Chapter Text
Bruce startled awake from another nightmare, the Joker's awful laughter rattling around in his head like a pile of shaken bones. Bruce tried telling himself that he was far too old to still be so scared of bad dreams, but that proved exactly as futile as it had been every other time he'd tried to get his heart to stop hammering by shaming it into submission. Sighing, Bruce reached out to turn his bedside lamp on, but that just revealed how badly his hands were still shaking. He couldn't remember everything which had happened in the nightmare, but he remembered the Joker promising to kill more—except that wasn't just a nightmare, was it? It was a memory.
Bruce had been researching the Joker again before going to sleep, which had probably, in hindsight, been a terrible idea. He really hadn't needed to top up on nightmare fuel right before bed, and everything the Joker had ever said to the press had a particularly high octane content. Rather than apologizing for his crimes, he was inclined to apologize for not killing enough, and the Joker thought nothing of casually swearing to take more lives next time he got out. There never seemed to be any question in the Joker's own mind that there would be a next time—why should there be, when he'd proven again and again that Arkham could not hold him?
Bruce was determined not to allow his homicidal rampage to continue, but the best he could do for that moment was creep down the hallway and check to make sure that Jason was still safe. Bruce pushed his son's door open quietly, and he was relieved to see a dark, person sized lump curled up on the bed. Bruce spent a long few minutes peering into the darkness, until he thought he could almost make out the small shifting of shadows caused by Jason's breathing.
Eventually, Bruce convinced himself to go back to bed, but he only really managed to toss and turn for a few more hours, before the sunlight creeping through his curtains got him up for the day. Despite how intense their early morning conversation had gotten, Jason had still made a huge breakfast for the two of them the prior day. Bruce had said he would cook their next breakfast, and he was determined to do better than some toasted bagels and oatmeal. As he walked into the kitchen, though, he couldn't even remember where the frying pans were. He wasn't sure whether that was because of his amnesia or because Bruce rarely did any real cooking himself. Aside from toast and microwaved oatmeal, the only thing he knew how to make in the kitchen was coffee.
Still, he could use his phone to look up recipes. He figured he could make omelets and sausages and french toast before Jason got up. An hour later, Bruce was exasperated at how inaccurate those online recipes had turned out to be. Ten minutes of prep time? It had taken Bruce that long to just hunt down all the ingredients for french toast in his kitchen! He'd ended up using a steak knife to dice the bell peppers for the omelet because he wasn't actually sure where the proper knives for the job were even kept. He hadn't found any sausages in the refrigerator, and so by the time Jason stumbled into the kitchen, Bruce had only managed to produce two very lumpy omelets (he probably should have cut those pepper pieces up smaller) and a stack of french toast that only looked respectable until you realized that half of the slices were burnt on at least one side. Why had the recipe not mentioned that the second side would cook so much more quickly than the first?
“Oh. You actually made food already?” Jason said.
“Yes,” Bruce replied, although he wished what he'd cooked had turned out a little closer to what Jason had produced yesterday.
“Cool. I wasn't sure you'd know where to find everything, since you got up before me.”
Bruce grimaced. “I didn't actually know. I'm still not sure where the knives for cutting vegetables are, and I couldn't find any sausages in the refrigerator.”
“That's because the sausages are in the freezer,” Jason told him, opening up the freezer briefly to point them out. Then, Jason opened up a drawer next to the sink and reached into it to slide a tray forward. Bruce saw several of the sort of knives he probably should have used to slice up the peppers and mushrooms.
“I didn't realized that tray was there,” Bruce admitted, feeling a little embarrassed that he had to be shown around his own kitchen. Still, it made him happy to see how comfortably familiar Jason was with everything.
“Because the top layer was pushed all the way back, you wouldn't have noticed this was a double layer utensil tray, unless you pulled the drawer out all the way. Now that you know it's there, I'm sure you won't have any problems finding the right knives,” Jason said, demonstrating the mechanism by sliding the top tray back and forth once more, before closing the drawer. “Alfred loves how space efficient it is,” Jason added, something wistful in his voice.
“Do you think I was too harsh, sending him away?” Bruce asked, second guessing himself yet again.
Jason shrugged. “That's your call. If you're worried that he's sitting around in some dingy Gotham hotel feeling miserable, though, you don't need to be. Babs told me Alfred's at the Tower, helping Tim out.”
Babs hadn't told Bruce that, but then, he hadn't broached the subject with her, either. She might have thought Bruce didn't want to talk about Alfred because he was still displeased with Alfred's failure to tell him about Jason. Bruce still found the knowledge that Alfred was with Tim relieving, though. “I'm glad Tim has someone with him in San Francisco.” Bruce might not be quite ready to forgive Alfred, but he was sure that Alfred would do his best to look after Tim at the Tower, just as he had looked after Tim at Brentwood Academy.
“You know Tim has lots of friends at the Tower, don't you?” Jason said, as he grabbed a plate with one of the omelets and forked some french toast onto it, as well.
“I know, but I feel better that he's with family,” Bruce said, putting a slice of french toast on his own plate while Jason poured himself a glass of orange juice. “Alfred better not be trying to draw Tim into that ridiculous 'bat man' story, though.”
