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“Before you break my face,” the Joker said, squirming beneath Batman’s body, between his sore knees, “can I just say that none of this is my fault?”
Batman snorted rain water out of his nose, tried to blink it out of his eyes. It fell in sheets from his cowl, coursed down his cheeks under the rubber. He tightened the hand he had curled in the Joker’s collar, twisting until neck flesh got caught between the folds of garish green fabric. His other fist, poised at shoulder-height above the Joker’s face, wavered.
“Bullshit,” he snarled.
The Joker shook his head. His hair was a matted wet mess around his head, and his makeup was running down the sides of his neck, pooling in chalky swirls on the sidewalk. “I promise. I promise that I, ah, had nothing to do with--” He broke off into a hoarse giggle, tongue darting out to touch at the distended corners of his mouth. “I didn’t do anything. I mean, is this really the sort of thing I’d do?”
Batman drove his fist down into the Joker’s face, the sharp edges of his gauntlet catching red and blue light from the police cars screaming past in all directions. The Joker’s head snapped sideways. Batman watched his cheek split against the pavement, and felt the drumming of heels against cement. He jabbed his own heels into the Joker’s ribs from either side, squeezing his thighs around the heaving chest.
The Joker was still laughing, wheezing for breath around Batman’s stranglehold. “I really didn’t,” he said, rolling his head to peer at Batman out of one swelling eye. The dark greasepaint had nearly washed away, and come off on Batman’s knuckles. Enough for Batman to make out the telltale webbing of burst blood vessels, and the jagged tear of an eyebrow. “Trust me, this is the sort of thing I’d take credit for.”
Batman punched him again. He put all his weight into the blow, desperate to feel bone crack. It didn’t. He let go of the Joker’s collar and shook him by his lapels, snapping his head back and forth on the flopping stem of his neck. The Joker sucked air, and managed to liberate one arm from between his own side and Batman’s leg; enough to wrap his fingers around Batman’s wrist. He was surprisingly strong, for the merry chase on which he’d led Batman over the roofs and through the sewers, and how much of a beating he’d taken before Batman had managed to pin him down.
“I. Didn’t. Do it,” the Joker hissed, still grinning, grinning. He licked his lips. “We’re right out on the street for everyone to see. Have you no shame?” He laughed, pushing himself up futilely against Batman.
Batman looked around, then, at the chaos of stampeding people, and cars trying to pass on the wrong sides of the road, horns blaring. There was so much yelling, so much hysterical screaming. Gunshots in the distance, the dull far-off impact of vehicles crashing together. The Joker was right; this was stupid. It was a wonder they hadn’t been run over or shot.
Batman straightened up, getting to his feet. Blood rushed back into his legs, and they nearly buckled. He dragged the Joker up by his lapels, and subtly leaned on his listing body for a second, until his own feet stopped tingling. They’d been there for a little bit, in the middle of the sidewalk.
He turned toward the nearest building, dragging the Joker after him. The Joker went limp, knees nearly touching the ground. Batman didn’t slow to accommodate his recalcitrance. Instead, he tried the handle of the nearest door (a back door-- a delivery entrance for a bakery). It was locked. He slammed the hard edge of his arm guard against the handle, twice, three times, until it broke. He kicked the door in.
It was dark inside; the dark of a power outtage. No emergency lights, or digital displays, or dull blue glows from refrigerators or ovens. Batman unclipped the little flashlight from his belt, and then thought better of it, and slipped on a slender pair of night vision goggles, instead. No reason to give the Joker equal ground.
Alfred, he wanted to say, to check in for a status update. How far the virus had gone, mortality rates, police reports, evacuation procedures. Not with the Joker right here, though, right in earshot. If they all got out of this alive, he sure as shit didn’t want any clues as to his identity, or Alfred’s involvement, floating around.
Instead, he gave the room a quick visual check. They seemed to be in a kitchen. Alone. He turned around and pushed the door shut. It bounced ineffectually against the jamb; he’d broken the latch.
“Stay here,” he said, shoving the Joker into the nearest corner. The Joker folded like a sack of damp rags, slouching down against the wall with his legs straight out in front of him. Batman turned away to find something with which to block the door shut.
The instant his back was turned, the Joker leapt on him, getting one arm hooked around his neck, the other making quick stabs for his belly. The armour took the worst of the blows, and Batman felt nothing but a shallow blunt impact.
He twisted, ducked, and flung the Joker over his head, catching him a solid shot to the kidneys on the way down. He grabbed the Joker’s wrists, squeezing until he could feel bones grate. “Drop it,” he ground out.
The Joker laughed in his face, writhing on the linoleum floor. Batman saw the knife glint in his right hand, eerily green in night vision, and worked to prise the fingers away, cracking them back farther than strictly necessary.
The Joker yelped, and snorted, and let the knife drop. Batman kicked it away, into the darkness, and punched the Joker in the stomach, doubling him over.
“Stay. Here,” he growled, shoving at the Joker’s chest to make his point. The Joker nodded, panting, tongue lolling.
Batman shifted away, wary until he was sure the Joker wasn’t going to make another lunge for him, and went to the nearest fridge. He ripped the power cords out of the back, set his shoulder against the side, and heaved it across to cover the door. It tipped and fell, scattering food with an enormous crash.
Batman turned quickly back to the Joker, who was still there, obediently lying on the floor, a tangle of shivering limbs.
“What next?” the Joker asked.
Batman frowned. He hadn’t really thought very far ahead, yet. “I’m going to tie you up,” he said, adlibbing. “And leave you here. Then I’m going to go back outside and help people.”
The Joker nodded, pursing his lips. They looked ridiculous, puckered up. He couldn’t appear honestly serious if he tried, Batman thought.
“And-- and that seems like a good plan, to you, does it?” said the Joker. He grinned, quick, and clacked his teeth together. “Tie me up here, all alone, and just… leave?”
“I tie good knots,” Batman said, but he wasn’t so sure. If Arkham couldn’t even make a good attempt at holding the Joker against his will, what could a bit of nylon and Kevlar twine do? He didn’t think the hesitation showed in his voice.
The Joker sat up slowly, gingerly. He put two fingers in his mouth, felt around, and withdrew a shard of tooth. He spat blood on the floor. “All right,” he said, extending his wrists together. “Do your worst.”
Batman stepped forward, grabbed both of the Joker’s hands, and yanked them around behind his back. He made quick work of the knots, doubling them up, running the cord around the Joker’s middle, down to his feet, back up to his hands, around his throat. By the time he was satisfied, the Joker was twisted into an extremely uncomfortable looking pretzel, hardly capable of movement, much less escape.
Batman nodded, taking a step away. The Joker looked up at him through a clump of brassy, grease-slick hair. “Satisfied?” he asked. His voice was a croak, after all the choking, and with the rope digging into his Adam’s apple.
Batman didn’t bother answering, just turned on his heel and barged out of the kitchen’s swinging double doors. The front of the bakery was just as deserted, but brighter from the few remaining street lights outside, and the wild jostling beams of flashlights from passers-by. Batman took off his night vision goggles and stood for a moment before the tall front window, looking up and down the street. There was the nearby sound of smashing glass, and he shook his head. Even now, when imminent death was at a premium, people were still bothering to loot and steal. What were they planning to do with the computers and movies and expensive sports equipment? For all Batman knew, society was in the middle of collapsing for good; there might not even be internet or a functioning national border after today.
