Chapter Text
Red. Everything around him was red. Red and gleaming and polished. Not quite dark enough to be as red as blood, but as red as scarlet poppies– his shape, the thick black bud inside of the bloom. There wasn’t a face looking back at him, not that he could see through the metal– no, not until the very last second. He had inevitably caught a fleeting glimpse of it, however, of a chin and a mouth, agape in fear as the man in front of him fell backwards, the flimsy railing behind him giving way beneath his– admittedly slight– weight. Then– a great splash that he had hurried over to try to witness, but the gunfire wouldn’t let him. He would have helped, if only they had let him.
Bruce awoke in his bed, on a morning soon after the start of his career as Batman, to find himself more frustrated than anything. It wasn’t normal for him to dream, or, more accurately, it wasn’t normal for his dreams to run away without him. He was in control of his mind, always. He had to be. It was just another tool in his arsenal– on his belt. It helped him to solve cases, to put the pieces together that he couldn’t whilst awake. But he didn’t have any need for what had been playing out in his subconscious, he had solved that particular case almost a year ago, whether officially or not. Everyone involved had long since been arrested– everyone except for that one obvious outlier. The man that got away.
But he was dead. He had to be dead.
He had to be, because the only other explanation stabbed a cold spike of chill through his heart. That he had survived, that his first major failure had come back to haunt him in the worst ways imaginable– as his own personal demon.
Nothing had ever come up linking the Joker to that man concretely, neither him nor Bruce had ever let mention of the incident slip in conversation, casual or otherwise, but he knew it to be true. He found it hard to deny when all of the evidence was staring him right in the face and grinning like it knew something he didn’t. No– like it knew what he did. It wasn’t his fault, but Joker never had any qualms with trying to convince him otherwise. Maybe he truly believed it was– that the Batman had come along one night and forced an innocent man over the edge, in a highly literal sense.
Bruce breathed steady, legs swung over the edge of his mattress as the sun began to rise. Alfred would be awake soon, if he wasn’t already, to tend to the manor and to him. To cook and to serve him his breakfast with all of the care and loyalty that he could ever ask for and that he had come to expect. The thought was already clouding over his worries, pushing them to the side– for later. He would think about it later.
Later happened to come crashing down on him at the worst time– or perhaps the most fitting. He had been standing in the centre of a swarm of unblinking red lights, menacing indicators of his impending doom, when the thought had occurred to him again. Red, bleeding into his vision, like the light catching the helmet, followed aptly by that equally menacing and theatrical shriek of; “See you in hell, batsy!” A death like that would have been fitting. One big bang and then nothing– a tattered and bloodied cloak pinned underneath a pile of rubble. But he didn’t die, because he can’t, not so long as he chooses to keep on living, for better or for worse.
He lived to see Joker’s cold body on the metal table one last time before it was cremated, he lived to watch as the warm glow of the chamber draped over his corpse like a blanket and he lived to feel the sense of emptiness that had come once all was said and done. Afterwards, he became stuck in a simpler loop than usual. Wake up, go to work, come home, suit up, patrol, come home again, but don’t go to bed, stay up puzzling and listening. Listening to everything that he had left behind. Calls, threats, songs. Private performances for Batman and only Batman. He would have liked to think that they were for the man beneath the mask, but he knew they weren’t, because Joker had never cared about him. Joker had never even known him– not to his knowledge.
“Only you.” Was a sentiment that he would be ashamed to admit he had fallen asleep to once or twice, or perhaps a few more times than that, lulled by its simplicity and sincerity– and familiarity. Even the pangs of sympathy he felt when the Joker’s illness had forced him to pause mid line and cough into the microphone were strangely soothing. They made it feel real, like he was there in the cave with him, not dead but alive and calm, weakened but still himself. Singing to him. In the dark.
The air in the cave was always a cool breeze on those nights, washing over his body like a healing balm– keeping his inner workings from overheating. As his eyes closed, he could feel his heartbeat slowing and his breaths opening up a space in his chest and head. As if his lungs and brain had disappeared completely, leaving behind only his heart and a feeling of pure elation, so light that he could have floated. Bliss. Oblivion. What would await him, if only he’d stop fighting.
