• For some reason, I got locked out of my old WordPress and I cannot get back in. So I am starting over.

Summary

In this dark AU of Batman Begins, no caped crusader comes in time to rescue Rachel Dawes from Arkham Asylum. When he realizes that he has given Dawes a fatal dosage, Dr. Crane can hardly bypass the opportunity to observe the effects of his toxin….in the name of science, of course. He had already told Ms. Dawes about the power the mind had over the body. But now that her body lacked that insufferable mind, it held a new power over him. READ THE TAGS!!! I cannot emphasize enough that this is a DEAD DOVE fic!!

• Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
• F/M
• Complete Work

16 Jun 2025

Tags from AO3

• Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
• Graphic Depictions Of Violence
• Major Character Death
• Jonathan Crane/Rachel Dawes
• Jonathan Crane & Rachel Dawes
• Jonathan Crane
• Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow – Character
• Rachel Dawes
• Scarecrow
• Dead Dove: Do Not Eat
• PLEASE READ TAGS
• Necrophilia
• Snuff
• Murder
• Alternate Continuity
• Unethical Science
• Corpse Desecration
• Graphic Description of Corpses
• Death
• Non-Con (postmortem)
• Jonathan Crane is a Creep
• Scarecrow (DCU) Played by Cillian Murphy
• Scarecrow’s Fear Toxin (DCU)
• Character Death
• rachel dawes played by katie holmes
• Limp Play
• Doll Play
• Body Handling
• Body Worship
• (kinda…)

Notes:

The tags tell you EXACTLY what to expect. DEAD DOVE: DO NOT READ.

An alternate universe in Batman Begins where, for reasons left to the reader to imagine, Batman does not save Rachel in time. Let’s imagine that Bruce was still unconscious when Rachel dropped by to leave his birthday present with Alfred and thus never learned she was going to Arkham that night. There are a few references to Crane’s history in some of the comics (a troubled relationship with his mother, being indirectly responsible for the death of the first woman to reject his romantic advances, his home state being Georgia) but only in passing.

I am still trying to figure out how to insert images into AO3. I have some photoshopped screenshots that I may post on Tumblr meant to accompany the story.

An Experiment

All day long, Dr. Jonathan Crane had fantasized about the hour he returned to his the historic Arkham basement that only Crane and his henchmen knew of. His lair. For the past twelve hours, he had tolerated the ramblings of patients, the scheduled meetings with the other Arkham Hospital staff, and the nagging understanding that a potential discussion with the Gotham City Police Department loomed around the corner when, inevitably, it was discovered that Arkham’s maximum security wing was the last place Rachel Dawes had been seen alive. All throughout the mundanity, Jonathan entertained himself by imaging the state of Ms. Dawes’ body, what stage of rigor, algo, and pallor mortis it was at any given hour while Mr. Sharpe droned on and on about negotiating insurance and budget cuts in the final staff meeting. He imagined the tension in its hardening muscles. The face graying to near translucence. The chill and texture of the dead lawyer’s breasts. 

What that now-rigid mouth would feel like around his cock. 

Dr. Crane clocked out from his shift around noon. As he had been assigned to night shift the previous night starting at midnight, no doctor in Gotham could work longer than a 12 hour shift due to a law set in place that limited medical staff’s working hours to avoid medical errors. “Before I head out,” he heard himself telling Penny the receptionist as he turned in his badge and keys, “I am going to check on a prescription for a patient who attests that we neglected to send it to their pharmacy. Do not wait to buzz me in again. I take the subway rather than drive, so it is more convenient for me to exit from the back, as it is closer to the L-line stop.”

More convenient to slip unnoticed into a rickety elevator, that is, as he had the night before.

Was it really only twelve hours ago that he and Ms. Dawes had stood side-by-side in the elevator? The same elevator that was taking him down to his private space right now? Really, what had she been thinking? Rachel Dawes could not have been a stupid woman to be elevated to Assistant District Attorney of Gotham at a fairly young age.

Rachel Dawes.

Lawyer.

Incarceration reform advocate.

Perpetual thorn in Jonathan’s side from the moment he had had the misfortune to cross the insufferable woman in court.

