Session Two

I'm running late, as always. I have this inclination to never be on time, regardless of how early I leave. I couldn't decide what car to drive to Arkham—whether to snag my dad's Vette, or take my cherry red Pontiac, both of which would be instant targets in the Narrows. I finally settled for the shitty old VW Gulf in the back of the garage that hasn't had an oil change since the Clinton Administration. It's better to not draw too much attention to ones self—there's some people trawling around the Narrows that might want to have a little talk with me.

Not to mention, during this whole auto crisis, I got caught up in imagining what kind of car he drives, Dr. Crane that is. I imagine it's something subtly pretentious, undoubtedly foreign, and tricky to pronounce. I bet he's meticulous about it, probably has all it's service dates saved in his PDA with little alarms and shit... and I'm definitely going to be at least ten minutes late at this point. I coax the ancient car into starting and bolt out of the driveway, in reverse. I'm not always too careful with my things.

The drive through Gotham is always fun; we live out by the Palisades where my dad can stare out the window at Wayne Manor and dream about rubbing elbows with the long dead Waynes—or perhaps of buying it out under the nose of the old butler that maintains it. If I had my car today, I would be sailing through red lights and weaving in and out of lanes, but this car is rattling it's self to bits, so I obey the laws of traffic, a rare occurrence. Maybe I should tell Dr. Crane. After only one week of therapy, my behavior is already improving! Give him some more shit to put down in his next book.

After a monotonous half hour drive, I sail into the Arkham parking lot, taking my place among the countless other outpatients, all with their shitty little cars. It's a damn good thing that I decided to not bring the Corvette, it would probably get it's tires slashed by some schizophrenic off their medication.

Medication.

And that's when it hits me; I never took those fucking blue pills Dr. Crane gave me. I grab my purse and pour the contents of it out on to the passenger seat. The blister pack of friendly blue pills sits on top of the mess. Using my fingernails, I poke a hole in the foil and pop the pills out in to my palm. They're a powder in a gel capsule... if I just want to make up for lost time...

I pry the capsule open and pour the powder out on to my palm. It's gone, straight up my nose in one long breath. I sputter slightly—it's rough stuff—and crack the other one open. A hundred milligrams, just what the doctor ordered.

By the time I make it to Dr. Crane's office, I'm absolutely floating. Shapes have lost their boundaries, and flow like syrup; the chair is all over the floor, and I'm wading inside the carpet. My hand sinks through the doorknob and gets stuck in the skeleton of the lock, the metal teeth nip at my hand and I start to cry. I pull my hand back, but the lock won't release me. It sinks angry mental fangs into the meat of my palm and I squeal in pain.

The door releases me with a clench, and I nearly fall over, gasping for breath. It's Dr. Crane, staring at me with a look that makes me want to melt into the floor. He's not much taller than me, but he's somehow cast his shadow over my entire form, enveloping me in darkness.

"Miss Walker, did you forget how to use the door?"

I try to answer him, but I can't do much but sputter and cough, pointing at my hand where the door bit me.

"I see that you seem to have scratched yourself. Do you need a band aid?"

Nothing in the hallway is spinning anymore. The floors have solidified, and my feet are back on solid ground. But, I can't see anything but him. I know without a doubt that if he walks away, the floors will melt again, and this time I'll fall through and drown, and sink forever...

Before I know what I'm doing, I throw myself on at him, crying hysterically.

"The door bit me!" I manage to eek out of my poor air starved lungs.

I can feel myself sinking through him, and I'm absolutely horrified. I can grasp his bones through the skin. My hands are hooked around his collarbone, and if I let go I'll fall right through and never be found ever again and...

"Jessica," he says, without any sort of inflection. I shake my head and come back to sanity, where I'm using him as a support beam and my fingers are pushed into his chest hard enough to bruise. He grabs me by the shoulders and pushes me back up to standing. I wipe my leaky nose on the formerly pristine sleeve of my white button down.

"Into my office, Jessica."

He takes a cursory look of the hallway to make sure no one saw, and then sweeps open the door. I follow, my figurative tail between my legs.

In his office with the door secured, he stares at me with those fucking awful eyes, like he can just suck the answer out of me.

"Those pills you gave me..." I whisper, realizing the cause of my behavior. "Those fucking pills!" I exclaim, my voice reaching a crescendo. "Is that what you would call a fucking allergic reaction, huh?"

