Re: Joker/Batman: In person at the Science Building
[Strangulation was intimate. It took rage, adrenaline, determination. It took a lack of distance that forced contact, that mingled breath (at least until one side tapered to nothing...), both of which were, by definition, intimate. Often it took enduring kicks, scratches, slaps. Yes, you got to know one another. Joker was not the first man Damian Wayne had strangled to death. He was not special. The fury that had the newly-born Bat lift the clown up, draw him forward once, and slam him back to send skull bouncing once against the wall—it encompassed more than this very evening. It was bigger than the both of them.
It was in his blood.
And who was he to deny his destiny? He had tried for so long.
Perhaps this was simply who he was.
It wasn't morals that defined a man. It was his actions. It was his choices.—Everyone had the capacity for both good and bad, for good deeds, for bad deeds. Every person had a dark side. What differentiated the good men the rest was what they chose to do—or not do. Damian needed to show restraint. That was a speech he'd heard thousands of times, in person and in echoing nightmares, over the years since he first met his father, and encountered the Bat's peculiar code, so unlike anything the young Wayne had ever been taught. Yes, he'd heard it all before.—He'd learned to follow it eventually even, and he might have grown into it, had circumstance not taken him to a Gotham unknown, to a man's doorstep—a man who looked like his father, but was not. A man who did not know him and didn't want to.
No, restraint had never gotten Damian much. If anything, he'd only ever lost. He knew this might force loss on him all the same, this choice. No more Robin.—But, he was the Bat now. He had no need for the other, and he grinned through what some might have called madness, this inborn, not bred of green gas. He laughed, crushing down on Joker's throat, only to see the flash of inhaler too late.
It hit him, the poison, noxious and nauseating. But, he fought against it. This was going to be his choice. Fingers cinched arteries, practically popped them with force, and it was only after Joker went limp, that empty-eyed smile much like the one he wore in life on pale lips, that Damian let up at all. He'd managed to puncture skin and his fingers were bloody to the first knuckle. He wheezed, the chemicals penetrating his lungs and rushing to brain to addle it, shake it up like a martini no one asked for—to move him to detonation, this Bat who was born only to kill.
He laughed in that classroom, alone, a long, eerie note that went too high, too long, and he threw Joker's body to the floor, flicking blood on the wall in violent expressionism. He brought his boot down once on the smile there, like it was a bug he could stomp out, sending teeth backwards into lifeless throat.] Joke's on you, clown, [he told the disfigured corpse viciously.] After tonight, it won't be you anyone remembers. You're nothing.