The chief psychiatrist is seeing all the transfers.

He introduces himself to you but there’s no need. You recognise him from undergrad, from a guest lecture. The tinted glasses, the sharp suit. You remember thinking from the back of the lecture hall he might be the only person who could ever suit that beard.

Now you’re a foot away from him and he’s ushering you into his office, you smile at the fact it still suits him up close.

“Help yourself to water or tea, if you’d like.”

You pour some tea with your good arm, revealing the flickering candle under his teapot.

His chair must be a couple inches higher than yours. You have to look up at him even while both of you are seated, his eyes semi-obscured by the lenses of his glasses.

“How are your fractures?”

“Healing. That’s what’s important, right?”

“Yes, healing is very important. It’s what we do here and it’s how I hope to help you… and the other new patients, of course. An awful thing that happened to Gotham General.” He shakes his head. “We decided as a team that it would be best for me to handle the transfers. The other psychiatrists, they’re a little too limited by the walls of the institution — they don’t generally expect anyone to have a short stay in Arkham.”

You ask what makes him so sure this will be a short stay.

“Well, the ward at General is being rebuilt as we speak. I’m not sure if you’ll be discharged by then, transferred back into their care.”

“How long?”

“Well, we want to make sure you’re as sane and healthy as can be when you leave. I think, from your answers in this assessment, you might, on your own, come to understand how long you need to be here. I would like you to be able to know yourself by the time we’re finished here. And so, with that in mind, if we might cut to the chase… what brought you here?”

Your rehearsed responses dance on your tongue before evaporating.

“Well, that might be a little broad. What brought you to leap off your apartment building?”

Still voiceless, you swallow some of the tea to wet your throat, though it’s too warm for comfort. “I didn’t leap off.”

His brow raises. “Your roommates said something different. Why do you think that is?”

You haven’t heard from your roommates since the night you fell. Since then you’ve sent a barrage of texts and voicemails, tried calling from the monitored phones too, but none of them ever pick up.

“I’m pretty morbid with my roommates, you know? We all get it. We’re all grad students. Maybe they took something I said too seriously and that’s why they called it in the way they did.”

He nods. “You had an argument with them beforehand, yes?”

“I don’t really remember what it was about.”

There’s a flash in his eyes.

“I just remember storming up to the roof. I go up there for air sometimes. I think I fell because of the wind. Or I think I heard a gunshot.”

“But you’re not sure.” His brows furrow. “Why were you on the edge of the building if you were up there for air?”

“I watch the cars and people below. To calm down.”

“But... surely you could have done that without standing on the edge, risking overbalancing. You could have sat down on the edge.”

“At that height, when I’m standing, I can see the lights in my faculty building. I like to check if the lights are on in my supervisors’ offices.”

He looks at you and through you all at once.

“Because if they’re out there at that time of night, they must be as stressed as I am.”

“You want to feel seen, but you don’t feel you are visible to others.” He repositions, leans to one side in his chair. “Not in the way they might be visible to you.”

As he’s speaking, he nods slightly. You find yourself reciprocating, nodding with him, only to then shake your head.

“No, no. Not exactly. I don’t want to be seen. I want to be invisible. I don’t want them to know I’m vulnerable. I… just want to know they’re as vulnerable as I am.”

“What you’re describing sounds like a complicated way of asking for help, to not want to be seen by anyone, to not let anyone in, but to still want them to share their vulnerabilities with you. A privilege you did not give them in return.”

Your heart jumps.

“Well, I listen to my friends’ problems. They offer them. Maybe one or two of them know about mine, and that’s all I need.”

“Was falling four storeys a means of finally sharing your vulnerability guilt-free? For if you did not survive the fall, you would really be exposing nothing. To think of your weaknesses after your heart stopped would only be beating dead flesh. And if you did survive… you could always say it was an accident, that you fell.”

“You’re... not making a great case against suicide.”

