DANCED WITH THE DEVIL

Warm, low lighting edits her in real-time. Each time she moves, the shadow landscape shifts. Any suggestion of time is smoothed under film grain.

Arthur frames her cheeks with his palms. Piano fingers slide toward her hairline, then submerge. Blonde and black flow over him. He inclines his chin. Each point on her face becomes its own center of gravity: her septum, her plush lips, her chin, even the star trio tattooed beneath her left eye. He kisses her nose’s peak first.

Nix squares her shoulders, folding her hands over her husband’s so her fingers can thread between his own — and keep her upright. She teeters on one heel. The other remains slung across her husband’s thigh. Doubtless he’ll remove her shoe completely and hold it for the remainder of the evening. She’ll have little choice but to hop with an arm linked through his.

Arthur tilts his head so their lips cross.

She gasps. Warmth from his cigarette and a smoky, woody tobacco note she’ll never be numb to send a shiver outward from the center of her back. Staticky branches reach over the backs of her shoulders and slither down her ribcage. She doesn’t bottle her sigh. It’s soft enough that clinking from glass at the bar could overpower it.

Arthur angles his head. His loosely curled, dark veil of hair shields her blushing cheeks and kiss-fluffed lips. He dips his tongue past her teeth. The first click ends with his thumb dipping below her bottom lip, then pushing up.

A similar slick sound flooded their suite at The Witchery this morning. She’d hooked her legs over each flank of their central, freestanding polished silver bateau bath and turned on the faucet. ‘Purifying’ herself under ice-cold water by rutting the stream and teasing that he couldn’t touch her until their nuptials.

Joke was on her.

Arthur flipped her onto all fours without any standing water and had her inside the bath, one hand knotted in her hair and the other reaching under her to cup a bare breast. She deepens the kiss from that memory alone — as if she can transfer it through their mouths. Arthur nudges her face with his own, indulges in Dirty Shirley’s fine film over her lips, then drops a thumb to her swollen ankle.

That shoe needs to come off.

One-handed, while Nix wilts into another kiss and folds her arms over his uneven shoulders, Arthur fiddles with his bride’s shoe until it slips over his right ring finger. He lets it dangle a moment, then flips like a bowling pin so he can snatch the heel and set it on the leather cushion alongside him.

The air touching her bruised foot stings. She bristles, then lets her jaw shake once and slouches her shoulders.

He kisses below each ear, where watermelon body mist and a salty sheen of sweat mingle near her pulse. The soft, flat plane of his tongue sweeps over that beat, then his thumb soothes her ankle in a languid circle.

She can’t hide in here. Amber light announces her every move quicker than any social feed.

He savors each spangle lancing off her ruby and diamond-encrusted engagement ring, off the bleeding heart wedding ring whose heart-shaped florals carve her skin if she removes it. She wanted it that way. Arthur clears his throat, frames her own with his hand in a loose cage in the event that Callum arrives with their food, then taps noses with her again and takes a deep breath.

Another pulse vibration on the table commands his attention.

Arthur turns the iPhone over so its red case is to the ceiling.

“You’re still a sister,” his reminder’s delicate enough to dissolve like spun sugar. The pad of his thumb draws the slope of her lower jaw. “You’ll...always...be a sister,” the smile that exaggerates his crooked maw isn’t meant to patronize, though he hadn’t meant to smile at all. His ugly face just does it. Arthur’s shoulders buck into a breathy wheeze-laugh that sends his face into his shoulder, “I’m sorry…” is muffled.

Nix frowns. Cups her husband’s cheek and draws his face close enough to rest against her shoulder.

“Why?” she purses her lips, then shakes her head.

He grimaces in an attempt to clear his throat, shaking his left leg and half-glancing at her, “Do you…” another splintered laugh that canes him to kill, “Do…you…” he coughs, “I’m sorry — do you remember him?” Arthur struggles to get the words out for her own protection, but it’s too late to claw them back, “Wilder?”

It doesn’t help to soothe her, but might him: Nix’s long fingers stroke in repeated downward sweeps against her husband’s high cheek. He’s tensed beneath her fingers, trying to cage the equivalent of a hive of angry wasps inside of his chest. He doesn’t need to strain and pull on his own lungs the way he does, Nix would take that chorus, even if it’s unintended, and treasure it. Any sound that proves he’s still here, still with her, is enough for her to covet.

Her own glossy eyes are fixed on the sight of their server slipping from behind the bar. He’d re-entered through the swinging doors of what she imagines to be a modest kitchen. Their modified meat platter’s balanced on just one of his hands, a white cloth that Nix mistakenly called a napkin on their arrival slung over his forearm and the crook of his elbow. The dining room is tight, considering the ostensible affluence of the place, but Callum swerves himself around each table with practiced ease.

He catches Nix’s eye, smiles, and seems to pick up the pace just enough to prove to the Waynes how much he cares. About his tips, perhaps, Nix thinks, but they actually pay their restaurant staff here. Arthur will still leave a roll of twenty-pound notes as thanks. Even here he prefers to use cash.

“ Your platter… ” Callum looks between the two of them, expertly ignoring the solemn and heavy air that now sits like a fog about their table. “ Minus the pork, as you requested. ” Fleetingly do Nix’s stroking fingers catch his eye, and the bleeding heart diamond, framed by rubies throwing colourful fractals against the back wall. Once he’s laid the slate slab between the couple, he folds his hands behind his back and performs a subtle bow that’s becoming somewhat familiar.

After a moment’s distraction, he continues, “ We’ve added more beef, some extra Scottish cheeses, and a taster of Haggis… ” Despite their steep expressions, both of their eyebrows lift simultaneously. It’s almost uncanny. Callum’s mildly proud of himself. “ Just in case you haven’t tried it yet on your trip yet. ” Ere Arthur can ask, he replies, “ No pig involved, whatsoever, you have my word. ”

Nix keeps her husband’s head rested against the bony shelf of her shoulder. It can’t be comfortable, especially when she hikes her shoulders working over time to thank their server. She feels Arthur swallow what feels, even to her, like rocks in his throat, and winces on his behalf. When he finally twists to view his wife’s face, it’s insipid. The sharp lines of her profile remain, but the canvas they cling to has turned more sallow than he’d like. She purses her lips in some silent plea that he’d perhaps forgotten the line of questioning that locked the muscles in her neck, but he hasn’t.

A kiss cossets her collar bone, though it trembles more than he’d like.

“ I love you. ” She reminds him. It’s also proof that she hasn’t entirely slipped into the back passenger seat of her mother’s car as it screams and groans and collapses in on itself and the ball of the flame at its centre. Her fingers sweep down to his jaw. Her voice stumbles into a whisper. “ I love you... ”

A long, slow breath punctuates her initial reach forward. She plucks a crumb of bread from the very edge of their slate and drops it onto the tip of her tongue. Tastes like ash, but she’s gotten good at masking the cringe. Her wide eyes settle of the relative Jenga pile the kitchen staff have constructed. It would have needed a damn architect, to get it all pieced together. Like a house of cards, should she tug something from the bottom she’s sure it’ll all fall. She tries. It doesn’t. Now she’s left with a wedge of brown loaf between her fingers. She’s supposed to dip it in the concoction of oil and balsamic, but her brain has stopped speaking to her muscles.

“ Nixie… ” Arthur says her name like she’s praying. It shatters something in her chest every time. “ Sweetheart. ”

She answers him, finally, “ No, ” And it’s gentle, though farther away than either of them would like.

Nix catches herself briefly, blinks her way back into Arthur’s proximity. He’s so warm. The sun shifts through the glass behind them and caresses him like she would. Like the flames would.

“ There’s… pieces, I think. ” Robotically, she dunks her bread. Drowns it. It isn’t released from its olive-oil and balsamic grave, but is squished against the trough’s bottom. She watches. “ But I-I don’t know his face. O-o-or his voice. I can’t remem– ” Bread is swapped for a drink. She doesn’t know which, just prays it isn’t the original Shirley Temple. This whole time, she’s been stroking his cheek. Nix’s laugh’s bitter, and into her glass. The red gash of Arthur's phone haunts her periphery. His brother dropped from the sky, and they haven't let each other go since. “ I’m not a sister. ”

#☠ ref. ⋙ 𝙖 𝙜𝙤𝙤𝙙 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙬𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙙 𝙞𝙣 𝙜𝙤𝙡𝙙.#nsfw cw//

darkly-entries

There’s nothing impressive about a fifteen-year-old’s sparse, repetitive chant-like melody. The stupid G string is so flat it drags the surrounding chords out of tune. E carries a vibrato he can’t fully kill either. Guitar tinnitus.

