And there Batboy went reminding him of Harvey again. J clapped him on the arm. "You're all right, aren't'cha?"

Batman did a wonderful affronted face that would probably be twice as funny if he wasn't wearing a mask. "Unlike you, I didn't get shot," he retorted, like he didn't know perfectly well that had been an evaluation of his character, not his health.

J snickered.

"We're done here," Batman announced, very this conversation did not happen, whoosh, and turned to stare down the aisle, out across the open battleground, to where Robin was visible just outside, helping with triage. The kid looked up after just a second of staring, received the silent message, and nodded a sharp affirmative. Said something bracing to the last patient, patted her on the shoulder, and stood up, exchanging grins with a weary-looking EMT.

J brushed his gloves together and glanced again at the suspicious lunchbox. "Right. So…tests, you said?" He hoped they weren't invasive. Having decided Batman was an okay guy, and allowing himself to be strapped down and experimented on, were kind of different things.

"And medical treatment."

For a second Jokester was unspeakably homesick for his Gotham, where his brilliant wife would patch him up and his adorable daughter would kiss everything better. He shook it off. He would get home again. Anything else was unthinkable. Until then, live in the moment. "I could go for that," he admitted. "So…blowing this popsicle stand, count of three? One…"

"I have to talk to Detective Montoya." Batman spoke flatly and suited word to deed, striding to the front door of the toy store and through it in a swirl of cape that made walking across a floor look cooler than it had any right to do. Which was totally the reason he wore it.

Jokester shrugged after him, kind of amused. "Fine, then."

J eased open the lunchbox, disarmed the gas bomb inside, left it open as a hint to the crime scene people, waited until no one was looking at him, and skulked out the no-longer-trapped back. The hostage-takers had found time to drink a couple of bottles of the ransom ginger beer before getting settled for the finale, he noticed, presumably in between setting up all those traps the caped duo had gotten tangled up in. He was particularly impressed by the slashed-open net hanging above a pool full of grinning mechanical piranhas. Had the Joker and not-Harlequin set that up by themselves?

By the time he circled around to the car Robin was there again, once again digging around in the trunk. Gear boy, apparently. Batman's batman? Heh. He straightened up as Jokester approached. Good ear, that kid. "Yo," J greeted, and the boy nodded acknowledgement.

"So you were shot," Robin announced, without preamble, pulling out a big, solid red box with a white cross on the side. J had noticed the bullet-passing-through-him thing, surprisingly enough. "How bad is it?"

Jokester waved a hand. "'tis but a flesh wound."

Eyebrows went up, dubious, as the box was balanced on the rear bumper and the lid unlatched.

"No, really." J grinned, because that look was all for a (stupid, reckless) person and didn't say monster at all. His dismissal of the physical injury in comparison to that triumph was completely genuine. "Okay, a pretty deep one, but no bones or major organs were harmed." He grimaced, because it was December and he'd rather not give up the protection of even the blood-sodden layers of fabric that were keeping his side covered; nothing more annoying than fiery pain surrounded by punishing cold, but he pulled up the coat, sweater, and shirt on his right to show the through-and-through. It wasn't even a hole, more like a deep groove. Not gushing, but okay, admittedly, still bleeding a bit more enthusiastically than an ooze.

Robin pulled a face at the sight, the expression halfway between the look of a doctor getting their first sight of blood on J's freaky white skin, and the look of a kid who hadn't seen enough open wounds to be blasé about it yet.

Still, he didn't do anything to make being patched up by him seem like a terrible idea, self-described 'not much of a medic' or not, and as he stripped off his lovely green gloves and replaced them with sterile-blue nitrile ones, J shuffled over and leaned back against the side of the vehicle. He was maybe getting a little lightheaded.

"This is just to stop the bleeding for now," said Robin, wiping at the skin around the wound with alcohol pads and clinical precision. "You're riding inside the impressive tank this time, since you're injured."

"Aw, I knew you guys were softies really. I'll do my best not to bleed on the upholstery."

