FIC: Double Helix
Title: Double Helix
Author: teru_bozu_ebi
Pairing: Nii/Tenpou
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Yaoi, dub-con. Violence. Language. Quite possible character death.
Summary: AU. 500 years later, and Tenpou finally wakes up. Unfortunately, Cho doesn’t want to let go, and Cho is just plain crazy.
Disclaimer: Mine, not hers. Blah blah blah and all that.
Notes:
This one needs definitely needs a bit of an explanation.
It all started when a certain person (can’t say who right now) was having trouble with deciding upon a scenario for a prompt she was given for a fic, and she wanted a bit of help. Given the parameters she was presented with, I bounced two suggestions off of her; either a prison piece, or an asylum story. She took the prison concept. I thought it a pity, since the asylum idea seemed so very promising, but prison fic it was and that’s where things sat for about a month. Then one fine morning I woke up, walked over to the computer, and this thing began to pour out of me. And pour. And pour... be forewarned, its almost 20,000 words long, over twice the length of my longest piece to date. And my first AU fic to boot. And my first stab at Nii. Lots of first here.
So here’s Ebi’s holiday offering to everyone. Enjoy.
Double Helix
Summer
The “Community Room” was meant to be cheerful, a place to banish all Bad Thoughts along with any of the previous evening’s nightmares. Nods to interior design had been made here and there- that is, if one could claim that paper flowers and print-outs of positive aphorisms taped on the walls had some sort of a design attached to it- and the place had been painted in the latest color deemed to be a Calming Influence on the Disturbed Psyche. In practice, these well-meaning attempts failed miserably, and ended up creating a room that was One Big Fake Smile which no one was remotely fooled by.
So the hospital had simply settled for brightly lit instead, employing a huge bank of ceiling-high windows that made up the entire outer wall of the room. It was his current theory that they were placing their hopes on the power of vast amounts of concentrated sunlight to bleach them into happiness, as if all their problems were a colony of ants to be burnt away under some perverse child’s magnifying glass. He had to say the sunlight didn’t seem to help anyone any more than the aphorisms had, though at least the Child seemed to find his dead ants somewhat entertaining.
The Child himself was huddled in the corner, giggling over some patient files with Dr. Hwan of the Gravity-Defying Cleavage. Or perhaps he was drooling over some pornography, who could say. He had that look in his eyes most of the time, the one that gave you the distinct impression of being mentally undressed whenever it was your time to dance for the boy. He tried to recall what day it was, if it was his turn at the doctor lottery... it seemed about right, but his sense of time was iffy at best in this place. Not only were the others popping into his head at the most inopportune moments and messing with the time flow, but the days themselves tended to run into one another in an unending stream of sameness, as if he were stuck in a time loop, doomed to repeat the same dismal moment over and over. That the medications had him wandering about in a drug-induced haze half the time did nothing at all to help matters.
He turned back to look out of the window. The view of the hospital grounds was the most pleasant thing about this place. Some patients who weren’t deemed a Danger to Society were sitting on benches underneath the cherry trees which had stopped their blooming quite some time ago. It was a bizarre concept, one which never ceased to amaze him; things changed here, trees fell asleep and bloomed and lost their leaves and gained them again. He closed his eyes and leaned against the window as he tried to recall the scent of cherry blossoms. The windows never opened, they were not only barred very effectively on the outside but also had some sort of wire grid imbedded in the glass in case someone should try to smash through. To compensate them for the loss of oxygen the hospital kept a few small white boxes called ‘air fresheners’ some 10 feet up on the walls that put out a scent which was meant to remind one of fresh air, or perhaps a field of flowers. He once spent two days throwing checkers at one of them in a vain attempt to break it; he eventually gave up when Chin started crying a bit too loudly that he wanted his checkers back.
Not that it would do the man any good to have them; he couldn’t eat them anymore, anyway. The doctors had taken to spraying them with something called Bitter Apple, used to keep house pets from chewing on furniture and apparently worked wonders in keeping lunatics from swallowing checkers. Chin still compulsively put them in his mouth every day, but instead of eating them he now simply spat them out and salivated a bit too much for anyone’s liking, including his own. It was doubtful that the man found the activity nearly as satisfying as it once was. But still, it was good to have a hobby of some sort. Things got a bit dull around here otherwise.
