Dr. Elder (plague doctor variety 1) x Beatrix Galen (first person) Platonic
This is strictly friendly fluff and supernatural exposition(that could lead to romance in the future if i revisit these characters). Based on what was supposed to be a drabble for @fuckyouamanda turned into me being sleep deprived and getting a bit carried away with lore.
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We’d been driving for miles, trying to find this little cottage I was supposed to be staying at, a detour for raspberry tarts had gotten us lost. As the sun began to sink further into the night, the needle on our fuel gauge sank into the red. My driver for the trip, Damen, found a small station and hopped out to raise some help. I remember waving to Damen as he turned and mouthed that someone was coming to the door. I got out of the car and start walking off to the side of the station, to make a call and make sure my reservation hadn’t been forfeited. I couldn’t get signal and I moved further away, waving my phone around like a mad woman. Then I heard Damen yell and I turned to see his face was full of horror, his arms were waving. Everything got very slow as I felt the air leave my body. I didn’t feel the pain until I hit the ground, I heard a crack, and everything went dark.
My eyes hurt when I try to open them, maybe I don’t want to open them, really. I’m so…tired. So, I drift back off and I dream, of a - person, no - are they even human? The figure is tall and slender with broad shoulders and flowing robes, they look like some illustrations that I saw in a museum in…I can’t remember where. But I remember this shape, the beaked mask with glass eyes. Am I dying? Is my brain throwing images at me of what I’ve seen? No, I only see them, the figure and their assistant.
These odd visions persist, these waking dreams. Sometimes all I see is a ceiling covered in lovely swirling designs, but there is a voice. This voice has a deepness that is comforting but it lilts and flows as it reads me prose. I know this must be a dream as everything I hear is something I remember. There is Shakespeare, Austen, and even some excerpts from stand-up routines I love. Hearing “There’s a horse loose in the hospital” in the confused tones of the voice in my head makes it, oddly, more hilarious. It was also comforting. To think that I am fighting, on whatever subconscious level, is reassuring. If I ever properly wake up, I hope I remember this.
~~~~~~~
When I wake again I am sore, but my eyes are more cooperative. The room is dim, but I am thankful for that. All around me, the walls are a mild mint green, as if they’ve faded from years of wear, the curtains are drawn, patterned in vines and sprigs of leaves. I feel as if I lay on a cloud, and as much as I want to know where I am, I feel no need to leave this place. I finally become aware of the I.V. hooked up on my left, at least they picked the easy arm. Well, I assume they picked the easy arm, its hard to tell if they had any false starts as my arms are fairly covered in bruises. The bag is covered by a casing, so I can’t see if they have me on saline or something else. My arms are swollen so saline is a good bet, but that could be the bruising too. I try to wiggle my finger and find something in my left hand. A small red button on a corded white toggle. I don’t try to see where the cord leads because craning my neck is still too laborious. I use every bit of strength to push the button and I hear a delicate bell chime coming from the other side of the door.
I don’t really know where I am but I’m more concerned about how I am. I’ve never been in a car crash before, but I feel like I’ve been dehydrated, crushed up, and reconstituted. A nurse knocks and enters my room and she looks like some colorized version of those portraits my gran used to show me. All but her cap, as it bears a small black bird.
“Ah finally awake, I see”
I try to speak, I want to but my throat feels dry and scratchy, and so I cough and stutter. The nurse comes over and offers me some ice chips and I nod, feebly.
“The doc will be in momentarily. He’ll explain everything.”
As the door opens once more and the nurse exits, the figure takes her place. The mask is closer to a dark brown than the black in my visions. But it could be lighting. Damn these drugs must be phenomenal.
“Ms. Galen, pleasure to see you properly awake. I’m Dr. Elder and I’m sure you have a lot of questions about-“
I smiled, I smiled like a damn goof. It was the voice, the one that was so baffled as to the meaning of a teenage boy yelling scatter and smashing a “forty, what is a blasted forty?” on the ground.
“You were reading to me, weren’t you? How did you know what I liked? How did you get into my dream?”
I know I must sound delirious, but the doctor doesn’t seem to notice as they shuffle their feet a bit and sit down in the chair by my bed. I feel a hand on my wrist, checking my pulse. There is a faint light behind the eyes of the mask, like a dying glowstick in the dawn of the day after a rave. Blue, lovely blue. Like the old icebox Gran had when I was little, before she was sent away. She made this pie that tasted like blue skies and honeysuckle. I miss Gran.
“Ms. Galen? Can you hear me?”
I realize I’ve been drifting in and out, too many memories to ignore all of them, so I let a few nice ones sneak through.
