Many thanks to my reviewers. I adore you lot. I'll try to keep it as funny and witty as possible. I'm honestly flattered by the compliments.
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No more wrathful soliloquies. No more chemistry experiments. No more nagging, complaining, pestering, or kvetching. No more speaking French, no words with more than three syllables. No more tucking his pencil behind his ear. No more letting his hair get so wild he looked like Harry Potter. No more Lord of the Rings, at least until the Joker was converted. No more telling Harley hyenas were actually closer to cats than to dogs. In short, no more being Jonathan Crane.
"Whatcha thinking about, Johnny? Leveling up your elfin warrior so he can use his lightning attacks?" The Joker asked.
"No. I don't have any elfin warriors, let alone one capable of shooting lightning. If I did, I'd direct them to fry you, since I firmly believe you should have been given the chair years ago." Crane replied.
"You'd better watch out. It's only been five minutes, and I'm close to counting that as nerdy." The clown said.
This was absolutely ridiculous. The Joker's experiment laughed in the face of scientific procedure. Of course, the psychopath laughed in the face of every established law, except for the laws of physics, so Crane wasn't surprised. It was probably only a matter of time and mental decay before the Joker tried to retort Newton, Einstein, and Hawking.
"Do as you see fit. I'm going to nap, as soon as you get off my couch. Go sit on the floor or lock yourself in the pantry. You're going to be filling it very soon, by the way." Crane said.
His tactic was perfect. He couldn't do anything to draw the Joker's interest if he was sleeping. Seeing as how he was used to having an unpredictable sleep cycle, he could conk out in five minutes nearly anywhere. Once you learned to sleep in the back alleys of Gotham, you could sleep any place north of Hell.
"That's a cheap way out." The Joker grumbled.
"Too damn bad. I'm tired, anyway. Wake me up at 11:59 so I can laugh in your face." Crane said. A 10 hour nap was really pushing it, but maybe he was underestimating how tired he actually was. That scuffle with the Bat a few nights ago had probably taken a lot out of him.
"What if I just want to sit here and poke at you all day?" The clown inquired. He jabbed a finger in the Scarecrow's direction.
The Scarecrow did something that wasn't nerdy, but which did carry the risk he'd be beaten to death with a nearby lamp. He kicked the Joker off the sofa. Literally, with his foot. The surprised clown sprawled out on the carpet, wondering just how in the heck he had gotten there.
"I told you, I'm taking a nap. Get lost." The Scarecrow said.
Where did Straw Head get the notion he was the boss? In case he failed to notice, he was in the presence of the Joker. Nobody was the boss of the Joker. Not even Bruce Springsteen. Anybody who tried to refute the clown's claim of superiority had better have his final will and testament signed and sealed, and his tombstone picked out.
"Finally, showing some backbone? Good for you, kid." The Joker said.
Crane's eyes went wide. He hadn't just acted rashly and guaranteed himself a violent, and bloody end? Maybe showing a little dominance wasn't a bad idea. He was sick of being the other villains' doormat. No matter how pathetically thin and angular he was, that didn't make him a hat-rack, no matter what Tetch thought. Next time someone tried to hang something on him, he was going to show them!
"Give me a hand up?" The Joker asked. He had extended his arm, as though offering a handshake. Crane searched his face for any devious smirk, couldn't find one, and took the offered hand. For an evil genius, he was sometimes a dope.
"Set phasers to stun." The Clown Prince said before collapsing to the ground in a giggling heap.
So that's what would have happened if four-year-old Jonathan Crane had stuck a fork in the electrical outlet. He would have been electrocuted, twitched like a broken beetle, and hastened his young mother to a grave she was soon destined for, anyway.
"Puddin', what's goin' on in here? What's wrong with the Professor? Uh, why's he shakin' like that?" Harley asked. She scurried from the kitchen and into the living room.
"Johnny doesn't like shaking hands, Harley." The Joker said.
The Scarecrow, still twitching, struggled to get up. His right hand, extended in friendship hardly 20 seconds ago, was utterly numb. He had no feeling all the way up to his shoulder. The nerves had been overloaded. It would likely be a few minutes before they started firing properly again.
The Joker waited patiently as Crane fought his way up. Once the Scarecrow was relatively stable on his hands and knees, the crazy clown clamped his hand on Crane's shoulder. The Joker's killer gag gift, his joy buzzer, knocked the Scarecrow right back down.
The second burst of electricity nearly knocked Crane unconscious. He was dimly aware of the rough carpet beneath his face, and the odd dance his feet were doing. Distantly, he heard the Joker's mad laughter, Harley's quiet concern, and the shuffling approach of the brown, blurry shape of a hyena coming to investigate. If the animal saw him as wounded prey, he was going to be mauled to death on his own hideous, beige carpet.
"Maybe that's enough, Mister J. Whatever Professor Crane did, I'm sure he didn't mean it. 'Sides, if he's got a weak ticker, that's gonna kill him. I don't like sharin' houses with corpses. It creeps me out." Harley said.
