Fic: Straightaway Dangerous 1/3
Series: Straightway Dangerous 1/3
Title: Your Boldness Stands Alone Among the Wreck
See the masterpost for full header and warnings
or my dreamwidth if the colour scheme here is too much work
*~*~*~*
Jonathan’s wrists are green and black. They rest in his lap, looking delicate, too thin to hold up his hands. His hands are very heavy. Perhaps that’s the reason his wrists are so sore. The bruises edge out from under a blue-grey shirt that matches his blue-grey trousers, and the placid, soothing, blue-grey of the walls around him. He is a ghost in a hospital made of shuffling blue-grey ghosts. They are part of the walls, and part of the floors, and outside the sky is the same colour; and they are a part of that too.
Jonathan watches the shadows from the bars on the window creep across the floor towards him. Never when he’s looking, no one even notices but him, but soon they’ll be on him. He drifts for a while when he blinks and gets lost in the maze of the veins on the insides of his eyelids. He can see every molecule in his blood slip past. He can see distinctions, the oxygen, and the hemoglobin, the platelets, red and white cells, he can see the toxin, he can see the medication. Jonathan knows the rotten core of himself, and thinks that this knowing might make him God.
His eyes shutter open and the very edges of the shadows are right there, brushing softly against the meager protection of his soft canvas shoes with no laces, and no one has noticed.
Jonathan tries to speak, but he cannot; his face belongs to someone else.
*~*~*~*
They give him something in the evenings and Jonathan goes out with the lights, then wakes up approximately four hours later. He doesn’t dream. It isn’t that he dreams and then forgets upon waking. He doesn’t dream. He would remember if he’d found his subconscious.
Jonathan lies awake an hour or so after midnight, and tries to think about escape. The room is small, he thinks, but the only light is a mustard-gas yellow staining the wall opposite the window and it’s hard to calculate square footage without taking his eyes off the bars on either side of him, sliding down on the left to scrape across the floor.
It doesn’t matter how small the room is, the bed is narrow and hard, and the pillow is flat under his head. His pajamas are soft, washed out, worn down to the same comforting dullness as the sheets and the day-room. The straps around his wrists and ankles are soft, too. They pad them carefully because he’s going to be here a long time and otherwise he might hurt himself. Hurting yourself is against the rules.
Jonathan tries to think about escape but mostly he just waits for what will come next.
Very rarely he is corrupted by the unrelenting encroachment of the light and he is wracked with terror. He starts screaming and the only escape is the needle they stick into his thigh when they finally grow tired of his noise.
Most nights though, Jonathan gets lost long before that happens and he can only blame the things inside his own head for that. He becomes nothing then, just another soul rattling its chains in Hell.
Jonathan comes to, some short time before the day begins, drenched in sweat with blood in his mouth, body aching, bruised wrists. He wants to ask why no one comes to save him, but most nights he doesn’t cry out, and he is afraid to find out what violations are meted out on his body while he is gone.
They give him something in the morning, to ease him back into the blue-grey haze of the day, as he is stripped, and showered, and dressed, and shuffled back into the day-room.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan’s wrists are green and black and he can see hues of yellow at the edges. One sleeve is up higher than usual, bunched around his forearm, but his hands are too heavy to do anything about it.
“I know who you are.”
Jonathan vaguely comprehends that someone is talking to him, but he doesn’t care. The voice is not informing him, just puzzling out the mystery of Jonathan’s existence. An I’ve seen you somewhere before, not a revelation to be shared with Jonathan. Jonathan doesn’t need a revelation, he knows who he is.
A body comes too close to him, slotting into his space, pushing his knees apart so it can fit between them, confirming the existence of the chair that Jonathan is on, trapping him between the curve of the back, and the width of shoulders and the smell of something other than antiseptic. There is a warm hand on Jonathan’s forearm, just above where his sleeve is bunched uncomfortably. The fingers curl around him and he can feel the strength there, and the catch of peeling calluses against his shirt.
Jonathan doesn’t focus, but he gets the impression of shorn curls, bright brown eyes, and the soft press of a bowed upper lip against the lower. Whoever this is is something of a mouthbreather.
“You’re the Scarecrow…aren’t you?”
“Now, John,” the dingy white voice of one of the orderlies says. “Don’t pester Jonathan. And we don’t use those names here, do we, dear?”
