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Title: One
Disclaimer: Don’t own them.
Universe: DCU
Rating: PG/R
Prompt: One
Table: Here
Word Count: 549
Characters: OC, Rogues Gallery.
Summary: A former doctor muses over his past
As it turned out, there was a support group – two in fact. One was for former employees who wanted to share their experiences, talk about what had happened to them. The other one was for relatives of dead employees who had lost their loved ones to Arkham and its darkened halls.
Doctor Joseph Steiner didn’t know which group he was applicable for.
He had worked at Arkham. But he hadn’t been traumatised by his experiences, nor physically maimed in any way…
No. He had lost the most precious thing in his life: His family.
Sandra, his beautiful wife; the woman he had loved so brilliantly, so fiercely, since college; she who had given birth to the apple of his eye. His baby girl, the light of his universe, flickered out in an instant…
The night of the breakout…
He was alone. Utterly alone in the world. Oh, ashen-faced relatives sometimes came to see him, to stare at him woodenly; his former colleagues would visit, saying all the wrong things, unable to stop spouting patronizing clichés.
He was alone and he was at fault. He had chosen to seek employment at Arkham despite the warning. He hadn’t understood the risks.
There were only three types of people who worked at the asylum: the naïve, the incompetent, and the arrogant. And how arrogant he’d been in his conviction that he was going to cure them all, somehow going to succeed where countless others had failed before him.
However, little by little, day by day, he begun to understand his folly. The inmates of Arkham were not merely insane. They were monsters. Monsters in human form.
The way Ivy’s eyes danced when she spoke of her victims; her unbridled joy when she described their screams as digestive enzymes hit their nervous systems….
The way Zsaz eyes burned; the way he stared at him, through him….
They all stayed with him. Haunting him. Their gleeful expressions branded into his brain. Keeping him awake at night and broken during the day.
But it was Mad Hatter who terrified him the most. Carnal evil obscured by a bland face and a kind smile.
Joseph had been planning to leave by the time of the break out…
He still remembered the alarms screeching, being dragged by urgent, frightened hands to the panic room…
He remembered the barely suppressed hysterics from his colleagues as they listened to the asylum being destroyed outside the sanctuary’s walls, their tears as they co-workers cried out their last…
He remembered the eventual silence from outside the haven and within….
He remembered vomiting upon the discovery of the missing personnel files…
He didn’t remember beating the monsters to his home, amid the chaos, his face wet with tears and mucus…
He remembered his joy upon discovering his family were alive, his instant despair when he realized they were already dead – it was only a matter of time. He couldn’t protect them from the monsters. He owned no guns, no bat signal, the phone lines were dead; there was nowhere to take them.
But he had to protect them. Protect Jessica from Hatter’s smile and outstretched hand. Protect Sandra from Zsaz tapping at the window.
So he saved them. Put them far beyond the reach of any monster.
The others don’t, can’t and won’t understand this….
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