Chapter Text
It’s too fast to stop now.
Bruce stumbles down the hall, blindly throwing himself forward. He just has to trust that the hallway is there ahead of him, and that’s the joke in all of this—there is no reason to think it will be. What are the odds now?
The air goes out of his lungs all at once and for one brief second he is hurtling through nothing, true void. His eyes scream and he slams his palms down over them, all the moisture sublimating from his mouth, and then he’s crashing to his knees on a linoleum tiled hallway that’s frosted with cold but it’s there, and solid, and there is air in his lungs again. His first breath sears. His eyes water behind his palms.
It’s getting worse. That was a bad one, so truly bad that he can’t think about it. They’re running out of time.
He isn’t going to make it.
He has to trust that the Joker is ahead of him, that the Joker will see reason, that the Joker will save the world—
Bruce lets out a sharp bark of a laugh, startling himself. The Joker. See reason.
There is no hope.
The world shifts again.
##
Three weeks earlier
“There is no way he could have escaped.”
Arkham’s head of security, a balding, bulky man named Reggie Blackwell, sits in a chair in front of the board of trustees, his hands resting on his lap. His broad shoulders stretch the steel grey uniform that the prison guards of Arkham Asylum wear.
Bruce Wayne leans forward, resting his elbows on the polished wooden table. “But he did.”
The rest of the trustees nod, looking back and forth from Bruce to Reggie. The room is what was once a solarium in the old manor, and the hot gray skies press flat white reflections onto the table through the skylights overhead. It is uncomfortably hot but Bruce doesn’t loosen his tie.
“I know.” Reggie shifts him a look that Bruce can’t quite read. The head of security has doughy cheeks and black, glassy eyes that have little expression except for the wet gleam they catch from the overhead lights. He breathes slowly and evenly, unperturbed by the questioning.
“And you have no idea how it happened?” one of the other trustees questions into the damp silence.
“No, ma’am.” Reggie turns his head towards her. “The doors keep an electronic record of the time they’re opened and shut. His door didn’t budge at all, and there’s no other way out of the room.”
“Did you review the security tapes?”
Reggie’s gaze shifts back to Bruce. “Two hours of tape are missing.”
One of the trustees to Bruce’s right, an older man with a thick white beard, lets out a loud sigh. Bruce would smile if the revelation weren’t so irritating. “Missing?”
A slow nod. “Just static.”
“You mean someone tampered with it?”
Reggie shakes his head. “We’ve been having some problems with the cameras for a couple weeks now. They go out sometimes, then come back on.”
“Could the electronic log on the door have been malfunctioning as well?”
“We checked that the first time we had trouble with the cameras. It works fine. Nothing else is affected.”
“Could the Joker have known the cameras were out?”
“No, sir,” Reggie says calmly. “It’s never at the same time twice.”
A fly buzzes in the corner of the room, bumping sluggishly into one of the skylights again and again. The drone mingles with the faint hum of an industrial fan somewhere else in the building. Bruce’s temples throb faintly and he pinches the bridge of his nose for a second, then forces himself to fold his hands on the table again.
“Could someone have told the Joker the cameras were down?”
There is a pause. Reggie doesn’t blink but for a brief moment his thin lips settle into a moue as he considers this.
“Do you mean one of our staff?”
“Or anyone,” Bruce says impatiently.
Another pause, longer. Reggie wets his lips. The fly lands on the table, affording them a brief second of silence, and then someone waves it away and it starts circling again.
“No one but the staff knew that the cameras were down,” Reggie says finally.
“Then the staff,” Bruce says, feeling a vein in his temple throb. “Could someone on the staff have told him?”
“We keep all of the staff out of the ward while the cameras are down.” Reggie blinks once. “Safety reasons.”
“And when you went back into the ward, the Joker was gone.”
“His cell was still locked. The ward was locked down. None of the other inmates heard a thing. No way he could have escaped.”
“Without help,” Bruce interjects.
“Without help,” Reggie agrees.
“We will have to make changes to the security system,” suggests a third board member, steepling his fingers. “Get maintenance in there and fix the cameras. Keep a close watch on the inmates until we can figure out how he did it, and limit interaction between the inmates and staff.”
“We’re working on a few solutions,” Reggie says tonelessly.
Bruce flattens one of his palms on the table, feeling a drip of sweat trickle down inside his shirt. Reggie looks at him. The room is getting darker and Bruce glances up to see the gray sky thickening as storm clouds slide in. Perhaps the storms will bring cooler air, although it’s been raining for weeks now and the cooler air hasn’t come yet.
