Sideshow 01c: 'and a cup of good cheer!'
A/N: Wow, this went on a much, much longer hiatus than intended! Fight scenes are hard, and so is the Joker. Sorry. Luckily we are snowed in today, and still have internet. It's a long chapter, at least?
Krampus is a mainly-Austrian anti-Santa, a demon usually all over black with two pointy horns, who punishes the bad children at Christmas.
In response to some timeline-related questions: On J's end his daughter is three and the first Talon is a teenager; meanwhile in spite of the presence of Detective Montoya, the Robin on the other end is a teenaged Dick Grayson. In neither case has Jason Todd yet entered the story, which means Batman doesn't yet hate the Joker to the same level as later on, and Jokester doesn't know Owlman's secret identity.
Jokester drew nearly even with the broken window, gathered himself up, glanced around to make sure the police weren't freaking out, and did a flying somersault inside. Landed front and center, arms spread, and stabbed a judgmental finger at the clown with the gun.
"Halt, recreant!"
Heh, well, that got his attention. In fact, everyone who could manage it was looking at him. Santa, all smudged with dirt and ash like he'd fallen down a few chimneys, calling the criminal to account.
And with no long white beard. Just purple hair falling around his shoulders, and a grin the mirror of the one frozen on the villain's face. But that expression was beginning to thaw, and while this Joker character had set the cartoonish-looking dynamite-wired-to-a-clock bomb down at some point, he still had the revolver. And a tiny hostage, tied at the ankles, within arm's reach.
Distract, distract, distract. Jokester pointed at the criminal again, swelling with a righteous indignation that was only partially put-on. "Yeah, you! How dare you try to spoil toys for children at Christmas? Huh?"
If he'd cared about the answer to his question, he would have been disappointed.
"Wowza!" said his own voice, only it wasn't. It was…
J knew the way the harbor smelled. Bad, mostly. Like a mess of low tide and seagull and machine oil and diesel exhaust and unwashed human. But there was that, and then there was the smell you got when a body had washed up under one of the wharfs and started rotting.
This was the second one.
"Holy doppelgangers, Batman!" the Joker sang out, and then, abruptly, fell into a scowl. "Wrong joke, bad timing, stupid hat, where's Batman? We've all been waiting so patiently." One hand in a strangely pristine white glove twisted in his hostage's hair, and it took all J's acting skills not to react.
He sniffed, instead, drew himself up another inch. "That pointy-eared bully? Off beating up jaywalkers or something, prob'ly," he shrugged, which seemed to amuse Joker.
Provoking Batman to get a reaction made about as much sense as doing the same thing to Owlman, which J had a history of himself, but what was the endgame here? Batman and Robin and Montoya had approached this like a routine emergency, not a shocking transgression, so either his counterpart was disappointingly unoriginal and kind of sucked at his non-job, or he did worse stuff than this all the time. Which…guh. Don't think about it. Or about Batman's ominous warnings that suggested Joker probably was pretty darn good at being bad.
He cocked his head, not a care in the world. "What's it matter?"
Scornful, but also thick with a private joke, the answer: "Pffft! He was invited to my Christmas Party, and you're just a gatecrasher."
"Well, that's just the kind of thing that happens when you get yourself stuck on the Naughty List," J retorted.
He'd have folded his arms, if this was just an argument, but the other guy had a gun he liked pointing at things, and his other hand inches from a little girl. Freedom of movement was kind of something he wanted to hang onto. He waggled a judgmental finger instead.
The Joker laughed. And that sounded even more like something that had been dead for a week than his speaking voice did, except that made it sound sort of swollen and gooey, and it wasn't, really; it was a high, jerky, cackling banshee noise, but the note was thin and clean, taken just as a sound. It sounded like him. And yet it didn't—at least, he hoped it didn't.
J blew out an irritated breath. "See, that's our problem! How's this funny?"
Secrets tucked themselves into the corners of the Joker's too-wide mouth, and it had been a few years since J's own face in the mirror had made him sick but he was feeling it now, the wrongness. "What? The party environment not jolly enough for you?"
"Kinda not, no. I mean, I can understand not getting it catered, this economic climate, but you could've at least thrown together a potluck, y'know?"
"Refreshments are just waitin' on the guest of honor," Joker retorted, with a worrying leer that said to J there was a boobytrap around here somewhere, he just wasn't deemed worthy of it. Which, hey, he was okay being profiled as not-a-booby.
"Hey, fine," he shrugged, and with a casual roll of his shoulders strolled forward, hands carefully in view. "Guess 'til then we just…circulate?"
