Willing Victim

A/N: I promise.. smut coming soon...lol. Do I need to mention that the only character that belongs to me is Darcy??

Darcy had been afraid to go home for the last week. Last night was to have been her first night at home alone after what everyone so callously referred to as “the accident.” She supposed that was one reason why she’d been so quick to go home with Jonathan. She almost wished that he had made a pass at her. At least then she could have felt something other than that horrible feeling of guilt and despair. But she inspected every bit of herself in his shower stall for any evidence that he’d taken advantage of her while she was stoned, but there was nothing. He had helped her through her first real night alone. Since the accident, she’d been staying with friends who, God bless them, had done everything possible to keep her mind off of reality. She had been afraid of a nervous breakdown last night, but the good doctor had made everything better. But she didn’t think she would see him again. As she walked back to the cemetery to retrieve her car, she went over all the reasons why she should leave well-enough alone. Though he had been nothing but kind to her, he scared her a little bit. There was something about his eyes that looked so cold and ominous. And his controlled demeanor made her feel like a puppet on a string. Like he could make her do anything he wanted. And then there was the fact that she found him incredibly attractive. Which made her feel like a worthless slut. Erik wasn’t even cold yet and she was already entertaining fantasies about total strangers. No, seeing him again would be impossible. She’d made up her mind.

She stopped her car outside of the townhouse her and Erik shared. She stared up at the reddish brick house and swallowed hard. She wasn’t sure she could do this. For a fleeting moment she wanted to turn her car around and drive as fast as she could back to Jonathan. They’d only been in this place a year. Erik had insisted that they leave their little apartment in The Narrows after the Asylum break-out last summer. Fortunately, the couple had been at a club near the center of Gotham that night, so they missed most of the excitement. But the next day they started packing up and looking for a new place to live. Erik had said that no one should have to have a police escort to get into their own apartment. A friend had helped them find this place and they’d been so happy to finally be out of The Narrows.

“Alright Darcy. You can’t put this off any longer.” She got out of the car and started up the stony steps that led to the front door. Each step felt so heavy, but she kept going. The peaceful feeling from the night before still lingered, but she was afraid that it would be gone entirely the moment she stepped inside.

Everything was just as they’d left it the night of the party. She put her keys down on the sideboard beside the door and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were dark hollows and her face looked almost sallow. She walked slowly through the tiny foyer and into the living room. She jumped as the clock on the mantle chimed 5 o’ clock. “God, I did sleep a long time.” She yawned and threw her coat across the nearest chair. “And I’m still tired.” So far, so good. She wandered from room to room, waiting for the one item that would conjure up memories too painful to bear, but nothing seemed to affect her. She took to the stairs, climbing up slowly, touching the framed photographs that dotted the wall. The pictures of Erik seemed somewhat foreign, like the person in the photograph was so familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on who he was. As she entered their bedroom, the same feeling of numb awareness hung over her head. She went to the closet and touched his things, but they were just… things. Nothing seemed to hold any meaning.

Sitting down on the bed, she stared across the room at the mirror above the dresser. She looked at her face and smiled. “Erik’s dead,” she whispered to her reflection. “Erik’s dead,” she said again, a bit louder, but she drew it out in long syllables, watching her face contort. This made her laugh and she almost couldn’t stop. “Erik’s dead!” she shouted, standing and going to the mirror. Leaning forward, she put her face close to the mirror and shouted again. Over and over she chanted “Erik’s dead!” until her throat was sore and her face red from exertion. She stood in front of the mirror and began pulling her clothes off slowly, as if in a strange striptease for herself, all the time whispering, “Erik’s dead, doctor.” She laughed and laid across her bed, pushing her hair out of her face. Her fingertips traced little figure eights on her bare stomach as she stared up at the ceiling at nothing. “Erik is dead, Doctor.. Doctor Jonathan..” she giggled. “He’s dead and now I’m going to fuck you,” she purred in a girlish voice. She closed her eyes, trying to remember Erik’s face, but only seeing Jonathan. Letting her fingertips travel lower, she trilled them over the insides of her thighs, then traced the triangle between them. She chewed on her lower lip as she reached down, pinching the small nub of flesh just inside the opening of her sex until she whimpered with the pain of it. “A little pain to make you feel alive.” Picturing his blue eyes peering down on hers, she rubbed gentle circles over her clit. Then controlled, firm strokes against it as she imagined that he would. She began to pant softly, still lost in the overwhelming sense of peace and anesthetized longing. With a swift flick of her wrist, she pressed her fingertip deep inside herself. It only took a few rough strokes before she was teetering on the edge of oblivion. As her climax rose, she could only scream, “Erik is dead!” over and over.

