Batman: Rumplestiltskin 3/10
Title: Stating the Obvious
Series: Rumplestiltskin 3/10(est.)
Rating: PG-13 for violence and boytouching
Disclaimer: I don't even have AC in my apartment. How the hell do you think I could afford to own anything other than these words?
Notes: Getting pornier darker (and longer). Slight movie spoiler
Thanks to meletor_et_al and agent182 for the speedy betas.
*~*~*~*
The walls were crawling again; thick with color and light, moving in ways that walls ought not to. He was having trouble seeing the walls anyway, since the air was so very thick with static, but that wasn’t exactly comforting. Jonathan shut his eyes for a moment, and then looked up at the ceiling. It too was crawling with movement, but the little demons creeping over the stalactites - Jonathan scrubbed at his eyes fitfully and looked again - the little demons which refused to become anything normal, had to be bats. It was the rational explanation, but the rational explanation didn’t stop his body pumping more adrenaline into veins already thick with stale fear. His heart protested weakly, skipping a beat before resuming its regular rhythm. He shut his eyes; they weren’t really there, and if he didn’t look at them, then they would eventually go away. He didn’t have to listen to the horribly skittering, scratchy sounds either.
“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real…”
He was a psychiatrist, of sorts, not a medical doctor, but even in such a delusional state Jonathan knew that palpitations were Step One on the road to a fear-induced heart-attack. What a horribly pathetic way to die - after being beaten on for most of his life, facing up the crime lords and low-lifes of Gotham, taking a straight shot of the gas and then being tazered, to then end it with a heart-attack seemed unreasonably anticlimactic.
Jonathan waited, patiently repeating his mantra until he calmed down somewhat. Deep, soothing breaths and a concentrated effort to relax were wasted, as he abruptly experienced a sudden sense of extreme vertigo. In combination with the after-effects of the tranquilizer it was too much; he rolled onto his side and vomited, mostly dry heaving since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. Tears leaked from under tightly shut eyes and his arms shook with the effort of holding himself upright. He tasted bile and his throat and stomach ached more than his hand and his face and…where were his glasses?
He wiped at his mouth and nose with the back of one hand, taking a moment just to stop and breathe. He’d had them; he’d had them in his hand. Jonathan tentatively opened his eyes and found though the walls continued to move about, changing size and color, the static in the air had thinned somewhat as he peered about on the ground. He found the largest part of the glasses frame and picked it up. An after-image of the path his hand took to reach the frame lingered in the air. Jonathan ignored it, taking stock of the situation.
He was terrified; so no change there. Heart-rate high, hands shaking, teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw ached abominably and sweating through the polo shirt. However, he’d spent large portions of his life in a similar state of fear and hadn’t let it beat him then, so why should he change old habits?
The straight-jacket was gone, but he’d been in it so long that to be without the weight of the straps at his back made him feel nervous all over again. Polo shirt and - good Christ - Jonathan stared at his legs with a mixture of disgust and incredulity. He hoped the smiley-face boxer shorts were a hallucination; they were repulsive. For all that, at least they were clean. He hadn’t bathed in…had it really been two weeks as his captor had suggested? And he was in no doubt that he was a captive here in Hell.
One hand was bandaged and sore and his face smarted something terrible. He was cold, but at least he didn’t feel quite as wretched as he had on the monorail, motion sick and delirious; now he was just bruised and tired. Not exactly a fine state of affairs, but a step upward, at the very least. If it weren’t for the overwhelming fear and the hallucinations it might have felt like any other night in his past. No, that was a lie. That one, foolish, desperate time he’d had the living daylights kicked out of him and had tried a little home-brewed medication to ease the pain. He’d seen such horrible things, and there the idea had been born, he supposed. At the time he’d been too young to conceive he’d ever be a disgraced professor working at Arkham, indeed Arkham had both terrified and fascinated him back then. Now…Now he was half-naked, sick, drugged to the gills and Batman’s captive.
Batman. The very name infuriated him until the moving walls, and the churning of his stomach, the fear and the pain and the madness didn’t matter any more. They were all subsumed by the rage.
Bruce Wayne was Batman. Jonathan would have kicked himself if he didn’t already feel so put upon. He should have known from the start. Everyone should have known. The man appears from the dead and all of a sudden, so does the Bat-Man. It doesn’t take a PhD to state the obvious.
He turned the bits of wire over in his hands. They’d been good frames, expensive, more than he should have spent, more than he could afford on his Arkham wage. But he liked nice things, and a little bit of petty crime paid off nicely enough that he’d been able to indulge his taste in pretty things. The small part of him that was still entirely Jonathan Crane was sneering at the rest of him. Clinging to old glasses like some child with a security blanket? How terribly Jungian. The madness, not the slight eccentricities he’d had before, but the Scarecrow - this was his field, he knew a multiple personality when he saw…lived with it - reminded him that those shards were all that was left of Jonathan Crane as he’d been. And so he clung to them.
