Julia follows Crane's orders to the word after he leaves, and proceeds to find peroxide and splash it onto her mouth. She then spends about five minutes cursing and swearing, before dabbing the excess peroxide away and looking at herself in the dirty bathroom mirror. The jagged slices carving across her once-smooth cheeks are ghastly when they're irritated by the peroxide; they're an angry pinkish red, and they hurt. She touches them gingerly, and sees black thread poking out like a wild hair. She digs into a drawer and finds a pair of scissors, and is just about to cut the thread when she gets a very close look at her face again. Her skin tone is very pale, ashen, sickly, dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep, dull eyes that were once vivid.
And she stares at that carved smile, and after a moment, she opens her mouth as far as she can and places the open scissor blades into the corner of her barely-healed wounds. If she's going to have a permanent smile, then it's going to be even grander than the one on man who gave it to her. She steels herself, and closes the scissor blades with a metallic snipping.
When Crane walks back into the room he left Julia in, he sees nothing in the bedroom itself. He does, however, hear snipping noises from the bathroom, and thinks he might hear sobs. This alarms him, though not very much, since she's not actually something he needs. And so, out of curiosity more than anything else, he walks to the small adjoining bathroom and looks in at what she's doing, and just stares.
The smile that the Joker carved for her? She's made it bigger with her pair of dirty scissors. Blood drips from her chin at a steady pace, and there are drops of it all over the counter top, though most of it is staining the sink she hangs her head over. Now her wounds are not just from right under her cheekbones to the corners of her mouth; she's gone so far as to begin to carve upwards and is getting dangerously close to her jaw hinges. The edge of the blade has continuously nicked her skin and now the outward scarring goes up to right below her ears. After one more snip to make them raggedly even, she sees his reflection in the mirror and turns towards him with wide, crazed, desperate eyes.
"I'm still pretty, aren't I?" She asks him, desperately, taking a dangerous step forward. Crane glances between her ruined face and the scissors in her hand, held with the point upwards. She's dangerous, she's too unbalanced right now and he needs to choose his words extremely carefully.
"Am I pretty?" She asks again, as Crane takes a cautionary step backwards. He weighs his options and the risks: he can say 'yes', and either placate her or cause her to do something like scream 'liar' and lunge at him with the scissors, or he can say 'no', and either have her break down in hysterical tears or become angry and try to replicate her wounds on him. Crane isn't a gambling man, though Scarecrow urges him to tell her that she's a horrific thing, and after a calm moment of thought, he looks her straight in the eye and says, "You're about average."
She blinks, confused, and it gives him just enough time to lunge forward with a hidden sedative and smash her hand into the wall, making her drop the scissors, and then stab the syringe into her and drug her with enough tranquilizers to take down a bull elephant. She goes down after five minutes of feeble fighting, while still sobbing wildly and screaming "I'm ugly, I'm hideous, he ruined me! I'm a monster!!", and Crane watches her go unconscious on the floor.
He theorizes that she's just completely lost her mind. And not in the manner of going along with a psychopath's plans without any care at all, because that's not madness, that's psychopathy. Julia, Michelle, Schwarzwald, whoever the hell she is, she's just suffered a complete psychotic break.
'Facial mutilation in an attempt to unconsciously remove the Joker's effect on her, and regain a sense of control? Similar situations have been seen in rape victims; a number choose to have sexual intercourse closely after the assault so that they may 'cleanse' themselves, and regain a sense of control over that aspect of their beings.'
Worthless. A harsh voice growls in his mind, and it's like the raking of razor blades across his psyche. When in Arkham, his little voice-slash-alter ego was calmer, cheerier. Now that he's not drugged anymore, Scarecrow has returned to a dark, ruthless monster in his mind. Crane can pretend that he can control it, but he knows he can't; it's just another primal part of him that he has no control over, like his own fears and pleasures. Kill the whore.
'No. There is use for her yet.' Crane snaps, in a thought, as he sees that Julia is choking on her blood and begins to look for some way to staunch the flow before she dies of blood loss.
When she recovers control, Crane notices a distinct change in her personality. She's very happy, very cheerful, even though her mouth is full of cotton balls and that section of her head is wrapped around with white bandaging, a series of white bandage strips circling around from under her nose to under her bottom lip, wrapping around behind her neck and in a circling pattern around. She can't speak, but she's very joyous most of the time. It's definitely madness; the loss of her beauty, the mutilation, has finally destroyed her sanity.
