Penultimate chapter

XII.

"Commissioner," Batman growled. "One more word, before you take him away."

"You," whispered Gordon, looking into the dark with anxiety written plainly over his taut features. They'd had to endure a lot those last few days—the death of Rachel Dawes. Harvey Dent's disappearance, fall from grace, subsequent cover up, Batman taking the blame, and finally death. The Joker had been caught, but at what price? In former times, if Gordon had been collaborating with Batman, it had been looked on as a barely-acknowledged enigma. Now, they were officially on opposite sides of the fence. If anyone found out . . .

"Gordon, it's important." The snarl was enough to raise the hairs on the back of Gordon's neck.

"Two minutes."

It hadn't been difficult for anyone to leave the Joker hanging upside down from a skyscraper long, long after Batman had left him pinioned up there. The more the blood rushed to his head, the more he'd cackled, until most people were convinced these were the cries of hell itself. Still swinging back and forth, with a considerable reddish tint showing under all that make up, he was now practically silent, frowning. "My favorite nocturnal mammal," he said softly.

"There's no proof," said Batman, "but I know for a fact you killed Luc Proux."

The Joker attempted to clap but found it very difficult due to gravity. "Mighty deduction, detective."

"And I know what he was carrying. I can't link it to Crane, but it's enough."

The Joker grinned. "And you would have done the same. You would have killed him, too. To protect the city you love soooo much."

Batman bowed his head. "But why did you do it? I would have thought that kind of destruction would have been your bread and butter."

The Joker licked his lips. "The queen of hearts still making tarts . . . and I not making hay . . ."

Batman shook his head in disgust. " 'O I loved too much and by such and such was happiness thrown away'? You expect me to believe that?"

The Joker shrugged. "O ye of little faith!" And he laughed uproariously as Batman melted away.

Cécile had had to make the phone call to Luc's estranged parents in Montréal. She'd never spoken to them before, and in the end she began to wonder if it was the early death of her mother, the trauma endured at the hands of her father, that had made her the dysfunctional human being she was, as much as Luc's childhood had separated him from his parents irrevocably. And now he was dead.

At the death of her own father, nothing had been cut and dried. The death certificate noted the heart attack but made no mention of all the alcohol soaked up by her father's liver. He had been buried quietly, without ceremony—as he had lived his life, really—in the parish churchyard of Notre Dame des sept allegresses in Trois-Rivières. She had tried to keep the date and time a secret, otherwise she knew the churchyard would have been swarmed with old business associates of her father's, intent on sharing their crocodile tears. No one could really get close to a mute tailor unless they were willing to expend the effort.

In addition to the very real grief, there was also anger, the darkness of retribution. The neglect and the one incident of barbarity—most of it enacted under the shroud of drunkenness but not all—had given her the thin shield of indifference that was easy to pass off as a Gallic temperament, with the chain-smoking, the Québecquois vocabulary. Cécile could develop empathy for few, but her father was, conversely, one of them. If her mother hadn't died, if her brother hadn't run away, if her father hadn't stuck proudly to his self-righteous morals and run afoul of the Canadian mob, if Cécile had been more beautiful and more talented, had Trois-Rivières enveloped them like friends instead of hid them like a tree's festering sap, maybe things would have turned out differently. But from where did you start to unravel the thread? At her birth? At her father's birth? And his father's birth, a decorated but deranged cavalryman of the First World War?

Luc had only been twenty-seven. He'd never told her his age. She must have looked at his driver's license and read it, but certainly it never impressed her, though she always thought of him as "the boy." She was ashamed, but until the morning he had lain among the garbage on the doorstep, she had found it difficult to find any empathy for him. Like most people, he was a degree removed from herself and her own depths. When he was hurt because she was cold, she was physically unable to bring herself to react. When he couldn't find work in Gotham, she blamed him for it, even grew angry that she had allowed him to tag along. Having seen what he'd become, and that even an innocent boy with all intentions of enjoying life and doing good could descend to monstrosity, reminded her of his humanity. But it was too late.

She had the funeral in the Catholic church whose cemetery had the best view of Wayne Tower. At least that way, symbolically if nothing else, Luc could enjoy the night-time view that was really his only pleasure once they'd moved to Gotham. The priests were Irish, and her own voice sounded foreign as she made the responses in French. Luc hadn't claimed to be Catholic, but she supposed the habit was like a bad penny: it always turned up in the end. She hadn't acceded to an open casket, for obvious reasons: when she went to the morgue to identify the body, the throat was torn up and the chest wound that actually killed him was ugly. But she'd made sure, before they put him in the coffin, all of his piercings were intact—with grim humor, she thought she'd at least do him the favor of making sure all the barbells were shiny.

By then, there'd been so many photos on the news and in the papers of the Joker's victims, some of them cut up with Glasgow grins, faces painted luridly, that she was in a way grateful that the killing, though undoubtedly painful, was relatively quick and straightforward. Officially on the records, since no evidence to the contrary could be substantiated, Luc's killer was unknown, the motive being robbery since his wallet was found empty next to his body. And if Cécile had said otherwise, it would have been about as useless as declaring Jack the Ripper had done it. There were so many deaths already pinned on the Joker, and now he was caught—there wasn't much point in trying to up a lifetime sentence. This is what she told herself. Besides, Luc had already been linked up to the escaped and recaptured Dr. Jonathan Crane alias the Scarecrow—had he lived he may have had a life sentence to live up to himself, if not worse.

