"Another headache, Stacey?"
"What? ... Oh, yeah. Another one. Woke up with it."
The nurse, who only went by the name Bev and nothing more, shook her head. "That means you haven't been taking your medicine when I bring it to you."
The girl lying in bed, Stacey, she had been called, grimaced lightly and scratched her blonde scalp -- not because it was itchy, but because it was a nervous habit that she'd acquired since being admitted. She really didn't know why she did it, but she always felt that it was just something to occupy her hands. Idle hands were the Devil's playground, and for Stacey, that was the God's honest truth. The last time her hands had been idle for too long, she'd slit her wrists. In fact, she still had them tightly wound with bandages.
"I take it," she responded dully. "My head always hurts no matter what."
"That's a lie."
"Bev -- "
"Stacey, enough." Bev very nearly slammed a small plastic cup on the table next to the bed and left, not saying another word to the girl who was glaring almost evilly at her backside as she exited the quiet room.
Picking up the cup, Stacey examined the pills that were rolling around inside of it. Two small blue and white capsules, no larger than an aspirin. However, they didn't have the same effects as aspirin, because she was still in pain, and she still got headaches on a regular basis.
Without much of an afterthought, Stacey threw her head back and downed the two pills without even taking a drink. Not like she had one, though. Her glass of water had been emptied long ago. That was another thing. She was always so thirsty, but the nurses and doctors claimed that she was perfectly fine, not dehydrated at all. They just gave her more water and more pills and left it at that. Stacey never asked questions, though. They were the professionals, after all.
Laying her head back against the pillows, Stacey lifted her arm and rubbed at the snowball white bandage on her wrist. It was terribly itchy, but everytime she made an attempt to scratch through the material, she winced. The cuts still weren't healed enough to not be sore, and pain shot all the way up to her shoulders whenever she wasn't careful.
Instead, she resorted to picking at the skin around her fingernails. It was another habit of hers, but more along the lines of self-mutilation than head scratching. She would pull and tear at her cuticles so much that they would rip and bleed and become infected in no time. It didn't stop her, and she would even tear open old wounds and turn them that familiar shade of purple all over again.
She closed her eyes, her fingers going to work all the while she laid there. Eventually, she would half-doze off while her skin would bleed all over the sheets, and then she would curse and fling them off of herself, calling Bev back in to change them. Then, Bev would pour peroxide all over her hands, and it would burn, bringing on another string of obscenities from Stacey's mouth. Medicine and band-aids would be applied, and back to bed she would go. This happened weekly, and she found it rather sad that she could bleed her fingers so much that her bedsheets needed to be stripped off of the mattress. But it wasn't sad enough to make her stop.
A whirring sound stopped Stacey from her usual routine, and her eyes shot open. She was startled, but not afraid. This was another routine, as well, only she never knew when it was going to happen exactly.
It was also one of the reasons that she was in this place to begin with.
"What do you want?"
The whirring sound had grown louder and louder, finally coming to a halt as the space between the windows blurred. The blur changed colors and started to take shape, finally forming into a tall, lanky, dark-haired boy wearing a black leather jumpsuit. Birdman.
"Stacey, please. No how are you? Not even a hello? I thought we knew each other a bit better than that by now."
Stacey let out a quiet sigh and laid back against the pillows once again, staring up at the ceiling rather than looking at the intruder who had been making himself present almost every other day for weeks.
She'd first seen him at home, in her bedroom while she was trying to fall asleep. She'd been frightened then, and when she screamed, her parents raced up to see what was the matter. Of course, Birdman wasn't stupid enough to remain visible, so he disappeared just as quickly as he'd come, Stacey's parents passing it all off as a bad dream on their daughter's part.
Stacey thought it might've just been a nightmare that bled into the real world, as well, but when Birdman kept paying her visits, she knew that this was actually happening. Unfortuneatly for her, the more she tried to convince those around her that this person was real and not just a figment of her imagination, the crazier they thought her to be.
Birdman was a smooth operator, she quickly found out. He would speak in that slow, lilting tone, getting into her head and underneath her skin. He eventually drove her to suicide, or the attempt thereof, at least. The things he talked about...killing her parents in extreme detail, taking her to some tower where she would be held captive forever... Night after night, it was enough to drive her mad, especially when no one else believed that this was happening. After enough time, she slit her wrists in the bathroom, and if it wasn't for her mother breaking open the door and taking her to the hospital, she surely would've died.
Within three months of Birdman's initial appearance, she'd been admitted to the Michaelangelo City Municipal Hospital. It sounded nice enough, but it was just a big fancy name for the loony bin.
"What is it this time?" Stacey asked, her voice monotone and listless.
"You don't sound very excited to see me," Birdman replied, a sneer on his face as he paced the length of the room.
"I'm never excited to see you."
Birdman stopped and approached the foot of the bed. His face had the tendency to suddenly change in extreme ways. He could go from looking gentle and harmless to absolutely insane in a split second. "We're going to have to change that, aren't we?"
Stacey's brow furrowed, and she lifted her head from off of the pillows, staring down at the young man with a quizzical expression. "What the fuck -- ?"
Birdman held up a hand to silence her. "Language, dear. There's no need for it." A pause. "You can't remember anything before you were found, can you?"
Stacey looked at him as if he'd grown a second head. "How did you -- ?"
He interrupted once again. "I know a lot about you, Stacey. More than you could ever believe. I know that you woke up in a back alley a few months ago with no recollection of anything prior. I know that the people who took you in aren't your real parents. I know that you've been having strange visions and dreams during the daytime. And I know why you're really here."
Stacey took the chance to cut him off this time. "I'm here because of you!" she cried. "I'm here because you kept showing up and making people think I was crazy. I am crazy. If I wasn't, you wouldn't be here right now. You're just...you're just in my head. I'm insane."
Birdman chuckled quietly and shook his head, pacing back and forth once again. "You aren't crazy, Stacey. Far from it. You're actually much more advanced than anyone in this world. You don't belong here with them. You belong with us."
Stacey raised an eyebrow. "Us?"
The pacing stopped abruptly, and Birdman spun on his heels to face the girl lying in the bed nearby. "The Galerians."