Sideshow 01b: 'we wish you a merry christmas'

No tricks indeed, Jokester thought, a tad bitterly. Tyrant.

There was a heavy knee in his back and a hand in his hair and part of him volunteered that this seemed like pretty much the ideal moment for having a flashback.

Right, you do that, he delegated, slightly waspish. And while you're busy enjoying your traumatic reruns, I will be dealing with the here and now. He might dare Owlman to try for a redo on his murder like it was his job, but that didn't mean today was ever a good day to die.

"You know," said the Owl, worryingly dry, "purple isn't a Christmas color."

J jerked at his left arm, the least securely pinned, and snorted. Fashion commentary, now. It wasn't like he'd asked to look like this. "What, you want I should dye it red every December? Or green to go with Santa? I had a wig!"

Now, generally Jokester liked a sense of humor, and would go out of his way to nurture and encourage it in others. Anybody who laughed at his jokes was automatically raised in his esteem. The fact that Owlman never seemed to get the joke was one of his many complaints about the man's general character.

Unfortunately, the rare occasions when Owlman made jokes of his own correlated closely with occasions when he did something especially inventively horrible. They weren't even funny ones. Travesty. Outrage.

Now he only made a small, scornful sound, like a hybrid of a huff and a snort, and pressed a little harder on the back of J's skull. "Joker."

There he went with the name-mangling again. As insulting diminutives went, J'd heard better, but considering the requirements the bully's dignity seemed to lay on him, it was probably the best he could do. He snickered. "Butterbeak."

He was expecting at least a twist at his hair for that one, but Owlman just demanded grimly, as though he hadn't heard, "What was in the candy?"

"Wha…? I dunno. Ow! Hehehehe, ow, heh, wow, okay, you're serious, but I'm serious! Sugar, peppermint? Emulsifiers, whatever those are. I'm not a candy maker. Tumpty-tum-tum, the candy-man caaaan and ow again. What's your damage, ya maniac?"

"I don't think that's your question to ask."

"Yeah, what was I thinking, this is a totally adequate level of torture, carry on!"

"If I'm torturing you, you'll know."

"Kehehe, yeah, I remember. Ow, again. Look, buddy, cross my heart and hope to die, there is no scheme I would ever pull that involved drugging random small children. This was not a plot. My life doesn't actually revolve around you."

There was a moment of silence, without any particular intensification of pain, that felt almost baffled. Like Owlman honestly couldn't parse not being the most important thing in his life, the fulcrum around which all his efforts revolved. J didn't act that obsessed, did he? No, it was just His Exalted Downy Majesty being an egomaniac. J was only a little obsessed. And it took a lot of focus to fight all those evil resources with what he had available! He needed to obsess sometimes or his work would go nowhere! He was an artist. He was supposed to be unhinged. He just had other things going on, too.

"Aw, sweetheart," he crooned, though he couldn't hold back a snicker. "Are you feelin' neglected? Is that what this is about?"

His face hit the icy grit harder than ever, and the grip on his right arm made the bones creak. "I will find out, one way or another," Owlman promised, in one of those icy voices of supreme threat he generally only pulled out when Jokester had actually done something. Maybe the style shift and increased wisecracking wasn't so much a sign of loosening up as going further round the twist?

"Batman!" called a clear young voice from somewhere above them, before the knives came into play or he could think of anything to respond, and the fire escape J had taken down here rattled with brief contact. "Where have you been? The Joker's taken a whole toy store…hostage…."

The boy trailed off just as he hit pavement and Jokester got his neck craned around enough to grin up at him.

He looked confused, but so far as J was concerned things had just gotten full-on surreal.

The face under the domino mask looked familiar, but the cherry-red, leaf-green, and canary-yellow weren't even necessary to make it hard to see Talon. There'd been emotion running hot and sharp through his voice and there was animation in every line of him. It was like Talon inside out and backward. Talon as a real teenage boy, instead of the unconvincing puppet J was used to.

