Phaedra M. Paderborn (painbreak) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2009-12-10 16:55:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | johnny rebel, morphine |
Who: John Harden [Johnny Reb takemystand] & Dr. Phaedra Paderborn [Morphine painbreak], Complete Log
When:: Wednesday, December 9. Late morning.
Where:: Nepenthe Clinic, Brooklyn. Office of Dr. Phaedra Paderborn, M.D.
Warnings: Mild drug use.
For the very first time in his life, Johnny had entered into what he thought was a meaningful, long-term relationship. It was far more than anything he'd had with his wife, and he had thought it was going well. Three days ago, he'd been proven wrong. Emo had dumped him --or so Johnny thought, because what else could he think? In his mind, you didn't tell someone you loved him and then run out on him. It completely floored him, left him more confused and emotional than he could recall being in decades.
And, two days later, there was nothing else he could think of to do. The liquor cabinet was empty. He had gotten into fights at (and subsequently banned from) three different bars. He'd filled Evan's voicemail with messages from varying stages of sobriety. None of that, though, did him any good. He just needed to clear his mind and calm down so he could sort out his options. And there was only one thing that had ever calmed him like that, made the pain vanish so entirely. With Evan gone, there was nobody left to dissuade him (Pa was too busy, Indie would disapprove, and Twee was still frolicking in New Orleans with a bunch of Greeks) from giving in to the desperate, aching need.
Which was how Johnny Reb, currently known as John Harden, ended up in the clinic of Doctor Phaedra Paderborn, also known as Morphine. He knew he was a sight, but at this point he wasn't out to impress anybody. There were dark circles beneath his still slightly bloodshot eyes, and it was a definite possibility that the clothes he was wearing were the same ones he'd been wearing for three days. At least he had taken a shower, although it had been more as a means of sobering up than for appearance's sake. She had seen him on battlefields, covered in blood and grime -- surely she couldn't fault his dishevelment now.
He approached the reception desk and fixed the mortal man with an impatient stare. "I need to see the doctor. Ain't got an appointment or nothin', but she'll see me. You tell her Johnny's here and she'll want to see me." At least, he sincerely hoped she would. He didn't know what else to do.
When the door to the clinic had swung open and a man swaggered through looking like a disheveled mess, Martin looked up from the computer screen, his fingers momentarily pausing in their endless data-entry. It was a somewhat slow day; Dr. Paderborn did not have many patients, and those that did have appointments were only in briefly, for consultations or picking up prescriptions. He cleared his throat slightly, trying to keep his expression and voice as polite and professional as possible, even as his eyes glimpsed the man's slightly wild look, heard the drawl in his voice. Martin's own voice had the slightest hint of where he had grown up, somewhere slightly south but not quite north, and there was a warm, blind friendliness to his demeanor. "Oh, all right. Johnny, hold on one moment please."
He picked up the phone, pressing the direct line to Phaedra's private office in the back of the clinic. It rang once. He spoke quietly. "Doctor, there is a man here to see you," a pause as she asked something to him. "No, no appointment." His eyes studied Johnny for a moment. "His name is Johnny and--" Silence. Instead of an answer, there came the opening and closing of a door down the hall, the click of flat heels against the floor and then muted as she walked onto the light carpet of the waiting room. Phaedra cast a glance to Martin, whose expression, while feebly trying to remain in that perpetual mask of customer service, told her much about her receptionist's thoughts.
And there he was. She found his upper arm with her hand, a polite gesture she often did with her patients. Her eyes remained distant, as she was ever conscious of her appearance in the office, and the detachment one must have, even when feeling fondly for the patient. "Hello, Johnny. Come with me." She gestured, and started toward the hall way. No trace of the inner fire within her that was suddenly ignited touched her facial expression, nor the sudden need she had to dig her fingers into his skin and give him the nothingness he craved.
Johnny fidgeted impatiently, shifting his weight from one foot to the other while the receptionist dialed back to an office. He wanted to breeze past the little man and find his own way back to her; he was so close now he could practically taste it. But he refrained, clasping his hands together behind his back in a pose not so dissimilar from the parade rest of his soldier years. He tried to appear fascinated by the decoration of the waiting area, tried to make it look like he wasn't a pathetic failure come crawling back to the one thing that had both saved him and almost destroyed him.
