Jason did not want to be here.

Surrounded by screeching reporters and their flashing cameras and sanctimonious pundits and the rich bitch donors who made it all possible, the inauguration of Gotham's latest puppet was the social event of the month, and Jason did not want to be here. At all.

But the stock of Wayne Enterprises was beginning to dip again so he didn't have much of a choice. They already had a major hit when Dami—with the latest difficulty, and Jason had a duty to keep the company afloat. He wouldn't be able to run around in a bat suit and beat up criminals otherwise. If that meant palling around with the jackasses who made his nightlife so difficult and sucking it up for the people watching it all at home, so be it. It was better than throwing his own fucking party and having those people standing on his estate, near his house.

(He didn't need another reminder of how empty the place was.)

At least this one isn't in too deep with too many pockets, he thought as the man crossed the stage and placed a hand on the Bible to take the oath. With the Court of Owls out of the picture, this mayor was nowhere near as corrupt as previous ones. He was still crooked — Jason was under the opinion that all politicians were — but not to the extent that he would make the Family's nightly activities difficult. Everyone knew the score, ever since Bruce Wayne revealed he was Batman's financial backer. Screwing with the Bat meant screwing with the Waynes, and while they were in a slump right now, they always bounced back. Jason's presence today proved that.

Thankfully, not too many reporters tried to interview him. The Waynes owned a sizable amount of shares in both the Gotham Gazette and the Daily Planet, and while they didn't mess with the free press all that often, the overhanging possibility they would was enough to keep the vultures in line. Plus, Jason, for all his good looks, was scary. Not quite to Dami—to his youngest brother's extent, but certainly scary enough. He wasn't Tim, and he certainly wasn't Dick.

He wasn't even Cass, who was making her own headlines in Bludhaven. Or at least she was, until she disappeared a week ago. Jason had wanted to follow up on that but the lack of a distress call and a discreet message sent to Barbara indicating she was on a mission had stayed his hand. For now, at least. If she was gone any longer than another week or so then nothing was going to stop him from finding her.

Nobody had asked about that, thankfully. He knew all of them wanted to, wanted more of that Wayne Family DramaTM, but they knew Jason wouldn't have it. What was between him and his sister was between them and them alone. Well, them and Alfred, but that was a given. Alfred knew everyone's secrets.

The insipid little asshole was almost done reciting the oath. Good. Then there was just the speech, the pictures, the freaking after-party and then he could finally go home and prepare himself for another night of punching out criminals. It would be therapeutic, after the hell that was to be today.

As if the world was listening to his thoughts, there was a hail of bullets and then screaming. Jason ducked down with the rest of the crowd, resisting the urge to go charging in and deal with the issue himself. He had an image to uphold, a lie to sell to the entire world. Bruce had already connected one dot for the populace by revealing the financial ties between Wayne Enterprises and Batman. Jason wasn't going to connect the rest for them and bring the criminals down on all their heads.

But that didn't mean he couldn't peek. He lifted his head, just enough to catch sight of the stage again, and snarled. Purple trenchcoat, tacky leather pants, bleached skin and coiffed green hair. Above all else, a red smile that stretched into a sick grin that even now rolled around his nightmares.

The Joker.

He was making one of his stupid, grandstanding speeches, waving around a gun and occasionally shooting down an official or two. Not the mayor, of course, he was too valuable a hostage, but everyone else seemed to be fair game. Jason felt the temptation to intervene again, and bat it down. Recklessness never helped when it came to the Joker, a lesson he had learned painfully, time and time again. All he could do was wait.

And wait he did. And finally, a familiar vigilante dressed up in yellow and black appeared. He was riding a motorcycle with a similar aesthetic, punctuated with a black bat painted onto one of the rims.

The Signal. Gotham's daytime protector.

A ragged chair rang out. Jason did not join them. As glad as he was for Duke's arrival, they weren't out of the woods yet. Not until the Joker was knocked out and whatever trap he laid out for them disarmed.

Jason watched the battle with trepidation. Duke did well at first, knocking out the henchmen the Joker had brought with him and even getting the mayor away. But the Joker was smart — he had brought a metahuman inhibitor to negate Duke's powers, and then used the crowd of hostages to his advantage. Aiming into the crowd, Duke could try to take him down but that would risk the safety of the civilians. He faltered, just long enough, and got a bullet to his arm for his troubles.

