The Legend of Gotham Hollow
"And you're sure you have no idea where you put it, my darling?" asked Emilia Crane, as she rifled through the mountain of papers on her husband's desk.
"It's in one of these stacks," said Jonathan Crane, who was leafing through an identical mountain on a nearby table. "I really should start filing these papers, but I find the whole process deadly tedious."
"Don't look at me," retorted Emilia. "I may have been a librarian, but my least favorite part of the job was organizing things people were just going to mess up again. And I know you, my darling – you have a naturally chaotic mind. Anything I organized would be ruined in a matter of hours, which would infuriate me. I hate seeing all my effort wasted."
"All my effort organizing this Halloween surprise is going to be wasted if I can't find that stupid formula," muttered Crane. "It's actually unbelievable – I invent a new strain of fear gas for my annual Halloween attack, and then I misplace the damn formula! If I didn't know better, I'd say Batman had stolen it in order to foil me."
"Have you heard of computers, my angel?" asked Emilia. "In the 21st century, people can type things up in documents, and then they're easy to find since you can just search for them by typing in keywords…"
"Don't mock me, my dear," he interrupted. "I've always preferred writing things down by hand. It helps me remember them better."
"Clearly not, if you can't remember the formula without us searching through all these notes," retorted Emilia.
"If taking notes by hand makes me an old fogey, then I fully embrace that label," he continued, ignoring her.
"It does, and it's a good thing I love old fogeys, or I'd be very annoyed with you for wasting my Saturday like this," replied Emilia, kissing his cheek. "I just don't understand how you have this many papers – what is all this stuff?" she asked, scanning the scribblings.
"Notes and things," he replied. "Some formulae, some just ideas for attacks on Gotham. I always save everything I write just in case it might be useful to revisit in the future, hence the vast number of papers."
"What's this?" asked Emilia, pulling out a stack of papers which were tied together. "The Legend of Gotham Hollow," she read aloud, seeing it written in big letters on the first page.
"Give me that!" snapped Crane, seizing it from her. "That's nothing!"
"Darling, what is it?" she asked.
"Nothing," he repeated. "Just…something I wrote once. A long time ago. Before I met you."
"You wrote a story?" asked Emilia.
"It's not a story – more of an homage, or fanfiction, as I believe the term is," replied Crane. "Rather pathetic, but I was in a very bad place mentally at the time, and writing fiction, even a silly fanfiction, helped a little bit. It's highly embarrassing in hindsight."
"My darling, I will not hear a word against fanfiction," retorted Emilia, sternly. "True, some is dreadful, but some of everything is dreadful. Originality is largely overrated, and some of the greatest writers in the world wrote what we might now term fanfiction – Shakespeare was hardly original with his plots, for instance."
"And mine was hardly Shakespeare," retorted Crane. "It isn't even Washington Irving, which it was based on. It was just bad, the insane ramblings of an unhappy man who cast himself as the hero of the story to alleviate his melancholy…"
"Read it to me," interrupted Emilia, sitting down on the sofa and patting the seat beside her.
"Darling, no," he replied. "I told you, it's badly written, and absolutely mortifying…"
"That's why I want to hear it," she replied with a smile. "You can't be embarrassed to share things with me, my darling. I'm your wife, and husband and wife are meant to share everything. Besides, it's a better way to spend a Saturday than searching through papers."
"I would really rather not…" he began.
"You don't trust me not to laugh at it?" she asked.
"No, it isn't that," he said. "It's just…my character in the story…is…in love with a character…based on Harley…"
"And you think I'll be jealous of your crush on her before you met me, is that it?" asked Emilia. "I wish you had more faith in me, Jonathan. I'm not a jealous woman, and I'm absolutely secure in your love for me. I'm not going to worry about some ancient history infatuation. Anyway, Katrina doesn't even end up with Ichabod in the original story, and I assume you cast yourself as Ichabod, Professor Crane."
"Yes, I did – it seemed a natural fit," he replied. "Odd-looking schoolteacher named Crane…"
"You're not odd-looking," she interrupted, kissing his nose. "And as I recall, the character of Ichabod was rather mercenary, only really interested in Katrina for her fortune. That's certainly not the case for you and Harley, assuming Harley is Katrina."
"Yes…she is," he stammered. "It's…quite different from the original story. There's no Headless Horseman, for instance."
"Oh," said Emilia, frowning. "But he's the best part of the story. Why would you cut him out?"
"I didn't," he retorted. "I merely transformed him. Into the Headless Batman."
"Jonathan, I demand that you read this to me right now!" snapped Emilia. "Or this is the first and last Halloween we'll be married!"
Crane sighed. "Well, how can I refuse you after that threat?" he muttered, sitting down next to her. "But don't blame me when you hate it. You're a professional writer, after all."
"So are you," she retorted.
"Academic writing doesn't count, my dear," he replied. "The purpose of that is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. It's a lot more difficult to write something interesting that people will want to read, and I suspect I haven't managed that."
"Leave that for me to judge, Jonathan," replied Emilia, cuddling against him as he began the story.