TDK Fic- Intervals- Father
Title: Intervals- Father
Summary: The third in a series of drabbles depicting the twisted relationship of Batman and Joker.
Pairing/characters: Bruce/Joker (eventually)
Rating: Overall NC-17, this chapter pg-13
Warnings For Series: Graphic sex, swearing, violence, slash, procrastination
Word count: 1083 (this chapter)
Disclaimer: This is where a witty disclaimer asserting my lack of ownership over the contents of this work of fiction goes. It is also where it is stated that every in fact is under the possession of the cool cats over at DC and WB. Suing is a total dick move.
This is a world where heroes dress in kevlar, hide themselves behind brittle masks and shrink away into the darkness where they decided they would thrive instead of blinding themselves on the harsh glow of a paparazzi camera and smiling like they don't have to heave around the burdens of the city that gave birth to them. This is a world where men and women see the first glimpse of theatrics in a steady line of banal, mundane grey and instead of speculating on the norm, they seize the new life and lift themselves up our of the status quo and tower over the people they left behind like angry Gods waiting to smite. This is a world where villains aren't just on your tv screen awaiting capture or trial, they're outside your window, ploughing down your children, making leftovers of your white picket fence. This is a world where walking to your neighbour's house after five pm stopped being safe years ago.
And in this world your lives aren't sugar coated and bubble wrapped by public officials who don't think you could cope with knowing. No, men with ghoulish pumpkin faces and dusty clothing popped that uneasily calm shelter with a glistening, sharp, very real, pin before you even had time to prepare yourself for the sudden absence of oxygen. This is a world where the stormy air is lustful and insanity is a seductress, luring the innocents into its claws before closing on them and slicing them open wide, ripping entrails apart like a woman in a deleted scene from an Eli Roth film. Oh, and the people are positively wanton. It's not surprising madness can thrive so well here. There are rows of ladies, thirty-somethings, hair pulled tightly back off their prematurely ageing faces as they packed the lunches of their squalling offspring, clawing at their legs. And they don't recognise the face that stared back at them in the mirror. The girl who's life is not her own. They are swamped in the lives they have on loop and when a maddened cackled sledgehammers its way through the sanctuary of their perfect, immaculate cotton wool padded delusion, the part of them not screaming in abject terror is craving more and more and more. This is the kind of world the good people of Gotham live in. And it's all down to one man.
But the man who started this, the man who spilled the chemicals together and sat back to watch the inevitable explosion, isn't the criminal they cower away from in pungent horror. The nightmare he orchestrates is never truly his own. He is a catalyst in the hurtling cancer growing within the pustules of Gotham, certainly. He drives the insanity with a purple pitchforked trident, cracking a whip and watching his prey scurry about like lice as he swallows them all, lulling them into the false warmth of death. But this chaos , these tumours growing on this breeding ground of bacteria, will never be something he can carve his name into. Though he possesses these people, this madness is something he can never possess. For it was not born out of him. He was born out of it.
The true source of this pain, this unrelenting, agonising, wretched poison can not be attributed to a hoard of criminals. Nor can the fault lie with an orphaned childhood or a struggling elderly man desperate to understand and aid the fallen son he had been left with. The blame can not be cast even on a sole mugger sending bullets like shock waves through the stench ridden air on an icy evening. Because no matter what happened, what choices were made, what lives were taken, no matter what he had suffered, he would always have arrived at the point where his steady fingers gripped the ebony object with a righteousness reserved only for the truly insane. And out of that, out of this act branded with the mark of “good intentions”, lathered in a balm of virtue, out of this, slithered the contaminated offspring, rising up in a silver storm over the sprawling skyscrapers, reaching up into the angry clouds as though they are trying to escape the plague on the ground. And it ignited instantly, bursting open, a pod choking on the delirium it contains. And all of it, every single last speck of derangement, of lunacy, of mania. Each and every disorder, neurosis and delusion defiling the face of this city. It was all anointed in the very second a sculpted cowl first sheathed a handsome face, blanketing it like a winding sheet. The minute he pounced off a building, the decaying walls of sanity, desperate to keep out the contamination and quivering under its might, deteriorated and crumbled. In apprehending the weak, he spurred on a tidal wave of oblivion and failed to notice. In becoming a symbol, the madness he inspired was inevitable, even if not intentional.
The man with the scarred face knows this and it sends him spiralling into a cavern where all that exists in the hilarity of this delicious irony. And he screams at the man, positively screeches at him to understand that he can bring his steel fists down onto the clown's etched face and body a million, a billion times and it will not matter. Because this, every ounce of filth the man in black is trying to fight off was never about him, it never came from him. Because Batsy...
This world, this infection, came from you. Our Father.