The shudders subsided and she could feel the tears on her cheek again. She touched the damp streaks over her face cautiously and swift realization took hold. She was crashing, and crashing fast. When she closed her eyes, she could see him falling again.

***************************************

By the time darkness had fallen, Darcy was sitting in the center of her bed, wrapped in blankets, clutching a picture of her and Erik-- taken just weeks before the accident. Her eyes were red from the crying that had been almost constant since her little episode earlier. She just couldn’t understand it. She had been, in the immortal words of Pink Floyd, comfortably numb just hours before. She had even laughed at the thoughts of Erik being dead, but now… now an agonizing despair slowly took hold again. Guilt piled on top of it like a stifling blanket. Her grief and memory of Erik pushed aside by an almost animalistic lust for the doctor. How had she let that happen? Maybe this was her punishment for that. “I’m sorry, Erik, so sorry…” she groaned, pushing it out of her vocal cords desperately. She rocked back and forth, waiting for the sadness to subside or for sleep to take over, but it never did. Tears gave way to screaming sobs, then to pulling at her hair and clawing at her skin, then chills that racked her body with violent shudders.

When she was able to walk a little, she ransacked the kitchen for the bottle of gin that Erik had always kept, but when she found it, the bottle was empty. “Is this some kind of cruel joke,” she stuttered. Way in the back of their makeshift liquor cabinet, she finally found a bottle of cabernet that someone had given them years before. How it had made it over here from the apartment in The Narrows, she had no idea. Neither her, nor Erik had ever drank wine much, but it would do in a pinch. She grabbed the bottle and opened it with some difficulty-- stabbing an ice pick into the cork and pulling it out. Not bothering to get a glass, she took it back to her bedroom, drinking from the bottle in deep, thirsty gulps. Half the bottle was gone by the time her stomach started to protest. She barely made it to the bathroom before everything she’d ever eaten, it seemed, came up. “This is it,” she thought, “I’m dying. I’ll just die right here.” She laid her hot forehead on the cool porcelain of the toilet as the dry heaving became less frequent. She could hear the phone ringing, but she didn’t want to answer. If she was going to die, she didn’t want anything like the phone to impede the process. She heard the answering machine kick on and heard her friend Mya.

“Darce? Are you there? No one’s seen you since Erik’s funeral and we were worried about you. Please pick up if you’re there. I’ve left five messages already. If you don’t call me back by tonight, I’m coming over there. Bye.”

Darcy smiled slightly. Mya was like the mom she’d never had. Sure they were the same age, but Mya was always the sensible one. The wise one. Erik had called her “Sunny Goth” because she never looked like she belonged with them. Always smiling, always laughing. Her red hair and wire rimmed glasses made her look like the polar opposites of her friends with their dyed black hair and exaggerated eyeliner. She wanted to talk to Mya, but she just couldn’t bring herself to. She didn’t think Mya could ever understand all the dark thoughts she’d had over the last few days. So she ignored the message and went back to her bed.

No sooner had she laid down did the phone begin to ring again. Probably Mya again. And if Darcy didn’t answer, Mya would have herself and the whole band over here banging on the door before long. She rolled over and scrambled to pick up the phone before the answering machine picked up. “Mya, I’m fine. I just want to be alone right now, ok?”

“Who’s Mya?” a smooth masculine voice asked through the receiver.

Darcy immediately recognized the voice as Jonathan’s. “Oh. It’s you. How did you get my number?” She asked, sitting up quickly.

“The most mysterious of places… the phonebook.”

“Oh,” she replied, catching herself before she laughed. “Why are you calling me?”

“Just checking on you. Making sure you’re alright.” She listened to his voice, barely paying attention to what he said. She imagined the way his lips would look forming the words.

“Well, to tell you the truth---”

“You’re crashing aren’t you?”

“I’m not sure. I just… it all came back, worse than before.”

“Let me guess. You feel even more depressed , you have chills, nausea.

“How did you know?” She swept her hair off of her face and cradled the phone to her hear with her shoulder.

“Drugs inevitably have a side effect. The only way to avoid it is to keep taking more of the drug. Miss one Prozac dose and two weeks later you jump off a bridge. You‘re de-toxing.”

“But I just.. I don’t think I can take this. It’s just too painful. But when I came home, I felt… I didn’t feel anything. Except…” She stopped in mid-sentence, not wanting to finish her thought. “Nevermind.”

