title; lair of mephistopheles
rating; r
fandom; shutter island
summary;This is a prelude to the deepest pits of hell.
and Lester puts on the cardboard teeth and ink smile and gives up Andrew just like that.
yeah, this little monster has bothered me to finish it for two weeks now, but I just had no idea of how to do it. I finally got it done, and I'm actually rather proud. It's a sorts of prelude to Shutter Island, my – won't deny it's strange – take on at how Lester and Andrew's relationship might've looked then. oh and: HEAVY SPOILERS. but you knew that, didn't you, guys?
There's a kind of red-rimmed eyes desperation reeking about Andrew Laeddis that makes Lester pause his monologue of psychiatric ramblings and stare at his patient. They're newly assigned to each other – because Lester likes to think of it as a mutual agreement and not just a one-sided commitment – and this is the first meeting that hasn't occurred in the presence of others. It's the first meeting not closely surveilled by outsiders – because equal commitment means a relationship, no matter how subsequent it may be, or how confidential – and this is where first impressions are found.
Lester's first impression of Andrew is fractured.
He's like a bone with intricate fractures in, impossible to fully mend, but none the less not immediately deadly. His eyes are a subsided blue traced with spider web reds, the vague reminiscent crew cut grown longer during a possible imprisonment, and his dead and broken pallor is clammy with sweat, uneven strands clinging to his forehead.
He also notices, except these pieces of a man tossed haphazardly around, that the world hasn't begun to mend itself around him. His clothes are hardly changed for something else, and the shirt is grey where it had previously been powder white, and the sand colored pants are grass flecked and torn at the knees. There are stains on the shirt that Lester hardly thinks are coffee stains, but leaves them be. One in his line of work knows to not start sewing the past together without knowing what it is first.
Andrew has adverted his eyes to the table, brow furrowed and breath quiet. Lester can hear from his seat across the table that it is still labored. He's got a handful of control, but not enough to rein himself completely in. The psychologist can't say he's especially surprised, he's seen many men come and go who are just like this.
He realizes that he's just pushed Andrew together with the others. Yet he sticks out. Obviously he knows some sort of self control, and could execute it should he need to. The file told him Andrew Laeddis is a former war hero, as well as US marshal. It told him he had been married to one Dolores Chanal, had three children named Rachel, Edward and Daniel. They were all killed by who they believed to be, Dolores, drowned in the lake whilst Andrew was at work. He'd gotten home, found them, and shot his wife straight through the chest.
Not that Lester needs to believe the file. He always knows that his patients are the ones with the truth – call it trust if you will, he trusts people, Lester – not always the police. They have the evidence, but evidently not always the truth. Because there is more to Andrew, more than a man who killed his wife and three kids for the hell of it, or for the thrill, or some other of the same caliber reason.
"Who are you, Andrew?" He asks, prying gently, offering his hands across the table – because a relationship is built on trust and Lester trusts, for some unfathomable reason – and looks at Andrew solemnly.
For the first time Andrew really looks up, and there's a hint of collection in his eyes. As though he's gathered up the pieces of himself now, at least for the time being. "That a rhetorical question, doctor?" He inclines his head, and Lester knows that he doesn't want to hear about any psychic symptoms he might sport, or hear about his ex-wife, or anything. He wants to hear natural things, wants to forget, and bury himself deep within the memories of somebody else.
"No, not really."
"Suppose I am, whoever you want me to be then."
"I beg your pardon?" Lester cocks his head to the side; a lightly confused gesture.
"I said, doctor. That I could be whoever you want me to be. It's easy; you don't know me, so you might form me into whoever you choose to." There's a sinister tug at the corners of Andrew's lips, and a settled distance in his eyes.
Lester swiftly picks up the pen to his left, rolls it contemplating for the briefest two seconds between thumb and index finger, before dotting down a couple of curved and gentle looking words at a scrap of paper he always brings to his meetings.
He says no more, doesn't deem it necessary. He just scribbles a few more sentences on the lined bit of paper, and stands up to leave. Andrew's gaze is with him the entire time, following, searching, probing and waiting. Waiting for what, Lester doesn't know, and he doesn't think about either. Not yet, he doesn't want to know. There's a feeling in the back of his head, the whisper of a voice that tells him not to make any assumptions about Andrew. He may discover the things he wants to know for himself.
When he's outside the door and looking in, he's still sitting at the table; arms outstretched across it, as though he's reaching out towards Lester's empty seat. Or just stretching.
The psychiatrist briefly wonders if there's the chance of sitting across him and staring into Andrew. But shakes the thought off. If it's possible, he may determine it later on.
The scrap of paper bleeds ink onto his fingers, but he just shoves it into his pocket as he swiftly turns his patient his back, and starts walking down the white washed corridor. Out, out to free his thoughts and smelling sea salt and cliffs and seaweed.
