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Tears and Rain	By : Waxcrayons Category: DC Verse Comics > Batman Views: 13546 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not nor will I ever own Batman, Superman,DC comics or any of their characters, or make any money off of them.

Chapter List
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The moon was hanging cruelly in the sky. Like a portrait painted by Lucien Freud, all dry scrapings of color, it barely lit up the Gotham skyline. Harsh street lights lent no help either. Gotham City, so cold and damp for so much of the year, was stoically holding on to it's reputation tonight. He shivered in his suit. His breath was visible. His fingers and toes were growing numb inside their thermal casings. A dark cold night like this one was sometimes a blessing. Sometimes even the ugly criminal underbelly thought it best to hunker down and wait out the frigid weather. Some freezing nights were captivating in their stillness. No cars or pedestrians. Just silent, frozen beauty reflecting off still water and dark windows. Gotham was... peaceful. Sometimes. He could have called it a night and been confident the regular police patrols could handle the possible staggering drunk or addict. He could have gone back to the manor and let Brucie have a rare night on the town with a pretty girl or three. The kind of night a wealthy twenty-six year old bachelor was expected to have.
But he didn't. Something made him drive up the bleakest road on the border of the city. Something made him park the car in a hidden clearing, and proceed in on foot. Arkham Asylum loomed over him, the shaded figure against the horizon line from Wayne Manor. Up close upon it's walled enclosure, it was far more... Daunting. There was a disquieting aura in proximity around the weather-beaten bricks and mortar. A sense of danger. No sane man would ever willingly enter such a place. Surely his own body was protesting the motions he had already forced upon it. Arkham Asylum was still and quiet. Waiting. And that was cause for alarm. For even when all of Gotham City stood still, Arkham Asylum roiled.
He felt like cold fingers were tracing along his spine before the grappling hook had even been discharged. Arkham was a maze of rooms and halls turned wards and holding wings. The top floor was for the 'safer' patients. The quiet ails, like depression and suicidal tendencies or high anxiety. The people above were not criminals, so they were kept as far away from the other populace as possible. That was where he would make his entry. If all was well inside the mad-house, there wouldn't be more then a guard or two on the top floor. The windows weren't even barred, he discovered. Just a quick peek in, and back out before anyone was the wiser.
The first signs of trouble greeted him just as he ducked into the window. The halls were a scatter of loose papers and rotting food. Even some blood. The doorways to the rooms hung open on bent or broken hinges, or flat on the ground. There were murmurings and slight scratching noises. His boots fell heavily even though he tried to make no noise. There was simply nothing he could do about the vacant echo or Arkham's halls. He closed in on the closest room and crooked his head to peer into the darkness. Beady eyes stared back at him but that was all.
"You all right?" He whispered. His only response was the shuffling as the pair of eyes skidded back further into the room. "...Very well."
The other rooms were all the same. Either vacant or just as good as. The people weren't talking. They cried softly, moaned in fear, or refused to acknowledge him. It didn't require any grand imagination to guess what had traumatized these poor people. The chaos outside their dorms was explanation enough. He steeled his nerves and carried on the tentative exploration. Down the halls was the beginning of his apprehension. Drawings and scrawled passages coated the faded wallpaper and yellowed walls. There were the ones from Alice he expected, but others that seemed almost too insightful for his comfort.
A person needs a little madness, or else they'll never cut the ropes and be free.
Maybe that's what hell is. You go mad, and all your demons come up and take you as quickly as you can think them up.
Part of being sane is being a little bit crazy.
How do you take away from a man his madness without taking away his identity?
And something's odd within. That person that I was and this one do not feel the same. Could it be Madness, this?
He stopped reading with some difficulty. He hated it when crazy-talk made sense to him. Partially because it almost always did, and he was not going to go through a mental list as to why that may be right now. Not when there was a high possibility that Arkham's nastiest patients were all lose on the lower levels. Hands on his weapons, he crept slowly down the first flight of stairs, down to the lower level. Here was were the medical bay and overnight rotating staff could trade shifts of sleeping or making the rounds. He checked the area over twice, but other then the blood scrawling and a handful of unfortunate staff cadavers, there was nothing moving about on this level. He paused momentarily to consider alerting Alfred of his expedition into the madness but a scritching sound dissuaded the thought. He could always phone in later with a concise understanding of the situation. Carefully he descended another flight of stairs To where the Psychologists and Therapists dolled out their medications as penance to the judgments they handed down.
