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

[damned-doctors.livejournal.com]

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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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.

[tender-cruelty.livejournal.com]

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.

[damned-doctors.livejournal.com]

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.

[tender-cruelty.livejournal.com]

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."

[damned-doctors.livejournal.com]

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.

[tender-cruelty.livejournal.com]

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.

[damned-doctors.livejournal.com]

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.

[tender-cruelty.livejournal.com]

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."

[damned-doctors.livejournal.com]

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.

[tender-cruelty.livejournal.com]

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.

[damned-doctors.livejournal.com]

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."