Waking up had always been a disappointment for him– but it became more of one after Joker died. Nights were near uneventful, if not entirely devoid of conflict or reason to be out in them in the first place, at least, by his standards. Friends would often be there to try to make him feel better– offering to share the meagre burden that the city had to give with him, to take the weight off of his shoulders– because they knew that he felt guilty and not just about Talia. But, he wasn’t sure if they fully understood– how could they? Joker was a mass murderer, an insane man hellbent on destroying everything good and pure that still found itself hiding within Gotham’s walls. Though, a necessary evil for him. His monster. It was a selfish thought, but Diana hadn’t exactly been wrong, and he couldn't escape it.
None of them had been wrong. Not Diana, Clark, Hal– or even other criminals– when they had told him that Joker would have been better off dead. They had not been lying or exaggerating in the slightest. He wanted to die and the world wanted him dead, it was only Bruce who seemed to have a problem with that happening. His code would never have allowed for it and that, similarly, had been the truth– at least, part of it. The part that sounded somewhat sane, the part that made other people respect him and stop to consider his life philosophy. It makes sense , they would think, Gotham has seen its fair share of bloodshed already . Or, if they knew his secret identity, they would replace their Gotham concerns with concerns surrounding his childhood. It makes sense, considering what he went through – citing the trauma as the cause for this pattern of behaviour, as if it were somehow irrational. It very well could be irrational, it could be a fruitless endeavour– a different type of insanity– but it is his and he isn’t going to give it up for anything.
His convictions are what make him, they’re more man than he could ever be by himself.
A rich orphan boy ignoring a dried-up well of hollow sympathy and wilfully destroying himself in an attempt to rebuild himself anew?– it was objectively pathetic. The only saving graces being the results. The power and control, the ability to influence and shape the things around him and his own life, the kind of fantasy that had seemed so far out of reach to him as a child.
The stoicism and the disconnect from emotion that came from it had always been there, unsurprisingly, aggravated by grief and years of training. The most he allowed himself to feel now was anger and when that wasn’t an option, micro doses of amusement, surprise and unease. Privately and with loved ones, there was also happiness and sadness, but everything felt far too real for him to indulge in those sentiments for long.
There was a protective fog over his lived experience, and for good reason. Without it, without his carefully-constructed coping methods and the padlocks on doors nestled deep within the cracks inside of his brain, he would be a mess. A mess of pure guilt and sadness and bitter fondness. He would be– manic. Manic depressive, to be neurotic and precise about it. A little outdated, too, though that is what Alfred would call it and Alfred was the one who raised him.
He barely remembers his parents in any detail, despite them being his entire life, the reason for his mission. He remembers certain things, of course, like his mother’s favourite mink coat and perfume and his father’s best suits and aftershave, but who they truly were deep down– he had no idea– and still doesn’t. No matter how old he got, he still had only a child’s understanding of them, he only knew them as mother and father, not Martha and Thomas. The names etched into their gravestones.
He could imagine bony white fingers gripping the top of one of them, thin legs draped in purple and pinstripes sitting crossed on the stone between the hands of the man that they belonged to. Rain, pouring down over the shape of the grave but not onto him. It went through him like he was made of light– a hologram.
Despite himself, he was silent.
When Bruce had gone to visit his parents’ graves some days before his final hours as Batman, he had been there, but he was silent. Smiling, only out of habit. It had been his own defence mechanism, like the spines on a cactus, fangs bared in a show of aggression and cruelty even when he meant no harm. Although, it could be argued that he had always intended to harm someone.
Bruce paid him no heed. He was obviously a hallucination, the first sign of his body’s decline, of the illness metastasising in his veins. He left his flowers and then he turned away from him, taking his appearance as the motivation that he needed to perform a blood test on himself– which confirmed his suspicions– and led to an entirely new kind of nightmare, both real and not. Nights of tracking down others who had been infected and nights of dreaming about the blood taking over, of killing his family. Dick, Tim, Jason’s screams and his pleading, his begging for anyone to hear him, to save him. His cries for his mother, the woman who had left him all alone, to simply appear. To walk into that wing of Arkham and tell him that everything would be okay, that he was her son and that she’d pull him out of where he was. That she still loved him.
