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By dee_ayy
November 28, 1999
Disclaimer: He belongs to 1013 Productions, and the company that doesn’t deserve him, 20th Century Fox Film Corp.
Rating: PG-13
Category: V, A, MT
Spoilers: Nothing too explicit, but for “Biogenesis” and “The 6th Extinction.”
Archive: Certainly. Let me know where, and I’ll send a bundt cake.
Feedback: Is gratefully accepted and always replied-to. dee_ayy@yahoo.com
Thanks: To the three who weighed in on this one, Keryn, Vickie, Peggy G. Sorry Vic, I couldn’t resist the fact that I’d actually written a vignette, and so I let it stand!
Author’s note: I couldn’t get that image of Mulder from the beginning of “The 6th Extinction” out of my head. This is the result.
Summary: Someone watches over Mulder.
Fill-in for that time between “Biogenesis” and “The 6th Extinction.”
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The Watchman
By dee_ayy
He’s quiet again, thank God. But he’s not asleep. He never sleeps. Just sits there, twitching, biding his time until his next rage. Countless days, and he hasn’t slept. Not on my watch, anyway. The rest of them sleep. Though their cells have no windows and nothing about their existence separates night from day, they know when it is night and they sleep. So I spend my graveyard shift watching mostly his monitor; watching him. He’s the only one who never sleeps.
Doctors come and go, “observing.” It’s like he’s some freak show attraction. The guy who doesn’t sleep, who barely even blinks, who has the abnormal brain function.
“Poor bastard,” one of them said the other night. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
Neither have I, and I’ve seen it all. Four years I’ve been here, corralling crazies, providing the muscle needed when insanity sends people to places the rest of us can only imagine.
But he’s different. Sometimes he looks at me, and I can see him in there. I wonder if he might be trying to tell me something; something I cannot understand. But he’s definitely in there. I can see it in his eyes, even if he can’t or won’t speak. It’s like he’s calling to me, pleading, and it freaks me out when he does it. Makes my blood run cold, because I don’t know what to say or do for him.
But that’s only sometimes. Other times his eyes are as vacant as a corpse’s.
When he gets violent, and he does sometimes, they shoot him full of Haldol and strap him down. In order to perform tests, they say. Tests for what? He’s quickly becoming their lab rat. Are they interested in helping him, or in simply mapping this ‘abnormal brain function’ that they are so excited about?
I don’t know, but I do know they don’t know him. And I don’t think they care. They aren’t the ones who clean him up after he messes himself. They aren’t the ones who put on the restraints they order. They aren’t the ones who had to cut his hair because he would wrap it around his fingers and pull it out until his scalp bled. But no one asks me. No one ever asks me, and I probably know him better than anyone here.
He usually lets me tend to him now. Not at first, though. At first anyone approaching him was taking a risk. In the first few days he went into such a rage, pounding and railing against the walls of the cell, that he managed to hurt himself. I noticed when I saw him crouched in the corner, cradling his hands, whimpering. That was at four in the morning, and the dumbass resident on call figured he could go in there and check him out.
“He’s in pain,” the moron said. “He won’t hurt me.” Jackass. I tried to warn him. He threw the kid across the room like he was a rag doll, even with two dislocated fingers. I’m sure the kid was thanking God for the padded walls--all he hurt was his pride. Learned a good lesson about the people on this ward, though.
They had to sedate him to unconsciousness to set the fingers, and when he came to, he immediately pulled off the splints in an act of defiance that everyone else thought was simply insanity.
He let me tape his fingers together. I’m no doctor, but he let me do it. It’s better than nothing.
The docs say they are trying to help him. I suppose I believe them. But they aren’t; they’re not helping him. He wages this battle within himself, alone, his brain apparently going at a million miles an hour. Even when he’s quiet, he’s in constant motion. Shifting, moving, tearing at his hospital gown, digging his nails into his own skin as if he needs to feel the pain. It’s like he cannot rest, will not rest.
Four times a day we put drops in his unblinking eyes. At first it took three of us to hold him down, but not any more. He got used to the routine, I guess. Now he’ll scream at me as I hold his head down for the nurse, but he doesn’t struggle. He lets her put in the drops, and the liquid forces his eyes to close for a brief moment.
It must be a relief, to finally be able to close his eyes to everything that is happening to him.
Life here develops a rhythm, a pattern to it. It becomes comforting to the patients, despite the fact that the rhythm includes any number of indignities inflicted upon them. That’s why he stopped fighting the eye drops. That’s why he lets me approach him three-quarters of the time. I’m part of the rhythm of his day. He trusts me, to a degree. At least I hope that’s what it is.
I think he senses that I hate it when they drug him up and strap him down. There’s no real point to it, I don’t think. And I think he agrees. But nobody asks me, and he can’t say.
People come to see him, if that’s what you call it. But not while I’m here--though once it happened. A woman, all haughty with authority. Swinging that long brown hair of hers, flashing that badge to get them to let her in long after visiting hours were over. But there are no visitors on this ward anyway. No one should see a loved one like this.
Yet she came. When she walked in I immediately paged the doctor. Damned if I was gonna be responsible. I’m just the watchman.
“How is he?” she asked me.
“How the hell should I know? I’m just an orderly” I answered. I resented her intrusion. And it wasn’t my place to say, not to her.
She stood there watching him on the TV monitor. Watched him curled up in the fetal position, feet shifting constantly, picking at his face with his taped-up fingers. He draws blood sometimes.
The doctor arrived, and she looked at me for a moment, then at the doctor. “I’d like to speak to you in the hall,” she said to him, and they were gone.
I haven’t seen her since.
There’s a man, too. Walter Skinner. We never met, but I saw him once, in the beginning. He calls. It’s the same conversation every time.
“How is he?”
“The same.”
“No improvement?”
“No.”
“Thank you for your time.”
I have that conversation every night. Sometimes he asks more questions, but usually not. He knows I’d tell if there was something to tell. He calls me, not the doctor. He knows where to get the real answers. He’s a man of great authority. He could get the fucking hospital administrator on the phone at midnight if he wanted to. But Skinner asks me. He’s the one who told me to call him “Mulder.”
Mulder makes noise sometimes, but mostly just guttural, animalistic noises. Growls and grunts accompanying a hitch in his breathing pattern. The doctor noticed that one time and wanted to run more tests; thought he wasn’t breathing properly. But it’s normal for him. I listen to him do it all night long. I don’t know if they ran their tests. I hope they didn’t bother.
I’ve only heard him say a word one time. It was the very first night. Actually it was early in the morning. It sounded like a name.
It sounded like “Scully.”
<FIN>