But the second he heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor, Johnny's attention was on the hall. And she was there and her hand was on his arm, and even without the drug itself the contact was so good he could have broken down and wept. He let her lead him down the hall, complacent and trusting as a small child. She would make it better. She would give him what he needed, and she would take away the pain that had plagued him. All of it. All of the leftover physical aches that she had once soothed, all of the mental and emotional turmoil, everything would be swept away in the sweet rush of the morphine he hadn't touched in so long.
It was only for this once, and then he would decide what to do. Just once.
She tilted her head softly, looking up at him in a glance as they walked down the hall. His face was a study in inner turmoil, despite the complacent way with which he handled himself. There was a second of contemplation and pause in front of the examination room - purposefully sterile and white - and she continued down the hall with him, choosing, instead, to take him into her office, all dim lights and warm colors. She opened the door and gestured for him to sit.
Leaning against her desk, she looked at him curiously. She knew why he was here. But, with an inviting, quiet smile, she spoke regardless. "Johnny. What brings you here today?"
She was not entirely surprised he was here, but she was almost surprised at how easy it would be, now.
Once they were in the office, Johnny nearly collapsed onto the nearest seat. He tried not to think about what he was doing or where he was, alone with the embodiment of his former addiction in said embodiment's office. It was the Temptation of Man all over again, but it was clear to all parties involved how this would end.
Running his hands over his face, he looked down at the floor. It would be easier to handle if he didn't look at her, didn't see her success at the cost of his own failure. "It hurts," he said. No need to specify what hurt, exactly. She would easily see that there was no physical wound this time. And hopefully, it wouldn't matter. He was counting on that. "Bliss, it hurts," Johnny repeated, this time looking up at her in slight bewilderment and desperation.
Phaedra's fingers and their light grip on the side of her desk tensed just slightly, enough to whiten her knuckles. Bliss, he had called her. He was the soldier who had given her the name she had until 1914; his blood had stained her dress and her fingers, and she had been with him in the worst of his physical suffering, his many deaths -- a guide on his journey to immortality. And now, he was sitting in her plush office, less than a foot away. Her office which had become her solace from the cold outside, in which she stored her most prized books, possessions, and antique medical paraphernalia from the 19th century, a private museum to a most obscure Symbolist painter, and a shrine to her financial, mental, emotional and spiritual success. And he was here.
She saw no wounds, could sense no physical injury whatsoever that may have been burdening him, but when she opened up her senses further, deeper, she could feel his pain, an anguish that was nearly tangible. In the dim light cast by various stained-glass lamps that lined the deep mahogany-wood shelves, a gentle smile took her features, and she slunk from the perch against her desk, to lean against the arm of the antique, over-sized chair he found himself in.
"Oh, Johnny," she said quietly, her voice dripping with a soothing, soft note, to fall upon his ears as a precursor to the soothing reprieve she could and would give him. Soft fingertips were then finding his shoulder, a gentle, nearly imperceptible squeeze. Moving off of the arm of the chair, the petite woman whose very being was created to relieve suffering and thus a goddess in her own, opiate right, slid quietly to a cabinet behind her desk. It was a glass cabinet, more modern than any of the other furniture that decorated and accented her office. She slipped a key from her white lab coat, and unlocked, withdrawing a small tincture and a hypodermic needle kit.
She was back at his side in the blink of an eye, yet nothing about her movement was fast, or swift. Calculated, precise, quiet. As she was a doctor, she treated him as she would any patient, and while she knew his suffering was not purely physical, she needed to ask. "Are you sure?" Brows furrowed just slightly, lips pursed subtly. Her oceanic blue eyes seemed to spark as she spoke, betraying the mellow way with which she spoke.
Was he sure?
Was he sure that he wanted to give up the hundred and thirty-nine years in which he had survived without the slide of the needle and the relief it brought? Was he sure he wanted to enter into another battle with the addiction that had started as just a desire to ease the pain of his deaths? Was he sure this would be worth it, just for a few brief hours of nothingness?
Hell no, he wasn't sure.
But Johnny was hardly thinking rationally right now. All he knew was that she was going to help him, and she had the kit in her hand. She would never leave him or make him leave when he was in need. He'd been the one to leave her when he cleaned up, hadn't he? She was the only one who had never let him down in some way. He pushed up the sleeve of his (not Emo's, he wasn't there anymore and after three days of drinking and spilling more than a little of the drink it was losing his scent as well) sweatshirt and extended his arm.
"I'm sure. Do it."
