6A/N I'm really just avoiding homework at this point, I should warn you.
"My mind has wondered from the straight and narrow." Oingo Boingo
Hannibal remembered when Murdock was first sent to the psych ward.
A kid, not even thirty. Always a little off, but never dangerously so. And you really did need to be a little off when you were doing the things he did with a plane.
Hannibal hadn't been in the plane, nor had BA or Face. But they had heard about it at one of the bases. Off on a routine scan of the jungle, searching for stray soldiers left behind, carnage of old planes and tanks they could use for scraps. No one survived long enough to confirm it, but Hannibal could imagine him, pre-insanity Murdock, humming quietly to himself and making off-hand comments about the weather. A weird guy, strange, but not crazy. Never crazy.
It had been a sneak attack, the big guns pulled out to bring down the American plane. And gone down they had, right into the POW camp. No one could be sure whether the plane's occupants had died immediately or under interrogation, but the real seller was that when they-Hannibal, BA and Face-had gone to retrieve him, he was beaten, crazy and alone.
At first they had thought him delirious. No one, not even Hannibal, had known him for longer then they had been in the jungle, so how could they have been able to tell the difference between concussed and legally insane? Face, always the charmer, had assured both the team and himself that as soon as they got him on ice, cleaned his wounds, got some food in him, he'd be right as rain. But, in the jeep, in the long drive back to base, in the hours worth of nonsensical ramblings and pitchy show tunes, his confidence faded, slowly but surely.
It wasn't until they finally, finally got to the front of the base, where their superiors waited for a status report, that they could finally say it aloud.
"He's lost it. The man's lost it."
So, really, it was Hannibal's fault he'd been sent to the loony bin in the first place. He had been the one to assert that, yes, something had broken young H.M. Murdock. It was him, something he had never admitted, not even to his team, that had caused him the hours worth of electro-shock treatments, poking and prodding, frustrated poundings from disgruntled orderlies. And the day they sent him there, to that place, when the chopper flew down to pick him up and the goons came out with their needles and straight jackets, when Murdock, bandaged and weak, realized where he was headed, he let loose the most heart wrenching cry Hannibal had ever heard. Fighting and clawing the whole way in, Murdock had been flown off surrounded by strangers wrapping his arms to his chest and pounding tranquilizers in his system. That was rough, Hannibal decided. That was a rough way to go, and he had decided he would make it up to him, no matter what.
But he would never tell him.