Fear’s embrace is the only kind I know.
Did Gotham never leave the 1930s, or did the 1930s never leave Gotham?
For decades, academics and reporters pondered some variation of this question. Regardless, in Gotham, “Party like it’s 1939,” was a threat. The organized crime syndicates that had dominated the city throughout the 1920s had grown to excess, spilling into one another’s territories and feuding nonstop. Meanwhile, petty crime flourished to the point where shopkeepers pulling sawed-off shotguns out from behind their counters to demand the contents of robbers’ wallets became an iconic postcard image on par with local landmarks. Was it glorification of an iconic era that preserved Gotham like an insect in amber, or was it fear of change? Better the devil you know, as the adage goes.
Scarecrow chuckled, raspy and unsettling. Perched on his shoulder, Craw let out a sharp caw of annoyance and flew up to one of the skeletal branches of a frost-laden apple tree. The crow mirrored the unsettling sound of his laughter with a series of guttural squawks. Their ominous mirth was the only noise in the moonlit township farm, miles away from the hustle and bustle of Valentine’s Day in Gotham, so awash in saccharine sentimentality and forced romantic gestures.
Holding onto the past as though it was a tattered security blanket hadn’t prevented change. One night, a dark knight with wings of waxed leather appeared to terrorize the criminal underworld. One night, a sinister jester emerged from a vat of chemical waste. One night, a page with feathery wings joined the knight. One night, a cat burglar donned a cat mask. Every night, it seemed, more and more of a motley crew of characters popped up. But the city’s already aged infrastructure, riddled with the wear and tear of countless battles waged by this ragtag band of misfits and monsters, buckled under the strain of a massive earthquake. Aftershocks wrecked the damaged carcass of the city, crows pecking the eyes off carrion. When the government officially relinquished control and declared it “No Man’s Land,” supplies dwindled, and the city fully descended into anarchy. Gotham lay slain for a whole year. Eventual reconstruction was piecemeal, fraught with challenges, and shadowed by ulterior motives. Yet, while the so-called New Gotham presented a gleaming façade of rebuilt skyscrapers and restored order, its aesthetics remained tethered to morbid nostalgia. Perhaps now out of anxiety about offending its protector? The Batman and the architecture were interlinked in the popular imagination, and for good reason: space distorted around him and his protégés.
Dr. Jonathan Crane was only a mortal man, doing what everyone with ambitions outside the cultural norm did in Gotham. Becoming his ideal self through mask and garb. Living life on his terms, consumed not by the fickle, lowly passions of romance but by a higher, relentless pursuit of scientific advancement. For that, the courts had the gall to rule that he was laboring under a defect of reason, that he did not know that his actions were immoral. What was so wrong about his life’s work, anyway? Not that he harbored any hope for a different sentence next time he ended up in custody—once the public decided someone belonged to Arkham, juries and judges alike stuck by that decision. He had no plans to end up in law’s clutches tonight, though.
“Tonight,” he told Craw, “I will revel in Batman’s terror until his mind shatters open for my perusal. After all—I have the home field advantage.”
He snickered at his own lame joke, gesturing dramatically at the frozen cornfield behind him with his scythe. The crow hung upside-down from a branch, swinging gently, and regarded him with polite interest while she played. His captive, bound and gagged at the heart of the field, didn’t hear it. The snow absorbed sound. There was only a rustle wherever the animals Scarecrow had let loose on the small, square field disturbed the vegetation. There were no buildings around for several acres, no windows to shatter through, no streets to shrink or elongate under mysterious shadows, none of Batman’s usual fare. It might not negate the monster’s powers completely, but it would make him struggle.
What an outstanding scene it’d make! Someone so fearsome squirming with dread. His pleas for mercy the whimpers of a beaten beast, writhing in anguish. Ah, what wouldn’t Scarecrow give to finally hear him scream?
