He dragged me over to a stained, wet and dirty armchair out on the street and tied me down, leg to leg and arm to arm.
"Normally I would just liberate you right now but you're different Miss Arkham, you're special."
"Special? Can't you hear yourself Zsasz? You're a freak, a psychopath. You aren't going to save me you're going to kill me." I was freaking out and getting desperate. "Just let me go!"
"No Miss Arkham you just don't understand the favour i'm doing you, liberating you from your miserable, meaningless existence. You know what life is Miss Arkham. You've seen your own fall apart, you've taken other's. That's why you're special, you aren't ready yet. First I must mark you, to show the lives you've liberated yourself."
"I didn't liberate them Zsasz, I killed them. Just like you aren't going to liberate me; I won't be free i'll just die!" he jumped forwards and put a finger over my lips.
"Shhh Miss Arkham, hush now. How many have you saved then? Let's see, there's the Doctor from back at the asylum in that explosion of your's." he dragged the knife across my arm creating a deep but short cut. "the two men here." he gestured to where their lifeless corpses lay before making two more identical marks next to the first one. "four men with the Cat" he completed the first tally and added another two. "The man who saved you from Cobblepot..."
"I didn't kill him!" I protested, his blood couldn't be on my hands. Could it?
"you say that and yet if it weren't for you he would be alive." he made the mark. "Within your first 20 minutes here you freed 2 of two-face's men." with that he completed the second tally. "What about your year after the asylum hmm? I've been doing my research, I hear that cop who was on trial for serial sex offences and rape was found dead with your mark on his forehead."
"He deserved it! Do you know how many women he hurt? How many of the people he was supposed to be protecting he brutalised? He didn't deserve to live and the courts were going to give him a minimal sentence!"
"So it's true." He cut the deep mark into my arm which was by this point slick with the crimson rivers flowing down my arm. "I presume it would be accurate that the trio of bodies down at the dock were also your handiwork judging by the similar markings?"
"They stole girls away from their families and trafficked them for the sex industry. I was doing the world a public service." the marks were added. "And of course there were the events of the the night of the breakout itself. He continued to list the lives I had "liberated" and added another eight marks. "I also happen to know that you are responsible for the end that befell the Master of Fear, Doctor Jonathan Crane down in the very depths of Arkham." He raised the knife again "Let this last mark signal your own end Miss Arkham, prepare to be saved."
"Except that she has not yet earned that mark." A voice called out from the darkness behind him. A voice I knew well and yet had not heard in almost a year. "Behold Zsasz, I am not dead." I saw Zsasz's eyes widen in fear as none other than Doctor Jonathan Crane, the man I had thought to be dead, walked out into the moonlight. "I'd put that knife down if I were you." Zsasz dropped the knife and began to run but he was too slow. Crane caught him quickly and injected him, Zsasz fell to the floor crying out in fear and scrambled off down an alley, we listened to his shrieks of fear grow more distant until they blended into the general noise of the city. He walked over to me and undid my bindings. "You simply can't stay out of trouble can you?"
"I did try not to."
"Not hard enough it would seem." I looked down at the 18 cuts on my arm and sighed.
"I didn't even notice how many it was, how much blood is on my hands."
"It could be worse, compared to the majority of this prison's inhabitants, me included, your record is practically white."
"It was you who left the notes wasn't it?" he shifted seeming a little uncomfortable then.
"Yes, it was foolish, but yes."
"And the chaos back at the museum?"
"Also my work." I nodded trying wrap my head around it all. "You need to get those cuts cleaned, they are bleeding quite a lot and since you have a habit of feinting it would be nice to avoid it for once." He helped me into a nearby building and set to work cleaning my wounds. "As you know I am quite familiar with the human mind and I can't help but notice a few tell tale signs in your behavior. Signs that when combined with your reaction to my toxin have helped me to formulate a hypothesis."
"Signs?"
"Your extreme violence towards men of a certain kind, your protective nature over other females, for example Harley; the way you remained frozen when under the effects of my toxin, almost as if what you were experiencing left you physically unable to move." I knew he had worked it out. He knew my secret, what had happened to me to cause the breakdown that sent me back to Arkham.
"He was called Andrew Leighton. I trusted him, I even thought I loved him; I was wrong of course there is no way I actually did. He bided his time waiting until I was alone in my dormitory, having had my weekend pass taken away, and then made his move. I let him in. I trusted him! When I saw what he was going to do I tried to fight him off but he was too strong, he held me down so I couldn't move. I can still hear his voice whispering to me not to struggle that it would be over soon. "shhh" they won't hear you anyway and he was right because he had planned it so he would be. He left me there alone and broken in the dark. I turned to my so called friends for help and support but they turned on me, said I was lying and called me a slut begging for attention. That was when I broke down and almost killed myself. I was hanging from the ceiling of the lunch room by a noose when I realised that my death would only give Quincy, Andrew and all those bitches what they wanted. so I cut myself down, but not before I had starved myself of enough oxygen to cause myself to feint on the floor of the lunch room. Which is where they found me right alongside the clear evidence of what I had attempted and promptly sent me packing, back to Arkham." I was crying by the end of this, I had never said it out loud before and it brought it all rushing back. I couldn't look at the man standing next to me and let him see the weakness and pain in my eyes.
"You know, what happened to you isn't anything to be ashamed of." he said in a low voice, burning with something I couldn't quite place. "It doesn't make you weak, it makes you strong. You are strong Genevieve you understand that? You are one of the strongest people i've ever come across." he sounded different then and I could understand how he been a psychiatrist. He was no longer the cold detached Scarecrow but was now the quiet, understanding Doctor Jonathan Crane. I looked at him and saw what it was I had heard in his voice reflected in his eyes, anger.
"This is why I have to look after them."
"Look after who?"
"Everyone? Anyone? It changes, but right now it's Harley."
"What about yourself?"
"What do you mean?"
"When will you protect yourself, and I mean properly not just taking down those who oppose you but actually stopping the memories from overtaking you."
"I'm past the point of no return now. I only live for two reasons: to look after others and to spite Quincy. That is all I am." his eyes softened then ever so slightly for a second before resuming their usual analytical stare.
"You honestly believe that?"
"What's not to believe?" I laughed bitterly "Besides i've got a full time commitment on it's way what with Harley being pregnant."
"You envy her?"
"Her pregnancy? No. Her optimistic attitude? yes. I wish I could see life like she does for once,but I missed that train a long time ago. Now I look out for her as if she's my own sister because I love her as if she were, that's why I need to stop the clown from dying. Because if he dies he'll take a part of her with him."
"She does seem to have become very dependant on him."
"Because she loves him."
"It makes her vulnerable."
"And happy, don't forget that." we sat in silence then, he had finished cleaning and bandaging my wounds by then, and I found myself wondering whether the gamble Harley took by falling in love was one she should have taken.
"Do you think it's worth it?"
"Love?"
"Yes." apparently he had been thinking the same thing as me.
"I don't know. It's all a chemical disease isn't it? No different to what they have either of us noted down as having. Harley doesn't seem to mind it, and I think Joker loves her back."
"You do?"
"Yeah, in his own twisted way. He asked me to take care of her if he dies, that's what convinced me. He doesn't show weakness but in that moment he did, only for a split second but it was there. I suppose it's one of those diseases that you don't know you have until you're trapped, by which point you don't want to get rid of it and even if you did it's claws have stuck in too deep to come away neatly without tearing a part of you out with them."
"A silent assassin." I looked at him and knew that he understood my meaning, that it was worth it only as long as you never let it get away.