Title: Deja Vu
Rating: T for language.
Summary: Kate regains consciousness in unfamiliar surroundings and has a familiar conversation.
Pairing: Cannon pairings mentioned.
Disclaimer: I own it all, by which I mean a copy of Magic Bites, Magic Burns, Magic Strikes, Must Love Hellhounds, Magic Bleeds, and Dark and Stormy Knights...Hexed and Magic Slays are on pre-order.

The first three chapters of this story have been overhauled so it might be a good idea to read the whole thing again...and it has been over a year since I updated. Bad Beckles. *gives self Gibbs headslap*

This chapter is dedicated to Kay030.

I hurt. That was good, it meant I wasn't dead. Apart from that I had no clue what I'd be greeted with when I opened my eyes. Of course given my recent history, I could make some educated guesses.

Somebody was talking, maybe to me.

"'I have not known a moment in years when the sight of you did not send my heart careening against my rib cage.'"

The words were vaguely familiar but the voice was more so…female, young, upset and trying not to show it…Julie. I wanted to see her, hold her hand and tell her I would be fine but the only parts of my body that seemed to be functioning were my brain and ears.

"'I have not known a night when your visage did not accompany me to sleep. There has not been a morning when you did not flutter behind my waking eyelids…Is any of this getting through to you, Buttercup, or do you want me to go on for a while?'" Buttercup? She was reading The Princess Bride to me. My copy was on my coffee table in Atlanta and I could count on one finger the people who knew it was my favourite.

I took it as proof that he was still alive. For some stupid reason that made me absurdly happy. I was beyond help.

"'If you're teasing me, Westley, I'm just going to kill you.'" Damn fine idea. One I was tempted to try out on Curran if he carried on being nice, or his version of it. It was too damn confusing. Unfortunately, killing the Beast Lord would require me to be slightly less corpselike than I currently was.

"'How can you even dream I might be teasing?' 'Well, you haven't once said you loved me.'" No he wouldn't have, he wouldn't have made things clear by telling her how he felt, and taken all the fun out of it. I gathered what strength I had and flexed my hand. The reading stopped.

"Did you…?"

"I saw." Derek, naturally. "Keep going, she hears you." Yes she does…and any second now she's going to remember how her eyelids work.

"'That's all you need? Easy. I love you. Okay?'" Julie sniffed. Dammit, my kid was upset and I was lying in bed with my eyes shut. "'Want it louder? I love you. Spell it out, should I? I ell-oh-vee-ee why-oh-you. Want it backward?'" Fighting off the last vestiges of unconsciousness, I bullied my eyes into opening. The grin that lit up Julie's face didn't distract me from the tear tracks on her cheeks. I held my hand out, the Princess Bride hit the floor and all the air left my lungs in a single whoosh. Derek winced on my behalf, for a human kid she had a pretty good pounce.

I held her as tightly as I could. It wasn't long before something warm and wet dripped on to my neck…for once in my life I knew it wasn't blood.

"'You love I.'"

"What?" She pulled back, presumably to see if I was non compos mentis. I wasn't, although there were times when I wasn't sure.

"It's the next line in the book. 'I love you', backwards. Incidentally…" I didn't finish the sentence; I hoped I didn't need to. Julie started sobbing so I think she got it.

"If the magic hadn't hit you'd have died." Shit. No wonder she was crying. I looked to Derek and he nodded, she wasn't exaggerating. He let himself out of the room then, presumably to tell somebody I was awake. I was hoping for Doolittle but I wouldn't have put money on the doctor being the first person Derek reported to.

"I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. Promise."

"You were so sick…and I was scared you wouldn't wake up. So was everybody else. Especially Curran." It might have been naive of me, but I honestly didn't think anything frightened him. I didn't flatter myself that he'd be distraught at the prospect of my death either.

"Hmm. Did he shout a lot? Roar at everybody? He was probably just throwing his considerable weight around."

