Sideshow 01d: 'good tidings for christmas'

A/N: I'm never going to be thrilled with this chapter, because I should have cut the last one off before Harley appeared and she should be in this one instead, but otherwise it's done, so here we are. ^^

Not all the hostages made for the door as soon as he cut them loose—some were shaking too hard to walk, and some just seemed afraid to cross that open stretch of floor alone. (To be fair, they had recently watched J make the run and get shot, and then throw a kid out the window for her own protection, and they didn't have any way of knowing what kind of shape she'd been in by then.) And then after those two groups had built up to a certain point, no one else wanted to make for the door because sticking with the group felt safer than breaking off alone.

People did really weird things when they were scared. Like, he was always hearing he was crazy for this or that risky or ridiculous idea he actually put into practice, but the way he saw it, it was frightened people who were really crazy. The things he did were either to get something done that needed doing, or because he wanted to; these folks were inexplicably staying in the booby-trapped Toy Store of Hostage Doom even though they didn't want to and it was counterproductive, because…they were scared.

He could sympathize, even if he didn't really get it; he didn't blame them, or anything, but seriously. Talk about stuff that made no sense: Fear.

There was a reason it was Owlman's favorite weapon.

All of which meant that by the time he sawed through the last wires with his borrowed Swiss Batman Knife, he had seventeen hostages of all ages and states of health clumped up on the far side of the cannisters from Ms. Quinzel's ongoing fight with Robin. Those last wires had been around the ankles of a dark-skinned little boy no more than three, in mittens so extremely blue they were obviously chosen to be easy to find in snow, and J snapped the utility knife closed, vanished it into his sleeve, helped Mittens to his feet, and turned around to find himself responsible for a small, terrified crowd, splitting their attention between Batman's fight, Robin's fight, and Jokester himself.

"Mommy," the little boy sobbed, searching the faces of adults and holding his arms up to be carried to everyone who looked back. No Mommy appeared. She had to be one of the serious poisoning cases, probably one of the ones Robin had carried out earlier. (It would be okay. No one had died, no one was going to die. Happy ending Christmas story.)

J's first instinct was to gather the kid up, give him a good snuggle, and convince him everything was as okay as it could be without outright lying, but that might not go over well with anyone, kid included, and he needed his hands free just in case, so instead he tugged the sleeve of the nearest non-staggering adult, pointed at Little Boy Blue-Mittens, and said, "Can you carry him?"

He added a hint of imploring pout, and when the adult (it was the blond man who'd been tied shoulder to shoulder with the disguised Harley Quinn; hopefully he wasn't a plant, too) just stared at him, he pulled a wry smile instead. "I'd do it myself, but." J shrugged, not wanting to get into 'but.' "Even if you're not good with kids, it's fine, he just needs someone to hold him and get him out of here. He's big enough you don't have to worry too much about carrying technique."

"Okay, okay," the guy said, holding his hands up in something like surrender. "I'm on it." He was about J's age, probably a few years older. Mid to late thirties. Maybe had a kid of his own at home that he'd been here shopping for, though the awkward way he hefted Blue said not. The kid didn't stop sniffling, but blond-man patted him stiffly on the back and he didn't shift up to screaming, so.

"Okay." J brought his hands together, but he didn't exclaim and he didn't clap. He had everyone's attention anyway. He smiled a little, but he didn't grin. "Buddy system sounds good. You guys, help them? Grandpa, I know you're tough but let the nice lady give you a hand, okay? Okay, good. Let's get out of this dump."

Miraculously, nobody protested. J got everyone who looked more than halfway to incapacitated paired up with somebody hale, and got everybody moving.

His eyes fell on Harlequin's abandoned hammer as he shepherded the group away. 'Giant mallet' was one of his specialties, and it would be good to be armed with something if yet another accomplice leapt out of hiding and made a final sally against his charges.

On the other hand, the odds of getting shot by the police if he came out armed definitely went up, which was a good excuse to not touch the thing. He left it where it lay.

He was glad he had his hands free about ten steps later, when an old lady—at least sixty-five, her pale grey hair bound very tightly behind her head, in a dull green houndstooth-tweed coat—stumbled, and J had caught her by the elbow and shoulder and steadied her before it occurred to him that this might be alarming enough to do her more damage than a fall. "'Scuse me," he apologized, stepping hastily away, hands to himself.

