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It was 6:45 on a Saturday evening in Gotham City, and Lex Luthor was on his way to meet the Joker.
Lex and the Joker were not friends. They were not even acquaintances. To the Joker, Lex Luthor was a snob and a bore: not worth his time and certainly not worth his attention. Lex disagreed with that, but he did have a severe allergy to anything approaching shtick. To him, the Joker was almost supernaturally irritating. Their occasional team-ups had only served to deepen their disdain for one another into an aggressive kind of apathy, where each man spent a lot of energy pretending that the other one did not exist.
This did not mean that the Joker didn’t try to annoy Lex whenever the latter was in town--it just meant that the annoyance was somewhat perfunctory and generally not done in person. Pranks, small bombs, mild hostage situations, that kind of thing. Low effort, low stakes.
Lex’s response, too, was equally perfunctory. In addition to his usual travel security, he always made sure to warn the relevant staff and change his number for the ten-thousandth time before flying out to Gotham. Not that any of it mattered--if the Joker really wanted to annoy Lex, and he usually did, then he would find a way to do it.
There was no reason to think that this trip would be any different. Lex bedded down in his hotel, hoping to get two or three hours of sleep before the Joker interrupted him with a volley of smile gas or shot fireworks off on his balcony. When he instead slept through the night without incident, Lex assumed that the Joker was having one of his biannual vacations over at Club Arkham and moved on, grateful for the reprieve.
The next few days proceeded smoothly, with a full schedule of meetings that went off without a hitch. Lex even found the time to call Bruce up and give him an earful about the state of Wayne Enterprises, providing the sometimes-CEO with yet another headache following WE’s disastrous earnings call the week before. Lex was a shareholder, he reminded Bruce. He referenced bats on the call. Bruce hung up on him.
That was the really tragic thing about Lex and the Joker’s hostility toward each other. Were the Joker just a little bit less of himself , his obsession with ruining Bruce’s life would have fit in so well with Lex’s favorite hobby of doing exactly the same thing. They could have been great friends. As it stood, Lex stuck to his boardrooms, the Joker skulked in his back alleys, and never the twain should meet.
Until this trip.
The first sign that something was amiss was that when the Joker did finally get around to calling Lex, he called him at a normal time of day. This was far out of the ordinary. In the brief windows between Lex’s regular Joker-blockings and number changes, the Joker always managed to call him at very strange hours. Not necessarily late, though that was most often the case, but just at odd times to call someone in general. He also had a sixth sense for knowing when a call would be inconvenient but not impossible for Lex to answer it. This time, the familiar UNKNOWN CALLER notification popped up when Lex was fully and completely unoccupied. Lex answered it because it was the easiest way to show that he didn’t care what the Joker was up to.
But the Joker was not calling to taunt Lex or to tell him that he only had twenty minutes to find the antidote for a poison that had already been piped in through his vents. Instead, he engaged Lex in a bizarrely normal round small talk before inviting him out to lunch later that afternoon--at a real restaurant that really existed, albeit in a neighborhood quite far from Lex’s hotel downtown. Lex would be busy then, but he made the mistake of saying, out loud, that the invitation was strange enough for him to almost consider it. That opened the floodgates. The Joker had many, many ideas for what they could do instead, all dumped into Lex’s unwilling ear over the course of the next few days. Primarily, the Joker had some plan he wanted to discuss for really sticking it to Bruce, but he insisted that they could only talk about it in person. Lex didn’t believe that for a second, but after seventy-two hours of continuous harassment, he agreed to meet the Joker at his hideout right before he flew out just to get the man off his back.
“I can only stay for one hour, max,” he warned. This was being very generous; Lex planned to stay less than ten minutes if he could help it. The Joker probably expected as much, but he assured Lex that an hour would be fine and gave him the address. Lex was halfway through writing it down before he stopped, pen in hand, and squinted at his phone. “You have an address?” he asked in disbelief.
“I have to live somewhere, don’t I?” the Joker replied.
Lex wasn’t sure about that at all, but he did his due diligence and looked up the address anyway. His search returned a neat little house on a neat little block, located fairly close to the really real restaurant from that first proposed lunch date. Lex scoured the news for any reports of explosions or general chaos in the area but found none. He did not even find any stories about the Joker moving to the house, which raised the unlikely possibility that the Joker had both moved in without detection and had then remained incognito for more than thirty seconds.
It was such a ridiculous idea that Lex rejected it outright. The more probable explanation was that the Gotham news services were so overrun by calamity that anything without a double-digit body count just didn’t rate. Lex’s own trip had been delayed for a number of hours because the Penguin had spent the morning of his departure knocking down the Gotham Bay Bridge. All things considered, it was a minor miracle that the Joker’s house was still a house and not a smoking crater when Lex’s driver pulled up to the curb.
The house looked much as it had in the pictures Lex found online, though the shutters were new and the stonework on the porch had been replaced. Lex walked past a manicured lawn and trimmed hedges on his way to the door. The greenery was in excellent shape. Did the Joker keep a lawn service on the payroll? Did the henchmen mow? Mysteries upon mysteries, right there in the suburbs. Lex rang the bell.
“Comi-i-i-ing!”
