Summary: (a/u) If even an innocent soul is marked off as insane, the victim is sent off to a mental institution. When Derrick is framed for his father's murder and Massie nearly kills her family in an accidental fire, they are sent to an institution in both confinement and redemption.
Disclaimer: neither of us own the clique.
greetings from nala and lily (hence the ship name, nalily).
nala: yoooooodaaaaaaaaaaa. though I am merely lilo's boobs, I like to write things that don't make very much sense. you can probably tell my and lilo's writing apart—she's the one that sounds like a poetic moonflower of words, and I'm the one that sounds like a blindfolded monkey banging on a keyboard.
lily: actually, it's the opposite of that. you'll be reading a few paragraphs written by nalala that sound like they were taken directly from a perfect angsty oscar winning script, and then i'll come in like "HEH. DERRY. MASSIE. DOGE. SEX. WHOO."
lily: ahem. so yeah. enjoy this thing.
nala: OH ONE LAST THING. this is a prologue. it was supposed to be 500 words. then it wasn't. oops. bye now.
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Derrick James Harrington was a household name, infamous and dangerous.
He was the man that stabbed his own father with a steak knife, the man who dragged his father out to the yard, the man who buried the one closest to him, and he was the man who was only nineteen.
He was the man who used to be a friend to everyone, and he was famous for his soccer skills and alluring charm that made ladies fall weak when he walked by. He was the man with the shaggy golden hair and twinkling brown eyes, and the man with a smile that made even the harshest of souls smile for a forbidden moment.
He was the innocent man framed for James Harrington's murder, and he was the man who was chalked off as insane and sent to an institution for a crime he didn't commit.
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Derrick tore another page out of the only notebook the institute provided, a notebook near-empty and filled with ragged edges from theories he had ripped away and crumpled into a ball of disbelief towards the misery and insanity he called a life.
The room he sat hunched in a corner within could often be mistaken for a small box, only being the size of the average bathroom. It was squared off at the edges, something that Derrick now believed to be even sharper than a normal corner. It was predictably windowless, and the single entrance was a small door near one corner, but blended in well with the rest of it. The walls were a shady gray, one that resembled how he thought of himself now: a bit empty, with a tad of peculiarity.
Derrick Harrington felt himself growing more insane by the second.
He wasn't half mad the day he was committed to the institution—he was confused. He was struggling with the reality of the lie he had been tangled in, and he was drowning over the flashing images of his future in the institution.
He liked to believe he was sane, but when one was surrounded by the shrieks of insanity, it was hard to keep a sane mind.
The brown-eyed boy had started to speak to the walls and himself both—he needed some outlet of feeling and thought, and he needed somewhere to put down his reality, a reality that had become an unhinged life verging on madness.
Anyone passing by would no doubt assume he had already let himself go to a mania, especially after seeing him muttering stray words to himself. And honestly, it wasn't him doing this to himself, at least not in Derrick's opinion. It was everything and everyone that had locked him in here, and the frame, and even the visions of his limp father in some deranged way.
Derrick was convinced that his growing madness was derived from the painful loneliness.
For the past three years, Derrick had been alone. He only spoke to a single soul, and the soul he spoke to was a toneless man he called a therapist through a sheet of bulletproof glass. Despite it somewhat helping his loneliness, he believed that the therapist was only placed there to make him believe that this place he had been stuck in was completely sane. The institution allowed visitors, but Derrick had none—the people he used to call his extended family were terrified of him, and even his old best friend had decided against visiting the golden-haired boy who was ripping himself apart from the inside out.
His voice was his only companion, and he tried to pretend that listening to himself speak was enough, but it never would be.
"My head confuses me," Derrick read, his brown eyes scanning over a formerly crumpled paper, the words scribbled in a pen too full of ink and therefore not making an easy decipher. "People say that losing your mind is graduate, but it's not. At least it's not for me. The moment I realized it was sudden, as if like an epiphany."
Reading his past words was scary in a way, because he barely remembered writing them himself. Each of his entries twisted together, and Derrick could easily think that one entry from two years ago was written the same time as an entry from just a week ago.
The key to finding a solution was simple: find the root of the problem, realize what caused it, and then discover what can be done to stop it. But there was one problem—there was no individual problem, there were countless problems jumbled together.
He was tangled in a blur of twisted lies, wrapped so tightly that he could hardly stand, could hardly breathe, could hardly think past the madness he could feel. He could see the insanity as though it was a picture painted clearly in front of him, and he could see a reflection of himself growing more and more mad with each passing day.
He wondered what he looked like.
He had yet to come across a mirror in the hell he called a home, and he had no clue what he looked like. He remembered scarcely what he looked like when he had been committed three years back—or rather, what he thought was three years back.
With no windows in the institution, he had no way to count the passing suns and moons, and had no way to differentiate the days and nights that passed by too slowly.
Each of the days had begun to blur together; days into supposed weeks, weeks into supposed months, months into supposed years. But throughout all of this, Derrick somehow had grown to accept it. He was faceless to himself, even mindless in a way, but there wasn't another life to know now. If everyone continued to believe he had really murdered his father, then there was no doubt that he would stay in the hellhole for the main part of the rest of his lifetime.
He needed stability, but a part of him knew he wasn't going to get it.
The prison only added to his madness, and with each passing day he felt himself spiraling further and further down a maze of blackness that he knew he would never be strong enough to pull himself out of.
He used to dream the true killer of his father would be found and he would be redeemed from his hell, but with each restless night of sleeplessness, he grew more and more sure that life wasn't a fairy tale—it was a nightmare, and the demons of insanity would consume him before he was set free.
He would die there, mad, unstable, and alone.