Robin had said Joker would have used the time he'd had to get everything just how he wanted it; J trusted local expertise, so that meant he'd gone in assuming everything was where it was for a reason. Joker had set himself up with long aisles of toys stretching out behind him, apparently unconcerned about being attacked from the rear; that said some kind of trap was going on there, though J didn't know evil-him well enough to say whether he was playing bait to get someone sneaking up behind him to walk into a trap, or if he was just okay leaving his back open because he'd secured the rear, or what. The three spread-apart hostage locations, meanwhile, were meant to splinter his attention. (Well, Batman's attention.)
If he'd been a different sort of person, or here with a different goal, it might have caused him real trouble, but in his role as a distraction, fussing over hostage dispersal would just put them in more danger. His path toward Joker looped right slightly, as he passed the knot of miserable tied-up 'guests' (and the ominous canisters that he was just going to say at a guess probably didn't contain helium for party balloons), to make sure none of the hostages were ever directly behind him. It wouldn't stop Joker from shooting them on purpose, but at least it meant dodging was an option if he took a shot at him.
Joker saw what he was doing. Didn't try to stop him, but the sharp points of his first molars were showing, he was grinning so wide. J knew a thousand different ways to smile with his face the way it was, and a few hundred of them were some kind of challenge or some kind of threat, but so far as he knew he'd never looked that much like a hungry jackal.
He kept on coming.
"Nyuh-uh!" the Joker burst out, as the distraction-clown's shoe landed on some invisible line. A gloved hand hauled the little hostage in by one pigtail, across his body like he thought there might be an upcoming need for a cute little bullet-catcher. She sank her teeth into her upper lip and the runnels of tearstains down her cheeks thickened again, but she didn't scream.
Scared enough to make her brave. J'd seen it before, and stranger.
"I think you're gonna stay right there," said the rotting-corpse voice, unnecessarily. He'd already pulled up sharpish. "Unless you don't care if I spoil this little morsel's Christmas forever? Ahahah!"
The little girl's breath stuttered a little over her shaking lower lip and it took everything J had not to react. He'd been ignoring her, up to this point, in hopes Joker would forget to use her as long as possible, but now he let his eyes rake over her—definitely not out of kindergarten yet.
White girl, blue eyes, button nose, pointy chin. He could see why a predator would have zeroed in on her. Shiny Mary Janes, only a few scuffs on her white pantyhose, and she was actually wearing one of those little high-waisted dresses with a taffeta petticoat to make the skirt bell out. Sea-foam green, not pink, but there was lace involved. The blonde curls looked natural, at least, but somebody'd gone to some trouble to get them up into perfectly symmetrical puffs of gold behind each ear.
If Harley'd married a rich blond guy, her daughter would look like that.
Slowly, he raised his hands, palm-out, to show that if there was going to be shooting it wasn't going to be him doing it.
He settled back on his heels, and smiled, narrow and sharp. "Look, I could say something about what kind of coward hides behind a little girl, but I think we both know that conversation wouldn't go anywhere interesting."
Joker sniggered, and gave a sort of incredulous shake to his head, like a dog with wet ears. Or like J did, when he could tell the joke was funny but he didn't—quite—get it. Yet.
He'd noticed the coldness in J's smile, probably. "Who're you supposed to be, anyway?"
J let himself snicker, too, shrugged one shoulder, loose and easy. "Ghost of Christmas…Fractal?"
"Here to lecture me about the meaning of holiday cheer?" The Joker laughed, "Hey, you people!" he shouted toward the largest clump of hostages. "Gimme a cheer!"
"Yay," came a ragged, shaken chorus. One of the smaller children, leaning against his mother's side for comfort since with their arms bound she couldn't hold him, nor he her, broke into a sniveling wail, and J stepped sharply, attention-catchingly forward when he saw not-his face crease with sudden irritation and one thin gloved finger move to caress the gun trigger as its muzzle drifted toward the group. Most guys, the gun would have snapped around to him when he pushed the limits, but the Joker turned it back on the kid, just a few degrees from the side of her head, grinning smug challenge. Drat. At least he didn't look like he was actively considering firing in the next second anymore.
"Not 'xactly thinking lecture," J answered the question, keeping his body language loose and open and counting on his long-polished keeping-the-bad-guys-talking skills to get away with crossing the invisible line. He'd made it to just inside three meters from Joker and his hostage-in-hand now, deliberately ignoring her and the way her teeth were going to break the skin any second if her captor kept tugging at her hair.
