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The lights of the makeshift laboratory flicker, shining light onto his papers on and off, it’s annoying — But options are few when you’re being persecuted by the law and lacking funds, Johnatan supposes, and he scrawls notes over the lines, brain running a mile per minute.
This world is filled with idiots who just don’t get it, and so a person like him ends up in a trash heap like this, locked up in a shitty abandoned bunker with one fraction of the research he’d done in his lifetime — Still something completely beyond many people’s imaginations, but not good enough, not as good as it had once been.
Lifting his head up to stare at the computer screen displaying the information on the newest formula for the fear gas that he still wanted to improve some more, Johnatan narrows his eyes at it, calculating amounts of chemicals in his mind, and his hand gets to work again. His penmanship was almost aggressive, like he wanted to take out his frustration on the paper.
He did, in a way, and could you blame him? Gritting his teeth, he runs a hand over scraggly hair, the anger festering right under his skin, ready to burst and tear its way out of its veins — Just waiting for an opportunity. Because of course he’d be angry, being diminished like this, ridiculed, humiliated by a world who seemed to just forget the value of the potential one could pull out of their own subconscious.
(That he could pull out of their subconscious, wrap around their necks and choke them to death with, for daring to humiliate him like this.)
But they were probably just afraid, weren’t they? Mixed in with the stupidity that bred that incapacity of understanding just how important his experiments were, it became a very special kind of fear. The fear that bred anger, the fear that was a reaction to a clear threat, fight or flight.
And that’s what made him powerful. Even the ones who weren’t too stupid to understand the full extent of his power could be scared of it too. Every person, in Gotham and in the world, has woken up at least once in a cold sweat, shakily cradling their head as they pant, feeling nothing but gratitude that blankets over the terror that had taken over them, thanking every god they could name that what they had seen as they slept wasn’t real—
So many things make us human. That complex system of fear is one of them. It’s inherent, impossible to just be deactivated or removed, everyone has at least one fear, deep down, one situation that triggers all those instincts within them so intensely they just can’t face it.
And — He slides the notes aside for a second, pushing himself on the ratty office chair towards the other side of the desk where his flasks and beakers laid, taking them from the stands to check the substances and add to the calculations — Batman, the person who was at fault for taking the already present destruction of his image, coming from being expelled from the university like that, and amplifying it to such a level, was like that too. Because in the end, he’s still a person.
After what he’d done, that man spent a fair amount of time in his head.
Since Batman had sworn to go against him like this, knocking him down in such a manner, he’d sworn to go, at the very least, twice as hard. The mere thought of the vigilante sparked a response in him unlike what he felt for anyone else.
It’s a burning so strong it could eat away at his entire soul, blood boiling in his veins, organs scorching and twisting with hate. It always comes down to how he’d been so humiliated, dominated to the point it filled him with a necessity for payback, to do the same to him. It’s obsessive, Johnatan knows. It’s unhealthy and it takes over his brain, his body, like a drug.
Like his fear gas, turning even the bravest of men into squirming, wailing little lab rats. The intensity warranted research, but he couldn’t be his own research subject.
(Things would be easier if he could.)
It was all complicated, unexplainable to the point he could look at it as some sort of admiration, maybe going as far as to call it passion — But he refused to, even though he knew that level of obsession, that unending desire to see him, fit it into the idea, albeit lopsidedly. It felt similar to something like the morbid curiosity that kept people staring at the aftermath of a disaster. It’s something that had been born from hatred and obsession, cemented into some sort of sadism. Something that hadn’t been categorized quite yet.
Those feelings usually felt like defeat, coloring the way he fought against Batman, but today, they were more like victory.
Because with his new formula, he’d finally be able to triumph over him.
The thought makes a smile splits across his lips as he gets up from the chair, making his way unsteadily towards the cylinders where he’d been keeping it. He wanted to see them for a bit now, to confirm the key to his success was still there. Maybe it’s a way to lick his wounds from last time. He looks at them proudly, comfortingly. Like they’re his masterpiece.
Hand rests over metal, thumb rubbing against a reflective surface affectionately. He catches a bit of his reflection there, twisted face and brassy hair sticking out pointily, similar to the image he’d based his own title off of — A scarecrow — but, ah, nothing near what he’d ever dreamed of being. The smile dies, the seeking of comfort backfired.
He’s very keenly aware that he isn’t as terrifying as he wished he looked. His mask, however, works to fix this issue.
