Transgressive Affection

Fear and Loathing Pt 1 (Scarebat, 2000 Word Challenge)

Fandom: Batman – All Media, Batman – The Dark Knight Trilogy, Batman Begins (2005)

Characters: Batman/Bruce Wayne, Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow

Ships: Kinda implied Scarebat content

TAGS: Dead Dove, Snuff, Strangulation, Arousal During Death, Nonconsensual Strangling, Accidental Death, OOC Characterization, (Because I don’t actually think Bruce would be careless enough to accidentally strangle a foe but why not)

DISCLAIMER: This work of fiction contains material that may be found disturbing, controversial, or morally offensive. The author does not endorse any actions depicted in their work. All characters, events, situations, and lines are fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is purely coincidental.

SUMMARY: Another AU take on the Fear Toxin Kidnapping scene in Batman Begins only, this time, it is Crane who pays the price when Batman accidentally takes shaking him down for information too far. 

AUTHOR’S NOTE: A challenge to myself to stay under 2000 words per chapter. However, I am going to use WordPress to archive each “section” until the piece is complete. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat fics mostly in the DC universe that I may expand upon later.

Jonathan Crane was surrounded by imbeciles.

Whatever Carmine Falcone’s dumb muscle provided as accomplices, that convenience was undercut by the micromanaging required of Jonathan to ensure these men successfully implemented drugs Crane designed into the Gotham City Water supply while avoiding noisy questions. It was preferable in lieu of whichever more powerful League of Shadows  associates Ra’s Al Ghul may have already had observing the operation (Jonathan shuddered), and yet interacting with Falcone’s people on a daily level was so pedestrian to Jonathan that he was actually relieved when the overhead lights flicked off with a clank. When he knew the “henchemen” were about the scatter at a sound they all could recognize.

Unable to see clearly behind his burlap Scarecrow mask in the dimmed light, Crane removed it, grinning manically. Elation rose within him at the sudden challenge. Only one foe had managed to discover his location and sneak in before — there was no doubt in his mind who this worthy opponent was.

“What was that?” one of the goons spat, upholding their reputation for dimness. 

“The BAT-MAN.” Crane breathed, scanning the shadowed overhead for any glimpse of the caped crusader. 

“What do we do?” he heard from one of the other smooth-brained morons.

“What anybody does when a prowler comes around,” Crane spared a condescending glance. “Call the police,” he quipped sarcastically. 

It was too late to stop them now, after all. The Batman could not have chosen a better time to submit himself to yet another experiment. He was exactly the masochist that Crane had recognized him as before they had even met. Like recognize like, after all. 

“Can he really fly?” 

As far as stupid questions went —  and Dr. Crane had been a teacher, he knew how dumb questions abounded — that one was particularly too dumb to dignify with a response. Yet so excited was the doctor by the possibility of yet another “rematch” that he could not muster up annoyance.

“Well…” Jonathan began ominously. “We’re about to find out.”

***

The Batman and the “Scarecrow” had years-long animosity. From Scarecrow’s perspective, it had technically begun when the former professor and psychologist had responded to his firing at Gotham University by embarking upon a series of escapades that had brought him into conflict, inevitably, with the Batman. Most recently, Crane had apparently organized a break-in to his old work place of Arkham Asylum, releasing dozens of dangerous criminals upon the streets of a Gotham that Batman and his allies had only recently, only barely gotten under a semblance of control. From Batman’s point of view, he would have said something similar and added that their first encounter had involved Crane nearly killing Bruce’s friend Rachel, barely escaping in that instance because Bruce had prioritized saving his friend over capturing Crane. In the past few months, Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and their allies at the Gotham Police Department and DA’s office  had been working to apprehend the criminals that Crane released. Yet lately Batman’s interests had shifted to Dr. Crane himself. It was apparently to him that Crane was clearly planning something for which the Arkham Asylum break-in was a distraction. And whatever Crane was up to that warranted releasing even some of Crane’s own enemies as a “distraction,” it must be big and Batman highly doubted a coward like Crane would be the driving force behind it.

