Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jun 15th, 2020 (updated Nov 1st, 2020)

From Doctor Charlotte Ritchie's notes

Here I have written some simple biographical information about Button House's current residents, including their names and ages, as well as anything we know about the identities they have taken on and anything we can gather about their roots and/or backgrounds. 

These notes were recently updated in November of 2020, so everything should be accurate unless any more information of our patients or their alter egos comes to light. 

I will be referring to the patients mostly with their preferred names to avoid confusion. 

***

Jim Howick/Pat

Full Name: James "Jim" Howick

Age and D.O.B: 41 (14.05.79) 

Name of Believed Identity: Patrick "Pat" Butcher 

Root of Trauma: archery accident 

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2015

Other Info:

After being accidentally struck in the neck by an arrow in 2015 and miraculously surving, Jim woke up in hospital believing he is the ghost of a scout leader named Pat Butcher who died in an archery accident in the early 1980s. 

He uses the scarring on his own neck as proof for Pat's fatal wound, and much like our other residents, Dr Smith-Bynoe and I can find no evidence of a Patrick Butcher ever existing. Jim has been with us since a few weeks after the accident, and although not lining up with his manner prior to it, his behaviour has been excellent. Possibly the best of anyone we've ever had. 

"Pat" is very friendly and enjoys explaining things to the other residents that they are rendered to not understand, and during his sessions in my office he prefers talking about the others over himself.

If it wasn't our priority to find him a cure, we would have allowed him to go home long ago.

***

Ben Willbond/The Captain

Full Name: Benjamin Thomas "Ben" Willbond

Age and D.O.B: 47 (18.01.73) 

Name of Believed Identity: the Captain

Root of Trauma: undeterminate

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2009

Other Info:

It is entirely possible that Ben's false identity is simply a version of himself that he hoped he would be. 

As an ex-soldier himself, Ben believes he is a man only going by the Captain, a WWII war captain whose cause of death he refuses to share. 

Both Ben and the Captain suffer from PTSD, and in the past we have witnessed him having up to ten vivid flashbacks every day. Though, through therapy, he can now handle himself better, we believe this to be the cause of his total of eighteen escape attempts. Because of this, we have chosen not to threaten any form of violence when he is caught, which we were forced to do during one of Larry/Robin's current five attempts. 

We do not know when Ben's ghost syndrome began affecting him, nor do we know of the near death experience that caused it. He refuses to talk about it, and even his family is clueless about what happened. He went missing for a month not long after retiring from service, and when he returned home he was suddenly in the mind of a different man entirely. We have no concrete evidence for or against our theory, but we suspect that during his disappearance he may have severely injured or possibly killed someone. 

Although Ben himself is not, the Captain is gay, and upon Ben's arrival he appeared to be showing romantic feelings for Dr Smith-Bynoe, who him and all the other Button House residents believe is a man called Mike Cooper for no apparent reason. They also believe I, Dr Ritchie, am his wife Alison Cooper. 

I'm not entirely sure who started this mass delusion but our evidence points to it being Julian.

***

Simon Farnaby/Julian

Full Name: Simon Farnaby 

Age and D.O.B: 47 (02.04.73) 

Name of Believed Identity: Julian Fawcett

Root of Trauma: physical and sexual abuse 

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2006

Other Info:

Simon will not talk about his childhood whenever we approach the subject in our sessions, which is understandable. All we know is that he ran away from home - and his abusers (three people from his school who are now imprisoned but will remain unnamed) - when he was sixteen, and he could have "become" Julian when he was as young as thirteen. He was found homeless in 2006, and soon brought to us, meaning he has been here the longest out of all our current residents. 

Julian, his fictional Conservative MP identity, is loud, outgoing and surprisingly sexual. Not towards any of the residents nor us doctors, but just in the things he likes to talk about. He prefers not to wear trousers, but because we didn't want him wandering around in his underwear we made a compromise; now, he permenantly wears his bed shorts. 

Dr Smith-Bynoe and I have chosen to try our best to separate him from Kitty, one of our more childlike residents.

***

Mat Baynton/Thomas

Full Name: Mathew John "Mat" Baynton

Age and D.O.B: 39 (18.11.80) 

Name of Believed Identity: Thomas Thorne 

Root of Trauma: shot in the abdomen

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2019

Other Info:

From what Mat has explained to us, Thomas Thorne is the ghost of an 1820s romantic poet who was shot and killed during a duel in the gardens of this very facility. Though this phase has passed, upon arrival Mat would do nothing but recite the poems of this imaginary man (which we believe are Mat's original work) as a substitute for making actual conversation, as he found immense comfort in them.

Mat himself was shot in the same place "Thomas" was during a home invasion in late 2019, making him our newest resident from his arrival eleven months ago.

Mat has a wife and two children, who visit him every other Saturday. These visits upset him. He seems to want to recall his relationship with Kelly Robinson, but doesn't know one thing about her that he hasn't previously been told. 

He gets along with his children well, but every time we ask him about Bo and Ida he talks about them as if they aren't his own.

***

Martha Howe-Douglas/Fanny

Full Name: Martha Howe-Douglas

Age and D.O.B: 40 (19.09.80) 

Name of Believed Identity: Lady Fanny Button

Root of Trauma: pushed out of a window

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2016 

Other Info:

Martha was pushed from the window on the third floor of a five-story building by an ex-boyfriend, who was imprisoned for attempted murder shortly afterwards. She has created this method of death for her newly adopted identity: Lady Button. 

She believes our facility was once the home of the lady's well-respected family in the Edwardian era, and after finding her husband in bed with two other men, Fanny's husband had pushed her from the window to keep his secret.

She is among our more ill-tempered residents, obsessed with giving lectures about manners and how people should act according to her old-fashioned views. 

Much like the Captain, she once took a fancy to my fellow doctor, but that seems to have recently passed.

***

Lolly Adefope/Kitty

Full Name: Ololade "Lolly" Adefope 

Age and D.O.B: 30 (14.09.90) 

Name of Believed Identity: Katherine "Kitty" 

Root of Trauma: unknown (presumably from birth)

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2014 

Other Info:

Other than insisting that her name was actually Kitty, causing her parents to adopt it as her nickname, Lolly's childhood was fairly normal. As she grew up into adolescence physically, her mental age seemed to change much slower. Her parents, concerned, had her tested for multiple developmental or learning disabilities, but all of the results came back negative. 

It was when she started secondary school and learned more about history that she seemed to identify with the Georgian era. 

She stated multiple times that she was a Georgian noblewoman named Kitty. Not knowing what to think, her parents chose not to feed into this delusion and told her multiple times, as calmly and reasonably as possible, that that wasn't who she was.

When Lolly was seventeen and her mental state still hadn't changed from the age of nine or so, her parents made the difficult decision to send her to her first psychiatric hospital of many. Passed from facility to facility, she finally ended up with Button House in early 2014, where she has stayed since. 

Kitty, although knowing how old she is, appears not to be aware that she is childish, and is also annoyed with the fact that she can rarely talk properly with Julian for a reason we won't explain to her.

***

Katy Wix/Mary

Full Name: Katy Wix 

Age and D.O.B: 40 (28.02.80) 

Name of Believed Identity: Mary 

Root of Trauma: fire 

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2011 

Other Info:

Mary, whose surname Katy doesn't seem to know, was a witch trial victim back in the early 1600s. 

Katy's "Mary voice" is very different from the one she used to have, even using a different accent when she talks to the one she was born with. 

Mary apparently refuses to speak of her witch trials, and gets upset at the mention of fire, which we quickly added to our list of trigger words for the residents with trauma (currently, anything relating to fire, guns and/or the very specific "pushing people out of windows" is forbidden). 

Every morning, Katy puts a thin layer of black chalk on some patches of her face to resemble the ashes she thinks Mary has on hers. We also have to bribe her to bathe and wash her hair, because unless her hair is a mess she becomes very distressed, telling us that she "doesn't look right." 

Although we have no evidence to prove that this supposed "witch" didn't exist, the similarity between her delusions and that of the others suggest that this identity has also come from Katy's own imagination.

She has also confessed to having feelings for Larry, but, interestingly, only when he is Robin.

***

Larry Rickard/Robin, Humphrey or Nigel

Full Name: Laurence Carl "Larry" Rickard

Age and D.O.B: 45 (14.06.75) 

Name of Believed Identity: Robin/Humphrey/Nigel

Root of Trauma: bear attack 

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2014 

Other Info:

Larry is our only resident believing he is more than one ghost. This is due to his Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which was developed about five years before the time of his bear attack. It was an unfortunate accident that took place during a visit to the zoo in his late teens. This attack has left permenant scarring on his right arm and right side of his face, but seems to have damaged his brain far more than his body. 

His first alter, the one he appears the most as and seems to be his host, is Robin, a caveman who was struck by lightning while hiding from a bear. As Robin, Larry can't communicate far beyond the level a real Stone Age man would, and appears to have astronomy and chess as his main interests.

His second alter is Sir Humphrey Bone, a Tudor man who was beheaded. When in the mind of Humphrey, Larry can either move nothing from the neck down or everything other than his head. This represents Humphrey's detached head and body. When he switches to Humphrey's body, his eyes remain closed. He pretends he cannot see or hear anything, and also refuses to speak until he switches again. When he is the head, he appears to be paralysed from the neck down, and we have to help him eat and move around. Though his switching to the head is rare, he has to use a wheelchair during those times. 

His third and final known alter is Nigel, a ghost who died of the Black Death. We don't know much about Nigel, other than the fact that he is both very self-confident and easily confused.

Chapter Text

They're coming for him. 

He's running through the woods as fast as his legs will take him, his dirty trainers slapping on the surface of the mud with each speeding, slippery step.

This is his nineteenth escape attempt, but this time he feels in his heart that he'll make it out. It's a quick-paced and sinking sort of feeling, like the one of the blood pumping through his veins. But he knows this flicker of hope when he feels it. He's felt it before, but not like this. He'll get out once and for all. 

The alarm rings from a distance, its tone shrill and panicked like the one of the doctor who set it off. The noise helps his motivation to press onwards, despite the cold air whipping at his hair and making his jacket fly behind him like a cloak. 

The wind makes his T-shirt press close to his chest, the metal on the back of his three medals digging into his skin. In all their glory and noble memory, they look a bit silly simply attached to a regular grey T-shirt, but he doesn't know what he'd do without them. 

They're all the evidence he has of who he is, all the evidence he has that he isn't insane like he hears them say he is. 

This is why he's getting out, why he wants to find a better life where people actually understand and respect him for who he is. 

He's sick of the looming thought of staying in Button House for the rest of his existence, a place that often uses the wrong name for him and tries to convince him he's ill, that something is wrong with his brain. 

He isn't crazy, he's just pissed off. 

He isn't crazy, he's just dead. 

At first, he didn't think it possible for him to escape. He thought ghosts were forever attached to the place in which they died, and although he couldn't remember exactly how the event of his death had played out, he knew that it probably wasn't at Button House. And that was it for him. That was the loophole. 

If he had died somewhere else, that meant he could go wherever he pleased, even though he doubted there would be people who could see him anywhere else.

He doesn't quite know how it is that the doctors and facility guards can see him, all he knows is that he wishes they couldn't. It would make his escape so much easier. 

As his mind clears up from his reminiscing and nostalgia from his previous escapes and the life/death he was (hopefully) about to leave behind, he stops in his tracks for a moment and gasps with excitement, his face lighting up like the one of a child on Christmas morning. 

There they were. 

The bright lights of the highway, floating gently into his line of vision like the ones of Heaven that he couldn't quite reach. 

That's how he got trapped as a ghost in the first place, he thought. He nearly made it, but he wasn't close enough. And deemed not bad enough to end up in the fiery pits of Hell, either, it was decided that he would be stuck back on Earth, this time as a ghost. 

However, in his opinion, this is a worse situation than any Hell he can think of. 

He stops standing still and starts running again, a bit slowly at first but then picking up speed, just as he had done when he first took off from the kitchen about ten minutes prior. 

A few steps into his second wave of sprinting, he stops fast again, his face falling. The beads of sweat on his forehead become illuminated by the lights as they draw closer. 

The lights... they weren't from the highway. They're not his first glimpse at an escape, his first look at a life ahead of the loony bin. 

They're torches. 

Five men and women stand watching him, all in warm coats, a couple of them with torches in their hands pointing right at him. 

Feeling exactly like a deer caught in the headlights, he turns around to try running back the other way. There's nobody behind him, but his feet stay planted firmly where they are after he turns his head back round to face the guards. If he ran back that way, he'd have no choice but to go back into the hospital. 

This is his only escape route.

And for the nineteenth time his plan has been foiled by that blasted alarm. 

"Captain!" the security guard in charge yells in her booming voice. "Don't try and run this time! If you make it easy for us, we'll make it easy for you." 

It feels weird saying that sentence to a man they know is called Ben Willbond, but they're obligated to do so. Every single ghost syndrome victim ever recorded refuses to respond to the name they're given at birth. The guards have been warned by Button House's two leading doctors that if even one of them utters the name "Ben" under their breath, then he'd run away faster and never return.

Not only had their claims implied that this man was convinced he was a 1940s war captain and would do anything to scream that fact to the world, they had also been insinuating that these guards didn't know how to do their jobs right. Even without the guns, which had recently been removed in the fear of a PTSD episode and a result of further chaos during one of the Captain's many escapes, doctors Ritchie and Smith-Bynoe still felt that the tones of their employees were too rough. 

They wanted anyone who felt uncomfortable enough to make a run for it to feel safe, so they could figure out their problem and fix it. But no. 

Mary had only attempted to escape once, and when she had, she felt so terrified of the guards that it took her some convincing to even go out into the garden for weeks. 

These people don't scare the Captain, they don't intimidate him. They're only another small part of the burden that is his trapped existence in the hospital. 

"Captain," a different, firmer voice says. 

This voice belongs to Dr Kiell Smith-Bynoe. Mike Cooper. He walks out of the shadows in the same way a villain would in an old movie. Really, the doctor is just trying to help, but not once had the Captain ever thought that. 

"Captain," he repeats. "Put down the knife." 

The knife? the Captain thought. 

He looks down at his hand.

Oh.

That knife. 

He forgot he was holding it. 

It's a large kitchen knife he swiped from the counter just before starting his route through the Button House halls. As he looks down at it, he keeps it gripped tightly in his hand like he thinks it's going to jump out of his grasp and hop away. 

No, he thinks. No, I won't put down the knife. 

He doesn't know what he's going to do with it instead of handing it over. He's not sure if he has the guts to even wave it near anybody's face, and he's not in the mood to use it as a threat. He just keeps it clasped in his hand, running his index finger over the rough surface of the handle over and over again like it's a stress toy. Only in reverse. Every time his skin collided with the ice-cold steel, his heart feels a little more like stone. 

His mouth goes from slightly opened in shock, to shut tightly, his jaw clenched behind his lips. 

The Captain and everybody watching his every move stay in complete silence for a few minutes as he glares up at them at all. His once-blue eyes are now greyish and lifeless, dark purple resting under them from stress, anger and a lack of sleep. They've been stuck this way since his mysterious return home eight years ago, and their state doesn't seem like it's going to ease any time soon. 

"Come on, Cap," Dr Smith-Bynoe says gently. "Pass it to me. It's dark and cold outside. You don't want to stay standing out here, do you?" 

He's right. He doesn't want to stay out in the cold at all. 

The wind has cooled down to a breeze, but the cold from that is somehow piercing him deeper than that of the former. His skin feels so freezing cold that it's doing a 180 and turning warm again, but his pale hands still shake lightly. 

Even now, he's surprised he can feel the cold. 

It's hurting him. 

If there's no way out this time, he decides he might as well take his chance to wrap up warm and rest until he can come up with a better escape plan. 

The Captain nods stiffly. 

"Alright," he says in an authoritative tone. He turns the knife in his hands a few times before the next words come from his mouth. "You win. You can have it." 

Slowly, he walks towards the six people watching him, studying his every movement as if it's an equation, the answer being whether or not he's going to snap and hurt somebody. 

Their calculations are incorrect. 

He stands just a few metres from the doctor, and lifts up his arm with the weapon in what looks like surrender.

And as soon as everbody's false sense of security is over, he plunges the knife into the closest guard's arm.

Chapter Text

"Where's the Captain?" asks Kitty. "I haven't seen him yesterday." 

"He's in isolation," Dr Charlotte Ritchie tells her, flipping over the paper on her clipboard absent-mindedly. "He'll be staying there for a few days." 

"Why?"

She looks up at her and thinks for a moment. "He's done something bad," she tells her vaguely, deciding not to explain further. The two had skimmed over the subject of violence before and it didn't really go that well.

Kitty frowns. "He tried to escape again, didn't he?" 

She nods. "We'll try and make sure it doesn't happen again." 

"He never learns, does he?" she asks with a smile. 

The doctor smiles back, and looks back down at the paper. She pulls a pen from the pocket of her coat and clicks it. "How are you today, Kitty?" 

"I'm well."

"That's good. You've been sleeping okay this week?"

"Yes."

"Any headaches? Maybe any memories or changes in interests?" 

"You need to stop asking that, Alison," Kitty sighs, her annoyance sarcastic. "Nothing's changed, I'm okay. It's still me." 

"Hm."

That's exactly what I'm worried about. 

"What about this 'Alison and Mike' business, then? I've said many times I'm Dr Ritchie. My name's Charlotte, not Alison." 

"I know you've said," she replies matter-of-factly. "But I think you're lying." 

"Why would I lie to you, Kitty? I'm your friend."

"I know."

The two share a silence, during which Dr Ritchie takes Lolly's file from a drawer under her desk. She flips a few pages and jots something down that Kitty can't see from the chair opposite her desk, even when she cranes her neck a little. For a moment, the only noises filling the room are the scratching of the pen and the ticking of a clock ahead of the door leading out into the corridors behind them. 

It's 2:15pm.

The weekly sessions have been arranged to run from Monday to Thursday, with a group session taking place every Saturday. There are two patients in the individual sessions per day, one with each doctor, and they have been paired up for their day based on how easy the sessions will probably go. 

Every Monday, Kitty has a twenty-minute session with Dr Ritchie starting at 2:00, and Dr Smith-Bynoe has one with Pat at the same time. On Tuesdays, Dr Ritchie talks with Fanny and Dr Smith-Bynoe with Thomas. On Wednesdays, it's Julian and Mary, and on Thursdays it's the Captain and either Robin, Humphrey or Nigel. 

Thursdays are usually the doctors' busiest afternoons. 

The Captain won't be attending a session today, and will instead be visited separately in the isolation room by the woman running the hospital, Heather Button. 

"Is there anything you want to talk through with me?" Dr Ritchie asks finally. She turns to a different page and lifts up her pen once more. "Any worries?" 

"No," Kitty replies, shaking her head. 

She smiles. "Alright then, if there's nothing I'll let you go. You can always come back to my office later if there's anything you want to tell me." 

