kittydesade | Entries tagged with big damn table

Title: Pal
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters: Antubis, Mary
Prompt: Friends
Word Count: 1,000
Rating: PG
Summary: A friendship for the ages.

He holds her hand when she walks through the dark places, and through the Old Kingdom. She isn't scared of the Old Kingdom anymore as long as the bad doctor isn't there, but he holds her hand anyway.

"Mary," he tells her. "It's time."

In the factory she was the time girl, and everyone looked to her to lead the way. Now she is alone in a hospital of people who take no notice of her, and she looks to her anteater to lead the way.

He isn't always an anteater, of course. He couldn't hold her hand if he were.

But he is sometimes an anteater, and she knows she can't say his name properly but he doesn't seem to mind.

"Mary," he tells her. "Come."

( Read more... )

Title: Old Man Hands
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Prompt: Yellow
Characters: Dr. Gottreich (II), Paul
Word Count: 1,076
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Doctor Gottreich has corrupting hands

Iodine had long since ceased to stain his hands, already wrinkled and yellow. They did not shake, a danger of old age that he was successfully and gratefully avoiding, but they were creased and the skin callused and the tips of the bones beneath his fingers could almost be felt by the sensitive bodies they poked and prodded. They often the first thing before the children's eyes when he began attending them, and sometimes the last thing they saw in life.

"Pass me the, er, scalpel."

His nurse gave him what he fancied a disapproving stare, but she was forced by protocol and status to obey. It didn't matter what she thought, at any rate. He knew what he was doing.

Of course there was always that faint buzzing in the background, something to do with the lights or the new wiring he had had installed that they had never quite fixed. It bothered him when he permitted it into his consciousness. It bothered him more that some of the nurses said it sounded like screaming. Of course it didn't. They were ridiculous, and could greatly benefit from psychiatric care. Unfortunately he was not in charge of their care and could not recommend it.

( Read more... )

Title: Rear Windshield
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Prompt: Rain
Characters: Stegman, Paul
Word Count: 550
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Stegman's going slightly mad.

It was raining the first time he experienced what a more professional head doctor of a different kind might have called a psychotic break. The wounds inflicted by the sound of the water drops, like crashing glass on the pavement outside. His car was slowly being demolished by fiends from the outside. The rain was just one more aggravation on top of everything else.

Stegman put his hands in his pockets and pulled out a knife, a scalpel with a dull and rusty edge. Not rust but blood, clotted with blood and hair at the end. Ridiculous. He would never have let his instruments fall into such an appalling condition.

He dropped it back into his pocket without thinking about it, though, and didn't notice when it made no drag or impact on the cloth.

The hospital was reflected in the glass of his rear windshield (which was the only intact glass left in his car) but what he failed to notice was that the ambulance in the reflection wasn't the one that should have been parked in the hospital bay. It hadn't been parked in the hospital bay in nearly seventy years.

The rain went away but the visions didn't. The elevator went down two floors too far, sliding back at the hands of a smiling, pasty faced boy with pointed teeth. Although the pasty faced boy with pointed teeth was preferable to having the hounds of hell chasing him after that rat-trap crumbling cement building they called a hospital. No rats at Boston General but the ones that served their time in the labs.

It was raining again when he huddled in the doorway and insisted he was a good person. A nice person. And didn't he try to help people? He did, he did. He did his best to make people better, take the disease out of their heads. He was a good doctor. A good person, a good man. No matter what those spiteful, jealous hags said. The hangers on, the people who wanted to tear him down just because he was from a good hospital with a good reputation. Not some back-country hick town. Not some back-country hick doctor.

"Not some back-country hick crazy."

The boy with the dark eyes smiled and tipped his cap for him, how kind. So nice to see young people with some respect these days.

He nodded back politely to the young man, having forgotten already what he had said. Bad case of water on the brain. No, knee, wasn't it? Water on the knee. Or the brain. He had forgotten that already. Liquid between the brain and the skull, pressing down. Just a temporary problem. Subdural hematoma. Easy to fix.