She could have taken him into the examination room, made him as comfortable as possible in that white, spartan room, laid him down and started the I.V. drip, for the slow yet steady stream of her substance into him. But this was Johnny Reb. She had found him in the battle field, and she had treated him with the tools she had at her disposal, which were limited. Now, as she withdrew the liquid morphine from the small vial and into the syringe, tapping the needle gently and squirting just a bit out to fully ready it for injection, she felt a wave within her, slow and growing - the tides were far receded, and a wave would crash upon her sense of stability and grace. But not yet. Not yet.
She smiled at him once more, a detached, empty smile, and she pushed that sleeve up a little further. She withdrew a quick-release tourniquet from the little kit she'd pulled from the cabinet, the needle and syringe in her other hand carefully poised as she leaned and cinched the rubber tourniquet around his upper arm, following this by pressing her thumb just beneath the crook of his arm, the inner side of his forearm, the vein there bulging from the pressure of the tourniquet. She dampened a cotton swab and rubbed a little bit of iodine there, holding her thumb over where the vein waited for her like some treat yet to be tried.
Phaedra glanced at his eyes, his face, once more. The angles of his jaw so familiar, the clenching of muscle beneath them even more so. She gently eased the very point of the needle inward, drawing the syringe back just enough to aspirate the blood. With her other hand, she removed the quick-release of the tourniquet. And in one fluid gesture, the needle slid sleekly deeper, as her thumb pressed down, the liquid form of herself would begin to spread its blissful fingers into his blood stream. There was no tremor in her hand, no falter in her expression to suggest the rising feeling within her - only a brightening of her blue-blue eyes, and her hair may have seemed a deeper red, increasingly so, as moments passed. She had to remain in control, until the last drops entered his system.
He didn't watch her do it, not the fastening of the tourniquet or the preparation of the syringe or the actual injection. He had never watched her do it. Those first times, he had been so distracted by his own blinding pain that he hardly noticed the needle prick that preceded the quiet nothing. When he did it himself after the war, he only watched as much was necessary for him to do it properly. It had never been quite as good as when it was her hand on the syringe and her presence by his side, though. Even if he couldn't watch, he knew she was there and that in itself was a comfort. He wouldn't be alone.
Johnny leaned back against the chair as he waited for the drug to take its effect on him. His eyes, half-closed from a combination of sleepless exhaustion and the remnants of the hangover that had resulted from his three-day drinking binge, focused on one of the paintings that adorned the walls. "What does it mean?" he asked. "What do they mean?" And the Lord only knew if he meant the paintings, or something else entirely.
She felt this with each patient, a slow and quiet spiderweb of bliss being knitted in her mind, but with Johnny, it was different, deeper, and growing. She finished with the injection, withdrew the needle, and quickly, gently, pressed a clean swab to the little puncture, using medical tape to bind it snugly to his arm while it healed. A couple of short, quiet strides, and she was disposing of the needle into a little red box marked for sharps disposal and with an orange 'biohazard' sign affixed to the side, next to the cabinet behind the desk.
Turning, she looked back at him, moving to his side once more, behind him, hands finding his shoulders. She followed his tired gaze to the painting he looked at, one of many by the artist Phaedra collected so passionately, M. K. Čiurlionis. Čiurlionis was a composer of song and poetry, and the symphonies he produced often found their way into his paintings, of which he painted three-hundred. Dr. Paderborn owned approximately twenty. Warmth and light were alight in his Sunset, painted in 1908, a diminutive silhouette of a tree growing from a sliver of landscape near the bottom, the ocean bright and yielding, the reflection of a setting sun carved effortlessly with the back of his paint brush. Phaedra had always been taken by large bodies of quiet water, contemplative, symbolic. And Johnny was staring into that sunset as he himself dipped beneath the horizon of full consciousness, into the euphoric glow of a golden, better place.
"It means you are safe." Whether she spoke of his presence in her office, or the painting itself, or the painting's possible parallels to his own life at the given moment, was ambiguous. "Warmth, light, a setting sun," mused quietly, as her fingers gave his shoulders a gentle squeeze, as if the action of her touch might lull him deeper into her world. Euphoria, bliss. Hands slid further down from his shoulders briefly, gently pressing fingers along his collar bone through the thick fabric of his sweater. She leaned down, close, so her serene voice could fall upon his ears with a breath. She wanted to dig her claws into him, keep him here, with her. But her smile was gentle.
"Warmth, Johnny. Bliss." Softly spoken, touched by only a whisper, an intonation, of need.