With the consent of my dear friend Vytina - the creator of Iris DeLaine, a love interest of our beloved Dr. Jonathan Crane, specifically his Animated Series incarnation - I bring "Shadows Nevermore", a Batman Begins/Dark Knight retelling of the story of Iris DeLaine and Jonathan Crane.

Iris DeLaine was Crane's student in psychology before he was fired, as told in Vytina's stories, because of their forbidden longing for each other and the complications surrounding them, but that doesn't part them. It seems like a fairytale, but it's much deeper than that. In "Shadows Nevermore", Iris becomes the youngest doctor in psychology and reunites with her former professor after he's released from his position, until the events of Begins when Jonathan loses everything and becomes a patient. Now Iris is the head of Arkham Asylum and the highlight of all the Rogues - among being Edward Nygma, Jonathan's best friend since college years. Other characters include Joan Leland (Nygma's doctor and high school love), Alice Pleasance (Iris' best friend and half-sister), Jervis Tetch (Alice's fiancée), and others including an original of my own making who becomes a major villain much later.

In terms of real actors and actresses for casting, alongside Cillian Murphy's alluring Dr. Crane is Alexandra Daddario (Percy Jackson, Texas Chainsaw 3D) as Iris, Amanda Seyfried as Alice, Cory Michael Smith (Gotham's Edward Nygma) as the Riddler himself, Kerry Washington (TV's Scandal) as Dr. Joan Leland, and unfortunately, I have no one as sweet Jervis. :( Nevertheless, these real people make the characters more believable.

Disclaimer: None of the characters belong to me, and the actors I picked to play them (with the exception of the wonderful Cillian Murphy) are their own people. And thanks to my friends Vytina, nicsnort, Irishchick1982, Windblazer Prime and sarah1228. :)

Prologue

Origins

Iris Mara DeLaine was born on the thirty-first of October in 1993 in Gotham City, New York. She was the only daughter of billionaire Marcus DeLaine and his wife, the world-famous model Maria Conveé who harbored a secret darker than you would ever imagine.

Marcus and Maria DeLaine were married in the summer of 1987 in a lavish Egyptian affair, attended by Marcus' Russian parents Andrey and Sylvia and a vast crowd of friends and colleagues, and some lucky fans of the model. The affair became the front page of the Gotham Times - but behind the closed doors of DeLaine Estate, the publicity did not match the union of the wealthy executive of DeLaine Towers and the model.

Maria DeLaine was diagnosed with a severe combination of bipolar disorders and narcissism, which her husband took note of not long after they were married; he tried to escape the marriage by meeting with a woman named Sophia Pleasance. A daughter was conceived, and the mother had tried to get Marcus DeLaine to acknowledge the child as the heir to the family company, but the child was not legitimate enough to inherit in the eyes of Maria DeLaine who soon discovered the affair and lashed out, striking the mother and trying to kill the child before being restrained by her husband. Once she was subdued, Maria schizophrenically slipped into seducing her husband back into bed, and a few years later, they had a daughter whom they named Iris and established her as legitimate and only heir - but the rumors of another daughter surrounded the family until Sophia Pleasance confirmed to the media for the whole city of Gotham to see.

The scandal did not damper Marcus DeLaine's reputation, however, nor did it affect Maria's and their daughter. What the public never uncovered was that Maria never intended to be a mother, choosing to never be around her own child and her husband escaping her hold once more - only after another series of affairs that didn't involve his former mistress Sophia, he passed away from HIV when Iris was only four years old, leaving her with her mother and grandmother, Marcus' mother Sylvia.

For sixteen years, there would be a cycle of abuse ranging from physical to emotional, overall psychological that became irreparable. Even her grandmother could not protect her at times no matter her tries.

When it became clear to her that the justice system would never accept her side and let her mother get away with her wrongdoings, Iris' rage and hatred for Maria and others around her as she progressed into a young woman festered and became who she was. One day she took her revenge against the one woman who destroyed her sanity, and she was free.

Iris' high level of intelligence guided her through Gotham State University at an outstanding pace. Graduating at the age of seventeen with a PhD in psychology - the youngest doctor in a lifetime - she moved on to care for the criminally insane at Arkham Asylum. She proved more exceptional than any other physician and therapist within the faded walls of the institution, the exception being her employer, partner, and former college professor Dr. Jonathan Crane, under whom she studied at the university before his disgrace for experimenting a hallucinogenic formula on a small group of his students who assaulted the girl when she was but fifteen years old.

