interlude.

[halcyen]

GONE LIKE A GUST OF WIND, HER PERFUME A VEIL.

SOPHIE DUMOND of 2019'S JOKER, written by Abigail, 25+, gmt. low-key, private, low-activity. influence solely from that film and my own work post-canon. single-story. anti-anti-anti 2024 musical, seriously do not come anywhere near me, I do bite.

independent sophie dumond of 2019's joker. this blog is part-time, exceedingly picky, and likely slow. exclusive to @jokethur's arthur and our own plot-driven canon we've built with my main muse, nix degraves, found at @banschivs. some influences from 2022's the batman. full pages here are unlikely.

currently sophie is not only a mother, and working in gotham square at gotham national bank, she is also putting herself through night school as a means to become a financial advisor some time in the future. she's aiming for a better life for her and her daughter, and like most in gotham, is pursuing some sense of freedom among the rubble. she is, however, due to her tenuous ties to one arthur fleck in the past, currently being surveilled by the court of owls. further information on the court and their reach can be found here.

number one banned fc is gaga, and essentially any other character from that upcoming musical. in an ideal world i'm allowed to forget it even exists, i don't want to so much as catch a whiff of its scent. for that reason i can be exceedingly picky when it comes to following back dc blogs. sophie, and the universe within which jessie and i have built that she exists, works perfectly for me.

though it's unlikely i'll be working off my dash much, i do ask all those i follow to please tag 'terminal illness cw' or 'cancer cw' where applicable. in turn i'll do my best to tag anything needed.

if your muse has anything to say to Soph, i.e you wanna interact, just lob a starter at me. as mentioned above i won't be using the dash here much at all, so that's your best bet for interaction.

general rules and etiquette expectations apply.

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

“Are you kidding,” on cue, the beast shows the slender line of his neck. Light catches a shimmering champagne-pink curve that bleeds from under his ear to his Adam’s apple. He assures Gigi, “I love glitter!”

The envelope scrapes across the formica as he guides it in front of him to flip over. Sophie’s daughter giggles, lost for context. Her mother, however, admonishes their old neighbor with a look that he returns in spades. They share a dry, breathy laugh that springs color to their complexions until Joker looks down and hooks the edge of his pinky under the envelope’s flap. Ivaylo catches the first corner that rends and tries to rip it back. His onesie’s trunk and enormous elephant ears bounce as he does so. All Joker pictures is the baby catching his delicate skin and giving himself a paper cut.

“*Не де́лай так, не де́лай так…!” he wriggles an arm out from under the table to catch Ivaylo’s palm so his grab reflex is triggered.

The baby squeezes his father’s hand, then tries to bang it on the tabletop. Werewolf flares his nostrils and feels his second smile touch his earlobes as the baby grabs the receiver of that ancient red rotary that likely hasn’t been touched since it first was mandated almost a century ago. The baby holds the receiver by its round face and waves it back and forth so the cord jumps across the table.

Joker guides his drink away and looks up to catch Sophie’s eyes, “I strongly suggest you do the same.” Mother and daughter on cue slide their drinks from the cord, which Ivaylo shakes around and babbles into. By the mandate’s order, someone behind the counter ‘must’ respond. The same barista who handed Gigi her drink starts heading for their table, but Joker holds up a hand and insists, “Oh, no no...! He’s not. Asking for anything — h-he isn’t even one,” he dismisses the barista with a smile, though by the age lines that droop her face softening Joker can sense she’s going to reply. 

Inevitably, she does, “He’s beautiful,” overzealous barista addresses Joker with a small gesture toward Ivaylo. 

Thomas Wayne’s prodigal son braces, then slackens his jaw and tries to mouth, “Thank you,” though it’s no louder than a whisper.

“If you do need anything, Mr. Wayne,” an awkward, nervous laugh preludes another useless gesture toward that rotary phone, “You know what to do.”

The notion that he’s in anyway used to the name and all that accompanies it thrusts a blunt blade into Joker’s spine. He lets that knife twist and tear any nerves and sinew it can before waiting for the barista to get back behind the counter and do her job. Once she turns, he suffers a brusque, breathy laugh that rattles in the back of his throat. More static crackles in his ear, though he doesn’t dare ask what’s on the radio. 

Tilting his head to catch a better glimpse of the lone man who won’t let his ugly focus drift from Sophie, Joker asks, “Now where were we…?!” with a hint of humor. 

[halcyen]

Gigi replies, " Talking about glitter. " With such sincere concern that she sounds like she's trying to broker a mortgage across the table. She's been tucked behind her mother's desk at the bank on one too many occasions, and has that cadence mimicry down even with her squeakier tone. She blinks at Arthur. She's trying to out-adult him. In a conversation about glitter. That facade falls the moment she throws her mouth open and points across the table to the baby opposite her. " See, mom? "

Ivaylo's cheeks catch minikin spangles of light... likely begotten by the same cause as Arthur's bedecked sparkle. Sophie's eyes follow her daughter's jutted arm with a genial smile. Gigi has never really been shy in nature, but their unexpected guest four years ago now has found her to be quieter in his presence. Now she eyes her old neighbor, aghast from behind her mountain of hot chocolate and whipped cream. Her mother blinks at her benignly in her periphery.

" He has glitter too. " Her appall at seemingly being the only one at the table without a sparkle to her skin hikes her timbre up an octave. She's partly playing with the modest crowd she has.

Sophie leans to her right like a tree sways at a river bank, her eyes laid on Arthur's own with much the same tired humor he'd seen of her in that elevator, but there's further light to her eyes than there ever was then, even while she purposefully fogs out the room around them, and that stony face watching them all. " I think you can pin that on his very sparkly mom. " She says, then twists her torso to face her daughter. " We could never, because you'd hate, " Two fingers make for her daughter's eyes to tease, " —getting glittery eyeballs. " Short, mauve painted nails have been home-manicured well enough to not actually risk Gigi's vision when she wiggles them in front of the little girl. She giggles and folds back into her chair to 'sulk'.

" Drink that hot chocolate, " Says Sophie, straightening up with a smile for her ostensible victory. Scorned, Gigi reaches for her pastry instead. " You'll hate it cold. "

Ivaylo seems to argue with her, bashing the twisted cord against the table as if he too demands compliance. A gummy smile pins Sophie sharply. He has his father eyes. The ones bright and whet enough to cut right through you without even trying. Instead of stammering, she grins right back, flashing teeth and wrinkling her nose so the boy all but cackles at her. The barista who now feels as if she hangs in a useless limbo watches on. 

Sophie huffs her final laugh out her nose and faces Arthur. Sincerity softens her features she'd broadened for the baby, and she tilts her head. " Is it okay, though? " The card now between his fingers. He doesn't have to read it here, or even really read it at all. Sophie thinks it's the thought behind that might stick in his throat. She shyly offers, " I thought about dropping it off, but.. didn't think I should just show up at your door. "

[halcyen]

𝚂.𝙳

[tvandfilm]

ATLANTA S01E06: Value

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

Formica surfaces make for great drum sets. Ivaylo puts it to the test by banging his chubby palms precariously close to his father’s Red Eye in a paper cup. It’s still shocking to strangers that there is no transfer between Joker’s scarlet maw and the black plastic. Steam ribbons threaten to dilute the pigment, but Joker has a care to blow it away each time he guides the cup toward his mouth. Sophie can probably count on one hand how many times he’s actually touched his drink.

Two paper bags sit curled shut alongside him for Nix: one containing an egg and cheese croissant and the other, chocolate mousse and a tiramisu dessert cup. He’ll order her a chai tea before they go. Every few minutes his attention darts toward the menu as if that item might disappear.

Gigi lifts onto her tiptoes and leans over the counter to see if they’re making her Italian hot chocolate at all. One more huff from her and he’ll appear behind her like an ugly shadow to ask those starstruck baristas for an update.

The stupid red Wayne rotary phone will soon become Ivaylo’s hammer. The infant spools the cord around his fingers and would bring it to his mouth had Joker not hissed in Russian and unbound the baby’s fingers. His mother dressed him as an elephant. A few wispy blonde hairs grazing his forehead. Sophie’s been smirking into her coffee anytime she catches sight of the baby.

Sokol scrapes his paw over Joker’s foot to get it to stop bouncing. He’s shaking the whole table, but only realizes it once his patent leather toe bangs the table’s steel leg. His shoulders stiffen. Sophie cringes on his behalf.

Werewolf brushes his trembling fingers over the card, half-smiles to distract himself from the static whooshing into his ears, then tilts his head and attempts to shift the conversation off of reading. 

“No,” his voice warms Sophie faster than the paper cup clutched between her hands. Catching eyes with him can’t be too dissimilar to witnessing a lightning strike either. “Not late.” The thin bangles around her wrist catch his attention. He’d curve his fingers beneath them were she not across a table. She’ll have to make do with his crooked smile. “But you didn’t have to.”

[halcyen]

" I did. " An incredulousness bends her brow into a subtle arch. Sophie leans back some as if he'd just produced some obscure creature from the inner breast pocket of his jacket. " I wanted to. "

Arthur's cadence is slow, though not unfriendly. She wonders how tired he is perhaps, or where else his concern lies. Ivaylo at his side is eyeing that red phone again. It's a strange placing on their table, which she learned is forever reserved for anyone carrying the Wayne name. From what she understands, her old neighbor does so with reluctance, and yet still took his defined seat without hesitation.

