![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficTitle: Duality
Fandom: Nolanverse Batman, Superman Returns
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,611
Characters/Pairings: Bruce Wayne, the Joker, Tim Drake, Harvey Dent, Barbara Gordon.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
damo_in_japan for betaing this.
Previous Part: Chapter 10
Next Part: Chapter 12
Summary: Barbara Gordon is no hero. But maybe Batgirl can be.
Dinah had sold her out. The motorcycle’s tank had nothing but fumes in it. Barbara had to walk the bike to the nearest gas station and stand around looking like an idiot while she pumped. She could only put five bucks’ worth in the tank, too, because she had only brought pocket change. Maybe she should’ve included a purse in her ensemble. Batman probably had a Bat-credit card in his utility belt.
By the time she’d traveled the fair distance between Gotham city limits and the Wayne mansion, the party was in full swing. Barbara saw a man carrying two garbage bags out. They were slack at the neck and heavy at the bottom. The guy carrying them was dressed like one of the Three Stooges, Moe, but he swaggered like he was carrying.
Under her cowl, sweat coursed over Barbara’s skin. She killed the engine and hid the bike in the woods. Then, she jumped the fence into Wayne’s place. She landed, light as a cat, and made no noise. Thank you, gymnastics class. Then Barbara started creeping toward the house itself. Every nerve in her body was shouting that this was a bad idea. Moe was throwing the garbage bags into the front seat of a minivan. Barbara head them jangle metallically when they landed. Then she stepped on a twig.
Barbara heard, felt, Moe tense. They were forty feet apart, solar lights on the ground casting staccato lights against the pitch-black night. She was in the darkness between two lamps. She hit the deck, trying to hide as much of her costume’s bright highlights as possible… holding an arm over her yellow chest-symbol and stuffing her cape behind her prone body, holding her body absolutely still, not even breathing…
Moe pulled open his jacket, revealing the ugly broken-nature shape of a gun in a shoulder holster like her father’s. With a hand on the pistol grip, he scrutinized the darkness. His thumb tapped the hammer as his head swiveled.
“Alright, I see you, come out.”
Barbara suppressed a whimper.
“Come into the light or I’ll shoot you.”
She would’ve, but she couldn’t move.
“Listen, dude, I’m not playing.”
Dude?
He thought she was a man. Or he was just bluffing. Barbara bit her lip so hard it hurt, but she didn’t move an inch. Not one inch.
Was this what a lightning rod felt like, waiting to be struck? She could feel the gun on her, like a spotlight, burning hotter and hotter until there was finally an explosion. What an utterly stupid way to die. Shot to death in the dark while cross-dressing in a Batman costume. Barbara Gordon, valedictorian, bled out on the front yard of Gotham’s most eligible bachelor. It’d be scandalous if it weren’t so terrifying. At least it wouldn’t hurt, if she was shot. There’d be a brief flash of pain then she’d go into shock. That’s how her father had described it. After shock came death by exsanguination, and that was just like falling to sleep. Just like.
Moe laughed to himself and went back inside. Barbara’s heart started beating again. She stood on rubber-band legs and staggered her way to one of the huge windows looking into the mansion. Inside, all the costumed guests were cowering like extras in a monster movie. The Stooges stood at strategic vantage points, covering the vast room with their submachine guns. Curly herded the cooks and waiters out of the kitchen at gunpoint. They took their seats as audience to the center tableau.
A man… a ghoulish, creepy presence wearing the shape of a man… had a boy practically in his lap, gun locked in their hands. It was aimed at her father.
Barbara ran as fast as her legs could carry her, back to the woods. She must’ve broken a land speed record. She flung her legs astride the motorcycle, gunned the engine, floored it. The tires ripped through turf and gravel as she accelerated as fast as Dinah’s bike would allow. Dinah was a gearhead. Her bike could allow plenty.
