James Wilson, D.I.D.
Author: resm
Title: James Wilson, D.I.D.
Pairing: None
Disclaimer: do not own
Summary: AU, set pre House M.D. - in which House and Cuddy are both med students and encounter Wilson in his youth.
Warning: Contains explicit imagery of grievous bodily harm.
Unbeta'd so please forgive me. Hopefully not too OOC
~~~
He startled back when the fist connected with his eye, and even as he clamped a hand over the lid protectively, he could feel it was already swelling closed. One of his attackers, the larger one with the beefy arms, grabbed a fistful of his sweater and slammed him up against the wall.
Before he could fend the hands away, a second blow, just beneath his ribcage, knocked him breathless and his knees liquidised beneath him. But he didn't even have the opportunity to crash gracefully and curl into a ball until it was all over, because the boys, a few years older than himself, had their hearts set on making him ride out the beating to the full.
The larger guy pulled him away from the wall to hold his arms behind his back, and, pulling taut on the already-aching limbs, he kept his victim upright so that his friend could deliver a particularly sharp blow to the stomach. They laughed together into the night's air when he struggled to pull air into his lungs. His head was feeling heavy and he felt himself sinking. Lower and lower.
He wasn't surprised when he hit the cold, wet asphalt, and it offered him a little respite to gasp for a breath. A dull ringing started in his ears, and, confusion hitting him, he tried to raise his head up in time to realise that the pair of them were hoisting him up from the armpits.
When he was finally on his feet again, albeit swaying madly, his vision was clouded even more so as they took him roughly by the neck and started forcing his sweater up and over his head. He bristled against the cold night air as it nipped at the bare expanse of his back and his sides, and he cried out when they checked him against the wall again, this time the unforgiving bricks grazed against his exposed skin.
A knee was inserted into his groin and he collapsed a second time, holding himself between the legs should they kick him there again. And, of course, they did. Three or four times until he was openly wailing for them to stop. He didn't want to give them the satisfaction of crying but the pain was unbearable. He tried to fold into himself and the sweater snapped back from over his head, covering at least half of his torso. He moaned unpleasantly when hands found themselves under his armpits again and he was yanked upwards.
Although he could see them again, the fist was moving too fast for him to place who had done it. All he knew was that he was spitting blood as, at once, his nose was bust and the back of his head smacked against the wall.
This time they didn't mind him collapsing. They kicked at him freely. Mostly in the privates and his stomach. He tried to turn over to dry-heave but he couldn't focus on anything but their boots. There was nothing for him to expel anyway, he couldn't even bring up bile. But he wanted to. If it made the nausea go away, then he really wanted to.
He heard someone shouting, angry shouting. And then the running of feet against the slick cobblestones of the back side-street. Then he felt hands roaming about his person, checking his pockets, checking his face, pulling his chin this way and that.
“Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes for me?”
He groaned, wanting the person to leave him alone. Fingers pried his good eye open and he squinted through a sticky film of blood. He was staring back at a man, a young man, but much older than himself. He had a lean face, dark hair and unforgettable blue eyes. But none of it mattered, he just wanted to sleep. His energy was spent and he could happily drown right here in his own self-pity, he didn't need anyone else to pretend to be concerned for him.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“James...” he heard himself slurring, as if there was a 'h' following the 's.'
“Your full name,” the man urged, patting him down, presumably for injuries and not to cop a sly feel while he was struggling through a semi-conscious haze.
“Wils...”
“Wilkes?”
“Wilson.”
“My name's Greg, James, and I'm a med student,” he told him. “You're not in the best shape right now so it's important that you hang in there for me, okay? Can you tell me your age?”
“Why?”
“What age are you?” Greg asked more forcefully, trying to keep James from slipping into a deep sleep. He pulled his jacket off and bundled it up, then pushed it carefully under James' head. He cursed silently when he took his hand away and realised that his palm was smeared with blood. Although the head wound beneath the hair probably only suggested a grade one concussion because he was still fairly lucid and hadn't lost consciousness yet, it was still hard trying to care for a real-time patient instead of a textbook. “James.”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen. Okay... okay, and do you live round here at all?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got a girlfriend or anything?”
