niteo_logs | madness, as you know, is like gravity

Entry tags:

madness, as you know, is like gravity

Characters: Open / The Joker, probably Youji
When: June 23rd
Where: Joker's Lair
Rating: Unrated
Summary: The Joker's halls grow darker

Screams echoed down the hallway, piercing the unnerving stillness that padded the short periods between each mind as they all, in turn, fell apart.

The Joker, facepaint worn with sweat and his coat stained and torn, wandered down the halls in a sort of daze. All of his men had been locked behind the countless doors along the maze of corridors underground; they had begun with the first to be affected by the living nightmares, the images and spectres that were each men's greatest fears made real. As each criminal was affected, he was locked away, perhaps with others. When, at last, it came down to the Joker and his four strongest men, he turned around and shot them all. No room for sanity in this town.

Now, there was a disturbing look of ecstasy (or was it pain?) on his face as he paced the halls, savoring each cry, tasting with his ears the delicious sound of one man strangling another in fevered insanity. Hail Discordia.

I've got to get you out of here before the baby comes...

He snapped his head violently to the side, as though he could shake the voice out of his head like water in his ear. A growl escaped his lips. He fought to focus on the screams.

Jesus, Jackie, all I said was-

You said 'oh'. As in, "Oh, so you didn't get a job?' As in, "Oh, so how are we going to feed the baby?"

He heard his own screams echo down the hall, and it made him laugh. His sides were beginning to hurt. She stood in every corner, stared from every shadow.

Or was it that?

Let me give you something to remember me by.

Now I'm always smiling!

Mr. Napier, I'm sorry, but your wife-

Why so serious?!

He couldn't tell anymore; they all blurred together, the stories, the scars, and the cards. There was no past for him; he burned it down long ago. He cut that from himself when he carved the smile into his face. It had been over for a very long time.

...but why did it feel like some alien thing fighting its way out of his chest, to flop out onto the floor and look up, grinning at him with shining teeth?

His insides turned, excruciatingly, and he stumbled against a wall, groaning. Gradually, he slid to the ground. He couldn't hear their wailing over his heartbeat, his own cries of pain. His black little eyes trailed up the hall and, finally, up into her face. The pain became unbearable, and his sight dizzied as she tore at the small shred of sanity he had left. Still, he grinned, grinding his teeth down, his expression a grimace of hate and pain and lust.

"Eris..."

To anyone else, there was nothing there.

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Magenta eyes blinked from beneath the doorjam, Youji kneeling by the door and spying on the Joker with an uncertain expression. He was really loosing it. Which was saying something considering where he'd started out.

He'd been struggling through his own visions and nightmares, but as he had only the one incident he felt badly about in his short life, he was growing used to it.

"...Eris?" he echoed curiously.

The Joker toyed with his PDA, speaking into it with a low voice, inaudible to Youji. But something interrupted his conversation, because he flung the PDA to the side and clutched his chest. His body began to writhe, and alternating cries of pain and laughter. The sight of him was terrifying, even to somebody who was interested in seeing pain; it was as though the agony only served his sick sense of humor.

Ripping sounds came as he tore as his shirt, shredding it, and then began to dig at his chest, as though there were something there he could extract, that was waiting to come out. His giggles reached a feverish pitch.

"..." His eyes widened, lips pursing in confusion. He didn't understand what was going on, why he was acting so...he didn't even have the word for it.

"...Are you dying?" he voiced uncertainly, tail twitching back and forth, growing more and more uncomfortable wit this strange behavior. Was this what dying looked like?

By the time the Joker was finished, there was blood on his fingertips and deep gashes in his chest. He was on his knees, hunched over, staring at the ends of his fingers, still tittering. The clown glanced around, and finally, he noticed Youji. His lips parted in a wry grin.

"Not fast enough, kid," he said. "You, ahh... don't suppose you saw my ribs wiggling around, did you?"

There was madness in his eyes. More so than before, if that was possible.

Down the hall, somebody wailed in terror.

There were some odd noises before Youji worked his door open a crack. His head was tilted, eying the wound with a frown and shaking his head. He held his hammer behind his back, keeping it out of sight. "Ribs aren't supposed to wiggle, are they?" he asked, looking at him with a confused expression. His ear twitched at the noise, eyes turning to follow with a thoughtful look. He was trapped with a lot of crazy, violent adults. Maybe this wasn't such a good place for him.

A long, awkward silence followed before the Joker shrugged.

"...huh. I suppose not, nope."

Absently, he wiped his own blood off on his coat and looked around. Sanity seemed to have come back to him; as much as it would, anyhow. He grunted and got to hi feet, giving a passive look around the place.