He doesn't make a single expression, and my rage intensifies with every second of his apathy.

"You can't just conduct some fucking experiment on seventeen year old girls without any paperwork or parental permission or prescriptions or... what kind of doctor are you?!"

He waits for me to finish my rant, actually tapping his foot on the floor, like he's bored with me. I'm enraged, but before I can continue chastising him, the wind is knocked out of me by an invisible force.

The floor goes sloppy again under my feet, and pools at my ankles.

Everything is black.

"Welcome back to reality, Miss Walker. I made a phone call to your parents and informed them that our session would be running irregularly late."

I wake up propped up in an armchair off to the side of the room that must be intended as some sort of "reading corner," as if Dr. Crane ever wanted to sit down and read through his own book or something.

"What...the fuck..." I mutter, rubbing my eyes and smearing black streaks of eyeliner over my clenched fists.

"Are you familiar with the symptoms of cocaine psychosis, Jessica?"

"Huh?"

Dr. Crane is sitting at his desk, with his legs crossed (what the fuck is that about) and smirking at me. Like he's a cat with a dead mouse—no—a cornered mouse. I half expect him to lick his jowls or some shit.

"You sit like a girl," I mumble.

"That's not an answer."

My eyes feel extraordinarily heavy, and I'm having trouble keeping my head straight up, if that makes sense. I feel like it's just going to roll right off my shoulders.

"Cocaine psychosis is a condition which occurs most often in frequent stimulant users, characterized by visual, auditory, and sensory hallucinations as well as irrational behavior and mood swings. You appear to have just experienced an episode."

I know exactly what I experienced, and it was no sort of episode.

"Those fucking pills you gave me..."

"Are you referring to the dietary supplement?"

"Some kind of dietary supplement..."

He pulls one of out the pocket of his suit, holding up so I can see the blue color, and pops it in his mouth without a moment's hesitation.

"You really must learn to be more trusting. I'm your psychiatrist after all."

I shake my head in disbelief.

"I'd like to talk to you more about your recent usage patterns, but seeing as you spent our entire session and then some passed out in the corner, and I'm a very busy man, we'll have to discuss this at a later date."

He walks over to his desk and scrawls down something on a post-it note.

"This is my business cell phone. If you experience symptoms of psychosis again, I'd like you to call me."

He hands it to me, and I look down at the piece of paper stuck to my palm. Right underneath the "Arkham Psychiatric Hospital" logo, he's written down what appears to be a completely valid phone number.

"At any time," he clarifies, clearing his throat. I noticed earlier that he doesn't wear a ring. Maybe he's just a lonely psychiatrist, looking for late night phone sex in all the wrong places—like with a seventeen year old patient. He is attractive though—I wouldn't turn him down...

"Miss Walker," he ahems at me. I feel like my face is on fire.

"Yes, Dr. Crane?" I squeak. "You can call me Jessica, you know."

"Jessica," he sighs. "Please call me if you feel another episode coming on, whatever the time may be."

I nod weakly.

He leans in close to me, until his nose is just about touching mine.

My knees are made of jello and I think I'm going to die from the way my heart is racketing around between my ribs, and I'm scared the floor will sink me again, but it doesn't, and he whispers oh-so-low and firm.

"My job is to help you, and I take that responsibility very seriously."

"Okay..." I breathe.

"Do you trust me, Jessica?"

He stares at me, and I swear he pulls my soul out through my own eyes,

"I trust you."

At home, I'm trying to sleep, but my feels body like it's burning up. It's not like the weird melting of surfaces and matter like earlier, because I can still perceive everything. However, my skin seems to be dancing right off my bones, and my legs twitch like they're doing some sort of unknown dance. I need to get out of this bed right now, I need to get out of my fucking skin.

It feels like I'm coming down off something, but there's no crushing sense of depression, just anxiety and fear; I'm scared of myself.

I don't know what's happening to me, so with shaky hands, I grab my cell phone with Dr. Crane's post-it-note affixed to the front.

He picks up on the second ring, which is unusual, because it's the middle of the night.

"Dr. Crane... it's Jessica. I'm scared."

He doesn't sound tired when he replies, in fact, he sounds almost intrigued.

"Are you seeing things, Jessica?"

