Chapter VI
Clinical Paranoia
"What are you drawing there, Alice?"
For a long time, the girl seemed to ignore Tobias's question, more intent on carefully coloring her childish drawing with crayons. Although Alice was heavily medicated and seemed to be doing much better in terms of stability, Tobias would not let her visit with other patients or outside visitors – mainly due to the lack of a response from Radcliff's lawyers.
"Alice, may I see your picture?" he asked kindly, trying to look into her face and judge her reaction. She looked up at him suddenly, holding on tightly to the red crayon with a quavering, yet outrageously tight, grip.
"Why do you want to?" she asked quickly, pressing a hand over it so Tobias could only make out splotches of the scribbled green grass and blue sky, "You won't be able to understand it. You're an idiot."
He sighed and rubbed his temple, and pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. It was a habit of his he usually did when dealing with difficult patients. His fiancée laughed at him about it all the time.
"I just would like to see it, Alice," he said, still keeping a smile on his face and a kind tone in his words. She removed her hand from the picture and showed it to him, though keeping a firm grip upon it so that Tobias could not hold it himself.
There were three smiling people in her drawing, the same sort of style of stick-figures that Tobias's niece drew in kindergarten. There were two people with pale blue hair, a girl and a boy if the length of their hair was anything to go by, and a blonde haired girl he knew to be Alice's representation of herself. It was one of those drawings where everything smiled, even the sun and the daisies, but Tobias's eyes drifted over the drawing to the grass on the ground where another sloppy stick-figure had been drawn.
A third girl with dark hair in buns and large Xs for eyes, a scribble of red beneath her that he guessed to be blood, lay on the ground with a thick black line through her chest.
"Can you tell me who these people are Alice?" he asked, pointing at the two blue-haired people, and the dark-haired girl. She frowned and looked at her drawing carefully, drawing her thin legs under her and then turning her icy leer to Tobias.
"Why do you care?" she asked icily.
"They look like nice people. Are they Ephraim and Eirika?" he asked, careful to pronounce the names exactly like Alice had said them. Slowly, she nodded and pointed at the two smiling figures.
"They're nice people, yes they are nice people," she said quickly. Her pale face began to grow ashen as she continued. ". . . But they don't seem to want to play with me right now. They want to play with their other friends more then they want to play with me."
"They don't sound like good friends then," Tobias said carefully, looking to where the nurse held the tray of syringes and sedatives. As he expected, Alice narrowed her eyes to slits when she looked at him and her voice was furious and icy.
"They're the best friends I ever had!" she snarled, "Better then Elizabeth and Justine and especially Caroline! Ephraim and Eirika have been my best friends for twelve years and they're better then any other damn person I've met!" In her anger, she snapped the red crayon that she held cleaning in half. "Even better then my parents!"
Tobias searched his mind for the victims of Alice McGee, and the only girls whose names matched the ones Alice had named had been her last three murders. All three were found dead one morning, of belladonna poisoning per the tradition of the Red Queen, and because of some witness accounts had pinpointed Alice as the last person to see the three girls alive, she'd been questioned and convicted of murder.
"But I know how to fix that problem," Alice had continued speaking, which snapped Tobias out of his reflections. She picked up a green crayon and began to fill in the many gaps of the picture's ground. "I have to make sure they like me best, and then Ephraim and Eirika will like me best as well!" she said, her voice taking on a delighted tone.
He nodded half heartedly as Alice beamed excitedly and pointed at the dark haired girl she had not yet named. "Who's this Alice?"
She chewed her lip and narrowed her eyes furiously, her voice becoming an apathetic monotone – a striking contrast to her previously chipper voice a few minutes before.
"That's nobody," she said, darkly.
"Why is she nobody?"
"She's bothersome. She's stupid, weak, pathetic. Draconian."
The last of the words stuck him odd. "Alice, draconian means strict, but you just said she was weak."
She didn't answer him. Instead, she stopped her coloring and began to fold the paper into a complex design – an origami bird, perhaps a crane or whatnot. Tobias was no expert on origami or birds. She grinned happily as she made the paper animal flap its wings, giggling as she did so.
"Birds are fun to play with, aren't they? They aren't very strong though, and my belladonna kills them so quickly," she lamented, avoiding eye contact with Tobias as she continued to play with the paper bird. She took a hold of each of the bird's wings and, in a quick motion, tore them off the body and laughed.
"Just like that! It's such a beautiful and wonderful plant and humans are so weak that they can't even stomach a few berries of it! Even an amount such as three is fatal, you know, to a mature human."
