Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to any aspect of the Batman universe. I own nothing save for any original characters that I have created.
A/N: We don't know much about Crane's activities between the events of Arkham Asylum and Arkham Knight, and so I thought it would be fun to write my own ideas of what he was up to. Each chapter will cover its titled game. The story title is a play on the song All of No Man's Land is Ours, recently covered by one of my favorite bands Einstürzende Neubauten.
All of No Man's Land is Mine
ASYLUM
Jonathan Crane's memories of his last night in Arkham Asylum were unforgivably cruel in their vividity, forever burned into his psyche like a hidden scar of shame and defeat. He remembered how incredible, how amusingly light a city's worth of fears felt in his needled hands, and the immense satisfaction of knowing that even as the Bat approached him in the darkness of the sewers, his every step a growing threat, both men were fully aware that he would not reach Crane in time to prevent the precarious inevitable. He remembered how for that one fleeting moment he was truly victorious, and as his bandaged fingers relaxed their grip on the toxin-filled pouch Crane could already hear Gotham begin to scream.
He remembered how his brain had barely registered the sound of splashing water before a sudden mass of muscles and scales and teeth erupted from the filth to sink its claws into Crane's flesh and fling him through the air; he remembered the creature's roar echoing throughout the stone walls followed by a blurred glance of an electric blue spark, and Crane's final thought before he was dragged beneath the surface and his greatest enemy's image quickly faded into a watery mirage was one of bitter irony: after years of having his carefully-orchestrated plans foiled by Batman's constant interference, the one time Crane actually needed Gotham's finest hero the Bat had failed to swoop in and save the day.
The observation felt like the punchline of an absurd cosmic joke, as humorless as it was humiliating.
But what Crane remembered most vividly of all was the pain—indescribable, dehumanizing agony that he had never before known even in the depths of his most depraved chemical nightmares.
A lifetime spent dedicated to fear had dulled Crane's sense of horror, and his initial reaction to the sudden attack had not been terror but amazement at both its bizarre randomosity and the plague of his poor luck. But the temporary blessing of numbness gave way to raw panic when Killer Croc sank his teeth into Crane's shoulder and bone and sinew were crushed beneath the force of the monster's jaws; red clouds of blood flowed from his thrashing body to dance through the polluted water, and when Crane opened his mouth to scream it flooded his throat and lungs. Croc continued to bite and tear at his flesh, stripping the Scarecrow of his dignity and his skin with each primal swipe of a claw or gnash of a tooth, and within the span of a few violent seconds everything that Jonathan Crane was comprised of—the first helpless cry on the day of his unwanted birth, childhood nosebleeds blossoming from beneath the fists of schoolyard bullies, endless pages turned in endless books, decades worth of knowledge, stitched burlap pulled over his face for the first time, the look of toxin-induced fright in a victim's eyes, every private moment of sadness and loneliness and doubt and fear, it was always fear—was at once reduced to a single body of wounded, gnawed failure. Only then did the monster abandon him to chase a more prized trophy, and Crane was left to float worthless in a sewer among rats and waste, waiting for a death that was sure to arrive swiftly.
But Crane did not die.
He survived, and would later wonder if perhaps that was a mistake.