#edited this because i originally said basement when i was mentally thinking closet

[realgametheory]

do you guys remember when matt’s recording studio used to be in his closet-- holy shifbdfvdshgs

[fordarkisthesuede]

At the Brink of Midnight - Chapter 9

*Arrives two days late with Starbucks* ‘Sup, guys! σ( ▼∀▼)σ These past 96 hours have somehow filled me with a weird chaotic energy, and I pumped out the longest roller-coaster of a chapter I’ve ever done in such a short amount of time!!! Thank you, whoever sent all the writing vibes my way!!!! ★>d(,,･ε´-,,)⌒☆ I’m sending out strong vibes to everybody in return! *May you get hit by the writing bug and have the opportunity and energy to completely translate your ideas to printed words!*

Buuut a big note before we get to the good stuff:  I realized too late that the original events of S2 take place in Spring. Like…April. I was writing all of this with the thought that S2 took place in fall; I mean, the characters can wear a leather jacket or a couple of layers comfortably, so I thought “yeah that sounds like early autumn”. Nope! So that means that for this story’s timeline, everything gets shifted into where it should be. On the downside, that means I had to go through and edit all the bits where it said “it was totally spring, you guys”. On the upside… IT’S NOW OCTOBER!!!!! THE SPOOKY SEASON THAT COMPLETELY FITS WITH WHAT’S GOING ON!!! And coincidentally, it’s my favorite time of the year, so I love writing about it even more! I get to add in a thing here and there about the spookiest time of the year, so I’ll have a nice list of what those little changes are uploaded here soon if you don’t feel like re-reading the whole thing. A re-read isn't necessary though, just keep in mind that the humid air of rainy spring in the city is replaced with chilling fronts and even more cloud cover than usual. Why am I bothering with this? Because I’m a stickler for keeping with canon as much as possible and I feel like an absolute fool for not remembering what goddamn time of year it was to begin with. (I mean, I went so far as to download all of TeamFourStar’s play-through because I watched it so often, you think I'd remember to go back and watch the very beginning once in a while…)

Anywho, thank you all again for your continuously loving support!!! 

♡~(ɔ ˘3˘)˘⌣˘ c)

Important Spoiler Tags: drugs (mentioned), swearing, canon-typical violence, electric shocks (mentioned), torture of flowers, flirting, almost an excessive use of emoji, crying, romantic dirty thoughts

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Read on Ao3 or continue below:

Chapter 9:  Grapevines

Bruce Wayne couldn’t remember the last time he’d conducted a meeting from his home office. It wasn’t as if he didn’t use it – the desk surface had hardly any dust settled on it and two empty coffee mugs he’d forgotten about on two different occasions just happened to be stacked behind the monitor – but it felt strange, like a lot of things did lately.

He knew part of the reason for that was watching houses down in the Batcave right now. Knowing he wasn’t alone in the house was comforting, but knowing there were two cops outside the Manor’s front door just waiting for a chance to grab his best friend-cum-houseguest was not, and knowing that they were both close to being thrown in hot water was even less so.

He figured the other reason he felt strange was because he was slipping back into his old habit as if it had never been shelved in the first place. He had time to kill before the video meeting started, so he’d been scouring for information on “Pam”, Jonathan Crane’s ‘old friend’.

There were a few Pamela’s in Gotham, but only one fit within Crane’s age-range and attended Gotham University at about the same time:  Pamela Isley, a forty-four-year-old former botanist with a record that ran the length of his arm. Theft, assault, threats, and attempted poisonings all done in the name of extreme environmentalism and social activism were sprinkled in her history before and after her days as a researcher, and according to GCPD records, she was now suspected of running her own drug-ring under the moniker of ‘Poison Ivy’. (Bruce found several recorded instances of people claiming to be Poison Ivy, most of whom were already arrested.)

Bruce would’ve wondered why on Earth she hadn’t been thrown in prison when she made a bomb-threat at a wealthy businessman several states away nearly a decade ago if he hadn’t seen her mug-shot from back then. At thirty-five, she looked every bit as beautiful as a top-billed Hollywood star, with natural orange-red curls cascading over her pale shoulders and ample bust in chemically-tamed waves, flashing the camera a come-hither stare that made it look like she was trying for a part in a high-budget porn flick rather than standing in front of a height chart for her criminal record. Pamela’s charges were mysteriously swept under the rug.

The latest photo he found of her reminded him a bit of those ‘cougar’ dating ads he’d seen – the older Pamela was blowing a kiss to the camera with a mocking look in her dark green eyes. Bruce glared at it. There was little doubt she was using people to cover for her constantly, and when she was in trouble, she managed to wriggle out of it with her looks.

Not this time. She was friends with Dr. Jonathan Crane, and that meant she wasn’t going to get out of this unharmed. The second his virtual meeting was over, Bruce was heading towards Toxic Acres, and hopefully the wounded Crane would still be there to see Batman’s fist hit his –

Bruce snapped out of his thoughts at the buzz of his phone. A message from the BatComputer…?

I’m bored :/

Bruce blinked down at the screen. John had found the emergency messaging system. Of course he had. He was just grateful that the encryption software on his phone was still up to date. Just what else did John poke his nose into down there…? (There was the chance that John would see files he shouldn’t, but Bruce kept those under a thumbprint encryption. He shouldn’t even entertain the thought.)

Stake-outs are usually pretty boring.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you were down here tho! :)

Bruce hovered his thumb over the keyboard, unsure of what to say. The feeling was kind of mutual, if he was being honest; having another person around on a stakeout would at least keep his mind wandering into the worsts of what-ifs and double-checking every last security issue…

No movement on either houses btw. Been reading Crane’s docs in the meantime but it’s DREADFUL!!! I feel like I’m reading a sleeping pill… =_=

You finish your WE stuff yet?

Meeting’s not for another 20 minutes. Been looking up stuff on Crane’s “friend”.

Oh??? :o Do tell!!!!

Bruce couldn’t help but smile at the enthusiasm.

Pamela Isley, former botanist w/ criminal rec., mostly extreme protest kind of stuff. Good chance she’s the head of a drug-ring that moved here a couple months ago; their leader goes by “Poison Ivy”.

They went to college together, but Pamela moved back here recently.

hMmMmm…. That means no burning the place down if we’re stuck! Bad fumes everywhere xP

Bruce focused on the word “we’re”. He hadn’t been planning on bringing John along. He wanted him safe, at home, where no one had a chance of seeing him and he wasn’t put in harm’s way…

Oh!!! You’ve got a bunch of sticky electro-shockers around - do you mind if I tinker with them? :3c pleeeeaaasssee?

What are you thinking of doing with them?

Making one BIIIIIG shock-bomb, of course! ;D I can wire them together so the shock spreads evenly in the space while it’s discharging.

Bruce reconsidered bringing John. He was still learning to curb his impulses, so being outside in a fighting environment would be a serious gamble, but... Maybe that could be their advantage, too. Bruce made a mental note to go dig out the spare bullet-proof vest from his closet’s secret panel.

You can do that?

I played around with making something like it before, but……well, you know.

Time + supplies for that project were low att. I figured I could always go back to it later anyway.

Bruce felt like his heart had deflated and swelled in such a short time that it hurt.

I mean I’m fine with throwing knives around too but I figured that would be less discrete ¯\_(ツ )_/¯

He’d been thinking of different methods of entering the “house”. Most of them featured a silent slip-in and as little combat as possible, but he knew that there would likely be some muscle around to stop any would-be intruders, and getting a quieter jump on them would certainly be helpful. He would certainly be lying if he said he wasn’t impressed that John had thought that far ahead even back then.

If you think you can get it done within 1.5 hours, then yes.

Ha ha ha with these supplies I can get it done in like 40 mins! >:3 just you watch!!!

Btw have you seen the news?

Not yet. Why?

I was on the morning edition! At least they used a good pic ;D

But also saw a guy getting fished out of the harbor. Your handy-dandy invasion software said he’s a registered Ryde driver.

I told you not to fiddle with that.

Sorry, but I only used it the once! Promise!!!

Bruce sighed through his nostrils.

Besides I thought you’d want to know. Think Crane stole his ride and dumped him by the docks? :v

Probably. I can get the plate from up here to verify. DO NOT TOUCH THAT PROGRAM AGAIN.

Yes sir ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Bruce wasn’t sure if that message was supposed to be flirtatious or mocking.

The incoming call from Iman Avesta stopped him from responding. He figured it had to do with John’s escape and the extra security added at Wayne Tower this morning, but why was she calling him now, rather than several hours ago?

