Work Text:
It is.... an illusion!'
(Mullholland Drive)
'The character is sometimes portrayed as having a fourth wall awareness. [...] On page five of "Sign of The Joker", the second half of the "Laughing Fish" storyline, the Joker turns the page for the reader, bowing and tipping his hat in mock politeness.'
*~*~*
She wakes as night is falling. She is lying on a pile of clothes: old costumes she stole from a closed down theatre – mouldy brocade and dusty, moth-eaten linen.
She gets to her feet and stretches, scratching absently at her belly, then stumbles somnolently across the warehouse floor to the old employee's bathroom: a stall composing a toilet and a grime and dust-streaked sink. She performs a Victorian-style strip wash, working with a sliver of carbolic soap and rust-coloured water; then she shaves, a single-blade razor scraping sharply over goose-bumpy skin. The custom clothes go straight back on her shivering body.
Then it's time for make-up.
She pulls back the rolling door and steps out into the alley. She breathes deep lungfuls of corrupted air and opens her arms, tilting her head back to gaze up at where the stars should be.
She has that odd sensation again – that unreal, euphoric feeling, like the fugue state that epileptics describe falling into before a fit. It's only a paper moon, she thinks. That building is just a cardboard facade. The whole of Gotham is a cheap and flimsy set. The city's inhabitants are all just puppets, poor players, in some grand, cosmic shaggy dog story.
There's someone – or a whole host of people – out there, watching... but the spots are so bright they're dazzling her eyes and she can't quite make them out. But they're there in the darkness, all the same – she can almost hear them whispering and tittering, just beyond the footlights.
[Nothing is real, nothing is real, nothing is real] Tetch's schemes are just another level to an already evident truth. She wrings her hands, suddenly paranoid, anxious.
"What?" she barks at that yellow moon, which has he audacity to hang there over her head looking so obviously phoney. "What the fuck do you want?! You want to see blood, you want to see chaos?"
[I don't want be a part of your rotten game]
She pulls the long-barelled pistol from her belt, cocks it and sticks it between her teeth. [Whatcha' gonna do, huh, what if I say night-night? 'Waa, I don't wanna play no more' What then, hm?]
She pulls the trigger.
Click.
She snarls and cracks open the cylinder: an almost-circle of bullets and one empty chamber [HA!].
She throws back her head and laughs triumphantly [alright, alright, you win – I'll play].
It is hilarious, after all.
She's suddenly hungry and horny: she craves sensation. She'll get some pancakes, she thinks, then she'll go and look up her sweetheart [where is Brenda Wayne dining tonight?].
She turns back to the warehouse with a loping skip, then she throws her slight body against the sliding door and pushes it back all the way, letting the frigid moonlight filter in and disturb the slumbering henchmen, crumpled in their corners.
She leans a hip against the frame and raises her hands, gestic.
"Come on boys, let's put on a show!"
*~*~*
She waits in the wings.
From beyond comes the sound of talking and laughing, the mindless pabulum of human interaction. From the shadows she can see her quarry, sitting at a table just left of centre [ooh, ooh, that's good! Left of centre, just like her, uh-heh, liberal pink-ooo politics!]. Brenda Wayne is wearing a dinner jacket with silk lapels (cinched in at the waist – tailored for a woman, of course), a high-collared shirt and an undone bow tie, draped with artful abandon around her neck. her fine, dark hair is swept back off her temples. She looks devastatingly attractive, as always; her high, patrician features somehow allowing her to transcend petty qualities like 'masculine' and 'feminine'.
She holds a glass of something which she's pretending is champagne, and she's leaning against a very beautiful woman, one hand on her companion's bare arm and her lips almost brushing a shimmering diamond earring as she whispers something charming and falsely intimate.
The Joker feels something hot churning in the pit of her stomach as she regards the interaction [Look at me! Look at me!]. It's only a fraction of a second before she regains her equilibrium: she tells herself that soon enough, Brenda will see [they'll all see].
