Archive of Our Own ^beta

Bruce slams his fist on the dashboard.

Thirteen people dead.

The whole block on fire. 

And no time to react.

The Joker, of course, pays him and his anger no mind. 

Dancing through the street as the world burns around him, his gleeful cackles bouncing off the crumbling walls. 

Gun in one hand, his suit covered in blood splatter—not a care in the world.

He has just killed thirteen people. 

Shot each of them cleanly in the head. Without warning, without cause, without giving Batman a fighting chance to get to the scene. In the most generous of estimates, the time elapsed between Batman receiving the news that Joker was holding up a bank and then getting the news that everyone was dead totaled—perhaps—sixty seconds. 

Far too brief of a period for Batman to get there. To stop him. To save those people. 

And Joker knew it.

Even though this was Joker’s first scheme in months, he wouldn’t have forgotten that it took Batman more that one literal fucking minute to get from wherever he was to a bank in midtown. 

In fact, Batman had only just slid into the Batmobile when his police scanner erupted in panicked shouts about shots fired inside. At first, he thought they must be mistaken. And then, when an officer confirmed over the radio, thirteen deceased, no survivors, Batman had been furious.

Joker, for absolutely no reason, had killed over a dozen people, jumped out a back window, ran a mile or two, and then started throwing Molotov cocktails into businesses alongside a busy street.

Bruce had taken this all in while speeding towards the city, his jaw clenched in fury and his foot pushed against the gas pedal so hard it touched the floor. It was a miracle he didn’t crash into anything, the anger blurring out the edges of his vision and the world rushing by the Batmobile even faster than usual. 

The police had blocked off the avenues on either side of the street Joker had temporarily taken over, and they had gotten most of the civilians out, though Bruce was sure there were a number of people still trapped, probably terrified, hiding from the armed clown outside. 

Batman had arrived right as the police finished securing their perimeter. He promptly drove through their wooden blue barriers in an explosion of splinters, ignoring the startled shouts from officers nearby. He slammed on the brakes, his car skidding to a screeching stop, whipping up sideways about a hundred feet from where the Joker was prancing about.

Now, he glares at the Joker through the driver’s side window, the clown a hazy figure of purple and green. 

This is not how he thought his day was going to go.

When Bruce had first gotten the call that Joker was mid-bank robbery—in that blissful sixty seconds inbetween the moment Joker had walked into the bank and the moment he had killed thirteen people—he had felt a wave of relief crash over him.

It had been two weeks since the Joker had returned to Gotham; two weeks since he had met with Batman on that rooftop, dropped his baby bombshell, and promised Batman that he was back permanently. Two entire weeks had passed, and Joker hadn’t done a thing. He apparently hadn't even bothered to inform his top, most loyal lieutenants that he was back, as they seemed genuinely unaware Joker was in the city when Batman had questioned them last Thursday. 

That was… worrying. 

Bruce had been beginning to suspect that the Joker was planning something particularly big and bad for his official homecoming—beginning to think that his quiet return on a rooftop (with surprise guest star: a baby!) was just a private showing for Batman, and that this—whatever he was currently planning—would be the main event. 

So a bank robbery had been good news. 

Pretty low level for Joker, a sign he wanted to ease his way back into things, slowly wade back into their regular song and dance.

Good, Batman had thought, a spike of adrenaline and grim satisfaction jolting through his blood. He probably needed a warm up, too.

As well as a distraction from thinking about what Joker had revealed to him on that rooftop. 

He grimaces even thinking about it. 

The baby. 

Which Bruce had promptly gotten rid of. 

For obvious reasons. 

After verifying with a quick DNA test that the baby was in fact, Bruce’s (he wasn’t an idiot), he had quietly called Diana and asked her to take it to Themyscira. Diana had been very curious, obviously, but Bruce kept the details minimal, just tersely telling her that the baby was his and he thought that it would be unsafe to raise here in Gotham, and could she please discreetly take it and have the Amazonians raise it as a foundling? 

Diana had agreed, as Bruce had known she would, and picked up the baby from the Batcave by the end of that same night.

Thus, Bruce was rid of the problem before anyone was the wiser. 

Not even Alfred knew. 

And Bruce had continued on as usual, silently waiting for the Joker to reappear. They were putting this behind them. They both wanted to. The roof didn’t happen. The Joker would come back and things would go back to normal.

(Just as he said he would. Just as he promised).

And today, he had fulfilled that promise.

Except, just as Bruce had feared, the Joker didn't appear to be operating within their usual set of rules. 

Instead of using the bank robbery as a ruse to draw Batman out, get his attention, instigate a fight, which would end in either Joker narrowly evading capture and scampering off into the night with a giggle, wave, and a guarantee that he’d be back soon, Batsy baby or Bruce successfully capturing him, loading him up in the car, and sending him to Arkham (where he would then eventually escape and they’d start all over again)—instead of that, he had killed thirteen people indiscriminately and then skipped off to terrorize this city block. 

So, yes, Batman is pretty fucking angry with him right now.

Batman swings his legs out of the car, slamming the door shut behind him, and stalks towards the Joker. His cape billows behind him as the fire rages on both sides of the street, his irate gaze locked on the maniac in front of him.

