Gripping the spear and holding it in front of him as though it were the banner representing his last hope, the Dark Knight charged forward to slay the Dragon with the blue scales, whose eyes blazed with red fire and whose crimson wings were spread outward on either side as if it sought to embrace him, but did so in open mockery.
The Knight normally thought himself brave, but the Dragon considered the quality to be foolish, and so unleashed his fire in response while smirking in mild contempt.
The bright-red ray cleaved through his left arm just below the elbow with the precision of a perfectly calibrated machine. His eyes widened in disbelief, his exposed mouth opened in silent surprise as he watched the kryptonite spear, burning like an emerald lit in a kiln, fall from his grasp with a clatter. This was the death knell of Earth's last hope.
Imagine how many you could have saved if you had only become a surgeon? he thought. And then the pain hit, even as he gritted his teeth and tried his hardest to ignore it. A man used to pain, indeed repeatedly reborn in pain, he was still brought to his knees in agony. It was fortunate that the heat beam had also cauterized the wound, otherwise he would also be looking forward to shock. He ground a false tooth by sheer reflex, and soothing pain medication spread through his body.
"It's over…" A voice, calm, reassuring; the slight hint of a midwestern inflection.
He tried his hardest to ignore it and look away and concentrate solely on retrieving the spear. He could still use his right arm and with it he needed only to reach out and grasp the fallen weapon; the glimmer of glowing kryptonite seemed alive, glowing brighter as though to taunt his discomfort.
"I never understood, Bruce."
Along with suppressing the pain, he also tried his best to ignore his enemy's taunts. It was so difficult. Keeping an enemy's blather in mind was usually a vital element of his strategy.
"The other leaguers in their quiet conversations…"
A rage was building in him with every word. He mentioned them - those that he had killed... slaughtered.
"... Always said that you could beat me, head to head."
An anger borne from helplessness.
"If we really fought..."
What were we just doing? He asked silently..
"... never held back."
He stifled his emotions, using ancient techniques of meditation to calm himself.
"...split you in half with only a breath."
Only the spear mattered, he reminded himself.
"...break every bone in your body."
Almost there. Another inch. If I can only reach it...
"And what do you have, Bruce? A spear?" Superman chuckled.
It's more than that, Bruce thought.
"Do you understand how weak you all are to me?"
"Yes, dammit," he couldn't ignore it any longer. He had to say it, if only to keep him talking; a distraction to buy him another moment. He coughed up blood and whispered, "I do."
In response a second ray of heat washed over his back and blasted the shaft from his grasp. The weapon flew several meters and landed with a clang, completely out of reach now.
There had been speculation as for the change; frantic plotting and 3 AM emergency meetings in the beginning. Was it red kryptonite? Black? A variant of Darkseid's Anti-Life equation reverberating in that invincible skull of his? Or had he been this way from the very start, now having become tired of the charade, and simply dropped the mask to reveal the killer that he always was?
How many cities had he destroyed? How many had Clark killed? Even with his memory hazed from pain, Bruce could only remember one in particular; a woman named Lois. The one that Clark had sworn to always honor, always love, and always protect. When he took her into the upper atmosphere and dropped her just to hear her scream, he knew then that Clark was dead, if he ever really existed in the first place.
And now there was only an alien monster wearing the face of a hero. The acceptable face of the invader had been torn away.
And now there was no hope at all.
Except one.
Plans A through Z had been tried. Bruce had held out that he would never have to initiate Plan Omega. Not for any lingering moral consideration, but rather that he had no guarantee that it would actually work. Robin – and at this point he could not recall exactly which one – had asked, despite the apocalypse, if he had a Plan AA or even a plan GT. Bruce shocked his sidekick when he said he would settle for a plan Super.
Now, humor and humorist long gone, he was mere seconds away from death. The only reason he was still alive was because Clark wanted to savor this moment, wanted to watch him crawl on his belly through the muck and the mire. To Clark, Bruce was an earthworm before the blaze of the sun, dying by degrees, waiting to be squashed.
"I really… loved you, Clark."
It was all pointless, but he had to say it.
"I believed in the world you promised us."
He thought of it then. Images of gleaming cities, bright fields, a safe place to raise a new generation free of the muck and filth of the past.
