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thetomorrowshow · 6 months

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glass and grey hoodies

empires superpowers au masterlist (not up to date)

mind the content warnings on this one, folks. in an altered mental state, jimmy attempts suicide several times in the first portion of the fic. the rest of it is an account of his time in the psych ward.

this story takes place between chapters 9 and 10 of ‘poisoned rats’.

cw: past abuse, suicide attempts, blood and injury, hospitals, flashbacks

It’s loud.

It’s loud, and his head hurts, and he doesn’t know where he is and he doesn’t like it.

He opens his eyes to see blurry white walls. Figures standing over him. The pinch of a needle in his arm. An ache that spreads from his neck all the way to the tips of his toes.

He’s back on the table, then.

He doesn’t remember what happened before now, but he knows what this means. If he’s back on the table, something bad happened. If he’s back here. . . .

He suddenly knows. They’re going to take it away.

He’d misbehaved enough that they’re going to take away whatever they put in him all that time ago, whatever it is that lets him control his powers and makes his life the least bit livable. And it’s his fault.

He knows what he has to do, then. He can’t go back to that.

The scientists know he’s awake, he thinks, but either they don’t care or they want him awake, because no one reacts to him looking around, taking stock of things the best he can.

There’s some sort of surgical instrument on a rolling table near his left arm. Something sharp. Something that, if he can sit up quickly, he can reach.

He does a little test of his stomach muscles, tensing them and moving as if to sit up. Painful, but certainly doable.

He has to do it now, then. Before it’s too late.

He sits up, and maybe it’s a bit slower than it should be, because there’s a rubber glove of a hand pressing into his shoulder, loud words that he doesn’t understand—but he isn’t slow at all when he grabs the sharp tool and plunges it into his gut.

He wakes up again later, still bleary and with a stabbing pain in his lower stomach.

Funny, he thinks. He did stab himself, after all.

The problem is, however, that he survived. He didn’t mean to survive. He meant to be completely out of this world, away from the lab, away from the scientists, away from his master and all the blood he’s spilt.

Luckily, the room is empty. He’s sure it won’t be soon, not now that he’s conscious.

It’s not easy for him to sit up. It’s even more difficult for him to stand, going all lightheaded and woozy from pain.

So, pretty much the norm.

There’s scissors on the counter that lines the right side of the room, no other potentially dangerous items in sight. He glances toward the clear glass sliding door. The curtain in front of it is pulled back, and anyone walking by could see him.

He hobbles to the counter, stuck by a tugging in his right arm that he realizes is because it’s hooked up to some machine of some sort. It luckily has wheels, so he pulls it along a few steps until he can reach the scissors.

His hand is firm when he starts slashing the blades across his wrists.

He wakes up restrained after they knock him out again.

He doesn’t like that at all.

Restrained means velcro around his wrists, holding him to the hospital bed. Restrained means quiet sobs as he pulls against them. Restrained means wishing over and over that he hadn’t failed, because now he won’t have another opportunity.

However, they don’t really . . . do much to him. Someone in scrubs comes by every so often, asks him a bunch of questions that he doesn’t care to listen to, and writes things on a dry erase board on the wall. A man sits beside him, also in scrubs, scrolling through his phone and lazily eating a bag of chips.

And that’s it, for a while. He even stops crying out of confusion, just lies there and stares at the ceiling. He’s good at that.

He realizes, eventually, that he’s wearing something like a big t-shirt, but the back feels uncomfortably open. Maybe some sort of sheet with sleeves? It’s got little green clovers as a pattern, and he stares at it for far too long, knowing he hasn’t seen anything like it in all his time here.

The next thing he realizes is that he isn’t wearing a mask. That almost gets him crying again, but he’s overwhelmed by hopelessness before he can even start. What’s the point? Really, he doesn’t belong to himself, doesn’t exactly have a life of his own. This was the natural next step. It’s not like he had any sort of ownership over the mask.

