Disclaimer: The Scarecrow and all Gotham-related characters belong to DC Comics. A Christmas Carol belongs to Charles Dickens.
This is a CATfic (www. catverse. com) taking place on Christmas Eve, 2013 (Arc 4), roughly the same time as "Surprise!"
There will be two more chapters after this, or so I fervently hope. Tonight, I will be driving to the airport. On the interstate. By myself. Pray for me.
Seriously. I need the moral support. (I wouldn't be doing this if my Ops wasn't worth it!)
Noel
"Wake up!"
The shriek, accompanied by a hard slap across the face, brought Jonathan Crane out of a sound sleep as fast as anything ever had. He sat bolt upright in bed, gasping, arms crossed over his chest in a vain attempt to slow his racing heart. The last time someone had woken him up that way, it had been in Arkham, when the Joker had wanted an extra pair of hands to help make Joker Venom out of pilfered cleaning supplies. He should have known the clown was going to spritz him before the night was done. And, of course, no one in Arkham would willingly investigate hysterical laughter where none should be. He'd dragged himself up two flights of stairs before his oxygen-starved muscles gave out on him. Then he'd still had to wait nearly an hour before someone finally decided it was worth it to investigate the wheezy pleas for heh-heh-help.
His airway constricted just thinking about it. But that was not the Joker sitting at the foot of his bed.
It was a strange figure--like a child, but not a child. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible. The Joker had gone through a number of alterations in appearance over the years, but he'd never had a halo.
Then again, the woman leaning over him wasn't exactly angelic, even if she was dead.
"Captain?"
She wiggled her fingers at him.
"Hey, Squish. How's it going?"
"Why—"
"—am I here?" she finished for him. "To teach you a lesson, obviously. You need to learn the meaning of Christmas before it's too late. Now, come on. Whether I'm a ghost or an undigested potato, I totally overslept and we should have done this half an hour ago." She reached for his hand. He pulled back, frowning.
"Why did you hit me?"
"How should I know? It's your subconscious." She giggled. "But if you need to blame someone else, you can safely assume that it was done for Techie's amusement. I'm the wrong ghost for it, but Al wouldn't wear the dress."
"The dress," he repeated, wondering for a moment just what Al would have looked like, all gussied up. That was easier than wondering what it meant that he was still dreaming about THEM.
"Yeah," said the Captain. "It's all very technical. Just trust me." She wiggled her fingers at him again, trying to be spooky. "I'm the Ghost of Christmas Past!"
"I gathered," he snapped. "If we're going by that script, wasn't I supposed to get a warning before you pounced on me, oh gentle spirit?"
She ducked her head, trembling. Without thinking, he reached out to touch her, just a hand on the shoulder--and they were gone, standing on an open country road, with snow-dusted fields on either hand.
"No one cares about you," the Captain muttered. "Who besides the three of us would bother to help you? You've never had a real friend." She looked up at him with that old twinkle in her eye. "Or have you, hmm?" She took his hand and led him down the road without waiting for his answer, which would have been an emphatic no.
He wasn't very much surprised, when she dragged him into the schoolroom, to see a skinny little boy bent over a desk all by himself, painstakingly writing out a letter with frequent assistance from the dictionary standing open in front of him.
"Okay, that's me," said Jonathan. "Kindergarten. The last day of school before the Christmas break. I had just turned five. Do we really need to see this?"
An absolutely radiant smile spread across her face.
"You started school at four?"
"Granny didn't want me in the house." She was just a dream. What did it matter what he said to her?
Outside, someone screamed. Or laughed. In children, it could amount to the same thing.
He moved to the window. Down below was a group of boys beating the holy hell out of each other with flying chunks of snow, breathless with the joy of violent games.
He turned away from the sight, to find the younger Jonathan's eyes trained on him. There was something startling about that, enough to freeze him in place, meeting his own gaze across a gulf of more than three decades. Then the boy looked back down at his letter and sniffled wetly. Jonathan felt his nose crinkle in disgust. He remembered that sniffle. The nasty little head cold that just wouldn't die. The toilet paper he'd stuffed in his pockets because he couldn't get his hands on any tissues. His nose had been rubbed raw by the constant wiping, and he'd learned to suck down cough syrup without a peep of protest.
And was it just blocked sinuses that were making that little boy's eyes water?
"You were lonely," the ghost said, so very sadly, and wrapped her arms around his waist before he could pull away.
"Very astute," he grumbled. "Look at me. I was five. I didn't know what people were really like."
Outside, the other boys shrieked with laughter. Inside, the boy at the desk put his head down and wiped his sleeve across his eyes. The Captain looked up at Jonathan. Mournful. Depressingly so.