“Not likely,” he panted, trying to work through the pain in his side.
“I'm sorry. A boyfriend.”
“I'm not gay,” James snapped irritably. “I'm just... girls don't go for...”
“It's okay,” Greg promised him, glad that he seemed aware enough so they could stop the strained conversation. “It's going to be okay. Look, I'm going to have to leave you for a little while - just a while - so I can run out to the main street and have one of the local shops phone for an ambulance. We're going to need to move you to a hospital, do you understand that?”
James closed his eyes once more, enjoying the peace and quiet. He couldn't have closed his eyes longer than two seconds before Greg had returned, sliding down onto his knees and shaking him awake. Except that he wasn't shaking him and it wasn't Greg. Two paramedics have swarmed around him, shining a penlight into his face and asking him the same generic questions that Greg had. They strapped him onto a gurney and lifted him into the back of an ambulance that he could have sworn was not there before he closed his eyes. Everything was happening too fast, too soon. It wasn't right.
The next time James opened his eyes, he wasn't on a side-street bleeding out and being bothered by some random med student. He wondered if he dreamt that, but the white-washed walls around him, dissimilar to his own bedroom back at home, suppressed the notion. He turned his head, wincing, and drank in the sight of the hospital room with which he was clearly situated.
Blue eyes swam into his periphery and he blinked at the young man, at a guess in his mid-twenties, sitting opposite him on a hard plastic visitor's chair. He was holding a glass filled with ice chips but, if it was for James, he didn't offer it to him.
“I'm Lisa,” a voice beside Greg said pleasantly and James wondered how her presence had escaped him. They must have put him on some damn strong pain medication, or else he's just losing his marbles left, right and centre. “We... we were allowed in to see you because we're actually doing a surgery rotation at this very hospital at the minute. We're technically staff.”
“Have we met before?” James asked cautiously, his eyes flitting between Lisa and Greg.
Greg took a breath before answering, “Not that it's any of your concern, but I was on my way to a restaurant before I... encountered you. You ballsed tonight up for me.”
“Greg,” Lisa scowled momentarily, before fixing James with a toothy smile again. “Don't listen to him, kid.”
“Kid,” James scoffed. She couldn't have been more than five years older than him. Or technically she could if she were a med student like Greg, but she sure as hell didn't look it. He studied her quietly and when he realised the weight of Greg's glare, he was suddenly overcome with timidity.
He pulled his blanket up around him and fisted the sheets nervously. This was the closest he had ever come to a girl seeing him half-naked, and it didn't even count: she was only here because she didn't want his death hanging over her boyfriend like a foul smell and colouring all of their dates thereafter, and the half-nakedness referred only to his embarrassingly loose-fitting hospital-issued gown.
“Because you were brought in through the ER and you've only come to now, no one has had a chance to get a thorough background check on you. If you tell us your parents' phone number, we can call them for you, if you like. It would be quicker.”
“They're busy with my younger brother,” James looked off to the left, trying to ignore how the doubt sat on their features. “They don't need to be hassled with me.”
Lisa opened her mouth to argue with him, but Greg pulled on her hand to let James have his privacy on the home front. He didn't care why James wouldn't want to face his parents, it didn't interest him. What interested him was why he was attacked. He didn't seem to be mugged because he didn't look like a kid with anything to his name to begin with. Being all of seventeen, of course. And the kids that he had chased from the alley were of a surrounding age, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty. They had done one hell of a number on him and yet they didn't mug him. Why, was right.
“Did you know those guys?”
James met Greg's stare and sighed heavily, “Are you going to talk to the cops or something? I, uh, I don't want any fuss made. I just want to go home.”
“For a kid who doesn't want his folks to find out, he sure is stupid. If you discharge yourself now, where are you going to go? Sit and brood in your bedroom until the bruising fades, listening to loud music and telling them to leave you alone?”
“They wouldn't notice,” James muttered, and then to distract Lisa from potentially jumping all over that point, he offered Greg a more substantial answer, “They're from my neighbourhood but we aren't friends. They used to go to my school.”
“James, you have to report them!”
