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The Undying

Summary:

NOW WITH AN AFTERWARD FROM THE AUTHOR!

Three years after a traumatic event alters what it means to be a hero, Batman is drawn into a web of murder and conspiracy, disappearances and intrigue, that threatens the very soul of Gotham. A villain known only as The Undying will test every last bit of The Dark Knight's courage and intelligence as Gotham is brought to the brink of disaster. And he's going to need help. Lots of it.

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Chapter 1: And He Ain't Comin' Back

Chapter Text

Chapter 1: And He Ain’t Comin’ Back

His arm was broken.

The Batmobile had chased The Joker’s van through Gotham’s Narrows, a particularly run down and violent part of Gotham.  It was a haven for the brand of criminal Batman fought: they who took garish noms-de-guerre like “Poison Ivy,” or “The Riddler.”  It’s easy for a costumed freak to set up shop in a hellhole with no beat cops.

The rear doors of the van opened during the pursuit to reveal The Joker himself, alongside one of his henchmen in a clown mask holding an RPG.  Batman could see The Joker screaming at the goon, but the speed and the winter wind deafened his screeches. Finally, not one to repeat himself during one of his fits of mercurial pique, The Joker shrugged, pulled a .44 Magnum out of the front of his purple suit pants, and decorated the interior of the van with his henchman’s brains.

As The Joker bent over to liberate the RPG from his dead goon’s clutches, Batman’s finger hovered over the buttons on the Batmobile’s steering wheel that activated anti-vehicle rockets, and thought against it.  They were going at such high speeds, and the van itself was so old, that the rockets would vaporize the vehicle itself along with anyone inside.

And Batman was not confident that this latest model of Batmobile could withstand an RPG straight to the engine block.

“Initialize safety protocols,” Batman said, and the Batmobile’s operating system, in the voice of the current Oracle (and former Batgirl) Barbara Gordon, replied “Foam initialized.”

At the exact instant that The Joker fired the RPG at the front of the Batmobile, the interior of the vehicle itself was filled with a patented WayneTech safety foam that would ensure Batman’s well-being, even if the rest of the Batmobile was destroyed.  The fuel lines of the Batmobile were segmented, and sealed off, preventing an explosion.

Or an even bigger one, at any rate.

The entire front of the Batmobile was demolished, and the flaming ruin of the car plowed into the side of an abandoned tenement building.

The trick with the WayneTech safety foam was that it was comprised of a special chemical compound (courtesy of Lucius Fox) that sublimated from a solid form directly to a non-flammable gaseous state roughly forty-five seconds after deployment.  As the foam disappeared into a faintly maple syrup-scented miasma, Batman knew he would have to talk to Lucius about the improvements that could be made. He knew he had suffered a concussion.

And his arm was broken.

Batman pressed the button on the dashboard of what was left of the Batmobile to open the roof, allowing him to escape.

Nothing happened.

He moved his left hand to the manual latch, which was how, in the worst possible way, he found out that arm was broken.  The pain was voluminous, like a coil of pure fire compressing the ulna.

With gritted teeth, Batman moved his right arm over to the manual latch, and emerged from the wreckage of the Batmobile underneath Gotham’s gun-metal gray January sky.

Batman took care to mind on his right arm as he crumbled to the street, his black cape and body armor protecting him from the scorching ruin of the Batmobile.  His breath exited his mouth in a plume of fog. His ears were ringing, and he felt so, so tired.  Even an icy pavement would make a perfect place to curl up and sleep until the stars burned themselves out.

But his discipline kept him from so much as blinking, for fear of drifting away.  In contrast to the cold, the world shimmered before him as though he were in a blanket of desert heat.

And cutting through that mirage was the sound of a van’s tires grinding into pavement.  The high groan of ancient brakes. A set of doors opening.

“THE BATMOBILE LOST ITS WHEEL AND THE JOOOOO-KERRRRR GOOOOOT AAAAA-WAYYYYY!”

And then the laugh.  The high, demented laugh that struck fear into the hearts of millions.  The laugh that filled graveyards. The laugh that Batman first heard almost a decade ago, and in the stillness of the night, trying to fall asleep, could hear in the silence around him, like white noise underneath the soundscape of existence itself.

As Batman nudged himself along the pavement to get closer to the fire hydrant in front of the abandoned apartment building, he could hear something being drug along the pavement.  He looked up.

The Joker was dragging the henchman whose brains he had liberated from the rest of his body on the inside of the van.  The Clown himself was wearing a fur coat over his regular retro purple suit. To Batman’s knowledge, no one made purple fur coats, so at appeared to him that The Joker just found a plain fur coat, and applied a whole can of purple paint from Sherwin-Williams.  His skin was a ghastly white, his lips a ruby red, and his green hair must have been fresh out of the shower, because Batman could see it bearing a thin sheen of frost that The Joker didn’t seem to notice.

