Chapter Text
“Alright, I’m okay!” Diego urges, releasing his grip on Dr. Moncton’s corduroy jacket. One of the crueler nurses that Diego hasn’t bothered to learn the name of levels him with a glare. The unspoken threat of another syringe full of tranquilizer hangs in the room. Diego backs off further, hands placating.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” he reassures them. He sinks slowly back down into the metal folding chair, careful not to dislodge the stolen pen sticking out of his waistband.
In a stroke of possibly the only luck Diego’s had since landing in this godforsaken decade, Moncton leaves the room with a shake of his head. The nurse is quickly distracted by the lady near the window ripping clumps of her own hair out. Diego exhales in relief. Today especially, he needs to have all his wits about him.
Plan A’s a bust. Moncton’s confirmed that Diego isn’t walking out of here the easy way for at least another month and a half. That’s assuming the bracelet making and fingerpainting haven’t actually driven him insane by then. Lee Harvey Oswald makes the shot in seven days. Diego needs to be out with plenty of time to ensure that never happens.
Plan B. Shave down the bars, climb out the window. A few more hours of filing, which he can get in after dinner if nothing goes wrong, and the bars won’t be an issue. The window, however, is on the small side. Diego’s not abundantly confident that he can fit through it without snapping his collarbone.
That leaves Plan C. Pick the cell door with Moncton’s graciously donated pen and knock out whatever guards get in the way before they can stick a needle in Diego’s neck. Most importantly: be far, far away by the time the police show up.
Diego's train of thought derails when he senses Lila's eyes on him, sharply staring at the side of his head from the next chair over. She’ll look away once he catches her, then start staring again when he turns away, until finally he asks her what the hell she wants. It’s some game of her’s, as far as Diego can figure.
He glances over. She innocently jerks her gaze towards the ceiling.
Diego’s not sure what Lila’s deal is, really. She was checked into the institution the same day as him, though she required notably less handcuffs and restraint. She doesn’t talk much during group, and when she does, it’s always flippant or vague. Once, she mentioned to Diego that she sees things that nobody else does. Compared to his brother, the only other person he knows with such an issue, he thinks she seems remarkably stable. Irritating, and somewhat strange, but stable. For whatever reason, Lila sticks to him like the glue she huffs while the nurses aren’t looking.
Lila drives him a little bit crazy. But in this place, she sometimes seems like the only thing that’s keeping him sane.
* * *
“You? A lone wolf?” Diego asks incredulously, later that afternoon. He snatches the glue bottle she’s holding to her nose before any of the nurses can take notice. “I can’t even take a piss without you trying to follow me into the bathroom.”
“Who says you’re another wolf? Maybe you’re just the rabbit I’m hunting,” Lila shrugs, sliding on the beaded bracelet Diego had thrown on the table.
“Pretty shit hunter,” Diego mumbles.
Lila grins conspiratorially. “That’s exactly what the wolf would want the rabbit to think,” she whispers, leaning forward until her nose nearly touches his.
Diego drops his head to the table, too wound up to deal with Lila’s antics right now. The clock on the wall tells him there’s still thirty painful minutes of arts-and-crafts time left.
The fact that it’s his last thirty minutes of arts-and-crafts ever offers little respite. With how slow time ticks by in Holbrook Sanatorium, tonight’s escape may as well be weeks away.
The beads on the table rattle as Lila plops her head down next to his. She blows air at the back of his head in puffs until he reluctantly turns to face her.
“What is your problem?” he asks, with more exhaustion than bite.
“What are you going to do once you break out of here?”
Diego sits up, spinning around in his chair to make sure no nurses are in earshot. When no one approaches him with handcuffs or a needle, he glares back at Lila. Her eyebrows are raised in question, her cheek squished against the crafts table.
“Don’t say that out loud,” he scolds.
“That’s what Dr. Moncton calls, ‘avoiding the question.’”
Diego flicks a bead across the table at her. It hits her in the nose without him even having to curve it.
“And that’s what he calls ‘anger issues,’” Lila says, smirking.
Diego clenches his fist around a knife that isn’t there. “I tell you my plan,” he grumbles, keeping his voice low enough for only Lila to hear, “and you leave me alone for the rest of the day.”
She giggles in that slightly manic way of hers. “No, you tell me the plan, that way I have an idea of where we’re going when we get out tonight.”
“If you think I’m breaking you out, then you really are crazy,” Diego huffs.
