Chapter Text
Emily had been inside the Wayne Manor foyer a handful of times now, and every single time she'd had the same thought: this room was built to make a person feel small. The ceiling vaulted up into shadow, the marble floor swallowed her footsteps, the portraits on the walls watched her from a hundred years away. It was a room that had seen generations of Waynes walk through it, and it did not care much who was walking through it now.
Tonight, it cared even less. Because tonight the foyer was dark— the chandelier dead, the sconces cold— and the only light came from the flashlights they'd drawn the second they'd come through the open front doors. The doors had been standing open when they pulled up. That was the first wrong thing. The manor had never once met them with an open door.
"Alfred," Nightwing said, and his voice cracked on the name in a way that made Emily's stomach drop. He was already moving, past her, into the dark. "Alfred!"
"Easy," Morgan said, hand on his sidearm, scanning the shadows. "Easy. We go together."
They went together. eight vigilantes, a super, and six federal agents, spread out across the marble, flashlights cutting white paths through the black. Emily's heart was hammering. The 911 call had cut off mid-sentence. The doors had been open. And now the manor was dark and silent and wrong, and somewhere in the back of her head she was already building the worst-case picture— Alfred on the floor, a body, a scene she'd have to work.
She rounded the corner into the main hall and stopped dead.
The light from her flashlight hit the floor, and all she saw was red.
For one long, terrible second, Emily Prentiss forgot how to breathe. The red spread out across the white marble in a wide, uneven pool, dark at the edges and still wet in the middle, gleaming under the beam. It was everywhere. It was too much— no one could lose that much and still be standing. Her training kicked in even as her stomach turned over. Scene. Preserve the scene. Don't move, don't disturb, call it in, find the body—
"Oh my God," Morgan breathed from beside her, and his voice had gone flat and hard, the way it did when he was looking at something he'd seen too many times before. "That's—"
"Everyone stop," Hotch ordered, sharp and low, and the whole room froze. "Nobody moves. Nobody touches anything. We have a scene."
Batman ignored him, “Spoiler, Black Bat, canvas the manor. Find Alfred.”
Spoiler and Black Bat nodded, running in different directions.
Emily could hear her own pulse in her ears. The red was still wet. Still fresh. Whoever had done this had been here recently, and that meant they might still be here, and that meant—
And then Robin stepped past her.
He was small and quick and he moved through the frozen tableau like the order hadn't been meant for him, which it probably hadn't. He crouched down at the edge of the red pool, and Emily opened her mouth to tell him to stop, to not contaminate the scene, to wait for the techs—
Robin dipped two fingers into the red. Lifted them. Sniffed them. And then, to Emily's absolute horror, he put his fingers in his mouth and licked.
"Robin!" Hotch snapped.
He stood up, unconcerned, and wiped his hand on his glove. "It's ketchup," he said, in the tone of a boy who was deeply unimpressed with all of them. "Cheap ketchup. The kind you get in a gas station. He wrote us a love letter in condiments."
Emily stared at him. Then she looked down at the red, and back up at him, and for a second she felt the whole room tilt.
"Ketchup," she repeated.
"Ketchup," Robin confirmed. "Smell it. It's vinegar and tomato paste. Blood doesn't smell like a burger."
"He's right," Reid said, and Emily had never been more grateful to hear his voice. He was crouched where Robin had been, tilting his flashlight along the surface of the red. "The viscosity is wrong for blood, and the surface tension is breaking the way you'd expect from a sugar-heavy suspension. It's ketchup. And there's writing in it."
Emily forced herself to look. Not a pool, a message. She'd been so locked onto the worst case scenario that she'd seen a body where there wasn’t one. The red was arranged in letters, sweeping across the marble, and now that she was actually looking she could see the deliberate shape of it, the flourish at the end of the last word. The Joker had written them a note. In ketchup. In the foyer of Wayne Manor.
She read it aloud, her voice flat.
"The punchline is best served cold."
There was a beat of silence. Then, beneath it, smaller and neater, a second line of red. Coordinates.
"Forty point eight zero two one north," Reid read, already pulling out his phone. "Seventy-four point zero five three one west." He paused, tapping. "That's Kearny, New Jersey. The industrial district along the Hackensack River."
"The chemical plant," Batman said quietly, and every head in the room turned to him. He was standing very still, his face unreadable in the dark. "Ace Chemicals. That's where he fell in."
