The Universe's Mixer

Things had been weird. Ted felt weird. If he turned his head too quickly, things started to tilt. It wasn't quite being dizzy, he knew that feeling. But it definitely wasn't what things should normally do.

It had been a while since he'd lost count of the days. Counting had been automatic. He'd been locked up before, he knew that. He hadn't liked it before, he knew that too. But this was different. They gave him jell-o here. They let him have a nice bed. They let him roam around. The food wasn't horrible. He had little slippers that were fuzzy and warm, and a pair of jammies that were comfortable. On the days when he was cold, he had a nice warm fuzzy robe to wear that matched the slippers.

He couldn't be sure what he was doing in this place, however. He recalled no trial. He didn't even remember being brought in. Just that he was here. The days passed, and he was still here.

A few times he thought he recognized people. But he was never sure enough to go introduce himself. Or ask them. Mostly, he just looked. Ted watched, and he kept to himself. That seemed like the best thing to do. Safest. He was abnormally concerned with safety, he realized. Nobody else seemed to be as worried about certain things as he was. He'd ask if certain things were safe, or if he was going to have a guard when he did some things - like shower, and they obliged him. Though it didn't seem to him that they took him very seriously.

Ted sat in a chair in the cafeteria where he ate his meals every day and watched other people while he ate a bowl of red jell-o. Thinking about being in this place. Thinking about not being in this place. Thinking about getting some more jell-o.

Buffy Summers spent the majority of her time at Arkham Asylum in a catatonic state. Each day a pair of orderlies would bring her out into the commons, seating her at a table. The young woman spent hours in her chair completely motionless, frozen with her face arranged in a troubled expression. She looked so concerned, so deep in thought until, usually another patient with a sense of humor, took her arms and posed her ridiculously-- positions Buffy could hold the entire day until she was put back in her cell for the night.

Most days Buffy was silent. There were rare occasions, however, when the slayer would say some meaningless phrase, repeated over the course of the day. Phrases like, My skin should crack and peel, or, Don't give me songs. Sometimes she merely repeated what was said to her.

Every two hours, a nurse would attend to the slayer, taking a needle to her arm and injecting her with an unknown substance. Except today.

Today, Buffy was left alone in the commons for four hours. After missing two doses of the drug cocktail she was regularly given, her eyes fluttered open as if waking for the first time. She placed a hand on her head suffering from throbbing pain and intense light sensitivity. For the first time since Buffy had been placed in the asylum she was able to process her surroundings, of the people next to her. She looked down at the white linen clothing she wore, unable to recall when she'd been dressed.

"Where am I?" Only after she asked did the slayer power through her migraine to see if someone nearby could answer her question.

The fragile seeming woman hung there. Her arms pinned to sturdy T form by cold iron. Her hands encased in the same iron, all the way up to her elbows. She hung there, her head bowed forward. Surely something kept her up. Sheer willpower? A band of iron under her pj top encircled her waist, which gave some support, but very little. An IV had been connected at her neck, but what was dripping through the line was anyone's guess. Drip, drip, drip.

"She eats children like you." Her voice had a scratch to it; the scratch spoke of anger, knowledge, and age. It had a hollowness to it of distance. "She builds a house and eats children. I never ate the children. I don't eat children. Children are stringy. They smell like sour milk."

Drip, drip, drip. Scratch, scratch, scratch. One would think that a hospital facility such as Arkham would be cleaner. One would think that rats wouldn't scurry by, settle at the woman's feet. One would think that the doctors and orderlies would keep spiders out of the woman's hair, off her body, away from her clothes. One would think that the woman would actually complain, but she seemed more intent on making sure people understood that she was not the one who ate the children. One would think that the orderlies would actually be concerned, but the woman wasn't any different from the rest of the current inmates. Sure, she was hanging there encased in iron, drugged to the gills, but she wasn't any different. She wasn't special. She wasn't a danger.

"You can't have my cabin. I hate it, but it's mine. Mine. No one else's but mine." She had only a few topics of discussion, this woman hanging there. She'd go into great detail about the cabin, giggling now and then because she'd never tell how anyone could get in. It was her secret. Only she would know. Not even that Totenkinder bitch would find out. Drip, drip, drip.

