"Come on, Sh…Shoe…"
"Schwarzwald!"
"Oh yes, Schwarzwald. Let's go."
Michelle (now Schwarzwald) walks out of the chemical factory, at the Joker's side like an obedient dog, the new tattoos still stinging on her face. She doesn't know what he has planned for her, but she knows that it'll probably be traumatic. But as long as she can be useful to him, that's all that matters; her own psyche is probably broken beyond repair already, anyway. What's a few more crises?
He doesn't have to toss her into the van this time; she crawls in back herself, after he does, and shuts the doors behind them. There are goons, masked, sitting in back with them with high-caliber weapons, and they make Michelle nervous. They twitch, mutter to themselves, one is licking his gun; Joker gets his thugs from mental hospitals, yes, but can't he pick any less crazy people to…wait…everybody that works for the Joker dies, so it only makes sense that the craziest of crazies would dare work for him.
The only problem is that the crazies hit on her all the time, and her new skintight suit isn't helping matters any.
She herself is armed to the teeth; there's a hunting knife in a holster strapped to her upper thigh, a small pistol tucked inside her left boot, a small knife tucked inside her right glove, against her wrist and near her palm, and, of all things, there's a grenade in her costume top, situated in between her breasts. Joker says they come in handy, and since she doesn't have anywhere else to put it, might as well have it there. He's still completely indifferent to her, sexually, and Michelle is starting to think that he's either asexual or is only interested in Batman. It would make sense, in some way or another, she supposes. In her lap is another gun, a Chicago Typewriter, and she sits nervously across from Joker as he coolly prepares for whatever they're doing.
"Today, friends, we're going to make a house call to the good Commissioner," Joker announces to everyone, though mainly Michelle since she's out of the loop, and she blinks. Gordon? Why? She doesn't ask, of course, but she wonders.
"Why we goin' after him?" A thug next to Michelle asks, and subsequently dies when Joker puts a bullet in his head.
"I was about to explain that. Impatient." He tosses the pistol back to the thug beside him that he'd stolen it from, before continuing, and Michelle notices that he's making a lot of hand motions again, so he's very excited. "With all of Gotham's other 'heroes' out of commission, there's only one little pillar of light left in the miserable, terrified populace's lives, and that's the Commissioner himself."
"Why don't we just kill him? Be easy." A thug asks, and Joker doesn't kill him, just gives him a pointed glance.
"Becaaause-ah," He drags out that word so much longer than any of the others, and it proves, to Michelle at least, that Joker is at his most dangerous right now; he's agitated, excited; antsy for mayhem. "Killing him won't make a difference. Batsy might have…interrupted…Dent's rampage, and smoothed it all over by playing martyr, but let's see him, ah, take down someone he works so closely with." At 'take down', he clenches his fists tightly as if he were going to crush the life out of Gotham with his bare hands. Michelle raises her hand, tentatively, and waits until Joker stares at her like she's an idiot and then asks, "What?"
"So…what are we going to do with him?" She asks, and he keeps staring like she's an idiot for not just guessing by now.
"We, Shoemaker, are going to 'enlighten' the good Commissioner into our view of the world." He seems quite pleased with himself, and Michelle only very quietly mumbles, "It's Schwarzwald". She's not having a panic attack about the bloody body at her feet; she doesn't even really notice it. "We're going to make him Arkham material, to be very…concise."
"Okay," Michelle mumbles, as the living thugs in the car shuffle nervously. "But where are we going right now? His house?"
"No," Joker states, "We're on the clock right now, and you're too…blunt. Think bigger, dramatic. The entirety of Gotham is going to be our playground for this…game." The van stops and two thugs get out, at this unspecified location, with a package in their arms.
"Now, Schwarzy, where do you hit a person where it hurts most? You should know this one well." He asks her, and Michelle very briefly considers saying "the crotch", but decides that this is probably a time to be serious, and besides, that's probably not the right answer anyway.
"Hm…I don't know; their wallets?" She suggests, and grabs the front of her costume and drags her in towards him, shaking her slightly.
"Gordon isn't a Wall Street man; it's their friends and family. Use your head." He lets go of her, shoving her back against her side of the van, and she rubs her chest a bit, before feeling something loose. She reaches into her costume and feels around for the loose object, and blanches when she pulls out a grenade pin. A loose grenade pin.
Joker sees it a second after she holds it up to stare at it, blankly.
He lunges for her, shoving his hand down her shirt with no qualms, grabs the live grenade and leans out the driver's window, tossing it out into traffic behind them. A scant second later there's an explosion, a rather large one, and the van tips from the concussive force, skating across the sidewalk on its side until it hits the curb and slowly flips again, coming to a rest upside-down. Michelle is pinned against the roof of the van, which is now the bottom of it, by Joker landing on top of her. The other two thugs are groaning, crumpled in a pile off to Michelle's left, and the driver is swearing loudly.