Silently cursing as he saw the Joker approach his friend with a knife, Jason prepared himself to intervene anyway. He and Duke were not quite as close as he was to the likes of Barbara and Stephanie, but he liked the other man all the same. He was a friend. And Jason had lost too many friends for one lifetime to let this happen, to let Duke be filleted by that man. That man had already taken enough when he murdered Jason's father. Jason wouldn't let him have any more.

But before he could act, a shadow caught the corner of his eye. A woman, around his age by his estimate. She had dark hair and olive skin, and would be beautiful if not for the angry tears in her eyes and the fierce snarl on her lips. More worrying was the knife in her hand, brandished and deadly and aimed entirely towards the Joker.

Jason felt a pit in his stomach, a dark premonition overcoming his vision.

No, he thought, Don't. Don't. It won't solve anything, it won't!

But the woman couldn't hear him. It was all in his head. He watched, in slow motion, as she charged the Joker from behind, catching him by surprise. He felt to the ground, on his back, and she perched himself on top of him. The knife came down.

One stab. Two stabs. Three. Four and after that Jason knew it wasn't going to end anytime soon. This was personal, he had surmised as much from the moment he saw the woman. She kept stabbing and stabbing even as blood drenched her shirt, matted her hair and face. She kept stabbing and everyone kept watching in horror. This would be another nightmare, Jason was certain. Another reason to avoid sleep for the foreseeable future.

And then…and then…

"Ha."

It was a soft thing. Nobody heard, nobody except Duke, and Duke wasn't sure if he heard it himself or if he just imagined it. It didn't really matter in the end, considering what followed after.

"Hahaha." A chuckle.

This one was louder. Now this, everyone on stage and some of the people at the front of the crowd heard. It made their blood run cold.

"HahahahahaHAHAHAHA!"

Laughter.

The woman, whoever she used to be, dipped her finger into the growing pool blood surrounding the Joker's body. With two quick swipes, a pair of parabolas were drawn on her face, connected by the ends, almost parallel. And as she turned her head so everyone could see what she'd done, it took Jason everything he had not to scream. This wasn't just a nightmare, it was real. And there was nothing Jason could ever do to change it.

He knew today was going to be hell.

He was just wrong about what kind.

If he dies, the next one will be worse.

Those words echoed in Tim's mind as a tense, terrified silence fell upon the entire Cave. That horrified stillness persisted for what seemed like forever, as everyone tried to comprehend Jason's words.

"I-I beg your pardon, Master Jason?" Alfred said weakly, "Three Jokers?"

Jason grimaced. "By the time I died, that number went up to six."

A gasp was heard at that revelation, though who it was, Jason couldn't tell. He could hear the audible tightening of Barbara's grip on the handles of her wheelchair, could see Dick going cross-eyed as he tried to process the words. Bruce's eyes held fear even as he he tried to put on a strong face. Tim was wringing his hands, drowning deep in trepidation. He already had an inkling of the truth, but hearing it out loud was enough to plunge him back into the cold waters. Only Cass didn't have a strong reaction, just a mere widening of the eyes, but then again this Cass had yet to see the full depths of a Joker's depravity.

"How?" His father asked quietly.

"I don't know," Jason admitted. "It's not a body-surfing situation or anything like that. If it were then I would have asked for Zatanna's help when she was here. Nor is it some chemical agent, like a drug or something, or a cybernetic implant, or anything along those lines. I don't know what it is, to be honest. It's like some kind of spirit of insanity just overcomes a person and creates a new Joker, one similar to but ultimately distinct from their predecessor. It's the one case we never managed to figure out. No matter how many different avenues we pursued, no matter how many different minds took their crack at it, we never got close to the truth."

"But you managed to figure out some part of it, didn't you?" Tim cut in before anyone else could process that. "That's why you keep on insisting he can't die."

Jason rubbed his arm, diverting his eyes. "We figured out how a new Joker appears. We didn't know why, we just knew how."

"And how does it happen?" Bruce blurted out, unable to stop himself.

Jason looked at him, ashamed. "Death."

Death.

"The previous Joker has to die," he further clarified, and suddenly, everything made a terrifying amount of sense.

"Bruce, the Joker is probably the one kill I regret the most."

