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“I’m not a vengeful man,” Jason says.
The Joker stares back at him. One of his green eyes is nearly swollen shut, already turning dark from bruises. It glitters at him nonetheless. There are flecks of blood on his stretched lips, blood caked between his teeth, blood oozing from his broken gums.
“Looks like revenge to me,” the Joker says. He tips his chin down, gesturing at the ropes which keep him stationary. They’re tied so tight that Jason knows they must be cutting into him, leaving raw red lines on white skin.
“Revenge,” says Jason, “would be me beating you to death.” He reaches behind the over-turned milk crate he’s sitting on and procures a crow bar, long and thick and heavy, the steel dented and chipped from years of use.
Joker’s eyes follow it with glee.
“What I’m about to do,” says Jason, “is worse. That means this isn’t revenge. It’s malice.”
“And you don’t mind being a malicious man?” Joker asks, gaze still tracking the crow bar. There’s a little crinkle beneath his one un-swollen eye. It gives his humor away as honest, unfaked.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Jason says.
Despite his intentions, he’s almost gentle when he takes Joker by the shoulders and pins him to the ground. Some ridiculous part of him, the part that used to watch cheesy action movies with Bruce and Dick, wants to say, It’s nothing personal. But it is, of course, and to say otherwise would be a lie. It’s more personal than anything Jason’s ever done.
He likes the way Joker’s chin scrapes against the floor. There’s an abrasion there, a layer of skin peeled off from the beating Jason administered earlier, before he had Joker tied up. It’s not quite bleeding, but it’s red and wet-looking, and he can already see specks of dirt from the floor grinding their way into that patch of abused skin.
There are bruises lining Joker’s neck, his sharp cheekbones, his collar bone and ribs. Looking at them, unbuttoning Joker’s waistcoat and shirt so he can see more and more, Jason can sort of understand why the Joker favors purple. The color of a bruise looks good on him. It complements his skin; it matches his hair.
Red and purple and white and green. Royal colors.
Corpse colors, Jason thinks with a grin. He was covered in all the same colors when he died.
Economically, he unzips Joker’s old-fashioned trousers — pinstriped, high-waisted, pleated, ridiculous — and pulls them down to Joker’s tied-up ankles. With his face pressed hard against the floor, Joker lets out a low, throaty chuckle. He’s not wearing underwear; his skin is unblemished and unnaturally white, like marble. There are almost no bruises at all on his legs.
Jason puts his right hand on Joker’s ass, fingers splayed, kneading the firm white cheek.
With his left hand, he grabs the crow bar.
“This is going to hurt,” he says. He feels it’s only right to be honest — and part of him relishes it, anyway, adores the fact that he’s finally repeating the words that rang in his head for years.
The Joker only laughs.
Afterward, Jason sits on the overturned milk crate again with a cigarette dangling from his lips and his hair lying limp against his forehead, damp with sweat. It’s too hot in here now; his clothes stick to him so badly that he’s already removed his leather jacket and tossed it on the floor.
A few feet away, Joker lies on the floor with his back to Jason, his ribs so visible that Jason could count them and expanding quickly, up and down and up again, in silent laughter that makes Joker’s whole body shake.
There are welts on the back of Joker’s thighs — long, red stripes on his ass, marks left by the crow bar when Jason swung it against him. Blood smears his skin, leaking from the stretched-out entrance where the crow bar itself is still wedged.
When he finishes his cigarette — when he’s cooled down a little — Jason stands and extinguishes it on Joker’s inner thigh. He watches the muscle spasm; he listens to the hysterical hitch of Joker’s breath as he lets out another shrieky little laugh.
“Let’s do this again sometime,” Jason says.
He grabs his jacket off the floor, slings it over his shoulder, and steps over Joker’s body on his way out the door.
He leaves the crow bar.