Jason snorted. “Yeah, Batman's pretty ridiculous, huh?” Bruce wasn't sure why there was suddenly such mischief in Jason's eyes, but he nodded in agreement. For some reason, that only made Jason grin harder. Bruce couldn't see why anyone would find that awful “bat man” story so funny, but Bruce realized that it might not sting so much for Jason, who'd only heard about the lies Dick and Alfred had told second hand.
Thankfully, Jason didn't seem to be put off by the lumpiness of his omelet or the burnt side of the french toast. He'd never been a picky eater—perhaps his early life had taught him that he couldn't afford to be a picky eater. In any case, Jason finished off his breakfast quickly and even had a second glass of orange juice.
“Did you not like what I cooked yesterday?” Jason asked, when Bruce had finished his own breakfast and was slowly sipping his coffee.
“I liked it fine, Jay. You're actually a much better cook than I am.” If Jason's omelets had been placed side by side with Alfred's, Bruce wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
“But you didn't eat a lot,” Jason pointed out. “I guess that I didn't really help your appetite by dumping my issues on you first thing in the morning, though,” he admitted sheepishly.
“I asked you, Jay, and it was clearly something that has been bothering you for a long time now. I'm glad you were finally able to tell me.”
“Even though you hated hearing it?”
Bruce smiled wryly. “Even then. It was something I needed to hear.”
“You won't remember, but I actually tried to tell you all of that before this,” Jason said, sounding subdued. “I'm not sure how coherent I was, though. We were both too angry, maybe. You're a much better listener now, without your memories.”
“Jay, I'm not going to stop listening to you if I get my memories back,” Bruce assured him, for what certainly wasn't the first time.
Jason frowned. “When you get your memories back, you're suddenly going to have a lot of other priorities to think about, considering all the stuff you've forgotten. What makes you so sure you'll have time for me?”
“Because you're my son,” Bruce told him, even though it should be obvious. Bruce had learned over the past month, though, that the things he thought were obvious weren't always so to Jason.
Jason's expression softened. “It's that simple for you right now, isn't it? I wish life wasn't going to get so complicated, once your memory comes back.” Of course Bruce himself would be happy to finally understand more about his own life, but he wasn't that eager for any added complications in his relationship with Jason, either. He felt like he was finally getting his son to open up to him. “Oh! Before I forget, I wanted to warn you that you might see a higher water or electrical bill than you might be expecting, since the group home is supposed to be empty now.”
Bruce narrowed his eyes. “Supposed to be empty?”
“I know the contractors are still busy putting up the guard shack, and the lawyers are waiting for the last of the paperwork to be approved,” Jason said. “The individual rooms themselves are fine, though, fully furnished and everything. With the utilities already on, that makes it the perfect place to squat.”
“Jay, did someone move in there already?” Bruce asked, a little incredulous. The group home wasn't legally allowed to operate yet, and none of the staff would be there.
“I'm sure hoping so. The police arrested Vincencio, but not his girls. I'm sure they've seen him weasel out of a lot of charges before, so of course their first thought was to lay low until he's out again. Last night, I tracked down as many of them as I could.”
“You went to Crime Alley?” Bruce had been so busy researching the Joker, research which he obviously hadn't wanted Jason to see, that he'd just been relieved when he hadn't seen Jason after dinner. He'd assumed, apparently wrongly, that Jay was safely in his bedroom studying for the GED. If Bruce had known what his son was actually up to, he would have been a lot more worried.
“Relax, Bruce,” Jason said, as if that were so easy to do. “I'm a Crime Alley local. I know how not to stand out, and I really needed to talk to those girls. Most of them insisted, at least at first, that the cops won't be able to get anything to stick, but when I pointed out that Ortiz was arrested at Wayne Manor and that attempted murder has a long minimum sentence, a few of them realized that Vincencio wasn't going to be able to sweep things under the rug. Not this time, not with such a celebrity target.” Bruce frowned at the suggestion that a non-celebrity target might have allowed leeway for Vincencio to escape punishment, but he didn't challenge Jason's statement. “Once word gets out about Vincencio being out of the game, some other pimp will definitely try to swoop in and snatch up Vincencio's girls. The smarter ones let me give them key cards for rooms at the group home. Since it's not open, not many people know about it yet, and with the food I stocked there, utilities covered, and high quality deadbolts, they can feel safe there. If the girls get used to it, well, I think we've got a pretty good chance of convincing at least a couple of them to just stay there officially once it opens.”
It was definitely illegal to effectively start operating the group home before it was licensed, but Bruce noticed that Jason didn't seem at all concerned about that. “You believe this is truly the best thing for those poor girls?”
“Yes.”
“And you don't think this could endanger the license for the group home?”
Jason snorted. “In that neighborhood, who would report it? Even if someone did, you think the cops working that beat actually investigate reports of squatting, when they can't even keep up with much more serious crimes? You weren't going to tell the staff to show up until the place was licensed, anyway, so by that time it would be legal for the girls to stay there. It's not like the girls are going to admit what actually happened, and no one is going to be surprised if it turns out social services was a little late handling the paperwork for them. They're always a little late. After my mom died, they didn't start looking for me for almost two weeks.”
“That's very concerning.” Leaving a child who'd just lost his mother alone for almost two weeks was a dangerous failure.
“That's reality,” Jason countered. “If you wait to work within the system, by the time social services might try to find those girls, some other pimp will already have snatched them up.”
