There was never a slow night in Gotham City.
Even with the Joker having disappeared six months ago, crime had not slowed down. If anything, it escalated. Since the Clown Prince of Crime held such a substantial piece of the Gotham underworld, his presumed death left a power vacuum in his wake. Every criminal and psychopath in the city fought tooth and nail to attain a piece of the Joker's property. Crime lords like Two-Face and the Penguin had turned Gotham City into a battlefield for a criminal turf war.
But even amid this chaos, there was still one beacon of hope: Batman.
As with every night, the Dark Knight was out on patrol. This night in particular, he was perched on the edge of a building overlooking Phoenix Pharmaceuticals through the built-in night vision lenses in his cowl.
A few moments earlier, he had received an alert on his Batcomputer that a break-in had occurred at the building. By the time he had gotten to the location, the door had already been blown off and the alarm silenced.
The Dark Knight figured it must have something to do with the crime war, some lowlife's desperate attempt to gain some property in this battle. Seeing as how Phoenix used to be one of the Joker's hideouts and still contained deadly and useful chemicals, this seemed like a prime location to break into.
Batman stood there, still as a gargoyle, and waited in the still, cool night. After a few moments more, a group of men exited the building. Three of them wore identical brown sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up, and all of them carried loaded sacks in one hand and assault rifles in the other. The only feature to distinguish the three was which Halloween mask they wore: Frankenstein, skull, or devil.
Their fourth member exited behind the rest, and Batman recognized him immediately: Jonathan Crane, a.k.a. "the Scarecrow." Dressed in his raggedy costume and burlap-like mask, it was hard to mistake him for any other criminal.
Knowing Crane's penchant for fear gas weaponry, the Dark Knight slipped on his plexiglass rebreather before enacting the rest of his plan.
The goon in the Frankenstein mask looked around nervously. "It's quiet, boss," he said. "A little too quiet."
"Yeah, shouldn't, like, the Batman be here by now or something?" the Devil-masked one asked.
The Scarecrow chuckled. "He's probably too busy with the rest of the gang war to investigate a simple break-in. That, or he's finally gotten wise and is too scared to face me."
"Wrong on both accounts, Crane," Batman announced, his baritone voice echoing through the night.
Just as the Scarecrow and his henchmen looked up, Batman loosed a smoke bomb from his utility belt towards them. A cloud of dark smoke enveloped them as their cries of "It's the bat!" devolved into coughs and sputters.
Batman leapt from his perch, cape extending to create a makeshift glider, just as the Scarecrow shouted, "Don't just stand there, you fools! Kill him!"
Rapid-fire bullets shot from the cloud of smoke, and while most of them completely missed the Dark Knight, one lucky bullet grazed his rebreather just enough to cause a small crack in the surface. Batman paid no mind to it as he torpedoed into the smokescreen.
His first target was Devil-Mask, who was blindly shooting into the sky in a vain attempt to strike the bat. By the time he realized his target was in front of him, his face met the pavement. He was out cold in an instant.
The smoke started to clear away, and Skull-Mask noticed his associate go down. He aimed his gun at Batman, but the vigilante was faster. His grapnel sprang from his hand and yanked Skull-Mask towards him for a knockout clothesline.
From behind, Batman heard the distinct click of an assault rifle reloading. With the reflexes of a trained martial artist, Batman spun with a kick and knocked Frankenstein-Mask flat on his back. A quick, vicious punch to the face rendered him unconscious.
There was only one threat left on this case, and Batman turned to find him.
Crane found him first and released a cloud of orange gas into his face, released from somewhere within his raggedy sleeve.
Batman responded by lifting the scrawny man by the scruff of his neck. He stared with intensity at the Scarecrow, who stared back with shocked eyes behind rough-cut eyeholes.
"Did you really think that I wouldn't come prepared for your…" Batman started, before his head started to swim.
The sensation was all too familiar to him: he was feeling the effects of Scarecrow's fear gas.
"You were saying, Dark Knight?" the Scarecrow said, his voice carrying a strange echo.
Batman coughed and touched at his rebreather. He felt the crack and cursed under his breath. The world around him started darkening.
"Gotta say," the Scarecrow said, "I'm surprised you fell for this old gag."
Crane's voice was strange, as if it wasn't his own. Batman felt inclined to remove the criminal's mask.
He did so, and the face that greeted him was a shock. It wasn't Jonathan Crane. It was a thin, white face with a wide, ruby-red grin and a shock of green hair. The eyes of the same color burned with insanity and bloodlust.
"Surprise!" the Joker exclaimed. He held up his arms in an exaggerated shrug, and Batman saw that he had a bloody crowbar in his left hand.
Batman's world swam. The Joker was dead. There was no way he could have survived that crash. And yet here he was in Batman's grasp, cackling in his face.
