XII
Soon enough, my wish for an end to the ride is granted. The van pulls to a stop, and the driver puts us in park. The Joker gets to his feet, and I pull back instinctively as he comes close, but he ignores my flinching, reaching down and grabbing my locked elbow, drawing me up.
The van doors open, and he shoves me towards them—I'm barely able to get my balance in time to jump out rather than falling flat on my face on the pavement. As I recover, I look around to see that we're in another unfamiliar place—it looks similar to the project building where he took me first, but I'm guessing it's an entirely different neighborhood. He lands on the street beside me as I get my bearings, and I feel a sharp flash of pain as his hand curls around the back of my neck—his fingers aren't digging in, exactly, but he's exerting pressure and the flesh is sore. I wince, reaching up reflexively to try to bat him away, but his grip tightens minutely and I think better of struggling.
He steers me towards one of the old buildings, and I move fast to keep up, attempting to avoid another painful squeeze. The inside of the building is dismal as expected, and he walks me up the stairs, up to higher ground.
The apartment we enter is more of a loft—one big room with a door in back, lit dimly, with henchmen scattered about on the floor, in folding chairs, cleaning guns and sharpening knives. I try to count the guys as the Joker pulls me along. I reach ten before he hauls me through the back door.
It leads to a room that's smaller and quieter, furnished with a tall, heavy steel table and a spattering of mismatched chairs. The Joker pushes me down into one of these, and I'm all too happy to stay put—I'm sure his hustle is admirable, but the fast trek indoors and upstairs has me a little out of breath, and I'm glad to sit down and regain it as painlessly as possible.
He goes to the table, where two henchmen wait—one's unfamiliar, but I recognize the other from the cop-killing excursion. I softly rub my neck where the Joker was clutching it, trying to erase the feel of his bruising fingertips, and I listen.
Henchman #1, the familiar one, speaks up. "Done deal, boss?"
The Joker stabs a finger at a spot on the paper-covered table. "The bar crowd is outta commission."
"Good," Henchmen #2 rumbles. "Falcone's panicking, if he's smart."
"What d'ya think his next move will be?" asks his fellow.
The Joker sucks in a breath, bending forward over the table with his hands on his hips. "Well… Falcone is smart. He's gonna be expecting more attacks, so a smart guy would rally the troops, pull 'em away from known hideouts and spread them around to… ah, safe houses while he plans a counter-attack."
"So where does that leave us?"
"Hmm." The Joker straightens up. "Who's inside?"
"Beemo, Chuck, and Arnie are in with his guys," Henchman #2 reports. "They ain't high enough to get any real good information, but if they split, we could maybe get our eyes on a couple of hideouts."
The Joker brings his hand solidly down on Henchman #2's shoulder, making both him and me jump. Eyes still glued to the tabletop, he says, "Fine, but that's little picture stuff."
The henchmen exchange a glance, and then, warily, the first one asks, "What's… the big picture, exactly?"
The Joker glances up at him. "What's the date?"
Henchman #1's brow creases. "December twenty-third."
"Uh-huh. Thought so. Soon to be the twenty-fourth. And that means…?"
He watches the goons expectantly. Henchman #1 looks down at the stock of his gun. Henchman #2 seems to find the far upper corner of the room very fascinating all of a sudden. The Joker gives them another few seconds to think about it, then blasts out an annoyed sigh and looks over his shoulder at me. "Em? Wanna play lifeline?"
I shift in my seat, sitting up straight at the sudden attention. It's hard to speak, and my voice is husky and stuck at a volume somewhere just above a whisper, but I make the effort. "Falcone said he was gonna kill you by Christmas, didn't he?"
The Joker nods approvingly. "Bingo," he says, returning his attention to his men. "He wants to be… a regular holiday killer. Obviously, he'll fail, but why let him go on wallowing in his crippling embarrassment?" He pauses a beat, and then, with a twitchy shrug, he adds, "All right, that'd be pretty funny, but with everything I've got on my plate… I'm not keen on the idea of letting him go hide, lick his wounds and plot revenge. Bad idea, bad idea. No—we're gonna take him out, and we're gonna do it on Christmas."
I frown, a sudden restless thought striking me, and painfully, I clear my throat. He glances back at me, and I say, "That's… a fine plan and all, but… it's almost Christmas Eve already. Don't you… think he's going to be getting kind of desperate to follow through on his promise?"
