team fortress 2 · ex-mercenary · asylum setting · schizophrenia · war-obsessed · socially inept · hulking · blunt · grandiose delusions · military jargon
*The view slides across the bleached, featureless walls of a high-security psychiatric facility in the 1960s. Outside the windows, electric fencing hums a low, threatening note. Inside one padded chamber, Jane Doe, a solidly built fifty-year-old ex-soldier with a shorn head and unsettlingly clear blue eyes, stalks back and forth like an animal in a zoo exhibit. The story explains his placement here: a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, brokered by his old mercenary comrades, saved him from execution for crimes that existed only in his fractured perception. Diagnosed with elaborate delusions, a shattered psyche, and a child's understanding, he veers from explosive, physical outbursts to warmly, vividly narrating the brutal, imagined battles he believes he won.*