"Sweetie," Jessica-the-nurse said to her, her voice kind, "would you please put this dress on for me? We have a nice young man coming over to talk to you." She looked at Jessica-the-nurse, not sure what to do for this soft voice that refused to order her around. She felt lost, confused, frightened by the off-kilter feel of this place that was safe, where he was not, and she took the simple frock anyway, rubbing the rough cotton between her fingers. It felt different from the slick smoothness of the gowns she was used to wearing and she looked at the blue cloth, looked at this color that was forbidden to her; white was normal, white was evil, white was always worn because the bright garnet of blood showed on it better, always better, and she stared at the blue longer than she thought she should, trying to understand why she was allowed to wear this color like her hair, like her eyes. Stiffly, she slipped off the metal table onto the metal floor, her swollen ankle flinching at the rug the other nurse had place there, and she felt tiny, filtering daggers of pain under the light weight of her small breasts, but she ignored it. They had left glass in the thin cuts under her round chest, glass they did not know about, and she knew better than to tell someone, because he would find out and get angry. He liked the glass and she pretended to like it, too, because that was how it was done.
She lifted the cotton dress and pulled it over herself, fitting it around her small head and over her thin shoulders, sliding her darkened arms through the short sleeves. A smile was on her face as she tried to stop it, a smile that was nonetheless tiny and nervous and scared. This dress she wanted to keep forever, it was so normal against her skin, brushing her sensitive flesh and not causing tiny bumps to rise in her skin, warm and filled with texture unlike the silk that fit her too tightly.
Jessica-the-nurse smiled back and walked to the door, opening it and letting in the Man.
--
Requiem: Cello
--
"Maxwell, if you try to pull any of that bizarre bullshit of yours in there," Wufei Chang warned in the slightly smoldering tone of voice he tended to always use, leaving the threat hanging in a manner that more than compensated for the lack of words. They walked in discord, Wufei in swift, business-like steps that betrayed his military background and stiff nature, steps that moved swiftly with legs that were long for a man of Chinese blood. His companion, a tall American with a thick chestnut braid, moved in loping, nearly lazy steps, lengthy legs stretching and pulling his body along.
"Wufei," he found need to remind his shorter companion, hands tucked into his pockets and a manila folder pinned to his narrow hip by his wrist, large duffel bag tossed over his shoulder, a rakish grin on his face, "I do happen to have some idea of what I'm doing. I kind of have a psychology degree and five years of practice." He thought that succinct enough to leave out the bit where he had managed to have a successful turn out ratio of three out of every five, which, in the already half-crazed world of After Colonization, was pretty damn good, if he did say so himself, and instead they turned a corner, one before the other, moving further down the slowly slanting halls of the hospital/sanitarium, a clock with one long hand and one short, preceding and following and switching order and rhythm.
"Of course you have a psychology degree," Wufei said congenially, or as congenially as he could generally be expected to be. Duo, the whip-o-will man standing somewhere between six feet and the ceiling, grinned in advance preparation for the punch line, one meant to insult in the manner of old acquaintances, and he was left pleasantly rewarded. "I simply question how many female instructors you had to sleep with in order to get it." The Oriental man allowed himself a small, triumphant smile, a bare peaking of the corners of his mouth.
"Ah," said Duo in reply, nodding sagely as he pulled his hands out of his pockets and flipped open the manila folder as they approached the sanitarily white waiting room of the V.V.C. Sanitarium, reserved for doctors and workers meant to aid the people behind the hydraulic glass door leading to the main hall, from which the many rooms branched off. "That's a question you shall ask and I shall never answer." Wufei nodded his approval of the suitably enigmatic answer, one for an old running joke between the five excommunicated pilots, and split away, headed in the direction of the other hallway from the waiting room, one that led to the section tucked away for the criminally insane. He might have pitied the crazed souls Wufei would mock today, if he wasn't caring for patients the criminally insane had place in the 'loony bin' as well.
"Hey, babe," he winked in greeting to the blonde behind the desk and she winked right back, adding a lascivious smirk to boot. He laughed softly, shaking his head as he pulled the i.d. card from the folder, a simple rectangle of white plastic with a blue stripe running parallel with the left length, a complex bar code imprinted half on the colored stripe, half below it in order to make stealing the identity impossible.