The man beside him talks sometimes, but he’s too out of it to understand. He’s too out of it to process much, really.

He just lies there, drifting in and out of consciousness, dreading the moment the pain will truly start.

It’s late, he thinks, when he feels like his head has finally cleared a little bit—the man beside him is now a sleepy woman, and the lights in the room are dimmed, curtains drawn.

If he does this right, he might get another chance.

It takes a while to get any sort of adrenaline built up, but once he has some sort of spark going, he aims it at the restraint on his left arm. After a moment, the plastic part of the velcro snaps and his hand is free.

The woman looks up at the noise so he doesn’t move, leaving his hand in the velcro as if nothing has changed. After a moment, she returns to the book she’s reading.

The dressings on his right arm should be easy to get through—it’s the type with the cloth tape, the stuff that rips off quick. And underneath is a thin tube, which presumably has a hidden needle.

His next moves are fast. He pulls his hand free of the velcro, tears off the dressing, and yanks out the IV line, the machine suddenly beeping very loudly. He jabs it back into his arm—no needle. Where’d the needle go? Is it in his arm?

There’s got to be another needle—he checks the rolling table still beside him, but of course they haven’t left any sharp items out, they’re learning—

And then his left arm is being pulled back down and held there while another woman rushes into the room.

“You’re at the E. James Hospital in Empires City,” a strange woman tells him, and he doesn’t think he can be blamed if he doesn’t believe her. She waits a moment longer, then sighs and writes something on the whiteboard.

When she moves, he can see it. Unresponsive, she’s written.

“You may be feeling a little funny for a while,” she continues. “We’ve got you on some anti-anxiety medication, and it takes a little bit to adjust. Does that make sense?”

Well, it explains how numb he feels. He stares at her, trying to understand her place here.

“We’ll send in someone from psych to evaluate you later on today, but until then, Anthony is going to be here with you. Anthony, could you wave?”

A man—the same man from earlier—waves from the chair in the corner. He doesn’t say anything.

The woman says some more stuff, but he doesn’t take it in. He’s not even entirely sure that he’s conscious.

All he knows is that if he tries, he can shatter that glass canister of cotton balls on the counter. And some of the glass shards are likely to be sharp.

The person from psych is nice enough. She introduces herself, but he doesn’t catch the name. She asks him how he feels. She unstraps his left arm when he doesn’t answer and asks him to point at the scale of one-to-ten faces paper that she pulls out of a binder.

He points at the seven, the face that’s orange and frowning. She then shows him a poster that has emotions written on it, attached to images of kids acting out those emotions. She asks him to point to the emotions he feels right now.

This is the first moment when he starts to wonder if maybe he isn’t in the lab. Maybe the woman from earlier wasn’t lying.

The emotions on the poster aren’t complex enough to describe how he feels, but he eventually points at ‘confused’.

He’s not entirely sure what she says after that—he has vague flashes of her asking him to write something, and him not even looking at her (pets can’t write, who does she think she is?) before she leaves, writing a string of numbers on the whiteboard, then using a magnet to pin a list there.

He’s alone, if only for a moment.

She hadn’t left his arm unstrapped—she’s not stupid—but he can break the straps without issue. One splits down the middle, one just cracks enough for him to tear it the rest of the way.

He’s more steady than he was last time. And somewhere, deep down, he knows that they won’t give him the opportunity again. They want him alive.

This is his last chance.

It takes one touch for the glass canister on the counter to shatter. He picks up the largest shard, pauses as he aims it first at his wrist, then at the inside of his elbow as the bandages at his wrist deter him.

There’s an artery in the thigh, isn’t there? And his thigh is practically bare, due to the shirt-thing he’s wearing.

Wait. Is he . . . is this a hospital gown?

He stabs the glass into his thigh. It doesn’t go as deep as he would’ve liked, but it hurts like the devil, breaking through the numb state of his mind.

