JMJ

Chapter Three

Breaking up a Golden Afternoon

Hopefully, I won't run into a headless horseman on the way across the Linden Street Bridge, he teased himself.

And it was a tease on the bridge as well, as it was really more of a rise over a deep gutter than anything. Linden Street itself was only two blocks long and was a stretch covered in thick trees that overshadowed the street. High hedges blocked most of the houses. It was, for the middle of a town, almost like a sort of hollow cut off from everything else, especially when most people were still at work and most students leaving the college some blocks away from here used the more open Birch Street to get to their destinations.

It was where Seventh Street crossing Linden against an especially large block upon which Jonathan could see his house on the far corner of Seventh and Birch. The yard had a big hill in the middle of the back yard like something under a living room rug. Birch was the busiest street aside from Main, but for a person used to living in one of the largest cities on the East Coast it was easy to take up this house where others had avoided it as too noisy a place. The fact that college renters lived right next door bothered the couple even less. What made it most undesirable to most people at all was that the house had been a college rental itself for fifteen years before the Cranes took up residence like some foreign birds to take up an old squirrel's nest for their own. But as both Harley and Jonathan had lived in hideouts far worse than the damage done to the house by careless renters, they hardly found a reason to complain about it.

For Jonathan, especially, he was not sure he would have been able to find himself at home in a house that was not drafty or smelled of old wood and did not have creaky doors. The window with the chipped pane that they taped over for a temporary fix was a little much, but they would get to that in time. It was a large house with even a third storey and a basement. Though the basement was unfinished and third storey had no heating— yet. That was a plan for another time when both he and Harley had more money to spend, and not to mention more people to share the house, which would not be for much longer.

"'Michael,'" said Harley as soon as Jonathan opened the door.

She was working as a waitress normally, but this was a day off, one of which she was having more of the closer to expectancy she got.

Jonathan's surprise was short-lived as he knew exactly what Harley meant.

"I thought it was going to be 'Jason'," Jonathan commented.

Harley gave him an excited hug in contrast to Jonathan's sober but not at all unhappy return embrace and gentle kiss.

"But then I thought of 'Michael'," said Harley. "If that's alright with you."

They had just recently discovered that it was going to be a boy.

"Well," said Jonathan with a shrug as he took off his coat. "'Michael' is a name that has stood the test of time. Always popular, never outdated. It is indeed a name in which one cannot go wrong with as long as you promise me that we shall never call him 'Mike.'"

"Aww, what about 'Mikey'?" asked Harley with a fake pout behind which her eyes sparkled. "I don't know if I can promise you about that, Professor Anthroponymy."

"A strong name might as well be used properly," Jonathan replied only briefly feigning offence, but he was smiling as he brought his things to his little home office.

"What about 'Harley'?"

"I'm not going to deny you what you prefer to be named," answered Jonathan, "but even if you call a 'Michael', 'Mikey', I can guarantee you that I never shall."

"Should we go back to 'Jason' then?" said Harley.

"That's entirely up to you. Both names are strong," Jonathan insisted.

"Well, 'Mikey' is better than 'Micky', at least," Harley laughed.

Jonathan shuddered at the thought. "Please. I'll lose my appetite for supper, you know."

Harley only laughed the more.

As Jonathan turned away he was smiling too. The idea of being a father was something that had been the furthest from his notions about the future before this strange but not unhappy marriage thing. Honestly, it was his idea to get married in the first place, and that alone was something that he could never have explained. He had in the past thought the human race better off never falling in love and never reproducing. The changes in him surprised himself. In some ways the starkness of the changes proved almost frightening, and as for this son he was going to have…

Certainly, he did not regret it. What he did feel though was a different sort of fear than he had ever experienced before. It was, in a sense, a type of thrill, which is both joy and fear together, of course, but the fear was no less real. The responsibility that was now upon him was something that he never expected, and it was the discovery of the gender of the child alone, which had made it all feel more real.

How fickle emotion was!

It was not as if knowing whether a child was a boy or a girl made the baby any less a child, yet in this week in which the discovery had been made, he felt the reality of fatherhood much more keenly than the week before.