But beneath all the bravado lay the same—exhilarating, repugnant, intoxicating—sensation that gripped him every time he faced the Batman: the way his breath quickened, the way the hairs on the nape of his neck prickled, the way his stomach churned. He hated it. He needed it. He loved it. He craved it. It was the only thing worth living for.
And yet, he wondered—could Batman, so consumed by his crusade against crime, so entrapped by Gotham’s ageless horrors, truly feel that same zeal, that same love, without the aid of Fear Toxin?
Tonight would be the night to find out.
Giddy with such prospects, he bowed theatrically before Craw. “Time to make ourselves scarce. My date should be arriving soon.”
Above, his feathered companion’s wings beat a hasty retreat for home.
An engine’s growl reverberated along the lonely dirt road.
He let the cornfield swallow him whole, and waited for it to savour the main course.
The corn hissed in protest as Batman pried closely-planted, brittle stalks apart, row by row. Frozen, sharp leaves with serrated edges must be tugging at the kevlar armor that protected a humanoid body, at the cape that safeguarded folded wings and elusive tail, at the cowl that shrouded half a face in mystery. An exposed mouth, framed by four tusk-like fangs, might have gotten some fine scrapes. If his skin could get scrapes from such a banal source as leaves. Jonathan wasn’t an avid occultist the way some of his colleagues were, but lacked for anything better to pass the time in Arkham than to join in when others compared their findings about the Batman.
“He has two hearts. I’ve heard them,” Two-Face would offer after a flip of his coin. “Must be for all the extra blood he drinks. Vampire.”
“Got two rows of teeth too,” Killer Croc would grumble, rubbing at a bandaged forearm. “Back row is dull, like human teeth. He must have mutated from a human.”
“His biology is certainly human-like enough to be affected by my toxins,” Scarecrow would interject with pride.
“None of you know what you’re talking about,” Riddler would declare. “Whereas I have found that the more living beings are around, the less his space-bending capabilities work. Similar to films about haunted houses where ghosts can move furniture around but not touch people directly. Therefore I propose that he is possibly some sort of undead.”
“He’s obviously a demon,” someone would invariably scoff at this point. “Must be horns under the pointy ears in that mask. Even the Robins have horns.”
“Their wings are different, so why wouldn’t their ears be? They’ve gotta be aliens,” someone else would say, less interested in the outcome of the familiar argument than in the violence that was sure to follow.
“What do the bird boys—and that one girl—have to do with anything? They’re not even the same species as Batman and Batgirl.” Someone would wind up to throw the first punch.
So a brawl would break out in the day room not too long after. For entertainment purposes. Nobody had solid evidence about what Gotham’s guardians were.
Undead, metahumans, demons, aliens, unknown creatures too obscure to have names.
It didn’t matter.
Fear was universal.
Scarecrow stalked his way through the snowy field, baiting his prey closer with the occasional swing of his scythe. Foxes and rodents testing the effects of a new, powdered version of his toxin trampled through the stalks, frightening one another and confusing his chaser. Couldn’t make it too easy.
“Where is he, Crane?” Batman called out. Deep, gruff, and barely just on the side human speech instead of… something else.
He was some old Gotham University professor who had always been quick to put down Jonathan for his lack of interest in frivolous spending… or had it been his unorthodox teaching methods? The truth was that it didn’t matter one bit now. The man was irrelevant, only picked for how quick Batman would connect him to his former coworker Jonathan Crane.
Scarecrow weaved around a Halloween animatronic decoration dressed in one of his old costumes.
“Who cares?” he called out, and ducked out into the cornrow behind the other scarecrow.
Batman emerged from behind another cornrow, hot on his heels, and uppercut the decoy’s head clean off.
A geyser of fake blood gushed out of the neck stump, and the severed head let out a blood-curdling shriek.
Wings of darkness unfurled in shock for a brief but precious moment of tense stillness while the detective processed this turn of events.
Somehow, through sheer willpower and professionalism, Scarecrow refrained from jumping for joy.
