Author's Note: This is the final segment of Gone, but not Forgotten. It is also the final piece in the Gen (or Primary) story arc of the "Bridges" universe. This part was posted as part of the 14Valentines Project over on LiveJournal. Topic of the Day: Domestic Violence. Also, a general FYI, Marjorie Chapel is an original character. I wanted a true outsider's perspective for the final chapter of this collection.

VI. Nurse Marjorie Chapel

Marjorie had been working inpatient wards for the better part of twenty years when she got the job with the VHA. The pay wasn't great, but it was regular hours and the retirement benefits were better than the last two jobs she'd held (and with things in the Middle East unlikely to cool down any time soon, it was also the most stable job she was ever going to find. No budget cutbacks likely in the military wards, that was for damn sure). Originally, she applied to work an infusion team in the main Denver facility, but they offered her a twenty thousand dollar signing bonus if she'd agree to work at the Secondary Inpatient Psychiatric facility. Despite her dislike of the psych wards, she hadn't been able to turn down that kind of money, even if it came with a two year minimum commitment and a stack of forms half a foot deep explaining what would happen if she repeated anything the patients said in her proximity. She made a good faith effort at reading through the fine print, but after three pages she gave up and just signed at the X. Twenty grand was a lot of money, and she could really use a new car.

The first few weeks were exactly like she expected, getting to know the staff and slowly learning the little bits of routine that were unique to each long-term inpatient ward. Then she started getting to know the patients, and she began to understand just how unusual the SIP ward really was.

^__^__^

For one thing, unlike the rest of the VHA facilities in the Denver complex, the SIP ward was a mix of military and civilian. Majors and sergeants rubbed shoulders with botanists and archeologists, all without the usual friction that came from throwing such different social spheres into close proximity. Marjorie's father had been in the military, thirty years served before retiring a colonel, and while he'd tolerated civilian professionals, he'd had no love for them. But there was no such segregation in the SIP ward, not in the cafeteria that served the patients and not in the rec areas where those not confined to their rooms mingled and watched television. The segregation that did occur seemed to be related to where the patients had been assigned, and even then it wasn't an overt split.

In her initial training for the SIP ward, Marjorie had learned that to become a patient there someone had to have been associated with one of two classified projects. Some of them had worked at the Cheyenne Mountain facility, down in Colorado Springs, and the rest on some classified research base code named "Atlantis." The few exceptions had worked on a third, affiliated, research project down in Antarctica and snapped due to the cold and the dark. Of the three projects, it was the patients from Atlantis who most separated themselves from the larger group. They weren't adversarial, they were just that extra bit withdrawn.

One thing that all of the patients had in common was their amusement with her name, which got old fast. Every time she introduced herself as Nurse Chapel, anyone who happened to be in the vicinity would start snickering. It wasn't until she met Dr. Kate Heightmeyer, a specialist who flew in every other week to work with some of the more troubled patients, that she finally got an explanation. Kate had laughed at their introduction, followed immediately by an apology and the much desired explanation. While Marjorie had been told on occasion that she had a namesake in the original Star Trek series, she'd never bothered to hunt the series down or commit the trivial fact to memory. Apparently everyone in the SIP ward had a better-than-average knowledge of Star Trek, Wormhole X-Treme, and just about anything else that classed as science fiction of a questionable nature. Marjorie eventually put it down to one of those things that only half made sense (there were plenty of them around the SIP ward) and smiled along whenever her name was broadcast over the loudspeaker.

Another oddity was the low incidence of drug therapy amongst the patients. The majority received no treatment outside of individual and group counseling. There were two constants for those on a medication schedule. First was that they were part of a clinical trial, either for PTSD or a related anxiety disorder. The other was that they all had family "on the outside." Marjorie had been shocked to realize just how many of the members of the ward, especially those in the "Atlantis" group, had next of kin whose relationship was listed as "coworker" or "teammate" or "friend." The only siblings and parents seemed to be amongst those who'd worked at Cheyenne Mountain, and those patients were the ones aggressively pursuing discharge.

The more she learned about the patients, the more the dynamics made sense and the more her heart went out to them. Whomever had staffed the "Atlantis" project had clearly sought out loners, people that no one would miss, and they'd succeeded. The only visitors the "Atlantis" patients had were friends and professional colleagues, never family. Even those out of Cheyenne Mountain who had family often refused to contact them, and Marjorie wished that she didn't understand their motives. According to the staff rumor mill, most of the patients in the SIP ward were there for the long haul. You didn't land there unless you had severe adjustment issues that made you unable to function in normal society, and while Marjorie had only seen hints of the problems listed on the charts, she knew that behavior inside a controlled environment was often very different than behavior in the general population.

All of the patient files, even those for the civilians, were red-flagged for "Risk of Violence." SOP in the ward was to call security if a problem ever arose, but in six months she'd never once had to call in security. There had been a dozen almost-incidents, but the other patients always intervened before things got out of control. They'd only had to sedate a patient once, and that had been when a letter arrived informing Dr. Coleman of her mother's death. The woman had been inconsolable for days, curled up in bed and refusing to leave her room. Marjorie couldn't blame her for lashing out, even if it had taken a week for the bruise to fade. Considering the notes in Coleman's file, Marjorie had gotten off lucky - Coleman could easily have killed her.

As time passed, Marjorie settled more deeply into the routines of the SIP ward. In many ways, she became a part of the insular culture that the patients had developed to cope with their isolation, incorporated into their "us" instead of part of the "them" beyond the building's walls. She knew she was lucky - she worked days, only covering the occasional night shift in a pinch, and the nights were when the rough patches came bubbling to the surface in the SIP ward. Almost all of the patients suffered nightmares, the kind that left echoes in the halls for hours after the dreamer woke, and more than one nurse had been injured trying to wake a troubled sleeper. Night brought the demons out, from the insomniacs to the caged violence that almost never manifested during the daylight hours. No matter how functional they appeared, each and every one of the residents of the SIP ward had their monsters, the kind better off caged than free.

By the time her two years were up, Marjorie didn't even have to think about whether or not to renew her contract. After taking the job, she'd asked her supervisor about the two year mandate, hoping to find out how often the staff turned over. Most psychiatric units had higher than normal turnover, and she couldn't believe that the staff lasted much over their required minimum, or there'd never have been such a generous signing bonus. To her surprise, she was informed that turnover was almost nil, only two staff members leaving in the last five years and both for reasons unrelated to the job. As she made the trip down to the HR office in the main facility, seeing the large and impersonal space for the first time since taking the position in the SIP ward, Marjorie finally realized why it was that the turnover was so low. SIP ward wasn't just an inpatient care unit, it was a home for those who no longer fit the world outside their door. She didn't know how or why they'd been changed, and two years into her position in the ward she had a feeling that she'd never know the half of it, but they weren't the men and women they'd been when they signed onto whatever projects had spat them back out, mishapen and maladjusted.

This time, when presented with the ream and a half of paperwork that went with her position, she didn't bother to page through it at all. Instead, she flipped to the last page and signed her name with a flourish. Some things you just did because they were right.

~ Finis ~

[End Primary Story Collection]