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"Elysium"Written By: The Plotting Housewife Disclaimer: Gundam Wing belongs to Bandai, Sotsu
and associated Parties. This work is written for pleasure not profit. Rating: NC 17 Warnings: Angst, Mental Illness, Mental Institutions,
Psychological Trauma, Psychological Torture, Mental Breakdown, Medical
Torture, Sexual Abuse, Visions, Alternate Universe - Writing &
Publishing, Recovery, life after trauma, Depression, Anxiety Disorder,
Dubious Consent, A Little Dark But Not Too Dark, introspective, Eventual
Duo/Quatre, rating may change as story progresses, mentions of past
suicide attempt, Major Character Death Pairings: 3x4, 2x4 Summary: After experiencing a mental breakdown
in the wake of his lover's death, Quatre is sent to the Aurora Valley
Psychiatric Hospital, situated on an isolated island a dozen miles
off the coast of New Zealand. Solace comes in the form of Trowa who
whisks him away during his darkest hours with sweet kisses and solemn
promises that life doesn't have to end here. " Elysium" What is madness and what qualifies anyone to decide who is sane and who is not? Perhaps the ones who speak in tongues and shout to the skies are the truly blessed among us. Perhaps their purpose is to open windows for us that we have previously closed. A chance to see the world in ways that we have long since denied ourselves. A chance to see that worlds outside our own do exist and know that the people we've lost along the way are not gone forever. They are simply making sure that those of us left behind are taken care of until the time comes to be together again. *** His room was ice cold and he shivered as he pulled the thin cotton blanket tighter around his shoulders. The facility's staff maintained a frigid thermostat of ten degrees celsius, under the belief that if the patients were cold, they were far more likely to remain docile instead of acting out in aggression, or attempting to escape. The hospital, though Quatre was loathe to call it such, was a maximum security, internationally recognized institution located on one of the smaller islands off the coast of New Zealand. Its purpose was to house and treat the psychotic disorders of the world's most reputable - or notorious, depending on who you asked - military veterans. Oddly enough, he'd always wondered what would become of a Gundam pilot should one of them ever experience a lapse of sanity. Now he knew, though he'd always envisioned something a little more Alcatraz so he considered himself lucky. This was a five-star hotel in comparison. At the very least, there were no perpetual storm clouds looming overhead, or gargoyles perched on gargantuan pillars, but looks were often deceiving. This place wasn't dubbed Tapu Island by the locals for nothing. In essence it was a prison, though instead of cells, they were locked inside sterile white rooms with only a bed, a simple desk, a chair, and a tiny bathroom that contained a toilet, sink, and a shower stall. Materials such as soaps, shampoos, pens, pencils, paper, and books were allowed only while under direct supervision by a member of the staff and those materials were removed from the patients' rooms by eight o'clock in the evening. In places such as this, just about anything could be used as a weapon and the staff had learned that the hard way. Considering that most of the patients possessed years of hand-to-hand combat training, they took no chances and Quatre couldn't exactly blame them for that. As a lifelong side-sleeper, he'd had to learn to sleep on his back since the patients were restrained to their beds at night. During the first few weeks of his confinement there, it had been infuriating not to be able to move around while he slept. Gradually, as his will to fight was drained from him, it became easier to ignore the vinyl straps locked tight around his wrists, ankles, and chest. He always knew when a newcomer arrived. The screams and curses could be heard up and down the hallways despite the supposed sound-proof walls and doors. Eventually as the nights wore on, the screams would turn to shouted pleas, and then incoherent wailing before the men's ward would once again fall silent. He wagered how seasoned a patient was by his ability to tune out the enraged screams and pitiful cries and sleep like a babe despite all the racket a few rooms away. Judging by that scale, he considered himself quite the old hand. Confined to one room for most of the day with no one to talk to and little to keep himself occupied, he wittled away the hours while deep inside his own mind, often with the help of books. Isolated from the world outside, he would curl up in his chair by the window and gaze through the shatter-proof glass, over the steep and jagged rocks to the sea beyond, imagining what it would be like to sprout wings and fly far away from this gilded cage where the loons that society didn't know what else to with went