The searchlight was hot on his back. He careened around cars, parked or still mobile. The window of a car he just passed lost a window in a short burst of sound and a scream of glass.
The gunshot wounds were a holy triad of pain in his chest. Burning with each breath, throbbing in response to every adrenaline-kicked beat of his heart. He could feel something slip between the solid weight of the Kevlar and his own chest. The wounds had reopened.
Bullets tore holes through asphalt flinging chunks of it into the air, spinning for one beautiful moment, before crashing to the ground. The dance of destruction. Doors were torn in two with the force behind each shot, the invisible touch of a terrible God long since unamused with the goings-on of his own people, now hell bent on terrorizing the dancing fools at his feet.
He wove through the streets, taking back alleys and flying under monorail tracks, jumping for any attempt to dislodge his flying pursuer when the moment presented itself. Bruce had no idea what he was going to do.
There was nothing else to do other than let himself be chased. There was always the possibility that if the Joker was caught, he would give away Batman's identity as a bargaining chip. He wouldn't let Alfred watch them carry him out of the door in handcuffs, hold him like priced game by the scruff of the neck while all of the reporters swirled and sniffed for blood at their feet like sharks. The flash of each camera would be worse than any firing squad.
A narrow thread of light sliced through the air, curving gently.
The explosion threw Batman off of his bike, tumbling face first onto the shrapnel rattled concrete. The heat on his back was different, alive and curling, born of vengeance and hateful energy. He pushed himself up to his elbows and turned, the pebbles of asphalt that settled on him scattering to the ground, each sound as singular as the opening notes to a sonata.
He held an arm up to his eyes, shielding himself from the light.
The helicopter that chased him loyally for three miles was a twisted heap of metal on the road. The flames illuminated its structure, the black bones that of an ancient dragon killed by knights who never for once considered any natures of the beast other than that to kill and maim.
Police cars were coming over the hill, a swarm of piranha's called by the scent of the blood of their fallen comrades. Bikes shot out of side alleys, cut off the pursuit, forcing a cruiser to pull onto the sidewalk to avoid hitting a biker. The bikes were the bastard children of the originals, cannibalized with bike pats found in junk yards and on the side of the roads.
Bruce stood, stepping over the smoking chunks of the helicopter. Between the corpse of the helicopter, and the two cars it crushed in its descent, the street was completely blocked off at one end.
Officers got out of their cars, crouched behind their open doors and aimed. As Bruce got closer he could see the fear in their eyes, the look of a rabbit just before the. wolf clamped his jaws down on the fragile neck, twisting. He was their new Joker. Odd, that they immediately believed in the word of someone deemed criminally insane, and made no attempt to try to prove him wrong.
Standing opposite of the officers was the bikers, five of them standing non-chalantly in a war zone, bikes abandoned. Two of them had grenade launchers slung over their back with rope made out of bungee cords, duct tape and a prayer. They were the statues of a warring land, where chains and tattoos were signs of social status, not grounds on which to become a pariah.
Bruce slinked closer, taking note that all of the guns had been pointed away from the bikers and were following him now. "What are you doing here?" He growled at them, his voice a stark reminder of broken bones and dark alleys that magnified every sound and turned a drying sheet into a dark cape. Full of dark eyes that stared down in silent judgment.
They all flinched away. That made him feel better.
They looked at each other, eyes visible through the yellow-tinted goggles they wore. "The boss told us to watch out for you." The one that said it looked particularly pleased, looking around his fellow misfits with a: Yea, I got balls, expression on his face.
"You're the ones that blew the helicopter out of the sky." It wasn't a question. It was said with the same air as someone who gives a jail sentence, with finality and barely controlled righteous anger.
They couldn't read the look in his eyes or in his posture. They couldn't hear the tick-tick-tock of the doomsday clock as the numbers steadily dropped down to zero. He could hear the minimalistic beat in his brain, counting down the seconds until everything vanished, focused on the sensation of splitting lips, breaking bones.
Bruce grabbed the first one, quick like a python's strike, breaking the delicate bones of the forearm and wrist then pulling the mangled appendage closer to him and breaking his nose.
A SWAT van sped down the hill, the force of its velocity making him jump the five feet of asphalt after its peak completely. It pushed its way through the impromptu barricade the police set up, forcing the bumper-to-bumper cars out of the way with its bulk.
It stopped two inches from Batman's legs.
There was a pause as officers relayed the new occurrence into their radios, and the mischief makers began to grin and crane their necks for any sign of the driver of the van.