When Joker notices him, he stops mid-twirl and his unnaturally red smile stretches wider across his face.

“Oh, finally, darling!” he calls, shooting off a string of bullets into the air jubilantly, as if in greeting. “It took you ages! I was beginning to worry you weren’t going to show.” 

It had decidedly not taken Bruce ages. He had made it to the scene in record time. 

(Still too late, though).

“Joker.” Batman growls, the word dripping with his obvious fury, which makes the Joker cackle louder. 

“Oo, feeling testy today, are we?” He titters. “Don’t be so glum, Bats. I know what will cheer you up! Now, stop me if you’ve heard this one before: thirteen people walk into a bank…”

He trails off with a wicked grin and Batman glares at him harder.

“Not funny.” 

Joker laughs, cruel and sharp. “That’s because you don’t have a sense of humor, my dear! If you saw it from my perspective, you’d be laughing your Bat-tail off, I guarantee it.”

Then he makes an unsteady lurch towards Batman, oddly stumbling a bit, his usual grace seeming to fail him. In fact, had the Joker been anyone else, Batman would say he looks vaguely drunk. But that isn’t possible. Joker physically couldn’t get drunk—something to do with the chemicals in the vat. He had complained about this fact more than once to an unmoved Batman. 

This stumble, Bruce will note later, is the second sign that something was very wrong with the Joker.

But in the moment, Bruce is so mad he barely catalogues the Joker’s imbalance as anything of import and just continues to glare at him, barely keeping a lid on the violence threatening to burst from his fists.

“Why?” Bruce grits out, finally close enough to really make out the Joker’s face. 

It isn’t good. 

He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, huge, dark bags hanging under his eyes, so prominent that Bruce can make them out through his white face paint. The paint itself is patchy, smudged, almost half-wiped off. Probably due to the absurd amount of sweat he’s producing. His hair is wet with perspiration, his mascara smeared and dripping down his face, as if he had just been crying—which Bruce knows he hasn’t. He looks like he has just gotten out of a shower after forgetting to take off his makeup. 

Bruce has never seen him look worse.

Joker laughs in response to his question, the sound slightly higher pitched than usual. 

Or maybe Bruce is misremembering. 

It has been months.

“Counter question!” Joker says, “Why not? It’s so dreadfully boring to always have to do things for a reason. Ugh! Can’t I just go on a shooty spree for funsies?” 

Bruce’s frown deepens, subtly eyeing the gun, waiting for a moment to lunge for it. “They were people, Joker. They had family and friends, and you murdered them in cold blood.” 

“Oh, people, schmeople,” Joker says, scoffing, making a dismissive gesture with the gun that makes Batman tense, much to his chagrin. “They weren’t real, not like you or I, darling. You know this.” 

Batman glares at him.

That’s an evasion if he ever heard one. 

Joker, of course, has said this before. They’ve had the same conversation a million times, in a million different situations, but right now, it has almost nothing to do with their situation or the question Batman has asked. 

He’s avoiding the question, which means he doesn’t want Batman to know the real answer. And that is always, always , a cause for alarm.

“Not good enough,” Batman snaps. 

“Don’t care,” Joker sing-songs back, grinning.

Batman tries to keep one eye on the gun—now hanging off one of Joker’s fingers, swaying loosely in the wind, and jostled by the Joker’s tiny movements. Joker can’t seem to stand still today, even his facial muscles twitching sporadically. It’s like his skin itself is vibrating with energy, like a shaken aerosol can ready to explode. Where Bruce had been afraid he’d shatter on the roof, now he braces for Joker to denote.

Joker makes a lurching motion towards Batman again. 

“If you really must know, Bats,” he says, after Batman fails to reply to his taunt, his tone hardening, “I did it just for the look on your face right now.” 

Bruce clenches his jaw tight and Joker gasps in faux-delight, and points with the gun.

“Yes, yes—just like that. So delicious and angry, all because of little old me.” 

“If you wanted a fight, there are other ways to rile me up than mass murder, Joker.” 

Joker smiles widely. “Ah, but that’s the thing! I don’t want a fight.” The Joker leans closer, his face so close Batman can feel the heat of his breath as he speaks, “I want you in pain.” 

Batman blinks.

He didn’t want a fight? 

This is incomputable. Unfathomable. Nonsensical. A Joker who doesn’t want a fight with Batman is not a Joker at all.

“What?” Bruce says out loud.

Joker’s eyes flash with something so dangerous and so angry that Batman’s hand goes to his toolbelt instinctually, fingers wrapping around a batarang.

“You were supposed to suffer!” Joker screams in his face.

Bruce takes a step backwards, the change in volume, demeanor coming out of nowhere.

“Suffer like I have! You were going to keep it, and then we’d be fucking even!” 

His eyes are wild—Bruce has never seen him look so unhinged—and Batman’s own eyes widen in surprise under the cowl. He opens his mouth, but before he can think of anything to say in response to… that, the Joker lets out an angry scream-shout, then hits himself in the side of his head—hard. 