The window was a target, she was an arrow. 50 MPH, 50, 70, 80. Good traction, too. She hit a solar light and launched the bike into the air. Gravity was for mortals as she arced toward the window. Glass shattered under her front tire, showered over her windshield, streaked past her face like crystal bullets.
She rammed Joker, a glancing blow so as not to crush his hostage too. The Joker prat-fell over the windshield, flying over Barbara’s hunched shoulders. Tim hit the deck and everyone started shooting.
Bruce tackled Moe to the ground, sending his revolver skittering across the floor. Harvey caught it, scooped it up, and fired all six cylinders into Larry. He wanted to stop at just one, but every time he paused he saw a flash of that animal brutalizing his wife and he squeezed the trigger again… and again… and again…
The gun clicked empty, leaving blue gunsmoke heavy in the air. Through the haze, the most vivid thing was the pool of blood spreading out of the dead criminal. Harvey numbly lowered the weapon. Nearby, Bruce was repeatedly cracking Moe’s head against the tile floor.
Curly had opened up with his SMG, trying to tag Batgirl. She leapt from her bike and skitched, hanging off the side of the bike with her feet on the ground like a skier. The bullets ricocheted off the motorcycle’s tank, which served as cover for her. At least until it ran into buffet table, catapulting Batgirl through an elaborate champagne glass pyramid.
Her motorcycle continued through the table, having reduced one end of it to splinters. It fell over and went into a skid, kicking up sparks. One hit the fuel leaking from its tank. The bike exploded and the screaming fireball scattered the hostages before ramming the wall, lighting the drapes on fire.
“Oh, bloody hell, not again,” Alfred said as he hit Moe with a candlestick. The Stooge had been starting to rise.
“Alfred,” Bruce said, a touch of franticness in his voice, before he grabbed Larry’s pistol and stuffed it into his costume. His mask and hat were off, leaving him chaotically disheveled. “Clean this up.”
He stalked after Joker, who was grabbing Curly by the crock of his arm and dragging him toward the elbow. The action caused Curly’s aim to go awry, blasting a trail of destruction across the wall.
“C’mon, Curly, we’ve overstayed our welcome!” Joker shot a would-be hero in the stomach and elbowed him aside as they stepped into the entrance hall.
Bruce followed them. The long hall had marble floors and walls, with an impossibly long red carpet along the floor and red curtains draping the paired windows that went down the length of the room. The moonlight coming through the tall windows shone between thick pillars. The Joker and Curly were nearly to the door leading out when Bruce lifted the gun and shot Curly through the leg.
He went down, screaming, firing wildly. The Joker neatly sidestepped the blaze of gunfire, which stopped as abruptly as it had began. Out of ammo.
The Joker turned, annoyed, and Bruce shot him in the thigh. He jerked and hopped up and down on one foot, cursing in pain. But not bleeding.
“Nice try, Gay Blade! But do you really think I’d go to a party without dressing the part?” He ripped open his vest. “Kevlar, through and through! So if you want to stop me…” The Joker pressed his finger firmly between his eyes. “Do it. Take it from me, it’s great fun.”
The gun was an ever-growing weight in Bruce’s hands. He hated the thing. Hated what this… clown had reduced him to. But he couldn’t very well use Ducard’s training on them, not without his armor or equipment, not in front of witnesses… not when guns were so much more effective.
“No. You’re going to jail.”
“Ha! I like you. You’re funny. Have we met before?” The Joker frowned, like he was trying to fix an obstinate puzzle piece. “Your face is familiar… but something’s wrong with it, something… pah, who cares!” He turned on his heel. “So long, farewell, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen! I'd like to stay and taste my first champagne…”
“What about me!?” Curly cried.
”What about you? Oh, yes.” He shot Curly through the head.
Bruce screamed so hard the force of it shook him, firing round after impotent round. Each whizzed by the Joker’s smiling face, none so much as parting his hair. The Joker threw open the door even as bullets chipped it, then he calmly turned and raised his gun.
“Great party, isn’t it?”