“Keep us updated,” one of the other board members says, and then everyone is standing up. Bruce looks around, startled, and then realizes that the meeting is over. Someone opens the door to the hallway and more stuffy air swirls in. Bruce pushes back his chair.
Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance. The board members mutter amongst themselves and move to the door. Bruce gathers his papers and stands up, smoothing down his jacket, feeling sweat wick into the fabric.
“He won’t escape again,” Reggie says, still sitting in the chair across from the table. The trustees have left.
“How can you be sure?” Bruce asks. He means it to be challenging but when it comes from his mouth it sounds worried.
“That cell is foolproof,” Reggie says. “There’s no way he can escape.”
##
“I brought you a little supper,” Alfred says when the lift reaches the bottom. A whirl of warm, damp air comes down the lift with him from the shipping yard above.
Bruce rubs his eyes and stretches, leaning back in his computer chair. “Thanks,” he says tiredly. His eyes are burning from hours of staring at the screen. He taps the spacebar on his keyboard to pause the video. All of the computer screens in his array show different angles of security camera footage. Inmates freeze mid-step, picked out in grainy black and white.
Alfred sets the bag down on the table and begins pulling out a thermos. Bruce pushes back his chair and stands up, feeling his spine pop and crack.
“He hasn’t told anyone yet?” Alfred asks, pouring coffee from the thermos into a coffee mug and handing it to Bruce.
Bruce takes it and wraps his hands around the mug, inhaling the steam. It would be too warm out for coffee upstairs but in his air-conditioned bunker the warmth of the coffee is inviting.
“No,” he says. “He hasn’t told anyone who I am.”
Alfred pauses briefly in the middle of unwrapping a sandwich. “You don’t sound surprised.”
Bruce takes a sip of coffee. It’s true; he’s not that surprised. “I guess…” he begins, and then trails off.
Alfred finishes unwrapping the sandwich and puts it on a plate. “You think you two have a connection.”
“What?” Bruce laughs. “A connection? I don’t have anything of the sort with that psycho.”
Alfred smiles and sets the plate down on the edge of Bruce’s computer desk. “He gave up so that you wouldn’t have to go to Arkham. And you brought him here instead of turning him in to the police.”
“I brought him here because we were handcuffed together and I couldn’t turn myself in,” Bruce answers immediately. “My extra set of handcuff keys was here. There wasn’t anything to it besides that. And I think he isn’t telling anyone who I am because he doesn’t want anyone else to know. He put out the hit on Coleman Reese for that same reason. It’s no fun for him if Batman is gone.”
“It won’t matter one way or another if he’s in Arkham, does it?” Alfred says archly.
Bruce sighs and sits back down at his computer desk. “I don’t know how he escaped, Alfred. It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve visited that ward. The walls are reinforced cinderblock. The electronic records say his door was never opened. He could have known the cameras were out if he noticed the lack of staff, but even if he knew they were out, there’s no way he could have gotten out of that cell.”
“Could someone have erased the electronic record on the door?” Alfred offers.
“That was what I was thinking. All staff was accounted for during the whole two hours the cameras were down, but maybe they could change the record remotely.” Bruce shrugs. “I don’t know if I’ll get anything else from watching these security tapes.”
Alfred sets the thermos down next to Bruce’s sandwich. “Perhaps you should get some fresh air, sir.”
Bruce puts his coffee cup down and nods. “I will in a little while. Thanks for the food.”
“You’re welcome.” Alfred heads back to the lift. “Good night.”
“Night.” Bruce takes a bite of his sandwich as the lift powers back up. As soon as Alfred is out of sight, he hits the spacebar again.
The tapes unfreeze. His eyes snap to the one he has been watching for hours—the Joker’s cell.
The Joker lies restrained for most of the twelve hours of footage he got from Arkham, staring at the wall as if it holds great interest for him. It is…strangely hypnotic to watch him watch the wall. Bruce has seen the manic side of the Joker, the feral creature that robs banks and takes hostages, but this here is the depressed side, as if all his lights have been turned out. It’s hard to feel pity for such a psychotic murderer, but he almost wishes he could give the man a magazine or something, anything to put that light back in his eyes.
Bruce’s eyes flick to the timestamp on the footage as soon as the image dissolves into static. One fifteen in the morning. The static continues for nearly two hours before abruptly snapping back to show an empty cell.