"Robin," said the man holding him by the hair, evidently perturbed by the news about the toy store.

Jokester cracked up. He couldn't help it. Not-Talon took a step back, visibly unsettled, which was even funnier, but it was hard to go into proper paroxysms when someone was kneeling on you. Though, feet free, could drum them. "Sorry!" he got out. "Ahahah, sorry, sorry, hehehe…sorry, kid, hold up! Hang on, please, haha. What's a Batman?"

When the kid just pulled a sort of grouper face, J rattled on. "Isn't a batman, like, a personal valet? Outdated slang from other countries isn't my, my thing, but I'm pretty sure…like Jeeves and Wooster, what what?"

"Are you sure about that hostage situation?" the man on his back demanded of the boy in the yellow cape, who shook off his astonishment at J to look the man in the face and give a firm nod.

Possibly-Batman-whatever-that-was let go of his hair. And then suddenly the weight on his back and arm was gone, and he flipped onto his back at once, to see that the dark figure had fallen back and was blocking off the opposite end of the alley, so the two of them were boxing him in.

J thought it was a little premature to worry about him running away, but shrugged and applied himself to the…cables wrapped around his legs. They were really nice stuff, cords knitted out of a mass of tiny wires for a maximum of strength and flexibility, but they were only held on by the clever twist of some small black balls around each other. Hopeless for his legs, but a few seconds' work with hands. He tucked the bonds inside his ruined costume as he stood up, brushing away what dirt and ash he could. He could get some use out of cables like that.

"So," he said, keeping his body language open and friendly as possible in front of a guy who'd just almost given him trauma flashbacks and threatened to torture him, and with a kid of unknown abilities at his back. "I'm thinking we might have us a case of mistaken identity. In which case I'm sorry about the barrel," he added, because now he got a look that glorious inky black was now a muck of sticky grey ash, flecked with red rust. It wasn't like people were choosy about what they burned in those, either. Minimum, he'd nailed the guy with a bunch of old cigarette butts.

The boy behind him made a funny little noise, and Jokester glanced over his shoulder at him with his friendliest expression. "He's fine," he promised. "So," to his ash-streaked recent nemesis, "you aren't Owlman?"

"He's Batman," said the kid. J did a one-eighty and smiled at him again. If he was the talker, he got the attention.

"Marvelous! So, young man, am I right in guessing that a Batman is someone less interested in killing me than an Owlman is? And may I ask your name?"

"I'm Robin," said Not-Talon, expression almost as blank as the person-he-looked-like-but-wasn't. "And Batman isn't going to kill you."

J rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. Not being killed was a low low bar and all but clearing it was always good. "Excellent! Pleasure to meet you!"

"And you are?" came the familiar silky growl from behind him. Batman, whatever that was, certainly sounded like someone intending to kill him.

"Glad you asked. I am that maven of entertainment…the Jokester! Tadah!" A flourishing bow, one for each half of his audience, and nobody went for the neck when he took his eyes off them, which was something to note. "The people's hero," he added as he straightened, with a self-deprecating wiggle of his fingers. "Champion of justice, defender of the helpless! And, occasionally, charity Santa." He brushed at the front of his costume some more, not out of any real hope of getting the dirt out of the white faux fur but just because it was a real mess.

…the folks at the Mission were probably a lot less likely to believe he'd been attacked by a Batman who'd mistaken him for somebody called Joker, than that Owlman had kicked him all the way up and down Beverly Street. But he couldn't lie and say the latter, because for one thing he was increasingly suspecting nobody on Beverly Street would remember seeing anything.

"Gotham's probably not the best place to set up as a clown," said Robin guardedly.

"On the contrary, I've been an established comedy act in Gotham for years! The clown thing is a tad more recent, I give." He paused, drifting to put his back against one alley wall so he could look between halves of his audience without starting to feel like a spinning top. "I went by Red Hood before," he added experimentally. Recognition joined the confusion and distrust visible on Robin's strangely expressive face, but didn't displace them. Batman was a closed book.

