Nightingale (Batman fanfic) Updated 12/15 - Last Chapter

[The Wench]

Sorry it took a while...

Chapter 11

It’s tiring to wake at night for no other purpose than to stare at the ceiling. Expressionless, emotions impeded so they may exaggerate the void. I know how I must look when I’m sleepus-interruptus. Disinterested in reason, staring onward to nothing as though presented with a black hole and encouraged to summon the meaning of life from its presence. Blank-faced. Were I a Dick Tracy character, that would be me. Blank Face. And I often wonder, would I be a melancholic bore, or stupidly optimistic?

I have one piece left to cram into the puzzle that’s my dejected life. Time between point A and point B; between alive and dead, waking and sleep. Between voluntary lobotomy and ‘hello, Bruce Wayne’. It was unaccounted for in my memory bank. It was all I hadn’t pieced together.

It all made sense because the stupid matter of fact was I’d never actually erased what I’d intended, which was Tommy. Instead, I only served to reconstruct the truth. The man I’d been emotionally paralyzed by wasn’t deleted because I distinctly remember thinking I was running away from him, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, thus explaining my wandering aimlessly and subsequent bumping into Bruce. I was in some self induced shock, evidenced by my only ability being to conjure sign language a mile a minute, like a chatter-box, a garrulous, verbose mute. I couldn’t conceptualize where I was going or where I’d been, let alone who I was – or thought I was – running away from. It was blurry, like navigating convoluted sight without glasses. No matter how hard I squinted, it all came back a chockablock of moments, people, and things. It was only until later that I could actually coalesce a past that I was able to accept.

It went something like this: Me, a battered, victimized woman of an abusive relationship. Him, the dubious second half of said relationship. His personality hadn’t much changed in my mind’s eye. It was my perception that had. I’d become someone else, rendering me hors de combat when it came to my initial purpose, and now found I was incapacitated. Completely spineless. I’d created a nightmare.

I’d wake up at night drenched in sweat, running from Tommy in my sleep. So inept from fear I’d stay awake just to avoid my own false cognition. He terrified me. Ironic that someone who reminded me of this person, someone base petrifying in a way that far surpassed that of Tommy, snapped me out of it. Enough I knew something was off kilter, that I was perpetuating a lie around Dee, but still hadn’t all the angles figured out enough to counteract my reasoning. So, when I told her I’d met someone who reminded me of Tommy, she must’ve suspected something. She wasn’t blind. She played dumb well, and had been for far too long so I might cultivate the myth. What was really going inside her head? Was I just a constant reminder of failure? How would she explain such a thing otherwise? To attempt to make sense of my mental debacle, it would’ve tangled the web so tightly, made the memories so un-navigable I’d have been committed a vegetable, drooling out the side of my mouth without words to glorify my stupidity. That I was behind my own conspiracy? She aided me in homemade brain surgery? Fuck. She must’ve been so pissed at herself, her only hope was I never remembered again so as not to be implicated. I doubt she feared cops or Feds or the regular brand of law. More like LexCorp’s brand of justice, I think.

So where was she? It’d been too long between days, weeks, and still no word. The last time I saw her was at the infamous bar where I’d stomped off intending to perpetuate the lie that was clarifying every second. Every second I walked away from her and got closer to him. What appears as though weeks of worthwhile trickling insight is really seconds worth of information hauled at me, as though impaled with it. It was all there. It was just a mess. It was the organizing of events that needed patience; not their fact.

Still. She hadn’t called. After I ditched her at the bar, she never called to find out why. Maybe someone else would say ‘fuck me’ and let me go. God knows my disillusioned mind was more than a burden to her, but that wasn’t like her at all. She’d say her peace, regardless of my mental health; even if it meant a conniving voicemail on my cell, which she was apt to do on occasion. So why the cold shoulder suddenly?

I was tired. Not from work, but from sheer boredom. It’d been a week since my grounding and though I was dying to go out, I couldn’t risk the attention it would obtain, just from putting in an appearance. The chance of running into opposition – from either player on the battlefield – was just too great. I wanted badly to infiltrate the bats, to be on their team, to be accepted by the great and infamous clan. On the other hand, it was oppressive to be goody-two-shoes indefinitely. I was stuck in the middle. I wanted both – the good and the bad, the executer and the perpetrator – the bat and the clown.

So I remained idle. And it was slowly consuming me.

I’d started by calling Dee on the phone excessively. One call after another, leaving belligerent messages in the hopes my annoyance and irrationality would force her to call me back – if she was indeed avoiding me like I suspected. Of course, I didn’t adopt this tactic until I’d thoroughly called every hospital, morgue, and police precinct in the county to track down a body that fit her description. When that came up negative, I ventured politely to LexCorp’s offices where the early twenty-something secretary with bubblegum pink lipstick informed me Dee had quit weeks prior to my query. It was all she could tell me, although I spent an obscene amount of time attempting to convince her we were so close, we were like family, and how could she keep information from a family member? She could be dead, and did bubblegum mouth want to be responsible for that? No, she didn’t. But she feared LexCorp more than she feared lifelong guilt. So I got nothing out of her but a sugar coated smile and a peppermint.

I’d been lying on my couch for what felt like hours, arms flailed out as though brutally maimed by a hit-and-run, strewn out and vulnerable; peppermint clicking against my teeth as I sloshed it around my mouth. Eyes bounced back and forth from a crack chewed away with mold, bordering next to the archway between the living room and the kitchen, and a feeble houseplant now etiolated and withering. Neither much to focus on but both impossible to ignore.

“I should water you…” I hadn’t determined my resolution with the molding crack in the ceiling. One thing at a time. But I didn’t get around to picking up the watering can, or filling it with water, or even getting to the kitchen because a package from the mailman halted my plans.

Not really a package so much as it was a large manila envelope, chicken scratch address written in bold sharpie on the front of its pee-yellow surface, no return address, no stamp.

“Told me I had’ta make sure you got it.” He seemed distracted, out of sorts like he just wanted to get this over with and go on with his regular route unimpeded with the burden of this delivery. He shoved it in my hands at the door and took off as though a drunk pigeon caught in a cascading vortex of wind, out of balance, but determined to fight the struggle onward. Onward being the stairs he could hardly navigate without appearing frightened by my mere answering of the door.

“Um…” I lifted it, turned it over to the back, then to the front again where I studied the handwriting once more. No one I recognized. “Thanks.” And shut the heavy door behind the amusing scene that was his escape.

I anticipated it could be anything. A picture of Dee’s blue and lifeless body floating in the river a la Twin Peaks…or a bill for services rendered by LexCorp and a conniving little note from little miss jump ship. Hell, maybe it was a pink slip from the bat, which would’ve suited me fine. I would finally know my fate and apply for unemployment to boot. Not that he did that sort of thing – he wasn’t a businessman all the time. This wasn’t BatTech or anything, but for some reason I didn’t put it past him. But I doubted Bruce was the type to scare a mailman into delivering something as banal as a pink slip. He’d have brought it himself. He was that kinda’ guy. So whatever this was, it wasn’t good only due to the sheer fact its compiler must’ve been someone…

Fuck. I ripped the top of the envelope open and tipped the contents over. No sense in treating it like fragile goods. Whatever it was, it had to come out. Like a birth. Just grin and bear it. Grin being the optimum word here.

Three pieces to this puzzle fell out onto the floor. One: a copy of a social security card. Not mine. Well, not Emma’s. Elvira’s. The one I thought we’d destroyed before implementing project fuck me up. This piece alone infuriated me. This was how it was going down? She was gonna’ blackmail me?

Two: a photograph. Black and white. A girl, asleep on a gurney hooked up to oxygen and an IV. Out cold. It took me a few turns to realize it was me, and that I didn’t recognize myself.

Three: A plain piece of paper with a few lines in the same chicken scratch writing, like ink bleeding across the paper, like tears seeping down as though the plain white sheet was crying words across its face.

What did I dream?
I do not know;
The fragments fly like chaff.
Yet strange my mind
Was tickled so,
I cannot help but laugh.

Fucking nursery rhyme. I couldn’t do it fast enough; crumple this fucking piece of shit paper into a jagged ball like lumpy hamburger meat and chuck it across my living room as hard as I could. Fuck you Mother Goose. Fuck you and your stupid…white…face.

[The Wench]

It's naughty, so not recommended for work or anything...not that anyone is reading it, but it serves my purposes well and good...

Chapter 12

The rain is pouring down as though the entire city is crying, seeping over the dirty oil-slicked streets and washing away the grime and death with fresh tears. A panacea to make it all okay, as if it would make us all forget. But I hardly can and suddenly wish I could. But today is my day to end all days. My postlude, my epoch, and there’s no other day that will be more certain about the truth inside my head.

When everyone huddles inside, wrapped in thick blankets stitched together by the gnarled hands of malnourished children working 12-hour days halfway across the globe, I’m stripped of it all. All of the weight holding me down like an anchor to the sea floor, and I suit up in the dark. The curtains gulp and swallow air like a madman’s throat, like a dipping Adam’s apple growing bulbous at its top before rolling downward as the wind blows through the crack in my bedroom window. I can smell the air outside. Thick with dirt and bale. It’s a good night. It’s a bad night. It’s the night of a thousand humid hours lying in my bed unclothed, wet fingers between my legs and unsure if it’s the sweat or the stickiness that makes me crazy with hunger; with want. No matter. The rain will purify me and it won’t unsettle me anymore because when I return, what’s inside my head will still be intact.

I slide my bare legs through the suit, pulling it taught against skin damp with perspiration and nothing else. Just me and leather. On my legs, on my ass, my bare breasts. On my tingling fingers that slide up my thighs and over my midsection, across my waist and between my legs; just to get me started. Because I don’t intend to do anything remotely nice tonight. Deeds or otherwise.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I woke this morning with an ache I couldn’t control. Primal and jolting. Like something sexual, but worse. A voice that heaved within my body, within my subconscious, telling me what to do, what to think, what would make it stop. A voice similar to his that oozed through me like the reeking stench of a bad egg, and the harder and faster I swung through the high-rise catacombs, the denser the permeation became.

It started like fingers strangling me softly, holding my throat so deglutition became difficult, then hands kneading my shoulders with considerable strength. Then it exploded, expanded across my body in all directions as though a virus in every vein, every vessel, expelling out my pores like sweat. I wanted everything terrible. I longed for a fight with innocent bystanders. I wanted to witness a malicious hit and run. I wanted to make crisscross gouges with sharp objects over someone’s – anyone’s – flesh, then lick the blade clean with my tongue. And a good fuck while I was doing it wouldn’t hurt.

I had to start simple, with someone nobody would miss. Not enough to go digging, and just enough to tame the yearning. So I went someplace where the cream of the congealed crop went, where rapists flaunted their horrors and mingled with the foulest of the murders. Where lackeys and henchmen unwound, and prospects and wannabes attempted to get a taste.

I kept on the suit as I walked through the black double doors hidden behind a dead-end alley between a condemned crack den and a half-burnt greasy spoon. I didn’t know why I knew this place or how to find it. A sixth sense led me to it, and it felt familiar the entire time as though I could’ve found it with my eyes shut. Unmarked doors without a keyhole or even a knob. I knocked a strange arrangement of taps that I didn’t realize I knew, but that gained me entrance immediately, and walked down two kohl black flights of stairs to the room below and stifling with muggy heat. Sultry heat. The breath of a hundred condensed mouths heaving and pumping through the tiny room, faraway beats drumming through my ears that I didn’t attempt to focus on. I had better things to do.

“Hey, aren’t you—“

A boy no older than 19 with hair like thick tar on fresh cement and baby-like skin got in my way. I summed him up in a second. No class. No fancy airs, or eyes that said his ‘slaughtered’ list was considerably more impressive and he knew it. I grabbed his shirt by the collar and drug him down the nearest hallway leading to nothing but more darkness. He would do.

I awed myself with every passing moment because not only did I know how to find this place, but I knew the quickest way out. And it led me and my newest companion to another side alley contiguous to the first. Quiet. Empty. Narrowly constructed between two apartment buildings. It would also do.

I slammed his back against the hazy red bricks, still clutching his throat. His eyes were a soft baby blue and I had to look up to stare them down. The sweet taint of liquor was on his breath. I hoped he was drunk so he wouldn’t realize what was gonna’ happen to him.

“I do know you. I heard about you. You run with the Joker.”

“I run with Batman. Who the fuck told you I run with Joker?” I squeezed his neck. Poor sweet boy. If I were an 18-year-old college girl with a dumb streak, I might find this guy remotely attractive.

“Fuck, I dunno. A coupla’ people said somethin’.” His eyes are adjusting to the outside light and as I hold him tighter, tease his throat with a depressed thumb, I can see he’s a little scared. I feel elated. I want more.

“What people?”

“I dunno.” He’s got his arms up against the wall like I’m a cop about to frisk him, or cuff him, or take his dumb ass downtown in a squad car. No luck, Junior.

“Think. Hard.”

He swallows and I feel it against my fingers pushing on his trachea. The sharp end of the metal blade against his belly is probably more intimidating. He feels it.

“Uh…coupla’ big guys…fuck, they looked like dead mimes or some shit. Started askin’ me some weird shit, like if I’d seen some blonde chick in a red and black bat getup. I said I didn’t know ya’.” He swallows hard again and it sticks so he has to repeat it. “Said yer name was Nightingale. They started to walk off. I asked if you was a bat; if I should look out for ya’. They said you ran with the Joker.” He gags swallowing this time. “Then I didn’t see ‘em again. I swear.”

Clever pompous cocksucker. Maybe it’s just this one guy. Still inchoate, I can kill this in its early stages. Before this game of telephone gets to the wrong people.

“You tell anyone else?”

“The fuck would I do that for?” Perturbed I even asked, so I stick the point into the thick of his flesh. “Fuck, no I fucking swear to Christ I didn’t tell anyone. I swear on my dead mom’s fucking grave?!” He’s crouched on his knees, looking up at me in the hopes I’ll grant a little mercy, but I have none.

I hike my knee into his chin, subsequently slamming his head into the brick wall behind him, creating a nice crumble from the impact of skull on mortar. It renders him unconscious instantly, which is probably best. This isn’t going to be something he’d rather be awake for.

I don’t know how many times I clocked him in the chin, the cheek, the jaw before I finally felt like I was through, but he was unrecognizable. The tungsten molded inside my gloves, covering my knuckles, blistered my skin from undeniable heat. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt an exhilaration as free as the one I’d felt while obliterating this kid’s face. But it wasn’t enough. I had to make sure this kid would never talk again, never admit what he knew and thought the truth. So I grabbed both his arms as he lay slumped on the concrete, clutching my fingers around each wrist before pressing my boot against his ribcage, and pulled as hard as I could.

