For most people in Destiny City, and probably elsewhere, the hospital was an uncommon scene to be at in one's everyday life. It was usually -- supposed to be, one might think -- a once-a-year thing, pop in for your physical and wait for your test results. Sometimes there was immunization or a blood test and you had to suffer through some kind of needle p***k. But it was never something you'd see every day. Hospitals maintained a foreign, uncomfortable atmosphere, and you typically only remembered enough of them to get where you were supposed to go after a brief glance at the directory to double-check.

Of course, due to recent events that had dramatically changed, at least for a while, with DC Memorial getting more foot traffic than a shopping mall during a sale weekend with none of the liveliness. Much of the city's population had become very, unpleasantly, familiar with the hospital.

Janice Fitzpatrick had been used to the place, with its sterile scent and harsh fluorescent lights and linoleum tiles that could never be polished enough, for a very long time. Having parents who both worked there, she would often make her way up to it for some reason or another, permission slips or reminders of something or other in tow. The staff knew her pretty well. She had her own drink coaster in the break room. As someone who intended to end up working there someday, this was a good thing. Occasionally someone would jokingly ask if she'd gotten her medical degree yet, to which she would dryly reply that she was still working on her high school diploma.

It had over the years become a home away from home, in a sense; a family to visit when her own house tended towards emptiness. At the very least there would be someone from the radiology department passing by to say hi, or someone willing to work off ER rotation stress with a coffee and a game of ping pong. For that, Janice was grateful that the droves of coma patients were slowly but surely getting out of their beds and back to their homes. It was a return to relative normalcy for a place that she found -- strangely enough -- comforting.

Unfortunately, amidst all the good news for so many families and friends, the hospital was still a breeding ground for tales of misfortune. And it was only a matter of time before Janice would be directly affected by one of them.

The first time the news passed by her, she responded the way humans naturally did to such thing: by assuming, or hoping, the news was wrong. There was a screwup. There was a mistake.

They had the wrong person, they must have skipped something in the tests.

This wasn't supposed to happen. They were wrong. This sort of thing only happened to other people. Not her.

Not him.

Janice was offered to see him for herself. She numbly accepted the offer, allowing herself to be led through familiar corridors, to a familiar ward -- she'd never really been in it before, but if told the location she would have been able to find it herself. Besides the restricted areas, she knew the hospital like the back of her hand. She was given the basic security rundown. Reminded what the visiting hours were. For once, she didn't irritably interrupt that she had all this crap memorized when she was in grade school. Her eyes were fixed on the scuffed tiles at her feet, and she was gritting her teeth so hard that they could have been used to press coal into diamonds.

Finally, she was told that she might have a better time seeing him if she looked up --

-- and there she stood at the fringes, some feet away from the bed.

And stared.

For several days, Janice kept on just like this. She would arrive at the hospital, maybe spend a few minutes playing checkers with someone in the break room, then blankly retrace the steps she'd been led in, until her peripheral vision caught the bed of one Franz St. Germaine. And there she would stand and stare from that safe distance where she could make out the blob of honey-blonde hair but not his facial features, for a few minutes. Sometimes it was more like thirty seconds -- other times it was closer to half an hour, and if you asked her about it she wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Maybe his case was different. Maybe he didn't have the usual coma case at all.

Who knew.

By the sixth or seventh day she was finally able to walk over to the uncomfortable plastic chair next to the bed, and sit.