Chapter Text
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
-- T. S. Elliot, "The Hollow Men"
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‘Twas a day like any other, the day it happened.
The sun was shining behind Gotham’s eternally grey and morose clouds. Birds were chirping away (although rather anemically, this wasn’t Metropolis) and there’d been a couple of gunshots ringing out in East End already. All around, a great way to start a Monday.
After some necessary wound-licking time, Joker was out enthusiastically causing mayhem.
He’d rallied a couple of goons for a small-time bank robbery, since he was running a bit low on green. People were terrified of him and naturally, Joker relished it. He owned Gotham, and your self-preservation instincts would have to be as piss-poor as the Bat’s if you didn’t fear Joker. However, the more terrified they were, the more money Joker needed to throw at them in order to make them comply. Unfortunately, there were some things that you just couldn’t do with one pair of hands, and some things that were simply too boring to do yourself. Turns out, crime was a team effort.
But that’s why God had invented henchmen. And then He had rested on the seventh day, looked upon His creation and then had a good ole’ hearty laugh, because they were stupid, gullible and expendable.
So it had started like any other day. Maybe it could’ve qualified as a good day, even. Prior to the robbery he’d dropped by his favorite tailor and picked up his new suit, which looked absolutely dashing. He’d even slept a dreamless couple of hours that night, and sleep was truly… a commodity one barely managed to afford, in this economy.
It all goes to shit, however, just a couple of hours later.
Bored, Joker is leaning against the wall, watching the two brothers he’d hired and unoriginally christened in his head as Blondie One and Blondie Two hastily shove cash inside duffel bags. He wasn’t terribly content with the clown masks he’d chosen for this endeavor. Bit too mass-produced. They needed more of a personal touch! More green, perhaps, he thinks as he spots movement out the corner of his eye.
It is a deeply-entrenched reaction: lightning-fast, mindless. He shoots without hesitation, barely even looking in the direction of the brave little hostage. Another heartfelt hero going for the panic button, huh? He opens his mouth to say something, to put the fear of… well, Joker into the rest of the huddled, terrified idiots in the corner, but then he actually looks, and freezes.
A flash of pain pierces through his head, and he nearly drops the gun.
He knows that face. The shape of the nose, the deep brown eyes, the sandy blonde hair. He knows that face, but he also has no idea who it was.
This tends to happen, sometimes— he’ll be walking through Gotham, minding his own business, and the glimpse of a place would awaken a shard of remembrance, within him. It was never something clear: a kaleidoscope of images, the blurry face of a person, a sound. Joker didn’t want them to exist at all, and he never tried to follow the pieces back to a source. He categorizes all of these painful fragments as from the nebulous Before… Before the darling Bat, Before the acid vat, Before the glorious mad. And so, utterly useless.
While staring at the twitching face of the young man on the floor, he’s surrounded by a smell. It’s deeply familiar and it permeates every cell of his body. There’s the ghost of a woman, the one he’s had disparate images of for years, smiling tiredly at him, dirty blonde hair nearly grey in the dim lights of their apartment. It’s the clearest he’s ever seen her.
The stranger bleeds out on the floor, bullet having gone straight through his chest, left side of his jaw sprayed with red. And Joker numbly thinks, He looks just like her. It rips through his brain without any input from him, painful and blindingly bright, as if someone’s directed a flashlight directly into his eyes.
The gun clatters to the floor at the same time the young man’s last breath leaves him. It feels like the sound of the gunshot has been multiplied, again and again, twisting in Joker’s ears.
“Boss!” Blondie One hisses. “What are ya’ doin’?”
The headache that explodes behind Joker’s temples is nearly unbearable.
“We gotta move!” Blondie Two shouts as he exits the vault. “Unless ya’ wanna tango with the cops, and I ain’t goin’ back to prison!”
But Joker’s lost it, the red string sewing time and reality together. That smell, the scent of comfort and familiarity, is filling his nostrils with an intensity that makes him want to vomit. The emotions wrecking through him are so incredibly foreign that Joker can’t even call them his own.
Ghosts. Right now he’s a house haunted by so many demons and so many ghosts, suspended in death for centuries, and now they’ve all woken up, screaming all at once. He’s left shaking with it, frozen in place as the shrill screeching tears through the fleshy substance of his mind like talons.
An entirely separate part of him senses the way Blondie Two hurriedly pulls him through the bank doors, but all the parts being conquered are too busy to muster any anger at the cockroach daring to touch him. Who? Who was that, the voices whisper. Who was that, and why did he matter, they howl like beasts. Why did he, for some reason, matter?