“Yes, loud and clear, sorry, Doc. My ears still work, at least. What happened to me?”
The nose of the mask bobs down then back up, the glass portholes seeming to stare into me. I don’t really mind them.
“Well, Ms. Galen-“
“Oh please call me Bea, or Beatrix.”
The nose bobbed again, the mask nodding.
“Ms. Beatrix, you were in a rather nasty accident involving some improperly parked farm equipment, I’m afraid that you- you-”
I peer at the mask, questioning.
“I what, Doc? Is it my legs my spine, my arms?”
In an odd sort of calculated panic, I start to wiggle everything, and though it is all sore, everything all seems to work. I reach for the cup of ice chips next to me and the doctor seems shocked. Obviously, there are no eyebrows to clue me in, but the shoulders, broad a they are, rise ever higher. The beak bobs side to side, ever so slightly, as if shaking in disbelief.
“Listen, Doc, let me level with you, I feel sore but otherwise functional. I’d really like the rundown on what I’m in for- Oh, and Damen, is he ok? Is he here too?”
“No, Ms. Gal- Beatrix. He was well away from the car when the accident occurred, he was unharmed. Your recovery will be extended, however you should regain most of the function in your extremities, your right leg was not broken but it hasn’t responded to stimuli as actively as your left. I’m afraid, it isn’t possible to transfer you to another facility as there was a terrible storm not long after you were brought in, and we aren’t currently able to reach anyone.”
I nod as I take it in, he’s ignored my dream-based inquiries, so I guess I really did dream them. I must have heard his voice while I was out, and my brain did the rest. It was a bit scary, not having a way to let anyone know. But I realized, only my school would really need to know.
“What kind of facility is this? And what exactly am I on for pain?”
The mask bobs again, my imagination is much more vivid than I ever realized. The doctor rises to his full height.
“This is a small clinic. Our purpose is to help our patients get to a place where they can move on. We typically only house about three to five patients at a time and usually we only deal with minor maladies. Currently we just have you with us.” He paused for a breath and poured me a glass of cold water to go beside my ice chips.
“As for the pain, if you are having any just ring Lottie again and she will help you.” The good doc picks up my chart and hums. “We have you on dilaudid, but your last dose should’ve worn off by now. If that is all, Beatrix, I’ll be getting on to some of my other duties that need tending. I will be back to see you though, I promise, you are our priority.”
I nod, numbly, feeling there is something I’m missing. As the door swings shut I realize that I can, in fact, feel an excruciating pain in my right shoulder and hip, and I just know a headache is coming on. I ring for Lottie and ask for an icepack and something to eat, as I feel starved.
There are worse places to recover, I suppose, than a comfortable room with a lovely view of- were those gardens? I wonder to myself, if the food is good. Back home when I was hospitalized the cafeteria had the best roast beef. Gran loved it, she joked that she visited me just to sneak food off my plate.
But this was a clinic, I didn’t expect a large cafeteria or anything like what I’d known. As if by some universal alignment, a heaping plate of roast beef with gravy, mash, and veg, arrived for supper. I dig in and it tastes like back home. I use a cloth napkin, embroidered with another black bird, to dab at my mouth. That is when I realize it, and my fork clatters onto the plate.
The mask is real. The glowing eyes. Real.
Somehow this doesn’t faze me as much as I think it should, but I’ve seen stranger things. I dig back into my roast beef and wonder what tomorrow will bring.
~~~~~~~
The next couple of days blended into this calming routine. It turns out that I did, in fact, need a wheelchair for a bit, as my good leg got tired after short bursts of activity. But the physio seemed to help, even as old fashioned as the physical therapist was. A slim man with a handlebar mustache, that served in the army at one point; he went by Butch and always seemed to be smiling.
I got to know Lottie too, and found there were even more of these clinics, dotted about the whole of Europe. No one ever explained why Dr.Elder wore the mask but I never asked either.
True to his word, I did see the good doctor again. Quite frequently. It started with morning check in, then there were impromptu visits, a few walks/ rolls, around the grounds, when it wasn’t pouring. As there were no other patients, and communications were still down from the storm, I found Elder to be great company. I hadn’t mentioned the dreams again, but volumes of my favorite stories appeared on my night table, and some nights when I was too tired to read, but too sore to sleep, Elder read to me. He admitted to reading to me, before I’d woken up, saying it seemed to soothe patients. We would talk about which stories we liked best, what we had grown up with. He had an upbringing rife with old classics, but once brought in a book of poetry. The verses were completely new to me, and I loved them. Lottie later told me they were his, he’d written them about patients over the years, the good and the bad. Being a doctor takes a toll on your soul and he relieved his burden through his writing.