"You made me hope…"
He closed his eyes.
"... for a better future."
He wanted to chuckle at the notion. Clark had destroyed so much of the world, preserving Bruce for last. There would be no future. It was a dead dream.
His speech had distracted Clark, kept him from seeing the threat that was right in front of him. Misdirection.
With his remaining hand - slight of hand actually - Bruce pressed down on a special pouch on his utility belt. The final solution. The last trump card. By this act alone any remnant of a world would be saved or destroyed. Maybe both. But Bruce was beyond caring at this point.
He didn't know if this would work. There were an infinitude of things that could go wrong.
But in this universe - one of a dark multiverse of dark possibilities - something went horrifyingly right.
The pouch was a sealed packet - a sealed packet which contained a microgram's worth of a retrovirus developed from a single skin flaking from the deadliest creature in the known universe, the most adaptive organism known. The only being that had successfully killed Clark in the same instant that itself perished. Bruce had mourned for months after that had happened, and inwardly had hoped that there had been some possibility for his return. Now in light of recent events he wondered how he could have been so foolish and sentimental. If Clark's body had just remained cold and dead then, none of this would have been necessary. It no longer even mattered if that death had been the catalyst for the evil that had eventually consumed them all. It was now all the hope there was for life itself against the Lost Son Of Krypton.
In less than a heartbeat the retrovirus inserted its copy of its genome within a single cell in Bruce's epidermis. In a microsecond - less time than it took to blink - the virus spread throughout his entire system, infecting every cell in Bruce's body, changing him, corrupting him with an alien RNA that was never meant to be bonded with his own, that in many respects was never meant to exist.
Bruce hadn't tested it. He had some idea of what it might do to his body, but to his mind? Would it reduce him to a bestial state - one devoid of doubt, fear and hope? Would it strip him of all emotion and memory, leave him unfazed by the thought of even his own extinction? If that were the case, then that could only help him. He needed to feel cold. He needed to be unfeeling. It would make what he was going to do possible.
Doomsday had slain with a killer's instinct.
And so would he.
Bruce felt it first in the stump where his arm had been. The flesh ripped open, and a new massive arm erupted, looking like an appendage belonging to some creature from the Permian age - covered entirely in knobby scales and bony plating. Reflexively he struck out, striking Clark in the chin; a blow that sent him flying.
His body rippled, the skin tearing up and down his arms and legs. Instantly he grew several feet in height, his bulk expanded and his costume split, breaking into kevlar fragments.. His mouth split at the corners, widening across his considerable face. Curved teeth that would have been at home in a shark's jaws burst from his gums. A hellish red light ignited within his eyes, growing in size and brightness until they resembled burning coals in some alien inferno.
Bruce's body was now a walking, spiky fortress cast in the shape of a walking beast - the very monster that previously slain this one Bruce had once called 'Dearest Friend'. As a final touch, the armored plate and the Bat-symbol shattered as his mutating flesh grew around it, incorporating it into the skin of his chest. He would wear the symbol always now, no longer as an accessory but as part of his very body. The cape, already in tatters from the prior battle, became tangled in the rapidly-grown organic shoulder-plates of bone, and yet still hung from his bulky frame. In a time now forever gone, he had made it exactly that durable.
Now the worm was revealed to be a snake with fangs. Now he was a man wearing the face of a monster.
Now he was the Dragon!
At the moment he was no longer truly Bruce Wayne or Batman or Doomsday. Now he was a living locomotive, an engine devoted purely the destruction of his enemies.
Devastator.
A fitting name.
The thing that had once been called Clark Kent sneered openly at the thing that had once been Bruce Wayne, now no longer able to be disregarded and smeared figuratively and literally. His smarmy lecturing voice now seemed laden with the territory of Batman and the incinerated Crane – the realm of fear.
"Bruce...what did you do?"
He charged forward, unwavering as a bolt of lightning meeting its mark. Newly-formed knuckle spikes raked Superman's back, drawing blood for the first time, alien microbes escaping into the atmosphere. Even in his current mental state Bruce noted just how fast he was in spite of his bulk. The world had slowed for him, and he felt faster than the Flash in that moment.