Bruce frowned but nodded. It still made him a little nervous to aid and abet a clear violation of the law, but if he had to weigh the law against the welfare of vulnerable girls who'd already suffered the worst of societies depredations, Bruce found that he'd much rather help the people who truly needed it when they needed it, rather than obey a law that wasn't going to help them until far too late. The thought of young teens being snatched up into the hands of yet another exploitative pimp was simply too much for his conscience to bear, regardless of legalities.
After breakfast, Jason did a little studying, while Bruce went back to his Joker research, although he told Jay he was looking through some Wayne Industries project proposals. He probably should have been doing that, but Bruce hadn't been able to concentrate on anything work related since Ortiz had come. He made sure to head to the home gym when Jason told him he was going to use it, though. When Jay had first moved back into the manor, Bruce had been surprised to learn he even had a home gym. He apparently had forgotten it completely. Jason hadn't, though, and Bruce had been very unhappy to learn that his son thought nothing of lifting extremely heavy weights without a spotter.
Thankfully, Jay had eventually agreed to tell Bruce before he used the lifting equipment, on the condition that Bruce would allow Jason to be a spotter for him. Bruce had agreed, even though he hadn't thought he'd do any actual lifting himself, initially. Jason had pointed out, though, that if Bruce couldn't lift the weights himself, then he might not be able to help Jason if he got into trouble. They had gotten into a habit of switching off lifting and spotting after every set, after that. Bruce had been quite pleasantly surprised to find out that he could actually lift quite a lot, although of course he had started out lifting lighter weights, as he hadn't remembered what he could handle.
“You wanna start first or should I?” Jason asked, when they got to the gym.
“You can go first, as long as I get to pick the music.” Bruce loved his son dearly, but Jason's taste in music was as bad as Dick's taste in hairstyles.
“Still not a fan of death metal, huh?”
Bruce grimaced. “It's just a bunch of shouting, Jay. There's no actual melody.”
“Fine, we can spare your ear drums for today, old man,” Jason replied with a grin, as he headed for the weight bench. Bruce seized the opportunity to start a playlist of actual music, rather than the discordant cacophony Jason preferred to blast out of the speakers in the room.
Since Bruce could actually hear himself think, he couldn't keep his mind from assessing the present situation while they worked out. He had been cautiously advancing to heavier and heavier weights over the past several weeks, and by this time, Bruce was almost caught up to what Jason was lifting. He was able to keep up with Jason when they went for a run on the grounds, too, although Bruce had often found himself more tired toward the end than Jason, especially at first. Jay had attributed that to “slacking off for a month”, which was probably a fair assessment. Bruce had gotten barely any exercise at all after he'd gotten amnesia, because he'd forgotten absolutely everything about his normal exercise routine.
Alfred had driven him to work and back, and Bruce had taken the elevator to get to his office, rather than the stairs. The night of the mugging had been the first time Bruce had so much as gone for a walk in a month, so it was probably a good thing he had Jay here encouraging him to exercise now. It still bothered Bruce that Jay might be so committed to staying in shape because he was worried about his physical safety, but now that feeling was offset by the relief that Jay could actually take care of himself in most situations.
Still, Jason had never been a helpless waif, even as a kid. His gym teachers had all spoken glowingly about Jason's energy, hand eye coordination, and excellent cardiovascular fitness. None of that had saved him from the Joker. The scrappiness he'd inherited from living on Crime Alley hadn't saved him from the Joker, either. The Joker had killed athletes and police officers and Gotham mobsters, and despite those wild rumors about “bat man”, there were no reliable stories of the Joker ever being beaten in a one on one fight.
Jason was incredibly fit, but it wasn't enough to keep him safe. If Bruce also knew how to fight, though, would that make a difference? Or what if he hired a trustworthy security company? He decided to gently probe Jason as they finished up their work out.
“Jay, how would you feel about hiring another security company, if you were the one choosing one?”
“Absolutely not,” Jason said immediately.
“I know we just had a really bad experience, but—”
“It's not that. Or, not only that,” Jason explained, before finishing his last rep. “Think about it this way, Bruce. If you put a person in a position where he has to choose between his money or his life, almost every individual will give up his money to save his life. When you hire security, you might think you're paying people to put their lives on the line, but realistically, there's no amount of money you can pay to make strangers actually willing to die for you. The real idea of security is that they have such overwhelming numbers or skill or equipment versus the challenges that might come up against them that their own lives wouldn't generally be at risk. Often, security wins simply by looking tough enough that no one wants to test them, so there is no actual fighting at all.”
Jason picked up his water bottle and took a sip of water before continuing. “Occasionally, if the attackers are really stupid, they box the security team in, so they can't get away. In that case, the security members aren't choosing to lay down their lives for their employers, so much as they are trapped and therefore fighting to survive themselves. However, if the attackers are smart or strong enough, they will either bypass the security team altogether or simply intimidate them out of the way—or maybe even infiltrate them, as we just saw with Laszlo. The larger the security team, the higher the chance that at least one of them is an infiltrator.”
“Isn't there any way to get a more reliable team?” Bruce asked.
“There are occasional exceptions,” Jason admitted. “I hope that the Secret Service hires enough actual patriots that their recruits are generally willing to lay their lives down for their country. But that's the thing—it would be for their country, for something greater than themselves that they truly believe in, not for some random rich guy who happened to have a lot of cash. Similarly, if someone really wants to protect and serve, I'd hope they'd go to a police academy, not a private security firm. If you hired a bodyguard and you treated him like family for years, Bruce, yeah, that person might be willing to die to protect family. But then, if a bodyguard who was like family died, you'd be losing family, not just an employee, which defeats the whole purpose of hiring a body guard to protect your family in the first place.”
