22
"It's time for your massage."

Orlando can't roll over onto his abdomen for Viggo.

"Ready?"

He feels the careful, skilled fingers do it for him.

Viggo takes some oil and starts to rub Orlando's legs. He's slow about it, tender and yet firm, applying pressure that's surprisingly pleasant for Orlando. Viggo works his way quietly up and down the crippled legs, up and down like a hospital corridor. He goes up the thigh, but stops at a safe distance from the crotch, slides back down the leg or moves up to Orlando's back, even gentler then before there.

But there's a bodily scream bursting inwardly under his touch. One form of daring, vicious, delightful motion is back in Orlando's body.

23
He's mostly tired.
He sleeps a lot.
He's still tired and distraught when he wakes up.
He's never left alone except when he's sleeping under the influence of science or while he's waiting for another round of pills.

They haven't stopped playing around with drugs and dosages. The mornings when his therapy is due are better, for the most part. The afternoons he still has to waste away. He thinks they do so to keep him asleep most of the day. There's not that much to do in the rehab centre besides therapeutic exercise, but even that is a limited occupier of time and if a patient has nothing to do, a patient has much to complain about and enough time in which to do so.

The first sheep that comes hopping over his bed in this round informs him, before leaving room for her successor, that he's drifting off into another cement-like sleep. He's not sure about this, though, because there's room for no more than one thought in his head. Viggo cares. He hears the man arguing with a doctor, Scott something, about lowering Orlando's medications, before the Delishoons clean his room from the dust of the determined voices.

25
Viggo leads him into an elevator, down a few floors and to the realization that there's a pool in the centre. In its waters he can see a bunch of exercise props and a Lady of the Lake, waiting to give him his legs back once he's proven his worth.

Viggo pulls down the wheelchair's breaks and walks around to him. Orlando doesn't spread his arms to reach for his caretaker. The Lady of the Rehab Pool smiles. The faint light shining from her is a delicate shade of green.

26
Under the water's touch, he feels like he should be crumbling. His skin is white, though the doubly hydrogenised oxygen paints it a pale shade of azure. He's hypnotized by the sight and doesn't feel when Viggo starts moving his hands along one crippled thigh. Not crippled, temporarily unresponsive, Viggo corrected him the other day.

Now his caretaker moves the muscles by pressuring them in the right places, reminding them what it feels like, movement, simulating the way they functioned back when Orlando could walk.

Viggo's touch, water can't put it out.

27
"All swords can be broken," Andrew nods in an imitation of wisdom as though there's a reason why Orlando should believe in his sword-expertise.

"I don't like swords," he says. Andrew asks why and goes on, talking about everything and anything he knew or made up about swords.

Orlando curses Andrew soundlessly to the rhythm of the pool waves' small motion.

28
"They are small and white, they have these long, pointy noses that look like cones, only they're much too slender and long to be actual cones." Orlando pauses from his enthusiasm, finally letting Viggo react. Fearing it.

"And you say that they, these Delishoons, take on the human form we know as Andrew?"

"Yes!" Orlando's energies burst out again when he speaks. "They know you're looking at them and they don't want you to see them. They clean up everything in the ward, but they won't let you know it. And another thing? It irritates them too that when they take Andrew's form, they can't control his speech..."

Viggo nods, still in thought, perhaps considering the evidence and asks whether he should leave anything for them, chocolate maybe?

To be continued...