...

Friday

It was another routine morning. Breakfast was bland and uninspiring. In the pill line, Tate was given a new cup of medication. He eyed it suspiciously. He didn't recognize anything in it.

"Are you sure these are mine?" he wanted to know. He could guess what the nurse's answer would be but he still felt the need to draw her attention to the fact that he wasn't getting what he normally did.

"I'm sure," the woman responded flatly. She was the same lady who'd given him his meds on previous days and had seen his paranoia over the pills before. It didn't impress her then, or now. "Take it up with your doctor if you have a problem with it."

He grumbled under his breath and carried his the cup away. Later in the recreation room he tried to hunker down over the pills to get a better look at them but Shelley came over. He let the pills drop from his lap to the seat between his legs to hide them, though he suspected he could probably trust her with his medication secret.

"I heard you went to see Doctor Heath," she said as she sat down next to him on the couch.

Tate didn't really want her sitting so close to him at the moment but he put up with it. "Yeah."

"What for?"

"He wanted to examine my head," he said. A perverse little smile tickled the corners of his mouth. "I guess they think there's something wrong upstairs."

"Like what?"

Tate shrugged and wished she would go away so he could look at his medication. "He said he wouldn't know till the scans came back."

"Wow. Sounds serious."

The teen shrugged again. Then he lost patience with the situation. "Hey, Shelley, do you know much about the pills they give people here?"

It was her turn to shrug. "Some of them. Why?"

He glanced about. No orderlies or guards were anywhere nearby. Just the regular host of crazies and the few questionably sane people who weren't paying them any attention. So he spread his knees and offered her a peek at the small pile of multicolored pills.

Her eyes widened in surprise then she smiled at him like he'd done something clever. "You haven't been taking them?"

Tate hid them again. "I was taking some. But they changed them. Now I don't know what they are."

"What were you taking before?"

"Just the pain pill," he said. "For the headaches. They're stupidly bad."

"Let me see again," said Shelley.

He spread his legs and she leaned closer for a better look. She poked the nearest, an oblong gray one.

"I don't know what any of this shit is," she admitted.

"Knock it off!" Patrick barked at them, catching them both off guard.

Tate snapped his knees shut and Shelley fell back onto the couch, away from him. They both looked up, wide-eyed. The orderly was heading their way.

"You know that kind of behavior's not allowed," he said. "Especially in the common room. Put some distance between you."

He glowered at them both for a moment then moved on. Once he was gone they looked at each other.

"He thinks we were..." said Shelley. She broke off in a laugh.

Tate smiled but his heart was still racing too fast for him to be genuinely amused. He'd come very close to getting caught sitting on a pile of pills. He scooped them up and sighed. He would have to wait till he was in his room to get a real good look at them but he already knew looking wouldn't do him any good. He had a hunch one of the pills would help his pains but he didn't want to have to take them all to find it.

..

In the end, Tate just stuffed all of the pills into his mattress. He wasn't in the mood to risk being a vegetable all day. So he checked out the assignment board. His name still wasn't on any of the work details or class rosters. Despite what he'd said when he first arrived, he found the oversight annoying. It was like they were telling him he couldn't be trusted with something as simple as clay.

"Hello, Tate."

The teen turned and saw Dr. Harmon standing there, smiling at him. Tate tried to return the expression but his lips just twisted in a wry way. It was the best he could muster.

"Hey, doc."

The man moved closer to the board, shoving his hands in the pockets of his slacks as he checked out the names posted there. After a moment he clucked his tongue. "Not on the schedule, huh?"

Tate's mouth twisted again, this time in a sour purse. "No. Even though I've pretty much been a model patient."

"That's a shame," said Ben. "On the bright side, you won't have to fold some other guy's underwear."

"I guess so."

"Have you thought about taking me up on my offer?"

Tate tipped his head. "Will talking to you get me out of here quicker?"

Ben knew that Tate wasn't a treat-and-release case. Anyone who knew anything about the clock tower shootings knew that would never happen. Pointing that out at the moment didn't seem prudent, however.

"Who knows?" the doctor said noncommittally. "It's possible. Mainly what I hope it will do is help you."

Tate thought about it for a moment. "Could we do it now?"

