Work Text:
“We have a new patient today.”
Gabrielle looks up at Dr. Zadkiel as she checks her schedule at the nurses' station. His white lab coat is pristine and his graying hair neatly combed.
“Oh?” she says absently. Another patient, another day. It's nothing new. The Halcyon Residential Care Center where she works has mostly long-term residents who are disabled and unable to care for themselves, but it's not unusual for them to rotate in and out of the facility.
“Unfortunately we don't know much about his history,” Dr. Zadkiel adds. “He was dropped off at a Gotham hospital as a John Doe after what looks like a botched lobotomy. The damage was too much for his brain to recover. He's non-verbal and mentally incapacitated as a result. He’ll need help with feeding in particular. The neurological trauma has inhibited his ability to swallow. We received a grant to pilot some better staffing ratios so you'll be able to focus more time on fewer patients."
Gabrielle nods. She's not sure why Dr. Zadkiel is explaining so much. She usually just reads up on the necessary notes in the patient's chart. Something about this patient must have struck a chord with the doctor though. It's not unexpected. She's worked with Dr. Zadkiel for a long time and he's one of the most empathetic and truly caring doctors she's ever worked for.
“I'll make sure to take good care of him,” Gabrielle says. She takes good care of all her patients, but the statement seems to soothe Dr. Zadkiel's nerves. “Anything else? Otherwise, I'll check in with the night shift for my handoff.”
Dr. Zadkiel is staring at his tablet, presumably reviewing the new patient's chart. His brows are knotted in a frown. Without looking up he says, “Who would do such a thing? He’s estimated to be in his early twenties. The lobotomy was clearly not done by a neurosurgeon. It's crude at best. It's just barbaric.”
Gabrielle shrugs. “If it happened in Gotham I'm not surprised. I grew up there and the city has its own brand of sickos.”
“So I've heard.” Dr. Zadkiel shakes his head. He finally tucks the tablet under his arm. “I'll be working up a more detailed treatment plan this morning and will check in with our new patient during my next rotation.”
The doctor heads toward his office and after the hand-off with the night nurse, Gabrielle makes her way over to her new patient. She doesn't like to think of him as ‘John Doe,’ so in her head she calls him Patient J.
Patient J's room is next to Michael's, another long-term resident who has been with them a few years. Gabrielle knows Michael well. She even has something of a soft spot for him. He was abandoned as a newborn and put into the care of the State his whole life. Michael has the mental capacity of a five-year-old but he weighs about two hundred pounds. He has a heart condition that's growing more and more life-threatening every day.
Six days out of seven Michael is a sweetheart and Gabrielle enjoys taking care of him. About one day out of seven Michael gets frustrated and angry. He gets violent sometimes and it takes at least three techs to subdue him when he kicks and punches the staff or residents. Sometimes he punches himself and one time it was so bad he cracked his skull. Gabrielle hates those days. He gave her a concussion once and Gabrielle thought about quitting, but then she remembers the six days out of seven, and how Michael was never given a proper chance at life. She remembers how he likes to squeeze her hand and mumble “thank you” and how every Valentine's Day he makes her a little paper heart. His real heart is about to give out one day too. Degenerative valve disease is cruel like that. He won't make it much longer, so Gabrielle stays and hopes that she can make his last days comfortable.
Michael is… a lot to deal with, so Gabrielle starts with Patient J. She knocks on the door and walks in to find him lying in bed, but awake. His eyes are staring blankly at the wall.
The lights are on but nobody's home.
It's a shame, she thinks. Her first impression is that Patient J is very young. Mid-twenties at best. He's very handsome too with a mop of dark hair and striking features. He should be in the prime of his life—in college or exploring the world… not living in a psychiatric facility for the disabled after being crippled from a crude medical procedure. She'd expected to see cuts and scars on his scalp too, but then she recalls the note in his chart said that the lobotomy was likely performed by inserting instruments behind his eye socket. He occasionally bleeds from his eyes as a result. It's something to watch for.
Blood is part of the job, but it's still something that Gabrielle hopes she doesn't have to see.
“Good morning, my name is Gabrielle,” she says warmly. “I'll be taking care of you during the day shift. I hope you don't mind, but since we don't know your name I'm just going to call you J.”
J doesn't acknowledge her. He doesn't move. He keeps staring into space.
“Let's get you up and dressed, okay?” Gabrielle goes through the motions of getting him out of bed and cleaned up. J is surprisingly amenable, and though he doesn't consciously acknowledge her, he moves when she nudges him. He obeys simple directions to use the toilet and even brush his teeth.
