Fear Awakened [Jonathan Crane / Scarecrow]

EPILOGUE

You never let me have any fun, Johnny. We didn't have to let her go.

The ever present voice in his head reminded him why he had to do what had to be done, no matter how difficult it had been.

And it had been a challenge, giving Jane the impression that he simply no longer cared and casting doubt on whether he ever did in the first place.

He had found that he actually cared very much for Jane in his own sense of the word, more so than he wanted to. As with most seventeen year olds, he felt some odd sensation as though she might be the last person he felt that way about, though one couldn't really define the feeling as truly caring.

That feeling was a weakness, one we can't afford.

The flat affect and unfeeling delivery as he had told her to stay away had taken effort, though she was unlikely to be in a position of appreciation for it.

She would never realize it was done with only her best interest in mind.

After all, only Jonathan knew he was soon to be the subject of much attention, and that the fallout could have proved dangerous for those close to him if all did not go as it was meant to.

Only Jonathan knew the things that Scarecrow wanted to do to her and the things that were already set in motion.

In three days time - although Jonathan didn't know when with such certainty, that part was more or less His choice - the GPD would receive an anonymous complaint about a rotten smell coming from the Keeny property.

Officers would trace the smell to the crumbling church on the edge of the property and be forced to investigate. Among the rotten pews and masses of sleek black feathers that covered the dirt floor, they would find the body of withered Mary Keeny, her eyes pecked clean from her skull.

They would go on to question Jonathan fruitlessly, though their efforts were quite halfhearted; they knew, as everyone knew, how wretched the old woman had been to him, how cowardly and meek the young man was.

They would eventually call it natural causes. There would never be a reason to suspect otherwise as the book which contained the bastardized recipe for what was essentially crow bait had been burned, along with the suit jacket she had always doused with it.

Even many years later, he would puzzle over how he had never thought to look through her stack of innocuous seeming cookbooks, how he had always missed that formula scrawled on notebook paper tucked between roast beets and cabbage soup.

Given that it was less than a week until Jonathan Crane officially reached legal adulthood, the police and the joke of a family court in Gotham would rule in favor of allowing him to stay put and finish the school year as planned.

He would spend the rest of the school year avoiding interaction of any sort, especially the downcast eyes of Jane Corrigan whenever the two happened to pass one another.

Perhaps if I were different, he thought so frequently when he felt the pang in his chest at the sight of her. But he wasn't; Scarecrow wasn't leaving, growing stronger if anything, and participating in Granny's death had opened up a new pathway in his life.

What lie ahead for both of them were distinctly seperate paths - his would take him to the top of the class at Gotham University, eventually to the title of Doctor Crane and a comfortable job at Arkham Asylum. Hers would take her out of the city, entirely.

Those paths would not cross again for many years, though they would certainly do so eventually.

That's it for this part of the story, folks! I'd like to thank everyone who's read and continued to hang tight with me through this. You're all amazing! You can either leave it here and imagine for yourself, or check out Fear Revisited, the sequel (I suggest the latter, of course!).