/ hello, i'm your mind * OPEN

[BELLE RAVEN]

Belle had grown used to the routines around here. Saturday's were pretty empty for most people. No school for the younger kids. No therapy sessions or doctor's appointments. On this particular day, a couple of the counselors had taken a large group of people outside. Belle had opted out. Choosing the library within the school wing as a more comfortable space. The room was more cosy than most in the building. The walls were lined with book shelves. Instead of dull tiled floors, rich red carpet covered the floor. Vintage-style, overstuffed couches created a comfortable place to curl up with a book. But Belle wasn't reading. She had a composition notebook on her lap and she was writing down all the thoughts that came to mind. She found it easier to control the nightmares and hallucinations if she wrote her racing thoughts down. She had woken again during the night, gasping for air.She had been dreaming about it again. About being buried alive. Unlike most people she knew what it felt like to die. She'd been dead for a whole two minutes. And she hadn't died quickly. She could remember ever second. Gasping, struggling for air that wasn't there. The burning in her lungs. Choking for air. When the pain in her lungs became almost unbearable, she could have sworn she heard her heart stop beating. everything went black after that. she woke up to the face of a female cop with short dark hair staring at her. Telling her everything would be okay. That cop had lied. Nothing would ever be okay. Not for Belle. She'd never be normal again. Not only had that man taken away her innocence, he'd taken away her sanity.

Ten minutes had lapsed since she had relocated from her room to the empty library. In those ten minutes she had filled seven pages, front and back with her somewhat neat handwriting. The words on the paper didn't alway make sense. She wrote whatever came to mind. If she thought she heard footsteps, she write it down. Everything that came to mind. It was a way of sifting through her thoughts. Once all the unimportant thoughts were gone, she could better focus on the important ones. Despite waking up from another nightmare in the middle of the night last night, she was in a considerably good mood. She didn't feel like today would be one of those days that landed her in a padded cell. She had those days. Or days when she'd be strapped to a gerny and put in a special room downstairs for observation. The last time that had happened was when she had stolen a knife from the kitchen during the night and was caught using said knife to carve more lines into her thighs. Cutting had been a huge problem ever since she had started doing it. It had started when she was fourteen and in between asylums. She was living with the same foster mother she had had since she was six. She didn't even know why but something sparked in her mind when she spotted a craft knife on the desk in the living room. Her foster mother had been using it to make christmas decorations. Everyone always said that the first cut is the deepest. But she knew for a fact that that wasn't literally true. Metaphorically speaking, it was. The first cut started everything. It introduced your brain to the feeling. Belle in no way found cutting to be a joke or a way of getting attention. But she needed to feel the pain somewhere else. Her mind couldn't take much more of it.

Lately she'd had her urge to hurt herself under very good control. The few friends she had made in here were actually helping her. For some reason she felt comfortable with them. Even though the rest of the world deemed them to be social disasters, Belle found them to be the most comforting group of people. All of them had faced some kind of trauma. Not always as crazy as Belle's own story. Belle hadn't told anyone what happened to her. Nobody really tried to force it out of her or anything. She appreciated that. Because when she started to tell the story, it almost always lead to a hallucination and then she'd freak out. She couldn't tell her story. It was too traumatizing. Too painful. Her mind would bring her back there every time. She'd feel his hands on her skin, she'd feel the pain, she'd feel the plastic of the garbage bag he tied her in, she'd feel the pressure of the dirt he shoveled on top of her and then she'd start gasping for air and screaming. As if she were suffocating again.

Her head shot up and her eyes looked toward the door as she heard footsteps. She hoped that whoever it was wouldn't ruin her day. She wanted to stay sane today. To continue feeling like she had it all together. She liked days where she woke up smiling despite everything. She awaited the arrival of whoever it was. Somehow she knew they'd come in here. There were plenty places in the School Wing that were of interest but something made her sure that this person was coming here. Her gut told her so.

[KAMRYN FAITH LA CROIX]

Seeing the sun wasn't really something Kamryn particularly looked forward too now a days. It hadn't been the main priority of hers she had been locked up in the Asylum. The thing about it was that Kamryn wasn't crazy.. well, naturally people would disagree with her opinion. Day in and day out, she would lay in her bed, look at the ceiling, and wonder how many days it would take for them to open the doors to her freedom. Kamryn La Croix had a variety of anger issues and they constantly landed her a gerny ride into her own little padded room. Things were not going as well as she wanted them to, no, but she made the best of things. Throwing off the sheet and sitting up in her bed, Kamryn groaned a little as the nurse entered her room and held out a small plastic cup with a variety of different pills in it. Faking her smile, Kamryn took the cup from the tray, popped the pills into her mouth, chased it with a small amount of water and nodded as the nurse left the room. Once she was out of sight, Kamryn spit out the water, along with the pills onto the floor. Rolling her eyes, she wiped up the mess with a towel and proceeded to get dressed. Saturday's were her favorite days of the week. There were no classes and no appointments on Saturdays. That generally meant she could do pretty much whatever she wanted as long as it was in reason and she wasn't breaking any rules.. which didn't mean she wasn't fully intending on abiding by the rules.

Grinning as she walked down the hallway towards the school wing, Kamryn couldn't help but notice the looks she was getting. Not from just the patients, but from the staff as well. She had quite the reputation and it was clear the way that the rest of the people in the Asylum felt about her. The staff had reason to be cautious of her. It was rare that she listen to authority and she did whatever she could to get into trouble, even if it meant getting hurt in the process. She had given some of the nurses and doctors bruises and even scars in the past, they had every right to give her bad looks. Kamryn never really thought she was going to end up in a place like that. Given the fact she had a pretty good life outside of the Asylum, there was never anyone that would have thought she'd end up here. Kami was more fortunate than a lot of the people who were also prisoners within the walls of the Asylum in the simple fact that her past was clean. There were no traumatic events that were pressing down on her shoulders. There was nothing to give her nightmares when she finally managed to drift off into her own little world when the lights went out. There was just her.

Reaching her hand out to skim her fingers against the wall as she walked, she counted the number of steps that she took. That was part of her Obsessive Compulsive disorder. She counted things when she was alone. 34.. 35.. 36. There was something appealing about the library this afternoon. Regardless of popular belief, Kamryn was actually a very intelligent girl. She read more often than not, really when no one knew where she was. The stories written upon the pages of the books she read captivated her. At times, she would become so consumed in the stories that she'd believe they were real and that she was in them, but of course, she wasn't crazy. Kami was highly imaginative. She prided herself upon the fact that she could turn the most boring of situations into the most interesting. Today was going to be a good day. She had no intentions of ending up in solitary. So, the library was where she found solace.

Pushing the doors of the library open, her brown eyes immediately fixed upon the only other person inside the room. Belle Raven. Out of all the people in the Asylum, she was glad that the person was Belle. Not a lot of people got along with Kamryn La Croix, but she could actually call Belle a friend and a good one at that. Pulling a book off one of the shelves as she walked towards Belle's table, she pulled up a seat next to the dark haired girl as she kissed her on the cheek with a grin. "Well, hello there. You're looking cheery today,"