[Fic] Not the Fall that Kills You
Title: Not the Fall that Kills You
Rating: R
Summary: The continuing adventures of Batfamily!Trickster. The series of events our Earth knows as The Killing Joke goes off the rails, but the Joker doesn’t give up that easily.
Word Count: ~4500
Additional Notes and Warnings: Sexualized creepiness and violence. General creepiness and violence. Seriously awful jokes. Desecration of a comics classic. Flagrant abuse of allusion in general. Nobody is in a wheelchair at the end.
Okay, I admit it, there’s no actual continuity-based reason Dick Grayson and James Jesse trading places should make things as Lighter and Softer as they’re turning out the more I write in this ‘verse (I’m sure there are areas where the switch made things worse than in canon - I haven’t written them, though, aside from Golden Glider’s visit to the ER). The feeble handwave I’m using in this case is that apparently one of the pre-reboot in-verse explanations for why Barbara Gordon hasn’t been cured while multiple other characters have bounced back from even worse is because she refuses the magic and super-tech on offer, thinking it’s unfair to the general population that doesn’t have access. In this ‘verse, James lacks her rigorous moral principles.
Crossposting to piper_trickster.
Anyhow, here goes. Hope I didn’t fail too hard.
Best as he could figure later, this was how it started:
He’d been at dinner with Liz and her dad. Commissioner Gordon was thoroughly unwilling to be charmed, obviously convinced that the apple had landed well in the shadow of the adoptive tree and despite all protests of “just friends” he’d make off with her virtue like Schrodinger’s catburglar the moment backs were turned (this was all operating on the assumption that her virtue was something detachable). You couldn’t entirely blame him - they hadn’t really stepped up the civilian get-togethers until she’d hung up her cape and cowl, and maybe they’d stepped up a bit too fast. Then, over cocoa, he’d asked why James kept calling her Liz, because no way on the planet you could pull that out of Barbara Gordon.
“It’s kinda complicated.”
“I have time.”
James strategically retreated to answer the door, buying himself a few seconds to spin an explanation that didn’t involve any references to Lizzie Borden (hey, Borden rhymed with Gordon!) or hacking or parricide. He was giving himself another second checking the peephole by the time Liz said, “Oh, that’ll be Colleen.”
“No it’s not,” he said, still staring. It came out quieter than he’d meant. “It’s the Joker.”
The upshot was that he called 911 on his cunningly-disguised widget while patching Bruce in on the exchange, Liz called Colleen to warn her to stay inside and away from the maniac who’d beaten her to the door, and the Joker was taken in by the standard-operating-procedure small army of cops before he and his henches could get through the improvised barricade. Two minutes of burning-rubber later, Batman landed on the roof.
The old man was impressed, maybe won over a little, by the unexpected quick thinking (“See?” said Liz, “he’s smart when he wants to be.”). Looking back maybe their thinking was a bit too quick and too accurate for a ditzy rich kid and a librarian, but while it was happening it would’ve been crazy to slip up on purpose. And he figured that was the end of it, at least until the next breakout. The police could feel proud of themselves and so could he. Nobody died this time (as far as they knew then. Much later they’d find a half-skeletal corpse on the carnival grounds, slumped over on a pink elephant, and they’d need to pull dental records to identify it). But starting to imagine the body count that could happen next time was enough to have him hugging Jason like no tomorrow when the kid asked why no one in all of Gotham got fed up and shot the fucker in the head already.
***
The first time he got a lungful of fear gas he hit the ceiling trying to fly away from the rapidly-approaching ground. If they hadn’t been indoors he probably would’ve been in orbit by the time Bruce finished with the Scarecrow. As it was, his knuckles were raw even through the gloves from trying to beat his way through. Things like it had happened a few more times in the gadgetry arms race, when ‘Crow got creative or lucky with his delivery.
And then there was the time in the Titans, when one of those guys in one of those fractious supervillain teamups that cropped up now and again knocked out his airwalkers with an electromagnetic pulse forty stories up. There’d been a moment of sheer blinding AAARGH before his training took over and he fired off a grapnel line. Redundancy paid off - he slammed into the building like the leading man in the George of the Jungle trailer, but he was right as rain before long and he took some time and cash to invest in EMP-shielding on the next model.
Etcetera, etcetera.
So it wasn’t like this was a completely new experience.
He hadn’t been wearing the airwalkers when he answered the door. He hadn’t been wearing any shoes at all.
He wasn’t wearing shoes now either. But to tell that he had to crane his neck to look up at his bare feet. They were tied together pale and flopping in the rain and he thought of fish on a line.
According to American Lit, junior year: My mother is a fish. Also: God no, Pop you cheapskate, not the cement.
When he craned his neck and looked up he wasn’t wearing pants.
The rope fed up past the roof of a, what was it called, a gondola (couldn’t see it floating down a canal though if the rain kept up…). Beyond that, a chunk of the curve of the Ferris wheel he couldn’t see but could fill in. From the gondola window a familiar white face grinned down.
If he could move. He could feel rain patter on and down his chest and back. He could maybe bend himself in half, grab the rope with his hands and teeth, pull himself up, and then what? Then. What. With the face in the window and probably still a gun in the white hand.
With the nothing below (above), and not much left in the rest of him but the throb of blood and fire.
Below (him), above (the rain), the old too-familiar sound of a calliope going and going and going.
This was the kind of thing that tempted you to religion because what could taking Pascal’s wager hurt now, if the big guy upstairs existed maybe he’d throw a miracle your way just to welcome you to the club.
That kind of thinking might be why he wasn’t getting any.