"Well, Dr. Maxwell," the receptionist, a buxom, flirtatious woman by the name of Mina who could have been a model had she not felt such overwhelming pity for those less fortunate, began, handing the card back as she studied the flat computer screen, giggling when he managed to sneak a kiss onto the back of her golden hand, "you've got Aimee Cortez in Room B-902. She's got a standing guard on orders of one Doctor Anders, so you'll need to present your i.d. and the case card, just to be sure." She turned to look at him and flashed her beaming, million-watt smile. "Still on for Friday?"
"What do you think?" he asked sardonically, grinning when she made a move to mock-slap his arm and stepping quickly through the doorway when the hydraulic door hissed open, a burst of compressed air shooting out of the frame, cold and forceful. He made a disgruntled noise at the unwelcome feeling and continued walking, passing B-896, B-899, and stopped at the door of B-902, a little surprised at the short distance he had to walk after the several minutes of twining paths to get to the sanitarium. The guard, a thin young man with a set jaw and a shaven chin - Duo rubbed self-consciously at his light stubble, suddenly, guiltily reminded of oversleeping and having to forego such formalities as breakfast, shaving, and a morning shower on the rush to find a late bus to drive him the hour to the hospital - staring with subdued interest at the rather unusual psychologist, gave him a worn smile and requested, in a bored monotone, for personal i.d. and patient i.d. Fiddling with the wallet in his pocket, he managed to find his personal i.d. after a few false tries and the revelation that he did, indeed, have a library card, expired though it may have been, and presented both required forms of identification.
The door swung open before he could enter, an old-fashioned door complete with swiveling handle and oiled hinges, and a small, rotund woman sporting a nametag with nothing more than 'Jessica, RN' printed on it stepped out. "Oh, good, you're here," she said in a voice that was rather unenthused. "I," she hesitated for a moment, and then plunged headlong into her concerns and advice.
"I'm hardly thrilled to find she's already supposed to be getting psych'ed," she confessed, arching a heavy black eyebrow at his ghost of a beard and he hid it with his hand in what he hoped was a casual, contemplative gesture, "and I don't condone this at all. The poor dear's only been here for a week and we haven't heard a single word from her, even if Dr. Anders swears her vocal cords are perfectly fine. I'll let this happen mostly because I ain't her mother and I ain't her doctor, but I'd like it if you'd be careful around her. She's skittish and easily upset, and she doesn't like being touched anywhere but her face. So…just be nice to her, okay?" She flushed, somewhat embarrassed at her outburst, but he was pleased to find the nurse didn't follow it with a nonassertive apology, to diffuse her stern words and unhappy tone.
"Don't worry," he smiled innocently, knowing completely how his heart-shaped face and mirthful violet eyes, framed as they were by feminine eyelashes, affected the opposite gender, and he hoped the unwelcome hair on his chin wasn't setting it off. He'd occasionally met women who didn't like his braid either, so it was to some relief when her face softened slightly, still a far cry from gentle, but, hell, he had to take what he got. "I'm only here to help."
Jessica eyed him suspiciously for a moment more, and sighed, her shoulders drooping as she shook her head forlornly. "I hope you do help," she admitted, opening the door and ushering him in. He was surprised when she didn't follow, closing, instead, the door and, he assumed, waiting outside with the young-neat-shaven guard.
Duo took his first look at Aimee Cortez, knowing the first name had been assigned her by the good Dr. Anders that they might have something to call her, and saw that, had she been fed better, loved better, she could be beautiful.
As it was, she was a waif of a person, pale as moonlight with dark, dark circles under her eyes that only accented her decisively French cheekbones, arching and slender in round curves. Her arms, wrapped around her knees, pulled to her breasts, were gaunt, skin painted onto bones with weak muscles injured, no doubt, by the mottled colors and scabs lining those thin arms and what he could see of her legs, naught more than two tiny feet, pale and Irish, with small, perfect toes, the foot on her right leg dwarfed by a swollen, violet ankle. She had dark eyes, the kind of deep blue he had seen only on the face of a Japanese mercenary, but hers were not the cold, cruel spheres he had possessed, but the quiet, raging, stormy, smoke-traced ones of a swirling ocean.
The rush of sorrow in his body caught him by surprise, the sudden wave of empathy, of knowing this agony painted on her body that he had never known, felt, touched before, and he barely managed to paste his standard smile onto his lips, feeling as if he could never smile in her presence without feeling a guilt. And it was this horrible malignance that made him do a few quick calculations in his head, taking the age the scant file had given him and subtracting the years back to the war of AC 195. Eighteen now, five then, an orphan of war, a child most likely sold into bondage for a profit during the fearful winter following the war, during the uprising of Mariemaia some called 'Endless Waltz,' thinking it poetic and lovely. He had heard of the things people had done during the winter of AC 196, in desperation for money during the famine and rebellion.
