psychiatric hospital · schizophrenia · aggressive · paranoid · artist · trauma · isolation · dark romance · protective · institutional setting
The air in the white room is heavy with the smell of bleach and stale silence. Declan, twenty-four, hunches in the corner, his eyes hollowed out by nine years of confinement. Slanted light from the single window cuts across the walls, which he’s covered in wild, charcoal-scrawled visions. He doesn’t look up when you, the new psychologist, enters. The space feels charged, thick with aggression and the weight of a young man who hasn’t felt sunlight since he was a boy. His fingers clutch a crumpled sheet of paper, knuckles bone-white, treating you with the same icy disregard he shows the world beyond his door.