He’d looked through the peephole that time, too, because what almost happened with the Gordons made you stop and think about those things. That hadn’t helped. That was supposed to be the joke. The Joker was already inside, behind him, just waiting for him to get home and kick up the feet he couldn’t feel anymore so five minutes later the hench could ring the doorbell and set up the setup. One second to look at some guy in greasepaint, again with the Hawaiian shirts. Bang.
… how long was he hanging around in there anyway?
He’d busted out only hours before (hadn’t even been a month!), so at least he hadn’t had a chance to see James in the shower or putting on his costume or anything.
But he was probably there while James was locking the door behind him, toeing off his shoes, throwing his jacket over the sofa, cutting up an apple for Mr. and Ms. Mynah.
Hopefully he didn’t have some kind of sick shoe fetish that had him pawing over things James wasn’t wearing. And hadn’t poked around enough to find the Blue Jay gear and all that fun stuff. He didn’t look sizzled as he should’ve been, if he did that.
If he got out of this alive he might check the video feed downloaded to his computer and find out. He’d bugged his own place so if someone else decided to bug it, he could see who it was (a lot of good those things did if you didn’t check them over). He didn’t see or hear anything happen to the computer before they trundled him out, and Liz taught him all about good passwords, so it should be okay.
He wondered if the Mynahs were doing okay. They were up and at ‘em as always, last he saw and last he heard, fluttering around doing their birdie thing, calling the goodbyes they’d learned for people going out the door, but he wouldn’t put it past the Joker to poison the pellets or stuff the cage in a dumpster or something else small and spiteful.
(“Mr. Mynah,” Bruce repeated as they stood in the bird breeder’s, as skeptical as he could let himself sound in public.
James took another look at the sleek black plumage. “Orrr I was thinking Batman. He look like a Batman to you?”)
Should’ve put the same thought into security in general as he did for his toys.
Assume and make an ass out of…
Still, he swore to sweet baby Jesus if he got out of this alive he was going to have words with the landlord of Johnston Court.
If the guy wasn’t dead already. Now there was a lousy thought.
***
“Don’t be such a chicken, boy!” Pop would bellow. “It’s not the heights you gotta worry about, it’s hitting the ground!”
Funny guy, was Pop.
What a way for the old man to go. And what a way for James not to go.
There was this one time in the early days of the Titans he ended up spelunking with Kid Flash in a cave full of vaporized truth serum, or at least babble serum, and his mouth finally opened and he asked “Just wondering, why don’t you like me? It’s kind of my hobby, getting people to like me.”
And Kid Flash said “Oh, I don’t know, you kind of remind me of Dad?”
He already knew from his research that Rudy West was a sleaze but he managed to say instead “Well that’s up there on things I never expected to hear. Just under ‘You’re pregnant.’” He might be the oldest founding member of the Titans but nobody ever accused him of being the most mature.
Kid Flash said “You asked.”
***
… teensy-tiny bright side, with time and scraped-together thought by now he was pretty sure the Joker didn’t know.
James could read people since before he could read books (What does he do if he doesn’t practice? He reads! And what does he read? Trash! I tell you, Elena -). The Joker was a book with half the pages missing and ink doodles flooding out the margins (but he wasn’t the one with a broken spine and where was this metaphor going again?), but there was still a bit of consistency in his inconsistency.
The way he talked to James (Oh Ja-ames? Still with us?) Jesse (all that trash about outlaws, desperadoes!) (so why didn’t you nip it in the bud and go with John Joseph, eh, Papa?), the way he moved in the frame of the window while he did it, wasn’t any of the ways he talked to Blue Jay. He didn’t talk like he wanted to throttle a plagiarist, didn’t talk like he was doing his best out of the kindness of his heart to show the ungrateful young First-of-May the ropes, didn’t talk like he was wheedling his date’s kid into helping him score, and didn’t talk like any mix of those. When he talked about flying like he was rehearsing (Let it never be suggested that I am not a tireless advocate of truth in advertising. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we see if the amazing Flying Jesse really flies!) he wasn’t saying it to be ironic any more than the obvious.
Unless maybe the Joker broke his people-reading with the rest of it.
(What the hell is wrong with you, he asked, because as a civilian bleeding out all over the foyer after the trapeze rope went snap for the second time in his life, he could ask. What the hell do you want, anyway? What did you want with Barbara Gordon? He wasn’t sure how many of the words came out right. But enough, it sounded like, from what the grin floating in front of him said next.)
(To prove a point)
Pulled into the gondola and while the world moved by pulled into something spangled with plumes on his head like the elephant riders that charged waving and smiling across the center ring. It was orange with some yellow. Orange like the shirt he’d been wearing tonight and like the shirt he’d been wearing at dinner with the Gordons (he liked orange, okay). If he’d known, James was sure (until three seconds ago), it would’ve been blue with maybe some orange, flaunting it, because so far the Joker was the kind of guy that flaunted. If he knew things he spelled them out in lights.
Maybe the feathers were the flaunting part. The Jesses hadn’t worn feathers (though Pop sure liked to stare at the girls wearing them). The Jesses wore blue with a big splash of orange across the front. Maybe that was what gave it away.
The feathers could not be looking very good by now.
Maybe he just couldn’t get a blue one on short notice.
Cold like it was moving up (down) and in. Maybe the bullet falling down, gravity, killing nerves as it went? Anatomy did not work that way (did it?).
Still bleeding? So much wet he couldn’t tell. Maybe all the blood, everything warm draining to the ground a hundred feet below. To think not so long ago or a very long time ago he wanted to stop feeling it.
