"Alright, I'm back," Felina says, closing the door behind herself. She grabs a straight chair from beside it and props it under the knob. "I talked to the nurses. The therapists are gonna want to take Chance down the hall to that therapy room they got, to exercise, well, Jake too once he's not..." She waved a hand at Jake's dopey expression. "We have to work out a schedule," Felina says, as she stalks back and forth across the floor at the foot of the two beds.
Barry is slumped in the chair and watching her suspiciously. "I don't get it Lieutenant. We're already staying 24 hours with them."
"That doesn't cover when they're separated," she says. Felina pauses mid-step and turns towards Barry. "I don't want either of these two left alone. One or the other of us needs to be with them."
Barry frowns and sits up slightly. "So if they're being separated at times… that means we both gotta be here. Ugh. You mean it's worse than 12 hour shifts?" Barry asks. Chance as well looks skeptical.
"Possibly. We're going to both have to be here at least some of the day." She nods.
"Great. Hey not that I don't like you T-Bone but I like my off hours!"
Chance shrugs, seeming unoffended.
Felina sticks her hands in her pockets. "You'll be here at night at least. If you keep the door secure you don't need to stand guard the whole time. Who cares if you sleep?"
Barry looks at her, startled. "What sort of superior officer says stuff like that?"
Chance snorts back a laugh.
"Alright, it's almost 1930 now. So I'll leave in a bit, and I'll be back at seven." Felina says, decisive.
"AM?"
"Yes, AM. 0700." She rolls her eyes and continues. "Until Chance gets back into this room and isn't leaving again, both of us need to be here. Hopefully that gets done early, so you can get home. Then if you come back at seven or so, I'll leave again."
Barry looks at her suspiciously. "Sounds like you get more down time than me."
"We'll work with it! It's got wiggle room!" Felina argues, then raises a finger. "One more thing. We need that door locked at all times. No nurses, no therapists, no nobody gets in or out without us letting them in or out. I'm gonna get a lock put in that door ASAP. Block it with a chair until then whether they're masked or not."
Barry grins slightly. "Alright. I can play doorman. I'm okay with locking nurses in with us, especially if they're cute." Chance mockingly swings backhanded at his head. His eyes widen and he ducks. "Hey! Cute she-Kat nurses, come on! What sort of Tom are you?"
Chance pauses, hand in mid air as if he's considering if the merits outweigh the concerns of the involuntary confinement of cute nurses.
There is a THUD at the door and a muffled "ow." All three Kats stare at the door a second. Even Jake glances blurrily that way.
"...Hello? Something is blocking the door!" someone calls.
"This is gonna be more complicated than I expected," Barry muses.
Felina ignores them and plunks down on the end of Jake's bed, and pats his knee through the blanket. "This is a security nightmare, huh Jake? Pulling this off will be a miracle."
"HELLO!? SOMETHING IS BLOCKING THE DOOR!?"
~~~~~~~~/. ~~~~~~~/ ~~~~~~~/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They'd put off the nurse for a while longer, but before long both SWAT Kats were masked up again because she was going to have a stroke if they didn't let her in. "I know those IV pumps are going to start beeping any second!" When Barry opened the door her tail was puffed out like a brush and she treated the Lieutenant and Sergeant as little better than kidnappers.
After a bit Felina left and Barry breathed a sigh of relief when the nurse went too, since all she'd done (besides her job) was glare daggers at him.
A speech therapist showed to work with T-Bone. She was cheerful and pleasant and brought along the kind of wrk books a Kit in Kindergarten would use, and a lot of colored pencils. She spoke to him clearly and slowly and asked lots of yes or no questions, and T-Bone got the feeling she didn't think he understood her. But he gamely tackled the exercises she was starting him on.
At first. He struggles.
He struggles through making 'B' noises and 'K' noises and putting up with the sweet expression of the speech therapist and Barry's bluff, hearty encouragement.
He struggles through forming word sounds, ones you'd use to make words like 'house' and 'car' and 'window'. The speech therapist wasn't even trying to make him form the whole word.
He was incapable of writing the letters or name them, though he recognized them all. He could trace the broken line letters in the Kit's workbook a dozen times then fail to write them freehand.
She did though have him work on drawing pictures of the words they were working on. The pictures went okay. He'd never been a genius draftsman with drawing like Jake, but he could at least sketch out designs when they were working on the Turbokat. And you know, talk. Yeah, talking had been in there too. Before this.
When the IVs are all flushed and fresh bags hung, the ST is gone, the last pill is swallowed and Barry finally gets the brush-tail nurse gone again and jams the chair under the doorknob behind her, there's a little time to unwind. The masks come off. Barry gets Jake turned onto his side the way he's seen the nurses doing it, so he could see the TV. Well, if he were awake. He wasn't responding to Barry speaking to him, just laid where he was put. Like a floppy log. Barry settles into Jake's bedside chair and he and Chance watch an episode of Scaredy Kat. Or Barry watched it. Chance keeps watching Jake. When the show's over Barry shuts the TV off and leaves Chance the remote before he drags the recliner in the room in front of the door and settles in.