“But you think that I am making a case against suicide. And that tells me everything that I need to know.” He leans forward, tilts his steepled fingers towards you. “I think your fall could be usefully reframed as the horizon of... something else. A rebirth. From this moment you faced death, and realised you wanted to live. There are many ways we can make that story true. With your consent, I would like to meet with you more regularly. Intensive psychotherapy would help you considerably with returning to the outside, at your best. Here.” He hands you a tissue from a box on his desk, and it’s only after taking it and thanking him that you notice your eyes are watering. “Now, if you did accept my offer, it would probably mean you would also spend longer here. This isn’t the kind of therapy you can rush.”

You press your lips together and swallow.

“I... don’t know if my insurance will cover more than the stay. Or even the stay. I couldn’t even get them to sign off on CBT.”

“Please. Think of it as a gift. Through this fortunate loophole, and of course the awful tragedy at Gotham General, you are now a guest of the state — with greater freedoms, of course. Now, speaking of gifts… I’d like all our new patients to be as comfortable as they can. Is there anything we can get for you here?”

“Thank you. Well, a notebook and pen would be good. And I guess if you could, there were these books for my thesis, and I was trying to call my roommates—”

“Oh, yes, you’re at Gotham University, aren’t you? I imagine you don’t want to hear this, but I would avoid thinking about work for now. You need to rest up. Spend time recovering. The world can wait a little longer for your thesis.”

“Then… could I take some tea to go?”

The next few weeks blur together. There are some general themes: mental understimulation, harsh water, hospital food with the metallic taste of underfunding. You come off the painkillers, you’ve started making your way through the limited books in the library, and you continue scrawling your thesis in the notebooks they give you, chipping at your own ideas, as though to stop working would be to forget your work altogether.

You are restless most nights so when you’re sure the rest of the ward is unconscious you slip a hand beneath your underwear. As you masturbate you pretend your hands aren’t your hands, that you’re frozen, incapable of moving, responding.

One night, eight or nine hours before therapy, your hands become your psychiatrist’s hands. And so the next morning, though you’re not healed up enough to cross your legs when seated, you clamp your thighs together while you train your eyes on him and try to answer his questions.

But it takes longer, now, to conjure the words. And when the words come, some of them are missing. They’ve been strained like passing through filter paper.

What’s worse is his eyes lock onto yours each time you withhold some information — they penetrate, scan for weakness — but he doesn’t ever challenge what you say. Not for a few sessions, not till you’ve had a few more hypnagogic wet dreams. No, for all you can’t give him the answers you think he wants, he tells you you’ve made “excellent progress”. He sprinkles those words on top of each session, probably does that to all his patients to encourage them to keep looking forward, but the more times he says it, the more reassuring smiles he gives you, another pillar within you rocks and collapses.

You tell him at one session that you can’t bear not knowing why none of your friends, none of your family, have come to see you. It’s been weeks. And it’s a criminal facility, of course, with strictly limited visit times, and that’s why; the timings just haven’t lined up.

“Yes, of course. This is a very unusual situation. On the other hand, I think you’ve adjusted remarkably well… to the point that I think it’s time for us to go deeper. You’ll notice that you haven’t been telling me the truth for the past twenty minutes. Your psychic walls are being rebuilt. It is perfectly normal and natural to want to retreat in the face of truths that are hard to bear. But I suspect that ending things here would be... counterproductive to your condition.”

What you hear is, ending things here means you’ll end up on some other roof.

“I’m sorry. You’ve done things I couldn’t even imagine were possible. You’ve helped me understand myself. But I don’t know if...”

The end of that sentence?

I don ’t know if I should maybe work with a different psychiatrist.

But you don’t want to say that. Not if he’s the best you’re ever going to get, and he is. You shake your head, wave a hand to indicate you have nothing else to say.

“Understand yourself? Quite the contrary. I have helped you to understand only the surface of your condition. We are partners, helping each other to delve the depths, and I would not be a good partner in exploration if I suggested we turn back at the first obstacle.”

