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Chapter Text

Jokester rang his bell with more enthusiasm than tunefulness and stroked his big white beard. "Ho ho ho!" he bellowed, in the deepest voice he could manage. "Merry Christmas!"

The young couple strolling arm in arm smiled at him, and the woman reached out to tuck a ten-dollar bill into the slot at the top of his little red metal pail. "Ho, ho, season's blessings on you, young lady," J told her, holding his big false belly as he laughed. "You're a very lucky fellow!" he added to her beau, and they both smiled again and strolled on through the winter wonderland of a decorated Hampton Park, generous with love and holiday cheer. Jokester grinned after them.

He loved this time of year. Admittedly, the weather had its downsides—finding warm beds for people who'd otherwise freeze to death was an ongoing project every winter, and wherever he was staying in a given year usually had some serious drafts, and who liked cold feet? Nobody.

And Harvey got especially grouchy about hypocrisy and avarice around the season, and lonely people seemed to get lonelier and celebrating Christmas was culturally exclusionary toward non-Christian Americans, and the new meta girl, Pamela Eisley, had a thing about Christmas trees and he got all of that, but…it was about being happy. About giving things, and making other people happy, and people who were too proud to accept help the rest of the year would relax a little around Christmas and let you do things for them, because of Christmas spirit.

He wasn't, J admitted to himself as he settled on a slightly icy park bench for a bit of a rest and rang his bell again, really sure about religion, but bits of it were things people needed to get from somewhere, and he'd never tell anyone not to do what felt right to them, so long as it wasn't hurting anybody. And Christmas meant lights and glitter everywhere, shimmering off the frost, and the colors were red and green and white, and if he strung a little purple in there he usually got away with it and felt like the celebration was sort of his. Which, for a guy without a birthday, was nice. And now they had little Ella, he and Harley could not borrow enough happy family Christmas traditions to share with her. She was big enough to help cut out cookies now!

And as always, he loved an excuse to wear a costume. The Prospect Street Mission loaned him this one every single year. They said he was the best collector they'd ever sent out. His main secret was impersonating the department store kind of Santa in parks and shopping districts full of well-off children, whose parents then felt obliged to chip in for other people's Christmas dinners. Not infrequently, he was recognized, which sometimes led to awkwardness due to his…complicated relationship with the law, but was mostly fine, especially as far as the kids were concerned. Grandstanding heroics paid dividends, whatever sensible people thought.

"Hey, Jimmy, look! It's Santa!" said a woman's voice behind him.

"Not like it's the real Santa," scoffed a little boy, but when J turned and waved to him, adjusting the little round spectacles perched on his nose, he scampered forward, well ahead of his indulgently smiling parental types. He was about seven, with a cap of smooth brown hair and his cheeks all bright from cold, and waved a little shyly.

"Well, if it isn't little Jimmy," J chuckled in his Santa voice, dropping a gloved hand onto the lad's shoulder.

"You heard Mom say it," Jimmy pointed out.

"Oho, so I did, so I did! But I also think I remember you from my List. The nice one, of course. Why, you're so sweet—" J performed a special twist of his wrist, "—you've got candy coming out your ears!"

Cynical as Jimmy might be, he was young enough, and non-spoiled enough, for his eyes to widen in delight at the trick and the peppermint pinwheel. He unwrapped the cheap sweet and popped it into his mouth with a rush that suggested he knew that if his parents caught up they wouldn't let him eat candy from a stranger, even if it was Santa. His eyes flicked to the nearby trashcan like a well-brought-up young man, and then, suddenly, back to Santa, where they caught on a patch of skin that wasn't covered by beard or wig or hat, or the makeup that gave Santa his traditional rosy-red cheeks and strawberry nose, and realized Santa was kind of improbably the same colors as the peppermint…

Jokester grinned down through his big false beard, the corners of his famous smile just peeking over the top, twinkled through his tiny spectacles, and winked. "Ho ho ho!" he said conspiratorially.

Jimmy screamed.

Heaping silent curses upon Owlman's head, J grabbed the charity bucket and bolted. This was not a part of town where he could risk sticking around; he didn't have the contacts to back him up if somebody went after him. Even in nice neighborhoods where he wasn't necessarily popular, though, his reputation wasn't normally so bad as to set kids screaming, which meant Jimmy probably hadn't recognized him at all, just seen something horrifyingly wrong with Santa and panicked. (Hence cursing Owlman for the scary face. Fear wasn't his thing, not really; he'd use it if he needed to, especially against the Owl's minions who'd been trained to respond to it so well, but he'd never wanted to scare kids.)

A fleeing Santa Claus wasn't exactly subtle, but J took a few alleys and cut across a few roofs and was able to stroll composedly into plain view again almost a mile away, in a somewhat shabbier neighborhood where he had a friend or four on every block. Charity Santa would get better reception but smaller donations here, but he needed the respite to get his groove back.

It wasn't long, though, before he realized something was wrong, wrong, wronger than wrong. This was his home turf, where he got invited round for dinner and summoned for middle-of-the-night emergencies. He'd performed at several local block parties. Scary face or not, he was a known quantity. He'd be recognized here, and he'd be trusted.

And yet even here, every kid who saw through his jolly red costume backpedalled furiously and ran like hell, some in tears. Several of them were kids he knew, even. Jacqueline and Rabi had joined him for a snowball fight a few days ago, but Jacqueline's face went almost as white as his when he called out to her, and she grabbed Rabi's hand and disappeared up an alley.

By the time he'd gone six blocks, word seemed to have spread and foot traffic had slowed to a trickle. He'd only seen Gotham go this quiet when the rumor mill churned up some solid news of danger, or a large-scale fight was obviously about to break out, or major tragedy had just struck. He could clear a street like this with a warning, but not usually with a visit.

What was this? Jokester sank onto the low brick stoop of #247 and burrowed one hand through his fluffy white beard so he could prop his chin on it. "It's like suddenly nobody likes me," he muttered, and gave his bell a disconsolate ring.

The chime spread cleanly through the little inlet of silence that had opened around him, and J closed his eyes to take comfort in its straightforward beauty.

Then they shot open, as instinct hurled him backward off the steps—the brush of shadow across his face, the slight reflection of the bell's clear note off a rapidly-approaching solid form, the faintest disruption of air; nothing consciously noticeable, but enough that he'd known. He barely missed braining himself on a fire hydrant, but escaped the swoop of the hell-kite now standing like a patch of pure night on the brick front steps of a Gotham tenement.

Huh. New outfit.

The birdsuit had gone through a lot of versions over the years, and now had apparently reached the apex of its long-running shift toward minimalism and away from feathers (which J took credit for inspiring with his razor wit), and plumage was now suggested only by an artfully scalloped edge to the cape. There was no sign of blue or white or bronze in the entire getup—in fact, if the cape had been crimson, he would have finally made a matched pair with Talon.

The glowering pillar of black, Jokester was willing to concede, made a statement. "Nice suit," he panted. "Very you."

He scrambled around to the far side of the hydrant, the cushion in the front of his coat swaying ridiculously, and threw one of his two smoke bombs. Owlman detoured around the smoke to attack, which wasn't ideal but gave J an opening all the same by controlling his trajectory. He launched a spinning kick, which didn't land, and ducked under the return punch, the fluffy white bobble at the end of his hat drawing wild arcs through the air.

Nuts. He thought he'd manage to bruise the tyrant's ribs, for a second there. He fell back a little, wishing fiercely for his hammer, or any gear at all. Or Harley. Or Harvey. Or Ed. Alonzo. Dulcita. Edna. Somebody. At least for moral support.

Okay, not Edna, not anywhere near this maniac; she'd be too good a target to resist. Feeling lonely wasn't the most propitious start to a fight, was all.

Still, he thought, leading the Owl over a treacherous patch of ice and evading a grab for his neck, he could do this much on his own.

They'd elevated it almost to a dance, by now. And J was the less predictable of the tow of them. So long as he stayed alert and kept on the defensive, all evasion and no counterattack, his feathered nemesis couldn't touch him. Usually. Most of his hurts happened when he took stupid risks, trying to save someone or get a hit in. Or when an accomplice stepped into play. He was keeping a sharp eye out for Talon—the boy was edging toward all grown up, and more dangerous than ever.

Leapfrogging back over a parked car out of the way of a punch, J caught hold of a street sign by the pole, kicked off the curb, and whirled himself around it fast enough that the Owl was the one falling back hurriedly, to avoid a double-footed kick in the throat. J gave a cackle and let go, just as his spin hit maximum velocity, sending himself careening through the air clear across the street.

"Whoooohoohohohoho!" he shouted as he tumbled, to distract himself from a hint of motion-sickness. "Santa can fly!" He kicked off the front of the yellow brick building to spin his feet under him, and landed behind his archenemy.

Who had not been prepared for the maneuver, but unfortunately prioritized getting turned around, drawing back, and generally protecting himself from flying Santas highly enough that J barely got one solid hit out of it. A second later, the shower of some weird new matte-black beakarang-shuriken things he must've had made to match the new suit kept J pinned down long enough that his advantage was lost.

So far Jokester had been kind of enjoying the fight. The simple absoluteness of it was as comforting in its way as the bell had been; survival left no space for fretting.

But now things got complicated: as he took a step forward, hoping to keep the bird on the retreat a little longer because giving any sign that he might be in any way even slightly afraid of Jokester ticked Owlman off like nothing else, which made it the funniest thing, his peripheral vision caught motion—Talon, he thought at first, swooping in to take him down hard, but when he spared a second to look straight on, he found it was two things, neither of them a ninja bird of doom. One was the round, terrified face of a small local boy he knew as Billy Seavers (who'd apparently made the unfortunate fashion choice to buzz off his stylish cornrows sometime in the past week, how sad), plastered against the side of a parked pickup truck.

The other was one of the elongated throwing stars the Owl had hurled at him earlier, wedged in a crack in the granite foundation of the yellow house…one end blinking with the steady baleful light J recognized as a promise of imminent explosion.

J dove forward, abruptly devoid of thoughts unrelated to getting Billy out of the blast radius.

The thing was, he wasn't the only one diving.

Before he could get to Billy and throw him clear, his shoulder slammed against Owlman's. J rolled with the impact and up across Owlman's back in time to drop to his knees between Billy and the bomb as it burst, scattering shards of stone like little knives.

Only two made it through the heavy Santa padding enough to sting in his back, and at first he thought the layer of polyester stuffing had swallowed up most of the slivers entirely and Billy hadn't been in all that much danger after all, until he turned and found that the Owl had straightened behind him as soon as they'd parted, and, unfathomably, taken the bulk of the shrapnel on his body armor.

J's mouth fell open and got full of synthetic white hair, around which he asked, "Did you…do that on purpose?"

The response came with a familiar look of austere scorn. "Not for you."

"Well duh—look, sonny, get moving already before something else blows up."

The Owl followed Billy with his eyes as he took Jokester's suggestion and fled, just barely not crying, but didn't try to stop the child. "Y'know him?" J hazarded. He didn't see how he could, but it was the only thing that made sense. He'd intentionally avoided saying Billy's name just now, to see whether Owlman would betray knowledge of it.

The big man shook his head.

"But…you did that for him, right? For just some kid?"

A long second of considering silence, and a stiff nod.

"Since when d'ya care?" J burst out.

It overlapped eerily with Owlman's gruff but better-enunciated, "Since when do you care?"

J leapt into the resultant second of silence, full of affront. "Since when wouldja think I don't? It's always been about helping people, featherhead."

"Really."

The word was sardonic, clipped, incredulous, with more than a hint of that aristocratic sneer that made J keep coming back to the Wayne theory, but that incredulity alone made it one of the most human moments the Owl had betrayed in years. Maybe the even-more-stylized outfit reflected a profound personal crisis or something, and the bastard was finally going to start loosening up.

J snorted as he got to his feet and brushed slush and dirt ruefully off his formerly white gloves. At this point he was going to have to call the costume a loss and do his best to pay back the folks at the Mission. Darn it. It was bad enough he'd already abandoned the day's donations. "Yes really. I know you're an egotist but I didn't think you really thought I let myself in for this kind of grief just to get to you."

The Owl was standing again, too, tense to move, and J stayed ready to dodge. "What was the point of this?" the Owl demanded, instead of attacking. Looking J in his Santa suit up and down. "The costume."

J squinted, favoring first one eye and then the other. "Are you asking me what's the meaning of Santa Claus?"

"Joker."

"Birdbrain." J stuck his tongue out, which wasn't as good an outlet for his feelings as thumping Owlman over the head, but you couldn't have everything. He guessed he couldn't complain about getting his name mangled, though; he'd started that one. Way back at the beginning.

The Owl stood still. He really hadn't brought any minions, it seemed like, and he was out in broad daylight, and he'd tried to shield a kid with his body. Compared to that, and the new suit, standing still wasn't weird at all, but it sent a prickle up J's neck, and he yanked the itchy wig and hat off with a grimace and flung them pettishly at his enemy.

Who dodged, like he expected the Santa hat or the fluffy beard to be stuffed with explosives or something—which, alright, not totally out of the question if he'd been expecting to fight today, though throwing explosives around a populated area was kind of a super last resort—which gave J a much bigger window than he'd been expecting to withdraw. He had no idea what they were even fighting about exactly, besides the general mutual hate, and he was done for the day.

Even he had a craziness quotient, especially when none of his friends were around to play off of and get up a proper banter.

He was around a corner and halfway up the next block when the Owl landed in front of him in a billow of cape. "Aw, come on, Scrooge!" J howled, flinging a slushball in each hand and going for a legsweep that very nearly almost worked, due to the distracting qualities of slush all up the side of the jerk's stupid head. "It's Christmas! Can't ya give a guy a break?"

His uppercut just brushed the end of the man's chin, and since he didn't have time to move back out of reach before Owlman recovered from that, he kneed him. Not in the groin—he'd fractured his kneecap last time he tried that—but further up the abdomen, where the creep couldn't have rigid armour because it would impede his ability to bend. That knocked him backward and off-balance enough for J to take a back handspring out of reach, a move from Harley's playbook that he had adopted with relish.

The Owl didn't attack immediately, and J took the opportunity to get his feet firmly planted and look around for any good improvised weapons. There was a rusty steel barrel that had recently held a fire, two rickety folding chairs, some newspaper, and half a brick.

He threw a chair. Wished he still had the Santa hat because then he could put the brick in it and have an excellent bludgeoning weapon; getting a sock off would take too long and mean he was half barefoot, and his gloves weren't nearly big enough to fit even half-bricks.

The chair hadn't hit, and he fell back and threw the brick, too, since he wasn't going to be able to make a flail. He should just stop leaving the house unarmed. And possibly get Ed to look into making radios they could carry everywhere because he was starting to need backup, stat.

"Are we really doing this today?" He clicked his tongue when Owlman ducked under the brick and kept coming. Scooped up another couple handfuls of slushy snow and stayed on the retreat. "I mean, doncha have holiday-related responsibilities, big guy? Family and friends to shop for? Okay, maybe not friends."

He laughed, but not so hard he took his eyes off his opponent. "Second cousin? Office party? Pet cat? Please tell me there's somebody in your life more important than little old moi or I might just cry—" He caught the moment when irritation slipped into the distracting early bubble of real anger and struck, a gravel-laced snowball right in the kisser and one over the eyes—the headpiece protected old featherface from the worst of it, unfortunately, but the initial sting and the muck plastered across his vision was all the opportunity Jokester needed to snatch up the abandoned fire-barrel and smash it over Owlman's head.

The barrel burst in a scream and crash of rust and a massive cloud of ash, and by then Jokester was already running, down the block and into an alleyway and tarnation this fence was not here last week, scramble up, jump like a squirrel, fire escape, dumpster, fire escape, roof, new alley—

And then something spun tight around both ankles, jerking them together, and he hit the dirt and skidded another couple of yards on his stomach. If he hadn't had his arms free he would have wound up facefirst in somebody's used condom, ew ew and also ew, but he stopped his slide and was just shoving himself up onto his knees to see about untangling the whatever-it-was, when something hit him from behind like approximately two hundred and forty pounds of highly trained bricks, and his face was in the dirt again.

Where had the little round Santa glasses gone exactly? 'Not poking him in the eye' was probably all the answer he was going to get. He shook with the kind of laughter that happens when you don't have enough breath to make any noise, and tried for a double-footed kick, since there was no one to pin his legs today. Even if he wasn't sure how they'd wound up tied together. New toy? Maybe somebody had been opening his Christmas presents early.

The kick landed, but with no real force, and in response Owlman grabbed him by the back of the head and pushed it meaningfully down. "No tricks."

Chapter Text

No tricks indeed, Jokester thought, a tad bitterly. Tyrant.

There was a heavy knee in his back and a hand in his hair and part of him volunteered that this seemed like pretty much the ideal moment for having a flashback.

Right, you do that, he delegated, slightly waspish. And while you're busy enjoying your traumatic reruns, I will be dealing with the here and now. He might dare Owlman to try for a redo on his murder like it was his job, but that didn't mean today was ever a good day to die.

"You know," said the Owl, worryingly dry, "purple isn't a Christmas color."

J jerked at his left arm, the least securely pinned, and snorted. Fashion commentary, now. It wasn't like he'd asked to look like this. "What, you want I should dye it red every December? Or green to go with Santa? I had a wig!"

Now, generally Jokester liked a sense of humor, and would go out of his way to nurture and encourage it in others. Anybody who laughed at his jokes was automatically raised in his esteem. The fact that Owlman never seemed to get the joke was one of his many complaints about the man's general character.

Unfortunately, the rare occasions when Owlman made jokes of his own correlated closely with occasions when he did something especially inventively horrible. They weren't even funny ones. Travesty. Outrage.

Now he only made a small, scornful sound, like a hybrid of a huff and a snort, and pressed a little harder on the back of J's skull. "Joker."

There he went with the name-mangling again. As insulting diminutives went, J'd heard better, but considering the requirements the bully's dignity seemed to lay on him, it was probably the best he could do. He snickered. "Butterbeak."

He was expecting at least a twist at his hair for that one, but Owlman just demanded grimly, as though he hadn't heard, "What was in the candy?"

"Wha…? I dunno. Ow! Hehehehe, ow, heh, wow, okay, you're serious, but I'm serious! Sugar, peppermint? Emulsifiers, whatever those are. I'm not a candy maker. Tumpty-tum-tum, the candy-man caaaan and ow again. What's your damage, ya maniac?"

"I don't think that's your question to ask."

"Yeah, what was I thinking, this is a totally adequate level of torture, carry on!"

"If I'm torturing you, you'll know."

"Kehehe, yeah, I remember. Ow, again. Look, buddy, cross my heart and hope to die, there is no scheme I would ever pull that involved drugging random small children. This was not a plot. My life doesn't actually revolve around you."

There was a moment of silence, without any particular intensification of pain, that felt almost baffled. Like Owlman honestly couldn't parse not being the most important thing in his life, the fulcrum around which all his efforts revolved. J didn't act that obsessed, did he? No, it was just His Exalted Downy Majesty being an egomaniac. J was only a little obsessed. And it took a lot of focus to fight all those evil resources with what he had available! He needed to obsess sometimes or his work would go nowhere! He was an artist. He was supposed to be unhinged. He just had other things going on, too.

"Aw, sweetheart," he crooned, though he couldn't hold back a snicker. "Are you feelin' neglected? Is that what this is about?"

His face hit the icy grit harder than ever, and the grip on his right arm made the bones creak. "I will find out, one way or another," Owlman promised, in one of those icy voices of supreme threat he generally only pulled out when Jokester had actually done something. Maybe the style shift and increased wisecracking wasn't so much a sign of loosening up as going further round the twist?

"Batman!" called a clear young voice from somewhere above them, before the knives came into play or he could think of anything to respond, and the fire escape J had taken down here rattled with brief contact. "Where have you been? The Joker's taken a whole toy store…hostage…."

The boy trailed off just as he hit pavement and Jokester got his neck craned around enough to grin up at him.

He looked confused, but so far as J was concerned things had just gotten full-on surreal.

The face under the domino mask looked familiar, but the cherry-red, leaf-green, and canary-yellow weren't even necessary to make it hard to see Talon. There'd been emotion running hot and sharp through his voice and there was animation in every line of him. It was like Talon inside out and backward. Talon as a real teenage boy, instead of the unconvincing puppet J was used to.

"Robin," said the man holding him by the hair, evidently perturbed by the news about the toy store.

Jokester cracked up. He couldn't help it. Not-Talon took a step back, visibly unsettled, which was even funnier, but it was hard to go into proper paroxysms when someone was kneeling on you. Though, feet free, could drum them. "Sorry!" he got out. "Ahahah, sorry, sorry, hehehe…sorry, kid, hold up! Hang on, please, haha. What's a Batman?"

