Interlude: Fiona

"Morning Tom," Fiona yawned, leaning against the reception desk, picking up her stack of files for the day. "You got anything interesting for me?"

The duty nurse looked up from his computer, and there was something in the way she felt him measuring his words before he answered her. There was a weight there. She set down her coffee and looked up. Tom reached over to her pile of folders and selected one with a green tab, placing it on top. "You've got a handover from Dr Gregory, tested last week."

Fiona blinked. "Okay," she drew out the word, not sure she was quite getting it. She was relatively new to work at the Columbus Sense Clinic, only recently moved from Chicago to take up a permanent position, following years of gruelling but rewarding sense training. "Why is Gregory passing the case to me? I'm on the initial test run, if the kid's been tested already..."

"He's over 4 on the scale," Tom said soberly. "And Gregory's six years from retirement."

Understanding dawned, and Fiona glanced down at the neat little file, a name printed carefully on the front.

BLAINE DEVON ANDERSON.

Blaine. The name of the child she would solely be responsible for, until her services were no longer required. A polite way of saying until the child died.

National law required any child diagnosed over 4 on the Hawkins Scale to be assigned a sense doctor for the course of their lives. And Blaine would be her first child in that range.

She took a steadying breath, and opened the file to read one little number.

Her stomach plummeted.

00000

Anger crashed, rebounding, fuming and hurt. Fiona kept her hands still in her lap as she sat in the middle of the floor, letting herself bend but not break against the howl of chaos.

"I hate you! I hate you I hate you I hate you!" The little whirlwind of a seven year old overturned a crate of coloured bricks, a horrible cauldron of confusion-fear-anger spilling over into the room. Fiona glanced over at Emily Anderson, who was desperately struggling to remain impassive and contained as her son raged on.

It had been the older brother who had triggered Blaine this time. The storm had been building for weeks, and Fiona had warned the parents to expect an incident. And by a small mercy, the tipping point had occurred in their weekly session.

Cooper was a sweet kid, but he was also a teenager, and naturally prone to misplaced and out of proportion bursts of self-centeredness. Unfortunately in this case, his projected emotions regarding his baby brother had actually mirrored Blaine's.

Always getting Mom and Dad's attention, they never even look at me anymore, why is Blaine so special?

Mom and Dad will never love me like they do Cooper, Cooper's so normal, Cooper's not a freak, Cooper's the son they wanted.

And now they were dealing with the fallout as it sent the little boy into a confused spiral where he couldn't tell where his surliness ended and his brother's began.

Finally deciding she had let Blaine continue for long enough, Fiona asked, "Where is the hate, Blaine? Is it outside or inside?"

The question confused Blaine enough to make him pause, angrily swiping over-spilling tears from his cheeks as he glared at his doctor. He sniffled, "Everywhere."

Fiona tentatively reached her senses out to Blaine. By now, she was intimately familiar with how Blaine's emotional print should feel. And right now?

Scared, out of control, full of something not quite right.

She projected a tendril of warm calm and safety, designed to stabilise. "What did we say to do, when you weren't sure whether something was inside or outside?"

Blaine scowled, the effect of his sullenness ruined slightly by a hiccup as he started to run out of steam. "Draw a picture in my head."

"And?" Fiona prompted.

She felt Blaine faltering, coming down from the waves of scared anger. He bit his lip and shook his head, a swamp of confused guilt starting to squirm as he wrapped his arms around himself.

Fiona nodded to Emily to break her vigil, watching in buried relief as the harried mother crossed the room in an instant, kneeling in front of Blaine as the little boy reached up and wrapped his arms around her neck, saying quietly, "I'm sorry Mommy, I don't hate you, not really."

Emily enfolded Blaine in her arms, glancing at Fiona over Blaine's head, her relief plain as she replied, "I know you don't baby, I know. It'll be okay."

"You did really well today Blaine," Fiona praised, her voice exuding confidence.

She made it to the break room before she fell apart. Nothing in her training had prepared herself for how hard this was going to be.

00000

She had been finishing off some late night paperwork when Tom burst into her office, "Fi, you need to come, now!" Her normally controlled and jubilant friend was spilling urgency and worry, "Blaine Anderson just got brought into the emergency room with a grade four E-E!"

Fiona was on her feet and out the door in an instant, hot on Tom's heels as he frantically swiped his keycard and dived through the doors that led into the staff corridor connecting the day clinic, test centre and ER within the Sense Clinic.