What had she been thinking to follow him into the underground passageway of Arkham Asylum without coercion? What kind of lawyer in a town like Gotham accuses a man of being involved with the mob to his face, threatens him, then follows him alone into an elevator with a secret key….and then keeps walking beside said man down a hidden passageway?  Perhaps she thought she could have taken him in a fight. She was slightly taller than him, especially with the unfair advantage of heels. He bristled in indignation at the memory of how she could, quite literally, look down upon him. Though she was probably younger than him (though he knew he did not look his age), at best, her judgmental gaze could make him feel despicably young again; a doe-eyed gaze that echoed every imbecile who mistakenly underestimated ol’ quiet, unassuming Doctor Crane. That nice but odd boy Jonathan.His bullies from high school onward. The first girl he had allowed himself to harbor affection for, killed in a car accident in which he had an (indirect) hand. ( Her wake had been a closed casket so he never saw the body. But God, the way he had imagined what she might have looked like dead for years, especially after his familiarity with cadavers in medical school and residency sharpened the details of his fantasies ). Even Falcone, for all his bluster, was reduced to a babbling idiot mere moments after bragging to Jonathan that “no one could touch him” in “his” town. Jonathan smiled at the squirm of power in his stomach at the memory of rendering mob boss Carmine Falcone  to screaming mindless slate. Yet even grinning, there was no eros in that exhilaration, at least not like seeing Rachel Dawes diminished to a slab of squirming, and then silent meat. Though Jonathan had always had an affinity for the dead, he could not say he would find Falcone attractive even if deceased. The calmness he felt in the presence of the dead — or, rather, in the absence of a present life — was not always tinged with eros. In fact, Jonathan rarely felt the need to indulge such puerile impulses. But if he was truly the master of fear and death was the greatest Fear of all, why not channel dread of the inevitable into something else? Tranquility…or desire.

Dr. Crane’s footsteps echoed in the damn passageway to his underground lab room now.  And, unlike last night, the blabbing of Raj Al Guhl’s mooks did not drift, muffled, through the concrete walls. The only sounds besides Jonathan’s own heart beating in his dry throat were methodical step of his flat loafers on the tile floor and the faint buzz of the green-tinted, flourscent lamp that had not been modified since the 80s.

The pristine underground lab room was empty and as cool as a morgue. Its stainless steel gurney, normally used as a makeshift measuring table,  was still clean with no signs of what had occurred upon it hours before. It was in this private room that Jonathan actually brewed the drugs. He required a private place equipped with his supplies and his tools to work on his recipe unbothered by the risk of his unique formula being found out. Underneath the nearby countertop, there were large cabinets that were usually used for storing equipment. The only hint that there was something unusual in one of the cabinets were the several vials and a flask directly above a single cabinet.

Jonathan opened the cabinet door. 

The lifeless corpse of Rachel Dawes, assistant district attorney of Gotham, was curled inside the cabinet in almost a sitting position, bent knees pressed against her chest like a child playing hide-and-seek in her father’s office — not like the woman whose existence had plagued Jonathan Crane since he had been aware of it. There was no trace of that infuriating, self-righteous, meddlesome fury in the body’s bloodless face, now tilted up at the cabinet ceiling. The body was in the same state of undress with which he had left it, clad only in a dark lacy bra with the straps slipping off her shoulders. Her short skirt was bundled up into a mere strip of cloth around her waist, revealing her torso and bare thighs, and her black panties hung loose around her bare feet and ankles discolored with livor mortis. Rachel’s open mouth was stuffed with the dark purple, cotton shirt she had been wearing the previous night. Jonathan removed it with exacting care, folding it and placing it on the countertop above the cupboard.

He moved slowly, deliberately, to draw out the moment of what he was about to do. First, the psychiatrist wrapped one of his arms around the corpse’s rigid shoulders and the other underneath its equally frozen knee caps. With a groan, he pulled the body from the cabinet, once again surprised at the slender woman’s weight. The corpse remained in that slightly curved position as he lowered it to the floor, allowing it to drop causally, titillated by its lack of response. Its stiffness turned him on just as much as its limpness had hours before.  

Jonathan took his time admiring his handwork. Dawes’ bulging, faded eyes had sunken visibly further into the head and the skin took on a waxy glow in the dim lab light. Jonathan pressed a thumb to Dawes’ icy throat, marveling at the tightness of its skin and its utter lack of pulse. Its chapped lips had turned a shade of violet with its slack jaw now frozen open.. Livor mortis seemed to have wilted its once protruding tongue back into its jaw —  though, when Jonathan examined it dispassionately, drawing it out pinched in his fingers, it retained its plumlike hue. Its nipples, frigid and hard, had taken on a similar purple-ish hue to its lips, or for that matter, to the wine-colored cotton shirt that Jonathan had shoved in its mouth to force its jaw to harden wide open with rigor mortis for him later.

