Going insane is easy. It is amazingly simple for anyone with the right motivation to take their mind off the hook for a while and scamper blissfully through fields of soft green grass, unaware that they are actually prancing half-naked down the highway during rush hour. After all, if life is going to be terrible anyway, you may as well enjoy yourself during your very own private apocalypse.
Going sane was trickier. It was very, very difficult to convince the doctors at Arkham Asylum that you had retrieved all of your marbles, particularly after you'd seemingly made it your life's work to scatter them as far as possible.
However, for Jervis, it wasn't going to take that long. After all, he had a plan, didn't he? Just because of that, he was miles ahead of most of the other inmates. Okay, so it was more of a plan to eventually plan something, but he still had a plan. He was going to get sane and get out of there.
He'd showed up to his next therapy session brimming with determination. His therapist hadn't noticed. "Come in, Jervis," she invited in a bored tone, as she always did, flipping on the tape recorder so that she could decipher what he said later on. "What would you like to discuss today? I believe last time we were talking about..." she squinted at her papers, "the mouse's tale?"
"Yeah," Jervis muttered. Well, he had been talking about it. She had been staring at the clock on the wall. "The Mouse's tail."
They sat in silence for a full ten minutes as Jervis fought to think of something to say. There was a very good reason why he'd retreated into the world of quotes: one always had something to say when one was parroting someone else. What was he supposed to be talking about here, anyway? He'd never taken one of these sessions seriously before.
What would a sane, healthy person say at a session with their psychiatrist? Well, goodbye, obviously, but what would they say before that? His right leg started to bounce up and down as he racked his brain for something to say. Anything.
"You seem upset," the psychiatrist said uninterestedly, breaking the silence. "Is something bothering you?"
"Oh, you sing - I've forgotten the words." No, dammit, no! He wasn't going back to Wonderland now! "I mean," he floundered, trying desperately to come up with the words to say what he wanted to say. "I..."
His purple-faced frustration had finally caught the doctor's full attention. She studied him as his fingers fidgeted anxiously. "Calm down," she advised.
He sank back into the chair, defeated. Well, maybe he could start with quotes and work his way into using real English later. "I don't want to be anybody's prisoner," he said slowly.
She tilted her head into a pose somewhat reminiscent of the RCA dog, which was rather appropriate considering the puffy bags under her eyes and her oversized ears. "Well, what do you want?" she asked.
He opened his mouth. He closed it again with a shrug. What did he want? He didn't know. Oh, certainly he had his short-term goal - getting out of Arkham - but what did he want out of life? He'd spent so many years doing nothing but mouthing another man's words and living in clouds of fantasy that he didn't know what he really wanted out of life. He didn't even really know who he was anymore under the layers of fiction that he'd wrapped around himself like a security blanket. "Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle," he murmured, mostly to himself.
Naturally, she heard him. "You should know who you are," she said bluntly. "You seemed to have a pretty good idea of it yesterday."
"Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else," he shot back.
"Who would you like to be?" she challenged.
"Anyone but me," he snapped. His eyes widened. He'd done it! He'd said something that wasn't a quote!
Could he do it again? What could he say? Anything! The sky was the limit!...he couldn't think of anything.
"Why?" the psychiatrist asked.
How could he possibly explain it to her? How could you boil down years of delusions and anger and pain? How could you put words to something that you felt every day like a hole in your heart? "I don't like belonging to another person's dream," he whispered.
She examined him with suspicious eyes. "Are you actually trying to tell me something, or are you just quoting at me?" she said, distrust lurking around the edges of her words.
He fumed silently. Of course he was saying something, any halfwit could tell that! "I am so very tired of being all alone here," he sighed.
She stared at him. "You're not quoting? You're actually talking?"
He fought back an urge to rip into her with only the best Victorian nonsense. Making her angry was not going to help him in the slightest - and neither was speaking in riddles, for that matter. What he needed was to get her on his side. How had the Joker tempted Quinn over to his side...
Sympathy!
He forced a pleading look onto his face and tried to look as small and helpless as possible. The Joker may have been able to lure Quinn over to their side by playing himself as a mix of lighthearted jester and dark, troubled enigma, but that would never work for someone who needed chairs to reach the top shelf and who could probably use a few thousand dollars worth of orthodontics. "Help me," he whimpered.
The psychiatrist nodded earnestly. "Of course," she smiled, leaning slightly over her desk. "I'll give you all the help I can." Even without any of his wonderful little devices, he could clearly read her thoughts: if she 'cured' him, she'd be in line for a pay raise, possibly a round of interviews on the talk shows, and maybe she'd land a book deal that could make her rich beyond her wildest dreams.
Well, let her be happy about it. He didn't care. All that mattered was getting himself out of here.
Six months later
Jervis slouched his way down the corridor. To the world at large, and particularly to the newly-hired orderly marching at his side, the Mad Hatter appeared to be the very soul of contrite and ill-used persons. His reddened eyes and his furrowed brow spoke of a man desperately trying to reconcile his past with his present.
The orderly let him back into his cell. "Feel better, Mr. Tetch," he offered gently before scurrying away to fetch the next inmate to the therapists. Jervis slumped onto his bed and buried his face in his pillow.
Suckers! he thought, letting the pillow mask the grin that he didn't dare wear in the therapist's office. Once he'd gotten past the trouble of making up his own sentences again, therapy had turned out to be easy. A cakewalk! Simple as a queen becoming a sheep...no! Not that! Just easy, that's all. The hardest part of therapy was keeping a straight face. Faking sobs was simple enough, particularly with the aid of a tissue or two to mop up "tears" as necessary.
