Chapter Text
Jonathan Crane did not consider himself a romantic.
He was a sociopathic, misanthropic, crotchety old man with bad knees and a bad back and a dry cough from breathing in so many chemical fumes over the years. He hated the human race with an undying passion, generally saw people as only slightly less disposable than tissues, and figured the only thing a person could be good for was being a test subject or some kind of bodyguard.
This world view of his usually was able to surmount any vestigial dredges of humanity that still resided in his chemically eroded soul, but there were… Exceptions.
When Jonathan was younger- more foolish, more trusting- he fell in love (he still hated that phrase, but it was the most concise way to say it) with a girl. He was very young and she was not much older. They were friends for a long time, until she moved away, and he privately lamented her leaving because he'd never gotten the chance to say I love you. He’d dreamed vivid dreams of running through the fields to her house in the middle of the night, the way lit by thousands of winking lightning bugs, and climbing in through her window and telling her to run away with him.
But he didn’t.
He knew now, of course, that it wasn’t anything. It hadn’t been love. It had been expectation. He was a boy and she was a girl, so they were in love. He had pined for her not because he would miss her, but because that was what the stories he read and the people around him pressed upon him. He had spun the yarn so thick at that tiny age that it was still hard to dig his way out of it as an adult.
( He liked to forget his teenage years. Suitable to say there had been no love there. Not for his classmates, demons and terrors they were.)
When he was in college, though, there was another girl.
He was disillusioned at that point. He had accepted that he was just like that- nonsexual, nonromantic- and it didn’t matter, because he could carve out a fulfilling career for himself and dating status was irrelevant.
At this point, he didn’t want to date. He had convinced himself (although that phrasing irked him, because he was persuading himself of a hard-fought fact, not feeding himself a bitterly choked-down falsehood) that he was just not built for romance. That his bloodline would die and he would be alone.
He hated the connotations of “alone”, too. As if not finding a mate was the worst thing in the world.
But, the girl.
His icy heart did not melt to her right away. He held her at the same distance he did all his classmates. It was only over time- months of study groups and debates about economic policy, government issues, books, media, their classes- that he began to view her as anything other than another acquaintance.
She was intelligent. Well-read. Humorous, but not to an excess. She had a steady temperament. She understood Jonathan had trouble articulating emotions. She had difficulty herself.
He found himself over at her apartment often as the months went by.
He went on a trip with her, the summer after freshman year, to Mexico. They had four others with them, all in the friend group or loosely related; almost all of them were women, except one.
If the man had been more handsome than Jonathan, Jonathan would’ve called him a jock; with rippling muscles and a cleft chin and shiny white teeth and flawless hair. A gormless man with so little brains and so much skull he didn’t need a helmet during football practice.
If he had been less handsome than Jonathan, Jonathan would’ve called him a dickless little parasite. He would have mentioned his unfair money or his viperish charm. He would have found something to seize and use in order to insult him. He would’ve brought up his attitude, his unfairness, his abusive behavior.
But none of that was true.
The matter of fact was, he was impossible to hate. He was perfectly average. Perfectly pleasant. He never gave Jonathan an excuse to hate him, outside the virtue of being competition. And Jonathan could only feel helpless anger on that trip as he watched her smile and laugh at him, and was forced to breathe his air and share his proximity.
Two years later she and the other man were married, and Jonathan still had no degree and no prospects whatsoever.
( Although this was a story for another time, it was around then when his fascination with fear manifested strongly enough for him to do something. Thoughts that had been tossed around idly in his head suddenly came sharp and clear, with the compulsion to act. He scratched equations in his notebook. He hypothesized amounts. And when he could, he underhandedly requisitioned supplies. )
At Gotham University (as a professor, opposed to a student) he met the next.
He was another professor. Around Jonathan’s age, perhaps slightly older. Jonathan had convinced himself at this point that he’d never actually loved before. The girl in his youth was societal pressure on him shaping an innocent childhood friendship into a romantic framework. The woman had simply been a great platonic partner, and he had been disappointed that she had moved on from him. None of it was love.
He fell hard and he fell fast for that professor, but it took him quite a while to work out what it was.
There was a party; birthday, holiday, Jonathan forgot what. The professor had invited him. There had been alcohol.
There was an illicit encounter. Jonathan didn’t know, completely, exactly, but he theorized that he’d lost his virginity that night, though he didn’t know and never would for certain.
