The Mad Hatter arrived on stage just as Batman was pouring the last bucket of water on Clayface's frozen remains three miles away.
Logically, a grown man with a baby face who bounces when he walks should read as harmless. Childlike, even. There are people who look permanently twelve years old and manage to be perfectly pleasant about it.
The Mad Hatter was not one of those people.
Whatever the growth-stimulant compound had done to his mind, it had done comparable work on his face — distorting the features, pulling them into angles that didn't quite resolve into anything a person's eye wanted to settle on. He walked onto the stage with a gloomy, fixed expression, and somewhere deep under the hat's chip suppression, Jude's brain processed the approaching figure and formed a clear, involuntary opinion.
Where did this squash zombie come from.
The chip pulsed. The thought dissolved. Jude's face went blank again.
The Mad Hatter trotted over and circled him like a buyer at a livestock auction. He snapped his fingers, and someone produced a small step stool. He climbed onto it, which brought him roughly to eye level with Jude, and began a thorough examination — pinching his ears, prying his jaw open, inspecting his teeth, his pupils, the structure of his face, the width of his neck.
After a long moment, he stepped back and shook his head.
"No," he announced, with genuine disappointment. "He can't act at all. There's no suitable role for him on my stage."
Then, seemingly remembering that he was angry, he reared back and kicked Jude hard in the chest.
Jude staggered two steps. The Mad Hatter toppled off the stool — he would have hit the floor if two Falcone men hadn't caught him by the arms and set him upright, an indignity he absorbed without acknowledgment.
"This one's useless!" He drew his pistol and pressed it directly to Jude's forehead, his voice climbing toward the hysterical register. "Kill him!"
Under the hat's chip, Jude registered the gun. His body didn't move. But something older and more fundamental than the Mad Hatter's technology lit up in his nervous system — a cold, very clear sense of this is going to kill you — and for one crystalline second the suppression cracked and he was completely present, watching the Mad Hatter's finger on the trigger from behind blank, obedient eyes.
Oh. Not a squash zombie. The Mad Hatter.
He let his face stay slack. Let his posture stay soft. The chip reasserted itself a moment later, smoothing him back into the correct controlled expression, and the Mad Hatter stared at him for several long seconds before apparently deciding that he was sufficiently subdued.
He lowered the gun.
"My Ding Dang brother's been picked up by Batman." He muttered this mostly to himself, as though accounting for inventory. "I could use a capable bodyguard. This one's barely qualified." He waved a hand. "Bring him his black robe."
"Boss, why are you putting it back on him?"
"Because he's useless as anything else. You think I want a pot-bellied middle-aged man wandering around my stage? At least in the robe he's slightly less offensive to look at. Give him back his character — the Bike Stripper. It suits him."
The two Falcone men retrieved the robe and mask from where they'd been holding them and settled the hood over Jude's head.
The instant the fabric came down, the beret underneath activated.
The chip's signal hit the SAN recovery buffer and scattered. Jude's eyes cleared — or appeared to, underneath the mask, where nobody could see them. He resumed the slightly unfocused expression of a man under control, which was now entirely voluntary, and filed away the past ten minutes for later review.
We've been waiting for you to put the hood back.
Not that the trap had been strictly necessary. Jude had walked in with two layers of insurance already running. The first: I Didn't Kill Anyone had been activated before he entered the theater — any attack within twenty meters of him would find its killing potential mysteriously redirected. The second was Feign Death, which he'd used on Deadshot once before and which allowed him to survive a fatal hit, motionless, for ten seconds. Enough time for most situations to change.
He had two more contingencies beyond those, which he was hoping not to need. If the Mad Hatter had simply skipped the inspection and put the robe directly on him, none of the backups would have been tested at all. As it turned out, the other party had cooperated beautifully.
"Alright." The Mad Hatter dusted off his hands. "Tell the Joker I've recruited a supervillain for him. Easy work."
On the other end of the communicator, the Joker listened to this report, and his smile — already a fixed architectural feature of his face — somehow managed to drop further at the corners.
"That idiot." He set down the communicator. "Why didn't he tell me first? The Bike Stripper value was in his access to the Riddler. That's gone now — there's nothing left to extract." A pause. "A dog that might betray you deserves a bone. A dog that's already betrayed you is just overhead."
He thought about it for another moment, then shrugged. "Fine. Whatever the Hatter wants to do with him — bodyguard, cannon fodder, stage decoration. He's used up."
The following morning, the Gotham Daily ran the full story: Batman and Kite Man had neutralized Solomon Grundy and Clayface, and the unstable mercenary known as the Bike Stripper had been seized by the Mad Hatter and folded into the Joker's operation. The consensus reading, from columnists and civilians alike, was clean and confident: Batman had won big, the Joker had won slightly, and the Riddler had lost.
The actual feelings of all parties involved bore no resemblance to this summary.
Batman had captured two key enemy fighters, returned them to Arkham, and placed an undercover agent inside the Joker's command structure. The Batplane was a write-off, but it was a Batplane — replaceable, accounted for in the budget, already ordered. Win.
The Joker had lost a high-value intelligence source inside the Riddler's operation, which nobody outside the room knew about. He'd also gained what he currently believed was a burned-out mercenary of negligible worth. He was wearing the smile he always wore. Complicated win.
The Riddler received the news that "Bike Stripper has been captured by the Mad Hatter" and opened a bottle of champagne. His subordinates arrived on the floor to find their usually severe, pedantic, please-address-me-as-Nygma-or-Riddler boss dancing a flamenco, bottle raised, cape swirling. The term boss had become genuinely traumatic for him after months of Jude's conditioning, a Pavlovian flinch he'd developed without noticing, and he'd made the renaming policy official three weeks ago. Tonight he didn't care about any of that. The Bike Stripper was gone, the jinx was lifted, and even Poison Ivy joined in after the third song, mostly because the music was good.
Nobody missed him. The relief in the room was palpable. The teammate-seller was someone else's problem now. Win.
And in the broader city of Gotham, Batman's victory meant the scales had tipped fractionally toward order, which the citizens experienced as a cautious, provisional, Gotham-specific form of hope. Win.
Four parties. Four victories. Four completely different reasons for celebrating, none of them visible to any of the others.
That night, without question, everyone in Gotham City had a bright future.
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