When the kid just pulled a sort of grouper face, J rattled on. "Isn't a batman, like, a personal valet? Outdated slang from other countries isn't my, my thing, but I'm pretty sure…like Jeeves and Wooster, what what?"

"Are you sure about that hostage situation?" the man on his back demanded of the boy in the yellow cape, who shook off his astonishment at J to look the man in the face and give a firm nod.

Possibly-Batman-whatever-that-was let go of his hair. And then suddenly the weight on his back and arm was gone, and he flipped onto his back at once, to see that the dark figure had fallen back and was blocking off the opposite end of the alley, so the two of them were boxing him in.

J thought it was a little premature to worry about him running away, but shrugged and applied himself to the…cables wrapped around his legs. They were really nice stuff, cords knitted out of a mass of tiny wires for a maximum of strength and flexibility, but they were only held on by the clever twist of some small black balls around each other. Hopeless for his legs, but a few seconds' work with hands. He tucked the bonds inside his ruined costume as he stood up, brushing away what dirt and ash he could. He could get some use out of cables like that.

"So," he said, keeping his body language open and friendly as possible in front of a guy who'd just almost given him trauma flashbacks and threatened to torture him, and with a kid of unknown abilities at his back. "I'm thinking we might have us a case of mistaken identity. In which case I'm sorry about the barrel," he added, because now he got a look that glorious inky black was now a muck of sticky grey ash, flecked with red rust. It wasn't like people were choosy about what they burned in those, either. Minimum, he'd nailed the guy with a bunch of old cigarette butts.

The boy behind him made a funny little noise, and Jokester glanced over his shoulder at him with his friendliest expression. "He's fine," he promised. "So," to his ash-streaked recent nemesis, "you aren't Owlman?"

"He's Batman," said the kid. J did a one-eighty and smiled at him again. If he was the talker, he got the attention.

"Marvelous! So, young man, am I right in guessing that a Batman is someone less interested in killing me than an Owlman is? And may I ask your name?"

"I'm Robin," said Not-Talon, expression almost as blank as the person-he-looked-like-but-wasn't. "And Batman isn't going to kill you."

J rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. Not being killed was a low low bar and all but clearing it was always good. "Excellent! Pleasure to meet you!"

"And you are?" came the familiar silky growl from behind him. Batman, whatever that was, certainly sounded like someone intending to kill him.

"Glad you asked. I am that maven of entertainment…the Jokester! Tadah!" A flourishing bow, one for each half of his audience, and nobody went for the neck when he took his eyes off them, which was something to note. "The people's hero," he added as he straightened, with a self-deprecating wiggle of his fingers. "Champion of justice, defender of the helpless! And, occasionally, charity Santa." He brushed at the front of his costume some more, not out of any real hope of getting the dirt out of the white faux fur but just because it was a real mess.

…the folks at the Mission were probably a lot less likely to believe he'd been attacked by a Batman who'd mistaken him for somebody called Joker, than that Owlman had kicked him all the way up and down Beverly Street. But he couldn't lie and say the latter, because for one thing he was increasingly suspecting nobody on Beverly Street would remember seeing anything.

"Gotham's probably not the best place to set up as a clown," said Robin guardedly.

"On the contrary, I've been an established comedy act in Gotham for years! The clown thing is a tad more recent, I give." He paused, drifting to put his back against one alley wall so he could look between halves of his audience without starting to feel like a spinning top. "I went by Red Hood before," he added experimentally. Recognition joined the confusion and distrust visible on Robin's strangely expressive face, but didn't displace them. Batman was a closed book.

"I gotta say," J continued, picking up steam, making his smile as crooked and careless as could be, "nobody's mistaken me for anybody since Owlman personalized my face." He laid the tip of one finger at the corner of his mouth and then gave it a flick that perfectly mimicked the passage of a knife through cheek muscle, to show what he meant. Robin flinched, fractionally. Batman didn't. "It's a novelty."

"And this…Owlman. Was he responsible for the rest of your disfigurement as well?"

"Pfeheh, rude. No, I like it, straightforward is good…yeah. He was trying to drown me in acid, mind you; I got off light with the palette swop."

"Why?" Robin demanded. Why easy? Oh, why drowning in acid.

J shrugged. He wasn't responsible for explaining Owlman's black-hearted little species of crazy; he could have given it a shot, but he felt like that was granting the man altogether too much recognition. "Gave his little criminal empire some trouble. I'm a simple entertainer at heart, but I do love my hometown. Like to see people smilin', ya know? So I branched out. You know how it is, get a stage name, punch out a few legbreakers, foil a murder plot, crack a few annoying jokes, and suddenly you've got a price on your head…hehe. Old news."

"Is he for real?" Robin asked. Jokester laughed, and the expressions on both their faces grew oddly fixed, but Batman said,

"I think he might be, Robin."

"I'm right here," J pointed out. "I'm real. You seem like it. We couldn't have missed each other in the same Gotham for ten years, and we prob'ly couldn't have missed an extra Gotham lying around, and I don't really think anybody could've time-traveled up a timeline where Talon was this funny, so I'm mostly like 'I really hope this isn't some kind of massive reality-warping effect that didn't affect me, again,' except there's apparently a bad guy who looks like me, so I'm in some kind of alternate universe?"

"Was that logic?" Robin had gone from incredulous to sort of smirking while J talked, but not in a really mean way. He looked like he might have laughed if his boss hadn't been there. J thought it might take him a long time to get tired of getting expressions out of Talon's face.

He folded his arms haughtily. "I can logic! I can also lateral thinking. I have multiple modes."

Alternate universe. Alternate universe! Ed was going to be so jealous. Alonzo wasn't going to believe a word of it. He kind of wanted to explore the whole thing, except if everyone was afraid of him it would just get depressing.

Of course, he might not have much choice. "Uh, if you guys are such experts, any chance you know how to get me home? I wouldn't want to, I dunno, deform reality on you or something."

The…possibly-heroes exchanged a look. Batman then looked sternly at Jokester.

"If you answer all our questions honestly and allow us to perform some tests, we should be able to return you to your…hometown."

J pulled a face. Tests. "Folks at home do need me," he said. Maybe he could find somebody else to send him, though? "You had a lot of experience with this kinda thing?"

"Some," shrugged Robin.

"Better'n me," J admitted. Bah. He did need help, clearly, but putting himself in the power of someone who was so clearly practically Owlman went against the grain. He cocked his head. "Look, didn't you guys have a hostage situation to deal with?"

Batman's lips thinned. He turned to his sidekick. "Robin."

"I am not staying behind to watch him," said Robin, folding his arms. "Joker's had time to get his prisoners and all arranged to his best advantage. You need me."

There was refusal to compromise in the young man's stiff neck and the lift of his chin, and J waited to see what Batman would do. He knew what defiance meant to Owlman; letting it go unpunished was like punching a hole in his own universe. Whatever else he might be, Batman was clearly a control freak in his own right, who expected to be obeyed. Lens-covered eyes locked. One pair challengingly tilted up, one implacably down. J held his breath.

Batman scowled. "I suppose you have an alternate plan?"

"He could come with us." Robin proposed this solution with only a little hesitance, which said to J that he knew this proposal could very well be rejected, but that he felt secure in his right to make proposals. "It's not very fair to turn him over to the police when he hasn't done anything," he added reasonably.

"I like the first plan!" J chimed in, waving one hand in the air. "If I get a vote, I vote for Robin's idea! I mean, I've never been arrested by cops who weren't on the take from Featherbutt, but I generally find it's not a fun experience." Tasering he could handle—he privately suspected he had some kind of superhuman resistance to electricity, though he wasn't about to start looking into why—but dirty cops had a thing for kicking him in the ribs that tended to end in tears.

The scowl moved to him, but J had borne up under far darker disapproval in his time, and beamed back.

"Fine."

Robin flashed a grin, and J made a triumphant fist. Almost offered the kid a high-five, but thought the better of it. Robin might try harder not to team up on Batman if his attention was drawn to his doing it.

"Huzzah," he said instead. Rubbed his grimy gloves together, and then pointed with slight hesitation back the way Batman had chased him before taking him down. "Lemmee get my stuff before we go?"

Apparently wherever they were going was in roughly that direction, because they let him retrace his steps without much fuss, so long as he was quick. Batman was glaring, but that was clearly just what his face did, like J couldn't help but smile. Everything was just where he'd left it, even the bucket of donations on the steps at #247, which really said something about how scared people were of this Joker, if the rapidly empty street earlier hadn't been enough. The bell was fine. He even found his granny-glasses, only slightly bent. He pulled the long red hat on, but put the wig and beard away. They'd been scratchy enough the first time, and now they were wet.

The car was impressive. "This car is impressive," Jokester announced, when they reached it, three blocks from where Batman had intercepted him. "Is it a car? Or did you retrofit a tank to have sleek sporty lines? If you tell me it can fly I will not even be surprised." He went down on his belly to get a look at the undercarriage and whether it was a) armored and b) recognizably that of an automobile.

Batman hauled him away again by the back of his jacket, and he stuck out his tongue but didn't protest. He saw Robin turning away to hide a smile, and cackled inwardly. Outwardly, he just cocked his head at the Batman.

"So, am I sitting in the back?"

"There is no back."

"What, a two-seater? What do you do when you're traveling with friends? Does this mean you don't have any?"

Robin snickered, and then tried very hard to pretend he hadn't. "I have friends," he volunteered dryly. "He has people he scowls at differently."

"Hehe! Okay, then. Do I go in the trunk?"

"It's full."

"Oh, hey, you have handholds on the top! …that's where I'm sitting, isn't it."

Batman's teeth ground just like Owlman's. He nodded.

"Awesome."

Less awesome was that they cuffed him there, but it wasn't like he couldn't get loose given like seven seconds. "Just don't roll the car," he said as he settled in and the retractable part of the roof closed over his hosts. "If you make me into clown jelly I will haunt you for years. Tapdancing when you're trying to sleep and pulling faces during serious meetings. I know seven hundred and thirty-two different knock-knock jokes. And I'll be invisible to everyone but you so if you react you'll look like a lunatic."

Don't roll the car, he could almost hear Robin telling his boss inside, and he chortled to himself and held on tight. The engine roared to life, and they were off.

People were staring. Of course they were. He was Santa chained to the top of a tank. People were staring, which meant he was on stage. He filled his lungs, and grinned.

"Haaave a holly-jolly Christmas, and when you walk down the street, say hello to friends you know, and everyone you meet. Oh, ho, the mistletoe, hung where you can see! Sooomebody waits for you, kiss 'er once for me! Have a holly-jolly—"

"Jokester," rumbled Batman's voice through a speaker directly in front of him, humorless as the Owl. "Be quiet."

"You are no fun at all."

But he stopped singing, anyway. The man already made him ride on the roof, in handcuffs. J knew when pushing somebody was going to leave him with no slack left to work with. Instead, he practiced his handstands. Being cuffed to the vehicle was actually great for practicing moving-car acrobatics, because it meant that even if he fell off he wouldn't hit the ground.

Dislocate an arm, possibly, but not hit the ground.

The toy store this Joker character had taken over was way uptown, fancy-schmancy and the police had it all cordoned off. Batman screeched up about a block from their circle and the lid opened up again, expelling Batman and Robin like they tasted bad. Batman had either changed or cleaned up while inside, and the ash was gone, so maybe that was what the car was objecting to. "Okay, so how's the situation look?" Jokester asked brightly, dropping down behind them. He considerately handed the cuffs back to their owner, who didn't attempt to hit him, just gave him a dirty look and put them away.

"Robin, make sure you get the Joker-gas antidote to the seven hostages that have been dosed as quickly as possible."

"How many hostages, total?" J inquired.

"Twenty-three adults and twelve children," said Robin.

"You're only here so we can keep an eye on you," Batman told him.

"Yes, because I'll be so easy to keep track of while you're staging a hostage rescue. C'mon. You know I'm not bad in a fight. Would you stand for it if someone wanted you to not help rescue kids? Let's coordinate. Has he made any demands?"

"Half a case of ginger beer, thirty-seven helium balloons, and the Great Wall of China." Batman's deadpan was perfect, at least as good as Harvey's, and J giggled. The big man ignored him. "He's gotten the ginger beer. Police are in negotiations about the balloons. Everyone knows he doesn't actually care whether he gets what he asked for, but it buys time."

"Do the cops know you're coming?"

"I radioed the Commissioner on the way," Robin said, like being on speaking terms with the Commissioner of Police was perfectly normal. J pulled a jealous face at him.

"Lucky. I know like seven decent cops, and none of them rank above Corporal. Well, Gordon's alright, I guess, but Owlman's got him sewn up tight. If I called Loeb he'd probably try to do some kind of voodoo curse through the phone line. So are they gonna just let you stroll in?"

Batman shook his head. "We'll proceed by stealth. I do plan to do the commanding officer the courtesy of announcing our arrival."

"And then we'll slip in through the back," Robin expanded, closing the indeed-very-full trunk almost noiselessly. Ed would love this thing. "Batman, I have fourteen antidote injectors." He handed half of them over, and both of the local vigilantes stowed the full hypodermics in their belts, to Jokester's fascination. Robin looked like he wished he had more, but there wasn't anywhere to carry it. Obviously Joker's inhalant wasn't an instant killer, so there'd be time to run to the car for supplies in the case of any further poisonings. "Surveillance?" he asked his boss.

Batman held up a palm-sized screen that seemed to have remotely hacked into the security cameras inside the toy store. "No change."

J craned his neck over Robin's shoulder to get a look. Fancy toy store, complete with the larger-than-life-size stuffed animals and hyperrealistic playhouse sets. In the fabulously appointed toy kitchen display was a line of twitching bodies that must be the poisoned hostages; the visible faces were stretched into painful-looking rictus grins. Eesh. At least only one of them was a kid, and that one looked to be in middle school. The rest of the victims were huddled within line-of-sight of the big front windows, tied hand and foot and miserable, with a cluster of what seemed to be gas canisters in the center of the huddle. One window was shattered, though J couldn't tell what had happened to it. Could be a bullet, could be not.

Standing further back, out of sight of the windows, with a revolver in one hand and some kind of bomb in the other, was a lanky man in a purple suit, with green-black hair combed in a dapper style J rather approved of, and an ugly face he knew from mirrors. He understood Batman's confusion perfectly now, but even if his double hadn't been toying with a gun and a terrified five-year-old girl there was a meanness in the other man's smile that Jokester hoped he would have picked up on right away, if they'd met under different circumstances.

"He's on his own," said Robin. "The real danger is any booby-traps focused on the hostages."

"Okay, so, I'll be the diversion," Jokester volunteered. And when Batman and Robin shot him matched quelling looks, just quirked an eyebrow. "What? I'm very diverting. I'll go in first, draw his attention, and then you can bop him over the head or extract the moms and kiddies or whatever your little hearts desire. Except get distracted and play with the toys. Please don't do that."

Batman's mouth made a flat line. Bully for him. "This is a very delicate situation, and the Joker is involved. Even if you distract him, you're likely to be killed."

"Look, he's supposed to be evil me, right? I can guarantee the odds of any version of me destroying something as weird as I'm going to seem before he has a chance to poke at it are pretty low. And if he tries…" J shrugged; pulled a softer smile than he'd usually use around dangerous strangers because after seeing the Joker he wouldn't blame them for reflexively punching him in the grin. "I'll manage. Owlman's been trying to put me down for years." He ran his tongue along the rope of scar tissue on the inside of one cheek. "It never quite takes."

The duo passed silent messages across him, which was especially impressive with both their eyes hidden, and then Batman said, "Very well. Distract. The hostages are priority."

"Of course! Oh, ah, before we go into a fight together—I got a read on Batman's style earlier, but Robin, do you heal?"

"I'm not much of a medic, if that's what you mean. But I can administer antidotes just fine."

"Ehe, nah, thing is, Owlman's chief enforcer, Talon, he has this regeneration thing. If he gets shot he just walks it off, it's crazy. Needed to know how much cover you need, you know?"

"Oh. Well, yeah. Normal human healing only."

"Mmkay! Let's go."

Being a distraction meant going in the front and causing a commotion, raising the priority of communicating with the authorities. Robin went ahead to scout out the rear of the building, while Jokester snuck and Batman ghosted over to the nerve center of the police cordon. J hung back behind the corner of the nearest building and watched Batman slip unnoticed to directly behind the police officer who seemed to be in charge, and then speak.

"Detective Montoya."

The woman started, jerked her gun toward him and then just as quickly away, and narrowed her eyes. "Where have you been? He says he's getting sick of waiting for you, I was just about ready to sent SWAT in and hope we could minimize casualties by hitting hard!"

"Any deaths?" Batman asked, instead of apologizing or offering justifications like a normal human being.

"Not yet, so far as we know." There was a beat. "Well? You're clear to move in."

"One more thing," said Batman.

J popped out from his hiding place and moved forward, both hands held up in exaggerated harmlessness. He waved at Montoya.

"Hi! My name is J, I'm from an alternate universe, and I hate people who mess with kids. I'm here to help!"

"He's the reason I was delayed," Batman informed the detective, while she tried to get her eyes back inside her skull. "He's volunteered to serve as a distraction."

"You don't have to make it sound like it was my fault," J grumbled. "You attacked me, I ran for my life. But yeah. Human target time for Jokester." He smiled engagingly at Montoya, who looked slightly ill, and huffed.

"Fine. Fine. Why do I ever expect anything to be even slightly normal around you? All three of you are clear to move in. I'll tell the boys not to target the creepy Santa."

J pouted, but didn't argue the description.

Batman disappeared, Montoya radioed her people, and Jokester looped around the side of the toy store before crouching down and moving crabwise along the wall under the windows. Distraction and surprise went together like cotton and candy.

He drew nearly even with the broken window, gathered himself up, glanced around to make sure the police weren't freaking out, and did a flying somersault inside. Landed front and center, arms spread, and stabbed a judgmental finger at the clown with the gun.

"Halt, recreant!"

Chapter Text

He drew nearly even with the broken window, gathered himself up, glanced around to make sure the police weren't freaking out, and did a flying somersault inside. Landed front and center, arms spread, and stabbed a judgmental finger at the clown with the gun.

"Halt, recreant!"

Heh, well, that got his attention. In fact, everyone who could manage it was looking at him. Santa, all smudged with dirt and ash like he'd fallen down a few chimneys, calling the criminal to account.

And with no long white beard. Just purple hair falling around his shoulders, and a grin the mirror of the one frozen on the villain's face. But that expression was beginning to thaw, and while this 'Joker' character had set the cartoonish-looking dynamite-wired-to-a-clock bomb down at some point, he still had the revolver. And a tiny hostage, tied at the ankles, within arm's reach.

Distract, distract, distract. Jokester pointed at the criminal again, swelling with a righteous indignation that was only partially put-on. "Yeah, you! How dare you try to spoil toys for children at Christmas? Huh?"

If he'd cared about the answer to his question, he would have been disappointed.

"Wowza!" said his own voice, only it wasn't. It was…

J knew the way the harbor smelled. Bad, mostly. Like a mess of low tide and seagull and machine oil and diesel exhaust and unwashed human. But there was that, and then there was the smell you got when a body had washed up under one of the wharfs and started rotting.

This was the second one.

"Holy doppelgangers, Batman!" the Joker sang out, and then, abruptly, fell into a scowl. "Wrong joke, bad timing, stupid hat, where's Batman? We've all been waiting so patiently." One hand in a strangely pristine white glove twisted in his hostage's hair, and it took all J's acting skills not to react.

He sniffed, instead, drew himself up another inch. "That pointy-eared bully? Off beating up jaywalkers or something, prob'ly," he shrugged, which seemed to amuse the Joker.

Provoking Batman to get a reaction made about as much sense as doing the same thing to Owlman, which J had a history of himself, but what was the endgame here? Batman and Robin and Montoya had approached this like a routine emergency, not a shocking transgression, so either his counterpart was disappointingly unoriginal and kind of sucked at his non-job, or he did worse stuff than this all the time. Which…guh. Don't think about it. Or about Batman's ominous warnings that suggested Joker probably was pretty darn good at being bad.

He cocked his head, not a care in the world. "What's it matter?"

Scornful, but also thick with a private joke, the answer: "Pffft! He was invited to my Christmas Party, and you're just a gatecrasher."

"Well, that's just the kind of thing that happens when you get yourself stuck on the Naughty List," J retorted.

He'd have folded his arms, if this was just an argument, but the other guy had a gun he liked pointing at things, and his other hand inches from a little girl. Freedom of movement was kind of something he wanted to hang onto. He waggled a judgmental finger instead.

The Joker laughed. And that sounded even more like something that had been dead for a week than his speaking voice did, except that made it sound sort of swollen and gooey, and it wasn't, really; it was a high, jerky, cackling banshee noise, but the note was thin and clean, taken just as a sound. It sounded like him. And yet it didn't—at least, he hoped it didn't.

