JMJ

Chapter Eight

Reflection

"My dear esteemed Jonathan Crane," Jervis wrote.

He paused and looked down at his paper. Then he frowned with a ruffled shake of his head.

"No, no," he said to himself. "Too personal."

"Dear Pr. Crane," Jervis then wrote, but he was not happy with that either. "Too dry."

A second time he paused and taking up a fresh piece of paper, he sharpened his pencil on a child-safe sharpener and began to write again.

"Dear Jonathan Crane," he wrote. He made face. He still was not exactly satisfied, but he decided it would have to do. Jonathan himself would prefer it simple anyway, he supposed.

Dear Jonathan Crane,

I wish first of all to make a formal apology for tricking you into coming to Arkham Asylum, and to thank you for your patience.

Yes, patience.

You have ever been patient with me even when you had your own ailments. Perhaps it was your own loneliness at the beginning to which you would not admit. Perhaps you found some comfort in having a fellow "nerd" in the ranks of Arkham. Or perhaps you tolerated me for your fascination with my fears. Whatever the reason it began, it continued. You even came to what you believed was a request for help from me at the asylum. I understand it was a difficult decision for you to make. I also completely understand that you must see it as a mistake and one you regret deeply making. I would likely see it that way myself if it was the other way around, and I see it that way now all the more with the side I'm on.

I do hope, however, that I have done no damage to you, and if I have, I ask not so much for your forgiveness, which I do not deserve, but for you to understand what happened that day for your sake, your ease of mind. In a manner, I suppose, I am asking you to be patient with me once more.

My original intent by inviting you was a whim. What my subconscious reasons were, I am not quite certain, except to bring the topic off from my family, my brother especially, during an appointment of sorts with Dr. Leland who had decided to take over as my psychiatrist.

My brother Bertram, you see, has more than once tried to reach out to me. In the past, I scoffed at his efforts, especially after my father disowned me. My two elder brothers, I believed, did not understand me, and could not. They did not understand the fanciful world that my sister and I saw in everyday life and had learned from my poor late mother. I felt them to be cold and calculating like my father, though even then I had to admit that they both had better characters than my father had. In the end, I believe I was effected the deepest by my father and became a sort of "looking glass" depiction— forgive my Wonderlandian comparison— a warped-mirrored representation of him, if you will. At least, this is true in how I perceived him as a child in my alias the Mad Hatter and my reign over Gotham with my mind control chips, and so much more unfeeling and meticulous about my work than my brothers ever were— and perhaps my father also, who despite his coldness was never a murderer. I had no care about the "gutter trash" I dug up to do my dirty work. I had no care about those I controlled, about those I hurt, about those I shunned. Like so many of the cruel of this world, I became that which I hated most, and perfected it. I do not believe this to be so because of chatting with psychiatrists either. I have thought this on my own, though I suppose I will have to express this to my doctor in time who will be reading this letter before it's sent out.

Anyway, it is interesting to note that I liked Bertram less than Caleb. He was the one who made fun of Meryl and I and our little games, especially after my mother died. I was wrong about him. If you had not guessed, I had stolen the letter I showed you on your visit before the Arkham staff had meant to show it to me. I knew that was why Dr. Leland had brought up my family again. Not many inmates have family. I wanted to believe I had none either. Some of the staff even wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe that more than ever after what I had done to Meryl.

But I suppose it is time to return the topic to you, poor fellow.

At first I did send for you as a distraction, but the more I thought about it, the more I truly did want to see you, because, yes, part of my depression was based on envy that you were out of the asylum with a clean slate, and everything that I had, I kept piling up upon my head like that cup of lukewarm tea I poured upon myself in my over-enthusiasm— my overacting. The fact that Dr. Leland deemed me unready for visitors of any kind after that mistake, made me want to see you more than ever. I almost considered taking the risk of leaving the asylum myself in the form of an escape to find you at your home, but I knew that you would not have been pleased to see me had I gone through with such a scheme. Not with your new life and your marriage and all that you've worked so hard to gain.

What I did not know for sure was whether or not it was a fa?ade to hide your continued work with fear or if you honestly were trying to make a new life for yourself. After all, you did not marry a normal person but one of us, a fellow rogue no longer interested in her original master. I almost wanted to believe that she had become your sort of sidekick in whatever experiment you were hatching in northern New England and planning for the citizens of the world. Perhaps your injections had truly made you smarter, swifter, darker.

