Dr. Shanti Kaul {is uptight} (playingod) wrote in olympianthreads, @ 2014-11-26 15:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | character: olivier bonheur, character: shanti kaul, player: erin, player: joan |
WHO: Shanti and Olivier
WHAT: Dreaming
WHERE: Olivier’s hospital room
WHEN: {backdated} November 15th
RATING/STATUS: LR for Life Ruiner (not but really, R) / Started in gdocs
dream, when you're feeling blue
dream, that's the thing to do
just watch the smoke rings rise in the air
you'll find your share of memories there
It was the substitute night nurse. He was nice enough to grab Olivier’s briefcase for him from the administrative building, and had brought back his bottle of water filled with water from the place with him. Olivier had been thirst, and the nurse had thought nothing of giving the man a little water- after all, Olivier looked great. His skin wasn’t gray or pale anymore, he was breathing more easily, and he’d been reading contently.
It looked as if he’d simply fallen asleep, actually. His head resting back against the wall, his book (“Les Deux Tours”) open and on his chest as he breathed deeply and slept on, his legs were elevated by some pillows to help his aching back. Besides needing to trim his beard, he really looked normal.. But in his mind, things were very different.
At first, it was paradise. The house near Murcia in the countryside, with the cracked red tile patio that Olivier had forever promised to fix. Funny enough, as Olivier stood on them, he looked down and saw he had, in fact, fixed them. The new tiles even looked old. He looked at his hands, slightly less wrinkled than in reality, and then up at the window before him. His reflection was odd and familiar: no beard, less gray, rimless glasses. His cane was out of sight, out of mind. He wore a red button up shirt and jeans, and next to him was a large suitcase.
What was happening? Was this home? It felt like home.
A moment later he heard happy cries behind him, and he turned to look down the sloping pathway that led to the dirt road. Running up the hill was a little girl with black curls, bright blue eyes, and a beautiful smile. Even though he had never seen her born or alive, he knew it was his daughter Delphine without even a thought.
“Papa! Papa!” she shouted, running up. Seven and beautiful she ran into his arms, and he shut his eyes tight as he hugged her near. A moment later, there was another woman laughing and saying his name. He opened his eyes and saw Elena, beautiful and in her 30’s… an age she’d never reached in reality. She looked relaxed and happy, and in her arms sat a fat toddler with fair blonde hair and crystalline eyes.
“We missed you very much. How was your mission? Can you take Nik, he’s getting too big for me to carry,” Elena informed him. Olivier took the boy, his little Nik, who wrapped his arms right around his Papa’s neck as the four of them walked inside. He stood in shocked silence as Elena and Delphine began to cook, laughing. Nik eventually squirmed his way out of Olivier’s arms and toddled over to Elena, grabbing her skirts.
“Olivier, are you alright?” Elena asked, looking at him with the dark brown eyes he’d missed so very much.
“I’m perfect. Elena- I’m perfect,” Olivier said, his voice cracking.
“Oh, good. Can you take your suitcase to the bedroom? It might rain,” she said. Olivier nodded, and got his suitcase from the patio, rolling it down the hall. He paused for a moment at the door of Nik and Delphine’s room, watching with a wide smile as Delphine lovingly bullied Nik into playing dress up, pulling one of Olivier’s old shirts over his head and declaring he was Prince Charming, and Barbie was Cinderella, and she was going to be the Fairy Godmother.
The light seemed to flicker. Delphine, on her knees in the bedroom, turned her head around and a different voice came out. A voice that was not a little girl’s.
“The patient died at 12:03 AM, Mr. Bonheur. We tried to save the boy, but we were unable to. We removed the bodies after we weren’t able to get ahold of you for a third time.”
The light flickered again. It went black.
“The patient died at 12:03 AM, Mr. Bonheur. We tried to save the boy, but we were unable to. We removed the bodies after we weren’t able to get ahold of you for a third time.”
The voice came out of the black now, repeating and ringing over and over again as a new room came into focus. An old organization hospital room. Before him was the empty bed Elena had died in, the empty bed that she’d given birth to an already dead child in. Olivier breathed in sharply.
It was horrible. But he’d dreamt of this room before. He wasn’t sure why his mind had replaced the word ‘baby’ with ‘boy’ when Delphine had been female, however. Olivier breathed, sighed, and decided he was ready to walk away.
He turned around and a new sight was before him- and that was the sight that made him drop to his knees, vomit, and scream out.
Nik laid there, perfectly still in a bed. Blood was smeared all over him. Next to the bed was Elena, now in her 60’s, and Delphine in her 30’s.
“How could you let him get hurt, Olivier?” Elena was screaming. Delphine was crying, holding Nik’s hand.
“How- how?” he asked, voice cracking.
