(no subject)

The asylum is whispering.

It always does. It's the wind through bars and broken windows, shredded cloth and hanging plastic, through abandoned rooms and hallways and past decades of cracked, flaking paint. Once he had thought of it as an unfriendly sound, malevolent and worrying, and it's still malevolent, but he no longer feels threatened and he certainly feels no need to worry.

In some ways, this is the closest to home that part of himself ever gets now. He's been spending more and more time here, wandering, listening to the whispers.

And then of course there's the company. Of more than one kind.

The place is technically abandoned, but abandoned is only ever a technical term in a place like Darrow. He and Spike aren't the only things moving in the dark.

In the building's large front atrium he stops, listening. "Cheerful fucking place, isn't it?"