I wanted to believe you were madder than I, but it shook me in a way that I could not shake off, the thought that you might have meant it. That you truly had gone sane and, more importantly, had gone straight and moral, deviating forever from your life of crime stealing chemicals and money for them for your dishonest and cold-hearted experiments. I wanted to feel justified continuing with mine.

You were a crutch in my mind. You always had been, and for that, again, I do apologize from the depths of my being. The "mad scientist" lifestyle I saw in you seemed the most befitting way at the time for my excuse for my own life.

If it was true, though, and you had changed, I longed selfishly to join you or even more selfishly, if less consciously on my part, to prove to the world that you weren't changed whether it was true or not. I resented the very idea.

No, I had had no real plan as to how to accomplish this. I mean what I say, that I was only half-conscious of my reasoning, because reason had very little to do with any of my decisions. I'd usually make these things up as I went along with everything I've done as the Mad Hatter. I was like a man on drugs with it, riding my emotions themselves like steroids from one new idea to the next. It is so much easier, despite the pain into which that life eventually leads— to allow yourself the pleasure of riding your emotions rather than fighting them. The more you ride them, the more unbridled they become and the more violently vigorous in their needs until you cannot tell what will please them anymore. You are a complete slave to your own whims.

Then you arrived. Even at the beginning of our interview, I could tell that you were different. I tried to tell myself that it was because of what you injected yourself with, but I knew deep down what it was. You were speaking like a rational creature and no longer the slave to terror you had been. You were no longer a vampire's servant to the Scarecrow. Your confidence had been regained, your integrity was perhaps something you'd never possessed, and your true ailments and mental conditions were under control through whatever therapy had been given to you. I envied you. I envied that a man who never knew a kind word without a cost, that never had a friend without betrayal, or a mother's sincere encouragement, or enjoyed a Christmas with grandparents' presents and love stronger and warmer than the spirits you were lovingly allowed to take one sip from despite being considered too young the rest of the year— without any of this, and indeed truly being scarred mentally and emotionally by your past, you found your way to freedom and found that the world was not so heartless and ironic, and full of mirthless hollow terror as you had supposed. Whereas, I who enjoyed all the comforts of life as a child that I have already expressed and more, could not find my way back to it.

I would blame my father who had never been one to show any affection and usually was more verbally abusive than not. That is not a pleasant memory. Then I blamed my brothers for not acting as I thought they should after my mother's overdose. I blamed even my own mother for dying, and then Alice Pleasance for not showing me the return affection I longed to shower upon her like a slap in the face worse than anything my depressed father had dished out. I think the only person in the entire world who I never blamed was Meryl. And everyone knows how much I blamed Batman for everything else after that; though he had not lifted a finger against any one of us except to stop us from harming our own race, including ourselves. Perhaps, he could be called even kinder to us that he morally needed to be.

Now, I wanted to blame you as well. Blame you for abandoning me, blame you for daring to leave the asylum for a better, saner life, and making me look worse so that the doctors would never deem me curable. I wanted to blame your entire existence for making me think my Mad Hatter persona was normal, so that I did not allow myself to be cured sooner. I'll admit that I felt far saner in your presence than not when we used to sit together at Arkham and speak of our plans and desires. You, who, as you stated at our unfortunate interview, truly believed you were the Scarecrow and I never believed I was the Mad Hatter.

But then it dawned on me, as you also expressed yourself, why you changed, and why I had not.

None of my resentments or blames could be strong enough to deny what my intellect had concluded.

You changed because you had not believed in goodness or light. You thought them concepts of hypocrites and the foolish dreams of the weak-minded and the sentimental. It is little wonder why you kept to your course so long as a Rogue with companions like myself foolishly and selfishly loving a woman who had no interest in me and even Harley Quinn with her obsessive and self-abusive infatuation with the Joker. You believed only in irony and darkness and decay. But somehow or other it had been proven to you that you were wrong for the first time in your life. You only made ONE decision. Once you learned of your mistake, you did not fight it. Well, perhaps you did a little, but you did not allow yourself to resent it enough to be in denial about it in the same way I have. You realized what you had become and you worked to find yourself. You woke up enough to desire change.

This was in direct contrast with me, who had always known I was wrong. I wanted to believe that I had an excuse because of my bipolar disorder, which you did not have, or my anxiety disorders or whatever else is piled up on top them as co-mordities. I wanted an excuse. I lied to myself so many times that it became a habit even before I broke out as the Mad Hatter kidnapping Alice Pleasance. I was working on projects, as you may recall from my boasting over chess matches, that my grants did not warrant. Experiments that Mr. Wayne's policies would not have tolerated on any circumstances.

