Angel Gray

Voted most likely to end up in Arkham in High School. 26, she/her, practicing Psychiatrist at the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Doctorates in Psychology and Biochemistry with a focus on Psychofarmacology. That flying rat needs to get out of the sky.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

Announcement!

Ok so hi, this blog has been kinda dead for a while now so I just wanted to pop in. Specifically to say that Angel is currently getting an overhaul, so basically anything prior to this post is noncanon to her character or personality.

Thanks!

-Patch

[doctor-jonathan-crane]

Mint || The world is a puzzle, so complex and multifaceted that you long to run your hands through the tapestry of its wonders and stay there forever, lost in the threads and colors and stories. You wish to stay there forever and you tell yourself it's to know the world but maybe it's not, maybe it's a fear that you're not enough, that you're so fragile and helpless in a world that moves too fast, to sharply, too many bright, painful colors that you stay locked inside your mind and thoughts, where you decide the tempo of your world, where you can grow and be as competent, as capable as you want, where the world is as wide as you can imagine it and never out of control unless you want it to be. Your shield is your knowledge, your mind, and you never feel ready enough for the world around you, never feel prepared enough, never safe, and you wonder if things could have been different, if you could have been better, happier, more like everyone else if you'd just known what you know now.

[ What Kind of Herb Are You? Quiz. Thank you for tagging me, @swansinstarlight ( from this post ) & @jcphd ( from this post )! Tagging @morally-ambiguous-bird, @dividedbybinaries, @brushandbludgeon, + genuinely open for anyone else who wants to take the test. ]

OOC: It was entirely between Mint and Dandelion (read this post from jcphd for that description). If there were a result somewhere between the two, that would probably be my Crane. That said, I do think there's a lot of merit to it.

With Crane, there is a vast chasm between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. He possesses an acute ability to understand, predict, and manipulate the emotional states of others, while exhibiting a diminished capacity to emotionally resonate with them. This disconnect extends to himself as well. He is capable of identifying and dissecting his own emotional states, but expressing them naturally is another matter entirely. It takes considerable effort for him to be thoughtful, caring, or emotionally present, even when he is compelled, in one way or another, to try.

And when confronted with something emotional (fear, humiliation, pain, or anything else that threatens to overwhelm him), he doesn’t experience it in the way most people do. His instinct is to dissect it, reducing it into something that can be understood and controlled. Emotional responses are translated into observations and conclusions before they are ever allowed to simply exist. As a result, he tends to filter emotions through a utilitarian lens. Interest becomes curiosity. Attraction becomes fascination. His own feelings are rarely permitted to remain feelings for long; they must justify their existence through some practical purpose or analytical value.

Relationships are not immune to this process. He approaches people as systems to be understood, patterns to be decoded, variables to be accounted for. Human connection becomes another branch of study. He’s not incapable of attachment, even now. But genuine vulnerability requires a surrender of control that he finds profoundly uncomfortable. 

Jonathan has spent years constructing himself around intellect. Knowledge is a passion, yes, but also a refuge, a shield, a means of compensating for the ways he has been used, exploited, and wounded throughout his life. Given the choice, he would much rather exist alone in the company of his curiosities. It is safer there. Easier. He can direct all of his attention toward an obsession like Batman—a figure so distant, so unattainable, that fascination never has to become anything more complicated than fascination. Because as long as the object of his interest remains out of reach, he never has to confront what that interest might actually mean.

That’s at least some of my thoughts on it. Let me know what you guys think of the results and how they connect to my Crane!

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

Thyme: Anxiety is your middle name. You need to check in with other people or beliefs when you take a step because the world is dark and you are so small, so fragile, and you've been hurt so many times before. You were bullied or hurt before, by people you trusted or people you loved, and despite all that you find yourself stumbling into other people, into bandaged trust because all you want is to be secure, loved, safe, supported. But maybe instead you long to be loved, long to find solace in the arms of someone else but can't bare to draw near enough to anyone long enough to feel safe and ache, ache, ache for company. The world is dark and you're so lonely it hurts sharper than any wound. How can you trust when it's all be shattered so many times before? How do you trust yourself when you've let so many in? You are a thousand contradictions, a thousand bits and pieces picked up along the way and maybe even this doesn't sound right, maybe nothing sounds right. You are so lonely and so afraid and you just want to be safe. Secure. Loved. You're so tired of being afraid.

//owie… she needs to be medicated

[doctor-jonathan-crane]

OOC: I went into this test fully expecting nothing much due to the minimal number of choices, but lowkey…they may have been onto something.

[ Find Your Own Fruit Quiz. Thank you for tagging me, @swansinstarlight, from this post! Tagging @morally-ambiguous-bird, @dividedbybinaries, @brushandbludgeon, + genuinely open for anyone else who wants to take the test. ]

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

// damn this really was more accurate than I thought it would be.

I’m gonna leave the tags open cause I really dunno who to tag.

[doctor-jonathan-crane]

Birdcage: The Winner Takes It All

PT.1 PT.2 PT.3 PT.4 PT.5 PT.6 PT.7 PT.8 PT.9

Crane stalked into the corridor, one arm drawn tight across his ribs. His limbs trembled like bare twigs rattling in a winter wind. The hallway bore the aftermath of Batman’s passage. Guards lie crumpled near the threshold, with their visors fractured and wrists bound together. They would wake eventually, assuming the Dark Knight granted them the charity of avoiding lingering head trauma. Another man sprawled further down the corridor, baton resting across the floor like a toy kicked aside by a bored child. Efficient, clean incapacitations, as always. Even impaired, the Bat had cleared the path. Crane stepped over them without breaking stride. His admiration was overruled by his desperation to locate Angel.

