JMJ

Chapter Eleven

Cold Tea

January 6th, a messy, spidery hand wrote hastily across a Gotham bank-logoed note paper. Day Six of Experiment: Walking Dead.

The first two injections have proven successful. Despite the aforementioned side-effects on days 4 and 5, my body is sustaining without severe concern as of yet. Though, as the side-effects have worsened since the last entry, I maintain the hypothesis that without the final injection to rebalance what I have taken apart, it would eventually end in death. Despite numerous tests including those on the lab rat specimens, there is still the continued risk of my shortened life expectancy even with the final injection.

Despite the benefits to having continued experimentation on human subjects before my own self-injections, time, as I also have mentioned before, is shortening. The death of Jonathan Crane is inescapable, and if there is even a small chance that the Scarecrow will survive the final step beyond him, it is worth the risk. Had I chosen not to take the risk, the psychology of Jonathan Crane will have eventually killed both. The ravings of a madman in a cell forever would have been the end result for the body in which I dwell.

Despite the side-effects, I already feel the desired properties from the first two injections. Fear is conquerable. Senses are heightened when I can think through the pain. Despite the pain-ever growing, I can feel the limberness in my body growing more and more. Tests have proven that my physical abilities will be more than at first calculated; strength that could be compared to that of a primate, the agility may be soon compared to that of a feline.

At present, according to the experiments with the calculations added to compensate for the extreme differences of my weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and regular respiration rate from the test subjects, my body will entirely shut down for at least four minutes, but all vitals should start up again from this sort of heightened rapid hibernation period in complete working order allowing me, in a sense, to rise up from my old life like a phoenix from its ashes. Regenerated and rejuvenated, I truly will be the beast of terror to the core of my being unhindered by the past life of Jonathan Crane...

Jonathan stopped writing.

He stared hollowly out ahead of him for a long while.

His colonial-styled desk, completely bare of its varnish, was chipped and scraped of its cheap pink paint that someone had once tried to repaint it with. In the dim light, in which the paint color could not entirely be deciphered, it befit that creature sitting at it like a ghost on that very unbefitting computer swivel chair he was sitting on. The pizza party restaurant pen he was using wasn't the greatest touch either, and it was slightly maddening to be using it with its grinning, childish hamster mascot in stereo-typed cartoonish Italian attire. This was such important work, after all. In fact, one might call it his manifesto— the pinnacle of his scientific career, but his plain black pen he had been using earlier had run out of ink halfway through yesterday's log.

So childishly particular was Jonathan Crane!

As if the Scarecrow needed to have things match like in one of those silly little stories Jonathan used to cherish so much. As if fear needed a theme. As if fear needed to be decorated in classic gothic attire with those thick medieval candles dripping with wax, those thick velvet curtains that hid whispers of phantoms and ghouls and murderers alike, those headstones of mossy deprivation, those creaky wooden steps, those cobweb-covered libraries of forgot lore in which yellowed pages cracked and the smell of antique paper followed blowing a plume of dust away, those deep-chest pounding chords on an organ deep beneath the bowels of the entertainment of the witless posh and wealthy.

Fear did not have to be dressed as stereotypically as that hamster on his pen. After a fashion, all those vintage flourishes were only a comfort, a security blanket for the lonely child named Jonathan Crane. At one time he these had been accompanied by images less gothic. Mysterious islands of buried treasure, the kindly gentleman's home of the savior of a famous orphan in London, the stately curiosities on the mantelpiece of a certain home on Baker Street, the feats of a boy outwitting a tiger in steamy jungles, and the escapades of another boy finding adventure in a lazy backwater Old South town after tricking the other boys into doing his chores. Jonathan had at one time loved these images just as much as that of the vintage terror that remained with him to this day. It was part of that boy. It was part of the condolences offered to a creature too pathetic to face the world in reality— too spineless, too broken, too afraid, and… it was a distraction. A vampire worked better disguised as a proper man of his time far more than he did wearing a black and red cape of his old country. His country must be left behind, where the howl of wolves greeted him as warmly as the sweet old retriever for a common happy person's home where the sun shone brightly and blinded the vampire with pain and agony.