Whenever the woman got a little too worked up, they'd up the dosage, change how much was getting into her system. Her body refused to settle; oh, it didn't change, but there was a feeling of age and youth all at once that could be unsettling. She didn't seem to be that lonely, what with the spiders and the rats always coming to visit. Yet, he staff were careful. They'd put her out of the way. Locked away with only a doctor to watch her, to record her ramblings then leave. Drip, drip, drip.

The crone, Baba Yaga, was caught again.

On the top possible floor of Arkham Asylum, Lestat de Lioncourt sat in a ball on the bare floor, several doors between him and the hallway.

The vampire resented this. He resented being put here. He felt punished.

Very punished. And he had the nagging thought, again... of what might happen if irresponsible people got a piece of his hair, a shred of his skin. He remembered giving Spike a hard time for being caught by that Initiative operation, and locked up. How irresponsible that had been. And now here he was.

Lestat didn't remember arriving here. He credited the City with amazing innovation, to sneak up on him. There was a gap in his memory that didn't make sense to him, and then he was here. There were chains attached to the wall, chains he recognized, but it didn't seem possible... these were the chains made from Maharet's hair, long and red and thick, braids of amazing strength. He might be able to break metal, but he couldn't break Maharet. And his wrists were in the chains, and he didn't know how in the name of anything THAT had come to pass.

They bled him.

They cut his wrists. The wounds closed almost instantly and he'd laughed. They did it until he'd lost a fair amount of blood. Weak, now, an orderly came in, keeping great distance, a cup on the end of a long pole presented with a straw in it. Blood.

Lestat's eyebrow had risen. He wasn't so weak and stupid he wouldn't read the orderly's mind, and the City couldn't find enough people capable of locking their minds down from him to hide everything it should've been hiding.

Dead blood. Taken from a corpse being embalmed for burial outside of the asylum.

Lestat laughed, then. Loudly, hysterically. "Get out," he'd commanded, as commanding as he could be in his current state. "I don't drink from the dead."

He'd stopped laughing and glared, and smiled at the kid. The orderly left.

Lestat listened carefully to the amount of door clicks as the footsteps faded.

He was very far from anything but these chains.

The iv in Lorne's arm dispensed an orange liquid. When the nurse changed the plastic bags full of the orange liquid, the change neither stung nor smelled like oranges.

His room had a nice big window and a view of the courtyard, and it seemed to only be the second floor. He got to leave, sometimes, and chatter with the nurses at the nurses station. He got to walk around, taking his iv on a little wheeled trolly with him, and watch TV in the common room. He got to sing if he felt like it, which hadn't been too often, but Lorne knew he'd done it and the acoustics were lovely here.

He couldn't tell when he'd gotten here, or how. Hadn't he just been with Angel? He didn't know. The orange stuff kept him in a state akin to human drunkenness--just out of it enough not to put two and two together, but his empathic abilities not really impeded. Asylum orderlies made sure to give him sleeping meds, too... they knew, somehow, what depriving Lorne of sleep would do and weren't prepared to deal with it.

As long as everyone was nice to him, Lorne didn't seem to mind what was going on. No one sang here, but him, and no one really hummed--at least not orderlies or nurses.

His connection to the Powers that Be was effectively severed. Lorne was just a green demon that liked to sing and picked up on the moods of others.

Today he stood in the hallway chatting up a pretty nurse named Emily, talking all about Judy Garland's career.

"Emily, do you think we could get a copy of 'The Wizard of Oz' out in the common room?" He didn't quite ask her with as much brightness in his voice as was normal, but it was close.

Emily considered. "Uh, I'll see what I can do, alright?" She didn't see the harm in it. It was just a movie. And Lorne would just sing, and the others would ignore it. No one had even asked why he was green, or what was wrong with him.

"That'd be swell, sweetie," Lorne said, walking past her and continuing down the hall. There was a library room down to the left, and he meant to find it.

In the first five minutes after waking, Wanda had destroyed her room, a huge swath of the hallway, and the nurse's station near the elevator. Four orderlies had been hurt as the ceiling collapsed above them; it had taken two more and a nurse to restrain her and still her hands. The glow around her fingers subsided once she'd lost the ability to move. The chaos stopped.