He followed the breadcrumbs of violence. Each mark traced the shape of Batman’s movement through the building, and Crane read it the way a naturalist might read bent grass and broken branches in a forest. 

Arkham was as cunning as he was. They were both clever creatures well acquainted with the habits of other hunters. Something precious would never be left out in the open unless it was a trap. It would be placed somewhere insulated, yet close enough to observe. But a truly clever predator knew something else. Opportunity presented itself best when another rival had already done the bloody work of clearing the ground.

The trail led him down a flight of steel stairs that groaned underfoot, then past a reinforced door somehow half-wrenched from its hinges. The metal hung crooked in the frame like a broken jaw.

As he descended deeper, the air cooled. It crept along his ankles in thin currents, like the chill wing that followed the ferries to the underworld. At the end of a narrow passage was a phosphorescent light that spilled onto the floor.

The sealed door had already been electronically unbolted, standing slightly ajar. A courtesy of the Batman, he was sure. Crane paused there, one eyebrow lifting behind his wry glasses. A gift of access offered, and almost intimate in its attentiveness. How could he refuse such a gesture? Especially considering Crane possessed neither the patience nor the technical aptitude to coax open an electronic lock. 

He stepped across the threshold on mortal feet and was drawn inside.

The room was drowned in a dim, sorrowful blue radiance at its centre. The bioluminescent glow washed the walls in submerged light, turning the bland concrete into mournful cathedral refractions. Electrical veins tangled in clumps, feeding into the artery of an apparatus that rose from the floor like a perverted reliquary. The tubes threaded in and out of it invasively, pumping viscous fluid, suspending her body in a dreamlike drift. The vertical medical containment unit framed and encased the body. 

Angel. 

The harsher manifestations of her transformation had receded, dwindled and sedated. What remained was an unbearably incomplete reversion back to human appearance: her wings wings diminished, shrunken from their former apex, her bare shoulders visible beneath the fluid’s shimmer, collarbone pale like fragile china, and hair fanned in weightless strands around her face.

God’s discarded beauty, repurposed by vivisecting hands. The enclosure caught the blue light and bent it across her features, scattering trembling halos across her preservation. She lied as still as a pinned bird, delicately mounted on display within a grim, glass birdcage. 

Crane approached slowly. Up close, he noted the biometric monitors embedded in the frame; intravenous lines; neural dampeners affixed at the base of her skull; a circulation system maintaining the density and temperature of the suspension medium. Fail-safes. Redundancies. An automated purge protocol would be used if tampering were detected. Lady Arkham had not been careless. Crane circled the contraption once, searching for manual overrides. Direct force would trigger a purge. Cutting power would destabilise the fluid matrix and risk organ shock. 

Fortunately—or perhaps as deliberate as the hacked door—the Bat had seemed to drop an offering from his claws before flying to his rescue. A device perched there, interface already primed and hooked up to the apparatus, with a pre-programmed, careful sequence designed to override the containment system without triggering its defensive purge. It seems the Bat had more than brute force in his belt. 

Crane crouched beside the control interface, retrieving the device tentatively. He held it just above the console. For a moment, he didn’t activate it. Suspicion’s hand settled over him at the back of his neck, fingers curling just enough to remind him it was there. The Bat was many things. Calculating among them. Crane’s eyes lingered on the device in his hand. What if this promise of cooperation was a misdirection? Not that Batman’s morality would ever permit Angel to be harmed. But that didn’t mean there weren’t other contingencies burrowed beneath the surface, willing themselves to become malignant the moment Crane was due to fulfill his end of the bargain. A neat little mechanism to ensure the good doctor kept his promise to surrender. 

Upon a sharp ache along the hinge of his jaw, he forced it loose with a slow breath. Speculation was a luxury for men who had time. Crane tensely sighed and initiated the program. The device’s commands flowed through the console and into the machinery, lines of code disseminating their parasitic override of the chamber’s architecture, entering its stream and spreading through the apparatus until the entire structure was fully infected by it. The neural dampeners eased back in measured increments to prevent cortical shock when consciousness returned. The readings adjusted slowly, the machine reluctantly releasing its grip. Then the suspension chamber responded. The drainage cycle began at a steady pace. Too fast, and she would aspirate the fluid flooding her lungs. Too slow, and their odds of getting out unscathed dwindled before she even took a breath. An alert pulsed once across the console, seizing his gaze for a moment. But the device intercepted the signal and buried it before it could reach the primary system, and the chamber obeyed. 

His gaze returned to the tank, where his reflection hovered like a ghost caught in a snapshot. The grim blue glow swallowed the colour of his eyes until they seemed to dissolve into it—two cold fragments of the same luminescence staring back from the surface. 

His glasses seemed to dissolve from his face in the curved reflection, their familiar frame no longer interrupting the illusions he had spent years constructing around himself. Doctor Crane—the controlled cadence of a clinician—vanished somewhere behind the glass. Packed away like a coat folding into the back of a wardrobe. Usually, when that mask slipped, it was replaced by something else entirely. The Scarecrow. A depraved creature who revelled in trembling nerves and unravelling minds. But the eyes staring back at him now were not wild with that kind of hunger. They belonged to someone else. Someone older than both the doctor and the monster.

