Chapter Text
A good detective knows that taking risks is part of the job. - Encyclopedia Brown
The Bat-Signal flicks on, a call for aid shining high above the city against the smoggy clouds that have been holding the soupy humidity of a New Jersey late spring hostage below in the dark streets and alleys of Gotham.
Dang it, thinks Tim.
He’s been sitting on his rooftop vantage point for an hour waiting for Batman and Robin to pass by. His algorithm, developed and refined over the last year, has become extremely accurate in predicting where the Bats will be on their normal patrol routes.
Tim’s getting better at this hobby he’s invented. He uses the scientific method. He iterates.
However, when the Bat-Signal flips on, the emergency could be anywhere in the city, and it could be hours until the Bats get back to patrolling again, if they do at all. Tim rustles in the pocket of his cargo pants, but when he swipes the screen on his phone to check Twitter and his police scanner apps to see what’s going on and where, the screen stays blank. Out of battery.
Double dang it, he thinks, and curses Past Tim for playing Candy Crush while waiting for the Bats to cruise by when he got to his roof a bit early.
Portable phone battery charger, he adds mentally, to the next iteration of his night photography packing list. More granola bars. Tonight’s supply went to some people sleeping rough under the overpass coming off Kane Memorial Bridge. He had managed to find an elderly Kit-Kat bar in a smaller pocket of his backpack, though, which had led to his ill-fated Candy Crush campaign. Up several stories removed from the stench of moist, warm Gotham alleys at street level, it’s possible to both feel hungry without being nauseated and eat without barfing off the side of the roof.
The odds of whatever’s going down being anywhere near him, way up on the border on Newtown and Amusement Mile, are slim. He taps his fingers restlessly against the warm tar paper, not wanting to give up so early, but it’s a long shot that he’ll see anything tonight and he’s already out of snacks. Probably should just pack it in for the night, Tim thinks, and then hears, very faintly, the unmistakable sound of the Batmobile going like gangbusters.
No way. He goes still, listening. No freaking way.
It is getting closer. Tim scrambles up, abandoning stealthy cover in order to get as high as he can. He’s selected his roof carefully, and has got a good vantage point down into the rest of the city. He brings the viewfinder to his eye, adjusting the zoom as far out as he can, scanning the north-south avenues, which are unusually empty, even for this time of night, which should make it easy to spot when the Batmobile screams into view.
Nothing. Nothing. Wait - There!
“Oh my gosh,” Tim whispers to himself. It’s a car chase! A green sedan is barreling uptown. A few blocks behind is a motorcycle. No, now a second motorcycle has joined the chase, back end drifting through a corner at high speed. Robin and Batgirl?! Hardly daring to believe his luck, Tim’s shutter clicks in quick succession. The sound of the Batmobile, not yet visible, continues to grow, an almost tangible presence getting closer.
He thinks he gets some shots of the two motorbikes flanking the speeding car, and then they are past him, flying into Amusement Mile proper. The Batmobile itself careens by with a roar, a few moments later, and a second after that all of them are lost from view. Batman, Robin, and Batgirl, all of them at once, passing right by and about to capture a criminal right in front of him?! It’s the luckiest he’s ever been in all the weekends he’s spent photographing the local nightlife the last several months.
There’s several sets of metallic crashes in quick succession, and tires screeching. Tim is already throwing himself down the fire escape and onto his skateboard, camera strap over his shoulder and around his torso like a bandolier. His skateboard is faster than walking, but much slower than a bike, and he briefly but bitterly regrets the trade off to something he could bring up on a roof with him, necessitated by the theft of his second bike despite being hidden behind a dumpster.
By the time he catches up to the finish line of the chase, several blocks away, the vehicles have been abandoned. The green sedan’s bodywork is scraped up almost beyond recognition, having been apparently used as a battering ram to get through the barred and chained main gates of the abandoned amusement park that gives the borough its name. The driver’s side door of the sedan is open. The themed colors of the motorcycles, hastily parked nearby, contrast sharply with the forlorn and fading gaudy paint that remains of the park’s decor, victim of Gotham’s acid rainfall and the heavy soot-like patina that inevitably emerges on any open surface after years of uninterrupted exposure to the local chemically polluted smog.
The Batmobile is nowhere to be seen, but must be now either parked or running in stealth mode, as it’s also nowhere to be heard.