“You died! You died and you left him all alone! He wasn’t ready to be a teacher! He left Kris and then he joined the organization! He died! You did this! You didn’t raise him right!” Elena screamed.
From the black that hovered around the edges of his sight, another voice joined in, following Elena’s words like a chorus.
“The patient died at 12:03 AM, Mr. Bonheur. We tried to save the boy, but we were unable to. We removed the bodies after we weren’t able to get ahold of you for a third time.”
“The patient died at 12:03 AM, Mr. Bonheur. We tried to save the boy, but we were unable to. We removed the bodies after we weren’t able to get ahold of you for a third time.”
--
Putting in extra hours was not a new thing for Shanti. In fact, it was quite usual for her. She was in her office until well after dinner most nights, not because she had patients or that much paperwork to do, but mostly because she really just didn’t know when to go home. Patients and research were her entire life, and she didn’t have much at her house on the island. She had no pets, hardly ever watched the tv in the den, and hadn’t really made a lot of friends in her two and a half months there. Really, her idea of going home was putting on some classical music and reading a book in front of the fireplace with a glass of wine.
But ever since Olivier had collapsed and she removed that infernal device from his chest, she had another reason to stay, even if she would never admit it. She was afraid for him, afraid to lose him. It was stressful, caring about another person that way, as was the fact that she didn’t want to care about him. He pushed at her nerves and thought he was just so charming, and dammit, she was having an increasingly harder and harder time keeping her physical and emotional distance from him.
For instance, after the surgery, she’d all but moved her office into his room so that she could keep an eye on him while she worked, and be there when he woke up. Of course, now she was starting to regret that because, while he seemed to be feeling much, much better, he was also becoming more insufferable, and she strongly disliked how little she actually disliked it.
A week later, she’d been about ready to release him back to his family, and stopped by to tell him so, when she saw him asleep. She stood in the doorway for a few moments, debating about whether to wake him up or not, eventually deciding to do it anyway, if only to get him out of her hair.
“Olivier?” she called to him as she came inside. “Olivier, I have some good news for you.”
But he stayed soundly asleep and didn’t even stir.
“Olivier, time to wake up and go home.” She put a hand on his shoulder, but he still didn’t wake. She gave him a little shake, and still nothing. Sighing in exasperation, she placed both hands on his shoulders and shook him again. When this also yielded no results, she frowned and placed her hand on his cheek and promptly fell to the floor as the world went black.
A second later, she was in another hospital room with Olivier, but now he was awake and a woman was yelling at him. She began to step between them to find out what was going on when she caught sight of the body, bloody and broken, on the table, and let out an involuntary gasp.
Shanti was by no means as attached to Nikolai as Olivier, but he was her ally in the older man’s health, and she would see his death no sooner than she would see Olivier’s. But it didn’t make any sense. How could this have happened? If Olivier was, in fact, dead as the woman claimed, how was he standing before her? And where was that other voice coming from?
It took her only a few moments to realize this must be some sort of hallucination or dream, as this was not a place she recognized, and there was no way Nikolai could be dead like this. There was no way Olivier could be standing before her if he was also dead.
“Pardon--excuse me, ma’am,” she tried to interject into the woman’s tirade, but she received no response. Not even a glance in her direction. The more she thought about it, the clearer things became. She’d been trying to wake Olivier and been unable to. The woman was only responding to him, but Shanti could also see her, so it probably wasn’t a hallucination. It had to be a dream. Olivier’s dream.
“Olivier,” she tried instead, coming around the gurney to stand next to him. “Olivier this isn’t real. Look at me.”
---
Olivier looked up at her, mouth hanging open. “Shanti, you have to save him, you have to save my boy,” Olivier gasped, his sides turning as he attempted to stand up, his grief making every inch of his body fight against him. He wanted to give up, he wanted to subside into death in that moment. His family, the women he’d lost in the birth and death of his child, mattered little to him then. Nik was his boy, his son, the only family he’d had for so long that wasn’t a reminder of the pain he’d caused that his life seemed so utterly empty without him.
“Please, anything, I’ll do anything,” Olivier said, his voice cracking. He felt his words slip from English to French as he stood up and began to feel his knees shake as he slumpd onto the bed next to Nik, holding the young boy’s face. “He has to wake up, Shanti. I don’t have a reason to fight if he doesn’t.”
---
Her heart hurt for him, to see him in so much emotional pain, that it almost didn’t matter that this wasn’t real. Even if there was nothing she could do, she’d have promised to do something anyway, just to get that look off his face and that tone out of his voice. She just wanted to make it stop hurting him. He’d been through so much in his life, and so much recently with his health, that he didn’t deserve to see this.
