Being drugged is pretty awful.

"I... don't know much about medicine but I think for any problems you'd have about your metabolism from being starved, nothing they'd want to give you would have any mental effects at all, or really feel like much even physically. It'd be something like a vitamin pill, which is more concentrated versions of stuff in food."

She tenses up, but makes herself relax: No, she doesn't think they're going to try to drug her now, she would run away if she thought that. Doctors are just upsetting anyway.

"Okay. I don't think Julie's scheduling an appointment, she's just calling our doctor to find out if there's anything to worry about. He probably won't pick up tonight because he's back East and it's later there."

Okay.

"Have you been feeling generally okay? You've seemed it but I don't know if you're usually livelier or if you're covering stomachaches or anything."

She feels okay. She might not notice if something was a little wrong but nothing's very wrong at least. And - she lived like that for a long time. They were pretty careful about not actually starving anybody, usually. And then when she got out she was eating better almost right away. She really doesn't think she could be in worse shape than if she'd stayed.

"Certainly it wouldn't be a good idea to have gone on being deprived of food forever. I'm expecting Doctor Chen to call back tomorrow and recommend some vitamins you might be low on from being underfed that a few days of normal meals won't fix."

All right.

Julie comes back fifteen minutes later. "I left Dr. Chen a message and then called the advice nurse, and he said depending on how underfed you were you might be at risk of something called refeeding syndrome, which does call for multivitamins but is also risky in other ways. I'm gonna let you read the Wikipedia page on refeeding syndrome," she offers Denice her laptop, already navigated to the page, "since you're the one who knows how you're feeling and how much you used to eat, and then we can talk about that."

She reads. It's not a pleasant read.

There weren't any days where she didn't eat anything, she's probably okay.

"Okay. I'm going to go out right now and buy some vitamins since those won't hurt you even if nothing's the matter, and see if I can get a cheap stethoscope so we can take a listen to your heart every now and then and escalate if there's an emergency. You should probably eat a little lightly next few days, we're not gonna lock up the food but keep it in mind. And tomorrow Doc Chen'll call back."

All right.

Julie sits back down. Sighs.

She's sorry that this is hard. (Snuggle?)

Snuggle. "Not your fault, kiddo."

Yeah. It's still tough, though.

"Mm-hm. We'll figure it out." Julie pats her on the head and gets up again. "Vitamins. Back in fifteen minutes."

Mmhmm.

Out Julie goes. Winona rearranges the snuggle slightly.

Denice is snuggly but not talkative.

That's okay. Eventually Winona puts her wing around Denice, frees her arms, and gets back to work. She does not choose this moment to look up Denice's institution.

Denice stares at nothing in particular for ten minutes or so.

What will you do if something is wrong and we go to a doctor and the doctor says I should go back?

"Go back to - the asylum?" says Winona. "We don't currently have legal custody of you but neither do random doctors. Also, we wouldn't be telling them you came from there in the first place, we'd be saying we picked you up hitchhiking near here and letting them assume you weren't eating much because you ran away from unspecifiedly bad parents."

They don't have to know she came from one to decide she should be someplace like that. They did get new kids from the outside sometimes.