Instinctively, Bruce reaches out to grab his arm to stop him, but Joker sidesteps his grasp. 

“Don’t TOUCH me!” he shrieks.

Batman takes another step backwards, extremely unnerved now. Joker pants heavily, and then abruptly bends over and presses his palms against his ears, still holding the gun in one hand, shaking his head over and over. 

“Joker,” Batman says loudly, cautiously moving closer to the nearly-folded-in-half man, trying to make himself heard over whatever the hell is clearly going on in Joker’s brain, “You need to calm down. Tell me what’s wrong.” 

Joker lets out a harsh bark of laughter, his hands falling from his ears. He looks up at Bruce through his eyelashes, though still bent over. 

“‘What’s wrong,’” he mimics in a crude approximation of Batman’s low growl, “What’s wrong, he asks. Ha!” 

Joker stands to his regular height, his eyes now fully open, huge and feral, pinning Bruce in place with their intensity, his hair askance, his smile manic.

The fierceness, fury, in his expression is a sharp contrast to the last time Batman saw him, two weeks ago on the rooftop, back when he had somehow seemed so exhausted and small; back when Bruce had felt an involuntary stab of sympathy for him.

That sympathy is all gone now.

“What’s wrong,” Joker hisses, walking slowly, jerkily, towards Bruce, who doesn’t move a muscle, the hand gripping the batarang tighter. “Is that you cheated me.” 

“What are you talking about?” Bruce asks, holding up one placating hand, the one not holding the batarang for dear life, trying to sound calming, grounding, and not as caught off guard as he actually is.

Joker’s eyes are hard and humorless. 

“You cheated me. Cheated me out of my justice.” Joker’s voice now has an edge of hysteria to it, his eye actually twitching sporadically, “It was supposed to be your punishment. We were gonna be even Steven, in the black, but noooo!” Joker laughs, the sound piercing, unstable, “You just—whoops! Got rid of it! And now you’re just perfectly fine, everything’s fucking normal for you, going to galas and parading around town without a care in the goddamn world—nope, no cares at all for Batman!” 

Batman stares at the Joker.

Going to galas? 

Batman has never been to a gala in his life. 

But…

But last week, Bruce Wayne had. 

Batman feels a chill drip down his spine.

This is the third sign that something is really wrong with Joker, and this one is so loud and blaring that Batman clocks it immediately, no benefit of hindsight needed.

Because that slip is, by far, the closest Joker has ever gotten to admitting that he knows who Batman is under the mask.

Bruce has long suspected he has known, but to hear this almost-confirmation out loud, from the Joker himself, is terrifying in more ways than one. Aside from the fact that the most dangerous man in the city apparently has knowledge of his secret identity, there is also the fact that Joker has almost told him so. 

And a Joker in his right mind would never, ever let Batman know he has an inkling of who his alter ego is; would never so much as joke about it. And the fact that he has revealed his hand, accidentally or on purpose (the former more likely), means that, right now, he is truly and deeply out of his mind. 

Joker’s deranged cackle breaks through the rapid-fire realizations running through Bruce’s brain. 

“It’s almost—it’s almost laughable, darling. Everything’s hunky dory for old Bats, while I’m over here fucking—fucking drowning! I’m—” he stops, almost gasping for breath, laughs again, “My brain is all—cracked up, and guess what? It’s all your fault! You did this to me! You!” 

Furiously, and quicker than Bruce can react, Joker shoves the barrel of the gun against his chest. 

Batman freezes, feeling a spike of true fear. 

The rules are clearly different tonight, and Bruce doesn’t know what the Joker is capable of in this state. Doesn’t know if Joker is really even… all there. From the way his gaze kept darting about, unable to focus on any one thing (when usually Batman had his undivided attention, wanted or not), his erratic movements, the wildness to him… Joker seems half here, and half somewhere else completely.

“It’s all your fucking fault,” he repeats, his words coming out fast, stumbling, blurring into each other, “You did this to me, and now everything’s wrong, I can’t think, I can’t make it stop, my stupid, idiot, dumb fucking brain won’t work—Work. Work!” he barks out sharply, and then, again , hits himself on the side of his head with the hand holding the gun, and Batman winces at the strength in his swing, the resounding crack the contact makes. 

“Work!” Joker screams at himself.

“Joker—” 

“No!” he screeches, whipping the gun back to Batman’s chest, “My turn to talk! Mine!” 

Joker emphasizes each word with a push of the gun into Batman’s armor, who in turn feels his heartbeat start to pick up. 

Fucking guns. 

“I’m going to talk, and you’re gonna listen, Alpha boy,” the Joker hisses, his voice suddenly dropping into a horrifying whisper. “I’m all fucked up, Bats. I’m alllll kinds of fucked up, and you’re not, and that’s not very fair, is it? Why is it all on me? Huh? Almost nine months I had that… thing inside of me, taking and chewing and growing and sucking the life from me, making me batty , but I think, ‘oh well, as soon as it’s out, I’ll be back to normal and then I can pass it on to the cunt that did this to me, ha, what a perfectly devious and devilish plan,’ but even when I finally cut it out of me and rid myself of the parasite—my brain still won’t work, still won’t shut the fuck up, and still WON’T. THINK!” 

