A/N: This shortish piece is inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe's "Lenore" (where I got this story's title), singerYunyu's "Lenore's Song", and the general Lost Lenore trope in fiction, that I notice is a motif with many of Batman's villains. So it's more of a character study of four villains rather than an action-packed adventure, is what I'm saying. This is sort of similar to my story Jackie, in that some of the sentences are intentionally run-ons or only semi-sensical, since these sections are all from various madmen's points of view. Although I'm rooting this principally in the DCAU, I've also borrowed heavily from The Killing Joke graphic novel by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland.
So they own that work, and Warner Bros. and whoever owns everything else.
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride-
For her, the fair and debonnaire, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes-
The life still there, upon her hair- the death upon her eyes.
-Edgar Allan Poe, "Lenore"
Never nevermore,
I'm your lost Lenore
A ghostly imprint upon your mind I bore
-Yunyu, "Lenore's Song"
Jervis Tetch sometimes thought the Hatter should chase Alice, not Alice chase the White Rabbit.
The corridors winding down to his cell in Arkham had the burrowing darkness of a rabbit hole. Down, down he would follow her.
But it would only be a game. Not like last time, when things got a little out of hand. He didn't blame Alice, of course: she was playing along splendidly, she had danced with him, with earnest, sky blue eyes and blonde hair spinning, spinning, spinning around him, just as they could spin and spin around this rabbit hole of an asylum, if she would only—
No. No. Jervis did not blame Alice. Billy the Lizard was the first to cheat the game, botching everything so miserably. What had once been an evening of blissful celebration of Alice's very Merry Unengagement was erased, obliterated; his Alice at the office again as if nothing had happened, save for that wretched ring on her finger.
Wretched, wretched ring.
Then there was the Batman. He had hammered the final nail in the coffin, punched the final fist through the looking glass.
But here, at night, alone in his cell, Jervis Tetch could block out Tweedle-Bill and Tweedle-Bat from his memory, out, out, out, off with those memories, off!
Night in his cell at Arkham, alone and away, the only sound the soft purr of the buzzing fluorescent lights in the steel-gray hall, and Jervis could think of just Alice, always just Alice.
Long blonde hair, round blue eyes, and a face, so beautiful, so beautiful.
"Cup of coffee, Mr.Tetch?" Asked that beloved mouse-squeak of a voice, at the end of her second week under Tetch's employ.
Tetch tried his luck. "No…no thank you, Miss Pleasance. How about…how about instead…" he cleared his throat, took a plunge. "…A spot of tea? You see, my dormouse has fallen asleep again, and I need something to pour on his nose to wake him up."
And he smiled in agony, in an agony of apprehension, as that clear little forehead suddenly grew wrinkled with confusion.Then he watched in ecstasy as the clouds lifted, the eyes brightened, and she squealed in laughter.
A few graceful snorts, then her merry voice rejoined, "Sure thing! That'll give me a chance to think about why a raven is like a writing desk!" And she hopped like a rabbit from her desk to prepare a cup for the best boss she'd ever worked for.
And she therefore confirmed for the eminent Jervis Tetch the hypothesis he'd been brewing since the moment he first saw her blonde hair and heard her distinct voice: that he was forever and ever in love now, nevermore to be left alone in the dizzying whirlpool rabbit hole of his life….
Harvey Dent didn't have an easy a time as Tetch did. He couldn't just spend time with Grace in his head, recall her just like that with a snap of his fingers, you know.
No, he needed to consult with the fates first.
The fluorescent light hummed off his coin, a single pinprick of light. Heads, Grace. Tails, Big Bad Harve would choose the subject for the evening.
His thumb sent the coin flying.
Please please Grace please just a few minutes….
Landed with a tiny thud on his palm. Harvey instinctively covered it with his hand, breathing heavily.
Then, like a child readying himself before ripping off a band-aid, Harvey counted to two and threw off his hand with a mad swing.
Heads.
His sigh of relief filled the cell around him, allowing his lost fiancée to saunter in with that certain half-grin on her face, blue eyes shining as she took all the space she could inside his mind.