"Um, there is one thing, actually," she says as she stands up. "I was going to go for a walk in the garden but I don't want to go alone." 

"Was it to talk about something? Because we could just do it in here."

"No, I just want to go in the garden with someone." 

"I'm a bit busy, I'm afraid. Can't you ask one of the others? What about Pat? He's always happy to help." 

"I want to go with you." 

Dr Ritchie exhales lightly through her nose in place of an obvious sigh. She's actually overwhelmed with paperwork for the incident with the Captain the previous night, that she was planning to go back to as soon as Kitty left the room. 

She hadn't wanted to punish him severely, as she suspected he had simply panicked and acted upon fear. From what her fellow doctor had explained to her, he didn't even seem aware that he had been holding the knife at first. 

And as insistent as the Captain is on not admitting it, he actually likes it at Button House, if not only a little bit. He prefers it to his home, and he prefers it to the medical hospital the facility had picked him up from. Sending him away would break his heart, and probably further damage his condition.

Though he'd hate it, what he really wants is to go home, but of course that isn't an option. Until he goes back to being Ben Willbond again, his family don't want the man he claims he now is.  

Long story short, a week in isolation and some commissioned cleaning work around the place should be punishment enough. 

"Alright," Dr Ritchie decides, standing up. 

She walks with Kitty out the door, and the two of them wander through the halls to round up the others. Kitty wouldn't mind if the others came, as long as the doctor was there. She'd never say it to Dr Smith-Bynoe's face, but the one she calls Alison is her favourite. She thinks they have a lot in common, making them great friends.

The only thing she's yet to understand is why her best friend would lie to her about something so simple as her name. 

They walk on through the halls. Most of the building was originally painted white so it was always hard for some of the patients to differentiate one part of the building from the next. To help with this, the walls of the more important parts of the building had been painted specific colours. 

The hall where the group sessions are held is yellow. The canteen is blue. The living room is green. The entire floor where their bedrooms are had been painted purple, with their names on plaques nailed to their designated doors because Robin never had any idea whose bedroom was whose. 

When the walls around them turn green, Dr Ritchie stops and opens a door to their left. 

The living room us a large space with many sofas, cushions and tables, and it's the place that almost all of the patients practically lived.

At that moment, everyone but the Captain and Kitty (obviously) is sat around in there. All but Julian, who is in an armchair in the corner with headphones on and mouthing along to the words with closed eyes, turn to look at the two when they walk in. 

"Does anyone want to go for a walk in the garden with Kitty and I?" Dr Ritchie asks.

"No," everyone replies in perfect unison. 

"What about you, Robin?" 

Larry Rickard sits very still with his eyes closed, seemingly locked in a trance. When the doctor repeats Robin's name, he clamps his hands over where his ears are under the hood of his jacket. 

"Oh, it's Humphrey now, isn't it?" She bites her lip and turns to Kitty. "I might have to-" she starts, but is quickly interrupted.

"Don't worry, Alison," Pat says. "You can go. I'll look after him."

Dr Ritchie nods gratefully and turns back round. "Thanks, Pat," she says. "Is everyone sure they don't want to come?" 

Julian, now with one ear of his headphones lifted up slightly, raises his hand and opens his mouth. 

"Actually, I-" 

The door closes. 

When Kitty and Dr Ritchie get outside, their walk commences in complete silence. 

The back garden of Button House is beautiful. 

Beyond the original strip of grass and large, colourful bushes is a second field almost the size of a football pitch. In there stands a picnic table with a parasol towering over it, a fountain often used for making wishes, and a small pond overgrown with water lilies which is inhabited by a group of frogs. 

Robin once picked one up and tried putting it in his mouth when Dr Smith-Bynoe's back was turned, so now he has to be supervised by either Pat, the Captain or one of the doctors every time he goes out to the pond. 

The sky holds up in a bright pastel blue colour above them, clouds dotted here and there like chunks of polystirene spilled on a carpet. Not a very flattering comparison, granted, but it does look beautiful. And the sun, a thing Kitty had forgotten made her eyes hurt to look at, shines brightly down on the two of them, beating onto their hands and the backs of their necks. 

When they reach the end of the garden, they walk along the side and then, slowly but surely, back up to the door.

The silence that occurs is a strangely comfortable one, Kitty thinks. She can rarely find such happy silences in people, even to get one to happen with her parents had been rather difficult. If only there was a patient like her, that she could talk with all the time. 

She's never had a sleepover before, but she's read about them, and she wishes there's someone out there she could have one with. 

When they reach the door, Kitty smiles in satisfaction and holds the door open for the doctor as she makes her way back inside. 

"Happy?" Dr Ritchie asks as the door closes behind them. 

"Happy."

Chapter Text

The rarely-used Isolation Room is a pristine grey room in the cellar. It reminds the Captain of a prison cell, the likes of which he had seen before and hoped he would never have to look at again.

"If you weren't here, you'd be in prison. If you were anywhere else, you'd have already been locked up multiple times. Maybe even killed."

Heather Button's words ring in his head.

Heather doesn't know of the Captain's background, of course, nor does she know what had rattled the brain of the man once known as Ben Willbond, and he won't be telling her anytime soon. Her words still unsettled him, though, and hit close to home in a place she wasn't even aiming to hit. 

"Your cure is within reach, Ben," she said, putting a hand on his upturned wrist, which he pulled away. "You just have to take it when the time comes." 

God, he hates that woman. 

Although he hears the hospital's doctors using his "real" name when they think he's out of earshot, Heather uses it right to his face. 

Benjamin Willbond. 

A silly name, he thinks. Especially for a man who apparently looks just like him. 

It has to be a case of doppelgängers; that's his only explanation. Why else would these people go out of their way to try and fix a man who isn't broken? There's no need for him to be locked up in Button House. If he wasn't, he never would have stabbed that guard in the first place. He wouldn't even be in isolation.

On that subject, how long has he been in isolation? 

There's no clock in that room, no concept of time. It could have been a few hours, it could have also been a few days. He can't remember if he's slept or not. If he has, he has no idea how long he'd been unconscious for.

He's lying down sideways on the metal-framed bed, his legs propped up against the wall and his head resting just over the edge of the mattress. There's nothing to do other than look up at the ceiling. 

He was given nothing to entertain himself with, not so much as a pen and paper. He'd even had his three medals taken away from him in case he tried using the sharp edges as a weapon against himself or others. 

And that is the real punishment. Not only had they taken away his comfortable, familiar surroundings of his bedroom, he'd also had the only things he could take pride in stripped from him. He hadn't even been told when he could have them back. 

Could he have them back?

He'd better. 

Though the room was only a little dimly lit, it felt pitch black, like he's seeing the patchy white ceiling through the dark. Maybe he is. He wouldn't be surprised, at this point. 

It's easier for him to navigate his way in the dark than it is for a lot of people. After all, he's used to working in difficult conditions. He'd ran easily through the darkness back in his home town in London once before, with only the moonlight and the adrenaline to accompany him on his mission. When everyone who knew him thought he was missing, when he was out in the woods and then... 

The door creaks open and Dr Smith-Bynoe pokes his head around it. 

"You've got a visitor," he says. 

The Captain quickly assumes a normal sitting position on the bed and tries not to act as bored and angry as he actually is. 

The door closes behind the doctor, but after a few moments Julian walks in, his headphones around his neck and a weak smile on his face. 

The Captain sighs. 

"Aren't you happy to see me?" Julian asks. 

"I can barely contain myself," he replies in a monotone voice, switching his gaze to the wall in front of him. 

"I'm sensing sarcasm." 

The Captain huffs again as he sits down on the bed next to him. 

"There's a chair," he says, gesturing to it. 

"A chair?" Julian parrots. "Oh my, I had no idea. How fascinating." 

He feels the heat of the man's unimpressed eyes burning into him, and when he turns to look at his face, Julian chuckles. 

"Oh, lighten up, Cap," he sighs. "You've only got to stay here for a week." 

"A week?!" he demands. "It was just a scratch!"

"He had to get the knife surgically removed, mate." 

There's a silence. Then, "Is it night?"

"What?"

"What time is it? They won't tell me."

"You haven't asked. They said you haven't said anything since they took you in here."

"Well? How long have I been here?"

Julian looks up toward the ceiling and thinks for a moment, calculating in his head. "About six hours." 

"Six?! I can't take this anymore."

"You're gonna have to."

A silence enters the room, rendering it so quiet you'd probably be able to hear the blood flowing through your body if you listened close enough. 

The Captain sits as wooden as the unoccupied chair in the corner, his hands on his knees and his eyes staring at where the floor meets the wall. 

The colours are indistinguishable from each other, as if whoever painted the two surfaces picked up a large paintbrush dipped in grey and stroked it all the way up to the ceiling with one swift swipe. The top wall is the only one not painted in the smoky shade, almost giving the illusion that the whole room has been flipped upside-down. There's even a white brick lining separating the top of the walls and the ceiling that looked much like one usually seen at the floor. If the furniture had been glued to the ceiling, that would complete the trippy, isolated experience. 

"Did you come here for any specific reason, or did you just decide to grace me with your prescence?" the Captain asks Julian after a while, his voice still dripped in sarcasm. 

Julian looks up at the ceiling again, squinting in fake thought and biting his lip for a moment. "Just to grace you, I think," he decides.

"Well," he replies. "I'm graced. Now leave."

"I was only trying to cheer you up," he says, standing up but not making any move to leave the room. He just looks down at him, confused. 

"Yes, well, it didn't bloody work. Made me feel worse, if anything. Now go."

"No."

"Go."

"No."

"Go!"

"Why?" 

"Because I want to be alone."

"But-"

"No."

"But-"

"Nope."

"But-"

"Silence," the Captain demands. 

"But-"

He won't leave, and the Captain knows that. Well then, he thinks, there's only one thing for it. 

He stands up straight and turns his back to Julian. He plugs his ears with his fingers and smiles for a moment before he begins shouting. 

"I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I've information vegetable, animal and mineral-"

"Oh God, not this again."

"- I know the kings of England and I quote the fights historical, from Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical-" 

"Yeah, very funny. Now-"

"- I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical, I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical-" 

"Cap-"

"- about binomial thereom I'm teeming with a lot o' news, with many cheerful facts about the square of the hyponetuse-" 

"Alright, seriously, stop that." 

"- I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous-"

Julian walks out the door, flashing him his middle finger just before he's out of sight, feeling the need to throw the gesture even if he can't see it. It slams shut behind him and locks promptly afterwards, courtesy of the guard constantly hovering outside. 

"- in short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General," the Captain finishes with a sigh. 

He turns and deliberately falls back onto the bed. 

Alone at last. 

That trick always works. 

It gets rid of anyone in the room almost as easily as it does when Thomas begins spouting his many mediocre poems.

It isn't that he doesn't like Julian. Well, he doesn't, really. But the main point is that he was "trying to comfort him." He was trying to talk to him like he was a normal person. And he isn't. 

He's just the lonely ghost of a modern Major-General. 

Chapter Text

Thursday 5th November 2020 was the day of the Captain's release from isolation. The doctors had made the decision to cut the punishment short, and instead have him attend more therapy sessions. 

They might as well put him through something they knew would simply piss him off rather than possibly force him into another breakdown. 

They did not need another emotional break on their hands.

Breakdowns have occurred in every single patient at Button House. Sometimes it's if their trauma has been triggered, other times it's on anniversaries or birthdays, which are always hard. They can be triggered by anything, really, and with certain patients the doctors have to tread on eggshells and dance around subjects like their lives depend on it. 

The Capatin is one of these certain patients. 

He doesn't cry. In fact, he doesn't think himself capable of such a thing. The closest he thought he'd ever got to that was when he ran and his eyes watered from the force of the air around him. When he breaks he just becomes angrier than usual. He shouts and slams doors or refuses to speak altogether. And, of course, he tries to escape. 

Sometimes he tries escaping for seemingly no reason. He waits just long enough for people to no longer be suspicious of him, but not so long that people start to think once again that he's planning something. 

And then he runs. 

When he emerges from the Isolation Room at 5pm, he's escorted back to his bedroom by two of the guards and instructed to stay there that night, without no explanation why. He asks what's going on and their reply is that his dinner will be brought to him rather than him eating in the canteen as usual. He's also instructed to inform them from inside his room if he needs to use the bathroom, and he'll also be walked there and back to make sure he doesn't make another run for it, or whatever it is that they expect him to do. 

"Am I still in isolation, then?" he asks them. 

"No."

"Then what am I doing in here?"

"If we catch you outside the room, you'll be asked to go back inside. If you refuse, we'll have to use force."

"That doesn't answer my question." 

The guards exit the room, closing the door behind them and still leaving him in the dark about the situation.

"This is ridiculous!" he calls out to them when the door closes, but no reply comes his way.

Well, he thinks, a closed door and a man or two isn't going to put a stop to anything. Especially if the "anything" in question is something I want to find out about.

When he turns around to search the room for possible escape tools (a makeshift lockpick, inspiration for an excuse to leave the room, anything), he sees that laying on his bed covers are his three army medals that were taken from him three days ago. Before putting them back on, he picks them up and holds them close to his chest, the metal digging into the palm of his hand. 

It feels like such a relief to have them back. It's almost like the final part of himself has just been restored to his body, like they've been missing for years instead of mere days. 

Under his medals is also an ancient-looking, yellowing envelope with a single name printed on it in the handwriting of somebody he knew very well. He must have left it there the last time he'd been in there. A stupid move, really. Anybody could have touched it while he was gone.

He picks that up, too, but doesn't look down at it, instead glancing at the window for a split second before turning back towards the door. 

He knows the view outside his bedroom window by heart, from his many years scratching around in the same room with the same surroundings, and even more sleepless nights staring out at the sky and plotting escape routes. 

He has lists as well as printed photographs and self-drawn blueprints of the hospital grounds, all piled together in several plastic folders he hides under his mattress, that currently haven't been suspected nor found by the Button House staff. 

It's go big or go home. 

And in order to go home, he has to go big. 

He resorts to just sitting cross-legged by the door with his head tilted sideways, one ear close to the wall. As he waits for a moment in which nobody is keeping guard, he tries to keep himself preoccupied with the letter. 

The cover reads one word only. 

A name. 

William. 

But it's so much more than a name, and nobody else would understand that. It's one of the most important things to him in the world, even if he hadn't been quite through with it before he was deemed insane and sent away. 

It's something he's opened hundreds of time, maybe thousands. The paper has long worn at the edges. 

When he slowly takes the letter itself, savouring the gentle sound of paper on paper as it's pulled from its case, he turns it over twice in his hands before reading. 

He always does this. 

He doesn't know why. 

The doctors say he's the one who wrote it, changing his handwriting to fit that of whoever it was who had spelled out this mission. 

But... he'd loved Havers. He'd never make a forgery of his identity in such a way. 

About an hour later, when he's read the words goodness knows how many times, he hears footsteps. Not coming towards the door, but instead slowly fading away until they're just a gentle tapping ascending the stairs up to the next floor. 

Very slowly, he gets to his feet and then presses his ear right against the wall. The walls are so thin, he thinks that if someone is out there, he must be able to hear them, meaning no one is outside. 

Luckily, he's right. Nobody is outside the door when he unlocks it with the pin of a medal and steps cautiously out into the hallway. No one is actually on that floor at all, which he thinks is a little strange. 

He decides to head downwards, as that's where the living room is and he knows the majority of the Button House residents are in there. 

Once again, he is correct. 

However, he doesn't get there before turning the corner leading into the hallway and walking right into someone, making him jump out of his skin and put a hand over his heart. 

"Woah, hey, Cap!" Pat greets him. "I was wondering where you'd got to!" 

"Good God, Patrick, you almost gave me a heart attack!" 

"Sorry! I didn't know you were there. How's isolation going?"

"I'm, um... not... there anymore," he says, stuttering a little as he ponders whether or not he needs a cover story. Clearly Pat hasn't been told of his orders to stay in his room. 

"Oh, yes, of course," Pat says with a light chuckle, slapping a hand to his forehead. "Well, I'll take you back to see the others. Kitty missed you, you know."

"Thought as much." 

With his hand tugging gently on his wrist, Pat guides the Captain down the hall to the other patients. All except Thomas are in the room, standing around by the window and seemingly waiting for something. 

"We're not scared of you, Cap," Pat says, leading him over to where everyone else is standing. 

"What?" 

"That's why you're a bit on-edge tonight, isn't it? We haven't seen you since... you know. It's not because we're afraid, it's because we weren't supposed to visit. The thing with the knife... we understand it, in a way. We're not scared of you because of it." 

"I am," Mary says, not tearing her eyes away from the window. 

Outside, it's extremely dark, as it always is early on at this time of year. The Captain can only make out the faint outline of the doctors walking around, one of them holding a box of something. He squints to try and get a better look, but to no avail. 

"Why are you nervous?" Pat asks him. 

"I'm not," he insists. "What the bally hell's gotten into you, man?"

"Is it because of the fireworks? They're lighting them in a minute, so you still have time to get out, I think. I suspect that's why Thomas is acting weird today, too. He's in his room now, I think-"

"Fireworks?"

"Oh, basically, they're lights in the sky made from gunpowder, and-" 

"Spare me the lecture, I know what fireworks are," he interrupts.

"Uh, me don't," Robin says, turning to the two. "What is firework?" 

"Well, Robin," Pat explains, "fireworks are lights in the sky made from gunpowder, and we usually light them on special days like New Year's Eve, or in America they have them on the Fourth of July, or today, which is Fireworks Night." 

"Firework night?"  

"Yeah, it's the two-hundred-and-somethingth anniversary of when Guy Fawkes tried to blow up King James."

"Why celebrate King blowing up?" 

Pat frowns. "I don't know."

"Hm, well," the Captain mutters, becoming increasingly paranoid as he listens to the conversation. He clears his throat. "Maybe I should just go back to..."

He's caught off-guard in the middle of his sentence when suddenly a loud, jarring, cracking noise fills his ears. 

Immediately, he starts panicking. His breathing quickens, and a wave of nausea soon starts stinging at his stomach. His arms fly up to cover his ears, but his hands don't reach them. They just stay raised in the air, fingers reaching out like they're trying to grab something that isn't there. 

A second and third noise follows, and he knows a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh... hundredth will follow soon enough. 

His knees buckle, and then he's kneeling down on the floor, not even noticing the change. 

His face stays almost frozen in his look of sudden fear, his mouth hanging open slightly and his eyes wide at the sight of a million memories in front of them. In that moment, he can't put a finger on what it is that he's seeing, but it's bad. Images of blood, guts, brains pouring out over the battlefield. Guns, uniforms, fallen wires and bullets and people. So many people. In that room, he feels both alone and surrounded by the entire world at the same time. 

Are these his memories, or Ben  Willbond's? Is this Ben's heart racing, his pulse quickening, his body trembling? 

