Disclaimer: Batman © DC comics

A/N: Warning: noncon in this chapter.

.

.

The Heart

Part 08 —

love and you

.

.

"'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me,
Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms.
In your arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.
In your electronic arms."

Laurie Anderson — O Superman

.

.

Bruce sits up on the bed, and regards his surroundings. In a way, it's his version of a goodbye.

He walks into each room and looks and looks and looks. The bedroom. The kitchen. The bathroom, still smelling faintly of chemicals like hair dye and detergent oils. Memories creep back with the old smells, and create imaginative settings in which Bruce comes regularly to the lean, nervous man above the flower boutique; a black hole away from the world and its problems. Jack greeting him, smiling, drinking that sugary sludge coffee. But it's fantasy—because Jack is gone.

Goodbye, Paradise.

You would not take someone like me. Not when Gotham lingers.

He walks as though in a haze. Out from the apartment, out from the building, out from the dream. Out.

.

.

Bruce stands in the amusement park. It is too early for it to take guests, 05:00, dark and ominous.

Jack did not specify where the dead henchclown had said he'd go, but he'd mentioned an amusement park as an end. The end of them. Maybe Jack had gone here to end it himself. Bruce feels naked and cold, now that his identity had leaked out. He looks around at the scaffoldings of the amusement park, picturing it various angles and aspects, imagines children screaming and laughing. Popcorn machines. Cotton candy stores. Roundabouts. A Paris wheel.

...The tunnel of love.

For fuck's sake.

It is a trap.

Of course it is.

I am not going with you.

Bruce heads there anyway, although his steps are a slowed, dreading the end. The tunnel is still pink and dotted with hearts, and there is a small path on each side of the water slide. Inside, the cold worsens, threatening to freeze him solid. Why is it always so cold? He misses Jack, and suddenly understands why Jack said he'd kill people just to be with him. More idly, he wonders who is at the end of the tunnel. An old acquaintance? A new one? Or the Joker himself?

"Jack!" he calls.

A trail of lights is lit up.

Leading to a hole in the tunnel, blown apart. Inside is only darkness.

This has been planned.

He enters the void, trapped by endless darkness. He tries to walk in one direction, and can't find any walls or obstacles to lean on. Fucking metaphorical place, Bruce thinks. He surprises himself by cursing. Has the playboy act infected him? Isn't he supposed to be whole and good? Oh no. That's Batman, not me. And he isn't here. This is something I have to do as Bruce Wayne.

There! A light! Several, actually. Stabled on top of each other.

TVs.

Dozens of them, small and old fashioned, all showing different things. Bruce comes to a halt, stomach tightening. He lets his eyes slide from screen to screen. Documentaries. Reality shows. An old black and white Dracula movie. Torture porn flicks, or just snuffs. Weird, undistinguishable things—ah, no, one of them is actually a woman on a bed getting mauled by a chimpanzee. Bruce's gonna puke. Most of them show things like that, gritty and disturbing, and it takes Bruce a moment to see that there's also footage from the henchclown murders. People torn open, intestines drooling out, missing limbs. No system or order. If he squints, he can see less grotesque but just as chilling scenarios, like a gun pointed at a child's head while a man saws his own foot off. Threats. Bribery.

There is a sofa chair in front of them, so small in front of the towering half moon, all surrounding it. The sofa chair is cushioned and blanketed, but the arms and neck is chained, forcing the observer to be still and watch.

"Jack? Is that you?"

The body moves, a bit stiffly. Joints, cracking. Head turns just a fraction.

Is that rustling, Bruce hears?

"J—Jack?" Careful, like a child of an unstable parent, Bruce walks over to the body—and starts to walk around it. Seeing. Really, really seeing.

Rifts.

Rifts, and what looks like barbeque gristle, at both ends of Jack's mouth. And it's Jack alright. Same hair, same face, same clothes. Thank god he isn't wearing that god awful clown grin (even if he might have, at some point, because of the rifts), but the eyes are unfocused and expression hollow. Bruce leans closer and sniffs in the scent of chemicals so strong they prickle and sting in his nose. "Jack? Can you hear me?"

"Is it time, boss?"