to rot. He could almost feel the cool ocean wind on his face and the warmth of the sun on his skin. Sometimes he was alone. Other times, Trowa soared gracefully through the air beside him with Quatre's hand clasped firmly in his own. They would laugh, loud, howling guffaws like two boys unscathed by the burdens of life and a freedom that was untouched by time. They would race each other as well as the birds who shared the open skies with them and the whales beneath the surface of the sea below. It didn't matter what this place and the sadists at its helm tried to take from him. This was the one thing they could never have and he guarded it as fiercely as any noble knight guards his young maiden's virtue. It was all he had left of Trowa, the only thing that prevented him from slipping into the black void of total madness. I don't care what you do to me, or how insane you think I am, or how insane you want me to be. There will always be a place inside me that remembers what's good in this world and there will always be a place inside me that knows exactly who and what I am. By God, you will not take that from me. It wasn't as if a few of them hadn't tried, though he could sense in most of them that they were twisted enough to truly believe they were doing right by their patients while pumping them full of experimental drugs and frying their neurotransmitters to a crisp with electroshock therapy. Considering how many men he'd seen in the common room drooling all over themselves, some of whom had had the most prestigious awards and medals of honor bestowed upon them by the world's most elite leaders, he was reasonably certain that the treatments were far more detrimental than beneficial. Then again, it didn't take a genius to know that zapping the human brain with four hundred sixty volts of electric current wasn't particularly healthy. How these barbaric practices were still being legally implemented was beyond him. Perhaps the lawmakers of the world were just as sadistic as the fuckers flipping the switch. Not exactly breaking news. Though, in all honesty, pseudo medicine was often used in these extreme cases because the experts simply did not know what else to do. These methods were more accurately used as a means of control rather than an attempt at healing the sick. When you have people climbing the walls and eating bugs off the floor, it puts you at a loss of how to handle it and it seemed the only viable answer was subduing them into near-catatonia. When a treatment, or drug didn't work, they merely went to the next one and when that didn't work, they tried another and another. Each one was progressively worse than the last until the patient was reduced to a raving, unintelligible shell of his former self. It was heartbreaking to see men who'd once been the world's best and brightest, noble and fearless in the face of death, rocking in corners and bawling like infants for their mothers. They'd all been brought here under the politically correct pretense that they were former war criminals, but Quatre knew better. The true criminals were the ones in the white lab coats with clipboards tucked beneath their arms and bedside manners as icy and clinical as the white concrete walls and florescent lights. The true criminals were the ones that had taken shelter in underground bunkers while the world went to shit and then had the balls to wag their fingers at those who'd stepped up to the plate and risked their lives for the sake of future generations. So that their children and grandchildren did not have to make those sacrifices. The true criminals were the ones that let themselves into the patients' rooms at night and took advantage of their vulnerability. Quatre had always been a fighter. He'd never been in a situation before where he was unable to make a stand and the fact that he was in that situation now made these experiences all the more infuriating. In this place, compliance got you off easy. So far, he'd been able to avoid the electroshock treatments as well as the severe beatings which often occurred when a patient tried to fight back. Whether railing against the torture that masqueraded as psychiatric remedies, or the routine sexual assaults by the orderlies in the wee hours of the night, the end result was still the same. The patient always lost and Quatre had learned that pretty early on. In other words, the more difficult you made life for the staff of this facility, the more difficult your own life became. He wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd given up any semblance of protest whenever that prick, Bill, crept into his room at three in the morning. Too long, that was for damned sure. He reached up and rubbed his fingers over the hickeys that were scattered haphazardly across his neck. His skin didn't feel any different as far as his fingers were concerned, but he knew they were there. The physical memories of Bill's mouth latched onto him