This is now officially AU, but I knew it would be since the end of Season 3. I had a little problem with the idea of turning Butch, who I found a strong enough character on his own, into a swamp zombie. So this fic was the product.
(Also, where in the balls do hobos find a gramophone?!)
Enough of my gripes, onto the show.
Since Gotham had turned into a zombie/Purge hellscape three days ago, Doctor Denise Diaz had slept for a grand total of two hours, twenty minutes of which had taken place on a toilet. She had also consumed somewhere in the vicinity of five gallons of coffee, come within inches of a total meltdown, and bloodied so many pairs of scrubs, she'd either lost count or subconsciously refused to remember.
And it wasn't over yet.
Though the influx of new casualties had subsided, and the most heavily injured by the infected and subsequent chaos had expired, every hospital in Gotham was full to bursting. And would be for the foreseeable future. Which meant Diaz had a lot more toilet naps to look forward to.
But before she could find a quiet stall, she still had rounds to make. Her normal workload had, up until three days ago, seemed like as much as she could handle safely. Now, she'd do just about anything to get back to her old number of patients, with their typical gripes and ailments.
Diaz picked up her first pile of charts and sorted through them. Blunt trauma, gunshot wound, gunshot wound, stabbing, bite wounds. Great. The human mouth was filthy. Not that bullet wounds couldn't also lead to massive infection, but at least bullets themselves tended to be sterile due to the massive heat they built up traveling so quickly.
Diaz made her way through the rooms. Some of the patients had been assaulted by people infected by the Tetch virus, some had been infected and out of their minds, and some had been injured by regular humans scared shitless and shooting anything that moved in the neighborhood. The formerly infected had been cured of their disease, but putting broken jaws back together was more difficult and took much longer than a quick little injection.
The last room was, to Diaz's surprise, singularly occupied. With space so limited and so many desperate for treatment, two and sometimes three or more patients had been jammed into each room. Diaz glared down at the chart. Did this guy have some kind of super MRSA or Ebola that demanded isolation? If he did, nobody had done a very good job with quarantine protocols. There were no masks or disposable gowns or so much as a sign on the door advising-
The door swung shut behind the frazzled doctor. In all likelihood, she knew, it was a passing nurse or aide giving her and the patient some privacy, blocking out curious visitors or even other patients. However, because this was Gotham, and the city had been ravaged by a virus that turned people into violent lunatics, and she and sleep had become distant strangers, Diaz slowly slid a hand into her labcoat, gripped a pen, and prepared to shank if the need arose.
"I'm all for stabbing if I'm not on the receiving end."
Shit, so much for it being a considerate nurse.
Diaz raised her hands, showing she'd dropped the pen. She took a deep breath and turned to face the voice behind her.
The voice belonged to one of the strangest looking men Diaz had ever seen. And considering her clientele, that was saying something. He was pale and completely bald, down to his lack of eyebrows, and the first thing that entered Diaz's mind was chemo. She rejected that notion a moment later: chemotherapy patients did not look this healthy or strong. They typically didn't dress in black from head to combat boots and carry two holstered handguns plainly visible beneath their jacket, either.
"There are no narcotics in this room," Diaz said, though the guy didn't look like an addict. She hoped, even if he didn't want to stick fentanyl patches all over himself, he'd refute her and reveal his real reason for lurking.
The strange man grinned and inclined his head at the occupied bed at the other side of the room. "Nobody's wasting the good stuff on Butch. Don't worry. He has a high pain tolerance."
To her surprise, Diaz found the intruder approaching her. She sidestepped and the man continued walking. He stopped in front of the patient and reached a hand for him. While Diaz watched in confusion, the man ran a finger along the patient's forehead, right below the thick crown of bandages he wore.
"If he can still feel anything?" the man asked.
Diaz started and glanced down at the chart in her hand. She'd hardly looked at it because she knew it would have been a waste, forgotten in a few minutes anyway. All she knew was Caucasian male, gunshot wound to the head, actually not related to the Tetch virus at all.
Not that it mattered if she knew nothing or had a perfect eidetic memory. "I can't tell you. His information is private."
The man put on a momentary frown that made Diaz feel like all five gallons of coffee she'd drunk had collected in her bladder. Then he smiled, and another gallon magically joined them.
Still wearing a grin that could make Pennywise the clown shit his pants, the man lifted his arms in front of him like a magician preparing to show the audience there was nothing up his sleeves. Except Diaz had a sinking feeling there was something there. A guy who wore guns as nonchalantly as he wore his socks probably had weapons strapped all over.
The creepy bastard tucked a finger under the cuff of his sleeve and began to roll it down. The first roll revealed something Diaz saw but didn't quite comprehend. The second clarified the point and made it impossible to ignore.