Joker is shouting by the end, the gun pushing Bruce so hard that he takes several steps backwards. 

Bruce’s brain process the words slowly, almost with a delay, because did he just say—

“And you’re just standing there, all normal, nothing’s changed for you!” the Joker keeps going, eyes locked onto Batman’s, but it’s like there’s nothing behind them, they’re unfocused, vague, like he’s not really seeing him, “Nothing’s changed for you! Everything’s wrong and you’re fine and it was supposed to drag you down, too, but you escaped it and I couldn’t and it’s not fucking fair!” 

Bruce’s mind is whirling, and he has to check, because he has to have misheard—

“Joker,” he says harshly, “Did you say cut it out of you?” 

Joker stops. 

Stares at him blankly for one beat. 

Two.

And then he laughs. 

Laughs for a long while. 

He meets Bruce’s eyes, a sudden clarity to them that startles Bruce, and then he flings the gun to the side and pulls up his shirt. 

Batman inhales sharply. 

A jagged red scar, looking relatively fresh—still slightly angry and bright—cuts across the Joker’s stomach. A haphazard single line through his skin, starting near his waist line and ending just below his sternum. 

The Joker stares at him with something vindictive and gleeful in his gaze, holding the edge of his shirt up with two hands. 

“I couldn’t take it in there anymore, I could feel it draining me, killing me,” Joker says, a hysterical edge to his voice, “So I grabbed me a knife and schhhink, ” He makes a knife noise with his mouth, grinning wider, unsteadily, “Cut it right out.” 

“You—” Bruce chokes out, bile rising in his throat, “You performed a C-section on yourself ?” 

The Joker giggles. “Call me Dr. J!” 

Bruce stares at him, horrified. Joker’s pain tolerance was high, but surely—surely even he would have felt that. And since painkillers don’t work on Joker, and since he would have had to have been conscious to do it—

He had performed a C-section on himself, while almost nine months pregnant, and without anesthesia or morphine. 

And judging by how the scar looked—the cut completely random and uneven and way too long to be medically necessary—it was clear he had taken a knife and literally started sawing himself open.

“Good god, Joker,” Bruce says.

Joker giggles again, even more off-kilter, and drops his shirt, covering the scar but not erasing the image from Bruce’s brain (without a doubt, he knows that visual will be seared in his mind forever). Joker stumbles forward, catches himself, then leans in towards Batman. He smells like sweat and gasoline.

“So you see—I have all these scars, and you have none. Zilch, zero. Nada. Even though you’re the one who did this to me in the first place. And you could’ve made it right. You could have done the DECENT thing and accepted your punishment, taken it like a man! But you just, oop, ducked and avoided the whole thing.” Joker shrugs and sighs heavily, jutting out his lip and looking at Bruce almost sadly, “So now I have to make you pay another way. I hate to do this, darling, I really do. But you brought this on yourself.” 

Bruce is still reeling, still stunned, so he just barely notices the glint of silver that suddenly appears in Joker’s left hand. Instinctually, he brings his arms up, only narrowly blocking the Joker’s first strike. 

The Joker pauses, his small knife—which had apparently been hidden up his sleeve—now inches from Bruce’s cheek. The strength of his attack is still vibrating through Batman’s armor when Joker rears back and attacks again. 

The blows afterwards come swiftly and unrelentingly. 

It’s all Bruce can do to block and deflect—he can barely get in a hit edgewise. Even so off balance, so out of his mind, Joker is still a formidable opponent—perhaps an even deadlier one, with each strike strong and aimed to hurt, maim, and now, to actually kill. 

It’s unfair, really, that Bruce can’t even revel in the fact that this is his first fight with Joker in months. What he’s been waiting for—his own release of frustration and anger—and Joker is spoiling it, sapping the pleasure out of it. 

Now Bruce has to think, has to calculate and figure out what will stop Joker’s tirade, or at least appease him temporarily. 

As he whips up his arms to defend himself, ducking the Joker’s knife, getting in a couple of punches when he can, his brain whirls, desperately trying to figure out how to diffuse this situation. 

It’s a lot of work, having to think and fight at once, more than usual, and Batman hasn’t done this in a while. 

Unfortunately, he’s slightly out of practice. 

But Joker is too. 

Joker’s attacks, while increasingly angry, also get increasingly erratic. 

Faster, sure, but less precise. He’s a blur of movement, of sharp silver, of bloody rage, snarling and letting out fierce, angry cries. The glimpses Bruce does get of his face are brief, but he can make out the wrath in his gaze, but also a desperate edge, a confused edge, like even he isn’t fully aware of what he’s doing. 

His makeup is even more smeared—he looks wrecked, an absolute mess—-and his cheeks are wet with tears of frustration, leaking out of his glassy green eyes. 

“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” the Joker begins to chant under his breath, each word in time with a stab, his voice slightly wobbly, weakening, as the power of his strikes wane.

Still, he shows no signs of stopping. 

He is going to keep fighting, Bruce realizes, until he physically can’t anymore.

