KvA batfic - Shared by Two
Title: Shared by two
Author: zombieboyband
Prompt: Folie à deux
Word Count: 3,131
Rating: Always R just to be safe.
Summary: There's more than one type of delusion.A gun? Nothing so easy for you, moonbeam.
Disclaimer: Neither clown nor bat nor supporting anyones are mine.
Warnings: crazy.
Folie à deux: from the French for "a madness shared by two," is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another.
--
It starts in an alley:
The click of a gun's trigger, a familiar and potentially overwhelming terror, a sudden fierce wash of regrets for all the things he didn't do--
--gives away to the unfurling of a flag; almost staggering relief, then the rage of something that tastes like humiliation rising, scorching his esophagus, like bile--
"BANG!" the Joker says gleefully, "You're dead!"
Batman growls low in his throat and advances again--
Then the Joker squeezes the trigger on his hilarious flag gun one more time, and the flag that says bang! flies through the air and hits Batman in the chest, with enough force and enough of a sharp and edgy point that it pierces armor.
"Bang!" the Joker says again, still laughing, always laughing, seeming to dance in front of Batman's eyes, "BANG! BANG! BANG!"
There's something on the tip of that unfurled flag arrow, and it makes Batman slow, makes him stumble.
"You're dead!" squeals the Joker, again, in seemingly endless, limitless mirth, "Aha, Batsy, how's it feel on the other side?" Playground teasing makes something shine in those manic eyes, maybe adoration, maybe psychosis.
Whatever was on the tip of that flag isn't enough to take down Batman--not the Bat, no. Bruce Wayne, healthy as a horse, may have fallen, but not this spirit of the city, not this spook on kevlar wings. So Batman's fist connects with the Joker's trunk, because it's hard for a body to keep on laughing while the liver is temporarily shut down. Body shots are efficient, practical. Less showy than blows to the face.
The Joker manages to wheeze some as he slides down, h-h-huh-hah-h-h-h-ugh-a-a--hah, spewing sharp little proto-laughs into the air through his clenched teeth.
Now it's time for a punch to the face, because Batman needs the satisfaction of seeing liquid red dribble down that painted red mouth, needs to see that what leaks out of the Joker is human after all. He hauls the Joker up from his boneless flop on the floor, making use of those hideous purple lapels, connects with his jaw, his nose, his mouth.
Make up smears rub off onto Batman's gloves, sticking to him and violating the beauty of his solid black. The white and red smears stick to his suit like the Joker's choked laughter sticks to his skin, and through the heat of the rage and the cold calm of concentration that he forces upon himself, he feels a wave of nausea over how he needs to wash this filth off himself immediately, before it sinks in, before it becomes catching.
The Joker's blood doesn't disrupt the darkness of Batman's gloves, unless the light hits just right and something gleams wet, giving it away. Otherwise it's just dark-on-dark. The blood, Batman doesn't mind.
He flexes his fingers, hating the make up, the face paint, and in that moment the clown jackknifes his body and pulls a foot back, the short but nasty blade of his other shoe burying itself in what would be Batman's muscled but vulnerable underbelly if not for the suit.
Batman drops his clown cargo, but throws himself forward to not lose his quarry. He wants blood on his fingers to cover up the white and especially despised red, wants to take the Joker in once more because he hates the idea of his madman holding his city hostage, but the Joker is wriggling away, all that despicable energy now on evading instead of hurting, his breath harsh in the cold night as he gives up his quips and his laughter in the need to get away, and he scrambles backwards, kicks Batman in the head, and finally gets a second with enough space in it to stand up and run.
The city betrays Batman, because it seems she has let the Joker know her secret places just as thoroughly, maybe more so. She took forever to unfurl her secrets to Batman, until he could move along the rooftops with graceful ease, until he knew--he thought he knew--every escape route, every hiding place. The city, it seems, may have given Batman control of her high road, but the Joker has something else, maybe the knowledge of how to slither around below, so Batman loses him.
Tomorrow night, he vows, tomorrow, and Batman limps home to fall into Alfred's ministering hands.