It was difficult to say when that man had first disappeared. Perhaps when Crane began his experiments, when curiosity became obsession, and the science that defined his life began to eclipse everything else. Perhaps earlier still, in the moment his professor’s breath left his body, and something irreversible took root in its place. Or perhaps the man had never truly existed. Perhaps there had only ever been a boy. A frightened child buried beneath the floorboards of every room he’d ever inhabited, suffocating slowly under the weight of the life built above him.

Yet the eyes in the glass looked…awake. Comatose things sometimes stirred. Sometimes a body clung stubbornly to one fragile thread of purpose, to one final opportunity to prove that someone, somewhere, had wanted it to survive. 

The chamber beside him chimed. A green light blinked in the corner of his vision. Process complete. Jonathan inhaled sharply and pushed himself upright, the movement determined despite how unsteady it was. His fingers found the chamber’s locking mechanism, fumbling briefly before gaining purchase on the heavy latch embedded in the glass. The seal released with a wet, mechanical sigh.

The door opened. Angel’s body sagged forward the moment the fluid’s support vanished, limp and unresisting as gravity reclaimed her. Crane caught her.

They collapsed together in a graceless descent, his knees striking the floor. His arms closed around her instinctively, gathering her against him before she could strike the ground. Cold fluid soaked through his coat sleeves. 

Crane remained there for a moment on the floor, breathing unevenly, clutching her close while the chamber hummed in the quiet aftermath of release.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

//uhhhh cw for vomit and stuff

A corpse-still figure lies disturbingly light and utterly limp within Jonathan’s arms, barely even constituting a shadow of the woman it had been a mere month or so prior. Previously pale but warm skin was now sallow and cold, full cheeks sunken and deep, bruise-colored circles adorned both of her closed eyes.  How a seemingly healthy young woman becomes borderline emaciated in such a short amount of time he doesn’t want to consider.

There’s nothing for a long moment, long enough for whatever passes for a heart within him to stumble over its rhythm. It’s only when Angel’s chest gives a meager raise that Crane shudders out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Her eyes snap open a moment later, wide and frantic like a child who just had a nightmare. Any relative peace is quickly made impossible as her body lurches with a deceptive amount of force, curling in on itself and letting out a violent retch.

Blood and tar splatters across the floor next to him, forming a thick, viscous puddle. Angel needs to be held up to keep her from falling face first into it. Every minute movement she makes is disoriented, like a marionette cut from its strings. She coughs, the noise escaping closer to a desperate sob, her fingers curling weakly into his clothing.

She feels humiliated, and cold, and used, but beyond anything else she just feels vulnerable. So exposed it makes her want to vomit a second time.

Such exposure never ended well, and even if she hadn’t been deprived of even her own dignity it was dangerous to be so dependent on somebody else for survival. He could easily leave her here now, to wither into nothingness in the dark and the cold. Angel clings to him as tightly as her protesting joints will allow, folding in on herself to nearly half her size. Her wings, dark and still soaked with whatever she had been suspended in cover her shaking form completely, plastering against her nearly translucent skin in a startling contrast. Breathing is a struggle, and through a drug-addled mind she thinks maybe now dying wouldn’t be so bad.

At least she wasn’t alone.

[doctor-jonathan-crane]

Jonathan’s hold tightened the moment life surged back through her. 

It moved through her body first in violent, desperate spasms of life—and then, somehow, it seemed to jump the distance between them. Like an electric current arcing from one body to another, the shock of her being alive shot through his arms and sparked somewhere deep in his chest. His heart, a machine restarting after years of disuse, stuttered into a faster, erratic rhythm. There were very few things left in the world capable of producing that response in him.

He had tried to manufacture it, of course. Tried through chemicals, through fear, through doses of his own inventions. Methods of self-experimentation and self-desecration had a way of sanding down old reflexes until very little remained. Just a hollow frame posted in a dead field, waiting for lightning or fire or catastrophe to justify its continued existence. Waiting for something strong enough to burn it down completely, just to feel one final surge of heat before collapsing to dust.

But this feeling placed his heart like a barbed-wire kiss, tender and cruel, scraping raw flesh just enough to prove it was real. It pierced him lovingly, and something inside him answered the wound without retreat; instead, with warmth, as if the blood it drew was devotional.

It kindled in the hollow spaces of his chest, heat spreading through corridors long abandoned, thawing structures that had been lifelessly cold for years. The sensation pressed against his lungs, weighing them down to make each breath feel harder to maintain.

It confused him. 

It felt good.

Worst of all, it felt kind.

Relief was unfamiliar territory. Pain, and fear, and cruelty, had rules he understood intimately. But this soft, persistent ache perched in his chest and refused to leave, far beyond what he believed his capacity for such a thing had ever been. He tightened his hold on her slightly, almost unconsciously, as if the feeling itself might slip away if he loosened his grip.

As her body convulsed, Crane reacted instinctively, one hand sliding to hold her upright while the dark, foul, viscous mess splattered across the floor beside them. His expression tightened almost imperceptibly behind the thin glare of his lenses. The startling force of her trembling was a motion completely at odds with how little of her seemed to be now, rattling inside a body that had its vigour gouged out. 

And as her fingers twisted weakly into his shirt, Crane’s eyes flicked downward with an apprehensive confusion crossing his face. He had never tolerated touch well. Touch implied obligation, vulnerability, unpredictability. But he found, to his surprise, that he did not immediately want to pull away.

