It takes a good month, but eventually, Schwarzwald is able to move around normally again. She, at first, needs to be tranquilized all of the time to a point where she isn't terrified to near death by any moderately loud noise. She has been moved to a new room, because when they examined hers very casually before moving her in there to rest, a sharp-eyed orderly spotted the white dust she ranted and raved about so much. They realize that it must be Crane's toxin, and they move her out of the room immediately.
In a clean room, she spends her time alone, drugged, relaxed beyond belief. Schwarzwald lets her thoughts flow easily, come and go like the crisp breeze on a November day. She wonders about how the Joker is doing with Dr. Quinzel. She wonders about Crane and his Scarecrow. She wonders if she'll ever be free of this horrible building masquerading as a hospital.
They slowly wean her off of her tranquilizers and the hallucination-controlling medication, seeing as they now know what caused those hallucinations. She doesn't scream at shadows anymore. She becomes relatively calm again, almost cheery at times. She doesn't tell them that the hallucinations aren't gone, but have only lessened enough to become manageable. Shadows still stalk along the walls after her, and for split seconds in time when someone shows up out of nowhere in front of her, she can still think she sees them as a corpse, but it disappears a second after it starts and she grows accustomed to it.
They let her back into the general population once more, and there she meets Crane again.
They still sit beside one another, though for a good long while, Schwarzwald ignores him entirely because she's still angry with him. Crane never tries to start conversation because he knows that even trying would be very useless. Scarecrow tries to get him to talk again, but he won't.
It takes another month for her even to look directly at him. Crane assumes that it's the loneliness getting to her; he suffered a bit of it himself, in the beginning, but nowadays he has Scarecrow to keep him company enough. He may not hold good company, but he holds it. She still isn't allowed to speak with Joker, so she speaks with no one else.
"So, which one are you?" She asks him at dinner one night, out of the blue, and he glances sideways at her.
"Speaking with me again?" His voice is chilled, detached as usual. She rolls her eyes; he can see her do it.
"Crane then. Scarecrow would've laughed in my face at that question, wouldn't he have?"
She's right. Snotty bitch.
"Any reason why you've chosen this moment to break your vow of silence?" He ignores Scarecrow's growls, looking back to his plate without interest. Tray, actually. She huffs under her breath.
"There's nobody else to talk to. I'm still pissed off at that psychopathic fuck, Featherhead or whatever."
Featherhead?! Lemme hit her! Let me knock out her teeth, Crane!
"I assume you meant Leatherface, and it's Scarecrow. And good for you, Schwarzwald." He speaks in his easy monotone, ignoring Scarecrow again. He notes that she's poking at her food with the spork, and she's nervous. "Any more hallucinations?" Crane asks her, and he smirks slightly when she whips her head around to glare at him wrathfully.
"No, you prick. They told me what the powder was, and I know I told you enough about it for you to know what it was." Schwarzwald snarls, and Crane continues to smirk at her, in a holier-than-thou manner.
"It was a golden opportunity to see the long-term effects of the toxin; I wouldn't be a scientist if I let it slip through my fingers." He may be smirking at her, gently, but his blue eyes are just as icy as ever and she knows that he's tearing her to pieces with his gaze, staring straight into her to try and figure out what she's thinking and what she might be hiding. She breaks eye contact, lurid green eyes now focusing on the opposite wall.
"Any side-effects still lingering from…our little session?"
"…No."
"You're lying." He deadpans, and she looks up at him, confusion in her eyes.
"How do you know?" Schwarzwald spits, narrowing her eyes.
"I used to be a doctor, you know. I dealt with compulsive liars and psychopaths for a good portion of my career; I can tell when someone is lying to me after all this practice. And you are lying." He explains, and Schwarzwald is surprised to see that there is finally emotion that he's showing her, instead of a glassy, icy exterior. He seems polite enough, when he's not being curt.
"Yeah? Maybe I am. Not that it's any of your business, Scarecrow." She says, and her tone is defensive; she's on the defense and he's gotten the upper hand. Crane pushes.
"Not Scarecrow, not right now. I am Jonathan Crane."
"Does it even matter? You're both in there, and I can't even tell when you're one or the other." Schwarzwald spits, and Crane resists the urge to roll his eyes. Instead, he lets Scarecrow slip into the driver's seat to show her the difference between the two of them.
"No, y'see. If you're smart, you can tell," Scarecrow says easily, smiling in a cat-that-ate-the-canary sort of way and leaning in slightly to her, sitting on his left side at the table. She widens her eyes and tries to scoot away, but he very smoothly puts an arm around her shoulders and makes her scoot back.
"You don't need to be that touchy. I don't get to have fun like our last session very often, now that the nutty professor is locked up in his own nuthouse." Scarecrow tells her, and the suave smile he's wearing is very out-of-place on Crane's normally austere face.
'Don't, Scarecrow.' Crane's voice sounds in his mind, but he ignores it as Schwarzwald glances up at him, confused.
"What? Crane…you…whatever the hell you are, you worked here?" She stumbles for the appropriate title for the two men in one body, and Scarecrow laughs under his breath, almost inaudibly.
"Worked here? Jonny-boy owned this entire asylum. Not really…but pretty much. He was the director. 'Til Batsy-boo caught him, knocked him down out of his job after the Narrows incident, and then got him tossed in here in a pretty pathetic capture. Scooting drugs laced with fear toxin on the streets, really? Pathetic." He spits the last word, as if saying it has put a bitter taste on his tongue.
