Chapter Text
Ryan does not want to be here.
For one, it’s boring. His room is plain with white walls and white sheets on the bed, no posters and pins adorning the walls like his bedroom back home had. The only sort of decorations are the few personal belongings Ryan had been allowed to bring with him, which consisted of his journal and a couple of sets of spare clothes. That’s another thing - he couldn’t even have his guitar! It’s downright miserable for him, he hasn’t gone a day without practicing since… well, since the train, before he got his stuff back in the party car. But before that, he hadn’t missed a day in years. He can at least jot down any song ideas he has, but he hasn’t felt like doing much of that lately.
Another reason he hates this place is because he knows Min-Gi is still on the train, and Ryan has no way of getting to him. Instead, he’s wasting his time here in a mental health hospital against his wishes, and has to talk to a therapist every day. He doesn’t like talking about his feelings, doesn’t like making himself so vulnerable even though that’s the point of therapy in the first place.
When he first arrived at the facility, Ryan had undergone a very long and tedious psychiatric evaluation to figure out the kind of treatment he needed. He had tried to not mention anything about the train, though they’d already heard about his public panic attack from the doctors at the hospital, so they asked about it anyway. In the end, Ryan was as honest as he could be, and they ended up diagnosing him with acute post-traumatic stress disorder (made sense, but probably not for the reasons they thought) and attention deficit disorder (also made sense?). They also prescribed him medication, which Ryan hates taking, but the staff makes him take it every night, so, whatever. He hasn’t really noticed any changes, but at the same time it’s only been like a week.
And yet another reason Ryan hates this place is that he has no idea when he’ll get to leave. The staff keeps telling him he’ll be discharged once his mental state improves, but considering he didn’t even feel that bad in the first place, why is he still here? Ryan is here, and Min-Gi is still out there, probably not having a good time on the train. He keeps mentioning this to his therapist, that he has to find Min (he doesn’t say anything about the train), but she only tells him what the staff told him. Once he’s doing better, he can leave. It frustrates him to no end.
He’s not technically confined to his room all day, he’s allowed to go to the bathroom and go to the common areas by himself if he so chooses. But he doesn’t want to. The first couple of days, he barely even ate, just stayed curled up underneath the thin blankets on the bed. If he went too long without eating, the staff would bring a tray of food in and force him to eat something so he wasn’t starved or malnourished. So he just gave in after a few times of that, and now eats at least a few bites of whatever food he’s given. Doesn’t help that the food isn’t exactly top quality - it reminds him of the cafeteria food in high school.
Other than getting up to go to the bathroom and attend his daily therapy sessions, Ryan has barely left his room. He spends most of the time in his bed, sometimes sleeping, sometimes just staring blankly at the wall or ceiling, wondering what Min was doing, if he was okay. Was Min thinking about him too? Was he even still alive? Ryan tries not to think about that last part too much.
Mr. and Mrs. Park stopped by every couple of days to check on him. They would wish him well, tell him with a sadness in their voices that there was no sign of Min-Gi yet (of course there wasn’t), and encourage him to feel better soon. Ryan appreciates the visits, but it makes him feel more like he’s trapped in a prison than anything. The Parks are like his only glimpse of the outside world, and their visits are heavily supervised so it just feels… fake. And Ryan can tell from the look on Mrs. Park’s face that she knows that Ryan knows something about Min-Gi, something that he isn’t telling her. And he won’t ever tell her, as much as he wants to. She wouldn’t ever believe him - nobody would. So she has to leave every visit knowing Ryan was the last person to see her son, and that he won’t even tell her where he is.
Ryan’s own family visited once, on the second day of his stay, and it wasn’t even the whole family. Not even his parents, actually - it was just his older sister, Hana. In a way he was relieved, he’d always been closer to Hana than any of his other siblings, and he was in no mood to deal with whatever his parents had to say to him (if anything at all.) Hana was clearly concerned for him, commenting on how down he seemed, but it was clear that she was avoiding asking too many questions about the situation, which Ryan was grateful for.
“So… what do mom and dad think?” Ryan asked, knowing he probably wouldn’t like the answer, but a part of him just wanted to know anyway.
Hana smiled weakly. “They’re worried about you.”
Ryan glared back at her, clearly not buying it, and Hana dropped the facade as quickly as she put it on.
“Well, they are worried, but they… also kind of played it off?” She said with a sigh. “Like, ‘oh, I knew he’d end up there eventually’ kind of stuff.”
Ryan’s brows furrowed.
“I tried to get them to stop,” Hana added quickly. “I don’t think they meant to be mean, just, they were trying to lighten the mood, I guess…?”
“Yeah,” Ryan muttered, suddenly withdrawn from the conversation. “I guess.”
Hana told him to give her a call once he got out, as if anticipating he wouldn’t even come home. Well, she was right, Ryan had Min-Gi to look for, and even before he hit the road he never liked to go home. It was just too much. But he promised he’d at least call.
