Chapter Text
Edward Nigma had, at one point, worked for Wayne Enterprises. Jokester hardly held that against him; most of Gotham worked for, or in, some Wayne property or other, or worked for people who did, or made a living selling the necessities and luxuries of life to them. Blaming Wayne's employees for the way he went about owning the city would be like blaming the mice that lived in Stalin's walls for the Cold War.
Assuming Stalin had had mice. Everybody had mice, right?
Anyway, J didn't have anything against Mr. Nigma just because he'd worked at WE, but it wasn't exactly a flattering character reference, either. More specifically, and sympathetically, he'd been part of Research and Development, and had lost his job, his home, and his life's work when a difference of opinion over his contract had arisen: Nigma had been quite sure that the language of the contract specifically denied him the right to file patents in his own name for the duration of his employment, but did not prohibit him from working on independent projects in his own time, with a view to possibly patenting them after he'd left the company.
Waynetech felt, on the contrary, that it granted them exclusive patent rights to everything he developed, whether he used their resources to develop it or not. Corporate thugs had seized his private computer from his apartment after Nigma had been unwise enough to mention his hobby work on encryption and high-speed data-something-something to a coworker who was not nearly so good a friend as he had believed.
He had taken them to court, they had counter-sued, no one had backed down; affairs had escalated to criminal charges for breach of contract. Unsurprisingly, since they could afford much better lawyers (including the nearly-undefeated hotshot prosecutor Harvey Dent, who had since become District Attorney), Wayne Industries had won. Lock, stock, barrel, and ten-year noncompete clause. Nigma was left with nothing.
That was where Jokester came in. Nigma wanted his help to steal his work back.
"I mean, I have a lot of the important parts still in my head, though even that I can't legally profit from in any way. But I'm not going to let them have it."
Nigma was a small man and, judging by the few lines in his young face, generally a cheerful one, but as he'd told his story he'd leaned further and further over the round wooden table, trying to impress Jokester with the importance and righteousness of his cause, his round face all pinched with ferocity.
J drained his beer and looked thoughtful, his smile small and crooked. "So you want me in on your revenge?"
"It's not just revenge! They're going to use my coding for weapons development. Yes, I know I did work for them that already went into military tech, but not this. This was special. It's mine."
When Jokester drummed his fingers against the glass mug thoughtfully, Nigma brought both his hands down flat on the table and stood up so he could lean further forward, his pale orange hair sticking up like agitated flames. "Come on! This is the big corporation screwing over the little guy for a profit, and the law playing along. I thought this was what you were all about."
He slapped a ten down on the table to cover the drinks and turned away, not caring how much attention he'd attracted to their discreet corner of Davis's bar. Jokester snaked out an arm and caught the little man's sleeve before he could get far.
"Hey, come on, don't go away mad," he coaxed, tugging. "You know how many people have tried to trick me into taking the fall for an assassination, or use me to make a quick buck at somebody's expense? It's like the word on the street is I fall for every sob story I hear."
Nigma yanked his arm away, scowling. "Why would you even care if somebody was stealing from Wayne?"
"I don't. But I don't like to be used."
The researcher pressed his lips together. "I'm not trying to use you. I just heard you were somebody who might be able to help."
"That's exactly who I am. Now, why don't you sit back down, Mr. Nigma, and tell me the plan."
The scientist looked torn for several seconds, but then he tramped back across the floor and joined Jokester at the table again. Reached into his pocket and drew his hand out covered in a fine, shining mesh worked in a pattern J vaguely associated with circuitry. "This is my cyber-glove. Don't laugh," he added sharply, and Jokester bit his tongue and didn't. He wouldn't have meant anything by it if he had, but some people were sensitive to being laughed at, and Nigma was already feeling defensive, so he didn't want to hurt his feelings.
"It's a prototype I took from the lab right after they terminated me. I replaced it with a dummy, so they probably just think I sabotaged it, but it's made of a material I developed—helped develop, alright, but it was mostly mine, like ninety-five percent mine—that means it's a computer you can wear. It has a built-in radio I can use to access other computers, and it still has all the security keys for the WE network. With this, I can get us through the mechanized security without being detected, and once I access the labs I can make sure they can't use any of what they stole from me.
"But I need your help to deal with the non-computer parts. Are you in?"
J reached across the table and stole Nigma's pint to swig from, since his own was empty. Slid it back with a grin. "I'm in."
Nigma looked a little like he wanted to take back his invitation, but he also looked so relieved that Jokester was half-surprised he didn't melt onto the table. The clown felt a flare of sympathy. Fighting as long as he had, against a titan like Waynetech, all alone—that was impressive, by itself. And J had no doubt that if he'd turned the job down Nigma would have kept recruiting for suitable co-conspirators until he either found somebody or ran out of time, and either way he would have gone in, reckless of consequences.