“I don't have to do anything,” he tried to reason with her, “Please.”
“Who are you trying to protect exactly? Or are you just playing the typically asinine teenage brat, confusing idiocy for manhood?” Greg demanded, pulling him back into his interrogation. “A pair of local thugs who you know, who you can single-handedly name and shame, beat you to a bloody pulp and probably would have continued to kick you within an inch of your pathetic little life had I not heard you squealing like a little girl, and you're refusing to do anything about it. Either you really are that much of a moron or there's more to them picking on the weakest link.”
“Are you sure you're a med student?” James glared reproachfully at him. “Maybe you've missed your calling in life. You sure as hell act like a cop.”
“Oh, you'd know, would you?”
“Look, I didn't start that fight if that's what you're getting at. They've always had it in for me.”
“Why?”
“Why do bullies need a reason, Greg?” Lisa rose to the boy's defence. “You're embarrassing him.”
“And he's lying,” Greg said, smirking appreciatively, “I just want to know why.”
“Why would I lie about getting busted-on? How would I lie about that? You found me for crying out loud!”
“I'm not talking about that. The whole contact details thing. Shady area. Cops, you got your little digs in there. What are you afraid of people finding out? What did you do?”
James stiffened and fisted the sheets again, looking pleadingly towards Lisa, “Get him out of here. I don't want any visitors. I don't even know you.”
“Fine,” Greg made to push up from his chair, “I'll just run your name through the database myself. You live locally, something will have to turn up for Wilson, James in the hospital records.”
“Wait,” James reached out, tugging on what he could grab of Greg's shirt sleeve. He dropped his arm immediately when Greg sat back down again, a smug smile playing on his lips. “My brother,” he sighed, “it was because of my brother.”
“The younger brother?” Greg leaned forward and James nodded wordlessly.
Lisa heaved a sigh, bored with Greg's cross-examination of how James came to be. Wasn't it enough that he was beaten so wickedly that the end result was hospitalisation? Or would Greg have to turn the rest of their evening into a whodunnit just to satisfy his hunger for puzzles seeing as their French restaurant plans were dashed when bloody hands and sirens made him miss their reservation?
“You still have to report this, James,” Lisa nagged him like some sort of protective older sister, pretending they've known each other longer than five minutes. “Tell your parents. God only knows what could have happened to you tonight. If you died - do you think that's what your brother would have wanted?”
“My brother has... problems. He manages to piss a lot of people off.”
“Do you think those guys maybe could have mistaken you for your brother, or did they know it was you?”
“It's possible. We look a lot alike,” James shrugged. “But it wouldn't really make a difference to them if they were hitting me or Daniel. They refuse to back the hell off from my family no matter what.”
“Forgive me in advance for saying so, but you don't look very threatening,” Greg mocked, but he secretly appreciated that, even if the kid couldn't handle himself, he seemed passionate enough and willing to try in the name of this waster-brother of his.
“What could Daniel have possibly done to warrant a bunch of teenagers taking it out on you?” Lisa asked with a pained expression. “How can they justify such an attack and how - I'm sorry - but how can you not see how wrong this is?”
“He had an episode,” James said quietly, biting down onto his bottom lip. “And a local girl got killed. He was speeding and his car nicked her bumper. She swerved... but he got off because of his condition. He's institutionalised,” he finally admitted, feeling the bile he feared from earlier rising in his throat. “And because we still visit him... we... the whole family gets judged for it. Ridiculed.”
“They called him a murderer,” he explained, bringing his eyes, glazed with tears, back to Greg's face. “He isn't a murderer, he just does things that he doesn't fully understand. Like speeding. He's Daniel, he isn't a bad person. He's - hell, he's even attacked me before. But that doesn't make him a murderer.”
“I'm sorry to hear that, James,” Lisa tried to comfort him in lieu of anything else. “But whether you think your parents are... busy with him or not, I'm sure they'd still like to know that their other son is well. And the people who attacked you nearly made murderers of themselves tonight, they can't get away with something like this. Especially if it's an ongoing thing. Greg's right, if he wasn't there, you don't know if they would have stopped.”
