It takes her four hours to jog to the outskirts of Gotham City. It takes another two to walk into the busy part of the city itself, and it takes her all of five seconds to make sure the scarf wrapped around her neck and mouth is secure so that she won't get stares.
Schwarzwald, now taking up the name Julia Kingsley, for this moment in time anyway, and going off about the city. She's incapable of doing anything that requires identification anyway, so it shouldn't matter if she takes up a random name.
Right now, she's on a mission: Find Jonathan Crane, codenamed for the hell of it as Operation: Fuck The World.
Operation: Fuck The World begins well enough. A hobo harasses Julia as she walks down the street, panhandling at her as she, very quaintly, ignores him. He calls her a bitch and then walks off.
So far, so well.
Julia then spends her time sleeping on a park bench, as she's very tired. She sleeps until noon, which is when the park fills up with children and parents and the noise wakes her up. She then just sits there, wishing she had her cane again because her leg is beginning to ache with all the exertion and it's making walking difficult, and watches the families frolic. She's envious, and has no idea why. Michelle King never wanted to have a family to tie her down. Why should Julia? Why should Schwarzwald?
A child runs up to her, and stares. It's a little boy, and he can't be more than five. He's just staring at the odd woman with the scarf around her mouth, the little blond boy with the brown eyes and the cute face, and then, he speaks in a child's shrill tone.
"Why do you got that scarf?" He queries, and Julia smiles behind the scarf, and the boy can see the smile in her eyes.
"Because my face is hurt." Julia speaks, softly, and he cocks his head.
"Why?" He asks, and Julia is about to answer, when she stops and strains to listen to something.
Because you're ugly, you fucking pathetic little whore. The dark whispering continues, as Julia begins to tear up. The voice is slick, calm, dangerous.
"I'm not." Julia says, very quietly, to the voice, and thinks she hears laughter.
You are.
"Huh?" The boy asks, and Julia closes her eyes. She feels something tugging at the back of her consciousness, urgently, and resists it, viciously. Whatever it was, it retracts and goes silent again, as Julia smiles at the little boy while pulling down her scarf.
"Am I still pretty?" She asks, and there's a crazed note in her voice and an odd glimmer to her eyes; desperate, depressed, needy. The boy pales as he sees her scars, and he runs away screaming about a monster to leave Julia sitting there alone, crestfallen. Nothing crueler than a child.
People begin to look and Julia pulls her scarf up around her mouth again, beginning to walk. She doesn't even know where she's walking, just that she needs to walk. She continues to walk until she walks straight into the Narrows, watching nothing but her feet and the concrete under them. She bumps into someone, and watches them scatter materials across the concrete.
"Here…let me help you with those." Julia says, though it's more of a sigh than anything, and leans down to help pick up what the other person is hastily trying to grab up and out of her sight. She sees that this person's supplies have spilled out of a plastic bag, and it's…white…powdery…dust.
Before the man can run, as he's trying to do, she grabs him and shoves him into an alleyway, glaring. "Where is he?" She snaps, eyes narrowing, and sees the random man that she's grabbed. He tries to shove her off and away, but she steels herself and he's unable to get rid of her as she drags him back; he's not a big guy, pretty skinny, probably a junkie. "Answer me!"
"I don't know what you're talking about!" The man snaps, shoving her, but she doesn't budge more than a step. Julia uses a free hand to jerk down the scarf, and show him the terrible slices on her mouth. She grabs a broken bottle from the trashcan they're next to, breaks it on the wall, and holds the jagged edge in his face.
"You tell me where Scarecrow is, or I'll do to you what Joker did to me." She threatens, baring her white teeth in a snarl, and when she presses the broken bottle's edge to his lips, he cracks. She thinks that it might have been that little extra telling him that she's been around Joker, so she's probably a crazy bitch.
"Fine, get that outta my face! He's at 1617 Mangrove Street, the old house on the corner! Setting up shop!" The man tells her, and she tosses him aside and drops the bottle, preparing to walk away and find this place. When she hears his footsteps behind her, too close to be innocent, she grabs the lid off the trashcan and turns, swinging. It catches him in the side of the head, and he goes down. Julia, now hurried, tosses the lid aside and walks out of the alleyway, hunting down the streets for Mangrove.
