Test Subject

by Byronofsidius

When Arkham Asylum is raided and its most terrifying inmates escape, the Batman must put a stop to a whole new spree of Joker crimes. But the Clown Prince of Crime has other worries, particularly when the Master of Fear, Dr. Johnathan Crane, sets his sights of the Batman's mortal enemy.

Test Subject

A Batman Fanfic by

Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy

Part I- Preparation

Hell's Philharmoic Orchestra flooded the halls and chambers of Arkham Asylum, turning the air into sour chaos. The percussion beats of tranquilizer rounds, rubber bullets and bodies being hurled into walls and floors rumbled. The strings soared high and low to the melody of screams and tearing cloth and flesh. The brass and woodwinds rampaged as blood splashes and the crash of equipment and the breaking of bones.

Someone had deactivated every security protocol throughout the asylum, and the inmates were tearing their way free. Pamela Isley fascilitated the earliest breakout by calling up the long-still thorns and roots that she'd been calling out to for months, slowly working them through ducts and spaces in the walls. Her own break had been weeks away yet, but the sudden absence of sensors around the compound meant she needed no more be cautious.

She'd traipsed away through a wall on the north end, the Mad Hatter and Penguin right behind her.

Killer Croc, newly freed of his pulse charge bonds, might have made a swifter retreat through the sewers if he hadn't taken the time to eat half of the lower level guards, sucking marrow from the bones of an arm as his dense flesh deflected another barrage of bullets. When he finished this treat, he turned his savage grin on the lone guard still in his path.

"Nice pea shooter," he snarled, breaking the hollowed bone off at a sharp angle. "I've always preferred hand to hand." Croc took one lunging step forward, ramming the stake-like bone into the center of the guard's face. A final death throe twitch threw a burst of bullets against Croc's hide, but the bullets flattened harmlessly against him.

The Major Response Team alone remained calm amidst the chaos. Their orders were simple- hold the Red Zone, the subterranean level of the asylum that hosted the four inmates declared by the administration and law enforcement to be the greatest threats to the city. In the event the entrance was breached, they were to fall back systematically from the least likely threat, nearest the entry point, until they were backed to the final cell.

In the front cell there sat Victor Freeze, his specially controlled environment holding stable on its own backup generator. Next came Johnathan Crane, the psychiatrist-turned-psychotic. His cell had been customized to perfectly replicate the study of Sigmund Freud. Past him was the cell holding Bane, whose body had developed mutations resulting in his ability to produce the growth venom in his own body so long as he worked up his heart rate. As such, his cell had been crafted to keep him almost utterly immobilized.

Keeping the Joker from escaping was the Major Response Team's bottom line. So when the blast doors slid open with a whoosh of the hydraulics, they didn't hesitate for a moment in falling back to Crane's cell line and opening fire on the stairwell. Canisters came rolling in at them, spewing smoke. Immediately the five elite guards pulled down their gas masks and activated their infrared goggles.

The first three assailants to come charging down at them were shot and killed before they could even brace their own weapons. Another batch came, these more cautious but just as vulnerable to the armor-piercing rounds the Major Response Team fired. One of this bunch had lucked out, however, keying the code to Freeze's cell before a bullet removed the top half-inch of his head.

The floor instantly frosted over, causing the guard closest to the onrushing enemy to slip and fall. Before he could get up, a knife came flying through the smoke and buried itself to the hilt in his throat. Only four men now stood between Gotham and its three most fearsome denizens.

A squadron of armed men came through then in a blinding hail of gunfire, and in less than twenty seconds, the remainder of the Major Response Team lay dead. Crane's cell door came open, then Bane's. At last, the Joker, sitting now in the middle of his cell, waited for the door to open. He'd stood at the window watching long enough to see the last guard go down, but when his own door opened, he wanted to let whoever had come for him see that all was yet well.

The hydraulics whirred, control rods sliding away, and the door popped open. He had been expecting Ra's Al Ghul, or perhaps good old Harvey Dent to be standing there. He might even have suspected Black Mask to be the inmates' benefactor in all of this falderall.

Certainly his surprise must have shown on his clown-like countenance. "Well, this isn't precisely your style, normally," he observed, standing up. The narrow man before him snapped his fingers, and a man dressed in the red-and-white striped shirt of the Joker's last crew of hired hands stepped forth, holding a dry cleaning bag with the Joker's signature suit. "Oh, you shouldn't have, Terry," he said to the goon.

"Wasn't any trouble, boss," Terry replied.

"Boss. Now there's a term that's up for some debate," said the Clown Prince of Crime, shaking free of his white clinical pants and shirt. He took out the pants from the dry cleaning bag and began to hoist them on. "What of it? Is my crew mine? Or are they on your payroll now?"

"They're yours," said the man behind the prison break. "As is the cloaking device your man Terry here is holding for you. You and I alone have been guaranteed an escape route from here."

As the Joker adjusted his tie, he narrowed his eyes at the benefactor. "Why would that be?"

"Because our inevitable guest will come looking for you first. When he doesn't find you, and the police can't count you among the ones they'll stop tonight, word of their failure will leak to the press. It always does. I've made sure of that, too."

"And you can afford all of this how, chum," the Joker inquired, pulling on his purple gloves.

"Simple. I didn't pay for it," said the benefactor. "You needn't worry yourself over the details. Simply make your way to safety and lay low for a few days before you do anything."

"Hell, I can do that. Terry? The device if you please." The goon drew a small red cube with a single black button on it from his pocket and handed it over to the Joker. The white-faced lunatic peered past the others, raising an eyebrow, corners of his mouth turned down in a rare frown. "You had Freeze's suit brought in?"

"I insist on being thorough. Life is far more pleasant when details are seen to." The Joker made a noise in his throat, stepping past Terry and the man who'd set Arkham loose.

"The Bat won't let this stand, you know," Joker said.

"He has no say in the matter," the liberator said, pulling his own cube out and activating it. As soon as the button was pushed, the man disappeared from sight. The Joker leaned his head to one side, then nodded.

"Can't even hear you."

"He said that'd be the point," Terry replied. "Me and the boys are set up at the old Majestic, boss. We'll meet you there?"

"Certainly. Is Rocco there? I like Rocco, he gets things done?"

"Uh, boss? Rocco's dead. Got shanked over at Black Gate." Terry rubbed the back of his head awkwardly. "I haven't heard much about it. Some of our guys got into it with some of Two-Face's people, things got bad."

The Joker scowled, shrugged, then hit the button on his own device. There came a thrum and warble, and he sauntered away, whistling a diddy. He stopped by the stairs leading up and out, brought up short by the massive Bane just starting up. "Wanna put on the turbos and get a move on, ape boy?" Yet the hulking villain didn't even flinch, taking the steps at a lumbering gait. "You can't even hear me, can you? I'll have to send him a thank you for this puppy," he said, stuffing the cube in a pocket.

Half an hour later, the man who'd engineered the power outage, the security systems breakdown, and the delayed contact of law enforcement stood on the edge of the lake, five miles away from the island on which Arkham stood. He watched through a telescope as police officers subdued dozens of inmates and pressed them back towards the recovering asylum.

"Sir," said a soft voice to his left. "Just heard over the police band that the Batman has been spotted fighting Riddler and his crew over near Fenton Market. Uniforms already nabbed up Two-Face and Penguin."

"They'll have Jarvis soon enough as well, I imagine," said the riot's engineer. "Victor will take longer to bring in, as will Pamela and Bane."

"What about Harley?"

"I made certain to keep the medical wing up and running, security and all. She shouldn't risk moving around much in her condition."

"Is that a personal opinion? Because the Joker might disagree there."

"That's my opinion as a medical professional, Mr. Blake," said Dr. Johnathan Crane, pulling his eye away from the telescope. "He may have sired the child she carries, but until such time as order is restored, anything that happens to her or the child is on my conscience. After that, any risk he exposes mother and child to is on his own hands."

"And he's a lunatic. You sure you're okay with that?"

"I'm ethically in the clear, Mr. Blake," said Crane. He handed Blake the telescope and headed for the large SUV Blake had picked him up in. "Once I've driven away, follow the instructions on that tape." Blake held up the microcassette recorder/player Crane had arranged to have smuggled in to his cell months earlier. "A pleasure working with you again, Mr. Blake."

"As always, Dr. Crane." Blake didn't wave as the vehicle took off calmly down the access road and out of the park. He hit the 'play' button on the cassette player, and immediately the doctor's voice hissed out.

"Hello, Mr. Blake. No doubt by now, I have made my way from you by some automated conveyance, be it boat, car, or helicopter. I sincerely hope you opted for a car or truck, some land-based vehicle. My abilities with a nautical or aerial vehicle are minimal.

"Now listen very carefully, Mr. Blake," said Crane on the recording, his voice growing huskier and echo-like, as if coming from the throat of a cave tunnel. It was the voice of The Scarecrow, when Crane allowed the maniacal part of his true nature take hold. Blake didn't mind Crane when he was, well, just being Crane. But of the three different Scarecrow costumes the doctor would don, this voice belonged to the spookiest of the bunch, the one that looked like some kind of zombified Western preacher with a noose around his neck.

"Alphas in the woods, my friend, alphas in the trees." Blake felt his entire body go rigid. There was silence on the tape for nearly ten seconds. "By now the control phrase I subliminally implanted into your mind, as well as everyone else I've worked with in the last three years, has taken hold. Listen very carefully to my instructions."

And so Mr. Blake listened.

Detective Rourke cringed at the smell coming from the little cavern on the shore of the lake, his minimag flashlight trained on the corpse at the back. It resembled a melted wax sculpture, or would have if not for the jelly-like blood and organs spilled out from under a white button shirt.

"That's just fuckin' horrific," he muttered to one of the crime scene technicians. An evening jogger coming through Ashburn Park had called into the Parks Police to report a disturbing smell, and the officer who came to check on the source called Gotham PD after losing his dinner.

"Could be worse," the tech said, shaking his head. "I was at the scene over by the sewage treatment plant last night."

"Those guys Croc got a hold of?"

"Yeah. Totally gruesome," said the tech. "Thankfully the Batman was right on his tail. Croc is back at Arkham now, though if you ask me, they should just gas him and be done with it." Rourke had heard similar sentiments spoken about a lot of Gotham's criminally insane, but the state had no death penalty. As such, even cretins like the Joker avoided the ultimate punishment.

Rourke thought Gotham could use a visit from Frank Castle.

