Chapter Text
When Harry first saw Special Agent Dale Cooper, he was sitting on the floor, he eyes searching intently throughout the room, brow furrowed in thought. In his hands, he held a shattered shard of glass from the mirror, his thumb occasionally stroking over the sharp edge, leaving a bloody trail in its wake. His finger continued its varied repetition as Harry looked on and as Cooper continued to scan the room, until a drop of blood fell from his finger onto the floor. Cooper didn’t even seem to notice. Harry felt a chill run down his spine.
“Cooper!”
As if he had just been drawn from a trance, Cooper started, his eyes taking a long moment to move from the base of the sink to Harry’s face. From behind him, Harry heard Doc Hayward let out a sharp sound of surprise at Cooper’s bleeding forehead. Harry had never seen anything like it before. The agent appeared to be confused-- no. He appeared to be lost, as if he did not recognize his surroundings, nor anything else around him at all. There was a far away look to his eyes, a blankness that Harry found unnerving in the face of a man usually so focused, so in control of himself. And then, there was the blood that was slowly beginning to run down his forehead and the chunks of glass scattered around in his hair, sitting there like a dark crown.
Harry was scared.
“Are you okay?” he asked, although he knew that answer couldn’t possibly be ‘yes,’ because the Cooper he saw sitting in front of him seemed only a shell of the man he had once knew.
Cooper said nothing, but simply stared, his brow creased. His thumb continued moving up and down the razor-sharp edge of the glass. More blood dripped to the floor.
“Agent Cooper, what just happened?” Doc Hayward asked from behind Harry, the concern evident in his voice. “Did you fall?”
“Fall,” Cooper echoed, his voice dead and stiff sounding. Harry could not tell if he was simply repeating the words or affirming them. Then, with a shake of his head, he clarified, “Yes. I fell.”
His gaze switched from Harry’s to meet Doc Hayward’s eyes, blinking rapidly as he did so. His lips parted uncertainly, and Harry wondered for a moment if he meant to ask something. But no words came. Only Cooper’s heavy breathing.
“Cooper, you’re bleeding,” the Doctor said after a moment, and Harry thought briefly that he was glad to have a man with such a skilled profession in medical school to point of these things to them. He shook off the thought as quickly as it came-- there was no humor in it or the situation itself.
Cooper’s frown increased as he looked, for the first time, at the damage he had been doing to his finger against the side of the fragment of glass. He let out a soft exclamation of ‘Oh,’ and dropped the shard to the floor, where it shattered into a million more pieces.
“Your head too, Coop,” Harry told him, wondering if Cooper even knew the full extent of injury he had suffered. Judging by the look on his face, Harry guessed not. The other man’s fingers brushed lightly against his forehead, only to be drawn quickly away when they felt the wetness. He stared at his hand as if he had never seen blood before.
“I fell,” Coop repeated, his voice still slow and uncertain. “I must have fallen. But I…”
He looked from the Doctor to Harry as he began to rub the blood around all over his hand. It was then Harry noticed that his hands were shaking horribly. Not only that, but his breathing was coming in short, shaking gasps.
“But you… What?” Harry prompted him, realizing the agent was likely not going to speak again on his own accord. Something was visible off about him, but Harry was not sure exactly why. It must be that place that he had gone into, the strange, horrible place-- the curtains in the woods. That must have been the reason for it.
Cooper’s hands ceased their movement, both of them being nearly completely red with his smeared blood. Cooper replied to his hands, “But I…. I don’t remember.”
Oh no. From behind him, Doc Hayward said in a voice fraught with shock, “You don’t remember?”
“No.” Cooper shook his head, and the vaguely lost look that had been etched into his every move since Harry had entered the bathroom was suddenly replaced with an intense desperation and fear that Harry had never once seen on the FBI agent’s face. Something was horribly, horribly wrong.
“I don’t remember anything. Harry,” Cooper switched his attention solely to Harry, as if imploring him to understand. “I don’t remember how I got here. I don’t remember what happened. Not to my head, not anything. I don’t even remember where I was before this…”
He broke off with a sudden gasp as if the full understanding of what he had just said had only just hit him. He pressed his bloodied hands against either side of his head, and began massaging his temples as his breathing began to come and go faster and faster. And although he blinked it away almost immediately, Harry felt sure that he saw a wetness in his eyes.
“Agent Cooper.” The Doctor moved from behind Harry to beside Cooper, where he knelt with one hand on the agent’s back and another working to slowly remove his hand from his face. “Can you tell us the last thing you remember?”
One hand fell from Cooper’s head and the Doctor began to work slowly on the removal of the other. “I…” He took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. “I… I was... “ His voice broke and he began to shake his head violently from side to side. “No. No. No. No. No.”
“Agent Cooper!”