He still wasn't feeling great about this party, but he was starting to feel the flow of it.
Jokester and his friends, they'd dealt with hostage crises before. The hostage-taker was usually as terrified as his victims, or boiling mad to the point of furious gesticulation. Joker was neither of those things. But his every motion, so far, and every word from his hyena-wide mouth had said, in some way, look at me! Pay attention! Look! Here!
J knew that behavior. He knew it from the inside. Which meant he knew that it didn't necessarily mean much of anything—wanting attention was part of the human condition, and some people just enjoyed it more, and more indiscriminately, and the performer's high was kind of worth chasing in itself. But he also knew something about the moments when it meant a lot, when every flourish was notice me and every bow tell me I'm real.
He had no idea what was wrong with the Joker, not really. What had happened, world to world, that made the two of them so different. But he knew people—that was his thing, his specialty; in some ways he was better than Harley even if he wasn't nearly as good at putting what he saw into words—and he knew the twist of sick recognition in his chest, and he knew that endless aching for acknowledgment.
And Batman had been so surprised by my life doesn't actually revolve around you.
J could read the writing on the wall.
"Maybe a pantomime?" Joker mugged, with something even nastier in his sneer, but his gun hand was still relaxed, an easy, flexible threat, not taking aim, not pressing cold metal against the little girl's forehead.
"Sure," J shrugged again, with a chuckle. Because yeah, that was a joke, but this really was a show. He knew how to join a show. "I can be Harlequin, you can be Clown; I'll save the day and get the girl, and you can run offstage pursued by policemen."
Unexpectedly, Joker found this hilarious; he shook so hard with laughter that J took the chance of advancing several steps, so hard that the hero in the Santa hat almost didn't catch the moment when the villain's shoulders jerked back, just before his wrist twitched in and his finger on the trigger tightened, and maybe he wouldn't actually kill his best hostage but counting on this guy to do the sensible thing was just not a good gamble—
Luckily, he had caught the moment, and by the time the gun went off J had already barreled into the Joker, giggling wildly with the sharply breaking tension, smacking the weapon up so it shot out a light, grabbing for it and getting the Joker's wrist instead.
Wrestling for control of the revolver, keeping it up where nobody was in the line of fire, wasn't so hard, but he was digging his fingers into the tendons that usually made people drop things and getting nowhere. (Where was Batman, seriously, this was not distraction anymore but he could not be blamed.) "Here!" laughed the rot-oozing voice, suddenly, and then there was a warm little body against his chest, and he braced it, automatically; Joker's suddenly-free left hand came up and wrenched against J's one, winning the competition for the gun. It was already coming down again. "You got the girl! Now save the day! Ahahahahahah!"
Time to feel stupid later.
There were about forty feet between the Joker's position at the mouths of the toy aisles, and the front wall. J ran, flat-out, zigging and zagging and trying very hard not to backstop any position with civilians, clutching the hostage tight to him and crossing his fingers for luck, because—there, yes, the bang and whirr, and he ducked as he ran.
That one had missed, but there were at least another four shots to go. J could almost feel the barrel lining up with his back, as a check-out counter loomed in his path, and he had to jump it without using his hands and without presenting a clear shot at the brave little bundle in his arms. Here went nothing.
He jumped, at the same time the gun behind them barked.
The thing about bullets—the thing to remember, thing numero uno, at least when it came to protecting other people from being hit with them after it was too late to stop guns going off in the first place, was that they were fully capable of going right through a person. They slowed down in the process, sure, and past a certain range you could massively reduce the chances of someone dying by taking a bullet aimed at them, but the toy store wasn't that big. A human shield was better than nothing, but unless you had armor on it was a last resort for reasons totally unrelated to the fact that being it tended to get you killed. Though that mattered, too.
J wasn't wearing Kevlar. The bullet sliced through his side like a high-velocity knife through marshmallow, and kept moving. Shattered against the steel window frame.
He'd jerked himself and his precious burden six inches to the left with a knee against the counter in the last instant, and as the pain seared through him he tumbled on, hit the ground shoulder-first and kept rolling right up onto his feet, didn't let himself stop once he got there. The kid in his arms was shaking harder than ever, snot and tears dribbling down her face, but a lightning-quick once-over as he ran the rest of the short distance to the front wall showed no sign she'd taken any part of the hit. Almost lost somewhere in the background of crazed laughter and the girl's tiny, rapid breaths, there came a metal click, as Joker manually re-cocked his revolver behind them.