(Smile for daddy!)
(You smile like a dead man. I know you can do better!)
(Pop, this high up they can’t tell the difference! he didn’t say. The scowling saying loud as the brass band: lazy malingering head-in-the-clouds Giovanni-who-thinks-he’s-James can’t even do the one thing he’s good at when it matters)
He could still move his hands but what good were they -
(over his head. They moved at least and he tried to move them up and down and in the way but they never seemed to get there. Buttons flying. The Mynahs shrieking Hello Hello Hello! Kick him, kick the sick fuck off, might not have skills like Liz but hard enough, in the right place, why isn’t it working!)
In the creaking swaying gondola before he went out the window on a line that had been his last best chance. He knew, while it was happening, but all he did was watch it happen. Staring, like a doll that didn’t have the rigging to make its eyes close.
(Step lively, you Brussels sprout, don’t you want your best side showing?)
Jaw locked because if he opened his mouth he didn’t know if he could shut it again. No words and no screams. And that was the best he could do to shove back, the only thing he could try to wipe away that smile: absolutely nothing.
***
As got pieced together later, three weeks in Arkham and his picture and condensed biography under human interest in the news (because while it might not be a marvelous thing to get hit twice by violent crime, not in dear old Gotham, it was quite a thing to do something about it twice, especially if you were a rich guy’s kid) inspired the sicko to change targets and rework his old plan into a “social experiment” (his words) that only a psych ethics board with Strange and Crane on it would ever sign off on. This was, best as he could put together, what was supposed to happen and what actually did:
Bruce Wayne had a sheaf of photos and an Admit One ticket hand-delivered to the outer gates of the manor by another expendable hench. The implied terms would be obvious. The Joker might not be able to pull off a barge-and-snatch on the manor quite as easily as he could’ve with the Gordons, but if Bruce didn’t show that’d be ammo in itself; the man was infinitely adaptable. The ticket would be for the same derelict carnival he’d acquired for whatever he’d planned for Liz and her dad, and all the trappings would take on new thematic significance. Bruce’d be taken up the Ferris wheel and maneuvered into prime position to watch James plummet headfirst to the ground. Or possibly he would throw Bruce off while James watched. Maybe he’d take a page from Two-Face and flip on it, see who begged hardest, see who’d ask for the other one to die. That might’ve been part of the experiment. What was definitely part of the experiment was seeing who went more batshit insane during all of this.
While this was going on, a second ticket would go to Batman, who would show up and be presented with whatever remains, well, remained. The Joker’s idea of a date. Hoped to get to first-second-third base, hit a home run with that stunt.
So he really didn’t know (whatta maroon, what a business!). Because obviously he wasn’t expecting Batgirl and Blue Jay to turn up instead. With Blue Jay hovering at a distance so it was harder to tell that as of yet he only stood six feet even because of hidden extensions, and harder to tell he had a blond wig pinned on under the hood - all stuff prepared in advance for emergency impersonation situations that in their heads had only vaguely resembled this. Blue Jay saying absolutely nothing as he cleared the remaining henches because Jason didn’t have James’s powers of voice differentiation, which would pass because even James had times when words failed. Liz on her farewell tour, her last hurrah, finished with her share and going slice slice through the rope with a batarang and schlepping all six feet of him to the ground. Air Walkers, available now at a Batcave near you.
And on the ground the Joker, cornered with an empty gun, in a solicitous mood, settled for Blue Jay the First-of-May as audience for his philosophical diatribe, maybe because as he stood silent and terrible in silhouette a foot off the ground you could imagine that if you tipped your head and squinted just right… And Jason pulled out the heaviest yo-yo and let fly.
***
Kerthunk. He could almost see the onomatopoeia in a jagged bubble wavering in the rain overhead, with an exclamation mark. And the thump-splash and the thud-crack, after, and the sounds after that. He was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to.
“Jay!” said Liz, from above. “Jay, that’s - that’s enough!”
“No it’s not!” screamed Jason.
Far away sirens wailed (who named the things? Who’d ever be lured anywhere by those?). In the next split second of nothing but sirens he could tell Liz was thinking: if the Joker was awake for that, awake enough to work through the screaming and figure out it wasn’t the same voice it had been all those years, definitely not, and he’d already had puberty and all the voice weirdness that went with it -
Heh. Open book.
Hop-skip-jump. Up in the air and moving again and his fingers tightened. Someone else’s fingers were under one set and someone else-else’s fingers were over another set, so that was okay. The sirens still going. The voices, too, still going.
“… Park Row…”
“… Mr. Wayne says Park Row…”
Skip. The hundred-percent-Bruce Wayne fronting voice. Frayed and raggle-taggle. That part was real. “James, stay with us.”
Mouth open now. Careful. Don’t give the game away. Maybe you’re hallucinating, even this. American Lit. Owl Creek Bridge, hung from the wrong end. “Present.” Something else. Harder to conk out if he was talking. But careful. “How’re the Mynahs?”
“Your… your birds are fine, James.”
“Oh. Good.” Something was. “I can’t. I can’t f-f-f -” His words were probably tripping over themselves before but now he noticed they were doing it and couldn’t stop. Ten-syllable pileup on the interstate. Bruce’s hand squeezed around his and he felt it jerk and shake. “I can’t fly.”
He realized after it came out that it made no sense, not nearly as much sense as the words he’d lined up in his head, but Bruce kept squeezing.