Fear Incarnate was more than a troll that would turn into stone in the nakedness of day, however. Fear Incarnate was more than a vampire that needed to bring the earth of his home with him in a coffin. Fear Incarnate had no weakness. It had no reserve. It was omnipresent. Despite bumps in the night behind shadows after sunset, there was such a thing as the noonday devil. Fear Incarnate was the genius of terror— a god.

Ichabod Crane was no different than Jonathan. The terror upon the horse of death grinning like a jack-o'-lantern and racing like Deimos towards him before Ares' war cry had caused him to flee and lose everything while the true victor remained and took all that his prey had left behind. But the Scarecrow would be unafraid to return victorious and mock even the brightness of the sun— No! To blot it out of the sky so that no one else could see it, and amidst the raging war he planned on the boorish louts of the world, Phobos would make night unending— unafraid and unparalleled himself.

Jonathan frowned— or the body of Jonathan frowned. It was difficult to say whose glower it was beneath the bug-eyed face, despite the claims that he was not been stricken with multiple personality disorder. He wasn't. It was simply the due transformation fighting within him as his body burned with pain, his head swam with dizziness, and his brow boiled with feverish sweat. A transformation from a caterpillar to a moth. Or as he had said before, from ashes to an exploding phoenix.

But there was one problem.

It was a problem he would not even admit in his log; though, as he stared down at the paper he knew it was very unprofessional of him.

His body shook violently from a strange tremor caused by the first two injections. He swallowed hard on his sandpaper throat, which he tried for a moment to clear but in vain. The lump and soreness remained.

The problem had nothing to do with that, however.

The problem was very much related to one of his own personally favorite sayings.

He sipped at his tea, which had long ago gone cold, and he shook his head from the bitterness of it from leaving the tea ball infuser in too long.

Only a fool knows no fear, he thought with single-mindedness.

There was a risk, however much his experiments proved it to be small. The alterations of the chemistry of his mind could destroy his ability to fear entirely. Without fear he would die. He would not care about anything but his mission. Perhaps his mission would not even work without understanding the pain of terror himself, anymore.

But could he truly lose the ability to fear so much that he would not even care to take a drink to stave his thirst? Would he care enough about life and death that he would take care of himself? Would he believe his body to have become that of a god's and die in the first attack he made over Gotham from making a leap he knew he had little chance in making and would take it anyway?

Was Project Walking Dead the same gambling leap?

He took another sip of tea, a little longer and more like a gulp, as he ignored how cold and bitter it was this time. He stared out again aimlessly.

Then he closed his eyes as he slowly set his cup back down, so he did not spill it with how violently he shook.

"Boss!"

"Nghhh!" cried Jonathan with a jump that spilled his tea and crashed his café-stolen cup.

Standing upright, though not turning around to face the goon and his heavy, dull breaths of anxiousness, Jonathan slammed his fists against the desk.

"What IS it, William!?" he snarled. "I told you I was not to be disturbed while I was working!"

He allowed himself the pleasure at least of being half-hidden in shadow so that the goon could not even seen the back of his head clearly without the Scarecrow mask.

"But, Boss, Broker's not back yet! What if he got caught?"

Jonathan rolled his eyes. Unfortunately, he still saw fit for the Scarecrow to have goons when he awoke from his short-lived death, but then would it not be interesting if the Scarecrow saw fit to dispose of them rather than make use of them once Jonathan Crane was out of the way?

He pulled out his favorite pocket watch— the one with the hooded Death counting the seconds of life with his infamous scythe as the secondhand.

It was too early to be truly concerned.

"Go and watch for him, then, if it troubles you so much. If he's not back within the next hour, we'll assume him compromised, and we'll have to move out in the likelihood of his prattling out our location to the authorities."

"Sure thing, Boss," gulped William.

"Good."

But what if it's Batman? A voice quivered in the back of his mind.

If Batman had caught Broker, the self-righteous vigilante could be right over his head in the empty rafters of this abandoned old micro-lab.

That was a small fear he told himself. After the Joker's escape in his attack on the Vreeland Manor, Batman had more than enough on his plate without snagging street scum and worrying about the Scarecrow. Besides, the true Scarecrow would be emerging within the hour anyway. Even if Batman caught him while he was still recuperating, he would escape at the proper time again without restraint at his leisure.