"Tuck and roll, kid!" J shouted as time ran out, and with that, he threw her out through the broken window.
He didn't stay to watch how she flew. She might land well, or she might not, and there was going to be massive freaking out even if she didn't get a scratch, because she had his blood all over her dress, but she was safer out there than in here. Defenestration of child accomplished, he needed to move.
Left hand clamped over his right side, he dove to use the register for cover. Too many hostages to stay here and make Joker come to him, though. There might be as few as two shots left, but that was enough to kill two helpless people, and anyway, he wasn't going to count on it. That revolver looked custom.
Joker had a gun and he didn't, and based on their one little tussle J had the feeling he had the advantage hand-to-hand anyway, so the number one goal was to get close. Primary condition: no getting anybody shot. Including himself.
Batman was officially late to the stupid Christmas party. Jokester had never had the kind of job where you attended office parties and griped about your coworkers, but he bet this was exactly how it felt when the one guy who was supposed to bring pizza flaked and left you to get stuck awkwardly making small talk with the boss, while you drank cup after cup of punch and hoped nobody had spiked it.
He was mad now, he realized. Not at Batman, unless it turned out he didn't have a good reason for flaking and was just messing around. At his double, mostly. Because taking hostages and poisoning people and scaring kids that much, that sucked, that was so low, but now J'd seen (felt) him honestly try to the hurt the kid. Kill her, even. This was real. His instincts had been telling him evil, evil, evil but part of him had just kept believing it was some kind of horribly over-involved joke.
This was no joke.
Shuffling silently to the far right of his hiding place took a few precious seconds, as the blood spreading down his side got far enough that the leading edge was cold against his thigh and he devoutly hoped he wouldn't do anything embarrassing like pass out, and then he pressed his lips together, braced his feet to make sure he wouldn't slip, and erupted out into the open space and ran for it.
Joker thought he was hilarious. Running away, running back, run run run little clown. J watched him raise the gun, almost shoot him in the face, and then decide against it, and aim for the knees instead. Jumped that, and then he was back in his enemy's space.
He dropped and twisted and kicked—up—in the move that had allowed him to knock Owlman clean off his feet three times running before the featherhead managed to adjust, proving that the sequence was indeed 'crazy-stupid enough to work,' thanks for your faith, Hye-Lim-shi. Joker dodged aside this first try, eel-like, as though he'd been expecting exactly that, but that didn't matter much because J was still moving, hands on the ground to give him the extra spin to whip his other foot around and send the gun flying.
He whooped, and hooked Joker's ankle with one hand as he tumbled heels-over-head toward upright, hoping to throw his evil twin off-balance, but instead he had to jackknife sharply (to his injured side's displeasure) to get clear when Joker stamped one heel and swung at him with the nasty little knife that had shot out of the end of his oddly shiny shoe. Which was definitely not playing fair, but still an improvement on taking hostages.
Joker was…sort of chortling. Sort of giggling. It sounded like a creaky door and J really hoped he didn't make that sound himself. Or at least that if he did, the door sounded less like it was installed in a haunted house.
J landed a punch across the jaw that the Joker shook off, then evaded another sharp-toed kick, distantly aware of the astounded attention of the hostages who were tied facing in their direction. Wondering who, if anyone, was watching over the security feed. He liked to know his audience; made them easier to play to.
Joker didn't care about a gut-punch any more than he had the face, and J surprised himself with a split-second of empathy with Owlman, because it must be just as annoying to hit him and get laughed at. Well, good. That was the point.
J hit his counterpart four more times and only took one glancing punch to the cheekbone, which was satisfying even if it didn't seem to be getting anywhere. He kept thinking he saw something flashing in Joker's beetle-green eyes, something that could be meaningful or at least useful, but whenever he tried to catch it it was just emptiness, like a glass Christmas ball crushing to shards that tattered your palm.
Then he danced back from another swipe with that stupid kick-knife, and his feet tangled in a giant stuffed lion, knocking him off-balance and almost flat on his back. Wakeup call, funny man: You're paying too much attention to your opponent and not enough to your surroundings. He wobbled out of the way of an uppercut, disentangled his feet, kicked the lion into Joker's face, and used the moment that his opponent was blinded to duck into what seemed to be an aisle devoted to traditional playthings like hobby-horses and bouncy balls, to plot a little and get his head in the game. It looked like this was going to be an honest-to-goodness fight, and he was still only equipped for collecting charitable donations, not beating up crazy people. Actually, he'd left the bucket with Batman's car, so he wasn't even equipped for that.
