No, not the end. More to come, I promise. Jane's become a little foggy, of course, so her…grasp of reality is not to be so easily trusted, but I like to think that we're all similarly sane way way underneath. Hope you like where this is headed.

-nH

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Chapter 16

Rain On the Wind

Time passed at an unsettlingly slow pace. Shivering on the floor, constantly twisting to escape the pinching confinement of the straightjacket, Jane felt years pass. The cobwebs gathered in her blond hair, dust settled on her sallow skin; the more she moved, the less she felt Death's approach. She tried to hang on to the present; deny the past, forestall the future. It most likely held more suffering. Life was but a dream, a memory, a possible lie.

In the aching of her muscles she felt certain that hours, at least, had gone by. It must be night by now; the same night, though? How many days had she been in this hell? Rationality came and went; when it was there, she tried to imagine what the real world looked like, so she could eventually figure out a way to get back there. In her sparse moments of clarity, even she marveled at her reluctance to give up the hope of eventual freedom. She couldn't accept defeat; while she had sanity, she had something to defend, and this hope was the only weapon she had left.

Humans can adapt to anything, Jane.

How true; in fact, she would hazard to say that she was getting just a bit better at handling this insanity thing. If Arkham was her home now, then madness was her new bedfellow. This realization stunned her out of her unconscious ramblings – she hadn't noticed that she'd been mumbling words like the ever-repetitive scarecrow, and new favorites like stitch and bugs. The dawn of courage stopped this, though; in adaptation she was silenced.

If she grew brave, she could move around the tremors, translate the moving walls and lurching sky into a new version of a familiar reality. The world may be nothing more than perception, she thought feverishly, and if that was so, than lucid dreaming was her shelter, and her escape.

Once again, Jane hauled herself awkwardly to her feet. The walls continued to shudder; but that was okay, once one got used to it, wasn't it? These were the new walls, the turning ground under her feet was the new floor, the shimmering air was the new oxygen. It was a new world, and she could learn to live in it, for as long as it took to get out.

Angel

Angie! She had to tell Angie that she would be okay…if she could find their conduit in the haze, of course. Her room now looked a lot like a foggy moor, with transparent walls and other illusionary trappings. No, no, the room was reality; the sense of the outdoors was the illusion, she hastily corrected herself. She focused, and brought the walls back to solidity. Better; there, near the ceiling, was the vent.

"Angie?" she called. She was met by the ominous rumble of thunder; real, or imaginary? Had she ever heard the weather down there before?

She tried again. "Angel!"

After a moment, during which Jane considered the possibility that all of this was a dream and she was still huddled and twitching on the floor, Angel replied.

"Jane! What the hell is going on?"

"I'm…I lost control for a while, but I'm better now", Jane offered. "I'm a little… mixed up? But, I can work around it. I'm not sure exactly what to do, but I think if we don't get out of here, like now, there won't be another chance for me, get it? I'm almost dead. I'm almost…totally dead."

Silence. Perhaps she had frightened the poor girl. If that was the case, the news only got worse for her.

"Angie?"

"I'm here", she answered. "What happened to you? Something's going off tonight, something huge. Crane disappeared for a while right after you got back, I heard them drop you in your room. You sounded…well, nevermind that now. But Crane, when he was gone upstairs I heard them talking about some place called Corridor F and how some kind of…like, bat-guy is trying to break into the asylum?" She gave a nervous titter. "If I didn't know any better, I might think I was surrounded by crazy people. Anyway…Crane is back…ah, you don't know what I had to do to get all this, girl.."

This rapid confession was a bit much for Jane to take at the moment, but she tried her best to assimilate the news. "Did you break out of your room?" she asked, grasping at the most familiar assumptions associated with Angie.

Angie laughed; it was a heavenly sound. "Uh, yes. Maybe you know me after all. I've been working on the hinges for months now, y'know, because patience is a virtue and all. So I finally pushed and got the damn thing unstuck, and then I find that the lock on my freaking door is like one-tenth as complicated as removing it from the hinge-side would have been. Basically, I found that my electro-lock is easily shorted with my CD player and other little odds and ends I have lying around, or stuffed into the mattress…luckily, we're not in Maximum security. So I got out, and no one was around, and I went back to the place where I'd heard about the real Max ward before. Crane was up there, some guards were saying, he got cornered by some freak in a rubber suit in this Corridor F and he had to be put into a Max room! But, then they moved him down here…somewhere. They said the police wanted to talk to him, and he'd given some kind of orders to be taken into our secret hideout level if anything should happen to his decision-making abilities, whatever that means. So…"

"Cops?" Jane spat suddenly. She couldn't help the voracity of her response. "Cops, here? Talking to Crane?" After the shortest second, she added, "Bat-guy?"

"Yeah…" Angie said, startled. "Cops, here. Well, they were upstairs, at least. What have they done for us lately, anyhow? So they talked to Crane already, but I guess he didn't tell them anything about us…then he came back down here, somewhere. There's something wrong with him, Jane. I mean, something more wrong than before; I know, I'm in love with him, but I can admit…Oh, and this Bat guy, the Bat-man…" she said in a tone that openly admitted to sounding ridiculous. "He did something to Jonnie. The guards who brought him down said something about Crane's own medicine. And now they say that this room in Corridor F, wherever that is, is still crawling with police. I don't know what the hell all this means, Jane, and now there's something happening to you too…the end is nigh, I think, isn't it?"

Jane's eyes had been opened unnaturally wide for most of Angie's testimony, taking in all the light they could, freezing time for as long as it took to accept this. What was going on, indeed. Angie spoke of this Bat-man with the tone reserved for religious fanatics and other dubious heroes. Bat-man? Was he like some radio personality here to do an exposé or something? Did he end up attacking the doctor physically thus earning him cult-figure status? And cops…finally, were they here to help the victims of Arkham, or were they only the nails in their coffins?

"Jane?"

"Yes…"

"Hon, I think something's happening right now. I hear something from down my section here…oh, my God. Get ready, girl. If I can, I'll come for you…"

Jane wanted to protest, but what would she be protesting? Already she heard the commotion herself; a sudden shuffling of feet somewhere at the end of her hall, the muffled shouting of men's voices…the cascading clack of the doors of her wing unlocking. The walls still shuddered, and the stiff arms of the straightjacket still embraced her harshly. But Angie would come for her, soon, if she could. Jane fervently hoped so; despite her new courage, this new world may prove too wild and wide to survive on her own. Especially if the wild and weird Crane still walked the underground with her, in a room recently unlocked, and his most basic sanity apparently in question.

Crane's own medicine

She steeled herself. All that had come before was merely a rain-shower; the true storm lay directly ahead. Inside, she was changed, she felt it. She didn't know what she would do when the time came, but it would be an attack from deep inside her, a place she would not have been forced into were it not for Crane. And if his medicine did this to a normal teenaged girl, what would it do to its own mad creator?

Thunder rolled darkly again; he was coming, that Scarecrow, coming for her. Like smelling rain on the cold wind, she could feel it.

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So, any questions? I know madness can be a little ambiguous…and I'd like to know if I've left anything out. Thanks for reading - nH