Laurel Lance (i_crylikeabird) wrote in we_coexist, @ 2013-10-12 22:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | dinah lance, jonathan crane, zz:status complete |
Coincidental Meetings (Dinah/Jonathan log)
Even superheroes sometimes got sick. Dinah wasn’t suffering from the plague by any means, but she was definitely coming down with something. She felt achy and a little sniffly and she really wanted to find some sort of medicine to nip this in the bud before it got worse. And preferably before the germs spread to Dean. Sure, she could have asked him to come and pick up medicine for her but she wanted to take care of this on her own. Besides, she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to take but was pretty sure she’d know it when she saw it. She wandered through the cold and flu aisle, going over every single product twice and trying to find some sort of miracle cure. Or something along those lines.
After all, who had time to be sick? There was a City to look after, a flower shop needing her attention, and not to mention that if she had to take time off from those things, she could think of quite a few ways that she’d rather spend that time and none of those involved being half-lucid on the couch while watching really bad TV.
----
Jonathan’s already too slender body was skeletal, a fact not hidden by the heavy coat he had wrapped double around him. The fact it was a bright green coat indicated it clearly wasn’t his, and more than likely belonged to his missing husband. He was leaning against the end of the aisle, waiting for the head pharmacist to return with his order.
Blue eyes watched Di as she went up and down the aisle, snorting. Obviously the annoying bird was sick and rather...lost amongst the millions over over the counter products that did nothing but waste money and taste like crap.
--
Dinah heard the snort and looked up. With a start, she recognized the Scarecrow. She frowned, but he’d clearly seen her. She moved a little closer, muscles tensing up for a potential fight. She wasn’t at her best, but that didn’t mean that she was just going to run the other way and leave these people to anything Jonathan had planned.
“Dr. Crane. What are you doing here?” she greeted the thin man.
The green coat was noted and she certainly had her guesses as to who it might belong to. The pairing of Scarecrow and the Riddler didn’t put her mind at ease in the slightest, though she had some hope that finding love might soften them both. Not much, but if someone was capable of love, one would hope that they might find their way to being capable of compassion eventually.
----
“I am here to pick up sensitive medications for the Asylum that can’t be trusted to anyone else,” Jonathan said, turning to fully look at her. “I would rather get my full order then track down whatever drug addict stole my codeine.”
At least at the asylum he usually knew which addict took his medications, and both of them had the initials of E. N.
“You seem to be ill, Litt...Ms. Lance.” It was one of the first times Jonathan had actually used her name, rather than Scarecrow’s mocking ‘Little Bird’. He just...wasn’t in the mood to poke at her right now. “Cold or flu?”
--
That was a surprise. That use of her name. Dinah looked at Crane, a little bit of confusion registering on her face. She also wasn’t sure how to react to the question. Did she answer? Was it going to give him some sort of edge over her? Then again, it wasn’t as though she could hide the fact that she was sick. She made a face, because as much as she could handle, even superheroes hated getting knocked out by something as silly as the common cold.
“I think just a cold. Trying to find whatever medication it is that’s supposed to nip it in the bud.”
She didn’t comment on the prescriptions that Crane was picking up, because she just wasn’t feeling up to a fight and she didn’t want to think about what sort of mixing he might do with whatever controlled substances he was able to get his hands on.
----
Jonathan move past her, down the aisle and took three bottles off the shelf along with a box of pills, handing them to her. “Take half doses of the two red ones together, one of the pills and four hours later the ugly green one. You’ll sleep for a day and be on the mend.” He stated, tilting his head as he held out the medications, waiting to see if she would take them or reject them.
He wouldn’t fault her if she turned him down, though she had clearly seen him take them from the shelves without time to doctor them into anything fun or interesting. “They never put enough active ingredient in these to be truly effective.” he added as an explanation for why he was recommending so much.
He was still a doctor after all...even if he didn’t often follow the hippocratic oath.