So that’s when Batman decides to take the easy out.

He rarely does so, but he’s tired and frustrated and honestly a little lost. It’s a last resort he always keeps on him—a syringe of propofol and midazolam, with enough strength to knock out a bull elephant, or in this case, one very angry clown. Bruce had conducted many experiments, testing doses until he had just the right amount to knock out Joker, whose tolerance for any sort of sedation was unusually high. (See: falling into a vat of chemicals).

Mind made up, Bruce slowly slides one hand in his back pocket, waiting for a moment to strike.

After a few more seconds of one handed blocking and dodging (which is tricky, even for him), his patience is rewarded.

The Joker is winding up, his eyes flashing dangerously, gearing up to deliver his next attack, and this time, Bruce lets him go further through with it—lets him drive his knife straight towards his chest—but just before the knife makes contact with the suit, Batman catches the Joker’s wrist mid-air.

Letting out an angry noise, Joker lashes out to hit him with his free hand, but Batman ducks it. Joker’s shiny, furious eyes shoot up to meet Batman’s gaze beneath the cowl, his mouth open to spit more vitriol, to scream, to rage, pulling back to hit him again, but before he can, Batman whips his hand out from his pocket and stabs the Joker with a syringe, releasing all of its contents into his upper arm. 

Joker’s eyes widen and he gasps, his bright eyes dulling.

And briefly—so briefly that Batman is sure, later, that he imagined it—something that looks like relief flits across his expression. 

Then his face goes slack and he slumps forward into Batman’s waiting arms. 

***

Batman stares at the Joker. 

He’s laying on a makeshift cot, his chest falling up and down rhythmically. 

Asleep. 

A machine monitors his heartbeat, its steady beeps the only sound in the room.

He almost looks peaceful like this, lips parted, expression relaxed, body still and calm.

Almost.

Bruce sighs. 

He dislikes bringing the Joker to the Batcave, but he can’t bring him to an ordinary hospital even on a good day, and he certainly can’t bring him to Arkham right now, not in this state, so unpredictable and erratic. 

So he has him here, in the Batcave, one wrist handcuffed to a cot, and the other hooked up to an IV pumping him with enough sedatives to keep him unconscious while Bruce figures out what to do. 

How to fix this.

He isn’t sure where to start. This day had been… a lot. 

But on the teeniest, tiniest bright side, at least Bruce knows what’s wrong.

Even though it had been a whirlwind of a fight, with Bruce’s own emotions oscillating wildly, he had been listening to what the Joker was saying.

And as he sped back to the Batcave, the Joker unconscious in the passenger seat beside him, he had gone over the Joker’s words in his mind, rotating them this way and that, until he understood. 

It didn’t take long—the Joker hadn’t exactly minced words.

The Joker is mad, Bruce concludes rather obviously, because he believes Batman is unscathed. Believes that… the thing they made together, however inadvertently, doesn’t haunt him. That Batman has somehow escaped any sort of consequence, while the Joker has had to bear the brunt of the pain and turmoil. 

He sees Bruce as unscarred, unmoved, unchanged by the experience.

(A speech about oceans on a windy rooftop echoes through Bruce’s mind).

Bruce can understand why he thinks so—it’s the very image he has been desperately trying to project to the public for the past two weeks: unaffected billionaire who hasn’t just learned he had a baby with an insane clown man.

But the Joker’s facts are wrong. 

While it’s true that Bruce hasn’t had to go through what the Joker has, that his life has not changed in the same… visible way, he is changed.

Bruce has been shoving all his thoughts about that night and the baby down and away, putting his emotions in a neat little box that he vacuum seals and stuffs in a corner of his brain, never to be looked at again. But he knows that if, even for a moment, he lets himself take a peak inside, lets himself feel them, he’ll be crushed by their weight. 

He will never be the same person again, not with this knowledge, not knowing that out there, somewhere in the world, was a being that existed solely because of what he had done with the Joker on a Friday night in January.

He sees it when he looks in the mirror every morning: he is different.

He is changed.

Bruce just doesn’t know how to prove this to the Joker. 

He can’t just tell him so. 

Hell, Bruce isn’t sure how he would even begin to have that conversation; can’t think of a way to coherently string those emotions and words together in a way that would make a lick of sense. He and the Joker don’t talk to each other to begin with, not like that, not with something as meaningless as words. 

And even if Bruce was able to come up with a verbal explanation, Joker wouldn’t believe him. He isn’t in a mental or emotional state to believe him. He would think Batman was simply trying to mollify him, lying, attempting to get him to stop murdering people and setting blocks on fire.

Which is partially true—Batman does need him to calm down, to stop doing those two things, but it’s also not the whole story. 

If he can just convince the Joker, get him to see it, that they were even, that Batman hasn’t escaped punishment, not even a little bit, then he would calm down. Stop killing people for nothing. 

(Batman knows this, knows it intrinsically, like he (unfortunately) knows most things about the Joker).

He supposes he could also just get Diana to return the baby and keep it like the Joker originally intended, but Bruce dismisses that idea quickly. 

There is no way in hell Bruce is fucking doing that. 

