Part III

Chapter 21: Tricks and Traps

Andi just sat, numb, her mind repeating the same two thoughts over and over, like a badly scratched CD. There was no way it was true. This couldn't be real. This couldn't be true. It couldn't be real.

She kept staring at the bodies, twisted around like grotesque dolls. Andi wanted to look away, but something about their brokenness was mesmerizing, hypnotic almost. Leena. Leena had broken them like that. It couldn't be true. This wasn't real.

It was.

Bruce reached past her suddenly for something white and flat, laying right where Bailey's body had been. The distraction broke Andi from her daze as if a switch had been flicked. A message? Judging by its position and the lack of blood on it, the paper had probably been stuffed beneath Bailey's leg. That had to have been intentional with all the other blood around it. She tried to lean over Bruce's shoulder to read it, but he shifted away so that he was sitting across from her.

"What does it say?" Andi asked impatiently. With the flashlight shining through the paper, she could see red ink; she didn't want to know whose blood had been used for that. "Is it from Leena? The Joker? What—"

Bruce looked straight up at her for several seconds, and something firmed in his face as if he'd decided something. "The Joker left a message," he told her quietly, "I'm going to go find him. Here." He held out the note.

"What?" Leena. If they found the Joker they would find Leena. There would be a reasonable explanation, some miracle answer that would prove her friend's innocence. Forget stopping the Joker—all she wanted was her friend back. "Yeah, of course, let's go. Where is he?" She reached over for the paper and suddenly it was gone, slipped into his glove. That was the only warning she had.

Bruce seized her by the wrist and bowled into her, shoved her off balance, handled her as easily as he had the corpses. Andi flipped around, slammed backwards his chest plate. She struggled, tried to sit up, and he pushed her back into him with one arm. Something very much like fear spiked in her, quickly stifled by anger.

"Just what do you think—"

He wrapped the crook of his elbow around her neck, pressing hard on the arteries. Andi thrashed, stared up at his dark eyes in panic and utter disbelief. Her sight was blurring, pain shot up her head, one hand, still grasping the flashlight, twisted and pounded futilely on his leg, but nothing was working. Bruce—choking her—why—

"Sorry," she heard him mutter, a sharp tiny something poked into her neck, and everything went black.

Andi woke to a swaying, lulling motion, her head pounding and thrumming worse than it ever had from a hangover. She was laying down, but all folded up, legs and head both touching walls to either side, something soft beneath her and at her back. The back of a car. I… fell asleep? Blacked out drunk? No… no Bruce… knocked me out. Again. He…

She opened her eyes, wincing as that made her head throb more than ever, and found herself staring at the back of a brown, scruffy head of hair peeking over the headrest. "Gordon?" she muttered. The Commissioner looked up and Andi met his guilty glance in the rearview mirror. She groaned and laid her head back again. "Batman. He left without me."

It wasn't a question but her boss answered anyways.

"Yes. Put you in a blood choke, then drugged you to keep you asleep. He didn't want you interfering with him fighting the Joker. Told me to tell you that he would protect Dr. Quinzel if he found her."

Andi made herself sit up. Not dizzy. That was a plus. And she could think clearly despite the screaming protests her head sent out whenever she moved. There must have been something in the drug to allow that; from what she had seen of chokes, most people could barely remember their name on waking. "We should go back. Help him."

Gordon snorted. "Even if I could, I wouldn't take you to him. I'm not letting you get near that fight, Taylor, sorry. And I can't anyways; he took off as soon as he gave you to me. He could be anywhere now."

Andi let out something between a sigh and a moan and put her head in her hands. Her head really ached. Bruce had done a good job trapping her, she had to admit. Gordon sure wouldn't let her go anywhere, and even if she evaded him, she had no clue where Batman had actually gone. Maybe this was his idea of revenge for all the times she'd tried to manipulate him. She cast around in her mind for some way out, but nothing came to mind except plans for afterwards, mainly involving the Tumbler and a good deal of hydrochloric acid. Satisfying, but not particularly helpful at the moment.

"Where are we going?" she asked instead.

"Home."

"Br—Batman's home?" Bruce had never cleared up exactly how much Gordon knew, but Andi hadn't thought he'd know where the cave would be.

"No. Mine."

"Oh." Andi considered it for a minute. "Your… your family won't mind?"

"We sent the kids to their aunt's in New York once the Joker blew up the police station. I can't convince Barbara to leave, but she won't have a problem with it. Not if I explain that you're working to stop the Joker." Gordon's voice hardened. "Or maybe she will mind. Enough that I can talk her into getting out of Gotham for a little while so she'll be safe."

