Do you think the Gotham Rogues plan their Arkham escapes to be at different times the way fast food chains plan their advertisements?

yEs

I wasn’t motivated to draw anything else so I just drew sexy Jon(s)

@crowsinthecornfield .....

//ooc ....he's never beating the allegations.

//ooc um- HEY YALL- Please don’t use the graphics/collages/headers I make for my friends on your own blogs. Reblogs are always okay; reposts (or just taking them for personal use) are not. These are gifts made for specific people, not general-use assets. Thanks.

"Funny. You seem to view fear as the God, in this scenario, and not the sacrifice. While I will admit that terror is such a primal, truthful emotion, and that it has the tendency to strip away all the masks that humanity tries to wear, simple terror cannot be the final goal. Nor purpose."

"I believe that, fundamentally fear is the key to open the box, and not the treasure inside. Regardless of the effect that it may have, an emotion is pointless if there is nothing to do with it."

A pause. His fingers drum idly on the table that separates them, the Scarecrow's claws tapping at the surface in a slow, constant rhythm.

"I would take you up on your offer, if I knew the context around it. After all, there is much to discover about a man, once you understand the intricacies of his work."

"Though."

"You will have to be more specific with your definition of demonstration. I doubt that your toxins will have an effect on me."

Oh, I’ve no doubt. Rest assured, dependency on using my compound would be a remarkably inelegant way to approach you. Where would I be if I relied on a single instrument to suffice? Fear is adaptable. So am I.

The doctor remained a statue of indifference, his features as bloodless as parchment. The only sign of life was the subtle, rapacious sparkle in his eyes with an unfiltered fascination.

Perhaps I misjudged the nature of this exchange. There may be greater value in discourse. I do recognize the utility of it, when it proves…mutually illuminating.

The opportunist’s adjustment. He glanced briefly to the tapping claws, then returned, unperturbed.

Fortunately, dissent does not unsettle me. But I’ve learned not to be too presumptuous about a subject before I’ve observed how it behaves under pressure.

His words were laced with a superiority that found its physical mirror in the supercilious curl of his lip.

He is met with a slight nod and the cold gaze of a gas mask. While the contempt and tone with registered, it goes unacknowledged. Simply written off an another quirk of this Jonathan's character, and set aside like a box of forgotten trinkets.

The Scarecrow does not have enough patience to play petty games, or see who can stoop the lowest. Nor does he enough to try and prove something to some rearranged and reflected version of himself. It is a waste of time.

"Pressure. Mh. Is that what you believe you are doing? Are these the tests that you believe you are conducting, trying to poke at a psyche and see how it reacts?"

"I must say, Doctor Crane, if this is your attempt to unsettle me, I am fairly... bored. You are searching for fear in a place that it does not exist. Terror is something that I have purged- unfortunately- from my system, along with panic, along with fear, along with anxiety."

"We could go back and forth on the details and semantics of our work, but if your end goal is to draw out a first hand experience, you will leave disappointed."

Duly noted, then.

Crane’s speech hovered just enough above the verge of too soundless to be heard, a low and delicate prelude suggesting his indifference. He spoke as a man already detached from the outcome. Completely unbothered. Whether he ever truly cared about anything was unclear, and perhaps irrelevant. The colour of his sentences were the grey of early winter dawn, understated, and veiled by a soft chill. Each syllable had none rising above the other. 

He regarded the mask the way he would regard a specimen that had inexplicably survived past its predicted endpoint. Marginally interesting. No more. Nothing reached his expression. There were only the soft-spoken words sliding discreetly from the stone his face was carved of, his eyes polished to a reflective sheen that concealed, rather than revealed, the entirety of the thing watching from behind them.

Purged is a fashionable word. One often favored by those who lack the courage to admit they’ve done nothing more than displace a symptom. That undesirable indication is just relegated to a quieter corner of the psyche where it can ferment without supervision. Elimination, after all, is a remarkably comforting fantasy; Seductive in theory, almost never achievable in practice.

You present boredom as evidence of mastery. I find that optimistic. In my experience, boredom is just the consequence of repeated exposure without integration. A stimulus loses meaning because the system has dulled itself sufficiently to survive its presence, not that it vanished. And there’s no adaptation in that, no insight or evolution. Only endurance and coping.