The cracking was beautiful as each rib broke, one after the other in succession under the pressure of my foot. Each break shook my leg with an aftershock till I reached his breastplate where I stopped, let his arms fall and watched him slump like a dummy to the ground. Just before slitting his throat for good measure. I had to be sure.

I wasn’t positive where I could find him, but I knew he couldn’t be far. He had an eye on this town that I was relatively certain of. If I didn’t find him, he was sure to find me. All I had to do was stay awake, stay alert, and he’d materialize.

I wandered aimlessly for the better part of an hour, not even bothering with rooftop seclusion. I kept it simple, stuck to the alleys, but stayed out of sight as much as I could. Joker wasn’t the only one with eyes in this town. They all had them, and in this secluded part of the city, only the assholes were looking.

It was two a.m. when I finally looked at my watch, leaning against a freight container down by the harbor. I started thinking I was making this harder than I thought. Maybe I was too secluded, jammed between multiple containers piled and lined like an impossible maze. Maybe it was time to throw in the towel and go home, and maybe tomorrow I’d get another manila envelope in the mail with his scraggily writing all over it that had some other mystery I was supposed to resolve; something else that made me want to hunt him down like –

“Well aren’t we in a tizzy tonight.” He eased out of the shadows like a birth, a product of the dark formed between the crates. I didn’t hesitate or wait for him to approach me. I made my way to him, and backhanded him with the strength of my entire body behind it. I was enraged, and nearly knocked him over with it all encapsulated in my one palm.

I envisioned a fight, a brawl that paled in comparison to the one on the roof so many months back. Finally I could release some of this aggression on the correct target and not on potentially innocent receivers. I could finally fuck him the way he should be fucked, the way he deserved to be fucked…with my fist. I only hoped this orgasm would be half as good.

“You’re right darling…I should’ve called first.” He’s wiping the blood from his lip, dripping down his chin, then licking it with his tongue as he rights himself. “I had hoped for a kiss…”

“Fuck you. You get nothing from me you piece of shit.” I wanted so badly to do something significant, like spit on him, but stopped and I held my ground. Studied him as he took steps towards me in full swagger, with moxie, and a smirking lip streaked with his own blood.

“Baby…turn that frown…” I can’t stop him. Pressed against me, pushing me into the wall of containers now gelid against my ass. He seethes with heat from his thighs, from between his legs. “…Upside down.” Already I feel his breath against the nape of my neck, heavy as if having run a mile.

“I don’t want you touching me, you make me sick.” I turn my head and make it easier for him to close the space between us, between his mouth and my skin, near my throat where my heart is pounding out of control.

“You’re lying….” Eyes studying me from the corner of my own where I’m straining to look because I can’t close them. When I do, I’m just alone in this nightmare I’m gorging on; on his smile sloping up and creasing his perfect skin. “Right to my face…how romantic…”

I can’t speak. My voice is mute, finally. I have to think about what I want to say to him, what’ll keep up the perverse flirtation between us.

“Isn’t that more your specialty? Lying…” Slowly, methodically I balance and float my fingers over his back, his spine, deciding whether I want to touch, but I can’t focus while his tongue savors the sweat dripping down my chin.
I missed it.

“Au contraire. I am the purveyor of the truth in everything. You of all people…should know that by now. You demonstrated it so perfectly…I hardly had to lift a finger.” One kiss. It’s all I get. “I can’t wait ‘till you really get started…”

“It was horrible…and wrong…” It hasn’t settled in what I’ve accomplished yet. The words are all reflexive. “…and don’t expect it to play into your little plans. It won’t happen again.”

“Such a little liar…” His lips drag across my cheek, across my lower jaw towards my lips, barely open to excuse my shallow pant. “But it gets my dick hard…so I forgive you.”

He tries kissing me, and I turn away. I feel sick, just for a second.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t…enjoy it.” Tongue running over the edge of my ear. “That it didn’t excite you...” His palm is open against the void between my legs before sliding up so fast I couldn’t account for the sudden presence of his finger hooked around the zipper at my neck. “…provoked a craving you couldn’t control.” His teeth clamp on his left glove, pulling creamy white ends so each finger is unimpeded, free from the prison of soft leather and intricate stitching. “I know all about it. Its consumption…devouring you…” I feel the zipper separating the two halves, the two pieces that make me one whole. My only protection. “…getting you wet…” And his hand, heated to the core like pokers from an inferno, the fingers of Hades himself, sink between my thighs like dipping in melted chocolate.

But that’s as sweet as it gets.

There’s nothing delicate about it. This is no cutesy midnight dry-hump from your high-school sweetheart in the back of his car after the penultimate Friday night game. He’s brutal and gouging, like the quickie, behind-the-rafters finger-fuck from the expellee who’s been to juvy; the one you’re cheating on your sweetheart with cause he likes it rough. And so do you. So do I, and I spread my legs a little bit more.

The build-up isn’t slow like a romantic movie. It’s fast like the momentum of an out of control freight train running up my legs, curling my toes, mangling my back and twisting my spine in opposing directions. And the more I fight in his arms, and grapple to stave back the inevitable, the tighter his hold becomes. My moaning is lost inside his mouth, gone to some deep cavernous pit where he probably saves it, along with screams of pain and death. They all go to the same place. All made of his hands. All of it.

The static in my head is finally quiet. Fuck, I needed this.

But it’s still not enough. Gasping for air like I’m drowning, I still try to kiss him. This time he rejects me.

“Still hungry?” He smiles as though proud. I wish I could wipe it off like makeup. The fucking red smirk on his white face is as invasive as his fingers’ penetration, but the emptiness is palpable as he takes them back, slips them in his mouth and sucks every bit of me dripping from them. “Me too.”

I wake before dawn. Still dark outside with just a hint of yellow signaling the impending day. An antecedent to the turmoil that’s coming, that I have to live with when I’m fully conscious enough to deal with the facts. Right now I’m half asleep and blinking stubbornly, wishing I could fall back asleep. But this isn’t the place to be when I have to make the right decision. I have to get out of here.

I slowly crawl out of bed, legs sore and strained, but not so bad I can’t make it home before daybreak. Before the sunrise makes me deal with it. I hope to be asleep by then where I can hide for as long as possible in the shadows I create, and where I hope to not dream the reality. Just for a little while.

I think he’s asleep beside me, but that’s a stupid assumption. To imagine he ever gets a decent night’s sleep…though I may be wishful thinking. As though he has a conscience to bang away at, to keep him awake with nagging insight. He probably sleeps like a baby.

I study the bedroom as I dress silently. The entire bedroom with vaulted ceilings and one wall entirely of multiple awning windows, thick curtains pressed to either side and fully open. Doesn’t matter. There’s nothing in this neighborhood save for decaying streets and broken down mansions. Might as well be in the middle of the ocean. A cemetery of dirt and rotting memories. An exclave.

Nothing fancy in here. An empty bookcase built into the off-white brick, shut doors to keep the secrets safe, a fireplace against the opposite wall; black and ash-stained from hours before. It burned a glorious red and orange, prancing shadows across the walls in spurts, and little demon angels cavorted around us in celebratory excitement. I imagine if they had ears to hear me with, I would’ve made them all worse sinners for simply listening. Or maybe I’m wrong, and they danced for me, for my begging that was music to their ears…and his.

I looked over at him one last time, lying peacefully on his chest, arms above his head and hooked around the pillow under his cheek. The light began to show the stale green locks, shorn perfectly if you didn’t count the patch of snapped ends by the nape of his neck, torn before their time by my own fingers. Though that wasn’t the sick part, my tearing at his hair as though overcome by tarantism and suffering electro-shock. It was that I kept several green slivers like a voodoo sorceress because there was something comforting in knowing I had a piece of him. Reminding me there were nights when I completely owned him. He was mine.

I found myself tempted. Watching the rise and fall of his tummy, lifting the multitude of muscle, clumped and molded over his shoulders and back with a precise hand as though dough for sugar cookies. Raw and sweet, and good enough to bite into.

Get out of here. Even his home had me enchanted. I shouldn’t even be in here. This was traitorous to say the least. My only propensity was to run. By the time I’d reached the door, it was like someone was pushing me out it with hefty arms against my shoulders.

And I ran the entire way home with the sound of his laughter trailing behind me.

[Havok]

I'm so glad I we are getting married.
So here is some of my fanboy fan art.

Nightingale.
Black leather. Red piping. Purple symbol. Blond hair. Nightingale-a-rangs. and a collapsible staff that she uses more like a sword/bat. "NO CAPES!!"

[Havok]

Mr. J. He isn't very nice.

[Havok]

This one may be a little spoilerish.

[The Wench]

R.A.D. That spells rad.

Man, whatta' tramp that girl is.

[Mr. Coffee]

If this story ends up having Batman and Joker high fiving each other over her back while they tag team her I'm gonna laugh my ass off.

Hav, go draw it. Now.

[The Wench]

If this story ends up having Batman and Joker high fiving each other over her back while they tag team her I'm gonna laugh my ass off.

Hav, go draw it. Now.

I could write you a special alternate ending...although, it might be hard to keep a straight face...

[The Wench]

Chapter 13

“Welcome back.” I hear Dick’s voice from behind, coming steadily down the stairs from the ground floor of Wayne Manor. I fold the previously crumpled piece of paper I have in my hands – the one I’ve been studying, repeating for hours in my head – and hide it in my sweater.

“Hey…” Not really all that interested in conversation with Mr. Grayson, but I have to give him precedence.

I cannot help but laugh. You stupid asshole. I can’t be sure if I’m directing that at him or me. More like me since I’m the one who validates his sick little games he plays with me, makes them all okay because I don’t go out and shove his dumb little rhymes down his dumb white throat with my dumb hands. I don’t even give him a stern little talking to, or even play hard to get. What does someone like me do? I go out there…and I let him fuck me. This is not working to my advantage.

What the hell got into me? I still can’t consider my choices with cogency. They were completely unjustified, and completely illogical. Just like him. Just like him, just like him, just like him…

Fuck.

“Fuck!” A rocket just went shooting through my throat. And I unintentionally aimed it at Dick’s face. “Oh, sorry.”

“Not so great for you?” Poor guy. He seemed so excited just seconds before I cussed him out like a jerk. Not even cussing him out, but some other jerk. A real jerk – me.

“I’m just…I’m cool. Had to let it out, ya know?” I cross my arms as I slump in the black leather chair, feet relaxing on the other one. If Bruce saw, he’d probably smack me, but Dick doesn’t quite care. He used to do it himself.

“Last time you needed to just ‘let it out’…you got grounded.” He pulls up one of the lightweight four legged chairs casually strewn about the place. It’s our fault really. We’re slobs in his organized little haven. Dick sits in the chair backwards, resting his forearms on the chair’s back, his little knobby chin then resting atop that whole mess of veins and limbs. “Wanna talk about it?”

Not really. On second thought…maybe. Can I?

“Dick…” I lean forward, rest my elbows on my knees, get down to business. “If you were…seeing someone—“

“Like a girlfriend?” He looks very hopeful with eyebrows raised and a cheesy grin half open, like some kind of salesman that’s just given me his outstanding pitch and expects me to bite.

“Um…sorta, not really.” It may be true, it may not, but I refuse to equate my unnamed example with a love interest. “Not…serious…” He shrugs. S’pose he’ll settle for what I give him. “Say this person was just sorta playing games with you…and instead of confronting them about it, you just…” Fucked their brains out all night. “…kept it quiet. Would you say you were being…stupid?”

“Depends, I guess. I mean, do these two hypothetical people like each other?”

“It’s entirely plausible.” I cringe as I fall back against the wide leather seat, cradling me like an upright basinet. I say it because I feel its truth more and more every day, though try as I might, I can’t make it go away. “But they sort of show it in funny ways.”

“Sounds like two people who are afraid to confront the truth of how they feel about each other to me.” He’s got that hopeful look on his face again.
I came to the wrong person. I forgot Dick wasn’t just Mr. Grayson. He’s also Mr. Hopeless Romantic.

“Yea…but I – I mean, this girl, she’s stupid right? For still…wanting a guy who’s playing games with her? She should just get away right?” I’m searching his face, every little crevice and crease for a sign in the affirmative.

“Not necessarily. I mean, I’m a guy. Guys are afraid to show their real feelings. I know I am sometimes. Maybe this….guy…is just afraid to tell the girl how he feels cause he’s just afraid of being rejected.” He takes my hand softly, clasping it like two slices of bread with my hand in the middle like lunchmeat. Cozy and warm between his palms. Not what I was hoping for. “I’ll bet this guy…” Smirking slyly. “…likes her a lot.”

Shit. My silent and real person turned hypothetical has now just been actualized onto Dick. Really, he thinks I’m talking about him. I was afraid of this. If only he knew how wrong he was. So I put my hand on top of his sandwich, press a little lovingly and give him a grin.

“What if he’s just really bad…for her.” God, if I were him, I’d have told me to fucking drop the guy and move on. The fact I’m even contemplating either angle is utterly…retarded. I am an idiot, and I’d be better suited to tell me this. But I can’t. I’m incapable of erasing what I know, what he knows, what’s taken place between the two of us over the last few months. Fuck. Months have had a chance to pass. This is ridiculous.

“Every villain has redeeming qualities.”

Oh, fuck you, Dick Grayson. Fuck you right in the face. Fine. If I birth a million of this white cocksucker’s babies, I’m blaming you. And just to prove it, I’ll name each one some variation of Richard, just to solidify my curse on your head. They’ll comprise a football team of heathens, and will sell drugs to your honor roll children on the playground.

“Thanks Dick. You’ve been helpful.” I thought I was trying to make him see I might be crying for a little help. Instead he’s given me the okay. What a world.

“So? What’s this girl gonna’ do?” He’s really trying to pull it out of me now. Probably thinks I’m just dying to let the cat out of the bag, inform him of my undying love for him, and that I’d like him to take me upstairs now and show me what he’s got. I need to be fulfilled.

“I…don’t know. It’s not that easy.” I hear the sound of more footsteps approaching, coming closer every second. Bruce. Thank god. Another opinion. Maybe Alfred will show and we can play best two out of three. “Let’s ask Bruce.”

Papers in his hands, fumbling through some files as he steps, but nothing about these papers deters his steady descent. Dressed in a full tuxedo, I look at my watch. Nine p.m. Must be going out. I wonder who the lucky lady is.

“Hey, Bruce. If you were…chasing someone…”

“What?” He looks up erratically, distracted and appears ill-prepared for whatever he thinks I’m gonna’ ask.

“I said if you were chasing someone…like a girl…”

“I chase criminals and maniacs, Emma. Not women.” Back to fumbling through loose papers, stepping towards the computer in his shiny black shoes, black silky lines running the length of his leg on each side. A pressed white shirt and a funny black bowtie. They all look a little odd on him after having seen him work.