The other professor was hit by a drunk driver and killed the night after, and that ended that.
And finally…
Jervis Tetch.
Not mentioning how Jonathan took up the mantle of the Scarecrow would make it hard to set the framework for Jervis Tetch’s introduction, but that was a long and elaborate story in and of itself. Summed, Jonathan may have gotten overzealous with testing an attempt at an aerosolized “fear gas” that would play merry hell with the minds of anyone who breathed it in. Someone may or may not have died, and Jonathan may or may not have gotten a big head and tried to test it out on Gotham’s elite during a charity gala under the guise of a scarecrow, and he may or may not have been arrested and sentenced to Arkham.
It wasn’t in Arkham where he met Jervis, though. It was on the outside. Jonathan broke free (it was very, very easy) and decided he was not going to be no one. He thoroughly embraced the Scarecrow and all it stood for, and let his impulses be his guide rather than society’s norms.
He established a reputation over the years. He went to quite a number of underworld meetings, both of the costumed criminal and mundane mob variety.
And at one of them he met Jervis Tetch.
If he hadn’t been to one these sort of things before, Jonathan may have found him strange, off-putting, or ugly, but the years of weirdness jaded him.
Four foot nine? Mary Dahl was two feet tall and had the proportions of a ragamuffin. Massive overbite? There was a talking crocodile. Hallucinating storybook characters? At least he didn’t cut a mark in his flesh whenever he murdered someone. Mind control with metal cards? Genuinely the most terrifying thing about him, but Jonathan had heard of Music Meister and Spellbinder and Poison Ivy, and they didn’t even need technology to seize your mind from you. Tea and hat obsession? Fine, he was no Mockingbird. Kidnapping a woman? Refer, yet again, to Zsasz. Or Professor Pyg. The Creeper. Joker. Jonathan himself. They’d all kidnapped someone at some point in their career. Maybe not with the intention to do- whatever it was Jervis wanted to do with women- but they had.
And Jervis was polite . His genuine politeness- not the barely contained wrath, sarcastic flattery, or nervous simpering of the likes of Sionis, Joker, and Wesker- was tremendously welcoming.
At the first meeting, Jervis didn’t talk much. When he did speak, it was when spoken to, and with a polite and prim accent and the curious little flare of his fingers for emphasis. Jonathan remembered thinking, at the time, that he was unlike anyone Jonathan had met in the criminal game; though, to be fair, there were a lot of rogues who were like no other.
Despite his novelty, Jonathan did not leave the meeting with Jervis on his mind. At the time, Jervis was only a slight change from the usual criminal drudgery Jonathan subjected himself to; like a slight breeze on a journey in a hot desert, forgotten about after the destination was reached.
Jonathan swore after that Jervis kept appearing at all the meetings he went to. It could’ve been the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon kicking in, but he was convinced the man was everywhere from then on.
Or maybe he had always been there, and Jonathan was just now noticing him.
It was concerning at first- paranoia did that- then sort of relaxing in its reliability. The Englishman was always there, in a nice coat and ridiculous hat and multicolored bowtie, ready with a thoughtful contribution to put forth. Jonathan did not suffer fools very well, and fortunately for him, Jervis was far from one.
They had lots of firsts. First operation done together— a deathtrap for Batman that, shocker, didn’t work, and ended up with a half-dozen crooks heading back to Arkham. First duo operation, after breaking out of Arkham and trying to infect a football stadium with fear gas.
Jonathan began to, however begrudgingly, respect Jervis, and—
Well, they spent years developing a sort of… Criminal relationship. Never anything intimate, of course. But they shared a safehouses. They played chess in Arkham. Jonathan sought his company when he needed someone halfway intelligent to talk to, or when there was a plan that needed more than one body to be enacted. (Both of those were still rare, though. Crane’s preference to be alone was as pervasive as lichen on a boulder.)
There hadn’t been a spark. Their lives were not conducive to that sort of thing. Crane didn’t do that.
But then Batman hunted him. Then he threw himself out the window. Then the glass, and the blood.
Jervis never asked Crane about it, but Crane knew where he was living. Crane had kept tabs on him. Had broken into his apartment once, even.
Jervis’s home was closer than Crane’s own hideout, and everything hurt so much. Every step drove more glass into his knees when he just wanted to lie down and weep from the pain.