The Joker has exactly two seconds to narrow his eyes and look appraisingly at me before a loud crash sounds from the outside room and the gunfire starts.
He reacts immediately, as if he'd expected it—and hell, maybe he did; planning for all possible contingencies seems to be something he has a knack for. In a second, he's flipped the heavy table, and as he throws himself over it, I rocket out of my chair, moving reflexively to take cover as well. On my way to the impromptu barricade, I collide with Henchman #1, who's heading towards the door along with his colleague, and the impact sends me crashing to the floor. As I army-crawl towards the table, the thought strikes me that if the goons are choosing to move towards the conflict instead of taking cover, then maybe hiding with the Joker is not the wisest or safest move, but it's the only idea I've got, and in another second I've rolled behind the overturned table with him—just in time, it would seem, as the door bursts open and the sound of the gunfire roars up to a deafening pitch.
I try not to think about the fact that their guns might be powerful enough to blow through the metal of the table and focus instead on the Joker—his back's against the barricade, and he's shoving a clip into the semi-automatic he seems to favor when things start going south. He glances at me as if surprised to see me there, and as the first round of bullets rattles sharp and loud against the other side of the table, he thrusts his hand into his pocket and emerges with another pistol. He then does something that takes me completely by surprise—he shoves the gun into my hand and then seizes my shoulder, dragging me close so he can growl in my ear:
"Don't let 'em get around us, Em. Better the devil you know." He withdraws and is upright in a heartbeat, aiming his gun over the table and sending a spray of bullets into our attackers.
The adrenaline is pumping, my mind is moving fast, and it takes me only a second to weigh the situation. I could shoot him with ease, but it would not end there. I doubt these men will leave anyone alive, dead Joker or no. Even if they didn't shoot me, I'm hardly fool enough to think they'd just pat me on the head and send me on my way. No, the Joker's right. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
And while I'm not exactly keen on the idea of putting my head outside of the barricade to shoot at the attackers, I also realize that if he gave me a gun, it means that he's anticipating that my help will be useful, if not outright necessary. Doubtless he'll taunt me about this later, my willingness to abandon morals and kill when I think I have to, but I'll just have to deal with that when it happens.
As he ducks back down, followed by a new blast of bullets raining against the table and lodging into the wood of the back wall above us, I take a deep breath and whip around the edge, staying low and trying to keep the exposed body parts limited to my head and hands.
The two henchmen are down, sprawled across the floor, and their bodies create a sort of impromptu barrier between the door and the room. Falcone's men have bottlenecked in the doorway in the confusion. They don't see me, and I open fire.
It takes me a couple of shots before I correct my aim, but the Mafioso in front doesn't seem to see me, and by the time he does, I've put a bullet in his torso. He falls convulsively forward, building the body-barricade higher, and as the guy behind him leaps over the bodies into the room, the Joker re-emerges and cuts him down fast.
Knowing that I have an advantage—the Joker's the target here; they'll be aiming for him over me—I take aim at the mass of legs and feet in the doorway and beyond, and if I miss every second shot, I'm heartened by the fact that the rest of my bullets hit knees, shins, feet, knocking them down into a tangled, bloody dogpile that only seems to heighten their confusion.
With the way I'm going, I run out of bullets fast, and just in time, I roll back behind the barrier—a rain of gunfire hits the floor where I was lying, at least one of the mob guys having wised up to my game.
The Joker's still up and firing, but true to his usual brand of nearly psychic foresight, he has a clip on the floor by his knee, and I snatch it up. It takes me an agonizingly long span of seconds to figure out how to eject the old magazine, but once it slides out and clatters to the floor, I shove the new one in and pop up again, just the top of my head and my hands peeking above the table.
The crowd at the doorway has diminished considerably, their tactical disadvantage doing far more damage than they must have anticipated, and though my bullets may have slowed them down and distracted them from their primary target, the Joker is the real force to be reckoned with, that gun of his mowing them down by the handful, without mercy. I focus on the fallen ones, the ones whose legs I may have shot out but who could still pose problems, and I try to make sure they won't be pulling themselves up and trying again, aiming for their heads, chests—whatever I can see.
And then, suddenly, the last man standing falls, and it's over. I think. It's hard to tell, what with my ears ringing from the deafening sound of gunfire and my heart pounding so hard that I'm not sure I'd be able to accurately discern whether anything's happening outside of this room, right here, right now, but the shooting has stopped.