The thought chases its own tail, showing no sign of stopping, moving in place like a toy spinner a kid left behind on a table. His mind feels like it’s on fire, and as the getaway car speeds through the alleys behind Gotham National and the police sirens echo behind them, he begins to shake with laughter. The deeply painful kind.
Joker has an ominous feeling that it isn’t just today that’s been ruined.
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He spends the next night killing Blondie One and Blondie Two, slowly.
It’s a bad idea. It was tough to find guns for hire recently, precisely because few were willing to risk their lives by being in cahoots with Joker. It had been why money was needed in the first place.
It’s not even funny, and deep down he’s always hated the times he’s killed when it wasn’t even funny. But he needs this. He can’t seem to care about anything else.
It hasn’t stopped. That face keeps flashing before his eyes, wide brown eyes frozen in death. Whatever shard this is, whatever piece of… Before, it’s a huge one, and it makes him itch and hurt and crave to leave his own skin behind.
All this time, he’s navigated the battleground of Gotham carelessly, burying each small landmine as quickly as it exploded under his feet. But now he’s stepped on the biggest threat of them all, the worst of the worst, the one he can’t sink back into the ground.
He nearly tears the head of the first brother in two by carving a smile into his face. The man gurgles and drowns in his own blood, and as he watches, Joker feels himself start to convulse, chuckles fighting to crawl out of his throat, little squirming creatures aching to be born. He scratches at his arms instead, again and again and again until he breaks skin, until he feels something.
It’s not helping. This isn’t helping. This isn’t funny, the pointless suffering is only making him want to laugh at himself, and it just keeps coming, that face frozen in helpless shock right before death cut the cord. The smile he carves into the helpless henchman is more of a smile he tries to carve into the stranger, because he needs the kid to stop looking like that. Stop looking like her. Stop looking…
He moves on to Blondie Two. But with the blade halfway through his gut, intestines spilling out, the laughter forces him to stop.
Hah. He hadn’t noticed the escalation, but his whole body is trembling with it so hard he can’t keep the knife still. He can’t concentrate. He can’t fucking concentrate.
He pulls out another knife from his coat and stabs it through his own thigh, laughs even harder when the pain turns into a beautiful black hole; it’s making the sensations flutter and sharpen to a point, clearing the fog in his mind and focusing the insanity into a singularity, into something he can weave the strands of a self around.
He gets back to it. Blondie Two hasn’t stopped screaming and pleading for him to stop, and it’s almost comforting, how little he cares.
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It won’t go away.
It only grows, this terrifying uncontrollable fixation, slowly but surely spreading through his head like a paralyzing disease. Simultaneously, Joker has never been more numb and more overcome with sensation; he keeps twitching, seeing the face of that man peek out the corner of his eye, keeps hearing footsteps behind him as if he’s being followed.
But there’s no one there. No one is ever there.
He wants it to go away. He wants the Bat to beat him so hard it all goes away. He knows the past few murders have angered him and part of him wishes the Bat would descend upon him, dark and vengeful and full of judgment. He can almost feel the fist, the bruises, the euphoria that comes from being made to exist in a fixed place in reality, in time. The gut-deep satisfaction of driving the Bat crazy, the pleasure shooting through his nerves when they painfully get to lay their hands on one another.
But there’s a fragility to his own skin that he doesn’t recognize. The face is still there. Sticky like molasses, it has infiltrated the mechanisms of his mind and made it all grind to a halt, and he can’t get it out.
Four days later, he steals the body from the morgue.
It requires those stupid muscle-relaxers and copious amounts of make-up in order to pass as a mortician, but he does it, because he needs to. Flashes of memory are attacking his mind like cancerous cells and frantically, as he loads the corpse in the back of the van, he thinks he can hear them burrow into his head like worms.
He’s aiming to bring it to a location he knows the Bat has never uncovered. Joker still had a good hand of aces up his sleeve, no matter how many of them the Bat thought he’d shaken loose. (A woman, smiling. Why why why why why—)
He pushes down on the cut in his thigh as he drives the car, making it reopen, letting the pain bring out his focus, his true self. It helps, but only slightly. The voices appear to always get distracted by wounds, by the aching burning of his nerves, heading towards the location like a bank of piranhas ready to consume prey bleeding in the water. His hands are trembling on the wheel, and he navigates the streets of the city on pure muscle memory; out the corner of his eye, whenever he looks into the rearview mirror, he swears he sees it move. The black body bag encasing the corpse.
