After the Trial
A/N: This is a sequel to an old story of mine called "The Trial" which is recommended to read first so this one will make sense. It's been on the back burner for several years and I finally decided to start writing it. Hope you enjoy. Please read and review.
It was the beginning of summer in Seacouver. The temperatures raised and the city continued to thrive as it always did: thousands of people every hour of every day going in every which direction and living their lives. The city was large enough that at times it appeared most easy to get lost in the midst of all its hustle and bustle, and the population was certainly large enough that life did not cease to function as usual just because one person fell out of the human rat race. A city with a particularly high crime rate, there were murders and suicides and suspected murders and suspected suicides quite frequently, and even this couldn't slow down the marathon pace of the city's life.
As such, life didn't merely cease to function when somebody became absent through hospitalization or institutionalization either. There were three major hospitals, two free clinics, and two mental health facilities, all of which saw a revolving door of patients, some repeat customers, on an ever-regular basis. People with broken bones, people in car accidents, people with severe allergies, women in labor, elderly who fell down or suffered a heart attack or stroke, children who fell off of swings, monkey bars, skate boards, and in all instances some people came and left in the same day, some stayed for an extended period of time, and some never left the hospital. This was not just limited to those the patients who died while under a doctor's care, truly some patients were beyond a doctor's help, but unfortunately there was just no other place in the world to put them.
Amanda Darieux was a doctor at Seacouver General Hospital, she'd first worked there during her third year residency in medical school, she'd been there now for 14 years. In all that time, despite all of modern medicine and science's advances in preserving life, she'd long lost track of how many people she had seen leave the world while they were patients there. She also couldn't remember how many new lives she had seen start out in the maternity ward. Every so often she liked to creep up there and take a look at all the new life, it was a pick-me-up whenever she was frustrated with her job and in desperate need of one. Her own son, Kenny, had started out in one of those bassinets as well almost 11 years ago, some days she wished he still was.
Another typical day at Seacouver General, everything from drunk driving victims to 80 year olds with chest pains to the hypochondriacs with good insurance who could afford to be and came to make a death bed out of every little ache and sneeze, and she had her own list of patients she'd whittled down over the course of the day. Now she had a free moment and strolled down one of the hospital's neverending corridors to find the man that she was looking for.
At the end of the corridor there were three male doctors talking amongst themselves on a coffee break. Dr. Adam Pierson stood in the middle and Amanda watched him turn one way and the other as he spoke with his colleagues, looking to her as though he were watching a tennis match as he talked.
In the middle of the conversation, Adam caught sight of Amanda in the corner of his eye and turned to see her, she just stood back and flashed him a smug smile and nodded her head to the left, letting him know she wanted to have a word with him. He quickly finished speaking with the other doctors and followed her down another corridor. Their own 'watering hole' of sorts where they could speak in private was in a part of the east wing that had been a TB ward when the hospital was newly built back in the 1930s. Though science was supposed to trump superstition, most of the hospital faculty had reservations about being in the ward at all, some outright refusing to set foot in it, their position at the hospital be damned. It was never officially closed down but the funding was granted to add onto and expand the hospital to accommodate everyone without having to rely on the old ward's facilities.
The ward looked like the perfect setting for a horror movie, a run-down part of the hospital by comparison to the rest that thrived with movement, long, empty corridors, rooms that sat empty, beds that only collected dust as no people frequented them anymore. Well, not quite no one.
Amanda leaned against the wall and said to Adam, "I need to talk to you."
"Shall I guess?" he asked as he folded his arms against his chest, "Or are you just going to tell me?"
"It's about that patient we have in common," Amanda told him.
"I guessed it," Adam replied.
She flashed a sarcastic smile and said to him, "Remember when you told me there was a place to send these guys to so somebody else can look after them and try to figure out what's wrong with them? Exactly how does a sanctuary for mind-melted Immortals have a waiting list?"
"It's still a highly experimental place, Amanda," Adam told her, "They have limited resources, limited space, and some pre-existing cases who are very difficult to manage right now."
"Meanwhile," Amanda nodded her head to gesture down the ward, "This guy's been this hospital's dirty secret for five months now."
"At least we had the ward open to use," Adam said with a small shrug, "Saves us the trouble of people asking questions."
The two doctors walked down the corridor and came to one room on their right and looked in through the wire partition in the door's window.
Confined to the room's hospital bed was a man most people in the city didn't know by name, and the ones that did wouldn't know him by his appearance now. This was Duncan MacLeod, a man who for all intents and purposes seemed to be in his early 30s and was once upon a time a strong, vibrant and lively man. In five months' time, his black hair that had already been long when he was admitted into the hospital had grown longer, gnarled and unruly, half of his face was concealed behind five months' of facial hair growth, also untended and unruly. His body had lost a fair amount of its muscle tone from the months of inactivity, and additional weight was lost from being fed only through a tube and IV sparingly, both of which the two physicians had had a particularly difficult time applying. The official word on his condition was comatose, save for the occasional writhing around on the bed and the series of grunts and whimpers that escaped him, he was completely unresponsive. All the tests had been done on him, he didn't respond to light, to sound, to pain, to stimuli of any sort, officially the hospital had been able to find no cause for his condition. As far as the rest of the hospital knew, this patient had been transferred out to another facility long ago, but Amanda and Adam had agreed to keep him hidden in General until they could figure out where to put him.