Removing fear does not produce clarity. It produces absence…something profoundly unfinished. I find it curious that one could covet such a vacancy. Many certainly try.

Do you miss it? That moment, I mean—just before panic overwhelms restraint. When the mind, stripped of pretense, becomes exquisitely honest about its own helplessness. 

His curiosity was left naked, openly indecent. One by one, he had peeled away the vestiges of restraint, the cultivated trappings of professionalism expected of him, leaving only the raw tissue beneath: unashamed fascination laid bare.

I don’t experience fear as others do either. But absence? That would concern me. To observe fear only in others is an inadequate substitute for understanding. It lacks the intimacy required to proficiently know something, much less utilize it to its fullest capacity. 

And yes, I’m aware that intimidation is crude and inefficient, particularly when one is dealing with a subject who already discerns the tactics employed. No, what interests me now is the method by which one convinces oneself they have transcended something so fundamental.

I have encountered precisely one mind that still elicits a genuine response from me. One.

…and it did not achieve that by pretending fear no longer resided within it.

I’ll spare you the performance and resort to discussion, if only you’ll humor me. I don’t need you to tell me how you did it. I want to know what you put there instead. Because from a psychological standpoint, rarely does something survive long after something essential has been hollowed out. What point would there be to persist, after all.

He considers the question for a moment, unpacks it and lays it out on the table in front of him. Some part of Jonathan considers giving the same non answer that he has prepared, and that he hands to every individual that asks any version of this question.

But the words leave his lips without his permission. And they do not hide behind half-truths.

"Ah, then I would ask you to note the word unfortunately that accompanied the statement. The feeling was not necessarily purged by choice- it was the simple, slow process of a limb falling off at the lack of a blood supply. Necrosis setting in to pieces of my brain, severing individual nerves with a steady hand, before moving on to the next tie to cut."

Jonathan lifts his palm, demonstrating the careful action that he was describing. Slowly tilting his hand to slice through the air and scoop the fear out from it.

"Many blame the toxins for the absence here, saying that the immunity to the chemicals that I manufacture have also numbed me to the pain and torment of terror. But... I believe you would agree with me, that all that is wrong with... you and I started far earlier, yes?"

"Where your mind turned cold and clinical, mine simply... ate itself to survive the winter."

He offers a smile that the other will not see, but the gesture is apparent in the tone that he layers over his words. It is performative. Almost nauseatingly so. Exaggerated and twisted out of shape as a way to ensure that the message is clearly heard. And yet, beneath all of that, there is some spark of something genuine.

There is a blade in the hand that his words extend, but at least Jonathan is being truthful about that fact.

"There is nothing to replace what has been lost. There is nothing to put in the void that fear once stood in, but at some point I believe that the void becomes as inherent as the fear that used to fill it. It speaks to me in the way that fear once did."

"It calls itself the Scarecrow, but I doubt that is its true name."

He takes a step closer, against his better judgement. His own curiosity- though quieter and more easily hidden behind the mask that he wears- driving him forward.

"It is not a question of endurance. It is one of purpose. It is the continuation of all that my work has amounted to. It is..."

"Ambition."

"Or something like it."

Crane drew a long, deliberate draught of air through his nostrils, letting it seep into him like a whisper slipping beneath a locked door. It settled low in his chest in a familiar occupation. He permitted the silence to descend. It sank to the floor between them, cold and viscous, pooling around their feet before creeping upward and threading its toxin through skin. Silence, properly applied, could unsettle most people. It could gnaw. Erode.

But of course, neither recoiled. 

There was nothing left for it to claim. Whatever tender flesh discomfort might once have found had already been stripped away and flensed by the same beast long ago. The one that teaches survival through mutilation. Fear had taken its due early, and what remained no longer registered its teeth.

Your ambition is relentless, I’m sure. One almost envies the confidence.

The past, however, was a less obedient thing. Its mere mention had a way of testing even immaculate composure. If not in the carved stillness of his face, set and severe as a funerary effigy, then in the gloss of his eyes where something distant arrived. They looked straight through the present, unanchored, seeing nothing but the residue of old horrors: the way one recalls a nightmare in daylight, absurd in retrospect, yet still clinging to the nerves.

