JMJ

Chapter Twelve

Above all Shadows

For a moment Harley feared Jonathan was dead, but she soon saw that he was still breathing and heavily. Quickly, she looked around and found a mat in the corner of the room that he might have been using to sleep on considering the pile of blankets thrown over it. She tried to help him to his feet, and thankfully she did not have to drag him. He was not completely unconscious.

He staggered as he leaned on her shoulder. His weight seemed to consist mostly of bone density, regardless, and his arm bones jabbed into her shoulders painfully to prove it. Behind the expected smells of a person not taking overly good care of himself, there was a strange chemical odor that almost reminded her of toxic sanitizer.

Once she had him laid down and she pulled the blankets up for him, he seemed to be out entirely for a moment. She started to check his pulse at his tense wrist, but his heavy breathing started up again. She stroked his sweaty head, and he shivered as though from fear of her touch— recoiling like an injured, frightened kitten. As she continued to stroke, however, he calmed and seemed to welcome it and slowly to melt into a sick child with his mother at his bedside.

"There, there, Professor," she cooed gentler than her mother ever cooed. "I do understand. I understand what it's like to be upset with yourself for not pleasing your master, your idol, your god, and then I found out that it wasn't a separate person I was trying to please— nope, not the Joker. It was myself I was trying to please. I wanted to prove I could help him, that I could tame the rage and the pain...to flirt with power and be unafraid. I was too proud to admit that I could never have what I wanted even though I hardly even wanted it anymore. It was the principle of the thing…"

Then slowly Harley stood up.

At one of the tables, after a moment, she happened to glance upon many angry, spidery sketches of scarecrows and scarecrow-like creatures. There was one in particular drawn numerous times and once very prominently in particular and circled with an arrow and a note. The note was too messy to read, but the sketch did not even really look like a scarecrow so much anymore. It looked like an Old West preacher-turned-zombie holding a staff, and the creature had been cut down from a noose.

So he had been planning to be his own god, prophet, and priest all at the same time, huh?

Harley sighed and looked again at Jonathan's shivering form. He was already beginning to drool in his sleep.

"Poor, poor Jonathan…" she whispered, and she proceeded to get him some water.

#

The siren wailed, but it was not a police siren. It was the sound of an ambulance. It was not coming this way or going that way. It was omnipresent.

Jonathan was only conscious enough to recognize the sound and the lights and the babble of medical staff like a dream. He was rather more delirious than anything when he was not sound asleep. He whispered to himself below the loud noises making his skull ache and throb with pain. His head throbbing made his stomach and chest lurch and squirm more than ever.

"You cannot contain fear… I won't go back to Arkham; I won't be a slave of hospital care… I am fear, I am the genius of terror, the Scarecrow— the embodiment of all things that mankind wishes to hide from itself…the headless genius of famine… I…"

He shivered as he saw amidst the shadows in the queer light of the ambulance, a bat, but it vanished in a double take. He blinked and closed his eyes and he thought, It is not Batman I fear, is it…?

The world around him was swallowed up as under a cloud of bubbles after being plunged beneath inky depths.

It was not a man in a stupid latex bat suit who stopped criminals and hardly ever, if ever, killed them even when he had ample opportunity.

It was a fear that was beyond Jonathan's fear of not being left alone like in his childhood.

Despite how he fought it, he recalled the jeers and the coldness of peers and teachers around him all through his childhood. At home he was usually ignored except for the occasional comment that he should have never been born or of being burden on the family, but somehow he had always tolerated that more than school. The worse thing at home was when his mother dropped him off at his grandmother's house who, after showering him with kisses and hugs, would exclaim in her senile age how much she missed her favorite younger brother (who had drowned at the age of nine) before giving him almond cookies that gave him a stomach ache. It was true that Jonathan had had a fear of drowning for a time as though he was somehow attached to this mysterious great uncle he had never known, but that passed by the time he was ten. Besides, his grandmother died of old age by the time he was twelve, and became ever after a subject of the creepiest lies he could come up with about her to other children at school to the doctors at Arkham later. It was school he hated. It was school he feared. Even sleeping in the neighbor's barn when his mother's drunken boyfriend locked the house on him at least saved him the trouble of hearing him drunk inside the house. Family was too stupid to bother with. There, reading saved him the trouble of bothering about them, and no one had stopped him from reading. It kept him out of their way just as much as it kept them out of his way. School was where he lived and breathed and got revenge in any way he could. He lied to children younger than him to make them fear the dark or Santa Clause after the older children pushed him down or made him fear that they would hurt him further. He put animals into the desks of his female peers to see them shriek about something smaller than they after they laughed at his gawkiness and mocked him to his face.