No one came, of course. Not her, not Batman, not anyone. He died there, for all Bruce knew and another had taken his place. He had tried not to feel guilty about it, he had tried to push it down, but he couldn’t get rid of the feeling entirely. The weaker his body got, the easier it became for his mind to follow suit.
But, much to his chagrin, he still had work to do, he couldn’t slow down for anyone– especially not the patients who were going through the same thing he was. The four unlucky souls whom Joker’s blood had gotten to before he was able to stop it. They needed his help and he needed them to find a cure for himself.
Eventually, he had decided to start sleeping in his own bed again. Falling asleep in his chair wasn’t doing him any good, and he had already committed every single memento that Joker had left him to memory. He could have played his messages back in his mind any time he pleased, listening to them first-hand would have proven redundant for some time. His voice remained as clear as day in Bruce’s head, as did his visage. Joker would be immortal so long as Bruce still lived.
That was what he had been assuming, up until that one fateful night. The night the Batman died.
Scarecrow’s fear toxin had worsened his hallucinations during the takeover– made them uncanny, lifelike and surreal in their accuracy and detail. Joker’s coattails had swayed and rippled with the wind, his voice had drifted all around Bruce’s head– a convincing auditory trick, surely not helped by the fact that he’d dutifully committed it to memory during those long nights in the cave. But he found that he could always tell when something was off. He had no bones when put through the scanners in Bruce’s contact lenses, his quirks and gestures were sometimes unconvincing– clear imitations and not the real thing– and there wasn’t even a single blemish on his skin. It wasn’t Joker. It was a malicious entity– a virus eating away at Bruce’s organs that wore his face. One that he’d swiftly knocked down and locked away.
It had been cathartic to pretend that it was him, however– that when he had pushed it into that metal box and sent it away to the solitary confinement within his subconscious, he’d been doing the same to the real Joker. The rattling of the mechanism overhead marked the end of the grieving process. Finally, it was over. He could at last stop thinking about him and move on with his life, the one that he no longer had.
The world had found out who he was and for that he’d had to die, but that turn of events had also given him the opportunity to be reborn anew, as a ghost, a shadow, a phantom in the night, an urban legend even more effective than he had been in the flesh– free from his thoughts and purified by the fire.
Rain fell from the sky, on a night soon after his supposed death, wetting the concrete as he crouched down to meet it, his hand turning the nozzle on a canister of fear gas– a blend of his own creation– and flooding the contents into a container attached to his hip. Encouragement, he liked to call it. A reason to still fear The Bat.
The night was quiet except for the strained squeak of the valve, not loosened by the downpour, but not especially difficult for him to turn, either. Everything was still, so he let himself slip into a kind of catharsis, quarter-asleep while he finished the job.
Which is why it didn’t register at first, the sharp change in temperature, the chill running up his spine. The sensation of a pair of eyes lingering upon his back, watching him.
When he’d realised that someone else was on the roof with him, he didn’t react. He didn’t flinch. He shut off the flow of gas and straightened his posture, listening– feeling for any signs of movement. But his senses found none, only the answer of the wet, biting, cold of the sea breeze, howling and whipping across his exposed jaw. He turned back to look, and again, found nothing but the night.
Stress . He set the word up like a dam against the well of emotions building inside his chest, following it with further rationalisations. Some of the toxin must have slipped out– it happens . Beguiles the senses . He knows it very well.
But then, he also knows that he had felt something so real only seconds after those thoughts had formed, that it almost broke the dam and made his heart stop beating. The world went dark for him as what felt like a hand penetrated his armoured defences and sank right down to his bare skin. It was cold and clammy, yet also strangely warm and soft. It felt like a freezer burn, without the pain. No… No pain or discomfort. Just a strange tingling sensation that hovered over him like smoke. All of this for a split second– and then it was gone. Bruce gasped out a breath he wasn’t aware he had been holding, his entire arm twitching as it tried to make up its mind on where to go. Should he hold his heart or his head? That seemed to always be the question.
“Who’s there?” He sank into his lower register, his back to the canister. “Show yourself.” The familiar growl in his voice helped to steel his nerves and stuff his anxiety back down, somewhere deep inside of himself. Though, evidently, nowhere near deep enough, as when the temperature around him once again plummeted all too suddenly, his heart did the same, sinking like an anchor in water down to his stomach.
