Ordinary People
A Weiss Kreuz fanfic by laila

+ cubicle 7

Six ten and a train pulling out, and a clutter of commuters spilling from the station exit and out into the quiet streets. The sky hung heavy with clouds, dour gray and menacing; the sun, sinking low on the horizon, sulked behind them, a few feeble rays of light slanted through the windowpanes of Officer Matsuda’s police box at precisely the wrong angle. It left him squinting when he peered out into the street, rudely revealing the dust that clung to shelves and surfaces. His wife would, he was sure, be sighing at the inconsiderate light: he could clearly picture her clicking her tongue and reaching for dusters and polish. She might have stepped into the room behind him, then leant over to wipe the film of dust from the top of his computer screen.

Thinking of Naomi made him less tolerant of the dust and he wiped it away himself, frowning slightly.

Behind his back Araki frowned her way through a telephone call, Sugihara chewed a toothpick and fingered the evening paper. It had been a quiet kind of day, or so he had heard. A stolen bicycle, a stray cat, a little girl who’d found a purse and a lost tourist asking, in faltering Japanese, if anyone knew where to find the Tachibana Hotel. Everyday things.

It was a quiet kind of job, but Yuuichi Matsuda was a quiet kind of soul, possessing all the patient competence of a man who had missed out on promotion only by proving far too good at his job. The very image of a neighborhood patrolman, he might have stepped, tall and sturdy and cheerful, out of the pages of a children’s book: Mr. Policeman in People We Meet. We won’t, he would say to the rookies when they complained, save the world doing this job, but we can at least make it a little bit nicer. It would have sounded corny from the sergeant but Officer Matsuda would say it like he meant it, with the smile of a man who understood the importance of the little things. The distinction was surprisingly important.

“Honestly,” Araki said as she put down the phone, “do we look like a left-luggage office?”
“You’d be amazed what people think we look like,” Sugihara said, and turned another page.

Matsuda simply chuckled, low and indulgent, and shook his head.

It was only when Mrs. Yamazaki rounded the corner, walking quickly as if fearful it would rain, that he realized he hadn’t seen her or her husband all evening. She should have been a familiar sight but – what’s wrong with this picture? – there was something strange about her, something indefinably off. Frowning, Matsuda stepped from the police box.

“No husband this evening?”

The woman jerked at the sound of his voice, her head snapping up. Strange that she should be out without a coat—

“Officer Matsuda!” She sounded breathless.

She was starting forward now, hurrying toward him – almost at a run. (Where was the dog? The husband was explicable though far from usual, but for her to be out without the dog, well! That simply didn’t seem—) Matsuda took a pace backward, hands raised for fear she would stumble or fall, or run into him: she did none of those things. She stopped short a few feet from him, and though her cheeks were flushed with exertion, her skin was pale.

“Mrs. Yamazaki,” Matsuda said, “is something the matter?”
“Officer,” she said again. Breathing hard still, her shoulders shaking. “Officer, you’ve… call an ambulance.”
“Is your husband all—”
“It’s not him!” She spoke urgently. “Not him. There’s been, there’s this—” She broke off, looked away, shook her head. “Oh, Lord, I can’t, I can’t say. I…“

And there was fear there, but there was also embarrassment. Clearly this was no conversation to be having in public. “Why don’t you come inside?” Matsuda suggested. “You can tell us your story there.”

Officer Araki must have been watching them through the glass: the girl was already scrambling to her feet as he guided Mrs. Yamazaki into a folding chair. Matsuda nodded to her as she disappeared into the back room, reappearing a few seconds later carrying a mug of cold water, which she pressed into Mrs. Yamazaki’s hands. Hovering, she watched as the woman sipped, swallowed, her hands shaking. Wrong, all wrong for a woman who was always so neat and composed: why should she have a run in her hose, or brick dust caught in her graying hair?

“Now, Mrs. Yamazaki,” Matsuda said gently, taking the mug from her, “what’s this about needing an ambulance?”

