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Barbara has a routine. Every evening, at around seven o’clock, she logs into her ever-expanding computer network as the newly minted Oracle and she pulls up a live feed of the Joker’s cell. Eight o’clock is dinner time for the inmates, along with their nightly meds, and the Joker will be waiting in his cell, whistling idly or making up disturbing nursery rhymes.
It’s a reassurance. It’s a nightmare. If her dad ever saw it, he’d freak, but Babs needs it. She needs to know that he’s locked up, that every ding of the doorbell isn’t him waiting at her door.
Babs installed several cameras around her new apartment. There’s two different doors that can be remote enabled to allow access to or bar guests—a useful mechanism given her infirmity. She’s yet to finish designing a wheelchair to fully accommodate her needs, every physical therapy session leaves her exhausted and on the verge of tears, and some days she just wants to lay in bed and scream until she can’t hear herself anymore.
Her father’s got a sixth sense for those kind of days. He’ll pop over with a bag of takeout, trying to hide his overprotectiveness with an offer to watch whatever game is playing, and subtly try to convince her to move back in with him. It’s been months, she’s capable of living on her own, but he never stops trying.
He always leave before she signs in—the lines between her world and his were blurred in the aftermath of the assault and the conversation they never had looms in the air between them. But he doesn’t ask and she doesn’t volunteer. Batman’s passed on information, so she knows he knows of Oracle. Knows his relief that it’s a desk role.
When she was a child, back when she’d first moved in with him, Jim Gordon used to take her out for ice cream whenever she got a good grade on a test or completed a new project. Whenever he was proud of what she accomplished. She could tell exactly when he found out she was Batgirl, because the ice cream trips stopped.
It didn’t matter. She was proud of herself. And now—now, the skills she’s spent her childhood learning, the fighting, the investigative work, the charm and compassion and care—all of it’s rendered useless by a monster. Oh, she can still work—the Joker destroyed her body but couldn’t break her mind—but her only worth is behind a computer screen.
She misses it. The cape. The mask. The wind in her air, the grapple in her hands, the pure exhilaration that came with flying.
Babs stares at the Joker in his eleven-by-eleven cell, watches him walk around humming an offbeat tune, and the magnitude of her fury roots her to the spot.
She didn’t know what hate was, before he attacked her. Didn’t know what it felt like, not truly, not until a man who styled himself a monster shot through her spine and raped her while she was breathless and paralyzed, and had the audacity to laugh while he was doing it.
She wants to reach through the screen and strangle him until the light fades from his eyes. She wants to never look into those crazed eyes again. She wants her legs back, her sleep back, her life back.
The helplessness hurts worse than the pain ever did.
There’s a new psychiatrist. Dr. Leonardo Donati. He has experience working in other mental health facilities, experience working with criminals deemed unfit to stand trial. It’s cute, the way they think that’s all it takes, like anything in the world can match Gotham’s specific brand of crazy.
Gotham’s specific brand of sanity.
Dr. Donati is undoubtedly arrogant, he has to be to take up the job. Or greedy and blind to the consequences. Arkham came into a huge flush of money after the Joker’s last escape, a Wayne Enterprises grant intended to lock the notoriously leaky doors and ensure that no prisoner ever walks free again.
It’s a fucking mess. They’ve updated their system to turn everything digital and decentralized the whole thing while they were at it and Barbara had to practically blackmail a nurse to get root kernel access. It was something Batgirl would never have done.
Babs finds herself increasingly uncaring of what Batgirl would or wouldn’t have done. Batgirl’s gone. The Joker killed her with that first bullet. Babs reforged herself from the ashes, but that doesn’t soothe the ache of what she’s lost. The missing cape feels like a phantom limb sometimes.
She watches, plugged into the system, as Dr. Donati tries to sort through the mountain of paperwork left from all the previous suckers foolish enough to take his job. Some are informative. Most are unhinged. In the case of Dr. Harleen Quinzel, they’re capable of inducing a psychotic break.
She watches as Dr. Donati gives up and puts in an order for clozapine. He hasn’t had a single session with the Joker. Her fingers dig in to her keyboard and plastic creaks.
The doorbell ringing. The gunshot. The terror, the panic, the disgust, the pain because it hurt, it hurt so goddamn much, and the worst of it all was looking up into those green, green eyes and knowing they thoroughly enjoyed it.
The monster sits in his cell, swinging his legs, a smile on his face.
The Joker isn’t sick. There’s nothing to cure.
It’s a week later when Babs hears the alarm. Arkham alert. To her disgust, panic crosses her mind first, and only when she reassures herself that the Clocktower is a fucking fortress can she calm down enough to find out what’s going on.
