'Obsession'

By Indiana

Characters: Jonathan Crane, Edward Nygma [Scriddler]

The first time Jonathan saw him was on the front page of the newspaper. He could say with absolute certainty that was the day it started.

Before that day Jonathan would have been first in line to declare there was no such thing as a human being that was so attractive that one could not control themselves. It was poppycock, he insisted. Anyone who allowed something as primal as hormones to waylay their every thought was a weakling and a fool. Jonathan had looked upon a lifetime of people and had never so much as done a single double-take.

The newspaper was in a browbeaten metal box next to a bus stop. It was locked and the only access was either by key, vandalism, or coin. Jonathan obviously did not have a key, the location made it difficult to vandalise, and he was loath to pay for absolutely anything. But one of those three he needed choose, and he justified the third by telling himself it was a small price to pay to get the newspaper into his hands and thus have physical evidence that the man pictured there really was not so beautiful as his memory was bound to recall him. He tucked it under his arm and did not look at it until he was safely home, and he discovered he was correct: he was not so beautiful as he recalled. He was even moreso.

Jonathan put the newspaper into his desk drawer and failed not thinking about it. Every single minute of every single day was haunted by the image of the beautiful man printed upon its face. He could not sleep for the thought of it. His lectures at the university, already marred with his general disinterest with being there, were now riddled with pauses and repetition as his thoughts unravelled even while he was speaking them. He was well-known to the staff as a solitary and unpleasant creature, so his constant inquiries as to the man in the newspaper were met mostly with confusion and dismissal. He was disgusted in himself for the asking but he could not stop.

Until the night he no longer had to, for he entered his apartment to find Edward there within it. He stood in the doorway to his bedroom motionless and thoughtless and directionless.

"Well," Edward said, his voice beautiful and direct from his lips to Jonathan's ears, "you wanted me. Here I am."

Jonathan had never put a single neuron into concluding what Edward must have smelled like, but all of the ones available were thinking about it now. He had no name to put to the man's subtle scent other than 'perfect'. And he was draped casually across Jonathan's desk, which would doubtlessly cause it to sink into the wood and remain there long after he left as an olfactory spectre which Jonathan would find himself unable to escape.

His hair was in that god-awful tousled style that Jonathan would now never be able to see on another man without thinking of him. It was that certain colour that was achieved only by maple leaves only on one day of the year and some of it was visible from the top of the shirt of which he had not done up the top few buttons. Jonathan had a nearly visceral need to see the rest of it, and whereupon it ran down his torso, down towards his artfully concealed genitals. Jonathan's own were filling with a steady heat it was already too late to hide. Not even the rare shame threatening to wash through him was enough to convince his barely used equipment to settle back where it belonged. For all his former conviction, it turned out he shared this carnal similarity with all those he had debased after all.

Edward laughed. It was condescending, and Jonathan hated that he deserved it. Edward swung himself to sitting with his knees spread and Jonathan hated that he had done it. "Surely you haven't been stalking me all this time just so you could stare at me," Edward said. "What was your aim, hm? Did you mean to lock me up in your basement, perhaps?"

Jonathan had indeed fantasized many times about that very thing. About restraining him, naked, to the wall with manacles which would chafe and bruise and ruin his beautiful skin. He would leave him down there until he was emaciated and weak and then this would all end for he would have been made ugly as all of humanity was.

Edward shook his head and twitched his wrist up to eye level. "I'm out of time, I'm afraid. Good talk." And he simply stood and left as Jonathan stared after him, his entire body rigid and unmoving.

The obsession somehow escalated from there.

His room was soon plastered with every newspaper page which contained any mention of Edward. Any and all news stories about him were preserved on video tape. He dreamed and he dreamed and he dreamed of Edward, and he had never before been one for masturbation, but it did not matter how often or in what way he did it for the intense sexual desire Jonathan had for him never ceased. In the dreams Edward was always beautiful, always enticing Jonathan to come to him, but when he did his hands could not feel the shape of him nor could his mind conjure up any image of what he may have looked like beneath his clothes and he knew it was because whatever he managed to think up would be so far inferior to the real thing that it was not worth the effort to visualise. He lost hours sitting at his desk, the scent Edward had left behind erasing all notion of time or purpose.

Then Edward began to turn up in Jonathan's daily life.

Jonathan did not ever have to look for him. He would simply appear at places where Jonathan was already fated to be. Some of these places were common sense and some of them were not, but Edward appeared in all of them nonetheless. Jonathan could not leave his apartment without scanning every person he passed for Edward. He could not remain inside of his apartment without scanning every person who passed the window for Edward. Night was the only time he could continue his work, and continue his work he did for he had concluded it was his only way out of this. Edward had stolen his body and so Jonathan would steal his mind.

When next Jonathan saw him the toxin was ready. He approached, which he had never done before. Edward's smile implied he had anticipated such a thing and Jonathan hated the thrill it sparked in his stomach.

"You have something in mind today, I take it?" Edward said. His words were the lyrics to a song no one had the skill to write. Jonathan nodded.

"I have a truck parked out back."

Edward hummed in satisfaction and followed him. Jonathan did not want to take his eyes away when he lifted himself into the bed and leaned back in it as though it were his own and not Jonathan's, but he had to. He had to stop this now. He removed the needle from the glovebox and concealed it behind his back.

