Archive of Our Own ^beta

Her office smells a bit like talcum powder.

It's rude to say, of course, but the thought does linger in his head. Elaine's office smells unmistakably like a nursery or the women's restroom at St. Patrick's Cathedral on 5th Avenue. Malcolm hasn't been since before Martin was arrested all those years ago, but he clearly remembers being brought in the powder-room by his mother when he was young. It smelled just like Elaine's office and was only marginally better decorated.

Her couches are that sticky, firm leather rich people like to fill their houses with even though it squeaks when anyone shifts a single inch and you have to peel yourself off of it when you're through using it. His childhood house had two in the downstairs foyer. Elaine's are kind of smoothed with age, though--and probably the asses of dozens of students visiting her in her off hours. That smoothness and the worn in springs are the only saving grace to this seating arrangement.

Malcolm runs a hand across the arm of the couch and leans in, fingering the seam where the arm rolls into that downward swoop towards the floor. It's thin and stiff. He could rip it but it would definitely take more effort than he has the energy for right now. Quickly he unmasks himself, revealing his father and his own sordid past with one sentence, "My real name is Malcolm Whitly."

To her credit, Elaine blinks once very slowly but otherwise doesn't outwardly react. He has enough experience to know he probably just short-circuited her so he gives her a minute to gather her thoughts.

"Tea?" She says instead, and heads into the kitchen without waiting for a response. Malcolm shrugs. At least she didn't ask him to leave or, worse, ask him 'what was it like' with that wide-eyed look of complete fascination and pity people always aim at him when they find out. While he waits, he scrapes the heel of his shoe on the peg leg of the couch. It makes a scratching noise and then a small splintering. He quickly moves his foot to the rug and pastes a look of complete cluelessness on his face. She doesn't return right away, but he starts to pick at his nails instead. At least this way he won't have to explain away a collapsed couch.

She returns moments later, "Microwave," she says briefly and tilts her head at the little tray of bubbling cups. There's two packs of tea also: chamomile and cinnamon. The cinnamon sounds disgusting, so he grabs one of those just to taste test. At the first sip he coughs violently and the scent claws its way through his sinuses.

"Went down the wrong pipe," he says quickly at her concerned face, unwilling to admit to his small experiment. To prove to himself he can handle the revolting concoction he adds a square of sugar, missing Elaine's own disgusted look, and takes a large gulp. Immediately it wants to return to the world from whence it came via his throat but he forces it down. Two more swallows over the course of a minute of silence drain half the cup. Elaine looks at him as if he's insane. That's fair.

She sips at her chamomile quietly, humming and blowing on it. She's stalling, but Malcolm doesn't really mind. Not enough people consider what they'll say before they throw it into the world. He tries to watch what he says but sometimes, like his last day at Quantico, his temper gets the best of him.

"The Surgeon," she says it like a title, like he's some 'Sir Martin Whitly, The Surgeon Errant'. Ideally she wouldn't even know his name, but she's been in New York since before he was born. The name Martin Whitly is synonymous with evil, and in the psych world its equivalent to a fascinating specimen. No matter how much he loathes and loves his father in almost equal measure, different each day, he can't deny how well dear old dad sells the persona he spent so long crafting.

"Yes," he begins, "when he was caught..." he explains in quick, brisk sentences how he came to be an adult with missing memories and probes her, questioning a real professional about the possibility of memories being locked away from him, warped by time and casual conditioning by his parents. She listens attentively, he'll give her that. By the end of his story she gives a halting proposal about the smell of chloroform reigniting his memory and revealing what he's missing. It's simple and right on the nose, forgive the pun. He really should have thought of it himself. The olfactory senses hold the most potential for retaining memories and recalling them at will. To this day he remembers how that old church smelled and he hasn't been in over twenty years. He smiles briefly in triumph and glances back up at her. She's running the edge of her nail over the lip of her cup. If it were crystal maybe it would play a low pitched note sharp enough to raise the mood in this room a little.

