"Author's" note:so, I wrote this for the BatJokes Multichoice and planned to make it a one-shot. It didn't work. This is the first time this happens to me I think, it's weird, I don't want this. Anyway, this is kind of a prologue, the Batman/Joker action will come in later chapters. Don't ask when. Don't ask at all. You don't want to know what goes on in my mind. It's weird, dangerous and infective and you don't want to end up like me. I hope you enjoy this

Disclaimer: not mine

Bruce was standing by the window, admiring the beautiful sunset. It was a cloudless evening, and the sun was painting the sky in shades of red and orange. Bruce wasn't an expert in poetry, but he supposed the moment was really poetic. And he certainly wasn't blind, nor totally insensitive to beauty. His arms were crossed on his chest, and he wondered if he could go to his room and spend the time reading something. He was tempted to, Alfred had given him a new book that looked interesting, but Thomas had said something about the possibility of needing him later.

An hour after the sun had completely disappeared, an alarm set off. It was a loud, piercing noise, and Bruce knew what it meant. He turned around and ran towards the south-east part of the manor. He opened the secret passage Thomas had built to get to the foundations, and as soon as he did thick black smoke and heat came out of it. Bruce got on the lift, and one second before he could close it behind himself Alfred joined him.

«You shouldn't come down there» Bruce said «It's dangerous»

«It is also for you» Alfred replied.

In the cave it was chaos. Alfred started coughing and covered his noise, the smoke rising from the chemical products on flames making his throat burn. Bruce didn't have this problem, though the heat was more than he could bear. He looked around and saw Thomas, standing on a table. He was surrounded by fire. Apparently, something had gone wrong with his experiments. Bruce was about to step out of the lift to help Thomas, when a can of something exploded near the man. Thomas screamed in pain as his body was set on fire.

«Father-» a flame hit Bruce's arm, the burning sensation traveling through him and making him stop mid-sentence. Before he could do anything, Alfred started up the lift and they were back in the upper rooms, the door closing behind them. The two sat on the ground right out of the lift, Alfred coughing and with tears running down his face, Bruce with his unharmed hand clenched around his burnt forearm.

«Are you-» Alfred couldn't finish his phrase as the coughing resumed.

«...ok? More or less» Bruce said. He thumped his head against the wall behind himself. Both him and Alfred had warned Thomas many times about the dangers of having all those flammable substances near each other, but he had never listened to them. Now the security system would contain the fire and eventually it would all burn down, but that wasn't the problem. As the alarm kept screaming, Bruce realized that Alfred's tears were not only of physical pain, that a lab could be rebuilded, but Thomas Wayne was lost forever.

Bruce wondered how people usually feel after seeing their father burn alive. Far worse than he did, that's for sure. Many would blame him for being so cold, but he simply couldn't feel any pain that wasn't due to his wound. He looked down and removed his hand from his wound, seeing the plastic that resembled skin melted and revealing the wires that ran underneath it.

Bruce made sure that Alfred was physically fine and sent the butler to sleep. The old man didn't complain at all, not when Bruce checked on him and made him breathe some fresh air in the garden, not when he declared that he should go to bed and get some rest. Bruce should take him at the hospital tomorrow, to be sure he was totally fine, but tonight he decided it was better to let the man have some piece. Thomas had not only been his employer, but also his friend, it was only normal that Alfred was emotionally drained.

Only when the butler was in his room, Bruce walked to his. Most of the tools were down in the cave, but he still kept something in his room, just in case he needed to repaired and the cave was inaccessible. Like now. He sat under the light and examined his wound.

Repairing his skin would be simple, but the wires were another thing. Half of them were burnt, and replacing them was a work of huge precision. He could do it alone, but it would be better to have Alfred help him with it when the man was in the conditions to. Luckily those were only the outer wires, who served the only purpose of giving him sensorial input. The important ones, those needed for the correct movement of his hand, were protected by a layer of a metal alloy, which had a non-conducting gel underneath. Bruce grabbed his tools and resigned himself to losing sensibility on his left hand for the foreseeable future.