Iris played a small role involved in her former teacher and mentor's further development of the fear toxin under the employment of the mysterious Ra's al Ghul, whom she encountered during her last months in college and trained under to defeat her opponents. With the help of the art of the ninja from the tutelage of Ra's al Ghul and Crane's teachings, Iris developed her own costumed identity that of her separate identity formed from her childhood trauma, the Empress.

Following her beloved mentor being incarcerated in his own asylum, the crown was passed on to Iris as its head doctor. She carried on his legacy as a "better successor than the madman" in the eyes of the hypocrites of society while maintaining her double life as the Empress. It was during this duration of time that the young woman realized her feelings for the man known as the notorious Master of Fear were no longer that of the schoolgirl she'd once been, and longed for more than companionship from Crane. Only to find that his "recovery" from the demons of his past no different than her own had to come first.

~o~

Born on November 22, 1983 in the rural countryside of Arlen, Georgia, Jonathan Thomas Crane was conceived out of wedlock.

When she was a young girl of seventeen years, Karen Crane fell in love with a man who only wanted sexual relations - and abandoned her upon learning she was pregnant. The young mother showed no love for her son even when she bore him, hence leaving him like her lover, his uncaring father, left them both before the child reached middle school years. This continued an equal decades-long span of abuse at the hands of his fanatically religious grandmother, who would often lock him in a dilapidated church of crows as "punishment" for his "sins".

The amount of cruelty and equal irreversible damage, too, went unchecked and fear-instilling with young Jonathan long before Iris DeLaine came into existence, and like his cherished student, Jonathan knew that he was meant to endure the pain on his own. He lived with the physical torture and verbal assault of his grandmother and classmates. Under the hard, stoic shell he displayed to the world, the pure loathing at his enemies grew stronger, and would later be used to exact revenge on his own.

Jonathan Crane was a young man when he finally killed his grandmother. Years of abuse had finally gotten to him, and so he did the one last resort before heading down the road to university. He killed her with what would later become his fear toxin, induced a heart attack and killed her in her own terror.

Similar abuse was at the hands of the other children at school, progressing into high school. Always called "scarecrow" for his appearance, Jonathan was tall and skinny, his clothing no better faring than his health. Even if anyone thought to help him, he never trusted anyone; he long ago abandoned accepting any help in the backwards town of Arlen. With no one as his one true friend, Jonathan Crane became a man and left the town of his painful past, harboring a dark secret filled with hatred and revenge...

Even as a man, he never achieved closure from murdering his abusive grandmother, never found the mother who abandoned him, never moved on from the torment of his classmates...as a young adult in university, he realized how alone he truly was, his cold shell melting as heat began to fester inside him. He had forgotten one thing a long time ago when he met his first real friend in college at Gotham State University.

He'd thought life at the university would grant him access to freedom to live on his own will, but as it exposed him more to the real world, he discovered that escape wouldn't be so easy. Of course, he met his first ever real friend at university, Edward Nygma - who would later become the puzzle-obsessed Riddler. When Jonathan started an uneasy friendship with the equally troubled Edward, the two young men shared their innermost darkest secrets and formed a bond unlike any other. But over the course of the four years of their unnatural bond, it was a battle of the two of them against their shared psychology professor who harbored an unhealthy obsession over Jonathan.

Jonathan finally received his PhD at the age of twenty-three years old, becoming the youngest professor of psychology at Gotham State University, and there he met Iris DeLaine, who was just thirteen years old and entering her first year of college. She enchanted him from the start even though she was a young teen and he a grown man of twenty-three, yet he feared a repeat of history like with his own beastly professor whom he had thought he could trust until that belief of helping him achieve his greatest desires was betrayed.

Young Iris was nothing like any of the other students he taught for the next two years. They shared more in common than he'd thought, much like he had with Edward, now coroner at the Gotham City Police Department. She confided in him with her great passion for knowledge and looked up to him as her mentor…and shared her dark past that was no different than his own. Soon, Crane came to the conclusion that the girl was special and deserved to achieve her goals. Safe to say that their relationship would in no way be that of his and his professor's.