She'd still sent Gigi up to the counter. Seems strange to call for anyone in a coffee house so small. She's locked eyes with the barista more than once. The young woman with her mousy hair tied at the nape of her neck reveals what looks to just be a heap of whipped cream and chocolate drizzle in a takeaway cup, much to Gigi's thrill. The little girl gasps, bounces on her feet, then slides the plate with her croissant closer to her across the counter to claim it. The barista waits for her to dance back toward her mother before following with the hot chocolate.

" Come on, Munchkin. " Sophie slips from her side of the booth so that her daughter can scoot across, sat closest to the wall and further from prying eyes. She's all too aware that the gentleman two or so tables away finished his drink some time ago. He sits there. That's all. Just sits there. 

The barista kindly lays Gigi's drink on the table, and Sophie slides it back. " Not too close to the baby. " She warns, and receives a wide eyed nod from the little girl, who hasn't blinked since she'd eyed the chocolate-drizzled heap in her cup. Her first sip is just a mouthful of cream, at which Sophie's eyes roll as she sits back down.

" Besides, " She continues, flashing her attention once again to the window in order to spot the red coat once more. She smiles for Arthur, and takes a mouthful of coffee herself, " This one picked it out, " A cant of her head cues Gigi to smile and nod, thankfully with her mouth clear of cream.  " If that makes you feel better. "

Proud of herself, Gigi lifts her chin, not unlike how she had a handful of years ago in that dank elevator. She tries to catch Arthur's eye and assures him, as if there was any concern, " It's sparkly. "

In jest, her mother winces, and warns, " Hope you don't mind a glitter bomb. "

[halcyen]

The little ivory envelope sits unchallenged between them and their coffee cups. Sophie's been cradling hers in one hand like it's her purse, her fingers bent tight, her trimmed nails clinked against the China. Her attention's been dancing from @jokethur to the counter. In front of which waits Gigi, her head titled up as if she can see how the barista makes her Italian hot chocolate. Casa Espresso also offers chocolate croissants, which the little girl waits for with as much patience as if she were starving. To Gigi's credit, it's a rare treat. She'd thrust the dollar bills across the counter while practically bouncing.

" ...I-It's not late, is it? " Sophie's eyes are perhaps wider than she'd like when turned to face Arthur across their table. The black leather corner booth beneath gilded sconces makes for a fashionable scene setting. Makes her think that for a moment she's somewhere less affordable. Truth is, that there's an ease here... or there would be had the lone gentleman two tables away not looked her in the eye on more than one needless occasion. Another waft of her attention over to her daughter. She masks sleeplessness and paranoia with a smile and reticent laugh, " Gigi signed it herself. " The festive card enveloped between them. " Insisted on it. "

Sophie lifts her brewed coffee to distract herself from glancing out the window and onto the street. From the corner of her eye, she's recognized the same red coat walking past twice already. She counts strangers these days. Has to. 

" It's the... " Squints to match the cant of her head, " Seventh, right? " An ostensibly proud smile tugs at her pursed lips, " So, it's not late. "

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

“Yeah,” Sophie candies that retort as much as she can without patronizing the wild-eyed nymph at her husband’s side.

Nix clutches his waistcoat with such tenacity, she might shear the polyester with her nails. Terror’s shrunk her pupils to pinheads, leaving two clear blue pools no less cold than Sokol’s stare. The wolf-dog side-guards his master so Nix has more range without worrying about accidentally stepping on a paw or tail. Joker averts his eyes to note how close her feet are to his, then cradles the back of her head and guides it forward for a kiss between her eyes.

Despite the rain ostensibly drenching him, his touch exudes all the warmth of a hearth. Nix finds herself blooming toward it like a flower to sunlight. Her shoulders, however, have caved. She’s deflated. Mist clings to her eyes and stains her sclera bright red. Compared to Sophie, she’s a pasty bag of bones with stringy wet hair and clothes that wear her. Nix blinks. A mascara-stained tear slips from her waterline and trickles down her cheek. Joker pads it away with his thumb, then kisses the upturned tip of her nose and massages her scalp in lazy circles.

He turns on an angle, one shoulder toward Sophie and the other pointed at the door so he can keep Nix tucked against him. She’s too quiet. Each breath leaves hastier than the last until she hyperventilates with little dramatics. Her chest hardly moves. The warm stained glass light fixtures hanging both in the foyer and kitchen blur and swirl.

Joker, too, feels the living room twist into a funhouse tunnel. The ceiling sweeps to the wall, floor, opposite wall, and back around. He staggers where he stands. Nix lays a palm across his chest to catch him, then follows his eyes back to Sophie. She still holds his wet jacket with little direction in terms of how close she can get to the wild animal trapped against his chest. Perhaps he’d debriefed her on why she should keep her distance from Skizm’s former top player. Joker’s veneer softens into a smile that Nix can see isn’t meant for her. It’s a scalpel through the chest, but she grips his waistcoat and burrows half her face so one pale eye watches his former neighbor from the safety of his waistcoat. Joker kisses Nix’s temple again, then noses her hair as he proffers a hand to receive his only blazer. 

“Thanks,” he says before the jacket even touches his skin.

Sophie crosses the room slower than intended and hands that damp blazer off with a touch of reluctance since it’s still wet. 

“Probably should’ve taken the hair dryer,” Sophie pantomimes using it like a blowtorch.

Joker scrunches his face and pushes his tongue down so his laugh is a little cleaner than usual. Phlegm still pools in the back of her throat, but pushing his tongue lower helps the sound be less grating. He then drapes the damp garment across his forearm. All the while a crisp blue eye watches Sophie unblinkingly. The other’s burrowed in her husband’s shoulder even though Nix is marginally taller. That dying star scintillates with the lightning. A chill shoots up Joker’s spine to prepare him for thunder. When the clouds finally collide, the entire apartment shakes. Sophie doesn’t gasp, but looks up as if nervous that one of the sallow light fixtures might fall and crack someone in the head.

“It’s happened before,” she doesn’t give much context, but doesn’t need to. Werewolf has spread her legs a little further than shoulder-width apart and follows her eyes to the light fixtures. She makes her golden eyes wide and presses her mouth for as ‘silly’ a smile as she can manage given the awkward situation. “Do you remember when we had that little earthquake?”

“The one that the press played up like we live in L.A.? Yeah,” he reaches into his pocket for a new cigarette to slide in his mouth. Without unsettling Nix, he fishes his lighter out next. Three flicks of a spark wheel finally produce a flame, which Joker holds to the tail and waits for a smoky finger to let him know it’s lit. Nix will likely steal it in a minute. “I don’t even think I felt it.”

“Someone’s desk shook for maybe half a second at work,” Sophie rolls her eyes. Then her attention settles on Nix, “It’s nice to finally meet you,” though she cautions extending a hand. She busies them by snap-clapping like the harried host she’s become and gestures toward the kitchen, “Can I get you anything? Coffee, tea, water, maybe I’ve got a few chasers in the fridge…?”

“No, thank you,” Nix speaks in a soft monotone that she’s fully aware doesn’t become her. The bony fingers latched around her husband’s waistcoat shake. Should she turn her left hand, hot pink and rainbow spangles from her diamond and ruby-encrusted wedding rings will dance across the floor and walls.

Joker kisses her crown and strokes the back of her wet head before catching Sophie’s eye. He asks, “D-do you have a hand-towel or something? She’s soaked.”

“I don’t need it,” Nix lacks any inflection. She stares into the kitchen. That same cyan glow once flooded the kitchen of Apartment 8J. Now she’s certain the power has been cut by the landlord. No one lives there. No one should. 

He presses a kiss against her hairline. The ends of his free fingers already work on combing out the ends so her hair separates and isn’t so staticky. Nix burrows half her face deeper into his chest, smearing her eye makeup on his clothing. He pays no mind. Joker scoops what damp hair has been trapped between her shoulder and his chest like Spanish moss and slings it behind her shoulders so he can start finger-coming those locks out. She keeps that same lidless eye pinned on Sophie as she nods and disappears in the inverted version of the dark hall inside 8J. She returns with a towel large enough to wrap hair in and tosses it at Joker. He jostles his own jacket until Nix helps him by taking the garment and tucking it against her own chest. It still smells like him after rain. All that’s left it is cigarette smoke, though she watches that exhaust trickle north and bloom across Sophie’s ceiling. Had she proper lighting, the off-white paint would probably be blackened — and not just from Joker.

This building has a mold problem, though Joker says he never had any in his apartment. Wouldn’t matter if it’s in the walls. Maybe that’s to blame for his chronic respiratory infections.

Tucking the cigarette between his teeth, Joker snakes his arms up and around his wife so he can begin towel-drying her hair the way he would their daughters’. He’d felt her spine go rigid at first, then relax as his fingertips work the terrycloth through her scalp and comb out the ends so she isn’t saturated.

“It’s still raining,” Nix would stake herself were she a fly on the wall. She feels her teeth chatter.

Joker braces as brontide announces another lightning strobe. Sophie twists to check the bedroom for Gigi. When the coast is ostensibly clear, she drifts into the kitchen so as not to crowd the couple’s space. She has a few dishes that can be washed. 

