Sleepy Hollow/Batman Begins Xover
More of what were supposed to be drabbles but got away from me. I TOLD you I'd get 'em all done sooner or later. Well, this is later. And there are still more on their slow, slow way.
Title: Crooked Shadows
For: fangirl_lizzie, mr_rekkan and gddisgrace
The request: "Sleepy Hollow/Batman crossover, Ichabod/Jonathan"
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine; though if their respective owners feel like making this Christmas the best one ever, I’d not say no.
Notes: banner made by bangx2
Warnings: Overall for the series - violence, self-harm, insanity.
Crooked Shadows I
Crooked Shadows II
Crooked Shadows III
Crooked Shadows IV
Crooked Shadows - Paper Cranes, an interlude
Crooked Shadows V
*~*~*~*
Ichabod is tired. His shoes are waterlogged and he can’t feel his feet from the cold. For all that the temperature has dropped so far he feels damp, more than anything else. Fatigue has drained him of all color, save for the pinkening of his nose and cheeks from where the wind flays his skin raw.
The city twists up above him, misshapen, because the architects of Gotham, hired after the great fire, seemed to have no conception of what skyscrapers should look like. The light catches on odd angles and the occasional gothic spire, until Ichabod is dizzy and he has to look away, back to the filthy puddles saturated with cigarette butts and old newspapers.
He wishes it would snow, just to cover all the dirt and grime. Just so he can pretend that the city is beautiful. Just for a moment. That would be enough to keep him going.
He hates his job some nights; nursing cheap, cold coffee with too much sugar to mask the taste, hands freezing because he left his warmer gloves in his apartment and he’s had to make due with ones for much warmer weather. Some nights it seems like no one in Gotham is good any more and everyone is as dirty and cold as the water seeping through his socks and creeping up his trousers. He wants to go home, play soothing music and sleep in front of the radiator. He does not want to see another old man frozen from the cold, or another hooker beaten and far too young. He wants to draw his shutters and drown himself in opera until he forgets the tiny blue hands of the baby shaken to death early on in his shift and the grim faces of the immigrant women standing over a man riddled with bullet holes.
Ichabod fumbles in his pockets until he finds a crumpled packet of cigarettes. He shakes one out and lights it with numb, clumsy fingers. It’s a habit he’s always hated, but on nights like this he feels like it’s all he can do to keep from screaming himself hoarse.
Last week he shot a man. One of the untreated victims of the gas attack on the Narrows had burst into a small grocery store while he was buying his cigarettes. Wayne enterprises has financed research for a long term cure. Most people have been given the first cure, or the one that came later, to treat those who had been under for longer. It’s Gotham though, it’s the Narrows, and there are those who still haven’t come out of the cracks yet. Ichabod keeps finding what’s left of them. He’d drawn his gun in the little shop but his warning shot hadn’t done anything more than enrage the man. He calls it a warning shot, but really his hands had been shaking too badly to aim straight the first time. Ichabod didn’t miss after that. Not with a mother and her children shopping for sweets, not with the drunk teenagers trying to buy liquor without ID, not with the innocent bystanders. He put five bullets in the man before he stayed down.
The newspaper rubbing up against Ichabod’s leg from the wind has a picture of Jonathan Crane on the front page.
Have you seen this man?
Ichabod has heard all the jokes and all the sly comments about his last name over the past few weeks. He has taken it all with a stoicism he no longer feels. He highly doubts the Batman is going to mistake him for the missing doctor. Sharing a last name with Jonathan Crane does not make them look at all the same. One Gotham police inspector, freezing to death from the cold and the misery, all black and whites except for the slash of red scarf, cannot be mistaken for the sharply handsome doctor. The newspaper’s photo is in black and white, but Ichabod has seen the headshots they took at Arkham. Jonathan is sallow rather than pale and his eyes are the kind of blue that the skies over Gotham never are.
Ichabod wonders if he’s still wandering the city, afraid and more than half mad. He doubts it. In Jonathan’s state he wouldn’t give the doctor more than a few days before someone killed him. Less, now that it’s gotten so cold out.
