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In Their Meadow All Starry With Flowers

Chapter 4

Will looked down at the papers spread out in front of him, and sighed. He'd arranged the drawings in chronological order so he could see the exact flow of the session, and to be honest the more he looked at them the more defeated he felt. There was no way the drawings in front of them had been done by a rational, normal mind, but then they were dealing with Nikola Tesla, normal and rational didn't apply here. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes,

"Just start again from the beginning, there's something you're missing here." He muttered. He picked the first few papers up, shuffled them into order and hit the "play" button on the Dictaphone he'd used to record the session.

There was a faint click and he heard his own low voice counting backwards from ten, then Tesla's withering comments and Helen's sharp admonishment. He heard himself sigh and comment that he thought the session was over and Tesla insisting that they try again to vociferous argument from both himself and Helen, then nothing but tortured, gurgling. He paused the tape at this point, mentally preparing himself, he could remember well enough the shocking change that came over his subject, and what came after. There had been a tiny frozen moment where he and Helen had both sat rooted to the spot as they registered that something dreadful was happening to the suddenly terrified Tesla. His eyes wide with shock Nikola appeared unable to move, his hand gripping the pencil so tightly that it splintered into shreds which stuck in his fingers as he struggled to breathe. Helen was the first to galvinize herself into action but it was no use, Nikola seemed to snap out of his paralysis, still unable to speak he grabbed for another pencil with his bleeding splintered hand,and began to sketch at lighting speed eyes tight shut. Will tried to bring him out of the trance, but no matter how loudly he counted or clapped he couldn't seem to get through, neither did Helen shouting his name or slapping his face, even her horrified begging, discretely erased from the Dictaphone by Will, fell on deaf ears.

He looked down at the sheaf of papers in his hands, and while trying to keep in mind all the sensory details of the room re-examined the shocking illustrations. They were bizarre half scenes, drawn as if seen through someone else's eyes but all the pictures were incomplete and it seemed, deliberately so. There was one of several laughing, jeering faces, all distorted beyond recognition, another of what appeared to be some kind of night club but as if through thick glass, another was a long thin hand, the fingers broken and twisted into odd angles. The most bizarre were the pages he'd filled with tiny figures of a girl floating as if held by strings over scribbled spirals. The girl was so clear and precisely drawn that Will could count her eyelashes but the scribble she was suspended over was often so violently drawn he'd torn the page. He was sure it was significant to the vampire's delusion, but as of yet, it's interpretation was impossible. His thoughts were interrupted by Helen poking her head round the door, coming in once she saw him look up,

"How is..." he began, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.

"He's stable for now, Henry's watching him but I can't be away for long, the sedatives only seem to be lasting a fraction of the time they should, so we need to work quickly" Will said nothing about the fact that Henry was perfectly capable of administering sedatives on his own and looked back at his papers.

"I've been going over and over the drawings and to be perfectly honest, if he was a regular patient I'd be recommending immediate sectioning and a course of anti-psychotics. But," He sighed, "We're talking about an abnormal genius with, uh, eccentric tendencies. Who knows what the inside of his head is meant to look like?" Helen held up a couple of the later drawings, one of a bleeding mouth, it's lower lip torn to expose pulped gums and missing teeth, the other a ill-defined sketch of what appeared to be a struggling girl pinioned beneath several contorted men.

"Well, I'm fairly sure that it shouldn't look like this." She said, her face grim. "No matter how bizarre or full of underlying evil you think Nikola is, this is not a product of his own mind."

"What?" Will looked concerned, "I'm sorry Magnus, as you said yourself, he's deluded. He's creating these fantasies and projecting the torment they cause onto a malevolent outside figure to assuage the guilt he feels for having them in the first place. I'm sorry but, these" He fanned out the pages "are him, and he just doesn't want to face up to it. I need to be blunt about this, and I know it's not what you want to hear, but it's my opinion that he's going through a psychotic breakdown and it's only a matter of time before he hurts himself, or someone else." Helen's hands tightened on the pages she was holding, and said nothing. Will knew what was going through her mind, she was telling herself that she wasn't going to let Tesla slip away, not so soon after losing Ashley. It was only a few weeks since she had finally accepted that Ashley was never coming back and only Nikola hadn't flinched away when she'd been looking for someone to take the pain out on. John had simply vanished, looking for vengeance in his own, bloody way. Will, to his shame, had been so wrapped up in his own sorrow after the death of Clara during the fight for the London Sanctuary that he hadn't the strength to cope with the sheer scale of Magnus' grief. Henry had hidden away with the Big Guy and Kate had refused to engage. So she'd poured all her anger and hurt out on her old friend and for once he didn't try to make fun of her or offer solutions, he'd just pulled her to him and let her scream it out into his cold chest.