She looked at him, long and piercing, and sniffed. "Thank you, young man," she said, very deliberately. He wondered whether she was the austere kind of grandmother, or had been here shopping for a great-niece or nephew, or godchild, or the child of a friend. "I can't seem to keep my feet."

It took him a second to realize she meant what it sounded like, but then he swept in and gave her his arm to lean on with what he wasn't going to even try to pretend wasn't relief. Before Harley, he'd never exactly been a cuddler—it wasn't really something a grown man without a family had much opportunity to be—but he'd never gone long enough without touching someone to get skin-hungry, either, and he felt…contaminated, right now, Joker-cooties like a slick film between him and the world. If a legitimate cuddle target had been available he would have been impersonating a limpet.

Helping helped. It usually did.

(It also helped that, of all the world's potential authority figures, he'd always responded best to authoritative old ladies. Which meant he almost never provoked them out of sheer contrariness, and tended to mind his manners instinctively around them. Harley thought he might have been raised by his grandmother. He thought Edna might be personally responsible for that part of his personality, all by herself.)

J focused on being a good support, not aggravating the bullet wound in his side more than he could help, and not laughing, because giving the hostages heart attacks would be very poor rescue technique. He always did have a tendency to giggle when tense, but this was worse, for some reason. Probably that breath of the green stuff he'd gotten earlier, which…would mean that the horrible laughing was actual laughing, it didn't just sound like it, which. That was just wrong.

It turned out the rescue crews did have their own antidote injectors, not to mention nice plastic inhaler-masks for the frail and especially traumatized, and J handed Granny Tweed over to a stressed-looking paramedic with a too-jolly, "See? All good!"

"Yes, thank you," she acknowledged, noticeably dry, to which he demurred, and awkwardly made what he admitted was a graceless escape, carefully looping around the K-9 unit standing by, just in case he smelled like Joker. Yurk.

For all his vaunted status as a head case, one of the many psychological issues Jokester didn't have much experience with was self-loathing.

Not that he felt great about every decision he'd made in his life, not that he hadn't beaten himself up for various stripes of idiocy from time to time, and not that he hadn't been insecure about his looks on and off ever since the thing with the acid, but—he knew people who just, who hated themselves, because of things they'd done or failed to do or just because they'd been told so many times in word or deed that they weren't worthwhile that they'd started believing it, and it always looked so…heavy. It hurt, it scraped at them, but most of all it was heavy, and he wondered how they could walk, sometimes. Carrying a burden like that—he was caught, sometimes, between respecting the strength of it, the responsibility, especially the people who were carrying actual wrongs, and wanting to just do everything he could to make them let it go, just a little of it, even, before they flippin' killed themselves.

J knew that he was, in one perfectly meaningful sense, not yet eighteen years old. But he'd spent those years in the world, fighting, on an adult's terms, and it wasn't naiveté, anymore, not a child's point of view that made him wish there was an easy way to go up to everybody in the world one by one and convince them, yes, you're good enough, you're worth making the effort to be better, nothing's futile, go ahead, care, risk, be happy. It was just…he'd always gotten lucky. Kindness was the first thing anybody had ever offered him, in this life.

He tried not to wonder about the Joker's empty eyes.

Granny Tweed's reaching out to him like that, it meant a lot, but she hadn't been able to help the tension in her arm, or the unmistakable subconscious flinching-away, and he hated that, had always hated that, the bone-deep knowledge that someone found him repulsive. He could laugh it off, usually, but, well, today…his defenses were down, you could say.

Not that long ago, he'd always worked alone. It was amazing, how fast you got used to having people watching your back. People you could hug and tease and slap between the shoulder-blades without anybody getting creeped out.

On his way back to the building, he spotted the adorable hostage he'd thrown out the window being cuddled to within an inch of her life by someone who was obviously her mother. She didn't look all that much like Harley, after all. Maybe the kid got her pointiness from the dad's side. Or maybe she was going to grow out of it. That happened. J really hoped Ella didn't turn out to have inherited his nose.