The words landed like a stone in still water. Emily watched the room go quiet around them— the vigilantes exchanging glances she couldn't read, the BAU team going still with the weight of what they knew. The chemical plant. The acid vat. The place where the Joker had been born, years ago, when a man and a woman had fallen into a tank of chemicals and climbed out with a smile that never came off.
"He wants us to come," Emily said. "He wrote us directions. He's inviting us."
"It's a trap," Morgan said flatly.
"Of course it's a trap," Robin said. "It's always a trap. The question is whether we go anyway."
"We go," Batman said. It was the first time he'd spoken since they'd come through the doors, and his voice was low and final, the kind of voice that didn't invite argument. "He's had four years. Whatever he's been building toward, it's here. We end this tonight."
Emily looked at the ketchup message one more time, at the flourish on the last word, at the coordinates that pointed to the place where it had all started. The Joker had invited them. He'd set the table. Now he was waiting for them to come and sit down.
"Then we go," she said. "And we don't let him choose the terms."
—
The chemical plant rose out of the New Jersey night like a skeleton, all rusted girders and shattered windows and the smell of something old and chemical hanging in the air. Emily had been to a hundred crime scenes, but there was something about this place that got under her skin— the knowledge of what had happened here, the weight of the history, the way the whole building seemed to lean toward them like it was waiting.
Spoiler and Black Bat had found Alfred unharmed, supposedly he had been in his quarters and heard nothing happen. Emily wasn’t sure if she believed that. Alfred and Penelope stayed at the manor, Penelope on comms. She and Alfred also checked on Duke, who was on a date with his girlfriend at the time of the break-in.
They approached in silence, spread out across the cracked asphalt of the parking lot, the vigilantes moving like they'd been born to this and the BAU moving like the professionals they were.
It was just them. Eight vigilantes, one super, and six federal agents, walking into the place where the Joker had been made.
"Traps," Red Hood said, his voice flat and hard through the comms. "He's gonna have traps. He's been planning this for years. Assume everything is rigged."
"Noted," Red Robin said dryly. "Thank you for that stunning tactical insight."
"Shut up."
"No."
"Stop," Batman said, and the bickering cut off. Emily almost smiled despite herself. They were a family, she thought. A strange, broken, bickering family— but a family. She could see it in the way they moved together, the way they covered each other's angles, the way the insults were sharp but never landed.
They found the first trap in the loading bay.
It was a tripwire, stretched ankle-high across the entrance, nearly invisible in the dark. Superboy spotted it and flagged it with a raised hand before anyone could trip it. Spoiler knelt and traced the wire back to its anchor, a small charge rigged to a vat overhead.
"Acid," she said, straightening. "He wanted whoever came through first to get a face full of it."
"Charming," Rossi muttered.
They disarmed it and moved on.
The second trap was more subtle— a pressure plate hidden under a loose grate, wired to something in the walls that none of them wanted to find out about. Red Hood caught it before anyone stepped on it, and they worked around it in silence, stepping over the seam in the floor like it was nothing. Another minute, another trap, another small victory. They moved on.
The third trap was the one that almost got them. A door that looked like every other door in the plant, rusted and ordinary. Rossi reached for the handle without thinking but Spoiler’s hand shot out and caught his wrist an inch before he touched it.
"Don't," Red Robin said. His voice was very calm, which made it worse. "There's a pressure plate wired to the frame. You open that door, the whole room goes up."
Rossi looked at him. "How do you know?"
"Because I'd have rigged it that way." Red Robin knelt and began to work, and Reid was there a second later, crouching beside him. Emily watched the two of them fall into the same rhythm they'd found on the rooftop— the quiet back-and-forth, the shared language, the way they finished each other's sentences without seeming to notice.
"Detonator's wired to the hinge," Reid said.
"Mm. And the plate's load-bearing, so we can't just cut it."
"Bypass the receiver."
"That's what I was thinking. If I isolate the circuit—"
"I'll hold the plate."
They worked together like they'd done this a hundred times. Like they'd been doing it for years. Emily watched and thought about the word family again, and about how the BAU had become one of those too, in a different way— a family of people who'd seen too much and kept going anyway.
"Clear," Red Robin said, and the door swung open onto darkness.
The heart of the plant was a vast, echoing chamber, three stories tall, ringed by rusted catwalks and the corroded skeletons of machines that hadn't run in years. The floor was a grid of metal grating, and beneath it, far below, Emily could hear the faint, slow drip of water— or something that wasn't water. The air smelled of old chemicals and something else, something sweet and wrong.
And there, on the highest catwalk, looking down at them, was the Joker.