So, here he was once again in this lair, underneath the older part of Arkham.  The last time the two foes had crossed paths in this room, the Scarecrow had easily incapacitated Batman with his fear toxin. Batman knew he was lucky to have escaped alive — humbled that his billionaire gadgets and ninja training were no match for a physically weak and untrained academic armed only with a gas mask, some petrol, and a lighter. He survived only due to his fireproof suit and the cunning of Lucius Fox, who had armed him with an antidote to the fear toxin. Batman already clenched the small antidote release device in his fist before he even entered the  grime-crusted, damp-walled corridor that led to the secret layer before Arkham.

He was not one to make the same mistake twice.

***

This time, before Crane could as much as lift the small device he used to spray the toxin, an icy gust of hallucinogen repellent blasted into his face, absorbed immediately up his mouth and nose with a metallic taste. 

The power dynamic between the two reversed before Crane could sputter out his first cough.

 Batman jerked him by with a fistfull of hair before grabbing his collar, effortlessly manhandling Crane even as the latter  wriggled like a fish, fighting for air while raised almost literally off his toes, his mind now at the mercy of his own creation.

WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR??

The little scarecrow gagged. As Crane hyperventilated in terror, eyes bulging bloodshot in their sockets, with only hisses of air and gurgling escaping his normally smug, condescending mouth, Batman could only wonder how his image appeared in Crane’s sick mind, distorted by the fear toxin’s effects. 

Finally, a response managed to fight through the slightly loosened grip around the psychiatrist’s throat. 

“Raj…Raj Al Ghul.”

“Raj-Al Ghul is dead.” Bellowed Batman. “WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR???” 

Crane sputtered in confusion — apparently unable to process the question. Then, the doctor shuddered, feebly rolling his eyes back in his skull while his tongue lashed out, wordlessly and his dull eyes feebly rolling his eyes back in his skull. 

Realizing he had inadvertently lifted the shorter man’s feet almost an inch from the ground, Batman lowered his grip to avoid accidentally choking him. The gesture brought Dr. Crain’s groin against the muscular, thick column of the taller man’s thighs. Desire pooled into Crane’s lower body alongside his blood at both the vice-grip and the feeling of a broad-shoulder, and no doubt toned body pressed so closely to his own. A wonderful, repulsive little shudder of arousal shivered through every nerve in his body. 

Dr. Crane knew arousal was a side effect of his toxin. He had experienced it before when testing his creation on himself. Yet for reasons Jonathan had never entirely understood, although he was not typically burdened by experiencing  lust, he did often deal with terror and stress with a sexual outlet. Many a night in graduate school had been spent drowning in terror and stress until he noticed himself growing hard. While fapping away that fear was not a particularly maladaptive coping mechanism — at least as far as Jonathan Crane was concerned — he still found himself embarrassed by the habit and then angry at his own shame.  That cycle of shame and anger chasing itself escalated his arousal, now that the toxin had stripped the researcher away at any pretense of dignity as he barely stifled a whine into a gargle, struggling to breathe for more than one reason. 

*** 

Batman hissed, disgusted. He was enjoying watching the Scarecrow choke — albeit, for another reason — but Batman was aware strangulation could lead blood to pool in the lower body. Batman tried unsuccessfully to hold his opponent in place to maintain the distance between their bodies while supporting his weight. Having Scarecrow lean on him for standing support with his eyelids aflutter while practically rutting up against his Batsuit leg like a dog in heat was not how Batman had expected this mission to go. Repositioning  his grip yet again, to try to shift the thrashing doctor away from him, Batman reasserted his grasp on the squirming scarecrow’s collar before bellowing into the face of a man whose sanity was rapidly unraveling. 

“One last time: Ra’s al Ghul is DEAD. WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR??”

“Ra’s al Ghul…” Crane stammered through his gasps, eyes dilated and uncomprehending. “He’s here in Gotham…”

Batman gritted his teeth in frustration. While Crane was undeniably a liar, he not only had not motivation to lie to protect anyone else (as he had no loyalty), but Batman was also unconvinced the man staring through his gasps, eyes dilated and uncomprehending could force a lie through his rapidly disintegrating mind if he could. 