He drifted on his medicated sea for awhile, baking away in the relentless sunshine. Annoying though they may be, whatever meds they had him on now ostensibly worked as intended; no more murderous rages. Well, none recently... at least, none that he recalled... not that he recalled any of them. The two idiots who shanghaied his karma were the offenders, not him. He hadn’t even reawakened until well after the massacre had occurred- and in the midst of an electroshock therapy session, no less. Talk about a wake up call... not that the doctors believed any of it. He couldn’t exactly blame them; he wasn’t even sure what he himself believed about the whole damned mess. It was rather difficult to make an informed decision when he wasn’t even there to witness things half of the time.
The medications had stopped all that nastiness anyway, blunted the fury. The daily pill cocktail didn’t make them happy so much as not unhappy, which struck him as all rather funny, since the others wanted to be miserable and now they weren’t. All and all, a rather apropos punishment for the two of them. Since the drama queens couldn’t be sad and tragic anymore, they simply opted for sullen and uncommunicative most of the time instead. If you won’t let me kill someone, I’ll just go and pout over here in this corner, I’ll show you... but the doctors hadn’t been particularly impressed by the continual snit the two had put themselves into, and had recently upped the medications again to compensate.
In fact... he looked up at the clock. He had about a half an hour at most before they all hit in full and he would be floating off into la-la land yet again. Not really time enough to do much of anything with what remained of his brief moment of morning cognizance but to lean against the window and burn under the magnifying glass, like the little ant he’d become.
Drooping there very much like a sunburned ant, he sighed for the umpteenth time that morning. Did ants sigh? Good question, that... well, he was an ant, and he sighed, so there you had it. Not that there was anything else for him to do. He wished there was something a bit more challenging than soggy checkers to occupy one’s more rational moments, but apparently chess pieces posed too dangerous a threat to Chin’s alimentary canal. Nor was there was anyone to play with; his fellow patients were to a man absolute idiots who found even Duck-Duck Goose too great of a challenge. Perhaps he could petition his doctors to be moved into the hospital’s Crazed Supervillain Wing. No one he was currently quartered with had enough grey matter in their heads to create a diabolical death ray in order to enslave the world, and those sorts of people had to be housed somewhere, didn’t they? One would have thought being convicted of killing a thousand people would have given him an automatic membership into that club. He should have opted for killing them en masse instead of one-at-a-time; the latter seemed to have put him into the Mass Murderer category instead, which meant he had ended up here and not with His Own Kind, People Who Knew How to Play Chess Without Eating the Pieces. It was a clear case of mistaken sentencing on his part, and he really needed to be moved to a place where one’s knight was moved to queen’s bishop three, and not topped with whipped cream and a side of lemon yellow crayon.
“My my, but our view of illusory freedom is absolutely breathtaking today, isn’t it Mr. Cho. All bright, and sunny... and how are we this fine morning?”
He turned slowly towards the voice; it was the Child himself today, not some nameless lackey sent to collect him. He supposed the honor deserved some sort of actual response, so he made the supreme effort to swim up out of the drugs to answer.
“Dr. Nii.”
The man reeked of cigarettes. There had to be some way of getting a smoke out of him, he had to understand what it was like. Apparently neither Cho smoked, which he seriously suspected was a part of the reason one if not both of them had become a homicidal maniac. But Nii couldn’t smoke here, either; the whole of the hospital seemed to be a no-smoking area. Not that he’d been through the rest of the building to know for certain. He could see through the windows that the place was rather large, but he’d never been out of the maximum security wing, at least not while conscious. He tried once, only to find that after a certain point the doors were locked. Also bolted, barred, alarmed, videotaped, and he suspected patrolled by angry pit bulls.
“How would you like to take a walk with me, Mr. Cho?”
So, it was his time today after all. He pushed off of the window sill and waited a moment as the meds settled lower in the gravitational field. He didn’t mind his integrative therapy sessions with Nii, not really. Anything that might get him out of this place. Anything to alleviate the boredom. Even a bit of the Talking Cure was better than this pointless march of nothingness into nowhere.
“Lead the way, Doctor.”
It all came out rather slurred, but he liked to pretend he was getting used to that. Nii grinned again in that childish way of his before turning and shuffling off. He was clicking his pen, on and off, on and off. It worked like a beacon through the drug haze as he followed behind to the private consultation room.
