While myriad snowy hands are clustering at the panes—
your hands within my hands are deeds;
my tongue upon your throat – singing
arms close; eyes wide, undoubtful
dark
drink the dawn—
a forest shudders in your hair!
-from The Harbor Dawn by Hart Crane
…
"It's beginning to snow," he remarked in a voice like cracking ice, looking towards the cloudy skies. There was no impression of his impatience to be found in either tone or bearing, but she felt the imagined press of it anyway.
"Do you want to get some dinner?" She asked nervously, blinking away the insubstantial flakes of burning-cold sleet.
"It is of no consequence to me what you choose to do."
"There's a café up here; it'll just be a minute." An anxious glance to gauge his reaction proved fruitless—he was merely tugging at his bright scarf, as if it annoyed him.
The café was one she remembered from childhood: golden-lit, sweet-smelling. She hastily picked out a sandwich and ordered a coffee.
"You hungry?" She asked him, scratchy-voiced with cold as she spoke over the roar of the coffee grinder and the gentle ooze of insipid holiday music.
He shook his head. "I plan to eat when I return home."
"Just a coffee."
He shrugged at her insistence. "If you insist." His voice was different; decidedly not warmer or gentler, but lazier. Lenient.
She ordered another coffee; when she turned to look towards him he'd gone over to the newspaper rack, absentmindedly glancing over the front page, long fingers brushing a headline for an instant before everything in him straightened and looked out into the black cold, as if expecting retribution for his easy informality.
"Coffee for…Darlene?" The adolescent barista flushed and chewed his lip, clearly aware that he'd misread her name. She smiled patiently and took the two coffees and her sandwich, handing one to Crane before they left the coffee shop.
"Well," she said with a false enthusiasm into the bone-deep chill, "I can walk from here. Thanks for—"
"I didn't become the head of Arkham simply because I can buckle someone into a straitjacket, Ms. Crandell. Don't insult me." He stared at his paper cup but didn't drink.
Her cheeks burned despite the sleety winter night. "Sorry. –And that wasn't a lie," she added with a nervous chuckle.
"I know." He sounded like he was expressing condolences at funeral. Darcy smiled into her scarf as she walked.
"Dr. Crane?" She had the feeling he might actually humor her prattle tonight, so she ignored her coffee-singed tongue and took a chance.
"Yes?"
"Do you ever laugh?"
He didn't miss a beat. "Must I?"
"Well, shouldn't you?"
"I see no call for laughter when I have twenty sessions' worth of notes waiting for me once I complete this errand."
"Point taken."
There was no response to her concession; his eyes were watching the line of parked cars to their right. "My car's here. Is coming down with influenza as well as unexcused absences from work also on your list of priorities, Ms. Crandell?"
"No," she replied quietly. Even though he unlocked the car and opened the passenger door for her, she realized she still felt like a vulnerable stranger as she got in. Something, some indescribable trepidation, indescribable but giddy too, sitting in the back of her mouth. She occupied herself by tugging at a button on her jacket, tempted to smirk at her own idiocy. He drove carefully, as if it were a life-or-death process, eyes never leaving the road, words never leaving his mouth.
The Wayne Tower slid past, a gleaming pillar warped in the curve of the window, and she didn't realize until they were a block away from the Clocktower and two blocks from home that she hadn't given him directions.
"Wait."
"What is it?" The words were slow and drawn out; he was preoccupied with watching the stoplight, his face bloodstained with its glow.
"My, uh, apartment—it's near here." She couldn't think of anything else to say. Something deep between her ribs bucked in a sudden dread, but sense quelled its fleshy tremors. He was probably just making a loop, waiting for her to direct him.
"Where?" It was the same forced preoccupation again, the word narrowly escaping between the gentle clench of his teeth.
"Take the—the next right after this one. It'll be the building with the navy blue overhang on your left."She became conscious of the fact that she was sitting forward in her seat, as if prepared to smash through the windshield. Quickly, she sat back, compelling herself to take a sip of her cooling coffee, knowing as she did so how paranoid and lonely she was, to think such things.
