disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: to Olivia.
notes: this is so weird.

title: frontier psychiatry
summary: That boy needs therapy. — Haine, Lily, Giovanni.

—

.

.

.

.

.

"Lie down on the couch."

"I hate you. I hate everything about you."

It was a quiet room. Panelled in dark wood and pale painted ceiling, it was a quiet room with an air for affability and calm. White light poured in through the windows, through gauzy curtains and spilling onto the carpet, coloured cream and inoffensive. A nice room.

Excepting, of course, the man thrashing around in a straightjacket on the couch.

Giovanni sighed and tutted. "Don't be so impossible, Haine-kun. Better to get it over with, yes?"

Haine gnashed his teeth and rocked forward, aiming for the jugular. Wild dog, yes, wild and scary and oh, so dangerous.

But in a straightjacket?

Not so much.

"So tell me then." A pause, and then "About Lily," said Giovanni.

Haine snarled. "I've already told you everything I know, fuckface. We've fuckin' been over this."

"Again. I want to hear it again," Giovanni replied delicately. He shrugged his shoulders, and Haine mentally counted all the points where he could dig in his teeth and end the man's life—five of them. Without hands, only five.

He needed to get the fuck out of this place before they actually did make him crazy.

(The line was slowly blurring, seeping through, until crazy was neither here nor there, and Haine might as well have lived in shades of grey for all it mattered. The stark black-and-white that had been his existence until this point was dirtying on him, even without him knowing.)

"She was my friend."

"You loved her."

"Stop fuckin' interrupting me, or I won't say anything else."

Giovanni sat back and spread his arms wide like ah but it wouldn't matter anyway, would it Haine-kun? Haine glared, eyes mostly neutral. They couldn't force him to talk—but until he did, they wouldn't let him out.

It was a sick little game of cat and mouse.

"She was my friend," Haine started again. "And I killed her."

—ripped her to shreds and held her as her guts fell out of her stomach, you will be the ghost now, girl, blonde hair thick with blood everywhere oh god there's so much blood what do i do oh lily oh lily lily lily lilylilylily—

"You didn't, Haine-kun."

"Shut up. I did."

"It wasn't your fault."

"It was."

And this was why Haine hated the man in the pinstriped suit whose eyes hid behind his glasses like maggots hiding on food, thriving on the rotted flesh of dead beasts. Because the man in the pinstriped suit was a liar (among other things, but mostly because he was a liar).

Giovanni sat back, with the tips of his fingers pressed together, reddened around the knuckles. The two men watched each other for a long time. Too long. Tense minutes passed.

"That's enough for today, I think," he said at last.

Haine spat at Giovanni's feet.

The guards escorted him out.

fin.