#lmk if additional tags are needed for more trigger warnings and i will gladly apply them

[adrenalinesaint]

Frozen peas smart against the bruise on Jonathan’s cheek. It’s too late to stymie the swelling, but numbing it will help with the pain. He’s out of ibuprofen again, you see. Go home, Crane, the Penguin had told him, so he did. Lindsay knows better than to hem or haw around him when he’s in a state like this -- knows better than to grill him on the subject of his most recent injury based off of his facial expression alone. Sensing she isn’t wanted, she takes up her jacket and camera and slinks out the door shortly after his arrival.

Alone in the apartment, the veil comes off. With a quick blow, he punches the wall and fails to cause a hole due to lack of strength. Cobblepot was right. He’s stupid -- he’s being stupid. Even right now, it’s absurd. It reminds that reaching out at all for emotional contact is a dangerous gambit. Specifically, Penguin reminded him of that -- and he won’t soon forget himself again.

Standing now in his apartment bathroom, he blacks out his eyes using his hands instead of a makeup sponge. There’s only one way to cope with conflict like this -- only one thing he knows how to do to get a release. He can shoulder the burdens of others, delighting in the knowledge that they aren’t his, but when it comes to his own, he’s weak. So, so very weak. Doubt creeps into the fringes of his mind and when the burlap comes out, he feels a comfort in the knowledge that he’ll see what he needs to see soon.

What are you afraid of, dear reader? What strikes you like a pang of ice in the dead of night when nobody is there to distract you? What absolute certainty picks at your sanity, when you dare to leave that place in your mind unguarded? And what if you could face that thing -- look it dead in the eye and experience it as if it were real: your worst nightmare -- would you do it?

Some performers stand in the mirror before a show and tell themselves the worst things they can imagine an audience saying about their performance. It’s a way to steel the nerves -- exposure therapy.

When his face is sufficiently blacked out, he dons the mask and stares hard into the mirror. A pre-loaded syringe filled with toxin sits in the bowl of the sink, looking up at him expectantly.

As the needle goes into his arm, he shudders with the anxiety of knowing what’s to come. As it pours into his vein, the toxin tingles and burns like eucalyptus on the lips. Leaning in closer to the mirror, he watches closely as his pupils dilate. Normally, half a syringe is enough to incapacitate a person for several hours and send them into a state of total disconnect from reality. The plunger pushes a full syringe into his blood and rests for a moment as he begins to shake violently.

Breath doesn’t come. There’s a large black cat sitting on his chest. A shadowy figure of a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat enters the bathroom and snaps his neck. The floor is cold on his cheeks -- he’s convulsing. Somehow, he’s alive, and his lungs burn for air, is he breathing? Is he underwater? A powerful current lifts him up from the floor and thrusts him into every wall and then the ceiling -- black.

A single crow caws overhead, and Jonathan is laying on his side in the fetal position. Tall grass all around him moves as though its kelp in tepid waters, stalks of corn rising up above and a smattering of orchids below: a strange and impossible scene. The floor is sand, and as he walks, he can feel vibrations deep below him rumbling out of giant worms that can feel the rhythm of his fear. His feet sink into the sand as he moves, threatening to fall in all the way and be lost forever.

In the middle of the field, he finds a million raindrops suspended in the air in a perfect dome around two figures: masculine and an androgynous femme. They stand there together, frozen in time in Klimpts lover’s pose. It’s him -- or a creature he knows looks like him but isn’t him -- and he’s holding Kira’s face in that perfect expression of longing and adoration, kissing her cheek. She’s smiling, bittersweet, and holds her hand over his, knees bent. Were the figures not frozen like wax, she would be falling to the floor in a display of romantic rapture. Both figures eyes are closed in ecstasy. 

In this strange suspension of time, Jonathan can approach the lovers. He can even draw near enough to reach out and carefully move one of Kira’s hairs out of her face. Even though he had not touched her skin, the smell of it washes over him and for a passing instant, he’s no longer inside the field, but inside of her. She’s welcoming and patient. Cold, precise, and clever. The oldest soul he could imagine.

In this wash of comfort, he forgets the dream he’s in and attempts to touch her skin. But the rain begins to fall. He blinks -- or perhaps here, in this strange world, he does not need to, perhaps time or the universe around him blinked. Kira and this other Jonathan’s eyes are both wide as saucers, piercing him with a stare that penetrates his very core.

His doppelganger peels his face away from Kira’s to reveal that there was never a kiss at all. His mouth is attached to the skin of her cheek, tearing and bloody as he pulls away to separate himself from her. What remains of his mouth is a bloody mess, no teeth, no tongue, no opening, just a flat plane of bone and gore. The universe blinks again. He’s standing underneath this other Jonathan, pinned down by his ankles.

It’s surreal, like a dream. He can only see and understand that he is underneath this other Jonathan -- everything else is black. His doppelganger stands with his feet atop his ankles, and as he desperately tries to free himself and scurry away, his doppelganger grows larger and larger, heavier and heavier. As Jonathan’s energy wanes and exhaustion takes over his ability to struggle, he realizes that he cannot free himself because he is immaterial. Holding out his hands, he cannot bring them outward or backward. He’s two-dimensional, a literal shadow, stuck under the shape of his other self. Kira stands at the fringe of what he’s aware of and takes a pencil eraser to his edges, slowly whittling him away.

He can’t protest. Shadows can’t speak. He can’t move on his own; he’s only what’s left from the light touching that other version of himself.

The sight of his doppelganger and Kira fall down a long tunnel and again everything is water and currents in the deep.

He stands alone in a room in the familiar style of most Gotham architecture, but the walls, ceiling, and floor are all painted black and sticky to the touch. Stevie Nicks plays on the television and he’s fourteen again, humming along in the dark, praying to a God he doesn’t believe in that he won’t be caught.

Kira. Her face, emerging from a pool of opaque black ink.

“You’ll suffice,” she says. And then the flood gates open.

You’re nothing but a replacement. A band-aid for a wound that you didn’t cause. I love the idea of you, not you. My love is conditional. You’re unremarkable compared to the other you. He’s better in bed too. Why bother making yourself matter in my eyes? My thoughts of you are written in stone and you never got a chance to help write it. You’re just one more of countless other versions of you, each more likely to have his shit together than you do. Somewhere out there, Jonathan Crane let himself have happiness, why can’t you? Aren’t you supposed to be fear incarnate? Fear doesn’t have this much weakness. What’s wrong with you?

What’s wrong with you?

What’s wrong with you?

Mary Keeny strikes him in the back of the head with her cane and he hits the floor. He’s watching from the corner where the wall and the ceiling meet. Little Jonathan weeps and begs for forgiveness while his great grandmother continues to beat him senseless.

“What’s wrong with you?” She demands. “Why can’t you just be normal?”