Bruce sighs again and leans forward on his knees, hands clasped together, staring at Joker. Thinking. 

As he does, his gaze drifts to Joker’s midsection, involuntarily conjuring the image of that horrible scar in his brain.

Performed his own C-section. 

Bruce shudders.

If Joker was waking up every day and looking in the mirror to see that, while Batman just acted like everything was normal—Bruce can see why an already mentally unstable person like Joker might lose it further.

Bruce closes his eyes and shakes his head.

Jesus. 

He can’t even begin to imagine what had been going through the Joker’s head to make him think that cutting himself open was a good, viable plan.

He must have been desperate. 

Willing to do anything.

Bruce’s eyes snap right back open. 

Ah, he thinks.

***

Batman watches as Joker blinks awake across from Batman, coming back to consciousness slowly.

Bruce has moved him from the bed and to the wall, his wrists shackled above his head and a cloth gag firmly tied behind his head, preventing him from speaking. 

As soon as the Joker’s gaze clears and he takes in the extent of his situation, he makes a furious, muffled shout, beginning to thrash and struggle against his bindings. 

It’s fruitless, of course. 

Batman knows how strong he is, knows how to keep him restrained. 

After a couple moments, Joker appears to come to this realization, because his struggles peter out, and he just glares at Bruce, chest heaving, his gaze full of hatred. 

Batman meets that gaze steadily. 

“I know. You’re mad.” Batman says calmly, “But this will only take a couple minutes. Think you can behave for that long?” 

Joker glares.

Bruce takes it. 

Nodding sharply, Batman turns and makes his way to the makeshift hospital bed behind him, directly in the Joker’s line of sight. He takes a breath, steadying his heart rate, preparing himself for what he’s going to do. 

He reaches behind him, unclasps part of the Batsuit, shrugging off the shoulders and unclipping the upper half from where he has it connected to his toolbelt. Joker makes a warning noise from behind him, but Bruce just holds up a hand, and the Joker quiets, waiting. 

He slides the top of the suit completely off, even shedding the underarmor too, letting it hang down uselessly at his thighs. He keeps the cowl on, but his whole chest is bare. Essentially shirtless. 

Batman turns around. Joker is staring at him, still with anger in his gaze, but an undercurrent of curiosity peaking out from the back of his eyes. 

Good. 

Batman walks over to a table in the corner of a room, grabs an array of metal objects, and places it on the rotating tray arm hovering over the bed. He wordlessly moves to a sink, washes his hands, counts out thirty long seconds, dries them, and then puts on latex gloves. 

He can feel Joker’s eyes tracking his every movement, sharp and unflinching and calculating. Bruce ignores it. Ignores him. 

He walks back to the bed, and pushes the tray arm aside so that he can climb onto the cot. He lies on his back, and adjusts the angle of the bed so that it’s positioned halfway up, halfway down, halfway between sitting and lying down. At an angle where he can still see Joker without having to lift his head. 

Here we go. 

He pulls the tray back. 

Flexes his fingers. 

And reaches over to pick up a sharp, glinting, silver scalpel. 

Joker’s eyes widen. 

Bruce clenches his jaw, inhales deeply, once, through his nose, and then grabs a small rag, placing it in his mouth and biting down.

He’s tense all over. He needs to relax. He tells himself to relax, his muscles to unclench, because it’s going to hurt a hell of a lot worse if he’s tight. 

He breathes out again through his nose. 

Braces himself. 

And then he takes the scalpel, places it at the base of his navel, and presses down hard.

It cuts through his skin like butter. 

Blood immediately begins seeping out of the incision, even with it as tiny as it currently is.

And it hurts. Hurts more than he was hoping it would. He lets out the smallest hiss, so quiet it’s almost imperceptible. 

The Joker, he notes in his peripheral vision, has gone scarily still. He can feel his razor sharp gaze on him, his torso, where he’s got the scalpel. 

Bruce swallows down the pain. Steadies himself. 

This is just the beginning. 

He slowly, carefully, begins to drag the scalpel up. Cutting himself open. With as much surgical precision as his medical training has afforded him. 

It’s not a shallow cut, either. It’s deep. Deep enough to scar. 

Just like Joker’s. 

Blood begins to gush out quicker as he moves up, but Bruce won’t bleed out. At least, not right away, not if he works quickly enough. 

Still, it is agony. 

He’s taken a couple of painkillers, not enough to stop the pain completely, but enough to ensure he probably won’t pass out.

Joker wouldn’t accept this if he wasn’t in pain. 

Maybe Bruce could have faked it, pretended to writhe and whimper, when really he was completely painfree—he was a good actor, a master of masks. But something about that felt wrong.

(There was also a small part of Bruce that wanted to feel the pain, to try to understand, even a little bit, what the Joker himself had felt, to know what it was like to be him). 

It wasn’t an exact replica of the Joker’s situation – Bruce was using sterile, clean tools that he’s certain the Joker didn’t have, and he isn’t cutting as wildly, as he knows more about anatomy than Joker and, perhaps more importantly, he doesn’t have a uterus to reach. Bruce doesn’t have to take out all of his organs and place them to the side and remove a baby-sized tumor from his womb. 