The supernatural had never been something that he’d liked to think about, despite all of the evidence he had been presented with over the years that went towards proving its existence. Magic, demons, zombies and vampires– all of them did exist– as much as he would have preferred them not to. But he could always find some way of explaining them away in more scientific terms. Magic was mostly illusory and when it wasn’t, it was the fault of some chemical reaction within a person’s body. Demons were simply creatures from a parallel dimension, whom all of the magical sciences still applied to. Zombies and vampires? The fault of viruses and mutations.
One thing that he had never truly been able to explain away, to himself or to others, however, was ghosts.
Ghosts shouldn’t exist. There has never been any concrete evidence for them to, not a single person in recorded human history has ever been able to make a convincing case. They’re all smoke and mirrors, lens smudges, light refracting, natural magnetic fields shifting, hallucinations. Nothing physical, nothing real. But he couldn’t ignore what he had just felt. He couldn’t ignore the fact that he was outside and the air was so cold that it was condensing his breaths, when before there had only been a cool breeze brushing past his skin. He couldn’t ignore the fact that someone or some thing had just touched him.
It also became quickly evident that his eyes weren't able to ignore the figure slowly taking shape in front of him on the roof, between the raindrops and the nightlights of the city. It seemed to pull the clouds out of the sky into it, the vapour circling and spiralling towards the centre of the outline of a person– a man. A man who was there, but all mist. A pale man in a familiar suit, with familiarly brittle acid-washed hair. Bruce felt a great sense of impending dread mixed up with a cloying calm, his heart doing things he didn’t know it could do. He could see a smile, though he wasn’t sure exactly how.
It stood as still as something ever-shifting can, clearly looking right at him, with eyes that Bruce knew were so wide that it would have been painful, had he been alive.
He tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come, his attempts at voicing his thoughts all ending with his throat catching. It took all of his will not to choke. Not real. It’s not real. Something in him appeared to be reaching its breaking point. I got rid of you. The voice within him wasn’t rational, calm or collected, it was screaming– shouting. It was angry, furious and panicking. It was making his eyes water.
No.
His entire body was vibrating, his knees felt weak, the concrete beneath his feet not so solid anymore. It jumped up to meet his face and only stopped when he was kneeling, head and arms hanging limp and low. The rain ran over his cowl, tapping on it softly as if asking to be let in.
Seconds passed him by and quickly turned into minutes, what felt like almost an hour before he heard a voice by his ear muse “I have to say, this wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting from you.” Where there would have been a fettered cough to hold back his words and punctuate the end of his sentences in life, there was now nothing. Nothing but that smooth hum there that had always been before his illness, his words purring at the back of his throat. Bruce could feel that the rain was no longer the only thing tapping a rhythm along his cowl.
“Rough night?” Bruce could hear the smile in his voice– the laughter threatening to spill over his lips. He didn’t know how to respond. “You are looking a lot more run-down than I remembered you. Did something good happen while I was busy rotting? I always manage to miss out on all of the fun when I go on vacation.”
His phantom nails had started drawing circles across Bruce’s cowl then, creating a sound that he could feel in his bones. Joker seemed to be suppressing the urge to talk further, out of some want or emotion that Bruce had been unable to pinpoint at the time. “You’re dead” he finally managed to speak, as flat and even as possible.
Joker didn’t laugh. “That I am, bats. That I am.” He went back to tapping.
“You’re dead.” Bruce repeated, softer, absently aware that his posture had slumped further, yet equally unaware of the fact that his words had come out scratchy and broken and not at all intimidating or composed.
Joker’s fingers slowed their pace, contemplative.
“You’re dead.” Bruce continued, stuck in a loop like a broken record. “Dead.” He was trying to affirm it to himself, will the ghost away. “Dead.” Again, hushed, as the light pressure atop his cowl vanished. Hope reeled his heart back in, he let it. A foolish mistake.