"He didn't shout, he was quiet, even when they were taking the bullets out." Curran was shot? A knot formed in my chest, tight and painful. I couldn't get rid of it so I had to talk around it.

"I'm fine now." The door opened but I carried on regardless. "Julie, look at me." She pulled back and looked me in the face. "I'm fine. Don't I look fine?" I gave her my best reassuring smile. It didn't really work.

"You look remarkably well for somebody who inhaled the amount of hydrogen cyanide that you did, but no, you do not look fine," Doolittle said, in the exasperated tone he reserved for his repeat customers.

"Thanks Doc." I supposed it was better than being told I look like shit, although that was probably coming, assuming Curran deigned to make an appearance. He took a seat on the overstuffed white sofa that had been pulled close to the bed. If his furriness was going to tell me I looked awful, he'd definitely already said as much or worse to his doctor. Doolittle couldn't have looked more exhausted if he'd been made his lordship's sparring partner.

"Let's get the Q and A over with. Where am I?" He gave me a weary smile. "I assume I'm in the Keep but I've never been anywhere this…" I gestured at the canopy attached to the frankly enormous four-poster bed I was in. The rest of the furniture was just as overtly feminine, with the single exception of the flat-screen TV. "Does shapeshifter Barbie want her room back?" Julie managed a little laugh but Doolittle just looked uncomfortable. What had I blundered into now? "Whose room is this? Did Curran kick somebody out?"

"It's Curran's spare room." That made no sense. Every empty bedroom in the Keep was Curran's spare room…unless Julie knew something I didn't. I gave Doolittle my 'tell me what you know and you might survive' glare. It was probably less effective coming from somebody in their sickbed.

"This is where His Majesty's female guests sleep." By female guests he meant the never ending parade of beautiful women Curran entertained himself with, and now he'd put me in the same damn room. Arrogant, presumptuous bastard.

"I am not convalescing in the Beast Lord's love nest." No fucking way.

"He gave specific orders…you'll have to take that up with him."

"Believe me I will." Doolittle's sigh spoke volumes. I must have been one of his most troublesome patients, which was saying something.

"Would you like to know how you got here or should I skip straight to describing how you nearly died this time?"

"Might as well do it properly. How'd I get from my house to this sugar-coated slut hut?"

"You were carried…" don't say it Doolittle, "by our lord." I grimaced. The good doctor merely widened his smile. It wasn't funny this time but I seemed to be the only one who knew that. "He carried you from you house to the Pack jeep, then from the car park to the medward, then from there to here." Smirking the whole time I bet. Nobody did infuriatingly smug like Curran. Part of it was the cat thing, part was being as powerful as he was, but mostly it was because he was an ass.

"So," I began, intent on changing the subject, "hydrogen cyanide…"

"Yes. Whoever your attackers were they wanted you dead and His Majesty incapacitated at the very least. And they very nearly succeeded. By the time you got to me you were in a coma. Tech was still up so I had to use sodium thiosulfate and vitamin B12a, all well and good for shapeshifters and moderate exposure in humans…but you don't know the meaning of moderation." That was me, all or nothing.

"Prognosis?"

"You'll make a fully recovery eventually…but only because magic hit ten minutes after I got to you. I cast so many healing spells that I needed medical attention myself." Damn.

"Do I say sorry?"

"No, you didn't make me do it." We both knew who did though.

"You should be out of bed later today. Walking is possible, but not far. I've told the guards at the end of the hall not to let you pass…and I should warn you that His Majesty has added his authority to my own in all matters relating to your health."

"So I'm a prisoner, wonderful."

"I'm not about to let you push yourself too far and collapse on the stairs. We're on the top floor, that's a lot of stairs to fall down. There will always be somebody within earshot if you need anything."

"Anything except privacy and freedom."

"There is a lock on the door that, to my knowledge, has never been broken…by anybody. You'd be too weak to take advantage of freedom if you had it, but privacy might be doable." Until I annoyed his High(handed)ness enough to kick the damn door down.

