The Rock, Part Four
Apr. 24th, 2009 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ugly_kitties told me to post it, so blame her. :DWow, how freaking long since the last batch of this acid trip? I'm terrible.
“Messiah Ward” is the name of a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds song that I listened to a lot writing this; I suppose the song itself is fitting, but the name I totally loved. Everything else is inspired by some of the more bizarre lucid dreams I've been having, in part.
From Mars, With Love
DCAU, J'onn/Wally. PG-13? It's messed up, but not in that way. Well, part kinda is. In that "strange hallucinatory perspective" kinda way.
7.7K+ words (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I really didn't mean for it to get to almost 24 pages long...)
Wally's grip on reality is thin, and getting thinner; J'onn blames himself, even as he's relegated to an imaginary voice in Wally's head... at least, that's what the doctors all say.
The Rock, Part Four: The Messiah Ward
Zatanna was perched in the cave, regarding the rock, as she had been for some time. It was some time before she actually spoke.
“Leaver cihtapelet segassem.”
Batman took notice, came over and watched words flicker faintly in circles about the stone. Martian words. None he recognized as being in the translation index...
Another dead end.
Perhaps...
There was another avenue he’d yet to explore. The nature of telepathy made him hesitant, but if the realm of magic would yield nothing, and the amounts of technology at his disposal revealed even less... perhaps it was time. Flash had reacted to it with certainty; and now there was evidence this behaviour had not simply been a symptom of his state of mind.
Once he was alone, he gingerly picked up the innocuous granite object and sat down with it, cross legged on the floor, the rock on his lap, where his hands could rest on it easily. He focused on his breathing and entered a trance state, not aware of a moment of clear contact, and yet...
J’onn wanted to be found.He left the path to his mind open, knowing who it was that sought him, but apparently unwilling to communicate directly.
He began to see unclear images of events that he knew were not real, now or ever. Of J’onn being a test subject, a captive of the United States government, or being trapped in a human body, going mad as John Jones without any mental contact of any kind with the outside world. Brief, disconnected glimpses.
Of Wally, there was little to find that made any sense, but he was there, a symbiotic component of J’onn’s psyche, thus fairly easy to find in this strange expedition.
In the absence of understandable input, the human mind will fill in the blanks with what it does understand. Before Batman learned anything else of note, he became distinctly aware that Wally West’s mind had been doing this so completely, for so long, Batman could only think he might be a candidate for Arkham if he made it back.
“Mr. West? It’s time for your medication. Wake up, please.”
Wally shook his head and groggily tried to wheel himself out of Nurse Waller’s way, but the orderly wouldn’t have it, giving Wally the evil eye as he begrudgingly swallowed the little cup of pills and the little cup of water she handed him.
“See, was that so bad?” she asked, in a sickeningly sweet voice, just to irritate him. Or so he thought.
“Not crazy,” he grumbled.
“No, of course you aren’t. Nobody here is crazy, you’re just getting well again.” She was a big woman, seemed to know what was best for everyone more than the doctors did. Her dark eyes crinkled at the edges when she smiled at him. She did that, smiling, because she was supposed to, not because she meant it, and Wally could tell. If he said something, she’d just wave it off and leave, but she’d leave quicker if he was quiet. So he was.
Wally just pushed the wheelchair closer to the barred window and glumly stared outside at the cars going back and forth over the bridge.
He was crazy, of course. It just made him feel better to be in denial.
The doctors tried to tell him he’d never walked a step in his life, but he was convinced he could run faster than sound. He could remember doing it. Being aware of the discrepancy didn’t make him feel any better, but Dr. Quinzel was pretty sure it meant he was getting better. Better grip on reality, whatever that was. Reality.
Her opinion, however, might have something to do with the fact that he didn’t talk about J’onn anymore. Not with anyone running the place, anyway. Nobody really takes you seriously when you tell them you hear a the voice of a Martian in your head. Nobody but the other patients, the ones that talked or listened to much of anything.
J’onn hadn’t been around for what seemed like a long time and he didn’t know why.
It made him sad.
The sound of a scuffle erupted outside his door, but he ignored it. Bruce was screaming about being sane, he usually pitched a fit around medicine time. Wally found a notebook in the pile beside his bed and began doodling J’onn’s lanky form with a green crayon. The book was full of them, in one form or another, and smelled like slightly sticky wax.
His door opened and shut real quick as someone ducked inside from the chaos in the hallway and jumped on his bed, but he wanted to finish his picture. J’onn smiling. So hard to get it to look right.
“Can I hide here? I don’t want to fight anymore.”
Clark. At the moment he was a big man with an expression like a little boy with parents fighting in the other room. He was usually more together than this, must be having a bad day.
