Chapter Text
To preserve our history is to force your healing.
The dampness of the old Gotham transit tunnel did not smell like the rain outside. Rain was clean, a sharp crack of ozone that cut through the smog of the upper districts; this was the smell of water that had given up. It tasted of lime runoff, oxidized iron, and the cold, slow rot of timber ties that had skipped the turn of the last century.
The Joker lay with his cheek pressed against the wet ballast, tracking the vibration of a city that didn't know he was dying. Or perhaps it did. Perhaps the tectonic rumble of the uptown express four lines over was just Gotham stretching its gray limbs, settling into the concrete, entirely indifferent to the puddle of grease and bile pooling beneath his chin.
His mouth tasted of pennies and battery acid.
“Not a funny joke,” he croaked into the gravel. His voice was a dry rattle, like a cicada shell crushed under an expensive boot. “Not... the structure is all wrong. Where’s the turn? Where’s the logic?”
He had spent seventy-two hours in the dark, trying to poison a ghost.
The first day had been an exercise in old-fashioned chemistry; a cocktail of industrial solvent, boiled nightshade from the botanical gardens, and three crushed tablets of black-market veterinary abortifacients he’d torn from the throat of a low-level fence in the Narrows. It should have worked. A horse would have dropped. A normal man would have dissolved from the liver outward, turning into a puddle of sweet-smelling marrow.
Instead, the Joker had only managed to turn his own vision into a smeared canvas of yellow and violet. The fever had arrived by midnight, a heavy, velvet weight that sat on his chest and forced his lungs to whistle through the grease paint.
It didn't care. The thing behind his navel, that tiny, stubborn knot of cells that carried the terrible, leaden scent of old wood and wet slate, remained anchored. It was an iron spike driven straight through his pelvis, pinning him to the earth, making him heavy.
He hated the weight most of all. He had always been a creature of edges, a cardboard cutout that could slip between the bars of a cell or the teeth of a saw. Now, he felt the terrible pull of gravity. He felt three dimensions. He felt like meat.
With a shudder that rattled his ribs like dry bamboo, he dragged his left hand down his torso. His fingers were stiff, the nails split from where he’d tried to dig into his own skin the night before, desperate to find the seam,.to find the zipper, and peel the whole red lining out. The purple wool of his trousers was damp, stiff with a dark, crusty salt that wasn't grease paint.
“Out,” he whispered, his fingernails hooking into the fabric of his shirt, tearing at the buttons until they popped like small teeth against the gravel. “Come on. Out of the house. Lease is up, you little... you little bastard.”
He pressed the heel of his hand into his lower abdomen, leaning his full, emaciated weight into the stone. The pain was magnificent, a white-hot needle that shot straight up his spine and blossomed into a garden of sparks behind his eyes, but it wasn't the right kind of pain. It wasn't the clearing out. It was just the walls of the house groaning under the pressure.
From the dark at the end of the spur line, the air shifted.
It wasn't a draft. A draft was cold and smelled of grease. This was a displacement, a mass entering a void that had been tuned to receive it for fifteen years. The scent came first, traveling faster than the sound of leather on stone: cedarwood, wet tallow, and the sharp, suffocating vinegar of an Alpha’s territorial rage, filtered through a million dollars of clean Kevlar.
The Joker didn't look up. He couldn't. His neck felt as though it had been stuffed with wet sand. He simply let his forehead drop back into the dirt, a wet, rattling chuckle escaping his cracked lips.
“Late,” the Joker wheezed. “You’re... you’re missing the third act, Brucie-bear. The critics are already leaving.”
The shadows didn't fall across him; they absorbed him. The black of the cape didn't seem like fabric in this light; it looked like an oil slick pouring over the gravel, swallowing the white of his shirt, the green of his hair, until there was only the two of them in the center of the world.
A hand; huge, heavy, the leather of the glove smelling of gun oil and fresh water, settled behind his skull. It didn't squeeze. It didn't slam him into the tie. It simply existed there, a five-pound weight that informed his central nervous system that movement was no longer an option.
“You’re burning,” Bruce said.