The half-beheaded henchman dripped gore on the pavement as The Joker drug him to the side of the building in front of Batman, and propped him up in the sitting position.  The Joker looked at the henchman, nudged what was left of the nose of his clown mask, and sighed.

“Harl?” he asked.  “Do we know this gentleman’s name?”

A voice from the front of the van.  High, and shrill, and Long Island all over.  “No, puddin’!”

The Joker sighed again, even though he never stopped smiling.  “Then I guess I’ll just name you Pete.”

It was then that The Joker fixed his gaze upon Batman, and it was only now that The Dark Knight allowed himself to blink.  He hoped it would help him think.

The Joker looked back at the dead henchman.  “Well, whaddya think, Pete? Should we use…”

He pulled the .44 back out of his pants.

“The gun?  I know you’re familiar with this one Pete, you scamp.”

The Joker stared at the corpse expecting a response.  When he didn’t get one, he just shrugged.

“Yeah, Pete, you’re right.  Where’s the flair?  Where’s the showmanship?  Luckily, I have…”

The Joker reached into the right pocket of his fur coat, and produced…

“Brass knuckles!”  The Joker said, his ever-present smile growing still wider.  “It’s old-fashioned, it takes a while, and it turns faces into fun new shapes!”

The Joker waited for another response.  The one he (and only he) got seemed to shock him.

“Well, there’s no need to swear, Pete!  Not in front of Batman! If you don’t like the knucks, you don’t like the knucks, but just because you’re discerning, you don’t need to be rude.  Now, how about…”  

He reached into the inside of his suit jacket and came up with…

“A cheese grater!”  The Joker let off a high, insane giggle.  “It’s thorough, it’s disfiguring, and it produces longs strips of bloody flesh that you can keep for your very own!  Or, y’know, to sell on Ebay, I’m not one to judge.”

And again, The Joker waited for a response from the dead henchman.  Unlike the other two times, however, he liked what he seemed to be hearing.  His head slowly turned toward Batman, and the rictus of permanent mirth that adorned his face had morphed into a suggestive grin.

“It appears we have a winner.”

Batman blinked again, trying to summon his strength.  He’s been in tighter spots before. All he needed was to study his environment, and wait for the time to strike.

The noise of sneakers grinding into pavement interrupted Batman’s survey.  Harley Quinn had parked the van, and had decided to join the scene.

She wore customized mismatched red and black Converse sneakers that went up to her knees.  The hot pants she was wearing were also read and black. As was the tank top. Her hair was in blonde pigtails, with black and red tips.  Her face was a smear of white paint and red lips that lent her pale blue eyes an even creepier air. She held a massive mallet over her shoulder, and there was a revolver in a holster on her hip.

And her exposed skin was turning purple in the freezing temperature.  She was trying not to shiver.

In the years since The Joker had come across the former Doctor Harleen Quinzel and bent her to his will, her apparel had become more and more revealing, going from a full body suit and motley to the hot pants get-up she was wearing now.  Batman knew that Harley was so mentally enslaved by The Joker that she wore these clothes by his suggestion, but whereas he formerly assumed that he wanted her to dress this way because he was attracted to her in his own sick way, it had begun to dawn on him over time that he wanted her to dress this way because he knew she wouldn’t say no to anything he said, and decided to push the privilege as far as he could, knowing it wouldn’t snap.

The Joker dressed Harley Quinn in hot pants on a ten degree January day because he thought it would be funny.

“W-w-w-we finally did it, Mistah J!” Harley said, shuddering, trying enthuse her way past the cold.  “We’re finally gonna put that stinkin’ Bat in a shallow grave!”

The Joker rolled his eyes and stood up from his crouch in front of his dead henchman.  He held his hand out to her.

“Dance with me, my dear.”

Harley set her mallet down, took The Joker’s hand, and they began a stately waltz in front of the abandoned apartment building in The Narrows.  While they did, Batman used his good arm to pull himself up into a sitting position. But the intense dizziness got the better of him, and he slumped back down.

It came to the point in The Joker and Harley’s dance when he twirled her around.  While her back was turned to him, about as quick as Batman could turn his head back to them, The Joker put her hand to the back of his head.  He used his right foot to sweep her legs out from under her, and Harley landed face first into a pile of snow. It hadn’t snowed in Gotham City in the past few days, so Batman could only guess that the pile of snow was mostly ice by now.

“‘We?’” The Joker asked with spite in his voice as he shoved the struggling Harley’s face deep into the brittle mass of ice.  Her hands clawed at his grip behind her head as she thrashed and let out muffled groans.  “‘WEEEEEEEEEEE?’”

The Joker, after what seemed like an eternity, finally let her go, and Harley, now crying and sporting a profusely bleeding nose, rolled away from him with her hands to her face.