He wasn’t chained, and really, he should have been grateful considering how damn sore he felt. It sickened him though; they just left him on a great stone slab as though he was no more dangerous than…well, he’d been thinking of Little Miss Rachel, but that little stunt with the tazer had shorted out his mask and damn near left him unconscious. So perhaps...
Jonathan smiled grimly and pushed himself to his feet. The floor swam wildly under him and the demons - bats - set up a horrible screeching. Give someone a powerful enough weapon and even a creature as fundamentally useless as Bruce Wayne’s bit on the side could become a formidable opponent.
What he needed was a long range weapon. He couldn’t take Wayne by brute force; he’d proven that in a saddening display of uselessness before. However, he wasn’t so broken that he couldn’t pull a trigger. Not that that would help the delusions, or the cackling of the Scarecrow in the back of his head that killing the Bat would not only be the most sensible thing he could ever do, but that it would be the death of Jonathan Crane once and for all, and wouldn’t that be wonderful you pathetic weakling?
The problem was that Batman was Bruce Wayne. Of course it was Wayne; Jonathan’s own terrible luck dictated that it had to be him.
He slid one foot and then the other across the floor, feeling more the madman than ever before, forced into the same hobbling shuffle that so many of his patients had assumed. How could he walk when he couldn’t see the floor for all the static and Things That Weren’t There?
All his foolish little indulgences were coming back to haunt him. So why shouldn’t Wayne be Batman? It was just fitting.
A man has basic needs and since Jonathan was more than used to taking care of them on his own, he had set up a system, which wasn’t quite as neurotic as it sounded. He chose an object to fantasize on based on certain standards of power, intelligence, charisma and looks. The choice was then analyzed. A healthy fantasy life is important, but only if it would have a useful effect on his psyche, or else the entire thing would become self-indulgent and possibly damaging.
For example, porn was out of the question because it made the act base and common, and the people in the magazines were worth neither his time nor his attention.
Ra’s had been an obvious choice but it seemed like a bad idea to think about one’s colleague. It would have placed him in a subordinate situation and he would not play second fiddle, not even for a man like that. This wasn’t to say that Ra’s hadn’t had him over several available surfaces, but there was a rather vast difference between a handful of moments together and a good basis for a fantasy. The latter smacked of fixation.
And now his own damnable luck had managed to catch him up yet again. His last subject had possessed the looks, the charisma, and the power, though he had thought him lacking in intelligence - though that was passable, as it made him look good in comparison and even in one’s fantasy life, that seemed important. He’d chosen, of all the people in Gotham, of all the people on the wretched planet, Bruce Wayne.
He stumbled into a large box which, irritatingly, wouldn’t retain the same size or color for more than two seconds at a time. Jonathan pushed the lid off with a resounding clatter. He had two options, he decided as he felt about inside the box. It looked like rotten meat and maggots crawling about inside, so he shut his eyes and worked by feel alone; if he couldn’t see it then it wasn’t real. He wasn’t afraid of such things, but he was afraid of losing his mind, and this certainly qualified. He focused instead on how furious he was at how his own body and mind had turned against him.
He found something that felt like a gun but when he opened his eyes, all he could see was oozing dead flesh.
“I am not afraid of spoiled hamburgers,” Jonathan muttered, tucking the wire from his glasses into the breast pocket of the polo shirt.
There really wasn’t anything for it, save for his two options; If he didn’t kill Batman, then he was going to have to sleep with Bruce Wayne, just to get the potential for fixation out of his system. Then he could kill the Bat.
For someone so totally insane, that last little thought certainly made the Scarecrow stop and raise an eyebrow. That was the most flawed logic that either of them had come up with in quite some time and it was starting to look like Jonathan could write a second PhD in flawed logic.
An engine revved as the Batmobile came flying through the waterfall to stop only a few yards away from where Jonathan stood. He fumbled with the gun, trying to cock it and hearing enough of a click that he hoped it would work. Jonathan stumbled backwards, nearly tripping over the crate, because no matter how many times he told himself he wasn’t afraid of Batman or his Freudian dream of a car, the things they appeared as were not comforting and had a very vast potential to cause him bodily harm.
The car opened and Batman climbed out slowly, as though he was tired. Jonathan took aim, refusing to be embarrassed about having to hold the gun with two hands. His arms were tired, bruised bone deep and his hands were shaking hard enough that he was worried he might pull the trigger before he was entirely ready.
