Eyes of Glass
His salt and pepper mustache darkened with the coffee as he gulped down another swig. He brushed the stain away, his eyes muddled and distant out the cop car window. The bags under his eyes had become more pronounced of late, even more so than usual. And for Jim Gordon, the Commissioner of the Gotham City Police Department, that was saying a great deal.
Stevens wasn't back yet from using the convenience store's restroom. The twenty-four-and-a-half minutes – he glanced back from his watch to the window again – had drawn out in his mind far too long. This area of Gotham wasn't exactly known for its friendly atmosphere, even by the city's rough standards. His hand brushed by his gun holster for the seventeenth time, but he had stopped registering the gesture after the fifth.
He knew he shouldn't be here, that Barbara would have thrown a fit of worry if she knew exactly where he was at present – and especially, why he was here. He rarely came out on the job for run-of-the-mill homicides anymore, being the head of police.
But with the Joker having unexpectedly skipped out of the public's radar for the past three weeks, the string of disappearances in this sector of Gotham that had cropped up repeatedly was something worth poking his nose into.
Stevens had come along as well, not only from being Jim's most trusted veteran on the force, but because he had been the one to pick up the phone and hear the anonymous tip-off from a woman who, in his words, had been "too shaken to be lying, but too scared to be telling the whole truth."
She had claimed to have seen a caped figure dragging its way through the street.
Gordon swallowed another mouthful of coffee. He could put two and two together. The Batman may be far more adept in doing so, but Gordon hadn't risen to the rank of Commissioner for nothing. But as he saw his own creased face staring dimly back at him through the faded reflection on the window, he found himself wishing more than ever that the dark knight was working with him on the case.
He would have been able to figure something out. If he weren't the one that Gordon was half-hoping to find after his inexplicable absence since December.
No headlines had made their way into the papers sporting the familiar catchphrases of "Caped Crusader Captures Crime Boss, Evades Police Yet Again." The half-sigh, half-chuckle that was usually the Commissioner's response upon reading them was becoming a sorely-missed ritual. His fingers unconsciously flicked to his gun handle as his eyes returned to his watch; it had now been thirty-one minu –
A shot blasted through the air.
Gordon's watch arm jolted at the sudden noise, spilling the cooled coffee over into the vacant driver's seat. His chest thundered rapidly as his limbs burned with adrenaline, paralyzed in place as his fight-or-flight instincts kicked in. After a few more rapid and shallow breaths into the sharp, crackling air, he opened the car door and jolted out, slamming it closed again more loudly than was probably prudent.
He hovered next to the passenger side door, his gun raised in the direction of the shot to the car's left. His breath whistled out of his nostrils for implacable seconds. But there were no answering shots, nothing forthcoming that registered another presence making itself known to him.
Cursing himself in his head for not acting sooner during Stevens' absence, Gordon crept forward into the splash of the eerie buzzing lights of the convenience store. He pressed his back to the side of the building, gun raised beside him as he prepared to round the corner. The shot hadn't come from the store, but from further down the street behind it. Whoever it was hadn't counted on anyone being around to hear the shot, not this late at night.
Criminals were becoming too scared to come out at night, too paranoid that a living shadow may come out of his unexplained hiding at any moment to unleash his wrath upon them…
Gordon leapt around the corner, aimed to shoot, but there was nothing. Nothing but the black night and the old, long-dead factory further down the road. His gun wavered in the air for a few seconds more before shakily lowering to the ground.
He froze as his eyes followed his gun barrel and fell upon a dried crimson slick on the gravel.
It wasn't fresh, but rather several days old, maybe even weeks at the most. But Gordon had seen far too much of it in this city to pretend it was paint. No one else knew he and Stevens had dispatched themselves out here, but he refrained from calling in reinforcements just yet – this whole trek was mounted on a single shaky tip-off, and the hopes against all hope that they would find either the Joker or the Batman after their extended hiatus. It was all on a hunch and a prayer.
But as he stepped one foot cautiously in front of the other along the staled maroon trail, he couldn't help the lurching in his gut that maybe Stevens had been onto something.
The messy stripe of rust-red pebbles continued down the back road, and Gordon realized that the factory was the only place in sight that it could be heading. He gripped his gun tighter – amazed that was possible at this point – as he noticed that a knotted blemish of the stuff had interrupted the trail. And that from that point onward, the stain was glowing brighter in the feeble lights of the distant convenience store. Fresh.
