Author's Chapter Notes:

This chapter contains graphic descriptions of violence and torture.

Disclaimer: I don't own anyone except for the OC's. I don't claim to, and I'm making no profit from this.

OOO

It was two and a half days later before she had another chance to think about Captain Napier. Hospitals were always busy, and here at Hines VA it was no different. There was no shortage of alcoholism, uncontrollable rage, depression, and the ever-present post traumatic stress disorder; in fact, she barely felt able to fit all of her patients into her work week.

At times, she felt overwhelmed, like she was struggling to swim, and all of the horrors that these men and women had experienced, the atrocities that they themselves had committed, they were all dragging her down, drowning her. But then she would remind herself of all the good she could do, forced herself to think of that, and she could make it through just one more day.

But as was stated earlier, it took exactly sixty hours and thirty-nine minutes for the quiet blonde to meander into her thoughts again. She didn't know what was more discomforting, the man himself, or the feelings he had very strangely evoked in her during their last session. It was patently unprofessional, and Harleen forcefully reminded herself that tomorrow was going to be different.

She sighed, and picked up the woefully thin manila folder that, as of this moment, was still unlabeled. Now that she had a name, she took a permanent marker and wrote in neat black letters "CAPTAIN NAPIER, JAMES" across the front of it. It was going to get easier from here, she hoped. Now that she had begun to unlock him just a little, perhaps the flow would increase, like a tiny crack in a dam getting wider. She had now a name, an age, a place of birth, and a glimpse at his childhood.

She had noticed he had not mentioned his father yet, even in passing, and she resolved to broach that issue tomorrow. She made a few more notes on his chart, estimating his height to be about 6'1, hair blonde, eyes brown, and, like most of his fellow soldiers, a tanned complexion. Faded bruises around his eyes, and on the visible portions of his arms, and of course, the most obvious. Twin incisions, from the corners of his mouth, not identical; the rough edges indicated they had been done with some sort of serrated blade. The right side extended upward and back about 4 inches, ending in that sickening little curl on his cheekbone. The left side was shorter, only about 3 inches long, but the pictures taken of his first arrival in the Baghdad medical facility showed that a wedge shaped piece had been hacked out of his cheek, leaving the stitches now struggling to hold his face together. The skin puckered, and pulled tight, and she knew the scarring was going to be terrible. He would need extensive plastic surgery to repair the damage, if he could even bring himself to allow a knife near his face again.

The skin was still inflamed, and deeply bruised, the blood gathering beneath the site of the incisions. The patient had interfered with the sutures, initially. He had been sedated often in the first few weeks after his rescue, still delirious with pain and fever from the infections that had already set in. His attending doctors said that if given the chance to reach full lucidity, he would begin to claw at his stitches, screaming and babbling uncontrollably. Sedation was a much safer option for everyone involved.

Once he had been stabilized, the Captain had been flown back to the US with thirty-four other wounded veterans. The Captain had ended up here at Hines with five others.

The most concrete information in his file existed from the moment of his discovery to the present day. He had been found some ten miles upstream of An Nasiriyah, in an abandoned complex that had been rumored to be harboring a group of Iraqi soldiers not yet subdued. Presumably, the Captain and ten other SpecOps soldiers had been sent to clear out the area ahead of a maintenance convoy they were escorting. The convoy lost contact with them at about 1300 hours on the 31st of March, and they were found seven days later by a Marine S and R, on the 6th of April, in exactly the same location as their last recorded dispatch. The abandoned complex truly was abandoned, holding only the bodies of ten dead soldiers, all killed execution style, a single bullet to the head of each. They had all been bound, gagged, blind-folded.

The Captain himself was found apart from the others, alive, but little more than a breathing corpse. He had been chained to the wall, beaten terribly, and quickly nearing death due to the extensive blood loss suffered from his facial wounds and internal bleeding. His left lung had collapsed, punctured by three of the broken ribs he had suffered; the other two were on the right side. There wasn't a single part of his body not covered with some scrape, cut, gash, or bruise. His knuckles themselves were bloody and raw, suggesting he had not made it easy for his captors.