Tim himself enters stealth mode, wedging his skateboard into his backpack again and tiptoeing around the fountained glass and twisted scraps of metal that are what remain of the front gates, and into the deep shadows between the ticket booths and concession stands. He crouches beneath an anthropomorphic hot dog to do a quick reconnoiter, streaks of grime and bleached color giving the impression that it silently weeps above him. Looking around for signs of life and seeing none, he takes a few closer range photos of the motorcycles with the getaway car in the background.
He flinches deeper into cover when gunfire and sounds of sudden movement echo from further inside the park.
Ugh. He’s missing all the action!
Not for the first time counting on whatever it is about him that makes him virtually unnoticeable to others, Tim ducks and weaves his way through the park, guided by occasional gunfire and the voices of Batgirl and Robin, tones sarcastic and quippy. There’s other voices there too, but they are lower, harder to pick out in the acoustic knot of the open areas and partially collapsed structures.
Tim slides to a stop, back against the rusted metal side of the tilt-a-whirl. Lens first, he peers around the corner. He manages to get a decent shot of Batgirl leaping off a cotton candy stand, but she lands in darkness that obscures both her and whatever criminal she is fighting. There’s a dull thud that makes him wince in sympathy, and Batgirl goes flying backwards into view, tucking and rolling to land in a crouch. Running footsteps take advantage of her momentary need to recover, and then she’s gone, too, giving chase once again.
Tim follows.
His camera, then the top of his head, peeks cautiously over the sill of an empty game stall a minute later, clicking silently as a cowled shadow moves across the light polluted sky, cape billowing into wings behind him as Batman himself drops onto the scene. He joins the dark silhouettes of Robin, Batgirl, and their foe, whirling and trading blows like a particularly violent shadow puppet play.
Tim really needs to invest in a better telephoto lens. He can’t even get a good look at the criminal they’re chasing, and in the intensely dark areas, his photos are going to be blurry at best.
The lens he has tonight is a standard zoom, 70mm, but he’s been coveting a f1.8 200mm. He’ll have to get that as soon as expedited shipping will allow. He regrets not having it right this second, more than anything else he’s ever regretted, to capture better shots when he has three out of four Bats all together. Such a wasted opportunity. The only consolation is, at least Nightwing isn’t here. If Dick Grayson himself had been part of this, and Tim had too crappy a camera and angle on the scene to get good pictures of it? He would never have forgiven himself for being an idiot, the worst vigilante hero photographer ever, for the rest of his natural life.
The fourth shadow disappears into the left side of a building that was once, from Tim’s view of the front, some kind of house of mirrors. Several letters are missing now, and graffiti has taken its place. The peeling painted sign now reads “ass funhouse,” which Tim would snicker at if he was less of a professional at being sneaky.
Batman chases their perp inside, but not before using hand motions that send Batgirl around the back, and Robin quietly picking the lock on the entrance and slipping inside.
Tim is strongly tempted to follow, chewing on his lip in indecision. Practicality wins out eventually, as it’s pretty much guaranteed that he’ll either be caught or it will be too dark inside to get anything worthwhile, or both. Given the way the night has gone so far, the Bats will most likely capture the criminal inside, and perp walk him to the cops when the GCPD eventually shows up, or the chase will continue further into the park. Either way he’ll have a better chance of getting a good shot of it from out here.
He’ll have to get closer, or a better vantage point. Tim looks around, trying to get the lay of the land. He’s hiding in a ring toss stall almost at the end of the midway, closest to where most of the rides are. A centrifugal swing is in his foreground, all the seats long since removed and the remaining dangling chains creaking and jangling eerily in the humid night breeze. Next to that, the Sizzler, providing no cover whatsoever. The old bones of a seatless Ferris wheel reach up from behind, at the far end.
What I really need, Tim thinks, eyes settling on the curving hills and valleys of rotting wooden roller coaster tracks, is to get higher.
The sign reading Mad Flight spans above the stairs to the covered loading platform. The entrance to the stairs is fully blocked by padlocked chain link, so Tim climbs the three flights up the back side of the wooden superstructure slat by slat, until he can pull himself onto the decking. Panting slightly from the exertion, he moves to the front of the platform and takes a crouch, slightly hidden by the ride attendant’s station.
Pulling his camera into position again, he finds his instincts were right: from here he’s got a great view of the midway, rides, and the house of mirrors. It’s not as high here on the platform as it would be from one of the peaks of the coaster tracks, but there’s nowhere to hide there. Here, there’s at least the attendant’s podium and a curved metal cover that arches in a half-circle over the platform, which was probably meant to keep the worst of the sun and rain off riders waiting in line. It hasn’t stretched far enough to protect the wooden safety fences that are decaying on the ends of the loading deck, or the coaster cars, still in a row on the track, waiting endlessly for passengers who will never come. What once was probably bright red paint on the cars, their ends stylized into pairs of wings, is now dulled and faded to the color of dried blood.