He swallowed, and turned toward the door. He caught just a quick flash of movement reflected in the glass, and managed to fall into an instinctive duck before the Joker smashed a thick wooden cutting board through the window, just where his head would have been.
Batman swept a leg out, knocking the Joker down, and stumbled back, sick with adrenalin. He landed a quick, vicious kick in the Joker’s midsection, and followed it with another, because the first had felt so damn good.
“How the fuck--” he demanded.
The Joker was too busy laughing and choking up blood to answer him, and Batman had to stop kicking just to get his breath back. He put one hand out to steady himself against the remaining window. He saw the tattered remains of rope around the Joker’s wrists, and only then noticed the sickening, unnatural angle of the Joker’s shoulders, of his hips.
“You-- you--” Batman said. He wasn’t often at a loss for words. He blamed the rather unorthodox events of the evening.
The Joker mimicked him silently, mouthing the words with a wry, sneering tilt of his head. He extended one trembling arm. “Help a buddy out?” he said.
Batman just barely restrained himself from delivering another kick, and didn’t take the Joker’s proffered hand, the bent fingers wiggling at him. “Fuck you,” he said. “That’s just...”
The Joker gave a hee-hawing bark of laughter, and slowly got to his own knees. Batman didn’t wince when the Joker wrapped one arm carefully around himself, set his teeth, and shoved his dislocated shoulder back into place. But he did convulsively lean forward and brace the Joker for the second shoulder, and then lent the flat of one foot to holding the Joker’s legs down for the relocation of hips and, freakishly, one knee.
The Joker dropped back against the floor when it was all done, gasping, picking at the bits of rope still fastened around his arms, chafed through at the ends.
“How,” Batman demanded, hating that he had to ask, “did you get out?”
“Besides the silly putty joints?” the Joker asked, squinting up through the gloom. “You left me on the floor of a kitchen filled with knives, Battyman. How do you think I did it?”
Batman couldn’t reach his forehead through the cowl, but if he could, he would have been giving himself a fierce temple massage.
He took a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “Are you left or right handed?” he asked.
The Joker narrowed his eyes. “Right,” he said.
Batman said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Fine by me.” The Joker shrugged.
Batman put the cuff around his own left wrist, and then snapped the other side to the Joker’s right. He wanted to put the Joker at a disadvantage by restraining his more useful hand, but he wouldn’t trust a single solitary word that came out of this man’s mouth. He might as well leave his own more useful hand free.
The Joker didn’t seem surprised, just rueful. “Are you sure you want to do that? I mean, with all the, ah.” He licked his lips, touching top and bottom quickly. “With the mutant undead, and all. I’ll just drag you down.”
“You’ll die, if you do,” said Batman, at once. He pulled, and the Joker got to his feet, led by one raw wrist.
The Joker squinted at him, stinking and too close in the pale orange light. “What makes you think that’s a problem?”
Batman didn’t answer. He stepped out over the window sill, over the broken heaps of glass. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ve got people to save.”
The Joker slogged along behind for the first few steps, stumbling in mad circles behind Batman, dragging his feet. Batman gave a couple vicious tugs on the handcuff, and the Joker quickly fell into line, coming up beside him.
“All right,” he said, and slung one arm over Batman’s shoulder. “Where to, chum?”
Batman punched him in the gut again, and then had to stand still for a few seconds, waiting for the Joker to regain his breath. Which he did promptly, and with a rock-solid knee to Batman’s groin.
Even through the armour, it hurt like a bitch. Batman hit the ground before he could stop himself, and Joker was on him again, the two of them crashing back onto the wet street. They rolled once, got the handcuffs tangled and punched at one another with only one hand apiece. Batman forced himself to sit up, pushing the Joker back with his free elbow, and that was when the knife came out.
Of course. Batman hadn’t checked the Joker for the knife he’d only just admitted to using. How fucking stupid.
Batman ducked the first slice, ramming his head into the Joker’s chest, and took the second jab high in the side. It slipped through a gap in the armour and bounced over a couple ribs. He snarled, got his own crotch-shot in with his free fist, and rolled to the side, pinning the Joker’s knife-hand with his own body. Their handcuffed arms were trapped beneath them.
“This is just getting silly,” said the Joker, breathless. His chest was bleeding where Batman’s pointed ears had stuck into him.
“Fuck you,” said Batman. The pain of the stab hadn’t hit yet, but he knew it would any second. The wound didn’t feel dangerously deep, but if that knife was sharp enough, it would have left scoring across his ribs. There was nothing quite like the ache of a chipped bone to cheer someone up.
“Truce?” said the Joker.
On Batman’s far side, the Joker’s hand flapped in the air, still holding the knife. He didn’t have enough room to use it, but Batman still twitched away, pressing more of his weight down onto the Joker‘s trapped arm.
“Truce,” he agreed. “Just until I can get you to the police station and throw you in the drunk tank.”
“Of course,” said the Joker. He tipped his head sideways and back to meet Batman’s eyes. “That old chestnut.”
“I’m not letting you run around out here.”
The Joker snorted. “Why not? Have you seen this place recently?”
Batman craned his neck to look around. It was quieter than it had been when they’d been out on the street a few minutes ago, but there were fires raging in nearby buildings, their windows lit up red. The smoking hulks of wrecked cars surrounded them, sprays of cubed windshield glass making the street glitter. A few hundred feet away, a fire hydrant had been rammed by minivan, and was gushing a geyser of water a dozen feet into the air.
In the distance, people were running. Some normally, limbs in a sharp panic, carrying children or supplies. Some… not so normally. Slower, lurching, with a calm sort of purpose behind their sudden lunges and stumbling advances.
“Because you’ll make it worse,” he said. “Somehow you’ll make it worse.”
“Are you kidding me?” The Joker grinned at him from disturbingly near. His yellow teeth snapped. “This is beautiful, this is fun. I wouldn’t mess up something like this.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. I have to stop this madness, not dance around in it.”
The Joker shook his head. “You got me there.” He licked his lips, quick and wet, pressed his tongue into the corners. “Dancing is what I do best.”
Batman tried not to cringe at the mental image. “We’ll get up on the count of three. One. Two--”
“Wait, wait.” The Joker got his feet braced on the pavement. “On three, or after three?”
Batman snarled and lifted his unhindered arm, curling his fist.
The Joker laughed, turning his face away. “All right, all right, fuck. You have no sense of humour!”
Batman heaved, and brought them both to their feet. “I’m leaving the cuffs on,” he said, “until we’re somewhere secure.”
“Sure,” said the Joker.
“Give me the knife.” Batman held out his hand.
“Sure,” said the Joker again. “If you give me your tear gas and your grappling hook and your armour.”
Batman snorted. “Not a chance.”
The Joker cocked one shoulder. “Same to you.”
“I need this stuff to protect myself, and to protect other people. To protect you.” He said this last between gritted teeth.
The Joker shook his head, weaving the tip of his short knife through the air. It looked like a paring knife, Batman through, for cutting vegetables.
“I’ll protect myself,” the Joker said. “And I promise not to stab you in the liver or anything.”
“The knife.” Batman held out his hand.
“Your, uh, arm thingies, there.”
Batman looked down at the curved blades on his forearms. “No.”
“Then no.”
Batman took a step forward.