The wings disappeared under the cape once more. A snarl escaped Batman’s lips as he booted the headless scarecrow from its wooden stake. He inspected the head, and a handful of crumpled chocolate wrappers fell out of the novelty haunted house set piece. All were discarded, thrown over his shoulder.
The commotion spooked nearby animals, and Batman chased after the noise. Scarecrow rose from his hiding spot to follow. A baseline reaction had been established. The procedure was now to be iterated on the remaining decoy scarecrows scattered across the field.
“Careful, now,” Scarecrow stage whispered. “I’m sure you want to rescue the good old professor in one piece… Then again, I don’t mind if you punch that pompous jerk into next week.”
Leading him to the next decoy took finesse, but the incessant rustling of dry, frozen corn stalks caused by the frantic animals kept Batman disoriented enough. The process was much the same as the first. Except, of course, Batman never fell for the same trick twice.
At least not the exact same.
This scarecrow was tied to the yard stake supporting it. It squirmed in its bonds, whimpering.
Batman approached the decoy gingerly, the way he approached helpless victims. He softened his stance and the harsh line of his mouth, as though that would dull the sharpness of his fangs and his—brilliant, cruel, unfathomable—mind. Did he truly believe placating gestures would stop his hulking form from leeching what foolish light dared touch most of it? That slowing his movements mitigated their inherent Uncanny Valley effect? That a chimera-shaped black hole was capable of not being intimidating? Ridiculous. Scarecrow gritted his teeth so hard one cracked.
Batman’s head snapped in his direction.
Tall, desiccated corn stalks swayed with a murmur of secrets not meant for human ears, as the space between two of them suddenly widened like a gaping maw to expose his hiding spot.
Disregarding all laws of nature as banal, the snowy ground between Batman and Scarecrow shrank.
They were chest to chest now, a shocking intimacy that made his backbone quiver. His heart pounded, not just in fear, but in a twisted kind of admiration for the horror that loomed before him. The embodiment of Gotham’s nightmares, a terror no one who lived in the shadow of the bat was immune to. The weight of Batman’s presence bore down on him, a crushing reminder that some terrors were not meant to be confronted, but rather, appeased.
A vicious grip enveloped Scarecrow’s wrists before he could even try to swing his scythe. Broiling heat penetrated through his ragged layers of flannel and burlap clothes. Batman’s grip shifted to press the wooden handle of Scarecrow’s own weapon against his midsection, leveraging the force to lift his foe off the ground. He was but a terrified ragdoll in the grip of a vengeful god.
The chilled air shifted.
Space snapped back in place.
Batman still had him.
“No Fear Toxin up your sleeve?” His voice was bricklaying and soldering steel beams, painstakingly reconstructing foundations for a stained-glass skyscraper as it crumbled in on itself ad nauseam.
“We have enough chemistry. Isn’t that what tonight is about? Hearts racing, adrenaline pumping…”
In a blink, the field forgot that the squirming scarecrow decoy was twelve feet away from them. Batman maneuvered the scythe to tear open the decoy, freeing a chittering colony of bats to fly off into the chill night—and a poem scrawled on a construction paper heart to fall to the ground, ignored.
“What’s the point of this?”
“You know fear is always my point. It’s the most powerful emotion—much more exhilarating than any faux romance anyone could indulge in on a night like this.”
“There’s nothing exhilarating about you terrorizing innocents.”
“But there is! Their mundane existences keep them unaware of the endless thrills that await in the dark. I’m only sharing my passion with them! It’s romantic in its own way, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t.”
With a violent, dismissive jerk of the scythe, Scarecrow was tossed aside to land hard, a heap of burlap and bone in the snow.
“What do you know about romance? You’re spending Valentine’s out in a cornfield with me. Got a deep, dark fear of abandonment? An unrequited yearning that eats away at your self-worth? Maybe—” A kick to the solar plexus knocked the wind out of him.
