Free Christmas Healing by Jasmine Bowen, Morris Fenris

“I’ll give her attending physician a call as well. But for now, no choices can be made until she regains her strength.”
    “Please, can I see her?” Arthur asked, trying to shape every word carefully so he could be understood.
    “Five minutes,” the doctor scribbled something on his clip board. “Five minutes and please don’t exhaust her. She’s in room 605.”
    “You can go,” Gregory said to Arthur. “Rosa and I will wait here. We don’t want to overwhelm the poor girl.”
    Arthur ’s head was still spinning as he approached the room. He had seen her already with tubes in her, and the monitors, but now that he was away from Rosa, he saw something that he had never seen before. Her life force was no longer flickering, it was stronger, but it was being sustained outside of her. She wasn’t holding onto of it of her own volition.
    He approached her cautiously, as if his mere presence might overwhelm her. She was sleeping, her eyes closed, and he gently leaned over, placing a kiss on her forehead.
    “ Annalise,” he breathed, and her eyes fluttered opened. The monitor beeped once and she looked at him, although the gaze was unfocused. “Annalise?”
    “ Arthur,” she replied, breathless in her struggle. “Stay.”
    He bit his lip.
    “I’m not supposed to stay.”
    “Stay,” she repeated, before the world overtook her again and she drifted back to the black abyss. And stay he did.
    He wasn’t allowed in her room the whole time. Gregory made it clear that he must obey the rules. He also made it clear that he could be hurting her more than helping if he constantly demanded her attention. So he stayed in the waiting room mostly, curled up in the uncomfortable chairs, painstakingly trying to work his way through her binder. He could barely make the words out, each letter foreign, but Gregory had found an English to Latin dictionary. While it was poor quality, it did the job.
    It was three days before she was properly awake and moved to a lower level of care. As soon as she was, he was in her room almost hourly, his chair pulled as close to the bed as possible, just to be near her.
    On her sixth day in hospital, he brought her the lists his brothers had made, silly things, but done under his threats and pleas.
    “An ugly sweater? A snow globe?” She snorted as she sifted through the lists. “Wow, they really went cliché and made lists for everything Christmasy.”
    “They did them wrong?” Arthur asked, and she shook her head.
    “No, just amusing. So guess what we do with lists now?”
    “We … send them to the fat man?”
    “Only if you’re five years old,” she replied. “We take them, and shop for the items on the list, and wrap them and put them under the tree on Christmas for them to open.”
    “But … so it’s the illusion of Santa?”
    “Exactly,” she grinned at him, proud of his progress. She was still white as a sheet, and she was getting thinner by the day, but her spirits were high. Or perhaps it had something to do with the constant amount of Christmas sugar cookies that were being brought around. “You want to go shopping?”
    He cocked his head, confused.
    “How? You are not leaving until you are better.”
    “Doesn’t mean I can’t go downstairs. I’m not on bed rest completely. Do you think you can find a wheelchair?”
    “Yes,” he nodded, eager to please her and rushed out into the hall. There was one waiting for him, as if placed there just for his purpose and he snatched it, bringing it back to her.
    Annalise felt so thin and fragile in his arms. His heart exploded with love and protection as he settled her into the chair. He wanted to believe that these harsh drugs would heal her, that she would be back to her old self soon, just like last time, but he wasn’t sure it was possible, even with modern medication. Surely nothing was so powerful that it could bring her back to what she was?
    Annalise settled into the chair and he took the blanket off the bed to