[Stand-alone] Name, Rank, Serial Number
Title: Name, Rank, Serial Number
Story/Character: N/A
Rating: PG-13 (horror-ish)
word count: 2,717
Note: Written for the mini October challenge over on brigits_flame - my prompts were "inkblot", "basement" and "flashback". Took 3rd place! Award banner created by the awesome cruixe_chan
"What do you see?" they ask him. Gently, sometimes, with hushed tones and bowed shoulders that invite him to huddle closer, open up and confide. Briskly, at other times, words fired off with all the crisp professionalism of a cog in a machine. Demanding, at still others, as though an authoritative voice and clear orders might shake loose what the first techniques don't.
He's heard all of them, and every other variation besides. He's answered the question so many times he could - does - do it in his sleep.
It's the quiet doctor today, with her gentle voice and sweetly caring cajoling. Good cop, he thinks, good cop, bad cop, indifferent cop, on a rotating schedule that he knows as well as he does the questions and the answers and the whole routine. It's Doctor Sala in the blue office at 2PM in the afternoon, and there was jello with lunch, and that means it's Tuesday.
"What do you see?" she asks him, mild and sweet as warm cocoa, the same color as the skin of her slim hands as she holds up the sixth card in the deck. They've played the same game a million times, but every time she asks with the same wide eyed intensity as though his answer might truly hold some insight just out of both of their grasps. The inkblot on the page framed between the tips of her fingers is sharp and angular and he knows every last shade and detail of it.
He likes Doctor Sala; she treats him like a human being, not a statistic. Offers him mints in little copper tins and sometimes caramel hard candies from her desk, gives him cups of tea and bottles of water. Discusses the weather outside (as though he could see it) and he's heard all about her son's sixteenth birthday party and the family vacation in Aspen. She always smells of something floral - not clinical and sharply bitter like so many commercial perfumes, but old fashioned floral, real rose and lilac waters. She holds up the card and he nods and answers, because he likes her and it's Tuesday and she mentioned the sun is shining outside. "An animal. A fur rug, the kind in the movies, with the bear head still attached. See? There's its ears." She beams at him, just as if he hadn't said it a million other times, and pens something in her notebook.
He wonders, sometimes, what would happen if he told her the truth. It's a sword, a blade thrust into the earth, the sword in the stone, Britannia's last great hope of her long lost True King. It's a dragon with outstretched wings, a castle on the edge of a lake, the skip and splash of a falling stone.
But the single most common answer to the sixth card of the Rorschach test is an animal skin, a bear splayed out on it's stomach with paws flopped to either side, and they both know it, so that's what he answers and she smiles, because it's a game, the same game every time, and picks up the next card.
Three cards later he's counting off minute in his head - half an hour the sessions run, and they're twenty into it, second card from the last - and he's telling her about the human figures in the multi-hued splash on the page. (Seahorses. Seahorses in a coral reef and giant's boots and a space shuttle hurtling ever upwards.) "Flamenco dancers - no, see? Those big ruffled skirts they swirl around, all in blue and red…" He's telling her about the time he saw a Flamenco dancer in Spain (it's in his files, it's all in his files) and she's smiling and laughing and then it all changes. The colors shift and lurch in front of his eyes, drip and crawl off the page in lurid splashes, washing away the inkblot and the office and Sala herself in a wave that he can't escape, can't hold back, though he throws his hands out reflexively to try. It hits him, full on, raw and real and unstoppable, and he knows.
He knows.
He comes back to the choked sound of his own sobs, the taste of them sour in his mouth, the carpet rough and scratchy beneath hands and cheek. Sala's hands are there, light and comforting on his shoulders, the hands of a professional healer and mother, her voice quick and concerned. "Sean? Sean, what did you see? What was it?"
It's crawling beneath his skin, burning through him, he knows, he knows, and he can not say. He chokes back another sob, bites his lip until he can taste the copper tang of blood, and gasps out the only safe answer he's ever had. "A-aldridge. Sergeant. 12-899-526. Sean Aldridge, Sergeant, 12-899-526." It's a rhythm he can bury himself in, something so trained into his tongue it overwrites everything else, forcing the forbidden back into his throat where he can swallow it down like molten lead. "Aldridge. Sergeant. 12-899-526!"
