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Malcolm has been here for two days. He will be here for another five. Might as well make it interesting, and talk to that tall dude. Sam. He seemed interesting.
His room is right… over here...
Malcolm looks into the room, and sees Sam pointedly turning away from… well, to Malcolm, nothing, but to Sam something terrible. He covers his ears and curls his body into a tight ball, like a roly-poly.
Malcolm knocks on the open door, softly, and Sam looks up. His eyes are shadowed and panicked, but his body relaxes slightly at the sight of Malcolm. He lifts a hand in a tentative wave, and Malcolm waves back.
“Mind if I come in?”
Sam opens his mouth, flinches away from something, shakes himself, and opens his mouth again. He is yelling. “Could you say that again, please?! I can’t - I can’t hear you!”
Malcolm winces inwardly before saying, loudly this time, “Mind if I come in?”
Sam looks surprised, but nods. He scoots over on his bed, making room for Malcolm to sit, which he does.
After a moment, Sam seems to calm some, and when he talks again it is quiet. “So, what are you here for?”
Malcolm smiles widely and responds with, “Hallucinations got bad, I took my car and drove it into a forest, where I had a rather… inconvenient hallucination and, well, long story short, ended up slicing myself up pretty good on the car windows.”
Sam nods, which is a pretty small reaction, but then again they’re not exactly in normal society right now. “Yeah, I get that. It’s - well, my one hallucination, he won’t let me sleep. Ran out in front of a car. My brother’s not… too happy about me being here. He thinks he can find a way to fix it.” Sam shudders, closes his eyes. “I just wish he were here. I’m gonna die, I know that. This can’t be fixed.”
Malcolm furrows his brow. “Anything can be fixed.”
Sam gives him a crooked smile. “I’ve been injected with as many sedatives as they can give me without killing me, and they’ve given me just about every single drug that’s even legal and won’t immediately kill me if mixed, plus a few drugs I took that weren’t legal.” He shrugs. “It’s okay. I thought I was gonna die years ago - here, see this scar?” He shuffles around and lifts up the back of shirt to expose - well, a lot of scars. The one he’s talking about is clear, though, because it’s massive. Must have severed his spinal column, and should have killed him immediately.
“How did you survive that?” Malcolm says, his curiosity growing stronger every moment.
Sam looks away, uncomfortable. He flinches - his hallucinations, almost certainly. “Nothing good.” Well, that is an ominous answer. “Point is, I thought I was gonna die five - four, however many years ago. And that was alright, you know? I didn’t want to leave Dean, but it was okay. I wish I would have died, then, because it’s all been downhill from there.” He huffs a weak laugh. “Sorry to dump all that on you.”
Malcolm lets himself grin; it’s a smile that his mother calls unnerving and JT calls creepy, but Sam doesn’t seem to mind at all. “Well, I do have a degree in psychology. And the human mind is fascinating. Feel free to tell me your problems anytime.”
Sam snorts. “Oh, trust me, I’ve got problems you’ve never seen before and never will again, if you’re lucky.”
Interesting… but untrue. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
“Well, you said you just have one hallucination. Tell me about him,” Malcolm says, leaning forward with his hand resting on his chin.
Sam rubs his palm, some kind of stress fidget, most likely. He glances to an empty (empty for Malcolm) chair. “Right now, he’s just… crashing cymbals together. Not the worst, y’know?”
Malcolm nods and gestures for Sam to continue.
“But, God, it gets so bad. All night - airhorns, or just him screaming. During the day, he likes to pretend to be other people, and I can’t - I just can’t tell the difference. Until he stabs me, or rips out his own teeth, or something.” Sam shrugs.
“A few of mine like to stab me, too. Would you look at that? We’re practically normal!”
Sam laughs, small and bitter. “Yeah, yeah. For sure.”
“Anyways, keep going? If you’d like to.”
Sam shakes his head as if to dislodge a thought, or something else. “Yeah. Yeah. Um, he’s - this, this whole thing, it’s pretty new. Like, a couple months, I think? Something… bad… happened, and I got away, but I didn’t remember. And everyone told me it was better off like that, and it was. So I left it alone. I didn’t want to remember. Then… I - there was… this thing, with a friend of mine? And he - it brought it all back. And then he died - not, not my hallucination, my friend. And then he was there. And I remembered everything.” Sam’s voice is a whisper now, and he is hunched down even farther. He’s rubbing his palm too hard now, it’s going to start to hurt him.