There was no mistaking that voice. Lex steeled himself. The Joker flung open the door a second later, all smiles. “Lex!” he exclaimed. He was wearing sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt that said ANTONY’S PIZZA on the front. ‘Pizza’ was misspelled. ”Oh, it’s so good to see you! It’s been too long!” He held out his arms for a hug.
Lex took an immediate step back. “I’ve warned you about the hugging,” he said.
“You know, I worry about you, Lex. I really do,” the Joker tut-tutted. “You seem so unhappy all the time.”
“I said I would be here at six forty-five, and here I am. What do you want?”
“There’s no reason to be so brusque! We’re here together, it’s a lovely day--“
“I have one hour , Joker.”
“Oh, bah. Where do you have to be? I mean really .”
“Metropolis,” Lex said flatly. They’d already gone over this twice on the phone. Lex had entertained the vain hope that they would not go over it again. “Then Monaco.”
“But we have so much to talk about!” the Joker insisted. “And I simply must give you a tour of the house. The boys and I have done a lot of work on the--"
Lex looked at his watch. “You’re down to fifty-five minutes.”
“It hasn’t been five minutes!”
“I’m rounding down. My driver will wait for me.”
The Joker peered over Lex’s shoulder at the black sedan parked by the curb. “You can’t leave your car in the street. I have an HOA.”
“Yes, but there’s no rules about street parking if someone is in the car. I checked.”
The Joker frowned. “Hm. I’ll have to bring that up at the next board meeting.”
Lex glanced at his watch again. “Fifty- four minutes.”
“Fine, fine, fine,” the Joker grumbled. “Follow me.” He led Lex through the entryway and into the living room, both of which were decked out in impeccable mid-century kitsch. Lex paused by a bright yellow princess phone that was perched just so on the end table next to the sofa.
“This is all vintage stuff,” Lex said.
“Of course.”
“No repros.”
“Don’t insult me.”
Lex looked at the phone again. “Does it work?”
“Why would I put a broken phone in my living room? That’s crazy .”
An almost-chuckle escaped from Lex’s mouth. It was the first time he had ever come close to laughing in the Joker’s presence. On a whim, he picked up the phone’s receiver from the cradle and held it, testing the weight, watching the movement of the coiled cord as it bobbed up and down. “But it’s been refurbished, right? Even if you somehow pulled a brand-new one out of storage--it’s seventy years of just sitting there. Forget the interiors, just the plastic on the cord would have--“
“How long do we have now?” the Joker interrupted politely.
Lex glanced at his watch. “Fifty minutes.”
“Do you really want to spend the next fifty minutes talking about phones?”
Lex’s face, momentarily unguarded, revealed that he did. “No,” he said.
“Then, please. Let’s try not to get distracted .”
Lex rolled his eyes, but he put the phone down. No sense in starting a fight this early. He followed the Joker to a staircase at the back of the house, which Lex assumed would lead down into the hideout itself. He was very surprised when they descended, not into a den of cloying madness, but into an ordinary finished basement instead.
This area also qualified as a kind vintage--the bad kind, having been allowed to lie fallow and fester since the 70s. Lex beheld the wood-paneled walls and orange shag carpet before him with disgusted fascination. Though the room had once been crammed with all sorts of wretched offal, it now sat empty, home to only a pair of newish couches, a large square coffee table, and the matted ghosts of furniture past still pressed into the miasma of shag.
And yet that was still not the strangest part. That award went to the astonishing amount of beer bottles on both the coffee table and the surrounding floor, all unopened and sitting happily in their cardboard caddies. It was a hideous, baffling tableau. Lex was speechless.
The Joker ushered his guest into the basement before trotting to the couches, where he ignored them in favor of sitting on the floor. Lex remained where he was. He looked around, waiting for the Joker to hit a button or open the panel that would lead to the secret hideout part of this secret hideout. But the more he looked, the more it seemed that the building around them was just...this.
“What’s with the rumpus room?” he finally asked. “Where’s all your Joker stuff?”
The Joker shrugged. “Some of it is in the other room. The rest is in storage. When they bulldozed the amusement park, I had to downsize. It’s hard to find a place to put a teacup ride. Besides, I’m cultivating a vibe down here. I want to be more approachable.”
Lex scoffed at the idea. “Why?”
The Joker looked like a lone explorer amidst the beer forest. “I’ve never done it before. And it’s working already, see? You’re here.” He motioned for Lex to take a seat on one of the sofas. Lex approached, but he did not sit.
“So the couch is booby-trapped, then,” Lex stated.
The Joker looked at him with reproach. “Why would you think that?”
“Because you’re sitting on the floor.”
“I like sitting on the floor. I don’t have to reach so far to get a beer. And I can look up at you, and enjoy your handsome face.”
Lex was mentally calculating how long it would take to get a SWAT team inside the house. “Inviting me over and then killing me with a couch is hack shit, by the way. Just so we’re clear.”
“Lex,” the Joker sniffed. “I am many things. But I can assure you that I am not a hack.”
Lex hesitated another minute before he gave up and sat down. Nothing jumped out of the sofa to grab him.
“There we are! Just a couch. And you were worried .” The Joker shook his head, clucking his his tongue. He picked up a bottle and nudged it in Lex’s direction. “All that stress? That’s the real killer. You need to relax. Have a beer.”