The doctor says something, her hands smoothing gently across his shoulders. He tucks his head against his knees, sobbing through the white hot burn of the pain, and offers up the only chant he can, prayer and warding spell all at once. "Sean Aldridge, Sergeant. United States army, 12-899-526."
#####
It's night time. Maybe. He thinks it must be. The room is quiet and the hall outside is quiet, the way it only is at night, and although the light from the hall cuts a slice through the cracked open door (Always open. Always. There are no locks here.) the lights in the room itself have been lowered to a dim glow. It's night, sometime after, and he hopes it's Tuesday night but he can't be sure and there's no one to ask. It might be Wednesday. He hopes it isn't Thursday.
His throat hurts and his tongue is swollen and leaden in his mouth, dry with the thick cotton feel of drugs. He swipes it gingerly across his lower lip, tasting old blood and the rough ridges of scabs. His head aches, dull and distant, insides too bruised and swollen for the tight confines of his skull.
When he closes his eyes he sees inkblots, twisting and writhing like serpents across the page. He would cry but the tears are all dried up, as dusty and arid as the inside of his mouth. There's nothing in his stomach to throw up and the taste of the bile is cold and sour, lurking around the back corners of his teeth. He stinks of fear and sweat so heavily he can smell it, rank stench in his own nostrils.
It might be Wednesday. It could be Friday, for all he knows, and it's night time but there's always morning after night and they're going to ask. They always ask. They'll let him have breakfast first, and a shower - warm water, generic soap, no locks and a cracked open door, but the water will be warm and that's good enough for him. After, though… after, they'll want to talk. They'll want to hear him answer.
What did you see?
When he closes his eyes he sees inkblots that twist into ropes, into wound strands of nightmare, so he keeps his eyes open to the darkness and tries to remember fire and smoke. He thinks about explosions and the heat of the desert and the impact of a gunshot wound followed by sharp fiery pain. He thinks about blood and battle and adrenaline and the weight of a gun in his hands.
He thinks about all of the things that sent him to this place, all of the blood and sweat and fire that he can frame into clipped words, offered up like a child's collage. He thinks about gunfire and the burst of bombs because it's safer. It's night time, and he doesn't close his eyes.
#####
The mind forgets the sensation of pain quickly, blunted under numbing layers of distance. It's self preservation, really. Species preservation. How would anyone ever do or try anything if they could remember in blistering clarity how much things hurt? Children would give up walking after the first tumble with a skinned knee, and he can't think that any woman would ever have a second child if they could recall what the first was like in unadulterated immediacy. But the human mind is smarter than that, so pain is buried fast, swept away into a dim memory of 'bad' without all the horrible sharp edges it has when happening.
He takes everything he knows and puts it under "pain", because it is, because he has to, and wills himself to forget even faster. Nightmares, he tells himself as Doctor Hurst (indifferent cop, yellow room, 1PM on Wednesdays after tapioca pudding for lunch) drones on about repression and the mind's coping mechanisms, should stay in the night, and not come trailing after a man during the middle of the day. He makes agreeable noises at all the right parts when the doctor pauses, and talks about things like emergency field medicine and what third degree burns can do to a man.
Doctor Hurst takes notes in cheap disposable blue ballpoint, the kind with the clear plastic barrels, on graphing paper. Sean talks about the sound of bombs just before they land and the heat of the desert at noon and digs his nails surreptitiously into the fleshy part of his thumb. Nightmares, he tells himself, are just nightmares. He puts them in a box and locks the box in a closet in the deepest depths of his mind and shuts the closet door and talks about guns and tanks and watching friends and comrades die, because nightmares are just nightmares and it's the past Doctor Hurst wants to hear.
#####
"What do you see?"
It's Tuesday. It's Tuesday, there was green jello at lunch, it's 2PM and he's in the blue room. It's Tuesday and there are cards with inkblots being held in front of him and he's in his usual chair; he knows the answers like he knows the back of his own hand but it's Doctor Rangan (indifferent cop, Fridays at 1:30PM after vanilla wafer cookies) holding the cards, Doctor Rangan sitting across from him instead of Doctor Sala, and Sean could cry for the terrible feeling twisting up through his gut.
