AN: Yes, I know the Joker's injuries weren't this bad when last we saw him. Don't worry, all will be explained. The siblings Abigail, Anika, and Adrian are characters from one of my previous fics, Act Like We Are Fools. Abigail is the Joker's tailor and Adrian is his doctor.
Thanks for the reviews!
"It's like Ozymandias, you know." The Joker lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Well, the ceiling for the most part; right down the center of his vision ran a metal bar affixed over the bed that he could grab if he wanted to sit up. He tended not to do that, as it added stress to his legs, plastered and elevated in traction to reduce the pressure on them, and that hurt in a way that wasn't amusing at all.
Besides, there wasn't much point in sitting up if he could rely on his caretakers to fetch anything he wanted. They were a lot like his henchmen, only less stupid. For the most part.
"From that poem by, uh, Shelley. Ozymandias. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" But his monument is in ruins, and deserted besides. That's what this is like." It made perfect sense to him, though he didn't bother to say it out loud. Trapped like this, all the fear and chaos he'd caused would slowly disintegrate, and he would be forgotten. It was obvious to anyone who wasn't an idiot.
Anika, apparently, was an idiot, because she only gave him a confused look and glanced back down at her cards. "Got any threes?"
The Joker gave a loud moan and let his head fall back against the pillow. "I can't take this anymore."
"I told you to tell me as soon as you needed the bedpan."
"Not that, idiot." He threw the cards at her face, without managing to inflict so much as a paper cut. Damn it. "Jokers don't thrive in captivity! I need to be moving, outside, anywhere but this godforsaken apartment."
She stood, taking care not to jolt the complicated pulley system strung up around him. "Well, I hope you've learned your lesson about following Adrian's orders. "Don't walk around too much" doesn't mean "strap rollerblades to your casts and—""
"Skates," he snapped. He was really starting to hate everything about her, from her pixie haircut to her high-tops to her habit of talking far too loud to compensate for her hearing loss. "They were skates. Much more stable."
"Obviously not." She bent to pick up the cards on the floor.
"You little bitch," he muttered, too low for her to pick up on. "You stupid bitch. When I get out of this, I'm going to cut you open and use your intestines as a jump rope, and—"
"You touch my sister and you'll have lost yourself the only tailor and doctor in this city that are willing to get within a hundred yards of you."
The Joker raised his head to find Adrian in the doorway. Bastard. If he weren't so good at treating injuries—and if the Joker had been able to get up—both he and his sisters would have been dead long ago. "You'd risk losing your only source of income?"
"You're not, actually, and yes. My neutrality to your crimes doesn't extend to the twins."
As if on cue, Abigail strode past her brother and into the room, her Batman doll in hand. The Joker felt his eye twitch. "What the hell is that for?"
"You, of course." She placed it on the bed beside him, her smile not faltering in the least as he knocked it off the bed. Anika, still shuffling around for the cards—he'd managed to upend the whole deck—placed it back beside him without looking. "Come on, Jackie, don't be like that."
He pulled the pillow over his head. One of them was bad enough with a captive audience. All three, and it became like those situations in the Marx Brothers movies in which they took as many people as they could and put them in a tiny room. Like that, only verbally. "Not my name."
"It's the name you gave us." Anika that time. He could tell by the volume of her voice. She really ought to get better hearing aids. Or just shut up, if those were doing the best that could be done. If he'd been the toxin-fueled psycho who'd slammed her against the wall, he'd have been thorough about the head trauma.
"I lied." His legs shifted—Adrian must be adjusting the pulleys—and he shoved his face further into the pillow. So what if it smeared his makeup into a pinkish-gray mess? It was better than whimpering in front of them.
Now someone was tugging on his sleeve. He felt long hair brushing against his hand. Abigail, then. He forced himself to remain stoic and threw the pillow to one side. "What are you doing?"
"Fixing your sleeve. I don't know why you insist on wearing your overcoat in bed. Do you know how wrinkled it's gotten?"
"So? I've got like twelve." He swatted her hand away. "Unable to stand" was not synonymous with "Barbie doll" and she need to learn that difference.
"Still." Abigail bent over him, straightening his lapels. There was a ring of bruising around her neck, just visible over the collar of her shirt, yellowed and fading. That was a gift from him, from earlier in the week when he'd just woken up to find himself in traction, and had shown her exactly how he felt about that. The memory gave him a smile, but not much else. "Have you ever considered plaid?"
"What?"
She pulled on the coat again. "Plaid."
"In varying shades of purple?" Anika asked, sitting beside them. Her movement on the bed made the Joker's legs sway, ever so slightly, and he bit back the urge to slam her upside the head for it. "That might be really cute, actually—"
"Absolutely not. Get out of here before I kill you both."
"You'd have to get up first." Adrian, finally through with the hell he'd been inflicting, straightening up, looking down at him. "Are you hungry?"
"I want a filet mignon."
Anika got up to stand beside her brother in the doorway. "I'll get you a burger."
"Your cooking sucks." All right, so he wasn't exhibiting symptoms of scurvy for the first time in a while, but just because it had nutritional value, that didn't make it good. Anyway, she insisted on cutting his food into bite sizes pieces for him, which was patronizing and infuriating and brought her closer to the top of his kill list every time she did it.
"You like my cookies."
"They were burnt last time."
