – out, she'd be just fine and ready to go home. Alanna pouted to herself as she remembered that the nurse from the night before had told her that she'd have to stay two weeks, minimum, from the day she'd first arrived. That was still days and days away.
Greg was grateful that Wordy and Spike's mothers had joined forces to take the evening watch; he had another issue to deal with tonight. Namely, answering his team's pointed questions about why Alanna wasn't being treated magic-side.
Team One had opted for Headquarters and the briefing room for this discussion. Winnie, who'd been keeping up on the updates, had inserted herself into the talk, though she was more curious than anything else. Giles Onasi and Roy Lane were present as well, the former looking grave and the latter puzzled at his partner's demeanor. Commander Holleran wasn't present, but he already knew what Greg would be telling his team; the Sergeant had asked his commanding officer to keep the information to himself.
"Okay, I'll cut to the chase," Greg announced, "I think everyone here wants to know the reason Alanna's being treated at Rush instead of Toronto's St. Mungo's Hospital."
Unsurprisingly, Ed took the lead. "Look, I get it; you went with what we'd do on the job when you found her, but after everything calmed down a bit? Why not call in the Healers?"
Greg waited until the praying stranger was out of earshot. "Lance, keep your eyes open, would you?"
The teen looked up, at first confused, then he understood. "Copy that."
"I did call the Healers in, Eddie."
A quick phone call to Onasi produced the expected results. The Healers showed up…a bit less discreet than Greg would have preferred, but that hardly mattered at the moment. He waved them in and spoke in an undertone, "They took her for some scans; that's not a problem, is it?"
The lead Healer shook his head. "Not at all, Auror Sergeant Parker," he reassured Parker.
"So what went wrong?" Jules asked.
As soon as Greg saw the man's face, he knew it was even worse than he'd been afraid of. The Healer looked as if everything he'd ever believed had come crashing down on him. "I'm sorry," the man forced himself to say, "We can't do anything." Before Greg could even come up with anything of his own to say, the Healers were gone.
"They couldn't do anything?" Wordy demanded incredulously.
A confirming head shake. "Not a darn thing, Wordy. I was trying to keep from breaking down when the ER doctor came in and asked me where I wanted to send her to get treated. I think 'Rush' was out of my mouth before I'd even caught up with the fact that tech-side doctors could treat her."
Giles shifted, but, after an arched brow from Roy – reminiscent of his brother Ed – and an encouraging look from Parker, spoke up, "I, um, talked to them afterwards…"
"What do you mean, you can't help her?" Auror Giles Onasi demanded loudly of the Healers who'd just returned with their tails all but tucked between their legs.
The lead Healer looked utterly miserable. "Exactly what I said, Auror Onasi," he replied. "The diagnostic spells confirm that she's bleeding deep inside her brain…we can't treat that – we don't know how."
One of the Healers made the mistake of muttering something about how the young witch wouldn't be in this position if she hadn't been left 'with that Muggle.' Giles rounded on the offender with a lethal glare. "Say that again," he hissed in the man's face. "Parker called you in so you could help, not so you could pass judgment on the decisions of the late Lord Calvin." A pause. "And you don't get to say anything when you failed."
"No one can save that girl," the lead Healer argued.
Giles opened his mouth to respond and stopped as his phone's rungtone went off. "Excuse me," he told the Healers silkily as he turned away and picked up, "Detective Onasi speaking."
"Hey, Giles, it's Roy. Parker's niece Alanna got taken to the hospital this morning."
Giles clenched his fist at his side. "Is that so?" Giles murmured, keeping his voice under control with an effort.
"Yeah, Ed said they're still trying to figure out what's wrong," Roy confirmed, "I'll keep you in the loop, okay?"
"Yes, thank you."
"When Roy called again to say that she was going into surgery…that she wasn't dead…I couldn't believe it. I believed the Healers when they said there was no hope." Giles hung his head as he admitted that.
Roy looked puzzled. "So, how come our doctors could do what they couldn't?"
Almost to himself, Lou muttered, "Numbers." When the rest of the group stared at him, he cleared his throat. "Giles, you told us you went to school with that arms dealer. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there only one magical school for all of Canada?"
"Yes, that's right," Onasi confirmed. "What about it?"
Lou shifted towards Wordy, "And isn't there just one school for all of Britain?"
"One school," Wordy agreed, the light starting to dawn.
Sam had picked up on Lou's line of thought. "One for France…it might serve a few other countries too…plus one school for Eastern Europe and the Baltics." The Squib-born sniper considered. "Really, it's not exactly all that many schools, considering we're talking about several countries."
"The magical world has always been smaller than the tech world," Onasi pointed out, feeling a bit defensive.
"That's the point," Spike realized, "We've got more people and we have to have the schools, the law enforcement, and the medical services to back that up."
"Plus," Sam put in, "Wizards don't get a lot of diseases that techies do, so if a wizard ever did get a…non-magical disease, they'd be out of luck."
Their Sergeant had shifted back on his heels, looking like he was thinking hard. "Giles?" he inquired suddenly, "How often do wizards in general suffer from illnesses that run in their family? Or anything along those lines?"
The group fell silent as Giles considered the question, turning it over in his mind for some minutes. Thoughtful, he finally replied, "I believe there are some instances where wizards do have that sort of thing occur. It's usually rather minor and easy for the Healers to treat. Why?"
"Sarge? Does that mean what happened to Alanna is hereditary?" Wordy questioned.
The slow nod shocked all of them. "Wordy, if what her neurosurgeon and Giles said is correct, I'm starting to think it is. And before anyone asks about why Alanna's magic hasn't done anything…I don't know. I don't think Lance knows either. But if wizards can get hereditary diseases and wizards don't get strokes, then it follows that what happened had to be hereditary."
Author note: And the plot thickens. On the RL front, we have all had our second interviews and I'm currently (as of Monday) waiting to hear the verdict: aka, who gets hired and who does not. Should I get an update before this chapter goes live on Tuesday, I'll inform you all. Frankly, I'm hoping to not get hired, odd as that sounds. 'Cause if I had half a choice, I'd turn 'em down...I do not trust this prospective employer...at all.