But back to Batman himself, though, it was strange that it was a fear so strong that Dr. Bartholomew had ascribed it as chiroptophobia to add to Jonathan's already long list of co-morbidities. The Bat insignia was indeed a symbol to him and all bats afterwards, but it was neither a fear of the creature itself nor the man who used their image to strike fear into criminals. That was stupid.

It was a reminder.

Yes, a reminder that he was mad, a reminder that he was wrong, and most of all it was as an apparition of conscience personified, reminding him that he at one time had had a conscience, and that maybe it was not as dead as he supposed. There was a time when he believed in the morals he read in his books. Each time Batman appeared, it was more than simply the act of him stopping his plans. His very presence and each of his followers was like a vivacious taste of brisk cold air penetrating his cloud of delusion in which his deadened conscience came back to haunt him like the ghost of a cricket that could no longer be killed. It was also a reminder that Jonathan was no more a god than Batman was a bat. He was not even human, really, anymore. He was only a block of wood. Worse than that! He was half a block of wood and half a donkey— the fool of Gotham City however disruptive his braying and his rearing kicks, but he had no father to return to in prison or otherwise, and he certainly had no blue fairy.

…Unless Lunabat counted in warning him to take his medicine before the black shapes of those rabbits of death came to place him in his bier...

He could almost see them now hovering over him as silhouetted mutated hare-like beasts instead of humans in medical garb. He shivered once again in pitiful, writhing terror like a test subject prone on a science lab table.

The siren was gone, the aura of haste had lessoned, and he heard instead an incessant beeping, beeping, beeping. Even after the shapes had vanished, there was a beeping, beeping, beeping… It was racing, it was slowing, and it was maddening. He was at the brink of death.

Darkness took him completely again swallowing him in a sea of shadow where memory and time faded out completely.

Now he was dead and deservedly so. Killed by his own hand just as he had wished, but no Scarecrow would arise from his ashes. He had believed the Scarecrow had overtaken Jonathan Crane before, but even death would not give the Scarecrow full reign. It was only one less maniac for Batman to deal with.

#

An orange-red glow appeared.

Jonathan squinted his already closed eyes, but the light still shone through them if only but dimly. After a moment, he dared to open them. They felt like rusty hinges as he blinked slowly once and then once more before they began to work normally again. His breath came out heavy and shaky, and he could hear the beeping again. It no longer pounded through his throbbing head. In fact, all the noises sounded so much more solid and calm and quiet than they had before, and not like the echoing madness he had shortly beforehand had endured.

He was alive.

He had survived.

The pain was not bad anymore; though, he was sure he was too drugged up to know for sure how ill he still was. He was attached to an IV aside from the heart monitor ultimately attached to his finger. The fact that his head, although rather heavy and sluggish, was on solid ground again, so to speak, was propitious in the regard of being better than he had been.

He listened for a moment, intent upon the heart monitor. The rhythm was normal.

He was alive.

And he was human.

Human and nothing more.

Why?

No, not why was he human. Why was he alive? He should be dead. He deserved to be dead.

Was fate allowing him to go again on his mission once he was well enough to escape?

He could still be the Scarecrow. He still was the Scarecrow. This changed nothing. Fate was with him for certain. The mission was still ahead. The screams of Gotham, of all who oppose him would pay in time. This…

"No…" he breathed, closing his eyes again.

It was over.

No Scarecrow anymore. Ever.

If anyone died, it was the Scarecrow. Even thinking about going through all that again— even just wasting the effort— made him tired and annoyed at best. It was not worth it. Every time he had tried, every time he had fought for his cause, he had hurt himself more than anyone else. He was not the terror of Gotham. He was the joke of Gotham. Ironic that the Terror of Gotham was the Joker, if anyone, and the joke was the one that tried to scare everyone.

For a moment he listened again. This time, he allowed the sounds from beyond his room to be soaked into the ambience of solidity that he welcomed at the moment. Solidity, sanity, calmness, quietude… Sane, unruffled voices echoed outside his door. Muffled vehicles outside his window were as a continuous white noise.

He sighed.

What even was his goal again?

It had been some time since he thought hard about it.

To terrorize the city?

Then what?

Study it, yes, but then what?

He swallowed hard on his dry throat after realizing that he had been breathing through his mouth. Firmly holding it shut, he opened his eyes again and stared up at the tiled ceiling above him.