"Ugh…" Michelle moans, trying to shove Joker off of her. He punches her in the side of the head, hard, and then sits up, rolling off of her. He kicks the back doors of the van, but they're stuck on the curb; he grabs the Tommy gun from Michelle and slams the butt of the gun into the window of the doors on the back of the van, breaking it out, trying to knock as much sharp glass away as he can. Michelle is already sitting up, ignoring the pulsating pain in the side of her head, and watching Joker crawl through the window, feet-first, and stagger off a few paces away from the van. Michelle crawls through after him, and when she tries to stand, she loses her balance and staggers towards him, grabbing a hold of his purple coat to try and steady herself.
"Get off me!!" He growls loudly, twisting and landing a nasty haymaker to the left side of her face. It hits hard enough for her to hit the concrete, and she goes dizzy for a minute, trying to regain herself. When she can, she sits up again, feeling horribly guilty for screwing things up for Joker, and doesn't even put a hand to the side of her face that now pulses with intense pain as she watches him surveying the decimation behind their van. The grenade landed in the middle of busy traffic; cars are blown to pieces, there's a school bus that's been knocked on its side, pedestrian cars are flipped upside down much like theirs is. The thugs are calling out that they think they've broken something; maybe one of them says that, and the other one says he's stuck under the first one; she can't hear them that well.
Joker is giggling, quietly, as he surveys the damage, the people crying for help, the sound of sirens in the distance. He turns and drags Michelle up by the front of her costume, smiling, practically beaming. "You're deadly." He drags her around to see all the damage, and she doesn't quite notice all the gasoline puddling around the various broken vehicles, including their van, or the fact that the Joker is striking a match and pressing the end of it into her hand.
"Cheers." He says in her ear, before stepping back quite a few paces and jerking her hand forward, making her throw the match. It ignites the gas and the entire wreckage scene goes up in flames in seconds, and Michelle isn't moving of her own accord, can barely think; can barely hear anything amid all the agonized screams and the sounds of fire. But she does hear the Joker laughing hysterically in her ear, can feel him dragging her along into a run down an alleyway as the flames lick at their boots, and as the fire hits more gas tanks and there's another explosion not too far behind them, and the heat rushes after them like a wall and it blows her hair back and in her face; his is too short. She looks back, in terror, just in time to see the driver of their van screaming at them seconds before their van goes up in flames too, and she watches the man burned alive and disintegrated in seconds, before the force of the explosion knocks them down to the ground of the alleyway and her hands come up over her head. Her vision is fuzzy and the explosion was so loud that her ears are ringing and all the noises she hears sound like they're coming in through thick cotton.
Joker is still laughing, though, and she hears that so clearly. He's laughing so hard she wonders if he's even taken a breath in the last five minutes. She's terrified, numb; can only think about how many people she's just inadvertently killed. Police sirens wail at their backs, fire truck sirens and ambulance sirens too, and Joker rolls to his feet and drags her along running with him, and his laughing dies down somewhat to what sounds like coughing or very dry laughing; it's hard to tell.
"This is what you've been missing!" He shouts to her, as his ears are probably ringing too, and he sounds so damn gleeful and happy in the hell that Michelle created herself that for a minute, she gives in to the hysteria and the mad happiness, and she starts laughing with him. The sound of their howling rings through the alleyway, then turns to coughing, and then, painful wheezing on her part from sucking in the dry, hot air, and they giggle the rest of the way to the other side of the alleyway and into a street, where her appearance, which is very windblown and harangued, gets a car to stop for her, a black minivan. A man leans out the window, his wife in the passenger's seat, and they ask her what's wrong, but she can't hear them and doesn't understand what they say to her because she's so caught up in this addictive feeling, the disregard for thought and plans and morals and everything, the drug of pure unbridled emotion. Its only seconds after they stop that Joker strides up to the driver's window and, before the man can gun the engine, shoves a knife into the his neck and drags him out of the car, while the woman screams bloody murder. Michelle throws Joker her pistol and he puts a bullet into the screaming woman's head to silence her, and it's then that they notice the completely terrified little boy, no older than nine or ten, sitting in the back seat, staring at the two painted monsters giggling like psychopaths.
"Have a nice day, runt!" Michelle giggles, breaking the window to the kid's seat with her t pistol's butt, grabbing him by the face, and dragging him out to the concrete next to his parent's corpses as the two psychos jack the car and go squealing down the street, caught up in their own mad reveries.