Ficsnippet: The Dark Knight (Joker)
I wrote this a while ago, but I'm pretty sure I never actually posted this before now. Not sure why. For zeitheist - Joker headspace, mentalhygiene-style.
Somewhere between the back of the cruiser - the second - the third? - cruiser, somewhere, after the Bat rigs him up to the girders and the cops come to take him, somewhere, right around there -
Things begin to fade. Little black whisps lick at the edges of his sight. His fingers start to tingle. The pain beginning to smear, thick like the greasepaint on his hands, across his bones and writhing in the muscle, oozing out the skin. Until.
Things fade. They go in flickers, stages.
His eyes cloud, clear, shiver, static.
It happens, sometimes.
It happens. He perches at the top of himself looking down, at his splayed and spectacularly, grimly bruised self, and what a day oh what a time of it, this was a good run.
It happens. Like the cat in the song, he always comes back, they might bury him this time but he's been buried before, only to dig himself out -
Here, with the help of another.
There, with a plastic spoon and a lazy staff nurse.
Here, again, a trembling hand who fears its secrets lets him loose.
There - here - transfer, bounce, static, the black stinging his fingers and wrapping heavy arms around him. His worn joints all sand, his eyes getting droopy, dreary, heavy, blank.
Somewhere, there, between the cruiser, and holding -
But before the restraints tighten over his wrists, pull down at his ankles and bend the breath from him -
Fading swift and rough and heavy - the gasping chortling breaths of an adulterer in the aftermath, the foaming tongue and snout of a hard-run hound. There. He catches a last memory - a badge and gun and the swooping, quivering wings of a bat-man, there, before he slips under.
They don't know what to make of it. Near comatose. They make note. Of the man - really, genuinely, vulnerably a man - passed out cold on a cot in twenty pounds of leather and canvas and good old fashioned steel buckling.
They make note of his face, raw under the beguiling mask. The roll of his adam's apple, swallow, breath. The steady spreading stain of drool under his cheek.
No name but - oh, baby, no one forgets that face, even unmasked and roughly cleaned and- peculiarly, unnervingly anonymous in spite of the heavy scars.
The man the orderlies avoid and the inmates buzz over, whispering - the man, Joker, sleeps, for two days, three, on the fourth the administrator adds a heavy, cloying sedative to the patient drip of the IV.
On the fifth the doctors relent.
By the sixth the man is blinking and groggy and starting to fight the restraints.
The basement is where they put the ones they don't know what to do with. It wasn't planned this way. The administrative doctor calls it a tradition with a wry smirk. The medical lockdown is halfway between the kitchen under the east wing and the morgue under the west. Caught in purgatory between slabs of dead meat, that's them. Three beds and a chorus of flourescent bulbs.
Across the hall from the groggily, steadily, inexorably waking Joker is a sad head case with a real name who used to be a real person.
The machines beep slowly, almost waiting for a reply - beeping hopelessly out to the semi-conscious body hooked up, IVs in his arms, IVs at his collarbone. Restraints in more polite and medical tones, grimly green and white with a touch here of brown - a reminder, or a threat.
Arkham is a place of the old school.
Harvey sleeps heavy, sleeps gone, mercifully sedated out of awareness. They wrap his face in gauze and carve fine sheets of skin from his own legs to patch the worst damage. Harvey can't refuse anymore.
I need to watch this movie again, like stat.
Somewhere between the back of the cruiser - the second - the third? - cruiser, somewhere, after the Bat rigs him up to the girders and the cops come to take him, somewhere, right around there -
Things begin to fade. Little black whisps lick at the edges of his sight. His fingers start to tingle. The pain beginning to smear, thick like the greasepaint on his hands, across his bones and writhing in the muscle, oozing out the skin. Until.
Things fade. They go in flickers, stages.
His eyes cloud, clear, shiver, static.
It happens, sometimes.
It happens. He perches at the top of himself looking down, at his splayed and spectacularly, grimly bruised self, and what a day oh what a time of it, this was a good run.
It happens. Like the cat in the song, he always comes back, they might bury him this time but he's been buried before, only to dig himself out -
Here, with the help of another.
There, with a plastic spoon and a lazy staff nurse.
Here, again, a trembling hand who fears its secrets lets him loose.
There - here - transfer, bounce, static, the black stinging his fingers and wrapping heavy arms around him. His worn joints all sand, his eyes getting droopy, dreary, heavy, blank.
Somewhere, there, between the cruiser, and holding -
But before the restraints tighten over his wrists, pull down at his ankles and bend the breath from him -
Fading swift and rough and heavy - the gasping chortling breaths of an adulterer in the aftermath, the foaming tongue and snout of a hard-run hound. There. He catches a last memory - a badge and gun and the swooping, quivering wings of a bat-man, there, before he slips under.
They don't know what to make of it. Near comatose. They make note. Of the man - really, genuinely, vulnerably a man - passed out cold on a cot in twenty pounds of leather and canvas and good old fashioned steel buckling.
They make note of his face, raw under the beguiling mask. The roll of his adam's apple, swallow, breath. The steady spreading stain of drool under his cheek.
No name but - oh, baby, no one forgets that face, even unmasked and roughly cleaned and- peculiarly, unnervingly anonymous in spite of the heavy scars.
The man the orderlies avoid and the inmates buzz over, whispering - the man, Joker, sleeps, for two days, three, on the fourth the administrator adds a heavy, cloying sedative to the patient drip of the IV.
On the fifth the doctors relent.
By the sixth the man is blinking and groggy and starting to fight the restraints.
The basement is where they put the ones they don't know what to do with. It wasn't planned this way. The administrative doctor calls it a tradition with a wry smirk. The medical lockdown is halfway between the kitchen under the east wing and the morgue under the west. Caught in purgatory between slabs of dead meat, that's them. Three beds and a chorus of flourescent bulbs.
Across the hall from the groggily, steadily, inexorably waking Joker is a sad head case with a real name who used to be a real person.
The machines beep slowly, almost waiting for a reply - beeping hopelessly out to the semi-conscious body hooked up, IVs in his arms, IVs at his collarbone. Restraints in more polite and medical tones, grimly green and white with a touch here of brown - a reminder, or a threat.
Arkham is a place of the old school.
Harvey sleeps heavy, sleeps gone, mercifully sedated out of awareness. They wrap his face in gauze and carve fine sheets of skin from his own legs to patch the worst damage. Harvey can't refuse anymore.
I need to watch this movie again, like stat.