But he still smiled, and she tilted her head to one side, curious, arms unfolding from their places about her knees and bony fingers touching the table she sat on, the bed she slept in at night, thick blankets tucked away in a storage bin in the far corner of the ceiling. She kept her knees at her breasts, afraid of punishment, and studied the Man who smiled at her and pulled a duffel bag from his shoulder, and she remembered sharp things he pulled from a duffel bag once, he-who-she-fears. Don't be afraid, Jessica-the-nurse whispered in her mind, he's a good man, a kind man. No sharp objects, she moaned in despair in her head, swallowed in the shame of knowing she is a bad girl for fearing the sharp objects, he told her so.
He had long hair, hair longer than any she had ever seen, longer than hers had ever been, longer than the other women with dark skin and pale hair she saw time after time in the rooms of pain, screaming in something that wasn't pain, something that turned her stomach like the pain did. His hair wasn't pale though and it was not tainted blue like hers, or the oily greasy black of him, but a color like the strong, big tree that stood outside her precious window, a deep brown. Braided and twisted, with a careful knot at the end to keep it in place, and she wondered what it would be like to have long, long hair. Bad thought, she reminded herself, that's a bad thought to want long hair when I'm meant to have short hair to tug and wrap and pull.
And when the Man looked up at her, she shrank back, tried to hide behind her knees and the cotton blue, behind the air, because he had purple eyes, too thick and deep to be human, in a face shaped like a heart, strong and nice, but he had hair on his chin, just like him, hair that hurt and scraped her skin raw until she bled, crying, and she hated the hair, hated the scraping roughness of it, even if it was the same brown as the long hair she wanted.
"Aimee," he said in a voice that wasn't deep and guttural like him, nor carefully sweet and gentle like Jessica-the-nurse, but an unbidden huskiness that rolled around in her mind, "I've brought you a toy. I know it's not much," he injected humor in it, humor she didn't understand, humor was foreign, "but it's all I could afford, me being a doctor and all. You like?" A doll with black hair, curling and stylized and fake, around a perfect female body, in a simple white dress with a bouncy skirt, and she leaned forward and he leaned forward, and she took it from him, ignoring the smile on his face.
Me, she thought, remembering what the other doctor had told her to do with a doll. Pretend it was her and show him what life was, what she was supposed to do, what was right. The hair was wrong and she fisted her hand in it, pulling it from the scalp of the doll, tearing clumps from softened plastic and arranging them carefully on her table bed, looking at the Man for encouragement. His eyebrows, lovely brown, were wrinkled together.
Duo had never seen a patient mutilate a doll before and he was therefore a little miffed that the one time he brought a high-quality doll, it was the one patient that would mutilate it. Aimee tore at its hair, ripping large chunks of the thick hair out as she held the doll clamped in her legs, lowered into a crossed position before her, and she was displaying an unusually scientific methodical precision in sorting the hairs. He'd stood up as soon as she began tearing, walking over to lean near her and watching her sort the hairs whenever she had torn out enough hair for her to warrant a break. She sorted them into shades, then lengths within the shades, and was moving them into a pattern, English letters without capitalization, upside down from his angle, and he moved carefully to crane his neck around, displaying a patience most people believed he didn't have, passing over the several strands she had clumped together as indefinite. "Miedo?" he read, and she started, pupils dilating as she turned her head to stare, and he stepped back several times, recognizing distrust when he saw it. Miedo, he committed to memory, figuring it was, in the least, worth a shot.
He heard a ripping sound, like cloth being torn by hand, and he walked forward again, almost laughing at the absurdity of his repetition, and saw she had stripped a small piece of her dress off. "Aimee, are you okay?" he asked, pitching his voice into a comforting level. She spared him a curious glance and lifted the scrap of fabric, trying to fit it over the doll's head in place of the black spots signifying where thick, manufactured hair had once resided.