( Apparently, they'd made a mistake in her dosage. )

It had taken the hospital staff a while to decide what to do with the Doctor. He wasn’t the only unusual patient in Arkham – they’d seen everything from supervillains to the undead - but when it came to anatomy, he was unlike the others. The Doctor was not human, or at least not a variant that the medical staff recognized. He’d woken the first night after his abduction, confused but lucid, hours earlier than expected. He metabolized the normal dosage for his height and body weight in half the regular time, so they’d increased the medication.

( It had almost killed him. )

Sarah Bailey was staring off in the distance, sitting on the ground with her arms hugging her legs. Her chin was resting on her knees, her back pressed against the wall in the inner courtyard. A rather childlike yet comfortable position as she watched the other patients, vaguely aware they were there. The drugs kept the witch’s mind and memory fuzzy to the point that Sarah thought she was still in Saint Francis Memorial Hospital. That was the name of the hospital her father had brought her after Sarah had slit her wrists back in San Francisco. Her mind had made the logical assumption she was still there.

Occasionally Sarah wondered about this as she didn’t remember there being quite so many people here before or that the hospital was so large. The dreams she had also troubled Sarah as well, dreams of girls who could fly, being able to change her appearance with a gesture, a troubled boy and lightening, always lightening. Sometimes she wondered if these dreams had been real but such thoughts usually went away after the nurses gave her the daily dosage of sedatives.

She was one of the quieter patients who never made a fuss, not even after she had first woken up in the hospital. Being in a psychiatric hospital had been too familiar for Sarah and though she had power, it was not in Sarah’s nature to lash out unprovoked. There had been no need to restrain the witch for long and the drugs she had been given had made it impossible for Sarah to concentrate long enough to use her powers. In fact, Sarah had forgotten all about her powers and believed it was part of the hallucinations she suffered. A strangely comforting belief for if the powers were a hallucination then Sarah had nothing to feel guilty about. She hadn't done anything wrong and the boy, Chris, he wasn’t real so she couldn’t have killed him.

As for why Sarah was sitting outside by herself, she was seeking some peace and quiet. The television in the common room had been too loud for her tastes and she liked being outside more than she liked being cooped up inside. It was comforting to feel the ground beneath her, to feel the air on her skin. She felt connected which Sarah knew was insane. How could she feel connected to the earth? The thought made her chuckle and Sarah muttered to herself, “Crazy new age bullshit”. Naturally that would be when Sarah realized someone was approaching, just as she was talking to herself like a nut job. “I’m not crazy”, she said to stranger as though she sensed the accusation coming. Too bad Sarah didn’t quite believe her own words.

They had learned quickly that Hannibal Lecter wasn't one to be trusted. They had learned quickly that despite the medications they gave him, he was still quite lucid. They had learned quickly that he didn't like his situation. They had learned quickly that he could be very violent.

At one point, Hannibal had bitten the hand of a doctor. Not a simple, easy bite, either. He had ripped off the flesh all the way to the bone. Devouring muscle and paralyzing a hand that had only been trying to make him more comfortable. An unknowing nurse who had not before worked with Hannibal was the next victim. She had bent over him from the opposite side of the bed he was strapped down to, and he had opened her neck with his teeth.

They tried many drugs, but they all wore off too quickly. He gave them a sense of paranoia when entering his room. When they wanted to work on him, when they wanted to help him get clean, they had to almost overdose him with medication and work very quickly. There were always four of them. They all had a task to complete so that they could focus only on what they were doing. Only the most trusted of doctors and nurses, only the most responsible, were allowed to work with Hannibal Lecter.

He was not allowed out of his room. He was not allowed visitors. He was not allowed any of the freedoms that other patients had. His room was lined heavily so that he could do no damage to himself, not that it seemed to them he would hurt himself. It was also so that he could not hurt those who were caring for him with body checks or quick movements. They had put him into the straight jacket early on, leery of letting him have access to his hands. The mouth guard had come only after the second biting incident, when they felt badly knowing they could have prevented the nurse's death if they'd done it right after the first.