***
Dr. Thompkins said the prognosis was not good. She said that barring medical revolution, the spinal damage would be permanent. Bruce said “We’ll see,” and swept out the door to fend off the media. When James got his hands on the next day’s newspaper it said things were still up in the air but all parties were optimistic - the kind of spin they’d come straight to the clinic on Crime Alley to get away with putting out. Lucky thing the place wasn’t so far from the crime scene or else Bruce’s billionaire eccentricity and massive grounds for post-traumatic stress might not’ve been able to cover his emphatic insistence that it had to be there.
The condolences had poured in from high society and he had a foot-high stack on the nightstand; that was just the ones in writing. Jason snuck in another stack from the portion of the masked fraternity that was in on his civilian identity, hidden at the bottom of Alfred’s care package. Bruce caught them reading and lectured them on security. James munched on a brownie and listened and watched for any twinges, any off notes that would betray some terrible knowledge that after years of such delivering these lectures to his wayward ward(s) Things Would Never Ever Be The Same Again. He found none. His smiles got a little wider: Batman had a plan. Maybe he wasn’t sure it would work yet, but he’d gotten a lead on at least one medical revolution. And knowing that, and reading the cards from the Leaguers and the Titans that said things like Get Well Soon, he knew he really was optimistic, if not realistic.
Then when he was looking away Jason clapped him on the shoulder and everything that could move seized and stars went supernova in the backs of his eyes. When they cleared Jason was pulling away looking horrified and muttering “That bastard!” James didn’t remember what happened in between, what he’d done or said, but he’d met Survivors before, and Victims, and Surviving Victims, and helped them best he could, and he could guess. His brain had the same switches and glitches as everyone’s, even if he knew more about how to play other people’s. It wasn’t like being a psychologist with a degree certified everything was in working order.
“I should get into trouble more often,” he told Liz when she came in, “if you’re going to save me every time. I figure if I time it closely enough you’ll figure putting the stuff in storage in between is a waste of effort.”
“Don’t even joke,” she said, and winced at the word, but a half hour of updates later she did say that her retirement wasn’t going to be as complete as she’d meant it to be. “But I need to think this over. I’m not going to count as a ‘girl’ for much longer, you know.” James understood. At least “Boy Wonder” was a subtitle. Liz reached out too, but Jason might’ve told her something about it or something he didn’t know about might’ve shown on his face because she stopped inches short and he put his hand up to meet hers.
Zatanna showed up in person on his second day lucid, in a lab coat, as a neurological specialist flown in on the Wayne dime. He recognized her straightaway. Among two hundred other things, he’d once dreamed of being a stage magician - another aplomb-and-accolades career that didn’t involve heights unless you wanted them to. As a civilian, he had her autograph in his album. In the League, they’d shaken hands.
“Hi,” he said, and without further preamble, “Can you fix it?”
***
The big question left after that question got answered was: how far was this particular gag going to run? Was the Joker just going to break out again and go after him again, or the Gordons again, or just keep switching it up until something took, until he finally got his claws in someone that’d play along with his script? Until Batman started answering his calls?
It turned out that for now Gotham was safe from that particular game. The word in Arkham was news had reached the Joker that James Jesse had been flown to Switzerland by private jet to see a medical genius about a spine. He’d cracked up right there in the rec room - judging from what could be gleaned from the hysteria that followed, he figured this meant James had gone completely round the bend and been packed off to a discreet European sanitarium so Bruce Wayne didn’t have to put up with a batshit adoptee crashing his society parties.
Hopefully he’d have gotten distracted by the time James flew back. There’d be plenty of time for that - even with the diagnosis they put out to the public, rehab would take time. Current estimate was at least six months more.
In the meantime, he was in the constant process of refurbishing his pillow fort in the Batcave. He spent most of his time there now, since he couldn’t go up into the manor or over to his own place while he was supposed to be across the Atlantic. Alfred sent down his meals. When he was with the Titans he made preemptive cracks about being stuck in his parents’ basement. Other times he puttered in the workshop, or watched the screens, or wrote postcards to mail from Switzerland, or put on a costume and joined Bruce on patrol, or put on a different face and put his ear to the streets.
Also sometimes he tried self-therapy. Self-medicating had a bad rep, but you couldn’t get high on breathing exercises. And he hadn’t seen a shrink since they sentenced Tony Zucco and wasn’t planning to even before they came up with the Switzerland thing; nothing new there, it wasn’t like Bruce ever went. You could play a shrink like anyone else, but there was still a risk of things slipping out. And people had been pulling through and coming out the other side in decent shape long before shrinks were invented. More were pulling through now that they were around, sure, but going without wasn’t a completely lost cause. And he had Liz and Jason and Alfred and Bruce to hold him up, and that was just the folks in town. Though when he was crouching in an alley putting his cloak around the trembling shoulders of a Fellow Survivor he still sometimes imagined himself chirping “Do as I say, not as I do!”
He knew by now that he could handle gunshots and people trying to hold him at gunpoint (with the usual amount of success). Maybe that last was because he hadn’t actually seen the gun before it happened. He could listen to a calliope and hardly shudder. He was looking over his shoulder more than usual, and he spent more time than he probably should double-checking all the dark corners of the cave, but at least he wasn’t startling so badly anymore. The nightmares about the broken rope at Haley’s had come surging back, now with extra clowns, but they were starting to settle. Another proof would probably be if he could still handle the Joker after the next breakout. He thought about doing it with a certain vicious satisfaction, but there was theory and there was practice. According to one of those quotes that got quoted all the time, living well was the best revenge. But he figured carrying on doing his part kicking the mook back into Arkham would make a pretty good bonus.