He was scooped up and thrown over a shoulder, not unlike the sacks his costume was made out of. He could work with this! Batman had kindly provided him with a front row seat to observe his reactions, really. His scythe was out of reach, but the reassuring weight of a skull bulb full of Fear Toxin hid in the folds of his costume. He would give Batman the true heights of intoxicating fear; all the sublime delights the Dark Knight reserved for his enemies, never tasting himself. Then, he would escape to unleash a fear so profound, so absolute, that Gotham would finally understand his vision. The vision he believed Batman, deep down, secretly shared.
Frigid air stabbed Scarecrow’s lungs with every ragged breath, icy daggers that twisted when he coughed. Batman had figured out how to ignore the ruckus of animals underfoot, walking with purpose to… wherever his yet-to-be-properly-described senses were leading him. Could he see things beyond what mere mortals could? Hear a mugger cock a gun a hundred miles away? Scarecrow entertained such possibilities until breathing stopped bringing agony.
He was unceremoniously sent tumbling to the snow, at the feet of a grotesque effigy of himself. A tremor of anticipation wracked his frame as he sat up, legs tucked beneath him, breath hitched in a moment of unparalleled wonder.
In Batman’s hand, a throwing knife, shaped like the symbol emblazoned on his chest, glinted wickedly in the fading moonlight. With a practiced, sickening slash, he ripped open the decoy.
A torrent of straw erupted. A stench of blood and rot that tainted the crisp air. From under the straw decomposing viscera spilled forth, sliced and arranged into a macabre semblance of roses. Thousands of insects, their chitinous legs a blur of frantic movement, teemed within the meat petals. Coffin flies, carrion beetles, cockroaches—consuming flesh and one another, even as they recoiled from Batman’s presence.
A subtle shift in posture, a tightening of muscles, no more than a twitch.
“Remember this,” Batman had told him once, “some of your victims are beyond help… because you killed them. That scares me.” [*]
Time to put that claim to the test.
Under his mask, Scarecrow licked his chapped lips. A fluttery, empty feeling blossomed in his stomach. Yearning for a glimpse of Batman’s wings to blot out the light-polluted night sky with the kind of darkness that caused people to hallucinate.
The blade paused, hovering above the gutted decoy. Not a tremor, not a flinch. Not even anger. It was something colder, akin to a surgeon dissecting a diseased organ, seeking only clinical understanding. Batman stood there, wrist-deep in a gore-slick bouquet of vermin-infested rotting human flesh, and remained as unperturbed as a shopper at a grocery store queue. Scarecrow’s elation was murdered and usurped by disappointment.
This wasn’t the reaction he’d hoped for. He had anticipated—craved—a mirror reflecting his own twisted vision, however fleeting. This wasn’t the breaking point. This was… worse. Was this contempt? Despite all his claims of worrying for Scarecrow’s victims? Did he simply not care for the deceased unless they perished in front of his eyes? Did he need to feel the personal failure of not being able to stop the killer on the spot? Or was it something else? Had he anticipated the crude theatre, and decided not to react outwardly no matter what? Had Scarecrow just gotten lucky to startle him at all the first time? The idea stung. It implied a level of predictability, a lack of skill anathema to his self-image as the Master of Fear.
Batman cleaned his hand and the knife with a scrap of torn burlap. He turned, his cape swirling silently around him, and for the first time, his gaze met Scarecrow’s. Or rather, Scarecrow assumed it did. Those cowl-obscured eyes were impossible to read, but the weight of that unseen stare pressed down on him nonetheless.
“Really, Crane?”
The two words were more devastating than any physical blow. It wasn’t the pronouncement of failure, though that was implied. It was the utter lack of surprise, the weary resignation in his tone, that made Scarecrow’s jaw tighten.
The Fear Toxin felt heavier in his pocket. He would unleash a fear so personal, so targeted, that the Batman would finally understand.