To his shock, he managed a single coherent thought, aimed at his own body and the thing it had become:
It is no longer enough to adapt to death. We must adapt to each attack. We are worse than anything known, but he is worse still than us. Will you allow this to stand?
Slamming the shocked Superman to the ground, his ogrish hand then gripped Clark's neck to bring his face close to his own. He stared into his former friend's shocked eyes.
"NOW WHO'S WEAK?!" he roared, fighting down the shock at just how bestial his voice now sounded. With the shout came something else, a spray of green mist which made Clark gag and choke.
Kryptonite? How could there be.. ? Then he recalled his own words a moment before. Doomsday could indeed evolve to adapt himself to any foe that he faced. It seemed that he now shared that unique trait. He didn't need a utility belt; his very physiology was an ever-shifting arsenal; whatever he needed they would provide.
The virus burned through his cells like a brush fire raging out of control; a wave of sheer malignancy ran down through his length, down past the twin trunks of his now-massive legs, finally down through his enormous feet and into the ground itself. Tiny black vines tore outward through the tips of his toes, worming through the soil, through the surrounding Earth and even the corpses of the slain themselves. Instantly spines of a petrified substance that bristled like ice crystals in pond water, began to grow from every surface, rising higher and thicker until they became spires of ivory, towers of bone and thorn.
It was one of these projections that Superman happened to land upon as he recoiled from the kryptonite mist. Bright red blood geysered from the center of Clark's chest where the newly-borne bone spike sprouted from the earth like some strange new crop. Clark's facial features went slack. Dead.
I tried to love all of you, Bruce...but you just weren't worth the trou...
The Bruce Wayne monster was breathing heavily, for this was no mere shrug and this foe was no mere speck.
Slowly he raised hands to his face - noting how different they had become. The fingers wider, thicker, tipped with blackened nails harder than diamond, sharper than obsidian.
Was he stuck like this? Could he ever return to being anything like he was before? Not just physically. That was comparatively easy; simply a matter of time spent in a well-equipped lab, and a series of problems to overcome. The mind…? the soul…?
Batman does not kill.
The realization finally struck home.
"There's something so satisfying in hearing that particular death rattle, isn't there?"
He flinched at the sudden voice, oddly familiar. It interrupted his bleak speculations.
A black, rail-thin figure approached in the distance, appearing like a shadow out of the noonday sun. Long, slim arms at its side. Its lower face was a smudge of white distorted by distance. It was wearing some sort of helmet; black like the rest. It approached casually as though it had all the time in the world.
The newcomer was tall and seemed even taller, exaggerated by its emaciation. From head to toe it was all outfitted all in black - a dark Kevlar coat, bright buckles of tarnished silver adorning the front. Despite the current trauma the warrior in Bruce couldn't help but wonder at what purpose such a get-up could serve. Intimidation? Masochistic pleasure? Surely not combat. Too restricting. Too many things for an opponent to grab onto.
The being's smiling mouth was wide, open to reveal yellow teeth set in gums that were inflamed with disease and rot. Blood dripped down from black lips, and ran all the way to its pointed chin. A sanguine tongue caught the drip, and lapped the liquid with relish.
"I think we all know a few ways to bring the blue boy scout down. But we never really think we'll have to use them. Until it's too late."
"JOKER!?" It was so difficult to speak, his chest felt so heavy, each lung feeling like they weighed a ton, but he replied. Disbelief in his voice which was now a low bass rumble punctuated by animalistic snorts.
Wait? Didn't Clark use him as his 'opening announcement of intent' – achieved by instantly switching his and Harley's heads?
Reflectively he reached out and grasped the stranger's neck and chin, and resisted the instinctive call to violence that came with the gesture. The beast in him wanted more death. The man in him wanted answers to this new mystery.
"I THOUGHT HE KILLED YOU?" he demanded.
He remembered it like it was yesterday. Clark hovering in the sky. The Joker chortling with the promise of quite literal explosive entertainment. The smirk on Clark's face as he told the Clown to go ahead and set the timed explosives off, and the Blue Boy Scout wouldn't even attempt to stop it - that in fact he wanted to see it more than anything. Then he did the head-switch just fast enough for Joker to cringe at Superman's smiling face.