His gaze shifted then, tracing the strange, sick iridescent sheen left on her skin from the tank fluid, and only then did he fully register her nudity. He removed his coat without a word.

The movement was clumsy, pain flashing through his ribs as he shrugged it off, but he managed it and draped the heavy fabric around her shoulders, pulling it closed across her chest. Her wings made the task difficult—slick, dark things that clung to her back, interrupting the neat coverage he intended. He adjusted the coat anyway, carefully, methodically, tucking it around her like a blanket against the cold laboratory air.

“There,” Jonathan said quietly. The word came out slightly uncertain, as if his voice didn’t quite know how to perform this particular function. Comfort was not a language he spoke often, and when he had in the past, it had always been imitation rather than sincerity. His hand raised to her neck, steadying her while the coughing began to subside. 

“You’re experiencing some form of post-suspension shock,” he said after a moment, his voice settling back into its clinical cadence. It made this moment manageable if he could rationalise the emotional. “Your lungs need to reacclimate to air. Your nervous system has been…rather unkindly tampered with.”

He watched her with suffocating attentiveness, eyes fixed on every small movement: each breath, each tremor, each attempt her body made to remember how to exist outside the glass coffin.

“In short, the next few minutes will be extremely unpleasant.”

And after a pause, he compelled himself to quietly add one more thing.

“But you are alive,” he said. “Try…to remain so.”

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

Her vision comes into focus incredibly slowly, with black splotches drifting in her blurry sight before she makes out his face. She tries to sit up, but her head is thick, and her limbs feel leadened, too heavy to lift or even move.

“You’re…” Angel’s voice comes out hardly audible “mmmno you’re not real, she said you left…” She’s about to say something else, but another round of harsh coughing puts a screeching stop to that. “I’m dying I think. You make an awfully comforting illusion, y’know.” 

Her head thumps rather limply against his chest, and her wet hair falls over her face in tacky clumps. Though her shallow breathing is mostly steady, there’s still the matter of the blood still rolling up her throat in sporadic intervals.

“Feels like I’ve known you forever and not at all. But I really wish I got to.”

The tone she uses is almost chillingly calm, like she’s already dead and all that’s left is to lower herself into the ground. Crane doesn’t know what to do with a woman dictating her eulogy to him.

“Either way I don’t think I’m getting out of here, fake Jonny. Don’t think I can walk or run away even if I wanted to.” Cold skin, delirium, that unfocused look in her eyes, Angel’s still fading, and fast. Whatever they did to her is keeping her body from healing like it should.

[doctor-jonathan-crane]

Sick. 

He was sick with it. The feeling that moved through him—a parasite burrowing through sinew, lugging itself wetly around the chambers of his heart—squeezed, hungering to feel the muscle strain against it before splitting it open. His pulse battered against the constriction in frantic blows. From those tears in the organ, bursting open from poorly stitched scars on the tissue layers, surged a sputtering invasion that forced his body to try to cauterise itself from the inside out. It scorched beneath his skin until perspiration slicked across him.  

It was unbearable. Worse still, it was alive. Every bated, rushed breath only seemed to fatten it more. 

“No. You are not dying.”  

With the force of a command, his reassurance came out more like he believed refusal alone could strong-arm her body back into obedience. Denial, wielded as authority, wasn’t the intended comfort that he was more or less incapable of providing. His hand moved instinctively to the back of her head, obligating her to remain above the grave she was halfway under. 

It was a horrific thing, feeling this much. 

Like swallowing something diseased and allowing it to nest alive inside your ribcage instead of carving it out while you still could. It scraped against his inner walls every time his heart beat, leaving everything tender and flayed raw in its wake. It spread through him feverishly until even the act of breathing was contaminated by it. 

He kept her head firmly in his hand to track the lag of her pupils beneath half-lowered lids, and the blanched colour of her skin. Every observation wanted to press fingers against a fraying wire, waiting to see whether there was still current running through it. Begging, in the only language he knew, for proof that she had not yet slipped beyond retrieval. 

“You’re delirious,” he said sharply. “And if you cannot walk, then I will drag you myself. I’m hardly above it.”  

He was not a good man. 

Not the sort capable of offering hopeful speeches about survival and brighter futures. He did not know how to speak gently around pain. He did not know how to tell someone they were loved without it sounding like a threat, an obligation, or a confession extracted under duress. 

He barely understood it himself. 

The terrible, unfamiliar realisation that he did not want to be alone anymore. That her presence had gouged into him somewhere along the way. That safety, in another person’s company, was perhaps the most frightening thing he had ever encountered. 

“You’ve survived this long already, Angel. I will not have you surrender now simply because your body has decided to fail you. And if you die, then I will be forced to find some miserable method of dragging you back again, and I assure you that experience would be considerably more unpleasant than surviving this one.” 

The words came rougher now, pieced together too quickly. Normally, this would have been easy. He was a psychiatrist. He knew how to manipulate, persuade, dismantle, reassure. He could construct the exact sentence required to provoke nearly any response he wanted. But his thoughts were clumsy. 

“So, listen to me carefully,” he said, leaning closer. “Stay awake. However you must. Hate me if necessary. Argue with me. Insult me. I truly do not care.” 

His grip tightened slightly where he held her steady. 

“But you will stay here.” 