She was trying to make the doll like her, he realized, and he watched, a bit impressed, as she fingered off a bit of the gauze on her arm to use to stick the blue scrap on the doll's naked head. Then, in a single, angry movement, she tore the white dress off the doll, nearly unsettling the toy and sending it to the floor, shredding the cheap accessory into a flurry of scraps, grabbing one of the small arms and squeezing it. She held the doll up to him and motioned with her other hand at her arm, eyes alive with intelligence and telling, and she proceeded to snap the doll's arm once, twice, thrice, and she pulled it from its socket, dropping the butchered toy arm to the floor.
Before Duo could remember Jessica's warning, he had reached forward to calm the raging mind, his fingertips brushing her shoulder ever so gently, and she screamed. She screamed higher, louder, and twisted around, small, compact chest heaving with the force of her cry, and he saw a dark stain lining the cloth under the swell of her breasts, the kind of stain he remembered from war as blood, culminating in one place and turning fabric a dark maroon. "Shit," he swore, a tiny part of his mind asking God why exactly He always gave him the hard jobs, and he lunged forward, nearly leaping onto the table to grab at her, and his large hands planted on her upper arms, squeezing slightly to steady himself. She cut off her scream, fell into silence, and her eyes widened, the brief glimmer of brilliance he had seen there vanishing as her eyes brightened dangerously, then fell dim, collapsing into lifelessness, a defense mechanism that he could recall using time after time, to protect himself for years in his youth, thirteen years ago, and he swore again.
What a damn day.
Author's Notes: I would /love/ to write some happy, jovial crap at around this point, but that'll wait, as I've got some more angst to cover. If you've been reading this story (and I hope someone has!), please suspend disbelief for the moment. ;] Yes, Aimee Cortez is Ami Mizuno, but while I've decided to maintain her intelligence (or capability to learn), she was involved in some bad stuff in this story. So she has an excuse. I'll try to have the beginnings of romance in the third or fourth chapter - just the beginnings! And don't worry, Duo will eventually be the wiseass he always is and Aimee will learn more about physics than your average rocket scientist. Reviews are still highly desired, and I would be eternally grateful - this won't always be a dark fanfic, you know. That's why it's romance. *&.^* (Care to guess what 'miedo' means?)
V.V.C. (as utilized in the beginning of the sanitarium waiting room scene) is an acronym for 'Victims of Violent Crimes.' As the 'of' is not considered a major word (much as 'a,' 'an,' 'for,' and 'the' are not considered major words), it is neither capitalized nor given its own spoofy letter. I have no idea if V.V.C. is an actual term used in hospitals or sanitariums, but it sounds official and this is a piece of (science) fiction. My alibi, gentlemen. (And ladies.) The RN on Jessica's nametag stands for 'Registered Nurse,' an occupation my mom is reattending college for - because two degrees aren't enough already. They have a remarkably high level of power, as nurses go. Just short of doctor, I believe, and they have more hands on duty.
Standard disclaimer applies. Distributed to www.FanFiction.net.
Feedback is encouraged in the form of reviews and e-mails sent to alien_wolf@sailorjupiter.com.
She lifted the cotton dress and pulled it over herself, fitting it around her small head and over her thin shoulders, sliding her darkened arms through the short sleeves. A smile was on her face as she tried to stop it, a smile that was nonetheless tiny and nervous and scared. This dress she wanted to keep forever, it was so normal against her skin, brushing her sensitive flesh and not causing tiny bumps to rise in her skin, warm and filled with texture unlike the silk that fit her too tightly.
Jessica-the-nurse smiled back and walked to the door, opening it and letting in the Man.
--
Requiem: Cello
--
"Maxwell, if you try to pull any of that bizarre bullshit of yours in there," Wufei Chang warned in the slightly smoldering tone of voice he tended to always use, leaving the threat hanging in a manner that more than compensated for the lack of words. They walked in discord, Wufei in swift, business-like steps that betrayed his military background and stiff nature, steps that moved swiftly with legs that were long for a man of Chinese blood. His companion, a tall American with a thick chestnut braid, moved in loping, nearly lazy steps, lengthy legs stretching and pulling his body along.
"Wufei," he found need to remind his shorter companion, hands tucked into his pockets and a manila folder pinned to his narrow hip by his wrist, large duffel bag tossed over his shoulder, a rakish grin on his face, "I do happen to have some idea of what I'm doing. I kind of have a psychology degree and five years of practice." He thought that succinct enough to leave out the bit where he had managed to have a successful turn out ratio of three out of every five, which, in the already half-crazed world of After Colonization, was pretty damn good, if he did say so himself, and instead they turned a corner, one before the other, moving further down the slowly slanting halls of the hospital/sanitarium, a clock with one long hand and one short, preceding and following and switching order and rhythm.