Jason shook his head. “My basic issue with hiring security is that really smart, talented people are rare, and people who'd die for strangers for money are even rarer. Thinking that you'll find someone with all those rare traits available to hire immediately is ridiculously optimistic. Maybe if you scoured the globe, you'd eventually get lucky, but there are other people who have already been searching for a loyal bodyguard for years, who probably would hire that rare person before you even heard about him. So, in general, you can't quickly hire greatly talented people who will lay down their lives for you.”
“On the other hand, you can hire fools who will leave a gaping hole in the perimeter for a threat to slip in or idiots who'll die so early in a fight that they wouldn't even get a chance to recognize the danger they were in. Good fighters, on the other hand, know how to judge what could be deadly accurately, which is how they've lived long enough to become good fighters. You can try to hire them, but they will back out if they see the job will obviously get them killed. You can lie, of course, to get them to take the job, but then they won't know enough to protect you well, and if they do find out what they're up against, why should they continue working for someone who tricked them into taking the job in the first place?”
“Frankly, a regular civilian security team just isn't going to handle very dangerous threats, and I don't need fools to die for me, especially if I'm just going to end up dealing with the threat myself, anyway,” Jason said, matter of fact. Bruce himself was still wrestling with the morality of hiring someone to die for him. Even if he could do that, should he? He obviously hadn't thought this through fully. “I get that a good security team could intimidate uncommitted threats into choosing another target or stop minor threats entirely. Those aren't the threats I'm worried about, though.” They weren't the threats Bruce was worried about, either.
“If we're just talking about minor thugs, I've got no issues taking them on myself,” Jason said, which was alarming, even though Jason had already proven how easily he could win such fights. “If we're talking about serious threats which are specifically targeting us, like Ortiz was, I don't believe you could find a security team immediately available that would be talented enough to stop a threat like that without taking serious casualties, and once a team takes serious casualties, they'd be more worried about protecting themselves than us. So, again, if I'm going to have to face the threat on my own in the end, I'd rather do it without unreliable bystanders in the mix, especially because I'd have to care about those bystanders lives, meaning my enemy could menace them to distract me.”
Bruce frowned. “Alright. I understand that you have concerns about bringing in privately hired security, but since I'm going to be here no matter what, how hard would it be for me to learn how to fight?” Not that Bruce thought he'd become some kung fu legend overnight, but he was smart and in good shape and deeply committed to protecting Jason.
“That depends on what sort of fight you need to learn how to win. If you're talking about helping me fight common thugs, it's not that hard at all.”
The Joker, unfortunately, was hardly a common thug, or Bruce wouldn't need to worry about him so much. “What about someone like Ortiz? Could I learn to take someone like him on?” Bruce knew Ortiz wasn't as dangerous as the Joker, but he didn't particularly want to bring the Joker up directly in front of Jason.
His son frowned. “If you want to help me take on someone like Ortiz, you're already doing the training best suited for such a threat, which is running, preferably in a direction that puts you behind me,” Jason said, his voice flat and expression solemn. “Look, I don't wanna hurt your pride, Bruce, but I am dead serious here. Even if I spent two months training you non-stop, you'd still be nothing but a liability to me in a fight against a talented and experienced opponent. Now, if you recover from your amnesia and you suddenly remember you are a martial arts master, we can revisit the topic, but for the moment, I need you to stay out of dangerous fights.”
Bruce sighed. Obviously, he wasn't going to wake up one day and suddenly remember that he'd been studying martial arts for years. “Is there really nothing I could do to help you in a difficult fight?”
Jason made a frustrated sound. “I know it seems intuitive that four fists are greater than two. But are those extra two fists in the place you need them when you need them, or are they just getting in the way or worse, enabling a hostage situation? You may have seen me take Ortiz out with just one move, but I needed a lot of skills to put myself in a position to make that one move at exactly the right time. First, I had to keep calm and react quickly. I know that doesn't sound hard at all, but some people will lose their cool, just because they're bleeding a little,” Jason said. Bruce certainly had lost any semblance of rationality, once he'd seen Jason bleeding. “In that moment when I was pushing us into the storage room, I could have headed for any corner. A lot of people would want to go to the back of the room, because that's farther from the danger, but Ortiz had a gun and he was good enough to shoot down drones in flight. A few feet of extra distance wouldn't have presented any challenge to him, and only the corner of the room that was closest to the doorknob allowed me to come at Ortiz from the side and unobstructed by the door.”
“You were thinking about that, even back when we were ducking into the storage room?” Bruce asked, surprised.
“I wasn't consciously thinking through a checklist of steps, but I knew generally that escape might not be possible, so I needed to put myself in a position where I could attack. You have to be familiar enough with fighting that you can choose the best position instinctively, because you may not have a chance to consciously consider your every move. It takes a lot of time to develop those instincts, though. Obviously, you have to be adaptable, too. If there had been a convenient rope in the storage room, I might have tried to get you out the window while using the phone trick to cover the sound of our movements and make Ortiz think we were still in the room. Since that wasn't possible, it's a good thing that I was ready to make an attack. I'm not sure if you noticed, but I was also quiet when I moved on Ortiz.”