The woman glanced about herself, sly and furtive: another flurry of schoolgirls and secretaries and salarymen slipped quickly past the police box’s windows like puppets in a shadow-play. “My husband’s at the old surgery,” she said finally. “There’s…” She swallowed, visibly steeling herself. “Momo ran inside. There’s someone in there, and – and they’re hurt.”
“Badly hurt?”
“Yes, they’ve, they were… she slipped her leash and just ran inside, she wouldn’t come out. My husband called and called but she wouldn’t and she always comes for him, we thought she must have been… well, we – we had to go in, didn’t we? You can’t just leave a dog in a place like that, and there they were. Just lying there, and—oh, God, Momo must have picked up the scent. My husband told me to go for help.”
“You did the right thing, Mrs. Yamazaki,” Matsuda said: the woman smiled, visibly relaxing, and she shouldn’t have needed to be told but somehow they always did. Out of the corner of his eye, Matsuda saw Sugihara reaching for the telephone, then hesitate like an actor waiting to be fed a cue, his hand outstretched: a single nod and he was picking up the receiver and dialing. “Where is your husband now? Is he still with her?”
Mrs. Yamazaki hesitated. She said, “No.”
“Where is he then? Did he go for—”
“No, it’s…” Mrs. Yamazaki flushed, twisting her fingers together. “I mean yes, he’s still there. But it’s not a woman. It’s a boy.”

The old surgery had still been a busy little dental practice when Matsuda was assigned to the neighborhood. It was a small, affair run by a single man, the gray-haired and grumpy Doctor Tokuno, his daughter doubling as nurse and receptionist. Not long after Matsuda’s arrival, however, a new, large clinic opened, hitting the old man’s business hard. His daughter married, fell pregnant: her replacement lasted less than a year, driven away by Tokuno’s carping resentment and constant fault-finding, seduced by modern equipment and higher pay. The old man had been felled by a stroke not long afterward.

Doctor Tokuno lingered on in a nursing home. His surgery stood abandoned, gradually and gracefully falling into ruin.

The wonder, Matsuda thought as he parked his bicycle by the damaged cyclone fencing that surrounded the building, was that nothing of the sort had happened before. The old surgery, its walls stained and slowly crumbling, its paths cracked and its yard overgrown with weeds, had been fenced off years back but all that had done was make it look more alluring. Curious children, spooking one another with stories of phantom dentists, slipped inside from time to time: their older siblings too, looking for trouble or a place to lie down. Sugihara had chased a couple out little more than a fortnight back, neither of them more than fifteen. Still, you’d have to be pretty hard up for privacy before the Tokuno surgery started to look appealing.

And now this. (They ought to tear this place down.) It would be a kid, most like. He’d seen that before, too many times. Kids messing round where they knew they shouldn’t be taking fright and fleeing when a friend was injured, and too afraid of the consequences to tell their parents what had happened. Kids, or a teenage misfit, dragged here by his classmates.

Odd that no child had been reported missing, though.

Six twenty-two by Matsuda’s watch and the sky quite gray now: the policeman hurried up the pathway, shoulders hunched against the wind, the grass whispering and susurrating all about him. The door, blue-painted and peeling, stood unlocked.

Stepping over the threshold, Matsuda found himself in a small, cramped corridor leading into a waiting area. Peering about the door he could see paint peeling like dry skin from the clammy walls, the ceiling mottled with mold. Chairs, some toppled onto their sides, some bleeding stuffing, still lined the room, a sheaf of magazines, models in clothing and hairstyles almost a decade out of date smiling vacantly up from their covers, lay moldering on a central table: amazing what got shut up in places like this, what just got left behind when the doors closed and lay forgotten thereafter. The carpet looked verdant, the air smelt of damp and rot. There was absolutely nothing there.

“Police,” he called. “Is anyone here?”
“Hello?” The response was instantaneous. A man calling from further within the building, his voice firm and not yet tremulous with age, his words followed by a flurry of barking – “quiet,” the man said, “quiet, Momo. We’re around the back, officer!”

Back out into the darkened hallway. Matsuda hurried past a small, untidy room which must once have been an office (chaos in there: record cards spilling out across the floor and a typewriter, its hammers clogged with rust, resting forlornly in the center of an empty desk) and out through an invitingly open door with a single frosted-glass panel, into—

“Thank goodness you’re here,” said Mr. Yamazaki, and his eyes, trapped behind his round-framed spectacles, were fearful.

A quiet kind of disarray. Though the dentist’s chair still sat smugly in the center of the treatment room and sinks and cabinets still lined the walls, the windows were glassless, the rear walls crumbling and tumbledown and the roof, in places, entirely gone. From the front, the old surgery still looked like a building: cut the lawns and clean up the paintwork and it would look much the same as it had in Doctor Tokuno’s day. From the back, however, it was little more than a ruin: the building was wounded, already half-destroyed. They really, Matsuda thought numbly, ought to tear this place down.

It should have been a woman: it appalled him that he should have thought so. Of course, he wouldn’t have wanted a young girl to have suffered—it was only that (this simply isn’t reasonable) a woman would have been understandable.

(This doesn’t happen to men, surely. Not like this.)