The Joker leapt back. “Ah, ah, ah! I can put this thing through your curiously unprotected eye faster than you can choke the shit out of me, Bats.”
Batman hesitated. Face-to-face like this, at an equal disadvantage with the cuffs, the Joker might be right. They stared at one another for a long minute. Some people ran by on the other side of the street, feet pounding the pavement. Neither of them spared a glance.
“Fine,” said Batman. “But you’re walking in front of me.”
The Joker shrugged. “Fair enough.”
They circled each other carefully, and then the Joker stopped. “Which way are we going?”
“That way,” said Batman, guessing and pointing. The nearest police station wasn’t for another four miles through the downtown slog, and Batman knew that the most direct route had been swarmed by the mutant undead earlier tonight, and was probably still impassable.
The Joker took one large step forward, and Batman jolted after him.
They made good time for the first couple minutes, and then they got out of the quieter areas, and into good and proper anarchy. On Cavalier street, a mob of people was racing down the middle of the dark road toward them, bristling with improvised armament, trampling one another. There didn’t seem to be any organisation, just a mutual desire to flee in approximately the same direction. Batman scanned the crowd quickly, searching for infected.
Everyone looked fairly healthy, at a first glance. The Joker shifted in front of him, from one foot to the other.
“Bats--” he said, as the screaming horde grew nearer.
Batman dodged sideways, climbing up the hood of a car crushed into the side of a coffee shop. He dragged the Joker up after him, and they stood on the roof, letting the body of the mob go by. The car was jostled, nearly tipped, but no one seemed to actually notice them. Batman searched the bloody, tear-streaked, frenzied faces, and saw nobody he recognized.
The Joker was crouched near Batman’s feet, cuffed arm bent up behind to accommodate Batman’s height. Batman realized, after a second, that he was jabbing the knife at the civilians passing closest, aiming for faces and throats.
Batman yanked him back just in time to save a young woman from getting shanked. She didn’t even look up.
“Are you out of your mind?” Batman roared.
The Joker snorted and giggled, and didn’t stop until Batman booted him off the far side of the car, leaping down after him at the last moment to keep their respective wrists from snapping.
“One more time,” Batman ground out, lifting the Joker by his lapels and giving him a solid shake. “Just one more, and I’ll break your neck.”
“Your one rule,” said the Joker, stepping on Batman’s feet.
“Fuck my one rule,” Batman said, shocking himself just a little, because he meant it. He would get the Joker in a full Nelson, dislocate both shoulders again, and crack his neck right over. It might even be easy, if he was quick about it.
The Joker’s manic smile never wavered.
“You’re a piece of shit,” he told the Joker. “You should have been drowned at birth.”
“Who says I wasn’t?” the Joker asked. “Did I ever tell you how I got these scars? My old man was a fisherman--”
Batman spat in disgust, clapping one Kevlar-clad palm over the Joker’s mouth. “Don’t,” he said. “All you ever do is talk. You waste so much fucking energy talking, I don’t even know how…”
He trailed off, because the Joker had gone suddenly tense in a way that Batman’s previous threatened beatings had never produced. And he was staring wide-eyed over Batman’s shoulder.
Batman spun around before he could think better of it, or consider that it might be a trick. He was just in time to jam his forearm into the gaping mouth of what appeared to be a massive undead lumberjack, if the demolished flannel and blue jeans were any indication. One of the creature’s eyes was missing, the side of its face torn away to hang in strips of gooey flesh against its jaw. Unwillingly, Batman thought of Harvey, but he didn’t have time to berate himself for the comparison. Another monster, a woman with her shirt shredded open and most of her abdomen bitten away, had come up on his left side, and he couldn’t get his handcuffed arm up in time to block her.
He ducked, jamming his shoulder into the heaving gut of the first infected, and felt the second one fall on him. His uncuffed arm was trapped against the infected man’s mouth, holding the gnashing teeth at bay. Any second, now, the woman would get her teeth into the soft unprotected square of his jaw, and bite down--
She slid sideways off him, and Batman’s cuffed arm was yanked painfully as the Joker followed her down, jamming his knife into her throat, hacking at her struggling body. Batman didn’t have time to be horrified, or wonder at comparative morality. The huge lumberjack had gotten Batman into a sort of bear hug, fingers scrabbling at his back.
Batman managed to twist enough to get his arm free of the teeth, which were cracking against his gauntlets, and drive the fine-edged blades on his forearms into the creature’s gut. Again and again he sliced, desperate to get even a few inches of space to turn and kick, or to land an uppercut on the man’s flapping jaw.
There was an unearthly racket coming from all around them, the slap of a hundred feet on the pavement, a slobbering congested sort of roar. Batman caught a glimpse of another dozen infected coming toward them, running as best they could with stiffened joints and missing body parts.
The Joker scrambled around Batman’s feet, suddenly, tackling the big undead around the ankles. All three of them fell in a heap, and Batman pushed himself up with his elbows planted in the infected man’s pulpy chest.
“Let’s go!” he bellowed. The mass of infected were bearing down on them, the frontrunners maybe fifty feet away.
The Joker didn’t seem to have heard him. He was jamming his knife again and again into the man’s throat, severing the head by inches. Batman caught a glimpse of the woman, spread-eagled on the road behind them. She was partially decapitated, her head dangling by a flap of skin at the back of her neck. There was blood everywhere, chunks of meat and bone scattered on the ground.
Batman felt sick. He bent down and grabbed the Joker by the collar, hauling him backwards and to his feet. “We have to go,” he snarled, and started running. The infected gave chase with a lumbering sort of gait that was, while probably too slow to catch them over a short distance, frightening by virtue of their seeming tirelessness, and the constant supplementation of their numbers. More and more infected appeared in darkened doorways and from alleyways, getting up from behind cars and lifting their heads from the corpses of victims.
Batman realized the Joker was still laughing, running along behind him. When Batman looked back over his shoulder, the Joker’s face was a mask of blood and gobs of flesh, the whites of his eyes rolling.
Batman kept running, dodging cars and strollers (empty, thank God) and shopping carts and dead bodies. He couldn’t see any uninfected people, anymore; they’d all fled back the other way. The two of them were running straight into the heart of the infection, it seemed.
Batman felt at his belt for his grappling hook. It was gone. Goddamnit, he’d specifically designed this belt so things didn’t just randomly fall off. Although, admittedly, he’d never drawn the plans to include attack by undead.
He scanned frantically for a ladder, a fire escape, anything to get them up above this chaos. There, just there-- He changed direction and yanked the Joker toward a store awning, which had collapsed over a sign proclaiming -ARKET. He scrambled up the canvas, finding toe-holds against the thin metal skeleton of the thing. It bowed and gave under his feet, and he just managed to leap and catch the edge of the roof with his free hand before it gave way. His arm was nearly yanked out of its socket when the Joker hit the end of the cuffs.
“Fuck!” he yelled, taking every bit of will power he had to keep his grip on the roof.
The Joker didn’t waste any time before scrambling up his back, lunging to get his own handhold. They dangled there, side by side, bloody and breathless. Batman nearly jumped out of his skin when something brushed his foot. He looked down. The infected were clustered below, their ruined faces peering up, bodies more disfigured than he’d thought possible. There was a boy missing the lower half of his body, pulling himself along on his hands, and with his teeth. Another’s arms had been gnawed away at the shoulders. The stink of burst intestines and rotting blood was unbearable.
