A/N—I know next to nothing about medical terminology and procedures, and apologize in advance if the scene involving it is really, really inaccurate. And Gumshoe totally takes the bus, since his car never really got fixed from its unfortunate accident in 2-4. (The department takes pity on him and gives him free bus ride passes every once in a while.)

And thanks to DeejaVu for reminding me of a too good to pass up Gumshoe abuse point.

Disclaimer—Detective Gumshoe, Franziska von Karma, Phoenix (the dog), and the Hotti Clinic © Capcom. Annabel could be split down the middle, because while the games mention her, I fleshed out the personality.

April 25th, 1:10 AM

Hotti Clinic

Room 103

There were certain things that people enjoyed waking up to. The smell of hot food, a gentle nudge by a loved one, the soothing sounds of nature through a window or specialized alarm clock. Detective Gumshoe, at best, got a form of the last one a few times a year—and it was never "soothing" as much as it was a loud bird screeching outside his apartment at six in the morning. However, he still knew enough about pleasant morning wake ups to know which ones were good and which ones were bad.

Waking up in a bed with several people starting at you intensely was most definitely bad in his book.

"Oh, good, he's awake. Rhonda, get the syringe."

The detective blinked in confusion and was about to ask several questions on his surroundings and condition when a gigantic wave of pain hit him like a brick wall. Had he been standing, he would've doubled over and fell to the floor; as it was, though, he was propped up in the bed and simply slouched over, groaning loudly. The pain was all consuming, and made the world outside his body a blur—he could hear the first voice harshly repeat the instruction to get the syringe, could smell the strong perfume of a woman standing next to him, and feel the same woman try to wrestle his arm down to insert the needle, but he didn't fully recognize what was going on because all he could focus on were the sharp pains in some areas and the powerful soreness everywhere. It took a couple minutes, but Gumshoe was able to put his right arm down and lean back long enough for the syringe to be inserted into a vein.

"Mr. Gumshoe, please, stop squirming!" Two more female nurses stepped forward to help restrain the writhing man so their coworker could inject the liquid into his bloodstream. "It'll only take a few minutes for the morphine to spread around your system, but if the needle gets dislodged, it's going to take twice as long!"

He could only manage a moan in response. Although it took all three nurses and a doctor to stop the detective from squirming and dislocating the needle in his arm, the pain killer did eventually get completely injected into his blood stream. At a torturously slow pace, numbness started to change places with the overwhelming pain he felt. While this happened, Gumshoe's focus flickered between the spreading pain relief and the various conversations that were going on around him.

"…and, obviously, he isn't able to concentrate without morphine…"

"Yes, but we can't keep giving him shots whenever he wakes up—his insurance might not cover it all…"

"God, look at those cuts and welts. I don't blame him for passing out in the break room…"

"He'd better have someone to pay, 'cause this is going to get expensive, fast."

"…think that he'll make a full recovery? Those don't heal well clean, and they look infected…"

"Y'know, I remember some crazy whip lady was the one who called this in. Do you think she had anything to do with this, doctor…?"

This statement rung a bell far off in his mind as his consciousness slipped away from him.

April 26th, 12:47 PM

Hotti Clinic

Room 103

Bright sunlight flooded through the open window, glinting off various metallic surfaces and making the hospital room glow with a soft heat. It was this combination of heat and light that woke Gumshoe from his sleep. The detective groaned sleepily, stretching his arms slightly and knocking his arm into a pole that was standing by the side of the bed. It fell over with a ringing crash, but he didn't really care about that for two reasons.

The first one was that a pleasant buzz that was over his mind, most likely caused by some sort of drug being fed into his system.

The second one was a rather angry looking blue haired woman standing at the foot of his bed.

"You take far too long to wake up."