The stoplight washed the car in green, and they proceeded forward, making the turn she'd indicated and pulling to a stop in front of her apartment building. She opened the door and got out, clutching her coffee and sandwich close; he rolled down the window, hands resting on the wheel as he looked into the lobby of the building with a strange remembering.
"Fourth, fifth, or sixth floor?" The doorman asked as she neared.
She nodded cautiously, hand on the handle of the lobby entrance.
"There's been a problem with the electricity on those three floors," the hulking man told her wryly, flashing teeth that were blindingly white against his dark skin, "Happens every single winter. Just take the stairs and the power'll be on again tomorrow morning."
"Oh, really…" She trailed off, heart pounding. Involuntarily, she looked back towards Crane, where he sat in the car, eyes a plea, a silent cry. Sheila, Dr. Bannon—anyone she knew—would have met her appeal with a roll of the eyes and a careless motion onwards, but he simply turned off the ignition and pocketed the keys, eyes boring into the dashboard for a moment of indecision—or almost indecision; he didn't strike her as one to be caught between two roads. Something in him won and he got out of the car, trailing behind her as she headed into the foyer.
"You heard about the power problem?" Lindsay asked her as she entered, looking up from her magazine and leaning conversationally on the desk.
"Yeah. I suppose the heat's out too?"
"Sadly, yes. Cold as a bitch up there. I can send some blankets up, if you want. –Back again?" She was looking at Crane, a tentative smile curling her glossed lips upward.
"Sorry?" Darcy inquired before she understood the question wasn't directed to her. She looked up at his face and saw his eyes grow hard.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he replied in tones of steel, flatly deflecting the query. Lindsay made a face and returned to her tabloids, one eyebrow still trapped in an indignant arch as her gaze skimmed the latest sensations. It was Crane who led the way to the stairs, his footsteps carrying the slightest trace of a hurry in their empty, pulsing strokes.
"What was that?" She asked as the door slid closed behind them and they began their slow ascent. "Have you been here lately?" The question was innocent, playful, but oddly resonant and real in a way she hadn't known it would be.
"No. She must have mistaken me for someone else," he replied shortly, hand gripping the rail.
They climbed in silence, until the fluorescent lights overhead suddenly went dark as they came to the landing of the fourth floor. He disappeared into blackness in front of her and an unwilling scream rose, waiting to tear her apart and burst forth as horror cawed rasping pronunciations of blind panic into her ear.
"Keep walking, Darcy," came his voice, the only sign of life. She clung to it and it pulled her onwards, even as she recognized the clichéd soothing, saccharine tone he adopted as a psychiatrist. "I can hear you hyperventilating. Don't think about the dark."
She followed the echoes of his footsteps blindly, counting the stairs in a desperate attempt at distraction. One…two…three…four…five…six…
Her foot slipped off the lip of a concealed stair and she did scream this time, hanging on to the rail, muscles balling up into shivering knots. The stifling air closed in upon her.
"Get back up." Where was he? He was nowhere. She was alone.
"I can't," she whimpered. I'm just a pair of eyes in this dark. I close them, and those will be lost too. I'm lost.
"Do as I say. Get back on your feet. You slipped, but you're back. You're safe now." It must have been the odd acoustics of the narrow stairwell; it sounded as if his once-emotionless voice were choked with some unknown grief.
The sound of his humanness brought her feet to stand on a solid concrete stair, standing shaky-kneed and waiting for him to speak again.
"Come on," he said after a moment, voice still oddly strangled. "Walk. Again."
She stepped carefully but easily now. The dark ceased to press in upon her, its fingers loosed its grip about her heart. It was all around her, yes. She could smell the sinister, waiting fear in the corners of her mind. But it wouldn't hurt her for the time being.
It felt like an age, but they finally reached what memory told her was the fifth floor. A bit of fumbling opened the door, and they were in the narrow hall of green doors, their ugliness lost in the swallowing black. A pale square of moonlight shone through the window at the end of the all, barely delineating his skeletal outline before her. Even that flimsy gleam was a comfort; she felt her pulse slow to an ethereal, queasy murmur in her temples and neck.
She knew he was watching her, knew she looked like a ghost as she walked slowly down the hall away from him, waiting for her apartment number to flash faintly out of the darkness of a bluish moonlit doorway.