"Wow, that little bitch really gave us some chucks, didn't she?" he murmured, still wiping his hands on his coat. He turned to look at Youji. "I'd say she's doing us a favor, though. Survival of the fittest, huh? Our boys are gonna be real dependable after she's through..."

"How do you know it's going to stop?" he asked calmly, still not opening the door all the way. He'd mangled the doorknob pretty bad in trying to 'fix' the lock. "Maybe it will just be like this forever." He looked almost bored as he said it, but his ears gave a downward tilt.

"...Why did you do that?" he asked, nodding towards his chest, "Doesn't it hurt?"

"Eh?"

He looked at his chest and torn shirt, and a look of honest surprise came over him.

"...uh, yeah. It does. Gonna go... get this patched up..."

The Joker then turned and walked back the way he'd come, with a distant affect. Business as usual... but the mental tug of war was only beginning.

Youji leaned out further, tilting nearly sideways before wandering out after him. The hammer was tucked back into his bear, and he trailed along few few paces behind, uninvited, but curious all the same.

"You're acting kinda weird, you know? Weirder than normal," he commented absently, "So who's Eris, huh?"

"Eris... Eris Eris Eris...... you're too nosy for your own good, short stack. Anybody ever tell you that?"

The thought struck him to pull the gun out of his jacket and put a couple bullets in the kid, but for some reason... he didn't. Maybe he was distracted, or his head hurt. Or maybe the kid wasn't even there and he would just be shooting at the wall. He loved the game of not-knowing, but it was a pain in the ass sometimes.

"Nope," he answered with a small smile, though it was a rhetorical question. He was curious, he always had been, and he didn't know much beyond the school. Nagisa-sensei usually answered his questions...usually.

"You going to tell me?" he pressed, half skipping after him.

Unturning, the Joker threw his arms out to the side with a theatrical flourish and began a recitation.

"So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature. For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due."

He maneuvered through the halls, ignoring the pleading of what men still lived, locked in their rooms. The Joker was going back to his office, where medical supplies awaited.

"Uh..." Youji blinked after him. The words sound pretty, but he didn't have a clue what they were supposed to mean. Two...two like...him and Natsuo? Was he talking about Fighters and Sacrifices? Was he he paired? Or was this some English language thing he didn't understand? Or maybe an age thing. "What's...Strife?"

He looked to the doors, giving a small giggle. If they wanted out so bad they should do something about it instead of whining. "Hey, I'm hungry, can you make me something after you fix that...? Everyone's going to starve in their rooms."

"You know where the MREs are. You're a big boy," he muttered, his arms flopping to the side. Goddamn, his chest hurt. He hadn't felt like this since the week of his arrival in Nesreca. The goofy ghost-images then hadn't fazed him; this was very different. It was in his head, a place volatile enough that it would hurt whatever came near it... including him.

"You know, I killed somebody for calling me crazy. I'm starting to wonder if he wasn't right."

"They taste gross, I want real food," he muttered with a slight pout, still wondering how the others were supposed to eat, not that he cared about them, but he'd been locked up too. Not fair at all.

"I thought you killed lots of people," he said, not seeing why one should be anymore special. Youji called him weird all the time, was he going to kill him?

He picked up his pace, cradling his bear to his chest and looking to the Joker's injuries. "You shouldn't do that," he said in an admonishing tone.

When they finally arrived in the Joker's office, the first noticeable thing were the bloodspatters everywhere. The remains of four of the Joker's men, the ones he'd seemed to rely on the most, were splayed in varied positions on the floor in pools of blood, their eyes long-since empty.

The Joker ignored them entirely, maneuvering around his desk and plopping into his seat. He rummaged around beneath the desk. Finally, he placed the first aid kid he'd been looking for on the desk, popped it open, and began to dig in it.

"Well, let's be clear. I don't make it a habit of trying to tear my lungs out of my chest with my bare hands. And I'm not a chef."

Gauze. Peroxide. Cotton balls. Lots of band-aids.

"I do kill lots of people. I just don't like it when people call me crazy."

"Ohh," Youji scurried inside, kneeling curiously by one of the bodies, poking at it and making a face, they felt...stiff. "What'd they do, huh?" he asked, sounding almost excited.

He gave a rather sheepish grin, "Can I still call you weird?" he asked, pushing back to his feet and coming to peer at the supplies. "Are you good at that? Medicine and stuff?"

"Funny, you make it sound like people need a reason to die."

He slipped the coat off and began to work what was left of the buttons on his shirt. His skin was hanging loosely from his chest; he'd been digging hard. Some creative application of thread might be in order.