“My, my, Mr. Cho, but you are a fascinating case. So few true Disassociative Identity patients around here to study, let alone one that is such a stunning antisocial psychopath on top of it all. Quite the little over-achiever, aren’t we? I have to say my cup absolutely runneth over with you.”
He seemed to have been nodding off again, because he hadn’t remembered getting into the room, or for that matter sitting down. It was a pity; he liked the consultation room quite a lot, and wanted to be there when he was there. It was nice and dark, the chairs were large and cushioned and more comfortable than his bed. Then there was the smell from the bookcase-
“But, it isn’t Mr. Cho at all today, is it? May I ask to whom I am speaking? No, wait- let me guess...”
He managed to force his focus back towards Nii. He was leaning back in the chair opposite, dramatically backlit by the floor lamp. The clicking symphony had been abandoned and had been replaced by his tapping of the pen on his bottom lip. He was quite sure it was for effect only- Nii often seemed compelled to follow some sort of internal script, stage directions and all. This one seemed to be another one of his comedies. A half smile curled gratuitously behind the pen, right on cue.
“Mr. Tenpou, isn’t it.”
Tenpou blinked back at the man. This was the first time in days he hadn’t been addressed by that unfortunate surname.
“How did you come to that conclusion?”
“Ah, it is you, I thought as much... so nice to have you here again, Mr. Tenpou. You’re so much more cooperative than our friend Mr. Cho. I have to say I’ve honestly missed your company.”
Nii sniggered a bit and clicked his pen. A few notes were hastily scribbled into the patient files. Tenpou wondered what it was that had given him away. Most people just assumed he was Cho; the name was the only one on his identification bracelet, after all... he found himself staring at the gibberish on his wrist once again, even though the medications were making reading just plain difficult. His heart sank a bit with that realization; once upon a time, he could have taken it all in instantaneously. Cho Gonou... Max. Sec. # 210 ... ICD-10 F44.8, comorbid ICD-10 F60.2...
“But to answer you; as you probably already guessed, my question was a rhetorical one. It was quite obvious that you weren’t our gregarious Mr. Cho. Mr. Cho smiles. A... bit... too... much, one could say.”
“Which Cho?”
“Cho Hakkai, of course. But, don’t you know? Hasn’t he told you? Our elusive Mr. Gonou has not shown his pretty little face since the day you were incarcerated. Actually, since absolutely everyone has placed all those nasty, horrifying crimes solely on his effeminate little shoulders, I’m not all that surprised. If I were him, I wouldn’t show myself, either. But I have been informed by our allegedly lone Cho that Mr. Gonou is actually dead, and not, as they say, on the lam.”
The pen twirled and tapped as Nii gave him That Look. Tenpou waited for the punch line.
“I wonder... if he’s truly dead... would that make the total body count... 1,200 and oh, 17, then?”
“I was under the impression he went for the even grand.”
“Well, the man is obsessive-compulsive, but not that exact in his mathematics. Plus the police are claiming his sister as one of the victims, though he still firmly insists otherwise.”
Nii always talked about the Chos in the third person, which made Tenpou like him at least somewhat. Even if the man was simply humoring him; it was beyond irritating to be called Cho all the time. From all he’d been able to gather Cho Hakkai was an absolute pain in the ass, and he would rather not be associated with the idiot any more than he had to be.
With that unhappy thought Tenpou’s hand wandered up to his ear and rubbed at the scars there. After the murders, one of the Chos had taken a staple gun to their collective ear to “contain the demon inside,” or some such rubbish. They still ached every once in awhile, though not as much as the scar on his stomach from what was apparently a failed seppuku attempt. Apparently Cho had a talent for killing pretty much anyone and anything but himself. Merciful goddess, but he hated the man. Hated them both, in fact. If they wanted to die so badly, let them do it already. Decrease the surplus population in his body. If Nii was to be believed, one of them had already kicked- which certainly sounded promising. There had to be a way of ridding himself of the other one as well.
He dropped his hand from his ear as his head did a bit of a loop to the side. The new prescription strengths made holding anything upright for any length of time- be it hand or head- too much of an effort.
“Are you finding your medications a bit too strong, Mr. Tenpou? It seems you’re having problems with simple coordination activities.”
