Harbour Bitterness
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"Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime."
Mineko Iwasaki.
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"Why do you do this, Jonathan?"
Doctor Leland's voice sounded worn out, heavy with defeat. She never looked so tired, one could see it in her eyes.
Jonathan stared at the blurred figure that was her. His glasses had been wrecked during his last fight with Batman, shards of glass had webbed his battered face with blood-red cuts between a bruised cheek and a shiner. He couldn't decide what hurt the most, if his body or his heart: he had been beaten up right after he'd had a breakdown and started venting on the verge of tears like a frustrated kid.
Like they say, nothing was lost, except honor.
The last thing he saw clearly before the last blow hit him was the triumphant face of Becky.
Fuck, he wanted to get hurt.
So he had to fight back, even if he didn't have a chance.
He was a fucking masochist, among everything else.
"What exactly are you referring to, doctor?" Crane cooed mockingly, squinting his eyes and cracking a smile. His bruises throbbed, his lips stretched and a deep cut on the side was again torn open by the movement; Jonathan sucked the blood away, filled his mouth with sweet metallic flavor.
Joan looked like she was about to cry.
"Everything, Jonathan" she sighed wearily, and covered her face with her hands. "The fear, the experiments, the violence… All these obsessions swarming in your mind."
Crane tilted his head, showing finger-shaped contusions on the side of his neck. "If you care enough, everything becomes an obsession. It's not like I'm fanatical, I guess it's just that I care too much."
Behind long manicured fingers a pair of watery eyes were fixed on him.
"The grudges you hold will kill you. They're consuming you slowly, eating up whatever remained of your good nature. They're preventing you from living a life that is rightfully yours. I thought you would have realized it, after the incident with that girl, Becky Albright."
Jonathan's face darkened, his fists tightened inside the straightjacket till the knuckles turned white and his nails dug in the palms. He desperately wished to break the skin and let it all out, every bloody noxious poison.
"That… incident, as you call it, had only made me aware that people are too pathetic and too weak to deserve my interest. I've learned my lesson, now: never have any expectations in them."
"You're angry" Joan stated, "I can understand."
"Don't you dare… Don't you ever dare say you understand" warned Jonathan through clenched teeth.
"You felt a strong connection with that girl. She was bullied as you were, she suffered so much by the hands of cruel people who tormented her just because she was different. When she refused to join you, you felt betrayed, that's understandable."
He let out raging huffs from his nostrils, as his heartbeat grew unsteady in the battered cage of his ribs. His heart had sharp claws, and wanted to rasp its way out of his chest.
"But Jonathan…" doctor Leland continued, "You should have learnt from her that you have to let go of your past. For your own good. Instead you ended up hating her, calling her weak…"
"She was weak!" shouted Jonathan. Then, in a more controlled tone, "I offered her the chance of striking back. She could have had her revenge, but she simply decided to leave her tormentors unpunished and stay a victim her entire life, while they live happily and free of problems. She decided to just shut up and take it, to give up. She's everything I hate."
"Maybe she didn't want revenge, but a chance to build up her future without her demons preventing her to do so. She decided to be not a victim, but a survivor. She chose not to let her past haunt her."
"Nobody gets rid of his past" Jonathan hissed. "It'll come back to her, sooner or later, and she's going to be sorry she didn't accept my offer."
"Are you speaking from experience, aren't you?"
To her surprise, Jonathan's body started to tremble as he giggled. At first it was a feebly vibration, but by the time she completely realized it he was shaking with suffocated laughs.
"You know what's funny?" he asked. "The fact that it almost looks like you care."
Her sad face grew even more miserable.
"Jonathan, I do care. I would like you to feel better, that's my job, and that's what psychotherapy is for."
"Psychotherapy is only good for studying people's mind. For controlling it, if anything. But for curing patients? I don't think so, remember I used to be a psychiatrist myself, I know the lies you tell those idiots in hope they'll let themselves being manipulated into believing them."
That was what shrinks did, Jonathan thought. Talking to you like they're your best friends and then rummage through your mind in search of a tag they could label you with.
Freak.
Sicko.
Nutjob.
So people would know what they should look out for.
And in the process, they fill your head with empty lies.
The most popular of them being there is still hope for you.
Truth was, psychiatrists were not just ordinary quacks. They were professional scam-artists, overpaid carnival fortune-tellers, and Doctor Leland was no exception. She would scatter the twisted convolutions of his mind on a table and read them like a diviner would read chicken guts: his haggard face, with jutting cheekbones and hollow eyes, hid a past of abuse, a present of violence and a future of agony.
"If only you would give therapy a chance, Jonathan…" Leland begged. "You don't have to live all your life like this, you can still fix..."
"There's nothing to be fixed, doctor." He spat the word as if it was something disgusting he'd just tasted. "It's too late. You think you can just come here with your inane psychobabble and your false concern and hope you can mend my shitty life? Well, bad news for you, sometimes we reach a point from which we can't return, and the past cannot be changed nor cured."
