Among all the machines Jack had encountered, this one had to be the most deplorable. The man winced as the table shuddered underneath him, the dull growl coming to a sudden halt as an even more awful clanging picked up. He eyed the walls nervously as if they would come apart at the noise and tried to keep from squirming. As soon as it began, the clanging stopped too, and a small knocking noise came from somewhere in the machine's bowels. Only the underlying chirps and and a low, staticky hum droned as the bore began to spin again. The little green lights were coming around.
Jack tried just to look at the mirror in the roof of the alcove. It had been tilted so you could see out the rim of the bore, and he squinted at the digital clock on the far wall. 6:48 AM. No more hopes of squeezing an hour of sleep in. Jack sighed exasperatedly, letting his eyes wander. Below the clock, Sigg was sitting at his desk behind the control room window. The alien eyed him for a moment, craning slightly above a monitor before he went to jotting more notes down.
The surgeon had made a writing fool of himself again while handling this song and dance. Jack would be surprised if the surgeon didn't have at least a small novel on him already. The chirping had been going on for a long time as the inner wall made its slow orbit, but the clock had only just ticked up to 6:49. Jack took a shaky breath and forced a second half-frustrated sigh. It was a desperate attempt to relieve the tight panic in his chest, but even after that, it still felt like he was holding his breath. Jack hated that feeling.
Lying this still, another force of equal power was warring with his unease. Aside from the brief 'nap' Sigg had given him, he had slept less than twelve hours in the past two days.
Jack had trouble sleeping as it was, but for two days he had been on the road, coming from somewhere east of where he was now. He couldn't remember who had tipped him off that there was a good street surgeon in the New Oslo Citadel, but he had remembered seeing Sigg's face a few years before, either on a television screen or in a newspaper. He couldn't remember which, or why he had been in there anyway. Regardless, he had made the journey; sitting on that stupid bike until he was bowlegged and worn down. It had still felt good to have a set goal again though, and he had all but torn up the road getting to the city. The first night, Jack drove until dawn and didn't stop to rest until he caught himself in the grass where he'd drifted off the pavement.
The bore was still spinning, scanning and humming along with the chirps deeper inside the machine, and Jack felt the exhaustion dragging on him. His eyelids felt leaden. As much as he tried to fight it, all the racket slowly began to lull him, and his eyes closed at some point. His mind turned to static.
EEEEEEEEEEE, EEEEEEEEEEE, EEEEEEEEEEE, EEEEEEEEEEE. Jack started so bad the paper wrinkled underneath him, gasping sharply as panic strung up his chest again. The drum had stopped rotating, and this new noise was earsplitting on an ungodly level. It felt like waves of the sound were lapping against his skull like water, radiating from every angle in the narrow tube. Amidst the racket, Jack vaguely heard Sigg chiding him, telling him to be still, but his mind was too iced up with panic.
His lungs spasmed, trying desperately to keep the air in his chest and his skin itched with the prickles of a cold sweat. Were the walls closer to his arms? The noise kept on, and Jack gripped at the edge of the table, trying to steady his thoughts. He was a warrior. He was his father's son.
But– his mind debated. There was one thing he wasn't, and it was fond of small spaces; especially small spaces that shot magnet waves into your skull and sounded like a buzzsaw. The screeching suddenly keened up into one shrill, metallic scream that was somehow even louder. Jack broke, chest heaving as he grasped for air. He had to get out of this death trap.
The man desperately punched his thumb at the distress button that had stayed locked in a clammy grip at his side, wheezing in relief when the atrocious noise sputtered out. The table shuddered and began to chug out of the mouth of the bore on its tracks, though the machine's ever-beating heart still chirped away, keeping the magnets cold. Once he was able, Jack scrambled out of the machine and sat up on the bed, trembling. He could breathe.
"Arggh!" Sigg's furious growl crackled over the speaker in the dim room as Jack shakily drank in air. "This is the third time you've hit your panic switch! Get a grip or I'm going to take it away, I swear..."
Jack shook his head and dangled his legs off the side of the bench. Sweat was running down his back, making his clothes stick. He shivered. The imaging lab was freezing, and the papery gown Sigg had insisted he wear was no help whatsoever.
"Look," the voice buzzed again. "I'm serious. Whatever... this–" he gestured through the window at Jack, waving a clawed hand like he did. "–is, you're going to have to cut it out. Act like the guy I see in the tabloids. People have conniption fits over you." Jack rolled his eyes.
"Now, I don't care how ancient that thing is. Sigg jabbed a claw toward the machine. "We're doing this if I have to strap you to the damn table."
Jack glared at him through the glass. This was humiliating. Sigg's strange, somber mood had passed once they had reached the imaging lab, and his usual coarseness was back with a vengeance.
"You could at least give me some kind of ear protection," he rasped, scowling dejectedly at the technician room. The surgeon scoffed behind the plate glass.
"I can afford the MRI scanner or I can afford earplugs. I cannot possibly afford both." Jack growled under his breath, looking downcast at the linoleum. He heard Sigg's chair roll as the surgeon returned to the monitor to reset the machine.
Jack's head was still a swirling soup of emotions as he stared at the floor. He supposed he should have been happy to be immortal; now he could pore over every stone in the world for a way home for a century if he needed to, but the idea was also horrifying. He felt inhuman. In many ways, this night had been almost as crushing as the morning after the rams. Almost. This hadn't ended in murder.
As Jack stared at the floor, he noticed something odd. He blinked, wondering why it hadn't registered in his mind before now.
"Sigg," he murmured. The surgeon didn't look up from his notes. "Why..." Jack blinked almost catatonically at the ground, mind slipping into a blank. He struggled to form the words as sudden calmness stole over him. It numbed his senses, turning his words into into strung out things he had to scramble to tie together. The chips and cracks in the tile hypnotized him, and he had to force them out. "... What... happened to the floor?"
Sigg hadn't appeared to have heard him. The lanky surgeon stood from his desk and crossed the control room, lugging his binder along as he opened the steel door marked 'IMAGING'.
"I'm going to check in case the scanner got enough data. Don't go anywhere." He paused, door in hand, and pointed at Jack with narrow eyes. "And don't break my machine. It may be old, but it still costs more than the bounty on your head," Sigg turned and ducked out of sight into the dark processing lab, as he had done twice before, and Jack was left alone in the dim room.
