Disclaimer: I wish I owned these characters. But if wishes were fishes...then Squishykins wouldn't need CAT.

There's a timeline, you know. This is near the end of the series, so for the love of all that is holy, don't start here. Visit www. freewebs. com/ bitemetechie/ catverse. html and bounce around a little. This would be September of the year arbitrarily designated as 2013.

Special thanks to Ops--for the snark.

A Measure of Trust

In the natural order of things, Jonathan Crane should not have had friends. For one thing, friendship implied a level of trust he had not been capable of in a very long time. For another, when a man was known for going masked and forcing innocent bystanders to live their deepest fears, people tended not to trust him. Besides, Crane didn't like people as a rule. Beyond what he could learn from his test subjects, they had nothing to offer him.

But the natural order had been thoroughly—and perhaps permanently—disrupted by the trio of miscreants who had…well, they had done things to him, emotionally, things he still wasn't prepared to accept more than a year after their death.

As things should have been, Edward Nygma would have been a colleague, an acceptable chess partner, and occasionally an ally, as the situation warranted. They had been cellmates often enough, and Crane could sleep with Nygma in the room, which was far more trust than he was willing to extend to most people. But friendship was far too strong a word for the lack of animosity that lay between them.

So when Crane looked up to see the Riddler tearing down the street with three of Gotham's finest in hot pursuit, he should have found a safe place to watch the show.

There should not have been a feminine voice in the back of his head saying, "Look, it's Eddums! Save him, Squishykins, please!"

And there was no way in hell he should have listened to that voice.

Edward and the police were causing quite a stir. No one even seemed to be looking in Crane's direction.

It was a fundamental law that people were stupid, and the young were doubly so. He looked into the nearest car and saw a girl barely old enough to have her license, staring at the Riddler with rapt attention. He opened her door, not at all surprised to find it unlocked.

The girl looked up at him, startled. Her eyes widened. She opened her mouth to cry out.

And he released the toxin hiding up his sleeve. The girl looked as if she might be one of the ones to have a violent reaction, so he simply shoved her out of the way, stole her seat, and held his hand over her mouth until she went still. It was a stronger dose than a fragile young mind could withstand. Once she stopped moving, he knew she wasn't likely to be capable of much more than rapid breathing.

Jonathan reached past her and opened the passenger side door.

"Edward," he called. Nygma saw him, and while he was quite obviously surprised, he was smart enough not to waste a moment of his time on making the decision. He skidded as he changed direction, nearly went down, but managed to throw himself into the car.

Crane hit the gas, leaving the cops with nothing but the smell of exhaust.

He had almost forgotten what a thrill it could be to give those fools the slip.

(For the first time in recent memory, he felt a rush of pure pleasure, and the urge to laugh.)

He glanced at his companion, who should have said something by now, if only a "thank you" or a simple "hello."

Nygma looked awful—pale, shaking with fatigue, and thinner than Crane remembered. As he watched, Edward doubled over, coughing hard enough that Crane could imagine he would soon be holding his own lungs in his hands.

There had been rumors recently that the Riddler was dead. Nothing so substantial that Crane would have believed it, but to most rumors there was at least a grain of truth. The same rumors had flown about him when he had been lying in that hospital bed as a John Doe. Nygma had certainly been out of the public eye for the last month or so, and he didn't look as if he had spent that time relaxing on the beach.

(And, no, that wasn't a pang of anything like concern he was feeling. Just simple curiosity, and the hope that whatever was wrong with the man wasn't going to get them both caught.)

"Dying?" he asked simply as he focused on weaving his way through the heavy traffic.

"Just—running—not the brightest idea." He shifted the girl to a more comfortable position across his lap. She clung to him as if he were the only life preserver in the middle of a stormy sea. For his part, he seemed quick to forget that she was even there.

"I take it you haven't been in top form lately."

"The flu. Followed by bronchitis." He had stopped coughing, but still sounded winded. It was going to be a while before he fully caught his breath. "Thanks for—what were you doing there, anyway?"