J blew out an irritated breath. "See, that's our problem! How's this funny?"

Secrets tucked themselves into the corners of the Joker's too-wide mouth, and it had been a few years since J's own face in the mirror had made him sick but he was feeling it now, the wrongness. "What? The party environment not jolly enough for you?"

"Kinda not, no. I mean, I can understand not getting it catered, this economic climate, but you could've at least thrown together a potluck, y'know?"

"Refreshments are just waitin' on the guest of honor," Joker retorted, with a worrying leer that said to J there was a boobytrap around here somewhere, he just wasn't deemed worthy of it. Which, hey, he was okay being profiled as not-a-booby.

"Hey, fine," he shrugged, and with a casual roll of his shoulders strolled forward, hands carefully in view. "Guess 'til then we just…circulate?"

Robin had said Joker would have used the time he'd had to get everything just how he wanted it; J trusted local expertise, so that meant he'd gone in assuming everything was where it was for a reason. Joker had set himself up with long aisles of toys stretching out behind him, apparently unconcerned about being attacked from the rear; that said some kind of trap was going on there, though J didn't know evil-him well enough to say whether he was playing bait to get someone sneaking up behind him to walk into a trap, or if he was just okay leaving his back open because he'd secured the rear, or what. The three spread-apart hostage locations, meanwhile, were meant to splinter his attention. (Well, Batman's attention.)

If he'd been a different sort of person, or here with a different goal, it might have caused him real trouble, but in his role as a distraction, fussing over hostage dispersal would just put them in more danger. His path toward Joker looped right slightly, as he passed the knot of miserable tied-up 'guests' (and the ominous canisters that he was just going to say at a guess probably didn't contain helium for party balloons), to make sure none of the hostages were ever directly behind him. It wouldn't stop Joker from shooting them on purpose, but at least it meant dodging was an option if he took a shot at him.

Joker saw what he was doing. Didn't try to stop him, but the sharp points of his molars were showing, he was grinning so wide. J knew a thousand different ways to smile with his face the way it was, and a few hundred of them were some kind of challenge or some kind of threat, but so far as he knew he'd never looked that much like a hungry jackal.

He kept on coming.

"Nyuh-uh!" the Joker burst out, as the distraction-Santa-clown's shoe landed on some invisible line. A gloved hand hauled the little hostage in by one pigtail, across his body like he thought there might be an upcoming need for a cute little bullet-catcher. She sank her teeth into her upper lip and the runnels of tearstains down her cheeks thickened again, but she didn't scream.

Scared enough to make her brave. J'd seen it before, and stranger.

"I think you're gonna stay right there," said the rotting-corpse voice, unnecessarily. He'd already pulled up sharpish. "Unless you don't care if I spoil this little morsel's Christmas forever? Ahahah!"

The little girl's breath stuttered a little over her shaking lower lip and it took everything J had not to react. He'd been ignoring her, up to this point, in hopes Joker would forget to use her as long as possible, but now he let his eyes rake over her—definitely not out of kindergarten yet.

White girl, blue eyes, button nose, pointy chin. He could see why a predator would have zeroed in on her. Shiny Mary Janes, only a few scuffs on her white pantyhose, and she was actually wearing one of those little high-waisted dresses with a taffeta petticoat to make the skirt bell out. Sea-foam green, not pink, but there was lace involved. The blonde curls looked natural, at least, but somebody'd gone to some trouble to get them up into perfectly symmetrical puffs of gold behind each ear.

If Harley'd married a rich blond guy, her daughter would look like that.

Slowly, he raised his hands, palm-out, to show that if there was going to be shooting it wasn't going to be him doing it.

He settled back on his heels, and smiled, narrow and sharp. "Look, I could say something about what kind of coward hides behind a little girl, but I think we both know that conversation wouldn't go anywhere int'resting."

Joker sniggered, and gave a sort of incredulous shake to his head, like a dog with wet ears. Or like J did, when he could tell the joke was funny but he didn't—quite—get it. Yet.

He'd noticed the coldness in J's smile, probably. "Who're you supposed to be, anyway?"

J let himself snicker, too, shrugged one shoulder, loose and easy. "Ghost of Christmas…Fractal?"

"Here to lecture me about the meaning of holiday cheer?" The Joker laughed like oil-slick over bones again. "Hey, you people!" he shouted toward the largest clump of hostages. "Gimme a cheer!"

"Yay," came a ragged, shaken chorus. One of the smaller children, leaning against his mother's side for comfort since with their arms bound she couldn't hold him, nor he her, broke into a sniveling wail, and J stepped sharply, attention-catchingly forward when he saw not-his face crease with sudden irritation and one thin gloved finger move to caress the gun trigger as its muzzle drifted toward the group. Most guys, the gun would have snapped around to him when he pushed the limits, but the Joker turned it back on the kid, just a few degrees from the side of her head, grinning smug challenge. Drat. At least he didn't look like he was actively considering firing in the next second anymore.

"Not 'xactly thinking lecture," J answered the question, keeping his body language loose and open and counting on his long-polished keeping-the-bad-guys-talking skills to get away with crossing the invisible line. He'd made it to just inside three meters from Joker and his hostage-in-hand now, deliberately ignoring her and the way her teeth were going to break the skin any second if her captor kept tugging at her hair.

He still wasn't feeling great about this party, but he was starting to feel the flow of it.

Jokester and his friends, they'd dealt with hostage crises before. The hostage-taker was usually as terrified as his victims, or boiling mad to the point of furious gesticulation. Joker was neither of those things. But his every motion, so far, and every word from his hyena-wide mouth had said, in some way, look at me! Pay attention! Look! Here!

J knew that behavior. He knew it from the inside. Which meant he knew that it didn't necessarily mean much of anything—wanting attention was part of the human condition, and some people just enjoyed it more, and more indiscriminately, and the performer's high was kind of worth chasing in itself. But he also knew something about the moments when it meant a lot, when every flourish was notice me and every bow tell me I'm real.

He had no idea what was wrong with the Joker, not really. What had happened, world to world, that made the two of them so different. But he knew people—that was his thing, his specialty; in some ways he was better than Harley even if he wasn't nearly as good at putting what he saw into words—and he knew the twist of sick recognition in his chest, and he knew that endless aching for acknowledgment.

And Batman had been so surprised by my life doesn't actually revolve around you.

J could read the writing on the wall.

"Maybe a pantomime?" Joker mugged, with something even nastier in his sneer, but his gun hand was still relaxed, an easy, flexible threat, not taking aim, not pressing cold metal against the little girl's forehead.

"Sure," J shrugged again, with a chuckle. Because yeah, that was a joke, but this really was a show. He knew how to join a show. "I can be Harlequin, you can be Clown; I'll save the day and get the girl, and you can run offstage pursued by police!"

Unexpectedly, Joker found this hilarious; he shook so hard with laughter that J took the chance of advancing several steps, so hard that the hero in the Santa hat almost didn't catch the moment when the villain's shoulders jerked back, just before his wrist twitched in and his finger on the trigger tightened, and maybe he wouldn't actually kill his best hostage but counting on this guy to do the sensible thing was just not a good gamble—

Luckily, he had caught the moment, and by the time the gun went off J had already barreled into the Joker, giggling wildly with the sharply breaking tension, smacking the weapon up so it shot out a light, grabbing for it and getting the Joker's wrist instead.

Wrestling for control of the revolver, keeping it up where nobody was in the line of fire, wasn't so hard, but he was digging his fingers into the tendons that usually made people drop things and getting nowhere. (Where was Batman, seriously, this was not distraction anymore but he could not be blamed.) "Here!" laughed the rot-oozing voice, suddenly, and then there was a warm little body against his chest, and he braced it, automatically; Joker's suddenly-free left hand came up and wrenched against J's one, winning the competition for the gun. It was already coming down again. "You got the girl! Now save the day! Ahahahahahah!"

Time to feel stupid later.

There were about forty feet between the Joker's position at the mouths of the toy aisles, and the front wall. J ran, flat-out, zigging and zagging and trying very hard not to backstop any position with civilians, clutching the hostage tight to him and crossing his fingers for luck, because—there, yes, the bang and whirr, and he ducked as he ran.

That one had missed, but there were at least another four shots to go. J could almost feel the barrel lining up with his back, as a check-out counter loomed in his path, and he had to jump it without using his hands and without presenting a clear shot at the brave little bundle in his arms. Here went nothing.

He jumped, at the same time the gun behind them barked.

The thing about bullets—the thing to remember, thing numero uno, at least when it came to protecting other people from being hit with them (after it was too late to stop guns going off in the first place), was that they were fully capable of going right through a person. They slowed down in the process, sure, and past a certain range you could massively reduce the chances of someone dying by taking a bullet aimed at them, but the toy store wasn't that big. A human shield was better than nothing, but unless you had armor on it was a last resort for reasons totally unrelated to the fact that being it tended to get you killed. Though that mattered, too.

J wasn't wearing Kevlar. The bullet sliced through his side like a high-velocity knife through marshmallow, and kept moving. Shattered against the steel window frame.

He'd jerked himself and his precious burden six inches to the left with a knee against the counter in the last instant, and as the pain seared through him he tumbled on, hit the ground shoulder-first and kept rolling right up onto his feet, didn't let himself stop once he got there. The kid in his arms was shaking harder than ever, snot and tears dribbling down her face, but a lightning-quick once-over as he ran the rest of the short distance to the front wall showed no sign she'd taken any part of the hit. Almost lost somewhere in the background of crazed laughter and the girl's tiny, rapid breaths, there came a metal click, as Joker manually re-cocked his revolver behind them.

"Tuck and roll, kid!" J shouted as time ran out, and with that, he threw her out through the broken window.

He didn't stay to watch how she flew. She might land well, or she might not, and there was going to be massive freaking out even if she didn't get a scratch, because she had his blood all over her dress, but she was safer out there than in here. Defenestration of child accomplished, he needed to move.

Left hand clamped over his right side, he dove to use the register for cover. Too many hostages to stay here and make Joker come to him, though. There might be as few as two shots left, but that was enough to kill two helpless people, and anyway, he wasn't going to count on it. That revolver looked custom.

Joker had a gun and he didn't, and based on their one little tussle J had the feeling he had the advantage hand-to-hand anyway, so the number one goal was to get close. Primary condition: no getting anybody shot. Including himself.

Batman was officially late to the stupid Christmas party. Jokester had never had the kind of job where you attended office parties and griped about your coworkers, but he bet this was exactly how it felt when the one guy who was supposed to bring pizza flaked and left you to get stuck awkwardly making small talk with the boss, while you drank cup after cup of punch and hoped nobody had spiked it.

He was mad now, he realized. Not at Batman, unless it turned out he didn't have a good reason for flaking and was just messing around. At his double, mostly. Because taking hostages and poisoning people and scaring kids that much, that sucked, that was so low, but now J'd seen (felt) him honestly try to the hurt the kid. Kill her, even. This was real. His instincts had been telling him evil, evil, evil but part of him had just kept believing it was some kind of horribly over-involved joke.

This was no joke.

Shuffling silently to the far right of his hiding place took a few precious seconds, as the blood spreading down his side got far enough that the leading edge was cold against his thigh and he devoutly hoped he wouldn't do anything embarrassing like pass out, and then he pressed his lips together, braced his feet to make sure he wouldn't slip, and erupted out into the open space and ran for it.

Joker thought he was hilarious. Running away, running back, run run run little clown. J watched him raise the gun, almost shoot him in the face, and then decide against it, and aim for the knees instead. Jumped that, and then he was back in his enemy's space.

He dropped and twisted and kicked—up—in the move that had allowed him to knock Owlman clean off his feet three times running before the featherhead managed to adjust, proving that the sequence was indeed 'crazy-stupid enough to work,' thanks for your faith, Hye-Lim-shi. Joker dodged aside this first try, eel-like, as though he'd been expecting exactly that, but that didn't matter much because J was still moving, hands on the ground to give him the extra spin to whip his other foot around and send the gun flying.

He whooped, and hooked Joker's ankle with one hand as he tumbled heels-over-head toward upright, hoping to throw his evil twin off-balance, but instead he had to jackknife sharply (to his injured side's displeasure) to get clear when Joker stamped one heel and swung at him with the nasty little knife that had shot out of the end of his oddly shiny shoe. Which was definitely not playing fair, but still an improvement on taking hostages.

Joker was…sort of chortling. Sort of giggling. It sounded like a creaky door and J really hoped he didn't make that sound himself. Or at least that if he did, the door sounded less like it was installed in a haunted house.

J landed a punch across the jaw that the Joker shook off, then evaded another sharp-toed kick, distantly aware of the astounded attention of the hostages who were tied facing in their direction. Wondering who, if anyone, was watching over the security feed. He liked to know his audience; made them easier to play to.

Joker didn't care about a gut-punch any more than he had the face, and J surprised himself with a split-second of empathy with Owlman, because it must be just as annoying to hit him and get laughed at. Well, good. That was the point.

J hit his counterpart four more times and only took one glancing punch to the cheekbone, which was satisfying even if it didn't seem to be getting anywhere. He kept thinking he saw something flashing in Joker's beetle-green eyes, something that could be meaningful or at least useful, but whenever he tried to catch it it was just emptiness, like a glass Christmas ball crushing to shards that tattered your palm.

Then he danced back from another swipe with that stupid kick-knife, and his feet tangled in a giant stuffed lion, knocking him off-balance and almost flat on his back. Wakeup call, funny man: You're paying too much attention to your opponent and not enough to your surroundings. He wobbled out of the way of an uppercut, disentangled his feet, kicked the lion into Joker's face, and used the moment that his opponent was blinded to duck into what seemed to be an aisle devoted to traditional playthings like hobby-horses and bouncy balls, to plot a little and get his head in the game. It looked like this was going to be an honest-to-goodness fight, and he was still only equipped for collecting charitable donations, not beating up crazy people. Actually, he'd left the bucket with Batman's car, so he wasn't even equipped for that.

Joker, out on the open part of the sales floor, cackled like wicked witch. "Come out, come out, wherever you are…"

J ghosted back another few feet. There was nowhere to hide, in the aisle; as soon as Joker stalked down to this level and glanced left, he was going to see him. He could probably scramble back to where the aisles divided and start playing hide-and-seek for maximum distraction, but that risked the maniac losing interest in him and going back to get his hands on another hostage. Also, it meant fewer chances to punch him. Decisions, decisions.

He took another step back. Plink, said something to his right. He spared it a raised eyebrow, and found that the largest jack-in-the-box on the shelf had chosen this moment to activate, under its own power, the handle on the side revolving slowly through the little tune J didn't remember learning but knew the words to all the same: round and round the cobbler's bench, the monkey chased the wea-sel. The monkey thought it was all in fun…

POP! went Jack, erupting from the box, nearly life-size, with Joker's face—his own face—looming under his jester's cap, behind the sharp knife rocketing forward in his little puppet hands.

Bemused, J tipped his head out of the way as the last notes (goes the wea-sel!) tinkled from the little machine. That moment spent dodging meant he was a little less ready than he could have been when the Joker leapt around the corner with a "Gotcha!" in the next instant, but it wasn't quite distraction enough for him to actually take a blackjack (disguised-as-a-rubber-chicken-what-the-hey) to the head, and he laughed in Joker's face as he grabbed the purple arm and twisted, until the crook could drop his weapon or feel his elbow pop out of joint. He dropped it; good to know some things about the creep were normal.

"Was that supposed to scare me?" he demanded, kicking the other man in the shin as Joker swung a haymaker at his left eye. "I've been loomed at by experts, buddy! You're gonna hafta step up your game." Which was reversing cause and effect a little bit, but his double didn't need to know that.

Spitting mad, Joker raised his free arm to his chest, but not inside his jacket for another weapon, just—

If he hadn't owned something just like it not so long ago, J might not have clued in in time. But he did, and Joker abruptly had all the space he could want as the purple-haired Santa hotfooted it backward out of range of the acid-spitting flower on his lapel. That kind of thing could really mess up your whole day. "Pbbbbbt!" he blew around his stuck-out tongue, as the stuff ate into the linoleum. "Missed me!"

The next few minutes took them through racks of plastic animals and a ridiculously large toy-truck section, and into sports gear, where J acquired a child-sized wooden bat. "Hey, look, I'm bat-man!" he exclaimed, which got Joker madder. Mad enough to ignore a cracked bone in his left arm and hit hard enough with it to cause a black eye, but then J lost him, somewhere on the other end of sports, where all the shiny new kiddie bikes were stacked up with their four-digit price tags.

It was in that moment of breathing space that he realized that Joker had been letting him lead him away from the hostages. There were probably more traps hidden all over the toy shelves—that was what he would have done—or even back near the hostages, ready to be set off once Joker himself was out of range, which made him bite his lip in hesitation when he thought of it. He'd have to try to get them nearer the front again, and then hold them still. Drattitude.

There was a sound of motion, just as he decided this, in the direction of the fortress of purple and pink that was Girls' Toys, and J turned to see a heavy little bouncing-ball skittering and rolling toward him, marked with red-and-blue stripes and a cheerful yellow star. Oh, now that was just bad news.

He lashed out with his battered bat and sent it careening back the way it had come. It stuck partway, under the wheel of a pink-tasseled bike, and a second later, the same instinct sent J to his face behind the baseball glove display.

Puh- FOOM!

When he raised his head, that bike and all the ones near it, not to mention the floor, were looking blackened, twisted, and worse-for-wear.

"Was that a grenade?" he demanded, hearing his voice rocket upward with affront. "What is with everyone in this city throwing bombs at me?"

Well, if that was how it was going to be…J dropped the bat for the sake of two free hands and flew forward, crossing the open floor that would be a killzone if the Joker had another firearm hidden and just hadn't pulled it yet, ducked a flying knife with a flailing of the bobble at the end of his hat, scrambled up among the bikes, and vaulted over the top rack, to fling himself shoulder-first through the space between one shelf and the next with a titanic crashing of Barbie merchandise, and pop out just over Joker's head in a shower of shiny pink plastic.

For once, he seemed to have managed to honestly take the other clown by surprise, and took full advantage of it by landing full-force, with his elbow in the sensitive dip between neck and collarbone, and delivering a solid blow to the head with the surprisingly sturdy chassis of a bright pink doll-size car. This moment of complete advantage was immensely satisfying, which was good because it did not last long—J tried to twist Joker down in a chokehold as he inevitably continued his fall, but had to give it up as the psycho produced another knife from somewhere and stabbed at his arm.

"That wasn't funny!" Joker proclaimed, but then he laughed, high and humorless.

"Says you!" J retorted.

He managed to land on his feet, ducking and weaving as you do, trapped in a knife fight without a knife. The Barbie car was a little narrow and heavy for a shield, but it was what he had to hand. Joker's eyes glittered as his blade glanced off thick plastic, and J honestly could not tell whether his opponent was enjoying himself or not.

A little more strength in the next stab, or a slightly different angle, and Joker's knife punched straight through the bottom of Barbie's car and out the other side, an inch from J's eye. Sniggering, the Joker bore down.

J twisted, tugged, came away victorious, and danced back trying not to slip on scattered Barbie vehicles that had scattered underfoot like giant wheeled flower petals, as he pried his prize out of the pink car. Joker was already producing another, with the same skill (though not the showmanship) J would have displayed himself, had he been carrying hidden weapons (he should probably make a habit of it).

Now he was going to be in a knife fight with a knife, which was an improvement. Jokester had a feeling, though, that he wasn't going to have quite the same edge he'd had with his fists.

He was right. Joker handled the knife like it had grown out of his arm, and lacked J's instinctive disinclination to stab people, and unfortunately he was already losing too much blood out his side to afford taking any more open wounds if he could avoid it. This would still be a really stupid time to pass out. Which meant it was Joker on the offensive again, as J fell back, and back, scoring long thin cuts to his evil twin's arms, and one to his cheek that represented his inability to go for the neck when he wasn't sure what kind of emergency services were available for monster clowns in this town.

Some people'd say he ought to take the risk, but he didn't need to defeat this person, wasn't even supposed to be fighting him; there was nothing on the line in this moment worth putting that on himself. The part of him that wanted to stab and stab until the horrible thing went away was the same part that thought it was looking into a mirror.

Batman hadn't actually tried to kill him, when he thought J was Joker, unless you counted throwing a knife with a bomb on it. He'd understand.

They were getting near the hostages again, and it was the split-second lapse of attention J spent noticing that that allowed Joker to swing that nasty shoe-knife at his gut and connect, in a hemorrhage of stuffing from the cushion that had been Santa's belly. It would have gone deeper, but J jerked back, purple hair in his face, just in time, whooping at the lucky chance of a costume never meant for fighting in still keeping him safe—Joker, the anger in his cackle easy to hear now, pounced after, stabbing at his eye, no holds barred, and J reared back just a little further—tripped, goshdarnit to heck, heel caught on the weight of a heavy steel truck cast in miniature, parked across his path.