How the air can be dry and damp simultaneously doesn’t help. Move closer to the boilers and washing machines, one can feel the air squishing between their fingers. Certainly made composing a lot more difficult in that hiding place. Not like it was a closet. Water damage eroded part of the wall away enough to hear the city. He won’t let Nix get too close. Not worth the asbestos exposure.

The strings don’t catch his fingers as well as they should. Not even with a lit cigarette drying them out. As a teenager, he noticed an ash-film worked better than a pick. Couldn’t afford a pick to know, but he imagined it outperformed that stupid tab he should’ve just stolen. Never did. Couldn’t bring himself to pilfer something he didn’t earn.

This guitar sounds awful anyway. The arachnids whose webbed condominiums are experiencing tectonic movement inside its sound hole would agree.

Out the corner of his eye, he gauges his wife’s sweet expression. Shadows contour her cheeks with greed. Even 2250 Anderson Avenue hungers for Nix.

The lone, sallow pull-string bulb swings.

Arthur pauses mid-pluck to listen again. That chipped, heavy green door to the building’s ‘lobby’ squeaks shut.

Scuff...scuff...scuff...scuff...scuff…

Arthur inclines his chin, searching heavy iron piping for the gurgle that’d confirm his suspicion. A groan followed by two rhythmic bangs from within the ground-level apartments. Radiators. The ancient kind that branded his ribcage as a toddler.

Creeeak…!

Nose parallel with the ceiling, Arthur slides a sidelong glance toward his wife, half-smiles, then declares, “Mail cage.”

Another metallic scrape lets him know the resident retrieved their bills…and are shuffling along to those rusting hulls the landlord dares to call ‘elevators.’

Arthur doesn’t bother waiting for the bay to ding open. They’d be here all night if so. Instead he resumes plucking, vexing his jaw when the frets don’t obey.

This piece of junk will never be in tune.

He taps his foot. Dust crunches beneath it. Disgusting. He holds his breath and rocks his shoulders back and forth to find his place. White-filmed eyelashes turn downcast as if he actually needs to remember placement. He can hardly see.

A faint vermillion gleam from his cigarette illuminates the gossamer grotto within. It’s a matter of time before something thick and black crawls onto his hand and he yells…then crushes it with his bare hand so Nix will yell and call him a barbarian.

Dark ringlets stray from behind his ears, moistened and lifted by humidity that makes his clothes feel heavier than they are.

Keeping the guitar flush against his chest, almost over his heart, Arthur sings so softly if the tenant upstairs were to open the door to the basement, they’d have no luck hearing him, “Fallen from my web, I have landed in the stream…” somehow he's still warm, yet his lyrics are so cold.

Nix coats in goosebumps. Every hair on the back of her neck and arms stands. She bristles, squeezes her bleary eyes and forces herself to breathe, and drops her face into her husband’s bad shoulder. He claims it causes him no pain. She’ll never know for sure.

His scarlet maw elongates. Arthur stamps a kiss on his wife’s hairline, then resumes wrestling the broken acoustic that at this point should operate on muscle memory alone.

The teenaged boy in him’s voice cracks where he normally wouldn’t allow it as, too cavalier for Nix’s fogged gaze to handle, he resigns, “Been drifting on a while or forever so it seems.”

Arthur’s shoulders lower. His head hangs low enough to let shadow cut his mouth in half. Dark pools swell under his heavy brow, too. Shadow isn’t supposed to score him.

Nix frowns. Tries to pretend she can still take a drag off that cigarette he’d lost to her. It’s hers now.

His fingers find the progression like twenty-seven years haven’t passed.

“My mother cries above me, ‘You have left the world too soon,’” his breath hitches, yet his fingers don’t lose their place. Arthur plays it off like he needed to clear his rotten lungs into his blazer, then continues, “If I were a spider and my mother was the…” he allows a note the him of today would never allow to warble, “Moon...!”

Somewhere, hiding between age-old appliances, under the blanketing air that’s thick as soup, she swears she hears someone return the note. That lone, long rasp crawls from the dank spaces around them, dodging the rats and cockroaches and avoiding the spiders in their webs lest it be to rattle them. It unfurls like wet silk, frayed at its edges and desperate to cling to any inch of exposed skin that it can. The haunt climbs their legs, slithers up Arthur’s torso, and wraps itself around his throat. Nix can tell by the way his Adam’s apple appears to shudder, but he makes no move to sweep himself clean of the noose.

Instead, his grip affirms around the guitar’s neck, whatever good those strained and broken strings are to him. He hugs the instrument to the barrel of his chest, and she finds herself wondering it once fit him better. He’s lost weight over the years, despite all of Nix’s efforts – continual torture and a cocktail of medications that now make his stomach refuse even the most basic of nutrition have shrunk his skin to his bones. Anyone would think he’d touch like withered leather, but his skin remains soft in spite of scarring. She knows it even through his jacket, which her chin nuzzles uselessly as if he can feel her anymore.

This basement’s eaten him. Again. This pit at the bottom of this malevolent tower. His mother’s apartment is far above them, and yet the damp in the air, that smell of musk that Nix can’t rid from her nose; the long, eager shadows creeping from the corners toward him; the rattle like dried bones in the walls – it’s all the same snare. And she’s let him lay his throat over the teeth of it all over again.

Nix’s grip could slice flesh, the taut muscle of his bicep clenches only slightly at her sudden grip. She’d designed her own talons as an extension of her teeth. They’ve carved through skin and sinew on more than one occasion and will again. Only Arthur, thus far, has proven safe, but the tighter Anderson Avenue’s grip becomes, the less she’s certain hers won’t prove damaging.

The thing is, he’d allow it. He’d welcome those scythes sinking right to the bone if she let them, because it’s all he’s known.

The inside of her cheek suffers the wound instead, one whet canine sinking south and carving a new ravine in the soft tissue. Blood floods the flat plane of her tongue, fattened by dread and the thirst this dearth encourages. Nix breathes in, tastes her own blood, and then swallows it as she’s done countless times before.

“So I've come to rest now down in my riverbed, ”

Loss paints her husband’s timbre. It wobbles more than she thinks is typical, but loses none of its warmth. His tone melts across her sunlight, and threatens the dank corners that’d otherwise close in on them. She loosens her grip around his arm, but only so her thumb can sweep in long, slow arcs against the muscle.

“ Dreaming of the life I left tangled up in the web… ”

In spite of the strings disobedience, his fingers glance them with a fluidity that’s only begotten by years of muscle memory. She could never join him, and not only for her lack of talent: when she glances at the cigarette she’s pincered between her finger and thumb on her right hand, the two dead digits in the middle jut up. They’re not even dead together, her ring finger’s adopted an arachnoid bend and her middle points to the boxes lining the opposite wall. Both shudder uselessly. Even now she tries to will them to move, flinch, anything as long as it is with her say. No dice.

He’ll always play for her. He’ll never be able to teach her.

“ My mother sits upon the hill singing a song or two, ”

The boy now, he steers his torso toward her own so she remembers what’s being gifted her. She sees him toying with the words in his head, hunkered down in some dank corner the light refused to touch, or struggling through a migraine while the light above flickered directly at his eyes. His mother, his torturer, floors above and plotting further hurts, and yet he never thought he deserves to be clear of her, of the walls penning in his violation. He’d turned this cave into art then, and does so now.

“ If I were a spider and my mother was the... Moon! ”

That chorus again, that echo bleeding out from somewhere beneath their seat. It laps at her ankles but otherwise takes no masticatory glee from her. Just him. Nix drops her head and almost sinks her teeth right into his shoulder, but the latch of her maw becomes a kiss just in time.

#☠ aes. ⋙ 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙧𝙗𝙞𝙩.

lanndscape

“It doesn’t want anything from me,” though allowing his eyes to stray from hers feels like a sin, Arthur slackens his jaw and reminds himself that the central dome is gone by searching for it.

An open wound takes its place. Perfect for Gotham to keep injecting poison while taunting the once-grand vaudeville hotspot with an escape. Allows God to inspect the failed social experiment that is Arthur Fleck once in a while, too.

Here on the ocean floor, Arthur watches smog and clouds too dark for moonlight to penetrate swim by through a sinkhole. Pale cream plaster has become marine snow.

Nix follows her husband’s eyes. Shuts her own to feel that erosion dust her shoulders and hair. It’s subtle, barely perceptible, but now that she’s searching for it she can spot those specks dappling the suit she’ll need to steam-clean later. He does laundry. He’ll insist on pressing his own clothes. She’ll do it anyway, then bring him some lavender leaf latte she learned to brew online. She’ll never admit it, but that Nespresso machine was one of the best gifts he ever bought her.