“Tell us your contact details, Wilson,” Greg tried to detach himself from acknowledging the can of worms he'd opened with the use of a last name. Maybe if this James boy became more of a case study, then it wouldn't be so difficult to sit in his company.
James didn't react well to them pushing him for information again, and, as his heart rate climbed and the monitor screening his vitals worked itself into a frenzy, he struck out blindly, trying to hit out at Greg but nearly clipping Lisa in the process. Nurses swept into the room in an instant and he was wrestled down onto the mattress. Greg and Lisa were forced out of the room with harsh, parting words from one of the attendees as they struggled to still James before the sedative took.
When they reached the hospital corridor, they noticed a distressed set of parents fighting with a passing doctor for information. They heard the name “Wilson” being bandied about and, cautiously, approached the couple.
“Excuse me,” Lisa cleared her throat uncomfortably. “You aren't James' parents by any chance, are you?”
“He was brought in and we asked at reception where his room number was,” presumably Mrs Wilson said as way of confirmation, “But they won't let us see him.”
“How did you know he was brought in?” Greg intervened and Lisa could have whacked him because now seriously wasn't the time for him to do his whole investigative act.
“You don't look old enough to be treating my son,” Mr Wilson countered Greg, eyeing him up uncertainly.
“I was the one who found him. We were just staying with him until you arrived,” he replied, if a little defensively.
“We would have called you immediately, sir,” Lisa excused Greg, “But there was no contact details for him when he was admitted. He didn't carry a wallet or anything.”
“Well, he's a patient here,” the father explained. “So it wouldn't have made much of a difference, we were notified pretty quickly.”
“He's a patient?” Greg frowned, “He didn't... hang on. James? James Wilson?”
The father nodded, and then glanced at Lisa, “Look, what is this? I want to see James' actual doctor. Not a pair of-”
“James told us his brother Daniel was the patient,” Greg said, looking to Lisa for reassurance. She nodded dumbly.
The father expelled a painfully put-upon sigh and reached around to hug his wife, who actively wilted into him, “We only have one son,” he shook his head. “No Daniel. James suffers from dissociative identity disorder.”
Chapter two this way... :)
Title: James Wilson, D.I.D.
Pairing: None
Disclaimer: do not own
Summary: AU, set pre House M.D. - in which House and Cuddy are both med students and encounter Wilson in his youth.
Warning: Contains explicit imagery of grievous bodily harm.
Unbeta'd so please forgive me. Hopefully not too OOC
~~~
He startled back when the fist connected with his eye, and even as he clamped a hand over the lid protectively, he could feel it was already swelling closed. One of his attackers, the larger one with the beefy arms, grabbed a fistful of his sweater and slammed him up against the wall.
Before he could fend the hands away, a second blow, just beneath his ribcage, knocked him breathless and his knees liquidised beneath him. But he didn't even have the opportunity to crash gracefully and curl into a ball until it was all over, because the boys, a few years older than himself, had their hearts set on making him ride out the beating to the full.
The larger guy pulled him away from the wall to hold his arms behind his back, and, pulling taut on the already-aching limbs, he kept his victim upright so that his friend could deliver a particularly sharp blow to the stomach. They laughed together into the night's air when he struggled to pull air into his lungs. His head was feeling heavy and he felt himself sinking. Lower and lower.
He wasn't surprised when he hit the cold, wet asphalt, and it offered him a little respite to gasp for a breath. A dull ringing started in his ears, and, confusion hitting him, he tried to raise his head up in time to realise that the pair of them were hoisting him up from the armpits.
When he was finally on his feet again, albeit swaying madly, his vision was clouded even more so as they took him roughly by the neck and started forcing his sweater up and over his head. He bristled against the cold night air as it nipped at the bare expanse of his back and his sides, and he cried out when they checked him against the wall again, this time the unforgiving bricks grazed against his exposed skin.
A knee was inserted into his groin and he collapsed a second time, holding himself between the legs should they kick him there again. And, of course, they did. Three or four times until he was openly wailing for them to stop. He didn't want to give them the satisfaction of crying but the pain was unbearable. He tried to fold into himself and the sweater snapped back from over his head, covering at least half of his torso. He moaned unpleasantly when hands found themselves under his armpits again and he was yanked upwards.
