A/N Another Gordon-reflects-on-Batman fic, but with a slightly different edge to it. Enjoy!
Gordon had been frightened around Batman before.
He had been scared in his office, the first time they met, of the man who held what he could only presume was a gun to his back and whispered in his ear. That it wasn't a gun he had discovered with some self-directed deprecation after returning to his office, legs shaking, but the fear had lingered: resigned and bitter in the back of his throat.
When the Narrows were shrouded in gas and the very city itself seemed to go insane, when he was shot at and almost turned a fake death into a real one, the countless times they met in the middle of danger, Gordan felt that thread of fear. He supposed it meant he wasn't a brave man, but he had long suspected that, not realizing that it was only common sense in a world gone mad and the fact that he went into danger anyway – the only honest cop in Gotham with no one at his back – made him so reckless even the crooked and criminal were wary with respect.
But then the Joker came to the station and the Batman waited in darkness to interview him, and Gordon felt a very different type of fear.
Gordon thought everything was all right, as the Joker spoke about what, to him, sounded like the shouts from the drunk-tank, or druggie mumbling in the back of the cruiser after a bust on some den; crazed, incoherent, and disconnected. It seemed to have only the merest relation to the world as Gordon knew it, even in Gotham.
"You have all these rules, and you think they'll save you."
("He's in control," Gordon said because he was still naive enough to believe it was true)
"I have one rule," Batman said, and it sounded like an argument but it wasn't, was it?
Quite suddenly, everything changed, because Gordon realized that what this madman was saying wasn't nonsense, not to the Batman.
When everything went so brutally out of control and the Joker spoke about rules and how much they were alike ("Don't talk like one of them; you're not," he said and Gordon knew that was true, but didn't understand, not yet) and the reasons they hid behind costumes and names – because normal people might arrogantly think they understood enough to judge them, but they could never understand the type of person who did the things these two men had done. And that repulsion they felt and hid behind civilized, modern words like vigilante and terrorism and insanity was only hiding the instinctual, ancient fear of the predator that lurked outside of the ring of firelight and was unknowable and insatiable and utterly inhuman.
As he banged his fists on the outside of his locked interrogation room, as the Batman showed his darkest side in the fluorescent lighting that made it more real, somehow, Gordon realized the futility of the labels he had given these men.
And for the first time since meeting him, Gordon was afraid not of what Batman could do, but of what lay underneath the mask.