Tenpou let his head flop back on the chair. He was risking falling asleep completely by doing it, but too bad. If they wanted him to stay awake, they needed to stop pumping him with half the pharmacy. He wasn’t the homicidal maniac, after all. They were.
“No ‘Mister,’ please. And yes. A little.”
He couldn’t tell if there was a pause from Nii or if time was drifting again.
“Ah yes, that’s correct. No surnames for the gods, are there? Just rank. Marshal Tenpou, wasn’t it?”
Another pause. Tenpou lifted his head and blinked to clear the blur as he tried one more time to focus. A pair of eyeglasses gleamed at him from out of the dark hole he assumed to be the doctor’s face. He shouldn’t have bothered to make the effort; Nii didn’t really seem to care if his question was answered or not. He was back to following his internal script. Tenpou seemed to be simply part of the set dressing.
“I have to say... Marshal... that I always find it quite fascinating that no one ever claims to be reincarnated from a plumber. Not even a heavenly one.”
Suddenly the room hiccupped. Nii was saying something, but the words weren’t following each other in anything near a coherent order. The full drug cocktail was finally hitting the bloodstream. I’m sorry, but our time is up...
“My my, but this won’t do at all. You can hardly sit up, let alone have a decent conversation... or an indecent one, for that matter. Our beloved Dr. Hwan does love to knock out the fun ones with her one-two punch. We’re going to have to tweak the strength of those medications of yours a teensy bit, aren’t we?”
Nii seemed to be leaning over to the side, making some sort of clicking sound with his hand on the desk. It began to talk in a tinny voice. He answered it
“Yes, please have someone come to the consultation room to escort Mr. Cho back to his room. And tell our lovely Dr. Hwan to call me at my office as soon as she’s available, would you?”
The clicking stopped and Nii righted himself as the room lurched once more. Tenpou was thinking he might lose his breakfast if this kept up for much longer. He wondered if Nii would mind terribly if his shoes were dirtied in the process. They seemed somewhat expensive, with some sort of strange design on the toes... oxfords, one of the Chos provided helpfully from somewhere in the darker recesses of his head. Damn it, this was his time, not theirs. He pushed the Cho back down and locked him out. Alright, oxfords.
“Yes, yes, we are definitely going to have to rethink your current pill cocktail. How will I ever be able to enjoy your lovely companionship if you’re constantly nodding off like this?”
Nii got up and walked off somewhere into the far corners of the room. Tenpou lost track of him until he suddenly reappeared again, almost in his lap.
“Before you go, Tenpou... I promised you a quid pro quo last time, now didn’t I? You stroke my back, I stroke yours...”
There seemed to be a ghosting of said stroking going on up and down his back. Still, who knew if it was really there. Those spiders crawling all over his legs last week hadn’t been real, either. They had apparently been a side-effect of a medication they had since thankfully abandoned.
“I’ve been finding it difficult to bring you exactly what I had promised, as I’m never quite sure just when it will be you and not our mutual friend who will show up to these entertaining little meetings of ours. I do hope this will do for now.”
Tenpou did his best to concentrate on what had been placed on his hands... a book. It was a book... his fingertips made their shaky way across the cover. As the room reeled about him he squinted and blinked, trying to decipher the title. No vowels, it seemed be an acronym of some sort. DSM III...
“It’s been since revised, so this copy will simply go to waste if you don’t take it. Waste not, want not as they say. I do hope you find some sort of enjoyment out of it. It had me chuckling for hours.”
Oh, yes... it didn’t matter what it was about, it was a book. He still didn’t understand why they couldn’t have a proper library in this place- he refused to dignify the pile of torn magazines in the Community Room with such a designation. Libraries had books, not old copies of Sports Illustrated... as he wrapped his arms tightly around his treasure the door opened. An antiseptic brightness poured into the room, nearly obliterating the tall shadow that stood looming in the center of it.
“Yes, Dou... please help Mr. Cho to his room, would you? Mr. Cho, I’ll see what we can do about your medication levels. In the meantime, please try to enjoy your quite legal, drug-induced high as best you can. We’ll talk later, Mr. Cho. Have a lovely day now.”
Another stroke down his back and then someone’s hands grasped his upper arms and lifted him up off the chair. Clutching the diagnostic manual tightly to his chest, he shuffled beside the shadow back out into the sun, only to be dissolved into nothingness by the morning light.
on to Autumn
Author: teru_bozu_ebi
Pairing: Nii/Tenpou
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Yaoi, dub-con. Violence. Language. Quite possible character death.