Unpleasant whispers echoed in his ears of a time when he resented being born, of hating his parents for having him at all, of running from the very notion of them so that he was a mind only and not a child of man. He became one with his profession as a professor of psychology in which the human soul was reduced to the idea of a machine alone and nothing more. Such ideas had made it so much easier to think of a living mind as a perfectly suitable test subject for his experiments in Gotham with terror and the science of emotional responses in general. It made it easy to pretend also, that parents were inconsequential in the life of any creature.

He had left a very weak mother in a tiny house she could barely afford who had sent him away, because she was afraid of him. With good reason by the time he was a teenager, of course, but she had started it by pretending that he did not exist through most of his childhood before that. He believed she had feared him ever since his nasty elementary school habit of pulling the fire alarm to watch everyone come out screaming and he had eventually admitted it to her.

As for his father? Well, he might as well never have existed. A boyfriend who abandoned the weak creature, his mother, to fend for herself, and only reappeared to try to squeeze money out of her by pretending to be interested again. She fell for it like a fool and they were nearly married before he got lung cancer from all the nasty stuff he smoked. Jonathan hated him and her both for their stupidity. He had no sympathy for his mother anymore than his father's lung cancer. She had never stood up for Jonathan against the careless vulture. Not to mention how during that time, the father had had a habit of locking Jonathan out of the house (whether by accident or purposeful cruelty, Jonathan never knew for sure) so that he had to sleep in the neighbor's barn in the hay for over a year.

Now, here he was.

He had fallen in love. He had gotten married and now he was having a child. He felt rather undeserving really. He had felt just as undeserving of Harley even as he had timidly admitted his affections after being confronted with it so shortly after his release from Arkham Asylum. Harley had been insistent upon it. Jonathan had flushed bright red with the realization of how he was behaving just like a teenage boy with a crush on a girl beyond his clique-range.

#

Still red from ear to ear, Jonathan felt his face resign also to a smile— a small one. His eyes faltered to the dinar table and his nervously drumming fingers. He stopped his fingers, but he did not stop his eyes from lingering on them. Finger-drumming was really not one of his normal habits, after all.

"I…" he cleared his throat and gathered himself far more professionally in manner into the professor Harley knew him as. He straightened himself like a sane adult man and not the crumpled mentally-ill and tormented child that he used to be. "I always felt very fond of you. Even in a mentally instable state as you were when I met you, I always wished the best for you. You were, to my deranged, darkened mind, a bright light in a harrowing, empty world where I did not believe in kindness. Perhaps, I believed it more as I did not believe in true charity and you were at the time quite capable of any deed the Joker could think of for you, besides…well, never mind about that."

Harley watched Jonathan with care. At first, she had been sucking through her cola straw, but now she was just gaping with knit in the brow as though she could not quite decide whether to be offended or touched in a strange sort of way, but mostly she looked like she was trying to decide what any of this had to do with her question.

"But then when you gave up your darker side and gave into your lighter side," Jonathan went on with eyes still downcast as his voice unwittingly changed into a very poetically passionate tone as one reciting Poe or some such similar poet, "I could not deny that it was true…that virtue was not a lie, that hope was not a thing for fools, that life truly was worth living in the manner intended for mankind. Your light…blinded me so used to the darkness that I had chained myself to both by my own hand and those who reared me. I tried to fight it, of course, but I could not. It almost propelled my resolve to kill my human soul and give into the Scarecrow's demands, but when I was finally given a chance to think deeply about it— time in the hospital can do that, I suppose…"

"'Hospital Flowers' by Owl City," teased Harley, though behind her grin, Jonathan could now see her impatience.

Again he cleared his throat. "Yes, well, what I mean to say is—"

"Professor, professor," Harley laughed. "Hold up, okay, I didn't ask for a whole Chicken Soup for the Soul, I just asked if you had a crush on me, cuz you were startin' to look like a sick puppy with it, and I couldn't ignore it anymore."

"Forgive me," said Jonathan feeling a renewed red burn in his face.

"So…" Harley pressed leaning in close. "Do you like me or not."

"Of course, I like you," retorted Jonathan.

"But do you love me?"

"I…I don't want to destroy our friendship, if you do not feel that way back. I'm perfectly happy with it just staying—"

"Hah! So you do love me!"

