This Isn't Justice.

Annabelle Libra. 24. Currently re-evaluating her views on good and evil. [ A 1x1 OC RP blog. ]

[asylumlie]

uneasy.

[adaaam]

“Abigail,” Adam tells her, almost dreamily. Then, with a little more force, a little frustration, “Abigail.” Wracking his crushed head, he tries to think of her number. “You’ve seen her–heard her. Small. Brown hair and big eyes. She used to scream. Do you–do you really not know her name? Do you know my name?” It’s not surprising, but it’s still disappointing. He offers her a sad smile, unfocused eyes turned up to her. “I know yours, Annie.”

His eyes flutter closed as he sighs through clenched teeth. Her thoughts come to him like water droplets hitting the floor, like a whistled tune. Fleeting, easy to ignore, but there nonetheless. “We are in control of our minds,” he murmurs. “More than you are.”

[asylumlie]

Annie felt her stomach sink. No one in the hospital called her Annie. It was always Annabelle, or Ms. Libra. Never Annie. And yet, this man knew what she went by among her few friends and relatives, even though it was hardly a usual name for a grown woman to prefer. When he answered her thoughts, she didn’t even stop to ponder the strangeness of the situation -- she had seen much stranger. She had been told not to question it, and she didn’t dare to do it now.

“Well, then you -- you’re a danger to yourselves. I would think that Abi -- the patient, the one who screamed, would be proof of that. And we helped her stop, didn’t we?” The doctors never revealed their “cures” to the nurses. All Annie knew was that the girl was close to killing herself and everyone around her, and now she wasn’t. The thought brought some calm. Surely, the Asylum was doing good work, if they could help that girl.

[asylumlie]

uneasy.

[adaaam]

Adam knows it’s a facade, but the voice is so sweet and concerned. It’d be nice to pretend someone really does care. Besides, he’ll probably die before she can do anything. He turns to face the bars again, sitting up and slumping against them. The movement sends bolts of stark pain through his head. 

“They were gonna kill her,” he starts, resting his head in his hands. “They were gonna crush her. It was heavy–too heavy, I almost couldn’t–,” As if he were back in the observation room, the panic hammers in his chest again. He takes a shuddering breath. “I pushed her out of the way, but that’s not what they wanted. So they took me to shock therapy, the ice bath…” he trails off, shivering. “But it’s okay, it’s worth it.”

[asylumlie]

Annie reaches out to touch him out of instinct, but stops herself before she can do so. She doesn’t know where he’s hurting -- besides his head -- and doesn’t want to make things worse. But his words drive any thought of touching or not touching him out of her mind. They were gonna kill her, he says, and all of her breath is locked away in her chest, all at once.

“Kill who?” She is genuinely baffled. She has seen doctors be rough with the patients here, but she can’t imagine them killing anyone. The thought is ridiculous. And, of course, there was a reason he was locked in the Asylum. Even if there are things she can’t explain -- objects that went floating through space and children with wide eyes who knew things about her even the other nurses didn’t -- that doesn’t stop the fact that the patients here are not in control of their minds. If anything, it just proves it.

[asylumlie]

uneasy.

[adaaam]

What about you?

The question is so strange and out of place; surely Adam hallucinated it, surely it’s a dream, a lie, a trick, a trap. He chooses to ignore it, turning his thoughts instead to Abigail, one of the older girls. It was her scream that landed her in the asylum. It was piercing and shrill, shook walls and windows, ruptured eardrums (even her own), and tore apart the brain. One day, a day that Adam will never forget, the doctors had enough, and muzzled her. They placed a chip at the base of her skull that will explode should she ever scream again. These days, she hardly ever talks.

But she is alive. Abigail still has a chance. The doctors have not taken that away from her yet. Adam smiles, wiping at his nose and chin with his sleeve. 

The nurse speaks again–he is surprised that she is still even there. High and giddy from his victory and maybe adrenaline, he sees no reason to lie to her. “I don’t know. My head…” Fragments of words like teeth and nails and tearing and shaking and screaming flicker through his mind. Adam has been burned and drowned and shocked and strained before, but this is different. He curls up on his side, eyes squeezed shut as if willing the world away.

[asylumlie]

She takes a few steps closer to the cell, abandoning rationality for a moment out of instinct. She worked in an actual hospital for years, and she’s trained to help at any sign of discomfort. She stops herself when she remembers her position. She’s not supposed to do things without being told. This is not her place. It’s never bothered her before, but then again, she’s never seen a patient so hurt before.

Annie can’t help herself. She walks right up to the bars, wrapping her hands around them. For the first time, she wonders what sort of asylum has bars like a prison cell, in the first place. The first floor, used for milder patients, has rooms more fitting of a mental institution, plush walls and bulletproof glass on doors. Visitors to the asylum never get past that first floor.

Anne, when are you going to admit that something is wrong here?

She’s never wanted to admit it before. She is irrevocably a part of this now, and she doesn’t want it to be wrong. But now, faced with such undeniable proof, her memory is flooded with all of the things she was able to ignore before. The sudden job offer. The non-disclosure agreements she signed. The patients with their desperate eyes, the ones she always wrote off as not understanding that they was doing the best for them. With the pit of her stomach noxious and threatening to rebel, she finally asks the question she fears the most.

“What did they do to you?”

[asylumlie]

uneasy.

