I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
-from For the Dead by Adrienne Rich
…
"It sounds good to me," Dr. Bannon remarked quietly, eyes thoughtful and abstracted over the white rim of her mug. "I think I did something similar for my application essays. It's stupid and chauvinistic, really, but they do like to hear about issues like home and female psychology from their women."
Darcy smiled. "I've noticed that."
The older woman took a sip of her steaming coffee and swallowed, leaning against the office doorframe. "Are you thinking of working with families once you finish med school?"
"I don't know yet," Darcy replied, a sheepish smile spreading on her face as she looked down at her blank application as if it would give her an answer, "After this" her eyes raked in her sterile surroundings "it might be a welcome change, but I really don't know."
"Well, going back to school will certainly give you some time to think that one over." Dr. Bannon's lips quirked in amused remembrance, then her expression brightened. "You know what would give you a bit of an edge?"
"What?"
Dr. Bannon leaned in furtively. "Arkham's got a fair amount of prestige, you know. Not recently, but back in its glory days it was the best facility of its kind on the East Coast. Drop a few names. Ask Jonathan for a quote on your topic. I'm not sure how ecstatic he'll be to see you working on this during office hours, but if you catch him off his guard, he might give you something worth using."
Darcy almost laughed, but thought better of it when she realized she could see every detail of the exact disapproving expression her employer would adopt when he saw her hunched over a med school application in the middle of the day. If her mind's eye were any indication, he wasn't going to be in much of an accommodating mood, especially after their near-collision that morning.
"I'll try," she murmured soberly, trying to keep the bitter tang of her sudden insight out of her voice.
"I think you can pull it off," Dr. Bannon replied warmly, finishing her coffee, "He's being extraordinarily soft on you, you know."
"Really?" She could feel her eyebrows disappearing into her hairline.
The slight psychiatrist nodded. "He sure is. Last year's intern was spending his breaks crying in the bathrooms, and the one two years before that quit midyear. I don't know what she ended up doing with her life, but it wasn't psychiatry. I think Arkham turned her off the subject."
"Seriously?"
"Yes. So consider yourself lucky." Dr. Bannon examined her empty mug with a sardonic grin. "Oh, Crane. He's a prickly one, all right, but one of the brightest people I've ever—" She stopped abruptly and looked up the hall. "Here's your chance. Best of luck."
Darcy's first instinct was to tense, but she fought it back. Be natural. She bent over her work again as Dr. Bannon left, hearing the clocklike, measured tread of his feet on the linoleum as she tried to casually resume her work on the essay outline.
"Good afternoon."
"Good afternoon," she replied lightly without looking up, the defiant scratching of her pencil across the paper almost softening the cold stillness. The back of her neck prickled, as if she were ignoring a loaded pistol, not just a man.
The footsteps paused before her, continued, and then she could sense his presence hovering over her shoulder, his shadow falling vague and indistinct across the desk.
"I don't seem to recognize what you're working on, Ms. Crandell."
"No, Doctor. It's a—" Her voice quivered despite herself, but she forced herself to keep her pencil pressed to the paper. "—a-an application for one of the schools I'm applying to."
"I see they've given you an essay."
"Well—yes."
"What is the topic?" She could have been wrong, but it sounded like he was curious. Maybe she had some chance of surviving this.
"We're allowed to choose, actually, so long as it's 1,000 words."
"And you have chosen—?"
"The devaluation of motherhood and its psychological effects on children and the home." There was no reply. "I-it's sort of a double topic," she forced out lamely.
There was a pause from the shadow. Now or never. Darcy took a deep breath and let her words out in an airy rush.
"I was wondering if I could get a quote from you to use in the context of this essay, Dr. Crane."
Please. Do something nice for me, for a change.
He left her shoulder and went to stand in front of the desk. She risked an upward glance, and was surprised by what she saw—he looked more than mildly surprised, as if she had just asked him to learn to speak fluent Cantonese in a day.
"I am neither a family counselor nor a child therapist. It is not particularly my field of expertise." He turned away from her, evidently thinking the conversation over, unlocking one of his cabinets and slipping an unfamiliar new briefcase inside before shutting it with a soft but final click.
"But you must have studied the subject at one point or another," Darcy replied, not knowing where she was receiving the idiot bravery to do so, "Or at least have seen the results in your patients here. Gilder speculated that few people can attain psychological maturity at all without a connection with the sense of futurity found through intimate association with a woman or a mother. Wouldn't most of the inmates fit that description? Mumford asserted that the devaluation of motherhood leaves children of both sexes cut off from the essential basis of all future commitments to cooperative functioning in the social framework."