He rolled as he fell, heels over head, keeping the knife in his hands away from himself, not completely sure what was behind him but knowing it couldn't possibly be as dangerous as what was in front, until he fetched up in a shower of heavy wooden blocks.

Enough, luckily, spilled away from him that he wasn't buried alive, but everywhere he tried to put his weight seemed to contain a skidding block that dropped him back on his butt. His bullet wound was bleeding more strongly again. He needed more time, and it was in a singing blend of hilarity and extremity that he seized the first block that came to hand and flung it at the advancing Joker.

Not so fast the loon couldn't dodge, but the solid wooden cylinder that came behind it clipped his shoulder, and he batted a cone out of the air right before it could hit him in the nose. Then he laughed, the same kind of gross, stomach-writhy sound that wasn't different enough from J's own crazy cackle to not make him feel like slime by association, and stopped advancing.

Joker, clearly exercising a mastery of giving you what you asked for in such a way that you no longer wanted it, planted his shiny-shoed feet, reached inside his stupid purple coat yet again, came out with a stupid purple blob, and drew his hand back to throw it. J finally found the floor with both feet and started to surge upright, already pretty sure that if he didn't knock that blob back with the block in his hand he would be very, very sorry.

Wshk.

A long black throwing-star pinned the blob to the floor, where it oozed and swelled and bubbled up into a much bigger purple blob like the B-Movie Thing That Ate Neptune, and J wasn't sure whether it had been going to dissolve him or just pin him in place, but he was really glad he wasn't finding out.

While his Blob was being defeated, the Joker'd spun, turning up unerringly to find the thrower dropping down on him from somewhere in the ceiling, scalloped black cape spread fit to block out a whole sky. "Batsy!"

J thought he sounded awfully delighted, for someone who clearly wasn't surprised to get a right cross to the jaw a second later. "Oh, hey," he remarked himself, feeling brightness return to his grin even as Joker bounced back from the punch like he was made of springs. "Krampus made the party, too. Ho-ho-ho!"

Chapter Text

He threw another wooden block, since he had it in hand, and it bounced off Joker's shoulderblade with a satisfyingly sharp rebound that said a nice deep bruise would be coming up within the hour. Batman shot him a sour look, clearly indicating his interference was unwelcome, and he shrugged overdramatically and stuck his hands deep into his pockets. Fine, then. If you're going to get possessive now you're finally here.

"Back entrances were all trapped," Robin took the trouble to say with a hint of apology as he blew past, zeroing in on the silly-looking bomb that was apparently more of a threat than J'd thought.

Must have been some traps; they'd left him alone in here for...he hadn't been counting, but definitely more than a quarter of an hour, which was more than three times as long as you'd expect a distraction to need to last, and plenty of time for Joker to have killed everybody, if J had failed to keep him busy.

He stood for a second, hands in pockets, and looked from where Batman was slamming the Joker up against the end of a steel shelving unit, to the teenage boy kneeling over the bomb with total concentration, and shook his head, before giving Robin's explosive task a wide berth on his way to the front of the store.

Hopefully the police snipers could remember orders for more than ten minutes at a time and would continue not to shoot the creepy Santa. All that, and he still had his hat on.

Nobody had given J any antivenin injectors; an oversight on his part not to have asked, or checked whether the police also had access to the stuff, so he'd better leave those seven alone for now, where Batman and Robin could get at them. He'd cut the self-mobile ones loose and see where to go from there. They should get whoever they could out of here before anything else happened, and he'd be more useful doing that than getting in the middle of the Cape Boys' teamwork. Everyone in this dimension was afraid of him, but given these folks had just watched him and Joker beating on each other, he'd probably have more luck with them than anybody else in this city.

It was a good thing J rarely got too attached to his plans.

Before he'd quite reached the knot of unfortunate holiday shoppers, his keenly honed sense of badwrong flared, set off by some detail of posture or stillness, and he threw himself into motion, trying to be there before whatever it was happened, so he could deal with it. His instincts weren't wrong, but they failed him anyway.

As he sprang, from the middle of the clump of hostages one huddled figure leapt up, whipped off a big brown wig and a big blue coat to toss butter-yellow pigtails and strike a defiant pose with a hammer almost as tall as herself. Jokester's leap faltered and he very nearly fell flat on his face—then paid for his shock-open guard when he took a mighty hammer blow to the left shoulder, and hit the floor anyway, right hip first, bullet wound flaring.

"Harley?" he coughed as he rolled onto his feet again, the pain disregarded for a more convenient time.

She set her jaw. That was exactly her challenging stance, with the shoulders cocked back, that she used when she got toe-to-toe with Owlman, but there was something wrong with it, with the cant of the hip, something… "You're not my Mr. J," she said firmly, with a hint of a pout, and reached behind her to twist open the top of the nearest gas canister.

Bounded forward as soon as she had, head over heels, to swing the massive hammer at his skull, and J found himself laughing uncontrollably as he dove under her, between the terrified hostages, toward the creeping fingers of violent green. No, he wasn't her Mr. J. And she, she wasn't his Harlequin. Black and white and red diamonds, and the laughter was leaving him short of breath.

He couldn't have quite explained the joke if anybody had asked, but it was a scream.

The handle turned back easily, stopping the flow of the ominous 'Joker Gas,' but all around him his laugh was already beginning to echo back from the nearest hostages. Oh, God. The flesh between his shoulderblades crawled, in something that wasn't quite fear as he understood the term, but wasn't just disgust, either. Horror. Yeah. He met the tearful, imploring eyes of somebody's grandfather even as the man's face was stretching into a joyless grin, and then a sharp kick landed in the small of his back and he hit his knees, barking his chin on the base of the canister.

"Ack!" was his inspiring battle cry, as he scrambled up again and headbutted the underside of bad-Harlequin's forearm, forcing it up and away from the gas valve before she could open it again. Hostages. Had to get the hostages away from the badness. He drove his shoulder in under Harley's ribs and shoved, pushing her backward, and stole a look around the toy store. Batman had just judo-thrown Joker off his feet, shattering a whole row of E-Z-Bake ovens, but the evil clown was already getting up again. Robin was halfway to the door with one of the original seven poisoning victims over his back. Great, but now there were more people poisoned. Sheesh.

The narrow handle of the massive hammer rapped him across the ribs, and he only just evaded the head as it came whipping around, and then had to tackle the whole hammer anyway before it could clip the nearest hysterical hostage. Slid himself down along the haft to bury an elbow in the false-Harlequin's stomach, wincing, and managed to wrest the weapon from her hands. She rabbit-punched him in the throat, and he went down, but wrapped himself around her legs and threw them both as far from hammer and gas as possible. They wound up a tangle of limbs with a plump Japanese-American woman and her little son, and J gabbled an incoherent, giggle-studded apology, grabbed Harley tighter, and kept rolling.

He had to get home. She felt so familiar in his arms and was trying to knee him in a very tender location, and if he got stuck here in backwards-land he was going to spend the next forever trying to make himself believe that she was a completely different person from his wife and he should leave her alone, and failing.

The crown of her skull slammed into his jaw, and he lost his hold. The two of them scrambled apart and up, and Jokester spotted Robin kneeling on the far side of the hostage cluster, sawing at someone's bonds. "Hey, birdboy," he hissed. Which was something he called Talon, normally, but it wasn't like it wasn't accurate in this dimension too, right? Robin looked up sharply; seemed relieved when his eyes fell on J. Drattitude, was that Joker's word for him, too? "Switch?" he beseeched, flailing an arm toward…Quinzel, he'd call her Quinzel, who was looking from him to Robin to her fallen hammer with her lips pouting out, as if making a decision.

The teenager straightened up, snorting, as the newly-freed hostage—a middle-aged man, grey with terror—scrambled for the door. "You can't handle Harley Quinn?"

"I can't hurt her," J shot back, his arms flying out in frustration. "She's too much like my Harlequin."

Robin's face changed, filling up with sympathy, and he gave a sharp, businesslike nod and started leaping forward between hostages. Quinzel went for her hammer at the same time. Jokester grabbed her by the back of her costume, the same way Batman had grabbed him from under the car earlier, and held her up long enough for Robin to leap up and clock her across the jaw. He offhandedly tossed J the utility knife he'd been using on the zipties, and then focused entirely on driving the crazy clown woman back.

He was good, J noted, even as he snatched the knife from the air and got down on his knees to start cutting people free—the worst-poisoned first, in the hopes that they were still coherent enough to get themselves out front, to wherever Robin had dropped off the others, presumably after dosing them with the antidote stuff. The cops would have the cure, too, right? He had to pin the granddad from earlier down so his convulsions of false hilarity wouldn't get him stabbed in the arm. Stabbing hostages was unilaterally bad.

But Robin, as he'd noted, was good. Not as good as Talon, maybe, or maybe just less aggressive. He wasn't sure whether to call him more or less graceful, because he had more wasted movements and less absolute poise, but there was something—well, beautiful in Robin's motion that had never existed in Talon, as far back as J could remember. The contrast between him and Harley wasn't as dramatic, here. (Not that he'd ever stood back and watched Harley fight Talon alone.) He was maybe a dancer? J would ask later.

The people laughing with miserable eyes offended him on a deep level, and he was sorry now he'd handed that fight over to Batman because he really wanted to plant his fist a few more times in Joker's obnoxiously familiar face. He frowned over the utility knife as its serrated edge bit through the zip-ties. (It had that scalloped bat-silhouette shape from Batman's chest printed on the handle, the same shape as those throwing stars; wow with the branding, people.)

"Go, go, go," he urged the hostages as he freed them. "Get out safe—hey, kid, it's okay; cry when you don't need to see where you're going, okay, yeah, there's your mom, stick with her, it's okay, ma'am. Yeah, hey, gramps, you're gonna be fine, just make for the door."

He didn't look at not-Harley. Tried not to wince when she grunted in pain; tried to focus on the sounds of store-trashing slapstick coming from further back. Aw, c'mon, big guy, I already wore him down for you.

Wow. This was getting to be a really, really long day. Merry Christmas, he said to himself, and muffled a snicker.

Not all the hostages made for the door as soon as he cut them loose—some were shaking too hard to walk, and some just seemed afraid to cross that open stretch of floor alone. (To be fair, they had recently watched J make the run and get shot, and then throw a kid out the window for her own protection, and they didn’t have any way of knowing what kind of shape she’d been in by then.) And then after those two groups had built up to a certain point, no one else wanted to make for the door because sticking with the group felt safer than breaking off alone.

People did really weird things when they were scared. Like, he was always hearing he was crazy for this or that risky or ridiculous idea he actually put into practice, but the way he saw it, it was frightened people who were really crazy. The things he did were either to get something done that needed doing, or because he wanted to; these folks were inexplicably staying in the booby-trapped Toy Store of Hostage Doom even though they didn’t want to and it was counterproductive, because…they were scared.

He could sympathize, even if he didn’t really get it; he didn’t blame them, or anything, but seriously. Talk about stuff that made no sense: Fear.

There was a reason it was Owlman’s favorite weapon.

All of which meant that by the time he sawed through the last wires with his borrowed Swiss Batman Knife, he had seventeen hostages of all ages and states of health clumped up on the far side of the cannisters from Ms. Quinzel’s ongoing fight with Robin. Those last wires had been around the ankles of a dark-skinned little boy no more than three, in mittens so extremely blue they were obviously chosen to be easy to find in snow, and J snapped the utility knife closed, vanished it into his sleeve, helped Mittens to his feet, and turned around to find himself responsible for a small, terrified crowd, splitting their attention between Batman’s fight, Robin’s fight, and Jokester himself.

“Mommy,” the little boy sobbed, searching the faces of adults and holding his arms up to be carried to everyone who looked back. No Mommy appeared. She had to be one of the serious poisoning cases, probably one of the ones Robin had carried out earlier. (It would be okay. No one had died, no one was going to die. Happy ending Christmas story.)

J’s first instinct was to gather the kid up, give him a good snuggle, and convince him everything was as okay as it could be without outright lying, but that might not go over well with anyone, kid included, and he needed his hands free just in case, so instead he tugged the sleeve of the nearest non-staggering adult, pointed at Little Boy Blue-Mittens, and said, “Can you carry him?”

He added a hint of imploring pout, and when the adult (it was the blond man who’d been tied shoulder to shoulder with the disguised Harley Quinn; hopefully he wasn’t a plant, too) just stared at him, he pulled a wry smile instead. “I’d do it myself, but.” J shrugged, not wanting to get into ‘but.’ “Even if you’re not good with kids, it’s fine, he just needs someone to hold him and get him out of here. He’s big enough you don’t have to worry too much about carrying technique.”

“Okay, okay,” the guy said, holding his hands up in something like surrender. “I’m on it.” He was about J’s age, probably a few years older. Mid to late thirties. Maybe had a kid of his own at home that he’d been here shopping for, though the awkward way he hefted Blue said not. The kid didn’t stop sniffling, but blond-man patted him stiffly on the back and he didn’t shift up to screaming, so.

“Okay.” J brought his hands together, but he didn’t exclaim and he didn’t clap. He had everyone’s attention anyway. He smiled a little, but he didn’t grin. “Buddy system sounds good. You guys, help them? Grandpa, I know you’re tough but let the nice lady give you a hand, okay? Okay, good. Let’s get out of this dump.”

Miraculously, nobody protested. J got everyone who looked more than halfway to incapacitated paired up with somebody hale, and got everybody moving.

His eyes fell on Harlequin’s abandoned hammer as he shepherded the group away. ‘Giant mallet’ was one of his specialties, and it would be good to be armed with something if yet another accomplice leapt out of hiding and made a final sally against his charges.

On the other hand, the odds of getting shot by the police if he came out armed definitely went up, which was a good excuse to not touch the thing. He left it where it lay.

He was glad he had his hands free about ten steps later, when an old lady—at least sixty-five, her pale grey hair bound very tightly behind her head, in a dull green houndstooth-tweed coat—stumbled, and J had caught her by the elbow and shoulder and steadied her before it occurred to him that this might be alarming enough to do her more damage than a fall. “’Scuse me,” he apologized, stepping hastily away, hands to himself.

She looked at him, long and piercing, and sniffed. “Thank you, young man,” she said, very deliberately. He wondered whether she was the austere kind of grandmother, or had been here shopping for a great-niece or nephew, or godchild, or the child of a friend. “I can’t seem to keep my feet.”

It took him a second to realize she meant what it sounded like, but then he swept in and gave her his arm to lean on with what he wasn’t going to even try to pretend wasn’t relief. Before Harley, he’d never exactly been a cuddler—it wasn’t really something a grown man without a family had much opportunity to be—but he’d never gone long enough without touching someone to get skin-hungry, either, and he felt…contaminated, right now, Joker-cooties like a slick film between him and the world. If a legitimate cuddle target had been available he would have been impersonating a limpet.

Helping helped. It usually did.

(It also helped that, of all the world’s potential authority figures, he’d always responded best to authoritative old ladies. Which meant he almost never provoked them out of sheer contrariness, and tended to mind his manners instinctively around them. Harley thought he might have been raised by his grandmother. He thought Edna might be personally responsible for that part of his personality, all by herself.)

J focused on being a good support, not aggravating the bullet wound in his side more than he could help, and not laughing, because giving the hostages heart attacks would be very poor rescue technique. He always did have a tendency to giggle when tense, but this was worse, for some reason. Probably that breath of the green stuff he’d gotten earlier, which…would mean that the horrible laughing was actual laughing, it didn’t just sound like it, which. That was just wrong.

It turned out the rescue crews did have their own antidote injectors, not to mention nice plastic inhaler-masks for the frail and especially traumatized, and J handed Granny Tweed over to a stressed-looking paramedic with a too-jolly, “See? All good!”

“Yes, thank you,” she acknowledged, noticeably dry, to which he demurred, and awkwardly made what he admitted was a graceless escape, carefully looping around the K-9 unit standing by, just in case he smelled like Joker. Yurk.

For all his vaunted status as a head case, one of the many psychological issues Jokester didn’t have much experience with was self-loathing.

Not that he felt great about every decision he’d made in his life, not that he hadn’t beaten himself up for various stripes of idiocy from time to time, and not that he hadn’t been insecure about his looks on and off ever since the thing with the acid, but—he knew people who just, who hated themselves, because of things they’d done or failed to do or just because they’d been told so many times in word or deed that they weren’t worthwhile that they’d started believing it, and it always looked so…heavy. It hurt, it scraped at them, but most of all it was heavy, and he wondered how they could walk, sometimes. Carrying a burden like that—he was caught, sometimes, between respecting the strength of it, the responsibility, especially the people who were carrying actual wrongs, and wanting to just do everything he could to make them let it go, just a little of it, even, before they flippin’ killed themselves.

J knew that he was, in one perfectly meaningful sense, not yet eighteen years old. But he’d spent those years in the world, fighting, on an adult's terms, and it wasn’t naiveté, anymore, not a child's point of view that made him wish there was an easy way to go up to everybody in the world one by one and convince them, yes, you’re good enough, you’re worth making the effort to be better, nothing’s futile, go ahead, care, risk, be happy. It was just…he’d always gotten lucky. Kindness was the first thing anybody had ever offered him, in this life.

He tried not to wonder about the Joker’s empty eyes.

Granny Tweed’s reaching out to him like that, it meant a lot, but she hadn’t been able to help the tension in her arm, or the unmistakable subconscious flinching-away, and he hated that, had always hated that, the bone-deep knowledge that someone found him repulsive. He could laugh it off, usually, but, well, today…his defenses were down, you could say.

Not that long ago, he’d always worked alone. It was amazing, how fast you got used to having people watching your back. People you could hug and tease and slap between the shoulder-blades without anybody getting creeped out.

On his way back to the building, he spotted the adorable hostage he’d thrown out the window being cuddled to within an inch of her life by someone who was obviously her mother. She didn’t look all that much like Harley, after all. Maybe the kid got her pointiness from the dad’s side. Or maybe she was going to grow out of it. That happened. J really hoped Ella didn’t turn out to have inherited his nose.

Or maybe the kid was adopted? You didn’t have to actually be related to be family.

By the time he got back inside, Robin had his knee in the small of not-Harlequin’s back and was cuffing her wrists together. Her makeup was smudged and her expression—J looked away. Police were fanning out through the space, seizing the dangerous canisters and the disarmed bomb parts and moving with much better confidence and coordination, not to mention situation-awareness, than J had ever seen in his Gotham. Except for a couple of the SWAT units, which these definitely weren’t; you could tell by the hats.

One of them was even apparently assigned to cover the ceiling with her weapon, just in case, and was doing it, in spite of the smashing and whooping still going on further back in the store. Whoever this police commissioner Robin had radioed was, he had to be a few cuts above Loeb. See again: jealousy.

Santa, I want a new Commissioner for Christmas. Though really, if you want to throw in a new Mayor and City Council while you’re at it….

Trying not to snicker, he threaded his way through the surprisingly disciplined police force, giving a wide berth to where Robin was transferring custody of his prisoner to the authorities with a smooth confidence that you rarely saw in kids his age. Montoya, in plainclothes that in no way concealed her coppishness, was overseeing the process, but her eyes flicked up when J moved through her peripheral vision, and fell on him. He waved again, smiling less than he had last time because now he got why she'd made the face she had when they met, and outright frowned when her attention fell away again without acknowledgment.

"It's mine," he said to the nearest cop, third of the four lady-cops he'd spotted, a grim-looking black woman about his height, who was scrutinizing the blood stains on the floor.

He knew it was petty of him, tried not to find it funny when she jumped and pointed her gun at him; failed, but at least mostly didn't show it. "I'm the only one who bled until after he pulled a knife in the Barbie aisle," he elaborated, flicking his fingers at the drips and drizzles of blood scattered across everywhere he'd run after the bullet winged him. Forensics were obviously a low priority here, because several cops had stepped in some of the drips and left rusty smudges over the linoleum, but after hearing Ed grumble about spending lab time on stuff that turned out to be pointless he figured it couldn't hurt to get that fact on record.

She blinked at him. Weapon pointed at the floor again. He wondered if Montoya had told her team anything about him other than 'don't shoot.' "Hey, can I borrow a hair tie?" he asked, noticing the three spare black hair elastics around her left wrist. She had her hair wound into such a tight knot at the back of her head he couldn't even tell whether she wore it natural or relaxed, but either way she clearly understood how annoying it was to get hair in your face in the field. "Well, I say borrow. It's probably going to wind up coming back to my dimension with me if you let me have it."

There was a second where her natural human impulse to help (people loved doing little favors, as long as they didn't feel coerced or duped or deprived; it was one of his favorite things about them) struggled against his having the Joker's face and her training, but in the end the fact that she would have to put her gun away in the middle of a hostile situation won, and she shook her head.

