[Henry - First session]

[plantfood]

As it turns out, Amy's body is the last straw.

This is something he's been thinking about for some time now, since the arrival of Henrich's body on the beach, but it's only with the arrival of vines the second time around -- and Amy's body with them -- that Mathias has finally made the decision. He hasn't told anyone, he's barely even admitted to himself what he's doing, but here he is, in the psychology office, meeting with Henry in more than a strictly administrative capacity. As of now, as of this moment, Mathias is officially a patient.

He's picked Henry for a lot of reasons, many of which he can't voice without feeling truly crazy, but he's still nervous. For what may be the first time since his first date with Veronica, he's truly nervous, though it shows only in the way he shifts uncomfortably now and then. As always, his face is neutral, looking faintly interested in what's going on around him and nothing more. Despite this, his fingers twitch every so often, touching the burns on his palms and it's as clear an indication as any that he's not comfortable. He wants nothing more than to return to how things have been before, but he's trying to get better.

"I don't know how this works," he admits, then laughs dryly. "How many people start their first session by saying that?"

Comments

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

Henry was pretty damn glad to have the psych department on the island. It's through that, having patients, that he gets a sense of normalcy, which is nice to have even if he is a little used to dealing in the unusual and unbelievable. He's got patients, and while it isn't even close to approaching the number of patients he had in his private practice back home, it's good. And he's good at it.

He sat back in his chair, relaxed, still wishing on some vague level for his familiar wingback and his office with the van Gogh. "It's definitely not uncommon," he said, giving Mathias a friendly smile. "How it works is simple: you talk, I listen, and I help you work through whatever it is you're here to deal with."

[plantfood]

"You know, that's actually sort of difficult for someone who prefers not to be the one who's talking all the time," Mathias points out with a small smile, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. He knows that this is what he's supposed to do and that's the point, that's why he's here, after all, but that doesn't make it easy.

"Did you... hear about the vines?" he asks reluctantly. It's why he's here, after all.

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

"I heard a little." Through the grapevine, he almost said, but that would have been crass. Henry tended to save his sarcastic sense of humor for non-professional situations. "Just something about bodies with vines wrapped around them. Do you have some sort of connection to that?"

[plantfood]

"My brother was the first," he says, spitting it out in a rush. It still hurts to even acknowledge that Henrich is gone and it hurts more to admit that he'd found his brother's body not once, but twice.

"Stacy's best friend Amy was the second," he adds a moment later. "We were all together in Mexico when Henrich and Amy died. When we all died, I think."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

"I'm sorry," Henry said sincerely, without pity, and now that he, Henry, had lost three of the most important people in the world to him there was a sprinkling of empathy in there as well. "That can't have been easy to go through, here or in Mexico."

[plantfood]

Mathias shakes his head and looks down at his hands for a moment before he holds them up for Henry to see the scars from the burns. "The vines did this," he explains slowly, knowing he needs to start at the beginning, but he isn't sure where the beginning even is.

"We all went on vacation and my brother went missing," he says. "I asked some of the Americans I had met there to help me find him and we ended up at this hill covered in these vines."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

Henry listened carefully, nodding, even though it sounded like Mathias had said his brother and Amy had been killed by...vines. Oddly enough, though, it didn't sound as far-fetched to Henry as it might have to most people. Not after what he'd seen and experienced in the Jefferson Tract, and especially not after having Duddits in his life. "What happened when you went to the hill?" he asked.

[plantfood]

Mathias has explained it to Veronica, albeit in a slightly distressed state, and he thinks he can probably explain it to Henry as well, just as long as he gives himself the time to find the right words. "We... there were men," he says carefully. "From a nearby village. They didn't speak English or Spanish, but we knew they were trying to get us to leave. We should have just left, but I couldn't. My brother was there somewhere..."

Drawing in a breath, Mathias stares down at his hands for a moment and then looks up again. "Amy was trying to take pictures and she stepped in the vines at the base of the hill. After that they didn't want us to leave, they wanted us to go up. They had weapons, they would have killed us. So we went up and we found nothing. Empty tents and a windlass that went down into some kind of mine."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

Henry's job at this point was simply listening, taking in what Mathias was telling him and processing it, observing the man's demeanor as he related whatever fuckarows life had thrown at him. It was something Henry did exceedingly well, even in comparison to some of his peers. He nodded encouragingly. "What happened then?"

[plantfood]

This is where it begins to get difficult and Mathias is quiet for a long stretch, staring down at his hands. He rubs the scars, studies them and then says, "We found my brother's body. He had been killed, shot with arrows by the villagers and then the vines... they had started to eat away at him. One side of his face was just... just bone." He can still see the stark white curve of Henrich's cheekbone through the lush green of the vines.

"And then we heard a cell phone down the mine shaft. Pablo wanted to go down and find it, so he tied himself up in the rope and we lowered him down, but the vines... the sap had damaged the rope. He fell and he broke his back and none of us were doctors. We got him back up, but we only made it worse by moving him." It's coming out in a rush now, all these words, all this pent up guilt and the events of the days spent there blur together. The only thing Mathias remembers now is cutting off Pablo's legs.