The parasite returned, gnawing through nerves and marrow in ravenous mouthfuls. Heat pressed against the inside of his skin until it felt suffocating, while something glacial punctured it, leaving him caught between fever and tremor. There was no sedation for this. No intellectualisation. No neat psychological framework capable of reducing it into something manageable. It simply lived inside him now, lodged deep beneath the sternum like shrapnel, twisting every time his gaze found her and lingered long enough to imagine a world in which she was no longer there. Jonathan Crane had spent years studying fear. Longer still enduring it. 

He knew its dialects intimately: the sharp electric snap of terror, the languid poison of dread, the cold vigilance of paranoia, and the exquisite helplessness of phobia. He had devoted his life to dissecting them, naming them, reducing them to mechanisms and chemical reactions. 

But this one had been absent for a very long time. 

Driven out. Starved. Buried beneath layers of control so dense he had almost forgotten its classification. 

Until now. 

Panic. 

“...won’t you?”  

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

Something warm blooms in her chest, curling itself around her stuttering heart and settling deep. The delirium holding her together was slipping now. Pain twists her face into an ugly grimace as she tries to sit up, willing her body to gather itself and bring her to standing.

It doesn’t.

“I’m staining your coat” She sputters, coughing up more of that foul black tar that had made a home in her lungs and in her guts. “You like this coat.”

Guilt. Even in the most life threatening situations she can’t escape it. It chokes her voice and brings new tears to her eyes. Guilt for getting him into this situation. Guilt for ruining his coat. Guilt for not being strong enough to escape by herself.

Guilt for simply being at all.

It was a monster that had been stalking her since birth, waiting in the dark and licking its chops at the prospect of finally proving to everyone that she was a monster. Now it seemed the beast was finally getting its chance to snap its jaws around her neck and bring the chase to its inevitable end.

Her limbs feel numb. Save for the faint buzzing of static at the tips of her fingers and toes she can feel nothing but the pain compounding in her chest. She hardly registers the feeling of weightlessness that comes with her limbs losing feeling. Angel’s legs lie limp, head lolling to one side as her strength fails her.

It takes a massive effort, but she manages to curl her fingers tightly around part of Jonathan’s shirt, grounding herself and him by extension.

“I’m trying.” Is what she manages to mumble between labored, shallow breaths. “I promise I’m trying.”

God, she can’t think. Her mind feels scattered, like a sweater with a loose string someone had just kept pulling and pulling and pulling until all that was left was a pile of thread, unrecognizable as what it once was. She can recall another time like this, after a surgery when she was young. Coming out of anesthesia had been an ordeal, she’d cried and cried while nurses tried to comfort her. Angel wonders if she’s crying now. Maybe Jonathan will be able to tell her later.

Would there be a later? Did she want there to be?

She did, if for no other reason than she couldn’t let the frightened look on her beloved friend’s face be the last she saw of him. Dead or not she didn’t think she could bear it. To see someone lauded as fearless, proud, and brilliant beyond measure so utterly helpless peering down at her, and to think that she’d done that to him? No.

“Please don’t hate me.” She rasps against the fabric of his shirt, which is also accruing a dark stain by now. “Please, I need you.”

Her eyes feel heavier now, harder to keep open and impossible to focus. Anything of the world she can see is reduced to a blur of watercolor interspersed with the fireworks that appear when her eyes close again.

It’s cold.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

More Birdcage later I prommy but for now heres a shitty pen drawing of Angel post-arc to tide people over

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

so how’s it feel to yearn for the attention of someone who will always choose to chase after a shadow?

I-

I don’t- He doesn’t, he wouldn’t-

…

please excuse me.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

//everywhere I look things remind me of them…

[memeapple2]

Say on anon (or don't I ain't ur mom ) what your muse thinks of mine appearance-wise!

Does your muse think mine is pretty or ugly as shit, let my muse know! Does your muse have a favorite feature or a not favorite feature of my muse's, let them know that too! Also please keep in mind this is all in good fun, please no actual body shaming, hurtful or racist rhetoricect, ect.

[doctor-jonathan-crane]

Birdcage: The Winner Takes It All

PT.1 PT.2 PT.3 PT.4 PT.5 PT.6 PT.7 PT.8 PT.9

Crane stalked into the corridor, one arm drawn tight across his ribs. His limbs trembled like bare twigs rattling in a winter wind. The hallway bore the aftermath of Batman’s passage. Guards lie crumpled near the threshold, with their visors fractured and wrists bound together. They would wake eventually, assuming the Dark Knight granted them the charity of avoiding lingering head trauma. Another man sprawled further down the corridor, baton resting across the floor like a toy kicked aside by a bored child. Efficient, clean incapacitations, as always. Even impaired, the Bat had cleared the path. Crane stepped over them without breaking stride. His admiration was overruled by his desperation to locate Angel.

He followed the breadcrumbs of violence. Each mark traced the shape of Batman’s movement through the building, and Crane read it the way a naturalist might read bent grass and broken branches in a forest. 

Arkham was as cunning as he was. They were both clever creatures well acquainted with the habits of other hunters. Something precious would never be left out in the open unless it was a trap. It would be placed somewhere insulated, yet close enough to observe. But a truly clever predator knew something else. Opportunity presented itself best when another rival had already done the bloody work of clearing the ground.

The trail led him down a flight of steel stairs that groaned underfoot, then past a reinforced door somehow half-wrenched from its hinges. The metal hung crooked in the frame like a broken jaw.

As he descended deeper, the air cooled. It crept along his ankles in thin currents, like the chill wing that followed the ferries to the underworld. At the end of a narrow passage was a phosphorescent light that spilled onto the floor.