Rainwater and soot-dulled gold leaf accents scintillate when Arthur’s iPhone flashlight is nudged.

Shredded lath and rusting steel supports form a fanged maw, greedy for the descending chords Arthur has since paused. Those hammered notes have orchestral weight. It wants to crunch those bones.

Arthur has no sustain pedal to let the notes resound. Each keystroke has more force than necessary. Leaning forward pushes more of his weight onto those wobbly keys to bolster their staying power.

The piano pulls down, beneath a crumbling tower so his belted, “Sanctuary—!” flies above it.

Those big chords that he’s been forced to project on his own now ring.

Nix rocks on her haunches, catching the groove in the dip of her spinal cord. It licks at each inked phase of the moon. One at a time her shoulders slant to savor it. She sways, chewing on her bottom lip and stealing his cigarette once his hand placement slightly adjusts.

“Breathe it in, scream it out…!” ricochets.

Hairline fractures in his warm voice add just enough grain that it’s battle-weary, yet defiant. Each descending note’s percussive, strengthened by his shoulders throwing what slight weight he has into the ivory.

Nix struggles to remember to breathe while looking over her shoulder.

This broken space exaggerates each note. Every word lingers in the balconies long after he’s sung them. Some return higher, others an octave lower and distorted…almost like they got tangled in the tattered velvet curtains or clung to by greedy spirits.

“No one’s coming to save us!” his last line hadn’t dropped from the auditorium before he pressed onward.

Tidal wave against stone.

He crashes.

He flings all his might at those immovable foundations while opening vowels and performing an opaque dance on a bench that has more mites burrowed beneath its dusty cushion than Nix cares to know. Her arms are rested on it. She doesn’t want to know if she’d inadvertently crushed a spider sac.

Smoke vents from her nostrils. Nix folds her elbows over her husband’s thighs, attuned to how the muscles flex and jerk despite having no pedals to help shape the harmony into anything other than stakes he’s shoving into the rotting stage. Daring his own voice to climb it.

He declares, “It doesn’t scare me!”

THUM!

Nix gasps.

Arthur carries on playing, yet tosses a sidelong glance her way as if the Newark Paramount just proved his point.

“I’m with you all the way down...!” is returned to him in such a beautiful operatic, she clears the teary film from her eyes by blinking and flings liquefied mascara across her cheeks.

She scans that pulp of overturned seats and debris for secret collaborators. Perhaps a physical manifestation of Gotham herself. Arthur’s always claimed the city is sick, that it’s evil, that the very ground its foundations were built upon is sour.

He defies them. Screams at them through notes no living being is worthy of bearing witness to.

She drags her wrist under her eyes. Scratches herself with a stud from her leather jacket. Doesn’t stop her from rocking along — left, right…! Those descending notes she’ll follow straight to Hell if they played.

Instead of closing the chorus, he loops the same notes he toiled at and explains, “In clown school…” a coppery taste fills his mouth, “I was taught...audiences aren’t obedient,” he glances out into the auditorium that still remembers its purpose, but doesn’t quite recall the mechanics, “With music…” another glance over his shoulder into the darkness, “Each space receives differently. Some…” he coughs into his shoulder, “Hold it. Others…” he winces, “Hate it. And then there’s that third thing…” pieces of his piano melody are handed back to him several beats later than they should, “Some spaces...change it into something new.” To prove his point, Arthur loops back around to a descending cry, “Sanctuary—!”

Dust drifts from the ceiling. Pigeons ruffle their feathers and scatter from the rafters. Empty, overturned, and pitted seats both bounce that sound off of them and unfurl it.

When Nix looks up, she swears broken, dangling chandeliers and stage lights have constructed him flint-sharp, fractured, glinting mechanical wings that riffle from plaster-snow.

Even the cobwebs, years old and long deserted by their former arachnoid inhabitants, seem to bend toward him, like saplings do toward sun. He has no idea the power he wields in the dark. Any Talon or other such creature lurking is unlikely to leap from the rafters and show itself on account of the fact that it’d make Arthur stop. They’re mesmerised the same way she is, fog behind the eyes and an almost drunken numbness claiming the body. She's not special. Nix can’t feel the ends of her fingers, but can feel the way the shells of her ears warm.

Her knees threaten to creak and destroy the otherwise perfect ambiance her husband’s built note by note; she locks them so they can’t betray her.

Somewhere up above, even the night’s sky peaks through the open gashes in the theatre’s ceiling. Silent in worship. She thinks if anyone could lure the stars back into view above Gotham, it would be the one sent from them in the first place. Arthur might be a Wayne by name, but he’s far larger than that moniker could ever dream. He just doesn’t know it.

Nix swallows something too thick and viscous to easily go down, so she has to clear her throat and dismantle the quietude sat adoring the final shreds of the echo. His voice will haunt these walls for days to come. The next rough-sleeper or urban explorer to stumble through the double doors and into this auditorium will find Arthur’s beautiful, nigh-florid notes still swelling above them in the proscenium. Lingers like abandonment, like wanting. A haunt she’s already jealous of.

Peeling her eyes away from the looming shadow she’s certain she can see his voice whirling around within is a task itself. The muscles in her neck ache and she leads herself, eyes first, back to her husband. He’s still crowned in light without origin, so bright and white that she has to fight not to squint. He’d think it judgement or wound if she did. Instead, Nix blinks. She sharpens the details of his face as she does so and spots the elongated ends of those cyan diamonds beneath his eyes. Her husband is never far from tears, but seeing the footprints of them in blue rivulets down his face always stuns her.

Something in him knows he isn’t supposed to be here. Something in him mourns the loss of the celestial paradise he’s actually meant for.

One hand splays at his knee, the other reaches to catch the teardrop before it slinks from the sharp shelf of his jaw and down his throat. It’s cold, while the rest of him exudes warmth. Event the matte paint he wears as a second face can’t suffocate what’s always felt like the sun’s caress from beneath his skin. He thinks the opposite. He thinks he’s moon-mad, werewolf – perhaps he’s just adored by both the same way.

Instinct withdraws her hand, so that she can lay a kiss to the pad of her thumb, now damp. The scant briny film throws her heart into a fleeting sprint. She feels the same girlish pull at her insides that she first felt across from him at a checkers table. Nix adjusts her boots against dust twice the thickness of their soles, and finds herself glad for the slits she cut into the knees of her bootcut jeans. Even if the chill draws gooseflesh from those bony shelves, it means she can sink a little further, lean a little closer to her husband’s lap.

She cradles his knee the way a mother would a child wounded, kisses the zenith because she can’t reach for anything else, then rests her brow there.

Beneath the ghost light that crowns him, seeping in from the bloom of penumbrae above, she’s cast as some penitent, wanton thing, clung to him ere ascension dares to begin. She’d hold the poor man down with her teeth and they both know it. The world knows it. The world continuously watches her do that very thing.

Years of fighting has turned her edges jagged and awkward. She moves with all the effort of a vixen shot. Nix folds her arms over his thigh and battens down for a hug that bends her spine in ways it protests loudly. She doesn’t care. Her hair drapes like a tangled curtain toward the stage floor, mottled with damp and fuzzy mould and dust that’s likely taking years off the lives of their lungs. Her husband’s can’t spare that many to begin with. Her chest hitches at the thought.

“ Does it scare you? ” Somehow she’s manages to lay her cheek against his leg and swivel her round eyes up toward him. Arthur might only view those pallid sclera, veined red from sleeplessness and booze. If the visual perturbs him, he’s kind enough not to show it. He's too good to. “ When it changes? Or… does it… stop being yours? Once you sing it? Like you sent it out? ”

#☠ nix. ⋙ 𝙞 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙞 𝙙𝙤 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪; 𝙞𝙩'𝙡𝙡 𝙗𝙚 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙩.

mardatann

A pathetic, “Awwww!” from NCB Studios’ live audience arrives with distant thunder.

Arthur searches the sky first. Pale green eyes lift and shift around the cloud wall.

Hotel Empire’s blood red lettering amalgamates into a single spotlight. It shines on Nix first, washing her face out so those watching at home can wonder how far along into her sixth alleged pregnancy she is.

Arthur’s symphony loses shape. Brass, snares, and saxophones replace his strings. The program's tunes are cartoonish, advertiser-friendly, and tough to dance to unless they’re playing someone else’s charting hit.

When he sprung out from that curtain on the night he died, Arthur recalls heavy lights blinding him. 'Seeing bright lights' during Murray's alleged assassination had a whole different meaning he was too stubborn to acknowledge at the time of his deposition. A current Arthur suddenly hated guided him toward the dais by an unseen hand. Murray actually stood to greet him whilst making fun of his final guest for being a virgin and exploiting his brain damage moments prior. At least Dr. Sally stood up. She’d have testified against him too had she lived long enough after that night. Likely sued him for some form of sexual assault.