She also keeps those large scissors on her at all times. And she hasn't washed off the blood yet. At first he took them away from her and wouldn't give them back, no matter how she plead, but as time passes, a week or so, and he sees this marked change in personality, he decides to risk it and let her have them. She doesn't do anything with them, just keeps them on her. Objects of macabre comfort for her broken self. He's seen people attach themselves to some aspect of their traumatic experience as a coping mechanism, and blades must be hers. She doesn't want the wounds sewed shut; wants to keep them open, though that makes many normal tasks like eating and laughing impossible, and highly risky for infection. Not that it's really a big concern of his; he's more concerned about starting production on his toxin again, which is proving difficult, seeing as he's only got a limited amount of those blue flowers that Ra's Al Ghul provided him with. He's been negotiating with an agent of a crime organization from overseas, and they have told him that they can deliver these flowers for him, and will do so if he gives them some of his toxin in aerosol form. He's been negotiating for a while, now, on how much of his toxin he's going to give them; they want much more than he can provide and still keep enough for himself with. He's also dealing with cops sticking their noses where they're not welcome, greedy workers (of which there are few) asking for more pay, and being under constant threat of Joker deciding to blow the Narrows sky high if he so chooses. And everyone knows that there's no way to know if and when he does.
In short, Julia is low on his list of concerns.
Time passes, and she's able to remove the bandages and cotton balls without bleeding to death. The scars have gone from ugly, which they were, to horrific; her mouth is two to three times larger than it should be, and it's twisted up into a smile that reaches her ears. As if she were trying to make herself into a modern-age Black Dahlia, he notes. She has the corners of her too-large mouth pierced shut with silver rings, almost like small hoop earrings, to hold her mouth shut and allow her to look slightly more normal, and be able to do more normal things easier, like eating and laughing and things like that.
Julia also lets him know that she's not going to go by Schwarzwald anymore. She informs him, cheerfully, that she wants to be called Angelface now. He informs her that he doesn't care, and returns to his work.
Crane observes her reactions to various different emotional stimuli. He ignores her, and she toddles off to amuse herself in some way or another, which is apparently talking to herself…or someone else. He is cruel to her, and she loves it; she smiles like a child up at him, as he spits at her to get away from him, and does as he says, skipping off. He attempts kindness towards her, and though she accepts it, she does not let him touch her, and seems quite eager to put distance between herself and him afterwards, almost as if she were worried for his safety in being near her.
All in all, she is a perfect candidate for his research. A creature that is happy in madness, needs no outwards stimuli to be happy and content with herself; someone that only wishes to serve, but does not demand love or affection in return. Then again, he's only seen her for a little bit of time, so she may change somehow soon. But he thinks that with her like this, he can stop acting like he cares about her and show his real colors.
Over the next two weeks, he is the sadistic monster that he has always been. He tries many things with her mind, and drives her to tears many, many times during these highly aggressive therapy sessions, if they can even be called that. He tells her that he will abandon her, that he will kill her, he gases her with various new twists on the fear toxin compound to see if they affect her or not, what with her having an immunity to the compound used before he was thrown in his own mental facility.
In short, he tries his hardest to mentally decimate her. And though she cries and begs him not to leave her, she never breaks.
In the end, when he's just finished telling her that there is no man on the planet that will ever want to touch her now that she looks so monstrous, and she's on her knees crying into her hands, he kneels down enough to pry her hands off of her face and look into her eyes, as she looks up at him.
"Julia, would you like to help me do more than just this?" He asks her, calmly, and she nods. Of course she does. She's desperate for any affection at all, even if it's just imagined. "Then I will need your help in the future. With a plan of mine."
Over the next half hour, he explains to her a plan so outrageous, so insane, so completely terrifying in prospect, that she's transfixed by him, sitting on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest, staring with childlike eyes. Crane thinks that's a temporary regression that should fade away soon enough; he's seen it before. After he finishes, she stares a moment longer, before watching him hold a hand down to her, to help her up.
"Is this a yes or a no?" Crane asks, and after a moment, she takes his hand and nods.
"Yes, doctor." Julia tells him, and he knows that with her help, he might actually pull this off.
First thing's first: they finish a certain amount of toxin. And then?
They call the Joker.