Although he could see them again, the fist was moving too fast for him to place who had done it. All he knew was that he was spitting blood as, at once, his nose was bust and the back of his head smacked against the wall.
This time they didn't mind him collapsing. They kicked at him freely. Mostly in the privates and his stomach. He tried to turn over to dry-heave but he couldn't focus on anything but their boots. There was nothing for him to expel anyway, he couldn't even bring up bile. But he wanted to. If it made the nausea go away, then he really wanted to.
He heard someone shouting, angry shouting. And then the running of feet against the slick cobblestones of the back side-street. Then he felt hands roaming about his person, checking his pockets, checking his face, pulling his chin this way and that.
“Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes for me?”
He groaned, wanting the person to leave him alone. Fingers pried his good eye open and he squinted through a sticky film of blood. He was staring back at a man, a young man, but much older than himself. He had a lean face, dark hair and unforgettable blue eyes. But none of it mattered, he just wanted to sleep. His energy was spent and he could happily drown right here in his own self-pity, he didn't need anyone else to pretend to be concerned for him.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“James...” he heard himself slurring, as if there was a 'h' following the 's.'
“Your full name,” the man urged, patting him down, presumably for injuries and not to cop a sly feel while he was struggling through a semi-conscious haze.
“Wils...”
“Wilkes?”
“Wilson.”
“My name's Greg, James, and I'm a med student,” he told him. “You're not in the best shape right now so it's important that you hang in there for me, okay? Can you tell me your age?”
“Why?”
“What age are you?” Greg asked more forcefully, trying to keep James from slipping into a deep sleep. He pulled his jacket off and bundled it up, then pushed it carefully under James' head. He cursed silently when he took his hand away and realised that his palm was smeared with blood. Although the head wound beneath the hair probably only suggested a grade one concussion because he was still fairly lucid and hadn't lost consciousness yet, it was still hard trying to care for a real-time patient instead of a textbook. “James.”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen. Okay... okay, and do you live round here at all?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got a girlfriend or anything?”
“Not likely,” he panted, trying to work through the pain in his side.
“I'm sorry. A boyfriend.”
“I'm not gay,” James snapped irritably. “I'm just... girls don't go for...”
“It's okay,” Greg promised him, glad that he seemed aware enough so they could stop the strained conversation. “It's going to be okay. Look, I'm going to have to leave you for a little while - just a while - so I can run out to the main street and have one of the local shops phone for an ambulance. We're going to need to move you to a hospital, do you understand that?”
James closed his eyes once more, enjoying the peace and quiet. He couldn't have closed his eyes longer than two seconds before Greg had returned, sliding down onto his knees and shaking him awake. Except that he wasn't shaking him and it wasn't Greg. Two paramedics have swarmed around him, shining a penlight into his face and asking him the same generic questions that Greg had. They strapped him onto a gurney and lifted him into the back of an ambulance that he could have sworn was not there before he closed his eyes. Everything was happening too fast, too soon. It wasn't right.
The next time James opened his eyes, he wasn't on a side-street bleeding out and being bothered by some random med student. He wondered if he dreamt that, but the white-washed walls around him, dissimilar to his own bedroom back at home, suppressed the notion. He turned his head, wincing, and drank in the sight of the hospital room with which he was clearly situated.
Blue eyes swam into his periphery and he blinked at the young man, at a guess in his mid-twenties, sitting opposite him on a hard plastic visitor's chair. He was holding a glass filled with ice chips but, if it was for James, he didn't offer it to him.
“I'm Lisa,” a voice beside Greg said pleasantly and James wondered how her presence had escaped him. They must have put him on some damn strong pain medication, or else he's just losing his marbles left, right and centre. “We... we were allowed in to see you because we're actually doing a surgery rotation at this very hospital at the minute. We're technically staff.”
“Have we met before?” James asked cautiously, his eyes flitting between Lisa and Greg.
Greg took a breath before answering, “Not that it's any of your concern, but I was on my way to a restaurant before I... encountered you. You ballsed tonight up for me.”