"Well, in that way, only recently, and emotion can be so capricious. You could do so much better than me, I assure you."

"Ah! Jonathan!" laughed Harley. "Like with who? Bruce Wayne? As if! Besides, not even Bruce Wayne has what you have even with all his good looks, social grace, power, money, and parties."

Jonathan winced and made a definite grimace. "Yes? What pray-tell?" de demanded.

"You understand me," said Harley gently. "Like no one else, and who else knows you better, hmm?"

"I see your point," said Jonathan, "but is that enough to say we would be compatible 'till death do us part?'"

Harley laughed. "Jonathan, if I could put up with everything I did visiting you every day in Arkham even on your grumpiest days, I think I could handle a normal life with you too."

"You really mean that…" it was not a question but a statement of awe. "Then you would be willing to have me?" asked Jonathan with some measure of uncertainty still.

"'Till death do us part,' Professor," Harley grinned.

The smile betrayed Jonathan again. Smiles of this sort were still rather alien upon his face, but at least the redness was falling away.

"Then, excuse me for not being in the least bit prepared," said Jonathan with much more purpose and confidence now and his smile turning somewhat wry, "but you are saying that if I proposed at this moment— excuse the fact again that I am not in the orthodox position of holding a ring— you would, in fact—"

#

He shook his head, and realized his phone was ringing. To this day he resisted carrying a phone on his person. He resisted it like so much of modern social tech, but he had a cell phone anyway. It usually remained on his desk in his home office. It hardly ever left that position unless he was going out of town, which was rare.

Casually, he lifted the phone. His thoughts still lingered with amusement on that day at the café in Gotham little knowing it was Gotham on the other end until he saw that the call was from Joan Leland.

He frowned and rolled his eyes with a sigh.

Oh, well. It would never truly be over. He would just have to get used to that. He had only left Arkham officially a couple years ago, and after so many false Arkham "cures", the government needed to be sure, didn't they?

"Good afternoon, Dr. Leland."

The only thing that surprised him so far was that it was Dr. Leland and not Dr. Bartholomew making the call.

He had never had a serious relapse and he had a new non-Arkham doctor for anything small that happened to recur, but Arkham would probably be checking up on Jonathan for the next ten years. It may only be to please the legal system; though, honestly, he did not even blame the politicians for this one. The leeway he was getting for a chance at a normal life was more than enough to surprise him already. He was hardly on a tight leash. As long as he cooperated with Arkham and never dressed up in a burlap bag with fear gas between his fingers sweeping through the byways, he was left in peace. A few phone calls now and then were a small price to pay.

"Hello, Pr. Crane," said Dr. Leland. "I'm sorry to bother you. I tried to call yesterday, but you did not answer my messages."

"Oh, no! That's quite alright. You're not upsetting anything. I'm sorry. I… I hadn't checked my phone," said Jonathan. He knew how lame that sounded to most people these days.

"That's alright," said Dr. Leland.

He noticed the uncharacteristic hesitance in her voice immediately. It made his eyes narrow with suspicion. His whole face turned shrewd and alert as he turned to the window of his home office at the budding branches and the squirrels flitting in them.

"Is something the matter, Dr. Leland?" He wanted to waste no time with pleasantries. "Is there some legal matter or something with the state or the crossing thereof into Maine that I've not attended to properly?"

"No, no," said Dr. Leland. "It's nothing like that. Your bill is now as clean as it can be, but that is the only reason why I wish to ask you this favor."

"Favor?" asked Jonathan blinking with surprise.

A shiver ran up his spine as she hesitated, if only briefly.

"A favor for one of the inmates. Jervis Tetch."

"There's…very little I can tell you about him, I'm afraid," responded Jonathan just a touch coolly. "Very little I have that could be of any help, if he's gone missing."

"He wishes to speak with you," Leland nearly interrupted.

Again Jonathan blinked. "Excuse me, Dr. Leland?"

#

"Jervis Tetch has been depressed for some time, apparently," Jonathan explained to Harley. "It is their belief that he is in a very critical state, that he could kill himself from his depression and that he is also going through another bout of guilt— perhaps allowing for a chance to help him, but he will not speak to the staff. He has expressed on no uncertain terms that he will speak to no one but me."