“Yeahsure. Can you hand me the orange one?”
The Pumpkin Orange crayon seemed small in the wide hand attached to the muscled arm, handed over with all the care generally given fine bone china. Wally filled in the eyes without being really convinced that J’onn looked happy. The smile came out more like a grimace, so he gave up and slammed the notebook shut with his hands.
“Are you okay?” Clark asked, hugging Wally’s pillow on his lap. “Have you heard from him?”
“No,” Wally sighed. “I miss him.”
“I miss Lois,” Clark said, so sadly. Hugging the pillow a little tighter. “She doesn’t visit me anymore. Because I can’t fly.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“Hey!” he said defensively, frowning. “It’s not her fault.”
“Whatever, man.”
Clark was a big guy, in the all-muscle way, and made the springs creak as he shifted around. At least the beds here had springs, not those uncomfortable things in the zombie ward. “It’s my fault, it’s all my fault.” Definitely having a bad day; on the worst, he’d blame himself for the sun setting at night and the light pollution blocking out the stars. He began staring longingly at the sky. “I miss her.”
Sitting here and listening to Clark lament was about the most depressing thing he could think of doing at the moment.
“You wanna give me a push around the block?” Wally asked, as chipper as he could. Clark tipped his head and listened before he nodded. “Thanks.”
The orderlies called it “the messiah ward,” he figured because of the nightly gathering around the news, everyone muttering about wishing there was something they could do to save the world from itself. If only they weren’t in here, if only they were who they thought they were. If only things were different.
Bruce was sitting in front of his own door, a well-tranquilized look in his eyes as he watched them go past. The nurse did that to him a lot. The doctors thought they were in charge, but everyone actually in here knew it was Waller running everything, and she hated Bruce. Wally thought he might have once known why, but now, like so many reasons, the reason Nurse Waller hated Bruce like a thorn in her side escaped him.
Perhaps the worst thing about being in here was the antiseptic smell of cheap industrial cleaners, followed closely by the bland monotony of everything being uniform, dull, and ominously non-threatening. The walls were all off-white with a green stripe along the middle, like an path-marker that didn’t actually go anywhere, the floor a gray-green like what he’d expect to find in a public school, only in better condition. His chair rolled over matching tiles and he could feel Bruce’s eyes on the back of his neck, the hairs all prickling up.
In the rec room, Diana and Shayera were fighting over... something. The orderlies were watching them warily, but so far there wasn’t any hair-pulling. They both used to have long, pretty hair, but Dr. Crane had the orderlies cut it off after yanking at each other’s all the time.
Arthur and Dinah were watching TV, enraptured by nature show, whales gliding peacefully across the screen. They both still had long hair, but it wasn’t ever very tidy. Not unless they let Ollie comb it out for them, which he seemed to have done today.
John was in the corner, watching over the top of his book. John didn’t talk much. He spent most of his time in his green plastic chair, in the corner there, behind the plant. One of the few things he had said to Wally was how green made him happy sometimes, and could let him forget how everyone was just made out of... photons or particles or something. Wally waved at him, but he didn’t wave back, a far-away sort of look on his face. Sad. Didn’t even see him there, not really, so they kept going. They must just be particle-y not-people-looking today.
Down the next hall, Ralph playing with purple Silly Putty and having a marvelous time, sitting in a little circle with Kara and Don on one side of the floor. They were laughing and smiling as Ralph tangled it around his fingers and made a sheet of purple that snapped down the center loudly.
The hallway made a big squarish loop, at another turn of the corner, past the empty ‘quiet’ room, they were back to Wally’s door at a slow walk that took about ten minutes or so.
Bruce slumped in a plastic chair, rumpled, looking at them like he was having trouble focusing his eyes.
“They’re lying, you know,” he murmured, like his lips weren’t quite co-operating with all those drugs coursing through his veins. His eyes were still a bit glassy and all over the place, but he sounded pretty convinced.
“Who is?” Clark asked, whispering, seemed to be afraid someone would hear them conspire.
“Don’t act like you don’t know,” Bruce grumbled, then looked away, muttering to himself, so they left him alone.
The medicine made Wally tired, and he couldn’t help but yawn.
“I’m gonna take a nap.”
“Okay. See you later.”
Wally waved and Clark left, closing the door with his usual sort of care, as he did. The silence he left behind rang in Wally’s ears, thick walls and doors.
He pulled himself out of the chair and into the bed, flopping down heavily before he dragged his legs up after him and set the picture he’d drawn where he could see it.
J’onn did seem to be smiling in it, now, a little crooked but... it was alright. He looked at it a long while, then closed his eyes... and almost fell asleep.
I haven’t abandoned you.
Wally smiled, curled in on himself and made a happy sound.
