TITLE: To the Victor Go the Spoils
FIRST PUBLISHED: August 15, 2023
SUMMARY: Joker tries to set the rules for their new game. Bruce can't refuse—but he can change them. // Set in an AU spin-off of Emperor Joker where Joker has godlike power over the whole universe.
SERIES: Jura Regalia [part 5]
oOo
After the feast, Joker and Bruce retire. The bedroom is—not the monstrosity Bruce had been expecting. It’s his own bedroom, from the Manor outside Gotham, which is somehow worse altogether. Outside the open windows, the sky is as yellow as piss and a strange, eerie light throws itself over the floor. Everything is hushed. The room, except for the rustle of purple silk sheets—as Joker flops back onto the bed and looks at Bruce expectantly. But Bruce is rooted to the floor. Even though the washing-machine door is gone from his costume, the memory of it is still sharp. “Anything,” he had promised, hadn’t he? And Joker can make him.
But all he does is sit there. And watch.
“Joker, I know you’re expecting—” —what he’s always expected, hasn’t he? There have been times, when the two were fighting somewhere in Gotham’s dingy streets when Bruce had almost believed the story Joker had concocted. Electric, the sound of his fist hitting flesh, and—he’d always known Joker’s madness was catching. In one instant, without even blinking, Joker could send him back to the vultures, if Bruce refuses; Bruce could make his refusal a point in this new game but he doesn’t want to know what Joker’s idea of seduction might look like.
He's gotten enough of it over the years to have a pretty good idea, anyway.
He stops short when Joker doesn’t answer. Under the madman’s pale, glittering gaze Bruce feels the weight of an entire universe; who knew the whole world would one day catch the Joker’s well-crafted illusion?
It’s so silent. As harsh as the grave.
Bruce pulls off his cowl. Tosses it on the floor, mechanically. Unbuckles his belt, his suit, piece by piece, and tries not to notice the rapt way Joker is looking. This isn’t like them.
He crawls onto the bed, but stops before he’s able to make himself touch the Joker’s reddened lips. This is a dream—full of the same unmoored imagery, devoid of sensory impressions in favor of style. He wants to say he is surprised when the walls are sheened with blood, as though sweating. None of this feels real. None of it feels right.
“Batsy,” Joker says quietly. “Would you feel better if I raped you?”
“It wasn’t rape,” Bruce says.
He doesn’t make a habit of it—these visits. Since those months after his parents’ death, when he was a child—the tell-all article, the way that, after, he’d refused to speak to anyone other than Alfred for nearly a year—he’s been wary of psychiatric care. But since Jason—
They’re not talking about him. Not this time. Bruce doesn’t even know how they got on this track; how him saying “I feel like I’ve lost too many sons,” has led to this.
The man doesn’t know he’s Batman. Some elision is always required.
(“Dick Grayson?”
“My ward? No—he’s alive—”)
He hadn’t talked about it until now. The wound still fresh although it happened a year ago. Just as long since he allowed himself to think of Talia.
“You said she drugged you.”
“Oh. That.” Bruce almost smiles; a bitter thing. “I think she wanted me to relax.”
He hadn’t tasted it in the cup, of course. But he’d recognized the effects; and the blood-sample analysis he’d performed with his batkit had confirmed it. For a marriage as strange as their own, it didn’t matter.
“Did you consent?”
“To the sex? Of course I did.”
“To the drug.”
Bruce just shrugs. “It was one of those Vegas-style affairs, you know. Passionate, short-lived, but—we’d been,” lovers— “friends with benefits. On an off. For a long time. It didn’t surprise me, that she did that.”
“Then why mention it?”
“I don’t know.”
He wants to say, that’s not the important part. The important part is, I don’t know what I did wrong. What I could have done differently. If I had just thought to keep her out of danger sooner—if I had said something more after the miscarriage, when I sat by her bedside, would she have kept me, then? It’s ridiculous. Bruce knows that the loss of a child—that can drive a wedge in even the strongest marriage. And his relationship with Talia had never been that. A collection of ifs and almosts.
“It can still matter, you know. Even if it wasn’t rape.”
“It wasn’t.”
“And your son. The one that was lost. You wanted him?”
Bruce has to stand up. Walks over to the window to hide his face; there’s a thickness in his throat when he answers. “Of course I wanted him. I loved—”
The walls of the room are bleeding red when Joker’s hands cradle Bruce’s face.
“This isn’t real,” Bruce says dully.
“Darling, you think too much about what’s ‘real’ or not, about ‘true’ and ‘false.’” Joker speaks her words as though he doesn’t know the knife he’s twisting; but there are no coincidences in this universe. Joker has always been jealous.
“I realize that is your way,” Talia had said, “but just this once, accept things as they are…”
“I can’t,” Bruce says. “Joker, you can make me fuck you, but we aren’t going to make love. All this,” he waves his hand at the bed, the room— “who is it for? Me? I don’t want it. You? After you always insisted Bruce Wayne was just a mask… it’s insulting.”
Something shutters in the back of the clown’s eyes. Green; eerie, moss-lit. Like hers had been. Joker would be furious to admit that he might fit into Batman’s type. As though he weren’t the most unique person in existence, the only one who mattered.
Snap. They’re outside, a rainy night; boots slipping in mud. The lights of the carnival around seem to leave neon streaks in the blackened air. Bruce can hear sirens in the distance. He’s gripping onto Joker’s shoulder. The costume back on, and the cowl. He doesn’t have to ask when this is. He doesn’t have to ask who’s lying in the hospital, her back shot through; he doesn’t have to ask about the commissioner, or how much time they have before this, too, becomes a piece of tired backstory. It’s good enough. When Joker presses his mouth furiously against Bruce; when they grapple, stumble into the mud; when, with hurried motions, they grind against each other like it had really happened, like Joker is still just a man, alone, and not a force of nature; a being so far beyond Bruce’s comprehension that it leaves all questions of consent behind.
One doesn’t consent to a hurricane. Even if one wanted to.
It can’t agree to be other than what it is.