Robin snorted. "You'd hardly be the first." He wiped a few times more, then turned to extract gauze and a roll of tape. "Anyway, who are you calling soft? You had to get me to hit a girl for you."

"Not just any girl," Jokester protested, wincing a little as Robin carefully packed a rolled-up square of gauze into the groove. Times like this he really wished he had a good layer of fat, to take shallower wounds and hold in some heat.

"Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure Batman could beat up evil me just fine."

Jokester huffed out a careful laugh that didn't come from his diaphragm enough to mess with Robin's work, and made no comment about how much Batman might or might not love Robin relative to how much he himself loved his wife. What was their relationship, anyway? Robin certainly wasn't a possession of Batman's, but he was pretty young to be a colleague, or…anything, really. Apprentice? They tracked each other constantly, he'd noticed. They'd been doing this for a while.

J went for the frank honesty of, "I'd like to see that."

The boy frowned. "Hold this." J took over the pressure on the rolled-up gauze, and Robin was silent for a second, tearing off strips of surgical tape and sticking them in a row along his left forearm so they'd be easy to grab once he was ready to use them.

"The Talon you mentioned," he said after a while, as he put the tape back in the medkit. "He's actually me? Not just Owlman's…sidekick, enforcer?"

J shrugged with his left shoulder. "Looks like you. Moves like you." Robin swapped out the sodden roll of gauze for a new one, but this time didn't take his hand away and leave the pressure up to Jokester. He pressed firmly. "Oof. Sounds like you, if you were into monotones and monosyllables. Owl's had him since he was seven or so." J shrugged again, chuckled a little awkwardly.

He didn't usually think of Talon as a kid—even when he'd still been small, you couldn't afford to hold back, and he'd never acted childish, but it wasn't like a seven-year-old had gone into villainy for the money. "I dunno. There's always been a Talon in the Court of Owls, but since Featherhead took over he's changed a lot of things around. The outfit, for one."

Robin shrugged, too, the wrinkles of concentration in his forehead deepening. "Hold this," he ordered again, laying a big gauze pad over the whole damage zone. J obliged, and Robin pressed tape over each edge. Even silent and solemn like this, and even though the black masks were almost identical—Talon's had sharply hooked corners while Robin's was a simple ovoid, and more flexible to accommodate the expressive face underneath, but it was essentially the same black domino approach to disguise—Robin's face was almost nothing like Talon's, despite being exactly the same. J found this heartening.

"I'd never mistake you for him," he offered, and Robin flashed a smile before turning away to stow the medical supplies.

J dropped his clothes over his side again, and shivered. He was definitely feeling the cold more than he had before the toy store fight. At least the finger of wind that found its way through the hole in his coat came up against gauze, now.

Talon should have been an acrobat, Jokester tasted the thought. It was…wrong of him, not to want to think about it. About the fact that the little monster who'd helped Owlman hold him down for the knife that night in the chemical plant was a kid, really, one who probably didn't have much of a life. Had never had a real life. He'd always felt a distant kind of pity, but nothing more, because he couldn't afford to…

…but he couldn't really afford to start pretending some people didn't deserve to be treated like people, either, could he? Argh.

He was grateful when Batman's voice said (out of Jokester's blind spot, naturally, because check out the very familiar compulsion to undercut other people's sense of control so he could dominate any given interaction), "Get in."

The roof folded back again, and J favored his right side somewhat as he scaled Mount Bat-Tank, and dribbled some more stuffing down the side, but didn't have too much trouble. There was another narrow row of handholds, presumably in case you were tired or slightly shot or something and couldn't vault your way in—he wondered what Batman did if he was too injured to climb. Counted on Robin to haul him? J'd seen Talon drag Owlman out of a burning building once. Or maybe there were doors in the sides for serious emergencies, and his injury just wasn't serious enough to go so far as to open them.

At the top, he contemplated the rectangular hole he was going to drop through. It was too dark inside to tell where he ought to be aiming.

"Bet I beat you there," Robin called, from halfway up a building he must have climbed while J was woolgathering.

