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It’s not that he’s insane, oh no. It’s not that he’s crazed, or deluded. It’s the eye’s fault. It’s always the eye’s fault.
If you excuse the chains pinning him down to the floor, he’s really quite an ordinary man. Excuse the bloodshed, please, for his key traits lay below it. This asylum must not allow visitors, as nobody ever stops by to see him. Is that loneliness? Surely not. It’s the eye’s fault, the fault of the beings beyond his control.
He touched a hand to his face— well, he tried, but he was too heavily bound to move. He’s had this thought process before, tried that exact same action before, and he knew it. Was it the eye forcing him to drag his mind in loops like this, was his thought process just an object to be toyed with? He bit his lip. Really, there’s only so many places his mind could go, and that was the problem. That no matter what he thought, he’d always be dragged back to this topic. And he could never change that.
He couldn’t just think of something else. That’s a luxury he could never afford, simply because there was nothing else. Just him, and the eye. And it wasn’t that he didn’t know about other things– no, that wasn’t it. In his mind, there was a little painted image of his family. And he could see them so clearly, despite everything that had happened to them. Some part of him still longed for that to come back. But if he ever tried to do more than just remember them, remember everything he could’ve had, he almost felt sick.
It wasn’t that he’s insane, please try to understand that. The feeling of being watched was normal for him, it hadn’t just emerged recently. The eye was a regular stain on his conscience, and he had made peace with it long ago. But some realisation had stuck with him still.
Things may not ever be able to go back to how they were, but he was content with how the future was going.