All right. Things would Never Ever Be The Same Again. When were they ever? He’d work with it.
Rating: R
Summary: The continuing adventures of Batfamily!Trickster. The series of events our Earth knows as The Killing Joke goes off the rails, but the Joker doesn’t give up that easily.
Word Count: ~4500
Additional Notes and Warnings: Sexualized creepiness and violence. General creepiness and violence. Seriously awful jokes. Desecration of a comics classic. Flagrant abuse of allusion in general. Nobody is in a wheelchair at the end.
Okay, I admit it, there’s no actual continuity-based reason Dick Grayson and James Jesse trading places should make things as Lighter and Softer as they’re turning out the more I write in this ‘verse (I’m sure there are areas where the switch made things worse than in canon - I haven’t written them, though, aside from Golden Glider’s visit to the ER). The feeble handwave I’m using in this case is that apparently one of the pre-reboot in-verse explanations for why Barbara Gordon hasn’t been cured while multiple other characters have bounced back from even worse is because she refuses the magic and super-tech on offer, thinking it’s unfair to the general population that doesn’t have access. In this ‘verse, James lacks her rigorous moral principles.
Crossposting to piper_trickster.
Anyhow, here goes. Hope I didn’t fail too hard.
Best as he could figure later, this was how it started:
He’d been at dinner with Liz and her dad. Commissioner Gordon was thoroughly unwilling to be charmed, obviously convinced that the apple had landed well in the shadow of the adoptive tree and despite all protests of “just friends” he’d make off with her virtue like Schrodinger’s catburglar the moment backs were turned (this was all operating on the assumption that her virtue was something detachable). You couldn’t entirely blame him - they hadn’t really stepped up the civilian get-togethers until she’d hung up her cape and cowl, and maybe they’d stepped up a bit too fast. Then, over cocoa, he’d asked why James kept calling her Liz, because no way on the planet you could pull that out of Barbara Gordon.
“It’s kinda complicated.”
“I have time.”
James strategically retreated to answer the door, buying himself a few seconds to spin an explanation that didn’t involve any references to Lizzie Borden (hey, Borden rhymed with Gordon!) or hacking or parricide. He was giving himself another second checking the peephole by the time Liz said, “Oh, that’ll be Colleen.”
“No it’s not,” he said, still staring. It came out quieter than he’d meant. “It’s the Joker.”
The upshot was that he called 911 on his cunningly-disguised widget while patching Bruce in on the exchange, Liz called Colleen to warn her to stay inside and away from the maniac who’d beaten her to the door, and the Joker was taken in by the standard-operating-procedure small army of cops before he and his henches could get through the improvised barricade. Two minutes of burning-rubber later, Batman landed on the roof.
The old man was impressed, maybe won over a little, by the unexpected quick thinking (“See?” said Liz, “he’s smart when he wants to be.”). Looking back maybe their thinking was a bit too quick and too accurate for a ditzy rich kid and a librarian, but while it was happening it would’ve been crazy to slip up on purpose. And he figured that was the end of it, at least until the next breakout. The police could feel proud of themselves and so could he. Nobody died this time (as far as they knew then. Much later they’d find a half-skeletal corpse on the carnival grounds, slumped over on a pink elephant, and they’d need to pull dental records to identify it). But starting to imagine the body count that could happen next time was enough to have him hugging Jason like no tomorrow when the kid asked why no one in all of Gotham got fed up and shot the fucker in the head already.
***
The first time he got a lungful of fear gas he hit the ceiling trying to fly away from the rapidly-approaching ground. If they hadn’t been indoors he probably would’ve been in orbit by the time Bruce finished with the Scarecrow. As it was, his knuckles were raw even through the gloves from trying to beat his way through. Things like it had happened a few more times in the gadgetry arms race, when ‘Crow got creative or lucky with his delivery.
And then there was the time in the Titans, when one of those guys in one of those fractious supervillain teamups that cropped up now and again knocked out his airwalkers with an electromagnetic pulse forty stories up. There’d been a moment of sheer blinding AAARGH before his training took over and he fired off a grapnel line. Redundancy paid off - he slammed into the building like the leading man in the George of the Jungle trailer, but he was right as rain before long and he took some time and cash to invest in EMP-shielding on the next model.
Etcetera, etcetera.
So it wasn’t like this was a completely new experience.
He hadn’t been wearing the airwalkers when he answered the door. He hadn’t been wearing any shoes at all.
He wasn’t wearing shoes now either. But to tell that he had to crane his neck to look up at his bare feet. They were tied together pale and flopping in the rain and he thought of fish on a line.
According to American Lit, junior year: My mother is a fish. Also: God no, Pop you cheapskate, not the cement.
When he craned his neck and looked up he wasn’t wearing pants.
The rope fed up past the roof of a, what was it called, a gondola (couldn’t see it floating down a canal though if the rain kept up…). Beyond that, a chunk of the curve of the Ferris wheel he couldn’t see but could fill in. From the gondola window a familiar white face grinned down.
If he could move. He could feel rain patter on and down his chest and back. He could maybe bend himself in half, grab the rope with his hands and teeth, pull himself up, and then what? Then. What. With the face in the window and probably still a gun in the white hand.
With the nothing below (above), and not much left in the rest of him but the throb of blood and fire.
Below (him), above (the rain), the old too-familiar sound of a calliope going and going and going.
This was the kind of thing that tempted you to religion because what could taking Pascal’s wager hurt now, if the big guy upstairs existed maybe he’d throw a miracle your way just to welcome you to the club.
That kind of thinking might be why he wasn’t getting any.