To hide his own fears, his own trauma, his own despair… it was pathetic really. It did not take a professor of psychology to diagnose that his focus on school was to hide how he had been ignored at home. How they had not wanted him. How his own mother had been afraid of him. He had always known it too. Even before the Scarecrow, he had known it: snickering at the preppy-type students at his college job who thought themselves special to volunteer for his experiments. They, not knowing that their teacher had once been the type they would have ignored at best in high school if not completely devastated. It all hid what had hurt before that. Even then he knew why he had been doing what he had. Even then part of him had thought it pathetic. Just as pathetic as a little boy dropping a cat who had once scratched him into a dog's fence to watch it scream in terror and flee for his amusement.

Pathetic.

It was the only word.

His revenge on Dr. Long… it had ultimately failed. It had supremely failed. It had been the reason why he had chosen to become a flashy super villain that had him ending up in Arkham Asylum for years of torture and misery there and for what? Dr. Long writing a pretty little book about how the Scarecrow's attack had saved him from insanity.

Pathetic.

It was enough to make Jonathan want to scream, but he felt he had already done enough of that sort of thing already, and who knew how much he had ranted and wailed in his sleep for his doctors here at the hospital.

He was alive. He had survived.

What did that mean?

It was as if he was being given a second chance like in the silliest of story books. It was enough to make one believe that, though his only self-deified status had been torn down, there truly was a God in heaven responsible for it, and perhaps that same Divine Providence that he had mocked since so earlier an age because of his hypocritical family. Had this truly allowed him this chance, this choice? And how many self-proclaimed gods had been brought down and not given this chance? It was bare before him now in the clarity of day.

Beyond the layer of snow upon the window sill, the sun was rather bright for January, he saw. He was reminded of something he read once about a lunatic being unable to blot out the sun by simply scrawling the word "darkness" upon his cell wall. How many times had he tried to do just that and failed? How many times did it take to see such absurdity?

He turned his head with care to more directly look out the window at his bedside. He felt like he had been living in a cave, and it had been centuries since he had looked— truly looked— upon a sunlit scene.

The reflection of the sun on the city windows was almost blinding. The sky showed blue behind some smoggy-looking clouds. It was just a normal scene. Nothing about it was fairytale-like, pristine, or like some Photo-shopped postcard, but that made it all the more reassuring, all the more real, and the more foreign to Jonathan Crane. He still felt so hesitant to look upon it. It was still a pain to see it. How the colors of blue, violet, and yellow and orange played in the light of the golden sun just beyond the vision of the window upon the gleaming buildings. How the snow on his window sill and on nearby roofs and jutting edges shone.

He was alive, and somehow, though it still confused him, he did not regret being alive.

He continued listening to heart monitor beeping over his heart. He counted every one of them for a time, not exactly knowing why as he stared intently out his window high above the traffic of Gotham. It was almost like riding on a cloud, or at least in a sense, in a state of suspension from the racing world below. Above the shadows and confusion of the raging world. He might as well been above skyscrapers, mountains, clouds and jet trails and even above (or beyond rather more scientifically speaking in this case) the moon.

The ever-powerful sun was there and ever brought light and warmth to the oblivious world in its wake. No one wonder it was used so often in metaphors for the secret persistent good in the world hidden behind all that was bad, and why Jonathan himself had rarely considered it except as a metaphor for how he would block it's light for man's inherent, instinctive fear of darkness and things they could not see and did not know…

The nurse came in, and though he felt himself recoil at her approach, he did not regret seeing her. She was neither what the world at large would consider beautiful (she was rather plain and plump), nor was her continence anything especially unique, but that was somehow better. She went about her business without much extra talk. Despite her politeness and a gentle comment about seeing him awake, she knew what sort of man she was treating. He could feel it, but he did not care. In fact, it would not have mattered who it was. He could not remember the last time he looked at another human being. Actually looked at one as a human being. Not as a test subject, not as some phantom from his childhood reading material, not something to compare himself to or to analyze or even to fear. She was just another human being, and he was as pleased, though hesitant to see her as he was the sunlit scene outside. So foreign and so alive. Her gray-blue eyes were alive and human.

He closed his eyes as she was about to leave. He felt he would go back to sleep within a few moments after she had tested everything and seemed satisfied with his progressed, but just as she was about to leave, she stopped.

"This came for you," she said suddenly.

Jonathan blinked in alarm as she held out an envelope.

"Excuse me?" Jonathan cracked on his unused voice, and he cleared his throat apologetically.

"This came for you. It's a card, I think."

Maybe she was not being so critical, after all, for she did very gently set it upon the table beside him and even smiled a little.

"There's a plant too. I'll bring it in with your breakfast."

