He hardly felt the cold anymore.
There were still days when the constant torment he was putting his body through would suddenly become too much for his system and for a few hours he would be able to do nothing but sit and shiver whilst his body threatened to give up on him. But days like that were becoming less and less frequent. Besides, the cold he suffered was nothing compared with what his wife had to endure endless day after endless day. No, he hardly ever felt the cold anymore. He never felt anything much.
"Who did this to you?" Mister Freeze quietly asked the man whose bedside he sat by. The man made no reply, which made perfect sense seeing as he was deep in the grip of a coma he was never expected to wake from.
It had been no easy task, locating his old medical professor Doctor Hugo Strange. Gotham's administration and information system seemed to be grounded in sheer chaos. But Freeze had finally learnt about his mentor's mysterious coma through an unexpected ally and been able to track him here to the recently rebuilt Gotham General. He had come, following his humiliating defeat at Batman's hands, hoping to ask a favour and had found nothing but silence. He could almost feel emotions creeping back into his being, so he forcefully pushed them away. There was no place for emotions in a world such as this, the only way to survive it was to become as cold as it was.
However, he did permit himself to unclasp his helmet and place it quietly down on the floor beside him. Having done so, he rested his chin on his balled fists and stared numbly at the patient.
Months spent lifelessly in a hospital bed were starting to take their physical toll on Strange. His eyes had sunken back into bruised-looking flesh, as if it was only the size of his brain that had kept them in place, and now that that great organ was atrophying, they were collapsing back in on themselves. It wasn't only his brain that was slowly degrading either, weeks of being fed by nothing but an IV drip had left his formerly rotund girth pitifully gaunt. Although somehow his flesh also seemed puffy and bloated, his pallid white skin giving him something of a maggot's look.
Unable to look at the wreck of the man anymore, Freeze put his head in his hands. "Why? Why has this happened? You were mine and Nora's last hope, Hugo." Lifting his head, grief breaking through on a face that had become little more than a mask, he imploringly took one of the Doctor's hands into both of his. "You are the only one who knows how to save her. I can't afford to keep her cryogenically frozen for much longer, or to keep hiring the help that keeps her barely alive as it is. This Gotham of yours, it is not easy pickings as I was led to believe, I still don't have the money I need. But what use is money anyway without your expertise?"
Hugo Strange said nothing.
Ashamed of showing his emotions whilst his beloved Nora must remain so cold and lifeless, Freeze turned resolutely to look out of the window as he gathered his composure.
The thought of the climb that faced him when he chose to exit the hospital made him feel incredibly weary. Because he had made his face known on those taped demands and because a man walking around in his particular attire was likely to attract all the wrong kinds of attention, especially here in Gotham, his hospital visit had to be achieved by scaling the wall and then climbing in through the window. No mean feat, but he had managed it. He would overcome any hardship if it was for Nora's sake.
The climb could have been made much easier if he'd just discarded the bulky suit that powered his freeze gun, but he had vowed never to take it off. He felt that if he did, he would surely die. The permanent chill of the suit, due to the liquid nitrogen being pumped around it to feed his weaponry, was his only link to his wife. Whilst she was encased in ice, waiting for a cure to be found for her fatal disease, he must surround himself with the cold, embracing it like he could no longer embrace her.
Anger coursed through him at this final frustration, this immense block in the road to his happy ending, and it warmed him like nothing else could. "Once again you set up challenges that I do not know how to overcome, Hugo! And now, when I am in most need of your guidance you mock me with your silence. I don't know what else to do… I don't…"
Worn out by the first emotions he had allowed himself in years, ever since Nora had been diagnosed and he'd known there was nothing he could do for his wife, he sank down onto his knees at the Doctor's bedside. Head buried in his hands, he slipped back into his native German tongue to murmur the incoherent platitudes of a desperate, heartbroken man.
For the first time since his wife had been diagnosed with the disease that would kill her, Freeze allowed himself to grieve.
A sharp gasp reached him through his haze of mourning, and he looked up to see a nurse standing shocked in the doorway, staring at him. His emotions deserted him in a rush as if they had never been there, leaving him clinically detached and in control of himself once again. The nurse would recover soon and start screaming for help. He couldn't let that happen.
Swiftly, whilst the woman was still too shocked to react, he retrieved his helmet and put it on, his arm continuing in one smooth motion to aim his freeze gun straight at her heart. His fist closed around the lever in his hand, sending a deadly arc of ice towards the nurse. Her body fell to the floor without a sound. Her heart as dead and cold as his.
Content that the alarm would not be raised for a while yet, Mister Freeze swung himself out of the hospital window and into the anonymous dark outside.
"How long will he be staying here for, sir?" Alfred hissed to Bruce in an undertone.
They were standing huddled together like secret conspirators in the doorway of the penthouse's sitting room, peering in at its sole occupant. The occupant, more commonly known by the alias Joker, was stretched out across the couch with that morning's newspaper. Disconcerting giggles and murmurs could be heard above the rustling of the broadsheet's pages.