Another painful and violent tremor went through his body—yanking like a barbed-wire lasso around the inside of his chest. For a few seconds he almost thought he would pass out, but it quickly passed. As it passed, just the hint of a sneer tugged at the corner of Jonathan's lip despite his heavy, choking breaths. He thought how very little the Joker's name would mean once the Scarecrow had been completed to his full power and dominance over this miserable city. All the pain Jonathan felt now would be well worth the echoing laughter that haunted Gotham's dream being replaced by lost shrieks in a green, murky fog that would blot out the living sun forever.

#

Harley raised a brow.

She was not sure what it was, but something about that guy no older than eighteen seemed to be hiding something. She shook her head. It had to be nothing. After all, there were so many things he could be doing sneaking away with a sack of groceries into the alleys at night. Sure, it was not safe, and a mother would have told him so, but that did not mean it was something that Lunabat needed to check out.

Honestly, she did not want it to be something she needed to check out. She was tired and wanted to go back to her seedy hotel, where a good Harley-like leap and a kick had already scared a late-night room-picker out of his wits the other night.

After more than a week of hunting for the Joker, her enthusiasm was down enough to decide that she should go find Batman first and ask him what to do. She was going to do it first thing that evening.

It was near dawn now, and she had not even been out all night for Lunabat scouting. She was hiding, deciding, and she had only come out so early now because she had done some pre-dawn shopping herself with what was left of her money that she had brought in her duffle bag. After all, dawn was not exactly early in January, and when she had woken up she had not felt like going back to bed.

As she turned away she could not help the nagging voice in the back of her mind telling her that if the boy was hiding something. He was probably doing something illegal or feeding someone else who was doing something illegal. She could not help but recall the grocery shoppers that the Joker had sent out when they needed something to eat while lying too low to eat out at a decent restaurant. It was common practice among the Arkham escapees who did not have a big underground network to give them food in the daytime like normal as with Rupert Thorn.

This boy had all the clues of being just the sort of "shopper" Harley was thinking of.

Could it be the Joker?

The kid was not exactly the Joker's type in goons. He usually liked the type that looked like stereotypical muscle so that it was funnier when he dressed them up. This boy just looked like the usual child from a mixed up family that ended up so sadly in Crime Alley with no future except to find out where the next meal was coming from.

Poor kid, thought Harley sincerely.

She sighed. Pity did not stop her from thinking that this was somebody's gopher, though. In fact it furthered her resolve to go and find out whose gopher. If it was an emergency, she may call Batman. She would use stealth and scout it out first. Then decide the best course of action.

Silent as a mouse she slipped after the boy who had lingered somewhere for a candy bar from the bag. Then he continued on, and, surprisingly, not very far before he entered a small office building.

Through the fog, the lights glowing from it reminded Harley of a tugboat surrounded by lifeless ships. The rounded shape of one corner might have been what caused it.

Though boards covered the windows and a sign said the place was due to be torn down in April, the light glowed boldly and unafraid. It was the neighborhood. No one was going to question it in a neighborhood like this one. Even the grocery story was seedy and dumpy enough to be condemned.

The boy slipped in through a window rather than a door where a man met him, and Harley, already having donned her Lunabat suit, made her way onto the roof and found to her pleasant surprise that a tiny top-window was not locked. She slipped inside with the finesse of an eel and crept like a fox across the boards. She did not get far before she found a crack broad enough to look through, and she did not hesitate to peek.

Far below in an ill-lit space were counters and tables and a cold cement floor. An old antique desk caught her attention that an old antique appraiser might say would have been worth at least a good ten thousand dollars if it had not been for the chips and the pink paint that made it worth only fifty bucks. What made it worse was that someone had tried to remove the paint by hacking it in such a way that made it worth less than twenty and a dentist sticker for how the owner would grind his teeth together afterwards from the irony of it. It takes a dentist with a crowbar to pry jaws like that open again.

It did not surprise her, though it certainly made her forget everything else, when, amidst the rat's nest of papers, test tubes, vials, books, and a cage of lab rats, was the bird's eye view of Jonathan Crane's messy copper hair as he scurried just like a lab rat himself over to his desk to scribble something in his open logbook.

A door opened.

"Say, Boss?" asked a voice.

"William! I thought I told you—!" snapped Jonathan back.

"Sorry, Boss," said the same voice, and the same door closed again. Through the door the man said, "In case you want to know, Broker's back."

"Thank you!" sniffed Jonathan.

