A/N: Thanks for your thoughtful responses! You guys are making me think. :)

3

"I'm Paul Mason," said Santa to the newly-arrived Dr. Norskard, "I'm this guy's legal guardian." He pointed his thumb at Bernard. Bernard rolled his eyes. Dr. Norskard came around the chair and handed Santa a clipboard and pen.

"Have Bernard help you fill out this form," she said, and then faced Bernard, staring at him curiously. "You're in luck," the doctor began, and Bernard could not possibly imagine why the doctor would have reason to say that, given the circumstances. "Boston is a great city to get a head injury in. We're equipped with some of the latest medical technology. We're swamped with MRI appointments for our permanent machine but we've got another MRI machine – portable – on the premise this month; we've managed to open a time for you."

"What's an MRI machine?" asked Bernard, warily. "If I'm going to need a blood test for it I don't want to be MRI'd."

"It's a machine that can take a picture of the inside of your body," said the doctor, wheeling the stretcher around and down the hallway. "It takes a while longer than a CT would have but we use different materials; we won't have to test you beforehand."

"How long will it take?"

"No more than 45 minutes."

Wonderful. That was enough time for Sandman to round up a sizeable gang of elves – enough to cause some serious, serious mischief. He had to convince Santa to make the call before they did the MRI thing.

"Mr. Mason," he began, not sure of how he'd proceed with the doctor hovering over him as they brushed past other patients and staff in the hallway.

"Shelf it, Bernard, we've got some paperwork here," said Santa, perhaps with a touch of glee. "Got to get this form filled out before your scan. Good thing I'm here to help you out, I know how much you hate paperwork."

"Gee, Uncle Paul, you're the best."

"Anything for my favorite nephew."

"And by best I mean worst."

"Oh you joker," said Santa, with a distinctly manufactured chuckle, before looking down at the paperwork and putting on his Business Face. "Do you have any metal fillings?"

"… What?"

"Fillings, in your teeth? Made of metal?"

"Of course not, why would I – "

"Do you have a pacemaker?"

"A what?"

In this way, Bernard, Santa, and Dr. Norskard came to the hospital wing containing the two MRI machines, Santa asking Bernard a stream of really puzzling questions about what was in, or attached to, his own body, and subsequently made worrisome little marks on the paperwork attached to the clipboard. Bernard, of course, had no metal in or on his body whatsoever, which he could have told them if they'd have just come right out and asked (except his radio, which Dr. Norskard swiped away and hid) and by the time Santa had completed the paperwork, Dr. Norskard was helping Bernard sit up and swing his legs over the edge of the stretcher. He bit back telling the doctor that he didn't need help; he had to remember, he was trying not to upset her. Besides which, he noticed that the walls seemed to be wiggling slightly. He blinked. Stop that, he said to his possible brain injury.

"Does your makeup contain any metal alloys?" Dr. Norskard asked him mildly. He gave her a quizzical look and got the impression she was trying very hard to keep her assumptions to herself.

"I'm not wearing makeup."

"… Your face has something on it. It looks sort of metallic. Are you sure?" she asked.

"Oh my gods, I'm… I'm not wearing any metal alloys," he sighed.

"Good. I just wanted to check. Here we are," she said, cheerily. "Mr. Mason, there's a waiting room right around the corner, you can take a seat. There's a vending machine there too."

"Wait, can't he come in with us?" asked Bernard, slightly frantic and nearly spraining his brain in an attempt to think of a way to get Santa to call off Sandman.

"If you're alright with Mr. Mason seeing the images, he can come with us to the radiology room. Mr. Mason, if you have any metal – "

"Yeah, take it off now," said Santa. "I had an MRI once on my wrist. Tendonitis."

Dr. Norskard was not listening; she was shining a flashlight into Bernard's eyes and looking grim, or he thought she looked a bit grim, though it was hard to tell while being blinded by a flashlight.

"How are you feeling?" she asked him. "Any nausea?"

"No, I'm fine."

"Dizzy?"

"No."

"Facial numbness?"

"No."

"Good. Let's…" She helped him stand and made as if to guide him towards the radiology door (marked, he noted with concern, with large CAUTION signs). He reached over and grabbed Santa's arm instead. The walls were still wiggling a little, and hanging onto Santa's arm was an excellent excuse to whisper frantically in his ear.

"You have no idea how bad this could be," he began, as they followed Dr. Norskard through the doors. "I'm serious, this is not the time to be stubborn."

Dr. Norskard glanced behind her curiously, but turned around and kept walking. Bernard hauled on Santa's shoulder and lowered his voice further still as they went down another short hallway.

"These elves are dangerous. You're putting Sandman, and the workshop, and Christmas, and innocent lives in danger."