"Of course you have a psychology degree," Wufei said congenially, or as congenially as he could generally be expected to be. Duo, the whip-o-will man standing somewhere between six feet and the ceiling, grinned in advance preparation for the punch line, one meant to insult in the manner of old acquaintances, and he was left pleasantly rewarded. "I simply question how many female instructors you had to sleep with in order to get it." The Oriental man allowed himself a small, triumphant smile, a bare peaking of the corners of his mouth.
"Ah," said Duo in reply, nodding sagely as he pulled his hands out of his pockets and flipped open the manila folder as they approached the sanitarily white waiting room of the V.V.C. Sanitarium, reserved for doctors and workers meant to aid the people behind the hydraulic glass door leading to the main hall, from which the many rooms branched off. "That's a question you shall ask and I shall never answer." Wufei nodded his approval of the suitably enigmatic answer, one for an old running joke between the five excommunicated pilots, and split away, headed in the direction of the other hallway from the waiting room, one that led to the section tucked away for the criminally insane. He might have pitied the crazed souls Wufei would mock today, if he wasn't caring for patients the criminally insane had place in the 'loony bin' as well.
"Hey, babe," he winked in greeting to the blonde behind the desk and she winked right back, adding a lascivious smirk to boot. He laughed softly, shaking his head as he pulled the i.d. card from the folder, a simple rectangle of white plastic with a blue stripe running parallel with the left length, a complex bar code imprinted half on the colored stripe, half below it in order to make stealing the identity impossible.
"Well, Dr. Maxwell," the receptionist, a buxom, flirtatious woman by the name of Mina who could have been a model had she not felt such overwhelming pity for those less fortunate, began, handing the card back as she studied the flat computer screen, giggling when he managed to sneak a kiss onto the back of her golden hand, "you've got Aimee Cortez in Room B-902. She's got a standing guard on orders of one Doctor Anders, so you'll need to present your i.d. and the case card, just to be sure." She turned to look at him and flashed her beaming, million-watt smile. "Still on for Friday?"
"What do you think?" he asked sardonically, grinning when she made a move to mock-slap his arm and stepping quickly through the doorway when the hydraulic door hissed open, a burst of compressed air shooting out of the frame, cold and forceful. He made a disgruntled noise at the unwelcome feeling and continued walking, passing B-896, B-899, and stopped at the door of B-902, a little surprised at the short distance he had to walk after the several minutes of twining paths to get to the sanitarium. The guard, a thin young man with a set jaw and a shaven chin - Duo rubbed self-consciously at his light stubble, suddenly, guiltily reminded of oversleeping and having to forego such formalities as breakfast, shaving, and a morning shower on the rush to find a late bus to drive him the hour to the hospital - staring with subdued interest at the rather unusual psychologist, gave him a worn smile and requested, in a bored monotone, for personal i.d. and patient i.d. Fiddling with the wallet in his pocket, he managed to find his personal i.d. after a few false tries and the revelation that he did, indeed, have a library card, expired though it may have been, and presented both required forms of identification.
The door swung open before he could enter, an old-fashioned door complete with swiveling handle and oiled hinges, and a small, rotund woman sporting a nametag with nothing more than 'Jessica, RN' printed on it stepped out. "Oh, good, you're here," she said in a voice that was rather unenthused. "I," she hesitated for a moment, and then plunged headlong into her concerns and advice.
"I'm hardly thrilled to find she's already supposed to be getting psych'ed," she confessed, arching a heavy black eyebrow at his ghost of a beard and he hid it with his hand in what he hoped was a casual, contemplative gesture, "and I don't condone this at all. The poor dear's only been here for a week and we haven't heard a single word from her, even if Dr. Anders swears her vocal cords are perfectly fine. I'll let this happen mostly because I ain't her mother and I ain't her doctor, but I'd like it if you'd be careful around her. She's skittish and easily upset, and she doesn't like being touched anywhere but her face. So…just be nice to her, okay?" She flushed, somewhat embarrassed at her outburst, but he was pleased to find the nurse didn't follow it with a nonassertive apology, to diffuse her stern words and unhappy tone.