And they were jumping, trying to catch his ankles, drag him back down.
Batman heaved himself up, ignoring, for the moment, the tortured strain of his left arm. The Joker came up over the edge of the roof beside him. They crouched for a moment, looking back down at the infected.
“I don’t think they can climb…” said Batman, unsure.
“It might be fun to watch them try.” The Joker cocked a look at him. “Especially the ones without hands.”
Batman promptly leaned forward and vomited over the roof. It splattered on the infected below, steaming and bluish, but they didn’t seem to mind.
The Joker dissolved into peals of high-pitched giggles. “Bit of a weak stomach, eh, Bats?” he asked, slapping one hand on Batman’s shoulder-- the sore one.
Batman whacked his hand away, and shook his head to clear it. “I have a concussion,” he said. He wasn’t sure if it was true or not, but not only was it pretty likely, he couldn’t stand to lose face in front of this madman. “Let’s get out of here.”
The Joker stood with him, slowly. Batman noticed that his cuffed wrist was bleeding profusely, the skin rubbed away nearly to the elbow. That one eye that Batman had socked earlier was swollen shut. His shirt was soaked in blood, and Batman knew it wasn’t all from the infected. The Joker seemed to notice his own injuries about as much as the infected noticed theirs.
“Police station’s that way,” the Joker said, pointing up the road, where bunches of infected were lumbering, occasionally putting on a clumsy burst of speed, tripping over themselves. At a distance, they looked almost comical, childish.
“I should know,” the Joker continued. “I blew it up a couple hours ago.”
Batman’s head snapped around. “What?!”
The Joker hopped from foot to foot. “I used nitro glycerine,” he said. “It was a controlled demo, if you will.”
Batman stepped forward, lifting his hands to put his fingers around the Joker’s throat, but the Joker batted him away, as strong as Batman was weak.
“Calm down,” he said. “I don’t think anyone was hurt. Well… maybe a couple people. But they were cops! That doesn’t really count, right?”
Batman broke the Joker’s nose with one quick punch.
The Joker stumbled back, taking Batman with him, cupping his face. “Truce!” he said between his fingers and a sudden fresh glut of blood. “We agreed!”
“You complete piece of shit,” Batman growled. “You contemptible, loathsome, slimy pile of--”
The Joker shook himself, taking his hand away from his face but for two fingers pinched around the bridge of his nose. “Enough with the compliments,” he said. “Don’t you have people to save?”
Batman jammed a hand into his belt, fumbling for the little pouch where the handcuff key was.
…Except, of course, that it wasn’t.
The Joker held up a tiny spark of metal between his fingers. “Looking for this, I suspect?”
Batman gaped, and then took a quick step forward. The Joker twisted around him, dodging Batman’s outstretched hands, and flung the key over the roof. Batman watched it sail out into empty space, and then drop. Straight down into the mass of undead.
He flung himself after it, and then aborted his own movement just at the edge of the roof. “You--” He curled one empty fist. “Why--” He just didn’t have the energy to think anymore.
The Joker lifted both hands in a placating sort of gesture. “All right, before you get mad, just think about all the fun we’ve had tonight. You wouldn’t want that to end so soon, would you?”
Batman stood stock still, his cuffed arm at full extension, with the Joker keeping as much distance between them as he could.
“Also,” the Joker said, “consider how much I don’t want to be hamstrung and thrown into that crowd of hungry taxpayers down there. I appreciate a good gangbang as much as the next guy, but that might be a little much.”
“Fine,” said Batman. “Fine.” He turned and stalked across the roof. The Joker leapt to catch up with him.
“So, where are we going?”
“We are going to help people. We are going to evacuate civilians until we can’t move any more, which will probably be sometime tomorrow night. We’re going to help the police, and neutralize the infected threat, and we’ll do it all without a single solitary smile.”
The Joker snickered. “What’s your killing policy now, eh? You think these things deserve to live, too?”
Batman ground his teeth. He hadn’t quite decided, yet. For all intents and purposes, these monsters were alive. They moved and had purpose and must have been able to think, to some extent. However, he’d seen them come up from injuries no human could withstand, start twitching and scuttling with their hearts plucked out of their chests, or so horribly burned that their skin fell away at every step. They couldn’t be alive, not really. Not salvageable.
“We’ve all seen the movies,” the Joker said, quietly, at his side.
Batman tried to imagine the Joker sitting down to watch Dawn of the Dead, and couldn’t. Night of the Living Dead, maybe…
“And after that?” the Joker said, when Batman didn’t answer.
“After that… I’ll be handing you over to the relevant authorities.”
The Joker stopped, snapping Batman’s arm tight yet again. “What relevant authorities?” He smiled in what Batman thought was likely supposed to be a winning manner. “They’ll be so busy, they won’t have time to deal with little old me.”
“They’ll make time,” Batman said. He started walking again. They were coming to the far edge of the roof. He peered across the distance to the next landing. It was maybe twenty feet. He could glide it no problem alone, but with a passenger?
A maintenance ladder led to the ground below. He crouched, and swung his legs over. “Here. We’re going down.”
The Joker took a couple deep breaths, air whistling through his broken nose. “Aye aye, Captain,” he said.
Batman scanned the surrounding area. There were a few infected down the street, and they were sure to notice any sudden motion, but hopefully their reaction time would be sluggish enough to allow a swift get-away.
On the ground, with the Joker nearly dropping straight onto his head, Batman took stock of their bearings. He set off down a little side road.
“Where now?” the Joker demanded, clattering along behind. “Pretty sure that’s back the way we came.”
“I need to get to more populated areas,” Batman said. “I need to help people.”
“The eternal quest,” the Joker muttered. “Got it.”
Now that they were prepared, and a little more coordinated, it was relatively easy to avoid the infected. With a little judicious running, and sneaking through shadows, they came back out a few blocks from the bakery where this whole mess had begun. Batman chose another street, and they ran down it for a bit, until sirens were audible again, and living people could be seen running.
Batman waded grimly into the fray, herding people toward the police blockade at the far end of Antoinette Road, instructing them over the din to approach with their hands up. The injured, he put into the arms of those capable, and sent them off as well.
The Joker tumbled along behind, offering commentary. “Here’s one with nice tits, Batman, if you’re into that sort of thing. Quick, help her first. Wait, there’s another, a little girl. Oh, rats, she’s already dead. Ah, well, might was well stock up for later, right?”
Batman stopped the Joker before he could hoist up the little mangled body and put it over his shoulder. “What are you doing?” he barked.
“Uh, saving people? Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
“She’s dead.”
“Yeah, but she’ll keep well in the deep freeze, trust me. You just have to leave her out in the sun for a bit, later on, when you want to do the nasty, and she’ll soften up in no time.”
Batman pointedly didn’t retch, or get violent, or dropkick anyone in the face. He pulled the girl’s leg free of the Joker’s grip, dropped her back to the pavement, and turned away. “Don’t talk any more,” he said.
The Joker came around him on the wrong side, pulling Batman’s arm tight across his own back. “You’ll miss my voice, I promise you.”
Batman was trying to come up with a reply that didn’t involve anyone being disembowelled, when an old woman came staggering toward them. She was bloodied and crying, but Batman didn’t think she was infected. He took her by the shoulders when she got close enough, and she flung her arms around him.
“Batman!” she sobbed. “My grandson, he’s trapped in the mall, I can’t get him out!”
