Team Anarchy - Round 3 - (fic) Whoops...part3
Title: Whoops...part 3
Author: medorikoi
Prompt: Bad luck…
Word count: 1,683
Disclaimer: I own a substantial amount of debt and not a lot else.
Rating: R
Warnings: A Joker amount of swearing, violence...MPreg
Summary: All these things seem random, schizophrenic even until they all come crashing together in the most brutal of circumstances. Not drunk, not hung over or high, dressed impeccably in his tailored purple suit and his smiling face Joker was on his hands and knees vomiting in the bathroom.
A/N: Because nothing says bad luck like a Joker-whoops-a-baby.
“It is yours.”
Batman hovered over him, silent and dark as ever, his thick hand pressed intimately against the Jokers bulging stomach, fingers curling around the shape of his future child, and for a single ignorant glistening moment the Joker believed the Bat would understand.
But then he wrenched his hand away as if the Jokers skin was toxic and the once gentle hand curled into a fist.
The Joker tells the Bat he is carrying his child and what does he do?
Does he show gratitude? Horror? Any emotion at all? No.
He punches him in the god damn face.
Again.
What. The. Fuck!?
The Jokers head whipped sideways, his cheek pressed into the gravel as the bile rose in his throat again, unrelenting. He fought not to choke uselessly, fought to focus on the Bat who was growling down at him as if he were the one who was laying here suffering through a cracked jaw while the human parasite continued eating his guts.
“Not funny Joker.” Batman hissed, and shifted to pin him to the ground more completely, as if he had the strength to move. And that does it. It is just too much. He is cold and numb and nauseous and the fucking thing in his gut is practically dancing and now and the Bat still refused to believe him.
As if he would ever fucking lie about this.
The Joker puts all the energy he has left into freeing just one arm from its atrophied coma and giving the Bat just one punch for everything he has done, for not believing the only words that mattered, for making him feel every ounce of weakness spreading in himself, for doing this to him in the first place.
But the Bat has both of his hands pinned above his head and he does not stand a chance. His stomach is bared, not even hands remain to cover this new deformity and all of a sudden that is all he wants. It is too intimate to lay like this so close to the Bat with this new rejection so fresh in his mind. Their bodies were almost perfectly aligned and the bulge lay between them as if they were real people. A real couple, happy and understanding.
As if this could really happen.
But he cannot hide from this new and unique form of torture and if Batman feels the horrible intimacy of the position, the bittersweet echo of a night three months before that has run around his mind every night since, he ignores it. He struggles just once more. One punch would make him feel so much better… but it is useless. His body is weak and his mind is over ridden with nausea and if he does not sit up soon…
The Joker is horrified when frustrated tears well in his eyes and spill down his cheeks, falling hot and obvious down his face. The Batman looks down at him again and he is frozen, as horrified to see the tears and Joker is to cry them. Batman’s anger is assuaged for now and his attention caught, Joker gasps the words through a tear stained voice that rips apart the fabric of Jokers collapsing world and finally breaks through the Bats all too realistic mind.
“I am not fucking Joking!”
The night comes to a screeching halt around them. The horns, the sirens, the screaming, even the wind whistling through the gothic buildings stops and Batman’s emotionless face actually drops, his mouth slightly agape.
The Joker is not joking.
Neither of them misses the irony.
Both tear stained green and emotionless blue eyes fall away from each other, searching between their bodies to stare at pale bulge of flesh.
The Joker squirmed on the ground. It was too intimate, too intense, too human. The Bat already denied that it exists, denied this mutated evil child. He has no right to look at him like this! To pick him apart, spread like a rat on a dissection table, to pin him to the ground and devour the new deformities with his eyes, deformities crueler than his permanent smile and so much less beautiful.
The Bat released his wrists but left them above his head as if they were held in place by tiny pins, an exotic butterfly laid out to be examined, cataloged, and hidden away. His eyes never left the Jokers abdomen, a gauntlet clad hand reaches out tentatively as if to stroke the flesh but it hovers in the air. The Bats mind has short circuited.
