sideshow 01g: 'and bring it right here!'

A/N: XD I know people have just been waiting on the edges of their seats to see how this wrapped up. ^^

Btw, Dick playing guitar in his teens and into his twenties is canon, albeit two levels of 'destroyed multiverse' ago now. Bruce found cohabiting with an aspiring rock musician as unpleasant as any other 60s parent; it's unclear whether he was being an old fogey or Dick actually sucked.

"Cooking is a life skill, you know."

"Cake is not a life skill."

"Sure it is! You know how many friends you can make via cupcakes?"

Robin was of the opinion that most people would not accept homemade food from strangers. J disagreed. You had to have a context, not just approach people on the street, but at a book club meeting or something they'd get gobbled up and win you all the brownie points. Brownies would also work, speaking of which. (Brownies from scratch were hard, though. More trouble to get the texture right than frosting little cakes. Also, chocolate was not cheap.) Robin admitted he had never really belonged to a club. They argued about the deliciousness quotient of commercial bakery goods, finally agreed that it depended on the bakery and that you did not necessarily get what you paid for.

Throughout this chat J had been ambling slowly along the same direction he'd already been going when Robin turned up, and Robin had come with, but as they neared the end of the row something caught J's eye. Deep crimson glinted at him from inside a case, and Jokester peered back, and then he just knew.

He stopped dead. "Holy sheep!"

Robin side-eyed him again. "Did you just—"

"That," J interrupted him, pointing. "It looks kinda familiar. Where'd you get it?"

After following his pointing finger to the shiny red helmet at the back of one of the trophy cases, Robin shrugged. "Before my time. Hang on, it'll have a tag; this is 'decorative evidence.'" Casually, he moved forward, unlocked the case, and turned the helmet over. "'Red Hood helmet,'" he read. "From, uh, twelve years ago."

It took J no time at all to crack up at this news, and howl with laughter that was not quite what a normal person would call amused, as Robin looked the several inches up at him, faintly unnerved. The youth started to say something, stopped. More slowly, "Didn't you…say earlier you used to call yourself Red Hood?"

"I did!" J affirmed, and burst out laughing again, all the harder. Slapped his knee. It was one of those unbearably funny things that, if he'd explained it to someone, he would have been forced to concede weren't really funny at all. At least not in a way that made sense outside his head.

"Yeah," said Robin uncomfortably, through the noise Jokester was making. Eyes flicking down to the label again. "So did the Joker."

"Really? That guy?" J was surprised and not surprised; he didn't understand, and at the same time he'd known as soon as he saw the helmet. Reached out to take it, and Robin let him. The smooth surface was more familiar under his fingertips than it should be. He'd only worn his own shiny helmet a few times before Owlman killed him, and it wasn't shaped exactly like this anyway. He wondered if Owlman had taken his mask as a trophy. Made a note to keep an eye out, if he ever penetrated the bird's secret lair. "So he wasn't always bad," he reflected, looking down at Batman's souvenir of an enemy's dead identity.

"Uh…well, I don't know about that, but Red Hood isn't exactly a hero."

J looked up from the helmet to scowl. "Hey! S'this city's oldest vigilante, thank you. I mean, maybe standing up for strikers when the labor movement was just getting started isn't as glamorous as—" Robin was shaking his head. "No?"

"It's a name criminals have used for years. To cover up who's responsible for something," the kid said. "Sorry."

Jokester looked down at the helmet again. Felt his shoulders sag. "Oh," he said. Contemplated his own distorted reflection in red gloss. (This wasn't twelve years of dust. Even under glass. Agent A dusted the trophies, good grief.) "Everything here sucks."

"I don't," Robin pointed out, jaunty, and Jokester grinned.

"That's true. You are a huge improvement on Talon. No contest."

"Thanks," said Robin, very dryly.

And probably he had only come to talk to J because they wanted eyes on him at all times, but J was still glad he had. Company was always preferable to solitude, except sometimes when he wanted to think very very hard, and if he did that now he'd make himself glum. Robin promised a distraction.

Still. He couldn't help dwelling on it. What Red Hood had meant to him. To generations of Gothamites. All their stubborn pride and sense of frustrated justice and stifled hope narrowed into a point, standing tall against the storm. A mask to be kind behind, when kindness was dangerous, and a hero to call upon when the world fell down. Something that could always rise again, no matter how often the human being behind the name fell.

