A/N: Thanks to everyone who's read and reviewed, and thanks again to Lunachick35 for her beta-ing abilities.

IV.

Someone on the TV was relating statistics about drunk driving and car accidents in the Gotham metropolitan area. The voice was droning, gratingly feminine. A turquoise and maroon patterned argyle sock hit the fuzzy screen.

"Hey, boss," muttered a nervous voice from a sweaty black hoodie, "why ya doin' that? I can't see the picture."

"Um, expressing distaste, you moron," snarled the Joker, though he allowed the nimble, shaking black hoodie to remove the sock and turn up the volume. "See, this is what's sick," he volunteered, smacking his lips. "We're not even in the Gotham metropolitan area, and it's blah-blah-blah, Gotham-this, Gotham-that."

Black Hoodie and a pair of assorted other unsavories, in jeans and sweats, with shaved heads and tattoos, tittered nervously. The warehouse hideout was furnished sparsely, a mass of shaggy brown carpet, dismal overhanging lights, and the single TV with its blaring female voice. The Joker seemed to tire of the jumpy crooks and let them gather around the TV. He kept to the fold out chair among a pile of hand-made detonators, explosives, and blueprints, printed off the internet and laid out neatly on the brown shaggy carpet.

"Hmm," he murmured, dipping his gloved fingers into the gash in the shoulder of his purple coat. He gently pulled the coat off his shoulders, ignoring the curious looks from the criminals not watching the TV. He carefully fingered the threads on the sleeve. "He must have been rushing," he muttered.

"Who, boss?"

"My tailor. I just got this suit a few weeks ago. Normally he's a real class-act. Tongue cut out, mute, but y'know, he did good work." The Joker poked a finger through the hole and wiggled it. "He's dead now, can't take the suit back." He smacked his lips, licking the corners of his mouth messily.

"So, get another one." Black Hoodie dared to give a small laugh.

The Joker hummed as he rummaged around in a metal tin, tossing out spools of thread and pin cushions. He triumphantly lifted out a staple gun and held it up toward Black Hoodie. "I know what people say about this suit." He fingered his tie with his free hand. "But I wantcha to know, it's not cheap. I've tried dropping hints to Cécile that maybe she could pick up where her father left off, but she's just not getting the message." He tapped his forehead frenetically, sauntering over to where Black Hoodie stood, nervously shifting in his cowboy boots. He rushed forward and pressed the staple gun to Black Hoodie's forehead and pressed. "So don't ever call the suit cheap, okay?"

Black Hoodie was led off bleeding and screaming. "Turn it up!" shouted the Joker. Trembling, one of the other gang members rushed forward to hit the volume button until the TV fairly shrieked. " . . . rumors of late have lauded the city's masked vigilante Batman—"

The Joker cackled long and low from the other side of the room.

"—for the lower crime rates as released by the Statistics Bureau in the last year . . ." Onscreen, shaky cell phone camera footage showed the cape and the cowl and the spiky silhouette of Batman running and then jumping into an enormous black tank-like vehicle. The Joker had threaded a needle and was sawing into the shoulder of his coat, drawing the sides of the rip together with shaking fingers.

"You really hate the Batman, don't you?" asked a young skinhead with silver teeth.

"Hate him?" the Joker mewled, pressing a gloved hand to his heart. "Oh, no." He was interrupted from further reflection by the reporter on TV. ". . . including Gotham's newest District Attorney, Harvey Dent . . ." Harvey Dent, blonde, beautiful, and neat, spoke fluidly, with a sincere smile, and nodded to Rachel Dawes on his right. "We-ell," said the Joker, putting down the needle. "Would you look what the Bat dragged in?" He gave a long, low wolf whistle that shocked the gang members, though eventually some of them joined in and laughed. "Err-ruggh!" the Joker grunted, tearing off the thread with his teeth.

Cécile held herself erect as if she was bitterly cold. In fact, the interior of Le Musée, a bar and club in the middle of downtown Trois-Rivières, was boiling. Luc would have said she looked like a cat ready to pounce, but she knew she was too angular, too full of elbows and the spike of her sharp nose, to ever be anything but Cécile. He'd told her where to meet him, and though she had passed by this neo-Romanesque building hundreds of times, she'd never expected to be going in. The music, which she couldn't identify, pounded on drums and metal bolts. How could Luc listen to this?

"Cécile." She felt herself standing and moving toward the voice, receiving the three kisses on her cheeks—faire des bises—but at the same time she wasn't quite sure what she was looking at.