The alarm was trigged by an unauthorized entry into the kitchens. Unlike previously, the new system doesn’t send out a general alert, shrieking klaxons adding to uncertainty and sowing chaos. There’s a silent alert sent to the nearest three guard stations and the warden, all doors within two hundred feet of the alarm are sealed shut, and all other personnel are directed to immediately head to their lockdown chambers, ignoring whatever else they may be doing.
It’s quiet. Quick. Efficient.
A few minutes later, the guards subdue the kitchen worker aiming to sneak in after-hours. He’s babbling something about a security test but the guards know not to fall for that lie. He’s awaiting GCPD custody within the half-hour, and in a jail cell not long after.
Nothing goes wrong. No one takes advantage. The inmates are docile. The Joker is sitting in his cell, entirely unconcerned.
Babs still can’t calm her racing heart. She pulls up the information on Arkham security again, and settles in to reread each and every contingency.
Her fingers shake long into the night.
“Red bird, little dead bird, flapping its wings,” the Joker croons, “dragging itself along on broken strings.”
Fucking hell. He’s singing again.
“Red bird, little dead bird, how fun were his screams,” the Joker grins wide. “Oh how he cried, with tears in red streams.”
Babs pauses her typing, turning to give the Joker her full attention. He can’t be—
“Red bird, little dead bird, oh his bones they did crack!” the Joker cackles. “Shifting and stabbing, not letting him crawl back.” He pauses, as though to fully savor the horror of what he’s doing, of singing about a murder, about a little boy’s death—“Red bird, little dead bird, just a little too slow. Robins and dead birds, sometimes they just blow!”
The room feels tight. She can’t—she can’t breathe. There’s no air. A hand immediately presses to her heart, to the racing beat, but she isn’t having a heart attack.
The Joker keeps laughing. Laughing and laughing and laughing. The sound fills her ears until she can hear nothing else.
Red bird, little dead bird—
She’s on her back. The floor is hard. Her stomach is a bright, searing point of agony. The shock keeps her frozen.
Oh his bones they did crack—
It’s not the shock that’s keeping her frozen. Hands are on her, cold and uncaring, ruthlessly baring her to a mocking grin.
Red bird, little dead bird—
She can’t feel it. That’s the worst horror. The slow, numbing realization of what he’s doing to her, the creeping fear that she can’t feel it.
Just a little too slow.
Her hands move like they belong to someone else, flicking through the Arkham terminals until they find what they’re looking for. They call in a noise complaint. The response is immediate.
The Joker’s verse is cut off as a pair of guards swoop into his cell and pin him down. He struggles, but more for the fun of it than trying to get away, still cackling harshly enough to scrape down her spine. A nurse steps in, pulls up his digital chart, and curses.
“He hasn’t been given his meds,” she snarls, and immediately goes to get it. The pills are forced down the Joker’s throat. He quiets a little, going complacent. The guards shove him onto his bunk, threaten him that if they get another complaint, they’ll gag him.
Everyone leaves the cell, the guards complaining about soundproofing as they go. In and out, they were done in five minutes.
Another product of the increased system efficiency. Barbara notes it absently, too stressed to turn her gaze away. The Joker lies slumped in his cell and yet she’s the one that can’t move.
It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.
Barbara doesn’t sleep that night. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees a little black-haired boy beaming at her.
Robin is magic.
No. No, it fucking wasn’t. The Joker isn’t a monster and Robin isn’t magic. They’re all just human.
The nurse on duty draws the Joker’s blood and sends it out for a report. Proper protocol after an event like missed meds, even if it appears to be an accident. Barbara is surprised they bother. Maybe Wayne money is doing something useful for once.
Barbara sees the report first. She’s not a complete chemistry whiz, but she’s been dabbling these last few months. She’s not going to let something slip her by because she didn’t understand it. All knowledge is useful.
Knowledge is the only fucking thing she has left.
Once she’s done, she lets the report forward to Arkham. Then she observes the clown. He’s quieter today—still smiling, of course, can’t stop that, but he’s not walking around. He looks duller.
Barbara can’t help the vicious satisfaction.
Fear is a terrible thing.
Fear and rage are worse.
Fear and rage and calculation?
There is a famous saying—misattributed and mistranslated—that claims if you wait long enough by the river, you will see the corpses of your enemies float by. They don’t mention that you have to destroy the dam first.
Nine o’clock. The Joker is sitting in his cell, doing nothing. No singing or laughing today. He looks a little off, a limp arm crossed on a bent knee, gaze scanning around him in quick, paranoid glances.
He doesn’t look at the camera once.