His heart thudded faster, and his footsteps picked up speed. That shot, and now this blood, could mean only one thing. But it couldn't be…
His eyes alighted on the body at the threshold of the creaking factory gates. He bolted into a run toward it, silent and futile prayers racing through his mind as fast as his heartbeat.
He dropped to his knees at the body's side, turned Stevens over and grabbed at his shattered chest, felt his pulse at the neck for a sign of life, anything. He forced pressure down on the bullet wound to stem the flow of blood that was no longer flowing, tried to shake life back into his trusted lieutenant when he knew such a miracle could never be.
"God-" he choked, "-Goddamnit-"
He shook Stevens by the shoulders, but the glassy eyes only fixed blankly up at him as he flopped uselessly like a ragdoll.
Gordon's reddening eyes bulged and burned, and he turned away to fumble blindly for the radio on his belt. He had to call for backup now, there was at least something he could do right now while struggling to breathe clearly –
He paused, his eyes fixed on the single limp, blood-streaked hand that lay protruding from the factory's entrance.
Slowly he rose to his feet, brushed the single betraying tear from his eye before more could fall. There may be someone else who needed help right now. He squeaked the iron gates open from their drifting sway in the wind, and crunched forward to the hand.
It belonged to a woman with wild dark hair, her stomach similarly desecrated by blood and bullet hole, pearly eyes staring in a distant horror up at nothing. Gordon would never know if it was the same woman who had phoned in to Major Crimes, but somehow he recognized in his gut that she was indeed the very same person.
He couldn't ponder it for too long, however, as he found his gaze drawn to the next two bodies ahead of her, stretching down the darkened corridor. He walked over to them, only to find four more overlapping each other further along into the distance.
Gordon kept walking down the hallway of nightmare, each step and every corner revealing yet another maimed corpse that raised its stained-glass eyes to the rafters in a forgotten terror. He tried to keep count as he continued on with increasing rapidity of footfall, to catalog in his report once he called in for backup, but he quickly lost count around thirty-six, then again somewhere at fifty-two. On and on the tumbling trail of bodies went, worming Gordon deep into the heart of the factory, when…
…they stopped, a foot away from the edge of an open doorway from which a quiet scuffling issued forth.
Even with all the years he had spent serving the city, Gordon's practiced hands trembled as he raised his gun. He gingerly stepped over the final body of a solidly-built man and lingered at the wall on the edge of the doorway, peering from his vantage point into the cavernous room.
His eyes froze. His heart stopped for a spacious moment.
The tattered purple coat clung to the turned back of the Joker, who was pacing forward, deeper into the room. The shotgun clutched in his hand was pitched over to the side and scuttled across the concrete into a corner.
Stepping towards the still and silent eyes of the Batman who lay slumped against the far wall.
"There, Bat, now no one will disturb us," the Joker spoke. He padded haphazardly toward the sitting Batman, unaware of the Commissioner behind him who couldn't even get enough oxygen through to break the steel obstruction in his thought patterns.
He couldn't tear his sight from the glistening eyes of the Batman.
"Sorry I had to leave you here for so long, but don't worry, dear, I'm back," Joker said, kneeling down in front of Batman. "Back home, dearest, safe and sound."
Gordon had to fight for each quiet breath. He urged at Batman, silently screamed at him, to get up and fight back – didn't he – wasn't he – he wasn't, no, he wasn't –
"Don't you worry about me," Joker said softly, too soft for him, much too soft. Too soft as he reached out and, with a flitting instant of hesitation, ran his fingers down the Batman's cheek, down his exposed chin. Batman didn't flinch at his touch, didn't move a muscle.
Gordon wasn't in reality, he just knew it. The Joker was acting so – normal – it didn't happen like this – didn't he…realize…?
The Joker leaned in closer to Batman, an inch from his face. But Gordon noticed the momentary sag in his back, the sudden dip in his spine like the string of a mannequin being snipped away, and something about it bothered his mind even further.
Joker grinned an out-of-place smirk. "Don't you know that I'll always come back for you?"
