Chapter Text
Bruce hasn’t slept in three days.
Every time he moves he watches Gotham whirl like a kaleidoscope. He lets the Batmobile’s autopilot drive for him, figures it wouldn’t be good if he ran someone over on his way to stop the Joker.
He finds him in an alley, drenched and mud-splattered and still smiling. It’s raining in relentless sheets of cold water, and through the blur of exhaustion and raindrops the world looks like a giant neon-lit fish tank.
Batman clambers out of his car before the roof of the Batmobile is fully retracted and runs full tilt down the alley.
“Oh Bats, there you are!” the Joker exclaims, throwing his arms wide like he is playing to a crowd, or preparing to accept a hug. “So good of you to show up.”
He always does this, talking like they’ve slipped away to some kind of alternate universe where just a second before they’d been chatting like old friends, or flirting over cocktails. It's disorienting; the Joker seems so doggedly delighted to see him that Bruce almost feels like he’s intruding impolitely on this other, sunnier reality.
Almost.
“Joker, how many hostages,” Batman growls. “Tell me how many are in danger.”
Joker laughs, a high-pitched and swooping one. It sounds like sirens receding.
“Always straight to work with you. Oh Batman, what would you ever do without me to light up your lonely nights?”
“Probably get way more sleep,” Bruce can’t stop himself from muttering under his breath. “The hostages, Joker.”
“Why silly batbrain, I can’t give you an exact number, it all depends on how good you are at saving the day, doesn’t it now?” Joker takes a step further from him, as if gauging his best options for an exit. “If you found me you must have found the little surprise I left at the substation, that’s what you should be stopping, isn’t it?” His eyes are fully open despite the rain.
Bruce loses his patience, and Batman lunges forward and punches the Joker across the jaw. It’s oddly muffled in the rain. Joker howls, but his cry of pain becomes a deep, dark chuckle as he braces himself against the brick wall and withdraws a knife from the pocket of his sodden coat.
“Why Bats, can’t I ever convince you to buy me a drink first?”
“I’ve already disarmed the substation,” Batman says, pressing forward and raising his gauntlet to deflect the knife that comes whistling towards him. It's a bit of a bluff, in that he isn’t bringing up the holographic map to see exactly where his drones are in their progress towards completely disarming. He's too busy using his gauntlet to avoid being eviscerated. “I know you have additional explosives at a second location, a location that’s the answer to whatever this knock-knock joke was before it got ruined in the rain.” He throws a wadded up paper at the Joker’s feet.
“Ooh, you’ve got the extra credit, well done. Pity, if you could only read what it says. I can assure you it’s hilarious.”
Batman wants to scream that human lives are not extra credit in a demented puzzle, wants to hit the Joker hard across the windpipe, wants to take that knife and stick it somewhere that will make the Joker cry instead of laugh.
What he actually does is stagger into a trash can.
He rights himself immediately, forcing himself to stand upright, but not before the Joker notices. Not before something soft and strange flickers across his smiling face.
“Bats, are you OK? You can’t die on me, you know. That would take all the fun out of killing you.”
“Shut up,” Batman snarls, and he succeeds in wrestling the knife away from Joker and tossing it to the far end of the alley. He can hear Alfred saying something about proper rest and recuperation in his mind and he hates it. Something lit up in the Joker’s eyes at that stumble and Batman knows he can't extinguish it now no matter what he threatens.
“Tell you what,” Joker says, and it isn’t in his stage voice, it's like an ordinary conversation, like there hasn’t been a stabbing attempt and a punch to the jaw and a negotiation over hostages at all. “I think you could use any easy win tonight, hm? You seem exhausted. Out of some residual good in my twisted rotting heart, I’ll disarm the last few bombs and we can both go quietly to sleep in our little hideaways, on one very simple condition.”
It’s probably a trick, Bruce decides, but the alleyway is starting to waver around him and it’s not totally out of the question that Joker’s mixed up in something he’d genuinely be willing to bargain about.
“What’s that?”
The lipstick seems to reach all the way to his ears when he smiles.
“Why, I’d like a little kiss to cap off this date of ours. Just one. I’ll behave myself.”
Joker’s eyes are so green and hazy that they look like traffic lights, and Bruce wonders for a wild instant if he needs to put the Batmobile in drive.
Is it possible to lose so much sleep your nightmares start to bleed into your conscious life?
“Why the hell do you want that?” Batman asks eloquently.
“Oh silly, look at you, who wouldn’t want to kiss you? It’s a trifle, a bit of nothing for amusement's sake.”
His eyes do not look trifling. He looks like he would swallow Batman whole if he could.
He must be very cold in that drenched coat on this dreary night, a little part of Bruce's mind thinks unhelpfully.
“Have you got poison in your lipstick or something?” Batman asks, but he knows the answer is no, has known in the unacknowledged parts of his mind that the Joker’s wanted something like this for far longer than he’s willing to think about right now. There’s a heaviness in the air between them when they meet like this, a kind of static electricity that has yet to deliver a killing jolt.
Joker giggles with what sounds like genuine nervousness.
“That’s really more Poison Ivy’s gig than mine. Up to you though, Bats, only if you want to. I’m sure you could find the other bombs in time. In fact, I might even enjoy watching you zipping around the city to do it! Bats do have a funny way of fluttering around when they’re in a frenzy, don’t they?”
He makes tiny flapping motions with his fingers, and Bruce suddenly wonders what those fingers would feel like touching his neck with affection rather than asphyxiation attempts. He has the distant thought that he should probably be pondering this with more dread.
If he agrees, Bruce will still need to verify that the Joker’s kept his end of the bargain, and it will be a horribly late night regardless. But he’s in no state to be solving a case; he remembers dimly that after this many days without sleep most people begin to hallucinate.
