When Schwarzwald meets Jonathan Crane, she thinks he seems like an okay sort of guy.
She sits in the dining room of the asylum at suppertime, chewing on bland paste that masquerades as food with a Styrofoam spork. On a Styrofoam tray. They really don't give the inmates any chances, do they? Schwarzwald sits in her seat between two other inmates, the one on her left drooling and the one on her right ignoring her completely. Concerning her treatment, things are going…slow, to put it very brightly.
The treatments for her consist of trying to build her own personality back up, trying to get her to accept that she's not Schwarzwald, she's Michelle King. They try to tell her, and convince her, that she doesn't need Joker and that he's a very bad influence on her. They try to get her to respond to the name Michelle.
Progress is glacial.
Schwarzwald is alone at dinnertime. Not really, not physically; there's an entire section of the inmates eating at the time, and plenty of heavily armed guards to make them play nice. But she doesn't know anybody here. Joker is taking his dinner with that pretty blond doctor; they're always together. Schwarzy doesn't mind; she's fine with being alone. The doctors don't let her see Joker anyway. He's a 'bad influence on her psychological health'.
Put bluntly, they don't want him anywhere near her because she regresses back to her lackey status when she talks to him.
Arkham? It's absolutely horrible. The entire building is created and run by madness and fear; inmates are constantly terrified and Schwarzwald knows that at least some of them must have gone even more insane for being here. The hallways are dark, claustrophobic; there's writing one some of them, mad gibberish that disquiets the soul. The guards are heavily armed, and half of them are…to put it easily, they're quite vicious. They don't like their jobs, apparently, and some take it out on inmates. The doctors are indifferent, and only want to do their jobs. Well, most of them. The ones that aren't play favorites, like Joker and his pretty doctor. When Schwarzwald asked, one of the doctors said that her name was Dr. Quinzel.
This place drives men mad. That's pretty bad, when an asylum can drive madmen even madder.
Schwarzwald herself has her lonely little padded cell, a dark little room, and she's all alone in it. The eggshell-tone sheets on her bed are stained with what looks like vomit, blood, or urine. Possibly all three. Her pillow has bite marks from the previous resident, and she keeps finding very thin layers of what looks like white dust on her sheets and pillow cover, all over the room. The doctor's offices are lit too brightly with harsh fluorescent lights, so that the patients feel like they're either on an operating table or in a porno.
It's not a very nice place at all.
Her sleep is plagued by nightmares. Shapes in the night rending her with long claws. Madmen cornering her in a dark asylum hallway and doing unspeakable things to her. Joker finally becoming sick of her and deciding to put her to the knife. By the end of the first month, she's a twitching, nervous mess with dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. This place isn't a respite. This place is more horrible than she could ever have imagined. When the doctors note her nervousness, her twitching, her jumpiness and lack of sleep, they drug her to near catatonia. They tell her that they're going to fix her, make her better again. The pills do things to her. It feels like she has writhing maggots under her skin, and after a day or two of this horrific sensation, she gets her hands on a shard of broken glass from a corner of one of the hallways, probably from a broken window, and she slices up her arms to try and mask the crawling sensation with pain. When they find out, they tranq her, wrap up her arms, and then they snap her in a straightjacket, the old type. The 1800's asylum type.
She spends three days in it, thrashing, screaming, charging at the walls and the door. It takes her those three days to realize that she needs to be quiet, lie down, and not act dangerous anymore for them to let her out of it. When they take it off of her, she spends hours in bed, wailing in agony from how stiff the muscles in her arms have become, and the blood having pooled in her elbows. It's excruciating to move even the slightest bit.
After two months, she's hallucinating often. Her nerves are so frayed that any noise provokes a near panic attack. Her hallucinations are mainly shadows stalking after her as she buzzes around her room, trying to outrun them. She sees things out of the corner of her eye, and they're not there when she turns to look at them. Sometimes, she wakes up and sees people crouched in the fetal position at the foot of her bed, shapes of pure black with perfectly round, pupil-less yellow eyes staring straight through her, and she screams. She runs to the door and screeches bloody murder that there are people in her room. When she looks back, they're gone. The doctors give her more medication to stifle the hallucinations. It has no effect.
