When I woke up, I felt warm and fuzzy. Which was weird, because usually when I woke up I didn't feel much beyond the soft pressure of my bed and blanket; the simulation didn't try to emulate heat or cold unless I made it do so. Opening my eyes, I had a few moments of confusion, as the room around me was clearly not my bedroom, but then memory returned.
I was awake—awake, not in the simulation anymore, but in the real world, some sort of hospital room by the looks of it.
I smiled and tried to sit up, then frowned. Looking down, I found that my right shoulder and entire midsection were wrapped in hard plaster; there was also an IV drip in my partially-immobilized right arm. I had never broken a bone before, so it took me a few seconds to realize what I was looking at; medical casts, designed to immobilize parts of the body and keep me from shifting set bones out of alignment. I knew decalcification was a serious problem for astronauts, and given how long I'd been in space for, I was grateful that I hadn't suffered a skull fracture, or something more serious during landing.
Papa hadn't had time to get me a helmet before I left…
Turning my thoughts firmly elsewhere, I looked around my bed, then picked up the small remote resting near my left hand. It had a few buttons on it, and after trying each of them out, I was able to tilt the head of my bed forward. Because of how I was positioned, my back curved rather than bending at the waist, I was fairly sure that I'd start to get sore after a while, but at least I could look around the room without straining my neck.
The hospital room varied in details, but held to the same basic theme as the hospital room my mother had spent her last few months in, as well as those I had seen in the many movies and shows I had watched in the virtual world. There were a couple of chairs, a few medical machines, an end table beside my railed bed, a television up on a wall mount, and two doors, one that doubtless led into a bathroom. There were labels and names on some things, but I couldn't read any of them.
My study of the room was interrupted by the door opening and a woman in what had to be medical scrubs walking in, smiling brightly when she saw that I was awake.
"Essp ishnone puah, jsg ps qsw zuud?" The woman asked.
"I'm sorry," I said, offering her a smile, "I don't understand what you're saying."
"Rjuq pop gahn iu qsw popn'r mxuay Baduan," the woman said with a sigh as she bustled over, "Dur'm muu jsg qsw'hu psone."
I allowed the woman to gently feel around the edges of my casts, my head, and the ports in my back, though she did have to flatten the bed back out with the little remote so that the nurse could roll me onto my side to check the port over my stomach
"Dssym doyu qsw'hu psone adhoejr," the nurse said with a smile, "O'dd twmr nsrozq rju pskrsh."
"Haruka Heartilly," I said as the woman began to withdraw, tapping my chest.
"Sunshine," the nurse said after a moment, tapping her own chest.
"Hello Sunshine," I said with a happy smile, "Thank you for taking care of me."
"O'dd fu faky on a isiunr Haruka Heartilly," the woman replied as she headed towards the door, "O'i twmr szz rs dur rju pskrsh ynsg qsw'hu wx."
When she stepped out, and the door closed behind her, I felt something seize in my chest, and a sudden, crushing sense of loneliness buried me. After a few moments of tightly clutching the rails of my bed, one of the medical monitors started beeping more rapidly, and I realized I was hyperventilating.
After so long, I did not want to be alone again.
I tried to control my breathing, but I wasn't used to my conscious sensation of breathing mattering, and… it was hard.
"How is she, doctor?" Ironwood asked as he followed Leister White through the medical wing.
"Stable," White said, "But in quite poor health overall. Her bones have been decalcified somehow, to the point where just trying to walk might break her legs, if she was at a healthy weight. She's suffering from general muscle atrophy, and her white blood cell count is almost terrifyingly low, on top of the three bone breaks she already has. The only upshot is her organs generally seem to be healthy; I want samples from the equipment she was hooked up to, to see what sort of nutrition it was providing her."
"It sounds like that supports the idea that she was in that little ship of hers for a very long time," Ironwood commented.
"Almost certainly," White said, "Aside from the low white cell count, her bloodwork is good, which suggests good general health outside of the musculoskeletal system. I don't know what caused the bone problem, but the muscle issue looks like it was at least as much caused by long inactivity as malnutrition; if it wasn't for the bone issue, I'd say it was entirely due to inactivity."
"What sort of timeline are we looking at for recovery?" Ironwood asked.
"That depends a great deal," White said, shaking his head as he approached the door to the girl's room.
"Sir?" Lieutenant Ochre, the higher-ranking of the two guards at the door, "Is there a reason you're carrying a teddy-bear?"
"I'm visiting a sick little girl," Ironwood said mildly, holding up the bear in one hand, and the odd pseudo-scroll they'd found in the cockpit with the other, "Why do you think I'm carrying these things?"
