Straightway Dangerous 2/3
Series: Straightway Dangerous 2/3
Title: I Hope My Smile Can Distract You
See the masterpost for full header and warnings
*~*~*~*
The room is bare and too bright. Jonathan is sitting on a chair that has been sat in by too many people. The seat is curved inwards, settling him too low, and he can feel the springs inside. He is on the wrong side of an ugly desk.
Jonathan feels exposed and he reaches compulsively to shove his glasses up his nose. When he remembers he doesn’t have those on, he jerks his hand away to smooth a tie that isn’t there, and finds his hands empty and bereft of something to do with them. He does the rounds a few times over, a nervous tic. It irritates him in a vague sort of way. He knows his appointed doctor is making a note of it. Of everything he does.
“You seem to be adjusting to the new regimen very well.”
Jonathan’s appointed doctor is an idiot. It’s been almost a whole month since John started swapping meds with Jonathan. He hasn’t taken most of those meds in weeks, weaning himself slowly off them. He is - was - a doctor himself and he’s fairly certain that he’s about eight different kinds of incurable crazy. Jonathan has decided he’s pretty much okay with that.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan sits in the dayroom and watches the others without interest. The paint on the wall is peeling off, chalky flakes, a little yellow from nicotine staining, back when you could smoke inside, back before someone decided letting lunatics smoke was a bad idea. He watches one of his fellow inmates, Oscar, pick up the shards and put them in his mouth. There’s probably lead in the paint.
Lead poisoning. If left untreated would cause nausea, pain in the stomach and intestines, chest pain, headache, possible insomnia, possible, if not unlikely, seizure and coma. Oscar would have to eat a lot of paint for that to occur but it could happen. No one was likely to notice him eating the flakes and the wall was unlikely to stop shedding any time soon.
“Candy time, open up.” Third shift, Laurence. He didn’t like Jonathan when he worked under him. He likes him a lot less now, or perhaps a lot more - depending on how you look at it. “Crane, open your fucking mouth or I’ll have to call the nurses.”
Jonathan opens his mouth without protest. He’d prefer to take the little paper cup himself, rattle the pills around and assess what the current head of psychology thinks he’s doing, then take them, but with Laurence, if he wants to tip the drugs down Jonathan’s throat, water be damned, then Jonathan opens his mouth like a good boy and gets it over with.
It isn’t as though Jonathan is taking the pills anyway.
Jonathan sticks out his tongue, lets the man look at the inside of his cheeks, bony fingers digging into the curve of his jaw and smiles a little at the scowl on Laurence’s face.
“Enjoy your round,” Jonathan says. Not because he means it. He rather hopes Laurence will slip on the freshly mopped floors and break his neck, but it seems to give the man the heebie-jeebies when Jonathan is nice to him, so he persists in being friendly.
When no one is looking, Jonathan makes a sound like a cat bringing up a hairball and spits out his pills. After two weeks of having to stick his finger down his oesophagus, he finally mastered the trick of holding them in his throat, rather than swallowing them totally. He stashes his medication in his socks and waits.
*~*~*~*
John is in the bathroom, crouched on one of the countertops, elbows resting on his knees. He’s managed to get his hands on one of the staff labcoats and it flares out behind him like long white wings. His hair is getting longer, dark blond curls, and he is pale and still. The florescent lights overhead combined with the pills Jonathan does take give him a luminous quality, whole body haloed.
If he believed in it, Jonathan would say he looked like the devil. Since he had been labouring under the delusion that he himself was God it makes a certain sort of sense.
Jonathan fishes the drugs out of his socks and slaps them down on the countertop, sharp rattle of health against the cheap ceramic. He leans against the wall, arms folded over his chest. “Risperdal, fluoxetine, clozapine, diazepam, alprazolam,” he says.
It’s a fucking joke is what it is. The idea of putting Valium and Xanax together is laughable. Either they’re trying to test the limits of his ability to mix medication or they’re trying to put him down and keep him there. Possibly permanently. Or it could be that the new head of Arkham is a total incompetent. Jonathan suspects it might be all three.
John cocks his head to one side and then hops down off the counter. “You’re sounding...heh, chatty today,” he says.
Some days Jonathan talks, some days he doesn’t. Today he is full of nervous tension, and he feels it in his feet, and chest, and throat. He digs his fingers into his arms and shrugs.