“But you’re out with a different woman like every night.” I spin around in the chair, facing him as he taps a few keystrokes on the computer, eyes studying the screen avidly before tossing the papers on the table. Just before putting his hands on his hips and looking down like Zeus about to smite me.

“Your point?”

Fuck it all.

He looks at his watch, spins around towards the stairway where he first appeared.

“I’ll be at the Opera. Dick, don’t you have a city of your own to attend to?” He turns around with just his right foot on the first step, insinuating we shouldn’t try his patience. Work has to get done around here, and I’ve got a lot to do. I shouldn’t even be stewing over this note in my pocket. But once they both leave, it’s exactly what I’m gonna’ do; while I’m listening to the scanners and updating some files. Exactly the pile of paperwork B left on the table for me. Manual labor. It’s a kind of punishment in disguise. Dick sort of shrugs, gives me a half-assed little hug before exiting a little forlorn, following in Bruce’s footsteps. I’m somewhat glad of his ejection, to be honest. Bruce smirks at me. “Don’t hesitate to contact me if there’s trouble.”

“Yea thanks. Great talkin’ with ya’ B.” Vanished. All by myself.

Hello note. Hello picture of me. In it, I’m out. Totally asleep in this hospital-type bed with all sorts of doctor gizmos around me. My heartbeat is showing its strength on the monitor just as this image is captured for eternity. My mind has deduced he either took it, or knows who took it. How else would he have it to give me? Ergo, he must know Dee. Or knew her. Knows of her. Fuck. Why don’t I ask these things? Why am I so blind to the obvious that I let him molest me instead of determining what’s really important. Namely, where my missing friend is. He knows. I know he knows.

More to it than just that. He knows everything about me, about her, about the experiment, and about the gap between spaces that I’m struggling with. Is he planning on using this? I don’t know. Probably just laughing at me while preparing my decimation. I think I’ve let everyone puppeteer me for as long as I’d like. Tommy, Dee, Joker. Even B is using me for his own gains. Am I not a person anymore? I’m a hollowed out shell for everyone to put their hand up my ass and wiggle around for their amusing little story hours. I’m not even a human being. I’m a fucking tool. Vulnerabilities are getting the better of me and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being scared, and of running. Of being afraid. I thought I’d been afraid all my life. Turns out, before I got myself into this mess – from the very fucking start – I was completely in control of myself. I knew what I was doing. I was skilled. I’d honed my craft, and I was in charge. Then I went and botched it by thinking I could control what I didn’t understand. Namely my brain. I’m not a doctor. I was stupid for thinking I could erase one man; pretend he didn’t exist so I could be in control again. I can’t go running from another one, no matter who he is. No matter what everyone thinks of him.

But this is where everything gets messy. Everyone’s in their spot, in their little specified box with title and everything. Black or white, good or bad. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle, in a gray space, and I keep changing my mind about the strength of my gradient. One minute I think I’m straying towards off white, the next I think I’m more like a charcoal. I can’t decide, and I can’t have both. They’d never allow it. Well, maybe I’m wrong. Joker probably couldn’t care less if I play both teams. Just as long as I don’t go stoolie on him. Turn in all his friends, all the jerks that get in his way, and he’d look the other way. But B is another story. I can’t hop the fence with him. I pick one or the other. There’s no having my cake and eating it too.

So now’s that time. When I’m gonna’ do what I should’ve done in the first place. Sit in this chair, right now, and figure out what I want. What I want, not what that fucker in a Versace suit wants, or what a guy dressed like a leather bat wants, or that jerk cop who wrote me a parking ticket fucking wants. What I want. And I’m gonna’ assert myself, like I do with everything else in my life. I’m gonna’ get control of this again. And if I decide I want it, then I want it. And if I don’t…so be it.

Now. What do I want?

[The Wench]

Chapter 14

“What is this?” The overhead lights flicker, blinking a few times before coming to life and glowing a warm, electrified hue around the room. Clean, glistening metal hangs from the walls. Knives. Scalpels. Wrenches. Tools of a madman. Each individual accoutrement occupies its own little private space against blinding white.

“Occasionally…it’s where I like to work.” I don’t touch anything right away, but barely flick a hand over a little glistening silver saw, hanging lifelessly against a few hooks on pegboard. My peach hand reflects back like a clear pool of water; clean and fresh. But I’m polite. At least, now I’m polite with him.

I check his facial features, make sure it’s okay before I touch. I know how these guys are about a stranger fumbling around. Not that I’m so much a stranger to him anymore.

“Can I?” My voice is quiet and meek down here, like a little mouse’s squeak in a three-story mansion. He nods encouragingly in the doorway. Arms crossed, bulging and swollen alabaster biceps just slightly dewy from sweat. No shirt. Just slacks. His build is smaller than Bruce, of course, but he’s not so weak after all. He tosses me around in bed like a Barbie doll, like a plastic piece of nothing. I smile about it as I twirl the saw in my fingers.

I’m in his house, in the basement, an underground room completely separate from the house itself by a long hallway that appears as if dug laboriously for the simple purpose of making it a complicated find. Winding and sinuous, often veering in several directions so lost miscreants attempting to find it could potentially get sent a number of places. Maybe out back, maybe in a ten-foot-deep ditch, or maybe the bay. It’s all a game of chance. However, it also serves a different purpose; namely, making it hard for a captive to escape. Someone scared…panicked…could easily get lost down here. Not good. But, whoever dug it, and however long it took them, they must’ve been quite proud by the time they were through.

I haven’t turned my back yet. Not on either. Not the bats, not this clown. Maybe in the end I won’t pick a side. I’ll leave both and go my own way. Finish what I started. Leave both these lives behind. But not yet. I have to be sure because once I walk away – from either of them – there’s no coming back. That I’m positive of.

The saw shines like sterling silverware, fresh from the manufacturer. The overhead lights reflect back luminously, almost opalescent, and bounce over my face like flashlights in the darkness.

“When do you…bring them here?” My eyes gloss over the walls reaching high up to the sky, fully decorated with shiny and sharp objects. Each one calling my name, begging I release them of their bonds and secure my own amusement. But I satiate myself with just the saw, now cradled on the board once again.

“Just for…special occasions.” I hear him behind me, still in the doorway as he most likely watches me, and beams in his ability to impress. A quiet snicker, the reverb of it, makes me shiver. “Ladies only.”

Things have drastically changed between us. I no longer hide from him or pretend I’m ashamed of his finding me. Right now, I tell myself as long as I’m not aiding or harboring him, I’m not contributing. What harm am I doing by sharing his bed on occasion? I’m fairly certain I’m deluding myself, but this isn’t the time to get logical.

“What do you do to them?” Standing barefoot in the middle of the room, this terrifying room where many unnamed tortures have transpired. So bleak inside, it’s as if the voices of each and every dead soul were able to speak. “What would you do to me?”

“That all depends.” He steps into the room, bare feet on cold linoleum, and I know it stings in its piercing iciness. “On how much I like you.” Hands in his pockets as if carefree, unburdened by the world, he comes just within reach of my fingers. Just able to run my middle fingernail down the center of his chest, from his jugular to his waist.

I feel for the silver table behind me. The reflective operating slab is against my hands and I pull myself up with grace and agility, as if a professional victim.

“You adore me.” I spread my legs, revealing my naked bottom half, peeking from under the shirt I threw on after screwing his brains out on the bed. But it didn’t start there. We’d tainted every inch of the floor between the front door and the bedroom, completely impatient.

He smiles wide and I feel butterflies in my stomach. Undulating, churning in my gut. No matter how many times I have him, I still want him insatiably.

“How perfectly fitting.” Fingers tighten against my thighs. Clamping pressure as he leans inward, kisses my lips gently, then reaches for the buttons on my shirt. His shirt that emanates his faint odor. A smell so distinct, I can recall it for weeks, and still lingers on my skin as he unlatches each individual loophole, slides the silk from my arms, and drops it to the floor. “You won’t need that.”

Another kiss before turning around, surveying this vast conglomerate of materials. Tools. Toys. Which one will it be? What am I worthy to receive? I watch his fingers dance over each one, deciding which will be mine.

“Do you undress them all?” I look away towards my feet, hanging over the side and I enjoy a split second of remembrance, dangling feet over the Golden Gate during the sunrise on a cool winter morning. I was lucky enough to see the blazing orange rise to greet me on those mornings Tommy and I used to get up early, park the car, and stand over the precipice. I miss it sometimes.

“Jealous?” His bone white hands delicately handle a scalpel as if an extension of himself, his own body. I see his cherry red lips in a pleasing grin at this inquest, peering over his shoulder before turning to face me again. I don’t want to answer. How crazed to assume I would be jealous of his victims. Even crazier to realize it may be true. But he chuckles at my sudden and sunken expression. “Baaaaby…” His lips on mine, his free hand warm against my cheek. “They pale in comparison.”

I’m turned, spun slightly on my bare ass and coaxed onto my back. Shivering against the table. Frozen like a block of ice except for his hands, his gentle and guiding hands slinking over me, soothing me with feverish patience.

“Tell me about one.” I shut my eyes and fade into the black, the silence that surrounds me, save for his deep and lovely voice.

“A beautiful girl.” I can feel the tingle of the blade from the scalpel running up my calf. Not enough pressure to do much damage, but I feel the blood seeping, rolling down my leg, followed by the cool sting of the laceration. “Maybe your age. Eyes as green as jades…and teeth like pearls…perfectly constructed, as if an angel from Heaven.” I don’t open my eyes as the scalpel takes on a life of its own; slits my legs with cunning precision and veritable care. Hardly noticeable...if I didn’t already know the feeling. Only after do the veins boil and pump, targeting every little slice, and in this dark void of shut eyes, every jolt is another deserved punishment. “Beautiful.” I don’t make him stop. I don’t attempt to betray my desire by tending to superficial wounds he’s purposefully inflicting. My trust in his skill is unwavering. They will heal.

“What did you do…tell me?” It’s as if begging coming from my voice. An addict needing a hit. That surge of euphoria rushing through my veins like an orgasm as he cuts. I feel every opening weep with desire, surging as though a floodgate released between my legs. Each limb weakens within consummation.

“I took her, piece by piece…and made each one…mine.” The faint smell of alcohol reaches my nostrils. Astringent. “Every chocolate hair on her head.” Dabbing of wet, stinging cloth against my legs, matching the cutout patterns forged. “Every ear, every jeweled eye.” A sharp needle imbeds itself in my leg, the pull of thread following behind. The afterthought. Twitching, catching my flesh as it slides through fresh holes. “Every finger…every toe…all mine.” The needle continues, binding carefully as a doctor might. “Every pearly white tooth was removed from her perfect little mouth.” He’s stitching me up. Making my torture a full circle for him as both the inflictor and healer of my pains. How many are there? It feels infinite. “Until there was nothing left to take…” Kisses on my legs are surprisingly cool. “Not even a breath.”

Both his hands are free and each roughly grasps a leg, pulling me by my ankles to the edge of the table. My bare bottom pressed against the brim. Legs hanging over the end, swinging over oblivion. Over the bridge.

“Another nameless wretch.”

“Not so my darling…my love.” His lips make their destination every mark he’s made upon my thighs. Babying me. Kissing every nick and scratch with ample suckling. “They all have names.” Spreads my thighs, legs carefully opened so he might bow over me and kiss my stomach. “I remember every one.”

“What was hers?” A mistake. I shouldn’t ask. It’s easier and simpler without names. Without giving the face a title. A personality that comes with every single name a person is born with.

“Delilah.” He whispers it low and in that instant, he must feel some delirious satisfaction. Probably knew far before this moment ever passed he would get this chance to reveal it to me, even make it fodder for enticement. Disgusting that I played right into it, asked for it, begged for his narrative. Let him tell me how he obliterated my friend with slow, calculating pain and no doubt insurmountable enjoyment at the punch line’s final divulgence.

How could I not have known?

“You sunnovabitch.” The tears run down my cheeks. Hot, steaming droplets leaving tracks down my face. “How could you.” I could barely get it out. But he’s not the asshole. I am for actually thinking for once second I could trust him.

Leaning over me, pressed against me with my legs spread eagle; a whore for his amusement, and suddenly I feel it. I feel every inch the whore that I am for him. Stupid and careless. Yet we’re so incongruent. Maybe it’s what kept me from closing my legs on his waist, crushing him until his stomach burst from the pressure.

“Sweet…sentimental little Emma…is this how you’ll be…every time I do you a favor?” His palms sweetly brush over my forehead, my hair, petting me and kissing me like a child to cosset.

I sniff, trying to remain somewhat calm, not go overboard. There’s a logical explanation for this.

What the hell am I saying.

“You’re…you’re fucking ridiculous. Did me a favor? You didn’t do me any favors you fuck.” Just fucking do it. Stab this fucker in the forehead with something. Anything. There’s a million instruments of torture in here. Why can’t I just pick up one?

“Of course I did…” I don’t respond, resist the temptation of his lips against mine. “You asked me to.”

[The Wench]

Chapter 15

I don’t know how many times I’d clocked him. Over and over I hit his jaw, his cheek, his nose; everywhere. Blood poured from slices I created with my throbbing knuckles, going numb from the abuse, and smeared across his slender white face like melting grease paint. But I just kept hitting him, again and again, until I thought I’d broken my wrist. Until I thought I couldn’t keep the fist any longer, I was so weak, but he never quit laughing. So I shook my hand, opened and closed my fingers, observing as though a robot, artificial intelligence just discovering the extent of my expert build, marveling at the wonder that was my hand, and I hit him some more.

He lay on the dust splattered wood floor, the quiet ‘ha-ha’s’ coming from his mouth like guttural spasms of a seizure, and I grabbed the closest thing I could find – his stupid silk tie. The violet one I’d grown to love, and hated to defile it, but made it a weapon of torture I did, and transformed the dapper accessory into a shiny silk noose just before dragging him outside with it clutched in my broken, bloody, mangled hands.

He was surprisingly light, though it didn’t help he was entirely dead weight. Hardly unconscious, but he didn’t fight me. Just laughed quietly, his eye swelling up to resemble a blue and purple beet as the red dripped out the slits of his mouth. But he smiled anyway as I drug him into the street, the gravel coming with us all the while, making one hell of a noise at three in the morning, but I didn’t give a shit. He deserved far worse than what I’d just given him. So I thought I’d gift him more. Really reward him for what he’d done because he deserved it. He deserved a little more torture than I could give. Not because I couldn’t do it. No, I was thoroughly capable of annihilating him like an H-Bomb to Nagasaki. I just couldn’t. It was sad to admit, and looking down at him on the cement, smiling up at me with one good eye scrunched up from his full grin, I wanted so badly to put my feelings aside, but I had to walk away. I couldn’t do any more. But I knew who could.

