Nameless One, 16/18
May. 31st, 2012 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackofknavesTitle: Nameless One
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tripatch
Rating: R
Pairing: Hannibal/Face
Summary: Kinkmeme prompt, Face secretly takes meds for bipolar disorder. But for whatever reason, Face is no longer on his meds. Then the manic behavior starts, from getting into a mess of fights to needing to have tons of sex with strangers. Then when the emotional roller coaster stuff starts, Face begins cutting himself during the darkest times. His teammates notice, and try to help but Face is stubborn and refuses help, heavily in denial.
Additional Notes: Title taken from James Clarence Mangan's poem, "Nameless One".
Additional, Additional Notes: I've gone back and included this chart of chapters on previous posts and will update it regularly. I hope this makes things a little bit easier to navigate!
The next day, Face creeps out of the house in the early morning and crunches along the gravel driveway to the car, feeling the dewy grass brush his jeans into dampness. Hannibal was snoring when he left him tucked under the covers, all sprawled limbs under patchwork, and it hadn’t been hard to search his wallet and pockets until he found the small, discreet card with the words, “Dr. Aharnish Malhotra, Psychiatrist” printed in neat lettering on it.
It’s the first verse of a well-known song, one that Face can sing along to with his brassy tenor.
Still, he remembers Hannibal’s patience, B.A.’s firm words, and the cryptic words of wisdom from Murdock, and he takes a deep breath as he follows the curving back-roads and listens to the hum of his car as it joins along with the lyrics.
The building is exactly what he expected. It’s tucked away in a wooded area, nicer, the type of houses that Face used to eye enviously, and he rides the elevator up to the fourth floor. There’s a waiting area with magazines sprawled lazily on the tables, warmly lit and fake plants tucked away into the corners. A row of teller windows, like a bank, are occupied by pretty receptionists with scrubs on. One of them smiles at him and he smiles back automatically. It feels familiar, just like the paintings on the walls and the magazines on the desk. The form is the same as every other one he’s ever filled out. He barely has to concentrate to fill in the blanks with the fake information from his forged ID before he turns it in and sits down to wait.
“Mr. Barry?”
“That’s me,” Face rises with an easy smile.
“I’m Dr. Malhotra. Follow me, please.”
The doctor is a slender man with neat black hair and a dark complexion and dark eyes. He holds out a hand and Face shakes it, following the man back to his office. There’s a line of windows along the west wall. The carpet is brushed with the dappling of tree leaf shadows that dance and sway; they’re reaching the refrain, the part where it becomes a duet, the doctor singing the praises of medicines and Face will bow out gracefully before exiting stage left.
He waits.
“So, I hear you’ve been having some troubles?”
“A bit,” Face says.
“Have you ever been to see a psychiatrist before?”
“A few times,” Face says.
“And?”
“They told me I was bipolar,” Face explains.
“Do you agree with that?”
That was the first time someone had asked him that, Face blinks. Dr. Malhotra stares at him, bemused, apparently unaware that he’s going off script.
“I… I don’t know,” Face says slowly. He recovers quickly. “I mean, aren’t you supposed to be the doctor?”
“I am,” Dr. Malhotra smiles. “But it’s always good to hear it from the patient’s mouth. Things like these are pretty subjective. The most we can do is listen to your experiences, tell you what it sounds like, and see if the diagnosis holds the pattern.”
“And prescribe medication for it,” Face adds.
“That, too,” Dr. Malhotra agrees. “So why don’t you tell me about what’s going on.”
Face runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t really know where you want me to start.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me why you came here?”
“A friend asked me to.”
“A good friend?”
“Yeah,” Face says with a soft expression on his face.
Dr. Malhotra makes a note on his chart. “Why did this friend ask you to come?”
“He’s worried.”
“Does he have any reason to be?”
“If you’re asking whether I’m going to hurt myself-” Face begins.
“Just a question.”
“Right,” Face blows out an angry breath. “Sorry. I just… I wasn’t acting—I don’t really know how to explain this.”
Dr. Malhotra puts his pen down and crosses a leg over his knee, leaning back in the chair in a move that Face recognizes as one he uses when he needs to put someone at ease, or convince them that he’s harmless. Even knowing that the man is aware of what he is doing doesn’t stop Face’s body from releasing some of the tension he wasn’t aware it was holding.
