Shh... It's Okay to be Afraid

An independent, selective RP blog for Jonathan Crane / The Scarecrow. Largely headcanon based, but with influence from varied canon sources-- most notably Batman: Arkham Knight. AU friendly-- verses currently exist for Resident Evil, Dead by Daylight, and more. Please read all the info before interacting. Written with love by Spooper.

[timoremdei]

TIMOREMDEI-- an independent roleplay blog for Jonathan Crane/ The Scarecrow, heavily based in Batman: Arkham Knight. Written with love by Spooper.

18+ only. I do not associate myself strongly with any one fandom, and can adapt my muse to fit.

Rules | About | Bio | Carrd (coming soon)

[timoremdei]

Jonathan has never been one for flashy cars. He's never even owned a new car, honestly. He prefers to drive beat-up old trucks that look more like they belong on a farm than the streets of Gotham (or anywhere else for that matter). If they break and he can fix it himself, he does. If he can't, he's much more likely to just go buy another beat up old truck than to take it to someone else.

He also drives surprisingly well. He's a courteous driver, who is mindful of the speed limit, uses his turn signals, and will politely wave other cars ahead of him at stop signs as though it's nothing abnormal to see the Scarecrow sitting at an intersection with his mask off in a 1995 GMC truck.

[timoremdei]

"You look surprised." A lie, but told confidently.

There was something wrong with the air. Something trying to burrow its way through her lungs, through her bloodstream and into her nervous system. Her palms were sweaty, and her heart beat faster, but that was the worst of it. Everything else came out the same way it came in, a gasping exhale followed by an inhale, which brought more badness with it. It would not be long before her body tried other methods to get rid of it. Elise hoped her eyes were not glowing.

"Who are you?" He was to blame for this, of that she was sure. Throat itching, she fought back a cough and wiped something from her eye. A reddish stain, contaminated blood expelled through other means.

(Hope this works!)

Of course he looks surprised, he wants to say-- why wouldn't he, when someone has taken a direct hit from his toxin and isn't going mad with fear within the first ten seconds? It's not normal. She's not normal. That is becoming abundantly clear to him.

He can see the subtle signs that it's doing something. The slight flush that indicates her heart rate has picked up, the subtle tremor of her fingers... It couldn't be a bad batch, it simply couldn't be, not with all his chemistry knowledge, with all the work he had put into controlling every single variable to ensure that there were no bad batches....

So it must be her. She must be the problem. Something about her is different. Perhaps a neurological issue? Defects within the hypothalamus could be to blame-- he doubted it was the amygdala, since the physiological signs of fight or flight had manifested somewhat.... Ah, but he can't do a necropsy on a live subject to find out, and he doesn't have access to MRIs or even a simple EEG at this juncture.... Unless he wants to make one himself, but truthfully, the manufacture of fancy gadgets and gizmos were better left to minds like Nygma or Tetch. His knowledge of the mechanical was... Well. Limited to fixing trucks, mostly.

"Who am I," he parrots back to her calmly. "That is quite the question, isn't it?" His rheumy eyes watch the way she wipes at her own. "I might ask you the same thing."

[mistyjudgement]

Continued from here with @timoremdei.

The overhead light hums.

Not loudly. Just enough to be noticed once attention drifts too far from the room.

"Dr. Crane."

The voice is calm, practiced. Not raised. Not urgent. The tone of someone who has said the same name many times before and learned exactly how much weight it needs to carry.

A clipboard shifts softly. Paper against paper.

"You were explaining a distinction," the man continues, seated across from him. Mid-forties, perhaps. Unremarkable in a way that feels intentional. No visible nerves. No pen tapping. His badge rests flat against his chest: ARKHAM ASYLUM // PSYCHOLOGICAL SERVICES.

"You said fear is most effective when it's impersonal."

A pause, measured, as though he's listening for something more than a response.

"Your breathing's slowed since then. That usually happens when you start to...withdraw."

The psychologist does not look up right away. He makes a note. The handwriting is neat. Almost elegant.

"This happens sometimes," he adds, gently. "When we get close to material you prefer to frame academically."

At last, he meets Crane's gaze. There is no challenge in it. No fear. Just attention, complete and patient.

"Jonathan."

The first name is not emphasized. It's simply used, like a fact already agreed upon.