He tosses his coffee into the nearest overflowing trash can and starts walking back to headquarters. He’s not on patrol and if someone needs him, they can call him at his office.
Ichabod thinks he’s a little crazy himself. He’s got the Crane case evidence strewn all over his kitchen table and pinned up on his walls. A montage of sharply angled cheekbones and huge, haunted eyes. There’s a tale to be told behind the bright reflection of Jonathan’s glasses and cheap suits. Something terrible and cruel that turned such a brilliant young man into the Scarecrow. He spends too much time sitting in the kitchen, staring at the photos, watching the progression from boy, to student, to doctor. He’s woken in the night dreaming of the countryside, cloudless skies that match Jonathan’s eyes and crows circling overhead. Ichabod dreams of straight-jackets and surveillance tapes of a man too afraid to even feel the fear. There are pictures and witness reports of that night in the Narrows, things too horrifying to be believed and Ichabod can feel nothing but pity for the man who caused all that pain and misery.
He passes by addicts and the homeless, shaking his head. He has no change. He needs change. This whole rotten city needs a change.
A crooked shadow lurches out of a doorway. Ichabod steps back into a half-frozen puddle, reaching for his gun.
The shadow is a man. A ragged, dirty creature in a jacket that’s far too big and a hat that’s slipping down over lank, wet hair and a face marred by healing burns. His hands are red as the burns and chapped from the cold. They’re curled into something like claws, as though the ice has set into the bones and made them as brittle as the few icicles that drip from the stop lights. Ichabod lets go of the gun when the man slips and falls. He only has one shoe on and it’s soft canvas, soaked through and nearly black from the grime of the streets.
“Sir?” Ichabod doesn’t step any closer. He has a jagged scar running the length of his ribs that taught him better. “Are you all right?”
The man looks up from his sprawl and Ichabod forgets how to breathe. Staring out from under the hat is Jonathan Crane. The burns and the new pinched hunger can’t disguise his face. He groans and tries to get up. His hands skid in the wet and he crumples again.
Ichabod looks around and there is no one on the street to notice this meeting. No one who will look up from their business of staying alive to care one way or the other. He knows he is going mad because he stoops down next to Crane, out of reach, but close enough that he can smell a month’s worth of filth on the man. “Jonathan? Can you understand me?”
Crane blinks slowly at him and his mouth twists into a sick smile. “Scarecrow.” His voice is as raw as his hands.
“Can you understand me?” Ichabod insists.
The smile fades as Crane shudders and gasps for air, his breath steaming feebly. “Oh god,” he whispers. “Please…help me.”
Ichabod is sworn to do two things. He must serve. He must protect.
He should not be squatting in a squalid gutter with a madman. There is a beautiful woman he left behind in New York who would come if he wrote her. She sends him letters, begging him not to spend Christmas alone, to visit her. He reads between the lines and wonders if it wasn’t love all those years ago before his promotion and transfer. He could go to her and let her bring the sunshine back into his life, coiled in her golden curls and the apple of her cheeks. Ichabod wonders if that is what happiness is.
Happiness is not two weeks from Christmas, numb and bitter, reaching out to drag one of Gotham’s most wanted men to his feet. It is not stripping the coat from Crane to see the straightjacket still on underneath and wrapping his own coat and an arm around the man.
Ichabod does not go to the station. He does not turn Crane in.
To serve and protect.
Jonathan Crane is muttering to himself under his breath and he clings to Ichabod with those clawed hands and Ichabod cannot force his feet to take them to Arkham. He will protect Crane because all the good has been eaten out of the heart of Gotham and maybe, just maybe, if he can save Crane, he can sleep at night. Maybe he can make that sliver of difference that will let him breathe again without feeling like he’s choking to death on the wretchedness of everything.
*~*~*~*
Ichabod’s apartment is warm and dry. He marches Crane straight through to the bathroom where Crane stands, shivering and awkward as Ichabod runs a bath hot enough to steam the mirrors and the little frosted window.