That isn’t too shameful, he tells himself. A scarecrow isn’t a scarecrow without the hemp bag for a head. The Scarecrow isn’t the Scarecrow without his mask. Jonathan Crane were but meaningless feeble words at this point, once they’d been stripped away from the titles tied to it. As long as he had the mask, he’d be okay.
Something about this brings up Batman again, reminds him of that pitch black mask showing no much more than his mouth. He wonders, for no more than a split second, if that was something that linked the two of them.
If, maybe, Batman was more Batman than the man behind such a name.
There’s a similarity between them that he can’t deny, and that feeds the accursed feelings. They’re both lurkers, figures that thrive in the shadows while the rest of the world festers at large. Batman is on his mind more often than he feels he should be, than he had the right to be, but their situation just appealed to the psychiatrist on him. They were here to strike fear into their enemies’ hearts. They were here to thrive over others, to take over, even though Batman hid behind a mask of justice too, instead of just the physical one.
But the very thought of it also makes discomfort start to bud within him, wondering if Batman thought the same when he saw him. If he saw through the mask — And that simply wouldn’t do, Johnatan takes a deep, anxious breath as he reaches for his hemp bag. It’s almost a silly thought, wanting to wear it when he’s alone, but something about tonight makes him feel a need to—
Suddenly, his blood runs cold.
A slam, raw strength against metal. Johnatan jumps, hand tensing over hemp, someone was there? He’d made sure he would be as difficult to find as humanly possible. If anyone could have tracked his hideout down, it’d have to be—
He swallows, heart racing, and rushes to pull the mask on. Johnatan — Scarecrow — feels it, that thrill.
The bunker was much more than the area he’d made his hideout, so he gets to listen to Batman’s heavy steps through the hallways as he makes his way to him in the maze. His skin crawls with all the excitement. He’d win this time. He definitely would.
He rushes towards the surveillance equipment he’d set up, adrenaline rushing along with his thoughts. Switching everything on to see what the vigilante looked like now, if he had that cautiousness he often did when dealing with Scarecrow.
That was his favorite thing about him, but not exactly the act itself, it was more about the meaning of it, how he still knew fear.
How Batman, brave as he was, had this visible humanity, how he noticed and processed danger like everyone else.
The thought that even when he thrived over Scarecrow, he still could wake up in a cold sweat whenever he went back to wherever he hid in during the day — It was one of the side effects of the gas, so he knew for sure that it affected him too, and just the thought was enough to get his blood coursing through his veins with such speed. Batman having nightmares, Batman being terrified because of him, even when he’d lost the game.
He thinks so extensively about what sort of nightmares the vigilante might have. What kept him up at night? What made him need to get a glass of water and fresh air, running fingers through his hair as he assured himself nothing he had seen was true? He didn’t even have a hint that could help him make that guess, maybe it was something as common as spiders, maybe it was something specific, deep rooted. A traumatic event replayed over and over, haunting him.
...far away into his mind, he’s reminded of Arkham too.
He’d spent a while there before he got out a couple months ago, through a well-planned web of events he was still very much proud of — It’d given him a whole new understanding of what he worked with. The animals he tormented and the nightmares he induced, the place turned him into an experiment.
He’d be subjected to all these people, all these different flavors of aggravation every day, reminded of how he’d been stripped away from his deserved role as the nightmare master, the one puppeteering the horrible delirium he’d plunged the city into those two, maybe three times. In Arkham, he was nothing more than a rat. He wasn’t the professor, he wasn’t the twisted villain, he was a defeated warrior that lost every single of the medals he’d earned through the war. He was the one running away from the darkness of his own mind that inched closer, the victim of the nightmare.
It always came back to this, didn’t it? The way he had everything taken away from him, even though he’d been the one who built his own life, who mastered the art of terror. Idiots, all of these people. No better than the meatheads from that college who became his guinea pigs. He wanted nothing more than to take everything back, to be on that high spot he deserved. Because he did. He deserved it!
Meanwhile, Batman tore those things away from him, but maybe not because he didn’t understand. No, he saw the value in the manipulation of fear, that much was clear with how cautious the oh so brave dark knight was around him, almost like he’s walking on eggshells. The reason he opposed Scarecrow was beyond not understanding him, no, he had a motive, a drive. He says he’s mad, and he has words to explain why he’d think so. Maybe he didn’t even mind that he went so far for science, for power — Ah, no, he had a hypothesis his reason ran much deeper than morality, it was personal, selfish. It wasn’t something heros were made out of.
