Chapter Text
Memories are the core foundation of the world we know. Meek creatures remember the faces of their vicious predators; predators remember which prey is better for their survival. Babies recall their mothers’ faces and their mothers remember every little smile, every laugh, every cry. Without memories, who would we be? Mindless, confused, endlessly searching for something we can’t process. The prey will die by the hands of predator, predator will starve without reasoning, mothers will never recollect the smile of their own child. It tears down the connection between the mind and the soul.
Thomas has seen it happen in his own mother. She forgot where her keys went, then her address, and then she forgot her own name and her children. Every time Thomas visited her, she would greet him as if they’d never met. When he’d introduce himself, she’d wear a saddened expression as she shook her head and muttered, “I don’t remember you.” Thomas used to cry when he visited her because he remembered her, everything about her, and she couldn’t even recall his face even though it was so like her own. But that was right before he graduated medical school. After that, he never had the time to visit, and soon he had stopped altogether. He blamed it on his busy schedule, how he never got to fit in anything but work in it 一 but he knew that he just didn’t want to feel that disappointment and shame he felt when his own mother thought of him as just another stranger.
Once he graduated medical school and actually became a doctor, he’d hardened his exterior; he became more cynical, more alienated. He’d always been asocial, but he’d become so bitter without knowing that he was constantly compared with Dr. House from that medically-inaccurate hit TV show. Needless to say, he hated that show.
“Doctor Jefferson, we have a case for you that just came in.” James Madison, a newer, more guileless doctor said as he ran to come to Thomas’ side. He was about a head shorter than his foreperson, but he was very well built in that he must have exercised a lot. He was a very ironic doctor in that he was a hypochondriac, but that certainly didn’t stop him from getting a doctorate of medicine. He moved the file that he was holding from the crook of his inner elbow to his hand. “We have a patient that came into admission an hour ago with multiple lacerations and bruises. He’s gone unconscious due to severe trauma to the brain.”
“If he has only lacerations and bruises, why is he in the main hospital and not the emergency care unit?” Thomas continued to walk, but at a slower pace as to not tire his co-worker.
“His brain trauma is… severe, to say the least,” is what Madison replied. “We don’t know how yet, but it’s done something to his brain. It might be a lesion, or he might go into a coma within today or so. Regardless, we can’t risk it and leave him there just in case we need to do some testing. Or, rather, if you need to do any testing; he’s your case now.”
Thomas looked down at the file in Dr. Madison’s hands, and Madison promptly handed the thin portfolio to him. It had two sheets of paper. Thomas, growing slightly irritated from the lack of information, flipped between pages as if it would unlock some secret, hidden page with needed information. “No family history, no emergency contacts…” Thomas hit the paper with the back of his hand lightly. “All we know is that his name’s Alexander Hamilton, as if that’ll give us the key to what the hell happened to him.”
Dr. Madison sighed, taking the portfolio back from him. “I didn’t say that the case was an easy one.” He and Thomas walked briskly to the information desk, where Madison got a clipboard from one of the nurse practitioners. “Here’s his room number and a blank medical information sheet. Maybe once he wakes up, he can tell you something that’ll help you.” Jefferson took the clipboard and read the room number, nodding first at the paper then at Madison.
“This is going to be both a shitshow and possibly a waste of my time.” The nurse practitioner who was nearest breathed an almost inaudible laugh, but Madison gave him a critical look.
“You’re a doctor; you’re here to save lives. Isn’t that why you became one in the first place?”
Thomas stood a little straighter, looking down at Dr. Madison with a sudden, cold look. “Why I’m here is none of your concern, doctor.” He snapped the clipboard closer to his chest and, giving Madison one last look, turned on his heels to the elevators. His wide and brisk pace made Madison’s attempts to chase after him futile and soon enough, he was across the hallway and pressing the down button furiously fast as he watched Madison walk towards him with a purely exasperated look. As the doors opened, he stepped in with one of the visitors that was leaving. Madison stopped in his tracks and stood with his right arm akimbo.
“Thomas Jefferson, you are the pettiest doctor alive, and I work with Burr daily.”
Thomas only raised his free hand to flip the other doctor the bird.
As he sat in quick silence with the stranger beside him, he lifted the clipboard and pulled out a pen, quickly scribbling down the one thing he knew about his patient.
Name: Alexander Hamilton
As the elevator doors opened to his floor, he stepped down at once, passing by some coworkers that he knew well, and others he wished he didn’t. One of the latter was Aaron Burr. He was a paradox wrapped in an oxymoron with a side of irony, as Madison loved to put it: he was a cool hot-head, a quiet loudmouth, a rude optimist. Everyone that was relatively close to him knew that he was impudent and stiff-necked, but he still imposed the least realistic façade that the world’s ever seen. To patients and patients’ visitors, he exuded a “polite” and “stoic” personality, though he just looked snobbish and patronizing. Even so, he wasn’t the best at his job. He differed by Jefferson by the well-known fact that Dr. Jefferson didn’t hide how cynical he was, and that Jefferson actually did his job right. Sure, he might make a couple of his patients or their visitors angry with a comment he might have said, but they still leave satisfied with their health.
Speaking of the devil, Jefferson made quick eye contact with Burr and inadvertently gained his attention. Burr left the conversation he was in, momentarily confusing the nurse practitioner he was informing, and walked to speed with Jefferson. He opened his mouth and just like that, Jefferson was irritated. “Dr. Jefferson. Did you hear about the John Doe patient in room-”
“Yes, Burr, I’ve been assigned to his case.” Jefferson tried to speed up in order to lose his trail but, like a conniving pest, Burr quickly fell back into speed with Jefferson. “He’s just another patient, not some celebrity. Now I have to check on another one of my patients, excuse me.” Jefferson made a sharp turn into a random room and closed the door behind him. The patients and visitors occupying the room looked at him, expecting for him to say something about the patient’s medical health. Jefferson leaned against the wall and gave them all a collected look.