A surge of adrenaline, fueled by wounded pride and incandescent rage, propelled him forward. He stumbled to his feet, the icy ground slick beneath his worn boots, and bolted. Frost-rimed leaves snagged on his burlap costume as he darted past, the spectral grasp of the field’s skeletal fingers slowing him down. Even so, he was faster than Batman expected, or perhaps, faster than Batman deemed him worth anticipating.
Batman would follow.
Batman always followed.
It was his nature, his curse, his purpose.
Still, he risked a glance over his shoulder. Batman was not actively pursuing, not yet, but he was an implacable shadow at his heels. No wasted energy. Scarecrow could feel it, the weight of that silent scrutiny, more oppressive than any shouted threat.
Panting, Scarecrow reached the center of the cornfield, where his disguised hostage was gagged and bound to a stake. A pathetic, insignificant pawn in the grand game of terror he was about to unleash, but a pawn nonetheless. Batman, for all his detachment, had a sentimental streak Scarecrow intended to exploit with surgical precision.
He wrapped his arms around his captive’s shoulders, a mockery of an embrace.
“Love lies.” He yanked the hostage’s mask and gag off. “But fear? Fear reveals all.”
Scarecrow loved the indiscriminate nature of fear, how it creeped into the hearts of the meek and valiant alike. It had the power to strip away pretense. In those painfully short moments of terror, individuals revealed their true selves—unmasked and exposed. Each person carried their own demons—those buried anxieties that whispered the darkest of truths in the back of their psyche. The allure of Fear Toxin was its ability to force these hidden fears into the open; its only flaw, that Scarecrow could never witness his “patient’s” unearthed nightmares firsthand.
Forget the other silly decoys he’d set up, scattered across each cornrow. No more theatrical displays. He was ready for something… personal. Something that would burrow under Batman’s skin, bypass his impenetrable defenses, and finally, finally, elicit a genuine reaction.
A silent, imposing, unyielding void approached.
Scarecrow carded a gloved hand through the hostage’s thinning hair in faux affection. He lifted the skull bulb, and squeezed. Orange vapor curled and swirled around them like ethereal serpents seeking their prey. He inhaled greedily. The acrid scent seeped into his lungs, and sweet dread sank its venomous fangs in his pounding heart.
“The Bat! No! Please! Stay away!” The hostage seized in terror. Panic-stricken eyes darted wildly, searching for escape, for salvation, for anything that would keep the monster at bay.
Batman hesitated. Worry flashed across his rugged features. To Scarecrow’s delight, Batman’s wings, dark as the void between stars, twitched beneath the heavy fabric of his cape.
As Batman drew near, the hostage’s shrieks morphed into a guttural, animalistic wail. The man trembled as though his skeleton was trying to shake his bothersome flesh off.
In a burst of surreal absurdity, Batman snatched an oxygen tank and mask from his utility belt. A cartoonish feat of space-bending that never ceased to cause a migraine when witnessed directly. At least it wasn’t the car—the bigger the object, the worse the mental anguish.
The hostage’s eyes, wide and frantic, rolled back in his head, showing only the stark white of his sclera. A silent scream escaped his lips before unconsciousness claimed him.
Scarecrow erupted in throaty cackles. “Look what you’ve done! Do you get it now? Everyone should fear you. It’s futile to pretend you only terrorize who you wish to. Why do you insist on coddling the law-abiding? Why do you fear harm coming to the so-called ‘innocents’ so much? Why do you so desperately need to protect them?”
The wind became a deafening buzz of white noise. Yet, a suffocating stillness descended upon the desolate field. No leaf stirred, no cloth fluttered; the air itself held its breath.
Batman lunged.
Scarecrow yelped and tumbled backwards.
With savage efficiency, Batman tore the bonds that held the hostage. He kneeled to lay the unconscious form on the ground. Strong, gentle fingers checked for a pulse, and fitted the oxygen mask over pallid lips. From the depths of his cape peeked a sinewy tail, held in a tense upward curl, a coiled spring ready to unleash its power.