It doesn’t do as much as twitch, when he pulls the stretcher out, minutes later. He brings the body to the middle of the empty warehouse, carefully places the kid on a chair, and stares.
He forgets to eat for days, sitting cross-legged on the harsh floor, shaking. He forgets about water, about sunlight, about sleep. He loses track of time entirely.
Brennan. Brennan Kairos.
The day after he’d left the bodies of those two goons behind, he’d found a private eye and threatened him (and his family) with all kinds of suffering for all the information that could be dug up on Brennan Kairos, early twenties. And fear, as always, proved itself to be a powerful motivator; it took less than forty-eight hours for the man to get back to him.
The kid was adopted, had bounced from a couple of foster homes, and was attending Gotham University to become an engineer. Kairos was actually the last name of the Greek family of immigrants that had taken him in, and Brennan wasn’t his original first name either, his original first name had been Milton. He was the premature son of a woman who had died in the hospital, and a man who’d… disappeared without a trace, soon after. Their names…
He’d slit the throat of the detective before he could utter their names, driven by such a blinding flash of panic it had felt like being possessed. Blood had spattered over the file the man had dropped to the floor, and as Joker picked it up with two fingers as if he was afraid it’d bite, he’d debated burning it.
He hadn’t burned it. The file is here now, next to the corpse, stained with scarlet, but it inspires such a primal terror in him that he laughs like a hyena each time the thought of opening it again crosses his mind.
“What’s the matter?” the kid asks him on the third day.
Joker raises his head, confused. He’s dimly aware that corpses usually can’t speak. But – hah – who was he to dictate the rules of reality?
“I…” Joker croaks, quickly forgetting what he had meant to say in the first place.
He even forgets the question. For a long moment, he peers at the grey naked corpse, barely covered by the white sheet. Finally, the sight of the gunshot wound stirs something in him.
“Hah! I killed you, didn’t I?” he shouts, manic.
“Yes,” the corpse says, blinking at him. “But I think it bothers you.”
Joker scratches at his arms again and the pain makes his synapses flare bright. He thinks for a moment, and then he leans forward, putting a bloodied cracked finger to his lips, as if sharing a secret.
“You know what,” he whispers, “it does bother me. Why does it bother me?”
From where it sits on the chair, the corpse shrugs.
“I’m from Before.”
Joker hugs his knees tighter.
“And you’re not supposed to be dead,” he says, morosely. But then, he gets angry. “Boo-hoo! I’m pretty sure none of the people I put in the ground wanted to be dead, bucko.”
“No,” the corpse corrects, patiently. “I was already dead. I was supposed to be dead all along. You just didn’t know I survived.”
Joker’s head feels as if it’s being split across the middle.
“Alive,’ he repeats, numbly. “All along.”
The dead kid hums.
“Yeah,” he says candidly. “Don’t you remember? You were pretty upset when mom died, you didn’t even think to check on her. Why didn’t you even think to check on her?”
Joker spasms. The image of the blonde woman rises to the forefront of his mind, all-encompassing.
Who? Who was she? Who who who who? The question hammers down on his senses with every beat of his pulse, and Joker scrambles back, covering his ears. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know!
But the voice doesn’t die out; it rings in his ears, pleasant, calm, measured.
“She died. You thought we both died. It’s all in the file, it’s right there! You’ve never been able to remember it right, you’ve always taken the fragments and rearranged them in a thousand different stories, but the truth is right there!” the corpse begins to shout, louder and louder.
No. No no no no no—
“You truly lost it back then,” it continues. “Because of what happened to us. Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t it funny?”
The corpse cracks its neck wetly, and then it starts laughing.
It crows laugh after laugh, slowly. Its skin was already bloated and sagged, but now there are burst vessels on its face that make it look even more nightmarish. The gunshot wound, maroon and perfectly round, pierces its grey chest, and the more Joker stares, the more a horrible urge to kill the kid again builds inside him.
Just so it would stop. Just so it would stop.
“Isn’t it so goddamn absurd, that I survived for over twenty years, and then you killed me?” Brennan Kairos shouts, manic.
Joker starts tearing at his own arms, begins reaching for a knife, just to make things quieter, just to feel…
“You were…” he chokes out, stricken by a flash of memory. The blade gently slides to the floor. “You were…”
“Your son,” the corpse answers cheerfully. “You turned into this because we died, didn’t you? Because of that horrible, horrible bad day. Madness, the emergency exit.”