Bruce is so engulfed in Jack that it takes several seconds for him to understand that there is someone else in there with them. Why didn't his well trained senses alert him? Somewhat panicked and freezing cold, Bruce looks over to the owner of the voice, and sees a figure standing wearing a clown mask with a sad expression. His head tilts, but other than that, he stands perfectly motionless.

When Bruce looks back to Jack's face, all colour drains from his face.

The eyes, lazy as ever, have slid over to Bruce.

The mouth starts to move.

Bruce can't discern words at first, mind swelling like a bruise.

"MmmammatMatthew. Mattie. Mama's boy." The slight perk of Jack's mouth. "Your mama, rightie?"

"Yeah," the henchclown replies with an edge of exhaustion and helplessness. "My mom. You said you let her go if I do this."

Out of a sudden a long thin white arm bolts out from under the blankets and hooks around Bruce's neck, pulling down with immeasurable strength so that Bruce's head ends in the crook of Jack's neck. Like a lover. The thing who can't—can't, can't, can't—be Jack continues speaking with Jack's voice. "Hey, Mattie, remember that chicken you ate two weeks ago? The one you thought was sinewy, but didn't say 'cos it was your girlie's first try at cooking? Truth to be told, she got the chicken already prepared from a butcher 'cos she was afraid to disappoint ya. Aaaand it wasn't chicken. Tell me, did it taste like home?"

The silencer makes a whisper of the gunshot.

There is a gun in Jack's hand, handle pressed against Bruce's back. He feels it.

He tries to move, slow at first, then quicker, but the hand around his neck is steel.

"Mmno. Nope. You're not going anywhere. Look at me, you creep. Straight in the eyes." Bruce does, slowly, dread and the smell of chemicals making it hard to breathe. "That's right. Can see it, can't ya? That I won't let you leave? Stand up."

Bruce gets off as quickly as he can, backing away.

The bluish light from the TV screens gives the thing stalking towards him pasty looking skin.

"Jack—!"

The metal pipe hits the centre of his chest before he can register it. The air is knocked out of him, and he falls backwards into the screens, shattering and breaking some of them. Glass fall down on him. Snow. On some of the TVs, too. He's going to die.

"I'm not Jack. And you're not Batsy. You're an imitation. A creep. You're not supposed to exist!"

Bruce knows at once who this is.

The Joker, wearing Jack's skin like a nicely tailored suit. Livid.

"Where's Jack?!"

"Shut up! I try, and I try, and I try, but you just throw this... this thing at me!" he gestures to Bruce. "This itty bitty shit shell. You think this, this is your core? Your heart?" The Joker walks like a badly designed doll, twitching. "I know better, Batman... wherever you are in there. So I decided to strip you off it and shatter this hollow heart. Didn't take long. That's how I knew that this wasn't you. Look, look Batsy!" he screams, eyes darting around the room as if someone is watching—and then his expression abruptly changes.

Becomes tentative. Trusting.

"God, Brucie. I'm so sorry. Here, let me help you..."

Bruce, scared shitless but delirious, lets the person reach for him. "Jack," he croaks, and it wounds up becoming a lot more broken than he'd thought it'd sound. The hands that reach for him wrap around his throat, almost lovingly. And squeezes.

"Want to kill you so bad," the Joker mumbles, aroused. Then he quickly stands up and lets go, hand under his chin in a contemplative fashion, while Bruce coughs so hard his lungs might shatter. "This isn't right. You're supposed to be here, B-man! Don't you wanna see me? Don't you wanna see what I did? Naughty naughty naughty, standing our date up like this. Maybe I gotta convince you I'm serious? How much I love you?" Bruce is trying to stand up, but the metal pipe comes down a second time and this time, breaking his jaw. A spray of red in his peripheral vision. The man in front of him is looking at Bruce like he hates him.

And then Bruce knows that Jack can't be saved.

But hope... Hope, oh, the hope. It's what fuels both Bat and Bruce.

"Jack," Bruce repeats.

"Nope," the Joker says. "No Jack. No love. Just me, and you, and this lil' black hole room."

Some of the TVs are still going, spewing angst and violence. The noise is almost muted, but now that he's close, Bruce can hear it like a horrifying orchestra of the absurd and grotesque. Dissociative, Bruce wonders if this is what the Joker always hears—and if sometimes, at the back of his head, Jack did too.

The Joker stops his reverie by kissing him. It's invasive. In terms of pain, his (broken or fractured?) jaw nearly matches the heartbreak.