The card is red and black - two women facing each other, he knows the answer unless he doesn't, unless it's a butterfly, or a manta-ray, or outstretched hands bracketing a pair of binoculars and fireworks in the night time sky over the walls of a church - held up casually between Rangan's thumb and forefinger, hands dark amber colored and nails bitten to the quick. Doctor Rangan doesn't chit chat. Sean doesn't know if it's sunny outside or raining. He doesn't have a mint or a cup of lukewarm tea to keep his hands busy. It's 2PM on a Tuesday and he doesn't know where Doctor Sala is.
He manages to choke out the answer past the tight grip of fear in his throat. Rangan takes notes - he doesn't look up, barely looks at Sean at all - and puts the card down to pick up the next one. "What do you see?"
It's dark, a heavy gray and black smear of ink (another animal skin, not the Excalibur one) and he's been so rattled since he sat down that he hasn't kept count, doesn't know what time it is, and the shiver is crawling up from his gut to strangle the breath in his lungs. He keeps his eyes on the inkblot because if he looks away he can see it start to drip in the corner of his gaze. "Where's Doctor Sala?" he asks, unable to keep the words back.
Rangan pauses, his pen (heavy barreled, engraved) quivering between his fingers for a second. "She's out," he says curtly, and Sean wants to squirm in his seat for the ache in his gut. Rangan puffs his cheeks out with a breath and for one slim moment slips into good cop (or indifferent cop who's only too aware of what effect a break in routine can have on some of the residents). "She's taken a leave of absence," he clarifies gruffly. "It's a family matter." And then, holding out the card once more, "What do you see?"
It's an animal skin, the laid out hide of a grizzly bear, but it's 2PM on a Tuesday and he knows, he can feel it in his bones and under his skin. He knows where Sala is, Sala with her little tin of mints and her soft voice and her rosewater perfume. He knows, he's always known, he always knows.
The nightmares are real, no matter how much he tries to pretend they're not.
"Basement," he blurts out, and it's not the right answer at all, not even close, but he can't enjoy Doctor Rangan's sudden look of surprise because the closet is open, the box is open, and he can't stop the flow of words against the dam of name and rank and serial number this time when they come crowding up his throat. The inkblot wavers in front of his eyes but he doesn't need to see, he already saw, he saw it in vivid nightmare color in the very same room the Tuesday before last. "It's a basement. A dark basement, and there are his feet." The words are relentless, the wave is inside him now and it won't be stopped, his voice rising helplessly in his throat. "You're looking down, from his point of view, there are his bare feet, dangling, he hung himself, he hung himself with an old sheet he took from the laundry, off of the water pipe, water in the dark under his feet and he's dead…"
Dimly, distantly, he can hear the doctor's voice, disbelieving, tight, startled, demanding answers. He closes his eyes - in the dark he can see the twisted line of the makeshift rope - and pulls his knees up to rest his forehead against. He could stop. He could stop, call it a nightmare, a flashback, something he'd heard in the past, an overactive imagination and nightmares and some companion somewhere who took a different way out. He could stop, except he can't find the switch and the words are spilling out, heaved out of his breath and guts in a bitter, choking purge. "He's dead. He hung himself. He was only sixteen."
It's some time after 2PM on a Tuesday and Rangan's voice is strident in his ears because Sala, quiet voiced Sala with her family vacations and happy smile, went home the night before to find her son hanging, limp and cold and dead, over a flooded basement where the pipe had broken open from the jerking tug of his dying weight. Sean knows it, the way he's always known, known what bombs would strike where and who would go out and not come back. He knows it and he's never told a soul, never said a word, not when it might have saved a life, not when he thought he was going mad, not when he did go mad and they placed him safe behind walls.
But if he had… if he could have…
His name was Andrew Sala, sixteen years old and the light of his mother's life, vibrant and alive in photographs from school yearbooks and sports strung in a long plastic sleeve that unfolded from her wallet if anyone asked. And Sala, sweet voiced Doctor Sala, won't be back. Not then, not next week, not ever.
He knows it, like the back of his own hand, like the set and ready answers for inkblotted shapes on white cards, but he's never said it because no one would ever understand. He's crying, salty tears and hiccuped breath that drowns out the shouting around him and when they come for him he's already curled into himself, head down and knees tucked tight, the age old mantra fighting back the thousands of things he could but should never say. It's safer that way. For everyone.