like a lamprey still tingled his flesh and made him shift uncomfortably in his chair. In all his twenty seven years, he'd only been with one man and that man was Trowa. From the awkward fumblings of their first time in that ratty old circus trailer at the age of seventeen, to Trowa's expert lovemaking the night before he died, he'd been the only one Quatre had allowed into his body and into his heart. Until now. The only thing that kept him from offing himself over the guilt of betraying his love were the moments when Trowa came to take him away, usually when Quatre submitted his body to Bill's whims. They retreated to places so magical, they could only ever exist in the most vivid of dreams. He would weep his grief and shame into Trowa's warm chest, lamenting his cowardice to take his own life so that they could be together again. Trowa would have none of it. Stroking his hair, he whispered into his ear, soothing reassurance that he was doing what he must to survive. He encouraged Quatre to submit if that was what it took to stay safe, insisting with reverent murmurs against his trembling mouth that unnecessary suffering was not something he was going to tolerate. He promised things that Quatre was far too terrified to accept. That he would be right there waiting the day he took his last breath in this life and crossed over into the next, but that he was not to rush it. He assured him that he still had a long life ahead of him, a life that was not doomed to this agonizing fate and when Quatre asked him how he could even know that, Trowa would press a finger over his lips to silence him and repeat the same phrase he'd been saying since he'd first revealed himself. Kai aftó tha perásei. Eímai pánta mazí sou. He didn't know what it meant and Trowa never answered when he asked, but the journal he'd been keeping since his confinement was filled front to back with it. Page after page, line after line, the phrase was etched in his meticulously swooping script, so much so that he'd lost count of how many times he'd written it. Of course, his doctors insisted that these visions were merely a manifestation of his delusions and he had no way to refute them. They forced him to question his own sanity, a sore spot that he'd nursed over the years since ever his inaugural encounter with the Zero system. The tragic downside of an empath. When someone he loved passed on, their death was felt physically as though he himself were dying. The excruciating lurch of his heart and the breathless moment that followed where it ceased to beat for several seconds was both excruciating and terrifying. Once it did beat again, it did so with such force that it knocked him off his feet. It pushed him forth into a place where everything that ever was and would be existed simultaneously. Eternal, but instantaneous. Faster than the blink of an eye, he was omniscient...immortal, only to be thrust back into mortality again with the speed of a bullet. It was like experiencing the stillness and weightlessness of zero g's in the moments before reentering the Earth's atmosphere in a lightning quick ball of fire. He knew what death felt like, had danced with it on more than one occasion, but it was never meant to be because death had not yet come for him. It had come only for those he cherished more than his own life. And death did not care for pleas, or compromises, or bargaining. It did what it wanted, when it wanted to do it. No exceptions, or negotiations. No refunds after thirty days. He'd been here for eight and a half months now. It was lonely, but if there was one good thing he could say about it, he could admit - albeit grudgingly - that the clockwork routine of his days helped to ground and regulate him in ways that fending for himself could not. Without Trowa, he'd been lost on his own. He'd forgotten how to be independent and he knew it wasn't healthy, but it was what it was. He'd been a mess, he realized that now, and he winced to think about how far he'd let himself slip into darkness. By the time the police had pulled him from the edge of that highway overpass in Fresno, he hadn't showered, shaved, or brushed his teeth in three weeks. He'd been emaciated and dehydrated in rumpled pajamas that he hadn't bothered to change in ten days. He could still remember the feel of the concrete bridge beneath his bare feet and the dried blood on his toes, though the act of walking the five miles to get there over sharp rocks and gravel with no shoes was hazy at best. *** Depression isn't pretty. It isn't what you see in films where the characters are clean and nicely groomed with a healthy glow to their skin, strategically-timed tears, and fetchingly tousled hair. It's dirty, it's smelly...it's ugly in every sense of the word. It's completely letting yourself go and not giving two shits in a paper bag about doing something about it. It's existing outside of time and space. It's forgetting who you are. The life you