Summary: AU. 500 years later, and Tenpou finally wakes up. Unfortunately, Cho doesn’t want to let go, and Cho is just plain crazy.
Disclaimer: Mine, not hers. Blah blah blah and all that.
Notes:
This one needs definitely needs a bit of an explanation.
It all started when a certain person (can’t say who right now) was having trouble with deciding upon a scenario for a prompt she was given for a fic, and she wanted a bit of help. Given the parameters she was presented with, I bounced two suggestions off of her; either a prison piece, or an asylum story. She took the prison concept. I thought it a pity, since the asylum idea seemed so very promising, but prison fic it was and that’s where things sat for about a month. Then one fine morning I woke up, walked over to the computer, and this thing began to pour out of me. And pour. And pour... be forewarned, its almost 20,000 words long, over twice the length of my longest piece to date. And my first AU fic to boot. And my first stab at Nii. Lots of first here.
So here’s Ebi’s holiday offering to everyone. Enjoy.
Double Helix
Summer
The “Community Room” was meant to be cheerful, a place to banish all Bad Thoughts along with any of the previous evening’s nightmares. Nods to interior design had been made here and there- that is, if one could claim that paper flowers and print-outs of positive aphorisms taped on the walls had some sort of a design attached to it- and the place had been painted in the latest color deemed to be a Calming Influence on the Disturbed Psyche. In practice, these well-meaning attempts failed miserably, and ended up creating a room that was One Big Fake Smile which no one was remotely fooled by.
So the hospital had simply settled for brightly lit instead, employing a huge bank of ceiling-high windows that made up the entire outer wall of the room. It was his current theory that they were placing their hopes on the power of vast amounts of concentrated sunlight to bleach them into happiness, as if all their problems were a colony of ants to be burnt away under some perverse child’s magnifying glass. He had to say the sunlight didn’t seem to help anyone any more than the aphorisms had, though at least the Child seemed to find his dead ants somewhat entertaining.
The Child himself was huddled in the corner, giggling over some patient files with Dr. Hwan of the Gravity-Defying Cleavage. Or perhaps he was drooling over some pornography, who could say. He had that look in his eyes most of the time, the one that gave you the distinct impression of being mentally undressed whenever it was your time to dance for the boy. He tried to recall what day it was, if it was his turn at the doctor lottery... it seemed about right, but his sense of time was iffy at best in this place. Not only were the others popping into his head at the most inopportune moments and messing with the time flow, but the days themselves tended to run into one another in an unending stream of sameness, as if he were stuck in a time loop, doomed to repeat the same dismal moment over and over. That the medications had him wandering about in a drug-induced haze half the time did nothing at all to help matters.
He turned back to look out of the window. The view of the hospital grounds was the most pleasant thing about this place. Some patients who weren’t deemed a Danger to Society were sitting on benches underneath the cherry trees which had stopped their blooming quite some time ago. It was a bizarre concept, one which never ceased to amaze him; things changed here, trees fell asleep and bloomed and lost their leaves and gained them again. He closed his eyes and leaned against the window as he tried to recall the scent of cherry blossoms. The windows never opened, they were not only barred very effectively on the outside but also had some sort of wire grid imbedded in the glass in case someone should try to smash through. To compensate them for the loss of oxygen the hospital kept a few small white boxes called ‘air fresheners’ some 10 feet up on the walls that put out a scent which was meant to remind one of fresh air, or perhaps a field of flowers. He once spent two days throwing checkers at one of them in a vain attempt to break it; he eventually gave up when Chin started crying a bit too loudly that he wanted his checkers back.
Not that it would do the man any good to have them; he couldn’t eat them anymore, anyway. The doctors had taken to spraying them with something called Bitter Apple, used to keep house pets from chewing on furniture and apparently worked wonders in keeping lunatics from swallowing checkers. Chin still compulsively put them in his mouth every day, but instead of eating them he now simply spat them out and salivated a bit too much for anyone’s liking, including his own. It was doubtful that the man found the activity nearly as satisfying as it once was. But still, it was good to have a hobby of some sort. Things got a bit dull around here otherwise.