She tugs up her dress: it's a strapless, fishtailed number with hundreds and thousands of green sequins. She looks like a mermaid or one of The Supremes. She snickers softly and fusses with her wig: an auburn up-do, turned out at the bottom. In one hand she holds a walkie-talkie, in the other a zippo lighter, which she's opening and closing with vicious flicks of her wrist.
She strikes the flint with her thumbnail and enjoys the flare of light and comforting petrol scent for a brief moment before snapping the lighter closed again.
"Hey," hisses a stage manager from behind her in the wings: a portly, balding, gap-toothed man who is sweating profusely, "no smoking in the club!"
"Ye-ah," she agrees languidly, "no smoking anywhere, now-a-daaays."
The jerk looks like he's going to retort, but a hand emerges from the gloom – like one of those old comedy crooks for hauling a bad act offstage – and clamps itself over the his mouth. His eyes bug out and there's a scuffling sound as he is yanked backwards. She smirks in satisfaction: her help are well trained.
She brings the walkie-talkie to her lips and speaks in a husky undertone. "Let's get this show on the road. Places, people!"
She steps onto her mark, keeping her head bowed so that her make-up and scars stay in the shade. The piano kicks in; slightly off key because the pianist is a little distracted by the Luger jammed into the small of his back. The lights come up nice and slow: still, no-one is looking too closely [they don't get it yet].
She starts to sing, an exaggerated, hammy croon worthy of 'old blue eyes' himself:
"My old flame
I can't even think of her name
But it's funny now and then
How my thoughts go flashing back again
To my old flame..."
The lights come up a little more: the room has gone quieter. They're looking more closely: they can see that the make-up is too garish... that there's something strange about her, something wrong.
"I've met so many who had fascinating ways
A fascinating gaze in their eyes
Some who took me up to the skies
But their attempts at love
Were only imitations of...
... My old flame..."
Right on cue, the lights come up fully in a sudden burst. There are gasps and a few stifled screams. They know who she is now [ah, recognition!]. There follows a brief moment of activity, chairs scraping on the floor as people half-rise to flee [send in the clowns]. Her henchmen step into the exits, folding their arms forbiddingly like sentries with the guns resting uppermost, their richtus plastic grins lending the whole thing a nice grotesque, old-timey carnival feel.
She sings again, and begins to move downstage and left, towards the steps.
"I can't even think of her name
But I'll never be the same
Until I discover what became
Of my old flame..."
She stumbles, a heel caught in a taffeta underskirt [never one for poise... never... uh, finished finishing school!]. She scowls, whipping a flick knife from her bodice and slitting the skirt down one side, as quick and efficient as a fishmonger gutting a shimmering, fresh-caught mackerel. Oh, and everyone has gone nice and silent since the blade appeared... and Brenda is looking, that pure, cold fire of hatred and impotent rage making her dark eyes bright [ah, now theeere's a Bat-a-bat!]. The Joker is in love with that look. In fact, Brenda is the only one looking now; everyone else has their heads bowed submissively [meek little lambs!], as if not seeing the maniac means she can't see them.
"My old flame
I can't even think of her name..."
She breaks into speech to interject: "I'll have to look through my collection of human heads!" and cackles to herself.
When she reaches the floor she plucks off her wig and plonks it on the head of a man sitting at the nearest table, leaving it rakishly askew. He twitches and she can see how badly he wants to dash it to the ground, but he's too scared to move – scared of a woman who's made of paint and steel and madness under her mutilated cocktail dress. The Joker is laughing inside, bursting with glee [uh, I call this piece 'Man Pissing Himself in Auburn Wig'], but she keeps her composure as she continues with the song.
"... But it's funny now and then
How my thoughts go flashing back again
To my old flame..."
She perches herself on the edge of a table and lets her gaze rest upon a trembling woman wearing an unflattering asymmetrical black dress, her attention drawn to the string of plump pearls around a quivering throat.
