They sat drinking coffee and eating toasties around the table in silence.
"I have a proposition," Jonathan said, and the Joker narrowed his eyes. "Well, for both of you, really?"
"Johnny?"
"What is it?" Alfred asked.
Jonathan pulled a small vial out of his pocket, it glowed green and the Joker instantly recognised it, the ghost of the smell filling his nostrils and making him want to throw up, all of a sudden. Funny how that happened. You can be surrounded by blood and entrails and puke and corpses and not be bothered, but the sickly sweet smell of that stuff lurked for days…
"Venom?"
"Not really."
"What then?"
"I isolated the healing part. This is all I have, it was slow work but I perfected it before we left. Figured we might need it. Now, really, we're not that injured."
"Speak for yourself," the Joker muttered. Jonathan ignored him.
"What I thought was, well, we could give it to Bruce."
There was silence.
"What?" The Joker asked, his voice at that dangerous level where he was trying to stay calm. "Give him Venom? He's not getting addicted to that stuff!"
"He won't. I didn't."
"What?"
"I spent days perfecting it on myself. I would cut my arm, take it, see if it helped." He rolled up his sleeve to show the faint white scars.
"Johnny, you're crazy," the Joker muttered, his eyes flickering greedily to the vile in his hands and a smirk playing across his lips.
"Not really. I'm the only subject I could trust, and I could hardly use Frank with your death threat hanging over me."
The Joker chuckled despite himself.
"Basically, I don't know if it'll work. His injuries are far worse than a few cuts. But, it might speed up the process slightly, if nothing else. Worth a try, eh?"
The Joker's face had lit up, and he'd started to twitch in the chair. Before he could control himself, he started giggling, and jumped out of the chair, wandering off and into the garden. Then the singing started.
"You think I'm pretty, without any make-up on. You think I'm funny, when I tell the punch line wrong. I know you get me, so I let my walls come down, down…"
Jonathan rolled his eyes.
"Katy Perry, again." He sighed, and looked up at the old man sat across from him. "You think that the incessant singing will drive you mad. But then he'll go into a mood and stop, and then the silence eats away at you. I don't know why I didn't just let Bane kill him, to be honest."
Alfred raised his eyebrows, "I don't know how you do it."
"I'm… I was a psychiatrist in Arkham, you learn to gain the patience of a saint when dealing with people who are a little… unhinged."
"You don't count yourself in that?"
Jonathan shrugged, "Maybe that's why I can deal with him."
They both looked outside to the Joker who was spinning around in the garden, his arms in the air.
"My. Heart. Stops. When you look at me. Just. One. Touch. Now baby I believe. This. Is. Real. So take a chance and don't ever look back, don't ever look back."
Alfred glanced at Jonathan.
"I hope that's not the first thing Bruce hears when he wakes up. Can you imagine?" Jonathan said. "He chooses the songs deliberately. Teenage Dream serenaded by the Joker to the great Bat-man."
"He can hold a tune better than I'd've thought, to his credit. You don't expect that voice to be able to keep to a harmony."
Jonathan snorted a laugh.
"You have no idea… He doesn't, most of the time. Just makes up his own tune. It's worse when he gets the guitar out too. You're trying to work and he's sat in the corner singing for hours on end to a different tune. He does it on purpose. I'm convinced."
There was a pause, and both men sipped their coffee.
"By the way, why did you offer to give that… stuff… to Bruce? He was the one who took you down, the one who got you committed. The one who made you lose your mind."
Crane looked up into Alfred's eyes, his hair falling into the piercing blue, and then he glanced outside at the Joker, a tight smile on his lips.
"To be honest, I just want things to get back to normal."