Part l

He would be lying if he said he doesn't think about her.

How can he fucking not?

He remembers the first time he saw her, thinks about it all the time, carefully plucks the hazy-edged memory from his mind like it's hidden in a corner protected by slivers and shards of sharp glass, and he doesn't want to cut himself.

Not that he's ever minded spilling a little blood—or a lot of it, for that matter.

But in his mind's eye, she is there. Always there. Always in that room where it all began. So pale and so small; pink-cheeked and shivering from the cold, probably on the verge of frostbite without even knowing it. He remembers—more than anything else from that encounter—the way she stared at him, the way she looked at him, so openly, so… unafraid. She had been wary and unsure, yes, but not afraid of him. Her curiosity far outweighed her fear. Perhaps that's why he liked her so much, why he still likes her after all these years, why he gives a damn in the first place and can't stop wondering about her.

What is she like now? What have the hands of time done to her? What has she done to it?

He finds himself imagining what she looks like, wonders if her hair is still gold and tangled with ringlets, if her green eyes are still big and round and framed by thick, dark lashes, if she's tall or short, thin or fat. He wonders if she's shy or bold, if she is sitting quietly in a corner or standing in the middle of the room, commanding attention to all of those who will freely give it. Does she have hobbies, does she paint or draw or read or write, does she yearn with the need to create and build, or burn with the desire to destroy and destruct, to wreak havoc on the things in this world she doesn't understand?

Most of all, he wonders if she remembers. If she remembers him. Maybe that haunts him—the idea of her remembering. It makes him feel… it makes him feel. Do you get that? It makes him feel.

He doesn't know if he wants her to remember him.

Of course he does want her to, but then, a much smaller part of him, a part of him that stays tucked away on some top corner shelf in the marrow of his bones, realizes that if she does remember him, she'll remember everything else, all the things he put her through and all the things he made her do. And it's not that he feels sorry for those things, because he doesn't, and he would do everything over again in much the same way if he had to, but the thing is that he wants her to like him. He doesn't want her to look back with some newfound semblance of teenage-clarity and realize how stupid and naïve she had been, and suddenly realize that he is a horrible monster, and that she hates him. He doesn't want that. He doesn't want that at all.

What he does want makes the hairs on his arms stand on end, makes his throat feel dry and hot and tight, sets the blood in his veins on fire, makes white-hot heat crash over him in dizzying waves because of what he wants and how he wants it, because he wants, he craves, and he needs, and it's with an intensity that burns him from the inside out.

Because what he wants is for her to need him again, to want him the way he wants her. He wants to feel that same unidentifiable magnetized force that drew them together, because he doesn't know what he wants from her, just that he wants her again, wants to see her and have her until this forest fire beneath the surface of his skin is wet and sated.

That's what he wants.

He plans accordingly.

She is a little hard to find, at first; he does everything but flip the whole city upside down and force it to shake out its pockets like its a little punk on the playground who's stolen his lunch money, and now he wants it back. It's nothing a little persistence and a little uh, friendly persuasion at the GCPD headquarters can't solve; people can be so accommodating when the knife's sharp enough and the angle's right.

So he does some digging in dark corners, spends some money and hires some people who can do a little digging for him so he doesn't have to himself and end up raising red flags. He's got a friend of a friend of a friend who can pull strings in high places, someone with all the right connections who can get him into all the right places—chief among them, being digitally birthed into the Gotham City public records system as a long-lost uncle twice removed to one Taylor Borden.

How strangely satisfying it is to learn her last name after all these years.

Now, he waits. Lies low for a few days, keep his gorgeous mug out of the papers and off the streets where the limelight won't touch it. It's maddening, the silence that seems to fall over Gotham in his very public and noticeable absence, and after a while people even seem to relax for a bit, like some heavy burden has been lifted from their shoulders and they can take deep breaths without having to worry about inhaling noxious fumes.

He hates it, but he knows it will be worth it.