"How can all of these elv – "

"Shh!"

"How can all of them be so dangerous?"

"Look, I'll answer all your questions when we get back up to the workshop but for now you've got to trust me." Bernard winced; he'd almost just begged right there.

Dr. Norskard cleared her throat and opened yet another door, eyebrows raised at the two of them. Bernard stared at Santa and thought that maybe the man's resolve to be an ass was beginning to crack a little; there was a smidgeon of self-doubt showing in his eyes. Was Bernard finally getting through to Santa?

I'd better be, he thought, and they followed Dr. Norskard through the door marked "RADIOLOGY: Authorized personnel and accompanied patients ONLY".

The walls began to wiggle furiously.

"Are you okay?" asked Santa dubiously, as Bernard's grip on his arm tightened.

"Yeah, I'm fine," he replied, which was a lie, and all three of them knew it. He tried to hide it anyways. The doctor eyed him and indicated a chair next to a slew of computerized equipment. From the chair he could see through a large window into the next room, which was white, and contained a giant white machine that had a deep, dark hole in the middle and a sort of oven-rack sticking out where he supposed people were supposed to lay before being shoved into the oven to be baked.

"Is that the MRI?" asked Bernard, pointing. His mouth felt as if it were full of cotton, or ice, or something unpleasant.

"Yes," said Dr. Norskard, whose fingers were romping across the keyboard of a computer. "Do you experience claustrophobia?"

"No."

"Good. Take your hat off, please."

Bernard moodily snatched his hat from his head, not really caring if she saw his ears.

"Quick blood pressure reading," she said, and he wondered, as she wrapped the cuff around his arm, if people who worked in hospitals were allergic to noticing pointy ears, or if perhaps everyone here had been immunized against noticing pointy ears. He sat resignedly in the chair, hoping a high number wouldn't cause any further complications, and then his eyes landed on Santa. His gut, which was suddenly pointedly unhappy, did a somersault. He hadn't called Sandman yet! Bernard fumed quietly as the cuff breathed and beeped and sighed, knowing if he said anything the doctor would probably have to take another reading.

She took the cuff off, brow furrowed.

"That's a very high reading."

"He was just in a horrible bus accident," said Santa.

"Yes, and why haven't you called yet?" asked Bernard of Santa.

"Well I took my radio off out there, of course. She took yours too. Metal."

"Then get out there and call!"

"I'm sorry to interrupt," said Dr. Norskard, "but we need to begin this scan; again, it takes a while to complete and so far Bernard's symptoms indicate there's cause for concern. He seems to be getting worse, all of a sudden," she muttered. She pulled Bernard to his feet, which Bernard resented a bit but couldn't deny that he felt none too steady. He glared at Santa, who looked torn in several directions at once. He thought about telling Santa that he wasn't going to go in for the MRI until Santa left and made his call but then Dr. Norskard opened the heavy door that led into the room that contained the MRI machine, and he quite forgot about Sandman.

He felt something smash into his body. He let go of Dr. Norskard in order to shield his face but whatever it was simply kept smashing into him. He felt his sense of balance evaporate; fortunately, Dr. Norskard had not let go of him. She managed to heft him forward onto the oven-tray MRI table, and he managed to sit upright but wasn't sure how long he would be able to keep track of exactly where the floor was and which way gravity was pulling. Why wasn't Dr. Norskard reacting?

"What's happening?" he asked. Pressing his hands to the sides of his head was doing absolutely nothing but he couldn't think of where else to put his hands at the moment.

"Well," said Dr. Norskard, in the voice of someone who is very pointedly attempting to remain calm, "there may be some internal bleeding in your head, causing you to feel strange sensations. At this point I'd really recommend a CT scan; your symptoms are becoming severe and CT's are much faster. If something is happening that we need to take care of right away – "

"I don't want a blood test," he said. Gravity was beginning to betray him. He placed his hands firmly on the table to either side. Dr. Norskard looked helplessly back into the radiology room, where Santa was waiting, looking rather horrorstruck.

"Mr. Mason will have to make that call."

Bernard squinted at Santa – the light in this room was really impractically bright – and wondered if he should be berating him for not being on his radio right now or begging him to deny a blood test. In the end Bernard said nothing, and looked at the floor, trying to keep steady.

"Let's just get this scan over with," Santa finally said.

"Alright," said Dr. Norskard, quietly, and began to move very quickly. Bernard found himself lying flat on the oven-tray (stop calling it an oven-tray, he told himself), and suddenly there were foam things around his sides and Dr. Norskard was asking him if he was okay so far.