The end of the island is freezing and I can hear the waves crashing against the pier a block away. You asked me to do this, and in such a sweet and adorable little voice, darling. As though overflowing with love…and grace. I can hear the sound of my boots crunching rocks under the soles, gravel and sand and chunks of cement all underfoot as I take long strides down the middle of the street. It’s freezing.

“Got one for ya.” I’d just clicked the com-link on as I eagerly traced the double yellow line with my toes. Following it out of this hellhole like a yellow brick road.

“Go ahead.” I don’t know where he is. In the cave staring at his computer screen, running around like a madman, maybe watching me right this second. I never knew.

“Joker. Tied and hanging from a streetlight in Robbinsville; near the cape.” I look back at the block I just left, the body dangling from the yellow and black pole by hands tied with the tightest double knot I could come up with. He deserved that kind of patience. A little unlike me, I know. But I regret I became rather fixated with you almost immediately. So much so, it would be criminal not to grant you one little wish. How could I refuse? And yet, I could still hear his giggle as he hung. Hardly a care in the world. “Don’t know how long he’ll stay there.”

“I’ll get Gordon. Then you can tell me how and why he got that way.” It seems he’s never happy to hear from me these days, even when it’s Joker I’m bringing in. I should be fuckin’ thanked. Instead, I get grief. I’m getting tired of the Daddy/daughter bit. Tired of explaining my actions to him. Tired of being judged, but right now it doesn’t matter. I know what will set this all right. What will make the most sense at this very jumbled and disheveled moment. I didn’t want to fall on this last resort, but it was bound to be the be-all, end-all of deal breakers. And he forced me to seek the final truth. So here I go.

“So?” He must’ve gotten dumped or something. He’s incredibly short tonight. More so than usual.

“Just…doing the rounds. Following that lead you gave me on Two-Face. I found him…setting a bomb on the rooftop to the…” I paused. Make it believable. “…orphanage.”

“And?”

“And…I didn’t give him time to explain himself. Besides, I deserved my retribution…for last time.” I swing my right leg over the bike sleeping silently in the alley a few blocks away. Sit for just a moment, thinking and contemplating. Trying to gauge what he’s gonna’ say to me. But it's not important. I can’t hear him. Or anyone else for that matter. I could have an auctioneer with a bullhorn in my ear and I wouldn’t hear it. I only hear him. Was it not all you hoped it would be, my love? Was I terribly disappointing? I know I took too long, but she was so very slippery. So eager to get away. I lost her for a while. But I did all that you asked…in the end.

I turn over the engine and the bike jiggles to life between my thighs.

“Gordon’s on his way.” The lines click dead. I don’t bother responding. I just take the com-link out of my ear, drop it in my pocket, slip on the matte plastic helmet over my head, flick down the eye shield just as I’m backing out of the alley. I resist the temptation to return to the scene of the crime, just to see his mutilated face one more time, but instead I take off in the other direction towards Trigate Bridge – towards Arkham.

“Tell me why. Why would I do that? Why would I ask you…to do that to her? I didn’t know you…I don’t…know you.”

You know me. You know about me, all about me, everything there is because you are me…and it’s all you know. Your life…this life…is not your life. Your memories aren’t yours. They’re mine. I made them. They belong to me…you…belong to me.

Even with my heavy leather jacket, it’s freezing. The cold doesn’t bother me. I ignore it easily as Arkham’s roof cuts into the fog creeping across the sky. It’s melancholy and dozing in the distance. Just waiting for me. I hate it. I hate everything it represents, everyone inside it. Everything it does and is for this city…and for me. Tonight it has answers and I’m gonna’ find them whether they want to let me in or not. I don’t care. I’d scale those walls in minutes just to get to where I’m going, and I don’t care who tries to stop me. B could fly out of the sky in on a winged plaid Griffin with three heads and the bodies of Judas and Caesar in its jaws to distract me and I’d still get inside because my determination is limitless. Because it’s not about right and wrong anymore. Those shallow titles mean little when you don’t know who you are. I don’t care if they crown me crazy and lock me in afterwards – I’m getting in. I’m going through the doors. I’m finding her, and she’s going to quantify me, make me human, and not the mask. In her sickness, I’ll live again, and it’ll be alright. I know it will.

It has to be.

I’m scared, I’m satisfied. I know he’s right behind me in the armored cop car like a sack of millions. He’s that valuable to the system, that vulnerable to the force, that feared by the people, and that hated by everyone left standing. They won’t try him. They’re done with his parlor tricks and courtroom antics. His lawyers are almost as smart as him, so they don’t even bother anymore. He’s got a clause – straight to Arkham. No options, no deals, no good cop/bad cop under heated lights and tempting glasses of water. Just a straight shot and it’s done. And it’s fine with me, ‘cause we’re not done. Not by a long shot. I’m counting on seeing him again.

But his arrival alone will secure my entrance. I just have to wait until they arrive to unload him, and I can’t wait to see them carry him inside because his right ankle is sprained and I broke his left toe. His depth perception will be weak from the deformed eye, and if I know him like I think I do, he’s probably laughing so hard he can’t stop crying. So yes, they’ll have to carry him in.

And I watch.

It’s tiring just to see them haul him through the double doors, his mouth relatively muted from the bloat, from the bruising that’s swollen his face to twice its size, but he laughs anyway. He laughs because it’s hysterically funny – the whole lot of it, because he can’t stop. One day, I think he may die laughing. But it helps. The whole distraction helps me get in, lets me get Gordon’s attention at the door as he and his men start their reports, attempt to determine how to scribble the first line. I wonder what it says…what they’re inscribing on the tops of their pads. Hanging from a telephone pole. Left by vigilante. Face bloodied and bruised. Rough night.

Fuck ‘em. I get through the door and take off down the halls. I know where to go. I know this place without a map. I know her room number ‘cause I’ve known it for years, because I’ve almost visited once or twice. Almost thought to come down here and hash it all out with her, just so it would all be spoken. Our past. Our troubles. All the crap we’d endured together. Secretly I’d wanted to make amends, but always found it too difficult to initiate the walk when I knew it would end with her. I could never go. I could never finish the task, so it never happened. I’d let the moments pass like sand through an hourglass, just pouring and skimming like time emptying forever into rotund bottoms waiting for it. It was never the right time, never the right hour, minute, second for us to speak the words I dreaded to say. So I kept them to myself.

Now I needed her more than ever. I didn’t need her to apologize or tell me she’d regretted what happened all those years ago. I just needed her to acknowledge me, to say she knew me, that she recognized me, that I’d been her daughter. Her terrible, vicious, vindictive little daughter. And to scream at me from inside her glass animal case and pound at the walls and screech at the top of her lungs about my abuses; that I’m the nasty little cunt she’d despised and reviled all these years. To tell me she regretted ever giving birth to me would be heaven to hear, and my stomach churned and bubbled the closer I got to her. I couldn’t remember the last time I was so excited…without taking my clothes off for the psycho clown whose horrific laughter continued to echo in the halls the moment I came upon my mother’s glass door; the second I put my fingers against the glass to grab her attention, thinking I would pound and pound and pound until she woke.

But she was already awake. Hands writing a mile a minute on her own flesh, her forearms, he fingers, her palms; all covered in black magic marker. Words and numbers and figures all pressed into her skin and covering her like handmade tattoos and watermarks. There was so much ink, I wondered how she kept it all straight.

The way she stared at me, crooked and wrinkled eyes more confused than I’d ever seen a person’s eyes. Enough that for a second I thought maybe I’d come upon the wrong person, but she was unmistakable. It was definitely her. Heavy lids that hovered slightly between sleep and death. Chalky pale skin that looked fragile and luminous. Wrinkles cut into her face like paths etched into dirt on the surface of Mars, like dried up rivers and valleys breaking up her skin, her pores, her features.

Her nostrils flared, her eyes remained crooked and questioning. I removed my mask. No change. The query on her face remained.

Mom. I signed slowly though she signed like a speed talker, like a person whose words moved faster than their mouth, who just couldn’t get it out fast enough, and everything coagulated together like a milky soup of jumbled figures and dancing movements. But I got nothing. Not even a hello. Mom, it’s me.

She looks at my hands moving, looks at me. Looks at my hands, and she shrugs. Her mouth moves, but I can’t make it out. I can’t read mouths yet. My training is weak.

What? Why don’t you just sign, Mom? I shrug right back, my arms sticking out from either side like I’m a little teapot.

She starts writing on the glass. Big, black sharpie letters on the clear screen in front of me like I’m in Sunday school and the teacher is trying to make her point about Jesus clear to me. Clear like I’m stupid, like I don’t get it. Like she needs to write it so big I couldn’t possibly understand it any other way.

?UOY ERA OHW

It’s clear on her face. All of it is as clear as the backwards writing on the glass. She doesn’t recognize me. Doesn’t know me. She can’t even sign. She can’t…even…sign.

I stare at the old lady’s back as she walks away, goes back to squatting on her hands and knees in the corner of her room, writing on the walls, her hands, her knee caps, her fingers with black ink; hurried as if she’s afraid she’ll get caught. She looks over her shoulder like a squirrel at the hoard and shoots me a look like I’ve got me eye on her nuts. Like I’m the enemy. Like I’m interrupting her needlessly mid-thought, mid-craze, and why can’t I just go away? To her, I’m the crazy one, and I’m starting to feel it as each second ticks by. For some reason I can’t walk away. I can’t give up. This farce can’t possibly be.

Not again.

[The Wench]

Chapter 16

I have a plan. But first, let me tell you a little bit about Two-Face. He dislikes me currently. He is obsessed with duality and anything remotely relating to the number two. His split personality made itself known once his face split years ago. Each half, each piece of his body, encompasses a personality completely opposed of the other. His coin, a heavy two-faced one, makes his decisions so fate might play its ultimate role in what shall come to pass. He never goes against the coin and tonight, he’s especially irate since the unmarked side determines he has to stay out of my current affairs of which he is heavily interested. But the laws governing his stupid coin don’t hinder me.

“What’s the deal with you, chippie? You run with the Bat and his brood, but I saw you…” His good side has a handsome and dignified quality that I find respectable. Indicative of the lawyer he once was. His scarred half couldn’t possibly emit any other feeling other than mutilated surprise. The skin is forever taut and torn, pulled into burnt, suspended animation. “…with the clown.”

“You don’t look so sure, Harvey.” Even as I pause in the silence we share, my ass kissing the cement from our scuffle, I let him think he’s overtaken me.

“Oh, no, doll face. That was most definitely you.” His deep chuckle is musical like a bass guitar, plucking strings delightfully. I could listen to him laugh from across the room in some hole in the wall bar and feel the sudden overwhelming need to seek it out. “I’ve never seen such a thing in my life. A bat and the Joker, playin’ nice.” The way he says it, so readily inferred with something else mixed in. With just a hint, a sprinkling of innuendo. He hasn’t dropped the cannon projected at me this entire conversation and I haven’t been up to performing the task myself, although I remarkably could without a shot escaping the barrel. I’m too interested in what he has to say to me. “I mean, one’a my boys said he heard rumors months back, but I didn’t believe the kid. Not one that comes up face first in a ditch, anyway.”

“I don’t know what you think you saw, Harvey, but it most definitely wasn’t me and the Joker, of all people.” I love the lie. It’s exhilarating. I’m liberated.

“Then you tell me, ‘cause I imagine you and the bat clan got all the answers.” He smiles, cocking his pistol back and letting up the resistance a little. “Who’s he playin’ kissy-face with? You gotta’ know ‘cause she’s stealin’ your suit to do it, and I’ll tell ya’ this much…it ain’t Harley.” He shakes his head, trying to control the grin on his good side.

“It could’ve been. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“You and I both know…that ain’t the case.” His pistol slides into its holster in his jacket, quite smoothly. “She’s outta the game, unless your boyfriend is tellin’ ya’ lies.”

“The bat isn’t my boyfriend.”

“I wasn’t talkin’ about the bat, sister.” He winks like we’re sharing a secret. “Besides…” He puts out his good hand, free of any weapon or trickery, to help me from the cement. I’d love to get up. My ass is killing me, but I think I’m more afraid than ever to even accept a compliment from one of these goons, let alone a helping hand from out of the blue. “He ain’t runnin’ around with her anymore. Not since you came on the scene…”

“Since when’re you so up-to-date on Joker’s affairs?” I stick out my hand into the air between us and suddenly change my mind, but it’s too late. He clasps it hard, and I find it’s comfortably warm and engulfing; like the hand of someone’s father. Not mine. As far as I know, I don’t know him. Maybe never had one. I’m like Christ. I was immaculately conceived in a barn someplace classy – like in the slums of Detroit.

“I got eyes and ears all over. You don’t think I know what goes on in my city?” Our hands are still hooked. I can’t get away. I knew this was a mistake. Not just this, but coming out here. Making myself vulnerable in his territory so he’d snuff me out on purpose. Feigning weakness so I could get close.

“Your city. What’s with you guys. You all think it’s your city. What about us? Trying to keep it safe for everyone else livin’ in your city?”

I’m not quite sure, but I think he’s laughing. It’s sort of hard to tell.

“I don’t know what you call ‘safe’. If it’s burnin’ guys like me so decent folks can walk the streets at night, you sure ain’t the definition of a savior, runnin’ back and forth between the bat and the clown like you can’t make up your mind if you wanna’ be good or bad.” He laughs again, completely cognizable this time. “Yea, I seen you for some time, playin’ the hero, but that’s all you’re doin’. Playin’.”

I broke eye contact with him a long time ago. “That’s bullshit. I’ve saved a lotta’ good people.”

“Only person you’re interested in savin’ is yourself. But that’s just it.” He’s walking away, stepping backwards with his arms out like I’m supposed to just let him escape, but I’m kidding myself. I never intended to capture him. “That’s all any of us is about, so I can’t fault ya’. Hell, maybe I’m a little impressed you still got the bat in the dark.”

He turns his back on me. Maybe a long time ago I would’ve been insulted one of these cocksuckers had the balls to turn his back on me and just saunter away, but that propensity for anger is gone. The remainder is just clarity.

“Wait…”

He turns around, peeking over his shoulder before spinning all the way to face me. He’s staring at me with one penetrating eye. The other is wide and distracting; enough I think I’m staring at it too much. Like when you catch yourself focusing on someone’s lazy eye, and then you realize you don’t know which one is good anymore. His suit is equally strange. One half is perfectly fitted and gloriously black, though fairly boring. Something a lawyer would wear into an everyday trial in court. Maybe some homicide or drug indemnity trial. Doesn’t matter. It’s generic. It’s the other side that’s intriguing. Torn and tattered, it’s precariously hanging together by threads and tears and pieces. Individual pieces from what must’ve been other suits tie these hunks together like knotted band-aids. Multiple colors like patchwork decorate each little section just directly under his tragic face. A bum. A bum with a gun, and one very intimidating glare.