The psychiatrist plopped himself down on the linoleum tile floor beside it, sitting with his legs stretched out straight in front of him to better manhandle the body into his throbbing lap. With a heft, seizing Dawes’ body by the shoulders, he clumsily scooched it backwards into his lap and let its torso slump against his thin chest, head tilted awkwardly at the side. His nimble hands made quick work of her bra (he paused to savor her fully exposed breasts) and he finished matter-of-factly stripping the body. Then, he set about massaging out the rigor from the muscles, flexing and pressing the joints with equal lack of sentimentality. The lividity, where the blood in the body had pooled near the floor, left the undersides of her thighs, ass, feet, and lower back bruised with discoloration. The muscles were as rigid and hard as he had fantasized, and its cold, ashen skin were so deliciously devoid of traces of life, so tantalizingly unresponsive under the good doctor’s examining touch.

Jonathan had been around cadavers in medical school, of course. The silence and stillness of the bodies in the morgue had comforted Jonathan as much as their rigor and flaccidity had fascinated, disturbed, and aroused him in different measures. In general, he had decided years ago that faking his way through sanity was the necessary price to pay in order to continue his well-earned reign of terror. This left him with little opportunity to indulge his minor wants on the rare occasion they crossed his mind. Not, of course, that most of the formaldehyde-soaked cadavers he studied in medical school sparked that particular desire. The boorish spark of lust rarely flared in Jonathan Crane with any true need to follow through. The peace he felt in the presence of the dead was in the calm of their stillness, the sense of complete and total power the living had over the hollow husks. The way those sightless eyes stared into the nothingness that terrified Jonathan at night completely empty, devoid of any fear. Even if he had both the opportunity and the desire to indulge in his more taboo whims, Jonathan thought, in many ways, the self-control it had taken him those late nights in the morgue studying to force himself to not get caught actually aroused him more than he thought fondling a dead, stiff body actually would. 

Or, at least, that is what Dr. Crane had thought. Until he looked at Rachel Dawes’ corpse. Until he watched her die. Now, in the lab, the traces of her final terror were etched in the details of rigor mortis in the fine muscles of her mouth and eyes and he was immediately transported back to the night before. Had it only been 12 hours? The day had felt endless as his imagination burned and at the same time he relished memory of her eyes wide in unseeing terror as if he was still watching it from the night before.  

***

Approximately 12 hours earlier 

The night before, she had ambushed him about Falcone. He had anticipated another visit, of course. Yet he had not expected that she would be so bold…so stupid…to accuse him to his face. It was almost, annoying, really, and he let that annoyance slip through his cool facade when he approached her in the hallway. It wasn’t that Jonathan Crane was unprepared for an antagonist. He had been on his guard all of his life from Georgia to Gotham. In fact, he had almost hoped that one of these days that elusive Batman would make an appearance and had been almost annoyed at how easily the bane of Gotham’s crime world had been so easily dispatched, though Crane knew that a little fire on an obviously kevlar suit would not dissuade his new “nemesis” for long. No, it was actually precisely that Ms. Dawes was, to put it bluntly, boring as a rival. If someone was to challenge him, at least let it be an enemy on his level. If he was to dread repercussion, let it be from a worthy opponent — not the adult version of the goody-two shoes who always thwarted the progress of science out of insecurity in the face of genius. He enjoyed a good opponent, yes…but his feelings towards Dawes had grown from mildly annoyed tolerance to actively resenting the way this mediocre woman posed a real threat to his plans that she was, frankly, unworthy of wielding. 

It had been when she said the damning words:

“Tonight. I have already paged Dr. Lehman at County General. I’m going to find out what you’ve put him on.” 

…that his gut made the decision without a single inner hesitation. County General typically did not keep psychiatric consultants on call (unlike Arkham, which did commonly have a staff member or two on site in the event of emergencies). Additionally, Jonathan knew Dr. Lehman. He was a tenured professor at Gotham University with whom Jonathan had taken multiple seminars under in forensic psychiatry while earning his joint MD/PhD. Lehman was a researcher well into his career with little need to work the thankless hours that younger staff members had to (though Jonathan often volunteered to). He would not be reachable until morning at earliest.