Joker, out on the open part of the sales floor, cackled like wicked witch. "Come out, come out, wherever you are…"
J ghosted back another few feet. There was nowhere to hide, in the aisle; as soon as Joker stalked down to this level and glanced left, he was going to see him. He could probably scramble back to where the aisles divided and start playing hide-and-seek for maximum distraction, but that risked the maniac losing interest in him and going back to get his hands on another hostage. Also, it meant fewer chances to punch him. Decisions, decisions.
He took another step back. Plink, said something to his right. He spared it a raised eyebrow, and found that the largest jack-in-the-box on the shelf had chosen this moment to activate, under its own power, the handle on the side revolving slowly through the little tune J didn't remember learning but knew the words to all the same: round and round the cobbler's bench, the monkey chased the wea-sel. The monkey thought it was all in fun…
POP! went Jack, erupting from the box, nearly life-size, with Joker's face—his own face—looming under his jester's cap, behind the sharp knife rocketing forward in his little puppet hands.
Bemused, J tipped his head out of the way as the last notes (goes the wea-sel!) tinkled from the little machine. That moment spent dodging meant he was a little less ready than he could have been when the Joker leapt around the corner with a "Gotcha!" in the next instant, but it wasn't quite distraction enough for him to actually take a blackjack (disguised-as-a-rubber-chicken-what-the-hey) to the head, and he laughed in Joker's face as he grabbed the purple arm and twisted, until the crook could drop his weapon or feel his elbow pop out of joint. He dropped it; good to know some things about the creep were normal.
"Was that supposed to scare me?" he demanded, kicking the other man in the shin as Joker swung a haymaker at his left eye. "I've been loomed at by experts, buddy! You're gonna hafta step up your game." Which was reversing cause and effect a little bit, but his double didn't need to know that.
Spitting mad, Joker raised his free arm to his chest, but not inside his jacket for another weapon, just—
If he hadn't owned something just like it not so long ago, J might not have clued in in time. But he did, and Joker abruptly had all the space he could want as the purple-haired Santa hotfooted it backward out of range of the acid-spitting flower on his lapel. That kind of thing could really mess up your whole day. "Pbbbbbt!" he blew around his stuck-out tongue, as the stuff ate into the linoleum. "Missed me!"
The next few minutes took them through racks of plastic animals and a ridiculously large toy-truck section, and into sports gear, where J acquired a child-sized wooden bat. "Hey, look, I'm bat-man!" he exclaimed, which got Joker madder. Mad enough to ignore a cracked bone in his left arm and hit hard enough with it to cause a black eye, but then J lost him, somewhere on the other end of sports, where all the shiny new kiddie bikes were stacked up with their four-digit price tags.
It was in that moment of breathing space that he realized that Joker had been letting him lead him away from the hostages. There were probably more traps hidden all over the toy shelves—that was what he would have done—or even back near the hostages, ready to be set off once Joker himself was out of range, which made him bite his lip in hesitation when he thought of it. He'd have to try to get them nearer the front again, and then hold them still. Drattitude.
There was a sound of motion, just as he decided this, in the direction of the fortress of purple and pink that was Girls' Toys, and J turned to see a heavy little bouncing-ball skittering and rolling toward him, marked with red-and-blue stripes and a cheerful yellow star. Oh, now that was just bad news.
He lashed out with his battered bat and sent it careening back the way it had come. It stuck partway, under the wheel of a pink-tasseled bike, and a second later, the same instinct sent J to his face behind the baseball glove display.
Puh-FOOM!
When he raised his head, that bike and all the ones near it, not to mention the floor, were looking blackened, twisted, and worse-for-wear.
"Was that a grenade?" he demanded, hearing his voice rocket upward with affront. "What is with everyone in this city throwing bombs at me?"
Well, if that was how it was going to be…J dropped the bat for the sake of two free hands and flew forward, crossing the open floor that would be a killzone if the Joker had another firearm hidden and just hadn't pulled it yet, ducked a flying knife with a flailing of the bobble at the end of his hat, scrambled up among the bikes, and vaulted over the top rack, to fling himself shoulder-first through the space between one shelf and the next with a titanic crashing of Barbie merchandise, and pop out just over Joker's head in a shower of shiny pink plastic.
For once, he seemed to have managed to honestly take the other clown by surprise, and took full advantage of it by landing full-force, with his elbow in the sensitive dip between neck and collarbone, and delivering a solid blow to the head with the surprisingly sturdy chassis of a bright pink doll-size car. This moment of complete advantage was immensely satisfying, which was good because it did not last long—J tried to twist Joker down in a chokehold as he inevitably continued his fall, but had to give it up as the psycho produced another knife from somewhere and stabbed at his arm.