“Do you have any idea how much work I did?” The Joker asked?  “Do you have any idea how much I’ve sacrificed?  How many bones I’ve broken, how many days I’ve lost to unconsciousness trying to get him to this point?  That was my work!  Not ours, and definitely not yours!  You… You embarrass me!”

The Joker pointed to the dead henchman.  “YOU EMBARRASS ME IN FRONT OF PETE!”

He turned around to look at Batman, and recomposed himself.  He walked over to the dead henchman, picked the cheese grater up off the pavement before turning his attention to Batman.  He squatted in front of him, put the cheese grater under his chin, and fixed him with a maniacal green glare.

“This is it,” The Joker said.  “This is where it ends. You were responsible for me, somewhere down the line.  You left a trail of damage and destruction behind you trying to protect this latrine of a city, and out of that grew me.  You got the assist on every man, woman, and child I killed, and I gotta say, you get the biggest and shiniest participation trophy there is.  And the funniest thing is that you don't even remember how you brought me to the dance."

The Joker’s grin grew wider.

“You never look back.”

He started laughing.

“So… so neither do I.”

The Joker cut his laugh short as he grabbed one of the ears of Batman’s black cowl and wrenched his head back  Batman didn’t make a sound. He was marshalling his strength, and as long as The Joker indulged his weakness for monologue, he would only get stronger.

“I am the only one that gets to kill you,” The Joker said.  “Not the lawyer with the two-tone face, not the insufferable dweeb with the green question mark jacket, not the sawed-off gangster with the bird fetish.   Me!  Because we’re so close.  I… I am the equal and opposite reaction.  Now, who knows what’ll happen to me tomorrow with you dead and in the ground?  Maybe I’ll just vanish. Maybe I’ll go sane. Maybe I’ll pop up in New Mexico working a factory job.”

The Joker stood up and looked at the cheese grater in his hand.  “Or mayyyyybe… I’ll just kill a whole bunch of people.  I’m down for whatever. You know me.”

And it was now that Joker looked at Batman again.  He boosted himself up on the fire hydrant and tried to ready his legs beneath him.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” The Joker said, “I have strips of you to sell on…”

BLAM!

“...Ebay…”

Batman tried to put together what that sound could have been through the miasma of his concussion, but whatever it was, it achieved the impossible.

It wiped the smile off of The Joker’s face.

The edges of his red smile were like vestigial wings across his cheeks as his actual lips drooped and sagged into a pained frown.  He looked to his yellow button-up shirt, and found smoke billowing and blood spewing from the hole in his chest.

He turned around and looked behind him.

Harley Quinn, blood falling from her nose and staining her shirt, held the revolver from the holster on her hip.  The barrel was smoking.

But she wasn’t shivering any more.

The Joker fell to his knees, his red lips eagerly flapping, but unable to form words, unable to even make a sound.

Harley, by now, had grabbed the handle of her mallet.  She kicked The Joker in the back, knocking him onto his stomach.  She walked the length of his slender body and put her left foot on The Joker’s exposed white neck.  She heaved the mallet onto her shoulder and then brought it over her head, before sending its business end careening towards her Puddin’s head.

And for the first time since he put on the cowl, Batman flinched.  He closed his eyes. He could not bear to see the sight that accompanied the grisly sound that followed.  It was like someone shoving a rotten jack-o’-lantern off a fifth story balcony.

A moment passed, a moment during which a river could have worn a mountain to sand, before he opened his eyes again.  He made sure to look at Harley instead of the mess of a corpse at her feet that used to be his greatest enemy.

Her breath came out of her mouth in shallow little clouds, obscuring the paint and the blood on her face.  Obscuring the pale blue eyes that were welling up.

“I get it,” Harley said.  “It took me a while, but…”

She looked at Batman.  

“He loves you more than he loves me.”

Batman tried to reckon with the wall of heartbreak in human form that stood before him in red and black sneakers.  And in the guiltiest corner of his mind, where he tried to sequester all of his unworthy thoughts, he reckoned with how what had just happened affected him.  What this would mean going forward.

He had been here before.  He had stood on this kind of precipice and had jumped into the darkness beyond, and that leap dictated the rest of his life.  But now? Now he had stumbled and tripped into that same blackness, unencumbered from his will and divorced from his wants. He didn’t have the faculties to puzzle out what this meant, but he knew that this moment would similarly dictate the things to come.

Batman finally spoke.  “Harley, The Joker isn’t… wasn’t… capable of loving anyone.”  The words tasted like bile. As though a past meal had risen back into his mouth.

With this, the tears finally fell from Harley Quinn’s eyes.  The placid mask of shock on her face cratered as she succumbed to open weeping.

“Aw, now ya tell me!”