Lex’s suspicions immediately reignited. He eyed the drink like it was a cobra. “What’s in it?”
The Joker picked up another bottle and read from the label. “Ingredients: water, malted barley--“
“You know what I mean. What did you put in it?”
“Not a thing. Inviting you here just to poison you is also very hacky.”
“Ok, so maybe it’s not poisoned,” Lex allowed. “Maybe it’s just drugged.”
“The only drug in these things is wholesome, cheap grain alcohol.” As if to demonstrate, the Joker pulled a Batman-branded bottle opener from his pocket and snapped the cap off of the bottle in his hand. He took a drink--a big one. Then he put the bottle opener on the table next to the bottle he’d offered Lex.
“I have your word on that.”
“Lex, we are not doing a contract negotiation here. I’m not going to punish you if you don’t ask the right questions. That’s exhausting. I’m a just a regular guy, in a regular house, running a few ideas past his coworker.”
Lex heard a shuffling sound in the hallway connected to the far end of the room. Claws and paws on hardwood. He looked up. Blinked a few times. “I think a hyena just walked by,” he said.
“Hm? Oh, yes. He belongs to Harley. She spends most of her time in an apartment in the city now, and you can’t keep a hyena in an apartment. Certainly not two of them.”
“Are they dangerous?” Lex asked.
The Joker’s shrug was noncommittal. “They’re hyenas.”
Lex looked around again. “Where are all of your henchmen? Henchpeople.”
“I sent them outside to play. They should be back before you leave. But you know, if I didn’t get on them, they’d just stay inside and play video games all day. It’s not healthy. That’s why I made sure to choose a house with plenty of green space nearby.”
“Oh, that’s nice. How are the schools?”
“WASPy. I might get a bulldozer and knock a few of them down.”
Lex snorted. “So much for the approachable thing.”
“Nonsense. Anybody would be welcome to come talk to me while I do it. And it’s for their own good. When people get too comfortable, they make up all sorts of imaginary problems for themselves. My job is to help everybody around me keep a sense of perspective.”
“So when you blow up a city block or make a bunch of fish smile, that’s not for you. That’s for all of us, because you love us so much.”
“Oh, I see. You’re making fun . But I do, I love people. I love to talk to them. I love to watch them. I love everything about them. You do, too, in your way.”
Lex made a face. “I hate people.”
“You can’t hate everybody.”
“Name one person I don’t hate.”
“Superman.”
“That doesn’t count. He’s an alien." Lex folded his arms. "Name a human person.”
The Joker smiled. “Superman’s mother,” he said primly.
“I don’t--ok, no ,” Lex sputtered. “But I don’t know Superman’s mother.”
“Right. So you can’t hate her.”
“No, I can’t hate her personally ,” Lex retorted with a scowl. He only enjoyed pedantry when he was the one being pedantic. “Hating people is more of a general thing. A philosophy.” He paused. The Joker waited. “She’s probably very nice,” Lex admitted. In a fit of pique, he snatched up the Joker’s bat-shaped bottle opener, opened his own beer, and took a drink.
“There,” he said. “You win. I’m dead.”
“And how is it, being dead?” the Joker asked.
“Less peaceful than I had hoped.”
The Joker laughed. A normal laugh, not the unhinged kind he saved for the Bat. It was...disarming. Strange, and disarming. “You knew I didn’t poison the beer.”
Lex did know that. Or at least, he hoped that he did. “Like you said, you’ve never been a hack.”
"Never," the Joker confirmed. He continued to engage Lex in pleasant, frivolous conversation, seemingly hesitant to talk about the perfect scheme that he had called the other man all the way out to the suburbs to discuss. Every time Lex checked his watch, the Joker noticed--and he would then insist that he was getting back on track, really, right this second, only to immediately spin off again. As the hour wound down, any pretense of nefarious schemes had been dropped in favor of the Joker teaching Lex how to make a matchstick disappear. Lex was a poor study.
“It’s very simple--“
“I know that the trick is simple. I know how it’s done. I just can’t do it myself. My hands don’t work that way.”
“Now, don’t get upset. It happens to the best of us. You see it, you know how it works, but you just can’t make your body do it. I can’t do a triple jump.” The Joker handed Lex another matchstick to practice with. Lex fumbled and dropped it on the carpet. By Lex’s own count, he was two and a half beers in. That wasn't even enough to get him tipsy, but it was enough to make him very, very intent on the matchstick thing.
“You want to know who’s really good at magic?” the Joker asked him.
Lex, bent over on the couch and searching the floor, could not care less. “Who?”
“Batman. Bruce.”
Lex stopped looking for the matchstick. He sat up. “He is not.”
“He is. He’s really good.”
“At what? Pulling a batarang out of his ass?”
“Haha, no. No, he’s good at things like this.” The Joker held up his hand and produced a card out of nothing, right in front of Lex’s eyes, before making the same card disappear again. “He does it all the time when he’s in the suit. Hides things, plants things. Sometimes I don’t even catch him doing it.”
“You’re lying.”
The Joker held up his hand again, this time revealing the five of clubs he had palmed in it. “With God as my witness.”
“Fuck,” Lex said. The Joker handed him the card so that he could try it himself. Lex palmed it, but not very well.
