InsaneJournal

This was Jonathan Crane's creed as he impatiently paced back and forth across the worn carpeting of his latest lair with a screaming bundle of baby in his arms.

He had to keep repeating it as though it were his mantra to drown out the wails of the little beast in swaddling clothes that he held. Stalking back and forth with a slight bounce in his step, knowing just how ridiculous he must have looked, he got more and more ill tempered.

It had been, what Techie would have called a "Rodney Dangerfield kind of day" in that aboslutely nothing went right.

First, Crane had made a batch of toxin that was horribly, horribly flawed. Rather than striking fear into the heart of the intended victim, they were filled with joy and laughed and laughed and laughed until the oxygen deprivation got to them and they passed out.

That sort of thing was all well and good for the Joker, but laughing gas was far from being an acceptable weapon for the master of fear.

That alone had put him in a bad mood and if that weren't enough, it seemed that Kitten had come down with a case of colic so now.

The three idiots were gone when this particular bout of crying started so of course it was up to him to deal with this.

Ye Gods he was getting sick of this. Almost an entire decade had passed since his entire universe had been tossed neatly on its head by Al and just as he'd originally thought, he did indeed live to see the day when he cursed the day he set eyes on her.

Almost every disruption in his nice normal little existence was their fault.

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But the most horrifying thing of the day--what made him go from irritible to being in an outright snit, was the front page photo on the Gotham Times. Apparently, some photographer who fancied himself the next Jimmy Olsen had snapped a picture of the Scarecrow with a baby.

As if that weren't enough, the accompanying article went a long way to making sure that his reputation could conceivably be completely and irrepairably ruined.