Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"It's like you don't even notice the sinks are a foot too low."

Jokester jumped, banging his wrist on the faucet; the running water had drowned out Harvey's footsteps up the echoing hallway outside, so the voice from the bathroom door had taken him by surprise. He stuck his tongue out at his lawyer friend and grabbed the hand towel Ed had laid out, rather than burn electricity on running the air dryers. "Hey, you! Welcome home. Maybe I'm reliving my childhood."

Harvey rolled his eyes, and didn't point out that J hadn't had a childhood, or contest being welcomed home, even though, officially, he didn't live with them anymore. Such a nice guy, heh. "They wouldn't have been too short when you were a kid. That's the point."

J shrugged. "Maybe I'm reliving a previous life where I was really, really tall." Harvey once again cast his eyes up to heaven. He was probably the foremost expert on the ceilings of everywhere they'd lived. "Come on," J said. "We have a bit over ten minutes 'til dinner, and Harley was wanting your opinion on some setup stuff for the new clinic. She left it all in seventh-grade English."

Stepping aside to let the Jokester out of the bathroom, Harvey made a small exasperated noise, which J considered a sign he was in fine form. So far he'd managed to get half his friends to give up on making him stop referring to all the rooms in the abandoned middle school by their previous functions, and he was bucking for all by the end of the week. There was a possibility Pam would vine him to the ceiling before then if he didn't stop, of course, but those were the risks you took in show business.

The building had been a good find. As the school budget shrank, the districts crammed the same number of kids into less and less space to save on operating costs, which of course increased the drop-out rate, meaning the smaller space came closer to being adequate—J figured this worked out for somebody. It sure wasn't the kids.

Right now, it was him and his friends; they'd needed a new main base after busting Jason out of the Owl's screwy torture chamber, and this was far enough away from all his previous digs that it should take a while to track them down. And there was so much space. It was like living in a castle. A minimally furnished castle with big windows and polyvinyl-chloride flooring, admittedly, but squatters can't be choosers.

They were very comfortable squatters, too, because their resident electro-mechanical engineer had gotten the water hooked back up, and installed a bigger version of his old solar generator on the roof. It was going to be chilly once the seasons changed, since the school's heating system had been expensively inefficient in the first place and there was no way they could keep the furnace topped up all winter, but there was time to prepare for that.

J figured if they were still here by then, they'd slap up extra insulation on a few rooms, especially over the windows, get a couple of space heaters in there, and huddle. It would still be more spacious than year before last. Depending on who was around by that point, possibly more so than last year, too. Pam was being seriously wooed by the League of Shadows again; he swore Ra's was going to try sending chocolates any day now. (Not cut flowers, though. He knew better.)

He glanced sidelong at Harvey, who'd finally requalified for the state bar and was now practicing law out of a storefront in Crime Alley, with a little apartment up above just for him. It was good he was getting his feet under him again, probably, even if the contrast between this and the life he'd ground his way through law school to achieve probably stung sometimes worse than not practicing at all.

But J didn't like the feeling of having one of his best friends out of his reach, and so visible. He had his name on a sign.

He kept waiting for the Owl to strike. Maybe he wasn't sure Harvey was Janus? He wore a mask for a reason, but still. It wasn't exactly a subtle pseudonym. Maybe he thought that if he started making moves like that, they'd find a way to blow up his mansion in Bristol. Not a bad idea, but an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, as Harley always said when she got her hands on vaccines.

"Clients treating you okay?"

Harvey looked sour. "Clients are skinflint. And while I understand why, it doesn't mean I'm going to let them harangue me for hours and then walk away without paying for my time."

"No, it's fair," said J. "Know what you're worth."

A too-rare smile split both of Harvey's faces, and he fell into step with J up the echoing hall. "Where's Jon?"

"Hehe, lab. I'm not sure he's left since he got his stuff set up."

