Oliver and Hannah
Oliver's sleep was surprisingly peaceful, but that might just have been the sedatives. He woke up slowly, feeling a heaviness in his bladder, and the call button brought a nurse bustling into the room with a bedpan. There was a television bolted to the wall, the remote on the bedside table, but he didn't reach for it.
The casts on his legs were a stark white, and he glowered down at them. He'd never broken a bone before, much less two at once. He hoped the doctors had been able to set them properly. A limp was a souvenir he didn't want.
He sagged back against the pillows, looking at the silent television. He wondered how the wreck was being explained, the presence of those decidedly not human bodies at the scene. He hoped Homeland Security fucking choked on the bad publicity.
Hannah’s ethereal presence filtered into the hospital room. She arrived tentatively; she was a little unsure of herself, because she hadn’t been Oliver’s knight in shining armor after all. In fact, if it weren’t for a terrible wreck, he might still be holed up someplace secret.
When she came into solidity, Hannah was over by the window. She was nothing more than dust particulates floating in a shaft of sunlight. Slowly those specks became girl-shaped. She gnawed on her lip. “Oliver?” She looked at his leg casts. Ouch!
Perhaps it was that he was getting used to her appearances, as if the way she materialized had a sound like the wind picking up, her petite frame slowly becoming solid to allow him to touch her. Maybe it was simply because he was in love with her.
Oliver's head turned towards on the pillow so that he faced the window, and a weary smile touched the corners of his mouth. From heaven, all things really are possible.
"Hello, love," he said quietly. "Please excuse me if I don't get up. I'm rather indisposed at the moment."
Hannah tried to drum up a laugh for Oliver's sake, because it was such an obvious thing to say, but the sound fell flat. Oh, how she hated seeing him in that gown. If forced to choose whether federal custody or this was worse on her nerves, she'd be deliberating a loooong while.
A step closer and a pause.
"Does it hurt?" she asked. Hannah's fingers tangled together. "I had a cast once. It itched like crazy. I broke the rabbit ears right off my TV, just to get in there."
A step closer and a pause.
"I suppose it will later, when it starts to heal," the spellcaster said, his voice both tired and thoughtful. "Right now I can't feel much of anything because of the painkillers." He moved his left hand slightly, the needle leading to the morphine drip tugging underneath the gauze bandage. "Wonderful stuff, morphine. It's like being wrapped from head to toe in heavy cotton."
There was another bandage on his head, padding the place where he'd struck it during the last moments of the wreck, and his unpunctured right hand touched it briefly. "I screwed up the spell. Didn't mean to half kill myself. Guess that'll teach me not to be in such a rush."
He looked at her fingers where they were knotted together, then up at her eyes. "Come along, then," he coaxed, his voice still soft. "I'm not going to break, anymore than I've already broken myself."
The last two steps were taken at a crawl. Quite honestly, she did not know how to behave in hospitals. There had been several children's units in her sickly younger years, but since then, most of her exposure came through her work for the PTBs. Hannah went to hospitals to gather the dead and lead them to a spiritual home.
At bedside, she gathered up his good hand and carefully squeezed. "I'm so sorry I couldn't help you." She swallowed past a lump. "I saw Jill though. She said to tell you..," Hannah searched her memory, "To tell you... she gets it, and she's starting over fresh. I think I helped her, a little bit."
He shook his head, negating the apology with a gentleness he'd not have revealed under other circumstances or to anyone else. "I knew something was wrong when the cells stopped filling up," he told Hannah, his fingers closing over hers. "When they started walking us out, all I could imagine was ending up in an unmarked grave in the desert. Of never seeing you again on this side of the mortal coil."
He listened to the heart monitor, the steady beep-beep of it, then nodded in response to Hannah's next words. "I rather hoped that she'd get that chance, to do something different. We parted badly, said things we shouldn't have. I hope...I hope she finds whatever it is she's looking for."
He fell silent, the effort of speech a bit of a strain in his condition. "I hate hospitals. I had forgotten that."