Jack shook his head, along with the haze that had come over him. Whatever he had been thinking about disappeared from his mind as his eyes returned to the floor. There had been something strange he'd noticed, but the more he tried to remember what it was, the faster it slipped out of his reach. The tiles were smooth and pristine like the rest of Sigg's wing.
The omniscient chirping from the MRI scanner seemed louder now that Jack was alone. He sighed, closing his eyes and pushing his sullen thoughts away before he slid off the table. He walked dejectedly across the linoleum to a few shelves on the far wall. A strip of red tape on the floor was marked 'CAUTION : MAG. FIELD – NO METAL BEYOND THIS POINT.'
Jack pulled his normal clothes off the shelf and changed out of the hospital gown, crumpling it up and throwing it on the floor in a childish attempt at making himself feel better. A half-second later, he was folding over the back of a chair out of guilt. He sank down into the chair, putting his head in his hands. He was about finished with this whole ordeal. If Sigg came out and said the scans were unusable, he would merely stand up, say thank you, and hot-foot it to the nearest bar. The surgeon obviously thought he was crazy, so it was gospel to Jack at this point.
His eyes landed on a corner of the ceiling that was discolored, watching as rainwater dripped onto a puddle on the tile. The storm had passed by now, but beneath the din of the scanner Jack could barely hear the rain. He wouldn't ask for his money back; he had the blood work. Still, after everything else, part of him just wanted to leave Sigg in the dust and never look back.
Still, Jack couldn't help but wonder if the surgeon would even let him. He had seemed oddly insistent with his treatments from the beginning, but Jack couldn't imagine why. Sigg was certainly a strange "criminal" indeed. Jack figured maybe it was to ensure he had enough to pay for, but he wasn't sure.
He had about fainted when he had first caught sight of the great hulking machine in the imaging room. It wasn't even moving yet and Jack had already heard its horrendous, chirping racket. Sigg had begun rambling away that the noise was just nitrogen pumps and something about magnets, but Jack had just stood there with the blood draining out of his face.
Sigg must have been insane. Absolutely crazy. The surgeon was babbling obliviously about the scanner's rotating bore and 'oh, how wonderful it is that this thing has a rotating bore; it only takes thirty minutes and oh, the resolution...'
Jack didn't know why Sigg yammered on about how old the thing was if he also talked about it like it was some wondrous instrument. He hadn't stopped rambling until Jack had just turned to him and flatly said "No." As per his prediction, that hadn't been an option.
Sigg almost had to wrestle him onto the table the first time, and that was after the muscle relaxers. Before the first scan, Sigg had injected a concoction of narcotics and imaging dye into his arm, and Jack was still nauseated from it. The drugs were supposed to calm him down, Sigg said, but his first scan attempt had lasted just under two minutes. It took almost another hour and all the grudging reassurance Sigg could manage to get him on the table again. The second scan lasted seven-and-a-half, but Sigg said it was still incomplete. Jack had lasted eighteen minutes this time, and he hoped to Gods it was enough. He couldn't take this any longer.
A muffled slam took Jack out of his thoughts, and he turned to see Sigg crossing the control room to the monitor, arms full of black plastic sheets. Rather than sit down, he hunched over the back of his chair and typed something rapidly on the keys, piping up on the intercom.
"Well, today's your lucky day," he said, and Jack felt his chest unknot. A breath he didn't know he'd been holding flew out of him as the surgeon finished whatever he'd been typing and flipped a switch on the console. A monitor on the far wall of the MRI room lit up blue, and the steel door fell shut as Sigg came sauntering out. The black sheets, a huge folder, and his binder of charges logged his arms, and he set everything down on a table before before Jack could help him.
"I thought there were no computers here," he said, walking to meet Sigg at the monitor. The surgeon shook his head, waving off the remark with a flick of his talons. Jack's brow furrowed at the shortness, but anticipation won over his confusion.
"So..?" he said. Sigg smiled, puffing up.
"Well, you may have terminated your scan– again– but you managed to keep still long enough to get your whole brain in the cross-section." Sigg opened the folder and tapped in the screen with a talon. The blue disappeared, and in its wake appeared a myriad of strange images. Jack blinked.
They were incomplete, each of them coming to a streaky halt at the spine; where he'd hit the panic button, Jack assumed. Half of them were brightly colored and half were monochrome, but he immediately recognized what they were, and an odd mix of disturbance and awe came over him.
So you're what's been giving me so much trouble.
"Is that..." Jack pointed at the monitor and looked at Sigg, who nodded in earnest, folding his arms with all the egotistical doctor-pride his frame could hold.
"Yep," he said, tapping a talon on the screen. "That's you." Jack stared at the brain scans in unsettled fascination, and despite everything that had happened, a ghost of a smile flitted across his face. It really was kind of amazing.
"The future isn't as bad if you let it help," Sigg said softly. He was facing away from Jack now, rummaging through notes and poring over his scans. Jack let the surgeon alone for a moment, turning back to the images. The closest thing to contentedness he'd felt that night needled at his mind, which was still drowned in grief and fear, but it was enough. Right now, it was enough.
"Diagnostics will start running in a minute." Sigg tapped on a black and white scan and it blew up to fill the screen. His face creased in concentration as he began to scribble more notes down. Other than the pensive expression, Jack noticed he had slipped back into that emotionless state he favored when he was working. Jack still stared at the details of the scan, taken aback by just how far the world had advanced without him, and a familiar splinter of ice pricked at his heart at the thought of his home. Would things turn out the same if he ever fulfilled his purpose? Would people a thousand odd years after his time still have these wonders if he removed Aku from the equation?
If, he thought sullenly. It struck him for the first time that the world may lose as much as it gained if he changed its course, and the realization was like a blow.
In the folds on that screen was his entire life; every broken bone, every sleepless night under an overpass, every moment of joy, or hatred, or sorrow, or love. Jack wrapped his arms around himself and shuddered. He he had never felt so small in his life. He was just folds and bones piloted by that thing. He couldn't save the world. His sword could, his father could, but he had spent his chance, and now he couldn't even save himself. He would be stranded here until he died. If he could ever manage to die.