He was dressed like he'd always been— the purple suit, the green hair, the grin that was too wide and too white and never reached his eyes. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking slightly on his heels, watching them file into the chamber below him like they were an audience arriving for a show.
"Ah," he said, and his voice carried down to them, high and bright and delighted. "There they are. My guests of honor. I was starting to think you'd gotten lost."
The room went very still. Emily felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. This was him. This was the man who'd killed Jason Todd. Who'd been killing people for decades. Who'd written them a letter and a message in ketchup and lured them here, to the place where he'd been born.
"You wanted an audience," Hotch said, his voice carrying. "You've got one. Now what?"
The Joker laughed, a high, skittering sound that bounced off the metal walls. "Now what? Now what! Oh, I like you. I really do. The fed who cuts to the chase." He spread his arms wide. "You want to know what I want? I want to be understood. That's all. Years I've been waiting for someone smart enough to understand me, Batsy stopped. And then you showed up." He pointed at them, one by one, counting. "The profilers. The ones who look at the things I don't do and see the shape of me. You got the negative space. You got the joke."
"The punchline," Emily said. "You've been building toward a punchline."
The Joker's grin widened until it looked like it might split his face. "She gets it. She gets it! The punchline. Yes. The big one. The one that's been four years in the making." He leaned forward, gripping the railing, his voice dropping to something almost intimate. "You want to know what it is? You want to hear it? Come up here and I'll tell you. I promise it's worth the trip."
Nobody moved. The Joker waited, grinning, and the silence stretched.
Then Morgan said, low, "He's not going to tell us. He's going to kill us."
"Probably," Red Hood agreed. "But he's not going to do it from up there."
And then they moved.
It wasn't planned. It was instinct— the whole room surging at once, vigilantes and agents alike, swarming toward the catwalks, toward the ladders, toward the man in the purple suit who stood above them laughing. Emily was running before she'd decided to, her heart pounding, her eyes locked on the Joker as he watched them come.
He didn't run. He just laughed, and stepped back, and vanished.
Emily skidded to a stop. One second he'd been there, silhouetted against the broken windows behind him. The next he was gone, and there was nothing where he'd been but empty catwalk and the echo of his laugh.
"Where—" she started.
"There!" Nightwing shouted, and she spun. The Joker was on the opposite catwalk now, arms spread, grinning. "He's—"
He vanished again. Reappeared on the floor, twenty feet from them. Vanished. Reappeared on a ladder, halfway up. Vanished.
It was impossible. He was everywhere and nowhere, a purple blur that danced just out of reach, always a step ahead, always laughing. Emily's head was spinning. She'd seen a lot of impossible things since she'd come to Gotham, but this— this was something else. He wasn't running. He was playing with them. Herding them.
“Something’s wrong,” Black Bat said, looking around the buuidling and keeping her stance strong.
"He's using the building," Red Robin shouted, and his voice was sharp with realization. "The catwalks, the ladders— there's a system of panels and drops. He knows every inch of this place. He's not teleporting, he's—"
"Don't care," Conner said.
And he moved.
Emily had never seen Superboy’s speed before. She'd seen him fly, seen him lift things that should have been impossible on the news, but she'd never seen him move. One second he was beside Red Robin, and the next he was a blur, a streak of red and blue crossing the chamber in the space between one heartbeat and the next, closing on the Joker where he stood on the far catwalk with his arms spread and his grin wide.
"Enough," Conner said, and his voice was flat and cold. "I've had enough of this bullshit."
He hit the Joker at full speed.
There was a sound like a wet sack hitting a wall. A sound like something bursting. And then—
The Joker didn't fall. The Joker exploded.
Emily threw up an arm as a spray of something hit her, something cold and wet and gray, and she heard the whole room gasp and stumble back. She blinked the gunk out of her eyes and looked up, and what she saw made her stop breathing.
The Joker wasn't there anymore. Where he'd stood, there was nothing but a collapsing, oozing heap of gray-brown clay, slumping off the catwalk and splattering onto the floor below in a wet, shapeless mass. Conner stood in the middle of it, covered head to toe in the stuff, looking down at himself with an expression of pure, disgusted bewilderment.
"What the hell," Morgan said slowly, "was that?"
"Clayface," Batman said. His voice was flat. "It was Clayface. The whole time."
The word landed like a grenade. Emily stared at the oozing mess on the floor, at the shape that had been a man two seconds ago, and felt her understanding of the night rearrange itself.