Jonathan blinks, and when he has come out of himself again he is inches from those startlingly brown eyes. He turns his face away. The hand on his arm tightens for a moment, but then there is a tug and his sleeve is down where it ought to be.
“I’m feeling a sense of impotent rage that there are, uh, bugs in the wall and there is nothing that I can do about it,” the owner of the hand, and eyes, and warm-body smell says. Some fragile part of Jonathan knows that this is a lie, and that group therapy sessions with the criminally insane is a criminally insane idea.
Loud voices follow, movement, and the man who lied slips away from Jonathan. Jonathan is not concerned with the fallout from the paranoid group-members who fear government plots and spies in the ranks. There are things in the walls, but not secret devices to eavesdrop on lunatics. That is foolishness.
Neither is he concerned by the accusations of being something he is not. Jonathan knows what he is. He is part of the walls, and part of the floors, and outside the sky is the same colour; and he is a part of that too. He is the ghost of God in a hospital made of blue-grey ghosts.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan’s lunch is at twelve-thirty in another room filled with cold-handed orderlies, and plastic chairs, and plastic cutlery. He is the second shift, the ones who take the longest. This would not be the case if he wasn’t given more pills an hour before that.
“Okay, sweetheart,” the orderly says, “try and get this down, I got you.”
A straw slips between his lips and when he is done, a towel pats his chin and neck to mop up the spill of juice and spit. There is not enough left of him to feel shame.
*~*~*~*
“I am feeling very, heh, helpful.” Jonathan knows this voice from somewhere but it’s not until the hands are on him, steadying him, one under his elbow, one curved around his waist, that he remembers. The liar. The one who says he knows who Jonathan is.
They are in the walled in yard getting fresh air. Jonathan is good, so he has privileges like outside. He would be bad if it meant he got to go inside again, but he isn’t sure how. He gets more medication after lunch as well. It’s difficult to put one foot in front of the other, and harder still to remember how to get around the yard.
The orderly retreats and Jonathan’s hand comes off the wall as the liar tugs him away, closer to the center where it’s much more like being outside than it was where Jonathan was. He is tucked in securely against this man’s warm body though and no longer feels as though he could crumple like dirty laundry and lie in a pile on the ground. There is something animal in the scent of sweat and breath that has Jonathan turning his face towards it this time, seeking out the quiet certainty that no matter which way around the yard he walks this man won’t change. He knows himself, this liar, and Jonathan isn’t sure who that makes him. Either of them.
“You don’t say much, do you, straw man?” the liar says.
John. They called him John.
Jonathan tries to say, no, no he doesn’t speak because he has nothing to say to these cretins, but can’t because of the medication.
“You were the first,” John says, like a secret in Jonathan’s ear. His voice is rough and complicated. “I thought you were just a dealer…even I’ve been known to be wrong. Before he showed up, you’d been wearing that mask.” They stop walking and John takes Jonathan’s face in his hands and makes him look at him. “You helped to create,” he waves an expansive hand, “all this.”
Jonathan tries to focus but the effort it would take to meet John’s eyes is too much, he cannot raise himself that high. He finds himself looking at John’s mouth instead and realizes the softness of his lower lip is bisected by a Y-shaped scar. As he watches, John tongues at the scar, hands still warm on Jonathan’s face, then he disappears.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan doesn’t like the bathrooms here. They’re colder than the rest of the ward. John shuts the door behind them, but there isn’t any lock to turn.
Jonathan isn’t allowed in here by himself, no one is. John seems fairly sure of himself though, and he manhandles Jonathan into one of the showers, gets one arm around his midsection, and sticks the fingers of his other hand down Jonathan’s throat.
“You’re going to do what I tell you,” John says, and Jonathan could swear he can feel that scar against his ear, even as he hangs from John’s arm, heaving and shaking. “I’m going to make everything make sense again, so you’re going to do exactly what I tell you.”
He drags Jonathan over to a sink and turns it on, shoves Jonathan’s head down and tells him to drink. Jonathan manages to swallow at least a little water before John lets him go. He slumps to the floor, feeling weightless and queasy. He is able to look up though, and when John turns around from running the shower, he can see John’s face, the right side pulled up like a smile and the left like a series of brackets gouged into his cheek. Behind him, the water washes away the mess of Jonathan’s lunch and his afternoon pills.