“Put it down, Crane.” Wayne pulled the mask off, setting it to one side. He sounded as tired as he looked, but under that was a sort of derisive pity.
Jonathan quirked up the side of his mouth in a little half-smile. “I don’t think so.” The shaking of his arms left after-images in his vision so the gun and his body looked like they were haloed. Wayne, thankfully, wasn’t oozing or changing color but retained normality except for the way his eyes were glowing and the fact that his voice would occasionally tunnel into near incomprehensibility.
Wayne strode towards him, cape billowing. How disgustingly overdramatic; it was a pity he’d have to kill the Bat - he’d make a fascinating case study.
Jonathan pulled the trigger.
There was a very satisfying clunk, but nothing else. The gun was snatched out of his hands and he was seized by one arm, tight enough to bruise him further. Wayne pressed the barrel hard against the underside of Jonathan’s jaw, tipping his head back painfully far. He snarled and tried to pull away, but it only hurt more and he felt rather like someone up against the metaphorical immoveable object. The spikes on Wayne’s gauntlets were cutting into his hands, so he stopped trying to push him off that way and instead reverted back to one of his oldest tricks; when in the face of danger: freeze.
“Do you even know what this is?” Wayne demanded, using the gun to move Jonathan’s head so he could peer into his eyes. “Can you even see with your pupils that tiny?”
Jonathan arched one eyebrow. “Is that supposed to be some sort of medical question?” he asked tightly.
Wayne barked out a laugh, pulling the cold metal way from Jonathan’s throat, replacing it instead with his fingers so he could check Jonathan’s pulse. “It’s a grappling gun, without the hook in it. You’d have done better if you’d just thrown it at my head.” He tossed the gun back into the crate, which now looked as though it was filled with fetuses. “You need to sit back down; your pulse is sky high.” He used the punishing grip on Jonathan’s arm to drag him back over to the slab, pushing him down into a sitting position.
“And what have we learned from all this?” Jonathan asked in a sing-song voice. He knew what he’d learned; he didn’t like being hauled about like a sack of potatoes and he didn’t like the pity he kept hearing in Wayne’s voice.
“That you’ll burn up my tranqs in half the normal time,” Wayne replied succinctly.
Jonathan experienced that horrible vertigo again, forcing him to cling to the stone and the soft rustling of the bats overhead turned into whispering voices and taunting faces staring down at him. He rolled onto his side so he could press his body against the stone and still put his hands over his ears so he didn’t have to listen to the horrible things they were saying to him, without feeling like he was going to fall off the edge of the world. Of all the things he didn’t need at the moment, painful reminders of his past from hallucinations were probably right at the top of the list. The nausea he was getting from the vertigo was up there too. Bonus points if it made him sick. Jonathan shut his eyes to block out Wayne’s pitying expression and started humming to himself. It was probably horribly off key, and all he could think of to hum was that terrible music the night-watch used to play at Arkham, on his tinny little radio, but at least he couldn’t hear the voices.
This time, when Wayne caught his wrists in his hands, he wasn’t squeezing as though he could try to break Jonathan’s bones. He gently pulled Jonathan’s hands away from his ears, and his touch helped ease the vertigo, though it did nothing for the voices.
“Ssh.” Wayne ran one thumb over the soft skin on the inside of Jonathan’s wrist. “It’s not real, remember?”
Jonathan’s irritation suddenly outweighed his fear, and abruptly the voices quieted. “I hadn’t realized that,” he said sweetly, as though disdain wasn’t etched into his face. He snatched at this wonderful break of lucidity though, and, taking his opportunities where they were, he continued; “Pants would be nice.” What was supposed to come out cold and sardonic sounded rather petulant instead. He tugged his wrists out of Wayne’s grip, pushing himself to his feet.
Wayne handed him a pair of jeans, and he could already tell that they were going to be embarrassingly large. Jonathan turned his back, pulling the boxer shorts off before dragging the jeans up over his legs. He’d been right, they sat dangerously low and the ends of the legs pooled around his feet.
When he turned around again, Wayne looked a little surprised. “You…”
Jonathan sat back down before he fell over. “That pattern made me feel queasy,” he said by way of explanation. “Also, they’re absurd, and I won’t be made a mockery of.”
Wayne set about ridding himself of his costume whiles Jonathan watched curiously. “How long will you be like this?” Wayne asked, hanging up his gloves and mask and setting into the numerous Kevlar belts and straps and buckles.
Jonathan shrugged, a bitter smile twisting his mouth. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“Then why aren’t you dead?”
Jonathan pulled the wire out of his pocket, turning it over in his hands. “Now, now, that’s not a very nice way of putting things,” he chided softly. “But then I suppose I should be grateful that you’re not pulling my hair, or throwing me about this time. Tell me, Batman, does it make you feel powerful to hurt someone weaker than you?”