"That isn't your call to make," intoned a harsh, raspy voice from the darkness nearby. Rourke straightened, stuffing his hands in his coat pockets as Batman stalked closer. "Detective Rourke."

"Batman," he replied with a nod of his head. "You've been busy this last five nights. Heard you snapped up both Bane and Ivy last night."

"I did. And I understand you arrested Nigma and his men while I was taking those two back to Arkham. Impressive work." He turned his cowled head towards the entrance to the small cave, eyes narrowed. "What do you have here?"

One of the other technicians came out of the cave with a breathing mask over her face and handed a plain black leather wallet to Rourke. Her eyes shifted to the Batman, and the tech's entire body went stiff, her eyes wide as saucers. The vigilante noticed, but made no sign of such.

Rourke flipped the wallet open. "James Blake, 4120 East Burnham Street. Looks like he was a fairly handsome fellah."

"Blake was one of Scarecrow's men," Batman said, looking toward the body. "Worked with Crane at least four times in the last nine years. He also had his own enterprises whenever Crane went away."

"Sounds like a pro," Rourke observed. "How come I never heard of him?"

"Because you're homocide. Blake was known well among the robbery division. Chop shop leader all around the state, including Metropolis. Only ever got convicted once."

"So how come he was working for Crane," Rourke asked, following the Batman into the low-ceilinged cave. "Most of these street guys keep away from the costume crowd."

"I never took the time to look into that," Batman said, his own respirator attached to his cowl. He withdrew a set of tools from his belt and a sample collection dish, scraping material from the remains of Blake's melted face. "In any event, this type of damage is familiar."

"You think Crane got rid of him after the prison break?"

"No. Scarecrow's chemicals are rarely designed to kill outright. This looks more like something the Joker would use." Every fiber of Rourke's being flinched at the mention of the clown-like psychotic. "I'll know more after I've had this sample analyzed."

"Speaking of Crane and the clown, have you caught any leads on either one of them?"

"There's been some talk about Joker preparing to carry out a series of deadly pranks involving fast food restaurants around the city. As for Scarecrow, there's been nothing." The Batman turned and started away from the corpse.

"What do you mean, nothing? These freaks always leave some kind of trail or hint behind, don't they?"

"Not always," the Batman admitted. "The smartest of the bunch, the truly clever ones, sometimes go as long as half a year without giving me something to work with. Hugo Strange once faked his death and remained underground for close to two years before he left any clue to his whereabouts."

"Jeez."

"If Crane keeps control of the Scarecrow aspect of his personality, he could easily stay out of sight just as long. But he's not my problem right now."

Rourke turned to look at the Batman and add a final question, but when he looked, the vigilante was gone. "Wish I could figure out how he does that," he grumbled.

Part II- First Run

Born Terrance Sean O'Halleran, Terry had grown up envisioning himself as being a great soldier some day. From a very early age he was fascinated with outdoorsmanship, hunting, trapping, and survival training. As a teenager, his father had pulled some strings to get him to train for three weeks with some militiamen who trained interested persons in 'End of Days Warfare'. The group normally took only adults; Terry breezed through their course at 14.

Unfortunately, a barroom brawl at 18 got him pinched for assault and underage drinking, and both the Army and Marines told him 'no'. It had crushed him. Until, that was, he moved to Gotham City from the suburbs in the hopes of joining the local MMA league. At the first tryout session he went to, he mopped up his opponents, garnering the attention of Two-Face.

So he'd worked for Dent for six months, until the Joker came sniffing around for men of his own. Dent owed the Clown Prince of Crime a favor, and Terry, along with six other toughs, came in the bargain.

Working for the Joker had been a dream come true for Terry. The cartoonish criminal's acts of madness smacked of the kind of freewheeling anarchy he was certain the country would fall into when the People's Revolution began.

So being tapped to be his driver for this series of attacks gave him a swelling of pride. As he pulled the station wagon into the darkened parking lot of the McDonald's on Effram Street, his heart rate spiked in anticipation.

"Roger, get that camera rolling," the Joker said, reaching down into a black satchel between his feet on the passenger side floor. "I want to make sure this is all run perfectly."

"Sir, what do we do if the Bat shows up," Terry asked plainly, eyes still fixed dead ahead as the car idled in its parking spot. "We didn't bring any guns, and Roger ain't worth dick-all in a straight fist fight."

"Screw you, Terry," the other goon snarled from the back seat.

"Easy now, boys, no fighting or I'll turn this car right around," the Joker quipped, laughing at his own jest. "Roger, he has a fair point. I've seen you try to fight. It isn't pretty. You end up looking like a drunk trying to fight his own shadow."

"But boss," Roger began to protest.

"Which is why when we pull away from here, Terry will stop the car a block over and let you out. You have to get back to the second site and upload the video." The Joker bounced a grenade in his hand idly and chuckled. "Ah, Youtube. Who'd ever have thought the iTunes generation would inspire me?"

The Joker began laughing again as Terry drove up to the drive-thru speaker.

The Dark Knight kept the Batmobile's stealth cloak on as he filtered through the police band air traffic, listening for an emergency that would require his help. At 8:36 pm, he got the call. A harried dispatcher came over the radio calling for police and EMT services at a McDonald's on Effram Street. Witnesses near the scene had just seen the Joker and two of his men driving off as an explosion tore the restaurant apart.

Batman deactivated the cloak and the Batmobile, a sleek bullet of black automotive superiority, shot from the alley where he'd been laying in wait. He'd known this was going to happen from the video Joker had posted to Youtube.

In the video, the Joker had been standing in a mock fast food kitchen in a stereotypical purple shirt with black pants, an apron and food service gloves and hairnet worn over his swooped, slicked-back green hair. He flipped burgers until his own voice spoke in a voice-over.

"Hey there, chums! Tired of the daily grind at your dead-end job?" The Joker made an exaggerated frown and nodded at the camera. "Looking for a way to break out of the routine?" He smiled and nodded enthusiastically. "Well look no further! We've got the perfect cure for your doldrums!" On camera, a toy grenade was lobbed at the Joker's feet, and he made an animated show of panicking and running all over the mock kitchen, until the footage cut away to stock film of a building blowing up. The voice-over continued. "So remember, folks, even your dead-end job could become suddenly thrilling, compliments of your ever-benevolent Clown Prince of Crime!"

It hadn't been a terribly long video, and scrambling programs had kept Batman from tracing the source of the upload, an annoying aspect of the entire scenario. Only a handful of people had that level of computer savvy, and the Joker and his crew had never been among
them. That was more the territory of the Riddler or the Mad Hatter, men who relied more heavily on technology as time went by.

Over the police band, Batman heard a patrol unit report that they had the Joker's vehicle in sight, and they were in pursuit. Batman got the location of the patrol car locked into his navigation system and let the Batmobile's autopilot take over temporarily.

Two minutes later he took over again, as the Batmobile slid into tight traffic right behind the pursuit. Three patrol cars were now harrying the Joker's getaway car, all of them heading toward the north end of the city. Batman slid in and out of traffic, getting right up behind the rear patrol car.

The Joker's getaway suddenly peeled off to the left, down a side street. The first two patrol cars flew past, but the third patrol and the Batmobile cruised onto the turnoff in hot pursuit. The Joker's car quickly veered off down a narrow alley, and the police vehicle screeched to a halt, two uniforms hopping out, guns drawn.

The Batman flew out of his own vehicle seconds later. The officers stared wide-eyed up at him, trembling as he approached on silent strides. He put one black gloved hand up to calm them. "Stay here and radio in your position," he intoned. "Leave the foot pursuit to me."

They didn't argue, not with the Batman. As the Dark Knight stepped into the alley, he tapped the cowl next to his left temple, rendering the world before his eyes in infrared. Only one door, halfway down the alley, showed traces of hand prints. He clicked off the infrared and followed after the Joker.

The building turned out to be a country-western clothing store. Batman slipped soundlessly through the back stock room he'd entered, listening for any hint of a noise to indicate an oncoming ambush. Had he not been paying attention, his brains might have been knocked around when the Joker's thug swung a crowbar at his his head.

Batman ducked the swing at the last moment, lashing out with a low-line kick at his assailant's legs. But the thug had come prepared, lifting his forward limb and planting again for a downward swing. On his back, Batman brought his gauntleted arms up in an X cross block of the metal bar as it descended at his chest.

He found himself looking up at a well-built man in his late 30's, early 40's, with a sheen of sweat breaking through the thin layer of white greasepaint he'd applied to his face and neck. Ruby red lips, curled up in a lipstick smile around his barred teeth, framed a mouth that seldom smiled without leaving an impression.

"Hello again, Terry," Batman grunted as he launched a hard kick into the thug's stomach, knocking him back. Terry staggered, but recovered in a ready stance as Batman rose, his cape drawn around him.

"You remember me? I'm flattered," Terry replied, twirling the crowbar like a Phillipino escrima stick.

"I always remember the ones who can actually stand and fight," Batman said, his hands moving unseen behind his cape. Terry slowly reached into his left pants pocket, drawing out a trio of marbles. He deftly hurled them at Batman, who didn't even flinch as the electrical current he'd set on the cape's controls reacted. "I also remember the clever ones," Batman rumbled, narrowing his eyes at the thug.

"I'm smarter than the average bear, Bats, but I don't expect you want a long exchange. I know you're thinking this is all just a delay tactic, that you're already thinking of which way the boss took off. You dart off that way, I pursue to slow you down, hit some trap you laid down to snag me, and the next thing I know, some of Gotham's finest are tuning me up with batons and maybe giving me the speech about being someone's bitch at Black Gate."

Batman said nothing, yet in his mind he was reeling. Either he'd become too predictable, or the city was fortunate that Terrance O'Halleran had only goon-level ambitions. As a street criminal, his perception and intellect would easily make him a rival for Gotham's more traditional mobsters.

"So what's your move, Terry," he asked, hoping to goad the thug into a direct fight.

"My move is this," said Terry, flipping Batman the bird, then making a break for the front of the store. Terry would never lead him to the Joker's backtrail, which left only the north side of the building as a logical escape route for the Joker. He darted through the shadows that way.

Fifteen minutes passed before Terry came back to the country-western store, stalking to the dressing room door. He tapped it twice, and the Joker eased the door open. "Remind me to give you a bigger cut the next time we pull a heist," the Clown Prince of Crime whispered.

"Just doing my job, sir," Terry replied with pride.