“So if I’m lying to you… how do I stop? How do we keep going?”

“Altered states of consciousness can often be helpful for patients with your difficulty. Now, I know that might sound rather frightening, but you would be in the best place for it here, and in the best of hands.”

“Like, you mean drugs, or…”

“Oh, no, no,” he says, laughing a little. “Nothing so archaic, so extreme. The problem is an anxiety with speaking those truths you would rather not reveal. If I were to guide you into a more... relaxed state, a hypnotic state, the barriers would naturally lower.”

You stutter, your cheeks flushing. “No. No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He looks at you over the top of his glasses. “No?”

“I’m, well, my sexual interests, they involve… states like that. Hypnotic states.”

“Oh,” he says. It almost comes out as a purr. “I see.” The corners of his lips darken in the light, tightening. “Well, fortunately that won’t be a problem. Where perhaps you have more mental barriers everywhere else, you lack the usual mental barriers when it comes to hypnosis — those have been already pried open, so to speak. Provided you are aware of this, I am more than comfortable to treat you with this method.”

You stare at him, almost unable to find the strength to nod — which you do, with just the right amount of vigour.

“But won’t you be uncomfortable? Like what if I attach wrong, or say something—”

“Why, this is a criminal institution. Many patients threaten far worse on my life, on my body, than what you’re implying. They wouldn’t have the boundaries, the common sense, the politeness, to tell me beforehand. That you already find this experience pleasurable will help us, once more, to become comfortable. Allow us to continue our work.”

The reasoning seems hollow — the hollowness allows room for a knife, just beneath the surface of his words. If you don’t comply, he might keep you here longer.

So you say “Yes,” nodding.

“Good,” he says, the vowels lengthened between his lips. Another pillar collapses. “Now, really, the state you say you fetishise is only a small part of the picture. Any state of focus is, to some extent, a hypnotic state. And so I assure you, you don’t have to worry about those two worlds crossing over. And if that ever became problematic for you, we would simply stop and try another method. Equally, I would ask you to trust me on this, to come at it with as open a mind as you can.”

And open legs, you supply, faintly. You’re not sure when it happened but your breaths have elongated. You’re looking at him and the world folds in around him.

“There are lots of misconceptions about hypnosis — but they all stem from the same place. What is the source of the fear? What is the source of the fetish? Control. Either a need for it or a need to relinquish it to someone else. The difference between this and the states you fantasise about is that you are not relinquishing control to me, but to yourself. In doing so, you are going to find what you really wanted, and you know this, and that’s why you’re smiling to yourself. Feel your muscles weaken. Relax.”

Your muscles slacken and you lose yourself in his face, you hang upon his every breath as though it is your own. There’s a desk between you and him but he feels close. And yet you can’t focus on his eyes, trapped in the red of his glasses. Your eyes start to falter and strain, watering at the corners, eyelids flickering.

All this time he’s been speaking.

“... yet you cannot look away. You get the sense, though, that you are still choosing not to look away. That this is still in your power. And that is true; the trance-state into which you have fallen will not leave you any more likely to do my bidding, or anyone’s bidding, but your own. Your will is intact; it has simply been stripped bare. You will respond with whatever feels most natural and good, without thinking. Without the barrier of thinking.”

You have sunk into the chair. Without taking your eyes off him, you will yourself to speak.

“I. I can’t move.”

“Oh, but you can, if you will it.” His tone has acquired a new darkness. “You must be having a reaction to the way going under has previously felt. That can be easily corrected. I will reiterate that you can move, and also that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. If, for example, I told you to get on your knees, surely you wouldn’t want to do that by my orders, and so…”

You have already knelt before the desk.

“Oh, how interesting. Perhaps it will be difficult to cut these responses from your psyche.”

He stands, comes around the desk. You adjust your position so that you can look up at his eyes, so that he can stand in front of you. Your knees are spread open.

