The signature, undulating thrum of the Batwave sounded within the interior of the car for the umpteenth time within the last twenty minutes, and the Batman gritted his teeth against the pained growl that continued to build in his chest. Every alarm from the Batwave meant another update from the Gotham Police Department. Every alarm from the Batwave meant another cop calling in to headquarters to report an officer was down, to request immediate backup.
Every alarm from the Batwave meant another tally on Joker's list of victims.
On one of the first rings from the Batwave, it had pulled up a news clip on the Batmobile's screen. Monolith Square was in complete chaos; everyone who wasn't running at full speed had either just tripped over one of the grinning bodies on the ground... or was one of the bodies themselves. The reporter, clearly wishing with every fiber of her being to be anywhere but where she was, only managed to choke out a few panicked sentences describing what was happening before Joker suddenly popped into frame beside her. He gave her a facefull of laughing gas before she even had time to scream; it was all of two seconds before the cameraman shared the same fate and the news clip turned to static.
The Batman had seen it all before, in a manner of speaking. He had seen the panic, seen the gas, seen the smiling bodies. But this was different. All of those things had always been mere components of some larger plan. Throw giant gumballs at the police station, trap people inside table-sized playing cards, whatever. The fear and the victims were just supplements, calling cards - always delivered with a smile. But now Joker seemed to desire nothing more than to rampage and hurt as many people as he could. And for the few seconds that he was on camera, even as he added two more to his tally, there was not the faintest trace of a smile on that ghoulish face.
At last, at last, the square came within sight. By the time the Batmobile ground to a halt, the Batman had already jumped out of the vehicle and begun to sprint to where the crowd's screams were loudest. He had to move, move now, because every second he wasted was one more second Joker could use to-
"Hey! Batsy!"
The Batman whirled. Joker was waving his arms at him frantically to get his attention from the other side of the square. He dodged several people (jumping completely over one of them) as he ran towards him. The Batman, to his numb surprise, found that he was doing the same thing.
The smile had returned to Joker's face in full, explosive force, but by the time he was close enough that he could be heard without having to yell, mild irritation had joined it.
"What took you so long? Do you realize how many people I've had to gas waiting for you to show-"
Although the Batman hadn't realized he was moving toward Joker until he was already doing it, in that moment every thought and muscle in his body was consumed with uppercutting Joker as powerfully and painfully as he could. Joker sailed through the air like a missile and landed a full ten feet away.
"Up," Joker finished thoughtfully, eying the spot in the air through which he had been flying a few seconds before. He began to giggle, until the Batman's foot came down and forced all the air out of his lungs. It was not until the Batman grabbed him by the front of his suit and slammed him against a nearby brick wall that he managed to muster up an indignant, "What's your problem?"
"Why?" the Batman snarled.
Joker wrinkled his nose. "I'm going to assume you're talking to yourself concerning your staunch refusal to take a breath mint, in which case I really have to agree."
The Batman gestured wordlessly to the grinning bodies piled around the square.
"What, that?" said Joker blankly, as though he was being reprimanded for littering. "As always, you have an exceptionally short fuse. All I wanted was to get your attention. If you'd just given me your number like I asked you last time, I wouldn't've had to bother with these little pests."
This gave the Batman some pause; he suddenly felt he should have realized that Joker had, for once in his life, been at least somewhat serious with that question. Shame quickly morphed into anger, and the anger automatically focused itself against Joker, because if it didn't, then there would be only one man left to bear the brunt of it.
Apparently able to discern from his facial expressions what was going through the Batman's mind, Joker flashed a knowing smirk.
"What's the matter, Batsy?" His voice shifted to its signature, would-be innocent falsetto. "Feeling... responsible for this terrible occurrence?"
Joker clearly sensed the Batman's imminent desire to convert his head into a permanent red-and-white stain on the brick wall behind him, because he switched back to his normal voice and said, "Oh, grow up. As if your precious Commissioner and half the city's cops aren't on their way with at least five truckfulls of antidote as we speak. These..." he seemed to search for the right word for a moment, "people will be just fine."