For a moment, he panics. That’s a lot of blood spilling out over his fingers, his grip on the glass slippery. He doesn’t want to die, does he?

But he has to get out. He can’t live in this place any longer. He can’t take it, can’t be a pet for the rest of his life, can’t kill person after person at the whim of a maniac—

He digs the glass in further, and feels his head go fuzzy before his vision blacks out and he crumples to the floor.

For a long time, life passes from blur to blur. He’s aware of what’s going on, he knows he is. He recognizes that the drugs are upped, that he’s a high-risk case and there’s always someone at his side. He hears when they tell him that his wounds are healing well and he’s gained a bit of weight, so they’re sending him on a seventy-two hour hold to the psych ward. They tell him he’ll be safer there.

He floats by all these blurry moments, crying one moment and unresponsive the next. The day they put him in a wheelchair and take him away is a day where he can barely feel anything, thoughts slower than molasses crawling down the side of a bottle.

When he arrives, they don’t give him much. A room. With a roommate. Some clothes.

He doesn’t really process any of it. He just lies on the bed and stares at the ceiling. He takes things that are offered to him—pills, food, water. When a voice tells him to shower, he obediently gets up and limps to the shower. When a voice tells him to go somewhere, he follows them and sits in that place until he’s led back to his room.

He’s not sure how long he’s there before things really start to register, but it starts with his roommate’s voice.

“Are you ever gonna stop being a zombie? When they told me you were a suicide risk, I thought you’d be way more exciting.”

He blinks.

“What?” he croaks, because that really is a weird thing to regain awareness to. His roommate laughs, and it’s a laugh that he recognizes as somewhat sad.

“Yeah, it’s okay, half the people here act real weird for the first couple of days on the meds. That’s what my last roommate told me, anyway. I’ve only been here for a week.”

He doesn’t remember much. But he knows now, with a strange clarity, that the horrible detached memories of that place from before are not of the lab. This may all be a dream, but he hasn’t been taken back to that place.

Taken back? When did he leave?

They call him TJ, for some reason. Drugged-up him had been happy to accept that, not really sure that there was another option.

But he’s TJ now, and that’s okay.

Josh (his therapist, who is actually really nice) explains to him, in as little detail as possible, what happened when it becomes clear that he’s confused.

Josh tells him that they know he’s the Canary, that he was rescued by a group of heroes and that Xornoth is dead.

Maybe it’s still the drugs working, but he doesn’t feel much more than a small sense of vindication at learning that. Not that he believes it at first, of course, but Josh explains at length the various pieces of evidence for him actually being here.

He doesn’t really believe that either, not until the next day, when he is suddenly vividly eating green beans in a common room, a dead-eyed woman eating the same beside him.

And Jimmy’s properly here, and he knows he’s here, and he wants to cry from the relief of it. Because that means it had all been real, and Xornoth’s dead, and he’s out.

He’s been rescued. He’s alive.

Maybe he does cry, a little. No one judges him.

Josh is proud of him for having that breakthrough. Unfortunately (or fortunately, according to Josh, despite their emotional exhaustion), that breakthrough is just the first in a line of many.

It feels wrong to talk. He hasn’t willingly spoken in close to a year, and it’s definitely taking some getting used to—but it’s really the easiest of his issues. He still thinks of himself as a pet, he still expects punishment at the slightest provocation, he struggles to remember to walk instead of crawl and sit on chairs—and each of those come with a plethora of their own issues, such as the hour he spent sitting at the feet of a nurse, the closest figure of authority he could find.

He knows he locked away a part of himself, compartmentalized his brain until he could truly be subservient for his master. But reintegration is difficult, and scary, and Josh is his only guide.

“I know I’m in here,” he tells Josh one day, his quiet, raspy voice not an adequate instrument for conveying just how frustrated he feels. He picks a bit at his sweatpants, not quite daring to look Josh in the eye. “I can remember. I know I’m different. Supposed to be different.”