“It’s like a clock,” he says, and the man just nods, like he has any clue what Face is talking about. He persists, his hands dancing in the air, painting a picture in broad strokes. “Or a watch. Like an old-timey pocket-watch that gentlemen used to carry, very ritzy, very Gary Cooper.” He winks and the man graces him with a small smile as he continues. “But it works, you can look at it and see the time whenever you want to.”
One hand holds itself in the 12 position, while the other inexorably ticks past. Tick. Tick. Tick.
“All of these tiny, perfectly fitted golden parts, moving in tandem. They’re all fitted for each other, perfectly in alignment – they don’t all serve the same purpose, but they all rely on each other to carry out their individual purpose.
So you’re going along, and all you want to know is the time, so you look at the face of the watch, and it tells you, time for lunch, time for bed, time for a re-run of Magnum, P.I. I always liked Tom Selleck. He had the cool car, too.”
He pauses, his hands still ticking past as if he’s unaware of their presence, grinning as he thinks of the shiny Ferrari that as a kid he wanted so bad he could taste it.
“But?”
The memory clouds and his smile sours.
“But then one day the clock says it’s 10:13, but you look outside and of course, it’s not. Because one little part got jammed and isn’t working right, so all the other parts are still trying their best, but they can’t, because that one part is broken.”
And that’s the crux, he thinks. He’s broken, but he’s not sure how to fix himself, so he tells himself he’s not.
“The clock can be fixed, though,” the man says with a gentle smile. “Just takes some time.”
“And new parts,” Face quips with a grin. “Can’t forget that.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe the old part just needs some oil, or some fine tuning, and it will work again.”
“I don’t like 10:14,” Face says dismissively, leaning back in the chair and propping his chin on the palm of his hand to stare at the strip of wall above the window. “It feels like it’s wishy-washy.”
“Wishy-washy?” and the man says it like he doesn’t know whether he should be laughing or not.
“Yeah, it’s not quite 10:15, which is nice and a perfect quarter, but it’s too far away from 10:00 to say it’s that.”
“I think we’re straying from the point,” the man says pointedly.
Face shrugs. Maybe. He stares at the clock, watches it go tick-tick-tick past.
He remembers his physics professor. He was a young man who wore an old man’s clothes, awful sweater vests made of brown wool and yellow ties, and he always smelled like chalk. The others in the class, engineers and political science majors and liberal arts kids who struggled through the basics, thought he was boring and made fun of him behind his back, but Face liked the guy. When he wrote equations, it was like seeing Dvorak’s Rusalka in the numbers and creating stars on a flat graph of the night sky. None of the other kids saw what Face did in math: a variable stretching toward infinity, the eccentricity of the orbit, and binaries that eclipsed like a selenehelion through a black piece of paper poked with pinholes. It was a work of creation, light and darkness and the sublime mingling in a clash of numbers and rules that were made to be broken.
He sometimes thought, sitting in the fourth row from the back, crammed into a tiny desk and jotting cramped notes into a beat-up notebook, pretending not to care because Face was too cool for school, baby, that this was what Father Magill saw when he read the Bible, because the numbers were without form and void, and then they slowly coalesced into something that was good: an answer. One time, when he was young and still thought that the rest of the world saw things the way he did – patterns and stars that were not supposed to exist and a Russian nesting doll of subatomic particles fitting together – that the Book of Genesis was an equation that no one else saw. F(x) = sin (1/x). And God divided the light from the darkness.
He wonders why God saw fit to divide him into two discrete parts, and which part is the dark, and which part is the light.
And which part is him, Face, the one who sees the connections and knows that equations are part of the balance of the universe, sees that homeostasis is a way of saying equation, and umwelt is what makes Billy real to Murdock and invisible to the rest of them, and that consensual reality makes allowances for it all, and he wonders what kind of God would make him see the connections in everything except the way that he feels split between two worlds that no one else can see.
He especially wonders what happened, that all the books think it’s comforting to say that bipolar can make you see those connections, but never talk about the teachers who are baffled by it all, or the people who want to take that away, or the way that it sometimes feels like they have turned something sacred into a nest of dry neural pathways that somehow explain who he is, an equation of chemicals that are imbalanced and say nothing of the soul that Father Magill believed in, that Hannibal cherishes, that B.A. protects, that Murdock nurtures.
It’s the first time math has failed him so utterly. He doesn’t think that he can find an equation to explain himself.
“What are you thinking about?” Dr. Malhotra prods gently.
Face turns away from the clock, from all those moving parts that symbolize a theory so vast that even physics cannot always explain it – just like him, nonlinear.