"I do alright. Do me a favor and hand me a few of those bottles of water," h said, waving his hand at the crate of them in the corner. "And find me a towel."

"Most people need a reason to kill, don't they?" He shrugged, not all that concerned about why. It didn't occur to him that he could just as easily turn on him. Sensei threatened to kill them all the time, but she never did.

He nodded, toddling off as though time weren't of the essence, collecting the water and finding a towel tucked away in a mess of things, though it wasn't all that clean. "How you going to fix it?" he asked, handing over the items and making a face at the self inflicted wound.

"Reasons, points, purposes... I mean, you know that human beings are the only things that act like they need reasons for anything, don't you?"

Rather than spend all day jabbering about the procedure, the Joker only proceeded in silence, letting his actions do the explaining.

First, he poured almost an entire bottle of water on his chest to wash out the wounds. Then, he dumped peroxide in the wounds, then rinsed that out with the remaining water.

Then came the time-consuming portion: the stitching. While Youji had gathered the water and the towel, the Joker was threading the needle. Now, he took the thing and, with as good of a view as he could manage, began to sew his chest back together.

"Not exactly a work of- [hiss] -art, but it'll work."

"But you're human," he pointed out, not understanding the argument. He liked reasons. Simple ones.

He watched him work, thinking it was rather a lot like sewing up his bear when it had an 'accident'. So you could just sew people up too. That was interesting.

"Does it hurt?" he asked a bit too eagerly, "What's it feel like?"

"It's not exactly kitten kisses," was the snarky reply. Maybe two bullets would be worth getting the little creep to shut up. Still, he needed a straight man... a dragon... and this kid would have to do. At least until he had the Nesrecans set straight.

"Human, sure, more human than the rest of you freaks. Even more human than most people where I come from. More honest about being human, anyway."

"Kitten...kisses?" He didn't know what those felt like ether. Probably not bad, people liked kittens. Still, he gave a bit of a pout. Why would no one ever just explain it to him? "But...what's it feel like?" he pressed.

He looked down at himself with a vague frown. "M'not a freak," he muttered.

"That- [hiss] -would be like trying to explain red to someone that's color-blind. Or blind, period, since god didn't see fit to equip you with functional nerve-endings," he said, finishing the last of the stitching. He washed the wounds again with the last bottle of water, then began to pad it with gauze.

"As it happens, emotional pain is manifested in physical pain, which, as you know, you can't feel. So unless you're just pretending like I just bruised your little ego, you already know what pain is."

Maybe now he would shut up.

"They're functional," he said, a touch indignantly "Just not pain receptors. And god has nothing to do with it. That's how Sensei made us." Still, he supposed he understood that argument a little better than the others. It was like trying to explain how he felt things to people.

"That's it?" he asked, looking unimpressed. It wasn't pleasant, but...the way people carried on and screamed and cried and whatever...he'd expected something...more."

"Not exactly."

Finally, the gauze was lashed into place with bandages, and, grunting, the Joker got to his feet. He made a half-hearted attempt to button his shirt and vest back together before giving up... the thing was ruined.

"I need a new suit... damn. Alright, well, listen, I'll put it to you this way. Pain's got its limits; you know, you punch somebody, and yeah, it hurts, but not as much as folks think it's gonna. Where the money's at isn't what you do to their body. It's what you do to their hearts. The more scared they are about what you do to them, the more emotional pain they pile on top of it- the more they hurt themselves. See, you can't hurt because you're not afraid of pain, you can't feel it. Take somebody who's never been hurt before, or is more afraid of pain than anything else- your average, anesthetized joe- and you'll have a lot more fun."

Could've been a college professor. Why didn't he ever make something of his life? Been a productive citizen? The thought made him laugh.

Hearts, huh? That's where he felt the absence of Natsuo. Like there was...pressure on his chest, squeezing and tight. And that's why they'd let the Aoyagi brat go.

"I've never been hurt, does that mean I'm fun?" he asked, ears twitching, giving a small smile, "You're pretty smart. Just like Sensei."

The Joker only waved his hand at the boy.

"No, enough, we're done. No more questions. We've got work to do. The plan- we gotta get back on track. This is a minor setback. Let's turn it to our favor."

He left the room, wincing. Here's hoping his humanity didn't try bursting out of his chest again; there wasn't much flesh left to keep it there.

"But-" he started to protest, but gave up with a sigh and a wag of his tail. He liked questions. And work was no fun.

He climbed over a few boxes to grab some water for himself before exiting. At least the Joker answered some of his questions. Youji liked him...for now.

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madness, as you know, is like gravity

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