Chapter Text
You still feel as if you're that same thirteen year-old obsessively looking over yourself in every reflection, trying to twist your way into something prettier and something more than the pimples on your cheeks and the gut you have to suck in or the uneven cut of your hair.
But today, nowadays, you're 18 years old and that thirteen year-old was long dead, buried in some half-hearted grave in a whole other universe. You're taller than you ever were before but you're still "petite". Not short and stump, but "petite"— and it makes being the shortest in your class somehow a nice thing. They tease you for it, yes, but their eyes crinkle like they're endeared and they tell you you're "cute".
People call you "pretty". Your hair curls and falls over your face in a careful way and you don't worry about a messy head because you know you still look good regardless.
You still check your reflection just as often. You still curl and hunch over to take up even lesser space than you already do and you still manage to fuck up every social interaction you've ever had with your peers.
It makes you wonder if there's still any worth to this life when it might as well just be the same as the other one. Once again you find yourself without a friend in college and obsessively drawing handsome men in the corners of your notebook.
It's pathetic, you realize. You have lived two lives. You are technically thirty-one years old and still you have the same bad habits and teenage obsessions as you did when you were thirteen and dead.
You want to die, you've thought to yourself. You could do it again. It won't be any harder than the first time— hell, it'll probably be a whole lot easier now that you live alone but when you look up from your mindless scribbling and tune back into your lecture, you find yourself post-poning that idea.
There, upon the ledger, with his back straight and voice a steady drawl, was Dr. Jonathan Crane. He doesn't look anything like anyone has ever drawn him as. He's self-assured— handsome. You can hear a few girls at the back giggling into their hands as their eyes flutter from him to their friends. He sports a professional suit and sleek glasses. He might've looked like Cillian Murphy if you'd even remembered what he'd look like. The memory of watching the Dark Knight trilogy sits behind your eyes but the faces escape you. You can hardly recall your own face despite looking too much into mirrors a whole lifetime ago.
With your chewed out pencil in hand, you feel your wrists sketch out the outline of his jaw instinctively. Then his eyes, then his hair, then fill each space with shadows that sharpen his face. When you look down and see the rough portrait of his image, you can't help but feel a sense of elation and shame.
It's probably, like, extremely immoral to fawn over a potential criminal. You can daydream about encountering Batman on your apartment's rooftop, fall into the arms of Bruce Wayne some time in the future, and paint out the entire Bat-family years before they'll even come to existence— but filling your notebooks with drawings of Dr. Jonathan "soon-to-be Scarecrow" Crane? You're going to get yourself locked up somehow.
Or killed, you think to yourself, heartbeat racing in your ears.
The line between what's real and what isn't used to be a clear and steady boundary that kept away your fantasies from consuming every aspect of your life but now there's nothing between you and Dr. Crane except air and several criminal charges either you or he could face. Perhaps there's still a boundary there after all— that realm of impossibility that keeps your feet planted to the ground and shows you out the door before you can even think about talking to Dr. Crane face-to-face after class ends.
You see a few students stay behind, crowding around the ledger— Dr. Crane, you sourly corrected yourself, Scarecrow— all bearing polite grins and just as polite questions that you know are just excuses to get a closer look at their professor's face and hear a bit more of his voice up close.
Dr. Crane barely looks them in the eye all throughout. He answers their questions with a professional conciseness you think only he could manage. He's as dismissive as ever with his Intro to Psychology classes. You wonder if the university is understaffed before realizing that universities are always understaffed no matter what universe you've ended up in. The man was probably only forced to teach this class. Perhaps if he had it his way, he'd forgo all his first-year classes all together. There were far more interesting— more important— things he had on his plate.
You recall the courses he handled, all listed neatly on the university's site. Your cursor once hovered over the choice between the school's journalism program and their history majors before you'd pulled up a tab of all the courses Dr. Jonathan Crane was teaching, saw that it was— obviously— mostly psychology classes, and you scrolled down the list of programs they offered and clicked on Psychology without much thought. You had to inform your parents, later that night, that you had changed the entire course of your career at the last minute.
Even as he flees his gaggle of overly enthusiastic students, he doesn't look like he's running away. He dismisses them with a "good day" you can only faintly hear from your seat at the back of the class.
He reaches the door and his eyes flicker briefly—
to you.
The door shuts behind him.