'I said stop it, Scarecrow.' Crane says, and his voice is strained and terser than usual. Scarecrow decides to push even harder.
"Poor Jonny. He can't stand it; poor guy just wanted to poison a couple million people with fear gas and watch them squirm, and everyone panics and he loses his job, then gets locked up with the loonies that still hate him. Nothing sadder." A moment after he finishes that little monologue, Scarecrow is wrenched from control and shoved far back into his own mind, as Crane seizes control again.
"Crane?" Schwarzwald recognizes the smile fading into annoyed muteness, as Crane proceeds to ignore her and sulk for the rest of the dinner.
The next day, she talks with him again. She tells him that she still hallucinates, though they're weak enough in comparison to what she's gone through for her to be able to handle them. He nods, listens to her talk freely, and eventually he listens to her open up about her entire life. It's blackly hilarious, because it's so pathetic and you can even see the strain that the loneliness is taking on her. Like a kicked puppy; he wonders if she does this all the time.
So, in a sick and twisted sort of way, Schwarzwald makes a friend.
She and Crane spend time together. If this 'time' is to be described accurately, then it is mainly time when Schwarzwald talks and talks, with a few prompts from Crane now and then, while Crane and Scarecrow offhandedly plot how they're going to make this woman self-destruct. It's what they do.
Really.
And then, one day, out of the pure blue sky that no one in Arkham can quite remember seeing, they start to let the Joker out into the general community. Why they had decided to do this, no one knows, but Schwarzwald assumes that Dr. Quinzel had something to do with it, probably.
"It's home away from home, isn't it, Schwarzy?" He says, sitting across from her at dinnertime. "Arkham Asylum."
Schwarzwald herself is gaunt, pale, sick-looking; her eyes are large, hazy looking, the body under the cotton uniform lacking in fat much more so than it had been before her little internment here. There are dark circles under her bloodshot eyes, and she looks so tired all of the time. It's Arkham at its best, really; House of Bedlam, turning the mad even madder.
He thinks of it as a relaxing sort of place. A vacation from the streets of Gotham was needed every now and then, and what better place to go than a stint in the Elizabeth Arkham Institute for the Criminally Insane?
"I've had horrific hallucinations for almost my entire time here. I see worms that walk, I see cadavers that gibber and laugh and sing with the madmen. I'm sick with some sort of physical illness because I vomit constantly and the orderlies are certain that I'm doing it to myself on purpose. I'm malnutritioned and my only friends are a terrorist that fancies himself a clown and doctor-slash-madman with a split personality that loves to watch me squirm with terror." Schwarzwald says, very calmly, tapping broken and dirty nails on the table. "My cell is cold and dirty, I'm most assuredly going completely mad here, even more so than I was before, and I've got nothing to look forward to but a cold, lonely death in a cell's corner, hallucinating, foaming at the mouth in terror, dying in a puddle of my own vomit and urine. Do you think I'm happy here?"
Joker has to admit, it's one of the most calm, coherent things he's heard out of the mouth of any Arkham guest. Aside from Crane, but Crane never talks to him anyway, just as he's ignoring Joker from his seat beside Schwarzwald. He raises his eyebrows slightly, as Schwarzwald remains cool and calm. That's funny; she seems to be a little Crane clone now. Why could that be?
"Well…to each their own, Schwarzy. I like it here." He tells her, easily, taking a bite from the Arkham paste they call food. She looks back down at her tray, breaking eye contact as she stares at her food again. Crane watches the two of them, and notices the apparent gap in between them.
You know what I think? I think she's got some sort of new thing wrong with her.
'Really? I was thinking the same thing. What is your hypothesis?'
I'm thinking that it's some sort of inherit Stockholm syndrome or a variant thereof that causes her to attach herself to a stronger person than herself, one that has exercised control over her at one point in time to prove dominant. She needs someone that beats her, she wants someone that has been known to hurt her to protect her. Daddy issues? Or do you think it's a recessive trauma that she isn't aware of, one resulting from the abuse from that guy that kidnapped her and kept her in his basement when she was a kid?
'Fifteen. And that is a viable notion, though I have another one entirely.'
Really? Shoot, Crane.
'I have the idea that Schwarzwald is suffering from an entirely new condition, one that may or may not have been discovered before; I can't be sure of it. I think that she has no real personality of her own. I think that she recreates her personality, her mannerisms and emotional responses and even unconscious reactions according to who she's around, what environment she happens to be in. In an easier way of explanation, whenever she spends time around a person that she attaches herself to, as you have said, then she crafts a new personality as a defense mechanism, a tactic to keep herself in that person's favor. The same notion would work for environmental responses; she would, in this hypothetical situation, be working to give herself the best chances of survival in this new environment.'
Interesting. Darwin's laws at work within a human being's subconscious? A human mind suffering from extreme trauma and abuse wiping away the personality and instead creating temporary new versions of itself? You know, if you'd have gotten a hold of this broad before we got tossed in here, she could've made you real famous.
'I am aware of this, though I doubt she would have survived very long in our Arkham. She would've gone downstairs rather quickly.'
That's the Jonny-boy I know. Cold, heartless bastard that you are.
'Flattery will get you nowhere.'
The two halves of Jonathan Crane are no slouches when it comes to their former profession; Crane and Scarecrow can and often do banter back and forth about various patients' psychiatric conditions, mainly out of boredom. They watch Schwarzwald and Joker begin to talk, quietly, and they start up a new conversation. Entirely mental, of course, but still, a conversation.
Hey Jonny-Jonny, how about that ten minutes with Schwarzy?
'No.'