There you are! Where did you go? Why did you leave?
I can’t stay, I’m sorry. I need your help.
Wally sat up again, scribbling with the crayon on a blank page; seemed like gibberish to him, words and pictures J’onn beamed into his head to be dutifully copied in Eggplant Purple on lined paper.
J’onn missed him, too, told him over and over, then told Wally to bury the piece of paper in John’s favourite plant’s pot, in plastic so it wouldn’t get wet.
It was an effort, not only to get back out of bed and wheel himself back to the rec room, because he was tired, but to bury the paper without the orderlies seeing him. He had to wait for them both to be facing away, watching the continued argument the girls were having on the other side of the room.
For the plastic, he had to settle with an empty bag of raisins that Kara had. Strange thing to ask, “Can I have your trash?” But when it was a Martian giving orders in his head, well... weird was already there, wasn’t it? It was good to feel J’onn there again. To be reminded that J’onn was real.
J’onn was real. Wally knew he was, he had to be, because sometimes it felt like nothing else was. His voice was sharp and clear... and everything else was... fuzzy.
Wally had to keep his room clean, just like everyone did, and tidied up every morning before the first time nurse Waller would come by, just before breakfast. Under the bed was the trickiest for him to do, because he had to get down on the floor to make sure his crayons or something hadn’t rolled down there, and lift up the bed if they had. Heavy beds, like they were made out of cast iron or something.
The orderlies weren’t very nice about things like that, anything out of place. If his stuff weren’t just where they belonged during breakfast, when the sheets were changed, Waller would have them take it away.
He landed on his bum with a little bump and got down underneath... no crayons, but he found a strange little box he’d never seen before against the wall. The sort of thing that screamed ‘I shouldn’t be here’ and made him glance up at the window in the door, just to be sure nobody was looking in at him before he moved the bed to get it.
It was a small green ammo box, light enough that he figured there wasn’t actually ammunition in it, metal and secured with a little brass padlock. Wally turned it over in his hands, keeping it out of sight.
It was important, he knew that much. He didn’t know how he knew, had no idea what was in it, but it was his job to keep safe, so there it was. That wasn’t an easy thing to do with stuff this size. Too big to hide in the secret hole in the bottom of his mattress (which was empty right now) or the second best hiding spot, inside the frame of his wheelchair. Way too big for that.
Wally got back in his chair and put the box between his legs, pulling a blanket over his lap and setting some of his notebooks to hide it. He was pretty sure someone was going to catch him, but the orderlies were strangely absent so far.
He kept it there through breakfast, which erupted in a food fight that allowed him to sneak outside into the fenced-in garden, the one door that didn’t have a lock on it, or a guard. Nobody really kept their eye on him, who would worry about a cripple being able to scale a twenty-foot wall? Not that he really wanted to. Most of his friends were in here. Even if he sometimes had the weird feeling he’d be able to run run run if only he’d ever make it out. He didn’t know if he believed it right now, which Dr. Quinzel would say was a good thing.
Out in the garden, he found a spot in the back, getting down behind a bush to dig a hole and hide the box in the well-tended dirt. He had to dig deep, to make sure Miss Isley didn’t find it, and he was filthy dirty when he was done.
Once the hole was disguised to his liking and his work was done, he went to another spot and began just playing in the dirt to disguise that he’d been doing something he shouldn’t; a nice, big mound he began decorating with twigs and leaves to look like what he intended to be a fort with a little flag on top, but it ended up looking more like... well, a pile of dirt covered in leaves.
It was nice out here, even if it was overcast and a little windy, threatening to blow away the little leaf-flag. The dirt was cool on his hands and smelled rich and nice, too.
The big, nasty orderly came out and gave him a marginally tolerant look; sneaking outside was generally against the rules, but Wally’s outbursts were never violent and he generally behaved himself, giving him leeway with this sort of thing most of the time. Dark eyes narrowed at him as he was not-so-gently put back in his chair and wheeled inside. He didn’t mind when one of his friends pushed the chair, but the orderlies doing it made him feel... uncomfortable.
He was taken straight to Nurse Waller’s office, which wasn’t such a good sign.
She was filling out papers at her desk, looked up with the exact same expression of almost friendly tolerance the guy that caught him wore, and shook her head. “What did he do?”
“Snuck out into the garden again.”
“Alright, that’s all Mr. Savage, leave him here. We’ll talk about your lack of perception later.”
The door shut behind him and Waller frowned deeply. Wally rubbed his dirty thumbs together, dry specks falling over his knees.
There was a little thing on her desk, one of those thermometers that read the time through floating glass bubbles with little brass numbers in a rather phallic-looking tube. The “75” was going up and down a little, like it didn’t know if it wanted to be up there or not.