I began spending the bulk of my time with him and we fell into a comfortable sort of friendship, something I had failed at achieving with even my closest classmates in nursing school. I felt better, every day and I wondered if my accident had really been as bad as all that.
The storm that had knocked out the phone lines was still coming in waves, and the fourth day of dreary weather in a row, I decided it was time to offer up some alternate entertainment. I went looking through my effects and found my laptop and my external hard drive full of movies and music. I switched it on and wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to do this earlier. When Elder came up for a check in, I was watching John Mulaney, as I couldn’t stop thinking about the excerpts from my dreams. He sat down with me, and before we knew it we had blown through a good chuck of my stand-up.
He tried to laugh along in the right places, even though a lot of it seemed to go over his head, but at the end he did seem to be thoroughly happy. We were just about to start on some animated movies when Lottie started banging down my door calling for us “chortling heathens” to come take supper in the dining room.
I also got along with Lottie and Butch through all of this, but they seemed more focused on each other and that was just fine with me. I liked my time with the Doc, and he seemed to like it too. Even spending as much time as we did together, I avoided mentioning his interesting choice of mask. I mocked up a few jokes about taking safety a bit too seriously but decided against them.
The longer I spent at the clinic the more I came to realize that there was most certainly something distinctly “other” about it, but there was something in me that didn’t need that to be acknowledged. I was still on vacation time and I was sending my brain on vacation too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After a time I was able to leave the wheelchair in my room and graduate to a cane, it was a cause for celebration. I was warned that I may need to use one intermittently in the long term, to help the healing along, and because I was showing signs of post traumatic arthritis in my right hip. I decided that once I was able, I would cover my cane with tacky stickers and sparkly duct tape. There are many canes like it but this one is mine, god-dammit.
Elder complimented my cane when we went on my first stroll in the gardens. He said I seemed to be glowing. As we walked parts of the grounds that I didn’t dare roll through, Elder told me that the clinic and its grounds had been a dairy farm long ago. its small size suited their purposes just fine. They had planted all a manner of flowers and fruit trees to yield beauty and fresh produce in the right seasons. We came across a raspberry bush and I remembered my tarts.
“Are the phones working, yet, could I make a call?”
“I can check, but they are supposed to be up and running today, these ancient lines go down so frequently.”
I stopped and picked a few raspberries, just ripe, so perfect I could do without the pastry. I offered some to Elder, and he declined. It was time.
“Doc, why do you wear it?”
Elders shoulders hunched, and I could feel something change. A mild tension that had permeated the air between us, dissipated.
“Well I never saw the sense in it, but now it seems I can never take it off.”
I let go of a breath, relieved I weren’t hallucinating, but now very aware that something was most assuredly different about this place, and my new-found friend.
“Have you tried, do you need help?”
Elder shook his head and took my hand. He led me to bench along the path and we took a rest.
“I can’t remember when I last tried, or when someone else last remarked on it. To our regular patients I look however they need me to. Whatever face will put them at ease. I’ve worn so many, I can’t remember my own.”
I patted his back with my left hand, minding the catheter still in my arm. I’d been on I.V just before our walk, a small transfusion of fluids was ordered, as I had been feeling very dehydrated and a bit dizzy.
“Lottie does her best, as well. You surprised her a bit, as young as you are. The memories help her a lot, so she’s grateful you seemed to have some pleasant ones to draw on. This isn’t a clinic for normal patients, I take it you’ve realized that by now.”
He sat silent for a moment and I motioned to speak.
“My Gran was a nurse long before I was born. Helping people was her calling and she worked from the day she got a job at the hospital to the day I was born. She would have worked until they stopped her, but she had earned her pension, so she retired to enjoy her family. When I happened, my father was pushing forty, and she was almost sixty. I was the apple of her eye when he adopted me.” I started to cry but I didn’t waver for more than a second.
I told Elder about dad dying when I was ten, a fluke heart attack. Gran being sent away when I was eleven, my aunt taking over. Gran dying, within a year, alone, in some home, from some treatable illness. Running away and getting caught, being put into a group home when they saw what my aunt had considered a suitable accommodation for a twelve year old. But I muddled through, and I graduated. I went to nursing school, for Gran. I had finished my first semester and entered a stupid raffle at the summer fair. I won, courtesy of our local travel agency, an all-expenses paid trip to *drumroll* England. I was studying in Ireland at the time, so really it was just a hop skip and a jump away, but I took it. And now here I was.
When I finished, he nodded and helped me stand.