"That wasn't funny!" Joker proclaimed, but then he laughed, high and humorless.
"Says you!" J retorted.
He managed to land on his feet, ducking and weaving as you do, trapped in a knife fight without a knife. The Barbie car was a little narrow and heavy for a shield, but it was what he had to hand. Joker's eyes glittered as his blade glanced off thick plastic, and J honestly could not tell whether his opponent was enjoying himself or not.
A little more strength in the next stab, or a slightly different angle, and Joker's knife punched straight through the bottom of Barbie's car and out the other side, an inch from J's eye. Sniggering, the Joker bore down.
J twisted, tugged, came away victorious, and danced back trying not to slip on scattered Barbie vehicles like giant wheeled flower petals, as he pried his prize out of the pink car. Joker was already producing another, with the same skill (though not the showmanship) J would have displayed himself, had he been carrying hidden weapons (he should probably make a habit of it).
Now he was going to be in a knife fight with a knife, which was an improvement. Jokester had a feeling, though, that he wasn't going to have quite the same edge he'd had with his fists.
He was right. Joker handled the knife like it had grown out of his arm, and lacked J's instinctive disinclination to stab people, and unfortunately he was already losing too much blood out his side to afford taking any more open wounds if he could avoid it. This would still be a really stupid time to pass out. Which meant it was Joker on the offensive again, as J fell back, and back, scoring long thin cuts to his evil twin's arms, and one to his cheek that represented his inability to go for the neck when he wasn't sure what kind of emergency services were available for monster clowns in this town.
Some people'd say he ought to take the risk, but he didn't need to defeat this person, wasn't even supposed to be fighting him; there was nothing on the line in this moment worth putting that on himself. The part of him that wanted to stab and stab until the horrible thing went away was the same part that thought it was looking into a mirror.
Batman hadn't actually tried to kill him, when he thought he was Joker, unless you counted throwing a bomb. He'd understand.
They were getting near the hostages again, and it was the split-second lapse of attention spent noticing that that allowed Joker to swing that nasty shoe-knife at J's gut and connect, in a hemorrhage of stuffing from the cushion that had been Santa's belly. It would have gone deeper, but J jerked back, purple hair in his face, just in time, whooping at the lucky chance of a costume never meant for fighting in still keeping him safe—Joker, the anger in his cackle easy to hear now, pounced after, stabbing at his eye, no holds barred, and J reared back just a little further—tripped, goshdarnit to heck, heel caught on the weight of a heavy steel truck cast in miniature, parked across his path.
He rolled as he fell, heels over head, keeping the knife in his hands away from himself, not completely sure what was behind him but knowing it couldn't possibly be as dangerous as what was in front, until he fetched up in a shower of heavy wooden blocks. Enough, luckily, spilled away from him that he wasn't buried alive, but everywhere he tried to put his weight seemed to contain a skidding block that dropped him back on his butt. His bullet wound was bleeding more strongly again. He needed more time, and it was in a singing blend of hilarity and extremity that he seized the first block that came to hand and flung it at the advancing Joker.
Not so fast the loon couldn't dodge, but the solid wooden cylinder that came behind it clipped his shoulder, and he batted a cone out of the air right before it could hit him in the nose. Then he laughed, the same kind of gross, stomach-writhy sound that wasn't different enough from J's own crazy cackle to not make him feel like slime by association, and stopped advancing.
Joker, clearly exercising a mastery of giving you what you asked for in such a way that you no longer wanted it, planted his shiny-shoed feet, reached inside his stupid purple coat yet again, came out with a stupid purple blob, and drew his hand back to throw it. J finally found the floor with both feet and started to surge upright, already pretty sure that if he didn't knock that blob back with the block in his hand he would be very, very sorry.
Wshk.
A long black throwing-star pinned the blob to the floor, where it oozed and swelled and bubbled up into a much bigger purple blob like the B-Movie Thing That Ate Neptune, and J wasn't sure whether it had been going to dissolve him or just pin him in place, but he was really glad he wasn't finding out.
While his Blob was being defeated, the Joker'd spun, turning up unerringly to find the thrower dropping down on him from somewhere in the ceiling, scalloped black cape spread fit to block out a whole sky. "Batsy!"