The boy was naked. Bleeding, bruised, barely clinging to consciousness, he lay on his back with his hands thrown above his head, legs splayed and bent at the knee. He had been left gagged with a thick strip of stained blue fabric, and a length of coarse rope was still tied loosely about one wrist: though his hands were unbound, he hadn’t tried to tug the gag from his mouth. His right arm looked painfully wrong.

“Son,” Matsuda said tentatively. “Son, can you hear me?”

Nothing. Not even a flicker of the eyes. The boy lay still, and silent, and utterly unreachable: that was the worst of it.

And with a woman it would have been different. Expected, even. There would have been procedures to follow, a protocol. There would have been female officers and specialists to call in, support groups. With a woman, it would have been serious. But now? Now there was nothing. Only him, and a boy who should have been a girl and shouldn’t have been there at all, an aging man with worry in his eyes and a little terrier with a little child’s name – and the unspoken expectation that Mr. Policeman, fine and upstanding and ready to help, would know what to do and could somehow make everything better.

But it didn’t work like that and it never had done, and it certainly wouldn’t now. Matsuda reached for his radio, fumbled the switch: his fingers felt thick and clumsy and foreign. “Matsuda here,” he said: his voice, at least, was as calm and clear as always. “I’m going to need backup.”

The boy struggled when they came for him.

One of the ambulancemen had placed their hand on his shoulder: that was how it started. A nothing of a gesture, meaning nothing at all – an offhanded, almost thoughtless attempt to offer reassurance. He must have felt the boy tensing, heard him inhale sharp and sudden and even that sounded like it should have hurt him. After that he lay still, stubbornly silent and passively uncooperative, yet somehow watchful: though the boy’s eyes were unfocused and heavy-lidded, something in them spoke only of his wariness. It was only when they made to move him that he tried to resist.

God knew what he thought was happening; obvious what he assumed. They touched him and he screamed, and his scream was hoarse and weak and wordless, torn from him through nothing but terror. He screamed and tried to shrink from them, to pull away and struggle to rise: when pain held him fast he lashed out, clawing at the arms and the faces of the men who clustered about him. (Leave me alone. Leave me alone, God damn you.) Fear in his eyes.

It took four of them to hold him down so the paramedics could sedate him.

Better they’d killed him, the old detective said, and resignedly shook his head. Easier all round, and probably kinder—

“Are you sure that was his?” his clean-cut young partner asked.
The old detective spared him a wry smile. “I can’t see a criminal leaving this on him, never mind going round in an apron.”
“Huh,” The young man said. “Silly kind of thing to call a store…”

He fought the drug, too, as desperately and hopelessly as he had twisted beneath the hands that pinned him down. Stark terror on his face as he felt the sudden sting of the needle and his eyes, as they fell closed, were a study in despair. After that it was easy.

The police had arrived in silence; the ambulance though had deployed its siren, drawing attention to itself. By the time the ambulance crew left the building the clutter of vehicles stood about the pavement around the old surgery had drawn the usual crowd of extras, commuters in suits or high-school uniforms, and quizzical children, and here and there a housewife in a kerchief or a pinafore, all watching wide-eyed over nothing at all and heedless of the distant grumble of thunder, the parched and dusty sidewalk spotted with the first heavy droplets of rain. A sudden ripple of murmuring greeted the reappearance of the paramedics, diligently struggling with a laden gurney, a portable cylinder of oxygen.

“What’s his name?” one of the ambulancemen asked, before they took him away.
The young detective only shrugged. “Apparently he’s a florist.”

It wasn’t, of course, new to her.

Senior Staff Nurse Madoka Mori had short dark hair, plump forearms and the placid brown eyes and brisk demeanor of the professionally sensible. Always a grave child, her natural tendency toward practicality had been honed by her time at nursing college, refined by walking the wards, a calm and uncomplaining figure, cool in pristine white, and perfected by seven years spent in emergency rooms. Nobody knew how she stayed so tidy, for she was certainly not a vain woman. Even Madoka herself professed to be mystified.

It had been one of those days, the same kind she had every day. A sweating salaryman with crushing central chest pain, his tie at half-mast; an old woman with a fractured femur found on the floor of her bathroom by the home help; an overdosing schoolgirl pronounced dead on arrival; a traffic accident. Amazing how quickly the life-altering could become only mundane.

Everyday things, for Nurse Mori, consisted of little more than other people’s tragedies and near-misses, with brushes with death that left them shaking and terrified. She glided through it all cool and white and serene as a swan: it was only on stepping from the unit and unpinning the cap from her head that she would realize how tired she felt and notice, as if for the first time, the marks of subtle strain about her mouth, the careworn look in her eyes. You’re no longer young, Madoka, she would think. She would wonder if her mother was right, if it was time to leave the ER and find a quiet, ordinary job elsewhere; she would think about children as she shrugged on her coat and hurried home to prepare her husband’s dinner.

