Author's Note~!: ...well, this is what happens when someone watches a certain cartoon and plans to write a ficlet for about five months. ...Actually, ~~no,~~ this is what happens when they actually sit down and do it.

Enjoy, my fine readers!! 8'D The ending's a bit rushed, but it'll do.

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Ultima Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

A place where the cuckoos and crooks took their punishments with dreamy-eyed stares, a few bad side effects and assistance from the voices in their heads. A place where straitjackets were thrown around like hot cakes, where Rorschach tests were more like the latest torturous trend than a series of inkblots. A white and wild-eyed place, where bright, whitewashed seas rose up to greet you and swallow you whole the minute you were forced to walk through that entrance. A building absolutely crawling with crazies (though the crazies themselves may have believed Ultima was crawling with something else, some monster). A place where justice was inevitably dealt, in the form of yellow, sometimes blue, sometimes white pills, and maniacal menaces to society dissolved in chemical upon chemical and unnaturally high doses of dopamine and came out as supposedly happy, healthy and wondrous members of society.

Only, some of them never came back. Whispers and wailing, terror and trite tears, every time she walked by.

Oh, yes. The high and mighty head psychiatrist, the published and professional Miss Tess.

At least, that's what she called herself, she with her bright, overly showy glasses and odd suspenders. With her prim, clipped tone and her long eyelashes and her puffed up, puckering lips. She had womanly wiles down to a fine art, it seemed, and she was able to reduce even the most hardened criminal into a pile of goo and tears and confessions. It was what she was known for, what she was feared for--all it took was a wink, a "Hm, yes, this'll have to be just between us, won't it?" and pretty soon even the rapists and the serial killers were blubbering to her about voices in their heads and abusive childhoods.

They were all vulnerable, and she knew it. That's what made her job so simple, so easy. She wasn't dealing with your regular run-of-the-mill psychos, begging for someone, anyone to talk to for a few bucks a week... ...but she wasn't dealing with your typical mass murderers and scheming sociopaths either. These people were attempting to walk the fine line between the two, fragile but deadly, damaged but damaging, tattered but terrifying. They were just her type. And they knew that she didn't care whether you were your average Joe or Jesus--you'd harmed someone. That's why you were here.

She could harm you back.

They all knew that. Maybe you'd be dismissed as just another nut in the nuthouse, at first. Maybe they'd try to up your dose, administer those strange shock treatments, test your blood for any deficiencies or abnormalities, scan your brains and poke and prod until you felt like there was nothing left. Maybe they'd dismiss you, mistaking your very significant observations for the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic, and maybe you'd be put in one of those confining and wretched jackets.

But they all knew, because none of them could escape him. She'd tried to lock them up in other places, tried to keep him in solitary confinement, tried to schedule therapy sessions so that he wouldn't have an opportunity to get to the newcomers before she could even utter the word "welcome." She'd tried to pump him full of sedatives and feel good talk, tried to fuck with his mind. She would have tried anything, anything at all, if it meant that he wouldn't get to their fragile minds before she could and storm around in their heads like a bull in a china shop. But he was everywhere.

And he told them stories.

It was always fascinating and slightly baffling, the way they'd all congregate around him in their perfect white suits, all huddled up like kindergartners waiting for the teacher to begin, eager and almost innocent. And he would hold himself proud, despite the apparent lack of dignity or personalization in his own white suit, and he would take a deep breath and ask all of them to move, damnit, give him some room to breathe, they were breathing his air, they were daring to breathe his air, were they morons or what? And once that fleeting moment of hysteria was over and done with and he'd gotten their attention, he'd begin his tall tales.