--
"Thought you were done for this time, sir," is the next thing Bruce remembers, and if he blinks he can see Alfred's lined but smiling face. The smile has a tension in it born of worry, and it's the fear rather than the warmth that reaches his eyes. "Of course, I think that every time, these days."
Bruce pushes himself up.
"How long was I out?"
"Only about half a day, as it happens, sir. About time you got some rest, really," Alfred tells him, sighing, "It's not the best way to make sure you get some sleep, mind, but it's the only thing that seems to work."
Bruce does not ignore the gentle rebuke there: he takes it to heart and stores it with all his other failures that weigh down his soul, a thing so heavy that only the cowl and the wings can make him light enough to move ever again. Outwardly, he seems to hardly register that Alfred spoke.
"What was it he dosed me with? Did you run an analysis yet?"
"Only a mammoth amount of tranquilizer, sir," Alfred says, before dryly adding, "If I didn't know better, I'd say he almost wasn't trying to kill you."
Bruce shrugs, slides out of bed.
"Is it too late to put in an appearance at Wayne Tower?"
"For you, sir? Never. You can waltz in for the last hour of the day and no one will think any less highly of you."
Bruce gives Alfred something that might almost be a smile, as he turns away to seek out a shower, but he's not really hearing anything Alfred says.
Somewhere he has read that the subconscious has trouble understanding even relatively simple negatives, but he doesn't think of that either.
All that he is thinking of is that echo:
kill you
kill you
kill you
kill you
kill you
"Bang," Bruce Wayne whispers, closing his eyes once he is under a stream of warm water, "Bang."
--
A man who looks just like the rest of the city's anonymous homeless population is skipping along the sidewalk. He's muttering to himself but it's muffled by the scarf wound around his neck and face, covering his nose and mouth. There's a hat drawn over his no doubt greasy hair, too, and he's wrapped in a baggy brown overcoat, has beat up brown shoes. It doesn't seem out of place for the weather, and, anyway, people don't look closely at things they don't want to see.
Anyone who could get close enough, anyone fast enough and deft enough with a knife, might be able to slice in and peel back the layers: under that baggy brown there is a sleek purple coat; under those faded pinstripe trouser legs are a fetching, festive pattern of purple fleur-de-lis socks; under that hat there is in fact greasy hair, but it has a sickly green tinge; under that scarf is a red, red mouth.
The mouth never stops moving, because--
"It's all coming together again, right now, here, finally," are the words it forms, low and fierce and quiet, "and it does, it always does. Won't he be surprised? Hah."
Because the city is unfurling again, giving him the shape of his next scheme. He divines the particulars from the city scape: that mailbox points the way to the Message, so he turns his feet and walks that way. The people around him, he has to count the colors--one two three six nine--so that he knows how many henchclowns he'll need. He's on the right track; he can tell by the exact combination of litter scattered across the street, the contents of the piles blocking the gutters. He reaches the end of his street and turns towards the dingy glass of a shop window. There's an TV, a newscast, a pretty anchor, and she's talking to him, telling him what to do. He nods, and chuckles low and sure.
He knows what to do.
All the way back to his hideout he skips, and he counts the cracks as he goes, jumping over some, jumping on the important ones--
loves me, loves me not, loves me, step on this one and break the Bat's back
stomp
loves me not loves me loves me not loves me
--
At Wayne Tower, Bruce stands up in a meeting and voices a suggestion. He is met with blank looks, until someone else--Lucius?--clears a throat and redirects the conversation. Bruce breaks out into a cold sweat. Sure, they can ignore what the dumb playboy has to say; yes. That happens. But there wasn't even a smirk; none of the haughty, envious, frustrated looks that accompanied most of his suggestions.
Why?
Why would they be ignoring him so completely?
He excuses himself; gets up to leave.
No one watches him go, and he worries.
--
A very tired Alfred picks up his cell phone on the third ring; finds a concerned Mr. Fox calling from his office line.
They talk for a time, and the words increasingly erratic echo in Alfred's head. He imagines the careful non-expression of board members, schooled as all the rich are in not reacting when someone makes a scene.
"I've hardly seen him these past few weeks," Alfred tells Lucius, "But I know what you mean."