He drifted on his medicated sea for awhile, baking away in the relentless sunshine. Annoying though they may be, whatever meds they had him on now ostensibly worked as intended; no more murderous rages. Well, none recently... at least, none that he recalled... not that he recalled any of them. The two idiots who shanghaied his karma were the offenders, not him. He hadn’t even reawakened until well after the massacre had occurred- and in the midst of an electroshock therapy session, no less. Talk about a wake up call... not that the doctors believed any of it. He couldn’t exactly blame them; he wasn’t even sure what he himself believed about the whole damned mess. It was rather difficult to make an informed decision when he wasn’t even there to witness things half of the time.
The medications had stopped all that nastiness anyway, blunted the fury. The daily pill cocktail didn’t make them happy so much as not unhappy, which struck him as all rather funny, since the others wanted to be miserable and now they weren’t. All and all, a rather apropos punishment for the two of them. Since the drama queens couldn’t be sad and tragic anymore, they simply opted for sullen and uncommunicative most of the time instead. If you won’t let me kill someone, I’ll just go and pout over here in this corner, I’ll show you... but the doctors hadn’t been particularly impressed by the continual snit the two had put themselves into, and had recently upped the medications again to compensate.
In fact... he looked up at the clock. He had about a half an hour at most before they all hit in full and he would be floating off into la-la land yet again. Not really time enough to do much of anything with what remained of his brief moment of morning cognizance but to lean against the window and burn under the magnifying glass, like the little ant he’d become.
Drooping there very much like a sunburned ant, he sighed for the umpteenth time that morning. Did ants sigh? Good question, that... well, he was an ant, and he sighed, so there you had it. Not that there was anything else for him to do. He wished there was something a bit more challenging than soggy checkers to occupy one’s more rational moments, but apparently chess pieces posed too dangerous a threat to Chin’s alimentary canal. Nor was there was anyone to play with; his fellow patients were to a man absolute idiots who found even Duck-Duck Goose too great of a challenge. Perhaps he could petition his doctors to be moved into the hospital’s Crazed Supervillain Wing. No one he was currently quartered with had enough grey matter in their heads to create a diabolical death ray in order to enslave the world, and those sorts of people had to be housed somewhere, didn’t they? One would have thought being convicted of killing a thousand people would have given him an automatic membership into that club. He should have opted for killing them en masse instead of one-at-a-time; the latter seemed to have put him into the Mass Murderer category instead, which meant he had ended up here and not with His Own Kind, People Who Knew How to Play Chess Without Eating the Pieces. It was a clear case of mistaken sentencing on his part, and he really needed to be moved to a place where one’s knight was moved to queen’s bishop three, and not topped with whipped cream and a side of lemon yellow crayon.
“My my, but our view of illusory freedom is absolutely breathtaking today, isn’t it Mr. Cho. All bright, and sunny... and how are we this fine morning?”
He turned slowly towards the voice; it was the Child himself today, not some nameless lackey sent to collect him. He supposed the honor deserved some sort of actual response, so he made the supreme effort to swim up out of the drugs to answer.
“Dr. Nii.”
The man reeked of cigarettes. There had to be some way of getting a smoke out of him, he had to understand what it was like. Apparently neither Cho smoked, which he seriously suspected was a part of the reason one if not both of them had become a homicidal maniac. But Nii couldn’t smoke here, either; the whole of the hospital seemed to be a no-smoking area. Not that he’d been through the rest of the building to know for certain. He could see through the windows that the place was rather large, but he’d never been out of the maximum security wing, at least not while conscious. He tried once, only to find that after a certain point the doors were locked. Also bolted, barred, alarmed, videotaped, and he suspected patrolled by angry pit bulls.
“How would you like to take a walk with me, Mr. Cho?”
So, it was his time today after all. He pushed off of the window sill and waited a moment as the meds settled lower in the gravitational field. He didn’t mind his integrative therapy sessions with Nii, not really. Anything that might get him out of this place. Anything to alleviate the boredom. Even a bit of the Talking Cure was better than this pointless march of nothingness into nowhere.
“Lead the way, Doctor.”
It all came out rather slurred, but he liked to pretend he was getting used to that. Nii grinned again in that childish way of his before turning and shuffling off. He was clicking his pen, on and off, on and off. It worked like a beacon through the drug haze as he followed behind to the private consultation room.