And as he moves towards the Joker and watches those too-red lips tremble slightly, a part of him is desperately hoping this might be one of those hallucinations.
“Only if you want,” Joker says quickly, in a strange almost-whisper. But Batman doesn’t have an answer to that question right now that makes any sense. He wants to end this long several-nights’-watching and he wants the Joker to be quiet. Of course he doesn’t want to kiss someone responsible for so much death and destruction in Gotham, but that’s irrelevant to the question of whether he’s willing to touch the Joker’s mouth with his own for a brief respite from the chaos, isn’t it?
Bruce thinks about all of this as he closes the gap between their lips.
Joker makes a soft noise of surprise, as though he expected Batman to pull away at the last second. His face is wet from all the rain, and his lips are slicked and soft and pressed very, very gently against Batman’s. If it wasn’t horrible, which of course it is, it would be rather sweet. Quite pleasant, actually.
Bruce decides the best way to get through this with a shred of dignity intact is not to move at all, so he doesn’t try to stop Joker when gloved hands creep up the sides of the cowl, one leather-covered thumb brushing across his cheek.
He flinches a little then, recalling that under the soft leather are the hands that have strangled, shot, and hacked at...how many Gothamites now? The fact that he can’t recall makes him feel a cold and twisting nausea, and for a moment he wants badly to hurt the man who is kissing him so gently in the rain.
How long has it been, anyway? Has it been a quarter of a second, or a whole minute? Joker’s not backing away, and Bruce counts down from ten, although he starts counting a little later than he intended, and he’s pretty sure he counted seven twice by accident.
It’s when Batman pulls away that Joker opens his mouth and nips at his bottom lip.
Afterwards, when he is staring at the ceiling in Wayne Manor, Bruce will reassure himself that the resulting aggression, while bearing some superficial resemblance to sexual lust, or the release of long-held tension, was completely understandable within its context.
Batman lunges at the Joker with hot rage, opening his mouth and biting back and not caring whether he gets lipstick on his teeth, or blood. Joker stumbles backwards and his head hits the wall of the alley with a loud clunk. He doesn’t seem to notice, and wraps his arms hastily around Batman’s neck to pull him forward so Batman can more easily continue his mouth to mouth assault.
Bruce can feel the Joker’s nose pressed against the side of his mask, can feel a wet tendril of green hair on his cheek, is aware that their chests are touching, but his focus is narrowed to the Joker licking against his tongue with a fervor that makes his whole body feel far too hot inside the batsuit. He realizes his hands are on the sides of Joker’s face and can’t remember putting them there.
The world spins, or maybe it’s just something in Bruce’s stomach flipping. He has the distinct feeling of watching this all play out with a circling camera, and wonders if he’s already passed out. Perhaps he’s been exempted from the actuality of all this, perhaps his fingers are not actually buried deep in the Joker’s sopping hair.
He licks inside Joker’s mouth and the Joker whimpers, which doesn’t help the whole overheating-in-the-batsuit situation. It also makes Bruce wonder if he’s inadvertently made some awful kind of noise the Joker will remember and he’ll never be able to retract.
He makes the strategic decision to stop himself from making embarrassing noises by attempting to push his tongue down the Joker’s throat and clutching him so tightly it could leave bruises.
Joker moans, and Bruce can feel it reverberate through his mouth.
It’s like an alarm rousing him from an unconscious darkness, and the terrible heat cools enough that he remembers why he’s here in this wet, disgusting alleyway with his hands on the murderer whose bombs have yet to be completely disarmed.
Batman extricates himself from the Joker with some difficulty, peeling away the arms still holding him like he’s the only thing keeping them both upright (he’s not at all sure it’s him and not the Joker responsible for that right now).
“Now keep your end of the bargain,” he growls at the Joker.
Joker looks up at him through ocean-green lashes. His lip is bleeding, and the lipstick is smudged a little. Bruce makes a mental note to wipe his own face, and another note that his heart rate is way too high.
“Well that was--I think I should give you a week off, for that,” the Joker says, recovering some of the showmanship from earlier. “It was the gas station on Fifth and Townsend. Promise.” His voice is a bit hoarse.
He pulls a crude detonator from the pocket of his trousers (so that’s what it was he felt, Bruce thinks, not anything worse), breaks it apart and gives the disassembled pieces to Batman.
Batman almost says “thank you,” but decides that’s too absurd, although everything else he wants to say at that moment sounds equally deranged in his head. He feels like he should indicate some resentment about being coaxed into a kiss, and feels like he should apologize for accelerating that kiss. He wants to let the Joker know that this will be the only time this ever happens, but he has the weirdest feeling that anything he says along those lines is going to sound a lot like a denial of something no one suggested.
The Joker is licking blood off his own lips, eyes gone fully dark.
“Stay out of trouble,” Batman settles on, and it sounds extremely stupid but at least he’s done with this interaction, normal life can resume its regularly scheduled programming. Same bat time, same bat channel.
He fires his grappling gun at a nearby building even though it’s hardly more effort to just run back to the Batmobile, and it’s honestly complete luck that he manages to scramble up the side without just crashing into the wall like a bird flying into a transparent window. He needs to verify the feed from the drones, take the Batmobile to clear the gas station, and go collapse in bed.
After, in the deep, silent shadows of his bedroom, Bruce tells himself that the Joker’s bite on his lip activated a reasonable, if oddly expressed, instinct in him. It gave him a strong zap of adrenaline that prepared him for a fight. He insists to himself that it was nothing but a freak of nerves.
And he knows he’s lying as he comes all over his hand in the dark.