title: we're all mad here
pairing(s): beck/jade, robbie/cat, andre/tori, beck/tori (how disgusting, i know), robbie/trina, andre/jade, sinjin/jade (slight and completely one-sided infatuation), robbie/jade, robbie/tori
pov: third
rating: t (language, graphic descriptions, violence)
"but i don't want to go among mad people," alice remarked.
"oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "we're all mad here. i'm mad. you're mad."
"how do you know i'm mad?" said alice.
"you must be," said the cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
Greenhaven Psychiatric Hospital was a place for those that people felt needed to be "amended". It was for people with a sickness; for those that society branded as inept.
None of the patients really wanted to be there, but then, they weren't exactly given a choice. Their parents or therapists shipped them off in a big white van when they wanted to rid their hands of their destructive child that was ruining the image of normality surrounding their pretentious lives.
People, they're fascinated by the peculiar, their interest always sparked when they see something uncommon. News stories about serial killers and wars and otherworldly experiences flashing on a TV screen intrigue them and make them stop for a moment, their eyebrows creasing and their mind spinning. Walking down city streets, luxuriously dressed men and women pass by the homeless, pretending not to notice them, but really they're glancing at them out of the corner of their eye, equally filled with disgust and wonderment. Rowdy and reckless kids sneak into abandoned places in awe - old factories, the machines perpetually stopped, prisons with dusty bars and locks and moldy, green floors, asylums (always the favorite) that were rumored to be haunted by the crazy, deceased patients, where everything looks as if everyone had just disappeared one day - toys and silverware and wheelchairs strewn about, files still in the cabinets, beds unmade, papers on desks half-written and words trailing off like whoever had wrote it had intended to come back and finish it in a moment - and words were etched into the walls and in journals; things like save me and help and leave before they harvest your corpse too.
Those adolescents, they're curious, they're nosy, they're stupid. They think it makes for a good story, and they believe in ghosts, and they're scared when they're wandering about, but not really. They're not because they don't know what real monsters are, they don't know the awful, traumatic events surrounding them, they don't know what it's like, really being a patient in one of those oh-so-interesting vacated madhouses.
A mental hospital is a place where they put you through hours and hours of therapy where they embed what's right and what's wrong into your brain and pump drugs into you to make you their definition of better. Psych wards do not produce healthy minds, they medicate you until you're a living zombie.
That is, if you get out.
Some people, they claim incurable. These are the people that are either too messed up for their standards of normal, or those who are too resistant. Those that are resistant don't want to give in and just become another fixed case, another folder stamped as cured and filed away. They wanted to put up a fight, just as long as they can, because they can see past the phony smiles of the therapists who want to "help" them. They don't want help.
In Building C at Greenhaven, the psychiatric ward for special needs cases, there were eight people - four girls and four boys that all had different mental illnesses. There was a sociopath, an anorexic and bulimic, a pyromaniac, and a schizophrenic. One was bipolar, one had multiple personality disorder, one had major depressive disorder, and another had sleep terror disorder.
These eight people were ones marked incurable.
Some of them tried to accept the help given to them and they just couldn't be helped. Others, well, they chose not to accept the help, because they didn't want to become another victim of the therapists' conformity.
You never know what could happen at Greenhaven Psychiatric Hospital. What happens there, stays there, haunting the halls of the hospital. Those that get out wouldn't be able to tell you what happens in there because they're practically brainwashed when they're released. And those who refuse to follow the rules never get out. They can never live to tell the story of their time spent in their version of hell. But sometimes, something happens where someone happens to escape, happens to get into the colossal world, even when they are incurable.
Sometimes, someone of vast intelligence manages to outsmart the Man.