Chapter Text
You were fucked.
Not the typical fucked, no, this was the grandmaster of all fucks. So fucked that, if you were to put it in traditional, more carnal terms, you'd be fornicating with the devil.
One could hardly call you "traditional." You loved to stir the pot, as they say, even if you were damn sure you shouldn't be allowed in any metaphorical (or literal) kitchen. You wouldn't go so far as to call yourself a contrarian—people who couldn't go with the flow even if the fucking Nile sat there and begged them to were high on your list of undesirables. But alas, you thrived off a good conflict like a plant takes to a good fertilizer; like said plant you were full of shit, feeling real tall, and you've got a pretty good chance of being carnivorous.
"Care to tell me why you, before the goddamn sun was up, decided to rob a convenience store of all its whiskey?"
As the officer worked his brow between rough, calloused fingers, his tired, damn near bloodshot eyes regarded you with barely disguised contempt. You learned long ago to sit and bear it—rude looks became your ally long ago. To know you really, really got to someone, bothered them down to their very core, disturbed them with every ounce of your existence? Well, you found yourself smiling like it was third grade picture day. All innocence, all teeth, and not a care in the world.
You provided the best explanation you could.
"No ablah engless?"
"No hablo inglés," the officer corrected with an exasperated eye roll, his brow working turning into brow pummeling rather quickly.
Huh. New record.
"Rather interesting, considering you had a whole lot of colorful English vocabulary at your disposal during your arrest. Your arrest that you, if I may remind you, resisted to the point of damn near sedation. When will you realize," he slammed his hands down onto the table for emphasis, "this isn't a fucking joke anymore!"
I don't know, I'm finding this to be pretty damn hilarious.
"Assault, petty theft, public indecency," the latter caused you to just barely restrain a snort, "I'm doing the best I can to keep you out of prison but you're giving me just about no other option. Do you know what your family would've said to you now? What horror you'd see in their eyes, after all you've managed to do?"
There it was, the big shebang: the obligatory tug on your empathy strings. But for better or worse, those were cut and burned a long, long time ago. Empathy as a whole was a foreign concept to you, even before you became a "bad person." Where other children cried, you stared. Where other teenagers loved and lived, you stood motionless. Where other adults planned, created, and maintained, you lay a victim of horrors of your own creation, an intricate web of failure after failure and inadequacy after inadequacy until you were surely stuck like the idiot fly you were.
It wasn't entirely your fault.
People loved to call you that magical ten letter word: narcissist. It took all of your withering self restraint to not smack the smirk off their face, to tell them that "no, asshole, a narcissist isn't a quirky little synonym for someone you don't like. It's a serious fucking condition, one that deserves to be destigmatized like all the others." Then you'd follow up with, "I think more highly of myself than your average person, but that's because I know I'm the best. I have to be. If I'm not perfect, I don't live. I'm perfectly imperfect, imperfectly perfect, so yeah, maybe I am a narcissist. Maybe I am a bad person. Maybe I was the asshole all along. Maybe…"
Maybe you'd be better off leaving the rest of that out.
"This is your final, and I mean final, clean slate. I might lose my fucking job over this but you're sick in the head, we both know that. You're gonna be sent to a facility one last time, and if you don't start shaping up? That's the end of the line for you."
"Why, thank you, officer! Truly," you went the whole nine yards, fluttering eyelashes and all, "I am beyond grateful."
You respected mental health facilities. No, you adored them. To set out and do your best to make life better for even the most dangerous, the most misunderstood? That took guts, compassion, and a whole lot of patience.
Not all facilities are created equal. If you're born white and rich and just happen to get a little too honest about your depression with your physician, you get sent somewhere with painted walls with the handprints of all your friends along with eye-bleedingly bright rainbows, cute clothes, group meditation, reasonable and kind medication practices, compassionate staff…note the "white and rich."
You were neither.
You've been poor as shit for as far as you can recall being aware of money and its uses in everyday life, and you certainly weren't pale. You were born into a world that, when given the chance to go to a cop with either a loaded gun or some melanin, many would choose the gun. Luckily (note the sarcasm) for you, biology chose the melanin, told you to go fuck yourself, and here you were on your way to a cruel hybrid of police custody and mental health institution. Because go fucking figure.
They had injected you with a sort of sedative, but where you expected exhaustion you felt excruciating pain. Your head hurt, far too much. Your wrists ached against cold, unforgiving metal cuffs, sharp edges threatening to break skin with even the slightest of movements. Your seatbelt within the inmate transport vehicle you currently rode in had been tossed over you haphazardly—a tit out here, your neck out there, it was like a bad game of hokey pokey. You put your left tit in, you put your left tit out, you see the car start to spin, and you're shaken all about—
No. This was no laughing matter. You're funny as hell, your little song took you to a better place for a moment, but the familiar road down to the facility was still the same.
Better "shape up," huh? What a bunch of horseshit.
There is no "shaping up" for me. I can't keep myself away from a bottle to save my life. Away from any harmful substance, actually. It's all so alluring, all so tempting, to say fuck it to all biology and test my fate. I can't stay out of trouble because god fucking damnit trouble comes crying to me like I'm its mother. I don't give a damn about this world or the people in it, but everyone for a good fifty mile radius thinks I should. Thinks I can.
"I'm doing the best I can for you"?
The best anyone can do for me is to let me die.
At least, that's what was going through your head before it all. Remember your dumb little song about the car spinning, being shaken all about? It became all too real in a matter of seconds. As you began counting the trees off sheer boredom alone, a dark violet car rode up against the transport vehicle—far too close, far too fast. Their (likely illegal) black tinted windows reflected only your own fear as they rammed into you, the sound of screeching metal clawing its way through your senses as the vehicle began to spin.
Your driver barked out something to an assistant, something to an officer, something to whatever god he prayed would save him, but you'd never know what was said for as long as you'll live.
It was just two popped tires—two loud pops and it's all it took for the world to turn upside down, rapidly blurred colors of the world rippling and fading as the vehicle flipped. You couldn't tell what was up, what was down, how to breathe, who caused any of this—as the vehicle came to its final orientation on its roof, all you could hear was the ringing in your own ears, your blood rushing through your head and likely out of your body, and a loud, harsh set of whirs coming from some sort of machinery. You were soon bathed in a red light, squinted eyes shutting against its painful luminance. Oh, how your head hurt. Far, far too much.
"The target has been collected, Commander. Awaiting further instructions."
What the absolute fuck?
And then it all went dark.
You, according to absolutely every sense of the word, were fucked.