[attr="class","frphoeimg"]

[attr="class","frphoetab"]
[PTabbedContent]



[PTab=]



[/PTab={background-color:transparent;width:400px;height:120px;padding:0px!important;margin:-23px -3px -3px -3px;position:absolute;z-index:0;}]
[PTab=]

[/PTab={background-color:transparent;width:400px;height:120px;padding:0px!important;margin:-23px -3px -3px -3px;position:absolute;z-index:0;}]
[PTab=]

[/PTab={background-color:transparent;width:400px;height:120px;padding:0px!important;margin:-23px -3px -3px -3px;position:absolute;z-index:0;}]
[/PTabbedContent={width:400px;background-color:transparent;height:120px;padding:0px!important;border:0px!important;margin-left:0px;margin-top:0px;text-align:justify;color:#494949;font-size:10px;animation:fade;}]

[attr="class","frphoetab2"]

[attr="class","frphoepost2"]







There were reasons, of course, that he hated going outdoors. He was a man of justifications, after all, one with an excuse for everything, an asterisk behind each action, each word. Never mind the smell of the filth of the city, the too-bright sun hanging low in the sky, the claustrophobia that came with pushing his way through the streets of one of the three last places to live in a region ripped up and raw, all valid reasons to sneer at the thought of leaving the comfort of his home-slash-base and tossing himself to the wolves of the wild. The reason that really mattered above all others were the eyes. Virtually everyone had them, a probability so high that it was guaranteed that at least one person would see him in passing any time he took his steps out into the light, and while there was nothing to say that people were, truly, looking at him, staring him down, peeling his outer layers down and down until all that was left was his bleeding, barren core, it didn't stop him from feeling that way. One face in the crowd to recognize him as the nameless gunman from before Imum's fall would be all it took to have him incarcerated once more. To have him back in that place again. (He didn't think he could make his escape a second time; all of the fortune he'd missed out on in his life prior had come back to give him his freedom the first time.) It didn't matter that Imum had fallen, that their existence and their influence and the proof of his crimes had made it to the public's knowledge: the law, filthy, rotten, had labelled him a traitor to the region he served, and the whole world who knew of who he was and what he had done thought him better off dead.[break][break]

The fear of them knowing once again was often too much for him to brave the trip. Often, his paranoia was unwarranted and his errands were run without trouble. Occasionally, something else would crop up that had him gritting his teeth, but never had the police been brought into the equation. Today, however, something very different gave him an entirely new reason to fear the city beyond his humble (read: crumbling) abode: namely a massive canine barreling his way and the helpless trainer that it dragged behind. "Look out!" had come the panicked cry of the woman in question, but it was a warning issued too late, and before he'd even had time to curse the heinous Doctor one last time, he was -[break][break]

[break]

White walls. White sheets. White mind.[break][break]

An asylum escape - a release from all of this - something he should have known was too good to be true. Nikki only had himself to blame, then, for the anguish that flooded through him upon waking up to his old prison after what must have been another idyllic dream. Good things didn't happen to people like him. For all of his trying and suffering, the mental ward was all he had to show for it.[break][break]

Sure enough, when he opened his eyes, the scenery was more or less the same as it always had been. There were differences, of course - the television screen appeared to have moved, perhaps was even a different model, and the tiny view afforded to him through the window was different. Sometime in his rest, as well, they appeared to have removed the steel bars that had sullied what may have been a picturesque scene, although a window that could inevitably used for a suicide would never slip by the personnels' ever watchful eyes. At the start of his time here, he'd considered that route: tearing the bars from the window, ripping it open, thrusting himself through the whole and letting his body splatter on concrete like goo (a kinder outcome than rotting away in here, certainly; the euthanasia he so craved), but he'd never had the strength in his fragile limbs to do it, and it wasn't even as though he'd ever had the choice, cuffed to the base of his bed. The fact that they had apparently moved him in his slumber, however, did not appear to change the one constant he wished to see the least: the face of a certain Sister Mary staring down at him from his bed side, the concern on her face falsified, the stream of accusations and curses on her tongue poised to strike from just behind her teeth. He saw her there when the blur of his eyes smeared the room and its details to a point he could only just barely make them - and her, by extension - out, but her presence was enough to elicit a pained groan from his lips. Go away, he begged silently, frightened of what the nurses would do to him if the words were spoken aloud. Aren't I suffering enough?[break][break]

She didn't go, of course. She wouldn't until the room was filled with his screams, and shortly after staff all jumping over themselves to quiet their unwanted menace to society. It'd be easier if he could ignore her, just turn on his side, and - oh sweet mother of Arceus, why did laying on his arm hurt so terribly. "Mew, fuck!" the hitman yelped and jumped, further than he should have been able to under ball and chain, more energized than the sedatives they held him under with would have ever allowed. And just like that, his surroundings snapped into focus: a hospital room around him, but not the sort of hospital he was used to, and a woman who looked so much like Mary he could cry sitting at his bedside, likely off put by the panic washing over him just moments after his awakening from slumber. In a sense, this should have been preferable. A medical hospital was not the mental hospital - there were be no sneering, no needles, no bars on windows and no straight coats to hold him down. But there were doctors here, cruel, greedy, the sort who could brainwash and betray and kill, kill, kill. Why was he here? His arm? Or was that just a pretense for wrapping him back up into a world of forced crime that he'd tried so hard to remove himself from?[break][break]

There was terror in his eyes, wild, feral as he looked at this nameless woman in the eyes. She was no nurse, that much was obvious - so why was she here? "Y-you - who are you? And why - why are we h-here?"