The Joker lay splayed for the Bats scrutiny, too wracked with gnawing pain, too embarrassed and frustrated by the tears streaming down his wet face to move and the Bat says only one word. One word escapes his cold lips now that understanding has embraced him and the world has started to turn in its horrible cycle once more.
“Shit.”
The Joker was sure that it was the most eloquent thing Batman had ever said to him.
----
There were a million questions to ask, a million statements to make and yet none of it would mean a thing.
‘Are you sure?’ Stupid. Foolish. Besides, he would check for himself regardless of the answer.
‘How?’ At the same time the answer was embarrassingly simple and dirty and yet impossibly medically complicated. Again it was irrelevant. He would find out for himself.
But the things most prominent in his mind were too awful - flashes of life- flashes of…nothing.
His own father standing protectively in front of his family in a dark alleyway.
His mothers face as she fell, her arms still reached out to him, protectively, uselessly. The look on her face when she realized how useless her protection was to her only child.
Bodies cooling on the wet cement, souls fleeing. Leaving him. Abandoning him.
Nothing but a child.
A baby.
Batman stared at the Jokers revealed abdomen and wanted to touch- to feel that tinny fluttering heart it would be impossible to feel.
A tiny doomed heart.
His father had been a doctor. His mother was a supporter of the arts who threw fund raisers for inner city kids.
And still they died.
Still he lost them.
This tiny fluttering heart, this creature of only a few cells, a tiny ounce of life you could hold in the palm out your hand- its morally corrupt, borderline psychotic parents were Gotham’s lone vigilante and its infamous prince of crime. If it somehow managed to survive the crapshoot of human genetics and the medical impossibilities that lay before it what chance did it stand even then?
Mother. Father. Good people who fought for life, fought to live. People who wanted a child and loved that child- loved him- more than anything. If they could not survive, if the product of their happy union could not survive intact this new fluttering life that belonged to that long ago broken child stood no chance.
The joining of the vigilante and his villain was not sweet. It was pain and passion and dirtied blood.
It was broken souls searching for meaning in the darkness.
Mother, Father. They had wanted to survive and failed.
The point of the Batman was never to survive.
It was then, as Batman hand brushed the exposed rounded skin, unable to feel a thing through the thick armor, that he realized that without proof, without tests or assurances the tiny mythical creature that may reside in the Joker had become real.
He believed the Joker.
His hand stayed over the flesh now- wanting to feel without a hope of doing so- and the Joker smiled at him, weak with sickness and almost…maternal?
No.
His mind was too lost in the past, his mothers smile was being superimposed over the present…over the Jokers face.
A deep breath of cold night air did nothing to clear his mind but at least it gave him the comfort of having tried. The Jokers weak smile had disappeared, maybe it had never been there in the first place but his face was strangely blank now. Batman had the sudden and fleeting feeling of sitting at someone’s death bed.
The questions, the answers, the morality and future whatever it may hold could wait. The Joker was really sick.
“Can you walk?”
The Joker looked down at himself as if deep in thought, examining with his eyes the whole of his strange body before answering slowly, in the exhale of a breath.“…..No-”
Regardless of his answer the Joker was trying to sit up. His arms dragged slowly, meticulously, back to his front. As he tried to push himself up the expression of wasted pain was too much for Batman to take. It was all…too real, too human.
What had happened to their surreal battles of the night where there was blood and darkness but they never seemed to feel the pain?
Batman put a hand on the Jokers back, lifting him while simultaneously trying not to touch, trying not to draw the clowns’ attention. No luck.
The Joker stared at him, sweat glistening on his brow even through the makeup, and smiled, his voice coming from earlier, more normal days.
Their eyes met in a strange truce.
“You better help me. It is your half of the parasite that is trying to kill me!”
How odd, they were not playing the role of clashing titans here. Slipping into some unseen role Batman responded without a thought, glad for mindlessness, the triviality.
“The killing half is yours.”