They burst through a second set of doors into chaos.

Entering the Sense ER on a good day required doctors to brace themselves against an onslaught of sloppy sense control and projection. A detached part of Fiona was glad there didn't seem to be too many other patients that evening, because those few who were present were already being tipped over the edge by the sheer hurricane of poisonous emotion that was flowing out of Blaine right now, and there were only so many staff on call this time of night.

"The EMT tried to give him a sedative in the ambulance but he kicked him in the face..." Tom filled Fiona in, gesturing helplessly at the scene unfolding before them.

Cooper Anderson looked completely out of place in dress pants and a shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows as he fought to keep hold of Blaine, who was kicking, screaming, biting, clawing, bucking against the arms fastened steadfastly around his waist.

Blaine's tux had seen better days – jacket, tie and shoes long gone, shirt torn – and Fiona remembered with a sinking heart how excited Blaine had been. Only last week he'd been telling her how he and Amy were patching things up and would be going to their school's Sadie Hawkins dance together.

What the hell had happened?

Fiona ran forward, "Everyone back up, give them space. And someone get these other patients out of here unless you want a full scale sense incident on our hands! Move, now!"

Her colleagues scrambled to her commands, grateful for someone to take control of the situation.

"Tell me what to do!" Cooper yelled at her over Blaine's struggled screams, voice cracking. Tears were tracking their way silently down the young man's face, but his jaw was set and determined.

Fiona took a step forward, only to have Blaine kick out, pressing his back into Cooper's chest, his head thudding against Cooper's shoulder as he recoiled. It was then Fiona realised that Blaine wasn't struggling to get away from his brother, but rather was pressing himself as close as possible, struggling away from anyone else who came near. Cooper was just trying to keep Blaine contained.

That explained the bare arms. The older brother had done the only thing he could think of, offering skin to skin contact to try and anchor Blaine.

Fiona quickly changed tact. Here would have to do.

"Can you get him on the floor? Someone get me some gloves and 10mg of diazepam!"

Cooper gritted his teeth and pulled Blaine closer to him as he attempted to kneel, mostly just falling backwards as Blaine's struggles unbalanced him. His grip dislodged for a moment and Blaine's hands immediately went to his head, violently clawing at his scalp with bloody torn nails, until Cooper managed to wrench them away and pin Blaine's arms again.

Cooper bent forward, desperately pressing his cheek to the top of Blaine's head, "Come on Blaine, it's okay, you're safe, I'm here, it's okay, it'll be okay, I promise. Come back to us Blaine..."

"Hold him as still as you can, Cooper." Fiona instructed, moving behind the brothers to avoid Blaine's kicking, pulling on the heavy-duty gloves that would allow her to touch Blaine without causing an immediate reaction.

A sudden wave of terror flooded her senses for a second before she could get her walls up tight enough. Cooper choked brokenly, the full force of it drowning him. He still didn't let go.

Fiona knelt quickly, reaching around Cooper to unemotionally tear the sleeve off Blaine's shirt. A wretched scream shredded Blaine's throat as he tried to pull away from her, but Cooper held firm, still repeating a mantra of useless placations and pleas.

Pull off the cap, jab the needle into muscle, press the plunger...

And finally Blaine began to quieten, his head lolling to the side after barely a minute, slumping bonelessly into Cooper's body, screams finally dying to a horrible, echoing hush.

Cooper took a shuddering breath, and without Blaine's projected storm, Fiona registered just how close to completely falling apart the young man was.

"Get a gurney out here. We're going to need to keep him under until we know what we're dealing with." Fiona gestured at one of the ER resident doctors, "Harris, I want a full blood and Blaine booked in for an MRI. I need to know what's going on in his brain. Dr Singh, can I trust you take point on this until I've got background from Mr Anderson? I'll join you as soon as I can. Tom, can you call Blaine's parents for me please? Let them know Cooper is here as well?"

A chorus of 'right away doctor', 'of course Dr Monroe' and 'sure Fiona' rang through the ER as Blaine was carefully lifted onto the gurney and wheeled away.

Gently, Fiona led Cooper to one of the exam rooms. Not only to afford him some privacy, but also because she was seriously considering calling a second gurney for this Anderson. He sat down heavily on the chair, silently accepting the paper cup of water Fiona offered him as she sat next to him.

One beat, two. Breathe in, breathe out.

The cup fell to the floor innocuously. And Cooper fell to pieces, sobs shaking him as he finally let his emotions spill out.

