Title: The Doctor Is In (The Patients Are Out)
Fandom: Asylum, in which the actors pretty much use their real names. So it looks almost like RPF, but isn't. If you haven't heard of it, and you probably haven't, highly recommended for anyone who likes Simon Pegg, Jessica Stevenson, Edgar Wright, or any combination of the three.
Characters/Pairing: Simon, Martha, Julian, Paul, Adam
Genre: humor
Rating: G
Summary: Everybody's got a hole to fill. In the world. In their heads. Post-series, brief glances at each of the patients.
The Doctor Is In (The Patients Are Out)
"Remember being crazy?" Martha says brightly, for the first time that day. Granted, it's always the first time. She only ever says it once a day. Twice would be overkill— more than that would mean certain death. Fact.
Simon doesn't say anything, though. He has no rehearsed response to this. He tried, once or twice, but ultimately got fed up. His hair is growing out— in lieu of him responding, she ruffles it for him. Just in case he wanted that.
"Remember being," she says, and stops herself. Because really. Once is enough.
Julian is frowning at a chair. The chair is doing nothing in return, just sits there being an offensive, wordless diatribe on the ineffectually puny liberalities mankind takes with design. There is nothing new about it. It has nothing definitive to say, no remarks to pass on fashion as furniture, and absolutely no class, style, or form beyond function. You could probably sit on it for a half hour and not even get a stiff spine. And it's ugly. He hates it.
Hates it hates it hates it.
But it's what the customer ordered.
He pairs it carefully with a canary-yellow chaise with slim green piping.
Adam has been fired. No severance pay, no apologetic bonus, no "Where've you been all this time, anyway?" No nothing. Just straight up termination.
It actually happened three months ago, when his parents had him declared legally dead.
They're so surprised to see him that his dad keels over. Heart attack.
There's a joke in there somewhere, he suspects. Surely someone must be having a laugh.
Paul the not-mime spends hours wondering why the phrase "flamenco singer" never sent off warning signals in his head. Flamenco was all about the dance, wasn't it, on reflection. (Like everything.) The movement, the rhythm. The pull and push, push and pull, the stepping on toes and spinning lazily in circles, the tightness of chest and constriction of throat that meant yes yes yes everything's where it's meant to be and couldn't you just die from the sheer bloody wonder? But it isn't words. It's feelings. Music. One thing it isn't is singing (on reflection).
Did such a profession even exist, he wonders? And if it doesn't. Can he ever really have done it?
And if it doesn't, he wonders, does he?
He chews on a ping pong ball (addicted) while he has a good think about this, and whether or not it really matters, and whether or not he really cares.
He was right, there was nothing for him at Pizza Perfection, and so Simon goes into a bit of a blue funk, for a while. Pizza, he decides, is dead to him. He's grown enormously tired of explaining to people that he's more than a pizza delivery boy (the way that Martha is more than a girl obsessed with Countdown ((and Simon's hair)), and that Julian is more than a paranoid schizophrenic obsessed with ART, and that Adam is more than a walking joke, and the mime is more than a mime is more than a mime is more than a mime) and decides that, instead, he will inform people that he is a psychologist (or maybe analyst is a better word) masquerading as a pizza delivery boy, which is far closer to the truth than he supposes. Or so he assumes. After all, he is the one that broke them out of the asylum. So there must be something to it.
On the strength of that, he sets up practice on his moped and everything goes according to plan. He deals mainly with passers-by on the street, and as a result, his rates are very reasonable. His patients frequently cry as they tell him about their problems.
"I think my wife is cheating on me with our post man," they say, "he always knocks twice, and I'm unfulfilled in my career as a television repairman because I only know how to use a hammer, and I think I'd do really well at the pub quizzes but no one ever asks me to be on their team, and I may have a secret calling as a superhero but I'm a vegetarian who believes in God and dinosaurs and wonders if the two are ever really compatible."
"Interesting," says Simon, rubbing his chin and getting sauce all over the place. "Have a slice of this Beef Magic."
The patient does, and the two of them chew together. It's a wonderfully uniting experience.
"And how do you feel about that?" Simon asks.
The patient, mouth full of crust, admits that on the whole, they feel better. And Simon grins, a bit crookedly.
"Tell me more," he says, and they go on.