“Are you listening?” she snapped, jerking his attention back.
“Yes, nurse. Right here.”
“You misbehave one more time and I’ll have to report it to Dr. Crane. And he’s not as nice as I am, you know that.”
“I’m sorry. I just... wanted to get away from the fighting.” Stealing lines from Clark usually worked. He had a way with the right words.
“We’re all here to get you better, Mr. West. Wally. You have to follow the rules.”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, looking back down at his lap.
“Alright, there’s your warning. You can go.”
Wally sort of half-smiled but she wasn’t anymore, so he stopped and looked away as he turned himself around then went back in the hallway again.
To his surprise, Bruce was standing there, loitering outside her office, looking uncomfortable in his white-ish robe. He muttered something softly to himself, then stopped and frowned in his direction. They sort of looked at each other for a moment, then Wally decided to just roll himself away.
Bruce followed him around for the rest of the day. He did stuff like that, wandering around behind someone all day, but usually it was Clark or Diana, not him. Didn’t ever offer to push his chair, but walked lackadaisically behind, occasionally moving like he was ready to defend Wally against one of the orderlies. It was odd, but it was sort of comforting at the same time. At least for a while. Eventually it gave Wally the feeling like everyone running the place might be out to get him, and Dr. Quinzel wouldn’t think that was a good thing at all.
Just as he was thinking about the doctor, Nurse Waller came up to him (causing Bruce to start mumbling to himself again) and gave him that fake smile. “Time for your appointment with Dr. Harleen,” she said, like she was talking to a six-year-old, which Wally really, really hated.
Bruce kept on mumbling, which caused her to give him a sharp look. “Excuse me?”
“Not talking to you,” he replied tersely.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Robin. Com-link,” he muttered, not loudly enough for her to hear, but Wally did, being right under him.
She sighed in exasperation and waved one of the orderlies over to wheel Wally out.
At this point, Bruce made himself scarce.
The set of double-doors that led to the rest of the hospital were always locked, but the orderly had a set of keys that let them out to gray-blue floors and a blue stripe on the wall, instead of the green one. Other than that, it was more or less the same, only they didn’t run into anybody on the way to Dr. Quinzel’s office, where Wally was left.
Dr. Quinzel sat behind a painted metal desk with one of those obviously fake wood tops, where a black and red harlequin doll sat beside a lamp, grinning maniacally at nothing. The doctor herself had a small, but genuine, smile, her blonde hair pulled back neatly, matching her neat white coat with a name-tag over a brown suit. There was a black, scuffed fake-leather couch, but Wally just sat next to it in his chair, a bit to an angle facing her.
“Good afternoon, Mr. West. How are you feeling today?”
“Fine.” He shrugged. “Better.” He wanted to say that it was because of J’onn, but bit back the words, thinking better of it.
“Mrs. Waller tells me that Mr. Wayne has been keeping you company today.”
“Yeah. Well, kinda. He didn’t really say much, I think he was just... bored.”
“Still, that’s good. He really should be more social,” she said lightly, but didn’t venture further into the subject, not aloud, anyway. Her pencil scratched at a pad of paper in front of her, one he knew from experience he couldn’t ask about and get a straight answer. “Socializing is important, for you, too. It isn’t good to keep things bottled up.”
“I hung out with Clark. We, uh, talked about... the weather, I think.”
“You don’t remember.”
“Must be the drugs,” he grumbled. “I don’t like them.”
“I could switch you back to the old prescription.”
He tried to remember that, but... couldn’t. There was this... haze over things back further than just a few days. He remembered... being surrounded by aliens, weird ones, with J’onn, that he did know happened, but it wasn’t in the hospital... even if it felt like it was recent enough that it should have been... had he left and come back? Before that... there was something else. A big castle where some lady was making him and J’onn do things they didn’t want to do, then making them forget about them right after.
But he had no intention of bring any of it up to Dr. Quinzel again. He wasn’t sure how to put it all together, anyway. Why bother?
“No,” he sighed, “that’s alright. Forget too much, I think. I don’t want that.” He played with the grass-stained knees of his pants, faded but persistent stains on the soft cotton.
“It was stronger, and I do think you’re getting better, Wally,” she conceded. “Much better. Much more grounded in reality, and that’s healthy. If you keep it up,” she began brightly, “you won’t be here much longer. You can go home.”
“Central City?” he asked hopefully.
Her bright look dimmed a bit, and her voice was patient as she replied. “No, Wally. Central City doesn't exist. It’s only in your mind. A construction. Do you remember where your real home is?”
Frustration sparked in him, too much for him to bite his tongue this time. “No, no, listen! I do know that, I know I belong in Central City, because it needs me... the people need me to be there!”