"You were distracting her," Abigail admonished, nodding toward the wire on the wall that had connected to an electronic buzzer on the bed. That had been up for one day before Adrian had taken a scalpel to it. He had something against being called in at two in the morning to hear knock-knock jokes, apparently.
"What's your point?"
"Keep being rude and you won't get any dessert," Anika said, as her brother shook his head at the situation and left the room. Why couldn't the twins follow suit? This was every bit as unfair as the living arrangement with the Bat had been.
"Your desserts suck too."
"It's not cookies this time." She crossed her arms. "It's strawberry shortcake. Made the good way. So there."
Subdued by the promise of strawberries, the Joker bit his lip to the point of drawing blood. Staying silent was that hard. He expected it was due to cabin fever. There was a light pressure against his chest, and he turned his head away from Anika to find Abigail pressing the Batman doll there.
"You miss him, don't you?"
Of all the idiotic questions. Of course he missed the Batman. The last thing he needed was some girl that he'd only let live due to her skill with a needle asking him about it. She didn't understand it. No one did, not even the rest of the Arkham gang. Harley, with her obsessive need for the Joker, and Jonny, with his attachment to the voice in his head, were the two that came closest, but the connection between the Joker and the Batman was something that went beyond any human understanding. The Joker didn't just need the Batman to survive; it was because of Batsy that the Joker existed to begin with.
The majority of his life he couldn't recall, the places where memories should have resided covered or wiped away by a sea of white noise. Of what little remained clear, a bit of it took place before Batman first appeared in Gotham City, before he'd first heard the story of the costumed man who'd stopped a drug pickup on the docks, but it wasn't until the name "Batman" had first entered his mind that any of that started to matter. His memory before that time was actually black and white, when he cared to reflect on it, a sure sign if any that the Bat had breathed life into a corpse with his presence alone.
The Joker owed his life to the Batman. Without that push, that inspiration, he'd be as lifeless as all the other stiffs wandering the streets of Gotham. Dead inside, or until he could bring them to life by bringing them to his way of thinking. But even those who'd embraced chaos and anarchy could never be a companion like Bats. A Technicolor person was still just a person, and he and his Bat were above that.
At least, for the most part.
The thorn in his side was Bruce Wayne.
Bruce Wayne. The name itself sent rivulets of pain through the Joker, a pain far deeper than anything physical he'd felt in his life. Every time he heard that damn name, he was overcome, if only for a split second, with the urge to slam his head against the nearest hard surface, to beat the knowledge of the other half out, as he'd tried to do when he'd first realized Batsy's identity, months ago. But try as he had, he couldn't remove the fact from his mind, burrowed there like dirt in an oyster.
Bruce Wayne should have been nothing. He was a man, nothing more. Boring and grey as everyone else on the planet until he slid the cowl over his head and became the Joker's creator, the closest thing to a divine authority the Clown Prince of Crime would ever accept—aside from himself, of course. Bruce Wayne was the vessel that held a god, as Jesus's body had held God on Earth, should one subscribe to Christianity. A tool, nothing greater.
All of that, unfortunately, was theoretical. Because where the prior owner of the Joker's own vessel had died when the clown took over, Bruce Wayne had remained. Restraining the Batman, keeping him in check. The dam that kept the flood from spilling over and bringing beautiful chaos. No man should have that power over the unwavering symbol of justice, keeping him reined on the fine line between control and chaos.
But Bruce Wayne did.
And for that, the Joker had to kill him.
Not physically, obviously. Despite what any psychobabbling idiot with a doctorate would spout when given their fifteen minutes of fame on the evening news, the Joker wasn't out of contact with reality. Certainly he knew that killing the body would destroy the entire being. But there was more than one way to destroy a person. Harvey Dent was proof of that. He would find Bruce Wayne's weaknesses, the little breaks in the armor, and pull them wide open, carving away until nothing was left but his Bat, as it should be.
The dirt in the oyster at least formed something of value. In this case, the knowledge of who to target to make sure nothing would ever stand between him and Batman again.
As soon as he could get up, anyway.
"Really, I'm not talking about, like, flannel plaid," Abigail was saying, turning up the edge of his vest to stare at the seams or something. "A classy plaid. It'd be a change. Don't you get tired of wearing the same thing every day?"
She was off in her own world, as she often became when designing, he'd noticed. Anika, on his other side, apparently felt the same way, and moved to switch her hearing aids off.
All right, so killing Bruce Wayne was second on his to do list. First, he was going to repay these idiots for all this suffering. He heard someone clearing their throat from the doorway, and raised his head. Adrian stood, car keys in hand.
"Where are you going?" the Joker asked, over Abigail's mutterings.
"To the store. To get steak," Adrian added, before the Joker could ask.
Well, they did keep finding little ways to redeem themselves. Maybe he'd settle for maiming them after all.
Ozymandias is a sonnet by Percy Shelley, regarding happening across a fallen monument to a king.
Somewhere on Youtube there is footage of a night club performer dressed as the Joker lipsynching to "Smooth Criminal" and "Disturbia." His coat is plaid and it, like him, is fabulous.
"The good way" to make strawberry shortcake, at least where I'm concerned, it s to make the shortcake by itself, leaving out the strawberries and whipped cream and all, and putting a slice in a bowl. The strawberry are pureed and poured on top, along with milk, and it's eaten that way. Done like that, it's more of a bread pudding than a cake, and it's fantastic.