"Hey, you wanna see me make this clown disappear?" the Joker asked. With a wink, the Joker dissolved into mist, leaving a chorus of ethereal mocking laughter behind him.
Batman took a few staggering steps back, searching for the Joker in this empty black void. He looked down at his hand. The Scarecrow's burlap mask had also vanished.
"Batman?"
The Dark Knight's blood froze. It was his voice. There was no mistaking it.
He turned on his heels. Jason lay a few feet before him underneath a spotlight. His red-and-green Robin outfit was in tatters and smeared with dark blood, the same blood that pooled around him. He looked broken, bruised…beaten.
Batman took a single shaking step forward. "Jason?" he asked, his voice just as shaky as his ward's.
Jason looked up at him. His left eye was swollen nearly shut, but the expression of pain was the same in both of them. Tears welled at their corners.
"Bruce," Jason said. "Why didn't you save me?"
Batman's voice caught in his throat. "I…I'm sorry, Jason. I tried—"
"Why didn't you save me, Bruce?" Jason wailed. "Why didn't you—"
Flames erupted all around, causing Batman to jump back and shield himself with his cape. The heat felt just as real as on that fateful day.
When he pulled the cape away, he was back on that day. The exploded ruins of the warehouse stood before him, the flames still crackling and licking at the burning wood. Snow drifted down from the sky, coating the Gotham street below in a blanket of white.
Batman dropped to his knees and stared at the wreckage. He couldn't look way.
"No…" he breathed.
Then, he noticed something coming from the ruins, something like water running down a hill. Only it was red, and it stuck out as it snaked across the snow-covered ground.
The red liquid dribbled its way towards Batman, and all too late did he notice that it was blood.
It started to pool around the Dark Knight's form, but in the most peculiar way. It seemed to be forming the details of a face. A set of wide lips, wild eyes, sharp eyebrows, all traced in red against the stark white snow.
Then the mouth opened up wide and laughed an all-too-familiar laugh. The endless black chasm of the mouth swallowed Batman up, and he fell, passing through nothingness as he was surrounded by a cacophony of clownish laughs and screams of pain.
Batman shut his eyes and covered his ears. "I'm sorry, Jason," he said. "I'm sorry…I'm sorry…"
He snapped his eyes open. The endless black voice had disappeared, and he was on the hard ground. He sat up to discover he was back in front of Phoenix Pharmaceuticals, with Scarecrow's three unconscious henchmen scattered around him. Crane himself was nowhere to be seen.
Still a bit shaken from his fear-induced nightmare, he stood and threw the rebreather aside in disgust and shame. He took a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves.
He took out three pairs of handcuffs from his utility belt and set to work on the knocked-out henchmen. All the while a single thought plagued his mind, the same thought that had plagued his mind for six months now.
Jason…
Alfred walked through the Batcave trophy wing, diligently dusting off his master's keepsakes. He stopped at a class case, where the original Scarface puppet glared at him from within, and removed the dust from it.
He looked around at the rest of the wing and marveled at the collection. Most of the other trophies were seemingly inconsequential items inside transparent casings – an umbrella from the Penguin, a question mark staff from the Riddler, a pair of goggles from Catwoman – but it was the larger attractions that always caught Alfred's eye: the giant penny, the mechanical T. Rex, the oversized playing card featuring the smiling face of the Joker peering down at whoever passed.
This whole section of the Batcave brought a smile to Alfred's face. He had been the one to suggest keeping memorabilia from Master Bruce's cases, and it warmed his heart to see that not only had his employer taken an interest in this idea, but that it had expanded to a veritable museum of Batman's exploits.
But Alfred's smile dropped when his eyes landed on a different memory. In this glass case hung a tattered red and green uniform, a battered capital "R" on the left breast. A gold plaque set at the base simply read "A Good Soldier."
It may have been six months since Jason's death, but Alfred could still remembered the gut-wrenching feeling he got when he received the news from Bruce like it were yesterday.
The sound of the Batmobile's approaching engine brought Alfred back to reality. He could see the car's headlights from down the tunnel, and he walked from the trophy wing to wait for his master by the vehicle landing.
The sleek black Batmobile pulled up, and the top slid open to reveal Batman inside.
"Welcome back, Master Bruce," Alfred said as Batman exited the car. "I assume that you've made sure that the people of Gotham can breathe easily for another night?"
But something was wrong. Batman's face was pale, and his eyes stared forward blankly as he pushed past his butler and stumbled towards the Batcomputer.
"Master Bruce?" Alfred asked, following him. "Are you well? You look as though you've seen a ghost."
"I saw him again, Alfred," Batman said as he sat down at the computer's desk.
Alfred raised an eyebrow. "Who, sir?"
"Jason."