“Like this,” the Joker explained. He demonstrated the move again with the six of hearts. Lex tried to picture Bruce--young Bruce, old Bruce, any kind of Bruce--practicing palming cards in front of a mirror, but he couldn’t do it. For a little while, he went quiet, dutifully listening to the Joker and adjusting his technique as instructed. The image of Bruce Wayne and cards still refused to conjure.
“Do you think Bruce got into this stuff before or after his parents died?” Lex asked. Maybe that would make the difference: Bruce learning sleight of hand for fun versus Bruce learning sleight of hand as yet another tool for Fighting Crime. Lex wasn’t sure which one made more sense.
The Joker paused. “How should I know? You’ve known him longer than I have.” Lex noticed the very tiny change in the Joker’s voice as he spoke. His instincts, lulled into complacency by the magic lesson, came roaring back to life. “Are you all right?” the Joker asked him.
“Sure,” Lex answered. He knew that he did not look it. “Why?”
“Just asking. You seem a little pale, that’s all.”
“It’s nothing. Low blood pressure. Happens when I drink.”
That earned him a hoot of laughter. As far as Lex could tell, this laugh, too, was genuine. “What’s low blood pressure for you? Seven million over a thousand and five?”
“Four million over five hundred. I’m on medication.”
“Ah! The miracles of modern science. I’m glad it’s working for you. I’d hate to be deprived of your presence.”
“You’ve hardly ever been in my presence,” Lex pointed out.
“Well! Our schedules are both very busy. But I do enjoy watching you on television. You always look very put together. Bruce never quite gels on TV.”
“You keep baiting me about him.” Lex handed the five of clubs back.
“Just making conversation. Not liking Bruce is something we have in common. Friendships have been made on a lot less.”
“I’m not in the market for friends.”
The Joker didn’t answer. He pulled a deck of cards from the ether, returning the five of clubs and the six of hearts to their places before beginning to shuffle. Even Lex had to admit that the demonstration that followed was impressive. Trick shuffling was one thing, but in the Joker’s hands? Those cards danced .
“And you do like Bruce,” Lex pressed.
“ Like him?” the Joker said dismissively. He made the cards jump back and forth a few times. “Who likes Bruce Wayne? I adore him. He’s half the reason I get up in the morning. The other half is the scintillating aroma of rich, Colombian coffee.”
Lex rolled his eyes. “Good luck to you, then,” he said. He returned to his beer. “I tell you what--you’ve got a better chance of fucking that deck of cards than fucking Bruce Wayne.”
The Joker smiled. Then he shot a card directly into Lex’s face.
The card bounced off of the billionaire’s imperious brow, careening in wild circles as it fell to the floor at his feet. Lex reeled back and sloshed beer on his pants. “Do not...do not do that again,” Lex snarled, his voice rising. The Joker just laughed at him. Lex gave the Joker a nasty sneer back--what else could he do?--before leaning down to pick up the card.
It had Lex’s picture on it. King of Diamonds.
“Very funny,” Lex muttered. “You had this ready to go?”
“Mm-hmm. I was going to show it to you in a regular card trick, but you just had to be rude.”
Lex turned King Lex over in his hands. “It’s good quality. Nice picture of me, too. I’m surprised you didn’t use an ugly one.”
The Joker's aquiline nose wrinkled a little at the edges. “That would have been sophomoric.”
“And you’re above that.”
“Oh, no. Not at all! I just know how to tailor my humor to my audience.”
“Well. You missed with me.”
“Did I?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Hah! Why would you laugh at a card? ” The Joker looked up at him. The deck continued to dance, smoothly and easily. “You’re not laughing, no, but you’re not angry. Not really. If you were really angry, you would leave.”
“I’m going to leave in about five seconds.”
“Nonsense,” the Joker told him. “You’ve already overstayed your hour. Look at the time.”
Lex did. He was not pleased. “Joker--”
The Joker cut him off. “At most, you’re a little miffed that I surprised you, because you came in here thinking that I was a buffoon. And I am. I am the king of the buffoons!” In one quick motion, he slammed the entire deck down onto the tabletop hard enough to make the bottles bounce. A second motion spread all of the cards out into a long, straight line. “But I can be a clever king, too.”
Lex looked down. Fifty-one copies of his face stared back up at him.
The Joker laughed and scooped up the cards again. He shuffled them twice, in a very utilitarian way, before spreading the deck in the same line on the table, this time with their backs facing up. “Not clever enough to stand with you, oh, no. But maybe just clever enough to be worth one evening of your time.” He tipped the end card over, sending the rest of the deck rolling face-up after it like a row of dominoes. Every single card was back to normal.
Lex pursed his lips, resting his forearms on his knees and lacing his fingers together. He sat that way for a long time. “It’s a pretty standard trick,” he said at last. “Not just the cards. The cards, the beer. All of this. You invite me here. You’re friendly, I dismiss you. You do something to prove to me that you’re smarter than I think.”
“You know,” the Joker said, “I learned many years ago that the real difference between a genius and a hack is showmanship.”
Lex thought about that. Not one minute of the preceding hour had qualified as showmanship, at least not in any normal sense of the word. Maybe that was the point. I tailor my humor to my audience .
