Disclaimer: The Joker and pretty much everyone else here belongs to WB and DC
Okay– okay, so there's this guy, right? And he's walking along the street one day and he thinks "hey, what if?"
…not very exciting, you say? But just that little bit of supposition has been behind every big leap forward in time. A bunch of architects look at a river and think "hey, what if?" a bunch of Romans look down on a peaceful little valley of Greeks and think "hey, what if?" an arsonist looks at a bunch of migratory worker's plywood shacks and thinks "hey…what if?" Worlds have turned on such ideas. Sometimes a whole chain of events are set in motion by people just thinking hey…what if? What if I just took that money? What if I followed that guy? What if I just stopped giving a shit?
That last one happens more often than you think.
My point is, children, that simply saying "what if?" is the catalyst, the little pebble that starts an avalanche.
Take, for instance, this guy I know. Let's call him Jack…or Joe! Joseph. Last name…I don't know, Kerr? Joe Kerr, yeah, I like that. Well Joe was your average…Joe, I guess, nine-to-five, smoke break, crappy car, brown suit wearin' Joe. Nondescript as a #2 pencil. Boring as all get-out. Couldn't tie his shoes without a chart. I hate him already, and I know you do too.
Joe worked at a factory, didn't he? I must've mentioned that. Axis chemicals. Came home every day smelling like a bus depot bathroom. Slowly going blind from the stuff he handled every day. Well, one day Joe just goes "hey…what if?"
He quits his job, takes up comedy. Gets in deep to the mob, deep. Promises to pay them back. They don't believe him. Cutthroat razor prepared to do just what it's named for, and he does a stupid thing. He ducks. It goes wild, slices him wide open–
…y'know, I don't really like this story anymore. Let's change it, you and I.
Joe had a crappy job, crappy house, crappy life. He has a wife too, but I don't know where he'd pick it up. It–She's pregnant. Tells him they need money, moolah, green, or they'll get evicted. He tries to rob a bank. Everything goes fine until someone trips the alarm…and him. There's no security guard, he's leaning against the wall with most of his brains sprayed out behind him. They don't have a gun. Nobody has a taser, or mace. But there's a glass bottle in the trash, and somebody's gets a bright idea…
Naw, let's forget the wife. She dies in a fire or something. Joe's got a wedding-ring tan line that ain't too popular with the ladies. Or he's too unattractive.
That's it, Joe's a small-timer and boy is he ugly. Can't even break in with the Chechen's thugs, and my blind gramma could do that. Now Joe's pretty lucky, and I'm talking Dent's coin landing tails-up lucky.
Maroni's after him, sends his best man to finish the job. The guy's like a cheetah or, I don't know, something fast and creepy. He sneaks up on Joe, right as Joe's about to tie his shoe. Joe looks behind him and by reflex kicks the guy's legs out from underneath him. I'm talking l-u-c-k-y.
The guy goes down, but manages to grab onto a rail. They're on a balcony, did I mention that? Joe's not too bright, I told you before, and offers the guy his hand. Joe doesn't know, you see. The guy punches Joe in the face, which must've seemed like a pretty bright idea at the time. Trouble was, he forgot to hold on with the other hand. Joe goes backwards, the guy goes down. You could hear the splat for blocks around, I heard.
Well, Joe's depressed. Why? Well, he just killed Sal Maroni's best man, and nobody'll believe him. His prints are all over, but they aren't even in the system yet, that's how much of a small-timer he is. So he decides to drink his troubles away. That doesn't work, so he decides to fight his troubles away. That doesn't work, so he decides to…well, you can see where I'm going with this.
So he finds a girl not too scarred up, and they go to his little place to have some fun, which is hard because she won't stop laughing at him. She hasn't stopped since they met. So he tells her the Maroni story, hoping it'll impress her. It doesn't. She laughs so hard she can't even stand up, so she sits down on the bed and slides right off, which just makes her laugh harder. Joe decides to smack her around a little, y'know? Just to show her who's boss. A girl like that's used to it, right?