Most importantly, Jonathan noted that Rachel had not mentioned a warrant. He knew enough of lawyers and other “do-good” bullies to know any threat to seize “evidence,” such as a blood test of a patient at Arkham, required a lawyer. He knew an empty threat when he heard one.

And perhaps she mistook the implicit threat of puling out a key to bring an elevator down to a hidden floor for being empty. He did not even turn to make sure she followed him down the corridor when the elevator reached the old building’s basement.

“This way, please. There is something I would like you to see .”

He watched his henchmen poor the toxins into the broken water vein without turning his head to see the woman he knew stood at his side. 

“Perhaps you should have some. Clear your head. ”

The psychiatrist allowed himself a long, satisfied breath through his nose at the sound of Ms. Dawes’ heels clattering down the hallway, audibly panicked.  So Dawes was not entirely stupid — Jonathan could give her that. It had finally registered what it meant that Dr. Crane was showing Ms. Dawes the scene of his crime: he had no intention of letting the District Attorney Assistant leave alive. A reptilian sense of cool came over him. For however briefly, Jonathan’s barely contained, shimmering rage that he always felt in the woman’s presence was replaced by the calm focus of the starting hunt. He was in his element now.

Jonathan allowed Ms Dawes to scamper away towards the elevator, like an animal hunted, following at a slower place. He alone knew the secret passageway to re-enter the elevator before her, and he was in no rush to retrieve his Scarecrow mask and toxins. Let her feel her own fear before he gassed her the moment the elevator doors opened. Let her sense her own terror first, before watched her be consumed by unknown horrors as the fear toxin seeped into her nervous system. 

Rachel Dawes screeched the moment the elevator compartment flooded with fear toxin. Then, Rachel coughed and stumbled back in the elevator at the first gust of his toxin gas. As she stumbled back, her widening eyes already started to roll upwards as her vision immediately began to distort. A moment later, her entire body fell limp, like a puppet with its strings cut. Jonathan had purposefully, but impulsively given her a far larger dose than usual. It was an impulsive dosage, yes, but one he knew that he would not regret (even as he registered that he had gone overboard). Once she was under the influence of the fear gas, it was easy for Jonathan and his henchmen to carry her shaking body back to the scene of the sabotage. They unceremoniously dumped her on a table usually used for measuring toxins or other drugs.Crane turned his back to his henchmen to apply his mask. Lest he begin to dispel the mystery. By the time Scarecrow loomed over her masked, Dawes was lying nearly motionless, spread across one of the tables but stirring feebly with fluttering eyelashes. 

Jonathan grinned behind his Scarecrow mask as loomed over Dawes’ feebly stirring body. Then he let out a guttural hiss:

“Who else knows you are here?”  

Dawes screeched in terror, thrashing, closing her eyes and weakly turning her head away as if by not seeing him, she could make the world around her erase. He wondered idly what she saw under the toxins’ influence. She was too far gone for psychoanalysis, obviously, so he supposed he would have to content himself with not knowing the details of the psychosis currently flooding her fading mind. He delighted in her fear, soaking in the horror that he knew would soon be etched permanently on that once-smug but lovely face.

“WHO ELSE??” 

She screamed again, but her screech was suddenly cut short by a distant clank and the sudden dimming of the lights. For a split moment, Scarecrow thought The Batman had come and his mind lit up with a thrill beyond even the joy of watching Dawes’ terror. However, it was only a power glitch. A moment later, he heard the generator surge and the dim orange light of the sewer access chamber rekindled again as if nothing had happened. 

He returned his attention to the dying woman laid out before him, his own gaze unblinking behind the refuge of his mask. It occurred to Jonathan, as he watched her wriggle in a terror so incapacitating she was unable to scream, that this was his first opportunity to observe the symptoms of fatal overdose of his invention. Though Crane had intentionally, if impulsively, given her an exaggerated dose, in the moment he had not intended (necessarily) for the dosage to be fatal. In fact, Jonathan had never had the opportunity to intentionally administer a lethal dosage before.  Test subjects were hard to come by and he could not afford to “waste” a subject when he did not know when he would find another that he could monitor without suspicion.  If too many of his patients turned up dead, that would attract more attention, he thought wryly. In the rare cases in which a patient had died from accentuating circumstances related to exposure to fear toxins — heart attack, for instance — there was always a pre-existing condition that could be conveniently cited as the cause of death. Jonathan lived for his experiments, yes, but he had to be careful lest he attract the wrong kind of attention too early.