“Greg,” Lisa scowled momentarily, before fixing James with a toothy smile again. “Don't listen to him, kid.”
“Kid,” James scoffed. She couldn't have been more than five years older than him. Or technically she could if she were a med student like Greg, but she sure as hell didn't look it. He studied her quietly and when he realised the weight of Greg's glare, he was suddenly overcome with timidity.
He pulled his blanket up around him and fisted the sheets nervously. This was the closest he had ever come to a girl seeing him half-naked, and it didn't even count: she was only here because she didn't want his death hanging over her boyfriend like a foul smell and colouring all of their dates thereafter, and the half-nakedness referred only to his embarrassingly loose-fitting hospital-issued gown.
“Because you were brought in through the ER and you've only come to now, no one has had a chance to get a thorough background check on you. If you tell us your parents' phone number, we can call them for you, if you like. It would be quicker.”
“They're busy with my younger brother,” James looked off to the left, trying to ignore how the doubt sat on their features. “They don't need to be hassled with me.”
Lisa opened her mouth to argue with him, but Greg pulled on her hand to let James have his privacy on the home front. He didn't care why James wouldn't want to face his parents, it didn't interest him. What interested him was why he was attacked. He didn't seem to be mugged because he didn't look like a kid with anything to his name to begin with. Being all of seventeen, of course. And the kids that he had chased from the alley were of a surrounding age, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty. They had done one hell of a number on him and yet they didn't mug him. Why, was right.
“Did you know those guys?”
James met Greg's stare and sighed heavily, “Are you going to talk to the cops or something? I, uh, I don't want any fuss made. I just want to go home.”
“For a kid who doesn't want his folks to find out, he sure is stupid. If you discharge yourself now, where are you going to go? Sit and brood in your bedroom until the bruising fades, listening to loud music and telling them to leave you alone?”
“They wouldn't notice,” James muttered, and then to distract Lisa from potentially jumping all over that point, he offered Greg a more substantial answer, “They're from my neighbourhood but we aren't friends. They used to go to my school.”
“James, you have to report them!”
“I don't have to do anything,” he tried to reason with her, “Please.”
“Who are you trying to protect exactly? Or are you just playing the typically asinine teenage brat, confusing idiocy for manhood?” Greg demanded, pulling him back into his interrogation. “A pair of local thugs who you know, who you can single-handedly name and shame, beat you to a bloody pulp and probably would have continued to kick you within an inch of your pathetic little life had I not heard you squealing like a little girl, and you're refusing to do anything about it. Either you really are that much of a moron or there's more to them picking on the weakest link.”
“Are you sure you're a med student?” James glared reproachfully at him. “Maybe you've missed your calling in life. You sure as hell act like a cop.”
“Oh, you'd know, would you?”
“Look, I didn't start that fight if that's what you're getting at. They've always had it in for me.”
“Why?”
“Why do bullies need a reason, Greg?” Lisa rose to the boy's defence. “You're embarrassing him.”
“And he's lying,” Greg said, smirking appreciatively, “I just want to know why.”
“Why would I lie about getting busted-on? How would I lie about that? You found me for crying out loud!”
“I'm not talking about that. The whole contact details thing. Shady area. Cops, you got your little digs in there. What are you afraid of people finding out? What did you do?”
James stiffened and fisted the sheets again, looking pleadingly towards Lisa, “Get him out of here. I don't want any visitors. I don't even know you.”
“Fine,” Greg made to push up from his chair, “I'll just run your name through the database myself. You live locally, something will have to turn up for Wilson, James in the hospital records.”
“Wait,” James reached out, tugging on what he could grab of Greg's shirt sleeve. He dropped his arm immediately when Greg sat back down again, a smug smile playing on his lips. “My brother,” he sighed, “it was because of my brother.”
“The younger brother?” Greg leaned forward and James nodded wordlessly.
Lisa heaved a sigh, bored with Greg's cross-examination of how James came to be. Wasn't it enough that he was beaten so wickedly that the end result was hospitalisation? Or would Greg have to turn the rest of their evening into a whodunnit just to satisfy his hunger for puzzles seeing as their French restaurant plans were dashed when bloody hands and sirens made him miss their reservation?