Hannah wrinkled her nose. "Me, too." She dragged a chair closer and perched on the edge. "I can't figure out which part's worse. The blood pressure cart that wheels in right before you fall asleep, every single time? Or the not being able to wipe your own butt." The blonde blinked and shook her head.
Slipping a hand beneath the starched sheet, she felt around for Oliver's hospital gown and began to scrunch it higher. The material bunched and bunched. Just when she'd begun to think it was endless, her fingers touched his stomach. Hannah slid her palm onto it. She began to move it in gentle circles. "I heard a rumor that there's a quadrant of hell where every time you doze off, an alarm clock rings. For eternity! If that's not a reason to get religious, I dunno what is."
The movement of her hand was soothing, and he closed his eyes to savor it more fully. "I hope not to be here for that long," he said. "I've been told they're clean breaks, and they've been set properly. If they haven't been, these people are going to be facing a lawsuit."
His shoulders slumped a little, and he released a soft sigh. "I do look rather dashing with a cane, though," he said, opening one eye to look sideways at Hannah, a hint of his usual teasing tone surfacing. "I could buy one for every day of the week to take walks with you."
A grin made her face light up. "Very distinguished! Like day-of-the-week underwear, but classier." Hannah dipped her finger into his belly button. "You should wrap it up with tape like a candy cane." She bent down and rested her cheek on his torso. It was nice to listen to his heartbeat. The conclusion was reached: this was way better than federal custody.
Hannah's face was pointed at Oliver's leg casts. When alive, the small girl had been able to heal things. After drawing energy from the natural world into herself, she then pushed it through the person she touched. It was like giving their bodies a boost. Not instantaneous health, but certainly quicker than before. It was easy to do with little injuries, like when Devon got burns from the silver chains. With Whistler, his sickness was so severe, it literally killed Hannah trying to push it out.
Broken bones would've been no sweat. What about now, now that she wasn't alive? It certainly couldn't hurt her. Hannah's hand inched tentatively that way. She didn't say anything. What if she promised to fix Oliver and couldn't? It'd be just like her broken promise in the jail cell.
In the silence, Oliver touched Hannah's hair and found it as cornsilk-soft as ever. He supposed that once he was coherent again he would have to make plans, to figure out what happened next. With his legs as they were he might be confined here for some time. And suddenly he wanted out of the entire city very badly. Las Vegas was no place for him now that he'd been locked up for doing nothing wrong.
Would he have to leave the blonde behind?
"You mustn't worry for me," he said, looking at the top of her head. "I'm merely bent, not broken."
The wall opposite had a television and a muted watercolor print, the kind Hannah didn't like. As she looked at it, her eyes started to burn and blur up. Oliver sounded so sad. She wasn't sure why, but it put an awful feeling in her belly. "I won't worry," she said. "I promise."
Hannah closed her eyes. Very softly, she took a breath of air and held it deep inside herself. Oh please, can't I do anything? She visualized the clean, cool air moving through her limbs, all the way to her fingertips on his hip. Did it begin to tingle? Could Oliver feel what she was doing, or was her gift gone?
"I love you," she said. "I love you when I'm here and I love you when I'm gone. All the time." Hannah moistened her lips. "I told Julie about this daydream I have. The Powers let me go, and I'm a normal girl again, because they don't need me anymore. All the spirits can talk on their own."
"If that happened," Oliver said, "I would build you a palace fit for the princess that you are. Who says the dead can't look after themselves, anyway?" His fingertips brushed over one narrow shoulder, through clean blonde hair.
"You're my light." He was looking at the blank gray screen of the television, feeling the hollowness of months ago trying to creep in. "I'd love you if I was halfway across the world."
There was a slight itch somewhere beneath the heavy blanket of drugs the IV drip was providing him with, and the hand without the needle in it moved away from Hannah's shoulder moved towards his thigh to scratch it. He was going to have to figure out how to work the remote for the bed. The next few months were starting to look like a long haul.