And Chance lays awake staring at the featureless ceiling, listening to Barry snoring and Jake's quiet breathing and the soft chug of the pumps at both their bedsides. And he wonders how many nights like this are left before they go home. If they go home. If Jake pulls through. Without warning tears start to flood his eyes.
'Crud. If you'd just wake up, buddy…'
With a shout of anger Chance grabs the nearest object and throws it as hard as he can against the wall. The porcelain coffee mug he'd been using for a pencil holder hits with a bang loud as a bomb and shatters everywhere.
Barry yelps, leaping out of the recliner like his tail was on fire. "I wasn't asleep Commander I was just resting my eye- hey!" he says, startled, staring at Chance.
The bigger SWAT Kat is hunched in the bed, face in his hands. Even Jake has lifted his head a little and is giving Chance a puzzled look before he fades off again. Barry assesses the situation in only a moment, and doesn't hesitate. He flips on a light, reaches over and checks that the door to the hall is yet locked. Which is fortunate, as the knob rattles and then there's banging.
"Sergeant! Sergeant? What's going on in there?"
"Everything's okay! Just dropped a cup. Nothing big!" Barry calls. He walks towards Chance, who's still got his face hidden in his hands. "Hey, get mad at something?"
Chance sighs and puts his hands down. The fur on his face is streaked with tears and he gulps a breath. And he glares at Barry before making a filthy hand gesture.
Barry shrugs, and walks towards the wall. Grumbling, he leans down to start picking up shards of coffee mug. He glances up, seeing Chance trying to wipe his tears away.
"Ah don't worry about it, T-Bone," Barry says, sticking a blue and an orange colored pencil in his breast pocket. "I'm not blaming you for getting frustrated. Though… holy Kats, you put a dent in the wall," he says, impressed sounding.
Chance glances over. Sure enough there's an indent in the drywall and Barry starts to laugh. "Remind me not to ever get you mad at me," he comments. He dumps his handful of ceramic into a garbage can, and goes into the bathroom. A moment of running water later, and he's back with a wet paper towel which he uses to swipe up the last tiny shards.
"I'll get the rest of it in the morning," he says, tossing the paper towel in the waste bin. "Or I'll make the cleaning chick do it. That sounds better. …. This sounds stupid but you want to tell me about it?" he asks, awkwardly. He heads back towards the beds.
Chance smirks, and wipes away another tear with the heel of his hand.
"Oh. Yeah, that is a stupid question. … you know," he says, conversationally, and lays the colored pencils down on the overbed table, "I saw you doodling earlier. Thought about drawing it out?"
Chance pauses, then shrugs exaggeratedly. He jerks his thumb at Jake.
"What, Razor? What about him?"
Chance struggles for a moment to say 'draw' which is difficult when one can't enunciate the 'd'. And then he scribbles in the air with one of the colored pencils.
"He good at drawing?" Barry guesses.
Chance nods.
"Well you could try it anyway even if you're not the greatest. I don't know. I'm no great shakes at drawing myself. I can't make a decent stick figure."
"Aaaaah…" Chance waves at him, like 'go along with you, you liar'.
"Nah really, look." He grabs a fresh sheet of paper out of the small notebook from his pocket and starts laboriously making a blue stick figure Dark Kat. One big circle, with stick legs and arms, and a round head with points on top for ears. The only way you know it's Dark Kat is the jagged toothy shape for the mouth and what is supposedly a cape. And the fact he wrote 'Dark Kat' above it.
Chance snorts, and grabs the orange pencil, and Barry rips off a couple fresh sheets. He makes a sneaky looking orange creepling and adds fire at the end of Barry's Dark Kat tail. And the creepling is carrying a pumpkin on its shoulder. Evidently because the pencil is orange.
Barry eyes the combined art work. "...Yeah this isn't going into the museum is it?"
"N-n-n.. Nah. Muh… mus…." He swiftly sketches a doorway that bears more than a passing resemblance to the main entrance to Megakat Museum over Dark Kats shoulder.
"Hey, not bad. Still. I don't think it's on the same level as an Old Masterkat." He tucks the blue pencil into Chance's hand. "Try it out, alright?" he encourages, and then he's rummaging in the exercise book the ST had left in the bedside table. There were some blank letter size pages in the back and he lays three or four out.
Chance sighs, scratching at the side of his head then gives Barry a wavery smile, picking up a pencil.
"I'm gonna go back to sleep. Holler if you need something. If you throw something my way, make sure it's soft." Barry wanders back to the recliner by the door and settles in, already half asleep.
And Chance sketches out an empty hospital bed. All in blues and orange.