It's night by the time she finally finds the house, standing at the door of the imposing building, and with slight hesitation, she pushes open the door and walks in. The living room is empty, decrepit furniture moth eaten and dirty. She hears, however, commotion in back, and walks towards it, down the hallway and past the empty doorway to the kitchen, coming towards the end of the hallway with three doors. One to the left, one to the right, and one right in front of her. The middle one is just a closet. The one to the left she decides to open, and peeks in. She sees motion, as people are apparently making something. While she's staring, she doesn't see or hear who's behind her and they club her with something blunt and heavy, and she instantly passes out and slumps to the floor.
When she opens her eyes again, she's in a chair and apparently tied to it. Her scarf is gone, and she sees that someone is opposite her in the dim room, back to her, looking at something. When she coughs, they pick something up off the desk and pull it over their head, before turning around to face her.
"What are you doing here?" They ask, and their voice is garbled and growling. From the frame of their body, Julia guesses that it's a man, though she can't be sure. She tries to answer as best she can.
"I'm…looking for Crane. Dr. Crane." She says, and her voice is hoarse.
"Why?" The man asks, and from the light outside and the fact he's standing in front of a window, she can't see what he looks like. Julia furrows her brow, wondering why she's even answering to this guy.
"I don't need to tell you. Someone…told me he'd be here. I need to talk to him."
"About what? Tell me."
"No." Julia answers, in a deadpan, and she thinks she hears him sigh. He turns back to the desk and digs in a drawer, before walking towards her and into her view. She sees, and is subsequently terrified by, the mask that he's wearing. It's nothing but a burlap sack, like the kind you get potatoes in, but for some reason, the crudely cut eyes and mouth are highly unsettling.
"Deep breaths." He tells her, leaning in her face, and before she realizes what's going on, he's used the small spray canister attached to his wrist by an elastic band, and white gas flies in her face. She automatically sucks in a breath and then coughs, and feels horror creep up on her with icy fingers. The floor seems to sway, in her vision, and as she coughs, she keeps her head turned down to look at the floor, and refuses to look up at him because she knows what'll happen.
"Look at me. What do you see, Ju-li-a?" He asks, turning her head up forcefully and as soon as she sees what the mask has become, she screams. The eyes are wide and black, like two deep holes into nothing, and the mouth is wide open and full of sharp teeth, and beyond the teeth is pure, unsettling blackness. Blackness runs down the face of the bag like tears, and the color is so inhumanly dark that it threatens to devour her.
"What do you want to see Crane for?" He asks again, and cups a hand over her mouth when she starts to scream. "Be silent. Tell. Me." He's very annoyed, and Julia manages to stutter out an answer.
"L-left Joker!" She screeches, and as the man speaks, the mask's stitch mouth pours out writhing maggots that fall into her lap.
"Why here, though? Why do you think he wants you any more than Joker does?"
I…I…I don't know!!" Julia wails, in terror, and hangs her head. "Voices…have to…Crane!" She shrieks his name, and hears the masked man sigh again before turning and walking over towards the desk, grabbing something before walking back, grabbing her by her blond hair and jerking her head up to face him, and gassing her again. She once again sucks in the gas, hacking and coughing. She watches as the mask returns from a snarling, drooling thing to a regular burlap sack again. An antidote? After she calms down, he tosses the antidote aside and reaches up, pulling off the mask, and retrieving glasses from his pocket to put back on his face. Julia just stares.
"C…Crane?" She says his name confusedly, as he puts his glasses back onto his face and then shakes his hair out a bit, fixing it smoothly again and then staring at her with his impassive blue eyes.
"Yes. I thought you'd have figured it out yourself by now, but apparently not." He says in his natural monotone, and she glares, continuing to breathe deeply, coughing softly now and then. "Now what are you here for? Shelter? Care and compassion? Why would I give you any of these things, when you've already taken up my time?"
She hangs her head, unable to answer that question, still tied to the chair and unable to move from it. After a moment of silence, he tosses the mask into a ratty armchair and walks around the room, out of Julia's line of sight.
"How did you get those scars? Joker have a temper tantrum?" Crane asks her, with a very uninterested tone, and she hesitates to answer.
Tell him. You're better than he is, why would you care? The voice appears from nowhere, a soft whisper with dark intent, and Julia finds herself spurred on to talk.