"It wasn't the Joker," she said. "It was never the Joker."
"Clayface," Reid repeated, and his voice was tight. "Basil Karlo. He can shape-shift. He can imitate anyone. And he was standing up there, pretending to be the Joker, luring us into—" He stopped. "He was a decoy."
"A decoy," Rossi said. "For what?"
Nobody answered. Because the answer was obvious, hanging in the air between them all, and nobody wanted to say it out loud.
The Joker had never been here. He'd sent Clayface in his place— a perfect imitation, a lure, a show. And while they'd been chasing the decoy, while they'd been swarming the catwalks and falling for the disappearing act, the real Joker had been somewhere else entirely, doing something none of them could see.
"He played us," Emily said quietly. "He knew we'd come. He knew we'd chase. And he sent a stand-in to keep us busy while he did—" She looked at the others. "While he did whatever he's actually been planning."
Superboy was standing in the middle of the clay, wiping handfuls of the stuff off his arms with a look of deep personal offense. "So I just tackled a shapeshifter," he said. "And the actual Joker is still out there."
"Looks that way," Red Hood said. He sounded almost amused. "Nice tackle, though."
"Shut up."
The chamber was quiet for a long moment. Emily looked at the mess on the floor, at the last traces of the purple suit dissolving into gray clay, and thought about the negative space. The things the Joker didn't do. The places he never went. The way he'd built this whole elaborate stage and then not shown up to perform on it.
He'd wanted an audience. But he hadn't wanted to be there to watch them watch him.
He'd wanted them to think he was here.
They stood in the cold outside the plant, the New Jersey night settling around them, and let the adrenaline bleed out of their systems. Superboy was still picking clay out of his hair, muttering under his breath, while Red Robin worked beside him with a handful of rags from the Batmobile, trying to get the worst of it off.
"There's more on your back," Red Robin said.
"I know there's more on my back. I can feel it."
"Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"You're not. You keep moving."
"Because it's disgusting, Rob."
Emily watched them and felt something ease in her chest. The night had gone sideways in a way she hadn't expected, but this— the two of them, the bickering that was really just care wearing a grumpy coat— was grounding. Real. A reminder that even in the middle of the impossible, there were still people who looked out for each other.
Commissioner Gordon walked over, his face tired in the sodium lights of the parking lot. He looked at the plant, at the dark mouth of the building, and shook his head.
"Sorry you couldn't get him," he said. "I know you wanted this one."
Hotch looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "No. We're sorry you couldn't get him. But this is still a step forward in the case."
Gordon blinked. "A step forward? He wasn't even there."
"He was never going to be there," Hotch said. "That's the point. He sent a stand-in. He set a trap. He wanted us to think we had him, and he wanted to watch us realize we didn't. That tells us more about him than a confrontation ever would." He paused. "He's afraid of us, Commissioner. He's afraid enough to hide behind a decoy. That's not nothing."
Gordon was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. "Huh. Maybe you're right at that."
"I usually am," Hotch said, and there was the faintest hint of something almost like warmth in his voice. "It's a burden."
Gordon almost smiled. It was the first time Emily had seen him do it.
The drive back to the manor was quiet. Emily sat in the back of the SUV with JJ beside her, watching the Jersey lights slide past, and let herself think about the night. The ketchup message. The traps. The decoy. The way the Joker had built an entire performance and then not shown up for it.
"He's still out there," she said finally.
"Mhm," JJ hummed. "But we know more than we did this morning."
"Do we?"
"We know he's scared," JJ said. "We know he's willing to hide. We know he wanted us to chase a ghost." She looked at Emily. "That's not nothing, Emily."
Emily looked at her. In the dark of the car, with the lights moving across her face, JJ looked tired and kind and sure, and Emily felt something settle in her chest that she didn't have a name for.
"No," she said. "It's not nothing."
—
They left the manor the next morning.
The team packed up their gear in the pale light of dawn, loading the SUVs while the manor watched them go from its hundred silent windows. Emily had said her goodbyes to the Wayne family the night before, in the study, in the strange, formal way of people who'd been through something together and weren't sure what to call it now. She'd shaken Dick's hand. She'd told Tim to take care of himself. She'd looked at Cassandra, who'd looked back at her, and neither of them had needed to say anything. Alfred had placed a hand on her shoulder and smiled as warmly as he did the first night they met.
But there was one person she hadn't said goodbye to yet.