He’d looked through the peephole that time, too, because what almost happened with the Gordons made you stop and think about those things. That hadn’t helped. That was supposed to be the joke. The Joker was already inside, behind him, just waiting for him to get home and kick up the feet he couldn’t feel anymore so five minutes later the hench could ring the doorbell and set up the setup. One second to look at some guy in greasepaint, again with the Hawaiian shirts. Bang.
… how long was he hanging around in there anyway?
He’d busted out only hours before (hadn’t even been a month!), so at least he hadn’t had a chance to see James in the shower or putting on his costume or anything.
But he was probably there while James was locking the door behind him, toeing off his shoes, throwing his jacket over the sofa, cutting up an apple for Mr. and Ms. Mynah.
Hopefully he didn’t have some kind of sick shoe fetish that had him pawing over things James wasn’t wearing. And hadn’t poked around enough to find the Blue Jay gear and all that fun stuff. He didn’t look sizzled as he should’ve been, if he did that.
If he got out of this alive he might check the video feed downloaded to his computer and find out. He’d bugged his own place so if someone else decided to bug it, he could see who it was (a lot of good those things did if you didn’t check them over). He didn’t see or hear anything happen to the computer before they trundled him out, and Liz taught him all about good passwords, so it should be okay.
He wondered if the Mynahs were doing okay. They were up and at ‘em as always, last he saw and last he heard, fluttering around doing their birdie thing, calling the goodbyes they’d learned for people going out the door, but he wouldn’t put it past the Joker to poison the pellets or stuff the cage in a dumpster or something else small and spiteful.
(“Mr. Mynah,” Bruce repeated as they stood in the bird breeder’s, as skeptical as he could let himself sound in public.
James took another look at the sleek black plumage. “Orrr I was thinking Batman. He look like a Batman to you?”)
Should’ve put the same thought into security in general as he did for his toys.
Assume and make an ass out of…
Still, he swore to sweet baby Jesus if he got out of this alive he was going to have words with the landlord of Johnston Court.
If the guy wasn’t dead already. Now there was a lousy thought.
***
“Don’t be such a chicken, boy!” Pop would bellow. “It’s not the heights you gotta worry about, it’s hitting the ground!”
Funny guy, was Pop.
What a way for the old man to go. And what a way for James not to go.
There was this one time in the early days of the Titans he ended up spelunking with Kid Flash in a cave full of vaporized truth serum, or at least babble serum, and his mouth finally opened and he asked “Just wondering, why don’t you like me? It’s kind of my hobby, getting people to like me.”
And Kid Flash said “Oh, I don’t know, you kind of remind me of Dad?”
He already knew from his research that Rudy West was a sleaze but he managed to say instead “Well that’s up there on things I never expected to hear. Just under ‘You’re pregnant.’” He might be the oldest founding member of the Titans but nobody ever accused him of being the most mature.
Kid Flash said “You asked.”
***
… teensy-tiny bright side, with time and scraped-together thought by now he was pretty sure the Joker didn’t know.
James could read people since before he could read books (What does he do if he doesn’t practice? He reads! And what does he read? Trash! I tell you, Elena -). The Joker was a book with half the pages missing and ink doodles flooding out the margins (but he wasn’t the one with a broken spine and where was this metaphor going again?), but there was still a bit of consistency in his inconsistency.
The way he talked to James (Oh Ja-ames? Still with us?) Jesse (all that trash about outlaws, desperadoes!) (so why didn’t you nip it in the bud and go with John Joseph, eh, Papa?), the way he moved in the frame of the window while he did it, wasn’t any of the ways he talked to Blue Jay. He didn’t talk like he wanted to throttle a plagiarist, didn’t talk like he was doing his best out of the kindness of his heart to show the ungrateful young First-of-May the ropes, didn’t talk like he was wheedling his date’s kid into helping him score, and didn’t talk like any mix of those. When he talked about flying like he was rehearsing (Let it never be suggested that I am not a tireless advocate of truth in advertising. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we see if the amazing Flying Jesse really flies!) he wasn’t saying it to be ironic any more than the obvious.
Unless maybe the Joker broke his people-reading with the rest of it.
(What the hell is wrong with you, he asked, because as a civilian bleeding out all over the foyer after the trapeze rope went snap for the second time in his life, he could ask. What the hell do you want, anyway? What did you want with Barbara Gordon? He wasn’t sure how many of the words came out right. But enough, it sounded like, from what the grin floating in front of him said next.)
(To prove a point)
Pulled into the gondola and while the world moved by pulled into something spangled with plumes on his head like the elephant riders that charged waving and smiling across the center ring. It was orange with some yellow. Orange like the shirt he’d been wearing tonight and like the shirt he’d been wearing at dinner with the Gordons (he liked orange, okay). If he’d known, James was sure (until three seconds ago), it would’ve been blue with maybe some orange, flaunting it, because so far the Joker was the kind of guy that flaunted. If he knew things he spelled them out in lights.
Maybe the feathers were the flaunting part. The Jesses hadn’t worn feathers (though Pop sure liked to stare at the girls wearing them). The Jesses wore blue with a big splash of orange across the front. Maybe that was what gave it away.
The feathers could not be looking very good by now.
Maybe he just couldn’t get a blue one on short notice.
Cold like it was moving up (down) and in. Maybe the bullet falling down, gravity, killing nerves as it went? Anatomy did not work that way (did it?).
Still bleeding? So much wet he couldn’t tell. Maybe all the blood, everything warm draining to the ground a hundred feet below. To think not so long ago or a very long time ago he wanted to stop feeling it.