There's only one little, tiny, microscopic thing that Schwarzwald looks forward to nowadays. And that's group therapy. Once every day, they take a select few residents and put them all in the room together to talk out their feelings and problems. Schwarzwald gets her turn once a week. That first week she goes, she meets the people in her small 'therapy group'. Suzanne Adams is a schizophrenic that snapped one day and decided to light a school on fire after moving debris in front of the doors. Fifty students died, along with five teachers. Edward Addal has said that God told him to kill prostitutes to keep the whores from spreading their sin. He killed twenty three. Charles Kingston murdered fifteen people and cannibalized their remains, in an attempt to gain pure enlightenment and to absorb the knowledge that each person had inside of them. Michelle King has shown total dependency on infamous criminal the Joker, and randomly flips between a calm woman, though during her stay in Arkham she's become quite nervous and a bit more unstable than before, and a dangerously psychotic alter-ego called Schwarzwald, who is known to be inclined towards manipulating others into mass murder. Recently, she's been hallucinating and cutting herself. The last patient in this lunatic circle-jerk is Jonathan Crane. Everyone knows about him. Except the out-of-the-loop Schwarzwald, of course.
"Well," The doctor begins, all the patients situated in a circle so that they can face one another. Their steel chairs are bolted to the floor. Schwarzwald is twitching. Suzanne is staring off into space, drugged out of her mind. Edward is drooling. Charles' eyes dart rapidly between everyone else in the small room. Crane is detached and calm. "Let's begin, all of you. How has your week been?" Bless this doctor's poor heart, he's trying so hard to be enthusiastic and encouraging.
"Aristotle foot dam foblabblig." Suzanne murmurs, head lolling against the back of the chair.
"Fine. Fine. Fine fine fine." Charles states, his voice cracking and jumping an octave at the last word.
"Mmmuh." Edward gets out.
"They're still in my room. The shadows. There's white powder all over everything in my room." Schwarzwald states, her knees pulled up into the chair with her and her arms wrapped around them. Her hair is oily and her eyes are wild, fingers clawed, nails broken from clawing at the floor. The doctor cocks an eyebrow at her statement. She's generally the one that's very detached from reality, they say, but she's never talked about white powder before.
"White powder? What about the white powder?" He asks, gently, and she turns lurid, crazed eyes to him.
"It's very thin, you see. Like air. It's so thin and fine that it's almost invisible. You have to look at it in the right light to see it, floating through. But it's there. It's there. You believe me?"
"Your room has been examined very thoroughly. There can't be white-" The doctor begins to explain, before Schwarzwald interrupts.
"There is! It's there, I swear!!" She shrieks, before noticing that Crane is staring at her, very intensely. "Do you believe me?"
He doesn't answer her, only looks back to the doctor. The man in the coat is writing something down on a legal pad for later, and then turns to Crane. "And how has your week been, mister Crane?"
"As it always is." He says, and his voice is so calm and quiet that Schwarzwald strains to hear him. He's always been that quiet, in every one of their group sessions. She can't imagine what he could've done to get thrown in Arkham, with how calm and withdrawn he is. The doctor is beginning to speak again before a phone rings and he moves to answer it, a moment later slamming the phone down and grabbing a small kit. Tranquilizers.
"Emergency down the hall; none of you move, the door is locking and the cameras are still on, so we'll know if you do anything." He barks, hurrying out the door. It locks behind him. Charles stands and paces over to the corner of the room, sitting down there facing the wall. Suzanne remains in her drooling catatonic state. Edward lies down on the floor, on his stomach, and doesn't move. Schwarzwald stands and begins to pace in a tight circle, trying to relieve herself of this constant feeling of needing to move, jitter, twitch; it calms her somewhat, relieves the discomfort of her constant nerves. Everything is terrifying; she's afraid almost all of the time, though it's most powerful when she's in her room.
After a few minutes of this pacing, she sees that Crane is staring at her. It's like he's examining her very closely, like the doctors do. It's scary; Schwarzwald backs up, keeping her eyes on him. He's been looking at her like that for a few weeks now, at the meetings, but since she's talked this time he's looking even harder than usual.