Behind her the masks catch the light again. One stretches out and grins demonically at him. He blinks and it's gone. Paranoia can result in mild delusions in times of high stress, he remembers. It also could've been his eyes playing tricks, his imagination, the lights, really any number of things. He chooses to believe it was the light.

The phone on the table lights up with a text from J.T. Jeffrey, Joffrey, James Tiberius? He briefly hopes that this doesn't become a running joke like in Star Trek with him trying to guess J.T.'s real name.

He grabs it and responds, then puts it back on the table. His hand stretches farther than it should, he thinks, and sinks through the table like it's a mirage. Malcolm inhales sharply and the image rights itself again. Elaine is looking at him, furrowing her brow. He smiles briefly and stands, taking long strides over to her display of African art. The one that stretched earlier... it's Lucifer. That's funny in a tragic, ironic way, he muses to himself and gingerly boops the nose. At least he only keeps weapons in his home. Masks would be too terrifying to wake up to. Elaine moans lowly behind him and a rushing realization catapults him into action.

"You've been dosed," he says quickly and shushes her even as the lights burn out. He trips standing on the rug while he's rushing to the door. There's a man, bulky and dark outline clogging the view. Malcolm quickly shuts the thin door and flips the latch, hoping the intruder didn't hear him. Elaine is terrified behind him and his own adrenaline is spiking. This job is quickly becoming more terrifying than Quantico ever was.
Even in the dark the colors of those masks flash brightly when he picks up a fire poker. Are they encouraging this? The Lucifer blinks and grins at him with teeth the size of his fingers but then it settles back into a thick mask. Why would Africans depict Western concepts of religion? He doesn't rightly know enough about the culture to answer that. The one on the right shivers and its frown screams 'be afraid, Malcolm'. He can't afford to be afraid right now, though. He goes to the door and peaks out. Music blasts him in the face, the unmistakable sound of vinyl ripping through the air.

'How is that playing without power?' he gripes and childishly hopes for it to skip and scratch. Coming around the corner wielding his sword-poker yields nothing positive. No Dominic in here. J.T. is fighting his way around the back of the house. He can hear Elaine whimpering in terror in the other room.

A little hysterically he begins calling out to Dominic, confident in his ability to talk people down. It worked on his last mission in Quantico; it works most of the time, to be fair. He has an uncanny ability to empathize with killers--part of the reason he's an acquired taste, maybe.

It doesn't work on Dominic. He sees right through him, and the bearded man knocks him into the wall. He smells like sweat, dust, and weirdly enough a woodshop. When his head shatters the glass pane behind him Malcolm briefly remembers hating his private school's woodshop class and the amount of splinters he received. He returns a punch and is spun around into the banister for his trouble, Dominic is too strong and his build is the exact opposite of Malcolm. In a fair, lucid fight maybe Malcolm would be able to outrun him, but in the dark, unfamiliar house against a man built like a brick shithouse it's not really likely. His head is hanging down over the stairs when a shot blasts the burly man out of his face. It's too powerful to be J.T.'s gun.

Sure enough, Elaine stands at the foot of the staircase gripping a shotgun tightly in her hands.
'Why does she have that?' he thinks frantically and slowly moves upright. Her features contort into his mother's and flash back quickly, then melt a little on her face before righting itself again. The floor is melting.

"The walls..." Elaine mutters and shakes the gun like a baseball bat, shivering like a leaf, "they're melting!" And that's not right, he wants to tell her. It's the floor that's melting. He thought she was smarter than that.

J.T. busts onto the scene with his gun trained on Elaine and the scene slows down. She obviously is terrified out of her mind and she is easy to convince to put the gun down. Malcolm breathes a sigh of relief and guesses the cop's name again before face planting into his own arms. Dominic's body is cooling off to the right of him but dead bodies are really nothing new. The blood forming a pentagram and then a smile, tracing the floor with his childhood address--that's new. He blinks, but it's still there. The blood sucks up into Dominic's body and his hair twists into tentacles that block out his eyes, curl up like his dad's hair and then flip down into loose female hair limp with death. He's curled up like that girl in the box.