He wasn't actually feeling like talking. His head was pounding and his body ached, which made him grouchy. But he wanted a diversion from his boredom and maybe a chance at scoring something that would ease the constant throb in his skull. If he worked things right, he might be able to get something for the pain from this doctor.

"I don't see why not," said Ben. " But we'll need to stop by the nurse's station first to check you through to the other wing."

.

Dr. Harmon's office was a bit larger than Dr. Thredson's but didn't feature more furnishings or decorations and the lighting wasn't any better. The offices at Briarcliff seemed uniformly drear. Tate took a seat in a chair similar to the ones that sat in front of Dr. Thredson's desk.

"I hurt," he said.

"Oh?" said Ben, looking up from the pad of paper he was flipping through to find an empty page. Like Dr. Thredson he recorded all of his sessions but he also liked to take thorough hand-written notes. "What's bothering you?"

"Everything," grumped the blond boy. He picked at a loose thread on a button on his shirt. "My head mostly. But my body aches too. I think it's from the bullets."

The doctor looked at him with mild concern. "Have you told Doctor Thredson about this?"

"He knows. He was having them give me a pain pill with my daily meds but he took me off everything when I went to see Doctor Heath for my head scan. Now I've got different meds and none of them's for the pain."

"I'll look into it," said Ben, making a note.

"Can you give me something now?"

"I'm afraid not," said the doctor after a pause. "I can see about getting you something after I discuss it with Thredson but I can't go prescribing you things without his consent."

That was not what Tate wanted to hear. He glowered and folded his arms over his middle. "But I hurt now."

"Do you want to talk about your pain?" asked Doctor Harmon. "Or what we came here to discuss?"

"That IS what we came here to discuss!" Tate exploded, tears springing to his eyes. They didn't fall. "Don't you fucking get it? This is why!" He smacked his head with his open palm, making his hair even wilder. It hadn't seen a comb in far too long. "My fucking head HURTS! All the time! I can't think. I can't sleep. All I can do is hurt! Everybody keeps asking me 'Why?', 'Why?', 'Why?' and I can't tell them because, God's honest truth, I don't remember what the hell I was thinking while I was up there! I hurt too fucking much!"

Tate flopped back in his chair and ground the heels of his palms into his shut eyes.. His head was pounding fiercely. The pain was almost like a living presence, sitting on his head like a demon, poking his brain with a pitchfork.

"Look," he said, letting his hands drop so he could fix the therapist with a stony gaze. "My head hurts. A lot. It started out just off and on and mostly manageable. But the longer it goes, the more strange shit I think. Did you see the note I wrote? The one from before, that Doctor Thredson has?"

Dr. Harmon gave a little nod; he had seen the note when he'd gone through his colleague's files without permission.

"Well, there you go," said the teen, waving his hands in an all-inclusive gesture.

"You said you wanted them to examine your brain during autopsy," the doctor prompted.

Tate gave a little nod. "Yeah. I think something's not right up here." He tapped his temple. "Maybe I am just crazy. Maybe it's just the fucking headaches. I really don't give a shit anymore. All I really care about is the fact that my head really hurts and if it doesn't stop soon I might do something nobody likes."

Ben eyed the young man. He had already done just what he was he was threatening to do so the doctor had no reason to doubt he meant what he said. "When you're on pain medication, you feel more stable?"

Tate glanced up at the ceiling briefly, a flippant gesture that turned into true consideration. "I guess so. It's like... I'm not thinking about it all the time. You know? So I can split my weird thoughts away from the not-weird thoughts easier."

"Weird thoughts?"

"You know," the teen shrugged. He picked at the loose button thread some more. "Everybody has weird thoughts. Like how you'd like to punch that guy that cut you off in line at the cafeteria or how you'd like to do your best friend's chick. Or maybe how you'd like to run your boss over because he fucked you over on a pay raise again. Whatever. Only you don't do it because you can tell yourself: 'That's just a thought. Now get back to work.'."

"So you're saying it's difficult for you to distinguish the difference between right and wrong—real and fantasy—when these headaches are bothering you?" Ben jotted down some notes quickly.

Tate chewed his lower lip then squinted his left eye a little as he thought. "More like it's difficult for me to give a shit. The world's such a screwed up place, you know? People doing fucked up shit for fucked up reasons. None of us really knows what's really going on. We're all just scrambling around trying to figure out how to make ourselves happy before we die. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, people are doing the most depraved, fucked up shit imaginable. And why?" He paused but it wasn't a question meant to be answered. "No reason. Just because we're here."