The Joker froze, his eyes shining, and he laughed. Hard. Real. Human.
It was all too surreal. Batman brought the Joker into his arms like a bride, silently glad when his purple shirt fell over his stomach. Now he could pretend it was any other day. Any other situation but this one.
Silently he made a list in his mind. What needed to be done immediately. Tonight.
He needed to get the Joker to a doctor. He would call Leslie when he got to the car.
He needed to find out if this was real and everything about it. Maybe he could take a trip back to Arkham and look through Cranes files. Had this ever been done before? Could it last? Where both of them doomed, Joker and fetus? Batman stole a glance at the Joker, uncharacteristically calm and pale in his arms and decided not to voice the questions out loud.
Could he keep it?
Did he want to?
He crushed the train of thought immediately.
They reached the edge of the building. Batman could see a place for his grapple hook to slide them down but could he do that? Should he do that? Falling through the night on steel cables looks graceful, it looks life flying, but it was nothing but a series of stop and go, wrenching flesh and abrupt crushing landings.
All of a sudden Bruce wished he had been around more women in his life. Pregnant women anyway. He did not want to have to think of these things, analyze them, picture it in his mind and then banish the images. He could do it. The Joker must have done worse in the last couple of months…
But now he knew.
If it was real, if it was alive…
Batman begrudgingly walked to the rusted fire escape the Joker must have used to scale the building. A police car sped through the night, past the adjacent street. Batman hoped that no one would walk by and see their slow careful descent.
Especially after part of the metal gave way under their combined weight and the Jokers arms twined instantly around his neck.
The Joker pressed his painted face into the Kevlar covering his neck and Batman could not help but tense. He waited for the slow slip of a blade into his flesh, for the cackle of a madman and poison gas to fill his face, he waited for a hot wet kiss that haunted his dreams to press desperately against his neck- an echo of a single night.
But the Joker did nothing. He was closing his eyes against the nausea, trying to cut off the senses of the world.
Batman tried not to feel the strange and fleeting disappointment as they finally touched the ground.
Author: medorikoi
Prompt: Bad luck…
Word count: 1,683
Disclaimer: I own a substantial amount of debt and not a lot else.
Rating: R
Warnings: A Joker amount of swearing, violence...MPreg
Summary: All these things seem random, schizophrenic even until they all come crashing together in the most brutal of circumstances. Not drunk, not hung over or high, dressed impeccably in his tailored purple suit and his smiling face Joker was on his hands and knees vomiting in the bathroom.
A/N: Because nothing says bad luck like a Joker-whoops-a-baby.
“It is yours.”
Batman hovered over him, silent and dark as ever, his thick hand pressed intimately against the Jokers bulging stomach, fingers curling around the shape of his future child, and for a single ignorant glistening moment the Joker believed the Bat would understand.
But then he wrenched his hand away as if the Jokers skin was toxic and the once gentle hand curled into a fist.
The Joker tells the Bat he is carrying his child and what does he do?
Does he show gratitude? Horror? Any emotion at all? No.
He punches him in the god damn face.
Again.
What. The. Fuck!?
The Jokers head whipped sideways, his cheek pressed into the gravel as the bile rose in his throat again, unrelenting. He fought not to choke uselessly, fought to focus on the Bat who was growling down at him as if he were the one who was laying here suffering through a cracked jaw while the human parasite continued eating his guts.
“Not funny Joker.” Batman hissed, and shifted to pin him to the ground more completely, as if he had the strength to move. And that does it. It is just too much. He is cold and numb and nauseous and the fucking thing in his gut is practically dancing and now and the Bat still refused to believe him.
As if he would ever fucking lie about this.
The Joker puts all the energy he has left into freeing just one arm from its atrophied coma and giving the Bat just one punch for everything he has done, for not believing the only words that mattered, for making him feel every ounce of weakness spreading in himself, for doing this to him in the first place.
