Warnings: Scary themes, violence, CHARACTER DEATH, language, some slash.
Archive: Kari Anna's Slash Haven, batslash. To archive elsewhere, email me.

DISCLAIMER: Nope.

An utterly human scream never made it any further down the hall of Arkham Asylum than the noise ever did. The walls weren't soundproofed, but sound didn't travel far through concrete walls and steel doors. The unlucky few close by, in the solitary confinement cells, were used to it, and paid as little heed to it as they could. It could be them in there.

The Joker was in one of the cells, and he knew who really was in the small room the scream had come from. The room was the 'treatment room,' and the patient was Dr. Jonathan Crane.

He really had to get out of here.

"And they say I'm insane. At least I don't torture my toys before I break them," he grumbled, kicking at the end of one of the straps of his straightjacket.

Another scream, and that one stopped abruptly, rather than tapering off as the other had done.

He really, really had to get out of here.

The harsh lights were a horrible contrast to the instrument of 'treatment,' giving the little room the atmosphere of a madman's dungeon that had been set awash with light for the benefit of some director's camera. It was like a movie set.

The first time Crane had been brought here, he had laughed. The room looked so unreal he had even supposed the gleaming stainless steel thing against the wall was nothing but demented decoration.

That was when he'd believed that Arkham was a legitimate institution.

No legitimate institution would have one of its patients strapped to a chair and electrocuted until they could barely form a coherent thought. Not anymore, anyway. The electric chair was technically illegal.

As if these crude mockeries of humanity care in the least about legality, Jonathan thought between shockings. He was limp, and he could hardly feel most of himself. Just his heart, lungs, throat, and eyes. His heart was pounding like he'd run a marathon, and his throat burned with his lungs' desperate attempt to make up for the air that was knocked out of him each time he was electrocuted. Tears pricked his eyes with a reassuring salty pain.

One of the attendants was trying to talk to him, but he'd long since withdrawn too far into himself to understand these people.

The tears had just spilled over when another wave of electricity washed through him.

His heart seized up in his chest, no longer able to deal with the stress. When Dr. Evan Margin gestured for one of his assistants to turn off the chair, and the one at the controls did, Jonathan Crane went limp once more. This time he was dead.

Someone from Beyond-- whether it was God, Fate, or something more sinister, saw and took pity on the pathetic figure being unstrapped from the chair.
When Jonathan Crane's body was suddenly just gone, the staff members of Arkham didn't question it. Who was Jonathan Crane? And then,

"What are we doing in here?"

No one seemed to be able to answer Dr. Margin's question. No one in that room remembered that Jonathan Crane had been a patient of Arkham for the past six weeks. Later, their colleagues would be stunned at the treatment team's memory loss, and wonder if one of their inmates had concocted something potentially problematic, or if madness truly was catching.

They would also wonder where Crane's body had gone. But not for long.

TBC...