“If you’d done anything more dramatic, I would have left. Right away,” Lex said slowly. He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “It’s a good read on me. Really good read.” The Joker smiled. He put the cards away. Lex pulled out his phone, dismissed his car, and told his assistant to cancel his flight. “All right. You win. You’ve got my time.”
* * *
Lex might have had the Joker’s time, but as the night wore on, he still did not have the Joker’s plan. Not the supposed one about Bruce--the real plan, whatever it was that the Joker actually needed Lex there to do. It was ludicrous to think that the Clown Prince of Crime had invited the CEO of LexCorp over just to sit in his awful basement, drink watery beer, and shoot the shit. Yet there they were.
Lex did notice that the Joker continued to draw the conversation back around to Bruce. He seemed especially intent on getting Lex in the mood to gossip, something that Lex’s public persona must have made seem like a truly Herculean task. That might explain the Joker’s convoluted approach and the informality and the extravagant amount of beer, but he needn’t have tried so hard. Lex Luthor was a child of privilege. He fucking loved to gossip. Two and a half beers hadn’t done anything for him; multiply that a few times, and he was on a roll.
“Like the playboy thing? It’s so fucking fake. You take one look at him and you know that Bruce Wayne doesn’t party. Bruce Wayne has never partied. Ever. He’s always been a narc. Even in school.”
“You went to school together?” the Joker asked. He wobbled back and forth a little. Lex had informed him that it was important for their fledgling relationship--vital, even--that they both match each other, drink for drink. As it turned out, even the Joker’s inhuman metabolism was no match for the mighty heritage of Luthor-brand alcoholics.
“Oh, yeah,” Lex answered. “St. Augustine’s Preparatory Academy, home of the Fighting Trust Funds.” He fished around the cluttered couch, searching in vain for the Batman bottle opener. When he couldn’t find it, he braced the top of his bottle on the edge of the table and slapped the cap off with his palm.
The Joker raised his eyebrows. “Did they teach you that at St. Augustine’s?”
“More or less.” Lex’s smile was uncharacteristically mischievous. “I learned all kinds of stuff there.”
He might have elaborated, but just then, the Joker’s goons returned from their outing. The sound of the front door banging open alerted the hyenas in the backyard, who careened back inside through the basement and clambered up the stairs to meet them. Lex would later learn that the hyenas used to have an automatic doggie door which led from the basement to the yard. It had lasted almost a day before the animals smashed the doggie door, the back door, and most of the doorframe itself right off the wall. Now, they just ran in and out through the hole.
“Walk time,” the Joker explained.
Lex listened to the sound of hyenas and henchmen and jangling collars until the whole maelstrom finally went out the front door again a few minutes later. “Does that happen every time they go on a walk?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. They love walks.” The Joker clapped his hands together. “So! St. Augustine.”
“Right, right. St. Augustine.” Lex shook his head. Hyena walks. Unbelievable. “It’s this exclusive boarding school up in Connecticut, but it’s also kind of a reform school. You know, the place you send rich brats for one last chance before you ship them off to dig post holes in Wyoming or whatever. Super strict, no drugs, no booze. We had lockdowns every time someone got caught with contraband, which happened a lot. Everybody got really good at breaking in and out of rooms.”
The Joker amused himself by stacking empty beer bottles on the coffee table while Lex talked. They already had enough to make a good starter pyramid. “But why was Bruce there?” he asked.
“Fuck if I know. I don’t think he ever acted out or anything. Maybe Alfred just got sick of him.” Lex took a swig from his bottle. “I mean, knowing Bruce, he probably asked to go. So he could observe the psychology of the elite criminal mind.”
The Joker’s expression was disgusted, but resigned. “That does sound like him.”
“Doesn’t it? Anyway,” Lex continued, “Bruce was three years behind me. Creepy dude. Didn’t talk, kept to himself. And I--I really can’t stress this enough--he did not party, because every single person in that school knew that he’d rat you out if you invited him to stuff. He almost got me expelled.”
“You? Hah! For what?”
“Making MDMA in the chem lab.”
The Joker’s eyes lit up. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. He found another bottle and started pyramid, part two. “You’re a chemist .”
“I am not just a chemist,” Lex corrected him. “I am the chemist. I am the world’s greatest chemist.”
“Mmm-hmm, yes,” the Joker murmured indulgently. “Remind me to crack open that brain of yours and poke around in there sometime. Metaphorically speaking, of course,” he added. His ever-present smile widened a bit more. “But let’s not get lost talking shop. What else do you remember about dear old Bruce?”
Lex thought for a moment, leaning back into the sofa cushions and drumming his fingers on the label of his bottle. “Ok,” he said. “I've got one. You know that freaky painting he has of him and his parents?”
“Which one, the one in the foyer or the one in the study?”
“It’s the, um, it’s the one in the foyer, where he looks like a dead Victorian child. His roommate told me that Bruce kept multiple copies of that thing in their room. Like one in a frame, one in his wallet, and one--get this--one inside the door to his wardrobe.”
The Joker sat back. “Oh, now that...that is bone chilling.”
“Right? His roommate said he couldn’t sleep after he saw it.”
“Sleep, nothing. I’d put a knife under my pillow.”
“Two knives.”