And now, Ryan is laying in his bed once again, not thinking about anything in particular. His mind seems to be racing these days, never focusing on one thing for too long. He isn’t sure what time it is, but lunchtime has passed already, so it’s probably getting close to time for his therapy session. Ugh.
As if on cue, there’s a light tap at his door, and in comes one of the staff nurses. This time it’s Jill, a tall, middle-aged woman with bumped hair. “Hi Ryan, it’s time for your session with Dr. Wilson!” She says with a smile. Ryan likes Jill, so he smiles back politely and sits up in his bed, stretching his arms.
“Mm, already? Feels like I just had one yesterday,” He jokes, though there’s less playfulness in his voice than there usually would be.
Jill laughs, though. “You’re a funny one, Ry! I’ll be waiting out here when you’re ready, okay hon?”
“Okay, thanks,” Ryan replies, and the door clicks shut. He doesn’t really have much preparation to do - he’s still wearing the t-shirt and sweatpants he put on earlier in the day. He hasn’t brushed his teeth, but oh well. It could be worse. He straightens out his clothes, combs his fingers through his hair, and heads to the door, where Jill is waiting as she promised.
Jill escorts him to the other side of the building where the offices are, making small talk and cracking jokes along the way. Once they’re in the office wing, Jill steps into Dr. Wilson’s office to let her know Ryan’s there, and soon he’s brought in. It’s a routine he’s dealt with for a week now.
He has to fill out some sheet about how he’s been feeling, and then they discuss that, and then they talk about Ryan’s progress, of which there apparently hasn’t been much.
“Well, Ryan, you’ve been here for a week now, and I have to wonder,” Dr. Wilson asks at one point during the session. She glances up at him from her clipboard, seated across from him in an office chair while Ryan sits on the couch. She’s very much the epitome of ‘old white woman therapist’, her long silver hair kept back in a low ponytail, the wrinkles around her thin-lipped mouth, and round glasses that rest just above the tip of her nose. “You seem reluctant to accept help from others, and I just want to ask why that is?”
Ryan pauses, fiddles with the hem of his shirt. He thinks about it for a moment. “I just… don’t think I need it, I guess.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well…” He stops again, the cogs turning in his head to come up with the words. He is very much not good at expressing his feelings. “Um… I’ve just… Always done things my own way, you know? I took care of myself a lot of the time growing up, and like… I know myself better than anyone else does.” Ryan pauses between phrases, trying to properly convey his thoughts. “I feel like if something was seriously wrong with me, I would know.”
Dr. Wilson writes on her clipboard, and quirks a brow at him. “Would you? Even if everyone you care about told you you had an issue you need to fix?”
“Uh...”
Ryan thinks back to the train. The whole reason he and Min were on that train in the first place was because they had ‘lessons to learn’ or something. But even so, every time they did something right and their numbers went down, they would always end back up at 202. Except… when Ryan had gotten his exit. He still isn’t exactly sure what he did to warrant that drop to zero. All he said was that he wasn’t going to leave Min, and then… he did exactly the opposite. So what did he even learn? What changed? Does it even matter?
“I don’t know, maybe.” He finally shrugs, looking down at the carpet.
Dr. Wilson pauses in thought, her pen pressed to her cheek. “Can you think of a moment in your life when you accepted help from someone else, even when you didn’t think you needed it?”
Now, Ryan has to reach into the deep recesses of the ‘life memories’ part of his brain, somewhere he didn’t delve often. Let’s see… there’s the time in the astro car where Ryan was dangling from a cliff’s edge, but well, he was going to die so of course he asked Min-Gi for help. Then there were the many times in high school that Min let him copy his math homework, but that doesn’t count because half the time Ryan was the one that asked. And then there was…
“Oh,” Ryan exclaims, like he’s surprised he managed to think of something. “Um.. well, back when I first got my driver’s license, I took Min-Gi out for a ride that night. I was just driving around town in my dad’s van, and it felt so freeing, you know? Like I could go absolutely anywhere and do anything,” He smiles a bit at the memory, the rush of energy he’d had that day.
“I had the radio up super loud, and it was dark, and I wasn’t paying that much attention to the road. And Min was like, yelling at me over the radio that I had to stop messing around and watch what I was doing. I was like, whatever, man, cus Min was always bitching at me about shit like that. I just wanted to have fun!” He chuckles nervously.
“But he kept yelling and shouting at me, he was just like, super anxious or something, and so finally I was like, fine, if you know so much about driving, then you take the wheel! And I took my hands off of the steering wheel, and…” Ryan gulps, smile fading a little. “A split second later Min leaned over and jerked the wheel in his direction, because… I was about to drive straight into a concrete pole.”