--
He hardly has the strength to move, and his hands tremble as he buckles on the suit. It's getting worse. Every day he feels heavier. There was another earthquake in Asia and it's all his fault. If only he'd moved faster, if only he didn't feel like he was moving through jelly these days. Crime is up. Alfred, who he has not talked to, seems miserable during the brief glimpses Bruce gets when he spies on him. It is all his fault. There was a woman found in pieces, in a suitcase, on the interstate. It is all his fault. He saw a mother crying on the news over her lost child. It is all his fault. Gotham is unhappy; there's a nasty round of the flu going on and the weather is too cold for this time of year. It is all his fault.
It weighs him down. He can't move. Can't.
Finally, he manages to slip the cowl over his head, and Batman straightens up and goes off into the night.
--
Bruce Wayne does not come into work for the next week.
--
Around the house, Alfred cannot chase shadows, not when the shadows are highly trained in the art of stealth.
He is ransacking his brain for some kind of plan, but all he can do for now is bring down the trays of food, leave them where they will be found, in the darkness of the cave that looks increasingly like that of a tomb.
On the altar of winged guilt he leaves the meals, like offerings to the dead.
That is exactly what Bruce, or Batman, or whoever, whatever haunts the cave now, takes them for.
Alfred would never stop speaking to him, would he? No, no. Never, not Alfred. If Alfred is not speaking to him, it is because he cannot. Bruce is not there to him. The angry and then pleading shouts of where are you, what have you done? are heart wrenching but rhetorical. He's dead; he can't answer. Alfred doesn't hear him when he tries. It's one more disappointment to add to the guilt he carries with him in the afterlife. It has not let him go. It hangs around his neck like a weighted noose, except it's already been pulled taunt, and he wasn't enough of a bat to fly, to keep his legs from dangling.
After a while, the trays of food remain uneaten.
--
The heist goes off perfectly, just as planned. It's brilliant--they always are--and meticulous down to the last detail. The Joker paces back and forth, machine gun in hand, impatient because the only thing that's gone wrong is how right everything is. It's not like he cares about what they're stealing; the money's just details. He takes a fast breath, glances up quickly to count the number of gargoyles he sees, because they'll tell him how long he has to wait--
Ah
The boots to the midsection send him flying (hah, hah, sharing your wings, Batsy?). Batman swoops onto the scene and it's the usual dodging, fighting, everything, the works--the black cyclone of movement that could be deadly if he just let it go. The Joker hangs around at the edges of the scenery, watching half his henchclowns go down. The other half have immediately scattered, to regroup with what loot they've managed, except for one smuck that's too slow--
The joker shoots him for idle amusement while he waits for Bats to not be so gosh darn busy, and he hightails it out of the street just in time to make sure dear old Bat brain only gets a glimpse of him.
--
It continues on a rooftop:
The Joker goads Batman into getting a face punch in early, because it hurts so good, so good.
"Losing your touch there, moon pie," the Joker says, when he can stagger to his feet in record time, "I hardly felt that one."
Batman does a high kick that sends him sprawling again, but it just gets giggles. In the harshness of the cold night, under the full moon, comes a questioning growl--
"How can you talk to me?"
"Oh, I can do more than just talk," the Joker promises, darting forward, seeing the space between plates there, and sliding his knife in between--
Batman half blocks and steps out, so that he only gets grazed.
"Is it because you killed me?" The question is accompanied by the hardest blow so far; it rattles the Joker's teeth and makes the echo punch through the other side of his brain, but still, what renders him incapacitated is the laughing fit that bursts through him, straight from the heart.
"I what now? In the where to the who?"
"--killed me, you killed me," Batman growls.
"I never," the Joker retorts, like a spoiled back talking child, but Batman hasn't stopped talking--
"--killed me. You killed me. You said you wouldn't, and you killed me."
The litany continues, even as they go back to their dance over the rooftop, kicks and swings and blocks. The moon, the moon shines on the matte black, on the woolen purple, on the snow. But it's wrong, the Joker thinks suddenly, it's all gone wrong; he tries to count the gargoyles so they can tell him for sure--
"Killed me, said you didn't want to--"
"No, no," the Joker growls, eyes darting around, trying to find the cameras that must be watching them, "I didn't. Won't," he insists, but the growl and the stance promise violence, and he lunges at Batman, limbs and knifes in a blur.