"Don't worry," he smiled innocently, knowing completely how his heart-shaped face and mirthful violet eyes, framed as they were by feminine eyelashes, affected the opposite gender, and he hoped the unwelcome hair on his chin wasn't setting it off. He'd occasionally met women who didn't like his braid either, so it was to some relief when her face softened slightly, still a far cry from gentle, but, hell, he had to take what he got. "I'm only here to help."
Jessica eyed him suspiciously for a moment more, and sighed, her shoulders drooping as she shook her head forlornly. "I hope you do help," she admitted, opening the door and ushering him in. He was surprised when she didn't follow, closing, instead, the door and, he assumed, waiting outside with the young-neat-shaven guard.
Duo took his first look at Aimee Cortez, knowing the first name had been assigned her by the good Dr. Anders that they might have something to call her, and saw that, had she been fed better, loved better, she could be beautiful.
As it was, she was a waif of a person, pale as moonlight with dark, dark circles under her eyes that only accented her decisively French cheekbones, arching and slender in round curves. Her arms, wrapped around her knees, pulled to her breasts, were gaunt, skin painted onto bones with weak muscles injured, no doubt, by the mottled colors and scabs lining those thin arms and what he could see of her legs, naught more than two tiny feet, pale and Irish, with small, perfect toes, the foot on her right leg dwarfed by a swollen, violet ankle. She had dark eyes, the kind of deep blue he had seen only on the face of a Japanese mercenary, but hers were not the cold, cruel spheres he had possessed, but the quiet, raging, stormy, smoke-traced ones of a swirling ocean.
The rush of sorrow in his body caught him by surprise, the sudden wave of empathy, of knowing this agony painted on her body that he had never known, felt, touched before, and he barely managed to paste his standard smile onto his lips, feeling as if he could never smile in her presence without feeling a guilt. And it was this horrible malignance that made him do a few quick calculations in his head, taking the age the scant file had given him and subtracting the years back to the war of AC 195. Eighteen now, five then, an orphan of war, a child most likely sold into bondage for a profit during the fearful winter following the war, during the uprising of Mariemaia some called 'Endless Waltz,' thinking it poetic and lovely. He had heard of the things people had done during the winter of AC 196, in desperation for money during the famine and rebellion.
But he still smiled, and she tilted her head to one side, curious, arms unfolding from their places about her knees and bony fingers touching the table she sat on, the bed she slept in at night, thick blankets tucked away in a storage bin in the far corner of the ceiling. She kept her knees at her breasts, afraid of punishment, and studied the Man who smiled at her and pulled a duffel bag from his shoulder, and she remembered sharp things he pulled from a duffel bag once, he-who-she-fears. Don't be afraid, Jessica-the-nurse whispered in her mind, he's a good man, a kind man. No sharp objects, she moaned in despair in her head, swallowed in the shame of knowing she is a bad girl for fearing the sharp objects, he told her so.
He had long hair, hair longer than any she had ever seen, longer than hers had ever been, longer than the other women with dark skin and pale hair she saw time after time in the rooms of pain, screaming in something that wasn't pain, something that turned her stomach like the pain did. His hair wasn't pale though and it was not tainted blue like hers, or the oily greasy black of him, but a color like the strong, big tree that stood outside her precious window, a deep brown. Braided and twisted, with a careful knot at the end to keep it in place, and she wondered what it would be like to have long, long hair. Bad thought, she reminded herself, that's a bad thought to want long hair when I'm meant to have short hair to tug and wrap and pull.
And when the Man looked up at her, she shrank back, tried to hide behind her knees and the cotton blue, behind the air, because he had purple eyes, too thick and deep to be human, in a face shaped like a heart, strong and nice, but he had hair on his chin, just like him, hair that hurt and scraped her skin raw until she bled, crying, and she hated the hair, hated the scraping roughness of it, even if it was the same brown as the long hair she wanted.
"Aimee," he said in a voice that wasn't deep and guttural like him, nor carefully sweet and gentle like Jessica-the-nurse, but an unbidden huskiness that rolled around in her mind, "I've brought you a toy. I know it's not much," he injected humor in it, humor she didn't understand, humor was foreign, "but it's all I could afford, me being a doctor and all. You like?" A doll with black hair, curling and stylized and fake, around a perfect female body, in a simple white dress with a bouncy skirt, and she leaned forward and he leaned forward, and she took it from him, ignoring the smile on his face.
Me, she thought, remembering what the other doctor had told her to do with a doll. Pretend it was her and show him what life was, what she was supposed to do, what was right. The hair was wrong and she fisted her hand in it, pulling it from the scalp of the doll, tearing clumps from softened plastic and arranging them carefully on her table bed, looking at the Man for encouragement. His eyebrows, lovely brown, were wrinkled together.
