A/N: Hi, all. This is my first Dark Knight fanfic, though I really am a big fan. I've really wanted to submit something here for a long time. Honestly, I've grown tired of the usual formulaic Joker/OC's that have been going around in this category (really though, I think there have been some early good ones), so I decided to submit something featuring a sort-of favorite pairing I think is a tad underused. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: The Dark Knight belongs to Christopher Nolan and Warner Brothers. Batman belongs to DC Comics. I don't own either; if I did I'd be one hundred billion zillion dollars richer. :(

Playing Games - Chapter 1

Matt and Freddie were the best of friends. Besides both being twenty-one-year-old first year high school dropouts, they had a lot in common. Their interests included drinking, stealing, visiting strip clubs and aimlessly roaming the Gotham alleyways with which they were comfortably familiar. They had every street name and location memorized. Every dusty little street in between the gleaming office buildings had a specific placement of old dumpsters, backdoors and fences. Every night they'd stroll casually through the alleys, rubbing their sleeves into the faded graffiti, throwing cans at sleeping bums and urinating wherever they damn well pleased. Gotham wasn't so perfect after all.

Wilson, could you send another police car over here? I'm on Haines Street. Yeah. Between the Starbucks and Pasquale's Bistro.

Matt and Freddie stumbled into an alleyway late in the night, laughing and stopping to lean against the wall every few moments. Freddie dropped his beer can onto Matt's foot, causing him to slip and land uncomfortably on the ground. This resulted in a punch and various swear words, but they continued on their journey. Winter was just beginning to arrive in the city, and they scared off a few street children so that they could have the barrel fire all to themselves. It cast a warm, orange light against the cement of the buildings, but also revealed a bundled up figure curled snugly beside a pile of trash.

Not in front, Wilson. In between. To hell with your Christmas shopping. This is important.

"Maaaaaatt, you said you scared them all off," Freddie slurred as he took a wobbly step towards it.

"I did, I did," his best friend replied, still focusing both his eyes and hands to the heat of the fire.

"Then why don'tcha go check if you really did?"

"Why don'tcha go to hell?"

"I'll do just that, but first we got a visitor," Freddie smiled slyly as Matt turned to look. He noticed it, too – a human being swathed in a brown coat and a tattered purple scarf, with clumps of ratty blonde hair poking out at the top. One bare, nearly blue hand hugged his knees to his chest. The other was lost somewhere in the folds of his coat. And for some reason, he didn't seem to shiver an inch in the frigid weather. He was as frozen as the air around him. Matt wrinkled his nose and came nearer to the visitor as well, heavy-lidded and clumsy.

Nope, not another dealer, Wilson. We got cold, hard murder here.

"Another bum, uh?"

"A damn quiet, un-crazy one."

"You're telling me."

"Hit it with something, Matt."

"Hell no. I don't throw things, you do. I'm a peaceful soldier."

"An' I'm the goddamn Batman."

A deep, rumbling groan. The two broke from their spat and returned their gazes to the figure before them. Or was it some sort of sick, distorted laugh?

"Hey, looks like the bum's alive," Freddie said, bending over with his hands on his knees for a closer look.

"Good, now he'll make a sound when we hit 'im," Matt snorted, turning to see if his best friend would either laugh as well or roll his eyes. Unfortunately, his eyes were all of a sudden wide and blank, and he had a large, bleeding hole in his forehead.

As Freddie collapsed lifelessly to the ground, Matt made a weak, horrified cry, jumping backward and nearly falling over. The figure rose up with the gun in his hand, his coat falling slightly down and exposing the ragged, grimy image of some sort of cheap purple suit. The scarf slipped off his shoulders and fell to the ground. What it had wrapped was a face, half-human, half-monster, scarred and infected and semi-caked in some grubby, twisted version of clown makeup. His eyes were sleepless red but with pupils that were unmistakably green. He was something terrifyingly familiar, a blocked out nightmare with the same sort of movement. Twitch, twitch, blink.

"And you won't make a sound at all."

Matt screamed, even when nobody else was there to hear him. He got up to race off to the end of the alleyway, away from the barrel fire and from this freakish killer, nearly tripping over his best friend's corpse in the process. Even at this speed, the killer seemed determined to follow him.

No, Wilson. Not one dead body. Two.

Bang.

To the Joker, Gotham seemed like a cold, stingy Scrooge of a city, bah-humbugging the Christmas season as it littered the news channel with countdowns and gift suggestions. While most people would carol from door to door and give each other presents and throw tinsel all over that ugly ghastly tree in their house, Gotham liked staying official and businesslike, with all this silly worrying about mob leaders and dark knights and district attorneys. Disgusting, the Joker thought. He wanted the holidays to be happy days.

The city always managed to find a way to ruin the Christmas spirit. The Joker was excited; he'd sewn himself a handsome Santa Claus hat (he was a wizard at the sewing machine, that Joker), strung wire lights around his room and tacked some stockings to the wall. He even ran a finger over his lipstick and rubbed it on his scarred cheeks for a light, rosy glow. Of course, the Arkham orderlies seemed royally ticked about this show of Christmas, sticking him in a straitjacket and throwing him in that boring white padded room again. The Joker sighed at the memory; Gotham citizens never wanted to celebrate. He was glad he'd finally escaped that stupid asylum.

One thing that cheered him up, however, was sitting in the streets downtown and watching the late-nighters and bar-hoppers stagger by. They never really seemed too friendly, but at least they'd mumble a "murry crusmuss" back whenever this weird brown-coat-purple-scarf stranger greeted them politely. Those who didn't only made him feel depressed, so he just decided to stab them and give them a happy holiday smile with the aid of a rusty potato peeler he'd saved from making latkes in Arkham (the Jewish orderlies deserved a Christmas, too).

Late that night he was sitting in an alleyway, where he grew tired waiting for other people and went to take a nap. Unfortunately, this was rudely interrupted by some loud young men who were toying with the idea of throwing something at him. Normally the Joker liked people as unserious as they were, but, really now, they disturbed him from a nap. That wasn't very nice of them. So, desiring to sort this out without a brawl, a highlight of his mission for a merry Gotham Christmas was shooting two men in an alleyway just in the onset of winter.

That night, it began to snow.