Fear Awakened [Jonathan Crane / Scarecrow]

006

[Note: this chapter is just Jonathan/Scarecrow fluff, no real plot advancement. I felt there needed to be some clarity on what his motivations for allowing the situation to progress are. Enjoy!]

It's a mistake, Johnny, the voice shattered the silence that Jonathan's bedroom, the lack of sound having been something he had longed for all evening.

He screwed his eyes shut and buried his face into his pillow, attempting to ignore the sound that gave new life to the clichéd phrase 'nails on a chalkboard'.

He didn't want to hear what the monster had to say that night, not after the rigorous prayer session he'd only just been subjected to.

His back still stung from the bite of the leather belt, Granny doling out lashes when she felt his devotion had wavered. He tried to ignore the bruising on his knees from kneeling too long as fervently as he tried to ignore everything else.

All he wanted to think about was the one pleasant subject he could reach for in the darkness of his mind -- Jane.

He wasn't entirely sure that subject was a pleasant one, but the feelings those thoughts conjured up were not cut of the same horrifying cloth as the remainder of his life.

She was pretty, to use an underwhelming adjective. Not the same variety of pretty that he had once attributed to Sherry Squires as a freshman, not long before her torment began, but aesthetically pleasing nonetheless.

That was not the focus of his interest in her, but as far from average as he was, Jonathan was still a teenaged boy, complete with all the necessary faculties to notice when a girl was pretty.

Wouldn't she look prettier if she were screaming?

He mentally threw everything he had into blocking out the image of her freckled face, contorted in an open mouthed scream of absolute terror, but there was no denying that the idea was... Intriguing.

He couldn't help but wonder what she was frightened of, how she reacted to fear. Was it something mundane, like run of the mill arachnophobia, or were there real life monsters that haunted her nightmares? Would she freeze like a doe in the headlights of an oncoming truck, or turn on her heel and attempt to run?

"Please, make it stop," he begged Him, voice muffled into the pillow. "I don't want this."

Jonathan didn't want to think of her that way, but whatever diseased creature lived within Jonathan very much did. It grew more difficult all the time to separate the two forces, that paralyzing voice seeming more and more real with every passing day.

Jonathan, the seventeen year old boy with secondhand shoes and dated glasses, wanted to think of Jane as a type of friend, as someone for whom he could feel compassion or any other humane emotion.

What He had in mind for Jane, on the other hand, was anything but humane.

We need to know what makes her tick, Johnny, it insisted. We have to know.

I don't want to know that, he begged every part of him to believe the sentiment. If he knew the heart of her fears, it was only a matter of time before He found a grotesque, creative way to exploit them.

And for once, Jonathan wanted to experience what it was to know human companionship.

He wanted to experience the feeling of having a person in his life who genuinely desired his company and displayed concern for his well-being the way Jane did, if her words and actions up until that point were to be believed.

He could not make out whether this desire was of a platonic nature or an indication of a different sort of liking, but he knew that type of interpersonal interaction was something his life had always lacked.

After all, his father had seen fit to leave before Jonathan had even made an appearance in the world, and his mother had apparently been so horrified of shouldering the responsibility that she left him with her grandmother.

The very people who gave him life had abandoned him without so much as a second thought, delivered him into the hands of a woman so twisted and repulsive that he struggled even to attribute some sort of mental illness to her rather than a natural state of pure evil.

If there was something he needed, it was a singular point of light in an otherwise darkened world. Jane, he thought optimistically, could be just that.

She won't understand us. She'll run away like the rest.

Maybe that much was true.

He was willing to concede to the idea that there was likely no permanence to whatever reprieve he was to get from the drudgery of his day to day life, but he could scarcely allow that to weigh in on his decision to be temporarily contented.

Without that momentary breath of air, even Jonathan himself could see that he would soon drown. Each new day brought with it the crushing feeling that he would not make it to the next, every moment a struggle to survive.

Being freely given the opportunity to escape that for even a short time, he knew he would be a prideful fool not to take it.

It was not so much about Jane as a complete person, as pretty and empathetic as she might have been, but about what she represented and how she behaved towards him.

It would have sounded cruel to the ears of anyone but Jonathan himself, but he had almost completely convinced himself that it would be enough to save her. From Him.

You just wait and see, Johnnyboy. Wait and see.