InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "alice says..."

Laurel Lance (i_crylikeabird) wrote in we_coexist,
@ 2011-01-09 19:11:00

Entry tags:

dinah lance, harry dresden, in arkham

Arts & Crafts Time (open)
Something was missing. Dinah knew it the instant her eyes opened. She tried her voice and, while she could manage to croak out some words, she didn't seem to have access to her canary cry. Panic coursed through her, as she remembered another time when she'd lost her cry. Her hands were bound to the bed, but she struggled against the bonds to get to her stomach. When nothing gave way, she glanced down. For a second, she thought she saw a trail of blood, felt the phantom pains of being gutted so long ago.

"Breathe, Dinah," she muttered to herself.

When she was able to fight through the memories, she took stock of things. As far as she could tell, there was no pain, save for the cloth restraints that bit into her skin. But she'd felt worse. Far worse. There was no cut trailing from her collar to her waist, no broken bones, and nothing else damaged except for her voice.

It was only after a few days of nurses visiting her room and shoving pills down her throat that Dinah started to piece things together. The pills had muddled her mind, so she couldn't quite place how she'd gotten here. They also must have suppressed her vocal chords, because she felt no sign of damage beyond the fact that she just couldn't use them properly. It took a few more days for her to remind herself to focus on one of the nurse's ID tags when they entered to give her a meal and her daily dose of medicine. Arkham. But why? How? Something must have gone very wrong with her last mission, but she couldn't remember the details of the mission or how she might have ended up here.

Dinah realized that the only way out was to play along for the time being. She needed to earn their trust so she could get out of the restraints.

Once she began to play along, Dinah was allowed the freedom to walk around her room, and to take the meds on her own instead of having them forced down her throat. This allowed her to hide them under her tongue, so that slowly she regained her wits. The next step in the plan was simple. She needed to find a way to get a message out to Oracle. Barring that, she needed to break out of Arkham.

After all, how hard could it be? It seemed someone was always breaking out of Arkham... Somehow, the thought brought her little comfort.

A few days later, Dinah paced her room. They'd finally released her from her restraints, though they had yet to let her out of the room. She'd started to piece things together during her time of solitude. She'd decided that this couldn't be Arkham. Not really. After all, Barbara had eyes all over Gotham. If Dinah had mistakenly ended up in Arkham, Barbara would have already sent a team to extract her.

So if this wasn't Arkham, then where was she? Who was behind it, and why? The who and why were perhaps more important, but Dinah didn't like this sense of being trapped somewhere without any idea as to where she actually was.

And that was always where her thoughts fell right back into the same loop. She might have been able to get out of taking a few of the pills they gave to her, but she hadn't been able to miss every dose, and there was still whatever they injected into her every few hours. All of that served to keep her mind in a perpetual state of confusion, as though the answers were right there, and yet she couldn't quite reach far enough.

The door opened and a kind-faced nurse grinned at her.

"You've been such a model patient lately, dear. The doctors have decided to allow you out for arts and crafts." Her voice indicated that Dinah was receiving a great treat.

Dinah stared at the woman as if she was, well, mad. Arts and crafts? She didn't paint, crochet, or anything else one might find in an arts and crafts class. She opened her mouth to tell the woman this, and then realized that this was her chance to get out of the room and hopefully learn more about her surroundings.

"Great," she said with a strained smile.

The nurse led her down the hallway, which oddly enough did look like one of Arkham's hallways. Dinah frowned, though she reassured herself that anyone could have recreated the design of the building. If they really wanted to make her believe she was inside Arkham, there's no telling what they might have done to pull this off.

It still didn't quite add up, but Dinah's thoughts were distracted as the nurse deposited her in the arts and crafts room in front of an easel. Dinah glanced around the room at the rest of the patients, some of whom were painting away happily and some of whom seemed just as perturbed as she was to be shoved into this situation.

She sighed and picked up a paint brush, forcing a grin. The nurse seemed satisfied with this and patted her on the shoulder.

"Have fun, honey. Someone will be back to collect you in an hour for lunch."

The nurse gone, Dinah took the chance to look around at her surroundings. From the view out of the one tiny window in the room, she would guess they were on the third or fourth floor. The room had one exit, and it was flanked by large orderlies. If she was at full strength and not drugged, she could easily have taken them out. But for now, she would just have to content herself to watch and learn more.

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i_wizard
2011-01-11 05:22 pm UTC (link)

Harry didn't have much in the way of artistic talent. He saw other patients trying to make some kind of design on the canvas, and knew it wasn't what he could do. Instead, he just started slapping his brush against the canvas, watching the rest of the room while his hand did whatever it wanted. He didn't bother to fake a smile like the woman they had just led in.

When he finally looked at the canvas, he froze. For whatever reason, he'd painted Lasciel's sigil on the canvas. Three lines, thick with color, in a shape reminiscent of an hourglass. Harry let out a choked sound, then picked up one of the full bottles of paint and dumped it over the canvas, destroying the sigil and splattering his own crisp white clothes with orange paint.

When one of the orderlies came and put a hand on his arm, to stop the outburst, Harry turned and blinked at him. Oh, yeah. I'm supposed to be crazy. He tilted his head, blinked innocently and said, "It was looking at me. I had to stop it."

The orderly sighed, patted him on the shoulder, and told him to clean up the mess. When the man turned away, Harry rolled his eyes. He glanced at the woman beside him. "I didn't get paint on you, did I?"

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i_crylikeabird
2011-01-12 02:47 am UTC (link)

Dinah looked up in alarm at the sound of paint spattering. She raised an eyebrow at the man next to her, who insisted in a relatively sane and possibly even sarcastic voice, that the painting had been looking at him. And then as the orderly turned away, she watched the man roll his eyes.

So perhaps she wasn't the only one who didn't belong in here.

As the man addressed her, Dinah took a rag and wiped off the lone drop of paint that had splattered on her arm.

"Not too much. For what it's worth, I don't think I'll be painting anything worth seeing either." Her lips curved into a half-smile, though she realized that she might just as well have imagined the sarcasm and eye-rolling and might, in fact, be addressing someone who was genuinely crazy.