She never would make the decision to leave. Deep down, Madoka Mori knew she didn’t really want to go anywhere.

“What’s he been given?”

The nurses had a name for the cubicles: they called them traps. Mean and cluttered little things, they were, inadequately split off from one another and screened from the corridor by nothing more substantial than a thin curtain made of woven white paper, offering only a parodic form of privacy and whose only true virtue was infinite disposability. Nurse Mori had been overseeing a patient transfer, escorting her forlorn and crumpled salaryman four floors to the coronary care unit, and had barely stepped back into the ER before the charge nurse hurried her over to cubicle seven. She barely had time to ask what the problem was before he was turning from her again, all his attention on an approaching doctor.

Eighteen year old male, he had said over one shoulder, as if it were merely an afterthought. Query sexual assault—and already he had slipped from her reach.

What was there for her to do but to see to it? Nurse Mori had sighed, shaken her head, schooled a reassuring little semi-smile onto her face. (Some things even familiarity didn’t make easier. First the overdosing girl, still trim in her middle school uniform, now this – thank God she had tomorrow off.) She stepped over to the cubicle and slipped neatly inside, the paper curtain swinging to behind her.

If surprise was what she felt, Nurse Mori knew better than to show it.

“What’s he been given?”

For the boy – and somehow it was difficult to think of the patient in cubicle seven as anything but a boy – had clearly been given something. He hardly seemed to feel it when they transferred him to the bed. His eyes opened only momentarily at the jolt, though he shied away when Nurse Mori drew down the sheet that covered him to press the ECG electrodes to his chest. It wasn’t even a surprise to discover he was naked. Easy now, she said, and her voice was soft and murmurous as a lullaby. You’re in hospital. You’re safe.

It would make a difference, she knew, that she was a woman: Nurse Mori made a mental note to request that the boy be examined by a female physician. The curtains billowed slightly as someone hurried past, pushing an overloaded gurney with a single squeaking wheel.

“We gave him ten milligrams of diazepam,” the ambulanceman was saying: he at least possessed the good sense to look sheepish, wilting slightly in the face of Nurse Mori’s obvious disapprobation. “He was panicking.”
“That,” Nurse Mori said, “isn’t really a good indication for sedation.” There was no malice in her voice – she simply stated a fact. (We don’t sedate just to make our own lives easier. Of course he was panicking!)

Tugging the sheet back over the boy, she turned her back on the paramedic to watch the cardiac monitor, checking the alarm limits. Blood pressure was a bit low: they’d have to watch that, though it could mean nothing. This boy looked the athletic type. Do you play sports, she wanted to ask, but what would the point of that be? She spared the stupid ambulanceman another reproachful glance. Now how were they supposed to get anything out of this young man?

“He’s on two liters of oxygen,” the ambulanceman was saying, talking a little too quickly as if hoping to dissuade her from questioning him further. “Saturating at ninety-eight percent on that, and we started him on one liter of normal saline in the ambulance, that’s to run four hourly. The doctors said to ask someone on your staff to write him up for more, he’s probably going to need it.”
“Painkillers?” Nurse Mori asked, and even to her own ears her words had sounded horribly pointed. It would be just like a fool like this to sedate his patient and forget to give him anything for the pain.
“He’s had five milligrams of morphine, so far.”
“Thank you.” Nurse Mori took the ambulance paperwork from the man, gave him a brief, placatory smile. (I’m only looking out for my patient. Surely you understand that?) “I’ll get a doctor to add that to his drug chart. Is there anything else?”

No, nothing else, or nothing that she couldn’t have guessed for herself. Just an inventory of abuse, and exposure, and dehydration, and a possible contact number and that was only for the boy’s supposed workplace. What was his name? The paramedic didn’t know.

She was glad when the man took his leave, leaving her alone with her patient, and beneath the blood and the bruising the poor child looked only terribly young. (No, it never gets easier. Who did this to you, honey? How did you get into this state?) Nurse Mori called to a passing probationer to fetch towels and a hospital gown, and an extra blanket. The boy lay still, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. Just breathing, and just to breathe seemed to tear at him. In the distance, somewhere beneath the bleep and the hiss of machinery, the hum of voices and the constant patter of footfalls, she thought she could hear someone screaming.

Madoka Mori didn’t relish the thought of the phone call she knew she would have to make one bit.