John comes closer, his heavy tilted walk, the curve of bicep and stretch of shoulders, and the four inches he has on Jonathan are never more apparent than when he’s invading Jonathan’s personal space, which he seems to delight in doing, since it makes Jonathan uncomfortable. He backs Jonathan against the wall, crowds him, drugs sitting on his palm between them.
“Tell me about it, them, anything,” John encourages and doubles the pile with his own unswallowed medication.
Jonathan shrugs again.
Now that he is feeling a little more clearheaded he can piece together what’s happened since he got here. They had strapped him to a gurney and pumped his veins full of the anti-toxin given to all the victims of his gas. He had felt it pushing into his body, seeping in through the IV drip. It hadn’t helped. None of the drugs helped him; they made him worse, reacted badly with his own anti-toxin. He’d spent a week screaming, in terrible fits of fear, before they took him off one of the first drug cocktails.
Now it seems as though they’re just…lazy. The fluoxetine is for Obsessive Compulsive Personality disorder (not to be confused with OCD). He could see how an idiot might think he had it but even if he had displayed a few of the symptoms, they still never interfered with his day to day. Getting a face full of his own fear toxin had “interfered with his daily routine” and he had solved that problem himself, thank you very much.
The alternate diagnosis, or perhaps they think he is both at the same time, of all the absurd things, of schizotypy is equally lazy but seems to be why they’re giving him the clozapine.
Jonathan picks through the drugs in John’s hand and carefully separates them into three piles. One for him, one for John, and one to trade. The latter pile is by far the largest. Jonathan is reducing down to nothing and John only takes things that will help him sleep; he gets bored at night and he rarely sleeps on his own. Mostly he just comes and keeps Jonathan awake, watching him. For a man who is frequently in motion, John has an incredible capacity for stillness. He doesn’t ask what John is trading the drugs for, or with whom he’s trading. He’s doing better, but not enough to care.
John tucks the medication away, stashing it in various bits of clothing and sighs. He thumbs the thin skin under Jonathan’s eye, pressing just a bit too hard, like he’s thinking about what it would take to really dig in and take the eye out. Jonathan stands docile. He feels clammy and out of control and he’s not sure what he’ll do when the fog finally clears.
“Why were you running your toxin as street drugs?” John asks. “Sloppy work, very sloppy work, Scarecrow.” Jonathan tries to shake his head. He’s just getting a handle on himself again, he doesn’t need that now. It’s against the rules. John puts his other thumb under Jonathan’s other eye and presses hard with both, holding him still.
“But then,” John continues, “you’re not a, ah, stupid man, not sane, no, but not, I think, stupid.” He licks his lips and Jonathan feels himself sway forwards, the curve of his shoulder-blades no longer touching the wall. John presses him back again and Jonathan’s hands unfist so he can grab onto John’s wrists. “You had to have known that would be a one way ticket here,” John says. His pulse is strong under Jonathan’s fingers and Jonathan’s whole body shakes with it and the machine-gun fire of John’s laugh.
“Perhaps I needed the money,” Jonathan says. He still has a tab of Valium stashed in his right sock. He wonders if that would help the way his stomach turns over when John examines him and then licks at his own mouth like a decision has been made.
“No. No, no, no,” John says. “That’s not it, no good at all. Your creation for the crawling masses, for money? You’ll break my heart.”
“Then what’s your professional medical opinion?” Jonathan asks snidely, holding on tighter.
John doesn’t actually smile very often. Laughing, yes, Jonathan is beginning to think that’s something of a nervous tic, as well as an affectation. He smiles now. “I think you did it...to get caught,” John says. “Which only leaves me with why. Why would doctor Jonathan Crane, why would Scarecrow, want to get caught by Batman? Is it the beatings? Hm. Is it the ears? Is it a blind faith that you just might win if only you confront him one last time? You won’t, by the way.”
Jonathan manages a smile back. “You don’t want the answer,” he says, tipping his head back so he can look at the water stains and cracks in the plaster of the ceiling. “And even if, deep, deep down in your psychosis you’ve convinced yourself that you do, I don’t want to tell you.” His neck is a long line of uncovered skin and he can feel John’s breath there. He wonders if John is the sort to try and tear his throat out.