“Just tell your boyfriend to stay outta’ my way and I’ll stay outta’ his.”

“No. Wait.”

He stops, tilting his head slightly and eyeing me with his gruesomely round cue ball with a black hollowed out core.

“I…”

“Speak up. I ain’t got all night.” His two thugs wait a few feet away. Two very large, gorilla-sized hammerheads just waiting for a reason.

“I wanna make a deal.”

He starts walking towards me with purpose, with authority. I actually catch myself backing up.

“You think ‘cause you fuck the clown you got clout? You think again. I don’t make deals with the likes ‘a you. You’re still a bat. And a traitor.”

“I have something you want.”

“I ain’t buyin’.” He spins around, taking a few angry steps over the gnarly cement that’s more a half undone construction site than a section of functioning city.

“Give me a fair chance Harvey. Don’t you think you at least owe me that?” He stops in the middle of the street, somewhere between me and his goons. “Or we could talk it over in Arkham. Your choice.”

I hear the jingle of the coin flipping in the air, the sound of the chime smacked against his palm. Then he turns his head. Just slightly, just a miniscule turn so his bright, gigantic eye can wiggle up and down like the Phantom of the Opera meets Cookie Monster. He doesn’t trust me. I don’t care about his trust. It’s not what I need.

“Start talkin’.”

An hour later, I walk the roofs quietly.

“Em. Report.” He’s in one of his moods tonight.

“Had a scuffle with Two-Face. All quiet now.” It’s a beautiful night and the air is cleaner than it has been in a long time. The sun had gone down hours before, but the deep blue tint shone in the distance where the sky met the sea; where everything came together and titans clashed.

“Where is he?”

“Gone. He got away.” I see it. Hadn’t realized I was in that part of town, I was so lost in thought; in my own little world. The gritty, black eye of the city. Dirty and determined, this end of the island is putting up a fight against technological advancement and rejuvenation. Streets jut upwards in crumbling corners, as if dormant volcanoes. Exoskeletons of abandoned vehicles now stripped of whatever uses they harbored, sit crookedly on the city blocks. Noises unlike the rest of the city echo here. No one comes here unless they have a need, a reason to, and even then it better be a matter of life and death.

The airwaves are silent. Uncomfortably so. Like I have to force conversation; like dinner with Dick Grayson.

“Keep me updated if anything new arises…” He’s sorry somewhere, deep down, that he is this way. “…get some rest.” Or so I say.

“Yea, sure.” But I’m distracted already with other plans on my mind.
His is a two-story wood monstrosity gleaming in the moonlight. His roof is higher than all the others on this dead-end block. Most of the houses around him are empty, making his comings and goings a cinch. Standing on the roof adjacent to it, one foot perched on the side, I ponder whether B knows it’s his. Whether he gives him leeway out here to retire in a house at the end of the day. Maybe keeping him quarantined to this side makes it easier than having to hunt him down every night. Sometimes out of the way is good enough if you’re relatively quiet, which he’s been lately. At least, since I had him thrown in Arkham a month before. I anticipate he’ll sit it out a few more days before making his grand escape, before coming after me…or not. I hope for the former, but for now, the house remains uninhabited.

Hiding in the dark feels primal, something I was meant to do. A hunter. A predator full of rage and blood lust. Thirsty for more of what I’m not supposed to want, but I do. Two-Face is right. I’m just a pretender. I don’t know who I am, where I came from, how I got here, but now those burdens of the past don’t trouble me. I’m free. A blank slate. I’m not forced to live in anyone’s shadow, or make up for what I lacked as a child. I don’t have a heritage or a family tree. I don’t even have my own best score to beat. No expectations. As of this moment, I can pave my own future without the excess dragging on my heels, holding me back. It doesn’t matter. I can write my story however I want. A new beginning.

I cross the street quietly from alleyway to alleyway, looking both ways reflexively before swinging onto the roof of the brownstone. Unlatching the sunroof and slipping through with no more sound than a dog’s whistle, and both feet hit the wood floor.

I feel it. A change in me as I step through the living room into the moonlight shining overhead. I pull the mask from my eyes and feel the chill night air penetrate my scalp. Swishing my head back and forth to loosen my blonde locks. Brush my fingers through strands like a homemade comb. Step once to my left. Pull one boot up and hurriedly drag the zipper downward. One foot free. Repeat with the other. The wood underneath my bare toes feels chipped, cold, weak in some places. Solidified in others.

Noiselessly I pass through the darkened dining room, through a carved archway, into the large bedroom. The biggest room in this house, the posterior, the ass of it, and crawl onto his bed; stretch out my arms like I’m free falling from the sky before grabbing all the white blankets in my hands and crumpling them into a mass under my cheek. Hurling another over my bottom half, rolling on the mattress until in a cocoon, until I’m thoroughly shrouded in his smell. I can close my eyes and imagine he’s beside me where he encourages me, envelops me in warmth. Tucks me in with strong arms tight around my waist, my frozen nose pressed against his chest in relief, in final calm at having eventually come to this moment in time. To be surrounded in his body heat. To share it. To be made whole with it, and in my peaceful sleep inside his empty bed, I gather the energy to start.

[The Wench]

Chapter 17

Time can pass like running upstairs, two at a time, and before you know it, you’re where you wanna’ be, walking the moving floor at an airport and zipping by others taking the traditional route. Or it can pass like everyone in the world is standing still. Frozen. When you’re impatient like I am, it’s hard to bide your time. I’ve been good and nice, and I’ve waited and stalled and pretended I couldn’t possibly have better things to do when I really have a preferred timetable, but I haven’t a schedule to go off of this time. I don’t know when he’s gonna’ appear, I just feel it. I know any second now he’s gonna’ get out of Arkham, and when I get word, I’m gonna’ be all over him like a fly on shit.

“Nervous about something?”

I jump at the sound of Bruce’s voice, shaking the squeaking chair’s black skeleton frame. Even though he’s been beside me this whole time, typing fingers over the keyboard like a woodpecker hacks through tree trunks, I still jump.

“Just…full of energy, I guess.” I rest my chin on my closed fist, knuckles grinding bone against bone uncomfortably. One leg crossed over the other, foot bobbing in the open air and gaining speed with bouncy spring-loaded calves.

“Have Alfred make you some tea. It’ll calm you down.” Even when he plays concerned, I wonder if he really is or if he’s just repeating a script he practices every night before proceeding with human interaction.

I look at my watch so fast I didn’t even catch the time. “No…no, I have to be somewhere.” I stand up and grab my bag, pulling the strap from the leather seat’s backrest and throw it over my shoulder, resting the bulk of it on my back like a pack mule. “I’ll see ya’ tomorrow.”

“Is he your other half?”

I stop in my tracks towards the steps, spinning on the ball of my foot like a top. “What?”

“This…guy you’re unsure about. Does he feel like your other half?”

I drop my bag. “What’re you talkin’ about?”

“Hypothetically, if there’s a…God…” He sighs. Starts over again. “People like to think they’re wandering the earth…only half a person while their other half is out there someplace, waiting to be found…to complete them. Who understands them, makes them feel like they can be themselves…who they really are underneath.”

“I…know the concept of soul mates, B.” Holy shit. Are we having a philosophical conversation?

“So, then based on that general and highly romanticized assumption of what we believe relationships to be, would you say this person feels like…your other half? Or how you put it, your soul mate?”

Christ. Is he anyone’s soul mate? Would a man forged in the smoking putrid lava of Hell be sectioned off so precariously as to have another half wandering around somewhere unattended? Unnoticed? Just as vile?

It’s possible.

“I…don’t know...” Shrugging feels so half-assed. I know the answer to this fifty-thousand dollar question. “…maybe…”

“Then it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks or what it means. Just don’t squander it. Cherish it…for as long as you have it.” He goes back to the keyboard, squinting at the mammoth screen. Business as usual. If only he knew what he just said to me.

“Are you…?” I smile, finally able to look now that he’s turned away. “Bruce, if you ever wanna’ talk…”

“I have a lot of work to do.”

Can’t say I didn’t try.

Darkness in the city is never really darkness. Not with the full moon shining overhead like it is tonight. Lighting my way as I casually walk the last block of the dead end street. I watch the sidewalk pass underfoot as I step. Each block of cement a different piece, a different story, another map of the world opening up and attaching to more, infinitely ahead of me. A series of connections all fated to come together to create a larger and more complex plan in this world. A world I play a small part in, but as I look up and see his white face coming towards me in the shining moonlight darkness of three a.m., I know I can make it a bigger part if I try.

He’s coming from the other end. The dead end, though it’s not really dead. Everything leads to other avenues, even when believed they’re dead and unable. They still have the ability to point the way, take you on a new and uncharted path, even unconventional ones. These are the paths he takes. The ones no one else ever thinks of. The new and previously unheard of ones where others won’t tread because of their fear of the unknown. But he has no fear. He skips the tightrope and laughs the whole way. Whether the life he takes is his or someone else’s in the process, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the point. What I have to ask now is if I’m willing to do what I have to for my new cause. Am I willing to die for it?

He walks towards me with purpose, as if he always has somewhere to go, even when he doesn’t. One foot in front of the other, the breeze of night blowing his three-piece pinstriped suit under his coat that flutters behind him. He’s frightening. Face so white in contrast to the black of his attire, you’d think he was a ghost. The undead. A zombie without the corny mannerisms you expect from ancient black and white movies or ‘70s re-runs on cable. I take that back. He’s far too handsome to be a zombie.

He smirks as our paths meet and his face says he’s not surprised to see me at all. As if this day has finally come and he was just waiting until I got my head on straight. The culmination of his spastic genius, and he kisses my cheek softly. I don’t respond. I’m silent because I haven’t come out of my introspective stupor I’ve been stuck inside the entire walk here. From the cave to the decaying house. The stronghold to the bull’s-eye.

I feel the gentle pull of his gloved hand, bringing my wrist to his lips above me, kissing softly at the tangent, the delta of veins and sinewy muscles. Clasping my fingers with his own and treading up the walk with me in tow. We have a lot of work to do.

[The Wench]

Chapter 18

The darkness in my bedroom feels like staring out to sea in the night when a fog has invaded and made it all but impossible to see past my own fingers in front of my face. Seconds pass before I realize it must be very late and I’ve still not gotten a call. Perhaps the night is quiet. Perhaps I’ve been discovered and I don’t know it yet. Now I’m a liability and this is how I’m punished. Perhaps I’m being fuckin’ ignored.

The one loose floorboard in my room creaks just so, and I realize the trouble might actually be in my own bedroom. I don’t need a call. I’m already here and I lay perfectly still on my stomach, feign sleep to draw the predator closer. I feel the glock hiding under my pillow, fully loaded and clutched in my palm because I don’t get the option of living in a safe neighborhood. In fact, my building is subject to break-in after break-in more times in a month than I can count on my two hands. I’m lucky it’s taken this long. A gun is simple necessity when I’m just a civilian, a tenant trying to protect herself from the dangers lurking beyond my easily penetrated apartment. For the record, I’ve never used it. Tonight, I hope I get to break it in.

The corner of my bed sinks as my would-be rapist-soon-to-have-a-hole-in-his-head-murderer mounts the edge by my left foot. It’s not Solomon Grundy turning my mattress into a perpendicular end of a seesaw, but it’s no featherweight either. I stall, I wait. I have to fight myself to pick the right moment to blow this fucker’s head off, and when I feel like I’ve given no-face John Doe enough leniency, I roll over and point my gun at the intruder, gulping at both surprise and relief to see Joker’s white face overpowering even this heavy darkness.

“Now, you know you don’t need that.” He swats the barrel away from his chest like a fly.

“Jesus Christ, you scared the shit outta me.” I let my head fall back on the pillows, releasing a sigh. I almost did it. I almost pulled the trigger.

“What would daddy say if he knew you were packing heat?” His is a quiet, sinister little chuckle, a subtle sonorous timbre in my eardrums as he lies on top of me. A delicately placed kiss finds its home in the crook of my neck.

“Maybe not too unhappy if he knew it was used for you. I think he’d forgive me for blowing your head off.”

Now it’s a full laugh. “I like it when you talk dirty to me.”

“How the hell did you get in here?” It took me too long to notice him. I should’ve heard him on the metal railing, coming through the window, pushing my curtains back, but I almost forget about it completely as his lips continue traveling around my throat, increasing intensity, dragging out longer with every kiss. Finally lengthening to skin suckling, pulling the blood to the surface as though a vampire attempting to take my life force for his own meal.

“You’re not the only one sneaking around at night.” I can feel him hard between my thighs. Anxious. Something’s gotten him riled up and I’m afraid to know what it might be that’s terrible enough he would brave the distance here, risk being noticed, risk all our plans just to have me.

“You snuck in my window?” The gun is heavy in my hand, pulling my wrist down, and getting heavier every second he’s on top of me.

“Never.” The cold air of my bedroom hits me, the wind blowing in from a crack hiding behind curtains as he throws the blankets off me with ease. “Why settle for windows…” Hot hands hook around the back of my knees, pulling my legs apart roughly. “…when you can come right through the front door.”

“I locked the front door.” I had a ritual every night where I inspected every window, door, and vent to make sure everything was secure. I only assumed he’d come in through the window knowing it was the only thing I kept open.

“Yes…you did…and it made forcing my entrance…” Arms wrap around my calves on either side of him, thighs open, and he jerks me against his lap. “…much more satisfying…”

“That’s breaking and entering.” I push the barrel into his chest. He pauses, eyeing the gun between us.

“So teach me a lesson.” Bare hands tickle the faint, blonde hairs on my inner thighs as his fingers open, widen, and slide downward to the abyss.

I spin the gun around in my hand, holding the cold silver barrel, get a good grip before turning it sideways and stretching my arm across my chest as far as it will reach before bringing it back – fast and without thinking – smacking the handle over his cheek; hard enough he almost doubles over.

Then I give him a minute.

“Was it good for you?” I sit up against my elbows, legs still spread and inviting him in.

He cracks his neck, lifting his head now gashed and bleeding in a line down his cheek, puddling in the corner of his mouth where his smile catches it. It lengthens his mouth, exaggerating his grin so it extends the entire half of his face like a horrifying version of himself. I wasn’t ever sure that was possible. To be more horrifying is quite a feat.

Without a word he unbuckles his belt, a jingle resounding as he slides it from around his waist. I can just barely make out his hands, slipping the tail end of this serpentine hunk of leather through the buckle and pulling it so it resembles a leash and collar in his clever fingers.

“Just what I wanted…” Metallic taste in my mouth as he kisses me, exchanging blood with our tongues. “Your turn.”