But the Bat has both of his hands pinned above his head and he does not stand a chance. His stomach is bared, not even hands remain to cover this new deformity and all of a sudden that is all he wants. It is too intimate to lay like this so close to the Bat with this new rejection so fresh in his mind. Their bodies were almost perfectly aligned and the bulge lay between them as if they were real people. A real couple, happy and understanding.
As if this could really happen.
But he cannot hide from this new and unique form of torture and if Batman feels the horrible intimacy of the position, the bittersweet echo of a night three months before that has run around his mind every night since, he ignores it. He struggles just once more. One punch would make him feel so much better… but it is useless. His body is weak and his mind is over ridden with nausea and if he does not sit up soon…
The Joker is horrified when frustrated tears well in his eyes and spill down his cheeks, falling hot and obvious down his face. The Batman looks down at him again and he is frozen, as horrified to see the tears and Joker is to cry them. Batman’s anger is assuaged for now and his attention caught, Joker gasps the words through a tear stained voice that rips apart the fabric of Jokers collapsing world and finally breaks through the Bats all too realistic mind.
“I am not fucking Joking!”
The night comes to a screeching halt around them. The horns, the sirens, the screaming, even the wind whistling through the gothic buildings stops and Batman’s emotionless face actually drops, his mouth slightly agape.
The Joker is not joking.
Neither of them misses the irony.
Both tear stained green and emotionless blue eyes fall away from each other, searching between their bodies to stare at pale bulge of flesh.
The Joker squirmed on the ground. It was too intimate, too intense, too human. The Bat already denied that it exists, denied this mutated evil child. He has no right to look at him like this! To pick him apart, spread like a rat on a dissection table, to pin him to the ground and devour the new deformities with his eyes, deformities crueler than his permanent smile and so much less beautiful.
The Bat released his wrists but left them above his head as if they were held in place by tiny pins, an exotic butterfly laid out to be examined, cataloged, and hidden away. His eyes never left the Jokers abdomen, a gauntlet clad hand reaches out tentatively as if to stroke the flesh but it hovers in the air. The Bats mind has short circuited.
The Joker lay splayed for the Bats scrutiny, too wracked with gnawing pain, too embarrassed and frustrated by the tears streaming down his wet face to move and the Bat says only one word. One word escapes his cold lips now that understanding has embraced him and the world has started to turn in its horrible cycle once more.
“Shit.”
The Joker was sure that it was the most eloquent thing Batman had ever said to him.
----
There were a million questions to ask, a million statements to make and yet none of it would mean a thing.
‘Are you sure?’ Stupid. Foolish. Besides, he would check for himself regardless of the answer.
‘How?’ At the same time the answer was embarrassingly simple and dirty and yet impossibly medically complicated. Again it was irrelevant. He would find out for himself.
But the things most prominent in his mind were too awful - flashes of life- flashes of…nothing.
His own father standing protectively in front of his family in a dark alleyway.
His mothers face as she fell, her arms still reached out to him, protectively, uselessly. The look on her face when she realized how useless her protection was to her only child.
Bodies cooling on the wet cement, souls fleeing. Leaving him. Abandoning him.
Nothing but a child.
A baby.
Batman stared at the Jokers revealed abdomen and wanted to touch- to feel that tinny fluttering heart it would be impossible to feel.
A tiny doomed heart.
His father had been a doctor. His mother was a supporter of the arts who threw fund raisers for inner city kids.
And still they died.
Still he lost them.
This tiny fluttering heart, this creature of only a few cells, a tiny ounce of life you could hold in the palm out your hand- its morally corrupt, borderline psychotic parents were Gotham’s lone vigilante and its infamous prince of crime. If it somehow managed to survive the crapshoot of human genetics and the medical impossibilities that lay before it what chance did it stand even then?
Mother. Father. Good people who fought for life, fought to live. People who wanted a child and loved that child- loved him- more than anything. If they could not survive, if the product of their happy union could not survive intact this new fluttering life that belonged to that long ago broken child stood no chance.
The joining of the vigilante and his villain was not sweet. It was pain and passion and dirtied blood.