Thought of all that, reduced to a flimsy cover story for thieves and vandals and maybe murderers too.

Reached over, to set the helmet back in its place among the rest of the evidence. Lowered the glass, careful as a whisper, and stood back. His voice came out quiet and empty when he said, "It's not just us, is it."

Everyone who'd worn the name before him. Had they just been out for themselves, in this world? Those three who'd robbed the mafia in the high days of Prohibition, that man who'd taken bloody justice for those the system refused to defend, the quintessential informant, the brave Chinatown fighter who'd been killed in bed.

And he was back to that thing he hadn't wanted to do, thinking about who in this universe might be just as wrong and twisted and backwards as the Joker, as Ms. Harley Quinn.

"No," Robin confirmed. A shade of apology. "It really isn't."

J swallowed, shook off the heavy feeling with a chuckle that was more aspirational than real, though the whole situation was still pretty funny. "Just, uh, give me a baseline…Alex. Luthor? And Ultraman? What's their jam?"

"You mean Lex Luthor and Superman? Luthor's a villain, but he's good at covering his tracks. Superman's the world's greatest hero."

J whistled. Ultraman didn't even rate world's greatest bad guy, really; he had the power but not the vision. Or the conviction. But hero work was largely reactionary, pushing back against bad things other people did, so holding back all the time probably worked out better for a good guy. At least, if you had godlike power to trade on. And Alex…sneaky evil genius, he guessed? Not the cackling kind of mad scientist after all, or he wouldn't be good at cover-ups. "Weird. Okay, I really didn't want to know, but. Had to ask. I recognized some of the kids on Beverly Street. But none of the cops in the toy store." He would have been a lot more unhappy to see them if he'd known them, probably. There weren't that many cops in Gotham either Wayne or Owlman didn't have in his pocket. And even fewer who didn't think they were above the law.

"There aren't that many old-timers left on the force these days," Robin said quietly. "There's been a lot of housecleaning in the GCPD since Batman started working. Especially since we got Gordon in. Uh, the new Commissioner," the teenager added. "Who replaced Loeb, who was terrible at his job."

Jokester had mentioned, earlier, what the Loeb in his universe would do, if he phoned him up. (Which, actually, would be hilarious, why had he not done that already? That was going on the list.) And now it turned out that here, James Gordon was the Police Commissioner whom the local vigilante chapter could call from their car, to get the all-clear to take over an active crime scene.

J chewed that thought briefly. "Is Batman blackmailing Gordon or something?" he asked.

"What?" Robin was staring at him, now. "Why would you even think that?"

"Because…in my world Lieutenant Gordon's an okay guy who Owlman's had on some kind of choke collar for at least ten years? Seriously, normally he wouldn't bother to keep punishing a cop he had this much trouble controlling, he'd just have him killed. But given his head Gordon tries to do right, so I figured if I went with the pattern he should be a corrupt meanie here, which his high position seemed to confirm, yeah? But no."

"No," very firmly.

"Huh." J rolled his shoulders. "Well, this sucks, let's talk about something else. Walk with me?"

After the Red Hood helmet, J now found the trophies a bit less entertaining, though he made Robin tell him the story behind the diving helmet. When they'd finished the loop around the trophy cases and were about halfway back toward the central workspace where they'd left Batman, J glanced sideways at Robin, and snickered. It took him long enough to stop that Robin rolled his eyes and asked, "Okay, what, do I have something on my face?"

"Well, mask," J pointed out, earning another (invisible, but still obvious) eye-roll. "But actually I just—I was thinking about your name and I just remembered a joke my friend Eddie told me this spring."

"Oh man," Robin sighed. Resignedly, "Go ahead."

Jokester laughed. What a great kid, seriously. "Okay, 'How do robins avoid muscle strain?'"

"I don't know," Robin answered, his forehead already preemptively resting in his hand. "How?"

"They do worm-ups!"

There was that wonderful second of disbelief, and then the teenage vigilante let out a long, pained groan, and rubbed at his temples for a second. "Oh my god, maybe you are evil, that was awful. Would you believe the Riddler has not used that on me once in all these years?"

