A/N - I don't own Batman, sadly.

Please let me know what you think, if you have ideas please let me know.

Vigilante.

The Beginning.

When he walked into the hospital wing slowly while he ignored the doctors and the nurses he met in the corridors - he had just let them know he was here at reception and he doubted he would be bothered that much - Frank's heart felt like it was going to be dropped into the lower pits of his chest when he took sight of Sonja. She was dressed in a baggy long-sleeved shirt over a pair of trousers and neat looking trainers, but she was sitting on a chair, staring vacantly into space. She had been like this for some time now since the break in, and Frank was losing any of his hope of her recovering from what had happened. He just could not believe that his once enthusiastic, bubbly daughter was now this broken young woman.

In the last few weeks, Frank had felt as if he had become a robot. Every day he would get out of bed, have breakfast, go to work, come home, go to sleep and restart the next day while he came to the hospital to spend time with Sonja. Upsettingly he had not heard anything from Detective Bullock; either the police had found it impossible to find the bastards responsible for what had happened to his family, or they had lost interest. Frank found that hard to believe since Detective Bullock had seemed so sincere, but if it turned out to be true, then he would need to rethink his beliefs in human nature, and he did not want to do that.

He had so far resisted the urge to contact Bullock because he didn't know how the detective was going to react to his call, but today he had decided not to care about that, and he would forget his earlier concerns.

Would the man even remember the case? Somehow Frank was sure the detective would, but had he been reassigned?

Was he bothering Bullock even though the man was supposed to be a civil servant?

Had he misjudged Bullock? Was the man as corrupt as so many other police officers serving the GCPD?

He hoped not, but he could not be certain. He knew that Commissioner Gordon was responsible for really cleaning up the GCPD over the years, but as Princess Leia had told Tarkin in Star Wars, A New Hope, the more the Empire tightened its hold over the galaxy, the more people and star systems would slip away, and join the Rebel Alliance. The simple truth was Gordon might have spent all of this time working on cleaning up the GCPD, and many of his targets had somehow slipped through the cracks…

Well, today he would check for himself.

Frank walked slowly over to Sonya, worried since he didn't know how she was going to react to his presence. Sonja had sometimes been completely silent whenever he walked in, but there had been times where he had startled her, and she had begun screaming her head off. Many of the doctors and psychiatrists tending to Sonja had told him she had been hurt (what a small word for something so devastating) and she now had a fear of men.

Frank didn't know much about psychology, but he could say he had heard of cases where someone had gone through a terrible trauma they would be left in this kind of state.

What made it worse was no one knew if Sonja would ever get over it. Frank often wondered what Sonja was thinking as she remained trapped inside her own mind; was she thinking of her own life, right up to the point where she was raped and beaten during the home invasion? Was she actually aware of everything around her, but she was just too shocked and comatose to interact with the world now? Frank prayed it was the latter because the former was not only too painful for him to contemplate her thinking about, she would have to go through the same painful memories over and over again, and he did not want her to live like that.

Frank stayed and sat with his daughter for the next three hours before he decided it was time to leave. He checked his watch, realising detachedly that it was time for him to go. He stood up and he hesitantly placed a kiss on his daughter's scalp. She looked at him with empty eyes which made him shudder, but otherwise, she didn't make a sound.

X

The joker was running through the streets of the city, laughing and hooting uproariously as he was being chased by a couple of cops, a gun in his hand that the mugger in a clown mask with green dyed hair inspired by the Joker's own hair colour was waving around like a Native American Indian waving a spear around in triumph. The smell of the weapons' fired bullets was a distinct odour, but it only excited the joker.

He had just attacked his first victims, a couple walking near Gotham Park, which was hardly surprising since it was an easy place in itself to get mugged since the trees and the relative darkness of the place afforded numerous hiding places for a mugger to spring out from and attack with the element of surprise on their side, and there were dozens of ways a mugger could escape if they found their victims were too strong for them.

But he had gotten lucky. He had assaulted the couple, hitting the man in the jaw with the butt of his illegally purchased gun before he had shot - actually shot the woman - and he had stolen their money before he had turned around. The woman was shrieking with pain from her gunshot wound.

A significant part of him wanted to help her, a side of him which even his obsession with the Joker had never been able to do away with. But the other part wanted to kill them both, so nobody could tie the murders to him.

With the shrieking, his choice was obvious, but the cops had seen him fire the killing blow at the distraught man, and now they were giving chase. He didn't care though. He had proven himself to be a worthy joker, like the Clown Prince of Crime had created a crazy crime clown cult.

Like most of Gotham's youth, the joker had turned to crime only unlike other Gotham kids, this joker mugger had actually grown up in a really good family, with loving parents and siblings. He had great prospects at school, but he was just not happy. Hence the reason he had turned to crime. His excuses were easy to understand; he wanted excitement, he wanted adventure in his otherwise dull, boring, and unfulfilling predictable life, but the scariest thing was he had always had a fascination with the Joker.