The report that Luc had been involved with Crane's experiments, that he'd willingly agreed to become a carrier for a biological weapon of terror, had shocked Cécile the most. When the chemicals expert had told Cécile that long exposure to exchange of fluids was the only way the chemical could be spread, Cécile had almost vomited. In the end, no one was as innocent as they appeared. Not Rachel Dawes, whose last moments had been terror-stricken, nor Harvey Dent, whose wasted face hinted at a deeper crime, nor Batman who was apparently a killer out of control, nor Luc. The only consolation, Cécile supposed, was that Crane's formula was not infallible, and once Luc had died, the poison had died with them.

She was paying her final respects in the chapel of St. Mary Magdalene. It had been a grey day, but with the sun finally washing its light over the churchyard, she'd gone out to stand by the newly-dug grave with Luc's simple epitaph. Maybe he would have wanted to be cremated, she considered for the hundredth time, reading "This, too, shall pass" carved onto the grey stone. She heard someone coming up behind her, and she turned. To her surprise, it was Bruce Wayne. He was dressed immaculately in a black suit with a pale blue tie, quite at odds from the jovial, boozy playboy she'd met at the fundraising party.

"What are you doing here?" she blurted.

Wayne looked up at her in surprise and removed a white and red rose from inside his coat and placed them in the cupola of a thin, elegant pillar shaped like a flame. "In memory of Dr. Thomas and Sarah Wayne," it said simply. "Oh," said Cécile. Wayne reached into his coat pocket again and removed a yellow rose and placed it at her feet, on Luc's grave. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said.

Cécile squinted into his handsome face and for the first time saw the lines, the tiredness. It reminded her of something, of someone . . . "I'm sorry for yours," she said. Rachel Dawes had been cremated and her ashes given to her family members. Cécile knew there were plans, spearheaded by Wayne, of course, to erect a public garden next to the Gotham Central Library, dedicated to both Rachel and Harvey Dent. She studied Wayne who gazed in silence at the monument to his murdered parents.

"Rachel told me a little about you," he said. "Your parents died when you were young as well."

Cécile reacted as if he had touched her. "My mother did," she admitted, surprised that there had been time or necessity for Rachel to pass this information on to her, well, "best friend." "My father died recently, heart attack."

"Hard to keep a smile on your face with all this tragedy," he said soberly, and Cécile glared at him. She was sure he'd put that bit about smiling in on purpose. She'd been wanted for questioning about her role in the Joker bank robbery, and then again when she'd disappeared onto the rooftop, but she'd thought present circumstances . . .

"Do you know who killed your parents?" she asked.

He cleared his throat. "Yes. It was a man named Joe Chill. He was put into prison, and on the day of his release I was going to put a bullet through his head, for taking away the two people who I loved most. But someone beat me to it, and in the end, redeemed me." He smiled and ruffled through his hair. "Actually, Rachel wasn't very happy with me for trying to take justice into my own hands."

"And Rachel," Cécile hazarded. "Aren't you tempted to just . . .?"

"Just what, Miss Blandine?" Cécile stared at her shoes, petrified to finish her thought. After the helicopters had surrounded the aviary, after the Joker had escaped by some means still not clear to her, she'd tried to take the easiest possible way out. She'd found a hole in the wire cage, and she'd made to jump through it. But she'd slipped on the broken glass, hit her head on the steel frame, and caused herself a week-long hospital stay from the cuts and gashes, bruises and fractures, when the aviary collapsed on her. No one could have alleged it was a suicide attempt. She claimed it was an accident, though she could have just have easily blamed the Joker. So she'd been in the hospital when Harvey Dent claimed to be the Batman, when he was driven in an armored car, during the fight between Batman and the Joker that went on all night on CNN. She'd been receiving flowers from Carly Ann and Fred when the Joker was taken into custody, when Rachel was blown up, when Harvey Dent went missing. She'd had to be evacuated with everyone else when the Joker threatened to blow up all the hospitals in the city, and she'd been recuperating with Lien's family at the Chinese grocery store when the news broke that Dent was dead, Commissioner Gordon had been kidnapped, and Batman was the perceived culprit.

"And there's still no news on Luc's killer?" asked Wayne, with a hard edge to his voice. Cécile guiltily couldn't meet his gaze. "It's always harder when you don't know, isn't it?" he asked.

"He killed Rachel," Cécile blurted. "The Joker did. Aren't you tempted to get revenge?"

Wayne smiled sadly. "What revenge could I possibly take that will make up for Rachel's death? What could I possibly take from him that would be an equivalent?"

"Then . . . do you forgive him?"

Bruce took a step backward, straightened his tie, looked at his watch. "My mother always told me that no matter how terrible a person was, there was never one-hundred-percent evil. And that's grounds for forgiveness. Oh yes," and Wayne laughed with an aching sort of hiccup, "she died with that belief, still. But if you can't believe that, you're no better than he is."

"And that's how you keep going?"

This time, Wayne actually stepped over and touched Cécile on the shoulder. "Don't let any of this get around, Miss Blandine. I'd hate to actually be thought anything but vapid."

"Mr. Wayne," said Cécile, gazing at the yellow rose, "is it true that you're a trustee of Arkham Asylum?"

A/N: The denouement is soooooooooo long. Sorry. The poem is "On Raglan Road" by Patrick Kavanagh and it's one of the greatest poems ever, so go look it up. It's been recorded by various artists to the tune of "The Dawning of the Day."