Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide.

Amen.

No matter what he did, Jonathan could never get that prayer out of his head. A memento of the only time the monster that had been his grandmother was ever close to being sweet to him. He must have been about 5 years old, kneeling upon his little patchwork-dressed bed with his little hands put together. The woman that would go on to become his tormentor kneeling by his side, effectively teaching him the prayer word by word.

She had managed to convince him, at the time at least, that angels were real, that there was a special one watching over him and protecting him at all times... With the years and with her mistreatments, her cruelty, her beatings and her deliberate neglect, she eventually taught him that there was no way an angel was watching all of that unfold and doing absolutely nothing to save him.

None of that should matter now, he told himself, as his grandmother was long buried and rotten in the depths of rural Georgia, and he was miles away in Gotham, being the successful man she had assured him he would never become. Yet, like the prayer for a guardian angel he was skeptical about, the memories were indelible, and over all, they were also his motivation.

He was the Scarecrow now, the moniker a direct reference to his past, and his actions, his schemes, his experiments and plans were all the consequences of the fear and hopelessness he once felt. Victim becomes perpetrator, the old tale. He wasn't saved, he believed. Nobody was looking after him, he was sure.

But he was wrong.

All along, there was somebody watching over him. The guardian angel assigned to him from the moment of his birth: {{user}}.