Crane is still whispering to himself and he hasn’t met Ichabod’s eyes since he first fell. Ichabod turns him around and undoes the last few buckles of the straightjacket. He eases the once-white shirt over Crane’s head exposing bruises and old, dried blood. He settles Crane into sitting on the closed lid of the toilet as he kneels on the tiles and removes Crane’s one shoe and what’s left of his socks. Crane’s feet look like his hands, red raw and curled from the cold. Ichabod makes him stand again and slides his trousers down, lifting one foot, then the other, to get them off. Crane doesn’t say anything, he stares at the steam rising from the bath, lips moving silently.
Ichabod rolls up his sleeves and dunks a flannel in the bath. He sits Crane down again and rubs at his hands with the cloth. Crane hisses and jerks them away. He finally looks at Ichabod and the expression on his face is like Ichabod just spat on him.
“It’s going to hurt,” Ichabod explains patiently. “That’s why I didn’t put you in the bath right away. But you have to let me warm your hands and feet.”
Crane eyes him warily but he holds out his hands again. It’s the first sign he’s made that he understands Ichabod at all. The warmth has to hurt, judging by the way Crane’s eyes water, trailing clean tracks through the dirt on his face but eventually Ichabod is able to ease him into the bath. He washes Crane’s hair and the sore skin on his back where the wet straightjacket rubbed and chafed.
“You have pictures of me in your kitchen,” Crane says quietly. He picks up the soap with shaking hands and washes his own arms.
Ichabod nearly drops the flannel into the rapidly blackening water. He pulls the plug and turns the water back on so Crane won’t be sitting in his own filth. “I’m an inspector for your case.”
Crane nods and stares at his own hands as though he’s never seen them before. “And yet you didn’t put me back in Arkham?” he makes it a question. The line of his shoulders says he is afraid.
Ichabod takes a comb and starts trying to get the worst of the knots out of Crane’s hair while it’s still got the conditioner in it. “No.” He tries not to pull but if he’s hurting Crane, the doctor doesn’t let on. “And unless you try to escape or kill me, I won’t.” He helps Crane out of the bath and wraps him in the biggest towel he has before digging his first aid kit out of his medicine cabinet. He cleans Crane’s burns as best he can, but they’re almost a month old and it’s too late for that. None of them look infected but some of them are going to scar.
Crane dresses in a pair of Ichabod’s pajamas. As slender as Ichabod is, they’re still a little too big for Crane. The doctor sits at the kitchen table and eats tomato soup out of the can as Ichabod takes down the photos and cleans up the case files.
“Sometimes I remember what it was like not to be afraid,” Crane says into the can. He uses his fingers to scrape out the very last of the soup and licks them clean. The red soup on his lips looks like blood.
*~*~*~*
Ichabod wonders if he should worry about being killed in his own bed. He doesn’t lock Crane into the spare room when he puts the man to bed, adding an extra blanket and leaving the nightlight on. Somehow he’s not sure he cares if he wakes up. If Crane leaves he’s failed anyway and he’d rather not wake up then.
The creak of floorboards and the soft pad of bare feet doesn’t sound threatening. But it’s been so long since Ichabod had company that he wonders if he wouldn’t be glad to hear a thief, if only for some companionship. Crane has the extra blanket wrapped around him and his eyes are wide and bright in the light from the hallway. He lets the blanket fall to the floor and crawls into the bed. When he curls up, one hand fisted in Ichabod’s t-shirt, one calf over Ichabod’s leg, with his head tucked into the crook of Ichabod’s arm and chest it feels like the world has started turning again.
“You remind me of school,” Crane whispers in the dark. “The black and white pictures in the history books.”
It makes sense to Ichabod as he wraps his arms around Crane, feeling him slowly relax. Even with the door shut again he can still make out the blue of Crane’s eyes.
“Go to sleep,” he says.
He means, you remind me of daylight, and clear water, and being alive. He means, you’re beautiful. Ichabod doesn’t know what he means so he doesn’t say anything else. Crane pulls himself up, just enough that he can kiss Ichabod and Ichabod decides he doesn’t need to say anything anyway.