Their second meeting goes as easily, Lester can't deny that he thinks it's an impossible relief that it does.
Andrew looks as clear as ever, his clothes are exchanged from the stained shirt and torn at the knees pants and long since outdated tie. It sure was an ugly tie, that one. So in a way there's a half bred smile that tugs at his lips when he sees it. That's what he remembers from Andrew's arrival – that tie.
"There something on my shirt?" He inquires lazily, making a swiping hand gesture over the teal to the green checkered shirt he's wearing, something in the depths of his eyes when Lester looks up.
He offers his hands once again.
Andrew says nothing, he just waits.
"You tell me." He finally answers, leaning back into his chair, withdrawing one hand for a brief moment to reach for the pen and paper in his robe pocket. He's being observed, not watched, merely observed from the safe distance of different airways between them. Lester figures that Andrew would probably smell of rural urbanity, fish and harbors and a little girl's shampoo and black coffee if they'd met during different circumstances. Now he smells strongly of oil and corrosion, of the Ward A bars of soap and dust, of exercised self control.
There's no trace of fear lingering on him.
But on the other hand, you can't be scared lest you want to die. Die here, there, in war, on the streets of Boston, Dachau. He knows where he comes from. Or he knows as much as the papers tell him. It's a big difference between knowledge and truth, but for the moment he goes for knowledge.
"Never knew doctors who make it this easy for their patients."
Lester bows his head, but looks up at his patient, his relaxed shoulders, feels his relaxed knees, how he can't make out tension from his fingers in the table, how stray strands out of Andrew's unkempt hair falls into his eyes. He's not vary at all.
He lets his gaze drop. Grips the pen, relishes in the impeccable and polished surface of it, dots down another few lines. Andrew's staring in the roof; his fingers are entwined on top of the table. Lester understands how this man works: you earn his trust not from offering yourself, but rather you take it from him. You don't shake his hand and offer him a genuine smile and be done with it; you steal his breath and offer him a cigarette and a solution. Because this man isn't a simple one way walk, he's a maze.
So first you map him out; find all his cul-de-sacs, uncover all the buttons to push, dare yourself to walk in. Find a way in, and finally a way out.
"Your name is Andrew Laeddis. You're thirty two, and murdered your wife, Dolores Chanal barely two weeks ago…" He trails off, looks up from his own now entwined fingers.
There's a crossed look on Andrew's face, a wide eyed-ness you expect from a misunderstanding child, not from this man. A ghost scurrying over his face; a war ghost, the memories of a man who saw the concentrations camps, who killed countless, the memories of a man who shot his wife in the chest, but the despair of a man who lost his grounds. He sucks in sharp air, the look of ashes on his face, and powder white bones and tendons weaving violence underneath his skin.
This time, Lester backs out, walking slowly and deliberately out the door. Shuts it softly, but doesn't stop walking.
The third time they meet is in the gardens.
It's unassigned for both of them, and Andrew wears purple bruises underneath his eyes and chains between his ankles and his wrists. He's twirling a dead pine twig between his fingers, ripping its bark and moss of at places. Lester refuses to think of the action in metaphors.
"Perhaps you're meant to." Andrew's voice cuts through the haze of his thoughts, blurring and fading out in a second. Lester looks up, slightly alarmed at how unguarded his own musings appear to be. There's a left crooked smile on his face, but it never reaches farther than his upper lip and touches his nose slightly.
"You know doctor; I never appreciated being called insane." Then Dr. Cawley calls for him and Andrew shrugs and stilts away.
Lester doesn't even have an appropriate answer this time.
It's by their fourth meeting that the discussion which would change one thing to another springs forth.
Andrew's up on his feet and pacing the angular room, occasionally he stops to slam his palms onto the table and catch Lester's eye with a bewildered one of his own. The same red-rimmed desperation that Lester witnessed at their first meeting is there, evident and hungry and insatiable.
"Andrew…" But he's not fast enough, because Andrew's slammed his open palms on the table again, and there's a cross between plea and sneer and snarl on his cheekbones and five o'clock shadowed chin. There are animalistic urges threatening to well up on the surface, and somehow Lester knows what he wants to find when he reaches for his right hip. What he wants to find is heavy and metallic and reeks of death, not an empty spot and a jutting piece of skin covered bone.
"Stop. Please, just stop." It's a rough whisper, a rush of air, fleeting and fragile and heavy as lead at the same time.
But he presses forward.
"Andrew, please, you recognize me, don't you?"
There is no time to think when there's a hitch and pause of breath– artery, blood flow, pulse point, because he's on his feet and slammed roughly against a wall. Andrew's palms are scarred, there's tissue still tender on a few of his fingertips, and from his point of view he can see several silver linings darting across Andrew's skin. In different shapes and forms and each with a different history.
