Batman
and Nightwing pull over by the dark, towering swing gates of Arkham Asylum. The
Batmobile comes to a stop with a screech, wrestling against the muddy earth.
The two masked vigilantes notice Commissioner Gordon as they dismount. He seems
to have been waiting for them outside, arms crossed and body swaying like a
buoy, transferring weight from foot to foot, and lost in thought. When he
finally notices the duo, he runs up to them.
“This
place has witnessed its fair share of rough events, but goddammit!” Gordon
says. “And… wait, do I know you?” Gordon points at Nightwing.
“It’s
me, Gordo,” Nightwing says.
“Robin?”
Gordon laughs, heartily. “Good to know you’re not dead, kid. Maybe send me a
postcard the next time you fall off the radar for… how long has it even been?
Too long, I’ll tell you that much.”
Nightwing
chuckles, scratching the back of his head. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
“Anyway,
as you can probably guess, I don’t have anything nice to welcome you with.”
“Tell
us what happened.”
Gordon
sighs. “I’m afraid Scarecrow is back.”
“That’s
impossible!” Batman interjects.
“Yeah,
about that.” Gordon pockets his hands. “You told us that Scarecrow was gone for
good. That you took
care of it,
whatever that meant.”
Batman
wants to say something but stops. He brushes past Gordon and marches through
the asylum gates.
“You
should, uh, probably go after him,” Gordon tells Nightwing. “He’s not gonna
like what he’ll find.”
Nightwing
turns around after crossing the gates. “You’re not coming?”
“No,
I’m good. I’m going to stay here for a while.” Gordon looks upward at an
anorexic and featherless tree branch drooping over the gates. It looks like
it’s trying to escape. Gordon sighs. “I just needed some air after … Oh god...”
“Are
you okay, Gordo?”
Gordon
winces thinking about how he could’ve been at home right now, having a nice cup
of tea and reading a book in his front porch or maybe having one of those
debates with his daughter regarding GCPD’s approach to fighting crime, if only
he hadn’t given in to the Mayor’s request to postpone
his retirement. He’ll still be retiring by the end of the year but… in a city
of clowns and scarecrows, he wonders if he’ll last
that long.
“Yeah,
no, I’m fine, kid,” he says, waving his hand. “I’m good.”
Nightwing
nods, although unconvinced.
***
Batman
walks into the scene and first thing he sees is an officer aggressively
interrogating an asylum guard. The guard is shivering and coughing, and when he
is trying to speak, he is failing to string up intelligible words together.
“Stop!”
Batman intervenes and briefs the officer about the Fear Toxin’s effects. The
gist of what he explains is this: victims of the toxin never remember what
happened or what they did while affected, so it’s pointless to push them. He
makes sure he is loud enough, so that all the officers at the scene who were
debriefing the guards can listen. They back off in response, although reluctantly.
Batman
waits but Nightwing is nowhere to be seen. Did he get lost? It wouldn’t
surprise Batman. In the meanwhile, he can talk to some of the victims and learn
more about the incident.
It
seems that all the surviving guards are in the same state, traumatized and
confused. The ones who can speak don’t recall anything, as expected. But, of
course, the amnesia is never permanent. The images ones sees while intoxicated
tend to return in fragments, either in dreams or in sudden psychotic episodes.
No victim of the toxin has ever fully recovered from the trauma that follows.
It’s much worse when the drug has forced them to perform acts that they can’t
undo. Acts like bloody murder.
Nightwing
finally runs up behind him, smiling with his teeth out. “Sorry! I got lost.
Haven’t been here in ages, you know … Where is the crime scene?”
Batman
shakes his head. “Come with me.” They walk for a minute until they reach
Sector-I. It’s a specialized zone inside the facility, dedicated to the
treatment of Arkham’s most delicate patients. The duo carefully step over small
pieces of glass as they go inside. Nightwing points to them and says, “I’m
guessing those are remnants of Scarecrow’s cartridges. The floor is dry, minus
the blood, even though air still stinks.”
Batman
points his index finger to ceiling. Starting from the guard’s room, the ceiling
has a sticky layer that is yellow in color and spread out unequally to every
corner, a little bit like the skin made up of fat and protein over a warm glass
of milk, except ten times thinner.
“Of
course,” Nightwing says, gaping upward. “The toxin becomes gaseous in room
temperature. It also leaves a mark. Everything we have here fits Jonathan
Crane’s profile.”