Batman’s head snapped up, and his gaze locked onto Scarecrow with an intensity that could freeze hell. Pearlescent fangs, long and longing for blood, gleamed in the pallid moonlight. He rose, his cape billowing like a storm cloud about to break.
Scarecrow swallowed hard to relieve the dryness from his gaping mouth, and scrambled to his feet.
Then came the tempest.
Burlap offered as much protection as a tissue against a hurricane. Scarecrow dodged a blow that would have shattered his ribs, and landed a desperate kick to Batman’s knee. Batman staggered, but his eyes never left Scarecrow. He was hunting, not fighting. The struggle became a blur of too solid shadows and flailing gangly limbs. However, no pain could diminish the pride that swelled in his chest.
He’d done it.
He’d touched the untouchable.
It was sublimated into anger, but an infinitesimal trace of fear had touched Batman’s heart.
The climax of their grim encounter wasn’t marked by a mighty crash but rather by a gasping breath, strangled and desperate. Pinned beneath the weight of the Dark Knight, the reality of defeat tightened around Scarecrow like a noose.
The hunt was over.
“What is it you think you’re going to uncover in me?” Batman seethed.
A physiological reaction, however alien, however brief. Something more honest than clipped words and mighty fists. Evidence of the universality of fear.
“Wings,” he croaked, a tremor of both fear and anticipation in his voice.
Batman’s lips curled into a grim sneer. “If you insist.”
With a haunting flourish, leathery wings of darkness unfurled from Batman’s back. They pressed down upon Scarecrow, a coffin’s lid sealing shut against the cold night.
Shadows, alive with whispers of horrors untold, caressed his senses teasingly. He was in an infinity beyond the narrow confines of existence, where nature’s laws as he knew them held no sway. The mere thought of such dimensions’ enormity turned his bone marrow to ice. The only silver lining was that he was a perennial insomniac. Because from this moment onward, specters of unseen shadowy horrors would claw relentlessly at every corner of his petty little mind whenever he so much as blinked. A dizzying plunge through the endless chasms of infinity, each moment stretching into a torment that felt both timeless and ephemeral. Thoughts—his or the shadows’?—flickered, as fleeting and insubstantial as the mist of Fear Toxin that had once fueled his nightmares: Was he even alive? Had he ever truly existed? Did anything else exist outside this void? Hadn’t he been with someone before he was here? Hadn’t he had a name, ambitions, a sense of self? Surely he had, it was on the tip of his tongue, itching in the back of his mind. If he even had such things as a tongue, a brain, a physical body, that is. Perhaps he was only what remained of a nightmare someone had woken from and promptly forgotten.
There was only darkness, and every reason to fear it.
Sublime.
The universe faded back into existence, an assault of lights and colors and shapes and noises and vibrations and scents and tactile stimuli and proprioception and aching and the taste of blood and altogether too much. Scarecrow groaned. A faint scent of ozone, burnt wires sparking under a heavy thunderstorm, covering something earthy, musky. Bleary-eyed, he stole a peek at his current situation through his eyelashes. Batman, his arm muscles as solid as the iron-reinforced stone walls of a gothic cathedral, carried him into the looming gothic monstrosity that was Arkham.
Before Batman could hand him off into the waiting hands of harebrained psychiatrists and bloodthirsty security, a sudden impulse seized Scarecrow.
“That was fun.” Feather-light and lightning-quick, bloody lips pressed against a square jaw’s marble skin. “We should do it again soon.”
“You are unwell,” Batman said in a soft monotone as he turned to leave.
“Outstanding detective work. Solve why next, and call these charlatans to let them know!”
Batman’s head tilted back in his direction. “Stay. Behave. At least try to let them help you.”
Scarecrow allowed the stunned staff to cuff him and drag him away, too busy belting out half-remembered love songs to care about the rough treatment.