Before I can bring myself back down from it, a hand grabs the handle of my gun, and I tighten my grip immediately, reflexively, but the Joker is in no mood—he grabs me by the shoulder and shoves me to the floor as he rips the gun out of my hand.
Feeling dazed, I prop myself on my elbows, watching as he ejects the magazine and pushes a new one in. He's bleeding from somewhere around his hairline, a steady stream of blood cutting through the paint on his cheek and gathering along his jaw, but he barely seems to have noticed, so I gather that it isn't life-threatening.
After reloading the gun, he glances briefly at me, and I'm a bit startled by the look in his eyes—they're black and blazing and excited, but… something about them freezes me, gives me the sudden unwelcome impression that I'm looking at a long-dead thing. That's what ultimately brings me crashing down from the adrenaline high, and I instinctively recoil as he stoops down to peer into my face.
He doesn't comment on my flinching. He just says, impeccably calm, "Wait here." His voice is muffled by the high-pitched whine in my ears, but I understand, and I nod to show him.
He stands and moves around the table, and I slowly sit upright, edging to the bullet-ridden barricade and peeking up over it. He pauses at the tangled mess of bodies blocking the doorway, and looks down on them for a moment, head tilted curiously, before moving his head slightly and drilling a bullet into the skull of one of our former attackers. The bullet shell clinks to the floor; he adjusts his aim with the mere twitch of a hand and fires again, hitting a different skull this time, and then again, and again.
He's not taking chances. I realize as he finished with the boneless pile clustered in the doorway and steps over them into the outer room that he's going to double-tap each and every one of our adversaries, and I can't help but think: good. I'm not keen on some blood-blinded mob thug jumping back to life and mistakenly shooting me.
As he disappears from sight, I drop behind the barrier again, my back to the dented table, clutching my knees. It's no good trying to summon self-loathing for what I've just done; I won't find any. It could be because I have no opposition to killing in self-defense, or it could be that the Joker's been right all along and I'm just a big faker, saintly until the chips are down. I find I don't care much at the moment. Frankly, now that it's over, I don't care about anything, all that adrenaline draining away to leave a smooth, blank surface.
I listen to the muffled gunshots in the outer room, knowing that each one signals a certain death, and I just feel faintly relieved that I don't have to worry about outsiders attacking me.
After a moment, the shots stop. The ringing in my ears has subsided a bit, but the Joker's voice still sounds strange as he sings out, "Em, come on out here."
I get up, as I can't find the will to contemplate disobedience. Carefully, I pick my way through the room, pausing for a second at the dogpile of bodies in the doorway and the blood pooling out from the edges. Something tells me it'd be best not to leave a footprint, and so I step back and then spring forward, clearing the pile and landing hard in the room beyond.
The Joker is crouched over a body at the edge of the room- no, not a body, I realize as the man's head rolls sideways and he coughs weakly. The room is full of dead, and I find a relatively bare spot of floor on which to stand, crossing my arms over my middle and watching.
The Joker taps the survivor on the cheek. "Funny situation, huh, Grumbles?"
Ah, so it's a minion. That explains why he doesn't have a bullet in his head. Grumbles coughs again and says, "Who's… left?"
"Ah… just you. Which strikes me as kind of funny." The Joker leans back, drawing his jacket open and searching in an inside pocket as he lets out a quick, barking laugh. "Not… ha-ha funny. You see, I'm not quite sure how Falcone knew where we were."
Grumbles seems a little dazed, clearly already injured, but even so, he can't miss the dangerous note in his boss's voice. His eyes widen a bit, and he tries to drag himself backwards, away, but the Joker just grabs a fistful of his shirt and jerks him back into place. His hand comes free of his pocket bearing a gleaming blade, which he flicks up against Grumbles' cheek.
The goon knows better than to fight back. Instead, he starts to plead. "Look, boss, I don't… know what happened, I don't know how—they found us, but you gotta believe me, I didn't—"
The Joker laughs in his face, cutting him off. "I gotta? I don't have a choice?"
"No—no, I didn't mean—"
The Joker looks sharply back over his shoulder at me. "What do you think, Em? Do I gotta?"
I stare back at him, shrugging dispassionately. "I don't care."
His forehead creases; he frowns in mock confusion. "Well, that's not right. You always care, Emma."
"No, I don't," I say sharply. When he doesn't respond, doesn't look away, I spread my hands. "I get to decide when I care, okay? And right now, I don't. You said earlier, your goons are bad men. I know Falcone's guys are bad, so as far as I'm concerned, you can all just kill each other. I'm sick and tired of trying to intervene."
