I think we all write fiction (or in this case fan fiction) for a reason. This story has been cathartic for me to write, and to be able to share it with a few excellent people who want to read it? It's good therapy. Thanks for the feedback and encouragement. You all rock my socks.

(x)

Red and blue lights from the grille flashers of the police cruisers down in the street washed over the dark brick wall of the church. Barbara gazed up at him, her arm taut as he clasped her hand in his white-knuckle grasp. He asked her to hold on. This time her hand clasped tightly to his. A butterfly inched out of her mouth and flew upward. Jim's eyes followed the butterfly, watching it float lazily above the window and out of sight. He stared back down at Barbara … to find that it wasn't Barbara's hand he was holding, but Lee's.

Lee smiled at him easily, looking fresh and young and beautiful. She laughed at something, that laugh that sparkled out of her. When Jim pulled her upward, the action felt effortless, and she stood safe and sound at his side within moments.

Jim placed his hands on her waist, needing touch to confirm her realness, and pulled her close. "Are you okay?"

She said, "I am now."

"Let's go home."

She reached up and covered his eyes with her hand. When she pulled away her hand, she said, "We are home." Just like that, they stood together in Lee's apartment in the middle of the kitchen. They drew close, wrapped their arms around each other, and Jim kissed her deeply. Behind them, a short electronic noise beeped, beeped, beeped. Deep inside Lee's kiss, he opened his eyes and glanced over at the stove. The timer was going off.

He awoke with a start.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Jim opened his eyes, unsure of where he was, and stared forward to see a whitewashed wall with pale blue mini-blinds covering the only window. The bed felt hard and had metal braces on either side. The air burned through his nostrils, holding the high stench of Lysol and antiseptics. A machine beeped next to him reporting his vital signs.

Someone stirred from beside him. Jim looked to his right to see Lee sitting in a chair by his side.

Lee touched his forearm. "Jim, it's okay. You're..."

Jim reached out, grabbed her, and pulled her close. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his head in her shoulder. Lee embraced him just as tightly. They stayed that way for a full minute, before Jim breathed out, "I thought I lost you."

She relaxed against him, and when they broke apart, she held his hand in hers. "The doctors here checked me out. I'm fine…" She touched her stomach. "We're both fine."

Jim clenched his eyes shut as shards of what took place slashed through into his mind. Barbara's apparition taunting him. Adrenaline pumping through his veins. The cold clammy metal of the gun in his hand. How his pointer finger touched the trigger. He tried to ignore the the horrifying images and the even more terrible thought looming behind them. How close he came to his heart breaking with sorrow and terror.

Lee squeezed his hand. "Hey," she said. "You stopped yourself. Even a drug designed to force you to hurt me couldn't make you do it."

He shook his head at her. "What were you thinking? You should have gotten yourself the hell out of there. I could have killed you…" His voice cracked when he said, "Both of you."

Lee said, "It wouldn't have helped. Harvey tried that."

Jim checked, "...He's okay?"

She smiled. "As okay as he'll ever be. In a weird way, it's good you were drugged. Your aim was off." She added. "Way off."

Jim ran his hands over his face. "I can't believe what I almost did…"

She whispered, "Don't do that to yourself."

"Lee, I held a gun to you. I could have pulled the trigger."

Lee didn't let him go there. "But you didn't."

He whispered, "I almost did."

"We aren't judged on what we almost do. That doesn't count. What counts is the actions we do take." She ran her hand over his. "You chose me." She placed her other hand on her stomach. "You chose us."

Jim's hand fell to softly caress Lee's stomach. "I've made other choices…" He looked up into her eyes, feeling an ice cold shiver run down his back. "Done other things that I haven't been proud of, that have … changed me."

Lee paused. She seemed to hear part of what was underneath his words. She looked at him with those dark eyes that were both kind and arresting. "We all do those things, Jim. We hurt people by accident, or even on purpose." Lee said, "The reason we do it is simple. It's because we're human."

Jim felt something pull deep inside his chest. "I want to be better," he said. "For you." He pressed his hand against Lee's stomach. "For her."