He doesn't even know anymore. 

He doesn't know what's real anymore.

He doesn't know who he is anymore. 

He feels like he's dying.

Again.

Chapter Text

"Do either of you want to talk about what happened on Thursday?" Dr Smith-Bynoe asks, leaning forward in his seat a little. 

"No," the Captain and Thomas say in unison, staring at the yellow wall ahead of them like it isn't even there.

Their eyes are glazed slightly from drowsiness and their heads are pounding in the same rhythm as their heartbeats. Right then, they appear to be synchronized. On the inside, however, completely different thoughts are running through their two broken minds. 

Friday morning, 6am. It's what is professionally described as an emergency therapy session, the morning after the two very breakdowns they were trying to prevent that night. 

As well as the Captain, Thomas had had a hard time that night. All night, no matter what he did to try and block out the distant booming sounds, he experienced a mix of flashbacks, both of his death and Mathew Baynton's life, phantom pains tingling across his bullet wound until he eventually fell into a short and uncomfortable sleep filled with dreams reflecting the sounds echoing in his room. 

He'd finally dozed off at about four in the morning, and was woken up for the session not an hour later. To try and keep his exhausted brain active and his drooping eyes open, he'd prepared a coffee in the canteen before heading over to the hall. As always, the flavour tastes as familar to him as one can recall a dream. 

It always feels weird eating and drinking. It's like he isn't supposed to do it. That's not something ghosts should be capable of, right? 

He never has much desire to feed his grumbling stomach, but if he starts refusing meals he knows the doctors will think there's something else wrong with him. They think he's insane as it is, and he's not in the mood to make it worse. 

The Captain, despite not sleeping at all on Thursday night, feels wide awake. The crackling and fizzing of the calming fireworks that he heard as he was dragged away is still ringing in his ears. His ability to sleep for a full night wasn't a reoccuring thing anyway, but now he's wondering if he'll ever actually be able to do it again.

It was like he was actually there. 

He knew his panic had been in the midst of a string of flashbacks and memories, not a sudden transportation right back into his past. Yet it still felt that way. His mind had tricked him into thinking he could smell the blood in the air, hear the shots rocketing from close range, feel the mud squashing under his imaginary steel-toe boots. 

He's still standing by his internal statement that he doesn't even know what's real anymore. 

"Well, I'm going to talk about it," the doctor says. "If you want me to shut up at any point, you can just tell me, okay? Now-"

"Shut up."

He pauses for a moment, the silence hanging in the air in an amusing manner. But the Captain isn't joking. One word in, he's already sick of the conversation, both mentally and a little bit physically. 

After a while, Dr Smith-Bynoe resumes. 

"Now," he says a second time, "first of all, I'm going to remind you that we're never going to light fireworks outside ever again. We didn't do it before Saturday, and we won't do it afterwards under any circumstances. We just thought we'd try something this year, but clearly that was a stupid decision. I apologise for my part in what happened and I'll never let it happen again. Sound good?" 

"Marvellous," the Captain mutters. 

"Just go with the sparklers next time," Thomas says quietly, shaking his head. 

He'd used one of them just before he retreated to his room. He found the experience fascinating. He thought of it like a tiny, quiet, pet firework on a stick. Dr Ritchie had showed him how to write his name in the air with it, and he found it magical. 

He found her magical too. During those few minutes in the garden, he payed more attention to her face lighting up in the golden glow than he did on the glow itself. She was almost worth staying out for the actual show. Almost. 

"Yeah, good plan," Dr Smith-Bynoe replies. "So, Captain, this next question is for you. You don't have to give me an answer if you don't want to, but it would be helpful to us if you could. So, er, have you ever been shot?"

"You know the answer."

That's another thing he could never understand about the doctors: their need to hear everything a million times. He can still remember, upon his arrival at Button House all those years ago, the amount of times he had to tell them what to call him. 

And they think him the mentally deficient one. 

"But could you tell me again, Captain?" Dr Smith-Bynoe asks. "Have you been shot?"

"Once," he says stiffly. 

"And... how did that feel?" 

"If I'm being honest with you, Michael, it bloody hurt." 

The doctor nods, waiting for him to carry on. 

The Captain shrugs his shoulders and shifts uncomfortably as he thinks of a way to continue. What else is there to say? 

"I can barely recall the day," he says eventually. "Nor what had happened beforehand. Just the pain. It was my left leg. It... It just burned. That's most of what I remember. It was so sudden, and it was the kind of searing pain you'd get if, I don't know, you poured a vat of acid over yourself. It was agony. Worst pain I've ever felt."

Thomas shuts his eyes tight and keeps the ceramic rim of the mug pressed to his lips, not drinking. 

He thinks about his own shooting. That fatal day where the wishing fountain now stands, all the way back when Button House was an actual residence. When he challenged that cheating bastard to a duel, which he thought would simply be a declaration of love for the woman of his dreams, Isabelle Higham. She stood there watching the whole thing, horrified when the bullet struck his abdomen and when he fell down with the crimson blood leaking through his clothes. 

Yet she didn't love him. 

That was the last thing he ever thought about as he hung onto his cousin's broken promise to bring her to him to say goodbye. Everyone in the yard left and never came back, and he died not knowing what ever happened to her. 

"And is that from your memories?" Dr Smith-Bynoe asks. 

"Of course," the Captain says, a little too quickly. "Who else's would they be?" 

"Let me rephrase that... do you have a scar where you were shot?"

"No." 

"Stitches?"

"No."

"Any traces of the wound?"

"No." 

"No evidence of it happening at all?"

"I know what you're getting at, Michael," he snaps, turning his head to glare at him. "Yes, it happened. No, I don't have any evidence of it occuring. No, I don't know how that's possible and no, it's not another delusion."

With his final word, he puts it in air quotes, a useful trick that had been taught to him by Pat. 

"I'm not getting at anything," the doctor replies gently. "I'm just trying to help you understand that your first step to recovery is recognising the problem. And the first step to that is coming to terms with some of the things that don't make sense."

"But it all makes sense to me. I think that's good enough, don't you?" 

"Don't you want to feel like yourself again?"

"I already do."

"I don't think that's entirely-" 

His words are interrupted by the shattering of Thomas' mug, suddenly and deliberately thrown down onto the floor. The remaining contents spill out into a bitter-smelling puddle on the white tiles. Thomas stands up immediately after this, and the doctor follows.

"What's going on?" he asks him. He puts a hand on his shoulder, but Thomas quickly pulls away like he'd just been burned instead of offered a comforting gesture. 

"I just remembered," he chokes out. 

"Remembered what?" 

He exhales deeply, and looks at the mess he's made like he's just realised what he did. He clamps a hand over his mouth, but only a second later it moves up to his forehead, which is pounding harder with every beat. His arm shakes as he does this, like it's taking a lot of strength for this simple action. When his voice comes out, it's that of a mere whisper. 

"It's my first death day."

Chapter Text

Mat knew Jim. 

They grew up together, best friends from childhood and inseparable up until the day they were... well... separated.

He was there the day his friend nearly died. In fact, he felt entirely responsible for what had happened. 

He insisted that he stayed in the hospital until Jim woke up, but they wouldn't allow him and he had to come back the next afternoon, when the arrow had been removed; a tricky procedure, to say the least, and they very nearly lost him. 

Mat arrived at the hospital early, and sat nervously in the waiting room for hours, absent-mindedly tapping his foot on the tiled floor as the worst possible scenarios ran through his head. His wife wanted to come too, but they didn't have anyone to look after their son that day, and they certainly didn't want to include him in such a horrifying situation. Mat decided it was for the better if he went alone, anyway. With so much as an "are you okay?" from Kelly, he was scared that would be enough to make him start sobbing in front of everyone. 

Finally, a nurse with a clipboard stepped into the room. She saw Mat and immediately recognised him as the fast-talking man with the paper-white face who ran alongside his friend being wheeled into surgery the previous afternoon. 

"He's not awake yet, not properly," the nurse said. "He hasn't been speaking. If you start talking to him, that should wake him up." 

When he saw Jim in his hospital room, that calmed his nerves a little. Of course, his friend didn't look lively at all. He barely looked conscious. The covers on his bed were pulled up almost to his neck, which was encircled in a cervical collar. His hair was sticking to his forehead with sweat and his eyes were only half-open, but at the sight of Mat he did seem to perk up a bit. He put on a weary smile and tried to sit up, but Mat shook his head. 

"Don't do that," he said quickly. "I don't know if you're allowed to move or not." 

He walked over to the bed and pulled up a chair next to it, sitting down and starting to shake. For a moment he just stared at Jim, but then he spoke. 

"Lauren's on her way," he told him. "I'll stay until she gets here, then I'll let you talk by yourselves. But for now, it's..." He tooo a deep breath, and bowed his head down for a moment. "I just... I'm so, so sorry. I know I kept saying it yesterday, and you said it was okay, but it's not. And I know sorry's never going to cut it, but I don't know what else to do. This is all my fault, I..." 

He noticed that Jim's eyes are closed, and he seemed unresponsive. 

"Jim," he said. He repeated the name, a little louder this time. "Don't fall asleep again." 

"Where am I?" Jim croaked out, still not opening his eyes. 

"You're in hospital."

"Hospital?" he squeaked. "Oh my Lord, what happened? Am I alright?" 

"Uh..."

"I was shot," he said, sitting up fast. Mat told him not to, but he didn't listen. "With an arrow, right?" 

With these words, Mat realised his friend was speaking in a Northern accent, which confused over amused him like it usually was. Jim had his funny voices and impressions, but he'd never done anything like this. But, to be fair, he'd never been in that situation before. But still. It was very weird. 

"Right," Mat said. "I was just saying, I'm really-"

"I heard what you said. But... you called me Jim."

He furrowed his brow. "Yeah." 

"I'm sorry, I... I think you're in the wrong room. Sorry, mate, but... I don't know who you are." 

"Wh..." Mat's breath caught in his throat, and a nervous smile appeared on his face. "What? I'm Mat."

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I don't think I've ever met you. My name's Pat. Patrick Butcher?"

"Wait... just wait a second."

Mat headed out of the room in a half-run, rushing over to the nearest doctor and explaining the situation at a hundred miles per hour. Just then, Jim's wife Lauren was seen hurrying down the corridor toward his room, the same nurse walking briskly in front. 

"Is he okay?" Lauren asked Mat, putting her hand on the door handle. 

"Um..." he started. 

This hesitation was enough to make Lauren throw open the door in a panic. The doctor followed her in, and Mat turned and made a run for it in the opposite direction, going through the fire exit and leaning still against the wall with a hand to his head in the car park. 

He didn't know what he was doing. He panicked. He just needed a moment. When he got back inside to try again, he was stopped by a doctor. He wasn't ridiculed for leaving through the fire exit, and was instead sympathetically advised to go home. Apparently, he'd get a call soon after he was back. 

The call came pretty much as soon as he got through his front door, and he was told that Jim was being hospitalized somewhere else and was already on his way to a swift diagnosis for something called ghost syndrome, which Mat had never heard of before. The second he ended the call, he googled this strange disease then puts his head in his hands after skimming through the first result. 

Just a few days later, "Pat" was sent away to a different hospital, one that specialized more in illnesses of the mind rather than those of the body. 

And that was it. 

The last time he ever saw Jim. 

Once he was moved over to Button House, Mat was allowed to visit him, but he didn't actually have the heart to do so after only showing up once or twice. Besides, what was the point if the man didn't even know who he was? 

Whoever this Pat was, he seemed nice, but he wasn't his friend. He wasn't Jim. And that scared him. He didn't want to get to know this person. Really, he already knew him, but the only memories he had of his friend were all the ones he couldn't recall. 

It took him years to accept it. It was simple things, like if he saw a movie he knew they'd both like and then thought about watching it with him, and then he'd realise. Or he'd watch a new episode of a programme they both loved, and he decided to text him to find out his reaction, and then he'd realise. Or it would be his birthday, and he'd think about paying him a visit with a card and a gift later in the day, and then he'd realise. 

Slowly, all his realising of the situation faded, and slowly he just subconsciously knew that Jim wasn't there anymore. 

It was on the night of November 6th 2019 that everything would turn upside-down for him once more. 

He was bored, writing a boring email, just a couple of hours from midnight, suggesting a Skype interview with someone who had played a small role in some war movie. That was what he did for a living - he interviewed actors. No one from anything big, which is what he first dreamed of when he got the job. Occasionally he did manage to steal a few minutes of time from people who'd maybe had a line or two in one of the live-action Disney movies, but he never managed to grab a few minutes with someone actually recognisable. 

He'd wanted to be an actor himself, taking it up as a career choice from the time he was in secondary school and making plans to become at least a little well-known. He and Jim had made up little skits that they uploaded to their now-abandoned YouTube channel, but nobody seemed to like them enough for it all to pay off. 

After finishing his quick skim over what he'd written, checking for typos and grammar mistakes, he pressed "send" and leant back in his seat with a tired sigh. 

As if on cue, the back door clicked open. 

Though the noise was light, and would probably have been drowned out by the tapping of his keyboard if he was doing it at the time, it made him jump as though it was the loudest thing he'd ever heard. Whoever it was couldn't be anyone he knew, any idiot would get that. His children were sent to bed hours ago, and they were now upstairs along with his wife. And he wanted to keep it that way. 

Hesitantly, he sat up straight again and looked around for anything he could use to defend himself. 

He wasn't exactly spoiled for choice. All there was on the table in front of him was his laptop, a mug of cold coffee and a thin glass vase decorated with a bunch of brightly-coloured flowers.

The vase would have to do. 

He grabbed every flower stalk in his fist and dropped them on the table. He couldn't get rid of the water without making a lot of noise. He did consider drinking it for a split second, but quickly decided that pouring water over the intruder's head would make for a short but sweet distraction. 

When he stood up with his weapon, his chair made a heavy squeaking noise as it pushed against the wooden floor.  This madr him flinch like someone just slapped him across the face. That was a noticeable noise if he had ever heard one. 

Walking into the kitchen, he almost froze in fear at what he saw. 

He had immediately expected the worst at the noise of the door, and he was right to do so. 

Standing just inside the kitchen were two stocky men with ski masks and guns. It didn't feel real; he felt like he was in a movie. A cliché, predictable movie that would unfold with someone getting badly injured within the next few seconds. If the main characters were lucky, the injured people would be the villains. 

Without even thinking, Mat tightened his grip on the vase, raised his arm and then threw it in the direction of the two of them as hard as he could. 

He missed them both. 

The vase flew right past the man on the right's head and landed beside the sink, shattering into a million pieces on impact, the water splashing in every direction and landing in small drops all over the counter. The shards of glass scattered over the floor with tiny clinking noises, but Mat took no notice of this. Instead, all he could think about is what happened afterwards. 

The loud, unmistakable sound of a gunshot rang out right in front of him, and the fired bullet tore into his skin. 

He stared back at the gun, completely silent. His gaze then switched to his abdomen. There was a small hole torn through his shirt, and the hole continues past his skin. This hole seemed ten times bigger when, shortly after, blood started spurting from it and slowly began making a thick red pool around it. It dripped down rapidly, staining right through his shirt and then even more so when it hit his jeans. 

He put a hand to it in disbelief, like he was expecting to take it away and see nothing, coming to the realisation that the whole thing was some elaborate fear-fuelled hallucination. Instead, he turned his palm up after pressing it to the wound and it was coated in the blood, dripping through his fingers and starting to form a scarlet puddle on the floor beneath his feet. 

Was it supposed to bleed that much? 

For a moment, he stayed standing there in shock, completely numb. But then the sweet bliss of ignorance is gone and the pain kicked in. It was a sudden wave of the worst thing he'd ever felt. With one hand clutching the wound again, he used the other to try and steady himself by leaning against the cupboards to his right. 

His depth perception failed him, and instead he grabbed at nothing and fell down to the floor, on his back with his eyes looking up to the ceiling. He couldn't gather the strength to get back up again. 

Just seconds later, he heard hurried footsteps descending the stairs, and then he heard his wife cry out in horror. She crouched down and looked at him immediately, tears spilling from her eyes. 

The men were gone. They didn't have time to take anything before they realised what they'd done. They panicked and fled like cowards. 

Kelly passed Mat something, but he couldn't see what it was. He really couldn't find the strength to get up; it was like he was paralysed. He still managed to put whatever it was to the wound like she told him to. She then stood up and hurried away, saying something about calling an ambulance. 

He could barely hear what she was saying. Everything around him sounded like it was happening underwater. Everything looked this way, too, and his eyes glazed over a little as he tried not to fall asleep. 

He was scared of what would happen if he did. Part of him was scared he'd never wake up again. 

But he was just so tired. The pain was making him exhausted, and the stress of trying to keep his eyes open made it a hundred times worse. 

He wanted to tell Kelly to stay with him, but when his mouth opened, all that would come out was a sharp gasp of pain. He didn't know how long he'd be able to make it without medical assistance. He felt like he was passing away right there and then. He couldn't wait any longer. 

And that's why, to pass the time, he made the mistake of closing his eyes. 

When he awoke, Mathew Baynton had disappeared and Thomas Thorne woke up in his place.

Chapter Text

Thomas didn't know why he said it was his first death day. He'd already had, what? One hundred and ninety six years since his death before then? He must have just meant his first death day at the house. But he'd died at the house, hadn't he? And he passed in October, not November, didn't he?

He chooses not to think about what he had said that morning, because once his mind wandered to Dr Smith-Bynoe's speeches about delusions he started to doubt himself. 

Doubt is one of the worst feelings in the world to him, arguably more mentally exhausting than whatever emotion it was that he felt as he collapsed against the tree on that fatal day in the garden almost 200 years ago. He feels as dazed and confused as he did in that moment, too. Sitting on the sofa now, he can almost feel the rough bark against his back instead of the soft leather. 

That session had ended on a bitter note, with Thomas mopping up the mess he made while the Captain hobbled out of the room uneasily as if his limp had come back, and the doctor scribbled in his curious little notebook for an uncomfortably long time. 

It took a while for everyone to wake up after that as it was still early. As the Captain retreated back upstairs, Thomas decided to take some time alone in the living room, which was what he needed.

He rarely wakes up the earliest. It's far more common for him to sleep in for so long that a doctor has to burst into the room to make sure he hasn't killed himself or escaped in the middle of the night.

Whenever he was the first to walk into that room, though, he always savoured the feeling. Even though he knew that everyone else was lying in bed on the floor above him, it felt like he was the only one in the whole hospital. He was so used to the chatter and the TV blaring and Robin's enthusiastic shouting that he always felt like he accidentally stepped into the wrong room. The sound of his footsteps walking to the sofa seemed so isolated that he could almost hear them echoing in his ears.

He sits there in complete and utter silence for nearly two hours, not tempted to turn the TV on or anything because it would disturb the silence and he didn't understand how the thing worked anyway.