Wayne made a face. “Don’t be an ass, Crane. I intend to use my advantages against you, as I’m sure you intend to do in return. You may not be able to wrestle me but you’re not powerless, and don’t think I’m foolish enough to forget that.”
It shouldn’t have made him so pleased to hear a backhanded compliment form the Bat, but Jonathan smiled again. It wasn’t a nice smile, and he knew it, but a nice smile would have shown his susceptibility to such flattery and that was not something he wanted to share with Wayne. “And there you have it. You’ve just answered your own question.” He found he had slipped back into the same lecturing tone of voice he used to use back in his professor days.
“You’re not dead because you’re not powerless?”
Jonathan tapped one finger against his temple. “Getting warmer…Come now, I should have thought that Batman would be good at puzzles, or are you really just here for the action?”
“My God, you are arrogant, aren’t you?” Wayne said it with a kind of appreciation, though. “You think you’re that much smarter than the rest of Gotham that you can retain your sanity when the entirety of the Narrows couldn’t?”
“The proof,” Jonathan drawled, “is in the pudding, my dear Bat.”
Wayne, the batsuit peeled off to the waist, toweled himself off a little and Jonathan quickly resumed his examination of his broken glasses. Well-tailored suits could hide a multitude of sins, but in Wayne’s case the suits themselves had committed the sin by hiding the body underneath. Jonathan chewed on his bottom lip, absently licking the blood from the splits. His estimations of Bruce Wayne had been off, and that, in turn, was throwing him out of balance. He snuck a glance out of the corner of his eyes and couldn’t help the grin that cracked his lips further.
“Snap.” Where he had bruises on his biceps forming the shape of Batman’s hands, Wayne had his own purple and black decorations. Wayne looked over, confused, but Jonathan only licked at the blood on his mouth and grinned to himself.
Wayne set the towel down and finished changing into a pair of jeans and t-shirt. “I’m going to set up somewhere for you to stay down here. So you can be good and sit there quietly, or I can make you stay. Which one, Crane?”
Jonathan sighed heavily. “You know, I do have a doctorate. If you’re going to call me ‘Crane’ you could at least do me the courtesy of calling me Doctor Crane.”
“Jonathan, are you going to sit still or-”
Alfred made a rather timely return bearing the straight-jacket. “Master Wayne, the rest of the supplies have arriv- Good Lord, he’s awake. I apologize, I had no idea.”
Wayne took the jacket. “That’s all right; he should still be out. Could you keep an eye on him while I bring everything down?” He held it out to Jonathan, indicating he should put his arms into the sleeves.
Jonathan considered refusing, but the ache was really starting to set in and he didn’t feel like being hit again. And, as loathe as he was to admit it, he’d grown used to having it on and he felt odd without it. Not as odd as he felt having Wayne address him by his first name though. That was something of a curve-ball. He could understand why Wayne wouldn’t call him Doctor - it was a power issue - but ‘Jonathan’? He did as he was told and put his arms in the sleeves so Wayne could strap him back in.
The fact that he felt more secure that way irritated him.
“Bring me back some cigarettes,” he said, more of a demand than a request, but Wayne nodded nevertheless and then vanished up an elevator. “So,” Jonathan said to Alfred, “Bruce Wayne is the Bat-man. That must be something of a chore for you.”
Alfred sniffed and ignored him.
He didn’t like being ignored, but to try and carry on a conversation would seem a little desperate, so he sat, polo shirt ill-fitting under the jacket, and tried not to let the creeping boredom make him slip back into fear. Thankfully Wayne returned (then went away again, and back, and again) with all the things he’d ordered. Alfred made a hasty exit.
“The builders laughed when I asked to buy a pack. I guess it doesn’t really fit my image.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know you smoked.” Bruce lit a cigarette for him and held it to Jonathan’s lips.
Jonathan took a deep drag, coughed and choked on the smoke and gave Bruce a sickly smile. “I don’t. Didn’t.” He tried another, smaller drag and managed not to make such an ass out of himself, actually managing to blow a thin stream of smoke out of his nose. “I thought it might be an apt time to take it up, seeing as I’ll have nothing better to do with my time.”
He took a third hit and then - distracted by the smell of Wayne’s cologne and the lingering scent of his sweat, and the sudden kindness he was being shown - he allowed a rather terrible lapse in judgment to occur.
Jonathan leaned over; overbalancing in the straightjacket and managing to turn what should have been reasonably smooth into an awkward, clumsy disaster. Their lips met with bruising force, teeth clicking together, then Jonathan’s neck refused to hold up his body via his mouth, and he toppled over entirely. He landed on the ground at Bruce Wayne’s feet. There had been less humiliating moments in his life.