Really, his intention had been to go home, but twenty steps- twenty steps of some of the most extreme pain he’d ever been in, twenty steps of hesitation and terror and not knowing how badly he was wounded- was enough to persuade him otherwise. He went to Jervis instead.
And what a choice that had been.
=
“Nmmmh,” Crane twisted. His fists balled, uselessly, then grasped at the sheets.
The Hatter’s smile from between his legs was warm and playful; but that wasn’t a good thing, because it meant he stopped.
“No,” Crane was hot and shivery. His muscles were gelatin; weak and quivering just from the weight of holding himself up.
“ No, dearest?” The bastard nuzzled Crane’s member with his cheek; he moved his head up, parting his mouth ever so slightly so his teeth caught, just for a second, on the glans. Crane’s inhale was sharp.
“For the love of God, you can tease me later, now I’d just like to—”
The Hatter sunk down unexpectedly, and Crane rocked upward with a throaty groan.
He wanted to grab Jervis so badly; his hair made for an inviting handhold, and he could envision himself very vividly controlling the pace at which Jervis’s mouth slid over his cock.
But he couldn’t.
Sex was chess. It had rules that had to be followed. Just as you could not piss on the board and declare yourself a winner when the stream knocked over the king, you could not grab your partner and face-fuck them without their explicit saying-so. Especially not in this circumstance, where they were playing chess with house rules; Jonathan could not touch, and if he did, it was all over.
Why did they have these little games? To torture themselves, is what he would’ve said the moment just before Jervis slid his tongue over the crown of Jonathan’s cock. But it made things interesting. Exciting. It was to flirt with danger instead of bending over for it and consequently getting pushed into a squad car.
Jervis drew back for a moment; had Jonathan been in his right mind, he would’ve known the man was planning a new angle of attack. As it was, Jonathan didn’t really care about anything other than the fact that Jervis’s mouth was no longer wrapped around his dick.
There was a residual thrust or two against the air before Jonathan could control himself. His face, flushed from strain, colored a brighter red. His heartbeat staggered in a shaky tattoo. His face burned.
“Jervis,” he all but begged, trying desperately to keep his hands to himself. “Stop- stopping.”
“But you look so delightful like this, dear,” Jervis said. “Red as a lobster and hard as a turtle shell.”
“Will you—” Jonathan began.
“— Won’t you,” Jervis cut him off. There was a gleam in his eyes.
“Jervis!” Crane snapped. Sweat was starting to feel cold on his back, and it did not mesh well with his superheated skin.
Good lord, he was so close. He was sure that with just a little more contact—
Jervis tutted. “Patience, dear.”
Gently, he stroked Jonathan’s shaft. The Hatter’s gloves were cotton, and rough against the sensitive skin. It was a mite uncomfortable, but it was something.
“This,” Jonathan huffed a deep breath through his nose, “will have consequences. Your punishment will be doubly this.”
“I sense an ‘unless’ coming.” Jervis’s languid strokes hurried, and Jonathan’s breath caught. With the saliva drying, it was beginning to edge on painful.
“You know what— the unless is—”
Jervis tittered. “I’ve said before that you need to learn how to use your words…”
“Your— punishment— will be doubly this,” Jonathan growled, breath labored, “— Unless you stop your childish games and get me off.”
“You need only ask.”
Obediently, Jervis traded his hands for his mouth. The look Jervis gave him- just before he enveloped the head of Jonathan’s cock in his mouth- was nearly enough to finish Crane off then and there.
It was the lidded blue eyes, pupils blown and swollen... almost like they were dilated with fear—
Jervis took him to the root, then slid back, and repeated. He didn’t even have enough time to form a proper rhythm before Crane choked out a warning; Jervis quickly pulled up, just in time for Crane to spend himself.
Jonathan panted, rapid-fire. Exhaustion bore down on him as the haze of orgasm cleared.
If he thought he was tired before…
Crane attempted to slowly lower himself onto his back, but his left arm gave out and he fell back onto the sheets.
Good lord, he was getting old.
“Good?” Jervis asked. He was the sentimental type. He didn’t move from where he was kneeling between Jonathan’s legs, whereas Jonathan would’ve already been out of the room and looking for mouthwash.
Jonathan didn’t respond right away and Jervis playfully rubbed the head of his softening cock; Jonathan groaned, angrily, and nudged Jervis in the ribs with his knee.