J thought he sounded awfully delighted, for someone who clearly wasn't surprised to get a right cross to the jaw a second later. "Oh, hey," he remarked himself, feeling brightness return to his grin even as Joker bounced back from the punch like he was made of springs. "Krampus made the party, too. Ho-ho-ho!"
He threw another wooden block, since he had it in hand, and it bounced off Joker's shoulderblade with a satisfyingly sharp rebound that said a nice deep bruise would be coming up within the hour. Batman shot him a sour look, clearly indicating his interference was unwelcome, and he shrugged overdramatically and stuck his hands deep into his pockets. Fine, then. If you're going to get possessive now you're finally here.
"Back entrances were all trapped," Robin took the trouble to say with a hint of apology as he blew past, zeroing in on the silly-looking bomb that was apparently more of a threat than J'd thought. Must have been some traps; they'd left him alone in here for a good quarter of an hour!
He stood for a second, hands in pockets, and looked from where Batman was slamming the Joker up against the end of a steel shelving unit, to the teenage boy kneeling over the bomb with total concentration, and shook his head, before giving Robin's explosive task a wide berth on his way to the front of the store.
Hopefully the police snipers could remember orders for more than ten minutes at a time and would continue not to shoot the creepy Santa. All that, and he still had his hat on.
Nobody had given J any antivenin injectors; an oversight on his part not to have asked, or checked whether the police also had access to the stuff, so he'd better leave those seven alone for now. He'd cut the self-mobile ones loose and see if any of the stronger adults were calm enough to help him haul the poisoned ones outside. They should get out of here before anything else happened, and he'd be more useful doing that than getting in the middle of the Cape Boys' teamwork. Everyone in this dimension was afraid of him, but given these folks had just watched him and Joker beating on each other, he'd probably have more luck with them than anybody else in this city.
It was a good thing J rarely got too attached to his plans.
Before he'd quite reached the knot of unfortunate holiday shoppers, his keenly honed sense of badwrong flared, set off by some detail of posture or stillness, and he threw himself into motion, trying to be there before whatever it was happened, so he could deal with it. His instincts weren't wrong, but they failed him anyway.
As he sprang, from the middle of the clump of hostages one huddled figure leapt up, whipped off a big brown wig and a big blue coat to toss butter-yellow pigtails and strike a defiant pose with a hammer almost as tall as herself. Jokester's leap faltered and he very nearly fell flat on his face—then paid for his shock-open guard when he took a mighty hammer blow to the left shoulder, and hit the floor anyway, right hip first, bullet wound flaring.
"Harley?" he coughed as he rolled onto his feet again, the pain disregarded for a more convenient time.
She set her jaw. That was exactly her challenging stance, with the shoulders cocked back, that she used when she got toe-to-toe with Owlman, but there was something wrong with it, with the cant of the hip, something… "You're not my Mr. J," she said firmly, with a hint of a pout, and reached behind her to twist open the top of the nearest gas canister.
Bounded forward as soon as she had, head over heels, to swing the massive hammer at his skull, and J found himself laughing uncontrollably as he dove under her, between the terrified hostages, toward the creeping fingers of violent green. No, he wasn't her Mr. J. And she, she wasn't his Harlequin. Black and white and red diamonds, and the laughter was leaving him short of breath.
He couldn't have quite explained the joke if anybody had asked, but it was a scream.
The handle turned back easily, stopping the flow of the ominous 'Joker Gas,' but all around him his laugh was already beginning to echo back from the nearest hostages. Oh, God. The flesh between his shoulderblades crawled, in something that wasn't quite fear as he understood it but wasn't just disgust, either. Horror. Yeah. He met the tearful, imploring eyes of somebody's grandfather even as the man's face was stretching into a joyless grin, and then a sharp kick landed in the small of his back and he hit his knees, barking his chin on the base of the canister.
"Ack!" was his inspiring battle cry, as he scrambled up again and headbutted the underside of bad-Harlequin's forearm, forcing it up and away from the gas valve before she could open it again. Hostages. Had to get the hostages away from the badness. He drove his shoulder in under Harley's ribs and shoved, pushing her backward, and stole a look around the toy store. Batman had just judo-thrown Joker off his feet, shattering a whole row of E-Z-Bake ovens, but the evil clown was already getting up again. Robin was halfway to the door with one of the original seven poisoning victims over his back. Great, but now there were more people poisoned. Sheesh.