"Thanks anyway," J sighed, and wandered off.

Finally fetched up at the end of the aisle where he’d been ambushed by the Joker-in-the-box, just in time to watch Batman drag a battered, laughing green-haired clown—with his hands cuffed in front of him, weirdly, but then, if they were cuffed in back Batman couldn’t see what he was doing with them, so maybe it balanced out—into the open space and off toward the police.

Finally. Sheesh. Well, it could have been worse, J told himself. The bad guy could have gotten away.

Also, there could be snakes in here, and the police could be arresting me. See? All good. He leaned back against a shelf of toy drums and light-up plastic guitars, watched law enforcement at work, and prodded a little at the eye the Joker had punched him in, which was definitely going to swell up. Hahaha. At least when it went purple it would look nice with his hair, and with that reminder he absently finger-combed it in hopes of holding off the worst of the tangles, since he still didn't have a replacement hair tie. (Another thing he should make a point of always carrying. Maybe Batman would give him storage tips; those belts were awesome.) Then he straightened up in sudden interest.

After getting Harlequin off his hands, Robin had spent a while conferring quietly with Montoya and two policemen, maybe filling them in, and when Batman reappeared he’d given that his attention for a second, but now he was making his way across the sales floor, toward the clown in the battered Santa suit.

J smiled not-too-wide as the teenage vigilante drew near, greeted him with a sort of friendly nod, and tossed the Bat Army Knife underhand. “So,” he said, as Robin tucked it away in what must be its designated pouch, “you a dancer, kid?”

Robin came to a halt about eight feet away, just across the mouth of the aisle, eyeing the Jokester a little more sidelong than he had a second ago. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve got moves, is all.”

Robin laughed. It was a nice sound, after all the insane and poisoned cachinnation recently; light and gently mocking and very human. “Acrobat. Though I like to think I can cut a rug pretty well when I want.”

Acrobat, J thought. He thought, Talon, too? “For somebody who’s surely not show people, your boss’s got quiiiite the flair for the dramatic,” he said, stretching his hands apart as he drew out the ‘quite.’

Robin snorted again, not disagreeing with either part. His eyes were landing on J’s face better every second, more like he was looking at a person and less like a dangerous animal that just hadn’t attacked yet. “You objecting to his horning in on your act?” he replied, slouching theatrically against the end of the shelving unit for a few seconds, but back on his feet by the time he finished the sentence.

J had a sense of being evaluated. “That? Nah. He’d already missed his cue like nine times; I was deep into improv territory. Besides, what’s that thing the Polish say? Not my circus, not my monkey. I’m just visiting. That was some entrance, s’all.”

Robin shrugged, an amused smirk lurking in the corner of his mouth. “It’s important to make a strong impression.”

J nodded again, because that was true, and glanced across the room to where Batman was holding the handcuffed Joker up by the front of his purple jacket while a half dozen cops stood back in a reluctant half circle, none of them wanting to get within reach. He let out a gust of laughter at the sight.

“Do I want to know what’s so funny?” Robin asked, somewhat dry but not especially wary, and J could have hugged the kid. He didn’t.

Tittered, instead. “Ehehehe. Well, nothing, really. Breathed some green stuff, earlier.”

“Oh! Here, then.” Robin barely held up his syringe in explanation before he was plunging the needle through J’s sleeve into his arm. Apparently he was used to prioritizing speed over sterility with his antivenin injections, and also to allies who weren’t too jumpy about suddenly needles. Could get himself in trouble that way.

Jokester squinched up his face and whined. “Ooowwwww. What, it’s not like I don’t already have the stupid grin.”

“At the heavier dosages, victims laugh for a while and then drop dead,” said Robin, with a very persuasive minimalism. J opened his mouth to concede the point.

And it was then that the wild, mocking laughter that had risen in the background cut off sharply, and both of them looked around to find that Batman had cold-cocked the Joker unconscious. Ms. Quinn shouted in outrage and jerked at her cuffs, as two police officers (with another two covering their approach with drawn firearms, just in case Batman wasn’t insurance enough) folded the limp clown into a nice white jacket and buckled the sleeves around his back.

Rather than stay focused on the potential for dropping dead, or the handcuffed Harlequin being dragged away by police, or the way his evil twin looked a lot more like him when unconscious, J abruptly realized what had been missing from that finale.

“He didn’t say ‘curses! Foiled again!’” he exclaimed. Turned, to pout hopefully at Robin. “Does he ever say it?”

“Huh.” The boy cocked his head, apparently trying to remember however many times he’d seen the evil clown defeated. “No. I don’t think he does.”

J sniffed in disapproval. “What a waste. Owlman never says it either; if I was the bad guy I’d say it every time I lost. Except apparently not.” He glared in the general direction of the door Joker was being carried through. It was bad enough he’d lost the ability to laugh at his double; if he passed up awesome bad jokes, too, this was just embarrassing. “You know his real name?” he asked idly, as the monster clown passed out of sight.

Robin shook his head. Asked the obvious return question, with a tilt of it.

“Oh, I’d tell you if I knew,” J shrugged, chuckling a little, voicelessly, from the chest. Huh-huh-huh. He sounded like a buffalo. Buffalos were better than the Joker. “My past is…kind of a multiple-guess section.” If he’d ever in his life taken a standardized test, he didn’t remember, but he’d liked that phrase from the first time he heard it, breezy and mocking and self-effacing all in one.

Robin snorted again, and then straightened as Batman reappeared in the entrance. “Got to go,” he excused himself, and threaded his way back across the floor. He meticulously avoided stepping on any of the drying blood, without seeming to be paying any attention to where he stepped. J wondered if there would be any discernible differences between his blood and the Joker’s, when and if the lab guys got it. They had opposite-colored hair, right? They weren’t identical.

New topic! J spun on his heel, putting birds and bats and doppelgangers firmly at his back. This granted him a scintillating view of trashed toy store, but hey. New experiences! He’d never been party to trashing a toy store before.

Remembering his earlier certainty that the aisle behind Joker must have been trapped, he started to pick his way amongst the disordered shelves, especially everywhere that hadn’t gotten particularly messed up by either fight, looking for any lurking unexploded bombs or other nasty surprises. There was an obvious tripwire in the first aisle, and just past it a sneakier one, which he carefully dismantled since he didn’t have wirecutters, and a bucket-of-threateningly-green-fluid thing that he was pretty sure was just a joke because you’d have to be really, really not-good at dealing with traps to knock it over. Like, an epic klutz. Maybe it was a cop trap? Except these cops weren’t all that inept. He lifted it down, anyway. Just in case.

While he was suspiciously eyeing an out-of-place acid-green lunchbox on a high shelf near the back, his foot bumped against an obstacle, and because today had had Murphy’s Law stamped on its forehead, he braced himself for the explosion. When nothing happened, he looked down to see what he’d actually kicked.

It turned out to be not a booby trap, but an unusually realistic stuffed monkey, wearing an engagingly enthusiastic expression and a red and white vest. J stripped off one grimy glove and stooped to pick it up. The fur was startlingly soft, and the long sleek tail turned out to have some kind of wire inside that made it prehensile. No sign of any kind of Joker tampering. He smiled. Ella would love it. He tugged open the front of his coat to tuck the toy inside.

“That isn’t yours,” Batman informed him from behind, voice thick with disapproval.

“Don’t sneak up on people like that!” J exclaimed, clapping his right hand, still full of monkey, over his steady heart. Frowned right back at the big masked man, when he didn’t react to the reproof. “I just got shot preventing this from being a murder scene. I guarantee that would have hit their profit margin harder than a single stuffie. Half the inventory’s been smashed anyway.” And most of that was not his fault. It was probably covered under some kind of insurance anyway, fancy place like this.

The taller man’s mouth tightened another notch. “That was part of the hostage situation. This is theft.”

“Well, excuse me! I don’t know your playbook, big guy, but I’ve never been in this game for some fancy ideal about ‘upholding the law.’ It’s about helping people.”

His arms floundered outward in a sweeping gesture. “Fine, I didn’t ask for the monkey, it’s a crime to take it, but it’s a victimless crime so I don’t give a hoot. Not all of us have eight gazillion dollars to pour into this gig. I’m already going to have to pay the folks at the Mission back for wrecking their Santa suit, maybe I want to give my kid a decent present!”

The empty hand that had been gesticulating toward Batman’s face froze in the air, and dropped; J pressed his lips together, pulled his eyes down. He shouldn’t have said that. Mentioning Ella just because he was angry—he needed to be more careful. At least he’d slipped up here, in an alternate universe where it wouldn’t get back to his home villains. “Sorry,” he said, pulling the corners of his mouth down as far as they went so he wouldn’t seem like he was making fun. “It was the voice. For a second there, you sounded just like Owlman when he’s telling gutter trash why we don’t deserve to live.”

Only he’d never cared what Owlman thought of him. He blew out a sigh and held the monkey in his hand for another second. Ella really would’ve loved it. It was too friendly a creature to just drop back on the floor, so he turned to the nearest shelf to prop it against a LEGO set.

“Keep it,” said Batman. J blinked at him. He had no owlish point of reference for that tone. “I’ll pay,” the man in black added, more gruffly. “Keep it.”

A lot of people J knew would have called this charity, and refused it. He understood that point of view, but it wasn’t how he rolled. He grinned, then remembered Joker and smiled instead. “Thanks,” he said, tucking the fluffy little thing away in the stuffing of his Santa belly, safely on the opposite side from the risk of bloodstains. “She’s really gonna love it.”

“No doubt.”

And there Batboy went reminding him of Harvey again. J clapped him on the arm. “You’re all right, aren’t’cha?”

Chapter Text

And there Batboy went reminding him of Harvey again. J clapped him on the arm. “You’re all right, aren’t’cha?”

Batman did a wonderful affronted face that would probably be twice as funny if he wasn’t wearing a mask. “Unlike you, I didn’t get shot,” he retorted, like he didn’t know perfectly well that had been an evaluation of his character, not his health. J sniggered.

“We’re done here,” Batman announced, very this conversation did not happen, whoosh, and turned to stare down the aisle, out across the open battleground, to where Robin was visible just outside, helping with triage. The kid looked up after just a second of staring, received the silent message, and nodded a sharp affirmative. Said something bracing to the last patient, patted her on the shoulder, and stood up, exchanging grins with a weary-looking EMT.

J brushed his gloves together and glanced again at the suspicious lunchbox. “Right. So…tests, you said?” He hoped they weren’t invasive. Having decided Batman was an okay guy, and allowing himself to be strapped down and experimented on, were kind of different things.

“And medical treatment.”

For a second Jokester was unspeakably homesick for his Gotham, where his brilliant wife would patch him up and his adorable daughter would kiss everything better. He shook it off. He would get home again. Anything else was unthinkable. Until then, live in the moment. “I could go for that,” he admitted. “So…blowing this popsicle stand, count of three? One…”

“I have to talk to Detective Montoya.” Batman spoke flatly and suited word to deed, striding to the front door of the toy store and through it in a swirl of cape that made walking across a floor look cooler than it had any right to do. Which was totally the reason he wore it.

Jokester shrugged after him, kind of amused. “Fine, then.”

J eased open the lunchbox, disarmed the gas bomb inside, left it open as a hint to the crime scene people, waited until no one was looking at him, and skulked out the no-longer-trapped back. The hostage-takers had found time to drink a couple of bottles of the ransom ginger beer before getting settled for the finale, he noticed, presumably in between setting up all those traps the caped duo had gotten tangled up in. He was particularly impressed by the slashed-open net hanging above a pool full of grinning mechanical piranhas. Had the Joker and not-Harlequin set that up by themselves?

By the time he circled around to the car Robin was there again, once again digging around in the trunk. Gear boy, apparently. Batman’s batman? Heh. He straightened up as Jokester approached. Good ear, that kid. “Yo,” J greeted, and the boy nodded acknowledgement.

“So you were shot,” Robin announced, without preamble, pulling out a big, solid red box with a white cross on the side. J had noticed the bullet-passing-through-him thing, surprisingly enough. “How bad is it?”

Jokester waved a hand. “’tis but a flesh wound.”

Eyebrows went up, dubious, as the box was balanced on the rear bumper and the lid unlatched.

“No, really.” J grinned, because that look was all for a (stupid, reckless) person and didn’t say monster at all. His dismissal of the physical injury in comparison to that triumph was completely genuine. “Okay, a pretty deep one, but no bones or major organs were harmed.” He grimaced, because it was December and he’d rather not give up the protection of even the blood-sodden layers of fabric that were keeping his side covered; nothing more annoying than fiery pain surrounded by punishing cold, but he pulled up the coat, sweater, and shirt on his right to show the through-and-through. It wasn’t even a hole, more like a deep groove. Not gushing, but okay, admittedly, still bleeding a bit more enthusiastically than an ooze.

Robin pulled a face at the sight, the expression halfway between the look of a doctor getting their first sight of blood on J’s freaky white skin, and the look of a kid who hadn’t seen enough open wounds to be blasé about it yet.

Still, he didn’t do anything to make being patched up by him seem like a terrible idea, self-described ‘not much of a medic’ or not, and as he stripped off his lovely green gloves and replaced them with sterile-blue nitrile ones, J shuffled over and leaned back against the side of the vehicle. He was maybe getting a little lightheaded.

“This is just to stop the bleeding for now,” said Robin, wiping at the skin around the wound with alcohol pads and clinical precision. “You’re riding inside the impressive tank this time, since you’re injured.”

“Aw, I knew you guys were softies really. I’ll do my best not to bleed on the upholstery.”

Robin snorted. “You’d hardly be the first.” He wiped a few times more, then turned to extract gauze and a roll of tape. “Anyway, who are you calling soft? You had to get me to hit a girl for you.”

“Not just any girl,” Jokester protested, wincing a little as Robin carefully packed a rolled-up square of gauze into the groove. Times like this he really wished he had a good layer of fat, to take shallower wounds and hold in some heat.

“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure Batman could beat up evil me just fine.”

Jokester huffed out a careful laugh that didn’t come from his diaphragm enough to mess with Robin’s work, and made no comment about how much Batman might or might not love Robin relative to how much he himself loved his wife. What was their relationship, anyway? Robin certainly wasn’t a possession of Batman’s, but he was pretty young to be a colleague, or…anything, really. Apprentice? They tracked each other constantly, he’d noticed. They’d been doing this for a while.

J went for the frank honesty of, “I’d like to see that.”

The boy frowned. “Hold this.” J took over the pressure on the rolled-up gauze, and Robin was silent for a second, tearing off strips of surgical tape and sticking them in a row along his left forearm so they’d be easy to grab once he was ready to use them.

“The Talon you mentioned,” he said after a while, as he put the tape back in the medkit. “He’s actually me? Not just Owlman’s…sidekick, enforcer?”

J shrugged with his left shoulder. “Looks like you. Moves like you.” Robin swapped out the sodden roll of gauze for a new one, but this time didn’t take his hand away and leave the pressure up to Jokester. He pressed firmly. “Oof. Sounds like you, if you were into monotones and monosyllables. Owl’s had him since he was seven or so.” J shrugged again, chuckled a little awkwardly.

He didn’t usually think of Talon as a kid—even when he’d still been small, you couldn’t afford to hold back, and he’d never acted childish, but it wasn’t like a seven-year-old had gone into villainy for the money. “I dunno. There’s always been a Talon in the Court of Owls, but since Featherhead took over he’s changed a lot of things around. The outfit, for one.”

Robin shrugged, too, the wrinkles of concentration in his forehead deepening. “Hold this,” he ordered again, laying a big gauze pad over the whole damage zone. J obliged, and Robin pressed tape over each edge. Even silent and solemn like this, and even though the black masks were almost identical—Talon’s had sharply hooked corners while Robin’s was a simple ovoid, and more flexible to accommodate the expressive face underneath, but it was essentially the same black domino approach to disguise—Robin’s face was almost nothing like Talon’s, despite being exactly the same. J found this heartening.

“I’d never mistake you for him,” he offered, and Robin flashed a smile before turning away to stow the medical supplies.

J dropped his clothes over his side again, and shivered. He was definitely feeling the cold more than he had before the toy store fight. At least the finger of wind that found its way through the hole in his coat came up against gauze, now.

Talon should have been an acrobat, Jokester tasted the thought. It was…wrong of him, not to want to think about it. About the fact that the little monster who’d helped Owlman hold him down for the knife that night in the chemical plant was a kid, really, one who probably didn’t have much of a life. Had never had a real life. He’d always felt a distant kind of pity, but nothing more, because he couldn’t afford to…

…but he couldn’t really afford to start pretending some people didn’t deserve to be treated like people, either, could he? Argh.

He was grateful when Batman’s voice said (out of Jokester’s blind spot, naturally, because check out the very familiar compulsion to undercut other people’s sense of control so he could dominate any given interaction), “Get in.”

The roof folded back again, and J favored his right side somewhat as he scaled Mount Bat-Tank, and dribbled some more stuffing down the side, but didn’t have too much trouble. There was another narrow row of handholds, presumably in case you were tired or slightly shot or something and couldn’t vault your way in—he wondered what Batman did if he was too injured to climb. Counted on Robin to haul him? J’d seen Talon drag Owlman out of a burning building once. Or maybe there were doors in the sides for serious emergencies, and his injury just wasn’t serious enough to go so far as to open them.

At the top, he contemplated the rectangular hole he was going to drop through. It was too dark inside to tell where he ought to be aiming.

“Bet I beat you there,” Robin called, from halfway up a building he must have climbed while J was woolgathering.

Batman made a small sound in his throat that might have been acknowledgment, or irritation, or had nothing to do with what Robin had said at all, but the kid laughed and disappeared over the roof. Him, J liked.

Well, nothing ventured. He swung his legs through the gap, and dropped.

His feet hit something springy; his right knee knocked against something hard, so he let himself angle left and bounced only slightly off some sort of low plinth that apparently separated the driver and shotgun, one foot tangled up with the inside of the door. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he got his feet into what seemed to be a footwell and his hind end onto the actual seat, just as Batman dropped apparently straight down out of the sky and landed perfectly in the driver’s seat. J poked out his tongue. Would’ve served the big guy right if he’d landed on a pile of discombobulated clown.

Batman made a gesture, and the roof slid shut, with only a faint mechanical whirring, and then Jokester was sealed in the dim belly of a war machine with Owlman’s duplicate.

More importantly, the air inside the tank was increasingly, gloriously warm. J settled back and snapped the seatbelt—which was really more of a mesh harness; did this thing pull multiple Gs or something?—over his chest, and huffed with surprise at how comfortable he was, bullet wound aside. Not only was the heat working, the springy surface under his back offered more lumbar support than most mattresses he’d encountered. No expense spared on an assault vehicle of righteousness, evidently.

The seat was black, and looked like leather but didn’t smell like it. J couldn’t make out any signs of old stains, despite what Robin had said, which meant either whatever grade of high-durability pleather this was was also easy-clean, or else Batman had his car seats replaced whenever they got grubby-looking. Or maybe just reupholstered. Was it still upholstery if you did it in pleather? He glanced at the driver, flicking unlabeled switches and dials with a certain hand and a stony expression, and decided not to ask. See? Discretion. Pressed his hands between his knees to control the urge to play with the buttons and switches. So much self-control right now; if he had a mom she’d be proud of him.

He did rub his cheek experimentally against the seat surface. Felt like leather, too.

They started moving, rolling along at a fair clip through the high-end shopping district considering it was a week until Christmas, and it didn’t take long for the silence to wear on him. “So,” he said brightly. “Car. Tank. Whatever. How’s that working out for you?”

Silence, but he could tell it was a slightly puzzled one, under all the resentment of his rude, chirping frivolity. “I mean,” he continued, as they acknowledged the existence of a stop sign for about a fraction of a second, “does it mess with the mystique, stopping at traffic lights and stuff? Owlman would never,” he explained, letting out a half-laugh at the thought of a spiky, armoured Owlmobile rolling around in plain sight, obeying petty traffic regulations. “Public streetsare so completely plebeian.”

The pressure of interest spiked from his companion. Grudging, but curiosity nonetheless, though whether it was more about sounding out his alternate-self the way Robin had been doing earlier or just wondering about alternatives to Bat Tank, it was hard to say. “How does he travel, then?”

J snorted. “He’d like us to believe he can teleport through shadows or nightmares or something, I bet, but far as we can figure out? Underground. I’ve been reaching out to the Morlocks, and—”

“Morlocks,” Batman interrupted, his voice flat enough that it was obvious someone with a little less pride would have been demanding Excuse me, Morlocks?! in a bit of a yelp. “In Gotham?”

“Yeah, you know. Or maybe not,” J acknowledged. This was a different city, after all. “The undercity people. Sort of a catch-all, really; there’s people who were born there and homeless folks who just drifted down to get out of the weather, and weirder things, sometimes. Gotham goes down an awful long way for a city that hasn’t broken four hundred years since the first settlers. Surprised we don’t sink ten feet every time it rains.”

