Out of the Belfry, into the Fire

Above all Shadows

For a moment Harley feared Jonathan was dead, but she soon saw that he was still breathing and heavily. Quickly, she looked around and found a mat in the corner of the room that he might have been using to sleep on considering the pile of blankets thrown over it. She tried to help him to his feet, and thankfully she did not have to drag him. He was not completely unconscious.

He staggered as he leaned on her shoulder. His weight seemed to consist mostly of bone density, regardless, and his arm bones jabbed into her shoulders painfully to prove it. Behind the expected smells of a person not taking overly good care of himself, there was a strange chemical odor that almost reminded her of toxic sanitizer.

Once she had him laid down and she pulled the blankets up for him, he seemed to be out entirely for a moment. She started to check his pulse at his tense wrist, but his heavy breathing started up again. She stroked his sweaty head, and he shivered as though from fear of her touch— recoiling like an injured, frightened kitten. As she continued to stroke, however, he calmed and seemed to welcome it and slowly to melt into a sick child with his mother at his bedside.

"There, there, Professor," she cooed gentler than her mother ever cooed. "I do understand. I understand what it's like to be upset with yourself for not pleasing your master, your idol, your god, and then I found out that it wasn't a separate person I was trying to please— nope, not the Joker. It was myself I was trying to please. I wanted to prove I could help him, that I could tame the rage and the pain...to flirt with power and be unafraid. I was too proud to admit that I could never have what I wanted even though I hardly even wanted it anymore. It was the principle of the thing..."

Then slowly Harley stood up.

At one of the tables, after a moment, she happened to glance upon many angry, spidery sketches of scarecrows and scarecrow-like creatures. There was one in particular drawn numerous times and once very prominently in particular and circled with an arrow and a note. The note was too messy to read, but the sketch did not even really look like a scarecrow so much anymore. It looked like an Old West preacher-turned-zombie holding a staff, and the creature had been cut down from a noose.

So he had been planning to be his own god, prophet, and priest all at the same time, huh?

Harley sighed and looked again at Jonathan's shivering form. He was already beginning to drool in his sleep.

"Poor, poor Jonathan..." she whispered, and she proceeded to get him some water.

#

The siren wailed, but it was not a police siren. It was the sound of an ambulance. It was not coming this way or going that way. It was omnipresent.

Jonathan was only conscious enough to recognize the sound and the lights and the babble of medical staff like a dream. He was rather more delirious than anything when he was not sound asleep. He whispered to himself below the loud noises making his skull ache and throb with pain. His head throbbing made his stomach and chest lurch and squirm more than ever.

"You cannot contain fear... I won't go back to Arkham; I won't be a slave of hospital care... I am fear, I am the genius of terror, the Scarecrow— the embodiment of all things that mankind wishes to hide from itself...the headless genius of famine... I..."

He shivered as he saw amidst the shadows in the queer light of the ambulance, a bat, but it vanished in a double take. He blinked and closed his eyes and he thought, It is not Batman I fear, is it...?

The world around him was swallowed up as under a cloud of bubbles after being plunged beneath inky depths.

It was not a man in a stupid latex bat suit who stopped criminals and hardly ever, if ever, killed them even when he had ample opportunity.