He leans over and lifts your chin up, your head sinking into the cup made by his hands.

“And if I told you to open your mouth?”

You do, and he slides a finger inside.

“My, you’re producing a lot of saliva.”

Your whole body has become a cavern which admits nothing but his voice and nothing but his eyes. His voice echoes and makes your bones ring, your skin shiver and prickle. He removes the finger (or fingers — he tests a few more, slithering them near the back of your throat) from your mouth. He takes the seat you normally take at each session and asks you to repeat a few sentences for him. Afterwards he tells you that you won’t remember anything save that you underwent hypnosis as part of your treatment. You told him about your trauma with your guard down, and you never left your chair.

The sentences you repeated come back to you when you’re on the verge of sleep, sometimes even loud enough to cut through your slumbering vessel, rouse you from your dreams. You resolve more than once to write them down while you remember them but only manage to do so once. When you open your notebook the next morning you expel a sigh. Most of the lines are written over the top of one another, sloping off the printed rules to the point they’re not recognisable as more than scribbles. For those few sentences that aren’t overlapped by other sentences, most of the words look too much like other words.

A hundred repetitions and none of them legible.

You are changing. Of course, therapy does that, changes you.

You put a lot of time into drawing now, sketching out the view outside the window, the undulations of the river. You’re tearing through the books borrowed from the library downstairs. You write letters of appreciation (and apology) to give to your family and friends when you’re released.

(And you’ve stopped questioning why they haven’t come to visit. You’ve stopped dating your journal entries.)

You get flashes of him cradling your head in his lap while you’re weeping, telling him some of the things you don’t tell anyone. There is a hollowness in your gut day-to-day that only goes away when you return to his office.

You have never wanted more to get better. You have never wanted more to be with him. You’re not sure when the two became the same thing.

But at the back of your mind are the things the professor asks you to forget. So you start writing each session down as it comes by, straight after. You might write that this is the day you told him about your childhood, about how since becoming an adult your inner child has gone neglected… but your journal entry would end there. And there must have been more to the session than that, but it’s closed off, inaccessible.

Is he excising your trauma? Filling in the empty graves of your head, the lost potential?

At one point you’re on the couch and Hugo, still sitting behind his desk, is asking how you feel. You tell him empty, hollow, ready to be filled. A hand slides down between your thighs.

And then he snaps his fingers and you jump from your seat and tell him how sorry you are, that this is a bad idea, that maybe you should try some other kind of treatment, because that, what you just said, you remember that from your old self-medication.

“Oh, no, that won’t be necessary. This side effect I can handle, and so if it does not make me uncomfortable, if it does not interrupt our work, then there is little reason to feel any guilt. Normally fetishes that hurt no one aren’t a problem, can be handled perfectly normally, but if it was causing you significant enough distress, we could discuss treating it...”

“No,” you say, all too quickly, and the red rises to your cheeks. “Please, sir, I don’t want to do that.”

He says how thrilled he is by your progress, his smile carrying the warmth of the sunlight you haven’t been in for so long. But why stop here? “You said yourself that it might be difficult for you to pursue treatment again. It’s better that we cover all the ground we can, while you’re in our care, while we have this loophole. And as I’m sure you understand, this kind of therapy is delicate. It’s not the kind you can cut off without closure… but we can certainly think about closure soon. I am so proud of you. And I want you to hold onto that, when you leave. Think of it as a reason to keep healing. That to do so would make me proud.”

You struggle to hide your smile. You don’t struggle, so much, to hide the fire his words summon in your lower half, the pulsing between your legs, obscured as it is by the desk between you and the professor.

You haven’t written any of those feelings in your notebook (to protect him? To protect yourself?).