Tears in her eyes that she would deny if asked about, she nodded and moved forward toward the body of someone she’d come to care a little about, and put her hand on his forehead. It was cold, but perhaps not as much as she would have expected from a body, and both the chill and the fact that it wasn’t chill enough brought her back to herself. This wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. It certainly felt real enough, but couldn’t be. She didn’t remember getting there.
“Olivier, I don’t think there’s anything I can do.” She covered his hand with hers and tried to get him to really look at her. The voices and faces of the other two women in the room had faded into the background as all her attention was on the man she was swiftly coming to love. “This isn’t right, none of it. I don’t think it’s real.”
---
Olivier was not an idiot. In fact, he was a smart man: he read the way other people breathed. He couldn’t stop himself from doing it, but in that moment there were not quotes. No smart comment, no nothing. He looked at Shanti and found he couldn’t help up with her words, even if she was brilliant and he knew she was generally right… even if he hated to admit that usually. He watched her lips, he heard the sounds, but the two didn’t connect for several moments.
“Shanti, what do you mean this isn’t real?” he asked, the sorrow still eating at him as he stood up and put a hand on Nik. The boy felt real to him, but he was not able to consider looking at the realism of the boy and his body when it was Nik, and the boy was not breathing. “Can you wake him up? He’s just sleeping, I know he is. He looks peaceful. He’ll be missing Kris when he wakes up,” Olivier explained, still watching his boy.
---
This was not the first time Shanti had heard those words from grieving parents. Denial was the first stage of grief, but it was also the natural reaction to hearing that someone very close to you had died. No one wanted to have to believe they’d never see their child, parent, or sibling again. And yet, no matter how many times she’d made notifications, she’d never had to tell anyone like Olivier before, and she wasn’t at all prepared for it. He even had the advantage of seeing the body for himself, instead of having to just take her word for it, and he still couldn’t believe that the man on the table was dead.
Hell, Shanti herself didn’t quite believe it either. She believed the body on the table was dead, and that the body appeared to be Nikolai, but she wasn’t convinced that everything they were seeing and feeling was real. It felt real to her senses, but it didn’t feel real to her mind. Which was what she imagined it felt like for Olivier, but the difference was that she wasn’t trying to convince someone that a dead body was simply a sleeping person. She was trying to convince someone that the reality they were in wasn’t the one they belonged in.
The longer she focused on her feeling that this didn’t feel right, the more sure she was that it wasn’t. There wasn’t really any empirical evidence to back up her feeling, so she would need to find some. She started with trying to remember exactly what had gotten them to this point. Her thinking was a little cloudy, but she clearly remembered being in the medical center on Olympus. She was going to send Olivier home. He was asleep. She’d tried to wake him up. And then she found herself here.
“This is a dream,” she said aloud, mostly to herself. “Olivier,” she reached over and took one of his hands in both of hers, “this is a dream. You are dreaming. You must wake up.”
---
“Why would I dream this?” he asked out loud, the question unanswerable. He had given Nik a good life, a happy one, one full of sunny days and a family that had adored him. A sister who had teased him and hugged him, a mother who had always helped him. And a father who had always had his back, and taught him how to stand tall. And now he was dead before him. A small part of Olivier’s mind was aware that this was a dream, Shanti had woken that part of him and he knew that this boy had grown up alone, in orphanages.
But he was alive. That boy, a boy who Olivier had not raised, was alive and well. He breathed in deeply, eyes closing tightly as he stood up, finally leaving Nik’s side. Three feet between himself and the man’s body, his eyes opening and finally recognizing the body as not being his Nik’s. He was not yet awake though, because he knew now, that when he woke up, he would alone in the hospital bed again. And even if she were screaming at him, he would take a screaming and sobbing Elena and a crying Delphine over those in the ground.
The dream responded to him: the women stopped yelling. They stayed still, looking at him. They were beautiful, inviting.
“Shanti, I think it might be alright if I didn’t wake up. I’ve waited- I’ve waited a long time to join them.”
---
The relief she felt was obvious in her expression and body language as he seemed to come to accept, or at least consider, her words; she was all but certain of their validity, that she was right about this room and everything in it not being real. She wasn’t quite sure how she knew that she and Olivier were real while the rest of it wasn’t, but that was something they could figure out later, once they figured out how to get back to their own reality.
But then he spoke of giving up, and Shanti was shaking her head before he even finished the first sentence. “No, no you have come too far to give up now. We’ve worked too hard to keep you alive.” She could feel tears burning behind her eyes, and there was a pang in her chest at the thought of him staying behind to be with his lost wife and daughter for eternity. She supposed that it was just the thought of losing a patient, because Shanti had never been very good at letting go, but it was more than that, even if she refused to acknowledge it.