Yet before Batman could even begin to speculate who this Ra’j Al Ghul imposter was, his present nemesis’ gasps now smothered to gargles at the back of his collapsing throat, Crane’s lungs burning as they fought for air. Before the pull of unconsciousness visibly emptied Crane’s face, a single sentence managed to pass his lips:

“ Dr. Crane isn’t here right now. But if you’d like to make an appointment… ”

Batman snarled. In a single, impulsive moment of fury, his hand around Crane’s collar clenched with his full might.

The loud snap that followed rang like a gunshot.

It was not Dr. Crane’s collar in the grip of his fist. 

It was Jonathan Crane’s neck.

Crane slumped forward instantly against Batman’s chest, his thin body going slack – terrifyingly limp and pliant in Batman’s strong arms as he laid Crane down with a hand behind his head; a care Bruce never would have imagined extending to Scarecrow. In the shadows that Bruce called home, a fragment of light fell across Crane’s face, illuminating a dead eyed-stare as glassy and empty as the lenses still across those eyes and a swollen, already-pale face taking on the ashen glow of the dead save for the sliver of blue tongue protrudingly slightly between parted, equally blue lips.

Bruce immediately straddled his enemy between his legs and began CPR. Bruce pounded on Crane’s still sternum in perfect rhythm, uncaring what ribs he would inevitably crack. Three chest compressions in, Bruce felt a thin, hard, shield-like material beneath Crane’s buttoned shirt that he instantly recognized as a partially bullet-proof vest often used for minimal coverage and maximum agility. Bruce hastily unbuttoned the shirt to remove the vest impending the CPR, tossing Crane’s tie over his shoulder as unvelcroed the vest straps, rolling Crane unto his sides and back, to reveal a pallid  and — for such a boyish man — surprisingly hairy chest.

 Bruce resumed chest compressions. Over and over again, he ducked down to seal his lips over the unconscious man’s, holding his nostrils, feeling the bare chest balloon with each unreturned breath. Pausing occasionally to check for a pulse, Bruce even removed one of his gloves to better locate one.

The room thundered with silence in absence of Scarecrow’s breathing. 

Finally, Bruce stopped, gasping for air, and leaned back to rest on his knees, sitting on Crane’s outstretched legs. Bruce lifted one of Crane’s hands by the pulseless wrist with his ungloved hand. He let it flop unceremoniously onto the body’s torso, and then slide gracelessly to his side on the floor. The limb was still perfectly malleable, but though untouched  by rigor, already noticeably chilled. It was this cold that sent the sickening realization through Bruce’s entire body: 

Jonathan Crane was dead. Batman had murdered him. 

****

Jonathan Crane was dead. 

As if testing a lucid dream, Bruce once more numbly lifted up the doctor’s limp wrist, noting the pliability, the lack of resistance or response even as he dropped it again abruptly unto the dead man’s bare torso where slipped to Crane’s side with a soft plop.

Crane’s eyes were no longer rolled back in the skull, but stared directly ahead — as blue and as cold as a fish’s, made equally unblinking.  Bruce closed the eyes with a simple hand across their lids. It was not respect for the man Dr. Crane had been, but honor for the man that Batman wanted to be.

The reality of the situation took further hold with each pound of Bruce’s heart in his eardrums, as he finally gave up his CPR attempt and simply knelt there in the gloom. The longer Bruce sat in silence, alone with the man he had killed, the more eerie… or at home…he felt. Bruce was suddenly driven by an instinct that resisted every name: the instinct to move the limp man from the half-shadows into full view of the light. As if by taking in the sight of the corpse unshielded by night would make it real. Reality was not redemption, but it was at least recognition of what had occurred. That Bruce had occurred. 