“Hm,” Batman acknowledged. The tunnels, at least, were the same on both sides, then.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if the Court of Owls put a lot of those in there,” J continued, sketching with his fingers in the air a suggestion of the interlacing depths of Gotham’s oversized sewers and the many, many tunnels and vaults that had never been intended for sewage, though it wasn’t always clear what they were for. “They’ve been around a loooong time. So, anyway, I’ve been putting out feelers, and it looks like he’s taken over some sections to put in trains. Like, his own private high-speed subway, way underground. And then I guess he does the roof thing to his exact destination, which is even more plebian if you really think about it. Pedestrian, even, haha.

“Or maybe he gets a driver to meet him with one of those shiny-black unmarked Mob sedans, I guess. I think—”

A traffic light ahead of them turned red, and Batman hit the brakes unnecessarily hard, jolting J forward in his harness. “Oof!”

“Put this on,” Batman ordered, and took a hand off the wheel to pass him a…black thing.

It turned out to be a mask, when he turned it over in the low light that filtered through through slanty, heavily-smoked bulletproof windowglass; one that would fit closely from above the eyebrows to halfway down the midface—a lot like Harley’s, in either world, except, crucially: no eyeholes. It was a cheat-safe blindfold. J whistled a little, impressed. (Handed a normal blindfold, he would absolutely have tied it so he could peek.)

“We aren’t showing you the route to our base of operations,” Batman stated flatly, as they rolled through a suburb J didn’t know all that well. Lots of nice light displays, though. He liked those madly twinkling yew bushes especially. “Put it on.”

Well, he already knew it was somewhere northwest of the city, unless of course Batman had used the entire drive so far to mislead him. J shrugged and put it on. Fair cop. Wasn’t like he didn’t go to lengths to make sure his safer boltholes were unknown to anyone who might let something slip. Especially since Ella.

He pressed the thing over his face, tied the strings behind his head, and waited a few seconds, prodding the end of his own nose where it poked out past the mask. So far as he could tell, the thing wasn’t even booby-trapped, or if it was it was pretty subtle. Cool.

He’d kind of been expecting micro-needles full of sedative, or something worse. He didn’t react normally to most drugs, but Batman was used to the Joker, so he’d probably have adjusted for that. But apparently it was just a blindfold. Not even interfering with his breathing. J tapped his fingernail on the stiff black material covering his right eye.

“So you just keep this around in case you want to invite somebody over for lunch or midnight bowling who you don’t actually trust, huh?”

Batman ignored him.

“Ready for anything, huh?”

Batman ignored him. J tried not to twitch. Felt his smile stretch a little wider.

“Did you used to be in the Scouts? My friend Eddie was a Scout for three years. He didn’t enjoy it. He’s not really a nature person. But he can still reel off the catechism of scoutly virtues, or whatever they call it. Lemme see if I can…ahem,” he cleared his throat. “Trusty, loyal, helpful, friendly, court-ee-ous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, uh, clean, and…reverent. Did it!” He contemplated the list for a second. “Some of those are easier than others. What do you think?”

Batman made no comment.

“I think they take an oath, too, but I don’t know what it says. I think it has God in it and something about ‘morally straight.’ The Scouts are actually kind of weird. They do have Boy Scouts in this universe, right? Obedient’s obviously the hard one for me. What about you?”

Silence. If the tank hadn’t still been rolling along around him, braking occasionally and taking curves in a way that suggested they’d left the city proper and were driving on a road instead of a street, J might have wondered if his only company had somehow slipped out of the vehicle. If he listened very closely, he could hear breathing.

“Friendly. I’m thinking definitely your sticking point is ‘Friendly.’” Waited. Drummed his fingers on the side of the plinth-thing. “Hellooooo?”

Finally, Batman broke his silence, in a dry, beleaguered sort of tone. “I have gags too, you know.”

His grin stretched abruptly straight across his face, and he wrapped one arm around himself to hold in the laughter. “Kyehehe, ooh, kinky. But I’m a married man, I’ll have you know.” Which reminded him. “Everything okay between you and Robin, by the way? Not that I’m prying; I’m super nosy but I only ask intrusive questions if it’s important. That’s manners.”

He’d gotten off-topic; blindness definitely stimulated his chatter reflex, even when he wasn’t actively trying to get a rise out of someone. Flapped a hand in the space outside the blindfold.

“Anyway, answer’s not important, just wanted to say. Kid seemed to think you’d have a way easier time hurting Talon than I did dealing with your world’s Harlequin. I mean, you’re clearly the self-discipline type, so maybe just knowing that it couldn’t be him coming at you with the knife would be plenty to punch his face in without issues. I dunno. Compartmentalization is weird.

“Being mentally compartmental, I mean. You have a lot of compartments in, I dunno, a fishing-tackle box, that’s just useful. Have you ever gone fishing?” He waited a second, but when no reply was forthcoming, shrugged a little. “I went once, with a friend, but the first fish he pulled in I was just, ugh, the hook dug into its jaw like that to pull it up to drown, when it’d thought it was scoring something nice to eat…” J shivered.

He’d have felt bad enough about the hook-in-mouth without that, because ow, but the deceptive promises of bait added a note of true cruelty that he just couldn’t justify doing to a dumb animal that’d never done anything to deserve it. Not for sport. “’Course, Ivy says if I really cared so much I’d be a vegetarian, but it’s different, you know? Well, actually meat farming is terrible even done humanely, if you think about it, but I guess my prejudices are showing.”

He pulled a face, then shrugged that off, too. “What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Just so you know, though, Harley’s not my sidekick. Marriage is an equal partnership that—”

“I don’t need to hear it.”

J chuckled. That had taken longer than expected. “Not if you’re not planning to get married, I guess.” Then he sighed, long and gustily, the memory of the clowns he’d met today playing technicolor against the black inside surface of the blindfold-mask. Crossed his arms, moody, knew he was pouting and didn’t care.

“Where does he get off being that lonely, anyway? With a Harlequin to call him J?”

“Lonely?” Batman repeated, in a tone not unlike the one he’d used about the Morlocks.

“Well, that’s the best word I can think of for it,” J shrugged. It helped keep the memory of the damp foulness and the crushed-glass emptiness at arm’s length. “Just that—hunger to be seen, to get a reaction, to…he doesn’t see her as real, I guess,” he concluded, and if he heaved a despondent little sigh, no one could fault him. “He’s not even sure he’s real, or he wouldn’t….

“Just you,” he said, abruptly, turning his blind face toward the driver, searching. “How come he believes in you?”

“I couldn’t say,” Batman answered flatly. A second’s silence, and then, “Your sympathy is misguided.”

“Sympathy? What sympathy? No sympathy here.” J shook his head hard. “Just because I can empathize with someone doesn’t mean I do.” Though it was probably the main reason he’d never killed anyone, if he was honest—because no matter how awful a person was, if you could figure out enough about what was going on inside them to know why they were awful, you couldn’t help but pity them, a little.

Not forgive them, usually. Only sometimes even sympathize. But pity…yeah. And then he usually didn’t have the heart to just take everything away.

Some of them changed, after all.

And there but for the grace had never fitted so neat.

There had to be a reason, he kept thinking. There had to. Something that had made the Joker into what he was. A because. Like how Robin wasn’t Talon because Batman wasn’t Owlman.

…why wasn’t Batman Owlman?

“Hey,” he asked, letting his voice go tentative. “Why are you a good guy?”

There was a beat of silence, and he thought he was being ignored again, until Batman retorted, “Why are you?”

“I asked first.”

“It’s my car.”

J burbled out a laugh. “God do you ever have control issues. Fine. I’ll go first. And point made, I don’t have a good answer. I guess I’m an entertainer at heart, really. I just want to make people smile.” He thought about what he’d just said, and the Joker’s green poison, and amended, “But not like that.” He sucked his lower lip into his mouth and gnawed for a second. “I mean, people should be allowed to be happy. If they were, I’d be back on the stage like a shot.” Face and voice and all. He could tell a joke and work a crowd and that was all you needed, really. “I…don’t like it when people are sad. That’s all I got.”

And he’d met the Joker. Batman knew next to nothing about the Owl. Turned out he’d asked a pretty hard question.

“I can’t stand injustice,” Batman stated. Grim, and dark, and honest, even if he was holding something back.

“I wonder what makes the difference,” Jokester mused.

Batman answered with an agreeing kind of silence, and they let that persist until the car went through a series of rapid switchbacks and rolled to a halt. Still in silence, Batman threw it into park, without that slight jolt J was used to feeling as a transmission locked down, and cut the engine.

“You can take the mask off,” Batman rumbled, in time with the sound of him once more throwing the series of switches. The last one clicked a hummingbird’s heartbeat after he finished the last word, and J knew without looking that he’d flicked that final switch with a curt wrist-flourish of conviction. He really was a theatrical kind of guy.

Which shouldn’t be surprising; so was Owlman, in his way. Feathers and complicated murders and dramatic poses. But. It was, somehow.

It was the chin, he figured. When he’d first laid eyes on it he’d thought a bully’s chin and he wasn’t taking that back, but the way Batman used it, it was all I am a solid and serious person who can break rocks with the seriousness of my face.

By the time the roof had telescoped back enough for a normal-sized person (not Batman) to wriggle out, J had tugged the bow apart and dropped the mask negligently on the seat, as he leapt up and stuck his head out through the gap.

Big, dark, echoing cave with glorious stalactites and a faint smell of damp…and a well-lit path up to some kind of fancy-schmancy hacker cave like Ed might seriously kill for and absolutely would maim. There were a couple of other, less tank-like black cars embraced lovingly by the shadows, a really swell motorbike parked haphazardly at the edge of the lighted space and, most interestingly, waiting a few yards from the car there stood a trim old-to-middle-aged individual in a simple black tuxedo.

Black bowtie, black pencil-thin moustache, black domino mask, massively receded hairline, expression of bland unconcern. Huh.

The car had finished opening by the time J was done with his survey, and Batman launched himself out again (no spring mechanism J could detect even from inside the car, apparently that was all leg muscles, sheesh) and landed on the cave floor, facing the suit-man.

“Sir,” the man greeted, with a measured nod and an accent straight out of a historical drama, or maybe a Jane Austen adaptation. Same thing, really. He turned to Jokester. “And guest.”

“Batman’s actual batman!” J realized aloud, delighted. What were the odds? He knew he was grinning all over his face again, which he’d been trying not to do since meeting Joker.

No harm done; the man in the suit merely arched one eyebrow above the upper edge of his mask. “Indeed.”

“Robin briefed you,” Batman concluded. Which meant that was Robin’s motorcycle, and he’d won his bet.

“Indeed.” There was definitely a hint of the sardonic in there, and no one was really like this, this was a stock character being played to the hilt, and J loved it. He scrambled out of the car, not bothering to try to be cool about it because no one would be impressed if he did, and got his feet on the stone.

“So are you like, the guy who comes out in a giant robot when the day seems lost?” he asked, looking Moustache up and down again. What would be really cool was if he actually was a robot. A steam-powered clockwork one. Yeah!

But he totally wasn’t. Robots did not do that thing with the eyebrow. Especially not steampunk robots. That would take, like, advanced polymers and nanotubes. Or nanobots. In which case he wouldn't be a robot, he'd be thousands of them.

“He runs logistics for us,” said Batman quellingly.

“And more pertinently at the moment, I provide medical assistance,” agreed the older of the two masked men.

“You have a whole costume just to be home base?” J laughed. “Cool!”

The butler-impersonator still didn’t turn a hair. “Quite. Mr…?”

“Uh, Gwynplaine’ll do. Joey Gwynplaine.” He thrust out his right hand, cheerfully ignoring the firm body-language social cues telling him not to, because he was an uncultured barbarian and he obviously didn’t know you weren’t supposed to shake hands with the help.

From the quirk of the older man's eyebrows as he accepted the handshake, he got the joke, and Robin—knowing already it had to be a pseudonym—let out a snort of laughter somewhere deeper in the cave, wherever he was lurking. Masked Man did not offer any name in return, which was probably punishment for inflicting handshaking. Heh.

Little did he realize he was dealing with Gotham City’s champion nicknamer. Not telling the Jokester what to call you was an invitation.

Chapter Text

“Uh, Gwynplaine’ll do. Joey Gwynplaine.” He thrust out his right hand, cheerfully ignoring the firm body-language social cues telling him not to, because he was an uncultured barbarian and he obviously didn’t know you weren’t supposed to shake hands with the help.

From the quirk of the older man’s eyebrows as he accepted the handshake, he got the reference, and Robin—knowing already it was a pseudonym—let out a snort of laughter somewhere deeper in the cave, wherever he was lurking. Masked Man did not offer any name in return, which was probably punishment for inflicting handshaking. Heh.

Little did he realize he was dealing with Gotham City’s champion nicknamer. Not telling the Jokester what to call you was an invitation.

Batman led the way up the slope, with the domino-masked character actor who might or might not pilot giant robots or be made of tiny robots bringing up the rear, and Jokester let himself be herded, taking his time to look around. He spotted three tunnels that were possible exits, one of them on the far side of a vasty chasm, and was impressed by the immense size of some of the stalactites. He couldn’t hear running water, though there was a distant dripping. They were at least a hundred feet above sea level, and deep underground. Obviously they’d gone up, as well as probably-north.

Bristol Heights, almost definitely. Another point on the Wayne-o-meter, hehe.

The décor was hilarious. There was a nine-by-twelve-foot computer screen looming over the whole raised area, which would’ve made J assume the room was used for some kind of class, or group presentations, except that the space in front of it was set up like a normal workstation, which only gave the person sitting below a few feet of clearance. Even if Batman was secretly nearsighted, J didn’t see how he could focus on the whole screen from that distance…

On the other hand, there were also a twenty-foot penny and a full-sized model tyrannosaur in evidence, so maybe Batman just liked giant things. It would fit with the car. Awww. Big bad warrior bat was really an eight-year-old boy at heart. (Of course, that could be Robin’s input. Fair’s fair.)

He liked those decorating touches, whosoever’s they were, blending bombast and whimsy both at odds with the businesslike gleaming surfaces of control panels and steel countertops, and whatever industrial sealant had been used to coat the raw stone floor and turn it easy-clean smooth, and under other circumstances J would have scampered off to poke the dinosaur and rap on the penny, to see if it was solid copper. But he was trying really hard to be good, because Harley was not going to wind up a single parent while he was still alive, no way no how.

Robin was seated at a more reasonable-sized screen off to the left of the huge one, typing, and he briefly raised a hand in greeting as the three of them arrived, but didn’t even turn around before getting back to work. He didn’t even bother gloating over having beaten them here. The bike parked below had been its own gloat.

J appreciated this. He’d been in this universe a couple of hours, and one person had already refiled him under ‘normal.’

…if he did get stranded here, he was going to take Joker’s evil reputation and ram it down his throat. This Gotham was going to get used to the idea that there was more than one kind of creepy-looking clown if it took him the rest of his life.

He sat on that thought and stuffed it in a jar. When was he going to learn not to jinx himself? Heh.

“This way, Mr. Gwynplaine,” said the round, dry tones of Batman’s batman, and J with a shrug peeled off to let Batman go do whatever he was going to do, and followed the neat black suit coat in the other direction, toward a little medical bay that had clearly already been prepped. Antiseptics, swabs, giant scissors, suture kit, all that stuff.

“I do hope,” his guide added, “you are not one of those who prefers to evade medical attention until you are no longer able to flee.”

“Nah, I’m a pretty big fan of wound treatment,” J assured the old man with a laugh, turning on his heel to check out his sightlines from here. He could still see Robin at his typing, though Batman was striding off into some other part of the cave, cape fluttering with significantly less attention to maximizing drama, now that he was at home. “Not, like, to intentional injury levels. But a definite fan.” He’d seen what happened when you tried to power straight through, or just curl up and hope like a wild animal. Not super fun.

Tuxedo-Mask accepted this with a grave nod that was probably only about 45% making fun, and gestured him toward a wide steel bench beside the medical table. J wrinkled his nose a little—he’d liked the comfy tank seats—but moved agreeably enough toward the spot. He’d already absently reshuffled this nameless old guy to the position of ‘most dangerous.’

Because yeah, Batman was in most respects identical to Owlman, and could probably tear off J’s arms by main strength if he really wanted to, but J had gotten a sense of him, now that his Owl-shaped assumptions weren’t getting in the way, and he wouldn’t. Not without plenty of warning as he nerved himself up, at least. He was dangerous, sure, in a fits-of-barely-restrained-violence, Harvey-Dent kind of way, only with epic ninja skills that Harvey sadly lacked, and Robin for his part was darn good at what he did, but the thin half-bald guy with the clipped vowels was the one who could strangle a man with a serviette, if that was what he decided needed to be done, and not change expression the whole time.

Not that J didn’t like the guy, or anything. Butlerbot seemed super cool, and had a sense of humor and everything. He wasn’t a butler expert—in fact his main source was basically Jeeves, who, fun fact, was actually a valet—but he was pretty sure the subtext he was getting off this guy didn’t come with your standard model. He’d figure the old guy for a retired vigilante, except the energy between him and Batman was wrong for that. Respect both ways, more or less, but still…hm.

Maybe the guy was an actual butler and it was some kind of class differences thing; J’d have to get to know them both better to be sure. And he wasn’t planning on sticking around long enough for that. Or maybe the old guy was a secret agent who’d infiltrated as hired help and Batman had somehow not noticed.

Bond, he played in his head, in the old masked man’s prim voice. Jeeves Bond.

He caught himself humming ‘I Wish I Had A Pencil-Thin Moustache’ as he unbuckled the Santa belt, and made himself stop as he extricated the much-deflated cushion, pushing his fingers rather mournfully through the rent in the front of the borrowed coat. (Stupid blade-footed booby.) Butler07 clearly had a better appreciation for the absurdity of life than his boss did, but very few people liked being laughed at.

He did chuckle a little as he set the stuffed monkey carefully to one side, before piling up the Santa wig and beard, the funny little bola-cable he’d appropriated from around his ankles earlier, the half-full collections bucket, his wallet, and finally his now-grubby white gloves, which he laid together on top of the ruined cushion.

Robin’s surveillance became a little less covert when J bared his hands, knobby and white, and as scar-speckled now as they had once been dotted with freckles. He froze for a split second, then threw a little wave at the kid, who turned back to his computer in obvious embarrassment. Batman now reentered the main cavern carrying some kind of crate; he at least evinced no interest in the state of his fellow crimefighter’s dermal damage.

The Jokester wasn’t embarrassed, darn it. Scars were proof you’d survived. He grabbed the bottom hem of his bright green sweater, wrinkling his nose at the bloodstained rip in the right side. At least the shoe-knife hadn’t gotten deep enough to damage it in front, too. J glanced at the old man’s domino mask for guidance. “Should I just…?”

The elderly medic reached for the giant steel shears. “I will take care of that.”

…now that he thought about it, scissors a foot long really didn’t make much sense for medical use outside a twisted Halloween special, and he should have noticed them being out-of-place, Harley would laugh at him, but J still goggled a little. “Uhm, no. Thanks.”

Domino-Seven made a pretty insistent case for his loppers, but J held his ground and did it his way, peeling sweater and T-shirt up over his head. (Speaking of putting himself at people’s mercy, heh.) If he could get through a whole fight with the owch in his side, and climb in and out of the stupid tank, he could undress just fine, and he liked this sweater. It was warm and really soft, and Edna had made it for him. He said as much, without mentioning Edna. “I’ll put a darn in later,” he shrugged, returning to a comfortable slouch now that his clothes were no longer in danger. The old guy was looking exasperated. So it went.

Lightheadedness returned as he dropped onto the bench—note to self: learn not to pop up and down after blood loss, already, funny man—so he almost missed the way the Englishman’s critical eye caught on the wedding ring swinging across his chest on its steel chain. Only almost, though.

One hand plastered itself defensively over the little bit of gold as soon as he noticed, and the rapid motion brought Batman and Robin’s attention snapping back around, before they saw what he was doing and relaxed again. Aw. They were worried about their medic-robot-person. It went both ways, too.

J moved his hand to the edge of the bench and grinned engagingly at Mr. Received Pronunciation. “Medic?” he prompted. “Or am I doing a shirtless scene for the entertainment of the cave toads?” It wasn’t a secret to anyone how things were between him and Harley, and nobody here was going to go around stealing people’s keepsakes. Crying out loud, J. Get a grip.