That seems to annoy John if the way he uses his grip to swing Jonathan around and throw him up against the sinks is any indication. Jonathan’s back will be bruised later, sore and hot when they strap him down tonight. John could hurt him, fairly easily. He’s not sure why John turns around and walks out, graceless thud of his uneven steps.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan and John are sitting on opposite ends of the same sofa when it’s medication time again. They share a look, and John has the audacity to wink at him, lips pursed like he’s blowing a kiss. Subtle, John is not, and Jonathan can’t help but roll his eyes a little.
John treats Arkham like it’s a resort and he’s on a holiday. Like he’s just taking a little break before he has to go back to work. It’s strange and enviable and Jonathan wishes he could see things like that. People have escaped before. He hopes that if John has a plan to get out, that he’ll take Jonathan with him. He isn’t holding his breath. He’s not so stupid as to think that John has any sense of compassion or empathy.
Jonathan accepts his pills without complaint but as they’re handing John his little paper cup he sees the label on the tray: John Doe.
The orderly shuffles away and Jonathan doesn’t remember to spit up his pills until John leans across the sofa and pinches him, hard. John cocks his head to the side, peering curiously at Jonathan. “Oh Doctor,” he says. “You thought John was my name? Don’t you know who I am?” He’s smiling again, bright wide grin. “I’m kind of a big deal, you know.”
Jonathan swallows the medication. He feels strangely disappointed. He’d expected a lot of different sorts of betrayals, but not this one.
“Hey now, Scarecrow,” John - fucking John Doe - says. “Don’t get your, ah, panties in a twist. I had no idea you were so...” he trails off into explosive laughter. “You didn’t know,” he says, gasping.
Jonathan gets up and takes himself elsewhere.
*~*~*~*
He knows where they keep the keys, and when staff will walk the halls, and when they’ll have snuck into the basement where the old tunnels are to have a smoke. Now that his head is clear, Jonathan finds it laughably easy to get his hands on exactly what he wants.
John Doe’s paperwork is easy enough to find. They don’t even keep the files in the main office, since there are too many of them. Jonathan is able to sit in the records room, undisturbed, and read.
Jonathan’s been in Arkham for quite some time now; locked up and halfway to catatonic from the drugs they were giving him. He wasn’t exactly keeping up with the news. But now he knows.
*~*~*~*
The Joker is in his own bed for once, when the lights go out. This time Jonathan breaks into his room.
He’s lying on his back on top of the covers, twirling a scalpel in one hand, the rancid yellow of the light outside flashing off the metal with each pass. He doesn’t look up until Jonathan flicks a playing card at him and it bounces off his chest and lands on the floor. And then he barely even glances at it.
“You want to know how I got these scars?” Joker asks.
Jonathan has his own profile he’s writing up in his head of this man. Psychopathic, possible Dissocial Personality Disorder. Histrionic. Masochistic. Sadistic. Tendencies towards pyromania.
Manic.
Obviously.
Jonathan grabs Joker’s wrist and pins it to the bed, stopping the motion of the scalpel. “The fact that I can predict and profile you,” he says, “makes you far less interesting to me. And no, I could give significantly less of a fuck how you got them. You were abused as a child, tortured as an adult, or self-mutilate, and none of those stories will do more than complete my diagnosis and further bore me.”
He’s not surprised when Joker twists his wrist out from his grip and uses the movement to reverse their positions, pinning Jonathan face down over the bed with his arm up behind his back, Joker leaning on it a little too hard. If he pushes much more Jonathan’s shoulder is going to pop out of joint. Jonathan is wholly unsurprised.
“You should have told me,” Jonathan says, despite the threat of the scalpel up against his cheek.
Joker doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what Jonathan is talking about. “I honestly thought you knew,” he says. “But you have to admit, it was funny.”
Jonathan sighs. “Either kill me or let me up,” he says. “You’re not going to cut me.”
If the Joker is irritated by Jonathan’s prediction, he doesn’t show it. He lets go and Jonathan rolls over onto his back, legs hanging off the side of the bed. “And spoil that pretty face?” Joker says. “Now that…would be a crime.”