He could see it all in his mind's eye. Jason, angry and desperate, finally killing the Joker he thought responsible for his death, perhaps thinking that he finally saved the city, saved the world, from his overarching threat. And then not long after, a new one arose to continue the chaos. Killing thousands of more people, leaving more devastation in his wake.

It was a daunting thought. But none more so than to Bruce. Because he hadn't forgotten who Jason said had been the one to kill him. And with this piece, this last, pivotal piece, everything fell into place.

"It wasn't your fault," he said before he could even think.

Jason opened his mouth at him, and then the tears welled up. "You don't know that. You weren't there."

"Were you the one who shot me in the face, who stabbed me in the heart, who made me stop breathing? Jason, you didn't kill me. The Joker did."

"But if I hadn't shot him—if I hadn't put that goddamn bullet in his skull—"

"Then, perhaps someone else would have, and then the next one would've killed me anyway. Or maybe it would've been something else," Bruce shut down any further argument with his next words, "You said it yourself, Jason. I always took for granted that I would die in the suit, regardless of what you or your siblings or any of my other loved ones thought. That was always my choice. I won't let you take the blame for something I decided for myself a long time ago."

A hiccup. And then—

Jason was in his arms, sobbing into chest, twisting his fingers into his shirt. Bruce rested his chin on the top of his son's head, and his eyes flickered towards the rest of his family. All of them were watching in shock and dawning horror and then sympathy. It seemed they had figured it out as well.

It was several minutes before Jason was ready to continue on with the discussion. After he had finished his cries, he had briefly excused himself to clean himself up, wiping away the tears and cooling his blotchy face. By the time he came back, he looked almost back to normal, though his face was tinted red. Nobody cared; they were too stuck in their own thoughts, on what all of this meant.

"We call it the Joker Virus, or the Joker Curse," Jason said, voice normal and almost business-like. "As I've said before, we didn't know the cause, just the effects, and ultimately all we could do was try to mitigate the damage. When you," he gestured to Bruce, "first found out about it, you didn't tell us because you were under the assumption that all three were alive and didn't want to panic the Family with the news. As we later learned, however, only one of them, Joker III, was alive. The first two were dead."

"What happened to them?" Dick asked, voice a mix of professional and curious, with just a hint of dread.

Jason grimaced once again.

The first Joker was a man by the name of Jeremiah Valeska. The original Red Hood. A simple bank robber, nothing to his name, until a fateful encounter with the Bat at Ace Chemicals saw him fall into a vat with an equally fateful concoction. Everyone knew the story after that.

He was the Joker that made his name against the original dynamic duo. The Joker who would terrorize Jim Gordon, who would cripple Barbara Gordon. That last killing joke, for what happened to him after that is unknown. Considering what happened to his successors, however, it was all but confirmed that he was dead. It was made almost certain when they found the place he had most likely been killed and the following forensics confirmed it. They had just never managed to find his remains.

A light bulb lit up above Bruce's head. "That's why you were waiting to tell us. You were searching for him."

"Yes," Jason confirmed, "He's the missing link. I thought if I could find him or his remains — most likely the latter, truthfully — I could finally solve the case. I could end this without any of you having to deal with the Joker ever again. But I've made no major headway thus far."

"Then we'll help you," Bruce promised.

His son smiled genuinely at him. Bruce, despite himself, smiled back.

The second Joker was Jack Napier. A former mob hitman that underwent a similar accident to Valeska's at an old toxic disposal facility his crime family was using as a hideout. Upon his transformation, he murdered most of his old family, and proved to be even worse than his predecessor. One of his first acts would be to murder Jason Todd, the second Robin. And his last act would set the bar that every subsequent Joker would try to top.

"His final act?"

"The one that led to his death. It's…" Jason grunted, rubbing his head.

"Jason?" Barbara probed after a minute of silence.

"I'm sorry, it's just so stupid. That incident should've never happened."

"But it did, didn't it? Please Jason, we need to know everything."

Jason looked at her and closed his eyes. "Alright, alright. What you need to know is that it all started because of a joke — one that was played on the Joker." There was a collective blink.

"What happened is that some idiot, who somehow managed to become a certified doctor at the Slab, thought to tell Joker II that he was dying of an inoperable brain tumor for a lark."

Silence.

"Yeah, you can imagine how he reacted to that," Jason said scathingly.

