damned_institute | Day 46: Doctor's Office 10 (Dr. Burroughs) [Fourth Shift]

Talking with Alex over lunch hadn't been what Jason had expected, as far as he'd had any expectations at all. He still wasn't sure what to make of the guy. Something about him made Jason wary, though it could just be that having been caught lying once already had reminded him he should watch his step. Although, Alex had gotten in contact with Drake which could cause problems with him if they met up. But little Timmy would have his own problems to deal with soon enough.

Jason had been expecting to be dragged off to the Sun Room for another shift of boredom and maybe the chance to catch up with Two-Face after his chat with the baby bird. Instead his nurse continued herding him through the Sun Room, explaining as they went, "You have a meeting with Dr Burroughs this afternoon Ben."

"So we're finally getting to the damn therapy?" Jason said carelessly. "'Bout time. I've already been here over a week you know. How do you expect me to get back in touch with what passes for reality if all I do is sit on my ass all day?"

"Well, being a little less confrontational would be a start," she replied, calmly leading him along the same hall he and Two-Face had travelled a few nights back. They went past the intact door to the office that they'd been planning to trap Bruce in and to another, identical door with a nameplate reading 'Dr. Burroughs'. The nurse knocked politely and they waited for his doctor to make an appearance.

"...huh."

That was the first time they knocked and waited instead of the nurse just bringing them in automatically to have a seat. Thankfully, it only took about five awkward seconds of staring at the door that Maggie realized she'd have to get up and she felt a twinge of guilt for being lazy as she stood and went for the door.

"Good afternoon," she said, swinging the door open wide enough to both look over her next patient and give him enough room to actually get in. Ben Smith (only a tiny bit better than John Doe), dangerously delusional with an attitude problem and a half. Great. Like she needed someone who could potentially drive her anger levels up and remind her of her heritage. "I'm Dr. Burroughs. Would you like to take a seat, Ben?" She paused for a second, waiting for the nurse to take her leave so she could close the door and get back to her desk. "Or would you like me to call you Jason for now?"

Maybe it wasn't so much a good idea to humor any delusions, especially with this man, but if it'd make him more comfortable and he didn't get too stubborn with her, she'd do what she could.

Back at her chair, Dr. Burroughs began pouring another mug for the company. "Why don't you have some coffee and tell me a little about yourself?"

Jason sauntered in as the doc opened the door, gaze flicking around to take in the room and the doctor herself. Pretty boring all up. The poster on the wall was odd but that was it. The doctor herself didn't look like anything special - young, not unattractive, average build. Unless she was a metahuman he could overpower her easily enough if he had to. He was unarmed but Jason knew his own strength, knew that if he wanted to he could kill her with his bare hands. It was strange then, that he was being left alone in an enclosed room with her. The nurses had only seen his disappointingly brief fight with Harley but from the lecture he'd received this morning and the state both he and his roommate were in they had to be aware of what had gone on last night. So it seemed a big risk to leave him alone with her.

Lucky for the doc here, he wasn't looking to make an escape right now but if this was going to be a regular occurrence it was worth keeping in mind.

Jason slumped into the empty chair, watching the doctor as closely as he would any opponent. He had been avoiding using his real name with the other supposed patients and the staff had never called him by it. Hearing this doctor use it now made part of him tense up. He knew already from Alfred and Bruce's prescence that whoever had brought them here knew everything but that didn't make him ready to be confronted with it like that. Still, he played it cool, calmly replying, "Why don't we stick with Jason? I like it a lot better."

Watching her pour a cup of coffee for him, Jason nodded his thanks, saying "I don't know if there's much I can tell you doc. You must have everything on file already right?"

For being stubborn, he was playing this awfully smart. No signs of shyness or resistance, no severe hesitation. He was still eying her like a target, which was fine with her - she could take care of herself surprisingly well. The real problem would be his safety if the orderlies were slow at her call.

Her face briefly paled at the realization that she was thinking of hurting someone, none the less internally boasting about how well she could do it. Goddamn it...

She took a swig of her coffee before setting the mug down again. If he was going to play smart, she didn't have grounds to sugar coat anything. Maggie picked up the file, his file, and casually flipped through it. "Files aren't that conclusive. They only tell you an outsider's perspective and no matter how close you can get to understanding what's going on, there's no better source than the horse itself." She paused, peering up at him from the folder. "If you'll pardon the analogy.

