Disclaimer: Don't own Crane, or Arkham. And I never gave my character a name so I guess I can't claim to own her, either.

Authors Notes at the bottom, if anyone is interested...

Untouchable

The longing had become the worst thing. It was like shouting down a dark, empty hole and waiting for your voice to return to you, but it never would. It was like being stretched, inside, unbearably long and wide, twisted and turned and yet never finding the beginning or the end.

Every day, she watched. Quiet from her post, doing her job, unnoticed. There was nothing to notice about her. She was like anyone else. Maybe she had been blessed without a weight problem, unlike so many around her, but that didn't make her beautiful, or appealing. It just meant she didn't have trouble finding clothes. In her nurse's uniform, however, there was little room for fashion, so she blended into the wall, like everyone else. Faceless, sweeping in to do a job and pulling back out again.

Dr. Crane passed by occasionally. When he looked at her, he did not see her, only the function she was to perform. Sometimes she was glad he did not see her. There was something sharp about him, something menacing and intimidating. He never raised his voice, but somehow his low tones were more fearful, more effective than any loud cry.

No one had ever seen what she had seen. Sometimes, she wondered if she had imagined it.

There were some on the staff who seemed to be "closer" to him, or at least they thought. She knew for a fact that at least three security guards worked under his direct orders and did things that no one ever saw. She never spoke of this knowledge to anyone, not finding anyone to speak to. After all, Dr. Crane was head of the asylum. His word was law. And she had no urge to cause him trouble, even ineffectively.

There was a nurse, a hard woman that all the others sought to avoid, that had free leave to come and go in his office, but even she had boundaries. She lorded her position over the other members of staff, even though officially she had no authority over them.

It made her jealous, she admitted. It just added to the longing.

On her second day in the asylum, she had met Jonathan Crane. Or perhaps not met so much as encountered. There was a man, Robert Peddler, that had been brought in for observation, and it being her first week she had the low-rung job of taking food to the crazier inmates. There were security measures, but it was still not a pleasant experience.

Peddler had been having delusions that someone was trying to poison his food. She had been warned about his outbursts, but had still not expected him to throw the plate across his cell. Everything was made of unbreakable plastic, so she paid it no mind. She simply called a guard to come and assist in the clean up. Procedure was followed. Later it was discovered that the guard was just plain sloppy. Regardless, she found herself being held with something pressing against her throat, the sharpened edge of a spoon that sliced at her skin, and the guard on the floor, quite unconscious.

Dr. Crane had been summoned immediately. She did not remember what he said or how exactly she had been freed. She only remembered seeing him come around the corner, a dark figure in all the washed white, not very tall, slender-built, hair neatly combed and glasses perched over bright eyes like blue ice. What she noticed most clearly was his mouth, fuller than a normal man, pillowly lips that hardly moved as he talked. His voice was sinewy as his frame, and before she knew it she was on the floor, calmly breathing and pressed against a wall, out of the way as poor Peddler was mercilessly attacked and beaten to the floor.

Crane had come to her as the guards dragged Peddler away. He knelt down before her, his eyes flicking over her form, checking for damage. "Are you all right?" he asked plainly, one eyebrow arched.

He was beautiful. It was the only word. Features so delicate and soft, yet there was a gauntness in his cheeks and a coldness in his eyes that contradicted any gentleness. She made herself nod, and it was over. He was on his feet, and she had watched him walk away, his attention completely reverted to his unruly patient.

For some time she simply dismissed it as a schoolgirl crush. She was, after all, no one, and he was like the handsome prince in a fairy book story. She scorned herself for thinking this and dared not breathe a word to anyone for fear of being mocked. And it wasn't like she was the only woman to notice that Jonathan Crane was attractive. At times, she would overhear a few nurses whispering odd comments to each other that led her suspicions in that direction.

