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red-riding-wood · 2 months

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Yellow Light

Pairing: Jonathan Crane x F!Reader

Summary: Jonathan is your guide as you escape Arkham Asylum.

Based off the song "Yellow Light" by Of Monsters and Men (original version here and acoustic version here). This song is really special to me and helped me brave my heart surgery in August. A lot of this fic is a projection of my own experiences, trauma, and health issues over the past several years -- but Arkham can represent absolutely anything you want it to that you or the character is trying to escape.

Song lyrics are in bold.

Warnings: angst, hurt/comfort, depictions of PTSD (hospital trauma specifically), drug addiction/use, psychosis, hallucinations, fear of death, blood.

Will also use similar themes to my upcoming series "Darkness Until Dawn" and OC Cassie Hart but this is a standalone x reader fic.

I also feel like Crane might come across a bit OOC in this fic because he's in an established relationship with the reader and he's in a comforting role, but I promise I have some very fucked-up stuff for him coming up where he's an absolute menace.

WC: 3309

Sounds of Hell threaded themselves into the night air. Howling, bleating, baying down the streets. Whispering thoughts of death into your ears. Thoughts that formed into icy talons that raked down your spine, that stirred goosebumps along the bare flesh of your arms. That froze you in place, your heart slamming against your ribs as they tethered you to the cold concrete like vines.

Frantic looks cast to your left, to your right, you turned, stumbling over your own feet as you whirled, the darkness of each alleyway sinking into your soul. Staring back at you as if to say, you cannot escape me.

I’m looking for a place to start. Everything feels so different now.

Which way was out? Which way was back there? Back to the dingy halls of Arkham, the acrid stench of spoiled cafeteria food, the howling of patients that still seemed to echo back to you from the alleys.

The maw of a great beast parted, razors of teeth glinting silver in the dark, stretching from one brick wall to another. Hurtling towards you, wisps of black smoke emerging from the darkness and curling round you like hissing tongues. The roar started as a peal of thunder, and ended as a shockwave, razor teeth shattering into glass as the beast collided against your skull. Dizzying waves sent the world spinning, brought you to your knees before the Devil himself.

She’s good as dead.

The beast’s maw burned hot as hellfire, breathing smoke into your aching lungs, ripples of molten lava racing beneath your skin. Teeth tore into your shoulder as your hand met the ground, shaking fingers settling into the grooves of the concrete like cold tiles. Death’s talons wrapped around your throat as a cry twisted from your larynx, pointed nails morphing to scalpels and tearing down your sternum, splitting open your ribs and baring your bleeding heart.

Crimson freckled the concrete, splatters of your blood landing hot and thick against the back of your hand as cold washed over each limb, the darkness creeping in from the corners of the alleys. You reached your free hand to your forehead, and nearly cried out again in pain, but you couldn’t speak; something sharp wedged itself between your fingers, something sticky attaching webs of hair against your clammy palm.

Your hand came away with a shard of glass protruding from the stretch of skin between your fingers, red dribbling down flesh too pale to be living.

Your stomach buckled, and you curled in on yourself, eyes rolling to the back of your throbbing skull and voices pouring in like a tide.

Get back here! She’s running. Running away. Where does she think she’s going? She’s not going anywhere. She can’t escape us. You can’t escape us.

Patients rattled the bars of their cages, threw themselves against their padded walls. Screeched warnings and mournful wails and haunted cries into the stale air of the hospital, into the icy chill of night.

Fingers seized into talons as they closed around your ears, attempting to block out the noise as it built into a terrifying crescendo, wails and whispers melding together as if the darkness were mocking you but the chill that swathed your impotent form reminded you of your isolation.

GET OUT! your lips parted to say but fell silent upon the words of the damned. Let me go. Let me go, let me go.

Warmth brushed your shoulder, and you blinked saline from your eyes, streaking salt down your lip, dampened hair falling over blurry vision as you looked up to the hand held to you in the darkness. The white cuff of a shirt disappearing beneath a black suit.

Just grab hold of my hand. I will lead you through this wonderland.

And his voice, soft and warm and human, cut through the noise. Hollowed a path through the tunnel of voices and breathed life into lungs that gasped for air. Sent a tremble of fear through death’s icy talons and made the demons crawl back into the earth.

I’m here, he said.