“Nothing,” he says with a smile. “Just wondering when lunch is.”
Author:
tripatchRating: R
Pairing: Hannibal/Face
Summary: Kinkmeme prompt, Face secretly takes meds for bipolar disorder. But for whatever reason, Face is no longer on his meds. Then the manic behavior starts, from getting into a mess of fights to needing to have tons of sex with strangers. Then when the emotional roller coaster stuff starts, Face begins cutting himself during the darkest times. His teammates notice, and try to help but Face is stubborn and refuses help, heavily in denial.
Additional Notes: Title taken from James Clarence Mangan's poem, "Nameless One".
Additional, Additional Notes: I've gone back and included this chart of chapters on previous posts and will update it regularly. I hope this makes things a little bit easier to navigate!
The next day, Face creeps out of the house in the early morning and crunches along the gravel driveway to the car, feeling the dewy grass brush his jeans into dampness. Hannibal was snoring when he left him tucked under the covers, all sprawled limbs under patchwork, and it hadn’t been hard to search his wallet and pockets until he found the small, discreet card with the words, “Dr. Aharnish Malhotra, Psychiatrist” printed in neat lettering on it.
It’s the first verse of a well-known song, one that Face can sing along to with his brassy tenor.
Still, he remembers Hannibal’s patience, B.A.’s firm words, and the cryptic words of wisdom from Murdock, and he takes a deep breath as he follows the curving back-roads and listens to the hum of his car as it joins along with the lyrics.
The building is exactly what he expected. It’s tucked away in a wooded area, nicer, the type of houses that Face used to eye enviously, and he rides the elevator up to the fourth floor. There’s a waiting area with magazines sprawled lazily on the tables, warmly lit and fake plants tucked away into the corners. A row of teller windows, like a bank, are occupied by pretty receptionists with scrubs on. One of them smiles at him and he smiles back automatically. It feels familiar, just like the paintings on the walls and the magazines on the desk. The form is the same as every other one he’s ever filled out. He barely has to concentrate to fill in the blanks with the fake information from his forged ID before he turns it in and sits down to wait.
“Mr. Barry?”
“That’s me,” Face rises with an easy smile.
“I’m Dr. Malhotra. Follow me, please.”
The doctor is a slender man with neat black hair and a dark complexion and dark eyes. He holds out a hand and Face shakes it, following the man back to his office. There’s a line of windows along the west wall. The carpet is brushed with the dappling of tree leaf shadows that dance and sway; they’re reaching the refrain, the part where it becomes a duet, the doctor singing the praises of medicines and Face will bow out gracefully before exiting stage left.
He waits.
“So, I hear you’ve been having some troubles?”
“A bit,” Face says.
“Have you ever been to see a psychiatrist before?”
“A few times,” Face says.
“And?”
“They told me I was bipolar,” Face explains.
“Do you agree with that?”
That was the first time someone had asked him that, Face blinks. Dr. Malhotra stares at him, bemused, apparently unaware that he’s going off script.
“I… I don’t know,” Face says slowly. He recovers quickly. “I mean, aren’t you supposed to be the doctor?”
“I am,” Dr. Malhotra smiles. “But it’s always good to hear it from the patient’s mouth. Things like these are pretty subjective. The most we can do is listen to your experiences, tell you what it sounds like, and see if the diagnosis holds the pattern.”
“And prescribe medication for it,” Face adds.
“That, too,” Dr. Malhotra agrees. “So why don’t you tell me about what’s going on.”
Face runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t really know where you want me to start.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me why you came here?”
“A friend asked me to.”
“A good friend?”
“Yeah,” Face says with a soft expression on his face.
Dr. Malhotra makes a note on his chart. “Why did this friend ask you to come?”
“He’s worried.”
“Does he have any reason to be?”
“If you’re asking whether I’m going to hurt myself-” Face begins.
“Just a question.”
“Right,” Face blows out an angry breath. “Sorry. I just… I wasn’t acting—I don’t really know how to explain this.”
Dr. Malhotra puts his pen down and crosses a leg over his knee, leaning back in the chair in a move that Face recognizes as one he uses when he needs to put someone at ease, or convince them that he’s harmless. Even knowing that the man is aware of what he is doing doesn’t stop Face’s body from releasing some of the tension he wasn’t aware it was holding.
“It’s like a clock,” he says, and the man just nods, like he has any clue what Face is talking about. He persists, his hands dancing in the air, painting a picture in broad strokes. “Or a watch. Like an old-timey pocket-watch that gentlemen used to carry, very ritzy, very Gary Cooper.” He winks and the man graces him with a small smile as he continues. “But it works, you can look at it and see the time whenever you want to.”