He was true when he said there was no love here, because the way he kisses is also contemplative, and what the Joker is contemplating is obvious: how to hurt Bruce as much as possible without killing him. Or does he view them as separate entities, the heart and the shell?

The kisses start gentle, then he uses teeth, puncturing Bruce's bottom lip. It bursts like rotten fruit, spilling. Bruce whimpers, and the Joker pulls away to smear the blood all over his face, inhaling it. "Like lipstick," he explains in a drugged moan, then goes back to kissing Bruce, more repulsive and sloppier than before, tongue and all. Salvia mixes in with the blood, creating light brown spit threads and bubbles. "Technically not cheating," the Joker says. "Just—attention whoring, I guess? Ha!" He moves to the neck, finding the fingerprint shaped bruises, and starts tonguing, biting and sucking on them.

"Why... are you... doing this?"

The Joker halts the relentless use of his mouth, to chuckle darkly and hotly into Bruce's skin. "Baby boy Bruce," he says patronizingly, "don't ya get it? I gotta finish off the story! Grand finale! And after the clean up comes the party, yeah? It all adds up, y'see. Rebirth! Genesis! I have a new face now, and I'm a new person, cleansed from old bitter Mr. J and that nervous wreck Jack guy you rave on about. No longer rotten and ill. No longer unloved." Cleansed? So there was a Jack? Just like there was an old Joker, once, there was a Jack who loved him? Bruce breaks. "And there'll always be more henchmen, but not ones like those prehistoric idiots."

"You want to rewrite your history," Bruce breathes.

The Joker brightens up. He pats Bruce's head. "Good boy! Now hold still while I fuck you out of him."

Bruce panics. Yelling in desperation, he starts hitting wildly around him, wanting to kill the Joker for just suggesting doing that to him—

and stops, because it's Jack, he can't hurt Jack.

The Joker punches Bruce in the face and breaks his nose. One more punch follows, hitting his eye, which will soon swell and blacken. Bruce growls in pain, and the Joker withers, turned on. While Bruce recovers, the Joker starts working on Bruce's jeans and underwear, ripping it off. His own, he leaves relatively untouched, only zipping it open and taking his cock out, already hard. "We fucked, didn't we? Back when I wasn't me. Bet it was very vanilla. Not like me and Batman would do it, oh no."

Bruce immediately becomes defensive. "Fuck you. He was better than you'll ever be."

"Oooh, Brucie—are you really defending a ghost?"

Jack, killed.

Killed with chemicals and grotesque videos that broke him and brought the Joker back.

Or is he still in there?

Suddenly Bruce is very aware of the hard member pressing against his ass, the Joker already pulling and pushing to position him correctly. Bruce's disoriented mind starts to shut down. There's not enough lube, and there's no condom, and nothing that'll lessen the dryness. The Joker's having trouble getting in. But he finds it funny. Laughs, just like Jack did, sans the cruelty. He laughs all the way when he starts worming himself into Bruce, tongue lolling out.

Rape. Rape!

"No!" he shouts, and the Joker looks at him, allowing him to speak. "Please, Jack, if you're in there."

The Joker stills. His eyes change, if not only a little.

"J—Jack?"

"Bruce?" Is it the truth this time, or just another act? "What the hell... What is happening to me?" Tears well up in his eyes. "Aargh, my mind, shit... It hurts..." he grabs his head, fingers tightening in his hair. Bruce doesn't dare move, nor speak. Doesn't trust himself to do it. "Bruce? What just happened?" His eyes go wide, staring. "And what happened to your face?! ...Did I do that? Oh no oh no oh no... I'll fix this, I promise," Jack says, abruptly hugging him. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," Bruce whispers. Bruce, slowly, starts to hug back, trembling and biting his tongue. Everything hurts and swells and contorts. They stay like that for a little while. Suddenly though, Jack starts to move. Bruce whispers, hoarse, "What are you doing?"

"Surprise!" the Joker screams, and slams himself in so deep his testicles slap against Bruce's ass.

Bruce's eyes go white. The Joker's, too, but only for a moment, and then he's drinking in every detail on Bruce's shattered face, and doesn't give Bruce time to adjust, just moves. And moves.

And moves.

...At the sixth thrust, Bruce can't grit his teeth anymore, and he screams while blood streams down his thighs.

