Work Text:
Early Years:
The early years of Alexander Durham were not like others in his field, after all he had been thrown into sickness before he even knew what it was. Witnessed it in a way so many people fear as adults, not as a kid in a remote area with only so much medical help around. Others knew about his mother's sickness, it earned him pitying looks in class, while other students played, he sat on the sun-baked clay head in a medical tome determined even then to find a cure to his mother’s illness to keep the family together. He exceeded in many classes, and annoyed teachers to no end with his vast understanding so young.
His Mother’s Death
The edges of the sky were dim when he sat by his mother’s bedside praying to whatever god there was. She took her last breath not with his father by her side, but him. His father was most likely drunk in the next room over, he had been doing that more often as his mother's illness had progressed. Even during this time, the worn medical tome sat on the nightstand beside him as he mourned.
The Accident:
He had been finishing a college essay in hopes of getting into his chosen one. His father had been drunk again, and insisted on taking his sister to her gymnastics practice. At fifteen and a half Xander had begged his father to let him drive her, instead of listening his father had him across the face at such a horrible idea. He had gone with them not trusting his father with her. He ran a red light and soon all there was, was black.
The Chair
He awoke a month later unable to feel a thing below his waist; they had told him he had been paralyzed . The chair sat in the corner ominously as if taunting him that life would never be the same again.
Adoption
He spent a few months within a foster home being just too young to face the world alone, especially with his newfound disability he was unsure anyone would ever want him. Then a family came in and looked at him not seeing the chair, but his mind and the medical tome that sat on his desk. It was one of the only things he had left from life before the crash.
Travel:
His adopters had been travelling medics so after graduating at just shy of seventeen he had shadowed them throughout the land. He had eyes set on college to get a degree in emergency medicine, but for the time being he was still figuring himself out; a little travel seemed exactly what he needed.
College:
College was a bore with a mind like his, especially after working with his new parents for two years. He makes the decision to switch courses to understand the mind of those like his father and perhaps prevent another child from losing everything. Psychiatry seemed the ideal route. He graduated multiple years later with an honor’s degree in psychiatry and behavioral health.
Military Years:
Sand and blood was often all he saw along with diseases he would not wish upon any of his enemies, even so there was a sense of belonging there with surgeons who were just as outly as him, his service dog Apollo sat by his side on those quiet evening watching the wind push the sand in unforgiving blasts. He saw many things during those years things he would never write down and would never want to. When he goes home, he is not the same man, and he needed a change from the humid air his homes had given him.
His Practice:
He is unpacking boxes in a place of his own, the past now feeling so far away. The sign on the door has his new name shortened to Xander as he had always preferred. One of the boxes sat there open with a picture of his mother's face, and a grey Corso by his side. There is a knock then of his first patient a young woman who had seemingly lost it all due to a man that there was always whispered about, Sherlock Holmes, and that medical tome sat on his desk from oh so long ago