Not Afraid to Die

"Lollipop," Dorian sang, skipping into the room with Jazz on his arm.

"Can we get him a muzzle?" Lestat asked, following the pair into the room.

Walking in after Lestat, Grim grumbled, "I'll look into it."

Neon and Arpeggio were the last to walk in, calm unlike their band mates. Apparently, recording hadn’t affected them as much as the other three. Then again, Arpeggio was finished, so she had every reason to be calm. The drumbeats weren't likely to be changed after being recorded through properly. Unlike the guitar parts or keyboard parts, there were no parts that would need to be changed due to another instrument. The drums were the beat of the song. All instruments conformed to them.

Arpeggio had a great deal of power with that instrument in her arsenal.

Neon's calmness could have been because she hadn't started recording yet. Lolita was sure Neon would record lyrics last. For someone who liked to be in control a good deal of the time, she picked a strange place in the band. It seemed most of the other instruments would control the vocals. How they sounded, how fast they progressed, the lyrics themselves. Neon relied on the other band members a great deal musically. It was strange to Lolita, because it didn't seem to fit the Neon she knew.

But the members of the band had changed.

"Tough time recording?" Dante asked.

"You have no idea," Lestat grumbled.

"How much is done?"

"I finished my parts," Jazz stated, still hooked to Dorian's arm.

"Well, you only had one song left. I would hope you finished your parts."

"With Lestat the Nazi on my ass, I'm surprised I got anything done," Jazz mock-glared at Lestat, "Touch my keyboard again and I'll cut you."

"If you would have played it right the first time, I wouldn't have touched your keyboard," Lestat argued.

"Okay, guys," Neon cut into the soon to be argument, "We're not here to argue."

"You're here to play a CD for me so I can hear how things are going," Dante said.

"No, we're here to see how Lolita is doing."

"I'm important," Lolita exclaimed, hopping in her bed.

Morphine flooding into her system from a recent button push, she could no longer feel the slight pain she had been feeling that morning. She still felt weak, but she wasn't in pain, and that was all that mattered. She liked not feeling pain. It was different and nice. Daily body aches weren't fun. They weren't something she enjoyed dealing with or something she was immune to. They were always there, and to have them nonexistent, if only for a little while, was amazing.

She wished she could a have a morphine drip all the time, but that wasn't plausible.

Rian chuckled at the excited teenager in the hospital bed. Her energy level seemed to have risen since the morning. Actually, that morning, she seemed a little ill. Nothing major, she just wasn't as upbeat as normal. Maybe it was the morning affecting her. Dante had informed him she had gotten a few hours of sleep under the sedative she was given. She could have been a little groggy.

"You're always important, love," Dante said.

She was always at the front of Dante's mind, right there next to their father. Before he told his friends about his sister's illness, he would sneak away during tours and band practice to talk to her out of respect for Lolita's privacy. He refused to disclose information she didn't want other's to know about, but he also refused not to get the chance to talk with her everyday. He couldn't bring himself to ignore her.

"Well, now I'm super important. I'm so important, Superman can't beat me."

"I see she's back to normal," Arpeggio commented.

"It’s the morphine drip. Stab her, I bet she wouldn't feel it," Dante said.

"Morphine drip?" Neon asked, "Isn't that for—"

"Oh my gosh, I have cancer," Lolita exclaimed, collapsing on the bed face-first. She stayed there, eyes on her, for a moment before popping back up and chirping, "Coloring time."

Rian promptly broke into a fit of laughter.

"Rian, would you like to color with me?" Lolita asked.

He stifled his laughs long enough to choke out a quick "sure."

"Okay," Lolita grabbed the coloring book and crayon packet Rian gave her. Opening the pack of crayons, she hummed to herself and picked out a crayon from the bunch. She held it out to Rian. "You get to use the blue crayon."

"I only get to use one crayon?"

Wide eyed, Lolita nodded.

"Are you sure the morphine isn't affecting her brain?" Lestat asked.

"I don't even know anymore," Dante shook his head.

When Blaine had clocked in at the ICU, he upped the amount of morphine that was allowed to enter Lolita's system. They were allowing small amounts to pump from the wires with each push of the button, so as to get her system used to the chemicals. The amount she was getting worked the same way as her pain medications were supposed to: it kept her body from feeling for a certain amount of time and allowed her to re-administer a certain amount of morphine when she was feeling sick. The drip only allowed her to administer morphine every few hours. Dante was told that Lolita would be fine during the few hours she wasn't receiving morphine.

But Blaine had warned Dante that she could experience side effects that could cause her lay in bed like a vegetable. Dante knew well enough his sister worked in ways that doctors never expected.

"Does she have cancer?" Neon asked.

"No," Dante said, "Just brain damage."

A crayon attacked Dante's head. Yelping in surprise, Dante turned to face his sibling. She pretended to color innocently. Next to her, Rian was suppressing his laughs.

"Why did a crayon just hit me in the head?"

Lolita turned her attention to her brother, "It decided being a kamikaze was more fulfilling than helping me color."

"So it magically flew across the room and hit me in the head?"

"Yep, jumped right out of my hand. That crayon was vicious, Dante. I hope it didn't hurt you in its quest for fulfillment."

Dante shook his head, chuckling. He loved her strange behavior. He really did. She was so energetic. Even though she was sitting the hospital with a life threatening infection, she managed to joke around.

She had moments, though, where her mood depressed a great deal, like that morning. It wasn't the first time she had expressed fear for her life. In youth, she seemed to be a lot more frightened of dying. He remembered that, up until the age of five or six, she didn't want toys. She was afraid to die and leave her teddy bears alone.

An early sign of her fear of commitment?

Probably.

But Rian would help break that.

Dante may have been planning on trying to push the relationship. In his defense, Lolita pushed Blaine to ask him out. However, her reasoning may have been a bit nobler.

He thought it was important for her to feel the kind of love their parents had.

"Where are the boy toys?" Rian asked while coloring in the face of an unnamed cartoon character.

"They should be here soon. We cut them off on the way here," Arpeggio shrugged.

"They're in the cafeteria," Jazz cut in, staring at her cell phone, "Apparently, Jack and Alex are hungry."

"I'm hungry, too," Dorian mumbled.

"Those assholes went down there without us?" Lestat asked.

"Apparently," Jazz said.

"We can go down there now," Dante offered, "Someone just has to stay up here with Lolita."

"I can do it," Neon offered, "I'm not hungry yet."

"Me neither," Arpeggio added, "I'll chill up here."

"Same," Jazz said, "Plus, I don't feel like watching Beatrice eat like a wild animal today. There are only so many jokes I can make before it gets old."

"That means you men-folk can go to the cafeteria," Lolita said.

"You're kicking me out? I thought we were having fun coloring," Rian said.

"You colored Jeff's face blue. I'm banning you from the coloring book till you can figure out what color a person should be."

"But you only gave me a blue crayon."

Lolita held up a hand, "Excuses."

Instead of asking who the hell Jeff was in the first place, Rian hung his head in mock shame. Giggling, Lolita patted his buzz cut. From the corners of her mind, she could feel the beginnings of another headache, but decided not to let it bother her.

She understood how these morphine cycles were working.

"Don't worry, Rian. I hear food is a great cure for color confusion."

He raised his head, "Where did you hear that?"

"My medical book of awesomeness. Now, go eat so you can help me color the right way."

"Fine," Rian sighed dramatically and stood from his chair, "I'll go eat."

"Good."