Bruce stared at Jack Napier's file for a long moment. He'd been wrestling with this question for months.
In the original timeline, Jack Napier would agree to help criminals rob a chemical plant to pay for his wife's medical bills.
The job would go wrong. His wife would die in an accident beforehand. Jack would fall into a vat of chemicals while trying to escape. He'd emerge as the Joker, completely insane, and go on to kill hundreds if not thousands of people over the years.
Bruce could stop it. A quiet anonymous payment to cover Napier's debts. A job offer through one of Wayne Enterprise's subsidiaries. Get the man into therapy before he snapped.
Save Jack Napier, and the Joker might never exist.
But what would that change?
The Joker had been Batman's ultimate nemesis in the original timeline. Their conflict had defined both of them.
Some versions of the story even suggested they needed each other, that Batman existed because Joker existed and vice versa.
'No,' Bruce thought firmly. 'I'm not that Batman. I'm not a broken vigilante who needs a nemesis to give my life meaning. I'm building something bigger.'
But there was another concern. Timeline stability. Bruce's meta-knowledge was his greatest advantage, but it only worked if events played out roughly as expected. Every change he made created ripples.
Too many ripples and the timeline would become unrecognizable.
Small changes were manageable. Training himself to peak human, building resources, positioning himself to lead the Justice League, those were personal changes that didn't affect the larger world much.
But preventing the Joker's creation? That was a massive change. It would alter the entire shape of Gotham's future criminal landscape.
'I need more time to decide,' Bruce thought, closing the file. 'Napier's crisis point is still months away. I can gather more information, run more projections, figure out the optimal choice.'
The assembly was wrapping up. Students filed out of the auditorium in loud clusters, already gossiping about the Kansas trip.
Bruce made his way to his first class of the day, Advanced Physics.
Rhe teacher, Dr. Charlotte, was a genuine MIT graduate who'd taken a teaching job at Gotham Academy for the prestige and salary. She was smart, demanding, and one of the few teachers who could keep Bruce even slightly engaged.
"Morning, Mr. Wayne," she said as he entered. "I graded your paper on theoretical applications of quantum entanglement. It's... concerning."
"Concerning bad or concerning good?"
"Concerning in that it's graduate-level work and you're seventeen." She handed him the paper. "Perfect score, obviously. But Bruce, this section here about using entangled particles for instantaneous communication across vast distances? That's Nobel Prize territory if it actually worked."
"It's purely theoretical," Bruce said with a modest shrug. "I'm sure someone smarter will figure out the practical applications eventually."
'Already have the practical applications figured out,' he thought. 'The math works. I could build a prototype in six months. But that would raise too many questions.'
Dr. Charlotte studied him with the same look teachers had been giving him for years. Part pride, part confusion, part suspicion that he was somehow cheating despite no evidence of it.
"You know, Bruce, I've taught a lot of gifted students over the years. Prodigies, genuine geniuses. But you're different. It's like you already know things before I teach them. Like you're just waiting for the rest of us to catch up."
"I read a lot," Bruce said.
"Uh huh." She didn't look convinced. "Well, keep reading. At this rate, you'll have a PhD before you're twenty."
'Try four PhDs worth of knowledge already,' Bruce thought. 'But who's counting?'
Class proceeded normally. Dr. Charlotte taught concepts Bruce had mastered years ago. He took notes anyway, asked intelligent but not too advanced questions, and generally played the role of exceptional but not supernatural student.
Between classes, his phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.
*"Rooftop. Lunch. Need to talk. -S"*
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