My Saboteur

He took a week off- wait. He took a week off?

That was worrying.

Dr.Cox never took time off.

JD thumbed through the March/April schedules... it wasn't just a week?

Oh shit. JD thought. This is indefinite.

He snuck behind the desk at records and pulled Dr.Cox's chart. Of course it was at the risk of being belittled and humiliated by Laverne or OUTRIGHT MURDERED by Dr.Cox, but he needed to see. He was careful and calculating, working hard not to even rumple the corner of any one of the pages he was reading.

Illnesses, injuries, procedures - all of them far outdated, none of them a factor- but something caught JD's eye suddenly. A little yellow tab stuck out from the upper right hand side of the file that read: Psych...

Psych?

xxxXXXxxx

January

Turk and Carla sat at their lunch table, Turk facing Carla from the other side.

"C'mon, baby... we never do it anymore." He pouted and Carla leaned over, suckling briefly on the lower lip that was pushed out toward her in order to portray a pitiful expression. She leaned back, rolled her eyes, sighed, and pressed the tips of her outward thumbs together, her pointer fingers straight up in the air. Turk beamed. "Now that's what I call a goal-post!"

Turk pulled the paper football out of his scrub-top pocket. He positioned it on the table and meticulously leveled his fingers against it, pulling them back and moving forward as though a real football player rushing the ball, and...

"Wait- Turk, what the hell is that? Is that laughter?" Carla set her hands over Turk's, looking concerned as she strained to hear what was now coming closer.

"It's probably JD tickling himself again." Turk replied, a bit irritated by the interruption of his triumph. His expression changed when the laughter sped through the room. It came through the room hysterically, insanely, and in the form of one freaked-out Dr.Cox, complete with his hand over his mouth and his eyes darting about the room as he cleared through it.

Through the almost shriek-scale giggling, Carla could catch miniature declarations of his worry through expletives and short, clipped help me's.

After a departure as quick as the arrival, the lunchroom was silent, a unanimous, worried nausea crept up in everyone's throats.

xxxXXXxxx

February

Dr. Cox denied up, down, left, right, and center that anything like January's interesting little show had happened. To him it certainly hadn't! It wasn't his fault, after all, that everyone else couldn't handle a little pressure like he could.

However, despite his reasoning, Bob Kelso still drop-kicked him in two directions: first, Ted's office to review legal implications of going absolutely apeshit crazy in the hospital, and second to the psych ward to speak to one of the resident psychiatrists. Go he did, if a little (lot) hesitantly.

"No one- and I explicitly mean no-one is to know about any of this. Got it?" He warned as he left Bob's office for… ugh… Ted's. Dr.Kelso nodded. Truthfully, Dr.Kelso was amused. He had known Perry Cox for god-knows-how-long, and somehow he saw this coming from a long way away. As a matter of fact the very moment JD hit residency, the quick progression of Dr.Cox's psychoses took a vast leap toward becoming a very quick reality.

Dr.Cox dragged himself through Ted's door and sat in the chair opposite the odd bald gentleman. "Dr.Kelso tells me that you and I need to have a completely unnecessary legal mumbo-jumbo sprinkled chit-chat about whatever it was that happened last month." Ted scratched the top of his dome, a small confusion creeping into his eyes. "What is it, then, huh? You look like a half-retarded monkey trying to splice genes."

"Are you in denial?" Ted began in his slow, thick banter, "Or did you really check out for that day?"

Dr.Cox turned red. Red red red from his hairline down to his collar and probably underneath. Ted began to cower a little; seeming tempted to draw his arms up before his face to ward off sudden blows. "I'M NOT GOING TO HIT YOU." He roared. It seemed as though his head could explode under a modicum of pressure more and when he stood from his chair, it flew backwards and clattered loudly on the floor. "And you can take yourself and that greasy sheen of flop sweat and tell BeelzeBob that he can cancel the FUCKING PSYCH APPOINTMENT."

His eyes widened and brimmed with sudden tears (and so did Ted's, for that matter), but before a single one could fall he ran from the room, throwing his beeper in the trash can as he stormed past Carla's desk. In his wake, her coffee spilled all over her pants and shirt. "Hey!! Dr. COX! ...Damn it!"

JD came by, blissfully unaware of the melodrama that had occurred within a millisecond of his arrival. He stopped, smiling at Carla. "You've got a little something on your shirt. Right…." He made a circular motion with his index finger, "…there."

"No kidding? I have coffee on my top?" She looked up at him. Turk would have known right away exactly what the fire in the back of those brown eyes meant.

"No need to thank-" At that, Carla had JD by the shirt, and still he smiled arrogantly.

"I know I have coffee on my damn shirt! Dr. Cox just knocked it all over me in one of his token flip-outs!" She let him go kind of hard, but relished it enough to smile a little as JD sprawled backwards.

"Ow." Was his only complaint as he got up and brushed off. He was careful to check his coif once he was standing and steady. "What is up with everyone anyway?"

"C'mon, JD you are far from that stupid." Carla replied as she went toward the supply closet. She grabbed a fresh scrub top and traded it out for her own while still within the private confines of the supply.

While she was at it, she grabbed up a chuck from the supply, intending to clean the coffee from her desk and chair when in the other direction, Dr.Cox came striding back up the hall. He seemed to be on one of his basic missions, he seemed as though he was heading toward a coding patient, however when he looked behind him and saw Dr.Kelso coming, he began to run.

"Do not want!" He cried out, suddenly stricken with a severe panic attack. "DO NOT WANT!"

"D- Do not want? Do not want what?" JD murmured to himself. His brow knitted together in deep thought. Nothing seemed out of the norm about how suddenly Dr.Kelso picked up his speed to run after the problematic situation. Carla, infuriated with the entire episode, ignored the entire hospital, meticulously cleaning away at her desk and chair.

Nobody saw the full syringe fall out of Dr.Kelso's pocket and roll beneath a standing medicine cart as he sped further up to catch Dr.Cox.