"Lemme show you," he suggests, producing a knife from somewhere. It is a little bit amazing how good the Joker is at coming up with knives.
Well. Even in the unlikely event Alice decides to keep creepy duplicate scars by suppressing his regen, his present when they get home will get rid of them, Bella has that on good authority.
Alice, meanwhile, is experiencing the sudden and obvious understanding that of course the Joker gave them to himself. He laughs.
"Alice asked about the..." Bella traces the scar locations on her own cheeks. "The Joker has offered to show him. The scars won't keep even if Alice lets them form to begin with, but... yeah." Pause. "Alice, who I guess would probably know, thinks the Joker gave himself said scars."
Roberta frowns, more interested than disturbed. Although she is definitely also disturbed.
Time for a kiss?
He lets himself heal somewhere in the middle of it, because he likes the tension between his cheek trying to come back together and the Joker's tongue pushing on the edges. It doesn't even hurt that much, but it's hot in a way that plain old pain can't compete with.
"He's letting himself heal," Bella reports. "So that's good. And of course they haven't gotten anywhere near the edges of his actual pain tolerance, which I don't think nonmagical humans can even approach without dying..."
"Just tell me: consenual experimentation, or some kind of horrible... magic... thing?"
"You're gonna do me a favour," he murmurs.
It's not even exactly the right wording, and practically everything physical about the situation is wrong, but it still works just the way he's sure the Joker meant it to. All of a sudden he's seventeen again, in a dim New York alley, every detail of the scene crystalline in a way only eidetic memory can achieve.
[Are you okay?] Bella asks him, sitting bolt upright. [You can leave. You can leave without notice at any moment.]
Bella keeps reading.
"He blocked me," she mutters. "I asked him if he was okay because he was having a flashback and he blocked me, and now I can't talk to him unless I brute-force it..."
He is more pissed off than he normally ever gets. At the Joker, at the man he was just reminded of so viscerally, at Bella; also, in a weird complicated inexplicable way, at himself.
"People having flashbacks do strange things," says Roberta. "Although I still think you should get him out of there."
She still doesn't want to go up there in person. She wishes on a pentagon.
It stays on its chain.
Bella blinks, and swallows, and asks in a trembling voice, "Bar, was that you?"
Bella uses that stubbornly undisappeared hex to declaw a star, and she tries the star.
"Fuck," Bella says. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, Lazarus did not warn me about this -"
Alice does not even know she is trying anything. He gets the Joker pinned, rips the knife out of his hand, and slashes open the side of his neck almost exactly over the scar they used to share.