His parents had assumed it was just a morbid obsession. Something that would soon pass. No need to get their worries up. It would soon go away. Or so they had assumed. It had taken far too long before they realised he would not give up on his obsession, and by the time they did realise it, it was too late and now he was running down the street, shrieking with laughter with the cops behind.

He was fast on his feet, so he was able to gain a bit of time; but he was just so hooked on the euphoria of his double assault and his murder, he was braying to the moon like a wolf scenting blood, or a chimpanzee shrieking with glee as they worked with the pack to bring down some unfortunate monkeys to feast on. That was the more appropriate description for the joker. He was so sure that his actions and his antics would get him noticed by one of the prominent Jokerz gangs in the city, and he would soon move up in the world.

He was just turning a corner when he ran into a man; the joker had been so fixed with running away from the cops he hadn't anticipated slowing himself down enough to run around someone.

"Get outta my-!"

The joker suddenly felt his face explode with pain; he was sent spinning around like a top before he slammed into a wall and he suddenly felt the world go dark.

X

Frank was panting hard as he glared down at the joker lying down on the ground at his feet, his hand still smarting from the blow he'd just thrown into the joker's face. He had been in his apartment for a few minutes before he realised he couldn't stay there; he was redecorating the place while he tried to fix the damage. He had already replaced the furniture which had been badly damaged by the jokerz, and it wouldn't arrive until he was finished with the redecoration, but tonight his heart was not in it.

When he had decided to go for a walk, Frank's immediate plan was to just get out, stretch his legs even though he had been walking quite a bit today and he had become tired, but he felt so restless. He wasn't far from his apartment, he was only a block away. He had been lost in his own thoughts although he had been more observant than he normally was. Mugging was rife in this part of Gotham even with Batman around.

And then the joker appeared.

He hadn't expected the joker to suddenly appear completely out of the blue, but the moment Frank had noticed the clown mask and the gun he had seen red. He didn't know nor did he think this joker was one of those who were responsible for the attack on his family, he was more realistic than that.

But when the joker had shouted at him to get out of his way and waved that gun, Frank had snapped and he had reacted with instinct.

Frank looked down at the joker. When he had punched the joker, he had been surprised when the clown had been spun around with enough force to be thrown against a wall, and then he dropped to the ground, and now he was lying still. Frank bent down to examine the body, the clown was still alive but he was just unconscious.

Curiously Frank slipped off the mask. He felt sick as he took in the age of the clown. The joker was young, perhaps as young as his own children had been before the attack. What would make a kid this young to put that damn mask on? Yes, he knew the Joker had formed a kind of sick cult following but had it really extended this far, even now, and kids were following that madman? Was this what the future held? Frank looked grimly into the face of the young kid lost in thought before he heard the sound of running footsteps, and they were getting closer and closer.

Frank got up quickly, looking around quickly for a hiding spot. By the time the footsteps arrived, Frank had disappeared.

Officer Simmons sighed as he looked down at the clown. "Think he's faking it?" He asked his partner, who bent down to examine the body of the joker.

"No. He'd out cold, and I can see he's got one hell of a bruise on his face. He's definitely got on the wrong side of someone, and I can't say I blame them for doing this," the second police officer said thoughtfully.

"Do we try to find them?"

"No, rookie, we don't," the second police officer replied before standing up to their full height. "One, because there is nobody in sight right now. Two, aside from the sickos and the anarchists in Gotham, nobody really cares or likes the jokerz that much to really say no to punching someone right in the face. Now, call it in. We have one confirmed perp, and we'll just say who it was didn't want to be identified or something."

Simmons wasn't entirely happy about not having a chance to find someone else to arrest and he liked the thought of fudging their paperwork even less, but he did as he was told and he called it in. While the two police officers were distracted, Frank watched them from the car he was hiding behind. It was a dodgy hiding place, but he had heard every word said by the two officers. As he made his way slowly back up the street away from the cops Frank thought about what he had done. He was partly upset he wasn't still near the joker. If he was then he could properly contemplate his actions and what they could mean from now on. But he wasn't and as he crept along the line of the cars, constantly checking his progress and making sure the police officers were too busy with the body of the kid for them to try to find him, Frank thought about what he had done.

He had reacted on instinct as soon as he saw the mask of the clown and pictured the bastards killing his family and reducing his daughter into a vegetable, ripping his life to pieces and making him feel like half the man he had been before because he did not know how to go on from here.

But he knew he hadn't acted exactly in self-defence although the gun being waved in his face begged to differ. A part of him felt guilty over what he had done. The clown was just a stupid kid who was playing a dangerous game, treading down the path the Joker and Harley Quinn played on a daily basis whenever they were free to wreck their twisted brand of humour on the city.

And yet he had strangely felt good as he had punched the joker in the face; the sound the clown had made as he was spun around on his heels until he hit the wall had sounded painful, but Frank had been floored himself by how good it had felt to unleash his pent up rage against the jokerz.

One thing was for sure.

He wanted to do it again.