He was that equal opponent, and the very symbol of him being knocked out of the pedestal he’d worked for. A foil. A main target. A mortal enemy. The monster in the nightmare he could see the most clearly, even through his mind’s haze — The one he remembered the morning after.
That’s a unique, rare sort of terror, wasn’t it? A match locked between two people only, it had that incomprehensible underlying tension that the gothic horror the romantics used to write.
The monitor switched on, a mosaic of images is presented to him, obnoxiously green tinted pictures of the sections of the bunker. One thing he liked about this was how overly complex it was, a system so tough to figure out you’d think the one who made it had to be a former Arkham Asylum inmate, or patient, as they liked to call them sometimes. Even though that was a lie.
Both things, actually — It was a clear prison, and he doubted anyone there at all had the intellect to stack a couple bricks evenly, let alone make an apocalypse-ready, weirdly ample bunker where he could properly continue his intricate psychiatric research on the nature of fear.
He stares at the images, an anxious hand fidgeting with the hemp that covered his face. With the poor quality of the video, making out where Batman was, precisely, had been slightly difficult, but he soon finds the man, captured by the cameras which footage he could follow on one of the squares near the top left corner of the screen.
There he is, Johnatan… Scarecrow, breathes out, hand tense over the keyboard, that one vigilante. Even just seeing him like this sparked a reaction he would say is misplaced, if directed at anyone else. Batman, despite being alone, moved like he was lurking, cautious, not afraid to be found, but definitely not seeking it out either.
That recognizement of the power of fear, once more. A grin splits across his face, a dark chuckle leaving him.
He looks around, searching for traps, for entrances? He wishes he could hear what was happening in those rooms and hallways now. Is Batman swearing or muttering under his breath? Is he laying out his plans to himself? The curiosity he felt towards the man was unmeasurable. Just as all-consuming as everything else, really.
He’s making his way along the place, now, and expectation crawls all over him.
When it came to the fear gas, Batman probably expected something like Scarecrow keeping his main weapon somewhere safe and sound, in the very center of his maze.
What he might not expect, however, is that there were vents ready to release the substance into the hallways, locked away from the center room by a heavy door that wouldn’t allow for it to affect whoever was in there.
And even though that wasn’t the perfect formula just yet, that one worked damn well too.
He knows what he wants to do here, he’d known almost instantly — Give Batman the false hope that he’ll get to the center of the bunker, find him again and lock him up in that hellish place, coming out as the victor, then tear it away with a single pull. Or, rather, a single push of a red button on his control panel that shone so beautifully, it seemed like the apple Eve had bitten.
It’s so tempting to just do it now. Unleash the gas everywhere, all at once, so much and so sudden that it’d fill up every single bit of Batman’s lungs, the chemicals traveling around him. Taking over that strong body like demonic possession, rendering every chiseled muscle useless in the face of a fear so overwhelming he’d fall into unconsciousness, eventually.
And he was oh so excited to watch that. The nightmares consuming every bit of him, trapping him within the confines of his mind and making him writhe with pure fear. He sees himself kneeling down to Batman’s unconscious body, a finger hooking on the base of his mask, feeling the skin underneath.
Once, when he had Batman hanging from the ceiling, upside down, they had an exchange—
It was Christmas, he had intricately planned a trap for him to get him there, tied and vulnerable in front of him.
“This is insane, Scarecrow!” Batman had roared, even in his unflattering position. “What do you even hope to gain with this?”
He remembers the grin he felt splitting across his face, the dark chuckles tearing out. The excitement, crawling all over.
“A warm glow.” He approached him, breaching his personal space. “The pleasure of slowly unwrapping you.”
His finger touched the bridge of his nose slightly, for not much more than a second, and he’d been thinking about it since then. Whenever he got to do something like this, whenever he triumphed, even for no more than a few fleeting moments, his heart raced in a way unlike any other. It was an incomparable thrill.
This heavy, addictive drug.
“Come to me, Batman.” He whispers to himself, smiling wide. “Come to me, so I can own you.”
In so many senses of the word, too — He found that since then, he’d wanted to keep Batman trapped, at least for a while. He wanted him as prey, as if he wasn’t that built man who could snap him into two, so he could poke his face like that again as he rubbed his current condition all over it, reminding him of what he had landed himself into.
He has a craving so strong to do this all over again, it’s the very thing that keeps his eyes glued to the screen as Batman moves, inching closer towards the square in the middle of the screen, the hallway leading up to his true hideout.
