Crooked Shadows V
Title: Crooked Shadows V - New Year’s Edition
Pairing: Crane/Crane (Ichabod, Jonathan)
Fandoms: Sleepy Hollow, Batman Begins
Rating: PG 13
Disclaimer: Not mine. Jonathan’s new look courtesy of the comic.
Previous parts:
Crooked Shadows I
Crooked Shadows II
Crooked Shadows III
Crooked Shadows IV
Crooked Shadows - Paper Cranes, an interlude
*~*~*~*
Gotham has been swamped by a fog for days. It’s a cold, white fog that sweeps through the streets and blinds everyone, covers up the dirt and the grime and stings everyone’s cheeks rosy and pink. It muffles sound almost as well as snow. It should make up for the lack of snow and the lack of cheer this holiday season. There are spider webs threading the railing of the balcony, silvered and frosted and Ichabod sits on the balcony in the cold and smokes his way through an entire pack of cigarettes. He thinks the silver-frosted city and the silver-frosted web ought to be beautiful and that he should feel better to see them, but mostly he just feels a little nauseous from smoking so many cigarettes.
Ichabod doesn’t like to be alone. He isn’t used to it any more. For a few days after Jonathan leaves, Ichabod haunts his apartment, picking the tinfoil on the food apart but not eating anything, and not cleaning it up. He changed the sheets on the bed and now he sleeps on the sofa because he can’t bear to sleep where it ought to smell of Jonathan and doesn’t. He dreams over and over that it’s Easter and there’s blood on the bathroom floor but it’s his body, not Jonathan’s. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out, but he wakes up sweating and shaking every time. He hasn’t slept properly since Halloween.
His days go something like this; he wakes up disgruntled and groggy and he’s usually in the shower before he’s really awake, mechanically scrubbing off the night-sweats. He swallows a multivitamin down with a glass of orange juice and dresses, never managing to get it right for the changing temperatures. He goes to work but he can’t remember details. At work everything looks skewed somehow under the fluorescent lights around his desk that make his eyes ache. Ichabod rarely turns the lights on in the apartment anymore and he works in his office solely by the glow of the computer screen and a soft side lamp. He stares at paperwork, filling out forms because somehow the red tape of his cases seems so much easier to deal with than anything involving real thought. He drinks coffee constantly, just to stay coherent.
He patrols in the afternoons, not actively working on any of his cases, just wandering through downtown, through the bad parts of Gotham, circling closer to the Narrows every day. He thinks about visiting Jonathan but he isn’t sure if the Scarecrow would be allowed visitors and he’s almost certain Jonathan would hate him for doing it. Jonathan has more pride than he can afford, Ichabod misses that.
Ichabod misses Jonathan’s arrogance, and the way he would sigh, with something not quite a sneer hovering at the corner of his mouth. He misses the way Jonathan would put his cold hands on his stomach in bed and Jonathan’s terrible cooking. He misses the way Jonathan’s hair felt under his hands and the unexpected curve of a smile or Jonathan’s rusty, startled laugh. The apartment feels very empty, but it’s not as though Jonathan had laughed much in those last months and Ichabod doesn’t miss the helplessness. He doesn’t miss it, mostly because he still feels it. Jonathan has been gone for two months and Ichabod doesn’t know what to do. He has gone through the motions these past few weeks. The bathroom has been refitted and retiled. The balcony doors are fixed and his spare room has been repapered. If he follows the routine he can get off the sofa in the morning and get to work. He even gets his suits dry-cleaned.
The invitation and plane ticket to New York for Christmas come in the mail, a week before the 25th; startling him out of the routine he’s settled into. It’s been almost a year since Katrina and Ichabod have spoken, not since Valentine’s day; she says she’s sorry and she hopes that he’ll spend Christmas with her, now that Jonathan is getting the help he needs. She doesn’t say that Jonathan is criminally insane and probably a murderer but Ichabod knows how to read between the lines. He believes that she means well. Ichabod has years’ worth of time off that he hasn’t taken and he barely spends his paychecks. If he wanted to, he could travel, see the world past Gotham, and he could certainly go to New York for Christmas.