His feet regain fluidity first. They spun and slid on their own volition. Arthur didn’t dance according to Nix: he glided.

Tonight, he’s reluctant to turn to the window-wall that’s been replaced by shadow and a live studio audience. Typical, yet the heat of the stage lights makes sweat gather around his collar and under his nape…or perhaps that’s misting rain.

Gotham herself has joined in. She spits on Thomas Wayne’s prodigal son. Not the kind with body, rather, that thin fragmented film that shoots between clenched teeth.

A laugh he can’t cage punches his ribs from the inside. He can taste his heart.

Nix hasn’t unraveled from him, though Arthur hadn’t stopped his own performance to notice the terror in her eyes. Blood in her mouth.

Werewolf places a trembling thumb on her bottom lip and tugs until he sees the crimson wine. His shoulders sag into a laugh he doesn’t mean and canes nonetheless. Aqueous slants and sways haul his shoulders along with a beat he can scarcely remember.

Told Dr. Beatty he remembered 'the music.' That was a crock. The lights stung most. Still do. He squints from their ferocity. Keeps his arm tight around his wife’s waist to shield Nix, too.

She isn’t as bothered by flood lights blasting into her face. She’s had far worse firing at her head. As has he at this point.

Werewolf cradles her face with his left hand, but turns his shoulders on a diagonal to try and get as broad a view of the studio as possible.

Shadow drops like a great black curtain, masking the faces who paid nothing to attend — dirty secret about Live! with Murray Franklin. Studio audience was paid in pizza. Tickets were free. Not easy to get a hold of, but free nonetheless.

His first attempt to breathe’s no less winded than he was on that night. Arthur’s voice is pared back to a candied whisper. He can’t will it stronger.

Rustling and laughter from the studio audience competes with the roar of city streets and air conditioning that refuses to relent — it can’t or the stage would swelter with so many heavy-duty fixtures and thick woolen suits.

His own blazer’s a wool blend…and polyester. Somehow.

“Nixie!” the urgency strikes her with a scorpion’s tail.

She freezes. Wall-eyed and clinging to his face despite the white and some red pigmentation transferring now that the rain’s having its way.

“Phoenix, I…”

Murray’s desk and microphone lurk behind her. Logo’s splashed onto the wood-paneled wall.

A lifelong dream of his!

First instinct still shrugs Arthur's jacket off. Doesn’t even bother asking if she’s cold. Nix never dresses for the occasion. He drapes that cherry red garment over her shoulders and rubs her upper arms to try and keep her warm.

Hums from the air conditioning and that hokey jazz orchestra killing Ashen World on his looper makes it difficult to hear her — especially when his own ears are ringing.

He taps their foreheads. Next breath is ragged. Shifting from foot to foot on the enlarged tile’s become too smooth…because it’s no longer stone.

The stage had flooring so burnished, one step too fast and it was a concussion or rolled ankle.

Nix would’ve rolled her ankle. She’s struggling to stand in those heels as it is.

“I’m sorry! I-I couldn’t…” Arthur swallows, but doesn’t have enough breath support to enunciate, “Give you what you would’ve wanted — Sweetheart, I-I-I-" his eyes slingshot from one side of her face to the other. He recenters his grip around her waist to shield her from the wind and their live studio audience carving their names in her back and upper thighs.

They’ll never love her.

He needs the world to.

It won’t.

Not as long as she’s in the way of a myth.

He taps their noses, then repeats, “I’m sorry. This was...”

Gotham laughs at him through police sirens and helicopter whirs.

“This was stupid,” he nods. “It’s on me. I-I’m sorry, it’s on me. I love you!” Melpomene’s blue half-diamond drags over his mouth with a tear, “So...much! I should’ve asked. It’s your birthday, b-but we couldn’t leave the city — I’m sorry!”

Her head shakes before words catch up to her, eyes wide in panic like she’s heard a gun cock behind his head. Her nails drag pinkish lines against his scalp, but she can’t let herself sink beneath the skin – she can’t even knot his hair. Not a single inch of him besmears no matter how much work she does. Nix rolls right off him. There’ll be no evidence of her while he’s sat on the dock tomorrow.

“ No. ” Her features bend in some attempt to knot together at the centre of her face. Her head continues to shake, loosening blonde and black extensions so that they roll over her shoulders on the next wet wind. The rest he’s trapped under his jacket, lain across her shoulders.

“ No. ” Her teeth flash. Arthur doesn’t flinch. He might not even be able to see through the fog occluding his vision. Cyan paint bleeds down toward his chin, barely smearing the vizard he’s used to hide his face from the world, from her by proxy. “ No, stop it. Stop it. ”

Adamance whets her tone more than she’d like, but her nerves are shot to nothing. She feels them screaming beneath her skin like an open wound so clearly that every pull of her spine is masked by that full-body pang. Arthur can’t see how her skin peels and rends the raw tissue, wriggling like a knot of insects exposed to open air for the first time. Her feet shits against the tile, the scrape of her heel effective punctuation while she juts her chin and cranes her neck so far forward she almost bashes their faces together.

Vexation curls her upper lip; something close to insult or betrayal’s sharpened the bones of her already long face. She shakes.

“ You… think I wanna run away with you because I’m ‘disappointed’?! ” She reels back just enough to watch his painted face. Comma-like red brows mask his own, and Nix has always had to work a little harder to gauge his expressions beneath. Gotham thrives on that mystery, to her it’s a counted loss. She works her jaw, affirms her grip on his hair. “ How’d you do that math? ”

Arthur breathes heavy enough that the taste of his last cigarette overrides the cocktail her fingers shake for, abandoned on the piano lid.

A glance left repaints the scene. Riktor’s body’s just out of view, but she can smell him. Resisting the urge to wrinkle her nose, Nix blinks and tries to clear away to fog of frustration, but that blanket is too stubborn to lift. It’s tied to the allegorical thorns gripping the organs in her chest.

“ It’s beautiful because, ” She palms her husband’s chest with more force than she realises, “ It’s… fucking you. ”

Blood threaded between her teeth’s all them more prominent when she bares them for their audience of a dead or dying city. It’ll get them too. It’s already had him by the throat for years. Any notion of abandoning this beartrap, even if he says the words himself, are a pipe dream. She’s going to die in this hole just like everyone else. Just like they always told her she would.

She can’t get him out.

“ Don’t guess with me. ” Quieter now. “ You know me – you’re meant to know me. ” Her eyes roll upward, though there’s no stars to guide her attention. The only allusion to a constellation drifts across the neighbouring building and buzzes like a nest of waiting wasps.

Her fingers splay over Arthur’s heart. It jumps with all the terror of a little boy.

“ It’s not safe. None of it. He, ” She doesn’t gesture past the piano to whatever’s left of her former owner. Corrects herself instead to disguise their company. “ It’s all I hear. It’s not safe, not here, you’re not– ” A deeper breath lures her husband closer. Her fingers curl against his shirt. She clenches her teeth. “ It doesn’t stop. This fucking place. ” A whisper shapes her heartbreak, “ It keeps winning. They, ” Gotham, the drones, Harvey Dent, the Court, his brother. Nix’s bones shake with useless energy. “ – keep winning. ”

A breath. She haunts his eyes with her own. She loosens the fingers of her hand and snakes them up his neck until she cradles his chin and holds him to her.

“ Arthur Fleck. I want to go, with you. ” She doesn’t blink. Eyes so large they could devour him are frozen to his face. “ You sing it, I say it. ”

#☠ jokerphoenix. ⋙ 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙞 𝙣𝙚𝙚𝙙 𝙞𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪.

89rooms

“Just lay still,” he says, I want to teach you to see what it is I see.“ And then his hand is on my waist, right above where my hip starts expanding. “Close your eyes now,” he says, and I do and his hand roughens its touches. “My hand can’t see, but it sees.” And now his hand is wide across the sea of my belly, his fingers seeking, seeking…. My hand can’t taste or smell,“ :: fingers moving down into my hair :: “but it tastes.” :: A finger enters :: “And it smells.” :: and moves in me :: “My hand can’t speak,” he says, his voice wet at my neck, “but it speaks, it speaks in you.”

— Peregrine

Arthur’s own orchestra has to chase his last syllable. It unfurls with a storm’s ferocity. Wide and sustained enough to cradle cloud — shield that rooftop from the inevitable downpour neither is dressed for.

He makes it look so easy.

The long, angular line of his jaw doesn’t unhinge like a snake’s. He doesn’t grimace or flare, rather, he pushes his tongue down to open a stubborn smoker’s airway.

