"You write whatever you need to write, Freddy," he said. A hatch opened a tiny bit on the top of the cube and a pair of eyes peered out, then it slammed shut and there was a round of convincing giggles and scurrying from within the box. This could be huge, if Sammy didn't fuck it up by worrying too much about what someone else was up to. "Oh, and one other thing: it looks like the Death Waits kid is going to be discharged from the hospital this week." # He wasn't ready to leave the hospital. For starters, he couldn't walk yet, and there were still times when he could barely remember where he was, and there was the problem of the catheter. But the insurance company and the hospital had concurred that he'd had all the treatment he needed -- even if his doctor hadn't been able to look him in the eye when this was explained -- and it was time for him to go home. Go away. Go anywhere. He'd put it all in his LJ, the conversation as best as he could remember it, the way it made him feel. The conversation he'd had with Perry and the idea he'd had for pwning Disney-in-a-Box. He didn't even know if his apartment was still there -- he hadn't been back in weeks and the rent was overdue. And the comments came flooding in. First a couple dozen from his friends, then hundreds, then thousands. Raging fights -- some people accused him of being a fakester sock-puppet aimed at gathering sympathy or donations (!) -- side-conversations, philosophical arguments. Buried in there, offers from real world and online friends to meet him at the hospital, to get him home, to take care of him. It was unbelievable. There was a small fortune -- half-a-year's wages at his old job -- waiting in his paypal, and if this was all to be believed, there was a cadre of people waiting just outside that door to meet him. The nurse who came to get him looked rattled. "Your friends are here," she said in her Boris-and-Natasha accent, and gave him a disapproving look as she disconnected his hoses and pipes so swiftly he didn't have time to register the pain he felt. She pulled on a pair of Salvation Army underpants -- the first pair he'd worn in weeks -- and a pair of new, dark blue-jeans and a Rotary picnic t-shirt dated three years before. The shirt was a small and it still hung from him like a tent. "You will use canes?" she asked. He'd had some physiotherapy that week and he could take one or two doddering steps on crutches, but canes? No way. "I can't," he said, picturing himself sprawled on the polished concrete floor, with what was left of his face bashed in from the fall.