After some sounds of combat in the funhouse while he climbed, it’s been quiet for what seems like a very long time. Suddenly anxious that he’s missed the end of the night’s excitement altogether, he leans out far from behind the attendant’s station, panning the camera around to check for movement.
He finds it. A shadow is separating from the side of the funhouse. It doesn’t have a cape on. Something must attract its attention, either Tim’s movement or a flare of light off his lens, because as he watches, the silhouette’s head turns in his direction.
Tim whips back into the shelter of the podium. At least it wasn’t a Bat. Even if they did make him, no run of the mill criminal is going to care about a kid with a camera who happens to be nearby. They’re just going to be focused on getting away as soon as they can. Must be an unusually lucky ne’er-do-well, honestly, managing to evade three Bats in an enclosed area.
Maybe Tim should actually be trying to draw attention to the fact that their perp is escaping? Tim’s wondering how he could possibly accomplish this without getting himself caught by a Bat when the person laughs.
It’s as unmistakable to any Gothamite as the sound of the Batmobile at speed or the cackle of a Robin.
It’s Joker’s laugh.
The Bat-signal, all three Bats, together, at once, even though Batgirl isn’t a regular patrol partner anymore? The unusually empty streets? Someone skilled enough to outrun the Bats for this long? Tim is an idiot, a freaking moron, for not figuring it out sooner, for letting his phone die, unable to receive emergency texts from the city or check the internet to see if there were any rogues escaped from Arkham, for not getting the hell out of here when he still had the chance. He’s alone and mostly exposed on a rickety freaking roller coaster, in the middle of a defunct amusement park, without even his mace (used up on an alley raccoon in an embarrassing case of mistaken identity last weekend) to defend himself from the Joker. It’s too late to bail; there’s nowhere less exposed to run to without being immediately caught before he has any hope of getting there.
Laughter ringing through the empty park again chills his veins and sends the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Is the laughter getting closer? It’s hard to tell over his pounding heart.
Surely that’s just the fear talking. He abandons the idea of taking pictures entirely, noiselessly putting his camera away in his bag both out of habit and for lack of anything better to do with his hands.
More gleeful, softer laughter that sounds louder because it is definitely, absolutely much closer than it was before. The decking beneath his feet shifts slightly, with the weight of an adult beginning to climb the front side of the platform.
Desperately hoping that the Bats figure out the Joker’s no longer inside with them before Tim is brutally murdered, or captured and taken to a secondary location as bait and then brutally murdered, Tim frantically looks for places to hide.
The sole advantage he has against the Joker right now is that while he’s climbing, he doesn’t have a visual on Tim.
Army crawling as quickly and quietly as he can, trying to keep his own vibrations to a minimum, Tim stuffs himself in the very last of the rollercoaster cars, shoving himself and his backpack under the seat as far as he can possibly go, in among the used chewing gum, leaves, and an ancient tin bottle cap. He curls up tight, knees to chest, breathing in ragged, short gusts. It smells like mold and rusting metal, and he puts a hand over his own mouth to silence any sounds that might give him away.
The slight swaying of the platform stops. There’s silence, for a long beat, and Tim squeezes the nails of his other hand into his opposite ankle painfully, to remind himself not to move, not to make a single decibel of sound.
“Batsy didn’t tell me there was a new one to play with,” Joker says, clicking his tongue chidingly. Tim can hear the cruel smile in his voice when the Joker entreats him, “Come out, come out, little birdie.”
The Joker, creepily talking to him in the dark, hasn’t realized that Tim is a photographer, not one of the Bats. Honestly, Tim can’t really even blame him for the mistake; no one who isn’t a Bat is going to be caught dead anywhere nearby if the Joker has escaped, if they can help it. No one could possibly have expected Tim to be as much of an idiot as he has proven himself to be tonight. The best case scenario for Tim, if - when - he gets found by the Joker, is that he ends up as a human shield hostage. There are many worse options that he can come up with without even trying, and his brain continues to list them out helpfully for him, one after the other, even as he tells himself firmly to shut up.
Wooden slats creak under the weight of footsteps, slowly getting closer. From his hiding spot, Tim can see a tiny sliver of reflection off the warped metal curvature of the weather cover. With another set of creaking footsteps, Joker’s image moves into, then out of sight. He’s checking the cars, one by one.