They said they had found him covered in flies and maggots, devouring the flesh that had begun to rot at the edges of his wounds. The bottoms of his feet had been burned and then cut into a diamond pattern, to make it impossible for him to run. Bits of wood had been driven into his toes and fingers, beneath the nail, and the S and R team had been forced to leave them there, so extensive were his overall wounds: they had higher priorities. There were IV tracks in his hands and his arms, and his chemical analysis revealed that they'd kept him pumped full of a coagulant, and adrenaline. There was a drain wound in the left side of his chest, for the punctured lung. These people, whoever the Captain had been ambushed by, they had denied him escape, relief in any way, even so far as death or sleep.

The pain that man had endured was unbelievable to her. The very fact that he still existed, and so calmly, so… restrained, it frightened her when she thought about it. She had absolutely no idea what was going on beneath the surface: there was no use lying to herself by saying that she understood the Captain yet. The man was a mystery, and she was a little intimidated at the idea of being the one to solve it… but it was her job, wasn't it?

She found herself very nervous at the prospect of what she might or might not find out, and possessing the distinctly anxious feeling that she would fall apart under his gaze again. It made no sense. She was a grown woman, a college graduate, a doctor for Chrissakes! She couldn't flirt with her patient!

She resolved not to allow that to happen again, and when Friday morning came creeping over the horizon, Harleen Quinzel stepped into the gray drizzle and began her walk to the bus stop, calm, collected, and above all professional.

OOO

Her professional demeanor lasts all of five minutes the instant she walks through the hospital's revolving door.

There is a particular claxon blaring, blue lights, the alarm for a fight. Everyone is rushing toward the cafeteria, so Harley carefully shoulders her tote, and takes off after them, running at a good clip for three inch heels. There is shouting and she can hear the sharp snap of flesh against flesh, the thump of bodies on the hard tile. There is a circle of bodies, presumably the two that are fighting are within, hidden from view. Doctors and nurses are desperately trying to stop the altercation, and prevent anymore from occurring as the men take sides in the battle.

It is a chaos of tangled bodies and garbled words, and she finds it hard to shoulder her way through the crowd of men; she eventually resorts to throwing elbows and shoving, and she nearly falls as the circle very suddenly widens. The sudden silence is so strange after the cacophony, but soon reality comes rushing back, and Harley realizes it isn't quiet at all: she hears screaming.

It takes her till some hours later to really process what it is that she sees in the next thirty seconds.

He moves like an animal, not gracefully, necessarily, but infinitely dangerous and unpredictable. His blows are precise, their force, the strength behind them, astounding, and suddenly his opponent is falling, head bouncing off the tile with a crack . She watches in muted horror as he falls upon the other man, and his fist connects once, twice more with the bloodied face. His hand wraps into the collar of his hospital smock, and pulls him up to again slam his head into the ground. That is what Harley expects him to do, and it's what she expects until her brain can no longer deny what she's seeing, because she watches the Captain bow his head and sink in his teeth.

It's almost comical, because at first the man's lips just stretch outward like rubber as the Captain leans backwards, but soon the skin gives way, flesh tearing, and she's staring at the man's teeth and gums as his lower lip simply rips away, hanging down his chin and onto his throat and pouring torrents of blood down his front.

Patients and doctors alike scatter in panic, the noise is deafening, and she hears a splatter as someone loses their stomach's contents onto the cafeteria's off-white floor. Guards and orderlies are pouring in now, looking as bewildered and terrified as everyone else. She's never seen anything like it, the orderlies are much larger than the Captain, but he makes it look easy as he takes them both to the ground, scrambling across their fallen forms and the floor to return to his former target.

The injured man lets out a pitiful, gurgling wail, scuttling on his back like a broken crab. He's screaming, "Get him away from me!" and "He's crazy!" over and over again, but Harley can barely understand it with just his bottom jaw working to meet what was left of his lips.

It only seems to fuel the Captain's rage further, because he lets out a wordless growl, and throws off the guard that had wrapped a massive arm around his neck in an attempt to choke him out.