Did he, oh, did he, is it over, did he break his favorite toy already? No, he would no. Why wouldn't he remember?
"NO," he screams, and he launches himself at Batman, who is still strong enough--barely--to stagger but stay upright under their combined weights. "I didn't!"
"Dead dead dead dead dead," Batman says, because there is no Bruce Wayne left, only the Bat, only the night.
The Joker shuts his eyes, buries his face into Batman's neck, finding no solace there, no softness, only hard rubber and kevlar.
"No," he says again, breath ragged, "No. I'd remember."
Batman stays silent.
"You're alive, you have to be," the Joker insists, "You can't do this. You can't do this to me. We weren't done. We weren't done!"
The only response is Batman shaking him off, so that the Joker falls back onto the hard floor of their rooftop, disturbing the snow.
There are sirens somewhere, down below, in the streets, but that's so far away and so very, very beneath them, in the realm of man. Up here, it's just them.
"No one else can see me anymore," Batman whispers.
"Please. You just beat the pulp out of half my hirelings," the Joker tells him, his tongue sliding out from between his yellow teeth to lick his still red lips, nervously, over and over again, "They saw you, just not before you broke their bones."
He risks a glance, trying to see the street, but he's too far away to see anything besides snowy rooftop. The panic, the panic rising in his chest, he is trying to control it.
"They see the night," Batman tells him, so seriously that the Joker breaks out into laughter again--
but it rings a little hollow, even if it's even more hysterical than usual.
"They see it. Not me," Batman finishes softly, and something about that makes the Joker quiet.
"I've always seen you," he tells Batman, with an exaggerated batting of his eyelashes, "Stop being so melodramatic." He can't breathe right. Can't breathe.
"You did it with a gun," Batman tells him, voice cold and sliding into place like heavy locks on secret doors, "With a gun." He finds this particularly repugnant.
The Joker frowns, still panting.
"Never," he says, and he grumbles a bit as he gets back up, "Nothing so easy for you, moonbeam."
"You did."
The Joker's fists clench and unclench inside his purple gloves, and he steps up to Batman and hits him in the mouth as hard as he can.
Batman lets him. What's it matter? He's dead.
Something clicks: Batman would never let that happen, would he?
The Joker glances around, tries to count the clues. The numbers make no sense, like the city's taken back the reference sheet that decodes it all. What does that mean?
"If you're dead--" he says, unsteadily, and why did he bother to get up, why, because he's hyperventilating; it hurts, he drops to his knees again, "Why can I--how are we talking?"
"Probably because you killed me," Batman says, and even in the cold and mechanical tone, there is a note of resentment. He's taking death rather personally. There was still so much to do.
The Joker shakes his head, the ice stiffened stands of hair whipping across his skin.
"Maybe it was beautiful," he gasps out, "Maybe it was both of us?"
Batman takes a step back. Does not like this development.
"What's this city without you?" the Joker says, still not looking up from where he's sprawled on all fours, "I musta rigged it so that I took out both of us, right? That's the only explanation."
Batman hesitates.
"It was a gun," he says, uncertainly, "A gun. Just like my--it was a gun."
The Joker finally looks up, eyes gleaming.
"What would you know about it, anyway?" he asks testily. "You're dead."
Batman does not have an answer for that. But since they are dead--
--he frowns, because he notices, for a second, how easily he has accepted the change from I am dead to we are dead--
the fact that this man is a viper ceases to matter. His deadly mouth has venom that can no longer hurt him, for they are beyond the point of inflicting and receiving pain.
So when the Joker shoves himself back to his feet, Batman doesn't move back.
One step. Another. Another. Those, he can count.
"And if you're dead," the Joker is saying, "You can't stop me from doing this--"
The kiss is hard and harsh and, surprisingly, warm.
If they are dead, the heat of their mouths must be the only heat left between them.
"--again, and again--"
The kisses get deeper, and
if they are dead, what does it matter?
Batman kisses back.
--
When the police burst through the door and onto the rooftop, they find the two enemies tucked into each other. The cape is covered in snow and drawn over both of them, tangled as they are into each other's arms.