Wary of the flickering lights, he ducked around overturned mahogany desks and various other furniture to avoid being seen by the stray inmate or two that were twitching about the area. They were clearly agitated and possibly even...bored. Present company excluded, he managed to make a fairly good sweep of this floor as well, but he found no hostages alive. Only the blank-eyed head of a woman that had been nailed to Arkham's Administrator's desk. Tacked gruesomely to her once pretty face was a simple note that read: 'What do you prescribe for this?
He swallowed back the vomit rising in his throat repeatedly. Knowing that he would encounter the worst of what mankind had to offer when he first donned his suit was nothing compared to the horrors of having to actually witness them. Honestly, he was a little afraid of the day when a decapitation would be so routine for him that he'd not even bat an eye. Just for propriety's sake, he lifted the phone next to the head off the receiver. No surprise, it was a dead line. The lighting was dimmer then he remembered. As if powered by an emergency generator or something.
I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
There is pleasure sure in being mad that only madmen know.
I suppose it is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, then to be sane and have one's doubts.
Now there was one he could agree with earnestly. You're not helping yourself here. Indeed he wasn't. The next level was a common area for the less violent of the inmates. A wide room full of sitting arrangements, two televisions in opposite ends of the room. A ping-pong and pool table, both heavily used, card tables set up with the standard chess and checker boards, cards, children's board games... He had walked through this area on a regular Arkham day and could recall the general normalcy that was severely lacking. That's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one. A cluster of men surrounded a pair of female inmates and he didn't have to stop and think about what was going on. The patients were separated by sex due specifically to this kind of behavior. Lock a bunch of men up together and they would attack any woman on sight, mentally ill or not...
He sidled along a wall until he was close enough to roll a smoke bomb perfectly into the cluster. Under the cloak of smoke and aided by his favorite element surprise, he knocked enough heads around to leave a pile of men unconsciously sprawled at his feet by the time the air cleared. Unfortunately the women were not at all thankful for his rescue. Instead they shrieked and flung themselves at him wildly... which really wasn't going to help him when he wanted to be stealthy. He caught one with his left and another with his right, clamping his hands over their mouths.
"Be quiet. I'm not here to hurt you."
The women were anything but. They struggled harder something other then he obviously spooking them. It left him little choice but to use a weak tranquilizer dart on each of them. They would wake in forty minutes or so. The men he cuffed and secured so as not to be any further threat upon their wakening. He stood silently pondering what other threats would be waiting below. So far the only Arkham staff he had seen were corpses. Or parts of a corpse. This wasn't boding well.
The floor below was the ground floor. It was a maze of offices and administration desks. A few rooms were set up to show the history of the Asylum along with it's famous family and the folklore surrounding the place. The ground floor was open to the public though he had never met a single person who had willingly come to the Asylum, historic landmark or not. Currently the ground floor was boarded up, decorated in the same mad scawling and bizarre shrines set up to the ghosts of Arkham. The smell of urine and fecal matter was stifling to say the least. There was more blood and featureless bodies rotting in the stagnant halls. How can this place be so cut off from the rest of the city? These bodies have been here for a while now. Why hasn't anybody caught on? It was more then likely that the people who wound up working for the Asylum were just as lost and unwanted as the patients. People with checkered backgrounds and nobody to count on or miss them. Still... He was suddenly quite glad it was a school night and he had left Dick at home. He had been training the elder of his three adopted sons since the boy showed such a natural flair for heroics. This wasn't the sort of horror show a child should be exposed to. The startling laughter over the intercom only reaffirmed that thought.
"Ahahahahahahahaaa! What's wrong, Batsy? It took you days to show up for the party we planned. Ohhh... I know. You were just shy over all the attention we were planning for you! You even forgot to bring that long-legged boy in the pretty swimming trunks."
There was no use in grating out a succinct response when the Joker wouldn't be able to hear him. He took a second to destroy all of the cameras in the room he stood in instead and mentally plotted the path from where he stood to the control rooms below where the Joker must be making his message for.
"You and you're shyness. Just like a pretty girl. That is, if you like girls. I can't seem to keep the damn things alive, personally! Ahahahahahahahaaa!"