When his requests are processed, and his likeness stares knowingly at him from a state-issued ID that reads 'Joe Kerr', he knows it's time.

The leaves are dying slowly. It's that time of the year. The pavement is littered with the shriveled, gold and red dried-up leftovers of a forgotten summer, and the air is crisp and sharp. The sky is that obnoxiously pretty shade of eggshell blue, without a single cloud to mar its vibrancy. Above him, the sun winks at him as he walks, its rays catching and flickering between skyscrapers that the Joker imagines to be Jenga blocks instead, so fragile and so full of destructive promise if he could just pluck the right block and send the whole thing crashing to the ground. Maybe another day.

He dresses up for the occasion—or perhaps dresses down is the better word, forgoing his usual greasepaint and dyed green hair.

Well—he hadn't been able to get all the green out, but it will do. The baseball cap will hide most of it, anyway.

The orphanage is in one of the more upstanding parts of Gotham, if you consider buildings that aren't derelict and keeling over due to neglect 'upstanding'. Regardless, it isn't in the Narrows, which is a step up no matter which way you look at it. It's not far from one of Gotham's lower-end shopping districts, where there's a mall and a baseball stadium and a park, and the orphanage nestled just outside of that. It's a small, plain building. Square. Bars over the windows, even the ones on the third floor. Looks more like a prison than a temporary home for young children. The way the buildings around it are arranged make it so that there hasn't been a single strand of sunlight to touch the building in years. The brick is hard and cold, cast in a perpetual shade it can do nothing about. It is dismal, to say the least.

The inside doesn't fare much better. He steps into a short but narrow hallway. Dark. Lit only by the daylight that the square, frosted glass window over the door allows. The paint on the walls—navy blue—is peeling, and the off-white trim is bruised and battered and dirty, littered with fingerprints and skid marks.

He takes a moment to fix his clothes, make sure his hair is tucked into his baseball cap, wets his dry and chapped lips. They feel odd without the greasepaint. Bare. He doesn't like it, but he knows this is a small price to pay to see her again.

Everything in his body is fueled by an electric current, his veins thrumming with an anticipation so palpable he can taste the copper tang of livewire on his tongue. He is both impatient and excited, and, maybe, even a touch nervous. Anxious. The only thing he knows about her is that she's alive, she's alive, and he will see her for the first time in eleven years.

He goes to the tall counter at the end of the hall. It's empty, but there is an office behind it. He walks closer to see over the countertop. The room behind it is crammed tight with filing cabinets, plastic bins spilling with papers, and an equally overflowing desk, the surface of which is not even visible. There is apparently so much paper that they've moved to utilizing the walls. There isn't a single space of wall that isn't occupied by a push-pin or Post-It note.

The Joker lets his eyes wander to the figure slumped behind the desk: an overweight woman with coarse, black hair—more grayish than black—passed out in a dead sleep, her mouth open as she snores.

He smacks his lips and leans against the counter, slicks back his hair and then clears his throat. Loudly.

The woman jolts awake, the rolls of fat gathered beneath her neck, like the jowls of a turkey, becoming even more prominent when she sits upright. She takes a minute to find her glasses—which are hanging around her neck—and puts them on before she looks up at him through a haze of sleep.

He waits for her vision to focus before addressing her. Time to butter her up.

"Hello, doll," he drawls. He watches the way her eyebrows raise, two very, very thin lines, with an arch drawn so high the Joker thinks it will recede into her hairline. She huffs to get out of her chair so she can give him a closer look.

She awards him the same courtesy. Up close, her face is pale and moony, and there are dark circles, the color of day-old bruises, permanently tattooed on the bags under her eyes. The blue blouse stretched across her belly is about three sizes too small. The Joker stares at her breasts—or rather, the buttons that run vertically down her front—that look like they are barely holding on by a thread, and will threaten to pop open if she would just move or bend over the wrong way. He lifts his gaze to meet her dead-eyed stare.

"Can I help you?" she drones.

