Avengers/Batman fic: Arkham Arcanum--[Harvey Dent and Wanda Maximoff, PG-13]
Title: Arkham Arcanum
Fandom: Batman/Avengers
Word Count: 1923
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Two-Face (Harvey Dent) and the Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff)
Disclaimer: Everything you recognise is either Marvel’s or DC’s.
Summary: There is no such thing as random chance when she’s involved. Written for dcmarvelthon.
--
[Takes place in DC chronology just before Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth and in Marvel, directly before and after the events of House of M.]
--
Harvey wakes.
He stares blearily into the darkness for a long while, trying to figure out what’s changed. The noise of the asylum is the same as ever, the sounds of screaming and babbling and moaning bouncing off the rotting walls. The floor is still hard and filthy beneath him, and the stale air in his cell still reeks of sweat and terror.
“Hello?”
There it is.
Harvey props himself up on one elbow, blinking. A woman’s face takes form out of the shadows; she, whoever she is, kneels over him where he is curled up on the floor against the wall.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice small and bewildered, “but I think I’ve lost my way.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” Harvey says, sitting up. Broken glass and dirt crunch beneath him. The woman rocks back onto her heels, out of his personal space, though she seems oblivious to the mangled mess that is his face; she is dressed in white silk that drags in the filth, and looks both young and very, very old. “All Arkham has to offer the world is time and lost souls. And broken ones. What do they call you?”
“Wanda,” she says. “My name’s Wanda.”
“Harvey Dent,” he replies, cheerfully offering her a hand. She doesn’t shake it. “But you get to call me Two-Face. For obvious reasons, I should think. Wanda, are you wearing a nightgown? Because if I wasn’t a gentleman, I might interpret a nocturnal visit like this one in entirely the wrong way.”
Wanda looks down at herself, startled, missing the edge in his tone completely. “Yes,” she says slowly, as though remembering, and puts a hand to her wildly curling hair. “Yes, I think I was sleeping. The Professor-he said it was better for me. That I needed quiet. That I shouldn’t be disturbed.”
Harvey eyes her and whistles. “Lady,” he says, “you’re even crazier than I am.”
Wanda’s eyes darken suddenly. “No,” she says, and the look on her face is frightening. Someone down the hall screeches in pain. “No, I’m not. Pietro says I’m not.”
Harvey picks up his scarred silver dollar. “Want to bet on that?” he says, and smiles; there is a viciousness to his lopsided grin that make Wanda recoil. Harvey fingers the makeshift shiv in his pocket, a jagged shard of glass wrapped in a rag. It’ll do for his purposes.
“I don’t think so,” Wanda says, and there is a pale red glow around her hands as she moves her slim fingers in some indiscernible pattern.
Inexplicably, Harvey shrugs, and says, “Have it your way,” tucking the coin away in his empty pocket. The sound of something forgotten and something lost rings hollowly between his ears. “What did they put you in here for, anyway?”
“Nobody put me here,” Wanda says, and tucks her feet in close to herself. “I think I was dreaming. I tend to wander when I dream-oh, all those realities, stacked together like cards in a deck. They’re beautiful, Harvey. So tempting. Decisions reversed, paths not taken… and sometimes… sometimes they drift. The realities merge, you see, they bleed into each other, at the border between sleep and wakefulness, and for someone with my gifts it’s so easy to slip across that line-”
She stops and cocks her head, as though listening to something very far away.
“And you say you’re not crazy,” Harvey says, and he grins again, his face stretching horrifically.
Wanda stands, unsteady on her feet. “I have to go now,” she says. “Pietro is worried about me. He thinks the Professor is making me sick.”
“Who is this Pietro?” Harvey asks. “He your shrink? Your boyfriend?”
“My brother,” Wanda says, hand on the doorframe. “My twin brother.”
“Oh, that’s too much, that’s too goddamn much,” Harvey says to her retreating back, and he throws his head back and laughs.
Afterwards, when he wakens under the slivers of afternoon sunshine that stream through his sole barred and meshed window, he’ll think it all a dream.
