"So…what are we doing?" She asks, dumbly, kicking her feet back and forth as they all sit in their black van together. Nobody's told her. The masked thugs on her and his left and right are silent, as their leader of sorts begins to tell them.
"Schwarzy, you haven't kept up with things lately, but that idea I told you about a while back?" Joker looks at her now, and she nods. "Well, it should be coming all together tonight."
"We're going to drive Gordon insane?"
"Not insane. Insane is when you…drool...and scream…and babble crazy things. We're just going to make him a bit…mad." Every space in his speech is illustrated by over the top hand gestures, before folding them in his lap and tapping his foot, excitedly. Schwarzwald nods, the shotgun balanced on her shoulder, the safety being on of course (safety first!), and glances around at nothing in particular.
"So…ah…how are we doing this?" Everyone else knows but her.
"With you, poor, wounded creature that you are." Joker tells her, smiling pleasantly. Schwarzwald cocks her head slightly, confused.
"But I'm not wounded."
"No, you aren't. Let's fix that."
It's not a moment later that he reaches across and grabs her by the front of her costume, pulling a long, thin object and stabbing her in the stomach. It's not very deep, just enough for her to bleed, but it still hurts enough. She whines in pain, jerking her hands over the wound, and looks up at him as he examines the ice pick in his gloved hand for a moment before putting it away again.
"Now you are." Joker smiles again, and it's a chilling attempt at mimicking a friendly sort of smile. Schwarzwald drops her head and stares at her knees, as the van comes to a stop. Joker begins to tell her the plan, in full.
"You walk one block in the opposite direction that we drive off in. One block away is the good Commissioner's home, where his darling wife and children wait. There's going to be a car parked not too far away; you'll know it when you see it. Tell them that you need a ride to the hospital because you've lost a fight with the wrong end of a knife in a mugging. Our Commissioner is at the precinct right now, working overtime to take care of that random bombing in the park earlier today, so he won't be bothering you. Get them into the car, and I don't care how. There's a guy in the back of the car, hiding; he'll drive you where you need to go to meet up with us. Easy enough? I thought so. Out you go!"
He pulls the back doors open and shoves her out, sans shotgun and with cane. She glances back in time to see him wave slightly and slam the doors shut, taillights disappearing down the street. Schwarzwald looks like a psycho freak, bleeding on the concrete, and he expects her to convince anyone at all that she's harmless? She needs an idea of what to do…a plan…
Wait…no she doesn't. Joker's never needed a plan, and she won't either. She's going deal with what happens as it comes. Time to see if she's a good ad-libber.
"Never a better time to learn." Schwarzwald murmurs, beginning to walk in the opposite direction of the van. She gets some odd stares from the occasional pedestrian, but they don't really want to question it as she has a hand over the stinging stomach wound and walks, looking angry or annoyed or something like that. After all the walking, she staggers up to the front doors of a home that has a conspicuous black vehicle parked out front, nobody in the driver's seat. Her cane taps against the concrete and remains the main sound in the night.
When she walks up to the door and knocks, fixing an ailing expression on her face, it's only a few moments before a woman answers the door; probably Gordon's wife. She seems wary, suspicious of Schwarzwald, who says her name is Julia, but after seeing the blood staining the front of her costume, and the cane in her hand, she seems to relent.
"I came from a costume party…I was walking home, and got jumped. Junkie, I think. I don't know how bad this is." Julia speaks in her most ailing, tired voice, glancing at her bloodstained glove. She was never going to get the blood out of that white.
"We can call the paramedics," The wife whose name Schwarzwald isn't privy to suggests, and 'Julia' shakes her head slowly.
"The hospital isn't that far away, and I don't think I can wait. Could you drive me? I'm too…dizzy…to do it myself…" She suggests, slowly, and the woman shakes her head.
"No; I have to stay with my children. I can't leave." She states, steadfast, and Schwarzwald hangs her head, groaning gently and dramatically letting her weight drop, falling against her cane. The woman startles, before leaning down to try and help her. "I'm going to call 9-1-1."
"No! Just…I can call somebody to drive me. Just help me to my car, please?" She raises doe eyes to the woman, bright blue and teary, and she sees the woman's will relenting. Eventually she gives in, and helps Schwarzwald to the car. When she isn't looking, the hidden thug comes up out of his seat and clubs her over the head, and she seems to pass out.
"Keep her here; I'm going for the kids." Schwarzwald orders, dropping the charade and tossing her cane in the back seat with him, turning for the open door and walking in. The kids aren't hard to find; they're noisy, and Schwarzwald catches one of them in the process of beginning to babble to someone about someone breaking in. She grabs the kid and jerks them away from the phone, and picks it up herself. She hears Gordon's frenzied voice on the other end of the line.
"What's happening?! Barbara?? What's wrong??" He demands, and Schwarzwald chuckles into the phone. "Who is this?? Who the hell are you?!" He barks, and she sighs slightly.
