damned_institute | Day 64: Doctor's Office 6 [Third Shift]

Having to work on a Sunday might have been something that Wilson complained about, if it wasn't for the fact that his schedule here was always so light. Even when he'd had a heavier schedule back at Princeton-Plainsboro, he couldn't say that working on Sundays was a thing that never happened. He couldn't count the number of times that he'd sacrificed his free time to go into the office and do paperwork or dictations or whatever else needed to be done.

It was part of being a doctor, honestly. Anyone who didn't think that their life was going to get consumed by it was probably delusional.

That being said, Wilson felt he'd done a decent job of keeping his interactions with the patients strictly professional. He could have tried to track down some of them in Doyleton yesterday, for instance, but he'd refrained. The idea of getting too tangled up with a mental patient was something even he wasn't about to get involved with.

Despite having to come in on a Sunday, though, Wilson was only needed after lunch, and so he was working on a full stomach as he entered his office and sat down at his desk. Today he would be seeing two patients: Jude, or Allelujah, the man with the split personality -- and someone new, a Watanabe Yori. Wilson got his files in order and then waited, curious to see who would walk through the doors first.

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His condition had worsened throughout the previous day and it had been all that he could do to protect himself once the buses had stopped and the birds had attacked. The creatures that he had destroyed only a few nights previously had proven more than he could handle when wracked with shivers that he couldn't control. A fever. He'd never had a fever before and it scared him how weak he felt when he woke up the next morning. Dizziness overtook him when he stood and the food was entirely unappetising, even though he knew that he should eat to keep up his strength.

He spent the first two shifts silent and miserable and hoping that Badou would be there just for some company to lighten his mood. Nothing. And then, worse than that, the nurse came to him.

"What?" he growled when she grabbed him, forcing himself not to lash out at her.

She frowned. "Therapy dear. Did you forget?"

and so he found himself once more in the room of that doctor, curled up on the couch because he felt too ill to sit as stiffly as he normally did and it was at least comfortable.

Having only just finished up his session with Mr. Watanabe -- or Seishin, as he'd called himself -- Wilson glanced up when a nurse escorted Jude inside. The man looked, to be honest, pretty horrible, and his nurse drew forward to explain that he'd been suffering from a sickness that had been passing through the patient body for the past few days.

Wilson nodded his understanding and dismissed the nurse, having no problem with letting Jude lay down on the couch this time around.

In reality, dealing with a physical illness was much more his specialty, and so Wilson decided to start there. Maybe it wasn't his job here, but he couldn't exactly ignore it, either.

"I'm sorry to hear you haven't been feeling well," he started. "What symptoms have you been suffering from?"

Allelujah stared at him blearily for a moment wondering why light suddenly hurt to be around. He had suffered through pain before; he'd had his head cut open and needles and wires stuck in there, had bruises and broken bones and concussions, and still, this was horrible. As for the symptoms, he really just wanted to say 'everything' and leave it at that. But no-one else had shown any concern, not even a few painkillers, not that they'd work on him anyway.

How had humans not died out by now if they had to deal with this regularly?

"Fever," he began, muttering the words with all of the sullen dislike he could muster at the moment. It was not, even he had to admit, up to their usual standards. "Headache, everywhere ache. My eyeballs ache and I think the brain surgery hurt less. I can't eat because thinking about food makes me feel worse."

It was a whole laundry list of things, and if there was something Wilson was used to, it was people complaining about pain. His instinct was to think about what sort of cancer that might have been indicative of, but he knew that this had nothing to do with that. It was still second nature, even if he'd been away from his actual job for months now.

"Sounds like the flu," he said after a pause. "The fever and nausea, especially. Honestly, you should probably be in bed." Chances were that Allelujah was contagious, after all, and the nurses here should have known that it was better to quarantine the particularly sick patients.

But he wasn't supposed to be giving medical advice to the staff here.

"I can give you something to ease up on the symptoms, but drinking lots of fluid and getting rest is most important right now." He could recite all of that almost without thinking about it, and in a way it was nice to be back in his comfort area.

The flu. Allelujah just stared at him for a moment, slightly perplexed by such a mundane answer. He'd seen people in Celestial Being with the flu, of course, although not since becoming a Gundam Meister, but he had never been subjected to it himself. "You're wrong," he said bluntly. "I don't get sick. I've never been sick so this is something worse. It has to be." He broke off to cough, which made his chest ache and his head hurt then turned his bitter gaze towards Wilson once again.

"How do you people deal with this?" he asked frustrated by the whole experience. "You get sick so often how do you ever get anything done?" Why hadn't people died out by now? They were slow and sickly and while he hated what he had been made into, the torture that he had gone through, he couldn't deny that it had made him stronger.

That wasn't the sort of response he'd been expecting. Jude was honestly acting as if he had never been sick before in his life, and he was speaking about it so seriously that he had to believe it down to his core. That, of course, was more or less impossible. That was the thing about illness -- it affected everyone, except in very rare cases.

Wilson figured it was much more likely that Jude's outlook on this was due to his mental illness rather than because he was some kind of medical impossibility, though.

"If you've never been sick before, you'd have a hard time diagnosing yourself, wouldn't you? And I wouldn't say the average person gets sick that often. A healthy person probably only falls ill once or twice a year." He was usually dealing with patients who were much, much sicker than that, and some of them still managed to function and get things done, so Jude's perspective was laughable, to say the least. Getting worked up over a fever and some body aches was pretty ridiculous when Wilson was used to patients who had terminal illnesses.

Allelujah's fingers twitched, and he wanted nothing more than to grab the doctor by the collar, by the throat, and shake him until he saw the truth about this place. He was blind, so blind to be able to overlook what was going on here. How could people be so stupid? "I don't get sick," he hissed. "I'm twenty, years old, I think, and I have never once been ill. Getting sick once is too much."

He leaned back against the couch, stubbornly looking away from the doctor, lips pressed into a hard line. "If I'm sick, then I'm useless. If I'm sick then I can't fight and I don't have a purpose if I can't fight."

This was the closest that Wilson had seen Jude get to anger since they'd started having these sessions, and he had to wonder if he was going to see Hallelujah for himself at this point. Granted, Jude had told him that his other personality only came to the forefront when he had to do something he didn't have the strength to take care of himself, and this situation didn't really fit that.

It was probably for the better. From what Wilson understood, Hallelujah was violent, and he didn't want to be put in a position where he had to call the orderlies in.

But what Jude said next stood out, mainly because Wilson couldn't see the sense to it. "If you can't fight? But you haven't had the chance to fight since you arrived here, have you?" It was true that being sick prevented someone from doing all sorts of things, but since when had this patient put so much stock into fighting?

Day 64: Doctor's Office 6 [Third Shift]

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