You couldn’t straighten your claw-like grip as it brushed the warmth of his hand, but his fingers entwined in yours and the glass split his palm and bled over your knuckles and he pulled, your shoulder screaming in pain and your legs wobbly beneath you, but you stood.

Your fingers balled into a fist, the touch of his hand dissolving like a pill in water, like sutures that held you to together for one moment only to leave you in pieces, scarred and bruised and broken. For a moment, you thought you’d fall again.

Faintly, a glow emerged from the blackness, silhouetting the lazy fall of a feather, so tranquil in contrast to the tendrils of ink black that writhed in your peripheral. You swiped a hand out to the feather, its softness akin to his hand, but the voices hissed at you to look up.

The jagged peaks of the skyscrapers groaned above, folding in across the dim sky and curling into black tides that came crashing around you as pressure mounted in your skull.

The darkness devoured you.

Water up to my knees. But sharks are swimming in the sea.

The ocean came flooding in around you, dampness seeping into the cuffs of your trousers, rising as the blackness pressed in around you. Ahead, the light glinted yellow, casting a thin line of white against the waves. The feather bobbed along the surface, chased by current that now buffeted the backs of your knees.

One foot placed before the other, you waded through the water, each step weighing heavier than the last. Each time, the light ahead grew just a little brighter, though the sides of your vision darker.

Wretched creatures began to emerge from the darkness, hissing and snarling and reaching for you in tendrils of smoke and ink. Gravity began to pull you downward, the current guiding you forwards as the alleyway morphed into a tunnel, and the voices of the underworld rang louder in your skull as you descended into the bowels of the city.

She’s heading into the darkness. The rot.

A giggle, echoing against the walls of the chamber that reeked of all things barren and desolate. Her mind’s a disease.

The reach of death grew thick here, in twisted ropes and vines that swallowed the arched ceiling, that bore down on you like snakes and streaked through the sea like eels of tar, the water itself no longer seeming so heavy in comparison as they engulfed each limb. Tightening. Shuddering.

She can’t get very far. She’s killing herself.

She has to. She has to live.

The voices were starting to argue.

Some were even voices you knew; they came to you past the iron bars nestled into pockets of your memories, depressions in the walls – people you’d known in that awful place cried out to you, cursed you, their faces fuzzy but still recognisable even in the darkness. Fellow souls trapped in the place that knew not of the sun’s warmth against your skin or the whistle of freedom through the wind.

Look. Look, girl.

Your brow furrowed, and your eyes scanned the darkness. With each face they landed on, the symphony of wails seemed to spike in volume along to the frantic thud of your heart, the little weaving line of a monitor etching itself across your mind’s eye.

Not there. No, not there.

Can’t she feel it?

It’s too late. The rot has her.

Soon it will reach her soul.

Your heart came lurching to a burning throat as the waters stirred and a creature emerged from their murky depths, slivers of metal protruding from its back before it disappeared, for half a moment resembling the wicked tips of syringes that still pricked your swiftly numbing skin.

Tearing your hands from the water, you froze, paralysis seeping in to every pore.

Ink tendrils snaked across the pallor of your flesh. From your fingertips to your elbows, the rot had taken you. It tightened round your forearm, your fingers turning completely numb.

You screamed.

Shhhhh, he soothed. Just come to me, darling. I’ll make it all better.

“JONATHAN!” Your mangled cry turned into something intelligible, the name sweet like honey on your tongue despite the bitterness of bile at the back of your throat.

Just follow my yellow light. And ignore all those big warning signs.

You began to slosh through the water, seeking him out in a frenzy, your teeth gritting as the walls of your skull began to cave in, as the rot spread to your shoulders and turned the water to pitch.

And at last, you saw him. Like the feather, silhouetted by the light, but unmistakably him. He paused, looking over his shoulder, strands of his black hair wisping this way and that. His face was shadowed, the sockets of his eyes black. The frames of his glasses glinted silver in the dark, like the teeth, the scalpels.

And he disappeared round the corner that twisted, walls shifting and shuddering as if forming a maze for a path.

Death’s icy fingers pried their way beneath your skin as the cold seeped past your blood and bones and settled somewhere deep inside the dwindling warmth of your soul. Freed from the water at last, you turned the corner and raised a rot-wreathed hand to the light fractured by a criss-cross pattern that reminded you of the bars of the asylum’s gate.

