The Scarecrow was out in all of his glory, and Jonathan Crane was finally happy. Finally, no one was watching him. No one was laughing or staring. He walked down the streets of Gotham with his suit, mask and hat, and not one person had the presence of mind to gawk. Instead, they screamed, each man and each woman lost in his or her own mind, because of Crane’s most prized and brilliant invention.
He grinned under his Scarecrow mask and felt a most wonderful feeling of peace with the world. It did, of course, help that he had his little device at his mouth to filter the air, and leave him sure of immunity from the gas. And it was the most wonderful bonus when a flock of feeding pigeons fled at the sight of him.
All around him, the city grew more and more afraid, and Jonathan Crane drank it in slowly, savoring his day.
*****
“Babs!” She thought she heard Renee scream. But Barbara knew that she couldn’t have heard it, not for real. Renee was right there, sprawled out and still, just out of reach. She had died, Renee and Bette both, just as Barbara had always feared. And still the nightmare hadn’t ended.
Somehow the television had turned on and tuned itself to an oddly specific daily news. “A massive attack on the headquarters of the super-team known as the Teen Titans,” the reporter was saying, in a voice that sounded very far away to Barbara. “It is unknown who committed this awful crime, but we can be certain that all of the Teen heroes have been killed.”
Barbara wanted to scream, to let out the heart-wrenching pain and guilt and anger inside her soul, but her body was too tired. She lay on the floor with her dead friends, nearly as silent as they were.
And then without warning, she became aware of something else. There was another heart still beating in the room. Another pair of lungs were gasping for air as that heart raced in terror. Quite suddenly, the TV shut off, and the bodies on the floor dissolved away. Instead of them, she could see Renee now, lying close to her and shivering, stuck in her own nightmare although seemingly wide awake.
And now, Barbara thought she understood. She may not have known precisely what was happening, but the sight of her friend and her hallucination combined with the eerie feeling that she’d felt all day gave her enough clues to figure out the important parts. She hadn’t been Batwoman for nothing. Whatever exactly had been going on, it hadn’t been real. And now that Barbara could see the job that she was needed for, she was no longer afraid.
*****
The dark and cold and solitude closed in around Renee and choked her, making her gasp for rattling breaths. She could feel the tears in her eyes as her petrified body tried to release the tension in every bone. Renee forbade herself from crying, and only grew stiffer.
She hated, absolutely despised being alone in the world. Alone in her home or a quiet place was one thing, where any needed help or company was just a phone call away. But to be truly alone, to be the only one, with no one to understand or offer support, with no companion to make life bearable, had been for some time now Renee’s most dreaded fear. Ever since she had realized…but there wasn’t any time or energy to spend on reminiscing. She was trying to focus, so that she could fight. The worst thing that she could possibly do was panic.
“Renee, wake up!”
It was a shaft of warm, bright sunlight in the darkness. Barbara’s voice. It was her dream become reality, as the worried, red-haired face of her best friend swam slowly into view. How could she not have seen her, or felt Babs’ hand shaking her shoulder like that? Now that the darkness and panic were finally lifting, Renee couldn’t believe how close she had been the whole time.
“Renee, can you hear me? Are you okay?” Barbara’s face leaned over hers, worried and looking as though she had just suffered the same feelings.
Renee sat up in Babs’ apartment, breathing hard as her heartbeat slowly calmed to a normal speed. “Yeah…yeah, I’m okay. I don’t know why, but I’m alright now.”
“What did you see?”
The question only seemed odd for a moment. Then Renee answered, “I…was alone. It was like that dream I always used to have, all alone in the dark…but it seemed so real…what was it?”
“I don’t know for sure. But I think it’s all over Gotham.” Barbara sighed and hesitated before adding, “I saw you dead.” Renee’s head picked up quickly, and Barbara looked back at her. “You and Bette. Dead because I didn’t train you well enough.”
There was a small pause as both women remembered their own personal hells. Renee reached out impulsively and hugged Barbara close, hanging on a few seconds longer than necessary before lifting her back up into her chair.
“Thanks,” said Barbara, taking a deep breath and snapping back into business. “Looks like it’s not coming back, so I’m guessing you’ll be safe. You’ve got to go find out what’s happening, and stop it. I’m counting on you, Batgirl. I don’t know if anyone else is even conscious right now.” There was a sadness in Barbara’s eyes as she spoke that made Renee more determined than ever.