"He escaped for tonight, sir," the brainwashed woman said as Dr. Crane sat at his ornate cherry wood desk, typing up notes. He looked up at her, admiring the strong line of her jaw, the kinked curls of her scarlet hair. She might have been a respected colleague once, in another life. Now, she was just a slightly higher-functioning worker bee in his hive.

"Hmm, poor choice of metaphor," he mused aloud on the tail of this thought. "I'd have to be a queen, and I've the wrong genitalia for that."

"What, sir?"

"Nothing," Crane said more loudly, chewing on the end of a pen. "Turn on the news feeds and run the keyword search for the latest buzz online, Kathy. Then turn in for the night."

"Yes, Dr. Crane," she said with a formal incline of her head. She turned on her heel and made her way out of his opulent office, his singular chamber of truest form and function. He still wore most of his costume, but for the reactive mask and hat, the noose hanging loosely from his throat. His hands, gray and gaunt, showed the extent of his peculiar metamorphosis when exposing himself to the unique chemical coating on the inside of that mask.

Crane typed up a few more notes on his computer, saved his work, and settled back in his chair with a blocky remote in hand. With one button, he shut his office door. With another, four television screens lowered from the ceiling and swiveled into viewing position. One was set to CNN, one to MSNBC, one to Fox News, and one to GMN, the Gotham-Metropolis News network.

His booted feet up on his desk, Johnathan Crane leaned back and alternated the audio feed from one source to the next, trying to keep up with the events he had set in motion.

It was just after three in the morning when Wayne returned to the Bat Cave, frustrated by his failure to catch the Joker. Alfred stood near the central command center, a wheeled cart with various covered trays on it. "One mustn't forget to eat, Master Bruce," the old Englishman chided as Wayne removed his cowl, setting it aside with a sigh.

"Thank you, Alfred." Wayne uncovered a platter on which sat a hefty ham and turkey sub, and he gave the butler a wry grin. "Sandwiches again? That's three nights this week, old friend."

"Considering the amount of time you'll actually spend on your late-light feedings these last few years, I'm opting not to let my finer cuillinary skills go to waste." Wayne raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "Tell me the last time you enjoyed something I worked on for more than half an hour on a night of crimefighting, sir."

"You have a point," Wayne replied after a moment.

"Thank you, sir." Wayne brought up the analysis he'd run a few nights before on the acid that had done for Blake, shaking his head. "I pored through all of your records on him, sir, and found not a single solid tie that would explain why the Joker would kill Mr. Blake."

"It didn't necessarily have to be personal with the Joker," Wayne said after swallowing his first bite. "Scarecrow's man might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time after the prison break. Tire tracks in the park were a match to Blake's Expedition, which was found six blocks away. Crane's fingerprints were on the wheel. I think Blake was waiting for him after the riot with a getaway, and the Joker followed Crane to that park from Arkham."

"None of which, sir, explains how the Joker was able to already have procured a dose of his acid," Alfred said.

"A detail I can fill in later. I'm still trying to figure out who orchestrated the breakout. I've already ruled out Ra's Al Ghul and Lex Luthor. They're both busy with other plans."

"Do you suspect someone within Arkham itself set things in motion?"

"It's not unprecedented," Wayne replied. "There's no footage from the breakout, and that's something that's bogging me down. Alfred?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Get me a list of addresses for any of the guards who survived the attack at Arkham. I'm going to have to be out into daylight," he said, rising from the console with his sandwich in hand.

"And where are you going now, sir?"

"A shower, Alfred. I need to clear my head."

Remy Gallus groaned as he fetched a beer out of his fridge. It was six in the morning, not an hour for drinking, but he couldn't get to sleep. Since Two-Face had slammed his head against a stone wall at the asylum earlier in the week, Remy had developed dreams that kept him from resting well.

So when a dark and brooding figure towered over him in his tiny apartment kitchen, he could be forgiven for yelping like a frightened child and falling on his ass. "Holy Christ on a cracker," he exclaimed. The Batman put a long finger to his lips to hush Remy.

"Quiet down, Mr. Gallus. I'm not here to hurt you. I just have a few questions," Batman said, sliding back from the asylum guard. Remy shook his head and clambered to his feet, sidestepping the fridge door.

"Uh, okay. Wanna beer," he asked, a faint smile on his lips. The Batman surprised him by returning a grin and shaking his head.

"Sorry, I'm already out and about later than I should be."

"That's true. Don't you usually disappear when the sun comes out? Man, for the longest time, I thought you were a fuckin' vampire."

"You don't say," Batman said. He'd heard this notion a hundred times, what with the bat motif and the late hours. It made a perverse kind of sense, really. "Please, sit down. You still have a concussion." Remy shrugged his shoulders and ambled past the Dark Knight out into his living room, sitting in his recliner. Batman followed, taking a seat across from him on a faded orange loveseat. "Remy, you're assigned to the second floor of Arkham most nights, right?"

"Yeah, I been on the second floor for three years," Remy said. "Never once came across any of the costumes you deal with in all that time."

"But you've watched over some of their henchmen," Batman said.

"Oh yeah, they can be almost just as bad. Joker's people usually wind up there. Working for him, it's like poison for the soul." Well put, Batman thought. "Why you ask?"

"Did you recognize any of them from the group that raided the asylum? Any recent patients who'd been released?" Batman waited patiently as Gallus cast his thoughts into the land of ago. After perhaps a minute, Gallus's eyes went wide.

"Yes," Gallus said, then triumphantly, "Yes! George Postino, used to work for the Joker whenever he could! I think he might've been in charge."

Batman nodded. All signs were now pointing to the Joker either somehow engineering his own escape amidst the chaos, or one of his devoted fanatics devising a plan to get his beloved boss out, along with dozens of other dangerous psychotics. Whatever those others did in the city would be considered ancilliary damage, secondary to giving the Joker a crack at terrorizing the city once again.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Gallus. Now drink that and get some sleep," the vigilante said. Gallus looked at his hand and did a double-take. At some point between the kitchen and living room, the Batman had replaced his beer bottle with a cup of herbal-scented tea. He drank it at a draught, and the sedative worked almost instantly.

Part III- Second Run

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it I always say," said the Joker as Terry pulled into a Burger King parking lot and backed into a space.

"You going to do another grenade," asked Terry. "Because last night I almost took glass in the neck."

"Calm down, Terry, I'm not that unoriginal. No, tonight's excitement is less combustable, though just as much fun," he said, pulling a slender silver canister from the satchel at his feet.

"What's that, boss," Roger asked, the camera trained on the Joker's hands over the back seat.

"Sarin gas," the Joker said with a widening of his semi-permanent smile. "If you're having a bad day, a whiff of this'll put everything into perspective, hahahahahahaaa!" Roger and Terry exchanged a meaningful glance before they each put on a gas mask. Joker gave them a silent glare.

"In case your aim is off, sir," Terry said.

"Where's my mask," the Joker whined.

"Frankly, sir? I've seen you huff shit that should've eaten your face and just giggle and itch your chin a little. You're made of sterner stuff."

"Hmm, an excellent point. Drive on, Jeeves!"

Elsewhere, in a cemetery seldom visited, a lone figure stood over a simple, partially broken headstone. The revenant, angular and wiry beneath his preacher's garb and gray duster, held a bouquet of lilacs clutched tight to his chest.

"Hello again, Mattie. It's me, John," the Scarecrow rasped in his echoing, otherworldly voice. "I'm trying to keep my promise to you, dear. It's slow going, but I think it will work, in the long run."

A wind whipped through, causing his duster to flap out behind him like the wings of some charcoal angel.

"You were always kind to me, Mattie. And you never patronized. We shared something, you and I. Something more than what the others came to suspect."

Crane threw his head back, eyes locked on the moon high overhead. The wind played its impish game with the dead grasses and his duster again, lending the Scarecrow the atmosphere that horror film directors would pay anything to have before their cameras.

"Oh, what an apprentice you would have made, Mattie! What joy I would have known to see you run your first city-spanning experiment! Mattie!" And he threw himself fully on the grave, beating the soil futilely with the fist that clutched the dead woman's favorite flowers. "Mattie," he groaned, devolving into sobs and groans.

The Scarecrow did not move from her grave for most of an hour, until his cellular phone chirped. He checked the text message Kathy had sent him and hauled himself up and away. Mattie Henderson, a woman nobody knew, remained silent in her tomb.

This time when the getaway car stopped a block away, it was the Joker who got out with the camera and dashed away unseen. Roger, dressed and painted to act as a decoy copycat, got up in the front seat. Terry floored the gas, and they were off.

They got less than three more blocks away when Gotham PD cruisers were on their tail. Tonight was different not only in the Joker's choice of weapon, franchise and escape route, but in style. As the first patrol car came up behind them, Roger reached his arm out the window and aimed the Tech-9 he'd come with back at the police.

His opening spray killed both officers in the first cruiser. Terry saw both officers twitch in the rearview mirror and he cursed, reaching over and smacking Roger upside the head.

"Ow! What the hell, Terry?"

"The boss isn't a marksman, nimrod! You gotta miss a few shots here and there, go for the tires on the next one! The Bat'll know something's up if you shoot as well as you can!"

"Well sooo-rry," Roger crooned, clearly anything but. Yet when a blue-and-white pulled up alongside them half a block later, he dutifully shot out the tires as Terry swerved to avoid a collission. "There, ya happy?"

"It's an improvement," Terry muttered. He stole a glance over at Roger, impressed with his partner's disguise. Without looking at the eyes, he'd have to say Roger did a hell of a job making himself look like the boss. "You know, if you'd gotten a set of those colored contacts in yellow, you'd be the boss's spitting image."

"I know, but there wasn't time. My voice is all wrong too."

"Can you laugh like him?" Roger leaned out of the passenger side window all the way to his ribs and opened fire on another cruiser, immitating the Joker's laugh with eerie precision. When he swept back into the car, Terry was smiling. "Yeah, that'll do."

Following the chase from above, Batman watched the Joker stick himself dangerously far out of the passenger side window and fire on his police pursuers, laughing that lunatic laughter of his.

"You won't be laughing long, clown," he muttered, lowering the Batplane closer. Before he could fire the grappler cable, the Joker's driver hooked a sharp left, and the maniac himself sprayed another wave of bullets at the patrol cars. The engine blocks started smoking on each, and the Joker pulled away.

Batman followed to a narrow alley on the city's west side, where the driver parked and got out. They were talking something over when Batman put the jet in hover mode and began to descend on a drop cable.

Terry's instincts were good. He locked eyes with the Batman when the vigilante was still fifteen feet up. "Go boss," he shouted, and the Joker sprinted away as O'Halleran opened fire with a compact uzi.

