| Subject: The Outside Operative 2 |
Author:
Nikita507
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Date Posted: Saturday, May 25, 07:22:57pm
In reply to:
Nikita507
's message, "The Outside Operative" on Thursday, May 23, 11:22:41pm
All hospitals gave Michael a sinking feeling. Too often, they were part of a plot for a mission. Why it was always easier to plan something to happen to a possible terrorist while they were dealing with someone in the hospital was always something that innately bothered Michael.
The fact that he had been killed several times in front of people in the hospital, particularly Elena, made his stomach churn.
Unfortunately, he had become a fixture in this one. All of the staff knew him and they expected him to do whatever he wanted, and not to follow most of the rules. It had been that way for months and no one challenged Michael’s decisions. The fact that he had flooded the hospital with millions of dollars in donations to make what he wanted happen was probably the easily explanation to why there was never a challenge to what he was ordering to be done.
But he didn’t order with a dominating voice. He was humble with his words to the staff while he was telling him what he was going to do. It was those soft words that he had used when he had walked out to the main desk on the floor, away from the wing that he had effectively taken over since he arrived at the hospital, to tell them that he had a visitor named Walter and that he was to be escorted to him.
He walked back and nodded his head to the nurses that he knew very well, but not in a physical way. Some had tried to offer to comfort him in that manner in those first couple weeks, but most of those single nurses had transferred to other duties as Michael slowly cleared the entire wing out of other patients, giving him the space that he craved. There was one nurse, Allison, who was single.
She was also more like the grandmother that Michael never knew.
Allison wouldn’t be back on duty until later this evening. Michael wasn’t sure he liked that timing, but it was what it was. He may have asked the hospital to make accommodations to the layout of the rooms, but he never interfered with the schedules of the staff. That was not his place.
He walked pass the empty rooms and rolled his shoulders back, relieved that a couple months ago the transfer from the I.C.U. was possible, not that it had changed the outlook on things. Michael rubbed his hands together and nodded his head at one of the janitors who swept the already clean floors and continued down to the area that had been converted into a suite of a type.
While Michael disliked hospitals, they were still nothing like Med Lab inside of Section One. He avoided that area of Section One as much as possible, but hadn’t been able to stay away after the War. He had been dragged there because of Nikita.
Hell, he ended up in Med Lab quite often because of Nikita. Michael ended up there either because it was touch and go or because she was known to be such a bad patient. It was the one commonality that his trainee had with him.
Michael felt his cell phone vibrate and he picked it up and stopped to stare outside. “Yes?”
“Hey, Walter was running behind. He is just turning on the road to the hospital. If he doesn’t chicken out again, he should be hitting the front door in five minutes,” Davenport reported without any chit-chat. Michael blinked his eyes and exhaled, hoping that this wasn’t yet again another false run. “Thank you.”
“I’m going to tail behind… he got this far last week,” Davenport reported. Michael knew that Walter had gotten to the parking lot. He had taken his motorcycle last week and had even pulled off the helmet before he jumped back on and spun out of the parking lot like he was being followed. The older man wasn’t sure what was going on and Michael did not blame him. Instead, he called a couple days later and asked him to try again.
“Don’t,” Michael issued the direction as he had done last week. “Walter has the freedom to decide not to come in.”
“Hell, I won’t find out what is going on until he goes in. I would have thought you were mangled up, in some weird science experiment, or worse if I hadn’t cajoled you into choking down a god-awful hotdog across the street a month ago when you first asked me to find Walter,” Davenport rattled off quickly and Michael eased away from the window, determined not to watch Walter run away again.
“Davenport…”
“Look, I know that you did whatever it is that got us… well, here,” Davenport struggled to say and Michael pushed the door open into the room that he knew too well. He exhaled as he looked at the bed and then leaned his head back. “I don’t need Walter to do this because of gratitude for doing what was right.”
“That’s not what I’m saying… but since you won’t tell me what is going on in that hospital, I’m almost afraid to think that you are guarding Operations or something like that.”
Michael didn’t reply. Davenport had made that accusation before and Michael did exactly as he had done the first two times Davenport said this statement.
He hung up.
Michael knew that Walter had grown distant from him after Nikita was sent out on the death mission. Walter was a smart operative. He knew that Nikita was marked to be in Abeyance and that it could happen. Walter refused to talk to Michael for a month afterwards as he silently grieved, to the point that even Madeline had mentioned it to Michael, which meant that Michael had to fix it.
It didn’t mean that once Walter started to talk to him that Michael didn’t double and triple check his equipment for the next couple months. But Walter thawed slowly, but never fully as he knew who he blamed for what had happened and what operative did not protect his own trainee enough from the realities of Section One. Those thoughts were probably brought back to the surface now that Walter was free.
Lots of regrets about who wasn’t around to benefit from the new freedom came up every day for Michael and he knew that it was that way for others.
Michael tossed the phone on the empty bed that was there for him to sleep in when he wasn’t at the side of the other bed. He rarely ever made it on that bed. He pushed into the other room and sat down, taking his position and silently willing Walter to have the strength to enter the hospital and to come to his side.
Because Michael needed him now.
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