"Grocery shopping." And nothing else. "And you? Don't you know better than to go running around outside when you can't even breathe properly?"

Aw, Squishity-squee! said the voice in his head. You're so cute when you're all worried about your brotherly-type.

Who asked you? he growled back, and ignored the girlish giggling.

"I didn't exactly expect the fuzz to recognize me." He sounded more than a little irritated. "I just…had to check on something." Jonathan stopped at a red light. No sense getting pulled over now. They were less than a mile from the city limits, and relative safety. Once out of town, it wouldn't take long to reach one of his old hideouts. He hadn't used it in years, but it should still be intact and relatively well stocked.

"They're still there," he said without taking his eyes off the road. Edward looked up at him in surprise.

"What?" Jonathan glanced at him just long enough to meet the other man's eyes before he turned his attention back to the road.

"You wanted to see the graves. They're still there. And the ground is undisturbed." A legitimate concern. If he could imagine anyone coming back from the dead, clawing their way out of their own graves, it would be those three. Only, instead of "brains," they would converge on him moaning, "lurrrrrve."

"You've been there?"

"It was on the way to the store." The light changed. He was glad of the excuse to keep his eyes on the road, knowing Nygma would never accept that. The graves in question were rather deep inside the cemetery, and at the top of the steepest hill in sight. Whoever had decided to put a cemetery there should have been shot, but it suited his girls to be buried in such an inaccessible spot, where they wouldn't be disturbed by anyone except those few who had cared for them the most.

Which didn't begin to explain why he kept making the trek.

He half expected Edward to try mocking him with his imaginary love for his dead minions. Instead, all he got was a heavy silence, punctuated by a hesitant sound that turned into a cough.

Then, finally, Edward spoke up.

"Have you…have you seen them, too?"

Jonathan's head whipped around so fast, he felt vertebrae pop in his neck.

"Seen them?" he repeated. "You…" He cleared his throat. "You should be wearing your seatbelt." Seen them? It wasn't possible.

"You have seen them," Edward exclaimed.

"No."

"Some time when you thought you were going to die, they popped up out of nowhere to set your mind at ease."

"No!" No, a hallucination was not the same as a visitation. Anyone that badly hurt, that totally alone, and that sure of his own impending death would have conjured up a similar illusion to bring comfort to his final moments. Just because they were the only people who had ever cared about him enough to sit by his hospital bed for a week, just waiting for him to wake up, didn't mean they had actually done it. Dead was dead, and even they couldn't circumvent that. Not even if he had wanted them to.

"There's never any proof, but—"

"They're dead." He sounded furious, and he couldn't have explained why. The girls were gone, and there was nothing left of them but the graves on the hill, three mangled corpses, and that irritating female voice in the back of his mind.

Oh, really? That voice spoke up now, distinctly the Captain's, and not the hybrid he had been hearing.

He almost wished she were alive, just so he could strangle her.

There are millions of women with voices that sound like that. And most of them are far more likely than the Captain to pick up a phone. A disembodied voice proves nothing. Especially if the owner of that voice consistently denies that she knows you. The real Captain would have caved.

"Jonathan?"

"They're gone."

"No, I mean look out," Edward said in a bizarrely calm tone of voice.

He jerked his eyes back to the road just in time to see a station wagon come barreling through a four way stop without so much as tapping the brakes, but not nearly in time to do anything about it.

He jerked the wheel to the right, and the car swerved just enough so that the station wagon plowed into the rear fender, rather than caving in his door and crashing through him. The car spun around, tires skidding freely across the surface of the road, and he had just enough time to think, This is going to hurt—

Then they hit the tree.

It had to be the only tree in Gotham City, a sad-looking oak growing up out of the sidewalk, with a pathetic metal fence erected to protect the trunk from situations like this, although most people seemed to view it as just another garbage can.