(Bruce tries not to think of Joker, alone, sliced in half, his intestines shoved haphazardly on the ground beside him as he blindly digs around in the bloody cavity that is his body, searching for the leech that had taken over his life). 

But this simulation is as close as Bruce is going to get. Or is willing to get.

As Bruce cuts further up, biting down on the towel so hard his jaw aches, it gets worse. He had been hoping he would get used to it, develop a tolerance, maybe, but he had known it had been a futile hope. 

His face has broken out in sweat, and he bites down on the towel even harder, willing himself not to cry out. It is the most pain he’s ever felt, and his hands shake a bit. He tries to get them to calm down, because the shakier they are, the worse the cut will be. Halfway up, he does make one particularly bad jerky movement, and a small noise escapes him, despite his best efforts at staying quiet, and he hears Joker’s breath pick up in response. 

He pushes on, pressing down slightly harder when he realizes he’s accidentally lessened the pressure in the haze of his pain, tears pricking at his eyes, gritting his teeth against the rag. 

Keep going, he tells himself. Blood continues to gush from the wound, faster now, and he’s running out of time, but he’s fine, it’s fine, Bruce thinks firmly, even as all the nerve receptors in his body are screaming at him to stop. 

The Joker had done this in worse conditions and survived.

So Batman can do this. 

His skin at the start of the wound has fallen apart, his torso opening in an increasingly wide, gaping hole, and Bruce struggles to look at it without feeling lightheaded, without his vision going white. 

It hurts. 

He keeps going. 

He’s close to being done, only a few more inches, and honestly, it’s only been thirty, forty seconds since he began, but it feels like a lifetime, a lifetime of pain, and he isn’t looking but he knows the Joker’s eyes are glued to him, knows he’s leaning forward as far as he can, getting as close as he can, dangling from his wrists off the wall, Bruce can hear his breathing, can hear it quickening as blood begins to stream down either side of his stomach. 

Bruce thinks he can’t take it anymore, is about to spit out the towel, screaming, writhing, giving up, and right as he’s about to hit his limit, sweat dripping off his forehead, pooling into his eyes, he reaches his sternum. 

He’s done. 

Eyes hot and wet, his hands shaking, he manages, with all his strength, to take the scalpel and drop it on the tray with a loud, metallic clatter. 

Blood—his blood—splatters across the tray just a bit. 

He gasps through the towel, closes his eyes tight, the pain almost all-encompassing, but he’s actually not completely done. 

Now he has to stitch up the wound. 

So he doesn’t bleed to death on a table while the Joker watches. 

He clenches his jaw and reaches over again, this time a little farther, and the movement pulls so hard at the wound that he almost passes out from the pain. He just manages to stay awake, his vision swimming. He has to take a two-second break, let his eyesight clear, the pain to ebb slightly, before, with all his strength, he grunts and curls his fingers around a needle and thread. 

Thank god. 

Bruce blinks hard and a faintly registers a tear falling down his cheek. He agonizingly brings his arm back over, trying hard, so very hard, not to flinch at the movement, every tiny movement jostling him, causing the blood to flow more, reigniting the pain. 

He forces himself to focus on the wound, his vision blurring out at the edges again.

No. Stay awake. 

With all the willpower he possesses, he forces himself to stab himself with the needle—and honestly, the tiny prick is so nothing in comparison to all of the pain he’s feeling he barely even notices—and painstakingly, slowly, shakily, pulls the thread through. 

He would shout if he wasn’t holding the towel in his mouth. 

But he’s still bleeding. Profusely. He isn’t sure how much time has elapsed since he began, but based on his vision, the way he’s starting to feel numb and faraway, he figures too much time has passed. 

And he may or may not be going into shock. 

So he makes himself work as fast as he can, which granted, isn’t very fast, but it’s the best he can manage. 

Threading in and out. Slowly stitching his flesh back together. Keeping the blood locked up inside. 

His cut is not as clean and straight as he had planned on it being—it’ll be much more similar to Joker’s than he had originally thought. 

A perfect match, he thinks absurdly.

He blinks that thought away, bites down on the towel harder, and keeps going. In and out, in and out. 

It feels like an eternity passes, the pain so constant and terrible that Bruce begins to forget what it’s like to not be in pain. Isn’t this his constant state? When has he ever not felt like this, like his nerves were on fire, like he was just a vessel for agony? 

The pain is all he knows. The pain and the weight of Joker’s stare.

And then he’s finished. With shaking hands, he rips off the rest of the thread, ties it off, and tosses the needle off the bed onto the ground, head spinning, body still screaming. 

But he is alive. 

And the majority of the blood flow has stopped. 

He has done it. 

He tries not to weep. 

Instead, he gathers himself, swallows, and slowly removes the towel from his mouth. He takes some gasping breaths, closes his eyes tight, allows the cool air to rush past his lips, cool the sweat on his chin.

The sharp pain dulls, if only a touch, if only in his mind. 

He’s done. 

He did it. 

Jesus Christ, he thinks faintly. 

After a few seconds have passed and Bruce no longer thinks he’s going to break down into a sobbing, screaming mess, he opens his eyes. 