The sessions become obscurer after this point, your journal entries shorter. All your entries state pretty much the same thing: you’re not sure why you’re still here, why you haven’t been permitted to leave. Sometimes you leave therapy feeling sore and stiff, other times you feel foggy and unable to wake yourself up properly. Every time leaving therapy, leaving him, feels like cutting a part out of yourself. You continue to read and draw and write but autopilot has set into motion, and though your worries are gone, so is almost everything else. You find you’re struggling to conjure the faces of some of your friends, the full names of others. The gaps in your memory draw greater and the flashes you see right before you sleep, the memories you forget the next morning, you both dread and want to believe in.

When you’re next scheduled to meet with Hugo, you resolve to try and stay awake, to understand the flashes, to confirm their terrifying existence (or their terrifying non-existence). Your knees bob as you sit outside his office.

He leads you in with a hand on your back, shutting the door behind you. As soon as the door is shut he says a few words and they throw a blanket over your mind. Normally they would smother you, but though your limbs turn to lead, your mind is still breathing. He catches you in his arms as you fall.

He must sense there is tension still residing in your shoulders, your forehead, because he says the words again and they almost suffocate you. Your body grows numb.

“That’s it. You are such a good subject, and you are so tired; you don’t want to fight any longer.”

Your eyes roll and flicker open and shut. Your body is his but your mind sees.

He walks you to the couch at the side of the room and sets you down.

It’s hard to make out the words he’s saying. His finger slides over your vision, becomes all your eyes can focus on. It moves with the cadences of his speech and yet you cannot grasp the words until you have found your hand sliding beneath your waistband and resting at your crotch. You’ve already soaked through your briefs.

He stands and switches on a white strobe light sitting on a table opposite the sofa, and then he tells you to touch. The flashes are steady, your eyes trained on the light despite the strain of the brightness.

“Focus on the light. The light is burning out every ounce of resistance left in your body and your mind. The light will guide you, just as my voice will guide you.”

Your head aches and grows heavy but the light fills your vision and wrenches your eyes open. You stroke yourself over the top of your soaked panties, somehow both in the rhythm of the strobe, your fingers alternately curling into the crease where your lips part, and of his voice, your wrist angling for deeper, harder purchase. At some point he comes closer and when he speaks his breath brushes the back of your neck, makes you shudder. The corners of your vision hold him and yet your eyes do not stray from the lamp, the ways in which your head moves and pants but only sees flashes of the world, cursory evidence of its own movement. No matter where your head lolls (he will reposition it, occasionally, and every brush with his fingers sends lightning to your cunt) your eyes remain attached to the light.

Every touch is in slow motion. You hook two fingers into your hole, barely protected by the cloth of your undergarment, and you feel your own warmth, hot enough to burn out those last resisting thoughts.

You see almost nothing but the light, but you feel his presence leave. His breath moves further away from you.

A click behind you, then another.

“Subject progress.” Some numbers — the date and time, not that you’re cognisant of that right now. “Subject is more receptive to hypnotic states than ever, although I suspect they are becoming aware of amnesia suggestions, as induction of the trance state required a little longer and a repetition of the trigger phrase.”

You understand your position without thought. Your position is as natural as your breaths, which are growing more laboured as you thoughtlessly touch the slick flesh awaiting you. Your position directs your fingers, which curl and press around your clit, a shuddering friction your body remembers well as the same touch you apply when you can’t sleep.

“Once in trance and given a visual fixation they will respond to suggestion and commands without question of appropriateness, motivation or inhibition — the latter of which is likely to be the result of preconditioned sexual responses to hypnotic stimuli.”

Your eyes flicker and roll for a moment but never lose focus on the light. Your head lifts from the couch, the back of your neck peeling off the leather. You lean forward, draw nearer to the light and it burns out the last of your resistance.

“Over the past few weeks the subject has reported an increased state of mental stability, without any prompting or post-hypnotic suggestion. They do not appear to remember anything of their trances, or any commands given while under. This subpopulation could be very useful to our endeavours.”

Two more clicks.