The Last Laugh, it would later come to be known. Jokerizing villains in the Slab, sending them out to infect others and cause chaos throughout the word, escaping the Slab to repeat his actions with villains interned at Arkham Asylum…those terrible, terrible events sucked in the Justice League and just about every other superhero active at the time, all just to mitigate the damage. So occupied, they were unable to help when the Joker inevitably went after the Bats. The Arkham Rogues would be sent after Tim Drake, the third Robin, in hopes of killing him and driving either Batman or Nightwing into killing the Joker in turn. After all, as far he knew he was going to die anyway, so why not make a spectacle out of it? Why not make it into one last shot against the enemy he made his entire existence revolve around?

"He succeeded."

He might as well have thrown a bucket of cold water on all of them. "What?" Dick mouthed quietly.

"For a moment, you," and Jason was looking at Dick, and why was it Dick? "thought Tim was dead. And then he mentioned me, and as far as anyone knew I was still dead at the time. And after that — you snapped. You beat him, and kept beating him, until he was clinically dead. Bruce managed to resuscitate him afterward, but that didn't change the fact that he was dead for those few precious minutes."

Dick stumbled back, as if struck. "I…I…"

"It wasn't your fault Dick. Not entirely. He provoked you, and either way you should've never been in that position to begin with. None of that would've happened if it hadn't been for that damn doctor."

"But it was still enough for the Curse to count it as a death, wasn't it?" Bruce instantly surmised.

Jason winced.

It was. The second Joker would be murdered not long after by the third Joker, Arthur Fleck. No chemicals were involved in his descent into insanity, at least not at first. Just a really bad day with his mother, with a series of soul-shattering revelations that drove him over to the deep end. He would willingly toss himself into a vat of chemicals and become the next Joker.

In many ways, he was both better and worse than the previous Jokers. He never managed to kill one of the Bats, or cause any lasting harm. His physical scars always healed.

The mental ones were another matter.

He was one of the only two Jokers to ever figure out the true identities of the Bat-Family. While he, as Bruce rightfully suspected, didn't care about them, he was not above using them for his own gain. And when it came to Jokers, 'their own gain' usually meant getting their figurative rocks off on torturing the Bats.

For example, he made the Bats believe he deliberately manipulated Bruce into meeting and adopting Jason, for the sole purpose of making him Robin and killing him later. It was bullshit, of course, but Jason was a hot-headed idiot with daddy issues at the time, and didn't realize it until later.

Such was the third Joker's cruelties. Screwing over Bruce's relationships was his modus operandi. Like a jilted ex-lover, the third Joker clung to Bruce jealously. His obsession with Batman would only ever be surpassed by the fourth Joker, his successor, in the bloodiest way imaginable.

"I killed him," Jason said, gazing up at the picture of Fleck with some mixture of contempt and despair. "At the time, I didn't have any regrets about it — he was in the midst of a plot that would've killed thousands of citizens along with Tim, Cass, and Damian. It didn't help that Bruce hadn't told us about the whole three Jokers thing, meaning that I believed I was finally avenging my murder." He shook his head bitterly. "Instead, I was committing one of the worst mistakes of my life."

Nobody said anything. They knew nothing they said would have helped.

"He's also the reason why people stopped trying to psychologically treat the Joker. At least not without a massive five million dollar reward at stake. And only if they lasted a year without going insane themselves."

Everyone blinked. "Really?" Tim asked, momentarily forgetting his sullen mood for astonishment.

Instead of saying anything, Jason put up another picture, replacing the one of Arthur Fleck with a slightly older blond woman with blue eyes. He had been surprised to find out she had yet to become a villain, but hadn't hesitated to take advantage of it.

"This is Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel. In another life, she would've been the newest doctor at Arkham Asylum, who would be assigned to treat the Joker as part of her hazing at the institution. Within three months, she would fall in love with him, break him out, and then toss herself in the same vat of chemicals that turned him into what he is, becoming the supervillain Harley Quinn."

Mouths fell open. Jason ignored them, continuing onward. "Poor Harley would become Joker's much beleaguered girlfriend, suffering severe domestic abuse at his hands, yet unable to leave him like a bad drug addiction. Eventually she got over him, becoming a long-time member of Task Force X and having on-and-off relationships with both Deadshot and Poison Ivy." At everyone's stares, he gave another shrug. "Hey, compared to the Joker, a suicidal sociopathic sniper and a seductive ecoterrorist with a god complex were both steps up. Unfortunately, it didn't end well."

