The fourth course arrived—the main event of the evening.
Snow-white fish fillet on one side of the plate, ruby-red steak on the other, both garnished with a scatter of parsley that was clearly decorative and equally clearly ignored by everyone present. White wine for the white meat, red for the red. Alfred moved around the table with practiced silence, cutting the steak with the precision of a man who had done this ten thousand times for guests considerably less dangerous than these.
Jude stood behind the Riddler and stared at the steak with the focused attention of a man who had not eaten since morning. The bandage on his shoulder existed. He had chosen not to acknowledge it.
The Riddler's hand drifted to the gun at his waist—then back. Alfred had done good work on the wound. The right hand still moved freely.
"From my conversations with Commissioner Gordon," Bruce said, swirling the vintage Bordeaux in his glass, "I understand the friction between you two centers entirely on... Batman."
He played the role flawlessly—the concerned, slightly detached billionaire seeking a pragmatic business solution. "Gordon was frustratingly vague. But I am not the police." He set the glass down with a soft, expensive clink. "I am a citizen with considerable resources who wants his city functioning again. Nothing said here leaves this dining room. If we can reach an understanding, my checkbook is at your disposal."
He looked between the two men sitting at his table.
"So. Why the Bat? Help me understand the fixation."
The Riddler did not smile. The Joker's face seemed to sink even further into its grim, unnatural stillness.
"Batman," Joker rasped, staring at the tablecloth.
"An anomaly," The Riddler corrected seamlessly. "A systemic error."
The Riddler picked up his silver fish fork, analyzing the poached fillet as if it were a flawed schematic. "If you require my methodology," he said, his voice a flat, tired drone, "I would dismantle him structurally. I would take his allies, his surrogates, his entire support network. I would place them at the precipice of a deep, inescapable drop, with him restrained at the bottom."
He didn't look up from his plate.
"I would execute them sequentially. Gravity would do the rest. He would feel the physical weight of his failures crush him, piece by piece." Edward took a precise, measured sip of his wine. "Then, I would stand at the edge. I would present the absolute, perfect riddle. And before his bruised, bleeding mind could even attempt to process the variables... I would pull the trigger."
He set the glass down. "He is the only equation in Gotham that resists balancing. I merely wish to close the brackets."
Bruce's expression remained a flawless, unreadable mask. He shifted his gaze to the pale man.
"Too much arithmetic," the Joker whispered. He stabbed a piece of rare steak, but didn't eat it. He just stared at the blood pooling around the tines. "I wouldn't use a gun. I would use my hands."
He looked up, his eyes dead and dark.
"I'd wrap them around his throat. I want to feel the pulse panic. I want to feel the exact moment the oxygen gives out." His mouth twitched—not into a smile, but a grimace of profound, agonizing intimacy. "No traps. No questions. Just absolute, crushing silence. And as he struggles, he'll look at me. Not with fear. He's too stubborn for fear. He'll look at me with peace."
The Joker dropped the fork. It clattered against the fine porcelain.
"At the edge of the abyss, the math evaporates. The rules, the crusade, the cape... it all burns away to nothing. There's just me, him, and the dark."
The Joker looked slowly across the table, locking his dead eyes on Edward.
"And in that last, suffocating second... he won't solve anything. He'll just realize it was all a terrible joke."
There was no cackle. No manic grin. Just a suffocating, heavy stillness as the Joker picked up his wine.
Standing in the shadows behind the Riddler, Jude kept his posture rigid, his face carefully blank. These men aren't just insane, he thought, feeling a cold sweat prickle at his collar. Pathological felt like too small a word. It wasn't hatred rolling off them in waves across the dining table. It was a suffocating, gravitational pull. It was an obsession so pure it looked like a grotesque distortion of love. Even monsters, Jude realized with a slow shiver, desperately needed to be understood.
The fifth course: sorbet.