Hm. Not interested, then. This isn't going to be as easy as he thought, but the Joker just so happens to be good at getting people to do what he wants, especially if that includes overlooking a few questionable discrepancies in the background check she's going to have to run for a person who doesn't actually exist—miniscule discrepancies, really.

He lays it on thick—as he is wont to do—and butters her up reaaal nice, bats his eyelashes, stares pointedly at her… feminine assets, if you catch his drift, says some things that are perhaps a touch suggestive, perhaps a touch not depending on where your mind is. And her mind? Stuck about 2.5 miles back at home within the pages of Fifty Shades of Gray lying on the nightstand next to the black, ribbed-for-her-pleasure dildo.

He's not joking. He's seen it.

She relaxes, then—or perhaps that's not quite the word for the way her pits are sweating through her blouse, and her panties are as wet as a coastal city during a hurricane, and he can smell the pheromones radiating off her.

She introduces herself as Deb, and yes, yes he already knows, can we get to the point already?

Soon, though, as predicted, she melts into the palm of his hand. Give or take fifteen minutes and a hell of a lot of patience, and his little plan is sold and in the bag. She is so utterly delighted that a handsome man such as himself deigns it upon himself to give her the time of day that she all but ignores basic protocol. He stares at her in a way that makes her face deep red—like the color of strawberry filling inside a jelly donut—and turns her eyes glassy with want.

"I—I'll just go get her, Mr. Kerr," she says, and the Joker nods, offers a salacious little smile, and makes a point of staring at her meaty bottom as she turns from him and does as she's told.

When the door clicks shut behind her, the Joker spins on his heels and paces, is all nerves and staccato energy once more, feels a shiver run through him in a way he hasn't felt in a long while.

The tick of the plastic wall clock sounds magnified and slow, as if time itself has slowed to a crawl just to torment him for his impatience.

His mouth is dry. His palms sweat. His pulse races, blood crashing around in his body like it doesn't know where it's going. He thinks the reaction he is having is almost comical, and he wants to laugh at the absurdity of all it, he does, but before he can, he hears the door creak open and he stops, turns slowly, so slowly, to look, to see her after all these years.

Taylor.

She looks at him and he looks at her and everything in the room falls away, like it's just them, them in this empty, space-less void where nothing else exists, not even sound.

He tries to read her face, tries to gauge if that expression sprawled so openly across her features is one of recognition. But she just looks at him like… like she's confused. Puzzled. Like maybe she has seen him before, but only in a far-off dream that was already half-forgotten by the time she'd woken up.

He watches the way she tilts her head and bites the flesh of her bottom lip, frowns a little, like she just can't pinpoint where she's seen him before. The look sends a thrill down his spine, her expression so reminiscent of the ones he knows he has often made himself, and he can't help but wonder if it's an expression she learned from him, if it's something she unconsciously picked up from him and has been doing all these years they've been apart.

More still, he delights in the way interest flashes in her eyes seconds later—green eyes, still so fucking green—something akin to wonder and fascination flitting across her gaze as she eyes him up and down.

She blushes when she realizes what she's done, when she realizes he hasn't looked away or blinked since the moment she stepped into the room, and he loves it, feels such intense satisfaction spark through him from her reaction… but then Deb breaks the spell to interrupt, and the trance is momentarily broken. Taylor averts her gaze to the floor.

Deb takes the opportunity to move a little closer so she can squeeze a bicep and introduce him as Taylor's "Uncle Joe", and remarks on how nice it is that he has come to visit. The Joker tries hard not to glare at her in a way that reveals how badly he wants to string her up by her thick ankles and cut out her insides so he can force-feed her her own entrails.

"Deb. Debbie," he croons. "Maybe it'd be best if me and the little lady here had some pri-va-cee. Get to be uh, reacquainted. Wouldn't that be alright?"

She nods furiously. "Of course!" she says too quickly. "Yes, yes, right over here." She leads them the short distance to the sitting room, a square, windowless space with a table and four chairs that looks more like an interrogation room than a room where parents can interact and get to know their potential future child in a quiet and private setting.