"Oh no. You misunderstand. The two of us. We're in a set, you see?"
He didn't understand. Thought-processes were slowed, his mind felt sluggish, but he still felt the same disappointment, remorse also.
With his newly-enhanced senses he now could smell the cloying rancidness of the newcomer's body odor; tight leather cutting into the flesh and years of sweat leaching into the material. He could just imagine the festering body sores and rashes that were concealed by it. Likewise, the Joker-Bat's breath was pure foulness - all tooth-rot and diseased gums. Bruce had always been one for brushing his teeth and flossing religiously. That, and regular dental appointments arranged by Alfred. If this one claiming to be him couldn't even aspire to something as simple as oral hygiene and basic cleanliness, then in what other areas could he be failing at? One was obviously the physical; the chiseled physique and ropes of compact muscles were replaced by sinewy emaciation brought on by an obvious lack of regular exercise and long periods of starvation. Its deathly pale flesh was also a clear sign of a lack of sunlight, as though he spent years in complete darkness hiding from his responsibilities.
The altered Bruce Wayne perceived and deduced all this at a mere glance. The transformation made it difficult to think, but it also focused him in some ways. The beast part of him took over when the deductive mind wearied.
"We're both Bruce Wayne gone terribly wrong."
What? No. It couldn't be. Not possible. He couldn't have any relation to this smiling caricature. He would never allow himself to become something so obviously weak and pathetic... laughable.
"From a broken planet that was never meant to be."
Now he was openly mocking his world, brazenly making a joke of his current predicament, and the way he was doing it was beyond infuriating. It was as casually cruel as a cynical, late-night talk show host. Bruce never quipped like this. Never one for the long supervillain monologue. Short sentences. Facts stated.
The clown-bat was still talking. A rapid-fire delivery of words using his own distorted voice. There was a slurring of saliva and a smacking of lips with each one, probably due to a deficiency of teeth. Would he ever shut up? he thought. Something about the world crumbling. Something about another world. He mentioned 'Clark' and the term 'trust', and that combination of terms brought back the pain of betrayal just as the haze of numbness had begun to settle over him.
Everything was overwhelming. The betrayal by Clark. The new body. Clark's death. Was that a distant rumbling in the distance? Earthquakes now? Something new? Did it ever stop? Would it ever? He needed time to think... to process everything...
...and this wretched, sickly being that claimed to be him was still talking. Not giving him a chance to stop and think. Still irritating him with a voice that sounded so much like his own, when the two of them couldn't be any more different. This being was not Bruce Wayne, if he had ever truly been. This was some trick sent by unknown Powers-That-Be or some clone of his that had escaped from Project Cadmus or Lexcorp or even Apokolips. Made with a grin that looked so much like the Joker's. A final mocking gesture that had tracked him down just to infuriate him at his lowest point, to rub his face in the muck the same as Clark had wanted to just mere minutes ago.
And this changed Bruce Wayne had had enough of the tricks, the lies and the deceptions.
The blood-rage that he had he thought would be satiated by Clark's demise was rising in him once again, boiling in his guts, demanding to be sated.
Batman does not kill.
Because once you start, you won't be able to stop!
And so for the second time that day, the Bruce Wayne of Earth-1 violated his one rule...
...And his spiked fist, in turn, violated the chest cavity of the smiling newcomer, tunneling through it, snapping ribs and piercing the heart in less time than it took to blink.
Even with most of his face concealed by the metal mask that most resembled an expensive spiked dog collar, the Jokerized Batman's surprise at this unexpected turn of events was obvious. He 'looked' down uncomprehendingly at the massive arm - like some enormous trunk of petrified wood - protruding from the center of his chest in complete disbelief.
"But I have nightmare arm-" He didn't finish the cryptic phrase. Instead blood shot up like a fountain from his throat, filled his mouth, and dripped between gaps in his diseased gum line.
Doomsday Bruce Wayne snarled at Joker Bruce Wayne.
"YOU'RE NOT ME," he grunted. "I WOULD HAVE PREPARED FOR THAT!"
He took a breath and continued.
"...couldn't even trust Clark…." he whispered, having to consciously keep his voice low to keep it from booming.