"I'm fine," he said. He still felt as if something were smashing into him in waves, and the feeling was uncomfortably familiar. He could not place it. "Where's Mr. Mason?"

"I'm over here," said Santa, from somewhere Bernard couldn't see.

"Why haven't you left yet?" Bernard groaned.

"These are to help you keep still," said Dr. Norskard, and Bernard found that straps had been secured over his body, which was a very disconcerting feeling. Although not entirely unwelcome, as he truly felt as if the table was tipping over sideways, not that he was about to admit as much. Santa hadn't replied; Bernard started to collect some scattered words to ask him yet again, but Dr. Norskard bent to the side of Bernard's head with a pair of ear buds in her hands, and said,

"Ear buds, so we can…"

She stared at his ears. Bernard wondered if he should even bother making up an excuse for them.

"… Um, so we can… Talk. So you can hear us talking." To her tribute, she didn't say anything about the nature of his ears, and merely stuck the ear plugs in. They didn't fit very well but he didn't suppose she had buds specially designed for elf ears so he didn't say anything about it. "And we'll be able to hear anything you say in there; there's a receiver in the machine. But try not to talk, it might make the scans blurry."

"Okay. Can I just ask Mr. Mason to – "

A cage came down over his head.

"This is to help keep your head still," explained Dr. Norskard. "It's imperative that you keep still for this. How are you doing?"

Bernard blinked; there was a cage over his face and he was tied to a table, something was still smashing into him, and now his heart, which had been slightly overexcited before, was now kicking around inside his chest like a drunken pony. It skipped a beat.

"I'm fine."

"Are you sure you're not claustrophobic?" Her face hung somewhere off to his right; she was fiddling with something out of his now-limited field of view.

"Yeah, I'm sure." His heart skipped several beats in a row, for good measure.

"I'm going to put in the IV catheter for the contrast dye now," she said, and pushed up his sleeve. Of course there was a band-aid in the way from the would-be CT scan contrast line, so she muttered, and leaned over him to push up his other sleeve. Bernard was too distracted to respond. The pain in his head was mounting; he felt like a mountain troll were stepping on his skull with each unsynchronized beat of his heart.

"This will pinch," said Dr. Norskard, and then came the stab, but Bernard was far more concerned with this awful smashing, the spinning and blurring and feeling like his center of balance had dropped out from under him. What does this feel like? He asked himself, over and over. It seemed imperative to identify why this feeling was familiar but Santa was still standing in the doorway, or so Bernard assumed, and it was taking most of his concentration to simply remember why it was that he didn't want Santa to be standing there.

Sandman. Iceland. That's right.

Dr. Norskard clipped something to the end of his finger and said something about his pulse, and then draped a blanket over him and said something about the machine and cold air and Bernard didn't catch any of it. She put her hand on his shoulder.

"We're going into the other room now," she said. "Still okay?"

"Yeah," he said, weakly.

"Remember, we'll still be able to communicate once I shut the door between our rooms." With that, she must have pressed a button because the oven-tray (table, it's a table) started moving into the white machine and suddenly there were mere inches of space between Bernard's face and the top of the tube, not that he could see much of the tube itself due to the white cage. The pressure in his head worsened, as if he'd just been thrown between the teeth of some huge monster and it was now chewing on him. Around his ill-fitting ear buds he could hear Dr. Norskard walking across the room and shutting the door, which he couldn't help but think sounded like the shutting of a coffin. Loud. Heavy. Now the only noise he could hear was the humming of the machine, and the thumping around of the pony in his chest, which had now blown the lid off of 'drunken antics' and seemed to be focusing not on pumping blood but forcing its way through his sternum, Alien-style.

"Mr. Mason is here with me in the other room," said Dr. Norskard's voice in his ear buds, causing him to start. "Can you hear me?"

"Yeah."

"I'm going to start the IV remotely. You may feel cold."

Instead of responding, Bernard opted simply to breathe. One moment later a chill took hold of his left arm and began to travel up to his shoulder.

"Still doing okay?" asked the ear buds.

"Yeah," he said, again, and berated himself for not demanding that Mr. Mason leave the radiology room, fetch his radio, and… And what? The chill reached past his shoulder.

"Remember, all you have to do is hold still. Ask if you need anything. Once I turn the machine on there'll be a lot of banging and clicking around your head as the magnets move around you."

"Magnets?" he tried to yell, but at her words he felt as if all of the air in his lungs had vacated his body, and he had no breath with which to speak. He forced his lungs to inflate.

"Magnets?" he tried again, and this time made a noise, small and pathetic though it was.

"Did you say something?" asked Dr. Norskard.

"Did you just say… Did you say there were… magnets in here?" Panic had jumped fully-fledged to the forefront of Bernard's brain now and forming a complete sentence seemed out of his grasp.

