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“Tell me more about my eyes!”
“Hrrn.”
Joker giggled at his response while Bruce breathed in deep, arms folded across his chest; he had to be patient. Joker would, as always, reveal his hand in the end. Every joke needed its punchline.
Though the man already appeared to be having a grand time, despite Bruce knocking one of his teeth out earlier. An entire amusement park full of hostages with the GCPD held at bay, and Batman himself following him from game to game, ride to ride. He had even let Joker smack him around on the bumper cars, before he was dragged towards the tunnel of love.
The slow ride’s exterior was brightly lit, decorated with obnoxious hearts in pinks and reds, but the interior was dark to provide couples with some sense of privacy. Not that the two of them needed any; their shows of fists and blades were often in the public sphere. Of course, those were hardly public displays of affection.
Sitting in the ugly swan boat, it was difficult to not let his mind drift, to think about the League and the horrors that lurked on the horizon. He knew Joker had been working with the Legion until recently and while he wasn’t sure what caused the fallout, he welcomed it. Though, he supposed, Joker was never particularly adept at playing well with others; even his own followers tended to end up dead by his hands.
Joker loudly hummed along to the song being pumped in over the speakers and their little boat, clearly built only for two, jostled a bit in the water. Bruce wished it would move faster so they could get to the next bit of nonsense, so he could get one step closer to securing the park and freeing the hostages. As harmless as Joker could appear to be in these moments, leaning against his side, Bruce knew better than to ever underestimate him. His mood could flip on a dime. He could decide that murdering everyone in the park was more fun than spending time with Batman.
After apparently tiring of the tune after a few moments, Joker spoke up. “Honestly, you can’t tell me you haven’t needed this.”
Anger flared under Bruce’s skin. “I don’t need you killing people, threatening their lives–”
“Shh. Listen to the music, smell the chlorine in the water, and relax.” In the dark, Bruce felt Joker’s hand fumble at his elbow, before he slipped his arm around Bruce’s, tucking in close at his side. Bruce tensed, ready for the bite of a knife or press of a gun barrel, but nothing came. Instead, Joker started to hum again and Bruce felt his cheek rest against his shoulder.
“I think you’ve needed this,” Bruce said quietly as his anger waned, still waiting for the knife. He recalled what Joker had said earlier: This is my night to be cheered up.
If only his version of cheer didn’t involve hostages and murder.
“I have,” Joker admitted, just as quietly; it was a shocking admission of honesty from someone who usually hid any shadow of a real feeling beneath a malicious cackle. He sounded bizarrely tired, and Bruce felt a whisper of concern before reminding himself who he was concerned for. If Joker was too worn out to cause bloody chaos, life would be all the better.
“Really,” Joker continued after a moment, “I don’t understand why you or I have to be involved with cosmic goings-on. You’re just a detective in an ugly outfit, I’m just a clown who enjoys a bit of mayhem. Why are we getting pulled into all of this universe-ending brouhaha?”
Joker’s words echoed something Luthor said to him earlier, that Bruce was just a city detective, that he was too small to be handling things like multiple universes and endless darkness. That would be true if he worked alone, but with the League, with Diana and Clark, things like the multi-verse became his responsibility too. He wouldn’t let anything happen to Gotham, or the universe it inhabited.
“I get involved because it’s important.” There was no being a detective, clown, Gothamite, or anything else should everything be swallowed up or broken down.
“I suppose it can be funny at times,” Joker conceded; clearly he equated the two terms. “It was cute how Lexy’s eyes lit up when he thought he’d gained access to some incredible power or ancient knowledge. I’m afraid my lips are zipped when it comes to the details before you ask though, Batsy. I keep my slumber party secrets.”
Despite himself, Bruce was beginning to relax. As quick as Joker often was to attack him, he was acting happy enough to play pretend tonight, to drag him around an amusement park like the two of them were on a twisted date. He hadn’t even killed anyone since Bruce had arrived and sunk a batarang into him, which he’d promptly returned. This felt like a rare quieter time, a lull in his usual bloodletting. “You never invite me to the parties.”