"Please, please no. Just, no."
Lester knows a dead end when he sees one. He's run into a fully known obstacle that he has no idea how to overcome. It's a brick wall of roughly ten feet, and he can't jump that high. He's got his bare hands, a pack of cigarettes and his vocabulary. He needs to extend it, but not in a gesture of surrender.
"Then what's your name?" There's a simultaneous thumping of hearts, but they don't bleed into sync with one other, but beats individually. Andrew's breath is on his face like pinprick needles, and now he is frightened.
"Teddy. Teddy Daniels." He locks Lester's gaze firmly in place. Keeps him quiet, his scarred fingertips splayed out over his neck and collar bones, could cut his breathing off at any moment. But when Andrew's fingers do wander, they settle for stroking the fluttering and wildly beating pulse, eyes plastered to the bluish trace of life on his neck.
When Lester finally reaches the front porch by the blue and worn door at the cliffside hill where he lives his fingers tremble so badly he manages to scorch the tip of his index finger on the small flame that erupts from the lighter when he's to light a cigarette. Smells smoke and gasoline and burnt skin, welcomes it.
He wonders when he became so weak.
They continue like that for weeks, months even.
Andrew digs the hole deeper and deeper, starts to bury himself in it and fill in with sand and matted memories that don't belong to him. In his alternate dimension Dolores was healthy and Andrew Laeddis was a firebug who set their apartment on fire, they didn't have any children. And Teddy – because that was his name now – had been happy.
For a while Lester went against it. Told him he was Andrew and told him about his children and about the cottage they'd owned out by the lake in Castlemont, Castlemont Avenue. Once he ended up with Andrew's fingers wound tightly around his throat, once with his clenched knuckles in solar plexus. But mostly he took out the agitation on chairs, the table, the walls.
But eventually he gave in. Because there was – still is – something about Andrew that makes him really unable to barricade against him, be the good little boy (dog) psychiatrist, put on the mask and smile through its cardboard teeth (canines, he's a wolf in sheep's clothing). He uses his real instead, bits and pieces of calcified cells composed into solid, white washed structures. He uses soft speech and flexes his fingers awkwardly when Teddy snorts unimpressed when teaching him how to use a gun. He thinks it's strange that they don't have one to practice on one, that his is lost, but shrugs it off, and splays Lester's hands over his own instead, improvising. He points at his knuckles, at his scar and at his nails, explaining the different parts.
"And, you gotta hold it with both hands, can't shoot with one, your aim'll be off in a second." He flails one arm briefly in front of him, the supposed muzzle pointing at Lester, only to tilt up through the roof when Teddy curves his lips into a silent 'boom' and deadpans. "Get it?"
Lester smiles, ever so briefly, nodding. He does, he does get it.
But he can't dream in lies, nobody can.
Lester stays with him throughout all night. Why, he doesn't know. He just sits there, outside cell 18b in the left row. In Ward C. Moved Andrew here yesterday, Lester can still see the evidence from it. Can hear it, imagine it, remember it, dream of it.
Andrew's blind with ice picks stabbing his temples, unseeing with his migraine. Lester knows that it's a grave mistake to force yourself upon a patient in such a situation. Further, you don't do that to Andrew, of all the patients they have on this island. The only time they could ever constrict Andrew when he got like this was when he collapsed himself. They could never do it, only Andrew himself could.
It had ended with two guards down, Andrew pressed against Lester pressed against a wall, his spine digging into the pale sea green wallpaper, palms upturned mid air, indecisive for a moment, don't know whether to put them on Andrew's elbows or not. They're scabbed black, his hair is matted and his forehead perspiring. It's only occurred to Lester afterwards that Andrew's fingers had once again been splashed out all over his throat, clawing faintly at the already red streaked skin that has people whispering amongst themselves.
Nightmares, he tells them. Who's, he doesn't mention.
And right now he's having them. Twisting on the damp and dirty mattress, a grinding in his jaw and chatter of his teeth, he's cold, so cold, and Lester knows in his head, why Andrew is cold.
His throat seems to constrict around the broken words as he whispers raw about logs in the water, of magenta skies, of Dolores' tiredness and of how he loves them. He loves them so much and Rachel is his everything and Teddy, he must've run and oh sweet Jesus how he loves them so.
When Dr. Cawley calls him at three oh five and wants everything, Lester spills just so much of everything, and he knows that nothing will ever be true after this. There's a sketch board of words hanging in the air, and Lester puts on the cardboard teeth and ink smile and gives up Andrew just like that.
Because this is war and maybe he doesn't even need an explanation to retreat to a place where his signature on sheets of paper matters more than the familiar feel of fingertips on his bones and lungs and softly exchanged words. Because contracts are withstanding until they officially end, and words are only withstanding as long as you don't break them. And Andrew, he was shattered from the beginning.