“If I had a dryer, I’d have thrown it in for five minutes,” Sophie speaks of the towel being worked through Nix’s hair. The sink’s ‘hot’ water is lukewarm at best. She’s numb to the lead-contaminated sludge that in her nightmares sometimes runs brown. In reality, it probably has more than once. “Number one on my wishlist.”

“What, a washer and dryer…?” Joker echoes what went unspoken, but his eyes only stray from Nix so he can gauge where Sophie is. They then lower so he can continue working the towel through his wife’s hair. “I wouldn’t even look at a unit without them when we were moving.” 

[halcyen]

The fact that she's merely busying herself while the couple in the doorway exist quietly with one another seems obvious. Sophie feels as if she's been shoved up onto a stage and made to perform, though she'd be the first to admit that the absence of her ostensible audience's eyes, namely those of Skizm's Killer-Queen, is of some comfort. The short-lived glimpse she'd received of Arthur's wife's too-wide stare was sharp, and cold. She wields those eyes like she does blades in her hands. Everybody knows it.

Working to swallow the judgement that which stems more from discomfort and feeling like she doesn't currently suit her skin, is harder than Sophie would like. She locks her jaw momentarily to answer her old neighbor with a friendly hum, grinds her teeth for only a second ere catching the slip, then rolls her eyes toward the half of Arthur she can see from the kitchen sink.

" That's because you were lucky enough to be out of here, " Her 'admonishment' is well-meaning, benign, and comes with a smile meant to tease as well as self-depreciate for jest's sake. " And looking. " The squeak of the sponge against a plate laden with suds almost makes her wince. In the terse air every sound feels far louder than it should. Her breathing's rattling in her ears. She thinks she can even hear Arthur's fingers comb through Nix's hair from here.  Something about those eyes... Sophie feels gooseflesh on the inside of her skin somehow. Everything's crooked. 

She continues, " I don't even know where you'd put one in this box. "

Arthur's focus is on his wife, ostensibly working to overlook her glazed eyes for some attempt at ease for her sake. If it's working, Sophie has no way of telling. The occasional sniff from around the corner is begotten by Nix. That she knows. She thinks she hears the snapping of teeth occasionally too.

" You'd need an extension. " He agrees contemplatively, though the subject itself holds about as much weight as the air should around them. It's gotten thicker, static and prickling at the napes of their necks.

" Out on the fire escape, maybe. " She says, balancing the last of her dishes on the rack with a certain expertise that comes with years of performing the impossible feat in such a small space. Sophie leaves the detritus to drip dry, instead reaching for a towel to pat her hands clean.

She clears the modest kitchen once again, chancing another reveal of her face to the woman in the doorway. She's never seen someone cut so sharply. Nix's profile's pale against the shadow of the hallway she still lingers in. Not a toe over the threshold. " You know, " Sophie lures her attention again, stern and immovable as the walls. She isn't even sure if Nix has blinked once while looking at her. " You really can come in. I'm not gonna hold you hostage in the hall. "

Her blonde head tilts in the way a lioness' would, observing a gazelle. Nix watches her husband's would-be paramour as she pretends she isn't swallowing a lump in her throat with all the same presumed indifference. There's something more embittered behind the eyes, though. Nix feels it even herself, as something painful, acidic. A long-drawn breath does nothing to soften her edges, and she's tired of every attempt. She lifts her hands, wordlessly pulls the towel from her hair, and therefore Arthur's stroking hands too, and draws a tempered smile.

" I'm good. " Now Nix swallows, and it's something rotten that will continue to hurt and fester somewhere in her chest. Working so hard to welcome her, Sophie's natural balm only deigns to scald her. It really is no wonder Arthur's drawn to her. That truth is a blade shunted up her neck and through the roof of her mouth. She suffers the wound because there's no other choice, turns her face to her husband but not her eyes, and says, " I thought you wanted me to come get you. "

Her lower lip trembles whenever used to shape a word. She hates it. Hates herself. Hates where they are. She swears she's seen her husband's attention drift up the hall to 8J, to the other lure still pulling him to this dilapidated building instead of the home they'd supposedly built for one another. Heart trembles too. She feels it, uncomfortable and grieved and biting at her breastplate. It wants out of her chest as much as she'd find comfort in seeing it land at her own feet.

Allegorical noose around her neck, and those honeyed bullets launched her way from Sophie's warm eyes, she's about as unwelcome here as any putrid thing. In spite of assurances. How she feels the rot eating away beneath her skin promises her much the same. Arthur's naked face, rare and yet so ostensibly comfortable here, only seeks to urge the allegorical maws to chew her faster. And so she avoids looking. Can't help it. 

Sophie agrees with her, but almost chokes under that stare of broken blue glass. Her presence alone is a poison to the woman opposite her. She wants to apologise without even knowing her true fault. There's no salvaging Nix from whatever pained truth sits behind her eyes, but she can help to free her from the cage of her apartment seems to be. " It is late. "

[halcyen]

S.D

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

From what he can glean, distance doesn’t wound Sophie the way that it does him…yet her hand’s half-proffered. She wears costume rings, necklaces, and bangles that jangle whenever she moves.

Werewolf slides his unblinking gaze toward the door as apex predators monitor their dens. No movement beyond her door. Rain continues hissing against the window and smearing her view of the art-deco building’s courtyard…of the golden headlamps that might leer into her apartment while their backs are turned. The notion sends a shiver up her spine that Sophie forgets to ignore. It catches her one shoulder at a time. She wiggles in place, though it’s disjointed and too violent. He tilts his head, frowns, then lays a hand on Sokol’s brow to command the wolf-dog remain where he sits as he slides that fateful step forward. Two-toned spectator shoes brush her bare feet. He should’ve taken his shoes off per tradition. That’s on him.

Joker mirrors the spasm that’d racked Sophie by rolling his own shoulders and adjusting his stance from foot to foot. His weight sways and slants without disturbing the darkness that continues pushing in on them. The storm might knock out power and 2250 Anderson Avenue didn’t exactly have the most attentive landlord. It’s a project.

He glances out the window that resembles one from his old kitchen, though Sophie’s is in the living area. His old unit has more windows than hers. Her kitchenette might be a little bigger, though.

Joker ignores the stained glass light fixture’s sulky cast of deep gold, red, and green onto his face. He collects and refracts light like some rare diamond. Were he wearing his face, the makeup would look straight from a fever dream. Rainfall’s strengthened the scent of his cologne and detergent. Sophie’s hand has been angled into position to caress the hump of his distended shoulder should she choose to. It won’t hurt. He doesn’t doubt it draws attention especially without his blazer to try and mute the summit.

Gentle fingers lay upon the winged scapula without applying enough pressure to leave him skittish. Joker’s heartbeat steamrolls ahead anyway. Her unit spins. What to even Sophie is a cramped hole in the wall to him has grown monstrous. He can no longer determine where any sound is coming from in this echo chamber. Metallic waves ripple toward him, then fade. He swallows something thick and foreign — Joker grimaces from the coppery taste and tries to pretend he felt no texture while finding Sophie’s warm bronze eyes in the shadows. Darkness tries its best to sink talons into her. Joker draws her closer by the nape, having a care not to accidentally tug one of her coils or trip her over his big feet. Soothing circles embed his fingertips in her scalp, beneath her hair so to part from him isn’t so innate. They’re no longer old neighbors. She said so herself. He tilts his head and squints as if doing so might offer further clarity. It doesn’t. She’s still too innocent to stand in his presence. She won’t smile, yet he watches her bottom lip to see if it curls between her teeth. 

Breathing’s become a chore. He’s forgotten to while cadaver-cold fingers rake down the back of his neck and stale, musty breath muffed under a pillow and rotten earth fills his ear. He inclines his chin as if Penny’s decayed hand has pulled his hair by the roots, then slides his focus back to Sophie’s door to watch for footsteps. He hears static and spectral whistling. Sophie doesn’t seem perturbed by it. Joker suffers a lung-rasping laugh that leaves him as a cough at first.

He grimaces, tastes his own blood against the backs of his teeth, then blurts, “Nixie’s coming.”

First-hand he witnesses the effect his wife's name garners from the average person. Sophie stiffens under him as if he just told her he invited Charles Manson for tea. He feels his jaw clench as he, blinking to reduce redness from unshed tears, sniffs back and swallows a wad of fetid flesh that doesn’t belong to him…or anyone in this apartment.

“Don’t be scared,” white lie if he’s ever told one. Joker slides his hand from the back of Sophie’s head to her jaw. She’s about as warm to the touch as he is. He shows teeth, but those crooked rows even when sparing a smile bring little solace, “She’s not gonna hurt you.” He doesn’t know that. “Wh-what you think you know…” Joker chooses his words in the most delicate manner he can muster, “It’s not…” he pauses to wince, then push his hand-heel against his pant pocket to trace the cigarette carton, “She’s a good mom.” Joker’s eyes feel weighted by half the sand in all the world’s oceans. He keeps them averted so he can rock back and forth without Sokol following orders. “Like you. She doesn’t know how to…” his attention tracks left and right as he finds a word, “Human. She might…” he shrugs, “Say things that feel cruel, but they aren’t. She’s not. Sophie…” pausing allows him to regain bearings and sense if his phone’s vibrating from Nix...it isn't, “Sh-she’ll get me out of your hair. Just…” A trembling hand gathers one of hers and guides it toward his mouth so he can kiss her knuckles and plead in a tight, strained tone, “Please be good to her. The way you are to me. And I’ll leave. I promise.”