"I gotta say," J continued, picking up steam, making his smile as crooked and careless as could be, "nobody's mistaken me for anybody since Owlman personalized my face." He laid the tip of one finger at the corner of his mouth and then gave it a flick that perfectly mimicked the passage of a knife through cheek muscle, to show what he meant. Robin flinched, fractionally. Batman didn't. "It's a novelty."

"And this…Owlman. Was he responsible for the rest of your disfigurement as well?"

"Pfeheh, rude. No, I like it, straightforward is good…yeah. He was trying to drown me in acid, mind you; I got off light with the palette swop."

"Why?" Robin demanded. Why easy? Oh, why drowning in acid.

J shrugged. He wasn't responsible for explaining Owlman's black-hearted little species of crazy; he could have given it a shot, but he felt like that was granting the man altogether too much recognition. "Gave his little criminal empire some trouble. I'm a simple entertainer at heart, but I do love my hometown. Like to see people smilin', ya know? So I branched out. You know how it is, get a stage name, punch out a few legbreakers, foil a murder plot, crack a few annoying jokes, and suddenly you've got a price on your head…hehe. Old news."

"Is he for real?" Robin asked. Jokester laughed, and the expressions on both their faces grew oddly fixed, but Batman said,

"I think he might be, Robin."

"I'm right here," J pointed out. "I'm real. You seem like it. We couldn't have missed each other in the same Gotham for ten years, and we prob'ly couldn't have missed an extra Gotham lying around, and I don't really think anybody could've time-traveled up a timeline where Talon was this funny, so I'm mostly like 'I really hope this isn't some kind of massive reality-warping effect that didn't affect me, again,' except there's apparently a bad guy who looks like me, so I'm in some kind of alternate universe?"

"Was that logic?" Robin had gone from incredulous to sort of smirking while J talked, but not in a really mean way. He looked like he might have laughed if his boss hadn't been there. J thought it might take him a long time to get tired of getting expressions out of Talon's face.

He folded his arms haughtily. "I can logic! I can also lateral thinking. I have multiple modes."

Alternate universe. Alternate universe! Ed was going to be so jealous. Alonzo wasn't going to believe a word of it. He kind of wanted to explore the whole thing, except if everyone was afraid of him it would just get depressing.

Of course, he might not have much choice. "Uh, if you guys are such experts, any chance you know how to get me home? I wouldn't want to, I dunno, deform reality on you or something."

The…possibly-heroes exchanged a look. Batman then looked sternly at Jokester.

"If you answer all our questions honestly and allow us to perform some tests, we should be able to return you to your…hometown."

J pulled a face. Tests. "Folks at home do need me," he said. Maybe he could find somebody else to send him, though? "You had a lot of experience with this kinda thing?"

"Some," shrugged Robin.

"Better'n me," J admitted. Bah. He did need help, clearly, but putting himself in the power of someone who was so clearly practically Owlman went against the grain. He cocked his head. "Look, didn't you guys have a hostage situation to deal with?"

Batman's lips thinned. He turned to his sidekick. "Robin."

"I am not staying behind to watch him," said Robin, folding his arms. "Joker's had time to get his prisoners and all arranged to his best advantage. You need me."

There was refusal to compromise in the young man's stiff neck and the lift of his chin, and J waited to see what Batman would do. He knew what defiance meant to Owlman; letting it go unpunished was like punching a hole in his own universe. Whatever else he might be, Batman was clearly a control freak in his own right, who expected to be obeyed. Lens-covered eyes locked. One pair challengingly tilted up, one implacably down. J held his breath.

Batman scowled. "I suppose you have an alternate plan?"

"He could come with us." Robin proposed this solution with only a little hesitance, which said to J that he knew this proposal could very well be rejected, but that he felt secure in his right to make proposals. "It's not very fair to turn him over to the police when he hasn't done anything," he added reasonably.