“Can I touch you, Sam?”
Sam looks startled at the question but nods. Malcolm gently pulls his hand away from where it’s pressing down on a thick scar, and then releases it. “You’re going to hurt yourself. They have stuff for you to squeeze here, you know.”
Sam stares down at his hands. “It’s - um. The pain. It makes him go away. Or, it did. Not anymore.” He shudders. “I talked to him. Let him in. Now he…” Sam taps his temple. “Won’t leave. No matter what.”
The implication there leaves Malcolm feeling vaguely sick, but so do most things.
“Have you talked to anyone?” Malcolm quickly adds, “Besides me. Like, an actual mental health professional.”
Sam’s eyebrows draw together. “What, are you not a mental health professional?”
Malcolm laughs. “No. No. Even if I were, I’m a patient here, not a doctor, remember? No, I’m a profiler.”
Sam’s face brightens, as much as it can. “Oh, neat!”
Malcolm raises one eyebrow. “Not most people’s reaction.” Sam looks sheepish, and Malcolm gestures with his hands spread out. “I’m not complaining. Nice to get some variety in there.”
“Do you profile… what, serial killers?”
“Yes, why?”
The taller man twists his fingers together. “I’m a bit of a, uh… serial killer nerd.”
Not the weirdest hobby I’ve seen, but definitely up there. If you don’t count the actual murderers, that is. “Yeah?”
Sam grins, still looking down. He nods his head.
Suddenly, his head snaps up. His eyes are wide and his whole body broadcasts exhausted alertness. “Can you profile me?”
Malcolm winces as he remembers how that went the last time. “It’s not a party trick.”
Sam nods frantically. “I know. I know. I just - umm…” His eyes flick to the side. “Please?”
There’s something in his voice, desperate and broken, that makes Malcolm agree. “Fine. But - but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Sam nods and shuffles to face Malcolm.
“Okay, so, first thing I’m getting - you have very low self-esteem. You have for a long time. You don’t care if you die, except that you don’t want to hurt your brother. Maybe you even want to die.” Sam’s wince at that tells Malcolm he’s right. “You’re a little relieved that there’s nothing your brother can do to help you here. Well, I don’t believe that - but you do. You’ve had a hard life, and you’re ready for it to be over.” Sam looks down. “You’ve seen too much - too much violence, too much death. You didn’t react much when you said your friend died, but you were clearly sad. It’s happened so many times, hasn’t it, Sam? Someone you love died. And then again. And again. And at some point, you started wondering, when is it my turn?” Malcolm can feel himself focusing, his hand steadying. “You say something bad happened to you, to cause your deteriorating mental state, but it wasn’t just that. No, you’ve had so many, many bad things happen to you. That, though - that was the worst. Wasn’t it? Something worse than you’ve ever had happen before. Someone hurt you. Your brother rescued you - or he tried to. He didn’t do a very good job of it, just encouraging you to forget instead of getting you the help you needed, and still need. You’re dependent on him. He - he raised you, didn’t he? Your parents - well, one parent, wasn’t it - didn’t take care of you. So your brother did. Thing is, no one took care of him, so he didn’t know how.” Malcolm takes a breath. Sam is curling in on himself, even farther. “You almost died in his arms. And every day you wish you had. The last thing you would’ve seen was his face, and you would’ve had peace. But each day you wake up and keep going. Why? What is so important, Sam?” Sam licks his lips. Malcolm thinks of the scars. “Oh. You want to help people. You think you have to make up for something you’ve done. You think you deserve it. Not only do you want to die, you deserve it. You deserve what happened to you, and you deserve to hurt. So as much as you want to die… you want to hurt first.”
Sam’s breathing is ragged, and Malcolm snaps back to the present. His hand starts to shake. “Fuck - I’m sorry, I-”
Sam doesn’t respond.
“I’ll - I’ll just leave.”
Malcolm leaves.
He doesn’t see Sam again.
-*-
“So, Sam, meet anyone interesting? Anyone crazier than you?”
“Nah. Did meet one interesting guy, though.”
“Yeah? Interesting how? Like, crazy-interesting?”
“No. He was - he was pretty nice. Kind of helped me out. Helped me realize some things.”
“Ohh, what kinds of things? Like that you’re sooo gay?”
“Whatever, as if you’re not gay.”
“Bitch!”
“Jerk.”