"If you really didn't care, why take the trouble to go out and kill a bunch of people?" asked Ben. "Seems like an awful lot of work for something you don't care about."

But Tate just shrugged again. "Beats blowing your brains out anonymously in some dusty basement. At least this way I made the news."

Ben sensed that was a bullshit answer but he let it slide.

"Well," he said, offering Tate a small smile. "I'd like to talk to Doctor Thredson before we go on, if you don't mind. I want to find out what the situation is with your medication and whether we can get you something for your pain. Did Doctor Heath tell you when your results might be ready?"

Tate shook his head. Even that small motion hurt.

"All right," said Dr. Harmon. "I'll get together with him as well. We'll figure out a treatment plan, Tate, that will help you."

Tate likewise sensed bullshit but he, too, let it slide. He put on a false smile. "Thanks, doc."

...

Violet had seen her father with Tate. She'd been putting some files into the huge oak filing cabinet at the end of the hall when they had gone into the doctor's office. She could have gotten her work done quickly but she took her time, dragging it out so she could talk to her dad afterward.

Eventually they came back out. When they left together it was Violet's plan to go wait in his office for her dad to return, but at the last moment opted to follow the pair instead. She did so at a distance so her father wouldn't notice her. Fortunately he seemed to be caught up chatting with his patient; she may as well have been invisible.

She followed them through to the central atrium where she hid herself behind the spiral stairs while her dad wrapped up the conversation with the inmate. He watched as Tate entered the hall leading to the commons, then Ben headed back in the direction of his office.

Violet hesitated then headed toward the patients' hall. There was a guard stationed there and she decided if he gave her any guff about going in, she would simply tell him that she had a message for one of the other staff. He didn't try stop her though. He barely glanced up from his copy of Reader's Digest long enough to even notice she was there.

The girl felt a thrill of excitement as she moved down the dark hall. She was an unflappable sort of person; it took a lot to rattle her. Her father called her fearless but often she just felt bored by what others found unnerving. Horror movies didn't scare her. Thrill rides couldn't make her scream. But here in the ward alone, she knew there was a possibility of real danger in amongst the insane. She wasn't suicidal; it was just kind of fun to feel on edge for once.

She reached the common room and peeked in through the open door, one hand on the door jamb. The wide room was hazy with cigarette smoke and the people within shuffled around like the damned in hell. A few conversed or tried to play games but the majority just seemed to be standing or sitting around, acting weird.

It took her a few moments to find Tate in the crowd of similarly-dressed people. The naked people were distracting. She didn't want to look but it was hard not to stare. She found herself searching the faces of the nude, seeking their reaction to their vulnerable state. Most didn't seem to notice they were unclothed. One man's head kept falling down to his shoulder like it was being pulled down.

She finally spotted Tate, sitting on one of the low, ugly couches that dotted the commons. There were a couple of other inmates chatting with him, both men. She wasn't quite bold enough to cross the room to where he was so she just stood there in the shadows, watching him.

She tried to envision him up there, on the deck of the clock tower, picking off people one by one. Unaware of her thoughtful gaze, he smiled, dimples appearing in his cheeks. She couldn't match that cherubic face to the television's villain of the tragic shooting. Since she'd first heard of the clock tower shootings, Violet had followed the crime avidly, first in horrified outrage then out of growing interest in some of the strange things she'd been reading about what set off the shooting spree.

She'd put together a scrapbook containing news articles she'd clipped from various newspapers and magazines. She'd even found some old yearbook photos of Tate Langdon that TIME ran, and put them in there as well. She knew the obsession was weird which was why she kept the scrapbook hidden under her bed.

She didn't condone the murders one bit. It was a tragic loss of life and pain for the people who survived it. But she thought she understood Tate, based on what she'd read of him and his past. She felt a strange sense of kinship she couldn't explain or even understand herself. The articles had never implied a motive but his history, the suicide note... her own feelings about life and people... She could see how someone could arrive at the point he did.

She only wished that she had met him sooner, before he did what he did.

Perhaps she could have helped steer that pent-up negative energy someplace less horrible. After a few more seconds the girl finally quit the doorway. The nuns would likely notice her missing if she didn't turn up soon. So she headed back down the hall, considering what life might have been like if she had somehow met the clock tower shooter before he lost his way.