Ichabod is having difficulty walking without dragging his feet. He has trouble not just sitting down on the floor of the monorail and giving up. Going to the airport, seeing all the lightness and brightness of Katrina might wear him out altogether.
He writes back, because that’s what he ought to do, and declines. The letter says he’s sorry. It also says that he’s doing well. It’s a very formal letter, since he can’t really remember what it was like when he used to write her love-notes and draw pictures in the margins.
Ichabod spends Christmas Eve working late. He sleeps through most of Christmas Day but he wakes up in time to pick at the leftovers in the fridge and stare blankly at the movies on television. The apartment isn’t decorated but Ichabod digs out his cd of carols and puts that on before going back to sleep again.
*~*~*~*
The GCPD have rules about how much overtime Ichabod can work, which they usually ignore, but the police chief comes to Ichabod’s office and tells him to stay home for New Year’s Eve. It’s expected that there will be an attack from one of what the press have dubbed super-villains but the chief reassures Ichabod that they can manage without him for a few nights. Ichabod doesn’t really care. He’s thinking he’s glad the super-villain won’t be Jonathan because it’s cold out and the straight-jacket isn’t very warm. He likes to think they’re treating Jonathan well, despite everything he knows about Arkham. Ichabod focuses on wondering if they know Jonathan doesn’t like having his scars touched and if they’ve given him an extra blanket now that it’s almost January. He thinks about intellectual discussions during therapy and if there’s enough protein in the cafeteria food. Ichabod does not think about injections, patient abuse, shock therapy, restraints, force feeding, patient experimentation, over-medication, or a plethora of other ills he’s read about in reports on Arkham. He doesn’t think about how Jonathan used to be in charge of all that.
Ichabod takes the monorail home. It’s cleaner, now that Wayne Enterprises has taken an interest in cleaning up the city but the carriage still smells of urine and there’s a small gang of angry looking children stealing the line map and graffiting the doors. They come over to Ichabod and demand to know what he’s going to do about it. Ichabod looks up tiredly and tell them, at this point, he’s either going to do nothing, or he’s going to crack under the strain and start shooting wildly. He’s still wearing his gun and the children actually leave. Ichabod calls after them that they ought to go home, or back to school. He thinks Jonathan might have found it funny, even if the boys didn’t.
The city is in chaos long before he makes it home. Ichabod can see the pandemonium on the streets and he can hear the screaming. Even away from the very center of Gotham the panic makes people abandon their homes and gangs throw bricks into windows as the Batman and whoever it is he’s fighting wreak destruction over downtown.
Ichabod gets off the monorail and navigates the three blocks to his apartment. He thinks he might get drunk and watch the riots on tv. It would be a fitting end to the year. He doesn’t turn on the lights, but he doesn’t need them to find the remote control or the wine rack. As it turns out, Arkham is the problem. Some idiot took it into his head to repeat the trick of releasing the most dangerous of its inmates. Ichabod pours himself a glass of wine and then drinks out of the bottle.
“Ichabod.”
Ichabod drops the bottle and it shatters on the hardwood floor, spraying red wine onto the sofa and onto his slacks. It pools around the broken glass and it looks too familiar, it looks like a broken balcony door and blood.
Jonathan looks up from his seat in the shadowed corner of the room and clicks the side light on. Other than the television, it’s the only other light in the room. He’s gained back the weight he lost and the dark circles under his eyes are gone but he’s still wearing the ugly orange jumpsuit from Arkham and he’s huddled up in a way that suggests he’s not altogether together.
Ichabod shouldn’t be surprised, he left the spare key under the welcome mat, but he has a dozen stupid things on the tip of his tongue anyway; saying something like ‘Jonathan’ or even ‘Scarecrow’ would be stating the obvious so he just sits down heavily and he suspects he looks as stupid as he feels. The silence stretches out as the television reports the latest damage to Gotham.
