damned_institute | Day 39: Doctor's Office 6 (Dr. Wilson) [Second Shift]

Entry tags:

allelujah,
wilson

Day 39: Doctor's Office 6 (Dr. Wilson) [Second Shift]

Stepping into his office on this particular Wednesday morning, Wilson had to admit that he was in a good mood. His last session the day before had gone particularly well, and he only wished that more of that patients were as willing to talk as Aubrey had been. Things could never be that easy, though, could they? Then again, considering he wasn't really qualified for this job, he would have thought he deserved a little slack here and there.

Either way, he was hoping that he was on some kind of good streak. Didn't those self-help books always talk about thinking positive? It was a load of bull (the sort of thing he and House had mocked together in the past), but the concept itself wasn't so bad. He'd seen enough dying patients hold on just a day more to see a family member to know that sometimes strength of will alone was enough to make a difference.

That was an internal thing, though. He had no sway over how well-behaved his patients were, but he was allowed to cross his fingers under his desk.

Next up was a new patient - new to him, at least. The man had apparently been at Landel's for a few days. Jude Davis was the name, and he was listed as having a personality disorder. He already sounded like a handful, but Wilson was going to withhold judgment for now.

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The nurses had grabbed him as he'd walked into the Sun Room, telling him that no, he couldn't go and sit in there just now because he needed to have a nice talk with his therapist who would help him to get better and wouldn't that be nice? Allelujah vehemently disagreed. Reasoning hadn't worked and had eventually ended up with a threat of sedation if he kept acting out and him being practically dragged to the therapy room by an orderly. Only the fact that being sedated would drastically inhibit his ability to fight against the doctor kept Hallelujah and his own anger from surfacing, but it was a close run thing.

Doctors. They were never good. Meetings with them had never boded well at the facility and he knew that they tortured and experimented on people here. But he wouldn't let it happen again! He'd kill if he had to.

The door shut behind him once he was shoved into the room and he eyed the other man, most likely the doctor, with deep suspicion, not moving any closer.

We should...

Not now. The nurses are probably just outside.

Wilson had become used to looks of suspicion from the patients here, but the way Mr. Davis was eyeing him beat out most of the other stares he'd gotten so far. So apparently all of his positive thinking and finger-crossing hadn't done squat. He wasn't too surprised.

That didn't mean he was going to give in and label this a failed session from the start, though. These patients got some pretty ridiculous ideas into their heads sometimes, and if he could just manage to assuage whatever fears Mr. Davis had, maybe this could be turned around.

Starting these things off tended to be the hardest part, but Wilson worked to make his expression neutral as he watched the patient.

"Believe me, you have nothing to worry about," he assured the young man. "I'm about as harmless as they come." He lifted up both hands to show there was no foul play going on.

No weapon then, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. How did he know that he wasn't going to be drugged and tortured as soon as he relaxed his guard? "You're a doctor," he said coldly. "They're never harmless." Even with the doctors of Celestial Being, he'd never lost his suspicion and wariness so he wasn't about to trust an unknown factor.

His gaze darted around the room, taking in the couch and the bits and pieces which littered the desk. There didn't look to be anything threatening, and there was no door except the one by which he had entered. At least he'd hear if someone came in that way. There wasn't a whole lot that he could do about it then except hope that he could kill or injure enough of them to leave them in some disarray.

But there wasn't any immediate threat and Hallelujah couldn't sense anything outside the room which should cause alarm, so slowly he relaxed a fraction. "What is this?"

One of those types, then? Wilson wasn't sure how all of these patients had gotten it into their heads that doctors were the devil (maybe they'd run through a string of doctors like House, but Wilson wasn't sure there were any other doctors out there who matched his friend's level of tactlessness), but he just had to hope that their minds could be changed. It wasn't like all doctors were the same, and Wilson didn't exactly appreciate being lumped in with whoever had traumatized these patients.

Waiting as patiently as he could as Jude gave a skittish glance around the room, Wilson then didn't hesitate to respond when the young man asked a question.

"It's a therapy session, and if you don't know what that is, you basically just sit here and talk to me about whatever problems you have, and that's about all." Everyone tried to make it more complicated than it needed to be, but just having a chance to get things off your chest was what it really boiled down to. And if he could start to determine what was ailing the patients at the same time, then all the better.