“My, my, Mr. Cho, but you are a fascinating case. So few true Disassociative Identity patients around here to study, let alone one that is such a stunning antisocial psychopath on top of it all. Quite the little over-achiever, aren’t we? I have to say my cup absolutely runneth over with you.”
He seemed to have been nodding off again, because he hadn’t remembered getting into the room, or for that matter sitting down. It was a pity; he liked the consultation room quite a lot, and wanted to be there when he was there. It was nice and dark, the chairs were large and cushioned and more comfortable than his bed. Then there was the smell from the bookcase-
“But, it isn’t Mr. Cho at all today, is it? May I ask to whom I am speaking? No, wait- let me guess...”
He managed to force his focus back towards Nii. He was leaning back in the chair opposite, dramatically backlit by the floor lamp. The clicking symphony had been abandoned and had been replaced by his tapping of the pen on his bottom lip. He was quite sure it was for effect only- Nii often seemed compelled to follow some sort of internal script, stage directions and all. This one seemed to be another one of his comedies. A half smile curled gratuitously behind the pen, right on cue.
“Mr. Tenpou, isn’t it.”
Tenpou blinked back at the man. This was the first time in days he hadn’t been addressed by that unfortunate surname.
“How did you come to that conclusion?”
“Ah, it is you, I thought as much... so nice to have you here again, Mr. Tenpou. You’re so much more cooperative than our friend Mr. Cho. I have to say I’ve honestly missed your company.”
Nii sniggered a bit and clicked his pen. A few notes were hastily scribbled into the patient files. Tenpou wondered what it was that had given him away. Most people just assumed he was Cho; the name was the only one on his identification bracelet, after all... he found himself staring at the gibberish on his wrist once again, even though the medications were making reading just plain difficult. His heart sank a bit with that realization; once upon a time, he could have taken it all in instantaneously. Cho Gonou... Max. Sec. # 210 ... ICD-10 F44.8, comorbid ICD-10 F60.2...
“But to answer you; as you probably already guessed, my question was a rhetorical one. It was quite obvious that you weren’t our gregarious Mr. Cho. Mr. Cho smiles. A... bit... too... much, one could say.”
“Which Cho?”
“Cho Hakkai, of course. But, don’t you know? Hasn’t he told you? Our elusive Mr. Gonou has not shown his pretty little face since the day you were incarcerated. Actually, since absolutely everyone has placed all those nasty, horrifying crimes solely on his effeminate little shoulders, I’m not all that surprised. If I were him, I wouldn’t show myself, either. But I have been informed by our allegedly lone Cho that Mr. Gonou is actually dead, and not, as they say, on the lam.”
The pen twirled and tapped as Nii gave him That Look. Tenpou waited for the punch line.
“I wonder... if he’s truly dead... would that make the total body count... 1,200 and oh, 17, then?”
“I was under the impression he went for the even grand.”
“Well, the man is obsessive-compulsive, but not that exact in his mathematics. Plus the police are claiming his sister as one of the victims, though he still firmly insists otherwise.”
Nii always talked about the Chos in the third person, which made Tenpou like him at least somewhat. Even if the man was simply humoring him; it was beyond irritating to be called Cho all the time. From all he’d been able to gather Cho Hakkai was an absolute pain in the ass, and he would rather not be associated with the idiot any more than he had to be.
With that unhappy thought Tenpou’s hand wandered up to his ear and rubbed at the scars there. After the murders, one of the Chos had taken a staple gun to their collective ear to “contain the demon inside,” or some such rubbish. They still ached every once in awhile, though not as much as the scar on his stomach from what was apparently a failed seppuku attempt. Apparently Cho had a talent for killing pretty much anyone and anything but himself. Merciful goddess, but he hated the man. Hated them both, in fact. If they wanted to die so badly, let them do it already. Decrease the surplus population in his body. If Nii was to be believed, one of them had already kicked- which certainly sounded promising. There had to be a way of ridding himself of the other one as well.
He dropped his hand from his ear as his head did a bit of a loop to the side. The new prescription strengths made holding anything upright for any length of time- be it hand or head- too much of an effort.
“Are you finding your medications a bit too strong, Mr. Tenpou? It seems you’re having problems with simple coordination activities.”