Bruce felt something tackle him behind a pillar just as an explosion echoed down the hallway. He looked down to see a girl in black sheltering him against the pillar, holding him tight as more bullets sparked against it. Then he heard an engine turn over and the squeal of tires as the Joker roared away.
The girl in the bat-costume let him up, and only propriety kept Bruce from shoving her aside as he ran out the door. In the distance, he could see the taillights of the Joker’s van as it drove out of the manor’s gates.
“Helluva night, huh?” the girl said behind him.
“Hell of a life,” Bruce turned. “Nice costume, Miss…?”
She was gone.
***
The following hours passed like a dream… a nightmare; surreal, feverish. How many times had Bruce’s investigations dovetailed with a crime scene? The interviewing of witnesses, the flashing of cameras, the moating of police tape long after the stronghold had been breached. It was all so familiar; déjà vu. But it always happened to others, never to him. Not since… that night.
In the nightmares, Joe Chill was like the man who laughed, the man who called himself the Joker. Laughing, uncaring, unfeeling… evil. It had taken years for Bruce to come to terms with the fact that the evil he fought hid behind human masks… The Joe Chills of the world had families. Ra’s Al Ghul had a past.
And the Joker had proven him wrong, for everything he’d seen of the clown was incontrovertibly evil.
He watched as the bodies were carted out of his house, of his parents’ house, leaving only blood. His hands twitched with the desire to wipe it away, erase it. Slowly, he walked through an adjacent room, a study. He carried his father’s defaced portrait under his arm, not sure what to do with it. It seemed wrong to leave it to the crime scene technicians in the other room. They’d already photographed this room, where the bullets had punched through. One had shattered the holder of Augustus Wayne’s coin collection, hanging from the wall in a wooden frame. Glass and semi-rare coins were spilled on the floor beneath it.
Harvey was sitting across from it in an armchair, his face wreathed in shadows. One of the EMTs had wreathed him in a dark blanket and stitched up the cuts on his face. Bruce moved to turn on a table lamp and Harvey signaled for him to stop. Bruce left it off. Harvey went back to rubbing his hands over each other.
“GSR. Gunshot residue. You know how many cases I’ve built on gunshot residue? It’s not really gunpowder, not usually. It’s primer. Barium nitrate, lead styphnate, antimony sulfide… they say most of it falls off in two hours, but if you use lotion or cream…”
Bruce set down the painting, looking away from him. “You sound like a man who needs a drink,” he said, opening up a drawer in his desk and pulling out a bottle of scotch.
Harvey grunted and leaned forward, head in his hands. Bruce wasn’t sure how long he would’ve stayed there if he didn’t shake a brandy snifter in front of his face, the ice jangling around. Harvey reached out a hand to take it, then sat back up and had a drink.
“They took Gilda to the hospital. You saw her cough up blood?”
“You should be with her,” Bruce said, not accusingly.
“I can’t. All those tubes and… I can’t look at her like that. She wouldn’t want me to. No. No.”
“Harvey, you’re in shock.”
“Of course I’m in shock. I just killed a man.” Harvey slammed his glass down on the lamp stand. “Didn’t hesitate. I swore to uphold the law and I shot a man six times.”
“You were protecting yourself. Your wife. Everyone in that room might owe their life to you.”
“Doesn’t excuse it. Nothing excuses… oh God, what am I saying? If Jim heard me… he’s probably killed people in the line of duty. I’ve never even pointed a gun at someone before tonight.”
Bruce put his hand on Harvey’s shoulder and squeezed with iron force. “You did the only thing you could do. The right thing.”
“Right… and wrong… is that all there is? I did the right thing… does that mean I did the good thing?”
Bruce didn’t have an answer.
Harvey chuckled darkly, picking up his glass again and shaking it for a refill. A little dubiously, Bruce poured. “You know, after Superman left, this woman wrote an article about him. Lois Lane. Won a Pulitzer for it.”
“Why the world doesn’t need Superman.”