"I like the first plan!" J chimed in, waving one hand in the air. "If I get a vote, I vote for Robin's idea! I mean, I've never been arrested by cops who weren't on the take from Featherbutt, but I generally find it's not a fun experience." Tasering he could handle—he privately suspected he had some kind of superhuman resistance to electricity, though he wasn't about to start looking into why—but dirty cops had a thing for kicking him in the ribs that tended to end in tears.

The scowl moved to him, but J had borne up under far darker disapproval in his time, and beamed back.

"Fine."

Robin flashed a grin, and J made a triumphant fist. Almost offered the kid a high-five, but thought the better of it. Robin might try harder not to team up on Batman if his attention was drawn to his doing it.

"Huzzah," he said instead. Rubbed his grimy gloves together, and then pointed with slight hesitation back the way Batman had chased him before taking him down. "Lemmee get my stuff before we go?"

Apparently wherever they were going was in roughly that direction, because they let him retrace his steps without much fuss, so long as he was quick. Batman was glaring, but that was clearly just what his face did, like J couldn't help but smile. Everything was just where he'd left it, even the bucket of donations on the steps at #247, which really said something about how scared people were of this Joker, if the rapidly empty street earlier hadn't been enough. The bell was fine. He even found his granny-glasses, only slightly bent. He pulled the long red hat on, but put the wig and beard away. They'd been scratchy enough the first time, and now they were wet.

The car was impressive. "This car is impressive," Jokester announced, when they reached it, three blocks from where Batman had intercepted him. "Is it a car? Or did you retrofit a tank to have sleek sporty lines? If you tell me it can fly I will not even be surprised." He went down on his belly to get a look at the undercarriage and whether it was a) armored and b) recognizably that of an automobile.

Batman hauled him away again by the back of his jacket, and he stuck out his tongue but didn't protest. He saw Robin turning away to hide a smile, and cackled inwardly. Outwardly, he just cocked his head at the Batman.

"So, am I sitting in the back?"

"There is no back."

"What, a two-seater? What do you do when you're traveling with friends? Does this mean you don't have any?"

Robin snickered, and then tried very hard to pretend he hadn't. "I have friends," he volunteered dryly. "He has people he scowls at differently."

"Hehe! Okay, then. Do I go in the trunk?"

"It's full."

"Oh, hey, you have handholds on the top! …that's where I'm sitting, isn't it."

Batman's teeth ground just like Owlman's. He nodded.

"Awesome."

Less awesome was that they cuffed him there, but it wasn't like he couldn't get loose given like seven seconds. "Just don't roll the car," he said as he settled in and the retractable part of the roof closed over his hosts. "If you make me into clown jelly I will haunt you for years. Tapdancing when you're trying to sleep and pulling faces during serious meetings. I know seven hundred and thirty-two different knock-knock jokes. And I'll be invisible to everyone but you so if you react you'll look like a lunatic."

Don't roll the car, he could almost hear Robin telling his boss inside, and he chortled to himself and held on tight. The engine roared to life, and they were off.

People were staring. Of course they were. He was Santa chained to the top of a tank. People were staring, which meant he was on stage. He filled his lungs, and grinned.

"Haaave a holly-jolly Christmas, and when you walk down the street, say hello to friends you know, and everyone you meet. Oh, ho, the mistletoe, hung where you can see! Sooomebody waits for you, kiss 'er once for me! Have a holly-jolly—"

"Jokester," rumbled Batman's voice through a speaker directly in front of him, humorless as the Owl. "Be quiet."

"You are no fun at all."

But he stopped singing, anyway. The man already made him ride on the roof, in handcuffs. J knew when pushing somebody was going to leave him with no slack left to work with. Instead, he practiced his handstands. Being cuffed to the vehicle was actually great for practicing moving-car acrobatics, because it meant that even if he fell off he wouldn't hit the ground.