A lump rose in Jack's throat, and the screen blurred. He wondered why that thought had taken so long to form from the black, oily feeling that had sated in his gut since the incident with the rams. Before now, he had never truly believed that he couldn't complete his mission, but reality was sinking in, and it was cold. He had never felt so horrible.
"I never asked for this," Sigg said. "I never wanted to be a street surgeon." Jack blinked, eyes clearing up in surprise, though the lump in his throat stayed put. Sigg had spoken so softly he had barely heard him, and he had been too lost in thought to notice when the surgeon had initially stopped writing.
Jack's stomach clenched at the deep sorrow etching the alien's face. All traces of pride and bitterness had seemed to drain from his form, and even though he towered over Jack by a head, he looked small. His eyes looked aged; hollow and distant and... terribly sad. A new page of scribbled notations sat on the table. Jack only caught a few words like 'receding' and 'progressive.' There was a third word, but he didn't recognize it. Sigg slammed the notebook shut when he caught Jack reading, and alarm cloyed at his mind at the surgeon's hastiness. What was he trying to hide?
"I never wanted to be a street surgeon," he repeated, voice wavering. Jack was incredulous. Sigg's attitude had changed so drastically.
"I was a doctor. A real doctor." He looked around the room, scanning the waterstained walls with empty eyes. "This is my hospital."
The surgeon was staring into some middle distance Jack couldn't see, remembering a past of his own with all the dazed moroseness of a sleepwalker. Sigg wrung his talons before they fell at his side, trembling.
"And then–" chills puckered the back of Jack's neck. The surgeon's voice was thunder. He followed Sigg's eyes to a line of bullet holes that ribboned out from behind a humors chart. "– then I got too good."
The scanner chirped, nitrogen hissing. Coils clanging. Jack's heart thudded in cadence. He was feeling more uncomfortable with each passing second.
"It's hope that Aku despises more than anything. I guess I learned that too late." The surgeon crossed the room to the damaged wall and ran his talons along the scorch marks. He sounded far away, like trying to recall a dream.
"They took no prisoners," he whispered.
Jack had been consumed with nothing but grief for himself just heartbeats ago, but now his mind wasn't full of thoughts rams and blood and time. He was thinking of empty rooms, of baby blankets in puddles. Of Sigg, who had to walk past ghosts and debris every night. It was sickening. No wonder the surgeon acted like he didn't see.
Jack looked sadly at Sigg, whose voice was wavering more and more. "I'm not a criminal, Jack. I'm not." Jack's breath caught in his throat. Sigg had used his name. "I wanted– I want to help people." He shook his broad head, feathers swishing.
"But it's not the name. It's nev–" Sigg stopped short, shoulders hunching as he put a hand over his mouth. Jack saw his wilted frame shudder as he swallowed. The surgeon took a deep breath and visibly calmed. "It's never The same." He turned around to face Jack, whose stomach turned at the tears that rimmed his maroon eyes.
"I can't find the point anymore. No matter how hard I try, stitching up switchblade wounds will never be the same as saving a child from a brain tumor. There's no pride in that; there's no honor in that! Rigg knows there's no thanks." His voice broke on the last word, and tears began to cut even trails through the Sigg's face feathers. He rocked with tremors and a few hiccups slipped out from behind his talons. Slowly, he regained his composure. When he spoke again, his voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper. "I have no purpose anymore. I haven't done anything that matters in years."
Since he had first put the scans on the screen, the surgeon had kept his gaze anywhere but Jack's eyes, but now he stared right into them. Jack didn't know whether he was more afraid of what the surgeon was seeing in his eyes, or of what he was seeing in Sigg's. The sheer intensity of raw shame in the depths of them was enough to make Jack recoil, but there was also so much grief. The most surprising thing there though was the rage.
"I want to hate you. I want to hate you so much." Jack blinked, feeling confusion and remorse at the sudden, hateful words.
"Why?" he said. His own voice was hoarse, warring with the lump in his throat. Sigg barked a humorless laugh, shaking his head like he had heard a joke.
"'Why?'" Sigg jeered. "Why else would Aku suddenly get oh-so worried about having me– another little fucking miracle worker running amok in his cesspool? That incredible brain surgeon in New Oslo who defies death with his gifts." He spat the sentence like a curse, waving his talons through the air in mock appraise. Loathing leaded his voice. "That ring any bells, O Great Samurai Jack? You ruined my life!" The surgeon heaved a breath, like the scathing words had fatigued him. Then, slowly, he sank down the razed wall and drew his knees up to his chest. The surgeon's shoulders shuddered as he put his head in his talons and sobbed.
Jack stood there, staring past the top of the surgeon's head and at nothing in particular. His hands were trembling by his sides, and no matter how much his eyes were burning he found he couldn't cry. Sigg had struck him dumb, and Jack supposed, vaguely, that he deserved that. He had never considered that even the idea of him would be enough to ruin people's lives. The surgeon had fallen silent.
"But I can't hate you. Not all the way," he muttered, looking up at Jack from the floor. He looked frail, swimming in his lab coat. "I know it isn't your fault. You would never want anything like this." The statement did not make Jack feel even remotely better.
"Really, I know you have it a lot worse than me. All that stuff you said about what your life is, I know." Jack just blinked at him. He wasn't going to say what was on his mind. The surgeon continued, not noticing the hard look Jack shot him.
"All night I've been telling myself, 'Don't mess this up. Don't mess this up. This is someone you can really help,' but I did; I fucked things up, and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." The frown disappeared. Jack had been telling himself the same thing all night.
"You're like a kid, really," Sigg said, smiling sadly. His short face feathers were matted with tears. "Of all the things, I never expected that you would be like a kid. They got scared too." Sigg chuckled tearfully, and Jack felt a stab of remorse. The vice grip on his throat tightened.
"You're the first person I've treated in years who feels real," he said. "You actually feel like a part of my old life. You know I haven't used that thing in a year and a half?" He waved a hand sadly at the MRI scanner, not even looking up from the tile. Jack winced. The surgeon had been so irritable about that whole ordeal, micromanaging and talking about how old it was and how much it had cost. Now Jack saw why.