“One of the reasons she cited is that… there’s a kind of balance to the world. Good and evil, yin and yang. A never-ending battle, she called it. Superman is like an A-bomb. Put him on one side, and pretty soon the equivalent springs up on the other side. Batman’s like that. He’s unbalanced the equation… and now someone’s come to oppose him. To equal him.” Harvey drank.
Bruce’s eyes were narrowed. “He’s been opposed before.”
“Not like this. I should know, I’ve prosecuted half of the freaks he’s put in Arkham. And now this Joker comes along… can you really say he wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Batman?”
“Batman didn’t cause the Joker,” Bruce said soundly. “Get your cape, I’ll drive you home.”
Harvey reluctantly let Bruce pull him to his feet. There was something dark in his eyes that Bruce hated to look at, mostly because it wasn’t exactly new. It was like something had thrived within him, and Bruce had the horrible feeling that he had fed it.
“You handled yourself pretty well back there,” Harvey said. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Harvey,” Bruce replied wryly. “Had to learn to fend off the ladies somehow.”
“I thought I saw you pick up a gun… you know… back there… but it must’ve been all the confusion, because then you followed the Joker and he shot at you. That’s all it was, right?”
“Yeah. I’m no hero.”
Glass crinkled under foot as he stepped back to make way for Harvey. He looked down to see a silver dollar poking out from under the toe of his foot. Bruce crouched down to pick it up. It was a commemorative coin, one side showing a profile of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the other an image of Lady Gotham.
He looked up at Harvey, who was once more allayed… comatose, really. “A souvenir,” Bruce said of it, dancing it across his knuckles. “Heads up.”
He flipped the coin to Harvey, who instinctively caught it. He opened his fingers to look at what he’d caught. The bullet had chipped the top of the coin, just a wink, the heat slagging the metal and caused a trickle of argent to seep down over the face, neatly bisecting it.
“For luck,” Bruce said.
Fandom: Nolanverse Batman, Superman Returns
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,611
Characters/Pairings: Bruce Wayne, the Joker, Tim Drake, Harvey Dent, Barbara Gordon.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to
damo_in_japan for betaing this.Previous Part: Chapter 10
Next Part: Chapter 12
Summary: Barbara Gordon is no hero. But maybe Batgirl can be.
Dinah had sold her out. The motorcycle’s tank had nothing but fumes in it. Barbara had to walk the bike to the nearest gas station and stand around looking like an idiot while she pumped. She could only put five bucks’ worth in the tank, too, because she had only brought pocket change. Maybe she should’ve included a purse in her ensemble. Batman probably had a Bat-credit card in his utility belt.
By the time she’d traveled the fair distance between Gotham city limits and the Wayne mansion, the party was in full swing. Barbara saw a man carrying two garbage bags out. They were slack at the neck and heavy at the bottom. The guy carrying them was dressed like one of the Three Stooges, Moe, but he swaggered like he was carrying.
Under her cowl, sweat coursed over Barbara’s skin. She killed the engine and hid the bike in the woods. Then, she jumped the fence into Wayne’s place. She landed, light as a cat, and made no noise. Thank you, gymnastics class. Then Barbara started creeping toward the house itself. Every nerve in her body was shouting that this was a bad idea. Moe was throwing the garbage bags into the front seat of a minivan. Barbara head them jangle metallically when they landed. Then she stepped on a twig.
Barbara heard, felt, Moe tense. They were forty feet apart, solar lights on the ground casting staccato lights against the pitch-black night. She was in the darkness between two lamps. She hit the deck, trying to hide as much of her costume’s bright highlights as possible… holding an arm over her yellow chest-symbol and stuffing her cape behind her prone body, holding her body absolutely still, not even breathing…
Moe pulled open his jacket, revealing the ugly broken-nature shape of a gun in a shoulder holster like her father’s. With a hand on the pistol grip, he scrutinized the darkness. His thumb tapped the hammer as his head swiveled.
“Alright, I see you, come out.”
Barbara suppressed a whimper.