The whole time his face and eyes are blank. Gabrielle hasn't ever had a patient quite like him before, but she'll take it. She's had to deal with worse after all.
Afterwards, she ushers him into the dining room where they're serving breakfast. J sits at a table. Someone is coming around with plates, so Gabrielle goes and gets J's neighbor, Michael.
When she comes back, she sits Michael down. He immediately starts slurping a bowl of cereal. In contrast, J hasn't eaten anything at all. The toast on his plate looks like it's been pushed around, along with the eggs, but the portion looks the same.
“Here, take a bite,” Gabrielle pushes a spoonful of the egg toward J's lips.
He begins to take a nibble, but then immediately chokes and gags.
“Hmm,” Gabrielle remembers that Dr. Zadkiel had mentioned the procedure somehow impacted his ability to swallow. When she checks J's chart again, sure enough, he's been prescribed a liquid diet as needed.
Twenty minutes later the kitchen has blended some kind of breakfast smoothie. Michael's already been escorted to his morning recreation so Gabrielle makes several attempts to get Patient J to eat. He manages a couple of tentative swallows but chokes again. After another few attempts, J goes completely non-responsive.
Gabrielle makes a note in his chart and stops pushing for now.
The rest of the day is much the same. Patient J gets moved around from room to room, but all he does is sit and stare blankly into the air. Gabrielle tries to get him to eat again with only moderate success. At the end of her shift, she makes her chart updates and hopes the next shift has better luck.
On the third day since Patient J arrived, Gabrielle arrives for her shift to find that he's been put in restraints. Or at least he's meant to be. When she enters his room he's somehow managed to get himself uncuffed. Thankfully, he's placid from heavy sedation. She learned at the handoff from the night shift that Patient J had awoken from a presumed nightmare and began screaming. Staff were unable to calm him down, and after he sustained skull fractures from repeatedly cracking his head against the floor the techs were able to hold him down long enough to sedate him.
A thick bandage is wrapped around J's head. His face is swollen and puffy. Blood trickles from his eyes like crimson tears. Gabrielle isn't sure how he's managed to get out of his cuffs because his hands are heavily bandaged too. He shattered the bathroom mirror with his fists.
Everything's been cleaned up by now, so Gabrielle goes to check his medication only to find he's also pulled out his IV. She inserts a new one, double checks the drip, and then goes to check on Michael.
"I think he likes it when I just call him Jay," Michael mumbles one day as he's coloring a book of various plants and herbs in the rec room. Patient J is sitting beside him. Silent. Unblinking. There's a coloring book in front of him too but he hasn't touched it.
"Oh," Gabrielle replies absently, "did he tell you that?" Michael often imagines stories and Gabrielle usually entertains him.
"I had a dream and he told me," Michael nods ardently. "I told him not to have scary dreams anymore."
"And what did he say about that?" Gabrielle inquires.
Michael just shrugs. He finishes coloring his page and then tears it out and hands it to his newly named friend, Jay. "Rosemary," he says. "You said you liked Rosemary in the dream."
Gabrielle looks at the picture and sure enough, the coloring page has a picture of a sprig of rosemary.
Jay doesn't take the paper so Michael puts it down on the tabletop.
"Do you want to go read a book?" Michael gets up and tugs on Jay's shoulder. Gabrielle watches as Jay obediently follows. His expression is still blank and his eyes are still vacant, but Gabrielle can't help but think that he rather likes it when Michael interacts with him.
Together they shuffle over to the bookshelf and Michael picks out a book. They sit on a nearby couch and Michael begins to slowly read.
"Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter…."
Jay sits unmoving and stares at the wall.
A few days later, Michael has a bad day. It starts off at lunch when a fly somehow makes its way into the dining room. The buzzing close to his ears triggers Michael into a sensory panic, and he starts flailing.
"No! Get it out! Get it out!" Michael shoves himself back from the table, toppling himself and his tablemate, Jay, over in the process.
Gabrielle can't pick Michael up. He’s too heavy and too strong. She tries to calm him down with a gentle hand on his shoulders but he shoves her away.
He swings with his fists. "Kill it! I'm gonna hit it! I'm gonna kill it," he screams and screams. He swings and swings his balled up fists in terror. Gabrielle ducks, but she's not fast and she can't get her feet under her quick enough to pull away.
Michael swings again straight at her temple.
Gabrielle closes her eyes in anticipation of the blow.
Nothing happens.
She blinks her eyes open to see that Jay has caught Michael's wrist! He's looking at Michael with an awareness in his eyes she's never seen before. Gabrielle gapes as Jay pulls Michael toward him. Michael responds by folding himself into Jay's arms.