Sigg had intimidated him so much at first, with his appearance and demeanor, but now Jack saw how much of his coarseness had been walls, and how withered he looked now that they had crumbled. He hadn't put Jack through all of this because of his hatred, but because he cared. He cared enough to have hulking, powerful machines smuggled in or refurbished for who knew how much money. He cared enough to hole himself up in a crumbling building, risking his neck for strangers who hardly spoke to him. He cared enough to write whole volumes of notes by hand. He cared enough to keep his little wing of the world so stupidly clean it was strange. He wasn't a street surgeon; he wasn't a criminal.
No, he was just a surgeon. A surgeon named Sigg who had lost his way, and who had cared enough to help Jack. He knelt down to help him up, unsure of what else to do, but Sigg waved him off and stood, albeit shakily.
"Are you..." Jack trailed off. "Are you okay?" Sigg gave a suffering sigh and shook his head, waving him off again and trudging back to the table. Jack followed, standing behind the surgeon with his hands clasped behind his back. He didn't remotely know what he was supposed to do; he had never been good in situations like this. Having been alone for most of his life, there weren't a lot of times in the past when he had had to deal with the emotional crises of others, and the few times he had, it had carried out pretty similar to this. Jack actually felt like he tended to make things worse whenever he tried to console other people, and he decided he would let Sigg be for now.
The surgeon leaned heavily on the table, lighting another cigarette. Slowly, the lines in his narrow face shallowed. While Sigg took a moment, Jack tried to distract himself by looking at the scans some more, but they had disappeared behind a pop-up loaded with data like the blood test results. He recognized one word on the entire page, and that was 'diagnosis.' He thought being a doctor must require learning a completely different language. The word that followed was at least ten letters long. Wait, he thought. Diagnosis? Something's really wrong with me?
Before Jack could feel a shock of panic, Sigg coughed and wiped his eyes, drawing his attention back.
"I'm sorry," he said. The tearfulness in his voice was gone, but so was his boorishness. What remained was a hollow, dead murmur. He almost sounded like a different person.
"I didn't mean to get carried away like that. It's not like I can do anything, anyway. The past is done." Jack frowned. The statement didn't offend him, but it was more like a bitter reminder.
"But you–" Wry light suddenly sparked in Sigg's eyes, and some of the cheek returned to his voice. "– you can fix that, can't you?" Jack blinked, floored. For a precious moment he had forgotten that the rest of the world had no idea about his sword, or that all the gaps in the timestream had been sealed. For a moment he had forgotten that he had shut himself off from civilization. Jack hoped he hadn't hesitated enough to give himself away, and plastered a weak smile on his face, nodding.
"Yes."
Sigg grinned darkly at him, nodding slowly, before sighing and shaking his head. He chuckled slightly, a coarse, disbelieving sound, and Jack knew he was busted.
"Wow," Sigg said. Baffled amusement tinged his voice, but Jack heard the underlying disappointment as well. "That was terrible." He laughed that weird, unbelieving chuckle again, and Jack's heart sank.
"Good Rigg," Sigg said, smiling. "I really would have thought you would be more versed in lying by now, Hut and Haldy..." Jack looked at the tile so Sigg couldn't see the look on his face. He had always thought maybe it would be relieving for someone else to finally know his situation, but instead of feeling the weight of it lighten, he felt vile. It was like his very morals had been peeled away to reveal the wretched, dishonest tar beneath.
The surgeon took a long drag of smoke and let his gaze wander. He looked like he was daydreaming. "You know," he said. "A lot of the time I really wish you would just get that over with."
Jack's breath caught in his throat. He heard his heartbeat in his ears, from astonishment or guilt or just from reeling at the audacity–
"That one day, I'd just be sitting here, reading the paper, processing x-rays..." He shook his head. Slowly, drunkenly. Inebriated on hope. "...and then, poof–" He flicked his claws open, eyes wide and far away. "Everything would just..." Sigg stared dead on at him. Justified audacity, Jack thought miserably.
"Stop." Bullets of sweat were running down Jack's neck, even though it was sixty-three degrees in the imaging room. He nodded slowly at the surgeon. Seeing this reality implode; no timestream to support its weight, was something he had been dreaming of witnessing for years. But still, something about the way Sigg talked unnerved him. How easily it was for the surgeon to say he wanted to disappear; to have never existed. It was like suicide. It was worse than suicide.
An unsettling thought struck Jack that there were undoubtedly more like him; dying for him to finish what he had started and end whatever dismal hands had been dealt them. How many... how many had already succumbed to that desire? He shuddered.
"Hey, look," Sigg said. His tone had dipped into something that could almost pass as consoling. "I won't tell. You're only human, and the world owes you too much already." Jack stared at him, stomach clenched and eyes burning. Was that it? Was he just supposed to tuck tail and say 'I tried?' Just because he was "only human?" He didn't know whether to be disheartened or furious. He still had a job and surrender was not an option. If giving his all meant getting himself killed, then so be it. He kept those thoughts secret, though. Sigg could believe what he wanted to believe about him. He just prayed that, one day, he might be able to prove the surgeon wrong.
Jack heaved a heavy sigh, letting his eyes fall shut, and they stung from exhaustion. If the surgeon had found something wrong with him, Jack realized his newest venture to find a physician would be over. He would be aimless again. He nodded in defeat, not bothering to defend himself any further. Sigg was wearing that weird look of pity again.
"Well," he said. "Whatever you're doing, I'm rooting for you, Jack." The despair at being found out dithered, chased away by a warm feeling that spread through him like thin fog over an ocean of grief. He smiled for real this time, even if it wasn't all happy. The surgeon smiled back, and held out a clawed hand.
"Sigga Kajar," he said. Jack's eyes widened. "I like to keep things casual between me and my patients." Jack blinked at the surgeon in disbelief. He was touched. The surgeon got a far off look in his old eyes as they shook hands, and Jack knew that he was remembering.
Nervously, Jack hoped the surgeon wouldn't ask for his name, but, as if on cue, the alien's long head feathers twitched. Just barely. Jack started. He knew Sigg was waiting for the courtesy to be returned. He hadn't let go of Jack's hand. A sudden calm took him though, and he straightened, letting go of the surgeon's hand without a word. Sigg knew enough secrets.
