A Heart to Heart with a Madman
After being reassured that I could sleep without worry, I felt a wave of drowsiness hit me like a brick. The bed sheets, thankfully, were clean and crisp as far as I could tell. Although, I was still feeling itchy overall as I thought about the possibility of bedbugs. The bed, even though it was pretty uncomfortable, was still better than any bed I'd slept in in over six months. I thought back to my bed in Connecticut; it was small, but comfortable, with a pink comforter-something that didn't even remotely match my personality anymore.
I fell asleep soon after settling down under the covers. Two-Face said he had some loose ends to tie before leaving me in the room alone. I hadn't realized it downstairs with Crane, but whatever had happened to me really wore me out. Sometime during the night my mind registered that I wasn't the only body lying in bed, but I didn't care enough to really wake up and check. After the ordeal I had been through tonight, my body was too exhausted to care about anything but rest.
I woke up the next day to the sun streaming brightly into the dated motel room. I winced as the sun hit my pupils and immediately brought my hand up to rub them. When I opened my eyes again, I took my first real look around the room. There wasn't much-the bed that I was on, a nightstand with a lamp on it, a (broken) television, and finally a table with two chairs. One was occupied. On the far end of the room there was another door that was opened, revealing a bathroom. My gaze shifted back to the occupied chair.
Two-Face was sitting at the rickety looking card table cleaning his gun. I noticed immediately that he'd changed out of his Arkham scrubs and into that bizarre suit he'd been wearing the night I saw him at the museum. Looking at him straight on, the left side was white and crisp, fancy even, but the right side was a scorched mess. Just like his face. His hands were still moving, wiping the gun down with a dirty rag, but his eyes were elsewhere, on me. As soon as I made eye contact, my mind immediately went into action trying to think about everything I knew about him. I knew he was obviously a burn victim, he was mentally unstable, and most importantly, he was dangerous. He had multiple personalities, although I hadn't really seen anything to suggest it other than the night at the museum. But, seeing as how I was technically diagnosed with MPD myself, I felt that I could use this to my advantage. Now you're thinking. Use it against him and then get the hell out of here. Somehow I doubt it will be that simple.
I begin to get unnerved by the intensity of his stare, which prompts me to break the silence, "What time is it?" I glance towards the thinly curtained window, thinking that it must be high noon at the least.
"Around 2:30. We figured you'd want to sleep." I swallowed, trying not to let my face betray how creeped out I was. I had a sinking feeling about who we was. I had heard Two-Face refer to himself as if he were two people once before, but never since my night in Arkham City.
"Thank you." I tried to sound grateful. His hands paused on the gun, "For letting me sleep." He nodded his head, his eyes still on me. I didn't know how to talk to this man. My communication skills were less than stellar, even before becoming a nutjob, but they were basically shot to hell at this point. I was so paranoid and jumpy around people anymore. "So…" He looked at me expectantly; his good eyebrow went up a little, "are you going to kill me?" Wow, real fucking smooth Violet.
He chuckled, still cleaning that damn gun, "We don't know yet. We'll have to see if fate is on your side." He left it at that. It wasn't reassuring but it also wasn't just an outright yes, so I guess that was at least a good sign. Well, not really, but at the moment it would have to do.
"Why am I here?" If I couldn't get a straight answer out of him after this, I'd have to try a different approach.
"I can't explain that to you yet." He looked back to his gun now, "It's still too soon for us to tell you everything. Soon though, you'll understand what's going on." That didn't help either. Two-Face wasn't dumb, he was a major powerhouse in Arkham City and I knew an idiot couldn't earn that position.
"Why are you here then?" He looked confused, and was probably wondering how dumb I was for asking this, but I had a point. Turn them against one another. "You're working with Crane, right?"
"You could say that, I suppose. Why are you asking?" He stashed the gun in his jacket pocket and immediately pulled out another one-an exact copy. He began disassembling this one now, piece by piece.
"Well, I just think it's odd." I knew I had to tread carefully. He was a powerful man, and powerful men tend to have big egos. So stroke the shit out of that ego. "I mean, I've never heard of this Crane guy. You I've obviously heard of. It just seems to me like you have a," I paused, looking for the right wording, "better reputation around Gotham than he does. You're certainly more renowned?"
If he knew what game I was playing he didn't show it, "You aren't from Gotham are you?" Okay, how the hell did everyone always know this? He took my silence as a no and continued, "If you were from here, you'd know Crane has a reputation himself. He's terrorized Gotham more so than a lot of the other clowns around here. He gets off on the fears of others. He used to be a psychiatrist at Arkham until he was caught experimenting on the patients." Oh, so there's a theme there; all of Arkham's doctors enjoyed experimenting on patients. Wait! I just remembered the conversation I'd had with Bane in the yard-he said a doctor had experimented on him before. Could Crane have been the doctor that experimented on Bane? "He was testing fear toxins on them. The same one he used on you last night."
