A/N: Out of either blatant pride or ignorant stupidity, I'm giving this another go. Here's hoping for the best! Also, please review. It makes me happy. Which is nice.
Disclaimer: I may or may not own DC. Maybe.
Arkham Asylum was at best unnerving. If you were being honest with yourself, it passed the line of being mildly disturbing and had branched into being outright horrifying. The walls were bloodstained and the thick suffocating smell of antiseptic filled the rooms. The lighting was gloomy to say the least. Once you had grown accustomed to the morbid atmosphere it was tolerable.
The thing that made Arkham Asylum all so awful was its patients.
You had the total crazies - the ones not even in touch enough with reality to form a complete sentence. For the most part they were incurable.
After that came the A rogues - the ones like the Joker and Harley Quinn who were feared. They were completely and utterly insane; the kind you avoided at all costs and if you were unfortunate enough to be around them you bowed down and hoped that, since you were going to die, it wouldn't be too painful.
Then it was the B rate rogues - chopped full of wannabe Jokers and the ones dumb enough to claim insanity in court. They were mildly feared but for the most part ignored.
Second to last came the just plain crazies - insane schizophrenics and definitive personality freaks. You could hear them screaming, chanting, or laughing in glee at absolutely nothing.
Last, but certainly not least, were the milds. They were the ones who were only slightly insane, but perhaps just hanging on the sanity by a thread - they were just barely there enough to know that they were insane. Almost every rogue, except perhaps the Joker, had been a mild at some point. Just on the verge of sanity, waiting for something to set them off.
For Eddie Nashton, now known as Edward Nygma and more commonly referred to as the Riddler, it was the milds that bothered him the most. Of course, he had been admitted into Arkham several times and not much bothered him to begin with. However, the milds were just really creepy.
Why was that? Perhaps it was because they knew both sides of the story. They saw through the eyes of the sane and the insane. They were the ones who made the most sense with almost reasonable eyes.
Whenever Batman caught him (which he always did) and the Riddler found himself back at Arkham (which always happened) he found himself dreading the journey to his cell. This was because the path to his cell always took him by that group of low-level inpatients known as the milds.
This time was the worst.
He found himself being pulled once again a long Arkham Asylum, strapped to the Hannibal Lector esque new confinements the Warden himself had invested in. They resembled dollies, things that Nygma remembered from his childhood as large crate-like things that rolled around and could hold several heavy boxes, except these were built to hold up and strap down a human being. It was amusing, simply because the confounded things might last a month at least, probably less. Then Sharp would whine for more money and Wayne Industries would happily oblige. More money meant new supplies. New supplies got destroyed, and the cycle began all over again.
Once again, he found himself under the plaque that said Level 1 and the usual wave of dread hit him once more. The plaque itself was unnatural - no blood, acid (an interesting story), or any other strange substance had scarred it. It didn't fit in, compared to the rest of the asylum.
Level 1 consisted of several cells which held two patients in each. The section was usually quite large, however this time it was relatively empty. That wasn't abnormal; people just didn't go crazy in June. June was Gotham's one decent month - it was hot, but not just broiling and that was nice. People just didn't go insane that month. There were still some Level 1 patients, a decent amount. No level in Arkham was completely empty. The amount was just less than usual.
As the Riddler passed through the cells, thinking that he had become impervious to the place, a sound assaulted the guards and his ears.
It was screeching. This eardrum-bursting, nails on chalk board, banshee like screech was why he hated the place. The screamer, in the cell to his immediate left, was a short person screaming at the wall. You couldn't really see if it was a boy or a girl, just that it had a mess of blonde hair.
In the cell next to the...person, however, was obviously a girl. She seemed to be a several years younger than himself (now nearing mid-thirties), maybe college-aged, with dark brown hair.
She was staring at him, her mouth forming words as if she was speaking to some invisible person. She turned her head slightly, as if to speak to this supposed someone, and then turned back.
Their eyes met, and it was awful. That look she had like she knew what he was thinking and it amused her. As if to prove it, she mumbled something and chuckled. Like it was some joke. Not like the Joker though, like it was planned. Then, she looked away and turned to the invisible thing again and began outright laughing.
Passing through the levels 2, 3, and finally 4 he did his best to forget about the psycho girl.
He really hated that place.