The Art of Lying [Past / Mood]

[HDub]

2013.

Madeline was through her third cigarette during the intervention, and it made the house smell like a well perfumed ash tray. Their house was nice. They had nice enough things and the construction was solid and the settlement after the hurricane and profits thereof. There weren't pictures in the house. There was a kitchen full of pots and pans and utensils that no one used and a liquor cabinet that stayed in consistent rotation.

The air was tense. Chuck and Madeline both were convinced that their son (her son- when things were tense or bad, Elijah was her son. He was her son a lot recently) was going to bolt for the door. The rather mousy counselor in the room, someone who was slight and weary and accompanied by a man who could have probably been a line backer once upon a time. He didn't say much. He didn't need to; the shoulders on the man said he was an insurance policy. Sometimes, these things went south.

"What the fuck, Mom, really?!"

Elijah was not taking it well.

"Language," Chuck Poirot warned.
"I'm not gonna watch my god damn language, this is bullshit!" Elijah exclaimed.
"You stay out all night, you barely graduated-" Madeline replied calmly.
"-How is a three point barely graduating-" Elijah interrupted his mother.
"-and we have had to pick you up at the hospital three times in the past three months-"
"-you jumped out of a fucking airplane without listening to the instructor, you could have died!" Chuck blurted.

The man was read in the face. When Elijah stood, then Chuck stood. He was a fair bit larger than his son, both in weight and in height. Elijah wasn't a short young man by any means, but Chuck Poirot was imposing. He'd always been good at reading people, and even when he was angry Elijah could tell that the tension in the man's shoulders and the way that he held his hands at is sides and clenched his fists relayed a temper that was always held so well in check. The sound of his voice, though, let something slip- he was reaching the end of his rope.

"Now who needs to watch their language," the smaller blond quipped.
"You. Could. Have. Died."
"And?!" Elijah laughed, though the sound was hollow, "if I died, the world would fucking go on, it's not that big of a deal."
"Is that what you were trying to do?" Chuck looked at his son as if he'd just been stabbed. Shocked, hurt, furious.
"Elijah," the little waif of a counselor asked in her too calm and too soothing voice, "your parents told me about the accident, you're here for a reason."
"I'm not suicidal," he huffed.
"I know that-" the counselor replied.
"Like Hell you're not," Chuck snapped. That got him a look from his wife, which immediately made the man grudgingly settle back into his seat.
"-but your parents are worried about you. From everything I've heard from your parents and your teachers, you're not well-"
"-I don't want to kill himself, It just said that-"
Wrong move, the Voice hissed.

Elijah stopped himself right there. His eyes flickered to a nearby wall, thinking himself covert but unable to really keep himself from seeming nervous. He'd said it. he'd said it out loud, mentioned the Voice to his parents and this counselor woman who suddenly was sitting up and looking terribly intrigued. Her 'little' friend didn't seem to care much, only concerned about her continued well being in a potentially dangerous situation. His parents looked on with dread.

"What did it say?" the woman asked cautiously.

Don't. Say. Anything.

So, Elijah didn't say anything. For the rest of the meeting, Elijah was very, very quiet. He didn't say a word to the counselor, to his parents, to the rather large and imposing man who had come with her. The next morning, he very calmly checked himself into a hospital.

Any hospital but the one that the counselor had recommended.

Funny, he could hardly remember what she looked like now.

[HDub]

The first lies we tell are told for fear of punishment. They are immature. They are impulsive. They are inconsistent.
---
2013.

The same television show had been on the TV since Elijah had come to the hospital. Intake was much like it was at any center. The facility was nice enough- clean. The walls were a pale purple and the hotel-styled furniture was arranged in a U shape over a wall mounted television. Nobody could reach the buttons; people weren't allowed to change the channel. Elijah had watched what seemed to be an endless loop of Law and Order while he waited to see someone in intake. What took Elijah back was how cold they kept it. His fingers ached when he bent them.

We don't belong here, the Voice said.
Elijah kept his eyes on the television screen. Focused. Determined. This wasn't real, this… this wasn't happening. The sooner he had papers to prove that, maybe, he just had a little stress, maybe some trauma-induced problems because of what happened a couple years back. His attentions stayed precisely where they were.

He didn't know how many people were here, he never really paid attention to them. He didn't know how many beds they had at this particular facility, but the woman not he other end of the phone had assured him that the typical patient's stay was at most a week. He didn't know this was a lie. He didn't know, at the time, that he was not the typical patient. The waiting room was eerily silent, and Elijah looked over at the woman behind the desk with her graying hair and glasses too hip to do anything other than serve as a reminder of her aging frame.

There was tension in the air, something taut and restless that fought so desperately hard against the feeling of stagnation in the air.

"Can we change the channel?" Elijah asked
"I'm sorry, sweetness," the older woman said in her most apologetic of voices, "we don't have the remote back here."

There was a pain, sharp and sudden in his ears, as if the words themselves ached. He winced.