Gordon heard it. Something registered on the edges of his spinning brain that was reeling out of control. The single micro-tremor in Joker's voice, how he nearly choked on the last word of his sentence. He then realized that the rhythm of the Joker's speech was wrong, the choppy yet signature cadence thrown off course. The ungainly music in his voice was missing a vital chord, leaving a wandering and disjointed dissonance in its place.
The Joker's hands were feeling down Batman's armored shoulders; one traced down his arm and found a palm wrapped in black, curled its limp and useless fingers together into a fist. Batman did not resist.
Purple hands took hold of the black wrist and sent the hand careening towards Joker's head in a brushing parody of a punch. Once those fists had packed power into the madman's body, but they never would again. Joker winced at the touch, almost in memory of pain rather than for the sake of faking it from the blow, and chuckled weakly.
At the sound, Gordon knew that the clown was far from his usual state. The laugh was hollow, could hardly be called a laugh worthy of the Joker's throat at all.
The Joker was a shell of himself.
"Now Batman, what did I tell you all those years ago about starting with the head?" he murmured with more of a fondly nostalgic tone than one of chastisement. He picked the fist up again by the wrist, flopped the fingers back together from when they had fallen out of position, and pressed the knuckles to his cheek again. This time he kept the touch where it was longer, a full ten seconds as his face melted into a shadow of amusement at the pretend-pain, then finished the follow-through of the blow as his head whiplashed backwards, performing a caricature of the act that more resembled a children's cartoon than an act of true violence.
Gordon winced and shuddered inside as he watched the Joker pick up the other bone-cold hand and used it to backhand himself. As his head swiveled to the side Gordon could make out the way his eyes were squinted closed, the puckering of the scars around his lips that twisted in both make-believe pain and a weak smirk. He continued slowly and routinely beating the limp fists against his face and chest, eyes shut the entire time.
Playing pretend, for there was little else he could do.
A horridly dry chuckle came from the madman's throat, and he smoothed his hands over Batman's armored shin, picked it up and bent the leg at the knee. He brought the steel-toed boot to his sternum, just as it had connected with him so many countless nights in the past. He laughed with that tone so insubstantial, and oh so very wrong, and doubled over the leg extended towards him, pressed his forehead to the symbol of the bat over the crusader's unmoving chest.
Gordon's hands fidgeted at his gun, but as he replaced his foot in a different spot to steady his dizzying vision at the unspeakable display, the Joker abruptly whirled around to face his jaded eyes to the intruder.
The Commissioner couldn't move, could only stare with increasing horror at the sight. The Joker was bony, far more gaunt-faced than his usual, his face so thinned it seemed skin was wrapped too tightly around the skull with nothing left in between. His hair was matted and in a maddened disarray. His clothes had once been custom-fitted to his already-lanky body, but now he seemed swamped in his ragged and fraying suit, a ghost of his former physique. A ghost of his former self.
But his eyes were gleaming with a far more terrifying light than when he threatened to kill in the name of nothing. Perhaps because they looked even more unstable than usual.
"Why, look," he slurred with a sudden jump of pitch at the second word. "Look, Bat…it's our old friend." He grabbed Batman's lifeless hand. "Well don't be shy, dear, wave hello!" He wagged the hand about sloppily, as Gordon's stomach churned at the display.
"That's enough," he chided Batman at the prolonged waving. "We don't need guests here, remember?" He turned back to Batman, ignoring Gordon's presence completely. "Don't you remember, darling? What I told you, so many times, all those nights?"
He hunched over Batman's lifeless form, and Gordon knew he should act before it was too late for him, before he joined the line of corpses behind him. Before he joined…him…
"There are only two places at this tea table, sweetcakes," Joker crooned with that same sour, off timbre that Gordon just couldn't place. "One for you," – he used one of Batman's fingers to point to the bat insignia – "and one for me," – it pointed to the Joker's heart. Then, the limp palm was flattened across Joker's chest, held in place by a purple hand that fit warmly over its cold, black counterpart. Almost as if trying to imprint his pulse into the hand so the other's heart would become inspired to follow suit and start up anew.
Joker suddenly cocked his head to the side, leaned in closer, listening to what wasn't there. Gordon's chest oozed inside with some black sludge of sickened revulsion, and something else he wasn't sure what to name.