Wordless, he faced her again, face empty, eyes and mouth still and adamant.
Taking a deep breath, she quoted, "'In repressing the mothering and nurturing impulses in the personality, the scientist has also lost the normal parental concern for the future life it cherishes. One hardly knows whether to characterize this attitude as innocence or fatalism; it certainly indicates—'"
"'—a failure to reach maturity,'" he concluded for her in a slow, thin voice, looking long and hard at her over the gleaming rims of his glasses. A dying ember of humanity in a mechanical man. "Yes. I've studied the books and articles in the past. I haven't thought about—their implications or theories for quite some time. But, given a day or two, I could provide you with an opinion, if you have such a critical need of it to augment your essay." The disdain had returned by his last sentence, but it seemed tempered somehow, subdued and lost behind some greater feeling.
Darcy realized that her palms were slick with sweat and she set her pencil aside hurriedly, folding her hands in her lap. Part of her wanted to leap up and hug him for finally caving in to normal human decency, but the majority of her reasoning told her that such a giddy action would only seem unnecessary and repulsive. A manic display of gratitude would merely suggest that her affections were extravagantly allocated—oh, God, now she was thinking like him.
"I trust that, as a student, you lack the finances to purchase a computer," Crane said suddenly, his flat, controlled voice jerking her out of the instant of mortified horror and thrusting her into an entirely new one.
Blood flooded her cheeks and she looked away. "Yes. I haven't bought one yet. I—probably won't buy one for a while."
"A handwritten essay," he proclaimed lazily, "will certainly not endear you to the admissions board. Especially one written in your haphazard script. There is a spare laptop computer in the file cabinet beside you that you may use to add a significant degree of erudition to what may well otherwise be an incomprehensible and obtuse work."
She took the blow quietly, chewing her tongue as her eyes bored holes in the stretch of ugly rug by his shoes. "Thank you," she mumbled, about as glowingly appreciative as a child who is given the gift of homemade socks for a birthday.
When she realized the doctor was doing her a favor in the quiet, double-edged way only he could, and looked up to thank him a little more eloquently, he and the stack of meeting agendas she'd made were already gone.
…
"Knock knock."
She looked up from her frustratingly imperfect thesis and cold, untouched lunch to see Mike in the doorway. Her insides froze, but she braced herself. Nothing to be afraid of.
"Is the meeting over already?" She asked without interest, turning her pencil on its head and tapping it against the desk.
Mike shrugged. "It was wrapping up when I got a call I had to take and had to leave. By the time I finished, it was four, so I figured I'd come say hello. Haven't seen you in a while."
"You haven't," she agreed mildly, setting her pencil flat across her paper, eyes downcast.
"What's new?"
The voice drew her in, like moth to flame, as it always had. She thought of overcast skies and falling New England leaves and quick kisses under trees dark with rain, but gritted her teeth, boxed up the memory, and put it away.
"Not a terrible much. And you?"
"A certain reliable source of mine who's privy to these sorts of things says that the board of directors has been talking about next year. Says that they have a lot of plans for Arkham, some new directions for us to go in. And that they're considering me to become the next head." His features were bright with suffused, stifled joy, and Darcy absently remembered what Sheila had said about him back in late September.
"—I guess a lot of people are giving me credit for the donations Arkham's been receiving this year," Mike was saying in a buttery, self-satisfied voice, "and—"
"But Dr. Crane is the Asylum's head," Darcy blurted quietly without thinking, her voice shriller and more dissonant than she expected. She wanted to swallow the words the instant they left her mouth.
Mike looked at her as if she were crazy. Or stupid. She remembered that look. From the parties at Dartmouth where she'd spoken out of turn, from the times when she'd raised her hand in classes and contradicted his answers, from that pounding-heart moment when she had told him that she didn't feel the same anymore.
"Darce…" The condescending, mature voice hadn't changed either. "Just because you're working for Ichabod doesn't mean you have to defend him when his back's turned. He seemed like he was off to a good start, but things have changed. We've all noticed. He's getting too involved with the city's politics and problems, and the board's become aware of that. They're letting him go in June."
Inexplicably, something in her burst, snapped, broke. Maybe it was hearing that voice again, maybe it was the superior attitude, maybe it was just Mike himself; her blazing rage couldn't be for Crane's sake alone, she knew. "They're firing him—!"
