He's startled awake by the sound of someone entering his room. Halfway out of bed before they even enter the door all the way. Whoever it is bends down, picks up Cath's shoes, and tosses 'em to him. He catches, not quite awake.

"C'mon, you have to see this!" The man—it is a man, dark haired, half a beard, blue clothes like his—motions him out of the room.

"How'd you get in here"!" Crankily, as he gets up and slips the shoes on. One foot on the floor, one hand in the air, flailing around for balance.

The man waves dismissively and slips out. Cath follows.

He's standing at a window, looking out when Cath catches up to him. He glances at it, curiously. Large, single-paned, thick. Doubts it would even ever open. Probably a good thing, considering how high up they apparently are. And...it's snowing. Slowly. Giant, soft flakes. Quiet. The perfect Christmas snow.

He looks back over at the other man for a second, just as curious. "What's your name, anyway?"

"Bert."

"Oh." He's belatedly coming to the conclusion that this is a doctor, too, not a patient. Stares back out the window. "That's my brother's name."

He leans against a support and they both gaze out the window in silence, watching the fat, lazy, beautiful flakes drift past on their way to the ground.

He's sitting at the bottom of his bed when the psychiatrist walks in.

Doesn't look up, even when he hears the chair creak. (This new one's wicker and a hell of a lot comfier-sized.) Too busy fiddling around with and staring at what he's got in his hand.

"So, nurse tells me you won't take your pills." The man probably wouldn't sound rattled or upset if he were tied to train tracks with a villain in black gloating over him. Cath doesn't acknowledge him yet. After a minute, he continues. "Care to tell me why?"

Cath turns around so he's facing the man, back to the wall. Holds 'em up to the light. One long white one, one round off-white one. He studies them carefully. "Never said I wouldn't take 'em, just said I wanted to think about it some."

"Oh?"

He twists them around in his fingers; brings the styrofoam cup of water up to bear with them. After a minute, he says, "What we have here are two little miracle pills. Guaranteed to make my friends happier, my lover sleep easier, my dog come when I call him, and keep my shoes a nice even shine."

Allan sits back in his chair and props his foot up on his knee. "I wouldn't call it that, exactly. They're not miracles, just science. And all they're going to do is help you feel a little better." He nods at Cath to keep talking.

It halts his speech for a few seconds, but not for long. "Even so, where am I in all of that?"

"Talking to your friends, spending time with your lover, calling your dog, and shining your shoes, presumably." Still in the same even tone of voice as ever.

Cath looks up at him now, lowering everything. "But is it really me?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, say I take this." And here he holds up the oblong one again, between two fingers. "And I wake up tomorrow, fresh as a daisy, no mood swings, no wacky brain chemistry. Am I still the same person then as I am today?"

Allan sits back. "Frankly, I'd say yes. And if you think it's going to be that easy, I'd say you also haven't been listening to what I've had to say all this time."

Cath shakes his head, dismissing the last part of it with a wave. He was listening. It was just for effect. "But is it' Ease or lack of it aside, it's still changing the way I think, the way I feel, the way I am." He looks up again, wide-eyed. "How much of who I am now's still in there?"

"Well, if we're going that route," Allan says out of the corner of his mouth as he leans forward again, "a hell of a lot more of you than if you'd ended up putting yourself in a coffin instead of taking the pill." He nods at it.

That startles a quiet snort out of Cath. "...Fair point." He hesitates, still. "And it's not like I have a hell of a lot of choice about it, do I, doc?" But he still closes his fist around it, not taking it yet.

"What do you mean?"

Cath stares at him like the answer is patently obvious. "I'm here, I'm under your thumb, you're not letting me out of here until I take the goddamn pill." His voice starts to rise by the end of that.

"No, it's your choice." Wry smile.

Cath stares at him.

"It's your choice." He repeats it and leans on his hand. "You're the only one responsible for this, here. If you don't want to take the goddamn pill, you don't take the goddamn pill." Echoing Cath's language, but without the heat. "We can try other options. Diet, regulating your environment, that sort of thing. In my professional opinion, it's not going to do you a hell of a lot of good right now. But we can try." He nods pointedly again.

Cath looks down at it again. It's starting to get warm and a little sticky in his hand. "So I don't have to take the pill." He feels turmoiled inside.

"No, you don't have to take the pill." Allan waits a minute before continuing. "At the end of the day, what matters to me and to the Clinic is whether I think you're ready to go home again without offing yourself. Do you think you're ready to do that?"

"...No." He hefts it in his hand.

Allan puts both feet on the floor and props his elbows on his knees, hands clasped out in front of them. "Look. Try thinking of it this way: you are who you are. Because your brain chemistry got a little out of whack along the way, you ended up with wild mood swings and an inability to keep your thoughts on straight. Now, are you the mood swings, or are you the person who got lost underneath all that somewhere along the way?" He points both index fingers at Cath, still clasping the rest. "The pill's not going to suddenly turn you into a different person. The pill's just here to help the rest of it, all the noise and distraction in your head, help all of that die down so you can think clearly again. So you can be that person again, the one who you were always supposed to be. Does that make sense?"