One hand holds itself in the 12 position, while the other inexorably ticks past. Tick. Tick. Tick.
“All of these tiny, perfectly fitted golden parts, moving in tandem. They’re all fitted for each other, perfectly in alignment – they don’t all serve the same purpose, but they all rely on each other to carry out their individual purpose.
So you’re going along, and all you want to know is the time, so you look at the face of the watch, and it tells you, time for lunch, time for bed, time for a re-run of Magnum, P.I. I always liked Tom Selleck. He had the cool car, too.”
He pauses, his hands still ticking past as if he’s unaware of their presence, grinning as he thinks of the shiny Ferrari that as a kid he wanted so bad he could taste it.
“But?”
The memory clouds and his smile sours.
“But then one day the clock says it’s 10:13, but you look outside and of course, it’s not. Because one little part got jammed and isn’t working right, so all the other parts are still trying their best, but they can’t, because that one part is broken.”
And that’s the crux, he thinks. He’s broken, but he’s not sure how to fix himself, so he tells himself he’s not.
“The clock can be fixed, though,” the man says with a gentle smile. “Just takes some time.”
“And new parts,” Face quips with a grin. “Can’t forget that.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe the old part just needs some oil, or some fine tuning, and it will work again.”
“I don’t like 10:14,” Face says dismissively, leaning back in the chair and propping his chin on the palm of his hand to stare at the strip of wall above the window. “It feels like it’s wishy-washy.”
“Wishy-washy?” and the man says it like he doesn’t know whether he should be laughing or not.
“Yeah, it’s not quite 10:15, which is nice and a perfect quarter, but it’s too far away from 10:00 to say it’s that.”
“I think we’re straying from the point,” the man says pointedly.
Face shrugs. Maybe. He stares at the clock, watches it go tick-tick-tick past.
He remembers his physics professor. He was a young man who wore an old man’s clothes, awful sweater vests made of brown wool and yellow ties, and he always smelled like chalk. The others in the class, engineers and political science majors and liberal arts kids who struggled through the basics, thought he was boring and made fun of him behind his back, but Face liked the guy. When he wrote equations, it was like seeing Dvorak’s Rusalka in the numbers and creating stars on a flat graph of the night sky. None of the other kids saw what Face did in math: a variable stretching toward infinity, the eccentricity of the orbit, and binaries that eclipsed like a selenehelion through a black piece of paper poked with pinholes. It was a work of creation, light and darkness and the sublime mingling in a clash of numbers and rules that were made to be broken.
He sometimes thought, sitting in the fourth row from the back, crammed into a tiny desk and jotting cramped notes into a beat-up notebook, pretending not to care because Face was too cool for school, baby, that this was what Father Magill saw when he read the Bible, because the numbers were without form and void, and then they slowly coalesced into something that was good: an answer. One time, when he was young and still thought that the rest of the world saw things the way he did – patterns and stars that were not supposed to exist and a Russian nesting doll of subatomic particles fitting together – that the Book of Genesis was an equation that no one else saw. F(x) = sin (1/x). And God divided the light from the darkness.
He wonders why God saw fit to divide him into two discrete parts, and which part is the dark, and which part is the light.
And which part is him, Face, the one who sees the connections and knows that equations are part of the balance of the universe, sees that homeostasis is a way of saying equation, and umwelt is what makes Billy real to Murdock and invisible to the rest of them, and that consensual reality makes allowances for it all, and he wonders what kind of God would make him see the connections in everything except the way that he feels split between two worlds that no one else can see.
He especially wonders what happened, that all the books think it’s comforting to say that bipolar can make you see those connections, but never talk about the teachers who are baffled by it all, or the people who want to take that away, or the way that it sometimes feels like they have turned something sacred into a nest of dry neural pathways that somehow explain who he is, an equation of chemicals that are imbalanced and say nothing of the soul that Father Magill believed in, that Hannibal cherishes, that B.A. protects, that Murdock nurtures.
It’s the first time math has failed him so utterly. He doesn’t think that he can find an equation to explain himself.
“What are you thinking about?” Dr. Malhotra prods gently.
Face turns away from the clock, from all those moving parts that symbolize a theory so vast that even physics cannot always explain it – just like him, nonlinear.
“Nothing,” he says with a smile. “Just wondering when lunch is.”