Stegman contemplated trepanning as a form of enlightenment before he realized the rain would leak in that way and put even more pressure on his brain. That would never do. Never do. He shook his head as he made his way past the old ambulance that had never seen the twenty first century, into the hospital. In one night, he had lost whatever chances he had had. His mind, cracked, like an egg, like a windshield on a car. Everything he had kept with him, the last things he had kept with him, gone. Washed away by the rain.

Title: Salt
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Prompt: Taste
Characters: Paul
Word Count: 789
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Paul. In the tank.

It tasted like salt. It was supposed to be an exercise in sensory deprivation, to calm him down, but it tasted like salt.

There was no light. A heavy cloth over the tank made it impossible to breathe even if the water hadn't forced his mouth and nose closed already. He had enough air to surface, live, and that was it. The sides were slick and glass and gave him nothing to hold onto. There was no sound in the room, no hint of what was going on in the world outside.

That was one of the things that would kill him later. But he didn't know that.

It was supposed to calm him, or that had been the original idea. He rather thought the doctor did it now more as a show of power, what would happen if he misbehaved. But when he'd first been brought to the doctor by his fearful, shivering parents, it had been for his little outbursts. His little "problems." They needed some way to keep him under control, to keep him calm. And they'd looked to medicine to do it, since the church hadn't helped one bit.

The doctor prescribed treatments in the tank. Too much stimulation, he'd said, too much sensory input. Senses were still new back then, science still learning where and when it could push the boundaries of faith. Treatments in the tank, he said, would remove the offending stimuli. Without respect or regard for any kind of scientific method, he plunged him into the tank that day. The boy had been too surprised to react when they brought him back out. The doctor said that was a sign the treatment had worked.

The doctor was wrong, but the boy had enough sense not to let it show. Sensory deprivation didn't calm him, didn't give him any focus. It did give him some moments to rest, when his bug-chittering and restless mind just shut up for a second. He drifted. He floated. And he stored up all the bile in his mouth to spit, later.

But the water still tasted like salt, like bitterness and scum. And it slid into his mouth and stuck to the surface of his tongue, disturbing his calm.

He bobbed up and down slowly enough that he didn't even feel the movement except when the doctor put him in, and when he was lifted out again. Naked, calloused hands on his naked, smooth body. It would have bothered him if it had meant anything at all. But the old man was a doctor, not a perv. Not like his uncle, even though his uncle had never laid a hand on him. Wouldn't dare risk angering the boy. Small favors.

He bobbed up and down in the water and when he was supposed to be thinking on all the evil he had done and how remorseful he was that he had done it, he was thinking of what he would do. Bloody thoughts. Crazed thoughts, that circled round and round in slower circles until he was calm again. Until he could at least pretend to be a human being. That he had been a real live boy, once upon a time.

The lights didn't blind his eyes here, at least, and he was sort of grateful for that. Ever since the headaches had started the lights had bothered him. On his bad days when he was curled over his stomach with sickness he screamed at anyone who turned the lights on. It didn't bother him, here.

There were no sounds. Not the clacking step of the doctor down the halls, crisp and even, suggesting painful experiments at the point of a knife. Not the steady drip of water from the pipes, or the occasional creaking when he smacked them with the flat of his hand. None of the screaming from the doctor's other victims. Patients. It was the same either way.

There was nothing for him to hold on to but his own thoughts, and if the doctor knew half of what he pretended to know he would have realized that was a bad thing. Leaving Paul alone with his thoughts. They were dark, and they wandered, and they were full of pain and blood and other things that came hurling out him in violent spits and outbursts when he was aware. When he was out of the tank.

Outside the tank there was less to hold onto, but it was worse because it gave the impression of being more. Fleeting little things. Phantoms. Chasing phantoms. Inside the tank the phantoms were all gone. Nothing but his own thoughts and nightmares, with whom he was intimately familiar. Old friends.

Old friends and the taste of salt.

Title: Red Dragon Tattoo
Prompt: Red
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters:
Word Count: 800
Rating: PG
Summary: The life and times of her tattoo.

He was sitting down to breakfast when she found the design she wanted and squealed so loudly that he almost dropped his spoon down the disposal. Cup of yogurt in hand, he leaned over her shoulder and voiced his unneeded approval. She was bouncing so hard he almost got strawberry-vanilla all over his shirt.