"Sean Aldridge, Sergeant. United States army, 12-899-526."
Story/Character: N/A
Rating: PG-13 (horror-ish)
word count: 2,717
Note: Written for the mini October challenge over on brigits_flame - my prompts were "inkblot", "basement" and "flashback". Took 3rd place! Award banner created by the awesome cruixe_chan
"What do you see?" they ask him. Gently, sometimes, with hushed tones and bowed shoulders that invite him to huddle closer, open up and confide. Briskly, at other times, words fired off with all the crisp professionalism of a cog in a machine. Demanding, at still others, as though an authoritative voice and clear orders might shake loose what the first techniques don't.
He's heard all of them, and every other variation besides. He's answered the question so many times he could - does - do it in his sleep.
It's the quiet doctor today, with her gentle voice and sweetly caring cajoling. Good cop, he thinks, good cop, bad cop, indifferent cop, on a rotating schedule that he knows as well as he does the questions and the answers and the whole routine. It's Doctor Sala in the blue office at 2PM in the afternoon, and there was jello with lunch, and that means it's Tuesday.
"What do you see?" she asks him, mild and sweet as warm cocoa, the same color as the skin of her slim hands as she holds up the sixth card in the deck. They've played the same game a million times, but every time she asks with the same wide eyed intensity as though his answer might truly hold some insight just out of both of their grasps. The inkblot on the page framed between the tips of her fingers is sharp and angular and he knows every last shade and detail of it.
He likes Doctor Sala; she treats him like a human being, not a statistic. Offers him mints in little copper tins and sometimes caramel hard candies from her desk, gives him cups of tea and bottles of water. Discusses the weather outside (as though he could see it) and he's heard all about her son's sixteenth birthday party and the family vacation in Aspen. She always smells of something floral - not clinical and sharply bitter like so many commercial perfumes, but old fashioned floral, real rose and lilac waters. She holds up the card and he nods and answers, because he likes her and it's Tuesday and she mentioned the sun is shining outside. "An animal. A fur rug, the kind in the movies, with the bear head still attached. See? There's its ears." She beams at him, just as if he hadn't said it a million other times, and pens something in her notebook.
He wonders, sometimes, what would happen if he told her the truth. It's a sword, a blade thrust into the earth, the sword in the stone, Britannia's last great hope of her long lost True King. It's a dragon with outstretched wings, a castle on the edge of a lake, the skip and splash of a falling stone.
But the single most common answer to the sixth card of the Rorschach test is an animal skin, a bear splayed out on it's stomach with paws flopped to either side, and they both know it, so that's what he answers and she smiles, because it's a game, the same game every time, and picks up the next card.
Three cards later he's counting off minute in his head - half an hour the sessions run, and they're twenty into it, second card from the last - and he's telling her about the human figures in the multi-hued splash on the page. (Seahorses. Seahorses in a coral reef and giant's boots and a space shuttle hurtling ever upwards.) "Flamenco dancers - no, see? Those big ruffled skirts they swirl around, all in blue and red…" He's telling her about the time he saw a Flamenco dancer in Spain (it's in his files, it's all in his files) and she's smiling and laughing and then it all changes. The colors shift and lurch in front of his eyes, drip and crawl off the page in lurid splashes, washing away the inkblot and the office and Sala herself in a wave that he can't escape, can't hold back, though he throws his hands out reflexively to try. It hits him, full on, raw and real and unstoppable, and he knows.
He knows.
He comes back to the choked sound of his own sobs, the taste of them sour in his mouth, the carpet rough and scratchy beneath hands and cheek. Sala's hands are there, light and comforting on his shoulders, the hands of a professional healer and mother, her voice quick and concerned. "Sean? Sean, what did you see? What was it?"
It's crawling beneath his skin, burning through him, he knows, he knows, and he can not say. He chokes back another sob, bites his lip until he can taste the copper tang of blood, and gasps out the only safe answer he's ever had. "A-aldridge. Sergeant. 12-899-526. Sean Aldridge, Sergeant, 12-899-526." It's a rhythm he can bury himself in, something so trained into his tongue it overwrites everything else, forcing the forbidden back into his throat where he can swallow it down like molten lead. "Aldridge. Sergeant. 12-899-526!"