“You’re going to start cheeking your medication. Just tuck it away” John says. “Get up.” Jonathan tries, he does, but he can’t figure out where he begins and the floor ends. John hauls him up by one arm. “You cheek them away and then you come and find me,” John says.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan manages to stand, but he can’t find John, and he’s being taken to his bed. They strap him down when they leave the room and Jonathan waits a few seconds and then spits his medication out onto the pillow next to him. The lights go out, but Jonathan is still awake.
“I hear you’re a, uh, screamer,” John says, slipping into his room. The doors are locked. Jonathan knows this, he used to walk up and down these corridors at night when he was stuck on a particular patient or strain of gas. No one should be able to get in except the orderlies.
John gets up onto the narrow bed with Jonathan, knee digging into Jonathan’s side, heavy on Jonathan’s hips, and picks up the pills. “Do you know what these are?”
He tongues his scars like they’re new, Jonathan notices. Or like an old nervous habit. He wants to put his fingers inside John’s mouth and find out how thick the scaring is.
John snaps his fingers in front of Jonathan’s face to get his attention. “Front and center, cupcake,” he says, voice harder than usual. “Do you know what these are?” John doesn’t untie him. That’s probably wise. Jonathan isn’t sure what he would do if he could move. “Try this,” John says, giggling, and Jonathan takes the pills that John gives him. He dry-swallows them, hoping vaguely that they don’t stick in his chest and make him sick. John lies down, half on top of him. Jonathan feels anxious and awake, but John is heavy and warm, weighing him down so he can breathe.
“The thing is,” John says, pressing at Jonathan’s bruises until he hisses and squirms. “The thing is, that you’ve just given in and I’m disappointed, really. I can fix that, I can.” He leans back so Jonathan can see the white-pink of the scars, the curl of his permanent smile. “I can make you into something strange and marvelous.”
Jonathan lies quietly and his body shakes beyond his control while John tugs at his too-long hair and thumbs his stubble, presses into the needle tracks on the inside of his elbows and on his thighs. His fingers twitch and he makes a fist, curls his toes, and stares at the black where the ceiling is, remembering the edges where he ends and the ward begins.
*~*~*~*
part one: Your Boldness Stands Alone Among the Wreck
part two: I Hope my Smile can Distract you
part three: You're a Criminal as Long as You're Mine
Title: Your Boldness Stands Alone Among the Wreck
See the masterpost for full header and warnings
or my dreamwidth if the colour scheme here is too much work
*~*~*~*
Jonathan’s wrists are green and black. They rest in his lap, looking delicate, too thin to hold up his hands. His hands are very heavy. Perhaps that’s the reason his wrists are so sore. The bruises edge out from under a blue-grey shirt that matches his blue-grey trousers, and the placid, soothing, blue-grey of the walls around him. He is a ghost in a hospital made of shuffling blue-grey ghosts. They are part of the walls, and part of the floors, and outside the sky is the same colour; and they are a part of that too.
Jonathan watches the shadows from the bars on the window creep across the floor towards him. Never when he’s looking, no one even notices but him, but soon they’ll be on him. He drifts for a while when he blinks and gets lost in the maze of the veins on the insides of his eyelids. He can see every molecule in his blood slip past. He can see distinctions, the oxygen, and the hemoglobin, the platelets, red and white cells, he can see the toxin, he can see the medication. Jonathan knows the rotten core of himself, and thinks that this knowing might make him God.
His eyes shutter open and the very edges of the shadows are right there, brushing softly against the meager protection of his soft canvas shoes with no laces, and no one has noticed.
Jonathan tries to speak, but he cannot; his face belongs to someone else.
*~*~*~*
They give him something in the evenings and Jonathan goes out with the lights, then wakes up approximately four hours later. He doesn’t dream. It isn’t that he dreams and then forgets upon waking. He doesn’t dream. He would remember if he’d found his subconscious.
Jonathan lies awake an hour or so after midnight, and tries to think about escape. The room is small, he thinks, but the only light is a mustard-gas yellow staining the wall opposite the window and it’s hard to calculate square footage without taking his eyes off the bars on either side of him, sliding down on the left to scrape across the floor.
It doesn’t matter how small the room is, the bed is narrow and hard, and the pillow is flat under his head. His pajamas are soft, washed out, worn down to the same comforting dullness as the sheets and the day-room. The straps around his wrists and ankles are soft, too. They pad them carefully because he’s going to be here a long time and otherwise he might hurt himself. Hurting yourself is against the rules.