(She could, she supposed, stave it off for a while, in the hope that the boy would snap out of it at least enough to give his name – but if she left it too late there’d be nobody to take the call, not in a flower shop.)

The student slipped in through the curtain, her arms laden with folded fabric: she stopped short when she caught sight of the boy, her eyes going wide, her lips parting as if to frame a question – Nurse Mori shook her head, no, and the girl colored slightly, murmuring an apology as she dropped the blankets onto the end of the bed and went to fill a large plastic bowl with water. Doctor Terada, a calm female voice said over the intercom, please report to resus. Doctor Terada to resus—

“Do you need me to stay, Nurse Mori?”
The woman nodded briskly, tugging on a pair of latex gloves. “Could you lower the bed head, please? We need to get him cleaned up, at least.”

Up close the boy smelled of the outdoors, of damp and of dust and of cold as well as blood, and spent fear.

And him too weary to struggle, or constrained by agony, or beyond terror, or stupefied by the drugs: she couldn’t tell what. All Nurse Mori knew was the boy didn’t try to fight her. He didn’t try to do anything, didn’t even protest, or at least not in words. He merely flinched when she ran a damp washcloth over one bruised cheek – it came away stained and bloody, smeared with red – and tried to draw in on himself, the breath hissing in sharp between clenched teeth. (Awareness filtering back: the boy opened his eyes again, just slightly, just enough for her to notice even his eyes looked torn, damaged, wrong.) Careful as she had tried to be, she knew that she had hurt him. Would not be able to avoid hurting him still further.

A thin film of grime collected at the bottom of the bowl. The student, pale-cheeked and clumsy, changed the water, changed it again: her hands shook as she turned the boy onto his side, felt him tense beneath her grasp. Nurse Mori worked quickly, conscious of the student’s frightened eyes upon her. Assessing, categorizing, wringing out the washcloth into the filthy water. Contusions and lacerations to the chest; abrasions about the neck and jaw, erythemia already darkening to a bruise; right radius either fractured or broken; rope burns at the extremities; perineal trauma—

The boy’s injuries were an indictment in themselves. He shivered when they stripped away the bedsheets and, shivering, tried to hide his face in the pillows.

“It’s okay,” Nurse Mori said, over and over and over again. “You’re in hospital. You’re safe.”

And it was awkward, and fumbling, and somehow far too intimate a thing to do to a hurt and vulnerable stranger: it always was, always had been. Familiarity merely anesthetized her to it. No wonder the boy’s breath caught in his throat, no wonder he tensed and fought against her in the only way left to him, offering nothing but mute and furious non-compliance. It was resistance of a kind, and it left her sweating and agitated as she fought to tug the gown over his stiff, heavy limbs.

Stop this at once, she wanted to say, sharp as a schoolmistress. I’m trying to help you, you stupid child—

She couldn’t blame him for a minute for refusing to believe it. And she would be hurting him: that much was unavoidable.

It was a relief to turn from him, stoop to collect her paperwork and flick quickly through it. A relief, though she hated, even to herself, to admit it, to reduce him to a tentative diagnosis, a series of numbers scribbled in black ink: pulse, respiratory rate, blood pressure. Eighteen year old male, query sexual assault – easier to deal with that way.

Lost, she thought. Poor kid, he looks so lost. (Someone must have missed you, honey. Surely they must.) The boy lay on his back, gazing vacantly up at the ceiling as the student rearranged the bedsheets and nervously fingered the IV tubing: the set of his jaw was a subtle betrayal of agony. The girl stepped anxiously away as Nurse Mori glanced over at her, clasping her hands before her apron as if she had been caught doing something she knew she shouldn’t. She – I’ll need you to stay with him – looked like a child playing dress-up, and barely less forlorn than her patient.

She spared the probationer a smile as, her arms full of papers, she turned back to the boy and bent to him – it was an effort to stop herself from talking his hand. Who are you?

“Is there anyone you want me to call? Your family? Perhaps a friend?”

Nothing. He didn’t appear to have heard. He simply gazed up at the ceiling, his wounded eyes unfocused and fixed upon nothing at all, as if it held something fascinating—

“What’s your name?” Nurse Mori asked, and her voice was soft, her tone was hopeful. “Can you tell me that?”
The boy stirred. His eyes slipped sideways, as if he were searching for her face, and he blinked – once, twice – snatching for focus. He swallowed, and winced. He said, and his voice was little more than a hoarse and painful whisper, “Siberian.”
“Excuse me?” The woman frowned. (Had she heard that right?) “I’m terribly sorry, I don’t think I…”
“My name,” said Ken Hidaka, “is Siberian.”

And let his eyes close, and felt himself falling.