She doesn't like that. Not. One. Bit. And she's got a knife to back her up.
Pretty cold-blooded, if you think about it. Shoot a john, he dies sooner or later. Cut a john, and he might just live to regret it. She does to Joe what her pimp's been threatening to do for a while, to wit: "open your face up so's the bullshit can pour out easier."
Joe can't see he's in so much pain. The girl's not smart, because a smart girl would've left right then. Her john can't move, can't pay her one back; she can take his wallet and steal away, ask her pimp to protect her. But this is a girl who carries a knife, and thinks she can handle herself. This is a girl who starts taunting the guy she just sliced up.
Joe's tired of being laughed at. By everyone. Teachers, librarians, cops, thugs, doctors, all of 'em. Especially this little whore. So he goes "hey…what if?"
He makes her stop laughing. And then something happens for the first time. He laughs. He laughs so hard tears pour out of his eyes and he has to sit down on the floor, just laughing and holding his gut. It's easy to laugh, because his smile's been cut wide, and all the laughs just flood out–
Bullshit you say? Fine. I'll give you another one. There's this guy Joe–
Yes, it'll always be Joe, unless you can come up with something better.
Well Joe's pretty smart. I mean s-m-a-r-t. Not in the way professors or millionaires are smart, but smart. He can read people like a map…or a blueprint. Yeah, that's more fitting, because Joe likes to look at a person and see just how much he has to take before they just collapse like an old building.
Now, being that kind of smart, your options are pretty limited. Not a lot of jobs call for that. So Joe decides to become an entrepreneur. He hires himself out for a respectable amount of cash, and does a neat, perfect, boring job. Oh yeah, it's fun at first, what isn't? But the mob has no imagination, no creativity. It's all too easy. He's never caught, never linked to any crime. Bo-ring!
Well, Joe goes down to a crappy little pub and slings one back, trying to think of why he's so bored of it all. There's this bar girl there, very sweet, who tells him he's got a real gift, and it's his job to share it with the world. Very, very sweet. So he thanks her, goes on his way, and sends her a little money.
Or he brains her with a bar stool and shoots the owner, I forget which.
So he goes on yet another heist, but this one is different. This one has and unexpected guest…
Of course it's the Batman, are you an idiot or something? A few knocks to the jaw and your IQ goes down to room temperature, huh?
Joe's never had a challenge before, really. He's also never gotten hurt. He's lost whole companies of loyal goons, but never a scratch. But this guy, he cuts Joe's face. Cuts it real bad. Joe gets away, but he's a little shaken. This is different from the police or the FBI. The man's a vigilante, a form of controlled chaos who sets out to fight the destructive order of crime…
Sorry if I wax poetic, but this part always makes me a bit moony.
So Joe stops doing jobs for a while. He holes himself up somewhere and looks up everything he can find, everything about the Batman he can get his grubby little hands on. It's not a lot. He hasn't been around long; nobody knows where he came from. He could be anybody just walking the streets, but inside, oh inside he's different from all those other schmucks. Inside him there's something that told him to do something no one else would've even considered, disguise himself and fight the freaks on their own level. Joe looks at article after article, heart pounding, mouth dry, face flushed, thinking "what if?" What…if?
No?
Okay.
So there's this guy who comes to Gotham and he…
It doesn't matter where he's from, he's in Gotham now! Stop crying!
So there's a guy in Gotham. He doesn't have a name. No distinct personality or skill. He's just passing through, maybe, or looking for work. It doesn't really matter. But he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. A bar, to be precise. A bar full of mob thugs. And he walks in just as the grand-high thug is finished telling a joke. Everybody laughs in a short, tense kind of way. Except for the guy, he just stares at everyone. The thug notices.
"Hey buddy," he says, "don't you think it's funny?"
The guy takes a good look around before he speaks. Nobody's in a good mood, not really, and if he doesn't answer they'll probably do something bad to him. Probably involving his kidneys. But he has a feeling they won't like any answer that comes out of his mouth, that's the kind of mood they're in. A kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. So he thinks reeeal hard before answering.