Whatever that reference to earlier years might have stirred was promptly sealed away by the man who understood precisely what prolonged suffering did to the internal architecture of the mind. Some distortions were not inflicted in moments of catastrophe. They accumulated and layered. He did not revisit them. There was no need. 

So Crane continued.

I see. In the absence, the void itself becomes what remains. Paradoxical, perhaps, but hardly unprecedented. Perhaps a system can lose a central function and compensate. Reorganize around the damage.

You said it calls itself the Scarecrow.

Those pale, glassy blues caught the light and shimmered with interest again, though quickly buried beneath the dryness of his next remark.

I assume that distinction between you and it was no more accidental than your choice of unfortunately before.

"Ah, I did, didn't I?"

A hum.

"That's the thing about paradoxes, wouldn't you say? They fold in on themselves and spiral on and on into oblivion no matter how desperately you try to set things straight again. You cannot untangle what is from what isn't, and the more that you try, the more that the concept dissolves into antimatter in your hands."

"There is an undeniable distinction between Jonathan Crane and the Scarecrow, but I could not trace the borders with a pencil if asked."

His head tilts to match the angle of his duplicate's, like a mirror finally catching up to the thing it is meant to reflect. Or a camera coming into focus.

"Sometimes, I am Jonathan Crane. Sometimes, I am his corpse, being piloted by something else."

Now, at this distance, it is easier to see the outline of his eyes through the lenses of the gas mask that he wears. Tinted orange and distorted by glass, but that is not enough to hide the fascination in his eyes this time.

The spark of interest- Narcissus staring into a pond. Two halves of a brain finally sewn back together and stuffed into the same skull. A scientist staring at a test subject that he wants to dissect.

"I have seen men sculpt masks from fear a hundred times over. I have seen them carve into their own skin and mold clay onto flesh in an attempt to tear off their faces and sewn new ones on. To become what they want to be. What they have to be."

"What they think that they should be."

His head tilts to the other side, and Jonathan allows a smile to force its way onto his face and make itself apparent in his eyes. There is poison in the meal that he offers on a silver platter. And he does not try to hide that fact. Jonathan offers it regardless.

"But I have yet to decide if this is your true face, or this is the mutilated pile of muscle and bone that has been left behind."

Crane appraised him with detached patience. He was pursuing a hypothesis and nearly craving it to devour its own margins. There was a certain satisfaction to be had if it could be nudged along; if he could locate the precise nerve and apply just enough pressure to catalyse a reaction. That, after all, was what unattended structures inevitably did. Collapse inward. But this would not be simple. Resistance implied complexity. And complexity, to Crane, was always more illuminating anyway.

There was something almost tender in his scrutiny now. It was the measured attention of a clinician studying a beautiful deformity, drawn not despite the damage, but because the damage had become its defining architecture.

Well, I’m afraid my identity is far less operatic than the narrative you’ve constructed for yourself.

Condescension threaded through his tone like a toxin diluted just enough to avoid immediate detection.

It’s my professional opinion that what you’re describing is rather indecision, refined into a philosophy as a means of self-containment. An unwillingness to accept that the mask and the man are not opposing entities. One is merely an instrument the other learned to manipulate. What remains unresolved, I think, is which one of them was ever meant to be in control, and which one was always designed to be used.

He moved laterally, skirting the edge of the room as though tracing a restricted boundary. When he crossed the threshold marked by the table, he violated its decree. Willingly wandering into the den of a beast. He leaned in just enough to be felt without offering the courtesy of eye contact. 

I don’t oscillate between identities. Nor do I require metaphor to justify continuity. I am quite intact. But we can examine me later.

The corners of his lips were dragged into a smile.

If anything, you seem to regard your deterioration as an achievement. Which leaves us not with a question of identity, but with a question of accountability. There was never a guiding hand. There was never anything else. Just you. Alone with the consequences.

"Not between identities, perhaps, but certainly between masks. No one is ever the same person, from moment to moment and from room to room- we all change to fit into the mold that has been provided."

"The way that we speak to those that we hate will always differ from the way we speak to those that we do not. Consistency- continuity- there is no such thing. And I see no benefit in pretending that there is."