It leans forward with a toothy grin, almost conspiratorial.
“You couldn’t save us from dying, and now you killed me.”
The laughter echoes through the warehouse. As he trembles there on the ground, Joker has no idea if it comes from him or the kid anymore.
His mind feels as if it’s dying at the same rate as it’s regenerating, one layer after another. He hears the words, and they burn through him, these forbidden shards of knowledge; but then immediately, they get brutally torn away from his memory, erased and crumpled into dust, only to rise again and again and again—
“The emergency exit,” he mutters then with a spasm, suddenly inspired.
“You think that’ll work? Again?” the corpse mocks. “How many times will you try to kill yourself only to stick around this world like an afterthought? What are you waiting for?”
Better, Joker thinks, incoherently. Bigger. He was too big to end that way. He had a point to prove, despite the irony of it, the irony of fighting for meaninglessness and giving the world meaning by virtue of the fight.
Death will find him, eventually, he sought it out too desperately. But it won’t ever come from him. He refuses to give the world the satisfaction. This rotten, absurd, pointless and hypocritical world, that had to be exposed. Exposed for its viciousness. He can’t stop until it breaks and admits to it, to its own ugliness. He won’t stop until it breaks: this childish illusion that allowed people to numbly parade across the streets and smile at each other as if any of it mattered.
He needs to drive the world as mad as it made him, and who else embodies that desperate, stubborn, infuriating drive to find meaning more than the Bat? He’s possessed by it, oozes it from every pore, and he does so by choice— which is the worst part of it, the biggest offense.
Joker can’t stop, not until he wins. Not until the world burns, and the Bat starts laughing.
“But haven’t you made that point already?” the kid mocks, as if he heard every strand of thought. “It’s all meaningless! It’s all random, it’s all absurd, the whole conceivable Universe is a neverending joke! Twenty years ago you went insane because of it, and now, twenty years later, you became the punchline!”
Unsteadily, Joker stands up on his feet.
“Isn’t that funny?” the corpse chortles, so loud it’s making Joker’s mind tear itself apart. “Isn’t that just so goddamn funny?”
Gritting his teeth against the dizziness and the nausea, Joker turns his back to the thing and starts walking towards the door.
The laughter follows him, a torturous sharp celebration of pain.
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When Bruce arrives at ACE Chemicals, the silence is deafening.
It feels almost as if the sound of locking the Batmobile injures it, somehow. The car Joker had stolen was simply abandoned in front of the gate, parked haphazardly, door to the passenger seat hanging open. Bruce narrows his eyes in suspicion as he passes it.
It was not in Joker’s MO to be quiet, and whenever the silence settled for too long, Bruce got antsy. As he told everyone, and as he told himself, Joker must be planning something. The signs had all been there, at first; this, in itself, was the problem. Joker had clearly been looking to fund his next scheme through that robbery, and it had all gone according to the usual script. Up until the dead hostages and the mangled bodies of the henchmen themselves, turning up just a day later.
And now, after a whole week of no movement, of Bruce driving himself up the wall, Joker had just went out in plain daylight, shot a woman for her car and came here. No attempt to disguise or hide himself. No taunting videos, no colorful invitations, no explosions. Nothing.
Something about this really didn’t sit right with Bruce. But then again, being here didn’t help the ominous feeling sweeping through him. He hates the citrus sweet smell of that awful chemical, the cold rancid air, the barely lit corridors. The city contained two points that perfectly encapsulated his failures: Crime Alley and this Godforsaken hellhole. The place where he wasn’t fast enough to stop the birth of Gotham’s worst nightmare.
He clenches his fists as he hurries up the stairs leading to the main room, driven by an increasing need to get out of here as soon as possible. And finally, finally, he glimpses movement.
Like a predator zeroing in on prey, he lunges almost instantly in its direction. But unexpectedly, his heart freezes in his throat at the full sight: a silhouette poised above the metal railing of the bridge. A disheveled man, halfway over it and staring down at the acid below.
“Joker!” he cries out, recognition ripping through him with all the makings of panic. He immediately starts running, halfway pulling out a grappling hook. “Get back!”
Joker doesn’t even seem to realize he’s there. He makes no move to acknowledge Bruce. All he does is let go.
Bruce’s mind feels like screaming white static. Not again, not again, he won’t let this happen again!