The sealed door had already been electronically unbolted, standing slightly ajar. A courtesy of the Batman, he was sure. Crane paused there, one eyebrow lifting behind his wry glasses. A gift of access offered, and almost intimate in its attentiveness. How could he refuse such a gesture? Especially considering Crane possessed neither the patience nor the technical aptitude to coax open an electronic lock. 

He stepped across the threshold on mortal feet and was drawn inside.

The room was drowned in a dim, sorrowful blue radiance at its centre. The bioluminescent glow washed the walls in submerged light, turning the bland concrete into mournful cathedral refractions. Electrical veins tangled in clumps, feeding into the artery of an apparatus that rose from the floor like a perverted reliquary. The tubes threaded in and out of it invasively, pumping viscous fluid, suspending her body in a dreamlike drift. The vertical medical containment unit framed and encased the body. 

Angel. 

The harsher manifestations of her transformation had receded, dwindled and sedated. What remained was an unbearably incomplete reversion back to human appearance: her wings wings diminished, shrunken from their former apex, her bare shoulders visible beneath the fluid’s shimmer, collarbone pale like fragile china, and hair fanned in weightless strands around her face.

God’s discarded beauty, repurposed by vivisecting hands. The enclosure caught the blue light and bent it across her features, scattering trembling halos across her preservation. She lied as still as a pinned bird, delicately mounted on display within a grim, glass birdcage. 

Crane approached slowly. Up close, he noted the biometric monitors embedded in the frame; intravenous lines; neural dampeners affixed at the base of her skull; a circulation system maintaining the density and temperature of the suspension medium. Fail-safes. Redundancies. An automated purge protocol would be used if tampering were detected. Lady Arkham had not been careless. Crane circled the contraption once, searching for manual overrides. Direct force would trigger a purge. Cutting power would destabilise the fluid matrix and risk organ shock. 

Fortunately—or perhaps as deliberate as the hacked door—the Bat had seemed to drop an offering from his claws before flying to his rescue. A device perched there, interface already primed and hooked up to the apparatus, with a pre-programmed, careful sequence designed to override the containment system without triggering its defensive purge. It seems the Bat had more than brute force in his belt. 

Crane crouched beside the control interface, retrieving the device tentatively. He held it just above the console. For a moment, he didn’t activate it. Suspicion’s hand settled over him at the back of his neck, fingers curling just enough to remind him it was there. The Bat was many things. Calculating among them. Crane’s eyes lingered on the device in his hand. What if this promise of cooperation was a misdirection? Not that Batman’s morality would ever permit Angel to be harmed. But that didn’t mean there weren’t other contingencies burrowed beneath the surface, willing themselves to become malignant the moment Crane was due to fulfill his end of the bargain. A neat little mechanism to ensure the good doctor kept his promise to surrender. 

Upon a sharp ache along the hinge of his jaw, he forced it loose with a slow breath. Speculation was a luxury for men who had time. Crane tensely sighed and initiated the program. The device’s commands flowed through the console and into the machinery, lines of code disseminating their parasitic override of the chamber’s architecture, entering its stream and spreading through the apparatus until the entire structure was fully infected by it. The neural dampeners eased back in measured increments to prevent cortical shock when consciousness returned. The readings adjusted slowly, the machine reluctantly releasing its grip. Then the suspension chamber responded. The drainage cycle began at a steady pace. Too fast, and she would aspirate the fluid flooding her lungs. Too slow, and their odds of getting out unscathed dwindled before she even took a breath. An alert pulsed once across the console, seizing his gaze for a moment. But the device intercepted the signal and buried it before it could reach the primary system, and the chamber obeyed. 

His gaze returned to the tank, where his reflection hovered like a ghost caught in a snapshot. The grim blue glow swallowed the colour of his eyes until they seemed to dissolve into it—two cold fragments of the same luminescence staring back from the surface. 

His glasses seemed to dissolve from his face in the curved reflection, their familiar frame no longer interrupting the illusions he had spent years constructing around himself. Doctor Crane—the controlled cadence of a clinician—vanished somewhere behind the glass. Packed away like a coat folding into the back of a wardrobe. Usually, when that mask slipped, it was replaced by something else entirely. The Scarecrow. A depraved creature who revelled in trembling nerves and unravelling minds. But the eyes staring back at him now were not wild with that kind of hunger. They belonged to someone else. Someone older than both the doctor and the monster.

It was difficult to say when that man had first disappeared. Perhaps when Crane began his experiments, when curiosity became obsession, and the science that defined his life began to eclipse everything else. Perhaps earlier still, in the moment his professor’s breath left his body, and something irreversible took root in its place. Or perhaps the man had never truly existed. Perhaps there had only ever been a boy. A frightened child buried beneath the floorboards of every room he’d ever inhabited, suffocating slowly under the weight of the life built above him.

Yet the eyes in the glass looked…awake. Comatose things sometimes stirred. Sometimes a body clung stubbornly to one fragile thread of purpose, to one final opportunity to prove that someone, somewhere, had wanted it to survive. 

The chamber beside him chimed. A green light blinked in the corner of his vision. Process complete. Jonathan inhaled sharply and pushed himself upright, the movement determined despite how unsteady it was. His fingers found the chamber’s locking mechanism, fumbling briefly before gaining purchase on the heavy latch embedded in the glass. The seal released with a wet, mechanical sigh.

