Chapter Text
Joker Junior doesn’t know who, exactly Janet Drake is. But he’s fairly certain that she isn’t trying to kill him so he plays along.
He’s not entirely sure where he is, either. The last thing he remembers is Mom leaving the house and then screaming, and sirens- not unusual- but then darkness.
A swooshing noise, Junior thinks, and tall, towering darkness and then black. Infinite, drowning black. He doesn’t think the man of darkness knocked him out. Dad had visited, that day, and Junior already had a concussion.
Then he woke up in a hospital. A woman had come- Janet Drake, and she’d bought him to car with another man- Jack drake, her husband, and a driver inside. He had assumed he had been going to Arkham, because he had assumed the man of darkness was The Batman but Mom had always said the most obvious thingumabob is not always the right thingumabob.
His mom is very poetic, he thinks.
So he isn’t in Arkham. Janet Drake had some responsibility over him? She was complaining, about being torn away from her dig (dig? Archeology, perhaps) in Africa (Africa? Big place. Maybe South Africa?) to care for such an ungrateful child. He figured he was the aforementioned ungrateful child given how she spent the rest of the car ride complaining about him and how ungrateful he is.
He’s not entirely sure what he did to her. She keeps calling him something that is not his name, not junior. Timothy.
There is something painful in that name, painful like white hot heat screaming through his veins.
He puts it in the box in his mind labelled ‘before’. Mom said that the box labelled before is where all the bad thoughts go. He must not think of before or Dad will get very angry.
But now he’s in a big house, that he’s fairly certain isn’t lived in. She tells him to go to his room but there aren’t any rooms at all that he thinks could belong to him, let alone an ‘unruly child’, not at first glance, so instead he hides on the stairwell and eavesdrops.
The stairwell is very big, very big and grand just like the rest of this massive house and junior would be in awe if he wasn’t so-
If he wasn’t so scared. Because he’s scared. That’s what he’s feeling. He clamps his hand over his mouth to stop the desperate giggle that escapes and focusses on what Janet and Jack are talking about. Africa. Ethiopia apparently, not South Africa and Junior is annoyed because he was led to an incorrect assumption. Again.
Dad will be angry.
When (if?) he comes to collect junior.
They are archaeologists, it turns out, and he is glad- they are going back to Ethiopia now, they say. And then they leave. And junior is-
Alone.
Huh.
Okay then.
He starts gathering intel. Mom never taught him to do that and mom taught him everything he knows so this is odd but something about it just feels- right.
He finds a room with a laptop in it and with closer inspection he sees that the windows are well cleaned and easy to soundlessly open and close and there is a camera hidden under the bed. There’s a school bag tucked away in the closet with clothes- boring stuffy uncomfortable clothes. The schoolbag is ignored for now- the laptop is more important.
This is probably his room.
Janet Drake must work for his father. That makes sense. Why he’s here, in this big, grand house and not Arkham and why Dad said he was going on a holiday to Ethiopia- Dad doesn’t go on holidays, it must be a work thing.
He doesn’t know why Janet Drake had not simply told him this but Mom said that sometimes adults think he doesn’t know as much as he does (which is stupid. Junior knows lots of things) so they tell him lies instead of the truth, because that is easier.
He looks up his father- he is in Arkham. Batman beat him bad this time.
But the news is not talking about how the Joker’s son had escaped arrest and disappeared. The news is talking about Jason Todd.