Malcolm vaults to his feet and rushes down the stairs. They stretch out until they look like an Aztec pyramid. He stumbles to the bottom, kicking the shotgun across the hardwood and hearing J.T. reprimand him. The floor is bubbling, not melting anymore. Everything is changing and his pulse is skyrocketing. He was dosed too. Everything in her kitchen had to be laced, he thinks to himself and puts his palms directly into his eye sockets. J.T. asks him if he's alright but nothing's alright. Nothing is real but everything feels so real, more real than anything else he can remember at this point in time. Suddenly he slams into the wall. Elaine's house has so many corners. He could never live like that. A murderer could be around any corner, something waiting in the dark to hurt him... another girl just out of reach, waiting to be found and destroy his life again.

"Whoa, what the fuck?" J.T. calls after him and he stumbles down the hallway. Already he can hear at least one siren. Gil is quick, that little cherry topper on his hotrod only helping him through the city at lethal speeds. The front door smacks him in the face and he knees it, slamming it shut again. He grips his hair with both hands and stifles a scream of absolute horror in his wrists. One more tug and the door slams into the wall, ricocheting and hitting him in the back on his way out. The railing to the front porch turns into snakes and they slither over the deck towards him. The grass is pitch black in the shadow of the house but it just looks like a pit. 'Where's the pendulum?' his thoughts flutter by and dash away, pushed by fear and adrenaline. He leaps into the pit and stampedes through the yard and crashes into the mailbox.

"Kid, what--" Gil doesn't even finish before Malcolm is on him, both hands gripping his leather jacket at the back and screaming into his shoulder. The older man's arms clap around him immediately and twist them away, putting himself between Malcolm and the house. Gil holds the back of his head with one hand and urgently speaks into his ear, years of police work stopping him from shouting in panic. Malcolm looks terrified and so young, hiding from literally everything. Gil smells like leather and Old Spice, whereas Martin smelled like Davidoff and medicine. Gil smells like days spent after school in the back of a patrol car and being safe.

Dani rushes into the house, sure something terrible awaits her. Malcolm is shouting incoherently into the leather, fingers digging into the tough material in Gil's back.

"We have to go, Gil, please!" He screams, pulling the older man towards the street. Nobody else has arrived yet, but Gil can hear an ambulance's distinctive wail approaching.

"Where are we going? What's wrong?" He desperately wants to know what's wrong, how he can fix it-- how he can help Malcolm.

"Laced-- the tea, she gave me tea. It's drugged, both of ours; he's dead and she's dead, in the box inside. The floor--Elaine knows, the floor it--it's just, Gil please," Malcolm doesn't make any sense until he makes complete sense, and Gil's stomach drops. If the bus is the first one here it can only mean good things. He presses Malcolm closer to himself and edges them farther away from the house and into the streetlight. The bus approaches and he flags it down, holding Malcolm as tight as possible and struggling to ignore his screaming pleas to just do something.

The bus pulls up just next to them and the back doors fling open. He points them at the house and then ushers Malcolm inside with one of the three paramedics left. The young man won't let go of his arm, pleading with Gil to help him and take him away from here. It's all he can do to mutter assurances as the paramedic efficiently straps him down as Gil describes a targeted LSD drugging. Elaine arrives strapped to her own stretcher and they slam the doors shut without asking if he wants out. That's fine. They peel out into the night just as three more police vehicles arrive, swarming the house and leaving J.T. and Dani in charge. They can handle it; he's got something more important to worry about.

Malcolm grips his hand and squeezes his eyes shut, begging Gil to get them away. The older man holds Malcolm's hand just as tightly in one of his and brushes his hair off his forehead repeatedly, muttering platitudes and urging the paramedics to work faster. This kid can't catch a break.