“Come into the light or I’ll shoot you.”
She would’ve, but she couldn’t move.
“Listen, dude, I’m not playing.”
Dude?
He thought she was a man. Or he was just bluffing. Barbara bit her lip so hard it hurt, but she didn’t move an inch. Not one inch.
Was this what a lightning rod felt like, waiting to be struck? She could feel the gun on her, like a spotlight, burning hotter and hotter until there was finally an explosion. What an utterly stupid way to die. Shot to death in the dark while cross-dressing in a Batman costume. Barbara Gordon, valedictorian, bled out on the front yard of Gotham’s most eligible bachelor. It’d be scandalous if it weren’t so terrifying. At least it wouldn’t hurt, if she was shot. There’d be a brief flash of pain then she’d go into shock. That’s how her father had described it. After shock came death by exsanguination, and that was just like falling to sleep. Just like.
Moe laughed to himself and went back inside. Barbara’s heart started beating again. She stood on rubber-band legs and staggered her way to one of the huge windows looking into the mansion. Inside, all the costumed guests were cowering like extras in a monster movie. The Stooges stood at strategic vantage points, covering the vast room with their submachine guns. Curly herded the cooks and waiters out of the kitchen at gunpoint. They took their seats as audience to the center tableau.
A man… a ghoulish, creepy presence wearing the shape of a man… had a boy practically in his lap, gun locked in their hands. It was aimed at her father.
Barbara ran as fast as her legs could carry her, back to the woods. She must’ve broken a land speed record. She flung her legs astride the motorcycle, gunned the engine, floored it. The tires ripped through turf and gravel as she accelerated as fast as Dinah’s bike would allow. Dinah was a gearhead. Her bike could allow plenty.
The window was a target, she was an arrow. 50 MPH, 50, 70, 80. Good traction, too. She hit a solar light and launched the bike into the air. Gravity was for mortals as she arced toward the window. Glass shattered under her front tire, showered over her windshield, streaked past her face like crystal bullets.
She rammed Joker, a glancing blow so as not to crush his hostage too. The Joker prat-fell over the windshield, flying over Barbara’s hunched shoulders. Tim hit the deck and everyone started shooting.
Bruce tackled Moe to the ground, sending his revolver skittering across the floor. Harvey caught it, scooped it up, and fired all six cylinders into Larry. He wanted to stop at just one, but every time he paused he saw a flash of that animal brutalizing his wife and he squeezed the trigger again… and again… and again…
The gun clicked empty, leaving blue gunsmoke heavy in the air. Through the haze, the most vivid thing was the pool of blood spreading out of the dead criminal. Harvey numbly lowered the weapon. Nearby, Bruce was repeatedly cracking Moe’s head against the tile floor.
Curly had opened up with his SMG, trying to tag Batgirl. She leapt from her bike and skitched, hanging off the side of the bike with her feet on the ground like a skier. The bullets ricocheted off the motorcycle’s tank, which served as cover for her. At least until it ran into buffet table, catapulting Batgirl through an elaborate champagne glass pyramid.
Her motorcycle continued through the table, having reduced one end of it to splinters. It fell over and went into a skid, kicking up sparks. One hit the fuel leaking from its tank. The bike exploded and the screaming fireball scattered the hostages before ramming the wall, lighting the drapes on fire.
“Oh, bloody hell, not again,” Alfred said as he hit Moe with a candlestick. The Stooge had been starting to rise.
“Alfred,” Bruce said, a touch of franticness in his voice, before he grabbed Larry’s pistol and stuffed it into his costume. His mask and hat were off, leaving him chaotically disheveled. “Clean this up.”
He stalked after Joker, who was grabbing Curly by the crock of his arm and dragging him toward the elbow. The action caused Curly’s aim to go awry, blasting a trail of destruction across the wall.
“C’mon, Curly, we’ve overstayed our welcome!” Joker shot a would-be hero in the stomach and elbowed him aside as they stepped into the entrance hall.