Seizing Crane’s body by the armpits, Bruce dragged it a few yards to lay it out sprawled upon the concrete fully beneath the view of the overhead light. The psychiatrist’s head tilted to the side at an nauseating angle, the streak of drool across his jaw tinted with the unmistakable pink of blood. Dr. Crane’s face had already taken on the ashen, waxy allure of the dead, graying and slightly translucent under the cheap, hazy glow of the underground fluorescent lights. A raw blemish the shape of a hand marred the doctor’s throat alongside the desperate scratch marks from Crane’s own fingernails. The curve of Crane’s Adam’s apple was somehow more pronounced in the dim light. Bruce’s hand shifted to rest on that cooling throat, his thumb directly above the silent pulse-point now marked with a bruise of his making. The dead man’s last erection was still tenting his pants. Even in the dim light, Bruce noted his visibly damp fly as cum leaked through his pants. Bruce felt a flush of empathetic embarrassment chased by another wave of loathing and disgust.

This time, however, his disgust was not aimed at Crane. 

Bruce could not deny that the sensation of a body, rutting hot and gasping against his suit, had affected him. Bruce’s memory of Crane’s dying arousal sparked something sickening in his lower gut. It had been so long since Bruce had found…company…with a woman or even alone, so preoccupied with his mission, so exhausted (The irony was not lost on Bruce that his exhaustion was partially the fault of the man whose husk of a form lay spread upon the damp concrete) that he supposed any warm body thrashing against his own would had a physical effect. That it had been his enemy Crane was entirely against the point.

When Bruce came out of his thoughts, in either mere minutes or hours after closing Crane’s eyes, the body’s eyelids had already begun to creep open. The dead man’s vacant expression was set with his piercing blue eyes half-closed in an awkward position that would have been difficult for a living face to maintain without fluttering. On impulse, Bruce set a fingerpad on each eyelid and further opened the eyes, so as to better gaze into their glassy sightlessness.

 Bruce’s breath caught in his throat at the dull glint in the whites of those dead eyes. 

Suddenly, his mouth felt very dry and he felt a strangle twinge he did not know how to name. He found his hands moving off its own accord across Crane’s lifeless body, marveling at the stillness of his vanquished foe. As his palm moved over the clothes, his hand carefully avoiding Crane’s bare skin as glided across the torso. Bruce’s touch wandered lower, absent-mindedly, taking care to avoid the psychiatrist’s final erection by touch (though he could not be help but be mildly impressed by the size for such a petite man).

With his other hand, Bruce brushed back Crane’s dark hair, still slicked with sweat and plastered against his broad forehead. Bruce’s ungloved hand trailed down Crane’s face, his fingers tracing the slack mouth still blue from asphyxiation, but yet to harden with rigor mortis.  Bruce made a few unsuccessful attempts to close the mouth, but it lolled open at each attempt, no matter how Bruce had tried to reposition the body’s head. Dr. Crane’s body was as stubborn in death as Batman’s nemesis had been in life. Seeing the psychiatrist’s smug, infuriating smirk wiped off his boyish lips could not be satisfying at that humiliating open-mouth gape, the sudden prickle in Bruce’s own skin when he finally let his hand rest upon Scarecrow’s unclothed, still lukewarm chest.

Yet now, in the stillness, Bruce could not stop touching the psychiatrist’s body.

Bruce just couldn’t keep his hands off of the corpse. As if of their own accord, his now-ungloved hands moved across the cooling contours of the dead man’s flesh, absorbing the aftermath of the last vestiges of Crane’s body warmth seeping first through and from his disheveled suit; then, his already pallid skin, until finally growing as cool and clammy as the sewer’s concrete floor right under Bruce’s touch. As Bruce stroked the dead body, he could not help but notice the petite man’s still-erect cock, tenting his suit trousers mere inches away from Bruce’s fingertimes. Bruce’s own cock twitched. He was glad he could not touch himself in the Batsuit, lest he humiliate himself further when already flushed with shame over what he had done, albeit unintentionally.

Bruce’s pulse blurred his sense of hearing again. It was a good thing that, for once, he was not asked to be Batman in this moment.