[adaaam]

“I can’t,” Adam hisses, gritting his teeth. Every muscle in his body is shaking; sweat is beading on his brow. 

“Hold it,” the doctor repeats, robotic and cold. 

Adam is restrained by a straitjacket, pushed into the corner of the observation room. A girl lies, drugged to unconsciousness, in the middle of the room. A slab of brick is suspended from a thin wire that has snapped twice already. Once more, and the girl–Abigail–will be crushed. With invisible hands stronger than anyone alive, Adam holds up the slab. The wire snaps for the last time, and the slab is free. Adam screams. Blood trickles from his nose. The slab shudders in mid-air.

“Move her!” he cries desperately. “Please, please…” He falls to his knees. It’s not worth the risk of looking away. Of course the doctors will be watching him. Of course they will be writing. Of course they will not care about Abigail. Frustrated tears spill out of the corners of his eyes, tinted thick, stark red. Vessels burst in his eyes; perhaps even his eardrums break. Blood trickles into his mouth from his nose. 

With his mind’s hand, he shoves. Abigail is moved from beneath the slab, which falls violently to the ground, breaking apart. Abigail is hit by the rain or rubble, but she will live. Adam collapses to the ground, head throbbing. 

He knows the doctors are discussing this, but he can’t bring himself to listen to them even if he wanted to. He hears nothing but watery, disconnected noises, sees nothing but red blurs. He can hardly even breathe. Like a worm, he rolls to his side, itching across the floor to see Abigail. Her chest rises and falls in breath, earning a triumphant smile from Adam before his world goes dark.

All he remembers next are flashes of pain and confusion. He is subjected to “electroshock therapy”–punishment for not doing as told. It burns his skin an steals his voice. He can’t even scream. After that is being thrust into ice-cold water. It runs red almost immediately–he’s still bleeding form his nose and ears. What happened to his brain? The doctors sigh as they lift him from the bath, murmuring about how much easier it’d be if he just drowned.

Finally, they drag him back to his cell by his elbows. Thrusting him in and slamming the bars shut behind him, the nurses ignore his moan as he hits the floor, ignore the blood he coughs up.

Adam almost doesn’t hear her. The voice is so kind and soft–if he did hear her at first, he would surely think it was a dream. Turning his bloodied eyes up, he sees that she’s real. At her question, he laughs. It makes his head pound, but still he laughs. “Yeah,” he croaks at last, wiping blood from his nose only for it to pour out again. “Yeah. Abigail’s okay.”

[asylumlie]

“But what about you?” She persists, even though she know she shouldn’t. The nurses work on a very strict set of rules. They are only to do exactly as commanded -- nothing more, nothing less. Usually, Annie’s orders are simple. She’s told to keep the patients clean, to keep paperwork up-to-date, and to prepare rooms for new patients.

She is rarely -- if ever -- told to speak with the patients. And asking after them like this would probably be considered the highest form of disobedience. She’s heard the way the doctors talk to the patients. They don’t talk like doctors at hospitals talk. They talk more like scientists discussing a lab rat than compassionate people referring to the charges under their care.

Annie has done her best not to question this -- she’s paid well, after all, better than the hospital she used to work at ever paid her. And she’s been told that there are reasons this place is run the way it is. These people are a very special brand of patient, after all, and they must be treated as such. After all, Patient #2480 has been known to spontaneously combust without being harmed, and Patient #1530 always knows who is at the door without turning around. It is easy, most of the time, to think of them as weapons, not people at all.

But Patient #1010 speaks of a girl, presumably one that he knows. He calls that girl Abigail. Is it a patient she never bothered to learn the name of? A girlfriend who isn’t allowed to come visit? A daughter, a wife, a mother, an aunt? Annie realizes that she’s never thought of the patients as having any of these things before. The realization makes her feel sick to her stomach.

Annie considers herself a good person. And she’s always told herself that what they’re doing here is for the greater good, and she’s ignored any doubts she’s had on the matter. But looking at the blood dripping from the patient’s chin, those doubts become impossible to ignore any longer.

And so she asks again, her voice almost too low to be heard, her eyes darting around for the slightest sign of a doctor or fellow nurse approaching. “Are you okay?”

[asylumlie]

uneasy.

Something was off. Annie was by no means the highest ranking nurse working in the Asylum -- in fact, she was closer to one of the lowest. But she had never had information outright withheld from her before. So the complete and utter disappearance of Patient #1010 disturbed her. After an hour of pressing, she was told that he was taken in for “testing,” but any further inquiries were met with evasive non-answers. So, when she heard sounds coming from his hallway, curiosity got the better of her and she took a break from the paperwork she was filling out to peek around the corner. Her reaction to what she saw there was instantaneous. “Jesus Christ, what happened to him?”

Patient #1010 was being roughly guided back to his cell, although Annie would have sworn that it wasn’t the same man she had seen yesterday. Patient #1010 was the eldest patient, and known to keep up morale among the other patients, but the man being more or less pushed down the hallway had about as much life as a ragdoll. One of the nurses spared her a glance as he deposited the patient back in his cell, locking the door firmly. “Boss’s orders,” the other nurse barked. “You know better than to question those.” And with that, he and his companion stalked away.

Annie turned her attention to the man in his cell. “... Are you alright?” She didn’t usually make conversation with the patients (they called them that, but Annie secretly thought that they were treated more like inmates), but she couldn’t help but be curious.

[katandlily-rph]

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