"Joker killed her," Bruce guessed instantly.

Jason nodded. "Joker was a complete bastard to her and more often than not used her as a meat shield, but he also felt entitled to her, since he was responsible for her transformation and turn to villainy. He didn't like others touching his stuff; he only tolerated Ivy because she was another one of our rogues and because she was usually more powerful than him. But when Harley turned her attentions to Lawton too…" He grimaced. "He didn't take it well. That incident where I killed the third Joker? During it he murdered Harley and Deadshot, and nearly Ivy as well. The only bright side is that Ivy finally decided to go straight afterward."

At the suspect looks, he smiled sadly. "Harley's death hit her hard. She was probably the only other human being Ivy — Pamela, ever loved. After that…well, she decided her extreme methods weren't worth it anymore. We got her help, and by the time her treatment was done she was using her powers for honest ecological conservation work." Jason looked up at the picture of on the screen. "To be honest, I never really liked Harley or felt much sympathy for her at first. But her attempts to go straight and her death — they all made me realize that in the end, she was just another one of his victims. Just one who suffered a little more intimately than most."

"Where is she now?" Barbara asked quietly.

"Working at a psychological institution on the other side of the country, far away from here. She'll never become Harley Quinn if I can help it." Jason crossed his arms. "On the downside, that means redeeming Ivy is much less likely, but if Pamela were here, she'd call it a fair trade for Harley's happiness."

The others weren't sure about that, having not known Harley or her relationships with Joker and Ivy, but they conceded to Jason's judgment on the matter.

"Enough about her, however. Onto the fourth Joker."

Robert Song. Joker IV. Nobody knows how he lost it. Nothing from the subsequent investigation revealed any sort of mental break or tragic accident or any other inciting incident. Even after a painful reconstruction of the last month before his transformation (Song became the fourth Joker a week after the third Joker's death). They traced his steps hour by hour, and found squat. By all accounts, he was a normal guy — until he wasn't.

But compared to what he would end up doing, it really didn't seem to matter in the end how he came to be. He would blow up city hall. He would instigate the Arkham Massacre, in which he would slaughter the vast majority of the first Batman's famous rogues gallery, seeing to the deaths of the likes of the Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Hush, Killer Croc, Victor Zsaz, and just about every other Gotham rogue who made their home at the infamous asylum.

And then, one year after he appeared, he did what no other Joker ever succeeded in doing: he killed the first Batman. He murdered Bruce Wayne.

"The others didn't blame me, but that didn't stop me from blaming myself. I was gonna quit being a vigilante, but Dick convinced me not to — with you gone, he needed all the help he could get stabilizing the city. In the end, I didn't have the heart to tell him no." Not when it was all my fault to begin with, went unsaid.

"What was he like?" Tim finally asked, speaking up for the first time in a while. He had been paying attention, perhaps more than anyone else had (especially when Jason went into the second Joker), but for the most part had been content to keep quiet until now, his face kept blank. Jason didn't like that at all, and resolved to keep an eye on him.

"Violent," Jason answered, scowling, though not at Tim. "Like I said, every Joker is worse than their predecessor. They're all poor excuses for comedians, make no mistake, and they're all psychopaths who love their mind games. But the fourth? The fourth seemed to revel in mindless violence in addition to that. It took everything we had to keep him contained, to keep him from drowning the streets in blood and guts for his own twisted sense of humor. And eventually, that led to his downfall."

At everyone's expectant looks, Jason clicked his teeth and changed the pictures on the screen once more. The next one caught everyone by surprise.

It was the picture of a woman.

Poor, sweet Felicia Bell. There wasn't a single Bat who didn't mourn her when her story came to light. Of course, then she became the bane of their existences, and any sympathy died after that. By that point, it had become clear to them that Felicia Bell was dead, and that only the Joker remained.

It hadn't always been like that. Once upon a time, Felicia Bell was a young woman with a bright future. Graduated at the top of her class at Gotham U, got married to her college sweetheart, a man named Samuel Broom. Hopelessly devoted and hopelessly in love, by all accounts they were happy together.