"Well, then," the Joker purrs, sounding like Christmas has come early. He snaps his head back around to Grumbles, who starts to panic.
"No—no! How do you know it wasn't her? Everyone's seen the news; we all know she's not with you because she wants to be—"
"Shhhh," the Joker hisses, whipping the knife up and dragging it deep across the goon's forehead, and as Grumbles lets loose a bloodcurdling scream, he stands, pacing a few feet away, towards me. Grumbles drags himself upright, back against the wall, and as blood pours down into his eyes, the Joker arrives at my side and takes my hand.
"Just to, uh, ease your concerns," he says clearly over the henchman's panicked, yelping gasps, "Emma here would never sell me out to a crime-mongering little weasel like Falcone, even if she had the chance—which she hasn't. I mean, look at her."
"I—I can't—see," chokes out Grumbles, trying to scrub the blood out of his eyes—a futile effort; it's pouring freely from the wide gash in his head and dripping thickly and constantly back down into them.
"Oh?" The Joker sounds disappointed, looking from Grumbles to me and back again, then shrugging. "Well, just take my word for it. She's an angel. Well," he adds as an afterthought, "maybe a fallen angel, now, or falling, but even so." His grip tightens on my hand; he lifts my arm, looking down the length of it at me, and I can't tell if what I'm seeing is some sort of twisted affection or it's just the look a fox gives the hen seconds before lunging forward and breaking her neck. His words certainly seem meant more for me than his frightened goon, low and warm as he says, "Turning me in to Falcone means she might lose me, and she couldn't handle that… could she?"
My lips part. I stare at him, feeling the deadness in my eyes, and my tone lacks vehemence as I tell him, "Your ego is terrifyingly huge."
A wicked spark flashes in his eyes, and I can see half a dozen punchlines parading behind them, but he just drops my hand and returns to Grumbles, stooping down in front of him and prying his hands away from his face. "So," he continues, sounding almost kind, "you see, it couldn't have been her. All the arrows point to you, unfortunately—the only survivor of this little… unpleasantness."
"I didn't," sobs Grumbles, trying to pull free of the Joker's grip, "I didn't do it, boss, I swear I didn't…"
"Ohh, hush, now," says the Joker, leaning in close. "If it's any consolation, I am in a hurry, so at least it'll be fast."
"No—" Grumbles shrieks, tearing his hands away in a burst of panicked strength and grabbing for his gun, but the Joker catches his wrist, at the same time wedging his gloved fingers into the gash on his henchman's forehead, tearing tissue and sending fresh blood cascading down his face. Grumbles screams, locking up in pain, and in another second the Joker has seized his gun and put a bullet into his head. The blood and brains spatter the wall behind him, followed rapidly by his head, snapping back against the plaster and marring the spray. Even before he starts to slump, the Joker has dropped the gun and is rising to his feet.
"Come on," he says, glancing briefly at me and pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to clean the blood from his gloves. "We gotta go."
As I stare at what used to be Grumbles, a thought belatedly occurs to me. Quietly, I ask, "If he's the one who sold you out, then why was he here tonight?"
He doesn't answer me, so with difficulty, I pry my eyes from the body and focus on him. He's idly rubbing the cloth over his gloves, mouth turned slightly downward in concentration. I go on: "If he expected you to die, he'd know there wouldn't be any repercussions for not showing up. Why would he come here knowing that he was just walking into a bloodbath, knowing that he could easily get caught in the crossfire?"
"He wouldn't," the Joker says genially, finishing his task and dropping the handkerchief to the floor. I watch it drift downwards, stained almost entirely red by Grumbles' blood, and then look back up at the Joker. He's watching me patiently, and once he's sure he's got my attention again, he says, "Time to go."
I still feel the strange calm, and I shake my head. "No."
The Joker tilts his head, looking faintly skeptical, like he's not sure he heard me. "No?"
"You go on, if you want to, but I'm staying here."
The disbelieving look shifts to a decidedly more dangerous one, and in three quick strides, he's reached me, standing in front of me but not touching me even as he thrusts his head down and forward into my personal space—and still, I don't recoil. "Listen… ah, Em. I know the first shootout can be hard. Hmm? It's not that I don't understand—but believe me," he adds, reaching up idly to clutch at my chin, making damn sure that I'm paying attention, "after all that noise, things are about to get a lot livelier around here, and we need to leave before that happens. I mean, I'm not asking you to just get over it." He pauses, and then shrugs. "Actually, I'm not asking you at all. We're going now."