Jonathan tries to think about escape but mostly he just waits for what will come next.
Very rarely he is corrupted by the unrelenting encroachment of the light and he is wracked with terror. He starts screaming and the only escape is the needle they stick into his thigh when they finally grow tired of his noise.
Most nights though, Jonathan gets lost long before that happens and he can only blame the things inside his own head for that. He becomes nothing then, just another soul rattling its chains in Hell.
Jonathan comes to, some short time before the day begins, drenched in sweat with blood in his mouth, body aching, bruised wrists. He wants to ask why no one comes to save him, but most nights he doesn’t cry out, and he is afraid to find out what violations are meted out on his body while he is gone.
They give him something in the morning, to ease him back into the blue-grey haze of the day, as he is stripped, and showered, and dressed, and shuffled back into the day-room.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan’s wrists are green and black and he can see hues of yellow at the edges. One sleeve is up higher than usual, bunched around his forearm, but his hands are too heavy to do anything about it.
“I know who you are.”
Jonathan vaguely comprehends that someone is talking to him, but he doesn’t care. The voice is not informing him, just puzzling out the mystery of Jonathan’s existence. An I’ve seen you somewhere before, not a revelation to be shared with Jonathan. Jonathan doesn’t need a revelation, he knows who he is.
A body comes too close to him, slotting into his space, pushing his knees apart so it can fit between them, confirming the existence of the chair that Jonathan is on, trapping him between the curve of the back, and the width of shoulders and the smell of something other than antiseptic. There is a warm hand on Jonathan’s forearm, just above where his sleeve is bunched uncomfortably. The fingers curl around him and he can feel the strength there, and the catch of peeling calluses against his shirt.
Jonathan doesn’t focus, but he gets the impression of shorn curls, bright brown eyes, and the soft press of a bowed upper lip against the lower. Whoever this is is something of a mouthbreather.
“You’re the Scarecrow…aren’t you?”
“Now, John,” the dingy white voice of one of the orderlies says. “Don’t pester Jonathan. And we don’t use those names here, do we, dear?”
Jonathan blinks, and when he has come out of himself again he is inches from those startlingly brown eyes. He turns his face away. The hand on his arm tightens for a moment, but then there is a tug and his sleeve is down where it ought to be.
“I’m feeling a sense of impotent rage that there are, uh, bugs in the wall and there is nothing that I can do about it,” the owner of the hand, and eyes, and warm-body smell says. Some fragile part of Jonathan knows that this is a lie, and that group therapy sessions with the criminally insane is a criminally insane idea.
Loud voices follow, movement, and the man who lied slips away from Jonathan. Jonathan is not concerned with the fallout from the paranoid group-members who fear government plots and spies in the ranks. There are things in the walls, but not secret devices to eavesdrop on lunatics. That is foolishness.
Neither is he concerned by the accusations of being something he is not. Jonathan knows what he is. He is part of the walls, and part of the floors, and outside the sky is the same colour; and he is a part of that too. He is the ghost of God in a hospital made of blue-grey ghosts.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan’s lunch is at twelve-thirty in another room filled with cold-handed orderlies, and plastic chairs, and plastic cutlery. He is the second shift, the ones who take the longest. This would not be the case if he wasn’t given more pills an hour before that.
“Okay, sweetheart,” the orderly says, “try and get this down, I got you.”
A straw slips between his lips and when he is done, a towel pats his chin and neck to mop up the spill of juice and spit. There is not enough left of him to feel shame.
*~*~*~*
“I am feeling very, heh, helpful.” Jonathan knows this voice from somewhere but it’s not until the hands are on him, steadying him, one under his elbow, one curved around his waist, that he remembers. The liar. The one who says he knows who Jonathan is.
They are in the walled in yard getting fresh air. Jonathan is good, so he has privileges like outside. He would be bad if it meant he got to go inside again, but he isn’t sure how. He gets more medication after lunch as well. It’s difficult to put one foot in front of the other, and harder still to remember how to get around the yard.
The orderly retreats and Jonathan’s hand comes off the wall as the liar tugs him away, closer to the center where it’s much more like being outside than it was where Jonathan was. He is tucked in securely against this man’s warm body though and no longer feels as though he could crumple like dirty laundry and lie in a pile on the ground. There is something animal in the scent of sweat and breath that has Jonathan turning his face towards it this time, seeking out the quiet certainty that no matter which way around the yard he walks this man won’t change. He knows himself, this liar, and Jonathan isn’t sure who that makes him. Either of them.
