[January 1] [Original] Visions

[rosehiptea.livejournal.com]

Title: Visions
Day/Theme: January 1/this universe we cannot control
Series: Original
Character/Pairing: Dr. Elise Cutler, Fred Cortland
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,152



"I found teeth in my bed this morning. A whole set of them," said Mr. Cortland.

"Dentures?" asked Elise. She pictured it immediately though, a white sheet with whiter teeth strewn across it, their hard surface against his skin.

"Heh," he replied. The sound wasn't very close to a laugh. "Come on. Somebody's teeth."

Of course they were human teeth. She didn't ask whose. The first rule, or maybe it wasn't the first, was not to play along.

"Have you been taking your medication, Mr. Cortland?"

He just shook his head and made that sound again. "Dr. Cutler. I am compliant with my medication. Now write that down," he said in a mechanical voice.

Elise put her pen down on the desk. "If you can't stay on your meds, it's possible that living independently is going to be too hard for you."

"And they'll put me away," he said.

She was about to argue that she wouldn't say it that way, but what difference did the words make to him?

"We're on the same side here, Mr. Cortland."

"No one is on my side." It was his normal voice now, or the one she knew as his, and maybe what he said was true also.

"I think they were my aunt's teeth," he went on.

She wasn't actually sure if he had ever had an aunt. They had never got to the bottom of that one. He had a mother, who desperately wanted him in a board and care facility. She was constantly calling Elise for information, even after being told many times about her son's right to privacy.

The last call had been typical. "You doctors don't know what it's like, raising a son, sending him off to college, and then he starts talking to people that aren't there--" Elise had interrupted at that point, and hung up the phone.

Fred hadn't said much lately about people who weren't there. But the teeth in his bed were definitely not real. Except to him, but she couldn't afford to think about it that way. Maybe that was the real first rule.

"And the apartment was flooded," Fred Cortland said.

"Really?" Elise asked, as if there were a possibility he would say "no."

Apartments could flood of course, but he probably didn't mean broken pipes or ruined carpets. He was talking about being surrounded by an ocean or a lake, hiding in the bed because there was no way to jump from here to there without falling in.

"It felt so cold walking through it. I almost didn't get here. And there were fish."

"In the water," murmured Elise.

"It wasn't water; it was gasoline," he said slowly. "Good thing I don't smoke, huh?"

He did smoke, actually, everywhere but Dr. Cortland's office and apparently his mother's house.

"Teeth is real," Fred added.

"You mean teeth are real?" she asked automatically.

"It's... real," he said with long pauses between the words. "It's a real... symbol. They're bad luck."

"I've never heard that," she replied.

"Well... it is."

"You're on several medications," she said. "Is it hard for you to keep track of them?"

"I'm not stupid."

"I know you're not," she said.

"Maybe I just don't like what the pills do to me," he said.

"We've discussed the side effects. But the meds keep you functioning and living in your own place. There are compromises with everything."

"Go make a compromise with your own brain," he replied.

"We aren't talking about my brain," she said.

"Because you have a... different kind," he said with a struggle. "Not like mine."

"That's not what I'm getting at," she said, but he wouldn't look her in the eye. "Do you really think this is good for you? Not taking them?" she asked.

"There were orange fish," he said, looking toward the window.

"In the gasoline?"

"Yeah. They were pretty." He held her gaze just a little too long.

Elise said something to end the session and watched him walk out the door. As she went to her car, she considered what the consequences might be if he kept refusing to take the pills: an institution, or whatever word you put on it, filled with other people and their own floods and fish.

On the way home she remembered a conversation with one of her teachers.

"You think you're there to get inside the patient's heads, but believe me, that's the last thing you want to do," Dr. Keller had said.

"What do you mean? It's mental illness; it's not contagious."

"I know that," he replied, rolling his eyes. "But you're the doctor, and you’re there to be the healthy one."

"Do we have to be 'us and them' about everything?" Elise had asked.

"I'm talking about being professional. There is an 'us and them' here, whether you like it or not."

After she parked in the garage of her apartment building, she closed her eyes, thinking for a moment that if she opened them she might see orange fish. Her small apartment was as plain and tidy as always, and dinner was normal. She could control dinner.

But afterward she sat on the internet and typed in different combinations of "teeth" and "symbol" until her eyes blurred looking at the screen. Teeth could be portents; they could be horror; they could be visions. They were in woodcuts and cave paintings and stories and they could end up places they weren't supposed to be.

Some people dreamed of teeth and then the unimaginable happened. Maybe someone died. Maybe they sent their normal son off to college and he came back one of them. Maybe they woke up one morning with their house flooded and everyone else pretended they couldn't see it.

"Teeth is real," she said as she turned the computer off.

All the other doctors out there -- were they always normal, always "us?" Did they go just a little too far into anyone's head? These days, Elise was afraid to ask.

When she slept, she dreamed of Fred Cortland of course. She kept asking him if he was taking his medication, but just smiled at her, putting a hand on her shoulder and acting as if he couldn't hear her. Then finally he said, "I'm the sane one," and handed her a small cloth bag. She could feel what was inside, like small rocks with sharp points.

In the morning when she opened her eyes she waited, staring at the ceiling, before she got up. Would she feel it, the shock of liquid on her ankles? Would she have to lie very still and hope to never light a match? Finally she took her chance and swung her feet over the side of the bed.

It was just carpet for one more day. But she put her face in her hands and murmured, "Please don't let me be next," to someone who wasn't there.