[Fateverse Side Story: NC Bundle] Finale
The Ringmaster: Chapter 13 of 13
The culmination of all efforts. To begin a story in medias res is to start in the middle.
Warnings: Crossovers, fateverse, sci-fi, experimentation on prisoners.
Pairing: Batjokes.
Disclaimer: Recognizeable characters belong to DC/Marvel.
Timeline: One week after Toccata.
It is edifying, but not completely necessary, to have read the Dark Nights: Metal event.
Visit The Fateverse Glossary for important terms, concepts, and people.
Notes: See postscript; linked footnotes may open in a new tab.
Finale
Bruce is
not afraid, exactly.
In any case, he spent almost fifty years making a profession out of using his own fear to sharpen his focus.
But this is big. This is thirteen new Jokers.
Jormungandr is being fed his first meal since becoming able to interact with his surroundings. For all Bruce knows, he changes drastically every time.
It’s such a silly insecurity.
He’ll still know his Node. No one knows Joker like Batman does, after all.
Jay will still love him.
Almost all of them do, and they can’t vary too widely while still being phasic dopplers. It’s just that many of them also want to torture and kill him.
“Ready when you are, Boss,” says Nurse Lawton. “We can revive them straight into the trance as soon as you give the word.”
But he can’t quite speak, so he simply nods.
(Jormungandr himself is humming, paying no attention to the people who tend his physical bodies.)
Thirteen new clowns, jerking against their restraints briefly before settling, right hands moving.
Jay stops humming. His comms device makes an unfmailiar vocalization that Bruce would hazard to call mildly distressed confusion.
And then the clowns start writing with their left hands, too. Bruce hurries to make an adjustment to the monitoring settings[ 1]. The projector stops showing Timestream simulation and starts to show scenes instead-vignettes of other times and places where Jokers exist.
~I c-I can see them,~ the Node says. ~All of them. There’s so many!~
“Jay?” Bruce calls. “How are you feeling?”
~Hundreds-thousands-I never knew there could be so many…I can see their laughter, hear their bright colors…~
wouldn’t it be
f u n n y
“Jay, honey, can you hear me? It’s Bruce. You’re starting to worry me.”
The projector catches on a scene of Bruce’s youth, battling his Joker on Amusement Mile.
~Is that-oh, he loves you so much he wants to peel your skin off bit by bit, but you don’t love him at all.~
“If you can see that, you can see all the other things he did.”
~He’s so selfish. He wants to gobble you up. He’ll kill anyone who takes up too much of your time.~
“He certainly tried. It did nothing to endear him to me.”
~And then you…oh, my. They say you always remember your first.~
He knows.
In the projector, his Joker is falling in slow-motion, laughing all the way.
For a moment, Bruce feels a spark of fear and shame. “I didn’t mean to,” he says quietly.
~I think it probably doesn’t count if you kill the same person more than once, so don’t let the idea get to you too much. Suicide by Bat shouldn’t count against you, anyhow.~
And then the projector simply shows Bruce himself, as he is in this very moment (albeit in monochrome), poised beside his desk.
~Peekaboo, darling!~ Jormungandr says with a chuckle. ~Oh, you’re more handsome than I remember…~
Bruce can’t keep the smile off his face. “Flatterer.”
~Who’s that with you? I can’t see them as clearly…~ The projector shows the room, with Bruce in stark clarity while the Jokers are a diffuse mist and the nurses are upright shapes. ~…three people-ish blobs. Hello, blobs!~
“Those are your nurses,” Bruce tells him.
~They’re tall. I’m surprised, somehow…not really sure why, since I didn’t really have any particular expectations. Why can’t I hear the colors? In all the other worlds, I can hear them.~
“We’re not native to this branch. Or…well…you are, now, but without outside intervention, there would never have been a Bruce Wayne or a Joker in this part of existence, so we don’t resonate with it. Think of it like old three-dee glasses, where looking through the red lens makes the blue ink show up boldly while the red ink almost vanishes.”
~Huh.~
The circus freezes for a moment, hands lax as the projector clears into darkness. They start to write again, and Bruce sees his own smitten face appear in the projection.
~If we do our job well, we can be together forever,~ Jay reminds him. ~So, then…which world shall I listen to today?~
Bruce takes a long breath.
reaching, reaching
fingers find purchase
skinny wrist in his grip
it’s not like the first time
last time
the end is
the beginning
dal segno[ 2]
sometimes the story starts
in m e d i a s r e s
“Play us something…rubato[ 3].”
~Anything for you, dearest.~
.End.
Notes:
1 After more than three millennia, Reed Richards has made the timestream monitoring equipment very good at finding and interpreting patterns.
2 In musical terms, ‘dal segno’ means ‘from the sign’-i.e. ‘play again starting from the sign,’ which is somewhere after the beginning of the piece.
3 In musical terms, to play ‘rubato’ means to disregard the strict meanings of tempo notations for a freer, more expressive performance.
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