Everything changed after Iris turned fifteen years old and was brutally assaulted by the jocks of the university…out in open public for all to see. No charges on the assailants were filed, much to the dismay, disgust, and enragement of Professor Crane. His star student was left in the dark once again, her pride and dignity stripped as his had been long ago, but Crane would not idly stand by and let the culprits get away with their crimes. Using the toxin he developed from childhood and continued on to the present, he extended Iris' knowledge of fear to help her, too, overcome her enemies as he had done so himself. Soon, Jonathan found himself feeling that she was destined for greatness.

Eventually, their activities were discovered when one of the alleged "victims" reported to the board, and Jonathan Crane was essentially fired from his position. Angered and embittered at the fact that there was no more justice in the world - not for him, not for Iris, not for anyone - he closed himself off from humanity for some time before he was discovered by Ra's al Ghul and arisen from the streets once more to the head of the Arkham Asylum. He was once more reunited with Iris, whom had grown into a beautiful, confident, assertive young woman with a PhD at seventeen - even better than he had ever done. It was then that Jonathan began to feel stronger feelings for her than he had before, and once again let her in on his schemes and activities as the Scarecrow and the Empress.

Jonathan refused to have his bright young colleague and former student be discovered as an accomplice in the Scarecrow's activities in the Ra's al Ghul incident in the Narrows, therefore taking the fall in it all. He was stripped of his title as doctor, his license revoked, and arrested by the Batman and the GCPD police and thrown into the wolves that were once his patients. His life resumed to be unbearable, as the patients he experimented on were hell-bent on taking their fun out on him for his experiments on them. But the targeting on him was prevented by the new director of the asylum, none other than Iris DeLaine.

Degraded to the level of the scum of the streets and again misunderstood by all of society - including the Batman - Jonathan was convinced he was never meant to be happy, looking back on growing up in Georgia, his hellish life under his former professor, his disgrace from GSU, and finally losing everything he dedicated his whole life to. But Iris DeLaine was his rock and his dark angel and heir to his unfinished work - if not the same as his own methods. She cared for him more than anyone else ever did, right next to Edward Nygma, who had been subsequently arrested by the Batman, too. Their friendship resumed within the asylum walls, and formed ties with Harley Quinn, the innocent, perky sidekick of the homicidal Joker, plant vixen Pamela Isley - otherwise known as Poison Ivy - and fellow physician Joan Leland, Nygma's high school sweetheart. The small group of the Rogues Gallery remained ever the closest of the villain alliances, and doctors Iris DeLaine and Joan Leland were ever their saviors and closest friends when no one else understood them.

Jonathan Crane lived in Arkham for two years, a prisoner in the one place that had been his kingdom. His misery intensified along with his insecurities and memories of the people that brought him to that place: His mother who couldn't keep her legs crossed, but then he wouldn't have been living and breathing. His grandmother, who encouraged his fascination and intrigue of fear by her own fanatical means. His classmates who scorned and ridiculed him. His college psych professor who used his desire to be great to his own advantage. Dr. Long and the board of directors at Gotham State, who took him away from young Iris. Ra's al Ghul, who tricked him into aiding him in destroying Gotham, something he never intended in the first place. The Batman, who took away his life from him.

Iris DeLaine was his salvation, his queen. Everything else in his life was all but a fading memory - she was all he had left. Jonathan Crane was not a man who lived with regret for what he'd ever done in his life - he was one who believed the ones who did him wrong were the ones who brought him to the padded walls he now resided in. And he knew it when no one else cared.

But now he longed to be free.

Both Iris' and Jonathan's profiles were inspired by Vytina's background on deviantart, "The Tale of the Empress" as well as her various fics which I love, and another in deviantart called "Little Boy Johnny" by Faceskinator, which tells of Jonathan's backstory. The tone is similar to Vytina's dark emotional version of this couple; I'm doing my best to stay true to that but otherwise giving something more erotic over the course, just as disturbing. I'll make sure no one forgets. ;) I've chosen to stay true, as well, to Jonathan's "Year One" origins which everyone still seems to love despite new incarnations, like the show Gotham, for instance.

Jonathan's birthday, with the exception of the year, is my father's birthday, so that's where it came from. :)