Hannibal was also strapped down to the bed. A plain metal thing that was more autopsy table than bed. Tightly. They had brought in a second set of straps just to be sure. The young man seemed to possess an extraordinary strength. Nothing like some of the others that were in here, but far more than an average human. He was strapped down, and still he would thrash sometimes. He would appear calm and when he was approached, his whole body would tense like a cat, and he would try to attack. It scared the staff even with him so restrained.

All of his food was liquid, so they didn't have to take the mask off to feed him. When they cleaned him, they kept him strapped down. The jacket didn't come off. His lower half was the only thing exposed fully to the water. It disgusted him that he had to spend hours in filth because they had only given him a catheter and nothing to resolve other issues.

He was treated like an animal. Many of those who came to tend to him used earplugs or headphones if it wasn't something that needed the direction or assurance of others. They didn't want to hear him talk. His voice was too soothing, his words too convincing. Even in the haze of heavy medication, he could still weave a spell with that voice, almost getting his way a few times in the early days before they'd all learned.

When he was alone in the room, he was perfectly still. He was not there, it seemed to them. When he was alone, Hannibal retreated into his mind palace. He thought of River and wondered where she was. He viewed pictures of her, relived interactions with her. His whole life played before him. He visited the museum in his head and was quiet.

Claustrophobia was a feeling that Spock was unaccustomed to. He was usually so calm. So composed. So rigid in his mannerisms and in his thoughts. But something in him had changed since he'd awoken to find himself trapped. Isolated. Restrained. Drugged. How very human of his captors to use internal medications on him. On a physiology that might not have been made for such medications. It brought out the very essence of his Vulcan nature. It tore at his logic, created waves in his mental sea of unwavering strength. He wanted to lash out in anger. In frustration. He wanted to be rashly emotional. He wanted to be violent. And he could feel his heart beating rapidly in his chest in response to this destruction of his emotional barrier. A barrier that his mind worked feverishly to repair.

His species was not meant for this kind of confinement. It tasted bitter in his mouth. He felt like he was tiptoeing around an alter-ego of his own making. The inner Spock. The true Spock. The Spock that wanted to give in to both his illogical human and feral Vulcan tendencies. He didn't know how long he could control himself like this. He wanted to beg his captors to keep him sedated. To knock him out of his conscious mind. In slumber, he might be able to fight it off longer. But he couldn't. Another one of his human emotions prevented him from calling out to the ones who had put him in this place. And this was an emotion he could deal with the least.

Pride.
( For the first time since arriving in The City, he felt sad. )

Norman. Wake up!

Groggy. Confused. Lost. Everything was blurry. Norman just wanted to roll over and lie on his side. He wanted to continue sleeping. But he couldn't roll over. And the voice was loud in his mind. Loud and screeching.

Wake up, you rotten, good-for-nothing, worthless, child! Would you dare disobey your Mother?!

Norman mumbled something indecipherable. His head was like a cloud. A fluffy cloud floating through a cheese grater. He didn't know where he was. He barely knew what he was. He only knew that he was asleep. And when he was asleep, Norman was at peace. He was happy. He had solace. But the voice continued. It grew louder and more insistent. Then the voice began to have form and Norman knew that he couldn't ignore it any longer. It was too dangerous to ignore that voice.

"M-m-mmother...?"
( His eyes slowly opened. )

"Doctor."

"Doctor."

"Doctor."

"Doctor....Wait a minute. He's not a doctor."

"Just humor him." The staff seemed more than willing to play along with one of the inmates. One who seemed to believe he really was a doctor. ( Actually he was, but that was a whole other kettle of fish. )

Eleven steps to the door, turn left four steps and down two flights. It wasn't the entire key to this place, but it was a start. Frank felt the effects of anti-psychotics coursing through him. Little firemen, designed to quench the flames that burned inside his mind for so long. How nice of them.

The frontal assault did not quite work as intended. It took The Punisher four seconds to make it to the stairs... sorry about the neck Doctor. Another nine seconds down the stairs, the last two after the taser hit him on the back. Fuck... plan B.

Torture and interrogation were nothing new to Castle. Sure they called it "therapy" and "counseling." Same difference. If the CIA, the GRU, and Vietcong could not break him, there was no way bipedial pill dispensors asking him how he felt about his mother would get anything accomplished. Ask him about his wife and children one more time. The clipboard would do the job quite adequately... later.