Batman felt the rush of air passing over him as he dropped, several bullets flattening against his body armor. He landed in a crouch within hand's reach of Terry, but the punch he threw up at the thug missed by an inch. Terry tossed the gun aside and drew out a wickedly curved knife from his belt.

"I should've remembered bullets ain't much good against," he started to say. Terry was smart, yes. His instincts were razor-sharp. He had extensive combat training to boot. But what he didn't have was the kind of arsenal the Batman possessed. When the Dark Knight had been rising to throw the uppercut with one hand, the other had been throwing a tranquilizer dart into Terry's leg.

The thug hit the ground as he tried to say 'armor'. It instead came out sounding like a drunken Frenchman trying to say 'love' in his native tongue.

More bullets smacked into Batman's back and legs. He whirled and sprinted at the Joker, lunging forward as the maniac tried to reload. It was as his fist came crashing into the faux Joker's jaw that the vigilante realized his eyes were the wrong color. The whites of Joker's eyes were yellow. This man's were not.

Another failed chase.

Part IV- Motivation

There had been few ways discovered over the years to incapacitate or render unconscious the Clown Prince of Crime. Though he could have brewed a copy of the tranquilizer serum the Batman had used on several occasions, Crane opted for the simplest approach as the Joker came through the rear door of the Majestic- a truncheon to the back of the head.

There was a sickening 'crack' as the weapon struck, and a second one when the Joker's long, beakish nose broke against the floor a heartbeat later. "Jesus," one of the Scarecrow's goons said nearby. "Sure you didn't kill him?"

"I certainly hope not," the Scarecrow rasped. "No less than he deserves, but not now. Bind him, get him in the van with the other one." The Scarecrow pulled a handheld sickle from his belt, sauntering over towards a knife-thrower's wheel. Tied to the wheel was another of the Joker's cronies, crying and screaming through his gag and duct tape.

Scarecrow stopped a dozen yards away, swinging the sickle idly back and forth at the end of his arm. "I'm afraid I'm not as practised as your boss at this," he intoned, cocking the sickle back over his shoulder. The goon began thrashing as best he could, but when the sickle landed a good five inches from his head, he sagged, greatful for this reprieve.

The Scarecrow walked with long, loping strides. "See? Not so bad, was it?" The goon started to try and say no, not bad at all. That was when Scarecrow retrieved the sickle and planted the hooked blade in the man's stomach, just above the groin. "This will be bad, though. Very, very bad."

An upward lunge and rip, followed by Scarecrow wiping the weapon off on his pant leg. The goon's innards began streaming out of the slit up his torso, and though he writhed and groaned, his eyes fluttered towards shutting. "Easy now, friend. You won't feel it for long."

That, it turned out, had been a lie.

Deep underground, the thin line between inquiry and obsession thrummed. Three weeks had passed since the Joker's second night of drive-thru murder and subsequent escape. Batman had tried to follow every lead, every clue he could, but in the end, he'd been forced to try the old method of looking to history.

With the chaotic mind and mannerisms of the Joker to work off of, this wasn't always a practical course of action. In this case, it had paid off, but not the way Batman had hoped. He'd gone to the old Majestic Theater three nights after the Joker's second attack, thinking the maniac might fall back on old habits. He had.

And what Batman had discovered there was a bloodbath. Fully seven long-time professional thugs had been slaughtered in ways that left him wanting to cringe. There had been no quarter given to the Joker's crew, and their methods of execution had all been, well, theatrical. Given that the Joker kept a large collection of old stage magician's props on hand, it wasn't any wonder, really.

One man had been sawed in half. Another had been shoved into the sword-piercing cabinet and run through with actual blades. Another had had his head crushed by an enormous strong man's mallet back in the props room, his head mashed between the hammer and the striker plate of the old carnival game. One floated limply in a box filled with water, bound in chains. The fifth body lay in a tangle of bear traps under the stage's trapdoor. The sixth corpse, burned to a husk, had a flame-eater's stick jutting out of his throat.

The final body had been lashed to the knife-thrower's wheel and split up the middle. This body stood out, and the Batman had followed several bloody footprints toward the back stage area. Here, someone had dropped a hand sickle, and in blood written a message on the wall. 'For Mattie', it said.

The Joker was nowhere in evidence, except for several drops of blood collected near the rear entrance. Analysis showed the blood had mixed with mucus from the nasal cavity, telling Batman that someone had broken the Joker's nose.

From the weapon at the scene, he knew the 'who' of this. As for how, why, when and where, he had not a clue.

So there he sat at his computer, once again combing through both the Joker and Scarecrow's files, trying to make a connection. Alfred watched from several yards away, ever silent and dutiful.

Gotham was about to receive an unexpected bit of good news.

The Joker groaned aloud as he came to consciousness, only hours after having taken one hell of a suckerpunch to the back of the old noggin. "That Bat sure doesn't fight fair," he said, bleary vision trying to come into focus. Something cold and metal clamped both wrists, and as he tried to rub his eyes, the clack-clack of chains echoed around him.

When the Joker opened his eyes, he found himself looking around a darkened medical patient's chamber, lifted from a medical procedural show and installed in a building with stone floors and walls. His arms and legs were shackled, each restraint connected to chains which, when he followed their courses, wound down into the floor, not the bed.

The Joker then remembered what he'd last seen before being knocked out- his crew, except for Terry and Roger, slaughtered like vermin at one of his own capers. He cast aside the hospital sheet laid over him and did a double-take at his own patient's smock. "Not very flattering," he muttered. He swung his legs over the side of the table and lowered himself gingerly towards the floor.

He managed to remain upright for about two seconds before his legs collapsed under him. Something he hadn't felt in a long time, pain, went roaring up his legs from the backs of his feet. He howled, but even in extremity the howl turned into a long peal of laughter as he writhed on the floor.

"Your Achilles' tendons have been severed, Joker," said a familiar voice over unseen speakers in the darkness of the room's ceiling overhead. "You could no more stand than a newborn pup."

"Johnny boy," the Joker called, rolling onto his back with the use of his arms. "My, my, and here I thought you wanted me out and about and up to my old tricks! Why else give me that handy dandy little stealth device back at Arkham?"

"In order to ensure that the city and the Batman were focused on you after the night of the escape," Scarecrow said over the speakers. "I'd already had my man Blake take a vial of an acid compound you're fond of and rig it into a cave at the park. Getting him to victimize himself was simply a matter of getting him to go into the cave again and activate the trigger."

"Clever of you, doc, really," the Joker said, dragging himself across the floor towards a set of steel doors. They swung open when he was halfway there and a pair of heavily muscled men scooped him up, tossing him unceremonially back up on the bed. He wheezed as the wind flew from him, trying to sit up and glower at them. "Not much of a way to treat a guest, Johnny!"

"You're not a guest here, clown," the Scarecrow said. "You are a test subject, nothing more. Chains, retract." The Joker's arms and legs were pulled taut towards the four points of the compass, but not painfully so.

"Hmm, didn't realize you were into the kinky stuff, straw head," the Joker gaffed.

"You may want to save your good humor for now," the Scarecrow intoned. "You'll need all those happy thoughts of yours in just a few minutes."

One of the thugs moved forward and grabbed the Joker by the hair, holding his head still as the other hired hand wheeled something into place. A steel sleeve slithered along the back of Joker's head and finally touched the base of his neck. The hands holding his head slipped away, and two metal plates came up on either side where they'd been.

The table was then tilted slightly forward on a hydraulic mechanism, so that he could see the operating theater doors open. In strode Crane in his undead preacher's costume, which, the Joker had to admit, gave him a fairly frightening appearance. With him was a short, perky-looking redheaded woman in surgeon's scrubs with gloves.

"What's all this, then, Scarecrow," the Joker asked somberly as the pair approached him on opposite sides of the bed. Crane carried with him the mixed scent of dust and graveyard soil, along with the faint, cinnamon smell of mummified flesh. "Trying to scare me?"

"Not exactly, though that would be a pleasant enough side effect," the Scarecrow rasped, his single visible eye nothing more than a pale glowing orb in the darkness under his long-brimmed traveler's hat. "No, we are here under the heavy auspice of discovery post mortem."

"Um, Crane? I'm not dead," the Joker pointed out. The Scarecrow raised up from his belt a hand sickle, and on the other side, Kathy brought up a scalpel.

"That is about to change," the Master of Terror said flatly.

Wayne found his inner thought process slipping more and more towards that of his nocturnal persona as the years went by, and as he signed off on the acquisition of a small software developer, he couldn't help wondering if the programmers in the room with him might render the Batman some of their computer savvy down the line.

He stood up and extended a hand to the two men, both young, barely out of college most likely. "Gentlemen, welcome to Waynecorp," he said, giving them his most winning grin and shaking hands. "You've both earned some time off, I imagine."

"We'd like to think so, but Norv and I never like to be away from a project too long," the shorter of the two scrawny computer aces said. "We'll contact Mr. Fox from our home office tomorrow to discuss our first leave, if that's all right."

Wayne assured them that it was, and the moment they were out of his office at Wayne Tower, he began brooding over the unusual peace that reigned over Gotham in the last three weeks.

The worst of his rogues' gallery were all locked up and accounted for with the exception of Scarecrow and the Joker. The two psychotics rarely worked together; he could count on one hand how many times that had happened in the last fifteen years. In each of those instances, Joker had taken the lead, with Scarecrow acting as more of a lieutenant than a stand-alone villain.

On the flip side of that coin, the two men had squared off against one another twice. In the second of those confrontations, Crane had directly engaged the Joker in melee combat. Wily though he was, the Joker had been outclassed by Crane's 'violent dancing' style of blended martial arts. Crane had left the clown bloodied and bruised, his legs broken and one shoulder dislocated.

The Joker's hired hands had chased after Crane and a single lucky bullet to the leg had ruined his clean escape. Wayne remembered that capture well. Crane had begged him for medical attention, as the shot had caught him in the left hip, the chipped bone grinding hellishly with every movement.

Now, he sat wondering if perhaps the Scarecrow had taken the reins of a slow-building, quiet plot. Psychopath he might be, but Crane was no idiot. The man held more degrees than you could shake a stick at.

"So who was Mattie, and what did she mean to you," Wayne muttered aloud in the voice of the Batman. He shook his head and started to head for the door, when one of his secretaries came bursting in, her curly brown hair bobbing about as she rushed toward his desk, stepping past Wayne effortlessly. "Claudia? What's the matter?"

