The Skin That Crawls From You [A Jonathan Crane Fan-fiction]

October 28th| Arkham Asylum

"You can't do this,"
I shriek, my voice so unfamiliar, ripped raw and laced with pain.

Two hearty nurses haul me into the parking lot, I kick at the air, swinging and flailing. Their hands gouge into my bare arms, holding tighter as I struggle in the cold morning air. A large red ambulance sits before me, I had been fighting against this very thing since the beginning.

A sharp jab pushes through my neck, and I whimper. A needle prick followed by a deep 'matter-of-fact' voice:
"Miss Alcott, relax."

My body gives up on me then, crumbling beneath the weight of that syringe, I feel myself go limp in the nurses' arms, a sudden chemical induced sleep swallowing me whole.

•

  The world had barely come back into focus before it hit me. A thick nausea that somehow covers every sense; a fear that I feel in my bones. Lunging forward, I swallow the sick and pull my self up wards.

Where the hell am I?

I'm stopped short of sitting up straight. Four leathery restraints chafe violently at my ankles and wrists, the once soft material almost sharp from negligence. A ball of ice grows within my lungs, and I remember.

She really committed me.

Ice turns to fire with a single thought, and I chew over the visual of my string bean mother batting her fake eye lashes and flipping her Hollywood curls to my doctor, or maybe to the judge?

I had never been committed before.
I had never been labeled a murderer before.
But here I am. strapped with both bone chilling facts and absolutely no idea how it had truly gotten to this.

My only (very limited) experience with asylums had been my brother's books and movies, depicting crumbling old instituons, haunted by sleepless demons and ghouls. Cheesy flicks from the seventies or awkwardly written comics, really.

My mother eventually banned our household from consuming such "dark fiction", it wasn't 'healthy.'
With everything going on within our new city, who needed the darkness anyway?

Ryan's fantasies proved far too accurate; at least here, within Gotham, because as far as the eye could see, untamed patches of mold stretch over thin walls, and sludgy water stains climb across foamy ceiling panels.

I can't help but wonder what my mother would say if she were here right now. This room in all it's disarray. Her golden girl, strapped to a cot, deemed a hazard to herself and others. I can almost laugh.

And it was funny until he came.