As Harvey closed his eyes, fighting sleep so that his consciousness could enjoy her for as long as it could, he was at his wedding. Both sides of Harvey were pure Harvey this imaginary day that never happened, Big Bad Harve either slain as a dragon of old, or maybe in this fantasy he just never existed. On this phantom wedding day, Harvey stood at the altar, drinking in the sight of his bride.
He saw the glad little smile on the face, the long blonde hair covered by a flowing white veil, everything about her beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
And he clutched her two hands with his two hands; his two hands—clean and unblemished, almost as pure and simple as the woman in front of him.
As he stood with her hands in his, her face so beautiful and her hair so long and blonde, Harvey Dent could forget that Grace had not visited him in Arkham for some time, that the last time she had come during visiting hours Big Bad Harve had won the coin toss, and had said such vulgar, crude things to her that her gorgeous little face had turned crimson and then white, and she had stood unsteadily and walked out.
Walked out.
No. No. Harvey had won this toss, so he could pretend that Big Bad Harve was a big dead dragon.
As long as he could tonight, he would hold her warm hands and stare at her ring….
"Harvey!" Her blue eyes shone with giddy tears. She was speechless, at least speechless as he had ever seen her: all she said again was, "Harvey!"
"You like it, baby?" Harvey said about the tiny box he held open to her.
She slipped the diamond onto her finger, shaking her head and smiling. "Oh, my God. I mean, I know we'd discussed this, but I never…I never…I mean, tonight of all nights?" She laughed lovingly at him. "When you're announcing your intention to run for reelection?"
Harvey shrugged carelessly, hard-pressed to care much about anything when he had a Grace in front of him as happy as this one. "I knew you were expecting this, so I wanted to spring it when you'd be most surprised."
He watched her carefully as she inspected the diamond's seemingly endless tiny, sparkling fragments. Her face was so reverent and serene.
"Well?" He asked quietly. "Shall we formalize our arrangement, Miss Lamont?" He joked in his best district attorney voice.
She pursed her bee-stung lips, swallowing a grin, eyes glowing happily. "I'll have my people sign all the necessary papers and fax you tonight." She leaned in impulsively for a bruising, powerful kiss. "Oh, Harvey, yes! Yes, you wonderful, crazy man, I'll marry you!" She stroked his cheek, studying his beloved face. "You do constantly surprise me,"she murmured, almost to herself. "I never know who I'm going to see on any given day: Harvey the brilliant shop talking lawyer, or Harvey the hopelessly hopeless romantic."
She buried her face in his shoulder as she hugged him, and Harvey breathed in the lavender scent of her long blonde hair.
"I can't wait until both men are my husband," she sighed.
An uncomfortable feeling thudded in Harvey's heart at those words, but as his arms squeezed protectively around her, he knew without a doubt that with Grace in his arms each night, he'd slay that dragon. Slay him for good.
Victor Fries did not need to carve out any time in his mind for Nora, needed to negotiate with no fates. All he was was Nora. There was never a time when she was not with him, not a part of him in some vital, necessary way.
His cell was comparatively isolated from the rest, so other inmates would not suffer the chill required to keep him alive.
Alive.
Victor sneered at the word. Death wasn't heat. Death was not knowing where she was, not knowing if her cryogenic chamber would ever be recovered, if she would ever be recovered.
The only warmth Victor Fries had ever known in his cold, lonely life was the only one he couldn't find now, couldn't save.
Victor and Nora had always had to struggle for peace. Always. From the very beginning. His colleagues had assumed the nearly forty-year old Fries had lost some of his stoic intelligence, and had merely fallen for a pretty, twenty-three year old face and the promise of a trophy wife. Nora's family, particularly her sister Dora who had managed Nora's dancing career for years, had essentially thought the same thing, and blamed Victor for stealing away their baby and taking her to thankless, chilly Gotham. They also blamed him for halting her promising ballet career before she could really make a name for herself.