He withdrew his hand quickly, the movement so fast that time seemed to slow.
"So what made you think I'd trust a pathetic Joker-clone like yourself, even if he did claim to be me from another reality?!"
The Bat-Clown did not reply; his tongue being permanently stilled through the act of being murdered.
Though there was something else coming from his blackened lips; a wisp of sickly green and yellow mist. As though the dead man had just taken a puff of a cigarette and blew it in the face of his killer to show contempt. More of the vapor poured forth from the bloody hole in the center of his chest where his heart had been located.
The former Bruce Wayne sniffed it and the smell was instantly identified by a brain that had every fact and memory carefully filed and organized.
Joker toxin.
It was some strain that he hadn't encountered before. Potent. Refined. But still recognizable as the modified laughing gas that killed thousands. The signature weapon of the Clown Prince of Crime.
Mere minutes ago he would have instantly broken out in maniacal laughter, would perhaps have had his brain and personality permanently rewritten...
But his new body had been adapted to survive the alien atmospheres of distant worlds. The concentrated strain of nanotoxin that had been germinating and percolating in his doppleganger's body had no effect at all.
Joker as a virus? As something that could be passed on, ensuring his craven immortality? It was like something out of a bad movie or one of Tim's video games.
"You thought you were going to poison me? Was that your brilliant backup plan? Make me something like you?! Carry on your plans?! Your design!? All with a smile on my face?! YOU FLATTER YOURSELF!"
He angrily ranted, releasing and giving vent to the outrage of Clark's betrayal on this one who had the audacity to interrupt Bruce in his moment of grief - a moment that rivaled the loss of his parents in that stinking alleyway. This one who mocked him with the Joker's smile while claiming to be worthy of the legacy of the Bat. The Devastator had to give up the Batman persona through necessity. But this one had tossed the mantle in that same gutter and thought the gesture to be a joke.
"Is that how you were changed? Were you that weak? How many people looked up to you, and then you let them down?! How many did you betray!?"
One massive hand ripped the dark metal helmet away, and squeezed. The three inch-long spikes dug into his new flesh, but he didn't care. He tossed it aside with contempt. He briefly caught a glimpse of the man underneath, and its resemblance to his former self only served to enrage him further.
Gripping the buckles and straps of the front of the leather coat which instantly tore with one spiked hand, he then used his other hand to grasp the ankle of his doppleganger and drove it to the ground.
The world was collapsing around him. Not just the towers of bone, but reality itself was screaming and tearing. In the distance, sections of continental crust were crumbling into a great void, but the Devastator gave it no mind - so focused was he on the grisly task before him.
'JUST…"
His kick impacted on the corpse's back midsection, the force so great it ripped the body completely in half.
"LIKE…'
He grabbed the waist and legs, tossed them to the wayside and then attacked the torso and head with renewed fury.
"...HE DID!"
He stomped the remains for a full six minutes until it was nothing more than a shallow puddle of blood in which floated slurried bone meal, flesh bits and strips of treated black leather. The spiked helmet had become hopelessly bent and broken until its shape and function were completely unrecognizable under the tread of his now enormous feet.
The red haze had run its course and he walked through the crimson pool that was all that remained of the one formerly called the Batman Who Laughed (who was now the Batman Who Perished).
He had won but he had lost. The universe was not fair, but Bruce knew that fact from the alley.
The Devastator turned from the sight of the two victims of his wrath, now joined in death, and looked at his surroundings. The sight invoked no response in either the beast or man.
And then, like some grotesque stone gargoyle, the altered Bruce Wayne sat down in the ashes of all that he had once known, and tucked his knees to his now massive chest and stared up at a sky that was being eaten away by cosmic forces that he was now beyond caring about. The city, the cars, the people, were already gone, everything in it being torn down its component atoms and then to a blazing white non-existence.
"I'll die here,"he vowed.
As this long process took hold, from time to time, the island remnants of the mind of Bruce Wayne and Batman still focused on the utter absurdity of Joker-ism as something that could be passed on like a bad cold.
Even past Clark's betrayal, the anger at that absurdity lingered until up until the very last instant.
Special thanks goes to Gojirob for the edits and additional dialogue he provided.