Author's Note: Hello and welcome to chapter two of "Trials of Mercy". As always, I would like to briefly thank everyone who took the time to read and reviewed the first installment, saichickAnnaErishkigal, Guest and Requiem for a Devil. Your support and interest in this fic are deeply appreciated! I do hope you enjoy this chapter.
Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of Legion nor any of the characters associated with the film.
Chapter Two The Gamble
Miggs stood next to Susan, the bright light shining off his rather distinct bald spot. "Do you want a cop in here with you?" he asked, watching as one of the nurses fitted a blood pressure cuff around the patient's bicep.
Susan looked at her shoes. There was a scuff on her right toe. Messy. She'd have to stop at the drugstore on her way home and pick up some black polish. "We'll be fine," she said. "Eric told me you gave him haloperiel."
Miggs played with his tie, smacking it against his chest. "He was very combative…even handcuffed."
Susan folded her arms over her middle. She had never seen Miggs, a veteran of the graveyard shift in the E.R., act like this. He was the kind of doctor that came across as unflappable, someone who could wade through the unmitigated chaos of gunshot wounds, stabbings and OD's and still manage to throw around a joke or two with the scared young residents. Right now, however, he was bouncing on his toes, giving off an unsettled air that made the nurses jittery and left Susan curious. She wanted to ask him if he was all right, but that would probably be unprofessional. Instead, she studied her shoes, allowed herself to get annoyed at that ugly scuff. Black polish. Maybe she still had some left in her odds and ends draw at home.
"We're good here," the nurse said, rolling away the portable cart with the blood pressure monitor. "Watch the dressing on his back, though, in case he bleeds through."
"I got this," Susan said, hoping her assurance would be enough to restore calm. Sometimes, she didn't feel half as confident as she sounded. Not now, though. Now she felt just fine.
"What's his name?" she asked Miggs before he sidled out the door.
The doctor blinked at her from behind his rimless glasses. "John Doe for now," he said. "Guy didn't have any I.D. on him, but he says his name is Michael. His clothes are in a bag on the chair over there. I wouldn't bother looking, though. No wallet."
"That's all right, we'll get to know each other," Susan said. She offered Miggs a final nod, her expression casual, as if she were about to have lunch with an old friend. Although to be honest, these initial consultations reminded her somewhat of a blind date, the perfect storm of anxiety, excitement and curiosity all stirred into one potent mix. Without meaning to, she rocked forward on the balls of feet, her soles pressing against the floor with an obnoxious squeak.
The door clicked closed behind Miggs and she enjoyed the emptiness of the room. It was just them now, her and Michael…or John Doe. Hmmm. Susan chewed on the inside of her lower lip. She decided to go with Michael. It was much friendlier than John Doe and if he was comfortable with that name, she thought he should have it.
The patient was lying quiet on the bed, so still that she watched his chest for a few seconds to make sure that he was still breathing. He didn't rattle the handcuffs. He didn't curse or spit at her. But his appearance, well, she had to admit, it was a bit daunting. Something about all those tattoos and his eyes. He had such angry eyes, eyes that projected a sense of offense or affront, eyes that hinted at abused dignity. Of humiliation.
For an instant, she felt terribly, terribly sorry for him, as if she shared his shame, as if they were both being debased somehow by this encounter.
But that was a silly thought and entirely unwelcome in her otherwise analytical mind. After all, there would be time enough for sympathy later.
Susan kept her hands folded over her middle as she approached him, stopping about a foot away from the bed railing. The I.V. sent a steady drip of medicine into a vein in his left arm. They were probably giving him something for the pain. Eric had said that he'd torn up his back pretty bad, although the injury was supposedly self-inflicted.
Susan raised an eyebrow. She had never seen a mutilation of the shoulder blades before. But either way, it had to hurt.
She let the silence settle around them, establishing questionable ease, and, Susan hoped, trust. A small, if not bland smile lifted her lips.
"Hello, Michael. Your name's Michael, right?"
A stiff nod. Curt. Restrained. There was absolutely nothing hysterical about this patient, only a sort of meditative calm that seemed almost inhuman.
If it was possible for a human to be inhuman, which Susan knew was entirely plausible.
"Well hi, Michael," she said evenly. "I'm Dr. Holm. I work for the psych department here at L.A. General. If it's all right, I would like to talk to you a bit. Can you tell me what brought you in here tonight?"
Michael swallowed, the strange black script on his throat rising with the movement of his Adam's apple. Dressed in a white hospital gown, he was still surprisingly intimidating.
"You humans," Michael said, "are exceptionally cruel."
His voice shocked her a bit. It definitely wasn't what she was expecting. He had an accent of some kind, but she couldn't really place it. There was a practiced roughness to his speech…and a hint of elegance, refinement. Maybe he wasn't from L.A.? Susan was tempted to ask him, but she held off. All in good time.
"Are you talking about the police?" she asked. "The men who arrested you tonight?"
"Unfortunate," Michael said, "for them." He swallowed again. "I am going to ask you to release me now, although I know you won't. But I am going to ask, at least."
"I can't do that, I'm sorry," Susan said. "And if I did release you, it would be into police custody. Do you want to tell me why you were arrested?"