"…Ms. King." He says, and she jumps hard, heart racing. Her hands are balled into the sleeves of her outfit, tightly, as she stares.
"…What?" She breathes, wide eyes focused on any movement he makes. He, very slightly, gestures for her to come over to him, and after a minute of silent deliberation, she does. Very slowly. She stops about five feet from his chair, now watching him with a slight sort of wonder.
"Come here." He orders, a slight tone of impatience, maybe annoyance, in his voice, and she does. It's that Joker-induced subservience that makes her do it. She leans down next to his seat and he takes her face in his hands, looking closely at her eyes, feeling her pulse.
"Have you had any hallucinations recently? Seen odd things, heard any noises that you shouldn't have? Explain about this 'white dust' in your room." Crane is speaking in a doctor's voice, cold and detached, medical. Schwarzwald wonders if he's ever been a doctor.
"Seen…shadows…people in my room…and whispering! There's whispering. Moaning. Hissing. Screaming. Walls make faces, growl at me, try to bite. Arms come out of the floor and grab at me. The shadow people have claws and teeth and they're night. They're the night. They're blackness." Her voice comes out as a whisper, hurried; nobody has believed her before now, and whoever this guy is, he seems to want to listen. He seems to believe her. "The powder…I can't move too much, or it flies into the air and the people and the whispering comes back."
"…I see." He says, noting that her pupils are too large, and the green is only a very thin ring around huge black pupils. She's very pale, twitching, her breath is shuddering, and she's hallucinating. He has a hypothesis on why this is.
She's got a taste of the juice, Jonny-boy. The rasping voice in his head states what he already knows, and there's a note of sick amusement in it. Crane mentally sighs at having it back. Of course Scarecrow had to chime in. How long you think she's been sucking it in?
'However long she's been in that room. You know that. It must have gotten into a ventilation shaft somehow and deposited in the room.'
"Ms. King, how long have you been in that room?" Crane asks coolly, letting go of her. She straightens up and clasps hands in front of her mouth, twitching still. There's loud noise down the hall and it's making her incredibly jumpy.
"T…two…two months…" She states, voice shaking. Crane mentally winces at the cacophonic, sharp laughter of the other in his head.
Two months! Can't be very much in there, if she's still together enough to walk and talk. Leave her in there; let's see what happens. You want to, you know you do; it'll be worth a good laugh.
"Why? C-can you fix it??" Schwarzwald jerks forward, hands on the arm of Crane's chair, leaning in with glassy, crazed green eyes. He knows that she's gotten some of the fear toxin in her system, though it's apparently a much diluted amount due to having moved throughout the cell and settled. If it were any stronger, she would definitely have gone completely and totally mad by now, and she's probably going to if she isn't moved out of the cell. He can either let someone know and wonder if they're going to test the room or he can let it go and watch what happens.
Come on, Jonny. You haven't had a good time in months, and here's the chance, right here! If you want, I could do it instead, if you can't handle it. Scarecrow rasps, and he sounds like he's having fun. Crane isn't too fond of the idea of letting his other half take control for any amount of time, and so looks at Schwarzwald again, speaking coolly.
"It's nothing; most likely just a side-effect of the medicines they give you." He says calmly, and can almost see the hope shattering like a pane of glass in her eyes. Scarecrow cracks into high-pitched laughter in his head at the pathetic sight, as the doctor walks back in, coat twisted off to the side, pressing the intercom on his desk in the office adjoining.
"Get the escorts; too much work to deal with." He states, and Schwarzwald moves back to her chair before the doctor can spot her out of it. Not too much later, the guards move in and begin to escort the patients out, Schwarzwald looking more and more terrified of the idea of going back in her room. Crane watches her carefully as they lead her down the claustrophobic hallways, jittering and sobbing. He wonders, for a moment, as they begin to escort him to his own cell, if the effects of long-term exposure to the toxin are permanent or not.
((Alright, guys; did I get Crane right or not? It's kind of been awhile since I've seen Begins; I think I've got a good hold on things, but then again, it has been awhile. And tell me; is the idea of someone getting stuck in a room contaminated with his fear toxin a stupid idea? Just sort of trying to make things a bit longer and more interesting, since it would be a waste to rush through a pleasant visit to Arkham.))