None of them understood the happiness Victor and Nora brought each other. And because Nora insisted, no one but Victor knew that her career ended because her natural sickliness, that had encased her in a protective shell of concerned loved ones since childhood, had increased to the point where dancing was out of the question for her.
Victor ground his icy teeth as he recalled the dismissive attitudes his co-workers had given his Nora when she'd earnestly visit him at his office, scribbling notes, trying to understand his work, to help in any way she could. Someone as pretty and delicate as she obviously had rocks for brains was the general consensus, though no one was brazen enough to say so in front of them.
No one knew how horribly she took it when she failed to grasp certain concepts, and how ecstatic she'd become on occasions when she understood one of Victor's many complicated theories or experiments.
Nora was far from stupid. But she was a stranger in a strange land, save for the man who looked her in the eyes and talked to her not as a condescending pedant, but as an enormously loving man she could not live without. Yet still: this was new territory for her, and she was far from her old home, far from the stage and the practiced steps she'd been rehearsing since infancy, per the recommendations from childhood doctors to strengthen her fragile frame.
Alone in his frozen corner of Arkham, Victor watched her miniature form dance in his hand, snow falling all around her, like the first time he saw her. When he, too, had been a stranger in a strange land….
He waited composed but entranced in the lobby. To think he had not wanted to come tonight. Since childhood, Victor Fries had isolated himself with his scientific hobbies, left alone by his detached, scientist parents and by the neighborhood children who quietly regarded him as an even quieter freak. And he had lived his adult life in a similar vein: keep to yourself and do your job. Soon, humanity will thank you once the techniques are perfected and immortality can finally be within man's reach. Until then, what else is there?
He had learned tonight.
Ferris Boyle, who from the beginning had irritated Fries with his snake-oil charm and ingratiating ways, had passive-aggressively insisted that Fries' department take a trip to New York for an annual scientific conference, and also that they attend the New York Ballet's production of The Nutcracker.
"It'll be positive publicity for your work with frozen crap to be seen at a ballet about winter, Victor," Boyle had said heartily, slapping Fries on the back. "Y'know, make you look slightly human. That oughta please the backers. Plus, they've agreed to comp the tickets."
For two acts Victor had fought sleep. For two acts, until the Sugarplum Fairy entered.
Unlike the others in the cast, this girl—this tiny, porcelain girl—wore her long blonde hair down, and her pink-red dress stood out from the more pastel colors surrounding her.
But it wasn't her outfit or her precise, delicate dancing that shook Victor to his core. It was the aliveness of her, the fiery abandon of this small ballerina while she danced to the falling snow around her.
Watching this pretty blonde girl dance, Victor Fries, already graying slightly at the temples, big-shouldered and full-grown, felt happy for the first time in his life.
Boyle had arranged for the dancers to greet the scientists afterward for a photo-op. It was the first and last kind thing Boyle would ever do for Victor Fries, though kindness was the last thing on Boyle's mind when he did it.
Waiting for the dancers to emerge, Victor's eyes landed on the gift shop, and on one item in particular.
On one of the shop's shelves were stacked several snow globes custom-made at the opera house for the ballet, modeled after Nora Smithy's Sugarplum Fairy. Victor had not realized he had walked over to one or was gently tracing the image of the girl with his finger, or that cameras were going off and a chatter of voices filling the lobby, until a soft, pert voice interrupted his reverie.
"I don't know. I don't think it looks much like me, do you?"
The always-dignified Dr. Fries almost jumped. He turned to the figure standing beside him, who barely reached his shoulders.
The same long, pale, abundant blonde hair from before, same wide eyes so deep blue they were almost violet, same little red dress. She locked eyes with him, no trace of shyness. He had no way of knowing that she was drinking in the sight of this tall, erudite looking man who seemed unaware of anything going on around him, so different from the comparatively blatant theatrical types she was used to.
All he saw was that beautiful, blonde face from before. With one difference. The smile was directed at him now.
For someone who had never experienced happiness before and was now experiencing ecstasy, Victor Fries handled himself relatively well. He held out a surprisingly steady hand.