Bruce was the one who recuperated Thomas's body, early in the morning. The fire had died quickly, after burning all the chemicals and a great number of the bats who lived in the cave. The air was still full of fumes and some zones were still burning, but Bruce could go through the cave safely enough. Bruce's smell sensors told him the place stink of chemicals and burnt flesh.

Thomas - or what remained of him - was lying near the spot the flames had caught him. The body was all blackened bones and wrinkled skin. Bruce took him in his arms and carried him out. Alfred was standing in the room when he walked out of the lift - the butler's eyes were red, due to the crying and the lack of sleep, and he was shaking lightly, but it didn't look like he was about to have a break down. He swallowed when he took sight of what remained of Thomas.

«Why didn't you listen to me Thomas?» he whispered. Bruce could have told him that it was useless to speak with a dead body, but he was sure it wasn't appropriate. He wished to say he was sad too, but that would be a lie and the both knew it.

Bruce had come home from the funeral as soon as he could. While he could fake sadness, someone would eventually notice that his lack of tears wasn't because he had already cried them all, but rather because he didn't have any to cry. Thomas hadn't given him tear ducts when he had built him, even for a genius like him giving an android a way to cry had proved too difficult. Now, of course, Bruce would likely never have any, since the only man who had managed to build a machine so closely resembling a human was lying dead besides his late wife.

Martha Wayne had died a couple decades ago. A man shot her while she and Thomas were coming out of a theatre. Thomas was wounded too, but it was a rather light injury. Instead Martha had died in a matter of seconds. The autopsy had revealed that she was pregnant of about three months when it happened.

From that day, Thomas became obsessed with death. He would perform experiments and create theories about how maybe a person could be brought back to life, earning from his colleagues a series of nicknames, the kinder of which was "Frankenstein". But while they pitied him, or mocked him, Thomas became one of the biggest experts in medicine and anatomy ever.

Thomas was not only a brilliant physician, but also an engineer and he knew a lot also in other sciences. After many tentatives, he had eventually managed to create a perfectly working android with a mind of his own, who at first went by the code BTM14, and then by Bruce. Thomas had created him because, he said, knowing how to build something that so closely resembled a human from wires, plastic, metal and absolutely no organic matter brought him closer to understanding how a real human mind could be recreated from dead bodies.

No one knew what Bruce really was - Thomas had presented him like a distant relative who decided to come and live with him. Only Alfred was informed of Bruce's real nature, but that was because the butler was already aware of all of Thomas's experiments. To the man credit, after a couple of weeks Alfred had already adapted to Bruce's presence and regarded him like he would have done were Bruce Thomas's son. Technically, he was, and Thomas had also programmed him to call him "father", at least when there was no one else around. And while Thomas thought him all he knew about science and life, Alfred patiently explained him all there was to know about the world and these mysterious things humans called "emotions".

Bruce knew perfectly why he didn't have any. In the first place, emotions were a matter of hormones and chemical substances that travel from one cell of a living being to another. Bruce worked on nothing but electric impulses, because designing him to be a cyborg rather than an android would have been to hard at the time. He was basically like a human without hormones - perfectly capable of thinking, learning, moving, remembering, but unable of having emotions.

In the second place, even if he was indeed designed to have emotions, creating an algorithm to make them work correctly was almost impossible. Emotions are something that does not work according to logical reasons, and if he had they would likely be rather weird. He could have become "crazy", or dangerous. All considered, Bruce thought that maybe emotions could have their use, and sometimes he had wished for them, but most of the time he didn't miss them. Because one can hardly miss something he never had, and because missing something is quite difficult if you don't have the aforementioned emotions.

Thomas had kept experimenting after creating Bruce, about three years before. The only people he allowed to help him where Bruce and Alfred. He didn't trust others, and most of his experiments were rather... unethical. Bruce had morals, both programmed and learned, and he couldn't help but think that maybe using bodies of people who hadn't decided to donate them wasn't the best choice. Thomas always retorted that it wasn't like he was killing them, and that besides it wasn't like anyone was going to give a decent burial to a prostitute or a tramp.

Despite all of his efforts, the only thing Thomas had managed to give life to was Bruce, who wasn't even a living being in the true sense of the word.