My mind went back to the cloud of spray I had inhaled last night. Next to car crashes (for obvious reasons), burning to death was my biggest fear. Not to mention, I'd ran through the bowels of Arkham not even an hour before being sprayed and saw more than a few charred bodies, so maybe that fear was just fresh in my mind? Still, it was terrifying to think that someone had been smart enough to synthesize a drug like that. Stay away from that guy. You don't need to tell me twice.
"I guess I just meant that, it seems like he was kind of bossing you around last night." His head shot up as his face turned into a scowl. Think fast. "You just don't strike me as a guy who takes orders from others. Seeing as how you basically were guaranteed to be the top guy inside Arkham City after Joker died." I didn't actually believe that, since I knew Penguin was just as, if not more, powerful than Two-Face. However, my schmoozing had the effect I wanted it to.
Two-Face's scowl turned to smile with frightening swiftness. "So you were in Gotham long enough to realize that, at least." Like I said, big ego. "Scarecrow and I are working towards the same end, if not for the same reasons." Who the hell is Scarecrow? Crane? "He wants revenge on Gotham. We plan on waiting until he's brought the city to its knees and then taking over what's rightly ours once again." He was speaking the way he had at the museum the first time I saw him. It was definitely weird listening to him switch from I's to we's all in one conversation. At least I hadn't started speaking like that yet.
"Oh." I nodded my head, acting impressed, but really I feeling sick to my stomach. These people were obviously planning something huge if they thought they actually had a surefire way to take over Gotham. Or destroy it. "That is a pretty smart plan." I inwardly cringed at myself. I sounded like a fool, even to my own ears. Well you are a fool, so there's that. I shook my head, trying to get that particularly loud thought out of my head. I'd been acting like a fool for a while now.
"You hear them too?" My head shot up at Two-Face's question. He was focusing on my face, making eye contact with me. Certainly he couldn't have known just from a shake of my head that I was internally arguing with voices that didn't even exist? "The voices." I guess he had.
I didn't want to answer; I hadn't talked about this to anyone. But I knew it was a good way to gain his trust and develop some sort of pseudo kinship or something close to it. "Y-yeah. Do you?"
"Not so much voices, no." Well, there goes my plan. Maybe I was more fucked up than I thought after all. "But we understand the feeling of being constantly at war with yourself. It's like another person is inside you, telling you what to do, isn't it?" That's exactly what it felt like, "Except it's not another person, is it Violet?"
"No." My voice was low. He understood-he felt it too. "It's myself. I'm constantly fighting with myself. It's like I'm fighting with a part of me that constantly disagrees with everything I do."
He got up and approached the bed. I was too caught up in the realization that I wasn't the only one suffering with this specific mental illness to notice he sat down on the edge of the bed, less than a foot from me. "Did you tell anyone about it?" I looked over at him. His face was handsome, well, half of it. His left eye was wide open amidst the sea of burned flesh that used to be the left half of his face. The right side however was the picture of a handsome man. I pitied him for the briefest of seconds. Here was a man who was the product of some accident, which had broken his psyche so badly that he became a criminal mastermind. He also killed Roman. That made me considerably less sympathetic. I felt downright sick thinking about how I was sitting in a motel room with his murderer.
He was still staring at me, which reminded me that he'd asked me a question. I hurriedly answered, "No. Not even Strange." Why would you tell him that?! I didn't know why I said it. It just came out.
Two-Face was nodding. "We didn't think so." He was staring at me again. His right eye was calm, but his bulging left eye reminded me that there were two different beings fighting for power inside this man. He reached up and pinched a strand of hair that had been hanging in my face between his thumb and forefinger. He slowly tucked it behind my ear, "Don't worry so much right now. If Crane tries anything again, we'll stop him."
Somewhere inside my chest something fluttered. I immediately felt guilty since this man had killed the other man who had promised to protect me. "Thank you, Two-Face."
He smiled a little before saying, "The name's Harvey." Harvey. Harvey Dent. That's who he really was. It's so weird to think that all of these hardened criminals were originally normal people, or at least semi-normal in their anonymity. Until they decided to try to be someone special and Gotham destroyed them.
"Thanks, Harvey." I gave him the best smile I could at the moment, which really was nothing more than a grin. He seemed to accept it since he stood from the bed. I took it that our conversation was over.
