Everything's Eventual

Chance

*** 

Harvey Dent's struggle with Two-Face is coming to an end. 

*** 

12:05

The wind is strong. Bitter cold. It whips the branches against the window pane with a steady, almost rhythmic click, clack, clack that the old man can feel reverberating in his bones. A contrast to the insistent clatter at the window, a hanging pendulum clock tick-tock-tick-tocks its way towards the the first minute after midnight, February second.

The year doesn't matter, beyond the fact the number begins and ends with two.

But the time...oh, the time. How quickly the end draws near.

Harvey Dent is dying. Not the parasitic creature characterized by turns as brainless thug or criminal mastermind. Not Two-Face. Harvey Dent is dying. He who once wore the shining armor of a knight, whose fall made that of Icarus look graceful. More myth than man, more ideal than individual, it seems a cosmic joke that such a man can die...and yet, here we are.

The chest pains started an hour ago. Insistent, ignorable, but still unmistakable.

Time is running out.

He moves in the dark with slow, deliberate steps toward his goal. Thirty years have passed since the last time he moved with such purpose—thirty years since he left the dungeon of Arkham Asylum, a terribly poetic twenty-two since these same purposeful strides took him out of his last therapy session.

Harvey...

The voice is almost unfamiliar, it whispers so gently. A rumble that has been silent for two decades and is best left forgotten, it rasps in Harvey's ear, mumbling bitter nothings.

Like a tiger knowing the end is near, Two-Face rattles the bars of his cage, threatening to escape. He mutters in a voice just below the range of human hearing—a sound that is more felt than heard, resonating in places that no doctor can identify—and mumbles plans for his final encore.

The small cedar box sits atop the dresser that the nursing home provides him with, tied with a dusty black velvet ribbon. He can still feel the ghost of its texture as he tied it—sealing it the day he was released from Arkham. Symbolic of his independence, it was the only mourning he did when he finally put Two-Face to bed: simple, dignified, and a hell of a lot more than the bastard actually deserved.

It hasn't been disturbed since.

For the first time since moving into this room, he picks up the box and rolls it thoughtfully between his palms. The rough texture of the wood feels good against the papery thin skin of his hands. Real. Solid. It's a grounding sort of texture, binding him to the physical plane when his mind is in definite danger of floating away.

He has barely touched the box in decades, he muses, at most occasionally fingering the ribbon's edges for a moment or two. Holding it now, he remembers why. Being this close to the coin—having a tactile sensation to connect to all those vivid, vivid memories—awakens a part of him long dormant.

Open it.

Familiar as an old lover's caress, the voice grinds inside his head afresh, as though it has been there all the time. Perhaps it has. Perhaps Two-Face has just been buried under layers of sanity colored whitewash. Perhaps this isn't the reopening of old wounds, just the paint peeling at last. Harvey resists, at first—a token battle, more to assure himself that he tried to fight the inevitable than anything else. He licks his bottom lip, tongue snaking out over flesh that's scarred and puckered and flesh that's merely dry and old. He is all the more acutely aware of the contrast with this box in hand.