Smile and wave, tell them what they want to believe. The door gets closer, and burning this place to the ground could wait a couple more days. If he played nice he would get group therapy. Frank simply couldn't wait for that.

It was dark, and then it was bright.

River was scared, when she was capable of fright. She was enraged all of the time.

Her room was not big. It didn't need to be, because she was too dangerous not to be kept in restraints. They'd known that when they came to take her. River could remember parts of that, the taking. She'd been leaving rehearsal, her ballet bag on her shoulder. A van had pulled up, men had gotten out. One of them shot her with a dart, and the dart hit her neck. After that, everything was fuzzy. River didn't blame herself, however. The man was blank. There was something wrong with the man.

And that part didn't matter so much now, anyway.

The light on the ceiling was very bright when it was on, and River knew the drugs she was on made it seem brighter.

She knew, from a doctor, a doctor that came in and measured her heartbeats, measured her brainwaves, stuck needles into her arm and into her temples, made her scream, that she'd come into this room limp and doll-like. Orderlies had removed her clothes and left her thermal strips of fabric were strategically placed across her chest and abdomen, covering the relevant areas. She'd been placed on a slab, something like a gurney, and restraints slapped on her wrists and ankles, then her hips and shoulders, and one on her head. The one on her head was bolted to the floor and made of metal. It felt to River like a cold helmet.

It had sensors in it. They were mapping her brain activity. Simon had tried this a few times, with better equipment.

She'd woken up after her arrival already strapped down, already mostly naked, laying there in the dark. She could hear a pen scratching. When the light went on, River glared at the note scribbler. Two needles went into her arm at different points and River yelled. Her veins felt like ice, then fire, and then finally River couldn't think much anymore. Her brain felt like.. like it had before she met John Coffey. River knew this wasn't permanent, and that the doctors here did this to be sure she couldn't hurt them.

Because they used words like lethal when they described her. Weapon. Brilliant. Amazing. Dangerous.

They never let her off of the gurney fully conscious. The cocktail of drugs would be allowed to wain until she could stand on her own, weakly. Then two orderlies would undo the restraints, beginning with her head, stand her up, wash her, reclothe her, and put her back. There was a drain in the floor for the water and a shower nozzle on the far wall. She never left the room.

River didn't eat anything that didn't go through an IV into her arm. She knew the contents were high in sugar and that they meant to keep her weak.

Because when the lights went off...

... they tried everything they could to trigger her.

There were two doctors behind a glass panel. River could see the panel at her feet, like a window to a better world. She could see them conferring, nodding. Flashes of things would come to her, from them.... the posters hung around the City were things they knew to trigger her. River considered the word 'trigger' and struggled to keep coherent.

They would never stop picking.

One of the two doctors vanished from behind the glass, and River heard the door swing inward. She heard talk of her charts, of her cerebral cortex, of stimulating different parts of the brain until they got the right combination...

The doctor wore blue latex gloves.

River moved her mouth to say "hands of blue." No words came out.

She closed her eyes as a needle went into her neck and the lights went out. Behind her closed eyes, River could see Serenity. She could see Hannibal smiling at her. See Simon.

"Write that response down," the doctor said.

At the end of his first day of exploration, the Doctor finally found his way into the dining hall. Inside the cafeteria, he quickly discovered that there were benefits to being 'mad' - he could ask for strange flavor combinations without any back-talk or mockery from his dining companions. After loading a tray with a slice of pizza (pepperoni with strange green peppers), a bowl of lime gelatin, and baked beans, he found himself a seat at a table. There, he proceeded to alternate bites of each dish.

It wasn't good. The beans were tolerable, but the peppers on the pizza tasted like fire dipped in brine and the jiggle of the green gelatin was downright terrifying. He turned the dessert dish upside down on his tray so that he wouldn't have to watch the mess swaying gently every time his knee bumped the table. Then he devoted his attention to picking the jalapenos from what remained of the slice of pie.

The Doctor felt uncomfortable and a little off - a mix of fatigue left over from all of the medical staff's tampering with his body chemistry, combined with the not-entirely-appetizing food. He knew that he needed to eat something, but honestly. If this was the main diet of the residents, no wonder they were ill.