Bruce hadn't noticed. He'd been too overwhelmed with shock and fear that Ortiz was shooting into the room to really notice anything else during those moments. He could understand why stealth had been important then, though.
“It's not that hard to learn how to do a blood choke. I could teach you that pretty quickly,” Jason asserted. “The issue is getting yourself into a position where you can catch someone in a blood choke, without, let's say, getting shot on the approach. I beat Ortiz because I was able to surprise him, but it took a lot of skill to get that couple of seconds of surprise.”
“So, someone who can surprise his opponent, who is unpredictable, can win fights reliably.”
“Well, a fighter still needs to be able to perform some finishing move, but yeah. In general, I'd rather fight someone with twice as many muscles and weapons as me, whose every move I can predict, rather than fight someone half as strong as me with worse weaponry, who I can't predict that well. That's because I'm more likely to get hurt in the second case. Talented fighters know a lot of different moves and are often proficient with several different types of weapons. They will choose to attack from distances where you have difficulty countering, come at you from unexpected angles, feint to get you off balance, and generally keep you guessing about what's coming next, so you can't anticipate them and come up with a perfect counter. Of course talented fighters also generally have a lot of physical strength, but all the strength in the world won't help someone who can't land a hit.”
“The unpredictable fighters land hits more.”
“Exactly,” Jason said. It made perfect sense. It also perfectly explained why the Joker was so good at killing people. Barbara had said that he was unpredictable, and everything Bruce had learned in his research only made him more certain that she was right.
“How do you beat an unpredictable fighter, then?”
“With or without taking a lot of hits to win the fight?”
“Definitely without.” Bruce didn't want Jason dying himself to defeat the Joker.
Jason snorted. “That's easier said than done. Maybe force that fighter into special circumstances where he becomes predictable. Or become so overwhelmingly fast in terms of reaction time that it's like you can predict him, because you can react so quickly. Or bring a tremendous numerical advantage of experienced combatants to the fight, so that he has no chance to counter your entire team. In my experience, you generally can't do those sorts of things very often, though. It's frequently impossible to find something that will make an unpredictable person suddenly predictable, or to increase your reaction time past a certain point, or to get half a dozen highly skilled fighters to shadow you at all times, just in case you come across an unpredictable guy. So, if you don't want to get into a fight where you're likely to take a lot of hits, the best thing to do with an unpredictable fighter is not to get into the fight in the first place.”
“What if someone unpredictable is aiming for you, like Ortiz was, so you can't avoid the fight?”
“See, that's one of the problems with waiting for the cops. If you might not be able to counter a strike, then it's a dangerous idea to sit around just waiting for that strike to be launched, likely at the very moment most agreeable to your enemy. If it's possible, it's generally better to proactively go after an unpredictable threat and get to him before he's expecting it, in a circumstance that's favorable for you. In other words, strike unpredictably at the unpredictable.”
Bruce nodded and started his own final set of reps, while Jason finished his water. Bruce had been hoping to hear a more optimistic assessment, but what his son had said agreed with what Bruce had already been thinking himself. Hiring another security force wasn't the answer. The Joker had never been stopped by one before, after all, and he had encountered many. There was no way to make the Joker's nature more predictable, and that meant there was no foolproof plan that could be developed to stop him, at least not once he was out and had free reign to make the most chaotic of choices. The only circumstances favorable for a strike against the clown occurred when the Joker was forced into a predictable routine by Arkham Asylum. That meant killing him before he got out.
When Bruce finished lifting, Jason went to take a shower, while Bruce finished off his own water and thought carefully over everything they'd discussed. Then, he took a shower himself and had a quick lunch with his son. Afterward, Jason went back to studying for the GED, and Bruce went back to his office to start plotting. Plotting. It sounded ridiculous, like something a cartoon villain would do.
The evidence pointed him in one direction, while common sense rebelled against the very idea. The Joker was in a Arkham. Surely Bruce couldn't be thinking about attacking someone who was already safely locked up. But he wasn't safely locked up, was he? Everyone who knew the Joker's history would know that his incarceration was only temporary, and unfortunately, once the Joker got out, there was nothing that could stop him. Even the police were only ever belatedly successful, with many lives lost in the delay.
Only a few days ago, Bruce had hired security, and they'd turned on him. The Gotham County Sheriff and the GCPD had been called to the manor, but they'd failed to arrive in time to stop a potentially lethal threat. Jason had been forced to defend himself. Jason had already failed to defend himself against the Joker once, though. Bruce remembered several conversations where his son had made it clear how dissatisfied he was with a justice system that kept doing the same ineffective thing and achieving the same undesirable results. Why should Bruce be okay doing that himself, when it came to his son's continued life?
He knew it was very illegal to attack someone who was locked up in a mental institution. Of course it was illegal. It could never meet the legal definition of self-defense to go after the Joker there, because the law assumed that if someone was locked up, they weren't a danger anymore. That was the way the legal system worked: law was a blunt instrument that applied equally to everyone, even though people weren't actually all equal, because some very small portion of them were gleeful mass murderers who had escaped custody repeatedly to add to their body count.
