THE MAD AND WRETCHED

PART ONE

"What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe...the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing."

—Nellie Bly

Chapter One

She was mad.

She knew this to be true, though never acted upon it. It wasn't a beautiful madness, one that borne the notes and melodies of the torment of the soul. Nay, it was a madness that consumed upon the frail host with a vicious, eternal tenacity. It ate at the marrow with snapping and spitting jaws, jaws that clamped down and threatened to never release. It was a madness brought on by nothing more than regret and mistakes. Mistakes and regrets. Remorse that could be no more wielded and used to harm as they could be cut down and obliterated.

The doctors that filtered in and throughout her room were no less comforting than the visage she had strung up within. "Hysteria," they hissingly suspected to one another. "But in a case such as this, we must monitor the patient before drawing a conclusion."

And so as she'd writhe and moan and lash out upon the bed, the one that had been purchased and furnished for her head and vessel alone, they'd restrain her. All the while she'd call out his name, his title, as they examined and probed and invaded her. Yet she found the force to abstain from them, to fight back. They were each baffled by the strength she possessed; truly a thing of her size, of her little caliber, was not capable of such ferocity! But then she'd find her teeth connecting with a wrist, and their idiotic, hazy philosophy would be banished by glaring truth.

On one particular evening, while roaming through the soupy dreamlike state, the one she'd heard some call "Cockaigne", she listened to—but didn't see, for she refused to open her eyes—a most unsettling thing.

"...And how long has it been since you two have been...man and wife?" she heard a voice inquire.

"Doctor, I don't see how this is helpful in the slightest—"

"What I am prepared to diagnose her with stems from the sexual nature," the doctor said, "or lack thereof. Therefore, your compliance would be most appreciated."

After a moment, her husband replied. "We've never been...together, at least in such an intimate state you have suggested," her husband replied, baffled and affronted.

"Not once?" The doctor's voice was fringed with laughter.

"No, not once," her husband replied, his voice small and slightly sheepish. "We've been married for a month." He seemed to be defending himself. "And she…well, she began to exhibit...these bizarre behaviors two days after we wed. I've kept her isolated."

"I see," he said. "Just as I suspected: she has hysteria. But it is quite common in women of her age, especially the sexually deprived—"

"She's sixteen!"

"...to be inflicted with such a disorder," the doctor finished. He clucked his tongue, his presence to her suddenly overwhelming and odious. "A girl of sixteen, to be inflicted with such a disease?" the doctor's voice came muffled and vague. "It's a pity, it's a shame. But there are cures."

Then there came again the voice of her husband. Never before had she heard it so frail and tenuous. Had she been lucid, she would have been concerned by its fragility. "T-there are cures for this...thing?"

"Yes," the doctor replied. "It's a practice that I've seen performed many times, many times. Some would consider it drastic, but in your wife's case, nothing is too extreme…"

"I would give everything to save her," her husband vowed, though his voice trembled with doubt.

At this, the doctor paused. "Is that so?"

"Yes," her husband urged. "Don't you believe me?"

"It's not that I don't believe you," the doctor assured, his voice cool. "It's simply that these medical procedures may be far too powerful for your young wife's weak constitution."

At this, the limbs of the chair by her bedside scraped across the parquet flooring. It was an awful sound; she flung her little hands to her ears and clamped her fingers, which brushed her pallid, sweating temples, to cease the atrocious noise.

She heard her husband stamped forward. "You're overwhelming her!"

"It was not I who upset her, monsieur," the physician answered, his voice tight and measured. There was a beat. "It was you."

At this, her husband came to an interlude. He exhaled sharply. Through her dark curtain of vision, she imagined him thusly place his palms across his scalp and muse his flaxen locks. His voice was as acrid as a ripened lime. "Do what you must to save her."

"You've made a wise decision." She could practically feel the doctor's malicious grin. "There is an asylum in England, just outside of London. It's a rather old establishment, one that is renowned for treating patients with the utmost care and sensibility."

"I don't care where is it," the younger man urged. "Just assure me that she'll be recover, that she'll return to me sound."

The doctor didn't reply to that; instead, she heard his low heels clack across the length of the floor and draw up a paper. "I'm inscribing here the address of the asylum; if you leave tomorrow night, you should arrive in an appropriate time."

"I'll do whatever it takes," her husband promised. She heard his lank form slip into the bedside chair; then, his perspiring hand coiled round her trembling wrist. She felt their pulses whisper and beat in ill-rhythm—his was fast and staccato, hers oddly sedated and melodic. There was no harmony between them. If only she had realized that sooner. He drew in a breath. "Doctor! Doctor, I don't think her heart is beating!"

The physician came to her side at an alarmingly unassuming and nonchalant pace; she could feel it in the adagio rhythm of his feet. He shooed her husband away. With an elongated sigh, he placed his index and middle fingers against her wrist. He released an airy, unconcerned chuckle; his rancid breath stretched and exasperated across the white hemispheres of her cheeks. "She's alive. However, she is cold as a corpse. I'd suggest having someone change her out of that chemise. It's positively saturated in perspiration. How long has it been since she's bathed?"

Her husband coughed feebly. "I...wouldn't know. I have her lady's maid take responsibility of such a task...when it's necessary, of course."

She heard the doctor cross to the threshold, causing her husband to rise. When the physician spoke, it was not saturated with a benevolence she would have hoped for. "If you act now, she can be helped."

When the door closed, the gilded handle snug and locked, she opened her eyes.

She had not blinked them open in perhaps days. Her brown, glazed eyes absorbed her surroundings, which were illuminated by a trembling, ocher candle at her side. Her lashes fluttered. Grain obscured the embossed ceiling above her—it depicted figures of pallid cherubs and wheeling angels. The marble seraphs loomed closer, grazing the glistening skin of her cheek. She blinked again. The angels vanished, leaving a ceiling fringed in darkness.

She rose from bed, reeling and quavering. It was a process liken to a sailor that had spent a year at sea, when in fact she had only been abed for half of a month. Her arm lashed out to clutch the bedpost nearest her. The gauzy, needless silk slipped hollowly through her fingers. Her limb shuddered. She took two, nauseating steps, which transformed in stumbles, and faced the full-length mirror to her right.

It was the first time she had glimpsed herself in weeks.

And she wasn't entirely sure if she were human.

Wild, obstreperous curls framed the milky globe of head; her chipped, frayed fingernails—so fractured and shred were they by hours of mindless gnawing and fretting—brushed the slope of her neck; blue veins pulsed weakly beneath the pale membrane of skin. Her cheeks, once so merry and healthy and roseate, were sunken and sharp (for the past week, she had refused even a morsel of food from the housekeeper, the maids, even her husband himself). Her lips, once so plump and pink and glistening, were reduced to a cracked, white maw that parted and closed and parted again so uselessly. Her hands lingered at her throat. It was a throat which held a voice that had produced songs crafted by genius, by pure insanity, by perfection.

"Who are you?" she demanded. After a pause, the morbid, withering reflection answered her. It was a singular, rasping strain, borne from a voice that had not spoken for some time. "Who am I? I can tell you this: you may have once looked like her, you may have once been her, but you are no longer Christine Daae..."

A/N: I got this idea today while finishing one of my final exams. What was going to be a one-shot turned into this. I hope it'll keep you all interested. I have a vague outline for what's going to happen next.

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