The voice wasn't the roar he used for the gargoyles. It was low, thick with the particular gravel that came from three days of sleeplessness and a biological wire that had been pulled so taut it was humming at a frequency that could shatter glass.
“I’m blooming,” the Joker corrected, his teeth clicking together as a chill took him, a violent, full-body tremor that jerked his knees toward his chest. “I’m... I’m an orchard, Batsy. Can’t you smell the blossoms? Mostly arsenic. Some... some lead.”
The hand moved from his head to his shoulder, turning him over with the slow, terrible care one might use on a unexploded shell. The Joker let himself be rolled, his limbs loose and useless as a ragdoll's, until he was looking up into the white lenses of the cowl.
The cowl was splattered with something dark. Not mud.
“You’ve been busy,” the Joker remarked, squinting through the yellow haze of his own eyes. “The boy wonders must be... so lonely at home.”
Bruce didn't answer. He was already tearing at the Joker’s shirt, his blunt, gloved fingers moving with an efficiency that was entirely devoid of theatricality. When the cloth parted, the skin beneath was a map of disaster. The pale, bluish skin of the Joker’s belly was crosshatched with jagged, shallow crescents where he’d tried to use a broken piece of a soda bottle before his hands had grown too weak to hold it. The blood had dried into a black crust, framing the small, rounded swell above his pubic bone like an unfinished frame around a terrible portrait.
A low, vibrating sound started deep in Bruce’s chest, a sub-audible snarl that wasn't meant for a human ear. It was the sound an animal made when it found its den cleared out by foxes.
“You didn't take the antidote,” Bruce said. It wasn't a question.
“The antidote? Oh, you mean that... that lovely gray soup you left in my kitchen? Smelled like chalk. Tasted like... like church.” The Joker spat, a red-flecked string of saliva landing on the black curve of Bruce’s collarbone. “I gave it to the rats. They didn't like it either. Died within an hour. Very poor vintage, darling.”
“It was an endocrine stabilizer,” Bruce whispered. His hands were hovering over the damaged skin, not touching, as if the heat radiating from the fever would burn through his gloves. “To keep the lining from tearing. To keep you from—”
“From what? From being your little garden?” The Joker’s hand shot up, clumsy, slow, but catching Bruce by the leather of his throat-guard. He pulled, though he didn't have the strength to move the Alpha an inch; instead, he merely pulled himself up a few inches, his face close enough to the cowl that he could see his own sweat-streaked reflection in the lenses. “Look at me! Look at what you put in there! It’s a parasite. It’s eating away at me! I can feel it. It’s trying to build a library in my liver.”
“Stop,” Bruce said. The word was a lead pipe dropped on a carpet.
“If I rip it out,” the Joker whispered, his voice dropping into something horribly soft, almost sweet, the manic edge sliding away to reveal the cold, gray stone beneath, “will you love me less?”
Bruce didn't blink. The lenses remained white, dead, and steady. He reached down, his large hands sliding beneath the Joker’s armpits, and lifted him from the dirt as if he weighed no more than a bundle of dry willow.
“I will love you until there is nothing left of either of us,” Bruce said.
The walk back to the Batmobile was a long, rhythmic torture. Every step Bruce took jarred the Joker’s spine, sending waves of nausea through his throat that he could no longer even muster the energy to vomit. He hung across the Alpha’s chest like a dead deer, his green hair trailing against the black weave of the cape, his fingers hooked into the utility belt out of some residual, animal reflex to keep from falling into the dark.
He tried to sing, a small, filthy ditty about a tailor from the East End who drowned in his own starch, but the words kept getting lost in his teeth.
By the time the hydraulic hiss of the cockpit closed over them, the fever had taken the last of his peripheral vision. There was only the black leather of the passenger seat, the smell of clean fleece that had been laid down beforehand, he knew, the Joker realized with a small, bitter pang, the bastard knew exactly where I’d be. And the heavy, rhythmic thrum of the engine that felt exactly like the pulse he was trying to kill.
The transition from the car to the Cave was always the worst part of the play. It lacked the theatricality of the theater; it was all steel and fluorescent tubes, the smell of sterile saline and the high-frequency whine of medical monitors.