Therapy huh? He'd never had that, but then again, a certain amount of personality quirks and obsessions and borderline insanity were sort of required by Celestial Being. Just look at Sumeragi or Setsuna. People without problems just didn't do what they did. But this man seemed pretty serious and genuine about it. Maybe he really believed that it would help, and undoubtedly believed whatever this place said about them.

Finally Allelujah deemed it safe enough to go an sit down on the couch. At least that woman couldn't find him while he was here. "I don't have any problems, except being here," he said, rather sourly. It was a complete lie, but what, exactly, was he going to say?

At least Jude had finally decided to take a seat, even though it was on the couch, which was further away. It was better than nothing, and part of the reason Wilson even had the couch was for the more suspicious patients who didn't want to get too close. Though he still could hardly understand how he could seem the slightest bit dangerous.

The patient's comment was pretty run-of-the-mill, which also meant that Wilson knew it probably wasn't true. In fact, considering some of the problems listed in the man's file, it definitely wasn't true.

Granted, bring up the man's personality disorder right off the bat wasn't the best idea. Wilson decided to go with something simpler. "I'm Dr. Wilson, by the way," he said. "What would you like to be called?" He might as well give the man a choice, seeing how he was stuck between three different names.

That question earned the doctor a raised eyebrow. He was actually being asked what he waned to be called? That was new. The nurses called him something ridiculous no matter what he said he was actually called. It could always be a trap of course, but at this point, Allelujah wasn't exactly intending to leave because he'd been cured.

"Allelujah," he replied quietly. "That's my name." And his most treasured posession too because it had been the name that Marie had given him. Before that he'd only been a string of numbers and letters and statistics.

"Allelujah," Wilson repeated back, not sure how that counted as a name but knowing better than to say anything like that. He didn't know if the man was even aware of the religious quality that his name had, but Wilson doubted that would be a good topic to bring up now. Religion was one of those topics that everyone was supposed to avoid; on top of that, some thought that it could drive people insane.

With a small sigh, the doctor tapped his fingers against the file. The patient had taken a seat, given his name (or what he thought it was)--it seemed like now was as good a time as any to point out the elephant in the room.

"But there's also... Hallelujah, isn't there?" he asked, glancing at the young man so that he could watch for his response.

There was something wrong with the way that the man said his name. It was a weird name, he knew that, but it was still his and was very important to him, so it earned the doctor a glare. "It's my name. It's better than just being called by a subject number," he said, somewhat bitterly. And in Celestial Being, names meant very little when everyone used code names, even people like Feldt and Sumeragi who seemed so comfortable with them. Who knew if Tieria even had a real name?

But it was the mention of Hallelujah which earned Wilson a dark look, Allelujah hand's clenching in his lap as he fought down his other half who really just wanted to leap over there and dismember the man. If he took over then there would probably be bloodshed. "What about him?" Allelujah asked coldly, a protective and defensive note to his voice. What did he want with him and how did he know when no-one else had found out?

Wilson wasn't sure what the man meant by "subject number," but obviously something the doctor had said had offended Allelujah. He wasn't sure what it could be except for his tone, and now he really had to wonder. Did the man even know what his "name" meant?

But even more interesting was the patient's response to the mention of his other personality. Rather than denying it, or even letting the other personality surface, he just gave a guarded response. It left Wilson unsure of how to proceed for a moment, but he only let it delay him for a few seconds.

"Can you tell me about him?" he asked. "I have to admit I don't have many details..." He furtively grabbed for a pen, though, aware that he might need to take some notes if Allelujah was actually willing to talk about it.

He wanted to know about Hallelujah? He didn't like the implications of that one bit. He knew that it wasn't right, to have a personality like his, but he refused to be treated like he was sick. He wouldn't take medication and he wouldn't let them take Hallelujah away from him. Not ever. And those notes would go onto a file and then he'd just have to find a way to destroy them. He would probably want to anyway. He didn't like the idea of them having notes about him, about either of them. It was just asking for trouble. There was that woman here now after all. What if she found them?