The actual treatment went smoothly, wound cleaned and packed all brisk and sanitary, and bandages wrapped all around his stomach at the end, rather than a taped pad. More secure, better pressure, he figured, or maybe The Mighty Buttle was just old-fashioned. Well, he was definitely old-fashioned. The pain wasn’t going to go away any time soon, but pain was no big deal. He’d whine a little when he got home. Anybody who doubted his story of ‘going to an alternate dimension and being shot by his evil twin’ got to be shown the bullet hole. And of course somebody—probably Harvey, maybe Alonzo, maybe Ed or Waylon or even Harley—would say that him getting shot wasn’t unusual enough to prove dimensional doubles, and he’d say you think that’s weird, my backup was Owlman’s good twin. He dresses like a giant bat.

Then a hypodermic needle appeared, and Jokester’s attention snapped back to the present, and his eyebrows popped up. “A simple antibiotic injection,” Butlerman informed him, tapping the syringe to get all the air to the top and avoid causing an embolism.

J’s teeth sank into his lip. He was in favor of antibiotics; Harley applied them fairly liberally when they could afford them. “Can we not and say we did?” he hazarded, watching the sharp end of the needle as a few drops of transparent contents rocketed out, chasing the air bubbles. This definitely crossed the line into invasive.

“What, are you afraid of needles?” Robin shot at him, white teeth showing. (J really liked this kid. Staring and all.)

“Yes!” Jokester said at once, seizing on the excuse. Lucky the gouge had been too wide to suture, so they hadn’t seen him versus needle already. Besides Robin, but that had been a surprise jab. “Totally afraid. Phobic, even. I may faint.”

He’d oversold it in his hurry, he could tell, but waited to see if any of them was willing to call his bluff. It was Double-Oh-Domino who did. “I really must insist, Mr. Gwynplaine. Please turn your head aside and try to bear it.”

“I’ll catch you if you faint,” Robin threw in, the smirky little rat. Batman was staying out of it, but he was watching.

J edged away down the bench, as Butlerman finished his prep work and advanced with syringe in one hand and alcohol pad in the other. “Really. Seriously. I can get by without. I mean, it was a bullet, not a fence spike or something. How biotic could it be?”

Nobody was giving, and the medic kept coming, even as J ran out of bench. He changed tacks. “Okay, okay. How about Robin does the poking, though? Robin plays the doctor like a champ, I liked that part.”

All the expressions—not just the ones on their faces (Butlerman’s face didn’t actually change at all) but the ones in the wrists and shoulders and knees—went darker, and J backpedaled a little, cuz he wasn’t trying to be rude here. “Not that you aren’t really good,” he assured the old guy. He wasn’t trying to be insulting, honest. Was trying to avoid that.

“You liked that part?” repeated Batman, like it was a threat, and J gave him a funny look.

Then, “Oh! Ew, oh, come on. Really? I just meant…” Jokester trailed off, shaking his head and laughing. Wow. This was why he didn’t usually do caution. See what it got you. “Okay, okay, maybe we all need to lighten up. Stick me.” He offered Butlerman his arm.

“Your phobia is suddenly cured?” said the old man dryly.

“Like you believed that for a second.” He was an okay liar, as these things went—had a knack for misdirection, at least—but had also this tendency to retreat instinctively to the truth when he had nothing specific to hide, or if you took him off-guard. He wasn’t ashamed. Of either part. Or, well, much of anything, really.

“I am curious,” said Butlermedic after a second’s pause, without advancing to deliver the needle now that it was allowed, contrarily enough, “what difference you expected it to make to have an injection administered by Robin, if it was still from the same syringe filled by myself.”

Jokester looked around at Batman’s grim-flatness and Robin’s pinched-concentration and realized they weren’t going to let it go. He huffed out a breath. “Because if it was gonna kill me, you wouldn’t let him be the one to do it,” he explained, with a rolling shrug of it’s-not-a-big-deal-really, with a little should-be-obvious. “I don’t think you’d even ask him to do that to himself knowingly, but there’s no way you’d let him play executioner without giving him an informed choice.”

From the way they were looking at him, the idea that they’d kill a man under the pretense of hospitality was somewhere in the range from sickening to profoundly offensive. Well, yeah. There was a reason he’d tried to take precautions without saying why.

The Mighty Buttle said, cool and brittle, “You put a great deal of faith in my character, for a man who has profiled me as a murderer.”

J laughed, a little. “Not so much a murderer,” he disagreed. “I met the Joker, remember? If you think I’m really another of him, and I’ve seen this much…” He shrugged. “It’s not how I roll, but there’s a difference between people who’ll do anything to protect their own and people who’re bad.” He almost clapped his hands to dispel the heavy atmosphere, then remembered the way the Joker had kept clapping his and waved them floppily in the air instead, trying to dismiss all of this unpleasantness like a bad smell. “Anyway I didn’t seriously think it was poison, but it could be all kinds of drugs and I didn’t live this long serving myself up on a platter.” J smiled. He was getting the knack of not stretching his face into expressions that made him look more like the Joker than he could help. “Well, without an escape route, anyway.”

Gah, now he’d gone and hurt the feelings of his nice fellow vigilante maniacs, and he didn’t even have the excuse that he’d been panicking. This was what being sensible got you. This. Why did he ever even.

“Look,” he said, mostly to Robin because the kid was his favorite and his hostility was showing signs of breaking down. “It’s a nice gesture letting me see inside your secret base, but just remember you look exactly like the people who’ve been working on torturing and murdering me and everybody I care about for years, and we’re in a secret underground cavern with a giant pit to drop things down, and no chance of anybody hearing the screaming. Yeah?”

He flapped his hands again, this time in expostulation toward the echoing chasm. “And the only reasons I have to believe you’re good guys is that the Joker hates you, the cops tolerate you, and gut instinct. Luckily, I run my life on gut instinct.” He grinned, crooked and wry. “I mean, what if you got banged up in my world, and I took you back to my House of Jokes, and Harley came at you with a needle?”

Considering Ms. Quinn’s determined attempts earlier to poison as many hostages as possible, J wasn’t really surprised when Robin gave a little shudder. “Okay, point. Have you got a history with your world’s…Agent A?”

And the Buttlemeister had a name at last! Obvious pseudonym though it was. J rolled his shoulders. “Nah. Just figured him for the type to take on dirty jobs to spare you two.”

That was it, he realized, kicking his heels a little under the bench with the satisfaction of placing the sense they’d been giving him. Agent A was parental, in an extremely weird, stuffy, hands-off and deferential sort of way, probably because there was an outsider here, and under the layer of professional-soldier stuff, Batman was dadding Robin. Almost as weirdly as A was, but he had it now. They were a family.

That was alright, then.

“You are not precisely wrong,” Agent A himself allowed, after a moment. “But we do not kill people, Mr. Gwynplaine.”

“That’s good,” J said brightly.

“And we’re not going to drug you, either,” said Robin, firmly. And somewhat coldly. Yeah, J had definitely bruised some feelings.

“Also good! Sorry,” he added. Twiddled his thumbs awkwardly. “My friends are always telling me to be more cautious, but it never works out when I try. Janus is going to have kittens when I get back. Which—I apologized, A-Man, can you stab me and let’s get on with these tests? I’m trying to worry Harley less. Also, I’d like to get to put a shirt on. It’s a bit drafty in here.”

Agent A shot him up with a couple different drugs, all of which he carefully let J read the labels off of first, and drew three ampules of blood for testing, then sent him into a sterile little bathroom enclosure with a pile of charcoal-grey fleece. The water came hot from the tap with barely any waiting, and Jokester wished he’d thought to ask for a shower before the bandages went on. He worked around that to scrub up—the soap was emphatically unscented, and in fact seemed designed to eliminate smell as a useful sense. Rad. He wondered if Batman had to sneak past guard dogs a lot or if it was just a ninja culture thing. He wished he knew more ninjas. Ninjas were cool.

He came out feeling like a scentless baby penguin in fleecy charcoal jammies that seemed a size or so too small for Batman and way too long in the leg for Robin. Agent A had disappeared, along with J’s clothes, the ruined cushion, and the monkey, but waiting for him were a pair of comfy charcoal slippers and a big mug of cream-of-tomato soup, marked drink me with a lavender post-it note.

Some orders, J was okay following.

The soup was awesome.

Having put on his comfy charcoal slippers he felt about four years old, which made it the perfect time to go manfully over and see what kind of progress Batman had made.

He’d unpacked some of his collection of boxes, and now a funny squarish device with very large lenses on one side and a periscope on top was about half-disassembled all over the very clean worktop. Batman was prodding at a tiny gear with what seemed to be an even tinier screwdriver, but maybe it was something specialized and J just couldn’t tell the difference. He was an okay mechanic and could do basic wiring, and he really knew his way around a sound system, but Eddie had long since despaired of him ever developing truly high-level technical knowhow. Left to himself, he’d try to tackle all problems with a hammer.

“Whatcha doing?”

Batman didn’t look up. “Rebuilding this DIOD, so we can gather data to calibrate the phase oscillator and hopefully return you to your native dimension.”

J nodded. He understood the important parts of that. “Can I help?”

“No.”

Well, that was plain enough.

“I’m gonna go poke around, okay?”

“Hm,” Batman acknowledged, still not taking his head out of the machinery. Apparently it was okay, then. Maybe they thought exploring would make him feel less like their cave was the kind of place where people got killed and flung into abysses. Maybe Batman just wanted him out of his hair.

“Call me when you’re ready to take those readings,” J said.

“Hm.”

“Splendid!”

So Jokester went off to look at Batman’s interior decoration. He had a good feeling about this.

He checked out the penny first; it seemed real. Smelled like copper, rang like copper when he tapped it with his nails. If it had a zinc core, the copper jacket was pretty thick. If he hit it with something hard he could probably tell because zinc was so stiff, but he might dent it or something. That would be poor guest-courtesy. On to the next attraction!

He looked over the safety railing into the abyss for a bit. It was really neat; he’d never been spelunking for fun but he moved it up on his to-do-if-opportunity-knocks list. He found two more exits. He decided to work his way over to the dinosaur, and look at some of the stuff on display as he went.

It really was kind of cute. At least, serial killers sometimes did the obsessive trophy thing, and the ominous stygian atmosphere should have promoted that vibe, but it didn’t. There was an unvarnished innocence to it, somehow. Like a little boy’s bug collection, he thought. All tagged and pinned behind glass. Only instead of species it seemed like Batman was trying to capture—memories, or moments, or maybe victories. Maybe it was like J’s photo albums, only instead of smiling faces Batman preferred to map out his history in private museum exhibits. Well, he had the space for it.

Boxes of beetles and butterflies had a generally gloomifying effect no matter how gorgeous, but none of these trophies had ever been alive so far as J could see. So no one had killed them to put them here.

He ambled along the rows of trophies, admiring things but not lingering too long anywhere. Snickered over a pearl-encrusted mirror displayed alongside what appeared to be a random segment of lead pipe, followed by an ornate dagger and then some knotted strips of leather with teeth marks in them. He was sure there was a story to go with each item. He spun away to look up at the giant penny from a little more distance again, breaking into a distracted sideways two-step, more for the sense of motion than because he really felt all that dancish.

He tried to put his heart into it anyway, and gave himself some music. “Oooowowowo. Keep pushin’ ‘til it’s understood, and these badlands start treatin’ us good. Ooh, poooor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings, and a king ain’t satisfied, ‘til he rules everything…!”

“You making a point?” asked that bright young voice, and Robin popped out from behind the dinosaur.

J laughed. If he were making any sort of point with that song, it’d be to himself, reminders: 1) I believe in the love 2) I believe in the hope, and finally the very important 3) It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive, because between the Joker and the cave he was feeling a tad bit off-color. He wondered if Springsteen didn’t exist in this universe or something. “Nah. I mean, Owlman in a nutshell, but your boss doesn’t seem like a megalomaniac.”

Control freak, yes. Not remotely normal. But not the type that wanted to own the world.

“He’s not,” Robin agreed. J half expected Firefly’s usual And he’s not my boss, but it didn’t come. Apparently Robin was secure in his sidekick identity.

“What’re you getting him for Christmas?” J asked, by way of a new subject, and Robin’s face wrinkled like he couldn’t believe the question, but he shrugged.

“Cufflinks. I found a jeweler whose style I think he’ll like, commissioned a custom design.”

Well. That answered a lot of questions at once. And ow, hopefully the big man wasn’t spying on them right now. It’d be a poor return for funding his present for Ella to spoil Batman’s present from his own boy. Hilariously opulent as that gift might be.

“Guess he’s a hard guy to shop for,” J smiled. Flicking his fingers around the collection and the equipment and the general accoutrements of a man who clearly had everything.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Robin huffed. “And it’s really his money I’m spending, so it is literally only the thought that counts.”

J nodded sympathetically. “If you’re not sure, you could always make him something.”

Side-eye. “I think I’m a little old for that.”

J knew his grin was dopey at just the thought of when his little girl got big enough to make craft projects all by herself and give them as gifts. He chortled. “I wasn’t thinking so much the paper-machê end, though I bet he wouldn't mind if you went there. After all, something you made yourself is the only thing he can’t get without you. Or you could, hm, bake a cake!”

“A—Agent A would probably object,” Robin gave an easy, rolling shrug, almost covering the way he’d started with an a-as-in-apple sound before switching hastily to a-as-in-agent. “It’s his kitchen.”

“So get him to supervise.” J treated the kid to his Most Responsible solemn-eyed face, all pouty with sincerity. “Cooking is a life skill, you know.”

“Cake is not a life skill.”

“Sure it is! You know how many friends you can make via cupcakes?”

Chapter Text

"Cooking is a life skill, you know."

"Cake is not a life skill."

"Sure it is! You know how many friends you can make via cupcakes?"

Robin was of the opinion that most people would not accept homemade food from strangers. J disagreed. You had to have a context, not just approach people on the street, but at a book club meeting or something they'd get gobbled up and win you all the brownie points. Brownies would also work, speaking of which. (Brownies from scratch were hard, though. More trouble to get the texture right than frosting little cakes. Also, chocolate was not cheap.) Robin admitted he had never really belonged to a club. They argued about the deliciousness quotient of commercial bakery goods, finally agreed that it depended on the bakery and that you did not necessarily get what you paid for.

Throughout this chat J had been ambling slowly along the same direction he'd already been going when Robin turned up, and Robin had come with, but as they neared the end of the row something caught J's eye. Deep crimson glinted at him from inside a case, and Jokester peered back, and then he just knew.

He stopped dead. "Holy sheep!"

Robin side-eyed him again. "Did you just—"

"That," J interrupted him, pointing. "It looks kinda familiar. Where'd you get it?"

After following his pointing finger to the shiny red helmet at the back of one of the trophy cases, Robin shrugged. "Before my time. Hang on, it'll have a tag; this is 'decorative evidence.'" Casually, he moved forward, unlocked the case, and turned the helmet over. "'Red Hood helmet,'" he read. "From, uh, twelve years ago."

It took J no time at all to crack up at this news, and howl with laughter that was not quite what a normal person would call amused, as Robin looked the several inches up at him, faintly unnerved. The youth started to say something, stopped. More slowly, "Didn't you…say earlier you used to call yourself Red Hood?"

"I did!" J affirmed, and burst out laughing again, all the harder. Slapped his knee. It was one of those unbearably funny things that, if he'd explained it to someone, he would have been forced to concede weren't really funny at all. At least not in a way that made sense outside his head.

"Yeah," said Robin uncomfortably, through the noise Jokester was making. Eyes flicking down to the label again. "So did the Joker."

"Really? That guy?" J was surprised and not surprised; he didn't understand, and at the same time he'd known as soon as he saw the helmet. Reached out to take it, and Robin let him. The smooth surface was more familiar under his fingertips than it should be. He'd only worn his own shiny helmet a few times before Owlman killed him, and it wasn't shaped exactly like this anyway. He wondered if Owlman had taken his mask as a trophy. Made a note to keep an eye out, if he ever penetrated the bird's secret lair. "So he wasn't always bad," he reflected, looking down at Batman's souvenir of an enemy's dead identity.

"Uh…well, I don't know about that, but Red Hood isn't exactly a hero."

J looked up from the helmet to scowl. "Hey! S'this city's oldest vigilante, thank you. I mean, maybe standing up for strikers when the labor movement was just getting started isn't as glamorous as—" Robin was shaking his head. "No?"

"It's a name criminals have used for years. To cover up who's responsible for something," the kid said. "Sorry."

Jokester looked down at the helmet again. Felt his shoulders sag. "Oh," he said. Contemplated his own distorted reflection in red gloss. (This wasn't twelve years of dust. Even under glass. Agent A dusted the trophies, good grief.) "Everything here sucks."

"I don't," Robin pointed out, jaunty, and Jokester grinned.

"That's true. You are a huge improvement on Talon. No contest."

"Thanks," said Robin, very dryly.

And probably he had only come to talk to J because they wanted eyes on him at all times, but J was still glad he had. Company was always preferable to solitude, except sometimes when he wanted to think very very hard, and if he did that now he'd make himself glum. Robin promised a distraction.

Still. He couldn't help dwelling on it. What Red Hood had meant to him. To generations of Gothamites. All their stubborn pride and sense of frustrated justice and stifled hope narrowed into a point, standing tall against the storm. A mask to be kind behind, when kindness was dangerous, and a hero to call upon when the world fell down. Something that could always rise again, no matter how often the human being behind the name fell.

Thought of all that, reduced to a flimsy cover story for thieves and vandals and maybe murderers too.

Reached over, to set the helmet back in its place among the rest of the evidence. Lowered the glass, careful as a whisper, and stood back. His voice came out quiet and empty when he said, "It's not just us, is it."

Everyone who'd worn the name before him. Had they just been out for themselves, in this world? Those three who'd robbed the mafia in the high days of Prohibition, that man who'd taken bloody justice for those the system refused to defend, the quintessential informant, the brave Chinatown fighter who'd been killed in bed.

And he was back to that thing he hadn't wanted to do, thinking about who in this universe might be just as wrong and twisted and backwards as the Joker, as Ms. Harley Quinn.

"No," Robin confirmed. A shade of apology. "It really isn't."

J swallowed, shook off the heavy feeling with a chuckle that was more aspirational than real, though the whole situation was still pretty funny. "Just, uh, give me a baseline…Alex. Luthor? And Ultraman? What's their jam?"

"You mean Lex Luthor and Superman? Luthor's a villain, but he's good at covering his tracks. Superman's the world's greatest hero."

J whistled. Ultraman didn't even rate world's greatest bad guy, really; he had the power but not the vision. Or the conviction. But hero work was largely reactionary, pushing back against bad things other people did, so holding back all the time probably worked out better for a good guy. At least, if you had godlike power to trade on. And Alex…sneaky evil genius, he guessed? Not the cackling kind of mad scientist after all, or he wouldn't be good at cover-ups. "Weird. Okay, I really didn't want to know, but. Had to ask. I recognized some of the kids on Beverly Street. But none of the cops in the toy store." He would have been a lot more unhappy to see them if he'd known them, probably. There weren't that many cops in Gotham either Wayne or Owlman didn't have in his pocket. And even fewer who didn't think they were above the law.

"There aren't that many old-timers left on the force these days," Robin said quietly. "There's been a lot of housecleaning in the GCPD since Batman started working. Especially since we got Gordon in. Uh, the new Commissioner," the teenager added. "Who replaced Loeb, who was terrible at his job."

Jokester had mentioned, earlier, what the Loeb in his universe would do, if he phoned him up. (Which, actually, would be hilarious, why had he not done that already? That was going on the list.) And now it turned out that here, James Gordon was the Police Commissioner whom the local vigilante chapter could call from their car, to get the all-clear to take over an active crime scene.

J chewed that thought briefly. "Is Batman blackmailing Gordon or something?" he asked.

"What?" Robin was staring at him, now. "Why would you even think that?"

"Because…in my world Lieutenant Gordon's an okay guy who Owlman's had on some kind of choke collar for at least ten years? Seriously, normally he wouldn't bother to keep punishing a cop he had this much trouble controlling, he'd just have him killed. But given his head Gordon tries to do right, so I figured if I went with the pattern he should be a corrupt meanie here, which his high position seemed to confirm, yeah? But no."

"No," very firmly.

"Huh." J rolled his shoulders. "Well, this sucks, let's talk about something else. Walk with me?"

After the Red Hood helmet, J now found the trophies a bit less entertaining, though he made Robin tell him the story behind the diving helmet. When they'd finished the loop around the trophy cases and were about halfway back toward the central workspace where they'd left Batman, J glanced sideways at Robin, and snickered. It took him long enough to stop that Robin rolled his eyes and asked, "Okay, what, do I have something on my face?"

"Well, mask," J pointed out, earning another (invisible, but still obvious) eye-roll. "But actually I just—I was thinking about your name and I just remembered a joke my friend Eddie told me this spring."

"Oh man," Robin sighed. Resignedly, "Go ahead."

Jokester laughed. What a great kid, seriously. "Okay, 'How do robins avoid muscle strain?'"

"I don't know," Robin answered, his forehead already preemptively resting in his hand. "How?"

