Solitary Confinement

By Indiana

Characters: Edward Nygma

Synopsis: They're told over and over again that they're sent to the Asylum to get help. What people refuse to understand is there's not much help to be had.

Everyone soon learns that there's being smart, and then there's being a smartass.

Being smart largely involves not being a smartass. That point is driven home fast when one discovers rolling their eyes inadvertently is enough to get on some overzealous guard's shit list. The lists are often long, and marked with transgressions both imagined and very real. Some people never learn. There are a few who can't. There are a few who won't. Sometimes, being stupid is all there really is to do.

The people who run these places either puff out the wrongdoings with all the wonderful programs they have to rehabilitate the poor lost souls they're housing, or they put their fist down on the piece of furniture nearest and look any concerned citizens right in the eye as they ask, "Do you honestly believe a murderer deserves cable TV?" Everyone at the Asylum learns fast that said programs do not exist, and inquiring into them is met with a disapproving shake of the head.

(They've all heard it so many times: "You killed someone I knew. You think you deserve more than someone who got caught up in your sick games? If it were up to me, you'd be down there.")

He's been down there before. A few times. Not because he's stupid, obviously; he's nothing of the sort. But a man says things he shouldn't when he's tired and hungry and has just been roundly assaulted by fists clad in harder armour than they have any rights to be. The thought grinds his teeth together. The material is to prevent his hands from breaking during night after night of driving them into zygomata and sterna and the like over and over and over again. A brutal one-man military force who had taken it upon himself to combat everything with vicious, unrelenting violence. Sickening. He was worth a prison sentence rivalling that of any of the higher security inmates. But somehow those of authority found his morals more silver than soot, and those who stood up to him lost every time.

He could admit that 'standing up to' was the wrong way to think about it. Imagining oneself standing between a dictatorial bastion of justice and the downtrodden, misunderstood subjects of his wrath was akin to delusion. No smart person became delusional. It was simply foolish. It was smarter to understand and admit that anyone who landed in here was here because of himself and himself alone, and his own selfish goals – though pretending that loon was not himself selfish was a delusion all of its own – and he was of course very, very smart.

Except for yesterday. And Tuesday. And the Saturday before. The problem with being down here is that there was little to do but become angry. Angry that he was down here in the first place. Angry that they wouldn't turn the lights off at night. Angry that he couldn't keep his mouth shut.

(He'd asked for and filled out the relevant human rights violations forms many times. Sometimes his stay was extended; others, they would wait until one of the rare hours he was allowed elsewhere and then shred them in front of him.)

There was no way to keep track of the time. There should have been. There had been. Originally. The first few times he'd been sent down here his cell had had a television, albeit an old one, and a radio. Every time within three days he'd become convinced someone was spying on him through the screen, or listening through the speakers, and he'd destroyed them in a fit he could only remember in a detached sort of way. As though he had been a ghost, somewhere, passively and disinterestedly watching as someone who looked like him and sounded like him and trembled like him caved to the paranoia that had been his shadow for so many years now. It was honestly a little frightening, even to himself, because he had tried many times to connect himself to that memory of that man driving his broken fists into the crumpled pile of plastic and glass and wire that clearly had no further use whatsoever, but he couldn't. The only further instance of him even having done it were the recollections of himself on the floor smeared with his own frenzied blood and hands swollen enough he couldn't get them through the slot to be handcuffed in order for someone to take away the mess.

(Most of them didn't particularly care what he'd done to himself; he deserved it, after all. But anything usable as a weapon was removed as soon as its existence was discovered, and he had never been quite able to get over what he'd done fast enough for it to occur to him to derive a weapon.)

So he didn't have those, neither to tell the time nor to pass it. In retrospect it had only made the problem worse. The few days would go by and he'd be right back to believing he was being watched again, through this crack or that stain or that hole, but there was nothing to destroy. He did not want to end up one of those crazies, scraping their nails off on the unforgiving cement leaving smeared blood and jagged fingertips and the unrelenting urge to bite deeper into the wounds because opening them up provided a twisted sense of purpose. He was no stranger to writing on walls, but only when it held meaning. Witnessing his own destruction spelled out in front of him would have been useless. It did nothing except extend his stay. After about a week, someone would put a pill on the trays of food he was given – if you could call Nutraloaf that – and he would line them up on the floor and stare at them. For hours at a time, sometimes. He knew what they were for. He could hear full well his adjacents screaming and crying about people watching them, and listening to them, and filling their ears with ill-will. Those people took them. They didn't understand how to navigate their minds in a too-bright room like he did. They took them, and they lived for them, and sometimes they became docile enough they went back upstairs. They broke, in a way that the screaming and the crying didn't denote. They compromised themselves to leave the box.

(He'd been in the box a long time. Several boxes, all at once. The trick was understanding that the box was not always something to escape; sometimes it was something to cherish. Sometimes it was all that really contained everything a man was.)

He knew what the point of being here was. He was supposed to lose his mind enough that he would 'behave', and he used to. He used to do that. He used to be afraid of them, and this room, and all the manufactured bravado in the world couldn't mask that. He would sit quietly and wait and wait and wait, and they would take him back upstairs and tell him he could put himself back together. But quietly. And he would, because he was used to it. It was what he did. He came close to that again, sometimes; sometimes it wasn't worth it to take a stand nobody was going to acknowledge. He came close to swallowing the pills and sitting politely on the floor and keeping quiet when they kicked him out of the fifteen degree shower while his hair was still matted with the wrong kind of soap. Life was easier that way.

(But when had his life ever been easy?)

As time went on, it became increasingly clear that he did not even have to do anything in order to get some sort of punishment enacted on him. It didn't matter if he held his tongue or kept his eyes to himself. There were people who just plain didn't like him, and that was justification enough for them. It was sometime after he realised this that he stopped caring. Giving himself a voice was worth being hit over. He could take it. These people never seemed to realise he'd been through worse. Things he didn't like thinking about, but worse things all the same.