"Do you feel anything?" she asked.
"No."
"I don't think I can watch this, Squishy." She pressed her face into his chest, very solid for a ghost, and so cold he ached where she touched him. "Could you please pretend you're getting it so we can skip ahead?"
"Fine. I wish I had gone outside to play with the other brats. It would have been the best Christmas ever. Now can we do the part where I wake up and buy a turkey?"
She smiled and shook her head at him.
"Close your eyes." He did.
When he opened them again, they were standing outside in the half inch of snow that was as much as his hometown ever got. His younger self was making his way very carefully down the steps, unsteady in his too-big snow boots that he was supposed to grow into. And the other boys had broken off from their game to cluster around the unsuspecting child.
One of them—his name had been Peter—scooped up a chunk of snow and ice and packed it tight around a rock. Jonathan was surprised to feel her hand wrap around his and squeeze, biting cold but doubtless intended to be comforting.
"You should wear gloves," he said absently.
"With fingers? You know I can't find any that fit." It was true, she had the same kind of hands he did, with long, thin fingers—piano players' hands, he'd heard them called.
"So cut the fingers off. You had no problem doing that bef—" He broke off when she held up her free hand, and he realized that she was wearing fingerless gloves, the same ones she had worn in reality, with 'good' printed on the back of one hand, and 'evil' on the other. Impossible to tell by feel alone; his hand in hers was completely numb.
He did, barely, feel her grip tighten at the cry of alarm from the little boy as the hard-packed snowball smashed him in the face, exploding in a shower of icy shards. Too-small mittens lost purchase on the handrail; too-large boots skidded off the steps, and the boy found himself sitting on the ground, dazed, with blood gushing from his nose and melting snow seeping into his pants. He touched a hand to his nose, more surprised than anything else. Then the tears welled up in his eyes.
"Why—why did you do that?" he asked in something approaching a wail. The others crowded around him.
"Lookit the baby crying."
"We're just playing games, baby. Ain't you ever had a snowball fight before?"
Oddly enough, the only thing Jonathan felt, watching this again from the outside, was mild annoyance with their accents. His great-grandmother, the pretentious old woman, had drilled proper English into him from an early age; they may have been as poor as anyone he knew, but as long as her grandson didn't sound like an inbred hick, she could claim to be better than her neighbors. As a boy, he had been vaguely aware of the difference between his speech and that of those around him, but he hadn't really understood until college, where, for the first time in his life, he hadn't seemed so very out of place. No one in Gotham sounded like this. Even the girls, who all had southern accents to varying degrees, had sounded educated. (Well, only Al's accent had really been southern. Techie had only had a few traces mixed in with her much stronger Midwestern accent, and the Captain had almost always made a concerted effort to rid herself of the evidence of her heritage. Or maybe that was just the product of her city upbringing. It wasn't as if it really mattered anymore.)
"Woolgathering, Squishykins? This scene loses its potency if you're not paying attention."
He spared a glance for the child lying facedown in the snow, trying and failing to fend off hard-packed missiles, and shrugged indifferently.
"I've seen it."
"Okay, okay." Her free hand disappeared into her pocket, and the scene blurred and reformed into—his house. His decrepit old plantation manor, of dull red brick, in all its crumbling glory, a house so large and imposing, he had always felt lost inside, too small to matter in the slightest.
His younger self was trudging up the walk, past the rows of corn that shielded the house from prying eyes. He clutched his backpack to his chest, shiny plastic made to look like that first Green Lantern now torn in half, school papers hanging out every which way, a jumbled mess. One blood-soaked mitten was pressed over his mouth and nose, as much to stifle his hitching sobs as to try to stop the bleeding.
Jonathan shifted his weight uncomfortably. He didn't remember this. He could imagine what was going to happen—what had happened—he hadn't been terrified of his great-granny without reason. But he didn't remember this particular occasion.
"This is important," the Captain said. "I wouldn't make you watch this if it weren't."
"I don't care," he decided. "I'm ready to wake up." He didn't need yet another lecture on how expensive things were, even bought secondhand, how they couldn't afford for him to keep ruining every nice thing he had, that he needed to stop antagonizing the other children, that he needed to work harder, stop daydreaming, stop crying, stop being so different, that he was lazy, he was spoiled, he was the seed of the devil, he was just like his mother. Ungrateful with a heart full of sin. He got enough of that from his psychiatrists.
He would have expected his younger self to go straight into the house. Even at that age, he'd known better than to try to shirk his punishments—hiding only made it worse when he was caught. But the boy limped right past the front porch and around the back, heading, Jonathan realized, for the chapel.
He tried to yank his hand out of the Captain's. She clung to him.