The lab had once been a science classroom, of course, but with everything the chemist had hauled in to equip it, it was make-no-bones-about-it a bona-fide-lab, and much more suited to the purpose than any of his last three. The computers and most of the books had been cleared out of the school library when the place was closed down, of course, but they'd left the tables with the rolling keyboard trays, so Ed had set up a hacker cave of his own in there. They'd been using this base for almost over two months now, and it was nice seeing everybody settled into their own spaces in a shared building. They couldn't always manage that.

Harvey shook his head at Jon's lab-burrowing. "It's good he loves his work, I suppose."

They turned the last corner before the one that would bring the stairwell into view, and J raised an eyebrow at his friend. "You s'pose?"

"Cooking up experimental drugs in an abandoned building is a little…"

"He doesn't just make drugs."

"I'm just saying there are good reasons that sort of thing is regulated."

"The pharmaceutical lobby, mostly," Jokester muttered, slouching.

"It's hard to mock conspiracy theorists when we're up to our necks in Owls, I admit, but J. In all seriousness. There are things that need regulation."

"Hah, and there's the lawyer talking."

"I am a lawyer."

He was a lawyer. But he was also the raging anarchist who they both still sometimes worried would lose track of himself in the moment, and wake up slick with blood. J didn't bring that part up. "Well, with your two-housed-ness an' all…"

The Bicameral Man flung up a hand in halfhearted frustration. "Look, I picked something shorter so it's easier to shout in a crisis—"

"Only so I'd stop calling you Bikey," J interjected.

Harvey ignored him. "So can't you let it rest? 'Janus the Bicameral Man' is a compromise."

"It sounds even worse than the original," J groused.

"You've been ragging on the name since I picked it," Harvey stated, which was accurate. Eight years, it had been. "I'm starting to feel harassed."

"Don't feel harassed. Just pay attention."

"Oh yes, I forgot perpetual annoyance is your favored method of getting your way."

J laughed. "Don't see how you managed that. It's a whole lifestyle."

Harvey looked even sourer than before, all lemon-sucking, and J hunched his shoulders, snorted, and after a few seconds went into a forward roll that kicked up into a handstand, and pointedly walked the rest of the way to the stairs upside down. Harvey didn't react even to sigh at him. He didn't even roll his eyes.

"J," he did say, when they got to the stairs and J paused to decide whether going up them on his hands was worth the effort, "I actually am aware you only sulk like this when you know you're wrong. It's my name. I should get to pick it."

J sighed, and let himself fall onto his feet, where he slouched against the abnormally low bannister for a second, and then started on the stairs, glancing under his elbow at his taller friend as he went. "Okay, yeah, it's your choice. Just…the Bicameral Man, Harv? Really?"

There was a logic there. A layered, twisty logic, which he guessed you should expect considering it was Harvey. Bicameral literally was 'two houses' but metaphorically 'two-headed,' which probably only worked because you almost never heard the word used for anything except legislatures, which brought in law. And for bonus points Asimov's Bicentennial Man had been a robot trying to become human, which J assumed was an intentional reference though he wasn't sure what it was supposed to mean.

The whole thing put him out of sorts.

Harvey looked sulky. "I thought you'd like it," he said, as he climbed. Like maybe he'd thought up the pun, years ago now, just for Jokester.

J got the joke. He really did. He got the message, even, a couple layers deep, about who Harvey was and what he wanted to be and what his scars meant to him. It was a good name, except that it was stupid. Most people wouldn't understand it. It could alienate people from him, in the slums, worse than any of his Harvard-trained attitudes and mannerisms, almost as bad as his past as the DA, because a joke people didn't understand was automatically a joke at their expense, and—seriously, Dent—most people don't know any Latin.

If J's memory weren't so good, if Ted the graduate student hadn't taken the time to explain the nested layers of the US governments to him years ago in the kind of sparkling, disorderly detail only the truly obsessed ever produced, he might very well not have gotten the joke himself.

"It makes you sound like a sideshow attraction," he said out loud, finally, as they reached the next landing.