This succeeded in halting the momentum of the stain-on-the-wall idea, though the Batman still found the concept dangerously tempting. To siphon off the excess emotion, he poured as much venom as he could muster into the words, "You're going back to Arkham."
"Good boy, we're on the same page. I was hoping to say a quick hello to Harley anyway. Poor kid's having trouble escaping this time 'round. Maybe this time I'll take her with me once I've decided I've had enough of a vacation myself." Joker paused to roll his eyes theatrically at the Batman's face; frustration seemed to be building up in the latter like a toxin. "Don't make me tell you to grow up twice in one night, Bats."
The Batman dropped Joker. "Get in the car."
The clown scrambled to his feet, gave a two-fingered salute made even more sarcastic by the fact that his blue tongue hung out of his mouth as he did so, and marched rigidly toward the Batmobile. It took a great deal of the Batman's considerable willpower not to kick him to the ground.
Within thirty seconds, they were both strapped in and the scenery of Gotham was racing past them as the Batmobile wove in and around traffic. Joker located the button that rolled down the window with incredible speed, and was now sticking his head outside in order to make funny faces at the pedestrians. If the Batman had been tempted to drop-kick Joker a minute ago, it was nothing next to his current urge to roll the window back up. All the way.
"You said you wanted my attention. What do you want?" he growled.
Joker's head turned halfway toward the Batman, but that was as far as it got; like a child with ADD, he appeared to completely forget he had been spoken to at all as his eyes fell upon the flashing array of buttons and readout screens before him.
The Batman saw what was coming just in time; he and Joker moved at precisely the same moment. He caught hold of the clown's wrist in mid-thrust, stopping it cold. Joker's finger quivered over the "FLAMETHROWER" button for half a second, still straining to reach its destination, before the Batman slammed the latter's arm back down against his seat. Joker gave him a sour look before turning back to the road - and then his expression shifted to sudden panic.
"STOP! AN OLD LADY!"
There was a deafening screech of protest from the Batmobile's tires as the vehicle came to a complete stop in less than two seconds. The Batman whirled around, searching desperately for the old woman. He felt his heart literally stop beating in the moment he realized that there was nobody there... then he heard Joker burst into unrestrained laughter beside him.
"Classic!" Joker gasped, now actually pounding his clenched fists against the dashboard. The Batman could only stare; his rage had surpassed such petty responses as knocking out the clown's entire set of teeth with one punch. It took a full two minutes and thirty-eight seconds for him to stop seeing red - he'd counted them himself as a means of distraction, however slight - then, hands trembling, he began to drive again.
"You know," said Joker as he wiped a tear out of his eye, "most of the time your nonexistent sense of humor would depress me, Bats. But that, haha, that was just, hahaha, just too priceless for even you to rui-"
"What. Do. You. Want."
Joker shrugged, still grinning and, for once, seemingly not at all bothered by being interrupted.
"I've been thinking lately... what do you mean to me, what do I mean to you? Oh, I don't mean the way we're tragedy and comedy, two sides of the same coin; I knew that almost from the moment I met you. Do you remember when we first met, Batsy? Down in the depths of Arkham Asylum?" The Batman said nothing, but Joker seemed to take his silence to mean that he did, because the clown closed his eyes wistfully and continued, "Ah. Memories.
"But one part of that memory bugs me. I ask you how my clothes look - which you never answer, by the way, but that's not the buggy part - then you grab me and ask me who I am, and I say 'Joker.' Ooh ooh, and then you say 'Not what: who?' You were so young back then." Joker punctuated this thought with a nostalgia-laced giggle. "Oh, but the problem is, I was young back then too. I thought I knew you already, and to be fair my general expectations have turned out mostly right, but you've continued to surprise me over the years, Bats. Sometimes in little ways, other times in big ones. The point is, we've both grown off each other a little bit. And I think it's time we addressed that, you and I."
"Get to the point," said the Batman, eyes still locked on the road.