“Iman?”

“Hey, Bruce. Hold on a sec – there we go, now we can both -”

“Bruce, what the fuck?” Tiffany asked over the line. “Are you at home right now?”

Bruce almost sighed at the attitude. “Yes, Tiffany, I’m at home, in my office.”

“Uh-huh. I keep getting alerts that your basement’s messaging system is being used. Care to explain that?”

Oh. Of course. He’d forgotten Tiffany had linked her phone to that, too. It’d just…been too long, he supposed. (She couldn’t read them, though, could she? He was fairly sure it didn’t give out mass-texts unless prompted.) “…where are you right now?”

Iman responded instead. “We’re in your second office.”

“…the line’s secure?”

“Of course.” Iman paused, and Bruce knew his new CSO was choosing her words carefully. “I’m guessing you have John Doe in the Batcave?”

“Yes.”

“Bruce, did you fucking break him out?” Tiffany asked with no shortness of impatience.

“I rescued him,” Bruce said firmly. “I know what you’re thinking, and I have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to say, but listen:  I had no choice but to take him with me. One of the doctors working at Arkham has gone rogue – he’d been doing experiments on patients, and I have a feeling he’s going to continue them on civilians. I need to find him before then, and John has been helping me.”

“Helping…? You’re not bringing him in the field with you?” Tiffany said disbelievingly. “After that psychopath almost killed us?”

Bruce could still see Joker running at Tiffany, knife in hand, his psychotic breakdown in full force. He could still see him being smacked against the railing, sheer madness played over his long, bloody face as he desperately fought to stab what was his hero.

But John and Joker were as much the same as Bruce and Batman were, and they were constantly changing.

The Joker in the Batcave wasn’t the same one from Ace Chemicals.  

“I know what John did,” he answered, trying to breathe even as something wanted to hitch in his throat, “and I know how far he’s come since then. I know you both regret-”

“No, I’m not listening to this right now,” Tiffany scowled, her voice fading in the middle her sentence like she was leaving the room. “Talk some sense into him.”

Bruce heard Iman’s voice call after her, and then nothing for a beat.

Iman sighed. “I’ll talk to her. But Bruce,” she started seriously, “Tiffany isn’t the only one worrying about you. Six months can’t possibly cure everything wrong with a man whose spent his life in an asylum.” He could practically hear her chew over her phrasing. “I need to know… If John goes too far – if he shows signs of regressing…or just becoming more volatile – I need to know you’re going to put your foot down.”

“I’m more than capable of handling him, Iman.”

“Please, Bruce, I’d rather not have to pull you off another broken pipe lodged in your kidney.” She paused, and Bruce let her continue, feeling the scar in his side twinge at the painful memory. “I know you care a lot about him,” she resumed in a softer tone, “and I know you trust him. But if you doubt him at any time, you need you to step back and re-evaluate your choices. I don’t want him to regress back into the Joker.”

That was a different Joker, Bruce wanted to say. He knew that wouldn’t sound the way it should. “I promise I won’t let that happen.”

“Good to know,” Iman replied, sounding somewhat relieved. “This doctor you’re hunting – is there anything we can do to help?”

Bruce shot a look at the clock in the corner of his monitor. He didn’t have as much time left as he would’ve liked before his virtual meeting started. “Tiffany can fill you in a bit, I had her help searching Arkham’s records before. Can you run a plate for me? I think Dr. Crane is running with a stolen car; I’ll send you the details in a bit.”

“Sure. We can check traffic cams for it, too, if you’d like.”

“If you would. And the second I have anything concrete on Dr. Crane, I’m sending Tiffany the details – I need her pull as Oracle to get the word out to the GCPD before anything happens. They’ll listen to their number-one informant more than a vigilante coming out of retirement.”

“…you’re…?”

He could almost see the shock in her face. They’d had a short discussion about his alter-ego when he decided to quit the first time; she’d been incredibly understanding about the whole thing. It was almost as if she’d seen it coming.

“Are you sure?”

He was as sure. She didn’t know about the instincts broiling underneath his surface every day. She didn’t know he never really stopped being half of himself. She wouldn’t know or really understand that he just shoved it all down and aside like he did so much else just to get through things. “I don’t have any other options at this point.”

“…you know you can count on us if you need the help.”

“Of course I do.”

“Right. Well, in the meantime we’ll keep the fort over here running as smoothly as possible.”

“Thank you. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Good luck.”

The line went silent, and Bruce pulled his phone away, catching a glimpse of three unread messages.

Sorry, buddy, I was just kidding around, you know? Ha ha

Bruce???

Hello???????

Sorry, had a phone call and couldn’t reply. It’s fine.

Seconds ticked by, and Bruce began changing out of his black t-shirt and into his button-down. It wouldn’t do to appear as a CEO in anything less than a proper suit. He could leave the jeans on, at least.

“Oh! Uh…sorry, Bruce…”

He felt his heart stop for a second. That was definitely John’s voice, even though it crackled slightly from the speakers. The monitor didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. John must have been using the spy-camera feature on the Batcomputer; it was linked to most the devices in the house, and Bruce’s webcam was no exception. He’d almost forgotten it had a loudspeaker function, too.

“I didn’t realize you were…um, changing.”

Bruce glared at the webcam’s lens. “John, what did I tell you about fiddling with the Batcomputer?”

“…sorry. I was worried when you didn’t answer me.”

He sounded genuine, at least. Bruce could easily picture him running upstairs to find him, if there wasn’t a chance he would’ve been seen. “I answered you a minute ago. I was on a call with Iman,” he stated plainly, fixing the buttons on his sleeves.

“…oh, ha ha, there it is! Uh, I guess I’ll just…go, then…”

Bruce almost questioned why John was sounding nervous and distracted, but it wasn’t until he saw the webcam light wink off again that he realized his shirt was wide open, the scars littering his torso half on display from the waist up.

Thankfully, no one was around to see Bruce bury his face in the palm of his hand for a moment, feeling like his face was on fire from first and second-hand embarrassment.

It didn’t last long. Bruce took a few deep breaths as he fixed himself up, and dialed into the meeting with a fixed expression of calm, firmly ignoring the heat that had settled in his stomach that threatened to go lower at the thought that John was bound not to forget any of that.

Driving the Batmobile in full gear again was certainly something else. Bruce felt the weight of the Kevlar body armor press against his limbs as he sped down Gotham’s twisting alley streets, no one any the wiser that the Wayne’s red sports car was hiding Batman behind it. The city’s CCTV signal was scrambled with the flick of a switch as he came into driving distance of the alley’s camera, making him almost untraceable.

He’d given the Honda Accord a head-start; it couldn’t go nearly as fast as the Batmobile, and Bruce had to find a spot to safely change before going to go pick John up from his drop-off point, and the post-working-hours traffic had already gotten its usual early start. It was a slower drive than he’d like it to be, even with Bruce’s shortcuts.

The setting sun was completely obscured by a dark overcast. It made the orange streetlamps glowing over the decorations sitting here and there in windows and doors even more energetic, like every corner of Gotham was slowly growing with the energy of Halloween.

Bruce clicked the communicator in his cowl. “John, are you there yet?”

Silence for a few seconds, and then a rustling noise. “Sorry, I had to take this off for a bit. What?”

“Are you there yet?”

John giggled slightly. “Oh, yeah, I’m here. Just waiting on you, pal.”

He was already at the meeting point? How did he get there so fast? “You put everything back where it was supposed to be?”

“No, I stripped the seats and threw everything into the garbage,” John grumbled with dripping sarcasm. “Of course I did, it’d be rude not to put Jerry’s stuff back. What do you take me for?”

“…I’m just making sure you didn’t forget anything.”

“I didn’t.” There was a loud slurping noise, like the last of a liquid being sucked from a straw.

“John, where are you right now?”

“In the alley, waiting for you.”

“Did you make a stop?”

John giggled, a little louder, but not at all nervous. He was enjoying himself. “What can I say? Going out on the town with you like this makes me thirsty,” he said with a strange purr. “Besides, no one bats an eye at me when I look like this anyway.” He paused. “Well, no, I’ve gotten some eyes on me, but, uh, I think they’re more the appreciative type. I guess ZZ Top was kinda right about the sharp-dresser thing.”

Bruce felt his brows knit together. “You’ve always looked sharp,” he said truthfully, turning down a narrow alley.

“Yeah, but not thousand-dollar-suit sharp. There’s a difference! Plus I think this bullet-proof vest makes me look a little bulkier than I actually am.”