The narrow handle of the massive hammer rapped him across the ribs, and he only just evaded the head as it came whipping around, and then had to tackle the whole hammer anyway before it could clip the nearest hysterical hostage. Slid himself down along the haft to bury an elbow in the false-Harlequin's stomach, wincing, and managed to wrest the weapon from her hands. She rabbit-punched him in the throat, and he went down, but wrapped himself around her legs and threw them both as far from hammer and gas as possible. They wound up a tangle of limbs with a plump Japanese-American woman and her little son, and J gabbled an incoherent, giggle-studded apology, grabbed Harley tighter, and kept rolling.
He had to get home. She felt so familiar in his arms and was trying to knee him in a very tender location, and if he got stuck here in backwards-land he was going to spend the next forever trying to make himself believe that she was a completely different person from his wife and he should leave her alone, and failing.
The crown of her skull slammed into his jaw, and he lost his hold. The two of them scrambled apart and up, and Jokester spotted Robin kneeling on the far side of the hostage cluster, sawing at someone's bonds. "Hey, birdboy," he hissed. Which was something he called Talon, too, but it wasn't like it didn't apply in this dimension, right? Robin looked up sharply; seemed relieved when his eyes fell on J. Drattitude, was that Joker's word for him, too? "Switch?" he beseeched, flailing an arm toward…Quinzel, he'd call her Quinzel, who was looking from him to Robin to her fallen hammer with her lips pouting out, as if making a decision.
The teenager straightened up, snorting, as the newly-freed hostage—a middle-aged man, grey with terror—scrambled for the door. "You can't handle Harley Quinn?"
"I can't hurt her," J shot back, his arms flying out in frustration. "She's too much like my Harlequin."
Robin's face changed, filling up with sympathy, and he gave a sharp, businesslike nod and started leaping forward between hostages. Quinzel went for her hammer at the same time. Jokester grabbed her by the back of her costume, the same way Batman had grabbed him from under the car earlier, and held her up long enough for Robin to leap up and clock her across the jaw. He offhandedly tossed J the utility knife he'd been using on the zipties, and then focused entirely on driving the crazy clown woman back.
He was good, J noted, even as he got down on his knees to start cutting people free—the worst-poisoned first, in the hopes that they were still coherent enough to get themselves out front, to wherever Robin had dropped off the others, presumably after dosing them with the antidote stuff. The cops would have the cure, too, right? He had to pin the granddad from earlier down so his convulsions of false hilarity wouldn't get him stabbed in the arm. Stabbing hostages was unilaterally bad.
But Robin, as he'd noted, was good. Not as good as Talon, maybe, or maybe just less aggressive. He wasn't sure whether to call him more or less graceful, because he had more wasted movements and less absolute poise, but there was something—well, beautiful in Robin's motion that had never existed in Talon, as far back as J could remember. The contrast between him and Harley wasn't as dramatic, here. (Not that he'd ever stood back and let Harley fight Talon alone.) He was maybe a dancer? J would ask later.
The people laughing with miserable eyes offended him on a deep level, and he was sorry now he'd handed that fight over to Batman because he really wanted to plant his fist a few more times in Joker's obnoxiously familiar face. He frowned over the utility knife as its serrated edge bit through the zip-ties. (It had that scalloped bat-silhouette shape from Batman's chest printed on the handle, the same shape as those throwing stars; wow with the branding people.)
"Go, go, go," he urged the hostages as he freed them. "Get out safe—hey, kid, it's okay; cry when you don't need to see where you're going, okay, yeah, there's your mom, stick with her, it's okay, ma'am. Yeah, hey, gramps, you're gonna be fine, just make for the door."
He didn't look at not-Harley. Tried not to wince when she grunted in pain; tried to focus on the sounds of store-trashing slapstick coming from further back. Aw, c'mon, big guy, I already wore him down for you.
Wow. This was getting to be a really, really long day. Merry Christmas.
A/N: XD Harlequin and Clown is a fairly traditional comedy duo, in which Clown is a stupid brute and Harlequin a clever trickster. This combo derives from the Harlequinade pantomime genre, wherein Harlequin was the hero and Clown a bumbling servant of the antagonist, who did indeed get into trouble with the cops on a fairly regular basis.
I really have no idea why Joker is okay with having a Harlequin sidekick. The only genre reason that makes sense is he thinks he's the innamorato of a romantic comedy, to whom Arlecchino played servant, but since Batman is the only possible partner I really hope not. Let's go with Joker lacking culture. (Not that J is actually all that cultured either, but he tends to trivia-cache about things he considers relevant or interesting, especially clowns and owls. It helps with the bantering.)
So there'll be another chapter, maybe two…this fight was so hard to write, and then once I got over the hump it wouldn't stop being written. Whatcha think?