Title: Crooked Shadows
For: fangirl_lizzie, mr_rekkan and gddisgrace
The request: "Sleepy Hollow/Batman crossover, Ichabod/Jonathan"
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine; though if their respective owners feel like making this Christmas the best one ever, I’d not say no.
Notes: banner made by bangx2
Warnings: Overall for the series - violence, self-harm, insanity.
Crooked Shadows I
Crooked Shadows II
Crooked Shadows III
Crooked Shadows IV
Crooked Shadows - Paper Cranes, an interlude
Crooked Shadows V
*~*~*~*
Ichabod is tired. His shoes are waterlogged and he can’t feel his feet from the cold. For all that the temperature has dropped so far he feels damp, more than anything else. Fatigue has drained him of all color, save for the pinkening of his nose and cheeks from where the wind flays his skin raw.
The city twists up above him, misshapen, because the architects of Gotham, hired after the great fire, seemed to have no conception of what skyscrapers should look like. The light catches on odd angles and the occasional gothic spire, until Ichabod is dizzy and he has to look away, back to the filthy puddles saturated with cigarette butts and old newspapers.
He wishes it would snow, just to cover all the dirt and grime. Just so he can pretend that the city is beautiful. Just for a moment. That would be enough to keep him going.
He hates his job some nights; nursing cheap, cold coffee with too much sugar to mask the taste, hands freezing because he left his warmer gloves in his apartment and he’s had to make due with ones for much warmer weather. Some nights it seems like no one in Gotham is good any more and everyone is as dirty and cold as the water seeping through his socks and creeping up his trousers. He wants to go home, play soothing music and sleep in front of the radiator. He does not want to see another old man frozen from the cold, or another hooker beaten and far too young. He wants to draw his shutters and drown himself in opera until he forgets the tiny blue hands of the baby shaken to death early on in his shift and the grim faces of the immigrant women standing over a man riddled with bullet holes.
Ichabod fumbles in his pockets until he finds a crumpled packet of cigarettes. He shakes one out and lights it with numb, clumsy fingers. It’s a habit he’s always hated, but on nights like this he feels like it’s all he can do to keep from screaming himself hoarse.
Last week he shot a man. One of the untreated victims of the gas attack on the Narrows had burst into a small grocery store while he was buying his cigarettes. Wayne enterprises has financed research for a long term cure. Most people have been given the first cure, or the one that came later, to treat those who had been under for longer. It’s Gotham though, it’s the Narrows, and there are those who still haven’t come out of the cracks yet. Ichabod keeps finding what’s left of them. He’d drawn his gun in the little shop but his warning shot hadn’t done anything more than enrage the man. He calls it a warning shot, but really his hands had been shaking too badly to aim straight the first time. Ichabod didn’t miss after that. Not with a mother and her children shopping for sweets, not with the drunk teenagers trying to buy liquor without ID, not with the innocent bystanders. He put five bullets in the man before he stayed down.
The newspaper rubbing up against Ichabod’s leg from the wind has a picture of Jonathan Crane on the front page.
Have you seen this man?
Ichabod has heard all the jokes and all the sly comments about his last name over the past few weeks. He has taken it all with a stoicism he no longer feels. He highly doubts the Batman is going to mistake him for the missing doctor. Sharing a last name with Jonathan Crane does not make them look at all the same. One Gotham police inspector, freezing to death from the cold and the misery, all black and whites except for the slash of red scarf, cannot be mistaken for the sharply handsome doctor. The newspaper’s photo is in black and white, but Ichabod has seen the headshots they took at Arkham. Jonathan is sallow rather than pale and his eyes are the kind of blue that the skies over Gotham never are.
Ichabod wonders if he’s still wandering the city, afraid and more than half mad. He doubts it. In Jonathan’s state he wouldn’t give the doctor more than a few days before someone killed him. Less, now that it’s gotten so cold out.