The doctor says something, her hands smoothing gently across his shoulders. He tucks his head against his knees, sobbing through the white hot burn of the pain, and offers up the only chant he can, prayer and warding spell all at once. "Sean Aldridge, Sergeant. United States army, 12-899-526."
#####
It's night time. Maybe. He thinks it must be. The room is quiet and the hall outside is quiet, the way it only is at night, and although the light from the hall cuts a slice through the cracked open door (Always open. Always. There are no locks here.) the lights in the room itself have been lowered to a dim glow. It's night, sometime after, and he hopes it's Tuesday night but he can't be sure and there's no one to ask. It might be Wednesday. He hopes it isn't Thursday.
His throat hurts and his tongue is swollen and leaden in his mouth, dry with the thick cotton feel of drugs. He swipes it gingerly across his lower lip, tasting old blood and the rough ridges of scabs. His head aches, dull and distant, insides too bruised and swollen for the tight confines of his skull.
When he closes his eyes he sees inkblots, twisting and writhing like serpents across the page. He would cry but the tears are all dried up, as dusty and arid as the inside of his mouth. There's nothing in his stomach to throw up and the taste of the bile is cold and sour, lurking around the back corners of his teeth. He stinks of fear and sweat so heavily he can smell it, rank stench in his own nostrils.
It might be Wednesday. It could be Friday, for all he knows, and it's night time but there's always morning after night and they're going to ask. They always ask. They'll let him have breakfast first, and a shower - warm water, generic soap, no locks and a cracked open door, but the water will be warm and that's good enough for him. After, though… after, they'll want to talk. They'll want to hear him answer.
What did you see?
When he closes his eyes he sees inkblots that twist into ropes, into wound strands of nightmare, so he keeps his eyes open to the darkness and tries to remember fire and smoke. He thinks about explosions and the heat of the desert and the impact of a gunshot wound followed by sharp fiery pain. He thinks about blood and battle and adrenaline and the weight of a gun in his hands.
He thinks about all of the things that sent him to this place, all of the blood and sweat and fire that he can frame into clipped words, offered up like a child's collage. He thinks about gunfire and the burst of bombs because it's safer. It's night time, and he doesn't close his eyes.
#####
The mind forgets the sensation of pain quickly, blunted under numbing layers of distance. It's self preservation, really. Species preservation. How would anyone ever do or try anything if they could remember in blistering clarity how much things hurt? Children would give up walking after the first tumble with a skinned knee, and he can't think that any woman would ever have a second child if they could recall what the first was like in unadulterated immediacy. But the human mind is smarter than that, so pain is buried fast, swept away into a dim memory of 'bad' without all the horrible sharp edges it has when happening.
He takes everything he knows and puts it under "pain", because it is, because he has to, and wills himself to forget even faster. Nightmares, he tells himself as Doctor Hurst (indifferent cop, yellow room, 1PM on Wednesdays after tapioca pudding for lunch) drones on about repression and the mind's coping mechanisms, should stay in the night, and not come trailing after a man during the middle of the day. He makes agreeable noises at all the right parts when the doctor pauses, and talks about things like emergency field medicine and what third degree burns can do to a man.
Doctor Hurst takes notes in cheap disposable blue ballpoint, the kind with the clear plastic barrels, on graphing paper. Sean talks about the sound of bombs just before they land and the heat of the desert at noon and digs his nails surreptitiously into the fleshy part of his thumb. Nightmares, he tells himself, are just nightmares. He puts them in a box and locks the box in a closet in the deepest depths of his mind and shuts the closet door and talks about guns and tanks and watching friends and comrades die, because nightmares are just nightmares and it's the past Doctor Hurst wants to hear.
#####
"What do you see?"
It's Tuesday. It's Tuesday, there was green jello at lunch, it's 2PM and he's in the blue room. It's Tuesday and there are cards with inkblots being held in front of him and he's in his usual chair; he knows the answers like he knows the back of his own hand but it's Doctor Rangan (indifferent cop, Fridays at 1:30PM after vanilla wafer cookies) holding the cards, Doctor Rangan sitting across from him instead of Doctor Sala, and Sean could cry for the terrible feeling twisting up through his gut.