Still, because he didn't like the conclusion he had drawn, Bruce spent several hours thinking in circles, trying to find a reasonable solution to an unreasonable problem. He couldn't fight the Joker himself, and he couldn't count on a security team to win that fight for him. Jason had already lost a fight with the Joker, and asking Dick to be the last line of defense was just trading one son's life for another. Various Arkham security upgrades over the years had done nothing to stop the clown from escaping, and the best psychologists had already exhausted all their skills and failed to change him. True criminal justice reform, done the right way, was at least a decade away, if it could even be sufficiently refined to keep the Joker from breaking out again without stripping basic human rights from the mentally ill.
The Joker was so unpredictable that once he was out, he might do anything. His sheer personal affinity for chaos made him almost impossible to counter or guard against. He had occasionally seemed to try to get the attention of “bat man” in the past, no doubt because the senselessness of a fake crime fighter in a bat costume appealed to him, but that costume party actor had decided to disappear for the past couple of months. Perhaps the Joker had actually killed him and just not admitted it yet. That rumor was making its way through the media now. With the strange bat cosplayer out of the picture, though, the Joker might decide to “play” with Jason instead, with innocent lives as the stakes in their “game”. Bruce knew his son, his brave and selfless son. Barbara was right: if Jason thought he could save innocent lives, he would go—straight into a trap. At that point, there would be no hope of saving him, not when the Joker could manipulate the battleground entirely to his own advantage.
Bruce could not let that happen, but the only way he could think of to stop it would be to strike preemptively, while Bruce could rely on the predictability of Arkham Asylum to give him a viable opportunity. A simple injury wouldn't be enough. The Joker had healed even from major injuries and come back even more dangerous. But what was there beyond major injury? Permanently paralyzing someone on purpose without killing them required far more medical knowledge than most people had, including Bruce, and it wasn't like that was the sort of thing you could just practice to be sure you had the technique down. Such a delicate operation would also require much more time and uninterrupted first hand access to the Joker than a simple assassination, and Arkham did actually have security. Even if Bruce could source an appropriate anesthetic or paralytic, successfully administer it to keep the Joker immobile during the operation, and actually pull off such an operation without any training, he doubted it would be possible for him to do so without discovery, unless various Arkham security systems were taken down. Even if he could do that, though, Bruce wouldn't, because he didn't want any other dangerous Arkham inmates to be able to escape.
That left only one solution: Bruce needed to break the law in the most serious way possible, to ensure that the Joker never could again. “Preemptive killing” was just a nicer way of saying “murder”, though. Bruce wasn't a murderer. He couldn't become one, could he?
Jason interrupted his spiraling thoughts by calling Bruce down to dinner. Since Vincencio had been denied bail that afternoon, Jason had decided that it was safe enough to order out, and Bruce walked into the dining room to discover the delicious smell of a couple of signature dishes from Thai Lotus. He couldn't actually manage to enjoy the meal, though. His eyes kept straying to the cut on Jason's temple. If that piece of shrapnel from the drone had hit Jason's eye instead, would they still have made it into the storage room? Jason had been quick and calm and clever, and it had still be so close. Ortiz wasn't even anywhere near as dangerous as the Joker, as far as body counts were concerned. Bruce forced himself to eat enough so as not to worry Jason, but he excused himself quickly and went up to his room feeling mildly nauseous.
The thought of killing someone terrified and sickened him—but perhaps not as much as other memories. Bruce thought of Jason, face covered in blood dripping from his temple, thought of his boy, dead in his arms, so small and still and helpless. He remembered the shame and agony of buying a child sized coffin, and the awful look on Alred's face as he picked out a funeral suit for his grandson. Bruce had already buried his child once. That was something he truly could not endure again, but the only way to keep Jason safe was to see the Joker dead.
So, if he was going to do this, first he needed to make a plan and gather resources, like a weapons or cash. No, Bruce realized. First, he needed some place to hide his plan and any resources that he gathered. He started searching his bedroom for a likely spot, even though it felt crazy. He second guessed himself every other minute, because he couldn't actually do this, could he? He didn't have the first clue how to commit a murder, or even how to get non-consecutive bills to pay someone to do it!
Eventually, Bruce took a close look at his dresser. He thought it might be possible to alter it to create a concealed space. First, he'd need to check the dimensions, so he got a tape measure and pulled the top drawer out. Bruce studied the outer dimensions of the drawer carefully, and then checked how deep the dresser was. It seemed like there should actually be some space, judging by the outer dimensions of the dresser, but when he measured how deep it was on the inside, it was a couple of inches less deep than he thought. It looked normal, but why would the back wall of the dresser be so thick?
Finally, Bruce took out all the drawers and reached in, feeling around the back of the dresser on the inside. He found nothing but seamless wood, until, by accident, he pressed the pad of his index finger to a metal bracket which reinforced the wooden beam that served as a divider between the left and right sides of the dresser. Suddenly, with a click, a hidden door opened in the back of the dresser. Bruce reached in to examine further and pulled out stacks of cash. Shocked, he examined several bills in one stack. They were non-consecutive.
Bruce felt a moment of mental vertigo, as his surreal fantasy of assassinating the Joker suddenly became something much closer to reality. Deep down, he had doubted that he could truly do anything, but hadn't he just found incontrovertible evidence that he'd already begun making progress? The cash was so well concealed, he wouldn't have found it, except that the way he looked for good hiding places had led him to come to the exact same conclusion twice.