The night is cold, and the sirens take a long time to die down.
Author: zombieboyband
Prompt: Folie à deux
Word Count: 3,131
Rating: Always R just to be safe.
Summary: There's more than one type of delusion.A gun? Nothing so easy for you, moonbeam.
Disclaimer: Neither clown nor bat nor supporting anyones are mine.
Warnings: crazy.
Folie à deux: from the French for "a madness shared by two," is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another.
--
It starts in an alley:
The click of a gun's trigger, a familiar and potentially overwhelming terror, a sudden fierce wash of regrets for all the things he didn't do--
--gives away to the unfurling of a flag; almost staggering relief, then the rage of something that tastes like humiliation rising, scorching his esophagus, like bile--
"BANG!" the Joker says gleefully, "You're dead!"
Batman growls low in his throat and advances again--
Then the Joker squeezes the trigger on his hilarious flag gun one more time, and the flag that says bang! flies through the air and hits Batman in the chest, with enough force and enough of a sharp and edgy point that it pierces armor.
"Bang!" the Joker says again, still laughing, always laughing, seeming to dance in front of Batman's eyes, "BANG! BANG! BANG!"
There's something on the tip of that unfurled flag arrow, and it makes Batman slow, makes him stumble.
"You're dead!" squeals the Joker, again, in seemingly endless, limitless mirth, "Aha, Batsy, how's it feel on the other side?" Playground teasing makes something shine in those manic eyes, maybe adoration, maybe psychosis.
Whatever was on the tip of that flag isn't enough to take down Batman--not the Bat, no. Bruce Wayne, healthy as a horse, may have fallen, but not this spirit of the city, not this spook on kevlar wings. So Batman's fist connects with the Joker's trunk, because it's hard for a body to keep on laughing while the liver is temporarily shut down. Body shots are efficient, practical. Less showy than blows to the face.
The Joker manages to wheeze some as he slides down, h-h-huh-hah-h-h-h-ugh-a-a--hah, spewing sharp little proto-laughs into the air through his clenched teeth.
Now it's time for a punch to the face, because Batman needs the satisfaction of seeing liquid red dribble down that painted red mouth, needs to see that what leaks out of the Joker is human after all. He hauls the Joker up from his boneless flop on the floor, making use of those hideous purple lapels, connects with his jaw, his nose, his mouth.
Make up smears rub off onto Batman's gloves, sticking to him and violating the beauty of his solid black. The white and red smears stick to his suit like the Joker's choked laughter sticks to his skin, and through the heat of the rage and the cold calm of concentration that he forces upon himself, he feels a wave of nausea over how he needs to wash this filth off himself immediately, before it sinks in, before it becomes catching.
The Joker's blood doesn't disrupt the darkness of Batman's gloves, unless the light hits just right and something gleams wet, giving it away. Otherwise it's just dark-on-dark. The blood, Batman doesn't mind.
He flexes his fingers, hating the make up, the face paint, and in that moment the clown jackknifes his body and pulls a foot back, the short but nasty blade of his other shoe burying itself in what would be Batman's muscled but vulnerable underbelly if not for the suit.
Batman drops his clown cargo, but throws himself forward to not lose his quarry. He wants blood on his fingers to cover up the white and especially despised red, wants to take the Joker in once more because he hates the idea of his madman holding his city hostage, but the Joker is wriggling away, all that despicable energy now on evading instead of hurting, his breath harsh in the cold night as he gives up his quips and his laughter in the need to get away, and he scrambles backwards, kicks Batman in the head, and finally gets a second with enough space in it to stand up and run.
The city betrays Batman, because it seems she has let the Joker know her secret places just as thoroughly, maybe more so. She took forever to unfurl her secrets to Batman, until he could move along the rooftops with graceful ease, until he knew--he thought he knew--every escape route, every hiding place. The city, it seems, may have given Batman control of her high road, but the Joker has something else, maybe the knowledge of how to slither around below, so Batman loses him.
Tomorrow night, he vows, tomorrow, and Batman limps home to fall into Alfred's ministering hands.
--
"Thought you were done for this time, sir," is the next thing Bruce remembers, and if he blinks he can see Alfred's lined but smiling face. The smile has a tension in it born of worry, and it's the fear rather than the warmth that reaches his eyes. "Of course, I think that every time, these days."