They talked about it over the rest of breakfast, trading ideas back and forth while he reminded her of the dangers of hepatitis and other blood-borne diseases. She called him an alarmist and made a noise like a deflating tire with her lips. He shook his head, grabbed water bottle and briefcase, and left while she was still clacking on the computer.

She was gone when he got back. He assumed she was out getting the tattoo. Went to bed, smiling. Was joined a few minutes later by her cold feet and sleepy murmurs.

( He went with her to hold her hand... )

Title: Man on Fire
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters: Dr. Richard Shwartzton
Word Count: 700
Rating: PG
Summary: "Then the itching becomes burning, heat upon heat, upon heat..." Yeah, it's a rough draft, but it's worth a post.

The whispers came before the burning, filling his ears with their words just out of reach and the echoes of nasty sentiment. He knew they were talking about him, most likely pointing and laughing behind his back, but he couldn't prove it. That didn't matter. That didn't matter. He'd get them eventually, prove them wrong, prove himself triumphant over all. Wait and see.

By the time he had reached the hospital the whispers had grown to tremors in the ground, and the itching had started underneath his toenails. Voices doubled around him, one set in chorus with the shaking under the hospital, one set in harsh congruency with the beeping of the machines and the clank of wheels on the linoleum floor. A part of him, a rapidly diminishing part, knew that the over-voices belonged to mostly nurses who were trying to help him.

He was strapped down to a bed, fed poison, the voices whispered. They were trying to trap you, get you, burn you alive. By now the itching had become burning, swelling his skin and crisping him from the inside out. He could smell the burning skin and hair. Could feel the layers of fat under the skin turning to melted wax and soap and bubbling, pushing up the epidermis. He scratched and scratched but they wouldn't let him peel it away. They wouldn't give him water when he was thirsty.

There was lye in the vats, acid that splashed over his skin and burned him but not half as bad as the flames curling over the walls. There were screams in his ears, black noise covering any soothing words the nurses might have tried.

As the hospital darkened around him the ashes started to coat the flames. Half the building was in wreckage and ruin by now, and the other half was still burning. He could feel his skin cracking open by now, flames licking at the edges of each fissure. No one was listening to him, no matter what he said, no matter how much he twisted and writhed and wiggled what was left of his feet. Charred and bloody stumps. They had to smell the flesh cooking in the air and they went about their business in their sterile rooms with their latex and aluminum equipment without the slightest care for his funeral pyre of a hospital bed.

His vision started to go black. He couldn't tell if it was from the ash or from the smoke or from night falling outside the ruins of the hospital wing, but it was black as despair and he was giving up on the idea of help. There was a ringing in his ears that was persistent, swelling as the darkness swelled to blind him. It grew as his sight faded, terrifying him.

"Who's there?"

The ringing was accompanied by crying. A little girl crying, and it wasn't a ringing in his ears or the ringing of metal falling against metal, it was a bell. It was a church bell, a death bell ringing as he burned alive. As he screamed he heard her crying in fear and pain, a kind of pain that he felt resonating in his chest.

"What's happening to me?"

"Help me."

It was his voice. It was the girl's. It was a chorus of voices and all of them belonging to people dying in agonies he would never have wished on a child. And there was a ticking sound of sharp shoes or claws against the concrete. One, two, three, counting down to destiny. To death, because by now he couldn't see and couldn't breathe for the smoke and death was imminent. Death was a result of smoke inhalation.

His breaths came slower and further between, rasping through a hardened throat. He could feel his lungs crisping and turning into ash and crumbling in his chest. He was dying and he could still hear her screams, even if he was no longer capable of making his own.

The fire was only a pleasant heat by now, pulling him under. The last thing he felt was the pinch of the needle and the soft-rough fabric of the hospital blanket before everything went black.

Title: Room 426
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters: James Hook, Eleanor Druse, Peter Rickman
Prompt: Triangle
Word Count: 1,230
Rating: PG
Summary: Three sides of grief; three people who shared a significant event in their lives mourn the loss of a young girl and the loss of any chance to get to know her.

