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English
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Published:
2025-07-12
Completed:
2025-07-12
Words:
1,242
Chapters:
2/2
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13
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341
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The Final Confrontation

Summary:

A new form of Joker gas at a gala provokes Bruce Wayne into killing his son’s murderer.

Jason Todd, newly returned to Gotham and trying to figure out how to make that everyone’s problem, watches his plan for retribution fall apart on live television.

Notes:

This was based (loosely) on a tumblr post by @favoritebatfam and written with permission (https://www. /favoritebatfam/781896553603399680/brucie-wayne-accidentally-killing-the-joker-this). I wandered off in certain areas. And also stole a bit of backstory from the Nolan films by accident, because I was writing this at work and couldn’t doublecheck which bit of canon I was remembering.

Also also super shocked that I remembered the Clown Prince of Crime was something they called the Joker without being able to look it up.

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Bruce did not want to be at this gala.

Not that he ever really wanted to be at a gala.

For all that Brucie Wayne was known to be a party animal, Bruce himself was not interested on any evening, let alone on the anniversary of his son’s death.

But Gotham high society didn’t know that.

Gotham high society thought that Jason had died in a Joker attack in Gotham weeks after he had already died.

So Bruce didn’t have an excuse, be it mourning or his own fundraising gala to attend.

Which meant that he was at the gala, trying his best to smother all of the rage and sorrow, and not in truth succeeding if the glances he was getting from some of those who knew him slightly better were anything to go by.

Still, he wined and dined with the rest of them, his mind constantly whirling back to Jason. To the bright future that had been in front of him. To the emptiness in the Manor and at Bruce’s side that no one could completely fill.

To the weight of Jason’s body in his arms.

He was talking to a television reporter from Metropolis about the Jason Todd Foundation when he smelt it. Joker gas.

Bruce whipped around, trying to find the source of it as a green fog began to swirl through the room. The journalist began to cough, and Bruce glanced back at them just as the cameraman gave her his gas mask, and if there had been any doubt, Bruce definitely knew they weren’t from Gotham now.

He felt in his own pockets and only came up with one gas mask himself. Cursing internally at his own foolishness, he passed it over to the cameraman.

He, at least, had some experience with this kind of thing.

Bruce held on to his rage as he began to scan the room again. If he could use the emotion he was already feeling to hold back the gas a little longer, he would.

Then he noticed something strange was happening.

Even as the fog grew denser, there was very little laughter. Instead, the screams grew thicker in the air as the Joker’s own laughter began to ring out.

Bruce’s rage spiked, and before he could even really think about what he was doing, he threw himself across the room and tackled the Joker, heedless of the gunmen around him.

“You killed my son!” Bruce snarled as the Joker hit the floor, “you killed my son and you have seen no justice for it!”

The Joker squirmed out from under Bruce and they both scrambled to their feet, Bruce swinging wildly, the terrible uncontrolled anger of his youth revisited upon him.

He forced the Joker backwards, tears streaming down his face and blurring his vision.

“You killed my son!” He shouted, half a sob, his rational mind taking a backseat, eaten away by the chemical influence of the Joker gas.

“What’re you going to do about it Brucie?” The Joker taunted, even as Bruce hit him and hit him and hit him, the rage pushing away all awareness of anything or anyone around him. “Is little Brucie Wayne going to do what the Batman never could?”

“I am not the Batman.” Bruce snarled. He backed the Joker against the edge of the balcony he had entered from. “And you do not deserve to live when Jason is dead.”

For all that Bruce had been unable to express it before, he felt it was true. Batman didn’t kill, couldn’t kill, was an upholder of the system of justice that swam, corrupt though it was, in Gotham’s veins. Bruce Wayne has trained with the League of Shadows, had killed some bad people in his anger and youth, and now Bruce Wayne was more angry than he had ever been in his life.

“Did your son deserve to live?” The Joker cackled and Bruce hit him again, his head snapping back and his laughter becoming even more breathless. “Did Jason Todd, the little street rat, the little thieving bastard, really deserve to live?”

“You keep his name out of your fucking mouth!” Bruce slammed the Joker against the railing of the balcony and he howled.

Bruce howled with him, a wordless sound of grief and rage as he threw his son’s murderer down into the unforgiving streets below.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

Jason froze, looking up from the spreadsheet in which he was laying out his soon-to-be elaborate plan when he heard the words ‘Joker attack.’

He hadn’t even known he was out of Arkham. He had only put the news on for a bit of background noise, but he watched in stunned silence as Bruce Wayne beat the shit out of the Joker on like television.

Bruce Wayne, Jason’s dad, who everyone had been telling him didn’t care, was beating the shit out of his murderer live on television, screaming his grief for the whole world to hear.

Jason expected the Pit to come back. For rage to fill his heart and green to fill his vision the second he saw either of them, but it had happened and all he could feel was relief.

Bruce cared.

He might be poisoned with Joker gas, but those feelings were still real. Had to be, for them to rear up like that.

He cared.

Watched as the news caster swapped between rambling speculation and aghast silence as they watched Gotham’s favourite son and the Clown Prince of Crime battle it out in a crowd of Gotham’s most famous and affluent.

Watched as Bruce didn’t relent. Even as the Joker was backed against a wall and bleeding.

Watched as the camera angle switched from the ballroom to the street, angled up, up, up at where the Joker half-dangled off of the balcony.

Watched as the Joker insulted Jason and Bruce tipped the Joker over the edge.

Jason waited with bated breath as the camera on the street recorded his fall.

There was no parachute. No hang-glider. No ridiculously contrived contraption appeared out of thin air.

No helicopter swooped in to save him.

No lines caught him in his tumbling free fall.

He just fell until he didn’t, hitting the ground with a thump that would have been sickening if it hadn’t been Jason’s murderer. Dead.

Dead after so much pain and so much grief.

For several minutes Jason found he couldn’t recon with it.

The camera cut back to Bruce for a second, sobbing wretchedly in the restraining arms of three paramedics and then the camera person quickly panned away to the clean up that was happening across the ballroom and Jason discovered that all he really wanted was to go home.

He wanted to go home.

He wanted to get a hug from his dad. To tell him about Damian and make him promise there would be no more dead Robins, not if any of them could help it. He wanted to get a hug from Alfred, and from Dick, and hell, he even wanted to meet the new kid.

The new kid Jason was pretty sure Talia was trying to get Jason to clear out of the way so Damian could be Robin. Jason swore quietly and snapped his laptop shut and the television off. The safe house was swept for evidence and Jason’s bag was thrown over his shoulder before he raced out the door, the phrase no more dead Robins ringing in his ears.

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