“I made these,” Jonathan says abruptly. He uncurls to hold something out but he falters and his hands shake, and a thousand paper cranes scatter over the living room, floating on the wine, wilting from the moisture. “I think they’re for you.”
Ichabod picks one up and turns it over in his fingers and it unfolds into a Rorschach inkblot. It might be a pelvic bone, or a butterfly, or the cross-section of a vertebra. Ichabod can pretend he sees something, but mostly he just sees ink blotted on a page. They all look the same to him anyway. Jonathan glances out the window at the chaos on the streets. Ichabod can’t force a smile. “That’s a bit…”
“Freudian?” Jonathan says, and he gets up, crunching over the broken glass so he can sit next to Ichabod. His eyes aren’t quite focused and his movements are clumsy and he rubs at his temples as though struggling to concentrate but he doesn’t protest when Ichabod takes one of his hands and threads their fingers together. His hands are warm, for once. Jonathan curls up again, this time with his knees bumping into Ichabod’s thigh and his head on Ichabod’s shoulder.
There are a dozen stupid things on the tip of Ichabod’s tongue but he says, “I missed you,” and that doesn’t seem too bad.
“The sedative,” Jonathan says and then trails off, looking confused. Ichabod doesn’t press him and a moment or two later Jonathan tries again.
They’ve had him on a sedative since he was cured of the effects of the gas. For hours at a time he couldn’t focus, couldn’t think, and each time it wore off he would remember and each time he was certain he wasn’t remembering everything and that they were destroying his mind. Before it wore off, when he was still too uncoordinated to fight them, they would drug him again. He says he barely crawled away from Arkham and there’s dirt under his fingernails that says he might be telling more of the truth than Ichabod can bear to think about.
Ichabod drags the blanket over them and puts the television on mute. The sofa isn’t quite wide enough for two grown men to lie on, so Ichabod lies on the sofa and Jonathan mostly lies on him. Jonathan has no where else to go, Ichabod knows that, and abruptly, with Jonathan slowly coming back to himself, Ichabod wonders what will happen when Jonathan doesn’t need him any more.
He dozes off with Jonathan’s hair soft under his hands and the warm thud of Jonathan’s heart beat against his own.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan is gone when Ichabod wakes up again, or maybe that’s the reason Ichabod wakes up. He doesn’t need to check the apartment, even though the orange Arkham uniform is neatly folded on the chair. He’s spent enough time alone to know when the apartment has someone else in it and Jonathan is gone. There’s no glass on the floor but the wine is still there and so is the double-handful of bent and broken origami cranes. Ichabod tries very hard not to picture Jonathan picking up the glass shard by shard before he left.
There are only eighty three cranes. Most of them were Rorschach tests or questionnaires to check levels of disorders. Jonathan used to be a doctor with a specialty that Ichabod can barely pronounce never mind understand and they drugged him to incoherency and watched him fold their tests into birds because it really didn’t matter if they diagnosed him since he was going to be there for the rest of his life. Only one of the questionnaires has any writing on it and it’s nearly illegible. He wonders if any of the doctors realized at least part of the reason for the origami was because Jonathan couldn’t work a pencil properly and wouldn’t admit to it. He has poor circulation; the drugs must have made fine motor skills nearly impossible. Each fold must have taken an incredible amount of concentration. Ichabod puts the cranes into the trash and mops up the spilt wine. They could have just asked Jonathan. He diagnosed himself months ago and worked out a possible cure, Ichabod just couldn’t get him the drugs.
Ichabod vacuums, just to be certain that all the glass is gone and then goes and stands on his silver-frosted balcony and stares at the fog.
*~*~*~*
Sometimes Ichabod forgets what Jonathan has done. Jonathan isn’t actually a nice person, especially when he’s in his right mind, but Ichabod likes him. It makes it hard to remember that Jonathan should be in Arkham, not because he needs to get better, but because he’s criminally insane. Jonathan said he suspects childhood trauma and a hereditary tendency for violence in addition to being completely psychopathic. As it turns out, the Scarecrow isn’t a multiple personality, it’s more of an alter ego, the gas attack just confused matters.