"GMN, sir, you have to see this," she blurted, using the remote on his desk to open a panel on his office wall, revealing an enomrous flatscreen television set. "My husband just called to tell me about it."

Wayne, thinking Claudia was indulging in one of her 'must-share' celebrity news moments, sauntered back to his desk and leaned back against it, amused. The screen flickered on, showing a pair of news anchors in studio, a shot of a vaguely familiar reporter in a smaller picture in the screen's upper-right corner. Wayne recognized the building behind the on-the-scene reporter; something was going on down at Gotham Police headquarters.

The female anchor in-studio was in the middle of a sentence as the audio came on. "-the conference is about?" The on-scene reporter's shot expanded, and the older man pushed his earpiece to hear better.

"At this time, all I've been able to learn from my source inside the department is that a package of some sort was received here early this morning, and that the city's top law enforcement officials and members of the FBI are coming in to look at it. Commissioner Gordon is set to come out and make an announcement to the press in about seven minutes on the matter, and we'll know more then."

Wayne returned to his plush chair behind the desk and sent Claudia for a cup of coffee. As soon as she was gone, he pulled out his encrypted cellular phone and called Alfred's direct line.

"Sir," the Englishman said without preamble.

"Are you watching GMN?"

"Master Dick already called at the top of the broadcast. Also, the command computer finally completed its run for any mention of a 'Mattie' anywhere in Johnathan Crane's files both public and private."

"And?"

"And it would be best if you saw for yourself, sir. I'll have the files transferred to the laptop in the car."

"Get ready to come get me."

"Already started, sir." The line disconnected then, and Wayne put the phone in his suit coat's inner pocket. Claudia came back in then with his coffee, just in time for James Gordon to show up on screen.

"Hello, everyone," the veteran commissioner said, clearing his throat. He ran a wrinkled, gnarled hand back through his white hair. He doesn't look good, Wayne thought. He's rattled. "Today, at 6:16 am, eastern standard time, a plain brown package was delivered here to Gotham Police headquarters. Having no return address and labeled as being specifically sent to myself and the Batman, the bomb squad was immediately brought in.

"Ahem," he grunted, clearing his throat. "All staff were evacuated down to the bomb shelter located under headquarters when the bomb squad arrived at 7:05. X-rays revealed the package wrapping covered a lead box, so we could not get a preemptive look inside.

"Bomb-sniffing K-9 units were sent for, and they arrived at 7:20. After a sweep with the dogs, the bomb squad technicians proceeded to open the lead box inside. No explosives were discovered or discharged. At this time, all I'm willing to tell you folks is that the message within the package came to us compliments of the Scarecrow."

A barrage of questions came then from the press, all of which Gordon bluntly dodged by walking away hurriedly into the building. Wayne shut the television off and sipped his coffee.

"Jeez, Scarecrow," Claudia said with a shiver. "He's one of the worst, right up there with Two-Face and that Joker."

"I'm sure Batman will take care of the Scarecrow, Claudia," Wayne said, feigning disinterest with a yawn. "Why don't you and Delores take the rest of the day off?"

She yipped excitedly and flounced away, freeing Wayne to dash for the private bathroom attached to his office. He stepped over to the medicine cabinet, pushing the concealed access panel and entering his code. The trapdoor opened underneath him, and Wayne slid down the angled, curving chute all the way to the ground floor.

The small room the chute emptied out into was a storage closet that only he and Luscius Fox had the keys to. Wayne peered out into the hallway via the monitor next to the inside doorframe, connected to a hidden camera in the wall just on the other side. With the coast clear, he stepped out and hustled to the curb fronting the building.

Alfred stood holding the door open for him. Wayne got in, and as soon as he was enclosed within the vehicle, his mind slipped free of its Bruce Wayne skin. As Alfred slowly pulled away from the building, Batman popped open the laptop the butler had brought with him.

"Shall we be stopping anywhere in particular, sir," Alfred asked from the front seat of the Towne Car.

"Drop point gamma," Batman said, opening the highlighted files Alfred had transferred to the computer.

"A rare daylight appearance then, sir?"

"Not much choice. I have to speak to Gordon, find out what the Scarecrow sent him. He looked more out of sorts than normal, Alfred. I need to know why." He tuned Alfred and the rest of the world out as he scrolled through his list of possible matches for the name 'Mattie' in Johnathan Crane's files. There were only four matches. A cursory glance through the first three showed random victims of his numerous schemes over the years whose were referred to by that name. Two were deceased, one was still in a catatonic state at an asylum across state.

The fourth file, however, introduced a whole new wrinkle. "Matilda 'Mattie' Henderson, a prominent psychiatrist specializing in phobias and abberant behaviors, had been working at Arkham Asylum for three years when she was killed during one of the Joker's escapes.

Batman remembered the woman as soon as he saw her driver's license photo. It had been a year almost to the date before the recent assault on Arkham. Joker took her as a hostage when the guards tried to keep him from making his escape. One of the guards on duty had been wise enough to use the alarm that had been configured to call in SWAT and, by borrowing their signal, Batman.

The Dark Knight had arrived within minutes to find the Joker about to hop into a waiting speed boat. The madman had stabbed her in the chest and flung her at the vigilante, laughing as he hopped into the boat. Batman had been forced to make a choice; carry the woman back around to the front of the Asylum to get medical attention, or pursue the Joker.

He'd radioed SWAT on their own channel to come get the woman while he pursued the Clown Prince of Crime. That decision had cost Ms. Henderson her life, as SWAT didn't tend to her until after they'd breached the asylum to secure it. She died on the shore of Arkham Island.

Batman had regretted his choice for weeks afterwards, but capturing the Joker that night before he could do more harm had salved his wounds.

According to the files on his computer, Crane and Henderson were suspected by Arkham's administration of having a more intimate relationship than just doctor/patient.

"Sir, we're here," Alfred said from the front. Batman looked up, disappointed with himself for not having noticed where they were, or that the car had stopped. He folded the laptop shut, pressed a button on the back of the seat in front of him, and slipped down through the bottom of the car and the open sewer grate below the vehicle.

Lights automatically came on as he landed in a crouch, revealing one of his many backup gear caches peppered around the city and its suburbs. Batman was suited up and equipped in minutes, reviewing the files some more. He had summoned the Batmobile with a remote transmitter, and he would have to wait until it rumbled to a halt overhead.

Using the network connection he had installed in the cache, Batman swiftly hacked into Gotham PD's database and searched for more information on Henderson. According to SWAT officers on the scene at Arkham the night she died, Dr. Johnathan Crane was a screaming, ranting mess when they entered the building, demanding what had become of his beloved Mattie. Asylum guards had opened his cell to try to sedate him, but Crane responded by beating three of them senseless along with a SWAT officer using his 'violent dancing'. He had then been tasered and brought down until later.

The Batmobile thundered to a stop overhead. He climbed up into the cockpit from the cache, stowed the laptop in the passenger seat, and drove towards the city's east end.

James Gordon had been the police commissioner in Gotham City for twenty-one years. Retirement never looked so good, and if what the package and its included letter said held true, he might be able to do so in good conscience. He drove towards the boxy little apartment he now called home, his thoughts consumed by the package.

The apartment, like his and Barbara's seperation, was only temporary. An occupational hazard, he'd thought of it when she'd asked him to leave their house in the north side. Just an occupational hazard.

"Like that fucking car being in my parking lot," he grumbled, spotting the Batmobile. Either Batman was in a rush, or he'd grown terribly ballsy with the rise of public support in the last few months. Jim took the manilla folder sitting on his passenger seat and entered the building.

In the elevator, he hit the button for the fourth floor. He didn't even flinch when the overhead hatch swung down and the Dark Knight dropped down next to him. He just kept staring straight ahead.

"Batman," he said evenly.

"Gordon." The elevator dinged, and the two men walked side-by-side down the hall to Gordon's apartment. He unlocked the door and let Batman step through first. "Spartan," Batman commented.

"It's temporary," Gordon replied, shutting the door and locking it. He turned toward Batman then, standing in the middle of the plainly and minimally adorned living room. "Bruce, what the hell are you thinking? Parking that monstrosity in the middle of the lot, where everyone can see it?"

"I'm not going to be here long, Jim," Batman replied, peeling back the cowl over his head. "I need to know about the package."

"I figured that," Gordon replied, holding out the folder. Batman took it, and a pair of small vials Gordon had secreted in his pockets. "There's a skin sample and blood sample there. Trust me, you'll want to confirm this for yourself."

Batman opened the file folder, and found on top a full-color photograph of the lead box, opened. Inside was the Joker's left hand, sawed off from halfway up the forearm. He looked quickly at the sample vials, confirming with his eyes that the patch of skin was bleach white.

"No," he breathed.

"Read the letter," Gordon said, heading for his kitchen. "I need coffee." Batman sat down on Gordon's simple futon, setting the vials and photograph aside. The letter was handwritten, in a curling script he recognized as Johnathan Crane's when under the control of the Scarecrow aspect of his personality.

'To Gotham's premier defenders, I present you this gift. It is a small, token offering, I know, but the rest shall follow shortly, I assure you. This monster shall not face your justice, no, never again. He shall answer to a different breed of righteousness! I shall ensure that his descent into Tartarus is filled with the ravages of all pains, all horrors!

'Make no mistake, I am not so delusional that I believe I can make him apologize for what he's done to so many. I'm also not a hypocrite; I've killed my fair share. But I do what I do in the name of science, and in honor of the dark and savage gods of terror and anguish! This maniac commits his crimes for a lark, for a laugh! Well no more!

'I will show the Joker that he can indeed be imbued with fear, and do you know how? By sending his condemned soul to Hell!'

-Johnathan Crane, M.D.

"Pretty intense stuff," Gordon said, handing Batman a mug after the Dark Knight activated the Batmobile's cloaking system by remote. "You think he'll actually do it?"

"Normally I would say no," Batman replied. "This time, I think he will. Has your lab analyzed the packaging?"

"We did. Common wrapping paper, the kind you can get at the UPS store. The lead box was a reshaped ammo container. It had a lot of old organic matter on it. Techs said it had probably been scavenged from the city dump."

"Easy enough to get a hold of, harder to track down," Batman said. "He's planned this out every step of the way. But what's his end game?"

"What do you mean? That seems pretty obvious to me. He's going to kill the Joker and take his place as the biggest threat to the city."

"No," Batman said, shaking his head. "Crane doesn't work that way. He only kills when it's necessary or part of a larger experiment. He's thorough, meticulous, almost always has a contingency plan. But I've never dealt with him seeking revenge."