Ignore him. Think and act. For one small terrible moment he felt like he had just put on the cape and cowl for the first time. All the anxiety and fear of the unknown stretching out beyond him. He couldn't shake the feeling that this was something more then a half-baked caper from his least favorite clown. He took the moment to send a voice message to the Cave. A brief status update that Alfred in all his diligence would listen to as soon as Jason was finally put to bed, hours after his curfew. Alfred would put in the anonymous call to the GCPD and James Gordon would arrive here with back-up.
"I should warn you that I have a very large number of hostages down here in the crazy-homicidal wing. Doctors, orderlies, nurses... Even the cleaning crew! Naturally, I'm not letting them go easily either. In fact," The Joker's voice dropped from it's high falsetto into icy seriousness. "I think we'll try something we've never done before. Meet us downstairs."
The sudden silence was deafening. He weighed his options. There were no guards anywhere that he could see. That meant the Joker had them, and their guns. An armed mob of mentally unstable patients and one homicidal lunatic to point their trigger fingers in all the wrong directions. He knew it would be wise to conference with Gordon and make a good clean sweep of the place, but at the same time he knew that the Joker wasn't going to wait too long before growing bored and starting the slaughter. He sent another quick update for Alfred to do with whatever he thought necessary and he made his way down towards the most dangerous parts of the Asylum. From a strategical point of view the low narrow passages would work well in trying to transport or apprehend a rogue inmate between facilities, but right here and now? They were a disadvantage he didn't need knowing full well that he was walking into a tight area with a lot of potential victims and a mob of armed men.
He decided the best option was to go in fighting. Maybe he could overwhelm the bulk of the patients. Not many of them were adept fighters. There was no guarantee that the Joker had wanted to share his playtime with the other big names housed here. There was likely a good chance that the Joker hadn't released Two-Face, The Riddler, Mad-Hatter and the other maniacs. He followed the smoke bombs in, using flash grenades as a way to distract the gunfire from his actual position. It was hard going in the limited space to disarm and subdue the assailants. The infrared in his cowl was appreciated. As the armed men fell, the hostages began to tear past him in droves. Their panic made it difficult to avoid the blows from freshly unarmed inmates. With little else he could do between being both pushed back along with the hostages and attacked by the detainees, he managed to grapple himself over the bulk of them and swing into the wider area ahead. He landed with a heavy thud in a ring of large man with madness in their eyes. The only thing holding them together in formation was the base animal instinct that recognized the more dangerous beast among them.
The Joker stood with the barrel of a gun pressed firmly under the chin of one very pale senior psychologist he could recall seeing on numerous drop-offs. Her eyes flicked nervously from the hand holding the gun and up in his direction. Behind he could see a collection of Arkham's senior staff members held at gun point. Victor Zsasz sharpened a large knife close by, fresh blood evident on both the knife and his person... There were many new soon to be scars on his body as well. In his peripheral vision he noticed Edward Nygma take a place among the circle just as surely as he felt the hot breath of Waylon Jones on his neck. Oh, this isn't very ideal. He tensed slightly weighing his diminishing options and the Joker, wise to his ways by this point, tsked with dissatisfaction.
"Don't even think about it, Guano-man. There are a good thirty people that could die within seconds here. One wrong step from you is all it's going to take. Honestly, I'm game for how ever you want to play this, Sweetums, but how about we do a different dance?"
"You'll surrender for once?" His voice was gravel. The stoic Batman sound he had practiced for years before employing it.
"I'm saving that one for your birthday, Cupcake! But now that I've spoiled it, I'll have to think of another gift, ahahahahahahahaaa!"
"What's the plan this time, Joker? Hold the Asylum hostage for money? Fear? A fish named after yourself?"
"I like your fish idea, Darling, but not this time. Nope. This, Honey, is all about you. These flies here," he waved the gun haphazardly around to gesture at the frightened staff members. "they're really just here to make sure you cooperate with this little project."
He felt Waylon close a hand down on his left arm before he was pushed closer to the Joker and his hostage. Not close enough to lash out and disarm the mad clown, unfortunately.
"Take out a pair of those kinky cuffs you always have handy, Baby." The Joker watched him intently as he complied. "Now lose the belt, Sweet-pea."
Just have to keep the innocents alive until Gordon gets here. Then I'll make a break... I don't need weapons and tools to get the job done. He unclipped the belt and kicked it away before the mad knave even asked him to.
"Eddie here likes to solve riddles." The Joker stated the obvious as Nygma approached him. Waylon took hold of his other arm and pressed him hard into the ground as a subtle warning not to kick out at the long-haired man before him. "He's been dying to know if there is a man under that suit. I'm convinced it's your skin, but you know those intellectual types... always gotta ruin it for the rest of us, right Sophie-dear?"
