AUTHOR'S NOTE: I think with this chapter (and certainly the next one) will make it onto the first page of the Joker/Batman pairing if you sort by word count on AO3. That's pretty cool in my opinion. Also wanted to mention that I think I'll be doing a Monday-Wednesday-Friday update timing. So this is Friday's - have a good weekend everyone. Thanks for the lovely words so far. WARNING: fairly graphic descriptions of chemical wounds.
The Other is... gone.
He fell, like an angel from heaven.
He was consumed, like the earth had swallowed the Other whole, deciding that Bruce was not worthy of the second half of his soul.
For a moment, Bruce thinks about throwing himself over the railing after Jack and becoming gone too.
O-O-O
Jack sinks, like a stone in the sea, all flailing limbs and burning. God, how he burns. Surely he has fallen into hell, the devil coming to claim him for his sins.
(He is so sorry, at that moment, for every terrible thing he has ever done because now it will take him away from his Other-)
He drowns, in liquid fire, the acid scratching away at every single piece of him, scarring and tearing him apart.
It wraps around and around him like a snake about to swallow him whole.
O-O-O
In his terror, Jack slides down, down and down. But something inside of him rises. Something twisted and black, that screams.
It claws at the surface, lungs gasping for air.
Jack drowns. The Monster inside him does not.
O-O-O
The Red Hood crawls over the rim of the tank and falls to the ground a few meter below within a couple of seconds of the whole thing happening and Bruce almost cries right there, as unusual as it is for him.
The Other is alive. Bruce's heart almost restarts, as if all those missing emotions over the years have finally made an appearance. He's about to leap down and hold Jack like there is no tomorrow, but then his League training slams him like a truck on the highway.
He slides down the catwalk and very, very gently pretends to handcuff the wheezing, limp man to a pipe. "Once my back is turned, get out of here, I'll meet you outside."
His only answer is a moan, and he wants to stay with his Other, find out what's wrong and help him, but his head is still in fighting mode, so he grapples up the ledge, snags the two very stunned gunmen and knocks them both out.
When he turns back to survey the crime scene, the Red Hood had vanished, leaving only a thin trail of blood and dripping chemicals to signal his flight. Bruce secures everything as quickly as he can, suddenly noticing the blare of sirens in the distant. The whole ordeal has taken maybe ten minutes and it suddenly feels like a lifetime. As the first police car skids to a halt in the parking lot, he makes his escape.
O-O-O
Jack wasn't hard to find. He was leaning against a wall near Bruce's car, still wheezing loudly and trembling like he'd run a marathon. The closer Bruce got however, the more he noticed his Other wasn't... wheezing, he was laughing. Fits upon fits of giggles, that shook his whole body.
The helmet was at his feet, and from here Bruce couldn't see his face, only the slumped back of his head, which had an odd coloured tinge to it. The laughter was rising in volume, shaking him more and more and Bruce reached him just as Jack fell to his knees, letting out a fresh moan of pain between giggles.
Bruce touched his shoulder softly and Jack's mirth dropped like a stone. For a moment all that could be heard was the police sirens in the background and Jack's lapsing breathing.
Then Jack turned around and Bruce almost wished he didn't.
His Other's skin was blistering and peeling, turning an unnatural shade of white. His eyes were bloodshot and his singed hair had a noticeable green shade to it. The look on his face was beyond manic as he struggled to grip Bruce's arm and stay upright. Bruce couldn't keep the look of horror off his own face as he lifted the smaller man up and started to carry him towards the car.
Jack let out a shrieking laugh, his smile enhanced from his split lips and cracked skins. His gums were bleeding and Bruce could see every single one of his teeth as he grinned one of his trademark smiles.
"O... Oh... Brucie." Jack shuddered against his Other's chest as he was put in the passenger seat and buckled in. "Th... That... Ww... Waa... Was..."
"Shut up!" Bruce hissed. "We don't know what the damage is."
Jack spared him a small glance and gave a slow nod, laughter and acidy breath sliding between his lips and teeth.