The door opened. Angel’s body sagged forward the moment the fluid’s support vanished, limp and unresisting as gravity reclaimed her. Crane caught her.

They collapsed together in a graceless descent, his knees striking the floor. His arms closed around her instinctively, gathering her against him before she could strike the ground. Cold fluid soaked through his coat sleeves. 

Crane remained there for a moment on the floor, breathing unevenly, clutching her close while the chamber hummed in the quiet aftermath of release.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

//uhhhh cw for vomit and stuff

A corpse-still figure lies disturbingly light and utterly limp within Jonathan’s arms, barely even constituting a shadow of the woman it had been a mere month or so prior. Previously pale but warm skin was now sallow and cold, full cheeks sunken and deep, bruise-colored circles adorned both of her closed eyes.  How a seemingly healthy young woman becomes borderline emaciated in such a short amount of time he doesn’t want to consider.

There’s nothing for a long moment, long enough for whatever passes for a heart within him to stumble over its rhythm. It’s only when Angel’s chest gives a meager raise that Crane shudders out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Her eyes snap open a moment later, wide and frantic like a child who just had a nightmare. Any relative peace is quickly made impossible as her body lurches with a deceptive amount of force, curling in on itself and letting out a violent retch.

Blood and tar splatters across the floor next to him, forming a thick, viscous puddle. Angel needs to be held up to keep her from falling face first into it. Every minute movement she makes is disoriented, like a marionette cut from its strings. She coughs, the noise escaping closer to a desperate sob, her fingers curling weakly into his clothing.

She feels humiliated, and cold, and used, but beyond anything else she just feels vulnerable. So exposed it makes her want to vomit a second time.

Such exposure never ended well, and even if she hadn’t been deprived of even her own dignity it was dangerous to be so dependent on somebody else for survival. He could easily leave her here now, to wither into nothingness in the dark and the cold. Angel clings to him as tightly as her protesting joints will allow, folding in on herself to nearly half her size. Her wings, dark and still soaked with whatever she had been suspended in cover her shaking form completely, plastering against her nearly translucent skin in a startling contrast. Breathing is a struggle, and through a drug-addled mind she thinks maybe now dying wouldn’t be so bad.

At least she wasn’t alone.

[doctor-jonathan-crane]

Jonathan’s hold tightened the moment life surged back through her. 

It moved through her body first in violent, desperate spasms of life—and then, somehow, it seemed to jump the distance between them. Like an electric current arcing from one body to another, the shock of her being alive shot through his arms and sparked somewhere deep in his chest. His heart, a machine restarting after years of disuse, stuttered into a faster, erratic rhythm. There were very few things left in the world capable of producing that response in him.

He had tried to manufacture it, of course. Tried through chemicals, through fear, through doses of his own inventions. Methods of self-experimentation and self-desecration had a way of sanding down old reflexes until very little remained. Just a hollow frame posted in a dead field, waiting for lightning or fire or catastrophe to justify its continued existence. Waiting for something strong enough to burn it down completely, just to feel one final surge of heat before collapsing to dust.

But this feeling placed his heart like a barbed-wire kiss, tender and cruel, scraping raw flesh just enough to prove it was real. It pierced him lovingly, and something inside him answered the wound without retreat; instead, with warmth, as if the blood it drew was devotional.

It kindled in the hollow spaces of his chest, heat spreading through corridors long abandoned, thawing structures that had been lifelessly cold for years. The sensation pressed against his lungs, weighing them down to make each breath feel harder to maintain.

It confused him. 

It felt good.

Worst of all, it felt kind.

Relief was unfamiliar territory. Pain, and fear, and cruelty, had rules he understood intimately. But this soft, persistent ache perched in his chest and refused to leave, far beyond what he believed his capacity for such a thing had ever been. He tightened his hold on her slightly, almost unconsciously, as if the feeling itself might slip away if he loosened his grip.

As her body convulsed, Crane reacted instinctively, one hand sliding to hold her upright while the dark, foul, viscous mess splattered across the floor beside them. His expression tightened almost imperceptibly behind the thin glare of his lenses. The startling force of her trembling was a motion completely at odds with how little of her seemed to be now, rattling inside a body that had its vigour gouged out. 

And as her fingers twisted weakly into his shirt, Crane’s eyes flicked downward with an apprehensive confusion crossing his face. He had never tolerated touch well. Touch implied obligation, vulnerability, unpredictability. But he found, to his surprise, that he did not immediately want to pull away.

His gaze shifted then, tracing the strange, sick iridescent sheen left on her skin from the tank fluid, and only then did he fully register her nudity. He removed his coat without a word.

The movement was clumsy, pain flashing through his ribs as he shrugged it off, but he managed it and draped the heavy fabric around her shoulders, pulling it closed across her chest. Her wings made the task difficult—slick, dark things that clung to her back, interrupting the neat coverage he intended. He adjusted the coat anyway, carefully, methodically, tucking it around her like a blanket against the cold laboratory air.

“There,” Jonathan said quietly. The word came out slightly uncertain, as if his voice didn’t quite know how to perform this particular function. Comfort was not a language he spoke often, and when he had in the past, it had always been imitation rather than sincerity. His hand raised to her neck, steadying her while the coughing began to subside. 

“You’re experiencing some form of post-suspension shock,” he said after a moment, his voice settling back into its clinical cadence. It made this moment manageable if he could rationalise the emotional. “Your lungs need to reacclimate to air. Your nervous system has been…rather unkindly tampered with.”

