A/N: I smell like K. pneumoniae! Woo!

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Dongfang Mingzhuta. He didn't know what it meant: it could be a person's name, a place, a... he didn't know. For some reason, however, it was in his mind that night as he stared at the padded room around him, his arms held in a Posey jacket. He quickly realised upon being put in the cell that unlike when he was a child, he was no longer able to break himself out of a straitjacket by dislocating his shoulder. After having his arm popped back into place by one of his nurses, he just resigned himself to sitting sullenly in the corner.

He had to admit, he was gaining some clarity to his life. Every day for three hours at a time, he worked with a therapist who specialised in dissociative disorders. For the first couple of days whilst cutting back on his diazepam, he had a hard time understanding exactly what he was in the hospital for, where he'd been, et cetera, but after being visited by a very bruised and very pregnant Lisa on his fourth day in the hospital, his mind began to clear. His therapist provided him with a copy of Eleni Petalas' doctoral thesis, encouraging him to read and understand it. By the end of the first week, he recognised and understood his multiple personalities as described by the late psychiatrist.

Unfortunately, understanding didn't help him control his alternate identities. He had huge time gaps in his life—for example, he had absolutely no recollection of why he'd been placed in the padded room. He remembered being with Lisa when she visited, remembered her crying when he asked what happened to her neck, remembered most of the time with his therapist, things like that. What he couldn't remember was what happened in his missing four months or what happened when he was checked into the hospital. The therapist was helping guide him through the locations he'd been whilst he was gone, but so far things only came back in fragments.

Today, he assumed it had to be Shanghai. He regulated his breathing, trying to focus his mind on the two words he could remember. Once he dropped off into thought, it was like lucid dreaming. He could feel people around him, the singsong tones of standard Mandarin blurring into the sound of water splashing against a boat. It was raining lightly as he looked at the skyline, his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

'Dongfang Mingzhuta,' said a voice next to him, and he turned.

'I'm sorry, I don't speak Chinese,' he said to the Chinese woman who had appeared beside him.

'No, we call that the Dongfang Mingzhuta,' she replied with a smile, reaching out to hold her umbrella over his head. 'The Oriental Pearl Tower.'

He looked at her for a moment more before turning to look at the bright tower. Memories of Berlin came to him, thoughts about a laughing redhead at a pub. As her face materialised in his mind, a raging headache broke out in his temple and he staggered, slumping against the tiny woman beside him. They were the only two people on the deck of the ferry, so when they both fell onto the grainy surface, no one came to help them. The umbrella in her hand rolled away, tapping against an empty bench behind them. He lay on her chest, his breath coming in staggering puffs as he grabbed at his head.

'Are you all right?' she asked shakily as the rain fell harder, soaking both of them.

'You have to help me,' he stammered, reaching up to grab the collar of her shirt. 'I'm lost. I... I don't know who I am. Please, you have to help.'

'What are you...' she murmured, staring into his eyes and seeing only thick confusion. 'We're docking. I'll take you to the hospital.'

'Thank you,' he replied, rolling over to let the rain fall on his face.

She stood, grabbing the umbrella and holding it over him before helping him to his feet. The boat shook as it came to the ferry slip, the clanking sound of the ramp jarring Jackson's brain as it slipped across the concrete. Taking his hand, the woman walked quickly, pulling him along behind her as she shoved through people to make it onto the dock. They moved from the dim lighting of the marina into the bright lights of the ferry terminal, standing under the overhang as the woman searched through her purse. She pulled out a cell phone before looking up at him and putting her hand over her mouth.

'You're... you're bleeding!' she said, and it took him a moment to look down at himself. In the brighter light, he could see patches of darker material on his jacket. Pressing his hand to one of the spots, he looked up at her to see that her blouse was covered in blood from him falling on her.

'I think you're bleeding,' he responded, pointing to her blouse.

She immediately panicked, pulling a handkerchief from her purse and blotting at her shirt as he opened his coat and looked down at himself. The lining of his jacket was sticky with blood, his shirt completely soaked through, but no apparent injury. As he pulled off the coat, the holster of his knife came into view and he stared at it, pausing for a moment before pulling the blade out a couple of inches.

Droplets of blood beaded on the surface of the knife blade.

The woman stopped blotting, staring at the knife with a slightly open mouth. Sniffling, she backed up a couple of steps, her eyes wide.

Jackson looked up at her. 'No, calm down... I don't...'

'Police!' she screamed raggedly, doing a skipping run away from him as tears ran down her face. 'Police!'

'No! Please!' he said, making a move toward her and reaching out to grab her wrist.

She dropped to her knees, staring up at him with her hand grabbing for her wrist, the fingers brushing against his as she whispered pleadingly. 'Please, please don't kill me. Please, please.'