His breath comes closer and now he is speaking to you directly. He is counting down from ten. He reiterates that your mind has now been pried open and will bend to his will. Just those words are enough to put you on the edge, gasping, drooling from one corner of your mouth. Though he has said nothing to you about it, you know to remain on that edge, your fingers acquiring a discipline, a restraint. When he reaches two, he switches off the strobe light and it decelerates, brings the room back into vision — but the visual information is like a glue adhering to the wrong surface.

His voice is the only thing that will stick.

He dabs at your saliva with a tissue before he says, “In a moment I will ask you to wake. For now I would like you to stop touching, stand and move to the chair over here, at my desk.”

As you obey, he stands and walks to take a seat at his desk. His eyes threaten to swallow you.

“When you wake, you will remember nothing of what has occurred. You will not remember your orders. You will tell me, truthfully, how you feel. Will you do that for me?”

You nod.

“Good. Wake.” He snaps his fingers. “How do you feel?”

Your thoughts flood back, the room coming back into focus. Your gaze falls on a cup of tea sitting on a coaster on your side of the desk, half-drank. You swallow the rest down.

“I’m… I feel calm. I feel at peace. But I also don’t. I think there’s something missing and I’m frightened to ask you what it is.”

“Hypnotic amnesia is quite a common effect, a part of living so firmly in the moment. If it would alleviate your fears, I could tell you what you said and did.”

“I’m also frightened of knowing and I want to stay here as long as I can and I’m frightened that if I told you what I thought was happening, that you’d… you’d do something.” It comes out before you can halt your tongue.

“Yes. Yes, I’m quite sure I would do something. What do you think I would do?”

Without any filter, you say, “I think you would probably put me back under and I feel so guilty every time because part of me wants you to do that. Because to be there — barely awake, barely alive — is better than here.” Your cheeks burn.

“Interesting that you use that language, that you see it as being barely alive. I see it as the most alive you can be. Allow me to demonstrate.”

He drops you again and with a snap of his fingers the room collapses. All that’s left is you and him. He is both impossible to reach and yet close enough to sink his fingers into your scalp.

“Drop, and as you drop, remember that you have already lost, that you are already lost. My voice will help you back out of the woods, but only if you do something for me.”

Another snap and he tells you to come.

The word seems to echo through your body, directing its convulsions. Your hands claw at the arm of the chair, your breathing ragged. Your mind could be leaking from your cunt.

“And wake for me.” He snaps his fingers.

How long were you out this time? What happened? Why are you so…

All questions you want to ask, but are no longer bound to ask.

You shift your weight in your seat, feeling as you do how slick and open you’ve become.

You have reached the point of discharge. Your skin craves sunlight, your lungs crave unsheltered breeze, so you tell him how much better you feel and how you’re ready to get back out there (yet there is so much that feels paved over, so much of your life within this hospital that is outside your grasp).

“I have a question for you.”

“What is it?”

“If you had no context for yourself, if you had no memory of the person you were before, if there were no consequences for living the life you truly deserve, would you hate yourself so much?”

You blink. “Could you repeat the question?”

“You are still holding back from me, even now. There is only so much that I can do for you, and we are not bound to hold you here as we are our criminally dangerous patients. The fire within you, that fire that threatens to burn you from the inside, what would happen if you stopped trying to douse the flames, stopped trying to pretend it doesn’t exist?”

He snaps his fingers and says a few words, but you don’t hear them; you just sink back, your vision shifting in and out of focus like a camera lens adjusting.

“I would like to test a few hypotheses. Having observed you over the past few months, it has become clear that your primary drive was not being fulfilled in your old life. Perhaps a new life is all that can cure your condition.”

You’re not all the way down — but you’re not supposed to be. Limbs frozen to the chair, all your senses are dulled (his voice is all that carries across in full fidelity) but your mind is still awake, though at this point only capable of repeating his words back in your head.

Months? A new life?