"They do worm-ups!"

There was that wonderful second of disbelief, and then the teenage vigilante let out a long, pained groan, and rubbed at his temples for a second. "Oh my god, maybe you are evil, that was awful. Would you believe the Riddler has not used that on me once in all these years?"

"Actually, no. Seriously, that was a new one? Wait, hang on. Is Eddie a bad guy in this universe too? Is everybody I know evil? Wait, strike that, don't want to know. Let's talk about something unimportant. Ooh! Maybe opposite sports teams are terrible and awesome in this world. How've the Gotham Knights been doing this season?"

Pretty good, actually, which kind of ruined that theory. Though in J's dimension they were the favorite to take the Superbowl. Wayne had poached the best quarterback and the best runningbacks in the NFL for his pet team. It was stupid; he didn't even care about football. But then, he didn't care about most things, but he did care about winning.

Robin was pretty good company, and J was no longer having any trouble not comparing him to Talon. They did have Springsteen here, but Robin did not consider him cool, and they wound up in animated discussion about rock stars and guitars, and the stinging you got in your fingers from too much strumming versus what you got free-running the roofs in this town. Robin had spectacularly engineered gloves, so he tended to suffer more from guitar than from intense parkour.

J complained vociferously about this injustice and displayed how while music and maneuver had both given him calluses, only the latter had left scars. He made Robin laugh several times.

Then he asked the question that had been lingering in his mind ever since he recognized the Red Hood's featureless face. And then this wasn't funny anymore.

He'd gotten away from Robin without giving anything away, he thought. The kid apparently did actually have stuff to do, and if J was going back to check in with Batman he should probably go do it, yeah, see you later. Robin might be circling around to keep an eye on his conversation with Batman, but it didn't matter if he was. Jokester set his feet on stone and stared across the steel-topped table at his host, who was bent over the same table as before, absorbed in the minute details of his refurbishing work.

"So."

Batman made a faint humming sound to indicate he was aware someone was present and talking to him.

"You dropped the Joker in acid and walked away?" J didn't raise his voice. He didn't say it friendly and easy, either, or stretch the words into a challenge. He didn't laugh. He just smiled, like he thought it was a pretty okay joke, and laid out the words so tidy it wasn't even a question, really.

Batman seemed to instinctively grasp the meaning of this behavior. He took his attention off his mysterious device and gave it to J. Straight-faced, he corrected:

"I didn't drop him. He fell."

"And then you walked away."

"I thought he was already dead."

Now Jokester laughed, high and jerky and more than a little bit cold. "Funny. That's what you thought in my universe, too. Guess some things don't change."

"No," said Batman levelly. "I suppose they don't." He turned his hand over, so it was palm-down on the work-surface. (Absently, J noted how he made even very small gestures so deliberate they seemed significant. Owlman did it, too; the secret was that stillness, that refusal to make unnecessary motions. He'd never seen Owlman use it to say I am not a threat. Well, obviously he hadn't, but—not to any of his allies, either. Not to anyone.) "For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

J laughed again. "Oh, I bet you are," he agreed. This didn't explain it, not really. That shining, hungry void, where only Batman was real. He had lived through the same pain and unmaking, without winding up that broken, that fixated, that empty. Maybe…maybe the Joker had had nobody to save him? Was that it? Could that be all it took?

After all, kindness was the most powerful thing in the universe.

In any universe, probably.

"No," said Batman levelly. "For what Owlman has done to you. I'm sorry."

It was real—cool, and distant, and doing its best not to be a weakness, but sincere, stranded halfway between condolence and apology.

It wasn't Batman's place to apologize, not really. Even if he had done the same thing to a similar person, by accident. But this was as close to that apology as J was ever likely to get. He breathed out.

"It's okay." And it really was. He waved a hand, swinging back onto his heels and cracking his neck to break up the moment. His smile had come back, without that hard edge. "He couldn't take the most important things."

No matter what happened, after all, there were smiles to protect. And the Jokester's choices were his own. Just as the Red Hood's had been. And every moment of soaring happiness he'd lived existed. No matter what happened in the future, they couldn't be unmade. (Though J knew better than most that they could be forgotten.)

Batman was still looking at him, hands open-empty-palmdown. "You don't trust me," he said.

J had trusted his life to the man several times over since they'd met, in spite of how that meeting had gone. Risking his life was easy, but risking his freedom by climbing into the Bat-Assault-Vehicle and remaining here as a guest, that had been hard. In his terms. And yet Batman was undeniably, entirely correct.

Jokester sighed. Located a chair, and dragged it over so he could sit down opposite the Bat.

"You're right," he admitted, as he took his seat. "I don't. Probably I trust you slightly less than you trust me, at this point. Taking our personal standards into account. And that's not very fair of me. Because you're not a bad guy." He let out a breath. "It's 'specially not fair because the reason doesn't even have that much to do with Owlman, not really." He flashed a crooked, cheeky grin across the table. "It's cuz you're rich."

The pure offense on the half of Batman's face he could see was kind of awesome, in that it was absolutely hilarious, but he realized he couldn't leave it at that. He liked Batman too much to let him misunderstand. "In fact," he added, "you're the kind of rich where your daily lunch budget could feed every elementary-school kid in lower Gotham for a week. Except you don't have a budget for your lunch, because you don't need to worry about how much you spend on meals. Or anything else."

Like adorable stuffed monkeys, for example. And this was a lot of the reason why people didn't like to accept charity—because then you owed the giver, because then you weren't allowed to criticize them. Like they owned a little piece of you the size and shape of what they'd saved you from with the gift they gave.

But anyone who offered charity thinking it worked like that wasn't really being generous, and was owed nothing.

"I just got here," J allowed, "and I've only seen you in action a little bit. I don't know what your standards are, when it comes to things less obvious than a monster clown threatening a little white girl in taffeta. But experience has taught me that people like you…don't always see people like me as people. Not really. Not when it counts. Let alone folks from my part of the city with a lot more color to 'em.

"So you dropped the Joker into acid, and that was an accident. You'd never murder anybody. But how hard d'ya think it's okay to punch a shoplifter? How bad do you feel when somebody you mistook for a crook walks with a limp the rest of his life? Wouldja attack somebody for vandalism? Even the kind that's just graffiti? D'you think making all druggies into felons has been good for society?"

He crossed his forearms on the steel table, propped his chin on them, and sighed. Batman let him, without taking the opportunity to answer any of his questions. Batman was apparently going to let him talk himself out.

J regarded the other man through his own lavender eyelashes. "I don't know you that well, yet." That was easy to acknowledge, even though it already felt kind of like they'd known each other for a lifetime. "And me profiling you by your race and class isn't really any more just than somebody doing the same thing to some poor black guy, so I swear I'm trying not to. But I met you from the wrong end of your fist. And I've had some time to look at your place here—and it's gorgeous, by the way, but something about it makes me feel like you probably think the way to solve gang violence is beating up the gang members, 'stead of making it harder for the gangs to recruit by givin' kids something to live for.

"Like you probably think it's somehow more evil when a thief stabs somebody to death for their wallet, than when the same somebody fades away in agony over the course of a year, beggaring their family paying for medicine that doesn't help, because their insurance company dropped them for the crime of getting sick.

"I mean," he said, settling into this theme, since apparently he wasn't getting interrupted anytime soon, "the insurance guys didn't break the law, or cause the sickness. But they made a calm, considered decision to make cutting the dying loose an item of policy, with full intentional knowledge of the results, just for the sake of a profit margin, and they probably don't even feel guilty. A lot of 'em are prob'ly proud.

"Whereas knife guy might have starving kids at home, and might not even have planned to use the knife for real, and if he's not too insane to understand what he's done might feel really guilty later. I mean, he might also not, he might just be an awful person, but you don't know, and sometimes he isn't. But the insurance company always chose knowingly, for a lot of people who'd specifically trusted them with their lives and paid them in good faith, and without duress besides a culture of greed. Corporations defray legal responsibility, ya know? Not the moral kind."

Batman's hands had closed into fists, by the end of this speech. "Your diction changes when you're angry," he observed very, very grimly after a few seconds.

J laughed. "Nah. It changes when I'm makin' intellectual arguments. I start t'talk like a book 'stead've a person." He rolled his shoulders. "So how 'bout it, Batman? School me."

Batman's mouth twisted. And he didn't say anything. So J took up his side of the conversation—probably really badly, because devil's advocate had never been something he was all that great at especially blind, but he was a talker. He'd talk 'til he dropped.

"I don't know you. I don't know your city. Maybe there's no real discrimination, maybe everybody here gets a fair shot at livin' their dreams. Maybe you've got a wonderful world where the things I see shadows of in you aren't real. Maybe the Joker really is the worst thing here. And if that's true, then…" J heard his voice break. Glued it back together, and caught Batman's eyes to show honest. "Then I'd be a monster, if the trade was changing the world around me that much. I'd do it, that's how amazing that would be.

"But I hope that if that ever happened, I wouldn't survive long."

He smiled, knew it was one of the creepy ones, but Batman didn't turn a hair. Of course he didn't. "Is that why he's still alive, Batman? The cops here don't murder suspects? Is this world of yours that beautiful?"

At that, Batman made a weird little noise—sort of a snort. Maybe an abortive little laugh. But not the happy kind.

"That's part of the reason," the big man told the disassembled 'DIOD device.' And oh, this was the part he answered. Of course. "But I've also saved his life several times. And even when he's killed, he doesn't die."

Well then. J leaned forward to speak, but Batman wasn't done after all. "It's gotten better," he said tersely, looking up. His eyes were hidden, but J thought they would have been bright with feeling. "Law enforcement. Profiling. Living conditions in low-rent areas. Gordon and I have both been working from that end. It has gotten better."

J felt his spine molding itself comfortably against the back of his chair as he relaxed. It was okay. Batman got it, enough at least. "Neither Chance nor Abuse are abiding," he said brightly, and by the complicated twist to Batman's mouth Agent A wasn't the only one who'd read his Hugo.

What is the father of Privilege? Chance. What is his son? Abuse.…Neither Chance nor Abuse are abiding. For both a dark morrow is at hand.

J hummed a little, Sir Percy Shelley welling up from cracks in his mind, surely the Second Coming is at hand.

(Poetry always sounded to him like it almost had a tune. He'd put poems to music before—it was simpler than writing his own songs. He made up his own words to existing tunes, too, and sometimes he'd even made up his own of both. If his life had gone different, he could've really focused on music, made a living, formed a band, maybe made at least one really good song of his own. He'd ached for that, a time or two. But mostly, he was happy with what he had, if not with the situation that made him needful.)

"So what's the rest of tonight's schedule looking like?" J asked. "Have you got all the parts you need, or do I need to borrow a sleeping bag?"

"Robin's currently out scouting your point of arrival for energy readings," Batman said. Which meant the kid really had missed their confrontation, which was good.

But since Batman couldn't have talked to him since before Robin went to hang out with J, how did he know? Had his orders been 'talk with clown, then go scout,' or had he been skiving off earlier? Oh well. "Unless he turns up anything too unexpected, we should be able to send you home before midnight."

"Capital!"

"Now go stand on that panel, while I get readings from you."

Jokester asked just enough questions to be annoying throughout the process, and chose them carefully so he felt like he had a decent idea of what was going on. They were supplied with coffee and scones at nine PM when Robin got back, but J got milk instead of coffee and was given a tall glass of some kind of fruit juice blend afterward because he'd lost a lot of blood and needed to hydrate, and Agent A was a magnificent fusspot.

Even the glass was fancy, without trying to be. Thin-blown, instead of cast, and without the mar of bubbles or the tiny scratches even glass picked up from rough cleaning over time. He didn't think Batman would really care if he drank everything from the same four cheap mugs on a rotating basis, so long as he could always get coffee when he wanted it, but someone obviously did. Fusspot.

Batman wouldn't let him poke around in his database finding out trivia about this world, which was probably for the best, and Robin had to do homework and asked for J to please not help, so from ten to eleven he caught a nap in a bed they had hidden behind a screen. It was surrounded by medical equipment that would have made Harley almost as super jealous as Eddie would be of the computers, but it was a perfectly fine bed.

Robin woke him up at eleven.

"Whozin trble?" J mumbled, when the person shaking his shoulder didn't stop after the first time he protested.

The voice that answered "Nobody, but wake up," wasn't immediately familiar, so J strategically rolled out of bed. He almost always woke up before he hit the floor, and if he didn't then he wound up really awake. This time, he managed to catch himself without any new bruises, and sat up wrapped in fluffy grey blanket. His side complained strenuously, but didn't start bleeding again.

"Oh. Right," he said, as he took in the red-yellow-and-green costume. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Time to go?"

"Almost," Robin answered, not making much effort to hide that he was just barely not laughing at him. J chuckled right back, disentangled himself from the blanket, and followed Robin out to Batman's workspace.

Batman presented the reassembled DIOD device and the calibrated phase oscillator with a minimum of flourish, very different from the mad scientists J hung around with, but he made all the usual approving noises anyway. He was pretty sure Batman wound up embarrassed. Robin was not-laughing again.

"Time to go?" he asked.

"Your things," Agent A said, and handed J a bundle of cloth.

"…this is a different Santa suit," he observed, running his hand over it. The velvet was heavier, more plush, less worn. A deeper crimson.

"I'm afraid some of the stains were beyond repair," admitted the Buttlemeister. It was the same cushion, though, restuffed and mended, and he'd given J's gloves back in spite of the mottled shadows of ash and the blood stains, even if he'd also included higher-quality fresh replacements. J ran a thumb across the new seam in the pillow and looked up, smiling.

"You didn't have to do that."

"Cleaning up Batman's messes is the meat of my professional bailiwick," Agent A replied, drily ignoring the slightly offended face Batman made, "so in fact I did."

Jokester laughed. (Nobody flinched.) "It was the other clown gutted my feather-filled belly," he said. "And made me bleed on things. Though I guess your boy can be called out for the black grease."

"Damage from fighting as an ally comes under my purview," the old man asserted primly.

"And standing up to bad guys is in mine. So I guess we neither of us need to be thanked for doing our jobs." J grinned, and Buttle-o-seven smiled faintly back, and they understood each other very well.

"So you're heading out?" Robin checked.

"Yup!" J replied brightly, settling the monkey in the crook of his elbow. "Thanks for all your hospitality, guys. You're still wrong about Jethro Tull," he added, to Robin specifically.

Robin shook his head. "Aqualung is the only good song he has. At all."

"False!" J laughed, and shook his head. "I should change," he said. "And then we're taking this show somewhere that won't probably leave me in the middle of Owlman's home base, yeah?"

Batman nodded, and Robin made a face like now he felt like an idiot. J grinned at him. Of course the kid hadn't thought about it; he felt safe here. Remembering how unsafe it was in another world wouldn't come natural.

"Hang frosty," J told them, and ducked into the changing cubicle beside the shower.

Agent A had returned his sweater washed but not mended, replaced his bloodied shirt with a similar one, and provided brand-new underwear. J assumed his had been thrown away. He decided to accept this meddling magnanimously, buckled his shoes—which had been cleaned, Buttle-O was either just as crazy as J in an opposite direction, or had actual robotic minions—pulled the hat on, and reemerged, holding the wig and beard in one hand.

"My bucket's back in the tank?" he asked. Batman nodded.

"You should put the beard on," Robin advised.

"How come?"

"Disguise."

J pulled a face. "I think it's funnier like this."

Robin shrugged. "Suit yourself."

"I am all suited up!" J replied, and stuffed the hairpieces inside his coat, under the cushion, next to the monkey. The cables he'd appropriated earlier had disappeared. He swarmed up the side of the tank again and dropped into his seat much more smoothly than the last time. As the roof closed, he heard the motorcycle engine kick up.

Batman set the device up in Robinson Park, not too far from where J had come through, in the middle of one of the graveled paths. The trees were wrapped in strings of lights, and at a distance you could see only the lights and not the trees, like a forest of stars had grown up out of the icy ground. There wasn't anyone there to see them by this time of night, and it was cold enough that J reconsidered the beard as a face-warmer, but nah. He swung his red donation pail and listened to the coins in the bottom go jingle-clank.

Batman turned the machine on, and it hummed to life and a circular white portal flickered into being.

J hesitated in front of the portal, turned, and waved a hand over his head. "Merry Christmas to all!" he called out, in his deepest bellow. Winked at Robin. Mimed biting into a cupcake. "And to all a good night." He tapped the side of his nose, and stepped backward…into Robinson Park, empty of Batman or Robin, and with a lot fewer Christmas lights.

The portal winked out, and J looked around, blinking the glare out of his eyes. His arrival had woken up a guy who'd been curled in a heavy coat on the nearest bench, and he was looking startled as heck but not scared.

"I'm home!" J told him. It occurred to him as he said it that Batman might have screwed up and it might not be true, but the guy smiled and said,

"So you are."

"So I am," J echoed, looking around the dark wintery wonderland. "What are you doing sleeping there, it's like fifteen degrees out here, come on."

The guy got up willingly enough, though kind of stiffly, and when he declined J's offer of an arm to lean on it was pride, not revulsion. "So where'd you go?" he asked as they fell into step down the path toward Pam's place, where they could get hot tea and thaw out a little before heading over to one of the unofficial shelters where J was sure they had to have some space, when he realized Jokester wasn't going to volunteer an explanation for why he'd just popped out of a glowing portal dressed as Santa.

"I had a team-up," J replied vaguely. "Hey, what's your name?"

"…Ellis."

"Cool! So Ellis, what's your favorite kind of tea?"

Chapter Text

(The folks at the Mission accepted his explanation for why he'd come back late, with a black eye, in a different Santa costume, with general tolerance and varying degrees of credulity, but since he was returning a superior costume rather than a ruined one convincing them wasn't so important. There turned out to be three fifty-dollar bills in the donation bucket that he couldn't account for; they were almost definitely from another universe which might be a little bit like counterfeiting, so he didn't point it out.

Most of his friends believed him eventually if only because he never stood by a joke based on an untrue tale for longer than it took to get a laugh; Harley believed him second, after Waylon, and they were able to curl up in bed together and cry when he confided about Ms. Quinn and the Joker's dead-beetle eyes.)

(He ran into Talon again the day after New Year's, and not one shred of him felt it was strange that there was no bright young laughter in that still mouth, that the boy did not swing his weight about on a narrow pivot-point, brimming with potential, daring the world not to entertain him.

It wasn't strange. This was in no way Robin. This was Talon, as he had always been.

But now he knew just how wrong it was, that it was so.

Talon almost killed him, while he was distracted. He's lucky Owlman would never forgive someone else landing the finishing blow.

Batman and Owlman were so much alike, and yet at the same time J couldn't find any shred anywhere in his nemesis of the good-hearted, awkward jerk who'd responded to his pique about socioeconomic disparities by buying his daughter a monkey.)

(Ella's face lit up just like he'd imagined when she ripped the shiny paper off the shoebox he'd put the monkey in and lifted the lid, her and her new toy sending mirrored brilliant grins back and forth before she swept it up in her pudgy arms and rubbed her face all over that impossibly plush fur. "DaddydaddydaddyMON'EY!"

The monkey winds up being named Plumpkin, because of course it does, and his prehensile wire-cored tail gets twisted around every possible thing, and not always by Ella—Harvey gets so used to encountering Plumpkin swinging at eye level when he opens a door or rounds a corner that he just ducks blandly out of the way even first thing in the morning, before coffee.

J would write Batman a thank-you note, but he lives in a different dimension.)

(Now that he knows about acrobat, it's not so hard to dig through the old missing persons' all over again and find Richard Grayson. The photo of the missing child looks almost nothing like Talon, but a lot like Robin, and the picture he finds of the father, John, looks like both of them, somehow.

Suspicion strikes and he digs a little deeper, further and further back, and at the end of the day he has to go outside and press both hands against the cold January bricks with sunset lighting up the little flecks of mica, to stop himself from shaking too hard with rage. That even the evil, unflickering eyes of the Court could look at a circus, a real, live, musical circus, and see a slave market with spangles.

Even if they did have a trained elephant, and a whole cage full of monkeys.)

(The vest gets lost, eventually, and the soft, soft fur picks up faint stains and gets mussed and nappy over the years, and eventually one eye falls off and no one can find it, probably because it's still at the safehouse they just evacuated. Ella is devastated on her monkey's behalf. Jon comes to the rescue with an offer of a 'glass eye,' an iridescent almond-shaped bead that he sews on with a little flourish of his long, thin fingers.

When Ella leaves home for the last time, Plumpkin stays behind. He's a dull, greyish brown now, with mismatched eyes, and the wire in his tail has kinked up and snapped enough times he looks more like the world's most battered alley cat than the fresh, gymnastic young primate J met in a wrecked toy store years ago.

But he's still smiling, and Jokester's smiling back. Some things, he guesses, don't change.)