Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the Batman universe or any of its characters. I own nothing save for any original characters I have created.

Unmasked

2006

"What was the plan, Crane?"

A far-away voice spoke to him with a mouth full of static, every word distorted and drowned by the fevered haze of chemicals burning through Crane's mind. From the moment the Batman had turned his own invention upon him—tormenting Crane with a monstrous visage and reveling in his humiliation before fleeing like a cowardly, loathsome little rodent eager to spread his plague throughout Gotham—the toxin had begun to tear at his brain with a shocking violence so agonizing that Crane was unsure if he would survive the high dosage; not even during their earliest days together, a lifetime ago when Crane had descended into the asylum basement to inhale his first breath of the new powder compound and witness its full splendor with an unspoiled psyche, had Crane experienced such an intense effect. With unforgivable vividity the toxin brought forth every secret doubt, every terrible memory, every fear, until Crane had witnessed them all a thousand times over—then, in the cruelest betrayal in a life wrought with many, the toxin began to mock him.

"Hey, Ichabod," a familiar drawl rasped into his ear, its cold breath like ice against his skin and thick with the scent of tobacco and rot, and Crane's stomach lurched with sickening realization as Billy Lee Walker's venomous grin flickered into his line of sight. Caked blood and garden dirt poured from Billy's head wound onto the shoulder of his straitjacket, and Crane felt a sudden rush of sensations—the taste of paper on his tongue as pages from a library book were crammed into his helpless mouth, Billy's fists and feet swinging at his prone body to land in bursts of pain, broken glasses perched askew on a nose wet red with blood, waves of anger and fear and hate and shame. So much shame.

"I didn't think you had it in you, Ichabod," Billy whispered, his once-syrupy inflection withered from decay, "and neither does he."

Billy pointed a bone-white finger towards the blurred figure sitting before Crane, shoulders hunched and his Scarecrow mask clutched unceremoniously in its hands, soiling the burlap with an undeserving touch.

"How were you gonna get your toxin into the air?" it asked with a voice as distant as before despite its close proximity, and in his foggy memory Crane now recalled it introducing itself as Gordon—a gray wisp of a man who carried with him a badge, an palpable sense of morality, and the clinging stench of stale coffee. He had come to ask questions that he already knew Crane would not answer. Weathered fingers more accustomed to the grip of a gun navigated across the mask's fabric, along the stitches of the mouth and the delicate coil workings of the respirator, and when the rudimentary examination was complete the detective regarded Scarecrow's face with a combination of bewilderment and revulsion.

In Gordon's demands there was desperation; he was not a stupid man, and he understood enough of the operation unearthed in Arkham's basement to recognize that Gotham was a city at risk of great peril. But the motivation behind Crane's machinations was still a mystery to him, and one that he knew must be solved immediately, even if the solution disturbed him. Millions of lives were on the precipice of something more disastrous than anything he had seen before during his decades spent in law enforcement—even in a city like Gotham—and he did not dare imagine what would happen if he failed.

But that didn't matter to Crane. Nothing mattered but the toxin.

It did not matter when the GCPD pressed an oppressive boot-clad foot onto his spine and clasped handcuffs roughly on his wrists, or when they spat out with disgust their vehemence and insults ("Freak! Creep!") like so many schoolyard bullies before them. It did not matter when his limbs grew sore strapped and bound beneath the stained confines of a straitjacket, or when a paper cup was pressed to his lips and his head forced back to swallow a tongueful of useless pills—didn't they know he had the real medicine? It did not matter when a rotation of Arkham nurses (some he had even hired himself) shone light into his eyes and checked his pulse with gloved fingers and clucked their tongues sadly at what remained of poor Dr. Crane. None of it mattered, because to Crane none of it ever truly occurred; he had spent every hour, every minute, every second in the throes of his toxin, and everything outside of his private fearsome world served as nothing but a dull backdrop that existed only to be overshadowed by the toxin's magnificence—barely noticeable, if it was ever even noticed at all.

"Scarecrow." The word seemed to bubble and burn unnaturally on Crane's lips, and yet never before had he tasted anything so pure. "Scarecrow."

Skeletal fingers gripped his shoulder, and beneath the straitjacket Crane felt his hands tightly clutch the edges of a feather pillow. Although he could not see it, he knew exactly what how it looked: white, with a delicate blue floral pattern, slightly faded from decades of washing and use. He knew it well, for it had been the key to his freedom.

"Does it upset you to know that I was right all along, Jonathan?" Granny Keeny hissed. "I told you that you were no good, and now look at you. You're as bad as ever."

In life he had never once seen her laugh, but her corpse found amusement in his suffering.

"Do you want to know what my last thought was when you pressed that pillow to my face, smothering the life out of me? 'Thank God. Thank God it's finally over and I'll never have to see that feeble, wretched, sinning little boy again.'"

She dug her fingers sharply into his flesh, harder and harder, until Crane was certain his arm would be ripped from its socket.

"Heaven's as beautiful as I thought it would be, Jonathan. So sad you'll never get to see it."

"Who were you working for, Crane?" Gordon pressed, his patience ebbing away with each passing second. It was apparent that Crane would be of no help, due to either the poison swimming around in his brain or simple criminal defiance, but Gordon had less than little else to go on—he had nothing.

But when Crane's eyes darted in his skull to fix on Gordon the seasoned cop felt a jolt of unpleasant surprise.

"Oh, it's too late," Crane muttered, his tone hushed but clear. "You can't stop it now."

He pressed his lips together tightly into a small smile meant for no one that Gordon could see, then retreated back into the toxin's haze.

Gordon stared for a moment, more unsettled than he cared to admit, before rising quickly from his seat to shove the mask into the arms of a nearby guard and head for the asylum exit, eager to put as much distance as possible between himself and Crane. As he drove towards the police headquarters, Arkham an increasingly-distant set of lights fading away into the smoggy night, Gordon felt no relief.

Just more dread.

More time passed—perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, perhaps an eternity. Eventually the toxin's vibrancy began to subside and his two companions retreated back into the shadows of his mind where Crane hid away the memories he could never forget, and he was left alone to his fading nightmares.

A sudden buzzing noise echoed through the hall outside his room, and when the creaking sound of rows of doors swinging open at once immediately followed Crane realized what was happening. It was a scenario he had been trained for back when he first started working at Arkham, and one that the former Warden Quincy Sharp had lived in fear of every day of his administrative career, for nothing frightened the ignorant fool more than his own patients.

The inmates were escaping the asylum.

Not Quincy, of course, Crane thought to himself. I suspect they'll find him right where they left him.

The idea of Arkham's patients running amok while Sharp sat drooling in a cell, oblivious to the mayhem unfurling outside of his open door, sent Crane into a fit of quiet giggles; when his own door swung open moments later he was still smiling.

Burlap was tossed into his bound lap, and Crane looked down into the face of Scarecrow before turning to glance at his liberator.

"Time to play," a man in a SWAT uniform whispered.

Crane remembered that sticky-hot afternoon in Georgia all those years ago, walking home from school with dried tears on his cheeks and hatred coursing through his veins, and how he had gazed at the scarecrow in the corn field and fantasized about his vengeance until the corners of his punched mouth turned upwards into the small, triumphant grin of a child who would grow up to become a feared man.

This time the scarecrow smiled back.