Idiots, Fools, Part-timers
A Count The Days story. Comes after They’re Laughing At Me and leads into Respite. Contains teeth gore, shoulder whump and some sembelance of comfort.
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Fennec is on his fourth cup of coffee. It is three in the morning, and he is doing the observation rounds, because none of the officers have deemed to do it, and it must be done. He has a splitting headache.
None of this is unusual for him. He limps down the corridor of C-5, a hand on his key chain to stop them from rattling around and waking people up. The people in Corrective Isolation tend not to be so happy if you wake them up in the night. He’s had a man take a chunk out of his chin with a makeshift knife made from a broken CD over that in the past.
Halfway down the coridoor, in the middle of the long row of locked doors, one of the blue metal doors sits slightly ajar, away from the frame. Fennec pulls a comical expression of incredulous shock before it drops from his face as he realises what a stupid expression it is.
He rubs gritty eyes on the back of his hand, and stops, staring at the slightly ajar door. “Idiots, fools, part-timers,” he mutters, as if the day staff would hear the criticism, and goes to try to shimmy the lock into shutting. The day keys- the individual cell keys- are all in sealed pouches upstairs, and the spares, the “doubles” keys, are in the hands of the night’s orderly officer.
The door’s locking mechanism won’t budge- true to its design, but certainly frustrating. Fennec pauses about to radio the orderly officer, one hand on his radio.
Who is the orderly officer for tonight, he wonders?
He puts his hand on his forehead as he remembers the name written on the whiteboard in the staff reception today. Jack Iverson.
He pulls the door ajar again to try and slam it, and see if the lock will shoot with that kinetic shock. It is at that moment when he realises the worst-case scenario has happened.
Somehow, the cell’s not empty. The door wasn’t checked, and the cell is not empty.
Fennec’s hand on his forehead turns to a hand in his hair, staring at the crumpled figure in the dark of the cell. “Oh, Scheisse,” he mutters.
The ones who are awake usually know better than to try to sneak by if a door doesn’t lock properly. The threat of escape charges is enough for them to point it out at lockup, and no later. But the man in the cell looks totally out of it. He’s lying almost foetal on the plastic mattress, writhing and clawing at himself, mumbling incoherently. “I can’t- I can’t- I can’t-”
Against his better judgement, Fennec decides to step in. He almost vomits as the smell of alcohol hits him. He almost vomits again as he stands on a tooth on the floor with a crunch. He winces, kicking it gently out of the way, and steps towards the figure writing on the floor. “Mother!” cries the man, jolted into the now by Fennec’s shadow falling on his face. “Mother! Please!”
“She isn’t here,” says Fennec quietly, recognising the man by his scarred back and his hands and not much else. Haskell- normally a relatively well put-together man- has been off Fennec’s roster for upwards of a week now. He had wondered where they had moved him, but had decided it was much beyond his payroll to even think about.
Where he was doesn’t matter. What they did to him is written over his skin. Fennec pushes his glasses up his nose and watches Haskell reach a hand out to something that’s not there. “Jesus,” he mumbles- an exclaimation of shock he’s picked up from the native speakers around him. An unusual idiosyncracy for a Jewish man to have picked up, but an expression of shock all the same.
Haskell’s face is a mess. Both eyes blackened, swollen, hair thick with salt, his jaw, swollen, blood dripping down his chin as he chews at his own lip, reaching out into the dark with a grunt of effort. “No, no, n- no, no, you can’t, I can’t-” There’s a reedy cry as he shifts his weight a little, and he goes back to mumbling incoherently to himself, writhing in agony.
Tipping his head to one side, then the other, Fennec realises that his left shoulder is out of its socket. It’s quite obvious to see at a certain angle, each time he reaches out for something that’s not there. As much as he’d like to clean the utter mess they’ve made of him up and get him into bed properly, he worries that they’re not done with him. And to interrupt the work of the people who like to periodically wipe Haskell from the face of the earth for a week or so is a dangerous game- Fennec already has a vague idea of Iverson’s obsession with the disgraced soldier, and doesn’t wish to know more.