Deb urges Taylor to sit down and then fusses over Uncle Joe. Can I take your jacket? Would you like some coffee? Water? Tea?

He declines all offers without once taking his eyes off Taylor, not even when the door shuts and it is finally silent, finally the two of them after all these years.

He knows he is staring at her like he wants to devour her. It makes her cheeks flush in the same way she did when she was little, but it's different now because she's grown up, and she knows grownup things and that people can be more ill-intentioned than all those years of childhood innocence would lead you to believe.

But she didn't exactly have those years of luxury, did she? Because he plucked that from her without consent, without asking if that was what she wanted. He's not ashamed of it because he doesn't feel shame, and he doesn't regret it because he likes what he's done to her, liked it when he did it and knows he wouldn't have done things differently.

He licks his lips and forgets they're not slathered in greasepaint. Misses the taste. He slides his tongue along the inside of his cheek instead, tastes the rippled scar tissue there and finds his voice.

"You have grown," he tells her, without any sort of special lilt to his voice. It's not a question, not a taunt, just the honest truth, perhaps the most honest thing he's said in a while.

He waits for a response, hungers for the sound of her voice, needs to hear her say something, anything, but she doesn't reply at all, just looks at him with wide-eyed wonder and a sliver of fear. She's scared of him.

That makes him angry.

She didn't used to be scared. Not like this. What he wants now is for her to open up to him like a flower, the way she once had eleven years ago when she was too young and too naïve to know any better, to know that opening up to him was dangerous.

In the silence that follows, he studies her. He doesn't try to make it look like he isn't, he just does. Stares at her hair—still blonde, a slightly darker shade of it—which is straight now instead of curly. Stares at her eyes, mouth, the shape of her neck and shoulders and everything below that that is visible before the table cuts off his view. Stares at this teenage version of the little girl who had once clung to him in a way that no one ever had. Time hasn't changed her much, except where it has changed her most of all.

Her eyes are dark, now, no longer full of hope and clung-to promises, or the special kind of innocence that only children can possess. Her eyes now tell the story of someone who has seen too many of the horrible things that the world has to offer, that Gotham has to offer. There is no faith there, no hope that one day the world will right itself and that good will triumph evil. There is simply the pain in knowing that the world is busted and broken, and that even if one day the world is righted, it will not undo or compensate for all the wrongdoings, for the rapes and racism and murders and conglomerate of sins of a people drunk on power.

The seconds continue to tick by. Why won't she say something?

He finds himself getting impatient. He licks his lips and shifts in his chair. "You don't know who I am, do you? You don't… remember me."

She looks at him like he's just spoken a foreign language, but he knows she understands because she shakes her head, just the slightest bit, to indicate that no, she doesn't remember him. She doesn't know who 'Uncle Joe' is or that she even had an uncle in the first place.

As the silence lingers, the Joker feels his patience waning. He is, for perhaps the first time, unsettled by the way she is staring at his scars. It's not the way she is staring that he doesn't like, but the fact that it's her staring. She had once, in her childish curiosity and delight, told him that his scars looked like caterpillars. Now she is looking at him like he's going to gut her.

Maybe he will.

"You see something you like?" He doesn't know why he's this angry all the sudden, why this little teenage girl who hasn't even said anything is able to pull these kind of emotions out of him, is able to make his blood boil like this, but he can't stop himself, can't grab ahold of this way she is making him feel.

"Answer me," he growls, knowing he has to keep his voice low so Deb doesn't get suspicious. "These interest you?" he asks, gesturing to his scars. This time he doesn't wait for a response. He snarls and lunges for her. "Maybe you'd like a closer look."

He stands before she can even register what he is doing, his chair scraping across the floor as his arm reaches for her and closes around her throat, hauling her out of her chair and halfway across the table so the tips of her shoes barely touch the floor.