Bruce was examining the feeds from the cameras Thomas had put in the cave to be sure that everything he did was recorded. If anything happened, he hadn't wanted it to be a unreplicable accident. It showed that Thomas had mixed two reagents and put them on a fire to accelerate the reaction. But then he had started taking notes on a piece of paper, and frowned before turning to a dead corpse lying on a table to examine it, forgetting of the substances on the Bunsen burner. The reaction had caused an explosion, which started the fire that killed Thomas.

Before dying, Thomas had "ordered" a couple other corpses to be brought to a secure location. It was easier to have others delivering them instead of searching them by himself, and after a few years the man had found people who just wanted to get paid and disappear, caring nothing about what Thomas did with the corpses. Being the owner of one of the biggest companies in the world, money had not been a problem for Thomas.

Bruce went to the deliver location a week after Thomas's death, which was the date the body should be delivered. It was night, and the area was isolated, but he had put on a black hoodie anyways. He had been standing there for ten minutes when a small truck pulled out of the road. Two men got out and walked towards Bruce.

«You're the one who ordered?» one of them said.

«Yes. I have your money» Bruce took out of his pocket 3000$ in cash, 1000$ for each body «This is the last... delivering I want»

«Whatever» the man said, grabbing the money and counting them. After he was sure he was paid correctly, he and the other went to the back of the truck and took out three wooden boxes, one after the other.

«It's all fresh, so they ain't stinking yet, but whatever you're doing with them do it quickly if you want to have them this way» one man said. They helped Bruce putting the boxes on a truck of his own, before driving away. Bruce got on the driver seat and went home.

When he was back in the cave, Bruce took out the three boxes and opened them. Thomas had had a refrigerator to put the bodies, but the machine had been destroyed and conserving the bodies was not what Bruce wanted. There was a pond in the cave, not very large, but quite deep. There was an area where the water was almost ten metres deep. Bruce thought he could burn the bodies, and then throw the remains in the pond with a weight attached to make them sink.

The first body had clearly been a prostitute, judging by the clothes and the fact that when Bruce moved her a couple condom fell out of her pocket. There was blood in her hair, and her skull was fractured. The second body was a man with a long, unkept beard and worn clothes. He wasn't wounded, but he was so thin Bruce suspected he had starved to death. Bruce put him over the prostitute, and went to open the third box. He broke the wood with the strength his steel muscles gave him, and when he did for a moment he was certain something had hit him in his chest, and the temperature around him had dropped. The strange feeling was soon gone, leaving Bruce wondering if his sensors had had a malfunctioning. He glanced down at the third body and froze for a second.

The man lying in the box was... unusual, at least. The suit looked expensive, if a bit worn, and he seemed to be far too healthy for a tramp. Bruce's color vision was far from perfect, he could only distinguish the brighter ones, and blood was basically black for him, but this man's blood was red, more intense than Bruce had ever seen. And there was a lot of blood, staining the man's suit and face. Bruce wasn't surprised. The man's cheeks were cut, his mouth spread in a grotesque Glasgow smile.

Bruce realized he had been staring at the body for a while without reason. He convinced himself to take it and deposit him near the others. He had chosen a place far from residuals of smoke and substances from the fire, to avoid risks. He covered the bodies in gasoline and threw a match on them. Two seconds later the pile was on fire, filling the cave with the smell of burning flesh. Bruce waited until there was nothing but bone left, before extinguishing the fire. He tied some bricks to every body, before throwing them in the pond. For some reason, he checked that what was left of the man with the Glasgow smile was tied well to the weights, that the ropes wouldn't come off.

As he walked away, Bruce thought he heard a faint laughter. He turned around, but there was no one there.

The next day, Bruce went in the cave once more to work on making the place safe once again. He had changed some air and cleaned a bit, but it was better to be sure that nothing dangerous could happen. Also, the cave could be useful someday.

Bruce froze in his steps as he walked out of the lift, his processor working on trying to find a reasonable explanation. A burnt body was just a couple metres from him, and the strange way the mouth was twisted told Bruce it was the man with the Glasgow smile, the one he was totally sure couldn't even get separated from the bricks he had tied him to.