“Show me where,” Batman said, looking around. There were people everywhere; trying to find a single child wouldn’t be easy.
“The mall,” said Joker, craning his neck around. “Could we be more cliché?”
The old woman looked up at that, seeming to notice the Joker for the first time. She screamed, so sudden and startling that Batman nearly jumped. She fought away from him, stumbling back, pointing one wrinkled finger.
“It’s him!” she shrieked. “He’s the one-- he’s here!”
The Joker bounced toward her, a quick spasmodic movement with his hands up and his grinning mouth snarling. “Boo!” he shouted.
The woman gasped, choked, and fell over, almost catching herself on an overturned mailbox before crumpling to her side. She twitched once, twice, and then went still.
Batman dropped to his knees. He couldn’t feel for a pulse through the gloves, but he pried up one eyelid. The eye was still, staring.
“You-- You gave her…” he began.
“A heart attack,” the Joker finished, musingly. “I don’t think I’ve ever done that before.”
Batman yanked him down onto the ground, seized his cuffed hand, and slammed the heel of his own palm into the Joker’s thumb.
“Ouch!” the Joker yelled.
Batman landed one more blow, and felt the satisfying give of bone. He shoved, not trying for gentle or even civil, and yanked the cuff over the Joker’s flopping broken fingers. Skin came peeling off with it.
“There,” he said. “You’re free to go. Get out of here.”
He stood, and strode toward the police barricade, dodging an erratically driven smart car, and pulling a man from beneath the overturned hulk of a motorcycle. The man limped, when set on his feet, but seemed otherwise unhurt. Batman pushed him toward the cops. He was going to find this mall the old woman had mentioned. He was going to find the little kid, and take him out of here.
A moment later, the Joker sidled up, rubbing at his hand. “Miss me?” he said.
Batman gave him a karate chop in the throat.
The Joker choked, and dropped back, but came up again. “That much?” he said, garbled and rasping.
“Why won’t you die?” Batman asked. “I honestly want to know. I’ve hit you so many times, you should be unconscious from blood loss, at least.”
“Just lucky, I guess.” The glint of the Joker’s single functioning eye said otherwise.
Batman had always kind of suspected there was something a little inhuman about the Joker, but now was hardly the time to discuss it. He continued toward the police, ignoring the Joker trotting at his side, walking sideways and occasionally vanishing to-- Batman didn’t want to know. He didn’t look back. He had to talk to the cops.
He tried checking in with Alfred, now that he had a spare second of extremely relative privacy, but there was no answer. Just a burst of static so loud he winced. Hopefully Alfred was just busy or, better yet, being evacuated.
He climbed over the first of the barricades, an immense orange plastic wedge, and paused to help some geriatrics clamber over, as well. A cop, with a machine gun locked to his shoulder, spun wildly, firing, and then caught sight of Batman bringing in a clutch of civilians, and lowered the gun to help.
Batman passed the last of the wheezing old men over to someone clad in the uniform of the National Guard. “What’s the situation?” he asked.
“Complete clusterfuck, sir,” the police officer said. He was streaked with soot and dirt and unidentifiable bodily fluids. “What you see here is all over the city.”
Batman was grateful that the cowl picked up on noises he needed it to; he had to strain to hear the man over the rapid pops of gunfire, and the frenzied surround-sound of violently dying humans.
“Where would I be most useful?” he asked. “Where’s Commissioner Gordon?”
“I don’t know where the Commissioner is, sir. Last anyone heard, he was headed for the highway with the National Guard. Communications have been down for the past half hour, so I don’t know anything more.”
“I’ll help here, then.” Batman turned around. “Thank you.”
“Sir,” said the cop. “You’re bleeding.”
Batman looked down at his side, remembering the sharp sting of the Joker’s blade against his ribs. “I’m fine.”
“Be careful. Apparently this shit’s contagious through blood, and ingestion.” The cop flung out a hand, apparently encompassing all of Gotham’s current predicament. “If one of them bleeds on your cut, or-- or in your mouth…”
“I got it,” Batman said. “Thanks.”
“Sir!” the cop suddenly yelled. “Look out!”
Batman ducked just as the cop let loose a spray of bullets near his ear. He saw the Joker dodge behind an abandoned car.
“Wait!” Batman yelled, before he could think better of it. “He’s with me.”
The cop lowered the gun fractionally. “What?” he yelled.
“Can you take him into custody?” Batman asked, straightening up.
“No!” the officer yelped. “We don’t have the resources or time. If you can take him out--”
Batman chuckled wryly. What a surprise. “Sure,” he said. “Will do.” And he strode toward the Joker, going around the side of the car.
“Get up,” he said, looming.
The Joker looked up at him, his elbows planted on his knees. “I think I’ll wait for the crazy man with the gun to leave.”
Batman shook his head. “You can come with me. You’re not staying here.”
The Joker sighed. “This all seems terribly familiar. I need a gun.”
“Fuck no,” said Batman.
“You didn’t notice what a pain in the ass it was to hack someone’s head off with a kitchen knife?”
“I don’t use guns.”
“Well, I do.” The Joker stood, and moved to step past Batman, toward the police.
Batman caught him around the middle and swung him back around. Down the street, where they’d entered this little tableau, infected were starting to appear in greater numbers.
His eye caught a dark sign that proclaimed ASHBURY MALL. It wasn’t much, just a tiny strip mall with two entrances. “We’re going there,” he said, pointing.
The Joker shook his head. “I’m getting a gun.”
“I’ll knock you unconscious.”
“You can try.”
Batman bent one of the Joker’s arms up behind his back, and hustled him down the road, toward the Ashbury place. This must have been what the old lady was talking about. He could see smoke pouring out the windows, and the low throb of emergency lighting from within.
The main entrance was smashed out, glass everywhere. Batman ploughed right on through, crunching glass beneath his boots. He let go of the Joker, once they were down the wide main hallway a bit, and didn’t stop to watch the Joker straighten out his mangled vest, smooth down his torn jacket.
Disturbingly, the Joker hurried to catch up with him, circling around in front and walking backward. “This is just your scene, isn’t it?” he asked. “Everyone dying, unable to save them all, a nice neat inhuman monster to fight…”
Batman stepped sideways to go around the Joker, but he matched Batman’s movement, and slowed down even more.
Batman said, “I don’t like seeing people get hurt, if that’s what you’re implying.”
The Joker shook his head. “Maybe not, but it certainly facilitates your delusions, doesn’t it? At least subconsciously, you need people to suffer. And I’m betting it’s not so subconscious, is it?”
Batman felt his face flush with anger. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t wear this suit because it’s fun, or because I like how I look in rubber.”
The Joker smiled, a sort of limp tilt to his lips that Batman had a sudden feeling was his real smile, not the manic one he broke out to intimidate people with his scars. That was just fucking eerie.
“I don’t believe you,” the Joker replied, mimicking Batman’s much earlier words.
Batman shoved past him, and didn’t answer. They moved down the hallway together, avoiding the toppled displays and places where the drop ceiling had come down. Batman paused at each little shop to search for the lost child, but there was nothing but corpses.
Near the end of the mall, two infected burst out of a juice bar with a sudden rush of stomping and wordless shrieking. Batman dodged the first one and leapt back a few paces, once again wishing for his grapple gun. A solid punch of that bad boy to the stomach, and even dead people would slow down.