Tenpou let his head flop back on the chair. He was risking falling asleep completely by doing it, but too bad. If they wanted him to stay awake, they needed to stop pumping him with half the pharmacy. He wasn’t the homicidal maniac, after all. They were.
“No ‘Mister,’ please. And yes. A little.”
He couldn’t tell if there was a pause from Nii or if time was drifting again.
“Ah yes, that’s correct. No surnames for the gods, are there? Just rank. Marshal Tenpou, wasn’t it?”
Another pause. Tenpou lifted his head and blinked to clear the blur as he tried one more time to focus. A pair of eyeglasses gleamed at him from out of the dark hole he assumed to be the doctor’s face. He shouldn’t have bothered to make the effort; Nii didn’t really seem to care if his question was answered or not. He was back to following his internal script. Tenpou seemed to be simply part of the set dressing.
“I have to say... Marshal... that I always find it quite fascinating that no one ever claims to be reincarnated from a plumber. Not even a heavenly one.”
Suddenly the room hiccupped. Nii was saying something, but the words weren’t following each other in anything near a coherent order. The full drug cocktail was finally hitting the bloodstream. I’m sorry, but our time is up...
“My my, but this won’t do at all. You can hardly sit up, let alone have a decent conversation... or an indecent one, for that matter. Our beloved Dr. Hwan does love to knock out the fun ones with her one-two punch. We’re going to have to tweak the strength of those medications of yours a teensy bit, aren’t we?”
Nii seemed to be leaning over to the side, making some sort of clicking sound with his hand on the desk. It began to talk in a tinny voice. He answered it
“Yes, please have someone come to the consultation room to escort Mr. Cho back to his room. And tell our lovely Dr. Hwan to call me at my office as soon as she’s available, would you?”
The clicking stopped and Nii righted himself as the room lurched once more. Tenpou was thinking he might lose his breakfast if this kept up for much longer. He wondered if Nii would mind terribly if his shoes were dirtied in the process. They seemed somewhat expensive, with some sort of strange design on the toes... oxfords, one of the Chos provided helpfully from somewhere in the darker recesses of his head. Damn it, this was his time, not theirs. He pushed the Cho back down and locked him out. Alright, oxfords.
“Yes, yes, we are definitely going to have to rethink your current pill cocktail. How will I ever be able to enjoy your lovely companionship if you’re constantly nodding off like this?”
Nii got up and walked off somewhere into the far corners of the room. Tenpou lost track of him until he suddenly reappeared again, almost in his lap.
“Before you go, Tenpou... I promised you a quid pro quo last time, now didn’t I? You stroke my back, I stroke yours...”
There seemed to be a ghosting of said stroking going on up and down his back. Still, who knew if it was really there. Those spiders crawling all over his legs last week hadn’t been real, either. They had apparently been a side-effect of a medication they had since thankfully abandoned.
“I’ve been finding it difficult to bring you exactly what I had promised, as I’m never quite sure just when it will be you and not our mutual friend who will show up to these entertaining little meetings of ours. I do hope this will do for now.”
Tenpou did his best to concentrate on what had been placed on his hands... a book. It was a book... his fingertips made their shaky way across the cover. As the room reeled about him he squinted and blinked, trying to decipher the title. No vowels, it seemed be an acronym of some sort. DSM III...
“It’s been since revised, so this copy will simply go to waste if you don’t take it. Waste not, want not as they say. I do hope you find some sort of enjoyment out of it. It had me chuckling for hours.”
Oh, yes... it didn’t matter what it was about, it was a book. He still didn’t understand why they couldn’t have a proper library in this place- he refused to dignify the pile of torn magazines in the Community Room with such a designation. Libraries had books, not old copies of Sports Illustrated... as he wrapped his arms tightly around his treasure the door opened. An antiseptic brightness poured into the room, nearly obliterating the tall shadow that stood looming in the center of it.
“Yes, Dou... please help Mr. Cho to his room, would you? Mr. Cho, I’ll see what we can do about your medication levels. In the meantime, please try to enjoy your quite legal, drug-induced high as best you can. We’ll talk later, Mr. Cho. Have a lovely day now.”
Another stroke down his back and then someone’s hands grasped his upper arms and lifted him up off the chair. Clutching the diagnostic manual tightly to his chest, he shuffled beside the shadow back out into the sun, only to be dissolved into nothingness by the morning light.
on to Autumn