The thin leather clamps around my throat, asphyxiates me instantly as he yanks the end with one hand, the other between my thighs. I can’t decide which sensation to focus on more: the loss of air and burning pain in my chest that accompanies it, or the tingling pins and needles that consume my legs from his finger fuck producing my orgasm. It’s a toss-up.

He’s taking his time tonight. Letting my gasps expel every bit of breath from inside my lungs. Emptying so I haven’t a single choking cry left to give him. But I don’t fight him. I stay with it. This is our game. It’s what we do. I stopped apologizing for it because it’s something concrete about me. Who I know me to be right now, and no amount of disfigured memories can take it away. Maybe it’s sick, and bad, and wrong; but it’s me and I’m thankful to know it. He feeds it in me, makes it seem okay because he wants it just as much as I do. Someone to share it with.

I tell myself I’m only doing what Bruce told me to. If only he knew.

I heave in and out, chest up and down, trying to calm my racing heartbeat, but he’s lying on top of me, making it hard to relax. I help him out of his shirt, slipping each little button between holes, from his neck to his belly; pushing the silk wrinkling over his shoulders and down his biceps that flex at my sides. I wish I could stay in bed all night; lick the sweat off his naked body for as long as the mood inspires me. Stretch out on the sheets, arms out, legs spread with his hands tracing my outline; lips following closely behind. Tongue between my legs, forearms under my backside – I want him. All night…I want him. Neverending.

I get the call.

“Dammit.” Not now. Why couldn’t this wait? Why couldn’t he ring me hours ago when I was waiting around with nothing to do or hours into my future when I’m not nearly as compromised? Now he’s starting to ruin the essential moments.

I yank a good chunk of his hair with my hand, pull him off of me like a snarling dog by the collar. The only sound is his groaning annoyance with the interruption.

Inhale. Exhale. Try not to sound like you’ve been fucking around. “Yea?”

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“I need you to look into a situation at the harbor.” Five minutes from my house. I can only guess what this might be. “It sounds like Joker to me. Keep your guard up. He may still be lingering.”

“I’m on it.”

I don’t speak. I don’t even infer who was on the other end of the line. I just stand, still reeling from the moments before, swimming them around in my head as the oxytocin in my bloodstream does its duty. Swirls throughout my entire body and sends off little signals to my brain, stimulating attachment to him. I attempt to hinder it, keep it from instigating its full impact because what my bodily functions don’t seem to understand is that he’s a maniac. A psychotic who is completely content to bash in someone’s head before hunting me down to get his rocks off, having been previously aroused by the aforementioned head bashing. My body’s natural mechanisms don’t understand those facts.

“Is it that time already?” He’s lying on his side, stretched out on my bed, vertical index and middle fingers clipping a cigarette from his lips. The smoke cavorts around my nose like an annoying brat child forever tugging at my hem, attempting to get my attention.

“What time?” My own fingers glide through the thick humidity of the air between us, following the burning embers of the cigarette butt with my eyes before plucking it from his mouth and inhaling it through my own.

“When you leave me for him.”

Lying on his back against my pillows, he almost resembles a normal human being. Sad, disappointed, prodding and fumbling with a teddy bear Dick won for me at the carnival once upon a time. Trying not to look at me standing beside the bed’s edge; beside him. Not so intimidating once jealous and poking Mr. Bear’s belly in the dark.

“I have to go clean up your mess.” I bend over him, peck his forehead. My hands gracefully skate up his arms, soft skin under fingertips and kiss him again before righting myself and finishing off the last bit of zipper on my cold, suddenly uninviting leather suit.

His arms are fast. Much faster than I am at evading him, but I don’t want to get away. I want him to snatch me like a sick perverted kidnapper in the night and burrow me into his chest, his arms circling around me like the rings of Saturn before crunching down on my ass as if claiming the land in ownership. I start to wonder if he’s got a little purple flag somewhere to puncture me with and commemorate the moment.

“Baaaaaby…I’m getting tired of sharing you…” His sing-song voice sounds lovely coming from under my jaw, just before clipping my ear between his lips. "You know I don’t like sharing." But his menacing growl is what gets me wet.

“Just a little longer...I promise.” I tilt my head from left to right, up and around, wherever his mouth is going I make some part of me available to consume. Whatever part he wants.

“You’re testing my patience.”

“You can wait.”

“I don’t wait…” His snarling pauses, now curling his fingers over the hair prickling my cheek, pressing it behind my ear and composing himself. “…for anyone.”

I smile. “Then get out.” I climb off him, stand from the bed and snatch my mask from the bedside table, sitting beside the loaded gun. “Don’t forget to lock the door.” My back facing him, I smile while adhering the leather peepholes that perfectly form around my eye sockets, the ones that let me watch the world as a hero while I hide behind it like a criminal.

“You’ll come back?” A sweet, quiet little voice stops me before I’m able to escape. I pause, my gloved hands holding either curtain apart, letting the orange glow of the streetlights break through the black cloth stronghold.

“Eventually.”

The curtains shift behind me, covering the window as I climb onto the fire escape, up the clinking metal staircase to the roof and I’m tempted to hang around for a moment or two to see if he leaves. My curiosity would love for nothing more than to spy on him, but I’m already late. Five minutes has turned into fifteen and I’m not concentrating as I take a quick detour through the park to the docks nearby. I almost trip on a shrub, lost in thought before I clear my head. Force myself to pay attention to what’s going on right here, right now. Not what might be taking place in my apartment while I’m gone. And I find I’m just in time.

* * *

Five minutes before the cops. They won’t know the difference. They might as well assume I’ve been here for twenty minutes, maybe a half hour before they ever got the call. But I only got five and it was my own fault. My fault for thinking, going over conversations we’d had over the last few days, weeks, month I’d made all about him. Stupid of me. But it was all part of the plan.

Tell me something about me. Tell me the truth. No more lies.

The guy in the alley is gutted.

There are ten things…all truth…

Red splattered against the brick wall he leans lifeless against like someone took a can of paint and hurled it.

I can’t trust you.

Hair, clothes, skin, everything soaked with his own seeping bile and goop.

I’d stake my life on it.

Head bent forward, legs spread like a rag doll hunched over, a child’s toy pretending to sleep.

That doesn’t mean much.

His hands are missing on both sides, a splayed solar plexis opens like rose petals, revealing a mess of sausage-like globules congealing inside.

I’d stake my reputation on it.

I can’t believe a body holds this much blood.

Then tell me something.

I lift his head so I can get a better look.

The man in your memories…really knew you…

His eyes are gone. Empty hollow sockets stare out at nothing…with nothing.

…you really knew him…you loved him…

I recognize him, even without eyes; without lips that have been severed from his face.

…and he did every terrible thing he could think of…to the only woman who loved him…

I know him – intimately. Like someone knows their own reflection in the mirror.

Now he’s sorry…and he’s looking for you…

He wasn’t bound, wasn’t forced here. He was lured. No signs of a struggle or anything suggesting he was drug here from some other locale. Throat slit horizontally with something very sharp, creating another mouth for him to breathe out of without any jagged tears from a dull blade. Clean. Fast.

…but I’ll find him first…

He gave him a Columbian necktie. Tongue hanging out the thin-walled cartilaginous tube more commonly called a trachea. A hole in his thoracic cavity indicates his heart was removed entirely. If he had one to remove, that is.

…and do every terrible thing I can think of…

I don’t look long at the gaping hole that used to be his groin. Sliced with the impeccable and experienced hands of a surgeon. Suddenly, I begin to wonder what order he did it all in.

…because I love it…

Tommy, Tommy, Tommy – you brought this on yourself.

[The Wench]

Anyone reading this? Do i care? guess not...

Chapter 19

“Well?” I hear B’s voice echoing behind me in the alley’s opening. Waiting for I don’t know how long. Watching me run the scenario through my head and check off all the connections.

“I think…” Looking around at all of the blood, splattered against the wall as if Warhol himself brushed the strokes. “I think he’s out of his mind.”

“Tell me information I don’t know.” He’s beside me now, eyes scanning the scene, taking in every little absolutism and possibility, combining it with everything he knows about our enemy. His enemy. My uninvited though no less welcome guest.

Christ he really fucked Tommy up good. Missing eyes, missing heart, missing dick. What’d he do with them exactly? Thinking about it, considering every angle and every thought, deliberating over the fact I know both attacker and victim intimately and find it’s unbelievably excruciating work looking as though I’m surprised at the current scene – and that I don’t recognize the victim by any means beyond a guy I might’ve passed precariously on the street.

Stupid boys. It never changes. Kindergarten to adulthood, criminals or heroes, they never change.

“It looks personal to me.” I try to restrain my arms’ habitual desire to reach out and really finger the body. Maybe six months ago I wouldn’t have hesitated, but now I’m 99% sure I’ll give something away. A potential vessel for truth in my tiny little fingers that are relentlessly harboring on a Lady Macbeth-ish ‘Out Damn Spot’ moment.

He stares at me, blinks once under protection of the cowl. Translation: elaborate.

“This…guy…” I point to Tommy, almost questioning the sex, making it seem as if I’m not quite sure it’s a ‘he’. “Why would someone like Joker go through the trouble? I mean, he spent extra time he normally wouldn’t’ve to inflict severe amounts of pain to someone he coerced here. Cause there’s no signs of a struggle, so the victim knew him…or wasn’t threatened or something.”

“A person Joker doesn’t intimidate would clearly be a maniac himself.” Now it’s his turn to squat down by the body, give it a good once-over while I stand at his side, hands on my hips while I try my best to appear sincerely inquisitive.

“Maybe a bad deal?” I’m so full of shit right now. Even if I were regular me, the good me, that would’ve been a dumb guess.

“Deals have gone sour with him before. Why take such a personal approach with this particular victim over something as impersonal as business?”

“Maybe it wasn’t so impersonal.” I shouldn’t have said it. I know I shouldn’t have.

“Unlikely that would lead us in any one direction. With an unpredictable character like Joker, everything and nothing is personal all and none of the time. I need something better.”

I want to tell him. I want to scream it at the top of my lungs with all the gusto I’ve got, exhilarated in its release. It’s a love note, and he’s as blind as a bat.

“What else?”

“Nothing.” Except I know who’s next.

“This location is significant.” He looks around, eyes darting here and there sporadically, smelling the air, drawing mental conclusions and putting together the pieces I’m afraid I might’ve given him without realizing it. But I’m frozen now. I can’t move. At least, I don’t think I can.

“What…” I clear my throat, trying to delete the sudden squawking. “…what makes you say that?”

“It’s private. Out of the way.” He looks up, checking rooftop corners, shadows hiding in the dead-end alleys. “It’s not like him to pick a private place for anything. He’s all about a show.”

“You just said he was unpredictable.” I must sound like a total moron arguing this point with him, being utterly difficult. Maybe the location is significant, but so is my most recent line of interjection.

“What’s it look like?” Thank God, Gordon finally gets within earshot. Just in time to hear us at the turning point where a partnered investigation becomes an argument.

“Joker…” B looks up at me, black gloved fingers circling oozing gore between each other as our eyes meet. This stare is also significant. “…maybe…”

* * * *

“You were ten minutes late.” I hate this about him. His omniscience. Although I suddenly have a renewed sense of faith he’s entirely in the dark about me. I was actually 15 minutes late. Though I’m sure it won’t abate the regular nightmares where he reads my mind and I’ve mistakenly told him everything.

“I had to convince my company...”

“Your company?”

“Yes…my company. He…”

“He?”

We’ve been walking down the alley kitty-corner from the scene. Once cops started to flood the interior, we beat it. Even after all this time, we didn’t commiserate – the cops and us.

I shrug. “You told me not to waste it, right?” Facing him with stern authority sounds easier than it is. Everything I say, everything I do, I worry he can see right through to it all. I’m afraid he’s read the bloodied wall as if my diary scribbled with innards and soon I’ll be enemy number one. I’ll be forced to admit defeat at this new game I’m perpetrating, and so quickly too. He’d be so disappointed.

We exit the alleyway together, following each other’s stride in synch.

“No. I...yes…I did. It’s just…” He sounds as if he’s a little embarrassed. “I forget…about holidays.” Scratching the back of his head, as if he has an available patch of hair to scratch.

I sigh. I’d forgotten myself. February 14th isn’t a day I’d normally concern myself with either, but this one is a little special.

“You and your boyfriend—“

“No. Not a boyfriend.” We continue to walk together as if longtime associates of a law firm meeting in the lobby and taking a friendly stroll. “Just…I don’t know.” And I don’t. I don’t even want to label whatever it is. A partnership, kindred spirits, frenemies, a great fuck. I don’t know. It’s too complicated, too easy, too everything it shouldn’t be for two people like us. I don’t want to think about it, so I think about him strolling home from my apartment, casual as can be, and I think I don’t wanna’ jinx it.

“What did you tell him?” He clears his throat. “Your non-boyfriend…boyfriend.” I smirk as he says what I think is his attempt at a joke. Jokes. That’s all my life is about now. Jokes and the men who make them. I could write a book.

“Work never sleeps.” I look up at him with sad and tired eyes. I’m in shock actually. The moments in my apartment, the body in the alley, this subsequent conversation. It’s all coming to a conclusion I can feel lurking closer than I anticipated. “He thinks I’m a nurse.”

“Didn’t even bend the truth? Pretend you’re a cop?” We’re inching closer to my apartment with every step. My pulse speeds. Is he still there, or will I enter an empty room? For all I know he could be around the corner eavesdropping.

“There’s only one police department in Gotham. What if he came looking for me?” Crossing my arms. I wanna’ laugh. That’d be the day. “There’s more than one place for a nurse in this town. More illusive that way.” I look at my window, still wide open from my exit. I didn’t bother to close it. The black curtains from inside made their way out the small opening, baying in the breeze. I squint, thinking I can catch a snowy ankle in the shadows, but I’m kidding myself.

“Smart.” He looks over at my apartment window, the curtains flapping angrily at us. “Get some sleep.” And with that, he’s gone. A banshee in the night.

I climb my own fire escape. Taking my time in a lazy sort of stride, not all that excited to go back home now that I’ve gone out. Unsure of what I’m going to find, though fairly positive it’ll be nothing, telling myself it’ll be nothing so when I do pull the curtains and find exactly that, I won’t feel the emptiness in my gut.

I’m not alone.

[The Wench]

Chapter 20

My heart threatens to choke me as it leaps into my throat in an instant.

He’s still. Asleep.

I unclothe my arms in the dark, silent so not to wake him. Afraid his being here might be an accident, that maybe he shut his eyes for just a moment and like everyone who pauses for that tired instant, fell asleep unintentionally. Though the scene hardly communicated unplanned nappy-time. Darkness-sheeted gray fingers twisting around a blanket, shielding half his peaceful face forced into the pillows as he lay on his bare stomach. Scissor legs open on the mattress, taking up space – a position only someone attempting to get comfortable would assume.