One week, when he was going through withdrawal and mumbling to himself and puking every five minutes, he attempted to tell his followers about his "Superbar." She studied him, watched as he managed to summon up the enthusiasm to tell them all about how he had built his own "party bar," in an attempt to woo Alice the prison guard over, and they'd listened to him just as eagerly as always. Never mind the fact that building his "Superbar" would have taken more than a few days, possibly a few years. Never mind the fact that he was talking to recovering alcoholics and not-so-recovering alcoholics, people who had taken their first sips of beer in their first years of life and had never looked back. Never mind the fact that he was shivering, shaking and occasionally hallucinating.

He managed to tell his story with the same enthusiasm as always, before enthusiasm found itself replaced with dread. And then, that very same Alice, Ms. Liddell, the supposed prison guard now magically turned psychiatric nurse, would pump him full of sedatives to get him to stop screaming about bugs underneath his skin, and he would drift away with a smile on his face, after murmuring something about her lovely hands.

"Freak," was her usual apathetic and gruff response, and then she'd march off to meet a patient who had a date with a case of Valium.

It wasn't just Alice Liddell that got incorporated into his stories, though, and that was the unsettling part. You had the people like Cherice, the shy and slightly spacey receptionist, who was almost insignificant in the strange storyteller's eyes and not very important to his "plot," and then…

…well, you had people like Tess herself. It made her sick to think about all the things a psycho like her patient had done to her, if only in his twisted and gnarled mind, but it was nothing but the truth. He'd taken her and stretched her thin, as he'd done to the others flocking all around her in her hospital, and he'd attempted to ram a square peg like her into round holes by assigning her a role in his bizarre, backwards world… …the world she didn't belong in… …the world she didn't want to belong in.

An electric buzzer interrupted her thoughts, and she almost struck out against the infernal thing, with a growl and a scream in her throat. She hated that wretched buzzer, though she was relieved to be brought back down to Earth every time it went off. She took a cautious look around her office, just to make sure she was grounded and secure, and found that everything was just as it had been before she started—she almost wrinkled her nose in disgust at the very notion—daydreaming.

"Miss? Miss, are you there?"

Oh—just Cherice. She criticized herself for believing that it could have been anyone else, if only for a moment. That simply wasn't logical at all. Daydreams and fanciful thoughts weren't normally a part of her agenda—must've been all that stress. Aggravated snarls turned into exasperated sighs as she rubbed at her temples.

She could feel a headache coming on. "…Yes, Cherice, I'm here," she began, though not without a bit of menace. She might have felt slightly zapped of energy, but she could always afford to make Cherice feel small, if she felt the situation warranted it. The receptionist knew better than to interrupt Miss Tess at a time like this, anyway. "what do you want?"

"Well, I hope I'm not interrupting anything, Miss—"

Sure you do, the psychiatrist found herself thinking, rolling her eyes a bit.

"—but we're having slight difficulties with the patient we admitted this morning."

At this, Tess found herself perking up ever so slightly. "What patient?" she asked, trying to rack her brains for the answer. Ultima admitted hundreds upon hundreds of patients every week, or so it seemed to her, and sometimes even she had difficulty keeping track of them all (much to her chagrin). And then, it came to her in a sudden flash of clarity: tattoos spelling out "PEACE" on his knuckles, an unclean and unshaven look. A quiet, dazed fellow, occasionally attempting to flirt with ladies, speaking in nothing but grunts.

"Oh, right—the criminal known as 'Jackknife,'" she very nearly spat as she put the pieces of the puzzle together, clearly not too keen on the idea of having another madman to manage, and then, dismissively: "well, just ask Nurse Liddell to shove some sedatives down his throat. You should be fine." She waved her hand nonchalantly, as if Cherice could see her. Sure, from what she could tell the newcomer had quite the criminal record and had been in and out of prisons for practically his whole life. Charges for rape and assault, charges for theft and vandalism, something about rabbits, and it was rumored that he was quite the escape artist, but he didn't seem too terribly dangerous. From what she could tell, he was either a selective mute or very, very stupid. Possibly both. He couldn't have been a threat.