A part of him, away from his own power fantasies and thoughts of success, is aware he wouldn’t be able to have Batman under control for too long.
But, and he thinks, if I could hold him here for longer than he’d ever held me, that would be enough for the time being. It’s about the push and pull in the end, isn’t it? It’s about that element of battling of a series of recurring dreams, the attempt to change how it ends before you wake up, only to have it start all over again the next night.
Or even nights away. The competition goes on, despite every intermission. As long as Batman is the little kid running through the forest, and Scarecrow is the monster chasing them.
His heart speeds up when he sees him walk into a blind spot zone, teeth catching his lip in a bite. Reaching the core of the bunker. Putting the puzzle together, piece by piece.
Almost there.
His grin widens. The hand that was on the table goes up to the screen, touching it, lingering on it, so close to that image of Batman, so far from the real thing.
His thumb traces the outline around him as he’s looking around, two cameras away from the central room. Had he gained awareness that he would lose this time? Was he beginning to suspect the trap? Did he know it all from the beginning, but was planning to tread onwards anyway, because he had some sort of plan too?
Knowing him, the third option was more likely. But he doubted he’d be able to deal with something like what was about to come to him, now.
The second Batman is one room away, his grin tugs at the corners of his lips so strongly his face hurts, and he gets up to bolt to the control panel, breathing fast when his hand is over the button, finally getting to smash it, bringing out a loud alarm and metallic noises of so many faraway containers opening.
“You played well last time, Batman.” He bites out, seething. “But now I’m going to win.”
He rushes back to the screen. The gas has a murky, smoky appearance as it pours out of the vents with a hiss, and Batman stumbles like a caged pet, almost. Like one of these college kids he’d locked up and tormented with the chemicals.
Hands tremble over the screen. What does he see? What does he hear? Has he breathed in at all, actually? Well, that doesn’t matter now, because he would do it, eventually.
Scarecrow waits for it to happen, for him to fall down — And he does, much to his exhilaration, but somehow it just doesn’t feel the way he wanted it to. He laughs when he sees Batman tumbling, but…
Ah. He’s unsatisfied. Those cravings he has hadn’t subsided at all.
The grin dies just as quickly as it had been born. And why is that happening? Wasn’t it his dream to have Batman like one of his lab rats? If he goes unconscious from the fear now, he’d be able to do whatever he wanted to him. Hang him up from the ceiling and taunt him, trap him and inject so much fear into his system he cries like the child he’d once been, unwrap him like he’d wanted to do on that Christmas nice.
So why isn’t he happy with it?
With Batman on his knees, it’s official that whatever he’d done there really hadn’t been enough. There’s joy, there’s pride, but it feels so little compared to what he’d imagined, his head a choir of why aren’t I happy, stepping away from the monitors for a second.
He works the control panel for a couple seconds. Metal hisses and drags until there’s no more gas being expelled. He glances at the screens. Batman had started to cower. What are you seeing, he begs to know, what terrifies you so much? He’d fall unconscious soon. He’d get to have something no one else had ever had, right?
(He doesn’t recall anyone at Arkham even bragging about something like this. Not even the Joker, who was so happy to appoint himself as Batman’s one true nemesis, more than any other sad bastard who hadn’t gotten nearly as close to what they wanted as Scarecrow. He scoffs at these people, even today. How insufferable they were.)
There’s a heavy metal door separating him and the vigilante now, where he places his hand and lets it linger on. It’s always a good idea to keep a healthy distance, or at least wait until the chemicals of the gas decompose themselves into the elements of the air, but now, the cravings want him to open the door.
They yell at him.
And it’s ridiculous. How even as his reaction to the ambush is so perfect, he wants the push and pull again. The fight. To hear his voice, gritting out insults at him.
“You’re mad.” Batman had told him once, and he had been clinging to it like they were the words god spoke to him in a dream.
God. Screw this.
Holding his breath, he opens the door. Most of the substance probably has dissipated enough, by now — It was a volatile one, luckily. Even then, he feels somewhat stupid doing something like this. Breathing in fills him with a lightly anxious feeling.
But he sees Batman, and the thoughts don’t matter.
“Good evening.” He greets, and the joyous feelings are back, so intense they crawl up his throat and spill into his words, pushing chuckles out. “You’ve been looking for me, haven’t you?”
“Scarecrow.” He mutters, voice wavering. And now he’s so close to being satisfied. Hearing the voice, the fear in it, the way Batman looks at him from below. “You’ve planned this!”