Bruce Wayne was like Owlman that way, J reflected. Neither of them ever seemed to understand that taking everything from somebody created a person with nothing to lose, and that that was a really stupid thing to create hating you. Especially when the person had been a fighter all along.
The brave little man picked up his beer in a numb sort of way, stopped, and put it down again with great deliberation. Heh. Somebody had germ issues. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Tomorrow night would be best. Can you do tomorrow night?"
"Think I can work you in," J assured him.
Nigma nodded some more. His eyes had gone far away, but not with shock at actually getting something he'd wanted; they were flickering intently over that distance. He was plotting. He stood up, pushed a big yellow envelope stiff with papers across the table. "Tomorrow, then."
Jokester nodded, drummed his fingers over the envelope but made no move to open it here. "Oh, one thing," he threw out, as his new B&E buddy moved to turn away from the table. "You have a suit?"
Nigma blinked at him. "A suit?"
"Yeah, a suit! Something fancy, get you into the vibe. You can't do a mission like this in just, you know, sweat pants. Well, you can, but it's just not the same."
"I'm not moving in on the cape game here," Nigma said. "I just want what's mine."
"Capes are nonmandatory," Jokester assured him. "Everything is nonmandatory! I just like to do things with style."
"Hm," said Nigma noncommittally.
J held up his hands for peace. Honestly, taking everything so serious. "Hey, never mind. I'll meet you in Hopewell Terrace at eleven sharp, huh?"
"Right."
Of course, if his story didn't check out, Jokester would just meet him there to tell him the job was off, but he'd still meet him.
It checked out. The envelope turned out to hold annotated blueprints for the building they were breaking into, which was helpful and saved time, and after calling up a few contacts and making one judicious scouting excursion to make sure they wouldn't run into any avoidable nasty surprises, J went about his usual business for that day and the next—patrol here, gig there; visit Lei Bao and get fed egg drop soup and tea; get into a fight with some of Owlman's lackeys, triumph; stop to gossip with the River Street girls; etcetera.
The next evening he caught a nap around sunset, grabbed a gyro for breakfast-dinner, combed his hair and made sure it was tied back tightly because you never wanted hair in your eyes when you were doing something tricky, and went to meet Nigma in fine fettle.
J got there first, and considered lurking out of sight, for the principle of the thing. Decided against it; the poor guy was stressed enough. He leaned back against the swooping iron pole that held up one of the elegant gothic-style streetlamps City Hall had installed five years ago, everywhere that might plausibly be considered 'tourist-friendly.' The gold braid on his costume winked in the lamplight. He was easily the most noticeable thing on Hopewell Terrace, and he exchanged brief nonverbal greetings with two bleary late-night pedestrians, a pizza delivery girl, and a very sarcastic striped tomcat with a ragged ear, before the person he was waiting for arrived, five minutes late. J's eyebrows shot up as his coconspirator came into view.
Nigma had assembled, from somewhere, a bottle-green tailcoat, neat little buttoned boots, and a bowler hat. A real old-school one, stiff and thick enough to offer some skull protection, with the brim pulled down over his forehead until it almost met the green domino mask plastered over his eyes, which in turn matched his waistcoat. It was a spectacularly Edwardian array, especially with the cyber-glove gleaming on his right hand and giving him a sort of futuristic steampunk vibe.
"All right," he declared, as he entered the pool of the streetlight, tugging his lapels self-importantly straight. "I'm ready."
Jokester did a tiny five-step jig as he left the lamppost, and clapped his hands approvingly. "Oh, I like this, this I like. Where'd you get the hat?"
Nigma folded his arms and shrugged. "Had it around."
"Awesome! Right, then. Come on, Eddie—can I call you Eddie?—to start with, we go around the side of the building to this emergency exit that the night shift people tend to leave ajar during their smoke breaks."
"They get away with that?" Nigma wondered aloud, letting the nickname pass without comment so apparently J could. "Security's awfully tight."
"Well, we'll need to get through a lot of locked doors to get anywhere sensitive once we're inside, but that's what the glove's for, right? Other option's the front door, and I figured if you wanted to try to double-bluff human security you'd've approached somebody a liiiittle less distinctive than my never-so-humble self."
Nigma hadn't written up his plans to go with the blueprints—J was pretty sure he was trying to make as few explicit statements of criminal intent as possible, just in case, which of course meant he wasn't going to commit the details to writing—which J had taken as invitation to wing it. After all, he'd been recruited for his breaking and entering skills, and as muscle, and most of all as a sort of psychological crutch so Nigma didn't have to go through with this alone.
He completely approved. In retrospect, staging his own grand comeback-tour vengeance-kick without anybody to lean on had been way, way too risky. But he hadn't wanted to drag anyone down with him if he screwed up. He hadn't been all that sure he was going to survive, back then, when he'd been trying to straight-out burn the Owl's kingdom down around him. There'd been the real possibility he'd go far enough that afterward he wouldn't so much deserve to. He was lucky his friends hadn't given up on him.