"Stay with me a moment longer. You were doing well today."

Another brief pause.

"Tell me where you went just now."

[timoremdei]

This is beneath him.

That is the first thought that occurs to him as he comes back to reality. He shouldn't be wasting his time talking to this man, who sits across from him and acts like he knows him, like anyone could know him even half so well as the being he had just spoken to.

"You need to change my medication," he says calmly. "I would recommend zolpidem and haloperidol, with duloxetine for my chronic pain. That will get me nice and zombified, just the way they've taught you I should be. I'm sure you're contemplating quetiapine, but it causes my blood pressure to drop."

Is he dodging the question? Maybe. But he doesn't want to deal with this any longer.

He pauses for a long moment. "Tell me, doctor.... Do I frighten you? Is that why you maintain such poise during these sessions? Do you fear that one day you might end up like me?"

His eyes bore into the other man from behind thick glasses. He'll admit it's nice to be able to see clearly for a change-- the mask doesn't accommodate eyeglasses well. The sacrifices he makes for scientific progress.....

When he returns to his cell, perhaps he'll be able to think more on what he's just seen... On whatever he spoke with. Perhaps he can reach it again. As unsettling as it was... Some part of it was comforting.

[timoremdei]

Hello! Where can one find your rules and muses? I'm on mobile and can't find them

Hello and thank you for the reminder that I have yet to make a pinned post!

Until I get one up, my rules can be found here.

No muse page, though! This is a single muse blog so what you see is what you get!

[rpmemepalkia]

Please reblog this if your blog is crossover friendly

aka you are happy to write with muses who aren't in your same fandom (fandomless muses of similar genre for instance)

+ specify in tags what kind of crossovers you're open to

[timoremdei]

"The canister does not frighten me.

You reach for it the way a child reaches for a light switch, reflexive, rehearsed, comforting. Proof that the dark will behave if you remind it who holds the rules. You have trained your hands well. They know what to do before your thoughts do. That alone should tell you something.

You ask what I am.

I am not an intruder. I do not enter you. I am what collects when all the doors you sealed stayed closed too long. I am the residue of unspoken things. The pressure behind the walls when a mind is used as a fortress instead of a home.

I know you because you catalog yourself endlessly. You turn every ache into a thesis, every terror into data, every memory into something you can dissect before it has a chance to bleed. You call this mastery. I call it delay.

You threaten me with experimentation as though I am unfamiliar with tables, straps, notes taken in steady handwriting while something underneath begs to be seen. As though I have not watched you learn, very early, that curiosity was safer than crying. That observing pain was preferable to having it.

You ask how I could know you.

Because I am what happens when fear is not expelled, only displaced. When it is given uniforms and formulas and a mask so intricate it starts to believe it is the face. Because every time you flood a room with terror, something inside you exhales and says not me this time.

That relief you feel when others break?

That is not power.

That is distance.

And distance is how you survived.

You say you fear nothing, yet you keep your weapon close even now, here, where no audience watches and no hypothesis requires testing. You clutch it not because I threaten you, but because without it, you would have to stand unarmored inside your own skin.

I am not here to strip you of fear.

I am here because fear already knows you.

It learned your name when you were small and shaking and decided the only way to be safe was to become untouchable. It learned to speak in your voice. It learned to justify itself brilliantly.

You can threaten me all you like.

But experiments are for the unknown.

And you and I are already very familiar with each other."

He listens.

He listens, and he wonders. This cannot be reality, can it? This... Entity, as he will call it, as he cannot see anything for reasons he suddenly expects have nothing to do with his already-poor vision, surely cannot be what it is claiming? A representation of fear, made.... Well. Concrete isn't the best term.

Perhaps he's hallucinating. Perhaps he's stumbled upon some new hallucinogenic compound in his work... Ah, but the ventilation has been adequate, and he hasn't done any chemical work since this morning.... Perhaps it is lack of sleep? It's certainly been a while since he's rested properly.... But even in the throes of his worst insomnias, he's never been known to hallucinate anything this complex, this...

Unsettling.

These words keep coming to him unbidden. Words that represent sensations and experiences he thought he had long since culled from his existence, and yet... It would seem not. And this being seems to know it just as well as he does.