"My old flame
My new lovers all seem so tame...
– They won't even let me strangle them!"
She wonders if... yes – they're hung on a platinum wire, the necklace won't snap, no matter what [perfect!]. The Joker grabs the pearls and twists them, cutting off the air supply. She sings the next lines with a wistful, desperate, pleading look in her eyes:
"For I haven't met a girl
So magnificent or elegant
As my old flame..."
Then just as suddenly, as capriciously, as she seized the woman she lets her go, watching her slump back in her chair and gasp, pretty pink bumps in her neck where those lovely pearls were so cruelly pressed. The Joker hops to her feet and is off again, weaving among the tables.
"I've met so many who had fascinating ways
A fascinating gaze in their eyes..."
As she delivers another spoken aside she lets a hint of mad scientist creep into her voice, and just a touch of nasal New York [ooh, that's good, that's nice!]: "I saw this eye! So I remove the other eye, that eye that kept winking and blinking at other wo-men!"
She points menacingly at the nearest person with the tip of her butterfly knife. The lady Gothamite in question goes deadly pale, torn between surrender and action. The Joker looks longingly at the white and spiderweb red of one eyeball and thinks the word 'aqueous humour', her knife twitching in her hand like a water diviner's rod. She thinks about how one deft movement [under, forward and twist] would pop that sucker right out and leave it dangling comically by its strings. She reins her whimsy in: if she plays it that way Batsy won't go along with the game later. She may not know anything about rules, but she understands consequences... better, perhaps, than even Batsy does.
She moves on, swaying among the tables and singing again as if there has been no break in the verse:
"... Some who took me up to the skies
But their attempts at love
Were only imitations of...
My old flame...
I can't even think of her name..."
By now she has reached Brenda's table, she leans a hip on it and fixes her lover's 'date' with a malevolent glare. "What was her name?" She asks thoughtfully, tapping her lips with the flat of the knife. " Doris, Laura, Chloe, Mannie, Moe, Jack? No, it couldn't have been Moe... I can't stand it, I tell you! This is driving me sane!" She pushes the unfortunate wretch, overbalancing her chair and sending her sprawling on the ground. All her beauty and poise is forgotten as she shrieks on impact, then sobs quietly, crawling off under a table somewhere like a wounded dog.
The Joker seats herself in Brenda's lap, absently noticing that her bella bambina looks a little pissed. The knife is gone, the hand-hot, finger-print smeared zippo back in her palm. She strikes the flint and holds it close to Brenda's face. The flame reflects beautifully in her lover's dark eyes but Brenda doesn't budge [no, not an inch!], even though by now the smell of red diesel is wafting up from the beneath the stage.
Her voice is lower, more intimate as she hisses:
"She would always treat me mean...
So I poured a can of gasoline
And struck a match to...
My... old... flaaame!"
The song is finished: she throws her head back and laughs [a claaassy caper!]. But Brenda doesn't appreciate it [not. one. bit.] – she's doing the serious face.
"Let these people go, Joker."
"Mmm," she pretends to consider it as she keeps flicking the lighter open and shut. "What will you give me if I do?"
"Whatever you want. I'll go along with it... just, let these people go and don't hurt them."
"Hmmm, o-kaaaay. Sure. I'll let them go... but first, I think I need a little... sign of good faith."
The other woman's eyes narrow and her tone becomes flat with distrust. "What?"
"Well... how about a little kiss? Hm?"
"Right here and now?"
"Yes, love, in front of aaaall these spectators. They won't mind – they don't look like pruuudes to me."
"You're insane."
"I'm getting a little tired of hearing you say that, honey-pie. So you'd better give me what I want... before me and the clowns think of something funny to do with these good people."
Sensing the danger inherent in further prevarication, Brenda manages to quell the fury in her gaze. She dips forward in a bird-like motion and presses her lips in a hard line against the Joker's waxy smile.