Andi didn't know how long Bruce had knocked her out for, but it was only another five minutes before Gordon pulled up in front of a shabby but respectable townhouse. A light was still on in the living room and a woman with a worn face and close-cut, rust colored hair ran out in her bathrobe while the Commissioner was putting the car in park.

"Jim! Where have you been? Did you find him, why did it take so long to—who's this?" She finally spotted Andi as she carefully climbed from the police cruiser. Andi shifted uncomfortably under her stare and rapid-fire questions, but Gordon seemed unphased.

"Barbara, this is Andrea Taylor. She's a forensic scientist from MCU working with… our friend. They needed to examine evidence with the Joker and I couldn't call to warn you because of the usual reasons."

Her worried face softened. "Of course. Come on in Andrea. You look like you could use some coffee." Gordon perked up at that and she gave him a flat stare. "Jim, you need to sleep if you're going to be any good to Gotham right now."

Gordon grumbled, but either his wife ruled the roost too thoroughly for him to protest or he was as exhausted as he looked, because he pecked her on the cheek and headed up the stairs as soon as they got inside. Mrs. Gordon watched him go, shaking her head, before turning and leading Andi into a clean but out-of-date kitchen. "Sit down, please," she invited, pouring coffee for both of them into a set of chipped mugs. "Do you want sugar or creamer? Or are you hungry? I can make pancakes or toast or something."

"No. No thank you. Just coffee, and I don't need anything in it."

She smiled, stirring sugar into her own mug before joining Andi at the kitchen table. Andi gulped half of it down in two quick draughts—anything to ease the pressure and pounding from the inside of her skull. Mrs. Gordon shook her head at that. "Sometimes I wonder if the force requires that you drink it black before they'll let you join. I haven't met anyone on Gotham PD who's taken more than a creamer. Well, Ramirez did, but then look how she turned out."

Andi didn't know what Ramirez had done to deserve that—she'd been diagnosed with PTSD and honorably discharged six months ago—but something much more important was pressing on her mind. "Mrs. Gordon—"

"Please. Call me Barbara."

"Barbara. I don't know if Gordon told you but… well to be blunt the Joker's tried to kill me. Twice. And he hasn't cared who's gotten in the way. If you'd rather I stay somewhere else, I can—"

"You can stay here and drink your coffee." For not being Hispanic, Barbara suddenly sounded very much like Abuelita when Andi had tried to cross her. Her eyes seemed to pin Andi where she sat. "Jim couldn't make me leave when he sent the kids away and I'm not going to get scared off now."

She kept quiet and finished her drink, watching through the kitchen window as the darkness slowly retreated. Barbara eventually got up and refilled both of their mugs. "Tell me what you're thinking," she invited.

Andi snorted. "That if I had the slightest idea where Batman was, I could try to hotwire your husband's car and track him down. I'm just debating whether I'd try to bash the living daylights out of him for leaving me behind or help him get the Joker first."

"Ah. Well if that's your plan, you don't have to hotwire anything. There's a spare key on the hook by the front door," Barbara said innocently. Andi caught her eye and both of them grinned at the same time.

There was a creak in the floorboards and then Gordon walked in, on his cellphone. Barbara shot up.

"Jim you're supposed to be asleep! What can be so important that—"

He held up a hand, still babbling away to whoever was on the other line. "Alright. Check up on the other members just in case and send them to a hospital no matter what they want. Then start looking into whether anything connects the ones who are already sick. There's got to be some common ground, something in their voting records or policies or who's bribing them that would trigger it. And I want an update from the hospital ready in fifteen minutes, including whether they think it could be a biological weapon. I'll be at Gotham General in twenty."

Gordon snapped the phone shut and Barbara didn't look like she wanted to protest any more. "What happened Jim?"

"We…" Gordon ran his hand through his already rumpled hair. "Well, we've got a bit of an emergency."

The second Gordon's cruiser vanished, Andi in tow, Bruce turned back to the warehouse. He felt bad for doing that. But as far as he could see, there hadn't been another choice. She wouldn't have let him go alone, not while her friend was in danger, and he couldn't risk her. He just hoped she wouldn't figure out how close he was going to stay to the warehouse. If she managed to convince Gordon to turn back…

Bruce shook his head. He couldn't think of that right now. Gordon had no way of knowing where he was going. Andi wouldn't either. Concentrate on the now. He pulled the note from his hand and read the shaky scrawl again.

Warehouse on the far left. Enjoy yourself.

The Joker's lair had been the warehouse farthest to the right, and despite the fact that the buildings were interconnected, it was still a long way from one end to the other. Bruce made his way towards it carefully, avoiding the streetlights to keep his movements invisible. He stopped right in front of it, staring at the door with his arms folded. It seemed beyond foolish to just waltz right into whatever the Joker had set up in that warehouse. What then? The Joker had to have anticipated him trying to come through the other doors. Those would be trapped and rigged. The front door too. Nothing was simple with the Joker. Riddles running in circles, and traps inside of traps.