A moment of silence passed, and then the receptionist spoke again, in quiet and unsteady tones. "But Miss, it's not that," she said quietly, almost hesitantly, as if Miss Tess could box her on the ears right then and there, "it's…" A small, dainty, girlish gulp. "…the Warden, Miss."

Shit. She cursed inwardly. Leave it up to storytelling patient to leave her spinning at just the right moment. Leave it up to him to pounce on this fellow madman on his first day, to attempt to tear into his mind like a piece of meat without any regard for her rules and restrictions. Leave it to him to evade all of her safety precautions with ease, to not only refuse to be trapped within picket fences, but to deny that the fences even existed.

"He's hacked into one of our computers somehow, we don't know how; J's been—I mean, Mister Jared Gilligan has been—I mean—" The incompetent woman with all the maturity of a child on the other end of the line broke off into giggles, as though she wasn't comprehending the gravity of the situation at hand, and for a brief moment Tess wondered why she hadn't fired her yet. She was absolutely smitten with one of the psychologists in the building; it was disgusting and unnecessary.

Miss Tess couldn't understand why people bothered with relationships like that. They just slowed you down, and that was a risk she wasn't willing to take, a risk she couldn't afford to take. Sometimes she felt like the only one with any work ethic in this place.

"Right, fine, Dr. Gilligan's been taking care of him, fine." Her voice was crisp and clipped as she drummed her fingers on her desk and tried to contain her rage. She wasn't sure if it was directed at her giggling schoolgirl of a receptionist or her dramatic troublemaker of a patient infecting the rest of her system like a virus, but this was one of those moments where she just didn't care. Anger was bubbling up inside of her and filling her up to the brim. She had to get rid of it, and fast.

If there was one thing she knew about the criminals housed in this madhouse, it was that they fed off of emotions like that. Vulnerability and volatility in any members of the staff couldn't be tolerated for long.

"Where is he now? How did he manage to get to a computer? Which computer was—" she halted even as she found the words tumbling out of her mouth, allowing the remainder of her sentence to fade away. "…it wasn't NOVA, was it?"

NOVA was a clean machine, a work of art in its early stages but a work of art nonetheless. Miss Tess, having a natural inclination in that direction for reasons she couldn't fathom, had been working on it for a while now, and it was all hers. She believed that it would revolutionize the way people looked at and thought of computers, although of course she would never tell anyone this and only fantasized about it in private. It was the best form of technology this day and age could ever hope to witness. She secretly referred to it as a "she" when she was alone, as captains before her had referred to their vessels into the unknown, and had even been known to talk to it once in awhile. Cherice probably knew about this, but she was the exception, not the rule.

No one else knew.

No one else could know.

NOVA was brilliant, yes, but placing her in the wrong hands could be hazardous to everyone. Not only did she contain information related to the patients themselves, countless records and off-the-records, but she contained information related to the facility itself, information that couldn't be revealed to the public. She knew all of Miss Tess's secrets, and if someone like her patient were to get a hold of technology and information like that…

…She shuddered to think of it, in spite of herself.

"Well?" she snapped, knowing that this was no time for patience.

"Oh!" The receptionist gave out a little squeak of surprise, as if she'd forgotten what her original point was, and then continued on. "No, it wasn't NOVA, Miss, don't worry, no one could have possibly gotten to her." Cherice piped up, quick to reassure her superior in her usual timid tone of voice, and Miss Tess found herself almost scoffing and rolling her eyes. It was just like her to walk on unnecessary eggshells, to refer to NOVA as a female, knowing that the machine meant a lot to her boss and to the stability of the facility itself. It was just like Cherice to be so sensitive and softheaded, to be so thoughtful.

Had she stopped to think about it, she would have realized that she appreciated it, on some level. Next to NOVA--and NOVA was a machine, she was careful to remind herself--Cherice was probably the person that understood Miss Tess the most in this godforsaken asylum. And you had to have someone like that around, didn't you, to keep yourself sane even surrounded by sheer insanity. Had to pick on someone half your size to raise your confidence. Had to have someone you could rely on, someone you could trust. Had to keep from thinking thoughts like, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do..."