The surgeon blinked a few times, and Jack thought he caught a glint of sadness in his eyes, but it was gone as quick as it had come. "'Guess that's fair," He said. There was no contempt in his voice. The jaws of tension had finally released them and seemed to free up the cold air of the imaging room, but even after all that, the guilt in Sigg's eyes hadn't faltered. Jack tried not to be worried by that.
Sigg suddenly turned, though, and grabbed something out of a cabinet before handing a vial of contrast agent to Jack.
"What– you think I can afford drinks?" he joked. Jack was shocked when he actually felt himself chuckle. He had laughed. A yellow, bubbly feeling filled his lungs, and he let himself chuckle again, and he teared up a little when he didn't have to force it. He was laughing. The surgeon smiled and raised his vial like a glass.
"To pariahs?" he said. Jack nodded.
"To pariahs." He felt a little more whole when he raised up that little glass vial.
Sigg's smile faltered, and finally died. A distant, wistful look clouded his face as he looked at the vial in his hands, and sighed. He sounded tired.
"How the mighty fall, huh?" he murmured. Jack could only stare before he gave the slightest nod in return.
"How the mighty fall."
Both of them were quiet after that, each digesting all that the other had said. Jack kept noticing that whenever he looked at the surgeon, his eyes would find the floor, staring at it with that guilt-ridden expression. Jack closed his eyes, dread creeping at his brief escape to contentedness, and took a deep breath. Preparing.
"Sigga," he said. The surgeon's head feathers pricked up. "Please look at me." Slowly, the surgeon turned his face up from the floor and fixed Jack in a gaze so deep with shame it was distressing.
"Yes?" For the first time since they had stepped in the room, Jack suddenly didn't notice the chirping of the MRI scanner. The jaws of tension were back, clamping down with ungodly force.
"What is schizophrenia?"
Jack would never forget such a silence.
The sky was lightening. Shadows in the city below slowly receded as the sun crawled slowly upward, and a dense black cloud bank carried its rain somewhere west. Cold wind whipped through the city and around the corner of the building, but Jack didn't feel it. The rust on the railing was biting into his hands. There was a brick on the far wall that was lighter colored than the rest, and for some reason that was all that had Jack's attention at the moment.
Vaguely, Jack thought he should feel something rather than nothing, but he didn't; he was numb. All he was feeling was the wrought iron in his hands and watched the sun rise. It wasn't as if he had been that surprised.
The long walk back to the fire escape was something Jack didn't remember, but he vaguely remembered what had come before. He could see himself and Sigg sitting in the technician room, having a one-sided conversation about symptoms, options, and medication. Jack had been hearing, but he hadn't been listening. He had felt like he wasn't actually part of the conversation, but rather sitting a little ways behind himself, watching some kind of sick soap opera play out. These were the things that were supposed to happen to other people. But then, Jack supposed, he was just someone else to everyone else. He was the most infamous man on earth, and he was still just someone else.
He did remember what Sigg had said about the disease, and he couldn't see himself ever forgetting it. If this schizophrenia truly worked the way the surgeon had explained, then he was in for it.
"Now, I'm sure there are some chemical anomalies in the hippocampus here," Sigg had said, pointing to a whitish smudge near the bottom of his scan. "– which would explain your changes in behavior and thinking, but most of what's happening is in here." He switched to a different cross-section, this one from a bird's-eye view, and circled the white, cloudy middle of the scan. Jack raised his lip, repulsed at the image. He could see his eyeballs.
Needless to say, his fascination with the 'technological wonders' of the world had long gone, and now he found himself more loathing and sickened by them than ever. "Now, these are your temporal lobes," Sigg had said. "– only, they aren't. This is a scan from a twenty-seven year-old man I tested for blood clots a few years back. This– on the other hand..." He grabbed a cel off of the counter next to him and held it up next to the first one, and Jack's stomach dropped to his feet.
Oh, God.
Jack hadn't been able to tell before, because he had never seen one, but when Sigg held up the two images side-by-side, he saw immediately that there had to be some truth to what the surgeon was telling him. There were... holes.
Jack shook his head violently, shuddering, trying to rid his head of the images, but they stayed cemented to the backs of his eyelids. That big, butterfly-shaped gap in the middle and the deep crevices rimming the outer edges where it should have been all white. His stomach was roiling, and he tasted bile on the back of his tongue, but he forced it down, hoping it would stay.
"Now," Sigg had said softly. Jack had turned white as a sheet. "This can affect many things, and... reality is one of them." he spoke slowly and gently, like he was consoling a child. Jack could spit in his face. "And, I... and the passage of time can be..."
The surgeon trailed off then, sighing and screwing his eyes shut as he ruffed the feathers on the side of his head in thought. Jack knew he was trying to be sensitive, and he suspected that it was very difficult to say what he had to say. He didn't have it in him to pity right then. The surgeon had wanted a real patient, so he could eat crow. Sigg suddenly straightened, though, fixing Jack once again in his professional, indifferent gaze.
"Your perception of time has likely been skewed. You've probably got it built up in your mind that fifty years have passed since you were eight, but that isn't the case." Ah, this song and dance again. Jack had figured a while ago that there was no way Sigg had been on Earth very long, or he would know about the thirty-odd years of mayhem Jack had already caused. How old some of those wanted posters were.
Jack had just stared at the surgeon, equally impassve, and shook his head, slowly. After all this fuss, all this heartache, the creature of science still didn't believe him, and Jack was done trying to make him. As far as he cared, the surgeon could believe whatever he wanted.
Sigg had gone on talking then, and that was when it got fuzzy again for Jack because he had just been staring at that scan and trying not to vomit. He had been thinking about how he was evidently immortal now and how this disease would play a part in that. The horrifying thought of his brain withering away until he just dropped dead one day wouldn't leave his thoughts. It was almost too horrible to think about, but he didn't cry. He didn't have the energy anymore to cry.
