With this fanfic, I'm trying to do my best to maintain Morrison's original tale while trying to keep within the boundaries of Nolan's movies. To maintain the character of Heath Ledger's Joker best as I can, I've done some things like remove the very sexual dialogue of the Joker and implied tranvestism that Morrison gave him in the original. I've done my best to keep most of the dialogue and plot flow in line with the graphic novel, however.
"Release the hostages, Joker." Batman demanded, trying to intimidate the Joker. But like always, Bruce's deep vocal shift when he was in the suit had no apparent effect on the man's posture, especially now on his playing field.
"You heard him, folks! Hit the trail!"
Hostages began to file out. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, guards, and other staff, all with vacant shell-shocked expressions in their eyes. Bruce wondered how many of these hostages were actually inmates having stolen uniforms in bids to escape. He would have to round them all up later, if that were true. If he could make it out. That was.
All that was left was a girl, and Batman instantly deduced that she must've been the girl named Pearl who the Joker had "mutilated" on their phone conversation. He must've lied, the scheming rat. The Joker was squeezing her shoulders while she snuffled in fear, feigning concern.
"'bye Pearl. Let's do it again sometime." He whispered into her ears along with other lines that Batman couldn't make out.
Pearl nervously glanced at Batman on her way out, her eyes shy and shamed. Not even a small scratch from one of his stupid knives he observed. He must've used her.
"But what about her eyes, Joker? You said…"
The Joker's face didn't show it, but his eyes filled with a manic murderous glee. His mouth subtly widened into a grin. Grabbing Batman by the shoulders, he snarled at the caped crusader:
"April Fools, Batman!" The Joker let out another round of his menacing laughter.
The hostages stood and watched as the doors of the Asylum closed for good, locking Batman inside the madhouse. It was like watching a prisoner on death row walk directly to their chair where his brain was to be fried or a fatal needle poked into his arm.
The safety of Gotham City with the signal that called for him in the sky and the Police Commissioner who worked with him were gone now. Batman was in uncharted waters. Bruce Wayne had taken a plunge and had sunk beyond the heart of darkness. Here are monsters and worse.
The reception hall was in shambles. The inmates must've had a little celebration after the riot, as streamers and balloons were discarded all over. A splotch of blood was across the reception desk, a discarded gun mere inches from it. The Joker was next to him, humming the tune to "People Are Strange" by The Doors and draped his arm around Batman's shoulder.
"Shut up." Bruce snapped at him.
The Joker mocked shock at Batman's order and continued to hum the tune.
"Loosen up, tight ass!"
Bruce screamed at him, his voice distorted with the diluted mess of emotions that the Joker brought out in him.
"TAKE YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF ME!"
"What's the matter? Have I touched a nerve?" The Joker was smiling wickedly at him. Batman threw the Joker's arm off his shoulder.
"How's Rachel's marriage with Harvey Dent going?"
"YOU MURDERING DENERATE!"
The Joker leered and laughed as he pushed open the doors. This was the dining area, Batman thought as he remembered the layout of Arkham Asylum.
"Flattery will get you nowhere, Batman. You're in the real world now, and the lunatics have taken over the asylum…"
A grisly party awaited Batman. Flashing lights. More balloons and streamers. Where had Joker gotten his hands on all this? Lunacy had invited all the inmates together for a feast, regardless of their mental state. There was no sanity to be found in this hall. Bruce Wayne had long ago fallen from the cliff that was rationality, the world that made sense was no more.
"…so welcome to the feast of fools, Batman!"
Kissing while orgies raged on. Laughing and screaming. Victor Zsasz was huddled in a corner, sobbing while his head tucked into his knees. There were much more slashes and crosses on his arms now. Bodies of personnel not lucky enough to be taken hostage were scattered all over. A security guard was slumped over the table, Jervis Tetch pouring tea into his gaping mouth. A nurse hung by an ankle from the ceiling, her slit throat dripping blood onto cake. He saw Jonathan Crane calmly wipe her blood from the cake, before taking a bite.
