Disclaimer: I don't own the Scarecrow. I don't own any scarecrows at all.
Karen Keeny and her daughter are from Scarecrow: Year One. Only the daughter's name and their life after leaving Georgia are original to me.
This is a CATfic, arc 5, following...well, several things, but let's call it "Caught in the Draft," and before, let's say, "The Significance of the Number Three." (Feel free to view the timeline at catverse dot com.) While the bookends take place in February of CATverse year 2015, the main story is May of 2005.
I'm sorry that I haven't written anything lately, and also that I haven't been answering my reviews. I'm currently in a position to be somewhat more productive than I have been, and I also have reliable internet for the first time in a year. As always, I hope to satisfy, and thanks for reading.
Small World
Dr. Elisabeth Carey was not the type of woman to bang her head on a flat surface in times of stress.
But she was beginning to rethink her decision to take this job at Sunshine Sanitarium. A private practice, throwing pills at the ennui of the very wealthy, was sounding more and more relaxing.
She had lost a patient.
That happened from time to time, and as a doctor, Elisabeth had learned to accept it. In the past month, there had been two suicides, a heart attack, and one very convoluted escape-none of which had been as upsetting as the simple disappearance of patient B3168 - Marilyn Keeny.
Marilyn was a sweet girl, an orphan who had been living at the State Hospital in Metropolis for more than a decade before being transferred back to her hometown with the opening of Sunshine. The girl was no danger to anyone, but she was prone to violent panic attacks under certain stimuli. She would never be able to function in the outside world, away from the caring, controlled environment she was used to, and she had never displayed any willingness to make the attempt.
The worst part about all this was that there was a witness to the disappearance: patient C6742 - Cadence Armitage.
She wasn't coping well with the disturbance. Cadence had made tremendous progress since the day, nearly a month ago, when the police had dragged her back in, kicking and screaming. She was able to speak in complete sentences again, and was learning to tolerate the presence of other people for short periods of time.
All that work had been undone. Whatever Cadence had witnessed had left her catatonic.
And she was sporting a nasty (Elisabeth almost had to think vindictive) set of bruises.
While Dr. Carey took a professional interest in Cadence's welfare, both physical and mental, she couldn't help being more worried about what was happening to poor little Marilyn…
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, the Scarecrow was being robbed at gunpoint.
Funny how that worked out. A man took a stroll down 15th Avenue in the middle of the afternoon, broad daylight, people all around, and he still managed to get himself yanked into an alleyway and thrown against a wall.
Fortunately, this mugger wasn't very bright. When Crane tossed a capsule at him, he merely caught it and stared as if it might turn out to be some new, perplexing form of wallet.
When the capsule burst open, the mugger fell to the ground, choking and whining about spiders.
Spiders. How…prosaic.
As a precaution, he took the gun, leaving his would-be attacker writhing in a pool of his own cowardice, to be picked over by the inevitable vultures.
Fortunately, this alley wasn't far from the Laundromat where the girls—his minions—had asked to meet him. He didn't even bother to remove the mask.
So, he supposed later, he could have feigned startlement and shot them all when they jumped out from behind an industrial sized washing machine and yelled, "Surprise!"
In point of fact, he was more startled than they must have expected by the presence of a fourth girl, a mere child, who took one look at his mask and started screaming her head off, clinging to the Captain and doing her best to hide.
"I take it you've already met," Techie said dryly. "So much for the surprise."
He stared at the girl, trying to place her. She was about eighteen, blonde, fairly pretty…no makeup…dressed as plainly as a modern day Quaker miss…and he didn't recognize her. The way she was carrying on, it was almost a given that he had experimented on her sometime in the past, but she just wasn't familiar. And while he might occasionally forget a name or a face, a set of lungs like that he would have remembered.
"All right, I give up," he admitted. "Who is she?"
The Captain led the hysterical girl away, trying to soothe her. The others grinned at him, all-out laughter threatening in their eyes.
"Well, Squishy, I can see why you never told us you had a sister," Al said.
He winced.
Oh, no.
The brat? This was THE BRAT?
Was he never going to be able to leave his relations in the past, where every one of them belonged?
"Where did you find her?" he demanded.
"At Sunshine. We were checking up on the bitch—you know the one—and this girl turned out to be her roommate. We thought…did we do something wrong?"
"Sunshine Sanitarium?" He forced back something that could have been a smile. "I must have made quite an impression on her the last time we met."
They looked at the girl, who was still screaming and showed no sign of stopping.
"I think we have some time before any meaningful reuniony things can occur," said Techie. "So, do we get to hear the story, or what?"