"So how about it? At least tell me what's on your mind?"

Sipping thoughtfully at his coffee - which wasn't as good as Alfred's but then what was? - Jason frowned to himself. The doc had looked.... upset maybe - for a moment there. He hadn't done anything to cause that kind of reaction. If she was a professional shrink she had to be used to being around potentially dangerous patients so it made no sense for her to be suddenly worried about being alone with him.

Getting to his feet Jason moved to her side under the pretense of trying to look at his file, using his height advantage to loom over her as he looked down. It was a cheap trick but it would at least give him an idea of how easy she was to intimidate.

"Well, if you really want to know," he said lazily, still staring down at her. "I'm wondering where you heard that name. You're the first person here to call me that." Besides Alfred that was. "I didn't think any one else knew it."

Whatever fear was showing on her face earlier had vanished by the time Ben moved himself over her shoulder. It was funny, but she really didn't see it for the intimidation tactic it was, at least not right away; being a measly 5'5" and a fraction more with heels, everyone loomed over you. It was something she was used to.

But then she remembered this man's track record and all she had been warned against when dealing with him. It wouldn't be out of the blue for him to try and scare her by almost pinning her to her desk.

It was a cheap trick. Maggie wasn't all that impressed.

"I heard it from your file." Just to prove her point, she closed the thing and held it up to him as she swiveled her chair back to face him. It wouldn't hurt any if he was that curious and it wasn't the entire thing anyhow. "Whoever wrote your file apparently heard it from you."

She looked up at him, watching his face. "Anything else? If not, maybe we can get started."

Jason took the proffered file, shifting to lean against the desk by the doc as he opened it and scanned the information inside. His eyes narrowed, frowning dangerously as some key points jumped out at him. Whoever had written this, he'd like to discuss with them some issues he had with the bullshit story they'd constructed. Preferably the kind of discussion that ended in broken bones. The whole idea of Bruce being nothing but an innocent victim left him grinding his teeth and just itching to beat someone's face in.

When Burroughs spoke again, dragging his attention away from the crap in his file, Jason's gaze snapped up to her face, staring her down intensely a moment before he relaxed and nodded, moving back to the empty seat again. Tossing the file down on the desk between them he threw himself down, feigning nonchalance.

"Sure, why not?" he answered flippantly. "Where do we start doc?"

Hadn't they tortured his mind enough for one week? Scourge had no idea if they were going to be doing Torkulon-style therapy or a special brand courtesy of Dr. Landel, but either way he wasn't going to let them take him again without a fight. Strange, how threatening his life made him roll over like a scared bumble-puppy but threatening his mind made him ready to coat his hands in crimson human blood--if he had the courage to actually face Lugnut after yesterday the larger Decepticon might have actually been proud of him.

By lunch time the tracker had repainted his nails hot pink, marking himself as Scourge again rather than some passive piece of meat. During third shift he'd taken the bulletin's advice and hidden in the bathroom to avoid Lugnut while he sharpened the points back onto his hands. He showed up to therapy with his body tensed and hands curled into claws, lurking in the doorway with a derisive scowl on his face. Do your worst, pitiful human--or don't, that would be even better, but either way he'd claw her eyes out before he let her near his CPU.

Maggie had seen terrifying things. She'd seen demons, the source of her nightmares for years, the mutilated bodies of innocent people (some of them even being her patients), and, on top of it all, her father trying to make her into another him. She saw the worst anything could ever give her the second she closed her eyes and the reasonably paralyzing and insomnia-inducing fear of letting something evil loose the minute she started to dream. She knew scary.

And then there was Joshua Cho staring at her from her doorway, trying to look intimating with a Fu Manchu beard and pink nails.

Dr. Burroughs gave him a tiny smile and made no motion to get up this time. Cho was different in his defenses and giving him reason to hate her (not like they needed those here, but it helped to keep positive) wasn't going to help her break those down. So she sat there and refilled her mug and the spare in case he wanted one too.

"Do you want to sit down, Scourge? Your legs will get tired if you stand all day." She wasn't going to bother the second question of what he'd prefer to be called. She knew the firmly rooted answer.

