AN: 'Fear of insanity'. Takes place…sorta…during Arkham Asylum. Recommended listening: Civil Twilight's 'How'm I Supposed to Die'.
Aaand that's a wrap! (Ah, bookends…it appealed to my black, shriveled little soul.) As previously mentioned, this will have a playlist on 8tracks-see profile for the link. I will be back to sporadic, with the exception of finishing Masks (Cigarette Smoke & Snark, Wattpad and Ao3), because my fantasy novel is crying out for attention. Dragons, guys. There be dragons in it. :D
As always, good to see ya, and have a very happy Halloween.
McStaken-Oh, I had my fair share of grief. That bullshit with the giant drill...I killed myself more than anything. And that's why I'm not Batman! :)
"B, c'mon already!"
No. No, no, no-toxin. Just fear toxin, Crane had…well. It's Crane, there's one thing he really does well.
That doesn't make it any easier to look at Jason, beaten bloody and with an oozing hole in his chest, bouncing up and down in front of him.
"We're gonna lose 'im, move your old ass!"
Hallucinatory-Jason has a point. Okay. Okay.
His lungs burn-side effect of the crap he'd breathed in-and he forces himself to take deep, even breaths to try and get this over with faster. He just has to-to remember that unless his fist is touching it, it might not be real.
And maybe not even then.
This was not what he'd expected when he'd put the cowl on all those years ago…sometimes, he wonders. He wonders if…if these people are his fault, somehow. If they'd risen to the challenge he created.
"Gotham isn't savin' itself!"
Arkham's walls seem to tilt and writhe and he can't be sure if those cockroaches are real or not. Doesn't matter. Crane disappeared down the hall (thankfully, there's only the one hall here) and that's where he's going to go.
He struggles up, putting his hand on the wall and possibly crushing a very crunchy-sounding roach, and nearly goes back down. His vision is trying to double and his heart refuses to what it's told and settle. Down.
Jason (not really, he's not here, he'll never be here again) makes an angry gesture that flicks drops of blood from broken fingers.
"C'mon, ya can't let this stop ya!"
His heart's just going to have to cope.
He wipes maybe-roach guts off on his cape, cracks his shoulders, and starts down the steadily-lengthening hallway.
All right. Crane…Crane came from. From the left. Medical's that way, and he's always been partial to that…that area. But he'll probably figure that Bruce will track him there, because he's insane, not stupid, so he would have gone to the right…unless he figured that Bruce would figure that, so.
Medical it is.
He stumbles over a corpse that he knows is real, toxin or no-it's got Richardson's signature (shattered kneecaps and a devastating blow to the skull) all over it. The computer supplies him with the name of a doctor, fond of electroshock therapy.
"I don't look that bad, do I?"
He keeps his mouth shut, closes the man's eyes (as best he can, anyway, his face is…not intact) and steadies himself as the floor pitches under him.
"You don't look so well, Bats."
He hurls a Batarang at her but it. It doesn't.
Either she's not here or his aim is off, because it doesn't hit her. She shakes her head at him and taps the object (crowbar? Pipe? He can't tell, it's metal and there's blood and brain matter on it) in her hand against the ground.
"You should be resting, old boy. Doctor's orders. I mean, I think he meant resting six feet under, but…"
"Okay, I'll distract her with short jokes and you tackle her, sound good?"
(Never coming) short jokes aside, the safest way to deal with her is sudden brutality. And that's exactly what he does-drops a smoke pellet and lunges for her, only-
-to go straight through her.
"Oh, this is a strong batch." she says from…somewhere. (Is she even here at all?) "Good to know." She taps the metal thing against the ground again, a heavy clang-clang! echoing up and down the hallway. "Come on, Bats…we've been waiting for you."
The speakers crackle but instead of the Joker, a chorus of children giggle and chant, "Come play with us, Batman! Forever and ever and ever."*
He can see her (maybe) through the smoke, walking backwards and beckoning to him.
"Catch me if you can."
And then she just. Vanishes.
Damn.
The smoke clears. The corpse has been kicked over, eyes half-open again, but other than that, she may not have been here at all. Maybe she wasn't-he could have done that, another patient, it could have been like that when he found it…
No. No, she was here, she had to have been here. He doesn't have proof that she wasn't (or that she was), and right now, she's his best leading to finding Crane before he can cause more damage.
BEEP!