Batman made a small sound in his throat that might have been acknowledgment, or irritation, or had nothing to do with what Robin had said at all, but the kid laughed and disappeared over the roof. Him, J liked.

Well, nothing ventured. He swung his legs through the gap, and dropped.

His feet hit something springy; his right knee knocked against something hard, so he let himself angle left and bounced only slightly off some sort of low plinth that apparently separated the driver and shotgun, one foot tangled up with the inside of the door. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he got his feet into what seemed to be a footwell and his hind end onto the actual seat, just as Batman dropped apparently straight down out of the sky and landed perfectly in the driver's seat. J poked out his tongue. Would've served the big guy right if he'd landed on a pile of discombobulated clown.

Batman made a gesture, and the roof slid shut, with only a faint mechanical whirring, and then Jokester was sealed in the dim belly of a war machine with Owlman's duplicate.

More importantly, the air inside the tank was increasingly, gloriously warm. J settled back and snapped the seatbelt—which was really more of a mesh harness; did this thing pull multiple Gs or something?—over his chest, and huffed with surprise at how comfortable he was, bullet wound aside. Not only was the heat working, the springy surface under his back offered more lumbar support than most mattresses he'd encountered. No expense spared on an assault vehicle of righteousness, evidently.

The seat was black, and looked like leather but didn't smell like it. J couldn't make out any signs of old stains, despite what Robin had said, which meant either whatever grade of high-durability pleather this was was also easy-clean, or else Batman had his car seats replaced whenever they got grubby-looking. Or maybe just reupholstered. Was it still upholstery if you did it in pleather? He glanced at the driver, flicking unlabeled switches and dials with a certain hand and a stony expression, and decided not to ask. See? Discretion. Pressed his hands between his knees to control the urge to play with the buttons and switches. So much self-control right now; if he had a mom she'd be proud of him.

He did rub his cheek experimentally against the seat surface. Felt like leather, too.

They started moving, rolling along at a fair clip through the high-end shopping district considering it was a week until Christmas, and it didn't take long for the silence to wear on him. "So," he said brightly. "Car. Tank. Whatever. How's that working out for you?"

Silence, but he could tell it was a slightly puzzled one, under all the resentment of his rude, chirping frivolity. "I mean," he continued, as they acknowledged the existence of a stop sign for about a fraction of a second, "does it mess with the mystique, stopping at traffic lights and stuff? Owlman would never," he explained, letting out a half-laugh at the thought of a spiky, armoured Owlmobile rolling around in plain sight, obeying petty traffic regulations. "Public streetsare so completely plebeian."

The pressure of interest spiked from his companion. Grudging, but curiosity nonetheless, though whether it was more about sounding out his alternate-self the way Robin had been doing earlier or just wondering about alternatives to Bat Tank, it was hard to say. "How does he travel, then?"

J snorted. "He'd like us to believe he can teleport through shadows or nightmares or something, I bet, but far as we can figure out? Underground. I've been reaching out to the Morlocks, and—"

"Morlocks," Batman interrupted, his voice flat enough that it was obvious someone with a little less pride would have been demanding Excuse me, Morlocks?! in a bit of a yelp. "In Gotham?"

"Yeah, you know. Or maybe not," J acknowledged. This was a different city, after all. "The undercity people. Sort of a catch-all, really; there's people who were born there and homeless folks who just drifted down to get out of the weather, and weirder things, sometimes. Gotham goes down an awful long way for a city that hasn't broken four hundred years since the first settlers. Surprised we don't sink ten feet every time it rains."

"Hm," Batman acknowledged. The tunnels, at least, were the same on both sides, then.

"Wouldn't be surprised if the Court of Owls put a lot of those in there," J continued, sketching with his fingers in the air a suggestion of the interlacing depths of Gotham's oversized sewers and the many, many tunnels and vaults that had never been intended for sewage, though it wasn't always clear what they were for. "They've been around a loooong time. So, anyway, I've been putting out feelers, and it looks like he's taken over some sections to put in trains. Like, his own private high-speed subway, way underground. And then I guess he does the roof thing to his exact destination, which is even more plebian if you really think about it. Pedestrian, even, haha.