And the damp air became dry and musty, and the sewers morphed into dingy halls, alabaster wallpaper peeling back to reveal the black rot. Your pace quickened as these walls closed in, groaning with curses of the damned.

Just a little farther, the soothing, slightly-lilted baritones of his voice encouraged you on, but every turn you made down the narrowing halls, he managed to evade you, disappearing just out of reach. At the end of each hallway, what must’ve been a sewer drain and not a gate yawned from the blackness, little pockets of light stretching wider with each turn.

The feather crunched beneath your toes.

Fingers wrapped around the bars of the gate, and the hinges squealed as it swung open, your feet slotting into indentations along the walls as you desperately attempted to pull yourself up.

Warmth made you shiver in your cold sweat, and whispers funnelled into thin threads and lay buried beneath the ground as his hand met yours. In the faint glimmer of the light, you witnessed the rot dissipate, chased away by his touch. Purified.

“Jonathan,” you breathed, pulled flush to his chest, the mint of his breath raking across your lashes and the familiarity of his musk inhaled deeply through flared nostrils. You buried your face in his wrinkled tie and dress shirt and sobbed, your tears still tasting like saline. You savoured this moment, trembling beneath his touch, his hand petting the back of your dampened hair. You pulled away only as he hissed in pain.

“Jonathan, I’m scared,” you whimpered, guilty that you had seemed to wound him but caring only for sanctuary in this moment in which you knew nothing but fear. “Please don’t leave me. I’m so, so scared.”

“I know you are,” he said, squeezing your shoulder. “But you have to keep going.”

“Where? Where are you taking me?” You stared into the hollows of his eyes, still pitch black past the glint of those silver frames. Why couldn’t you properly see him? Could he see you? Was he just another shadow, a trick of light on the wall?

Somewhere deep in the dark, a howling beast hears us talk.

Sirens wailed from the alley behind, and your blood ran cold. Jonathan stepped away, his touch tearing from yours almost painfully. Like he’d left the shards of glass in your palms.

“Don’t let them take me!” You pleaded, stumbling forward through the darkness. “I can’t go back! I can’t! COME BACK!”

She’s so afraid. So pathetic. She can’t do this without him.

The light grew in intensity, tinted more gold now than yellow, bathing the walls in a soft glow as they drew impossibly close, tapering the air in your lungs, building the pressure against your temples until your shoulders sagged under the weight of fatigue and white-hot fire cleaved your skull in two.

Jonathan paused, and turned. “Close your eyes,” he told you. “It’s not so dark here when you embrace it.”

I dare you to close your eyes. And see all the colours in disguise.

“NO!” You screeched, afraid that if you so much as blinked, he’d disappear, and you’d be lost to the darkness forever. You lurched forward on your heel, wedging yourself between the shuddering walls that closed in around you, following the same – and only path – he had taken. Turning sideways, you gulped in a breath of air, fingers scraping madly against the brick walls as the tide beginning to pool again round your ankles. The sky collapsed, pinning you, forcing your only breath from your lungs and snapping your ribs around your stuttering heart.

She’s gone. She won’t make it. She can’t reach him.

The air grew stuffy, stale. Your own breath bounced off the walls and flushed your cold, tear-streaked cheeks.

“Just trust me,” Jonathan said. “Just let go.”

Running into the night. The earth is shaking and I see a light.

With the darkness claiming you and the ground beneath you quaking with wrath, the howls of the damned echoing through a familiar hall, the world swaying on its axis, you had no choice but to suffocate your fear, to shutter your eyes closed on the light that seeped through the crack in the walls, warm against your skin in the cold dread of night.

She’s giving up.

She’s fighting.

She wants to die.

She wants to live.

The yellow-gold exploded across the backs of your eyelids, streaking like fireworks along the pitch black. Your skull still throbbed in pain, and your lips parted, the sound of a window banging against old hinges as death whispered to you through the alleys, the sewers, the hallways.

Next time.

Jonathan’s touch met your clammy palm, and the world fell silent, the walls disappearing around you and the emptiness of air spilling around your limbs.

I’m here, he reminded you.

The light is blinding my eyes, as the soft walls eat us alive.