Bruce hits rewind and goes back to the beginning of the static. He has watched this section again and again, like running his tongue over the hole where a tooth used to be—something important is missing here, and he has to find out what it is to make sure it never happens again.
##
Morrison taps his nightstick against his thigh as he slowly paces the room, surveying the blank surface of the painted cinderblock walls, the linoleum floors, the tiny ventilation grate in the ceiling. He stomps his feet a couple times, listening for echoes, and then runs a hand over a crack in the wall, picking at the paint.
“So how’d you do it?” he asks.
The Joker is restrained in his cot. The straight jacket he wears is tightly strapped and his ankles are manacled together to the end of the cot. His eyes follow Morrison as he circles the room but his expression doesn’t change—a slight smile, maybe, or perhaps that’s just the way the shadows form under his scars.
Morrison finds himself studying the scars and then tears his gaze away. The Joker once killed another inmate for looking at his scars too long. True, he’s restrained, but he did escape from a locked room just last week. Morrison wouldn’t put it past the man to get out of a simple straightjacket.
“Who helped you?” Morrison continues, trying to cover his nervousness by searching more of the wall, continuing to tap his nightstick against his thigh to remind himself that it’s there. “Was it Dr. Quinzel? She looks like she would do a thing or two for ya if you asked nicely.” He throws the Joker a smile and a wink.
The Joker declines to respond. Morrison meets his gaze briefly and then turns back to the floor. Out of a locked cell, out of a locked ward, through three other locked wards and out of Arkham altogether without anyone noticing. Harding is watching from the viewing window set in the door, ready to leap into the room if Morrison needs help, but that probably wouldn’t matter. If the Joker attacks him, there won’t be a hell of a lot of time.
Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance and Morrison glances towards the door, even though there aren’t any windows in the cellblock. God, what if they lost power? Stuck in the pitch black in the Joker’s cell, alone—
Something slaps into the side of Morrison’s head and he lets out a shriek, flinging his arms up over his head and waving the nightstick wildly. There is a whirr of startled wings and feathers burst around him. Morrison drops to a squat, covering his head. His heart thumps in his chest.
When he catches his breath again, he hears laughter. The Joker is laughing on the cot. Harding, just outside the door, is laughing as well in great whoops and snorts. Morrison raises his head and sees a bemused looking pigeon perched on the end of the cot, its feathers ruffled. It turns its head to glare at him.
“Where the fuck—” Morrison sputters, and that makes Harding and the Joker laugh even harder. Feeling his face flushing red, Morrison stalks towards the pigeon, ready to beat it to death with his nightstick if he can get close enough for a good swing.
It waits patiently at the end of the cot, fluffing its feathers. Morrison slowly steps toward it, hand outstretched.
The Joker abruptly kicks his feet. The chain pulls them up short before he can touch Morrison but the clang is loud and Morrison leaps backwards again, just barely suppressing another shriek. The pigeon flaps away, swinging around the windowless room. The Joker continues to laugh, tears streaming from his eyes.
“You shut up!” Morrison shouts, delivering a sharp blow with his nightstick to the end of the bed, narrowly avoiding the Joker’s bare feet. Harding gives a warning tap on the door. Morrison bites back his anger and fumes as the Joker laughs, and the pigeon flies in confused circles around them, looking vainly for a way out.
##
“Harleen Quinzel.”
The blond doctor whips around, looking startled, her car keys in her hand. Batman steps into the range of the parking lot floodlights. The wetlands around the parking lot are pitch dark under the heavy clouds, showcasing the flat expanse of the lot in a brassy artificial light. A frog croaks somewhere in the water, out of sight.
“I need to talk to you,” he continues.
The doctor holds up her car keys, her eyes wide. “I’ll hit the panic button,” she says.
Batman glances towards the Arkham admin building a hundred yards away. “No one will pay any attention,” he says quietly.
She glances up at the admin as well and then lowers her hand, acceding his point. She’s a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face and curly blond hair kept in a ponytail. Her eyes are startlingly blue behind reading glasses.
“I need to talk to you about the Joker.”
Her expression shifts from nervous to annoyed. “You and just about everyone else. I didn’t let him out, okay?” She leans against the door of her car, which is a rather nice looking cherry red convertible.
“Other people have been questioning you about it?”
Dr. Quinzel rolls her eyes and swats at a hovering mosquito. “They think I’m a lovesick moron but I’m not. I wouldn’t let a criminal out of jail. He’s sick.” Her voice when she says the word ‘sick’ is more sympathetic than disgusted.