“How cute that you think I need your help,” she replies, sitting up to tuck her hair out of her face. The light glints off multiple bobby pins she has stashed just above her ear.
Diego’s jaw tightens. “It takes a little more finesse than just jamming bobby pins in a lock, you know. Not to mention the fact that you’ll never make it past the guards.”
Lila bats her eyelashes as she rests her chin in her hands. “Well, it’s a good thing I have a big, strong man to take them out for me, isn’t it?”
“Not if I can make it out the window.”
She squints at him, assessing his body before glancing back to his face. “I get what they mean,” she says, resigned.
Diego blinks. “What who means?”
“The doctors,” she states simply. “When they say you’re delusional. I do see it now.”
Diego feels his nails dig into his palms.
Lila’s straight face breaks with a peel of laughter. “Diego,” she says, her voice thick with condescension. “Have you seen your shoulders?”
“They pop out, I pop them back in,” he replies, making no effort to keep the bravado out of his voice.
“You plan on duct taping your collarbone back together when it snaps, too? And what about the head injury from when you flop out of that window with no functional arms to catch yourself?” Lila asks.
Diego’s mouth opens and shuts. He feels his face heats up, and chooses to blame it on anger rather than embarrassment.
Lila grins like a shark. “Guess that only leaves one option, doesn’t it?”
A nurse, one of the older ladies, pulls up the chair next to Lila. It screeches against the floor in protest. “What option is that, Lila?” she asks. Friendly, but the kind of friendly one is with a toddler.
“I don’t have enough beads left to make a necklace, so I have to make a bracelet instead,” Lila answers smoothly.
The nurse’s gaze lands on the abundance of unused beads scattered across the table.
“I don’t want any of the ones Diego touched. Idiocy is contagious,” she explains, winking in Diego’s direction.
The nurse just nods with patient understanding.
* * *
The Sanatorium is silent that night, save for the buzzing of the lights and the click of Diego’s cell lock giving way to the pen. Painstakingly, Diego pushes the door open a few inches, just enough to stick his head through. The immediate hallway is clear. He strains to listen for any shoes squeaking on linoleum, any keys jangling from a belt loop, but the only sound he picks up is the soft hum of the lights overhead.
There shouldn’t be more than three night guards, and one of them is stationed at the front desk all night. Down the hall and around two corners, there’s a side door that the guards often leave propped open for smoke breaks. If Diego’s lucky, he can avoid the front doors entirely, and no one will even notice he’s gone until breakfast.
The plan depends largely on Diego’s capacity for stealth - which, honestly, has never been his fortė. It could also be easily derailed by a certain wildcard inmate with no concept of boundaries. Diego had half expected to find her sitting cross-legged outside his door. He can’t decide if it’s more or less worrying that he has no idea where she is.
After several minutes of no men running at him with needles, Diego emerges fully from his cell, gently shutting the door behind him. He creeps down the hall at an agonizingly slow pace, wishing he had something better to throw than half a broken pen. Unfortunately, the knives the cops took off him the day he got caught are buried in some police station right now. The ones he was able to stash before he was arrested are (hopefully) still under some shrubs outside the Texas School Book Depository.
At the end of the hallway, Diego pauses to scout around the next corner. He nearly jumps out of skin when a single gunshot shatters the silence.
He drops to a crouch instinctively, even though the bare hallways offer nothing to hide behind. The stark white lights switch without warning to a pulsing yellow, like some kind of silent alarm. The quiet settles again, amplifying the sound of his heart, pounding hard as an extra shot of adrenaline flies through his veins.
Diego could swear that shot came from the front of the building. The guard at his desk. Sweat beads on the back of Diego’s neck as he tries to rationalize the situation. They wouldn’t shoot Lila if they caught her, he thinks. There has to be some law about that, even in the ‘60s. They’d tranquilize her, or taze her, or at the very worst put her in a chokehold, but they wouldn’t -
More gunshots rip through Diego’s train of thought, this time in rapid bursts. They’re coming from the east side of the building, now. The women’s ward.
Lila’s frantic scream propels Diego into motion. He breaks into a run towards the shots.
She crashes into him as they both round a corner. “Move, move!” she screams, pressing a bedpan against his chest.
They’ve made it less than a quarter of the way down the hall when Lila’s pursuers turn the corner. Three of them, Diego catches as he glances over his shoulder, but not the three night guards he’d expected. Three starkly blonde men calmly aiming military-grade guns.