“I’ll come back, Babs. Don’t worry about me.”
“Oh, I’ll worry. But I’m sending you out anyway. Is that horrible of me?” It was an honest question, and Renee longed to relieve the doubt in her friend’s mind.
“I’m just doing my job. And so are you,” Renee said, and slipped off of the balcony in costume, ready again to take on whatever menace was waiting for her.
*****
Harley hadn’t moved from the kitchen floor since she shook out of her episode. The scene she’d seen kept playing in front of her eyes, the imagined pain seeming far too real in the pit of her stomach. She thought she could feel the sting of the Joker’s hand on her face again, and had to remind herself over and over that it hadn’t really happened again.
“He wouldn’t…” Harley whispered to herself, swallowing hard. “My Joker wouldn’t…”
Once he did, a tiny little voice whispered back. Harley’s lips twitched down as her eyes started to water. That voice had left her alone for a while, but ever since she’d come back from Ivy’s, it had been back. He’s hit you before. He doesn’t care. He’s using you.
“No!” She yelled back aloud. “He isn’t, he isn’t!”
Just then, a shout sounded from the Joker’s study, loud and angry, and for once needing help. Harley picked herself up immediately and looked in the direction of the door.
“Mister J?” There wasn’t an answer. “Puddin’, are you okay?” Still nothing. On trembling legs, Harley stepped forward. Another cry came from the study, and Harley started to race toward him. Could he really be frightened? What could have happened? How could she help him? The questions pushed the small, wise voice out of her mind again, and Harley burst through the door.
The Joker was lying on his back on the floor with his chair tilted over behind him, as if he had suddenly tipped back too far and fallen without noticing. Harley knelt beside him, brushing a few strands of bright green hair away from his troubled brow.
“Puddin’? Oh Mister J, Mister J, wake up! It’s just a bad dream. Oh Puddin’, please wake up.”
Gathering him up in her arms, Harley sat her vigil on the floor, waiting for some sign that he could hear.
*****
The Joker’s mind was always a rather twisted and unpleasant place, but today it wasn’t even bearable for him to be there. Within his head, he was in the middle of the crowd, and watching some other, undeserving nitwit take his glory, his spot in the pecking order. The people around him were yelling and pushing by, as if he were just another extra in the background with them.
The Joker was furious. High above him, some other jerk in a costume was raining death from above, and here he was on the ground. It was all wrong, the whole world had gone upside-down on him.
With a lightning-fast movement, Joker shot out his arm and grabbed a citizen by the collar. The man looked straight into his eyes, and had the nerve to be annoyed. “What’s the big idea?”
“Do you have the faintest inkling who you’re talking to?” Joker asked him menacingly, his eyes boring into the man’s head.
The man actually shrugged off Joker’s white hand. “Hope you get hit, asshole!” he called back as he ran off, leaving the Joker wide-eyed, twitch-lipped and whiter than ever with fury.
The crowd passed him by, giving their attention and their fear to the newcomer in the Joker’s place. He may as well have been just a normal citizen, just a man, someone who things happened to, who didn’t make things happen. He might as well be typical, average and uninteresting. As far as the world cared, he was.
The crowd was slowly thinning. Soon, only a few other petrified souls stood with the Joker on the ruins of the streets. The villain seemed to decide that the few people weren’t worth the trouble, and he threw out a line and swung out after the rest of the crowd, soaring into the bright light of the Batsignal on the clouds.
The Joker stood unimportant, unnoticed, robbed of the fear and hatred he thrived on. He stood without purpose or will, as frozen as the other meaningless people collapsed on the street. For a second he thought how nice it would be to be one of the corpses instead. At least then he could be a statistic, instead of a nothing.
“Puddin’? Mister J!”
He whirled around to see her running toward her, and the strangest feeling clenched in his chest. Harley was looking right at him where all others had looked past. She reached him and threw her arms around his neck, and for once he found that he didn’t mind. Still hugging him tightly, Harley was chattering away, so glad to see him, so adoring and devoted just to him.
He wasn’t alone anymore, he wasn’t invisible after all. Harley still cared.
“Puddin’, wake up! C’mon, please get up.”
The Joker snapped his eyes open to find himself laying on the floor, with Harley staring down into his face. For once in a very long time, the smile was missing from his face as her fingers brushed tenderly over his brow, wiping away the hints of sweat. His breath was coming in quickly, and there was no clever remark on the twisted lips. Harley hugged him right there on the floor, and the Joker was glad that she wasn’t looking at his face. He didn’t want to be seen without his smile.