Brine winds thirst for him too. Attempt to steal that note.

Nix feels a hammer to her own chest, yet obeys some phantom hand to set her Ginferno down on the Steinway’s lid. She only tastes copper anyway. A crimson flush seeps into the grooves of her lips. He’ll notice once the swell of his own strings relents.

Arthur doesn’t release that note until the piano finishes vibrating beneath him.

Nix hasn’t breathed. Her chest rattles. Mascara and liner burn her eyes. She’s forgotten how to work her arms, instead watching red from Hotel Empire’s signature loud fifty-foot lettering splash her husband’s matte white foundation and add a chestnut tint to his dark locks, which wind and rain have damped just enough to loosen from behind his ears.

Then his left hand abandons the keys in pursuit of hers. The right settles at the small of her back. Every finger finds purchase, bending and burrowing in her skin so little room’s left for elegance.

A waltz doesn’t call for such a desperate clutch, yet he clings to her waist as if Heaven will return the wings that were so cruelly torn from Phoenix’s back.

Instinct curls her fingers around his. She hopes the lunar craters carved into his wedding band leave prints. Nix is supposed to settle her free hand on his lower back, but she’s clumsy. More like greedy. Nix latches onto his bicep. Still hasn’t remembered how to inhale, yet smiles until tears spill over the apples of her blushing cheeks.

One tap reminds his loop pedal to carry the piano melody he’d been recording live. The sustain pedal has kept his final chord shimmering for as long as possible before his orchestral arrangement flourishes into a funerary, yet seraphic swell that no doubt will somehow be felt at street-level.

Arthur’s boyish smile urges her closer. The scarlet second smile remains immaculate despite kissing her and battling elements that intermittently threaten her birthday evening.

Nix tries to giggle. Ends up blubbering and giving herself paper cuts on the inside trying to find breath support and not faint. Her pulse thumps his thumb.

Arthur's folded her fingers between his own and raised them to eye-height, yet leads with a bob of his left hip. His shoulder dips and rolls to his own rhythm.

She’s led into her husband's explosive, yet free, “Let’s escape—!”

Her ankles aren’t ready for the first turn, but don’t need to be.

Arthur carries her into that step, head tilted so the wind drags his hair over his face in dark lianas and creates a pale swathe around her.

Nix can neither smile nor weep. She dissolves into some horrific blend of both that she can’t remain standing through, yet clings to his arm and squeezes his hand in her own. All she can think to do is arch her back towards him.

His footwork somehow navigates enlarged stone tiles not at all meant for dancing let alone in heels.

“Escape this ash—en world!” another dip and groove from his left hip and shoulder don’t belong, yet he sways into it and lets her swing from left to right.

She’s safe.

Her head dips so far back, he can brush his lips over her misspelled throat tattoo and let his voice ring like those church bells he’s trying to make less doleful.

The orchestra and piano soar without him, yet part for the lightning bolt of his voice to flare up and sparkle with blinding voltage, “Where the hearts are sold,” he never releases her waist while twirling her.

Nix almost loses her footing, but uses his curved hand around her waist as a guide and never releases his skin.

“And the flags unfurl!” once his hands reposition, Nix is turned in circles that resist being slow, yet are measured enough to find the eddies in his own rhythm, “We’ll…rebuild…a realm from forgot-ten dreams…!”

Another spin dizzies her.

Nix lands awkwardly, but catches herself on his arms and drops her jaw for a clumsy, soundless laugh she can’t find the breath support to vocalize.

Arthur bends his voice around each lyric, using himself as the only instrument this masterpiece needs, “As creation rises…”

He projects only for her, yet she knows God is listening — Gotham is listening.

Doubtless those little black security cameras and mobiles aimed from nearby windows capture Mr. and Mrs. Joker in some improvised, messy waltz he keeps breaking up to swing her and move his hips — he can never be still below the waist. The current won’t allow for it.

Nix, too, tries moving her hips even though scoliosis protests such a maneuver. A dull ache blooms across her lower back, yet she knocks her chin back and lets him dip her until her leg hooks around his hip.

“Through fractured seams...!” Arthur lets his voice climb high enough to ease into a note no one would think his baritone and tenor-favoring timbre could support. It's a mixed resonance that engorges and pushes into the night.

Nix squeezes his hand. Kisses him hard on the mouth. MAC Chromacake theatrical pigments taste like nothing. It’s not ‘greasepaint’ when each tin is over forty bucks.

“Far a-way..." Arthur holds her lower back and tucks their hands against his chest as he sways them from left to right and touches his forehead to hers, “Beyond their schemes!”

Gotham watches with the cruel intention to prise them apart. It’s only competition is in Nix’s remaining eight fingers, some of which are bent around Arthur’s hand. Her other she’s snaked up from his shoulder, against his nape and into his hair. She doesn’t trust the sky, nor the few scant windows surrounding the Empire on either side with his life. She doesn’t trust anyone. She’s been proven right to – tomorrow looms like an oblique blade, the guillotine he’s been walked to – she is currently walking him to – has been built by his brother and ex-lawyer. All Nix has been left to do is watch.

The corpse’s right eye, or what was its right eye, rolls in the hollow socket it’s been dropped into. Riktor’s grey-blue stare has become milky since he was ground into the gravel atop the refinery's roof, but his sight is no-less sharp even while being eaten by those clouds. He doesn’t speak – he can’t speak, he’s been shredded from the nose down. The butt of the rifle destroyed his jaw first, and still he laughed. Even now, were Nix to turn her head, she knows whatever’s left of the teeth in his skull are clacking together. It’s not the shudders characteristic of rigor mortis. He’s laughing.

Her fingers splay across Arthur’s crown. She makes as close to a shield as she can with her hand, protecting him from any shrapnel of bullet that might manifest, shooting through otherwise empty air and cutting thick static. Arthur’s back is to the city. They both know it wants desperately to eat him and contort whatever scraps are left into a performance. They’re both letting it, or they will.

Nix has to swallow bile and remember they were dancing once her husband’s pulls her in and upright, out of the low dip he’d had to perform without her. Dead weight grows guilty once she has both feet back on the tiles. Her next breath is part-gasp, like it’s the first time seeing his beautiful face in a decade. She maps his features with darting eyes, an impish simper fixed on her face with all the obstinance of the damp in the air. Her hair’s gained some limp volume, curled at its ends. Arthur’s remains untouched. She can see that truth in every soft curl framing his face, brightening the jade caged within his eyes, and the sparks even deeper within. He can’t see the guillotine she can, or is wilfully ignoring it for her. She hates that.

Not willing to free his crown up to scrutiny or a bullet, Nix lets loose his hand so her own can cradle his cheek. Her grip’s too tight to carry the façade of girlish ease she’s been fighting to portray, but she hopes her face picks up the slack while her fingertips seek to sink past his skin and under the high shelf of his cheek bone. He’d let her dig her way through that soft tissue like the rot the rest of the world knows she is.

The loop pedal prolongs the song’s life, despite the fact that Arthur’s performance has seemingly ended. Even if it hadn’t, Nix crossing her mouth over his would thieve the final lines. It’s clumsy, punctuated by a force that knocks their teeth and would make anyone else wince. For Nix, however, it isn’t enough. Her tongue sinks past his teeth, bloody gash and all, and the rest of her torso follows that swing forward. Her breasts flatten against his chest, the spine arched so steeply that it screams at her. Nix ignores the pang that would pull tears from anyone else and locks her fingers through Arthur’s hair. Any wrong move and those claws capping her fingers will sink right into his scalp.

“ Let’s go. ” She says, before they’ve even parted. Her heart pinches, either for her own pathetic, muffled mewl, or the fact that she knows declination’s to follow no matter what. “ Let’s just go. ”

He should’ve known better than to siren song her with the notion of escape.

Nix’s eyes only shift so that she can watch a little red light, floating alongside the next building. Drone footage will flood her explore page come morning, just in time to overlap with their arrival at the Courthouse. No one will know why she’s there – what good can she do? Has she done? Watch as the boy she’s loved since she was eighteen is disembowelled at the behest of those he trusts. That’s what she’s done.

Nix almost chokes on her own lungs. The bend of her desperate fingers beckons closer the possibility of her nails breaking through skin.

“ I love you. It's us. Let me take you somewhere. ” Let me. Begging again. She’s the siren, though the promise of something, somewhere inviolable is ill-suited on her awkward face. Her teeth chatter when the hinges of her jaw lock so tight they hurt, blood in the grooves of her teeth. She paints his cupid’s bow with it when she kisses him. He’ll resist her. “ Somewhere quiet. ” The drone groans, too far away to hear her whispers, pressed into her husband’s open mouth, “ Somewhere safe. ”

#☠ rig. ⋙ 𝙠𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙖 𝙬𝙞𝙣𝙠 𝙤𝙛 𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙚𝙮𝙚.

sheisaninterior

Bury me in leather.