"Jason?" Alfred took another step towards his employer. "But Jason's been—"
"Crane. His fear gas got to me." Batman removed the cowl from his head, revealing the handsome face of Bruce Wayne. "I had to watch him die all over again."
Alfred placed a concerned hand on the back of the Batcomputer chair. "Sir, you must stop blaming yourself for what happened. It's not your fault—"
"But it is, Alfred," Bruce interrupted. "I dragged Jason into this war. He'd still be alive if it wasn't for me. My mess. My problem. My fault."
He rubbed at his eyes before clicking a series of buttons on the keyboard before him. The screens lit up with electronic files and Gotham City maps as Bruce searched through the Batcomputer's criminal databases.
"Master Bruce, perhaps you should take a break from crime-fighting," Alfred suggested. "After all, you never truly had a proper period to—"
"No time," Bruce said, not taking his eyes off the monitors. "Scarecrow's still out there, and this gang war on the streets is only getting worse by the minute. Penguin and Two-Face will tear this city apart if left unchecked. There's work to be done."
Alfred sighed. "Always the workaholic, sir."
Bruce did not respond. Alfred stepped away from his employer towards the staircase. He was concerned for Bruce. He had been even more relentless than usual concerning his war on crime since Jason's death, presumably to keep his mind off of mourning his ward. Everyone deals with grief differently, as they say, but Alfred knew this was not healthy for Master Bruce.
The butler ascended the stairs to find himself in the living room of Wayne Manor. Clicking a hidden button, the broken grandfather clock slid back into place over the hidden Batcave entrance.
Alfred's concerned welled up inside until he picked up the telephone receiver and dialed a number. When the voice on the other end answered, Alfred said, "It's me. Master Bruce isn't doing too well. Do you think it would be at all possible for you to stop by and perhaps talk to him? He needs a friend right now."
"Sure thing, Alfred," the other end responded. "I've been looking for an excuse to get out of Blüdhaven for a little bit."
Harley Quinn strolled down the nighttime street, flanked by two clown-masked henchmen wielding out-of-date assault rifles. Harley herself carried a splintery baseball bat.
While the harlequin-patterned criminal usually had a playful spring to her step accompanied by an impish smirk, presently Harley walked with a somber gait and a solemn expression. This had been default mood for the past since months, since she took over the Joker's gang after her puddin'…
"Well, well, well," one of her henchmen, Frankie, said. "What do we have here?"
Harley followed his gaze as they stopped before Phoenix Pharmaceuticals, where three men sat handcuffed to the building's external support beams. They each wore cheap Halloween masks and the brown sweatshirts of the Scarecrow's gang, and the handcuffs were obviously the work of the Batman.
"Looks like a few Scarecreeps on Joker territory," Jo-Jo, Harley's other henchman, said.
"You ain't Jokers no more!" Skull-Mask barked. "You're barely a gang since the clown croaked!"
Harley's mind snapped with rage, and her regular bleak expression became one of anger in a split second.
She let out an animalistic shriek and leapt towards the skull-masked man, her bat raised. She brought the weapon down on his head, and it shattered in half.
Harley grabbed the man by his shirt, shaking him as she screamed in his face, "Don't you dare say that! He's not dead! He's coming back and he's gonna kill you all!"
"Quinn! Quinn!" Frankie grabbed her shoulder and tried to pull her away. "He's out! He's out!"
Harley stopped shaking him long enough to realize that his head had lolled off to the side. She released the unconscious man and stood up in a huff.
Though she didn't believe Skull-Mask – or anyone for that matter – about the Joker being dead, it was true when she said the Joker's was barely a gang anymore. When he disappeared, leaving Harley in charge, many of the criminals under his employ jumped ship, either to join up with other big gangs or to start their own. They were two-faced backstabbers in Harley's eyes, ironic since at least half of them had allied with the actual Two-Face
"Hey, Quinn," Jo-Jo said from the side. "Don't we know this guy?"
Harley and Frankie turned to him. Jo-Jo stood before another Scarecrow henchman, the man's Frankenstein mask in Jo-Jo's free hand. The revealed face was indeed a familiar, albeit bruised one scowling back at them.
"Yeah," Frankie said, snapping his fingers. "That's Charlie Tillman. He used to be one of ours."
Another turncoat. Harley had an urge to beat this one up too, though her fractured weapon caused her to settle for glaring at the ground.
"What do you want us to do with them, Quinn?" Jo-Jo asked.
Harley turned away and stared off into the distance. What would the Joker do?
"Take care of 'em," she said.
Frankie and Jo-Jo chuckled as they loaded their assault rifles. Charlie and the other Scarecrow goons let out screams of protest, but Harley barely heard them. Her mind was somewhere else entirely.
Where are you, Mistah J?