Yet here the night had gifted him the opportunity to explore his masterpiece up close. The body of her boss, DA Peter Finch, had been hastily tossed into the Gotham City  sewer alongside the toxins the man was too stupid to recognize until it was too late. Yet Dr. Crane understood the scientific merit of withholding the disposal of Ms. Dawes corpse in the same manner.

It would be insulting to the name of science to not document the subject’s symptoms. 

A positive disgrace, in fact, to allow the opportunity to go unseized.

He ordered his henchmen to carry the dying bitch from the public dock inside the nearby lab room. Walking ahead of them,  Jonathan approached the stainless steel table that he used for holding his measuring equipment, currently free from any beakers, vials, and test tubes, as he never left his equipment out after using it. The henchmen draped Dawes across the stainless steel table while Crane calmly selected a hand-held tape recorder from a nearby drawer. Jonathan had always preferred using a hand-held tape recorder used to record oral notes. He was not one to listen to the sound of his own voice, but it was easier and safer than written notes that could be too easily skimmed by prying eyes. His voice was soft and cool as ever, and he assured himself that should he ever re-listen, that he would not hear his voice shake beneath the sounds of the lawyer’s dying gasps.

 He waited until he was alone with the dying lawyer’s moans, after the henchmen departed, before he began to document her symptoms. 

“Subject shows symptoms of asphyxiation. Shortness of breath. Visible discoloration. Rapid heartbeat and onset of delirium compatible with high fevers or delusional episodes. ”

Though Dawes was a conventionally attractive woman (he was not blind to the cultural standards of attraction), Jonathan was not one to be distracted by physical beauty. He was particularly repulsed at the idea of desiring a woman who had been an impediment to his more important plans, even to the point where he risked attracting attention asking Falcone to “take care of her” as much out of petty spite as real necessity.

Yet here he was, delighting in how her eyes bulged gorgeously, unable to repress a hungry grin. It was the last grin, or flickers of it, that Carmine Falcone’s mind could process before it lost itself completely. Before unseeing eyes, he grinned with all his teeth and the scale across his large blue eyes fell away to reveal something far more animated, animalistic. Insane.

Within minutes, Dawes was no longer clawing at her throat, her small hands flopping uselessly at her side as her body bucked helplessly in dying convulsions. Oh to be inside that snatch as her thin hips bucked one final time…Jonathan could not hold back a delightful little shudder at the thought. He could edge himself to near hardness without even touching himself watching the gaping of her worthless mouth, mawing at air like a fish that leapt too high and found itself stranded without water. A little hungry gasp of anticipation escaped him as her hazel eyes started to roll back in her skull, and her entire body began to quiver. He knew she was fully unconscious now.  With each of his enemy’s spasms, Jonathan’s resolve wilted. He dug his fingers into the sharp side of the cold metal gurney almost to the point of breaking skin and forced his own hips backwards, resisting the temptation to rut against it as he grew hard at sight her final shivers. His own breath was coming in shakily and he willed himself with all his might not to touch himself in front of her, even though she could not see. Less than an hour earlier, had he not been extolling to this stupid, stubborn woman the power of the mind over the human body? How then could this loathsome pain in his side have power over his mind, even as he watched her own mind fade?

It felt like forever. It was not long enough. But her gasps eventually subsided into a gargle as her convulsions faded to twitches. Then the gasps faded to hisses and then a final gurgling shudder as every muscle in her body fell flaccid, her head tilting to the side as trails of saliva foamed down either side of her paling, blue-tinted mouth. The moment Rachel Dawes died, her bloodshot eyes, still rolled slightly upward, relaxed and rolled down to stare forward; eyelids frozen wide, pupils dilated, death stare fixed blindly on oblivion while the rest of her face went beautifully slack.

She was dead.

Rachel Dawes was dead.

My God, he thought, his eyes soaking her in, famished. She was completely dead.

Light-headed, oddly exhilarated, he allowed himself a shaky laugh before recording one final, monotone message in his recorder. 

“Subject time of death is estimated to be at 2:00 hours. Signs of asphyxiation visible upon the extremities of the body. Pupils are dilated and fixed. Observation shall be continued to monitor the state of rigor.”  