The pad of his thumb brushes Sophie’s cheek, up and along the bone toward her ear. Her skin’s rich to the touch, almost buttery. He imagined no less. Joker continuing to shake his leg finally summons Sokol from the opposite end of the kitchenette. Giant footfalls announce the wolf-dog before the weight of a 140-pound animal’s paw can displace onto his shoe.

[halcyen]

The size of the wolf dog is still shocking, given the cramped space they occupy. He's a flash of thick fur and those cold, cutting eyes. Sokol all but stamps his paw atop his charge's foot, pressing all of his bulk down toward the floor. Sophie blinks, but finds herself peering through the same preternatural fog that which held her in place for that ephemeral moment in the hall. Applying more pressure when next she lowers her lashes does little else to aid in her vision.

It can't quell the tempestuous running of her heart through her head either. That organ beats in her ears now, having made it's heavy way up her throat. Gulping has proved to the both of them a failure. No doubt that Arthur watches her throat bob in her attempt to wet that channel once more and dissuade its narrowing.

He'd tried to speak away her upset with soft words, and how his palm trembles against the round apple of her cheek. He's warm to the touch, she thinks that he always has been in the fleeting seconds they've every matched to one another in quiet spaces as the one they currently inhabit. A tenuous lustre climbs her cheek at the touch, and instinctually she finds herself leaning toward the cradle of Arthur's bent fingers, a somewhat perplexed bend of her of her brow turning soft expression.

" I'm not gonna do anything. " She promises, her countenance only partially taken by the same unease as would claim anyone at the thought of Skizm's forever-crowned victor knocking at their door. Most wouldn't imagine her to be so mannerly as to even wait for an invitation to come inside. Sophie makes an inexperienced effort to steal that judgement sharply under Arthur's stare. She asserts with a nod, " I wouldn't. "

What time has passed since he'd tread across her threshold remains a mystery. She hasn't looked to the clock once, but the night has deepened beyond the window panes still thrashed by rain. Somewhere, presumably over the sea, thunder snaps its allegorical jaws.

Sophie swallows yet another dry wad of what feels like sand between her teeth, then lifts her free hand to delicately wrap her fingers about Arthur's wrist. Careful not to simply pull away, she takes his hand in her own, affirms that hold, and tells him for what feel like the fifth time at least, in some vague capacity, " And don't talk about yourself like that. "

He doesn't need to ask, she watches the enquiry bite behind his eyes. Crows feet burgeon, only just, at the very corners of those twin headlamps of his.

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes as she would before her daughter seemingly pretending to misunderstand her, Sophie leans in, her eyes wide to make her point, and timbre just a touch below stern. " Like you're a burden. " She tells him, quiet yet sure. " Or an intruder. " Once he was. Only once. She guides him down the hall to 8B now, away from the clutches of his ghosts that she presumes to be worse for him. " Or like you're— "

The knock at the door which thieves her voice from her lungs is sharp, short. Just two swift raps of Nix's knuckles announce her presence in the hall. She stands alone, her lingering form swathed in rainwater and her hair hung limb between her shoulders. She's a pallid thing, a lanky waif who feels as though the very walls of the place attempt to wrench her from its insides like some festering disease. Nix sniffs and tastes damp and black mold, cloying in her throat... or perhaps she too succumbs to the facade of Penny's walking corpse these days. Can't see her. Might smell her. She swallows repulsion and does her best to hold herself as one merely waiting, as opposed to putrefying along with this building's ghouls.

A bolt slides, and a chain drops. A deep yellow light spills out on to her feet from the inside of 8B, along with a warm, soupy scent of cinnamon and pine. Sophie Dumond opts for seasonal scents, while Nix left Gary with citrusy candle burned at home. Both the light and the homely scent are pervaded by Arthur. He blocks sodium vapor from reaching her, and swiftly fills her lungs with cigarette smoke and that tinge of amber she pathetically clings to the moment he's within eyeshot.

Ere she leaps across the threshold to crush his chest with her own and wind her fingers his hair, she halts. " Your face... " She hangs, instead, as a spectre in the doorway, refuting any urge to peer beyond her husband and further into the apartment he appears to seem so at home in. Perplexity has tilted her head, and set her wide, hooded eyes to crystalline pools as she stares at his bare face. Not so much as a scratch of the white base he even prefers to wear at home lingers on his olive skin.

" The rain. " He tells her, softly, slow, taking the hand she hadn't even realized she'd proffered and tugging her close. Nix bends to him like a young tree beneath the wind, but the pleat of her brow remains. Not even the soft push of Arthur's thumbs beneath her eyes can soften the expression, as he wipes days old mascara from beneath her lashes. The storm's done a number on her, too, though he knows she'll lack any consciousness on the matter.

Nix searches the modicum of space between herself and her husband with the same exhausted vigilance as a vixen peering from her hidey-hole with her kits tucked behind her. The questioning turn of her brow aims to shade her pallid stare, yet it only cuts through the shadow with more ferity, in spite of the fog that which claims it. She lays her hands against Arthur's chest, notes that Hawk has followed his charge to the door and props his legs straight from behind, then seeks to count the speed at which his heart beats. Lithe fingers that are able, curl against his waistcoat. That mustard yellow canvas is typically framed by red...

" Your jacket. " She hasn't yet fully immersed herself in the homely environs of Sophie's apartment, and yet her wonderings travel through the living space. She's regained the voice that had previously buried itself in her throat. There's a bite to it that, whether intentioned or not, reels Sophie in from the peripheral field.

She treads forward with her hands interlocked at her sternum, caged not only by the gelid eyes of Nix, but by the ever-warm and seemingly perpetually startled eyes of Arthur, who swings around at the waist upon hearing her footsteps. Nix bears her the utmost fleeting glance, ere her eyes shoot away and back to her husbands face. The strain of her jaw is a striking, fine line that juts her lips forth and burgeons her downturned pout.

" I can get it. It won't take a second. " Sophie offers, and it feels like a useless gesture of ostensible comradery, but she smiles a smile that still pinches her cheeks, and waits until she's crossed to the hall and lingers out of sight to swallow the rocks having piled up in her throat. She'd hear the boots of Skizm's Killer Queen pounding after her if they were to do so. Her apartment, however, remains in a nigh-eerie silence that persists, even while her back is turned as she unhooks Arthur's cherry red suit jacket from its place hung above her shower.

Her return alludes to the reason for quietude. Nix cradles her husband's face in her hands, that tight and needy pinch that's been caught by one too many cameras before. Were her fingers curled at any steeper angle, those talon-like nails would carve right into Arthur's flesh as she crosses her mouth over his own.

Drawing away, she sniffs. The motion wrinkles her nose and curls her upper lip as if she'd tasted tasted something foul wriggle its way up her throat. Perhaps she has, and bile churns the moment Sophie re-enters her own living space, even if Nix doesn't dare to look toward her. Despite that, Sophie sits as some persistent ghost in her periphery, clutching Arthur's sodden jacket and dumbly awaiting some form of clearance to step forward.

Nix comes to a familiar conclusion, though it sits tight in her throat and stumbles with her voice, " The rain. " It trembles, the same way her tense fingers do, the same way Sophie watches her shoulders do.

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

“Why now?” though most would taste venom in that last inflection, Joker’s voice doesn’t exceed a whisper. Sophie asked for distance without opening her mouth. He obliges by padding backward, though his footfalls leave no audible trace and perform rhythmic sweeps that guide him across the kitchenette until his hips carve into the laminate counter’s edge.

Sokol shadows him. Beyond his blue vest and piercing eyes of an even paler hue, the wolf-dog himself is almost bereft of contrast. From certain angles, empty air fills that vest alongside Joker.

Withdrawal arrests his left hand. Joker doesn’t bother hiding that tremble. Swishing his tongue across the backs of his crooked teeth doesn’t paint them with the ashy taste of tobacco. He doesn’t remember what happened to the American Spirit carton that he could’ve swore was in his pocket. Sophie’s shower curtain rod currently houses his blazer, which he doesn’t think to retrieve just yet.

Scraping across the patent leather toe of his spectator shoe summons his attention downcast. The hybrid whines that sharp, weepy whistle that dogs tend to whenever vying for attention while scraping his master’s shoelaces to try and get that foot to stop shaking. His warm pink tongue bloops under Joker’s upturned palm, too.

Endless hissing at the windows remind Alpha Wolf that there is no moon to transform beneath. He’s trapped in human flesh. Penny won’t call to him from down the hall, though he blinks until a tear slips from his left eye and further dilutes what he envisions as the half-diamond under it. MAC Chromacake pigments have no taste. Joker preemptively skates his tongue across his teeth as if the blue track sits there already.

Time has no place here. Joker shifts his attention toward a wall-mounted clock to try and gauge how long he’s haunted Sophie’s home. Sokol has tirelessly been nosing Joker’s bizarrely bent fingers to try and loosen his joints. Werewolf leans to the left, hangs his head so Sophie tilts at a ninety-degree angle, then gazes beyond her again. Beyond the partition separating the kitchen from the living area, a frail yet gaunt silhouette waits with blood red eyes and orange teeth fully on display. He belongs down the hall. Whether Penny dons the red floral dressing gown and grip socks he buried her in or the hospital gown that he killed her in is a coin flip. From what he can distinguish, today his mother wears red. Her matted, partially greyed strawberry blonde hair has been gently swept into a low half-pony with bobby pins holding it together. Nix tends to like butterfly and banana clips for both her real hair and the extensions she often wears. He can barely tell where her roots end and those sew-in locks begin.