Hook had gotten to know grief on an intimate and personal level as a neurosurgeon. Later there had been a diagnosis and he had gotten to know a different kind of grief that happens before a loved one dies, watching the slow retreat of life from empty and shallow cells until there is nothing left but the quiet pass of dignity. He got to know grief a little better when he started working the ER, a screaming and frantic grief that knows nothing but its own pain and the attempt to deny a hole that exists for only a few hours before the numbness starts to fill it.

He's made his own little catalogue of different types of grief, a twisted attempt to cope, like the graveyard in what passes for his apartment. Probably, if Chris found out about that, she'd call it sick, too.

What he doesn't know is what the word is for this kind of grief, the kind that seems as though it's a little unjustified. He didn't know the woman, after all, and she's twice over dead. Both times long before he was born.

One hand covered the edge of the door and Hook leaned in the doorway and stared at the empty bed. It was supposed to be a good thing, albeit a miraculous thing and one quite unexplainable by modern science. After what he'd seen and done, modern science could sometimes go hang.

( Read more... )

Title: The Breakfast Club
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters: Hook, ensemble
Prompt: Breakfast
Word Count: 1,092
Rating: PG
Summary: Mornings in the cafeteria at Kingdom Hospital

Despite the fact that Hook never seemed to keep to an assigned shift hour, very few people noticed that he kept his rooms in the Old Kingdom.

Every morning he staggered out of bed and stripped down for a bracing two minute wash in the chemical shower he'd managed to get working again. Pull the cord and be inundated in freezing cold water, or room temperature at best. Scrub off as thoroughly as he would if he were scrubbing down for surgery, all over and not just down to the elbows. Pull the cord again, and again if he had to in order to get all of the soap off. One minute fifty eight seconds was his record best.

And then it was time to get dressed and get upstairs, if he didn't have anything personal to do. There was always someone who needed him on shift.

( Read more... )

Title: Boys Will Be Boys
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters: Paul Morlock
Prompt: Broken
Word Count: 500
Rating: PG
Summary: Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. Inspired by some of

weallscream's most excellent entries.

Paul takes a breath, lets it out, and rises to the surface. His hands wrap around the metal edges of his tank but not too tight, or the glass will break. He's learned that one the hard way.

Impressions.

Light and dark are sharp. The haze is gone, as is the green glow, as is the stinging in his eyes when he opens them. Sound is no longer muted. His mouth no longer tastes of soap, salt, and filth. He tries not to piss in the water but sometimes he can't help it.

Knife quick, he hauls himself out of the tank and over the side, dropping bare, wet feet to cold tile floor with a little smacking sound. First he teeters, then he crouches, then he stands straight. His hands flex for a second and then he closes his eyes as familiar, welcome cloth sinks around him. He doesn't like being naked.

Paul looks around. As the water turns the air from green to pale gray his face changes. Fearful and cowering to simpering predator.

He shows teeth, and rolls his shoulders back.

Paul bounces a little on the balls of his naked feet as he walks circles around the room. What to do today. He could sink his meaty little fingers into Stegman's mind, stir up the paranoia, the megalomania. Tastes of babies. He opens his mouth and clacks together pointed teeth around blackened gums. He screams.

One or two more bounces and he crashes through the doors, running down the same hallway in which he's chased so many others. He couldn't tell what he's running from now but he's definitely running from, not to. He imagines he hears feet behind him, and sometimes they're shod in surgical slippers and sometimes they end in four inch claws. Sometimes it's doggy feet clack clacking on the cement.

He skids around a corner and hits the wall, pressing into the corner with his back to the tile and stucco and shakes his head side to side. Bashes his temple from side to side against the wall. Don't want to. Don't want to. Don't want to.

"Please…" he whispers, whimpers, but it doesn't work. "Please, I don't want to go back there. I don't want to go back."

His eyes are wide in the reflection of the glasses. Tears don't move them.

It's all lies, of course. Grown ups lie. Kids lie. Little girls with big toys and the mangy fleabag furball lies. Worst of the lot. Paul closes his eyes and bangs his head against the wall until the shadow goes away and he can smile again.

Paul's moods change as often as the luck in Kingdom Hospital. He'd just as soon bite your hand off as kiss your fingertips. The best thing to do with Paul is to stay away from him altogether, stay out of Swedenborgian space, if you can. Paul's broken glass edges are so sharp that he might just cut himself. He'd much rather cut you.

