Flashback:
Side Story - Reasoning
The first time O'Malley killed something, he was only four.
Of course, it was nothing huge. It was just a beetle that he found under his bed. It'd been a complete accident. O'Malley had just been sitting on the floor, holding it between his fingers and watching the legs wave around in the air frantically. And then a few moments after that... smoosh.
"Mamaaaaaa!"
His mother had been sitting on the couch, reading a magazine. She vaguely acknowledged her son tugging on her dress, but didn't look up.
"Mama! Mama! I finded a beetle! And it was making clicky noises, it was all, clicky clicky clicky! And then I picked it up and it was all swish and then I was holding it between my fingers and it was all swish and then—"
"Darling, your mother is trying to concentrate on something."
"But I can't put the beetle back together! It exploded! How do I put it back together?"
His mother blinked, then looked down at him over her magazine. She had a miniature freak out once she realised O'Malley had been tugging on her dress with hands that were covered in beetle guts, but once that freakout was over, she immediately dragged O'Malley to the bathroom to help him wash his hands.
"Hands under the water, okay?"
O'Malley put his hands behind his back. "But they have pieces of the beetle on them, and you need all the pieces to put him back together again."
"Look, sweetie... you can't put a beetle back together."
"Why not?"
"Because... look, wash your hands first." When O'Malley continued to hide his hands behind his back, his mother started singing. "It's fun to wash your hands, and I know you understand, so washy washy clean, scrub scrub!" She gently tugged his arms towards the sink, started helping him wash the gunk off. "We start by washing palm to palm, between each finger we must rub..."
"Now the back of the hands, it's such a simple plan..." O'Malley chimed in. He knew the hand-washing song by heart, his mother had been singing it to him for years.
"So washy washy clean, scrub scrub," they both sang together.
Once they had gone through the entire song, and his hands were nice and clean, O'Malley's mother sat him down on the couch to explain why it was impossible to put a beetle back together.
"You see, sweetie... you know how once you accidentally tore your teddy bear and the nanny stitched it back up?"
O'Malley nodded seriously.
"Well, that is because teddies only have fluff inside. Fluff is something that can be found easily and put back inside easy. You don't have to be an expert to sew up a teddy bear. Because all teddy bears need is fluff. But living people have lots of squishy parts on the inside. Like the heart and brain. They all need to be connected and working for living things to move and breathe and do all the fun things. But when a living thing is smooshed, then the smooshed parts stop working and the unsmooshed parts can't work without the rest."
"And then what?"
"And then they stop working for good. They die. Like Grandpa."
"Grandpa was smooshed?" O'Malley asked, looking alarmed.
"Well, not exactly. But parts of him stopped working. Smooshing just makes it happen faster."
"So... if one thing stops working, I will not work?" O'Malley asked, eyes wide.
"Well, not exactly. It doesn't happen to kids as much as grandpas. As long as they wash their hands and don't get nasty germs from smooshed bugs! Nasty germs sometimes make parts stop working. But sometimes people can be fixed if they get a bit smooshed. Doctors can fix people."
"Aren't you a doctor, mama?"
"No, I'm a nurse. It's different. Besides, not even doctors can fix bugs, because they're so tiny that we can't find a small enough needle to sew them up with." His mother nudged him. "Now go and play in your room, your mother wants to finish her magazine before your father gets home."
A few days later, O'Malley found another beetle. This time, he squished it on purpose because he wanted to see all the squishy insides. He couldn't see them, though. He just saw gunk. He thought maybe he wasn't smooshing them right, so for the next few months he kept trying to squish bugs. He could never really see the insides that his mother talked about. He didn't ask her about it again, instead just making sure he washed his hands every time he smooshed a bug so she wouldn't get angry.
Eventually, he gave up trying to see beetle insides and forgot about it until he was about seven years old, when he was wandering around outside. He wasn't really supposed to wander out of the house without the nanny's permission, but she had told him it was too hot to go outside without a hat and since he'd lost his hat he wasn't allowed to go outside. He had decided that it was a stupid rule.
It wasn't the first time he'd run off from the nanny. The nanny would complain to his parents, but they would dismiss it as 'boyish shenanigans.'
He'd been running around the street, dragging his pink teddy bear along with him, when he found a dead bird. One that had probably hit the electrical wires above. O'Malley tilted his head and prodded it with his foot, before making a mock gasp of shock and holding his teddy bear near it.