He tosses his coffee into the nearest overflowing trash can and starts walking back to headquarters. He’s not on patrol and if someone needs him, they can call him at his office.
Ichabod thinks he’s a little crazy himself. He’s got the Crane case evidence strewn all over his kitchen table and pinned up on his walls. A montage of sharply angled cheekbones and huge, haunted eyes. There’s a tale to be told behind the bright reflection of Jonathan’s glasses and cheap suits. Something terrible and cruel that turned such a brilliant young man into the Scarecrow. He spends too much time sitting in the kitchen, staring at the photos, watching the progression from boy, to student, to doctor. He’s woken in the night dreaming of the countryside, cloudless skies that match Jonathan’s eyes and crows circling overhead. Ichabod dreams of straight-jackets and surveillance tapes of a man too afraid to even feel the fear. There are pictures and witness reports of that night in the Narrows, things too horrifying to be believed and Ichabod can feel nothing but pity for the man who caused all that pain and misery.
He passes by addicts and the homeless, shaking his head. He has no change. He needs change. This whole rotten city needs a change.
A crooked shadow lurches out of a doorway. Ichabod steps back into a half-frozen puddle, reaching for his gun.
The shadow is a man. A ragged, dirty creature in a jacket that’s far too big and a hat that’s slipping down over lank, wet hair and a face marred by healing burns. His hands are red as the burns and chapped from the cold. They’re curled into something like claws, as though the ice has set into the bones and made them as brittle as the few icicles that drip from the stop lights. Ichabod lets go of the gun when the man slips and falls. He only has one shoe on and it’s soft canvas, soaked through and nearly black from the grime of the streets.
“Sir?” Ichabod doesn’t step any closer. He has a jagged scar running the length of his ribs that taught him better. “Are you all right?”
The man looks up from his sprawl and Ichabod forgets how to breathe. Staring out from under the hat is Jonathan Crane. The burns and the new pinched hunger can’t disguise his face. He groans and tries to get up. His hands skid in the wet and he crumples again.
Ichabod looks around and there is no one on the street to notice this meeting. No one who will look up from their business of staying alive to care one way or the other. He knows he is going mad because he stoops down next to Crane, out of reach, but close enough that he can smell a month’s worth of filth on the man. “Jonathan? Can you understand me?”
Crane blinks slowly at him and his mouth twists into a sick smile. “Scarecrow.” His voice is as raw as his hands.
“Can you understand me?” Ichabod insists.
The smile fades as Crane shudders and gasps for air, his breath steaming feebly. “Oh god,” he whispers. “Please…help me.”
Ichabod is sworn to do two things. He must serve. He must protect.
He should not be squatting in a squalid gutter with a madman. There is a beautiful woman he left behind in New York who would come if he wrote her. She sends him letters, begging him not to spend Christmas alone, to visit her. He reads between the lines and wonders if it wasn’t love all those years ago before his promotion and transfer. He could go to her and let her bring the sunshine back into his life, coiled in her golden curls and the apple of her cheeks. Ichabod wonders if that is what happiness is.
Happiness is not two weeks from Christmas, numb and bitter, reaching out to drag one of Gotham’s most wanted men to his feet. It is not stripping the coat from Crane to see the straightjacket still on underneath and wrapping his own coat and an arm around the man.
Ichabod does not go to the station. He does not turn Crane in.
To serve and protect.
Jonathan Crane is muttering to himself under his breath and he clings to Ichabod with those clawed hands and Ichabod cannot force his feet to take them to Arkham. He will protect Crane because all the good has been eaten out of the heart of Gotham and maybe, just maybe, if he can save Crane, he can sleep at night. Maybe he can make that sliver of difference that will let him breathe again without feeling like he’s choking to death on the wretchedness of everything.
*~*~*~*
Ichabod’s apartment is warm and dry. He marches Crane straight through to the bathroom where Crane stands, shivering and awkward as Ichabod runs a bath hot enough to steam the mirrors and the little frosted window.