*~*~*~*
part one: Your Boldness Stands Alone Among the Wreck
part two: I Hope my Smile can Distract you
part three: You're a Criminal as Long as You're Mine
Title: I Hope My Smile Can Distract You
See the masterpost for full header and warnings
*~*~*~*
The room is bare and too bright. Jonathan is sitting on a chair that has been sat in by too many people. The seat is curved inwards, settling him too low, and he can feel the springs inside. He is on the wrong side of an ugly desk.
Jonathan feels exposed and he reaches compulsively to shove his glasses up his nose. When he remembers he doesn’t have those on, he jerks his hand away to smooth a tie that isn’t there, and finds his hands empty and bereft of something to do with them. He does the rounds a few times over, a nervous tic. It irritates him in a vague sort of way. He knows his appointed doctor is making a note of it. Of everything he does.
“You seem to be adjusting to the new regimen very well.”
Jonathan’s appointed doctor is an idiot. It’s been almost a whole month since John started swapping meds with Jonathan. He hasn’t taken most of those meds in weeks, weaning himself slowly off them. He is - was - a doctor himself and he’s fairly certain that he’s about eight different kinds of incurable crazy. Jonathan has decided he’s pretty much okay with that.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan sits in the dayroom and watches the others without interest. The paint on the wall is peeling off, chalky flakes, a little yellow from nicotine staining, back when you could smoke inside, back before someone decided letting lunatics smoke was a bad idea. He watches one of his fellow inmates, Oscar, pick up the shards and put them in his mouth. There’s probably lead in the paint.
Lead poisoning. If left untreated would cause nausea, pain in the stomach and intestines, chest pain, headache, possible insomnia, possible, if not unlikely, seizure and coma. Oscar would have to eat a lot of paint for that to occur but it could happen. No one was likely to notice him eating the flakes and the wall was unlikely to stop shedding any time soon.
“Candy time, open up.” Third shift, Laurence. He didn’t like Jonathan when he worked under him. He likes him a lot less now, or perhaps a lot more - depending on how you look at it. “Crane, open your fucking mouth or I’ll have to call the nurses.”
Jonathan opens his mouth without protest. He’d prefer to take the little paper cup himself, rattle the pills around and assess what the current head of psychology thinks he’s doing, then take them, but with Laurence, if he wants to tip the drugs down Jonathan’s throat, water be damned, then Jonathan opens his mouth like a good boy and gets it over with.
It isn’t as though Jonathan is taking the pills anyway.
Jonathan sticks out his tongue, lets the man look at the inside of his cheeks, bony fingers digging into the curve of his jaw and smiles a little at the scowl on Laurence’s face.
“Enjoy your round,” Jonathan says. Not because he means it. He rather hopes Laurence will slip on the freshly mopped floors and break his neck, but it seems to give the man the heebie-jeebies when Jonathan is nice to him, so he persists in being friendly.
When no one is looking, Jonathan makes a sound like a cat bringing up a hairball and spits out his pills. After two weeks of having to stick his finger down his oesophagus, he finally mastered the trick of holding them in his throat, rather than swallowing them totally. He stashes his medication in his socks and waits.
*~*~*~*
John is in the bathroom, crouched on one of the countertops, elbows resting on his knees. He’s managed to get his hands on one of the staff labcoats and it flares out behind him like long white wings. His hair is getting longer, dark blond curls, and he is pale and still. The florescent lights overhead combined with the pills Jonathan does take give him a luminous quality, whole body haloed.
If he believed in it, Jonathan would say he looked like the devil. Since he had been labouring under the delusion that he himself was God it makes a certain sort of sense.
Jonathan fishes the drugs out of his socks and slaps them down on the countertop, sharp rattle of health against the cheap ceramic. He leans against the wall, arms folded over his chest. “Risperdal, fluoxetine, clozapine, diazepam, alprazolam,” he says.
It’s a fucking joke is what it is. The idea of putting Valium and Xanax together is laughable. Either they’re trying to test the limits of his ability to mix medication or they’re trying to put him down and keep him there. Possibly permanently. Or it could be that the new head of Arkham is a total incompetent. Jonathan suspects it might be all three.
John cocks his head to one side and then hops down off the counter. “You’re sounding...heh, chatty today,” he says.
Some days Jonathan talks, some days he doesn’t. Today he is full of nervous tension, and he feels it in his feet, and chest, and throat. He digs his fingers into his arms and shrugs.