He was about to answer her when a voice came from behind him. 'Christian!'

Letting go of the woman's wrist, he stood up straight before slowly turning to look at a blonde woman who was running toward him.

'I've been looking everywhere for you,' she said as she reached him, immediately buttoning his pea coat. 'It's dangerous for you to wander off like that.'

'I'm sorry,' he murmured as she rubbed up his arms, keeping contact with his eyes, but he didn't recognise her at all. 'I don't think I know you.'

'Your name is Christian Poulain, and I'm Nitsa Petalas,' she responded with a smile. 'You're having one of your attacks.'

Silence fell between them before Eleni looked over at the Chinese woman who was still cowering on the ground. The Greek woman gave her a blank stare as she grasped to Jackson, who was staring with half-closed eyes at her jaw line.

'Thank you for helping him,' Eleni said in a detached voice. 'I'm sorry if he scared you.'

The woman shook her head jerkily, backing up a bit before using a bench to pull herself up. Without a word to either of them, she turned and jogged away, never looking back. Once she was gone, Jackson felt a little prick in his neck and then the world faded around him, but not before he saw in his mind's eye the lifeless face of another oriental woman, blood pooling under his feet as he looked up to see himself in a blood-streaked mirror.

Jerking his head, Jackson came back to the present and immediately began thrashing around, his eyes wide. It was the first flash of memory stemming from his violent personality, the personality that his therapist claimed he had but he continued to deny, instead insisting that violence was part of his host personality.

In one of the theses his therapist had given him, Jackson had read that the only way to mend the personalities together was to have the patient realise the accuracy of the diagnosis so that he would begin to make a complete commitment to fuse the alters into his own host personality. As the blood-covered face of Saeng Chaiyasan flashed into his mind again, Jackson fell to the side and threw up bile, deciding at that moment that he had to overcome this dark side of himself, to bring it to the point of atrophy so that it would disintegrate.

---

Jonathan Rippner really had no idea what was going on. He knew he'd been picked up early from school, and that he was in the hospital in a room not including his mother or sister, and that the people around him seemed very on-edge, but all he really cared about was the little colouring book that his father brought to him from France a year or so earlier. He muttered the words as he coloured the pictures, a technique his father had taught him. Once the door opened and a doctor came in, however, Jonathan looked up with a smile.

'Are my brother and sister here now?' he asked, dropping his crayons and walking to the OB-GYN. 'Do they look like Daddy or Mommy? What are their names?'

'They're not here yet,' the OB-GYN replied, squatting down to Jonathan's height. 'It's still a little early for them to come, so we went ahead and stopped them.'

'They're too excited!' exclaimed Jonathan, throwing his hands in the air. 'I bet my little brother wants to get away from my little sister because she has cooties.'

The OB-GYN laughed and mussed up his hair before standing and walking to the boy's grandparents and nanny. 'We've been able to stabilise her and the babies. She's sleeping now.'

'So everything's all right?' asked Joe, leaning forward in his chair.

'We put her on an IV of magnesium sulphate and would like to keep her on it for at least the next forty-eight hours. That should be enough to hold off the labour until closer to her real due date,' the woman said in a calming tone. 'You got her here early enough that the labour hadn't advanced much, so you can relax. If we keep her here at the hospital, she should be able to deliver a little closer to the due date. We've injected her with steroids to help jump-start the babies' lung development, so that will help some.'

'Jonathan was born early also,' said Carol, watching the boy as he coloured. 'He has asthma because of it.'

'That's something very common in premies,' the OB-GYN replied. 'Well, like I said, she's sleeping now, so I think the best thing you can do is just go home and get some rest. We'll take good care of her here, and you can come visit in the morning once she's calmed down completely from this scare.'

Joe stood before offering a hand to Carol to help her stand. 'Thank you, doctor.'

Augustine took the finality in Joe's tone to mean that they were leaving, so she went over and scooped up Jonathan into her arms, holding him on her hip as she looked at the page of his colouring book, reading the words on it aloud. Joe let the women walk out before turning back to the doctor.

'I'm sure you know that her husband is at Manhattan Psychiatric and her daughter is missing,' said Joe quietly.

'She managed to tell us, yes,' the doctor replied, putting her clipboard under her arm.

'We're hoping that her husband will be well enough to attend the birth,' Joe added, taking a step back closer to the doctor. 'About how long do you think he has?'

The woman thought for a moment. 'I can't really be completely certain, but I'd say no more than four, maybe five weeks. Lisa's right between twenty-nine and thirty weeks, and we'd really like to get her as close to thirty-seven weeks as possible, but I have a feeling that she's under enough stress that she won't make it that long.'

Joe nodded. 'Thank you. We'll be in to see her tomorrow.'