“So escape, escape…” as much as his vibrato longs to soar with the orchestra he’d played live, recorded, and is now playing back on the loop pedal, Arthur restrains that famed four-octave range, “This carnivorous night...!”

His weight sinks into the left hand to hammer chords like distant church bells.

It took some Wayne magic to get a Steinway onto Hotel Empire’s rooftop terrace. Red letters spelling the famous venue’s name bleed between wisps of low-lying cloud. Gotham never allows for stars or even a full moon, but tonight — for Nix, it stopped raining an hour ago.

His right hand barely brushes the keys. Those notes climb with the strings. That melody flutters a thousand feed above the city. Sustain pedals capture both the notes that broke too soon and the tremble in his voice that liquid encouragement can’t embolden. It’s likely his magic still echoes into the night.

Arthur slants his shoulders to the melody that doesn’t belong to him, but one would never know it. His chin touches his shoulder, talented hands occupied by the keyboard so he can’t reach for the birthday girl.

Tomorrow, he belongs to Gotham’s Justice Center and the strange side of Assistant Prosecutor Harvey Dent’s direct questioning. Tonight, fairy lights and fake plants and large grey stone tiles envelop him and his wife as she cradles a Ginferno.

Nix's forehead touches his. She scrunches her nose to hide that her mascara’s already begun to bleed.

He’s going to twirl her again. Catch her waist, keep her steady so her heels don't skate over a groove in the tiles given this isn't by any means a ballroom. He's made it one. The enormous sign's buzz provides percussion that she almost wants to close her eyes and ride.

Steel, neon, and boundless glass eyes watch them, cage them, envy them from beyond terrace’s glass panels. Flanking them on the opposite side, warm amber lamps gleam like fireflies. Traffic slides. Sirens scream. Bruce’s signal no doubt is splashed on a muddy cloud somewhere.

The entire lounge has been closed off save for a single chef, a bartender, and a server whose sole charge is Mrs. Joker.

Wet wind kicks Arthur’s dark hair off his upper back and shoulders, mussing his part. His blood red blazer doesn't stand a chance. It'll end up draped around her shoulders in no time.

Nix gave up trying to correct hers. She sways, one arm hooked around her husband’s slender waist and her backside one more gorgeous flourish from hopping on the piano’s lid. He dances in place, yet hasn’t shifted his feet — not when he’s operating his looper and the Steinway’s sustain pedals.

“Where the ghosts in glass…” the wind slashing Hotel Empire’s glass panels tries to carry his voice beyond the rooftop, back into Gotham so everyone else can claim him on his wife’s thirty-sixth birthday, “Beg for a second sight..!”

There’s a body near the roof’s ledge Nix doesn’t need to look at to know. His brains adorn the concrete, his teeth scattered like confetti.

The red glow of Hotel Empire’s enormous roof sign combs through Arthur’s hair with a grace and fluidity that her broken fingers never could. Light pollution unfurls its way up above their heads, bleeding into a sky that might otherwise be bespattered with stars and far away galaxies, and yet Arthur seems caressed by the illume of a hundred nebula Nix can’t actually see. Intangibly the vast space adores him like a paramour. Stroking her own hand from his crown to the soft, curled ends of his brown hair can’t even begin to compete. She tries anyway.

How his body seems so soft is beyond her. Her husband’s shoulders reel backward in graceful, nigh-aqueous pulls that proves the theory the music is borne from him and not the instruments he expertly handles. The Steinway is a façade, really; same way his guitars, violins, and any other number of pieces he has tucked away in his music room at home.

She’d have thought they’d be there. Every second that passes, every press of his fingers against the ivories, draws them closer to doomsday. How can he even breathe? Nix would have been content spending the night behind locked doors, given they apparently can’t simply leave and rescue him from the torture awaiting him. The truth of how utterly inconsequently she is shanks her through her ribs – it gives the smile she’s painted on cause to pause, flutter with the same uselessness she carries at her core, but she rescues it in time for Arthur’s beautiful eyes to find her again.

The song itself feels like testing embers in a fire pit to see if they spark.

“ We'll invent a world from our dying gleams… ”

The test falters. They remain in the damp pit with the ashes. Despite the soaring of Arthur’s voice, more graceful than a night bird, Gotham’s dull fist remains around their throats.

Nix adjusts in her heels, thinks for one moment the weight of her might just sink through the roof underneath her feet, then latches her arms around Arthur’s chest from behind. She nuzzles his hair even as he projects the song’s next line out to the roof, and what fingers can, curl.

“ Where the cruel dissolves into fractured dreams…!”

How he holds that final note forces her to sink. Nix buries her face into the crook of her husband’s neck, searching for his pulse point with her canines like a tiger would. When she finds that pulsing channel, however tempting the lure hangs behind her eyes, she doesn’t sink her teeth into his skin. She hovers instead, counting every beat, breathing out her her mouth in harried, sickly pants. Her own heart screams between her ears. She should be somewhere else, with Harvey Dent’s eyes popping between her molars and a can of kerosene at the Court House’s steps. Why is she fucking here? Indulging in him the same way everybody else wishes they could? Doing nothing, good for nothing. Nix bites through her own tongue to save her husband’s skin, and the bleed begins at the final edge of his long-held note.

#☠ aes. ⋙ 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙧𝙗𝙞𝙩.

mirrorsinner

“Is that his name?” Arthur, smirking at his wife so that missing molar on the upper right’s unearthed, wends around Evelyn without so much as mussing a single straw strand in the enclosure. He’s been minding his step for those blackened pellets that’ll crush into his soles.

Nix knows that’s what he’s minding his step for without Arthur needing to announce it. How a man so gentle that deer flock to him is so repulsed by them at the same time never ceases to amaze her.

“I have wet wipes in the car,” Nix mutters with her mouth screwed up to one side, anticipating the kiss he plants on that pucker.

Muscle memory keeps his fore and middle fingers extended around an imaginary cigarette once his left hand slips into her hair. His other hand plucks the rabbits’ party bucket from her so he now holds Evelyn’s riding helmet, her N-95 mask, and the rabbit treats or whatever the hell they paid for.

Nix squeezes her eyes shut, squeals once he kisses her again, then taps her nose with his cheek and lays his forehead over hers with minimal pressure so she doesn’t faint. She adjusts her hold on the stowaway who absolutely wasn’t part of the plan tucked under her arm.

The rabbit's held like a football, tucked against the cinch of her waist so its fat head and ears hang. It’s certainly comfortable enough.

She lolls her head onto her husband’s shoulder. Splays her bad hand under the Lop's chest as best she can so it can be lifted between them.

Finally the lilac rabbit wins Arthur’s attention. He tilts his head so it lays atop his wife’s, then makes a delicate 'C' shape with his fingers so he somehow caresses around the animal’s ears in rhythmic strokes.

The Lop closes its eyes into the caress.

Arthur smirks, then kisses Nix’s forehead and points to the grayish-purple rabbit, “The kids are gonna freak.”

“And to think…” Nix makes her eyes bulge, tutting at the rabbit, “You could’ve been dog food.”

“Or stew,” Arthur adds, wrinkling his forehead, “Or a um…A coat.”

“Jerky,” Nix kisses the Lop’s cheek.

Arthur uses his own face to nudge her cheek, then half-turns to find Evelyn pivoted to crouch by her new Holland Lop. He frowns, glances at the bucket in his hands that was handed to Nix, then clears his throat.

“Evelyn…?” his timbre’s gentle.

Arthur pinches his brow and waits for their eldest to turn, thick blonde dragon braid hanging over her left shoulder. Nix glances between her husband and their daughter.

He reminds Evelyn, “It was Mommy’s idea to take you here.” Without disciplining their daughter on her own birthday, he drops his free hand into his wife’s hair and cossets her scalp in languid circles, “She and I built the hutch, you know,” the corner of his mouth quirks, “Sure, we…” a glance out the side of his eye prompts Nix to play along, “Could’ve done the normal thing and just bought one-”

Nix smiles so hard, her upper lip almost curls back, “But Daddy’s a carpenter.”

“Was,” Arthur kisses her cheek’s apex.

With a peck to the edge of his nose, she says, “Don’t…be modest.”

Werewolf play-bites Nix's cheek, then soothes her nape and feigns correcting her, “What Mommy means…” an awning covers them, yet he still needs to squint, “Is that she’s was holding up different types of wood and stained fifty different floorboards until she found one she liked.”