Jack remembered when Sigg finally fell silent, realizing that he was just talking to the walls and that it had been long since Jack had heard enough. He remembered the weight of a rough, clawed hand squeezing his shoulder and the surgeon's tear-rimmed eyes not quite meeting his. Jack supposed the surgeon couldn't bear to. He had been donning that emotionless mask all throughout the night, but now he had let the walls down, and the most raw grief for Jack clouded his gaze and shimmered on the edge of his eyelids. His voice broke when he whispered, voice strained against the weight of a sob.
"I am so, so sorry."
Jack had just stared at him before he stood and walked out of the control room. Sigg let him. When he reached the door, he saw the surgeon's reflection in the cross-hatched window, hunched over the countertop that was covered in black and white lives, shuddering with his head in his talons. Slave to his work. His lot in life.
Jack hadn't turned back. Goodbyes always stung less when they were quick. The smallest inkling of guilt wormed through his gut when Jack realized he had never even said thank you.
Standing there, the inkling niggled and grew, quickly turning into a roiling plume of shame in the forefront of his mind. At first, he tried to brush it off, but that only made him feel more guilty. He had been so wrapped up in his own issues that he had left his friend– were they friends?– alone with nothing. He was no different than any other charge of the surgeon's: with cold silence and disregard in return for his efforts.
A familiar voice, clear as a bell and just as lilting nagged at him from behind, and it certainly wasn't Sigg's.
Look how self-absorbed we've become.
Something strange happened to Jack then, as he stood there on the fire escape with the railing so tight in his fists that his knuckles turned white. He was suddenly aware of a funny feeling in his chest. Something bitter and needy and familiar; something that felt like it had been there for a long time.
Slowly, Jack leaned over the wrought-iron until he was almost hanging off the fire escape. The pavement stared up at him from four stories away. Not too far, but enough. Inescapable. Mind blank with exhaustion, Jack planted a boot on the rail and hauled himself up. The wind lapped coldly at his sides as he reached up to grab the fifth floor platform. The sun was just breaking the horizon of buildings in the east, and the sky was bright. Pale. He closed his eyes, lulled by the wind in his ears. He was so tired.
Jack let go.
Gravity wrestled at him and Jack's eyes shot open, white fear stunting every nerve ending in his body. The ground spun as he teetered on the railing, looking much farther away than it had a moment before. Jack yelped as he swayed, frantically reeling his arms in the opposite direction as he truly realized what was happening. He lost his balance, finally, crashing back onto the grate with a brassy clang that bounced back at him from the bricks he had been staring at.
What... just happened?
The metal buckled and vibrated under the sudden weight, and Jack lay frozen where he'd landed, as if even his racing heart would cause it to come apart at the bolts. His mouth was open in shock, and his eyes were just as wide. Even long after the rattling had passed, he still didn't budge an inch. Finally, though, he slowly raised himself off of the metal on wobbly elbows. He had landed hard on his knee, but the pain blooming in his bones barely registered in his mind compared with the fact that he had almost fallen to his death.
Fallen, he thought. Fallen.
He sat there for a few minutes, catching his breath and watching the white sun climb over some of the lower buildings. A few aircraft were already putting along in between high rises, off to who-knows where. The sounds of the city slowly rose around him, and his heart slowly returned to its normal speed. Sigg timidly reentered Jack's thoughts, and he decided then that he should go and talk, or apologize, or something. He refused to be one of hundreds of footnotes that disappeared from the surgeon's thoughts after they were filed away all nice and neat. He wouldn't– couldn't leave Sigg like he had found him.
Shakily, Jack grabbed the rail and pulled himself to his feet, taking a last look at the dawn. It felt like ages since last night when he had last done this. When he turned to climb back through the window, Jack stopped dead. His blood froze.
The mare was no different than it had been when Jack first started noticing it a few years ago, and it was here now, blocking the entrance with its black, leviathan frame. Everything Sigg had said about hallucinations came flooding into his mind as their eyes met. He could almost feel the mare leaping out of that butterfly-shaped chasm in his head, landing in that damn room. Scaring him. Dry anger pried at his will, but fear and knowing kept him frozen.
The horse stood silent as ever, staring coldly at Jack with its empty eyes that burned like twin coals. Its coat was dull, dark enough to stave off any light that may have caught it and turned it into anything more than a silhouette. The morning sun filtered watery pink through the window and came to a stop just before the beast's hooves. It pawed at the floor with one of them, hoof clacking on the tile– though Jack noticed that it barely left so much as a smudge in the dust– and nickered softly at him. Jack felt nauseous. As it stared him down, though, flicking its tail, he felt the rage coming on. Squaring his shoulders, he turned fully to face the mare. It didn't move.
"You aren't real," Jack muttered. It came out much more hoarse and strained than he meant for it to be, but he took a step forward, setting his jaw. His voice rang out, bouncing off of brick walls.
"You. Are not. Real." Jack leaned down over the window sill, gripping the rotten wood tight despite the shards of glass that bit at his hands. He felt his palms become sticky with blood, and it stung, but he didn't care.
"Go away," he hissed. The mare still stood, undeterred, which only made Jack's anger burn deeper. "Go–" He hauled himself through the window, trembling with rage as he hit the floor. Mildew smell bombarded his senses again as he craned his neck to glare at the horse, which was looming black and mountainous in the shadows. "–away!"
To Jack's astonishment, the mare actually took a half a step backwards, taunting him. Indignantly, furiously, Jack took the bait, and planted another foot forward. Dark, victorious joy burned through him like fire. He could make this beast comply.
"Go away!" he screamed, flinging his arms wildly at the mare, who took another tantalizing step backwards. Jack exploded, advancing on the horse. "You aren't real!" He crowed. "You aren't real, you aren't real, you aren't real!" He roared the last word, rearing back on his feet as his anger reached its tempest.
"I will not be swayed by shadows!" Jack lashed out at the beast's stout neck, knowing his fist would sail through empty air. Knowing it would dissipate. Knowing he would wake up. But he didn't.
The mare lurched backward, arching its back and rearing up to a height Jack knew should have propelled it through the ceiling. A whinny like a roar filled up the waiting room and cold fear speared Jack's chest as the beast moved to stab at him with its hooves. He reeled backwards, falling against the windowsill. This time, his movement was quick enough to slice his palms open. This time, he didn't feel anything.