The card is red and black - two women facing each other, he knows the answer unless he doesn't, unless it's a butterfly, or a manta-ray, or outstretched hands bracketing a pair of binoculars and fireworks in the night time sky over the walls of a church - held up casually between Rangan's thumb and forefinger, hands dark amber colored and nails bitten to the quick. Doctor Rangan doesn't chit chat. Sean doesn't know if it's sunny outside or raining. He doesn't have a mint or a cup of lukewarm tea to keep his hands busy. It's 2PM on a Tuesday and he doesn't know where Doctor Sala is.
He manages to choke out the answer past the tight grip of fear in his throat. Rangan takes notes - he doesn't look up, barely looks at Sean at all - and puts the card down to pick up the next one. "What do you see?"
It's dark, a heavy gray and black smear of ink (another animal skin, not the Excalibur one) and he's been so rattled since he sat down that he hasn't kept count, doesn't know what time it is, and the shiver is crawling up from his gut to strangle the breath in his lungs. He keeps his eyes on the inkblot because if he looks away he can see it start to drip in the corner of his gaze. "Where's Doctor Sala?" he asks, unable to keep the words back.
Rangan pauses, his pen (heavy barreled, engraved) quivering between his fingers for a second. "She's out," he says curtly, and Sean wants to squirm in his seat for the ache in his gut. Rangan puffs his cheeks out with a breath and for one slim moment slips into good cop (or indifferent cop who's only too aware of what effect a break in routine can have on some of the residents). "She's taken a leave of absence," he clarifies gruffly. "It's a family matter." And then, holding out the card once more, "What do you see?"
It's an animal skin, the laid out hide of a grizzly bear, but it's 2PM on a Tuesday and he knows, he can feel it in his bones and under his skin. He knows where Sala is, Sala with her little tin of mints and her soft voice and her rosewater perfume. He knows, he's always known, he always knows.
The nightmares are real, no matter how much he tries to pretend they're not.
"Basement," he blurts out, and it's not the right answer at all, not even close, but he can't enjoy Doctor Rangan's sudden look of surprise because the closet is open, the box is open, and he can't stop the flow of words against the dam of name and rank and serial number this time when they come crowding up his throat. The inkblot wavers in front of his eyes but he doesn't need to see, he already saw, he saw it in vivid nightmare color in the very same room the Tuesday before last. "It's a basement. A dark basement, and there are his feet." The words are relentless, the wave is inside him now and it won't be stopped, his voice rising helplessly in his throat. "You're looking down, from his point of view, there are his bare feet, dangling, he hung himself, he hung himself with an old sheet he took from the laundry, off of the water pipe, water in the dark under his feet and he's dead…"
Dimly, distantly, he can hear the doctor's voice, disbelieving, tight, startled, demanding answers. He closes his eyes - in the dark he can see the twisted line of the makeshift rope - and pulls his knees up to rest his forehead against. He could stop. He could stop, call it a nightmare, a flashback, something he'd heard in the past, an overactive imagination and nightmares and some companion somewhere who took a different way out. He could stop, except he can't find the switch and the words are spilling out, heaved out of his breath and guts in a bitter, choking purge. "He's dead. He hung himself. He was only sixteen."
It's some time after 2PM on a Tuesday and Rangan's voice is strident in his ears because Sala, quiet voiced Sala with her family vacations and happy smile, went home the night before to find her son hanging, limp and cold and dead, over a flooded basement where the pipe had broken open from the jerking tug of his dying weight. Sean knows it, the way he's always known, known what bombs would strike where and who would go out and not come back. He knows it and he's never told a soul, never said a word, not when it might have saved a life, not when he thought he was going mad, not when he did go mad and they placed him safe behind walls.
But if he had… if he could have…
His name was Andrew Sala, sixteen years old and the light of his mother's life, vibrant and alive in photographs from school yearbooks and sports strung in a long plastic sleeve that unfolded from her wallet if anyone asked. And Sala, sweet voiced Doctor Sala, won't be back. Not then, not next week, not ever.
He knows it, like the back of his own hand, like the set and ready answers for inkblotted shapes on white cards, but he's never said it because no one would ever understand. He's crying, salty tears and hiccuped breath that drowns out the shouting around him and when they come for him he's already curled into himself, head down and knees tucked tight, the age old mantra fighting back the thousands of things he could but should never say. It's safer that way. For everyone.
"Sean Aldridge, Sergeant. United States army, 12-899-526."