Chapter Text
Harvey Dent was dead. Worse than dead, actually. About as dead as the proverbial doornail, and just as wretched.
Harvey closed his eyes
and opened them.
There was nothing in the hospital room except for a little bed, machinery, and a window. The time of day didn’t seem to matter. Dawn slipped into sunset slipped into the dead of night – but really, did it have to be so dark all the time? He had asked a nurse that. And he felt bad, for he asked her name every time she came into this sinking lifeboat of a hospital room and he still couldn’t remember what it was. It was all the same, anyway. Words slipping away just over his head, adrift on the fuzzy sea of the drugs and what remained of Harvey’s shattered psyche. It was shattered, Harvey knew. The wave of the tsunami hadn’t yet hit; he was forever suspended in the breath just before a head-on collision, wide-eyed and thoughtless. Harvey had always been lucky: now he gets to know exactly what it feels like to lose your mind, stretched out over so many days and nights it becomes an experience unto itself. It was the dubious privilege of knowing, in excruciating detail, that this was the end of Harvey Dent, Gotham’s most foolish DA. The least Harvey can do is savor it, this accursed period of forced myopia. The dying, the very sick, and the very injured were afforded special privileges. Harvey’s is this. A front-row seat, and supposedly the time off work to try and play a hand in shaping his burgeoning insanity. Or – did he always know that this was his due, and was just putting it off?
“It certainly seems like it’s always dark now, but that’s just November, isn’t it?”
‘
The nurse says while making notes in his chart. Harvey just stares at the ceiling, teeth clenched. He’s sure his jaw would be aching if it wasn’t numbed with morphine. November. Election time. One year – that’s all he had. His career – his career – his career!
His heart spasms with the thought, and Harvey is momentarily alarmed at how the emotion rips through him like the cracking of melting glacier ice. It aches terribly, and Harvey seizes on it immediately as the first human-feeling emotion he’s had since he was staring down the neck of a silver flask. It’s still not quite right. The grief tasted metallic, not wet and red. But it felt like being ripped apart, and so Harvey seized on it anyway. And pain, oh pain - how it can be used as an excuse. Because Harvey was alone yet again, he listens to the dull hum of the room’s AC and the faint ticking of a clock, feels the thin hospital sheets on bandaged, dully throbbing skin, and occupies himself in re-learning how to cry. One eye dutifully performs its purpose. One eye was not made less than what it was supposed to be. One eye, and only one, remains Harvey’s to reach up to and to reassure himself that not all of his face was gone – especially in those hazy early hours.
The other eyelid is grafted on and is currently infected. Harvey is curiously unsurprised when the doctors tell him that his body is rejecting a graft from his own skin. But because it hurts to blink, the other eye is always dry, no matter how much solution he pours into what feels like a weeping wound. He squirts some solution into it now. It’s a good enough simulation of crying, at least. Now Harvey can pity himself properly.
It's a shameful thing for one to indulge in, pity. It ate at Harvey from the soles of his feet and curled somewhere around his beleaguered organs, nestled in deep with the sense of fatigue Harvey feared would become permanent. And yet it was unbearably seductive. And yet the pity, as shameful as it was, wasn’t the unkindest cut. It was the grief, lonely and all-encompassing. Because Harvey knew the one thing that all the rest of the world did not, and really ought to learn soon: Harvey Dent was dead. Harvey tried. He really, really did. Harvey strove to be a good man, and let the loveliest of fools tell him, tell him with admiring smiles, that he was good. He had found Justice, and strove to be just as blind. Fair is as fair is as fair is just. And Harvey had grown quite adept at arguing with himself, so he foolishly came to believe that reason would prevail eventually. And it did, how wonderfully it did, until…
If I’m good, will God protect me?
It was an old thought, but Harvey had toyed with the idea of religion again and again. Maybe if the law didn’t exist, he’d be a religious man, and that’s how he would drag the unwitting public into his saint complex. Hm. The saint got martyred. And the thought isn’t quite Harvey’s, but Harvey doesn’t immediately push it away. In this privacy of his own head, in the washed out hospital room… Harvey wondered. It felt a little bit like making first contact, all wonderful and strange.
Are you there?
I’ve been here for years.
I know.
Harvey draws a blank at that. He’s strangely embarrassed, almost feeling like a poor host or like somebody daring to be surprised that their garden has grown weeds after years of neglect. Of course his little problem wouldn’t just… go away. Of course it would fester, and of course it would grow strength just as his face festered. A part of his mind was alive in a way it hadn’t been in years, always so viciously repressed. It spread itself over the tender flesh, and anchored itself there – the way it had always borne Harvey’s pain. The anger Harvey would not permit himself to feel.
I’m not a violent man.
I know.
It’s why you need me
don’t you?
It’s wrong
what (happened / they did) to us.
I wonder
what I could do
to make things right.