Nigma faltered in dismay when they got to the designated door and found it closed, with no smokers in evidence, and no external lock or handle, nor anything to cyber-glove-hack, but J laughed and produced a very thin-bladed knife, which he shimmied into the seam where the flange along the outside of the door closed over the wall, and began to carefully lever it ajar.
"There's two different alarms attached to these doors," he explained as he worked. "One that triggers when the latch disengages—fire exit, right?—and one in the pneumatic arm at the top, that goes off when it stands open for more than a minute and a half.
"One of the smokers disabled the alarm in the latch a couple of years ago, so they didn't have to go all the way to the front for a cig, and they just leave it propped just a little bit open around a notebook while they're out here, not enough for the arm-alarm to register, but enough to keep the bolt from catching. They figure it's fine because they're the only ones who know, and you can't use the fact that the alarm doesn't go off to get the door open.
"What they don't know is, I set up a distraction and jammed the latch with chewing gum one time while they were out here having their smoke, and then came back later and disabled the locking mechanism just enough…that…there." He pulled the door open a few inches, listened, peered inside, waited until the camera that covered this part of the hall had swiveled past, then stuck his head in to check the hall as far as he could see in both directions. Empty. Yanked the portal wide, and gestured grandly for the mastermind to precede him. "Tah-dah!"
Nigma was giving him such a look from under that green mask. "You did this last night?" he asked.
"No, I did this months ago, after the thing with the escaped mutant house pets that WE denied involvement in. Now get inside, timer's running down."
Nigma scooted obligingly, his face now set into thoughtful lines, and Jokester got the door closed behind them within the 90-second limit and disappeared the knife again before turning to Nigma expectantly, tugging his purple vinyl gloves on straighter as he watched the camera turn as far left as it would go and begin its slow pan back. They had eighteen seconds. "Where to first?"
"Main server room. Actually," Nigma corrected himself, scratching at his forehead under the edge of the thick wool derby with his left hand, while making a complicated series of decisive finger-twitches with his right that made the cyberglove light up in exciting patterns, and squinting at the results, "can you get us in someplace we can be out of sight while I finish breaking back into the system?"
By the face he was pulling, he'd brought up the blueprints in his head and was either trying to place the 'you are here' pin or figure out what the best nearby place to hide was; J spared him the trouble.
"Sure," he shrugged, and ducked them out of the camera's zone just before it caught them, hugged the wall as he approached the next one, waited another few seconds 'til that one turned away, and moved on another few yards until they got to the side of the nearest door that had a keypad, and punched in four digits to gain access to…
"A janitor's closet," Nigma stated, very arch, not taking his eyes off his weird little hand-computer as J followed him inside. Clearly a major part of his role here was watching the little scientist's back, since apparently he didn't know how to do it for himself.
"It possesses a rich history in the annals of hiding places," J declared staunchly, pulling the door shut behind them and hitting a light switch. "It's traditional."
"Cliché, you mean," said Nigma, with a cursory look around. "What do you call a creepy midnight creature made of sticks and straw?" he muttered to himself, as he propped his shoulders against the nearest shelf and settled in to frowning and tapping at his glove-computer.
It looked like the five little divots along the inside edge of the wrist were additional controls for the ungloved hand, though J still didn't see how that could equal a full keyboard's worth of inputs. He guessed there was some trick to it.
Jokester made himself comfortable on a stack of plastic-wrapped toilet-paper-roll bales and drummed at nothing with his fingers as he smiled to himself. "Broom-closet-monster," he said, since neither of them was a scarecrow.
Though if Nigma had actually meant that J didn't have a brain, he could just have said so. J wouldn't mind. He knew he wasn't a genius, but even if he played the Fool, he wasn't an idiot, and he knew that, too.
"Huh?" his partner-in-righteous-crime jerked his eyes up, as though expecting to be attacked by said monster.
"Did I get it wrong?" J asked, slightly abashed at the possibility. "Your riddle," he prompted, when Nigma looked blank.
"Rid—oh. Oh! No, you got it right. Didn't even really hear myself asking. Old habit," the little scientist explained, only raising more questions. "Nervous habit," he admitted, wriggling his shoulders in embarrassment as he dropped his eyes back to his computer-glove, where a little holographic screen had flickered to life. "I'm a little tense."
"'Course you are," Jokester agreed, because seriously. That was kind of an awesome nervous habit but this was not the time to ask, or the time to laugh out loud. The little man seemed relieved when he didn't, and returned to his hacking with a new fervor.
"Okay," Nigma announced after a few quiet minutes, shoving away from the wall and hitting one last button with a flourish. "Cameras are mine. Let's go."