The Batcave had always been a place of controlled chaos. Tonight it was a tomb.
On the main monitor, a rictus grin filled the screen. The Joker's laugh poured out of every speaker in the cave, and, Bruce knew, out of every television in Gotham.
Behind him, a dozen hostages sat gagged and pale, strapped to crude devices that hummed. The camera lingered on a bomb strapped to a young woman's chest, its red timer bleeding down. Then a glass vial of luminous green gas, nestled in a larger machine.
"Good evening, Gotham!" The voice was sickly sweet. "Did you miss me? I thought we'd play a little Choose Your Own Adventure for our dear Caped Crusader. Option A: he hunts down the gas bombs I've sprinkled around your delightful city, the ones that make everyone giggle themselves to death. Option B: he comes and finds me. Fail at either, or let me get bored, and these lovely people go boom. Ta-ta for now!"
At GCPD headquarters, Gordon slammed his fist on the desk hard enough to rattle his coffee. "Not again."
"Just shoot the clown," Bullock muttered, but there was no bite in it. His eyes were on the little girl in the corner of the frame, clutching a teddy bear.
Then the screen warped.
Static swallowed the broadcast, and the night sky over Gotham filled with light. A hologram bloomed above the city, dwarfing Wayne Tower, and in it stood a young man no older than twenty. Messy brown hair. A black shirt under a green jacket, a white stripe on the shoulder marked with a "10." Green eyes, steady and tired in a way that didn't belong on a face that young.
"My name is Ben Tennyson," he said. He didn't raise his voice, and it carried anyway. "Joker. Release the hostages and go back to your cell. That's the only offer you're getting."
In a cramped apartment across the city, a little girl named Lily stared up at the sky, unblinking. Her mother, Sarah, pulled her closer. For the first time that night, the fear in the room loosened a notch.
The Joker recovered fast. He leaned into the camera, grin widening. "Oh? And why would I do that, my dear Benjamin? Can I call you Benja—"
"Because I know what scares you," Ben said. "Not dying. You'd love that. You've been trying to make it a punchline for years."
The laugh stopped.
"I'm going to fix you," Ben said, almost gently. "Whatever it takes. Tech, magic, I don't care. I'll give you back every ounce of sanity you burned away, and then I'll leave you in a room with everything you did while you were gone. Every face. Every name. Every sound."
The grin faltered. "You can't. You're bluffing."
"Am I?"
On a rooftop three blocks from the hologram, Green Arrow lowered his bow. "Okay," he whispered to no one. "That's new."
"H-heroes don't do that," the Joker said, and for the first time, his voice cracked like a child's. "That's cheating! That's not—"
"I'm not a hero." Ben's calm held, but something cold moved under it. "Heroes get to go home. I stopped getting to go home a long time ago. I've watched the universe nearly end more times than you've told jokes, and every time, the people who survived were the ones who didn't hesitate. So I don't."
The feed cut wide. Ben stood beside a neat stack of gas bombs, the same ones the Joker had boasted about. He nudged the pile with the toe of his boot.
"These are yours. Took me under a minute."
At GCPD, Gordon's mouth fell open. Bullock stared at the screen, and for once he had nothing to say.
Ben's eyes lifted, and he looked straight down the camera, straight through it, into the cave.
"I know you're watching, Batman."
Bruce didn't move.
"I'm not here to fight you. I think you're a good man. I also think every name on the list of people he's killed is the cost of a rule you decided matters more than they do. I'm not going to argue the philosophy with you. I'm going to give you thirty minutes."
The screen went black. A white countdown replaced it: 00:30:00.
In the cave, the only sound was the hum of the Batcomputer and the soft tick of water somewhere deep in the stone. Alfred, standing at the stairs, did not say a word. Bruce's jaw worked once, and then he turned to the console and began to type.
Across Gotham, the hologram faded. The fear hadn't left, but it had changed shape into something stranger: a flicker of hope that someone was finally willing to break the cycle.
The clock kept running.