lived before is not your own. It is a life that was lived by a stranger, someone whom you may have passed by on some random street and never saw again. It's Death with a beating heart. You are a ghost, wandering the planet among the living, searching for something to bring you back to life, or at the very least for something that will give you that little extra push needed to throw in the towel. *** "Quatre. It's time for your meds." He glanced up in surprise, startled from his thoughts and closed his copy of Season of Migration to the North. The book was a classic, both a literary masterpiece as well as a connection to his heritage. It had been difficult to find since it was out of print, but Bill had found it for him and made sure he had it. He supposed the plus side to whoring yourself out was the occasional privileges that came with it. It wasn't as though he had any dignity left to lose so why not enjoy the little perks when he could? He leaned over and set the book down onto the desk before reaching for the tiny paper cup containing his midday dose of antidepressants and atypicals. He popped them into his mouth and took the other paper cup filled with water to wash them down. After showing the nurse that he didn't have them stashed beneath his tongue, she nodded and left the room without another word. He listened to the telltale sound of the lock clicking into place and then turn his attention towards the window. It was nearly summer now and the sun shone brightly beyond the security bars and thick layers of shatterproof glass. Beyond the rocky hill that served as the hospital's foundation, there was a steep ravine. It wasn't all that deep, but it was enough to break your neck if you ever decided to take the plunge. On the other side of the ravine, more rocks and boulders provided a steady decline for a good thirty meters until they disappeared beneath the ocean waves. The sun streaming in through the window felt warm on his face and he wished more than anything that he could actually step outside and breathe in the fresh, salty air. Perhaps even dip his toes into the cool waters of the sea. Sadly, there was no beach on this island which meant no sand, but beggars couldn't be choosers. What amazed him were the lengths people were willing to go to prevent someone from offing themselves, even if those in power were rewriting history to make it seem as though people like him were nothing but filthy terrorists. He snorted and reached for his book again, easily finding the page where he'd left off. They had been terrorists, but they'd also been on the right side of history as far as he was concerned. But by their logic, a former terrorist who was mentally unstable enough to be suicidal must be mentally unstable enough to be homicidal. It didn't matter that he was as far from homicidal as anyone could get. It was enough to cough up the funds to cover the expense of transporting him here so that he would be neither a threat, nor a burden to society. Nevertheless, he was stuck here until the board of psychiatrists declared him recovered, or at least mentally healthy enough to go back out into the world. When that would happen, he didn't know, but the only thing he could do now was keep his nose clean and focus on his recovery so that he would eventually be released. What happened after that was anybody's guess and he tried not to think too much about it because it never failed to invoke an anxiety attack. He had to face the fact that his post-recovery would involve some maintenance level of medication and therapy, perhaps even for the rest of his life as his doctors suspected. Trowa spent years trying to reassure him that he wasn't crazy. He'd been convinced that he had a few screws loose after the Zero incident. After Trowa's death, he hadn't exactly implemented the healthiest coping mechanisms either. You're not crazy, baby. You're an empath. "Same difference," he muttered as he turned the page. "I think it's safe to say they're not mutually exclusive." There was an exasperated sigh and then, You're always so hard on yourself. I hate it when you do that. He snorted and glanced up in the direction of the voice, though there was nothing there but empty space. "I'm talking to my dead lover. Are you really going to tell me I'm not nuts?" There was a long pause and just when he was convinced Trowa was not going to respond, he said, Okay, perhaps a little. But it's one of the things I've always loved about you. He shook his head and looked down at his book. "You have terrible taste in men." I think my tastes are just perfect. Refined to appreciate the palatable eccentricities of the rarest delicacy on the planet. "You're hopeless, you know that?" Only for you, love. "Where were you when I was ready to throw myself into oncoming traffic?" I was there, Quat. I was there the whole time, begging you not to do it. You just refused to listen. Eímai pánta mazí sou.
~ * ~ Chapter 2 |