“No, no, you’d have to go through everything. Count up all the Bruces, then make sure you had at least one knife for each of them.” Lex, who was in the middle of a drink, choked his laugh back into the bottle. “It’s a simple precaution! What if they all come at you at once?”
“Oh, my god.” Lex looked horrified. “I can see it.” He laughed again, hard, but had to stop when the room began to lurch. “Fuck. How many of these have I had?”
The Joker waved his hand at the pyramid. “About half of this.” Lex groaned. “Can’t hold your booze like you used to, eh?”
“I guess I can’t.” Lex looked down at the bottle in his hand. “I forgot how much...never mind.” When he looked up again, the Joker was watching him. “What?”
“What do you mean, what? I’m just sitting here.” Which he was. Lex glared at him anyway. “Don’t get mad at me. Age comes for all of us.”
“I’m not mad about that.”
“Then what are you mad about?”
“I don’t know,” Lex answered, and he really didn’t. He examined the bottle in his hand again. “You know...I actually feel bad for telling you the painting story.”
“Oh, please don’t,” the Joker replied. “It’s a beautiful thing. I’m going to hold it in my heart forever.”
“Yeah, well. If any of it gets back to Bruce, he’ll give me a brain hemorrhage.”
The Joker dismissed Lex’s concerns with a dazzling smile. “Mum’s the word.”
“I'm serious. I don’t want to get a lacerated kidney over this. It’s not even that funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“I mean it is, it’s just...ah, fuck. I don’t know. The portrait thing was weird, but it wasn’t bad. We gave him a lot of shit for it.”
The Joker’s eyes lit up. He did his best to hide it, but now he was very, very interested. “Lex Luthor,” he chided. “Are you saying that you were a bully?”
Lex snorted. “Come on, man. I was a spoiled rich kid with a dead mom and a shitty dad who only showed up when it was time for him to scream at me. Hell yeah , I was a bully. We all were.”
“But not Bruce,” the Joker prodded.
“No, not Bruce. Bruce got bullied.”
“By you?”
Lex scrunched up his face, trying to decide if wiggling out from under the question was worth the effort it would take to do it. “I mean, I was three years older than he was. We didn’t really cross paths a lot, you know? But yeah. After he tried to get me thrown out? I did what I could to make his life hell.”
“Like what?” the Joker asked. Lex didn’t answer. The Joker tried again. “Le-e-e-x. We’re all friends here. Give me an example. Just a little one.”
“I don’t--no, ok? No. It was one year. Not even a whole one. He pissed me off, I fucked with him. I graduated. That was it. Besides, the guy saw his parents murdered right in front of him. Nothing we did was ever gonna touch that.” Lex took a break to finish his bottle. “It was like trying to bully wet sand.”
“Aw, that’s a shame. You must have been very disappointed,” the Joker cooed. His voice oozed with sarcasm. Lex grabbed a stray bottle cap and threw it at him.
“Fuck off, man. You’re the one who asked. Besides, where do you get off criticizing me? You spend all day blowing up orphanages.”
“I have never blown up a single orphanage in my life,” the Joker huffed. “The closest I ever got was burning down a petting zoo.”
Lex was happy for the change of subject, but he did not enjoy the images that this new topic conjured in his mind. “I...why?”
“They stiffed me on the animal food. It was one dollar for one scoop and I only got a half. I’m an advocate for the consumer, Lex.”
“Thank god they have you.” Lex paused. “I know I shouldn’t ask--”
“Oh, the animals were fine. I wasn’t angry at them. I had a few of the boys take them over to the playground while I gave my constructive feedback to the management.” Lex supposed that a bunch of Joker goons carrying ducks and sheep and baby goats to a merry-go-round made about as much sense as anything else in the world.
“Let’s talk some more about Bruce,” the Joker suggested.
“Let’s not.”
“Oh, come now. I won’t ask you anything else about your wayward youth together, deal?”
“Fine.”
“There we go. Let’s see. How did you find out he was Batman?”
“Please. I have two eyes and a working brain. If I put on a mask and did a goofy voice, would you still know it was me?”
“I would hope so.”
“Well, there you go, then. I don’t know why no one else can see it.”
“Like with Clark Kent.”
“Exactly. Thank you. It drives me nuts. Maybe it’s different if you don’t see them every day, I don’t know. It’s stupid. Like I would never have expected Bruce to become Batman, but when I saw him in the suit, ok. That’s Bruce, all right.”
“There were no hints beforehand?”
“What the hell kind of hints would he have given? He wasn’t drawing bats all over his notebooks or anything. We all knew that something had happened to him because he just dropped off the face of the earth after he finished school, but that was it. A lot of us thought he was in rehab. My money was on mental breakdown. When he didn’t show up anywhere for two years, I figured he was probably dead.”
“Dead!” the Joker exclaimed.
“Well, sure. It wouldn’t be the first time one of us flamed out, you know? And he never seemed like he was all there to begin with. I thought he just cracked under the pressure. Honestly, the weirdest part was that nobody had heard anything--the billionaire kids’ club is very small, so you’d usually know real fast when one of us bought it. I was mostly annoyed because I thought he’d died before he got control of Wayne Enterprises.” The Joker gave Lex a quizzical look. “Dead CEO, big scandal, stock tanks,” Lex explained. “Wayne Enterprises has been a little bit wobbly for decades. Something like that could really sink them. I might have been able to pick up a few pieces on the cheap.”