"How long can we possibly keep him here?" Amanda asked him.
Adam gave the patient in the room one more look and said, turning to Amanda, "As long as tuberculosis doesn't make a comeback in this part of the country, probably until we're both old and gray."
"Would you be serious, Adam?" Amanda asked.
"I am," he replied, "We both know he's not going to get any older."
"It's just so frustrating," Amanda said as they walked off and headed back the way they came.
"Why?" Adam asked, "Because we can't help him or because he's still here and we have to look at him and be reminded of it?"
"It's everything," Amanda told him, "He has such a wonderful family. Oh, by the way, what are you and Alexa doing tonight?"
"I get off in an hour," Adam looked at his watch, "We're going out for dinner, why? You want to tag along?"
"Can't," she answered, "Tessa and I are going out for the night too."
"Oh really?"
"Yep, Tessa's bringing Richie over, and he and Kenny are staying home while we go out," Amanda answered.
It truly was remarkable how strange life could be and how bizarrely things could work out in the strangest circumstances. Five months ago Amanda had seen Tessa Noel enter the hospital with her husband and her teenaged son, and she had been the one to break the bad news to the French woman that her husband would not be coming home, likely would never be coming home.
Guilt wasn't just a mother's favorite weapon of choice, she was an expert in the field from being on the receiving end of it as well. As a doctor she had to be the bearer of bad news to a lot of families when tragedy struck and modern medicine couldn't save the day. But there was just something about this case in particular that stuck out to her, she couldn't put her finger on it but she also couldn't let go of it. She had urged Tessa from the start not to make things harder on herself by coming to see Duncan, because it wouldn't change anything for him and would only be worse for her to see him like that. To her surprise, Tessa had taken her advice, all the same Amanda found herself reaching out to the woman in the weeks to follow. Something happened and a bond was formed between the two women, and over time their two sons also came to be friends despite the age difference between them. Now, it was like they had been best friends all their lives, Amanda still felt a gnawing twinge of guilt every time the two got together to have fun given the circumstances that brought them together in the first place, but she was glad that she had been able to be a part of Tessa's life now that she was reentering the world a lone woman again, something Amanda could strongly relate to, she had raised Kenny as a single mother from the time he was born, and it could definitely be a challenge at times.
"Well in that case, make sure to hide anything sharp or flammable," Adam suggested.
"Really, Adam," Amanda said in an annoyed tone, "They're good boys, Richie's a good kid, you ought to come over and meet him sometime."
"No thanks," Adam replied, "I don't like children."
"How can you say that? You've never had any," Amanda said.
"My point exactly," he told her, "Alexa's trying to talk me into getting a cat instead."
"And?" she asked him.
"I don't like cats either," he replied.
"Adam, you are impossible," Amanda said.
"Thanks for noticing," he answered with a smug smirk on his face.
"What about his file?" Amanda asked him, nodding back towards MacLeod, "Where does it say he is?"
"Amanda," Adam replied, "Immortals sent to Sanctuary don't have Watchers anymore, there's no reason for it."
"What about those two men you were talking to the night he was brought in?" Amanda asked.
"Joe Dawson and James Horton? What about them?" he asked.
"One of them was MacLeod's Watcher, wasn't he?"
"Dawson was one of them, Watching is a 24 hour job, they have to sleep sometime, so they alternate, once Joe found out MacLeod was being transferred to Sanctuary he put the memo in to close the case file on him. No Immortal has ever recovered enough to leave Sanctuary yet, so they're considered as good as dead. No able bodied Immortals know where it is, nobody's going to go there and behead 50 catatonic Immortals, even though it would be the easiest way to power up for a fight against a stronger opponent."
"So that's it," Amanda said almost melancholically, "MacLeod's record ceased to exist the night he did."
"Pretty much," Adam told her, "The people running the place don't bother to keep in touch with the Watchers, so nobody's the wiser that MacLeod never got there."
"And as long as our superiors never get the urge to come down here," Amanda said as they headed back the way they came in the ward, "They won't be either and we'll get to keep our jobs. If anybody saw him in the state he's in now, we'd both be thrown in jail."
"They don't have any reason to come down here," Adam responded.
"Just as long as they never find out where the missing IVs and feeding tubes have disappeared to," Amanda pointed out.
Adam wasn't concerned, "Amanda, as much stuff disappears from this hospital…"
"A few bodies included, right?" she asked.