The abrupt, screeching halt of enraged gears was evident on Scourge's face as his stalwart expression of anger dissolved to confusion. He'd had a rebuke all planned out for when she called him that disgusting human name and here she'd gone and called him 'Scourge'. It had to be some sort of trick--or was she one of them? Maybe she was brainwashed too, like Lockdown and some of the others had been, and was really someone completely normal underneath that veneer of being normal. Maybe she knew who he really was but couldn't help being in an office chair in a suit drinking whatever that funny smelling earthy brown water stuff was.

"No, I don't want to sit down. I don't want to be in your stupid squishy office at all," Scourge growled, attempting to compensate for his previous lack of scary Decepticon dignity. He pointed one pink claw at her. "And if you try messing with my head like they did yesterday I'll tear your face off."

"Squishy office." That was a new one. She could hear Tracy laughing about it already.

Instead of talking in circles further about how he should sit down, Maggie just listened to the man with clinical interest. "They?" Did he mean those 'monsters'? ...No. If he was pointing his anger at her, he had to be thinking of a staff member. From his attitude now and what she read in his file, it was obvious he got rowdy and had to be sedated. She'd have to double-check with the nurses, but for now she needed to know his own views on the matter. "What happened yesterday?"

"They, the...the people who set up this slag, Dr. Landel and his lot." Scourge waved a frantic arm towards the door and the upstairs. "They made me think I was someone else and break off all my allegiances. I still have Lugnut roaring for my fuel because I told him off in the middle of breakfast and Unicron knows what other kinds of messes I made, or would have made if I hadn't snapped out of it. I'm not letting them do that to me again. I'm Scourge, I'm not anyone else."

He was fully aware, in the midst of his flailing and shouting, that he sounded quite insane. Anyone raving like that would whether the situation was dire or not, but since there was no chance of the doctor believing him there was no point in trying to put up an act of sanity in the hopes she'd help him.

Thinking he was something else? ...so he had been feeling lucid the day before and was blaming it on the people who were trying to help him now that the window of coherence closed? Huh. Well, if she lost her grip on the world and made up an identity, she'd probably throw the same fit.

It also meant he had a higher chance for recovery if he already had even just a day of self-awareness, yet a higher chance of violence and resistance for each time he slipped back into this persona. She needed to know what sort of medication he had been put on before this and if they needed to up it.

Until then, though...

"Alright, Scourge. If you don't want to take a seat, do you want to at least tell me a little more about yourself?" She could already tell his delusions were severe (the man fiercely thought he was a robot. She didn't need her PhD to understand that). She'd just like to get to know them a little better before unraveling his perceptions of reality to his actual life. Speaking of. "What kind of person did they turn you into?"

It was like trying to push a block of gelatin. Instead of having a resisting surface fighting back against him the human kept dodging his questions and being polite and that made her even more infuriating because he now had no idea what he should be arguing with, or fighting against.

"A human. A disgusting little creature, a drugged protoform-loving pathetic suicidal fool." His voice was losing some of his conviction as he returned to dwell on exactly how terrifying the situation was. "It was happening to plenty of people, we were believing what the nurses were telling us, ignoring our lives, being what they wanted us to be. I'm not going to be that again. I'll...I'll offline first, you can't make me be that again."

He almost wished Joshua was a real person for him to hate and to kill. You could escape a person or destroy him, as they'd done to Starscream, but the faint memories lurked in the back of his mind kept prodding him with the possibility that Joshua would take him over again.

She could understand how terrifying it had to seem to wake up as yourself after choosing to be someone else for so long, but he had to realize that this wasn't some conspiracy. If people were starting to come around, that was a good thing.

"I'm not here to force you into doing anything you don't want to do." She set down her mug and raised her hands, giving him the sort of look a teacher gives a stubborn student who's afraid of having their homework graded.

"Why don't you tell me a little more about Joshua. Is he really that bad?"

But she was trying to force him into something, that was the entire point of the therapy and of this entire place. Scourge couldn't figure out what the game was. He was still angry on general principal but now that he was in the Chamber of Therapy, confronting its confusing guardian, his trademark cowardice was starting to come back and make his voice shake.

"He is. He plays games with little humans and he talks back to people this big." Scourge held up his arm to indicate the impressive heights reached by the likes of Lord Recluse and Lugnut. "And he thinks he's human, which I'm not, and I'm not going to be no matter how many times they screw around with my head or throw zombies at me or anything they do to me. I'm me."