Series: Rumplestiltskin 3/10(est.)
Rating: PG-13 for violence and boytouching
Disclaimer: I don't even have AC in my apartment. How the hell do you think I could afford to own anything other than these words?
Notes: Getting pornier darker (and longer). Slight movie spoiler
Thanks to meletor_et_al and agent182 for the speedy betas.
*~*~*~*
The walls were crawling again; thick with color and light, moving in ways that walls ought not to. He was having trouble seeing the walls anyway, since the air was so very thick with static, but that wasn’t exactly comforting. Jonathan shut his eyes for a moment, and then looked up at the ceiling. It too was crawling with movement, but the little demons creeping over the stalactites - Jonathan scrubbed at his eyes fitfully and looked again - the little demons which refused to become anything normal, had to be bats. It was the rational explanation, but the rational explanation didn’t stop his body pumping more adrenaline into veins already thick with stale fear. His heart protested weakly, skipping a beat before resuming its regular rhythm. He shut his eyes; they weren’t really there, and if he didn’t look at them, then they would eventually go away. He didn’t have to listen to the horribly skittering, scratchy sounds either.
“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real…”
He was a psychiatrist, of sorts, not a medical doctor, but even in such a delusional state Jonathan knew that palpitations were Step One on the road to a fear-induced heart-attack. What a horribly pathetic way to die - after being beaten on for most of his life, facing up the crime lords and low-lifes of Gotham, taking a straight shot of the gas and then being tazered, to then end it with a heart-attack seemed unreasonably anticlimactic.
Jonathan waited, patiently repeating his mantra until he calmed down somewhat. Deep, soothing breaths and a concentrated effort to relax were wasted, as he abruptly experienced a sudden sense of extreme vertigo. In combination with the after-effects of the tranquilizer it was too much; he rolled onto his side and vomited, mostly dry heaving since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. Tears leaked from under tightly shut eyes and his arms shook with the effort of holding himself upright. He tasted bile and his throat and stomach ached more than his hand and his face and…where were his glasses?
He wiped at his mouth and nose with the back of one hand, taking a moment just to stop and breathe. He’d had them; he’d had them in his hand. Jonathan tentatively opened his eyes and found though the walls continued to move about, changing size and color, the static in the air had thinned somewhat as he peered about on the ground. He found the largest part of the glasses frame and picked it up. An after-image of the path his hand took to reach the frame lingered in the air. Jonathan ignored it, taking stock of the situation.
He was terrified; so no change there. Heart-rate high, hands shaking, teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw ached abominably and sweating through the polo shirt. However, he’d spent large portions of his life in a similar state of fear and hadn’t let it beat him then, so why should he change old habits?
The straight-jacket was gone, but he’d been in it so long that to be without the weight of the straps at his back made him feel nervous all over again. Polo shirt and - good Christ - Jonathan stared at his legs with a mixture of disgust and incredulity. He hoped the smiley-face boxer shorts were a hallucination; they were repulsive. For all that, at least they were clean. He hadn’t bathed in…had it really been two weeks as his captor had suggested? And he was in no doubt that he was a captive here in Hell.
One hand was bandaged and sore and his face smarted something terrible. He was cold, but at least he didn’t feel quite as wretched as he had on the monorail, motion sick and delirious; now he was just bruised and tired. Not exactly a fine state of affairs, but a step upward, at the very least. If it weren’t for the overwhelming fear and the hallucinations it might have felt like any other night in his past. No, that was a lie. That one, foolish, desperate time he’d had the living daylights kicked out of him and had tried a little home-brewed medication to ease the pain. He’d seen such horrible things, and there the idea had been born, he supposed. At the time he’d been too young to conceive he’d ever be a disgraced professor working at Arkham, indeed Arkham had both terrified and fascinated him back then. Now…Now he was half-naked, sick, drugged to the gills and Batman’s captive.
Batman. The very name infuriated him until the moving walls, and the churning of his stomach, the fear and the pain and the madness didn’t matter any more. They were all subsumed by the rage.
Bruce Wayne was Batman. Jonathan would have kicked himself if he didn’t already feel so put upon. He should have known from the start. Everyone should have known. The man appears from the dead and all of a sudden, so does the Bat-Man. It doesn’t take a PhD to state the obvious.
He turned the bits of wire over in his hands. They’d been good frames, expensive, more than he should have spent, more than he could afford on his Arkham wage. But he liked nice things, and a little bit of petty crime paid off nicely enough that he’d been able to indulge his taste in pretty things. The small part of him that was still entirely Jonathan Crane was sneering at the rest of him. Clinging to old glasses like some child with a security blanket? How terribly Jungian. The madness, not the slight eccentricities he’d had before, but the Scarecrow - this was his field, he knew a multiple personality when he saw…lived with it - reminded him that those shards were all that was left of Jonathan Crane as he’d been. And so he clung to them.