"No... no, I'm not... I just know something awful is about to happen, and I feel like my skin is coming off and..."

I can hear him clear his throat on the other end of the line.

"My office is closed at this hour. Would you like to meet me somewhere? There's a diner in midtown that's open all night."

"Sure...uh...okay."

"Can you drive?"

"Yeah, yeah. I just need to get out of my house or something...what's it called?"

"Midtown Diner," he says, very slowly, like he's talking to a mental patient—oh, right.

"Okay, uh, okay," I mumble, looking down at my slipper clad feet. "I'll be there in half an hour."

He's waiting outside when I get there, standing beside a white Audi—I was right about the car. He's still wearing a suit, even though it's two in the morning, though his glasses are tucked into his front pocket. My legs have shaken the whole way here, through the burning sensation in my skin is fading into a tingle, like every part of me is sleeping. I practically trip over my own assorted limbs getting out of the car, numb as I am.

Once I approach him, he sticks out his hand to greet me, but before I can reciprocate, I'm taken over by a wave of the strange numbness, and I lose track of my legs. I can't tell if I'm walking forward or backwards or sideways, and I stumble over.

He catches me, I suppose, or maybe I fell into him. I can't be quite certain, but I know that as soon as he has hold of me, I start sobbing, tears punctuated with shudders and snorts of mucus. It's lovely, really.

"This never happens to me, it's never happened before; I don't know what's wrong with me."

I'm fucking wailing at this point, and it's horrifically embarrassing, but I can't make myself stop. The lights of the diner behind me are too bright and I'm being swallowed up by everything.

"I snorted the pills today," I sob. "The ones you told me to take, I forgot about them, so I just snorted them and now I'm all like this and I can't feel my legs and I don't even know what's wrong with me..."

To my extreme surprise, he reaches to my face and pulls a lock of hair behind my ear.

"It's going to be okay, Jessica. Your body is reacting poorly to detox."

"Detox?" I ask with a sniffle.

He nods, serene and all knowing.

"The highly concentrated dose of the supplement you took has pushed your body into a state of detoxification."

I wipe my eyes and push myself away from him.

"So, what do I do?"

Without missing a beat, he answers.

"Keep taking the pills at regular intervals."

He pulls another blister pack out of his pocket, but this one is full.

"50 milligrams, once a day. This should keep the symptoms of detoxification at bay—provided that you don't use while you're taking them."

Okay. I will do anything to keep this feeling from coming back, even if it means ditching my favorite past time. He hands me the pack with seven pills in it.

"Don't you have any more?" I ask.

He smiles at me, but it's not sincere. I feel unsettled.

"I need to make sure you come back next week."

I nod, as if it all makes sense.

He looks around the parking lot and reaches back into the veritable pharmacy in his pants pocket.

"Take this when you get back home. It's Ambien."

"Don't you need to prescribe this sort of thing?" I ask.

He shrugs. Fucking shrugs.

"I don't think you have any incentive to report me, and I don't believe that anyone would doubt you gained it through anything but your own, illicit means. Take it when you go home; it will help you sleep." He looks over his shoulder to the diner.

"Did you want to get some coffee?"

I shake my head.

"No, I think I need to go home..."

"I'll see you next week, Miss Walker. Remember, the pills go in your mouth."

I walk back to my car, with the eerie sensation that he's following me somehow, and it lasts the whole way home. Even though I don't see anyone in my mirrors, I can't shake his presence, and that creepy smile of his, and the way he pulled my hair back from my face, and then myself earlier with hands buried into his ivory white skin...

I pull into the driveway and pop the Ambien, not bothering to wait until I get back up to my bedroom.

This business with Dr. Crane may be less simple than I assumed.

Author's Note: I find that in many villain & OC fics, the character arc usually consists of a sweet girl being corrupted by a sinister madman. While this is a perfectly legitimate and interesting plot, with Jessica, I wanted to try something a bit different. Jessica is not meant to be a nice girl. She's a spoiled rich chick that blows her parent's money on drugs. Though, I also intended for her being someone whom the reader could relate to, in the way she responds to crisis situations. I hope you all feel that the characterization I intended was apparent in this chapter, and I'd love to hear your feedback.

I really appreciate everyone who reviewed, favorited, followed, and read! Thank you all so much.