Or maybe the kid was adopted? You didn't have to actually be related to be family.

By the time he got back inside, Robin had his knee in the small of not-Harlequin's back and was cuffing her wrists together. Her makeup was smudged and her expression—J looked away. Police were fanning out through the space, seizing the dangerous canisters and the disarmed bomb parts and moving with much better confidence and coordination, not to mention situation-awareness, than J had ever seen in his Gotham. Except for a couple of the SWAT units, which these definitely weren't; you could tell by the hats.

One of them was even apparently assigned to cover the ceiling with her weapon, just in case, and was doing it, in spite of the smashing and whooping still going on further back in the store. Whoever this police commissioner Robin had radioed was, he had to be a few cuts above Loeb. See again: jealousy.

Santa, I want a new Commissioner for Christmas. Though really, if you want to throw in a new Mayor and City Council while you're at it….

Trying not to snicker, he threaded his way through the surprisingly disciplined police force, giving a wide berth to where Robin was transferring custody of his prisoner to the authorities with a smooth confidence that you rarely saw in kids his age. Montoya, in plainclothes that in no way concealed her coppishness, was overseeing the process, but her eyes flicked up when J moved through her peripheral vision, and fell on him. He waved again, smiling less than he had last time because now he got why she'd made the face she had when they met, and outright frowned when her attention fell away again without acknowledgment.

"It's mine," he said to the nearest cop, third of the four lady-cops he'd spotted, a grim-looking black woman about his height, who was scrutinizing the blood stains on the floor.

He knew it was petty of him, tried not to find it funny when she jumped and pointed her gun at him; failed, but at least mostly didn't show it. "I'm the only one who bled until after he pulled a knife in the Barbie aisle," he elaborated, flicking his fingers at the drips and drizzles of blood scattered across everywhere he'd run after the bullet winged him. Forensics were obviously a low priority here, because several cops had stepped in some of the drips and left rusty smudges over the linoleum, but after hearing Ed grumble about spending lab time on stuff that turned out to be pointless he figured it couldn't hurt to get that fact on record.

She blinked at him. Weapon pointed at the floor again. He wondered if Montoya had told her team anything about him other than 'don't shoot.' "Hey, can I borrow a hair tie?" he asked, noticing the three spare black hair elastics around her left wrist. She had her hair wound into such a tight knot at the back of her head he couldn't even tell whether she wore it natural or relaxed, but either way she clearly understood how annoying it was to get hair in your face in the field. "Well, I say borrow. It's probably going to wind up coming back to my dimension with me if you let me have it."

There was a second where her natural human impulse to help (people loved doing little favors, as long as they didn't feel coerced or duped or deprived; it was one of his favorite things about them) struggled against his having the Joker's face and her training, but in the end the fact that she would have to put her gun away in the middle of a hostile situation won, and she shook her head.

"Thanks anyway," J sighed, and wandered off.

Finally fetched up at the end of the aisle where he'd been ambushed by the Joker-in-the-box, just in time to watch Batman drag a battered, laughing green-haired clown—with his hands cuffed in front of him, weirdly, but then, if they were cuffed in back Batman couldn't see what he was doing with them, so maybe it balanced out—into the open space and off toward the police.

Finally. Sheesh. Well, it could have been worse, J told himself. The bad guy could have gotten away.

Also, there could be snakes in here, and the police could be arresting me. See? All good. He leaned back against a shelf of toy drums and light-up plastic guitars, watched law enforcement at work, and prodded a little at the eye the Joker had punched him in, which was definitely going to swell up. Hahaha. At least when it went purple it would look nice with his hair, and with that reminder he absently finger-combed it in hopes of holding off the worst of the tangles, since he still didn't have a replacement hair tie. (Another thing he should make a point of always carrying. Maybe Batman would give him storage tips; those belts were awesome.) Then he straightened up in sudden interest.

After getting Harlequin off his hands, Robin had spent a while conferring quietly with Montoya and two policemen, maybe filling them in, and when Batman reappeared he'd given that his attention for a second, but now he was making his way across the sales floor, toward the clown in the battered Santa suit.