"Satisfied?"
"Hard-lee. Well, no wonder the Gotham Star never published a kiss-and-tell about the 'butch billionaire' – looks like it's nothing to write home about. Come on now," she licks her lips, "gimme your best shot."
"Go to hell, Joker!"
"Ah-ta-ta-ta!" she admonishes, gesturing to draw Brenda's attention to the henchman holding a gun to the temple of her former date.. The woman is pale and impossibly wide-eyed now, her bottom lip trembling faintly. She won't be accepting any more dinner-and-a-show invitations from Ms. Wayne in the near future.
Brenda's dark eyes flicker as she sizes-up the situation with the Batman's quickness and acuity, then she grasps the Joker's scarred upper arms and leans in. Her lips are soft and pliant now, she parts them and lets the Joker slip her tongue in, flickering and sucking, melding their faces together.
A dull click and a digital-sounding whirr sounds somewhere within the room.
The Joker pulls away and licks her split lips, enjoying the pinkish smear around Brenda's mouth [looove to put a smile on that grumpy face!]. "Alright!" she barks, "every-boooody out! You heard me. Look alive you degenerate Gothamites! Leave while you can still walk!"
The herd looks confused and uncertain for a moment, then sheep-like, it begins to filter out, tottering on high heels, bleating in fear. The clowns step through the exits last, closing the doors behind themselves. There they will stand, letting nobody in until Gotham's finest get here, as per orders.
"Alone at last, my dear," the Joker has time to say, before the Bat appears and she is shoved onto her back on the table; an untender slam. "Aha, ha ha haaa! Oh baby, why so cold? You didn't like my serenade?"
"You think this is a game? You're bored so you decide to threaten the lives of a few innocent people. What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Batsy," she sighs, rolling her eyes and licking at the joints of her lips. "Don't you get it, yet? I pull a stunt, you intervene, we fight, we fuck. The existing order is challenged just to be reaffirmed, et ceteraaa – that's how it, uh, works. Stop questioning it. I have."
"You're really sick, you know that?" Brenda's fingers dig deeper into the bare flesh of the Joker's upper arms. "This is some... demented kind of foreplay to you, isn't it?"
The Joker tilts her head to one side and looks up from under her tawny-coloured eyelashes, a mockery of a seductive glance. "Mmm-hmm. Now you're gettin' it." She raises her knee and pushes it between in Brenda's thighs, then moves it in a sliding, see-sawing motion.
In response Brenda gives her a hard slap with a flattened hand. The Joker tastes blood where her eyetooth has cut into the inner flesh of her upper lip. "Mmm,' she sighs, going limp with an appearance of sexual abandon, "baby, baaaay-by, why do you keep fighting our destiny..."
Brenda's voice has deepened in register, it's almost the Bat's now: "This isn't destiny, it's just... a mistake."
"Once is a mistake, twice a co-incidence... three times or more?" she clicks her teeth. "Now Batsy, I know deee-nial is both your bread and your butter, but cooome on!"
"Shut up."
"You know, you'd be a lot happier if you'd just stop torturing yourself. There's lots of people who'd do it for ya." This earns her a punch to the jaw. "Ow."
"You just love to bring out the worst in people, don't you? I should stop giving you the satisfaction."
"Uh-huh," the Joker agrees in a low voice. Dear, predictable Batsy has alway been her Rubik's Cube – a few manipulations [if you know just where to, uh, tuuurn] and suddenly all the sides align. She knows that there's a certain combination of words, looks and touches that will get her what she wants tonight. Intuitively, she reaches out and lays her fingertips, warm through the buttery leather of her purple gloves, against the stern angle of Brenda's cheekbone. The dark haired woman stiffens and pulls back. [No dice]
The Joker lies back down, letting her arm drop to her side on the tabletop, and brings that hint of vulnerability into her expression, affecting a clumsy earnestness inhibited by her inability to put her feelings into words. Her eyes flick towards the blue velvet drapes of the procenium arch, the bare stage, the empty tables and unoccupied chairs. "It's... it's a strange sort of eeevening, isn't it?"