He wasn’t chained, and really, he should have been grateful considering how damn sore he felt. It sickened him though; they just left him on a great stone slab as though he was no more dangerous than…well, he’d been thinking of Little Miss Rachel, but that little stunt with the tazer had shorted out his mask and damn near left him unconscious. So perhaps...
Jonathan smiled grimly and pushed himself to his feet. The floor swam wildly under him and the demons - bats - set up a horrible screeching. Give someone a powerful enough weapon and even a creature as fundamentally useless as Bruce Wayne’s bit on the side could become a formidable opponent.
What he needed was a long range weapon. He couldn’t take Wayne by brute force; he’d proven that in a saddening display of uselessness before. However, he wasn’t so broken that he couldn’t pull a trigger. Not that that would help the delusions, or the cackling of the Scarecrow in the back of his head that killing the Bat would not only be the most sensible thing he could ever do, but that it would be the death of Jonathan Crane once and for all, and wouldn’t that be wonderful you pathetic weakling?
The problem was that Batman was Bruce Wayne. Of course it was Wayne; Jonathan’s own terrible luck dictated that it had to be him.
He slid one foot and then the other across the floor, feeling more the madman than ever before, forced into the same hobbling shuffle that so many of his patients had assumed. How could he walk when he couldn’t see the floor for all the static and Things That Weren’t There?
All his foolish little indulgences were coming back to haunt him. So why shouldn’t Wayne be Batman? It was just fitting.
A man has basic needs and since Jonathan was more than used to taking care of them on his own, he had set up a system, which wasn’t quite as neurotic as it sounded. He chose an object to fantasize on based on certain standards of power, intelligence, charisma and looks. The choice was then analyzed. A healthy fantasy life is important, but only if it would have a useful effect on his psyche, or else the entire thing would become self-indulgent and possibly damaging.
For example, porn was out of the question because it made the act base and common, and the people in the magazines were worth neither his time nor his attention.
Ra’s had been an obvious choice but it seemed like a bad idea to think about one’s colleague. It would have placed him in a subordinate situation and he would not play second fiddle, not even for a man like that. This wasn’t to say that Ra’s hadn’t had him over several available surfaces, but there was a rather vast difference between a handful of moments together and a good basis for a fantasy. The latter smacked of fixation.
And now his own damnable luck had managed to catch him up yet again. His last subject had possessed the looks, the charisma, and the power, though he had thought him lacking in intelligence - though that was passable, as it made him look good in comparison and even in one’s fantasy life, that seemed important. He’d chosen, of all the people in Gotham, of all the people on the wretched planet, Bruce Wayne.
He stumbled into a large box which, irritatingly, wouldn’t retain the same size or color for more than two seconds at a time. Jonathan pushed the lid off with a resounding clatter. He had two options, he decided as he felt about inside the box. It looked like rotten meat and maggots crawling about inside, so he shut his eyes and worked by feel alone; if he couldn’t see it then it wasn’t real. He wasn’t afraid of such things, but he was afraid of losing his mind, and this certainly qualified. He focused instead on how furious he was at how his own body and mind had turned against him.
He found something that felt like a gun but when he opened his eyes, all he could see was oozing dead flesh.
“I am not afraid of spoiled hamburgers,” Jonathan muttered, tucking the wire from his glasses into the breast pocket of the polo shirt.
There really wasn’t anything for it, save for his two options; If he didn’t kill Batman, then he was going to have to sleep with Bruce Wayne, just to get the potential for fixation out of his system. Then he could kill the Bat.
For someone so totally insane, that last little thought certainly made the Scarecrow stop and raise an eyebrow. That was the most flawed logic that either of them had come up with in quite some time and it was starting to look like Jonathan could write a second PhD in flawed logic.
An engine revved as the Batmobile came flying through the waterfall to stop only a few yards away from where Jonathan stood. He fumbled with the gun, trying to cock it and hearing enough of a click that he hoped it would work. Jonathan stumbled backwards, nearly tripping over the crate, because no matter how many times he told himself he wasn’t afraid of Batman or his Freudian dream of a car, the things they appeared as were not comforting and had a very vast potential to cause him bodily harm.
The car opened and Batman climbed out slowly, as though he was tired. Jonathan took aim, refusing to be embarrassed about having to hold the gun with two hands. His arms were tired, bruised bone deep and his hands were shaking hard enough that he was worried he might pull the trigger before he was entirely ready.
“Put it down, Crane.” Wayne pulled the mask off, setting it to one side. He sounded as tired as he looked, but under that was a sort of derisive pity.