J smiled not-too-wide as the teenage vigilante drew near, greeted him with a sort of friendly nod, and tossed the Bat Army Knife underhand. "So," he said, as Robin tucked it away in what must be its designated pouch, "you a dancer, kid?"

Robin came to a halt about eight feet away, just across the mouth of the aisle, eyeing the Jokester a little more sidelong than he had a second ago. "Excuse me?"

"You've got moves, is all."

Robin laughed. It was a nice sound, after all the insane and poisoned cachinnation recently; light and gently mocking and very human. "Acrobat. Though I like to think I can cut a rug pretty well when I want."

Acrobat, J thought. He thought, Talon, too? "For somebody who's surely not show people, your boss's got quiiiite the flair for the dramatic," he said, stretching his hands apart as he drew out the 'quite.'

Robin snorted again, not disagreeing with either part. His eyes were landing on J's face better every second, more like he was looking at a person and less like a dangerous animal that just hadn't attacked yet. "You objecting to his horning in on your act?" he replied, slouching theatrically against the end of the shelving unit for a few seconds, but back on his feet by the time he finished the sentence.

J had a sense of being evaluated. "That? Nah. He'd already missed his cue like nine times; I was deep into improv territory. Besides, what's that thing the Polish say? Not my circus, not my monkey. I'm just visiting. That was some entrance, s'all."

Robin shrugged, an amused smirk lurking in the corner of his mouth. "It's important to make a strong impression."

J nodded again, because that was true, and glanced across the room to where Batman was holding the handcuffed Joker up by the front of his purple jacket while a half dozen cops stood back in a reluctant half circle, none of them wanting to get within reach. He let out a gust of laughter at the sight.

"Do I want to know what's so funny?" Robin asked, somewhat dry but not especially wary, and J could have hugged the kid. He didn't.

Tittered, instead. "Ehehehe. Well, nothing, really. Breathed some green stuff, earlier."

"Oh! Here, then." Robin barely held up his syringe in explanation as he crossed the space between them, before he was plunging the needle through J's sleeve into his arm. Apparently he was used to prioritizing speed over sterility with his antivenin injections, and also to allies who weren't too jumpy about suddenly needles. Could get himself in trouble that way.

Jokester squinched up his face and whined. "Ooowwwww. What, it's not like I don't already have the stupid grin."

"At the heavier dosages, victims laugh for a while and then drop dead," said Robin, with a very persuasive minimalism, as he stowed the empty syringe away. J opened his mouth to concede the point.

And it was then that the wild, mocking laughter that had risen in the background cut off sharply, and both of them looked around to find that Batman had cold-cocked the Joker unconscious. Ms. Quinn shouted in outrage and jerked at her cuffs, as two police officers (with another two covering their approach with drawn firearms, just in case Batman wasn't insurance enough) folded the limp clown into a nice white jacket and buckled the sleeves around his back.

Rather than stay focused on the potential for dropping dead, or the handcuffed Harlequin being dragged away by police, or the way his evil twin looked a lot more like him when unconscious, J abruptly realized what had been missing from that finale.

"He didn't say 'curses! Foiled again!'" he exclaimed. Turned, to pout hopefully at Robin. "Does he ever say it?"

"Huh." The boy cocked his head, apparently trying to remember however many times he'd seen the evil clown defeated. "No. I don't think he does."

J sniffed in disapproval. "What a waste. Owlman never says it either; if I was the bad guy I'd say it every time I lost. Except apparently not." He glowered in the general direction of the door Joker was being carried through. It was bad enough he'd lost the ability to laugh at his double; if he passed up awesome bad jokes, too, this was just embarrassing. "You know his real name?" he asked idly, as the monster clown passed out of sight.

Robin shook his head. Asked the obvious return question, with a tilt of it.

"Oh, I'd tell you if I knew," J shrugged, chuckling a little, voicelessly, from the chest. Huh-huh-huh. He sounded like a buffalo. Buffalos were better than the Joker. "My past is…kind of a multiple-guess section." If he'd ever in his life taken a standardized test, he didn't remember, but he'd liked that phrase from the first time he heard it, breezy and mocking and self-effacing all in one.