In this room he was forced to face many things he could not anywhere else, not that he could here, either. Parts of his life went forgotten for a reason. Here there was little else to do but remember. He'd heard the pills went a long way to dulling that. But this was why he put them on the floor in the first place. You never knew what the person before you had done in here, but you did know it wasn't pretty, or civilised. These cells had a funny way of making a man cease caring about anything but revenge. All manner of bodily fluids had been spilled here, many of them for the sole purpose of getting one in on the guards when a chance was to be had. He'd never done it. Thought about it, obviously; he'd thought about plenty of outlandish and ridiculous things in here, and that was after considering his unusual career choice. Staring at the perfect little line of pills made him wonder what he could do with them. Not now, in particular; there was not a whole lot of things to do anything with them with. He was barely permitted to keep the clothes he was wearing. Sometimes he would line them up vertically, instead of horizontally, and use them as physical manifestations of the bullet points in his brain, and he would make plans. The contents of the plans didn't matter. Some of them were questionable, and unsustainable. But it was better to give them consideration and allow them to pave the way for better ideas as opposed to trying to push them aside. And it was something to do, after all.

(The last time he had taken any of these kinds of pills had been long ago, promised by his school counsellor to his father to make him less 'disruptive'. He'd learnt fast what that really meant.)

Being down here was hard. There were people an arms' length away but behind unforgiving concrete. He could hear their voices but not what they were saying. And it smelled like loss. Sometimes the smell of old blood woke him up at night, chest heaving, because it brought reminders of those things he was keeping from himself. And he would lie back down, and fold his arms across his chest to encourage it to settle or perhaps to mask it was out of sorts at all, and he would remind himself not to break. It was what they wanted. It was what everybody had wanted out of him since he'd taken his first breath, and it would be so until he drew his last. But he wouldn't. They could damage him as much as they liked, and he would patch himself up stronger than before. They could keep him in this room for the next several months, and never turn this damned light off, and halve his rations for any imaginary transgression they could come up with. Every day he'd become stronger. More solid. He would reach as deep into himself as he had to, and even if he never came back the same he would not do as they wanted. That was what he was here for in the first place, after all. No authority on this earth would bend him to its will. No man, woman, or Bat would change him. That was his decision.

("He's been down here for six months. I swear this guy gets weirder every time. Word is they put him here just for kicks. Talks to himself a lot. He's convinced himself staying down here proves some point of his. If it weren't so funny it might be sad.")

He was sent down here every time he was returned to the Asylum. It didn't matter if he did anything to deserve it; his existence was enough to some. He was used to that. It was nothing new. And as he had always done, he would be smart. And being smart meant being angry, because of all the few things he was allowed to do in here that was the most productive. The thing that kept him focused. That gave him something to work with that could not be taken away. It was a quiet anger, a rational one; every day they left him down here he learned further how to refine it into a weapon greater than any even he had built before. They thought they could break him. Make him a docile and harmless half-wit who kept his head down and spoke only when spoken to and they could eventually send out into the general population, crowing how effective and beneficial to society it was to lock a man into a box and give him a wall to stare at for days and weeks and months at a time. He wasn't going to do that, wasn't going to prove that point for them. They took everything away in an attempt to trick him into doing so, but he wouldn't fall for that. They could drive him to hallucinate, and take his sheets away, and converse about what a foolish mess they thought he was within what they knew full well was his limited range of hearing, but he wasn't going to let them win. He knew how to play this game, and he was going to win. No matter what the cost.

(He knew, sometimes, that the cost had already been paid and it was already far too high. But what could he do but pretend it didn't matter?)

Everyone soon learns that there's being smart, and then there's being a smartass. One keeps you out of trouble, and the other lets you keep your dignity. Once you've crossed the threshold you've somehow lost your right to have both.

Author's note

This is neither the flavour text I mentioned, nor is it part of the DJ AU (obvs).

The other day I came across this article about solitary confinement. People who are sent there routinely go insane and/or hurt themselves just to feel something. They get sent there for little to no reason half the time and are treated like the scum of the earth whether they deserve to be there or not. As sad as it was, it made me think about Arkham Asylum, which in most canons that I can remember is much more a prison than it is a hospital. We all know Arkhamverse is my main canon, but beyond that we have A Serious House on Serious Earth, Living Hell, even in BTAS they're mostly shown to sit in cells all day long and sometimes a psychiatrist comes along to make a point about how irredeemable they are or to snark at them or they get to watch TV to make some plot point. I know little about prisons or mental hospitals, but from what little I know of both the Asylum is far more a prison than a helpful facility across the board. Which brings me to the connection I'm making: solitary is treated as nbd. Joker gets sent there as a matter of course, Riddler is depicted in a cell with a solid steel door and nobody is to talk to him. Why? No real reason, except that someone thought they were annoying and wanted them out of the way. Which is one of the unjustified reasons to send someone to solitary.

A lot of people, including me, tend to treat the Asylum as some convenient home away from home that everyone in there can just stroll around and escape whenever they darn well like, even though it's often renovated by the infinitely paranoid Bruce Wayne and staffed by people who are tired of being ridiculed and manipulated by people who, largely, refuse rehabilitation because it spoils the game they're playing. But much subtext points to the Asylum being more of a superprison which the inmates can do whatever they like in for plot convenience. Once I realised that, and that solitary is not the joke it's made out to be, I wanted to address it a little.

Some people may want to argue with me about how the Asylum is actually a kind and helpful place and isn't what I'm saying it is, but I am not interested in arguing that. This is how I see it and you don't have to like it but you're not going to change my mind.

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