By the time she looked back up at him, he had plastered on a false grin to hide his confusion, and the strange and unsettling feeling that still gripped him.
“Oh Mister J! Are you okay? I heard you yelling so I came in to help, and you were all shaky and couldn’t hear me and—“
“Yes, yes, Harley, I know.” He sat up and pushed her off of him, and then thought twice. Fully aware of how horribly out of character it was, the Joker held open his arms and allowed her to hug him, wondering what it was about her.
“But you’re okay now, Puddin’? You’re not hurt or nothing?”
“No,” he said, looking off into space. Finally, Harley let go on her own, and dared to peck him on the cheek before hurrying back out of the room and leaving him alone.
A very confused Joker actually brought his finger up to touch his cheek before he realized what he was doing, and angrily shook his head and got back to his feet. Slamming the chair back into place, he sat at the desk and began to scribble, throwing himself into his work so that he didn’t have to feel.
*****
Crane started to frown slightly as he walked through his city. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, but a bit of the terror had faded away from the public consciousness. The sun was dipping lower in the sky, but the oncoming darkness was not bringing the same sense of fear that the morning had. While some people still sat lost and terrified and others ran panicking through the streets, others looked to be waking, to be throwing off the chemical that Crane had spent so much time developing to be perfect and inescapable.
There was hope and light creeping back into Gotham, and now it was Crane who started to become nervous. He had removed his re-breather after he realized he couldn’t breathe well though. The amount of gas in the air wasn’t affecting him, and Crane was reasonably sure that there wasn’t any more to come raining down or creeping up. All the same, he was the one feeling uneasy now, and feeling suddenly foolish in his costume. He thought that perhaps he should return home and consider his day finished. A moment later he pushed the thought out of his mind, a strange fierceness coming into him that he had never let loose before.
Jonathan Crane may have been a scared and weak sort of a man, but there was a villain inside him, a menace that had been begging to be set loose upon the town for years. It lived under the Scarecrow mask, and now that it was free, it would not be put back away just because Crane was getting afraid again. The teacher, the chemist, the man behind the mask was pushed to the side, for now. All that mattered today was the Scarecrow.
He turned around suddenly to growl at a pair of birds walking beside him. They twittered and flew off in a rush of frightened feathers, and Crane felt himself smile. The day wasn’t over yet. He could still be this menace, he could still be the fearsome one. He wouldn’t let that power go on just a whim, not after so many, many years of waiting.
*****
There wasn’t any doubt in Renee’s mind that this was her man. She crouched on a tall rooftop with her binoculars and silently thanked Gotham City. If there was one advantage to this job of hers, it was that the bad guys made themselves more than obvious. The weird hat alone would probably have been enough to identify him, along with his calm and confident steps. But only the special breed of Gotham supervillain wore that kind of a mask.
She threw out a line and swung down to the streets, with so much more grace and ability than she’d had only so many months ago. A young man looked up from his trance at the sound of Renee’s landing, and she found more strength in the look of relief and gratitude in his eyes. With a nod and a rather dramatic swish of her cloak, Renee was off after the man she’d seen, who she was so sure was behind the entire miserable day.
Once she’d caught up to him, Renee made sure to stay hidden from his eyes while she watched his every movement. Every so often, the man would stop and look around, more often pausing to frighten a sparrow than to do anything useful or important. Renee wished he had a more urgent and obvious direction. Then she could get there first and surprise him, be ready and waiting. But the man didn’t seem to know where he wanted to go. He was just walking, wandering the streets. It was nearly sundown by the time he stopped walking, only to sit on an empty park bench.
By now, Renee had waited long enough. She didn’t spare any energy on a fancy entrance. She only took a second to adjust her own mask, and stepped out from the shadow of a tree to face the Scarecrow.
Under the burlap mask, a pair of blue eyes widened, and suddenly the man in the suit and hat was much less imposing. “No…” he muttered, more to himself than to Renee, “Not yet…”
“Yet.” Batgirl was in no mood to worry about pleasantries or compassion. Those three words were enough of a confession for her.
Crane reached for his pocket, but Renee’s hand shot out quickly to stop it. Her tough fingers wrapped around the thin wrist, threatening to snap it in two if he so much as tried to pull away.