The driver's side door opened silently and hung open. A purple pant leg appeared and the rest of the purple body followed. The only difference in the Joker from the day this first started, when the citizens of Gotham hated him but didn't hate him, was the odd-fitting Kevlar vest he fitted over his suit top.
He grinned at Bruce but made no attempt to talk to him, his mischief makers were ignored as well. The Joker turned to the officers huddled behind their cars. Bruce got a glimpse into the madness. The Joker became the personification of the boogey-man. Dark eyes that divulged nothing, the eyes of a crocodile that could not explain why he ate the fish and the occasional person only that it was in his nature. His mouth was a dark den of lies, where words were carefully chosen and sewn together to gain the maximum result.
"Greetings, boys and girls of the Law." His voice became low, the voice that you hear through the fog as you succumb to blood-loss limbs heavy and immobile. It was dark, full of year's accumulated hate. "I am very ashamed of you. Very ashamed. I warned you about what would happen if you went after the bat. Didn't I?" He turned around to pin one of his henchmen with that dark stare. "I did, right?" He hardly waited for the confirmation.
"And in doing so, I made a promise, a vow, to the Bat. And I hate to go back on my word." Getting fear was great, it was fine!, but he wanted the blood.
The grenade launches were raised in eerie synchronation.
Bruce tried to make his way through the line, knock their weapons onto the ground and show them how much fun a maniac in war paint really could be. He felt the satisfying give of ribs beneath his fist-
Too many explosions, too many deaths.
The cars went up in flames, their drivers jittering puppets moved by instinct rather than a real will to live. No one in the houses and apartments on either side of the street moved.
So many bones to break, concussions to give.
When all of the henchmen laid out on the road like a vagabond's traveling hospital, he advanced on the Joker. The Joker stared back with eyes full of destructive happiness, the type of person who watches burning homes with a smile on his face, and no spared thought to the people who may be inside.
His fist broke that smiling lip and Bruce watched each individual drop of blood slide down the Jokers pale chin. He used props in this terrible play to inflict more destruction, a car to knock a head into a wall to be thrown into.
"Do you realize what you've done?" Batman normally didn't contain this amount of anger. But the Joker had a way about bringing out certain things in him. He tried to summarize all of the abstract feelings, utter hopelessness, dejection, and fear at being caught. Fear of Alfred being caught. He tried to morph them into one cohesive sentence.
The Joker blinked up at him. One green eye obscured by a veil of dark blood. He looked like a sacrifice to a dark God, supple and complacent in a world overrun by Chaos. "What are you talking about?" His brows were brought down low over his eyes in his characteristic show of confusion. "Is it about them?" He gestured with one pale hand towards the smoking remains of the helicopter and the cars that littered the road. "Don't worry about them. You're the Batman. They'll always come back to you when the mob starts to move in, or a misunderstood madman starts to chop up little children in his basement. This hasn't changed anything." He grinned and tried to catch a floating ember in his had. "Though it has made things much more interesting, I must admit."
"How?"
The Joker cracked his neck and tried to get comfortable. When he looked up at Bruce, the playfulness was gone. In its place were dark eyes full of slick oil and skeletal creatures with wide luminescent eyes crawling beneath the surface. His grin grew wide, distorted, like a sharks. "You. You'll never trust them again after this will you? Able to take the word of a madman so easily and swallow it whole. While the innocent man waits, chained to the jailhouse wall, unable to say a single word in his defense." He cackled with the pure delight of it, howling at the sky like a wolf.
Bruce was silent. It was true. Trust didn't come easily, and now that it had been breached so, it would become neigh unattainable.
Arms curled themselves around his neck, each as sinister as a python. "I love you Brucie. But I love you even more when you're in pain." The words were murmured against his lips, softly, like they were spoken to an adoring lover and not the man who had been forcing the blood from his body to bless the air.
"Someday." The red-and-blue combination of strobe lights came closer. The Joker's hands slipped down his neck to grip his shoulder blades with white-knuckled force. "Someday you'll leave this city to die. And you'll come to me. Because in the end; only those who want to kill each other are loyal."
"That's not true."
The Joker shook his head, a teacher surprised by the bounds of a student's stupidity. "Yes it is. Because you and me have a connection. We represent the darker side of Gotham. When your father gets shot and blood sprinkles your face like holy water, you're changed. The world seems darker, grittier, ash falls from the sky even on a good day and sometimes you hear voices that aren't there. I get it too!" He leaned close, as if confiding something. "I'm the only person that understands you Bats. And I'll always be here. Waiting for you."