Crane is still whispering to himself and he hasn’t met Ichabod’s eyes since he first fell. Ichabod turns him around and undoes the last few buckles of the straightjacket. He eases the once-white shirt over Crane’s head exposing bruises and old, dried blood. He settles Crane into sitting on the closed lid of the toilet as he kneels on the tiles and removes Crane’s one shoe and what’s left of his socks. Crane’s feet look like his hands, red raw and curled from the cold. Ichabod makes him stand again and slides his trousers down, lifting one foot, then the other, to get them off. Crane doesn’t say anything, he stares at the steam rising from the bath, lips moving silently.
Ichabod rolls up his sleeves and dunks a flannel in the bath. He sits Crane down again and rubs at his hands with the cloth. Crane hisses and jerks them away. He finally looks at Ichabod and the expression on his face is like Ichabod just spat on him.
“It’s going to hurt,” Ichabod explains patiently. “That’s why I didn’t put you in the bath right away. But you have to let me warm your hands and feet.”
Crane eyes him warily but he holds out his hands again. It’s the first sign he’s made that he understands Ichabod at all. The warmth has to hurt, judging by the way Crane’s eyes water, trailing clean tracks through the dirt on his face but eventually Ichabod is able to ease him into the bath. He washes Crane’s hair and the sore skin on his back where the wet straightjacket rubbed and chafed.
“You have pictures of me in your kitchen,” Crane says quietly. He picks up the soap with shaking hands and washes his own arms.
Ichabod nearly drops the flannel into the rapidly blackening water. He pulls the plug and turns the water back on so Crane won’t be sitting in his own filth. “I’m an inspector for your case.”
Crane nods and stares at his own hands as though he’s never seen them before. “And yet you didn’t put me back in Arkham?” he makes it a question. The line of his shoulders says he is afraid.
Ichabod takes a comb and starts trying to get the worst of the knots out of Crane’s hair while it’s still got the conditioner in it. “No.” He tries not to pull but if he’s hurting Crane, the doctor doesn’t let on. “And unless you try to escape or kill me, I won’t.” He helps Crane out of the bath and wraps him in the biggest towel he has before digging his first aid kit out of his medicine cabinet. He cleans Crane’s burns as best he can, but they’re almost a month old and it’s too late for that. None of them look infected but some of them are going to scar.
Crane dresses in a pair of Ichabod’s pajamas. As slender as Ichabod is, they’re still a little too big for Crane. The doctor sits at the kitchen table and eats tomato soup out of the can as Ichabod takes down the photos and cleans up the case files.
“Sometimes I remember what it was like not to be afraid,” Crane says into the can. He uses his fingers to scrape out the very last of the soup and licks them clean. The red soup on his lips looks like blood.
*~*~*~*
Ichabod wonders if he should worry about being killed in his own bed. He doesn’t lock Crane into the spare room when he puts the man to bed, adding an extra blanket and leaving the nightlight on. Somehow he’s not sure he cares if he wakes up. If Crane leaves he’s failed anyway and he’d rather not wake up then.
The creak of floorboards and the soft pad of bare feet doesn’t sound threatening. But it’s been so long since Ichabod had company that he wonders if he wouldn’t be glad to hear a thief, if only for some companionship. Crane has the extra blanket wrapped around him and his eyes are wide and bright in the light from the hallway. He lets the blanket fall to the floor and crawls into the bed. When he curls up, one hand fisted in Ichabod’s t-shirt, one calf over Ichabod’s leg, with his head tucked into the crook of Ichabod’s arm and chest it feels like the world has started turning again.
“You remind me of school,” Crane whispers in the dark. “The black and white pictures in the history books.”
It makes sense to Ichabod as he wraps his arms around Crane, feeling him slowly relax. Even with the door shut again he can still make out the blue of Crane’s eyes.
“Go to sleep,” he says.
He means, you remind me of daylight, and clear water, and being alive. He means, you’re beautiful. Ichabod doesn’t know what he means so he doesn’t say anything else. Crane pulls himself up, just enough that he can kiss Ichabod and Ichabod decides he doesn’t need to say anything anyway.