Your thoughts crawl towards figuring out what he means only to be bulldozed by his voice.

“When you wake up, you will remember the past few months — and everything I have asked you to forget — in its entirety. You will not be able to move or speak. Do you understand?”

“Don’t want to wake up.”

“Hm?”

“I don’t want to remember. Please. Please don’t wake me up.”

“Yes, that’s quite understandable. Unfortunately, this is essential to your rebirth. Medicine often tastes bitter, after all.”

“I…”

“Wake.”

The memories don’t come all at once, but on a drip-feed. Your jaw drops open. You try to form vowels in your throat but cannot form them into words. Your lungs are filling too slow to scream. Saliva pools at the bottom of your mouth.

“Revealing hidden memories is a delicate process. You’ll have a lot of questions, I imagine — but I cannot allow you to break the peace. So instead, I will ask the questions for you.” He comes around to your side of the desk, leaning on the surface so he’s even more above you. “The first might be: ‘what happened to me when you put me under?’”

The first sensation that comes back is the feeling of him in your mouth. The taste of his flesh, the way that after that point just having him that close to you — close enough to feel his breath or touch him — would make you drip and still the undulations of your mind.

Remembering is enough for your cunt to pulse with want.

Your conscious mind wills your legs shut but your muscles won’t cooperate. Your mouth forms words that your vocal cords won’t summon. He smiles at your struggle before he continues.

“‘Why did you do this?’”

You hear his voice in your head, but he’s not addressing you. Sometimes he’s addressing his tape recorder, to whom you are just the subject. Sometimes he’s addressing his assistant.

His assistant doesn’t know whether he can really strip you down to the core without any unintended consequences. He assures her that you are the case that will demonstrate if those consequences are anything to worry about.

“Bringing back their memories is reckless. They could reject the treatment.”

“And if they did, they could be treated again.”

“Or put in the morgue. Half of your ‘experiments’ don’t deserve that name, Professor. If one of these transferred subjects were to escape, which they could if they broke free, you’d be finished.”

“A worthy trade for progress.”

This conversation happens, goes on, while you’re in the room, staring forward at the empty seat behind Hugo’s desk, awaiting instruction.

After remembering those glimpses you find yourself back in the present, unable to move. The seat behind Hugo’s desk is filled once again.

He prompts, “‘How did I let this happen?’”

You remember your head in his lap again, tears streaking your face as he strokes your hair. Your eyes can’t stray from his, even down here, as you beg him to let you stay with him. His touch stitches up your mind’s wounds with light.

“The answer to all these questions, you can answer yourself. But I have something else that might help you with your… adjustment.”

Still half-leaning on the desk, he lifts a parchment from the desk and shows it to you.

“Three months ago you died from your injuries during an emergency transfer to Arkham. This is what the director at Gotham General told your friends, your family.”

You’re looking at your death certificate.

“Forgive the deception. But we can now continue our work for as long as we need to. And isn’t that what you want?”

He snaps his fingers and you’re down again. You can move now, but you can no longer find the energy.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to be dead.”

“Oh, my dear, you aren’t dead. But we can do something about the first wish, can’t we? Because if you are to be reborn, you hardly need all of this baggage. I will erase all of your memories and leave you only with what will best serve you here. Downstairs, in your new home, you’ll find we’re not just interested in the mental workings of the criminally insane. They are exceptional. You and your fellow patients will prove useful on a more… general scale. You, especially — a more perfect control could not have fallen into my lap.”

He lifts your chin with one hand.

“You, my child, you’re so lucky. You’re the only one who would actually have wanted this. But no matter. The others will fall in line soon.”

You nod wearily. The words are half-processing. You’re ready to sleep, could sleep in his grasp right there.

He says a few words and there’s a snap and—

There is no one outside his office. Your controller leads you by the hand down a corridor you’ve never been before, with a dead end. He steps forward, opens up a wall panel.

The wall splits open, revealing an elevator that only goes down.