“Maybe I have.” He says.
“I’m not going to…” He’s trying to growl, trying to puff his chest up and be Batman, the terrifying dark knight, but with the awareness that he can’t, and Scarecrow can’t stop laughing to himself. “I can’t—”
Shaking like a leaf, that built man takes a step forward, pushing himself.
“How brave of you, putting yourself through this.” He comments. “But there’s not much more to do other than surrendering, Batman, let the fear take over you! Both of us use it as a weapon, so you understand, don’t you?”
His words fall to deaf ears, but he’s happy about it, because Batman is being taken over. He’s being possessed by the fear. He’s the one running away from the monster that can show up from every corner, jump out of his own shadow.
And he was the one who did it, Scarecrow, the master of fear. He was taking over, possessing, chasing him down. Him, not anyone or anything else. The puppet strings hung from his fingertips.
Batman looks up from the ceiling towards him, eyes wide and frozen with the fear, and he’s still for a moment, before he lunges forward despite his trembling, landing a punch on Scarecrow’s face that sends him toppling over, grabbing him by the shoulders and moving towards slamming him down, but—
He barely has any time to react, really. He knows he should be angry, fuming, just absolutely enraged at the offense of Batman attacking him like this, but somehow he isn’t. He just looks at the hands on his shoulder and he thinks — The only times they touch is when he’s being pinned down like this.
He has no way of fighting back, effectively, just hoping the gas gets to him, and maybe for a second, a part of Scarecrow feels some sort of fear too. Maybe he prays the plan works, quietly in his thoughts, instead of proclaiming his success loudly as he so wanted to do.
“You’re going to regret this, Batman.” He grits out
And he’s right. Thankfully. Batman stares with those eyes, wide and jittery, like he struggles between fear and courage. He doesn’t want to say he’s still praying as he takes steps back and the vigilante keeps attempting to follow him, to attack again, but the fear seems to run deeper, now.
“Can’t— Father—”
With his breathing shallow, one unexpected thing happens, and the second it’s too much for him and he faints, he’s merely a step away from lunging at Scarecrow to fight, and he falls — They fall.
His back hits the floor with a painful thud.
So it had worked, he first thinks in his adrenaline-addled mind, breathing ragged as Batman’s weight keeps him down. The pain spreads dully, all over his back, sharp in his spine, and on the side of his face, where he’d been punched, but he doesn’t bother with it too much, somehow.
“Batman—” He bites out, trying to move, but the man above him is too heavy to do much. Damn it. And now he’d have to carry him, how would he do that?
He’d thought about that before, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to actually do it — And envy burns like a chemical spill, acidic on his skin as he tries to squirm out of Batman’s grip, reminding him once more of what separates the two masked men who dwelled in nightmares.
And it just had to be something as frivolous as physical strength.
“Damn it!” He yells out, and in a fit of anger, is able to worm out of it, pushing Batman to the side, his back against the floor. Scarecrow’s breathing is fast from the exertion, but he’s on top of him again.
They had only ever touched when Batman was attempting, and succeeding, to take him down. This is different.
Now he looks into his face as he heaves, hair all over his face, and it feels like if he was just a little more inclined to delirium, he’d try to frame it as something intimate. He hated when Batman’s big hands caught his arms, wrapping around what was more bone than flesh. But he finds that he doesn’t hate it like this, at all.
His hands are hovering in the air, at first, but he then lets them tentatively fall over the vigilante’s body. Has he ever been able to feel him like this, in so much more detail? Fighting isn’t the same as touching, he logically knows. But maybe he’d been assimilating the two in his mind, and now that, in a way, he had the real thing…
(Were he just a little less proud, Jonathan would have admitted that even he didn’t fully understand what he felt for this man. He just stuck to his mind tortuously, and whenever something so new like this came up, it just floods all his senses with an even higher obsession. It’s a whole curse, isn’t it? Beyond just the symbolism of nightmares, a haunting. A burden to bear, but one he doesn’t want to get rid of, somehow.)
A hint of exhilaration lights up in his core, right at its very center. There’s a lot he could do like this. He could unwrap him as he had previously fantasized of, stripping away the wall between the man he pretended to be and the one he truly was. He could become the first one to put together the pieces of the puzzle, to see what the face of justice, as he’d heard some citizens call it, truly looked like.
But somehow, even that isn’t as appealing now. He finds that he does have a craving for action, but one he can’t name. His hands shake, and even with all the places they can go to, they stay still.