My mind-control work was something that could have gotten me into prison faster than Batman flies an inmate back to Arkham, if anyone had found out about it. Even had my work been ethical in its own right, I did not have permission to use company money that was supposed to be used for nothing but medical research. I had not even gained myself a doctorate yet. The leeway I was given was already more than generous for such a new employee in such a field. Perhaps, despite her power-woman vulgarity, Dr. Cates had a reason to dislike me. She had reached her position without disability aid and she had done it all herself in a field where women are usually temps more than anything. Besides that I knew she distrusted me. I knew that she saw more than my gentle, shy fa?ade implied.

I was already so filled with emotion and believed that I had a right to do whatever I wanted. I believed that I was in control and could be about everything in my life before long. I could not even deny my gratuitous desires for Alice Pleasance. A girl I barely knew, a girl who had never left her side of Gotham. A girl who was completely innocent of me and what I was and what I was doing. She was only being kind to me, because she saw that I was socially stunted, as it were. She saw that I likely had a disorder of some kind, I'm sure. But I wanted it to be romantic before I even knew what she thought about anything. One look at Billy and I wanted to believe he was a cad just because he looked like a stereotypical unpleasant jockey, but I knew it was wrong of me. I knew it was all wrong of me. I entertained my emotions, despite myself. I had entertained them far too long already. I could no longer control them, and it was my own fault. I even knew a manic episode was coming on. I knew ahead of time. I could have gone to a doctor. I could have told Dr. Cates or even Mr. Wayne. I could have told Alice! But I didn't want to. I didn't want to, you see! I had wanted nothing more than to deny I even had a disorder more than chronic depression; contrariwise, at the same time, I wanted my whole wasted mind to have an excuse for my behavior and one that could not be labeled as I had been my entire life. This was my new life, and I was failing it more miserably than my old one.

It was easier being mad. It was easier to give in to the power and mindlessness of a manic episode. Perhaps you cannot relate to that exactly, but, especially after a deep depression, it is the most freeing feeling in the world. At least, at first, before it becomes frustrating and sometimes even painful, which it quickly spiraled into this time around. I was in so much mental anguish about what was happening. I was frustrated because everything was going wrong. I was angry with myself for starting this in the first place. I was already thinking of myself as becoming one of those Rogues one always hoped to never have the misfortune of running into while on the streets of Gotham City. I believe that is even where I got the idea of "enlisting" a Walrus and a Carpenter in the eventual case of the infamous rogue wrangler, Batman trying to stop me. I never dreamed, though, that I would meet and, indeed, live with the other Rogues in Arkham.

I recall thinking over a cup of tea at work once early on before I had completely fallen for Alice, that you, especially, were a frightfully disturbing mess of a psychiatric nightmare.

Anyway, your patience, by now, is likely wearing thin, if you are still reading at all; so I will end this with saying that when I could not deny how you had changed and could not deny how many chances I was given and did not try, I knew in my heart that if ever I was to escape, I had to stop what I had started. It was difficult, at first, I'll admit. I think I made it worse instead of better initially, but I was not sure how to explain to you what had just passed through my mind. I was already drowning in my own emotions that I had built up into circular reasonings beyond count, but I was determined to find my way through the torrents if it was the last thing I did. I felt as though I was being pulled down by weights on every side of me. Demons I had gathered round me for years were unwilling to let me go, but I kept my focus on what you had accomplished. You married, got a normal job, lived in a normal house, in a normal town far away from Gotham City, and I believe, and forgive me if I'm wrong, but that you even have a child on the way. Perhaps the child has already arrived by now. I congratulate you and dear Harley who I am sure went through as much struggle on her recovery as you, especially with her detour as Lunabat and facing down the Joker. I admire all you have fought for as much as I regret all that I got in the way of.

When I finally broke through enough to remove the chips from Dr. Leland and the staff and myself… I was thinking only of allowing you and Harley to escape, even if I never did. And I did not want to control anything or anyone ever, ever again. I wanted and do still want it to be considered the final doff of the Mad Hatter of Gotham City.

I do not trust myself, even now, but as long as I am in a decent frame of mind, far more decent than usual, I have written to you and my brother. I hope this letter does not bring more distress to you. On the contrary, I do so hope someday I may even be able to make it up to you, but for now, I am in the process of making my escape, my first true escape, from…well, myself. Or rather, what I have wrapped round myself in a tight knot. Perhaps you know all about my fear of labels which I believe is stronger even than my fear of being alone. I don't know if there's any hope for reclaiming Wonderland and the childhood memories associated with it that I marred beyond recognition, but perhaps for myself, I will one day be well enough to meet you again as Jervis Tetch to offer my service to you in any way that I can— for you and your family.