Tobias said nothing, and instead stood and took the chart from his nurse's tray and a pen from his pocket. She needed more medication, judging from those comments and the cruelty she'd shown to the paper bird. Alice looked over as Tobias wrote in her chart, watching as the young doctor clicked his pen and slipped it back into his coat pocket. She curled up on the chair, wrapping her arms around her legs, and speaking in a cold voice at him.
"Tell me, Dr. McArthur; are you familiar with the term lycanthropy?"
Tobias thought for a long moment before answering. He had studied the disease a bit in college, but honestly knew not much about it. Racking his brain for details, yet only came up with the basic facts: Clinical lycanthropy was where a human believed they could transform into an animal or possessed animalistic qualities, and luckily Tobias had never had to deal with any man whose insanity stretched to that point.
"Of course," he said to Alice, still smiling, "Is there something you want to tell me, something that your friends Eirika and Ephraim told you?"
She smiled slightly and brushed the ruined bits of her drawing off of the bed. "Don't pretend to diagnose me with that clinical crap, you moronic bastard. I mean just plain old lycanthropy. If it will suit your little mind better, call it therianthropy. If you don't, then just go back to your little office and wait for things to make sense again to you." She waved her hand to shoo him away, laughing hysterically. "You don't know much, and that's a fact."
"Give her some tranquilizer," Tobias told the nurse as he left Alice's room, waiting for the nurse to nod before shutting the door and walking down the sterilized halls of the Radcliff Asylum, wondering exactly who these two people – Ephraim and Eirika – were and why Alice never spoke badly of them.
Lonely children often imagined friends for themselves, yet Alice had certainly not been a lonely little girl. Her mother had thoroughly informed Tobias that her child was the ideal social butterfly, and he had to wonder exactly why she had slipped into insanity and began to kill people with her past. Respectable family, honor roll all through junior high and high school, class president, president of her honor's society, head cheerleader . . . The list went on and on and on.
No matter how much Tobias wished to claim otherwise, he was no expert on the mechanics of a human mind. He didn't know what caused her madness, but he had a strong feeling something had to do with these two hallucinations of hers – Eirika and Ephraim.
Ephraim tightly ground his teeth together, impatience and fear clouding his mind. He'd wrapped his bleeding and broken knuckles with pieces torn from his cape in makeshift bandages, and was now attempting to use two snapped branches of the holly trees to create a fire – a task made very difficult by his lack of knowledge on that subject. He had tried to duplicate what he remembered Forde and Orson doing when setting the campfire alight, and yet had not managed to accomplish even a single spark.
Natasha lay curled next to him, his cloak placed over her body for warmth. The cold didn't seem to be affecting her very much, since she never shivered with chills, whilst Ephraim could barely manipulate his fingers or feel his skin.
"Damnit," he swore, abandoning his task to try in favor of trying to gain movement back in his blood encrusted hands. All he wanted to do was to start a fire, never mind Myrrh or Eirika or even the whole of Magvel. Just a fire so he or Natasha didn't end up dead of hypothermia – although a small part of his mind wondered if she was still alive, for she was so still and lifeless.
He looked intently at the pale face of the cleric, at the blonde locks of hair surrounding her expressionless face, and thought on what she had said before passing out.
"Wings . . . I see wings . . . Your Majesty, please don't let it be true . . . Not like . . . Not like . . . Not like Myrrh . . ."
What exactly had those broken phases meant? Had Natasha seen Myrrh after she had run away from him, and had something happened to the Manakete? But yet, how could Natasha have seen Myrrh when she was trapped underneath the ice?
The question that was plaguing his mind, first and foremost, was; had Natasha seen him with wings, just before she'd fallen unconscious?
Ephraim knew quite well the thought was laughable – he did laugh himself – for how exactly could he have wings? However, he did give a quick glance over his shoulder. There was nothing but the empty holster where he kept a spear or lance inside of upon his back and he returned to the task of attempting to start a fire.
This time, a small spark ignited in the pile of holly wood he'd been attempting to set ablaze and he gave a very large grin of happiness very unlike his usual grim expression. Blowing carefully on it so as to have the embers spread and strengthen, Ephraim sighed in the utmost happiness as the wood caught flame completely and he warmed his freezing hands to the fire. Slowly, feeling returned to the fingers attached to his injured knuckles.
While the fire was a great step towards survival, he had to wonder how long they could last. They had neither food nor water to sustain them. Humans could survive about four or five days without water, more without food, but it was a very bad idea if the past few hours (or minutes, or however the hell long they'd been in Paradise) were anything to go by.
"What –?" a soft, weak female voice said by his side, groaning a little.