“That’s terrible .”
“Yeah, well. That’s business.”
“It is indeed. What a tremendous profession!” the Joker enthused. He picked up a new bottle and tried to hand it to Lex.
Lex waved him off. “No way. I’m out.”
“I’m not.”
“Ok? Good for you.”
The Joker pushed the bottle at him again. “We still haven’t found the bottle opener," he pointed out.
“You just like seeing me smack it on the table.”
“I do, I’ll admit that. It’s...unexpected.”
Lex took the bottle. “I know when I’m being flattered,” he said.
“And you like flattery.”
“Absolutely.” Off went the cap. Lex handed the bottle back. “Where was I?”
“You thought Bruce was dead.”
“Right, right. So, yeah, not dead, obviously. When he came back, he was a foot taller and built like a brick shithouse. I was fucking floored . Everybody went nuts over him. And why wouldn’t they? He was hot as hell. I thought, hey, maybe we can both be adults about this. Bury the hatchet long enough to hook up, and then never speak to each other again.”
The Joker’s goggle-eyed reaction was well worth the hangover Lex would have in the morning. “ Did you? ”
“Are you kidding? No way,” Lex laughed. “By that point, I was a well-known degenerate. Even if there had been an attraction, he never would have been caught dead with me. Bruce has always been very image conscious.” His words hinted at darker feelings than his flippant tone might suggest. “A bunch of us still had a good time bullshitting about who was going to nail him first, which kept us entertained for a while. Then I finally saw him doing the fake playboy act in person, and it was...it was basically an impression of me and my friends.” Lex made a face. “Asshole. He’s such an asshole.”
“I do agree with you on that,” the Joker let him know.
Lex was skeptical. “Sure you do. You and your giant crush on him.”
“He’s broken just about every bone in my body,” the Joker pointed out. “And he’s very mean to the Robins.”
“Mean to the-- you killed one of them!”
“Yes, but killing someone doesn’t cause emotional damage,” the Joker insisted. Lex’s expression did not change. “All right, maybe it does, but you’re not supposed to have to deal with the trauma of being dead. You’re just supposed to be dead. It’s not my fault they brought that one back.” The Joker sighed. “Really ruined the pathos, too. Some people have no respect for art.”
This was the point where a more sober Lex might have reconsidered palling around with a remorseless killer. Then again, he would never be able to add up the toll that LexCorp had taken on the population. It was all stones and glass houses in the end. So they kept talking, and drinking, and drifting sideways off the vertical. Lex ended up stretched out on the same couch, his limbs askew in a nearly elegant way, looking like an old engraving about the perils of gin. The Joker rolled under the table.
“Joker, I am...really drunk. Level with me.”
The pause before the Joker answered was a long one. “I am leveled. I am leveled with you...and this table...and this floor.”
“You didn’t invite me over here because you had a plan to fuck with Bruce Wayne. You just wanted to talk about Bruce Wayne.”
The Joker snorted from under the table. “Pff. Selina and I talk about him all the time. That’s plenty, believe you me.”
“Yeah, but Selina didn’t go to school with him. You knew we were both at St. Augustine.”
There was another, longer pause. “I may have seen some item in some article some where.”
“Uh-huh.” Lex reached for the nearest empty bottle and dangled it where the Joker could see it. The pyramid had long since fallen down. “This,” he said, “is the beer that I drank in high school. We used to sneak out when we were on lockdown and steal it from the Quick-Mart two miles away. The company that made it went under and sold the recipe to Anheuser-Busch seven years ago. They changed the name, but this--“ he clanked the bottle against the tabletop, “--is the beer.”
“Hunmmmmnnngh,” the Joker grunted. Lex still couldn’t see his face, but he could picture it. “You might be on to something.” Another pause. “Seems a little pathetic when you lay it all out like that.”
Vindication. Lex lay back down on the couch. For one brief, overwhelming moment, he was seventeen again. Tossed away at boarding school with his friends, trashed on cheap beer and bitching about a kid they all hated. The ensuing blood sport of high society made sure that their own friendships had not lasted long, but Lex could sometimes imagine a world where they did.
“You know what?” he said at last. “I appreciate the effort.”
“At least someone does,” the Joker grumbled. His expansive hand gesture got cut short by the tabletop. “Ow!” he yelped. “Who put that there?” No one stepped up to take the blame.
“The uh, the house wasn’t for me, though,” Lex clarified.
“No, no. This is my house.”
“Because the basement--“
“Basement is a work in progress,” the Joker interrupted. “I’m gonna gut the whole thing, down to the studs. I want to put in a conversation pit.”
“Oh, fuck yeah,” Lex agreed. “I love those.” He had never been in one, but he felt like he would love it.
Their conversation lapsed into a companionable silence. Lex nearly fell asleep, something he would have considered unconscionably dangerous just a few hours ago. Now, his main concern was how fucked up his back would be if he passed out on the couch.
“Lex?” the Joker asked suddenly.
Lex stirred. “What?”
“Why do we do this?”
“Do what? Drink?”
“No, no, no. Chase after men who don’t want us.”
“Obsessive personalities? Bad childhoods? I don’t know. Who cares?”