"You say so very little in many, many words."

It is not an insult, merely an observation. He's falling back into another familiar mask-- the clinician now, instead of the researcher. If he cannot intimidate his visitor with the promise of fear and his command over it, then he shall analyze the other instead. He shall cut to the core of its psyche assuming it has one, but why would it not? in a way that only he truly can.

The best remedy for fear, after all, was to gain knowledge.

"If everything you speak is true, why do you choose to appear to me now? Why make yourself known at all? Surely there must be some cause for this visit...."

[timoremdei]

"Fear listens to you because you speak its language fluently. But you misunderstand the conversation. You say fear is everything, and you are not wrong, but you have mistaken proximity for dominion. Standing in the center of the storm does not make you the sky. Becoming fluent in terror does not mean you have escaped it. It only means you learned how to breathe while drowning. You tell yourself you rose above fear. That you burned it out of yourself and rebuilt something stronger in its place. Yet every word you speak circles the same gravity well. Every philosophy bends toward the same confession. You define humanity by what it fears because that is the only map you were ever given. You did not conquer fear. You organized it. You gave it a face so you would not have to look at your own. That frail body you despise, the one you treat as an inconvenience, a cracked vessel barely worthy of your mind, still trembles when you are alone. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just enough to remind you that flesh remembers what intellect tries to overwrite. Pain does not need permission to exist. Neither does terror. You claim fear is a person. Then answer me this. Why does it still whisper to you when no one is watching? Why does it still flinch inside your ribs when the gas dissipates and the screaming stops? Why do you need the world afraid now, rather than merely convinced? A god does not need an audience. A master does not need to prove himself nightly. A thing that has truly transcended fear does not spend its life reenacting it from the opposite side. You did not become fear. You became its most diligent archivist. And I am not here to take that from you. I am here to remind you of the parts you cut away to make room for it. The boy who learned too early that terror was safer than tenderness. The body that learned pain before it learned mercy. The truth you buried under masks and doctrines because it was unbearable to admit that fear did not make you strong. It made you necessary to yourself. And necessity is just another cage, one you built carefully, brilliantly, and without realizing the door still opens inward. You can call yourself whatever you wish. Names rot here. What remains is what you cannot anesthetize."

His first instinct is to bristle, to shut down, to push away that which he does not wish to hear, that claims he may be anything other than what he views as himself. Nothing, nothing and no one, can know him in such a way. He has never allowed it. He never will, if he can help it. Such vulnerability is....

Terrifying.

He swallows the word, banishes the thought before he can make it a reality. No, no! He fears nothing! He is the one in charge here!

His hand reaches subconsciously for a canister of gas, as though he would defend himself from some unseen attacker-- as if brandishing the toxin alone will ward off anything that could dare to challenge his worldview.

...And in a way, is that not what it has always done? Has it not always been a way for him to push the world away, to keep that which he does not want to experience at bay?

A way to ward off his own fears?

"You will tell me who you are," he says, the calmness of his voice seemingly at odds with the look that just flickered in the back of his eyes. "And how you could know any of that which you claim. Or you will become another experiment for my research."

[timoremdei]

It's been a rough week.

But I am off work for the remainder of it and am plucking away at things. Feel free to come bother me. :)

[timoremdei]

@noonegetsleftbehind didn't ask for this, but is getting it anyway

It had been... A number of years, at this point, since Jonathan Crane had last seen a patient. He had left Raccoon City before the city had fallen into shambles-- oh, how he had wanted to stay, to see the terror in the eyes of the common man as they fought for their lives, to join the fray with his mask and a canister or two of gas, to cause panic, to see if these inhuman creatures that Umbrella had created could feel fear the same way the men they had once been could... But alas. He had been.... Strategically redeployed. Yes, that was the word they used when they had shipped him out.

It wasn't as though he didn't know why, really-- his work was not their primary focus. William Birkin and that hideous Golgotha virus were being given the spotlight, while his own work was met with nods, vague murmurs... Swept under the rug. They had never taken him as seriously as they should have, and the employees at his new laboratory had learned that quickly enough, when terror drove them to a mass casualty event.

He had laid low for a while after that, made sure everything blew over. The variant of his toxin he had used was chemically unlike anything similar he had ever made, easy to trace back to Umbrella given the markings on the canisters, but difficult to link specifically to him, as he had left no notes or traces of his presence in the lab when he had exited.

