((Augh, sorry for not updating for so long. I apologize if this is a bit confusing. It is Fogg, the owner of the lunatic asylum. I've always thought that he was a bit looney himself...))
They spoke with him and pronounced him different.
He didn't know where the line was; after all, everyone was different. But this was a bizarre branding: he had not known, his whole life, how others acted, and so he couldn't compare himself to those people. How was he to know what he was and what he couldn't be?
No matter, they all told him: it will pass. You will be normal.
He felt that somehow that day never did come to pass—he simply learned to hide it better. He watched people now, watched how they walked and spoke and dressed and danced. He mimicked them, so that he would seem, to the average person, if not a normal man, then a pretty damn good imitation of one. He even, for the first time in his life, began to get friends, and, for some time, the trouble melted.
Then he found out that there were more. More, more people such as him: people whose worlds were a little sideways-skewed, whose expressions did not always match their faces, whose words escaped them – people who had heads in which sane thoughts simply would not form. And so soon after he had remedied himself – it was something of a shock to him, to find that this so-called infirmity that had polluted his head was not a little corruption in his brain, it was in others' brains, too. It was scary, how he began to wonder: and to wonder was to question, and so he began to seek answers.
He talked to them and the first question on his lips was, Was I really like that?
He knew he wasn't, couldn't have been. These were the folks that had to have special places built for them – the people who had untold strength and no morality, or no intelligence, or no way to piece their thoughts together. Lunatics, everyone called them.
Fogg did not call them lunatics.
He called them his flock.
He knew that somehow, here, he'd found his calling: somewhere beyond the normal, beyond the happy-faced friends he'd so recently met and the troubled world of his childhood, there were these people, these odd, half-formed people – the ones they called lunatics – and the people on the outside resolved to lock them away.
He hated them all, and loved them too. They were all too much like him. They had minds like children, some of them; others had the minds of philosophers, others those of demons. He could not let himself fear them, though they itched to have power and wanted to be feared. He wanted to control them. Somehow, he knew, or thought he knew, that by controlling these freaks he could control the part of himself that made him like them.
He was better than them. He did not have to be locked up in an asylum, anyhow. Perhaps he would have been, if he hadn't had such skills at imitating others. Why, he had put on such a brave face, brave enough to convince all who had questions, and so there was nothing to fear from him. True, the darkness still thrilled him sometimes, chilling his brain as it seeped into his thoughts, but he pushed it down, he pushed it down. Plus, he had those who loved him, even if he did not always love him back. They were good for him; they'd not locked him up, as these other loveless fools' families had. He was safe on his own, if he had someone looking over his shoulder.
But that shepherd would not always be there for him, those parents, that sibling, so he had to learn to watch out for himself now.
Besides: he was now the shepherd of others. He had lunatics to protect, to protect them from themselves.