The moment the final message was recorded and he turned the machine off, Jonathan’s hands were suddenly moving of their own accord across the body. He just ran his palms over the soft form to feel its  soon-fading warmth through the dead woman’s clothes, pausing to lift and flop its arms upon its face and tilt its head side to side to marvel at the limpness. With an almost detached curiosity, Jonathan allowed himself to begin to examine the body with a faux matter-of-factness he knew he did not feel. He knew he should be taking notes, but he was unable to do more than calmly marvel at the unnervingly serene, glassy stare of eyes that once looked at him with distrust and condemnation, eyes now as flat, unfeeling, and unreadable as the steel table on which Rachel’s body cooled. 

If Jonathan had not been a doctor, he would have thought the body looked as if it had been dead longer than it actually had been, despite the fact he knew it was still warm. Pallor mortis was setting in, and desire coiled in his groin at the sight of her already ashen face. Slowing down, treasuring each moment, his hands continued to run across the body over its clothes, only pausing to recheck for a non-existent pulse as he absorbed the silence of her remains and its default acquiescence. Jonathan squeezed her breasts through her knit purple cotton blouse, feeling her softness through a thick bra-pad. That touch sparked a twitch in his groin he felt with a whimper. The sheer will-power it had taken to not to touch himself at the sight of her lifelessness had him straining in his slacks. He abruptly released his penis from his zipper. Though he winced as it shrunk back in response to touching the morgue-cold air, he knew it was better than coming in his pants like a child and suffering the indignity of damp underwear for however long he would be in his Arkham lair that afternoon.

He had a feeling it would be awhile.

He calmly removed her heels and tossed them to the floor, pausing to squeeze her bare feet through opaque panty hose. Already, he could feel the toes’ heat leaving as the cold of the steel gurney began to seep into the lifeless flesh.  

Overwhelmed with lust, Jonathan planted a tentative kiss on Dawes’s lips. A shudder of pleasure coursed through him at their already-cooling touch. Awkwardly, almost boyishly fumbling as he moved, Jonathan pushed both the cotton shirt and black lacy bra upwards to expose her ample breasts, gasping childishly at the sight of them like the schoolboy he sometimes still felt he was in the presence of naked women. There was no point even trying to restrain the grin that split his face as he crumbled her pencil skirt around her waist and actually ripped open her dark tights in his eagerness to pull them from her legs and toss them aside in his haist to  reveal her bare legs, abdomen, and torso. He indulged an animalistic little lick of his lips and grinned, standing back to savor the view of half-stripped body, body humiliated and sprawled before him.

There was a comfort in knowing that he could do anything….or nothing at all….to the body. He could lick, kiss, and even bite Rachel Dawes’ pink, hard nipples as clumsily or hungrily as he wanted and all the while her vacant gaze face stared directly into green-tinted light.  Panting, feeling his own heart pounding in his eardrums, Jonathan pulled the body’s head to the edge of the table in a rough jerk. He twisted its head in an awkward position with one of his hands on the back of its skull and used his other shaking hand to pry its jaw further open, so as to better fuck the lifeless mouth. The doubly taboo thrill of desecrating the lovely corpse set his limp cock hardening more than the actual sensation of her wet, warm, but unresponsive mouth pressed against his head. Her protruding tongue was still too swollen for him to fully slip his thick cock past her lips. He had to content himself with the mere sight of his half-hard penis slapping the pallid cheek of what had been, hours before, one of the most powerful women in Gotham.

Yet the rough sensation and sight of cock-slapping her corpse was not satisfying enough. Angry that somehow in even death, Rachel Dawes’ fat mouth thwarted his desire again, he abruptly pulled out, pushed her head back unto the gurney table more roughly than intended, and began again to run his hands over and under her rapidly removing clothes, not bothering to stifle a pathetic little whimper at her still-warm breasts under a half-stripped bra. Like a dog, crawled up over her and straddled her body on the table so as to better jerk back her head and force her sightless, glassy gaze upon him so he could stare into them, equally unblinking, as he settle between her thighs. His free hand stroked himself harder and harder as he rutted against her dry legs, before he was finally stiff enough to guide himself into her unresisting cunt.

It was not a particularly comfortable position for his knees and lower back. Jonathan may have been mistaken at times for a graduate student in his late 20s, but he was pressing 35. The assistant district attorney’s body jolted with each unwieldy thrust of his hips, her bare breasts bouncing in time with each thrust and moan and her feet, dangling on either side of the gurney table sandwhiching Crane’s still-clothed legs, also bobbed complacently.