He continued, "If they started trying to account for everything that turns up missing, then this hospital would go under because they'd be too busy doing that to do anything else."
"I know there're a lot of problems with the prescription drugs, people coming in, steal them and then turn around and sell them on the streets or take them themselves…"
"It's not just the drugs and the needles, Amanda," Adam told her, "It's everything, last week some crackpot got in here, made off with every bedpan in the storage closet. You try explaining that one, no one else around here can. After something like that, who's going to notice a few bags of liquid missing? Especially since we only give them to MacLeod twice a week, nobody's going to notice that, and we know he can survive on it, a gift of Immortality."
"Still," Amanda was adamant, "This better not come back to bite us in the ass, if I lose my job or my son, I'm holding you responsible."
"As long as we keep our mouths shut, we've got nothing to worry about," Adam assured her, "We know he's not going to tell."
Amanda glanced over her shoulder and commented, "I should hope not anyway. If he does, we're in big trouble."
"In more ways than one," Adam added.
While the doctors returned to their work, their mutual patient writhed around in his hospital bed. His eyes never opened, no more than a few grunts and moans escaped his throat, but his mind was running in overdrive. When he was first admitted to the hospital, Adam Pierson had informed Dawson and Horton that thinking was the only capacity he had left. This had been verified by Dr. Anne Lindsey, a specialist who had been called in to examine him shortly after the Quickening that in Dr. Pierson's words, 'melted his mind'.
Brain scans had been ordered, the tests confirmed brain activity, however the readings differed greatly from any other patient in the hospital's history, a pesky little fact that the three doctors had agreed need not be shared with anybody else in the facility. Dr. Lindsey, anticipating the outcome, had come prepared and readily supplied them with a set of somebody else's brain scans, for Amanda and Adam to show to anybody else who inquired about the case.
"Basically the human brain already operates on warp drive," Anne had told the two local doctors, "MacLeod's brain is functioning on a basis I'd estimate at twice that rate. Whatever he's thinking of, most of it isn't more than a couple seconds before it shifts to something else entirely. Except last night when we were monitoring him, what we saw indicated he held onto the same continual thought for three hours before his brain shifted gears again and went to something else. It's really amazing how much more we can find out about Immortals' brains than regular people's."
"Sounds more like ludicrous speed to me," Amanda had responded, "All that brain power and it can't do him any good. What's he thinking about that hard and fast?"
"That's anybody's guess," Anne said.
Adam looked down at the 400 year old Scot who was lying motionless in the bed, and he commented, "I can guess."
"You read his files?" Anne asked.
"I know his Watcher," Adam replied, "Have you seen anything like this before?"
"A few cases, none as bad as this though," she answered.
"So there's no hope," Amanda said.
"I wouldn't bet on it," Dr. Lindsey replied, "There's a reason why Immortals don't have kids, they're not supposed to have families period, they're just a liability to them and put their lives in danger."
"I hope everybody gunning for this bastard finds that out before they get to his wife and son," Adam told her, "Apparently they've driven off that bridge a few times already."
"Well, if I were you, I'd get this guy to Sanctuary as soon as possible," Anne said, "I can put in a recommendation for you, but it won't be easy. More cases like this are popping up and it's hard to get an opening."
"I know somebody assigned to the place," Adam remarked, "I'll notify them myself."
"Sorry I couldn't be more help," Anne said, "I don't know what it's going to take for us to start seeing fewer cases like this, but whatever it is, I wish somebody would figure it out soon. At least my regular patients have the option of a pulled plug to end their and their families' misery."
"I wouldn't imagine it's a popular one though," Amanda commented.
Anne nodded towards the man laying in the bed and responded, "No, but it beats this alternative."
"I guess I'd better let his wife know," Amanda said, and sighed heavily, "I hate this part of the job."
"I'll tell them," Adam told her.
Amanda shook her head, "No, I better do it." She inhaled again and said, "I just need to get my legs to move. It's a real shame, he has a wonderful family. I already got them half prepared for this but, actually having it confirmed, that's going to be a real bombshell."
Amanda had left the room, leaving Adam and Dr. Lindsey to talk amongst themselves.
"You said you could guess what it is he thinks about," Anne said, "What is it?"
"Doctor," Adam Pierson explained, "Before you is a very self righteous and very guilt ridden old man, whose conscience finally ran out of other people to blame for all his own mistakes. I think everything he ever did wrong is coming back to haunt him, and then some."
"How old is he?" Anne inquired.
"400 years," Adam answered without missing a beat.
"That's a lot of regrets," Anne concurred.
"More than a thousand, I'm sure," Adam added as he looked down at the highlander almost smugly, "And I think they're all replaying themselves now that he has no barrier to protect himself from those pesky memories. And if I know his kind as well as I think I do, I'm sure his subconscious has it in it to fabricate a thousand more that never happened."