He wanted to believe The Bat was a symbol above what he felt as a man. Yet completely alone with Crane’s body, he felt more devoid of himself than ever before at the rising heat in his groin and throat.

Was what Bruce secretly desired worse than taking the man’s life? Surely killing, even accidentally, due to losing control in pure rage was far more morally repulsive than anything that he could do to Jonathan Crane’s dead body now? It was not as if Crane himself, in life, had been above using bodies of patients who died in his experiments for his own perverse pleasure — albeit that pleasure being purely intellectual rather than sexual (as far as Bruce knew). And would it not be better to get this “out of his system” with Crane rather than the unsuspecting corpse of a stranger or, god forbid, the body of someone Bruce loved the next time one (inevitably) died?

And that’s how Bruce’s mouth found its way around Crane’s wilting cock, his hand still running across the length of his member. Those lifeless blue eyes still staring at the ceiling, unseeing, instead of gazing at Batman in detached observation, or glinting in cold, brittle, manic cruelty. Bruce let his own eyes flutter closed to feel the still-stilled arched member in his hand, finding himself straining against the Batsuit flap just at the touch…and the taboo of whose body he was touching.

A moment later, he was carrying the body bridal-style in his arms. Without thinking, Bruce wrapped one muscular, thick arm around the dead man’s slender shoulders and another arm beneath the crook of both legs and heaved the body into the air, nearly effortlessly. Though the dead took on a limp weight that Bruce never knew a living body to possess, Dr. Crane was far smaller, more petite, than Bruce had realized — a realization that dipped his entire body in shame as the physical weakness of his opponent continued to plague him.  Bruce laid the psychiatrist’s corpse across the nearby table. He vaguely recognized the table as the one upon which Rachel lay, completely unconscious, the night he first rescued her….the night he met Crane…Rage should have boiled at the memory of Scarecrow’s mask. 

Yet here lay the ragdoll, pathetic corpse of the body. The curve of Jonathan Crane’s body’s Adam’s apple was particularly pronounced in the dim underground light, as were the sharp contours of his face as his skin tightened around his skull, postmortem. Carefully removing the cracked glasses, Batman placed them folded inside Crane’s left-side pocket while carefully smoothing back sweat-slicked dark hair from his nemesis’s face. Then, he made quick use of the tie, the jacket, and man’s loafers. Bruce was mildly surprised by the holes and darning patches in Crane’s socks; he would have expected the put-together psychology professor to be meticulous about his appearance. Crane’s shirt came next, baring his scrawny chest in full. Here Bruce paused, feeling a sense of encroachment for the first time  at the sight of the body of his rival stripped. Looking upon the still sternum before him felt distant from Dr. Crane in a way that felt both impersonal and yet too private. Still panting against his inconvenient erection, Bruce rested a broad hand on the still chest, taking in the silence of its absent heartbeat. The stillness and silence in the underground room was more tranquil than any room Bruce remembered being in for years — the constant cycle of his own thoughts soothed by the stillness of the cooling body beneath his touch. 

Then, hefting the body near the edge of the table to allow its head to loll, upside down, Bruce tilted the dead doctor’s head to the side to better stick his own cock in one swoop down its throat. With the free hand not clenched in Crane’s dark hair, he continued to fondle the half-naked corpse as he carefully inserted himself into its mouth with slow, cautious thrusts as he continued to fondle the corpse.

Bruce could not but revel in the contrast between the heat of his own responsive cock and the still moist, but cooling mouth. Crane’s lips had already taken on an alluring chill, but the inside of those cherubic cheeks maintained traces of Crane’s fading warmth as they bulged with Bruce’s cock, the bumps along the roof of Crane’s mouth and his motionless, still swollen tongue rubbing against Bruce with each motion. As he barely managed to stifle a moan, his hips moving gingerly to avoid the dead man’s teth, Bruce’s hand travailed across Crane’s body almost affectionately; pausing over a downy breast with an erect nipple, leaning his weight foreward and planting both hands on either side of Crane’s shoulders for support as he felt his orgasm rising. The body’s broken neck allowed him to manipulate it at such angle as to reach as far down the unresisting throat as possible while Bruce’s mouth occasionally ducked down to pelt the flat, unbreathing navel. 