Bruce spotted him leaning against the graffiti-covered wall, a Burger Lord cup in one hand and a plastic orange bag in another. Just how much time did Bruce lose while he was changing?

John tossed the drink in the dumpster and practically jumped into the car, shoving the orange bag behind the driver seat and slamming the door shut as Bruce switched off the communicator. He took one look at Bruce’s questioning glower and gave a nervous sort of grin. “Hey, don’t look at me like that, there’s something in there for you, too.”

Bruce almost asked what, but decided that a lecture on keeping a low profile and not taking money from his house’s various hiding spots would have to wait. (Though he supposed whatever John got wasn’t expensive. He was quite frugal, and it wasn’t as if Bruce couldn’t afford to buy John whatever he wanted anyway.) He concentrated instead on heading down the twisting path towards Toxic Acres. At least the traffic over there was a hell of a lot lighter.

“Hey, when you drove me to the Batcave, did you go in fourth gear, or third?”

He wasn’t sure why he asked, but he honestly couldn’t remember. He just recalled putting his foot to the floor and keeping his eyes on the road, occasionally reaching over to check John’s pulse. “I wasn’t really paying attention to that; I concentrating more on driving as fast as possible.”

“Oh – so you didn’t know you could punch the shift down into third whenever you wanted? It was so fun! I can say I literally punched it out of the Batcave!” He laughed. “I’m guessing you can’t do that in this car?”

“…I’ve got paddle shifters.” They were starting to travel into the more deserted road leading into Toxic Acres. Bruce took a sharp turn onto the hill with the broken Do Not Enter sign, and checking that no one was behind him, flipped the switch to shift the car into armored plates and pressed the wheel-paddle for a lower gear.

They flew down the road with a whirring whine of the engine, John’s notorious excited laugh mixing with it, and Bruce allowed himself to smile a little at it, knowing his own little joyful thrill wouldn’t last very long.

John was soon tapping his fingers together in some kind of rhythm as they passed by more empty houses, Bruce moving a little slower to keep his eyes out for trouble. Sitting close to the river on the outskirts of the city, they were originally meant to be a long neighborhood for the middle and upper class to build their lives, but as the unemployment and crime rates rose, the place became abandoned. It didn’t help that the piping structure to carry water there had been faulty, making either lead poisoning or unfiltered dirty water a prominent problem and giving the section of Gotham its nickname.

“How do we know which place is the botanist’s?” John asked, his green eyes scouring the houses in front of them.

“I sent out another drone earlier for some aerial shots. There’s a place with camouflaged green-houses in the back on Aster Place.”

“Wow, you did that before I left? That was fast…”

“It was a quick job. I’m not picking up the other drone until later.”

They turned the corner onto Aster Place; the road would dead-end in a while, but Bruce knew the house wouldn’t be situated at the end.

“Oh, there’s the spot Jackie got shot at!” John pointed ahead. “I wonder if there’s a bloodstain left…!”

Bruce tightened his grip on the wheel. “We’re close.”

It was oddly quiet out there. There was no other sign of life in what was a hot-spot of criminal hide-outs. Bruce turned on the thermal vision in his cowl; a lot of the houses were actually empty for once.

Except for one. 1801 Aster Place. There were a group of people scattered around on the bottom floor and what appeared to be a lot of heat-lamps running on the top floor. If one of the people in the group wasn’t Pamela Isley, then she might have been holding up in the basement…

They left the Batmobile out of sight down the road, and Bruce and John moved swiftly behind the backs of the houses in the chilly night air, the taser bomb safely in John’s coat pocket; John was surprisingly quiet, only humming a familiar tune here and there. (Wasn’t it the theme from that old spy-thriller…?) Bruce managed to quiet him with a look, and John mimed locking his mouth shut and throwing the key away.

Two unknown people were standing in what used to be a kitchen; three more people were up in the front room of the house. There were no security cameras to be seen.  

“Stick close to me,” Bruce whispered, the modifier in his cowl deepening his voice. “We go in through the back window, take out the two in the kitchen quietly and throw the bomb up front so we can cuff the lot. If none of them are Ms. Isley, we find the basement.”

John gave him a thumbs up, pulling out the riot baton he had hidden away. (Bruce had still not remembered when he or Alfred bought that, but vaguely remembered stashing it in the towel cupboard with some other emergency gear. He wasn’t surprised John found it.)

The bathroom window’s locks weren’t difficult to break. They looked like they had been broken several times already. Bruce slid the insect screen up and slipped in through the thin opening feet-first, twisting his limbs just right to softly land on the floor. He had to help pull John through the rest of the way after he smacked his head on the bottom of the window; thankfully he hadn’t made any noise, but he did give Bruce a strange look as brushed himself off where Bruce had gripped his sides.

Bruce didn’t have time to think about it.

The two people in the kitchen stood in semi-darkness, watching through the patio windows with rifles leaning against the wall. There wasn’t so much a bare bulb to give off light. Bruce figured their eyes might have adjusted to the dark, and signaled John to follow as he crept up behind the two goons.

“I dunno, with all the hype surrounding episode four, you just know those guys are going to mess up somewhere. Remember when they decided to let Celestyne drop to his death back in season one?” The one with dreadlocks asked.

“Oh, come on, that was just to test the game’s limits. Besides, Celestyne couldn’t die; I don’t think Jane can, either,” the second person responded in a higher voice with a casual shrug.

“Dude, you know the game’s gonna make her a villain in the end, though, right? She might die…”

Bruce was ready. John was gripping the baton with a widening grin…

“Are you kidding me? They have her affection meter up so high I’m surprised the game doesn’t have a dating opt-”

Bruce slammed dreadlocked goon’s head into the wall just as the baton crashed down on the other goon’s skull, little smears of blood marking the plaster and paint with a satisfying crack.

John clutched the collar of the goon he’d struck, gripping the slightly bloody baton a little harder in his other hand. He seemed to be thinking.

Bruce took a zip-tie out and cuffed the goon’s hands behind their back, and wondered just what John was staring at until he’d turned the person around and caught a glimpse of them in the light of the window.

They were both women with little tattoos of vines creeping along the back of their necks.

If Bruce guessed right, those were ivy leaves on the vine. Poison Ivy had a loyal gang.

John zip-tied the wrists of the woman he’d struck and patted the part of her head that wasn’t wounded. “Sorry,” he whispered as if she would hear it. “Lauren’s ex,” John mumbled, gesturing to the woman on the floor as if he knew Bruce had raised his eyebrow at him.

Bruce simply swept onward, spying the door for the basement. There was a light on in the front room, and three women who looked like they could be professional boxers of different weight categories were sitting in different areas. One was sharpening a knife at the table, and another was cleaning a semi-automatic rifle as the third kept watch over a monitor showing security camera footage; three looked to be by the greenhouses (Bruce recognized the Foxglove variety growing in one under an opening in the glass, sitting next to something that looked primeval), and two were watching over the plants upstairs (marijuana, by the looks of it) and in the basement.

There was a figure in the last screen, working over a row of potted plants with low lamps. A zoom-in with Bruce’s lenses showed long red hair.

Bruce felt a hand on his shoulder, and John crept ahead him, the taser-bomb in hand: it looked like a mass of the sticky-bombs grouped together, colorful wiring connecting them all like some kind of net, and before Bruce could do or say anything, John threw it into the living room, where it tumbled into the middle of the floor.

The group began to shoot out of their seats in a second, and in the next the ball seemed to expand like a geometric toy, the wired tasers being thrown in the air with a flash before smacking people and surfaces alike as they discharged. All three people fell to the floor in trembling heaps, and John dashed out and started to cuff them, Bruce close behind.

The electric bombs were safe to touch now that they had fully discharged, so Bruce had no qualm about stomping on the lightly-burning sections of carpet underneath some of them to prevent any spread of fire as he pushed them aside. The bulkiest goon wasn’t quite down for the count; she was still conscious.

She yanked John off her fallen comrade by his shoulder and threw him into the table’s edge. Bruce threw a Batarang at her arm just as she was about to punch, and John gave a swift knee to her stomach as she flinched.

She fell to the floor with a louder crash and a grunt, pulling the Batarang out from her arm and letting it drop to the floor. “You fucker…” She said, glaring up at John before looking over at Bruce, her eyes widening as he approached with more Batarangs at the ready. “B-Batman…?”

“Yup! He’s real,” John said playfully before smacking the side of her head with the baton. “And so am I,” he added with a growl. He decided to tie her wrists behind the nearest table leg. “I hate not being able to call myself Joker like this… Really sells it better.”