(Smile for daddy!)
(You smile like a dead man. I know you can do better!)
(Pop, this high up they can’t tell the difference! he didn’t say. The scowling saying loud as the brass band: lazy malingering head-in-the-clouds Giovanni-who-thinks-he’s-James can’t even do the one thing he’s good at when it matters)
He could still move his hands but what good were they -
(over his head. They moved at least and he tried to move them up and down and in the way but they never seemed to get there. Buttons flying. The Mynahs shrieking Hello Hello Hello! Kick him, kick the sick fuck off, might not have skills like Liz but hard enough, in the right place, why isn’t it working!)
In the creaking swaying gondola before he went out the window on a line that had been his last best chance. He knew, while it was happening, but all he did was watch it happen. Staring, like a doll that didn’t have the rigging to make its eyes close.
(Step lively, you Brussels sprout, don’t you want your best side showing?)
Jaw locked because if he opened his mouth he didn’t know if he could shut it again. No words and no screams. And that was the best he could do to shove back, the only thing he could try to wipe away that smile: absolutely nothing.
***
As got pieced together later, three weeks in Arkham and his picture and condensed biography under human interest in the news (because while it might not be a marvelous thing to get hit twice by violent crime, not in dear old Gotham, it was quite a thing to do something about it twice, especially if you were a rich guy’s kid) inspired the sicko to change targets and rework his old plan into a “social experiment” (his words) that only a psych ethics board with Strange and Crane on it would ever sign off on. This was, best as he could put together, what was supposed to happen and what actually did:
Bruce Wayne had a sheaf of photos and an Admit One ticket hand-delivered to the outer gates of the manor by another expendable hench. The implied terms would be obvious. The Joker might not be able to pull off a barge-and-snatch on the manor quite as easily as he could’ve with the Gordons, but if Bruce didn’t show that’d be ammo in itself; the man was infinitely adaptable. The ticket would be for the same derelict carnival he’d acquired for whatever he’d planned for Liz and her dad, and all the trappings would take on new thematic significance. Bruce’d be taken up the Ferris wheel and maneuvered into prime position to watch James plummet headfirst to the ground. Or possibly he would throw Bruce off while James watched. Maybe he’d take a page from Two-Face and flip on it, see who begged hardest, see who’d ask for the other one to die. That might’ve been part of the experiment. What was definitely part of the experiment was seeing who went more batshit insane during all of this.
While this was going on, a second ticket would go to Batman, who would show up and be presented with whatever remains, well, remained. The Joker’s idea of a date. Hoped to get to first-second-third base, hit a home run with that stunt.
So he really didn’t know (whatta maroon, what a business!). Because obviously he wasn’t expecting Batgirl and Blue Jay to turn up instead. With Blue Jay hovering at a distance so it was harder to tell that as of yet he only stood six feet even because of hidden extensions, and harder to tell he had a blond wig pinned on under the hood - all stuff prepared in advance for emergency impersonation situations that in their heads had only vaguely resembled this. Blue Jay saying absolutely nothing as he cleared the remaining henches because Jason didn’t have James’s powers of voice differentiation, which would pass because even James had times when words failed. Liz on her farewell tour, her last hurrah, finished with her share and going slice slice through the rope with a batarang and schlepping all six feet of him to the ground. Air Walkers, available now at a Batcave near you.
And on the ground the Joker, cornered with an empty gun, in a solicitous mood, settled for Blue Jay the First-of-May as audience for his philosophical diatribe, maybe because as he stood silent and terrible in silhouette a foot off the ground you could imagine that if you tipped your head and squinted just right… And Jason pulled out the heaviest yo-yo and let fly.
***
Kerthunk. He could almost see the onomatopoeia in a jagged bubble wavering in the rain overhead, with an exclamation mark. And the thump-splash and the thud-crack, after, and the sounds after that. He was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to.
“Jay!” said Liz, from above. “Jay, that’s - that’s enough!”
“No it’s not!” screamed Jason.
Far away sirens wailed (who named the things? Who’d ever be lured anywhere by those?). In the next split second of nothing but sirens he could tell Liz was thinking: if the Joker was awake for that, awake enough to work through the screaming and figure out it wasn’t the same voice it had been all those years, definitely not, and he’d already had puberty and all the voice weirdness that went with it -
Heh. Open book.
Hop-skip-jump. Up in the air and moving again and his fingers tightened. Someone else’s fingers were under one set and someone else-else’s fingers were over another set, so that was okay. The sirens still going. The voices, too, still going.
“… Park Row…”
“… Mr. Wayne says Park Row…”
Skip. The hundred-percent-Bruce Wayne fronting voice. Frayed and raggle-taggle. That part was real. “James, stay with us.”
Mouth open now. Careful. Don’t give the game away. Maybe you’re hallucinating, even this. American Lit. Owl Creek Bridge, hung from the wrong end. “Present.” Something else. Harder to conk out if he was talking. But careful. “How’re the Mynahs?”
“Your… your birds are fine, James.”
“Oh. Good.” Something was. “I can’t. I can’t f-f-f -” His words were probably tripping over themselves before but now he noticed they were doing it and couldn’t stop. Ten-syllable pileup on the interstate. Bruce’s hand squeezed around his and he felt it jerk and shake. “I can’t fly.”
He realized after it came out that it made no sense, not nearly as much sense as the words he’d lined up in his head, but Bruce kept squeezing.