Julian is the first to walk in, a cheese toastie in one hand and the other in the pocket of his compulsory shorts. He's shocked to see that Thomas of all people is awake before him. He doesn't say anything, just falls back onto the sofa with such an unusual amount of force that he almost sends the poet flying off it, then snatches the remote from the coffee table in front of them and turns on the TV himself. 

This prompts Thomas to stand up and start walking out of the room. As he puts his hand on the handle, Julian clears his throat as if about to make an important announcement. 

"Death days are a pain in the arse in the hospital, I of all people should know," he tells him. "But you'd better get used to it, I can't see us getting out any time soon." 

"How..." It's Thomas' turn to clear his throat, this time nervously. "How did you know it's my death day?"

"I have my ways."

Thomas turns back to look at him properly. He uses a facial expression that he often directs at him; his eyes squinting a little, one eyebrow raised in disbelief.

"Come on, don't look at me like that. I was standing outside." 

"In the hallway? For twenty minutes?"

"Actually, no, I only heard the last bit. You looked like you'd seen a ghost, if you'll pardon the expression." 

"Where were you afterwards, then?"

"Played golf on the iPad. Got bored. Went outside," he says bluntly, taking a bite from his toastie. 

"How?" he asks him. "They lock the back door at night, don't they?" 

"Alison's already here. She opened it for me," he says through a mouthful, spraying crumbs all down the front of his shirt. 

Thomas' face turns to one of disgust as he turns around once more and leaves the room, turning a corner at the end of the corridor to go downstairs just as he sees Kitty emerging from the stairs at the other end. 

He isn't going outside simply because he hopes he might run into Alison. Well, maybe he is. 

He knows the fact that he loves her makes her uncomfortable, so he does usually try to surpress it. He can't help what he's feeling on the inside, though, and whenever he's alone with her he always blurts out some romantic poem or other. 

Originally, he had his therapy sessions with her, and Smith-Bynoe had Fanny. This didn't work for either of them. Both patients stared at the doctor talking to them so intently that they often forgot to answer their questions, let alone hear them, and Thomas forgot that the sessions were about himself altogether and constantly tried to get an insight into Dr Ritchie's personal life. He knew Alison was married to Mike, of course, but did she really like him? And why him when Thomas was right there? He didn't get it. 

When he gets to the door, he can't see Dr Ritchie anywhere. She's already gone, he grumpily concludes, only stopping downstairs for a split second to unlock the back door as Julian requested. 

Oh, well. He supposes he wants to go outside anyway. Anywhere is better than somewhere with Julian, especially when Thomas is in a mood. Most of the time, he's in a mood, and so he tends to avoid Julian as a whole. 

When he stands outside, he sees that the sun hasn't risen properly yet. It's still stuck somewhere between a dark golden colour and its usual daytime grey. As Thomas makes his way under this strange sky, morning dew sticking to his shoes, he stops and frowns. 

There's not a tree there anymore. Instead there's just a long clump of prickly bushes. He decides not to fall into the brambles, and instead sits on the grass and leans back against the fountain. It's almost where he remembers the tree being, and that's good enough for him. 

He doesn't want to act out his death. 

That's something Fanny does.

It was her death day only a few weeks after she first arrived at Button House. The day seemed fairly normal, though she was quieter than usual, but during the night it was much worse. 

The alarms on the second floor went off at three in the morning, and when the guards were silently checking the rooms, one of them opened her bedroom door only to see that she was gone, leaving the window wide open. Her fall was broken by the bushes that she landed in, but her mental state was weak for ages afterwards. 

They thought it was just a one-off escape attempt, but after it happened a second year in a row - and on the exact same day as before - they all realised what was coming on the third. That night they had guards patrolling both outside her room and down on the ground below it. They also got one to sit in her room, and when she sleepily got to her feet at exactly 3am she was restrained for a whole hour until she stopped trying to throw things at the now-bolted window.

She's been in the hospital for what she percieves as one hundred and fifteen years, and every death day is as vivid as the last. 

Thomas, on the other hand, has been here for nearly two hundred years, but somehow he can only remember one of them. 

It must be a delusion, but one caused by his death. He refuses to let the doctors think they've won, because they haven't. Death has just scrambled up his brain once and for all, it isn't his fault. 

"Death," he says to himself. "It suffocates every thought, like a... like a... um..."

He thinks for a few more seconds. He then sighs, and has to give up on his poem there. It's usually hard to complete something in the hospital anyway; there's little to no inspiration for him within these walls. But today it's worse. He can barely think at all.

It's only when Dr Ritchie sends Pat out looking for him that he's forced to go back inside, and when he does so he refuses to talk in anything but failed little poems for the rest of the day.

Chapter Text

New Patient File:

Anya McKenna-Bruce/Jemima

Full Name: Anya McKenna-Bruce

Age and D.O.B: 13 (06.06.07) 

Name of Believed Identity: Jemima

Root of Trauma: illness

Year of Arrival at Button House: 2020 

Other Info:

Anya was recently in hospital for two months after catching a very severe case of the flu. Although it was after a lot of pain and even almost dying, she was able to return home with no problems. After a week passed, her behaviour changed. She started talking less and less and became shy even with her own family. She also adopted the strange habit of repeating the same nursery rhyme over and over again, which has now become almost the limit of her vocabulary. 

She was soon sent to therapy as her parents held onto the small hope that it was just some extreme side effect of the medication she took. 

When she was asked to write her name during a session, she wrote "Jemima." 

This was when her parents started to get worried, even more so when, after a while, she refused to respond to any other name. 

First she was sent to a youth psychiatric ward in Surrey, not far from us, but when nothing changed no matter what medication she was put on, they chose to pass her onto us.

Of course we currently only hold adults here, as ghost syndrome has only been recorded in a minor three times before, two of which being in the cases of Simon and Lolly. We will keep Anya's room on a different floor to the ones of our other patients, and do bi-weekly therapy sessions with her to make sure she isn't feeling lonely nor intimidated by the other patients. 

We're doing all we can to make her comfortable, safe, and hopefully cured.

***

"Who is Jemima?"

She frowns a little, her eyes squinting in confusion. 

Isn't that a bit too obvious of a question? Do they think something is wrong with her? Well, do they think something else is wrong with her? 

Her and this strange doctor woman are sitting in the latter's office, her sitting at a large desk in a large chair that made Jemima opposite her look tiny by comparison, shifting uncomfortably on her hard plastic seat. 

The doctor's desk has a shiny silver name plate on it.

DR. HEATHER BUTTON

HEAD OF HOSPITAL  

Jemima has long forgotten how to read, but just looking at the plate and the printed black letters she feels a bit intimidated. She doesn't know if she prefers the second pristine alien building of two to the cosy house she was sent away from, or not. She doesn't know anyone who lives in any of the buildings, so all of them scare her a bit anyway. That was okay. She knows how to be scary back.

"Me," she whispers. Obviously. 

"And who is Anya?" Heather asks, a bit more gently this time. 

This question is much harder to answer.

She'd heard of this person, a young girl around her age with her same appearance, address and supposed family members, but she didn't actually know her. She hadn't met her. Even so, when people wanted to know about Jemima's health they'd always ask "how's Anya?" instead of "how's Jemima?" 

It irritates her every time, but every time she expresses it all she gets is confused looks and, eventually, a trip to a mental hospital. 

She knows that she's supposed to know who this Anya is, she knows that her answer is supposed to be a confident "me." But she doesn't, and it isn't. 

Jemima shrugs her shoulders hopelessly. 

"Have you ever heard of ghost syndrome?" Heather pries.

She nods. "That's what people say I've got." 

"Do you believe you have it?"

She shakes her head. 

"It can make you think those things," Heather tells her. "I won't stop you from believing anything, but one day you'll understand."

"Understand what?"

Heather pauses for a moment. She takes a small stuffed bear from under her desk and passes it over to Jemima. Jemima snatches it from her too fast, and holds onto it too tight. She feels like it has always belonged to her, like it had been taken from her a long time ago. How does Heather know?

Heather sees Jemima relaxing a little with the toy in her arms. She cradles it like it's a baby, letting its fluffy head rest on her frayed pink cardigan as she looks down at it protectively with her sunken brown eyes. The girl's encounter with the bear proves the point that the doctor was thinking. 

Heather sighs. "I'll need you to understand that ghost syndrome is dangerous."

***

"Am I dangerous?" Jemima asks the closest person to her when she walks into the room. 

The Captain, not hearing her quiet footsteps or seeing her small figure when she entered the room, jumps so hard that he nearly falls out of his seat. This causes the soup he was eating to spill all down his clothes as he accidentally knocks the bowl with one flailing arm. He barely notices the spill or the mild burning sensation as he's momentarily trapped in silent shock. 

He stands up quickly and stumbles away from the table as Jemima stays standing there, staring at him. 

At this point, every eye in the room is resting on her. Most of them look a little bit scared, at least. Mary looks like she's about to burst into tears. 

The Captain makes his way out of the cafeteria, trying to keep his composure. As he leaves, he can distantly hear Pat introducing himself to the girl, and asking her who she is in turn. The second the doors close behind the Captain, he then breaks into a run towards Dr Ritchie's office. 

"Alison!" he calls. "Alison!" His voice is strangled and a bit high-pitched as he bursts into her office, the door shutting fast behind him. 

"What's wrong?" she asks quickly, standing up. "Why are you covered in soup?" she adds, her tone a lot more confused than concerned. 

"There's a small child in the cafeteria, I repeat, there is a small child in the cafeteria, this is not a drill." 

"Oh," she says, realising. "That's Jemima. Jesus, Cap, you have got to stop shouting for me like that. I thought something was wrong!" 

"Something is wrong. You can't just let some child come pottering around in here without warning us first!" 

Dr Ritchie walks away from her desk and holds open the door, waiting for the Captain to shuffle back through it before following. She starts taking him back to the cafeteria, and he hesitantly follows, trying to wipe the drying soup stains from the front of his shirt with his sleeve as he does so. 

"But I did warn- tell you," she says. "I thought Heather Button told you all there was going to be a younger patient."

"Yes, but I didn't think she'd be that young, or that..." 

Unnerving? Scary? Horrifying? 

"... different," he decides, but realises that sounds more of an unreasonable statement than his three internal suggestions would have been.

They stop walking outside the cafeteria door, and she looks at him. "Are you scared of her?" 

"No."

She pushes the door open and walks half-way through, leaning on it to stop it from closing again.

"There's nothing to be scared of. She's just a kid. She's like you, just... a lot younger, a lot smaller, a lot quieter, and... okay, she's different. But really, you don't need to be scared of her."

"I'm not scared of her," he insists, a little too quickly and far too loudly. 

"Then why won't you walk through the door?" 

For a moment, he doesn't know what to say in reply, clenching his fists and looking down at his shoes, which, he notices, also have small drops of soup stained on them. Then he decides that he can't think of a reply at all. He sighs and walks in after the doctor. 

Jemima is now sitting at the table where the Captain once was, clutching on to the plump, tousled arm of her toy as though she thinks someone's about to take it from her. Pat sits opposite her, and after a few seconds, the two standing just inside the door see Thomas join them. 

"I think I heard you, this morning," Thomas says to Jemima, squinting a little as he tries to figure out if he's ever seen her face before. "Do you sing?" 

She nods, and begins her usual little nursery rhyme to prove it. 

"Ring a ring o' roses,

A pocket full of posies, 

A-tishoo, a-tishoo,

We all fall down." 

Her voice is quiet, almost a whisper, and the last line is sang in less of a sing-song tone and more of a matter of fact one. It was like something pulled right out of a horror movie. 

"People find it scary, apparently," she adds, shrugging her shoulders. 

Pat laughs nervously, beginning to a avoid eye contact with her. "Yeah," he says shakily, "can't think why."

The Captain makes desperate hand gestures at the table, his eyes widened and fixed on the doctor. 

Dr Ritchie sighs. "I know you might find her a bit... unsettling," she says after a long pause. "But she's a good kid, really. She's a good, quiet, mildly creepy kid, and she can't hurt you. She's way more scared of you than you are of her." 

Jemima hears this, and she turns to look at the Captain. Her dark eyes burn into his light ones, and he clears his throat nervously. She doesn't look scared one bit. She looks more like she knows that he's scared of her, and she's almost enjoying it. The hint of a smile flickers on her face, and somehow that's scarier than a full-on malicious grin. 

"Probably," Dr Ritchie adds uncertainly, giving the new patient a quick wave. 

She was worried that the other patients might scare Jemima out of her wits, but actually it seems to be the other way around.

Chapter Text

There's a room on the top floor of the hospital. A spacey room, yet the dark grey walls still give the appearance of it being rather cramped. One of the walls is decked almost from top to bottom with security cameras, showcasing every single room, with the exception of the bedrooms and bathrooms, which still have cameras positioned outside so you can see every single person that goes in and out. 

In a place that has nine insane, dangerously delusional people practically running wild, this is extremely necessary. The Captain had the most escape attempts before half the cameras were installed, and ever since the new ones were put in he's had a much harder time with making his way out. His last attempt had been through the exit at the back of the kitchen, and now that a camera has been installed in the corner by that door, yet another route of his has been blocked. 

If he feels the need to get out again, he's now beginning to wonder how much damage the fall from the living room window would give him.

There are only four people working in there. Their names are James, Ed, Sarah and Alex. All are middle-aged, married and a bit underpaid. They live normal, relatively boring lives for people of their status, so it seems a bit odd for their job to be keeping an eye on a bunch of crazy people. They also work part-time as guards, and Ed had the gaping, healing stab wound from a kitchen knife in his arm to prove it. 

They've all picked their favourite lunatics of the bunch. James thinks Robin is funny, Ed likes Pat's high-pitched angry voice, Sarah could spend hours on end watching Julian dancing badly around the empty cafeteria to whatever it was that he played on his headphones, and Alex thinks the Captain's attitude is hilarious. After the initial panic about Ed's stabbing, he can almost look back on the entire situation and simply laugh. 

None of them are allowed to say any of this out loud. This is private, they can't talk about the patients like that. This is a psychiatric hospital; the only things they should be feeling are pity and other blunt, serious emotions.

The night of November 30th, just a couple of hours after Jemima settles down to sleep for her first night at Button House, Dr Heather Button walks into the room. She unlocks the restricted door with her key, and locks it behind her again when she enters. Everyone is sat at the table running along the middle of the room, waiting for her arrival and keeping themselves occupied by occasionally glancing at the cameras, most of them now showing no one as they've all gone to bed. 

All four heads are turned to look at the doctor when she walks in. 

She's a very old woman of small stature with a naturally quiet voice, but she still holds an overwhelming sense of authority about her. It's something in the way that she holds herself, the way her eyes constantly scan her surroundings when she enters a new place, rarely settling on a single thing before switching to something else. Something in the way the flat heels of her shoes hit the squeaky-clean tiles as she moved around, the way her posture is that of someone who has spent years in the captivity of war. 

Nobody fears the woman, but in a way, they're also all at least a little terrified of her. She'd give her brisk instructions and then be on her way, and soon the four security guards would let go of a breath they couldn't recall holding. 

Tonight is no different. 

"We've got them all," she says. 

Her voice rings important and quiet still, but nobody responds for a moment. This statement makes them all seem a little unsure, though they knew that one day it would be coming. 

"The girl is the last one?" Sarah asks. 

She nods. 

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure," she replies, her voice a little louder than usual. 

"No, I mean, are you sure you want to..." 

Heather stares at her for a moment and says nothing. Sarah can't take back her question literally, but emotionally she's abandoned it altogether. She almost forgot that she'd asked it in the first place. 

Heather's eyes squint slightly before she replies, judging. Of course she was sure. 

"Initiate the lockdown."

Chapter Text

On December 1st, Button House hospital goes into lockdown. Restricted access rules were put in place for the gardens, the cafeteria and even the living room, and these rules also apply to all the staff. 

Robin switches to Humphrey's head not long after Dr Ritchie starts explaining the situation, and then turns back to Robin just minutes after, so she has to go over all of it all over again. Twice. Not that any of them understand a word she says the first time around, anyway.

She's told it's because England had gone into a coronavirus lockdown again, and although that was a whole month ago, it was better late than never. The patients are in no danger of passing anything on as they'll all be spending a long time here, but the doctors had to choose to either go home or live in the hospital for the time being. 

Ritchie herself wasn't that pleased about the situation. She's never slept there before, only staying with them from 6am to 9pm every day before retiring to her house for nine hours. Well, eight and a half hours; it was a fifteen minute drive. But now her stay has to be permenant. It's that or stay at home for a couple of months, and residing in her house wouldn't get enough money to support her during lockdown. In fact, it wouldn't get her any money at all. 

"Any questions?" she asks when she finishes, her throat actually hurting a little from all the talking. 

Mary puts her hand up slowly, a nervous look on her face. 

"Yes?"

"Can we still sees the frogs?" 

"No."

"Will they die?"

"No, they'll be fine. Yes, Captain?"

"How good will security be?"

"Everyone's on high alert from now on," she tells him. She then reflects on the question and promptly points at him. "So don't even try."

"I wasn't trying anything," he says quickly. "I was just... interested."

"Well, don't be. Thomas?" 

"Does this mean you'll be living with us?"

"Yeah, for the time being."

"Does this mean we could sleep in the same room?" 

"Next question. Julian?" 

"Is this about the cure?"

Dr Ritchie is taken aback for a moment. 

None of the patients believe that anything is wrong with them. They know that the doctors "think" they're delusional, but not once have any of them believed them. 

Whenever they're told of a possible cure, they dismiss that such a thing could exist, and some of them even keep forgetting what they are being told altogether. Most of them are more or less happy with who they think they are. They just wish that everyone would believe what it is that they're telling them. 

Despite all of that, it was a bit weird that Julian of all people would be asking this question. 

Out of all the patients, he seems like one of the most content with living the rest of his life - well, death - in Button House with only a golf game and some headphones to his name. Out of all the patients, he seems like one of the least likely to escape. Out of all the patients, he seems like one of the least likely to want to take a cure. 

The question caught the doctor off-guard for a good few seconds before she could come out with an answer. 

"What do you mean?" she asks him. 

"You'll trap us in here and make us take it. You'll pump it into our veins while we sleep or whatever, force-feed us our little happy ghost pills, right?" 

She sighs. "Wrong. No, this isn't about the cure. It's just about keeping everyone safe."

"We've seen you try before, so I just thought-"

"What?" Thomas interrupts, swiftly turning his head to Julian. 

"Yeah," Julian says to him. "You weren't there, though."

"What happened?"

Dr Ritchie pinches the bridge of her nose as the Captain takes up talking about it. The look on his face is saying that he couldn't wait for a chance to explain it all to somebody one day. 

"No, this was in, uh... good lord, it was all the way back in 2012. Only Julian, Mary and I were there at the time. Ever heard of electroconvulsive therapy?" 

"Don't-" she starts, but he ignores her and continues telling the story of Button House's original ghost syndrome cure plan. 

