Chapter Text
“White male, forty-five years old. Identifying marks…”
Ian speaks into the recorder with a calm, clinical voice, steady and unwavering. The air around him is still, and the only sound to be heard, besides his own voice, is the faint hum of the fluorescent lights overhead.
Well, that and the whispers. Sometimes the cries and the moans. Ian tends to tune them out for the most part. He’s learned how. Now, they simply blend together into soothing white noise, unless a specific and urgent message is being sent, desperate to break through. Ian now finds the noise soothing. It’s the only way he’s managed to get by without driving himself crazy.
For as long as he can remember, he’s always been able to see dead people. Spirits, ghosts, the souls of those who’ve passed…whatever you want to call them. Sure, it sounds ridiculous, the whole “I see dead people” thing, like the kid from that movie, but it’s the truth.
He’s not sure if he can pinpoint exactly when it all started. As a kid, his siblings always thought he had imaginary friends. But to him, they weren’t imaginary.
No one ever thought anything of it, or had even the tiniest inkling that Ian had a “gift.” It’s not as if he even knew what it was. It wasn’t until he was sixteen years old and Aunt Ginger’s spirit appeared to him, directing him to the exact spot in the Gallagher backyard where Frank had buried her body—which ended up saving them all from having to explain the buried bones to city inspectors—that Fiona, Lip, and the rest of his siblings realized something was, in fact, different.
But it scared them. Ian can’t say he blames them. It’s a scary fucking thing. It had scared the absolute shit out of him when he’d realized what he was hearing, what he was seeing. The voices, the apparitions. They were never more than shadows, dark forms surrounded by light. Some had more light than others. Once he was old enough to realize what it was, he’d gone through all the stages of grief—from denial and anger all the way to eventual acceptance.
He hates calling himself a “medium.” It makes him sound like one of those people on TV, trying to make a buck off of someone’s loss. And he’s never thought of it as a gift; just a part of who he is. He was endlessly grateful for it when he was able to talk to his recently passed mother and managed to bring closure to their complicated relationship. And now, he’s at peace with it. In fact, being among the dead is where he’s most content, where he feels most comfortable. The dead don’t judge him, don’t expect anything other than to be heard.
Maybe that’s why he became a forensic pathologist. He knew the dead had stories to tell, and he wanted to help them do it. So here he is, at work, his only companions a few lifeless bodies and the spirits that still cling to them.
At night, the morgue is cold. Even more so than usual. Ian works all hours of the day and night, typically on-call when there’s a suspicious death being investigated. Tonight, it’s the graveyard shift.
The goosebumps though, the chill that runs through his entire body and sends it into an almost violent shiver, isn’t from the cold of the morgue. It happens when Ian hears a faint, almost imperceptible whisper, like air moving through a cracked door.
It’s nothing new, the echoes, the last gasps of consciousness that cling to a body like static. His therapist would tell him it’s “empathy burnout.” His friend Gil from the coroner’s office would say it’s stress. And what would Ian possibly say to correct them, to even try to explain it? That sometimes the dead still have things to say, and they pick him to say them to? So he doesn’t say anything. No one other than his siblings know. And even they don’t know the half of it.
But as Ian searches the body on the table in front of him for identifying marks before making the Y-incision, the whispers grow stronger until he can make out a clear, “Help me.” He looks up to see a fleeting shadow, so unlike his usual apparitions. Gone before he’s even registered its presence, completely devoid of any light.
“Tattoo over the left pectoral muscle,” Ian starts as he examines an ambiguous marking on the body’s chest. A circle with swirling symbols inside, some sort of glyph if he had to guess. But upon closer inspection, he notices that it looks very different from a regular tattoo. It looks almost as if it was burned on, branded, the scorch marks a fresh, deep black. He tries to ignore the way it looks to be pulsing, something in it still very much alive, because it has to be in his head. He blinks twice, clenching his eyes tightly to refocus his vision.
He does his best to describe the marking into the recorder before taking his scalpel and making the careful Y-incision. And as he stares down into the chest cavity, he suddenly hears it again. “Help me.” It’s louder this time, unmistakable.
“Help you with what?” Ian whispers. But there’s no answer. “I can hear you. I can try to help. But I need to know what it is.” Still, no answer.
He shakes his head and clears his throat, steady despite the growing chill down his spine, and focuses his attention back on the open chest cavity of the body in front of him.
“Heart shows signs of acute stress,” he notes softly into the recorder, “consistent with—”
He stops. Because something’s wrong. Beneath the rib cage, the tissue is scorched, like a wound that never healed. The muscle itself bears that same brand, the same curling symbols as the one that had appeared outwardly, as if it went all the way through skin and layers of muscle.
Ian leans closer, squinting through his glasses. The marks pulse again, just like the ones on the skin had done. This time, Ian has an even harder time trying to ignore or explain away what he knows he’s very clearly just seen. And then he hears it again. This time, more than a whisper. It’s almost a growl.
“Help me.”
The temperature in the room drops several degrees, the lights flicker, a shadow flits across the room, and a sudden and harsh wind knocks Ian off of his feet and onto the floor, taking a tray of instruments along with him. Once the harsh clatter of the metal tools hitting the floor has died down, quiet settles over the place again. Eerie quiet.
Ian stands up, hands shaking and breathing quick—although he’d never admit it. He reaches to pick up the surgical instruments off of the floor, places them into the sharps container to be discarded, and opens up a new set. He changes his gloves and takes a deep breath.