"Violet."

The sound of his voice made her stop. She looked back and saw that he had followed her. He was standing just a few feet away.

A small smile touched the corners of her lips. "Hi."

He smiled and those angelic dimples surfaced again. "Hi. Come here often?" His smile split into a cheesy grin.

"Every chance I get," she responded sarcastically, with an eye-roll. Then she said more seriously: "Hey. Um. You... want to go someplace and talk?"

He gave her a funny look. "I can't exactly go anywhere."

"Your room's not locked right now. Is it?"

Tate blinked and then shrugged a shoulder. "No. Not till later."

"Let's go there, then," she smiled.

..

Tate led the way to the men's ward. Since there wasn't a guard stationed there, no one questioned them. The zoned-out patients lingering in the halls certainly didn't care. Once in his room, the teen headed for his cot and flopped on it, making it creak.

"Oh, my God," Violet murmured in awe, looking around as she moved further into the tiny cell. "This place is..."

"Prison?" Tate supplied helpfully. He folded his hands over his middle and looked at her expectantly.

The corner of her mouth twitched in a faint, wry smile. "Yeah." She got wide-eyed all over again as she realized how little furniture was in the room. She sat down in the chair beside the bed. "How can you stand it?"

"The drugs help," he admitted. "But it's not like I've got much of a choice. You know?"

She nodded, conceding that.

"You got a cigarette?"

"No," she said. "Not on me. They won't let me have them in here."

"Why are you here?" he asked abruptly.

"What?"

"Why are you here," he repeated. "With me. In here. You could get fired."

She fidgeted a little then shrugged. "I guess I just wanted to know... Why."

He couldn't help rolling his eyes. Then he dimpled another grin. "That's the million dollar question, isn't it?"

"Well?" she pressed. Now that the subject was out in the open, she wanted an answer. She might not get another chance to learn what could make a seemingly normal young man go berserk at school.

He looked at her for a long moment, trying to decide what to tell her. The problem was, he'd told Dr. Harmon the truth: Even he wasn't entirely sure of why he'd gone through with the shooting. He'd done a good job of hiding that fact from the doctors who'd been trying to shrink him, but it was true. The event itself had taken on the shape of a hazy nightmare for him. It was a tangle of impressions and images without feelings attached.

He thought back to the time before, when he was stockpiling his weapons. So many nights spent sitting up in his room, learning how to take them apart and put them together, how to clean and load them. It was hours and hours of busy work that had taken his mind off the persistent pain in his head. Back then it had been a fantasy, a way to blow off steam after dealing with a world full of mindless zombie-people. People who bit at you simply because you were near.

"When I was a kid," he said, picking at some dead skin next to his thumbnail. "I used to have this nightmare a lot. Sometimes twice a week. I'd dream I was at a swimming party and there were all these other kids running around the pool, swimming and jumping off the diving board and going down the water slide. And for some weird reason I'd start sinking down to the bottom. And I can't swim back up, no matter how hard I try. I'm drowning and I look up and above me, all around, are these people and they're so busy being dipshits, splashing each other and having fun, that they don't even notice me drowning. Not even the grownups, who're supposed to be watching for shit like that. I can't scream. Nobody can hear me. Nobody cares."

He paused then and looked at her. She was listening with rapt attention. He rewarded her with a wry little smile.

"I always heard that if you die in your dreams? You die in real life," he said. He ripped off a tiny chunk of skin, making his cuticle sting. "It's not true. I died every time in that dream."

Violet shifted in the rickety chair to propped her elbows on her thighs. She had believed if she met and talked to the clock tower shooter, perhaps she'd finally be able to understand enough to satisfy the need for closure she felt. She would be able to let the matter go and move on. But, hearing his side of things, she was more enthralled than ever. Tate was no Ed Gein. If anything, meeting him had only deepened the mystery as to why he did what he did.

"What do you think it means?" she asked.

"That I shouldn't go swimming," he grinned.

"Not much risk of that happening here."

"Funny enough," he said, chin lifting poignantly. "I haven't had been swimming once since I've been here."

"Really?" she arched her brows.

"Scout's honor," said Tate, holding up the Boy Scout salute.