Brenda looks for a moment like she might buy it, then suddenly she folds, ducking her head and letting out that seldom-heard hoarse, breathy laugh of hers.
"You gatecrash a cabaret show with an army of clowns and then you tell me it's a 'strange evening'? She softens then – that moment.
[Bingo!]
The Joker sits up again, leaning back on her hands, inclining her head in a way that will make it easy for Brenda when she decides to kiss her and opening her thighs so that the other woman can fit her hips between them when she steps closer.
"Hmm..." a lazy, lascivious smile, "I'm just sayin'."
Brenda is drawn to her as if as she's caught on the end of a line that has been tugged. Their lips are only inches apart when Brenda pauses; for a second that look comes on in her eyes like she knows she's being played, then she surges forward recklessly, just the way Batman strides into what is clearly a trap.
The Joker feels fabric rustle against her legs. "What the hell are you wearing anyway?" Brenda asks. "Is that thing meant to be a dress?"
"Mmm-hmm. Pretty... shiny." Brenda's fingers have found the slit in the skirt, have inched through the rough sequinned layer and the scratchy taffeta underskirt to touch the bare skin of her thigh.
Brenda's voice is rich and amused because she thinks she's in control. "What are you, a magpie?"
The Joker brings the warmth of desperation into her gaze, even though she knows Brenda will probably recognise it as artifice. "Just... wanted to get your attention."
"Yeah?" Brenda's fingertips caress the seam between her thigh and her hip, then veer to the left, brushing against the sandpaper-catch of the shaved area euphemistically referred to as the 'bikini line'. It feels good – the teasing lightness of the touch and the sharpness of the microscopically short stubble digging into her skin.
Brenda's lips quirk into that sardonic smirk of hers, but she seems to decide to skip the routine about the Joker's less-than-perfect attempts at personal grooming. Maybe she finally gets that it's all part of the look, like the grown-out dye job and the Estée Lauder lipstick worn on top of clown face-paint. Like everything she does and is it's a statement: a méchant parody intended to reflect on the idiocy of those who take the business of beautifying themselves seriously.
The pad of Brenda's thumb draws up the line where her outer labia meet; the more sensitive parts within tingle with expectation. Brenda's smirk returns, but the character of it is playful, teasing now. When the Joker widens her thighs, demanding a more intimate touch, the other woman merely lays a hand over her. The Joker can feel her own pulse there – it beats against the close-pressed palm of her lover's hand like a heart.
Brenda leans down, draping her long torso over the other's more compact frame. The kiss is voluntary this time and the Joker marvels at how yielding those narrow, stern-looking lips can become. As they kiss, Brenda's free hand slips down into the bodice of the ill-fitting dress and cups the other's right breast, thumb searching for her nipple and circling it. The Joker gives another lazy smile and sits up, twining her arms loosely around the other woman's shoulders and pressing her lips to the elegant arch of her neck.
"Don't like to hurry you, loveeer, but I give it about fifteen minutes before the cops finally get here. I mean I–" she gasps as the other woman's middle finger twitches against her like a violinist playing vibrato, "I set... I set up some aha obstacles they'll have to go, uh, uh up and down and arooound..." when Brenda drops to one knee, the Joker gives up on speech and just lets her head loll back for a moment, the fingertips of one gloved hand gripping her lover's shoulder, the other cradling the back of her skull and carding through the strands of soft, clean hair.
Brenda kisses it first, a teasing, soft brush of her lips against the exposed inner labia. Then a lax tongue draws all the way up to her clit and slithers downwards again. The Joker moans, loud and shameless, and it echoes around the room (which has excellent acoustics, after all). The next variation is the teasing tip of a tongue circling the small bud, and the presence of a fingertip circling her opening, dipping inside.
