AN: Hello! This story focuses on the man with the broom in the Storybrooke Asylum as he faces down Doctor Who monsters and wonders about the girl in the cell adjacent. It's very good fun, unless you're a Whovian. Whovians might be a little scared at parts. Once Flew over the TARDIS. Yes. (PG)
Bromden didn't like the groans and clang of the boiler room pipes, they disturbed the other inmates. He liked perfect silence on his ward, but silence was a relative, flawed thing. The pipes made his knuckles go white around the broomstick and sent shivers down his legs. It sounded like a ghoul, or a wraith. Something lurking just beyond his line of sight that could pounce at any moment and rip him to shreds.
Nurse said it was nothing, but Nurse was lying. Nurse always lied. She couldn't know how the great struts ached against the heating and cooling pipes, hissed at the smallest pressure changes. Nurse didn't understand that the building was screaming, telling the tale of the Girl in Cell Four until it became like a second skin to him: love, cowardice, loss. It took a careful ear, certainly, to make sense of all the lowing and groans cutting through quiet air like a fleck of static on the radio. The barest hint of fingers on cinder blocks spoke contritely of love, while the swish-swish of his broom mingled with the bubbling glurb of hot water rapidly cooling, to sing a song of unfathomable suffering.
Sometimes the Girl in Cell Four would sing too, a little humming melody about a wheel that never stopped spinning, but that story was nonsense — a dream within a dream, memories of a distant life made fuzzy by heavy air and over medication. All out of order, and entirely without a sense of beginning or ending — but still the tune was lovely; Nurse didn't like the humming, but Brom did. It kept the clangers at bay, reminded him to keep tally of the lurching bile that rose in his stomach sometimes, digging his thumbnail into the broom handle — always sweeping, always counting.
In all the ward, the Girl's song was the only thing that ever changed. Nurse thought he was crazy, but then — Nurse thought everyone was crazy. He wasn't though. Not crazy. Things walked into the darkness and never walked back; not every shadow, but any shadow, and the men in the suits with the funny heads… His nail dug into the broom handle. What was he thinking again? Nothing. He was listening, and he wasn't stupid: he could count. 10,227 days since he started sweeping, and nothing ever changed except the singing and the building, groaning in protest at the sheer audacity of it all.
Then, the night he felt the vibration of a thousand clocks simultaneously start ticking run up his feet and nest in his chest, Bromden heard the grinding. Low and warbling, the sound of orange skies, civilizations burning, and angels crying. It was not the sound of drums, of a chieftain's pride or a master's madness. It was not drumming, he reminded himself. There was something… Oh, no. Just the darkness creeping, it was nothing. Bromden notched his broom handle with his thumbnail anyway, to remind himself of something. He wasn't sure what, so he just went on listening for the sounds of feet on cement that he simply couldn't be hearing, and the long draining gurgle of the water heater.
He was afraid when he heard the new sound for the second time.
It was the single most terrifying, hopeful, wonderful, dying sound — bookmarking the beginning and the end of the world — and it originated at the start of all good things: behind the door of Cell Four. It came and went, starting and stopping in cycles of two, always after sundown and again before Nurse brought their medicine. He marked his notched his broom, sure he was supposed to, but not sure why; something he was forgetting, right at the corner of his eye… no, it was nothing. Bromden choked back his rising bile and took the medicine, like a good boy. Nurse said everything was fine. Just the darkness playing tricks again, waiting to devour the first person who set a foot out of line. Sometimes he dreamed of rodents with two shadows, but that simply couldn't be right. Then again, Nurse always lied.
What was he forgetting? His broom was raised defensively, a splinter of wood beneath his thumbnail stung. Bromden paused for a breath, listened for the sound of pipes dripping, and went back to sweeping. There was always silence after the grinding, all he'd ever wanted, and Brom found the lack of scratching-clanging-panic-building more unnerving than he could have ever dreamed.
He wasn't crazy.
"Mr. Bromden," Nurse said, making the morning rounds. He did not respond.
"Chief?" she tried again.
The Girl in Cell Four had returned moments ago, he'd heard the grinding, but Nurse ignored it like all the other noises. She said they had no meaning. She was lying.
"Have you been chewing on this thing?" Nurse asked, pulling the broom from Brom's wide, strong hands. It was covered, top to bottom, in little tallies he'd scratched in — too many to count, lifetimes worth of them. Bromden had never noticed how many.
"Give it here," she demanded, her red-painted lips pressed together, tightly. He didn't want to, but she insisted, and Brom followed her dutifully to the broom cupboard at the end of the hallway. The hospital had a closet full of brooms, each one bearing his little thumb tallies to the point that it did look like gnawing. Bromden did not chew on his broomsticks. The marks — he always made them, and then forgot why — had to mean something.
Nurse fished a new broom out of the back and handed it to him. His palms were already sweaty for the lack of sweeping, a calm ocean of straws on cement midst the hell of clangs and scraping. As Nurse returned to his post, with the pristine broom in hand, he looked down at it again. It bore five scratches already, and he choked back the bile before resuming his position.
If he was the Sentinel, the Girl was the key. Something about the grinding sound, the engines of change that started on the same night as the time. Ten marks on the broom handle now.
This place wasn't right. Nurse didn't see it, but Bromden figured Nurse was probably crazy. He brushed his fingers over the Girl's door, looking for anything to calm his nerves, and he heard her cut off the humming mid-refrain.
"It'll be alright," she told him in a voice that spoke of great power, wisdom, and consoled him in his time of need. "Allons-y."
Fin.