Her Safe Haven

Chapter 13 - When Hospitals Had Silver Linings

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Yes guys, I'm alive! >.< No amount of sorry can describe how terribly... sorry ( :') ) I am that I have left this story on hiatus for almost 4 months now... but as soon as school started things just started to flood my to-do list and I was forced to neglect everything that was not school-related :( but in the middle of this busy exam week I just thought that I needed a break so here's a (relatively) long one for all you faithful readers ;)

Previously on Her Safe Haven: Winter encountered Rohan Garrison in her weekly visit to the state's Institute of Mental Health. She asked her psychiatrist, Dr Natalie Switzgerald, on how to help Rohan, and she told Winter that she should just "treat him like how you treat your other friends".

As a medically diagnosed heavy insomniac, Rohan Garrison had never even once, in all of his life, experienced the feeling of being sleepy.

So when he suddenly felt his eyelids drooping; eyes heavy, and his focus slowly thinning — all the legendary symptoms of how being 'sleepy' would feel like — as he was reading the files that Dr Switzgerald gave him that morning, he was convinced that he had just gone from crazy to crazier; courtesy of the thirty-six pages long document on his hand.

He was further convinced of his undeniable descend into madness when he found someone who looked suspiciously alike to his female escort in Lakeside High during his visit last week. The look-alike girl was standing in front of a vending machine on the first floor of the Institute of Mental Health, waiting for her drink to brew.

He blinked several times to make sure that there hadn't been any hallucinogens added to the morning coffee he just drank.

"Winter?"

He didn't realise that he had said her name until after she turned to look at him with an equally surprised expression, her eyes quickly widening. 'Rohan?'

Inwardly, Rohan got even more hysterical when he noticed that this look-alike girl actually looked exactly identical to the only daughter of the McHalen Corporation. And she had responded when he had called her with the name of said daughter, 'Winter'. And she also somehow knew his name and was suspiciously talking in the exact same sign language that Winter McHalen spoke.

This could only mean one thing...

Rohan Garrison was officially in need of another brain MRI*.

Because apparently, his visual cortex had just reported him discovering the existence of a mystical doppelgänger.

Rohan would be lying if he said that he hadn't been thinking about Winter at all since their last meeting last week. What she had said at Lakeside Town Park had left quite an impression on him — and quite a deep one at that, that he had decided to adopt the very puppy that she had shown him that evening and brought the dog back to Dews Town.

His siblings, of course, had stared at him as if he had grown a second head when he showed them the dog, but in the end they just shook their heads and welcomed the white puppy as a new member of the family (even though that new family member always glowered at its owner whenever Rohan tried to pick it up).

But even if he had been thinking about Winter McHalen for quite a number of times throughout the course of this week, that didn't mean that he wanted the gods to create a doppelgänger of her, dammit!

Rohan was then quite relieved when the look-alike told him that she was really the Winter McHalen, and that she was coincidentally also seeing a doctor in this hospital.

Though at the same time his curiosity was piqued.

Jonah had told him some parts about the somewhat tragic incident in Winter's past, so it was possible that she needed treatments for some post-traumatic stress in this hospital. But Rohan had frequented this hospital every week since twelve years ago, and he had never once seen her face here before.