Shinjuku Manner Center Ch. 01

The Shinjuku Manner Center... the mental hospital you worked in.

This place had some serious issues: Serial killers, suicidal girls with no body fat whatsoever, people who'd just stare at you all day, and a little bit of all three in combinations. And no one really helped them, at least... you didn't see any improvement. Especially not for one of your favorite patients... Beyond they said his name was. You liked that name, it was otherworldly, like him. His glossy brown eyes were wide yet slit, had a red shine to them when the light hit them, his long but not too long black hair, shone blue in the purest light. And red when in the sun. Though his skin was pale it had a tanned olive tone to it. He sat in an odd way and ate nothing but jam, they tried to starve him until he accepted other food, but you put your foot down at that, you told them that you'd pay for the damn jam if they needed you to. When they asked why, you told them that he wouldn't eat anything else anyway, why not just let him have it instead of starving him to death? Because he WOULD die.

You'd just watched him from the monitors before then, but you already knew a lot about him. You had a fairly high IQ even if you denied that you were smarter than anyone else, you sort of were, but only when it came to words, and people. You could read people so fast it hurt your own eyes, haha. Beyond was crazy, not pretending to be crazy or mildly crazy, no he was out-and-out Psycho! But you still liked to watch him when he was thinking or speaking. You gave the patients privacy of course, but you watched them while they were outside their rooms, and the suicidal ones when they were in their rooms and upset.

The Center as you liked to shorten it: had a nice looking exterior, the walls were painted green and blue, the insides were gold and crimson. You'd done this, you told them that if they couldn't upset the patients with certain colors, you'd find out which colors upset them. Red, gold, blue and green were the only ones that didn't upset anyone. So you'd had it painted, and they seemed to like it more than the whiteness. Or... well, so you imagined, since you... you know, couldn't read minds.

Today, you get to take lunch to Beyond. Apparently his newest nurse was terrified of him. You smile to yourself as you walk down the hall with his jam in your apron. What's to be scared of? Sure he could kill you, but why get upset about that? Why think about what if? If he didn't kill you Great! If he did, well then you suppose he had a reason for doing that. Honestly you were a tad bit crazy yourself, but it's barely noticeable so you hadn't been found out yet.

You stop at his padded cell, not so much for his protection as the people who went in, he couldn't break their skulls on the walls or floor this way. You open the first door, close it behind you, lock it, put the keys in the wall safe, open the next door, step in. He's sitting there, on his bed, staring off into space. You walk over and take a jar from your apron pocket, they'd gotten rubber or plastic jars now, seeing as Beyond liked to break them and go after someone with the glass. Like you couldn't have told them he'd do that.

"Beyond, I have your jam." You stay where you are, halfway across the room. The only thing Beyond would get up for was jam, and you wanted him to come get it. He looks over at you, and gets up from the bed, standing on the bed from his odd sitting position and then stepping down off the bed. It was so fluid, the way he moved. He walks toward you, you're still standing against the wall halfway across the room. He grabs the jar with one hand, though you notice his other hand is hidden, his fingers fisted. "I hope you like it," You smile and he tilts his head at you, giving you that blank stare, but when he smiles at you, you know something is coming, but funnily enough, your hearts' sudden pounding has more to do with his smile than what the smile means.

Suddenly you're up against the wall, a sliver of metal on your neck, he must've twisted it off something. His breath is fanning across your face, you think you can actually smell the strawberries. You look up into his eyes, like you've wanted to do for a while. His eyes darken in an odd way, and he presses the metal hard enough to draw a few drops of blood, someone checks on all the rooms once every ten minutes, they must have seen or are going to see soon. You don't change where you look or how you stand, you just gaze into those dangerous beautiful eyes. And then he's let you go, and stepped back, he steps forward again, dropping the metal, but the door bursts open.

You're hustled out the door with two nurses on either side of you, obviously protecting you. But Beyond just watches you, and when you look back at him, he smiles.

"Are you okay!?" You glance up from the floor, where you were looking when the nurse put the bandage on your neck.

"Yeah I'm cool Chikita." You knew her name was Mexican, but she was not. Her name flowed nicely off your tongue though, so you liked it.

"They said they sent you in to BEYOND!?" Everyone knew him here, he was the celebrity of the ward. You nod and she throws a hissy fit about you being their scapegoat or some other such nonsense. "Don't worry, if you don't want to, you can refuse to go back."

"Oh, I'm going back."

"WHAT!?"

"He didn't hurt me, well... not really anyway, and he stopped before they even came in the door. I like being around Beyond, even if it's only through a monitor, he just seems to make me feel... I don't know, but it's a nice feeling." She's gaping at you now.

"OH MY-"

"Girls?" your supervisor comes in and you do the same song and dance.