He watched her with suffocating attentiveness, eyes fixed on every small movement: each breath, each tremor, each attempt her body made to remember how to exist outside the glass coffin.

“In short, the next few minutes will be extremely unpleasant.”

And after a pause, he compelled himself to quietly add one more thing.

“But you are alive,” he said. “Try…to remain so.”

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

Her vision comes into focus incredibly slowly, with black splotches drifting in her blurry sight before she makes out his face. She tries to sit up, but her head is thick, and her limbs feel leadened, too heavy to lift or even move.

“You’re…” Angel’s voice comes out hardly audible “mmmno you’re not real, she said you left…” She’s about to say something else, but another round of harsh coughing puts a screeching stop to that. “I’m dying I think. You make an awfully comforting illusion, y’know.” 

Her head thumps rather limply against his chest, and her wet hair falls over her face in tacky clumps. Though her shallow breathing is mostly steady, there’s still the matter of the blood still rolling up her throat in sporadic intervals.

“Feels like I’ve known you forever and not at all. But I really wish I got to.”

The tone she uses is almost chillingly calm, like she’s already dead and all that’s left is to lower herself into the ground. Crane doesn’t know what to do with a woman dictating her eulogy to him.

“Either way I don’t think I’m getting out of here, fake Jonny. Don’t think I can walk or run away even if I wanted to.” Cold skin, delirium, that unfocused look in her eyes, Angel’s still fading, and fast. Whatever they did to her is keeping her body from healing like it should.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

💞 + what in the wacky whimsical world of “so what are you two” is your relationship with Jonathan Crane??

-Chase (Mun of @doctor-jonathan-crane)

Well at the risk of being cliché, I would say it’s, um… complicated.

I’ve never been in any type of relationship really, hell I don’t even really have acquaintances. I think you’d call us friends? I mean he has some… conflicting feelings towards a certain flying rat bastard, and it’s caused some problems between us I don’t know how to fix.

I’m not stupid either, I know normal friends aren’t so… attached at the hip, I guess? Not at our ages at least. When have either of us ever really been normal though?

Anyway. I can’t speak for him, but I think he cares about me in his own roundabout way. Maybe not… but that’s ok too. I just- I know I love him, whatever that might mean. I’m not super sure myself

God please don’t show him this.

[uniiicornsources-old]

send 💞 + a question about my muse's relationships for my muse to answer

this could be about relationships in general (romantic, platonic, familial) or about a specific relationship in particular.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

carpals

//ooooo habits huh? On the bad side of things the mid level stuff, skin picking, scratching to the point of making herself bleed, forgetting to feed herself most of the time.

Little mundane habits? She likes to click sensory things, or collect little objects fucking bird lady she has a habit of double checking everything, favors, validation, etc. most common phrase is basically “are you sure?” at this point. Makes herself something sweet every Friday morning, it’s an old habit from the orphanage she grew up in where they got sweet breakfast foods on Fridays.

well, the other kids did.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

Metatarsals was for the ask game

//Mun is a fucking idiot, ignore me 😭

BUT to answer your question, Angel would probably visit the mountains. Being in nature is the only type of loneliness she appreciates, because for better or worse you’re never really alone in the great outdoors, are you?

And god does she ever wanna run away. If she could she’d probably just spend the rest of her life in a little cabin in the mountains. Maybe raise a few animals.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

metatarsals

No I’m not showing you my feet.

[morally-ambiguous-bird]

In the spirit of fear… #26. Tell me what you’re more afraid of losing than you are afraid of losing your own life. -Chase (Mun of @doctor-jonathan-crane)

//is it too corny if I say Jon? Probably, but in seriousness I’d say Angel is terrified of being completely alone again. It’s the biggest reason she was so freaked the fuck out during her cute little captive era, because she was completely isolated for weeks on end. It’s not him specifically, she’d probably react similarly to anyone.

She found someone who she thinks cares about her, and she’d rather die than lose that.

[felimemesandthings-deactivated2]

Reblog if your muse has ever kept it together in public and fallen apart alone.

[jamsmemes]

(     *     BARE BONES.

a selection of headcanon questions inspired by key bones in the human body.

skull.   what memories/thoughts do they guard the most from others ?

cheekbone. what makes them smile ?

mandible / jawbone. what are they incapable of saying out loud ?

teeth. what lasting mark do they leave on others ?

hyoid / neck. who taught them to speak up, or stay silent ?

clavicle / collarbone. who/what do they lean on when they're vulnerable ?

scapula / shoulderblade. what burden do they carry on their back ?

sternum. what makes their heart pound hardest ?

ribcage. who/what are they trying to protect ?

humerus. do they use humour as a shield or a weapon ? what from/to ?

radius. who/what do they reach for first in a crisis ?

ulna. who stands by them no matter what ?

carpals. what small habits do they have ?

metacarpals. do they ask for help or clench their fists and bear it ?

phalanges. what is their relationship with touch ?

spine. when do they lose their backbone, what scares them ?

pelvis. what future or legacy are they afraid/excited to be responsible for ?

sacrum. what sacrifices have they made ?

coccyx / tailbone. what outdated beliefs do they still carry, if any ?

femur. what drives them forward ?

patella / kneecap. how compliant/obedient are they, who will they kneel for ?

tibia. who/what keeps them moving forward ?

fibula. do they ever feel overlooked ?

tarsals. what past mistakes stick with them with every step they take ?

metatarsals. if they could disappear for a day, where would they run ?