Bruce drew back into the protection of the doorway and admitted "I don't know."
"Then please let me phone the police, Master Bruce. They'll get rid of him."
Batman's daytime ego sighed. He glanced at Alfred's concerned face, guiltily taking in the bruise that had been bestowed by Joker the night of his arrival. It was healing well, but that did nothing to salve either his feelings or Alfred's.
"No, you know we can't complicate things any further. Besides, he said he wanted to help."
Of course, Bruce had believed that no more than he would have believed someone telling him on good authority that they had seen a pig take wing. He trusted in it even less after having to take care of that police officer Joker had attacked the night before. But still, there was something that kept him from calling off the arrangement altogether. Perhaps it was only that he had shared the Joker's mind once, giving him a twisted sense of kinship with the man, or perhaps there was more to it than that, he couldn't be sure. All he could be sure of was that Joker was genuine about wanting to help him take down Mister Freeze.
"Begging your pardon sir," lowering his voice even further so that the clown wouldn't be able to hear, Alfred voiced Bruce's own doubts, "But I don't believe that for a second and neither should you."
They were interrupted by a voice suddenly calling out. "When are you two housewives going to stop gossiping there in the doorway? I ordered breakfast half an hour ago."
Bruce caught the flinch that he was sure Alfred would deny if mentioned, and with a fresh stab of guilt reached out to take the tray his friend was carrying. He thought the action especially wise considering the murderous look on the man's face, flinch or no flinch.
"Let me take it," he murmured. The butler didn't argue.
Leaving the other man in the doorway, he walked coolly in. The tray was slid onto the coffee table before he casually pushed Joker's feet to the floor so that he could occupy the couch space beside him. The theory was the same one that governed encounters with dangerous animals – don't let them see your fear and let them know who's in charge.
There was a crackle as the newspaper was lowered, and the clown ran a dismissive eye over the breakfast tray. He lunged suddenly for the tall glass of orange juice and downed it in large gulps as if he hadn't taken nourishment in a long while. A small bead of escaped liquid tracked an orange line down his painted chin.
Bruce looked away, feeling mildly disgusted. To take his mind off of the feeling he took the paper from Joker's lap and opened it to the page he had been on. At first he couldn't make out what the article was about, so covered was it in thick, heavy pen lines. An army of scribbled 'HA's marched drunkenly across the page, over the headline, all semblance of order lost in their anarchic scrawl. Then a word heavily ringed in blue pen caught his eye and his heart sank. Cropping up haphazardly throughout the article, he noticed more and more of the circles, each one enclosing the same word: Joker.
There was only one thing this news story could be about and it was going to make his job even more difficult. A cluster of mockingly drawn hearts, the word 'Batman' nestled amongst them only confirmed his suspicions. The policemen who'd seen him with Joker had gone to the newspapers about it, blackening Batman's already soiled name. But that was okay, you didn't need to be liked to save a city. Did you?
He looked up to find Joker watching him with an intense half-smile and not for the first time was made to think of hero worship that has become perverted, turned homicidal. There was a zealous fervour in the clown's eyes that made them seem to burn from within.
"They think you've sided with me," the scarred man smirked like he was telling the joke of the century. "They know what you are now."
Bruce said nothing. What was there to say? If he said something then it might lead to accepting the idea that maybe on the inside he really was as ugly as the man sat beside him. If he spoke, it might be admitting that he wasn't one of the brave men walking the path of the straight and narrow, but a twisted outsider lurking on the edges of reason. After all, he was working with a murderer. Such thoughts were unacceptable; he had to believe that he was better than men like the Joker, so he said nothing.
In the strained silence his attention was caught by a news story unmarred by Joker's frantic doodlings. This one sent his heart racing instead of sinking. It told of the unexplained death of a Gotham General nurse, found in the doorway of a patient's room. Tentative suggestions had been made that the woman had died of shock, although what could have caused her heart to freeze up so suddenly was a mystery. Even stranger were the marks akin to frostbite found on her chest, whilst the rest of her body was unmarked. Unfortunately, the patient she'd been attending could not serve as a witness, because he was deep in a coma.
Bruce's hands tightened around the paper, turning his knuckles white. He had a pretty good idea of what had stopped that poor young woman's heart – a sudden burst of liquid nitrogen to the chest, freezing the blood in her veins. Mister Freeze had been at the hospital last night. And almost as certainly as he knew that, he also knew that the coma patient mentioned was Hugo Strange. He wasn't sure how it was he could be so certain, but he was all the same.
Mister Freeze had been paying a night time visit to Doctor Hugo Strange… but to what purpose? Or was Bruce simply clutching at straws and this was just coincidence? Had Freeze been after the nurse, or was she someone who just got in the way? There was only one way to find out the answers.
"Make up off, Joker." Standing, he folded the newspaper and let it drop to the surface of the coffee table alongside the breakfast tray. "If you're serious about helping me take down Mister Freeze, then we've got some in cognito investigative work to do."
But by the time they got to the hospital, Doctor Strange had already gone missing.