“Beatrix, I wanted to tell you the truth about this place. Our patients are, not quite here nor there. Some of them are with us for only a night but some have stayed for the equivalent of years. When they are ready to move on they do, whether that means going back to their house… or going ‘home’. Every once in while someone with a physical form finds their way here and we care for them as we would anyone else. But only once in a blue moon can someone see the mask. That is how Lottie came to be here, Butch has his own story. But that’s why these little clinics began popping up all over. More and more of us came to be, and we wanted to help as best we could. There are more and more people not ready to leave this world, so we help encourage them along.’
It all made an odd kind of sense, and it is vastly more comforting to think that one has stumbled onto something benevolent, and otherworldly. You know, as opposed to being trapped by a strange sadist wearing a bird mask.
“So this means, I’m dead.”
“Not quite. You aren’t…yet. You were supposed to proceed along as usual but you were so-“
“If you say full of life I’m liable to punch you in the arm.”
He flinched away with a laugh and held up his hands in defense.
“Well you are, for lack of a better word. Your body wasn’t supposed to last much longer, it has been put through so much. But you just aren’t ready to be parted from it. Or this world. So we kept you alive, the only way we could and we planned to tell you when the time was right. I could tell you saw the mask the moment you saw me enter your room. I just wanted to give you some time before you had to decide”
“How are you keeping me alive? Do I have to decide to die or-”
A small chuckle, not sinister, just a bit of an “oh boy, you wouldn’t believe” sort of noise.
“There is an energy that we use to stay here in between planes, it was given to me when I was dying to prolong my usefulness during a time of great need. But I never wanted to stop helping, and I adapted. It is ambient within this world and easy to find if you know where to look. It comes from love, from happiness, from the basic components of life itself. That is what has been in your I.V, what causes my subdued glow, and your budding glow as well.”
“So my decision, as it stands, is between allowing myself to die and possibly pass on, or staying here, helping other souls cross over, like glow worm Charon in scrubs?”
I thought for a bit, as we continued to walk. But I stopped Elder when we reached the tree bearing his name.
“So if I stay, Does this mean I have to wear the bird mask?’
This time it was a full blown laugh, I’d even go so far as to say, a chortle.
“Not unless you want to. When I passed into this state, this is how people who were purported to be healers often dressed. So I chose it, thinking anyone who saw this form would feel comforted by it. Times have changed of course, and I can make others see whatever they like, but I’ve gone so long without really changing that I don’t know what may lay beneath, if anything does. For all intents and purposes, this is my face now. Elder was not my name in life, I didn’t remember who I was. But I knew I wanted to help. You would look however you liked, most likely how you look right now, but maybe with less bruising. And you don’t have to wear scrubs or dresses or anything-‘
He stuttered and corrected himself.
“Well, I mean, you can wear anything you like. You don’t even have to help, I’d just… I’d like it if you stayed” The eyes went down, and the beak was perpendicular to he ground.
‘Lottie is lovely and kind and she has been here for decades now, and we get along just fine. But I can’t read Shakespeare with her, and she isn’t much for comedy. Though I don’t always understand yours, I like it, and I’d like it if you’d teach me more about it, and even about the world. Lottie can blend in with the crowd, but I never venture out if I don’t have to, I feel awkward and out of time.
“Butch is a sweet man but he keeps to himself, goes to the cinema with Lottie, he likes going through the motions of being an out and about human. That’s fine and dandy for him, and I hope he enjoys every moment of it”
He took both my hands in his and we looked into each other’s eyes as best we could. In that moment I swore I could see proper blue eyes peeking back at me.
“But you, Beatrix, you make me feel like I’m not alone. You are the first proper friend I’ve had since I still had my own face. I don’t want to force you to stay, I know you have others to see in whatever comes next, but I don’t want to lose my friend. That’s why I wanted to prolong your stay here. I feel guilty for not having told you sooner but-“
I put two fingers, close as I could get, to where Elders mouth would have been.
“Oh hush, you old crow. Of course, I’m staying. Gran would never let me hear the end of it if I didn’t do what she raised me to. And even without Grans watchful eyes over my shoulder… I would never leave a friend behind.”
I was promptly lifted and hugged so impossibly tight, and yet, as I hugged him back I didn’t feel a single twinge of pain. When he reluctantly set me down the bruises were gone. His glow was a bit brighter, and I felt brand new.
“Well, now I suppose we must tell Lottie”
A loud happy chortle floated down from the clinics back door.
“I already know, you two lollygaggers. Now, come on. Doc, nurse trainee, we have two new patients who need processing, and someone has to help me.”