Shifting her focus to Nix, Evelyn rolls off her knuckles and approaches her mother with a diffidence that knots her father’s stomach.

He braces, but otherwise doesn’t show it.

Nix kisses his throat’s hollow, then grins at Evelyn and accepts their eldest daughter's hug with her good arm.

It doesn’t feel earned. Arthur endeavored to make it so.

All of their children have adopted their father’s ability to exude warmth by nature, and so even if Evelyn’s arms appear stiff, it’s her mother that chills the embrace. Nix doesn’t intend to, and it doesn’t even come from the fact that she’s accepting a hug that all but needed to be prised from her daughter like blood from a stone – she just isn’t a base for comfort like her husband is. She clears her throat like it’ll help her try to think of anything but the sensation of Evelyn’s arms not quite locking around her middle, and runs the girl’s blonde braid through her fingers. Arthur’s perfected the plait, as well as the majority of any other hair style their girls wear, because Nix only has one working hand.

“ You’re welcome, Sprog. ” She says, and her lips press too tightly together because there had been no vocal thanks to prompt it.

A longer breath hastens her heart in her chest and lifts her shoulders awkwardly. Jodie’s been pretending not to watch the encounter by sifting her fingers through the sawdust between her boots and picking pallid flakes of it out of the nearest rabbit’s fur. Despite her best efforts, Nix knows the awkward exchange sits prominently in their tour guide’s periphery. Once her fingers reach the end of Evelyn’s hair, tied sweetly in a bow the same colour as her riding gear, Nix releases her from her duty.

“ Why don’t you, um, ” Her eyes lift. She avoids her husband’s gaze and instead seemingly takes to counting the animals surrounding them. They’ve followed the ‘party bucket’ as its been passed around almost as diligently as Pancake follows Arthur’s heel at home. That dumb cat wouldn’t even be a threat to the prey now surrounding them. “ Make sure they all get a snack, yeah? The we can go see what other creatures Daddy can fit in the trunk. ”

Evelyn receives her cue. Her skinny arms slip from around Nix’s waist and she smiles up at her father, full-cheeked and bleary eyed still. She bounces on the balls of her feet whenever he looks at her, Nix swears she’s seen it on more than one occasion. She plucks the bucket from the hook he’s had to make of his little finger to carry everything, then dutifully spins on her heels, to face the lilac rabbit still tucked to her mother’s side.

“ Here you go… ” A carrot stick’s proffered forward. Evie’s eyes flash a moment as she assesses the animal’s velveteen nose twitch, dubiety lacing her tone, “ Flops. ”

The transition from the crook of Nix’s arm to the ground so that the Lop can actually eat without being suspended mid-air is awkward, but to Evelyn’s credit she doesn’t raise a brow at her mother’s awkward crouch. Her eyes stray briefly to the pair of inked fairies atop her mother’s breast, just above her heart. It’s she and Lilac, but Nix is so overcome with ink that nobody ever thinks to ask.

She lays a lettuce leaf in front of the rabbit’s nose, “ And for seconds. ” Then dodges past her father with a gasp, toward some albino fluffball at the enclosure’s corner.

Saving face works only when Nix succumbs to an impish twist of her features. She knots her lips to one side, steering herself back against Arthur until she can wrap one arm around his waist with all the tenacity of a python clutching a kill, careful not to step on what is now their rabbit sat on the ground between them. She finds herself looking over his shoulder toward the empty farmyard in search of an audience indulging in the strange sense of deep embarrassment knotting itself below her ribs.

Nix swallows what she can of the sensation, kisses the shelf of his shoulder to mask the gulp, and mumbles, “ You’re gonna need a bigger hutch. ”

#☠ aes. ⋙ 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙧𝙗𝙞𝙩.

mirrorsinner

Laurent Castellani

“You have read all of Mr. Fleck’s journal before, correct?” Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent’s careful with his wording. Hands tuck into his pockets as he approaches the witness stand. It’ll appear less imposing to Debra Kane, whose perpetually tired gaze avoided her ‘client’ altogether. Government-mandated. He tried countless times, but she couldn’t muster the gall to listen…though when she was laid off because Social Services was shut down, he should’ve listened. He didn’t.

The Beast clenches his jaw and suffers a fracture behind his sternum that didn’t register that first time he stared her down. She testified against him. Everyone did. The only one who wouldn’t have is perched on his lap, legs butterflied so the view up her skirt’s open to prying eyes and cameras. Those black bubbles are hidden between dangling luggage tags and mounted in each corner. Shadow and soft light shield her somewhat. Arthur keeps his right arm lowered so his wrist covers that coveted view that’s typically hidden behind a paywall. Not that it wasn’t widely available for free…or for a baggy. Crystal or snow. Either worked.

She wishes he’d just flip the pleated skirt and get her out of her head. In any other setting, he would. Were his eyes not streaked scarlet and every age line drenched in mucus and tears, he would.

He doesn’t belong here.

Arthur forces a wheeze. Averts his eyes when Dent, back facing him because his respect for Arthur doesn’t exist, waits in front of Debra to give him the response he’s hoping the jury is looking for.

After a pregnant pause, she replies into the microphone, “Yes, I have,” with a conviction Arthur would’ve loved seven or eight years ago.

Where was that when he was in her office each week? Court-mandated. She was supposed to listen. Yet he didn’t either.

Arthur can’t bring himself to see beyond his wife’s shoulders. Doesn’t want to. His right hand splays where her thigh-highs end and traces the material’s elastic.

Nix bites her bottom lip and tries rolling her leg towards him, exposing skin that belongs against his, beneath his lips and tongue.

Arthur angles his head. A curve of light runs the length of his cheek and tries softening his jaw. Age looks more like film grain here for everyone but him. Not that Nix needs it. She’s lit from within, but will never see it. Louis Vuitton’s trademark flowers splash her throat and exposed thighs, teasing him with ambrosia he can’t quite indulge in and preserve her dignity. No one would ding Arthur Wayne for indecency. Not with that name. He doesn’t know how to be a god among men. His left leg shakes, jostling Nix with it.

She bends her hips and adjusts one thigh at a time so she rolls over his knees and the backless black scalloped lace panty she chose is apparent to him. Invites him.

He tries clearing his nose.

Nix purses her lips and blots his philtrum with a napkin, dipping into the groove where his cleft palate surgical scar sits. It doesn’t shine once she’s through.

Arthur kisses her for it, ignoring the acidic tang from bile that jumped up her throat from terror at the black-mouthed, nearly-toothless wraith acrawl with ink that’s formed a will of its own. Black mold in liquid form dribbles over what remains of his pulverized mouth. Partially decomposed, mottled, and broken fingers the color of clay fold over the back of the yellow armchair Arthur was placed upon like a throne. He hates it. Can’t tell who’s coming behind him. Can’t tell who is behind him.

Nix sweeps her tongue across the bottom of her husband’s upper lip. It’s swollen from a kiss and laughter that turned to tears beyond his control. She drops the napkin on her own thigh and frames his cheeks with her palms. Her hips roll forward so only the dining room’s gelid air kisses where she aches most — even now. She’s disgusting. Nix curves her tongue past her husband’s teeth instead of recoiling in shame. She rocks again, tapping lace against that palm he’d lain to buffer her from view.

Arthur’s cuff dampens through a layer of lace that leaves nothing to the imagination.

She’s swollen deep pink and protruding in a soft ridge from the lace. Were the seat any less bulky, she’d graft her mound to his and hump until her only thoughts are white noise. His trousers would soak, then draw too tight once his cock stiffened and sac thickened taut. He’d wear her. He’d wipe her brain, too. Nix keens into her husband’s open mouth, then strokes beneath his eyes to dry them.

Arthur, too, cradles her cheek...but has a care not to expose her or touch her back unless he wanted their evening to end here.

“Go ahead, you filthy bitch…” blood from a crushed larynx gargles in Riktor’s throat, “Show him that perfect...tight little pussy. He never did learn how to fuck it. Not like me.” Laughter akin to rocks rattling inside a can bleeds over the back of the chair, "You didn't play with your cunt all day when I'd fuck you. My cock was just too good."

Nix slings an arm across the backs of her husband’s shoulders and displaces her weight onto her tiptoes to try and seat on his skin.

“Buyer’s remorse, Nixienoo…” Riktor chortles, slinging his tongue around his chapped and split lips, “We all make mistakes.”

“Hey…!” Arthur’s interruption dissolves before he can finish.

She halts mid-undulation, short of breath and lightheaded. The dining room has begun to spin.

Rain no longer whispers against the window-wall, rather, it hisses.