"Actually, no. Seriously, that was a new one? Wait, hang on. Is Eddie a bad guy in this universe too? Is everybody I know evil? Wait, strike that, don't want to know. Let's talk about something unimportant. Ooh! Maybe opposite sports teams are terrible and awesome in this world. How've the Gotham Knights been doing this season?"

Pretty good, actually, which kind of ruined that theory. Though in J's dimension they were the favorite to take the Superbowl. Wayne had poached the best quarterback and the best runningbacks in the NFL for his pet team. It was stupid; he didn't even care about football. But then, he didn't care about most things, but he did care about winning.

Robin was pretty good company, and J was no longer having any trouble not comparing him to Talon. They did have Springsteen here, but Robin did not consider him cool, and they wound up in animated discussion about rock stars and guitars, and the stinging you got in your fingers from too much strumming versus what you got free-running the roofs in this town. Robin had spectacularly engineered gloves, so he tended to suffer more from guitar than from intense parkour.

J complained vociferously about this injustice and displayed how while music and maneuver had both given him calluses, only the latter had left scars. He made Robin laugh several times.

Then he asked the question that had been lingering in his mind ever since he recognized the Red Hood's featureless face. And then this wasn't funny anymore.

He'd gotten away from Robin without giving anything away, he thought. The kid apparently did actually have stuff to do, and if J was going back to check in with Batman he should probably go do it, yeah, see you later. Robin might be circling around to keep an eye on his conversation with Batman, but it didn't matter if he was. Jokester set his feet on stone and stared across the steel-topped table at his host, who was bent over the same table as before, absorbed in the minute details of his refurbishing work.

"So."

Batman made a faint humming sound to indicate he was aware someone was present and talking to him.

"You dropped the Joker in acid and walked away?" J didn't raise his voice. He didn't say it friendly and easy, either, or stretch the words into a challenge. He didn't laugh. He just smiled, like he thought it was a pretty okay joke, and laid out the words so tidy it wasn't even a question, really.

Batman seemed to instinctively grasp the meaning of this behavior. He took his attention off his mysterious device and gave it to J. Straight-faced, he corrected:

"I didn't drop him. He fell."

"And then you walked away."

"I thought he was already dead."

Now Jokester laughed, high and jerky and more than a little bit cold. "Funny. That's what you thought in my universe, too. Guess some things don't change."

"No," said Batman levelly. "I suppose they don't." He turned his hand over, so it was palm-down on the work-surface. (Absently, J noted how he made even very small gestures so deliberate they seemed significant. Owlman did it, too; the secret was that stillness, that refusal to make unnecessary motions. He'd never seen Owlman use it to say I am not a threat. Well, obviously he hadn't, but—not to any of his allies, either. Not to anyone.) "For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

J laughed again. "Oh, I bet you are," he agreed. This didn't explain it, not really. That shining, hungry void, where only Batman was real. He had lived through the same pain and unmaking, without winding up that broken, that fixated, that empty. Maybe…maybe the Joker had had nobody to save him? Was that it? Could that be all it took?

After all, kindness was the most powerful thing in the universe.

In any universe, probably.

"No," said Batman levelly. "For what Owlman has done to you. I'm sorry."

It was real—cool, and distant, and doing its best not to be a weakness, but sincere, stranded halfway between condolence and apology.

It wasn't Batman's place to apologize, not really. Even if he had done the same thing to a similar person, by accident. But this was as close to that apology as J was ever likely to get. He breathed out.

"It's okay." And it really was. He waved a hand, swinging back onto his heels and cracking his neck to break up the moment. His smile had come back, without that hard edge. "He couldn't take the most important things."

No matter what happened, after all, there were smiles to protect. And the Jokester's choices were his own. Just as the Red Hood's had been. And every moment of soaring happiness he'd lived existed. No matter what happened in the future, they couldn't be unmade. (Though J knew better than most that they could be forgotten.)

Batman was still looking at him, hands open-empty-palmdown. "You don't trust me," he said.

J had trusted his life to the man several times over since they'd met, in spite of how that meeting had gone. Risking his life was easy, but risking his freedom by climbing into the Bat-Assault-Vehicle and remaining here as a guest, that had been hard. In his terms. And yet Batman was undeniably, entirely correct.