The Joker went screaming past him, catching the second infected around the waist and driving it back into the floor. Batman opened his mouth to warn the Joker about the transmission of the disease through mucous membranes and bodily fluids, and then snapped it shut just as fast. Wouldn’t do to distract him at a moment like this, of course.
Batman yelled, “Hey!” when the first infected spun around on its cockeyed heels and started lumbering toward its buddy and the Joker. It turned back, fixed Batman with a gory, drippy stare.
“Come on,” Batman said, shaking out his arms, ignoring the protesting stab of pain from his injured shoulder. The hooked blades on his forearms gleamed in the emergency lights. The infected came stumbling toward him. Part of one leg was gone, and the sheer white of ribs were showing through on its side. Batman thought that, if he couldn’t take down one piddling little zombie, he probably shouldn’t be a vigilante anymore.
Of course, sharp edges were not the best weapon against a creature whose only vulnerable point was the head. Batman crouched, waiting for it to make that last sudden lunge. When it did, he took a page from the Joker’s book and got it around the thighs, knocking it to the floor. He came down on top of it, driving his knees into its back. It flopped and thrashed, but he held it down, gripped a handful of thinning hair to hold the head still, and drove his blades into the base of its skull. The first thrust only tore skin and maybe cracked the skull, but the second broke right through. The infected immediately went still. Batman churned the blades around in the brain anyway, just to be sure, and withdrew them dripping with grey matter and blood. He shook his arm, sending gore flying. At the last second, he thought to close his eyes and his mouth.
It was probably too late, he thought, squatting there on top of the cold body. Could he really not have ingested even a molecule of these messy creatures’ blood? They dripped and oozed and gushed so much… And he was cut up all over, from the Joker’s knives and fists, and his own clumsiness.
A hand clapped down on his back. Batman jumped and jabbed his elbow back. The Joker fell over backwards, legs in the air.
Batman stood up as the Joker giggled and relaxed on the floor, sprawling out.
“Get up,” Batman said, and then realized he didn’t care. He spared a glance for the second infected (thoroughly eviscerated, head rolling at its side) and took off down the hallway. There were only three shops left. He darted into the hairdresser’s salon, ducked to check beneath the chairs and counters.
Nothing.
In the gift shop, everything was broken and trampled on the floor. All the glass unicorn figurines and inspirational posters, the novelty mugs and kitschy tee-shirts. It was too small to hide anyone, living or dead. He moved on. The clothing retail store was a little large, and more difficult. He fished his goggles out of his belt, toggled the infrared vision, and scanned the entrance area, behind the tellers’ counters.
A flash of hot red in the corner of his eye had him whirling around, but it was only the Joker in the doorway, hunched and leering.
Batman moved down an aisle of sweaters, turned left into the shoe section, moved past that into women’s under things. He paused, suddenly, caught by a vague familiarity. This wasn’t the sort of store Bruce Wayne would frequent, but he was pretty sure the flavour of last week had been wearing these gaudy pink leopard panties.
He kept going, scanning for red blurs beneath the racks of clearance pants and hat displays. All his searching turned up nothing. He started making his way back toward the front of the store, the Joker’s bright scarlet form like a beacon, when a noise stopped him. He paused, cocking his head. Somewhere to the right, near the changing rooms. Infrared turned up nothing. He clicked it off just in time for a sudden scream to pierce the gloom, and for a slavering child to fling itself at him. It was too short to reach his bare neck and chin, even jumping, but Batman slapped it away anyway, reflexively. It skidded across the carpet, smacking into a revolving case of jewellery.
“A hundred bucks on the kid!” the Joker hollered.
Batman hesitated, watching the child get back to its feet, dragging itself up the glass case. It was a little boy, sure enough. He might have been quite cherubic if most of his scalp hadn’t been peeled away, and if all his veins weren’t standing out in purple and blue ropes all over his body. He was shirtless, and when Batman stepped aside to avoid the boy’s next shrieking rush, he saw the long livid mark on the boy’s back, where all the blood had pooled when he’d been lying dead on the floor.
Which must have been for a while, if he hadn’t show even a hint of orange on the infrared.
Batman booked it back for the entrance, charging right past the Joker.
“Hey!” the Joker called after him. “Are you just going to leave the little fucker like that?”
Batman didn’t respond, didn’t slow. He really didn’t know what the right thing was, the moral thing. And he didn’t look back to see if the Joker was dispatching the zombie child. He didn’t want to know.
Out on the street, it was quieter than he’d left it. The police barricade was gone, presumably moved farther down the road. Batman hoped they were advancing, not retreating, but he sincerely doubted it.
He leaned against the nearest wall, conceding to exhaustion for just a moment, and pulled his goggles down around his neck. His headset crackled, suddenly, startling him.
“--hear me, the-- cordoned off a street-- first available--”
“Alfred?” he blurted. He resisted the urge to smack a hand into the side of his head, to knock the Bluetooth into action. “Are you there? I can barely hear you.”
“--sir?”
“Yes, hello? Can you hear me?”
“--boosting signal for--”
Batman waited, eyes darting up and down the road, searching for movement. It wouldn’t do to get tackled from behind while distracted.
“Sir?” Alfred’s voice was clearer, now.
“There you are,” Batman said, relieved beyond description. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, sir. The infected are nearly at the Tower, now. The police are camped not two hundred feet away.”
Batman’s heart sank. That was nearly twelve city blocks from here; the infected had moved faster than he’d expected.
“They’re insisting that I leave, sir. I promise you, it is under duress.”
“No, you should go,” Batman told him. He pressed two fingers into his eyes, trying to wipe away the stinging sweat. “You should have been out of here hours ago. Take the chopper, if you can get a hold of Horatio.”
“Haven’t seen him since yesterday, sir,” Alfred said. He sounded dour.
“I hope the police are providing you with transportation, then.”
“Quite, sir. There’s a car waiting.”
“Don’t let me keep you.”
“I hope you’ll be joining me soon.”
Alfred’s tone made it very clear that this was not actually a hope so much as an order.
“I’ll try…” Batman trailed off. “But I can’t promise anything. I’ll stay in Gotham as long as I’m needed.”
“I fear that you won’t ever be not needed,” Alfred said. The static was coming back again.
“You’re breaking up, Alfred,” Batman said loudly. “Get out of the city. I’ll leave when I can. Don’t wait for me.”
“Very well, sir.” Alfred sounded very far away, now, and receding fast. “I’ll make myself available for contact when I can. I don’t know where we’re going…” His voice dissolved into pure static. Batman caught “arrive” and “coordinate,” and that was it.
He sighed. There were four infected coming into view on the road, now, moving sluggishly. He stayed still in the shadows, not wanting to attract their attention.
“Alfred, huh?” said a soft voice very near his shoulder.
Batman closed his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Mmm,” said the Joker. “I bet you don’t.”
Batman shook his head. “Let’s get out of here. The police blockade has moved further downtown.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?” The Joker smacked his lips. There was clotted blood on his chin, his cheeks, and only smears of makeup across his forehead and beneath his eyes. Batman thought that his swollen lid was starting to open up again.
“Yes,” he answered.
“So much chaos down there already… There must be stragglers out here you can heroically liberate.”
“Why do you care?”
The Joker shrugged, picked at his grimy fingernails. “Can’t say I do.”