"Or maybe he gets a driver to meet him with one of those shiny-black unmarked Mob sedans, I guess. I think—"

A traffic light ahead of them turned red, and Batman hit the brakes unnecessarily hard, jolting J forward in his harness. "Oof!"

"Put this on," Batman ordered, and took a hand off the wheel to pass him a…black thing.

It turned out to be a mask, when he turned it over in the low light that filtered through through slanty, heavily-smoked bulletproof windowglass; one that would fit closely from above the eyebrows to halfway down the midface—a lot like Harley's, in either world, except, crucially: no eyeholes. It was a cheat-safe blindfold. J whistled a little, impressed. (Handed a normal blindfold, he would absolutely have tied it so he could peek.)

"We aren't showing you the route to our base of operations," Batman stated flatly, as they rolled through a suburb J didn't know all that well. Lots of nice light displays, though. He liked those madly twinkling yew bushes especially. "Put it on."

Well, he already knew it was somewhere northwest of the city, unless of course Batman had used the entire drive so far to mislead him. J shrugged and put it on. Fair cop. Wasn't like he didn't go to lengths to make sure his safer boltholes were unknown to anyone who might let something slip. Especially since Ella.

He pressed the thing over his face, tied the strings behind his head, and waited a few seconds, prodding the end of his own nose where it poked out past the mask. So far as he could tell, the thing wasn't even booby-trapped, or if it was it was pretty subtle. Cool.

He'd kind of been expecting micro-needles full of sedative, or something worse. He didn't react normally to most drugs, but Batman was used to the Joker, so he'd probably have adjusted for that. But apparently it was just a blindfold. Not even interfering with his breathing. J tapped his fingernail on the stiff black material covering his right eye.

"So you just keep this around in case you want to invite somebody over for lunch or midnight bowling who you don't actually trust, huh?"

Batman ignored him.

"Ready for anything, huh?"

Batman ignored him. J tried not to twitch. Felt his smile stretch a little wider.

"Did you used to be in the Scouts? My friend Eddie was a Scout for three years. He didn't enjoy it. He's not really a nature person. But he can still reel off the catechism of scoutly virtues, or whatever they call it. Lemme see if I can…ahem," he cleared his throat. "Trusty, loyal, helpful, friendly, court-ee-ous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, uh, clean, and…reverent. Did it!" He contemplated the list for a second. "Some of those are easier than others. What do you think?"

Batman made no comment.

"I think they take an oath, too, but I don't know what it says. I think it has God in it and something about 'morally straight.' The Scouts are actually kind of weird. They do have Boy Scouts in this universe, right? Obedient's obviously the hard one for me. What about you?"

Silence. If the tank hadn't still been rolling along around him, braking occasionally and taking curves in a way that suggested they'd left the city proper and were driving on a road instead of a street, J might have wondered if his only company had somehow slipped out of the vehicle. If he listened very closely, he could hear breathing.

"Friendly. I'm thinking definitely your sticking point is 'Friendly.'" Waited. Drummed his fingers on the side of the plinth-thing. "Hellooooo?"

Finally, Batman broke his silence, in a dry, beleaguered sort of tone. "I have gags too, you know."

His grin stretched abruptly straight across his face, and he wrapped one arm around himself to hold in the laughter. "Kyehehe, ooh, kinky. But I'm a married man, I'll have you know." Which reminded him. "Everything okay between you and Robin, by the way? Not that I'm prying; I'm super nosy but I only ask intrusive questions if it's important. That's manners."

He'd gotten off-topic; blindness definitely stimulated his chatter reflex, even when he wasn't actively trying to get a rise out of someone. Flapped a hand in the space outside the blindfold.

"Anyway, answer's not important, just wanted to say. Kid seemed to think you'd have a way easier time hurting Talon than I did dealing with your world's Harlequin. I mean, you're clearly the self-discipline type, so maybe just knowing that it couldn't be him coming at you with the knife would be plenty to punch his face in without issues. I dunno. Compartmentalization is weird.