"I've had enough of this. I'm leaving."
"Squishy, no! You need this. Trust me. Please."
"Trust a product of my own subconscious? You're under my control, and I say this dream is over."
Nothing changed.
"Subconsciously," she said, "you know you have issues you need to work through before it's too late."
"I hate you," he replied.
They followed the boy into the old chapel, noisy as ever with the flapping and quarreling of roosting birds. Jonathan had rarely ventured inside of his own free will. To him, it was a place of punishment, fear and the smothering dark. It hadn't taken him very long to stop looking for God there, or anywhere else. But like any other child, when he was very young he'd believed what he'd been told.
That didn't stop the boy from carefully propping the door open with a rock before he would take a single step inside. He dropped to his knees before the broken altar, still casting nervous glances toward the door, as if, without his vigilance, it might swing shut and trap him inside.
Waiting unseen in the doorway, Jonathan almost felt as if he were the one holding the door open, providing the boy with a path to safety. Ha.
With one final glance toward the exit, the younger Jonathan took a folded piece of paper from his ruined backpack and bowed his head.
"Gracious Heavenly Father," he began tremulously. "M-merry Christmas. And Happy Birthday. Um…I wanted to pray because…I have this letter I wrote, and I was hoping You could help me. Also my nose won't stop bleeding and I don't feel very good, and if You could fix that, I would be…really, really grateful. But if not, that's okay. I know you're very busy. But I do need help sending my letter, God. I don't know how to get it to Santa Claus without you."
"What are you doing in here, boy?"
Jonathan nearly jumped out of his skin. He hadn't heard that voice in twenty years, and it still made him feel like a little boy in trouble. He took a dive out of the doorway, dragging the Captain along with him.
She hugged him.
"She can't touch you now."
"I know that, you idiot," Jonathan snarled, and shoved the ghost away. She stumbled back, falling right through the shadow in the doorway.
For a moment, it was nothing more than a silhouette, massive and imposing. Jonathan's stomach churned.
Then, before his eyes, the shape re-formed into…a woman. Just a woman, old and frail. Iron-willed and quite as coldly deranged as he remembered, but somehow smaller than she had seemed when he was young. The old-fashioned, high-necked black dress she had always worn was tight and starchy, emphasizing the slightness of her build—to his immense surprise, she was thinner than he was. Shorter, too. They had stood eye to eye the last time he'd seen her, before that last four inch growth spurt near the end of his senior year of high school. Now, tall though she was, he found himself looking down at her.
He laughed a little in disbelief as his younger self whimpered and cringed back.
"Well, boy?"
Her voice was sharp, not a hint of weakness to be found. The child burst into tears.
"I'm sorry, Granny. I didn't mean to do anything bad."
She moved like lightning, incredible for someone her age. The boy had no chance to fight back. Arthritic or not, she had a hell of a grip, strong enough to drag him right off his feet.
"I didn't mean to," she taunted as he fought to keep his balance. "You're pathetic, boy. Spoiled, selfish—"
"No, Granny!"
"What do you call this, then? Praying for Christmas presents. You worthless little shit." She flung the boy away from her. He landed on his face in the dirt, sending a fresh spurt of blood from the nose that had very nearly run dry. He scooted away from her, holding his breath hard in an attempt to control his tears.
The Captain was crying harder than the child. Jonathan was glad she was just a figment of his imagination.
He nudged her.
"It got better."
Apparently, that was her cue to throw her arms around his waist again.
"When?"
"Hmm." He frowned, thoughtful. When had the old woman died? "Eleven years."
"I can track her down for you," the Captain said hopefully. "I'm dead, you know."
"It hadn't escaped my notice." He patted her shoulder, hoping to remind her to let go. She didn't take the hint. "You're not doing your job very well, dead Captain."
"What?"
"The boy. He's leaving. Don't we need to follow him?"
Her grip around his waist went painfully tight.
"Not in the script. Besides, you already know what he's doing." Oh, yes. He did remember that part—being sent to cut his own switch. Oh, yes, he remembered that. Just getting a whipping hadn't been enough; his great-granny had been delighted to add to his dread of an upcoming punishment by making him do most of the work himself.
On the off chance that his Ghost-Captain was real, and could find a way to track the old woman down in whatever corner of Hell she'd made her own, he said, "She was afraid of snakes."
The Captain nodded.
"Understood."
"What am I going to do with that boy?" his granny muttered, leaning on the part of the altar still standing. (He had kicked it, he remembered, trying to escape the old black crow she'd told him was the devil come to punish him, that first time she locked him in overnight to pray for his sins.)