Had he gotten any further in his plan? Bruce searched the rest of his room and found nothing until he picked up the tablet Dick had brought him to try to “prove” he was “bat man”. It opened to Bruce's thumbprint and then demanded a retina scan and voice match. Luckily, Bruce still remembered the pass phrase Dick had told him to say. When the tablet finally allowed him to log in, there was a shortcut sitting right in the middle of the screen. Double clicking it opened up a set of camera feeds. It took Bruce only a few minutes to realize that the feeds were from cameras inside Arkham Asylum. Bruce didn't remember setting this up, but it was surely what he needed. Had he actually been planning to kill the Joker months ago, and simply forgotten about it, as he had forgotten Jason?
Bruce had deeply questioned how he could ever have been so callous as to allow his murdered child to manage his violent trauma on his own. Ever since their conversation in the parking lot at Batburger, he'd also wondered how he could possibly have given Jason the impression that he was not upset about the Joker. Now, it was obvious that Bruce had been planning something all along. He probably just hadn't wanted to tell Jason, to avoid making him an accessory to murder.
One detail struck him, though. Dick had given him this tablet. His son couldn't have logged in himself, not with the biometric requirements, but he'd known the passphrase, so presumably, he'd at least witnessed Bruce logging into it in the past. What did he know? Had he seen something he shouldn't?
Dick had been a police officer. Bruce wouldn't have wanted to force him to choose between upholding the law and remaining loyal to his own family. If Dick had grown suspicions, what would Bruce have told him? The answer suddenly hit him in the face. Dick had given him the tablet as “proof” that he was “bat man”.
Had Bruce told Dick some ridiculous story about being a bat cosplayer, in order to explain away his preparations for an obviously illegal killing? If so, it was hard to believe that Dick would actually have believed him, but maybe Bruce had stuck to the ridiculous story anyway. Maybe Dick and Alfred had actually gotten quite annoyed with Bruce's increasingly preposterous “bat man” lies, and then, when Bruce had gotten amnesia, they'd thrown the same lies he'd given them right back into his face. That made so much more sense than assuming they'd concocted this preposterous story all on their own. Bruce couldn't just admit the truth and make either of them an accessory to murder, though, so he'd have to continue with the “bat man” story when he got his memory back. How incredibly humiliating that would be, but if that was what it took to keep Jay and Dick safe, then Bruce would endure the rightful condemnation from his family.
So far he knew he had money and a perfect source of information about what was going on in Arkham. How could Bruce actually get to the Joker, though? By studying the cameras, he learned that while Arkham security had never been enough to keep the Joker from getting out, it was still good enough to stop random people from walking in to the building with a weapon. Even employees had to put all of their items through the X-ray machine, and they had to walk through a metal detector. Even the night security guards did that. They then all picked up their weapons from personal weapon safes in the security wing. It didn't look like it would be easy to get to those.
Bruce didn't know what some of the applications and folders on the tablet were for, as some required additional passwords, but he did find a few useful folders he could open. One contained Arkham personnel files. Apparently, the security team was very carefully vetted, as well as the psychologists who dealt with the Joker. Not that it had stopped him from secretly turning Dr. Harleen Quinzel, but the vetting process seemed good enough to stop Bruce from getting a job that would give him direct access to the Joker with a flimsy fake ID. Barbara had said that an airtight ID might takes months to make, and she presumably understood the process much better than Bruce did. For all he knew, it could take him a year to make an ID that would get him through the strict Arkham vetting process for anyone with direct access to the Joker, and the clown might have broken out and killed Jason by then.
If Bruce couldn't get access directly, though, then what else went to the Joker? Food, water, and medicine. Food and water came from the Arkham cafeteria. If someone adulterated those, every inmate in Arkham would be affected, not just the Joker. The medicine, though...the medicine was an option. Bruce carefully checked medication schedules, another piece of information he'd found on the tablet. He felt a flash of guilt for violating the Joker's privacy, but then Bruce thought of what the Joker had done to destroy Bruce's son, how broken he'd left that small body, how swollen and bruised Jay's young face had been. Suddenly, he had no more respect for the Joker's privacy or anything at all about him. There was a note in the Joker's file about a medication that had to be special ordered just for him.
How could Bruce get access to that medication, though? Searching the tablet further, he found more Arkham employment records and employee training manuals. It became immediately obvious that Arkham had a retention problem, especially for the night shift. They obviously took who they could get to fill some of the least important roles and didn't do anywhere near as much vetting as they did for security and medical professionals. Some of those employees would be able to walk past the medicine cabinet, even if they shouldn't have access to it.
However, there was a training period where new staff members were watched closely. Even if Bruce could get hired, he would probably have to wait out that month long training period, if he wanted to try to get into the medicine cabinet. He'd need a very good disguise to remain incognito for a month, and even then, Jason would wonder about where Bruce was spending so much time and why he wouldn't answer his personal phone (which he obviously should not bring to Arkham or the police could ID Bruce from cell phone records). Bruce didn't think he could keep an Arkham job secret from his son without basically cutting ties with him, but even if he were willing to do something so inherently cruel, suddenly cutting ties would likely prompt the rest of the family to investigate what was going on, which was the last thing Bruce wanted.
No, he likely needed to hire someone to do this. Immediately, Ortiz popped into mind, and the thought made Bruce feel ill. How could he hire a hitman, like Vincencio had done? He couldn't conscience handing money over to a stone cold killer, so that he could buy more guns and bullets to kill yet more people. Bruce wanted one person to get hurt, and one alone. No, he needed to find a person who shared his mindset, who would only go after the Joker. It shouldn't be that hard to find someone who met that criteria. The Joker had destroyed so many lives, after all.