He watched in morbid fascination as the hood of the car crumpled like paper, curling around the tree almost as if it were being eaten away by the stubborn will of Mother Nature.

In classical mechanics, momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. The momentum of an object can be conceptually thought of as how difficult it is to stop, as determined by multiplying two factors: its inertia and its velocity. As such, it is a natural consequence of Newton's first and second laws of motion.

Newton's laws are as follows: An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The object in motion was, of course, the car. The outside force acting upon it was the immovable barrier of the tree. The force of their impact was considerable. And because the tree was not going to move, the equal and opposite reaction took place within the automobile itself.

Of course, he wasn't thinking of any of that when the car stopped moving and he didn't. The only thing going through his mind was, "Ow."

The air rushed out of him all at once when the steering wheel slammed into his chest. Bones that had been shattered not very long before couldn't take the strain in their weakened condition. He felt something snap, and spent one panicked moment dreading the next breath he was going to have to take.

Then his head hit, and—perhaps mercifully—everything went black.

--

It could be so convenient sometimes to have chatty nurses. When they didn't know their patients were regaining consciousness, they tended to let things slip that would be difficult to learn otherwise, especially at Arkham, where the nurses worked in pairs for safety.

For example, in the time it took Jonathan Crane to work up the energy to open his eyes, he learned that he was a low priority patient (not only had he been given an insufficient dose of morphine, but they hadn't even bothered to clean the glass out of his hair.) He was sharing a room with Edward, who was in worse shape than he was (and after Crane had warned him to fasten his seat belt…that was the last time he'd show any concern for the idiot.) The girl whose car they had been using was in critical condition (another stain on his record, what a tragedy.) And some actor whose movies had dominated the shelf in his former lair had recently gone missing after a messy divorce. And he was interested in that last tidbit only insofar as to note that he wouldn't have to listen to the girls speculate about their heartthrob, or tag along on some kind of ill-conceived rescue mission.

The nurses left soon after the talk turned to entertainment gossip, thankfully. Soon after, Crane worked up the will to open his eyes.

Ugh. He knew this ceiling intimately. He had spent many a day finding pictures among the cracks and stains. He had no desire to find any of them again, not even the one that looked like Batman lying in a pool of blood.

He let his eyes wander. Ceiling. Four walls painted a sickly shade of yellow. Tiny, barred window looking out on a tiny, barred parking lot. Steel door that only opened from the outside. Second hospital bed housing a second patient, in this case Edward, who was in traction.

Crane laughed, and immediately regretted the action. Oh, he should have known better than to take any but the gentlest of breaths. He closed his eyes to wait out the stabbing pain.

When it eased, he opened his eyes to find Edward looking at him.

"You look like hell."

Crane took in the man's heavily bandaged face, unfocused eyes, and the casts on all four limbs. He made no comment.

"D'you see them?" Edward continued.

"Of course not." There was no need to ask who he meant.

"'S good. Knew I wasn't dying. They said." He closed his eyes and dropped off.

Crane went back to staring at the ceiling.

The plaster had cracked again, forming new pictures since the last time he had seen it. No surprise there. It had been—he actually had to count—more than two years since he had found himself lying in the Arkham infirmary, and even longer since he'd been in this room in particular. The three semi-private rooms were used only for the most serious injuries, or for the most dangerous patients. Crane hated to have to admit which way he qualified at the moment.

He felt himself getting lightheaded, partly from the painkillers and partly from the effort of breathing shallowly enough to avoid letting his ribs move. Maybe Edward had the right idea. Maybe he should just let go and sleep.

"You know…" Edward's voice startled him. He jumped, sending a jolt of pain down the entire left side of his body. "If they were still alive, this never would have happened."

Crane snarled something belligerent without enough breath behind it to be audible. He inhaled very carefully and tried again.

"You've never ridden with one of them."

"No. Why?"

He grimaced.

"Bad." There was no other way to describe it. Even Al, the best driver of the three, had scared him more often than not. Usually on purpose. Bitch.

"How bad could it be?"