The length of the man's arm was covered in scars in various degrees of healing. Not random scars, but obviously intentional tallies grouped in sets of five. Diaz was quite familiar was the scars of those who had attempted suicide or engaged in self-mutilation, and had even seen ritual scarification gone bad once or twice, but she'd never seen anything quite like this.
Diaz had always had a sharp eye and an even sharper mind for math, and multiplying by five was as easy as breathing for her. In a blink she'd totaled up 52 tallies along the length on the man's arm. It seemed like a random number that meant nothing obvious to her, but had to signify something important to the creep.
"I appreciate your professionalism, but if you love HIPAA more than your coworkers, your life, or sweet old ladies with broken hips, I am going to need more space here." With a flourish, the man motioned to his bare arm with the one still sleeved.
The doctor's mouth dropped open. When she finally found her voice, she said, "You- you do that every time you kill someone?"
"Yup."
"Oh, sweet Jesus. Here." Diaz thrust the chart at the man.
He flipped through the chart with disinterest and shook his head. "I'm the best hitman in Gotham; I can clean and assemble any gun you'd like while blindfolded. I don't know what any of these squiggles mean. Is this good?"
Diaz took the chart back and looked at the ECG. "It's normal sinus rhythm. This bump here is the heart's atria- You don't care."
The "best hitman" replied, "I prefer the short story. I don't have all night. Places to go, people to terrorize."
"What do you want, specifically? Between here and all the crap on the computer, there's immense data. I assume you don't give a shit when he got his measles vaccination as a kid, so..."
"Is he still in there?"
Diaz sighed. She wished she had memorized the chart. And even if she had, it might not provide her a clear answer. Brain damage and its effects weren't like other injuries, especially when they were severe enough to put someone in a coma. A broken leg was put in a cast and six weeks later, ta-dah, healthy leg. Two people could receive the same general brain damage, and one would be visiting the other's grave.
"He isn't brain dead, I can tell you that much," Diaz said. "He's breathing on his own and his heart is beating, so at least his brainstem is alive."
The man looked down at Diaz's comatose patient. "Butch's brain didn't have all that much life to begin with. How much is left?"
Diaz shrugged and, though he lacked the actual eyebrow, the man raised his brow. "There's no wavy lines to tell you that?"
"There are tests and the Glasgow scale and scans, but it's nothing as concrete as taking a pulse. The brain is- it's amazing. I've seen people come back from catastrophic damage, and I've seen people die from bumps on the head. When someone is like this, you'd need a crystal ball to know how they're going to end up."
The man sat down on the edge of Butch's bed. Though the gun-toting intruder was slim, he was still forced to balance precariously like a bus full of school children on the side of a ravine. Butch hadn't been comatose long enough to make suitable sitting space for visitors and old friends.
"I've heard," the man said conversationally, "that hearing is the last sense to go. That people in comas can hear their families talk to them."
"I was told in medical school to always assume the person being anesthetized, in a coma or even actively dying can hear what's being said around him. I believe it," Diaz replied.
"Hmm, actively dying? I've sent people off with some interesting last thoughts in that case! Want to hear some? How about you, Butch?"
Diaz grimaced and Butch's face remained slack.
"All fun aside, I came here with a serious mission. I've appointed myself Butch's power of attorney because he has no other family and nobody loves him. Fish is dead. Again. We're assuming permanently this time. Who knows. Rumor has he, he had a girlfriend, but...he's Butch. He burned every other bridge he had. Except mine."
Diaz thought for one nanosecond about explaining the actual legal way one was given the status of power of attorney, but she realized it would have been more productive to explain it to a lizard. If this guy wanted to proclaim himself king of the cafeteria's pepperoni pizza, she wasn't going to stop him.
The man dug around under the blankets and emerged with Butch's limp hand clasped in his own. "Butch and I go way back. We used to play for the same side. Then he chose Fish, and I brainwashed him, and we had some good times. Just Butch and Victor and power tools."
Victor allowed himself another minute of happy nostalgia. Then, with no warning or change in expression, he used his free hand to draw a gun and press the muzzle against Butch's forehead.
Diaz dropped Butch's chart and threw her hands up in front of her. "No, what are you doing?! Don't shoot him!"
"If I pull the trigger," Victor's finger tightened slightly, "am I killing Butch or am I killing a potato? Best guess, doctor."
"Butch! I honestly believe he has a chance to wake up and recover."
The psychopath's dark eyes traveled from Diaz's sweaty face to Butch's artificially tranquil one. It betrayed nothing. Blank as a fresh sheet of paper. It could have belonged to a corpse. Or a perfectly healthy man fast asleep. Or a man occupying the limbo in between.
