This is another fanfiction I just really wanted to do. It features an original character that is not me, a nurse working in the asylum. There are also other OC's, like the psychiatrists and the other nurses. None of the nurses or doctors are non-original characters AT THE MOMENT. This may be subject to change. There may or may not be character death. There may or may not be a spin-off. I may or may not ditch the asylum setting. Everything is up in the air now.

Arthur=England

Vash= Switzerland

Lili= Liechtenstein

The chapter was named in honour of Media Production and my sudden obsession with movie-making.

Chapter 1: Establishing Shot

He sat on his cot, legs pulled up to his chin. He didn't want to be here, but he had no choice.

He could see them. The fairies and trolls and other magical creatures that more ignorant humans could never see. He wasn't crazy; he was special.

He had tried to tell his friends. He had explained to his doctor. No one believed him.

His "friends" had arranged this. It's for your own good, Arthur. You'll thank us someday. If you were to hurt yourself, we wouldn't be able to live with it. Yet they had locked him up, against his will, in this loony bin.

His real friends, the ones nobody else believed in, would never have done this. But he hardly saw them anymore. They said the place was hard to enter, that it drove them away.

At first, the traitorous people who had put him here had visited. But he never talked to them. He had nothing to say to non-believers. So after a while, they stopped coming. He knew they still came, but only to ask the doctors about his condition.

He wasn't crazy. He did not have silly hallucinations.

He laughed inwardly, thinking of the hundreds who must claim that every year. He wondered how many were like him, perfectly sane, just misunderstood.

He had no cellmate. His psychiatrist had fretted about Arthur "contaminating' the other patients. It gave Arthur no satisfaction; a roommate might alleviate the monotony. Nothing ever happened. He met with his psychiatrist every day, but refused to speak. What was the point in defending himself against a man who was trying to cure him of a nonexistent illness?

His door opened. It was a glass door, fixed within a glass wall. It was bulletproof, supposedly for his safety, but he knew it was to make sure he didn't get out. He felt like he was on display: three yellow walls and a thick pane of glass separating him from the nurses and personnel who wandered the halls freely.

A young nurse in yellow entered, carrying a clipboard.

"Mr. Kirkland, the doctor will see you now."

Arthur sighed. He stood up and followed the nurse down the corridors, until they reached a wood-paneled door. The nurse knocked, and opened the door for Arthur. When he entered, she closed the door behind him.

The man seated behind the mahogany desk was not Arthur's psychiatrist. The photos on the wall were not the same drab college snapshots that Arthur had grown bored of looking at. The plaque on the desk no longer held the same name. Instead, the walls were lined with photos of the man behind the desk and two little children, or a woman about his age. And the plaque read "Dr. Noah Daniels".

The man looked to be in his twenties, with brown hair and glasses. He had a kind smile, but Arthur had seen kind smiles on people who thought he was loony. He wasn't going to trust this man yet.

"Arthur Kirkland." The man behind the desk gestured to the chair opposite him, indicating that Arthur should sit. This was new; usually, Arthur was told to lay on the couch that was currently in the corner of the room next to a potted palm.

Arthur moved to the chair and sat carefully, eyeing the new doctor. "Where is Dr. Williams?" he said.

The man said, "Dr. Williams began his retirement today. I've taken his place, and I must say, I'm very excited to work with you, Mr. Kirkland. I've heard so much about you from Dr. Williams, though most of it was about your condition, and none of it was very convincing." He held out his hand. "Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Noah Daniels. You can call me Noah, or Mr. Daniels, if you wish, or you can just call me Dr. Daniels.

Arthur hesitated, then shook the psychiatrists hand.

"Now, then." Dr. Daniels picked up a file and flipped through the enclosed pages. "According to Dr. Williams, you suffer from hallucinations and a firm belief in fairies. I personally see nothing wrong with believing in fairies—no one can decided what others believe in—but these hallucinations…what exactly do you see?"

Arthur said, "They aren't hallucinations! There really are fairies and elves! You just can't see them because you're "impure", but they exist, and I can see them!"

Dr. Daniels held up a hand. "Now, I never said they didn't." He picked up a piece of paper. "According to this, you were checked in by some friends? Yet you refused their company. And you have been uncooperative with your previous psychiatrist…though I'm not sure what he was trying to accomplish, if his notes are anything to judge by. He seems very critical of you. In fact, can I be honest with you?" Dr. Daniels put the paper down and took off his glasses. "Dr. Williams said he found you stubborn, childlike, and a public hazard. And, being equally honest and blunt, I disagree. For now. My opinion has yet to be formed."

Arthur snorted. "No one ever believes me. There is nothing to cure. I'm not bloody insane!"

"Yet you got in a fistfight with a man at a bar when he said fairies were the product of a moron's imagination." Seeing Arthur's look of surprise, Dr. Daniels held up another piece of paper. "No one can get checked in here unless they have done something to harm themselves or someone else. And we have the reason on file. This applies to everyone." The doctor chuckled. "How you got on the topic of fairies with a man at a bar, I can't even guess."

"This place is bloody insane, not me. No afternoon tea, no breaks from my cell, no contact with the outside world…"

"Ah, that's Dr. William's fault, I'm afraid," the doctor said. "He has to give clearance for a patient to wander outside, and he apparently didn't see fit to give you clearance on any extra privileges." Dr. Daniels put his glasses back on. "But I see no harm in clearing you for afternoon tea. The other privileges will have to wait, though. I need to assess you mental stability some more before I can clear you." He made some notes on a very official-looking sheet. "Now, tell me about these fairies. How long have you been seeing them?"

Arthur sighed. "As long as I can remember."

"I see; you must have had a hyper imagination."

"I beg to differ! I am a completely rational individual."

"Of course. And could you describe any fairies for me? In as much detail as possible, please."