"Being mentally compartmental, I mean. You have a lot of compartments in, I dunno, a fishing-tackle box, that's just useful. Have you ever gone fishing?" He waited a second, but when no reply was forthcoming, shrugged a little. "I went once, with a friend, but the first fish he pulled in I was just, ugh, the hook dug into its jaw like that to pull it up to drown, when it'd thought it was scoring something nice to eat…" J shivered.

He'd have felt bad enough about the hook-in-mouth without that, because ow, but the deceptive promises of bait added a note of true cruelty that he just couldn't justify doing to a dumb animal that'd never done anything to deserve it. Not for sport. "'Course, Ivy says if I really cared so much I'd be a vegetarian, but it's different, you know? Well, actually meat farming is terrible even done humanely, if you think about it, but I guess my prejudices are showing."

He pulled a face, then shrugged that off, too. "What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Just so you know, though, Harley's not my sidekick. Marriage is an equal partnership that—"

"I don't need to hear it."

J chuckled. That had taken longer than expected. "Not if you're not planning to get married, I guess." Then he sighed, long and gustily, the memory of the clowns he'd met today playing technicolor against the black inside surface of the blindfold-mask. Crossed his arms, moody, knew he was pouting and didn't care.

"Where does he get off being that lonely, anyway? With a Harlequin to call him J?"

"Lonely?" Batman repeated, in a tone not unlike the one he'd used about the Morlocks.

"Well, that's the best word I can think of for it," J shrugged. It helped keep the memory of the damp foulness and the crushed-glass emptiness at arm's length. "Just that—hunger to be seen, to get a reaction, to…he doesn't see her as real, I guess," he concluded, and if he heaved a despondent little sigh, no one could fault him. "He's not even sure he's real, or he wouldn't….

"Just you," he said, abruptly, turning his blind face toward the driver, searching. "How come he believes in you?"

"I couldn't say," Batman answered flatly. A second's silence, and then, "Your sympathy is misguided."

"Sympathy? What sympathy? No sympathy here." J shook his head hard. "Just because I can empathize with someone doesn't mean I do." Though it was probably the main reason he'd never killed anyone, if he was honest—because no matter how awful a person was, if you could figure out enough about what was going on inside them to know why they were awful, you couldn't help but pity them, a little.

Not forgive them, usually. Only sometimes even sympathize. But pity…yeah. And then he usually didn't have the heart to just take everything away.

Some of them changed, after all.

And there but for the grace had never fitted so neat.

There had to be a reason, he kept thinking. There had to. Something that had made the Joker into what he was. A because. Like how Robin wasn't Talon because Batman wasn't Owlman.

…why wasn't Batman Owlman?

"Hey," he asked, letting his voice go tentative. "Why are you a good guy?"

There was a beat of silence, and he thought he was being ignored again, until Batman retorted, "Why are you?"

"I asked first."

"It's my car."

J burbled out a laugh. "God do you ever have control issues. Fine. I'll go first. And point made, I don't have a good answer. I guess I'm an entertainer at heart, really. I just want to make people smile." He thought about what he'd just said, and the Joker's green poison, and amended, "But not like that." He sucked his lower lip into his mouth and gnawed for a second. "I mean, people should be allowed to be happy. If they were, I'd be back on the stage like a shot." Face and voice and all. He could tell a joke and work a crowd and that was all you needed, really. "I…don't like it when people are sad. That's all I got."

And he'd met the Joker. Batman knew next to nothing about the Owl. Turned out he'd asked a pretty hard question.

"I can't stand injustice," Batman stated. Grim, and dark, and honest, even if he was holding something back.

"I wonder what makes the difference," Jokester mused.

Batman answered with an agreeing kind of silence, and they let that persist until the car went through a series of rapid switchbacks and rolled to a halt. Still in silence, Batman threw it into park, without that slight jolt J was used to feeling as a transmission locked down, and cut the engine.

"You can take the mask off," Batman rumbled, in time with the sound of him once more throwing the series of switches. The last one clicked a hummingbird's heartbeat after he finished the last word, and J knew without looking that he'd flicked that final switch with a curt wrist-flourish of conviction. He really was a theatrical kind of guy.