“You think you’ll ever get Superman?” the Joker asked. “Not kill him. Get him. Have him. Whatever that means to you.”
Lex stared up at the ceiling. “I think I have a better chance of fucking your deck of cards. What about you? For real.”
“Mmmgh. Best I can hope for is a murder-suicide.”
“Well. At least you’ll go together.”
“Yeah. Sort of poetic, I guess. If I can’t be happy, I can still be poetic. That’s something, right?”
“Sure.” Lex closed his eyes. He thought about the odd turns a life could take. About bad portraits and bats and flying gods with perfect hair. “You know...I think if it came down to it, Bruce would toss you in a Lazarus pit,” he offered.
The Joker brightened. “Really?” he asked.
Lex nodded. “Really.”
“That’s a lovely thing to say.” The Joker sounded like he might nod off, too. “I’m sure Superman would do the same for you,” he added.
“I doubt it. He’s less of a tamper-in-God’s-domain kind of guy. But thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Sure enough, both Lex and the Joker were fast asleep by the time the henchmen got back with the hyenas. The party’s return was much quieter than its departure had been, and the noise was not nearly enough to rouse two middle-aged men who had drunk far beyond their capacity. Lex was vaguely aware of something when the animals trotted down the stairs, but he did not truly wake up until one of them put its mouth around his foot.
Lex sat up with a yelp. The hyena balked, then sneezed and shuffled away. Its companion cast a disdainful glance in Lex’s direction before leaving as well.
“Sorry,” Lex muttered. He looked around the room, disoriented, trying to recenter himself while his heart hammered in his ears. Where was--oh, yes. The Joker. The basement. Right. Christ, he had to piss.
Thankfully, there was a bathroom downstairs. More thankfully, Lex had already been to it a few times, so he didn’t have to ask where it was or risk taking a wrong turn and stumbling into the hyenas again. Lex could hear them chasing each other out in the yard. Surely, the Joker’s HOA had rules about hyenas.
Lex relieved himself and washed his hands. It was cliche, but there really was something about looking at yourself in the mirror while your stomach did backflips and the floor lurched away from you. When was the last time he’d been this fucked up? If the hyena wake-up call hadn’t sent so much adrenaline smashing through his body, he might have gotten maudlin about it, but the sudden rush had stirred something in him.
He staggered back out into the main room, sat down on the couch, and kicked the Joker in the leg. “Hey,” he said. “We gotta get out of here.”
“It’s fine,” the Joker mumbled. “They might chew on you a little, but they won’t eat you. They’re just being friendly.”
“No, I mean we can’t stay here and mope. Let’s go out. Let’s do something.”
“Lex, please. I have worked myself into a remarkable stupor. I don’t want to ruin it.”
“Fuck your stupor. We’re going out. Well...we’ll go to a bar. There’s got to be one around here.”
A giggle--a titter --bubbled up from under the table. “Are you being serious? Listen to yourself. Go to a bar . Haven’t you had enough?”
“I mean, not to drink. Just like...hang out. You can start a fight, stab somebody, whatever you want. I’ll run cover.”
The Joker laughed again. “You know we’ll get caught. I can’t go anywhere in this city without the Bat following me around, and I’m sure he knows that you’re here. What’s your plan for when he shows up?”
Lex thought for a moment. It was very difficult to do. “I guess...we run?”
“We run? ” The Joker was incredulous. He crawled out from under the table. “You’re supposed to be some kind of genius, aren’t you? We run . We’ll get our heads caved in.”
“He’s not going to cave my head in. I’ll sue.”
“What about my head?”
“You’re used to it.”
The Joker remained unconvinced. “You're drunk. You can’t run. You probably can’t even walk. If Bruce shows up, you’ll make it two steps before you fall down. And I’ll only make it five steps.” He narrowed his eyes, tapping his fingers on the carpet. “Damn,” he said at last. “That is hilarious .”
“I told you!” Lex crowed.
The Joker hopped to his feet, listed too far forward, and almost landed right on top of Lex. The billionaire’s ancient party reflexes reactivated long enough to shove the Joker back upright with his arm. “What should we wear?” the Joker asked him.
“Just what we’ve got on. Don’t let me sober up, or I’ll talk myself out of this.”
The Joker bobbed his head in agreement. He helped Lex off the couch, though that was less an act of altruism and more of being too uncoordinated to get his own body out of the way. “We’re going to end up on the news.”
“Fuck, I hope so. I hope Clark Kent writes the story. I’ll do an interview from jail.”
They stumbled upstairs, grabbing hold of one another back and forth as each man lost and regained his balance in turn. The Joker hollered for a couple of his thugs to follow them at a distance and set up gas bombs to cover their eventual exit. It wouldn’t work--it probably wouldn’t even slow Batman down--but it would be funny.
The hyenas returned from the yard in order to protest at the door, annoyed that this new excursion did not include them. Lex did a shockingly coordinated dodge to keep the bigger one from grabbing his coat. He ended up out on the porch, still on his feet and looking much more put together than he felt.
“You must have been a real kick when you were younger,” the Joker told him. Bleary admiration shone in his eyes.
Lex tried not to throw up on the welcome mat. “Joker,” he said as they left, “I was a blast.”