--
Weeks later, Harvey sits alone in the grim fading twilight, regarding the die the psychiatrist had given him at their last session. He doesn’t like it. The world isn’t black and white, Harvey, the psychiatrist had told him after she’d taken away his coin, and he’d shifted in his chair disgustedly, his chains clanking. We don’t deal in absolutes, there are more alternatives in every situation that you need to consider.
Six sides, six different options. Harvey scowls at the die, and when he looks up, the woman named Wanda is standing above him, her brown hair swinging before her.
“Harvey,” Wanda says.
“Hello again,” Harvey says, palming the die neatly. “I thought you were a figment of my imagination.” He pats the floor beside him. She sits, folding the skirts of her delicate green nightgown around herself gracefully.
“It’s quiet here now,” she says, and she’s right; the inmates only really hit their stride during the night. Then Wanda sees the chains around his wrists and feet, and she looks confused. “What are you in those for?”
Lazily, Harvey settles himself more comfortable against the wall. “There was, shall we say, an altercation with another inmate last week,” he says dryly. She smells of powder and jasmine and freshly-laundered sheets. It’s hard not to notice.
Contempt is etched across Wanda’s face. “I used to deal with people like you all the time,” she says. “I didn’t like it. I had to do it-I wanted to do it, I wanted to help, but-it hit too close to home, you know.”
“You weren’t one of the good guys, were you?” Harvey curls his lip. “Buddy-buddy with the big blue boy scout?”
Wanda blinks at him. “Do you mean Cap?” she asks, then shakes her head. “I was a hero, yes. Or what approximated one. Once. I-I did a lot of bad things to good people.”
“You and me both,” Harvey says. “What’s your deal, Wanda?”
“I can manipulate the flow of probabilities,” Wanda says.
Harvey turns the die over in his fingers, smiling to himself. “I’ll just bet.”
Wanda goes on unbidden, fidgeting with her sleeves absently. “It’s like… it’s like I can feel the whole of reality, everything that is and could be-and I can change it. Make it do what I want it to. I used to call it chaos magic, but Doctor Strange… he said I was making it up. That I didn’t understand my own powers. Why would he say something like that?” Her lower lip wobbles slightly, like a child’s. “And Daddy took me away, and they put me to sleep. But it doesn’t stop. I can see reality warping around me, and I can’t make it stop. I just want it to stop.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Harvey asks. He keeps rolling the yellowed die between his fingers as he stands. “You’re trying to run away from what you’ve really done?”
Wanda stares up at him, then looks down. “Yes,” she says, and she bits her lip hard.
“Coward,” Harvey says. “Embrace your nature, and stop making excuses. The doctors here tell me I have a split personality. That they can fix me. But I don’t need to be fixed. And neither do you.”
“Stop it,” Wanda says, hands curling into fists, her eyes blazing, “just stop it,” and Harvey finds himself stumbling and falling hard against the wall.
“Huh,” Harvey says, picking himself up carefully. “What’re the odds of something like that happening, huh?”
But when he looks around the cell, Wanda is gone.
--
After that, she doesn’t visit him for a long time.
The doctors think he is improving. As the months wear on, and he loses more and more of himself in the darkness, they move him from the die to a tarot deck, seventy-eight cards combined in an unlimited number of combinations to describe an infinite number of choices and possibilities that clamour and screech in his mind over one other until he can’t think straight, can’t decide what they want him to do. He misses the die. No, he misses his coin.
“The three of swords,” Harvey says aloud, flicking at the edge of a card. “Reversed. How appropriate. Misrule. Disorder. Or to interpret it more simply, the swords might fall out and the heart may heal, but you can still feel the pain, can’t you, Wanda?”
She is standing in the doorway, and for a change she’s actually dressed in real clothes, some kind of costumey peasant-girl dress and cloak that somehow suits her exactly. “The tarot deck,” she says. “My aunt Agatha taught me how to read it. How are you, Harvey?”
“I don’t know,” he says, and turns over another card. “The High Priestess. That’ll be you, I think. The cards won’t tell me-it’s so noisy, Wanda. It’s too much. They won’t tell me what I want to know. You try. ”
“Oh, Harvey,” she says, and her voice is sad. “What’s happened to you?”