...because once you embraced thoughts like that, you never went back.

So that was why Tess hadn't fired her yet. It made all the sense in the world, now.

And then Cherice ruined it all by clearing her throat. All the respect that Miss Tess had held for the short redhead was sent plummeting--what a disgusting habit!--and she listened to her babble on with frayed nerves and fury bubbling up into her veins, her fingernails clacking against the surface of her wooden desk every so often with impatience. Cherice could never be a proper lady. "It was the... ...other model. We don't know how he managed to gain access to it, but we think he may've obtained information about the newest patient in our database from there." A pause as she inhaled, as if preparing to dive into icy cold waters. "I... I know we've all been instructed to keep the Warden from interacting with the other patients at all costs, so I thought I'd warn you." Another one of those irksome pauses, and she spoke again, slight panic colouring her otherwise timorous tone. "Please, don't think we've been anything less than diligent; it's just hard to keep track of him, that's all. It's no one's fault, really."

Her supervisor knew what that meant: Don't blame Dr. Gilligan.

If she thought she could get away with it, she would have blamed Dr. Gilligan. He drank far too much coffee than was good for him, he flirted with Cherice and distracted her and kept her from performing the necessary tasks, and, as if that wasn't enough, he was too nervous. Fidgety, nervous men normally had no place in a hospital like her own, around criminals who could tell what Jared Gilligan was like just by knowing what he ate for breakfast. Criminals took men like him and twisted and warped them in their own image, influenced them and played with their minds like toys in a sandbox. But he knew more about her hell-raising patient than even she did.

Anyway, she had more important things to worry about, right now. "I'm not surprised he managed to hack into that old thing," she said dryly, ignoring the other woman's plea for lenience entirely and continuing on her own train of thought. "He does seem to be fond of it, doesn't he? I've heard he's nicknamed it 'Jailbot.' It's almost sad." She almost chuckled as she thought of the blocky, outdated computer, and then remembered that she wasn't the type of person to chuckle at anything.

Cherice chuckled nervously along with her. It was almost pathetic, the terror she inspired within that girl. It wasn't like she could breathe fire.

"But I digress--back to business!" Miss Tess barked, hunching over the desk, closer to the intercom, and she could almost hear the receptionist snap to attention. "Find out where our clever patient is hiding, track him down and send Dr. Gilligan in to occupy him. If things get too..." she tried to choose her words as carefully as possible, "...messy, let Nurse Liddell intervene. Above all, make sure we get to the newcomer before he does."

"Yes, ma'am."

"We don't want a repeat of what happened last time."

"No, ma'am."

"Good, very good," she murmured almost without thinking as she slipped her white jacket on and prepared to walk right out the door of the office, out into the chaos he'd already created to aggravate her, "I'll be there shortly. ...Oh, and Cherice?"

"Ma'am?"

"I want you to quit referring to our resident troublemaker as 'the Warden.' We don't encourage patients' delusions. You know how warped their minds are." She took one last look around her office, making sure she wasn't forgetting to address anything, and marveled at how orderly it was, how sensible it was. Everything was in its right place. Everything made sense.

"But Miss," she heard Cherice say with a bit of hesitation in her voice, "if we don't call him that, then what do we call him?"

"Not my concern."

With that said and done, Miss Tess took one last breath of her sensible, contained air, opened the door to her office...

...and stepped outside, immersing herself in her secondary, catastrophic world.

Her Rome.

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Author's Note~!!: ...well, that's it for this chapter. I hope you enjoyed it~! If not, feel free to say so, anyway. ;D Any attention at all is appreciated and encouraged.

Also, Honey Bunches of Oats with cinnamon clusters are surprisingly addictive.

TTFN~!