Ryan glances up at Dr. Wilson, expecting a scolding, but she is only looking back at him with a slightly concerned expression. These therapists were good at keeping their emotions at bay. She doesn’t say anything, but nods as a gesture for him to continue.
Ryan twiddles with his fingers, silent for a few seconds. There isn’t much else to the story. “It was… pretty silent the rest of the ride home. I tried to laugh it off, you know, but Min was so pissed off and scared that… it rubbed off on me, I guess. And… I was more careful when driving after that.”
After a moment of scribbling down notes on the clipboard, Dr. Wilson looks back up at him. “And what would have happened if you hadn’t let Min-Gi take control of the wheel?”
It’s an obvious answer, they both know, and just thinking about it leaves a pit in Ryan’s stomach. “I… probably would have killed us both.” He says quietly, a slight quiver in his voice. It’s strange, because at the time it happened, it hadn’t seemed that significant. It was just Ryan doing stupid Ryan things again, and that’s probably why he’d mostly forgotten about it. But now, thinking about just how serious it could have been…
“Well,” Dr. Wilson’s gentle voice pulls him out of his thoughts before they can get too nasty. “While that example is… a little more extreme than I expected, it still works. You thought you had everything under control at that moment, and didn’t realize until after your friend helped you how awful it could have turned out. So, I want you to think about how you could apply that to other situations.”
“Like..?”
“Like now, for instance.” She says pointedly. “You’ve been refusing help here whether you realize it or not. I would be amazed if you took your medication without the nurses watching you do it.”
Ryan frowns, averting his gaze. Sheesh, when did she become so harsh? He almost feels bad about it. He is avoiding their help in a way, but only because he doesn’t see why he has to be here in the first place.
“And I’m not telling you this to be mean,” Dr. Wilson adds, as if reading Ryan’s mind. “I just need you to understand that, regardless of the situation, you cannot solve every problem by yourself.”
Ryan doesn’t respond, just clutches at the cushions of the couch, brows furrowed. He’s not quite sure what he’s feeling - shame, guilt, frustration? Maybe a mix of them. Normally he hates being told how to feel or what to think, but… maybe she has a point. He just doesn’t like thinking about it, doesn’t like confronting his feelings.
Dr. Wilson turns to look at the clock, and tsks with her mouth. “We’re out of time for today, I’m afraid,” She says, looking back at Ryan. “But can you promise me to think about what we talked about today?”
“...Yeah,” Ryan manages after a long moment, his voice low, like he doesn’t even trust himself to follow through with her request. “I’ll try.”
--
Tending to bugs at an old western saloon isn’t a frivolous occupation by any means, but it pays the bills. Or, it would if Samantha had bills to pay, and if she planned to keep this job at all. She’s spent her time as a denizen of the train traveling from car to car, residing in them and doing whatever they have to offer until she gets tired of it, and moves on to the next car. Maybe she swindles a few poor souls along the way, too, who knows? It’s all part of the business.
She feels that her days as a saloon bartender are running short, though, on account of she’s getting bored. Mixing drinks is fun and all, but it’s a difficult show to run when she has no opposable thumbs and has to constantly deal with foul-smelling, drunk insects yelling in her face. So she figures in a few days, she’ll resign from this position and head elsewhere, like she has countless times before.
But perhaps this car has a few more surprises for her.
Around early afternoon, when there aren’t usually many customers, a rather peculiar sight catches Samantha’s eye. Floating into the saloon - above the door, not even pushing it open - is a certain floating cowboy hat. Interesting. She watches as it levitates towards the bar, and as it gets closer, she notices blue and purple sparkles emitting from underneath the hat. The cat recognized those sparkles anywhere.
“Well, if it isn’t one of my favorite patrons,” She teases, a crooked smile on her face. This specific patron is no doubt still wanted by the authorities here, but last she heard Judge Morpho had left the car to go after her. So while whatever the bounty this time may be is tempting, she decides to hold off for now.
The cowboy hat turns a few times, as if looking around to make sure nobody is listening. The few other customers in the saloon are sitting at the other end of the room, having a loud conversation and paying them no mind.
“Okay, look, I know you like, just helped me out and all that, and I still owe you a favor or whatever but like.. I need your help again.” The hat says, a slight nervousness in her voice that is not all that characteristic of her.
“Hm.. and what’s in it for me this time?” Samantha asks, putting a paw to her cheek and tilting her head to the side. As much as she loved to help another denizen out, she never did so without a price.
“I’ll do whatever stupid thing you want me to, okay? I’ll buy you dinner, you can name your first child after me for all I care, I just, I’m being serious!” The desperation in the hat’s voice doesn’t miss Samantha. She’s intrigued, to say the least. What could possibly have this poor little denizen so frazzled?
“Alright, Kez,” Samantha leans forward with a purr, a classic smug smile on her face, and voice low to prevent anyone else from hearing. “I’m listening.”