To find the Joker staring right back at him. 

Still gagged, still bound, his chest heaving. His pupils are absolutely blown out, his eyes almost completely black, and there’s heat in his gaze, deep, burning heat. Which should disgust, frighten Bruce, but all he can manage in this state is a faint note of interest, pushing it away for further analysis afterwards. When he’s not so weak. Not so out of it. 

Bruce stares back at him, meeting his gaze through the cowl. His torso is a bloody mess, his stitches pretty poorly done if Bruce is honest, but Joker looks at him like all he wants is to devour him, to jump onto the bed and lick it all up. 

Bruce is too tired to figure out how he feels about that. 

Gritting his teeth, he manages to reach over—wincing as his stitches pull tight but able to clamp down his grunt of pain—and grab a small remote next to the scalpel on the tray. He jabs at it, pressing the red button in the middle. 

The restraints holding Joker’s wrists release. 

The Joker immediately stumbles forward, not expecting it, but he rights himself before he faceplants. He slowly stands up to his full height, eyes locked on Batman. He rips the gag off his mouth and throws it to the side, still not taking his eyes off Bruce—off the scar across his stomach. 

Bruce opens his mouth—he had planned on saying something, trying to explain, ask if this did it, if they were even, say something, anything, but his voice is gone. He tries to sit up, but immediately abandons that idea, pain lighting up his whole body and feeling so dizzy he can’t see straight.

He really underestimated how much this was going to hurt. 

He sags back against his pillow, exhausted, watching as the Joker approaches him. 

Thinks—a bit belatedly—huh, hope he doesn’t kill me. 

The Joker reaches his side. His silhouette looms over him, but he seems blurry, faraway, slightly out of focus. 

Blood loss, Bruce thinks.

He can make out some of the features on Joker’s face. His head is tilted, his pupils are still huge, and he’s staring at him a little strangely, his body eerily still. 

Then he lifts his hand, slowly, and reaches out towards Bruce’s stomach. Bruce is so out of it he doesn’t even tense. Too late, thinks, he should stop him, but by then the Joker’s fingers are already hovering millimeters above Bruce’s skin. 

Bruce blinks sluggishly, moving his gaze from the Joker’s hand over his stomach to the Joker’s face, which is pinched in concentration. He doesn’t even notice Bruce staring at him, that’s how locked he is in on the stitches. 

He’s really very close to Bruce’s face right now. So close, Bruce could count his eyelashes. His long, long eyelashes. Framing his bright, green eyes, sparkling in the light, like emeralds, and Bruce wants to pluck them out and put them in a display case so he can look at them forever. His eyes drift to the Joker’s long nose, going down, down, down until Bruce’s gaze catches on his mouth, and at the same moment, the Joker’s tongue darts out to wet his lips. 

His red, shiny lips. 

Bruce follows the movement, entranced. He is struck, suddenly, by an odd urge to reach up and pull him down. Capture those soft, wet lips on his. Lick into the inside of his mouth, touch his tongue with his tongue, see if he tastes as good as he remembers.

Pretty, pretty Joker.

Bruce is snapped out of his staring when he feels a featherlight touch on his stomach. He looks back down at himself, and sees Joker’s fingers, his long, lithe fingers, dancing across his skin, tracing the scar from the bottom up, up, up to the top. It hurts, but in a quiet way. Bruce shivers. 

Joker is slow, methodical, but right before he reaches the edge of the wound, his fingers unexpectedly freeze. With difficulty, Bruce drags up his unfocused eyes to the Joker’s face. He’s staring down at the future-scar, gaze unreadable. Bruce can almost see the calculations whirring through his head. That makes him want to laugh. The Joker doing math. 

He briefly wonders how much math Joker knows. What level he got to in high school. If he even graduated high school.

Probably. Maybe. 

Maybe he could teach Joker some trigonometry one day. He might like it. Good for jumping off buildings.

Bruce feels like that’s a pretty good, solid, smart plan, and is trying to figure out how to make his mouth move to say so out loud when the Joker finally lets his fingers trail off Bruce’s skin. 

Bruce lets out an involuntary noise at the loss of contact. He feels cold, empty, without it. The Joker’s eyes dart up to meet Bruce’s gaze under the cowl. 

Bruce feels, inexplicably, like he should smile at him, reassure him, let him know he’s okay, tell him not to look so concentrated, so serious, not to frown, baby, but his facial muscles aren’t responding to him. 

Oh, well. Maybe he could go to sleep instead.

That’s a great idea, actually. 

Bruce would very much like to go to sleep.

Joker stares at him for a long while, Bruce doing his best to stay awake, to focus. 

And then, he nods once. 

So slightly, so minimal that Bruce, in his near delirium, almost misses it. 

“Alright,” the Joker says quietly, “Alright.”

Bruce vaguely thinks that this is an important statement, one he should pay attention to, but he’s having trouble keeping his eyes open. 

He closes them, just for a moment, to rest them for a second or two, a quick little momentary break. 

But when he opens them again, the Joker is gone and Bruce is alone in a pool of his own drying blood. 

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