With eyes widening, Hannah watched him scratch his leg. Oh. Oh! Maybe he couldn't feel it because of the morphine! Quickly she refocused her efforts, taking a breath so big, her lungs might pop. "U-uh-huh, meh too!" She kept on focusing that energy into her fingertips, and it was a good thing Hannah's face was turned towards the dark TV, because she was wearing one mischievous expression.
When she began to feel her energy wane, Hannah rested a second. "Hey!" She flipped onto the opposite cheek and smiled innocently at her boyfriend. "You know, there's no place in the whole world you could go where I couldn't visit. That's the one good thing about this whole Agent thing. It's like the earth is my oyster, only it's way cheaper than flying commercial. I heard they don't even have movies or buttery pretzels or mini-soda cans or satellite radio anymore. Not even that magazine, whatsitcalled... skyways, skywalker, something like that."
Hannah rambled right on, now oblivious to the unpleasant thoughts in Oliver's head. "Do you know why they call it your oyster?"
He had lost the thread of her chatter somewhere in the middle, and he was left both bemused and charmed by her rambling. "I'm afraid you'll have to tell me," he confessed, offering her a crooked smile. "I like listening to you talk anyway."
He scratched absently at his thigh, worked his shoulders against the pillow so that the stiff casing rustled. "Would you... wouldn't you miss it here? Is that part of why you keep coming back? Because this was home?"
She was glued to the oyster thought. "It was in the Merry Wives of Windsor. Some selfish guy wouldn't give another guy a penny, and the poor guy said then the world was his oyster, and he'd crack it up with a sword. I guess it means..." Hannah's brow furrowed in confusion. "If you've got a sword, you can get a pearl out of something ugly?"
Whatever the heck that meant.
The small fingers of her left hand touched Oliver's hair. "I come back because I have people I care about here." The lightness left her features. "But they're all moving away. I get scared that now, if I go visit them at their new places, I'll be crazy old Hannah who keeps showing up." If her friends were around, and Hannah was still alive, she probably would've become an old lady living in Searchlight. But not if the only company she had was Mrs. Abernathy and her casserole friends. "I used to live in Oklahoma," she said. "I wasn't in Searchlight always. I liked to travel around in my car. It was fun."
It hurt him to think of Hannah being lonely, and he stopped scratching his leg so that he could touch her hair again. "I don't think I would mind if you visited me, no matter where I went," he said, his fingers running through the silky strands. "I'd hate to think you'd just fade away because you were worried I'd take you for a stalker."
There were other cities, after all, and maybe he had had enough of the desert for a while. But he would go nowhere without at least the chance of the blonde being able to come to him occasionally. Even he wasn't that self-destructive. Once he was coherent enough to have a prolonged phone conversation, he would telephone Virgil and look into his options.
"Do your...'employers' require offerings? Something to ease the path for you to have more freedom?"
"To move around, you mean?" Hannah crunched her nose. "Mmm, no. Any place on the earth plane's pretty much the same to them. I go where I'm needed. I helped a ghost in southern California last week. They spoke Spanish reallllly fast. I only know how to ask where's the water fountain, so I just smiled and gestured reassuringly."
Hannah's eyes wandered up the IV tube to the saline bag. "I been plottin' how to get other things I want. I can't figure out if it's through good behavior or bad behavior. But I'm gonna figure it out, you watch, even if it takes 50 years! I'd still have my best Bingo years left in me."
The blonde smiled at Oliver. "For now, I'm happy right here. I'll be your hospital entertainment. Maybe next time, I'll work up a candy striper uniform."
"I love you, Hannah," Oliver said, smiling back at her, feeling as if she really never would leave him. His mind drifted briefly towards rituals he could try, things he could do once he was healed, to maintain that status quo.
Because he loved her.
"I wouldn't mind a uniform, though, if you can manage it," he teased. "I've never gotten to play doctor before."
"Well, you're in luck," she proclaimed. "Now only have I got no shame, I've got lots of experience in the service industry." She winked. "So you better get your rest."
"I think that's the best prescription someone's offered me yet," the spellcaster said with a thoughtful smirk. "Even better than morphine."
It looked as though he might not mind this recovery period at all.