Jonathan quirked up the side of his mouth in a little half-smile. “I don’t think so.” The shaking of his arms left after-images in his vision so the gun and his body looked like they were haloed. Wayne, thankfully, wasn’t oozing or changing color but retained normality except for the way his eyes were glowing and the fact that his voice would occasionally tunnel into near incomprehensibility.
Wayne strode towards him, cape billowing. How disgustingly overdramatic; it was a pity he’d have to kill the Bat - he’d make a fascinating case study.
Jonathan pulled the trigger.
There was a very satisfying clunk, but nothing else. The gun was snatched out of his hands and he was seized by one arm, tight enough to bruise him further. Wayne pressed the barrel hard against the underside of Jonathan’s jaw, tipping his head back painfully far. He snarled and tried to pull away, but it only hurt more and he felt rather like someone up against the metaphorical immoveable object. The spikes on Wayne’s gauntlets were cutting into his hands, so he stopped trying to push him off that way and instead reverted back to one of his oldest tricks; when in the face of danger: freeze.
“Do you even know what this is?” Wayne demanded, using the gun to move Jonathan’s head so he could peer into his eyes. “Can you even see with your pupils that tiny?”
Jonathan arched one eyebrow. “Is that supposed to be some sort of medical question?” he asked tightly.
Wayne barked out a laugh, pulling the cold metal way from Jonathan’s throat, replacing it instead with his fingers so he could check Jonathan’s pulse. “It’s a grappling gun, without the hook in it. You’d have done better if you’d just thrown it at my head.” He tossed the gun back into the crate, which now looked as though it was filled with fetuses. “You need to sit back down; your pulse is sky high.” He used the punishing grip on Jonathan’s arm to drag him back over to the slab, pushing him down into a sitting position.
“And what have we learned from all this?” Jonathan asked in a sing-song voice. He knew what he’d learned; he didn’t like being hauled about like a sack of potatoes and he didn’t like the pity he kept hearing in Wayne’s voice.
“That you’ll burn up my tranqs in half the normal time,” Wayne replied succinctly.
Jonathan experienced that horrible vertigo again, forcing him to cling to the stone and the soft rustling of the bats overhead turned into whispering voices and taunting faces staring down at him. He rolled onto his side so he could press his body against the stone and still put his hands over his ears so he didn’t have to listen to the horrible things they were saying to him, without feeling like he was going to fall off the edge of the world. Of all the things he didn’t need at the moment, painful reminders of his past from hallucinations were probably right at the top of the list. The nausea he was getting from the vertigo was up there too. Bonus points if it made him sick. Jonathan shut his eyes to block out Wayne’s pitying expression and started humming to himself. It was probably horribly off key, and all he could think of to hum was that terrible music the night-watch used to play at Arkham, on his tinny little radio, but at least he couldn’t hear the voices.
This time, when Wayne caught his wrists in his hands, he wasn’t squeezing as though he could try to break Jonathan’s bones. He gently pulled Jonathan’s hands away from his ears, and his touch helped ease the vertigo, though it did nothing for the voices.
“Ssh.” Wayne ran one thumb over the soft skin on the inside of Jonathan’s wrist. “It’s not real, remember?”
Jonathan’s irritation suddenly outweighed his fear, and abruptly the voices quieted. “I hadn’t realized that,” he said sweetly, as though disdain wasn’t etched into his face. He snatched at this wonderful break of lucidity though, and, taking his opportunities where they were, he continued; “Pants would be nice.” What was supposed to come out cold and sardonic sounded rather petulant instead. He tugged his wrists out of Wayne’s grip, pushing himself to his feet.
Wayne handed him a pair of jeans, and he could already tell that they were going to be embarrassingly large. Jonathan turned his back, pulling the boxer shorts off before dragging the jeans up over his legs. He’d been right, they sat dangerously low and the ends of the legs pooled around his feet.
When he turned around again, Wayne looked a little surprised. “You…”
Jonathan sat back down before he fell over. “That pattern made me feel queasy,” he said by way of explanation. “Also, they’re absurd, and I won’t be made a mockery of.”
Wayne set about ridding himself of his costume whiles Jonathan watched curiously. “How long will you be like this?” Wayne asked, hanging up his gloves and mask and setting into the numerous Kevlar belts and straps and buckles.
Jonathan shrugged, a bitter smile twisting his mouth. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“Then why aren’t you dead?”
Jonathan pulled the wire out of his pocket, turning it over in his hands. “Now, now, that’s not a very nice way of putting things,” he chided softly. “But then I suppose I should be grateful that you’re not pulling my hair, or throwing me about this time. Tell me, Batman, does it make you feel powerful to hurt someone weaker than you?”
