Liam has gained (perspective) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-10-07 15:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: dc comics, riddler, scarecrow |
Who: Eddie & Crane
What: A strained meeting of friends
Where: New Arkham Asylum
When: Recently!
Warnings/Rating: Other than some awkwardness, nothing.
More than anyone else in Arkham, Eddie needed the least amount of security. Beyond the simple fact that he could break out whenever he felt like it in a number of different ways, Eddie Nigma actually wanted to be there. Still, guards followed him from his cell to the small garden area for his allotted relaxation time and seemed silently grateful they were assigned the little green man and not one of the incurably deranged in the darker parts of the Arkham castle. Of course, they didn’t remember this very island as Eddie did: deteriorating, dark and without an ounce of true therapeutic remedy in sight. It reminded him of how different this Gotham was from his own. Of how strange the world Selina described must have been in comparison to this.
“Do you think it’s always going to be like this?” Eddie turned to ask the guards, voice free of the harshness they must have heard about from reports in Arkham City. They looked puzzled and didn’t answer. “The nice garden. The good doctor?” The green man in grey patient scrubs frowned, rolling the ring around his finger with his thumb. Still nothing but silent shrugs. The guards weren’t interested in anything but having an easy day so they could go home and thank god they weren’t assigned to Blackgate City. “Ten letter word for-” Eddie started, finger slowly raising in the air, but he stopped himself short and turned back around. They weren’t going to play along and even if they did, it wasn’t going to help his tangled, riddled brain any.
The garden was just starting to show signs of fall. Dying summer flowers with loose, green necks dipping their colorful manes down towards the soil. Sycamore trees with leaves that were already curling at the edges. Eddie thought that symbolically this was the worst time to be participating in rehabilitation and he had a terrible vision of it lasting well through the winter months and into the spring. Would Stephanie wait that long? And, when he emerged from the fire, would she even welcome him back into her arms? No, Eddie couldn’t think of it like that. He was trying the hardest to get better. And, in his humble opinion, he was the most likely to get out long before anyone else.
Eddie would have normally found himself lost in an endless maze of worthless what ifs, but he quickly distracted himself with other things. How the air still felt warm in September. What he thought Stephanie was doing right now. How long did he have to wait to see her again. Just as a small pain started to bloom in his chest, Eddie spotted Crane and decided he’d make a good distraction. “Strawman.” Eddie called and walked over, sitting down next to him on a stone bench without asking if he could do so. “They let you spend some time outside for once, too? That’s good.”
Jonathan Crane still wasn't pleased to be trapped behind bars like a common criminal, but he had to admit that New Arkham was a step up from the last place. His days were still spent largely in his room, save for the private and group therapy sessions that were led several times a day, but he had more freedom here. A common room, not that he particularly enjoyed being around other people. The garden. It was better out there, the first hints of fall creeping up and around them, the breeze that promised a cold winter.
He could feel the guards nearby, could feel the uncertainty that all but dripped from them at being in charge of the man who, once upon a time, had been known as Scarecrow. There were similarities between who he was now and who he was supposed to have been then, but there were plenty of differences as well. And, as Crane had been advised by Eddie, he was attempting to take all of this seriously, seeing it as the only real way out of a situation he had, in his opinion, done nothing to deserve.
All in all, the young man was the picture of an ideal inmate. He was quiet, took the medications that were prescribed to him, followed orders without complaint, and generally was well-behaved. But it was taking longer than he would have liked; good behaviour did nothing to wipe away the crimes his predecessor had committed, and Crane was beginning to realise that it was going to be a long journey until things were 'right' again.
When Eddie found him sitting on that stone bench, Crane was hunched over the book in his lap, legs pulled up on the bench with him, glasses sliding down the perch of a long, narrow nose. He was a tall man, long limbed and little more than skin and bone. Slight as he was, the guards that were assigned to him still watched him warily, as though they expected him to attack them at any moment. Truth be told, attacking someone was the last thing he was inclined to do. Physical altercations never ended well, leaving him more a victim than an assailant.
When he heard that voice, familiar in an unfamiliar place, Crane looked up from his book, arched brows as he watched Eddie approach and then sit without invitation. The book was closed, James Joyce's Ulysses, and he turned towards the other man, long fingers twining together. "Don't call me that," Crane said simply, his voice flat. "My name is Jonathan. Or Crane, if you prefer. Not strawman." It was a call back to something he was trying to escape, a shadow that lingered over him uncomfortably, reminding him forever of its presence. "And yes, they let me out. Though they still act as though I'm going to do something wrong the minute they look away." He made a gesture back to the men who stood nearby, arms folded over their broad chests, eyes that he never left him for more than a moment.