John comes closer, his heavy tilted walk, the curve of bicep and stretch of shoulders, and the four inches he has on Jonathan are never more apparent than when he’s invading Jonathan’s personal space, which he seems to delight in doing, since it makes Jonathan uncomfortable. He backs Jonathan against the wall, crowds him, drugs sitting on his palm between them.
“Tell me about it, them, anything,” John encourages and doubles the pile with his own unswallowed medication.
Jonathan shrugs again.
Now that he is feeling a little more clearheaded he can piece together what’s happened since he got here. They had strapped him to a gurney and pumped his veins full of the anti-toxin given to all the victims of his gas. He had felt it pushing into his body, seeping in through the IV drip. It hadn’t helped. None of the drugs helped him; they made him worse, reacted badly with his own anti-toxin. He’d spent a week screaming, in terrible fits of fear, before they took him off one of the first drug cocktails.
Now it seems as though they’re just…lazy. The fluoxetine is for Obsessive Compulsive Personality disorder (not to be confused with OCD). He could see how an idiot might think he had it but even if he had displayed a few of the symptoms, they still never interfered with his day to day. Getting a face full of his own fear toxin had “interfered with his daily routine” and he had solved that problem himself, thank you very much.
The alternate diagnosis, or perhaps they think he is both at the same time, of all the absurd things, of schizotypy is equally lazy but seems to be why they’re giving him the clozapine.
Jonathan picks through the drugs in John’s hand and carefully separates them into three piles. One for him, one for John, and one to trade. The latter pile is by far the largest. Jonathan is reducing down to nothing and John only takes things that will help him sleep; he gets bored at night and he rarely sleeps on his own. Mostly he just comes and keeps Jonathan awake, watching him. For a man who is frequently in motion, John has an incredible capacity for stillness. He doesn’t ask what John is trading the drugs for, or with whom he’s trading. He’s doing better, but not enough to care.
John tucks the medication away, stashing it in various bits of clothing and sighs. He thumbs the thin skin under Jonathan’s eye, pressing just a bit too hard, like he’s thinking about what it would take to really dig in and take the eye out. Jonathan stands docile. He feels clammy and out of control and he’s not sure what he’ll do when the fog finally clears.
“Why were you running your toxin as street drugs?” John asks. “Sloppy work, very sloppy work, Scarecrow.” Jonathan tries to shake his head. He’s just getting a handle on himself again, he doesn’t need that now. It’s against the rules. John puts his other thumb under Jonathan’s other eye and presses hard with both, holding him still.
“But then,” John continues, “you’re not a, ah, stupid man, not sane, no, but not, I think, stupid.” He licks his lips and Jonathan feels himself sway forwards, the curve of his shoulder-blades no longer touching the wall. John presses him back again and Jonathan’s hands unfist so he can grab onto John’s wrists. “You had to have known that would be a one way ticket here,” John says. His pulse is strong under Jonathan’s fingers and Jonathan’s whole body shakes with it and the machine-gun fire of John’s laugh.
“Perhaps I needed the money,” Jonathan says. He still has a tab of Valium stashed in his right sock. He wonders if that would help the way his stomach turns over when John examines him and then licks at his own mouth like a decision has been made.
“No. No, no, no,” John says. “That’s not it, no good at all. Your creation for the crawling masses, for money? You’ll break my heart.”
“Then what’s your professional medical opinion?” Jonathan asks snidely, holding on tighter.
John doesn’t actually smile very often. Laughing, yes, Jonathan is beginning to think that’s something of a nervous tic, as well as an affectation. He smiles now. “I think you did it...to get caught,” John says. “Which only leaves me with why. Why would doctor Jonathan Crane, why would Scarecrow, want to get caught by Batman? Is it the beatings? Hm. Is it the ears? Is it a blind faith that you just might win if only you confront him one last time? You won’t, by the way.”
Jonathan manages a smile back. “You don’t want the answer,” he says, tipping his head back so he can look at the water stains and cracks in the plaster of the ceiling. “And even if, deep, deep down in your psychosis you’ve convinced yourself that you do, I don’t want to tell you.” His neck is a long line of uncovered skin and he can feel John’s breath there. He wonders if John is the sort to try and tear his throat out.