And then Samuel died in one of Joker IV's rampages.

Felicia was devastated — and furious. A born and bred Gothamite, she had lived all her life navigating through the city's worst crises. And, like many other Gothamites, she was sick of the endless masochistic tango between the Batman and the Joker. And with the third Joker's death having never been publicized to prevent panic, she, like the rest of the public, was under the impression that this was the same Joker everyone had been dealing with since the beginning. So, she figured she'd do what Batman and the police failed to do for all these years — she'd kill him.

"And you didn't stop her?" Tim questioned.

Jason gave him a pointed look. "I didn't even know she existed. She's one person among millions, and I'm not Big Brother. I already had enough on my plate at the time. Anyway, it didn't even matter — the entire event occurred at the inauguration of the city's newest mayor, during the daytime. There was nothing I could've done without exposing myself."

Dick blinked. "You mean you were actually physically there?"

"Yes, and before you ask, no, it was not planned. Damian had died a few months prior and this was to be my first official public appearance since his funeral. I was twenty-eight at the time, and still trying to establish my public identity and ingratiate myself with the company's board and investors as the undisputed head of Wayne Enterprises and as the last son of the Wayne family. The last thing I needed to deal with was an interloping supervillain." Jason pursed his lips. "Besides, Gotham already had a daytime protector — Duke Thomas, aka the Signal. He was also present and watching the ceremony because we correctly suspected someone would try to attack during it. But even with that precaution…not even he could've stopped what happened next."

"The Joker attacked the ceremony, trying to take the new mayor hostage. Duke prevented that, but was captured in turn, and was about to be turned into mince meat. I was preparing myself to intervene, secret identity be damned, when Bell made her debut. She knew that the Joker liked to make a spectacle of himself, and hoped that he would appear. The moment he had his back turned, she sprung her trap, and in full view of the crowd and the cameras, she knocked him down, mounted herself on his upper body, and stabbed him in the chest. Once, twice, three times…she didn't stop."

Jason inhaled. "She didn't stop, and then she started chuckling. It was a low sound at first, one that barely anyone could hear, but then escalated in volume until it was full-blown laughter. She was covered in his blood, perched over his dead body, and just like that, she was gone. And in that next moment, when she painted a red smile across her lips, I knew."

A healthy silence followed, as each and every single member of his family tried to visualize that horrifying scene.

"She escaped before anyone could grab her, and the next time she appeared in public her hair was a stringy green and her skin was bleached. Her very first scheme was to try and recreate an even worse earthquake than the one that turned Gotham into a no man's land. Even with the rest of the Family, I was barely able stop her, and if it hadn't been for Carrie Kelley — the girl who would become my first Robin — I would've died. Schemes on the same scale followed. After another one when I was thirty-five that saw her forcibly activate the metagene of hundreds of people and unleashed an entirely new rogues gallery for me and and the rest of the Family to deal with, the city had enough and locked her down in her own cell underwater, beneath Arkham, with security measures that were outright draconian. She never escaped again after that."

"And you allowed that?" Bruce asked, though his tone wasn't admonishing or disapproving. It had a mix of wonder and understanding.

Jason shrugged. "What else was I supposed to do? With her — and with every Joker, really — it's no longer a question of morality. It's a question of safety. The city, quite frankly, can't handle that level of chaos and destruction on such a scale, let alone on a frequent basis. And no other permanent solution was guaranteed to work. Killing her would've just unleashed a Joker worse than her, and the death of the second Joker," Dick flinched, which nobody missed, "put into question what exactly this curse considered a 'death'. Magically sealing her away, sending her to the phantom zone, putting her into a forced coma or suspended animation — they were all considered, but they all had to be rejected due to the risk. In the end, this was the only solution that worked for the long-term while we tried to figure out what exactly was going on. I'm just grateful that by that point we managed to root out the corruption in Arkham, meaning no one was ever going to willingly let her out for something like thrills or a quick buck."

"What happened to her?" Cass asked quietly.

"Life," Jason sighed, "She died from breast cancer. We gave her the best care possible, we had no choice, but in the end she still died, and the city had to prepare itself for the worst."

And the worst did come. For the sixth Joker would begin his final jump into the annals of madness. And that Joker's name would be Jake Chill.

