I'm baaaaaaaack!
Hey, everyone. Thanks for the support. Yeah, in my headcanon there's about a 23-year age difference between the two of them, putting Crane at around 24 when he started his Scarecrow career and 30 at the beginning of this fanfic. 24 is pretty young for a respected university professor, but he's a genius so there's my excuse. His mother didn't seem too old in Scarecrow: Year One (although that might have just been the art style) so teen mom or not, it wouldn't really fit to have him be too much older than that. Overly long intro over.
Disclaimer: Though I'd be delighted if DC relinquished all of their rights to Batman and friends over to me (pwetty pwease?), I don't think that's happening any time soon. So yeah, I own none of these characters.
Dear Jonathan Crane,
Thanks for the plan! Her house is like that so I was able to use the first plan. I didn't really know how to find the bugs at first so I looked at this BIG book of bugs I have that I got for my last birthday for it. I found a picture of the bugs you wanted me to use and it took me two weeks to find a lot of them and I kept them in a big jar with holes on top and dropped sticks and bits of wood in there so they wouldn't get hungry and waited until Beth went to Myrtle Beach for the weekend. Beth's house is kinda nice so the criss-crossy wood surrounding the empty space under the porch and stuff didn't have many holes but her dad had just fixed a pipe under there or something because a little door-thing was open and I got in through there. The bugs kept falling on my face when I was putting them to the part I scraped off but I got a lot on there. It didn't do anything for a long time (that's why I haven't written in a while) but then I think Beth found a few in her room and then her dad called a bug person to come in and look and the bugs had eaten so much of the bottom of their house that they need to move away and if the bugs hadn't been found the house would have fallen down. It was on the news, even. Biggest bunch of telephone-pole beetles ever found eating a house. I am happy because Beth's family picked to go to Oklahoma with her granny. Good.
From Hester-Mae
Dear Hester-Mae,
I am happy to see that your first foray into entomological terrorism went without a hitch. Very good. I feel a strange sense of pride that I have coached you into a relatively large-scale revenge plot at such a young age and with only a few letters. Ah, but the satisfaction a teacher receives when a pupil has done perfectly is one of the most rewarding experiences in life, made all the more so in their rarity. Truth be told, I only began writing you back in the first place because I thought it would be an amusing diversion and that you would be a dull and ordinary child, but I am pleasantly surprised to find that you seem to be more similar to myself than I could have imagined. Blood is stronger than I thought. I cannot say I am displeased.
Ah, but enough of my rambling. You still have two more adversaries to be taken care of, do you not? You mentioned that you believed Jake to have issues with his father and that he enjoys harassing you. The two are perhaps related. Boys will usually look to their fathers as role models as to what a man should be and how they themselves should strive to be. This is true even if the boy fears or even despises his father. They see their fathers as a source of fear and torment but also as powerful and dominant and will often want to be dominant in return both to hopefully placate the father and to hide their own fears. Perhaps he is also hurting you out of a twisted sort of crush. The cliché of a boy tormenting a girl because he likes her has its basis in truth, but in no way excuses the little monster from plaguing you simply because he cannot express his hidden feelings (perhaps even hidden from himself) in a manner that does not involve you being harmed.
I've managed to gain a little help for this plot. In the envelope you will find a tiny seed that a colleague of mine managed to hide from the guards. Although she and I are not anywhere close to being friends, she agreed to help me when I showed her your letter explaining her troubles. She does not like to see the oppression of female by male any more than she likes the oppression of Kingdom Plantae by Animalia. I am not much into botany outside of plants with compounds useful to my endeavors (I do wish your schoolmates had more phobias that work to my mental strengths), but she informs me that she developed this seed to bring out hidden aggression in people, likely so that she may blame others for crimes she committed. If this is true, than perhaps I should work with her one night. If she is as skilled in the manipulation of human emotions through such means as she claims, we should develop a fear toxin together of such potency that the fear would be absolute and all-consuming.
Excuse me. Back to the plan.
She claims that this current seed is from a prototype group that, while effective, takes a few hours to work its magic. While inconvenient for our benefactor, this trait proves remarkably beneficial for our needs. Given time periods between letters and your own information in earlier letters, you should be beginning third grade soon. Which means that by now you are likely around eight years old. Congratulations. You may consider the seed and my plan as birthday presents if you like. It is not as if I can send out much else. When school starts again (if it hasn't already), wait until lunch. Somehow slip the seed into Jake's food when he is not looking. That is all you have to do. I know it may sound simple enough, but you have to make sure that absolutely no one sees you do this.
If all goes well, Jake's suppressed anger towards his father, which according to your succinct description I assume he has, should come out sometime after school when he is at home. This should hopefully trigger a confrontation with his father and let all of the issues that Jake has be finally released. He will then most likely stop bugging you for good. Do not worry; this confrontation should be therapeutic for him. It's not healthy to suppress emotions and misplace them on someone else.
If it does not work, mail me a can of the strongest weed-killer you can find. I will likely not make it past security, but I could always manage to steal it from the guards. Or it might go through anyway, knowing the incompetancy of Arkham's finest.
Best of luck,
Jonathan Crane
Our hero, ladies and gents. Slowly converts his impressionable baby sister who's desperate for a friend into a bite-sized supervillain whilst simultaneously poisoning small children and getting them abused on purpose. A round of applause. /sarcasm
Seriously though, even though I'm trying to delve into the "nicer" part of Crane's psyche, he's still a frickin' Batman villain who thinks that his mass poisonings of Gotham are a perfectly rational response to his (admittedly) horrible childhood.
I wonder how often Hester-Mae needs to run to her dictionary when reading Crane's letters. She's fairly smart but she's still only seven or eight and the not-so-good doctor has a rather extensive vocabulary.