When Alyssa woke up, her arm was on fire. It was a dull, muted flame, but it was there all the same. There were tubes in her arm, needles in her veins, and no sooner did she saw them than she itched. God, what, was she on morphine? Was that why everything was all bleary at the edges, or had she just lost that much blood?
Everything felt off. Something was definitely wrong. It took her a while to place what it was, and when she did it was that Karl wasn't there. As panicked and over-protective as he'd been, she would have thought that she wouldn't be able to shake him by just lying down in a hospital bed.
She sat up to look for him, which set off all sorts of buzzers and alarms -- what if something had happened? What if he'd gone and done something stupid? Ten minutes of arguing later, the nurse had explained that he'd left, she needed to sleep, and she could call him in the morning. Then she'd decided to up Alyssa's morphine.
Alyssa waited until the nurse was gone, and counted to forty-five before she decided that this was stupid. She knew something was wrong. She wasn't bleeding anymore. And she wasn't going to sit around waiting for permission to call her partner.
Getting to a phone to call him wouldn't have been so hard, except for the way the removal of the IVs caused the machines to go off again. So she had to be quick and -- discrete. Making your way through the hospital in a hospital gown was one of the few things that was a lot harder than it sounds. Everyone would try to be helpful, get you back where you belonged...
...steal some scrubs, though, and suddenly everything was so much easier. Of course, there was the pain, and the blurry, and the blurry and the pain and the dizzy, and by the time that Alyssa had actually made it into the scrubs, she had no idea what time it was, and she was sweaty and pale, and all she really wanted to do was lie down.
But the urge to find him only increased. She couldn't make the phone call from the hospital -- if they caught her they'd just make her go back to bed. Which... sounded really good right now, actually.
Damn it, Whedon. Where the frak are you?
The trick was to look confident and casual as you walked through the labyrinth of sterile halls. She wasn't sure she could pull off either, but she had to pull off a passable impression as she made her way as steadily as she could -- involving plenty of stops in small doorways and dodging of security as the world spun -- until finally she made her way down into the fire stairs which would eventually open up onto the ground level -- she'd be home clear if she could just make it down two more flights.