Sorrow.
I have read many a Constantine/Batman crossover. But I have actually liked very few of them. So I decided to write my own. In my little fantasy land, John grew up in Gotham and moved to Los Angeles. So there. Bite me. There will be five chapters to this story. I might make a sequal. Feel free to guess at the title of the next chapter. And yes, they will spell sight. Anyways, yes or no? Just pick one, and review it to me. Don't worry about the question, there isn't one.
The boy wasn't quite young. That is to say, he was younger than the doctor treating him, but not young enough for said doctor to consider him a child. But it had another meaning too. Under that frail, flimsy shell of a sixteen year old boy, there lurked a soul that had suffered far more than anyone less than ten times that should have to suffer. Underneath that waxen skin, that lank, dark hair, behind those worn out brown eyes, there was an old soul trying desperately to escape from the cruel world around him.
The doctor understood completely. The two of them had led shockingly similar lives. Born into lower middle class families, smarter than all the other members of those families put together and hated for it, bullied and abused every step of the way by imbeciles who couldn't understand them even if they bothered to try… Reading this young man's chart was like reading his own autobiography. There was just one small, but very important difference.
Somewhere along the line, this boy had broken, and he hadn't.
It made him feel disturbingly proud, in a way. The two of them had faced the same challenges, walked the same path. But the boy had fallen along the way, and he hadn't. He was the stronger. He had accomplished what another had failed to do.
He had kept his mind.
"Dr. Jon? Are you all right?" It was Mary, of course. She was the only one who dared call the eccentric genius by his first name.
"Yes, of course." He flashed her one of his ingenuous smiles, electric blue eyes glittering from under his graceful, arching brows. "Why would you think otherwise?"
"It's just that you've been staring at that there boy for an awful long time, Dr. Jon." The aged nurse looked at him, concern clear upon her features.
"He interests me." Dr. Crane turned back to the tiny Plexiglas window separating him from the boy who could have been him.
"I suppose it's only natural." The nurse said casually, shooting a sly look in his direction. "You doctors have a tendency to be most interested in yourselves."
Crane scoffed, not because the statement was false but because it was all too true. Especially in his own field. There was little that interested a psychologist so much as the innermost workings of his own mind.
But his interest in this boy went beyond the relatively superficial similarities between the two. They intrigued him, yes, but there was more to it than that. There was something about the boy, about the way he behaved. Perhaps it was the way he talked to his fabricated delusions of air and shadow, with the terrified resignation of a man used to being afraid. All these things might have been it, but only one thing actually was.
When the boy looked at him, talked to him, his eyes were dull. For all the demons he spoke to, for all the angels he begged to help him, there was no glitter of insanity resting in those dark eyes. There was nothing there.
Nothing but sorrow.