"I understand the weight of my actions, Doctor. I understand that it is my hands that are stained with blood and with sin, and I understand that it will be my body that they burn when I am dragged away to the stake."

"But I also understand that Jonathan Crane is not the Scarecrow. Not wholly. Not exclusively. And that distinction allows me more freedom than most. I exist as both monster and man. As Jekyll and as Hyde."

"There is a power to that, if you understand what to do with it."

A laugh, though it holds no humor.

"I mean, do you truly believe that the Batman wears his cape and cowl once the sun comes up? Or that every man who has ever hit his wife would do so in front of a live studio audience? Or that children will still cry over the same spilled milk once they have grown into adulthood?"

"Change, though cyclical, is inherent in identity."

Unfazed by the refutation, Crane paused. His gaze remained fixed, unblinking, the act of looking being an integral part of the thinking itself. Then he drew in a breath. He began again, entirely undisturbed. 

I’d argue the separation you’re proposing is far less generous. Man and monster reside uncomfortably close, often occupying the same thought, the same impulse.

Adaptation between contexts is inevitable, of course. We modulate and perform almost without exception. But the core does not fragment so neatly. What persists is the composite: the sum of every inclination, every restraint, every indulgence. Not the mask. The whole.

The Batman may prowl Gotham at night and shed the cowl by morning. But what defines him is neither the costume nor the civilian disguise. It’s the psyche that necessitates both. The space between them. A man who beats his wife may care for his children sincerely. He does not become two men because the behaviors conflict. He is one individual, capable of both cruelty and affection. Both acts belong to him. He is not absolved by compartmentalization.

That is where I find your argument falters. In the freedom through division, I see only avoidance. Nuance matters, and complexity is unavoidable. But fragmentation does not create liberty. It only makes accountability easier to misplace.

"I would not call it fragmentation. Nor compartmentalization. I am simply wearing the correct attire for the correct occasion. Sometimes, that attire will include my own corpse, and other times it might include a straw hat."

"The argument here is circular. You are finding meaning in words that I did not say. If my intention were to avoid the truth of reality, I would have put efforts into hiding my name and isolating the straw from the man, no? However, I have done neither."

It is his turn, now, to take a step forward. This little game that they are playing, this dance that they are doing. Running around through the woods, poking at sleeping bears, throwing rocks into ponds that would have been better left undisturbed. It is a game of chicken that neither of them are all that willing to lose.

"Everyone finds their own way to live with the demons in their heads, Doctor Crane. I, on the other hand, have learned how to horrify them instead."

Crane’s shoulders ascended with a near-imperceptible shrug, as if he had to raise them for the words to graze him. 

If you insist. 

The words weighed nothing. Permissive to a minor indulgence rather than relinquishing an argument.

In truth, whether he even believed a syllable of what he said was beside the point. Belief was not the instrument here. Provocation was. He had learned long ago that the surest way to map a mind was not to confront it directly, but to irritate it. Introduce a carefully chosen grain of sand and observe where the abrasion bloomed.

He wasn’t interested in being correct, really. He was interested in watching what surfaced when the other was disturbed. If the other was capable of such things at all. So, he allowed the debate balance to tip, unopposed. He wanted to see which nerve of his the other’s fingers would gravitate toward, which wound would demand to be pressed. Curiosity, after all, had always carried a faintly masochistic edge for him.

This was not the cowardice of swerving away from collision. It was the far more intimate experiment of loosening one’s grip on the wheel and observing what the machine chose to do when no hand restrained it.

Crane watched, patient and unblinking, prepared to learn exactly how much damage the other was willing to inflict when given the chance. Well, if any damage could be drawn out at all, of course. That uncertainty was part of the appeal. The anticipation. Toying with an exposed wire. The sensations of standing just outside catastrophe and feeling the air distort around it, waiting to see whether the spark would catch. He didn’t make his excitement known with a smile, but something in him leaned forward all the same.

“Hm.”

“It’s interesting, though, that you would bring up accountability of all things. Some might say that accountability, and all that associated, are meaningless in the grand scheme of Gotham City. No matter how many apologies are spoken, nor how much forgiveness is offered up, it will never erase the weight of the moral failing that has been committed. Those broken things that call themselves people will never be fixed, no matter how desperately they wish for it.”