Jervis was a very nice person- a gentleman- but once you agreed to “I won’t touch you during sex so long as you eventually get me off”, he took it and ran off with it like a thief who’d just been given royal jewels.
“Yes, it was good,” Jonathan ground out. Jervis always wanted him talking for some reason. Asking for things Jervis already knew he wanted. Sharing his feelings. Jonathan had no earthly idea why he was so insistent about it.
But that annoyance came packaged with Jervis himself, which was worth it. Jonathan would’ve put up with nearly anything to keep him.
(Now that Jonathan could have someone- that they had given themself to him and he had given himself to them in turn- he would sooner kill someone than give it up. He had killed for far, far less than the prolonging of his own happiness.)
Jervis moved, pulling himself up from Jonathan’s thighs to rest above him, on his hands and knees. The Hatter wore a self-satisfied smile.
At their age it’d be a bit before their libidos recovered; if they could even muster the physical strength for a third go-around.
Jonathan didn’t really want to, though. What he wanted now was for Jervis to lie beside him— they had already figured out how to jigsaw their bodies together in a comfortable way that Crane found hopelessly and shamefully pleasing. The feeling of domesticity that radiated from their arrangement- from their, their, their— cuddling- was disgusting, but Crane still wanted it, so strongly and so desperately that it almost scared him.
It was galling how, in the three weeks since he had propositioned Jervis, they had fallen together so neatly. How Crane’s carefully maintained, razor-thorned hedges were bulldozed over in favor of the soft little heart that’d thawed so quickly it was still dripping. How Crane was able to internalize thoughts like I want Jervis to cuddle up to me or I want to put my legs over his lap when we share the couch or I want to have sex with him .
That last one was jarring, because he’d found that the desire was not necessarily correlated to Jervis doing anything particularly salacious. In fact, none of them were prompted by Jervis doing anything particularly romantic or sexual. Jervis would just be working on something in his apartment, and Crane would be quietly reading on his couch, and a great deluge of disgusting softness would flood in from nowhere.
At those moments Crane felt like he was drowning, and the only way to displace the water he was suffocating in was to do the unthinkable: display affection.
He tried, very hard, to keep the need contained at first; but the most horrible thoughts would come right after, borrowing the Scarecrow’s voice like an old coat.
HE HATES YOU, YOU KNOW.
HE WOULD TRADE YOU FOR ALICE IN A MOMENT.
THE ONLY REASON HE’S SETTLING FOR YOU IS BECAUSE HE CAN’T FIND ANYONE ELSE FOOL ENOUGH TO DOTE ON SOMEONE SO UGLY.
The attacks would be multi-pronged. Lauding Jervis and ripping into Crane for how worthless he was, then turning around and insulting Jervis for his looks and desperation, coyly whispering that there was so much better Crane could look for.
Ohh, these days Crane’s mind was in so many pieces. He really wished he could have the medication he took in Arkham back. It had horrible side effects, but it suppressed the worst of his inflamed paranoia. It quieted the loudest of the Scarecrow’s shrieking.
But he would rather walk with broken glass in his knees than return to Arkham.
Jervis sighed, and stooped his head to press his lips against Crane’s collarbone. There was a mutual understanding that mouth kissing after blowjobs was not going to be allowed. Neither of them were particularly interested in tasting their own issue.
Jervis moved to settle peaceably beside Jonathan. Crane’s heart squeezed tightly, the one last hurrah of adrenaline amidst his quivery limbs.
Good God, it was not fair that a human could feel this strongly. Jonathan was the master of fear. The lord of terror. The king of screams! And here he was, in bed with a ridiculous Hatter who was presently using Jonathan’s bicep as a pillow, and his fleshy, traitorous heart loved it.
“You’re sweating,” Jervis observed. There were trace amounts of disgust in his statement.
“You did a good job,” Jonathan grumbled.
He envied Jervis, in a way. If the roles had been reversed, Jonathan would’ve had to shift away after saying something like that, just to protect his own pride. But the Hatter didn’t. He was open about how he felt; adoring, loyal. He had accepted the mushiness that dwelt in his heart, and how that entitled him to complain but not do anything because of love. But Jonathan couldn’t.
“Oh my. High praise from you.” Jervis teased.