He almost laughed.

"They wouldn't have had to be in the car to total it. It's a wonder they haven't killed themselves…didn't," he corrected. "Didn't kill themselves driving."

He actually sounded as if he missed them. Anyone who didn't know him might have thought he was mourning their deaths, or remembering them with some sense of fondness or nostalgia.

"Would have been better off that way," he said gruffly.

Edward snorted in disbelief. If Crane hadn't been strapped down to the bed, he would have gotten up and done something creative with a pillow.

"Don't you miss them at all?"

"No," he said quickly—a little too quickly. But he wasn't in denial. He had just been expecting the question, and the answer was so obvious, he couldn't have said anything else.

"Not the least little bit?" Damn it, he was smiling like a kid with a secret he was just bursting to share.

"No."

"You're lying," Edward said smugly. "You love them."

"I do not—did not—love them. I do not love." Edward grinned, disgustingly pleased with himself.

"Y'know, they stayed with me for a month before they went to you."

"Don't care." Ow. Being that forceful with broken ribs was a bad idea. But he didn't care what they had done before they made themselves his.

"There was this one time that Al came back with a kid..."

"I don't care."

"Didn't they ever ask you, 'Can I keep him, please, please, please?'"

He tried not to think about the endless succession of kittens, puppies, baby birds, tarantulas, crabs, hamsters, fish, snakes, lizards, pumas, and that thrice-damned bunny rabbit.

And Edward knew about the bunny. Everyone knew about the bunny. His reputation was never going to fully recover from that one.

"Would you stop talking about them?" he snapped. Edward smirked and fell silent. At least, for a few seconds.

"Did you know that the Techie almost got caught by the Bat their first month here? She did pretty well for a first-timer."

This was going to require some careful management of his breathing.

"If you don't shut up, Nygma, I'm going to stuff your pillow down your throat."

"You're strapped down," Edward replied with maddening logic.

"And you're in traction. Who do you think will be getting up first?"

This should have been the time for Edward to be intimidated. Maybe the drugs in his system were interfering with his thought processes. Or maybe Jonathan just didn't look like much of a threat.

Maybe he was remembering the bunny.

Damn the bunny.

"I saw them last Halloween."

"Right after they died?" The words slipped out before he could stop himself.

"It was a dream. Or so they said. But they kept showing up."

He refused to comment. He absolutely refused.

"When?"

Damn it! Since when had he lost all control of his mouth? He was definitely not making a good case for himself this way.

"Once when I had a concussion. I, uh…nearly drowned." He sounded embarrassed. "They said something about a near death experience."

"Concussion?" Crane thought back. Something about that sounded familiar. "Was that back in…April, was it? When they found you soaking wet and unconscious on the floor of the laundromat?" The look on Edward's face was priceless. It was all Crane could do to keep from laughing. "What did you do, hide in a washing machine?"

"Well…when did you see them?"

This time Crane did laugh. He didn't even care that it hurt.

"A washing machine, Edward?"

"It seemed like a good idea at the time. I…didn't realize Al would be doing laundry from beyond the grave."

That, somehow, was a sobering thought. Al…laundry…the grave. He was struck by a sudden mental image of prying the lid off her coffin and being hit by a wave of Gainy freshness. She would never be happy smelling like a corpse.

He decided it was best not to share this thought.

"She always did have an unhealthy fascination with fabric softener," he said instead. Not that she'd had any healthy fascinations that he knew of. They had all been the obsessive types, unshakeable once they'd made up their minds to go a certain way.

"She did…it was nice. Everything…smelled good. I'm guessing fabric softener doesn't do much for burlap, though."

Crane mumbled his response.

"What?"

"She melted it," he repeated. "The plastic tubing. I had to restock." And masks like his weren't as easy to come by as green bowler hats and question mark neckties.

Edward laughed, sounding vaguely disoriented.

"Sounds about right…" He was slipping away, losing his grip on the waking world. Good. Crane wasn't feeling exactly spot-on, himself, and a lull in the conversation would be more than welcome.