Slackening his jaw won’t wedge a cigarette between his teeth, so Joker tries to mimic the sensation by poking the inside of his bottom lip with his tongue. Then he tucks a hand in his pant pocket to produce his bright red iPhone. Facial recognition gets him to a chat window with ‘Ambrosius’ before he even took his eyes from Sophie. Keeping his eyes on his former neighbor and paramour, he taps into his most recent emojis and sends Nix a shit emoji. 

Within record-time a heartbeat pulse strobes against the back of his hand. He pinches his forehead, then flips the dimmed screen around to see the push note: 

Messages 10s ago Ambrosius 🪠 Messages Now Ambrosius Stay put Messages Now Ambrosius Or the AirTag’s going on your collar

He holds that last message, taps the laughing reaction, then drops his mobile back into his trousers. Sophie doesn’t lift onto her tiptoes to try and read Joker’s iMessages, though she does avert her focus to the mug that he hasn’t touched. His free fingers patter a delicate piano composition on the countertop alongside him. He can’t see which imaginary notes he’s striking, but Frozen Flowers falls like snow in his ear. The chill that clings to Penny’s composition rolls the length of his spine. He chews on the inside of his cheek, purses his lips, then tilts his head to watch his fingers strike the same running melody that peaks in the dead of winter. He needs to visit her grave toward the end of the month. Her death day’s approaching faster than he realized. 

“I…is everything okay?” a coil tightens in her chest for appearing too meek. 

Werewolf inclines his chin to make his eyes appear half-hooded, then mouths, “Yeah,” and resumes staring at her from across the kitchenette without blinking. “Though you didn’t answer me…”

Those jade irises pin her like wings on a fly. Sophie’s pupils shrink. Breathing becomes arduous. She grips the mug that Joker basically discarded so tight, the ceramic might break. A nudge from her chin towards him doesn’t improve clarity as it should. She’s still regarded the way panthers at the zoo pace behind the bars of their enclosure and eye spectators like prey.

“I asked…why…are you concerned now? What changed from when my mom and I lived down the hall?” Joker’s pocket hasn’t strobed from Nix yet, though she doesn’t need to quadruple-text. ‘Find My Friends’ tracks him for her. Joker clenches his jaw to keep from leaning into his shaking leg, then pats his pockets down to try and locate the cigarette carton. “Or is all this what you think I wanna hear?”  

[halcyen]

He doesn't need his second face in order to claim the space he resides in. In Sophie's dimly lit kitchenette, the strip bulb above their heads on its last legs, and no window for the smoggy moonlight to peel through and onto the floor, those jade eyes cut sharp as diamond. She's beneath them like pins, feels those whet edges as they prod against her skin. They're sharper in the wake of tears, she thinks. They slice right into her now in much the same manner they did four years ago. She's never forgotten the sensation of twin blades sliding under her flesh like she was made of butter.

Everything else appears softer about him. In spite of his bright edges of teal, canary yellow and bright red. Arthur collects no shadows. She doesn't even think, should she look down, that she'd find one begotten by him on the tiled floor. Her own must shrink on the retreat back to her, scampering under her feet, pursued by unbroken, if dull, light. He hasn't blinked. She does thrice.

The wolf dog has sat himself back on his haunches. No longer do those gelid eyes look to her, but to his charge. He's working. Once Arthur blindly slides his foot back barely an inch, just enough to roll his weight onto the front and bounce his heel, that great dog whines. She watches Sokol stretch his front leg and lay his oversized paw on Arthur's foot. All of the wolf's weight is then pressed forward, but he can't stifle the shudder of his charge's knee in much the same way.

He knows what changed. The entirety of Gotham and even the globe is aware. Anyone with a television set. They don't even need to have seen the live recording of Murray Franklin's grisly swansong and the riotous aftermath to have followed it. It goes beyond the news segments and myths for one such as Sophie, who'd watched the same man the world came to fear or venerate bent and broken on her couch. Watched herself become just another loss.

" I got to know you better. " She tells him, and her voice doesn't waver. Sophie's slowed her lashes now, they fan peacefully south and momentarily yawn shadows against the balls of her cheeks. Her eyes don't leave his and his haven't hers. Her hand's lain atop the kitchen counter, fingers bent just enough that they relax, but not so that she gives into the urge the patter her own tune against the surface. Arthur's fingers cavort still, the mug of tea is only good for one thing. Whatever rhythm he plays seems to hang as a lure in her periphery. She fights not to form the nigh-silent duet it would become.

Parting her lips betrays to her just how dry they've become. She's been breathing through her mouth. The dry air skating across her tongue tastes faintly of cigarette smoke, and a warm citrusy hint. She fills her lungs once more and reminds him softly, " I saw you that night, on my couch. " Something itches the corner of her vision. A faint sheen claims her gaze. It was shock then, now a certain grief she's unable to name is that which steals her so. Sophie chews on the underside of her bottom lip, then releases that clamp. A gentle shake of her head punctuates, " I don't think i'd ever seen anybody like that. You weren't angry. I hurt you, " Timbre's thick, partially trapped in her throat with a wad of anxious spittle. " And I didn't even know how. "

All this time he hasn't skipped a beat. Whatever plays in his ear might even deafen him to the response he'd so wanted.  Sophie clears her throat, but it doesn't nothing to clear her voice. Still, she continues. " And I was there. When Evelyn was... when you were new to it. And it was like you weren't. " A tinge of disbelief given how she sometimes still treads through parenthood blind and uncertain. " You just wanted to help her. And you loved her. "

Something pinches behind his eyes. The sort of pain and bliss she assumes only a father can feel. She isn't sure but she thinks she watches him waver before her. The little girl's name alone is both a knife to his throat and a soft, warm compress to suffering. For the first time since he'd commanded from her her answer, Arthur's gaze falters. It drops momentarily to the dog on his foot. Sokol won't move until commanded to do so... or until the saving grace she presumes Arthur texted for aid only moments prior beckons him. For his sake she wonders how far his sanctuary is. It isn't here, and it isn't her. That truth doesn't startle her, but pools as sorrow between her lungs.

Uncertain, she concludes, " I don't think we're strangers anymore. " Her voice barely above a whisper. She knows these days there are ears pressed to her walls, beady and glowing eyes bulging against the slick panes of her windows. Sophie sniffs back her dread of such, widens her eyes and cants her head to suit a well-meaning shrug. " I don't even think we're just old neighbors anymore... " Another sway of Arthur's torso draws her hand uselessly upward into thin air. He's just out of arms reach, and yet her fingers bend just subtly enough to cradle what would be the back of his shoulder were he a half-step closer to her. A nervous pinch thieves her brow. " I'm just saying, I care. I didn't want to upset you. " Softly, a smile shudders at the corners of her mouth. " Tonight I just wanted you to be okay. "

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

Stained glass plays tricks on him. When she wasn’t real, he’d see her in gold. Gold shines down upon her now. Sophie is radiant. Hard water has yet to dry her skin out. That or she has a killer regimen. He spotted a few dispensers in the bathroom. The labels escape him.

Sheet after sheet of bullet rain strikes the window panes. He stills for a moment to listen to the wind’s hiss — from the eighth floor, every storm feels infinitely more violent than it would on the street. Sophie’s young daughter must be numb to those gnashes and whistles. ‘She sleeps through anything,’ Sophie told him. Werewolf feels the canker in his heart sting as penance for forgetting.

She stands too far for him to reach and cradle her cheek, though he curves his free hand to fit the shape of her face and strokes the empty air at his side. Perhaps she isn’t here. Maybe this is a subtle hint from his own mangled mind that she did put herself through school, got a job where her boss isn’t a pig, and moved to another part of town. He clucks his tongue for Sokol to ‘greet.’ Doubtless she’d heard him and Penny arguing in Russian from down the hall, but he refrains for now. A quick whine signals to Joker that his message was received. The wolf-dog’s claws strike linoleum tiles with titanic force. They scrape and echo even though the animal is so massive, he barely needs to move to nudge Sophie’s thigh with his nose. He sits, barks at her — though it’s closer to a howl. She gasps. Sokol nudges his nose under her palm so Joker can see that he’s interacting with an actual person.

Still skeptic, Joker displaces his weight to the left, crosses his legs at the ankle so one leg can bounce ten thousand miles a second, then ignores an old woman breathing in his ear to follow the tips of Sophie’s gentle fingers as they inadvertently dangle above the hybrid’s snout. Anxiety makes her giggle. She gazes into the service ‘dog’s’ ghastly blue eyes, resists temptation to verbally greet the working animal, then lifts her eyes until they settle on Joker’s. 

“Can I…?” a jump of her dark brows fills in the blank.

He heard her, yet his lips refuse to take shape. Not when a guttural laugh boils behind his sternum. He suffers the first spurt of it. Nasal, raspy noise buries his face in his forearm. 

Joker wilts into a cough, then forces himself to nod and reply, “Yeah,” in perhaps too tense a voice for the situation. 