“What have you done to my city?” growled Batgirl.
“My city,” he said so quietly, gaining back his confidence. “Today it’s my city.”
“Like hell!” Renee grabbed his other hand and twisted. “What did you do?”
“You felt it, didn’t you?” he asked her, looking straight into Renee’s face now, two pairs of eyes locked behind two masks. “Tell me how it was…how it felt to face your deepest fear.”
Renee ground her teeth and went to shove him against the bench, but the Scarecrow’s long leg picked up and hit her squarely in the chest with all of the force that the thin man could muster. She was thrown back onto the grass, and a sharp hit to her knee kept her on the ground long enough for him to stand and walk over. Somehow he looked so wild, brutal, the embodiment of every fear in Gotham.
“Was it terrifying? Did you cry?” He asked her with almost a hunger in his voice. “Tell me, tell me how frightened you were…tell me the Scarecrow made you afraid, tell me I had my day!”
Renee stood as slowly as she dared, catching back the breath that had been knocked out of her. The sun was dipping below the far horizon, bathing the scene in a blood-red light that made the Scarecrow even scarier. She didn’t say a word in response to him. If he needed that validation, he could get it when he was safely locked away.
Somewhere in the city a scream cut through the air. Renee watched Scarecrow carefully, ready to pounce the moment that he made a wrong move. That moment came as soon as Renee was ready; he went for his pocket again and she charged.
This time it was the Scarecrow who was sprawled on the ground, and it was a sudden rush of panic that kept him where he was while Renee walked forward. He had landed on his pocket and heard a soft crunch and a hiss; the remaining capsules of fear gas had cracked, and the contents were racing straight for the mind of their creator. Renee felt herself gasp as she inhaled a stray wisp of the gas and the darkness began to crowd around her once more. But this time, she was ready for it.
“I’m not alone!” she shouted at the empty room, and the vision faded away obligingly, leaving her in the park once again in the growing twilight, while the Scarecrow lay shivering on the ground.
Crane was fighting his own demons, now. His straw hat fell off as he shook his head frantically, trying desperately to fight back the images. He had seen them too many times in his life, with and without the gas to bring them on.
He was a tall, lanky boy being bullied. An eight-year-old losing his toys to the older kids. A twelve-year-old mocked for his fear of birds. The late bloomer who the girls wouldn’t touch. The one who tripped on his robe at his graduation.
Jonathan Crane didn’t need an imagination for this. His life was a nightmare in itself, up until he’d begun to work on his revenge. That life that he’d tried to leave behind was swimming before him, more vivid than reality, more real and more terrifying and miserable. A sob wrenched its way out of his throat, and tears began dotting the burlap mask. Renee had been stepping cautiously toward him, but she stepped back with a start when she realized he was crying.
That moment of pity passed by very quickly. Renee took her advantage and tied Crane’s arms behind his back with a bit of rope, while he was too upset to fight back. With her own brand of mercy, she drew a small capsule out of her belt and held it in front of him. The gas made him slump over and pass out, but knocked out his hallucination, leaving the Scarecrow a broken man, but a relieved one, deep in his slumber.
When the police finally arrived, many officers still shaking, they found a tall, gangly man knocked out on the ground. His hands were tied behind him over a brown suit, and a straw hat covered his head. Beside him lay a hideous mask, and the GCPD’s favorite calling card; a quickly-drawn bat on a bit of paper.
*****
Eventually, the gas dissipated. Fresh air came back into the city, and those who had been hit the hardest began to come out of their trances. Poison Ivy was one of the last.
Now, she sat on her chair with a blanket wrapped around her, still haunted by those visions that she’d had. They hadn’t been real, that much had been obvious as soon as she woke to see her beloved plants surrounding her. But what did it mean? Had it been some sort of sign? A premonition? Just a hallucination? Ivy didn’t know, but the thoughts wouldn’t leave her head.
The worst effects had faded, but the sense of fear and foreboding was still clinging to her. For once, Ivy sat subdued and lost in thought, not wanting to move or think, wishing she could sleep, but fearful of what dreams may come.
It must be a sign, she decided eventually. It had been a reminder of what she fought for. Her job was to prevent that horrible future from ever taking shape.
Ivy began to calm with this thought in the front of her mind. It would not ever happen, not as long as she lived to fight against it. The world would be beautiful and green and living. Ivy wouldn’t ever let her nightmare come true.