Bruce felt his heart twitch at the name. “You can call yourself that, if it helps,” Bruce said gently, tying the monitoring-station woman’s wrists together, “Just not to people’s faces.”

“Kinda defeats the point,” John grumbled.

Bruce shot a look at the security monitor – Pamela Isley didn’t seem to have heard anything. Still, precaution should be used. “Let’s go,” he said plainly, sweeping out of the room with a swish of his cape.

John tucked a hand into his pocket and followed.

The basement stairs were carpeted and quiet, but Bruce was careful to walk on the outsides rather than the middle. Spiders had clearly made themselves right at home in the damp corners of the walls, and he had to duck to avoid getting the tips of his cowl’s ears stuck in one of their webs. A soft sort of click was heard behind his back, and Bruce figured John had gotten out his grappling gun.

Pamela Isley was bent over a row of exotic-looking orchids posed under heat lamps, dabbing something into the center of a blue orchid’s petals. Bruce saw several troughs full of hallucinogenic mushrooms sitting on the other side of the wall.

“There you go, my darling,” she cooed in a honeyed voice, acting like she was carefully painting the center of the flower, “You’ll soon be the belle of the ball…”

Bruce eyed the electrical box on the other side of the room. It wouldn’t do to drown the place in darkness; he’d be able to see, but John wouldn’t. The best bet was to tackle and restrain her.

Or…

Bruce took out his own grappling gun, and aimed it at Isley’s collar. One click, and it snagged her shirt with practiced ease.

“What the-?!”

Pamela Isley was suddenly dragged yelping through the air at an angle, smacking hard into one of the tables and spilling several unusual potted flowers to the floor.

Bruce grabbed her and threw her to the concrete floor, standing over her with several Batarangs in his hand as John cackled beside him.

“Jonathan Crane,” Bruce growled out, “Where is he?”

Pamela Isley sat up, shock written all over her face as she processed exactly what happened – it quickly morphed to a steely stare. “Batman,” she said slowly in a sweet voice, “I thought you were an urban legend,” she continued, wiping the corner of her mouth where a dribble of blood leaked out. “Do you always treat a lady this way?”

Bruce dragged her up by her collar and threw her against the wall, keeping her at arm’s length. “I know he bought plants from you today. Tell me where he is.”

“Or what?” She taunted, smirking widely at him. “You think I haven’t been knocked around by men before? I’ve been in whole worlds of hurt, honey.”

There was the distinct sound of the grappling wire rushing through the air, and then an enormous crash – John had taken out one of the mushroom tables, the fungi now breaking and bouncing against the floor it the scattered in the dirt.

“Whoopsie,” John hummed, a wide unnerving grin on his face, “butter-fingers.”

Isley looked rather taken aback, but the expression quickly warped into a mocking glare. “You think destroying my inventory is going to intimidate me?”

John shrugged, leaning back against a table and knocking over a several small tropical plants with a slide of his hand, shattering the clay pots and sending the plants scattering to the hard floor.

That definitely got her attention; her face paled slightly and there was tremble in her. “Stop that!”

Bruce glared at her, mentally thanking John for his quick thinking. “Tell me where Crane is and I’ll consider stopping him from tearing this place apart.”

Her dark green eyes glared at him with a slow-boiling dislike. “Let me go first.”

Bruce did a very quick once-over; she didn’t seem to have a gun holster on her, and she was definitely a lighter build than the rest of her gang. Knives were still a possibility. He decided to let go, keeping a Batarang between his fingers just in case as he stepped just out of her reach.

Pamela dusted off her green turtleneck. “I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care. He bought a few of my flowers and left,” she said, crossing her arms.

John laughed, fingering the leaves of the blue orchid she’d been attending. “With a hole in his shoulder? You didn’t even offer a band-aid for that?”

Pamela was closely eyeing the plant in John’s hand. “What if I did?”

“I know he’s a friend of yours, Isley,” Bruce growled. “You’re the only one who could know what he’s planning.”

“I told you, I don’t know,” she stated, “and I don’t care. I’m not his mother.”

“I can see why you were paying such close attention to this one,” John hummed, fingering the petals with a gloved hand. “It’s so pretty. You put a lot of effort into keeping all these, huh?” He grinned at her, almost looking like his usual self. “It’s not just some financial scheme for you, is it?”

“Of course it is,” Pamela stared at him, trying to keep her voice level; Bruce noticed her eyes kept flicking slightly downward, like she was watching the plant. “I breed and sell rare plants to collectors on the side.”

“Oh good! So this won’t bother you!”

In a swift move, John cut the blossom off the stem with the bowie knife one of the group upstairs had been sharpening.

The blossom fell to the table, and Pamela Isley looked as if she’d seen a ghost.

John picked up the blossom. “Let’s see – she’s honest,” he said playfully, plucking a petal from the stem, “she’s not!” He pulled another.

“STOP IT!” Pamela shrieked, making to rush at him – Bruce pulled her back and pointed the tip of the Batarang at her face. She glanced at it fearfully, but then looked back at the flower being torn apart in John’s hand, and it looked like she was watching a child die before her eyes.

“Stop that,” Bruce instructed; John hummed and held it still. “Talk, or my partner and I crush every plant in this place.”

Isley stared at the flower in John’s hand. “I… I don’t know what he’s planning,” she said quietly, her voice cracking slightly. John only touched the tip of a petal before she spoke again – “But-! But I know… He’s building something. He didn’t say what, but he asked for some muscle - I hooked him up with some of Maroni’s old boys.” She shut her eyes and took a breath before glaring at John like he was a complete monster. “I hope the lot of them tears you limb from limb.”

Bruce forced Isley’s hands behind her back and zip-tied them. “Down on the ground,” he growled, pushing down on the top of her head. John pointed the grappling gun in her face with a smirk; a good insurance if she decided to try and elbow Bruce in the face.

Pamela shot them both a hateful glare as she knelt down, and it didn’t waver as her ankles were tied, too. “I won’t forget this,” she spat.

Bruce sent off a message to Tiffany regarding the coordinates of “Poison Ivy”’s headquarters from his gauntlet. He knew she’d get the word out before he could even get back in the car. “Tell it to the judge,” he taunted, leading the way out of the basement, not missing the sparkle in John’s eyes as he followed, the severed, torn orchid blossom having been carelessly thrown at Pamela Isley’s feet.

John gathered up the sticky bomb device before they hustled back to the Batmobile, and it wasn’t until the doors closed that he spoke, and when he did it was in a tone Bruce would almost call revered.

“So, what do we do now, partner?” He asked, a definite glow on his face.

“We go look at some of the Maroni gang’s old haunts and see if we can find anyone recently hired,” Bruce said, the voice modifier in his cowl now disabled. He glanced at his recent text messages:  one from Tiffany giving the ok on Poison Ivy, and another from Iman with the last known location of the stolen Ryde car. “After we look into the motels in the red-light district. Crane might’ve stayed there.”

John laughed to himself, but for once he didn’t share the joke; instead, he pulled out a packet of jerky from the plastic bag he’d brought along. “I knew this would be a long night,” he said cheerfully, as if he was really looking forward to the whole thing.

It was well past one in the morning when Bruce arrived back home through the front gate, the Batsuit stowed away and the plates flipped back to red. The two patrol officers were only somewhat surprised to see him arrive back. Naturally, they reported nothing new, since John had been dropped off in the Batcave first.

Sore muscles were nothing new to Bruce. The old strained climb back up to his bed was just as annoying as ever. He honestly didn’t feel like he wanted to sleep, but after following several empty leads over the city and bruising a few heads alongside John, he did admit that he was physically exhausted. He knew lying down was better than nothing, and he still had to go to work in several hours like he didn’t have a double life. At least he wasn't starving, thanks to John thinking ahead and buying him protein-and-carb-filled snacks.

He forced himself to go through his usual nightly routine, despite the temptation to just flop into bed and lay there. He looked at the bruises on his back and ribs from where John had struggled against him under the influence of Crane’s drug, and decided not to bother putting the bruise-away cream on them, nor on the new ones forming on his shoulder from where one of the former mobsters had hit him.

When he did finally collapse onto the master bed in nothing but his boxer-briefs, his brain still decided to chat away at him.

There were no leads as to who exactly Isley had hired for Crane. Bruce cursed himself for not trying to work the specifics out of her. At least he knew she was arrested for drug possession and manufacturing, as well as smuggling illegal fauna.

