Rating: PG 13 (at least for this installment)
Pairing: W/T (although as this is after months of them being apart, only technically)
Feedback: But of course! You all know how to reach me. But on my jockstrap phone -- please, just ring once.
Distribution: Maybe. Let's see how it turns out first.
Disclaimer: All characters, as you know, belong to Joss Whedon, except those that I created, but are only minor incidental characters, so who cares.
Spoilers: Season 6, "Tabula Rasa," probably "Smashed" and Joss Knows what else. Most of this is guesswork.
Notes: Basically, with everybody writing about the impending break-up of Willow and Tara, and Willow's probable estrangement from the Scoobies, I decided to tackle it from the other end -- The Long Road Back.
Part 1.
The young woman lay on the gurney as it crashed through the doors of Sunnydale General’s ER, the paramedics pounding alongside. She looked about as dead as a live person could be, her red hair hanging lifelessly about her head, her face deeply lined. Her pupils didn’t respond to light, and she was too deeply unconscious to feel the IV’s feeding plasma and DW-5 into her scrawny body. She looked on the keen edge of malnutrition. Only the fact that she was breathing, has a pulse, and blood still trickling from her left nostril, had prompted the paramedics not to head immediately for the morgue.
"Where’d you find her?" Dr. Everett Malcolm barked, supervising the nurse and the orderly as they cut away the girl’s shabby, dirty clothing. He was already putting on gloves, not the thin, surgical kind but the thicker ones almost indistinguishable from the ones sold by Playtex for cleaning the toilet at home. This girl looked like she’d been living in the sewer, and smelled it too.
"Alleyway off Delaney," said the head paramedic. "Right near the Espresso Pump. Don’t look like she’s had much caffeine, though."
"She hasn’t had much of anything for awhile," Nurse Ziyang muttered. "Hmmm…no needle tracks. Looks like junkie, though. Probably doing video porn to pay for it, although with a body like hers…"
"That’ll do, Ziyang," Malcolm snarled. His job was hard enough without giving in to the cynicism that drifted in her with the indigent and the dying, more often than not the same individual. At the same time, there were the genuine inexplicable occurrences that happened more in the five years he had been in this small town than in fifteen in San Franciso. He’d heard all the tales about Sunnydale being a suburb of the Twilight Zone, and the last few years had made it harder to dismiss the stories as water-cooler bullcrap.
"Any sign of, uh…neck rupture?" He used the well-worn euphemism for the puncture wounds that seemed, at times, to be almost epidemic in this town. His imagination, if not his medical training, supplied the diagnosis of the wounds.
Nurse Ziyang examined each side of the girl’s neck, then shook her head. "Nope, not a vam—" That was as far as she got.
"Don’t!" Malcolm muttered, turning a dangerous shade of burgundy. “Don’t say that word. Just because you all talk about such things in between the times you pretend you’re working—!" The silent orderly staring at him finally forced him to calm down. "Type and cross-match, do a red-cell count, and a quick-screen with that new analyzer. She might be on something regardless." He snapped a question at the orderly. "ID?"
He shook his head, dreadlock flailing about. "No, sir. She might’a gotten ripped off, but I don’t see signs of a struggle…" He trailed off, realizing that he was a bit out of place, but Dr. Malcolm nodded, agreeing with his snap assessment.
With her vitals low but stabilized, Dr. Malcolm let his attention wander a bit, to a nagging feeling that had been in the back of his mind: the feeling that he had seen this young woman before. Young? he thought for a second, because the woman lying half-naked on the examination table before could pass for thirty-five on a good day, with artistic lighting and a professional make-up artist. But he was sure he had seen her before, within the last few years, as a teenage girl. A coma, brought about by severe head trauma, that was it. It had something to do with another case, a teenage boy with a broken forearm bone…and something about another girl, a Bahamanian national who had someone entered the country without Customs having a record of her, who ended up having her throat slit by a razor-sharp knife that had someone not left any metal specks for the particulate analyzer to pick up.
This girl, the redhead, she had an unusual first name, starting with 'w'. The last name was “Rosen…” After that, his memory failed him.
"Transfer her to ICU, and have Serology monitor her. Schedule an EEG, too." He had a bad feeling about the nosebleed. Malcolm went out to the main ER station and inquired the head nurse to run a check on the partial name he had. In less than a minute, he had his answer: Rosenberg, Willow D.
The file had an extensive list of in-case-of-emergency-please-call numbers, some of which had been crossed-off, others appended. Two even had the area code for Los Angeles, with the legends C. Chase and Angel Invest. beside them. One might be a bank, the other a brokerage, maybe. There were also several cross-references to other files: Harris, Alexander L.; Summers, B.A.; Maclay, Tara J. The last one, he vaguely recalled, had been one of a rash of sudden onsets of psychological dementia last year, where an abnormally large group of people seemed to lose I.Q. points in a bad poker game. Malcolm recalled that the Maclay girl had been the only one to miraculously recover.
Rosenberg’s file has her vital statistics. Born 1981. He looked over at a nearby calendar. She was just twenty-one years old. Sweet Jesus, he thought, she looks like a forty-year-old bar hag! I guess I better call some of these numbers.
As he looked for a free phone, he saw Rosenberg being loaded onto a gurney and shipped off the the intensive care unit. Nurse Ziyang walked over to him, carrying the ER log for him to sign. "What do you think, Doctor?" she asked, her voice for once free of sarcasm and bitterness.
"I think it’s a good thing this girl had a lot of friends, at least at one time," he said, holding her file up in emphasis, "'cause she’s gonna need 'em." He dialed the number next to Summers, B.A.; he had a feeling that one would provide him with the most answers.
Four months after.
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"I will say, I've been in some weird places, but this is…another weird place."