"Oh no! The birdie got shocked! It needs to go to hospital and see Dr. Strawberry!" he said, changing his voice to sound more gruff and bear-like. "Into the ambulance! Whooooooo, whooooooo!" He picked up the dead, stiff bird and started running back to the house, waving his teddy bear around like an airplane. "Zoom zoom, whooooooo!"
His nanny hadn't taken the fact that he brought a dead bird into the house well. She immediately took it from him and threw it in the bin, before locking him inside his room. O'Malley hadn't been happy about it. He'd looked forward to pretending he and his teddy were doctors. And if he could never see an insect's guts because they were tiny, he'd be able to see the ones a bird had. They would have been bigger.
Stupid nanny ruining his interests.
O'Malley couldn't find another dead bird. And he couldn't catch a live one. Too difficult. But while he'd been confined to his room, he'd been looking out the window. He'd seen the cat that lived next door. An old, fat, cranky cat that always scratched him when he went near it.
No-one would miss a nasty cat like that.
Catching it had been hard, because it kept scratching him. He'd had to hide the cat in the garden shed overnight before going inside, and even then his mother had been concerned with the amount of scratches he had on his arms. Stupid cat.
But kitty insides were much more interesting than bug insides. He could actually see the bits and pieces. It was awesome. Much more interesting than the medical books his mother had. O'Malley had looked at the pictures in those and it had been boring. Especially boring when compared to real insides.
One cat just wasn't enough to satisfy the little boy's curiosity about animal insides. About how they worked and which parts you could smoosh without the animal dying. He found a lot of animals over the next couple of months. That's how long he lasted before someone found out. His parents didn't use the garden shed except for stashing random stuff that they wanted out of the way. But once he stayed in there too long and the nanny came to check on him.
"Dr. Strawberry, you may make the incision into the pink thing over there," O'Malley said, waving the teddy bear around, while holding the knife in the other hand. "And then we will—"
"Are you in there?"
O'Malley yelped a little at the interruption, and the hammering on the wooden door. "I'll be out in a minute! I was just looking for something! I left my teddy in here!" Which was true, sometimes O'Malley left his teddy bear in there to 'guard the patients.'
"Why would you leave it in the shed?"
O'Malley only had enough time to shove his newest patient, a raccoon, in a box before the shed door swung open.
"You wander off so much... I should be getting paid for every time I have to find you," she muttered under her breath. Then she frowned, wrinkled her nose. "Smells awful in here."
"Yes, it does. So we should go now." O'Malley tugged on her hand. "I don't like it in here, I was just finding my teddy bear."
The nanny didn't move. "Smells... rotten." Her eyes narrowed. "You didn't bring in another dead bird, did you?"
"No," O'Malley said truthfully. "Can we leave now?"
It was dark in the shed. Which was probably why it took the nanny a while to notice the bloodstains. And the bloodstains, unfortunately, led straight to the box O'Malley kept his 'patients' in. A box that he hadn't really cleaned out since he started on animals.
There was a lot of screaming. O'Malley thought the nanny was being kind of a wuss about it, honestly. It was just a few dead animals. Even if a couple of them weren't really recognisable as cats anymore. Still. No different from carving up a turkey.
The nanny immediately quit after that, but not before telling O'Malley's parents all about it. Telling them that their kid needed help. They did listen to her. But afterwards, once she had left for good, they asked O'Malley why he had all the dead animals in the first place.
O'Malley lied and said they were already dead, and that he was trying to put them back together again. His parents believed him. Or at least they pretended to. It hurt a lot less to dismiss O'Malley's behavior as more 'boyish shenanigans' instead of admitting that he liked to cut apart animals for funsies. They never told anyone else, just made him promise not to do it again.
O'Malley was a bit more discreet after that. And it didn't take too long for O'Malley to get bored with animals. People were much more interesting. Which was why, when he got older, O'Malley became a surgeon.
Later on, Doc would express a disbelief that he could ever apply to be a surgeon without wanting to help people. But it wasn't that. It wasn't a desire to hurt people, either. That came later. It was just because O'Malley loved seeing how people ticked. He liked studying the nuts and bolts of the full, fleshy machine.
When he was a proper, legal surgeon, he never killed a patient on purpose. After all, that'd be incredibly stupid. They kept records, they'd get suspicious if too many people died when he worked. If he kept killing people, they wouldn't let him work on the more interesting cases. If they let him continue being a surgeon at all.
