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When the nightmare hit Batman, it came over him like a storm swallowing a city. As the clouds—physical and metaphorical—rushed over him, he planted his mental feet and began the automatic struggle to catalogue his symptoms. His surroundings remained the same. His heart rate was trying to leap forward, and as he pushed through the gas a cold sweat beaded underneath his suit. The shapes and figures of the world remained intact, but the feeling of them had gone sinister, sickly, like fruit with a rotten heart.
Crane was long gone, leaving behind only the detonator and the fear gas to guard it. Genius though he unfortunately was, his pride wouldn’t let him think that Batman would be able to withstand this mixture, not this time, despite every previous confrontation proving time and again that Batman could and would withstand anything.
Without truly changing, the world around Bruce seemed to ooze, creeping and viscous and suffocating as he punched access codes into the detonator’s interface. The machine sucked hungrily at his fingers. If it pulled him inside—but of course it couldn’t, that was the gas talking, physics dictated the conservation of matter—but if it did pull him inside, into the rotten heart of that decay, into that whimpering frothing well—
The light beside the keypad clicked green. Bruce fell away, boots sliding across the concrete, but he wouldn’t allow himself to turn and run. Running would just give the fear what it wanted. He needed to remain slow… and deliberate…
When he emerged from the fog of the gas, there were already police vehicles surrounding the park. Their vacillating lights caught in the thickness of the air, and under the choking weight of the fear they felt as if they were lying in wait for him, evil eyes blinking into the darkness.
That was the difficulty with Bruce’s work. The bones remained broken after the prison door was shut, the haze lingered long after the day was saved—you couldn’t just opt not to take your work home with you. And, he thought, the manor being as dark and dusty as it always was, the windows being as sharp and high as they always were, home was no place to take this kind of work. The beginning of a shudder passed through him. No, his home was no place to bring your fears.
Instead, he shot a line into the old courthouse and disappeared into the ornate shadows of the mason work around its roof. He swung up among a company of gargoyles, their snarling faces more familiar than his own doorstep. The medieval French had believed that they frightened evil spirits. Bruce tucked himself under the shoulder of one, and grimly hoped that in modern Gotham they could do the same.
Under the heaviness of the poison, Bruce drifted into the worst kind of sleep. Jerking, twitching, comfortless stage-one sleep, as his body tried and failed to sink beneath the cocktail of chemicals that his lizard brain pumped out to keep him alert and alive. He couldn’t go under—the fear grabbed him and snapped him like wood. He couldn’t stay awake—the gas lay on him and sank through him, with the exhaustion of a fever.
He half-dreamed, in the green shadows of the Victorian architecture, that the city ate up his heart, chamber by chamber. That the city was a gargoyle, stone mouth running with blood instead of rain. That he was sleepy and soft as it pressed its claws into his flesh, kneading, and hung above him. He twitched, heart thumping in his perfectly whole chest, and he reached out for the dreamy shadow of the monster. There would be nothing there, of course. When his hand could touch the empty air beneath the hallucination, he was certain his heart would quiet again.
His knuckles met physical weight, mass, the give of cloth—his whole body spasmed in terror, breaths coming thick and ragged over the renewed thump thump thump of his heart. Bruce closed his fist with a monumental effort, only made possible by years of muscle memory, and drew back to slam it into the thing looming against his side. He’d fight it, whatever it was; better to die than be killed. He had driven himself through worse.
Something caught his hand in mid air, effortlessly. He blinked up at it, his vision swimming and reforming again. That was another hand. A human hand, in shape—but human hands don’t come in that color, do they?
“Shhhh,” a voice said, and the hand around his own pressed gently, until his arm gave way and fell back to his side.
Bruce took a deep breath. He followed the line of the wrist and moved upward along the arm, blinking and straining to take in each section individually. In isolated portions, it was clearly not a monster. He traced onwards, up to the red slash of a familiar smile. Nightmare and reality clicked together at last.
“Joker,” he managed, more throat than tongue.
“Got it in one,” Joker said, with a wink. The night was too dark to make out much in the way of colors, but his eyes glittered like gem stones, distant lights pooling and flickering there. Bruce couldn’t look away.
“Look at you,” Joker carried on, tsking like a school teacher, “ridden hard and put away wet. Don’t you have sidekicks to handle this kind of thing?”
Bruce struggled against the weight of the poison, core straining as he tried to drag himself upright. He was alone here, incapacitated, and if—
“Shhh,” Joker said again, pressing a gloved finger to his lips. They were beautiful gloves, rich and dark against his papery skin. He leaned forward and pressed Bruce back against the stone, gently as a nurse, and where the pressure of his hand met Bruce’s chest, the fever’s aching weight seemed to break. Bruce sucked a breath into his relieved lungs. When the hand retreated, and the weight of the fever closed back over his ribs, Bruce let out a choked noise of dismay.
“What’s that?” Joker asked, cupping his ear. “Couldn’t quite make it out.”
Bruce grit his teeth. In the midst of Crane’s oozing, sinister nightmare, Joker sat there as solid as—as stone. Perhaps it was because Bruce was always afraid of him. Perhaps the familiar fear broke the foreign tide of the infection. What alternative could there be?
Joker hummed. Deliberately, thoughtfully, he stripped off one of his gloves and laid the back of his bare hand across Bruce’s cheek. A shiver raced through Bruce, as his skin lit up with something—something unfamiliar, bright in the midst of the fever’s bone-deep misery—
Bruce let out a little ah, barely a sound at all.