After a minute, Bruce pulled out the heat-seeking goggles, hoping that those would give him an idea of what he was facing, but they showed him nothing inside any of the warehouses. Not that that was surprising. With the warehouses the size they were, the goggles might not pick up on people if they were very far inside. They were designed to see into buildings the size of apartments or offices, not football fields. Maybe if he was on the roof…

The roof.

Moving quickly now that he'd decided on a course of action, Bruce shot his grapple gun at the ledge of the roof next to the warehouse he needed to get into and swung himself up. A dummy attack first or go straight in? No time for the decoys and checks he wanted. Dawn was approaching, and with it the police. Best to go for speed and surprise then. He unwrapped a small packet of explosives from its casings in his belt, adjusted the settings, and lobbed it hard at the roof. It detonated on impact, and he raced for the crater, falling into the warehouse before the sound of the explosion had faded, cape spread to allow him to drop the full three stor—

He landed instead in bright light, only one floor below the roof, on what seemed to be a very make-shift deck. The floorboards cracked and splintered alarmingly under him, but held. Bruce straightened quickly and spun to face the black blur in his peripheral vision.

His own reflection stared back at him. Many of them did in fact.

A house of mirrors. Old mirrors with frilly Victorian carvings, modern mirrors, mirrors with stains and mold spots, stand mirrors and ladies' compact mirrors still smudged with make up. The explosion had shattered some, but what he saw was enough. One at about face height had Groucho Marx glasses and mustache inked in, while several others were smeared with what he very much hoped was brownish-red paint, repeating the word 'Ha' over and over again. Corridors branched in three directions, filled with twists and more passages. He was lucky he'd managed to jump inside a corridor rather than landing on a wall.

Where to go from here? The entire thing was a maze. Bruce was inclined to throw a couple more explosives at the mirror-walls and simply knock his way through, but he decided against it. He only had so many explosives and the Joker was bound to have other things in here than just mirrors, likely including dynamite and gasoline. Just setting off bombs willy-nilly would be stupid. Instead, he began to sprint towards the center of the maze, taking the routes that would bring him towards his target whenever possible, smashing his way through the mirrors when he came to dead ends that would need backtracking for more than a couple of turns.

The labyrinth was as convoluted and dangerous as the Joker's own mind. Tripwires and pressure mats abounded, and the floor was haphazard at best, at some points so brittle that Bruce chose to jump over it rather than push his luck, in others so thick with added boards and ridiculous amounts of nails that it looked like a five-year-old's attempt at a tree house. The Joker was there, Bruce was sure of it, but he made no attempts to find the Batman. That left it to him to work his way towards the inside of the maze; he hoped his sense of direction was staying straight despite all the twists.

He nearly stumbled into a slide in the center of the maze, curved, going down to the concrete floor below. Bruce pulled up short, then picked up a large chunk of smashed mirror glass from the deck and slid it down first. It skittered strangely on the surface, accelerating as it sped down, whooshing up into the air at the slight lip at the bottom.

FWOOM.

Glowing red shot out at the gauntlet and the surface of the glass burst into flame. Oil. The whole slide had been coated with oil. If Bruce had been the one to slide down—

The grease still on the slide caught a spark, and a river of flame suddenly flowed up towards him. Bruce backed away, only for the flame to follow him onto the floor, picking up speed, the heat and smoke increasing. The Joker had to have treated the timbers too for them to catch so fast. Something behind one of the mirrors suddenly exploded in the heat, glass flying everywhere, and the inferno roared like a monster catching its prey. Bruce threw out dignity and ran, leaping lightly over a tripwire, going by instinct and memory more than sight as the smoke blurred sight and breath, mirrors shattering as explosives behind them were triggered. Had to do something, get out, get up, get...

Get down. Get beneath the smoke. Bruce's foot caught on a weaker board, one that cracked underfoot, and he made himself stop, stamped hard on the deck. He could just explode it, but if the fire hadn't spread to the floor beneath this one, Bruce didn't want to set something off. The board splintered and he bent down, used the spikes on his gauntlets to rip huge chunks of the floor away. The flames were all around him now, and he plunged down, feet first, cape spread as he dropped the remaining two stories. His feet slammed into the ground and he allowed his knees to buckle, rolled to put out any stray sparks, flipped onto his feet, head swiveling to take in his new surroundings.

The flames hadn't reached down here. They flickered above, though, loud and angry, giving off a strange, orangey gloom one second, darkening again the next.