Dislocate an arm, possibly, but not hit the ground.

The toy store this Joker character had taken over was way uptown, fancy-schmancy and the police had it all cordoned off. Batman screeched up about a block from their circle and the lid opened up again, expelling Batman and Robin like they tasted bad. Batman had either changed or cleaned up while inside, and the ash was gone, so maybe that was what the car was objecting to. "Okay, so how's the situation look?" Jokester asked brightly, dropping down behind them. He considerately handed the cuffs back to their owner, who didn't attempt to hit him, just gave him a dirty look and put them away.

"Robin, make sure you get the Joker-gas antidote to the seven hostages that have been dosed as quickly as possible."

"How many hostages, total?" J inquired.

"Twenty-three adults and twelve children," said Robin.

"You're only here so we can keep an eye on you," Batman told him.

"Yes, because I'll be so easy to keep track of while you're staging a hostage rescue. C'mon. You know I'm not bad in a fight. Would you stand for it if someone wanted you to not help rescue kids? Let's coordinate. Has he made any demands?"

"Half a case of ginger beer, thirty-seven helium balloons, and the Great Wall of China." Batman's deadpan was perfect, at least as good as Harvey's, and J giggled. The big man ignored him. "He's gotten the ginger beer. Police are in negotiations about the balloons. Everyone knows he doesn't actually care whether he gets what he asked for, but it buys time."

"Do the cops know you're coming?"

"I radioed the Commissioner on the way," Robin said, like being on speaking terms with the Commissioner of Police was perfectly normal. J pulled a jealous face at him.

"Lucky. I know like seven decent cops, and none of them rank above Corporal. Well, Gordon's alright, I guess, but Owlman's got him sewn up tight. If I called Loeb he'd probably try to do some kind of voodoo curse through the phone line. So are they gonna just let you stroll in?"

Batman shook his head. "We'll proceed by stealth. I do plan to do the commanding officer the courtesy of announcing our arrival."

"And then we'll slip in through the back," Robin expanded, closing the indeed-very-full trunk almost noiselessly. Ed would love this thing. "Batman, I have fourteen antidote injectors." He handed half of them over, and both of the local vigilantes stowed the full hypodermics in their belts, to Jokester's fascination. Robin looked like he wished he had more, but there wasn't anywhere to carry it. Obviously Joker's inhalant wasn't an instant killer, so there'd be time to run to the car for supplies in the case of any further poisonings. "Surveillance?" he asked his boss.

Batman held up a palm-sized screen that seemed to have remotely hacked into the security cameras inside the toy store. "No change."

J craned his neck over Robin's shoulder to get a look. Fancy toy store, complete with the larger-than-life-size stuffed animals and hyperrealistic playhouse sets. In the fabulously appointed toy kitchen display was a line of twitching bodies that must be the poisoned hostages; the visible faces were stretched into painful-looking rictus grins. Eesh. At least only one of them was a kid, and that one looked to be in middle school. The rest of the victims were huddled within line-of-sight of the big front windows, tied hand and foot and miserable, with a cluster of what seemed to be gas canisters in the center of the huddle. One window was shattered, though J couldn't tell what had happened to it. Could be a bullet, could be not.

Standing further back, out of sight of the windows, with a revolver in one hand and some kind of bomb in the other, was a lanky man in a purple suit, with green-black hair combed in a dapper style J rather approved of, and an ugly face he knew from mirrors. He understood Batman's confusion perfectly now, but even if his double hadn't been toying with a gun and a terrified five-year-old girl there was a meanness in the other man's smile that Jokester hoped he would have picked up on right away, if they'd met under different circumstances.

"He's on his own," said Robin. "The real danger is any booby-traps focused on the hostages."