...alright, ignoring the aside about zombies, his fears seemed... entirely irrational. Nothing new on that front, but it felt more worrying this time around, especially from his warped standpoint.

For a minute there, she thought he hated Joshua for his sickness, for not being as strong and reliable as a machine would be. Instead, she was getting the exact opposite, signs that a timid Scourge was hateful for Joshua being normal. Likable, even. For being outwardly friendly towards children (that's what she could assume he meant, anyhow) and sticking up for himself against people bigger than him.

That last part would explain the "suicidal" bit, at least. So much for the usual depression.

Maggie leaned back in her seat some and gestured for him to take a seat in the opposite chair. He probably would still refuse, but he had to be getting tired of fidgeting up there. "You're an awfully big man yourself. Is there something wrong with showing courage?"

Scourge stomped over to where the human was sitting and made a go of looming over her with his five foot ten inch bulk. Was she mocking him? Wasn't clear. "Yes, there is when it's going to get me killed! I'll be plenty courageous if someone gives me a gun and three to one odds. If you're putting me up against Lord Recluse I'm going to say 'slag you' and run off. You think I'm crazy just for that?" More looming, with a slight twitching of his nose at the dark scent of the therapy doctor's coffee.

He was grabbing at straws now, finding anything to argue with and be angry about, something to try and protect a dignity that he was personally shredding into little tiny bits with every outraged outburst. Being dragged out by the orderlies would at least mean he got to leave.

"I wouldn't call it crazy, no. I'd call it cowardly, though." And from the look on her face, it was obvious she wasn't intimidated by him hovering over her in the least or shared his views on the subject matter. "Don't you think it's strange to be frustrated with someone because they have enough strength to face something frightening while you want a crutch in order to do it?"

Harsh words, true sentiment.

She took another drink of her coffee (she felt bad that the smell irritated him, but some evils were necessary), watching his actions calmly. He was trying desperately to be intimidating, but there wasn't much driving force behind it aside from the want to get away. "Don't you think it makes you look jealous that you can't do the same?"

Hm. This human obviously had nerves of titanium and could not be scared by his Decepticon might.

Scourge scowled again, hands clenching. "I don't care what Joshua does, if he went and got himself killed I'd love to watch. I just don't want him doing it while he's using my body. I like not being dead or mangled or in horrible pain, and this body's so vulnerable that I could wound myself just trying to eat breakfast, and here he is...was...whatever wandering around alone at night thinking he's invincible."

Jealous of courage? Never. Scourge was jealous of a person's strength or cunning but he had no wish to be an idiot who ignored appropriate risk-benefit analysis measures.

She'd heard this spiel before. Lights go off, doors open, monsters are unleashed. It was a staple for all cheesy horror movies and, why not, let's have it in an actual asylum. She'd heard some of the nurses and orderlies chatting to themselves in the break room, spreading juicy little gossip about the "stories" here, about how creepy it was at night and how Janice always had to be bribed to work the graveyard shift because she was so scared of nothing.

Most likely, the "stories" were just dreams, further propelled into legend and so-called reality by those rumors and gossip. And it made her feel more than a little silly to think that might have been more dangerous than the actual prospect of them moping around the halls at night. You could stop actions. But dreams...

But as much as she didn't believe in the stock of nighttime being dangerous, it was still her job to ask and she couldn't just brush him off entirely. "What did he do? Aside from sticking up to himself against this Recluse, I mean."

He wished Starscream was here. Starscream deserved this, it was only payback for what Starscream had done to him. Or maybe Motormaster, or Ultra Magnus, or anyone he really hated just so he could laugh at how they had degenerated to a squishy mind.

"Mouths off to Lugnut, who's still trying to kill me for it, plays games with a little human girl and likes it, screws around with the Scarecrow which is just unfair--" He liked the Scarecrow. The guy wasn't bright but he wasn't scary and he seemed nice enough. "--and on top of all of that he stole my body and I'm getting really really sick of people trying to defrag my hard drive for me."

At a loss as to what to do in order to provoke her further, Scourge became contrary to his former contrariness and finally thudded down into the other chair with his fists tightening in frustration. "I don't want to be here, but if it means I need to be reprogrammed into some nice human drone I'll find another way out."

Day 46: Doctor's Office 10 (Dr. Burroughs) [Fourth Shift]

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