Something moved. Bruce's head snapped toward it and something huge and heavy landed hard on his back, knocked him to his knees. He threw himself backwards, head snapping into the face of his attacker and heard familiar laughter in his ears as they rolled, Batman somehow staying on top. A flash of green hair, giggles, a knife slashing, trying to get past the armor. Bruce caught and twisted his wrist, flung the blade away. The Joker tried to pin his arms instead and he somehow broke one loose, twisted so that he was facing his enemy, seized his lank green hair and snapped his head back into the cement—

"NOOOOOO!"

Bruce barely saw the plank swinging at him, ducked his head just in time. His attacker shrieked, kept batting at him with her improvised weapon, luckily avoiding his head most of the time. Her movements were clumsy and rather weak, but still painful. "Let him go! Let my Mr. J—"

He hooked an arm around the Joker's throat and yanked himself and the madman up. The minute the Joker was between him and the woman, she went still.

Bruce stared at her. Somehow, even with the Joker's barely stifled giggles and the roars of the inferno above them, there was silence.

Dr. Quinzel. She was a mess. Not that she had looked good in the brief glimpse Bruce had gotten on that rooftop, but this… her face was bruised and battered, her clothes filthy and torn. She held the plank like a baseball bat, but it was her big blue eyes that caught his attention. There was something both childlike and rabid to them. Unnaturally bright, but with that same burning darkness Bruce had seen in the Joker's.

He hesitated. She'd gone insane. Even Andi couldn't deny that. But he'd promised to save her. "Dr. Quinzel?"

No response, at least from her. The Joker started to shake with suppressed laughter. Bruce grimaced and tried to make his voice as gentle as it could with its growl. "Leena?"

She let out a shriek. "NO! I'm not Leena, I'm Harley-Quinn, now you let my J go, mister, or I'm—"

The Joker let out a modest cough and she broke off, staring avidly at him. It was like nothing Bruce had seen before. Complete and utter, almost doglike, devotion.

"Ya like my handiwork Batty? You tell, uh, your friend, mmm… Taylor… what's happened alright? And make sure she tells that—that, uh, red girl the same thing 'kay?"

Maybe Bruce was imagining it, but he thought he saw Leena give the slightest twitch at the mention of her friends. He turned back to her, hoping to monopolize on it. "Do you want to see Dr. Taylor? Or Isley? I can—"

"Ya know we really should hurry this up," the Joker broke in airily, "We don't wanna stand here until the roof falls in." As if to prove his point, there was an explosion almost directly above them, and chunks of wood and broken glass sprayed to the ground. Bruce grimaced. No time. No time, and he had to save this woman.

"You—" Bruce nodded at Leena, "Get out of here. Run for the exit."

"I'm not leaving Mr.—"

Bruce suddenly pushed the Joker slightly away from him and threw his other hand into the madman's occipital ridge. The Joker went limp and Bruce twisted the sharp edges of his gauntlet against his throat. "Leave. Now. Or I kill him." Bluff, pure and simple. Bruce hoped 'Mr. J' hadn't told her yet that the Batman's murders had all been framed. "Get out of here. Get out and stay away or he dies."

Her eyes started to swim with tears. She looked like a child watching her cat die. "Mr. J! Please, don't hurt him. Please, please, please."

"GO!"

"Alright! Alright. But if you hurt my angel…" She started sob as she went for an exit. Bruce waited until she'd passed out of sight, then slung the Joker over his shoulder and raced for the place where he'd first dropped into the warehouse.

Wood and glass were falling everywhere now, like some sort of rainstorm. It wouldn't be long before the whole structure fell on them. Bruce guessed as well as he could where he'd come in, then tossed another explosive up. It detonated, and Bruce could just barely make out one edge of the crater. The grapple gun came out, Bruce hooked himself and the Joker on, and they flew up, onto the roof and out. He dashed for another warehouse a safe distance from the flames as a loud crash sounded below and behind him, the roof collapsing. He could only hope Leena had gotten out alive.

Author's Note: H-Hi guys! It's, um, been a little while, yeah? I'm back now though, and on Spring Break, so I might even be able to post a little early too next time.

I think I mentioned a couple posts back that we're nearing the climax of the story, and a few of y'all commented on that in the reviews, so just let me clear things up: climax is a relative term. Things are all starting to come together now, sides are finally being taken, and the epic fight begins! But that doesn't mean the story's about to end, just that the ante's been upped. By my count, there's still going to be about... five or six chapters left (and that's if I stick to the outline) before things finish off, so Andi and the gang are going to be here for a little while longer.

Thank y'all SO MUCH for the response you've been giving lately. I've been absolutely floored by the awesome and often thought provoking responses, particularly to last chapter. I never expected anyone to get so emotionally invested in the characters, and I'm so glad you found Leena's fall compelling. I promise that that was the darkest the story's going to get, at least as I have it planned.

If y'all are on vacation, have a good one and stay safe!