jukeboxhound_backup | fic: physics (batman) (Reply)

Gah, self, it's a quarter after four in the morning and you have class in five hours and why won't you stay asleep? *flails* I'M GOING TO HATE MYSELF FOR THIS LATER.

Physics
Character: Joker
Warnings: Movie-verse, technically. Pretty mild, actually, relatively introspective and that was fun to write. :3

It was basic science. Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.

The Batman acted, and the Joker was the reaction. Their middle ground was Gotham’s stinking streets. Polar opposites meeting in a clash of equals—theoretically two such substances should cancel the other out, but the growing number of dead in the city’s morgues said otherwise. Polar opposites—fire and fucking ice, dear God but the Joker couldn’t help but laugh at that kind of bullshit.

Fire and ice made a fucking puddle of steaming water, not some sublime metaphor of transcendent spiritual crap. Really, people. Things became clichés for a reason—not because of truth, but because creativity was something limited to the unlimited imagination of the insane.

Or the mildly disturbed, at least. Somewhat disappointing that the Batman hadn’t understood him sooner, but there you go. People’s dementias could run the whole spectrum, and the Joker could be patient. He was quite finished with screwing over the screw-ups in the mob. The first time he’d seen the Batman, Joker had dismissed him as another lost soul in this low-income pit of hell trying to be a schemer and failing miserably, with a crappy costume to pad his fall from fifteen minutes of fame.

But he wasn’t stupid. Mad, well, most might raise their hands and volunteer a ‘yes,’ but the Joker wasn’t one of those retard kids with a football helmet. There were people, and then there were people, the sort of people who could change the course of history simply by existing. And the Batman was one of those people.

Schemers and their scheming schemes. Gordon and Mayor What’s-His-Face had their little pet projects, but the Batman, he was defined by schemes. Couldn’t exist if there wasn’t law, now could he? So came in the physics. The Joker was good at physics, especially if it involved the stuff that went boom and made pretty red outlines on the asphalt.

A guiding angel for the guardian, killing the people that the guardian was tied down to. That was funny.

He had slightly less patience for people like Doctor Crane.

“Severe trauma in childhood can cause the psyche to become permanently trapped in the childhood mentality. Someone who suffered abuse may never lose their instincts of distrust or self-preservation. He may exhibit the same behavior that caused the mental break in the first place, most often some form of violence but also immaturity.”

Yes, doctors killed all the fun in life. Scarecrow woke up in his cell at Arkham to find himself surrounded by bats. They were even rubber, to keep the good former doctor from hurting himself as he screamed and flailed and screamed some more. Wasn’t that funny?

Of course it was. Few people could appreciate the irony. Like the Batman.

Oh, Batsy. Now there was a fucking head-case if there ever was one and the only difference between the loveable not-hero and his source of nightly entertainment was the side of the justice fence he squatted on. The Joker and the Batman; not fire-and-ice but wolves-and-bats.

No, the Joker didn’t want to kill him. Batman was just too delicious to see squirm in trying to solve the moral dilemmas that were put before him without breaking his precious scheming rules. Tried too hard to stick to the laws of physics when there were some reactions that just couldn’t be predicted. Every action had an equal and an opposite, but sometimes you couldn’t see them until they blew up in your face.

That was funny.