He'd spent his free time for the last six months coming up with a childhood that should wring the heart of anyone. Mean parents...no, neglectful parents...no, wait, abusive neglectful parents that forbade him from doing anything but reading! Yes! And so of course he'd turned to Alice as a source of comfort and Lewis Carroll as a surrogate parent.
Or something like that. Really, all he had to do was imply horrors in his past with a somewhat offhand demeanor and the therapist was putty in his hands. His look of surprise when she gently broke the news that not all children, for example, slept on the kitchen floor under a ratty beach towel was enough to push her into complete acceptance of that story.
"Mr. Tetch?" He raised a suitably upset face to see the new orderly tapping at his window. "Would you like to go to the recreation room? Your doctor has an assignment for you," he added, waving the small bundle of papers in his hand.
An assignment? This sounded promising. He nodded and joined the orderly in the hallway, sneaking looks at the papers whenever they came into view.
The orderly led him to an empty table in the corner. "Here you go, Mr. Tetch," he said, politely offering the sheaf of papers. "If you need anything, let me know."
Jervis carefully waited to roll his eyes until no one was looking at him. Did the boy really think that treating them like people was going to keep him safe? Calling the rogues Mr. and Ms. wasn't going to change the fact that orderlies suffered more casualties than the court of the King and Queen of Hearts.
He opened the bundle of papers and flipped through them. Most of them were blank notebook paper. A small envelope containing a pair of small charcoal sticks was attached to the neatly typed letter on top. He skimmed it, sifting through the psychological babble to unearth its meaning with the practice one only acquired with long hours in the therapy chair.
He was to write a resume. As if anyone on the outside would actually hire Jervis Tetch, he thought irritably. It would have been much better to start over as someone else, someone who hadn't held large amounts of the city under his control at one time or another. But he had to be himself, as inconvenient as it was.
With a sigh, he began to write. He had only been a legitimate scientist for a short while in his early adult life. After he'd witnessed the blatant thievery that occurred in the academic community as a matter of course, he'd decided that he may as well blatantly thieve things that would make him very rich very quickly. As a bonus, he could wear whatever he pleased and speak however he chose...and he had chosen to emulate the Mad Hatter, whose life of carefree lunacy had always appealed to him. He had maybe gone a touch overboard with that, but...
But this was not helping him with his resume. He stared at the half-blank page. He couldn't exactly put that his last position was as a criminal mastermind, but he couldn't leave it blank, either. He drummed charcoal-covered fingers on the tabletop.
Should he simply list his skills? He did have a unique and varied set of skills that could take him far in a lot of industries. Unfortunately, he'd tended to use them all in his not-quite-legal dealings with people. No, he'd do better to leave all of them off. After all, Dr. Henry Holmes wouldn't have put his skill with architecture on his resume.
Hmm. He had to tell the truth, but no one said it had to be the truth truth, did they? He brightened and carefully wrote "Owned and ran small, private business dealing in acquisitions and classic literature." Well, it was kind of the truth, wasn't it? It was true enough to please his therapist, and that was all that really mattered. "Responsibilities included procurement, management of employees..." At least it was something to fill the page with. It even sounded like he'd spent his life being a productive citizen instead of stealing things from actual productive citizens.
A throat was cleared above him. Acting purely on instinct, Jervis snatched the papers close to his chest and glared suspiciously at whoever it was that had interrupted him. The Riddler grinned cheekily down at him. "What do you want, Edward?" Jervis sighed irritably.
"So it's true," Nygma said, dropping into the chair across the table, uninvited. Jervis scowled at him. He was busy. "You really are out of Wonderland."
"Yes, I am," Jervis said, trying to imply that the sentence ended with and I'm too busy to talk right now.
Nygma ignored it, settling in with one jumpsuit-clad leg crossed casually across the other. "So what will you do?"
"I don't know. Get a job?" Jervis said, nettled.
The Riddler shook his head. "You're not the first to try and go down that rabbit hole-"
"You don't have to quote that around me anymore," Jervis snapped.
"Force of habit. You're not the only one to try something new," Nygma rephrased, glancing across the room to where Harley Quinn sat chatting idly with Poison Ivy.
"Yes, well, maybe I'll be the only one to succeed," Jervis said, knowing full well that the Riddler's last attempt at reforming had ended in a spectacular explosion and a complete psychotic breakdown that had left him screeching questions at himself for weeks. Everyone with ears remembered that little event.
Nygma scowled at him. "It's harder than it looks," he informed him before stalking back to his crosswords.
Jervis shrugged. So the Riddler had failed. So what? It didn't matter that Nygma hadn't been able to cut it on the outside, or that Isley and Wesker and Quinn and all the rest had botched their various attempts at normalcy. It was perfectly possible that he'd succeed. And if it was impossible, well, that was fine too. Why, sometimes he'd believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...
No! The Red Queen had nothing to do with this. It wasn't impossible, and he was sane. He was!
He redoubled his efforts on the little piece of paper, trying to prove it to himself as firmly as he could while fervently wishing that he could be trusted with a pen.
(to be continued)
Author's Note: Most of Jervis' italicized lines (and some that aren't) are direct quotes from either Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass. Dr. H. H. Holmes is as close to a real-life rogue as one could get, with particular attention paid to his castle full of deathtraps. Eddie's breakdown is from the Batman: the Animated Series episode "Riddler's Reform".