Fiona didn't tell him it would be okay.

00000

Flicking through the chart, Fiona felt ill. She nearly hadn't come, she could have emailed the document, but she knew she owed it to Blaine. Technically as Blaine's registered sense doctor, she remained on the books as Dalton as a consultant, but his day to day care decisions were out of her hands.

How had it come to this?

Blaine had barely recognised her, his emotions sluggishly drifting in a sickly way so unlike the brightly sparking sense patterns she was used to feeling from him. The cocktail of drugs the doctors had him on was bordering on the extreme to say the least, but from what Dr Hargreaves had explained to her, they had been a necessary evil.

Sometimes, in her darker moments, Fiona wondered if she was too close to Blaine to be objective. Because as soon as she had seen Blaine in that room, she had wanted to yell, she had wanted to scream, she had wanted to pick Blaine up and take him out of there.

Everything her training taught her said that Blaine was getting the absolute best care. She knew the doctors and teachers at Dalton had made all the right calls, had done everything by the book...

So why did this feel so wrong?

"Blaine's sense buddy, Wesley? What do you plan to do with him?" Fiona asked Dalton's headmistress, Dr Miranda Hargreaves, leaning forwards to place the chart back on the desk between them.

Miranda sighed, "As yet to be determined. If Rosen had her way, Wesley would be out on his ear already, but really... the boy's heart was in the right place. He was just incredibly misguided, and that cat was the final straw. Blaine has suffered for it, but that's for Dalton to account for, not a young student like Mr Montgomery."

Fiona hummed, non-committal. It started as a niggling thought, but quickly grew until she knew she couldn't leave until she asked, "Would you mind if I spoke with him?"

There was a drift of bland surprise underneath the projection of too-quiet the headmistress maintained. "I have no objection," she said. "You can use my office, I need to do the rounds anyway. I'll send him over."

The headmistress departed, and Fiona leaned her elbows on her knees, fingertips massaging her temples. Tomorrow would be the end of it all. Tomorrow, she would sign the paperwork, a messy scrawl, right next to the one belonging to Dr Hargreaves, and the pair from John and Emily Anderson.

Tomorrow, she would sign Blaine away to end of life care, and her responsibilities would be ended.

It wasn't as if Blaine was her only kid over 4 on the scale anymore. She now had five in total of varying ages and intensities. She shouldn't be this invested.

But Blaine was Blaine. Blaine was her first high-ES child. She had learnt with Blaine, she had put her heart into that family, had given them over a decade of dedication and love. And now it was broken, and she couldn't help feel like all she had gotten out of it was a sucking sense of abject failure.

How many times had she told Emily to be aware of the risks, how many times had she reminded John that any time with Blaine was a gift, because they didn't know how long they would have?

Turns out she hadn't taken her own advice.

"Hello..?"

Fiona shook herself and turned to see a tall Asian boy standing in the doorway. He wasn't wearing the typical uniform of a Dalton sense buddy, a silent marker of his suspension. Considering he couldn't be older than eighteen, Fiona was impressed at the boy's sense control. He was a little wary, but very self-contained.

"Hello, you must be Wesley. I'm Dr Monroe, please..." She gestured to the empty seat next to her.

Wes paused for a beat longer before taking the invitation. "You're Blaine's sense doctor," he stated.

"I am," Fiona confirmed, waiting to see if the boy had anything else to add.

"I won't apologise," Wesley stated calmly, a righteous fire burning within the teenager as he folded his arms across his chest. "I don't care what Rosen crows on about, Molly was the only thing keeping Blaine together this past week. If we hadn't smuggled her in, Blaine would have crashed and burned weeks ago. I don't care if this costs me my place in the program, I'll never regret helping Blaine the way I did."

"Dr Hargreaves seems to think Molly's presence was causing Blaine to withdraw from the school more and more. She theorises Blaine became so reliant on the cat that it made his time with the rest of the student body even more difficult."

Wes laughed hollowly, "That's a load of crap. Anyone who spent two minutes watching Blaine with Molly would tell you that." He glared at her challengingly.

Fiona smiled sadly as she finally voiced her opinion, "I couldn't agree more."

A thrum of tilting confusion slipped through the teenager's tight controls as her answer completely wrong-footed him. He quickly recovered, "Well then why haven't you told them that? Make them give Molly back! The teachers just freaked and pulled out the drugs, but Blaine doesn't need that, he doesn't! We just need Ku-" Wesley abruptly cut himself off, but Fiona had got the gist.