Jokester sighed. Located a chair, and dragged it over so he could sit down opposite the Bat.

"You're right," he admitted, as he took his seat. "I don't. Probably I trust you slightly less than you trust me, at this point. Taking our personal standards into account. And that's not very fair of me. Because you're not a bad guy." He let out a breath. "It's 'specially not fair because the reason doesn't even have that much to do with Owlman, not really." He flashed a crooked, cheeky grin across the table. "It's cuz you're rich."

The pure offense on the half of Batman's face he could see was kind of awesome, in that it was absolutely hilarious, but he realized he couldn't leave it at that. He liked Batman too much to let him misunderstand. "In fact," he added, "you're the kind of rich where your daily lunch budget could feed every elementary-school kid in lower Gotham for a week. Except you don't have a budget for your lunch, because you don't need to worry about how much you spend on meals. Or anything else."

Like adorable stuffed monkeys, for example. And this was a lot of the reason why people didn't like to accept charity—because then you owed the giver, because then you weren't allowed to criticize them. Like they owned a little piece of you the size and shape of what they'd saved you from with the gift they gave.

But anyone who offered charity thinking it worked like that wasn't really being generous, and was owed nothing.

"I just got here," J allowed, "and I've only seen you in action a little bit. I don't know what your standards are, when it comes to things less obvious than a monster clown threatening a little white girl in taffeta. But experience has taught me that people like you…don't always see people like me as people. Not really. Not when it counts. Let alone folks from my part of the city with a lot more color to 'em.

"So you dropped the Joker into acid, and that was an accident. You'd never murder anybody. But how hard d'ya think it's okay to punch a shoplifter? How bad do you feel when somebody you mistook for a crook walks with a limp the rest of his life? Wouldja attack somebody for vandalism? Even the kind that's just graffiti? D'you think making all druggies into felons has been good for society?"

He crossed his forearms on the steel table, propped his chin on them, and sighed. Batman let him, without taking the opportunity to answer any of his questions. Batman was apparently going to let him talk himself out.

J regarded the other man through his own lavender eyelashes. "I don't know you that well, yet." That was easy to acknowledge, even though it already felt kind of like they'd known each other for a lifetime. "And me profiling you by your race and class isn't really any more just than somebody doing the same thing to some poor black guy, so I swear I'm trying not to. But I met you from the wrong end of your fist. And I've had some time to look at your place here—and it's gorgeous, by the way, but something about it makes me feel like you probably think the way to solve gang violence is beating up the gang members, 'stead of making it harder for the gangs to recruit by givin' kids something to live for.

"Like you probably think it's somehow more evil when a thief stabs somebody to death for their wallet, than when the same somebody fades away in agony over the course of a year, beggaring their family paying for medicine that doesn't help, because their insurance company dropped them for the crime of getting sick.

"I mean," he said, settling into this theme, since apparently he wasn't getting interrupted anytime soon, "the insurance guys didn't break the law, or cause the sickness. But they made a calm, considered decision to make cutting the dying loose an item of policy, with full intentional knowledge of the results, just for the sake of a profit margin, and they probably don't even feel guilty. A lot of 'em are prob'ly proud. Whereas knife guy might have starving kids at home, and might not even have planned to use the knife for real, and if he's not too insane to understand what he's done might feel really guilty later. I mean, he might also not, he might just be an awful person, but you don't know, and sometimes he isn't. But the insurance company always chose knowingly, for a lot of people who'd specifically trusted them with their lives and paid them in good faith, and without duress besides a culture of greed. Corporations defray legal responsibility, ya know? Not the moral kind."

Batman's hands had closed into fists, by the end of this speech. "Your diction changes when you're angry," he observed very, very grimly after a few seconds.

J laughed. "Nah. It changes when I'm makin' intellectual arguments. I start t'talk like a book 'stead've a person." He rolled his shoulders. "So how 'bout it, Batman? School me."

Batman's mouth twisted. And he didn't say anything. So J took up his side of the conversation—probably really badly, because devil's advocate had never been something he was all that great at especially blind, but he was a talker. He'd talk 'til he dropped.