His mouth straightened into a hard line. Susan found herself marveling at his self-righteous fury. It was so direct, so focused, intriguing the clinician in her. What motivated this man? His mystery was enticing, and for the first time, she forgot to be sympathetic, disregarding his humanity in favor of academic interest. Psychiatry liked to label people and Susan loved the orderliness of the art. But the meaning behind this man eluded her. She felt as though Michael were observing her from afar, gazing down from on high, passing judgment on something that was less definable than science.
Maybe that's why easygoing Miggs had been so jittery with this guy. There was something off about him. Not wrong, just off.
"I was too slow," Michael said at length. He kept perfectly still when he spoke, ignoring the jumble of noises that filled the nighttime hospital. Outside the room, beyond their tiny haven, the foot traffic was heavy. Susan listened to the grinding of the wheels on a stretcher, the calculated beep of medical equipment. What a chaotic world we live in.
"You were too slow?" she repeated, allowing just a little of her confusion to show.
Michael seemed annoyed at her lack of understanding. "I would not have been arrested," Michael explained, "if I only had only been a bit faster. Quicker to the draw. I was armed. I could have killed them both."
His revelation unnerved her…slightly. Susan uncrossed her arms, her body craving motion. "That would have been murder," she said. "Why do you feel like you have to hurt people? Why did you hurt yourself?"
"Murder is a subjective term," he countered. She expected him to get agitated then, but he didn't. His heart monitor beeped steadily. His pulsed stayed at an even 88. "I said I wanted to kill them. When you are all dead in an hour, will that be murder too?"
He was trying to drag her into a debate, let her get bogged down in semantics. Nonetheless, Susan had to admire his command of language. There was a certain philosophical bent to his phrasing, a timeless quality that could be fascinating if observed in a research setting. But then she caught herself, remembering her place and her situation. She was starting to play Clarice Starling to his Hannibal Lecter. Not good.
"You said we're all going to be dead in an hour," she replied, searching his reaction for some hint of paranoia. But this guy was calm. Cool as a cucumber, her Grandma would say. Completely unruffled.
Susan moved a step closer to his bed, gave him what little trust she had in the hopes that he would repay it. "Why do you think that? Are you going to try to hurt more people?"
Michael's gaze never faltered. "No," he said, "but He will."
Was this a case of a Dissociative identity disorder? Voices inside his head? It almost seemed too textbook to her, too clichéd. Was he intentionally leading her to believe that he was unstable?
Susan turned her head to the side, broke eye contact for a moment. She had to remind herself that there were a bunch of policemen outside the room. But since when did she ever get nervous around a patient? Maybe Miggs wasn't too far off base with this one.
"Who is He?" she asked pointedly.
A hint of a smile now. His teeth were white and even. "God."
"And God talks to you?"
"He used to talk to you as well, Susan, but you've stopped listening."
Her face colored a little. Susan knew she hadn't told him her first name and it wasn't on her I.D. tag. Michael must have heard it from Miggs or one of the nurses. Her blush faded and she kept up her mild grin.
"Is religion very important to you?" she asked. Ah, they were really getting to the meat of it now, she felt. She almost wanted to ask him outright about the angel business Eric had mentioned, but that would definitely be jumping the gun a little. Patience. Patience in everything.
Because she was determined to help this man. He deserved it, as did every human being that passed into her care, as did all the patients whose files sat on her desk. Susan liked to think she was something along the lines of an incurable optimist, at least when it came to psychiatry. Her graduate school days had been fueled by her sustained conviction that no disorder, no errant fluctuation of brain waves or unbalanced chemistry or psychological trauma, could ever truly overcome a person. She had faith in that way. She felt that the core of humanity, whatever it was, the soul, the heart, would always exist unaltered in its truest state. She thought that hope was underrated and held onto it as the only thing of absolute permanency in the world, as the only-
"Hope," Michael said, scattering her thoughts with a single word. "In the midst of all this darkness, you still have hope."
She dropped her hands into her pockets, aware, suddenly, that her fingers were tingling. "Excuse me?" Susan asked, her voice a bit louder than she intended it to be.
His smile shrank, but the ageless echo in his eyes, the indefinable, the undiagnosable, remained. "You already know what I am," Michael said. "Will you help me?"
Susan was about to answer him, was about to offer him the same assurances that she had given to so many other patients. Yes, that's why I'm here, I'm here to help. She was about to tell him all that and truly mean it when the room went dark.
The lights in the room flickered, the back-up generators kicking in just in time to hold off what seemed to be a power outage. Susan looked around her, bewildered, as if she had been overcome by madness and then restored to sanity, plunged back into the icy cold water of reality. She blinked once, slowed her breathing and consciously plugged back into the world around her. Two orderlies were talking loudly in the hall. The P.A. system crackled with static as a code was called. Feet smacked against the linoleum floor. Michael's heart monitor beeped shrilly
Susan looked at him. He wasn't smiling anymore.
"It's too late," Michael said.
But Susan didn't believe that the world was going to end. She didn't believe him at all.
"Wanna bet?" she asked.
Michael's frown deepened. His heart rate, however, remained at 88.
Author's Note: The numerous references to Michael's heart rate were inspired by a brilliant section of prose in Thomas Harris's "Silence of the Lambs" describing Doctor Lector's almost inhuman calm while in a murderous frenzy. Michael, of course, isn't anything like Hannibal, but he does seem to possess an otherworldly levelheadedness. ;)
Thanks so much for reading! If you have a free minute, please leave me a review. As a writer, I thrive on feedback from my readers. Chapter three is in the works and should be posted soon. Until then, take care and be well!