Franziska's sharp voice was tinged with more anger and displeasure than Gumshoe had ever heard before from the whip wielding woman. Although his reflexes were slower than usual for him, fear started to infect his mind almost immediately after the sentence ended. He opened his mouth to try and form some sort of coherent reply, but only a pained groan came out—apparently, not exactly what Franziska wanted to hear. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth turned into an even more vicious grimace than what was normally on her face, but—unlike the look usually indicated—no sound of a whip crack came to his ears.

"I wasted twenty minutes of my perfect life waiting for you to wake up. Had it not been for the interest that the hospital has been showing in me lately I would have gone against the nurses' wishes and whipped you awake. Count yourself among the lucky." She sighed, lifting her right hand and leaning it against her forehead. In it was a plain white envelope with writing, several stamps, and a post mark on it. "Apparently, the hospital thinks I had something to do with your…injuries. It would do you well to not mention my name when they start to ask about them. As you know, when I become annoyed—as I will inevitably be if these fools start poking into my life even more—it tends to transfer from me to my subordinates."

He gulped audibly. Franziska grinned, although it wasn't as much a humored expression as it was a predatory one.

"In any case, I trust you will be able to have enough sense to keep your mouth shut. And now that I have my actual whip back, instead of some foolish pathetic plastic one…well. Your punishments are going to hurt much, much worse, Scruffy. Oh, and this is for you." The click of high heels on linoleum filled the room as the prosecutor walked over to shove the letter into his trembling hands. "Annabel wanted to mail it here, but the hospital refused to take it, so I was forced to bring you her letter."

She exited the room, stopping at the doorway to shoot one more warning glare before shoving several nurses out of the way and stalking down the hall. There were several thoughts going through his head—most of them revolving around how legal that warning from Franziska was (it reminded him of a blackmail case the homicide department worked on a few years ago, which shot up red flags immediately)—but they were pushed to the back of his mind as he looked down at Annabel's letter.

On the plain white, slightly crumpled envelope, impeccable black handwriting clearly addressed it to Dick Gumshoe, Room 103, Hotti Clinic, Los Angeles, California, as well as a return address in Germany. Several stamps adorned the upper right hand corner of the envelope, as well as a postage mark. Flipping it over, he saw that the back was completely blank. Slowly, Gumshoe opened the envelope and shook the contents out.

The letter fell out first and was closest to his hand, so he picked it up and brought it close to his face to read. The handwriting matched the handwriting on the front exactly, almost as if a machine had been writing instead of a seven year old.

Dear Scruffy,

If you're reading this, then I'm surprised you survived. I was listening at the door to the whipping that Auntie Franziska gave you. It certainly sounded like you were going to die. But whatever, that's not what I'm writing to you about.

The reason I'm writing is that I have something that I'd like to share with you.

The fact that Annabel wanted to share anything with him that wasn't painful was enough to make the detective go back and re-read the sentence several times, just to make sure his pain medication hadn't caused him to start hallucinating. However, after he read them again three times, they were still the same, so he moved on.

What I have to share with you, though, is not just one thing. It's two things. You see, when I was going through your jacket on the day you took me to that stupid lake, I didn't just find the whip. I actually found something else that surprised me.

You don't look like a rich man, Scruffy. You don't smell like one, either. In fact, a point could be made that you look/smell more like a lower middle class chauffeur after a long night with various different drunken fools demanding to ride in the front seat. But I never imagined—for whatever reason, since it really isn't that out of character for you—that you would be so low as to carry around so much food in your jacket, of all places.

Honestly, a servant to the von Karma family should be higher than stuffing their pockets with whatever measly sustenance they can get their hands on.

After reading up to this point, Gumshoe had to stop for a moment. His mind worked through the sluggish cloud that his drugs put on it to process all he had read from the letter. Despite his best efforts, though, he couldn't directly remember having any abnormal amounts of food in his jacket pockets, so he decided to retrace the day as best he could.

"Ok, let's see…the morning of the Gourd Lake Discovery, what did I do? I woke up, I showered, I got my clothes on for the day and had breakfast…"

The breakfast part seemed particularly blurry in his mind, so he thought very hard about that specific time period. Then it occurred to him—he hadn't had breakfast that day. His alarm clock, unbeknownst to him, had reset itself during a random blackout in the middle of the night, so the detective had woken up only ten minutes before his bus was due to leave. This had caused him to be in a frantic rush, grabbing random essential things and shoving them in his coat pockets.