"I know that," Lee whispered. "But for right now, for just this moment, maybe you don't have to be better. Maybe what you are, what we are, is already enough."

Jim drew her close. He whispered in her ear, "I love you, Lee."

"I love you, too." She rested her head against his, and after a long moment, she asked, "Do you remember what you told me? What you said right before you passed out at the station?"

He pulled back to look into her eyes. "I think I might have said, I need you."

Lee's eyes shone with tears. "I think I might have heard that, too."

He shrugged boyishly. "I mean, all it took was having a dangerous, mind-altering drug in my system to get me to say it."

Lee squeezed his hand. "Next time we might want to try saying that without a loaded gun between us."

Jim felt himself smile. "I think we can work on that."

A few minutes later, the two of them looked to the doorway as Harvey Bullock stepped into the hospital room. "Hey, hey, he lives!" Harvey walked up and dropped down a brown paper bag with a heavy, foil-wrapped meal inside. "Brought you a meatball sub from Lucky's Diner. Figured you'd want some real grub instead of whatever this hospital dumps on a plate and calls food."

Jim accepted the meal. His stomach spoke up with a gurgle as he smelled the oregano, beef, and sauce. "Thanks. I think the last time I ate was …" He looked at Lee. "What day is it?"

Lee said, "It's Tuesday."

"Yeah. Monday. The last time I ate was Monday." He unwrapped the sandwich and began to chow down.

"This one," Harvey said, pointing at Jim. "He forgets to eat. Don't make no sense."

Lee nodded, commiserating. "He tells me that all the time."

Jim said, "I get distracted."

"You get dehydrated and cranky," Harvey said. "Man's gotta keep his strength up."

Jim said, "I think you keep your strength up enough for the both of us." Jim looked at Lee and pointed a thumb at his partner. "Never once seen him turn down food."

"Hey, asking me if I want food is like asking me if I want money. Of course, I do."

Jim nodded to him. "How's the case coming?"

Lee kissed Jim hastily on the side of his mouth and said, "I think I'll let you boys talk shop. I'll be back in a bit."

Harvey waited until she'd left to say, "I come bearing good news. We got the bastard."

Jim eyes widened. "You found him? He's in custody?"

"Don't get ahead of yourself." He said, "Our Paycheck Pharmacist was one Dr. Frederick Moon. Worked in the chem lab at Gotham University, in the basement of their science building that sits on the tallest hill on campus. We found him in his garage sitting in the driver's seat of his dark blue van." Harvey produced the file, along with the pictures taken by forensics. "He left the car running with the garage doors shut, but not before he wrote a suicide note which included his confession."

Jim looked over all the evidence. "Did it say why he did it? Why he wanted to drug all those people? Me?"

Harvey said, "The note didn't get into detailed specifics. Basically, it was one last 'screw you' angry gram to the entire Gotham University science team. Saying how they never appreciated him, always told him he'd never amount to anything." He said, "He called attention to all these long dead scientists talkin' about how history never appreciated them until after they croaked."

Jim read aloud from the letter Dr. Moon left behind. "'If the world won't appreciate what I've achieved in life, they'll be left with the discoveries I leave behind in death.'"

Harvey sat back, shrugging. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

Jim leaned back in his hospital bed. He looked at Harvey. "That ties things up tightly."

"I know, right? I tell ya. I love the easy ones."

Jim made a noise of suspicion. "...Wraps things up a little too tightly, don't you think?"

His partner's face fell. "Let me get this straight. Just to make sure I didn't hear you incorrectly, now your problem is that we have TOO much evidence."

Jim said, "I'm just saying, it's suspect."

"I swear to God, Gordon, I could show up here with Amelia Earhart, the Lindbergh baby, and the Loch Ness Monster and you'd tell me, 'But what're they all doing in the same room together? I don't know. Sounds fishy.'"

He thought about it, clicked the side of his mouth and said, "It does sound fishy. Why'd they all decide to congregate in Gotham decades after they disappeared?"