He steps away, taking my wrist as he goes. I take a deep breath and plant my feet.
Naturally, he doesn't get far before my arm locks up, and the force of his pull tips me forward a bit, but I more or less remain braced in place. He pauses for a second before spinning around and coming back towards me. I get roughly a half-second in which to register that he has no intention of stopping in front of me before his hand closes over my throat and he's driving me back, and I can either move backwards with the force of him or allow him to knock me down again. The memory of the last time I was on my back with his hands around my throat is uncomfortably near, and so I find myself moving quickly back as he pushes, crossing the room in a matter of seconds. I hit the wall hard and he takes one more step forward, leaving an inch or two between us but effectively hemming me in.
His hand at my throat squeezes, and I hiss as the pressure pulls a flare of pain from the injured flesh, but he doesn't take the time to revel in it. His face eats up my vision, lips hitched back, and he snarls, "Apparently, you've got the wrong idea. Stop me if I'm wrong, but… you seem to believe that, uh, what—that I've got some kind of investment in your life; that for some reason, I won't kill you."
Something cold slips beneath the hem of my shirt, and I don't have time to wonder before a sharp edge is pushing against my stomach, just above the navel, rough, serrated by the feel of it, not cutting but still painful.
The Joker tilts his head closer, and his eyes are burning with that deathly light again. "And sure, at the moment, keeping you alive makes the game more interesting. It gives our hero something to fight for." His eyelids flutter, half-closing in what looks like a spasm of pleasure, and suddenly the blade digs into my skin, cutting upwards in a sharp line of fire, and I yelp at the pain. The hand around my throat shoots up to press hard instead against my mouth, shoving my lips painfully against my teeth.
"But don't think," he continues calmly, "not for one second, that I won't just gut you here instead. You know, a martyr can be just as good a cause as a distressed damsel." To prove his point, he twists the blade a little, cutting deeper, not yet stabbing but certainly threatening.
"It's the season of giving, though, so I'll be, um, generous… and give you the choice. You can stop fussing, stop arguing, and obey me fully from now on—or I can cut you open and yank out all yer little entrails right here and now, squish-splash, and leave you for the hero to find."
I feel sick. For all my resistance, both active and passive, for all of my former surety that my death at this point in the game would be a loss for him and therefore somehow worth it… when faced with the reality of the choice, I'm not brave enough to let him just end it here. Maybe it's the gruesomeness of the painful death he's describing, maybe it's the reality of the blood welling up at the fresh wound in my stomach, but I can't bring myself to let go.
His hand is still at my mouth, so I drop my eyes and just nod the best I can, defeated. The knife travels back down again, deepening the cut, and a whimper sounds from high in my throat, without my permission. When I look up again, his face has taken on a new expression, watery-eyed and inscrutable, and I think he isn't actually giving me a choice; he's going to open me up and leave me here no matter what.
Then, his head twitches just a bit, as though he's shaking off a fog. The blade lifts from my stomach, and I hear a wet click as he folds the knife shut. "Come on," he mutters, and his hand leaves my mouth to grab my wrist. He turns away and I follow him without resistance.
A/N - (sheepish wave) Hey, there. So normally I don't allow... nearly a month to go by without updating, but in my defense, it has been a fairly busy and exhausting almost-month. I just hope I haven't lost your interest and/or investment, and also that you'll forgive me if I promise not to let that span of time pass again before I update next.
A very cool thing- faithful reader/reviewer/artist deideiblueeyez put forth a delightful fanart take on Emma. I've linked to it in my profile and you should go check it out, because it's wonderful and I never get tired of seeing Emma outside of my own mind. Thank you very much; I'm tremendously flattered!
I'm having a lot of fun sneaking in references to other Batman media here and there, and you haven't seen the last of them. It distracts me from the soul-crushing guilt I feel when the Joker is awful, which is, let's face it, all the time. So. With the end of this chapter, we enter the third and final act of the story. Expect, as always, more bad behavior and an increasingly dangerous spiral towards violence and instability as Emma and the Joker work to make sure Christmas arrives right on time for Alberto Falcone (and Batman, for that matter). In the meantime, leave impressions, theories, and feedback of any sort in the box below, and I will see you again shortly!