The Joker doesn't mind. "Just scream it out, Bats—scream him out. Bribed the workers to keep out of here. Planned this from the start. The perfect date, huh?" He gives a particular rough shove, pressing Bruce further into the ruined TVs. They're full of missing parts and cut into his back. Bruce claws at the Joker's back to get him to stop. "Tch. Bad move." And then Bruce's hands are held by the Joker, shoved roughly down in heaps of broken glass. Bruce makes an incoherent scream, 50% human language and 50% animalistic noises.

Bruce is crying out Jack's name in time with the thrusts, repeating it like a selfish prayer. He wants his own personal god back. Wants Jack. Or perhaps it's more like those horror games teens play in front of mirrors at midnight, saying a name three times and then the ghost will appear.

Jack doesn't appear.

The Joker was speaking the truth—it's just him, and Bruce, and a void.

A memory chooses to reveal itself.

"He creates himself each day," Dr. Adams, the Joker's long surviving psychiatrist, had claimed once, when she wasn't going on about Aspersers and super sanity. "One day a mischievous clown, the next a homicidal maniac."

Yesterday he was Jack.

Today...

"Out! Get out!" the Joker pants, trying to hurt Bruce as much as possible, cock a knife to be injected into Bruce until he bursts, spills and flies away. Calming down a bit, fucking him slower, the Joker asks in a sugary sweet tone, "Did Jack cry for you? He did, didn't he! Such a fucking baby... Did you ever cry for him? No? Gonna cry for me instead, Brucie?"

The TVs are still screaming and laughing and crying all around him.

In particular, a little child.

A defenceless little baby.

Crying.

...Somebody really ought to help that baby.

"That's it. Good boy."

Bruce's cheeks are wet. He can't understand why, too numb from all the pain. In a last pathetic try to find Jack, Bruce reaches out and touches the Joker's cheek. That's what Bruce is reduced to, now.

The Joker takes one of Bruce's fingers in his mouth. Sucks on it, a little bit.

Then he bites, and does not let go until he hears the crunch of bone.

Bruce's utter look of anguish, agony and betrayal sends him over the edge and he empties himself inside Bruce, giggling as he comes, thrusting a few more times for maximum pleasure before he pulls out.

He fixes his pants, and sits down beside Bruce. "...Bye bye, Brucie. Nice knowing and all, but you're simply in the way. Don't take it personal." As a last insult, he bends down and kisses Bruce's forehead with a sloppy noise. Not quite satisfied, he laps up some of the tears, and some blood. Bruce doesn't react, and it makes him smirk. "And when my darling wakes up in a lil' bit and takes your place—well, tell him I said hi. And that I'm waiting."

.

.

He doesn't know how long he just sits there.

It's going to be light soon. He'll need to move. There's a dead body about two meters to his right and the place reeks of violence and sex, and he'll need to move.

He does, ignoring the feeling of cum and blood running out of his ass. It'll go away. It can be washed away. So can the shattered finger, the black eye, and the broken nose—with proper care and attention. Attention he'll give it, as it is daylight, a time for rest and healing. So that he can go out again in the night and be Batman.

Mommy's dead. Daddy's dead. Brucie's dead.

Jack's dead.

The two doomed lovers stand on a hill, somewhere in far away in his—Bruce's—ruined mind. The background is beautiful and looks like a watercolour painting of a dream. Looking at each other, holding each other. Fading to dust, too lost in each other to notice. Smiling, sadly. A little more innocence shattering. A little more Bruce, gone.

Till there's nothing left.

Nothing.

.

.

They're at a rooftop again.

Like always.

Batman glares up through Bruce's dead eyes and sneers, lips curling above his teeth. He is all of Bruce's negative feelings personified.

"I will catch you," Batman promises, sneering, drooling, grinning—always so inhuman and in total control.

"Again and again, always," the Joker answers, and laughs

and laughs

and laughs

and—

.

.

Somewhere, a child is crying.

.

.

A/N: Originally, the noncon scene was scrapped, but I wanted the Joker to illustrate his "heart rape" literally. I hope it helps build the feeling I was going for in the end: hollowness. I'd love for you to tell me if it succeeded or not. CC is welcome.

Other than that, thanks for following The Heart. Glad I managed to finish it before 2015.