Distressing as it is, she’s trying to learn how to behave around his mysterious laughing condition. Maternal instinct wants to rub Joker’s back and guide him to sit, but he’ll wave her off. Sophie doesn’t want to completely ignore how his face flushes and he almost drops his mug while trying to kill the noise. The ceramic mug is balanced half on the laminated countertop, half over the sink. It’s an accident waiting to happen. Sophie’s not attached to the cup, it’ll just be a bitch to clean up with such piss-poor light fixtures. That cyan strip above the sink barely allows for dish washing, let alone picking fractals off the floor. 

“Hey, there…!” she upends her wrist so the wolf-dog can sniff and get comfortable enough for her to sweep behind his ear. His fur is so thick it doesn’t feel real. He’s well-loved, too. Whoever’s on coat duty keeps the wolf-dog both looking and feeling like a stuffed animal. Since Joker didn’t answer her, she teases him by ‘asking’ the dog, “Do you like coming back here?” She doesn’t notice Joker's haunting, backlit stare has settled on her from a little more than an arm’s length away. “No?”

Sophie tucks her bottom lip between her teeth and allows Sokol to, for a change, behave like a dog by licking her hand and forgetting the task. Joker’s stopped laughing anyway. He’s void of anything beyond that siren’s lure he inadvertently casts out to sea.

Joker rolls off of the countertop and crosses the kitchen with a cat’s stealth to trap that same hand in his own. Sophie goes stiff when he first catches her wrist, then relaxes once the pad of his thumb brushes her veins. His skin’s warm and he hasn’t yet reached for a new cigarette. Sophie watches the cage he’s bound her hand in fortify. Her knuckles are then brought to his mouth. He dusts her knuckles with a kiss fit for a nickelodeon. Sophie’s lashes nearly brush her brow bone from how wide her eyes open. There’s nowhere to back up. She twists to glance behind her, then gives his fingers a quick squeeze for acknowledgement. 

“You gonna keep coming back after I leave this dump…?” she asks for herself more than for him, though a glimmer of concern deepens the honey-brown hue of her eyes. 

Joker swallows what tastes like a pulp of rotten flesh that doesn’t belong to him, suffers a laugh that throws his head to the right and doesn’t last long enough to make him gag, then finally responds, “I won't track you down if that's why you're asking.” 

The wind’s moulded its cries to sound more like a giggle at his expense. He’ll haunt this charnel house after it’s condemned and pulverized to rubble. He’ll find a way to play house with Penny. He stares past Sophie, out the living room window. Blinking fails to keep his eyes dry. Joker shakes his leg with such unintended strength that the mug balancing on her counter may meet an untimely demise. 

[halcyen]

Whatever distraction, of the countless she has noted since he stepped across her threshold, lures his attention across the apartement also momentarily steals her own. It isn't folly. On too many occasions has she seen someone —something— at her window. Eight floors up. With no logical explanation for getting there. Fire escape ladder isn't broken or dropped on the ground below. She knows, she's checked. She's checked more than once. Whatever shadow-made men crawl up to peer through the net curtains don't appear exactly as men at all. They're angular, long-limbed and bent like spiders on the minikin steel platform of her fire escape. She can't see any now, though she fears for Gigi in the bedroom. She'd shut the curtains, and the window itself is bolted... but would that be enough?

Her heart suffers a tremor in her chest, and so her chest suffers a hitch. Sophie's eyes, still wide from the initial cradle of his hand, flit to Arthur's own. They appear glazed, green oceans doused in Gotham's perpetual smog. They don't focus on anything, lingering nor fleeting, that she'd missed. He's just there even while he isn't, as is his way sometimes. She listens for any sound that isn't her own heart beating in her ears, yet hears nothing. Even the dog is eerily still sat alongside her.

" It isn't. " She recovers in time for Arthur's grip to lessen and essentially drop her, albeit delicately, so she can sternly respond. She prays it hasn't been minutes since he'd made the suggestion himself, and also wonders if in his state he'd even know the time having passed. She tilts her head so that her eyes fix on his profile. If he isn't careful he'll let loose a tear. Or has already. The cyan half-diamonds beneath his eyes tend to give him away. Without them, his grief might just slip down his cheeks incognito.

" I'm not getting away from you. " She looks once again across the living space, and finds herself glad for the hole in the wall of the kitchen partition. Less chance of a jumpscare as she makes her way through the place. " It's got nothing to do with you. " Her assurance is clipped on account of the stress wreathing her heart in its barbed limbs. Sophie steals a breath. " It's got everything to do with this place. Those windows. Those... things. People? " Her nose scrunches, yet its a fleeting gesture that she cannot hold on account of the horror behind her stated wondering.

" And it has... everything to do with, " Her tongue parts her lips, and she notices how dry they've become. Gigi's Cherry Cola lip balm would have stood a chance against an evening of studying and refusal to look out of the corner of her eye. Sophie herself has failed in both if those tasks. She's even committed to watching her periphery now. Her mouth's a dustbowl for reasons beyond what he would assume. " Getting better. " Assurance doesn't sweep her tone and yet she's knocked her chin as if it does.

She swallows. Even that feels like sand. It isn't only 8J that can claim itself a mausoleum. The whole building is forgotten. The whole building is rife with life that shouldn't exist, their eyes aglow or their faces blank white slates. She swears she hears them breathing on the other side of her door. She doesn't look through the peephole anymore, and Arthur may have noted the added locks and assumed they were because of him. They aren't. With his company is seems as though the hauntings actually stop. Arthur's previous closing of the space between them leaves the stood alongside each other.

Frightened, she admits, " I don't wanna be the last person on this floor. " and looks at him with heavy-lidded eyes. " I don't wanna be the last person in this building — and it's going that way. And I don't blame anyone on their way out. " In earnest, her head shakes. Sophie has succumbed to a still sort of dread that's built her spine to be rod straight. Compared to how he seems afloat on the air, she is wired through it. She sighs, and yet her shoulders don't fall.

" This place was condemned while you lived here. " He still seems to, in some fashion she can't quite pin down. " It is still. No notice on the door, that's all. It's just forgotten. " Her resignation doesn't deign to gain pity. Rarely is she predisposed or wanting for such. Instead she's in search of an understanding from that might ease her calcified innards. " No one checks in, no one keeps an eye. The cops just 'lose' the place whenever they're called... I-I don't even know if it's people moving out or dropping off the face of the earth, it's... " For all her ostensible, nigh-tangible fear, her timbre's remained at a level of simple bewilderment, then lowers moreso for a gentle conclusion. " It's not good here for anyone. "

Finally, she performs a deft sweep of her arm. Her hand tucks beneath his own wrapped around the mug. She nudges both forward smoothly so that she doesn't end up with chips and shards over her floor. Sophie nudges for his attention, and thus acknowledgement that she thinks is a hopeless endeavour while telling him. " That includes you. Makes me worry. "

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

The floorboards creak under Sophie’s slight weight, yet remain silent under his. Joker’d twisted the old silver knob and abandoned clearing the dregs of his face in favor of following Sophie. Some things will never change. He should’ve taken his shoes off at the door as he would anywhere else, but that’s too familiar…are they that familiar?

He drifts into the short hall that mirrors unit 8J's. Just about every apartment has a similar layout. He half-expects her to flinch upon being trailed. The old wood panels refuse to announce his presence even as he shifts from sole to sole and sidles closer to her in an eerie, albeit elegant sway. Couldn’t have been choreographed better.

Sallow light fixtures paint him every inch her old neighbor. It exaggerates every crease and deepens his olive skin tone. In all likelihood he’s as sick as he looks: mentally and physically, yet when he edges closer and supplicates with those big glossy green eyes Joker is almost youthful. His breathing is thready at best — her own heart suffers a palpitation from a puree of anxiety and allure whenever he gets too close. He doesn’t need to verbally refute for Sophie to feel his counterargument. Joker's shadow hugs her own without him needing to lay a hand on her.

Damp fingertips cage her wrist without actually making contact. He ghosts the tops of the few hand-beaded bracelets that were made by Gigi for her mother. He doesn’t defile them with a touch, rather, he frames her feet with his own and tilts his head to follow the path his fingers wander up her arm and halt at the elbow. His thumb strokes an imaginary circle, then ventures higher. A turn of the wrist would glide the back of his hand up her arm were he actually touching skin — or sleeve in Sophie’s case.

She flashes a nervous smile — giggles when her nerves boil over, then swings her attention from his gentle undulation to those eyes. They collect every drop of light and appear to fire it back at her. They’re mesmerizing, paralyzing. An arch curves her spine toward him as if he’d pulled a string in her core. Message received. He doesn’t further breach her invisible barrier, rather, he watches Sophie's face without blinking and lets his smile dismantle. Sophie gulps, leans to the left to locate his other hand that at the moment trembles at his side, then touches his upper arm and nudges her head to the left.

The same pale blue light fixture that illuminated his and Penny’s old kitchen hangs in a strip over the sink. A similar light fixture to that in Joker’s little foyer casts the rest of the kitchen in a vitreous glow. Its golden wash even appears to tint Sophie’s deep caramel skin. This building makes a wraith out of whoever crosses its threshold. Even Nix melted into a sobbing little girl upon entering his old unit.

Joker smells like smoke, amber, rainwater, and citrus among other less potent notes. Sophie has no choice but to breathe it in. That strange medley doesn’t wrinkle her nose or ring as unpleasant, though she again tries to point toward the kitchen and remind him, “Your tea’s iced at this point. Let me microwave it.”

