Not Alice

"It says here your name is 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐀𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐧," he said then, his voice cold and matter-of-fact, having clearly had enough of their little game.

That however, made their eyes flicker up to him, expression still blank. The doctor sighed again and sat the chart aside. Silence fell over the room. If he'd been expecting more of a reaction, he wasn't about to get one right away. But the name had struck a chord in them. And in the deep blankness of their mind, a memory rose and tugged at their subconscious, begging to be acknowledged. If computers had been around then, they'd bet good money that their brain would have sounded like a fax machine in that moment, processing the new information with a mechanical type of precision.

Then after a few moments, their lips curled up into a smile, then a husky, broken chuckle exited their mouth from days of misuse. It was a weak sound, pathetic in nature but then the chuckle grew into a hoarse laugh, then an almighty cackle that seemed to echo in the dark, damp of their cell. And in the deep crevasse of their mindscape, a story unfolded and in disbelief, they barely realized that their mask of steel had fallen so far and a vulnerability as immense as this was showing on their face. And so they laughed. They laughed so hard that tears started streaming down their face. It went on for a long time but the doctor just watched then pulled out a large needle with a syringe filled with a clear fluid. He held it up for them to see, but they just laughed harder, their body shaking with the force of the hysteria they felt. Their body strained against the restraints and it wasn't long before they felt a pin prick in the corner of their elbow and their laughter slowly began to fade into breathy snickers. And on the edges of the calamity, they watched as the doctor looked upon them with sad eyes and left the room, vision blurring into darkness as reality came crashing down upon them.