TERRIFIER: ART OF THE KILLING JOKE 👈
Great stories are built on rivalries.
Not just between people—but between ways of understanding the world.
Control against the slow inevitability of entropy.
Damian Wayne was trained to impose order on chaos.
But sometimes the world produces something worse than chaos.
Something that refuses meaning altogether.
Damian didn’t inherit the Joker.
He inherited Art the Clown.
And this time, the joke isn’t the point
Gotham: a city where reason and insanity shared the same sidewalks—split just enough to trip the careless. Joker always loved that. Gotham was his city as much as it was the Bat’s. Gotham didn’t hide its rot.
It wore it like stage makeup—garish, imposing, impossible to ignore.
Unless the Bat showed up, of course—and his little brats too.
Lucky them, Joker thought, a dull, irritated irony settling in as he stared at his latest muse.
He checked his watch. The carved-up face of a policeman’s daughter stared back at him—eyes void, fixed on something beyond him. Something empty.
Normally, the sight would have brought a smile to his face. But tonight, the spark wasn’t there. The joke refused to land.
It had all grown so mundane.
He remembered when the city had a rhythm—an off-beat drum only madmen could hear. A time when sirens didn’t interrupt the night—
Gotham still had that pulse—
that hell-born heartbeat—
where everything that could go wrong inevitably would, and your life was nothing more than a punchline scrawled in blood.
Most days felt like a joke no one else understood: heroes scrambling for meaning, villains scrambling for a bit of fun—
Joker always loved that part.
The audience participation.
“I’d kill to feel that zest again,” he cooed, sighing his frustrations up at the moon like it might sigh back. “Looks like I’ll just have to settle for the incontinence factor." He made sure to leave as much of a mess as humanly possible—call it muscle memory.
But something deeper gnawed at him, a kind of artistic block he refused to name. Stories of a killer clown—some painted nobody out of Miles County calling himself Art.
“Of course his name is Art,” Joker grumbled upon first hearing of this new Clown.
“Another jester. How original,” Joker scoffed dismissively as he flipped through the headline and its lovingly photographed gore.
At first he was impressed—flattered, even.
But as the clown continued to terrorize, maim, and reduce his victims to little more than a puddle of pink slurry, Joker found himself… wondering. Not about the horror—no, he adored horror. But about the intent.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/86125266