She tries to break from the undertow those sea green eyes possess, but finds herself closing a hand around his arm and leaning close enough to catch the exhaust from his next smoky breath. Then she’s gone. He’d lowered his eyes to watch her mouth form a straight line and her throat’s knot jump as she pivoted and retrieved his mug. To no surprise, it’s largely untouched. She’s never seen him eat. It shows. Joker never fills his clothing out. Clothes wear him. If she remembers correctly, he never ate anything she’d seen him prepare for Evelyn Rose either. And he doesn’t speak.

He watches with feline intrigue in the dark as she moves from the living room to the kitchen. It requires passing him in the foyer again. Sophie pauses, tugs one side of her mouth back, and again tries to signal for him to follow her into the kitchen…into the light. Joker hangs in shadow. Almost as if he knows he doesn’t belong here and can’t bring himself to be a blight on her home. The same one he’d entered without her knowing and waited for her in. 

“You coming…?” she chums the water in front of the vintage microwave that probably fires asbestos into everything it ‘heats.’ The hanging stained glass fixture defines her afro’s coils that she wears up. She shifts her weight and lays a hand on the nearest laminate countertop to lean against it and stare at him. Joker swallows hard enough to cough and bites the inside of his cheek so hard that he tastes a coppery rush. He then nods, eyes averted, and enters the kitchen. 

[halcyen]

Sophie's kitchen is not as worked in as he's perhaps used to. Some counters are too clear, some drawers too light. Beyond the microwave she's currently watching whir around with his tea inside, and the gas hob alongside, she's lacking in accessories. She favours a kettle over a coffee maker, too, but a small pump bottle of Starbuck's Honey Ginger syrup sits against the kitchen backsplash.

She doesn't wait for the microwave to sing itself finished. Arthur's been hanging in her periphery since he'd entered the kitchen. It's thankfully larger than her bathroom, but would only just allow their two bodies to stand side by side. The window into the living room creates the illusion of more space. 8J was a corner space; which wouldn't have provided Arthur and Penny much in the way of further luxury, but did gift them a window for the kitchen. Sophie's is only lit now by the lamp above their heads.

That same glow washes Arthur's face. His warm olive complexion is almost a shock to see after one's gotten used to that white base he surely prefers. He doesn't quite shy from her attention the way she'd expect, however. It isn't just the clown's veneer that begets him more confidence than he used to have. His whole has changed. She thinks him taller than he used to be, but Arthur used to hang his head low between his shoulders when he walked. Now, even with the unsettled questioning of how he'd previously caught her against the wall and attempted watch how her heart behind her eyes, he's stalwart.

Sophie herself suffers a cage having locked in her chest. Wolf's eye might not look directly at her now, but they had. His stare has a way of venturing beneath her skin, even if it isn't on purpose. She worries for the same now that she places his tea in front of him on one of the many clear counters. She hopes the swallowing of allegorical sand isn't audible.

" There, " She says, quiet yet genial. A peak of one brow wryly helps her warn, " Don't waste my tea bag. "

She keeps space between them that she previously couldn't in that narrow hall. It isn't for the repulsion or utter discomfort she's sure he'll presume, but rather to save them both that weighty silence yet again. While not blind to the way his eyes seem to deepen in their verdant shade whenever he looks at her, really dares to look at her, she won't having him hiding from her, either. He's no imposter here. She let him in, shut the door behind him. Concern washes her features for the man who can't tell how far he should encroach... or perhaps how far he wants to.

" God, I feel like I ask you this a lot, " She laughs good-naturedly as she shelves her hip against the counter. Gigi could fit twice in the space between them, but Sophie's otherwise not as guarded as her stance. Her brow pleats, eyes ghosted in a gloss of worry. His profile's sharp, stern, and yet somehow sleek. Ere he thinks she's scrutinising the naked skin beneath his second face, she blinks, and continues, " But... are you gonna be okay? "

She'd witnessed him lost in the sloping plains of her face, spied how his eyes dropped the surprised part of her lips. He needn't be so close to study her. She isn't in the business of hiding. 

" Does that place, " 8J, " Down the hall... doesn't it screw with your head? " Once again she swallows the dustbowl her mouth's become. She's beginning to regret having left the dregs of her tea on the coffee table, amidst the scattered school work she should otherwise be finishing. " You come here a lot, " It's mere observation with a benign tilt of her head. " The building, not my kitchen. It can't just be for the chance of my microwaved tea. " Her full lips turn back to a smile, but disquietude continues to pinch her brow.

The schoolwork on the tale thieves back her attention. Sophie gestures to it through the hole in the wall they're stood before. " I'm trying to become a financial advisor, you know? " The way she preens must endear him, or at least draw him further back into the room she isn't sure he's been entirely in with her for a time. " It's... endless school work, and a little like putting my brain in a blender sometimes, but, " A pinch of nigh-girlish pride purses her lips. " If it works? If I get there? It's gonna get us out. " That narrow hall, the closed door at the end to the bedroom she and her daughter must share lures her eye. " And it'll be worth it. "

Now she must reel herself back. Feet on the floor, eyes on the man in front of her. In earnest she reminds him. " You got out, Arthur. " The bend of her, drawn forward by an ostensible need to affirm her point to him so that he'll in some way ever believe it, narrows the space between them some. She's careful to watch those eyes, that tempestuous sea greens won't seek to impale her where she stands. As if she could stop them. " And you did that before 'Arthur Wayne' was ever a thing, right...? My point, " Sophie closes her eyes, ere she slips into an emboldened digression that only steers her further away. " Is that you did it. This isn't all you have to come back to. This isn't anything you have to come back to. "

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

The roar from the sink forces Sophie to speak above her normal tone. If he turns, Joker might notice how her chin lifts and she almost rises on her tiptoes. Gotham’s lead-contaminated tap still tries to overpower her. Joker never uses hot or cold water either, which only makes washing his face even more taxing. It’s almost lukewarm. Sophie noticed that upon holding her washcloth beneath the faucet. Patinas of her perfume vanished faster than she had, though she hasn’t gone far.

Joker scrunches the dead man’s nose at the way she holds up the doorframe. Four years ago, Sophie only smiled like that in his mind’s eye…and now they’re sardined together in her tiny windowless bathroom dragging washcloths over his face and pawing what he hopes she doesn’t notice are tears from his eyes. He swallows what feels like a pulp of his own flesh, smiles for her without daring to catch a glimpse of the corpse’s skin, then pumps more Bioderma from the plastic bottle and smears it around his face. He shaves close enough not to feel any stubble while gliding his palms and fingertips over his skin. More white, scarlet, and blue melts away. Joker doesn’t dare to lift his eyes and gauge how much more is left, but swings his focus her way as best he can while avoiding his reflection. Pale blue, bright red, and off-white streaks still paint his face. 

He smiles, but dismantles it by raking his teeth over his bottom lip as he admires her warm brown skin and how radiant her complexion is. Joker almost indulges her by noting that today must be one of the days she’s chosen to forego foundation, but instead reduces water pressure by twisting the sink’s knobs so he isn’t shouting above it. Musician’s fingers then curve over the edge of the porcelain.

Leaning forward, Joker keeps his head angled so she doesn’t see just how ugly the wrinkles and dimples on his face truly are. She never would have loved him. 

“You don’t need foundation,” his velvety compliment only augments how hideous his grin is. Her teeth are perfectly straight and white. His own are crooked and stained from smoking since he was eleven.

Joker then twists the knob so lukewarm water tumbles from that faucet yet again. He tucks a green lock behind his ear and, after running his fingers under the water, continues scrubbing the makeup away. Clear rivulets dribble down his neck and under his teal collar. He hadn’t thought to unbutton that satin soda-cap patterned dress shirt.

“You’re beautiful the way you are,” Joker speaks with little to no knowledge of how much makeup Sophie tended to wear back when he lived here — if any.

He reaches across the bathroom to take the washcloth from her hands and, during that transfer, brushes his fingertips over hers and toys with taking her hand. Sophie doesn’t turn herself into a wolverine once every two weeks the way that Nix does. Her nails are kept short. Joker glides the pad of his thumb over them, tilts his head as if it’d somehow make this scene play differently, then squeezes her fingers before he brings the washcloth to his face and begins currying splotches of makeup from more of his skin.

“Besides…” though he half-smiles on Thalia’s side of his face, it lacks depth. Joker clears his throat and shifts his weight from foot to foot while wiping more makeup from his skin. “Every day was basically a 'lazy day' back when I lived here.” Now he hooks her into his periphery. Somehow she keeps smiling for him. “No makeup…” Joker frowns and reaches across the bathroom for one of her hands again. “This was my only suit, more or less.”

At one point, he envisioned this potentially being their bathroom until he could’ve afforded a better unit. Now he knows he was alone in that vision. Werewolf threads their fingers, tugs her close as if an imaginary jazz orchestra calls for it, then looks at Sophie instead of his own reflection in the mirror. Water isn’t warm enough to fog it.

“And I didn’t even exist,” his voice is too soft for the venom he’s laced in that final line. Joker squeezes Sophie’s fingers and opens the medicine cabinet so he can avoid the prospect of coming into contact with the dead man’s face, which is basically fully exposed. He keeps his damp eyelashes downcast, coughs, then squeezes his eyes shut to push any tears from irritation loose. “If I don’t put my face on, what’s the point?” He won’t swing that medicine cabinet back around, but keeps Sophie’s hand in his so his thumb can glide alongside hers. He anticipates her drawing away like she accidentally touched black mold. Joker squeezes her hand and wipes under his eyes to collect any blue or white residue lingering there. “No one would even know who they’re talking to.” 