"Oh, and by the way, I don't mean to be rude, but it is 'Bill,' just in case, well…" the voice dropped into muttering.

"May I work in peace, now? You're job is to remain outside and leave me undisturbed until the—until I come out."

"After the experiments?"

"Yes. Now, if you would be so kind?" snapped Jonathan.

"Sure thing, Boss."

The conversation over, Jonathan let loose a frazzled growl, and then muttered to himself something about good help as he scratched through the hair on top of his head. Then he glanced over a sheet of paper before grabbing a syringe from a drawer.

Lunabat squinted as she eyed the poor rats in the cage near at hand, and her eyes darted back to Jonathan who extracted something from a bottle of very green liquid. The vividness of it made it look like it was glowing in the sickly pallor of the single winking, florescent ceiling light.

"This is it," Jonathan said in a near-whisper to himself as he stared into the syringe held just inches from his eyes. "The final injection, and though, I've said it more than once already, this, and no other time before this, is the final moment before the Scarecrow's supremacy… and the death of the miserable creature known to mankind as Jonathan Godfrey Crane…"

He spoke like a madman in an old black and white movie boasting passionately about his plans for the audience.

Lunabat wrinkled her nose. She was used to such melodrama having spent so much time at Arkham. Hey, she had indulged in it herself once or twice, but she watched him more closely than before now. Hey eyes flickered at every movement he made.

After swallowing hard, as though with much difficulty, he shook his head and shifted his weight. Then he pulled up the sleeve of his red, scarecrow's tunic. He was wearing no gloves or his mask, but everything else was part of his costume. His bare skin looked so pale and clammy and prone. Then he took the syringe, and Harley's eyes went wide. Only for a second, did she panic. Then she glowered and leapt like a tiger upon her prey.

"No!" she growled even before landing just in front of the completely stupefied, horrified, and furibund mad scientist interrupted at the brink of the copestone of his career. Throwing off her cowl and mask, she snapped, "You can't do this!"

He had dropped the syringe onto the floor under one of the desks, but he was still staring at her for some moments before he remembered his poison. It gave Harley plenty long enough to see his condition in full. He was worse than she had guessed from her sight of him from the rafters. His eyes were swollen red, his face as pale as a ghost and almost looked a little blue or green in the cheeks. Dark rings circled his eyes, and he looked gaunter than usual. He swallowed with difficulty as though his Adam's apple really was him trying to swallow a small crab apple whole. His breathing was strained, and he shook now and then and winced with pain when his eye lids were not simply twitching.

But this was the last injection that he had been about to administer to himself. How many more had there been before this one?

"You look awful," Harley pointed out as a matter of fact and quite suddenly.

This made Jonathan blink in surprise again as though he had expected that they would stand there for eternity staring at one another.

Outside the door there were mutterings and whispers. For a moment Harley prepared herself to face the goons and their guns. Instead she and Jonathan heard rummaging and then silence before footsteps echoing outside.

Jonathan rolled his eyes and growled.

"Well, what do you expect?" Harley said putting her hands on her hips. "What kinda person wants to help a guy whose MO is spraying fear gas at people without any real purpose or motive other than to do it?"

At first Jonathan looked about to fly into a tantrum like an overtired child. But after clenching his fists and chattering his teeth for a few seconds, he shook his head and tried to regain composure.

"H—Har—Miss Quinn," he choked out. "I don't have time to explain what I'm doing, but as I stated earlier, everyone has to do what they need to! I accept what you need to do, and you must accept what I need to do."

"Kill yourself and hope you come back as a Scarecrow ghost?"

Again Jonathan closed his eyes.

"Really, Miss Quinn! There's no need for that kind of sarcasm. I normally would appreciate the concern, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave. Immediately."

"I wasn't being sarcastic," Harley said noticing how he held onto the counter behind him for support, but she also noticed how his eyes darted suddenly and a little too purposely towards something else behind him as well. "Professor, listen. Whatever it is that's going on, injecting yourself with whatever you're doing is killing you, can't you see that?"

"It's too late to back out of this now," muttered Jonathan. "Only completing the transformation will balance out what I've broken down. The pathetic humanness I must fight every day cannot get in the way any longer."

"But you are human!" Harley insisted.

"I'm perfectly aware of that!"