And yet, his hands, which she saw on the rare occasion she had to assist him, were clear. No wedding ring. She considered the possibility that he was simply a man who did not wear a ring in spite of a marriage, but there was no mention of a wife, and the offhand remarks she caught eventually strung together to form a story of the eternal, oblivious bachelor. Either he was not aware of his appeal, or he disregarded it.

The moment that she had realized that her simple admiration for his attractiveness had turned into something much more deep and painful had come not during one of their rare work encounters, but late during one night shift, when she had graciously agreed to take the shift so that another girl could attend a wedding the next day. She was walking the basement ward that night – there was little to do in the overnight shift outside of dealings with emergencies – with a tray full of various medications that had to be replaced in the downstairs supply cabinet.

The door to one of the private rooms opened, and Dr. Crane stumbled out. He moved normally enough at first, but then slumped against the wall, as if injured. She was just ready to set down her tray and approach him when he rolled against the wall and turned, his knees nearly giving out from under him.

It was then that she saw the look of euphoria upon his face. It was astounding, to see this normally composed man roll his head back as if in ecstasy. His body seemed to be jellified underneath the straight lines of his suit.

It seemed, to her mind, as if he'd just come from an extremely…satisfying encounter of the physical kind. But every part of him softened like this was a sight from which she couldn't look away. It was breathtaking. It gave her the terrible urge to cross the distance between them and wrap her arms around that quivering form to drink up whatever pleasure was left.

His head turned, and to her horror, he looked at her. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes were so brilliant they were nearly transparent, and his lips, those soft pillowly lips, twitched at her, as if in a bewitching smile.

The flame of her embarrassment was almost enough to make her melt into the floor. She temporarily lost the ability to breathe, and felt her subconscious will take hold of her feet to propel her from further humiliation. She turned a corner and kept walking until she could no longer drive her legs, which wasn't very far, and nearly collapsed against the wall in much the same fashion the doctor had.

Since that day, she stood back as he passed on the odd day she did encounter him, not looking when she thought there was the slightest possibility that he might glance at her. The chances of that happening, she knew, were even slimmer than the likelihood that she might see him. Yet every morning she awoke and went into her day hopeful that perhaps she might see him, get to gaze upon him and refresh the daydream in her mind with the sweetness of his appearance.

Yet she knew she would never again encounter that strange man she'd met in the hallway, the one who looked as if he were in the stages of afterglow. There was no trace of him in the Dr. Jonathan Crane who occasionally moved through the halls, hardly acknowledging anyone as he passed except the few privileged enough to work for him directly.

She was not one of them. Dr. Crane, she knew, would never look at her. She wondered if he would ever look at anyone. In fact, she seemed to understand something about him that no one did. There was only one passion for him in this world. His work. And while she said nothing, and continued about her job, suffering in silence, she knew that his work was not all that met the eye.

Yet it didn't matter. It wasn't her concern. It would never be. Such was the fate of one unrequited. Especially when the one longed for was quite untouchable. Not because she was beneath him – even though she knew she was -- but because there was simply no one that Dr. Crane noticed.

His heart was not there to notice.

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A/N: I usually don't write one-shots, but I was intrigued by the way Cillian Murphy played Crane. I just wasn't expecting him in the movie, you know? All these great actors and I'm like, "who the heck is this guy?" The lips and the eyes are just captivating in my opinion, and his whole acting job was amazing, really stood up to the other performances around him. And the movie was so amazing as it was...anyway, I saw the fic starting to build and had to throw my two-cents in. I've been trying to come up with a good idea for a longer fic for a while but everything feels too obvious and I still have to let it ride for a while longer. Crane is a very hard figure to pin down -- I don't want to do a romance story, but yet he's so pretty I just can't help myself, so I went with the old tried and true unrequited-love theme.This came to me late on a Saturday -- doesn't all fanfic? -- much like my first chapter from my first Collateral series, and I had to share. So if you liked it, drop me a line, and maybe someday I'll either write a real story for this section, or post another ficlet like this one. Thanks -- SJ