"I don't know you. I don't know your city. Maybe there's no real discrimination, maybe everybody here gets a fair shot at livin' their dreams. Maybe you've got a wonderful world where the things I see shadows of in you aren't real. Maybe the Joker really is the worst thing here. And if that's true, then…" J heard his voice break. Glued it back together, and caught Batman's eyes to show honest. "Then I'd be a monster, if the trade was changing the world around me that much. I'd do it, that's how amazing that would be.

"But I hope that if that ever happened, I wouldn't survive long."

He smiled, knew it was one of the creepy ones, but Batman didn't turn a hair. Of course he didn't. "Is that why he's still alive, Batman? The cops here don't murder suspects? Is this world of yours that beautiful?"

At that, Batman made a weird little noise—sort of a snort. Maybe an abortive little laugh. But not the happy kind.

"That's part of the reason," the big man told the disassembled 'DIOD device.' And oh, this was the part he answered. Of course. "But I've also saved his life several times. And even when he's killed, he doesn't die."

Well then. J leaned forward to speak, but Batman wasn't done after all. "It's gotten better," he said tersely, looking up. His eyes were hidden, but J thought they would have been bright with feeling. "Law enforcement. Profiling. Living conditions in low-rent areas. Gordon and I have both been working from that end. It has gotten better."

J felt his spine molding itself comfortably against the back of his chair as he relaxed. It was okay. Batman got it, enough at least. "Neither Chance nor Abuse are abiding," he said brightly, and by the complicated twist to Batman's mouth Agent A wasn't the only one who'd read his Hugo.

What is the father of Privilege? Chance. What is his son? Abuse.…Neither Chance nor Abuse are abiding. For both a dark morrow is at hand.

J hummed a little, Sir Percy Shelley welling up from cracks in his mind, surely the Second Coming is at hand.

(Poetry always sounded to him like it almost had a tune. He'd put poems to music before—it was simpler than writing his own songs. He made up his own words to existing tunes, too, and sometimes he'd even made up his own of both. If his life had gone different, he could've really focused on music, made a living, formed a band, maybe made at least one really good song of his own. He'd ached for that, a time or two. But mostly, he was happy with what he had, if not with the situation that made him needful.)

"So what's the rest of tonight's schedule looking like?" J asked. "Have you got all the parts you need, or do I need to borrow a sleeping bag?"

"Robin's currently out scouting your point of arrival for energy readings," Batman said. Which meant the kid really had missed their confrontation, which was good.

But since Batman couldn't have talked to him since before Robin went to hang out with J, how did he know? Had his orders been 'talk with clown, then go scout,' or had he been skiving off earlier? Oh well. "Unless he turns up anything too unexpected, we should be able to send you home before midnight."

"Capital!"

"Now go stand on that panel, while I get readings from you."

Jokester asked just enough questions to be annoying throughout the process, and chose them carefully so he felt like he had a decent idea of what was going on. They were supplied with coffee and scones at nine PM when Robin got back, but J got milk instead of coffee and was given a tall glass of some kind of fruit juice blend afterward because he'd lost a lot of blood and needed to hydrate, and Agent A was a magnificent fusspot.

Even the glass was fancy, without trying to be. Thin-blown, instead of cast, and without the mar of bubbles or the tiny scratches even glass picked up from rough cleaning over time. He didn't think Batman would really care if he drank everything from the same four cheap mugs on a rotating basis, so long as he could always get coffee when he wanted it, but

Batman wouldn't let him poke around in his database finding out trivia about this world, which was probably for the best, and Robin had to do homework and asked for J to please not help, so from ten to eleven he caught a nap in a bed they had hidden behind a screen. It was surrounded by medical equipment that would have made Harley almost as super jealous as Eddie would be of the computers, but it was a perfectly fine bed.

Robin woke him up at eleven.

"Whozin trble?" J mumbled, when the person shaking his shoulder didn't stop after the first time he protested.

The voice that answered "Nobody, but wake up," wasn't immediately familiar, so J strategically rolled out of bed. He almost always woke up before he hit the floor, and if he didn't then he wound up really awake. This time, he managed to catch himself without any new bruises, and sat up wrapped in fluffy grey blanket.

"Oh. Right," he said, as he took in the red-yellow-and-green costume. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Time to go?"

"Almost," Robin answered, not making much effort to hide that he was just barely not laughing at him. J chuckled right back, disentangled himself from the blanket, and followed Robin out to Batman's workspace.