Thank you again for all the patience you have ever given me and the friendship that you have shown me, for which I will ever be grateful.

Sincerely from the bottom of my heart to both you and Mrs. Crane,

Jervis Tetch

#

"You did not have to come," said Jervis sheepishly after their initial good-mornings.

"I wanted to," Jonathan assured him as he set up the final pieces in front of him for the chess game.

It was a few months later, and Dr. Leland had, with care, allowed the visit. The staff had been checked thoroughly for chips, and Jervis had been examined from head to toe with electronic scanners. Jonathan himself put up with being scanned for chips. The tea was as lukewarm as ever, but their old chess set they used to play with was allowed down into this little room, for the ease of tension if nothing more.

Jervis was stirring some sugar into his tea with a red face and downcast eyes while he had spoken, and they remained there until Jonathan replied.

He looked up and set his spoon down, and he smiled a red, bashful smile.

"Thank you," said Jervis quietly.

"I find it is much easier to find one's way through such times as yours with decent moral support," Jonathan remarked back in the same casual tone. "I was given such opportunity so I see no reason why I should not do my part for someone else in return."

Every piece was now in place, and Jonathan poured himself some of that lukewarm tea.

"You're welcome," Jonathan then added.

He smiled and looked up at Jervis.

Jervis blinked.

Jonathan's return smile was a smile that, despite what he knew about Jonathan's recovery, was a surprise to see on his face. It was sincere, confident, kind even, and strangest of all, encouraging. Now, it was not quite a smile that Jervis would have called out of character for someone of Jonathan's rather melancholic temperament, because it was still slow, deliberate, and sober. In fact, it was the complete natural manner in which Jonathan bore this smile that left a deeper impression on Jervis than it otherwise might have. It was a smile that not just touched the thin line of Jonathan's mouth, but affected his large hazel eyes in such a manner to have them look truly lively, and not in the predatory leer that Jervis used to know to light up his eyes like a power of the undead. No, it was the bright light of a bird. The kind he used to know in the eyes of his sister. The kind he used to see in the eyes of Alice. Yet it was a far deeper reflection, because it was the eyes of someone who knew pain and knew horror and knew deep regret.

"What is it?" asked Jonathan, his smile vanishing as Jervis's own face took on a rather stupefied look.

Jervis' teeth dug into his lip and he caught himself wincing with Jonathan's understandable query. Then he blinked and shook his head. His own bashful smile returning as he waved a hand carelessly aside.

"Nothing, nothing, please. Just a passing thought," Jervis insisted blinking down at his pieces and taking a sip of tea.

Jonathan nodded and shrugged. "Fair enough." He made the first move.

Jervis distractedly made his.

"Well!" Jervis then said suddenly even though Jonathan had likely already and honestly let the incident pass without a further thought upon it and would have forgotten it entirely had Jervis not gone on.

Jonathan blinked in a mild surprise himself as Jervis said, "I only was thinking that my hoping for a future where one can be healed of one's wounds is more plausible than one may think."

"Oh, how do you mean?" asked Jonathan lightly as he made his second move without looking up again.

Jervis could tell despite his nonchalant appearance that Jonathan was sincerely listening. He always was listening as the natural observer of psychology that he always had been. It was the natural observation of humans that had been warped into his madness and had made him what he had been as a rogue. This habit seemed to have regaining its original state.

Jervis coughed. "Well, only that one may find hope in appreciating one's life perhaps more as someone who had once squandered it and reformed than a person who has never given it a thought either way at all."

After Jervis' second move, Jonathan paused a moment thoughtfully as though deciding where to move next, but instead he let loose another of those smiles that Jervis was quite unused to. He did not look up this time, but he said gently and in full seriousness, "I heartily agree with you."

Then Jonathan made his move.

If he could gain that sober appreciation for life, Jervis would be satisfied. In a sense, he supposed it was what it truly meant to grow up and not to simply be an overgrown, reject-child. Jonathan was more an adult than he had seen most adults ever be, and if he could gain half of that maturity, he would call his life restored. Little did he know that his own brief smile that had slowly grown upon his face now that he did not feel quite so sheepish was very near to Jonathan's already; though he did feel strangely at peace.

The howling of the wind outside of Arkham's cold stone walls, the creaking of the foundations, and the whining of the out-of-date electric lighting did nothing to shake it either as Jervis took a sip of tea. He made the next move on the board in front of him.