There was no word on the whereabouts of Jackie Lant. Her car was missing, and she’d called into work sick. Her apartment hadn’t been visited in the entire time Bruce had his drone’s eye on it, and neither Tiffany nor Iman had seen anything when they looked into Jackie’s friends’ places, either. All Bruce knew was that she hadn’t called an ambulance to fetch her from Toxic Acres, that she hadn’t been admitted to a hospital, and that there was no sign of her body either in the Acres or in the Gotham River.

She was alive, somewhere, and Bruce didn’t know what she was going to do next. He hoped she was just going to lie low until he caught Crane.

Jonathan Crane was nowhere to be found. His house was still empty. He didn’t seem to be staying at any of the motels – or hotels – around the red-light district or its surrounding streets, and nothing had come of a quick credit-card check. The Ryde driver the GCPD fished out of the River that morning had been shot in the head, and his car was so common that if Crane could’ve switched the license plate with anything and been completely invisible. They’d done a quick search of the warehouse district and found no sign of him there, either.

Bruce had the nagging feeling that he wasn’t going to find Crane until the doctor reared his head.

The billionaire rolled onto his stomach, shoving the anxious thought away as he pressed his cheek further into the plush black jersey pillowcase. There were a couple more places he could check tomorrow…

The bedroom door creaked, and Bruce’s eyes shot open, a second away from grabbing the billy-club under his pillow – he could see John’s messy hair in his dark silhouette.

“Bruce? You awake?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled.

“…can I come in?”

“Sure.”

Bruce noticed he closed the door behind him. Like he was planning to stay there.

That definitely put a new light onto the situation. A tense thrill was building in his shoulders as John deigned to sit on the edge of the mattress, his back to Bruce.

John was only wearing his Arkham-regulated pants, and the pale white of his bare skin almost shone in the light streaming in from the window. Bruce saw several bruises forming, one of which was from where he’d gotten grabbed by the shoulder by a Poison Ivy goon, and several more where he’d gotten knocked into.

“…I don’t think I can sleep in that guest room,” John sighed. “I mean, I tried my usual methods of sleep induction, but… It’s too big…and empty. I’m really not used to that.” His voice came out quieter and more contemplative. “I know it’s weird, but do you mind if I sleep in here?” He asked, turning halfway to look right at Bruce.

He felt trapped. If he said no, at the worst John would sulk, and at the best John wouldn’t get any sleep, and that was definitely worse for his mental health. John had mentioned before about how regular sleep cycles were supposed to help with that.

If he said yes, though, he’d know he was sleeping next to John, and there was the tiny worry in the back of his head that John might…try something. Or at least roll over too much.

“I promise I’ll stay over on my side,” John muttered, not tearing his eyes away.

“Alright.”

A sweet smile stretched on his face. “Thanks, Bruce. You won’t regret this.”

“If you keep talking, I might.”

John giggled as he slid beneath the covers on the far side of the bed, flopping one of the extra pillows down between them. “There – a no-roll barrier,” he said as if he had to explain the concept to Bruce.

It did not escape Bruce’s attention that John had decided to lie facing him and rest his arm on top of the pillow. John had pulled the covers up to just underneath his armpits; Bruce could see John's sharp collarbone and the lean wiry muscle of his chest. (Bruce made sure not to look for more than a moment's curiosity would allow.)

God, John’s face was actually his for the first time that whole night. Bruce had gotten used to seeing it in the natural makeup, but it was almost a relief to see it in its normal borderline-luminescent white. He looked like the man Bruce knew.

Acid-green eyes stared at him, flicking slightly and growing soft. “I…did want to talk to you about something, though. If it’s okay.”

“I suppose I’m still awake,” Bruce said in an attempt to lighten the tension in his arms. “Sure.”

“Do you ever…look back on something, and think about the worst thing that could’ve happened in that situation?”

He didn’t like to admit it, but he had. Usually in his worst moods, he’d think about how everything could’ve gone wrong. He’d usually think about everything he could’ve done better, too. “I try not to, but…sometimes, yeah.”

“I’ve been thinking about our fight a lot, lately,” John confessed, “At Ace. I used to think about it a lot when I got recommitted, but… You started visiting me,” he said softly, a light smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “You remember when I told you I thought I’d messed things up for us?”

“Yeah.” It was Bruce’s first visit to John. He never forgot the sheer hopeful joy on John’s face upon seeing him. It was practically engraved in his memory.

“Ever since I started sessions with Crane, I kept going back to that night. He always tried to weasel my worst secrets out of me,” he said with a low scowl, “but when he started using that…toxin on me… I kept…thinking about what could have happened back there. I… I know I almost killed you.”

The sheer pain reading in John’s eyes was enough to make Bruce want to wrap his arms around him. It was beautiful and raw and honest, and Bruce found himself holding stock still, almost captivated by the expression.

“I kept seeing it. Over and over – it was like I could see myself throwing you over the railing or-or stabbing you, or...” Bruce saw tears welling up as John clenched the pillow between them. “I don’t want to come close to that again, Bruce,” he managed to say, his voice starting to hitch. “I don’t… I don’t want to kill you.”

Bruce threw his pride away and grabbed John’s hand in his. “You won’t.”

“You…you don’t know that,” John said with a light sob. “If…if I…go back to how I was… If I mess up...”

Bruce squeezed his hand, feeling the soft skin twitch under his fingertips. “I won’t pretend you’re perfect,” he said, honesty seeping through every word, “but I know you, John. I know you’re not going after Crane out of revenge, like you did with Waller. You reached out to me for help – but you were already trying to find a way to stop him without resorting to just stabbing him with the nearest shiv.”

John sniffed, a tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth like he was almost smiling. “Yeah…”

“So you’re not the same person you were then, are you?” He soothed with a supportive smile. “Even if you feel you are going backward, I know it won’t be to that same point.”

“Maybe…” he said with another sniff, looking more serious. “But Bruce, you know there are things I can’t ever really stop, right? The auditory psychosis is pretty much going to stay with me the rest of my life,” he started, clutching Bruce’s hand back, “and I’m not going to lie here and pretend my pulse wasn’t pounding a mile a minute when we were fighting those mobsters out there.” He sported a small knowing grin at him. “You know what that’s like, though, don’t you…”

(Yes, he did.)

“…you know what’s funny? I used to think one bad day could turn a person completely upside down.” John managed to stroke his thumb against Bruce’s knuckle, sending a little shiver over the skin, and Bruce wondered if John knew how incredibly intimate that gesture felt as he stared softly at him from the pillow. “Especially after Waller came to town… But…I never really thought things could go back up after it. I guess it just…takes a while.”

Bruce knew there was something right in John’s line of thinking. It only took one day to turn his life on its head, and he felt he knew, despite John having no memory of his life before Arkham, that something similar had happened to him. “Well…they say time heals all wounds.”

“How much passed before yours started to heal?”

He almost didn’t want to answer. The truth was that he wasn’t sure at all if he was ever going to fully heal, despite knowing what his parent’s really were. Maybe it was because he knew the terrible truth about them that they wouldn’t ever heal right. Maybe he’d always have that miserable note in the background of his life.

“…I’m still healing.”

“I didn’t say you stopped, buddy,” John chuckled with a knowing look. “Still…got good days and bad days, huh?”

“Feels like it, yeah.” Today…was definitely more of a mixed day. Looking at John across from him, though, all honest and open, and thinking back to how it felt to fight alongside him again, and investigate with him, with that warmth and instant familiar comfort between that never faded away, he almost felt like he wanted to call it a good day. “Today might have tilted things right-side up.”

John laughed, a genuine, humored one that was almost infectious. “Now I know I’m rubbing off on you; that sounds like something I’d say!”

John slipped his hand away and turned to lie on his back, still chuckling to himself. The warmth still burned in Bruce’s palm, and he found himself reluctant to pull his hand away at all.

John turned to him once more, an all-too-familiar affection shimmering brightly in the green depths. It pulled Bruce in and made him feel like he should inch close enough to feel the warmth and security it promised. “’Night, Bruce.”

“Goodnight, John.”

John turned over, leaving Bruce to stare at the bruises forming on his shoulders. There was the terrible temptation in his hands to shove the pillow between them aside and wrap his arm around the man’s middle so he could lean into that pale, battered back and bury his face in a head of soft, green hair.

There was a worse urge, one so vivid it almost made Bruce’s head spin – he could just reach out and touch the bruises, feather-light, and trail his fingertips down the curve of spine until it arched with a pleased shudder, and Bruce could follow that trail with his mouth as far as John would let him.

Bruce turned his head away, the memory of John’s lips on his coming to the front of his mind, and he shut out the mental image of repeating that kiss right then and there, telling himself that he really shouldn’t feel that way towards someone who desperately needed support, nor to his best friend who he’d left scarred in more ways than one, and certainly not someone who was both.