“You still have to report this, James,” Lisa nagged him like some sort of protective older sister, pretending they've known each other longer than five minutes. “Tell your parents. God only knows what could have happened to you tonight. If you died - do you think that's what your brother would have wanted?”
“My brother has... problems. He manages to piss a lot of people off.”
“Do you think those guys maybe could have mistaken you for your brother, or did they know it was you?”
“It's possible. We look a lot alike,” James shrugged. “But it wouldn't really make a difference to them if they were hitting me or Daniel. They refuse to back the hell off from my family no matter what.”
“Forgive me in advance for saying so, but you don't look very threatening,” Greg mocked, but he secretly appreciated that, even if the kid couldn't handle himself, he seemed passionate enough and willing to try in the name of this waster-brother of his.
“What could Daniel have possibly done to warrant a bunch of teenagers taking it out on you?” Lisa asked with a pained expression. “How can they justify such an attack and how - I'm sorry - but how can you not see how wrong this is?”
“He had an episode,” James said quietly, biting down onto his bottom lip. “And a local girl got killed. He was speeding and his car nicked her bumper. She swerved... but he got off because of his condition. He's institutionalised,” he finally admitted, feeling the bile he feared from earlier rising in his throat. “And because we still visit him... we... the whole family gets judged for it. Ridiculed.”
“They called him a murderer,” he explained, bringing his eyes, glazed with tears, back to Greg's face. “He isn't a murderer, he just does things that he doesn't fully understand. Like speeding. He's Daniel, he isn't a bad person. He's - hell, he's even attacked me before. But that doesn't make him a murderer.”
“I'm sorry to hear that, James,” Lisa tried to comfort him in lieu of anything else. “But whether you think your parents are... busy with him or not, I'm sure they'd still like to know that their other son is well. And the people who attacked you nearly made murderers of themselves tonight, they can't get away with something like this. Especially if it's an ongoing thing. Greg's right, if he wasn't there, you don't know if they would have stopped.”
“Tell us your contact details, Wilson,” Greg tried to detach himself from acknowledging the can of worms he'd opened with the use of a last name. Maybe if this James boy became more of a case study, then it wouldn't be so difficult to sit in his company.
James didn't react well to them pushing him for information again, and, as his heart rate climbed and the monitor screening his vitals worked itself into a frenzy, he struck out blindly, trying to hit out at Greg but nearly clipping Lisa in the process. Nurses swept into the room in an instant and he was wrestled down onto the mattress. Greg and Lisa were forced out of the room with harsh, parting words from one of the attendees as they struggled to still James before the sedative took.
When they reached the hospital corridor, they noticed a distressed set of parents fighting with a passing doctor for information. They heard the name “Wilson” being bandied about and, cautiously, approached the couple.
“Excuse me,” Lisa cleared her throat uncomfortably. “You aren't James' parents by any chance, are you?”
“He was brought in and we asked at reception where his room number was,” presumably Mrs Wilson said as way of confirmation, “But they won't let us see him.”
“How did you know he was brought in?” Greg intervened and Lisa could have whacked him because now seriously wasn't the time for him to do his whole investigative act.
“You don't look old enough to be treating my son,” Mr Wilson countered Greg, eyeing him up uncertainly.
“I was the one who found him. We were just staying with him until you arrived,” he replied, if a little defensively.
“We would have called you immediately, sir,” Lisa excused Greg, “But there was no contact details for him when he was admitted. He didn't carry a wallet or anything.”
“Well, he's a patient here,” the father explained. “So it wouldn't have made much of a difference, we were notified pretty quickly.”
“He's a patient?” Greg frowned, “He didn't... hang on. James? James Wilson?”
The father nodded, and then glanced at Lisa, “Look, what is this? I want to see James' actual doctor. Not a pair of-”
“James told us his brother Daniel was the patient,” Greg said, looking to Lisa for reassurance. She nodded dumbly.
The father expelled a painfully put-upon sigh and reached around to hug his wife, who actively wilted into him, “We only have one son,” he shook his head. “No Daniel. James suffers from dissociative identity disorder.”
Chapter two this way... :)