Your eyelids peeled back to reveal the checkered, rose pattern of your wallpaper, the bright fluorescents of the bathroom, the blue eyes that bore into your own past silver frames. Slivers of ice encroaching on ink black pupils, cold and calculating yet echoing a familiar warmth.

He loosened the makeshift tourniquet from your arm, pins and needles racing from your fingertips to your elbow. A syringe of your favourite poison lay on the bathroom tile, beige powder swirling in a sea of saline.

“Come back to me. Come back to me, please,” he begged, as if for this moment alone, he allowed himself to believe in the higher power you knew he cursed.

Water seeped into your clothing like the sea of pitch, spilling from the bathtub that you had left on. It carried little rivulets of crimson around a minefield of glass. He didn’t seem very concerned with turning it off right now, despite always bitching at you about saving electricity or water. His eyes were on you, and only you.

“Jonathan,” you mumbled weakly, though you thought you screamed; your eyelids fluttered and your heart pounded faster in your chest as the darkness threatened to spill across your vision again. Your nails dug past the fabric of his suit, gripping his arm tight so that he could never let you go.

“I’m here,” he breathed, and reached his other hand around your neck to cup your head, to bring you forward. You glimpsed the white ceramic of the bathroom sink, bloodied where you’d tried to steady yourself with your hand after you’d bashed your skull against the mirror – your ineffectual attempt to cast the demons out. Glass shards lay scattered against the tile. Fragments of your broken reflection.

You still remembered the haunted look you’d hoped to banish from your eyes.

“You have to get your head out of that place,” he murmured against your scalp, his fingers bloody and sticky as he brushed shards of glass from your hair, seemingly immune to the pain. “You’re not in hospital anymore. You’re here. With me. You have to come back to me.”

Your lower lip trembled. “I can’t escape them,” you admitted, voice a mere whimper. “I can’t escape it. You’re here to take me back, aren’t you? You’re gonna lock me up.”

For a moment, you really thought that he might; his palm still rested, warm and bleeding, against your cheek, but his cold blue eyes studied you not as his lover but as his patient, assessing your condition. He sighed, as if disappointed. Shame crawled its way beneath your skin like the cockroaches that had infested the asylum’s lower wards. You had always been so desperate for his approval, he rarely saw this side of you since your rehabilitation. It wasn’t until slivers of ice shattered into twin pools of blue fire that relief began to seep into you, slow and warm but whelming.

“No. No, I’m not,” he said, voice gentle, soothing. Blue eyes glanced to your head again. “Though, you are showing symptoms of a concussion…”

Your heart sped in your chest, and the icy talons of death speared your soul, the darkness hedging the borders of your vision. Innerved by your fear, you reached for the bottle of tiny white pills that lay open, haphazard next to you. But the warmth of his hand left your face, and your fingers clenched around nothing. In a blur of movement, Jonathan threw the bottle at the toilet and it clattered against the back of the seat. You jolted, gasping, wincing as the jagged teeth of the beast sliced through your clothing.

“You prescribed me those,” you told him. “They’re supposed to make me better. You said so yourself.”

“I’ll fill you a new prescription tomorrow. Taper you off. They were no good for you,” he said, and laced his fingers through the bloodied locks of your hair. Pulled your forehead to his so that your breaths became one, and the demons in your skull grew muffled, and his warmth chased away the icy touch of death.

“What am I gonna do?” you whimpered, sobbing, hands grasping feebly at whatever you could grab hold of – his sleeve, his tie, his collar. You felt as if your soul, your mind, were laying in fragments around you like the glass, and no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t piece them back together. “I just want to be free. I just want to be okay.”

“I know.” He inhaled, closing his eyes, and his grip tightened on your hair, scalp stinging slightly at the almost needy action. Like in this moment he was more afraid of losing you than you were him.

Even he thinks she’s a lost cause.

And Jonathan was never one to utter false truths; because you knew this about him, his silence unnerved you. But finally, after what could’ve been hours or minutes of your pitiful sobbing and the endless drone of the tub, the trickling of water against the tile, he said,

“I’ll be right here, darling. All you need to do is take my hand.” The warmth of his palm slotted into your own, and you wove your fingers so tight that your knuckles turned white around the blood that trickled down both your wrists from the jagged glass that barbed your flesh. A seal. A pact.

“I will see you through this,” he said. “All of it. I promise.”

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