"What's that, dearest?" the Joker piped up after a time. "You…no! I'd never! You know I never would!" He shook with weak laughter at Batman's supposed question. "What have I told you, over and over?"
It suddenly hit Gordon like a flash, in a surge of memories of the Joker's various banters and jests to Batman, all culminating to the same thing.
I don't want to kill you.
It hadn't been him. That was what didn't add up in Gordon's confused brain. The scenario didn't fit. But it still didn't, not with the way the Joker was acting toward this whole affair, how he almost didn't…believe…
"Don't you understand?" the Joker brought his free hand to cup Batman's cheek again, causing Gordon to stop cold in his tracks toward the man. "Don't you understand why you don't have to run from what I say anymore?"
Gordon wasn't sure that the Joker understood the real reason why. Or maybe, he didn't want to face the unthinkable truth that the man did fully understand.
Joker's body melted closer to Batman's unresponsive form. "I'm here, precious, and I'm. Never. Going to leave you."
Gordon's mind locked down completely at the Joker's next move, as he moved his head forward to close the distance between his and Batman's faces. His chapped and blood-ridden lips fell on Batman's cold mouth, working his lips only sparingly, preferring to simply hold still in that void of a promise that was all the Joker had ever had to hold onto.
Gordon soon recognized the cold, clammy clenching in his chest as an unnerving and unbearable weight. He couldn't bear to watch this anymore. He stepped forward to the wretched, piteous display of the Joker clinging to the last thing on Earth he had left to cleave to.
The Joker didn't make any indication of noticing Gordon's approach, but still knelt over the Batman, caught in his kiss and holding his dead form in his arms as best he could. Though his eyes were closed, if he felt the shadow loom timidly behind him he gave no sign of its approach.
The gun barrel was shakily trained a centimeter from the back of his head when the Joker gently, gently, gently broke the kiss, hovered over his fallen enemy's lips. A moment later he opened his eyes. Gordon just knew that the maniac sensed he was there; it was the goddamn Joker after all.
The Joker calmly raised his head, and his eyes never closed. He stared at his Bat with reverence, never wanting to tear his eyes from the glassy-bright blues that gazed blankly back at him.
A shot blasted through the air.
Later, the media swarmed the Commissioner, and he released in his statement a full account of what happened. How he and Stevens had stumbled upon the Joker's latest hideaway and his stash of victims, the Batman among them. How Stevens had lost his life in the struggle that followed, but Gordon had proceeded to at long last bring down the Joker. The city lauded him as a hero, for bringing an end to the cruel regime of the two warring freaks that had plagued their city for the past six years.
It was self defense, he told them. And no one questioned it any further.
No one brought up that the single shot had been fired to the back of the head at point-blank range, and beyond the destroyed week-old corpses there were no signs of any alleged struggle to be found. No one wanted the truth when they felt that the story that stood was what everyone involved so rightfully deserved.
No one but Jim Gordon would ever close their eyes and see the images of two men with blood dripping like scarlet teardrops down one's makeup and onto the other's cowl, two pairs of eyes made of blue and green glass staring back at each other. No one but him would ever know it hadn't been self defense.
It had been mercy.
A/N: Tonight I was going through the insightful B/J analyses found in the reviews of some of my stories of the past, and in her review of Ch. 2 of "Nightmares" dollhouseDISASTER wrote this:
"In all honesty, slash and tin hatting aside, if Joker happened upon Batman's dead body, he would be hysterical. I don't think he would cry, but I can imagine him shaking him for utter hours and suspending all belief. He'd probably even move his body 'round like Zsaz so it looks like he's still alive and can play the game or something. And then I think he'd go absoultely batshit insane. The city would play in blood and teeth. And I think in the end, he'd fade away himself. So yeah, I imagine the prospect to be absolutely horrifying for him. For both of them."
I was so struck by this notion, and then imagined Gordon happening upon them, and the final scene and the final ending line of the story popped into my head (as is what often happens in my stories, where I visualize the ending line more than anything else; it's setup and beginnings that get me, ugh). I was so taken by the idea and started crying like an idiot going "THAT'S SO SAD, GIRL, WHY ARE YOU SO CRUEL?" in my room for a bit, then decided I just /HAD/ to write it. xP Tell me what you think, and who knows, maybe it'll be /your/ review that inspires the next oneshot from me! D