The Joker murmurs obscene encouragement, babbling unconnected curse words along with 'yes' and 'baby' and 'Batsy'. She feels the relentlessly deepening slide of the digit inside her, then the faint stretch of another joining it, and there is something almost hypnotic about the movement. She gets up on her elbows and watches from beneath eyelids that keep rising and falling along with the flow and ebbs of pleasure, always fascinated by the sight of her noble opponent doing things to her. She admires the image of the muscles moving beneath the skin of Brenda's forearm as her hand drives the fingers in and out, of long, dark eyelashes against pale, high-boned cheeks, and the tendons straining in her neck along with the flexing of her jaw.
By the time Brenda presses her face closer, the flat of her tongue now working in an undulating movement against the raised clit, the Joker is already close. There's that feeling of wonderful inevitability, the ever-strengthening waves which suddenly blossom, and for a moment she can't breathe, her whole body goes rigid and she shudders and shudders and shudders.
She's just coming down from the high when Brenda is suddenly all over her, grabbing one of her shoulders and pushing their mouths together while the free hand searches out her breast. The taller woman straddles one of the Joker's exposed thighs and rocks against it, hips jerking. A memory(?) surfaces – coming from that mysterious unknown part of her brain – of sitting on some big grown-up's knee and being jigged up and down [horsey horsey don't you stop...] and she has to stifle a giggle against the other's mouth. She tastes herself on Brenda and wonders what idiot ever compared the scent of it to fish – it's something far more subtle and elemental - something like salt rain, amniotic fluid and the tang of clean skin.
Brenda is either very turned on or in a hurry. The Joker opens her eyes to the sound of the rustle of fabric and the lowering of a zip, and suddenly a hand is around her right wrist, insistently pushing it into the opening in the front of the beautifully tailored black trousers [and they say only boys are pushy!]. The Joker is still wearing her lavender-coloured leather gloves, but they are unlined and so tight against her fingers that the impression of her almond-shaped nails can be seen though them; she can feel the heat of her lover's body almost as clearly as if her hand was bare, and the slippery texture as she moves her fingers lets her know how excited the other woman is. She follows the curve to find the very top of the slit and dips in at an angle, locating the discernible bump of that all-important little cluster of nerve-endings and sliding her middle fingers back and forth across it. Brenda makes that groany-gaspy sound which the Joker loves to hear, a set of blunt nails curling painfully into her bare shoulder as she establishes a rhythm. Brenda is still impatient, because after only half a minute of this she hisses the instruction: "faster, fast as you can go – I'm ready!"
As the clown complies she gives a hoarse giggle. "What is it baby?" she whispers in her lover's ear, her hand rubbing so fast it's almost a blur, despite the awkwardness of the downward angle. "What's got you so excited? Hm? – the danger? The smell of gasoliiine? The dress? It's the dress, isn't it?"
Brenda gives a soft shaky laugh that's almost a sob and trembles against her, translucent eyelids fluttering and her mouth opening wide as she rides out her orgasm against the Joker's exhausted, aching hand. Her body surges against the smaller woman's, then sags, so that she is almost crushing the Joker to the table rather than standing on her own two feet.
The Joker pets her lover's hair, mindless of the edge of the desk digging into her lower back, and murmurs meaningless reassurances, her usual stock of romantic phrases.
Minutes later, she watches Brenda fastidiously rearrange her clothing, stoic mask securely back in place despite the touseled hair and the bright red flush to her cheeks. The Joker props herself up on her elbows again as Brenda walks over to one of the artfully tarnished mirrors and examines her own face in it, raising her chin and turning her head to catch the play of the light.
"Jesus, I think you gave me stubble rash."
