|| Three Months Later: July 15, 2008 ||
Electricity. My body was on fire. The lights of the room in Arkham’s Intensive Treatment were beating straight down onto my face. I had lost track of the days that had passed since I had been admitted into Arkham Asylum. I was breathing heavily in order to try to stay awake, to remember things that had begun to start missing from my mind. Hours were beginning to pass that I didn’t even remember sleeping through. Sometimes, I would go through full days without even moving from the corner of my cell, and only remember to move to the bed when my body began to ache from sitting in the same place all day. I could feel the bones of my hips and ribs through my skin now, having not had a full stomach in months. It was as if my skin was starting to shrink. Whenever I saw my reflection, I appeared to be a shell of myself. My face had grown pale and shrunk so that my eyes appeared swollen. My lips were thin and pale almost all of the time. My hair had gotten long and began to go without proper care after a week. I was a complete skeleton, nearly dead already.
Lacerations had formed along my wrists over the old ones several times already after trying to escape the constant handcuffs that were placed on me whenever I was transferred to Intensive Treatment. This was two to three times a week, sometimes even four. After the first day, I learned that the man who had come into my room would be my psychologist, responsible for all of my treatment at Arkham Asylum. He had submitted me to electroshock therapy treatments, which gave permission for the visits to Intensive Treatment. Each time, I would be rendered unconscious with an anesthetic. Electricity would shock my brain several times until I began to seize. After this, I would sleep for hours on end, sometimes even a whole day. When I finally woke up, a different reaction would occur each time. Sometimes I vomited, other times I cried, and other times I had fits of anger that would not stop until I was bleeding somewhere from throwing things around the room in rage.
However, after I began to calm down following the treatments was when the personal visits from the psychologist began to occur. They were unscheduled, undocumented, and happened late at night when no one else was around except for the guards, who were ordered not to do anything unless necessary. Each time, the routine was the same. The door to my dark room would open, and I would see the light appear and disappear in a matter of seconds before the door closed again. Seconds would pass before I could feel the man pick me up off of the ground, or wherever I was, and threaten me before he would handcuff my hands to my bed. The first time I realized his intentions. I tried to fight back, to keep him from removing the pathetic excuse for clothing that I had been given. I screamed, louder than I thought I could, and nearly sliced my wrists open trying to get out of the chains that kept me still.
My body was not shown any mercy. I was beaten into complying with anything he wanted. The first time, he hurled me into unconsciousness before doing anything to me, because I will strong, still unbroken. But the more the weeks followed, the more I began to obey everything he said, do what he wanted, even remove the clothing myself. But I still screamed. It was the one thing he didn’t mind, simply because he knew the guards would never come to my rescue. No one would, which made me begin to understand what he had told me the first day. And I hated him for it, for being right.
But over the past few weeks, I had begun to think about the Joker, how he had simply left me in the courtroom to be captured and taken to this place. Why hadn’t he taken me with him to escape? I could have gone with him and made it out in time. The more I thought about it that way, the more I began to think about what I would be doing with him at different times of the day. And I realized I would rather have been chained to the table in the abandoned apartment, while he watched me, than anywhere near Arkham ever again. I even imagined different ways he could kill me. Guns, knives, poison, I was desperate for any of it whenever I heard the door to my cell open.