Him. His back. It’s warm like an oven and soothes the sting of my frozen lips as I kiss him between the shoulders.

“I was dreaming.” His eyes are hardly slits, a white Venus flytrap with jade-green teeth interweaving over the center – over the stomach, the soul of the thing. I scoot sideways; meet him head-on.

“About?” Spreading my fingers over the back of his neck, petting the hair at the nape feels like the most intimate thing I can do right now.

“Not yet.” The endless trail of blood from forehead to lip is gone. Only his smirk remains. “Well?”

“I thought you didn’t wait for anyone?”

“I don’t.” Kissing me roughly, forcefully, as if I’d have objected and he wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. “I wasn’t waiting.”

“Then what would you call it?” I smile softly, his eyes shining aqua pools reflecting straight through to their bottom; void of life to disrupt their stillness.

“Did you see?” Completely avoidant of any line of questioning, I don’t push for an answer. Why he’s still here isn’t important all of a sudden. I nod in a soothing sort of manner, like the subtle wind blowing a flower’s bulb on a threadbare stem in a field of nothing.

“If you wanted his attention, you certainly got your wish.” Continuing to shed my clothes, I’m struggling with my suit that doesn’t want to let go. It’s clinging and sticky, adhering like double-sided tape. A thing, a something, that doesn’t want to leave me behind as I yank. Can’t. Get it. Off.

“As much as I…love…ruffling his leathery feathers…” Something clicks behind me as he creeps, his adjustment from stomach to knees to leaning over me just so, causing the mattress to shift and bend beneath him. Then comes the switchblade. “…I wasn’t concerned with his interest.” The blade is sharp as if brand new. It cuts through the leather as if nothing at all and he’s simply miming the movements. All I can do is watch as he turns it into pieces on the floor, snipping and clipping me out of it till I’m free.

“I needed that.” I’m surprised at myself, pointing at the slippery clippings on the floor, keeping my eyes on his. So quiet and subdued as if I don’t really care after all. I shed my old skin and now I’m much more nimble without it. It was such a burden.

He smiles, the soft skin of his index tickling my chin. No, not a smile. More like a slight smirking tease, disrupting the round puff of his cheeks where the corner of his claret mouth convened. I look away. Fidget with my skin I believe is forming wrinkles around my kneecaps, bent irregularly over the mattress.

“No…you don’t.”

Yes, I know.

“He looked…” I gulp noisily. “…terrible.” I look over my shoulder and he’s there. He’s always there – my subconscious waiting for me to acknowledge its presence, but quiet enough to forget when I obtain the fortitude to look away; when I distract myself with trivial, vacant attempts at heroism.

“And?” Fingers, his fingers, tickle delicately over my bare shoulder, dabbing a snail-trail in my perspiration.

“I was…glad.” The feeling of the word forming in my mouth is… “Like a…weight…” I throw my arms in the air, demonstrate with interpretive dance, the dissolution of the burden I’ve carried for I don’t know how long.

He laughs. He’s always laughing, even when he’s not. The inclination constantly exists. Anything and everything is funny, even when it’s not. Especially when it’s not.

“Yes…I know…” His lips are feathery delicate against my cheek, already coated in my tears; tears I didn’t want to fall, that I didn’t want him to see so he could use them against me, so he could prove he was right. But he was right, and I was grateful; actually grateful.

“Tell me something else…about me.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand, sniffing roughly because I’m too stubborn to delete the moment with a quick blow of my nose. With every dripping tear comes another kiss of his mouth, another tightened squeeze of his arms. I fear it and desire it all at once. My tears are my confession, his arms my assurance of salvation. I just need to say my ‘Hail Mary’s’ and ‘Our Father’s’ and it’ll be all over. Until next time.

“We met. A long time ago…” His kiss suddenly alters. It’s kind and subservient. I’m not his slave. “…you don’t remember.” He’s mine. “You never will.” When I lean back into his chest, he cradles me. I could fall backward and trust him to catch me, indefinitely.

“Why?” Eyes shut, I wait to hear his voice answer mine; I wait to see the bouncing musical notes bound over me like sheep over a fence while I lean against him, turn his body into my mattress, my bed to rest silently on.

“I took it away…” Another kiss. A stroke of his beaten, jagged nails across my forehead, so soft and so methodical, a soothing lullaby.

“What was your dream?” I’m falling asleep, drifting into another realm of consciousness, but I can still hear him, his heart beating, his breath coursing in and out of his body.

“I dreamt…of the day we met…” In my sleep, his fingers are serrated teeth gnawing through my hair, just waiting for a reason to clamp down. “…it’s funny…the things we do…as children…” He’s far away now, sinking into the dense tar pool in my mind. “How the simple act of kicking a chair…your…little…blue…chair…” I think I feel him kissing me, rose petals dabbing my cheek gracefully. “…would lead us here…”

I can’t move. I watch him sink into the mire. Refusing to struggle in its center, he continues vanishing, steadily. I want to save him. I want to reach out for him and salvage whatever I have left, whatever I can hold onto. When I accept I can’t save him, I’m free to move, and I jump in after him.

I follow the sound of his voice.

“There is no Tommy Sims.” His whisper is faint, and I can barely keep up. “Only me.”

Tonight the world changed. A volcano erupted in the middle of Manhattan. Everyone discovered the meaning of life. Dogs stopped chasing their tales. And I slept beside him in my own bed and finally belonged. I found my way home and I was safe.

[Zablorg]

This is disgusting and I despise every sentence.

And yet, here I am, so what does that say about me?

[The Wench]

This is disgusting and I despise every sentence.

And yet, here I am, so what does that say about me?

That in an odd way, you totally made my day?

[The Wench]

Chapter 21

“Tell me…how you knew it was him.”

Blinking dead, virtually hollow eyes. I think I see nothing in them. Nothing where once I saw everything I ever thought was noble. Now I see nothing but impending castigation. I hate him.

“What?” I’m glad I hate him.

“Joker…who killed the man in the alleyway.” B sits in his chair as if a god, Zeus, surveying the world as judge, jury, and executioner. What he’ll do to keep the peace instills fear in everyone; fear of his wrath.

“You…told me.” Standing at attention like a soldier, like a person awaiting the firing squad. Words like bullets, I anticipate and plan my counterattack.

“I said it sounded like Joker.” He stands from the black leather upholstered chair that begins to spin as he rises, a phantom movement. “I never said it was. You didn’t question my assumption.”

I can’t focus on him as he approaches. The decadence of the cave – the gunmetal tables, creamy leather chairs, excess of gadgetry blinking their particular EKGs. The whole mise-en-scene disgusts me.

“What do you know…Emma?” The way he says it, emphasizes it. There’s so much Joker in him. If only he would admit it and move on. If only I had the words to convince him, make history right here in the infamous “office” everyone wonders about, but I’m not sure I’m ready to let the cat out of the bag. I’m not even sure I have to.

I read his face. Cocking my own in interest, in the hope I can tell the difference between his wanting me to spill something he doesn’t know, or pleading I let him in on the mystery.

So I gamble.

“It was about me.” I didn’t collapse like I imagined I would. When I fantasized this moment, I likened the slightest slippage of truth to a weight lifting from my shoulders and floating away; releasing me so violently of its constraints I would tumble to the ground and let the salvation consume me – salvation in no longer denying the truth. “I didn’t want the attention. But he’s just so…” I’m talking crazy. “…such a showman.” But the reality is just too delicious to overlook.

When I finally open my eyes, he’s dumbfounded. Sideswiped. A deer in headlights. The greatest detective and crimefighter the world has possibly ever or never known, and he has no idea what I’m talking about.

I love it.

“You know what I’m talking about, Bruce? Do you have any idea…who…I…am?” I hear him in my own voice as I speak, knowingly possessed by him, indulging myself with his fearlessness. I’m not afraid anymore. “You know I’m someone else? Someone better?”

“You’re talking ludicrous.”

“No…see, I’m not that girl. The broken, battered nobody plodding aimlessly down the street, waiting to be rescued by you. That was just…part of the plan.”

Ha. He’s trying so hard to keep a straight face. He wants nothing more than to appear unsurprised. Because his shock would mean I’m winning. Ha.

“What plan?”

“To get in here.” Finger pressed against his chest; against his heart. “And in here.” Pressed against his forehead.
His frown is an upside down smile, deeply creasing his chin, pulling his cheeks down as if sinking. A face made entirely of clay and melting steadily.

“He’s full of tricks, Emma. Lies. Bullshit.”

“Of course he is.” I can feel his chest pressed against my own, heaving, hot, and pounding an angry heart underneath all the meat and flesh. “I wouldn’t have him any other way.” His shoulders are sturdy, yet malleable in my fingers. I’d never the gall to wrap my arms around him before.

“This isn’t you.” He leans inward. I’m relatively surprised at his reaction. Calm. Composed. Practically poised for a kiss. How quaint. How flattering.

“You don’t know me.”

He pushes me off, a move I anticipated. Just like a man full of himself; always in control. But not of me. Not anymore.

“You’re sick…” The faint spit from his lips sprinkles onto my face. I don’t care. “…you sicken me.” He spins around, scratching the back of his head, and for the life of me, I still can’t figure out why he hasn’t tried to strangle me yet. At least take a poke at my cheek with his fist. It’s infuriating. Who fucking scratches the back of their head and paces after finding out one of their own is sleeping with the enemy?

Maybe he didn’t catch that part yet.

I watch him, leaning against the computer with its oversized screen and massive keyboard, head bent upward as his shoulders hunch over like some big cat, a hunter, a lion, waiting to pounce.

“I searched every databank on you…” Tapping his toe as he reads over what I assume is any and all data he has on me, hidden in that computer of his. “…days…weeks…nothing. Nothing about you.” Looking over his shoulder at me, I suddenly find him slightly tempting. Only now…now that I see so much Joker in him.

“I know you did…” Suddenly, now that I’m focused, I have no problem approaching him, no problem stepping my gams right up to the back of his own and stealing a liberal squeeze of his ass. I’m suddenly chartreuse with envy regarding every girl that’s ever had him. “…lover…”

He’s really got the cold-hearted bit down. I got nothing out of him. Not even a wince.

“He won’t be happy…until he sees you dead.”

God he’s got a nice ass.

“Maybe. I think it’s….worth the risk.”

I am such a slut.

“Why?”

He’d be so proud. Revealing our affair with my hands kneading his backside. The backside of the bat. I may get off on it later...as I’m sitting on his worst nightmare’s face and having the ride of my life. Just thinking about it makes me all…tingly.

“The sex…” His thighs are like steel underneath all that expensive silk. “I could fuck him all night.”

He sighs. Still no reaction.

“I’ll see you both in Arkham by the end of the year.”

I believe that’s a dare.

“So soon? It’s only November.”

“Yes…it is.”

This conversation is over. I feel it in his stiffness, his resistance, his rejection. And yet, I’m still free to back away, to take the stairs, to walk out the front door and take my chances out on the street like any other prey. I’m something to hunt. A challenge for his ego, or so my ego says. But not before I give him back all the toys, the tricks, the trappings. Remove the com-link from my belt, toss it on the computer keys so he knows I’m serious. I want him to hunt me through the city’s labyrinth of streets and alleyways. I wanna’ see him rush at me through the fog with his cape billowing from the gusts of rancid sea air, eyes pricking me violently behind he cowl. And I wanna’ be surprised. Maybe Tim’ll be with him, maybe Dick. Maybe both. I await all three in their good, sweet time.

[The Wench]

Chapter 22

He’s wrong. I remember, though not through any memories or enlightenment on his part. Through my dreams. Vibrant, dramatic dreams that include both my current reality and the one of fallacy, where I sleep soundly and motionless, and his arms and body clasp me like an Iron Maiden on cloudy, billowy blankets from Heaven.

But he’s also right. There’s no Tommy Sims. There was a gutted man I knew, who’d known me my whole life, who’d known me like no one I ever knew, who’d done terrible things to me, who I’d done terrible things to, as he tried to save me from the fate I mapped out for myself. Who may very well had gotten through to me if I’d let him. If only he hadn’t been such a good cop. If he hadn’t been such an enabler and kept my record clean, destroyed my fingerprints so long ago in a small little Oakland police department, and always gave me a place to stay. I’d recognized his handwriting all those years when letters showed up randomly in my mailbox, but through Joker’s customized brainwashing, I’d thought it was Tommy, trying to bust his way through my life again. I’d thrown away every single letter. But he was persistent, my brother. He never gave up. Not even after he hunted down the man he knew was the last man he wanted to hunt down. He wanted to find me that badly. It was sweet, really. I applaud him for finally overcoming a fear he’d insinuated so long ago. I’d forgotten everything and anyone that was pertinent in my life, including my sibling. But he never forgot. He knew how to find me, who to find, and where to find us.

It was the last piece of the puzzle.

We’d met just as I described. What was his name? I can’t recall. It’s not important. It was too long ago to remember those little details. We’d sparked immediately. The kick of my chair just got my attention so I’d reciprocate what he already knew – that we were perfect for each other. So we began the torture almost instantaneously. I loved it, needed it. I couldn’t get enough of his simple and straightforward torment, and the more he gave it to me, the more I mutually responded. And it was most obviously the point. I was never convoluted about it like I thought. Even as a child, it turned me on, though I didn’t quite understand that’s what it was until the incident in the bathroom. Then it was clear that it wasn’t just his attention, it was him that I wanted.

He was impressive, even as a boy. Something about him was mysterious. I don’t know where he came from, who he was, where he lived, or why he singled me out. He was intelligent beyond our meager ages, but I knew one day that I’d catch up. I think he knew it too. Our families never knew each other. I’d tried in vain to track him home several times. He always eluded me, but found me when it suited him. He snuck into my house when I was alone, crawled into my bed, and we’d spend hours together until I fell asleep. When I woke, he would always be gone. Just like a ghost.

In my dream, it’s the last time I see him. Well, the last time I see him as the boy I’ve always known. Years later, after I track him down, after his transformation into the person in the bed beside me, I see him as a man; as the man I always knew he’d become. But in foggy sleep, he’s still a schoolboy. Pink, peach-like skin glows health in the sunlight of the morning. Wearing a buttoned-up, collared shirt, I see the future him hidden among the creases as his clothes wisp with the breeze fluttering past my front yard, taking crisp orange and yellow leaves with it as it passes. His charcoal black hair shines hints of blue, complimenting the glistening lime of his eyes. He’s smiling and laughing as we talk about our most recent escapade together, when we tried to send Dee on a whirlwind spiral we thought induced suicide. We giggle about it. My face hurts I’m smiling so much, even when it’s silent between us. I can’t believe I ever forgot this day. It’s the day he left.

I have to go, he tells me. I can’t stay here any longer.

I ask him if he’s in trouble. He says no. This town isn’t big enough, he says.

