A/N: Another self-insert. We love those. This is basically fake me giving John advice and real me wondering if that advice would change anything. (I've decided to pretend that it does.) Shockingly, despite my use of some quotes straight from the book, I was not alive in 1932 and therefore do not own this wonderful story. I apologize again for any mixed spellings.
She expects the man to show up as soon as he is able, after the phone call. It is not often that the people here display much emotion; most of them don't seem to experience much emotion beyond the soma-induced happiness that is so sought after. The man on the phone had sounded distraught, though, almost like people back home did, before she ended up in the Brave New World that was closer to a horror story than a paradise.
She knows that the other nurse - Florence - will be unable to handle the man's emotions; he is far more human than she is. No one else will really be able to understand what he's feeling, so she makes her way to the entrance of the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, hoping that she will be able to get to the man before the nurse does.
She doesn't manage it, is rounding the last corner when she hears the nurse explain, "We try, we try to create a thoroughly pleasant atmosphere here, something between a first-class hotel and a feely palace, if you take my meaning."
"Where is she?" the man demands.
"You are in a hurry," Florence replies in affront.
She can see the disaster that this entire situation is about to become, so she cuts in quickly, saying, "Right this way, Sir. The Beta Linda is just down this hallway, if you'll follow me, please."
She leads him toward the inappropriately cheerful room where the bloated woman is lying limply on one cot amongst many.
"If you like," she offers, "I can come back after I've asked the nurse to give you some privacy. I might be able to help you process the loss of your… friend?"
"Mother," he says firmly, as though he expects her to flinch away from the word.
"Mother, then. Would you like me to come back and sit with you?"
"Yes, please."
"I'll be back in just a moment." And with that, she exits the room to find the nurse, who, she is unsurprised to find, is waiting just outside the doors to the room with a gaggle of Delta children behind her.
"Florence," she says, "the man in there doesn't seem to have the same conditioning regarding death as everyone else. I think he needs privacy. Perhaps you could move the children's death conditioning to after he's left?"
Florence looks at her, before turning around and walking farther down the hallway. "Certainly, Dorothea." she says in clipped tones. "Come, children," she calls, "let's play a few rounds of hunt-the-zipper. Your death conditioning can wait until a bit later."
Dorothea slips back into the hospital room to find the man gripping the Beta's fleshy hand.
"There. We shouldn't be disturbed for a bit. Now, what is your name?"
"John," he mutters.
"Okay, John. Can you tell me about your mother?"
"She gave birth to me back on what you people call the Savage Reservation. She did her best to raise me, but she didn't get along with the other women much, and she slept around with a lot of the men. They didn't like her for that, and they didn't like me for being an outsider, or for being her son, though she never claimed me as such. She got an impure version of your soma from one of the men, used it so much that she… well. You see what's happened to her."
"You really love her, don't you, John?"
He nods, his eyes glued to Linda's still form. "Do you think she loved me? I used to wonder, sometimes. She liked to spend time with the men more than she liked to stay with me. And she wouldn't let me call her Mother. But she used to sing to me, and tell me stories. And," he adds in a small voice, "I love her, so she must have loved me, mustn't she have?"
"I'm sure she loves you in her own way. You have to remember that she's been conditioned to think and believe certain things. Even her years in the wilderness didn't break her conditioning. She's been conditioned to be promiscuous, and to find the very idea of parents horrifying, and to be reliant on soma. It's not her fault that she's the way she is, and it's not your fault that you being born didn't break her conditioning. She's just a product of her conditioning."
He looks down at the Beta's malformed body, squeezing her hand gently. She shifts in her sleep, and John whispers her name desperately, his voice cracking with it.
"Popé?" Linda mutters, before her words tumble into an unintelligible stream of consonants and vowels.
"But Mo- Linda!" John says, switching gears within seconds. "Don't you know me?" He squeezes her hand again, harder than the first time. "Don't you know me, Linda? Mother?" His voice shatters on the words, and tears pool in his eyes before slipping down his cheeks.
"She doesn't know who anyone is, right now. She's trapped in her head, in a perfect world that she's created for herself."
"But she's dreaming of him." he says viciously, the quality of his tone bordering on a snarl. "She's dreaming of him, and he ruined her life. He destroyed her. How can she be dreaming of him and not of me. I'm right here. I'm here and I've loved her all my life, and he's not here. He doesn't love her. Why is he in her perfect world when I'm not?" The tears spill over again, and his face turns a blotchy red, and his chest heaves as he takes gasping breaths.
"You don't know that you're not in there," she says gently. "How can you not be, when you love her as much as you do? It's only that she doesn't associate you with this particular form of perfection. I know you're in there somewhere; she didn't say your name because there are different kinds of love, and your love for her is less passionate than whatever this Popé feels for her. That doesn't mean you love her less," she adds at the ugly look he gives her, "it just means that your love for her is more of a fixture in her life. It is steady and dependable and unconditional.
"Part of being human - even a human decanted in a test tube and conditioned within an inch of your life - is the need to be loved, the need to be wanted. I don't doubt that if the World Controllers could have gotten rid of the need for connection, they would have. What does it tell you that even these people need to be wanted? It's an innate part of human nature. She knows you love her, and so that's in her perfect world. She doesn't know that people want her, but she needs to know that, so it is also in her perfect world.
"You have a need for your Mother to love you, you have a desire to be accepted, to be a part of something greater than yourself. You may not like Popé, whoever he is, but you don't get to be offended by the fact that Linda wants to be wanted. You don't get to be offended that, in her perfect world, she is wanted. You are human, so you don't get to be offended by something as basic as human nature."
John looks at her, wide-eyed, and he nods once. He turns back towards Linda, and he kisses her forehead. As he sits back, her eyes flutter open and focus on him. She smiles at him as sweetly as her distorted face allows, whispers, "John."
She closes her eyes for the last time.
John pulls his hand free from Linda's and runs it through his hair. "He that dies pays all debts," he says. His voice lowers to a whisper that she has to strain to hear. "You hurt me, Mother, but I forgive you."
At her inquisitive look, he explains, "It was in The Tempest, by Shakespeare."
"I see." She does not tell him that she has read very little Shakespeare, and has been fond of even less.
"I thought it would hurt more. Her dying. In Shakespeare's plays people are always killing themselves when someone dies. But I don't want to kill myself. I don't want to die."
"Shakespeare's plays are works of fiction; they can be beautiful and romantic and absolutely tragic, but they're still fiction. Real life isn't always the way he wrote his plays, and that's okay. If we all felt as deeply as Shakespeare's characters do, the world would be a very different place."
He mulls over what she's said for a few moments, wipes the stray tears from his cheeks and stands from the chair next to Linda's cot. "Thank you for sitting with me. I think it really helped me understand her. And it helped me deal with her… her death."
She reaches over, puts her hand on his shoulder and says, "You're welcome."
John makes his way over to the door, pulls it open, slips through it. The door swings closed with a hollow finality not unlike death.
A/N: Quotes from the book are taken from pages 199, 204, 205; some quotes from page 204 have been altered. A quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest has been included. Names were inspired by Florence Nightingale and Dorothea Dix.