“You’re writing your dissertation on him,” Batman prompts.
She smiles. “He’s the most interesting patient in the ward. He’s not your textbook sociopath. He has layers. You’ve met him. Can’t you see how charismatic he is?”
“Charismatic isn’t the word I’d use,” Batman says. Her eyes focus on him sharply.
“Just because I think the guy is interesting doesn’t mean I’m going to get myself in trouble letting him escape. If he’s out there—” Dr. Quinzel waves a hand towards the gates, “—then I can’t exactly get the inside story on his life, can I?”
A moth whacks into the hood of Dr. Quinzel’s car, then flaps away. She glances up at the spinning insects circling the light over their heads. A mosquito lands on the side of her neck and Batman resists the urge to slap it.
“Has he told you anything about his life?”
“He’s told me things.” She looks back down at him, tipping her head to the side. “In confidence, of course.”
“Of course.” Batman hadn’t expected any less from her. “You were in the staff room with the rest of the staff for the entire two hours the cameras were down, right?”
“Everyone saw me there,” she says airily. “I played cards with some of the other interns. It got pretty boring after a while.”
“Was anyone else missing from the room?”
“I think Benny called in sick that day.” She shrugs. “Everyone else was there, as far as I know.”
“Did you notice anything strange in the ward before the Joker escaped?”
“Strange?” She laughs. The laughter echoes off the pavement. “In Arkham? Have you ever been in the place?”
“I meant stranger than normal.”
“Strange is normal for that place, especially recently. I sit in my office and all of a sudden there’s a smell like someone’s eating an orange right next to me, or I put down a paper and it completely disappears and after I search everywhere I find it right on my desk where I left it. Once I was walking down the hall and—” She suddenly catches sight of his expression and stops. “Nothing that would help the Joker escape, no.”
“I want you to keep an eye out for anything suspicious,” Batman says. “I’ll be in touch.”
“I…” Dr. Quinzel frowns, trailing off. The frog has stopped croaking in the swamp and now they’re surrounded by a vast, echoing silence. She glances towards the pitch-blackness to her right. “…Sure,” she finishes distractedly.
Batman follows her gaze, but now that he’s in the circle of light, he can’t see a thing beyond the point where the pavement ends. Not even the crickets are chirping anymore. Their spot in the parking lot seems to have been carved out of the night and set into a void, just Batman, Dr. Quinzel and the car.
“Get in the car,” Batman says, feeling a strange chill run through him. Dr. Quinzel looks at him, her expression serious and a little worried, and then pulls open the door to her car. She slides into the driver’s seat without a word.
“You should think about pepper spray,” Batman adds.
She smiles, although he can still see the nervousness in her eyes. “I have some. I keep it in my glove box.”
Batman reaches and pushes her car door shut. As he does it, his ears register a twig snapping and then footsteps slamming on concrete.
Batman whirls around and Dr. Quinzel lets out a shriek. He gets a second to see a man’s face twisted in a grimace and then the man crashes into him, arms flailing. There is a piece of broken glass in his hand and his fingers are slippery with blood.
They both hit the ground and Batman shunts the man off to the left, sending him sprawling. The man is wearing an orange jumpsuit, the uniform of the Arkham inmates. He scrambles back from his feet and comes at Batman again, swinging wildly.
“B-b-b—” he’s saying. “B-b-bat—”
The car horn blares suddenly and Batman flinches. He can see Dr. Quinzel sitting in the driver’s seat, dialing her cell phone. The horn keeps blaring and he realizes that she has hit the panic button. The inmate doesn’t seem the slightest bit fazed. Batman sidesteps him again, grabbing his arm as he passes, and shifts his weight to the side, spinning the man around in order to slam him to the concrete and pin him there.
Except that Dr. Quinzel has opened her car door again, holding a can of pepper spray. The man’s face hits the corner of the car door. Batman feels the impact go through the man’s body and he belatedly pulls back but it’s far too late. The man sags, slumping against Batman.
“Oh God,” Dr. Quinzel whispers. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
Batman lets the man slide to the ground, gently laying him out on his back. He rips off a gauntlet and gropes for the man’s neck, searching for a pulse. Dr. Quinzel is still babbling apologies in the background but all of that fades away as he leans forward, shifting his grip, pressing his fingers against the carotid. Nothing. Nothing. He puts an ear to the man’s mouth. Nothing.
The man is dead.
Batman has killed him.