Lumbering out onto the familiar hospital lobby, his thoughts raced with angsty reflection. He could hardly wait to be free of this place. To put behind him all the smells, the sounds, the drab, sterile décor. The sleepless nights of excruciating pain. The dreary days filled with struggle, hopelessness, boredom, and an endless battery of testing that gained him nothing and led him nowhere. It was all he could do to not make a break for those looming double doors as he got closer to the main enterence, chattering open and closed with every hint of passing action, offering tantalizing glimpses of the big beautiful world just outside.

  But for now at least, he could resist the temptation and all its sweet promises - so long as she was waiting.

  Keeping to the edge of the swirling cafeteria, Mikey's eyes scanned the faces with thinly-veiled misapprehension––

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  Could she be late?

  He kept his distance, sifting through the faces in a perpetually unblinking stare.

  Could he be early?

  Mikey clung to the faint possibility as he lurched into the line-up for coffee.

  Nearly forty-five minutes later, he stood awkwardly from his table and made for the exit.

  She wasn't coming.

  It seemed impossible to him that he could feel so much lower here in this moment than all his lowest moments combined. Who was she to hold so much sway over his temperament? Someone he'd only just met––and talked to maybe twice––and yet something about her had stirred something inside. Something buried.

  Most likely more ego.

  A lungful of fresh air revitalized his virility. Surely, being able to walk outside by himself was victory enough for the moment. A harbinger of happier days ahead. And if his own stubborn bones could heal with time, then perhaps, so too could the rest of him.

  "Glad to see you ain't dead, Mikey."

  A baritoned bellow startled the smoky breath from his nostrils. There at the bottom of the ramp, blocking access, was a man twice the size of two more. The menacing, no-less imbecilic figure known to him simply as—