Sophie Brant... Head psychologist. He gave Sophie what he hoped was a reassuring look. It was near impossible to pick out any of his facial expressions under the cowl, but Dr. Brant had always seemed intuitive enough to catch his mood. The look was brief as he quickly turned his attention to Nygma's wiry hands caressing the suit... No. Just looking for the latches and the buckles to take it off. And while he couldn't claim to physically feel the roaming hands, he knew they were there, and he felt the icy tickle of the unwanted touch through the Kevlar and Nomex bioweave.
"...Like a puzzle, Batman. I'm impressed. Have you had a lot of trouble with people trying to undress you in your day to day that you needed to make trick locks on your clothing?"
"I'm a popular guy." He replied flatly.
The Joker sniggered and Nygma went to work, freeing him of his chest and back pieces of armor with too much ease for his liking. The padding followed each subsequent piece of armor Nygma removed until he stood only in cape, cowl and boots, and the slinky-fabric of his form-fitted undersuit. The boots followed after a pensive moment, and were unbuckled and cast aside. At least I'm wearing matching socks. Humor aside, this was turning into a very real crisis. He would have never have suspected the inmates of Arkham wanted to strip him down like this. This was not close to any of the games they liked to play. He felt suddenly vey small. Which was also true. The suit gave him the illusion of more bulk then he truly possessed, and the boots added and inch and at last a half to his height. He was watching his hard-earned indomitable persona being broken down. He was suppose to be a monster to these people. Now he could tell they were looking at him like a man.
Zsasz stalked over in no great hurry to stand by Nygma. With a bloodless hand he reached out and slipped said appendage up beneath his shirt and rested his frigid fingers over the Dark Knight's heart. "What do you know. He has flesh and a beating heart." Zsasz closed the gap and peered into the lenses on the cowl as if he could see through them and into his eyes. "He's not a zombie though. I can see it in your eyes... But when they're all done with you, I'll liberate you from your suffering... Here," Zsasz pointed to a small bare patch of skin over his heart. "This is where your memory will be."
Between Waylon Jones' vice-grip, Zsasz's steely digits clawing at his heart, and now the standing Nygma's all too familiar hands on his hips... Just...too much...physical contact.
He squirmed ever so slightly before he caught himself, but again, the Joker seemed to be the expert on his every twitch.
"Don't crowd the little flower, boys. We have a strict schedule to keep up. Bat-boy's presence here means that aging dinosaur of the GCPD will be arriving shortly to spoil all my fun. Cuff him and lets get moving."
"If this is about me, let them go." He motioned with his head to the hostages.
"How will I make you behave yourself if I give up our playmates over there?" The Joker said as if he was explaining something to a child. "Besides, Zsasz really wanted to get to know them on an intimate level!"
That was exactly the answer he expected he'd get. "Voice-activate self-destruct." He said crisply, and the utility belt he had conveniently kicked over towards the armed guards earlier exploded in a dazzling display of lights and smoke. "Run!" he commanded, and for once the hostages didn't freeze in fear in a situation. They bolted hidden in the fog and by the time everyone's eyes had cleared he had wrestled down several more of the men in a effort to aid the escape before Waylon was on top of him with Zsasz at his throat. In the clearing air his last-ditch effort had been adequately successful. Sophie Brant was still in the Joker's clutches and Jeremiah Arkham along with two senior doctors were left beaten into submission by the large armed men he hadn't been able to take down. Twenty-six saved. Still... There were four lives he was responsible for still in danger from the madmen around them.
"I outta blow her brains all over the ceiling, Batsy. But, out of all the people here, she's the one you're most fond of. You have a weakness for the weaker sex. Makes you predictable. So I think I'll hold onto her for a while yet... But you're going to have to learn." The gun aimed low, the ominous click-click-click followed by a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning. He hated that sound. He hated the screams that always followed that sound. Down in these halls, the sounds were amplified a hundred times. Sophie's shrill shriek from the slug tearing through her leg was topped only by the wild laughter of the man who had shot her. "Now stop wasting time. On to phase two. Zsasz, enjoy your killing spree. Croc, knock our Sweetheart out will you. I don't want to ruin the surprise for him."
"What surprise?" He had wanted to ask, but Waylon was a strong man and after the third blow to his temple, everything slipped into darkness.
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Tears and Rain