What do you want, now? What else could you want, beyond taking him down?
Scarecrow tries to answer the question, moving without much awareness of it. He feels like he isn’t allowed to do any of this at all, and even though he’d never been one for rules, exactly, it’s like the barrier between them is even stronger.
Every sort of thought appears in his mind at once. Punch him too. Strangle him. Rip the mask away.
Kiss him.
The last one has him shaking more harshly. Is that what he had been craving? It seems to make sense, although the full extent of his own reasoning eludes him. Is it humiliation, revenge, just desire? It couldn’t be out of tenderness. He touches the other man’s cheek, his heartbeat echoing across his body. The mask underneath his fingers feels surprisingly flimsy, nothing like the invincibleness Batman seemed to wear when he was conscious. That heartbeat continues to ring across his whole body, chanting echoes loudly in his mind.
Hemp covers his own face, too, keeping the unsightly away from perception, even though there were no prying eyes around. He becomes the person inclined to delirium, for just a second, as he leans down, their faces press, lips faintly felt through fabric.
It doesn’t exactly quench the thirst.
He’s still breathing hard when he pulls away, straddling Batman’s hips as he stares down. Someone would be alerted of his presence there. They would come for him, too.
And he’d be looking forward to that, to find them here, in this crow’s secret lovenest—
Even though… love, really? The mere thought of the word makes him want to gag. Nothing about this is romantic, of course. It couldn’t possibly be. Maybe desire born out of crossed wires, but he wouldn’t bring himself to link all of this together and put a label of something so far away from their realities into it. Love didn’t belong here.
Despite the way this looked, with him on top of Batman like this, hands on his chest like he’s bracing himself—
But thoughts of everything else, his feelings and thoughts, just swirl faster, dizzyingly, kiss him again, take off your mask too, put an end to this fight here and now. They’re loud, too loud for him to take any action, analogous to panic. He wonders how much time he’d have until someone came for Batman. He wonders if this really was anything at all like a victory, if he hadn’t ended up pinned down once more, just in a metaphorical way.
His hand had stayed on his cheek, he lets it move just barely, thumb tracing over Batman’s lips.
Maybe it had been. Maybe he actually won something out of this.
Even if it didn’t make a lick of sense — It didn’t have to. Because they’d go on like this, wouldn’t they? The end that isn’t really an end is that he runs away, and then Batman chases him again. The intermissions usually were him just running away. This wasn’t like that.
He knows he couldn’t fully win, at least not like this, and the path to thriving over Batman completely is yet to be discovered by Scarecrow, but in this single moment, as he gets to have this small sliver of victory, it feels like something glorious. It floods adrenaline into his system, so much he trembles in the same way Batman had as the fear gas traveled across his veins, impulses shot through his nerves.
He could kill Batman here and there. Maybe not with his bare hands, not the way Batman would kill him, if he did that, but he could do it. He could put an end to everything. But why would he?
It wouldn’t be a victory. If Batman died, he’s not getting what he wants, even if the burning hatred ceases to exist — There would still be more feelings left, more cravings that needed, and wouldn’t be able to, be fulfilled.
Everything far too confusing to fully untangle, but one thing Scarecrow knew was that if he continued at the same pace, he could be the monster chasing him down again. He could be the one to terrify him to his core, and that’s what he wanted, wasn’t it? In the very center of all those thoughts, there was one he knew he could name.
He wanted Batman to be the victim of his nightmare, one he’d tailor just for him. That was something he could admit. If they were linked through fear, wouldn’t that make him his?
He stares at Batman’s face for one last moment. There’s so much you can do, he thinks once more, and to acknowledge it, he simply gets up, a heavy aching in his chest.
Rushing back to the makeshift laboratory that couldn’t be his anymore, breath shallow and limbs aching from conflict, gathering his papers quickly, stuffing them into folders. The cylinders would have to be left there, but as long as he had the formula, he’d be fine.
Someone would come for Batman soon.
Taking off the mask, putting everything into a bag, he gives one last look at Batman’s unconscious body, laying there quietly. That moment would end the second he left. He doesn’t want to go, even when he knows he needs to.
One more second is barely enough to scratch the itch crawling all over him, but it’s all he can allow himself.
With all that made Scarecrow himself in his hands, Jonathan Crane runs out of the bunker in heavy steps, echoing around metal hallways, leaving everything behind.
They’d see each other again, very soon. He’d make sure they do.
And one day, he’d get what he wanted, no matter what he had to do to get there. No matter what that truly was.