He is breathing so hard he can barely see straight. Her neck is so soft and pliant beneath his hand, and he feels the muscles of her trachea contracting as it struggles for air. He doesn't cut off all her air, just enough to make her eyes widen in fear, but she doesn't fight him.

She doesn't fight him.

This close, he can see the freckles dotted along the bridge of her nose and cheeks, can see his own reflection in the dark irises of her eyes, and the faint, purpled leftovers from an old bruise on her temple. A bruise from what or whom he doesn't know.

He stares at her, and she stares at him, and he thinks for a moment he is going to crush her and how fucking easy it would be, how good it would feel to hear her choked gasps for air and the crunch of her vertebrae—but all that bloodlust fades almost as instantly as it had come. Taylor reaches out a hand, slowly, almost tenderly, and touches the scar on his left cheek.

She is crying.

He freezes at the foreign touch, at the way he can feel every groove and ridge on the pads of her fingers against the furled and rippled flesh of his scar. His grip loosens until his hand drops entirely, and when their eyes meet, he sees recognition flash in her eyes.

She stares at him in awe, unblinking, and then she sobs aloud and collapses into him, wraps her arms around his neck in an embrace, her knees planted on the table, and he doesn't do anything but stand there as she sobs into his neck and grips him with bruising force.

"It's you," she says, and her voice cracks, and it's the first time he's heard her voice in eleven years. She sounds so little and afraid. "You came back for me."

He feels something like a smile biting at his mouth, something like relief wash over him. "Leave you here all by yourself? Why, I would never."

She sniffles and he can feel her tears on his neck. "I… I remember when you told me that," she says, as if she is awed that she does remember.

She pulls away from him, and when she does her cheeks are ruddy and her eyelashes are soaked from crying, and she's embarrassed to be kneeling on the table, so she quickly gets down, he steps back, and she dusts invisible dirt off her jeans which are three sizes too big.

It's quiet for a moment, the two of them standing there, the Joker still trying to process that she remembers him, remembers him after eleven years. He feels… cautious. Like maybe this could be a bad thing, or maybe he could twist it in his favor, or maybe he doesn't have to.

"How much do you remember?" he hears himself asking, quietly, like there's a sudden spell cast over the room and he doesn't want to break it, doesn't want this moment to spontaneously combust and to wake up and realize this was all some strange, psychotic dream.

"They tried to make me forget. The therapy, I—it didn't work. But seeing you… I remember everything." She looks up at him. "Oh, God, I remember everything." She puts a hand to her forehead as if she suddenly has a headache, and a look of panic crosses her features. She looks so much like a child when she stumbles towards the nearest chair and sinks into it, pulls her knees to her chest and bows her head so it rests atop them. "All of it," she breathes.

The Joker's mind races. He wonders if this is the moment where she'll realize that she hates him for what he's done, for all the things he made her see and all the things he made her do.

Her voice cuts through the silence with all of the intensity of a sharpened sword. She looks at him. She has to know. "Are you going to kill me? Is that—is that why you came?" The thought of it breaks her. "I—I waited for you, after all this time and you…." she trails off, unable to finish, and the Joker's face hurts from how hard he is grinning.

This… this is not what he had expected. Before—before all of this—he hadn't wanted her to remember, hadn't wanted her to see him as the monster that he is. But now… now that's exactly what he wants. He wants all of those memories to come flooding back to her, for her to remember every last disgusting, gritty detail of their story. He'll make her remember that he saved her life while simultaneously destroying it. She'll remember and he'll make her feel glad that it happened.

The Joker hears himself laugh after a long beat of silence has passed. He laughs, and Taylor buries her head as if her fate's been sealed. He is grinning when he kneels in front of her, pulls down her legs so she can't shield herself from him, and forces her to look at him.

