Re: Batman/Maria
Of course he hadn't. It was good interrogation technique to ask questions you already knew the answer to, but this wasn't the appropriate application of the technique; while it established facts, it also pissed her off to hear it from his lips. "It mattered," she snapped back. Not that SHIELD would have accepted his word; they still would have pushed for the interview, medical reasons or not. Even the Frost Giant invasion had only put temporary brakes on the investigation, and only because they couldn't manage to run it at the time, not because they hadn't tried.
"That is entirely to be expected under the circumstances," she said. No one was the same after they'd killed someone. She just wanted to prove that he'd been justified so he could start finding his feet in his new reality, knowing that he was no murderer.
Batman insisted that the Joker could possibly be alive, and the thought that had tickled the back of her mind knocked stronger. Sitting back, her eyes went a little distant even as she stared out at the world, thinking it through. "I want to take another look at the camera angles of him falling," she finally said, reluctantly. "I want to know what Kal saw on the rooftop - if his vision was compromised, maybe he didn't see what he thought he saw. Or at least, at the angle he thought."
She blew out a long breath, hating that she was allowing that much wiggle room; the Joker fell burning, and no one recovered a body. That said "death" to her. Or it would, if she wasn't a secret agent and didn't know that what people thought they saw could so easily be manipulated with the right angle, the right chemical to obscure the vision for just a moment, just long enough. No body meant that there was no official confirmation that he was, in fact, lying cold on a slab in the morgue.
She fell silent as he detailed exactly what the Joker had done in the past to cause him pain. "He goes for the weak points," she said thoughtfully even as her hands curled into fists with the instinctive urge to strike out and beat him to death. "Psychological and physical."
She glanced over, raising an eyebrow. "Please explain how killing him would not be to the benefit for the general law and order of the United States in general and Gotham in particular." She'd meant it when she'd told him that Kal killing him had only saved her from having to tell Agent Barton to find him and take the shot. The lesson in this, she thought, was to never send a idealistic superhero to do a sniper's job. "Funnier," she had to likewise repeat flatly.
Given what they'd just been discussing, she was willing to concede that the Joker had an animal cunning and a very good read on what would cause pain; she would not try to argue about what did or did not count as genius. Besides, her loophole theory notwithstanding, he was most likely dead.