“Remember what I said about having a split personality? They decided to split it further. Little pieces of Harvey Dent all over the place. I’ve splintered, like you, Wanda.” The scarred half of Harvey’s face is in shadow, and in the small slices of moonlight coming in from the narrow window, he looks serene and beautiful. Wanda stares too long, though, and Harvey turns to face her with the full horror of his face. “Your turn,” he says, and thrusts the deck at her as she sits before him, folding her scarlet cloak around herself.
Wanda’s pale hands flash in the darkness as she shuffles and cuts the deck, arranging the cards in a simple spread. The Lightning Struck Tower. The King of Swords.
“I broke out of there, Harvey,” she says, tracing the back of the final card with one blood-red fingernail. “I did some bad things. But it was all an accident. It wasn’t fair. They didn’t understand. But I’m making myself better. I made everyone better.” Her eyes drift shut, and with a barely audible sigh, she flips the card. A reaper on a white horse.
“Death,” Harvey says, and because there is no such thing as random chance when she’s involved he can feel his skin crawl. Harvey turns the Death card face down and gathers the rest of the deck up with trembling hands, dropping several onto the dirty stone floor. “The end of a cycle. A transition. A change. Something’s coming, don’t you smell it in the air? The Joker, he said he had a plan. He said he was going to shake things up around here. He said it, Wanda, he said it-”
“I’m sorry, Harvey. But you were wrong, you know,” she says, peeling one card off the floor. “I went wrong for a while there, and-and I need to go fix myself right now. So do you, you know. You have that choice-hold on to that. Remember yourself.”
She passes the card to him: the Wheel of Fortune, grime smeared across its face.
And then he is alone in the darkness.
Somewhere in the distance, he can hear the low rumble of Batman’s voice, and the Joker’s delighted cackle. “You’re in the real world now, and the lunatics have taken over the asylum,” the Joker crows, and Harvey stands. He’ll go see what’s going on, he thinks, and leaves the room, shuffling the tarot deck as he goes.
Fandom: Batman/Avengers
Word Count: 1923
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Two-Face (Harvey Dent) and the Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff)
Disclaimer: Everything you recognise is either Marvel’s or DC’s.
Summary: There is no such thing as random chance when she’s involved. Written for dcmarvelthon.
--
[Takes place in DC chronology just before Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth and in Marvel, directly before and after the events of House of M.]
--
Harvey wakes.
He stares blearily into the darkness for a long while, trying to figure out what’s changed. The noise of the asylum is the same as ever, the sounds of screaming and babbling and moaning bouncing off the rotting walls. The floor is still hard and filthy beneath him, and the stale air in his cell still reeks of sweat and terror.
“Hello?”
There it is.
Harvey props himself up on one elbow, blinking. A woman’s face takes form out of the shadows; she, whoever she is, kneels over him where he is curled up on the floor against the wall.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice small and bewildered, “but I think I’ve lost my way.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” Harvey says, sitting up. Broken glass and dirt crunch beneath him. The woman rocks back onto her heels, out of his personal space, though she seems oblivious to the mangled mess that is his face; she is dressed in white silk that drags in the filth, and looks both young and very, very old. “All Arkham has to offer the world is time and lost souls. And broken ones. What do they call you?”
“Wanda,” she says. “My name’s Wanda.”
“Harvey Dent,” he replies, cheerfully offering her a hand. She doesn’t shake it. “But you get to call me Two-Face. For obvious reasons, I should think. Wanda, are you wearing a nightgown? Because if I wasn’t a gentleman, I might interpret a nocturnal visit like this one in entirely the wrong way.”
Wanda looks down at herself, startled, missing the edge in his tone completely. “Yes,” she says slowly, as though remembering, and puts a hand to her wildly curling hair. “Yes, I think I was sleeping. The Professor-he said it was better for me. That I needed quiet. That I shouldn’t be disturbed.”
Harvey eyes her and whistles. “Lady,” he says, “you’re even crazier than I am.”