“Ha,” Jonathan muttered. Exhaustion was settling in fast. In fact, he’d really like to sleep…
=
Crane woke up a few times throughout the night. He’d always been a disturbed sleeper, and contrary to the opinions of romance novels, a partner definitely only made sleeping worse. The heat that radiated off of Jervis could be unbearable when the nights were hot, and there was the anxiety of extricating himself carefully enough to not wake Jervis, or the half-awake stupidity of not knowing whether the thing he was touching was his arm or Jervis’s, because it’d gone numb in whatever weird position they were lying in and he couldn’t feel it anymore, compounded with the fact that it was dark as hell—
Oh, most definitely learning to sleep together (in both senses of the phrase) had been challenging. Fortunately, Crane did not balk from most challenges presented to him.
Weak grey light spilling in from the window slats heralded the morning. Crane tended to be a late riser, but he got the impression that he was not going to be able to get back to sleep.
He very carefully peeled himself away from Jervis, who continued dozing, blissfully unaware.
It had only taken Crane one ill-timed trip to the living room to learn that Jervis hated waking up alone (consequently subjecting Jonathan to the most feelings-heavy talk he had ever had in his life, but that, too, was a story for another day) but he risked it this time.
Jonathan pulled the covers up around Jervis’s bare shoulders, and quietly trod over the carpet to the door.
Jervis’s apartment had become Crane’s home away from home these days. Jonathan had his own place, of course, but it was a tiny space hidden behind a false wall in a drafty warehouse. It was… far less hospitable than Jervis’s apartment. Here, there was clean bedding, running water, and good company, all of which he couldn’t easily get back at his hideout. In truth, pretense and the difficulty of moving in his equipment were the only things that kept Crane from simply moving in full-time.
Crane slipped out of the bedroom and approached the kitchenette. Jervis had a distaste for coffee, but Jonathan had been a long-time addict ever since he’d moved out of his childhood home. Jervis, gentleman he was, had been willing to begrudge him at least the instant stuff.
Jonathan found a chipped mug in the cabinet, measured into it a spoonful of coffee granules, ran it under the sink until it was nearly full, and gave it a minute in the microwave.
Crane hated cream, in tea or in coffee. His preferred form of diluting the bitterness was a teaspoon of sugar, which he stirred into his cup and tasted.
Being a crook lowered your standards so much it was hard to not trip on the bar; he’d take it.
Since he was already in the kitchen, he started a pot of tea. Jervis drank the stuff like an addict, and there was no point during his day where he wasn’t 1.) preparing it, 2.) drinking it, or 3.) cleaning up from it. The entire flat smelled so strongly of lemon and herbs one could barely detect the underlying smell of water rot and mildew that pervaded the entire apartment complex.
Maybe the living conditions weren’t glitz and glimmer, but this place was hom—
—Ooh. What a disgustingly sentimental thought. It almost hurt.
Jonathan picked up his mug and strolled back to the bedroom. Jervis hadn’t woken up yet. Maybe Jonathan could surprise him with tea in bed; wake him the way a lover ought.
He gently placed his mug down on the nightstand, then sat on the edge of the bed, trying not to consciously acknowledge the urge to ruffle Jervis’s hair.
THE LABORATORY, the Scarecrow said in his mind, with an insistent snarl. It was the mental equivalent of a toddler grabbing onto his sleeve and refusing to let go. WE HAVE TO BREW—
Shut up. Let me enjoy myself.
WHAT IS MORE ENJOYABLE THAN FEAR?
Shut up!
Jonathan hadn’t even realized he’d taken fistfuls of the blanket in his grip; he made an effort to relax.
He leaned over Jervis, stopping just short of resting his forehead on the Hatter’s temple. He hovered there for a moment, indecisive.
He had the notion in his mind to awaken Jervis with a kiss, but it all of the sudden seemed silly. Like something the younger Jonathan would’ve done, before he realized the world was loveless and it was better to be feared than loved, at any rate.
Jervis shifted.
“You’re breathing in my ear,” the Hatter twisted onto his back, blue eyes cloudy with sleep. His hair was tousled and Crane had the queerest urge to flatten it down.
“Sorry.” Crane pulled back, partially thankful he had been given an excuse to withdraw.
“Don’t apologize,” Jervis said. “I would put some clothes on, though.”
There was a sly twist of his mouth, and the hatter stretched indulgently. “Unless there’s a reason you wouldn’t need them...”
Ah. There was an idea.