So, when on the job, he stayed a good, professional surgeon. Putting on a likable, charming personality was easy in those days. No-one suspected a thing. There was no reason to, at first. He wasn't doing anything illegal all through college and med school. When he became a surgeon, it turned out he was pretty good at it. For a couple of years, it was all well and good.
But newbie surgeons didn't get the most interesting operations. Sometimes he got to watch, sure, but it wasn't quite the same. Being a surgeon was an interesting job and he wouldn't trade it for any other occupation. But he got antsy. He got bored. And when O'Malley got bored, his mind immediately started working on things that would make him less bored.
Cutting people apart was the thing he found most interesting, and the restrictions on how much he could cut was what annoyed him most. Was it really that much of a surprise that he turned to cutting apart other people? Cutting apart healthy strangers?
The idea came into his head a long time before he went through with it. Just a year after he started work, just after his internship ended. It was just one stray thought. O'Malley had been standing outside the operating room, washing his hands and frustrated that he was stuck on another appendectomy. Just cutting off a useless piece of flesh. Cutting exactly where they told him.
And there was just that one stray thought.
They wouldn't be able to tell me where to cut if I found someone outside the hospital and... The thought didn't even really finish before O'Malley interrupted the thought with: Don't think about that. It's a stupid idea. He returned to washing his hands.
The thought never really left him, though. Any time he got bored, that thought returned. The thought of just wandering into the nastier part of the city, the part filled with the homeless and criminals. The areas filled with the junk of human society. People that wouldn't be missed. Just finding someone, dumping them in the trunk of his car, dragging them home and—
He entertained the thought for eighteen months before going through with it.
It started with just random homeless people. They were usually just sleeping in the gutters, and the majority of them were probably diseased or starving, not enough strength to really put up a struggle. He'd always grab them at night, obviously. If anyone ever saw him bundling a homeless man or woman into the trunk of his car, they never reported it. Not that O'Malley was aware of, anyway.
At first it was just the fascination with the body. With the nuts and bolts. It started like that. The first person he kidnapped was an old man. Beard covering the majority of his face, dressed in rags. Typical aging hobo.
He'd actually used anesthetic for him. He hadn't been interested in the pain. He'd just wanted to really have a proper look at all the organs. All of them, not just the ones other people told him to cut. And this hobo had some funky stuff going on in his stomach. It was really quite fascinating.
The second and third ones had gone the same way. Out for the entire procedure. They'd died quietly in their sleep, even if it was because someone had been shoving a scalpel into them while they were napping.
The fourth one would have been the same, except that O'Malley had been low on anesthetic (which he'd pilfered from the hospital to begin with) and taken a bit too long with cutting apart their kidneys. They'd woken up in the middle of it, just as O'Malley was reflecting on the fact that this person was probably a heavy smoker. They'd started screaming, writhing around, making a big mess of things before O'Malley quickly slashed their throat to shut them up.
He regretted it immediately afterwards. Because when the man under the knife started screaming... this wave of exhilaration just crashed through O'Malley. It'd been the most thrilled about anything that O'Malley had felt in his life. Just a massive surge of pure excitement.
He never used anesthetic again, although he remembered to muffle them before he started. No two people reacted quite the same to the pain. It was so fascinating that O'Malley wondered countless times why he had waited so long to start killing properly.
Since he wasn't bound by hospital rules, he didn't have to wear plastic gloves. He could feel the texture of the organs and the feel of the liquids without any plastic blocking the sensations. But even so, he always scrubbed his hands clean before and afterwards. Old habits die hard, and that'd been a habit ever since he was a little kid. Washy washy clean, scrub scrub.
It went on for many years. Homeless people and random criminals weren't enough, once he became interested in the reactions. He found victims all over the place. All of them different. It was more interesting when the victims didn't have beard covering their faces. It was easier to see their expressions that way.
Countless people went under his knife. Among the people he tried to kill and torture, only two ever escaped on the outside, the first of whom was Church. The second one led to him eventually getting found out, though it had really been a streak of bad luck. What were the odds that he and his escaped victim shopped at the same store?
When he was finally caught, more than twenty years after he started, he was thrown in prison. When he was first arrested, he was interrogated as to why he killed so many people. Trying to figure out if there was a reason behind all the killing. Barring the fact that most of the early victims were homeless, none of his victims really had anything in common. They wanted to know why he did it.
Fact was, it was just interesting. It was exciting. It was fun. There was no other reason.