Title: The Thin Green Line
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters: None
Prompt: Green
Word Count: 250
Rating: G
Summary: What's really important in Kingdom Hospital

No one understands the importance of the green line until it becomes theirs.

Kingdom Hospital is home to seven comatose patients, three in a persistent vegetative state, and an extensive ICU ward. Of those, perhaps ten receive regular visitors. They know the importance of every beep, every blip, can discern the meaning of every little mark on the screen as well as the doctors. They think, sometimes, that it would save the cost of medical school if only the doctors had had someone in the ICU to watch as intently as they do.

Things in the hospital take on a certain rhythm. The tapping of fingers and toes, the twirling of pencils. It's all the same rhythm, like the bouncing balls of the children, if you look closely enough. Like the soft thud of barely shod feet.

Every breath comes in to the rhythm of the hospital. Breathe in, breathe out, that's good. Turn your head this way, turn your head that. Breathe in. Out. Minute by minute by minute.

Sometimes even the machines do the breathing, in the wee sma's when no one's around to hear. In and out in their clanking metal fashion they mark out the time in tics and blips and little green arrows on black screens. Tic, blip, and, here, clang. Dingle dangle goes the bell. Don't be afraid of the bell, be afraid when it stops. When the green line goes white on black.

Everything throbs to the rhythm of the jagged green line.

Title: How Now Brown Cow
Fandom: Kingdom Hospital
Characters: Antubis, Paul, Mary
Prompt: Brown
Word Count: 510
Rating: PG
Summary: Mary had a little lamb. But Paul didn't like him.

( Read more... )

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH.

fanfic100 and Kingdom Hospital. HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH.

12 / 100
(12.0%)

001.	Beginnings	002.	Middles.	003.	Ends.	004.	Insides.	005.	Outsides.
006.	Hours.	007.	Days.	008.	Weeks.	009.	Months.	010.	Years.
011.	Red	012.	Orange.	013.	Yellow	014.	Green	015.	Blue.
016.	Purple.	017.	Brown	018.	Black.	019.	White.	020.	Colourless.
021.	Friends	022.	Enemies.	023.	Lovers.	024.	Family.	025.	Strangers.
026.	Teammates.	027.	Parents.	028.	Children.	029.	Birth.	030.	Death
031.	Sunrise.	032.	Sunset.	033.	Too Much.	034.	Not Enough.	035.	Sixth Sense.
036.	Smell.	037.	Sound.	038.	Touch.	039.	Taste	040.	Sight.
041.	Shapes.	042.	Triangle	043.	Square.	044.	Circle.	045.	Moon.
046.	Star.	047.	Heart.	048.	Diamond.	049.	Club.	050.	Spade.
051.	Water.	052.	Fire	053.	Earth.	054.	Air.	055.	Spirit.
056.	Breakfast	057.	Lunch.	058.	Dinner.	059.	Food.	060.	Drink.
061.	Winter.	062.	Spring.	063.	Summer.	064.	Fall.	065.	Passing.
066.	Rain	067.	Snow.	068.	Lightening.	069.	Thunder.	070.	Storm.
071.	Broken	072.	Fixed.	073.	Light.	074.	Dark.	075.	Shade.
076.	Who?	077.	What?	078.	Where?	079.	When?	080.	Why?
081.	How?	082.	If.	083.	And.	084.	He.	085.	She.
086.	Choices.	087.	Life.	088.	School.	089.	Work.	090.	Home.
091.	Birthday.	092.	Christmas.	093.	Thanksgiving.	094.	Independence.	095.	New Year.
096.	Writer‘s Choice.	097.	Writer‘s Choice.	098.	Writer‘s Choice.	099.	Writer‘s Choice.	100.	Writer‘s Choice.

ETA: Just so I know what to head every fic up with...

Title:
Fandom:
Characters:
Prompt:
Word Count:
Rating:
Summary:
Author's Notes:

Warhead On Legs

What Goes Around Comes Around

[Fic] Pal

[Fic] Old Man Hands

[Fic] Rear Windshield

[Fic] Salt

[Fic] Red Dragon Tattoo

[Fic] Man on Fire

[Fic] Room 426

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Big Damn Table

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