Not that it was a painful subject. Just touchy. Unpleasant. Annoying as hell.

Chaotic was what it was—what they had been. Nothing related to those girls could have any sense of order, and he was definitely at a point where he needed some stability. Some evidence that the world made sense, that it was governed by rules…that people didn't love for no reason and come back from the grave.

That kind of thing just wasn't possible. Even for a man who saw impossible things every day, there was no way to have faith in such utterly inconceivable notions.

How could he?

How could they?

"How could they what?" Edward mumbled. Crane blinked in surprise. Had he been talking out loud? He was going to have to be more careful with the Arkham Cocktail pumping through his veins.

"How could they come back?"

"'S not goodbye. So long and thanks for all the fish."

That settled it. Edward Nygma had officially gone around the bend.

"Fish?"

"Fish. 'Sides, people come back all the time."

Yes, it was true. People like Superman came back from the dead whenever the hell they felt like it. People like Henchman Number Three, however, tended to stay down when they were put in their holes. And while the Captain, Al, and Techie might have been strong enough to stand up to a superhuman in a battle of wills…well, he just couldn't see them clawing their way up out of Hell.

Oddly, he could see them clawing their way out of Heaven, out of sheer boredom.

And he could, if he felt like being especially silly, imagine them getting special favors out of Satan by flirting and feeding him soup.

One of them had once theorized that Satan was actually a level sixty Gnome priest. And he was positive he had heard them speculating about his need for a sandwich, and how the afterlife might be a better place if "Mr. Grumpy" had something yummy in his tummy. This was, of course, immediately after they came up with a foolproof plan to murder priests without it counting as a sin.

Not that any of them had actually been Catholic.

And why was he still thinking about them?

Even dead, they wouldn't shut up and leave him alone.

If they were dead…

No, he was not going to give in to the sudden urge to dig up their coffins and see what was inside. That would be crazy. Besides, the crime scene photos should have been proof enough. He had seen them back in November, when they were still big news. Some idiot had been showing them off in the Iceberg when Crane had stopped by for a drink. Attracted by the unusual sight of one of the Joker's henchmen being sick in a potted plant, he had approached the table in time to see the others guiltily hiding their stash exactly the same way another group had done when the Joker had caught them looking at topless photos of Harley Quinn that some paparazzi with a telephoto lens had shot just three days before his "mysterious" disappearance.

That group had fared just a bit worse than the ones Crane had dealt with. He hadn't thought it wise to destroy other people's minions—professional courtesy and all—so most of those had been able to return to work within the month. All but the one who had dared insinuate that the Scarecrow's feelings might be hurt by the insensitive way they were treating his dead "friends." That one was still gibbering away in some dark corner of Arkham, perplexing the doctors with his strange compulsion to write, "There is no such thing as love. There is no such thing as love. There is no such thing as love," whenever he could get his hands on a piece of chalk.

"I miss Christmas," Edward said out of the blue.

"What?"

"Christmas with them. It was like…being a real person. Friends."

Family. That was what they had said. One big, happy family.

He felt his lip curl in disgust. Family. He'd never had any use for family. And even if he had, he never would have chosen them to be his—his—

Actually, maybe that was the point.

He shook his head slightly. Do not go down this track.

"Just go to sleep, Nygma. You're not thinking clearly."

"You can't say you don't miss Christmas dinner."

"I…" His stomach chose that rather inopportune moment to growl loudly. He forced himself not to think of a steaming hot bowl of chicken soup loaded with oregano. Or of blueberry oatmeal pancakes drowning in butter. Or of…damn. "I suppose I miss the cake," he snapped. "And maybe the tea. But that's it."

Edward smirked in such a way that he just knew the conversation wasn't over, and wouldn't be for a long time.

"You're such a liar, Jonathan."

"Let me reiterate—you're in traction, Nygma. I can move faster than you."

And Edward just smirked.