The Prince of Renais gave a start and turned to look at Natasha, only to find the cleric moving slightly and blinking her bleary blue eyes up at him.
"Are you alright Natasha?" Ephraim asked of her quickly, eyeing her critically. She was rubbing her temple slowly, looking at him in a confused manner that quickly turned to fear.
"Prince Ephraim?" she asked sharply, clutching her both her own thin cloak and his to her throat.
He nodded hastily, making sure to neither move his injured hands or broken foot too much. "What's wrong?"
The fear left her face and she shook her head softly, her skin still pale. "I'm sorry, milord, but for a moment I saw something odd about your person." She looked from his face to his hands and gave a small scream at the sight of the bloody knuckles wrapped in pieces of thick cotton. "Saint Latona be praised, what happened to your hands!"
"It's fine Natasha, don't worry," Ephraim said quickly, hiding the wince as he fed the fire with a bit of kindling taken from the holly tree.
The cleric took no notice that he had even spoken and grabbed his badly damaged left hand. Slowly and carefully, with expertise taken from treating battlefield wounds, she took off the makeshift bandages and examined the deep gashes and dislocated bones in the knuckles.
"I have no elixir or salve to treat the wound, and no staff to mend the bone," Natasha said, more as a whisper to herself then to him, and took his hand in both of hers, "So this will hurt greatly, milord, but it is necessary if the bones are to be as they once were."
Ephraim was very familiar to pain, so he merely tensed his muscles tight as Natasha pressed hard on the knuckle bones to shift them back in their correct positions. He inhaled sharply through clenched teeth as she tended to the wounds, using strips torn from her white cloak to wrap the wounds better then he had done.
"What happened, Your Majesty?" she asked delicately, avoiding direct eye contact.
For some unexplainable reason, he did not wish to tell her how Natasha came to be in his company. Ephraim racked his brain for an excuse – that he did not wish her to worry, that he didn't think she would believe the outlandish tale – but his reply was simply, "Revenant. Alice left me without the Siegmund or Reginleif."
"Alice?"
Ephraim now looked at Natasha in confusion, trying to ease a creeping paranoia out of his mind. Why was he thinking that she was in league with that evil little girl and her evil little minion Cat? How could he even be sure Cat was in league with Alice?
"What's the last thing you remember before waking up near me?" he asked slowly and carefully, weaving her fingers together as she thought. Natasha's already light coloring went very pale.
"I remember I heard something strange when I woke up – a scream or shout, I think, when we were staying with Madame Radcliff in her manse, and I went to see what had happened. One of the maids at the house came up to me, and my memory's blurry after that."
He nodded dazedly, prodding the fire with a long shaft of wood. Why did some part of his mind deny Natasha's words to be true, and why couldn't Ephraim shake the paranoia and adrenaline from his veins?
The cleric brushed back several locks of her fair hair and drew her cloak tightly to her shoulders. "You look very pale. Perhaps I should take care of the fire while you rest?"
"I'm fine Natasha," he said, careful not to sound too quick or snappish. A defiant look entered her eyes, as it always did when dealing with the wounded. At that familiarity, Ephraim gave a long sigh of relief to himself and nodded before she could speak in an angry voice.
If only he had a lance with him, maybe the fear would relax and he'd stop wondering if Natasha was really Natasha. This was the first time Ephraim could recall in several years that he had been without a weapon of any kind. He didn't even have a knife to defend himself.
Positioning himself so that little pressure was put on his broken foot and drawing his cape tight around himself for warmth, the Prince of Renais fell into an uneasy sleep aided by exhaustion and fatigue.
His dreams were less than relaxing.
Both Myrrh and Eirika were dying, their faces turning blue and eyes very pale with a starving lack of oxygen, and all he could do was stare at the two of them helplessly. He could either save Myrrh from the noose that bound her to a tree, or save Eirika by killing the faceless man who strangled her. Yet which was he to choose?
"Tick tock, ye murderer," said the simpering, happy voice of the half-demon Cat, who could not be seen.
Ephraim couldn't choose.
Myrrh was young and innocent, and shouldn't die because of that innocence. It wasn't humane, it wasn't right.
Eirika was his twin sister, his dearest friend. It would be immoral to let her die; against everything that Ephraim stood for.
Who was more important?
Side Note:
Clinical lycanthropy is a mental illness where a human believes that he/she can transform into another species – physical, mental, or spiritual. Lycanthropy itself is the mythical condition of being a werewolf, while therianthropy refers to any other type of magical transformation from human to animal.
I do not own Fire Emblem, Nintendo does. I own all original characters.