Joker giggled. “But I do! You just don’t like the invitations, you always look all queasy. I don’t think you’d care much for our pillow fights either.”
“I could surprise you,” Bruce said and Joker’s laugh grew to a cackle.
“You know how I love surprises.” He felt Joker’s fingers probe around his wrist and he wondered briefly if he was going to try to remove his gauntlet, before he felt Joker’s palm against his and he realized he was trying to clasp their fingers together in a proper lover’s handhold. Bruce resisted, keeping his fingers tight against each other, and Joker cursed quietly in annoyance before he settled on wrapping his fingers around Bruce’s instead of threading through.
Joker’s behavior was always odd, that was par for the course with him, but tonight’s was unusually particular. He was rarely this quiet or seemingly reflective, for one; for another, despite his large number of hostages, the body count had been quite low, though Bruce still silently grieved for the man he’d been too late to save. At least the old man with the peanut allergy had had an EpiPen handy. He wondered what sort of universe-altering event it would take for Joker to treat people like people, instead of props in his twisted games. It felt beyond his imagination.
It occurred to him then that Joker might actually be worried about what was coming, and that in itself was concerning. How much did he know about Perpetua? How much had Luthor told him before his death? The lack of answers made him uneasy, but he kept it from his voice. “We’ll win,” he said firmly, with a confidence didn’t fully feel, and Joker chuckled.
“I know you will, darling; you always do.”
“Then what’s the point of tonight–”
“I told you,” Joker interrupted with a chuckle, “Just a bit of rest and relaxation.” His thumb tapped gently against Bruce’s. “A little reminder of what you’re fighting for.”
“You don’t need to take hostages to remind me of Gotham.”
“So you say, but nothing gets you moving quicker than a bunch of innocent lives in mortal peril. Don't think I haven’t noticed.”
Bruce definitely didn't think about all of the times Joker’s been the one in peril and how quickly that got him to move too.
Joker picked his humming back up as Bruce contemplated recent events: Clark rebuilding the moon, Starro, the World Forger. Perpetua, who sought to gather her powers again, to remake the universe and those beyond into something dark and evil. He wondered how much Luthor had to do with this approaching darkness, and how much Joker had played a part. It was disconcerting to remember the man tucked against his side, trying to hold his hand, was the same man who tried to remove Kendra’s head with a chainsaw.
Luthor had believed that inside every human was darkness. He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right either; humans possessed selfishness, pettiness, but they possessed selflessness, humility too. No one was perfectly good, no one was perfectly evil. It was one’s choices that determined their lives, their fate. What impulses and instincts they listened to, if they chose to be kind or cruel.
Joker chose to stop working with the Legion and trying to destroy the universe. Joker chose to take innocent people hostage, kill a man, and nearly kill another. Joker chose to drag Batman from ride to ride, attempt to hold his hand, and not hurt anyone else.
He was perhaps the worst man Bruce had ever met. Those terrible choices, that mocking laughter. And those bright green eyes with pupils that expanded only for him. The last little sliver of something actually human left in him, after he’d dug everything else out to leave himself hollow.
Maybe one day, the universe would share a secret with Bruce. Maybe it would whisper in his ear a way to make Joker more man than monster. Maybe it would tell him how to soften that look in his eyes.
One more bumpy turn, and they would be able to get off the boat ride and back into the light. “I like the color,” Bruce remarked.
“Hm? What color?”
Bruce kept his mouth shut as he shook off Joker’s hand and stretched slightly. Joker asked what he meant again, but Bruce ignored him as their swan boat exited the tunnel and gently bumped up against the automatic gate to let them disembark. His silence only appeared to annoy Joker further, who had resorted to listing off whatever his gaze landed on: did he mean the boat? The water? The pink hearts? What the hell are you talking about, Bats?
Bruce continued to ignore him and Joker grumbled for a bit, until he spotted the roller coaster and grabbed hold of Bruce’s cape to tug him along. With a shadow of a smile, Bruce let him and said nothing more about his eyes.