"Then listen to what you're saying. You're afraid, Professor, and I understand that." She smiled as Jonathan glared dangerously at her through clenched teeth and another violent quiver that might have been both rage and pain at once as he gave a few gasps between his teeth. "Come on. There's gotta be something you overlooked."

Like giving up being the Scarecrow for instance…

"I saw the book by Dr. Long," said Harley with a careless shrug. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you hit a rut here, Professor. You feel like none of your work was worth anything. That you're not good enough. That you gotta work harder to make the pain worth it, to please the master above you."

"You don't— you don't understand, child! Nor can I expect you to. I said you were never meant to be a Rogue, and I meant it. The heroine suits you better than the stooge, but you cannot help me."

He was scooting back from her along the counter with hands against it for continued support as his legs began to wobble beneath him, but Harley was not falling for it entirely. He was making it worse on purpose. The pain may have been real, and the exhaustion, and the fear and desperation, but in that desperation he was holding a reserve of power that he aimed to use in the very, very near future.

"You don't understand," he cracked with large swollen eyes looking at her like a rabid bloodhound, "that the two forces I wish to settle will war to the end of time to the core of the kingdom of Hades if it is not controlled. It must be stopped."

Harley tried not to get emotional back, except to raise a skeptical yet sympathetic brow. She knew why Jonathan kept speaking: he was stalling to get away, but why was Harley stalling when she knew that words were useless?

"I know this sounds crazy," she found herself going on even though part of her kept nagging her to just catch the poor fool for the authorities and be done with it, "but have you ever thought that it's just your own humanity trying to escape the madness that you put yourself in?"

"I have thought…" muttered Jonathan. "And have considered madness and it is irrelevant to my cause, except that it is all the further reason to destroy Jonathan Crane, and be it far from me to forget that you are a student of psychology as much as I am."

With a growl, he made his move like lightning.

Snatching a vial, he meant to throw it at her. No doubt it had fear gas in it enough to allow Jonathan to escape behind her screams, but Harley kicked it, snatched it, and then gave Jonathan himself another good kick in the chest before she tossed the vial gently into a wastebasket behind her. He did not have the strength to fight back, and he collapsed like a ragdoll onto the floor with a hideous moan.

When, after some time, Jonathan did not say anything more than another moan and a whimper as he clutched his chest, Harley's eyes softened.

Although it was against her better judgment, she crept closer. The thought of the Joker bouncing up after his supposed knock-around by Batman emerged in her mind, but Jonathan was seriously hurt and seriously ill. She reached out a hand as he began to shield himself from her. She tried to touch his shoulder, but just as she was inches away he tried to swipe at her like a stray cat.

"I don't need your pity!" he snapped.

Hardly offended, Harley stepped back again patiently.

"You think I need you at all? I am the Scarecrow! The Scarecrow!" he wailed, looking sicker than ever and so sweaty in the brow that his hair was sticking flat to it. "I don't need you anymore than I need the pathetic being called a 'mother', for lack of a better word, who dared to spawn that spineless, simpering, whimpering brat with the irony of his forename meaning 'gift' just to add to his misery. That child of goblins that terrified that fool of a mother, that changeling forsaken by all and cared for by none! He is DEAD, you hear me! DEAD!" He was sobbing now despite himself. "Only the Scarecrow remains! Fear Incarnate! Don't I frighten you?! A creature neither man nor beast, neither alive nor dead! Your interference changes nothing! Nothing! Nothing…"

Again Harley reached out a hand to touch him. This time, either he desired it now or he was too weary to fight her.

"Cold…" he shivered.

"Are you cold?" asked Harley.

"Cold tea…" he breathed incoherently. "…never, never again…"

To Harley this almost sounded like something Tetch would say in a similar situation, but then she had noticed already the broken tea mug and tea on the floor.

"I care about you, Jonathan," said Harley with full seriousness as the thought of the other Arkham inmates came into full focus in her mind. "Doesn't that count for something? I'd hate to lose you too."

She could not catch the last phrase as she thought of Poison Ivy, and she nearly choked.

Jonathan raised his eyes slowly to Harley. They rolled with the true lolling of a lunatic. He looked almost like he was about to bite her, but his eyes changed suddenly again. He looked at her only for second with sincere confusion as though blinking through a thick cloud that was thinning only now, but he did not answer. He suddenly closed his eyes. Completely drained, he went limp.