A Scarecrow and His Ragdoll
By: The Glorious Cheshire Cat
Disclaimer: I only own Ragdoll and that's about it. Enjoy.
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They were almost complete opposites…
His outfit was either a suit or worn clothes (usually dressy) occasionally with an unfastened straight jacket as a coat.
Hers was either jeans, a T-shirt, tennis shoes, and a hoodie (when she wasn't helping him with his plans) or loose pants, shirt, gloves, arm warmers, and shoes made of scraps of fabric sewn together tightly before being gone over with a thicker black thread haphazardly to make it look like a demented six year old had made them.
His mask was made of what looked like badly sewn burlap.
Hers was made to look like a lovingly stitched cloth doll's face and head, complete with faded red yarn hair.
His greatest weapon was his fear toxin, which was kept on his person and usable via a lever in his sleeves.
She had the same set up, but her greatest weapon was the ragdoll of a smiling scarecrow she always carried, which was either filled with a paralytic toxin of her own creation or could be a bomb depending on the positioning of the scarecrow's eyebrows (happy, normal eyebrows meant toxin and evil grin with furrowed brows meant bomb).
His eyes were icy blue; hers were poisonous green or gold in the dark. His hair was brown and straight; hers was an unruly mass of very short corkscrew curls that were as black as pitch.
He read mostly non-fiction with the exception of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; the only non-fiction she read was history since she would rather live with her head in the clouds than deal with the real world.
He had to work with no noise, and if he did listen to music, it was classical; she couldn't go two hours without listening to music, her tastes running all over the spectrum, though the more beat a song had the better.
He was tall and gangly, and she was a little taller than average and neither skinny nor fat but in between.
He knew little of fighting; she could gut a man with a butter knife and had once done just that when she'd been attacked walking home from the store one evening. She had mastered several fighting styles.
He had the looks of an actor; she always said she was plain once she'd been cured of the bad self-image she'd been given by her abusive drunkard of a father and her peers (if anyone else called her anything less than beautiful or divine, he gave them a taste of his toxin).
He only feared two people and nothing else; she went running straight to him when there was a storm unless he was locked up in Arkham Asylum, then she had to be the strong one for both their sakes.
He usually got caught after awhile; she never got caught and always broke him out of wherever they were keeping him to the great dismay of Gotham's taxpayers when they had to pay for the repairs of a hole in the walls of Arkham caused by her dolls or pay for the therapy or funerals of those guards and doctors that were exposed to both toxins.
He couldn't cook anything besides microwave dinners; she adored cooking and always made sure he ate and ate well (she'd never tell him, but she thought he could do with a little meat on his bones).
He liked to sit still and watch people (she was his favorite subject to watch); she always had to be doing something.
He was one you could tell was devious; she was so subtly devious that just her eyes filling up with fake tears made you apologize for ever thinking ill of her and wanting to wrap her in a hug and place her in a tower where nothing could harm her (he'd tried once to lock her up while he faced Batman alone, but she'd escaped, saved him from certain capture, and only cooked him burnt toast for a week as revenge).
He was prone to fits of anger and depression that only she could cure by wrapping her arms around him and snuggling close or it would take a week for the fits to pass; she had moments of profound sadness where she would just burst out crying and he would go out of his way to do something to make her smile, even if it meant having to postpone his criminal plans.
He smelt of pumpkin spice, apple cider, his fear toxin, and Fall; she smelt of cookies, lilac, sage, and Spring.
He'd been in a handful of relationships; she'd never been kissed until that night in the rain when they'd blown up a warehouse full of drugs belonging to one of the biggest drug lords in Gotham who had called him weak and her a pitiful little slut. (They'd gleefully gassed him at the same time before he'd sent her to gather the supplies they needed from the man's house and painfully castrated the man, leaving him to bleed to death on the floor as he washed up and joined her.)
She could improve a computer in half an hour; he couldn't work the VCR or even the toaster.
They were the most unlikely couple besides Harley Quinn and the Joker (those two fought like cats and dogs every two days) since she was nineteen and he was in his early thirties, but they worked better than anyone thought they would.
For what was a Scarecrow without his Ragdoll or a Ragdoll without her Scarecrow?
…And yet, they were utterly and woefully incomplete without the other. They were each one half of a whole.
They had a life together that had both their souls stitched together by the strongest thread of all: True Love.