Bruce barely managed to pull out from the mouth as he came. He splattered his cum across Jonathan’s throat and chest with a gasp that echoed through the otherwise empty room. The sight of his cum dripping like drops of glue on the still sternum and unbreathing and bruised throat of the man he killed filled Bruce again with shame. He once more touched the blemished jugular, the mark of Bruce’s handiwork, as he ducked down his head to plant a kiss on its pulseless skin. 

Later, he would imagine what the body of Dr. Crane looked like when it was cold and stiff. What it looked like in a body bag. After receiving the crime photos from Commissioner Gordon in his capacity as detective, Bruce no longer had to imagine. But first, he would scrub from Dr. Crane’s body from all DNA. Eventually, he had managed to manhandle it back into its clothes. Button the shirt. Straightened the tie. Adjusted the jacket over his collar. He managed to finally close its eyes again and rearranged its arms over the torso as if positioning Crane’s body in a coffin. 

ThatBruce was not proud of what he had done — any of it– meant he felt the responsibility to carry the memory of the moment of rage and desire like a talisman. Though Bruce continued to convince himself that the arousal had been due to a combination of going a long time without sex and the natural response to a warm body rubbing up against his groin, in the late hours of the night, he found his imagination drifting to the memory of a smug, infuriating mouth now lax and lifeless across his throbbing cock; the shell of his former foe now powerless within his grasp.

He could imagine a living Jonathan Crane smirking at the thought of Bruce debasing himself with his body — now sickened at the realization that, in that sense, it had been Crane who had his victory. But the absence of Scarecrow’s manic grin on the lifeless face Bruce had left in Arkham Hospital’s basement remained in Bruce’s mind; reassurance that Crane’s hollow frame bore no recognition of Bruce debasing himself through debasing the body. 

The memory of that face and frame would remain in Bruce’s mind in the dark hours of his lonely nights for a very, very long time. Bruce could not say with all honesty that he regretted that. 

In his dreams, however, he found his one regret was not indulging Jonathan Crane’s cold lips with a final kiss goodbye. 

Bonus: Crane’s POV

The power dynamic between the two reversed before Crane could sputter out his first cough. Batman jerked him by with a fistfull of hair before grabbing his collar, effortlessly manhandling Crane. Crane wriggled like a fish, gasping through his burning lungs as they fought for air  —quaking spastically in Batman’s grip from either asphyxiation, or utter terror at his mind left to the mercy of his own creation.

WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR??

 Terror jolted through every nerve, every muscle, limp and trembling at the mercy of the iron grip lifting him from the floor. Jonathan felt every other sensation in his body detach except the white hot, blinding, vibrating fear that then had him rigid and quaking, helpless…

“Raj…Raj Al Ghul.”

“Raj-Al Ghul is dead.” Bellowed Batman. “WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR???” 

Crane sputtered in confusion — unable to process the question. Then, the doctor shuddered, feebly rolling his eyes back in his skull while his tongue lashed out, wordlessly. In his hallucinating mind, the demonic visage before him gurgled out rot with every incomprehensible, vibrating syllable. His vision distorted further, obscuring the malformed mask before his face from a squirming rotting corpse to a blank, featureless shadow. If rotten, he could almost imagine it as a human face.The demon’s guttural voice echoed through the smoke-blanketed room, shivering through Jonathan’s own body as it shook,  trembling and overwhelmed by emotions of horror and a fear beyond terror….

….And the clear sensation of something more warm and compulsive deep in his gut. 

Dr. Crane knew arousal was a side effect of his toxin. He had experienced it before when testing his creation on himself. For reasons Jonathan had never entirely understood, despite not being one who typically experienced lust, he could be turned on by panic attacks. Many a night in graduate school had been spent drowning in terror and stress until he noticed himself growing hard. While fapping away that fear in reverse procrastination was not a particularly maladaptive coping mechanism — at least as far as Jonathan Crane was concerned — he had still found himself embarrassed by the habit and then angry at his own shame.