Jonathan lets himself back in a little after ten thirty. He’s wearing a straight-jacket with the sleeves cut off and incredibly tight leather pants. He pulls the Scarecrow mask off and his hair sticks up sweatily in all directions. Jonathan leans back against the door and Ichabod wonders if it makes him a bad person that he doesn’t think about what Jonathan’s done, only that he’s happy Jonathan came back.
“You have a scythe,” Ichabod points out. He wonders what it says about himself that he thinks Jonathan might try and kill him and that it scares him, but it doesn’t bother him.
Jonathan heaves a sigh, leans the scythe next to him and straightens up, and Ichabod flinches away. Ichabod had forgotten how intense Jonathan’s stare could be. It’s been so long since Jonathan’s been able to focus his attentions. “I’m not sane, you should know that.” Jonathan crosses the room, grabs a handful of Ichabod’s hair and jerks Ichabod’s head back. No one touches Ichabod anymore; he’s missed it, even if it hurts. It all hurts, from the arch of his back and his neck, to the hair pulling loose, to the way Jonathan’s other hand digs into the soft skin of his upper arm. There are canisters strapped to Jonathan’s belt and they look like little grenades but they’re labeled with chemical names. Of course he’s not sane. He’s never been close to it.
Ichabod doesn’t bother to struggle. Jonathan sneers at him and lets go. “You have no idea,” Jonathan says, and Ichabod doesn’t think he’s still talking about the same thing. Jonathan sits down on the sofa next to Ichabod and now Ichabod can see old needle tracks from IVs and fading bruises from restraints.
Ichabod touches the bruising lightly and Jonathan flinches. Ichabod thinks he might have some ideas after all. “I like the leather,” he says, instead of saying he’s sorry for the way life has turned out for Jonathan.
*~*~*~*
Light flashes intermittently outside the curtains casting bloody patches of light over the bed and over the pale skin of Jonathan’s back and Ichabod’s chest. Ichabod can hear screaming. It might be screams of joy and fireworks. It might be panic and flares. Ichabod doesn’t care.
He smokes in bed, dropping ash onto his chest and onto the sheets, watching the cherry smoulder dangerously above his eyes. Jonathan rolls over and rubs a finger through the ash, smearing it on Ichabod’s skin. They should leave Gotham, go somewhere where no one knows who Jonathan is. Somewhere warm. Jonathan could practice psychopharmacology again. Ichabod wonders if Jonathan misses being a doctor and if he ever helped anyone, or if he just experimented on them. He suspects that without Batman Jonathan would destroy wherever they went.
The clock reads 12:02 and one of them should say happy New Year but it’s unlikely to come true and it doesn’t seem like anything to celebrate. Ichabod puts the cigarette out in his coffee cup and Jonathan crawls on top of him and pins Ichabod’s wrists to the bed. He’s going to have bruises but he doesn’t mind; his throat and chest are already scored with bite marks and he’s bleeding a little bit from one of them, but he doesn’t mind that either. Ichabod wishes Jonathan a happy New Year and Jonathan calls him a idiot for even thinking it. It still sounds like I love you, to Ichabod. They have sex again because Jonathan’s been gone for two months and because they can and because Jonathan might be insane but he’s beautiful and Ichabod doesn’t mind a lot of things, including the pain because Jonathan’s a sadist.
Jonathan makes breakfast the next morning and he burns the toast and overcooks the eggs. Ichabod was hoping his cooking had also been a symptom of the gas, but it’s probably more to do with the fact that Jonathan microwaved all his meals before he moved in with Ichabod. He’s on the front page of the news but neither of them mention it, just like Ichabod didn’t say anything when Jonathan hung the straight-jacket and mask in the back of the closet. They’ll have to eventually because Ichabod swore to serve and protect and Jonathan hates everyone but Ichabod has the day off and Gotham isn’t his problem this morning.