"Thanks." There was one more thing left in the little routine Doolittle and I had got into. Curran. I usually asked how he'd injured himself saving my ass. Was I pathetic for still not wanting to see him hurt by anybody other than me…maybe. Was I going to find out how he was anyway? You betcha.

"Julie said Curran was shot."

"He was. While he was carrying you out your back door, so I'm told." Kill me now.

"Badly?" Dumb question. How did you not get badly shot? Nobody had ever had a gunshot wound that just tickled a bit.

"I took six bullets out of his back after I'd done what I could for you."

Crap. While six normal rounds wouldn't have caused Curran any lasting damage, in the short term they had to hurt like hell.

"And he breathed in more cyanide than I did."

"Yes. Fortunately he has a remarkably strong constitution…" That and he was a stubborn son of a bitch who refused to die out of sheer pig-headedness. "And I decided to set out and meet you halfway when George described the scents in the air."

"Bitter almonds."

"While you will most likely need to take it easy for at least a week, His Majesty was right as rain after a cup of tea." The knot loosened until I could barely feel it.

"So he's ok?" The door swung open and the topic of conversation strode in looking as whole and distractingly attractive as normal. Derek followed soon after.

The Beast Lord gifted me with an infuriatingly serene smile. Evidently his anger evaporated once he got his way and his smug superiority returned. Either that or he had a damn unusual reaction to cyanide.

"You concern for my wellbeing is touching." Come close enough your Majesty and I'll touch your face with my fist. My right hand twitched as my anger, conditioned to reach for a weapon. I didn't know where Slayer was. I felt incredibly vulnerable, and, weirdly, like a limb had been amputated. I always had a weapon within reach, always. I got increasingly tense as the moments ticked by. Derek noticed the thickening atmosphere first, flicking his eyes from me to Curran warily, but said nothing. Doolittle however looked like a stiff breeze would knock him on his ass and wasted no time in making his excuses. I didn't blame him. I didn't want to be there either.

"My Lord, if my services are no longer required…"

"You may leave." Curran didn't even look at Doolittle as he dismissed him, he just kept his eyes on me. Arrogant swine.

The door shut behind the doctor with a discrete click and Curran's posture changed to 'off-duty'. He hadn't got to impress or intimidate anybody in the room. Julie and I weren't Pack and Derek worshipped the ground he walked on. It was a subtle change but he was slightly more relaxed. It would make it all the more surprising if he went from calm to homicidal rage between one heartbeat and the next.

Curran sat on the sofa by Julie and put his feet up on the edge of the bed. At least somebody was comfortable.

"There's French toast downstairs. Absolutely delicious." That was just sadistic. Curran knew damn well that healing spells made you hungry, with the number that Doolittle had performed on me I was tempted to gnaw on the furniture. It was bound to contain some sugar as sickly sweet as the room was.

I wasn't the only one scowling at him though. My kid was catching on fast.

"You can go a while without sleep or without food, but not without both." The scowl faded as she worked through the logic of the situation, mine deepened when I realised she'd deprived herself of rest and food while I was out of it. I highly doubted there was anything Derek could have said or done to get her to eat if she was set against it…but Derek was no master manipulator. Enter the Beast Lord, stage right.

If she had breakfast she'd be gone for half an hour at most, if she put her head down somewhere, nobody would disturb her and she would miss anything that happened in the next few hours while she caught up on her sleep. Julie huffed as she realised Curran had out-manoeuvred her; it was a feeling she'd get used to. Not that I spoke from experience, it still irritated the hell out of me.

"Go on kitten, Derek will keep you company." Kitten? Since when did Curran have a pet name for my kid? And she wasn't calling him on it. What the hell kind of deal had they made while I was busy being unconscious?

Julie got up, gave me a hug and walked through the door boy wonder had chivalrously held open for her.

There I was again, alone with the Beast Lord.

Wasn't this how all the bloody trouble had started?

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