Jonathan paused still staring at the envelope for a moment. Then he nodded.

"Thank you, Miss," he said rather absently.

The nurse nodded and left.

He did not know why he felt so bewildered. He already had a strong feeling who it was from, and it was hardly surprising, and yet, it was almost a further invitation, he felt, into the world he was tasting just now— the world, that even now he was not sure if he had the right to enter or even if he wanted to. Would it not be a well-educated assumption, that once Jonathan Crane was psychically treated and returned to Arkham Asylum, he would quickly lose the sentiment he now felt almost tantalizingly pulling towards the chance for a normal life and one he had never had? Would not the aura of the old castle— that old moaning, wailing structure haunted with screams, ranting, and mirthless laughter— remind him of his passion for his mission?

Its staff was almost as mad as its inmates, and the inmates had certainly more control if only psychologically. He knew his own doctor, Dr. Bartholomew, was nearer to the verge of a nervous breakdown each session he had with him. No matter how much he was advised by others, including Jonathan himself in mockery, to stop practicing and simply be the acting head (or just retire entirely), Bartholomew refused. Jonathan was quite aware that it had something to do with an acute fear of the Asylum losing control and his attempt to fight a touch of dementophobia that seemed to be growing more and more within him. Would it not all bring Jonathan back to his usual frame of mind? One session with Bartholomew would awaken the Scarecrow from the deepest grave to drool and gorge himself on the terror of that man. Besides, how many times had inmates thought they wanted to escape their fates and yet were only brought home again to that place of perfectly faultless despair called Arkham Asylum? Jervis Tetch, Edward Nigma, Harvey Dent…

Harleen Quinzel.

He rolled his eyes and swallowed again as he took up the envelope with a stiff and shaky hand.

With eyes now only half open and an expression of idleness, he opened the envelope and pulled out the card. It looked just like the sort of thing Harley would pick out. He clicked the roof of his mouth, but he smiled just a little even if a touch wryly. It was a puppy with large, exaggeratedly photo-shopped bright and hopeful pair of eyes holding up a brightly colored package by the ribbon in between its teeth.

Inside the card read something silly with a dog pun or two, but he only briefly noted that as he went down to the part written in a pink gel pen.

"Get well soon, Professor!"

She drew a couple plump heart shapes and a winking smiley face next to them. Jonathan had a strong feeling that she meant more than just physically too. Or least it was hidden behind the encouraging remark in some fashion.

His wry smile turned sad. Then he frowned thoughtfully.

He was alive. More alive than perhaps he had been since he first opened his eyes as an innocent infant from the womb, the womb where had been the only comforting place he had ever truly known and only out of natural human physiology. He almost felt as though he had just gone through birth again. It was a strange and almost terrifying feeling, though not altogether unpleasant somehow.

This was probably his last chance to give up the Scarecrow forever. The last heaven-sent chance. It was a miracle by his standards of the living-irony he had always known. An angel's word penetrating through darkness to his very soul, was this now. He knew it was just a tingle of physically explainable emotional responses, but he almost felt as though his soul was stirring with anticipation.

Maybe some of it really was his soul.

He held his breath.

Then the nurse showed up with Harley's little houseplant and his breakfast.

There is another popular subject for metaphors, thought Jonathan as he sipped at his dull tomato soup and spooned his gelatin, green life and spring.

His gaze was upon the white trimmed and vivid green hosta in its pot wrapped in bright, polychromatic foil.

Despite himself, he entertained the notion that the Scarecrow, the genius of famine, had ever dwelt in an eternal autumn, an era of decay unnatural and uncanny like a curse of Lovecraftian proportions. The Scarecrow had halted time and space more than Time itself for Tetch's mad tea party, with more acute precision and depth than the eternal winter of an ice age over the northern states.

No spring could ever come and rejuvenate or replace that which was lost, Jonathan had always known, thus trapping Jonathan in that state of slow and perpetual decay like some form of leprosy of the mind. Trapped beneath a falling house dilapidating, molding, crumbling. Replacing the lack of life and humanity with ghosts and howling demons and shrieks of lost souls whirling round and round into a flushing abyss. Never a winter to end it and bury it for the necessity of spring. And would Jonathan Crane continue to fear the pain of winter when now it was proven to him that his doubts about the reality of spring had been a lie? At least, if he would allow it, spring would come.

Finished with the soup but unable to eat the last scraps of the gelatin, Jonathan closed his eyes and stopped fighting the urge to drift back into unconsciousness, and he rested fitfully to the sound of the steady beeping of his living human heart.