 The sight of that lifeless face over exposed breasts alone turned Jonathan on more than he could have been able to admit. Jonathan Crane had no reason for feeling shame and rage when he came almost instantly with his cock-head barely inside her. Despite no one to please — nothing behind that gaze — he still felt a rush of humiliation and shame for cuming so early, followed immediately by rage at Ms Dawes for somehow still having such power over him even in death.

He would, of course, show her.

The plan would be quite simple. Jonathan knew exactly what he would do. He would keep the corpse — for more observation, of course — until Dawes’ disappearance was several days’ news and no one would be surprised when her bloated body turned up in the Gotham City sewer system. In the meantime, he would reposition the body so that it would grow hard with rigor in a shape more susceptible to his desires, physically and visually. He would move the body into one of the nearby empty medical cupboards and leave it essentially hidden in plain sight alongside the rest of his operation. If the corpse was discovered in the next 24 hours, he reasoned it would be discovered alongside the traces of Ra’Al Guhl’s plans. And so, Dr. Crane would have bigger problems. 

It was surprisingly difficult to manhandle the flopping body from the table to the floor to the cabinet cubby. Because Rachel Dawes had been slightly taller than him, somehow, she still managed to make him resent her by overpowering him passively as he dragged her stubborn body and awkwardly stuffed it inside the largest medical cabinet. Once he had managed to curl the body in, he carefully tilted its head as far back as possible so as to better encourage pallor mortis and liver mortis to set her face pale. As delicious as the idea of watching her extremities bruise, being present as gravity would draw her blood to pool to the parts closest to the ground, he need not discolor her still-soft face. Just in case, on a mischievous impulse, he took her removed purple shirt, wadded it up, and stuffed as much of it as possible inside her gaping mouth. A better vessel for his cock.

Now, for the next hours, he would entertain himself with fantasies of her muscles going taunt. He felt himself grow stiff in a different way at the thought of it. Later, when the time had come, he would return to the scene to inspect his creation. Until then, he knew he would go about his day as normal as possible. After all, it would be easy enough to forge Dawes’ signature signing out from the asylum the previous night. Simply copy the already familiar, sloppy scribble of an impatient signature when she had checked herself in as a visitor. As far as anyone knew, Jonathan had been at Arkham the entire evening and given no one knew of his “secret lair” below the hospital. His alibi was already woven into his presence at the scene of the crime.

After a final, authoritative squeeze of Dawes’ now-lukewarm breast, Jonathan carefully closed the cabinet door. He redressed himself nonchalantly and left the room feeling oddly numb, as if nothing had happened. 

He remembered to flick off the lights before leaving the room. The lab remained in darkness — its near silence only broken by soft hum of the generator echoing mechanically just slightly above the volume of a whisper.

****

Circa 12:30 pm — Arkham Asylum Basement 

Circa 12:30 pm — Arkham Asylum Basement 

By the time Jonathan returned, the body was entirely cold to the touch. He instinctively planted a kiss on those dead lips as if he was being welcomed home. Rigor had hardened its supple breasts, he noted, as he squeezed those breasts while he continued kissing the dead mouth. Liver mortis had drawn away the blood in the bloated tongue to pool at the parts of the body closer to the ground. That woman’s infuriating mouth now lay ready for his pleasure, now that the rest of his new doll was equally unresisting.

After admiring the body’s rigidity, he had to break the rigor to better enjoy his prize. But first, he held the curved corpse of his nemesis in his own lap, nestling it between his two outstretched legs with its back pressed against his chest and its upward-tilted head lolled against his shoulder. After Jonathan made easy work of the bra barely dangling from the body’s breasts, one hand snaked down further past the hem of its panties to feel the icy folds of a now-dry cunt. His other hand held its stiff torso upright, resting almost gently on its graying face in a mocking imitation of a caress. Almost worshipfully,  he stroked the muscles back to near- limpness as foreplay, removing the tattered remains of her clothing as he did. Soon, the Assistant DA”s body lay nude and eagle on the linoleum title. Its dead stare remained fixed, utterly passive, as he wrenched open the body’s thighs and positioned himself between them, lying on the corpse with his entire weight, uncaring of causing indignity to flesh that would never bruise again.

Dr. Crane sucked on her dry, unresisting tongue — tentatively licking it, holding it gingerly between his own teeth, biting it; closing his eyes and burying his fingers in her thick dark hair as he stuck his own tongue down her throat as far as he could, for as long as he wanted to. As he kisses her dead lips passionately, he breathed in the body’s sterile scent in through his nose, somehow aroused even more by the smell of a medical setting that highlighted the taboo of the act.