"Yes, there are magnets in there," Dr. Norskard said. "And they'll make a lot of noise but don't worry about it."

"Made of iron?" he said, hoping they could hear him more clearly than he was hearing himself.

"Well…" said Dr. Norskard, "To be honest I'm not really sure, some ferromagnetic material. Why? Did you remember some metal you're wearing?"

"Don't turn the machine on. Let me out," Bernard heard himself say.

"… I assure you, the machine is completely safe. Safer than a CT scan."

Between the overwhelming urge to keep breathing and the overwhelming urge to shout, Bernard wasn't sure what to do with his precious lungful of air.

"Let me out," he said, again. Don't turn the machine on, don't do it.

"Are you feeling claustrophobic?"

IRON, his brain was yelling, along with a string of curses, none of which he had the wits to actually say. Of course.

"Yes, this is, I'm, I think I'm claustrophobic," he finally said. Saying that many words seemed to have winded him; he tried to concentrate on breathing but the knowledge that he was sandwiched between several large slabs of what might be magnetized iron, and that with the press of the button they'd be activated, made even breathing a difficult task. His arms twitched; he wanted to shield his face, but the straps held. Why weren't they moving him out of here yet? He listened to the ear buds; Dr. Norskard was talking, but she wasn't speaking to Bernard.

"Mr. Mason, it's clear that there's something serious going on in his head and if he's not going to let us do a CT it's important that we're able to complete this scan. His pulse is becoming highly erratic. We have the ability to administer a sedative through the IV here to combat claustrophobia; we just need your permission."

"Don't give me a sedative," Bernard said, "Please don't start the machine, just get me out. Please let me out." Santa didn't know about the iron thing, did he? No, he did not. Bernard had never told him.

"Bernard," said Santa's voice in Bernard's ears, "you'll calm down if we give you a sedative. It's totally safe in there."

"It's not safe in here," Bernard said. "Don't sedate me, don't turn this thing on. I haven't told you…" He paused to take another breath. "I haven't told you something about… I didn't know there was iron, I didn't know there were magnets in here, you have got to get me out of here."

"Oh for heaven'ssake Bernard, it's an MRI machine, how could you not have known? Magnetic Resonance Imaging, that's what MRI stands for, why else would the doctor have made sure you weren't wearing any metal?"

"How was I supposed to know that?" he cried. "I don't keep up with these things!"

"Mr. Mason," said Dr. Norskard, "his pulse is climbing, this could be dangerous if he has a brain injury. We either need to sedate him now or pull him out."

"Look, Bernard," said Santa's voice, "she says you need this scan in order to – "

"I don't need it!" he said, but his voice came out quiet. Could they even hear him? His lungs weren't working right, panic was making his throat close up. His mind screamed but he couldn't communicate.

"I think we should do this," Bernard heard Santa's voice say.

"NO!" This time, Bernard's voice rang. "Please, you have to trust me, boss, you have to."

For a moment Bernard could hear nothing through his ear buds. The great magnetic machine bore down on him. Was Dr. Norskard about to turn the machine on? Bernard struggled again; he could move his arms a little. He reached across himself and tried to pull the IV out of his left arm but his hospital bracelet was snagging on the strap across his body and the tape holding the needle in place was very stubborn, or else the iron was making him feel exceptionally weak, or…

He muttered a curse at the people in the other room, and put all of his panic into fighting off the sedative; he yanked at the IV line, finally pulling the tube out of the catheter.

"Sedative's not going to work," he said aloud.

"He pulled the IV," said Dr. Norskard's voice, flatly.

"Let me out," Bernard said, but it was more of an echo of recent thoughts. His thoughts, confused as they'd been beforehand, were bogging down with the small amount of sedative that had managed to sneak through the IV before he'd yanked it, and with the knowledge that Santa had ordered the sedative to be administered, despite Bernard having begged him not to. Something within him crumpled. He could feel himself shaking; his teeth rattled in his jaw.

There was a hum, and the top of the tube, beyond the cage over his face, began to move. The oven-tray was coming back out. He should have felt relief but all he was feeling at the moment was sick. Even once the tray had come out completely and he could see the ceiling of the room, which seemed impossibly far away compared to the ceiling of the MRI machine, and even though Dr. Norskard was right there pulling the blanket off and taking the face cage away and undoing the straps over his body, still all he could feel were tremors, and a crawling sensation that stuck to his skin, and the pounding in his head, and pain in his elbow, and mostly the awful knowledge that he was far too close to this machine.

A/N: The bit about "Uncle Paul, you're the worst" was SafyreSky's doing.