Helen looked down at the horror that had poured from Nikola's subconscious,

"Will, I know you're the person I can rely on to look at this dispassionately, I know you don't particularly care for Nikola," she waved away his interjection, "But thank you for giving me your advice. I don't expect you to count everyone here as a friend and the fact that you don't like Nikola is useful to us as you can keep us focused and impersonal. But, I am telling you this," she gestured at the papers on the desk, "This is not Nikola. If he'd drawn pictures of vampires crushing the human race or him ruling the world with an iron fist, then maybe I could believe it. You of all people know how out of control his ego is." Her mouth quirked into a small smile, "Believe me, if these had been the delusional fantasies of Nikola Tesla, they'd all be centred around him and I can't see a single reference to him anywhere in these. There's nothing we know he cares about, I mean, there's no reference to any of us, his own vampire race or his work. There's no drawing of himself, or even a single reference to electricity. Trust me, there is no way Nikola would leave himself out." Will took a deep breath, about to point out that Magnus had never studied the workings of the deranged mind like he had, but she spoke again before he could get his thoughts out.

"Will, what's this?" She'd picked up one of the sheets with the marionette like girl and scribble drawings.

"I'm not sure but he filled about four pages with it before his condition deteriorated. It seems to be integral to the delusions he's having" Helen stood up, holding the page close to her face,

"I know this" she murmured "I'm sure I've seen it before."

What? Where?" asked Will confused.

"I can't remember, but this picture, or a version of this picture. I've seen it, I knew it well, a long time ago. I just can't place where." She frowned. "I have to work on this, can you continue studying these and the audio? There may still be something significant" She turned on her heel and purposefully strode out.

"No, it's fine Magnus," Muttered Will exasperatedly, "It's fine, leave me to try to find sense in the freakish torture fantasies of a crazy vampire man that you, for no good reason, think is an ok guy regardless of the fact he's tried to kill you and unleash a pack of vampire clones on Rome. No really, it's fine!"

Henry tapped at his data tablet in the dim light of the hospital wing, Nikola had finally quieted down a few minutes ago and apart from a huge spike in endorphins just before calmed down he couldn't find any reason why. Especially as the sedatives Magnus had given him should have been wearing off rather than kicking in, but no matter what analysis algorithms he used, all the monitors told him that apart from being a little dehydrated, Nikola seemed to be sleeping comfortably. The door opened and Henry looked up expecting to see Magnus, but Kate stood in the doorway holding a cup of coffee.

"Big Guy thought you could use this, I brought it as I was passing." She put it down on top of the monitor bank and looked over at Nikola,

"So how's Chuckles? He doesn't look so bad, from the way everyone's been freaking out I was expecting at least a straight jacket or something." Henry rolled his eyes,

"Trust me, it was bad enough when we brought him in, I'd rather deal with sleeping Tesla than full on, whacked out, crazy Tesla"

What happened? I was over at the main lab giving Steve his crickets and by the time I got out, you and Magnus were in here strapping him down." She raised her eyebrows at him "Come on, spill, did he really try to eat Will's face right off?" Henry chuckled despite the situation,

"No, not quite. There was no face eating, just lots and lots of screaming. Magnus said they were doing some kind of hypnosis experiment because of Tesla being all twitchy this week and, well as you can see, it went very very wrong. When we got there he'd thrown Will into the wall, upturned the desk, pulled it into the corner of the room and was hiding behind it having a hysterical fit. We had to pull his claws a full inch out of the desk leg"

"I wondered what that was, he's been weirder than normal, I was having a snoop in his lab..."

"What? How? He's got it locked down" Interjected Henry incredulously,

"I have ways" she smiled, "Anyway, he's somehow made a whirlpool in a big glass vat and this thing that looks like an x-ray but if you turn it on it just makes this hideous noise. There's no doubt about it, Electro-vamp is definitely nuts."

"And is that your professional opinion?" Came a groggy voice from the other side of the monitor bank. Grey and shaking Nikola held on to the table for support. They'd been so engrossed in their conversation that neither of them had noticed him struggle out of bed.

"Obviously I need to up my security." He continued, "As you seem incapable of respecting people''s privacy Miss Freelander" He looked down at the sensor patches on his bare chest "Henry, what happened to me?" he whispered as his legs buckled beneath him.