The hallway has no cover. Zigzagging won’t do any good against three of them. Diego has no weapons, just a broken pen and -
“Throw it, idiot!” Lila shouts.
- and a pretty heavy bedpan.
Diego whirls around and throws the bedpan like boomerang, knocking the gun out of each man’s grasp. Lila whoops over the sound of misfiring gunshots. Pain shoots through Diego’s side, but he’s too focused on making it down the hall before their assailants recover to care.
The men don’t speak, to them or each other. Diego hears one of them reload as he and Lila round the last corner.
“Right here,” he says, pulling Lila towards the side exit. He thanks God that it’s unlocked and propped open like he’d hoped.
Diego remembers why he’s not religious when he nearly slams into the night guard on his smoke break, listening to blaring country music on a portable radio.
“What in the hell are you two doin’?” the guard exclaims, startling to his feet.
Diego knocks him out with a kick to the head. His vision blurs as the wound in his side splits further. He grasps it tight with one hand, grabbing Lila with the other.
They sprint away from Holbrook under cover of night, stopping only to duck out of sight from patrol cars. Thanks to his flesh wound, Diego’s wheezing by the time they reach an alley suitably far away.
Would’ve figured you’d be in better shape, Hargreeves,” Lila quips as they come to a stop. Diego ignores the jab, more or less relieved that she’s not completely freaking out under the circumstances. He continues to hide the blood on his side as best he can in the darkness, because surely even Lila has her limit on how much she can deal with in one night.
“We can’t stay here too long,” Diego reminds her, like he wasn’t the one who needed a break. “They’re going to be looking for us.”
Lila snorts. “The cops, or those large Scandinavian fellas with guns?”
Diego takes as deep a breath as he’s able, which isn’t very deep at all in his current state. He scrunches his eyes closed for a moment, trying to shake the dizziness settling over him.
When he opens them again, Lila’s glaring at him like she’s caught him stealing bacon from her breakfast plate.
"You good, Diego?” she asks curtly.
“Hundred percent,” he gasps.
“How’s the cramp?” she presses, nodding towards the hand pressing into his side.
Diego turns away from her. “Fine,” he insists.
He turns back around at the sound of her climbing atop a dumpster. Light from an apartment window illuminates her as she grabs a handful of clothing of a drying line.
“New clothes. Good idea. Won’t get far dressed like a lobotomy case,” Diego concedes.
Lila throws a couple shirts in his direction. “I was thinking more for the volcano of blood you’ve got building under your hand, but dress-up works, too.”
“It’s just a graze,” Diego mumbles. He slumps down against the brick wall and presses a wadded up shirt to the wound while Lila climbs down.
“Whatever,” she calls dismissively. She lands easily on her feet and makes her way to Diego, who takes a minute to process why she’s suddenly pulling off his shirt.
“Arms,” she commands. Diego pulls the already bloodsoaked shirt away from his side and lets Lila pull the white cotton top over his head. She appreciatively scans his chest, not the least bit unnerved by the chunk taken out of his side, and hums in what Diego decides is approval before slipping a clean shirt onto him.
“I could’ve done that,” Diego says lamely.
“Well, that’s not as fun, is it?” Lila argues, pulling her own shirt off without warning. Diego looks towards the street, figuring that keeping watch is probably more respectful than gaping.
“Put your pants on,” she says after a minute. Diego turns back to find her wearing a brown overall dress she snagged off the line.
He stands up and finishes getting changed. While he’s distracted, Lila takes the opportunity to smash a car window.
“You know how to hotwire?” she calls, before Diego can even react.
He zips up his pants and presses the extra shirt back to his side. “Of course,” he answers.
“Great,” she beams. Her eyes flash under the streetlight. “How about you get us out of here before the trio of death catches up?”
Bringing Lila along was never part of the plan. Then again, neither were gun-wielding men that reminded him all too much of Hazel and ChaCha.
Diego climbs into the driver’s seat. Lila skips around the back to the other side.
If they are like Hazel and ChaCha, they’re after him, not Lila. Diego’s the one trying to change the timeline. Maybe it’s better he leaves her here.
“Whoops,” she giggles, unlocking the passenger side door. “Window was already open.”
Diego rolls his eyes. Like she’d survive a night out here on her own.
The car sputters to life as he connects the right wires.
“Lean back,” he tells her, flicking the headlights on. “Let’s get out of here.”