anthony is a sassy malaysian desert (helpline) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2012-11-11 09:20:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, ! plot: horror, anthony liu, moira bloom, ~ horror: insane asylum |
WHO: Anthony Liu and Moira Bloom
WHAT: Day 2; Therapy session
WHEN: Day 2
WHERE: Insane asylum
WARNINGS: Some talk of violence.
STATUS: Completed
This session reminded him of the ones he had with the rest of the Swans. On Fridays. That was only in his mind. Shaken as he was, he remained just a little skeptical whenever a memory that he had in common with Moira was brought up. Like right now, when they were talking about their beach trip. “It’s not a story,” he snapped at the therapist, losing his patience when he was told once more that they had only created the memory. “There was a hotel that we had just for us, and we swam and snorkeled and --” Anthony faltered for a moment. The therapist had mentioned earlier that his memory had been too detailed, that he had made it complex on his own. “Right, Moira?” Anthony’s words didn’t register at first. Everything was taking extra time to reach her, as though the surrounding scenes of the asylum, the conversations of her fellow inpatient candidates, the doctors and nurses, and even the implications of her own thoughts were all dead stars millions of light years away, traveling through the blackness of space. She twitched her head in something approaching a nod, her eyes unnaturally wide and fixed on their therapist’s impassive face. Everyone else seemed so certain. Still, she was waking up. The sedatives didn’t feel so strong today. Their “hydrotherapy session” from earlier in the afternoon had left her shaking, and the moorings of her trust in their surroundings had started to fracture. Even if all of IVI had been a psychotic episode they’d created together, that had been real. That had been death trying to drag her under. The food was bland, the asylum was a misty white, and even the doctors could fade into the background of speckled walls behind them. But that scalding water had cut right through to the heart of Moira’s stasis. Capped by the man in the garden’s stories of the lighthouse, she felt the day had brought her scrabbling to the surface. But there hadn’t been any burns. “Right.” Right. She snapped her gaze away from the therapist to her--her teammate. And then the words caught up from her from space, all tumbling out in a clumsy rush. “No, I remember it too. How can we have the exact same memories? I never even met Anthony before the bloody school. I’ve never been to Palestine, or America. How can I have thought of all these places and stories, all these other students? It’s not just my life, it’s loads of people and things. I don’t see how we could all be living in this place together, and have it still be bollocks.” The doctor sighed. He was always sighing. “Okay, we’ll try this again. You’re all morbidly predisposed to psychosis, and you’ve been feeding into one another’s preexisting delusions since the moment you got here. Folie à deux generally occurs among individuals living in close quarters, but with this group, it’s more like folie en famille. Through a process starting with emotional and hysterical contagion and ending with full-blown psychological splitting and dissociation, you pulled away from the emotional implications of what you’ve done, and deeper into your fabricated reality. We understand, really. It’s only natural to share your hopeful world with friends, rather than being alone in the harshness of reality.” He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his prominent. “We decided since you’re all complicit in this delusion, we’d need to get you out of it together. Links of a chain, and all that. Until you can face the truth, we’ll never in good conscience be able to discharge you.” “Anthony, let’s start with you. Let’s talk about why you are really here.” He had been nodding at several points of Moira’s explanation to the therapist. Rather than the continuing hopelessness he had begun to feel ever since he couldn’t heal Solomon’s injury, his optimism was about to return. But that optimism quickly diminished at the doctor’s comeback. He sounded so convincing that it was... confusing. There wasn’t a lot of time for Anthony to dwell over this, as the therapist’s attention had turned back to him. Silence lapsed in the room, simply because he didn’t know the answer to that question. “Why am I here?” he finally asked. The doctor gave him a small, pitying smile. “Anthony, we’ve gone through this before,” he made a note on his book. In the temporarily silent room, the scratch the pen made against the paper seemed to be the loudest sound. The man in front of them looked up again. “Three years