A few months after Mary arrived at the hospital, Heather Button granted the use of ECT under anesthesia on the patients, a method that is effective in the case of Cotard syndrome, a similar mental illness to the one the three of them were suffering with. 

None of them were up for it so it was a struggle to get them sedated. Julian wriggled like a child in a car seat and the Captain tried leaping up and stabbing one of the doctors with a syringe. He was held back by four people until he could be put under, and even then it took a while to pry the potential weapon from his clenched fist. Mary was the only one who didn't struggle, but she seemed visibly distressed whenever they took her into the room. 

The idea was to give them a short, mild seizure to rapidly gain and then reduce the electrical activity in their brains. This was supposed to reduce their memory loss and overall weaken the depth of their psychosis, but the treatment didn't exactly go to plan. 

When Mary woke up, she had a splitting headache and couldn't remember where she was for a while. Her head burned all throughout the therapy session that followed shortly afterwards and she barely said a word. 

When the Captain woke up, he couldn't remember who or where he was. This seemed to be a good sign until they realised that he still couldn't quite believe them when they referred to him as Ben. A few hours later, the effects wore off, and he was back to his usual state. 

When Julian woke up, the first thing he did was rip the IV tube out of his arm and the electrode pads from his head. The second thing he did was throw up all down the front of Dr Smith-Bynoe's shirt. A few hours later, he was sick again, but this time on his bedroom floor. 

As this was just the first time, they kept trying every week. But after just a few sessions, they realised that that method wasn't going to work at all. 

Mary became mute, the Captain would either back away from or start attacking everyone who went near him and it made Julian dangerously depressed. On top of all of that, none of them appeared to back out of their ghost identities so they had to stop anyway. It definitely did a lot more harm than good, and none of them ever forgot it. It took them a while to even trust the doctors again.

"I thought shock therapy was illegal," Pat says when the Captain finally shuts his mouth.

"It's not," Dr Ritchie says. "And he's making it sound way worse than it was. None of them were awake, and they couldn't even remember the seizure when they were. And it made Julian sick because he ate before it when we told him not to. Are there any more questions?"

"Did they really sedate you all day?" Thomas asks the Captain in disbelief. 

"Questions for me," she corrects him. "About the lockdown. The answer to that is no, by the way." 

"I have a question," Kitty pipes up, raising her hand. "What do we do now? I mean, we can't go outside or anything, so we'll be quite bored."

"What about the knitting club?" asks Pat.

"We cancelled that," Dr Ritchie says. "Four months ago. Remember the gloves incident?"

"Oh, yeah. What about book club then?" 

"I can't read," Mary says. 

"Neither can I," Jemima says. 

"Neither me," Robin says. 

"Book club just usually ends in a fight, for whatever reason," Dr Ritchie tells them. 

"But I'm in the mood for a fight sometimes," Thomas says. "Can't that be a club?" 

"I think it's best if we just give up on the clubs altogether."

She stops for a moment to check her watch, and the date shown in digital letters gives her an idea.

"Actually..." she says slowly. "All but one. Who wants to start a Christmas club?"

Chapter Text

As Christmas rapidly approaches, the only thing the patients have to keep themselves occupied is decorating. Ritchie and Smith-Bynoe had tried to spread out the tasks to last as many days as possible, but by the 15th they already ran out of things to do.

So in putting their plan into action, the patients are paired up for different jobs. This makes everything last much longer, which is actually a good thing for once. 

Pat and Kitty decorate the trees (one in the living room and another in the canteen), Robin and Thomas put up the lights, Fanny and Jemima arrange the other decorations, Julian and the Captain wrap every present that isn't their own, and the doctors and Mary make a start on the Christmas dinner. 

At first, the doctors aren't sure if Julian can keep the secrets of what presents everyone is receiving, so for the first few days they have him wrapping convincing fake ones. They give him a week while the Captain gets on with the real thing, and when he doesn't utter a word they give him the benefit of the doubt and let him start for real. 

Aside from Mary being startled by a small oven fire and Robin tying the lights around Thomas' neck and pretending to strangle him only for him to actually start choking and going blue in the face, spluttering out "you dick!" over and over again to a frozen-in-shock Robin until he manages to unravel them, everything goes fairly smoothly. 

Over the next few weeks, the hospital turns from bleak to colourful. Suddenly, with the reds, greens, yellows, blues, silvers and golds, you feel a sharp glint of excitement walking through the halls. The festive feeling kicks in every time they do something as simple as eating their lunch, staring at the not-so-neatly wrapped gifts under the tree and wondering what they are. 

By Christmas Eve, everything is ready for the next day. All that they need to do now is their Button House tradition: eat cookies and watch a Christmas movie in the living room without getting bored, sneaking off or starting any fights. 

This year, it's Julian's turn to pick which DVD they would order, but when it arrives and they turn it on it soon becomes obvious that it's a horror movie. It's called Better Watch Out, and on the cover one of the main characters is holding a knife. Really, Ritchie and Smith-Bynoe should have realised what they were in for a lot sooner. 

None of them really mind his choice other than Kitty, who is the kind of person to still believe in Santa and his reindeer. While everyone else watches, she and Jemima (who actually wants to watch the movie but isn't allowed to) are dragged away. Instead, they prepare milk, cookies and carrots for the supposed visitors before watching The Muppet Christmas Carol with Dr Ritchie in her makeshift bedroom. The puppets do scare Kitty a bit, but at least it isn't enough to give her nightmares.

Meanwhile, Dr Smith-Bynoe shares out the patients' cookies equally to avoid arguments, mostly those started by Robin. Once everyone is sitting comfortably, most of them now in their pyjamas, the movie begins. 

During a home invasion scene, Thomas is looked at curiously by the doctor. He seems unfazed, the only things to make him look uncomfortable being the gunshots. 

"Stop looking at me," he says bluntly at one point, not tearing his eyes away from the screen. He doesn't need to look to know what's happening; every patient had long since gained the ability to sense such a look without even glancing back at it. 

"Sorry," Dr Smith-Bynoe mutters back, but he doesn't really mean it. 

At the pair's words, a hundred shushes erupt from the remaining six people in the room, and the conversation is cut short. 

"It's getting to a good bit!" Julian hisses, which prompts another few angry whispers begging him to shut up. 

It's probably for the best; if Dr Smith-Bynoe so much as uttered another word, Thomas would start sighing and throwing himself around as he always does whenever he hears something he doesn't like. And then even more shushing would start up, everyone shushing each other every time the other made a noise and making it last for hours. It's happened before, and Dr Smith-Bynoe wouldn't put it past them to make it happen again. 

Most of them find the movie bearable, but it's only Julian that grins proudly at the ending scene and claps as the credits began to play. 

Mary had hidden behind her hands at any sign of danger and nearly jumped right off the sofa when a flash of lightning managed to strike during the silent build-up to a jumpscare. Pat, on the other hand, let out a high-pitched squeal of alarm just seconds later when the real scare occurred.

All the while, the Captain and Thomas simultaneously criticized the stupid decisions made by the characters. Multiple times they explained to anyone who would listen how they would do things... provided that they were armed with pistols and a grenade. Thomas didn't understand why the girl on the screen wouldn't follow their hushed instructions. 

The concept of TV is still odd to him as it was to the majority of the patients. He wishes the tiny people living in the screen would just listen to him for once, and maybe they wouldn't be getting themselves into those silly situations in the first place. 

When the movie is over, there's still a while before they all have to be in bed, so while some of them called it a night and wander away upstairs, others decide to stay awake for a few more hours. Namely: Julian, Fanny and Pat. 

Julian and Pat sit on either side of the small, round chess table and set up a game to play as they chat. Fanny watches them from the table, but whenever they look she quickly averts her gaze to the wall, pretending she isn't interested. 

"Word on the street is that Alison's got wine for tomorrow," Julian says, pushing a pawn forward. "And champagne, if we're lucky." 

"What street?" 

"It's a saying." 

"I knew that," Pat insists, putting one of his own white pawns into action. 

"Come on, at least pretend to be excited. When's the last time we were allowed to get wasted, hm? We're gonna get druuuuuunk!" 

"You already sound it," he replies, moving another piece when his turn is initiated. "I'm not that bothered about drinking. It's fun to get tipsy and all that, but I don't like being full-on drunk, I go all weepy. I'll get high enough on Pepsi, thanks. Besides, you know they won't let you drink drink. They never do." 

"So you're one of those kinds of drinkers," he sighs, choosing to ignore the end of the statement. "What about you, Lady B? You in the mood to get decimated?" 

"Not for me, thank you," she says dismissively. 

"What? You live your best life when you're badgered, when you're blathered, when you're buttoned! Hah! Get it? Buttoned?"

"How many synonyms for drunk have you got?" Pat asks. 

"Too many. I read a dictionary online the other day and I got a bit carried away." 

Fanny sighs at this. Julian turns to her with an eyebrow raised. 

"If you want to play, just say you want to play," he tells her, his eyes still glinting smugly. "You can play the winner." 

"I don't want to play," she says, pulling an expression that implies being disgusted by the very thought of it. 

"You don't know how to play, do you?"

"Well, no. But that's not the only reason why I don't want to. You know, my husband George-"

"Alright, alright, don't bore us with that," he mumbles quickly, turning back to the table to make another move. 

"Oh, don't worry, Fanny," Pat says, his expression softening a little. "My wife left me, you know. Cheated on me while I was still alive." 

"And no wonder she did," Julian laughs. "I've only spent five years with you and I've hated every second of it. I can't imagine being married to you. And the thought of doing... you, it just... makes me sick. And there's not a lot of people I can say that about." 

"Alright," he whispers. "That was uncalled for."

"But it wasn't, though, was it?" 

"Will you boys please stop arguing for once?" Fanny asks them exasperatedly. "You're like a couple of children. Not one bit of your constant bickering is necessary at all, I-" 

"Actually, Fanny," Julian interrupts, putting a hand up. "It is necessary. At the end of the day, it's all down to me and little Mr Butcher here. Remember knitting club?" 

"You know that wasn't me," Pat snaps.

"Do I?" he retorted. 

"Yes. You do. No one knows who it was. And I would never..."

"Whatever," he huffs. "I suppose you wouldn't really have the strength to do that anyway." 

The whole time the argument continued, they kept playing, but Pat was the only one who could concentrate both on playing Julian and snapping at him.

"Checkmate," he says, pointing at Julian's doomed king. He then swipes a hand across table, sending all the pieces flying. "Goodnight." 

He storms over to the door, and takes one last look back before sulking away out of sight. 

"And... merry Christmas Eve."

Chapter Text

Like a child, Kitty barely sleeps, only managing to keep her excited eyes closed for an hour or so before sitting up fast. And, like a child, she decides that she will do anything to get everyone else out of bed as fast as possible.

She creeps into the Captain's room first, because she knows he'll be one of the hardest to wake. When he won't stir with a few simple pokes and prods, it's easy enough to begin singing loudly, her pitch high and her tone off-key. 

"You can't be angry," she says quickly when he sits up. "It's Christmas!" 

"Christmas doesn't make me immune to frustration," he mutters. But he says nothing more, only grumbling further under his breath once Kitty leaves to let him get dressed. 

She wakes up Thomas next, making him jump and then pull a pained expression at her singing. Slowly, she passes by every single room and makes sure everyone is ready for the day ahead of them at the ripe old time of 6:30am. 

Pat and Robin are the only ones already up and excited when she knocks on their doors to check if they're dressing. 

The Captain is one of the least impressed. 

"I don't like Christmas," he says to Dr Ritchie as she hands his present to him. "Never have, never will. I've told you repeatedly, Alison; you know this. I don't even know why you bother giving us anything if you know we're all unable to give back." 

"Alright, Captain Grinch."

"What?" 

"Doesn't matter." 

His mood seems to change a bit when he unwraps the long, thin paper to see a black swagger stick, identical to the one he used while he was alive. He tries not to show any excitement, though. 

Mat would think this is a bittersweet morning, what with it also being his first anniversary at Button House and all. Luckily, Thomas can't fully remember the day he arrived, especially because he thinks that that day passed almost two hundred years ago. 

Though Thomas had also convinced himself that he wouldn't show as many signs of happiness as the others would, he can't help but crack a smile after unwrapping his present. It's a smooth leather-backed notebook with a thick velvet ribbon to use as a bookmark. Some of the pages at the back aren't lined, in case he wants to doodle as well as scribble over his bad poetry ideas. It comes with a fountain pen, the ink a thick, deep, blue when he first lets it spill out on one of the blank pages. 

He could have thrown his arms around Dr Ritchie and kissed her. He decides not to because 1. He knows she won't be the happiest about it, 2. The book and pen are also from Dr Smith-Bynoe and 3. He's under the impression that the two doctors are married. Though, usually, he thought he could find a way around that last point.

However, his brain's refusal didn't even upset him. He just comes out with a meaningful "thank you," and walks away to put the book in his room with a spring in his step. 

Fanny gets some sweet-smelling perfume to which she smiles gratefully, a pretty rare thing for her. In the box it comes in, there's also a sprig of mistletoe pressed at the back with cellotape. She leaves it where it is, uninterested, and tosses the box in the pile of wrappers to go in the bin. Seconds after she does this, Thomas quickly rips out the mistletoe and shoves it in his pocket for later. 

Kitty is given two friendship bracelets, one from each of the doctors. Overwhelmed with happiness, she thanks and hugs each of them in turn, and then puts them on her wrist along with the ones given to her last Christmas, and the Christmas before that, and the Christmas before that and so on. 

Robin gets a pocket telescope, and the second he tears off the paper he rushes over to the nearest window and eagerly looks out for the moon. The sky is still dark outside, but the moon can only be seen through a window facing the other way, not any of the ones in the cafeteria where they all are. 

Pat gets a miniature disco ball with a stand to go in his bedroom and be what he says is a "funky nightlight." When he first gets it out of the box, he cups it in his hands and stares at it, mesmerized, like it's a magical golden orb and not a small silver ball, staining his hands with glitter and not even turned on yet. When Dr Smith-Bynoe unboxes a proper, life-size ball to hang on the ceiling for a makeshift disco later that night, Pat puts his glittery hands to his face and squeals with excitement. 

Jemima gets a fluffy, pale pink cardigan. The sleeves are a bit too long but she doesn't seem to mind not having visible hands ninety percent of the time. Her "thank you" to the gift is mumbled and shy, but they know she means it. 

Julian had been a hard person to buy for. Whenever he was asked what he wanted, he'd either suggest something straight-up weird or simply shrug his shoulders and mutter a "you're the one buying it, figure it out." 

In the end they just settled on getting him a festive tie, which he actually likes. It's smooth and green with a Christmas tree design, and on every printed light there is a real glow that appears at the flick of a switch on the back. There is another switch that plays We Wish You a Merry Christmas, but he never uses that one after figuring out what it does. 

The last one to open their present is Mary. Hers is something special, something that can't be wrapped. When she told the doctors what she wanted, they originally didn't think it would work. But this year she wouldn't settle on anything else, and they couldn't think of anything either so they decided to give in. 

Dr Ritchie sneaks away while Robin, Pat and Julian's presents are being opened, then comes back in shortly after everyone is done and tells Mary to follow her. Out of curiosity, everyone else does, too. 

They end up outside Mary's bedroom door. Mary creaks it open and looks around for a few seconds before her eyes land on the new addition to the room. 

"It's my fish!" she shrieks, jumping up and down ecstatically for a moment. 

A large, spherical fish tank stands on her bedside table. A small metal treasure chest is resting at the bottom, fake gold coins bursting out of it. At the very bottom lies some blue gravel which the inhabitant of the tank is occasionally picking up in its mouth and promptly dropping again. A small Black Moor fish circles around the tank, staring around at its new surroundings with bulging golden eyes. 

Mary walks over to the tank and crouches down in front of it, watching her new pet for a few moments in silence. 

"He's the best fish I ever seens," she whispers. "I shall names him Gilbert." 

The pun is unintentional, but nobody knows that. 

"Nice," Julian says, high-fiving her. (Well, he raises his arm, but she doesn't really know what's going on so he guides her hand to his and then they both laugh, Mary's more of a confused little chuckle.) 

When everyone walks back through the halls, Thomas gives the mistletoe its first go, holding it above his and Dr Ritchie's heads and smiling at her. She looks at him, then at the mistletoe, then back at him... and then she rolls her eyes and carries on walking.

As everyone eats their breakfast and tries out using their new presents, Robin and Mary taking turns with the former's telescope as they marvel at Gilbert, Dr Ritchie recruits a few patients to help her and the other doctor finish arranging Christmas dinner in the cafeteria. With Pat, Thomas and Kitty's help, everything is ready by 1pm. 

Thomas tries for a kiss with Dr Ritchie again, but she just shoots him a look and carries on with what she was doing. Thomas doesn't like that look. It seems pitiful. 

Everyone is called in shortly after dinner's all dished out, and all of them take their seats and nearly immediately start tucking in. 

Without thinking twice, Pat sits down in the seat next to Julian. They seem to have made up already. Or at least they both get too caught up in Christmas spirit and forget about the argument in the first place. 

A few minutes into the meal, Dr Ritchie brings out both of her rumoured drinks, and Julian grins and claps his hands together like an excited little kid. 

All the while, they snap open their Christmas crackers with no particular routine, some of them snatching a third and fourth when they're only supposed to have two each. Though the jokes are bad, Kitty and Pat giggle at them together like they're the funniest things in the world. They repeat them many times over, laughing every time. 

Fanny doesn't put her winning cracker's paper hat on, but when Kitty reaches over and pushes it onto her head she doesn't protest.

"Hey!" Pat says proudly after a few moments of silent eating. "Look at me! I'm Johnny Three-Hats!" 

Everybody turns to look, and sure enough, Pat is wearing three red hats on his head, a smug smile on his face like they're crowns made of silver and not tissue paper. 

Robin bursts into hysterical laughter so loudly and suddenly that Mary jumps. 

"Johnny Three-Hats!" he repeats over and over again through gruff wheezes, slapping his leg hysterically. 

"Two can play that game," Julian mutters. 

He walks around the table and snatches every hat in sight, a deadly serious look on his face. Atop his mop of curly hair, he manages to balance nine hats, quickly introducing himself as Johnny Nine-Hats before over half of them fall off. 

This then turns into a competition of who could get the most hats on their head. Fanny refuse to play, shaking her head at the "spectacle", but everyone else does their best. Kitty gets six, Mary gets seven, Dr Ritchie gets five, Jemima gets four, the Captain gets ten and Robin only gets one because they keep falling from his head as he shakes with laughter. 

Dr Smith-Bynoe thinks he's won at first, giving himself the title of Johnny Twelve-Hats, but then Thomas gives it a go. In his attempt to impress Dr Ritchie, he manages to declare himself Johnny Fourteen-And-A-Half-Hats (one of them tore in half while he was trying to hold it in place). There's some debate over whether the half-hat as well as the three pulled down over his forehead count, but ultimately he's chosen as the winner. His prize, he convinces them, is an extra slice of Christmas pudding. 