"Revenge?"

"Dr. Matilda Henderson," Batman said. "She was working at Arkham, got taken hostage and killed by the Joker last year during an escape."

"Oh, Jesus, I remember that now. I wish I'd been on the scene for that. Tapper should have taken his men to her right away."

"He doesn't take orders from me, Jim. He never would. You know him."

"True enough."

"Anyway, Henderson and Crane were suspected to have been having a romantic relationship when she was working with him as a patient," Batman said. "That's why revenge stands as Crane's motive." He picked up the photo of the Joker's arm. "And if this really is the Joker's, then we haven't got much time to stop Scarecrow from exacting it."

Batman pulled his cowl back on and moved toward the living room window that looked out on the parking lot. Behind him, Gordon called out quietly. "Batman?"

"Hmm?"

"Do we have to save him?" The Dark Knight had been worried about this question being asked aloud. "Think about it for a minute."

"No," the Batman replied curtly. He shoved the window open, hard. "If I think about it too long, I'll reach the same answer just about everyone else would. I'm not everyone else." And with that he left Jim Gordon alone, standing in his living room, the last dregs of his coffee waiting to be drank.

"No, you're not," Gordon whispered.

Part V- Quiet Time

The arm and blood turned out to be genuine, according to Batman's systems. Samples he'd taken over the years dealing with the Joker gave him a wealth of sample material to test against, and every test showed positive. Scarecrow held the Joker captive, and had cut off a sizable bit of his left arm.

A full 24 hours had passed since the arrival of the package at Gotham PD headquarters. Batman had run every analysis he could think of on the arm and blood, as well as the sickle he'd recovered from the old Majestic Theater. He was no closer to finding Scarecrow.

He wondered if the Joker was laughing now.

Laughter can come from a lot of places. The source of the Joker's current peal of laughter was a gleefully hideous god called pain. Johnathan Crane was the currently sitting pope of said god.

The hacksaw used a couple of days earlier on his arm had been awful, but it had been a welcome change of pace from the darkness of the chemically induced sleep the Scarecrow had been keeping him in. Joker hadn't thought much about the difference between names for the demented psychiatrist until now, but there was one.

Crane didn't suffer from any kind of split personality disorder. The Joker had worked with and been housed with plenty of those in his time, and Crane wasn't one such. To the Joker's way of thinking, the Scarecrow was the whole of the man, while Crane was that man under control of his less pleasant personality traits. Different levels of the same being, each taking dominance when circumstances called for it.

The very idea made him laugh some more, a low chuckle that echoed through the small room. "Something stinks," Joker muttered aloud. He shifted on the bed, sitting up. There was an old wooden barrel a few feet away, the stench wafting up out of it. "Oh, right. My toilet."

He might have had an easier time with his morning piss if he'd had two hands to work with. No sooner had he pulled the hospital gown back down than his two orderlies (as he'd taken to thinking of the thugs) swept in and hauled him back onto the bed.

"Now boys, let's not be too rough with the merchandise," he said seriously. "I bruise easy." As the chains on his remaining limbs went taught, he shrieked, the throbbing in his damaged arm kicking up dickens again. His breath came in short, sharp gasps, and once more the head brace was clamped into place.

The Scarecrow came in once again with the surgeon, this time a tray riddled with both surgical instruments and power tools wheeled by the woman. Behind them strode a pale fellow wrapped in mummy's bandages from head to toe.

"Going for a Universal Studios vibe, Scarecrow? I must say, I've always enjoyed the classics."

"Do please be quiet," the Scarecrow replied. He motioned to the mummy, who exited and returned half a minute later with a television/DVD player combo on another cart. As he wheeled it over to the right side of the room, the Joker saw a receiver plugged into the side of the set. When the mummy plugged the television in, it blinked to life.

On screen was Harley Quinn in her medical ward cell at Arkham. She was sitting in her bed with a copy of 'What To Expect When You're Expecting' in her lap.

"What is this," the Joker asked mildly, turning his eyes toward Scarecrow.

"This is Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Harley Quinn as she's now known," Scarecrow replied, pushing past the surgeon and mummy to stand by the television. With his short ash staff he pointed at her abdomen. "And this would be the seven-month-old fetus she's carrying, spawn of your union. How the two of you managed to arrange your rendezvous is no business of mine."

"There's a whole lot of stuff here that's no business of yours," Joker growled, furrowing his brow. "My arm, for instance. Get to the punchline, Scarecrow."

"I can have her killed, Joker," the deranged doctor said, slipping closer to the restrained clown. "I'm already having her watched. All it would take is a single phone call."

"What's your point," the Joker asked, his mad grin slowly returning. Crane seemed nonplussed for a moment, then just hung and shook his head, one hand kneading the forehead of his mask. "There a problem, doc?"

"Yes. Your response."

"Throw things off, did it?"

"On the contrary," the Scarecrow rasped, whipping his face up an inch away from the Joker's. "It's exactly what I expected! Some great trickster you are! Too self-absored to ever feel what I felt when you took my Mattie from me!"

"Okay, look, heh, let's not get hasty here," the Joker began to stammer. Scarecrow flipped the bed up so the Joker lay looking up at the ceiling, and the other two backed away from the table. "Crane! What are you doing?"

"I'm afraid Dr. Crane isn't available right now," the Scarecrow snarled, revving up a cordless drill.

Batman heard the call come over the radio along with every other officer in the city the following night. A body, burned to a crisp and lashed to a set of crossed beams like a scarecrow, had been found in a corn field on a farm some twenty miles north of Gotham. The body was missing half of its left arm.

The Batplane descended almost majestically half a mile away from the spotlight-drenched crime scene. The Dark Knight crept up to the perimeter, but decided the officers on-scene might be jumpy enough already. He came the last stretch loudly, letting himself step on twigs and rustle the corn stalks nearby.

A uniformed officer near the cordon stepped in front of him, hand on sidearm, and straightened on seeing him. "Oh, it's you. Commish says to let you through." The officer lifted the tape, and Batman approached the rest of the officers, including Gordon.

To say the Joker's corpse was a mess would be a grand understatement. He'd had his belly cut open with another sickle, this one then buried in his left foot. The clown's insides had spilled out, dangling in the air while the rest of him was set on fire. A couple of organs had burned off of their slender tethers of meat, dropping to the ground.

His face appeared to have been smashed in with a hammer, violently but not lethally. Charred bits of his purple suit clung to the fried flesh beneath. When Batman tried to pull on a pant sleeve, the skin underneath peeled away wetly from the roasted muscle and bone.

A few feet away, someone vomitted.

"He said he would do it," Gordon was saying, shaking his head. "He wasn't bluffing." Batman peered up at his old nemesis, shook his head, and stepped back to allow the coroner and his assistant through. The body was lowered, the liver temperature taken to confirm time of death. Samples were smuggled from the body by the coroner's assistant to the Batman, a bold maneuver that the vigilante appreciated.

Later, in the medical examiner's autopsy chamber, Batman stood silently in the corner as the stout, frumpy man spoke aloud to his digital voice recorder. "Stomach contents of the deceased include potato matter and ground beef, likely a meatloaf. The meal had undergone at least an hour's digestion, suggesting a final meal before execution. DNA results from the blood on the ground at the scene and heart and lung tissue confirm that the deceased is the criminal known only as the Joker. Genetic abnormalities from previous samples match those present in the samples taken from the cadaver."

The ME shut off his device and sighed, looking to Batman. "You know what I want," Batman said quietly.

"I do. Unfortunately, I can't give it to you. This is the Joker." The ME walked over to a sliding glass door and stepped from the autopsy floor to his attached office. Protocol required that the door and wall of the office be clear glass ever since a newer villain by the name of Shamble Lord had stolen several fresh bodies from autopsy tables around the state two years earlier.

Batman followed the examiner in. "I'll take copies of the photographs you took," the Dark Knight said. The ME handed the copies over easily, then started on his typed report.

"I know you don't want to hear this, but for once, I don't feel the slightest bit bad for the victim. If that man being on the slab hadn't put so many people there himself, this might not be such a good evening for me." The examiner turned to say something more, but the vigilante was gone.

Darkness possesses layers. For the Joker, those layers flowed past like the waters of the ocean for a deep sea diver returning to the surface on a slow winch. His extremeties tingled, the fiery pins-and-needles sensation of feeling returning. It had been a long time since he'd been so far under the level of waking consciousness. The experience wasn't pleasant, but similarly wasn't unpleasant. It just was.

And he'd managed to think up a few new gags and jokes while returning to the waking world. The Joker's eyes fluttered open, the scent of cleaning antisceptic heavy in the air. He was lying on a bed again, this one far more comfortable than his previous locale of imprisonment. For starters, it was a real bed.

And the room around him, he saw as he sat up, was no makeshift patient's room. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like an efficiency apartment. There were six flatscreen television sets lining the wall opposite his bed. There were no shackles on his wrists or ankles.

"Wrists," he said aloud, looking at his hands. "Plural. Did I somehow wind up in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, broken bits put back on the second reel?" He flexed the fingers on his left hand and smiled.

"The how of these things doesn't matter," said a familiar voice from a speaker grille set in the wall to his right. A deep, wide metal drawer stood out from the wall, of the sort used in high security prisons to give inmates their meals and other materials. A clear window revealed Scarecrow standing there, once again in his undead preacher's garb. A single jaundice-yellow orb looked in from the shadow cast under the brim of his traveler's hat.

"Could've fooled me," said the Joker, walking gingerly on sore legs toward the window and speaker grille. A plain gray sweat shirt and pants over soft gray slippers covered him, and the Joker longed for one of his trademark suits. "You're a psychiatrist. I thought the why and how of things was important to folks like you."

"Oh, it matters to the living," the Scarecrow said. Out of Joker's line of sight his fingers manipulated a remote, turning on the six televisions in the Joker's cell. "As you'll see soon enough, such things are beyond you now."

"I've never been your biggest fan, Johnny boy, and when you pull the cryptic card I get tired quick," Joker groused. "Speak plain." Scarecrow just pointed into the room at the televisions, and the Joker turned his attention there.

"No need," the Scarecrow said. The Joker's eyes roamed from screen to screen, each one tuned to a different news station. On all of them, the same general headline, given different wording, stood out boldly at the bottom of the screen- Gotham PD Officials Confirm The Joker is Dead.