"She was also afraid of men," he added, surprised to have remembered it. "Grown men. The kind who actually stood a chance of overpowering her in a fair fight." She had certainly ended up resorting to an increasing number of dirty tricks to keep him in line when he'd started to get too big to throw over her knee.
"I don't think I have any dead burly friends. I do have an old pet over in Boa Constrictor Heaven, though. Don't worry. We'll get her."
He felt his face stretching in an unaccustomed smile. Maybe he really was missing those fool girls and their weird desire to come to his defense.
The old woman leaned over to pick up the paper the boy had dropped. Jonathan wished rather fervently that he were able to give her a nice little shove.
She scanned the letter, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, looking as if she were trying to swallow a rotten lemon.
Then her expression went blank.
"What happened?" he blurted. "What's wrong with her?"
The Captain squeezed his hand.
"She's reading your letter to Santa. Whatever you wrote, it must have been good. What was it?"
"I have no idea." He didn't. It had been so long ago, he couldn't remember believing in the bearded toy fairy, much less what he had asked for.
The Captain's free hand slipped back into her pocket, and the scene froze.
"What did you do?" Jonathan asked sharply. The Captain's hand came out, clutching a remote control. She waved it in front of his face, teasing.
"Universal remote. Come on." She moved to read over the old woman's shoulder, dragging him along with her.
The handwriting was familiar, recognizably his, but smudged and uncertain.
The words were not familiar at all.
Dear Santa,
Thank you for sending the teddy bear with the church ladies last year. It was very nice. We don't go to church any more and Granny says I am too old for stuffed animals any way. If you have any thing for me please bring it to my house but I don't need toys. Please send some medicine for my Granny's ARTHRITIS so she will feel better.
(He must have been awfully proud of all the work that had gone into spelling that word.)
She hurts a lot and for Christmas it would be good if she would be okay. I would also really like something good for dinner please. Granny's favorite is green beans. I like macaroni and cheese. Thank you. That is all I need.
Love,
Jonathan Crane
PS: If it's not too much trouble, I would also like to have a friend and something new to read. Thank you.
The Captain turned around and threw her arms around his neck.
"Oh, Squishykins, I'm your friend."
"Captain?" He shoved at her arm. "Can't breathe."
She sprang back.
"Sorry! I love you." She pressed a button, and time resumed its flow.
The old woman was smiling. He had never seen her do that before.
Of course, she lost it the moment the boy reappeared in the doorway, clutching a hickory switch and trembling from head to foot. He stared at her, too afraid to breathe. She stared back, severe as ever. Then, when he seemed about to faint from the tension, she gave a little shake of her head.
"Get back inside the house, boy."
He knew better than to stick around asking questions. He dropped everything and ran for it before she could change her mind.
And when he was gone, she smiled again, very briefly, folded the letter, shook her head, and left.
Jonathan turned to glare at the Captain, who was grinning eagerly.
"That's it? This was the best Christmas memory you could come up with? The day my great-grandmother decided not to beat me?"
Her face fell.
"Oh, well…you were thinking of her, so…so it was your selfless thought that…made things better and…stuff…"
"So she was the selfish one? Oo-ooh," he squealed in falsetto. "It's a Christmas miracle!"
"You…ass." She grabbed his hand.
"What are you doing?"
"Skipping to the next scene." She pressed the button, and everything went blurry. He snatched the remote out of her hand. "Hey! Squishy, give that back!"
"No. I'm taller than you." He held the thing over his head, making her jump for it.
"Damn it, Squish! You're missing it!"
"I've seen it all before." He caught flashes of scenes he recognized. A Christmas party he'd been invited to when he was thirteen—a humiliating night that had set the tone for the rest of his adolescence. He certainly didn't want to show her that. The day his granny had fallen in the chapel and broken her hip. He would have liked to pause and watch her die again, but with the Captain hanging off his arm, he couldn't find the button in time. There was his first year in Gotham, when he'd been mugged outside Bergduff's, and rescued by a Salvation Army Santa—who then hit him up for money. And there was the year Al had stuffed him into a straitjacket and locked him in the trunk of a car. Ah, memories.
"Gimme the damn remote, Jonathan!" Tired of jumping, she leaped onto his back and tried to climb. He hit the dirt.
With a triumphant shout, the Captain made a grab for the remote. He yanked it back with all his might.
"Let go!"
"It's mine!"
He pulled. She pulled harder.
The remote control started shooting out sparks. Alarmed, they both let go.
"Whose bright idea was it to give you magical electronics?" he demanded anxiously.
With an offended, haughty glare, she snapped, "Yours." And then she disappeared.
After a moment's hesitation, Jonathan picked up the remote. It didn't explode in his hand, so he pressed the power button.