Barbara shifts to the appropriate terminal and calls in a noise complaint. It’s the same protocol—the guards burst in and restrain the Joker, who’s looking a little less amused and lot more pissed off.
Good. Babs has tasted nothing but helpless rage for months. He should know what it feels like.
The nurse checks the chart, pulling up doctored digital notes that show no record of the correctly administered medication. Before, Arkham was on paper charts and it was so hard for Barbara to change anything in their system. The new system is perfect. The blackmailed nurse has been transferred far, far away, with a fat payout for her trouble, and no one else suspects that Barbara is lurking. That she has access to anything and everything.
She can only see the Joker through the system. But she controls the system.
The nurse comes back in, gives the Joker his pill. He refuses to take it, says he already has, but who listens to the Arkham patients?
They force it down his throat. A double dose of clozapine. If the Joker’s labs are correct—the ones Barbara carefully adjusted before forwarding to Arkham—it’s a dangerously high dosage. Lethally high.
The nurse and guards leave, ignoring the way the Joker slumps against his cot. No one has any sympathy left for him. Not the man that wanted to become the most reviled creature in Gotham.
Well, he’s gotten exactly what he wished. He created a city that hates him. Sooner or later, someone would get a lucky shot.
Barbara waits. She can do this again, but she would prefer not to. According to her calculations and the Joker’s medical history, this should be enough.
The Joker’s leg spasms. He tries to get up and ends up collapsing. Before he can utter the first syllable of a shout, Barbara triggers an alarm on the other end of the facility. Arkham goes into lockdown.
The lockdown protocols are rigid. Only the nearest guards can respond. Nothing else gets through. No one else gets through. All other alerts are silenced, including the ones on the wearable tech the inmates have, the ones that send out alarms in case of medical emergency. Like in case of the Joker, whose vitals are growing increasingly erratic.
What a tragic error in coding. People will shift the blame for years, wondering why no one caught it. Or perhaps why no one changed it when they did catch it, hidden in layers upon layers of contingencies.
Barbara watches the Joker spasm, gasping in a horrible, dying rattle. She wonders if that’s what Jason sounded like in those last few moments. She sees the man claw at the ground before his fingers go limp. He doesn’t laugh once. You need air to laugh.
The body shudders and shakes before going entirely limp. She watches and waits until all the signs go flat. And then she counts until she reaches one thousand two hundred. Twenty minutes without a pulse.
The guards find no discernable cause for the alarm. According to protocol, Arkham must remain on lockdown until a full search is conducted.
Barbara stares at the flatline for a long, long time.
It’s a rare sunny day in Gotham. Babs leans back in her wheelchair and closes her eyes, letting the sun soak into her, for once not worrying about sunburn. A library copy of Pride and Prejudice sits closed in her lap. Birds are singing and the faintest of autumn breezes tugs at her hair.
Footsteps jerk her out of the contentment. Even the quiet serenity of green grass and tall trees and relative peace can’t break the Gotham City in her. She relaxes when she recognizes her companion.
“Hey, Dad,” she smiles. “Decided on a stroll?”
Jim Gordon does not smile back.
Babs sits up straighter in her chair, gripping the book tightly. “What is it?” she asks immediately. “What happened?”
Her dad opens his mouth and then closes it again. He looks tired. Finally, with Barbara’s patience stretched to the breaking point, he says, “Joker’s dead.”
Babs stares at him. Her mouth drops open slightly, her body goes rigid. She’s clutching the book tightly enough that her fingers hurt, her other hand wrapped around the armrest of her wheelchair. She doesn’t move. She barely breathes.
“Are you,” her voice is hoarse and cracking and she has to blink furiously behind her glasses, “are you sure?”
Jim’s expression softens further as he nods. “Had a heart attack in his cell. Some medication issue. The Arkham security cameras have confirmed it, the guards and nurses confirmed it, hell, even Batman confirmed it.” Babs doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She rubs at her face, smearing the tears. She chokes down a strangled sound. “The body’s been cremated. I saw it myself.”
Burned. Burned and dead and gone.
The world feels lighter.
“I have the rest of the afternoon off,” her dad says. He dredges up a smile. It looks disbelieving. “Would you like to go get some ice cream?”
“That would be great,” she manages a watery smile back. “I’ll meet you at the car?”
Jim nods and heads away, leaving her the privacy to shed the last few tears prickling at her eyes. She didn’t realize how much weight on her was the monster until he’s gone. Everything feels brighter. For the first time in a long time, Barbara is eager to see what the future holds.
She bends down and presses a kiss against the cold, gray gravestone. “Rest in peace, Jay,” she whispers.