"But you don't have to go back"

"But I want to. I'm not going to abandon him like every other nurse." They try to persuade you otherwise, but you wave them off, and when it's time to go home, you walk by the monitors and spot Beyond, walking around his room, eating the jam, before leaving. Your dreams are filled with him as usual. His face, the metal against your skin, in some dreams he slices a line across your collar bone and laps up the blood, he did that with the nurses sometimes. He held them down, cut them somewhere and then drank their blood. It's funny how it never made him sick. When you wake in the morning you decide to take a shower and use the strawberry scented shampoo instead of the apple scent. You'd have to ask Beyond if strawberry was the only flavor he liked, if not, you could get cherry or grape or apple flavored jam.

When you get to work, you decide to start the day off with a bed check. You did this yourself, you'd volunteered for it, you always knew if someone was hiding something, you'd take it, and say nothing, tell them it was wrong with your eyes. They'd always look indifferent or guilty, depending on their mental state and what they'd hidden. The skinny girls hid slivers of something sharp, and laxatives, heaven only knows where they'd gotten them. The ones who'd stare would hoard feathers or rocks they'd picked up, you'd wash them and bring them back and hide them better, while they'd watch, an you could swear the little pebbles you found on your windowsill in your office were thank you's.

You find a few sharp things and give the girls a hard glare, find some rocks and take them with you, you'd wash them later, and then you get to the high security ward. Now that you were his attending nurse, so to speak, you could decide what to do with him. You open up one door, and then slip inside, lock it up and open the other, just like before. You walk inside, he's sitting in the same spot, and then he glances over, expecting what, you don't know. You can see a little blood on his hand. He sometimes bit at his thumb until it bled and sucked on it.

"Beyond, would like to go out into the game and TV area today?" You stay there, silently watching him as he thinks about this. He stops thinking and gets off the bed, walking over to stand in front of you. His blank stare is the only answer you'll be getting. "Okay, let's go then." Since he'd gotten up in the first place, he must want to go, if he didn't want to, he'd have blankly stared at you from the bed.

You lead him out of his room, a hand on his arm so you could be sure not to lose him. Though he suddenly jerks his arm from your grasp and when you're about to turn, in the same second, he grabs your hand. You feel a strange fluttering in your fingertips, like electricity in the form of clouds or something.

When you both walk in to the game area the nurses glance up for a moment before double-taking and gaping at you. You lead Beyond over to the windows, not open enough to fit through, and bullet-proof glass. He sits at one of the chairs there and you give him a jar of strawberry jam you'd had in your apron.

He always uses his hands to eat it, he always licks them clean and then later when it's time for them to go back to their rooms, he'll take a shower, and all the jam will be gone from his hands and face. Funny though... when he's seen that you've sat down next to him, he offers the jar. Like he wanted to share with you. You smile, "I'll eat later, when we're done here, and I'm not as evolved as you are, I have to eat a lot more than jam." He goes back to eating it, you think maybe he might be sulking. "I appreciate the offer though, I know you don't really share it." The sulking aura around him is gone and you smile happily.

Two hours later and you're reading a book, waiting for Beyond to make a move, waiting for him to be sick of sitting there and thinking. But apparently he's content to wait until room time. You sit there quietly and read, stealing glances at him every now and then, his pale olive skin seems to glow in the sunlight. You see him look over at you, and you realize you've been staring at him for over a minute. You look back down to your book, and he shifts in the periphery of your sight. When you glance at him from the corner of your eye, you nearly jump. He's got his top half turned towards you, and his entire front is nearly touching you as he stares at your face. His face is blank, with curiosity in his eyes.

"Something wrong Beyond-?" You're cut off at the end of your sentence when he reaches up and touches your face. It's light and barely there, just a brush of a knuckle on your cheek, but it makes your face flare up in fire. And then that grin is back, the one he gave you yesterday. It makes him look crazed and bloodthirsty but... it was nice... "Room time!" The yell went up and Beyonds' face is blank again. He stands and you scramble to your feet. You walk with him, a hand on his arm until you get into the hallway, then he grabs your hand again and your face is hotter than before. You drop him off in his room and leave for the night.

Your dreams are full of him again, his eyes staring at you from the darkness, his hands at your throat, his body luminescent. All different dreams that haunt you. When you awaken in the morning, you're making some coffee, since you're up a bit early, and your beeper starts going crazy. You call in,

"What's wrong?"

"You have to get down here! Beyond has one of the male nurses, he's bitten him and he's losing a lot of blood!" They needed his attending to do something because it was protocol.

"Alright, tell him I'm coming."

"The nurse is unconscious-"

"Not the nurse, Beyond." You hang up before she can reply and rush out of the house, shutting off the coffeemaker and putting on your shoes. You drive quickly, even though you're only five minutes away, you make it in about three this morning.