"Yes. It's getting to be too much for him. It's been unusually rough this year, and most heads don't last for more than a couple of years anyway. This stuff burns you out fast."
"Not him," Darcy replied, almost laughing madly as she thought of a weary Crane staggering to the ground with exhaustion, the thrill of sheer, vehement disagreement running silvery-hot in her brain, "Not him."
"Look," Mike said, growing impatient, "You barely even know the man. I'm beginning to think you don't want this for me—that you're not happy to hear—"
"I don't," she retorted, standing to her feet, "I don't and I'm not. You know what? I don't want you to get this job. I told you I'd had enough of you over a year ago, Mike Laramie. I meant it. Leave me alone."
"I was the one who offered you this internship—" Mike began, voice low and livid.
"—and Jonathan Crane was the one who actually gave it to me," she interrupted, "I don't need your help. So call it even. Leave him alone. Leave me alone. I don't need you to—to tell me how to think and act. I'm not one of your patients, Mike."
The bruised silence between them was broken again by one of the inmates on the floor above as he let out a keening, crossbreed cry that was half-scream, half-sob, animal and alone. Dr. Crane entered the room not long after, but his appearance was not the cold, unexpected jolt it usually was. He set his papers aside and took in the quiet and chill with unblinking, scathing eyes.
Darcy knew he saw. He saw the vein rising in Mike's neck, the tension of her own stiff, defensive stance, the awkward angle at which the pencil had been set down on the desk, like a declaration of war between them.
"Dr. Laramie," he began evenly after a second's analysis, "I believe that I have already requested that you refrain from visiting upon Ms. Crandell during office hours. It is clearly a source of agitation and also disrupts the agenda I've laid out for her—and, as a result, my own. I will not ask again. Please allow her to work in peace."
Mike looked between the two of them, face dark, eyes leaden but undefeated. "You pompous son of a bitch," he snapped at Dr. Crane, voice shaking with long-suppressed loathing, "I can't believe you. Darcy and I know each other; what we discuss is our own business. How dare you—"
"I know she doesn't want you here," Crane interrupted smoothly, nonchalantly stacking his papers with a diffident apathy. Again Darcy felt like there was something breaking loose from his caged eyes, something that shone through as he returned his gaze to the other psychiatrist. "I advise you respect her wishes and leave."
"You're the one who'll leave," Mike ground out, bearing stiff and rigid. Darcy felt a terrified inner smile tug at her; she knew how much he hated to be treated with contempt or—worse—contempt and unconcern. "You're on your way out, Crane, and everyone but you knows it. I visited your new patient, Victor Zsasz, the other day, the one that some assistant D.A. keeps calling about. I thought I'd see for myself. And here's my evaluation—I think he's sane." His smile grew wolfish, vindictive, triumphant, when Crane didn't respond. "I'll bring this in front of the board. A serial killer, sure, but the man belongs in Blackgate, Crane. Not here. You've made a mistake."
Dr. Crane drew a deep breath that did not tremble in the least. "I'm not one for making mistakes, Dr. Laramie," he replied in a strange, fiercely ecstatic tone that Darcy had never heard before, a voice so low and vibrant that it seemed to come from another man altogether. "You see, I realized that Zsasz was sane, even before I testified as an expert witness for the defense at his trial. It is no error, no chance, no 'mistake' on my partthat he is here.
"In fact, once you hear my reasoning, I'm sure you'll understand." His words were systematic but merry, like a cat toying with prey. "Return to my office this evening at eight o'clock before we close and we can discuss today's conversation. Clearly, you harbor some resentment and suspicion, and I am quite willing to openly address both—in extensive detail, if that is what you wish." There was some tangible, untrustworthy dark pleasure left lingering in the air afterward, and Mike was not wholly unaware of it.
"Eight o'clock?" He repeated warily.
Dr. Crane only nodded, eyes shining as if he were about to deliver the punch line of some fine joke. "It is my aim not to subject Ms. Crandell to anymore of this absurdity and indignation. This is a personal matter. We can settle it between the two of us."
Mike nodded slowly, reluctantly, like a puppet. "I suppose." Anger subdued by the prospect of delay, he left without another word.
Dr. Crane dropped his eyes to the floor for a moment, something very like a smile on his face, mouthing words too softly for Darcy to hear. All of him seemed possessed by a sudden glee, unexpected and alien.
"What did you say?" She asked, after mustering up the courage to do so.
