Re: Batman/Maria
"Maybe so," He allowed with an incline of his head. "But I've been keeping him in my home, Agent Hill, and he was in no condition to be moved. It would have been a waste of both our time, considering we were both needed elsewhere, to argue over a point I wasn't going to concede; Kal wasn't going anywhere, and I wasn't inviting you over for tea. Even if you had the resources to available to delegate people to work the case during the invasion - I didn't. Nor would I have, if I did." This was something he wanted to handle personally, as much as possible.
"I have all the footage availabie," he told her. He'd taken security footage from every building, ATM, and street cam nearby, not to mention the new recordings and every cell phone and camcorder image he could get his hands on. "I'm still looking for something, but if you can see something I've missed, you're welcome to it. Kal was in a world of his own, so what he thinks he saw and what he actually saw... it's all subjective." You could put ten people on the same street corner at the time an accident happened and get ten different accounts of the event. "Oscar Wilde said, 'the truth is seldom pure, and never simple'. When Joker is involved, question everything."
Joker was a masochist of the cruelest kind. He thrived on people's pain, but had always shown a particular interest in Batman. "I'm fairly certain he knows who I am," he said. "He just doesn't care. My other life doesn't interest him; he's never attacked me on a personal level, only as Batman."
He looked at her, knowing it wasn't something he could explain, or really cared to, since it would only lead to arguement. "No reason you could really understand," he said, knowing she'd take offense where none was really meant. "I'm not quite the pacifist Kal is, but I am one, nonetheless. Would it be better if Joker weren't in the world? Probably, but it's not my place to decide. The work I do is enough outside the law already that I couldn't afford to kill, even if I wanted to, and I don't.
"There's a tenant I learned when I was training - 'when you take a person's life, you destroy not only everything they were, but also everything they could potentially be'. For someone like Joker, maybe that sounds like a blessing, and it may be naive to say I believe in rehabilitation, which I do, but as insane a criminal as Joker is, he's still insane. We can argue till we're blue about the laws regarding the criminally insane, but the bottom line is that I'm not going to do it, and anyone who's tried has failed miserably." Batman shot a glance her direction. "Never underestimate him, Agent Hill; those who do, end up dead."
Which was why he was so certain Joker was alive; it was so easy to assume he was dead, but there was one detail in particular that bothered him. "There's no body," Batman said. "The human body is composed mainly of water; it takes approximately three hours to render a human body to ash at 1700ยบ F, and even then there are bone fragments remaining. For Joker to have burned to ash almost instantaneously and leave no bone fragments, the temperature would have had to have been incredible.
"Kal has never used his heat vision at that great a temperature, not even as an uncontrolled reflex," he said." And you'll notice, none of the buildings, nor the street below, bear any signs of a fire of that intense magnitude having occurred there. There should have been a conflagration. And yet some hair surivived?" Batman shook his head. It just didn't add up. Or rather, it did - but not to the picture it was supposed to look like.