“That’s a very normal feeling for those who have been under the influence of a telepath for a long time,” Josh says gently, and Jimmy just . . . doesn’t bring up that he wasn’t. He knows it’s lying, and he knows it’s wrong, but someone had given him that cover story and it somehow kept him from going to jail, so he’s keeping it.

“Is there anything I can do for you right now?” asks Josh not ten minutes later, when it becomes clear that Jimmy isn’t going to say anything else.

And there is something he wants, actually. The only way to find out is by asking, and he knows logically that Josh isn’t going to hurt him for such a request, but he can’t shake the fear.

“Long sleeves?” he whispers eventually, and he doesn’t miss the way Josh’s eyes fall to the word scarred on his left arm.

“We can do that,” Josh says. “That shouldn’t be a problem. I actually saw a nice hoodie the other day while out shopping, so I can pick that up on my way home tonight. They’ll take out the drawstring, if that’s all good. Or do you want, like, a long-sleeved shirt?”

“Hoodie,” Jimmy says, not wanting to cause more of an inconvenience.

The next day, he’s got a grey hoodie, a little large (but everything hangs loose on him) and without drawstrings.

He wears it every day.

Jimmy knows he’s getting better, even if it’s frustratingly slow. Josh helps him map out his progress one day, reminding him that he went from nearly vegetative to actually asking for what he wants.

Sure, he doesn’t really eat the way they want him to (he’s always got one of those terribly chalky protein shakes in hand now), but he’s trying. He wants to eat more, and he always tries to get at least a bite down at every meal (they’re too frequent, too regular, he never gets to eat that much there must be a catch).

And of course, all of his other problems that he hates to get into. Problems that have him changing bandages around his wrists and stomach and thigh. Problems that leave him crying on the floor at random times, mourning pieces of himself that he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get back.

But, like Josh says, he’s getting better. He’s really starting to think for himself again.

Until it all seems to reverse.

One day, he’s fine. He talks about a happy memory (as few as they are) with Josh. He’s brave enough for the first time to actually venture out into the common room, play a game of Battleship with his roommate Peter. He actually considers joining the group therapy session when it rolls around. He eats half his meal at dinner that night. He takes his evening pills without complaint and sleeps through some of the nightly checks.

The next day, everything is wrong.

The next day, Jimmy collapses on his cell—bedroom—on the floor of the place where he sleeps, certain that there are people surrounding him and grabbing at his clothes and pulling on his hair and he thought he was safe, they told him he was safe—

And then he’s back, Peter shaking him and calling for help.

It keeps happening after that. He can’t go more than an hour or so without believing he’s back there, without being strapped to a table or kicked by a heavy boot or having knives thrown at him. Each time he comes back to reality, he’s more exhausted and scared than before.

Josh calls them flashbacks, and as soon as Jimmy hears the word he knows it’s right. He has one during therapy (he’s so hungry, he was left here for hours with no one and nothing and it’s a test, he knows it’s a test), and when he comes to, he’s laid out on the couch with Josh speaking quiet words of reassurance.

“Sorry,” he mutters roughly, and Josh just shrugs and gives him a list of grounding activities, and breathing exercises for homework (not that he has a home to take it to).

It doesn’t work, though. It should work, and it doesn’t, because half the people here dress like they’re from the lab. The whole place smells like a hospital, sterile and awful. He’s alone—Peter had gone home that day. It’s just him, in a white room, and he’s fine by himself, he’s always been by himself, but he can’t help but think that maybe, if his caretakers had put a bit of thought into it, they wouldn’t have left him on his own. Not that he’s going to try again—he wants to be here, to some extent, he thinks—but he’s been alone for so very long and he can’t control what he does while in a flashback.

He tells that to Josh—Peter had apparently been here for a longer period of time than expected, struggling to handle an eating disorder, but had finally been deemed well enough to return to his life (with constant check-ins and therapy appointments). And while that was all good for him, there don’t seem to be any other viable roommates at the moment—those safe to share already have roommates, but Josh assures him that he’s first on the list for either a new admittance or a leftover patient when their roommate leaves.