I tell him it’s plenty big enough for him. Truth is I don’t want him to leave. Truth is he can’t leave. If he does, I won’t know what to do with myself, just like a co-dependent girlfriend, just like a weakling, just like a Dusty Springfield song.

I know, he says. It’s why I have to go.

I ask him where he’s going. He tells me he’s going east. He doesn’t have to tell me where. I already know. I ask if I can go with him.

No, he says. Not yet. And if you follow me, I’ll kill you. He smiles afterward. Tickles my chin with his soft baby fingertips, kisses me tenderly. I loved him then. When you’re ready, I’ll find you.

I cried when he left. In fact, I didn’t even wait until he’d left. I cried in his arms right at that moment because he was right. I’d have to accept my fear of being alone, accept my rejected family life, and acknowledge having to live without anyone who loved me, who accepted me. I’d have to do it alone.

You’ll forget all about me, he whispered. You’ll find someone new, and he’ll love you the way I never will.

I want to say I felt tears between his lips as he kissed my forehead. I want to say I could’ve talked him out of it if I’d tried hard enough because I want to say he loved me. No, I know he loved me. He wanted me to succeed, to progress. If he wanted me to stagnate, he’d have brought me along. Maybe he didn’t love me the way I loved him, but he loved me enough to leave me behind.

Even as I dream, I know it’s phony. I know I’m curling against him in the dark. I know the silent puffing on my back is from his muffled snore. I know it’s him. I don’t have to look to know his skin is bone white, or that his hair is the color of the last rotting patch of lawn behind the gates of Arkham. When I kiss him, I know his lips resemble the decomposing flesh of a red, Aegean plum. I don’t need to leave my dream world to verify any of it. And in my dream, when he’s not him, it’s still him. The him he was always meant to be, the him that could love me the way the other him couldn’t. Because I was the me I was supposed to be. The me who could go on without him, who didn’t need him to make me great.

I don’t know why I let who he was distract from realizing it was him. Why I forgot his kiss was the same, heated, passionate kiss that sucked every last breath; why his hold was the same constricting vice grip. I don’t know how I forgot the same fuck I’d always known, and it made it all clear. No wonder he reminded me of the false man of my memories. No wonder I clung to him.

I woke in my sleep and felt him shift behind me, afraid he was leaving. But anxiety ceased as our bodies adjusted, as he silently rolled on top of me and burrowed his face between my breasts. Timed just perfectly, his nestling coincided with my nostalgia, and wondered if he knew what I did. I wondered if the bleach-job had excommunicated his ability to love me. I wondered if too much had happened to us, between us, to ever get back what we had the way we had it, but my fear told me it was impossible. I wasn’t impressionistic anymore. We weren’t kids. We were killers.

Now was the time to finish what we’d started all those years ago. Lying around in my bedroom, making plans, exchanging ideas, shushing each other as my brother passed by the door. Even then, he was a narc; always tattling on me, on us. But my parents were never really around to take the threats to heart. Both successful lawyers, we mostly raised ourselves. It was the perfect prescribed lifestyle for troublemaking. And considering who I hung around with more often than not, it was easy to see I was headed that way. The one person who tried to stop me then erased, now eradicated. The dream; it helped me remember.

I woke, tears streaming down my cheeks, dripping onto the pillows. His hands tightly wound around my upper arms as though I may attempt escape in the night, the full weight of his upper body holding me down. Fast asleep. He hardly moved, even when I slithered my fingers through his hair, this lout with icicle strands softer than a mink stole, tepid at the scalp and warmer than steamed milk at his sideburns where my fingers gallivanted before gliding over the stray hairs cascading over his forehead.

I remembered, just as I woke, the very end of that last day; the day he left me to fend for myself and escape his shadow. I slid a few sloping, stray hairs back into their place on his head, slid my spread fingers through his widow’s peak, felt the coolness tickle the webbing between my fingers, and thought about that night, wiping away the wet streaks. I cried all night against my pillows, and not because both my parents were found dead from some obscure mixture of strychnine that forced their faces to shrink and constrict into contorted smiles, but because I missed him. And he was gone.

I wrapped my arms around him, felt a kiss between my breasts before closing my eyes and listening, feeling his heart beating, his eyelashes twitching, lips molding over my stomach as his mouth began to travel listlessly. Never again. I’d come too far, hurt too many people, and mangled too many lives to get beside him. He’d never walk away from me again.

[The Wench]

The final chapter. Hope you like it...

Chapter 23

Swinging over rooftops, flying as if an F-14 out of hell without a care in the world. Looking straight ahead as I pulsate, passing building after building towards the towers in the unfolding distance. I’m not late, but I rush regardless of the span of time I have to see me through this midnight errand. Always putting on the pressure, pushing myself to the limit. Testing myself. Making every moment count as if it may be my last. Never can be too sure in a city like this.

I slam my boots down on the cement. A pile of dust issuing upwards with my landing and left behind in my stride. Too much to do already before I have the time to worry about a little debris on my shoes, and check the time before leaning over the side of the building, smiling down to the pavement below. It’s a long drop.

A whistle gets my attention from my backside. Not our whistle. Our communicative, endearing little tune we pass back and forth. Another one. One from not so long ago, but of my past I’ve pushed aside, and turn around to face my opposition, waiting in the shadows.

“Hey Dick.” I smile for him as he approaches me with apprehension, just as I’m squatting down to open the pack I’ve been toting for the last 20 blocks.

“Hey…Em.” I s’pose he’s not sure what to call me by now. I have to assume B got the goods on me by now. And how his head must’ve pounded when he discovered it all.

He continues to close the gap between us, steadily striding in my direction before stopping a few paces away. I look up and see his face staring down at me with a stern and steadfast grimace, yet I know underneath the façade he’s covering up his concern. His curiosity. “Been a while.”

“Mmm-hmm.” This heavy rope, my burden to curl about my arm as though a wrangler. “Almost 6 months.” I succumb to my own surprise at its admittance. Half a year since I took that pivotal step. No, a leap, into the deteriorating abyss. The up and down roller coaster, the fragile unknown, the what-if legacy I thought I left behind so many years in my past, yet I got back on that bike and rode it as sure as the day I mastered it. No looking back this time. No second-guessing or reluctance. Of course, I had help.

“You…altered the suit.” His voice is cold and calculated, just like the bat. Fancies he were the next in line to secure the mantle, but hardly so as that will most notably be passed to little Tim. Dick has his own demons to tame before delving once more into the Bat leagues. What I believe to be a bottomless pit of desperations and anxieties. Never ceasing their strangulation. Forever unsatisfied.

“Not much.” I stand confident, a unique and addictive lust coursing through my blood this night. Every night for the last half a year, in fact. A sexual, seductive, primal combatant. “Still me.” So I crudely tore out the symbol. Big whup.

“Not really.” Arms crossed over heaving pectorals. Breathing in and out with purpose as he watches me unravel the thick cord in my fingers, beginning to secure the noose’s knot at the end. An unsung hero, the noose. Such a simple to procure contraption and a time-honored tradition. The beggar’s necktie.

“No…you’re right.” I smile as best I can; as best as can be expected. “How’s B? Tim?” Something to encourage my enjoyment that much more.

“The same.” He seems to shrug as if their behavior were simple nuances. As if children acting the fool with eventual hope they might grow out of it. Part of me wonders if he wishes it weren’t so. If he wishes he were able to change these irrationalities into something more normal, more stable. Be someone other than Nightwing for a day. What must that be like? I giggle aloud and his eyes jump from daydreaming wandering to my face, smiling at him with a secretive grin.

I know something you don’t know, Dick Grayson. Do you know it?

“I miss it, Dick.” I pull the cord of the noose in my grasp. Gloved fingers protected from the frozen night air, stabbing my cheekbones with miniscule pincers. Were I not so pale-faced already, I might’ve appeared ten shades whiter due to the snowfall. “I miss B, and Tim…being one of the bats.” I step towards him slowly, taking extra care to plant my feet in just the correct way. Slinking, seducing. A snake with charms. “I miss you.” He doesn’t back away as I wrap my arms around his neck. Breathe over his chin as if preparing for a long-awaited kiss.

“Then stop this madness.” He’s attempting to appear every bit the bat, but there’s something else in Dick’s voice that is distinctive to him. To his gentler character. Compassion. Consideration. Love. “I can help you.”

“You’d do that?” My leather-bound leg slides easily up his own, pressing into him with deliberate tension between us as if horizontal. As if in bed together.

“Of course.” I can feel his lips hovering above my cheek, as if attempting to control himself. “Tell me what the noose is for, Em. I can help you stop him. You don’t have to do this.”

Yes I do.

“Silly little bird.” His towering frame appears as if something born of the shadows. Birthed from the pockets of nothing, from the black void where his snow-white face makes him an outcast. An ugly duckling, only to be unleashed on this world as a beautiful swan. “I knew you were stupid, but I always gave you the benefit of the doubt.” His thick arm readily chokes Dick with a strength I long for around my waist. “I guess…I was wrong.” I fantasize him gripping my thighs, prying me apart. The knife in his hands, gleaming in the moonlight, making him more enticing. I knew he was there all along. Watching me as I closed the space between Dick and I. Waiting. Smiling that anticipatory curl, the excitement of the hunt. The lure. His wink as I embraced Dick in my lithe arms, pretending it were my clown, instead. Baiting him to the trap until the jaws closed down over Dick’s neck and I could end the farce.

The noose looks delicate and lovely in my black fingers. “It’s a present, Dick.” I twirl it about as if a monstrous cat’s cradle. A game in my grip. “I made it for you.” I slip it over his head, watching his eyes attempt to keep their composure. Stay calm and not resist until the moment is right. When he’s sure he can get out of this with a simple flick of his wrist and a call in to the Bat for backup.

“Isn’t she a doll?” His crimson lips smile down at me with pleasure, with adoration.

“A noose, Joker?” He chuckles. “Can’t you come up with something more original than that?”

“Well, you haven’t received the whole present.” His lips press firmly against Dick’s cheek, speaking in deep, quiet whispers. “A little slit here…” He mimics the draw of the blade over Dick’s lower throat, below the rope’s grip at his jaw line, and laughs. “More like a big slit.” Harder giggling now. “You fly over the side and drop 30 stories…without your head.”

“You’re sick.” His wide eyes attempt to look at the clown leaning against his side, dagger at his throat. The slightest bead of red oozing down his neck from the sharp ends.

“Not…my…idea.” I don’t blame Dick for being surprised. It’s not his style to let someone else take the credit, even if it was my idea, but he’s not quite the same Joker he was a couple of years ago. Hard to say someone’s changed and believe it.

“He’ll kill you too, Em.” Dick is starting to struggle a little in my clown’s arms. I’m sure he never anticipated he’d be stronger than he last remembers, but Dick is a slippery little bastard and only someone physically overpowering could detain him. We had to be prepared and with a plan as big as this one, drastic measures were sought. Going all the way to the top with it. However, I make sure to squat down and tie his legs, bound his arms for good measure.

“Sadly, every relationship must come to an end.” I’m aware of the dangerous line I walk on. Of course, Dick hasn’t given any concern to the fact I might be the one to end it, not the other way around. “But, not until he kills you first.” I tickle my fingers over his chest, running them down the blue and black absurdity that is his suit. Lick his chin that creeps back from me.

“I spoke too soon. You’re both sick.” He’s avoiding me like the plague, as if whatever I have is contractual through the air between us. By my breathing over him, I will make him one of us.

“You have no idea…how very sick I am.” I tighten the knot around his throat, choking him just a little. My fingers curling elegantly around Joker’s holding the knife at his flesh where we’ll make the first incision. “C’mon, Dickie. You’ll like it.” Carefully, methodically, I unzip the top of my suit, just enough to reveal my neck and the multitude of stitches that keep my throat clamped shut. A similar smile on my flesh that will soon be his. “I did.”

I am sick. There are so many sick things about me I can’t keep them all together anymore now that I’ve found a suitable outlet, someone who encourages every last one of my diseases to fester entirely. Someone who accepts the way I am without pause for concern and I’m not so depressed anymore. I don’t brood. I embrace it. I smile about it in the morning. I laugh about it in the shower. I giggle arbitrarily throughout my day-to-day and at night, when we make love, he tortures me and it’s cathartic. I sleep more peacefully than I ever have, even at the epitome of my duress a decade ago when I thought I couldn’t get any more flagrant. And in the morning, it starts all over again to my delight. It’s my perfect existence and it can’t last forever.

Dick tries to turn away, but only his eyes are in his control. He shuts them, trying not to see what he does, what I’m making him admit to himself. That I’m unsalvageable. He can’t help me because I don’t want it.

“You won’t get away with this.” It sounds funny. Rehearsed. Something from out of a comic book and yet so fitting when it comes from Dick Grayson when he’s about to die.

“You always say that…” His red lips curl into a hysterical grin. I release my grip on the knife and let him take it, have the last laugh as he turns Dick to face him and jams the blade into the top of his shoulder. Dick screams aloud with the first slice into his flesh. “But you and I both know…” The tension has mounted and the thrill as he cuts through his throat is like the revealing of a surprising plot twist. “…I will.”

His screams end once slitting his larynx. Only seconds left on his life before sending him silently over the side of Wayne Towers, the weight of his strong and virtually lifeless body working against him this time, tearing from the last bit of flesh as the noose pulls taut – or so I imagine. We don’t stay long enough to witness it, although the excitement is similar to the ball dropping on New Years, fireworks painting the sky with their electrifying displays of circles and stars, jutting out in all directions for our enjoyment. But we can’t stay to celebrate. We have to haul ass to Harvey’s, to the apartment building he keeps on lock-down 24 hours a day. Snipers hide on the roof. Steroid inhaling guards watch the doors. It’s a prison designed to keep people out instead of in and the whole thing is his immanent domain. They’re waiting for me. He and I have an agreement. A simple one made and one he has to abide by because of the coin. Because of our deal. And I’m prepared to keep it.

I can't wait any longer. The anticipation is killing me. Somehwere between Dick's demise and my escape, I pull a revolver out of my pack, cocking it and holding it against his forehead.

Not his escape. Just mine. That was the deal.

He smiles. He’s been waiting for it. I knew he was. I think he assumed he would do it first. I beat him to it. I hope he’s impressed. It’s what I’ve always wanted.

“I never forgave you for leaving.” It would be really dramatic of me to cry right now. It'll keep until he's dead and buried. I can fight it back.

“I know.” He’s still. Waiting. Handsome. Beautiful. It made me want him more than anything, to forget my promise, my duty, everything he’s done to me and go home, forget my cares, forget the plan. Just fuck it all. Fuck him. All night. At least one last time, but I knew it would be the unraveling of me. I couldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t let him happen again.

I squeeze the trigger. It's the loudest noise I've ever made.