mirrorfalls prompted: Arkham's most wanted, "This is your fault."
A/N: I greatly apologize, I got weird and abstract with this one but it was super cathartic to write lol
Disclaimer: Batman and associated characters are the creative property of DC Comics.
Silly Saint, Arkham's for Kids
He avoids it when he can. At least that's what he tells himself.
When he goes he stalks the corners and enters the shadows, looming large and distant from all who pass beneath him. It's better for him to not be seen, even as he checks and double checks the security systems and steals away notes and files on his most critical suspects.
Batman fits into the grooves and wisps through the vents of Arkham Asylum, his every breath indecipherable from that of Scarface, Mad Hatter, Mockingbird, and Freeze.
There is a haunting, sterile odor that is too much like chlorine and not enough like aromatherapies. It grows heavier as new janitors take over the draining shift from the one before.
The halls are lit, brightly, even at night, clear and visible for security and doctors alike.
Individual cells have time operated systems of lights and toiletries, every precaution taken to ensure the safety of patients.
And of others.
But even as Batman watches over the hospital, he is taken aback by how, between visits, his absence seems hardly noticed.
Bruce Wayne may be paying billions of dollars to keep Arkham Asylum in the best of conditions. But Batman is renting free real estate in the forefront of every mind there.
Anyone can find this phenomenon for themselves.
Batman lives in the whispers of madmen and the wails of old nurses reporting to HR about the awful creeping suspicion that they are being watched on their shifts.
He is given more coverage and levity by the cruel night terrors of less risky patients, overcoming terrorizing encounters even if it was only once or twice. Even if Batman hadn't even bothered looking up their names at the time of the terrorizing.
New faces, old faces, young faces, ghastly faces — there is a plague of the mind in Gotham. Perhaps.
Or, perhaps, it is the case that in Gotham they recognize what the rest of the world is too afraid to see in themselves.
These questions itch at the back of Batman's mind as he sits in his cave, surrounded by the warmth of kith and kin, but feeling no heat from himself. As he stares at walls and completes puzzles no one else can see or solve. As he tenses at sounds too much like the pop of a gun or the cracks of bones or the cries of a loved one too close to being gone.
He wonders at those times, when he slinks into shadows and avoids smiles and laughter that is to abstract to comprehend, why he hides in the shadows of darkened cells instead of in the light with the doctors and professionals.
But his answer isn't simple, and it's as frightening as it is strange.
Perhaps Arkham isn't the place to heal that he needs it to be. Maybe its separation between bright hallways and dark cells are too starkly drawn.
So he should see to it that Bruce Wayne works to make the system they have better. And then, someday, Arkham will treat the Batman himself.