"You."

Jonathan rolled his eyes. He could not help it.

Before he could answer, though, Harley said, "Well, how long's he been like this?"

"Several months, I believe."

"Months!"

"Since, his recapture. Though, apparently Dr. Leland has only taken over charge him very recently," said Jonathan trying to remain neutral in tone, but he could not hide his displeasure from Harley.

"Then you should go right away!" said Harley.

"Go?" demanded Jonathan.

"Well, you're going, aren't you?"

"I—I," Jonathan stammered. "I haven't given a response. I was given liberty to think about it. I've as yet made no commitment."

"Why not? He's your friend."

"He's not—!" Jonathan stopped his voice from rising any higher. He sat down heavily into the sofa and rubbed his temples with a groan. "We were hardly friends, Harley. Just because I played a few rounds of chess with him… He won't even to speak to the staff. It's just one of his fancies. I know it is. He's off his head again and feels guilty. I've seen it before."

"But what if he means it this time; or what if seeing you is the one thing that will help him to stick with it. I don't care what you call it. You and Jervis were always sitting and chatting like the quiet boys in the corner at school playing with match cars instead of soccer balls. You were practically the only support you two had."

"He knew perfectly well the situation, and it was very one-sided," said Jonathan with an air of technicality. "I never participated in anything that would be considered the upkeep of a friendship. He was the one who gave me things when I did not ask for them. He was the one who read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He…" Jonathan's voice trailed away.

He sighed.

Whether or not Jonathan had particularly cared about his relationship with Jervis while an inmate at Arkham, he knew full well and had even at the time, that Jervis had seen their friendship as real. To the best that he could despite being mad, Jervis had tried to be a good friend to him regardless of how he knew that Jonathan had little care for the relationships. All Jervis wanted in return was someone to talk to. He had expected nothing in return other than that. That in itself was worth at least giving him this chance.

"But he still might not mean it," said Jonathan more to himself than to Harley. "He's faked things before. And Gotham… it might be worthless in the end, or worse, he might have some plan for his chips in mind, and he might try to talk me into it in a state of emotional delusion. Or try to mind control me for that matter. Or he's already mind-controlled the staff into this situation in the first place."

He sniffed recalling how hesitant Leland had sounded on the phone.

"Jonathan," said Harley gently. "Two things." She held up those two fingers; then she singled them to one. "First, you're not afraid of being mind-controlled. You're too clever to let his hand slip behind your head. I know you too well for that."

"Perhaps," shrugged Jonathan idly.

"Not to mention the staff doesn't allow him to wear his hat anymore, so it will make it more difficult even if that is what he's planning."

"True."

"Two," said Harley hold up her second finger again. "Y'know, I didn't think it was worth it to visit you in Arkham either even though I did anyway."

Jonathan's brow furrowed as he turned to her with searching hazel eyes.

"I mean, who was gunna argue with the Lord of Despair about hope?"

"Or the God of Fear about courage," muttered Jonathan.

"Exactly."

"And I would not have blamed you for not trying," said Jonathan. "I still don't understand why you did…"

Harley smiled. "Maybe it was stupid. Maybe not. It was because you were my friend, and that's what friends do. Help each other, right?"

"Not in my experience… with the exception of your friendship, naturally."

"Even as psychotic as you got, you still didn't lay a finger on me before you went to the hospital."

"I was not in a physical condition to fight a wiry bat-companion," muttered Jonathan. Then he shook his head. "But… you're right. You're right. I did appreciate his company more than I wanted to admit."

"Mmm, I know," Harley winked.

"But it's only going to be in payment for his friendship towards me, you understand. If I go there and he shows the slightest signs of—"

"Well, then he'll've forfeited his chance," agreed Harley with a prompt nod.

"Indeed."

"I'll come with you."

Jonathan's eyes jumped at the suggestion. "Absolutely not! You're not going into Gotham like… like…" His hands motioned towards her middle. "In your condition!" He finished and crossed his arms.

Harley made a face.

With a firm shake of his head Jonathan proved he would not be moved upon that subject. However neither was Harley to be moved.