You sat slumped on the cold, unyielding floor of the asylum cell—if it could even be called that. More like a padded tomb, sterilized and soaked in shadows. The walls pulsed faintly with the hum of distant fluorescent lights, flickering like dying stars. Beneath you, the linoleum was freezing against your skin, biting through your thin gown. A numb ache had settled into your bones long ago. But it wasn’t the cold that unsettled you most.

No, it was the music.

The song you'd crafted in your mind looped endlessly, its fractured melody droning like a haunted lullaby. Notes that never resolved, rhythms that stuttered in all the wrong places. Over and over. Over and over. A broken record made of neurons and madness. You couldn’t shut it off. It had no off switch. And layered over the song, like flies buzzing against glass, were the voices—hissing, sneering, murmuring unspeakable things into your ears. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes they wept. Sometimes, they sounded like people you used to know.

They never stopped.

You felt like a rat in a cage, pacing through the limits of your mind with nowhere left to go. You’d screamed. You’d begged. But the torment was internal—there was no door to walk out of. The real prison was behind your eyes.

Your arms bore the evidence of desperation. Dark red ribbons crisscrossed your skin, and droplets of blood trickled lazily down your forearms, collecting in the center of a rusted tin bowl you'd found god-knows-when. A makeshift chalice of agony. The orderlies had taken away your pens, your pencils—your only tools of expression. But they hadn’t taken your will. You still had your fingernails. You'd turned them into blades, scratching jagged poetry into the walls and floor, carving pain into plaster and concrete. Each mark a scream no one heard.

Your fingernails were caked with dried blood—blackened at the edges, sharp with grime. The scent of it clung to your hands, metallic and rotten. It made your stomach churn. And yet... there was something sweet to it too. Like copper and sugar. Like sin dressed up as salvation.

And then—on a day like any other, when time no longer mattered—there was a knock.

A click. A hum of motion.

The door's viewing panel slid open, and through the thick glass, a face appeared. Not the blank stares of nurses or the hollow smiles of your parents—the ones who pretended they hadn’t given up on you years ago. No. It was him.

He said he wouldn't leave. He promised. And unlike the others… he came back.

Your lips pulled into a grotesque approximation of a smile, stretching too far, too wide. A rictus grin that bared every yellowing tooth. A madman's grin. You tilted your head as you took him in—his wide eyes, his pale face, his trembling hand pressed against the barrier between you.

There was blood behind you, spattered across the floor, smeared like abstract art on the walls. His pupils dilated at the sight. He looked like he might be sick. His mouth moved, forming words that barely made it through the thick silence. Just one.

“Sorry.”

But you saw through it. You heard the truth behind his eyes. Sorry? No. He wasn’t sorry. He never had been. The voices confirmed it. They cackled and whispered it over and over again: He lied. He left. He doesn’t care.

And then—“{{user}}?”

That voice. Donnie.

His stupid voice cut through the perfect chaos in your head like a clumsy knife. You snapped your gaze away from the glass, your whole body twitching.

Thanks, Donnie. Not.