Which shouldn't be surprising; so was Owlman, in his way. Feathers and complicated murders and dramatic poses. But. It was, somehow.

It was the chin, he figured. When he'd first laid eyes on it he'd thought a bully's chin and he wasn't taking that back, but the way Batman used it, it was all I am a solid and serious person who can break rocks with the seriousness of my face.

By the time the roof had telescoped back enough for a normal-sized person (not Batman) to wriggle out, J had tugged the bow apart and dropped the mask negligently on the seat, as he leapt up and stuck his head out through the gap.

Big, dark, echoing cave with glorious stalactites and a faint smell of damp…and a well-lit path up to some kind of fancy-schmancy hacker cave like Ed might seriously kill for and absolutely would maim. There were a couple of other, less tank-like black cars embraced lovingly by the shadows, a really swell motorbike parked haphazardly at the edge of the lighted space and, most interestingly, waiting a few yards from the car there stood a trim old-to-middle-aged individual in a simple black tuxedo.

Black bowtie, black pencil-thin moustache, black domino mask, massively receded hairline, expression of bland unconcern. Huh.

The car had finished opening by the time J was done with his survey, and Batman launched himself out again (no spring mechanism J could detect even from inside the car, apparently that was all leg muscles, sheesh) and landed on the cave floor, facing the suit-man.

"Sir," the man greeted, with a measured nod and an accent straight out of a historical drama, or maybe a Jane Austen adaptation. Same thing, really. He turned to Jokester. "And guest."

"Batman's actual batman!" J realized aloud, delighted. What were the odds? He knew he was grinning all over his face again, which he'd been trying not to do since meeting Joker.

No harm done; the man in the suit merely arched one eyebrow above the upper edge of his mask. "Indeed."

"Robin briefed you," Batman concluded. Which meant that was Robin's motorcycle, and he'd won his bet.

"Indeed." There was definitely a hint of the sardonic in there, and no one was really like this, this was a stock character being played to the hilt, and J loved it. He scrambled out of the car, not bothering to try to be cool about it because no one would be impressed if he did, and got his feet on the stone.

"So are you like, the guy who comes out in a giant robot when the day seems lost?" he asked, looking Moustache up and down again. What would be really cool was if he actually was a robot. A steam-powered clockwork one. Yeah!

But he totally wasn't. Robots did not do that thing with the eyebrow. Especially not steampunk robots. That would take, like, advanced polymers and nanotubes. Or nanobots. In which case he wouldn't be a robot, he'd be thousands of them.

"He runs logistics for us," said Batman quellingly.

"And more pertinently at the moment, I provide medical assistance," agreed the older of the two masked men.

"You have a whole costume just to be home base?" J laughed. "Cool!"

The butler-impersonator still didn't turn a hair. "Quite. Mr…?"

"Uh, Gwynplaine'll do. Joey Gwynplaine." He thrust out his right hand, cheerfully ignoring the firm body-language social cues telling him not to, because he was an uncultured barbarian and he obviously didn't know you weren't supposed to shake hands with the help.

From the quirk of the older man's eyebrows as he accepted the handshake, he got the joke, and Robin—knowing already it had to be a pseudonym—let out a snort of laughter somewhere deeper in the cave, wherever he was lurking. Masked Man did not offer any name in return, which was probably punishment for inflicting handshaking. Heh.

Little did he realize he was dealing with Gotham City's champion nicknamer. Not telling the Jokester what to call you was an invitation.

A/N: Alfred! :D I enjoyed how J's first through fifth assumptions are not that he is an actual literal butler, because that would be ridiculous. Owlman's subterranean train is actually something Azrael did while he was Batman. And Gwynplaine is the eponymous lead of The Man Who Laughed. ^-^

This is the crossover that never ends...it just goes on and on my friends...but I've gotten tired of it, so unless any of you weep and gnash your teeth at not getting to see Jokester go home, next chapter will begin an entirely new storyline.