"You're predictable," the Riddler spat, still half-collapsed on the floor, voice raw from everything it had been doing in the last few minutes. "You're a puzzle I wanted to solve and did solve. I should have had you figured out from the beginning!" He grabbed the Joker's lapel again, shaking him. "I started this war. I lost this war. And you — you should be laughing."
Batman stopped listening.
His mind had gone somewhere else. A hospital room. A small body in a bed too big for it, hooked to machines, a father sitting in the chair beside him who hadn't moved in hours.
I was there. He had been there when they brought Charlie in. He'd been there when the doctors said the words. He'd been there when Chuck sat in that chair with his hands open in his lap, unable to do anything with them.
Nygma had poisoned a child to set up a punchline. Had calculated the dosage, chosen the timing, selected the target — not because Charlie Brown was important to any tactical calculation, but because his suffering would produce a useful emotional response in people who mattered.
"Do you want me to spell it out for you?!" The Riddler's voice cut back through. "Are you too stupid to follow? Should I draw you a diagram?"
Batman thought of the boy asking his father, in a voice too small for the question, whether he was being sent somewhere bad. Whether saying that bad word had earned him this. Whether it was his fault.
That had almost been his last sentence in the world.
"Do I need to break this down into smaller pieces?!"
The rage came up from somewhere central and moved outward through Batman's body in a single even wave. And at the same time — simultaneously, not sequentially — something in his mind went very cold and very precise, the two states occupying the same space without contradiction. His face settled into something that looked like calm. His heart was not calm.
He was done listening to the Riddler.
His eyes moved to the desk.
There was a knife on it.
His feet were already moving before he'd finished deciding. Four steps to the desk, hand closing around the handle, pivot — and he was crossing the room toward Nygma with the blade and a set jaw and eyes that said something new.
The Riddler turned at the sound of footsteps and looked up.
He took in the knife. The jaw. The eyes.
He's going to kill me.
The thought arrived complete and uninvited. The Riddler dismissed it immediately — Batman did not kill. This was not a variable. The Joker had spent a year establishing it, testing the boundary from every angle, offering himself as proof of concept. The rule held. It always held. Batman was a madman who insisted, against all available evidence, that he still had a line he wouldn't cross. That rigidity was practically his defining characteristic.
The reef doesn't shake. Everyone knew this.
Except his body apparently hadn't gotten the memo, because while his mind was still running the dismissal, his mouth had already opened.
"What are you — no—"
Batman's arm drove forward.
Yes.
This was not a loss of control. This was not an accident or a breakdown or a moment of weakness. He knew exactly who he was and exactly what he was doing and he had made a choice, and the choice was to thrust the knife forward and kill Edward Nygma in this room right now, because some things couldn't be balanced against each other and he had stopped trying to balance them.
Puff.
Blood bloomed.
The Riddler stared.
The knife had not gone into his face. The knife was embedded in a hand — a pale hand, thin-fingered, wearing a purple glove — that had appeared from nowhere and placed itself directly in the blade's path.
The Joker's hand.
The clown looked at Batman. Looked at the knife in his palm. Looked at the Riddler, still alive, still blinking in blank incomprehension.
And slowly — for the first time in over a year — the corners of his mouth began to move.
An unexpected event. Something neither the cleverest man in the room nor the most principled had seen coming. Something that had required no planning, no maneuvering, no forty-page preparation document. Something that had simply happened, the way truly funny things happen: entirely outside the control of anyone who wanted to engineer them.
The rock shook.
Batman had a line. Batman had always had the line. The Joker had spent a year trying to erase it, and he'd come to believe — almost believed — that it was permanent, immovable, geological. And then a child's near-death and a nobody in a kite suit and a lunatic on the floor screaming about riddles had done in thirty seconds what a year of deliberate effort hadn't managed.
He can become like me. One bad day is all it takes. One bad day is all it ever takes.
The smile spread.
The Riddler had foreseen everything and failed to foresee that he would die at Batman's hands over an insignificant bystander's child. The Riddler had failed to foresee that the Joker would save him. Batman had failed to foresee that the Riddler had engineered the entire war as an elaborate joke delivery mechanism. Batman had failed to foresee that he himself would pick up a knife today.
And Chuck Brown — a nobody, a kite hobbyist, a man nobody had calculated for at all — had simultaneously made both of them the biggest losers in the room, and had done it by being exactly who he was.
This, the Joker thought, is the funniest thing that has ever happened.
"Now then," he said, the grin fully formed now, manic and electric, filling his face the way it was supposed to fill his face, "this is going to be interesting."
And then he laughed.
It started low and built fast — real laughter, the genuine article, unperformed and uncontrolled, filling the room and then the floor and then echoing somewhere down the building's empty stairwells. The Joker laughed with his whole body, and somewhere in the sound was a year's worth of pressure releasing all at once.
Batman lowered the knife. Something in his posture collapsed by a single degree — not visible to most people, but visible to anyone who knew what they were looking for.
The Riddler's face contorted.
He could lose. He was capable of absorbing a loss — he'd factored loss into the plan, had used loss as a mechanism. But not this. He had always been most certain of one thing: that he could read people. That he could understand them, disassemble them, predict them. And he had been wrong about both of the men in this room in the same minute.
"I'm going to kill you," he said, very quietly. "Both of you."
Then, louder: "Everyone — move! Kill them! All of them!"