"Okay, so, I'll be the diversion," Jokester volunteered. And when Batman and Robin shot him matched quelling looks, just quirked an eyebrow. "What? I'm very diverting. I'll go in first, draw his attention, and then you can bop him over the head or extract the moms and kiddies or whatever your little hearts desire. Except get distracted and play with the toys. Please don't do that."

Batman's mouth made a flat line. Bully for him. "This is a very delicate situation, and the Joker is involved. Even if you distract him, you're likely to be killed."

"Look, he's supposed to be evil me, right? I can guarantee the odds of any version of me destroying something as weird as I'm going to seem before he has a chance to poke at it are pretty low. And if he tries…" J shrugged; pulled a softer smile than he'd usually use around dangerous strangers because after seeing the Joker he wouldn't blame them for reflexively punching him in the grin. "I'll manage. Owlman's been trying to put me down for years." He ran his tongue along the rope of scar tissue on the inside of one cheek. "It never quite takes."

The duo passed silent messages across him, which was especially impressive with both their eyes hidden, and then Batman said, "Very well. Distract. The hostages are priority."

"Of course! Oh, ah, before we go into a fight together—I got a read on Batman's style earlier, but Robin, do you heal?"

"I'm not much of a medic, if that's what you mean. But I can administer antidotes just fine."

"Ehe, nah, thing is, Owlman's chief enforcer, Talon, he has this regeneration thing. If he gets shot he just walks it off, it's crazy. Needed to know how much cover you need, you know?"

"Oh. Well, yeah. Normal human healing only."

"Mmkay! Let's go."

Being a distraction meant going in the front and causing a commotion, raising the priority of communicating with the authorities. Robin went ahead to scout out the rear of the building, while Jokester snuck and Batman ghosted over to the nerve center of the police cordon. J hung back behind the corner of the nearest building and watched Batman slip unnoticed to directly behind the police officer who seemed to be in charge, and then speak.

"Detective Montoya."

The woman started, jerked her gun toward him and then just as quickly away, and narrowed her eyes. "Where have you been? He says he's getting sick of waiting for you, I was just about ready to sent SWAT in and hope we could minimize casualties by hitting hard!"

"Any deaths?" Batman asked, instead of apologizing or offering justifications like a normal human being.

"Not yet, so far as we know." There was a beat. "Well? You're clear to move in."

"One more thing," said Batman.

J popped out from his hiding place and moved forward, both hands held up in exaggerated harmlessness. He waved at Montoya.

"Hi! My name is J, I'm from an alternate universe, and I hate people who mess with kids. I'm here to help!"

"He's the reason I was delayed," Batman informed the detective, while she tried to get her eyes back inside her skull. "He's volunteered to serve as a distraction."

"You don't have to make it sound like it was my fault," J grumbled. "You attacked me, I ran for my life. But yeah. Human target time for Jokester." He smiled engagingly at Montoya, who looked slightly ill, and huffed.

"Fine. Fine. Why do I ever expect anything to be even slightly normal around you? All three of you are clear to move in. I'll tell the boys not to target the creepy Santa."

J pouted, but didn't argue the description.

Batman disappeared, Montoya radioed her people, and Jokester looped around the side of the toy store before crouching down and moving crabwise along the wall under the windows. Distraction and surprise went together like cotton and candy.

He drew nearly even with the broken window, gathered himself up, glanced around to make sure the police weren't freaking out, and did a flying somersault inside. Landed front and center, arms spread, and stabbed a judgmental finger at the clown with the gun.

"Halt, recreant!"

A/N: J was correct about the word 'batman,' by the way. In a universe without Batman, fictional or real, the only definition the word has is the longstanding British Army term for a soldier assigned as the personal servant of an officer. Deriving from the older 'bat-horse-man,' which came from the French for a packhorse's saddle, which came in turn from Greek for carrying things. Yay etymology! I always like it when Alfred is called 'Batman's batman.'

You know, this was not intended to get nearly this long. Original storyboard ended right after the Batman-Jokester fight. Ah well! One more 'part' to go, pending feedback.