For the second time, the Captain is on top of his prey, for it was clear what the man was to him now. His victim throws up his hands in an attempt to fend him off; he easily bats away the broken right arm, both hands closing around his left, and Harley watches as though in slow motion as the man's hand wrenches backwards, his forearm snapping in two beneath the pressure of the Captain's grip.

Four guards fall on him at once, then two more when it's obvious the initial dosage of thorazine is doing nothing at all. Three syringes later, the rigidity finally leaves the Captain's limbs, and he collapses in a heap. The bottom half of his face is a mask of gore, strands of his hair painted red and plastered to his skin.

It only takes one orderly to lift the unconscious man and strap him to a stretcher to be taken to isolation… It took six of those men to bring him down.

OOO

Both the Captain and his unfortunate victim had been wheeled off, but the cafeteria was still chaos. It took a good thirty minutes to escort all of the patients back to their rooms, until now, there is nothing left in the room with Harley but overturned chairs and an eight inch pool of blood on the tile. It was disconcerting, to say the least, and she struggled to keep her eyes directed away from it as she waited at the table for the two patients she had summoned here: Alberto Nunez, and Nubby Smith, Captain Napier's poker buddies.

Witnesses had indicated that they had been at the table with the Captain right before the attack, they would know better than anyone just what had happened. Five minutes later her wait ended, and the double doors of the cafeteria swung smoothly open, and the PV2 was rolled through, being pushed by one of the new nurses, a pretty brunette. Nunez doesn't seem to have any smart comments for the ladies today, though.

PFC Smith followed him soon after. He had lost most of his left arm to a malfunctioning hand grenade, and Harley was initially horrified by the name the men called him until she learned that it had been Christopher Smith who had christened himself Nubby. Each soldier had a different way of dealing with their trauma: some denied it, some internalized it, but Smith made it into his own permanent running gag. He didn't seem as bright today, just like Nunez. They both looked rather shell-shocked.

"Thank you for coming here." She offered, quietly, and they regarded her with an almost distrustful air. "I think you both know why I called you."

Nunez is staring at the pool of blood with a sick expression on his face, and Smith glances at him before he looks back to Harleen, pushing his glasses up his nose with his remaining right hand.

"You wanna know what set J-Boy off." He says, simply.

"Yes. From what I can gather, there were only the four of you at that table, and no one else was close enough to hear what was going on."

"He was fucking with him," Nunez snapped, and he seemed to regain some of his usual fire.

"He always fucks with him," Smith continued. "But I didn't think he would do it. He was calling him out. He pushed too far." The words come out like machine gun fire, rapid and staccato, and she holds her hands up quickly.

"Woah, woah. Let's just start from the beginning."

The two look between each other, as though deciding who would take over, before Nunez finally spoke up.

"We always sit at the same table, everybody knows it, so I meet Jack down by the chapel garden cause I go there to say my rosaries in the morning, and we head in to meet Nubs. Now when we get there, Thomas (Major Roderick Thomas, her brain chirrups) is already sitting at our table, but it's a free country, so we just sit down and eat our food. We're talking, cause that's all we ever do, just bullshit and eat, and we're talking about our next poker game, when Thomas starts butting in, and making these nasty comments. So Jack, he's just trying to brush this guy off, but I can tell he's getting under his skin. That's not like Jack, cause he can banter with the best of them, but he's different, he's real sensitive this morning, I can tell. I'm telling Thomas to shut the hell up, but he just keeps running his mouth, taunting him, trying to press all his buttons, and he just can't take it anymore. Hell, I can't take it anymore! So Jack finally stops eating, and he just looks at him like he's only just realized he's there, and Thomas goes 'And what the fuck are you looking at, pretty boy?' I'll never forget it… He smiled, Doc, he smiled at him, biggest fucking smile I ever seen on J's face, and he taps his spoon on the edge of the bowl three times, like he doesn't even know he's doing it, and then…" he trails off, and Harley raises her eyebrows impatiently.

"And?"

"And then Jack takes his teeth and tears his fucking face off." Smith put in, grimly.

"That's it?"

"From start to finish," Nunez says. "Strangest thing, Doc… I ain't never seen a human being move like that before."