The unmarred half of Harvey's face bent into an unhappy smile. "Well, they do call our little club the Circus. Guess every circus needs its freaks."

Bitterness was never good. J bit his lip. "Harv—" he began, as he pulled open the third-floor door. It opened on a cluster of guys in SWAT gear, bulky black, almost as startled as him. One lowered his assault rifle at Jokester's face.

"Nope!" J slammed the door closed again, and knelt to throw the weird bolts that went down into the floor. They wouldn't last long. This was a school, not a fortress. "Up!" he called at Harvey, for the SWAT guys' benefit, gesturing the opposite with his hands. As one, they flew back down to the second floor as quietly as they could, as the metal door shook behind them with the weight of SWAT heels.

When they reached the first cross-corridor, J shoved Harvey to the right while veering into the left-hand turn-off himself.

"Split up. Get everyone out. I'll draw them off!"

"But you—argh!" Harvey's knuckles were almost as white as Jokester's, and if he could have spared the time he would clearly have put it through the nearest wall and not felt the pain until later. But there was no time, and he turned and ran.

No sooner had he vanished when another batch of SWAT cops burst through the door at the end of Jokester's chosen hallway, bristling with military-grade weapons.

"Whoop!" No going that way. But he couldn't run after Harvey either…he ducked into the hall he'd just left, to at least stop presenting a target for the next few seconds.

"This is a raid!"

"I got that, thanks!"

Maybe he could double back and go up another level?

But back the way he came, the first unit had spilled into the stairs, filling the entryway with guns and shields and big black boots. That left one direction.

J rolled across the mouth of the corridor he'd meant to run down, popped up, and charged straight ahead.

He flung himself flat and rolled some more as bullets tore into the plaster. Only one gun's worth; the rest were holding their fire. Did they want him alive? He scampered onward, then dropped again, hands over his ears, as a combination of flash-bangs and what seemed to be actual concussion grenades ricocheted after him. In a hallway, guys? Seriously? Jackknifed up at the next corner, pulled a fire alarm, and booked it as the lights and klaxons started. They wanted to play the shock and awe game? He could play that. He was pretty sure he was a higher-rated smoke and mirrors technician than anybody in the police department.

Unfortunately, he was also outnumbered, and he only just ducked around the shelter of the next corner in time, as a flashbang rolled along the good, solid PVC-formica flooring. Then he held still with his back against the wall for a second, as it went off in the police's way, mentally enumerating his resources.

At least he knew the floorplan better, though SWAT was usually professional enough, even in Gotham, that they'd probably had a look at the blueprints before bursting in.

They hadn't been ready for the rolling chair full of cleaning supplies that they met caroming toward them as they rounded the next corner after that, and which they reflexively shot to death. J heard them slipping and sliding on the puddling soap as he fled on. Too bad he hadn't had time to cook up anything more violently reactive.

But there were still pounding boots—drat their professionalism anyway, some of them must have hung back—and he stretched his stride as he made for the end of the hall—and dropped, automatically, at the singing buzz of bullets and, almost simultaneous, the crack of guns.

What'd I do? he demanded poutishly of the universe. Everybody official always trying to kill him. And then the Arkham goons asked why he had problems with authority.

Eighth grade biology, finally! There was a fire escape out the window here; they'd made a point of it, what with Jon's record for lab accidents that went boom.

J dived right, slammed the door behind him, rolled upright surrounded by gleaming glass beakers and alembics and humming higher-tech gear he couldn't name.

Lab, yes. Jon, no. Either he'd actually gone to dinner, early even, or he'd heard the alarm and gotten out already. Or they'd caught him, but there was no sign of a fight. The escape window was open, but it was a warm day, so that might not mean anything.

Another concussion grenade sailed through the missing pane on the door. Not good! J dived for cover behind the nearest workbench. And then—

—all the world was bang and the shattering of glass. And now a sharp smell, sticking in his lungs, and he needed to get up and keep moving, but his limbs were oddly heavy…and…prickling…

.

…

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