"Make it go away!" Michael sobs.
Jay closes his eyes and holds him.
Gabrielle's never seen Jay act so… deliberate. She's never seen him respond at all to other people's emotional state. She's never seen anyone catch a flailing fist before either. She hovers beside them, reluctant to separate them, but wary that Michael will have another outburst.
Eventually, the techs arrive to help Michael back to his room. He sniffles as he's untangled from Jay's arms.
There's a wet spot on Jay’s shoulder.
Jay sits on the floor. He watches Michael be led out the door. He blinks before he turns back to staring at the wall.
The next morning Gabrielle comes into work to find Jay strapped to his bed. He's as calm and catatonic as ever, but apparently—from what she learns during handoff—at some point during the night he eloped from his room. After a full facility lockdown and a check of the security feeds, the night shift found him sitting on the roof.
They're not quite sure how he got there. None of the security cameras showed him leaving his room or walking through the halls. He was found because he was sitting quietly on a ledge, dangling his feet over a three-story drop, where one of the cameras was able to see him.
The facilities guys come to install new locks on the door as Gabrielle begins working to insert an IV. Jay lies motionless through the procedure. He doesn't push or pull on the restraints as Gabrielle hooks up a line. The doctors have prescribed IV nutrients as a supplement. Jay still isn't eating much at all. He's losing weight.
Gabrielle turns the TV on to fill the room with a little background noise. She flips to a local news channel, then leaves Jay in the room to go check on Michael.
When she comes back later, Jay is out of his restraints and has unplugged his IV. He's curled into a tight ball on his side with his hands over his ears. The TV is still playing the news—some kind of attack in Gotham proper is happening. Blurry footage plays of a woman with long, dark hair firing a gun into the streets. Another dark blur of what Gabrielle thinks is Batman flutters across the screen.
Jay scrunches his eyes tight and begins screaming.
Months go by. Jay loses ten pounds. Then twenty. Fifty. He gags nearly every time they try to get him to eat.
They start IV nutrition, but Jay somehow manages to tear out the line almost every time. They're inserting a PICC line today. Jay's arms and legs are littered with bruises from old IV insertion sites. Once the procedure is done, they hook him up to the nutrition bag and Gabrielle waits.
He's less likely to mess with the line when someone is present, so she sits in a chair by the bed and settles in.
Over time, the room has gradually gathered a small assortment of decorations, mostly from Michael. Colored pictures decorate the wall. There's a little potted plant on the bed table. The facility started a gardening program and Michael's gotten into planting an assortment of herbs and he's brought Jay a fresh sprouting sprig of rosemary. The aromatic scent wafts gently through the room. It smells lovely. And Gabrielle wishes that maybe the herb might entice Jay to eat more.
Gabrielle sighs. It's been a losing battle. Jay is rapidly wasting away. The IV nutrients aren't helping much because they can never get him to keep the line in. If this doesn't work a feeding tube may be next. But it's going to be the same problem. Jay won't keep it in.
Or maybe at that point he'll be so weak he won't be able to take it out….
Starving is a horrible way to die. But this… it's a horrible way to live.
Jay wouldn't be the first patient Gabrielle's had that lived for years through a feeding tube. It's necessary at times. It's the right thing to do. Sometimes.
Not always.
Gabrielle finds herself wishing that Jay had never survived the lobotomy in the first place.
As it turns out, Jay doesn't make it much longer.
One day when Gabrielle isn't on shift, Jay chokes on his food and collapses. The nurses and techs had tried to revive him, but they couldn't get close enough to perform the Heimlich maneuver—not with the way he was kicking and punching anyone who got close—and by the time he stopped moving, it was too late. The extreme weight loss had caused significant heart damage, and he went into cardiac arrest.
Michael was beside himself. He'd seen the whole thing.
The next day the staff cleaned out Jay's room.
Gabrielle helps take down the little pictures Michael had drawn. She throws out the sprig of Rosemary, but she can't help but think the aromatic scent lingers in the air for far longer than it should.
Three weeks later Michael's heart gives out too.
Gabrielle attends the mass funeral ceremony the county holds for unclaimed dead. She doesn't usually go when patients pass. It happens a lot and Gabrielle tries not to get attached, but Jay was different. And Michael was special.
She finds she misses them both.
After the funeral, Gabrielle quits her job.
Six months later, Gabrielle is on her day off. She found a new job at an outpatient program that cycles through patients more quickly. She doesn't have time to get attached. She does her job and she does it well, but then she goes home at the end of the day and tries not to think about her job anymore.