"Old friends. Don't worry; we'll contact you." She hangs up after that, before dragging the flailing, screaming kids outside and into the car, hopping into the passenger's seat, and having the driver lock all the doors and windows. When they try to club her with her own cane, she jerks around in the seat and fights with them over the cane, taking a few blows to her shoulders and hands in the process.
"You little brats! Give me that!" Schwarzwald snarls, and when the little girl starts screaming, she clamps her hand over her mouth. The girl bites her, hard, and Schwarzwald snaps her hand back, cussing. "I'll beat the hell out of you little shits!"
The poor driver deals with all the fighting and screaming and random cane flailing with the patience of a saint, not saying a word. Eventually, Schwarzwald, inept criminal that she is, gets her cane away from the kids and resists the urge to beat them with it, digging in her bag for her valium bottle. She swallows a pill for the aching in her leg and stares out her window, irritably, for having to babysit the deathly quiet children in the back seat.
By the time they arrive at an abandoned two-story motel that seems to be the meeting place, the kids' mother is awake and has tried to grab the wheel once before, nearly driving them into a ditch. Schwarzwald snarled at her to get back and threatened her with her cane, and she backed off, but only because of the fact that the thug had a gun on him. The helpful thug assists in dragging the three into the dilapidated motel, by dragging Gordon's wife, as Schwarzwald takes the kids.
"Jo-ker! We're ho-o-me!" She sings, and sees a thug waving her towards the second floor. They drag the family there and find the Joker on the second floor in a large, open room that appears to have been more than one room in the motel's better days, from the piles of rubble here and there where walls have fallen. There's a thick layer of dust in the air and the lights flicker, barely illuminating the very dark building. When he sees them he smiles, and it's terrifying, as usual. The kids begin to cry; the wife shrinks away, but they're all dragged up to him anyway.
"Schwarzy, looks like you've done it." He chimes, before ordering the thugs to tie up the wife and children together. Schwarzwald kicks at a hunk of stone or plaster, her stomach still stinging horribly. Damn puncture wound.
"Expect anything less?" She asks, dull expectation in her voice, and he laughs slightly.
"You know I did."
"Comforting!"
The two of them walk in different directions, Joker dialing on a cell phone while Schwarzwald sits on a decrepit old table. She's listening to him talk, to who she assumes is the Commissioner.
"Hel-lo, Constable. You don't have to yell; I'm right here, you know. Anywho, we've got a gorgeous woman and two beautiful children right here, and they're just dying to see you. We're at the Oceania Motel, waiting. Oh, and we only want you to come; we don't have enough dip for anyone else." He laughs at that last part, and Schwarzwald rolls her eyes. Just because she's devoted to the man doesn't mean she has to enjoy his jokes. It sounds like Gordon is screaming on the other end of the line."
"Flattery will get you nowhere, Commissioner. Looking forward to seeing you too." He laughs and hangs up the phone, as Schwarzwald messes with her cane again. She spins it, tosses it in the air, catches it, swings it around like a sword; she's so bored.
"You're impatient." Joker tells her, sitting beside the wife and kids, and Schwarzwald sighs.
"I know. Kind of excited though, you know? I've never committed a felony before."
"You caused that kid to bomb out an entire park."
"That doesn't count. The kid did it, not me." She hears sirens in the distance, and pulls back a moth-eaten curtain to look out a cracked window. Police cars. SWAT vans. She glances back to Joker, dispassionately. "You know that we're totally surrounded, right?"
"Yup." He answers, leaning against the wall and staring at his boots, and she shrugs.
"Oh. Alright then." She turns back to the window, watching a single man walk up towards the front doors. "Just making sure. Hey, look alive; it's show time." She turns away from the window and keeps her cane in her hand, sighing, as the door shoots open.
"Barbara!" Gordon barks, seeing the kids and his wife alive and tied up, and glares at Joker.
"They're fine, they're fine! You act like you don't trust me." The madman laughs, pulling out a knife and pressing the flat side against Gordon's wife's cheek. Gordon stamps forward, menacingly, pulling his gun and aiming, when Schwarzwald points her cane at him and reveals herself from the corner she's been concealing herself in.
"There are more of you?" Gordon asks, disbelieving, and she nods.
"Ayup. Drop the gun." She taps the floor with the cane, and after staring between Schwarzwald and Joker and his family, the Commissioner begrudgingly complies. Joker smiles, knowing the show is really beginning now.
"Now…Commissioner, dear Commissioner…we're going to have fun." Joker states, giddily almost. "Tonight, you get to grasp sanity by the thinnest threads, and see if you can hold on." Gordon glares, watching him go on. Schwarzwald is silent. "Now…you pick who's worth saving. Your dear wife…" Joker gestures to the woman, with wild, terrified eyes, "Your strapping son…" He pats the boy on the head, "Or your darling daughter." He brushes the back of his filthy, bloodstained glove along her cheek, and she lets out a whimper of terror.