He pried his gaze away from the concrete and looked up, only to be met with the same wide green eyes, staring at him curiously, with just a little less malice in them than he had remembered them having in life. “Finally gone round the bend have you? The bat’s flying in loops?” Joker rolled his scrawny wrist around by his temple, pointing to it in an illustrative gesture. “It figures you’d choose now of all times to let go.” He tutted. “I bet you’re only doing it to spite me. Very funny.” Bitterness quickly crept its way into his tone. “Let’s all laugh at the dead guy!” He yelled, meandering off to the side and proclaiming his words to the city, though no one but Bruce was able to hear.
The familiar drone of Joker’s voice became background noise for Bruce’s thoughts, of which there were many. He sorted through them, neatly enough, to regain control over his body and stand on his own two feet again, watching.
“What fun is haunting you going to be if no one’s home up there?” He continued to whine. “Worse yet– what if I can’t even do anything to you? What if all I can do is talk and be a generally frustrating presence? I’ve never tried to possess anything before– lord knows I would have, had the thought ever crossed my mind and I’d been in a position to do it.” Joker flapped his hands about and let his head bounce along the intonations weaving their way through his speech, his spirit still as strong and energetic as ever.
Bruce snuck up on him and unabashedly stuck a gauntlet into his incorporeal form while he was preoccupied with his own not-so-private thoughts, causing him to freeze for a beat before grumbling disapprovingly. “You know, you really should warn a guy before you do something like that. I’m not sure how stable my current… Situation is, exactly.” He leered down at the hand sticking out of his chest, quietly concerned, even afraid, before it saw fit to retreat. His form sewed itself back up once it was gone, in wisps of pale and purple smoke. Bruce held his wrist and shifted his gauntlet back and forth subtly, as if clicking it back into place, despite the mesh beneath it hugging perpetually tight to his skin.
He was still finding it difficult to form words– coherent sentences– ones that weren’t simple, stunned admittances of the reality he had found himself in. Joker was still dead, yet somehow also with him, on top of a roof in the city, walking around and animated, droplets of rain illuminated by the neons shining through him like precious stones. Diamonds. Frozen diamonds.
Joker caught him staring, head turned over his shoulder, eyes meeting Bruce’s own, the city reflected back in them, alert and predatory. In contrast, Bruce’s were tired, very tired, a fatigue that was not only bone-deep, but soul-deep as well. Exhausted couldn’t even begin to describe it.
Joker twitched, briefly, as if stung by it– bothered, at least. ”You really have gone crazy, haven’t you?” He began cautiously, eyes narrowing. “What happened? Tell me! And don’t skimp on the details.” An eager grin stretched itself across his face, jaws grinding out his words in an uncanny way.
Bruce shook his head gently, the movement stilted by instinct. Batman shouldn’t respond like that. He should speak a clear and firm ‘no’, all stoic and mysterious. His internal monologue was less of his own at that moment and more shards of memories, like mirror glass, shoddily pieced together in place of it, to serve the same purpose whilst it recovered.
“Where were you?” The question felt entirely natural for him to ask.
“What?” Joker’s face fell in confusion and frustration, a frown to his features that almost made Bruce feel some kind of warmth.
“Where did you go?” He asked again before Joker could interrupt, unable to keep up the growl or speak with his usual projection. It didn’t matter, it was just them up there, after all. Them and the vague awareness he had– that this line of questioning was making him sound like an abandoned puppy seeking comfort from its owner.
Joker softened imperceptibly, looking him over. “Nowhere. Purgatory.” He sounded oddly defensive about it.
Bruce gave a low grunt of acknowledgement, eyes still fixed on Joker’s ghost. Transfixed. He watched Joker bristle underneath the weight of his gaze, scanning him up and down, equally as curious. “Why? Did one of your new sweethearts bite the dust?– again? Want to know if she’s singing with the angels or boiling alive in the devil’s big cauldron?” He paused, briefly, as if catching his breath, though he had none to catch. “Well, I didn’t see any bombshell blondes where I was dropped. Not too many bombshell assassins either, a distinct lack of women. So, unless you were dating the far reaches of space, I can’t help you.”
Then, something occurred to Joker that brightened his disposition up with morbid intrigue. “It was Selina wasn’t it? I always knew that cat’s lives were going to run out sooner or later. Who did it? Harvey? Oswald? One of her little friends?” He chuckled to himself, and the sound made every part of Bruce feel alive.
“No.” He answered. “I just wanted to know.”