From down the hall, there's a chorus of shrieking laugher and resignation settles into his chest. The speakers crackle again.
"Oooooooops! Wroooong button!" The Joker giggles and Bruce can just see him rocking back and forth. "Here come your adoring fans, Bats!"
The chorus grows closer and real or not, it sounds like the handful of patients that have been here since Crane was the director. The ones he…treated.
"Well, shit."
It's on the tip of his tongue to say language, Robin, but he bites it back and retreats, instead, into an air vent just as a mob of shrieking, teeth-gnashing patients round the corner.
He hasn't seen Richardson again, but she's easy to track-just follow the trail of corpses. Of Crane, there's no sign.
At least, not until he reaches Medical.
The (probable) first sign of Crane's presence is the twitching, gasping orderly sprawled on bloody tiles, maybe-roaches scurrying over him with their twitching antennae. The blood is coming from a head wound, and it doesn't take much to determine that the orderly tripped, fell, and hit his head. Head wounds bleed. God, what a near-heart attack he'd had the first time Dick cut his head on an open cabinet, of all things…
Oh, for such simpler days.
He crouches down, pins the man's hands together against his chest, and continues his observation. No visible track marks-aerosol formula, then, likely the same one he's…dealing with. No other signs of bodily harm.
Green, twisted fingers grab a maybe-roach out of the puddle of blood and let it scuttle into a bullet hole.
"Kinda tickles, actually."
Eyes. On. The victim. The victim is a living, breathing (bleeding) thing. Jason is not.
"B! Hey, B, watch this!"
He looks up out of habit (will that ever fade?) in time to see Jason grin and open his mouth to let the roach climb out over his teeth and fall to the floor with a sickening whap!
"Ta-da!"
The orderly jerks and inhales suddenly, bitten lips moving quickly.
"No, no-"
"It's a hallucination." Hopefully the man can even hear him. "Whatever you're seeing, it isn't real. You were attacked by the Scarecrow. Do you remember that?"
He nods, swallowing hard, and Bruce thinks the roaches must not be real or they'd be crawling into him or at least reacting to the movements beneath them.
"C-c-caaaaaaame outta nowhere-"
"Did you see where he went?"
A hand jerks, fingers curling, towards the doors at the end of the hall. Bruce nods.
"Good."
He only feels a little bad for the surprise sedation, but it's for the man's own good. He tucks him out of the way, in a broom closet, and radios Cash.
He's sure he's imagining the way the doors are still swinging, ever so slightly, on their hinges. All the same, he approaches with caution. Toxins aside, he's seen (failed, always failing, isn't he) one poor cop lose his head to that scythe. Took less than a second-walked too close to an open doorway, and…well.
The room behind the doors (the morgue) is dark, the only lighting being the emergency bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Crane could be anywhere in here. In a body bag, in a locker, in the shadows…or he could not be here at all. Bruce isn't the only one who can get into the vents.
A gurney rocks on rusted wheels as Jason flops onto it, hands hanging towards the filthy tiles. Bruce ignores him, focuses on a locker door that's halfway off its hinges, banging gently. A centipede pulls itself through a gap in the wall, scurries into the dark with a soft scrapescrapescrape.
Clang-clang! Clang-clang!
Squeak!
It's an effort not to tell Jason to stop playing on the gurney.
Right. Crane's not in any of the lockers. He'll check the body bags and if he's not there, Bruce will have to assume
"Y'know what they say 'bout assumin', B!"
(Oh, that had been Jay's favorite saying. Bruce suspects it's partly because he could swear in front of Alfred without retribution.)
that Crane's taken the vents out. Or wasn't here in the first place.
He's just reaching for the nearest zipper when there's the sound of the doors bursting open. He whirls, Batarang in hand, only to see them swinging wildly, with no sign of why. There's no footsteps. No cackling. Just swinging doors.
The walls curve and bend in on him and he tries to breathe, tries to get his vision to stop blurring so badly. He's. He's in medical, in the morgue. That's real, he knows it's real because he's leaning on a gurney. That's. That's real. The wiggling body bag on the gurney is not. He knows this because body bags don't wiggle. They lie still
(still as a boy sprawled on filthy tiles still as a man and a woman slumped in a dark alley still)
and silent.
He opens it anyway.
It's empty.
A whistle echoes down a white hallway. Bruce's head hurts, but he's betting the man he's just knocked out is going to have it worse when he wakes up.