OOO

She had spoken to the only two witnesses to the event that were capable of discussing it, and it hadn't told her a single thing. Now she was being called to Lieutenant-Colonel Standen's office completely blind, with no explanation of her patient's behavior today.

Her heels clicked on the tile, and it seemed much too loud as it echoed off the walls, and the hallway seemed to stretch on forever as she made her way to the center of the hospital, and the administration offices.

The wooden double doors at the end of the hall were not typical of the rest of the hospital's architecture. They were French style, with a stained glass insert that left a kaleidoscope effect of light on the floor. It turned her skin into a rainbow as she stepped into it and turned the handle of the door, entering the plush waiting room. She has no time to appreciate the overstuffed chairs because the stiffly shouldered woman behind the secretary's desk looks up, and says curtly, "The Lieutenant-Colonel is expecting you." and Harley has to keep right on walking, straight into Standen's office.

His uniform is crisp, immaculate. He's a short man, head and face carefully shaved, but he is by no means a small man. She cannot imagine that he could have been any stronger the first day out of boot camp, than he is right now.

"Sit down, Doctor." He motions sharply, the gesture moderate, nothing wasted on ostentation. She obeys, and takes the indicated seat.

"You know why you're here, and I want to know why you're here: I want you to tell me why your patient assaulted a superior officer, and, above all, I want to know why you didn't inform your department head the minute you had any reason to believe this man was mentally unstable!?"

Harley doesn't flinch, she learned that in BT, they smell weakness the way sharks smell blood in the water.

"Lieutenant-Colonel, sir, I had no reason to believe he was a danger to anyone. This is the first sign of violent behavior that I am aware of him exhibiting. I had no idea he would be capable of something like this."

"No idea he'd be capable of something like this?" Standen said, incredulously. "I don't think you understand who you're dealing with here, missy. He doesn't need a knife, or a gun, he decides he wants you dead all he needs are his hands." He paused, staring at her as though to let that sink in. "This man is the weapon, and the last I checked we don't hand rifles over to the crazy ones. So what I am telling you is, if you've got any reason to believe this man might be a danger, I need to hear about it. This is not a mental hospital, Dr. Quinzel, I don't have the facilities to house a lunatic. But what I do have is a responsibility to each and every soldier in this building, to give them a place to heal, and above all, to keep them safe. I can't do that if I throw a time bomb into the middle of them."

"He's not crazy, he's not," she says quickly. "I'm not offering excuses for what my patient did, but the Major was taunting him. You must understand, the Captain is under an immense amount of mental strain. He's going to bear those scars for the rest of his life, with no way to hide them from the world. Have you even read his file? What that man endured would cripple anyone!"

"I'll thank you to remember your tone in my office, Doctor."

She gritted her teeth, bowing her head and getting some control over herself.

"I apologize, Lieutenant-Colonel, but all I am saying is that… With all that he has been through, you cannot abandon him now. An asylum is not the place for him, he needs to stay here where people understand him, understand what he's been through. He can be healed, sir." Her eyes were burning with tears, she knew they were, and she'd never been more humiliated in her life, but the Lieutenant-Colonel frowns, gaze on hers, before he shakes his head.

"I'd better not be making a mistake."

"You're not, sir—"

"Shut up, Doctor. I'm not finished. I'm giving you a month, that's sixteen sessions to get his treatment together, and if in that time there are no more incidents, then I'll allow the Captain to remain here. If, however, he so much as squeaks at anybody, or if you find out he… threw a rock at a kitten when he was five, I don't care what, any sign that he is a danger to himself or anyone else, I'm gonna throw him in a padded room under the hospital, and you'll never work in Veteran Affairs again, you understand me?"

"Yes, sir." She says quietly, and he throws a dismissive hand out at her, turning back to his computer screen.

"Now get the hell out of my office."

Chapter End Notes:

Please feed the Comment Monster! Edwards Hines Jr. VA is a real hospital... it's just outside of downtown Chicago, and I decided to use it since TDK was filmed in Chicago, but I've stolen it and moved it to some fictional city entirely of my own creation.