Bruce punched in his home number as he pulled out of the shadows and made for the highway towards the richer residential areas of the city. A moment later Alfred's voice crackled through the interior of the car. "Yes, Master Bruce?"
"Alfred, I need the infirmary set up downstairs." He grit through his teeth. "One patient, acid reaction and chemical burns."
There was a pause and then; "Don't you think it'd be a better idea to take this patient to the hospital?"
Bruce cast Jack a quick look, where the Other was slumped against the car door, still bleeding slightly and whimpering from the pain that was setting in. His clothes were falling apart from the acid content and Bruce could see mottled patches of white and cream skin laced with red and blue veins. "No, I'll explain later."
"Very well, Master Bruce. I'll prepare the medical supplies." The butler could barely keep the displeasure from his voice.
Bruce just cut the connection and focused back on the road. He didn't want to think about the man beside him, his manic laughter or the damage that was done.
He also didn't think about the possibility that Jack could still die.
O-O-O
Alfred's look of terror must have matched, if not surpassed Bruce's own, but Jack was too far gone at this point to care. Carrying the Other bridal style to the bright steel table and its rolling trollies of bandages and washes, Bruce tried very hard not to look his father-figure in the eye.
Part of him wondered if Alfred would regonize the boy that had laid in the hospital with a hole in his stomach all those years ago, though he doubted it. The butler had only seen the Other once, in between a flurry of panic and nurses and he had been far more focused on whatever the fuck Bruce had been done. Now Jack was older, more refined, and very quickly mutating into... something.
The billionaire's stomach twisted painfully as he laid Jack's limp body on the table. Sometime during the ride back he'd passed out, still twitching slightly in his sleep and only regaining consciousness for small amounts of time.
Alfred hesitated with some scissors and a scalpel, at first prepared to cut alway his clothes, but now uncertain at the strange discolouring staining the Other's skin. Under the lights, Bruce could see that Jack's black hair had begun to go a deep shade of green that he hadn't noticed in the shadows. The colouring itself was very uneven, being almost its normal shade around his ears, a discoloured, blood tinged forest green around the roots and almost lime near the ends that were pasted to the mess of his face and neck.
Bruce took the scissors and began to cut away the fabric, revealing more and more of the burned skin. Now that the acid had time to react to cool air, it had distorted most of him, leaving very little of him untouched. Some areas were still the cracking, wrinkled white while others were bright red and bleeding as Bruce worked.
After a moment, Alfred joined in, careful to discard clothes and beginning to set up bottles of fluids to clean wounds and an IV line. He still looked sickened, but at least he'd seen worse in wars. Not much worse, but it still existed.
Jack came too for a few minutes as they worked to bandage raw limbs. By this point he was almost out of his mind on pain killers, but he still managed to focus slightly on Bruce as he laboured to clean the chemicals off his skin.
"Ttthaa-" The man was cut off in a coughing, hacking fit that sent blood up his mangled throat.
Bruce carded his fingers across his hair lightly, trying to avoid as many injured parts as possible. "Jack, we'll talk later, go back to sleep."
Jack's hand curled on the table for a moment and Bruce brushed his own fingers across it, holding on as gentle as he could.
The Other's eyes fluttered shut after a moment, and Bruce had to fight past the mauling feeling in his chest to continue to work.
Alfred just watched with an unreadable expression on his face.
O-O-O
By the time dawn rolled around, the only noises was Jack's laboured breathing and the steady beeping of the machines.
Bruce sat beside the bed, his fingers entwined with his Other's. He'd thrown up not five minutes before, the stress gnawing at him and the questions battling his brain for attention.
What now?
Jack was probably forever disfigured, and now instantly recognizable. Their system of lure and attack would be pointless if their victims passed along his appearance, which no doubt they would.
They were no longer equal. It slashed at him with iron claws, torn his insides to shreds. What was the point of the Batman if their team of two couldn't go outside? Gotham was an unforgiving city, they would lash out at something was strange looking as Jack.