As he'd once said to Jim Gordon, alive was a very broad category.
And Butch could keep occupying that category, at least for now.
Victor holstered the gun. He tucked Butch's hand under the blanket and smoothed the covers. That accomplished, the killer-but-not-this-time rose and approached the disturbed doctor.
"Take good care of him, because I'll be checking in. Will I have any trouble?" he asked.
Diaz shook her head. "No, you're his power of attorney. I'll make sure it's added to his chart. Call any time you like."
Victor smiled and held out his hand. Diaz extended her own hand about two inches from her body. It was grabbed and shaken heartily.
"Get well soon, Butch. I'll send flowers."
The killer took a moment to button his jacket, effectively hiding the twin guns he wore. Thus disguised to security, the man headed out the door, whistling something that sounded hideously disco.
Diaz took a few seconds to gather herself and make sure her legs would support her (and that the terrifying son of a bitch hadn't forgotten anything) before she walked over to the bed. Her first instinct had been to run out of the room, the second she was alone, but she had to make sure. Seizures and tremors were common in brain-injured patients, but what she'd seen had been one hell of a well-time spasm if it happened to be random.
"Butch, are you-"
His lips moved.
Diaz recoiled instinctively. Then her brain kicked on and she realized how amazing it was to be present when a comatose man returned to consciousness. She stepped closer and leaned down to hear better.
Butch rasped something that, even with her ear almost in his mouth, Diaz couldn't quite hear. Which, given the fact Butch had been intubated at one point and hadn't had a drink in three days, wasn't surprising.
"I'll get you some water," Diaz said. She straightened but, before she could find the nearest small Styrofoam cup, Butch grabbed her wrist.
He worked his jaw as though he was vigorously chewing gum, trying to get saliva flowing again. After a minute of looking like a cow masticating cud in the field, Butch tried again.
"Gone? Is he gone?"
"The guy with the guns? Victor?"
Butch nodded.
"He's gone. I hope a bus hits him on the way out," Diaz replied. "If I ever get any real sleep around here, he's going to be in my nightmares."
Butch released Diaz's wrist and lay down in bed, breathing a huge sigh of relief as he did so. Once he was supine, however, the magnitude of his situation struck him. He had emerged from basically nothing, the deepest sleep he could ever remember, to find himself back in Zsasz's clutches. And in a hospital. With tubes pumping fluids into him and bandages all over his head and-
"Does he know?!" Butch screamed.
Diaz jolted at her patient's outburst. "Know what?"
He lowered his voice to the scratchy level it had been when he'd first managed to speak. "I've got- I'm pissing into a-"
"No, he didn't see your catheter. No offense, but most people would be more concerned with the being shot in the head angle."
Butch reached up and touched the bandages, confirming them. "Who shot me?"
"I don't know, and I think the police were hoping you could tell them."
It wasn't like he had a shortage of enemies. His friends he could count on one hand, which was lucky since one hand was all he had. But the number of people who would happily put a bullet in his brain could probably fill the whole hospital with a few left milling in the waiting room.
If he could even remember all his foes. Which, given that he wasn't sure exactly when his memory last functioned, meant he might have made some new ones without remembering them.
Yep, staying in a coma sure sounded like the better option now. It was hurting his brain even thinking about thinking.
Butch looked up at Diaz. "Hey, Doc, any chance you could slip me a little morphine or-"
"You slept through three days of the apocalypse. As far as I'm concerned, you're not sleeping any more until we get you healthy enough to walk out of here and take your maniac friends with you. Nice try, though. I'm going to call any neurologist in the building to examine you, and then I'm going to find a quiet dirty laundry room and nap away my traumas. Hang tight," Diaz replied.
She then scooped up Butch's chart and proceeded to the nearest nurses' station to locate a phone and physician index.
Alone with his thoughts, Butch stared at the IV pump quietly clicking away next to his bed and pondered important questions.
The most important: What kind of flowers would Zsasz send him? Probably nice ones, the son of a bitch.
The End!
Author's Notes:
The Purge series features a day where all crime is legal.
MRSA is a bacteria resistant to many common antibiotics. Super Ebola does not yet exist, and regular Ebola is bad enough.
Fentanyl is an incredibly potent painkiller that can come in a patch.
An eidetic memory is also known as a "photographic memory."
Pennywise is the evil clown from It.
HIPAA is a law to protect patient privacy among other things.
Evidence does support that, in some cases, people in comas can hear what's going on around them, particularly familiar voices.
You cannot declare yourself someone's power of attorney (sorry Zsasz). They must give you the ability to make their decisions should they become incapacitated, and in many cases it must be in writing.