Bruce followed them. The long hall had marble floors and walls, with an impossibly long red carpet along the floor and red curtains draping the paired windows that went down the length of the room. The moonlight coming through the tall windows shone between thick pillars. The Joker and Curly were nearly to the door leading out when Bruce lifted the gun and shot Curly through the leg.
He went down, screaming, firing wildly. The Joker neatly sidestepped the blaze of gunfire, which stopped as abruptly as it had began. Out of ammo.
The Joker turned, annoyed, and Bruce shot him in the thigh. He jerked and hopped up and down on one foot, cursing in pain. But not bleeding.
“Nice try, Gay Blade! But do you really think I’d go to a party without dressing the part?” He ripped open his vest. “Kevlar, through and through! So if you want to stop me…” The Joker pressed his finger firmly between his eyes. “Do it. Take it from me, it’s great fun.”
The gun was an ever-growing weight in Bruce’s hands. He hated the thing. Hated what this… clown had reduced him to. But he couldn’t very well use Ducard’s training on them, not without his armor or equipment, not in front of witnesses… not when guns were so much more effective.
“No. You’re going to jail.”
“Ha! I like you. You’re funny. Have we met before?” The Joker frowned, like he was trying to fix an obstinate puzzle piece. “Your face is familiar… but something’s wrong with it, something… pah, who cares!” He turned on his heel. “So long, farewell, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen! I'd like to stay and taste my first champagne…”
“What about me!?” Curly cried.
”What about you? Oh, yes.” He shot Curly through the head.
Bruce screamed so hard the force of it shook him, firing round after impotent round. Each whizzed by the Joker’s smiling face, none so much as parting his hair. The Joker threw open the door even as bullets chipped it, then he calmly turned and raised his gun.
“Great party, isn’t it?”
Bruce felt something tackle him behind a pillar just as an explosion echoed down the hallway. He looked down to see a girl in black sheltering him against the pillar, holding him tight as more bullets sparked against it. Then he heard an engine turn over and the squeal of tires as the Joker roared away.
The girl in the bat-costume let him up, and only propriety kept Bruce from shoving her aside as he ran out the door. In the distance, he could see the taillights of the Joker’s van as it drove out of the manor’s gates.
“Helluva night, huh?” the girl said behind him.
“Hell of a life,” Bruce turned. “Nice costume, Miss…?”
She was gone.
***
The following hours passed like a dream… a nightmare; surreal, feverish. How many times had Bruce’s investigations dovetailed with a crime scene? The interviewing of witnesses, the flashing of cameras, the moating of police tape long after the stronghold had been breached. It was all so familiar; déjà vu. But it always happened to others, never to him. Not since… that night.
In the nightmares, Joe Chill was like the man who laughed, the man who called himself the Joker. Laughing, uncaring, unfeeling… evil. It had taken years for Bruce to come to terms with the fact that the evil he fought hid behind human masks… The Joe Chills of the world had families. Ra’s Al Ghul had a past.
And the Joker had proven him wrong, for everything he’d seen of the clown was incontrovertibly evil.
He watched as the bodies were carted out of his house, of his parents’ house, leaving only blood. His hands twitched with the desire to wipe it away, erase it. Slowly, he walked through an adjacent room, a study. He carried his father’s defaced portrait under his arm, not sure what to do with it. It seemed wrong to leave it to the crime scene technicians in the other room. They’d already photographed this room, where the bullets had punched through. One had shattered the holder of Augustus Wayne’s coin collection, hanging from the wall in a wooden frame. Glass and semi-rare coins were spilled on the floor beneath it.
Harvey was sitting across from it in an armchair, his face wreathed in shadows. One of the EMTs had wreathed him in a dark blanket and stitched up the cuts on his face. Bruce moved to turn on a table lamp and Harvey signaled for him to stop. Bruce left it off. Harvey went back to rubbing his hands over each other.
