Use Psychology, (Sable)

[Nick Temin]

Valeria, having known Nicki a long time and being generally a rational sort of person, probably had a pretty good grasp on what was going on here. Nick thought this. She liked to think this, at least, and so she was going to try really hard to do so. She had to think it, because as long as she could think it, she had a plan.

As long as she had a plan, she would be fine. The first step was always to have a plan. After that, maybe it failed! Sure. That could happen. The answer then was to make another plan, not to give up on the whole notion entirely because frankly that was stupid it would be like giving up on science just because one experiment hadn't turned out properly the point was that the method had to be respected and adhered to and that meant that she had to stick to this plan because she had no other, and she couldn't just go running about in petrifying scent voids like hospitals without any kind of plan.

That was ridiculous.

In the interests of things being non-ridiculous, Nick had a plan that started with talking to Valeria, who understood both that Nick was very upset in a hospital and therefore could not be effectively evaluated by mental health professionals as long as they were keeping her confined in this place, and that Nick was a reliable and practical sort of woman who could be trusted to make good plans like murdering supervillains using questionably ethical homemade poisonspraying blood guns.

Obviously Valeria would understand.

Valeria wasn't facing Nicki, but Nicki had faced away from Valeria anyway, only occasionally glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn't being looked at because even though it was clearly not the case Nick was still fairly sure that somehow people could tell that she'd had sores all down one side of her body and she just didn't want to talk about that she wanted to talk about something else.

I hate myself, she thought. Where did that come from? she thought next. No getting distracted.

Nick had had to come to grips very quickly with the fact that Rick had gotten her underwear, which meant that he had seen her underwear. Her underwear drawer wasn't messy, right? She'd hidden all of those things, right?

She didn't have time to think about that because thinking about that wasn't part of The Plan. The Plan involved getting dressed and making a very important point to Valeria Who Was Reasonable And Knew Her Pretty Well.

"So, speaking objectively and not because this place is freaking me out, but this place is freaking me out and I don't think that they are going to be able to accurately assess my mental state in a hospital. I think that it would be in the best interests of the doctors and the accuracy of their report if they were to maybe try and do that someplace else."

Nick pulled her bra up and put her arms through the straps nonchalantly as though she had made a perfectly casual observation that had no bearing on whether Sable let her walk out of here right now.

"You know, like soon, maybe."

That was because Nick was being entirely reasonable. It was everybody else here who was out of control and being ruled by their emotions. They could not see how obvious it was that it was better for everybody if Veronica left. Right now.

[Sable]

"Why don't we tell the doctors how you're feeling and see if they think it's all right for you to leave?" Sable asked. She had no intention of letting Nick out of professional custody.

"Maybe they'll be able to suggest a place that isn't a hospital room where they'll be able to help you." Where they'll be able to protect you from yourself, she thought.

[Nick Temin]

"The doctors," Nick said carefully, shaking her shirt out from its folded position where Rick had put it because she could smell where he'd touched it and held it which was really fortunate because it smelled like Clean in here. "...were the ones who wanted to keep me in a hospital room. Moving me was my mom's idea."

Moms were great. Nick's mom was great. It was important sometimes to invoke maternal superiority because in her own way Melissa could be as hard to argue with as Deborah, especially when she wasn't even here to participate.

"And Taryn helped me. She was a hell of a lot more use than they were, and now it's her turn to be helped."

[Sable]

"The fact that Taryn is better at physical healing than the doctors doesn't mean they're useless," Sable pointed out. "And you need different doctors now. You need a psychologist, Nick. I'm not helping you leave before you see one, and I'm sure your moms would feel the same."

Was that too blunt? Probably.

[Nick Temin]

Sonova--

It was fine. Some opposition was part of The Plan, and Nick was prepared to deal with it by demonstrated that she was one who was reasonable here.

Nick pulled her shirt over her head and turned around, speaking way more loudly than she'd intended, more so than she even realized while she was doing it. "I already know everything they're going to say!" She took a breath, brought her volume down a notch. "I can have the whole conversation in my head without them. I know what I need and some of it I can have and some of it I can't. I have learned to deal with not being able to have stuff. Everybody else needs to figure it the hell out and get off my back."

She took a deep shuddering breath and her thoughts collided with the realization that it smelled just fucking horrifying in here and everything was getting all smashed and she really had to leave and Valeria might not let her but she couldn't think like that right now she had to stick with The Plan and not do things she had sworn not to do.

Not that that really counted for much.

Apparently.

Ha ha.

[Sable]

"Nick, if you really knew how to deal with it, you wouldn't be in here now," Sable said. "Listen to me. I will make sure that you don't have to spend the night in a hospital room. Okay? If I have to break you out, watch you overnight myself, and break you back in tomorrow morning, I will do that. But I'm not going to just let you leave without even talking to anyone."

She didn't think it would come to that. She was quite sure that there was somewhere they could put Nick on suicide watch that wouldn't involve keeping her somewhere that was triggering panic attacks in her. But she was willing to stand by her word if she had to.

[Nick Temin]

Sable was halfway on board with The Plan and halfway not. This was maddening. It was driving her mad. If she was crazy now, this was why, and the next time someone asked she should probably just say that she really was nuts but it was because nobody would listen to reason because they were all crazy and they'd made her crazy, too.

She wasn't sure whether to argue with Valeria's assessment of why Nick was here, or whether to support her apparent willingness to get Nick somewhere reasonable.