Batman presented the reassembled DIOD device and the calibrated phase oscillator with a minimum of flourish, very different from the mad scientists J hung around with, but he made all the usual approving noises anyway. He was pretty sure Batman wound up embarrassed. Robin was not-laughing again.

"Time to go?" he asked.

"Your things," Agent A said, and handed J a bundle of cloth.

"…this is a different Santa suit," he observed, running his hand over it. The velvet was heavier, more plush, less worn. A deeper crimson.

"I'm afraid some of the stains were beyond repair," admitted the Buttlemeister. It was the same cushion, though, restuffed and mended, and he'd given J's gloves back in spite of the mottled shadows of ash and the blood stains, even if he'd also included higher-quality fresh replacements. J ran a thumb across the new seam in the pillow and looked up, smiling.

"You didn't have to do that."

"Cleaning up Batman's messes is the meat of my professional bailiwick," Agent A replied, drily ignoring the slightly offended face Batman made, "so in fact I did."

Jokester laughed. (Nobody flinched.) "It was the other clown gutted my feather-filled belly," he said. "And made me bleed on things. Though I guess your boy can be called out for the black grease."

"Damage from fighting as an ally comes under my purview," the old man asserted primly.

"And standing up to bad guys is in mine. So I guess we neither of us need to be thanked for doing our jobs." J grinned, and Buttle-o-seven smiled faintly back, and they understood each other very well.

"So you're heading out?" Robin checked.

"Yup!" J replied brightly, settling the monkey in the crook of his elbow. "Thanks for all your hospitality, guys. You're still wrong about Jethro Tull," he added, to Robin specifically.

Robin shook his head. "Aqualung is the only good song he has. At all."

"False!" J laughed, and shook his head. "I should change," he said. "And then we're taking this show somewhere that won't probably leave me in the middle of Owlman's home base, yeah?"

Batman nodded, and Robin made a face like now he felt like an idiot. J grinned at him. Of course the kid hadn't thought about it; he felt safe here. Remembering how unsafe it was in another world wouldn't come natural.

"Hang frosty," J told them, and ducked into the changing cubicle beside the shower.

Agent A had returned his sweater washed but not mended, replaced his bloodied shirt with a similar one, and provided brand-new underwear. J assumed his had been thrown away. He decided to accept this meddling magnanimously, buckled his shoes—which had been cleaned, Buttle-O was either just as crazy as J in an opposite direction, or had actual robotic minions—pulled the hat on, and reemerged, holding the wig and beard in one hand.

"My bucket's still in the tank, right?" he asked. Batman nodded.

"You should put the beard on," Robin advised.

"How come?"

"Disguise."

J pulled a face. "I think it's funnier like this."

Robin shrugged. "Suit yourself."

"I am all suited up!" J replied, and stuffed the hairpieces inside his coat, under the cushion, next to the monkey. He swarmed up the side of the tank again and dropped into his seat much more smoothly than the last time. As the roof closed, he heard the motorcycle engine kick up.

Batman set the device up in Robinson Park, not too far from where J had come through, in the middle of one of the graveled paths. The trees were wrapped in strings of lights, and at a distance you could see only the lights and not the trees, like a forest of stars had grown up out of the icy ground. There wasn't anyone there to see them by this time of night, and it was cold enough that J reconsidered the beard as a face-warmer, but nah. He swung his red donation pail

Batman turned the machine on, and it hummed to life and a circular white portal flickered into being.

J hesitated in front of the portal, turned, and waved a hand over his head. "Merry Christmas to all!" he called out, in his deepest bellow. Winked at Robin. Mimed biting into a cupcake. "And to all a good night." He tapped the side of his nose, and stepped backward….into Robinson Park, empty of Batman or Robin, and with a lot fewer Christmas lights.

The portal winked out, and J looked around, blinking the glare out of his eyes. His arrival had woken up a guy who'd been curled in a heavy coat on the nearest bench, and he was looking startled as heck but not scared.

"I'm home!" J told him. It occurred to him as he said it that Batman might have screwed up and it might not be true, but the guy smiled and said,

"So you are."

"So I am," J echoed, looking around the dark wintery wonderland. "What are you doing sleeping there, it's like fifteen degrees out here, come on."