She found Todd Harper in the garden, at the edge of the roses, looking out at the grounds like he was memorizing them. He didn't turn when she approached, but she could tell he knew she was there— the way his shoulders shifted, the way he went still.
"You're him, aren't you?" Emily said.
He didn't answer right away. When he finally spoke, his voice was carefully light. "I'm Todd Harper. We've been over this."
"No," Emily said. "You're not. Garcia found a file on you. Like it appeared out of nowhere." She walked up beside him, looking out at the same view he was looking at. "I know what it's like. To come back from the dead. To have everyone think you're gone, and then to walk back into the world and find out it moved on without you."
He was very still now. She could feel the tension in him, the careful control.
"I know how that can mess with your head," Emily said. "I know what it does to you. The not-telling. The hiding. The watching everyone you love grieve you and knowing you can't fix it." She paused. "I've been there. I came back from something I shouldn't have come back from, and it took me a long time to figure out who I was on the other side of it."
The silence stretched. A bird sang somewhere in the trees, oblivious.
"Jason," Emily said quietly.
He flinched. It was small, barely a twitch, but she saw it.
"I'm not going to tell anyone," she said. "That's not why I'm here. I just—" She reached into her coat and pulled out a card, holding it out to him. "If you ever need anything. If it gets too heavy, or you need someone who understands, or you just need to talk to someone who's been where you've been." She pressed the card into his hand. "Call me."
He looked down at the card, then back at her. For a long moment, his face was unreadable— the careful mask he'd been wearing. Then, just for a second, something shifted behind his eyes. Something almost like recognition.
"Emily," he said. Not a question. A test.
"That's me," she said. And she turned and walked back toward the manor, leaving him in the garden with her card in his hand and the morning light coming up over the trees.
Garcia was waiting by the SUV when Emily got back, bouncing on her heels with barely contained glee. Next to her was Barbara, who'd apparently stopped by to see Dick.
"So," Garcia said, brandishing her phone like a trophy, "Barbara and I exchanged numbers."
"Barbara and you," Emily said. "Exchanged numbers."
"Don't look at me like that. She's a genius, Prentiss. She knows things. We're going to be friends. I also got Spoiler and Red Robin’s."
Barbara smiled, a small, knowing thing. "She's very enthusiastic."
"I'm delightful," Garcia smiled.
"You are," Barbara said, in a tone that suggested she'd already figured out exactly who Garcia was and had decided she liked her.
Emily looked between them and felt a small, unexpected warmth. In the middle of all the impossible things— the vigilantes, the manor, the decoy, the Joker still out there somewhere— there were these small, human moments. People connecting. People finding each other.
"Take care," Emily said to Barbara.
"I will," Barbara said. And Emily believed her.
—
The plane was quiet when it lifted off, the Gotham skyline shrinking behind them until it was just a smudge on the horizon. Emily watched it go through the window and thought about everything they'd left behind— the manor, the vigilantes, the case that wasn't over. The Joker was still out there. The punchline was still coming. But they'd taken a step, and that was something.
Hotch was in the front of the cabin, his phone in his hand, when it buzzed. He glanced at the screen, and Emily saw his jaw tighten.
"Strauss," he said, and answered.
Emily watched his face as he listened. It was a controlled face— Hotch's face was always controlled— but she could see the shift in it, the careful blankness that meant he was hearing something he didn't like.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, we're in the air. We're heading back." A pause. "We didn't get him. He wasn't there. He sent a decoy." Another pause, longer. "I understand. But our case was the Joker—"
He stopped. Whatever Strauss said next, it made him go very still.
"The Red Hood," he repeated. His eyes flicked toward the back of the cabin, toward the memory of a man in a helmet who'd told Morgan to just kill the Joker and been right. "When?"
Another pause. Then Hotch said, quietly, "I understand. We'll have the debrief ready."
He hung up. The cabin was silent. Everyone was looking at him.
"Strauss," he said, and his voice was flat. "She expects our debrief to include the arrest of the Red Hood."
"Red Hood?" Morgan said. "We don't even know who he is."
"We know what he is," Hotch said. "He was just reported to have killed more people." He looked at them, one by one. "Strauss says this case is sliding across our desk soon."
Emily felt the words land like a weight in her chest. The Joker, still out there. The punchline, still coming. And now this— a new case, a new hunt, a new name on a file that was already moving toward them.
She looked out the window at the receding skyline, at the city that held more secrets than she could count, and thought about the man in the garden with her card in his hand.
She'd told him to call if he needed anything.
She had a feeling, somehow, that she'd be seeing him again.