Gotham could be breathtaking by night. Fog and dazzling droplets of rain glimmering in the warm city lights. That's the city Batman protects, his hands holding it together at the seams that others can't help but try and pull apart.
He cherishes it.
The beauty would be hidden by the rotting walls of the rotting apartment, but for the tiny slivers of light slipping in from the boarded window.
It makes it hard to know what he's fighting for.
"Decide, now!" The boy screams in a desperate voice so different, yet so like the cries of the child in the nightmares that haunt him on sleepless nights.
The Joker is laughing, a low chuckle that bounces off the walls, magnifying the terrible sound until it's so, so much louder than it should be.
The boy or the hidden city.
The whole thing is almost surreal, dream like.
Batman decides.
He drops the gun, and outraged, the boy pulls the trigger. Batman ducks and a batarang flies from his fingertips.
Blood and a wheezing gasp. The boy goes down, clutching his throat and dropping the gun, releasing his captive. Something new appears to take its place, an oblong box, wired and with a single blood red switch.
Batman rushes forward, kicks the trigger from the boy's hand, it shatters against the nearest wall and the boy falls into the ground, bright red droplets splattering all around him.
The clown's chuckles have morphed into a full-blown bout of hysterical laughter. Batman drags the monster by his lapels before he can escape, bashes his bleached face into the nearest wall hard enough to shatter the crumbling plaster.
His fist crashes into that face again and again, cartilage and teeth caving under heavy blows until the clown falls mercifully silent.
It's only then Batman hears the feint, beeping, accompanied by the flickering of dimly lit numbers.
A countdown, but he'd… there's another trigger clutched loosely in a limp hand.
No time to defuse the bomb.
He drops the clown, grabs the boy, Jason weighs more than the man himself does, more than Batman could have ever thought that scrawny, brightly colored child would ever get the chance to weigh.
Batman crashes through the locked door and across the hallway, then directly though the door of the adjacent apartment.
BOOM
The explosion rocks the building to its foundations, throwing both Batman and the boy wrapped in his cape clear across the apartment. Only the tether of Batman's grapple hooked securely on the exposed piping saves them from being tossed through the shattered window.
It's hard to hold the line while still gripping the dead weight of the boy, but he manages it until the rubble stops pelting him and fiery wind ceases trying to penetrate the thick fabric of his cape.
By the time it's over he can scarcely feel his numb arms, and the icy Gotham wind is biting at the exposed skin of his face.
"Jason." He says, his voice firm, conveying his disapproval at the boys course of action. There were other ways, so, so many other ways he could have gotten Bruce's attention. Courses of action that wouldn't have put him in the difficult position he now found himself.
The boy is silent, not so much as a twitch from him, there hadn't been since…
"Jason?" He tries again, this time softer, more hesitant as he lays the boy on the ground, right on top of a puddle of his own singed blood.
His skin is ashen under the soot staining his cheeks, dust and fragments of debris gathering at the gash stretching across his neck.
Bruce's chest feels like it's been pierced through by a blade of ice, his entire body freezing up like it hasn't in years.
He cradles the boy's head, presses against the boy's throat. In trying to stem the flow of blood he worries for a second that he's going to strangle his son, but there's no air flow to restrict, no more blood bubbling out of the wound.
No pulse fighting against the pressure.
It takes his breath away. Smoke and glowing embers shining in the burning fires. Bruce's hands go limp at the ragged tear in his son's neck, there's nothing left to hold together.
Across the non-existent hall, a bloody batarang warps in the fires and snaps in two with a final crack.