That same frown pulled Joker’s features down again. “Careful now. It’s starting to sound like you might have actually missed me.”
Bruce didn’t object and Joker’s frown quickly shifted into equal parts surprise and contempt. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to.
“You’re joking.” He stated it as fact, voice dangerously low and as sharp as knives. “You know better.” He added, scolding Bruce like a child, who, strangely, accepted it, looking away with his guilt hanging uncomfortably in the air between them. Joker’s face fell entirely then, unreadable. The sound of rain engulfed them both for a long while, as did the rain itself, sheets of it falling from the heavens, almost hardening into tiny crystals of hail when in Joker’s proximity. Bruce felt him reach out a gloved hand and poke a finger at his nose, into his face, in an accusatory manner. It wasn’t at all solid, but there was something to it, some foreign weight that he had never felt before, something not of his dimension, alongside freezer burn, again.
Bruce tried reaching up to grab it– and, strangely, succeeded– able to hold Joker’s hand and move it away from his face, much to both of their surprises. The moment he tried to grip it any tighter, however, it eluded his grasp and his fingers fell through whatever Joker’s ghost was made up of. Joker held the hand in front of his own face and stared past its transparent shape to look at Batman. “I can already feel you getting ideas. Don’t tell me you’ve got a Batvacuum on your belt.” He cringed, half-expecting such a thing to actually exist.
“I don’t.” Bruce put his mind at ease, staring at his palm like he’d been expecting to find some sort of ghostly residue there. Ectoplasm, isn’t that what all the movies say?
Joker made a sound like a disgruntled cow, hoarse in annoyance. “You still haven’t answered my question. What happened to you? Why are you suddenly so limp and useless?” Where’s the pep in your step? The Pez in your dispenser?
“You haven’t been here.” Was all Bruce said in defence of himself for the moment, balling his hand up into a loose fist. “Not really.”
The last minute clarification made Joker’s gaze turn suspicious. “Not really? .. How was I there?”
Bruce fell silent, his mouth worrying itself ever so slightly in consideration of Joker’s simultaneously inquisitive and knowing tone. “You weren’t.” He tried to choose his words carefully. “But even in death, you were able to influence a great deal of people.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.
“Yes, yes. I’m sure.” Joker tossed away what he had taken as praise with practised bravado. “That doesn’t exactly answer my question though, bats. You know I’d be able to understand whatever trauma you went through if you’d only clue me in. Hell, I’ve probably been through the same thing myself.” He punctuated the thought with a string of bright chuckles that quickly soured. “So quit stalling and tell me already.”
Bruce quelled the urge to shake his head again, his hackles and defences rising back up to the surface. “It doesn’t matter, and it’s none of your concern.” Thunder clouds had begun forming in his head, crackling and unpleasant. He turned his back on Joker, his cape flourishing itself for him, and started to walk away from his ghost. “Go back to wherever you came from, Joker.”
Joker knew very well what this was. Damage control. An abrasive form of comfort, like a blanket woven from steel wool fibres. “Don’t be such a baby.” He scoffed. “If all of this is just because you missed me…” He called out to Bruce, his speech trailing off for only a second, though when it came to Joker, seconds felt more like hours. “You only had to say so.” The grin in his voice was palpable and goading, but Bruce didn’t fall for it. He kept walking until he was running and jumping over to the next building, then the next, then another. He covered a fair amount of distance before deciding to land, perched atop the roof of a thinner and taller stack of apartments. The rain showed no sign of stopping.
“Peekaboo.” Bruce knew that he hadn’t managed to get away, even before he’d heard Joker’s menacing rasp behind him. “It looks like somebody hasn’t read the ghost handbook.” He sing-songed, the steady tap of his phantom footsteps growing louder and louder before falling away at Bruce’s back. Bruce could feel Joker’s cold, dead breath on his skin– his suit doing little to protect him from it– and it gave him goosebumps.
“Go away.” Bruce grit his teeth, mindful of the pressure he put on them, even in his anger.
“We both know that isn’t going to be happening any time soon.” Joker crept his way past every syllable that left his mouth, guiding them all directly into Bruce’s ear like a piper, until they had gathered to become a venomous whisper. “So why don’t you just sit down and tell Uncle Joker all about it.”