--
Dinah considered the offered medications. Crane was a doctor, but that didn’t mean she trusted him to not try to kill her. All the same, she felt crappy enough that she just took the offered meds. She could always check later to make sure that there wasn’t something about the suggested combination that would kill her or have some sort of adverse effect.
“Why would you help me?” she asked, not in a combative way so much as simply stating a question she was curious about.
She didn’t point out that it most likely benefitted him as well as the Riddler to have her off the streets for a few days. She was sure that he’d thought of it himself but if he hadn’t, she certainly didn’t want to put the idea in his head.
----
“Because I have nothing better to do,” Jonathan said in a cold tone, though there was a hint of something more...a deep sadness and depression. “It’s either this or throw myself off the clock tower at Arkham and I can always do that later.”
--
The sense of hopelessness Dinah felt in that statement caught her attention. She looked at Jonathan, still trying to figure out if he was joking or not. He certainly didn’t seem like himself, for whatever reason that was.
“Is everything alright?” she asked.
Even as the words left her mouth, she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d really just asked that.
----
Jonathan laughed, a cold, hard, brittle sound, something that used to carry along Gotham’s dark streets as Scarecrow destroyed great swaths of minds...but it was hollow, the joy and happiness he used to have in his laughter missing. “It is far from alright,” he said, before closing his eyes, wrapping his arms around his thin chest. “I...have done something bad.”
He was a thief and a murder, someone who tore at minds and bodies as if they were playthings to be discarded at a whim. Bad was his stock and trade. This...this was so much more than ‘bad’.
“I don’t know how to fix it.”
--
Uh oh. Coming from Scarecrow, those words weren’t a comfort. Dinah tried to quell the quick surge of worry as she watched Jonathan, her mind running through a few ‘worst case’ scenarios as to what he could have done that had him feeling like this. Finally, she worked up the courage to simply ask.
“What did you do?” Her voice only held a small trace of suspicion but mostly she worked to keep her tone neutral.
----
Jonathan stared at her silently for a moment, wondering how much she knew of him...of Scarecrow, how much she knew of the fact they weren’t exactly one and the same, before he looked away. “I let someone hurt Edward...badly.”
Okay, so he hadn’t exactly let ‘Crow do it. He didn’t really have a choice in the matter when his other smothered him so deep he couldn’t even tell he wasn’t conscious, but the fact remained, he allowed his other half to gain that much control, to get that close to something so precious to him.
And now...Edward was God knew where, probably dead, and he couldn’t make it better and it hurt so badly to be without him. It so much that he wanted to shut it all out and never feel again.
--
Dinah didn’t know about the Scarecrow’s split personality, in fact. She frowned, still trying to fit the obvious regret that Jonathan felt for Edward getting hurt into her view of the man.
“Who? And is he okay?”
Of course she was concerned. She might not have any love lost for the villains of Gotham, but that didn’t mean that she wished them dead. Except maybe the Joker. After what he’d done to Jake, there had been a lot of dark thoughts and she wasn’t all that broken up over the fact that Jesse had turned him to stone for the time being.
----
“Scarecrow. And I...don’t know,” he whispered, looking away from Dinah. “There was so much blood, I don’t know how he could be, but I can’t...there’s no body...no new graves on Arkham’s grounds…”
Something he had search restlessly for, which would normally be an easy job, but with the way the City constantly shifted things around, he ended up always checking the same places...and for some reason he ended every night at Amadeus Arkham’s headstone, staring down at it, thinking.
“Effie is missing as well, but if she was dead, I’m sure the Hulk would have come to visit Arkham already.”
--
“Scarecrow? But you’re-” Dinah cut herself off as it started to dawn on her.
He wouldn’t be the first with a fractured personality. He certainly wasn’t completely sane, that part wasn’t news. This just… explained a little too much, if she was being honest.
Effie too. Dinah knew the name, even if Enigma had refused to use it for years. That Scarecrow-Crane, she corrected herself-was using it now made very little sense, but that didn’t matter as much. Dinah had grown to believe that the redhead might get back on the right path and she’d gotten attached. Knowing that Enigma was missing and possibly injured as well as Edward made her stomach turn.