“No!” Bruce shouts as his body moves automatically, preternaturally fast. He hasn’t moved so fast, so desperately, in his life. And this time his fingers grip around the back of Joker’s shirt, body folded almost entirely in half over the fence. He's caught him.
Pulse drumming in his ears, ice flowing through his veins, Bruce thinks in helpless wonder, I caught him.
For a long second, Joker just dangles there over the vat, with the emptiest of looks on his face. The greenish tint emanating from the chemical makes him appear almost ghostly. For a second, Bruce slips into the memory of decades before, the memory he’s replayed in his head countless times: a smirk under the Red Hood. A fall.
Joker isn’t smiling, now. And Bruce snaps out of it quickly, heart pounding like a drum, dragging him back over the ledge with incredible hurry, as if he’s afraid his fingers would fail him.
What in God’s name—
Unspeakably angry, he grabs Joker by the collar of his shirt and shakes him so hard that his bones rattle. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he growls out, bordering on a shout.
He can count on one hand, the times he’s ever been this furious. There was no guarantee about what would happen if someone as bleached and damaged by that cursed acid fell in it again. The possibility of survival was so much lower, and God knows it was low to begin with.
But Joker barely seems to hear him; barely seems to take him in. His eyes are unfocused, blank. His body starts shaking harder and harder under Bruce’s hands, and that’s when his mouth starts twitching too, and that awful laughter begins echoing in the darkness.
He’s laughing. That is no surprise, except it chills Bruce in ways it rarely did before. The sound of it is enough to distract him from his anger, mind finally becoming focused on taking Joker in. The way he looks is all wrong: hair disheveled, coat and vest missing, stained and dusty dress pants. Was he thinner, too?
Bruce swallows, gaze traveling over Joker’s body, now deeply unsettled. He’s fought Joker for a long time, for almost two decades, and he’s never seen him like this.
While Joker was definitely insane, it was difficult to rationalize how he also wasn’t. He was incredibly intelligent and calculated, with everything about him – including his appearance – scripted out and performed for an audience. But despite his terrifying shrewdness, he had a temper like fireworks, his moods were dangerously mercurial, and his mind… his associations, his ideas, were never entirely predictable. Bruce had seen enough of him to know that Joker himself couldn't entirely predict what he’d do, on any given day. The combination was a deeply lethal one, and many times, Bruce had wondered how the madness could coexist with the genius.
This time it sounded like Joker was not fully there. It sounded as if he wasn’t performing at all. The starkly cold glint of lucidity was missing from his eyes.
Bruce lets him go, and without any support, Joker just falls to his knees. He stays like that, kneeling on the rusted metal of the bridge, head bowed and clutching his ribs, laughing harder and harder as if he’s bleeding with it.
“Joker…?” Bruce calls to him, tentative. He refuses to label the emotion running through him as fear.
Joker doesn’t even look at him. The laughter is just a series of hoarse, choking sounds now, and that’s when the awareness can’t be avoided anymore.
The shrill, sadistic edge of it was missing. It wasn’t mocking, or bone-chilling in its cruelty. It wasn’t the crescendo of an intentional, controlled orchestra, meant to assert itself as the soundtrack of nightmares.
It sounded as if Joker couldn’t help it, as if it hurt.
He puts up no resistance while Bruce restrains him, which Bruce does because he doesn’t know what the hell else to do, most of all. He meekly follows when Bruce drags him outside, still spasming, blind and swaying on his feet as if ready to stumble at any moment. Halfway through, Bruce grips him by the forearm, gently— just to make sure he doesn’t fall.
The chuckles don’t subside, they just abruptly die out in the car. Suddenly, as the Batmobile starts moving, Joker becomes blank and subdued, staring forward unseeingly.
At this point, the unsettled feeling has turned into a stone weighing heavy in Bruce’s stomach, and he can’t help it. He calls out to Joker again, but he doesn’t get an answer. In a way that registers as simply wrong, Joker isn’t smiling, isn’t moving. His eyes read like shuttered windows with nothing behind them.
Bruce’s hands tighten around the wheel. As he sets a course for Arkham Asylum, the alarm spreads through him like poison. What was happening? Could Joker be faking this for some reason? But why would he try to throw himself back into that vat of acid, risk death for it? And his erratic behavior for the past two weeks was also hard to decipher; the botched robbery, the dead henchmen, the way a downtown morgue containing six of the bodies of the hostages Joker had left behind had suspiciously burned to the ground…
This was all wrong. Something was wrong. And God help Gotham, if there was anything left to be wrong with Joker.