"Gosh, that was fun," Kitty chuckles. "Can we do it with shoes now?"

"What?" asks Pat.

"I played it with my sister once. My record is one."  

"One pair?" 

"No, just one shoe. I lost the other one."

"Oh."

"It was very pretty, though."

Chapter Text

In the corner of the living room, there used to stand a grand piano. It was moved four years ago for safety reasons after Humphrey's body tripped, fell onto it and cracked his supposedly non-existent head open. 

Like every year before, Dr Ritchie calls everyone over to sing carols together. And like every year since the instrument was moved, they now do their singing in one of the empty rooms on the third floor. The echo makes everyone's synchronized voices sound a hint more angelic, which isn't really saying much because most of them can't sing well at all. Jemima is the only one who doesn't sing, but she sits on a stool close to everyone and watches the keys being pressed with somewhat happy eyes. 

They sing a total of ten songs as Dr Ritchie plays, ending on a fun note with The 12 Days of Christmas. Some of them had only heard the song a few times before, so don't know all the words, and whenever someone - usually Robin or Mary - messes up the lyrics in a weird way, they all burst into laughter. 

Needless to say, Thomas watches Dr Ritchie intently as she plays, and often sings various lyrics wrong just because he isn't paying attention to the music and instead to the woman playing it. 

He holds the mistletoe between them for the third time when it's over, but once again she just blanks him out and leaves to set up the disco ball. He sits still for a moment after she's gone, still raising his arm and fiddling with the stem in his fingers. Julian emerges a few moments later, and he kisses Thomas' cheek and runs off giggling sarcastically. This snaps Thomas out of his sadness, instead turning it to annoyance. 

Everyone then flocks to the cafeteria, eager for their party to begin. Most Button House Christmasses follow this exact routine, with the exception of Thomas' first day, which was a bit chaotic as him and the Captain started bickering the moment they saw each other. It escalated to the launching of the star from the top of the tree, which avoided Thomas' face by just a few inches, instead breaking through the window behind him and landing in the wet mud outside. If you look closely, you can still see some of the stains on it.  

Even on Christmas, they will never really stop hating each other. 

After Julian runs off, Thomas sighs and follows him. 

In the cafeteria, all the ghosts are helping to move tables into the storage cupboard, set up speakers and prepare a tray of snacks for when they get tired of dancing. Once the disco ball is hanging securely from the ceiling, they dim the lights to see how everything looks. The glittering lights, combined with the rainbow-coloured ones hanging along the walls and the little glowing sparks up on the tree, look magical. 

For once, Julian doesn't have his headphones on. He takes his iPod and finds some Christmas songs while Dr Ritchie peers over his shoulder and suggests all the classics. Last Christmas, Merry Christmas Everyone, Winter Wonderland, Jingle Bell Rock... you get the idea.

The songs are played on repeat through the speakers from the moment the carols are over to when everyone begins to wander off to their bedrooms six hours later. There's a fifteen-minute interval about half an hour into the music where the Captain wants to watch the Queen's speech, but other than that it's basically Button House's longest ever party. 

Pat is the first to start dancing, spinning in circles with his miniature disco ball under the light of the big one. Julian follows soon enough, joined by Mary and Kitty. Soon everyone is in the centre of the room, most dancing at least a little enthusiastically. 

This has the exception of the Captain, Thomas and Robin. The Captain because, although fairly happy, he's pretending to be in a mood. Thomas because he's actually in a mood, still holding a bit of a grudge over the lack of a kiss. Robin, because he isn't Robin anymore. 

He's in the process of switching to Nigel, but isn't quite there yet. He's sitting in the corner of the room, his face blank but his hands clutching the telescope like he thinks someone will snatch it from him. It usually takes him a few minutes, so everyone knows it's safe to leave him be. 

Both doctors are out of the room. Ritchie is getting drinks for everyone from the kitchen and Smith-Bynoe is in a meeting with Heather Button to talk through everybody's end-of-year mental health reports. It's very boring to him, so he thinks it best to get it out of the way quickly to reward himself afterwards. The reward being dancing around and singing along to Christmas songs like his life depends on it.

"I've had enough of this," Thomas decides, standing up. 

"Enough of what?" the Captain asks him. 

He gestures around at everyone. 

"People having fun?" he questions, furrowing his brow. 

"People having fun without me," he corrects him, and walks away. 

The thing is, he doesn't want to have fun. He likes being angry now, because he thinks he has good reason to be. 

He doesn't think he's obsessed with Dr Ritchie, he just loves her. But sometimes he doesn't know how to act around her in a way that doesn't come off as a bit unnerving. He decides that, instead of joining in with the fun, he's going to go and sulk in his room, maybe write out a depressing poem or two to vent. 

He bumps into Dr Ritchie on the way back. She's on her way back in, holding a tray of paper cups, all filled with orange or blackcurrant squash to try and ease the alcohol out of everyone's systems. The two of them stand either side of the doorway, and for a moment it's in silence. 

"Alison," Thomas finally says, putting on a fake surprise. He takes the mistletoe from his pocket and holds it between them once more. "Your reverse psychology isn't working on me," he tells her, smiling. 

"Do you even know what reverse psychology means?" she asks. 

Thomas doesn't reply.

"This isn't reverse psychology," she continues, "this is me telling you that I want you to stop following me around with that mistletoe before I confiscate it." 

"I'll stop following you when you kiss me," he says. 

The doctor raises an eyebrow in disbelief. 

"Forgive me, that sounded extremely predatory, let me try again. I just... please?" he whispers desperately. 

She sighs, but her face is amused. "Thomas-"

"You kissed Mike last year, I saw you both! And Julian kissed me!" he says. "Not- not properly," he follows up quickly. "He didn't- I'm not-" 

"That was a joke," she tells him. "And Julian's was too. I don't want... I would kiss you, Thomas, but not seriously. Not in a romantic way. You always interpret everything I say and do completely wrong, and I don't want you getting any funny ideas." 

"My feelings are a joke to you?"

"See what I mean?" 

"No," he says. "I don't see what you mean. I love you, Alison, and I'd give my own... death to make you see me in the way I see you. That's all that I want, truly. For you to think I'm more than the lonely ghost scratching around within these walls for the rest of eternity. Because that's what I am. More than that, I mean." 

And then Thomas gets his wish, only not exactly in the way that he was hoping. 

Dr Ritchie looks at him for a long, pondering moment. He can see the emotion in her eyes, and realises that it really is one of pity. She then sighs, leans in, and kisses him lightly on the cheek, her lips meeting his face directly under the leaves. 

After a moment of shock, wondering if that split second had even happened and wasn't just another of his many fantasies, Thomas can feel his face turning pink. He eagerly leans in towards her mouth, a smile forming on his own, but she puts her hand in his way. 

"Don't push it," she warns him.

She walks away, leaving him standing there with a hand to his heart, a huge smile plastered on his face. 

He doesn't care if she only did it because she feels bad for him, he doesn't care that it was only to cheer him up. After all, the latter worked perfectly. 

As she goes, All I Want for Christmas Is You begins playing from the speakers. Now, Thomas is in the mood to join in with the dancing. He even mutters along to the few words he knows as he glides around the room with a phantom partner. 

After Dr Ritchie keeps her eye on Nigel for a few minutes, she sees his eyes shift into focus and a look of recognition slowly makes its way to his face. 

"Nigel, yeah?" she asks him. 

"Yeah," he says. "What's happening?" 

"Well, today's-"

He looks around and gasps. "Christmas! Already? Did you get me anything?" 

"I got Robin a telescope," she says, gesturing to the tool in his hands. 

He looks down at it, just realising it's there. Though he doesn't really understand it, he cheerily examines it and thanks her profusely. As the party goes on, he looks around at everyone, none of whom notice him back, oblivious to him through their dancing. His eyes finally rest on Jemima, hunched up in a chair just a few metres from him and sipping blackcurrant squash. Since her arrival, he hadn't seen her at all. 

"Wait, who's she?" he asks curiously.

Jemima hears this and glances at him. She starts her usual little nursery rhyme as opposed to a reply, barely heard over the music. Nigel's eyes widen only a couple of lines into the song. 

"You died of the plague too!" he whispers, amazed. 

She nods. 

Just then, Dr Smith-Bynoe bursts into the room, the door slamming behind him. His eyes dart around the room frantically before settling on Dr Ritchie. 

"What's wrong?" she asks him loudly, walking closer so as to hear his reply. She starts getting closer to the door so they can have a quiet and private discussion, but he grabs her by the arm and shakes his head. 

"What?"

"Her name's not Heather Button," his voice calls over to her, as loud as it possibly can.

Though she's just inches away from him, it strains Dr Ritchie's ears to hear his words. Desperately, he holds up an unnamed paper-backed file. He's clutching it far too tightly. 

"It's Ania Marson," he yells.

"What?" 

"Dr Button. But... that's not her name, her real name is Ania Marson."

She takes a few moments to reply, looking into the distance and thinking, which is a hard thing to do with Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree buzzing in your ears. 

"Who's Ania Marson?" she questions eventually. "Why would she use a fake name?"

Dr Smith-Bynoe stays silent. He knows who Ania Marson is, and he knows why she'd use a fake name, but he no longer feels like he can speak. Now that he's said the words out loud, he feels like he's already said too much. 

Dr Ritchie squints in confusion at his expression and then leaves the room. A couple of minutes later, she emerges with a laptop. She flips it open as she walks across to the one remaining table in the corner and perches at it, pushing the drinks tray to one side and settling it in its place. 

When she frantically taps the keys, everyone stays silent. She's sort of glad about the music; it's distracting her from her confusion. 

What the tune can't do, however, is phase her sudden anger and worry that waves over her after just a few seconds of silent reading.  

By now, all eyes are on the two doctors, but no one makes any move to do anything, not even turn the music down or switch the lights back on. Dr Smith-Bynoe doesn't look at any of his audience, keeping his gaze fixed on the grey floor beneath him like it's the most interesting thing in the world. 

"Oh my God," Dr Ritchie mutters slowly. She then repeats it, louder, followed by a string of swear words that cause Pat to clamp his hands over the nearby Jemima's ears. 

"What is it?" Kitty asks. 

"She w-" She stops for a moment, gulps, mutters another curse under her breath and carries on. "She went into a coma after a car accident in 1952. She woke up two months later but went insane after that. She escaped hospital and hasn't been seen since. She... she was the first person diagnosed with ghost syndrome."

Chapter Text

Full Name: Ania Marson 

Age and D.O.B: 18 (22.05.49) 

Name of Believed Identity: Heather

Root of Trauma: car accident 

Year of Arrival at Higham House: 1952 

Other Info:

When Ania was three, she was in a car accident in the Surrey area, and taken to the nearest hospital. 

She woke up after being in a heavy coma for two months, and began showing symptoms of amnesia. Her symptoms were odd from the start. She had years and years worth of memories, but none of them were hers. Her symptoms were that of a young girl with a permenant identity disorder switch; she had convinced herself that she was a girl named Heather. 

She was quickly sent here, and we planned to keep her until we found a cure for her disorder, which is what we believe to be the first of its kind. We have nicknamed it "ghost syndrome", as when we asked Ania about Heather, she said that she was a ghost and died in the same year that the car accident took place. 

Shortly after Ania's eighteenth birthday, however, she escaped the hospital from the living room window after being left unattended. 

Her current whereabouts are unknown. 

***

"How- how did you get this?" Dr Ritchie chokes out. 

"She gave me all the files to look through, she must have put it in by mistake," Dr Smith-Bynoe replies, and then clamps a hand over his mouth, still pacing as he had been for the past few minutes. 

Christmas is cut short. 

Though the music keeps playing, blasting Do They Know It's Christmas? so loudly that the floor is thumping beneath their feet, it feels like there's been a loud, comical record scratch.

Dr Ritchie stands up and presses both palms to her forehead. When she opens her eyes again, something about the sight of the tree in front of her makes her lose her temper. "How did we not know?!" she shouts, kicking it.

It wobbles, but doesn't fall. A couple of the baubles break free from it, though, and shatter on the floor. 

Thomas flinches. 

"Alison, please, calm down," he says gently, moving forward and putting a hand on her shoulder. 

He slips his mistletoe back into his pocket, having previously been holding it throughout all his dances. Now wasn't a good time to try for another kiss, and he knew that. 

"It'll be okay," he tells her. "We can figure this out." 

"Shut up, Mathew!" she shouts.

He flinches again, sharper. 

"Thomas," Dr Ritchie quickly corrects herself. She falls back into her chair and puts her head in her hands. "I'm sorry. Jesus Christ. Julian, turn the music off." 

Julian stands up, but she quickly interrupts him. 

"Wait!" she says. "Don't! She'll hear us if you turn it off."

"But you told me to."

"I know, but don't."

"But you-"

"Just stop, okay?" she shouts, and Julian doesn't have the energy to do anything other than reluctantly shrink back into his seat. 

"1952," she mutters. "And she escaped in 1967. How can you hide for that long? That's fifty-three years with no one suspecting a thing." 

"I guess she never told anyone what her last name was," Dr Smith-Bynoe says, shrugging. "Escaped the hospital, ran away as far as she thought she could go, created a new identity for herself off the coast of Wales until she knew it was safe to come back. Nobody ever even recognised her." 

She looks at him. 

"There's some letters and stuff in this as well," he explains, nodding to the file. 

She stands up again and extends her hand. "Let me see," she says firmly, like she's expecting him to refuse. 

Without hesitation, he passes the slab of paper over to her, and she stands at the table and flips through the pages slowly while everyone crowds around her. 

"What an idiot," Dr Ritchie says gratefully, her smile expanding with every turning page. "She's basically just handed over her entire life story by accident. I would have worried about providing the police with evidence but this says literally everything about her. But why would she want to come back over here in the first place? Why would she want to govern the hospital she was placed in?" 

"For revenge?" Pat suggests. 

"On who?" Dr Smith-Bynoe asks him. "Most of the people who worked here when she was here are dead." 

"What the hell do we do?" Ritchie asks, her voice shrill and nervous. She buries her head in her hands while Thomas resists putting a comforting hand on her shoulder, in the fear of making her snap at him again. 

"I don't know," Smith-Bynoe says quietly. "Putting all of them in here, the lockdown... she's been planning this for ages, probably since she first came back. She must've waited until Jemima arrived, she must have known she was the last patient somehow." 

She looks up, tears threatening to spill from her eyes. 

"Wait," she says. "Planning what for ages?"  

"The cure."

"Wh-what? It's not curable, she knows that."

"Well, now she reckons it is." 

"She wants to cure us?" Kitty asks. "I didn't know we were ill. When does she want to do it?" 

"Next Sunday," he says quietly. "I don't know why, but it has to be Sunday. And I have a feeling that I don't like whatever she plans to do to you." 

"What is it that she plans to do?" Pat asks, his voice cracking. 

The Captain mumbles something. 

"What?"

"I think I know," he says, his tone still hesitant. 

All eyes are now fixed on him instead, and he clears his throat nervously. 

With the doctors' last words, he remembers the last time he spoke to Heather. As he quickly analyses this memory, he picks up clues in his head, little snippets of what might be the truth. It's a hard thing to do; now that he knows there was some kind of a motive involved, he doesn't know what cues she could have used and what each of them insinuated. 

"She grabbed my wrist when she spoke," he says, looking down at it. "I- I think that probably could have meant... something."

"Something like what?" 

There's a long moment of silence. Everyone's practically tuned out the music at this point, suddenly able to hear each other almost perfectly over it. Even though the room stays loud, none of them felt far from hearing their own blood pumping through their hearts. Dr Ritchie puts her head in her hands again. Those that understand say nothing, and those who don't have the same reaction. 

"Your cure is within reach, Ben," the Captain quotes after the few minutes of nothingness, twitching as his own voice echoes the name. "You just have to take it when the time comes." 

"I don't understand," Dr Ritchie says to him. "If she's agreeing with you, if she has what you have... why would she have called you Ben?"

"Because she said I'm trapped in his body," he replies. "We're all ghosts trapped in the bodies of humans who happen to look exactly like us. That's... her theory, I suppose. I thought it too, once." 

There are various murmurs of agreement, small buzzings of approval heard under the deep, loud hum of the continued music. Finally, one of them has the sense to reach over to the closest speaker and turn it down, but not by too much. 

It's now quiet enough to be able to hear yourself think but still too loud for the cameras to hear the conversations beyond it.

"I'll put the file back in her office," Dr Smith-Bynoe says, more to himself than anyone else. The original decision is silent, but he doesn't know if he can handle another period of silence. "She's out now, she wouldn't have noticed it missing."

"Wait," Dr Ritchie snaps as he heads towards the door. She has to repeat it twice before he turns around. 

"What?" 

Her reply doesn't even hold a hint of hesitation. 

"We need to go. All of us, including them. We need to get out of here." 

Chapter Text

It's two days after that bittersweet Christmas, and Humphrey is having a bit of an emergency therapy session himself. On Thursday, both him - well, Robin - and the Captain had missed their weekly session because of the preparations, so the second it was over, the new plans were made. 

His session is with Dr Heather Button herself, as Dr Smith-Bynoe came up with the excuse of wanting to keep an eye on the patients as opposed to talking to Humphrey himself. This was so the doctor could make an attempt with developing the escape plan a little further, and the excuse didn't raise suspicion at all. With a group of patients like the ones that they have, wanting constant supervision over them isn't exactly an outrageous desire. 

The thing that happened this session wasn't exactly anybody's fault. You could, obviously, point the finger at Nigel, but he didn't quite understand that what he had said was wrong. You could blame Dr Smith-Bynoe for not talking to Humphrey instead. You could blame Thomas for what happened following the situation. You could blame the Captain for accidentally making Thomas do what he did. 

But yes, if the events of that night were anybody's fault, the blame would mostly if not entirely rely on Thomas. 

Anyway, the usual "How are you?" "Any emotional ups or downs this week?" "How have you been getting along with everyone over the past few days?" "Any changes in interest?" "Anything else you want to talk to me about?" procedure was leisurely and steadily taking place throughout the twenty-minute slot. 

The entire time, Humphrey has to try and speak for four people, two of which he doesn't share the memories of and one of which doesn't have a head to store any memories in. The only person he has full control over is himself, and "full control" is a very bold choice of words once you remember that he doesn't think anything below his neck is supposed to exist. 

Despite this, he's still adamant with an often repeated phrase of his to her: "I'm fine." 

She has no physical reaction to these words, but he knows she's becoming frustrated with the repetition.

"So you're trying to tell me... what? You think you're sane?" Heather asks. 

There's an edge to her voice as she asks this, something sharper than usual. Maybe her act drops for a moment, but Humphrey can't seem to concentrate for long enough to make any kind of an assessment. 

