Hehehehehehehe
From the roadkill b-sides, therapy pretty please? 🥺 (or if someone already asked about that one, driving lessons? but I'm SUPER intrigued by Therapy hehe)
-- @four-toast
heheh hi toast or shall i say doc, given the occasion? so glad you asked about this!
(all roadkill b-sides are one-shot prequels or sequels)
i haven’t actually started writing this one yet, but i have a pretty clear idea of what’s going to happen and the vibe.
roadkill b-sides: Therapy
Therapy gives a glimpse into the therapy sessions between dorcas and evan and, by extension, pandora. it’s made up of short moments from multiple sessions over a longer period of time from inside the psychiatric ward. the pov constantly switches between evan and dorcas to show the disconnect between evan’s hallucinations and the actual reality.
evan’s pov is hazy and detached, since he's completely riding the high of whatever drug cocktail dorcas pumped into him. in his mind, pandora is physically present in the room with them, acting as the deeply concerned sister who is confiding in dorcas and trying to find a way to help her brother and get him out of this “prison”. even from evan’s pov, dorcas’s reactions seem entirely genuine. she listens to pandora, talks back to her, and treats them as two entirely separate, real entities. of course, as a professional doctor who specializes in psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs, dorcas just plays along to keep evan stable and to avoid aggravating him.
when the pov switches, we see how dorcas actually observes evan and how he’s switching between personalities. it happens much more violently and frequently than it did in roadkill. she intentionally acknowledges the split and addresses both evan and "pandora" respectively just to keep him compliant. they talk about his childhood, his upbringing, his relationship to his father and his mother and grand-mére, and sometimes even about the events of the night at the river. though dorcas might not always be successful in the beginning. evan has aggressive, violent outbreaks where he tries to attack her or harm himself. this happens especially when she touches on the topic of pandora’s death. of course, there are guards who are immediately on him to stop him, but it leads dorcas to changing up his drugs or upping the dosage until he adjusts and reaches a level where she is able to calmly talk to pandora while evan retreats to the back.
or at least, that’s what dorcas thinks is happening.
pandora (and evan by proxy) are much more aware of what’s going on than dorcas thinks or than they will let her know. they intentionally manipulate her. pandora figures out it’s easier if she talks to her rather than evan. poor dorcas doesn’t realize that pandora is the real threat, not evan, and that it might even be her own fault, because of the drugs he’s experimenting with.
over a long stretch of time, we see dorcas’s own descent. (this is, of course, heavily inspired by the dynamic between the joker and dr. harleen quinzel (aka harley quinn)). though, dorcas doesn’t fall for evan, she falls for pandora, while the isolation and their intense sessions wears her down, her own mental health slips, in order to stay focused she starts using her own drugs. she’s a doctor, she should know better, and she should stop the experiments and distance herself, but at that point, she’s in too deep with the rosier twins. eventually, the lines blur completely and pandora starts manifesting in dorcas’s pov even when evan isn’t switching. at that point, dorcas has lost her grip on reality completely and descended into evan’s delusion.
the final scene is dorcas and pandora plotting their escape shortly before the events of roadkill take place.
thank you for the ask, keira. whenever i start writing this, expect me to be asking you all kinds of questions on the topic!