It had been a long time since Bruce shared a bed with someone, and far, far longer when he shared one with someone he didn’t have sex with.

He hoped that was all it was. Just the bed’s memory getting to him, and nothing else…

Notes:  Super-sexy-plant-person-in-her-late-twenties Ivy is OUT. Cougar-aged-mobster-botanist Ivy is IN! >:) 

I really wanted a different Ivy. I’m tired of the young, uber-sexy walking plant-human-hybrid that’s immune to all toxins and diseases; plants get diseases, too, and she’s so plant-like she should have some kind of physical humanizing weakness! It’s much more interesting to have a human who’s just built up an immunity and uses her babies for weapons and business; I kept her serious environmentalist trait, though, because while I dislike the anti-hero thing she’s got going on lately and would love to see her as a straight-up villain again, we do have to relate to her somehow, and her love of nature is always going to be a good part of her. Since Harley’s older, too, I figured it would be alright if they had a ten-year gap between them, so when Pam eventually goes to Black Gate one day, they’ll be pals. ;)

And Bruce you complete fool!!!! You should’ve kissed him!!!  Why do you do this to yourseellllfff? D:

I'm sorry it took so long, but as you can tell, I had a lot to work on, and I’m doing my best to write the next chapter as quickly as I can while this nutty energy in my brain is still fresh. I’m trying to keep with my weekly schedule, but I hope you guys are okay with having a gap day, as appears to be the habit now. ( ._. ) I mean, no one yells at me or anything for being late, but I aim to please with my work, and part of that is being consistent. 

I shall continue to try my hardest! (*｀へ´*) 彡3 See you next weekend!!!

[the-master-cylinder]

SUMMARY Dr. Dan Potter is the replacement for Dr. Harry Merton, a psychiatrist at Dr. Leo Bain’s psychiatric haven. Dr. Merton has taken a position at a psychiatric hospital in the nearby city of Philadelphia. Dan, his wife Nell, and daughter Lyla, have recently moved into a house in the area. Dan’s sister Toni arrives for a visit. Leo operates the haven through very lenient methods. The 3rd floor patients–paranoid former POW Frank Hawkes, pyromaniac preacher Byron “Preacher” Sutcliff, obese child molester Ronald Elster, and homicidal maniac John “The Bleeder” Skagg–initially treat Dan with mixed hostility. Dan learns from staff worker Ray Curtis that the 3rd floor patients believe he has killed Dr. Merton. Later, the four men on the 3rd floor talk of killing Dr Potter.

That evening, Dan, Nell, and Toni go to a punk rock club. Lyla and her babysitter, Bunky, remain home. A regional power blackout occurs. Frank realizes the security system keeping patients in check has failed. The four men begin to carry out their plan. Preacher and Robert kill Ray. The four escape in a doctor’s car. They drive to a store in the middle of a looting raid to pick up weapons and new clothes. Skagg slashes an innocent bystander and runs away. The others take the murdered man’s van and drive off. Dan arrives at the hospital to discuss the escaped patients and the people they killed, with Leo.

The next morning, with the blackout still in effect, Preacher arrives at the Potter residence to deliver a telegram, but Dan is at the hospital. Nell and Toni leave to participate in a demonstration at a nuclear power plant and are arrested. Lyla arrives home from school and discovers Ronald there, claiming to be the replacement babysitter for Bunky.

Nell calls Dan from jail to tell him she and Toni were arrested. Dan phones Bunky to have her go to the Potter residence to check in on and to stay with Lyla. Bunky arrives at the Potter residence and finds Lyla asleep. She invites her boyfriend Billy over to have sex. After hearing a noise, Billy is dragged and killed underneath the bed by Preacher, and Bunky is strangled by Ronald. Dan arrives home with Nell, Toni, and Tom Smith, a man who Nell and Toni met in jail, claiming he was arrested at the same demonstration they were at and allowed them to take his turn on the phone to call Dan. When they see police all over the house, they are concerned about the family’s safety. Lyla wakes up unharmed, but she tells them about Ronald. The police haven’t found out about the murdered Bunky and Billy, nor do they find anyone else in the house.

The police leave but Dan invites Detective Barnett to stay for dinner. Barnett investigates noises outside the home and is killed by Frank’s crossbow. With the phone line out, the family barricades the windows from the crossbow bolts; meanwhile, Leo is told by the telephone operator that the phone line to the Potter residence is out of order, causing him to drive over to the house where he is slashed and axed by Preacher. Dan recalls Curtis telling him that the four men want to kill him because they believe he killed Harry. Dan screams at the men outside, telling them that he did not murder Dr. Merton, but he gets no reply. Barnett’s dead body is thrown through a window by Ronald, and the group stacks furniture against it as Frank shoots his crossbow through the broken window. Preacher sets a fire in the basement, prompting Dan to the basement where he injures Preacher and extinguishes the fire. Ronald attacks the group before getting killed by a meat cleaver.

While Dan starts Leo’s car, Tom’s nose bleeds, revealing his identity as Skagg, the fourth patient in the group, and he attempts to strangle Toni. Dan runs back inside and grabs Tom away from his sister. Nell stabs Tom, killing him. Preacher comes out of the basement and Dan struggles with him, though Dan manages to stab Preacher and throw him back into the basement. As Dan, Nell, Lyla, and Toni gather together for comfort, Frank reappears standing in the kitchen doorway with his crossbow aimed at them and shouts “It’s not just us crazy ones who kill!” Dan pleads with Frank to spare his family. Suddenly, the electricity comes back on and Frank sees Harry being interviewed in a news report on television. Upset, Frank breaks the TV, leaves the house, and escapes into the night. Frank then walks through the town and enters the club. While Frank watches the punk rock band perform, a drugged out girl walks up to him, and he pulls out his pistol and points it at her neck. She looks at it and laughs, and so does Frank.

Jack Sholder

PRODUCTION Jack Sholder’s notion to make a suspense film is of more recent origin. “I’ve known Bob Shaye, the head of New Line Cinema, for a very long time,” says Sholder, “I was at his wedding, and his wife went into labor in my apartment. He’s seen some of my short films, and I’ve edited a lot of trailers for him. I was in his office one evening after closing time, and I asked him what he’d think of a story about a bunch of maniacs who escape from a mental institution during a blackout, terrorize Little Italy and are captured by the Mafia. He told me he liked the idea, and proposed that I write the script, for very little money. Then, if the film were made, would direct it under a deal that would compensate for the lower payment on the script.

Though the final screenplay is credited to Sholder, the story was developed by the director in collaboration with Shaye and another writer, Michael Harpster. The largest revision from Sholder’s original idea was the change of setting, from lower Manhattan’s Italian community to suburban New York, a change dictated by the high cost of location shooting in urban areas. Since the Mafia holds a low profile in the ‘burbs, the Sicilians fell by the wayside.

Sholder felt it was important from the first to see that the film reflect his sense of humor; he considers the evocation of laughter a far more honorable pursuit than the chore of scaring people. “The whole idea of the shrinks provided a good opportunity to do a send-up. I didn’t want to write a comedy, though; I didn’t want to do, for instance, what was done in Mother’s Day, which I think played down to the audience, that said ‘We’re better than the genre.’ wanted to do a film that would take its job as a horror film seriously-really scare people and give them their money’s worth, with interesting, real characters. At the same time, humor is very useful in setting up scares; there’s a scene in Jaws where some people are out in a boat, and you know the shark is going to turn up; it’s gonna come, it’s gonna come any second… then there’s a little joke, and all your defenses go down, when whammo, the shark comes up the back of the boat! I must’ve jumped six feet.”

Sholder’s handling of the frightening elements in Alone in the Dark was also influenced by his experience editing The Burning, which he says “was a much more frightening film before it got the rating, and a lot of Tom Savini’s effects were cut out. As a horror film, I think it was quite scary, but it had an awful script: it will be forgotten, though they had a good director. But it was very helpful to me, because it was made by people who had never made a movie be. fore who got videotapes and studied every successful horror film, to put together a That’s Entertainment of horror films. It helped me to learn all the conventions, the ditferent kinds of scares and the different kinds of set-ups. So after The Burning, when Bob Shaye approached me for a rewrite, was delighted to do it, with all that I’d learned

“For instance, we had a scene in Alone in the Dark with two bodies falling out of a closet-every horror film has a body fall out of the closet, but ours differs in the set-up. There’s a fire and maniac in the basement, and the husband says to his wife, where’s the fire extinguisher? He’s going into the basement–the sort of stupid thing that people do in horror films that make audiences groan, ‘oh, come on.’ But we’ve established that they’re trapped in the house; everyone that’s left the house has been killed. So the wife says, ‘Don’t go down in the basement, there’s a fight, shouting, the husband says. “Look, it’s a wooden house, if I don’t go down we’ll burn to death.” So that’s resolved and the wife turns to the closet to get the fire extinguisher, and the bodies fall out.