"I screwed up on a job; saved a hostage from exploding with the bomb strapped to her chest, screwed up the mangled thing that he called a 'plan'. He decided that he needed to punish me or something." Julia speaks in monotone, before feeling the restraints slacken around her midsection and arms.
"Heroic. Didn't you learn that no good deed goes unpunished?" Crane asks her in his deadpan manner, and she laughs slightly, though it's humorless.
"Yeah. It didn't stick 'til recently." She looks back at Crane, and he has his arms folded across his chest as he stares at her, straight through her.
"And you've never answered me. What do you want me to do about it? I won't coddle you. I'm very busy with my own operations." He informs her, and she shrugs exhaustedly.
"I…I really just don't know. I wanted to get away from there, I can't work in Gotham because I have no identity that doesn't have an 'Arkham Escapee' tag to it. I…thought I'd ask you…" She trails off, and Crane picks up the slack.
"If you could work for me? Do you even know what I do?"
"Erm…I could learn…"
Crane sighs under his breath, as if he's very tired of dealing with this woman, and looks out the window. The curtains are drawn again, so that people wanting to catch a peek will be met with nothing but fluttering curtains of a deep rust color. "I'm not going to spend valuable time teaching you how to do a job that I need to have done quickly. Get out."
With that , despair crushes over Julia. A moment later, she snaps and stands up from her chair, walking over to him quickly, angrily. He turns back to face her in enough time for her to grab the front of his shirt and jerk his face close to hers, glaring harshly at him. He's slightly taller than she is, and so she has to look a little upwards.
"Listen," She seethes, and Crane's eyes seem to glint and then narrow at the complete change in posture, in tone of voice, body language, everything about her. Besides, Julia would never dare touch him for fear of what the little canister attached to his wrist could do to her again. "I don't have any other choices. Either you help me, or I let the cops know about your operation, yours and Joker's."
"And you would give yourself up as martyr just to spite me?" He asks her, nonchalantly, and she grits her teeth.
"You bet I would."
He's not bothered at all by this threat; he could gas her again and then let her mind rot from the pure terror of a highly concentrated dose straight to the lungs, or he could have her killed in an instant. But this is slightly interesting, and he wants to pursue it a bit longer before he gets rid of her.
"Michelle, how are you feeling?" He asks her, and she seems to slip a moment, blinking, looking confused.
"Huh? I'm…my mouth kind of hurts, still." She mumbles, before remembering her situation and straightening up. "What say you, Crane?"
"Julia, I don't know what you want me to do." He states, keeping a very close eye on her now. Her eyes narrow and harden, and she grips the front of his shirt harder.
"I want you to help me out, you moron!" She growls, and he takes her hands and pries them off of his clothing, letting go of them and turning to walk away.
"I don't have any use for you, Schwarzwald." Crane says, distantly, and turns around in time for her to catch him across the face with a hard slap. As soon as she slaps him, he snatches her hand and bends her forefingers back, further and further so that she digs her nails into his palm and drops to her knees. A very simple test to see if his theory is correct, and she doesn't even catch that he's doing it.
"What is your name?" He asks her, though Scarecrow is beginning to tell him to break her fingers. She looks up at him, eyes wide, tearing up slightly now, and she growls two words at him.
"The Second."
He lets go of her hand, Scarecrow letting out an annoyed groan, Julia clutching her hand to her chest.
"Fine. I don't see why I should let a willing worker turn away; since you've been subjected to the gas on a long-term basis, I need to see what effects a newer mix would have on you, and I would like to see if you build up an immunity to it. You will be my test subject." He walks around her, towards the door, picking up the mask on his way. "You will do what I say, when I say it, with no argument or I will have you killed. Is that made perfectly clear?" Crane glances back to her, turning slightly to do so, and Julia turns back and looks at him, too.
"Y…yes, sir."
"Yes, Doctor."
He wants to see if she'll say it, and prove that she's willing to give her loyalty to him like she did to Joker. After a moment where she battles with herself over whether she wants to demean herself like that or not, she manages to say it.
"Yes, Doctor Crane." She says, and he allows the slightest of smirks. She glares back, before he once again regains an expression of apathy and walks out the door.
"We begin in the morning. And take care of that Chelsea Smile of yours, or it'll get infected."