“Any yet, the role of a psychiatrist ultimately is to fix, no? To rehabilitate and repair all of society’s worst members. Ask the insane to look within themselves and find any trace of a soul that might still be left behind. The endeavor will ultimately prove to be fruitless, as humans so often fall back into the same cycles that they were born into.”

“What is the end goal of a psychiatrist. Of a therapist. Of Arkham asylum. If not to simply perpetuate the cycle and extend the lifespan of that which should have died? You wish to teach humans through the toxins that you produce you wish to unveil something through fear, but you cannot speak to someone unwilling to listen. You cannot ask a blind man to look for the colors of the sunrise. And you will run in circles, trying to lead a drowning horse to clean water.”

“You tried to hoped my identity and my mask, but you failed to realize that your own… conquest is a mask within itself. You try to invent purpose and blame and guilt and accountability and apologies. But all that you are doing is reinventing the wheel.”

“You have stagnated. Your mind now rots within your skull, as it has nothing left to do. I would pity you, but that, too, would prove fruitless.”

"....The part of me that I can see."

The part that he didn't see.....he wasn't worried about that. It was inside him, suffocated but...controlled. But once it got out...

" When I let the thing in me out....that's when people die."

“People will die regardless of who you are and what you do. Every second, a human being on this planet drops dead, what is the point in worrying over how many deaths happen. Or when. Or where.”

A shrug.

“I mean. Honestly. Is it really the act of killing itself that scares you or is the loss of control and autonomy over your actions? Or. Is it all the associated consequences and the guilt that you would rather not deal with?”

He could simply pull the trigger right here and right now. He could let their brains splatter across the wall and watch their body crumple to the floor. He could wrap his hands around their neck and strangle them until they beg for a bullet to end it all.

There is something alluring about the idea that he cannot quite explain. A tempting offer. A proposal that Jonathan does not want to pass up.

But.

He reaches forward, plucking the coin from their grasp. He holds it between his fingers, the clawed gloves of the Scarecrow's uniform making it difficult to hold and to handle. But he manages, flipping it up into the air, closing his hand around the flash of silver before either of them can see the result.

"You know, I've always had the worst luck. Asking for fate to do me favors always results in the worst possible outcome. But what do you think God would call the worst outcome in this situation? Who wins, if you die?"

Though, there really is no point in asking a question to someone who cannot answer. There's only one way to find out. When Jonathan opens his palm to reveal the scarred side of the silver coin.

A pause.

The Scarecrow places the coin back into Harvey's pocket and draws the gun out from his mouth.

~. The taste of the heated barrel against their tongue was about to become all too unbareable - but then right as Crane pulled the gun out, their knees buckled. Their entire split frame getting off the high of their anticipated death.

As like many times before, they were denied peace at last. Again. Who could be so unlucky?

Spitting and heaving, the duo now kneeled down against the wall. One hand on the brick wall to stay balanced and one still holding their revolver. If Harvey's calculations were correct, they were down to just one bullet.

One bullet enough to kill.

They could shoot Crane right there and then. But they didn't. They had something important they needed to do first -- obeying their unwritten law above every other string of logic.

"...That was our turn...Now...Yours---"

The coin was once more presented. This time however, Harvey was the one who was determined to flip it.

F L I N G .

No need to say anything else. Because right then the double personality flipped the coin, both eyes watched it soar in the air - before landing in the palm of their gloved hand. Opening up their fingers one by one -- revealing the exact same side as before.

"...Guess we are destined to keep playing this game after all, Crane." .~

“Disappointing.”

Jonathan pressed the gun against their face to turn it, to stare at Two-Face’s half of their face and the damage that had been caused. And then it trailed down and he left it in the man’s scarred hand.

“Perhaps you should get that coin checked. Or ask for a renewal on your luck.”

He stepped back. Jonathan could play Russian roulette another time, and throw his life on the edge of a cliff whenever he liked. But he still had a heart to remove and a body to dispose of. Leaving the corpse alone and unsupervised would only cause more problems for him.

Now, he wasn’t nearly stupid enough to turn his back on the two just yet, especially now that he was unarmed. Instead, he took slow and even steps backwards drawing a path towards his scythe and towards the body.

His blood dripped on the ground, tracing his steps as he made them.