“I asked you what you needed help with,” Ian mumbles as he resumes his work. Looking back down at the body on the table, he sees that the burn marks have slightly faded. He sighs before stating into the recorder, “Possible chemical reaction, tissue anomaly.” Because he truly has no other words to describe what he’s just seen.
He completes the autopsy without incident, or so he thinks. Once he’s finished with that body and ready to move onto the next, however, he hears the voice again.
“Helpmehelpmehelpme.” It’s loud and low, insistent, unrelenting. Ian glances down at the body, incisions now stitched closed, and sees a flutter of movement just under the skin covering the chest cavity.
Ian backs away from the table slowly as he hears footsteps approaching. Footsteps coming from the hallway. He briefly wonders if it’s an apparition. He’s never heard footsteps coming from a spirit before. But some crazy shit’s happened tonight. And it’s only 12:43 a.m.
It doesn’t take him long, though, to realize that the footsteps he hears are very much human. Heavy boots against the linoleum floor, pound pound pound with every step. He can tell it isn’t the janitor.
And the door slowly creaks open.
“Hello? Who’s there?” Ian calls out, desperately trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “This area’s restricted.”
Just as the words have left his mouth, a man appears in the doorway. Black hair, slightly mussed—almost as if he’s just been in a fight—pale skin, and the bluest eyes. Dark circles under those eyes, letting Ian know he’s been through some shit. A leather jacket over a plaid flannel, ripped jeans, and worn boots. A chain around his neck, tucked into his shirt, a bag slung over his shoulder crossbody style and… is that a holster around his waist?
The man’s fists, knuckles adorned with letters that Ian can’t quite make out from a distance, clench and unclench, twitching with the desire to do something. Ian wishes he knew what.
“This area’s restricted,” Ian repeats weakly, meeting the man’s steady, unwavering gaze. Ian tries not to think about how blue the man’s eyes are, trying to focus instead on the fact that there’s a strange man entering the morgue without permission.
Ian doesn’t miss how the man’s chest heaves with heavy breaths, as if he’s just run a marathon, and the way his eyes dart away from Ian and around the room before he steps inside, blatantly ignoring Ian’s warning.
“Yeah? Well I’ve been lookin’ for this asshole for a long fuckin’ time and I think I’ve finally found him. Your restrictions can fuck right off.”
“Wha- security!” Ian calls out to no one in particular, rather half-heartedly if he’s being honest. Because as much as he’s freaked the fuck out, he wants to know what this man’s doing here. And maybe he’s strangely intrigued.
Ian’s brittle threat only serves to elicit a chuckle and an eye roll out of the other man, who continues to step closer to Ian and the dead body… that’s suddenly twitching on the table.
Just as Ian opens his mouth, ready to say, “What the fuck??” the other man’s voice stops him in his tracks.
“There you are, you fucker,” the man whispers as he bounds forward, pulling something from his bag—what looks to be a vial filled with clear liquid—opens it, and flicks a few drops of it onto the corpse.
“Get back,” Mickey commands, so firmly that Ian has no choice to obey—no matter the fact that this stranger has just trespassed, blatantly ignored the rules, and put an unknown substance onto the body on which Ian’s just performed an autopsy.
Before Ian even has a chance to wrap his mind around the baffling and rather unsettling turn of events, however, the body arches off the table in a violent, impossible movement and then slams back down. Smoke curls from the incisions in the chest cavity, the faint smell of sulfur seeping through the room.
The man grabs some sort of charm from his bag, presses it against the corpse’s sternum, and murmurs words Ian’s never heard before. He thinks it might be Latin.
The smoke suddenly coalesces into a face, complete with menacing eyes and a gaping mouth, but it lasts only seconds before a flash of light accompanied by a loud crack and a burst of glittery… something—salt, maybe?—fills the air, causing the smoke figure to break apart, its shape instantly shredding along with a high-pitched howl that practically pierces Ian’s eardrums.
Once the smoke clears, a bitter, metallic smell fills the air. Ian watches in shock as the mysterious stranger holsters the revolver he’s presumably just used and wipes the sweat from his forehead. Ian glances back at the body on the table, now still, the mark on his chest faded and the whispers gone silent.
“What the fuck was that?” Ian breathes. “Who the hell are you? Why was he asking for help?” Ian certainly didn’t mean to ask that last question, but he doesn’t think he can be blamed for a little slip of the tongue considering the circumstances.
The man’s eyebrows rise high up on his forehead. “You can hear them?”
Ian simply stares, unflappable. Or at least trying to appear that way. “You didn’t answer the question.”
“Which one? You asked a bunch of ‘em,” the man replies with a smirk. Ian’s not sure he likes what that smirk does to his insides. Or maybe he does like it. Fuck, he’s confused.
“Who are you?” Ian repeats.
The dark-haired man reaches into his jeans pocket, pulls out a wrinkled business card and hands it to Ian, who takes it and stares at it with utter confusion and a heavy dose of curiosity.
Mickey Milkovich
Specialist in Unnatural Affairs
Exorcisms, Cleansings, Demon hunting & ass-kicking.
No refunds.
Ian looks back up to see the man, Mickey, heading towards the door. But the man pauses just before he steps into the hallway, turning back to face a bewildered Ian. “Keep that card, Doc. I got a feeling you’re gonna need it.”
And he walks out the door, leaving Ian to once again wonder what the fuck just happened.