Jake Chill, the great-grandson of Joe Chill, the man who, unbeknown to the world, killed the Waynes and in turn created the world's greatest vigilante, was the worst kind of career criminal. Most career criminals became career criminals because they saw no other paths left for them. They came from poverty and poverty very rarely offered any legitimate opportunities. Only the lucky got that.

Jake Chill was not that kind of career criminal. On the contrary, compared to the life his great-grandfather lived, his childhood was positively idyllic. He wasn't rich but he wasn't poor either. He grew up in a Gotham that had been throughly removed of the Court of Owls' influence and the subsequent corruption that came with it. Several businesses, with Wayne Enterprises leading the charge, were gentrifying the city's worst neighborhoods, offering jobs and aid programs of all sorts. Recidivism was down, lower than it had been since Bruce Wayne's parents died.

Most of all, Jake Chill was smart. Smarter than his great-grandfather ever was. He was at the top of his class, clever in ways that made even the heads of the most streetwise kids twist and turn. By all accounts, he should've been a man that would one day stand side-by-side with the likes of the Waynes on his own merits.

If it weren't for one thing. If it weren't for his obsession with criminals.

From a young age, the boy worshiped criminals. There was no discernible reason; perhaps his entire moral fiber was just born backwards. Either way, he loved crime, he loved criminals, and the one thing he wanted, more than anything else, was to be one. But the world didn't work that way, criminals were not the great heroes he saw them as in his mind. Crime was condemned, and if Jake wanted any sort of a future, he would have toe the line. So dear old Jake Chill shoved those desires in the back of his mind and did just that.

Of course, with a love of crime meant a hatred of those who fought them. Police, federal agents, lawyers, judges, the system itself was a target for his loathing, as capable as he was at hiding it. But even the system itself paled in comparison to superheroes, and in Gotham, there was only one superhero that truly mattered: Batman. There is no one in the world that Jake Chill hated more than Batman.

In the end, it shouldn't have mattered. Jake Chill didn't have it in himself to act on his impulses, his desires. He cared more about success, about fitting in. And for all his hatred of Batman, there was little he, a mere civilian, could do against one of the greatest superheroes in the world.

Except fate had other plans. When Jake was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, Gotham went on lockdown for an entire month. Word got out that the fifth Joker was dying of cancer, and that once she bit it, it would only be a matter of time before a new one replaced her. Jake found himself secluded in his old family home, bored out of his mind, and as a result diving into old family heirlooms — including his great-grandfather's journal.

It was in that journal that he learned that Joe Chill was the man who murdered the Waynes and plunged Gotham into its crime-ridden state for close to six decades. Jake felt elation, pride in this realization, until he read a journal entry about a nightmare his ancestor had. Of the fear that one day, Bruce Wayne would find out it was him who killed his parents and come for his head.

To Jake Chill, Bruce Wayne might as well have been a curse word. A blue-blooded billionaire, a devoted philanthropist, a financial backer of the Bat, he was the anathema to all of Jake's beliefs, everything he hated all rolled into one person. And despite his great-grandfather's fears, Jake initially derived pleasure from the pain Joe Chill caused the object of his intense dislike. It made him borderline jubilant — until that brilliant mind of his started making connections.

Why had Bruce Wayne been so devoted to his philanthropy? Why had he backed the Bat? It only could've been because of his parents' deaths. That realization had certainly put a damper on Jake's mood, and if Jake had been dumber man, that would've been the end of it.

But no, Jake's mind kept running, kept connecting things together. He looked up Bruce Wayne's biography, and saw that the man had disappeared on some sort of trip for five years before returning to Gotham. Around that time was when Batman started making his first appearances. Coincidence? Perhaps at a glance.

Then the adoption of his first son, Richard Grayson, coincided with the debut of the first Robin. The appearance of the first Nightwing, rumored to be the first Robin, coincided with Richie Wayne moving out of Wayne Manor. Coincidentally, a new Robin appeared around that time, the same time that Bruce adopted his second son, Jason Todd. Then came Tim Drake and Cassandra Cain and Damian Wayne and coincidences, coincidences, coincidences.

Jake knew, deep in his heart, that none of them were coincidences. But he didn't want to believe it. So he extrapolated the idea — if Bruce Wayne truly had been the first Batman, then his sole living son, Jason Wayne, had to be the current one. And if he was the current one, then that meant his children had to be the current string of Robins. So he tried to match them.

