“Um.”

“Just agree, so I can move on to other patients.”

Panacea sounds very tired of all this.

I can’t blame her. She’s probably been healing non-stop for several hours now.

“What was it you said during the bank robbery?  You’d make me horribly obese?  Make everything I eat taste like bile?  What’s to stop you from doing something like that here?”

“Nothing, really.  I mean, you could sue me after I did it, but you’d have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’d be damn hard if I gave the symptoms a time delay before they showed up.

You’re not helping your case, Pan, by bringing up a detail of your power I didn’t know about that invalidates my argument for why Taylor could trust you.

Plus I’m a valuable enough resource that I could get help paying the legal costs.  And, let’s not forget, Carol, my adoptive mother, is a pretty kickass lawyer.

Ah, yeah.

Whatever you did by trying to sue me probably wouldn’t cripple me as much as what my power did to you.”

Yeah, I suppose that’s true.

“I’m sure you have,” she frowned.  Her hood and scarf were down, so I could see her face, much as I had during the bank robbery.  She had dark circles under her eyes that looked painted on.  She spoke, sighing the words, “I need your permission to touch you.”

“What?”

That might not be the best way to phrase it.

But yeah, it makes a lot of sense that Panacea would be required to ask consent, especially considering she can run her power in reverse, so to speak, and make matters worse if she wants to.

That said, Panacea doesn’t necessarily need touch to affect someone… although it seems her power is vastly weakened if she doesn’t. I guess that’s why she complained about Taylor’s outfit covering everything back in Agitation – if she had been able to touch Taylor’s skin for just a moment, she might’ve been able to do so much worse than give Taylor a headache.

“Liability reasons.  Someone overheard you say you’ve got a broken back.  There could be other complications, and that takes people, time, equipment and money that the people in charge of this hospital are reluctant to spare at a time like this.

Yeah, that’s all fair.

You could refuse to let me touch you, make the hospital give you the X-rays and MRI, get months or years of treatment paid for by the Preservation Act, all under oppressive confidentiality agreements that could cost the hospital millions.  It’s an option, but the treatment wouldn’t be as fast, good or effective as it would if I used my power.  You’d be shooting yourself in the foot for the sake of being stubborn.”

Taylor has literally no rational reason to decline this. I mean, she’s butted heads with Panacea before, and Panacea could do some nasty stuff to her, but if Panacea really wanted to be that spiteful here, she might as well do it without asking permission. She’d get in trouble either way unless she kept it subtle.

A handful of cockroaches from near the kitchen made their way through the walls, through an air intake grate in the wall, and up to my bed.  They gathered on my stomach.

Hi, little friends. (Might want to avoid the sight of the hospital staff if you want to stay alive.)

I gathered them into a pyramid on my stomach, let them collapse.  Made a kaleidoscopic starburst pattern, then moved them all in sync to expand out into a perfect circle.

😀

“You’re so creepy, you know that?” the voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Ooh.

Hm. I’m going to guess that this is Panacea. It would make sense for her to be walking around here, visiting patients, she’s someone whose voice Taylor has heard a while back, and it sounds like something she might say.

“I’ve heard worse,” I replied, opening my eyes.  Panacea was entering my curtained enclosure, shutting the curtain behind her.  There was a PRT uniform with her.

Yup!

Nice to see you again. Are you going to help Taylor move her legs again? 🙂

Minutes ticked on.  No more than three seconds passed without someone screaming or shouting orders or updates regarding a patient in crisis.

This place is hectic as fuck.

It would have been interesting to listen to, if I could make out more than half of it, and if the half I could hear wasn’t so horrible.

Yeeah, not exactly a pleasant audio backdrop.

The anxiety over my circumstances and not knowing what was going to happen was gradually overriden by a maddening boredom.   I couldn’t move, had nobody to talk to, didn’t know enough about my present situation to think up contingency plans.

Relatable. Waiting at hospitals tends to be pretty dull, whether you’re in the bed or a visitor.

I closed my eyes and used my power, because it let me be outside my own body in a way, because it was something to do.

Nice.

Boredom is usually one of the feelings people hate most. Most people will prefer mild pain over boredom, just because it’s some kind of stimulus. Taylor, fortunately, has remote access to a stimulus most people don’t.

“Okay,” I spoke, quiet, my thoughts going a mile a minute.

“The phone call, I can let you use my cell phone if you promise not to…” she trailed off, as if realizing the possibilities of what could happen if a villain had her phone number, contact info for her friends and family.

Aw. I like this nurse-in-training.

Yet she could hardly back out, not without potentially upsetting a bad guy.

Whoops.

I shook my head.  “No.  But it’s really good of you to offer.  Thank you,” I tried to put as much emphasis on the thanks as possible.  “With that kind of empathy, I’m sure you’ll become a great nurse.”

😀

Absolutely.

She gave me a funny look, then backed out through the curtain.  I could have called after her, asked for something for the pain, asked if maybe I could get some help, but I suspected she didn’t have the power to give me any of that.

Yeah, probably not.

Besides, she has other patients to visit.

I had no idea how long I’d be here, and I suspected it’d be worth more to have a potential friendly face around than go for the long shot and risk seeming manipulative or alienating her.  That, and I didn’t want to get her in trouble.

That’s another good point. You’ve pushed the boundaries a fair bit already, might want to take a break.

A darker thought struck me.

“Is that – would that be my one phone call?  These cuffs – am I being arrested?”

Right, that whole mess.

She shook her head, “I was just offering.  I don’t know if they’re arresting you.  Only thing they said was that I was supposed to fill in the charts for the patients on this end of the room that have the red tags.”

Fair enough.

She pointed to a set of plastic tags that were clipped to the curtain rod, so that one large tag hung down on either side of it.  Was it to designate the seriousness of my injuries?  No, they hadn’t even examined me.

…

Villain tag, eh?

I drew a connection to my line of thinking from earlier – was it because I was a villain?  Did I get a mere check-in from the nurse-in-training while the heroes got actual nurses and doctors?  I hadn’t seen anyone put the tags up, but then again, I hadn’t been looking at the curtain rod right after I was stuck here.

Taylor and I are on the same page here. I like when that happens, because I’m an idiot compared to Taylor sometimes, though it does leave me with the occasional paragraphs where I can’t really say much else than “yes, that’s what I just said”.

“Do you want to call your dad?  Or try calling your friend?” the nurse-in-training offered me.

Those do sound like decent options, though (on top of lingering awkwardness between them) calling Danny does present some of the same problems as coming home injured, mainly that he’s guaranteed to ask questions that would compromise Taylor’s identity as Skitter if answered honestly.

If she was offering for me to call Tattletale, that at least meant she hadn’t seen Tattletale’s body.  That was some relief.

Oh yeah, that’s a good point.

I still think she’s soggy toast, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to let Taylor have some hope for now. There’s been very little of that going around in this Arc, after all.

I wasn’t sure if I should take the offer.  If I called my dad, would they track the call?  Find out who I was?  Would they track down Tattletale, if she wasn’t dead or dying?

Oh yeah, I didn’t even think of that.

Although if they really wanted to find out your identity, there’s not much you could do to keep them from removing your mask. Granted, they’d still need to tie the face to a name.

Who else could I call?  Coil?  Way too many issues if they traced the call, and I wasn’t sure if Lisa had passed on word of our recent argument and/or breakup.

I seem to recall that being mentioned in passing. Must’ve been in Interlude 8 if I’m not making it up.

Grue, Regent, Bitch?  I wasn’t on their team anymore.

Doesn’t mean they’re not the ones most likely to know something about Tattle out of those you can contact.

Alright, let’s get back to the story!