"Not exactly the kind of joke I'd pull, but interesting," the Clown Prince of Crime said evenly, turning back to the window. "Batman will figure out that I'm not dead, though."

"I've taken him into account," said the psychotic psychiatrist. "Enough sample material was put forth to convince even him that you are, in fact, dead. Now, there's food in your intake shelf, and the corner of your quarters has been screened off so you can use the toilet and shower in privacy," the Scarecrow said, his voice changing slightly, sounding more alive, more cultured.

"Wait a minute," the Joker said, shaking his head, hand against his forehead. "What's your game plan here, Crane? Lull the city into a false sense of security, then watch them all shit themselves when I miraculously show up again? Because I'll cooperate with that kind of plan, no need to keep me penned up."

"I'm afraid you've missed your guess," Crane said, producing a small notepad from his coat and a pen. He scribbled something down, then tucked them away. "You should eat. There are clean clothes in the provided dresser."

"Clinical trials? Are you going to test a new fear gas on me? Because you know none of that stuff works."

"I'm well aware. Three meals will be provided daily. Other provisions will require my approval before being offered. Dr. Belik will be by to check on you a few times a day," Crane said, now grabbing a clipboard from off to one side of the window.

"Crane, this isn't Arkham. You're not a licensed shrink anymore."

"Also known. I will speak with you again in a couple of days." Crane turned away, the giggles of the Joker behind him staying him only a moment. "You may find this all very amusing for now, but rest assured, before the end you will beg for mercy."

Johnathan Crane walked away then, the Joker fairly howling with laughter behind him.

"Sir, it has been four months now," said Alfred, pouring Bruce Wayne his coffee. "You've read through every available news service I think there is, both here and abroad. I trust that if any law enforcement body anywhere suspected the Scarecrow was in their jurisdiction, they would happily inform you."

"Not entirely true," Wayne replied, rubbing his eyes. "There's one person who may know something more than he's telling me, but I can't go to him yet. The police need my help still with this newest street war."

In the time since the official pronouncement of the Joker's death, Terrance O'Halleran had been jailed and bailed. Since being acquitted on a technicality, he'd begun establishing his own criminal syndicate within Gotham's borders. As Batman had expected, O'Halleran was shaping up to be one of the Gotham Police Department's biggest problems.

Currently, O'Halleran's outfit was at war with a ragged union of several of the city's petty drug-dealing groups. Using spies and undercovers of his own, O'Halleran kept that union from becoming a major threat by instigating in-fighting among the factions. It was clean, efficient, and nearly impossible to prove through legal means.

The street war had served as a perfect distraction for Batman as well, helping to keep his mind off of the death of his greatest foe and the disappearance of Crane. Gotham PD, and most of the city's citizenry, had held itself in tense anticipation of some kind of spree by the Master of Fear for weeks following the Joker's death. But nothing happened, and life returned to normal.

"They won't need your help for long, at least not yours alone. Master Dick is coming home soon, and I understand there's a new vigilante making the rounds as well."

"He's not an unknown," Wayne grumbled. "I know detective Rourke means well, but he's pushing the line harder than I'd care for. If he isn't careful, I'll have to turn him in myself."

"I hardly see how you could, sir. He operates during the day, mostly."

"He doesn't want to come across me at night. He has the wits to minimize the threat of our paths crossing." Wayne tossed another newspaper aside, finishing his coffee. "Which meeting do I have today?"

"The Police Benevolence Association benefit, sir," Alfred said, bussing the table. "I've already laid out your suit and contacted Ms. Kern to confirm that we'll be picking her up at one."

Wayne nodded, the strong scent of coffee still redolent in the air. He wondered, briefly, how long it would be until he caught the scent of straw and decay that drifted from the Scarecrow. He hoped that it would be soon, and before Crane could do any more damage.

Time only held meaning when one had a consistent way of keeping track of it. Even the Joker, in the depths of his natural madness, could not stave off the creeping panic that set in without a frame of reference. The televisions Crane had provided him with all had remote interfaces, as the date and time on any station was always blurred out, and programs announcing such information were blocked entirely.

The routine beggared the Joker's attempts at keeping track with the outside world as well. Meals were delivered at uneven intervals. Sometimes he would receive two breakfasts in a three-meal cycle, sometimes two lunches or three dinners. The female doctor came to see him every day or so, but even her pattern wasn't a true pattern.

Normally the sheer chaos of it all might hold a certain appeal to him, but the Joker had no control over, well, anything. He deposited dirty clothes into the intake drawer, and received new garments as they were needed. But he was never brought the same clothes twice. He knew this by making small marks with a pen he'd been provided on the tags. No amount of laundering could entirely remove such a mark, he believed, yet never did he receive the same articles of clothing back.

Various gases flooded his cell sometimes, and their affects on him ranged from minor inconvenience (developing small itchy spots) to royal annoyance (losing all control of his bladder and bowels). Whenever he soiled himself, a cloud of yellowish gas was pumped in until he lost consciousness. The Joker would awaken later in clean clothes and a clean cell.

It was worse than being at Arkham. At least at Arkham the doctors interacted with him, engaged him in conversation, regardless of the frivolity or futility of such. The woman, Kathy, didn't even do that. Whenever Crane came down nowadays, he did so without the Scarecrow costume, and he left almost as abruptly as he came.

On his last visit, Crane had put a handwritten note in the shelf and slid it through. It read- 'Your son, Jack, is doing well with his foster family. Harley is beside herself with grief at your death and the loss of custody of your child.'

The Joker tore that note apart in a fit of pique, right in front of Crane. He had no idea how long ago that had been.

What was worse, however, was seeing no indication from various television news broadcasts after a month that anybody even cared. The Joker was dead and buried. He was beyond death, even. The city of Gotham had already begun to forget him.

Time passed, and the Joker felt his mind beginning to pull in on itself. One evening(he presumed it was evening) he sat glaring at the new anchor on GMN's Daily Report, muttering to himself. "You people can't forget me. I'm the Joker. I'm you people's worst nightmare. There's going to be a reckoning, oh yes."

On screen, the anchor continued his report. "The mayor responded by saying, quote, 'All possible ideas are being aired, and I am confident that the city council will soon come to terms on a new budget deal that will be amenable to both parties'. This is Rod Burris, and this has been the," he said, at which point the screen went blank and the audio cut out. It came back on moments later, "-edition of the Daily Report. Thank you, and good night."

The Joker let out a primal snarl and threw the remote at the television. It shattered brilliantly, sparks and shards of plastic flying hither and thither. A voice piped up from the speaker grille as the yellow gas began pouring out of unseen vents into the room.

"Temper, temper, Joker," Crane said, a haughty smile plain in his tone of voice. "Now you've only got one television left. You really should learn to enjoy the peace and quiet you've been afforded here." The Joker sprinted from his chair to the shatter-proof window, hammering on it with balled fists, shrieking his outrage as the gas crept toward him. Crane, leering like a demon at him behind his spectacles, just shook his head. "Pound and wail all you'd like. Just remember this- the world doesn't know, and nobody cares."

Darkness swallowed the Clown Prince of Crime once more.

When he awoke again, the Joker felt sore and weak. Raising his head took a drastic effort, and a quick look down at himself told him things had not gone well while he was unconscious. His body, ever average in size and tone, was now a scrawny, wasted thing. An IV stand and several machines were connected to him.

"What happened," he mumbled. There was a whoosh of air to his left, and his eyes turned quickly enough to see a section of the wall sliding back into place, the sole means of ingress or egress for the people who were his captives. There was a click as something turned on nearby.

"Joker? Can you hear me? It's Dr. Crane. Welcome back." The Joker shook his head, pulled the sticky pads and monitor attachments off, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He got to his feet, wobbled, and planted his legs wide enough apart to restore balance. After a moment and several deep breaths, the maniac managed to reach over for the IV stand, rolling it with him to the window.

"Oh, shit," he croaked, looking at Crane. The good doctor had already been going gray, but the progression showed much more starkly now. Crane's hair had grown out, and it was coming in iron-hued.

"You've been in a coma for ten months," Crane said evenly, holding up a patient's metal-cased clipboard. "I made an error with the last batch of sedative gas, and your entire body went into a long-term hibernation state. Sorry about that," he said.

"You don't sound very sorry, doc," Joker rasped.

"You should drink some water. You've got four bottles of water on your nightstand. A breakfast will be brought immediately. You may notice some changes, to yourself and to your cell both."

"I'll say," the Joker replied, tugging his loose sweater outward. "I've lost a little weight."

"Unavoidable, given the circumstances," Crane said, putting the clipboard up. He tucked his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and offered the Joker a cheery grin. "I'll have some news magazines brought to you. You've already got a new remote, to replace the one you broke ten months back. Feel free to watch some television or some movies. I had a Blu Ray player installed, in the event you awoke. And Joker?"

"What?"

"Things have changed while you were enjoying your quiet time of slumber," Crane said, his voice husky, closer to his Scarecrow tone. "They have changed a lot."

The doctor walked away then, leaving the Joker wondering what he meant.

The Batman was dead. The cover of Newsweek, dated nine months back, proclaimed it in bold type. 'Gotham's Defender Dead!' The Joker, unable to believe his eyes, flipped through the magazine, devouring the information within. Even the adverts didn't escape his attention.

According to the issue's main story, the Batman had been slain in an ambush set by the Scarecrow, Two-Face and Bane. The caped crusader had been in the midst of breaking down a street gang war for months when Two-Face had a group of his men, disguised as common hoods, lead the Batman to a warehouse at the city docks.

There, Bane had engaged the vigilante in hand-to-hand combat. Witnesses then stated that during the fight, the Scarecrow had doused the Batman from one side with a fluid of unknown origin. When the villain Bane next struck the Batman, the vigilante's body crumbled where he was hit. The chemical, apparently, had turned the Batman's body into so much glass, which Bane then systematically broke apart.

The Joker refused to believe it at first. Several more magazines came, including an issue of Popular Science. In this latter publication, researchers had produced a definitive analysis and study of the compound that had been used against the Batman. The results stated that any organic matter sprayed with the compound would take on the fragility of cheap glass.

"No," the Joker whimpered, the magazine dropping from fingers gone numb with shock. "No! Nononononono!" For close to an hour he ranted, raved, and flung himself around the cell.

The Batman was dead, and no one would come looking for the Clown Prince of Crime.

Part VI- Conclusions

Dr. Johnathan Crane stood over Mattie's grave, the lilacs in hand. He could feel a single tear running down his cheek, concealed from the darkened night by his gray revenant's mask. He sniffled, cleared his throat, and spoke. "It's almost over now, Mattie. I believe he's truly broken now, and the damage done forever. I know it isn't what you would have wanted, but it is no less than you deserved. I have avenged you."