The lawyer’s cunt had hardened past penetration. He made no effort move inside her, content to revel at the feeling of the rigid body pressed against his own. The cold, dry friction of her frigid thighs around his genitals was intoxicating enough that he indulged a shaky moan as the blood drew to his crotch. Jonathan suddenly had the impulse to remove more of his own clothing to better feel that cold against his own flesh. Still, Jonathan’s cheeks flushed again in humiliation when he stood up and let his pants fall to his ankles. That compulsive shame at being half naked was instantly chased by anger yet again at being made to feel that way, even when there was no one living to “play to.” He knew he had to reassert his victory, even though there was no witness to reassert his triumph to . 

 Smirking with a chutzpah he did not actually feel (why was his throat dry?), standing nude from the waist down, he leveraged her stiffening spine against the nearest wall. Holding the dead woman aloft by its hair with one hand, he forced the body to near-sitting position while he used his free hand to pry open her jaw and work is half-stiff penis into her cold, dead mouth. The sensation of a motionless tongue against his member sent Jonathan’s own eyes rolling back in his skull in pleasure. He moaned in accidental mimicry of the dead woman’s final throws. Tightly gripping the back of the skull by her long, dark hair, he bobbed the dead woman’s head down the length of his hardening cock without much care. The sight of Rachel Dawes’ pallid cheeks bulging from the inside from the movement of his cock down its throat just turned him even more and he further titled its head at an angle to avoid its back teeth. He let the body flop down, supine, to the floor and rearranged its awkwardly splayed limbs. He then removed his shirt, tie, and jacket in order to crawl over it.  Such to better enter its mouth from a position where he could stare at an angle of its face. Then, he was suddenly half-sitting, half-lying on the floor facing Dawes’ corpse at an angle where he could more easily manipulate her head into his lap. With one hand, he continued to move her head complacently along his cock while he fondled her stiffening breast with his other before he finally simply held the head, clutching its hair with both fists, and fucked its mouth with abandon.

It was not, he could reassure himself with pride, that he had been particularly attracted to Ms. Dawes’ body alive and continued to find arousing qualities to her form despite the fact she was dead. It was the markers of death itself that turned him on — the coalescence of blood in the stiffening corpse’s extremities. The film that had set in over its overblown hazel eyes. The chapped, violet-tinted texture and color of those bloodless lips.  The absence of any spark of life granted Rachel Dawes’ body an erotic quality Jonathan had found utterly absent in its owner alive. The sheer power he had over his fallen enemy’s hollow shell exhilarated him in a way oddly nerve-wrecking and, yet, allowed him to feel safe under its unjudging, blank expression in a way that he did not feel in the presence of the insufferable living. 

When Jonathan finally came with a shout, his cum splattered over the body’s unflinching open eyes and mouth. Quivering in pleasure, he collapsed onto his back, gasping, and then chuckling manically. He kept his flaccid cock inside Dawes’ wonderfully gaping mouth for almost a minute, delighting in how his semen glistened like tears of glue across the dull, still bloodshot whites of her unblinking eyes. Soon, however, he began to feel discomfort in his hips, and had to reposition the plaything again. Jonathan pushed the body off his lap — with more gentleness, this time — then rolled it onto its side to face him. Lying down on his own side, propped up on his elbow, he pulled the dead woman into his arms with care that surprised even him, holding it flush against his naked, sweat-slicked chest. He did not know how long he remained lying on his side, feeling its torso re-striffen in his arms. He flung one of its thighs over his own bony hip, so as to better feel the icy flesh against his own.  He held it without wiping the smeared cum from its face, even while stroking its hair and forehead with an almost fatherly affection.

Later, of course, he would return one last time. By the time that he and his henchmen were ready to dispose of the body, he knew that rigor would have passed, leaving a gray, but fuckably limp corpse. His cock already twitched as he imagined the film over its eyes and the pallor of its floppy limbs — final fuck that would await him, his last and most perverse goodbye.

 After he re-stuffed the body into the cupboard again, he wiped himself clean with her discarded shirt, coolly redressed, and remembered to turn down the temperature in the room even further before he left. Before he straightened his tie in the reflection of the steel-plated gurney, before walking out of the lab (slightly flustered, but otherwise visibly unbothered, as if on his way to meet with any other patient), after he wrangled the body into its hiding position, he paused to brush the dead woman’s lips in a single, chaste kiss.