ago, you attempted to drown your sister,” At this, the boy’s jaw dropped, sounds of protest coming out of his mouth. “Afterwards, you developed an erratic behaviour and began to harm the people you came close with -- your friends. You were sent here to be cured ---” “That’s bullshit,” he interjected the doctor. “I wouldn’t do that to Stacey, ever.” “We’ve had this same conversation,” the doctor’s voice was gentle, familiar that it was almost soothing. It made him want to listen to him more, because it seemed as if he had listened to his words before and they had made sense -- what? Anthony’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “Let’s watch that video again.” He picked up the remote control on his desk, switching on the television at the side of the room. Unwillingly, he turned to look at the screen. His younger siblings appeared; his sister explaining to the interviewer about what had happened. They had gone for a swim at a river, and he had held her underwater -- almost killing her -- until Joshua came just in time to stop him. Now, she was telling the camera that she hoped to see him again as a changed person. “The guilt that you must’ve felt was overwhelming that you decided to fabricate a story that you’re a healer to ease it,” the therapist’s voice spoke up again. “Do you understand now?” He felt numb, unable to string his words to defend himself. Somehow, this made sense. It was supposed to make sense. That was why he was here. Anthony lowered his head, overwhelmed by guilt. “Yes.” “It always takes time for it to sink in,” the doctor assured him. “I’ll let you think about it some more. Now, Moira -- would you like to talk about your mother?” Everything was coming faster now. Anthony was sinking in on himself before her eyes, before the evidence of his own sister on celluloid, replayable ad infinitum, irrefutable. And yet when the doctor--Dr Morrow, Moira saw, his nametag suddenly jumping into sharp relief--turned to her, she whipped her attention from the television almost instantly. She felt closer to surrounding stimuli now, as though she was actually levering herself into a mental standing position, where yesterday she’d been nothing but a nodding mute. Still, the doctor knew about her mother. IVI officials had never made her discuss Eileen in group, acquiescing early to her pleas her teammates not know the guilty monster she was, and her promises to process it individually. Panic rose in her throat faster than she could swallow it. “No. You don’t--you can’t.” The doctor looked so kind, just then. “Now, Moira, we know this is a painful process, but try to remember what we’ve discussed. Bringing this out into the open will start your healing. Anthony has shared his past--don’t you think he deserves that same trust from you?” Her breath quickened, and her hands had gone white where she gripped the edge of her chair. “Remember, Moira? You agreed to talk about this weeks ago. You’ve always been one of our best patients. It’s time to cooperate again. It’s time to talk about Eileen. It’s--” “Don’t.” Her eyes had gone wide in fear, but her gaze was steady. She was rising to the surface. “You don’t get to talk about my family. I never--I never meant to hurt Ma. I went through this in London, and Edinburgh, and they know, they know it wasn’t me, they know--they know I didn’t mean...I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. ” Her tears were coming now, two fat, hot beads down each cheek. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Anthony, but all she could imagine was his abject horror. “I didn’t mean to,” she eked out, talking more to her teammate than the doctor. “I was sixteen, I didn’t even understand what being a Vol was, and she snuck up on me. I made her stop breathing, stop moving. It was over so fast. It was my birthday, I didn’t--she was my ma, Anthony, I’d never have done it if I had control. ” The faces of her brother and father swam into the foreground, and she’d have started sobbing save for the intervention of Dr. Morrow’s suddenly-impatient demand. “Moira, that’s quite enough.” The doctor had risen to his feet, and his kind face had gone abruptly red. “I’m sorry I have to raise my voice, but I thought you’d been making such progress. You know these lies will only set you back. Admit it to yourself!” As he advanced, the pitch of his voice shot skyward, and the room seemed to blacken behind him. He raised a finger and came still closer, shaking it slowly. “You know the truth. You killed your mother in cold blood. You knew your brothers were her favorites. You knew your father didn’t care for you. You knew they only saw your expensive athletic ambitions and anxieties as the domain of a silly, little, girl. This was the only way, for you. And when it