“The virus is transmittable by bodily fluids,” Batman said suddenly. “So if you’ve gotten any of their blood in your cuts…” It was just cruel to bring it up now, he knew. The Joker had been mixing plasma with the infected all night, and it was just starting to get light now, on the far horizon. There would be a change soon, Batman thought. He’d have to be ready.
The Joker pressed his tongue into the inside of his cheek. “I know,” he said. “I know that. Better than anybody.”
Batman gaped, and then resisted jabbing a fist into the air. “I knew it. I fucking knew it! You’re behind all this, aren’t you? You rotten, lying--”
“Ah, no.” The Joker shook one finger at him. It was one Batman had broken earlier, but it didn’t flop loosely anymore. “No, I’m not.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Besides general observation?” The Joker chuckled, leaning against the wall near Batman. He looked uncomfortable with his arms folded, ankles crossed. “This whole… thing started at Arkham, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Batman. He’d been one of the first to get a call, at six in the evening, during dinner. The Bat Signal had blazed like fire in the clouds, flashing erratically and then going solid.
“Does anyone know how? Officially, I mean.”
Batman shook his head. “If they do, no one told me.”
The Joker clapped his hands together. The infected on the street went rigid, heads swivelling. Batman put one hand out and grabbed both of the Joker’s, holding them still and quiet. They stood silently together for a long few minutes, until the infected lost interest and continued their aimless meandering.
They must not have a very good sense of smell or sight, Batman thought. If these ones had managed to get turned around in civilian-stuffed Gotham, had already lost all inkling of which way their prey had retreated… It boded well, perhaps.
“As I was saying,” the Joker continued, quieter, “you’ll never get the official story. There isn’t one. But… I know what happened.”
Batman shot a glance sideways. “Do you.”
The Joker nodded, lank hair flying. “I’m sure you’re wondering, by this point, why I’m not dead in a gutter, or trying to eat your brains.”
“I’d assumed,” said Batman, deadpan, “that you were just too stupid to die.”
“Too smart. But that’s besides the point.” The Joker flapped his hands, and Batman grabbed them again. The infected turned in restless, loose circles in the shortening shadows. He turned, pulling the Joker, and went back into the mall.
“Did you,” he started, and stopped.
The little boy was stretched out in the hallway. The back of his skull was crushed in. Near him, on its side, lay a big metal garbage bin.
“Yep,” said the Joker. “Oh, that one put up a fight. Is it just me, or are kids just evil?”
Batman looked away. “Continue your story.”
“Mm, yeah.” The Joker pulled his hand away from Batman, tucked his hair back behind his ears. “Last time I visited the old homestead--”
“Arkham?”
“Yeah, the day spa, that’s the one. Last time I was there, I met a doctor, a new one. You might have heard of him. Archie… Copper?”
“No,” said Batman. Bruce Wayne had, because of his position on the board of directors for Arkham, but Batman had never met him, officially.
“New,” the Joker said again. “They don’t tell us inmates about the doctors’ backgrounds, of course, but I knew it was something funny. He had sort of a…” He shivered, once, tipping his head to the side. “A look about him.”
“A look.”
“Yeah. A good look, a really good one.”
“So, a bad one.”
The Joker rolled his eyes. The one Batman had soundly thwacked was definitely losing its heavy bruising. “If you must,” he said. “He was doing all sorts of nasty little things in his lab at Arkham. Everyone took a turn through his operating room, but only some of us got the good stuff.”
“And that would be…?” Batman prompted, when the Joker fell silent.
“Ah, yeah, injections. And… shocks. Not the bad kind, not the--” He made a jittering motion with both hands, and let his tongue flop out. “You know.”
“Right.”
“Science, all in the name of science.”
“Okay.”
“He did all this.” The Joker hooked a hand over his shoulder, gesturing toward the street, and let the other dangle toward the dead boy. “All of it, he did it.”
“How do you know?”
“Call it a hunch. Call it… a bit of surprise at my own immunity.”
Batman’s mouth went dry. Immunity. He repeated it out loud, stupidly.
“Yep.” The Joker shifted feet. He reached down and tugged up his pant leg, showed Batman the livid bruising on the back of his calf, the purple indents of incisors and bicuspids. Dry blood flaked away when the Joker prodded at it.
“Oh, God,” Batman said. “They bit you.”
“That they did. And as you can see…” The Joker spread his hands, and let them drop. “Still here.”
“That makes no sense. Why would you--”
“Because he messed up, Doctor Copper did. This is what he was trying for.” The Joker made a lofty up-and-down gesture toward himself. “But better, I’m betting. He tried for better, and ended up much worse.”
Batman swallowed, paced a tight circle. He’d signed the slip on hiring Archie Copper. He’d met the man, as Bruce Wayne, talked some shop about biochemistry. He’d never thought that…
“You’re lying,” he said. “You’re a fucking liar.”
The Joker touched his tongue to his red lips, a quick wet smack, poked at the knots of scar. “Whatever you say, Bats. You know best, dear.”
“It doesn’t matter how it started. However it did, I have to finish it.”
The Joker cocked one brow, looked up at Batman through his lashes and a fall of hair. “Pretty sure you can’t. Caped Crusader, you might be, the Dark Knight, but you’re no Louis Pasteur.”
“I have to try.”
“You really don’t.”
“Archie Copper--” Batman paused. “He injected you with something?”
“Yep.”
“And other inmates of Arkham?”
“Yep.”
Batman curled his fingers. His shoulder had stiffened nearly to immobility. He stretched it a bit. “Did he say why?”
“Yesss… Not really.” The Joker held up a palm when Batman opened his mouth. “Before you start complaining about people submitting to medical procedures they don’t understand, remember that I didn’t. Submit, I mean. Willingly.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.” Batman sighed. He rubbed a hand over his chin, squeezing. He was just so tired, he could go to sleep right here on his feet.
“You look like you need a nap.” The Joker sounded sympathetic, smarmy, cocking his head to the side. His eyes glittered.
“I’m fine.” Batman shook himself.
“Let’s find somewhere to have a nap.”
Batman barked out a laugh. “Are you kidding me?”
“No. I’ll, uh, take first watch.”
Batman pushed past the Joker, heading for the door. “Sometimes I don’t even--”
The Joker grabbed his arm, pulled him back around. “Stop it,” he said.
Batman made one half-assed attempt at escape, and subsided. He was just too tired to do anymore of this laconic squabbling.
“You work too hard. Take a break. Get a-- get a facial!” The Joker cracked up, then, all pretence of empathy dropping from his wide green eyes. “Let’s get manicures,” he said, examining his fingernails. “They’re getting a little long.”
Gently, Batman put one hand around the Joker’s throat, started squeezing.
The Joker stopped talking, stopped moving, just stared at him.
“I’m going to kill you,” Batman said softly. The words tore at his throat. He wasn’t used to talking so much with this voice, this ungodly growl. He could probably spit blood, and then nails. “I’m going to hold you down until you stop fucking wiggling, and stop making fucking noise. And then I’ll do it a little longer, just to be sure.”
The Joker didn’t answer. He swallowed against Batman’s palm, but Batman didn’t think it was a nervous motion.
“I’ll chop your goddamn head off, if I have to.”
“Why not just…” The Joker’s voice was low, careful. “Why not just throw me out to that mob in the street. They’ll do enough damage eventually.”
Batman chuckled, mirthless, shook his head. “No one gets to kill you but me.”