The Joker found himself on his back, the cool vinyl of the examination table a shock against his burning skin. Someone was cutting his trousers off. Not with a knife; with medical shears that made a wet snip-snip sound through the wool.
“Get... get those away from me,” he mumbled, his arms flailing, striking out at the dark silhouette hovering over him. “I know what you do with those. You’re going to... you’re going to trim the hedges.”
“Lie still.”
“No. No, I don't think I will.” He tried to roll, to throw his legs over the side of the table, but a strap, wide, padded with black neoprene to keep from chafing, clicked into place across his chest. Then another across his thighs.
“Brucie,” the Joker hissed, the name coming out like a curse. “You can’t... you can’t lock the door from the inside. That’s not how the house works.”
“Your temperature is 104,” Bruce said. He had discarded the cowl. His face was gray, the skin under his eyes bruised with a fatigue that looked almost like the Joker’s own makeup, his jaw set in a line so hard the muscle was twitching under the skin. He was holding a large, silver syringe filled with something clear and thick. “The toxins you ingested are binding to your red blood cells. If I don't flush your system in the next twenty minutes, your kidneys will fail.”
“Let them!” The Joker laughed, a high, thin sound that ended in a wet cough. A drop of dark blood appeared at the corner of his nostril, tracing a line down into his white-painted lip. “Let them turn to ash! Let’s see what the little prince does then, when his castle falls down! Let’s see him swim in the grease!”
Bruce didn't argue. He leaned over the table, his massive chest pressing against the restraint strap, his scent turning so heavy, so thick with the primitive Command of an Alpha that the Joker’s throat involuntarily closed, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth.
It was an unfair trick. Biology was a cheat. It was the only card the Batman played that didn't have a label on it.
“You aren't going to die,” Bruce whispered, his face inches from the Joker’s, his breath warm and smelling of old coffee. “And it isn't going to die. I’ve spent three days cleaning the streets to make sure I had the time to stay here with you. Do you understand me? There is no one else coming.”
The needle went into the big vein in the Joker’s neck.
The Joker shrieked, not from the pain of the steel, but from the sudden, icy rush of the saline and the blockers hitting his heart. It felt like winter being forced into his arteries through a straw. His vision cleared for three seconds, three seconds of terrifying, razor-sharp focus where he could see every pore on Bruce’s broken nose, every silver hair at his temples, and the absolute, terrifying lack of doubt in his gray eyes.
“You’re a monster,” the Joker gasped, his fingers spasming against the vinyl. “You’re... you’re the worst one.”
“I know,” Bruce said.
He reached down, his bare, scarred hand wrapping around both of the Joker’s wrists, lifting them away from the self-inflicted wounds on his stomach. He held them together in one fist, a grip that was iron, that was a handcuff, that was the only thing keeping the Joker from flying apart into a hundred green splinters.
With his other hand, Bruce took a warm, wet cloth from a basin. He didn't use antiseptic, the skin was too raw for it, just clean, distilled water. Slowly, with a patience that felt like an executioner counting the links in a chain, he began to wipe the dried blood from the Joker’s skin.
Smear. Rinse. Smear.
The pink water swirled in the stainless-steel bowl.
“It kicked this morning,” Bruce said softly, his voice steady as the pulse of the city. “Before I found you. I could feel the spike on the monitor from the safehouse tracker.”
The Joker stopped fighting. He let his back go flat against the table, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps that smelled of the chemicals Bruce was forcing into him. He looked up at the stone ceiling of the Cave, at the stalactites that looked like teeth waiting to drop.
“It didn't kick,” the Joker whispered, his voice small and hollow in the vastness of the room. “It was just... it was just a spasm. A death rattle. A joke you didn't catch.”
Bruce leaned down, pressing his forehead against the Joker’s wet, green temple, his scent-glands marking the skin of the neck he had just stabbed with medicine.
“We’ll see,” Bruce murmured against his skin, his hand remaining heavy and unyielding over the Joker’s trembling fingers, holding him down to the earth he so desperately wanted to leave. “We have six months to find out.”