Warhead On Legs

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: 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.