The Joker groaned, then, low and pained, and pushed forward, into Batman’s fist. It was a slow advance, an uncharacteristically careful one. Batman let him do it, breath caught in his throat. At the last moment, the Joker paused, mouth a scant inch from Batman’s.
“Come on,” he whispered. Batman felt the words vibrate against his hand.
“Come on, I know you want to.”
For a long second, Batman didn’t move at all. The Joker’s lips still shone red in the crevasses of his scars, twisting up his cheeks. Batman watched the wet pink tongue dart out, quick and thoughtless, like the scars still hurt, or the paint tasted good.
And then he tilted his head forward and kissed the Joker. His own lips were dry, chapped, and the Joker’s were wet with spit and paint. They stuck together. Beyond that first press, he couldn’t do anything more. He was frozen there, lips open against the Joker’s.
The Joker put one hand on his neck, the other on his side, near where the knife wound still trickled blood. Batman felt his fingers curl there, against the armour, and let his own fingers loosen from the Joker’s throat.
“Come on,” the Joker said again, sticky and muffled. “Good boy. You’re a good boy, come on.”
Batman went a little crazy, then. Everything was wet and soft and thick, the firm bumps of scars under his tongue, the strange place at the corners of the Joker’s mouth where the lips didn’t meet quite right, where they spread just that much too far. He put his tongue there, touched it against the Joker’s own tongue, that quick hot thing.
It slipped away from him, so he chased it down, sucked it and bit it. The Joker was pressed right up against him, now, climbing him like a tree. Batman nearly buckled under the weight of him, the hard lean, but stood his ground. His hands hung at his sides, helpless, until the Joker took hold of one and put it on his own waist.
Batman curled his fingers around the stiff, tacky purple suit, pulling at it. He caught the other hand in the Joker’s collar, pushed him back, stepped with him, until they hit a wall.
The armour was just too thick-- he couldn’t feel this enough, but he couldn’t--
The Joker hooked one leg around the backs of Batman’s thigh, lifted himself up. Batman slid one arm down, under the arse he’d never once looked at on purpose, and pulled the Joker into him, held him long enough for the other leg to come up, wrap around his waist.
He got his hand into the slick hair at the back of the Joker’s head, snarling it into the joints of his gauntlet, and pulled away.
The Joker gasped, panted, neck bowed back. Batman looked at him for a second-- not too long, he couldn’t bear it for too long-- and then leaned down and bit at the damp dirty throat. It tasted like sweat, like blood (ohgodblood), like grease and paint. He held the Joker there, immobile. He curved around him, a solid wall against the world, and sucked at the tight fold of skin beneath the Joker’s ear, down his jaw. He tasted the jagged end of the nearest scar, kissed the place where it joined his mouth.
The Joker was breathing raggedly, rubbing himself against Batman’s belly. If only this fucking suit could come off, could just keep him safe from zombies and not from… this.
Of course, sometimes he had to take a piss in the middle of the night, when he was gliding around the city with no one around. And it wouldn’t make sense to remove the entire suit. It had been a little embarrassing to bring up that request with Lucius.
He reached down, letting go of the Joker’s hair, and touched the tiny hidden button at the juncture of thigh and hip. The cup of rubber slid sideways, and the feeling of relief, of hard cock nearly exposed, made Batman groan.
The Joker pushed an arm down between them, felt what Batman had done, and slid his fingers in, pushing aside the damp layer of boxers. Batman choked, and put his teeth against the Joker’s jaw.
“There you go,” said the Joker, growling. “Want to put that in me?”
Batman didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The Joker rubbed him a couple times, up and down, tilting his head to let Batman lick at him, get at his whole face. Batman had never really done this before. He had always liked kissing, sure, getting girls wet and squirmy for him, but… This was just filthy, biting cheeks and earlobes, frantic to get everything in his mouth, swallow it down.
The Joker lifted up, tilted his face away from Batman long enough to spit in his hand, stroke it along Batman’s dick. He cupped his palm beneath Batman’s mouth. “Contributions,” he said, and Batman spat.
It was probably not enough, and they were probably going too fast, but Batman just didn’t care. He let the Joker sink down, his dick wet and cold in the night air. Until it wasn’t anymore, until it had pushed all the way up inside, snug and hot and--
“Fuck,” said the Joker, drew it out into a whine. “What a fucking lovely thing you are, fuck me, come on--”
So Batman did. It was a weird position, one he’d never done with someone this heavy, but he was absolutely rippling with adrenalin, with the sex-crazed strength of a rutting male animal. The Joker’s horrid purple suit pulled halfway down, trapping his arms, and Batman had no choice but to hold him up against the wall, drive up and in.
The Joker came so fast, Batman almost missed it. It wasn’t more than five thrusts in before the Joker clenched, yelped and hissed, and shot off all over Batman’s hard rubber stomach.
Humiliatingly, Batman wasn’t too far behind. When he came, his legs shook, but he stayed upright. Just long enough get his breath back, to very carefully withdraw, and then they sunk down to the floor.
Batman rolled over onto his back. His heart was pounding like it hadn’t since he started this job. He could feel his pulse in his face, throbbing hot through his scalp.
The Joker was limp near him, feet twitching against Batman’s side.
There was silence for a few minutes. Batman turned his head, and saw the dead zombie boy not ten feet away. The blood around him was going thick and viscous.
“Most people avoid the scars,” the Joker said finally.
“Most people?” said Batman. He tried to picture the sorts of people who would be voluntarily kissing the Joker. And then, embarrassed, he stopped. “Right.”
The Joker flopped out one hand, patted at Batman’s nearby thigh. “You did good, champ,” he said.
Batman rolled his eyes. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Trust me, I won’t.”
The Joker snickered, and fell silent.
Batman saw through the shuttered windows, through the mall’s broken exit, that the sun was coming up. The white walls were going gradually pink and yellow.
“So,” said the Joker. “You’ve gotten pretty beat up tonight.”
“I guess,” Batman conceded.
“And you’ve been bled on a lot.”
Batman swallowed, went still. “Yes.”
The Joker shifted against the floor, his suit rustling. “Just something to keep in mind.” The hand on Batman’s thigh went a bit tighter. “Want me to take care of it, if it comes up?”
Batman let out a slow breath through his nose. He was so hot in this suit, he could nearly smell himself through the rubber. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said.
The Joker rolled around like an exuberant, disfigured puppy, limbs ungainly and sharp where his elbows hit Batman in the side. He propped himself up on Batman’s chest, put his chin in his cupped palm.
“I might keep you around,” he said. “As a pet. You know that, right?”
Batman closed his eyes. It was getting too bright in here. “I figured.”
“Well.” The Joker produced a knife from somewhere undoubtedly indecent, and set it point-down on Batman’s chest plate, spinning it with one finger. “I guess we’ll wait and see.”
Batman let one guilty hand touch the Joker’s back, push up under the coat and vest, lay against the damp skin. “I guess we will.”
He closed his eyes. It would be so nice to go to sleep. Maybe just close his eyes for a few minutes.
Everything was under control, now. The sun was coming up, Alfred was safe. There was a lot to do, but he’d deal with it later. Later, when he woke up, refreshed and alive and new.
And he was sure he would wake up, with the Joker lolling around near him, and Gotham demanding his attention, and everything would be chaotic for a while, but ultimately amended and set right.
Because the thing was… he felt fine.