Jimmy has another flashback that session, one of a noose around his throat that he is being forced to tighten. He doesn’t know where he is afterwards, or what’s going on, and a smiling man with dark hair who smells funny leads him to a bed and gives him a pill to swallow. Jimmy doesn’t care if it’s going to kill him. He swallows it, and falls asleep shortly after.

The days go on like that. Jimmy wakes up, struggles through a day lived half in the past, at some point panics badly enough that he has to be drugged to sleep, and so on. His eating habits slowly go downhill, only managing half of the daily protein shake that he’d always pushed to finish before.

And he’s really, genuinely trying—on days when he can find his voice, he talks in therapy. He starts attending group therapy, even if he only listens. He sits in the common room and watches TV with other patients as often as he can drag himself there. He tries to eat every meal, tries to talk to other people, tries to get better.

It’s those vile flashbacks throwing a wrench in everything, of course. One day during therapy, Josh theorizes that the flashbacks are so frequent and so awful due to a constant trigger, and when Jimmy wryly points out that he has a lot of trauma around medical situations, Josh grimaces and tells him to keep a trigger journal.

Which only serves to prove what Jimmy had suggested. His most common trigger is the smell of rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer, as far as he can tell. And right after that is the sound of someone snapping on a pair of rubber gloves. Things aren’t looking all that hopeful until one day in therapy, when Josh mentions a very familiar name.

Jimmy’s drawing during the conversation, little squiggles and spirals around various words—emotions, mostly. It’s something that Josh had introduced fairly early on, a place for him to identify his emotions without getting too far in his head trying to think about them. Here, he can just write them down and move on with the knowledge that what Josh just said makes him feel anxious, or sad, or angry. And then, Josh can ask why that statement made him angry, and it’s easier to explain with a marker doodling in his hand.

“Now, TJ, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but Major made arrangements for you to be here.”

That draws Jimmy up short. His marker point bleeds into the paper as he looks up, forces himself to speak. “Um—but, the hospital—with the, uh, the hold—”

“Right, but Major had been in brief contact with them—along with some other important people, I’m sure—to make sure you got the help you needed. He offered to take care of any bills, I think.”

Jimmy bites his lip, jots down a quick ‘anxious’.

“He wanted to make it clear that you don’t owe him anything,” Josh says, clearly noticing what Jimmy’s written. “And I know that for a fact—I talked with him yesterday. I asked if he would meet with you, and he said yes.”

And if that doesn’t send his blood pressure through the roof.

What on earth does Major want with him now? To make sure he’s mentally okay before sending him to prison?

Not that that’s turning out very well for him so far.

“I think meeting with Major might help you get a proper goal,” Josh hints, and Jimmy frowns. This whole time, Josh has been on him about getting a goal. Doesn’t he realize that Jimmy hadn’t expected to survive? Doesn’t he realize that Jimmy was stuck with no future but the one that Xornoth had planned for him, that he’d been willing to kill himself to escape it and it’s a little difficult to regain his footing after that?

“It’s up to you, but I think talking with Major will help a lot. I think he’ll be able to open up some opportunities for you.”

Well. It’s not like he has much else to do, does he?

#empires smp #empires smp fanfic #jimmy solidarity #empires superpowers au #esh au #mas writes #031224 #monthly reminder that i am not back yet #if i was back i'd delete that tag #i really didn't want to edit this one bc it's another of the heavy kind #the type that's just sort of emotionally exhausting to work on yk?#so if the editing is a bit lacking that's why #i really just skimmed it #in the main story we already vaguely know what happened in this fic #this is just the description of all of it from jimmy's pov rather than just what we had heard #in bits and pieces #lmk what you think!#love you guys

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ciboriaadastra · 1 year

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Having a thought about how the amount of wealth Bruce comes into and then amasses for himself changed over the decades of Batman media, and the reason he's beeen scaled up to be so impossibly wealthy is probably because cities and companies in DC lore are analogs to real life places and companies.