"I don't think. I know," he replies quietly. 

He's surprised he has an answer to the question. He can barely pay attention now; he feels like he's fighting to stay awake. Looking away, staring into the distance, zoning out, dissociating... 

"Larry, if you're sane, then my name isn't Heather."

Nigel closes his eyes for a few seconds, and then stares right back at her. "But it isn't, is it?" he snaps.  

Silence. 

Heather raises an eyebrow. "What did you say?" 

He can realise his mistake now and back out of it, saying he misspoke in the midst of confusion. He can blame his words on himself, jump out of Humphrey's wheelchair and get out of there as fast as he can. He can pretend it was all some weird joke. 

He can also not do this. 

Nigel rolls his eyes. "I said, it isn't your name. Anna something, isn't it? Wait, no, it's Ania, isn't..."

But then it clicks.

"... Oh, Christ." 

***

"She knows!" he shouts, bursting into the living room. 

The room had been oddly quiet before this. Nobody was able to find a reasonable conversation to hold onto, so the entry of the plague ghost causes everyone to immediately look away from whatever they're doing and instead at him. This is more interesting, they know, but they'll come to wish it really, really isn't. 

Dr Ritchie is the first to process what he says. Though she has a sinking feeling in her stomach that says she already understands what he means, she asks for confirmation with the hope that he's talking about something else entirely. 

"What? What are you on about?" she asks, standing up. 

"She knows that we know..." He gulps. "... About her."

Dr Ritchie shuts her mouth tight and closes her eyes for a moment, holding herself back from saying something like "fuck," which would just cause everyone to panic. 

"Okay," she says simply, using her best, calmest therapist voice. She wants to stay sensible, but her head is already beginning to spin. "That's.. not okay, but... How does she know?" 

"I told her."

"You did what?!" Julian shouts. 

"I- I didn't mean to!" Nigel protests, looking over to him. "It just sort of... slipped out." 

He keeps on looking around the room, not daring to keep his eyes on a single person for more than a milisecond. He wishes he could be literally anywhere but in that room. Not just because he's in a high-security mental facility with seven fellow lunatics and two confusing doctors, but because he's in a high-security mental facility with seven fellow lunatics, two confusing doctors and an eighth lunatic who wants to terminate them all simply for existing. 

Not only that, but he's also just thrown everyone and what little they had of a plan under the bus. An old, dead, psychotic bus. 

Thomas is practically shaking with anger. "What is wrong with you?!" he screams, making all the attention instead turn to him.

If looks could kill, Nigel definitely would have exploded by now. 

"I didn't know she was going to... I forgot I wasn't supposed to tell!" he shouts helplessly. "I'm sorry!"

He's never seen the other man in a state like this before, so he's already nervous about what could happen in the following minutes. Hours, even. 

"I don't think sorry's gonna cut it, mate," Pat mutters. 

"Pat's right!" Thomas announces. "For once. Clearly Nigel is a danger to all of us. I suggest we offer him up to Dr Button and escape while everybody's occupied with his insanity." 

"Wh-what?" Nigel asks. 

"Of course we're not going to do that," Dr Ritchie sighs, shooting a glare to Thomas with an equal chance of murder. 

"Whyever not?" he protests, walking up to her. "If a secret as big as that can just slip out, maybe you shouldn't have left him alone with her. Surely after this many years, you'd know better."

"So you're blaming us now?" Dr Smith-Bynoe demands. 

"Naturally. You practically own this place. Nigel, Robin and Humphrey are all three of your earliest 'patients', so you should have known not to leave whoever it was alone with that sociopath. He's a hazard, they all are." 

Nigel takes a few steps back while the other man is briefly distracted, his mouth dry and heart pounding. Usually, Thomas doesn't come off as intimidating to him, not as much as simply arrogant. But now he's genuinely getting scared of him, already fighting the urge to leg it back to his bedroom. 

"Nigel didn't know what he was doing," Dr Ritchie explains, reverting back to sensibility. Her voice is so slow, so forcibly calm, that you'd immediately get the impression that she's trying to talk a child out of a temper tantrum. 

"Didn't know what he was doing?!" Thomas splutters. "All the more reason to get rid of him! This wazzock's going to get us all killed! Again!" 

"If you die again, it'll be your fault. Just like last time," Nigel snaps, then immediately regrets it. 

Thomas stands still for a minute, his head tilted slightly to one side and his eyes burning into Nigel's. The room is devoid of any noise, nobody moving a muscle. No one even dares to breathe, unsure whether to stand aside or intervene or to do anything at all. Button House is no danger to a fight, but this is different. Violence, of course, is never the answer, but this time it's a bit harder to decide who to root for. 

Then Thomas jumps forward and Nigel shrieks in terror, and all hell breaks loose. 

One man chases the other around the room, eventually catching and attacking him when he trips over the chess table and knocks the pieces across the carpet. Mary gasps, Kitty cries, Pat claims he can't look despite keeping his wide eyes on everything, Fanny mutters disapprovingly, Jemima sits still with an almost amused expression and Julian, however concerned, immediately starts up an isolated chant of "Fight! Fight! Fight!", though the entire confrontation is very much a one-way thing. 

Even the doctors are almost at a loss with how to react. Obviously they need to tear up the fight, but with a relatively small room full of patients reacting in vastly different ways, many cameras monitored by Heather herself watching their every move and a floor scattered with pawns and bishops and rooks, it's a lot harder than you'd think. 

"Thomas!" Dr Ritchie shouts as her and her partner struggle to get to them, but for once her voice doesn't faze him.

"Someone stop him!" Kitty wails, covering her eyes with her hands. 

Nigel doesn't fight back; he doesn't know how. He's grateful when he's pulled away protectively by Dr Smith-Bynoe while practically everyone else makes an attempt to push Thomas away. Somehow it's taking Mary, Pat, Julian and Dr Ritchie to keep him restrained, and still he protests and flails dangerously. After one final break free and another lunge at Nigel, Thomas is stopped. 

This is because the Captain swings the plastic chess board at the back of his head so hard that it knocks him out on impact. 

"He's down," he announces. 

He sees everyone staring at him, wide-eyed and gaping. He shakes his head in genuine confusion, and then freezes, as if the realization of what he just did suddenly dawns on him. 

"Oh. Sorry." 

Dr Ritchie puts a hand to her forehead and takes one long, deep, exasperated breath. 

"I'll let it slide this time," she decides. "Since Christmas, he's been completely unhinged. Well, more completely unhinged than usual." 

Smith-Bynoe pulls Thomas up from his still, unconscious position, and makes his way out of the door to carry him back to his room. There's a small, thin puddle of blood staining the floor where his head lay. The Captain drops the chess board over the stain, covering it completely, before talking. 

"So..." he begins. 

Pat manages to say the same word at the same time with the same low speed, but he doesn't have it in him to say "jinx" like he usually would. He just closes his mouth again and looks away. 

Neither of these "so"s actually lead to a complete statement. The entire room still seems to be in shock. Even Julian, who pretends to recline nonchalantly on the sofa, looks distant and perplexed. 

At the second loss with what to do next, they all look at Dr Ritchie expectantly. She feels all the eyes on her despite keeping her own gaze fixed on the floor, a fresh pool of blood from Nigel's nose. As all this is happening, Nigel himself sits against the wall with the back of his hand pressed to his forehead, occasionally making a few noises half-way between a choke and a sob. A few go to help him up or to wipe the blood, but he dismisses every offer and sits alone, praying his nose isn't throbbing because it's broken. 

Dr Ritchie doesn't need to glance at him to understand the severity of what happened. It's like some sort of a switch has been flicked, and she doesn't know if it's fogged her brain or helped her think a hundred times clearer. This confusion is confirmed by what she says next, shortly after a further silence in which she bites her lip and tries not to cry out of frustration.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but..." She sighs. "About the plan. We need one of you to take over." 

Chapter Text

"What if he comes back?" Nigel asks shakily. 

Usually, Nigel is laid-back, friendly and funny, but tonight he looks vulnerable and broken. Literally. After giving in to the fact that he needed help, he'd been fetched a bandage for his sprained wrist and two ice packs; one for his nose and one for his burning forehead. He'd also struggled into a clean checked shirt, as the hoodie he'd been wearing before was now decorated with the blood from his nose. 

The ice packs are being held by Fanny and Pat, and Kitty holds his non-painful hand worriedly as he stares at the wall with no expression. 

Meanwhile, Dr Ritchie gets Jemima, the Captain, Mary and Julian to help clean up the mess. Jemima and the Captain put back any moved or toppled furniture, Mary carefully sets the chess pieces back up on the board (in the completely wrong order, of course), and Julian mops away the blood, attempting to drown out the situation under his headphones. 

"He won't come back," Dr Ritchie reassures Nigel, crouching down next to him. "I promise he won't. He's being taken back to his room and we won't let him out until tomorrow, at least. And if he does come back, I won't let him hurt you. I won't even let him in the same room as you, not if you don't want him to be." 

Nigel stays silent, still breathing deeply from the shock of Thomas' outburst. He's had his nose checked and it isn't broken, just badly bruised. It still feels like someone has punched it into oblivion, however... probably because it had. All it takes is a breath too sharp for him to clench his jaw in pain.  

"Are you sure you're okay?" Dr Ritchie questions. 

He doesn't reply.

"Alright, stupid question, I know. But you know what I mean. We might have to transfer you to a different hospital if you can't even breathe normally."

Julian picks up on her words and pauses his music, putting his headphones at a jaunty angle on his head. "Yeah, Tom really went all Tyson on him, didn't he?" 

"Except Nigel was a punching bag, not an opponent," Pat pipes up, then considers. "Too soon? But hey, that's an idea. If Nigel does need to be transferred, that's a way for him to get out, isn't it?" 

"What about the rest of you?" Dr Ritchie replies.

"Well, what if we kept getting into fights? Let Thomas loose on us all?" 

"I think they'd start to get suspicious at that point, Pat," she laughs. "And it's a bit unfair to Thomas to do that to him. We're trying to help you here, remember? I'm not starting some underground mental patient boxing ring. You'll be fine, won't you, Nige?" 

Nigel doesn't even make it obvious that he heard her words. He hasn't so much as glanced at anyone since his initial question, which concerns her. 

"This is still Nigel, isn't it?" she asks in a softer voice, putting a hand on his shoulder.

He shrugs it away aggressively.

"Of course it is," he snaps, still not making eye contact. "I just don't want to talk right now. Can you all leave me alone, please? I want to go to sleep." 

"Are you dizzy?" Dr Ritchie questions. 

"No. Just tired."

"Well... alright, then."

"Thanks," he mutters.

With those words, he struggles to his feet with the help of Pat and hobbles out of the room, taking both ice packs with him. 

They all stare after him for a long, pitiful moment, but then Dr Ritchie speaks up. 

"It's been two days," she says, looking around at the others, "and we've got nothing. We still need a plan."

"Of course," Julian says. 

"Of course," she copies. "And it's probably best if I come up with it."

"Didn't you literally just say you need one of us to take over?" he replies. "Or have you gone back on that?"

"Look, I don't know," she says. "I wasn't really thinking then, I was too... Thomas. I'm starting to think it really is safer if Dr Smith-Bynoe and I are the brains here. Especially after what's happened, I'm not sure if I can trust any of you with something as big as this. No offence." 

"None take-" Pat begins, but gets cut off. 

"But you've never escaped before," the Captain points out to her. 

"Neither have you."

"I've tried," he says defiantly. "More than anyone, in fact."

"Yeah, that's not an achievement."

"Well, it's better than nothing." 

She pinches the bridge of her nose. "Yes, I know that," she stresses, "but you're not supposed to even try. Part of my job is getting in and out of this hospital. If we can come up with a good enough excuse, we won't need to escape at all. They'll just let us out." 

"Well go ahead, then," he shrugs. "Come on. Come up with something, woman. We're all ears." 

"That's no way to speak to a lady," Fanny scolds. 

"Shut up, Fanny!"

Dr Ritchie can't even tell him off. She just shrugs and shakes her head at his suggestion of an idea, and there's a short silence. 

Pat nods in the Captain's direction. 

"He's right, you know," he says to Dr Ritchie. "About the plan. I mean, he is a captain after all. Plus he's had the most success with escaping. Or trying to escape, anyway. If you're still alright with one of us coming up with the plan, I vote Cap." 

"Ditto," Julian says. 

"Me too," Kitty says.

"And me," Mary says. 

Everybody, including the Captain himself but excluding the still-shocked Fanny, agrees with Pat's words. They all look at Dr Ritchie expectantly. 

"Honestly..." she begins, and pauses for a moment.

Like she said, over the past couple of days, they'd tried for a plan, but nothing seemed to click. There were a few good ideas thrown around, but there was always something stopping it from going smoothly. Most of the problems involved the fact that there were cameras watching their every move in most of the rooms, so even while planning they had to put some music on and lower their voices to whispers. 

Even Dr Smith-Bynoe's simple suggestion of calling the authorities, they realised, was out of the question. No matter what Dr Ritchie had excitedly said when she first laid eyes on the file, they knew it wouldn't truly work. Especially if they were in Button House while making the calls, Heather could easily deny them, and even with the documents they had no real evidence that Ania was Heather. It wasn't exactly a rare name, and it's not like it's hard to print out a fake document or fifty.

Ritchie locks her contemplating blue eyes with the Captain's squinting grey ones. He's trying to calculate what her answer will be before she thinks of it. His face looks like that of a confused puppy, turning its head and twitching its nose in an excited hopefulness. 

"Yeah," she decides bluntly. "Alright, I see Pat's point. I'll be keeping a very close eye on you but... you do have the most escape experience. You've got the closest anyone has ever been to the highway."

"Knew it!" he says triumphantly, raising and clenching his fist in glory.

Julian nods to the doctor. "He's like the Houdini of nutjobs," he says approvingly. 

"Sorry, the what of... what now?" Captain asks him. 

"You don't know who Houdini is?" 

He stares back at him blankly. 

"He's the man who escaped all those contraptions, you know?" Julian explains. "He was this performer in a freak show, and they'd put chains on him and stuff, that kind of thing. He was known for being able to escape literally every trap he was put in, hence me calling you the Houdini of nutjobs. A nutjob is just another word for a crazy person. I can't believe you-"

"Is this... really important?" Dr Ritchie interrupts him questioningly. 

"No," he mumbles. "Sorry." 

She raises her eyebrows at this apology but says nothing.

Suddenly, the door to the living room opens and Nigel emerges again, looking embarrassed. 

"I think I am a bit dizzy, actually," he says hesitantly. "I can't remember where my bedroom is. I... I don't even know what floor the bedrooms are on." 

"I can show him," Kitty offers, but Dr Ritchie shakes her head.

"Thanks, Kitty, but I'd better help instead," she tells her. "I need to go and check up on Dr Smith-Bynoe anyway; him and Thomas have been gone for a while now."

And with that, Dr Ritchie leaves to help the mildly concussed plague ghost find his way upstairs. 

"Does your nose feel any better now?" she asks as the door closes behind them. 

"Mustn't grumble," Nigel shrugs. "But if I must, then it stings like hell." 

"What about your head?" 

"Again, painful. Still, can't be as bad as the plague, right?" 

"Yeah," she laughs, though it's impossible for her to relate. "Look, I'm really sorry for what happened with Thomas. I should've known he'd panic about something like this. Panic being a loose term. I know his life's on the line here but... Christ. Whatever happens, just promise me you won't blame yourself, okay?" 

"Yeah. But nothing's gonna happen, is it?" 

"No, yeah, don't worry," she says quickly. "I don't know why I said that." 

As they go down the corridor and up the stairs, she thinks over her own words and scares herself with them. Of course she knows how serious it is now that Heather knows about their discovery, but she'd been too occupied with preventing Nigel's second death that she hadn't been able to truly think about it until now. 

His life's on the line.

Scary. 

What's scarier is the fact that when they reach the top of the stairs, they find Thomas sitting against the wall in the corridor alone, the lights not yet turned on and a cold breeze filling the air. He looks like he's in denial about something, eyes on the verge of crying and a mouth on the verge of speaking some stunned, half-finished sentence. 

"Nigel, you go ahead," Dr Ritchie says, making a dismissive motion with her hand. "Yours is that one on the end, opposite Fanny's." 

She's never seen Thomas like this before, even on his bad days. He usually has a similar reaction to the Captain when upset - covering the emotion up with more anger and sarcasm than usual - so to see him actually looking like he's about to cry is worrying. She doesn't want Nigel to be near Thomas when he's like this, regardless of whether he's just been viciously attacked by him or not. She'd even ask someone like herself to stay away. 

But because she's the only one around, she has no choice but to stand warily near him and begin asking questions. 

"Hi, Thomas," she says calmly, though on the inside she wants to run away as fast as she can. "What are you doing down there?" 

He doesn't reply. It's like Nigel all over again, only this time she can't predict any of his reactions. 

"Thomas," she says again. "Are you alright?" 

He doesn't even look at her.

"Where's Dr Smith-Bynoe?" 

Nothing. 

"Where's Dr Smith-Bynoe?" Dr Ritchie repeats, searching his face for any kind of a reaction. 

This repetition seems to earn some kind of a response from the mute Thomas. He still doesn't give a verbal reply, but he flinches slightly at the name. He then moves his arms, which makes her jump, but it's only so he can put his head in his hands helplessly. 

She waits a few seconds, then tries again. 

"Thomas, where's..." She gives in. "Where's Mike?" 

"Outside," he replies out of the blue. 

He sounds like it's paining him to talk, like he's trying as hard as he can to get his point across without raising his voice.

"Outside?" she echoes. "Why?"

It's before Thomas answers that she realises why there's a breeze. 

When she takes a quick look down the corridor to check if, for some reason, Dr Smith-Bynoe is standing at the end of it and watching their conversation unfold in silence, she sees a shard of glass on the floor. Then another, then another. Then only a few more, because when she sees the window it's obvious that the large shattered hole in the middle has been made from the inside. 

Thomas sighs. "I pushed him out the window."

Chapter Text

"He pushed him out the window?" Julian asks in disbelief, a shocked smile plastered on his face. "Usually that's the sort of stunt I'd pull. Haven't you learned your lesson from knitting club about not installing thick glass?"

"But is he alright?" Kitty asks fearfully.

"He's perfectly fine," Dr Ritchie assures her. "He sort of... hit the bushes on the way down, so that- stop laughing, Julian- that broke his fall. It was from the third floor, so... He could've died." 

"Please stop talking about this," Fanny pleads. "I'm getting quite literally sick of it." 

For once she looks timid, sitting stiffly on the opposite side of the sofa to Julian, who's slumped back as usual with I Want To Break Free by Queen playing quietly from his headphones around his neck. And she truly looks ill, pale and sweaty with her eyes glinting with the flashbacks of her own similar "death."

