Drabble: Blackout
Title: Blackout
Author: interpretthis
Fandom: TDK
Pairing: Batman/Joker
Rating: Mature
Summary: Gotham’s guts go dark one night.
Notes: For teithiwr. And, as ever, but especially today, for Heath. This wouldn't exist without you.
I am everything in the dark.
Thought’s pale corpse clunks to the floor between us and Feeling surges into play, an intoxication headier than any drug. The sharp toe of my boot slams into something, some part of him, and an eager giggle claws its way from my throat to meet his angry growl. Something hard and fast slams into my side and my giggle surges back to my lips as I inhale sharply.
Out the window, Gotham is a black labyrinth of heavy shapes pushing up through a suffocating curtain of shadow, of hard angles muted by darkness and silence. I can feel the fear, palpable fear, of a city doused in darkness. Somebody somewhere in some corner of the black world is afraid of the dark and that somebody is screaming inside, mind illuminating a whirlwind of fear. I feel a grin tear itself across my face. My nerves are humming, excitement pooling like a choked scream in the flesh above my elbows. My lungs are searing, muscles raging, skin on fire, pulsing under each blow. We lunge out at one another, again and again and again, canceling out any real effort, lost in the feelings of hitting and being hit, hitting and being hit, hating and wanting and hitting and hitting and hitting and being hit and unraveling in the darkness.
Another giggle. My lungs feel like strained bellows squeezing out air and frenzied sound. My words tumble into the craze, riding on thin, breathy giggles.
“I ca-can’t see.”
I double over then and my laugh scrapes at the dark corners of the room, all sharp nails and bright plastic and screaming delight.
His fist collides with my jaw. I can feel him deflating, feel his energy or his will draining away to hide with everything else in the darkness. I can feel his eyes close as my laugh shrieks down the walls and away. I see black, black, black everywhere, creeping through my eyes into the tunnels of my mind. I feel the clammy stick of unseen color on my face, feel blooming bruises and blazing cuts and sour breath in raw lungs and broiling heat in my gut and groin and all over, all over and I hear him slide down the wall beside the window that looks out on nothing, his own magnified breath ragged.
“What do you want?” There is a taste of a growl in his whisper.
I let the silence mingle with the darkness just long enough.
I straighten up, cricking my neck, stretch stretch stretching up and everywhere, moaning and sighing and laughing all at once before letting it all fall down and taking a step that echoes in the silent darkness like a particularly satisfying bomb blast.
“This.”
I feel him - his heat, his confused anger, his flesh (so soft and warm and human), his pride, his nerves his heart his breath his gaze his denial his gray area, hidden there amongst the black of the night and the white of nothingness.
My laugh slaps him hard across the face and I know he feels it sharper than any blow.
We are everything in the dark.