Especially because his comrades consider 'gunfire' to be an acceptable way of getting him down from his gargoyle prison. He suspects he should care more.
"You're pretty good at not carin', B, s'fine."
His jaw clenches. In front of him, Jason grins, forms a gun with his fingers and presses them to his head.
"I mean, I kinda doubt your parents wanted ya to dress up like a ninja and beat the crap outta criminals. 'N then you got me killed, so…"
"I tried to save you, Jason." he whispers involuntarily. "I tried."
The hallucination shrugs, drops the hand and wiggles a finger into the bullet hole.
"Uh-huh. I noticed." He tilts his head back, revealing bloody holes from barbed wire in his neck. "Whatcha think?"
What-
Jason's not alone in the hallway now. Behind him are…are…
They're not real. He's not real, they're not real, Bruce is alone.
Mother and Father stand before him, unsmiling, unhappy. Thankfully (or not, he deserves to see what his childish whims brought them) their black raincoats cover any injuries. The coats are wet, dripping red rainwater that runs through the grout lines on the floor.
"I told you he wasn't well." Mother says. She puts her hand on Father's arm and shakes her head. "Look at him."
No.
"You're dead." he says firmly. "All of you."
"Yeah, thanks a lot, Bruce."
He moves, intending to go straight through them (half the time Crane's hallucinations vanish like smoke when touched), but Father tilts his head (did he used to do that something isn't right he's not here of course it's not right but) and he…can't. It's like he's eight again, and did something he shouldn't have.
"You're quite right."
Maybe. Maybe if he apologizes (always so sorry so sorry), maybe that will be enough.
"I." His voice cracks in a way it hasn't since… "I'm sorry."
Father pulls a piece of straw out of his jacket and snaps it. It sounds like a breaking bone.
"Is that so?"
Wait-
Mother and Father flicker and for a second or two, the dripping coats are old straitjackets and Mother's umbrella is a pipe, but then everything is as it should be.
But that second was enough…enough to remember that apologizing to the dead is useless, and that he has work to do.
"You're. Not. Here."
Father smiles, indulgent, almost like he used to when Bruce asked for ice cream after dinner. Almost. Not exactly.
"Oh, but we are here." he whispers, moving forward in a jerky, uneven way. "We're always here. In your head." A cold (how can he know it's cold?) finger jabs his cowled forehead. "Remember that."
"No-"
"Yes." he hisses, and he's taller now than Bruce remembers, even granting the lens of childhood. "Oh, yes. Don't try to lie to yourself, it's impossible."
Maybe it is. But he doesn't have to lie to himself now.
He moves, joints cracking as they're jerked to new positions, and Mother swings the umbrella at him. He grabs it, feels cold, sticky metal rather than fabric, and the illusion shatters.
"Look at you, Bats!" Scarecrow spreads his hands, the liquid in his syringe-clad fingers sloshing a little. "You were always my finest subject…so determined. You've had enough of my toxin to drive ten men insane, and here you stand, ready as ever!"
Damn right.
He rips the pipe out of Richardson's grip and flings it aside. It bounces off the walls with a resounding CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!
"It's over."
"Or maybe…maybe you're already mad, Bats." Scarecrow barks a laugh and swipes with the glove, needles just missing Bruce's arm. "You're one of us!"
"I'm nothing like you."
"Little quick to deny, huh?" Richardson's moving in a quick, ratlike scurry towards the electrical box. If she thinks a little more darkness is going to stop him, she's had one too many knocks to the head. "Face it, old boy, you belong with us. You always have."
And then she yanks on the lever.
Bruce is expecting darkness-looking forward to it, in fact. What he gets is a cloud of smoke that stings his eyes and sends him scrambling for a gas mask.
Damn!
He stumbles forward, eyes locked on Scarecrow's yellow eyes, and staggers against the wall.
Can't breathe can't breathe-
A hand grabs his arm and he's pulled down the hall, out of the smoke. He can make out…orange. That's all. One of the guards-no, no, they're blue not orange and the doctors are white.
Inmate?
That doesn't make sense.
"Run and run as fast as you can!" Scarecrow's voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. "I'll hunt you down, little gingerbread man!"
The hand lets go the second they're out of the smoke, and by the time his vision clears enough to see anything that's not 'colored blob', he's clearly alone, and there's no sign that anyone else was there at all.
THE END
*The Shining. But you should know that.