“Why is that?” More pencil-scratches on the paper, which was even more frustrating. Her expression remained pleasant and even.
Wally scratched at his scalp with both hands, the need to get up and run and do something so profound it was going to drive him mad: really mad, not just crazy like they thought he was in this place.
It was just a prison!
“What’s the point in telling you? You don’t believe me and you just think I’m nuts and there’s just no point.” He crossed his arms and looked away, pointedly focusing out the window; like all the other ones, it had bars, so the ones that thought they could fly wouldn’t go jumping out them. Jumping out a window and running off did seem like a good idea right now, though. “If that isn’t home, what is? Tell me.”
“Alright, let’s talk about home. I’d like to begin with your parents, is that alright?”
“I’d rather not, but I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
He did remember them pretty well, and she seemed to believe everything he told her about growing up, so the rest of the time was taken up with memories of being young, mostly about his dad. Of fighting and anger, his dad getting drunk and thinking of little Wally as nothing more than another person in the house to be his servant. There wasn’t any real abuse or anything, which he was pretty sure she believed, he was just a jerk was all, but the pencil kept scratching away no matter what he said.
It was all stuff he was pretty sure they’d covered before. The doll on the desk began freaking him out a little. Eventually, just as he got worried he was running out of material to go on about, she smiled and put her pencil down.
“That’s good, Wally, it’s healthy to talk things out. But our time is up for today.”
She got up and knelt down in front of his chair, grasping his hands, apparently not minding they were a little sweaty as she held them together in hers in a strangely intimate gesture that he internally wondered about, as far as doctor-patient protocol went.
“Are you really feeling better? That is why you’re here, and if I need to change your prescription, I can do that. I want to help you.”
“I don’t need drugs. I... I just hate them.” He frowned, shrugging instead of pulling away from her like he really wanted to. “I want to think like myself.”
“We’ll talk about it again in a few days,” she said noncommittally. No change, then. “Have a good evening, Mr. West.”
She squeezed his hands once more, then got up and opened the door, where the orderly was waiting to take him back to the so-called messiah ward, and his friends.
He was more or less left there in the hallway by his door, but there was no Bruce waiting around like Wally was sorta hoping there would be. Bruce’s paranoid distaste for their surroundings would be nice right about then, but any company at all would do, company that didn’t think everything he said was a delusion.
The TV was playing in the rec room again, an old black and white movie he had a good idea that J’onn liked from deep inside his head. Shayera and Clark were watching it; Shayera like she was actually paying attention and Clark had a far-away look in his eyes. John was sitting by the plant again, reading a different book with a picture of a tank on the cover.
Wally rolled over beside Shayera on the couch, smiling at her friendly greeting.
“I just saw the doctor,” Wally told her.
She gave him a knowing look, knowing it was all bullshit, but not saying it. “Anything new?”
“Not really. What are you watching? Anything good?”
“Lolita. It’s pretty good.”
“J’onn showed me it one time. Don’t remember much, though.”
“I don’t think Clark will, either,” she said wryly, elbowing the distracted man on the couch.
Clark jumped a bit and gave her a look of wide-eyed confusion. “Hm?”
“You’re out in la-la land.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Shayera and Wally just shrugged.
“S’okay,” she replied.
“What are you thinking about so hard?” Wally asked him.
Clark blushed, just a little, just for a second. “Lois.”
They all smiled and nodded, then looked back at the screen, watching the figures have an argument about something.
“Sheep,” accused a bleak voice that had them all jump in surprise before looking back. Bruce, looking particularly irritated about something, his lips held in a deep frown. “Pathetic.”
“Go away,” Shayera snapped, waving her hand at him. “Don’t ruin everything.”
“Fine then. Take your happy pills and forget your purpose. Let the world burn.”
“I won’t let that happen,” Clark gritted out.
“Neither will I,” Shayera said with just as much passion.
But they were stuck in here, and went back to the movie, just with less enjoyment on their faces, a stiffness in their shoulders. Wally understood that, but he didn’t want to join them. He wheeled himself around, beside Bruce, and wrinkled his nose at him.
“You don’t have to be so mean about it.”
Bruce didn’t reply, or move.
“And you were following me around, why were you doing that?”
Bruce shrugged.
“I want to go outside. Do you want to go outside?”
Bruce shrugged again.
“Well, fine, come on.” He began pushing himself along, his hands propelling the rubber and metal wheels toward Nurse Waller’s office. “I’m going to ask the Wall first, though, she said if I don’t and I go outside anyway she’ll send me off to Dr. Crane.”
Bruce made a sound of distaste at that, apparently following along, though he didn’t make any noise at it and Wally didn’t look back to check.
“Don’t fight with her, okay? She’ll say no and get all pissy.”