Cooper’s hands began to shake again, more rapidly, his breathing came once more in desperate gasps. His fingers, desperate for something-- anything-- to hold on to, began to claw his pajama shirt from his body, leaving smears of blood wherever they touched.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, it all stopped. His fingers ceased their motion, the distress left his eyes only to be replaced by a cold blankness, and his breathing slowed so rapidly that for a moment, Harry was afraid that he might have stopped altogether. It was as if something had possessed him, had drained all of what Harry and Doc Hayward had just seen from his body. Fear began to snake through Harry again, and he crouched to the floor to join the Doctor.
“Coop...?”
Then, Cooper began to laugh. But it was not like any sort of laughter that Harry had ever heard come from him before, save from a few moments earlier behind the closed door of the bathroom just after they had heard the crash. Cooper was not the sort of man who laughed often, but when he did, it was a warm, full sound. This-- this was cold somehow, chilling, all the warmth stripped from it. It was unnatural, and Harry suddenly thought that he ought to be as far away from this man as possible.
Cooper began to tip his head side to side as he stared at something invisible beyond what Harry could see. It reminded Harry of the way a snake moved as it was being charmed-- the slow, rhythmic pattern that seemed almost like a dance to strange music no one else could hear. Harry was about to do something as Cooper threw his head back, his laugh morphing into some kind of howl, but as he was deciding whether he should strike him, cuff him, or simply grab his hand, the agent quieted.
“Cooper...?” Harry asked again, a pit forming in his stomach. Who was this man sitting in front of him, wearing the skin of his best friend?
The gasping rushed back, as did the desperate, shaking hands, and once more, Cooper was trying to claw the shirt from off his back.. “I don’t know what I last remember,” he said, his voice surprisingly even despite the rest of his body’s language. “I don’t know.”
It was as if he had not laughed at all. He simply continued as if it had never happened. There was no space between his words, no explanation. He turned back to Doc Hayward, and Harry jerked his shirt back onto his back. “Help me, Doc,” he heard Cooper say, and suddenly, Harry felt very afraid. There could have been a million logical explanations for what was going on, but somehow Harry knew none of those were right and that what was happening here was something worse-- far worse-- than anything Harry could imagine.
“I’m trying here, Agent Cooper,” the Doctor said, shaking Harry from his thoughts. “But I need you to help me too, so we can see what the trouble is. What’s the last thing you remember? It’s okay if it’s unclear, but I need you to think.”
“Okay.” Cooper’s back shuddered as he breathed. “Okay, Doc.” Time passed in silence for a moment as Harry and the Doctor waited for something from Cooper. Then, “The... the-- the trees. The trees.” He turned. “Douglas firs, Harry. I was in the woods.”
“What were you doing in the woods, Agent Cooper?” Doc Hayward asked carefully. “Can you remember?”
The agent cringed, turning back to the Doctor. “No. I-- Yes. Yes, I was walking… It was dark… And I was walking but I didn’t have a flashlight. And… and… Harry!” He turned again. “Harry, you were there… And you were telling me something… Something important…” He searched Harry’s face but the Sheriff only nodded.
“That’s right, Cooper; I was.”
“Yes… But I don’t… I can’t remember anything else.” Cooper continued to stare at Harry, brow creased in thought.
“Harry,” Hayward peered around the agent to see Harry. “Does this sound at all familiar to you? Do you know what he’s talking about?”
“Yes, I do, Doc,” Harry replied, not breaking Cooper’s stare. “It was two days ago, right before he disappeared.”
“Everything is so jumbled,” Cooper said, shaking his head again, turning back towards the other man. “Nothing makes sense.”
“It’s okay, Agent Cooper. We’ll make sense of it all in time,” the Doctor said with a smile that seemed more uneasy than confident. He glanced back to Harry before speaking again. “I think you might have a concussion. We should get you to the hospital. You’ll be in good hands there, Agent Cooper. The staff loves you.”
“Do they?” Cooper eyes brightened for a short moment. “And the concussion is from the fall, I’m guessing?”
“I think so, yes,” the Doctor supplied, and Harry’s eyes strayed to the shattered mirror above their heads. “Do you feel sick at all? Like you might vomit? Or pass out?”
Cooper shook his head. “No. I… How did I fall, Doc?”
Harry answered the question before the Doctor could respond. “Well, Coop, you wanted to brush your teeth, so you came in here while we waited outside. Then, all of a sudden, we heard this crash-- like glass breaking-- and we heard you laughing. When we came in here, you were on the floor, and that’s all there is to it.”
“You heard me laughing? Why was I laughing?”
Harry sighed and dropped a hand on the agent’s shoulder. “You tell me, Coop.”
Cooper said nothing in reply, only continued to stare into the space in front of him, his brow furrowed as he tried to answer a question that his mind had no memory to explain.
Harry decided it would be better not to mention the other episode of laughter, and given the Doctor’s lack of speaking, he must have decided the same thing. Something was seriously wrong with the FBI agent, and regardless of whether the reason for it was just a concussion or something far worse, Harry had no desire to concern Cooper anymore than he already was.
“We can use my car,” Harry said, standing and offering a hand to Cooper to do the same. “Now, let’s get you to the hospital.”