“You poor darling,” Joker said, in that same disapproving tone, “you’re burning up.”
“Crane,” Bruce said, and then wondered why he had volunteered anything at all.
Joker nodded, knowingly. He turned over his palm, so that his cool fingers cupped Bruce’s cheekbone, his thumb tracing slow lines over it. “What delightful terrors those are,” he murmured, soothingly, “what a pretty cavalcade of monstrosities.”
The words seemed to disentangle themselves from their tone in Bruce’s ears, leaving two equally strange impressions behind. He leaned into the Joker’s touch, desperately trying to ground himself against the rising confusion.
“I wonder what the world looks like to you when you breathe it,” Joker said.
“Liquid,” Bruce answered. “Rotten.”
“Oh,” Joker said, “but the world is always that way. You can poke right through it, if you like.” Then he leant down and took Bruce’s face in both hands, appraising him in one lingering glance.
“…What?” Bruce said.
“You’re in terrible shape, my dear,” Joker pronounced, without letting go. “I’m afraid you need some looking after.”
Bruce made a sharp noise of protest.
“None of that now. What kind of friend would I be if I just left you here, in your time of need.”
Bruce, who was still half-expecting to be stabbed in the ribs at any time, had no idea how to answer that question.
Joker sat down beside Bruce and, with some quiet effort, pulled the man into his lap. His body seemed to hold Bruce like a coffin, satin-lined and snug, and his hands wandered the length of Bruce like a child caressing a favorite toy.
“What would you have done if someone else found you? Someone who doesn’t love you like I love you?” Joker mused, and then let out a cackle that rattled in his chest, squeezing Bruce tight against himself. “Ha, but then, who loves you like I do?”
All of this was perfectly intelligible to Bruce, and all of it too bewildering entirely to process. The skyline beyond them still seemed ominous with cruel promises, the pale and sickly moon a conspiratorial eye—but against the sharp solidity of the Joker, their menace was muted. Distant. Joker was the protective embrace of a home, locks and strong doors and a porch light left waiting on for you by someone who cares to see you safely returned. Joker was the nightlight against which nightmares dissolved and faded.
“It’s getting worse,” Bruce said, because there didn’t seem to be a way to undo the vulnerability of the moment, and because there was no one else he could tell, no one who wouldn’t either worry or use it against him.
“What’s that?”
“Fear toxin,” Bruce said. “Every time—it doesn’t leave my system—it compounds itself—”
“Ahh,” Joker said. “So, you get better at ignoring the symptoms and the symptoms just get wilder. That one’s a doozy. One of these days you’re gonna walk into the dark and never walk back out, Batsy.”
Bruce sucked in a breath that seemed to crack in his lungs. Something like a sob came back up. He knew that, of course. If it wasn’t one darkness it was another, and as his family was so fond of pointing out, he was digging his grave each night, one shovel stroke at a time. They didn’t understand that he knew, he knew and maybe even wanted it that way. He liked the clean clarity of suffering with a purpose.
“Shush sh shh. Don’t worry,” Joker murmured, “it won’t be so bad. I’ll be there, of course—well, I live there, don’t I? I’ll show you around.”
Easy, simple. Unlike everyone else Bruce knew, Joker would never try to deny him his downward spiral. He took it as a matter of course, that it would happen if Bruce willed it to happen, and moved on to the next step. This was why Bruce didn’t go to visit him in Arkham. When the procedure and the interrogation were gone, it was too easy to fall into this camaraderie with the man who remained in front of him. Behind that man there was a hulking monster of hate and pain and fear, but here, between its foreclaws, there was the man who stops to measure a fever and promises to show him the neighborhood on the other side of sanity.
“Dawn’s coming,” Joker observed, picking out the faintest shift in light beyond the spires of the city. “I’ll stay till then.” Joker caught his chin with one finger and tipped it up, so that Bruce could look at him. He looked pleased. Not smug, exactly, but…
He dipped in, close, and pressed his lips to the forehead of Bruce’s cowl.
“If only you would let me help you more,” he sighed, against the smooth curve of armor. His lips trailed down Bruce’s temple, leaving kisses like the afterimages of light. “If only you’d lean on me,” he said, his voice breathily approximating the notes of a song, fading into a vague hum.
Bruce suspected he would regret this later, but for the moment the world was so strange—twisted, the familiar fearful and the fearful familiar—that nothing at all seemed possible except the inevitable path of the Joker’s mouth, as he followed gravity down to the corner of Bruce’s lips. Bruce opened himself up to it, to the testing press of Joker’s tongue, to the taste of something that knew him and owned him and wanted him. And Joker held him like a coffin, or like a home.
When dawn came, Joker pulled away with a sigh. Bruce reached up and caught him by the collar, weakly but still very clearly, and tried to pull him back down.
“Ah-ah,” Joker said, his eyes glittering again—vivid now, greener than the foggy darkness falling away from the rim of the world—“That’s cheating.”
As the Joker disentangled himself and stood, Bruce struggled up to his knees. The weight of the fear was falling away with each movement, like so much shattered clay. “We’re not done here,” he said, although he was not entirely certain what he meant by it. He pressed a hand to the stone and levered himself upright, slowly. The world spun, but not too much.
Against the rising dawn—clear and pale, the color of faded curtains—Joker laughed, wrapping his arms around himself. “Of course not,” he said. “Catch me,” he said, even as he retreated, like a child enticing a playmate to chase.
He took one step back, and then another, and then he was lost among the green shadows of the crouching gargoyles.