The guy got up willingly enough, though kind of stiffly, and when he declined J's offer of an arm to lean on it was pride, not revulsion. "So where'd you go?" he asked as they fell into step down the path toward Pam's place, where they could get hot tea and thaw out a little before heading over to one of the unofficial shelters where J was sure they had to have some space, when he realized Jokester wasn't going to volunteer an explanation for why he'd just popped out of a glowing portal dressed as Santa.

"I had a team-up," J replied vaguely. "Hey, what's your name?"

"…Ellis."

"Cool! So Ellis, what's your favorite kind of tea?"

(The folks at the Mission accepted his explanation for why he'd come back late, in a different Santa costume, with tolerance and varying degrees of credulity, but since he was returning a superior costume rather than a ruined one convincing them wasn't so important. There turned out to be three fifty-dollar bills in the donation bucket that he couldn't account for; they were almost definitely from another universe which might be a little bit like counterfeiting, so he didn't point it out.

Most of his friends believed him eventually if only because he never stood by a joke based on an untrue tale for very long; Harley believed him second after Waylon, and they were able to curl up in bed together and cry when he confided about Ms. Quinn and the Joker's dead-beetle eyes.)

(He ran into Talon again the day after New Year's, and not one shred of him felt it was strange that there was no bright young laughter in that still mouth, that the boy did not swing his weight about on a narrow pivot-point, brimming with potential, daring the world not to entertain him.

It wasn't strange. This was in no way Robin. This was Talon, as he had always been.

But now he knew just how wrong it was, that it was so.

Talon almost killed him, while he was distracted. He's lucky Owlman would never forgive someone else landing the finishing blow.

Batman and Owlman were so much alike, and yet at the same time J couldn't find any shred anywhere in his nemesis of the good-hearted, awkward jerk who'd responded to his pique about socioeconomic disparities by buying his daughter a monkey.)

(Ella's face lit up just like he'd imagined when she ripped the shiny paper off the shoebox he'd put the monkey in and lifted the lid, her and her new toy sending mirrored brilliant grins back and forth before she swept it up in her pudgy arms and rubbed her face all over that impossibly plush fur. "DaddydaddydaddyMON'EY!"

The monkey winds up being named Plumpkin, because of course it does, and his prehensile wire-cored tail gets twisted around every possible thing, and not always by Ella—Harvey gets so used to encountering Plumpkin swinging at eye level when he opens a door or rounds a corner that he just ducks blandly out of the way even first thing in the morning, before coffee.

J would write Batman a thank-you note, but he lives in a different dimension.)

(Now that he knows about acrobat, it's not so hard to dig through the old missing persons' all over again and find Richard Grayson. The photo of the missing child looks almost nothing like Talon, but a lot like Robin, and the picture he finds of the father, John, looks like both of them, somehow.

Suspicion strikes and he digs a little deeper, further and further back, and at the end of the day he has to go outside and press both hands against the cold January bricks with sunset lighting up the little flecks of mica, to stop himself from shaking too hard with rage. That even the evil, unflickering eyes of the Court could look at a circus, a real, live, musical circus, and see a slave market with spangles.

Even if they did have a trained elephant, and a whole cage full of monkeys.)

(The vest gets lost, eventually, and the soft, soft fur picks up faint stains and gets mussed and nappy over the years, and eventually one eye falls off and no one can find it, probably because it's still at the safehouse they just evacuated. Ella is devastated on her monkey's behalf. Jon comes to the rescue with an offer of a 'glass eye,' an iridescent almond-shaped bead that he sews on with a little flourish of his long, thin fingers.

When Ella leaves home for the last time, Plumpkin stays behind. He's a dull, greyish brown now, with mismatched eyes, and the wire in his tail has kinked up and snapped enough times he looks more like the world's most battered alley cat than the fresh, gymnastic young primate J met in a wrecked toy store years ago.

But he's still smiling, and Jokester's smiling back. Some things, he guesses, don't change.)

A/N: Single largest delaying factor on this story was trying to stop J from having a conversation about the class warfare subtext of the Batman franchise. I finally let him go ahead; hope no one's enjoyment was spoilt. I did refuse to let him actually deliver Gwynplaine's address to Parliament, though. And yes, J intentionally implied to Ellis that he had joined forces with the real actual Santa Claus. ^^