Robin snorted again, and then straightened as Batman reappeared in the entrance. "Got to go," he excused himself, and threaded his way back across the floor. He meticulously avoided stepping on any of the drying blood, without seeming to be paying any attention to where he stepped. J wondered if there would be any discernible differences between his blood and the Joker's, when and if the lab guys got it. They had opposite-colored hair, right? They weren't identical.

New topic! J spun on his heel, putting birds and bats and doppelgangers firmly at his back. This granted him a scintillating view of trashed toy store, but hey. New experiences! He'd never been party to trashing a toy store before.

Remembering his earlier certainty that the aisle behind Joker must have been trapped, he started to pick his way amongst the disordered shelves, especially everywhere that hadn't gotten particularly messed up by either fight, looking for any lurking unexploded bombs or other nasty surprises. There was an obvious tripwire in the first aisle, and just past it a sneakier one, which he carefully dismantled since he didn't have wirecutters, and a bucket-of-threateningly-green-fluid thing that he was pretty sure was just a joke because you'd have to be really, really not-good at dealing with traps to knock it over. Like, an epic klutz. Maybe it was a cop trap? Except these cops weren't all that inept. He lifted it down, anyway. Just in case.

While he was suspiciously eyeing an out-of-place acid-green lunchbox on a high shelf near the back, his foot bumped against an obstacle, and because today had had Murphy's Law stamped on its forehead, he braced himself for the explosion. When nothing happened, he looked down to see what he'd actually kicked.

It turned out to be not a booby trap, but an unusually realistic stuffed monkey, wearing an engagingly enthusiastic expression and a red and white vest. J stripped off one grimy glove and stooped to pick it up. The fur was startlingly soft, and the long sleek tail turned out to have some kind of wire inside that made it prehensile. No sign of any kind of Joker tampering. He smiled. Ella would love it. He tugged open the front of his coat to tuck the toy inside.

"That isn't yours," Batman informed him from behind, voice thick with disapproval.

"Don't sneak up on people like that!" J exclaimed, clapping his right hand, still full of monkey, over his steady heart. Frowned right back at the big masked man, when he didn't react to the reproof. "I just got shot preventing this from being a murder scene. I guarantee that would have hit their profit margin harder than a single stuffie. Half the inventory's been smashed anyway." And most of that was not his fault. It was probably covered under some kind of insurance anyway, fancy place like this.

The taller man's mouth tightened another notch. "That was part of the hostage situation. This is theft."

"Well, excuse me! I don't know your playbook, big guy, but I've never been in this game for some fancy ideal about 'upholding the law.' It's about helping people."

His arms floundered outward in a sweeping gesture. "Fine, I didn't ask for the monkey, it's a crime to take it, but it's a victimless crime so I don't give a hoot. Not all of us have eight gazillion dollars to pour into this gig. I'm already going to have to pay the folks at the Mission back for wrecking their Santa suit, maybe I want to give my kid a decent present!"

The empty hand that had been gesticulating toward Batman's face froze in the air, and dropped; J pressed his lips together, pulled his eyes down. He shouldn't have said that. Mentioning Ella just because he was angry—he needed to be more careful. At least he'd slipped up here, in an alternate universe where it wouldn't get back to his home villains. "Sorry," he said, pulling the corners of his mouth down as far as they went so he wouldn't seem like he was making fun. "It was the voice. For a second there, you sounded just like Owlman when he's telling gutter trash why we don't deserve to live."

Only he'd never cared what Owlman thought of him. He blew out a sigh and held the monkey in his hand for another second. Ella really would've loved it. It was too friendly a creature to just drop back on the floor, so he turned to the nearest shelf to prop it against a LEGO set.

"Keep it," said Batman. J blinked at him. He had no owlish point of reference for that tone. "I'll pay," the man in black added, more gruffly. "Keep it."

A lot of people J knew would have called this charity, and refused it. He understood that point of view, but it wasn't how he rolled. He grinned, then remembered Joker and smiled instead. "Thanks," he said, tucking the fluffy little thing away in the stuffing of his Santa belly, safely on the opposite side from the risk of bloodstains. "She's really gonna love it."

"No doubt."

And there Batboy went reminding him of Harvey again. J clapped him on the arm. "You're all right, aren't'cha?"