She's lying to you, said the Voice from some point from behind the wall. Elijah put his attention back towards the television. We don't belong here.
"Yes, we really do," he muttered to himself.

No, not to himself. He said it to the damned wall.

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. Were you talking to me?" the nurse behind the desk said.
"Nothing," he shook his head. There was that pain again.
She's lying again?
"Can you blame her, she is dealing with crazy people," Elijah grumbled.

He spent the rest of his time being quiet. The nurse behind the desk, old and frail and generally harmless, started up a conversation with one of the orderlies. It was just past the range where Elijah could care to listen, but every time the woman spoke there was again that pain. That physical pain that was getting worse and worse. Something that kept insisting upon itself, interruption thoughts with a physical pain and the reminder that something had twisted. Something was aching and off and wrong, and each time the Voice travelled on from behind the wall lies.

It was getting to be too much.

"… so I said to him that if I didn't want this new position I wouldn't have accepted the position-"
"Stop." Elijah winced and snapped at the woman.
"Oh, is everything okay, sweetling?" the woman asked. The orderly, who was tall and lean and fast looking. He wore a mustache that made him look at least seven years older.
"Every word that has come out of your mouth for the past hour and a half hurts-"
The hypocrisy of you craving the truth amuses me.
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Elijah snapped, though his attention was on the wall that held the television. There was tension in his shoulders, there was a knot in his stomach.
You seem so adamant to deny the truth, I thought it was appropriate you be aware of how prevalent a lie is, and how badly they hurt, no matter how harmless they seem.
"What… what the fuck did you do to me?" he looked incredulously at the wall.

It laughed at him.

"Mister Poirot, you need to calm down," the nameless orderly said. The nurse at the desk carefully watched the situation. She was solid.
"I won't calm down goddamnit, I want to know what the Hell is wrong with me!" Elijah snapped back. The Voice laughed harder. Not sweet, not loving, not carefree. No, it was spiteful, Elijah was sure of it.
"Mister Poirot, you need to go to your room."
I didn't do anything to you, child.
"Like Hell you didn't," Eliah growled at the Voice. his muscles were tense, his stomach in knots and suddenly he felt sick. The orderly was making his way to Elijah, and the Voice? The Voice laughed harder and the longer it did, the worse it felt, the more his head felt like it was swimming. "What the fuck is so funny?! Stop- make it stop-"
"Mister Poirot, it will be fine-" sharp, sharp pain "but we are taking you to your room."
"Stop. Lying, things will not be fine-" Elijah was feeling light headed. The room felt small and he hurt and the Voice wouldn't stop laughing. The sound muffled from behind the wall and he could practically taste it on his taste buds along with the swimming and floating and lost feeling that was washing over him.

… do you want to hear a secret?

Elijah took a few steps back, and his heart was pounding and the feeling of chaos and disorder and the call to revolution was loud and bright in the room. The feeling was not the eye of the storm, but the tension that came from Elijah was not that. No, he was the hurricane itself. The air was electric, and it was even electric as his attention flickered to the television on the wall and its stupid lack of remote and he knew, in an instance, how many near misses that television has had.How, if something hit just right it might break.

The same with the orderly's nose.

He took the less dangerous of the two and he picked up the nearest projectile. It happened to be a small end table, and the laughter, the mocking derisiveness nagged hand built to a fever before Elijah found himself alleviating the problem related to the remote. Clearly, they sins'r need one once he… remodeled. The end table clattered against the wall, hitting just hard enough, just right enough that the television sparked and shorted out. There was a solid crack in the flat panel screen.

"Stop now!" he yelled at the television, even if the damn thing was broken.
I didn't do anything… you did this to yourself.
"Mister Poirot, we need to leave now," the orderly said to Elijah. His hand was on his arm and in the tension, in the panic, Elijah did the first thing he could think to do. The feeling of restlessness was still high, and soon enough that hand was met with resistance. Elijah reared back-
"Don't touch me-"

The last thing he remembered before he punched the orderly was that the floor was coming to the ground very suddenly very quickly. He remembered taking a swing and knowing just how to hit in order to give the man a bloodied nose. He that the hit hadn't done anything except get the man off of him for a second and served to make him very, very displeased with the young man. It was't the firs title this particular man had been punched by a patent, and it wouldn't be the last.

This was just a standard Tuesday.

"Bette, why do I get the angry ones?" the orderly asked the nurse. She shrugged, and the rather panicked Elijah found himself rudely introduced to the floor and out of the way. The last thing he thought of was how he had been confused, how could he have done all of this to himself?

The world went slow after that

---

When Elijah woke up, he couldn't move his hands. Everything felt… it didn't feel. His head was cotton and he couldn't get himself to quite focus, and the prospect of sitting up seemed to be no longer an option.

He thought he heard someone outside talking about a transfer, and how sad it was to see someone so young so far gone.

"Well, you know, it's just another Thursday," one of the voices outside of Elijah's door said.


… what happened to Wednesday?