A noncommittal noise.
“Oh come on, please? Just this once?”
“Very well,” he growled.
“Thanks.”
Nurse Waller did, in fact, let them go outside, but with an orderly hanging around watching them, which neither was really big on, but fresh air was nice and Wally was happy to get out of the boring walls and the boring floors for a little while. It was late afternoon into early evening now, but still sunny out, with only a few puffy white clouds in the bright sky and a warm breeze working through the leaves and the flower beds and Wally’s hair. The orderly hung back enough so they could talk unheard, and although Miss Isley was out here weeding, she was along the far wall, and her head was bent under her wide hat with eyes only for her beloved plants. Thankfully, it wasn’t anywhere near the buried ammo box.
Wally sighed and closed his eyes, slumping back. The sun was nice, but it, like everything else, was a little fuzzy, a little distant.
“J’onn only talks to me in my head now, but I’m starting to think... I think maybe he’s the only thing that’s real here. Is that crazy?”
“No. It’s true,” Bruce said levelly.
“Really? You’re sure?”
“They are only a figment of your imagination. I am only a figment of your imagination.”
“How can you know that?”
“I don’t know anything. Everything is a product of your subconscious mind, in a delusion created to a purpose I am not aware of. Therefore, a purpose you are not aware of. Being fictitious, I have no mind or being of my own.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Wally sleepily replied, feeling suddenly exhausted and only wanting to crawl into bed.
“Only because the reality you accept and this one are mutually exclusive.”
“Whatever,” Wally yawned. It was dismissive, true, but Bruce didn’t really get offended, so he wouldn’t care. And he was really starting to drift off now.
“Don’t trust them.”
“Not real. Who cares?”
“She can still see you.”
“What?”
Wally snapped his eyes open, surprised concern jolting him awake, but... maybe he was already asleep, instead. Maybe he’d dreamed the whole thing, because there was just...
Nothing.
Not blackness, like nothing usually is, but a void of even non-colour. His physical form wasn’t present, neither was anything else at all. He was aware of nothing, just his own thoughts, his feelings of being suspended in this non-being in something so not there he couldn’t conceive of anything to make it look or feel like.
He knew, somehow, he’d been here for a long time, even though time seemed to be one of those missing elements, along with light and substance.
He wanted to speak, but with no mouth, he could only think out the words, but that was something he could do, something he was used to. Because of J’onn. Because of their life together, which wasn’t some dreamy almost-memory anymore, but clear past reality. Purpose and meaning and vivid clarity lived in that memory, giving it comforting weight.
J’onn? Are you here somewhere?
I am.
The nothing became warm, green that hugged his not-being, like squeezes and kisses made with love and presence, but no less real for it. Wally felt his mind tangle with J’onn’s and the hospital-delusion become a difficult to remember half-dream itself, the details blurry.
J’onn’s mind nuzzled and caressed his own more weightily and tenderly than physical touch ever could, with a wholeness of intent and trueness that only the removal of the barriers of flesh could give.
Wally knew J’onn had missed him just as much as the reverse was true, that his mind was nearly as full of holes and fuzzy-bits as his own was, they had just been in different places, with different half-truths. He knew there had been a tether that had been very thin, too thin.
Then he knew Batman was trying to contact them, through the rock, through the part of himself that J’onn had left behind for just such a purpose, but one that had been sullied by their captor’s hold over his mind and the world outside this world they currently occupied. J’onn had just been there, but didn’t remember what he’d done there.
J’onn loved him, and J’onn was wracked with guilt that he had helped their captor trap Wally’s consciousness like a firefly in a jar, just like him. He just didn’t know what else he could have done, and still kept Wally alive.
Batman will try to contact us again, their minds resonated in a statement that might as well have been an ‘I-statement’, but had to be said. He will succeed only if we do not remember he will succeed.
The part that was still entirely Wally was a little more worried about what would happen after that, but only a little.
She’ll know.
The J’onn-part was resigned to throwing Wally back into his delusion, feeling her tether pulling at him.
You’ll know what to do, without knowing.
It was only in such a state as this that Wally could know what that meant, at all, which he reflected clearly.
We must forget this meeting was real.
Forgive me, love.
When we’re ourselves again, we can worry about that.
I love you.
Miss Isley was still gardening away, Bruce was still lurking, the orderly looked bored, the sun was only a little lower in the sky, and Wally wondered if he’d fallen asleep.
He remembered touching J’onn, somehow, and emptiness, but... the rest was fleeting, gone as he woke up the rest of the way. The sense that this wasn’t really his body, these people weren’t really here, was intense, but there was nothing to back up the thought, even to himself.
“Are you real?” Wally asked Bruce.