"Well, what do I do on a day when I don't get breakfast?" He asked himself. "I usually get a few things of ramen to heat up at work so the vendor near the police department doesn't get me with his high prices…"

It all clicked into place at that moment.

That day, instead of just grabbing two ramen, like he usually did on missed breakfast days, he had put his entire stash of the dried noodles into his pockets accidentally, due to repeat trips into the kitchen (his keys had gotten misplaced, and the kitchen was usually where he left them) and short term memory issues because of the lack of sleep. He'd noticed on the bus, but by then it was too late to do anything about it, and now Annabel was talking about large amounts of food in his jacket…

And you know how I feel about things like this, Scruffy. So I threw most of the stuff out in that trash bin near the hot dog stand. But then, right as I was about to throw away the very last package, the label on it caught my eye…"ramen". I didn't really know what that is, so I opened the stuff, and it smelled weird and spicy and looked like long dried worms. So I brought it back to Germany with me—moronic airport security officials tried to take it away from me, but Auntie's Whippy sorted that out—and then my mom told me that it was actually instant noodles. You…make some sort of soup out of it by adding hot water or something like that. I tried it.

I don't think I've eaten a worse thing in my life, Scruffy.

So I gave the rest to Phoenix, my dog. He ate the stuff up really quickly, noodles and all. I'm writing this letter to you a few hours after he ate it, and he hasn't thrown it up, which is surprising. The dog must be used to your American food. (Most of the stuff is fit for dogs to eat anyways, so I guess I shouldn't be that surprised.)

Anyways, the two things I wanted to share with you—a photo of Phoenix with the bowl of noodles (post-eating) and the wrapper from the package. I thought they'd "brighten up" the hospital room that undoubtedly you must be in if you're still alive and reading this.

—Annabel

Sure enough, when Gumshoe moved the letter to the right, there was a picture of a brown golden retriever with a wet muzzle and an empty, yellow stained bowl next to its left paw and a wrapper with the words "World's Best Ramen" on it. Slowly, he lifted the wrapper to his nose, sniffing slightly at the inside. The bitter burning taste of the powder that came with the package filled his mouth and nose and made his eyes water.

(Though, really, it probably wasn't just the powder that made his eyes water. After all, his hospital bill—which he just knew wasn't going to be covered by any sort of work insurance, despite him being on the job when he sustained his injuries—was going devour whatever sort of rent money he had saved up. Instant ramen was going to be a thing of the past sooner or later.)

The last thought Gumshoe had before drifting into unconsciousness was how, if it was the last thing he ever did, he would find some way to escape the hell that the majority of the von Karma family seemed so happy putting on him.

---

A/N-So it's finally done.

I'm…in shock that I haven't updated this for six months. I mean, yeah, sure, I knew I had been ignoring it for a while, but six months…well.

I'd really like to thank all those that have reviewed, and all those that (hopefully!) will be reviewing. It's really nice to know that people are not only reading my work, but reading it and thinking that it's worth enough of their time to sit down and comment. Everything means something, and I thank you all for it. (Especially with this fic, since it was my first foray into the world of public online fanfiction and has been one of the biggest writing learning experiences I've had.)

I could go on for a while with the what now's and the likes, but…well. That isn't for this moment in time. I'm planning on doing many different things—sadly, though, not in this fandom, but in the Avatar: the Last Airbender fandom (it's kind of a long story)—but I'll probably start talking more of it in my writing journal (burnt_heaven at Live Journal, linked in my profile). Actually, I'm very active on that journal, and a) have anon commenting on and b) will have lots of new fics up on it, so…it may be worthwhile to check out.

It's a bit of a rush, finishing your first multi-chaptered story. I do hope I did the ending justice.