Pairing: Crane/Crane (Ichabod, Jonathan)
Fandoms: Sleepy Hollow, Batman Begins
Rating: PG 13
Disclaimer: Not mine. Jonathan’s new look courtesy of the comic.
Previous parts:
Crooked Shadows I
Crooked Shadows II
Crooked Shadows III
Crooked Shadows IV
Crooked Shadows - Paper Cranes, an interlude
*~*~*~*
Gotham has been swamped by a fog for days. It’s a cold, white fog that sweeps through the streets and blinds everyone, covers up the dirt and the grime and stings everyone’s cheeks rosy and pink. It muffles sound almost as well as snow. It should make up for the lack of snow and the lack of cheer this holiday season. There are spider webs threading the railing of the balcony, silvered and frosted and Ichabod sits on the balcony in the cold and smokes his way through an entire pack of cigarettes. He thinks the silver-frosted city and the silver-frosted web ought to be beautiful and that he should feel better to see them, but mostly he just feels a little nauseous from smoking so many cigarettes.
Ichabod doesn’t like to be alone. He isn’t used to it any more. For a few days after Jonathan leaves, Ichabod haunts his apartment, picking the tinfoil on the food apart but not eating anything, and not cleaning it up. He changed the sheets on the bed and now he sleeps on the sofa because he can’t bear to sleep where it ought to smell of Jonathan and doesn’t. He dreams over and over that it’s Easter and there’s blood on the bathroom floor but it’s his body, not Jonathan’s. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out, but he wakes up sweating and shaking every time. He hasn’t slept properly since Halloween.
His days go something like this; he wakes up disgruntled and groggy and he’s usually in the shower before he’s really awake, mechanically scrubbing off the night-sweats. He swallows a multivitamin down with a glass of orange juice and dresses, never managing to get it right for the changing temperatures. He goes to work but he can’t remember details. At work everything looks skewed somehow under the fluorescent lights around his desk that make his eyes ache. Ichabod rarely turns the lights on in the apartment anymore and he works in his office solely by the glow of the computer screen and a soft side lamp. He stares at paperwork, filling out forms because somehow the red tape of his cases seems so much easier to deal with than anything involving real thought. He drinks coffee constantly, just to stay coherent.
He patrols in the afternoons, not actively working on any of his cases, just wandering through downtown, through the bad parts of Gotham, circling closer to the Narrows every day. He thinks about visiting Jonathan but he isn’t sure if the Scarecrow would be allowed visitors and he’s almost certain Jonathan would hate him for doing it. Jonathan has more pride than he can afford, Ichabod misses that.
Ichabod misses Jonathan’s arrogance, and the way he would sigh, with something not quite a sneer hovering at the corner of his mouth. He misses the way Jonathan would put his cold hands on his stomach in bed and Jonathan’s terrible cooking. He misses the way Jonathan’s hair felt under his hands and the unexpected curve of a smile or Jonathan’s rusty, startled laugh. The apartment feels very empty, but it’s not as though Jonathan had laughed much in those last months and Ichabod doesn’t miss the helplessness. He doesn’t miss it, mostly because he still feels it. Jonathan has been gone for two months and Ichabod doesn’t know what to do. He has gone through the motions these past few weeks. The bathroom has been refitted and retiled. The balcony doors are fixed and his spare room has been repapered. If he follows the routine he can get off the sofa in the morning and get to work. He even gets his suits dry-cleaned.
The invitation and plane ticket to New York for Christmas come in the mail, a week before the 25th; startling him out of the routine he’s settled into. It’s been almost a year since Katrina and Ichabod have spoken, not since Valentine’s day; she says she’s sorry and she hopes that he’ll spend Christmas with her, now that Jonathan is getting the help he needs. She doesn’t say that Jonathan is criminally insane and probably a murderer but Ichabod knows how to read between the lines. He believes that she means well. Ichabod has years’ worth of time off that he hasn’t taken and he barely spends his paychecks. If he wanted to, he could travel, see the world past Gotham, and he could certainly go to New York for Christmas.