And while Bruce could hold no claim of vanity, Jack defiantly could. All their combined lives, Jack had been obsessed with completing the perfect image, no matter how bad it looked. To be degraded for his appearance would destroy him faster then any weapon alive.
If Jack could not go outside, he could not help Bruce and if he couldn't help Bruce, they couldn't complete their plan, and if they couldn't complete their plan-
All was for naught. The training, the traveling. The years of painfully being apart would have been wasted on a childish dream.
Bruce wanted to weep, but he knew he couldn't. When his Other woke up, there was no saying the state he'd be in. He had to be strong.
The path ahead was more cloudy then it had ever been before. For once, for the first time since that painful night in an alley so many years ago, Bruce had no idea what he had to do.
O-O-O
Jack couldn't talk right away, and if they hadn't been each other, they'd have never gotten anything communicated. He'd swallowed some of the chemicals and they'd torn his throat to pieces, irritated his stomach lining beyond belief. He couldn't eat, he couldn't speak. His hands were still bandaged, soaked and wrapped to preserve the joints and one wrist was in a brace. He'd broken his leg and cracked some ribs as well in the fall from that vat of hell. Between his mass of IV cables and monitoring lines and the yards upon yards of medicine soaked fabric, Bruce could barely see any part of him.
The first day or so, they did nothing but monitor and try to keep him from passing out once a scan determined a concussion. After a few days had passed however, the scans were done and there was nothing to do but wait for things to heal.
That was when the boredom set in.
Jack started with scratching, dragging one of his nails across the steel over and over. Then once the pain had subsided a little, he returned to a constant stream of giggles, mumbling noises under his breath that set Alfred on edge.
Bruce could see it in his eyes; something had changed. In the few seconds Jack had been under the surface of that chemical tank, something very delicate had snapped. Something Bruce was still holding onto, but Jack had dropped in his attempts to get back to the normal world.
After a week or two (Bruce couldn't keep track, he couldn't bear to think about how long it had been), Jack's hands had gotten well enough to write things down. He scrawled requests for food he threw back up, and then told really bad jokes that Bruce smiled at.
After a while, the Other asked a question; u gone out as bat?
Bruce shook his head, knowing he was about to be told off. "No, I have to be in meetings during the day, I want to stay here during the night."
Jack shook his head slightly. G needs the bat.
There was never any question on what "G" was.
So Bruce went out and left Jack with a comm line so he could hear every crunch of bone as Bruce took out his built up frustration on the unsuspecting criminals.
O-O-O
Jack takes two months to recover enough to walk from "The Batcave" to the manor above. Alfred gives him looks like he's a stray cat the butler doesn't want around and Bruce gives the old man equally heated glances.
The two lay in Bruce's old room, staring at the posters and faded photographs. Now that Jack's skin has cleared up, his scars are laced upon pure white skin, a shade Bruce had never seen on a human being before. His hair had been cut to clean out some of the more odd shades of green and even out the burnt ends and his eyes have cleared up (though he confesses to poorer vision then before and his hearing isn't that great either from the damage the acid had done).
Jack's been reading Bruce's old novels and comic books, flipping through unread pages and favourites alike. He's been unnaturally quiet since the chemical plant. His Other knows that this is Jack's way of trying to deal, to struggle through whatever has been done to him.
Bruce wants desperately to help, so that's why he picks up one of the comic books - a generic villain vs hero sort of deal, and hangs it in front of Jack's face.
The younger male looks up in curiosity, and gives his Other a little confused glance.
"I have an idea." Bruce tries it on his tongue, throat dry on the prospect that this will go great or horribly.
Jack crawls up one eyebrow in a silent go on. So Bruce takes a deep breath and tries to explain, trying to forget that Jack used to know all his thoughts before he said them, because they thought the same.
"Batman is being called violent." He pauses, not sure if that was the best place to start. "I'm... pretty much the worse thing out there at the moment. We... thought people would rally behind a hero, but he isn't really a hero yet..." He gives Jack another glance, who just nods in agreement. He's been watching a lot of TV recently.
"We need... something worse then the Batman. Something worse then the criminals and the gangs. Something for him to fight against."