So cleaning him up is off the table, reasons Fennec. But the shoulder? It wouldn’t be out of the question that the shoulder had simply slipped back in whilst the man had writhed around in his half-conscious state, he thinks. He could lie his way through that.
Glancing behind him, he puts a hand on the wall, and clumsily sits down beside the man.
He glances behind him again, expecting Iverson to be standing in the doorway, poised to attack. Reaching over, he takes Haskell by the intact shoulder, who screws his face up with a groan.
Fennec gently turns Haskell over. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says quietly, getting a good grip on the injured side, one hand on the side of Haskell’s neck and the other at the top of the arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“N- no- no-”
Fennec, aided by a grim sort of muscle memory, puts his weight behind his hands.
The shoulder slips back in with an audible crack.
Haskell’s eyes go wide. “Ah! Ah!” he howls.
“I’m sorry,” says Fennec quietly, putting a hand over Haskell’s mouth to try to quieten him down. “That’s better now, it is better, it is better.” Haskell shifts around, trying to get away from him, but slowly, the realisation that the pain has subsided a fraction sinks in, and he stills with a sigh, pressing his face against the cool of the floor.
Fennec sits there for a moment, looking at the utter mess they’ve made of the man, before he can hear the distant clicking of Munroe’s shoes against the laminate, coming down the other corridor of the wing.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbles, remembering just how much trouble he is in if he’s caught here, and tries to get to his feet again, grabbing onto the doorframe to ease himself up with a grimace.
He stumbles out of the room, nearly bent double, still holding onto the door frame with white knuckles, and lets a few tears slip down his cheeks as the pain gnaws at the inside of his knee. He stays, a hand on his knee, until he catches his breath, and then he straightens up, and pushes his glasses up his nose with a sigh.
In the dark, Haskell stops writhing around on the plastic mattress, and drifts off into a dreamless sleep.
Fennec takes his radio from his belt with a sigh, and keys the transmit button. “This is tango-four to control, over,” he says flatly. He utterly despises using the radio.
“Control. Go ahead, over.”
“I have a door here- 467, down on C-5- that’s not been shot by the day staff. The… the, er, lock mechanism seems… erm…” He trails off for a moment. “It was shut but not locked. Requesting the NOO to come down and ensure that it is locked, over.” He chews his lip, praying that he’s not going to get yelled at for being unclear on the radio as he often is.
There’s a moment as he stands there in silence, with his radio in his hand, and then Iverson’s voice cuts through the static. “Night Orderly Officer, receiving. Thank you, Anton. I’m on my way down, over.”
Iverson announces his presence with the jangling of his keys as he walks, as he always does when he wants to be heard, walking onto the wing in the knowledge that it is his kigdom and his alone. “Is it down here?” he asks, walking down the hallway. Fennec keeps his distance, just nods. In all honesty, he thinks the man smells godawful- salt, fish, and a coppery undertone- and he doesn’t want to be within arm’s reach either.
“There. There’s someone in there,” he says to Iverson, gesturing towards the unlocked cell.
“No, there isn’t,” says Iverson, and fixes him with a stare. Those parchment-pale brown eyes are full of rotting bones and decay and blood and carrion. Fennec instinctively stares at the floor, wrenching his gaze away from the stare. That stare means what Iverson says, and it means what is in Iverson’s eyes, despite the soft smile on his face. “I think you must be very tired.” His voice drips with a sort of condescending sarcasm.
There is, then, as far as Fennec is willing to argue, nobody in that cell. “It has been a long night,” concedes Fennec quietly.
“Go and take your break,” says Iverson.
Fennec looks at him again, and nods slowly. He leaves before Iverson has a chance to say anything else to him, but out of the corner of his eye, watches the Special dissapear into the cell and pull the unlocked door of the cell to behind him.
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