"Jeff said he would get an infection and die. I let him talk me into cutting off Pablo's legs," he says, finally looking up, stricken. "I let him talk me into it. I didn't argue hard enough. I cut off his legs."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

Henry didn't interrupt the silence or attempt to prompt Mathias into anything. He simply sat, patient, and let the other man collect his thoughts. Sometimes it took a long while to get down to the meat of the matter, if the patient had done an effective enough job of burying the trauma. It took effort to get those thoughts out.

"You were in a high stress situation, to say the very least," Henry said calmly. "You did the best you could under the circumstances. No one would have expected you to know exactly what to do." He was not there to offer platitudes, though, so he left it at that. "What happened after you cut off Pablo's legs?"

[plantfood]

Having said all that, Mathias fell silent again, realizing it was more than he'd said to anyone about the situation while not under duress. Even then, he'd only barely managed to get the story out and really only to Webster and Veronica. Stacy already knew everything that had happened.

"Things just got worse," he murmured quietly. "The vines began to imitate our voices and produce smells to drive us crazy. We had very little food, almost no water and they could smell like fresh bread or... apple pie. Anything we wanted and couldn't have. The men down below had set up guards all around the hill, so we couldn't escape. The vines began to grow on our clothes. They infected us. The others couldn't handle it."

But could he? He'd been one of the last left, killed by Eric instead of the vines, but that didn't make it better. He was here, after all, talking to a psychiatrist, hoping for some kind of forgiveness. "They got drunk. Eric and Amy and Stacy. They stupidly got drunk and at night, Amy went out to talk to Jeff, but he was angry at her. She lay down nearby and Jeff thought she was throwing up because she was drunk, but the vines were smothering her. She died first."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

The fact that Mathias had specified Amy as dying first didn't bode well. Neither did vines that could imitate a person's voice or produce fake smells, but shit, it wasn't exactly like Henry's own life was devoid of the strange and fantastic. It had started when they met Duddits, but the last 36 hours of his life before showing up on the island had been one big clusterfuck of weird.

"The men who weren't letting you escape - did they give some indication as to why they were keeping you there?" Henry asked. He had an idea, which may or may not have been correct, but he wanted to hear what Mathias thought, or what he had heard.

[plantfood]

Shaking his head, Mathias lifts his gaze. "No," he answers. "They didn't speak English or Spanish, we couldn't communicate with them. They just set up camp all around the hill and wouldn't let us go. They... would have shot us, just like they shot my brother."

It's still all such a mess in his head. He can't remember if Jeff or Pablo died next and he feels awful. Like that's something he should remember and respect.

"Jeff tried to run and they shot him," he says, and although they never found that out for sure, he knows it. He and Stacy both knew it. "Pablo was suffocated. Eric... the vines got inside of him, they were crawling under his skin and he kept trying to cut them out. Me and Stacy found him like that and I knew if he kept cutting he would die. He would lose too much blood and die, so I tried to stop him. I just wanted to stop him from cutting and he..." He trails off and touches the place between his ribs he's sure the knife would have gone. "I was here before he could do it, but I know he stabbed me."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

Again, Henry had an idea of the answer, but he wanted to hear it from Mathias, wanted to hear what Mathias thought. It was Mathias' opinions on the situation that mattered here, not Henry's. "Why do you think Eric stabbed you?" he asked.

[plantfood]

"Because I saw the knife coming at me," he says, rubbing his chest, two fingers pressing against that place he knows the blade slid into him. It's just over his heart, the gentle thumping right there, just behind the bone. "I closed my eyes. I got ready to die."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

That wasn't exactly what Henry had been asking, but that was all right. He nodded, knowing a little about what it was like to be ready to die. "And that's when you showed up on the island?"

[plantfood]

Mathias nods, glancing toward where he knows the front door of the Compound is. "Out there. In the jungle. I didn't know what had happened, I thought maybe I had gotten away somehow. That the villagers and the vines were somewhere behind me, so I ran."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

"Doesn't seem like an entirely unreasonable response, given previous events," Henry observed. "So you ran - where did you end up?"

[plantfood]

"On the boardwalk," Mathias answers, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the front. "I was found by a man named John. He took me to the clinic and a doctor looked at the burns on my hands and then I was released."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

Briefly, Henry wondered if Mathias was referring to John Sheppard. He nodded, continuing to take in and process every word. Every so often, he jotted down a note in his untidy doctorly chicken scratch. "I think you told me before, but just to be sure I'm remembering correctly - how long have you been on the island, Mathias?" he asked.

[plantfood]

"Seven months now," Mathias answers, after a brief consideration. Just under seven months, but he doesn't think it matters to give the exact number of days. "Not very long after I arrived here, Henrich's... his body arrived. On the beach."

[eggman-henry.livejournal.com]

Henry made a quick note of that. "What did you do with Heinrich's body once you found it?" he asked.

[plantfood]

"There was a woman who wanted to look at it and make sure he hadn't been killed on the island," he says. "But I wouldn't let her move him. After she was gone, I took him to the graveyard and made him a marker and a casket."