Ichabod is having difficulty walking without dragging his feet. He has trouble not just sitting down on the floor of the monorail and giving up. Going to the airport, seeing all the lightness and brightness of Katrina might wear him out altogether.
He writes back, because that’s what he ought to do, and declines. The letter says he’s sorry. It also says that he’s doing well. It’s a very formal letter, since he can’t really remember what it was like when he used to write her love-notes and draw pictures in the margins.
Ichabod spends Christmas Eve working late. He sleeps through most of Christmas Day but he wakes up in time to pick at the leftovers in the fridge and stare blankly at the movies on television. The apartment isn’t decorated but Ichabod digs out his cd of carols and puts that on before going back to sleep again.
*~*~*~*
The GCPD have rules about how much overtime Ichabod can work, which they usually ignore, but the police chief comes to Ichabod’s office and tells him to stay home for New Year’s Eve. It’s expected that there will be an attack from one of what the press have dubbed super-villains but the chief reassures Ichabod that they can manage without him for a few nights. Ichabod doesn’t really care. He’s thinking he’s glad the super-villain won’t be Jonathan because it’s cold out and the straight-jacket isn’t very warm. He likes to think they’re treating Jonathan well, despite everything he knows about Arkham. Ichabod focuses on wondering if they know Jonathan doesn’t like having his scars touched and if they’ve given him an extra blanket now that it’s almost January. He thinks about intellectual discussions during therapy and if there’s enough protein in the cafeteria food. Ichabod does not think about injections, patient abuse, shock therapy, restraints, force feeding, patient experimentation, over-medication, or a plethora of other ills he’s read about in reports on Arkham. He doesn’t think about how Jonathan used to be in charge of all that.
Ichabod takes the monorail home. It’s cleaner, now that Wayne Enterprises has taken an interest in cleaning up the city but the carriage still smells of urine and there’s a small gang of angry looking children stealing the line map and graffiting the doors. They come over to Ichabod and demand to know what he’s going to do about it. Ichabod looks up tiredly and tell them, at this point, he’s either going to do nothing, or he’s going to crack under the strain and start shooting wildly. He’s still wearing his gun and the children actually leave. Ichabod calls after them that they ought to go home, or back to school. He thinks Jonathan might have found it funny, even if the boys didn’t.
The city is in chaos long before he makes it home. Ichabod can see the pandemonium on the streets and he can hear the screaming. Even away from the very center of Gotham the panic makes people abandon their homes and gangs throw bricks into windows as the Batman and whoever it is he’s fighting wreak destruction over downtown.
Ichabod gets off the monorail and navigates the three blocks to his apartment. He thinks he might get drunk and watch the riots on tv. It would be a fitting end to the year. He doesn’t turn on the lights, but he doesn’t need them to find the remote control or the wine rack. As it turns out, Arkham is the problem. Some idiot took it into his head to repeat the trick of releasing the most dangerous of its inmates. Ichabod pours himself a glass of wine and then drinks out of the bottle.
“Ichabod.”
Ichabod drops the bottle and it shatters on the hardwood floor, spraying red wine onto the sofa and onto his slacks. It pools around the broken glass and it looks too familiar, it looks like a broken balcony door and blood.
Jonathan looks up from his seat in the shadowed corner of the room and clicks the side light on. Other than the television, it’s the only other light in the room. He’s gained back the weight he lost and the dark circles under his eyes are gone but he’s still wearing the ugly orange jumpsuit from Arkham and he’s huddled up in a way that suggests he’s not altogether together.
Ichabod shouldn’t be surprised, he left the spare key under the welcome mat, but he has a dozen stupid things on the tip of his tongue anyway; saying something like ‘Jonathan’ or even ‘Scarecrow’ would be stating the obvious so he just sits down heavily and he suspects he looks as stupid as he feels. The silence stretches out as the television reports the latest damage to Gotham.
