AN: Thanks, you two! I'm glad you both liked the dress, haha. Ring: Yes, this is after Arkham, by about two months. So now we're going back to Arkham (Then) so you can find out what happened to her there, and how she got out. There's a smallish cameo from The Scarecrow in here; he comes back later, but only in passing, so don't get too excited. Oh, and the guest list will be checked – don't worry.
1: Then.
Two months earlier. . .
It is a curious thing that I should regain my peace of mind in a madhouse. The repetition, the routine, the predictability were comforting. They were leery of letting me out of my room at first, but as I showed no signs of violence to myself or others, and as I showed no desire to escape, a few carefully monitored freedoms were returned to me. I was escorted to breakfast at precisely nine o'clock every morning, and sat alongside the better behaved patients in the mess hall. At ten, I spoke to a trained therapist for approximately thirty minutes, and as she hammered hopeless questions at me I listened to her thoughts, lazily following the pattern she constructed around my behavior to explain away my crimes. I found her cyclical reasoning dull and uninspired. At noon I was allowed into the courtyard to see the sky. There were a myriad of activities such as basketball, shuffleboard, tennis, and others. I chose to lie on one of the benches, eyes closed, and simply listen.
Sometimes, if I was very still, and the other patients were sufficiently distracted from their own troubles, I could hear him. The rattling, busy clockwork of his mind was instantly recognizable, and although I could not pick out which, if any, of his thoughts were focused on me, the sound, the feeling of his inner voice soothed me. When I found it, my heart jump-started, giving a little hiccough of delight, and then quieted like a sigh. I did not need to know what he was plotting. Only that he was still there.
The hours between one and five were spent in various courses of group therapy and meaningless diversions of cards and television. I spoke when spoken to, and answered questions honestly, but incompletely. Supper was at six. The evening news was a consistent entertainment: many of the criminals in my company had been famous, at least locally, and some were so vain that they hoped to catch themselves on the TV, if only in passing. The Scarecrow was ceaselessly distraught over his exclusion from the inner workings of the hospital. He gave unasked for diagnoses at mealtimes, and commandeered the conversation during our group sessions. His opinions were aggravating most of the time, but at the evening news, his scrambled insights to human behavior in the outside world never failed to make us smile.
Nighttime was difficult. The others grappled with demons in their dreams, and my unique gifts made their screams, both real and unvoiced, echo all the more thunderously along the bare walls. I could see their night terrors, their tortured pasts, and their foggy, uncertain futures. Sleep did not come easily, if it came at all.
It was eight months, two weeks, and four days before he came for me. Four o'clock in the morning, after the screams had died down, but before the sun rose. It began with a low rumbling deep in the floor. At first I thought it was an earthquake, but the resonance was all wrong. It was a man-made quaking. And then, I heard him. The ticking, the restlessness. I was sure of it.
I left my cot and ran to the door, peering through the narrow barred window down the hallway. I saw nothing. Suddenly a searing explosion ripped through the air, and I fell back, clapping both hands over my ears. Little pops sounded further off in the hall, each one coming closer. The last blew the hinges off my door; I had to duck to avoid being hit by the screws. The door, now black and charred at the edges, shuddered in its frame, and fell inward. When the smoke settled, a silhouette appeared in the doorway: the slightly hunched posture, the lank greenish hair, the trim, tailored suit in garish colors that would have looked foolish on anyone else.
"Honey, I'm home!" he called, stepping over the wreckage. "Sorry I'm late. Work ran over a smidge—couldn't be helped. I hope you didn't wait up for me."
I laughed, sprang to my feet and threw myself into his arms. He pressed me close, stroking my hair with a gloved hand, nestling his chin against my shoulder. And just like before, his mind quelled. I felt him relax and go still in my arms. After an all-too-brief eternity, he held me at arms length and took my face in his hands. His face seemed large in my eyes, it had been so long since I'd seen him. The crooked, painted grin thrilled me with the same fear-tainted awe that I'd felt when he'd first found me.
"Surprised to see me?" he asked.
"Not one bit," I said. Then I kissed him. He kissed me back and grabbed me so tight that my feet left the ground for a moment, and released me only when we'd both run out of breath.
"C'mon," he said, with a sinister twinkle in his eye. "Step lively, little lady – we've got a lot of ground to cover before dawn." He took my small white hand in his and led us away, over the night-shrouded rooftops of Gotham.