Eddie was smaller in comparison. A little green man who managed to have bounce in his step even on the drugs Leland gave him. He didn’t seem to fear or show concern about anything in the Asylum and it was clear he had a hard time wrangling his mind from wandering elsewhere. Mostly back to Stephanie, who he hadn’t seen in a full month. Eddie could get stuck in an endless loop thinking about his pretty bat. Her blonde hair. The smell of her skin. The way she tasted. Without the drugs she would have turned into an unhealthy obsession scribbled between question marks and riddles in his cell. Without the therapy, that strong flame of hope would have been smothered out. No one outside of the island needed to know that, though.
A moment passed and Eddie sized up the young Scarecrow for the first time. Crane flattened his words into conversational pancakes. Eddie gave his a gritty shine like street magic. “You’ll have to get used to people calling you that. These guys see you and see an echo of some psychopath who killed one of their buddies.” Eddie told him wisely, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles. He looked up at the sky. He silently identified the type of commercial airliner that was flying overhead. “Even if I got rid of every last riddle, I’d still be the guy who ran around Gotham in green and question marks.” There wasn’t anything in Eddie’s voice that suggested he was going to give up that green, though. Not all the way.
He glanced at the book in Crane’s hands and then up at the tall scarecrow. “Joyce, huh? Yeah, I can see it. A little meandering for my tastes and a little too crude for yours, but I read computer manuals for fun so what do I know?” Eddie flashed him a smile that was all Gotham streetwise. “What do you get out of it?” The old rogue asked, eyebrows quirked up in true interest. A man of questions always listened to good answers.
Crane understood the things they saw when they looked at him, but that didn't mean he had to like it. "Psychopath," he echoed after a moment, rolling the word around in his thoughts before he unfolded long legs to let his feet come to rest on the brittle, dying grass at his feet. "It seems they picked the worst words possible to describe him. Me. Whoever it was." No matter how many times Crane read the journal, the things penned there before he had hold of it, he couldn't find any familiarity in the words that were written under the name he shared. He could understand the motivations, he could understand the anger that rested there, but he couldn't see saying any of that himself.
But he knew it was there, just beneath the surface. Eddie had drawn that out back in those side-by-side cells. Scare me, came the demand, and he had. It hadn't been as difficult as he might have imagined, the words coming smoothly in a way that almost frightened him, but really, he liked that feeling. Liked the spike in his heart rate as he enjoyed the reactions his words provoked. Even now, when it was just a memory from days prior, he still enjoyed it. Long fingers twisted in the fabric of his state-issued trousers, the only real sign of the restraint that was chipped away in places.
The discussion of the book brought him back though, fingers relaxing, apologising to the fabric as he let his hand rest upon his knee. "My grandmother hated that I read it. I thought I might try again now that she wasn't there to throw her distaste at my face." Because Crane was still alive to be able to do that. There was no grandmother to scorn him, and in a way, he had won that battle, hadn't he?
Eddie thought to ask how Crane would feel if he saw why his grandmother might have wanted to ban such a book. He wondered if Crane was the sort of man who could relate to a character of great empathy or simply pity him. But, the drugs and the quiet autumn garden made Eddie feel mild. Pushing the formerly (or predetermined) strawman again wasn’t something he was all that interested in. The riddled man liked to have a reason for things that he did, after all. “I like a little distaste thrown my way once and a while.” Eddie said pleasantly and then looked up at one of his guards. “I should have brought my knitting. Can you go get it, Bryan? No dice, huh? Alright.” A smart man never stopped asking for favors, even from men who were supposed to knock him out if he tried to escape.
He sat there in the autumn chill and let his thoughts wander back to Gotham and away from the the island. Arkham City got the closest to changing him back to the dangerous criminal he used to be all in the name of survival and when it all ended Eddie couldn’t control all the question marks dotting his mind. Crane saved him from an unraveling panic attack and in the process might have pushed himself too far and for that, the green man was sorry. “Listen Crane,” Eddie said after a moment and turned to the tall, thin man. “Thank you for the other night. I know first hand what happens when my own,” Eddie made a humming noise, “obsessions get pushed a little too far. I shouldn’t have asked you to do the same.”
Crane gave Eddie a long look at the mention of him enjoying a little distaste once in a while, but he refrained from commenting. He knew what those sort of comments got him anymore, a sneer at how difficult he felt his own life to be, how everyone had it hard, and Crane was not an insane man. He knew that continuing to say the same thing over and over and expecting a different response was not a healthy thing to do. So he held his tongue and simply looked out over the garden and the cool sky that hung over him.