A crescendo of madmen were chanting their nonsense.
NO ROOM NO ROOM FATHER DEAR FATHER I HAVE TO CONFESS TAKE TAKE TAKE EINSTEIN WAS WRONG! I'M THE SPEED OF LIGHT CRACKING THROUGH SHIVERY ATOMS AND GOD THE SKY WHIRLS AND WITHERS LIKE A MELTING RAINBOW! MILLIONS OF ROBINS! SOME SAY GOD IS AN INSECT. DEAD IN A BATH. WHO KILLED BAMBI? DIRT! DIRT! DIRT! I BELIEVE GOD IS IN MAN. Oranges?
Bruce felt disgust boiling within him. There were still some hostages. A security guard with tears rolling down his face, apparently catatonic. Two others were present, Batman assumed they had to be doctors. One of them, casually dressed, had his face smeared in facepaint, a red clown nose forced on him. The other was a woman in a slim mid-length black dress. Her feet were bare.
"Joker! I've had enough of this madness!" The male begged. The Joker noted this and wrapped his hands around the man's chin.
"Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? Not with rods and wheels and clocks surely? You do look quite pretty when you're mad…"
"I'm warning you…" The doctor tried to reassert his position.
The Joker plucked the red nose from the man and brought him in close. The man's eyes grew wide with terror.
"You're in no position to give warnings, Charlie. Not with YOUR guilty secret. Now sit down and stay down before I think of something funny to do with you." The doctor slumped into a chair, his face downcast.
"Who are these people, Joker? You told me you'd release all the hostages." Batman finally spoke up.
The woman answered for the clown. "Well… we insisted on staying, Batman. I'm Ruth Adams, I'm a psychotherapist here." She lit a cigarette and puffed on it.
The Joker in turn answered in turn for the defeated doctor in the chair. "And this is dear old Doc Cavendish, our current adminstrator. A man who just LOVES to administer current to ECT PATIENTS!"
Cavendish somehow found courage to speak up again.
"I have a duty to the state and the city of Gotham. I will not leave this asylum in the hands of… of MADMEN!"
"And while we're discussing duty, it looks like someone's just done theirs on the floor!" The Joker noted. He pranced to a table nearby, Batman following. He saw that Harvey Dent, split between handsome district attorney and scarred maniac on the other. He was shaking in a puddle of his own making.
"Oh Jesus, Harvey! Is it you again? Trying to ruin my new shoes, are you? Mad about Rachel, still?" Joker mocked the quivering Dent.
Dent hastily stammered. Batman noticed that in his hands were flipping through a deck of cards.
"I'm sorry… couldn't help it… it takes so long to decide… so many options… I'm really sorry. I think. I can't decide." Bruce Wayne was horrified to see what had become of his former friend and ally. He had believed in Harvey Dent… that the man was the pivotal step in saving Gotham from its corruption.
He wished Harvey had died the night they confronted him. That the fall had broken his neck for good. To spare him from the torment that had taken over his life. But by a twist of luck Harvey had survived. Dent had been in control of himself while on the manhunt for those he deemed responsible for Rachel's death and his scarring, using the coin only to decide the fate of his victims. But soon afterwards, Dent started to exhibit a split personality. Almost as if the coin was the gateway that decided who was in control for the day.
Gordon had Dent committed to the Asylum. He and Batman agreed to keep the truth of his crimes and condition from the people of Gotham, it would destroy their spirit for good. They had added the crimes to the Joker's list, but at what cost? The world had moved on…
Bruce felt pity for Harvey. Harvey was his failure, the one that he had failed to save. He had carried Harvey from the wrecked building, but the man was still set ablaze. Now, he was a wreck torn between the Harvey that Bruce knew and the maybe the Harvey that he really was the whole time. I'm sorry, Harvey…
"Please miss!" The Joker called out. "Two-Face has had an accident again!"
"Two-Face?" Batman inquired.