The Scarecrow grumbled, casting a watchful look around the cemetery. He thought he could feel eyes upon him, and not those of the armed men he had hired to guard his visit to his beloved's grave.

"I must needs be brief now, Mattie. I have one last visit to make to the clown, and then I shall restore Gotham to its natural order. The experiment has about reached its termination point. Ah, you would have been proud of me, Mattie! You have no idea, none of them do, how complex this study has been. Yet it has perhaps yielded me my greatest results ever."

Silence then, interrupted only by the whispering wind. "Fare thee well, Mattie," Crane said, crouching to set the flowers down. "I loved you well, and always will."

The Joker sat staring glassy-eyed at the television, focused on nothing but the same litany that had been running through his head for the five days since coming out of his coma. They've forgotten me, they've forgotten me, they've forgotten me.

When there came a tapping at the window, his heart lurched. "Ah, company," he exclaimed happily. Scarecrow stood at the window, and despite his effort not to, the Joker flinched at the sight of him in his undead preacher's garb. Bad news came with Crane, regardless of his clothing. "What news, Crane brain," the Joker asked, chuckling.

"I am finished here," the Scarecrow said.

"What?"

"A year ago, I presented to you the hypothetical possibility of your precious Harley Quinn and your unborn child coming to harm. You showed far less concern then than you have since discovering that you've been left in the dust of Gotham's memory. You showed greater affect when you learned of the Batman's death.

"I conclude from these observations that you are quite possibly the most selfish creature I've ever had the misfortune to work with," Scarecrow growled. "You are a narcissist, Joker. You claimed for years that no mere shrink could withstand analyzing you, but in the end, you're nothing more than a self-indulgent criminal with a depraved sense of humor."

The Joker said nothing, letting the Scarecrow's words wash over him. After a minute, he spoke in a small voice. "So, you've reached a diagnosis. Will you let me out now?"

"No," the Scarecrow snapped. "Now I'm going to make ready for my automated drones to take over the run of this facility. Human staff needn't be bothered with you anymore."

"Now wait a minute, John," the Joker gibbered, legs trembling slightly.

"This study has concluded. The record will indicate my final diagnosis and final recommended treatment. You're so concerned about and in love with yourself, Joker, that the best method to help you is to leave you without human contact for a while. In the company of machines, you might learn to value human interraction again. In a few years," the Scarecrow added.

The yellow gas began leaking into the room once again. The Joker wheeled about, backing against the window, eyes wide, searching for the escape he knew wasn't there. "Crane! Don't do this! Let me out!"

There came no answer, and when the Joker turned his head to look through the window, he saw a steel security panel had come down over it. As the gas filled the air, he screamed, a long, warbling howl that would have rent the courage of brave men.

To Johnathan Crane, the sound was bliss.

The Scarecrow stood at the foot of her grave once again, alone. It had been four days since he left the hidden facility behind, along with its lone ward. The drones had been stolen from The Mad Hatter's previous hideout, and they had been programmed to take care of the clown for a few weeks. They wouldn't even be running that long.

Scarecrow just stared down at the headstone. He'd been standing there for the better part of an hour when he finally reached up and removed the hat and mask. Next came the noose, all deposited neatly and calmly into a plastic bag. He then reached into his coat's inner pocket and deposited a USB flash drive from it into the velise he'd put his marble notebooks in.

He sighed theatrically, smiling sadly. "You can come out now," he said clearly. "Surely you've come to realize this isn't an ambush." The Batman swooped down from a nearby oak tree, landing in a crouch a few yards away.

"I had to be sure," the Dark Knight intoned.

"Of course," Crane replied with a nod. "Given how detailed my fictional copy of Newsweek was, I can't blame you for thinking I'd try to make it into truth." There settled over the two men a peaceful quiet, both looking down at the headstone. Batman finally broke the silence.

"She was pregnant," he said.

"Nine weeks," said Crane. "It would have been my second child. First one that I would really have the chance to know. My first child, well, his mother and I were at college together. She transferred back to a school in Michigan to be closer to her family."

"Ever see him?"

"A couple of times. When he found out who I was, he sort of stopped writing." A long pause, then, "What about you? Any family?"

"No."

"Fortunate for you, what with the night life and all," Crane replied. "Mattie and I were kindred spirits, Batman. She was going to secure my release. We were going to be legitimate partners in practice. I'd stay home and consult on her patients, raise our child as a stay-at-home parent. I'm not getting any younger, you know. But Joker," he snarled, closing his eyes, clenching his fists.

"He took that from you," Batman said gently.

"Yes, he did. He'd bragged for years about being untouchable, but I've been studying him for a long time. I've been studying all of them, quietly. I had some bits of tissue I'd work on analysing on the side during my brief bouts of freedom from Arkham. His genetic composition is unstable, but not inscrutable. He's mortal, just like you and I."

"Hence the need for a Lazarus Coffer," Batman said.

"Indeed. Securing that required a great deal of back-channel wheedling. I ultimately had to tell Ra's Al Ghul my whole plan before he agreed to send me one. It was the only way to carve the Joker up and get his organs without finishing him off."

"You could have just killed him."

"Not as satisfying," the Scarecrow cooed, his voice echoing and distant for a moment. "He always said I could never make him afraid, but he was very, very wrong."

"How long does he think it's been?"

"About a year and a half. Sensory deprivation, chaotic scheduling, it all helped knock his sense of time out of kilter. Still, five months out of the world is nothing to sneeze at."

The Dark Knight and Master of Fear exchanged a look briefly, a nod of respect. Then they returned their gazes to the headstone.

"This was a lot to go through for revenge," Batman said. "You slaughtered those men at the Majestic."

"Science has always involved sacrifice, detective. You know that." Crane looked over at the Batman for a moment. "I learned that form of address from Ra's. I like it. It fits you well."

"You realize they're going to house you in the same level as Joker when you get back to Arkham," Batman said.

"Irrelevant. I won't be able to hear him. And detective?"

"Hmm?"

"This wasn't revenge. This was vengeance. There is a difference. Revenge is often messy and purely self-motivated. Vengeance, however, is righteous." Batman narrowed his eyes, but offered no rebuttal.

"He'll recover."

"Never completely. In the back of his mind, he'll always know that the Scarecrow finally got past all of his defenses and nonsense."

"Hmm. What's on the flash drive?"

"Details regarding how I pulled all of this together, as well as my compiled notes on the Joker and several others from Arkham, notably Two-Face, Bane and Poison Ivy. There's a layout of the facility, including the computer room where I programmed the fake news reports. That took a lot of effort, but I thankfully had a couple of men working on that full time. You will not find their names anywhere in my notes."

"Why protect them?"

"They were just men working for a good wage. No need to drag them down," Crane said abruptly. There was another long, awkward pause between the two men, interrupted by the approach of sirens in the distance. "They'll be here shortly, then."

"Yes."

"He told jokes in his sleep, you know," Crane said, not resisting as Batman gently pulled his hands behind his back and cuffed him. "He was actually pretty funny. I recorded some of them."

"The location of the facility, John," Batman said in a whisper.

"Front left pocket." Batman pulled a small device from Crane's pocket and held it up. "Green button activates the freight elevator. You've already been out there, when you found him the first time."

The Batman nodded, took Crane by the arm, and started walking him towards the cemetery gates. As the first patrol car pulled up, Gordon clambered out and walked stiffly up to Batman and Crane.

"Crane," he said to the doctor.

"Commissioner, could I beg a favor of you?"

"Words are free enough, Crane," Gordon replied around his cigarette. "Speak your piece."

"I'd appeciate some classical on the ride back downtown," Crane said with a grin. "And Batman? Mattie liked lilacs quite a lot. They were her favorite." Batman said nothing, but he did nod. Gordon took Crane by the arm and eased him into the car, asking the driving officer to turn the radio to the local classical station. He shut Crane in, then turned to Batman.

"You never did tell me how you figured it out," Gordon said quietly.

"Ra's Al Ghul was very careful not to draw my attention when he sent the Lazarus Coffer here. He wasn't so careful about retrieving it. I followed the shipment to him. He told me what Scarecrow told him about his plan. Ra's thought it was brilliant."

"I'd have to agree," Gordon said. "Did you get a location out of him?"

"The farm where we found the false body. He said to use this remote on the freight elevator. It's probably in the barn."

An hour and a half later, Batman followed SWAT officers as they barged through the Scarecrow's underground facility. It wasn't a large affair- four workrooms, one bedroom/study, a servicable kitchen, and a corridor leading down to a secured cell. In that cell, the Joker lay curled up on a bed in the fetal position, apparently catatonic.

Until, that was, his eyes fell on Batman. His yellow, gimlet eyes went wide, and the maniac began laughing so hard that he convulsed on the bed for several minutes. EMTs were checking his vitals on the bed when he sobered enough to ask Batman what was going on.

"Scarecrow had you down here for an experiment. Sensory deprivation, fabricated publications, and programmed television broadcasts pre-recorded with the help of actors," Batman said.

"It was very convincing," the Joker said with a shudder. "I thought I'd been shuffled off the collective consciousness of the world."

"And how did that make you feel, Joker?" The Joker blinked, stunned by the question and his own answer.

"Terrified," he admitted. "I'll be damned. Straw head finally got to me. But what about my body? My arm?"

"Scarecrow got hold of a Lazarus Coffer to regenerate you after harvesting your organs. Neither the medical examiner or myself thought to check the brain after confirming that the heart and lungs matched your genetic structure. If we had, we would have known it wasn't you. As for your current state, I found notes in a lab down the hall about a toxin that can leave a healthy man in your state in twenty-four hours. It was all chemical smoke and mirrors."

The Joker chuckled a little, shaking his head. "You know, for a crazy prick, Johnny boy has one hell of a brain in that head of his."

"He does."

"What was this all about, anyway," the Joker asked as he was hauled to his feet and escorted out of the cell. The Batman didn't answer, though. The Joker repeated his question, but Batman just walked behind him, departing in the Batmobile when they got outside.

A week later, he stood at the foot of Mattie Henderson's grave, a clutch of lilacs in his gauntleted fist. "He loved you," the Batman said, laying the flowers down. "He did a terrible thing to a terrible man, to avenge your death. And to tell you the truth," he said, looking skyward as a bat flew past overhead, "I can't say I blame him."

-Fin