“When did it happen?”
----
“A week ago? Maybe more? I...am unsure. The last thing I clearly remember is arguing with Effie over the unicorn and then..waking up in the bowels of Arkham, covered in blood with neither Nigma in-sight.”
And no word since then.
--
A week. When people were injured or went missing, every minute counted. If they’d been gone a week and were gravely injured and on their own, there wasn’t a lot of chance. However, if they had simply escaped, they might be hiding out to stay safe from the Scarecrow. She pursed her lips, silently vowing to look for the pair. That didn’t mean that she’d tell Jonathan if she found them safe. As much as she actually felt bad for him now, she didn’t want to put anyone in more danger.
“Have you considered getting help?” she asked softly. It was a delicate question, but if Crane actually felt remorse for the Scarecrow’s actions, perhaps it was something he’d considered himself. Then again, since he was the head of the asylum, Dinah didn't have a whole lot of hope for the quality of mental health professionals available to the people of the City.
----
“From who? Myself?” he asked, his tone dry before shaking his head. “I had...medication at Arkham...our Arkham, but they kept going missing. Scarecrow has been with me since I was a child, he knows what they would do to him from the few times he paid attention in med school...he..removes them.”
And even here, in the City, a lot of the drugs that would help treat his disorder, to silence Scarecrow were missing from the shelves, making it incredibly hard to treat actual patients when Scarecrow wouldn’t say what he did with them. For something that had no real body and no real form...he was very talented at making things vanish.
Plus...Jonathan was scared. To be rid of Scarecrow, to be free of him...he had never really known that. He had no idea what to do or even who he would be without his lifelong companion. It honestly terrified him, to face the world without Scarecrow’s silent presence.
--
“There isn’t anyone else in the City who could help you?” Dinah asked, frowning.
If Jonathan was telling the truth, she hated the idea of someone being bound to an alternate personality that was so… for lack of a better word, evil. The Scarecrow that she’d encountered on multiple occasions had held little regard for humanity and had seemed focused on causing as much anguish as possible. And now it seemed as if he might have taken the only person that Dinah had ever seen Jonathan show affection for.
She felt at a loss to help in this situation. This… wasn’t her department. Redemption, sure. Beating bad guys into submission, absolutely. But helping someone with a genuine mental illness? Not so much. That was what Arkham was supposed to be for. In theory.
----
“Hannibal might…” Jonathan said, pondering the idea. He wasn’t sure, after all, Hannibal was much like himself, leaning towards a bit of chaos and destruction, even if he was more..hands off of the matters, content to poke at things and then wait for them to explode.
He wasn’t quite sure if he could trust his friend not to screw things up just to see what would happen.
--
Dinah didn’t immediately think ‘Lecter’ when Jonathan mentioned Hannibal, though perhaps she should have. As it was, she was surprised that he had someone that he thought might be able to help. She studied the man who so often stood on the wrong side of things from her point of view. Even still, she had a touch of compassion for him. Which wasn’t to say that she was opposed to beating the crap out of him if he tried to hurt people.
“Well, it can’t hurt to try. I’ll try to find Edward and Enigma and see if they need help. But if they don’t want to be found, I’ll make sure that they stay safe.”
Even from you seemed to go without saying at the end of that statement.
“Take care, Jonathan,” Dinah said, and turned to go.
----
“Thank you, Ms. Lance,” Jonathan said softly, earnestly. They were, more often than not on opposites sides, but Jonathan could appreciate being offered help when it was given, and it meant something to him that she was willing to help, even in a limited capacity.
“If your cold does not clear up, call the asylum and I will have something stronger delivered,” he offered, an olive branch of sorts. Jonathan was after all, a master chemist and could easily create something to help her symptoms.
He could also create something to send her screaming into the night, but he wasn’t that cruel...at the moment. Another day, perhaps.