He looked up, shook himself. "Light travels at a speed of 300,000 kilometers per second," he remarked lightly, voice distant and almost quivering with delight, "Quite slowly, really, in the grand scheme of things. It takes years for light from distant stars to reach our eyes here on earth. Ergo, it is very much possible for us to see the light of some stars that have disappeared thousands of years ago. –Goodbye, Darcy. It is nearly four-thirty, and I have an appointment to attend."
Author's Note
Hello, all. I'm braving a monstrously painful splinter in my finger to bring you this post, so enjoy.
ACleverName – Thank you for your honest and insightful assessment of this work. Your review was very sophisticated and well-put, and I can't wait to see what your actual writing is like. Thanks again!
Azina Zelle – I owe my officious-sounding knowledge of the fear toxin to my DK Batman guide, to give credit where credit is due. Jonathan's mother most likely won't make a return, but she has been sticking in my head for a while, so we shall see. I'm a little intimidated by how masterfully you handled her in your story, to be honest. Good luck on the new story!!
Valse De La Luna – Thank you. AP classes are hell, but I'm a college whore and will do anything to improve my resume. ;-)
Dr. E. Vance – Eight stories? Are you mad? Even I can't multitask like that, and I'm a bloody overachiever. Step away from the computer, child! (pause to consider) Nah, keep writing, please.
Eccentric Banshee – Oh, I love Fuse, it's okay you mixed the two up. Anyway, I can't believe Bruce talks to you. (glares pointedly at Jonathan) Some people just don't talk at all.
Jonathan: I do talk to you. Tell me about your mother.
Me: You never talk to me.
Jonathan: Bring me more donuts and coffee and I'll be open to negotiation.
Me: You've eaten enough already. You're supposed to be dead skinny.
Jonathan: (eyebrow raises) Don't make me come over there.
Me: (ulp) Okay. The Krispy Kremes are in the fridge and you know how to make the coffee. And Banshee's giving out some cupcakes too, I think.
Jonathan: Very well. I am appeased. For now. (resumes reading Baudelaire and other dark stuff)
Yeesh. You can tell who's wearing the pants in this couple. I'm partial to vanilla, by the way, but I can do chocolate too. ;-)
hornofgondor2 – Corpse Bride was sweet. Not the greatest Tim Burton stuff ever, but I did cry at the end. Then again, I cry over everything, so it's not a huge point to make. :-) And you?
Skyler McAndrews – Rest assured that more is on its way!
Karina of Darkness – Don't worry about 'weeny' reviews. I like those too. Sometimes one needs a big fudgesicle and sometimes they just want a little sugar cube to keep them going. You rock my socks too. Yes, I've read Scarecrow: Year One and love it. :-D
VampireNaomi – You raised the question of when Dark My Light ends. Here is my answer, as best as I can explain at this point in time: it runs through the events of Batman Begins and ends about six months thereafter. In short, I think you have at least ten more chapters to go, if all goes according to plan. (evil cackle)
SpadesJade – I'm sorry if I confused you there. The exact phrase was: 'Amy would have remarked upon Crane's surliness but, fortunately, his intern lacked the authority to further perpetuate that similarity.' I can't imagine her being surly either. :-) Crane would be a different, far more twisted man if that were the case. Hmm (glances around) a lot of people are comparing my story to a drug—is that good? ;-D
Kagerou-chan – Between you and me, I want Crane to go crazy too. Hehe. So happy to see you updated your story by the way! Anyways, I did mean to put 'doffing' in Chapter 9. It makes sense that he would be removing his doctor's coat before leaving, not putting it on. Yum! Tea! My fave! (gulps)
Jonathansgirl18 – Glad you enjoyed the little vignette I wrote for you. No one will ever know how Jonathan got on the ceiling, but I do particularly enjoy your idea of him swinging from some bizarre art-nouveau lighting fixture and then dropping like some sort of twisted geek-tiger onto an unsuspecting Laramie.
Not Human – Yay! Thank you. If you read this far, I love you even more!
I love you all so, so much. Chapter 10 will bring you the long-awaited showdown between Crane and Laramie. Place your bets in your reviews, ladies and gentlemen, and do so with haste and in plentitude. Because I like lots of reviews—er, bets. Whatever.
Love,
Blodeuedd
p.s. Mucho thanks to the wonderful 'Motherhood' section of A Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets for the information on Gilder and Mumford that Darcy mentions to Crane in this chapter. Very insightful, yes?