Tim’s breath is coming faster and faster, and he bites the inside of his knuckle hard to ground himself, keep his exhalations silent. Joker’s reflection is gone, but now a faint shadow, darker than the surrounding light pollution twilight, is growing as it moves closer and closer to Tim.
“Come and play, little birdie. I promise it will be fun! For me.” He laughs again, and the sound seems to be coming from all around him, it’s so close. Another shift of weight, and Tim sees the toe of Joker’s pointed shoe come into view in the opening to the car Tim’s hiding in.
“If you wanted to play, you should have stayed in the house of mirrors,” Robin says suddenly, and Tim wants to cry with relief. “The party was there, and you left early.” The brash young voice sounds like it might be coming from on top of the metal roof, but Tim’s not exactly in a position to say for sure.
“Ah, but you didn’t tell me there was a new tweety bird in the nest. Two of you, now: Robin and a little chick, fresh from the egg.”
There’s a noticeable pause, and then the platform gives a small shudder. Tim sees a red, yellow, and green figure drop lightly into view on the far side of the platform in the wavy, dim reflection. Joker turns to face him, blocking Tim’s view of what’s happening.
“You must be crazier than usual. Batman’s an empty nester, ‘cept for me.”
Joker laughs and clucks his tongue. “Hasn’t Batty Bat taught you it’s rude not to share?” He moves away from the cars, closer to Robin, but not before Tim catches a glimpse of the can of aerosol venom, a long range can like wasp spray, that Joker’s got hidden against the side of his leg. From this angle, Tim was briefly able to see it, but he’s very sure that Robin hasn’t.
More afraid now than he has been the entire night, Tim unwraps his hand from where it’s been clawed into his opposite ankle, and slowly, noiselessly, reaches for the tin bottle cap.
Things happen fast, after that.
Tim whips the bottle cap as hard as he can, snapping it like a skipping stone against the sheet metal of the weather cover. The resulting twang, in the otherwise still night, is satisfyingly loud and distracting. Tim launches himself from his hiding spot at a four limbed crawling run, aiming to slide under the wooden safety rail and book it down the ride’s superstructure before the Joker can spray him, hopefully giving Robin the chance to subdue or apprehend him while he’s distracted.
It almost works.
Robin recovers faster than the Joker does. He throws something from his belt that explodes into a net, weighted with bolos that wrap around Joker and send him staggering backwards, off-balance, before he can bring the can of venom to bear on either Robin or Tim.
Robin reacts so quickly, in fact, that Tim is still directly behind the Joker, crouched and moving, as the Joker stumbles. The hard weight of the Joker’s legs crash into Tim’s side, and then over his back. There’s a loud crack as the rotted safety railing gives way, and then a short yell of surprise. Tim is shoved over the edge of the platform by the collision, rolling and miraculously catching the slats he originally climbed up with his hands, barking his shins painfully against the side before he can get his feet on a lower board as well, his stomach jumping into his throat at the near miss.
There’s a crunching thud below him. Tim looks under his arm to see the Joker on the ground below, bloody jaw working as though trying to laugh, even as his spine and legs are bent at unnatural angles.
“Holy fucking shit,” Tim hears from above, and looks up, wide-eyed, at Robin, who is looking down at him, and then at the Joker, with an expression that holds just as much shock as Tim is sure he’s staring back at Robin with.
Robin kneels suddenly, reaching a hand for Tim, but jerks his head over his shoulder as from far away, a growly voice bellows, “ROBIN!”
By the time Robin turns back, Tim is halfway down the ride, throwing himself onto the ground at an all-out sprint as soon as he thinks he can take the fall without breaking his legs. He looks back, once, and sees Batgirl running for the Mad Flight, Batman limping at a rapid pace behind her, one hand wrapped around his abdomen. Robin, above, is still knelt, hand extended, watching Tim go.
Tim runs half-blind through empty streets, police sirens chasing him out of Amusement Mile. He keeps running, turning east through Newtown, ignoring the stitch that develops in his side. He only slows for long enough to grab his skateboard out of his backpack when he starts to wheeze from the sustained exertion.
He’s halfway back over the bridge into Bristol before the blind fear powering his retreat turns into a sort of buzzing hum under his skin.
Holy crap. Tim pushes off the pavement, picking up more speed and leaning into a curve. He laughs out loud into the night air, relieved, disbelieving, exhilarated. That’s the most exciting thing that has ever happened in my whole entire life.