***
Dr. Thompkins said the prognosis was not good. She said that barring medical revolution, the spinal damage would be permanent. Bruce said “We’ll see,” and swept out the door to fend off the media. When James got his hands on the next day’s newspaper it said things were still up in the air but all parties were optimistic - the kind of spin they’d come straight to the clinic on Crime Alley to get away with putting out. Lucky thing the place wasn’t so far from the crime scene or else Bruce’s billionaire eccentricity and massive grounds for post-traumatic stress might not’ve been able to cover his emphatic insistence that it had to be there.
The condolences had poured in from high society and he had a foot-high stack on the nightstand; that was just the ones in writing. Jason snuck in another stack from the portion of the masked fraternity that was in on his civilian identity, hidden at the bottom of Alfred’s care package. Bruce caught them reading and lectured them on security. James munched on a brownie and listened and watched for any twinges, any off notes that would betray some terrible knowledge that after years of such delivering these lectures to his wayward ward(s) Things Would Never Ever Be The Same Again. He found none. His smiles got a little wider: Batman had a plan. Maybe he wasn’t sure it would work yet, but he’d gotten a lead on at least one medical revolution. And knowing that, and reading the cards from the Leaguers and the Titans that said things like Get Well Soon, he knew he really was optimistic, if not realistic.
Then when he was looking away Jason clapped him on the shoulder and everything that could move seized and stars went supernova in the backs of his eyes. When they cleared Jason was pulling away looking horrified and muttering “That bastard!” James didn’t remember what happened in between, what he’d done or said, but he’d met Survivors before, and Victims, and Surviving Victims, and helped them best he could, and he could guess. His brain had the same switches and glitches as everyone’s, even if he knew more about how to play other people’s. It wasn’t like being a psychologist with a degree certified everything was in working order.
“I should get into trouble more often,” he told Liz when she came in, “if you’re going to save me every time. I figure if I time it closely enough you’ll figure putting the stuff in storage in between is a waste of effort.”
“Don’t even joke,” she said, and winced at the word, but a half hour of updates later she did say that her retirement wasn’t going to be as complete as she’d meant it to be. “But I need to think this over. I’m not going to count as a ‘girl’ for much longer, you know.” James understood. At least “Boy Wonder” was a subtitle. Liz reached out too, but Jason might’ve told her something about it or something he didn’t know about might’ve shown on his face because she stopped inches short and he put his hand up to meet hers.
Zatanna showed up in person on his second day lucid, in a lab coat, as a neurological specialist flown in on the Wayne dime. He recognized her straightaway. Among two hundred other things, he’d once dreamed of being a stage magician - another aplomb-and-accolades career that didn’t involve heights unless you wanted them to. As a civilian, he had her autograph in his album. In the League, they’d shaken hands.
“Hi,” he said, and without further preamble, “Can you fix it?”
***
The big question left after that question got answered was: how far was this particular gag going to run? Was the Joker just going to break out again and go after him again, or the Gordons again, or just keep switching it up until something took, until he finally got his claws in someone that’d play along with his script? Until Batman started answering his calls?
It turned out that for now Gotham was safe from that particular game. The word in Arkham was news had reached the Joker that James Jesse had been flown to Switzerland by private jet to see a medical genius about a spine. He’d cracked up right there in the rec room - judging from what could be gleaned from the hysteria that followed, he figured this meant James had gone completely round the bend and been packed off to a discreet European sanitarium so Bruce Wayne didn’t have to put up with a batshit adoptee crashing his society parties.
Hopefully he’d have gotten distracted by the time James flew back. There’d be plenty of time for that - even with the diagnosis they put out to the public, rehab would take time. Current estimate was at least six months more.
In the meantime, he was in the constant process of refurbishing his pillow fort in the Batcave. He spent most of his time there now, since he couldn’t go up into the manor or over to his own place while he was supposed to be across the Atlantic. Alfred sent down his meals. When he was with the Titans he made preemptive cracks about being stuck in his parents’ basement. Other times he puttered in the workshop, or watched the screens, or wrote postcards to mail from Switzerland, or put on a costume and joined Bruce on patrol, or put on a different face and put his ear to the streets.
Also sometimes he tried self-therapy. Self-medicating had a bad rep, but you couldn’t get high on breathing exercises. And he hadn’t seen a shrink since they sentenced Tony Zucco and wasn’t planning to even before they came up with the Switzerland thing; nothing new there, it wasn’t like Bruce ever went. You could play a shrink like anyone else, but there was still a risk of things slipping out. And people had been pulling through and coming out the other side in decent shape long before shrinks were invented. More were pulling through now that they were around, sure, but going without wasn’t a completely lost cause. And he had Liz and Jason and Alfred and Bruce to hold him up, and that was just the folks in town. Though when he was crouching in an alley putting his cloak around the trembling shoulders of a Fellow Survivor he still sometimes imagined himself chirping “Do as I say, not as I do!”
He knew by now that he could handle gunshots and people trying to hold him at gunpoint (with the usual amount of success). Maybe that last was because he hadn’t actually seen the gun before it happened. He could listen to a calliope and hardly shudder. He was looking over his shoulder more than usual, and he spent more time than he probably should double-checking all the dark corners of the cave, but at least he wasn’t startling so badly anymore. The nightmares about the broken rope at Haley’s had come surging back, now with extra clowns, but they were starting to settle. Another proof would probably be if he could still handle the Joker after the next breakout. He thought about doing it with a certain vicious satisfaction, but there was theory and there was practice. According to one of those quotes that got quoted all the time, living well was the best revenge. But he figured carrying on doing his part kicking the mook back into Arkham would make a pretty good bonus.
All right. Things would Never Ever Be The Same Again. When were they ever? He’d work with it.