"You want to get rid of him," Allelujah replied accusingly. Because that's what doctors wanted in cases like this, wasn't it? "We don't always agree," he added more quietly. "But he's mine and we protect each other." Because Hallelujah would get them killed if he was in charge the whole time, And Allelujah knew that he sometimes couldn't do what was needed.

Wilson had to admit that wasn't the reaction he'd expected. While people ended up with split personalities out of some necessity, in his experience they usually were plagued by the other personality and wanted to integrate it back so that they felt whole again. Or at least in control--why would someone want to not have a hold on part of their subconsciousness?

He was quiet for a good stretch of time, thinking it over and yet knowing it wouldn't make sense unless he got more information. "Could you explain that to me, then?" he asked. "How exactly do you protect each other?" He knew that split personalities could often be defense mechanisms, so he needed to figure out what it was that Allelujah needed defense against.

The long silence left Allelujah feeling distinctly uneasy and he kept his eyes on Wilson warily, still suspicious of the intentions of any doctor no matter what they claimed. He couldn't trust anyone who worked for this place anyway. He didn't think that anyone would. But he supposed that at least the doctor was asking questions about him rather than demanding answers or making assumptions. "He does the things I can't do to keep us alive," he explained, a little hesitantly. And even if they were sometimes terrible, horrifying things, in the end it meant that he was still alive. You couldn't do anything if you were dead.

"Like when that woman attacked me in the courtyard a few nights ago," he added. "She hurt me and he stopped her because I was too hurt to do anything." Because Hallelujah just didn't seem to feel pain, or at least, didn't care that much about it.

A survival mechanism, then. Wilson nodded, jotting it down even though it wasn't anything too out of the ordinary as far as split personalities went. One thing was for certain - Allelujah here had a very good understanding of what he was going through. It was common for people who had another personality to be unable to acknowledge that it was there, but Allelejah had apparently learned how to deal with it to the point that he didn't want to live without it.

As Wilson knew, with mental patients it was very difficult for them to get better unless they wanted to. He could have prescribed medicine to repress the other personality, but there was no telling that it would work, and it might leave the patient worse off.

The mention of the nights gave Wilson that uneasy feeling, but he focused instead on the rest of what the young man said. "If you were too hurt, then how could your body have kept going?" he asked with a slight frown.

He didn't mention anything about the nights? That was strange. As far as Allelujah could tell, during the nights the staff really believed that they were in their rooms, locked up tight, with nothing to do and nowhere to go and definitely no chance to be attacked by psychotic bitches wielding electricity. Had he just overlooked that bit of information? Or was he just mentally writing it off as some kind of lie or was it something else? He was probably over thinking this far too much.

He shrugged in response, looking down at his knees again. "Hallelujah doesn't care too much about pain." Or at least, not about his own. He much preferred other people suffering it and himself inflicting it. "And it wasn't that so much as flashbacks," he admitted. Torture wasn't something that he was unfamiliar with, even if they had been disguised as experiments for the glory of the hUman Reform League. To a child, they were still torture.

Blocking out pain was possible, as the brain could just shut down in that area, but developing that kind of response must have meant that the patient had been put through a lot of pain. Though then Allelujah made it sound less like a physical pain and more like a mental block that he went through, and Wilson knew he had to follow up on that.

"Flashbacks? What do you mean?" Had Allelujah repressed memories and then been forced to form another personality to take charge when those memories started seeping back into his consciousness? Wilson hated making stabs in the dark like this, especially when he knew he didn't have all of the proper training to be making these conjectures, but he was working with what he had. In the end, even if he couldn't diagnose the patients or give them an easy fix in the form of pills, at least he was getting them to talk.

Why was he still talking? Hallelujah was his and no-one was supposed to know about him. He got the impression that Tieria knew, but Tieria knew everything anyway so that would be no surprise. But he'd never mentioned it, and Allelujah had never offered an explanation for his sometimes erratic behaviour. So why was he talking now? Maybe because it was someone who he had no connection to, no reason to care about who he could probably get rid of later when the building was destroyed. Or maybe because it was a different world where none of this even mattered anyway.

Am I a problem now?

You know you aren't, except when you take over to kill things.

Allelujah looked up at him, a dark expression on his face. "I grew up as an experiment in a laboratory," he said harshly. "They cut open my skull to test a theory. They tortured me."