"Dr. Victor Fries. And yes, I do think it looks like you. Just not as…warm."
Her hand was so little it practically disappeared into his great paw. Like her, it gave off a welcoming heat for something so fragile.
"I'm Nora Smithy. I hope you buy it. No one else is, and my feelings are getting a little hurt." She laughed, and Victor Fries asked her to dinner right away.
He was only ever so bold once more in his life, when he smuggled her comatose body into his lab that faraway night….
"Hey, Frosty!" Victor was jolted from his memory by that cackling, malicious laughter that assaulted all the inmates every now and again, from far down the hall. "Hate to tell ya, but your wife's been seen with another man! Apparently someone put her next to Walt Disney's freezing chamber, and well, looks like he's got himself a new Snow White!" The Joker's voice dissolved into a fit of mad guffaws, echoing mercilessly down the hall.
Victor's livid blue face smashed against the small square window of his door, staring into the darkness where Joker still laughed.
"Do not mock my pain!" He yelled vengefully as guards ran to calm him down. His eyes slit dangerously. "Do you hear me? You may have never felt love or lost it, but don't intrude on us who remember! And who can never stop remembering! It's all we have left!"
"Psh, what a cry-baby," Joker muttered bemusedly to himself as he rolled over on his cot.
Unlike his compatriots in this dungeon, Joker fought sleep not at all. He savored no memory to keep him awake. At least, not in the queasy sentimental way a snowman like Fries did or loonies like Tetch and Dent did. True, there were some memories he enjoyed revisiting time and again- hell, he loved reliving all the times he had roughed up Batman, pissed him off, made him lose his even temper. Plus, y'know, all the innocent lives Joker'd ruined over the years, those were fun to daydream about.
Joker could be a romantic when it came to idealizing the comic gods of generations past, the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Jack Benny. People worth romanticizing.
But he laughed in the face of Harley's "genuine" affection. Of Batman's attempts to redeem him.
He laughed at the faraway, dim memories of a childhood, a childhood with a smiling family consisting of Momma, Poppa, Gram and Gramps, everyone cooing over little J-'s antics he'd learned from the cinema. A little Chaplin cane twirl, a Keaton pratfall. "Maw, we've got a little Buster of our own," Poppa would proclaim proudly over the pipe.
Maybe. Maybe not. But the memory was still too damn precious, too damn loving. Sometimes Joker would enter such a memory and pull out a meat cleaver...
The Joker's eyes fluttered, and he could feel his mind slipping a little bit further into obliviousness. Before it did completely, he jumped forward a good fifteen, twenty years in time to when he was a gangster. Shoot 'em up James Cagney type, not Buster Keaton. HA! Even more embarrassing. He was certainly glad he gave up that lifestyle in a hurry- well, to be fair, it was more like he'd been dunked into acid.
But still, Joker felt very proud he was able to combine both those personas of the zany comedian and the brutal killer so brilliantly into his present shtick. No one could improve on the Joker.
Nothing had ever made him happier.
He believed this simple truth of his, even as he fell deeper into sleep, and a nagging voice was telling him otherwise and warned him not to enter the territory between the memory of his Norman Rockwell childhood and his tough-guy adulthood-
His mind hummed and the idiots babbling about their soppy lost loves pushed him and pushed him, and hard as he fought, he was suddenly there.
He could hear it now.
That laugh.
Always, no matter how nasty and hateful the crime or how proportionately innocent the prank, there was a laugh, very faint, in the back of his mind.
This anonymous laughter didn't increase his manic glee like the idea of Batman laughing in agonized madness. And it didn't annoy him like Harley's sycophantic giggles.
It frightened him. Frightened him because it reminded him of a place in his emotions that wasn't sentimental yet wasn't cynical. A place that was-
Yes, too late now. He was asleep. Asleep, and saw the face the laughter belonged to.
Long blonde hair. Long blonde hair that could turn lank and a little greasy if she wasn't careful with it. Blonde hair and blue eyes in a face. A decidedly average-looking face, neither beautiful nor ugly, average.