"No…don't do this!" Gordon barks at him, and as he moves forward again, Joker holds something high enough for everyone in the room to see.
"Whoa whoa whoa, Joker! What the hell?!" Schwarzwald shouts, terrified, as she recognizes that he's holding a detonator. That means there's a bomb somewhere around here. He ignores her, focusing on Gordon.
"Too close, and we all go…sky high. You play by my rules, Commissioner."
Everyone in the room, besides Joker, is staring in horror at the new danger of the situation they're in. All of their lives are in Gordon's hands right now, and if he so much as sneezes in a way Joker doesn't like, they all die in fire.
"So…who's it going to be, then? Pick. I want you to pick, when they're looking at you." Joker goes on, and there's a satisfaction, or is that anger, in his voice so complete, so total, that it's terrifying. Gordon is at a loss; he stares at his family, stricken with total grief at this horrible choice he's being forced to make, and Schwarzwald feels sick for some reason. Maybe it's the last fluttering threads of her humanity? Or maybe it's the ice pick wound in her stomach getting to her. Either way, she waits in breathless silence for Gordon's decision. Joker's got a knife ready to dispose of the two not chosen, and they all know this.
"Tick tock, Commissioner. Take too long and I'll just kill us all." The madman warns, nonchalantly, and Schwarzwald feels dizzy. Does she want to die? No, no. She wants to live. She wants to live this new life of mad glee and love of destruction. She didn't go through all the pain and tears and torment just to die at the whims of a madman. But she serves this madman, and she does absolutely nothing to stop him, even as Gordon shouts at her and the few thugs in the room.
"Are you going to die here?! Do you want to?!"
Schwarzwald doesn't make eye contact. How do you answer such a question? 'No, not really, but I will if Joker wants me to, because he helped drive me crazy and I like it'?
Another interminable silence passes, and Joker clicks the detonator into an armed position.
"I guess they are, huh? Goodnight!" He chimes, before there's a distinct metallic noise and he jerks his hand back, hissing in pain. The detonator skids across the floor, and a black shape descends upon them like the fist of God. Joker lets out a pleasantly surprised, or is that even gleeful, laugh as he sees him, and Schwarzwald freezes. Batman tackles Joker and Gordon lunges for the detonator, disarming it and tucking it away. Schwarzwald leaps into action, swinging her cane down in an arc at Gordon's back. He takes the blow in stride and kicks her in the bloody stomach, and she staggers back, coughing. The entire room is a maelstrom of movement, clashing, fighting; everyone is moving at once and the entire room is submerged in chaos.
And the one sound that raises above all the others is the laughter. The shrieking, high-pitched laughter of a euphoric madman that chills sane men to the bone. Schwarzwald falters when she hears it. Batman doesn't even flinch, and he and Joker continue to take shots at one another, a brutal battle for dominance over the entire situation.
Schwarzwald flips a switch on her cane and the hidden bladed edge comes out, the cane turning into a veritable machete as she swings at Batman's back while the Joker keeps him occupied. Gordon is already gone, and they know that they don't have much time left. She thinks that her blade scores a hit because she hears a small grunt of pain before he's turning on her, and he's bearing down on her as a cold black rage, and Schwarzwald suddenly feels so small and helpless. Because this isn't a man, not anymore. This is the night, this is the pure blackness that makes her yowl like a cat when she's lost in it.
This is what she fears most.
She's hit. She doesn't know what he hit her with or how he did it, but she's staggering backwards from the vicious force of a blow, and she collides with a cracked window and it breaks under her weight. Glass embeds itself in her skin but she's not paying attention, only hits the floor, in a daze, and watches the titanic confrontation between two forces of nature, two halves of Gotham, two halves of mankind itself. It is a wonderful and horrible thing to see.
Joker gets Batman on the floor and is in the process of trying to drive an ice pick into his eye, when, of all things, Batman grabs her cane and bludgeons Joker off of him. It's not a fatal hit; he didn't even use the bladed edge, and not long after, SWAT rushes in to find two very dazed, defeated psychopaths tied up and left for the garbage pickup. They are dragged out, and though Schwarzwald isn't looking forward to what's going to happen next, Joker seems fine enough with it as they're cuffed, shackled, and set in the back of a police car. Neither of them have anything other than superficial wounds, though they're probably going to have nasty bruises later on.
Schwarzwald stares ahead of her, blankly, as Joker sits beside her hand hums something, twiddling his thumbs. After a long moment of silence, he looks over at her, paint rubbing off in places, covered in sweat, exhausted but happy, and he says to her, smiling, "Why so serious?"
"We're going to rot in the Giggle Farm, that's why I'm so -fucking- serious."
There's another moment of silence between them, before he can't help himself as the car begins to move.
"Don't be. Look at it like this: Now, you get to see what the inside of Arkham Asylum looks like!"
Schwarzwald begins to bang her head against the window, and she doesn't stop until they get to Gotham PD.