"Sure," the guy says, "I think it's funny. But I'm not laughing. Know why?"
"Why?" the thug says, and he's got this humorless kind of not-smile on his face.
"Well, not to be a pain, but I think you told it wrong." He says. You could've heard a pin hit the floor like a thunderclap. Then they all pile on him at once. He was wrong, you know. It wasn't just his kidneys they worked over; it was everything they could get their hands on. Which turned out to be a lot.
They beat him for a long time, ending up in this alley somewhere in the narrows before it went all funhouse-mirror. The guy's body is like one big bruise, or a bag of pain. Sorry, I'm not good with metaphors. So the main thug's there, right? And he hears the guy whispering something. The thug bends down and says, "What?"
Somehow the guy manages to open one eye, just barely, and talks in this ruined kind of whisper. The thug has to bend down to hear it.
"This," he says, looking the thug straight in the eye, "this is the best you can do? This is the best the city can do?"
The thug gets real angry. His neck gets bright red, and his teeth start grinding like a cement mixer.
"The best I got?" he says, real quiet, "oh no sugar, this ain't the best I got, not by a long shot."
He wants to do something to commemorate the occasion, something lasting, and his eyes fall on this one piece of broken glass. It's nice and sharp, got quite an edge to it. So he picks it up and looks down at the guy.
"Y'know, I been thinking," he says, real slow and calm, "maybe it ain't me who told the joke wrong. Maybe it's you hearin' it wrong. Or maybe you don't know what funny is. So, hey, what if I helped you with that?"
And he takes that glass and he makes sure that guy, that…clown won't have to be left out of any joke ever again. And then he leaves. He leaves! I mean, couldn't you just die? The guy dares him to show his best, and he leaves! Thank you, good night nurse!
So the guy just lays there in the alley and after a while he starts to chuckle. Starts to giggle. Because it is funny. You see, that was the best he could do. It was the best any of them could do. All they did was step on you and then walk away. No of them had any feel for it, not of them had any balls. This was the best the city could throw at him. And he was still here. It was funny, you had to laugh.
And he does. Ha.
Somehow he stands up, still laughing, and he catches sight of his reflection in a filthy window. This sets him right off. The best they could do to him, ha ha ha heh heh.
This was the kind of criminal that Gotham dealt in. Haha hee hee ho, hoo ha hee ho. Sorry.
He plays with his face, sort of…admiring himself in the dirty glass, and decides something. Gotham really was in need of a better class of criminal. Someone who could be more creative than just ripping off Glasgow thugs as a punishment. Someone who could tell a joke without the slightest possibility of it going misunderstood. Someone who commanded respect.
And then he stopped. Looked at himself more closely in the mirror. And thought hey…what if?
…think I'm lying? Okay then. There's this guy. It could be anybody but it's this guy specifically.
What do you mean? His name doesn't matter! It never mattered!
There's this guy, and maybe he's done wrong by the mob. Or he wants to do the mob wrong. Or he's lost someone. Maybe a wife, or even a dog. You don't know, he could be lying. That's not the point!
He comes to Gotham one day and looks around and doesn't like it. It's too…typical, you know? Pretending to be like every other city, when it wasn't. No, this city acted like all it ever deserved were useless Maroni thugs and dumb Chechens. But it really needed something else, something else that really represented the soul of the place. A yin to its yang. Something to combat the sudden outbreak of justice that swooped across his vision like it was hunting moths…
What does it matter what he did? Or why he did it? My whole point is that this is a man who looked up one day and said "what if?"
What…if?
…by the way, did you wanna know how I got these scars?
Author's note: even though this is (loosely) set in the movieverse, this fic owes a lot to the comics and the Joker's many origins. Especially The Killing Joke, and the Joker's immortal line "if I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" But what it owes most to is Heath Ledger's portrayal of him, and the scary thought that there might not even be a person in there! I looked at it one day and said "hey…
what if?"