"Kill you? After everything we've been through? No. No, no, no, no, no," he says quickly. He shifts too close, so energized now. He sees only her and the map work of her brain laid out before him and the way he is going to twist and tangle all the roads and pathways so she doesn't even know which way is up and which is down. "That'd be too easy. Too boring. Because you know what's much more interesting to me than all that?" He shifts so he's closer, grips the legs of the chair. He realizes he's got her right where he wants her, where she's open and vulnerable and his for the taking. "I think you're mad at me that I didn't come back for you sooner, and I think you pined for me like the sweeee-t lonely little girl you are," here his voice drops, "and I think despite all that you still love me, and I wanna hear you say it."

She looks away as if he's read something from her diary, and if she looks away fast enough, maybe he won't be able to decipher if his words are true. The room feels weighted and buried in a heavy silence. He already knows what she's going to ask next.

"Why didn't you come back for me sooner?" she asks, and her voice cracks from the weight of her words. "I… I waited. I didn't know it was you I was waiting for. But I did wait." The tears lodged in her throat makes her voice crack. "I waited for so long."

"And that makes you mad, doesn't it?"

She can't look at him. "Yes," she whispers.

"But you still love me after all this time, don't you? You still wished I would come, thought about me eveeery night that you laid awake in your little bed, wishing on all those stars you saw outside your window that I would come for you." When she doesn't reply he grips her chin in a vice and forces her eyes to his. "Didn't you?"

"Yes," she sobs.

The Joker scowls and releases her chin as if he is physically repulsed by her. "You are disgusting," he sneers. "Weak. Do you think anyone could possibly want someone so pathe-tic?" He leans back on his haunches, lets go of the legs of the chair. "You, so desperately clinging to idea that I would come and save you, that I would rescue you so you can have the fairytale ending you've been wanting and we'll all live haaappily ever after." He tsks. "You are in love with a monster. Think about all those things that I've done, that I made you do. Doesn't that shame you? Doesn't that make you just hate yourself for the way that you feel?"

Taylor shook her head, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks. "Stop this. What are you doing?"

"Telling you the truth. You're old enough now to know the relationship between cause and effect, and that every action has consequences." He leans in close, then, changing his approach, letting everything he just said weigh down upon her so that it sinks into every pore, worms its way inside her like a parasite and eats away at every part of her that doubts his words. He's planted the seed, now it's time to watch it grow.

He reaches out and tucks a long strand of hair behind her ear. "You're so fragile," he whispers. "A liii-ttle broken doll. No one else can change that, not even you." He raises his brows, almost as if daring her to challenge his words. She won't, though, not when he can see her hanging off of his every word even though she'd like him to think that she isn't. "Out there," he gestures behind him, to the dirty streets of Gotham just behind that wall, "the world will eat you alive. It will crush you until you are nothing but ashes and dust. Gotham… it has a way of finding your weak spots and digging and burrowing into those holes with a five-inch blade until you've bled out and nothing of you is left." He grips the seat of her chair on either side of her. "Out there, no one can protect you, and no one will want to because of the things you've done, because you are a dirty, pathetic piece of shit." Taylor winces at the insult, at the intensity at which it is delivered. "But I can," the Joker says, watches as he tears away that last shred of her innocence, tears it right in fucking half. "I'm the only one who can save you now."

He studies her intently. Doesn't say anything as he watches all her emotions flash freely across her face, reading her just like he used to when she was a child.

She is too stunned to say anything, and when he stands, when he leaves to let her mind simmer with all the seeds he's planted in there, she cries out for him, just when his hand is on door, ready to turn the knob.

"Wait! You can't leave me," she pleads, sounding so desperate and afraid, so much like the little girl who had been taken from him and forced into the back of a police car against her will as she screamed for him. She jumps out of her chair and stands to face him, curls her arms around her middle like a lifeline, like it's the only thing keeping her upright. "I know that I need you. You can't leave me here again. Please."

The Joker faces the door and grins. He doesn't turn around.

"Oh, sugar, don't you worry. I'm gonna come back."

Author's Notes: This is, as the summary states, an AU where Blackout doesn't exist. It takes place eleven years post Clockwork.