That seems to annoy John if the way he uses his grip to swing Jonathan around and throw him up against the sinks is any indication. Jonathan’s back will be bruised later, sore and hot when they strap him down tonight. John could hurt him, fairly easily. He’s not sure why John turns around and walks out, graceless thud of his uneven steps.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan and John are sitting on opposite ends of the same sofa when it’s medication time again. They share a look, and John has the audacity to wink at him, lips pursed like he’s blowing a kiss. Subtle, John is not, and Jonathan can’t help but roll his eyes a little.
John treats Arkham like it’s a resort and he’s on a holiday. Like he’s just taking a little break before he has to go back to work. It’s strange and enviable and Jonathan wishes he could see things like that. People have escaped before. He hopes that if John has a plan to get out, that he’ll take Jonathan with him. He isn’t holding his breath. He’s not so stupid as to think that John has any sense of compassion or empathy.
Jonathan accepts his pills without complaint but as they’re handing John his little paper cup he sees the label on the tray: John Doe.
The orderly shuffles away and Jonathan doesn’t remember to spit up his pills until John leans across the sofa and pinches him, hard. John cocks his head to the side, peering curiously at Jonathan. “Oh Doctor,” he says. “You thought John was my name? Don’t you know who I am?” He’s smiling again, bright wide grin. “I’m kind of a big deal, you know.”
Jonathan swallows the medication. He feels strangely disappointed. He’d expected a lot of different sorts of betrayals, but not this one.
“Hey now, Scarecrow,” John - fucking John Doe - says. “Don’t get your, ah, panties in a twist. I had no idea you were so...” he trails off into explosive laughter. “You didn’t know,” he says, gasping.
Jonathan gets up and takes himself elsewhere.
*~*~*~*
He knows where they keep the keys, and when staff will walk the halls, and when they’ll have snuck into the basement where the old tunnels are to have a smoke. Now that his head is clear, Jonathan finds it laughably easy to get his hands on exactly what he wants.
John Doe’s paperwork is easy enough to find. They don’t even keep the files in the main office, since there are too many of them. Jonathan is able to sit in the records room, undisturbed, and read.
Jonathan’s been in Arkham for quite some time now; locked up and halfway to catatonic from the drugs they were giving him. He wasn’t exactly keeping up with the news. But now he knows.
*~*~*~*
The Joker is in his own bed for once, when the lights go out. This time Jonathan breaks into his room.
He’s lying on his back on top of the covers, twirling a scalpel in one hand, the rancid yellow of the light outside flashing off the metal with each pass. He doesn’t look up until Jonathan flicks a playing card at him and it bounces off his chest and lands on the floor. And then he barely even glances at it.
“You want to know how I got these scars?” Joker asks.
Jonathan has his own profile he’s writing up in his head of this man. Psychopathic, possible Dissocial Personality Disorder. Histrionic. Masochistic. Sadistic. Tendencies towards pyromania.
Manic.
Obviously.
Jonathan grabs Joker’s wrist and pins it to the bed, stopping the motion of the scalpel. “The fact that I can predict and profile you,” he says, “makes you far less interesting to me. And no, I could give significantly less of a fuck how you got them. You were abused as a child, tortured as an adult, or self-mutilate, and none of those stories will do more than complete my diagnosis and further bore me.”
He’s not surprised when Joker twists his wrist out from his grip and uses the movement to reverse their positions, pinning Jonathan face down over the bed with his arm up behind his back, Joker leaning on it a little too hard. If he pushes much more Jonathan’s shoulder is going to pop out of joint. Jonathan is wholly unsurprised.
“You should have told me,” Jonathan says, despite the threat of the scalpel up against his cheek.
Joker doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what Jonathan is talking about. “I honestly thought you knew,” he says. “But you have to admit, it was funny.”
Jonathan sighs. “Either kill me or let me up,” he says. “You’re not going to cut me.”
If the Joker is irritated by Jonathan’s prediction, he doesn’t show it. He lets go and Jonathan rolls over onto his back, legs hanging off the side of the bed. “And spoil that pretty face?” Joker says. “Now that…would be a crime.”
*~*~*~*
part one: Your Boldness Stands Alone Among the Wreck
part two: I Hope my Smile can Distract you
part three: You're a Criminal as Long as You're Mine