Bruce pushes himself up.
"How long was I out?"
"Only about half a day, as it happens, sir. About time you got some rest, really," Alfred tells him, sighing, "It's not the best way to make sure you get some sleep, mind, but it's the only thing that seems to work."
Bruce does not ignore the gentle rebuke there: he takes it to heart and stores it with all his other failures that weigh down his soul, a thing so heavy that only the cowl and the wings can make him light enough to move ever again. Outwardly, he seems to hardly register that Alfred spoke.
"What was it he dosed me with? Did you run an analysis yet?"
"Only a mammoth amount of tranquilizer, sir," Alfred says, before dryly adding, "If I didn't know better, I'd say he almost wasn't trying to kill you."
Bruce shrugs, slides out of bed.
"Is it too late to put in an appearance at Wayne Tower?"
"For you, sir? Never. You can waltz in for the last hour of the day and no one will think any less highly of you."
Bruce gives Alfred something that might almost be a smile, as he turns away to seek out a shower, but he's not really hearing anything Alfred says.
Somewhere he has read that the subconscious has trouble understanding even relatively simple negatives, but he doesn't think of that either.
All that he is thinking of is that echo:
kill you
kill you
kill you
kill you
kill you
"Bang," Bruce Wayne whispers, closing his eyes once he is under a stream of warm water, "Bang."
--
A man who looks just like the rest of the city's anonymous homeless population is skipping along the sidewalk. He's muttering to himself but it's muffled by the scarf wound around his neck and face, covering his nose and mouth. There's a hat drawn over his no doubt greasy hair, too, and he's wrapped in a baggy brown overcoat, has beat up brown shoes. It doesn't seem out of place for the weather, and, anyway, people don't look closely at things they don't want to see.
Anyone who could get close enough, anyone fast enough and deft enough with a knife, might be able to slice in and peel back the layers: under that baggy brown there is a sleek purple coat; under those faded pinstripe trouser legs are a fetching, festive pattern of purple fleur-de-lis socks; under that hat there is in fact greasy hair, but it has a sickly green tinge; under that scarf is a red, red mouth.
The mouth never stops moving, because--
"It's all coming together again, right now, here, finally," are the words it forms, low and fierce and quiet, "and it does, it always does. Won't he be surprised? Hah."
Because the city is unfurling again, giving him the shape of his next scheme. He divines the particulars from the city scape: that mailbox points the way to the Message, so he turns his feet and walks that way. The people around him, he has to count the colors--one two three six nine--so that he knows how many henchclowns he'll need. He's on the right track; he can tell by the exact combination of litter scattered across the street, the contents of the piles blocking the gutters. He reaches the end of his street and turns towards the dingy glass of a shop window. There's an TV, a newscast, a pretty anchor, and she's talking to him, telling him what to do. He nods, and chuckles low and sure.
He knows what to do.
All the way back to his hideout he skips, and he counts the cracks as he goes, jumping over some, jumping on the important ones--
loves me, loves me not, loves me, step on this one and break the Bat's back
stomp
loves me not loves me loves me not loves me
--
At Wayne Tower, Bruce stands up in a meeting and voices a suggestion. He is met with blank looks, until someone else--Lucius?--clears a throat and redirects the conversation. Bruce breaks out into a cold sweat. Sure, they can ignore what the dumb playboy has to say; yes. That happens. But there wasn't even a smirk; none of the haughty, envious, frustrated looks that accompanied most of his suggestions.
Why?
Why would they be ignoring him so completely?
He excuses himself; gets up to leave.
No one watches him go, and he worries.
--
A very tired Alfred picks up his cell phone on the third ring; finds a concerned Mr. Fox calling from his office line.
They talk for a time, and the words increasingly erratic echo in Alfred's head. He imagines the careful non-expression of board members, schooled as all the rich are in not reacting when someone makes a scene.
"I've hardly seen him these past few weeks," Alfred tells Lucius, "But I know what you mean."