For two years they had been playing this game, and Jack knew he had just broken the rules.
He watched, frozen, as the horse surely would strike him down, or try to, but before it could lash out, it suddenly spun and ran out the far door. The hooves thundering down the hallway matched the thundering of Jack's heart, and something snapped.
Jack pulled himself off the ground and tore away after the mare, heart pounding. He hadn't even realized he had fallen. Numb and enraged, he tore through the open doorway after the horse, which to his shock, was still not going away, cantering down the hallway ahead.
Unlike the previous night, the crumbling hallway was shot through with morning sunlight, not that Jack cared. All he saw was the beast's back disappearing down it. He was in a daze, jumping over god-knows-what, running through god-knows-where. Everything looked so different from last night, and Jack was soon lost in a labyrinth of hallways, caught up in the chase. His heart felt like it was going to burst out of his chest from exhilaration, fury, terror, grief, exhaustion.
He hurtled over a bed that had been half melted by flames long ago, slammed into singed walls, stumbled over toppled IV racks, but still he ran, and the horse never faltered. Other than the deafening knock of hooves on linoleum, the mare made no sound at all. It hadn't opened its mouth when it whinnied at him, and it wasn't breathing, even as it ran.
Jack shot out of a hallway and into a place where several other hallways converged. A huge round desk sat low in the middle, and the horse's eyes flashed wildly as it flanked it, disappearing down another corridor. Jack let out a yell of anger, jumping the edge of the desk and racing after it. He saw it fleeing in the slim windows beyond two steel double doors, though the doors themselves were completely still. Jack rammed into them full on with his shoulder, hissing as stinging heat seared his arm. He had definitely sprained something.
The horse was at the end of the skybridge by then, and Jack finally realized that he had been here before. Peeling black paint blazed the word 'PEDIATRICS' above the far set of doors. One of them was slightly ajar, held open by a buckled frame. Sigg had mentioned something about it when they had passed through the same door the previous night.
Jack blew through this one with ease, whipping past a toppled defibrillator and left, down the hall that had the windows and debris. He leaped over the puddle and frog blanket, not even glancing. The beast was his prey.
Sigg's haunt was near, Jack could tell, although the chemical smell from last night had vanished almost entirely.
Wait–! he thought, skidding to a stop. Wind lashed at his face from a broken window. Sigg. Sigg. Sigg could help this! The din of the mare's hooves was still bouncing around in the hallway, but Jack didn't remember now which way to turn. The rest of the journey had been made in the dark. His heart was pounding. The hallucinations usually wore off by this point, but the sound of the mare cantering through the web of corridors was still ringing in the distance. A ghostly whinny echoed down the hall, grating and thunderous. A bolt of fear sped down Jack's spine, and he cupped his hands around his mouth in panic.
"Sigg!" he yelled, hoping his voice would carry through the empty building. "Sigga!" he thought the galloping would surely have stopped by now, but if anything it sounded like it had changed direction, and it was coming louder and louder down a hallway next to him.
"Shit!" he hissed, charging blindly in the other direction, cold with terror. The mare had heard him. It was chasing him. Hooves hitting like thunderclaps reached him over the hammering of his heart, and he started swinging around the frames of doors trying to run faster, screaming like a madman as he went.
"Sigg! Sigg! Answer me– help!" but there no sound except for hooves and his heart and straining lungs. Silence. A horrible feeling seeped like oil into Jack's heaving chest.
He's gone. Oh hell, he's gone for the morning. Dread and terror slammed into Jack, but still he screamed the surgeon's name, praying on some shred of hope that Sigg hadn't left the building yet. He had just been here! An equine scream shredded the air and Jack glanced over his shoulder, feeling his heart stop in his chest. It was six feet behind. Maybe five. Head bowed, its eyes blazed blankly. Terrified thoughts streaked through his head.
I'm dead, I'm dead... I couldn't catch it even when I was running as fast as I could. It can't be real... but it can't not be.
"SIGGA KAJAR!" he screamed hoarsely. His voice echoed back at him from the blank walls and tile floor, mocking. No answer. Doors flanked him on either side, always closed. Always hiding things. This corridor was burned almost completely black. One door at the end stood open, heavy and steel and tarnished by time. Jack burst through it panting. Through all of it, the mare's staccato was still there. Staring dizzily at the cracked tile, Jack finally sunk to his knees. He closed his eyes and shook, waiting for the beast to finish its job.
The sound of it running escalated and escalated until it was just outside the wall, and Jack trembled harder, putting his head in his hands when suddenly, the sound died away.
For a moment Jack just sat there and waited, but the sound had all ceased. Slowly, he cracked open his eyes and allowed himself to look at the tile. It was cracked and dusty like the rest of the building, but nothing stood there. There was something about it... looking at the floor gave him the strange feeling that he had done so before. Finally, he lifted his head... and all his horror drained away.
The window to the technician room stared unmistakably at him through the darkness in the room, but it was completely busted out. Monitors were toppled, glass peppered the floor, and inky blackness sat coldly just inside. Jack was dumbfounded, blinking several times at the sight just to make sure his horse spell hadn't ended and segued into a different episode. He shook his head and stood dizzily, hearing bits of plaster and drywall crackle underfoot.
He stopped right in front of the shattered window, forehead creasing as if he was trying to remember something vital. A strange, catatonic feeling crept over him, and for all that was he couldn't remember when he had last felt it.
Jack tried to shake it, but both it and a horrible dread had come over him like a rising, poisonous tide. He reached out with a trembling hand and ran a finger over a shard of glass. Brief, biting pain prefaced the ribbon of blood, and he was suddenly dizzy. This was real. He spun around to make sure he was in the right room, but he knew, horribly, that he was.
The chirping had seemed so omnipresent and inescapable when Jack had been in the imaging lab before. He had thought he hated it, but now the pressing, ghostly silence felt so terrible, so wrong. The scanner was still there, but the sight of it made Jack feel like someone was walking over his grave. Huge sections of the thick plastic hull were fragmented and lying around, revealing the inner workings of the machine. Endless cords, coils, and pumps stared at him, as wrong as seeing the inside of a body. The revolving drum inside had come loose from the frame, and was laying on top if the rim of the bore like something dead. The tunnel was bowed in the middle from the weight of it, and the patient table had been pried completely off of its tracks, lying in the floor beside it. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and Jack whipped around, suddenly searching frantically for a part of the room that wasn't also caked in it.
