What was easy for Scarecrow to enjoy was substantially more difficult for Jonathan to stomach.

Jane's screams of agony and terror sunk below the surface of him, pleasing the thing which lurked just beneath. Her screams were an ethereal chorus to the strawman's ears, something long awaited and deeply desired.

It was strangely disconcerting for Jonathan himself, who had never experienced a particularly unpleasant reaction to another person's fear, before.

While he couldn't claim to have been upset by Jane's fear, he was not as satisfied by it as he was with the average test subject. This neutrality itself was a troubling thing.

She writhed against the restraints that immobilized her, gutteral screams tearing from her throat. It took quite some time to work out what it was she was seeing until a pair of legitimate words formed on her tongue -

"Jonathan, don't."

His heart sunk to the pit of his stomach.

In the grip of primal fear, in the face of her deepest horror, it was him she was afraid of.

You're shocked? Think of all you've told her, all she knows about us...

He supposed it made sense.

Jane knew about Scarecrow, about Granny, about Sherry and Bo. She had seen that side of him up close and personal; it only followed logic that she would be afraid.

And wasn't that what he had wanted, to show her that she had every reason to fear him?

As he watched her - sweating, shaking, tears streaming down her face in abject horror as she cried out for him to stop - he could no longer be certain.

There came a point when he could no longer comfortably tolerate the scene playing out before his eyes, but had no will to stop it, either.

After all, Scarecrow's desire for that very thing had been building and growing for so long, the seed planted more than a decade beforehand; it wasn't as though he was going to peacefully allow Jonathan to draw a line in the sand.

We can't stop it now, Jonathan. Listen to how she screams, and because of you! Doesn't that make it all the more sweet?

Not this time, he replied mentally, gritting his teeth against the shrieking that filled the room.

-

Approximately two hours after it began, the screaming died away into silence.

It was a welcome reprieve for Jonathan, his chest loosening as he felt himself able to breathe again in the stillness.

She had passed out, presumably her mind's way of protecting the brain. He unbuckled the restraints and checked her pulse to reassure himself that it was nothing more serious than fainting, though he'd given her a relatively safe dosage.

She would come to soon and he would keep her overnight for observation - a necessary precaution, he told himself.

After all, he had no way of predicting her physical reaction to the toxin as he might with an inmate or patient, no lengthy medical history or biophysical profile to build off of.

How do you think Sleeping Beauty is gonna take to that after what just happened?

He shook his head 'no' in a silent answer. It didn't matter what Jane had to say about it.

My terms, remember?

He was attempting to sound convicted, even to himself, but to no real end. He wasn't sure how he had imagined he would feel when he proved her love to be a lie, but whatever satisfaction he had hoped to gain was sorely missing.

It took fifteen minutes for her breathing to become regular and her eyes to begin fluttering - standard timing in accordance with the dose of toxin he had administered.

He held his breath as her eyelids lifted, brown eyes darting wildly around the room as she fully came to.

This was the end, the destination he had been pushing towards, and yet, he found himself somehow unprepared to lose her.

When at last her eyes settled on him, she drew in a harsh breath and lunged forward. He anticipated the aggressive manuever but remained still - he found himself to be deserving of whatever meager damage she intended to inflict.

He was still as stone when the impact was made, though his brain took a moment to register that she had not attacked him.

She had thrown her arms around him.

-

It took several moments to gather where she was, the dark cornfield morphing into a warehouse of sorts with little more than a blink of her eyes.

But Jonathan, she panicked, where was he? His body was in her arms, just seconds ago, and now -

Her eyes landed on his face and she breathed in sharply.

His face, whole and unbroken, was the utmost relief she could have asked for upon waking. It was a sensation that filled her body entirely, like a breath of air after being submerged almost to the point of drowning.

Her arms wrapped tight around him with no regard for his usual protocol regarding physical contact, she crushed herself against him and sobbed quietly.

"You're okay," she whispered, time and time again as she struggled to press herself closer to him, "you're alive."

There had been nothing she could do to stop it, too much blood seeping from too many wounds.

She bit her lip as she tried to forget the images that had flashed through her mind, each more horrifying and realistic than the one which had preceded it.

Skinny, seventeen year old Jonathan, body bent and broken in the middle of that damnable cornfield. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't stop the bleeding.

She drew in a shaky breath, breathing in the scent of barsoap and mild aftershave in the crook of his neck. None of it had been real, she tried to remember, it was all in her head.

The birds swarmed from the mouth of the church in an angry, noisy black cloud as she watched the blood spread into a pool over the ground he laid on.

"There was so much blood," she whispered, screwing her eyes shut as though it would help to block out the memory of what she had seen.

Jonathan was stiff and utterly still beneath her embrace, but it did not deter her enthusiasm.

She couldn't bring herself to let go, not after what felt like an eternity watching him die on repeat in the cornfield she had found him in on that night, so many years ago.

"What did you see, Jane?" he finally asked, voice barely audible even in the otherwise quiet room now that Jane had once again quieted her tears.

She didn't want to say it aloud, give life once more to the horrifying hallucinations she had experienced, but she answered dutifully.

"You. Dying. Ripped apart by those crows from the church, and I couldn't save you."

Jonathan shuddered and she regretted speaking the words for him to hear, but it had been the truth of what she had seen.

She loosened her grip and pulled back to look at his face, stifling a gasp at the expression she found there; all the walls and defense mechanisms that usually guarded his feelings so carefully were shattered, if only for the moment.

"You were saying 'Jonathan, don't'," he said, shaking his head as though her words were impossible to believe.

"As in, 'Jonathan, don't die'," she clarified, face flushing both at the knowledge that she'd been speaking while unconscious and at the way his gaze burned into her.

She trailed her fingertips down the curve of his jaw, admiring how much his face had changed from the young boy in her memory. The difference was not so apparent until she had seen it again.

In a motion she did not expect, he inclined slightly and closed the small gap between them, pressing a firm but chaste kiss to her lips. It was the first time she could recall that he had kissed her, rather than the other way around, the significance of which did not go without notice.

She did not seek to deepen the kiss, cautious and wary of breaking the moment, but rather stayed perfectly still while he tested the waters.

Eventually, he pulled back, still examining her with those open blue eyes that she hardly recognized with the unhidden emotion swimming through them.

"Even after this, after what I've put you through tonight for my own amusement -?" he questioned without actually speaking the question she knew he was asking.

"Always, Jonathan."

-

There it is, guys!

So, unbeknownst to me, I feel like this story has sort of been heading to an organic end. This doesn't have to be it, but I thought I'd do an interest check.

Do we leave Jonathan and Jane here, or explore Batman Begins territory with Jane thrown in the mix? And do we keep that in this book, or turn this sucker into a trilogy?

Please let me know your thoughts on that in the comments, or get a hold of me via PM.