The apology that was offered to him was unexpected, so much so that Crane glanced back towards Eddie, brows arched in surprise. He wanted to say that he should be sorry for dragging that out of him, but again, he held his tongue. "It's fine," Crane said instead, even though it wasn't. Because he had gotten a taste of that feeling, of how that fear felt when it was caused by him, and he itched to feel it again. But doing that wasn't going to get him out of here any sooner, wasn't going to do a thing to get people to trust him. "I did what needed to be done. I couldn't have you losing it in there under my watch." Not that Eddie was truly under his watch, no, and not that the man would do the same for him. Jonathan knew better than to expect any sort of niceties from the people who had known who he was before.
Eddie raised a brow in surprise at Crane’s politeness and then smiled. They both knew it wasn’t fine. Eddie understood the twisted wrong that reared its ugly head when someone deliberately pushed him a little too hard. And, though Stephanie insisted on taking some of the burden to help him, a lot of the battle had to be internal. It was an unfair balance between resistance and self preservation. “I’m sure you’re sick of Nigma advice, so I won’t bother.” Eddie knew the strawman wouldn’t understand the importance of holding onto his straw until it started overtaking his personality. He knew that he wasn’t talking to a rogue yet.
“But, I bet it felt good, huh?” Eddie leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and he squinted across the garden towards Gotham. “Doesn’t matter how many drugs they put me on, the riddles are always going to feel good.” He didn’t sound remorseful about it or even guilty. If anything there was a fondness in his voice that hinted towards a true love for his own question marks. But, the truth was that Eddie had managed to find something that felt better than riddles. The trick was learning how to have a little bit of both.
"I'm not sick of your advice," Crane said after a moment, looking away from the other man as he picked his book up. It wasn't a gesture made of dismissal, but something to occupy his hands, to keep him from fidgeting right off the stone bench. Long fingers traced the letters on the cover, slightly raised with the embossed ink. When the conversation went to how it had felt, that it had felt good, Crane pressed the palm of his hand against the front of the book, fingertips turning white with the pressure he exerted.
"It's not supposed to feel good," he said after a moment, his voice tight with tension. "That isn't me. And if it starts feeling good, I'm not going to be able to stop myself from doing it again." Because the truth of the matter was that it had felt good. It felt freeing and exhilarating, that rush of power as he had driven Eddie down some road towards crazy town. Crane had liked it in the worst way possible and he did want to do it again. But those weren't the sort of things he could say here, that he could confess to. They'd never let him out if they knew.
Eddie liked the darkness. Even in this healthy asylum. Even with his blonde bat that he put before everything without asking her to do the same (though she did anyway, bless her). Even with letters from his priest giving him words of encouragement and scripture from the Bible to reflect on. Even with all that he still liked looking right into the darkness to see what flew out. That was the difference between himself and this thin man. Crane liked casting a shadow, but was just as afraid of the dark as his victims. Eddie lifted his head, turned and looked up at the strawman. No, he couldn’t say that the pleasure each one of the rogues got from their kinks could never fully go away. Not in this place. Not in front of the guards. But, it was there, somewhere in his large, dark eyes.
Eddie looked down and then felt strange without having anything to do with his hands. Usually he was knitting or creating or fixing. Now he was here without anything except his thoughts and company. It let his tick tocking mind wander a couple ways at once and for the first time since he arrived in Arkham, he felt like himself.
“You hand in your ticket and you go watch the geek.” Eddie said lyrical as if he were reciting a riddle. And, of course, he was. “Who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak. And says,” His voice lowered with a smirk. “How does it feel to be such a freak? And, you say Impossible! as he hands you a bone.” The riddled man lifted his chin, watching the guards as they went from comfortable to terribly uneasy in seconds. He stood, hands in his pockets and he took a step backwards. “Because something’s happening here. But, you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?” Eddie took another step backwards, waved and then told his guards to escort him to therapy.
Crane didn't say a word as Eddie spoke, dark eyes upon him, taking in every word. He'd go back to his cell later on, write those words down, try to puzzle them out, but riddles weren't his forte, not in the slightest. His jaw was tense, fingers curling against the cover of his book, eyes eventually narrowing as Eddie stepped backwards, away from him, towards the guards that lingered only yards away. That quiet gripped him well after Eddie had left, his gaze becoming fixed on the ground in front of him, the dying blades of grass that clung to the green so tightly.
"I'm not a freak," he muttered quietly, rubbing the heel of his hand over the cover of his book, his agitation clear in the set of his shoulders. Nothing else was said as he got up to his feet, feeling the shadow of the guards come up behind him, following him. Being out in the garden felt too vulnerable just then, and the last thing he wanted to feel was vulnerable. There was fear in that feeling, something that creeped up and over his spine and shoulders, and Crane wanted nothing more than the security of his room, behind closed doors and lock and key where no one could get to him.
He wasn't a freak. He'd prove them all wrong on that.