In response, the Joker throws her head back and laughs as she strips the leather off her right hand. "Yeah well, you ruined my favourite pair of gloves so I guess we're even." The billionaire ignores her, frowning in concentration as she dabs a napkin in someone's abandoned glass of water and rubs the smears of clown make-up from her own mouth and neck. "Hey Batsy-pie," the Joker calls, "want me to tie you to a chair for when the cops get here? You can pretend to be a damsel in deee-stress. Ha ha ha! 'Help, help, the fiend overpowered me!'"
"It's always theatrics with you," Brenda comments in a tone of wry exasperation.
The Joker grips the edge of the table and swings her legs. "Why not? Makes life more interesting."
Brenda slips her hands into her pockets and crosses the room towards her. "Everything's just a big game to you, isn't it? It never occurs to you that other people don't enjoy playing on your terms."
"I keep telling you, Batsy, people only think I'm a monster 'cause I'm... ahead of the curve." The Joker blinks rapidly, then licks her lips and gesticulates. " Look... look... these citi-zens, they don't get it yet, they don't understand the nature of game. But one day they're all gonna wake up and see just how futile all their efforts and busy little lives really are. Then they'll throw their hands up in deee-spair –" she points a finger and gives the other woman a level stare, "and they'll thank me. They'll say 'gosh, Joker, you sure give our empty lives meaning!'."
"By terrorizing and killing them?"
"Right! Clever girl, see I knew you'd get it..."
Brenda perches next to the Joker on the table and pushes the loose strands of dark hair off her face to fix her with another wry look . "Can I ask you a serious question?"
"Mm-mm... you can try."
"Were you born this insane, or did something happen to make you this way?"
The Joker laughs. "Ooh, you wanna trip down memory lane? Hm? Something you want to, uh, share with the group, Ms. Bitter Orphan With Misplaced Rage Issues?"
"Fuck you, Joker."
"No-no-noo-nooo. You really wanna know? I'll give you something. Did I ever tell you... what the boys in high school used to call me?" She traces her scars thoughtfully with the index fingers, sweeping the grin from ear to ear. "'Cunt-face'. That wasn't very nice, was it? I mean, no wonder I stopped going. What'd they call you?"
Brenda snorts humourlessly. "'Dyke'."
"Yeah? They knew about your... a-heh, pro-clivities, huh?"
"I was six feet tall and playing on the hockey team. My sexuality was irrelevant."
"So it's just a coincidence then?" This remark earns her another flat-handed slap. "Hey ow! Ow, that was my ear!" She sticks her finger into the offended organ and twists it about to stop the ringing. "Tch... fuck sake Batsy... you're a real mood killer tonight, you know?"
For a long moment, neither woman speaks. The Joker can hear the roar of traffic on the boulevard two blocks over, the very faint lilt of sirens that are further away still. Eventually Brenda says: "you know... I hate it when you make sense–"
"They say even a stopped clock is right twice a day, kiddo," the Joker cuts in.
"–but it is a strange evening."
There is something in the dark-haired woman's expression in that moment which the Joker has never seen there before: a hint of uncertainty... or paranoia, maybe. Brenda's eyes flicker around the empty stage as if she is searching for something that she fears to see.
[Do you hear it sometimes, Batsy, the audience whispering? The flutter of pages turning? Do you know that there are thousands of eyes straining to catch your next move? ]
She is sitting on the edge of the table, her hands dangling between her legs and her shoulders uncharacteristically hunched. The Joker has never thought it before because there's usually a trained dignity and an energy about Brenda Wayne that conceals it, but she is awkward: she is too tall.
The sirens are in the middle-distance now, winding their way closer through the rain-slicked Gotham streets, with their tortuous one-way systems, bridges, underpasses and overpasses. By now they'll have diverted past the burning double-decker bus she left on Upper-Fifth. The Joker slides sinuously off the table and kisses the fingertips of her bare hand, pressing them to the line of Brenda's narrow lips.
"And for my next act–"
"Yeah, yeah... watch you disappear."