"The point is the Lord-President of Gallifrey. Oh no, it's not a joke," he added; the Batman had turned toward him for the first time since Joker had started his speech, and the look on the vigilante's face was far from pleasant. "Think about it. When the residents of Gallifrey discuss their leader over their cups of Time Tea or whatever it is they drink, you just know they always say the Lord-President this or the Lord-President that; he's so far removed from the rest of them that they're afraid to just call him Rassilon even when they're talking directly to him.
"Now take 'the Batman.' It's got a lovely ring to it, sure, but it just seems so formal. It's like you expect me to bow down to you or something. All that was fine in the beginning, it even spiced it all up a little bit, but I know you better now, and it's time we worked toward some familiarity. Once we've reached the same level as each other the way we have, that the's just acting like a wall built between us, and that just won't do at all. We need to wave it safely goodbye so that five minutes from now I can stride into Arkham smiling, and when they ask me, 'How did you get here?' I can answer, 'Batman brought me in!'"
Joker appeared so overcome with enthusiasm at this point that he finished the last sentence with a grand sweep of his arms and an open-mouthed grin so huge it literally looked like it would crack his jawbone. The Batman could only stare - his sheer disbelief was actually powerful enough to have smothered his anger like a wet towel thrown on top of a flame, even as his thoughts turned to such matters as, This is the reason he decided to go on a murderous rampage? He snapped out of it enough to pay attention to his driving again within a few seconds, but he was still aware that his mouth remained slightly open as he murmured, "You're insane."
"Has it really taken you this long to notice?" Despite Joker's carefully melancholy tone, his smile only grew wider.
"Even if you hadn't just given about fifty people trauma that will stay with them the rest of their lives, how could you honestly expect me-"
"Hey, that one's a favor to you, Bats. You still have to meet me halfway."
"What does that mean?" said the Batman.
"Well, like I said before, there was just one problem with our first meeting. 'Joker,' I said. Joker. You took to the name swimmingly, I must say; by the time you first said it out loud it seemed like you'd already been calling me that for years. But now that it really has been years, things have changed, as I said before..."
"So - what, are you asking me to call you the Joker now?" The Batman felt like the conversation was now slipping even further past him than it had been when he wasn't talking.
"And for that answer, you win a free set of custom-made Kryptonite rings!" Joker scoffed at the sidelong glare the Batman gave him. "Oh, come on, you know it's a good idea. Just in case."
"I thought the word the was driving a wedge between us."
"When it was working for you. But now it's my turn to be the one with the title instead of the name. I've been on the receiving end of enough familiarity, thankyouverymuch. Between turning Ethan Bennett into Clayface and stealing the entire city's television, I think I've earned some show of respect."
Though the Batman was not seeing red again precisely, the borders of his vision were definitely beginning to change color.
"You will never, ever get any respect from me, Joker."
There was an infinitely short moment in which the clown simply gaped at him. Then Joker threw back his head and cackled so loudly that the Batman initially thought he was screaming in mortal agony.
"Silly bat! Don't you understand? If you had any more respect for me you'd be begging me to make you my sidekick! Everything I do, I do for you, just for you, and yet you've never stopped fighting me, never even considered it! You justify this to yourself by saying that people would get hurt if you didn't try to stop me, but you know deep down that's not the real reason. The real reason is that you just, can't, help yourself. Face it, Batsy: You need me as much as I need you."
The Batmobile seemed to stop of its own accord. It took the Batman a moment to realize that he had stopped outside the front gates of Arkham Asylum. He didn't speak for a very long time; he felt that if he tried he would surely shatter from the inside like a glass sculpture.
Then, at last, he said in little more than a whisper, "Just this once. I'll let you win... just this once, when there are no lives at stake. That's the only reason."
Joker nodded. Either he was giving the best acting performance of his life, or the look of somber, gentle understanding on his face was actually genuine.
"If that's what it will take for now, Batman, I can deal with it."
How long the silence lasted, neither of them knew, but they were both roused at the same time by the sounds of the approaching Arkham guards.
The hero gave a weak smile. "I think the Joker has a madhouse to break out of."
The villain returned the smile with explosive force. "And I think Batman has a city to get back to!" And with that, he jumped out of the car and skipped past the open gates and into the night.