"It's a name the inmates call Dent, in reference to both his scarred half and dollar coin. We'd prefer if you call Harvey Dent by his real name." Ruth Adams objected.
"What have you done to Harvey?" Batman demanded.
"Done? He's being cured. This place is a mental hospital, after all. We're here to treat the mentally ill like Harvey, in case you'd forgotten given all the mobsters we've hosted."
Batman glared at her, and she glared back annoyed at him.
"As a matter of fact we've successfully tackled the obsession Harvey developed regarding duality. I'm sure you're familiar with his silver dollar coin – scarred on one side, unmarked on the other. He used it to make all his decisions when he turned to crime with it, as though it somehow represented contradictory halves of his personality."
"What we did was wean him off the coin and onto a die. That gave him six options instead of the former two. He did so well with the die that we've decided to move him to a pack of tarot cards. That's seventy-eight options open to him, Batman."
"Next, we plan to introduce him to the I-Ching. Soon he'll have a completely functional judgmental facility that doesn't rely so much on black and white absolutes."
Harvey was sprawled across the floor, having built the tarots into a house of cards. His hand was fingering one, gazing nonchalantly at it.
"But right now, he can't even make a simple decision like going to the bathroom without consulting the cards. Seems to be that you've effectively destroyed the man's personality, doctor."
She defended her work. "Sometimes we have to pull down in order to rebuild, Batman. Psychiatry's like that."
"You must admit it's hard to imagine that this place is conductive to anyone's mental health." Batman motioned to the chaos around them.
"You're going to hit me with local folklore, aren't you Batman? About the secret passages, the ghost of Dr. Amadeus Arkham, and bleeding doors. Just a bunch of Gothic crap." Ruth Adams blew smoke from her mouth.
"Well, you'll pardon me for saying so, but your techniques don't seem to have much effect on the Joker."
She was dumping into an ashtray. "The Joker's a special case. Some of us feel that he may be beyond treatment. In fact, we're not even sure if he can be properly defined as insane. He has nothing but lint and knives. His stories about his past are anything but consistent Nothing to give us anything to fully classify a profile of his psyche."
She had stepped on a spilled collage of Rorschach tests. Ruth bent to pick them up.
"It's quite possible that we may actually be looking at some kind of super sanity here. A brilliant new modification to human perception. More suited to urban life at the beginning of the twenty-first century."
"Tell that to his victims." Batman growled. Rachel. She said she'd come for me, the day that Gotham wouldn't need Batman anymore.
"Unlike you or I, Joker seems to have no control over the sensory information he's receiving from the outside world. He can only cope with the chaotic barrage of input by going with the flow. That's why some days he's a mischievous clown we sometimes see in treatment, others the psychopathic killer and anarchist that terrorized Gotham. He HAS no real personality. He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule and the world as a theater of the absurd."
Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn. Bruce recalled Alfred's words.
"We…AHH!" The Joker had snuck up on Dr. Adams, snatched an inkblot from her hands.
"Card games, Dr. Ruth? I just adore card games!" He grinned viciously and starred at the card.
"Well, I see two angels screwing in the stratosphere, a constellation of black holes, a big-logical process beyond the conception of man, a Jewish ventriloquist locked in the trunk of a red Chevrolet… What about you Batman?" The Joker flipped the inkblot to face Batman.
"What do you see?"
Bruce gazed long and deeply at the card in front of him. The ink was in blots of red and blue, forming purple when they met. Slowly, it darkened and came together to form something that flew at him.
A flutter of wings, a hiss in the darkness.
It was the Bat, nightmarish and all-consuming.
Rage and terror are its fuel.
A childhood, over at age eight as Thomas and Martha Wayne lie dead at young Bruce's knees.
His parents had taught him a lesson as they lay on the street having died for no reason. No reason at all. Bruce realized that the world made sense only when you forced it to.
Criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot.
I must be a creature. I must be a creature of the night.
I must be black. My disguise must strike terror.
I shall become a bat.
I am Batman.