Jack's face was taking on a thoughtful look. He was catching up, seeing the trains of thought Bruce was taking.
"He needs a villain." And Bruce holds up the comic book, watching Jack's eyes suddenly light up with the idea of could it be?
"Jack... will you be my villain?" The billionaire curses himself for not thinking of a better way of phrase that. But it doesn't matter.
Jack sits himself up and gives the Other a deep look. "Bruce, that would have been a lot better on one knee and with a ring." He grabs the cheap paper though and flips through the coloured pages. "But you could be on to something..."
O-O-O
"I'll need a costume." Jack muses, modelling himself in a mirror. He'd spent painfully long hours before in the bathroom, going over boxes of stage make-up Bruce had ordered. Some of his skin was darker then the rest, cream coming through in some places. He'd spent ages on that alone, turning the skin an equal shade, covering scars and sleep circles under his eyes.
He'd decked out in eyeliner, lipstick and a lot of hair dye. Then he'd borrowed every single coloured piece of fabric Bruce owned, and was now playing them against his chest, trying to get an idea for what colour scheme to go with.
"You could just go with black." Bruce responded from his collapsed position on his bed. They'd moved back down into Bruce's new bedroom, much to Alfred's great displeasure on letting the riff-raff walk on expensive carpets. Jack's Other had endured many hours so far of humming and debating over things he hadn't bothered with for Batman.
Then again, "Batman" had been built over a decade. They would be building Jack's persona within a couple of months, perhaps just a year.
Jack laid out a silk, deep purple shirt beside Bruce, smoothing his scabbed fingers over the fabric.
"You've got black, I can't do black too."
"Why not? Plenty of villains wore black?"
Jack made a noise in the back of his throat. "And superheros wear bright colors because they're 'good' and stuff. We've got to switch up the status quo, Brucie my man!" He frowned. "I need a theme before I get a costume."
Bruce moaned into the sheets. "Nothing stupid, please?"
Jack blinked innocently. "Are clowns stupid?"
"Yes! No clowns, Jack... Just please no."
O-O-O
Jack said no to the clown idea. But two days later he dropped a playing card on the table with a devilish jester twirled around the word Joker.
It fit him well. Non-serious, teasing and laughing. God, Jack's laughter could put the fear of the devil in any self-respecting person.
It was perfect, and Bruce already hated it.
O-O-O
Jack took very careful measurements and then ordered jackets, suits and vests through some anonymous companies. Thankfully, the great thing about setting up a gig through Bruce Wayne was... well, he couldn't really run out of money very easily.
Then they spent all their waking hours inside Bruce's new Batcave, building tools and practising fights. Fox's stuff was separated into two piles for sharing. They both knew they couldn't share their techniques, but that didn't mean they couldn't co-ordinate their attacks.
Joker. It rolled over Bruce's tongue rather uncomfortably, sounding both strange and familiar all at once. Batman and the Joker. Bats and Joker. Joker and Batsy, as Jack had taken to teasing him over the past few days.
Thankfully, Bruce ended that one most of the time by replying with Jackie. His Other just made lots of faces at that.
They practiced and practiced until they would collapse exhausted on mats and then Bruce dragged his ass up, got in his suit and rolled off to fight crime and Jack stayed behind and helped him over the computers, while doodling some ideas for schemes and plots and so on in that old, weathered journal he still had.
They both had schemes - wonderful ideas and plans, but they had also made an agreement. They wouldn't tell.
It was like the biggest game they'd ever played, with the citizens and criminals of Gotham as pawns and the city itself their playing board. It was beyond exciting. Sometimes they had no choice but to fall back and look at each other, as if to say are we really going to do this?
In years to come, people would accuse the Batman of creating his own villains. That his desire to become a costumed vigilante would drive others to similar, if opposite results.
And in all of their debates and guessing and multi-million dollar book sales, none of them would ever be able to guess that while the rest may have been up in the air, one fact was not.
And that was simply this; in Bruce Wayne's desperation, he had created, paid for and encouraged the Joker's creation.