"What have you got there?" Edward asked. Jonathan did not answer. He instead climbed onto the bed and straddled Edward and pressed his left wrist above his head, at which time he -

They were so close together. And he knew. Jonathan could tell that he knew, but he had come anyway. All of this together stole Jonathan's breath and his thoughts and replaced it with the violent need to grind his body against Edward's until the ever-present ache between his legs was relieved at last. He glanced downward to find that Edward's bulge was no more present than it had been before, but his was firm beneath Edward's knowing fingers. He turned his head aside, into his right arm, in an attempt to dissipate the ensuing moan into his sleeve, but he knew the moment he did so it had not worked.

"Something tells me," Edward said with accursed playfulness, "that drug isn't going to be one of the ones I like."

Jonathan could not answer because his ability to form words had been lost with a motion of Edward's free hand.

"You know, if I wasn't certain that was a lethal dose of your little fear experiment, I would have gone for it. But as it is I'll have to refuse. No hard feelings."

Jonathan bent down and pressed the point of the needle against the side of Edward's neck. Edward did not flinch. Sweat was beading along Jonathan's hairline and underneath his arms and the place where Edward's hand was still bewitching him. "If I kill you," Jonathan murmured into his ear, "then this will end."

"Why would you want it to?" Edward whispered. His breath seemed to caress Jonathan's skin. "Tell me, Jonathan. When was the last time you felt this much excitement? This alive? You never have, have you? That's why you've fallen into this so hard and so deep. Your work gives you purpose, but it does not give you life. Not like I do."

Jonathan prayed that his grip upon Edward's wrist would not weaken and that his thumb on the plunger would not falter.

"If you kill me," Edward went on, the sound of his voice making Jonathan helpless, "you will never know the part of yourself that I have awoken. And you can't have that. Can you."

Jonathan's breath stalled. Edward's eyes glittered knowingly in the dark and Jonathan could not stop looking at them.

"Drop the needle and do what you should have done when I laid myself out so nicely for you on your desk."

Jonathan's body obeyed against the panicked protestations of his mind. He was kissing him at long last, hard and desperate. His hand had released the needle and was clenching as much of Edward's buttock as it could grasp, and Edward was laughing but Jonathan did not realise it until he ran out of breath. He lowered his head to the breast of the man who had broken him and left it there. Edward's free hand was in Jonathan's hair, at once reassuring and condescending, and he did not want for him to ever move it.

"Oh, Jonathan," Edward fairly hummed into his ear, "you have been fun." And his hand, still holding Jonathan's crotch, clenched and twisted it with sudden violence. Jonathan saw white and that was all he was able to perceive for a good few moments. His resumed awareness told him he was curled against the side of the truck, and once he had regained enough of his breath he scrabbled his hand up the bed until he could push himself to sitting. He looked over his shoulder to see Edward sitting atop the other side, and as soon as their eyes met Edward smiled and swept his legs over the side and disappeared. Jonathan could not get up fast enough to chase him and he noticed with a start that the syringe was gone.

Days went by. Days, and then weeks, and then months. Edward had gone. He had vanished. Jonathan tore through newspapers for mention of him in between glances at the ever-on television for a hint towards his whereabouts. He scoured the Internet to the best of his limited ability and glowered at the publicly viewable footage and photographs and words describing the man who should have been his and only his. He fantasized about storming into the places who thought they had the right to publish anything about him, inflicting upon them their worst fears and watching as the building burned to the ground before him. He did not purposely sleep, and the occasions he found himself doing so he woke with clothes both sticky and sweat-soaked, driven by dreams of all the things he could have done when Edward had been beneath him but had not.

It was seven months and twenty-five days later when Jonathan received the postcard. The photograph upon the front contained nothing he recognised, but the words upon the back froze his very blood:

You want me. Here I am.

Jonathan learned then there was something worse than lust. The rage that rose up in him was blinding and numbing and deafening, and a scream of fury tore a strip into the back of his throat that would echo for days. His hands, divorced from any thought at all, tore the postcard asunder into a hundred jagged pieces and his eyes did not watch himself do it. When vision returned to them his breath shuddered and his legs weakened. He found himself kneeling on the floor amidst the fragments, and after a moment he began to gather them together in a panic. "No," he whispered to himself with a horror he would never learn how to inflict upon another. "No!"

He tried for hours to reassemble the card, but to no avail. The pieces were too small and too many. He held the scrap which contained the most of the words Edward had written and clenched it tightly within both hands. And then Jonathan knew something which was nearly as horrible as the rage had been, and that was sorrow. His body was a rigid inward curl and he cried hot and bitter tears into his own knees, his forehead pressed into his clasped hands. Edward's laugh was echoing in his ears. Even now Jonathan could not find it ugly.

The sleep that came to Jonathan then was of a sort he had not known in years, deep and black and dreamless, and when he awoke and looked upon the evidence of what he had spent months upon months buried inside of he felt nothing. He felt nothing at all. Edward was still beautiful, but whatever part of him had cared was no longer there. His eyes fell to the paper scattered upon the floor.

"No," he said to it. "No, I think I will wait until it is you who wants me."

And he rose to his feet and laughed and began to think of what he would do when finally that day came.