“I made these,” Jonathan says abruptly. He uncurls to hold something out but he falters and his hands shake, and a thousand paper cranes scatter over the living room, floating on the wine, wilting from the moisture. “I think they’re for you.”
Ichabod picks one up and turns it over in his fingers and it unfolds into a Rorschach inkblot. It might be a pelvic bone, or a butterfly, or the cross-section of a vertebra. Ichabod can pretend he sees something, but mostly he just sees ink blotted on a page. They all look the same to him anyway. Jonathan glances out the window at the chaos on the streets. Ichabod can’t force a smile. “That’s a bit…”
“Freudian?” Jonathan says, and he gets up, crunching over the broken glass so he can sit next to Ichabod. His eyes aren’t quite focused and his movements are clumsy and he rubs at his temples as though struggling to concentrate but he doesn’t protest when Ichabod takes one of his hands and threads their fingers together. His hands are warm, for once. Jonathan curls up again, this time with his knees bumping into Ichabod’s thigh and his head on Ichabod’s shoulder.
There are a dozen stupid things on the tip of Ichabod’s tongue but he says, “I missed you,” and that doesn’t seem too bad.
“The sedative,” Jonathan says and then trails off, looking confused. Ichabod doesn’t press him and a moment or two later Jonathan tries again.
They’ve had him on a sedative since he was cured of the effects of the gas. For hours at a time he couldn’t focus, couldn’t think, and each time it wore off he would remember and each time he was certain he wasn’t remembering everything and that they were destroying his mind. Before it wore off, when he was still too uncoordinated to fight them, they would drug him again. He says he barely crawled away from Arkham and there’s dirt under his fingernails that says he might be telling more of the truth than Ichabod can bear to think about.
Ichabod drags the blanket over them and puts the television on mute. The sofa isn’t quite wide enough for two grown men to lie on, so Ichabod lies on the sofa and Jonathan mostly lies on him. Jonathan has no where else to go, Ichabod knows that, and abruptly, with Jonathan slowly coming back to himself, Ichabod wonders what will happen when Jonathan doesn’t need him any more.
He dozes off with Jonathan’s hair soft under his hands and the warm thud of Jonathan’s heart beat against his own.
*~*~*~*
Jonathan is gone when Ichabod wakes up again, or maybe that’s the reason Ichabod wakes up. He doesn’t need to check the apartment, even though the orange Arkham uniform is neatly folded on the chair. He’s spent enough time alone to know when the apartment has someone else in it and Jonathan is gone. There’s no glass on the floor but the wine is still there and so is the double-handful of bent and broken origami cranes. Ichabod tries very hard not to picture Jonathan picking up the glass shard by shard before he left.
There are only eighty three cranes. Most of them were Rorschach tests or questionnaires to check levels of disorders. Jonathan used to be a doctor with a specialty that Ichabod can barely pronounce never mind understand and they drugged him to incoherency and watched him fold their tests into birds because it really didn’t matter if they diagnosed him since he was going to be there for the rest of his life. Only one of the questionnaires has any writing on it and it’s nearly illegible. He wonders if any of the doctors realized at least part of the reason for the origami was because Jonathan couldn’t work a pencil properly and wouldn’t admit to it. He has poor circulation; the drugs must have made fine motor skills nearly impossible. Each fold must have taken an incredible amount of concentration. Ichabod puts the cranes into the trash and mops up the spilt wine. They could have just asked Jonathan. He diagnosed himself months ago and worked out a possible cure, Ichabod just couldn’t get him the drugs.
Ichabod vacuums, just to be certain that all the glass is gone and then goes and stands on his silver-frosted balcony and stares at the fog.
*~*~*~*
Sometimes Ichabod forgets what Jonathan has done. Jonathan isn’t actually a nice person, especially when he’s in his right mind, but Ichabod likes him. It makes it hard to remember that Jonathan should be in Arkham, not because he needs to get better, but because he’s criminally insane. Jonathan said he suspects childhood trauma and a hereditary tendency for violence in addition to being completely psychopathic. As it turns out, the Scarecrow isn’t a multiple personality, it’s more of an alter ego, the gas attack just confused matters.