"That all depends on how much you'll be willing to…"
"Life is not a matter of will, it's a matter of choices. I made mine, and I don't care if that made me a psychopathic freak. Maybe that's what I've always been in the first place."
"You know it's not true. By asking Becky to join you, in your own way, you wanted to help her. There's still a part of you that wants to be saved, Jonathan; in that girl, you saw yourself. I bet you spent all your childhood waiting for someone to offer you what you offered Becky. You would have liked to have someone on your side."
Crane's empty eyes looked far away. He gritted his teeth to prevent himself from biting his lip bloodily.
"Well, guess what, nobody came for poor little me. What a surprise! Nobody cared about an insignificant scrawny scarecrow! Becky didn't even know how lucky she had been meeting me. She was just an ungrateful little bastard, like all the others! None of you normal people is worth anything!"
"Jonathan, did you love her?"
His emaciated face turned livid. Jonathan stood up, trying to balance himself as much as the straightjacket permitted.
He didn't love her, he didn't love her, he absolutely didn't love her!
He just thought he had found another soul like himself, someone who could understand him, because nobody understands you better than a person who suffered what you did on her own skin. He had dared to hope that, in the middle of all this cruelty, this madness, this suffering, he wouldn't have to be alone anymore.
He gave in to the loneliness, because after seeing another person like him, it became all to much to bear.
He just wanted someone.
Was that so wrong?
But that wasn't a fairytale, and even if it was, he would still be the villain, and villains don't get the "happily ever after" bullshit.
His plucky Becky… She was the gold-hearted girl people applauded when they read stories. She had been the heroine who had slayed him and carried his torn heart in a golden box and his mask on a pike among a cheering crowd of normal citizens. Her trophies to celebrate the victory of good over evil: the monster is dead, hooray!
He didn't love her, he didn't love her, he absolutely didn't love her!
He cared so much.
He had cried for her, could still feel the burning of salty tears in his eyes.
How pathetic he must have been, making a fool of himself in such a way.
He was so emotionally starved he wasn't sure he knew how to love, but he could have learned. In his defense, he had to say he never cared so much about anyone in his life before.
He felt so bad right now: so furious, so cynical, so betrayed. So completely and utterly sad he could cry his eyes out if he stayed there a moment longer.
That wasn't fair.
"I believe we're done" Jonathan whispered.
The woman's features carried all the weight of demise. "I want to tell you that it's normal to feel so angry after all this. I can see that it mattered really much to you."
Jonathan found again his contemptuous attitude, and manifested it through a lopsided evil grin.
"If everything that concerns me it's normal," he began, "Then I have no need to be here."
Joan took in a deep uneasy breath. "Please Jonathan. It's important that you understand…"
"Funny choice of words" Crane interrupted, leaning towards her. "No one ever thought what happened to me was important enough to deserve attention. But you know something? Taunt after taunt, torture after torture, I decided it wasn't important to me either. Now, I do what I do because that's just how things are meant to be, the reason is not important. Not anymore."
Leland watched him standing tall, but couldn't imagine what was going on in Jonathan's mind.
What did she wanted to hear?
That he needed help because he was a poor little bullied kid who never healed from the wounds of his past?
He knew what she would say. All this trouble over this? They just mocked you, and teased you, what's the fuss? Is that really the reason you became a bloodthirsty psychopath obsessed with fear and control? Don't be ridiculous.
And he would stood still and take it.
Because it wasn't that important.
I had been hurt, Jonathan thought, but not enough.
That was the problem.
He never suffered enough for people to care.
So it wasn't all that important.
As he kept thinking, he felt himself slip. In the back of his mind the Scarecrow's straw arms were encircling him in a creepily warm embrace made of promises of reassuring madness. Its arid fingers were covering his eyes in a gesture that said it was ok to let himself go, that he could surrender now: a whole new world of madness was ahead of him, and there he would be at home.
This so-called normal reality, its people, its rules, it was all so full of shit.
Lucky for him, he knew if he looked hard enough in his mind, he would always find an escape. An invisible door he could crawl through to somewhere nice and cozy, where he would exchange his weak body with a brand new indestructible straw one, his abused mind with a burlap made of chaos, and his scarred soul with a cloud of fear gas.
No use for such idiotic things as sanity. And as for that gashed pulp that was his heart, he could just throw it away. More space for the straw.
He wanted to be someplace where everything made sense. He wanted someone he could trust and that won't stab him in the back like Becky did. And there was only a person he trusted so.
"Jonathan…" Leland started again, after what seemed an endless silence.
"Jonathan isn't here right now" snickered the Scarecrow. "But if you'd like to make an appointment…"
He closed the door behind himself, and he was safe at last.
Alone with Himself.
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I was feeling a little blue, so this came out.
Personally, I cheered for Jonathan when the Becky incident occurred.