And the questions went on like this for an hour. Dr. Daniels never scolded Arthur for obstinacy, or looked at him as if he were retarded; nor did he ever say anything that explicitly implied that he thought Arthur was lying. In fact, despite himself, Arthur was beginning to like this new psychiatrist.

By the end of the hour, Dr. Daniels was no longer calling Arthur "Mr. Kirkland". When the nurse came back to escort Arthur back to his cell, the doctor handed her a piece of paper. "I've cleared Arthur for afternoon tea. Please make sure it gets filed and added to his portfolio."

The nurse nodded, and Arthur went back to his cell feeling a little better than he had before.

Of course, the minute he was back in his cell, the feeling was gone. So what if he had tea? He was still in a mental hospital.

Actually, it wasn't only a mental hospital. It was only a wing of an extensive building that housed patients suffering from mental, physical, and emotional disorders and diseases, and it was well-equipped for even the rarest of cases. But being in the mental wing of the hospital made Arthur feel inferior.

He kicked the glass wall. It didn't shatter, of course. No matter how hard he kicked it, he could never escape this hell.

Alarms started blaring. Arthur smirked. One of the crazier patients was running rampant, apparently.

Vash's hands were bloody from pounding on the glass of his room. He ignored the pain, until finally he couldn't stand it. That was when he started using his shoulders to ram the wall. They weren't going to keep him here.

He heard the alarms, and they only made him increase the tempo of impact. He cursed when he saw the nurses running down the hall, some to fetch the security guards, some to try to calm him down.

One of the women was foolish enough to enter the room. She quickly locked the door behind her. She was his regular nurse, a blonde who was annoyingly optimistic. Vash hated everything about her.

"Vash, this is ridiculous, stop this! If you stop, I'll ask the doctor to—"

She was cut off by Vash, who grabbed her by the throat and flung her against the glass wall. She crumpled to the floor, an expression of shock frozen on her face. Vash didn't notice; he had resumed his escape attempt, pounding harder and harder.

When finally the security guards arrived, he was yelling at no one in particular, yet everyone: "Let me out! You can't do this to me! Let me out, you assholes!" Blood was smeared on the glass. Scared nurses were cowering far away from Vash's room, too terrified to even speak. Some of them had even fainted.

The guards burst into the room and grabbed Vash from behind. He struggled against them, trying with all his might to break the glass. When that didn't work, he tried clawing at their faces and punching, kicking, biting—anything that would make them let go and inflict pain.

Eventually, the guards had to resort to tranquilizing Vash. As he went under, he saw the concerned looks of the nurses as they entered to pick up their injured colleague.

Serves her right, Vash thought. Stupid girl, thinking she can stop me with cheap language.

Then his vision blurred.

When Vash came to he was strapped to a hospital bed, no longer in the mental hospital. He was in medical care. He was slightly propped up on a pillow; only his arms and legs were strapped. He glanced at his hands and found they were wrapped in bandages, blood soaking through in some places. An uncomfortable stiffness in his right shoulder caused him to turn his head and examine the gauze that covered his right shoulder and went around his neck. Here, too, Vash could see blood.

A different nurse entered the hospital room where Vash was being held, carrying a clipboard (weren't they always?) and smiling sadly.

"Hello, Mr. Zwingli. Do you mind if I check your hands? It seems they need a new set of bandages."

She knelt down beside his bed and carefully began unwrapping his hands. She had dark-caramel-brown hair that reached to her jaw and wore the standard pale, light yellow of the hospital, with a light pink hat. She had a kind smile, Vash noticed.

With his hands unwrapped, Vash realized just how much damage had been done. His hands were cut everywhere, and looked awful, too awful to describe. The nurse put a few drops of ointment on each hand, then changed the bandages. When she was done, she patted him on the head. Vash growled.

"Don't baby me. That damn nurse I injured tried to, and I knocked her out."

The nurse looked shocked. "Vash, didn't you know?"

Vash glared at her. "No, know what? Did she win a prize or something?"

The nurse shook her head. "Vash, you didn't knock her out. She died about 30 seconds after you slammed her against the wall. Vash, you killed her."

And just like that, all feeling drained out of him. Vash could feel his lungs gasping for air as he began to hyperventilate. His eyes widened.

Killed? That couldn't be right. Vash hadn't meant to kill her. She had simply annoyed him; he had meant to knock her out.

She was dead? Was this new nurse telling the truth?

Unwanted tears began to spill, not for the nurse, but for someone else, someone dear to him: his sister, Lili.

What would Lili think? How could he explain that he had killed a nurse?

"Vash? Oh, no, doctor!" The new nurse was shouting. "Doctor, his heart is beating irregularly!"

Panic overtook him. The doctor wasn't coming; he would let him die; and then he would let Lili die if she came here; and Lili would hate him so much…

"Vash? Vash, can you hear me?"

"How is Mr. Zwingli?"

"His condition has stabilized, Dr. Daniels. It seems he had a heart problem we didn't know about. His sister assured me that his previous physician told her it isn't a problem, as long as he has his portable defibrillator. She dropped it by today."

"And no one else was hurt during his rampage?"

"No one other than the nurse."

"Thank you, Miss Osmond."

"Please, just call me Rosabella. Everyone does."

"Okay, then, Miss Rosabella. Keep an eye on Vash, will you? I haven't had a chance to speak to him yet."

"Yes, Dr. Daniels." The nurse with the light brown hair and kind smile gave a small bow and left the room. Dr. Daniels flipped a file open and consulted it.

"Vash Zwingli. Paranoid Personality Disorder and Separation Anxiety. Possible schizophrenia, hints of something more severe. Has a tendency towards violence. And now we have this heart problem. My, my, you are a hassle, aren't you?"