“I suppose so,” he grunted, although Wally was pretty sure the conversation had gone differently just before he fell asleep...
Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe he’d already been asleep and Bruce had admitted to being a hallucination in the grips of a weird dream.
“It’s time for your medication,” the now up-close orderly informed them. “And dinner. Time to go inside.”
Wally looked up and them and saw Bruce snarl, like he wanted to fight, but resignation flickered over his expression and the snarl, the fists he’d made, melted away. The orderly eyed Bruce warily, just the same, as they went inside for bland peas and bland meatloaf and bland 2% milk and unwanted little pills which for Wally came in a blue and green variety.
In the zombie ward, Wally was pretty sure he remembered everyone ate in a cafeteria, but the drugs must have been way worse, because he still didn’t have a clear grasp on things that far back. He thought of it as the “zombie” ward because he could glimpse expressionless faces everywhere, not talking, moving slowly, pale and uncaring all around him, and not much else.
“They were aliens!” someone outside yelled. Ollie, maybe. Or Vic. Vic would yell about aliens.
There was suddenly a banging on the door, jolting Wally into dropping his plastic fork, a bland pea rolling a little on the floor. Not knocking, but wild flailing sort of banging.
“IT ISN’T REAL!”
He tried to ignore that, as whoever it was pulled away and he couldn’t hear them anymore.
Something like days passed. He could remember going to sleep more than once, seeing the moon change a little out the barred window, different kinds of weather, but everything washed into everything else like an abstract painting of time. He told Dr. Quinzel and Nurse Waller everything they wanted to hear, Bruce followed him around silently a couple times, and other things he forgot about pretty quickly happened, too. Unimportant things.
He began to notice that he wasn’t entirely grasping reality when he found himself on the floor of his room, crayons in his hand, arcing his hand over and over to make a messy rainbow.
The action, the sensation of the crayon over the smooth tile, and over the bumpy, waxy places the crayon already had been, was just... nice. He became aware of this, but didn’t stop, long after the colours crossed over one another so many times that waxy flecks were making a mess and the rainbow looked more like an ugly, rotten banana.
Then he had enough of that, and shifted around to get some more empty tile. He doodled in Grass Green, a crayon spared from the ugly banana, still with most of a tip. He made J’onn, and John in green, with glowy jagged lines sticking out from all around him, and a woven vase he thought he had owned or something in the past, and little stick figures fighting each other with laser beams.
When he was done, half of his floor was covered in the art project, and it was medication time.
Nurse Waller stopped in the doorway, frowning deeply at the mess, looking ugly and twisted in her displeasure. Wally felt sheepish, like he was a little kid caught painting his mom’s silk dress with his fingers, knowing he’d be punished somehow, no matter how fun it had been, the embarrassed waiting for wrath dampened it.
“I won’t do it again,” he said softly, then looked down at the pictures, hoping he’d remember what they looked like.
“You certainly won’t. Mr. Savage will clean this up, and you won’t have any more art supplies until I think I can trust you with them,” she declared cooly.
Wally tucked the green, now well-worn crayon up his sleeve.
“I’m sorry I made a mess.”
Wally was deposited back in his chair roughly by the big angry man, given his pills, then pushed out of the room and out of the way for a mop and bucket and scrubby sponge.
When he was done, he was allowed back in, to a wet, clean floor, and his two Crayola boxes now missing from his shelf. At least the notebooks and sketch pads were still there. Maybe he could convince Dr. Quinzel that drawing was therapeutic, but maybe not.
Then he remembered the warning about seeing Dr. Crane. A picture of a spindly man with a perverse twist to his smile made him want to bolt. It screamed fear and danger. Bad things would happen if he was taken to Dr. Crane.
Wally went back out, frantic, looking for help, but... nobody was there.
It had just been light and busy, but now the hallway was dark and shadowed, and hollow in its quiet. The sound of his wheels squeaking a bit as they moved echoed as he cautiously moved himself along, a sound that made him think of bats roosting somewhere in those dark ceilings. He was apprehensive, but not really afraid. On edge, readying to defend himself without really knowing how.
The dark grew, and grew, and grew, sneaking from corners and edges, filling everything, until it was all gone, and even his chair and his tired hospital clothes were gone, and he was.. floating.
Disoriented, confused, he reached out to touch something, to get his bearings, but there was nothing there at all. He was swimming in the endless dark so long that when light did come, it was startling.
Tendrils of grayish light, weaving their way up from somewhere below and above, headed for him cautiously, as if they were the ones afraid. One touched his arm and immediately pulled back, as if he might be red-hot, but he must not have been, because it went back there and snaked around his skin, signaling the others to do the same.
They all snaked over him like impossibly light, soft ropes, then pulled him out of the dark and into light so bright everywhere he couldn’t see, at first. Then he did.