Any panic he had felt otherwise that night diminished like rain in the coldest, deepest ocean. This fear– this horror that was clawing up his back was unlike anything he had ever felt. It felt... it felt like he was in a different time again.
Reality felt suddenly warped and impossible. He spun in a circle, staring at dust and burn marks and ruin that hadn't been there. The monitor on the wall was a lightbox. The shelves where he'd put his clothes were lying in shambles all the way across the room. There was a gaping hole in the far wall, and another in the ceiling above the scanner. Dim light filtered in through them from outside, but the darkness of this place seemed to swallow it up.
Sigg went home, he thought. He was just here. Jack blinked and lit up. Sigg was just here! His mind strained to think of an explanation. This was a big hospital– there had to be more than one imaging room. If he could just catch Sigg, maybe all of this could be sorted out. Dazedly, Jack turned to run out of the destroyed room, only to fall back on his rear in shock.
He had been seeing this horse for almost three years. Not once had it ever had a rider.
The mare had changed; saddled and decked out in full regalia. It looked less wild than before; steadfast, and severe, and somehow even taller, but it was the rider that scared him. It looked like a man, but Jack's gut told him it was something more hollow than that. It didn't feel human, or even like something that once had been. It was broad-shouldered, armored. Its face– if it even possessed one– was concealed by shadows and an antlered helm that made it look devilish and inhuman. Only its hauntingly familiar eyes were visible, all too similar to the horse's. A long spear pointed in his direction, but that wasn't what drew his gaze. Light didn't have to be hitting them for Jack to know exactly what type of blades were strapped to its back. What they were used for. He gasped, a pitiful choked reach for air, and clapped a hand over his waist.
Jack realized with choking dread that this thing that looked like a shadow on the wall felt more real than anything in that hospital had ever been.
It's holes. The thought was a blubbering, pleading wail in his mind. It's just holes in my head. It isn't real. The words buzzed over and over in his skull like terrified wasps, even as the horse stepped closer. Even as he scrambled away. Even as mortified tears spilled down his cheeks. Even as his bloody hands stung from dust on the ground that hadn't been there just a few hours ago.
"It isn't real," he whimpered, voice thick with a sob. His back pressed up against the hull of the scanner. "It isn't real, it isn't real, it isn't real..." The Horseman and his mount advanced, though until they were looming directly in front of Jack, and his whispering keened up into panicked blubbering as he buried his face in his hands.
"It's isn't real! It's isn't real! It's– it's– oh God, please go away!" He was shaking so badly he could hear his back hitting the plastic over the roar of blood in his ears. Image after image was flashing through his mind; holes in the walls and holes in his head and magnets and rams and blood and steel and fire. Sigg.
Out of my head... he thought, delirious with fear as the Horseman suddenly ceased his advance. Out of my head...
You– a legend, coming to me for help.
My clients call me Sigg.
The ice last winter froze out the breakers...
Subject age approx. 304 mo.
I'm sorry too.
I don't think an eye test is what you need.
You ruined my life!
Everything would just... stop.
How the mighty fall, huh?
Jack had his hands over his eyes by now, hunched in on himself against the destroyed scanner. A breathy nicker wheezed in front of him, and Jack barely peeked through his trembling fingers. His heart was thundering. His head hurt. He was almost too hysterical to hear the voice that grated like iron being dragged heavy and cold toward him on the floor.
"How the mighty fall."
A/N: watch?v=kdhhQhqi_AE
Sooooo, anyone here seen A Beautiful Mind? *nervous laughter* (this took so long to write lord have mercy) I want to know just how many times I've written the words 'Jack blinked' so far. I bet the number is staggering, I swear (Note: I checked. It's twenty-one).
If you're reading on , I'm sorry I didn't know the horizontal lines didn't work :0 but it's a hassle to edit a past chapter so I'll probably just leave it.
Well, from here on out I have officially run out of rough draft, so uh, be afraid. My friends were telling me to put my Spanish teacher in this fic somehow, so.. Profe Siggs dice: "¡Eres esquizofrénico!" (Now let's hope Mrs. Briggs never sees this lol). I also discovered how huge the spaces in between the paragraphs were, so I fixed that. (Good lord, could I say 'so' again, please?) I snuck in the tiniest hint to Blue Jack(? did the fandom ever decide on a better name for him because there is no way to make it sound less goofy) and also a reference or two to the Plague Dogs, which I love to connect to Samurai Jack because it's another good story about lost souls and craziness and just bleak situations in general. Annnd I would also be lying if I said I didn't base the fire escape thing off of that one scene from Forrest Gump where Jenny almost unknowingly throws herself from the balcony of a high rise. I had a lot of fun writing this one, that's for sure. For kicks I put every chapter so far into one OpenOffice document and put in in book mode and it was over fifty pages. Fifty. And it isn't even done yet. This chapter alone added like 27 to that mix, so there's that I guess– I'll have a full fledged book by the time this is done lol
I've been noticing when I go back to AO3 to get refs on previous chapters (it's quicker than digging through my documents, that's for sure), there are like, a ton of typos and little grammatical things even in the author's notes I never noticed. Maybe using 10-point font in OpenOffice isn't a very wise decision but I'm too lazy to edit them out ( ´_ﾉ`) I also reread some of chapter one and already I want to just completely rewrite it, lord. There are so many little irritating things I want to straighten up but lord knows that would take another eighty years. As I was on the bus for a choir thing I was writing this and sure enough I look up to see a great big flashing hostpital sign that said 'CT & MRI DONE HERE.' Ohh the irony.
Dude y'all wouldn't believe how much I ended up researching stuff about MRI scanners like I watched one video and next thing I know I have like 15 videos about MRIs on my YouTube history. I added the thing about how the bore revolved like a catscan because I think it would make sense for even familiar technology to be a little different in the alternate timeline. Seriously, though if you've never heard one they're crazy like no wonder Jack would freak out they sound like a semitruck in a blender.
watch?v=6Aj2QspPf7s