“To me, the film is about what’s crazy and what’s not. There’s a line in the film that came from an experience of mine, in a bank. I hate Muzak, it’s one of my pet peeves, and l approached a bank officer and said, ‘look, I must complain: 1 think it’s terri ble that you have Muzak here, can you please turn it off. Right away, of course, they look at you like you’re a bag lady. So the bank officer said to me, ‘I don’t hear it, most people never hear it…maybe you have sensitive hearing; my wife hears sounds coming out of the TV when it’s not turned on.’ So I had the detective give that line at the dinner table, and turn to the young psychiatrist and say, ‘Is that normal…or what?’ and the psychiatrist replies, ‘I don’t know what’s normal anymore. That’s the whole thing like when the same psychiatrist goes to a rock club and there’s a band there called the Sic F*cs singing a song called Chop Up Your Mother, and everybody there looks like they should be put away.”

The equation between the asylum and the outside world is carried to its logical conclusion in the picture’s final scene, where Jack Palance, the last surviving crazy, stumbles across the same rock club, and en counters a stoned-out young lady. “It ends with him holding the gun to the girl’s head, and they’re both smiling,” says Sholder, “He’s smiling because he knows that he’s not alone–the whole world’s crazy.

“I loved that ending, thought it was a marvelous, sort of existential ending. The problem is that the horror audience is not a very existential crowd. While we followed a lot of the conventions, we did not follow the convention of closing the film with a strong shock. When Palance finally confronts the family in the kitchen, the audiences shout for him to kill–and he doesn’t, he walks away. Then he draws the gun on the girl-and he doesn’t shoot her! In editing, suggested to the producer, almost as a joke, that we could add the sound of a gunshot to the track, after it cuts to black. I seriously thought about it, and decided against it: 1 now feel that I should have done that. because this is not an art film. When a film ends on a strong note, the audience goes out buzzing.”

Much of the film’s strength comes from its excellent cast. Dwight Schultz deserves praise as the quiet, logic-ruled doctor/hero, but the flashiest roles belong to the escaped maniacs and their keeper. “It’s customary on low-budget films to get one personality with a small but crucial role, and while everybody else works six weeks, they work two weeks and their name is put on the marquee. The character Jack Palance plays was to be that character, so I knew we were going to get somebody heavy for that role, and I wanted Palance or Sterling Hayden for that role. Then I learned that they felt they should have three names instead of one; they felt they could afford it, and would more than make it upin foreign sales. We all made up lists, and when I found out Donald Pleasence was going to play the part of Dr. Bain I was thrilled out of my mind – I respect that man so much, from films like Cul de Sac. Martin Landau surprised me, because when I thought of him I thought of Mission Impossible and Space: 1999, and he didn’t Strike me as the kind of guy who would play that kind of role. When I told him so, he said, ‘Obviously, you don’t know my work that well, because in most of the roles that I’ve played I played crazy people.

“But the scary thing for me about working with those guys was that, in all my short films, I always rehearsed with my casts, as did with all the non-name actors in Alone in the Dark. That way, we had an idea of what their characters were, and what they were going to do, while with these guys I wasn’t going to meet them until the day they showed up on the set. They had to come in and be suddenly right in character. Landau, for instance, has almost no real dialogue in his role, but had instead a certain kind of presence.

“Palance was somewhat difficult. He was doing a show, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and it turned out that they wanted to begin shooting during our picture, he wanted to be let out and we wouldn’t let him. He was also led to believe that the character he was playing was the personification of evil. He is an enormously talented man, who has a face that has limited him to playing a great many evil characters, so that did not make him happy. He walked on the set the first day and said ‘I don’t know what the hell to do; I don’t know why I’m here; I don’t like to play these characters and so on. Furthermore, he was supposed to kill somebody that night, and he said he didn’t want to do that: he didn’t like violence. Sol said, ‘Look. The guy you’re playing is not a villain, he’s a hero. What he’s doing, he’s doing because he thinks it’s right. He thinks the new doctor deserves to be killed because he killed the old doctor. Palance said, “Don’t give me any of that psychological horseshit. But, in fact, that’s what he did with the character.

He played the character a little bit crazier than I’d thought of it, he brought a real in tensity and a strange, sardonic humor to the part. So we had a truce. “When we got to the point where we were behind schedule, we were shooting scenes as fast as we could set them up-‘Ok, quick, you stand over there, roll sound, roll camera, let’s go.’ Palance was obviously getting very annoyed. When we were just about to roll, he stood there and said, ‘I have to tell you this story…

‘It was my privilege to work several times with George Stevens, the great director. Of course, they had a lot more money and resources than you people have, and he was a very powerful man who could do pretty much whatever he chose to do. But he would sit in his chair, and he had a little set of knobs right next to him. When a scene was all ready to go, when everything and everyone was on set in their expected places, he would stop. He would turn one of these knobs and music would come up, the right sort of music to prepare you for the scene. He would let the music play for about 30 seconds, and then gradually turn it down, and say, roll camera.’

BEHIND THE SCENES/INTERVIEWS

Interview with actor Dwight Schultz: How did you get involved with Alone in the Dark? Dwight Schultz: I was in New York City trying to break into film; I had a good theater career going. I auditioned three times for Jack Sholder, and I got the part! I had to meet Donald Pleasence at the Algonquin Hotel, which was a thrill for me because I was a huge fan. He’d been in a lot of plays by Harold Pinter, who is one of my favorite playwrights. As an actor, he’s the only playwright, or one of the few, where when I performed him, I could go on indefinitely. I wanted to talk to Pleasence about his experiences working with Pinter and Robert Shaw, and it was just a thrill all the way around-not knowing that New Line Cinema was going to become so big with Lord of the Rings.

Were you familiar with Pleasence’s work in the Halloween films at that point? Dwight Schultz: I’d seen bits and pieces. I hadn’t seen either one all the way through, but I’d seen previews and excerpts. And Pleasence was very unabashedly making money there, as he was with (Alone in the Dark). You know: “This is how I make money, so I can do these other things.”

Was it intimidating going into the film opposite so many big names? Dwight Schultz: Well, you know, you get your composure together and say, “I’m working with Jack Palance, I’m working with Martin Landau, I’m working with Donald Pleasence-I’m working with them!” And you do your takes, and you sit down and talk between them. It’s much easier to do a movie in that regard than it is to do a play. You have so much time to get to know each other and what you do outside of the business. That’s much harder when you’re working in the theater, because you’re always rehearsing, and you don’t have time for small talk. You get to know people better on a movie, because all you have is time. That’s why people get in trouble on movies!

And you had to be the straight man among all those over-the-top characters. Dwight Schultz: Very straight-laced, yeah! He’s the victim of his own work. They’re the motivators of the angst, and I just had to take my part. That’s your job as an actor: to know your part and enjoy it as best you can.

How about Jack Palance? How was he to work with? Dwight Schultz: When I was introduced to him, I was brought onto the set, and he was standing in a garden at what was supposed to be the hospital, and he had his back to me. And he had the biggest head of anybody I had ever seen in my life! I was brought right to his back, and the AD said, “Mr. Palance, Dwight Schultz is here.” And he just turned to me, looked at me like this (squints his eyes and does a Jack Palance rasp) and kind of talked like this. But he ended up being an incredibly sweet guy who was very friendly to all the actors and very gentle. He didn’t like Jack Sholder, though, so there was a lot of tension there.

Was that due to creative issues, or just a personality clash? Dwight Schultz: No, it was… Jack Palance had worked with some of the great directors, and he wanted the set to be controlled by the director so the actors could work. But this was more like a television shoot, because it was very quick. There was lots of noise, lots of noise, Sholder would say, “OK, let’s get ready to shoot,” and Palance would say, in Palance raspl “George Stevens…wouldn’t do that.” Laughs “George Stevens would have a Victrola, and he would play some Vivaldi to bring the set to a quiet so the actors could compose themselves to do the scene.” And Sholder, who stuttered to begin with, would stutter more and Jack would imitate his stutter. But you could see Palance just wanted the respect: “This is my work. I respect your work because I’m here, now you should respect mine.” And this was Sholder’s first film.