--
He hardly has the strength to move, and his hands tremble as he buckles on the suit. It's getting worse. Every day he feels heavier. There was another earthquake in Asia and it's all his fault. If only he'd moved faster, if only he didn't feel like he was moving through jelly these days. Crime is up. Alfred, who he has not talked to, seems miserable during the brief glimpses Bruce gets when he spies on him. It is all his fault. There was a woman found in pieces, in a suitcase, on the interstate. It is all his fault. He saw a mother crying on the news over her lost child. It is all his fault. Gotham is unhappy; there's a nasty round of the flu going on and the weather is too cold for this time of year. It is all his fault.
It weighs him down. He can't move. Can't.
Finally, he manages to slip the cowl over his head, and Batman straightens up and goes off into the night.
--
Bruce Wayne does not come into work for the next week.
--
Around the house, Alfred cannot chase shadows, not when the shadows are highly trained in the art of stealth.
He is ransacking his brain for some kind of plan, but all he can do for now is bring down the trays of food, leave them where they will be found, in the darkness of the cave that looks increasingly like that of a tomb.
On the altar of winged guilt he leaves the meals, like offerings to the dead.
That is exactly what Bruce, or Batman, or whoever, whatever haunts the cave now, takes them for.
Alfred would never stop speaking to him, would he? No, no. Never, not Alfred. If Alfred is not speaking to him, it is because he cannot. Bruce is not there to him. The angry and then pleading shouts of where are you, what have you done? are heart wrenching but rhetorical. He's dead; he can't answer. Alfred doesn't hear him when he tries. It's one more disappointment to add to the guilt he carries with him in the afterlife. It has not let him go. It hangs around his neck like a weighted noose, except it's already been pulled taunt, and he wasn't enough of a bat to fly, to keep his legs from dangling.
After a while, the trays of food remain uneaten.
--
The heist goes off perfectly, just as planned. It's brilliant--they always are--and meticulous down to the last detail. The Joker paces back and forth, machine gun in hand, impatient because the only thing that's gone wrong is how right everything is. It's not like he cares about what they're stealing; the money's just details. He takes a fast breath, glances up quickly to count the number of gargoyles he sees, because they'll tell him how long he has to wait--
Ah
The boots to the midsection send him flying (hah, hah, sharing your wings, Batsy?). Batman swoops onto the scene and it's the usual dodging, fighting, everything, the works--the black cyclone of movement that could be deadly if he just let it go. The Joker hangs around at the edges of the scenery, watching half his henchclowns go down. The other half have immediately scattered, to regroup with what loot they've managed, except for one smuck that's too slow--
The joker shoots him for idle amusement while he waits for Bats to not be so gosh darn busy, and he hightails it out of the street just in time to make sure dear old Bat brain only gets a glimpse of him.
--
It continues on a rooftop:
The Joker goads Batman into getting a face punch in early, because it hurts so good, so good.
"Losing your touch there, moon pie," the Joker says, when he can stagger to his feet in record time, "I hardly felt that one."
Batman does a high kick that sends him sprawling again, but it just gets giggles. In the harshness of the cold night, under the full moon, comes a questioning growl--
"How can you talk to me?"
"Oh, I can do more than just talk," the Joker promises, darting forward, seeing the space between plates there, and sliding his knife in between--
Batman half blocks and steps out, so that he only gets grazed.
"Is it because you killed me?" The question is accompanied by the hardest blow so far; it rattles the Joker's teeth and makes the echo punch through the other side of his brain, but still, what renders him incapacitated is the laughing fit that bursts through him, straight from the heart.
"I what now? In the where to the who?"
"--killed me, you killed me," Batman growls.
"I never," the Joker retorts, like a spoiled back talking child, but Batman hasn't stopped talking--
"--killed me. You killed me. You said you wouldn't, and you killed me."
The litany continues, even as they go back to their dance over the rooftop, kicks and swings and blocks. The moon, the moon shines on the matte black, on the woolen purple, on the snow. But it's wrong, the Joker thinks suddenly, it's all gone wrong; he tries to count the gargoyles so they can tell him for sure--
"Killed me, said you didn't want to--"
"No, no," the Joker growls, eyes darting around, trying to find the cameras that must be watching them, "I didn't. Won't," he insists, but the growl and the stance promise violence, and he lunges at Batman, limbs and knifes in a blur.