"You're a Boy Scout?" asked Violet, skeptical.

He gave a soft snort. "Was. Haven't been for a long time."

There was a pause, then she said: "Did you know any of the people you killed?"

Tate hesitated then shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe." He thought about it more. Flashes of forms rushed through his mind, none familiar. "Probably not. I d'know. Nobody's told me anything about... anything. I don't even know how many people I shot."

She shook her head, amazed. "I don't get it, Tate. You seem like a nice guy. How... how could you just do something like that?"

"I was mad."

Violet stared at him, perplexed by the simple answer. "At who?"

She had no idea how frustrated her father and Dr. Thredson would be. In just a few minutes, she'd managed to get to a place with Tate that they'd been struggling to reach.

"Everybody," he said. "For letting me drown."

"But. That was just a dream, Tate."

"I don't mean literally," he said. He sat up then, suddenly intense. "There was all kinds of fucked up shit happening, Violet. Stuff you wouldn't believe unless you saw it yourself. And not just at my house. The school? Oh, my God, the school." Tate pressed his wrists to his temples for a moment, overwhelmed by the sudden flood of unpleasant memories. "People disappearing. You know they've got tunnels that connect to the ones here? They do. Harvey told me."

He was starting to sound paranoid to Violet but she still didn't find him scary or dangerous. His mild hysteria seemed to her like steam venting.

"Who's Harvey?"

"Another patient," Tate said.

"You're not supposed to be in here," Max the orderly barked from the doorway.

Violet hopped up and scampered out, ducking past the big man with an apologetic glance back at Tate. Once she was gone, the stocky man came all the way into the cell, cracking his knuckles.

"You just like gettin' in trouble with the ladies, don't you?"

Finding the man's demeanor entirely too threatening, Tate tensed up and eyed the man warily.

When he didn't get an answer, Max smirked. "Yeah, well. This time it's gonna cost ya." He pushed the cell door shut and moved toward the bed, one hand drifting to his crotch. "Come on over here and suck on this."

Tate stared at him, surprised at first then disgusted when he realized the orderly was serious. "Fuck you."

Max clucked his tongue. "You got two choices, sunshine. Get over here and polish the ol' knob or I tell Sister Jude how you can't keep your hands off the ladies. She'll castrate you and then she'll can your little candy striper girlfriend. You'll never see her again. Not that you'll wanna."

A slow, sickening chill spread through Tate and he wished desperately that he would wake up. But it wasn't a dream. This was another miniature horrid reality that wasn't going to go away just because he didn't want to participate any longer. Hot tears stung his eyes but he blinked them back, making his sinuses burn.

"Well?" said Max. He pulled his dick out. It was short and wide, like he was. "Come on. We don't got all day."

Hating the moment, the orderly, and himself, Tate got up and moved over to where the guy was waiting. He dropped to his knees but he didn't look at the fat dick the dark-haired man was waving in his face. He just took a breath, opened his mouth, and shut his eyes. Immediately Max shoved his cock in. Springy pubic hair tickled the teen's nose and he felt the guy's hand on the back of his head, forcing him all the way down.

"You even think about biting," the orderly growled. "And I'll put you in a wheelchair."

Tate thought about it anyway as the man started to thrust. But it was a hollow thought he didn't act on. The short-term victory would be sweet but the long-term would be even worse for him—and for Violet too. Revenge would have to wait. For now.

It was an awful eight minutes for Tate, gagging and choking on Max's cock as the man face-fucked him. When the orderly finally came, he pulled out and shot his load all over the teen's face, laughing while he did. Then he gave the boy's blond head a pat and left him there like that.

Tate hastily wiped his face as best he could with his hands then hurried to the bathroom where he spent several minutes washing and washing his face and mouth. He tried to gag himself with a finger, to induce vomiting. It didn't work. It just made him dry heave.

He washed more. He washed and washed but it didn't make him feel clean. Eventually he gave up and sank to the floor next to the sink's mildewed base, hugging himself miserably.

xxx

Author's Note:

Camera pans back away from Tate, back and back, through the halls, out to a long-shot of Briarcliff Manor. Roll credits. Etc.

The end of this episode actually made me feel slightly ill to my stomach. Not often I manage to write something that bothers even me.

Next Ep: The asylum takes a toll on the Body and Soul.