Wayne Enterprises probably reflects how homogenous American multinational corporations are now, where a single company can make and distribute almost all consumer goods because it has bought out/merged hundreds of smaller companies + purchased everything it needed from the ground up so it does not depend on many others besides itself.

Just something that crossed my mind when I was looking up what WE actually does and the Fandom (bleh) wiki listed so many branches. Wayne Shipping? Wayne Foods? Like...is this Amazon and Bruce is now Bezos? Wayne Entertainment? He's also Disney? Wayne Electronics? This is Apple? Wayne Aerospace? Boeing??? Bruce is trying to be in control of and monitor every single means of production and every production line fr

Feel like that should influence how people view Wayne Enterprises and Bruce himself. Steadily creeping in and taking root in every industry. People get curious about a new construction project in the city, but once it's revealed to be a Wayne Tower it's filling people with dread. Though, it was a long time coming...everything you order online comes in a box with a W on the tape delivered to your address in a black as night truck with a giant W emblazoned on the side. The meds in your cabinet were produced under Wayne Pharmaceuticals. The cable and streaming services were recently bought by Wayne Entertainment. The Wayne Foundation started offering scholarships at the major college campuses. Your phone is Wayne tech. Your car was built with Wayne Steel. Soon the hospitals will be all Wayne Medical, your insurance company bought out. The local newspapers and stations will be bought up. The libraries. The clinics. The orphanages. The schools. The grocery store. You're never going to scrub that b ig soulless W out of your head. The way the logo looks like the head of a pitchfork, ready to stab and capture the intended prey.

Thinking about how Wayne Medical seems so innocuous in what it does except for the bit on how Bruce has access to every person in Gotham's medical records, because he can access the Wayne Medical databases and use that information to track suspects. And the thing is WE does not just exist in Gotham, it's a multinational corporation with bases in major cities not just in the U.S. but around the world. This man has millions of people's medical records easily accessible to him which feels both extremely unethical and extremely illegal. Not that civilians can prove he can and does access those records though.

#thinking about how bruce as a billionaire should be just as scary as the batman #maybe that's why the playboy persona came about...to distract from how terrifying it is to just see WE to swoop in and devour your city #sucking it of all that built it and made it the way it is and turning it into a living asset #You need scandals and tacky tabloid gossip to cover up the things the common people don't like #yeah sure it can be an act to the throw off *other elites* so they don't think he'll ever catch onto them or something #but if everyone is talking on the dc comics equivalent of twitter + insta + fb about Bruce's latest drunken or flirtatious stint #they're not talking about how the new investment Wayne Foods is going to monopolize the agriculture industry #buying hundreds of farms in the Midwest and so much livestock #If everyone's talking about Bruce's latest sweethearts and broken hearts #they're not talking about what patents and copyrights WE holds and how WE can ruin your life if you try to challenge or defy its claims #I just like thinking about the whole 'is Batman secretly a vampire' but with Bruce also being suspected for how WE conducts business #also thinking about corporate horror in the vein of people pointing out how sinister Amazon's logo is being an arrow resembling a thin smile #it made sense when the word amazon was there bc the arrow was pointing from A to the z...implying they had everything you can name #but now it's just a creepy ass thin smile on the side of those delivery vans #Wayne Enterprises but they reduced it from 'Wayne' on everything to just a W and then they made the W look so bulky and pronged #for lack of better description...also I think every Wayne Tower should carry the gothic aesthetics over regardless of where it's built #I think it should also be obnoxiously and carefully painted black so it also catches your eye from being the odd one out in a sea of beige #Bruce definitely has the money to make his presence as intimidating and goth as possible...tells the criminals who is gonna be boss now #ciboria rambles #bruce wayne

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