The stale air of the Batcave hung heavy, usually a sanctuary of controlled chaos, now a tomb of dread. On the gargantuan main monitor, a familiar, rictus grin stretched across the face of Gotham's greatest nightmare. The Joker. His laugh, a grating cacophony, spilled from every speaker, amplified by countless televisions across the city.
Behind him, a tableau of terror: a dozen bound figures, gagged and pale, strapped to crude devices that hummed with a sinister energy. BOOM! The screen vibrated, a close-up of a ticking bomb strapped to a young woman's chest, the timer a stark red countdown. BOOM! A shot of a glass vial filled with luminous green gas, nestled within a larger device.
"Good evening, Gotham!" Joker's voice, sickly sweet, echoed. "Did you miss me? Because I certainly missed you! So, I thought, why not a little game? A little 'Choose Your Own Adventure' for our dear caped crusader!"
In the GCPD headquarters, Commissioner Jim Gordon slammed his fist on the desk, the cheap coffee cup rattling. "Damn it, not again!" Beside him, Detective Harvey Bullock grumbled, "Just shoot the clown already, why do we keep putting him back in that asylum anyway?" But even Bullock's usual bravado was tinged with a fresh layer of fear. The sight of the hostages, specifically a little girl clutching a teddy bear, had silenced his usual crass remarks.
"Option A," Joker continued, oblivious to the city's mounting panic, "our Bat-brain can try and find my little surprises – lovely gas bombs I've sprinkled around your delightful city, ready to make everyone... giggle themselves to death! Or, Option B, he can come find me! But here's the kicker, folks! Fail to find the bombs, or fail to find me before I get bored – and trust me, I get bored very easily – and these lovely people go boom! And for an encore, the gas bombs turn Gotham into a permanent laughter factory! Ta-ta for now!"
The screen warped, a static-laced image of Gotham's iconic skyline filled with a shimmering, almost ethereal light. Then, a massive hologram bloomed in the night sky, dwarfing the Wayne Tower and casting an otherworldly glow over the terrified city.
It was a young man, no older than twenty, with an intensity in his green eyes that cut through the Joker's madness. His brown hair was slightly tousled, and he wore a simple black t-shirt under a dark green jacket, a stark white strip on the right shoulder bearing a stylized "10."
"My name is Ben Tennyson," the voice boomed, calm and steady, yet resonating with an authority that silenced even the Joker's maniacal chuckles. "I give you one chance to release the hostages and crawl back to your cell, clown. This is not a threat."
Across the city, a young woman named Sarah, huddled with her children in their small apartment, gasped. "Who is that?" Her daughter, Lily, usually fearless in the face of TV monsters, stared up at the sky with wide, unblinking eyes. For a moment, the suffocating fear lessened, replaced by a flicker of bewildered hope.
The Joker, however, quickly recovered. His smile returned, even wider, a glint of amusement in his eyes. "Oh, and why would I do that, hmm?" he taunted, leaning into the camera, his voice dripping with playful malice.
Ben's voice, amplified by the hologram, remained unwavering. "Because if you don't, I will do the one thing that terrifies you more than death."
Joker tilted his head, feigning curiosity. "And what's that, do tell, my dear Benjamin? Oh, can I call you Benja—"
"I will erase your very existence," Ben cut him off, the calm intensity in his voice deepening, becoming something cold and terrifying. "No, I won't kill you. I will strip you of your madness. I will give you back your sanity and force you to watch as I remove every memory of you from the history of this world. I will scrub every trace of your existence until you're less than nothing.
And for the final act, I will remove the one person that your twisted mind loves from the equation of this city:
Batman. Your other half, the yin to your yang. I will make sure he's a non-factor in your history."
In the Batcave, Bruce Wayne felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cave's temperature. The words, "remove every memory of you from the history of this world," resonated with a power he hadn't encountered since... since ever. And then, the casual mention of Batman as the Joker's "other half"—it was a truth he'd always known, but never spoken aloud by an outsider, least of all one threatening to break it.
The Joker's grin faltered, his eyes widening in genuine, unadulterated horror. "Yo-you can't! You're bluffing!" His voice was no longer playful, but strained, a desperate whimper escaping his lips.
"Am I?" Ben's single word hung in the air, a hammer blow.
"Ho-how?" Joker stammered, the bravado completely gone, replaced by a raw, naked fear. The hostages, previously frozen in terror, stirred, a glimmer of hope in their eyes.
"I have the power, and the willingness to deliver on my words" Ben declared, his gaze unwavering. "And even if that's not enough, I won't stop. Through tech or magic, even if I have to change the very space-time continuum of this reality, I Will Erase You."
On the rooftops, perched in the shadows, another costumed figure watched the sky-hologram. Green Arrow, visiting Gotham for an unscheduled meeting, lowered his bow, a look of profound disbelief on his face. "Okay, now that's a power play," he muttered to himself, his usual quips lost in the sheer audacity of the young man's threat.
"Bu-bu-but heroes don't do that! That's my mem—" Joker stammered, his mind reeling, his carefully constructed reality crumbling.
"Do I look like a fucking hero to you, clown?" Ben roared, his calm facade finally cracking, a raw, furious energy surging through his voice. "Do you see me wear a mask or a silly little costume? I did not fucking save the damn multiverse time and again just so some fucking deranged psychopaths and some nutjobs in colorful costumes can play cop & robbers, turning the world into their fucking playground while innocent people pay the damn price of their incompetence."
The screen zoomed out, showing Ben now standing beside a neat stack of the very same bombs the Joker had threatened the city with. He gestured to them with a dismissive flick of his wrist. "Oh, and these are your bombs. Took me less than a minute to find them."
A ripple of shock went through the GCPD. "He... he found them?" Gordon whispered, his mouth agape. Bullock just stared at the screen, a new respect, and a healthy dose of fear, dawning in his eyes for the mysterious newcomer.
Ben's gaze then hardened, shifting as if looking directly into Batman's eyes through the screen. "I know you're seeing this too, rat.
If your boyfriend in cheap clown makeup doesn't crawl back to his crack house or harms these people, it will be on your head. Just a couple of new additions to the long list of people you condemned to suffer because you're too much of a pussy to man the fuck up and put these rotting diseases down once and for all."
In the Batcave, the temperature plummeted. Bruce Wayne's jaw tightened, a muscle clenching furiously. "Rat," "pussy"—the words stung, not just for their vulgarity, but for the uncomfortable truth they exposed in Ben's brutal assessment. He had always believed in his code, in the sanctity of every life, even the Joker's. But Ben had just laid bare the cost of that code, painted it in the blood of countless victims.
The screen flickered, going completely black, only to be replaced by a stark, white numerical display counting down from 00:30:00.
A heavy silence descended upon Gotham. The holographic figure in the sky vanished, but its words, and the chilling timer, remained. The fear hadn't gone away, but it had transmuted into something else – a terrifying uncertainty, and perhaps, a sliver of hope that someone, anyone, was finally willing to break the cycle. The game had changed, and Gotham, along with its Dark Knight, had just met a new kind of reckoning.