Did he seem intimidated, especially dealing with all these big names? Dwight Schultz: Oh my God, he was terribly intimidated. I mean, it wasn’t a big budget, it was a short shooting schedule, he had all these personalities to deal with. Now, Pleasence accepted it all, and kind of went into the chaos and, as the psychiatrist, he used that chaos. But Palance had no time for that

And Martin Landau? Dwight Schultz: Oh! If you knew him from television or the Alfred Hitchcock films, he was always very deep and together and an Actors Studio type, but when you met him, speaking much faster he’d talk like this and he was just this bundle of energy! Which, for me, was wonderful, because you knew what a good actor he really was. I had a fight scene with him, and that was great! We had a ball.

Any memories of Erland van Lidth, the man mountain who played Ronald “Fatty” Elster? Dwight Schultz: Well, I didn’t get to talk with him. I mean, he was just big. He didn’t really speak a lot, but he was a very sweet guy. I loved everybody on that production-Deborah Hedwall, who played my wife… I got to work with her husband, Dennis Boutsikaris, in a musical play in New York. There were a lot of good actors on that set, and we actually got some good reviews.

It is a very good film. But were you apprehensive at first that this might be just another slasher movie? Dwight Schultz: No, because I thought it was well-written, and I was going to get to work with Donald Pleasence. The moment I knew who the cast was, I said, “My God! How could I turn this down?”

I imagine it was largely night shoots, especially when you were doing the house siege that makes up the second half of the film. How was it working the vampire schedule? Dwight Schultz: Oh, it was very interesting. It was, for me, a new experience. It was chaotic. Of course, there was lots of waiting. You know, it’s the old Spencer Tracy thing: “I don’t get paid to act, I get paid to wait.” Jack Sholder also wrote the script, and there were aspects that weren’t fin. ished, and there would be a lot of pacing about-“We have to have a line here.”

There was one line in particular toward the end, I think it was the very last scene it was a long time ago, I wish I could remember—but Palance didn’t like his last line and couldn’t think of one, so he kept saying to me, “Come up with a line! Come up with a line!”

One of the most fun moments in the film is when you get dragged to the nightclub where The Sic F*cks are playing. What was that situation like? Dwight Schultz: It was, again, total chaos. I was kind of familiar with that type of music, but I just didn’t have a lot to do. I was basically taking in the performance. I don’t have any great memory of that particular part. Most of my memories have to do with the structural difficulties we had with the script, and how there was tension between Jack Sholder and Robert Shaye, and between Sholder and Palance. Poor Jack Sholder was right in the middle, and I think he was unfairly treated by Jack Palance in some ways.

The film is remarkably cohesive, coming out of all that chaos. Dwight Schultz: You know, I haven’t seen it in a long time. I went to see it when it opened in Pasadena with my wife and a friend, and we were the only people in the theater. And it was a huuuuge theater! It had 1,000 seats! We went and sat down in the middle, and it was my first big film role, and I went “Ahhhhh…” But I liked it.

SPECIAL EFFECTS The chief disaster, however came when the effects man (Tom Brumberger) refused to deliver the corpse or Donald Pleasence, whose head he had Cast near the beginning of the shoot. As a result. Pleasence is cruelly wounded this ear is sliced off, but certainly not dead in his final appearance toward the end of the film: his ultimate fate is unknown. That’s when we brought in Tom Savini,” says Sholder. “We had shot three days over our schedule in this house–the owner, coincidentally, was a psychiatrist and we had two effects to be done, the corpse and this apparition. So we brought in Tom Savini, who I knew to be a champ from working on The Burning The detective was another victim that had disappeared, and Gordon Watkins, who played the role, was still around, so we had Tom make him up for the crash through the window.

“Tom came up with just his kit, and making a guy look like he just came through a window was pretty simple for him, remember that he did something with toilet paper-I couldn’t say just what he did, but it looked horrendous. The apparition a hallucinatory monster that is another statement of the “insanity everywhere” theme; we had a meeting in the afternoon and he had to do it that evening. If he had more time, he told us, he could get a glass eye, some dental stuff, and really do something. So what he did for us that day is he took soap, and waxed down the guy’s hair, used some mortician’s wax, and got Rice Krispies and stuck it on the guy… literally worked with what is in the kitchen cabinet, and when he finished, literally couldn’t look at the guy, it just turned my stomach. It wasn’t the world’s greatest monster-it was the type of thing where it would appear, you’d jump out of your seat, and by the time you landed back in your seat it would be gone. It was quite a remarkable thing especially after working with this other guy, where everybody worried whether he was even going to show up. Tom was professional all the way. As it turn ed out, we weren’t able to shoot it that night. Tom did it again the next night, and in the meantime, he’d been able to materialize some teeth, a glass eye and a few other things, so he used a few less Rice Krispies the second time. He made a marvelous Creature, my hat’s off to Tom Savini.

Tom Brumberger’s side of the “Alone in the Dark” debacle

Tom Brumberger’s first association with Sholder was a straight makeup assignment on Sholder’s short film The Garden Party, which Brumberger recalls as a good experience for all concerned. Much later, a chance meeting on a New York street reunited the two and, as Brumberger tells it, Sholder was anxious to have him on the crew of Alone in the Dark. then in preproduction, on both straight and Special makeups. “It’s my experience that you really can’t do both and do both well.” says Brumberger, who eventually signed to do only the special makeups for the film.

Fred Travalena

As Brumberger describes it, Alone in the Dark was a severely troubled production Communication with the producers was so that he did not have a contract to sign until the third week of production, and he feels that it was not the contract that he was promised. One condition, however, was clearly spelled out. “My agreement was X amount of dollars for X’ number of weeks. If we went beyond that time, it was to be figured on a per day basis, at another fee.”

But Alone in the Dark went well over its production schedule, we are told, and in the crush to complete all the scenes requiring the film’s “names” before their departure, two effects scenes remained unfilmed. Advised that the film’s budget had all been spent, Brumberger told the producers that he would stay on the film for one additional week at no charge: Brumberger says that the free week” eventually became three weeks, during which time the effects sequences were scheduled and rescheduled several times

Meanwhile, Brumberger was offered an unusual opportunity. Fred Travalena was to star in a cable television special, and Brumberger was approached to design a series of prosthetic makeups that would transform the night club impressionist into nine of the personalities that he mimics in his night club act, ranging from Sinatra to President Ron. “I had to do nine characters in nine days,” he says, because four other competent and creative people had turned it down, due to the time involved and the producers had been told that the only person that could do it in that time-frame and give them quality work was Tom Brumberger.”

Brumberger says that his departure from the crew of Alone in the Dark was preceded by full notification of all involved, including an on-set announcement by himself and his partner, Don Lumkin, at the beginning of his final week. The effects scenes, however, were pushed forward to the Tuesday following the end of that week-too late, since he’d accepted another job; he advised the producers of the film to have their lawyer contact his lawyer. “Immediately Corson called me back and said, ‘Are you holding the effects for ransom?

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Months later, with the release of Alone In The Dark, Brumberger would again hear about his “refusal to deliver the film’s effects. That’s how lack Sholder described the situation. Never even remotely true, says Brumberger. *The lawyers were on the phone all day back and forth, back and forth. What was finally resolved was that I would turn over all of the equipment necessary to do these effects in the state they were in which was an unfinished state, in exchange for a release.” Brumberger says that the Donald Pleasence head, its PMC molds, and a full body suit and pullover mask for the apparition were picked up by a representative of New Line, who signed a release relieving him of all future liability in respect to Alone in the Dark and New Line Cinema for whatever reasons, New Line did not use any of these materials, and Brumberger later found himself on the receiving end of a $100,000 lawsuit.

Alone in the Dark (1982) Music Tracks

CAST/CREW Directed Jack Sholder Produced Robert Shaye Benni Korzen Written Jack Sholder Robert Shaye Michael Harrpster

Jack Palance as Frank Hawkes Donald Pleasence as Dr. Leo Bain Martin Landau as Byron ‘Preacher’ Sutcliff Dwight Schultz as Dr. Dan Potter Erland Van Lidth as Ronald ‘Fatty’ Elster Deborah Hedwall as Nell Potter Lee Taylor-Allan as Toni Potter Phillip Clark as Tom Smith Elizabeth Ward as Lyla Potter Brent Jennings as Ray Curtis

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Fangoria#025 Fangoria#317

Alone in the Dark (1982) Retrospective SUMMARY Dr. Dan Potter is the replacement for Dr. Harry Merton, a psychiatrist at Dr. Leo Bain's psychiatric haven.