As if realizing that he had inadvertently lifted the shorter man’s feet almost an inch from the ground, Batman abruptly lowered his grip to avoid accidentally choking him. As he brought the squirming psychiatrist down to touch the ground, the  gesture brought Dr. Crane’s groin against the muscular, thick column of the taller man’s thighs. Desire pooled into Crane’s lower body alongside his blood at both the vice-grip on his veins. The feeling of a broad-shoulder, and no doubt toned body pressed so closely to his own, and that vice-grip around his wind pipe, sent a wonderful, repulsive little shudder of arousal through every convulsing nerve.

Crane felt his pants grow tight, an embarrassing flush of blood rising to  his cheeks irreducible to the inherent eros of a fist clasped around his throat. Fortunately, the moan that bubbled up in his throat escaped only as a gasp, lacking oxygen to form a sound even as that same lack edged his arousal even more. The sound would have been unthinkable to the delicate mask of sanity he had so carefully crafted and maintained for years. Now, that shame just turned him on more, flushing at the desire sparked by his own humiliation, and the delight of taboo at that desire just arousing him even more in a vicious circle of feeling arousal and shame escalating each other in equal measure. 

The body pressed against his readjusted — Crane’s final embers of consciousness vaguely noticed that Batman was holding him up. Crane knew that whoever was behind that mask had a strong, almost cartoonishly handsome jaw. The kind of lower face that a hackneyed comic artist would imagine for a superhero had Crane not noticed its beauty, detachedly. 

Then, the voice:

“One last time: Ra’s al Ghul is DEAD. WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR??”

Finally, a response managed to fight through the slightly loosened grip around the psychiatrist’s throat. 

“Ra’s al Ghul…” Crane stammered through his gasps, eyes dilated and uncomprehending. “He’s here in Gotham…”

Soon, the body of Jonathan Crane would be lying on a metal gurney in the morgue, shrouded by a thin cotton sheet as white as the face of the corpse beneath it. If Jonathan’s dying mind could think, he would register, dissociated, that in hours, his thrashing body would be still, stiff, cold. . He would vividly imagine his own body on the steel morgue table after it had gone stiff. He would imagine being washed, bathed, cared for. The idea of his worthless, untouched, puny flesh touched in reverence in a context that would not cause him to feel embarrassment or fear…or anything at all … would be more erotic, in that moment….

As Crane’s lips were inches from the Batman’s, as dark in Crane’s psychosis as his iconic cowl, there was an intimacy of dying in your best enemy’s fist that no lover could match. The intimacy of being the last face ever seen, the last to touch your skin, was an idea that had always escaped Crane. The eroticism of the bodies in the morgue at medical skill were erotic to him precisely because he could not risk molesting one in the very, very rare occasion that he had been compelled to do so. Still, Jonathan had gone through enough therapy to understand himself enough to know that the degradation that he had experienced his entire life from philistines unable to comprehend or accept his rare genius had filled him with a rage that incentivized him to maintain control as powerful as his terror. He knew himself well enough to know exactly why he did not like to relinquish control, and the detailed ways it impacted his life and (lack of) relationships.

 He had also lied to enough therapists to know he had no intention of changing. 

Yet before the dead psychiatrist’s glassy, vacant eyes glinted dully in the lair’s harsh orange light, before his smug, boyish mouth fell agape in ways that Batman’s nemesis was too proud to let another see, those eyes would dilate, unseeing, while the body breathed. That mouth that would be soon kissed cold wheezed out its final, ironic words:

Dr. Crane isn’t here right now….but if you’d like to leave a message….

The snap that ended Crane’s consciousness let his frame fall limp in a mimicry of post-coitus afterglow. Though he would not live to feel it, soon, his unused body would become an object of touch, of intimacy, even, in death though not in life. All the while Crane’s blue eyes stared — devoid of all flickers of life, devoid of all traces of fear.