You run inside and there's a grouping of people down the high security hall, outside his room. You run over and push through, "Attending nurse, attempting to save a man's life here!" They back out of your way and you walk into the room. Beyond has a man on the floor, he's leaning over him, his lips red from the blood. And when he sees you, he grins in that manic way. "Beyond, you can't just take other people's blood." His grin melts away, "If you want it, you have to ask for it, otherwise it's not really sharing blood is it? And it has no meaning." He's staring blankly at you, you sigh and walk forward, the loud speakers squeak at you, "Don't go near him! Don't you remember what happened to the last attending?" You scoff and walk over, grabbing Beyonds' arm and pulling him up. "If you want blood, take mine," You stare him in the eyes, and that grin comes back. "Leave them be, okay? You can only take my blood." He looks into your eyes and his grin turns into a smirk.

"Of course Mistress." He murmurs this with a voice so deep and husky you blink while a heat curls in your abdomen and flits up to your face. "What-" You start but then he's being tackled by hospital personnel and you're being shoved out of the room while they detain him. You can hear his manic laughter as you follow the nurses down the hall to the main office.

"And you stopped him?"

"Yes... why was he tackled? He wasn't even touching me, I had a hold of his arm but he was just talking to me-"

"He SPOKE to you?" You blink at her and raise an eyebrow.

"Yeah... he speaks... go figure..." She shakes her head, being your boss you couldn't call her an idiot but you sure wanted to right now.

"You've been wanting Beyonds' case since you started here, and you never noticed that the only time he spoke was when he was speaking to himself in his room? And it was indecipherable."

"So? The fact that he spoke means he CAN speak, and I guess he just never had anything to say before." She shakes her head at you again.

"If you can get this kind of progress from him I'll make sure you're paged first no matter how bad he gets, I'd rather not have him sedated all the time." You nod and leave the room, heading back to Beyonds' room. He'd be asleep for about four hours but you'd check on him anyway.

You walk in and see him, he's been placed on the bed and you sidle up next to him and sit down on the edge of the bed. You reach over and move some hair from his face, it was shaggy and long, but it was clean and soft. You watch him breathe for a moment, his long sleeved black shirt is probably stifling, you'd ask him if he'd like short sleeved shirts later. You get up and walk out, resolving to come back when he was due to wake up.

Four hours later you've helped your clients all out of their rooms and into the cafeteria for lunch. You usually sent a tray in to the critical wing, but this time you wanted Beyond to have lunch with you. With everyone else, too. You walk in to see that he's walking around muttering to himself, and then he looks up to grin at you. "Mistress...?" You hear the tone of his voice and shiver a little.

"Beyond, why are you calling me that?" His grin simply doesn't change. You sigh in disappointment, you'd hoped he'd talk some more. "Okay, it's lunch time and you're coming with me." He saunters over to you and looms over you with a leer.

"Whatever you wish Mistress." Okay so coming from him the whole 'Mistress' thing was actually kind of... alluring. No! Bad girl bad!

You lead him into the lunchroom, his hand holding onto yours. Everyone looks up and a few of them gape at you, but you just lead him through the line, making you a plate and handing him a jar of jam before sitting at a table. You eat silently for a while, "Beyond, that shirt looks so hot, wouldn't you like something with shorter sleeves?"

He blinks at you, "I'm getting you some anyway, wear them or don't." He grins crazily again.

"If you wish, Mistress."

"Mistress? BDSM much?" Your 'friend' Chikita comes over and comments.

"I know, but he seems to like calling me that, what are you doing over here, I thought you were sitting with your patients."

"They can do without me for five minutes." She seems so sure about that and you unconsciously glare at her. "Oh don't give me that look, I know they're important to you, but for me, they're just other people, people with problems but still people."

You sigh in aggravation and turn back to Beyond who is watching you, his hand in the jar and then it comes out and he sucks the jam from his fingers, his eyes never leaving your form.

When lunch ends, you walk with Beyond to the rooms with showers, "I'm giving you ten minutes, be out before then or I'm sending someone in to get you."

"I think I'd like it better if you came to get me Mistress." His eyes are lidded lazily and he smirks at you as he plays with his words.

"Well, if I'm your 'Mistress'." You place emphasis on this word. "Then why should I bother myself with fetching you when I can have someone else do it?" You say this off hand and his smirk turns to a maniacal grin. He laughs as he enters the shower rooms.

"Well reasoned Mistress."

You wait for him and he comes out after about nine minutes. His shirt is gone though. You try very hard not to stare at his body, it's got burns on it. All over it. But it's still the most delectable chest you've ever seen. You can feel your face start to burn as you walk ahead of him, but you breathe deeply and push it back.

"Beyond, why didn't you grab one of the extra shirts? Are you hot in here?"

"Yes..." He trails off and when you glance back, you see he's trailing your body with his eyes. You turn back around and resolutely pretend to not notice.

You let him into his room and as you turn to leave, he grabs your hand, so you turn back to him, just in time for his lips to graze your cheek. He stays still for a moment, taking in a deep breath, and then he's letting you go and you're walking out with warmth pulsing deep inside of you.

You walk and breathe, walk and breathe, trying to take in the lingering scent that hovers about you. Even though you'd think he would smell like strawberry jam, he doesn't. He smells like blood, and sugar.