“Except
one thing,” says Batman. “Why would he break Joker out? It doesn’t make any
sense … And all the guards that were killed… Crane is a mad scientist, not a
murderer. I don’t see how he could’ve done this.”
“On
the contrary, Batman, the crime scene itself answers the ‘how’ part.”
Silence.
Nightwing
puts his hand on Batman’s shoulder and lowers his voice. “Bruce, I know you
wanted to help Crane but… this incident puts him beyond redemption, don’t you
think? His place is in Blackgate or worse, not in a college lab.”
“No,
you don’t understand. We had a deal. Crane has--” Batman catches himself
noticing a group of uniformed men walk by. They must be here to carry away the
body bags. Batman shakes his head, staring at his feet and the bloodstained
floor beneath.
He
chose to keep the identity of Scarecrow a secret. In reality, Scarecrow is more of
a mindset than a person. It’d be an understatement to say it feeds off fear.
No, it’s addicted to fear beyond measure. Batman, at the request of Crane
himself, and with the confidential help of Dr. Quincy Sharp, who is now Arkham’s
warden, buried Scarecrow at a
subliminal level. The therapy took an obvious psychological and physical toll
on Crane. But he was more than happy to pay the price. Batman allowed him to
teach at Gotham University and continue his research at one condition. He had
to desynthesize and destroy all samples of SCRO—or as it’s more commonly known,
the fear toxin—which also meant discontinuing his lifelong pursuit of a cure
for major neurodegenerative diseases. Batman now fears that Crane may not have
held up his end.
Nightwing
folds his arms and sighs before speaking: “You were saying?”
“I
was saying Crane has everything to lose by breaking our deal.”
Nightwing’s
eyes widen beyond the holes in his mask. “Please don’t say it, for the love
of--“
“I
have a feeling that Crane is being framed,” Batman begins. “No other guards but
the ones stationed in Sector-I were intoxicated. Gatekeepers, doctors, or even
some inmates should have remembered seeing Scarecrow on his way to Sector-I,
yet that wasn’t the case. He entered the asylum like a ghost and vanished with
the Joker, leaving behind a massacre and a calling card. It does not seem like
something Scarecrow would do, or even be capable of doing."
“That’s
your bias speaking. Aren’t you the very man who always preaches about how
there’s a logical explanation to everything? Maybe Crane has invented some kind of
invisibility potion. Who knows?”
Batman
rolls his eyes. “Come on now--”
“You
just can’t admit that you failed to help Crane,”
Nightwing blurts and pauses, as if allowing for the hard truth to sink in.
“Some things are just beyond fixing.”
Before
Batman can retaliate, his attention is shifted to a scream coming from outside
the sector, which is followed by a clamor of people shouting indistinctly. The
duo rush into the corridor to see what it is about.
The
commissioner’s unconscious body is being carried away on a stretcher by quite a
few nurses. An injured officer—he has a black eye and a bleeding nose—is
sitting on the hallway floor with his head against a grey wall. He is being
aided by a doctor.
Batman
realizes that there are no other police officers in sight; they’ve all been
dispatched.
“What’s
going on?” Batman asks the injured policeman.
“The
commissioner went off on me,” he says. “I mean, it’s an understandable
reaction. I did come in bearing the most horrible news.” The officer sighs and
takes a moment to collect himself. “The clown killed the commissioner’s
daughter.”
Batman
immediately feels his blood boil. His hands form fists and his eyes show him
everything in red. In truth, the news is so heavy that his brain has only
managed to fully process the first part so far. Batman thinks about Joker and
how he could kill him right now. Damn the code. Damn the crusade. But then his
brain gets to the latter part of the news and his whole body goes numb. The
only thing he can feel right now— the only thing keeping him grounded in
reality—are the warm tears dripping down his cheeks. He is confronted with
another thing beyond fixation:
Barbara
Gordon is dead.
Batman
wonders what must be going through Nightwing’s head right now.
“I’m
sorry,” Batman says, turning around, but he is gone. “Oh god, no…” It doesn’t
take him a second to deduce where Nightwing is headed. There is no time for
mourning. Batman runs as fast as he can, so fast that his cape rustles
horizontally behind him. Exiting the facility, he sees that the Batmobile is
gone too.
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