"Oh, God, not this again," Julain sighs. "We get it, Fanny, okay? We get it. We know you were pushed, we know it puts you in a tizzy, we know you haven't felt a man's touch in over a century. But stop taking all that pent-up bitchiness out on us for once."

"Julian!" Dr Ritchie shouts. 

He shakes his head, shutting his eyes. "Not even sorry."

"Do you think it was the chess board that did it?" Pat asks bitterly, shooting the Captain an accusing look. "Y'know, interfered with his brain and whatnot?" 

"I highly doubt it," Dr Ritchie replies. "If it was the chess board, he wouldn't... I just don't understand how he was suddenly conscious and aware enough to do that. I honestly don't know what to do with him at this point. I don't think I can trust him to be around the rest of you after what happened with Nigel alone. And I can't keep him in isolation forever. I think we'll just keep him in there for, I don't know, a week? And see how he's getting on? Do you think that'll be okay?" 

"Why are you asking us?"

"I don't know. I just..." 

She sighs and leans back against the wall, putting her head in her hands. Pushing somebody out a window doesn't seem like too bad of an idea to her now. Or better yet, jumping out of one herself. 

Fourteen years, she's been working in Button House. Fourteen years. She was transferred not long after the first of the current patients was admitted, and she's been putting up with his and everybody else's bullshit ever since. They're just her patients, that's all they are, but she can't help but realise quite how fond she's grown of them all. 

Which is why she feels so strongly that she's let them all down. She's supposed to be helping these people, curing them, even, but there's a fat chance of that happening now. 

"I just hope he's okay," she whispers. 

"Who? Mike or Thomas?" Julian replies jokingly, but she meets him with a look of guilt. 

"Both." 

***

Ah, yes. 

The Isolation Room. 

He'd narrate a lengthy ballad about it if he didn't feel so absent.

Apart from Kitty and Jemima, he's the only one who's never been here before (there was a partially accidental yet pretty bloody fight between Pat and Mary on the latter's death day). He already hates it.

Upon his arrival in the cellar, after a lot of struggling and attempted restrainment, he's shoved into the Isolation Room alone and locked in. Really, he's in a regular room, but what he feels as he's shut inside is the hands of the security guards pushing him into the darkness, letting him fall endlessly in the nothingness. 

Then he opens his eyes and looks around briefly, seeing it all for real. It's a smallish rectangular room with a grey floor, grey walls and a patchy white ceiling lit up with a single bulb. A bed, a chair and an almost equally empty bathroom he's only allowed access to at specific times. It's something of a baby-proof jail cell, he thinks.  

Is this really where they think he belongs? Has he sunk this low? 

In protest, he walks right back up to the door and starts slamming his hands on it repeatedly, screaming such a long list of desperate pleas that when he stops he knows they've long stopped making sense. There's no window on the door, so he can only pray he's deeply aggravating whoever's on the other side. But when a few minutes pass and his throat and hands are sore and he hasn't heard anybody so much as breathe on the other side, he gives up on this tactic. 

Instead, he crosses the room to the back wall, as far away from the door as he can get without becoming one with the flaking paint, and he clenches his fist and punches the wall ahead of him. 

He wasn't ready. 

He's punched a wall before - hasn't every ghost, at this point? - but never one that was so hard. Every other wall in the building is thin and hollowish, not enough to make dents but enough so it doesn't hurt. Yeah, your knuckles would go pink and maybe leave a light bruise, but nothing like this. 

He immediately cries out and then hisses in pain, clutching his fist with his non-painful hand. His fingers are burning, and when he carefully removes his cupped hand over the injured one he's surprised he can't see the bones sticking straight through his skin. 

When the pain ceases enough for him to concentrate, he takes a deep breath and punches it again. And again. And again. And again. Again and again and again, over and over and over, colliding both fists with the wall on repeat until he's beating the shit out of it with his bare knuckles as if it's somehow its fault.

He suspects he's broken something by now, but he's beyond caring. Nothing can stop him now. 

Nothing, of course, but her. 

He hears footsteps approaching the door. Alison's footsteps. He recognises the pattern. Not in a creepy way. It's just that if you have two people following you around in the same old building and watching your every move for over a year, you're bound to learn what sound comes before their arrival.

"Visitor," her voice says on the other side of the door.

He doesn't perk up as much as he'd expected he would, but he still takes a step back from the wall. 

"Tell Pat I'm not interested," he calls. 

"It's not Pat." 

"Then who is it?"

"Me."

In the few seconds before the door is unlocked, Thomas realises what a mess he looks. His knuckles are badly grazed and bleeding, blood trickling all the way down to his wrists. His hair is messy and tangled from the fight, and when he looks down he realises that an impressive amount of the blood from Nigel's nose has somehow spilled down the front of his shirt. 

When Dr Ritchie turns her back to him so she can close the door behind her, she looks wary about doing it. It's then that a tear finally escapes Thomas' eye, but he quickly wipes it away before the doctor is facing him. He then sits on the metal bed and folds his arms so both of his hands are hidden, praying the blood doesn't trickle into her eyesight. 

There's a moment in which the two simply stare at each other, but Thomas surprises himself by becoming the first to speak. The words that come from his mouth shock him even further. 

"Did he survive?" he asks. 

Dr Ritchie looks surprised, too. 

"He's fine," she reassures him. "Concussed and aching, but fine." 

Thomas nods slowly, switching his gaze to the wall and biting the inside of his cheek. "Then send him my apologies," he whispers, half-hoping she won't hear the request. 

She hums. He isn't sure what that means.

"You must think me a monster," he says matter-of-factly, not able to meet her eye again. 

She shakes her head, furrowing her brow. "Honestly, Thomas, I don't know what to think of you. I don't even know if I should." 

"You pity me," he continues, in a voice like he'd just discovered a big secret she'd been hiding. "Look at the debilitated poet, she thinks. Since when did he become a homicidal sociopath?" 

"You're not a homicidal sociopath," she sighs. "I hope you aren't, anyway." 

Cautiously, she walks towards him, like he's an animal ready to pounce. He thought he'd hate this kind of treatment like usual, but now he finds it strangely comforting. He doesn't want her scared of him, but rather knowing what he's capable of. 

Which is why he then slowly removes his beaten, bloody hands from where they were hidden and instead rests them over his knees, wincing as the fabric of his shirt briefly sticks to his torn knuckles. 

Dr Ritchie gapes at his hands and then his face like he's just presented a corpse to her. He gives a weak smile at the sight of her stunned expression, but isn't amused by the situation itself in the slightest. He's already wishing he'd left them hidden, or better yet, not used the wall as a punching bag in the first place. 

"Why, Thomas?"

She was talking about his hands, but when he accidentally holds her gaze and looks away uncomfortably, the mood vastly changes. Thomas swallows and answers a different question. 

"It was a mistake," he insists. "I thought he was going to hurt me."

"Why?" 

"I had a... I had a thing." 

"A thing?" she parrots. "What thing?" 

He brings his broken hands to his face for a few silent seconds. 

"You'd call it a flashback," he says eventually, sounding defeated. 

"Is that what Nigel was about?" she asks, almost sarcastically. "Did you flashback then, too?" 

"Aren't you supposed to be sympathetic?"

"Aren't you supposed to be romantic?" 

She regrets this the moment she says it, immediately realising she's gone too far. She's been pushed to the limit, and now she's pushed her patient with her. She expects to be attacked, or at the very least shouted at, but Thomas stays silent and still.

He hides his hands again, and this time he can't stop the tears. He pretends not to notice as he cries, and Dr Ritchie does the same out of caution. 

"The silence, Alison, it's killing me," he says bitterly, his voice cracking. "Not just here. Up there. I've been in this blasted facility for over a year now. Do you think this is helping me? Curing me of whatever sickness you think I've contracted? I have told you time and time again, I am not the man they call Mathew. I was always Thomas Thorne, I am Thomas Thorne, and I will always be Thomas Thorne. When Mathew's wife and children visited me, when I sat opposite them and looked directly into their eyes, do you know what I felt? Absolutely nothing, Alison, absolutely nothing. I don't know those people, and I'm not even sure if I wish I did."

When the doctor stays silent, still mulling over the previous statement and sudden change in subject, he carries on. His voice becomes more broken, his tears heavier, and he's not even sure if he's making complete sense or not. 

"I don't want to die," he sobs. "Not again. I shouldn't have even died the first time. I'm so... tired of being dead. I'm tired of being nothing. Why can't I just move on to the afterlife? Why this?" 

Dr Ritchie opens her mouth to reply, nearly in tears herself.

This wasn't him. Despite how typical of a poet he seems, he always keeps the things that really matter close to his heart. He doesn't really know this himself, obviously, he's denied many times that he even has emotions to hide. Everything that he holds dear ("everything" meaning "Alison" nine times out of ten) is already out in the open, according to him. 

But today is different. Today, he's truly out of control. Today, he's scared. Today, he's realising that he might have a true physical form to be destroyed. This is the chip in his false identity that Button House always wanted him to have, only it's happening in a way that leaves an ache of desperation in Charlotte Ritchie's heart.

She makes her decision. She doesn't care what anyone might say about it. 

"I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, okay, Thomas? I'll get you out of here." 

Thomas' big dark eyes go from depressed to stunned within miliseconds. 

"You're still taking me with you?" he asks in shock, his voice dropping to a whisper. "After all I've done?"

She gives him a soft, solemn nod. "You still matter, Thomas, you demented bastard. Of course you're still coming. I can't leave you."

Chapter Text

"Sorry for the weird meeting place," Dr Ritchie says to everyone. "We just needed somewhere where they wouldn't be able to see us." 

Everyone is crowded together in the women's bathroom on the third floor. None of them have been allowed access to that floor since lockdown began; this became where the doctors slept. 

The doctors are standing and resisting the urge to pace, Pat and Kitty are sitting on the counter beside the sinks and swinging their legs with boredom, Julian is staring at himself in the mirror blankly and everyone else is sitting on the cold floor, most hugging their knees with their chins on their chests. They just got in here, but they feel like they've been sat there for hours already. 

"Won't they have seen us all filing in?" the Captain questions. 

"They don't have cameras on this floor," Dr Ritchie explains.

"Why not?"

"Because I told them not to."

"Could you tell them not to have them by the exits?"

"No."

"Why not?" he asks, a smile twitching at his mouth. 

The doctor ignores him, but he knows that he doesn't actually need a verbal answer to that. The look in Ritchie's eyes, oblivious to the Captain's sarcasm, says it all. 

The rain hits the windowsills outside at top speed, marking patterns that are barely seen through the frosted glass. It provides a white noise for them all, which is really what they need. After that long night of the same twenty-two Christmas songs on repeat, they decide they'll never take silence for granted in the same way again.

Dr Smith-Bynoe, however, would be somewhat relieved by another Christmas party after the nothingness that he's experienced over the past twelve hours. He spent it all in a bed in the infirmary, the only truly hospital-like room in the facility. He lay down for the majority of that time, fading in and out of consciousness, and the rest of it was spent staring at the ceiling or chatting to Dr Ritchie as she questioned him about what happened in the corridor. 

After skimming through all Thomas' notes, the panicked rambling about Isabelle Higham before the push made a lot more sense. 

He feels almost fine now. However, he's subconsciously picked up the habit of not getting too close to any of the patients, as well as trying to hold back an obvious flinch every time they address him. 

"Okay," he says, a little hesitantly. "Captain. What have you got for us?" 

The Captain stands up and clears his throat, taking his swagger stick from its place tucked under his belt. He's been waiting since Christmas to find a good way to use it, and even though he's been carrying it around every single day since he got it, he somehow feels like he's putting its potential to waste. 

But not anymore. 

"Right," he begins, pacing immediately. "I only have two potential steps of the plan so far, but um... first on the agenda, we need a USB stick removed from one of the cameras, just to make sure nobody captures the escape. Preferably from the camera in the kitchen behind the cafeteria, as that seems to be the most accessible way out for us all."

"But how will we get it?" Pat asks. 

"With great difficulty, Patrick, thanks to Nigel," he replies, accusingly pointing the stick in Robin's direction. 

"Who isn't here," Dr Smith-Bynoe says. 

"Who isn't here," he copies, squinting with uncertainty. 

"It not difficult," Robin says, shrugging. 

Pat looks at him. "Huh?" 

"Me know way around vents," Robin explains. "Me climb up and expl- exp- expal- expo- look around when in toilet room." 

"Well, it's the first I'm hearing of this," Dr Ritchie says, glancing at him with wide eyes. 

The Captain shushes Dr Ritchie loudly and points the stick back at Robin with purpose. 

"Do you think you'd be able to get to the security room?" he demands. "Do you have a precise route that you know you can stick to without failure?" 

Robin nods. "Yes. Me get stick." 

"I concur. We'll send Robin." 

"Look, I don't mean to poop on your party, Cap," Julian begins, "but he won't know how to find the right camera, will he? Let alone the stick inside of it." 

"What mean?" Robin protests. "Me observant as next as the much man." 

"You don't even know what a USB looks like, mate." 

Kitty gasps in excitement. "I could draw a picture of it."

"And how do you propose you get a good look at it to know what it looks like?" 

She gasps again. "We could take a photograph." 

"And how do you suggest we do that?"

"Silence, Julian," the Captain interrupts, "don't be such a... actually, that's a bally good question." 

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. Alison-" 

"Dr Ritchie," she corrects him. 

"Alison, do you think you could gain access to the security base at some point tonight to take a photograph for Robin? After everybody's retired for the night, of course." 

"I mean, I have a key to the security room, if that's what you're on about. So yeah, it should be easy enough." 

"Excellent," he says, glowing with triumph. "Second point is... actually, that gives me an idea. Do you have some kind of a drawing board I can use?" he asks the doctors. "It's just that most of us here aren't great auditory learners." 

Dr Ritchie nods. "Follow me."

***

"Marvellous," the Captain mumbles. 

His eyes glisten with a shocked silence before he can carry on. 

"This is just... thank you, Alison, thank you. You're an angel," he breathes. 

"... It's just a whiteboard," she replies, gesturing to it in confusion. 

"This is exactly what I needed," he carries on. "I really can't thank you enough. It's perfect. I can't believe I've never come into contact with one of these before. I am completely and utterly... wow," he finishes, following his statement with one of the brightest smiles she's ever seen him pull to his usually frowning mouth. 

"Okay," she says, amused. "I'll go and get the others, we'll be back soon. Try and come up with a rough first draft or something. It doesn't have to be perfect, just a few quick ideas so I know you know what you're doing."

"Of course," he says, not tearing his eyes from the board. "It'll be the plan to end all plans, I promise you." 

As she leaves, he hears him thinking out loud to himself still. 

"My, what a fascinating modern age we live in. I- good lord, the writing erases as easily as anything. What on earth will they think of next?" 

"If you're impressed by that, you should see the digital ones," she mutters as the door closes. If he'd heard her, he would've been beside himself. 

By the time she comes back with everybody else, he's already fully prepared for their meeting. He looks so excited that he could burst; he must have really missed being in charge. 

"A rough first draft?" she asks doubtfully as her, Dr Smith-Bynoe and the other patients file in. 

"What can I say? I had a breakthrough," the Captain replies smugly, tucking the swagger stick under his arm. 

Along with a detailed list of planned conversation subjects written in bright red marker, he's also cellotaped his hand-drawn maps and blueprints from his bedroom to the corners of the board, as well as a long sheet of paper with twenty bullet points running down it, all but one crossed out. 

Some of the crossed points read things like "GROUND FLOOR" and "GARDEN" and "BEDROOM WINDOW (?)"

The second most recent reads "KITCHEN" and when Dr Ritchie sees the newest scribble on the list she realises what it is. 

DISTRACTIONS/SECURITY. 

Despite everything, she shakes her head and smiles.

This is his list of escape plans, and the newest addition is something she can't wait to hear.

***

"We act tomorrow evening at nineteen hundred hours, that's seven O'clock," the Captain announces after clearing his throat at an enormous volume. "The day this happens, you let Thorne out of isolation. If you want to make precautions, I know you have handcuffs somewhere because of the fight during last year's Halloween party. You cuff him, and he never leaves your side. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," Dr Ritchie says, giving him a half-hearted salute. 

"We'll begin during supper, so we meet here at half-past six," he continues, using his stick to point at the cafeteria on the map. "You can all be eating and talking beforehand, so as to calm any suspicion. Just act normal, if you're capable of doing such a thing. Robin will leave to go up through the vents after ten minutes or so, and he'll end up here."

He points again, this time to a red cross scratched over the security room on his map. Also drawn precisely is a route from there back to the bathroom that Robin will use as entry. 

"When he does this, that's when it really begins. Pat, Mary, Fanny, Kitty and Jemima; all of you - and Thomas, of course - will follow Alison and Michael into the kitchen to put away your plates, but that won't be what you do. Instead, you wait for the light on the camera to go out, courtesy of Robin, and the second it does, all you have to do is make a run for it."

"Where do we run?" Pat asks. 

"Just make your way across the field around the back in a horizontal line until you see the front path, and then you turn there. Remember the minibus? Well, when you see it, you're home free. Just get inside and wait for Julian and I. The alarm shouldn't go off when you leave, but if you're caught then just kill them."

"We're not killing anyone, Cap," Dr Smith-Bynoe says firmly.

"Just knock them unconscious then, whatever suits you best. Anyway, Julian and I will remain in the kitchen and start a small fire, then retreat to the living room where they'll find us and lock us in our rooms as punishment. We'll get out through the windows; it should be easy enough. The second we step inside that bus, you drive as fast as you can. We'll think of phase two on the way to Alison's house." 

"Wait," Dr Ritchie says. "First of all, what's this about going to my house? And what the hell is phase two?" 

"We need somewhere to stay," he explains. "I thought you'd be happy to accomodate us for a few weeks or so."

"A few weeks?"

"Right you are. Phase two will be what we do next, of course. We need to think of how our strongest fighters can break back inside and take Heather down." 

"No, we don't," she replies firmly. "I'll let you wait at my house for a few hours, not weeks. We call the police when we get there, show them the evidence and hope they can handle the rest from there. This isn't the movies, Cap. You really need to stop thinking you're some kind of indestructible war hero." 

He glares at her, then sighs in defeat. "Fine, we'll do it your way. Any questions?" 

"One thing, actually," Dr Smith-Bynoe says. "There's only six seats in the minibus, not counting Charlotte and I at the front. Three of you will have to sit on the floor."

"That's not really a question Michael, but I appreciate the enthusiasm regardless. Anyone else?"

They all glance at each other, shaking their heads. 

"Jolly good. Just keep in mind that this is war, and we can't afford to lose it." 

"No it isn't," Pat corrects him. "And if it was war, technically we'd be deserters." 

"I'm sorry, who's in charge here?" he snaps, making eye contact with the scout leader. 

"You," Pat mumbles, looking away. 

"Thank you. That's settled then. Remember, we congregate at supper time. If you're late, you're left behind."