Small cups, pale and cold. Fresh fruit blended and frozen, no milk, no sugar. The kind of dish designed to reset the palate between heavier courses.
Jude had heard of sorbet. He had never tasted sorbet. At this rate he was going to eat one of the candles.
"Good," Bruce said, setting down his spoon. "We've established you both want to kill Batman. So here's my proposal." He looked at both ends of the table. "Tonight, you each convince me why you deserve it more than the other. The better argument walks out with a billion dollars. With that, you can bribe every soldier on the opposing side—no need to grind your armies against each other anymore. One side absorbs everything. The war ends." A pause. "My only condition: go straight for Batman. No collateral damage. This city has suffered enough."
Silence settled over the table.
Bruce watched them think, and knew he had the right lever. Whoever used the money to bribe the other's army would immediately face every super-criminal on the opposing bench—which meant only the Joker or the Riddler could actually execute the plan. The prize was real. The logic was airtight. And both of them were tempted—he could see it plainly.
The sixth course: salad.
Red and green, fruit and vegetable, no cooking required. The kind of dish that made a quiet case for simplicity.
The Riddler set down his fork.
He didn't blink. His posture was rigid, his voice a flat, mechanical drone of absolute, crushing certainty.
"The solution is elementary," he said, not breaking eye contact. "You cannot kill him. Because you are a forgery."
The Joker's expression remained frozen, a plaster saint of apathy.
"I solve puzzles. That is my function," Edward continued, dissecting the man across from him with a surgeon's detachment. "You presented yourself as the paramount enigma of Gotham. Naturally, I solved you. It took embarrassingly little time."
He didn't smile. In fact, his face was a mask of sheer exhaustion, burdened by his own intellect.
"The city looks at the white skin, the green hair, the theatrics, and they construct a narrative. They project trauma to justify the anomaly. A pregnant wife. A vat of acid. A cruel father. A 'bad day.' They desperately want your madness to have an origin."
Edward picked up his wine, his movements painfully precise.
"But we both know the math doesn't support the myth. There is no tragedy. You aren't insane. You're a performer hiding behind greasepaint because, underneath it all, you are fundamentally, mathematically... ordinary. A predictable sequence."
He stared into his glass, as if seeing only the chemical composition of the liquid, the refraction of light, the inevitable, boring truth of it.
"You have no concept of the burden of absolute clarity," Edward said, his voice tightening with a cold, hollow despair. "To look at the world and see every mechanism, every lie, every inevitable conclusion, stripped of its mystery before you can even formulate the question. The Bat is the only variable that disrupts my equation. The only riddle that fights back."
A microscopic, dismissive gesture toward the Joker.
"I am the intellect. You are a distraction. That is why I am the only one mathematically equipped to erase him."
The seventh course: cheese.
Yellow, firm, the kind Jerry was always stealing from Tom. Alfred placed it without ceremony.
Joker just stared. His face was a porcelain mask, completely devoid of the manic energy that usually contorted it. There was no chuckle bubbling in his throat, not even a cracked smile. Just a dead, exhausted silence.
He turned his wine slowly by the stem, watching the dark liquid swirl.
"A reason," he murmured. His voice was hollow, stripped of all its theatricality. "Why it has to be me."
He looked at The Riddler as if explaining a basic law of physics to a slow child. He set the glass down.
"A riddle is a question. It has rules. It demands a logical answer. It tricks people into believing the universe makes sense if they just think hard enough."
His expression remained completely flat, but his eyes locked onto the Riddler's with a terrifying, absolute certainty.
"But a joke... a joke is a trap door. It's the sudden, violent realization that the rules were made up, the answer doesn't matter, and the universe doesn't care."
He leaned forward, a rigid, deliberate tilt across the table, closing the distance between them.
"At the very last second... when the fuse is burnt and the floor drops out from under you..." He whispered, his tone as dry as bone. "...who has the time to solve a puzzle? They only want to know why it's funny."
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