Wanda’s eyes darken suddenly. “No,” she says, and the look on her face is frightening. Someone down the hall screeches in pain. “No, I’m not. Pietro says I’m not.”
Harvey picks up his scarred silver dollar. “Want to bet on that?” he says, and smiles; there is a viciousness to his lopsided grin that make Wanda recoil. Harvey fingers the makeshift shiv in his pocket, a jagged shard of glass wrapped in a rag. It’ll do for his purposes.
“I don’t think so,” Wanda says, and there is a pale red glow around her hands as she moves her slim fingers in some indiscernible pattern.
Inexplicably, Harvey shrugs, and says, “Have it your way,” tucking the coin away in his empty pocket. The sound of something forgotten and something lost rings hollowly between his ears. “What did they put you in here for, anyway?”
“Nobody put me here,” Wanda says, and tucks her feet in close to herself. “I think I was dreaming. I tend to wander when I dream-oh, all those realities, stacked together like cards in a deck. They’re beautiful, Harvey. So tempting. Decisions reversed, paths not taken… and sometimes… sometimes they drift. The realities merge, you see, they bleed into each other, at the border between sleep and wakefulness, and for someone with my gifts it’s so easy to slip across that line-”
She stops and cocks her head, as though listening to something very far away.
“And you say you’re not crazy,” Harvey says, and he grins again, his face stretching horrifically.
Wanda stands, unsteady on her feet. “I have to go now,” she says. “Pietro is worried about me. He thinks the Professor is making me sick.”
“Who is this Pietro?” Harvey asks. “He your shrink? Your boyfriend?”
“My brother,” Wanda says, hand on the doorframe. “My twin brother.”
“Oh, that’s too much, that’s too goddamn much,” Harvey says to her retreating back, and he throws his head back and laughs.
Afterwards, when he wakens under the slivers of afternoon sunshine that stream through his sole barred and meshed window, he’ll think it all a dream.
--
Weeks later, Harvey sits alone in the grim fading twilight, regarding the die the psychiatrist had given him at their last session. He doesn’t like it. The world isn’t black and white, Harvey, the psychiatrist had told him after she’d taken away his coin, and he’d shifted in his chair disgustedly, his chains clanking. We don’t deal in absolutes, there are more alternatives in every situation that you need to consider.
Six sides, six different options. Harvey scowls at the die, and when he looks up, the woman named Wanda is standing above him, her brown hair swinging before her.
“Harvey,” Wanda says.
“Hello again,” Harvey says, palming the die neatly. “I thought you were a figment of my imagination.” He pats the floor beside him. She sits, folding the skirts of her delicate green nightgown around herself gracefully.
“It’s quiet here now,” she says, and she’s right; the inmates only really hit their stride during the night. Then Wanda sees the chains around his wrists and feet, and she looks confused. “What are you in those for?”
Lazily, Harvey settles himself more comfortable against the wall. “There was, shall we say, an altercation with another inmate last week,” he says dryly. She smells of powder and jasmine and freshly-laundered sheets. It’s hard not to notice.
Contempt is etched across Wanda’s face. “I used to deal with people like you all the time,” she says. “I didn’t like it. I had to do it-I wanted to do it, I wanted to help, but-it hit too close to home, you know.”
“You weren’t one of the good guys, were you?” Harvey curls his lip. “Buddy-buddy with the big blue boy scout?”
Wanda blinks at him. “Do you mean Cap?” she asks, then shakes her head. “I was a hero, yes. Or what approximated one. Once. I-I did a lot of bad things to good people.”
“You and me both,” Harvey says. “What’s your deal, Wanda?”
“I can manipulate the flow of probabilities,” Wanda says.
Harvey turns the die over in his fingers, smiling to himself. “I’ll just bet.”