Duo had never seen a patient mutilate a doll before and he was therefore a little miffed that the one time he brought a high-quality doll, it was the one patient that would mutilate it. Aimee tore at its hair, ripping large chunks of the thick hair out as she held the doll clamped in her legs, lowered into a crossed position before her, and she was displaying an unusually scientific methodical precision in sorting the hairs. He'd stood up as soon as she began tearing, walking over to lean near her and watching her sort the hairs whenever she had torn out enough hair for her to warrant a break. She sorted them into shades, then lengths within the shades, and was moving them into a pattern, English letters without capitalization, upside down from his angle, and he moved carefully to crane his neck around, displaying a patience most people believed he didn't have, passing over the several strands she had clumped together as indefinite. "Miedo?" he read, and she started, pupils dilating as she turned her head to stare, and he stepped back several times, recognizing distrust when he saw it. Miedo, he committed to memory, figuring it was, in the least, worth a shot.
He heard a ripping sound, like cloth being torn by hand, and he walked forward again, almost laughing at the absurdity of his repetition, and saw she had stripped a small piece of her dress off. "Aimee, are you okay?" he asked, pitching his voice into a comforting level. She spared him a curious glance and lifted the scrap of fabric, trying to fit it over the doll's head in place of the black spots signifying where thick, manufactured hair had once resided.
She was trying to make the doll like her, he realized, and he watched, a bit impressed, as she fingered off a bit of the gauze on her arm to use to stick the blue scrap on the doll's naked head. Then, in a single, angry movement, she tore the white dress off the doll, nearly unsettling the toy and sending it to the floor, shredding the cheap accessory into a flurry of scraps, grabbing one of the small arms and squeezing it. She held the doll up to him and motioned with her other hand at her arm, eyes alive with intelligence and telling, and she proceeded to snap the doll's arm once, twice, thrice, and she pulled it from its socket, dropping the butchered toy arm to the floor.
Before Duo could remember Jessica's warning, he had reached forward to calm the raging mind, his fingertips brushing her shoulder ever so gently, and she screamed. She screamed higher, louder, and twisted around, small, compact chest heaving with the force of her cry, and he saw a dark stain lining the cloth under the swell of her breasts, the kind of stain he remembered from war as blood, culminating in one place and turning fabric a dark maroon. "Shit," he swore, a tiny part of his mind asking God why exactly He always gave him the hard jobs, and he lunged forward, nearly leaping onto the table to grab at her, and his large hands planted on her upper arms, squeezing slightly to steady himself. She cut off her scream, fell into silence, and her eyes widened, the brief glimmer of brilliance he had seen there vanishing as her eyes brightened dangerously, then fell dim, collapsing into lifelessness, a defense mechanism that he could recall using time after time, to protect himself for years in his youth, thirteen years ago, and he swore again.
What a damn day.
Author's Notes: I would /love/ to write some happy, jovial crap at around this point, but that'll wait, as I've got some more angst to cover. If you've been reading this story (and I hope someone has!), please suspend disbelief for the moment. ;] Yes, Aimee Cortez is Ami Mizuno, but while I've decided to maintain her intelligence (or capability to learn), she was involved in some bad stuff in this story. So she has an excuse. I'll try to have the beginnings of romance in the third or fourth chapter - just the beginnings! And don't worry, Duo will eventually be the wiseass he always is and Aimee will learn more about physics than your average rocket scientist. Reviews are still highly desired, and I would be eternally grateful - this won't always be a dark fanfic, you know. That's why it's romance. *&.^* (Care to guess what 'miedo' means?)
V.V.C. (as utilized in the beginning of the sanitarium waiting room scene) is an acronym for 'Victims of Violent Crimes.' As the 'of' is not considered a major word (much as 'a,' 'an,' 'for,' and 'the' are not considered major words), it is neither capitalized nor given its own spoofy letter. I have no idea if V.V.C. is an actual term used in hospitals or sanitariums, but it sounds official and this is a piece of (science) fiction. My alibi, gentlemen. (And ladies.) The RN on Jessica's nametag stands for 'Registered Nurse,' an occupation my mom is reattending college for - because two degrees aren't enough already. They have a remarkably high level of power, as nurses go. Just short of doctor, I believe, and they have more hands on duty.
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