Not like she used to think about Michael. Not like she used to think about Jay.
Not like she's thinking about them now for some strange reason, as she sips her morning coffee and scrolls through the news on her phone.
Maybe it's a sign. Her two dead patients continue to haunt her thoughts when there's suddenly a knock on her door.
It's a little early for the mail, but sometimes her neighbors stop by to chat. Except when she opens the door a woman she doesn't know with long dark hair is standing there. She looks familiar, but Gabrielle can't quite place her face.
"Gabrielle?" the woman's voice is somehow soft and stern at the same time, "you were a nurse at the Halycn Residential Care Center, correct?"
"What's this about?" Gabrielle frowns. The woman is smartly dressed and for a moment she wonders if she's being served some sort of legal papers.
Sure enough, the woman reaches into a folio she's holding in the crook of her arm and pulls out a piece of paper. It's not a legal notice, but a photo. "Do you know this man?"
Gabrielle immediately recognizes the dark hair and handsome features of her late patient. "Oh. That's Patient J… J for John Doe. We never found out his real name."
Something flickers across the woman's face. A tightening around the expertly lined corners of her eyes. "I've been searching for him. Where is he?"
The woman's voice is cool and flat, but there's something. Something in the upward pitch of her last word that makes Gabrielle think she is desperately clinging to hope.
"I… I'm sorry." Gabrielle's throat wants to close up. She hates delivering bad news but she does it anyway. "He passed last year. He's buried at the County plot."
The woman doesn't blink. She presses her lips into a thin line. It looks like anger. It looks like pain.
"Take me there," the woman demands.
Gabrielle doesn't know this woman. She doesn't need to answer to some stranger who suddenly showed up at her door asking about a patient she hardly knew, but she does. She thinks back to the funeral and how she and Dr. Zadkiel were the only ones there who knew him. She thinks about how his ashes were buried in a mass County grave with others who were unknown and unmourned. She thinks about how even Michael had a decent-sized turnout—he was a difficult patient, but there were people at the facility who genuinely learned to like him over the years, or felt enough pity to come to the funeral. So if there's just one person in the world who wants to mourn for Patient J, who is Gabrielle to deny that?
The woman motions for Gabrielle to enter the back of a waiting car. It's not exactly a limo, but it's black and sleek with windows tinted so dark Gabrielle can easily see her reflection in them.
She directs them to the cemetery, then to the site where the mass funeral was held. "He isn't buried here yet. They hold the ashes in storage for a time just in case family turns up to claim them," Gabrielle explains.
The woman nods. She's looking down at the grass. She's looking at the nearby mausoleum. She glances up at the gray sky. There's a chill in the air. She pulls the lapels of her coat closed before finally looking back at Gabrielle.
"His name was Jason," the woman says, nearly a whisper. "I will claim him. I will take him home."
Silence follows. They stare at the rows and rows of tombstones and plaques, some of them half buried under the grass, until Gabrielle feels compelled to speak.
"He came to us after some sort of botched surgery. A lobotomy."
The woman nods. "I know."
Her words aren't any answer to the questions that still occupy Gabrielle's mind. It's not enough. She needs to know more. "Do you know who did it to him?"
"Yes."
"Who?"
"His father."
Gabrielle lets that sink in. His father? A parent is supposed to love and protect. What sort of man would do this to their own child? She's seen the worst in people. It's part of her job. She's seen people abandoned. She's seen what it does to people like Michael. She's seen how he fought every single day to find the barest smidgen of joy in his life. She's seen how Jay couldn't. How he slowly withered away and starved.
This man… these parents… this supposed father… she wishes they could see what they've done. The gifts they destroyed.
"Is he in jail?" Gabrielle's voice cracks. Her eyes are stinging hot.
The woman shakes her head. "No."
"Why not?" It's Gabrielle who makes the demand this time. Anger cuts sharp through her words.
"It's… complicated." The woman turns her face to the ground. When she looks up again her eyes are hard. "I'll take care of Jason’s remains. You may go. My driver will take you home."
There's something final and almost threatening in the way the woman says it. Gabrielle takes a step back. She hadn't been afraid before, but for some reason, she is now. It occurs to her that she doesn't know this woman's name. She doesn't know how the woman found her. She has wealth judging by the driver and car. Given that, it's likely she also has power.
Even so, Gabrielle can't leave without saying one last thought. "His father… I hope he rots in hell."
Gabrielle turns and walks back to the car.
It starts to rain. Gabrielle can see the woman still standing at the gravesite when the driver pulls away.
Thunder claps across the sky as she disappears from view.