Work Text:
Elizabeth Crane was an accident.
That’s what her father said at least. He said it whenever he strapped her down and stuck needles into her. He said it was the least she could do with all the trouble she caused him. For all the messes, for the money, and time she wasted. It was always her fault.
He wasn’t a good dad.
When Eliza wasn’t his test subject he let her watch TV. In the shows she watched there were good dads and bad dads, and her’s probably fell into the bad category. It was ok though if she wasn’t here that would mean someone else would be, being tied to a chair, having needles jammed into their arms, seeing their worst nightmares. It was better that it was her, at least she didn’t have nightmares anymore.
He called it fear toxin, she supposed it made sense. When Eliza was little she would see spiders, their gangly limbs stretched out to abnormal proportions. She could practically feel them on her skin (sometimes in her skin ready to burst out at a moment's notice). The hallucinations changed though, to the needles and then to her father.
The worst one was when he was arrested. The police came into the apartment and took her to an orphanage. It was… fine. The kids were loud and mean and would not stop touching her… but the adults were alright.
Then her father came back and dragged her away to an abandoned warehouse, leaving the orphanage smoking with fear toxin from anywhere it could leak out. The nightmares were different after that. She’d see herself escape only to find the door led back to the old apartment filled with vials of fear toxin and nightmares and needles and her father.
It got better though. Slowly the nightmares became less vivid, less terrifying until all Eliza felt was a cold emptiness. Her father thought that was interesting, told her she had developed a tolerance to the fear toxin. That didn’t explain why she didn’t see anything when he gave her brand new strains of the toxin or why the cold numb feeling never really went away.
After a while he stopped strapping into the chair as often, sometimes he still would but nothing would happen. The spots on her arm never really faded and her arms still looked too veiny, but at least she wasn’t getting stabbed and injected with gunk as much anymore.
Then he started having her help making the toxin. It was… fun? She wasn’t entirely sure how she felt doing it but the only activities she had available now was watching TV and… no that was it, and TV got boring after years of doing only that.
She didn’t really like what he was using it for but making it was like solving a puzzle, figuring out how much of each vile she needed to combine to make something new. She made other stuff too, knock-out gas, a truth serum, poisons that ranged from paralyzing someone to causing cardiac arrest, fear gas immunizer.
Her father liked that last one. Apparently, he hadn’t been able to make it himself and had been relying on gas masks to avoid being affected by his own toxin.
So Eliza stayed in the warehouse making different concoctions and then testing them on the bats her father insisted she experiment on.
Then one day there was the sound of fighting and her father was knocked into the lab. He seemed manic and a look towards the door that he was kicked through revealed why. There was a man dressed in black who towered over him. Batman if she remembered correctly.
Her father always got upset whenever he showed up on TV and demanded she change the channel. She watched anyway when he wasn’t around, the hint of fear in her father’s voice whenever he saw the vigilante made her curious.
They were arguing about something, she wasn’t really paying attention, too busy at her work station. Then her father said her name. Told her to release his newest batch of fear toxin into the room. She looked down to see him take off the gas mask and inhale the immunizer.
Fun fact about it.
The immunizer was derived from that latest batch of fear toxin. It targets the same area of the brain and causes it to temporarily relax, causing the fear gas to be ineffective with a side effect of delayed reaction speed.
It also, when combined with a certain gas, causes the affected person to be sent into a bout of hysteria worse than anything the fear gas could have resulted in. Or at least that’s what she assumes, she hadn’t seen any version of her father’s toxin drive a bat to bash its head against its cage till it stopped moving yet.
Eliza lazily pushed a vile of said gas onto the floor and watches.
She watches her father look at her with fury in his eyes that slowly turns to terror. Watches the man who taught her how to make her concoctions scream and writhe on the ground. Watches as Jonathan Crane begins slamming his head into the ground, splatters of red beginning to form before Batman is able to sedate him. Watches the man who tormented her entire life lay unconscious on the ground, defeated thanks to her.
She stares until Batman kneels in front of her to block her view and asks her if she’s ok. She nods. Her vision begins to unfocus as he stares back at her. He eventually stands, takes her by the shoulder, and leads her out of the lab.
She looks back one more time at Jonathan Crane, her father, her teacher, her tormentor.
She thought she’d feel something.
But she still feels empty.