She wilts beneath the mire of her own revulsion and glances at both herself and her husband. He didn’t raise her skirt. Isn’t even touching her, yet uses his forearm as a shield so their server, no matter how trained for the upper echelon’s indecencies, doesn’t even entertain up-skirting. Enough have succeeded. What does it matter anymore? Nix’s lips shake.

No one’s behind her husband’s chair. Nothing but a looming aperture in the background that opens to the kitchen.

Manufactured stillness, curated coziness, and insulation from the minefield of human shit and homeless just beyond the window. Manhattan is no longer ‘clean’ either. Not much better than Gotham across the Bay. Few are logical enough to point out just how on the brink New York is, too. Between ‘congestion taxes’ that go to nothing and lack of sanitation, they’ve hopped from one toilet seat to another…yet in here, even if only for an hour and a half, those who also bleed blue can escape.

Arthur seems to shiver from that cold. His jaw shakes. He drapes an arm across his wife’s thigh closest to their server as he brings over a bottle of red with a napkin between his skin and the bottleneck. Likely so he doesn’t have to touch anything that she will.

“Clos des Lambrays,” their server pours one-thousand-dollar-a-bottle wine into her glass.

Arthur’s pupils don’t shrink upon hearing the wine owned by Louis Vuitton being handed to his wife like she ordered a Sprite. He doesn’t care. Trembling fingertips brush her long crimped hair behind her ear, minding the extensions so he doesn’t pop a thread and humiliate her. They’re usually sturdy enough for her to shower in with zero issues — they’re supposed to be sewn into her scalp.

Nix turns. Kisses the inside of her husband’s wrist where his yellow cuff rides. Nix noses where he sprayed his amber-dominant fragrance. It’s far louder than he is. Commands the entire room.

Their server clears his throat, then sets the bottle down as Mrs. Wayne instructed and asks, “Is there anything else I can get you?”

Arthur bristles like he just was told his black card declined, then forces chuffs of laughter he doesn’t mean and mouths, “No, thank you,” as gently as he can despite himself.

“Enjoy,” smiling, the waiter gestures toward the filet mignon that the couple has yet to touch.

Nix glances at the damp she’s likely caused under a spell, then glances at her husband again.

Arthur tilts his head, kisses her even as Harvey Dent continues leading Debra for the court, “And…in your opinion…does this sound like a different voice…?” It’s not a question. There’s one answer. “Like a different, uh…” he gesticulates, “-personality…wrote this?”

Kane leans forward, astonished at the notion, then replies, “No, it sounds like Arthur,” with more enthusiasm than their topic of conversation ever got from her in eight months.

“Go on…” Dent continues leading.

Marianne never thought to object for leading the witness. Probably was too enamored with him, who was too just as wrapped up in her. A love affair played before the jury. Somehow they found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Fucking his state-appointed attorney who is older than his mother likely had something to do with it.

“He often…” Debra shrugs, “Wrote about his fantasies. And…the…women he had imaginary relationships with.”

Arthur splays a hand across his wife’s breastbone, then patters his fingers. Each tap against bone should confirm she’s here.

“I’m sorry,” he atones, bleary-eyed and congested. He uses his own face to nudge hers, then swears, “Phoenix, I-I-I’m sorry. I’m sorry — please…” his nose bumps hers, “I just want…” he grimaces once his throat runs dry, “To do the right thing by you. I love you,” garbles under his own shortness of breath, “-so much. More than anything.”

She blinks, and only sees glass in his eyes. Like cut jade they gleam desperately up at her, a pinch of his brow steepening the shadow that wouldn’t usually dare touch his pristine face. The sight alone is enough to make solid the air in her lungs. She swears those organs plummet far into her stomach, churning acid and repulsion until something like a whimper tightens the channel of her throat. His hand remains against her thigh, splayed but not wandering. The other lies at the base of her spine as a shield – his fingers don’t curl so much as they wait, and guard against any number of foes that she’s blind to. The allegorical blinkers she wears only lock her on his face, and the space behind him.

Riktor’s disappeared. Vanished like he was only ever built from shreds of cloud, or the dark grey slashes of the rain now battering the windows across from them. Her eyes roll from one side to the other, searching from pillar to pillar for any shadow too long or flash of movement she might otherwise miss. She can still hear him breathing. The racket of broken bone and teeth shuddering in the hollow cavern that now remains of his chest. Inside him’s a dark pit, the same bleak penumbra that’s eaten the empty, wet sockets of his eyeballs. He’s claimed the light on what she knows to be his fleeting retreat, dampened the sconces lining the dining rooms walls and killed the glow of the underlighting. Even from her husband’s eyes, he’s claimed the light; left behind wet, shimmering pools.

Nix blinks again. The green verglas remains. It cuts her.

Her jaw drops. The fingers he draws against her collarbone might as well be the promise of a noose, but she grasps at it with her own shaking hand anyway. Her dead fingers bend awkwardly against his knuckles as she wraps what she can around his own. It’s a miracle her nails don’t sink past the skin. She’d add another scar to the countless others already besmearing him and he would thank her, as if she hasn’t done enough already. Nix’s chin trembles, locked south of the rest of her face like her jaw’s hinges have cracked open and gone stiff as death. Her head shakes, but she can’t steer it as far as she’d like. What accumulates is barely a shudder.

“ No. ” She manages, but her voice is frail as the broken ends of her hair hanging at her back. No amount of extensions, dyed or otherwise, can hide the frayed edges of her, made tired by addiction and brutality. Arthur’s fingers are kissed with more teeth than she realises. “ No. ”

The wound cracks his beautiful face in two, then shatters it. Nix watches it dissolve into bloody bricks, crumbling as another long wheeze wrenches itself from his chest. He’d double over if he could, were she not in the way as the cause of the agony.

Phlegm breaks her voice at first. She crackles like static and reaches suddenly for her husband’s face. Long fingers she’s always thought fit against him perfectly now fumble for an efficient hold. He slips between them, sloughing away the same way Riktor had under the butt of a hunting rifle. But Arthur – Arthur won’t come back. He’ll fall to ribbons right in front of her until even the barest breeze would steal him away.

He doesn’t belong here, or to her. He’s not rooted. He’s above and beyond and sometimes it’s like his body remembers.

There isn’t a tether beyond the chain she’s become, and selfishly will continue to be.

Riktor was wrong only once. There’s no remorse. She only regrets not tightening her hold sooner on the boy opposite her at the checkers table. She should have nailed him in place in the exact way the stories say she did – it would make no difference now, but to save her from the fear of him turning to sand in her hands.

Irene Degraves burned so she could keep him. Nix’s own mother and brother, the sensation of their flesh sloughing from their skulls, their lungs scalded black by smoke and terror. They choked and they didn’t die. Didn’t die until they were dry and awake and alert enough to grow familiar with the sensation of desiccation. All at Nix’s will. She chews on it now like she did the taste of that immolation. Twists until she sits only on one of her husband’s thighs and can reach the poured glass of red wine.

The Burgundy’s profile is supposed to be spice and deep red fruit. For four-figures a bottle, she should be counting the black cherries and notes of truffle and pine on her tongue. All she gets is the iron. Right at the back of her throat. It’s now, the same as then.

“ If it’s that bad, ” He remains unseen, but she can hear him. He must’ve curled his body like a dead spider underneath their table. Nix takes another gulp that does nothing to rescue her from the tongue curled at her ear. “ Just take the steak knife, and finish it. Right in the neck. Easy. ”

Her eyes bloom wide. Not for horror, but because he’s right.

Riktor’s exasperation climbs up her thighs, “ Do it, pussy! ”

Her free hand curls against Arthur’s crown. She strokes again and again until she’s sure she’s dirtied the curled ends of his brown hair. “ I love you, ” She says, and it feels like the confession again. She exhales acid into her wine, and it spits back at her as an intangible plume. She stares down at her contorted reflection in the Burgundy pool, and accidentally twists her fingers against Arthur’s scalp. “ You didn’t… do anything. It was me. ”

In comparison to her own thick voice, choked by the viscous fluid she can’t swallow, her previous owner’s timbre relates to song, “ Us. ”

“ Yeah. ” She doesn’t hear herself. Doesn’t need to. The smell of rare cooked meat floods her nostrils and reminds her of all she needs to know. Again and again, she paws at Arthur’s nape, tending to the faint beads of cool sweat besmearing him there. Her doing, too. Perhaps he isn’t breaking apart, perhaps he’s melting away. The tips of her nails tempt a scrape against his skin ere she collars herself, and finds his wet eyes. The sight rips at her chest on the inside, but she bends to shape her words against his mouth in case she isn’t actually projecting a voice. “ You didn’t do anything. ”