Post by maxinefox on Nov 9, 2011 20:04:53 GMT -5
Maxine remembers very little of who she once was, and what she has managed to cling to and reclaim are just fuzzy flashes that don't make sense. She remembers a great deal of the asylum but not why or how she ended up there. What she does know is that she was nine when she arrived, and this was preserved because she had befriended a girl her age who had been incarcerated within the same week.
Like everything, friendship was a rare and valuable commodity within that particular establishment that would inevitably be taken away. Her friend, who she knew by 8724, and she were forced into a supply closet by a couple of fellow patients wielding broken glass. For hours, they were raped and mutilated, and no matter how much they screamed for help, no one came. When they were eventually discovered, they were thrown into their cell without any treatment for their wounds.
8724 died in Maxine's arms and rotted there for a week before the doctor came to care for them. She barely survived herself. Shortly after she began to dream of vultures, and also to forget.
A year following the incident in the closet, Maxine met another patient that would change her life forever. His name was Caine, and he brought her to the rooftop of the asylum, where she saw trees for the first time in years. It woke up something that had either given up inside of her or had simply never been there. A burning desire to live and to have freedom was kindled that day, one that wouldn't be put out in the years that followed, through crippling surgeries and the screaming cacophony that was everyday life.
She had already aided Caine's escape long before her own, and in the meantime her sanity was leaking away. For months upon months she was locked in an isolated padded room and tied up in a straitjacket as punishment, helpless to defend herself when morally challenged orderlies came for her in the night. Shock therapy, hypnosis, forgetting... It never ended, and she was becoming aware of beaks and flashing lenses in the eye sockets of every nurse and doctor to approach her.
At last, as her arms were unbound and she was strapped down onto an operating table for a bleeding treatment, the administering doctor showed his true face, the human one tearing away like tissue paper. Frantic, she tore out his throat with her teeth as he leaned over to check the restraints. She fought her way out of her bounds and armed herself with a scalpel and a jar of leeches.
Maxine carved her freedom out of the flesh of a dozen medical workers in the middle of the night, because they had shown they were vultures and she could never unsee it.