“GSR. Gunshot residue. You know how many cases I’ve built on gunshot residue? It’s not really gunpowder, not usually. It’s primer. Barium nitrate, lead styphnate, antimony sulfide… they say most of it falls off in two hours, but if you use lotion or cream…”
Bruce set down the painting, looking away from him. “You sound like a man who needs a drink,” he said, opening up a drawer in his desk and pulling out a bottle of scotch.
Harvey grunted and leaned forward, head in his hands. Bruce wasn’t sure how long he would’ve stayed there if he didn’t shake a brandy snifter in front of his face, the ice jangling around. Harvey reached out a hand to take it, then sat back up and had a drink.
“They took Gilda to the hospital. You saw her cough up blood?”
“You should be with her,” Bruce said, not accusingly.
“I can’t. All those tubes and… I can’t look at her like that. She wouldn’t want me to. No. No.”
“Harvey, you’re in shock.”
“Of course I’m in shock. I just killed a man.” Harvey slammed his glass down on the lamp stand. “Didn’t hesitate. I swore to uphold the law and I shot a man six times.”
“You were protecting yourself. Your wife. Everyone in that room might owe their life to you.”
“Doesn’t excuse it. Nothing excuses… oh God, what am I saying? If Jim heard me… he’s probably killed people in the line of duty. I’ve never even pointed a gun at someone before tonight.”
Bruce put his hand on Harvey’s shoulder and squeezed with iron force. “You did the only thing you could do. The right thing.”
“Right… and wrong… is that all there is? I did the right thing… does that mean I did the good thing?”
Bruce didn’t have an answer.
Harvey chuckled darkly, picking up his glass again and shaking it for a refill. A little dubiously, Bruce poured. “You know, after Superman left, this woman wrote an article about him. Lois Lane. Won a Pulitzer for it.”
“Why the world doesn’t need Superman.”
“One of the reasons she cited is that… there’s a kind of balance to the world. Good and evil, yin and yang. A never-ending battle, she called it. Superman is like an A-bomb. Put him on one side, and pretty soon the equivalent springs up on the other side. Batman’s like that. He’s unbalanced the equation… and now someone’s come to oppose him. To equal him.” Harvey drank.
Bruce’s eyes were narrowed. “He’s been opposed before.”
“Not like this. I should know, I’ve prosecuted half of the freaks he’s put in Arkham. And now this Joker comes along… can you really say he wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Batman?”
“Batman didn’t cause the Joker,” Bruce said soundly. “Get your cape, I’ll drive you home.”
Harvey reluctantly let Bruce pull him to his feet. There was something dark in his eyes that Bruce hated to look at, mostly because it wasn’t exactly new. It was like something had thrived within him, and Bruce had the horrible feeling that he had fed it.
“You handled yourself pretty well back there,” Harvey said. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Harvey,” Bruce replied wryly. “Had to learn to fend off the ladies somehow.”
“I thought I saw you pick up a gun… you know… back there… but it must’ve been all the confusion, because then you followed the Joker and he shot at you. That’s all it was, right?”
“Yeah. I’m no hero.”
Glass crinkled under foot as he stepped back to make way for Harvey. He looked down to see a silver dollar poking out from under the toe of his foot. Bruce crouched down to pick it up. It was a commemorative coin, one side showing a profile of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the other an image of Lady Gotham.
He looked up at Harvey, who was once more allayed… comatose, really. “A souvenir,” Bruce said of it, dancing it across his knuckles. “Heads up.”
He flipped the coin to Harvey, who instinctively caught it. He opened his fingers to look at what he’d caught. The bullet had chipped the top of the coin, just a wink, the heat slagging the metal and caused a trickle of argent to seep down over the face, neatly bisecting it.
“For luck,” Bruce said.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:11 am (UTC)That's, what, a double-layered reference?
no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 05:31 am (UTC)Hah! But wow, is it wrong to read of Bruce with a gun. Jarring, but believable. And the description of Harvey's newly acquired coin -- just fantastic.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 09:56 am (UTC)Can't wait for the next chapter ! :D