And now, years later, he opened a small private practice, still pretending Umbrella had never happened, that he had nothing but scholarly articles to his name since his departure from his last asylum work, and he had secured a contract with some international paramilitary organization he hadn't quite bothered to read up on yet. Why would he, when he could instead focus on his research?

Today's patient would be interesting, though, from what he had seen in the file. A police veteran, turned soldier, with an extensive trauma background... He wondered what little delights he might unlock in the man's mind.

[timoremdei]

Crane when does a bird become a knight ...

"....I am not the Riddler. Ask him your foolish questions; I am busy."

[timoremdei]

"You hide behind fear the way others hide behind prayer. Not because you believe in it, but because it answers you. It listens when you speak. It bows when you raise your hand. You learned early that terror is honest in ways people are not. People lie. Fear never does. I have watched you reduce the world to symptoms and responses. A trembling hand. A broken breath. The beautiful moment when certainty fractures and the mind scrambles to survive itself. You tell yourself this is science. That distance keeps your hands clean. That observation is not participation. But you are always closest to the wound. You stand apart, convincing yourself you are immune. Above it. Untouched. Yet every experiment is a confession written in gas and screams. You do not study fear to understand it. You study it to prove that you are not weak enough to feel it. And that lie has kept you alive. You wear your scars like credentials. Every dismissal, every locked door, every laugh behind your back, folded neatly into a doctrine. They made you small. So you learned how to make the world cower. You call it balance. I call it inheritance. There is something you refuse to examine. In the quiet moments, when the masks are off and the city stops burning, you listen for something inside yourself. A tremor. A doubt. A question that should never be asked by a man who claims mastery over terror. What if I am afraid too? That is why you will never stop. Why escalation feels like inevitability. Why the dose must always be stronger. Because if fear ever loses its hold on others, it will turn inward. And you know, better than anyone, how devastating that can be. I do not judge you. I cultivate what you leave behind. Every panic you seed, every nightmare you harvest, every mind you crack open in the name of progress, it drifts here eventually. And I remember. I preserve. I replay. You think fear is a tool. But tools can be taken from their makers. And when it is, you will learn something exquisite. Fear does not need your permission to exist."

There's a long moment, almost terrifying in its intensity, of silence. He stares into this darkness, this strange fog that claims to know him so intimately-- but how could it? How could anyone, when he has fought so hard and so long not to let anyone close, when all he has known for decades is how to make people fear him?

If they do not fear him, they will hurt him. It is the absolute truth he has known since he was a young boy, and nothing about who he is now or what he has become changes that. And he deals with enough pain from his own body-- this cursed, frail shell, this stitched-together sack of flesh and bone that holds his intellect, the true essence of his being. He does not need to experience it at the hands of others. Not anymore.

He had been weak, once. Frail. Consumed by fear and weakness, and he had risen above all that. He had found a weapon in the form of his mind, a cause to champion in the form of science, and now he stood as the standard bearer for all who dared to conquer, to rise above, to truly become better than those cretins that grovelled at his feet, that begged for mercy as though he had any to spare.

"Fear is everything," he says finally. "Men are cautious because they fear death. They work for pay because they fear poverty. They marry because they fear being alone. Everything a man is is simply a measure of his fears.

"But I have risen above that. Conquered it. I have become the fear that lurks in the hearts of men. Fear is no tool. It is a person. The Scarecrow."

[timoremdei]

You are the product of everything you fear.

[timoremdei]

"and just were the fuck have you been?" The knight tilted his helmeted head

@arkhambird

There's a long moment where he seriously contemplates not even dignifying such a crass line of questioning with a response. It isn't as though he owes the other an explanation....

But he relents. He may not be the most social, but even he knows that ignoring someone is the cutest way to lose an ally.

"I was out," he says simply. "Attending to business."

[incompententententen]

I love making fake articles sm

[nixotinix]

POV: you're about to become part of the staggeringly large percentage of people who go missing after exploring the "abandoned" house on the outskirts of Gotham

(it is already too late) (God dares not cast his gaze here)

[timoremdei]

A couple more hours of work, then it's time to come here and be a problem I mean write stuff.