Jonathan lets himself back in a little after ten thirty. He’s wearing a straight-jacket with the sleeves cut off and incredibly tight leather pants. He pulls the Scarecrow mask off and his hair sticks up sweatily in all directions. Jonathan leans back against the door and Ichabod wonders if it makes him a bad person that he doesn’t think about what Jonathan’s done, only that he’s happy Jonathan came back.
“You have a scythe,” Ichabod points out. He wonders what it says about himself that he thinks Jonathan might try and kill him and that it scares him, but it doesn’t bother him.
Jonathan heaves a sigh, leans the scythe next to him and straightens up, and Ichabod flinches away. Ichabod had forgotten how intense Jonathan’s stare could be. It’s been so long since Jonathan’s been able to focus his attentions. “I’m not sane, you should know that.” Jonathan crosses the room, grabs a handful of Ichabod’s hair and jerks Ichabod’s head back. No one touches Ichabod anymore; he’s missed it, even if it hurts. It all hurts, from the arch of his back and his neck, to the hair pulling loose, to the way Jonathan’s other hand digs into the soft skin of his upper arm. There are canisters strapped to Jonathan’s belt and they look like little grenades but they’re labeled with chemical names. Of course he’s not sane. He’s never been close to it.
Ichabod doesn’t bother to struggle. Jonathan sneers at him and lets go. “You have no idea,” Jonathan says, and Ichabod doesn’t think he’s still talking about the same thing. Jonathan sits down on the sofa next to Ichabod and now Ichabod can see old needle tracks from IVs and fading bruises from restraints.
Ichabod touches the bruising lightly and Jonathan flinches. Ichabod thinks he might have some ideas after all. “I like the leather,” he says, instead of saying he’s sorry for the way life has turned out for Jonathan.
*~*~*~*
Light flashes intermittently outside the curtains casting bloody patches of light over the bed and over the pale skin of Jonathan’s back and Ichabod’s chest. Ichabod can hear screaming. It might be screams of joy and fireworks. It might be panic and flares. Ichabod doesn’t care.
He smokes in bed, dropping ash onto his chest and onto the sheets, watching the cherry smoulder dangerously above his eyes. Jonathan rolls over and rubs a finger through the ash, smearing it on Ichabod’s skin. They should leave Gotham, go somewhere where no one knows who Jonathan is. Somewhere warm. Jonathan could practice psychopharmacology again. Ichabod wonders if Jonathan misses being a doctor and if he ever helped anyone, or if he just experimented on them. He suspects that without Batman Jonathan would destroy wherever they went.
The clock reads 12:02 and one of them should say happy New Year but it’s unlikely to come true and it doesn’t seem like anything to celebrate. Ichabod puts the cigarette out in his coffee cup and Jonathan crawls on top of him and pins Ichabod’s wrists to the bed. He’s going to have bruises but he doesn’t mind; his throat and chest are already scored with bite marks and he’s bleeding a little bit from one of them, but he doesn’t mind that either. Ichabod wishes Jonathan a happy New Year and Jonathan calls him a idiot for even thinking it. It still sounds like I love you, to Ichabod. They have sex again because Jonathan’s been gone for two months and because they can and because Jonathan might be insane but he’s beautiful and Ichabod doesn’t mind a lot of things, including the pain because Jonathan’s a sadist.
Jonathan makes breakfast the next morning and he burns the toast and overcooks the eggs. Ichabod was hoping his cooking had also been a symptom of the gas, but it’s probably more to do with the fact that Jonathan microwaved all his meals before he moved in with Ichabod. He’s on the front page of the news but neither of them mention it, just like Ichabod didn’t say anything when Jonathan hung the straight-jacket and mask in the back of the closet. They’ll have to eventually because Ichabod swore to serve and protect and Jonathan hates everyone but Ichabod has the day off and Gotham isn’t his problem this morning.