“Except what?” His voice rose, as if just on the edge of laughter.

“I just… it was so odd…I had uncontrollable… urges. And this overwhelming sense that my entire existence was without consequence. That is, until I started… I guess, crashing?”

“Hmmm… that’s interesting. Are you feeling alright now?” Though she couldn’t see him, Darcy was quite certain that he was smiling.

“Actually… no,” the tears in her voice that had been threatening to break since she’d picked up the phone finally broke in a torrential downpour over her cheeks. “I’m as bad as I could possibly be. I can’t stop crying… and I want to eat, but I’m so sick. My heart keeps racing in my chest and I can’t even control my thoughts---” Her words trailed off in a slur of heaving sobs. “You have to give me something else to fix it…”

“Oh I’m afraid I can’t fix it, darling. But you can just wait it out. The side effects will eventually subside.”

“How long will that take?”

“You should be back to normal… well, as normal as someone who’s lost a loved one can be, by tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?! I’ll be dead if you make me feel this way until tomorrow.”

“Dearest… I didn’t make you do anything. You asked for my help and I gave it. You have the power to stop it--”

“I’m not taking any more of it! Not if I feel like this afterwards.” Darcy rubbed her eyes, looking hopeless. “But would you come over… please… I just don’t want to be alone.”

“You don’t have other friends?”

“I do.. But they would never understand this. Please… please, you’re the only person I can talk to right now. Maybe its because I don’t know you at all… and I know I don’t have any right to ask---”

“Where do you live?” Darcy sighed with relief and gave him directions to the small townhouse. When she hung up, she felt peaceful once more.

***************************************

Jonathan Crane smiled smugly as he hung up the phone gently. If Darcy only knew how truly intrigued he was with her, she would either be flattered or horrified. The truth is, he’d been watching her for a long time. Her voice was the first thing he’d noticed about her. It had an almost supernatural hypnotic quality to it. He’d been hiding out, skulking around The Narrows, in the weeks after the Ducard disaster. One night he’d been sitting in the corner of a dark hole in the wall called The Shadow Lounge. He fit right in with the rest of the lunatics that slinked around that place. All of them pierced or tattooed, groaning about how horrible life was. His clouded and infected mind raced with the incessant conversations of those around him. He couldn’t distinguish their voices from the ones that had now taken up residence in his brain. Intellectually, he knew that they were just phantom voices, but still he listened. Eventually, he would come to appreciate his own madness and wield it like a weapon, but at this moment, he was trying desperately to hang on to the part of his mind that still remained rational, small though it may be.

And then… Darcy, like some kind of dark angel, took the stage and began to sing and a moment of clarity dawned. Everyone turned to look at her, enraptured by the highs and lows and tiny nuances of her voice. She stood completely still, holding on to the microphone so tightly that Jonathan could see the white appear on her knuckles. “You scream and you shout, know you’ll never get out. No you never will see what’s new.” The lyrics dripped from her tongue effortlessly, her eyes closed the whole time. Before the end of the song, no one was speaking or even dared to bring their glass to their lips. She had them locked under her spell and it didn’t let go until she was finished. As soon as she was gone, Crane had decided that nothing would stand between him and this girl. She had a power that he couldn’t understand, but God how he wanted to. It wasn’t a sexual attraction, per se, though the thought wasn’t unpleasant, but more a hunger to understand and use her… talent. She was interesting.

He’d spent the next few months following her, watching her every move-- going to the market to buy vodka and pomegranates, dying her hair jet black in her bathroom, making love to that pathetic little boy--- he watched everything, becoming more obsessed with each passing day. It didn’t take long to construct his plan. The coordinated attack on the annual Halloween party had been almost too easy to arrange. Sure, it was harder to think now with all those voices constantly whispering and his skewed perception of the world, but a little experimentation with modern street pharmaceuticals had taken care of that. A little of this, a little of that in a syringe every morning and he was almost normal-- well, normal enough to be perceived as such. The planning of the robbery, killing the Senator, and creating a new villain to occupy the Batman was almost an orgasmic experience, but what he was really after was Darcy. Getting Drago out of the way was the ultimate goal, the rest had just been the icing on the cake. Not to mention how satisfying it would be to convince Darcy that the Bat-freak was the one to blame for her lover’s fall, making her desperate for vengeance. Once he’d finished warping her mind enough, she’d be the perfect mate-- and partner-in-crime. He even had a name for his creation: Siren.

A/N: The lyrics that Darcy sings in this chapter are from a song called "Drool" by Switchblade Symphony. Great band! Check 'em out!