“You don’t say much, do you, straw man?” the liar says.
John. They called him John.
Jonathan tries to say, no, no he doesn’t speak because he has nothing to say to these cretins, but can’t because of the medication.
“You were the first,” John says, like a secret in Jonathan’s ear. His voice is rough and complicated. “I thought you were just a dealer…even I’ve been known to be wrong. Before he showed up, you’d been wearing that mask.” They stop walking and John takes Jonathan’s face in his hands and makes him look at him. “You helped to create,” he waves an expansive hand, “all this.”
Jonathan tries to focus but the effort it would take to meet John’s eyes is too much, he cannot raise himself that high. He finds himself looking at John’s mouth instead and realizes the softness of his lower lip is bisected by a Y-shaped scar. As he watches, John tongues at the scar, hands still warm on Jonathan’s face, then he disappears.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan doesn’t like the bathrooms here. They’re colder than the rest of the ward. John shuts the door behind them, but there isn’t any lock to turn.
Jonathan isn’t allowed in here by himself, no one is. John seems fairly sure of himself though, and he manhandles Jonathan into one of the showers, gets one arm around his midsection, and sticks the fingers of his other hand down Jonathan’s throat.
“You’re going to do what I tell you,” John says, and Jonathan could swear he can feel that scar against his ear, even as he hangs from John’s arm, heaving and shaking. “I’m going to make everything make sense again, so you’re going to do exactly what I tell you.”
He drags Jonathan over to a sink and turns it on, shoves Jonathan’s head down and tells him to drink. Jonathan manages to swallow at least a little water before John lets him go. He slumps to the floor, feeling weightless and queasy. He is able to look up though, and when John turns around from running the shower, he can see John’s face, the right side pulled up like a smile and the left like a series of brackets gouged into his cheek. Behind him, the water washes away the mess of Jonathan’s lunch and his afternoon pills.
“You’re going to start cheeking your medication. Just tuck it away” John says. “Get up.” Jonathan tries, he does, but he can’t figure out where he begins and the floor ends. John hauls him up by one arm. “You cheek them away and then you come and find me,” John says.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan manages to stand, but he can’t find John, and he’s being taken to his bed. They strap him down when they leave the room and Jonathan waits a few seconds and then spits his medication out onto the pillow next to him. The lights go out, but Jonathan is still awake.
“I hear you’re a, uh, screamer,” John says, slipping into his room. The doors are locked. Jonathan knows this, he used to walk up and down these corridors at night when he was stuck on a particular patient or strain of gas. No one should be able to get in except the orderlies.
John gets up onto the narrow bed with Jonathan, knee digging into Jonathan’s side, heavy on Jonathan’s hips, and picks up the pills. “Do you know what these are?”
He tongues his scars like they’re new, Jonathan notices. Or like an old nervous habit. He wants to put his fingers inside John’s mouth and find out how thick the scaring is.
John snaps his fingers in front of Jonathan’s face to get his attention. “Front and center, cupcake,” he says, voice harder than usual. “Do you know what these are?” John doesn’t untie him. That’s probably wise. Jonathan isn’t sure what he would do if he could move. “Try this,” John says, giggling, and Jonathan takes the pills that John gives him. He dry-swallows them, hoping vaguely that they don’t stick in his chest and make him sick. John lies down, half on top of him. Jonathan feels anxious and awake, but John is heavy and warm, weighing him down so he can breathe.
“The thing is,” John says, pressing at Jonathan’s bruises until he hisses and squirms. “The thing is, that you’ve just given in and I’m disappointed, really. I can fix that, I can.” He leans back so Jonathan can see the white-pink of the scars, the curl of his permanent smile. “I can make you into something strange and marvelous.”
Jonathan lies quietly and his body shakes beyond his control while John tugs at his too-long hair and thumbs his stubble, presses into the needle tracks on the inside of his elbows and on his thighs. His fingers twitch and he makes a fist, curls his toes, and stares at the black where the ceiling is, remembering the edges where he ends and the ward begins.
*~*~*~*
part one: Your Boldness Stands Alone Among the Wreck
part two: I Hope my Smile can Distract you
part three: You're a Criminal as Long as You're Mine