"Luc?" she asked. It was beyond just the studs in his ears and the rhinestone in his lower lip. He was wearing eyeliner.

"What?" he laughed, sitting down opposite her at the bar, though she stood stiffly like a giraffe. "Haven't you ever seen a boy in makeup?"

Cécile moved slowly back to her chair. "Well . . ."

Luc frowned. "You don't like it."

Cécile felt herself flushing. "That's not it at all . . ."

Luc leaned in to her. "You do like it, then?"

"I know all about it. I even have makeup remover if you want it."

Luc winced, as though something she'd said had scratched at him, but he gulped his wine. Cécile didn't really dance, but later in the night she let him hold her close on the dance floor.

"I haven't ever," she breathed, half-aware a giggle was forming in her throat, "kissed a man with a hole in his lip."

"There's always a first time," said Luc, grinning from between his teeth. He slid an arm around her waist, then lower. She let him kiss her. She let his mouth move across her lean cheekbones, to her ears. She let him hold her closely, crushing her against him—he was so young, so young. She felt the color draining from her face and was glad the darkness in the club obscured her. She placed a gentle hand in the middle of Luc's chest and pushed him a few steps backward. "Come on," he laughed softly. "We are not children . . ."

"Well, I know I'm not," said Cécile, horrified with her bluntness. And yet part of her rejoiced in having both literally and symbolically pushed him away. No one can get close, part of her whispered. I'll only let him down . . .

"Bien," said Luc, his voice slightly high-pitched. "I guess I'll go home. If you'd rather have the whole green hair thing . . ."

"What?" Cécile was laughing along with him until she saw him grin and then leave that smile with a tremor. She grabbed him by the shirt front and pushed him outside with her into the alleyway behind the club. It smelled of urine and gasoline. "What?" she repeated.

"We do have TV in Québec," said Luc sullenly. "And I can read, despite what you might think."

Cécile reached for her pack of cigarettes. "W-what?"

"The bakery. I knew who you were before you walked into PC World 'cause I'd seen you before."

Cécile held out her hand impatiently for the lighter. "I still don't know what the hell—"

"I saw him run out of the bakery," said Luc, handing over the lighter. "Your friend. The Joker."

"Why do people keep saying that? He's not my friend!"

"Okay, then, your lover." Luc's face held a crooked smile.

"You make me sick," said Cécile, flushing violently.

Luc stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. Cécile lit her cigarette. The music of the club was still banging and echoing in the cold, dark road. "I was passing in the street," said Luc with a sigh. "I used to walk that way all the time. Our eyes probably met someday if you were staring out the window ever of your father's shop, and my eyes staring in. And out flies this madman in purple and green, grabs another passerby by the collar. Just someone on his way into the bakery." Luc rubbed the piercing in his lower lip with his nicotine-stained fingers. "Not prepared for what he's got coming."

"Which was . . .?"

"The Joker—doing that thing, with his tongue."

"Yes," said Cécile thinly.

"He says—and he's American, obviously—'Ah, a hostage.' He doesn't see me—or maybe he does, maybe it's the thrill of the chase—calling the police on my mobile." Luc sighed. "I didn't have the guts to stick around and watch. I called the police, that was my contribution. Which is more than you did." Cécile glared at him. "But while I was there, frantically dialling, I heard him muttering to himself, about his tailor, and about a bat, and about being sorry to leave behind Murray-Cécile, his little blind doll-face."

Cécile winced. "Doll-face? He's out of his mind. Luc, I gave him hair dye and decks of cards. My father made him suits. He paid, we didn't ask questions. I'm sure that seems unethical to you—"

"I wouldn't blame you if you thought he was . . . attractive, in a dangerous way."

Luc dropped his shoulders, looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "You don't have to be jealous of some freakish thief and God knows what else."

Luc took her hand and warmed it in his sweaty palm. "I wouldn't have to be jealous if you'd let me take you home."

Cécile let him hold her hand, but she crossed her fingers behind her back. She wasn't going to say that she'd taken the American money the Joker had given her, that she'd taken it to the bank and then used it to meet Luc in the first place. She wasn't going to mention Gotham and why she'd done the Google search. Luc had let himself be kidnapped; Cécile had let the Joker escape the bakery and refused Duplessis' pleas for information. They were both lying, of course, to themselves and to each other. It was hardly the basis of a good relationship. But Cécile didn't consider anything in her life "good." She lived through levels of acceptable and the slightly aberrant. She didn't know any other way and, at heart, she didn't think Luc did either.

"We go to my place," she said.