Did he, oh, did he, is it over, did he break his favorite toy already? No, he would no. Why wouldn't he remember?
"NO," he screams, and he launches himself at Batman, who is still strong enough--barely--to stagger but stay upright under their combined weights. "I didn't!"
"Dead dead dead dead dead," Batman says, because there is no Bruce Wayne left, only the Bat, only the night.
The Joker shuts his eyes, buries his face into Batman's neck, finding no solace there, no softness, only hard rubber and kevlar.
"No," he says again, breath ragged, "No. I'd remember."
Batman stays silent.
"You're alive, you have to be," the Joker insists, "You can't do this. You can't do this to me. We weren't done. We weren't done!"
The only response is Batman shaking him off, so that the Joker falls back onto the hard floor of their rooftop, disturbing the snow.
There are sirens somewhere, down below, in the streets, but that's so far away and so very, very beneath them, in the realm of man. Up here, it's just them.
"No one else can see me anymore," Batman whispers.
"Please. You just beat the pulp out of half my hirelings," the Joker tells him, his tongue sliding out from between his yellow teeth to lick his still red lips, nervously, over and over again, "They saw you, just not before you broke their bones."
He risks a glance, trying to see the street, but he's too far away to see anything besides snowy rooftop. The panic, the panic rising in his chest, he is trying to control it.
"They see the night," Batman tells him, so seriously that the Joker breaks out into laughter again--
but it rings a little hollow, even if it's even more hysterical than usual.
"They see it. Not me," Batman finishes softly, and something about that makes the Joker quiet.
"I've always seen you," he tells Batman, with an exaggerated batting of his eyelashes, "Stop being so melodramatic." He can't breathe right. Can't breathe.
"You did it with a gun," Batman tells him, voice cold and sliding into place like heavy locks on secret doors, "With a gun." He finds this particularly repugnant.
The Joker frowns, still panting.
"Never," he says, and he grumbles a bit as he gets back up, "Nothing so easy for you, moonbeam."
"You did."
The Joker's fists clench and unclench inside his purple gloves, and he steps up to Batman and hits him in the mouth as hard as he can.
Batman lets him. What's it matter? He's dead.
Something clicks: Batman would never let that happen, would he?
The Joker glances around, tries to count the clues. The numbers make no sense, like the city's taken back the reference sheet that decodes it all. What does that mean?
"If you're dead--" he says, unsteadily, and why did he bother to get up, why, because he's hyperventilating; it hurts, he drops to his knees again, "Why can I--how are we talking?"
"Probably because you killed me," Batman says, and even in the cold and mechanical tone, there is a note of resentment. He's taking death rather personally. There was still so much to do.
The Joker shakes his head, the ice stiffened stands of hair whipping across his skin.
"Maybe it was beautiful," he gasps out, "Maybe it was both of us?"
Batman takes a step back. Does not like this development.
"What's this city without you?" the Joker says, still not looking up from where he's sprawled on all fours, "I musta rigged it so that I took out both of us, right? That's the only explanation."
Batman hesitates.
"It was a gun," he says, uncertainly, "A gun. Just like my--it was a gun."
The Joker finally looks up, eyes gleaming.
"What would you know about it, anyway?" he asks testily. "You're dead."
Batman does not have an answer for that. But since they are dead--
--he frowns, because he notices, for a second, how easily he has accepted the change from I am dead to we are dead--
the fact that this man is a viper ceases to matter. His deadly mouth has venom that can no longer hurt him, for they are beyond the point of inflicting and receiving pain.
So when the Joker shoves himself back to his feet, Batman doesn't move back.
One step. Another. Another. Those, he can count.
"And if you're dead," the Joker is saying, "You can't stop me from doing this--"
The kiss is hard and harsh and, surprisingly, warm.
If they are dead, the heat of their mouths must be the only heat left between them.
"--again, and again--"
The kisses get deeper, and
if they are dead, what does it matter?
Batman kisses back.
--
When the police burst through the door and onto the rooftop, they find the two enemies tucked into each other. The cape is covered in snow and drawn over both of them, tangled as they are into each other's arms.
The night is cold, and the sirens take a long time to die down.