Bruce would start by investigating the current staff at Arkham. The high turnover and difficulty hiring night shift sanitation works meant that they got the lowest level of vetting. If one of them had a preexisting grudge against the Joker, maybe all Bruce would have to do was supply the means. A metal weapon would be hard to get in, but a poison could easily be disguised as prescription eye drops or as sauce for a bag lunch.
Where would he get poison, though? It would be risky to just go out and buy rat poison. The police could trace the sale. He could make his own, though. Bruce didn't remember a lot from his college years, but he certainly knew enough chemistry to be dangerous. He thought there might be some hellebores growing in the back garden, which might mean easy access to helleborin or hellebrin. When he thought a little more, he remembered a whole row of biennial foxgloves, which Bruce had never been allowed to play in as a child because they was poisonous.
It was past the season for foxgloves to flower, so those that were in their second year had flowered and died off already. However, their seeds were still poisonous. Also, the foxgloves that had just started from seed this year were still growing, awaiting for their chance to flower next year. Their stems and leaves were poisonous, too. Surely Bruce knew enough to extract some digoxin or digitoxin, and ingesting enough cardiac glycosides could certainly be fatal.
Under cover of darkness, Bruce stole out to the garden to retrieve some samples. Luckily, Jason paid no attention to plants unless they were edible, and Alfred wasn't around to notice what Bruce had done. When he got back inside, it took Bruce a while to find his old chemistry equipment. Actually, he didn't find it, exactly. Instead, he found much newer equipment in the attic that he didn't even recognize. Still, it wasn't that different that he couldn't figure out how to use it.
At first, he was a little concerned about how he was going to ensure Jason didn't catch him setting it up, but then he caught his son heading into the garage, where his motorcycle was stored. “Jay, where are you going? I hope it's not Crime Alley again.”
“Sorry to dash your hopes,” Jason said, with a sheepish smile. “There are still a couple of Vincencio's girls that I didn't find last night, and a couple who were on the fence and didn't take key cards. I want to make another attempt to convince them to go to the group home.”
“Alone? At night?” Bruce was not fond of that idea.
“At night is when they'll be out, and approaching them with a group is just likely to make them run away.”
Bruce sighed. He loved how kind and brave his son was, but he was beginning to understand how dangerous a combination that was, too. He knew it would be pointless to tell Jason to forsake those girls, though. His conscience wouldn't let him do that, not any more than Bruce's would let him stand idly by while his son's life was under threat. “I know you want to help, but be careful, okay?”
Jason's expression turned softer. “Of course. I promise I'll be back in a few hours.”
“I'll look forward to seeing you back home safe.”
Jason waved and took off after that, and Bruce went to do some chromatography. It took him some time to prepare the plant matter he had collected and choose the right eluant, but once everything was set up properly, all he had to do was sit back and wait for results. In the mean time, Bruce went back to scrutinizing Arkham's current night shift employees. One of the applications on the “bat man” tablet allowed Bruce to see social media posts that normally should have been private, which made him feel a little bit guilty, but all he was doing was searching for the terms “Joker” or “clown”. If he didn't find them, he moved on.
He did actually find someone who had made a lot of angry posts about the Joker in the past week, though. Hired only five weeks ago, Geoff Barnell was just past his month long initial oversight window. Perhaps that was why he now felt safe making angry posts that were visible to his friends. Apparently, the man's wife, Melanie, had been poisoned by the Joker during the time Gotham had been declared “No Man's Land”. Because her murder had never been officially recorded, as there had effectively been no government operating in Gotham at that time, no red flag had shown up when Geoff's records were checked prior to employment.
Geoff was obviously furious at the injustice he had suffered. He complained of starving during “No Man's Land”, only to find out that the Joker always received three balanced meals a day at Arkham. He missed his wife dearly, but the Joker showed no remorse for anything he'd done. The clown had not even been charged with a crime for her death, because when the GCPD had finally started officially operating again, they hadn't been willing to take a police report for anything which had happened during Gotham's lawless period. That wasn't just a matter of the police being lazy. Technically, since Gotham had been legally disavowed by the government during “No Man's Land”, no government institutions had any jurisdiction over what had happened in the city during that time.
Bruce could deeply sympathize with Geoff's anger. The reality of what the Joker had done was exceedingly unfair. It was clear that no justice would be delivered by the legal system for either of them, though. Why shouldn't they help each other out, then? Maybe Bruce had been searching for someone like Geoff before his amnesia struck, because he found that he had a fake social media account already set up on the tablet, which he could now use to contact the man.
It felt like his heart started to beat double time as he typed out a vague private message indicating that he too had lost family to the Joker, and that he felt not enough was being done by their legal system. He offered to buy Geoff a drink and to sit down and discuss their mutual issues, if the man wanted to vent his frustration. Bruce paused before he hit send, though. Could Bruce really do this? He was already mentally backing out, when he got a perimeter alert: Jason was home. How long would he keep coming home if Bruce wasn't willing to do anything to protect him, though? How long until the Joker escaped again and destroyed the son that Bruce was just beginning to regain? Swallowing heavily, Bruce hit the button to send his message.