While the man's story definitely seemed like something out of a sci-fi movie, his tone made it obvious enough that it was very serious for him. So long as he believed that it was true, then it was going to torment him and force him to need his other personality.

"How much of it do you remember?" Wilson asked. "Does it only come back to you in flashbacks?" He could have offered his condolences, but he doubted that pity was what the patient needed right now. There was a time and place for that sort of thing. While he could have asked for more details on the experiment, Wilson didn't think that was the most important point here. It all had to do with how the Allelujah was dealing with the trauma -- and apparently he hadn't been handling it too well so far.

That question earned the doctor a look of surprise from Allelujah. He'd mostly been expecting a dismissive response, because they'd been telling him that nothing he knew was real since he'd arrived here. Why should this doctor be any different? But still, even if he was just being humoured, it was nice to not be told that he was crazy by someone else on the staff. The nurses made him want to scream a lot of the time with the fake name and fake history which they wouldn't actually tell him about.

"I remember everything," he said coolly. "Years being locked up there, other children disappearing because they weren't useful anymore so they were disposed of." He hated them, hated them all for what they'd done, and he hated himself for having killed those who remained, even when he'd heard them begging him to stop because he'd been their brother too.

That wasn't what Wilson had been expecting, but he went ahead and continued his line of questioning, hoping that the pieces would fall into place eventually. "If you remember all of it, then what exactly triggers Hallelujah to come out?" he asked. The man had mentioned something about flashbacks, so maybe he had moments where he literally relived his supposed past.

There was also the question of dreams, but that was treading a little too far into Freud's territory for Wilson's taste. In any case, it was starting to sound like post-traumatic stress disorder was what had caused the formation of the other personality.

Allelujah didn't like that way of describing it. "He's not triggered," he protested. "He's always there, even if he doesn't always talk to me." Sometimes he was quiet and sometimes he just wouldn't shut up making remarks which were utterly useless. He had a skewed perspective on everything. It was sometimes difficult to remember that they were the same person. "He comes out when there's something I can't deal with, or if there's a fight he wants to be involved in or if I'm incapacitated or if he's bored and wants something to do. And then he leaves when he gets bored."

It was becoming obvious that the patient was getting sick of the onslaught of questions, but Wilson needed to establish all of this before they could make any progress. Though he wasn't sure what they should be working toward if Allelujah was happy with the way things were. The man needed to realize that he couldn't pass the buck like that -- he had to take responsibility for himself, even when it seemed impossible.

"All right," Wilson said, nodding to indicate that he got the picture as he scribbled a few messy notes. "So when did Hallelujah first... make himself known, then?" He was doing his best to use terminology that better fit the dynamic the patient had just explained, so hopefully that would work.

Allelujah's face blanked at the question and he shook his head. "I'm not talking about that," he replied in a flat tone, obviously displeased with the question. He wasn't about to tell anyone about that, certainly not a stranger who worked for this place. It was too terrible to talk about, all of his comrades, all of them who'd escaped and they'd... It made him feel sick, even if killing them had been the only thing that had allowed them to survive.

"I was eight or nine though. I don't remember exactly how old." He couldn't remember what his original name had been and most of the rest Celestial Being had found out for him later. But Hallelujah had been there for more than half of his life, he couldn't imagine living without him.

When Allelujah immediately shut that thread of conversation down, Wilson knew that he would only make things worse if he tried to push it. He had gotten a surprising amount of information out of the patient already, so he knew better than to keep working on something when he'd gotten the essential piece of information in the end: the time period.

If the other personality had developed that young (which was extremely rare as far as Wilson knew), then the chances of actually being able to integrate it were probably very low. However, if Allelejah didn't make some effort to get Hallelujah under control, then he was going to have a very small chance of getting out of here.

Wilson could have made that point now, but he wasn't sure that would be the best idea. The patient was already agitated, and both of them probably needed some time to think all of this over before getting into absolutes like that.

"Thank you for being so cooperative," Wilson said as he took some final notes and then closed the man's file. "I think that's enough for today, but I'll see you next week."

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Day 39: Doctor's Office 6 (Dr. Wilson) [Second Shift]

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