Wanda goes on unbidden, fidgeting with her sleeves absently. “It’s like… it’s like I can feel the whole of reality, everything that is and could be-and I can change it. Make it do what I want it to. I used to call it chaos magic, but Doctor Strange… he said I was making it up. That I didn’t understand my own powers. Why would he say something like that?” Her lower lip wobbles slightly, like a child’s. “And Daddy took me away, and they put me to sleep. But it doesn’t stop. I can see reality warping around me, and I can’t make it stop. I just want it to stop.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Harvey asks. He keeps rolling the yellowed die between his fingers as he stands. “You’re trying to run away from what you’ve really done?”
Wanda stares up at him, then looks down. “Yes,” she says, and she bits her lip hard.
“Coward,” Harvey says. “Embrace your nature, and stop making excuses. The doctors here tell me I have a split personality. That they can fix me. But I don’t need to be fixed. And neither do you.”
“Stop it,” Wanda says, hands curling into fists, her eyes blazing, “just stop it,” and Harvey finds himself stumbling and falling hard against the wall.
“Huh,” Harvey says, picking himself up carefully. “What’re the odds of something like that happening, huh?”
But when he looks around the cell, Wanda is gone.
--
After that, she doesn’t visit him for a long time.
The doctors think he is improving. As the months wear on, and he loses more and more of himself in the darkness, they move him from the die to a tarot deck, seventy-eight cards combined in an unlimited number of combinations to describe an infinite number of choices and possibilities that clamour and screech in his mind over one other until he can’t think straight, can’t decide what they want him to do. He misses the die. No, he misses his coin.
“The three of swords,” Harvey says aloud, flicking at the edge of a card. “Reversed. How appropriate. Misrule. Disorder. Or to interpret it more simply, the swords might fall out and the heart may heal, but you can still feel the pain, can’t you, Wanda?”
She is standing in the doorway, and for a change she’s actually dressed in real clothes, some kind of costumey peasant-girl dress and cloak that somehow suits her exactly. “The tarot deck,” she says. “My aunt Agatha taught me how to read it. How are you, Harvey?”
“I don’t know,” he says, and turns over another card. “The High Priestess. That’ll be you, I think. The cards won’t tell me-it’s so noisy, Wanda. It’s too much. They won’t tell me what I want to know. You try. ”
“Oh, Harvey,” she says, and her voice is sad. “What’s happened to you?”
“Remember what I said about having a split personality? They decided to split it further. Little pieces of Harvey Dent all over the place. I’ve splintered, like you, Wanda.” The scarred half of Harvey’s face is in shadow, and in the small slices of moonlight coming in from the narrow window, he looks serene and beautiful. Wanda stares too long, though, and Harvey turns to face her with the full horror of his face. “Your turn,” he says, and thrusts the deck at her as she sits before him, folding her scarlet cloak around herself.
Wanda’s pale hands flash in the darkness as she shuffles and cuts the deck, arranging the cards in a simple spread. The Lightning Struck Tower. The King of Swords.
“I broke out of there, Harvey,” she says, tracing the back of the final card with one blood-red fingernail. “I did some bad things. But it was all an accident. It wasn’t fair. They didn’t understand. But I’m making myself better. I made everyone better.” Her eyes drift shut, and with a barely audible sigh, she flips the card. A reaper on a white horse.
“Death,” Harvey says, and because there is no such thing as random chance when she’s involved he can feel his skin crawl. Harvey turns the Death card face down and gathers the rest of the deck up with trembling hands, dropping several onto the dirty stone floor. “The end of a cycle. A transition. A change. Something’s coming, don’t you smell it in the air? The Joker, he said he had a plan. He said he was going to shake things up around here. He said it, Wanda, he said it-”
“I’m sorry, Harvey. But you were wrong, you know,” she says, peeling one card off the floor. “I went wrong for a while there, and-and I need to go fix myself right now. So do you, you know. You have that choice-hold on to that. Remember yourself.”
She passes the card to him: the Wheel of Fortune, grime smeared across its face.
And then he is alone in the darkness.
Somewhere in the distance, he can hear the low rumble of Batman’s voice, and the Joker’s delighted cackle. “You’re in the real world now, and the lunatics have taken over the asylum,” the Joker crows, and Harvey stands. He’ll go see what’s going on, he thinks, and leaves the room, shuffling the tarot deck as he goes.