Beautiful. He takes in a stranded woman, her mad lover, and her pets and doesn't charge her a red cent of rent. When the psychotic clown she loves abuses him, how does she respond? She doesn't throw herself over his body like some movie heroine. She stands there, biting her lip and can only talk about how unpleasant his dead body would be.
"Don't you worry your pretty blonde head, Harley dear, I'm not cutting my experiment short. I'm just teaching Spooky how to share the couch." The Joker said.
Bud trotted over and stuck his snout in the Scarecrow's ear. There are few things that feel nastier than a big, wet, snorting nose going into places it doesn't belong.
Crane swatted the hyena. Bud acted as though nothing had happened. He removed his muzzle from the Scarecrow's ear and began to lick his face, instead. The hyena had breath bad enough to blight crops and sicken farm animals. Raw meat, Ramen noodles, and not brushing were a deadly combination.
"Get it off me! It stinks, get it off me!" Crane shouted.
"Sure thing, Professor. Come to Mommy, Bud." Harley called. The hyena forgot about slobbering over every inch of the Scarecrow and scrambled over to clown.
Before Lou could wander in and commence the licking, Crane forced himself to stand. The double dose of electricity left him feeling weak and shaky, like a newborn calf. However, it also left him positively furious. If he knew a physical assault wouldn't just result in the Joker breaking every bone in his body, he'd punch the clown.
"You insidious, cowardly, bastardly lunatic! What's wrong with you?" The Scarecrow demanded.
"According to my doctors, pretty much everything." The Joker replied, chuckling.
"Obviously! Do you know what damage you could have caused me? Never mind the fact that I could have died. As though you wouldn't just move out and leave me to putrefy. I could have suffered permanent nerve damage. This hand could have constricted into a claw and stayed like that forever! Then I'd have to learn to write with my left hand. I am not ambidextrous, you know! My research could suffer for years. You try dragging a kicking, screaming test subject with one hand when you weigh as much as I do!" The Scarecrow shouted.
The Joker counted with his fingers. "Let's see. Knowing exactly what effects he'd suffer. One strike. Knowing the word 'ambidextrous'. Two strikes. Admitting to being a scrawny weakling. Three strikes. Throw in the strike from before, and we're nearly half way to proving you're a nerd."
"You're a third of the way, actually." Crane said before he could smack himself.
"Math whiz. Five strikes."
The Scarecrow was seconds from tearing his hair out in great clumps. If he didn't get the Joker's grin out of his sights in the next minute, he was going to take a butcher knife to the clown, Harley's mislead heart be damned.
With as much dignity as he could muster, the Scarecrow turned from the Joker and made for the stairs. He intended to go up to his room, lock the door, and perhaps push a large piece of furniture against it for insurance. Unfortunately, Crane had underestimated the buzzer's lingering effects. Half way up the stairs, his legs buckled and he ended up rolling all the way down.
Harley and the Joker clutched each other and brayed laughter. When Crane had fallen gracelessly down the stairs, he had looked like a giant dead spider, a tangled mess of long limbs. The thud he made upon landing was the perfect sound effect to complete the whole show.
Too bad that hadn't killed him. Dying of a broken neck would have saved him the great shame of untangling himself from himself, and crawling up the steps. As was, having come through the tumble relatively unharmed, the Master of Fear was forced to become the Master of the Pratfall. Muttering about how he'd like to drown the Joker in a very deep well, the Scarecrow hobbled off to his lair to brood.
Even with the door shut, the Scarecrow could still hear the Joker's laughter. When that clown thought something was funny, he let folks in Red China know about it.
"In a perfect world, he'd develop throat cancer and lose his larynx and tongue." Crane muttered. He knew it was incredibly rude to wish the c-word on anyone, but if there was a single human being not in control of a dictatorship who deserved to be eaten by his own mutated cells, it was the Joker.
Judging by the noises downstairs, Harley was doing impressions of what the lanky Scarecrow had looked like rolling down the steps. Crane wanted to hide his head. No doubt falling on his ass had earned him another strike in the Joker's useless experiment.
The one bright spot was that Crane was finally alone. His 'guests' were downstairs, entertaining themselves at his misery. Even if he had just been electrocuted, twice, and humiliated, there was now a high chance he'd come out the winner in the Joker's game. Yes, game was a much better word than experiment. To call it an experiment any longer would be to spit in the face of all things scientific.
In some of his hideouts, the Scarecrow had been reduced to sleeping on the floor. In a story he would repeat only under extreme torture, he had once lived inside a refrigerator box for a week and shared the cramped quarters with a ratty mutt he used as both a pillow and an alarm. The things he'd do to avoid the Bat apparently had no end.
Compared to that, the lowest of low, this house was paradise. Whoever had owned the house before the mortgage meltdown, sheer bad luck, or simple human greed had taken it from them had left behind some furniture. The couch downstairs, the kitchen table, and Crane's bed were all abandoned. The television he had stolen, and had been chased for three blocks by the TV's former owner.
The rest of the forgotten furniture had been a bonus, but he would be eternally grateful for the bed. Crane, like the communist critters of Orwell's Animal Farm, knew one of the main things separating man from beast was a clean set of sheets and a mattress to put them on. Bed sheets good, box in the alley, bad.