Finally, a golden flicker of five and three met her searching eyes.
"Here I am," she said with an unseen smile for his shadow loitering down in the gradually deepening darkness of the corridor, feeling in her coat pockets for her keys. His starved shade said nothing in return, so still and motionless that he seemed almost frozen.
She put her key in the lock, smile widening. "Thanks," she called out cheerfully, waving vaguely at the figure, "Thanks for helping me. Good night—"
Nothing. Not a sound. The sleet outside whispered against the frozen glass, deafeningly soft.
The nothing made her halt. Simply the nothing she got in reply. It stopped her as surely as a hand on the shoulder. The knowing that he was searching for words and finding none. The gradual breaking inside him.
It stopped her feet and heart, and made her turn around again, to look at him—him, wan and thin and unreal against the powdery progression of light into dark.
"Come here," she said, so soft she could barely hear her own voice, more questioning than commanding, feeling herself almost shrink back as he started towards her. It was impossible to realize what had happened first—the invisible fall of a mouth upon hers or the upward press of her own to his.
As they stumbled together into her apartment, the shadows woke and rose to meet them, but she was not afraid.
Author's Note
Dearest Readers,
Now I know there are some of you who've been longing for this moment forever, and those of you who have been dreading it, and I know that after reading this chapter a percentage of both will be disappointed. To the former group, I'm sorry, there will be no explicit roll in the sheets waiting for you in the next chapter—far be it from me to describe the most intimate moment imaginable between two people at this time in my young life. (Yes, I do realize how cheesy that sounds.) To the latter group, sorry; in my defense, I did bill this as a romance fic. Either way, spare me the gratuitous criticism and blame it on Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan—'twas their rendition Girl from the North Country that got me through this chapter. And sorry yet again for the belatedness of this chapter…obviously, it was difficult to write. That Crane is a man of ice.
Kagerou-chan – I sure thought of Red Eye when I gave Crane his scarf! Consider it a tribute—as well as a physical representation of his humanity, however temporary. :-) Gotta love symbolism.
Eccentric Banshee – Answering the phone in the third person? It's just professional…ok, ok, and funny. So now you're a female Crane look-alike? Geek chic, babe. Start speaking in a monotone, wearing sweater-vests, and carrying around weaponized hallucinogens and you're set. Yeah, double exam threat. Hate that. In fact, two tests were what kept me from writing and posting this chapter sooner. Sucks!
Dai Katana – 'Psychical,' 'physical,' same diff. You're not an idiot!
Tigger-180 – Obviously, she doesn't remember…for now.
SpadesJade – I do like reading poetry…most of my little snippets come from the ginormous anthologies I have in my room. Looking for excerpts that coincide with the events in my chapters is definitely fun; I'll miss it when I finish this fic. I think if you check back a little ways, you'll see Darcy does mention her achluophobia to Crane.
Firefly4000 – Go ahead and include the ideas for your fanfic in the next review; I'd love to hear what you have planned.
ForensicPhotographer711 – (glares at Crane) Down, boy. No scary clouds or clowns.
AngelLust12387 – Yup, Mike is as dead as a doornail from the overdose of fear toxin that Rachel Dawes should have suffered from in the movie, if Batman hadn't conveniently come to her rescue in the nick of time. (DARN!)
hornofgondor2 – Heh, me too. I have a habit of letting my mouth run away with me before I think about what I say. Grrr.
Dr. E. Vance – Happy birthday to your friend:-D
Sophie – I think I would be one of those fangirls trying to tackle poor ickle Crane. (guilty grin)
ACleverName – I am very much in love with poetry… It's creepily funny how many people asked me about where I get my poetry oddments after I posted Chapter 14; they're all from these phonebook-sized anthologies and collections I have on my bookshelves. It's almost scary how alike these poems are to the chapters they precede. ;-)
In Chapter 16, the events of Batman Begins really come into play…stay tuned for yet another Crane POV chapter!
I know I have 200+ reviews, but you know I'll love you even more if you kick it up to 250 before story's end!
Slices of cheesecake and chocolate bars to each and every one of you,
Blodeuedd