"Just so you knooow," she adds, offhandedly, "it's, uh, on a timer, and you probably won't find it in the next twelve minutes, so if I were you I'd skeee-daddle."
The look of rage that blooms on Brenda's face is just priceless.
As the Joker moves beyond the circle of illumination centred on the floor of the club and steps into the murky darkness beyond she puts a wiggle in her hips, a little touch of film noir dame, just for Batsy. She calls out: "so long beautiful - see you in the funny pages."
*~*~*
She wakes up in a bed. What's-his-face's apartment [Something Italian... Bobby di Tortellini? Pizza-face Cannoli? Johnny Tiramisu? Ah, who cares...] – she forgot she still had his keys. She idly wonders if he's still rotting in that dumpster two storeys down from the balcony or if its been emptied yet.
Whatever his name was, Mr D. Ceased is still getting the morning edition of the Gotham Star delivered. She picks it up off the mat and brings it back to the bed, where she lounges wearing a dead man's robe and drinking black coffee.
As she unfolds the paper her eyes light up and she starts to laugh, a low rumbling that crescendos majestically until her whole body shakes and her jaw almost unhinges. Tears are streaming down her cheeks, leaving tracks in the faded, chalky residue of her face paint.
The headline reads: "HARLEQUIN OF HATE IN CLINCH WITH SAPPHIC SOCIALITE". The sub-heading elaborates: "Lesbian Billionaire Brenda Wayne in Hostage Drama with Notorious Terrorist 'the Joker' – Exclusive Pictures!'".
Below is a poor-quality, slightly pixelized colour photograph, obviously taken on a camera phone, showing herself in Brenda's lap. A red ring highlights the point of her tongue slipping between the other woman's lips. [Now theeeere's one for the scrapbook!]
Her bright, shrewd gaze lingers on the picture for a few moments and she laughs again, thinking of all the upstanding citizens giving it disapproving stares over their oatmeal and juice, then she moves on to read the accompanying article. There are eyewitness accounts stressing how terrifying and harrowing the situation was, but the prurient tabloid hack seems incapable of focussing on anything except the interaction between the criminal and the heiress. He wants details. He wants speculation. He's even dug up a couple of 'experts' – a psychoanalyst of dubious accreditation and some broad who apparently makes a living reading body language.
The Joker wrinkles her nose, her smile fading as her mouth twists up in anger at the presumption of these peons. While no doubt the morning broadsheets will suck up to Brenda and call it an 'ordeal' valiantly endured by Gotham's most cherished philanthropist; the common people (as represented by the insalubrious Star) seem incapable of viewing it as anything other than an opportunity to rub their trousers and gawp. They haven't even mentioned the beautiful explosion!
She reaches up and drums her fingers on the headboard [you try to send a message and nobody gets it! Dunno... why I bother]. Her brows draw down and she scowls for a full five minutes; then, like the sun reemerging from behind dark clouds, her smile reappears and she brightens perceptibly. Because now she has a plan.
A plan involving a gun, some prosthetic breasts, a script and a handheld camcorder. The hack will die, obviously, along with the so-called 'experts', whoever took that sneaky little pic, and some of the more moronic eyewitnesses.
She casts a fond eye over the photograph, wondering if Batsy has seen it yet. She hopes so. Maybe one of these days her paramour will finally realise that the city she so loves thinks she's a joke, whatever costume she happens to be wearing.
The Joker gets up and shuffles bare-footed around the apartment, pulling drawers open and slamming them shut until she finds what she's looking for: a marker pen and an envelope. She carefully tears around the article, folds it around a joker card and writes across it: 'FREAK LIKE ME?'. Then, as an afterthought, she gives the dark haired woman a little pair of scribbled bat ears. On the envelope she writes 'Head Honcho, Cushiest Office, Wayne Towers, Gotham'.
[Now, where does Johnny Tiramisu keep his stamps?]