Maybe he'd rob a bookstore tomorrow, if the opportunity presented itself. A nice, long session with his favorite authors would be just the thing to get the horrendous memory of the clown and his demented jokes out of his head. Crane hadn't really had the opportunity to read anything decent in some time. In fact, the only thing he read with any regularity was the daily newspaper, which he filched from mailboxes.
His musings on literature and petty theft were broken when something very large crashed below. The Joker had probably broken one of the scant pieces of furniture the Scarecrow possessed. Crane scowled. That bloody maniac had crossed the line from house guest to house wrecker. If the buzzer hadn't knocked so much fight out of him, the Scarecrow would have been down the stairs and shouting about destruction of property.
Since any more conflict would just result in him getting turned inside out and hung from the ceiling fan, the Scarecrow decided to take that nap he wanted. He made sure the bedroom door was locked before settling down. The last thing he wanted to see when he woke up was the Joker, either standing over his bed like some specter or defacing what little clothing he had.
Downstairs, Harley and the Joker finally calmed down. The Joker tripping over Lou and smacking his head off the kitchen table had really sobered them both up. It was only funny when other people sustained injuries as a result of their clumsiness.
"Puddin', are you gonna need stitches? I'm sure the professor has a needle and thread around somewhere. He sewed his own costume, you know." Harley said.
The Joker was holding a dish towel to his head. "No, I'm not. It's hardly even bleeding. Harley, get that hyena away from me! He's eying me like an antelope!"
Lou was sitting at the Joker's feet, staring at him. Being so scrutinized was uncomfortable in the best of times, but when the watcher had some of the strongest jaws in the animal kingdom, it quickly became a health hazard.
"Sure thing. Come on, Lou, baby. Let's go see if you like okra." Harley said. She led the hyena into the kitchen. The whimpering noises that soon followed suggested that Lou did not like okra in the least.
The hyena ran from the kitchen, skittered up the stairs with much more grace than the Scarecrow had managed, and disappeared into one of the rooms. Harley, the open can of okra in her left hand and a spoon in her right, watched him go. If Lou didn't like okra, she probably wouldn't either. Since it was a vegetable, the chances Mister J would like it were slim to none, and slim was packing up to leave town. The harlequin sighed. The only food in the house was something nobody wanted to eat. It sounded like a really bad episode of the Twilight Zone.
"Is that the last of the food?" The Joker asked, eying the okra like it was some lethal alien virus. He had never eaten okra, and never would. In fact, he'd rather grill up Harley's jingling jester cap before he'd eat the horror in that can.
"'Fraid so, Mister J. I guess we could try to find edible plants out in the yard, but asides from that, there's no more food." Harley said.
The Joker stood up and snapped his fingers. His head injury was forgotten in his excitement. There was, of course, an easy way to get food. As a bonus, it would also annoy old long, tall, and frightful.
"Johnny!" The clown exclaimed.
"What? Puddin', there's no way I'm gonna eat Professor Crane!" Harley cried.
"No, you silly nit! Our deal. All we have to do is get Spooky to act nerdy seven more times. It can't be all that hard. You know, and I know, and I'm sure he knows, deep down he's a loser. As soon as he flunks out, we send him on a grocery run." The Joker explained.
"Great idea! That's why I love you so much; you're so clever." Harley beamed.
"Huh. I thought it was because I said I'd beat you to death with a crowbar if you ever left me for good." The Joker said. The cheery grin fell straight off Harley's face.
"Well, there's tons of reasons I love you, Puddin'. But, I was just wonderin', how are we gonna get to the professor? I know he locks his door." Harley said.
"They haven't invented a lock I can't pick, shoot, or blow up. I'll have that door open in a minute." The Joker said. "In the mean time, I need you to do something for me."
Harley looked at her man with pure adoration. "Sure. Anything you need, I'll do it!"
"I need a black marker, shoelaces, shaving cream, duct tape, and a bucket full of cold water." The Joker said.
Harley memorized the eclectic list. She scurried off to hunt through the kitchen drawers, while the Joker crept up to the Scarecrow's room. He wasn't exactly a ninja, but he wasn't a tool chest falling down the stairs, either. Unless Crane was paranoid and listening for the squeak of the steps, the clown hadn't been detected.
Jonathan Crane wasn't listening; he wasn't even awake. Two minutes after lying down, he had conked out. It was never safe to fall asleep around the Joker. It was even more dangerous to do it when the clown was both hungry and in the mood for serious mischief. If the Scarecrow didn't know that by now, he would in about five minutes, or however long it took Harley to track down the list.
Oh, he was going to be so furious when he woke up.
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Author's Notes: Bruce Springsteen is nicknamed The Boss, on the off chance every person in creation didn't know that all ready.
If you've never read Animal Farm, it's about a group of barnyard animals in Britain overthrowing their human master. The pigs take over, and soon become just as bad as the farmer. It's an allegory for the Russian Revolution. The animals agree that no animal will ever sleep in a human's bed. Also, the line "bed sheets, good, box in the alley, bad" is a little joke. The animals had a mantra "four legs good, two legs bad".