Young, barely in her twenties. He looked at his hands that were constructing crude balloon figures for her amusement. His hands were young, too, and just as average-looking, if not a trifle long and twitchy. Not as young as the child Joker, not as old as the gangster Joker.
He was occupying that in-between time that his subconscious always warned him against. He stared at that average-looking, rather washed out face, thinking abstractedly that even given how obnoxious she was Harley was at least a lot hotter, when that face smiled.
SMILED.
Oh, god.
Oh, god.
That smile. That big smile made that little face so beautiful, though it wasn't really. Blonde and beautiful and average and washed out and his all his she was his and he'd stay with her and they'd raise a child-
Raise a child.
He couldn't believe his ears. "Ch-child?" He asked the petite girl in front of him.
"Yes!" She laughed at him, her blue eyes ecstatic. She patted her stomach, imitating a drum-roll. "The punchline is that it weren't no case of indigestion after all!"
He dropped haggard into his chair, blinking rapidly.
"Uh-oh, we're losing him," she said, kneeling down to look him in the eyes, still laughing, always laughing. "You want to hear it again? You're going to be a dad-"
"NO!" Joker commanded sharply in his sleep.
The steel-gray hall was startlingly quiet.
His mind tried again, confident nothing more disturbing would occur in the safety of his inner funhouse.
But she was there still, always laughing, always.
"Of course I'll marry you! I never could find anybody as good in the sack as you. Oh, and you're funny as hell, too." Her smile was so wide he thought his heart would burst, and then she leaned in for a kiss-
"STOP IT!" The guards shot a questioning glance to each other, wondering if it was worth the trouble of waking the clown freak, or if they should just let him toss and turn and yell occasionally.
Again, one more time, she won't be there, surely.
"Ugh, look at how fat I am," she said, looking at her growing belly, her slippered feet resting on the chair in front of her. The small apartment was a lot like her, physically plain and a little worn, but homey and frank, comforting. "Honestly, I wouldn't be offended if you worked in some fat ugly pregnant wife jokes into your act, I would if I were you." She glanced at him, frowning. "What's the matter, babe? I was fishing for compliments, you know."
"Oh, honey," he groaned into his hands. "What the hell have I done? We're not making ends meet, and the baby will be here soon. God, I'm such a failure!"
"Hey," she said softly, gently taking his wrist. "Cut that out. Where's that smile I'm so fond of?"
Another figure cut in, another place. A plainclothesman.
"Sir, I'm sorry, but your wife"-
Things were getting staticy underneath his eyelids. Sweat permeated Joker's white forehead.
He was outside that nightclub. Getting ready for the night."Your wife had an accident"-
"NO!" Joker yelped. "That's not-not how it happened!"
No, there was fire everywhere. And it was his fault. Everything had gone wrong, and-
"Apparently testing some sort of baby bottle heater"-
"I hear some kind of boiler exploded."
A big smile with long blonde hair and shining blue eyes was his wife as she rolled over in the middle of the night, waking him up, saying, "Hey. Hey. I'm bored, make me laugh."
She had been six months pregnant, the papers said.
"Make me laugh."
The burial would be at Gotham Cemetery on-
He pulled the funniest face he could manage at three o'clock in the morning.
No trace of the husband on the premises. No other family to note.
Even something as silly as a lolling tongue and bulging, crossed eyes was enough for her.
Jeannie laughed.
Jeannie laughed.
...Jeannie laughed.
And it was that laugh that woke him up, screaming.
He panted, ignoring the officers yelling at him to pipe down and the disgruntled objections from neighboring cells.
Joker would not remember these dreams for long. In a few more moments, once his eyes focused on the fluorescent lights in the hall and his heart rate dropped, she would be gone. And he'd hear Hatter moaning about a lizard stealing Alice, Dent screaming at Two-Face for scaring off Grace, and Victor speaking in hushed tones to the snow globe in his hand.
Yet all Joker would hear, all he would let himself hear, was her laughter in the back of his mind.