Frowning, she asked, "Kurt? The low ES boy who went to Blaine's old school?"

"Blaine's boyfriend," Wesley admitted quietly. "It's complicated."

Fiona recalled a long conversion with Emily Anderson in the hospital not too long ago, following Blaine's panic attack scare. It had all come spilling out. Kurt, Blaine, a spiral into the unknown.

"I've got that impression," Fiona sighed.

A burst of anger, and then the boy snapped coldly, "Why is everyone so quick to assume what's wrong is wrong, and what's right is right? Molly helps Blaine stay grounded, she helps him stay him, but the teachers say, nope, that's not proven, that's not right, and they take her away! Kurt loves Blaine, and Blaine loves Kurt, but sorry, Kurt's low and Blaine's high so they can't possibly be good for each other? Isn't it a good job we've hidden poor Blaine away from the nasty little empty kid?"

Fiona's heart wrenched in her chest as she watched the carefully contained tempest of a boy in front of her. Sadly, she reached over and squeezed Wesley's shoulder. "And there's the biggest lesson you'll learn in your career, probably the only one you'll take away from your time at Dalton. Sometimes the rules are wrong, but there's nothing you can do about it." She swallowed tightly, "Thank you, for everything you were able to do for Blaine."

Except that wasn't it. Tomorrow never came. Blaine disappeared, and it quickly transpired that Kurt had been involved.

Was it wrong to be grateful, when everything her training had taught her was that this could only end in tragedy?

00000

When she hung up the phone, she cried for a good few minutes. A whole week of pent up not-knowing simply burst out in disbelief and hope.

Gathering herself, she quickly checked in with the Sense ER night shift staff to make sure she'd have the test centre to herself. Mutterings and rumours were immediately rife – even those staff members who hadn't got to know Blaine over the years had caught up by following the recent news coverage.

"Talk about an assault on the senses..." A clear and confident voice sniped, and Fiona exited the back office to meet the new arrivals, taking everything in with one glance.

The man and woman with an irritatingly perfect projection of professionalism would be the agents from the Sense Protection and Incident unit. There were John, Emily and Cooper, looking tired and drawn, but shining with the kind of energy that could only come with the sort of news the Andersons had received tonight.

And there was Blaine. He looked far from healthy, but no thinner or gaunt than when she had last seen him at Dalton a week ago. And this time, his eyes were bright and clear, and his emotions although threaded with apprehension and edged with rawness, were contained. And next to him, keeping a tight hold of Blaine's hand, a small cut blooming into a bruise standing out on one pale cheek, was the one who had criticised the décor.

Kurt.

"I guess they didn't think of runaway teenage boys when they decorated," Fiona said, catching everyone's attention.

Kurt Hummel was nothing like Fiona had expected. She had seen pictures on the news of course, and as a sense doctor she knew what to expect when faced with someone sub-1 on the scale. But none of that captured the determination, stubbornness, love and strength that practically exuded from the taller boy as he stood at Blaine's side. Fiona didn't need any kind of sense-ability to see that.

Carefully keeping one sense on Blaine's ebbing and flowing emotional state, Fiona introduced herself to the agents, greeted the Andersons, and shook the hand of Burt Hummel, Kurt's father, as he joined them.

A sweep of panic, and Fiona began to feel Blaine unspool on the edges of her senses. She was prepared to step in any second. Despite her private hopes, if Kurt turned out to be in any way damaging to Blaine, she would remove him immediately.

The ribbons of fear spiralled outwards, but they were tempered by a quiet, certain love. Fiona was just listening to Agent Miller explaining the details of Blaine' apparent episode, when-

Blaine was gone.

Fiona whipped her head round to look at the boys, mouth ajar.

Her eyes could see Blaine, her eyes could see Kurt. There they stood, arms wrapped around each other, Blaine leaning back into Kurt as the taller boy rested his forehead against Blaine's temple. The picture of harmony.

In all her years knowing Blaine, she had never known his emotional print to be quiet.

For him to be silent...

"Boys," Agent Miller said exasperatedly. It sounded like this wasn't the first time she had tried to get them to separate.

Fiona's brain couldn't process her thoughts fast enough, watching with fascination as Blaine slowly came back to himself, his emotions flowing calmly around him. Their eyes met, and the Blaine she saw there was someone she thought had been lost long ago.

Sometimes the rules are wrong, and there's nothing you can do about it.

But that's not an excuse. And Fiona was done pretending it was.

TBC