Wayne made a face. “Don’t be an ass, Crane. I intend to use my advantages against you, as I’m sure you intend to do in return. You may not be able to wrestle me but you’re not powerless, and don’t think I’m foolish enough to forget that.”
It shouldn’t have made him so pleased to hear a backhanded compliment form the Bat, but Jonathan smiled again. It wasn’t a nice smile, and he knew it, but a nice smile would have shown his susceptibility to such flattery and that was not something he wanted to share with Wayne. “And there you have it. You’ve just answered your own question.” He found he had slipped back into the same lecturing tone of voice he used to use back in his professor days.
“You’re not dead because you’re not powerless?”
Jonathan tapped one finger against his temple. “Getting warmer…Come now, I should have thought that Batman would be good at puzzles, or are you really just here for the action?”
“My God, you are arrogant, aren’t you?” Wayne said it with a kind of appreciation, though. “You think you’re that much smarter than the rest of Gotham that you can retain your sanity when the entirety of the Narrows couldn’t?”
“The proof,” Jonathan drawled, “is in the pudding, my dear Bat.”
Wayne, the batsuit peeled off to the waist, toweled himself off a little and Jonathan quickly resumed his examination of his broken glasses. Well-tailored suits could hide a multitude of sins, but in Wayne’s case the suits themselves had committed the sin by hiding the body underneath. Jonathan chewed on his bottom lip, absently licking the blood from the splits. His estimations of Bruce Wayne had been off, and that, in turn, was throwing him out of balance. He snuck a glance out of the corner of his eyes and couldn’t help the grin that cracked his lips further.
“Snap.” Where he had bruises on his biceps forming the shape of Batman’s hands, Wayne had his own purple and black decorations. Wayne looked over, confused, but Jonathan only licked at the blood on his mouth and grinned to himself.
Wayne set the towel down and finished changing into a pair of jeans and t-shirt. “I’m going to set up somewhere for you to stay down here. So you can be good and sit there quietly, or I can make you stay. Which one, Crane?”
Jonathan sighed heavily. “You know, I do have a doctorate. If you’re going to call me ‘Crane’ you could at least do me the courtesy of calling me Doctor Crane.”
“Jonathan, are you going to sit still or-”
Alfred made a rather timely return bearing the straight-jacket. “Master Wayne, the rest of the supplies have arriv- Good Lord, he’s awake. I apologize, I had no idea.”
Wayne took the jacket. “That’s all right; he should still be out. Could you keep an eye on him while I bring everything down?” He held it out to Jonathan, indicating he should put his arms into the sleeves.
Jonathan considered refusing, but the ache was really starting to set in and he didn’t feel like being hit again. And, as loathe as he was to admit it, he’d grown used to having it on and he felt odd without it. Not as odd as he felt having Wayne address him by his first name though. That was something of a curve-ball. He could understand why Wayne wouldn’t call him Doctor - it was a power issue - but ‘Jonathan’? He did as he was told and put his arms in the sleeves so Wayne could strap him back in.
The fact that he felt more secure that way irritated him.
“Bring me back some cigarettes,” he said, more of a demand than a request, but Wayne nodded nevertheless and then vanished up an elevator. “So,” Jonathan said to Alfred, “Bruce Wayne is the Bat-man. That must be something of a chore for you.”
Alfred sniffed and ignored him.
He didn’t like being ignored, but to try and carry on a conversation would seem a little desperate, so he sat, polo shirt ill-fitting under the jacket, and tried not to let the creeping boredom make him slip back into fear. Thankfully Wayne returned (then went away again, and back, and again) with all the things he’d ordered. Alfred made a hasty exit.
“The builders laughed when I asked to buy a pack. I guess it doesn’t really fit my image.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know you smoked.” Bruce lit a cigarette for him and held it to Jonathan’s lips.
Jonathan took a deep drag, coughed and choked on the smoke and gave Bruce a sickly smile. “I don’t. Didn’t.” He tried another, smaller drag and managed not to make such an ass out of himself, actually managing to blow a thin stream of smoke out of his nose. “I thought it might be an apt time to take it up, seeing as I’ll have nothing better to do with my time.”
He took a third hit and then - distracted by the smell of Wayne’s cologne and the lingering scent of his sweat, and the sudden kindness he was being shown - he allowed a rather terrible lapse in judgment to occur.
Jonathan leaned over; overbalancing in the straightjacket and managing to turn what should have been reasonably smooth into an awkward, clumsy disaster. Their lips met with bruising force, teeth clicking together, then Jonathan’s neck refused to hold up his body via his mouth, and he toppled over entirely. He landed on the ground at Bruce Wayne’s feet. There had been less humiliating moments in his life.