One more Batfic snippet for the road

[buggery]

Arkham is like home, comfortable as a pair of old jeans, familiar as your mother's perfume.

Arkham is a madhouse and a prison, and he chafes every moment he's here.

He's not sure anymore which of him holds which opinion of the place. It keeps changing.

The inmates change, the guards more so -- few of Arkham's residents remains as long as they ought to before misplaced optimism paroles one prematurely, or carelessness allows them to make an escape. The people who choose to be here never last as long as they think they will before their charges, or the place itself, breaks them badly enough in body or mind (or both) that they can no longer do their jobs.

Not a few of them have made the transition from keeper to kept, in Arkham.

The landed gentry of Arkham's cells run the place as much as anyone. There are too many chinks in Arkham's architecture, too many gaps in its schedules, for the always-too-new prison staff to maintain complete control, of the prisoners' communications or movements, much less their mental health.

Rendezvouses -- liasons -- have been taking place in this particular bend of corridor since Jeremy Arkham was warden. His hand twitches against the lack of pocket in his Arkham-issue inmate scrubs, against the lack of anything *in* the pocket.

They're only trying to help him. He'll make them pay for taking it from him.

It was his idea. Lunacy has its advantages.

She sidles up softly from behind, moving almost as quietly as one of the Bats. She smells like fresh fruit, fresh air, like the outdoors.

Like freedom. Like terror.

Sometimes she is as soft and yielding, as sweet, as a rose petal, bending to his touch and annointing him with dewy touches. Sometimes she is all thorn, rending and repelling and drawing blood with vicious indifference.

Her duality delights Two-Face.

It disgusts Harvey... until she kisses him.


Harvey Dent / Pamela Isley (Poison Ivy)




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all DC universe stories by the Jack
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Comments

[buggery.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I never realised how much of either of them had snuck into my consciousness, but it all came out here.