ii. anger


Cycles. His life is a series of cycles; one horror traded for another at each twist and turn of his existence, and the name Nikki Strauss would mean nothing without its morbid routines trailing on the last syllables of the title. Work for Doctor X, too, had been nothing but a continuous circle of hits, meetings, meals, and more hits still, and even the small reprieve he'd had upon leaving only earned him a new schedule to follow all the same (alongside a dead lover): sleep, remember, sedatives, forget, and repeat. He loses himself in the morning and reclaims his history in dreams, but as dull sunlight filtering through Seattle's rainy clouds splatter against his ghostly pale skin in the day that follows, he finds himself once again without any recollection of who he is and how he has managed to land himself in a room set aside for only the most criminally insane. Nurses hiss profanities at him from under their breath, his doctor seemingly given up on him (if there'd ever been any faith in him to begin with), and as the whole world tries to swat at him like a bothersome insect, he can only grasp for the straws that might tell him what he's done to make humanity hate him so.

Make himself hate him so.

It's difficult to gauge time, chained as much to his bed by his mental distaste for movement as the straps meant to hold him down; every twilight is one eternity dying to give rise to the next, and the former hitman can't be sure if it's weeks or years before his ears catch the sound of his door swinging open, screeching hinges signaling the arrival of his foul-tongued attendant. Blue eyes catch her murky green, and there's nothing unusual about the sourness that splays over her countenance; nothing to set this night apart from the hundreds preceding it save for the newscast seeping into his room through the open door from what must be another room. "It's ten minutes past curfew," she says, but the words are lost on him, his mind preoccupied with straining to hear about the exploits of a world he has decided he'll never be a part of again. "Why are you still up?"

"... bizarre murders of political and religious leaders that have shocked this city over the last few months seem to have ended as suddenly as they began. No terrorist group has come forth claiming responsibility for the slaying," the reporter drones in the distance, monotonous words nearly impossible to make out, but the sound of the nurse's own words overlapping them makes it a greater feat still.

"Hello? Hello? … Oh, perhaps you need another shot."

She moves with practiced steps, heels of her shoes clacking against the hard linoleum of his room, but the sound of her footsteps and the sight of the freshly produced syringe are lost under a sudden need to listen to the cast through its entirety. "...spect in custody at the state hospital. His identity is being withheld, ending further investigation. Sports and weather next." A grunt tears itself from his throat as the needle jabs its way through the surface of his skin, but the act of her applying pressure to the plunger, paired with the words still ringing in his ears from the television outside breathe familiarity into the rusted gears of his mind. The noise itself is lost on her, and she smiles a bit to herself as one would at a job well done as she steps away, discarding the used object as well in one fluid motion. Already, a fog is beginning to settle over the vague hints of remembrance (and he fights it, fights it hard, because this may be his only chance at answering why he's here to begin with), and it takes the blond more time that he's proud of to process the falsely bright-sounding things she says upon departure.

"That should do it! Sweet dreams..."

Dreams. Yes, dreams; never sweet, though, never sweet. Eyelids pull toward one another, the effort to keep them open greater than the effort to keep himself awake, but he hasn't quite given up on the battle, and the fight for consciousness leaves him able to catch her words on her way through the door. "... you monster." Hinges creak for one final time, the door shuts with a great slam –

- and it all comes rushing back to him.

He remembers the speech at the park, fiery words spilling from Doctor X's lips in Occidental as the crowd roared back. He remembers the revolution, hunting down the man who had inspired him and dedicating his life to the cause of creating a newer, fairer American, freed from the tyranny of political hypocrisy and religious inequality. He remembers the methodical killings, the gun in his hand, the priest the Doctor had enlisted and the nun he had brought with him. The candle lighting, the fresh guilt over crimes long ago committed, the blackmail, the brainwashing - and the sweet Sister Mary's lifeless eyes staring back at him. His own shattered life looking back at him in the mirror through the eyes of a stranger.

Anger shatters Nikki's mind, liquid fury seeping through the spider web of cracks, and he sucks in a pained gulp of air at the overload of information. Consciousness swings back and forth with him, mind running with the speed of a car to process everything he had forgotten while the drug fought hard to keep him down, and it's in this pendulum of awareness that one thought stands out above all of the other painful thoughts dancing around his mind: All of this - every single detail - is all the Doctor's fault.


The intention was to put this up sooner, but I kept forgetting to almost immediately after I tried to remind myself to update this. Admittedly, ah - I'm not sure of what else there is to add about this chapter after my whole shpeel at the bottom of the first one, aside from the fact that this probably works better with a gap in between. Mostly because this and Denial both have him starting out without any idea of what's going on, and then suddenly he remembers everything for one reason or another. The gap in time between posts sort of helps with the idea of the gap in time between the night Mary died and the first time (the only time? maybe not the first, but one of many? who even knows?) he remembered why he was in the hospital in the first place. But I dunno. *shrugs into the abyss*

Probably going to update this with the next part, Bargaining, sometime later today, so. Get ready to jump an even larger time gap... implying you haven't lost interest already.