Text Overflow: Scarecrow - The screams you're hearin are the wrong kind

[tinstar]

[Continued from here]

They'd set a 10 AM meeting time and while this wasn't Raylan's office, being in New York for reasons he wouldn't tell anyone, he'd managed to talk the local Chief into letting him borrow a conference room with a promise that Art Muller would buy him a high shelf drink next time he was in town. He was sure Art would be fine with it.. After a little cussing and swearing at him. The case he had actually been on was still active, but Raylan was waiting for someone to come in from overseas in a few days.

Set with a couple cups of coffee, Raylan (and his hat) looked over Crane's file as he waited for the man to arrive and be shown up. Crane hadn't been lying about his record; a point in the man's favor, but Raylan wasn't sure about him yet. The morning was going to prove to be interesting, if nothing else.

Comments

[tinstar]

Raylan glanced at the book between the road and Crane himself. "Left for the Marshal's service when I was 19. Didn't have any plans dying in any mines or ruining my lungs." He gave Helen no end of shit for her smoking - the only bad habit he indulged in was drinking. For the most part.

"That doesn't make you car sick? Reading on the road? What did you teach again? Psychology?" What made you want to be a shrink?"

[hosannas_of_anguish]

The good doctor beside him smokes, but he tends to save it for when he's stressed or lacking inspiration... or after really good food. "Sounds like you were smarter than those we are after today." He spoke, with his eyes on the pages instead of the road.

"Not really, and any usable minute is time to read and learn more." He explained, before looking up again, for a moment. "Yes, psychology. I choose it trying to understand human nature. At first to understand how people could treat one another as they do. Then I learned how truly amazing it is. Had I had the money I would have remained in academia, but as I was offered a position to teach I took it instead." He explained as he looked at Raylan, and closed his book again, sitting it on the Dash as he looked at the other, silently sizing him up again.

"You don't trust Psychiatrists, do you? Even ones who have had their licences revoked?"

[tinstar]

"Wouldn't make much of a Marshal if I wasn't." It helped that a lot of people were just plain dumb. Stupid was its own blessing, for sure.

"We aren't that hard to understand are we? Creatures of pride and selfish desires, just waiting for an opportunity to get whats ours or prove our point...." Raylan glanced between Crane and the road with the question.

"I just don't get it, is all. What your whole academic point is. You torture a guy and say it's helpin' him to 'face his fears'.. how's forcing a man into a panic bad enough to almost give him a heart attack any part of 'do no harm'?"

[hosannas_of_anguish]

"No, I suppose you wouldn't." He replied simply. Stupid was always a blessing that's how Jonny got half his goons, stupid was its own brand of dependable.

He shrugged his shoulders some as he measured Raylan up and down. "Maybe, maybe not. I was rather isolated in my youth, so I didn't really have a wide grasp on the human psyche. The bastard of a old gentry family in a small town. I'm sure you gather what I mean." Church had to of been hell. And it was.

"Yes, yes, we all know the Hippocratic oath, and yes I did have to recite it as well. However, my branch of medicine does not actually have legal issues with it. Though I am legally bound to never share what my patients have spoken to me about, I can harm them if I choose. I am a textbook sadist, U.S Marshall Givens. I enjoy harming people, but, I am also a scientist, a jack of all trades, if you would. And, I myself, no longer feel fear. I used those same drugs on myself until I no longer feel the emotion. The men you shot, they were my assistants when I did this. They ran their mouths, and their friends wanted to be fearless as well. Thus, how I came into the business of scaring men half to death. Both for the money and my own twisted satisfaction. Every one of them was willing. That is why they couldn't keep me on anything besides drug manufacturing and illicit experiments. Which my lawyer is working on. Isn't consent a lovely thing?"

[tinstar]

Raylan looked over smoothly, head lowering and rising in a bare fraction of a nod. Yeah, he could gather that wool - small towns were unforgiving enough. Any oddities or perceived 'strangeness' would always make it worse. Bastardism made it worse.

But whatever sympathy the telling might have garnered evaporated as Crane continued and his jaw set, expression settling into one of stoney calm.

"No fear huh? Jack of all trades, master of none." To finish that saying. "That mean you work on odds? Statistics of probability or somethin' like that?"

[hosannas_of_anguish]

That small town, that cycle of violence continued through Jonathan. Generations of Keeny's, pretending to be perfect, pretending to be fine and taking out what the generation before had done to them. Though he was never allowed to carry the Keeny name, because he was a literal bastard, he was more Keeny than Crane. Though his parents still messed around to this day. despite both being married to others, Gerald had never met the boy. There was next to nothing of Gerald Crane in his son.

"A side effect of my work." He added with a wave of his hand, as he kept those cold hazel eyes on Raylan. "Yes, you could say that. Why do you ask?"

[tinstar]

"Doesn't seem much else that you could run on," he explained casually with the same easy affability he kept in the office. Like they were talking about nothing but the weather and hey, hows your mama.

"Though seems to me that it might be to your disadvantage. You know, they say fear is a product of our evolution?" His free hand gestured as he spoke, that one long index finger pointing at nothing in particular as he continued. "Let's us know when somethings wrong, the hairs on the back of your neck standin' up, that stone you get in your gut when you look in a dark room..

Funny that you'd give up survival instinct with such ...ease."

[hosannas_of_anguish]

He chuckled at that, maybe not the best response and yet, he did. "You seem to understand my predicament more than I do. Yes, I have to actively keep myself out of danger. I have to remind myself that I should feel the emotion, but while making my formula, i broke a few beakers along the way. I know exactly what my formula does, and after the third time, it no longer bothered me. It was not on purpose. I miss having that instinct. It is my lifes work, and it deprived me of the emotion I knew best. However, what is done is done. I cant erase that."

[tinstar]

Raylan bobbed his head back and forth. "I pay attention, now and then. Makes you an unreliable source though, for danger assessment. Sure, you might have the facts of the matter, but that much calculation.. doesn't seem like it leaves a lotta room for the the weird ass shit the rest of us try to pull.." Himself included.

"Let me ask you somethin' - what started this whole.. formula thing? Why get rid of fear?"

[hosannas_of_anguish]

"It is expected, with your occupation and all." He admitted with a nod. "And yes, unfortunately you are correct, my response to normal stimuli is not what a normal mans would be anymore. I find it makes it easier for moments like these, to no longer care what happens to oneself." He added with a shrug, sitting back again after Raylan's question.

"I used to be afraid of everything, Marshal, but mostly, terrified of all the horrid things people said to me, about me, around me. All of it. The city was supposed to be different. A place where no one knew my name, but just a new class of bullies, none of my accomplishments mattered. A professor in a cheap ill-fitting suit? Please, even my colleagues would torment me day after day. I started down this path to cure my own fear, I went to far however, but I have helped others, no one will take as much of the formula as I have pumped into my own veins. I destroyed my fears, why not help others?"

[tinstar]

Always nice to hear someone agree with him, validate his gut, but Crane's position was a dangerous one. For both of them.

"Maybe that's what I don't understand - Your education should have provided you some tools, or at least an understandin' that some people will always have shit to say. People are assholes," Raylan said, face pinching in his confusion. "Always have been."

Do you know how much shit he got for the hat and cowboy boots?

"Normally out of their own issues. Got little to nothin' to do with you or how well your suits fit."