The appearance of the first female Robin (disregarding the rumors of a female Robin during Bruce Wayne's time) fitted neatly with the hiring of Carrie Kelley at Catherine's, Jason Wayne's diner. Of course, not many knew of Carrie Kelley at the time, until Jason Wayne made her his ward upon her parents' deaths and then adopted her soon after. The fact that she had the same shade of red hair as the current Robin never seemed to dawn on anyone.

Then that Robin became Batgirl and a new Robin appeared soon after, a year or two after Gotham was rocked by the appearance of a living biological child of Bruce Wayne. Helena Wayne was taken in by the man who was legally her adoptive brother. In practice, however, everyone considered her Jason's daughter, even if they tried to avoid directly mentioning her as such in the tabloids. More importantly, Helena Wayne had the dark hair of her biological parents, and the next Robin was a girl with dark hair.

Then the girl Robins were gone and Gotham had its first male Robin in over two decades. A dark-haired boy, around the same time that Jason Wayne adopted the recently orphaned, dark-haired McGinnis brothers. And who could ever forget dear Cassandra Wayne, Jason's sister? A socialite in her own right, a great patron of the arts and the current head of the Wayne Foundation branch in Bludhaven, which had the fabled Black Bat as its protector.

It was obvious. It was so obvious!

And yet, how was it that he the only one who saw it? Or perhaps other saw it too, but didn't want to admit to it? The Waynes were the First Family of Gotham, after all. Their influence within the city was unparalleled, and globally they were no slouch either. They might as well be royalty.

The last week before the fifth Joker, Felicia Bell, expired, Jake Chill broke curfew and became a criminal. He ran wild, stealing everything not nailed down, vandalizing the streets with near impunity. Nobody was gonna care, not when a Joker might soon walk among them. Or at least that's what he thought, until on the day Felicia Bell finally kicked the bucket, he saw himself chased down the streets of the Financial District, right into a passing truck filled with toxic waste set for disposal. His motorcycle smashed right into the truck, but Jake Chill miraculous survived the crash and bathed in the waste.

It didn't take a genius to figure out what happened after that.

"One of the first things he did was try to murder my Terry. By the time I arrived for the save my son was barely hanging by a thread. Then he released my entire rogues gallery from Arkham and forced me to face every single one in a gauntlet that left me bloody and barely standing. And then he tried to turn Gotham into a floating wasteland in space by rocket launching the entire city into the atmosphere. I nearly died, and if it hadn't been for Terry you'd be meeting me five years younger. And that was within his first month as the Joker," Jason shook his head, "I regret a lot of things in my life, but leaving my children behind to deal with him without my help certainly ranks near the top."

Everyone winced.

"If I could kill any of them, I would, no question, regardless of whatever punishment I would face afterward. Like I said, it's not about morality anymore — morality comes down to opinions in the end. What you and the people around you can live with, and what you can't. But safety is universal, because there's nothing to live with if you aren't living to begin with." Jason shrugged, looking so very tired. "But I can't kill them. Any of them. It just makes the problem worse. So I learned to live with them, just like with everything else in my life."

Some trembled. Others looked away. All remained silent.

"If we don't solve this case…then that's what you're going have to do too."

And now you know why Jason regrets killing the Joker. Because it created a new Joker who ended up killing Bruce months later. Even though no one blamed Jason for what happened, that didn't stop Jason from blaming himself. He's carried that guilt for decades, and it remained a driving force that turned him into the person he is today.

This is the reason why Jason refuses to kill the Joker again — because it never really kills the Joker. It just creates a new one using a new Gotham citizen who is inevitably worse than the last one. Jason has been trying to figure out how that's been happening for years, but has never succeeded. He considers not finding a way to end the Joker his greatest failure and regret.

And as you can see, Jason did consider other methods of dealing with him, like sealing the Joker into the Phantom Zone. But because they don't know why this is happening and because of what happened to the second Joker, Jason found he couldn't risk it. Better the Joker was caged at Arkham Asylum, where he/she could be watched 24/7 while they searched for a way to end all this.

This might be the last chapter for a while. I've gone through most of my buffer so I need to write more chapters. I'll probably update again when I have the flashback arc I'm writing right now completed.

Next chapter: The aftermath, plus the beginning of the next flashback arc.