He was back on Azgor 7, he realized, surprised at knowing so clearly what that was, that other planet, with those expressionless aliens.
But this time, he knew the alien planet didn’t exist anymore. It was only a construct of their collective memories of a better time, long in the past. They had shared it with J’onn, with a strength and clarity that Wally’s poor little human brain couldn’t rationalize as a projection so strong it could have ripped him in half. They shared this with him not directly, but like overhearing their mental conversation, so intense it was easy to pick up.
He felt weak and small and hated it. It was only their opinions being so insistent he was absorbing that, too, but he couldn’t shake it off.
They became aware of his awareness, and began to pacify it with contentment, quieting his thoughts.
The strange sky shone with a silvery sun, above ocean waves in front of him and reaches of pale sand underneath and stretching out as far as the eye could see on either side. Behind him, the sculpted cities of their civilization grew out of well-tamed gray-green grass that dissipated into the beach sand. A warm wind blew off in gusts from the ocean, with a salty, fresh smell that refreshed him.
Gradually, he could feel the gritty sand under his toes, sun-heated under his body. His own body, or something like it, and he gleefully moved his legs about, digging his heels into the beach, just because he could.
Wally knew he should be worried about something, but distantly, not enough to provoke the feeling into fruition.
Then he was aware he was being watched, that the aliens were all around him, reading through his mind like a National Geographic that was particularly fascinating, and that he didn’t care they were doing it. He was too happy to care.
Gradually, one by one, they showed themselves, and at first he recognized them as the aliens, but then he recognized them as beautiful, tanned, blonde beach-goers that could have been relaxing on some lonely stretch of nudist territory in California, or some southern French paradise, but were only interested in him.
In touching his body - that he was now vividly aware was just as naked as they were - and watching and feeling how he reacted to what they did. The generic, toned men and women huddled around him, somehow without blocking his sun, and began this strange exploratory orgy that was all centered around him.
‘Good’ was not a word to do the feeling justice, but it felt... fake.
Memories of his delusions surfaced, along with real things, where he belonged, Earth. Being on Mars, in space, or other places poked around, too, but the moving bodies pushed them away with their powerful minds, insisting with intent he simply react pleasurably to their hands and lips.
And he did.
But when the sky broke open, the ground shook, and the revelers all fled from him in terror, relief washed over him like a breaking wave, and he moved up, standing on the trembling sand like he’d just been freed from an unbearable weight.
This freedom let him be disgusted with being taken advantage of, brushing off his skin like the simple action could cleanse him of their obscene curiosity. They thought of him as some strange lesser being to be examined, like he was something J’onn kept around like a goldfish in a bowl. He was not advanced in the ways they respected, so different they struggled to understand how he functioned. But that wasn’t any excuse.
J’onn’s influence rumbled everywhere, but without voice or clear manifestation. Still, he was here now, all around him, scaring away the aliens back to their shiny buildings in the distance.
It is time.
Time for what?
There was no reply, not in words or other sorts of projections. But briefly, J’onn manifested from the water, a blue-clear version of himself that swelled up only long enough to press against Wally’s lips, cool and charged with feeling.
Then he, the beach, and all that resolute clarity of mind were gone again.
Wally was back in the chair, back in the hospital, back in the hallway, with a nagging apprehension that he had to do something quickly, or things would go from bad to worse.
The lights were back on, but nobody was around, except for the sound of someone running toward him with bare feet.
Bruce. He turned a corner and came into view, stopping in front of Wally with a look of startled bemusement. His eyes were sharp and clear, everything about him different from the groggy, strange man that wandered around behind his chair on off days.
“Where the hell have you been?” he barked, looking frustrated and a bit scattered. “There isn’t much time,” he said, his voice different, deeper, somehow more familiar and comfortable. “Where is the Mother Box?”
!!
on 2009-04-26 06:50 pm (UTC)Thank you~~~~
Re: !!
on 2009-04-27 03:37 am (UTC)I hope you enjoy; I really am looking forward to finishing this up and getting back to more of the tone of the sanity in the other ones. XD
Re: !!
on 2009-04-28 04:38 pm (UTC)It always makes my week when you update, and it was a nice break from finals studying. XD
Re: !!
on 2009-04-28 11:17 pm (UTC)Good luck with those!
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on 2009-04-27 05:04 am (UTC)And oh god, I hadn't read the previous part :D! Only you could have sold me J'onn/Wally :B. So good. <3!
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on 2009-04-27 08:22 am (UTC)I'm glad I have, they're so cute together in my head. XD
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on 2009-05-05 12:35 pm (UTC)Bruce figuring it out because Wally knows he could figure it out was just fantastic.