"Makes perfect sense to me," Sergeant Ecru said with a grin, "Still, not every day you see the General carrying a stuffed animal."
"Not all of us are family men," Ironwood said with a smile as White opened the door, "Some of us set our sights on women who are very difficult to win over."
"We're all wishing you luck, sir," Ecru said with a sloppy grin and a crisp salute.
After a moment of decision, Ironwood deliberately returned the salute with the arm holding the bear, before following White into the room, deliberately ignoring the conversation he was certain he'd just sparked between the veteran sergeant and the rookie Lieutenant. White was looking the girl over again, the sort of routine checks that Ironwood knew from experience would try one's patience more and more the longer spent in medical care.
"What does her recovery depend on?" Ironwood asked, nodding to the nurse who was already in the room.
"On if she gets sick," White said, stepping back from his examination and turning to face Ironwood, "I'm not sure if she suffers some form of permanent immunodeficiency, or has simply been in an isolated environment for so long that her immune system has atrophied to this point. If she isn't incubating something already, we will most likely need to either send her somewhere with proper isolation rooms, or awaken her Aura."
"How bad is her immune system?" Ironwood asked, looking back and forth between the bright-eyed girl and the doctor.
"Bad enough that if we don't support it with antibiotics," White said, shaking his head, "I'd give fifty-fifty odds that any disease will flat-out kill her. Something more serious, like from the disease wards up on level four, she wouldn't stand a chance. That's the main reason I wouldn't allow the guards inside of the room, and why, unless it's to awaken her Aura, you aren't allowed to touch her."
Ironwood turned his gaze back to the girl, who was biting her lip as she looked back and forth between the three adults in her room. When the gap in conversation lengthened, she smiled, and tapped her chest.
"Haruka," she said.
Ironwood glanced at the nurse, a question on his face.
"Yes," the nurse said, "She's introducing herself; she did that with me earlier."
"I see," Ironwood said with a nod, before turning back to Haruka, and tapping his own chest, "James Ironwood."
"Leister White," the Doctor said, tapping his own chest, before turning his gaze back towards Ironwood, "I guess this confirms that she speaks a different language, rather than suffering some sort of damage to her ability to process and express language. General, I don't suppose you have an expert in languages squirreled away somewhere?"
Ironwood shook his head.
"Then the decision will have to be made without the ability to get her informed consent," White said, shaking his head, "And the sooner the better. We either send her to a facility that can keep her in a clean environment, and then spend months building up her immune system again, or we activate her Aura. You're the first one to talk with her General, which gives you Loco Parentis, more or less, as well as rank. Do you want me to decide as her physician, or do you want to make the call as a proxy parent?"
"What would be healthier for her?" Ironwood asked.
"It's always healthier to have an active Aura," White said, shaking his head, "The question is whether it's worth the level of exertion and investment involved."
"Then I'd better take care of this," Ironwood said with a nod, stepping towards the bed, "No point in risking disease any more than necessary."
It was frustrating, not knowing what the people around me were saying, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do, and I didn't want to interfere with the work of medical professionals, especially when I was the patient at hand. It helped that the Officer gave me back my bear and tablet, and eventually they clearly decided on something, and the Officer approached me, pulling one of his gloves off, before offering me the revealed hand. I was a little surprised, because judging by how he moved, it looked like he was offering me his non-dominant hand, but after a moment's hesitation I reached out with mine, not entirely sure what he wanted.
Moving almost excruciatingly slowly, he gently took my hand in his, crouching down beside my bed so he could look me in the eye. His hand was rough and calloused, like Papa's, and warm. I glanced between his face and his hand, and then started, jerking my hand back as he glowed. A sheathe of greyish energy shrouded his form, flaring for a moment before it faded to a less blatant level.
He proffered his hand to me again, steadily looking me in the eye, clearly wanting my hand, but not planning on forcing the issue. I was a little impressed with how effective he was at wordless communication, and that inclined me a little towards trusting him.
I took his hand again. The strange light around it felt warm, but didn't keep me from making contact with his skin; if anything, the touch seemed more personal, rather than less.
"Rjany qsw zsh rhwmrone iu," he said, nodding to me, before speaking again…
But not speaking like he had before, his words were like a chant, and his light began to brighten again. I resisted the urge to pull away, as my hand began to tingle inside of his…
Something passed from him to me, something warm, bright, and fierce with strength and protection.
I gasped as something ignited within me, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. When I opened my eyes, the world around me shone a brilliant white.