It was broken souls searching for meaning in the darkness.
Mother, Father. They had wanted to survive and failed.
The point of the Batman was never to survive.
It was then, as Batman hand brushed the exposed rounded skin, unable to feel a thing through the thick armor, that he realized that without proof, without tests or assurances the tiny mythical creature that may reside in the Joker had become real.
He believed the Joker.
His hand stayed over the flesh now- wanting to feel without a hope of doing so- and the Joker smiled at him, weak with sickness and almost…maternal?
No.
His mind was too lost in the past, his mothers smile was being superimposed over the present…over the Jokers face.
A deep breath of cold night air did nothing to clear his mind but at least it gave him the comfort of having tried. The Jokers weak smile had disappeared, maybe it had never been there in the first place but his face was strangely blank now. Batman had the sudden and fleeting feeling of sitting at someone’s death bed.
The questions, the answers, the morality and future whatever it may hold could wait. The Joker was really sick.
“Can you walk?”
The Joker looked down at himself as if deep in thought, examining with his eyes the whole of his strange body before answering slowly, in the exhale of a breath.“…..No-”
Regardless of his answer the Joker was trying to sit up. His arms dragged slowly, meticulously, back to his front. As he tried to push himself up the expression of wasted pain was too much for Batman to take. It was all…too real, too human.
What had happened to their surreal battles of the night where there was blood and darkness but they never seemed to feel the pain?
Batman put a hand on the Jokers back, lifting him while simultaneously trying not to touch, trying not to draw the clowns’ attention. No luck.
The Joker stared at him, sweat glistening on his brow even through the makeup, and smiled, his voice coming from earlier, more normal days.
Their eyes met in a strange truce.
“You better help me. It is your half of the parasite that is trying to kill me!”
How odd, they were not playing the role of clashing titans here. Slipping into some unseen role Batman responded without a thought, glad for mindlessness, the triviality.
“The killing half is yours.”
The Joker froze, his eyes shining, and he laughed. Hard. Real. Human.
It was all too surreal. Batman brought the Joker into his arms like a bride, silently glad when his purple shirt fell over his stomach. Now he could pretend it was any other day. Any other situation but this one.
Silently he made a list in his mind. What needed to be done immediately. Tonight.
He needed to get the Joker to a doctor. He would call Leslie when he got to the car.
He needed to find out if this was real and everything about it. Maybe he could take a trip back to Arkham and look through Cranes files. Had this ever been done before? Could it last? Where both of them doomed, Joker and fetus? Batman stole a glance at the Joker, uncharacteristically calm and pale in his arms and decided not to voice the questions out loud.
Could he keep it?
Did he want to?
He crushed the train of thought immediately.
They reached the edge of the building. Batman could see a place for his grapple hook to slide them down but could he do that? Should he do that? Falling through the night on steel cables looks graceful, it looks life flying, but it was nothing but a series of stop and go, wrenching flesh and abrupt crushing landings.
All of a sudden Bruce wished he had been around more women in his life. Pregnant women anyway. He did not want to have to think of these things, analyze them, picture it in his mind and then banish the images. He could do it. The Joker must have done worse in the last couple of months…
But now he knew.
If it was real, if it was alive…
Batman begrudgingly walked to the rusted fire escape the Joker must have used to scale the building. A police car sped through the night, past the adjacent street. Batman hoped that no one would walk by and see their slow careful descent.
Especially after part of the metal gave way under their combined weight and the Jokers arms twined instantly around his neck.
The Joker pressed his painted face into the Kevlar covering his neck and Batman could not help but tense. He waited for the slow slip of a blade into his flesh, for the cackle of a madman and poison gas to fill his face, he waited for a hot wet kiss that haunted his dreams to press desperately against his neck- an echo of a single night.
But the Joker did nothing. He was closing his eyes against the nausea, trying to cut off the senses of the world.
Batman tried not to feel the strange and fleeting disappointment as they finally touched the ground.