"Jesus-tap-dancing-Christ. It's a conspiracy!" Harvey exclaimed. "They've been working together all this time!"

Jim grinned. "Sounds like enough evidence to, you know, reopen their cases."

"Look, Gordon, I know you're in the hospital recovering from going all nutso on a mind control drug, so I'm gonna take it easy on you and give you a pass." He dug into his pocket and pulled out a roll of Rolaids. He shook his head and popped one in his mouth. He suddenly looked like a man who was going to need quite a few more Rolaids before the day was done. "We're just gonna chalk up this crazy talk about there being an over-abundance of evidence to that."

Jim looked at him. "You know, way back, when I first signed on with the GCPD, I could have been partnered up with just about anyone in there."

Harvey stood up and said, "I know. I think about that all the time." He went to leave the room but not before barking off, "Get back on your feet. All that paperwork back at the office ain't gonna fill itself out."

Jim relaxed back onto the hospital bed. He looked down at his half-eaten meatball sub and finished it off with gusto. He thought about calling one of the nurses. He'd need a bedroom smile and the right words in the right places, but he could get himself a discharge. He considered ringing up the Captain, making his assertion that this case appeared to have what some of his more uncouth colleagues called an 'orgy of evidence'.

The minute he balled up the leftover foil and placed it on his nightstand a wave of exhaustion washed over him. He'd go back to working the case. He would. He just needed to rest his head against his pillow for just a moment.

When Lee walked back into the room, she smiled down at her fiancee. She watched his chest rising and falling rhythmically as he fell back into a deep sleep. She leaned down and whispered, "Sweet dreams, Jim."

(x)

Deep underground in the confines of Indian Hill, the electronic beep of a machine designed to measure blood pressure and heart rate spiked. The machine angrily sounded its alarm, and Professor Hugo Strange reacted immediately. When a person worked in the medical field for as long as he did, it was easy to become desensitized to the varying electronic noises of all the machines kept up and running. They even had a term for it. 'Noise fatigue'.

He doubted he'd ever experience that when it came to this particular patient, nor would anyone in his employ. This one was far too important.

Professor Strange walked briskly down a sterile hallway lit entirely by overhead fluorescent lights. Ms. Peabody stood ever vigilant, looking in on the patient's room from a large, thick glass window.

The professor came to a halt by her side. He squinted through his spectacles into the room. He said, "Another nightmare."

Ms. Peabody said, "This one might be the worst yet."

He ran his hand over his chin, over his short neat beard. "What elements were in that serum his father gave him, I wonder? That even now, he's still under its effects."

She glanced down and scribbled a note in the patient's chart. "The Crane Formula works well enough on our subjects upstairs from what I've seen."

"Yes, it works," Strange said with a hint of impatience to his tone. "For all of ten minutes."

Ms. Peabody returned her gaze back to the patient. When she spoke, her voice held only interest. "And why, Professor Strange, would you need a serum that would last for days, weeks, even months?"

He made a thoughtful noise. "Dr. Frederick Moon asked me that same question in nearly the same way."

This earned a dark frown from Ms. Peabody.

Strange clucked his tongue. "Such a disappointment that one. He showed such promise…"

Ms. Peabody said. "I'll take that to mean that we'll going to have Project Crane take a backseat to some of our more… pressing deadlines."

"Alas," the professor sighed out. "So he will."

She cast him a glance out of the corner of her eye. "... You still think you can get the boy to talk, don't you?"

"Don't you know the secret to not letting this profession drag you down? Hope springs eternal."

She humphed. "No matter what mind control drug we use, it's completely ineffective."

"The drug his father gave him no doubt scorched any pathways that would let the mind control drugs do their work." A smile spread across his face at the question. "But everyone has a button, Ms. Peabody. All you have to do is find it. And push."

In the small, whitewashed room, Jonathan Crane lay strapped to a hospital bed. He bucked and contorted, screaming animalistic noises. He'd gotten twisted in his sheets and moved so wildly in his sleep that his bed was a battlefield.

It would be hours before the nightmare would stop.