was finished, you couldn’t live with the guilt of what your psychotic selfishness had wrought. This is why you are here. ” Morrow dropped a folder of pictures at her feet where they fanned out at random on the floor, exposures with the harsh light of a police flashbulb. A sheet hastily draped over a woman’s prone form. Red hair curling out from beneath the frayed edge. Blood spattered against the white material. Moira herself being escorted away in cuffs. Her weeping father clutching her brothers to his breast. “Wait.” Moira said, finding her voice again. “There was never any blood. I know there was never any blood. I know it.” Haltering, as if she hadn’t used her legs in years, she found her feet. “You’re lying. My family are everything to me. Do you know how often I wished it hadn’t been my fault? How I bargained with God to make her have died in a car accident, if it meant it wasn’t me that killed her? Do you know I feel like fecking scum to say that out loud? Things were perfect before that morning. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy. We loved each other. I took that away from Da, Daniel, Graham. I did that. I’ve accepted that. But before, I’d have JUMPED to go live in some version of the world where I hadn’t been responsible, even if I knew it was just pretend. But I didn’t murder her, not on purpose, not like you say. The last three years have been a nightmare, hell on earth, not a bloody delusion! They’ve been worse than anything I could make up.” She was shouting, now, distantly realizing how mad she sounded, but unable to care. It was spilling from her like an avalanche. Her throat burned, as though her voice was protesting from lack of use. “You’re a fraud! Tell me where we are! What have you done with the rest of them? What was in that water? Who are you? Show me my family!” The nurses swept in like a faceless storm, and pinned Moira’s arms behind her back. She felt a hot sting at the back of her neck, and suddenly the world was swimming into darkness again. “Anthony--Anthony please, you aren’t a killer. I know...” but they were already frogmarching her away. Silence dropped over the room, until the doctor spoke to his last remaining charge. “I’m so sorry for that, Anthony. Just last week she was doing so well, even helping you understand what you’d done. But it’s always harder to face ourselves, now, isn’t it?” Moira wouldn’t kill her mother. Anthony believed that – he knew that she was telling the truth. The Moira he knew was sensitive, kind and cared for her friends; she was his teammate, was a fellow sports enthusiast, who was liked by everyone in their team. He wanted to move from his seat to help her, wanting to stop them from taking her away. You aren’t a killer. Her voice echoed in his mind, trying to pry him away from the video he had watched, from what the therapist had told him. At the same time, he found himself being swayed to Morrow. It was hard to face who you really were, and at that moment, he wasn’t sure who he was. He was overwhelmed with this new reality that was brought on to him, it was like trying to touch a surface that was real and yet unreal at the same time. His silence brought the doctor to his feet, and he walked around the boy, hands placed on his shoulder in a reassuring way. This felt familiar, too. “I know that you can get through this, Anthony. You can trust me -- tell me anything you want. We’ve done this before.” Shutting his eyes briefly as he inhaled and exhaled to calm himself down, Anthony opened them again once he arranged his muddled thoughts. He was supposed to accept this, and yet there was still a part of him that wasn’t willing to. “What about--” his voice was hoarse. “What about the rest of our memories --” Anthony thought of the Swans; the easygoing Benjie and Benjamin, Carter who was good at giving advice about girls, Ethan with his quiet humour, Claudia who he had deemed as an evil mastermind, Lilja, who had joined him making marshmallows, Coralie who didn’t mind being buried in the sand at the beach, Javier who always made sure that everyone was taken care of, Mariana, the responsible, no-nonsense one, Carmela who always seemed enthusiastic, Savannah, who made a promise to to keep him updated about her crush not a while back, Sel, who used to make the most amazing drinks for them back before he was caught by the school; he thought of Julian, his roommate who liked to watch shows Anthony had never heard before and shared the same bemusement whenever their room ended up cluttered; and then he thought of Chelsea, remembering their first date and how they kissed and he was certain that it had happened. It had to have happened. “--they feel so real.” The doctor leaned down to whisper in his ear, “They were real in your mind.” |