"I have to go do something right now, but you should take a shower." He gestured towards the bathroom door. "We're going to be taking a ride somewhere later, so you'll want to clean yourself up." I undoubtedly looked like hell right now, so that was the understatement of the century.
I nodded my head and watched as he reassembled the gun he'd been cleaning and stuffed it in another pocket of his suit. "We'll be back in an hour. Someone will bring you a change of clothes in the mean time." I nodded again, silently noting how he kept alternating between the use of "I" and "we" as if he were confused or something. It was bizarre. He walked out of the room and shut the worn wooden door behind him. A second later I heard a key in the lock. He was locking me inside like an animal. Or a prisoner.
Deciding to just get the shower over with, I made my way to the bathroom. It was old, but surprisingly not dirty. I noticed there was a towel sitting on the sink. I peeled the Arkham uniform off of my body quickly. I felt like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon of insanity. What stood before the cracked mirror in this beat up motel was now the new and improved Violet Morgan. And when I say improved, I really mean completely insane and hellish looking.
The water in the shower was lukewarm, like Arkham's, but it felt good to have it wash over me nonetheless. I stood directly under the showerhead as my mind drifted back to the water that coated me from the sprinklers last night. Standing here in this dingy little shower in this shitty motel, I couldn't help but wonder how my life had deteriorated so rapidly in less than a year. I went from a high school graduate, to an inmate in a mega prison, to an inmate in an asylum, to being on the run with a bunch of lunatics.
When I finally did get out of the shower, I made sure the towel was wrapped tightly around my body before opening the door to the bathroom. Walking back into the room, I expected a thug to be waiting, not Ivy. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with a pile of clothes beside her.
"Violet." She said serenely. She was positively glowing in the sunlit room. It was like looking at a plant thriving in sunlight. She had changed from her Arkham scrubs as well and was wearing a green looking leotard that I swear was made out of leaves. Her long, bright red hair shimmered in the light as well. I blinked at her. I ignored the fact that I should be happy a woman brought me my clothes and not some pervy thug, and instead felt a surge of betrayal.
"So, was being nice to me in the asylum always part of the plan?" I had actually liked Ivy. Even if it was because I was a female, like Roman had said, I felt like she was someone I could see myself befriending. She had seemed like she liked me, not in a fake way.
She sighed and gracefully stood from the bed. "I know this is all confusing for you Violet," She didn't understand how I was feeling at all "I certainly didn't expect them to kidnap you and bring you here. I'd been told you were to be used at the asylum and that was it." Used at the Asylum? As if that made me feel better. That's all you're good for. Being used. "I didn't even know Harvey was planning on bringing you along until last night. I wasn't consulted on that part of the plan." She sounded bitter. I knew it had to kill her, being left out of the plan. She probably took it as a slight against her femininity.
I ignored her, "Are those my clothes?" I glanced at the pile that was neatly folded on the bed next to her.
"Yeah, I was told to bring them to you. Sorry if they don't fit perfectly. I had to guess on your sizes." I looked at Ivy. I wanted to like her. She was a feminist if ever there was one. She should feel bad for me, being left here with a bunch of madmen, but I knew if she was involved with this takeover of Gotham, she was more worried about the plan succeeding than she was about my safety.
"Thanks." I stepped forward, picked them up, and headed back towards the bathroom to change in peace. Behind me I heard Ivy move towards the front door. I was about to close the bathroom door again when she spoke.
"Violet." I tentatively poked my head back out from the bathroom. "Be careful around Harvey."
I scrunched my face in confusion. I knew he was crazy, but I was used to dealing with crazy people at this point. "I think I can handle him." Again I moved back into the bathroom, thinking the conversation is over.
"I wouldn't be so sure of that." This time I stepped completely out of the bathroom, all while gripping the damp towel that was still wrapped around me.
"What does that mean?" These villains were all the same. They all acted like they were all so important and knew something no one else knew. Which, in this case they did, but that didn't make it any less annoying to me.
"It means, that the Two-Face you've been around has been the Two-Face on his meds. You've never seen Harvey off of them. He's unstable, Violet." She opened the door to the room and glanced back at me, "Just don't piss him off." With that I was alone in my room again. Locked in, even if you aren't in a prison.
She was wrong though. I'd seen Harvey when he wasn't on his meds in Arkham City. He didn't seem so bad then. Don't be naïve. The guy was crazy. I thought about his swiftly changing speech again and realized that maybe she did have a point. After all, look how much the meds had altered me.
A/N: Hello, faithful readers! The semester is done, which means I have plenty of time to work on this story again! Expect frequent updates during this time. Also, what do you guys think of Harvey? Should Violet be worried about him or is he another villain with good intentions? Let me know what you guys think!