“I apologize for interrupting,” said he to them, “I’m trying to avoid one of my coworkers.”
He counted to ten in his head and excused himself, stepping back into the hallway and looking down both sides of the hall to check for any Burr-related activity. Silently thanking fate that he was nowhere to be found, he continued to the near end of the hall, checking his clipboard to confirm the room number and opened the door, stepping in slowly to make little noise. To his surprise, the curtains were moved to the sides and a nurse practitioner was hovering over the patient, attaching them to the heart rate monitor and looking up to see that it was working. During the process, she locked eyes with Dr. Jefferson, and promptly jumped, yelping lightly and accidentally hitting her foot on one of the chairs beside the bed.
“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly, applying the last attachment of the monitor to the patient. “I’m new.” As he walked closer, Jefferson could read her tag: E. Schuyler.
“No need to apologize,” he dismissed. He, too, leaned over the idle patient, watching his even breathing with a furrowed brow. “How are his vitals?”
“They’re looking normal, there are no complications,” replied the nurse practitioner, turning the screen for the doctor to analyze. “If he doesn’t wake up soon, should we start feeding him with a feeding tube?”
“Only if he doesn’t wake up or if he has some kind of damage that impairs his eating,” replied Jefferson, pulling a small flashlight out of his pocket and leaning over the patient’s body to peel one of his eyes open. Turning on the flashlight, he flickered the light in his eye to check to see if his pupils would constrict and dilate. Clicking the flashlight off, he sighed and looked at his empty medical assessment form. “Did you get any information on this John Doe?”
“Besides his injuries, no,” Schuyler replied, looking at the battered, bruised body with a saddened look. “I’ll be sure to page you if anything new should happen, doctor.”
“And I the same, Schuyler,” said Jefferson. The practitioner nodded and, after tip-toeing across the wires of the monitor, walked out of the room. Jefferson felt his fatigue weigh down on his shoulders and fell in the seat adjacent to the patient's bed. He threw one leg over the other and used the makeshift "table" to scratch notes on the margins of his still-empty paper. He looked up at his patient once before standing to hover over him once again. He noted the bruises along the side of his frail body and pondered on what the hell happened to this man before he ended up… there.
Thomas narrowed his eyes and gave his patient one last look before exiting the room, turning off the lights behind him, and shutting the door soundlessly.
“I’m not saying that it’s improbable,” Dr. Madison said as he slathered an abundance of hand sanitizer on his hands, “It’s just that the possibility of-”
A shrill ringing interrupted Madison’s speech, and it was Jefferson’s pager. Normally, it would sound off his notifications as a would-be peaceful melody, but this “tune” was nowhere near peaceful. Jefferson almost panicked because he hadn’t received an emergency alert in so long, and said his apologies as he ran towards the elevator and jammed the button several times, his tension increasing with every second of waiting. Unfortunately, the elevator was a bit full, but that didn’t stop him from pressing his floor button incessantly until the elevator closed and began to move. Once the doors opened, he sprinted out of the tiny enclosure and darted past unsuspecting nurse practitioners and visitors, even Burr as he watched Jefferson’s sprint with unbridled curiosity. As Jefferson burst through the door of his patient, he was met with the sound of restrained groaning and a large object - most likely the bed - shaking and hitting the wall. Schuyler, the practitioner he’d met the day before, came to him in a hurry, looking absolutely terrified.
“Doctor, the patient woke up screaming and attacked one of the nurse practitioners,” she said in a hurried and purely horrified tone. “We’re trying to sedate him, but he keeps attempting to attack more practitioners.”
Jefferson went to the patient’s bed, where he was met with a sight to behold. The patient, who once looked like a corpse, was screaming at one of the nurses who’d grabbed him by the arm and attempted to place him back down on the bed and hold him there. The second patient, the one with the sedation, was merely watching in fear. The patient was spitting curses and demands to be released, as well as some other, more prevalent remarks:
“Where the hell am I? Who are you people?! What are you trying to do to me?!”
Jefferson sprung to action, grabbing the patient’s other arm and effectively holding him down. The latter thrashed violently and broke free of the practitioner’s hold, and Jefferson jumped on the bed to pin both of the patient’s arms down, shouting “Sedate him already!” as he fought to keep the man still.
“If you put that fucking needle in me, your medical licence isn’t the only thing you’re going to lose!” said the patient as the nurse nervously cleaned the skin to insert the needle. Soon enough, she’d injected the sedation into the patient; the man screamed, faltered, and fell into a silent sleep. Thomas, who was kneeling on the bed and breathing heavily, took a moment to process what’d happened before climbing off the bed as he groomed his coat.
“Oh my goodness,” muttered Schuyler. “What was that?”
“He might have gone into a small episode of psychosis,” the doctor replied. “What happened to the practitioner that he attacked?”
“She went to get a first aid kit for herself, but I’m sure she’s fine,” Schuyler sighed, kicking one of the legs of the bed lightly. “If his head trauma caused a psychotic episode, what else could it have caused?”
Jefferson shook his head as he, again, watched the patient sleep; though this time, it was in a much different pretext. “I don’t know,” said he, and he brought his hand to the side of his face and rubbed his cheek and beard, sighing. “What the hell was he saying before he got sedated? ‘Who are you, what are you doing to me?’”
Schuyler shrugged, watching the heart rate monitor fall back into its regular pace. “That could mean anything.”
Dr. Jefferson sighed again and clicked his pen, writing again on the margins of the paper. He still had nothing written down on the patient’s information.
Hopefully, when he wakes up again, he’ll be able to finally crack the code.