"Oh, I won't be spending the night in any hospital room," Nick said, willing to hint at but not willing to rehash the fact that without Rick people would have a hard time stopping her. Her basic human decency was what protected them, since killing them or not killing them wouldn't actually change that she'd already killed someone. She was someone who killed people. She was something that killed people. She'd be that whether she fought her way out or not, because the fight to be a thing that didn't kill people was already decided, already over, and she'd lost on purpose.

"I don't know why doctors think they can just lock people up whenever they want."

Yes. All of them. Not just that one who had done it that one time. This was a systemic problem with the mindset of doctors. They got too used to overriding their patients, and so naturally people like Mertoi would happen. It was the obvious outcome.

Valeria just didn't understand. She hadn't been there. She didn't know.

[Sable]

Sable was Not Happy with the menace in Nick's voice.

"Good, then," she said. "You'll stay here until tonight, and then we'll leave. Why don't we talk to Rick and make sure he knows that's the plan?"

She wasn't going to get into the "doctors are evil" issue. She just wanted Nick to agree to stay here for the night.

[Nick Temin]

Another few hours?

Could Nick do that?

She considered this counter-offer.

Few hours. That would leave her here discussing the Daniel issue with the aliens and the future and the three percent survival rate and perhaps that was good, provided she could keep herself thinking in straight lines. Not that they needed her. They really didn't. No part of this conversation could be eased by Nicki poisoning someone to death.

If both Rick and Sable promised to keep Nick out of this place, then she might believe them. They could probably do it. That wasn't exactly what she was hearing, though.

"You'll want me to come back tomorrow. Contrary to what everyone seems to think, I am not above asking for help, but not if you two are just going to turn on me and drag me back in here tomorrow."

[Sable]

"I will drag you to a psychologist tomorrow," Sable said. "Doesn't have to be at the hospital, though. Is that acceptable?"

[Nick Temin]

That was not precisely a denial of Nick's suspicions, which meant that it was not good enough. Valeria was going to keep the option open of locking Nicki up and that meant that she was still part of the problem. Then there was Rick who was just worried and didn't know what to do with the waste of energy he'd made the stupid mistake of kissing at a red light.

"I don't mind talking to psychologists," Nick said. "I'm a good test-taker and we can do it if you don't mind the great big pointless diversion from this whole alien invasion thing but I want a promise from you and from Rick that you won't let me get held anywhere against my will because that is what we are talking about here and I swear to god I am not going to have that happen and you are either with me on that or you aren't."

Nick wasn't sure if that counted as a whole sentence. It certainly contained enough raw verbal material to constitute a sentence or two but she didn't really have the energy to evaluate whether she'd done it properly. She did not have shoes. This was what she had for clothes. That was fine. It was clothing. It was hers and it smelled like her and it smelled like Rick which meant that she smelled like herself and Rick and those were good smells and he had made a very good call because he was an excellent boyfriend when he was not getting confused about whose side he was supposed to be on here anyway.

[Sable]

Sable turned around and looked at Nick with her arms crossed.

"I can only make that promise if you can make me believe that you aren't going to hurt yourself. And that's going to be awful hard for you to do. You know I'm your friend, and normally, yeah, I'd be with you 100% on that. But I'd rather see you held against your will than dead."

[Nick Temin]

Nick took a deep breath, filling her lungs with as much air as she could get because there was nothing in the room for her to throw and so she needed to take a couple of seconds to stall herself before responding.

She really didn't want to have this conversation but apparently all of her friends had decided that they were no longer equals who respected each other but that Nick had to go to each and every one of them and prove herself to them and make sure that she was up to their standards of whatever the hell.

Why couldn't they just leave her alone? For god's sake she had killed someone for these people and they couldn't just leave her alone.

"It was. an accident. Sable. If I had wanted to off myself, I am a god damned scientist and I wouldn't have ended up lying in my apartment for days with my skin rotting into the tile. I would have succeeded. It would be nice if my so-called friends could give me a little bit of fucking credit for that if you can't give me anything else."

[Sable]

"You accidentally stopped taking your meds?" Sable asked skeptically. "How exactly did that happen?"

You probably weren't supposed to have conversations like this with suicidal people, but Sable did feel like she was obligated to hear Nick out. She certainly wasn't going to help hold her against her will if it wasn't saving her life.

[Nick Temin]

Nicki pressed her hands together, put her fingertips against her forehead, and then spread her hands out over her face.

People were really stupid. She had to remind herself that she was not upset at Valeria; she was just upset. She should not take this out on her, which was what she was doing which was bad because it would mean Valeria would think she was being crazy and irrational and therefore in need of a psych evaluation and probable nonvoluntary confinement.

"I have been phasing off of them for the past few weeks." Nick put her hands down, bracing them on her hips. "That is a ridiculously inefficient way to commit suicide. It is, however, the standard way of responsibly phasing off of medication." Because it had been an entirely rational and careful clinical decision that Nicki had made and in retrospect that much was obvious. She'd only seemed upset at the time, but actually she was behaving perfectly sensibly by lowering her blood levels of the drug gradually by only taking it irregularly. "I just... dropped the dose too fast and I gave us all a scare and that is regrettable but you are all seriously overreacting."

Seriously. Their overreaction was serious. That was the sort of overreaction this was: the serious kind. Sure, it had been clinically non-optimal to go off her meds entirely before she'd spent more time with an irregular dose, but it was going to happen eventually.

"This isn't a failed experiment, because an experiment didn't fail if you learned something, and I did."