Cath stares at his hands. "Yes." He looks up, eyes a touch wild. "That makes a hell of a lot of sense, actually."

"Enough to take the pills?"

He looks down again at them. "Maybe."

"Are you ready to try find out who that person is?"

Robert Cath takes a damn good look at the pills, at the water, at his hands. And wonders whether he'll be seeing them the same way in a week. "Yeah." And then he raises his hands to his mouth, tosses the pills back, and swallows them with a swig of water.

It's not such a bad place. Hell, I've been here for years. It's not that they think I'm a danger, so much...but, y'know, someties a doctor'll get the thought of kicking me back out into the big wide world. You start to recognize the far off look and the shudder. Nah, much better this way. Least this way m'kids can pretend they wouldn't put me in a home the second they got me back anyway.

And hey. This way, if I want to be a six foot purple rabbit for a week, I can be a six foot purple rabbit for a week. Or Napoleon. Napoleon was fun, if a little cliche. I should do that again. Still catch the docs sometimes conferencing to try and figure out if I'm for real or faking, or set me up for some new treatment or other, but as long as they don't actually kick me out, they can tell it to their palms when they wank off at night.

The rest of them, they come and go. Even if they all think it's forever at the time. Y'see some strange things in here, meet some interesting people. Let's just say, that guy, you know, the Cath guy, he barely stood out at all.

Think he spent the first few days holed up in his room or something. I mean, the nurses and doctors and all watched him carefully, don't get me wrong. But it was nothing to do with me, you know" No, I think it was about a week before he really ventured out into the common room. Stared at the TV like he'd never seen one before. But like I found out later, maybe he never did. But that was only a few minutes before he scuttled away again.

Couple days later when he came in, I turned off the TV so he didn't get spooked and taught him how to play Scrabble. Fast learner. Done me proud by the end of the first day. If we'd been playing for money, I don't think I would've got more than enough for a cup of coffee out of him, let's put it that way. By the time his month was up, I probably wouldn't have been breaking even, the little s***.

Still skittish, though. Except when he was on one of his highs. (Caught one of the doctors talking about 'rapid-cycling bipolar.' It's not that I like to listen in on the other patients' business, but you can learn a lot that way and sometimes it's pretty damn interesting. And makes a lot of sense, like this time.) And then he'd talk your ear off, scrub down the common room (one of the nurses gave him a plastic thing of antiseptic wipes. It was like Christmas for a toddler, you should've seen it), or, this one nasty time early on, scream at the nurse on duty until they came and took him away.

But yeah. Interesting things. He had a few of them to say, especially at those times. But it wasn't until he started to calm down some that he really opened up.

It was when I was watching some old black-and-white movie during some marathon or another. It was in French or something. I was by myself and I didn't think I was that into it, but about halfway through I hear this quiet little voice, and he's standing there, behind the other chair, critiquing the subtitles. After a while, he sat down. And that was when he really started to talk. About movies, about France, about war, about what it was like living at the turn of the century on Earth before he got here. I talked about my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids some, and he actually seemed interested. It was...it was actually kind of nice, all right' Especially when Casablanca came on next, and he started talking about pre-WWII Germany and what it was like on the continent and the like. Really made things stand out, you know" I've lived on Rhy'Din my whole life, and only heard about this stuff through stories and movies. Not that we haven't had our own troubles over the years, of course, and I made sure he got to hear about them all through the next couple of weeks.

(And after the movies were over it went into some old repeat of Magnum, P.I. and then the funny bit was watching the way he was watching Tom Selleck in those short-shorts, if you know what I'm sayin'.)

And then there was this little girl there the whole time, too. Really troubled little thing. Didn't seem to get a moment's peace, ever. But...somehow they bonded. And next thing you know, one of the nurses is painting a couple of the girls' nails, and he's right there with them getting his done too, getting them to open up some. Then I catch Cath playing that weird Pretty Pretty Princess game with her and one of the other girls, complete with wearing plastic jewelry (under supervision, of course.) And then, sometime after that, she started crawling into his lap to fall asleep at night, every night. Would almost be enough to warm the bottom of my heart, if it weren't just a shriveled little black lump already.

So, I started calling him Princess. I mean, what else can you do"

'Course, the longer he went, the more restless he got. Everyone who comes through here just wants to get out as soon as possible. It's just the way things go. So, yeah, he just started to...drift away. Especially after his little friend was released. They finally let him go the day before yesterday. He was ecstatic, just about bouncing of the walls (without actually bouncing off the walls, if you know what I mean) when they let him go. Promised to write, promised to visit. Some of them say that. Some of them actually do. So we'll see.

...No I don't miss him already, what the hell's wrong with you?!