Gotham: the city that never sleeps because it is afraid of nightmares.
In the restless silence of a frightened child holding its breath in the dark, the only sound to be heard in the white-tiled corridors of Gotham General was a steady beep, beep, beep. There was no one to monitor that mechanical pulse, no one came running into the room with their crepe-soled shoes squeaking when it began to speed up. The hospital employees were far too busy making sure friends and relatives were okay to look after their patients. After all, in a world where a man could threaten to bury everything you ever cared about beneath a sheet of ice if he didn't get what he wanted, it didn't make any sense to waste time on men who most likely would never be a sentient part of that world again.
So, what should have been a joyous occasion was one celebrated alone and without comprehension. Beneath the impassive gaze of the moon, the machines that were hooked up to him beeping out a wild tattoo of life, Doctor Hugo Strange awoke from the coma that had kept him from the world. The former head of Arkham Asylum ripped the oxygen mask that had kept him artificially breathing from his face and dragged in ragged lungfuls of air like a man recovering from being drowned. His eyes rolled in sightless confusion as his shattered mind tried to cope with the first real sights and sounds that had reached it since his experiment had backfired, leaving his brain a broken wreck.
Neurons fired clumsily around the inside of his head, blazing trails of destruction in their haste to get to where they were meant to be. They screamed abuse at each other as they passed and he wanted to lift his hands to his ears to block out the noise, but he couldn't remember how to use his arms. Images of the functional hospital room with its single window merged and interchanged with rolling hills, crumbling masonry straight out of the pages of a Gothic novel, greasy kitchens, prison cells and bat-infested caves deep beneath the surface of the ground. Faceless horrors swooped down from the ceiling towards him but he didn't flinch away because he no longer knew how to be scared.
The lack of a fixed point of reference, the inability to make sense of time passing or distinguish imagination from reality didn't bother Strange. He wasn't aware that there was anything wrong. So much pressure had been put on his mind, that night in the laboratory when he had tried to make the minds of Joker and Batman one, that it had simply snapped under the strain. It was a miracle that he was even alive at all.
For an immeasurable amount of time he simply led in his neglected hospital bed and listened to the intimate sounds of his monitored heart beat, gaping in automatic breaths with a slack mouth that leaked thick strings of saliva down the side of his face. His roving eyes fixed unsteadily on the patch of moonlight reflected on the floor. In some deep and primal way, with the part of his brain that had been with him since before evolution began, he thought about how beautiful that disc of silvery light was. His hands made unconscious grasping motions.
Abruptly, the perfect patch of light was marred by a dark shadow outside falling across it, renting a hole in its purity. Or had the darkness always been there, is there, was there, will always be, only for a second? The beep-beep-beeping of his heart sped up into a high-pitched whine when he saw that the dark shadow had bat ears. Whether he was really seeing this, or whether it was a product of his shattered mind, he could no longer understand, but he still understood one thing perfectly. That was why he threw back his head and began to laugh like he would never stop.
Alone in his hospital bed, trapped inside a broken mind, Doctor Strange screamed with laughter at the bat-eared shadow on his floor.
A/N: Apologies for the shortness of this chapter, but I didn't want this section merged with another one. The next chapter will definitely be longer. =]