[halcyen]

She expects his touch to be gelid, on account of the rain still sticking to his skin and the tap water he'd previously been rinsing through his fingers, but Sophie has no reason to jump at his touch. Their position is somewhat awkward, however, as she's not entirely sure what to do with her hands herself, and the giant wolf dog stands between them. Those icy eyes of his peer out from the pillow of dark fur around his face. Hawk stares at her, unblinking and seemingly unbothered, even while assessing the close situation all three of them are in. This bathroom isn't made for such interactions, even Gigi struggles to dart around her mother most mornings. Sophie must hover in the doorway or be pressed against the tiled wall.

Arthur's pinned with a quizzical look as she tilts her head and screws up her face for just a moment. " I wouldn't be so sure of that, Mr. Wayne. " Her emphasis exacerbates the tease on her tongue, ere a smile pinches both her cheeks and flashes him her teeth. Most on the ground below, throughout the streets of this city and even beyond those borders, would simply die at the notion of aiding the billionaire's secret heir rid himself of his second face. Though she only watches her neighbour opening her medicine cabinet and spilling water droplets onto her floor, the vast majority would have a coronary at the sight. She knows it, and he knows it — even if succumbing to such a truth is less than desirable.

Now that those painted-on commas have vanished from his skin, she watches his brows lift and features soften as he realises what she's just said. Sophie shakes their conjoined hands as if such a movement can emphasise her point, then pretends to study him. " Don't think there's anywhere you could be anonymous now. " Two men in one, and yet somehow neither at once, he is what is painted upon him, just as he has been since his short-lived stint on Murray Franklin. No one took note of his true pleas for the audience, those in-studio and at home, because no one wanted to. They martyred what was real on top of a cop car, for a cause unbelonging to him. Sophie snatches her attention back before the quietude lasts too long, and softly wonders aloud, " That must suck. "

Before he can do anything beyond blink at her with those wide, bright eyes, she takes note of a particularly stubborn rivulet of cyan running from his jaw and throat. She doesn't know if that Chromacake he paints himself in daily will stain or not, but her eyes fleetingly betray her ostensible dread at the notion. Since the wash cloth he has in his hand is about as useful as smearing more paint on himself by now, she shuffles as best she can between the dog and the toilet, and sweeps another cloth from the pile by the sink.

Their hands only part so that Arthur can refuse the second offer, attempting to cut her off politely with that arm. A reticent, if perhaps nervous laugh escapes him, " Soph— "

" I'm not precious. " She tells him, locking her gaze to his without hesitancy. For a moment she spies the man who he believes never to have truly existed, kindly and timorous, like his presence alone should demand from him an apology. His upturned and open palm is soon home to his second cloth, patted into his grasp with the determined drop of her hand. " You really think I could be, living with the tornado, " Gigi, " Sleeping next door? " Her lips press so that her smile continues to hold, and he won't shy away thinking her supposedly irked exterior in any way real. She squints at him, hand laid atop the cloth in his own for a second longer ere she steps back whence she came. " Did you ever get that impression of me? "

She steps away, but blows a laugh out of her nose when tilting her head back. Her eyes roll to the dank ceiling light for just a second before landing on Arthur's once again. " I don't know if your face stains, " Her finger performs several loops in the air, directed toward his face as she sidles from view, " But I'm not letting that waistcoat get ruined on my watch. You know, I'm not convinced you have more than one of those. " It used to be his only suit, and despite the presumed billions he's owed and owns, she wouldn't be surprised to find that it still is.

" Finish up. " Full cheeks rise for her smile, she's careful to keep it cavalier so that he won't fear discomfort from her. " Because your tea's gonna be cold and I will microwave it. " Her feet land on the carpet of the narrow hallway once again. That channel is dark, a no man's land untouched by the lamp of the living room. " See? Not precious. "

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

Cover of night fails to mute how her irises are the same shade as clover honey. Joker lays a trembling hand upon her cheek, bends his fingers so they print her soft skin and stroke downward, then spares a crooked smile. A lifetime without dental insurance has left him with a twisted maw that he’s reminded of whenever Sophie smiles. Her lower lip tends to tuck between her perfectly straight teeth and pop out whenever she giggles…or maybe that’s his mind’s eye lying to him.

Werewolf tilts his head, yet cannot repel the lamplight’s spray from exaggerating the way his makeup runs and fades. His left thumb runs across her cheek in languid strokes until he clonks his hairline against her own. He angles his head so their noses don’t touch, but keeps his shy smile while looking her in the eye and ignoring the shadows coalescing all around him. Those ghoulish silhouettes rob him of breath. He imagines skeletal fingers unfurling from nothing to trap his shoulder and tear him asunder. Penny didn’t die here nor has she ever set foot in Sophie's apartment, but he can smell the oxidized perfume from her old vanity. He clenches his teeth to refrain from coughing once the phantom scent tickles his nostrils.

Sophie’s stiffened under the touch, but ropes a few green locks around her fingers and, perhaps too trusting, waits for him to speak. Each inhale’s more ragged than the last. Through his nape, Sophie can feel how his pulse jumps and his heart runs away from him. If the tears swelling his eyes indicate anything, he’s frightened. Joker looks beyond her to that static-swathed screen again. Television plays nothing but fuzz…yet garbled patter calls to him from the static. Lips that he can’t distinguish move onscreen, too. Sophie notices that something has blown his eyes disproportionately wide and rendered him dizzy from terror.

Against her better judgment, Sophie draws back from him to let her own jaw tremble and ask, “What is it?” before turning to see nothing’s there. She frowns at the screen, mutters, “Oh…” then lifts the remote from between two cushions to turn it off, “Sorry.” As Joker shakes his head to downplay his own tangible horror, she presses her lips and adds, “I’m sure it’s kinda weird, but…” she shrugs, “White noise helps me study. Usually I just…” she gestures in the general direction of her laptop, which has likely also slipped between cushions, “Spotify it,” she doesn’t catch Joker making a face upon her mentioning the streaming giant he joined a movement against, “But I hate those god damn ads.” She doesn’t lift her hand from his nape, but instead props her chin in her hand and leans forward, “You know, they used to make them every half hour, but now it’s every two songs and who the hell can afford premium?”

“Wh-who would want it?” Joker speaks like Nix doesn’t pay ten dollars a month, “I get three fuckin’ cents a song.”

“Times what…” Sophie lifts her eyebrows, teasing a smile out of him; “Two-hundred-billion streams?”

“If I showed you my royalty checks — e-even with my team of mob lawyers…” he prepares to rock off his haunches to head for her bathroom, but Sophie cuts him to the quick. 

“You could buy not one, but two…” she throws two fingers up, “—frappes and a cake pop.”

“Three once Ava’s Barbie track is released,” Joker scrunches his nose and holds Sophie’s forearm so it doesn’t slip while he rocks onto his feet. “Y-you know, that was the final song I wrote for her before I switched labels.”

“Wasn’t a fan anyway,” Sophie replies in too coy a tone for him to take seriously. Joker rolls his eyes and ‘bats’ her arm away before pivoting and heading for her bathroom with Sokol at his heels.

“On that note…” he’s slowed his pace to the point that it hardly appears his feet are moving en route to that cracked-open door where his suit jacket hangs, “I’m stealing whatever’s left of your makeup remover.”

“Use the Bioderma!” Sophie ‘calls’ without raising her voice, “I’d say all you need is a little dot on a cotton ball, but for that whole situation…” she clambers off the back of the sofa to follow Joker to her bathroom’s threshold, “You should probably use a washcloth.”

“And fuck up your towels...?” Joker halts in front of the sink and tugs the medicine cabinet identical to 8J’s open, “I’ll buy you new ones.”

“You don’t think I ever go glam?” Sophie folds her arms across her chest and leans her head against the doorway. She tempers a broader smile while watching hip squeeze the makeup remover onto his bare palm and begin working it into his skin. 

“There’s glam…and then there’s theatrical makeup, Soph,” Joker speaks between sweeping his hands over his face to wipe away what he can. He uses his hand-heel to flip the sink on and, leaning over it, continue to wipe white, blue, and red from his face. Multicolored rivulets dribble down his throat, but he uses one of the tissues Sophie had given him to clear that residue away. His nose and throat remain congested, but he powers through to continue washing his face. “Believe me…” when he looks over, his face is a watercolor wash that does get her to laugh, “You don’t want this on your linens.”

“Your poor wife,” she thinks aloud, “Unless…” she swings her index finger toward him, “You do the laundry…?”

“He cooks…” Joker speaks of himself in third person while tucking a lock of green hair behind his ear and avoiding his own reflection without makeup at all costs, “He cleans…and he launders.” 

[halcyen]

The lighting in here is terrible, only a single strip bulb casts any illume across the floor of the box-like bathroom she and Gigi share. Arthur'd had to dig past a small pile of scrunchies and coconut Sephora sheet masks to find the Bioderma bottle he was looking for waiting in the shadows. Sophie squints as if the light is anything other than dank, folds her arms, and props herself against the doorframe.

A fleeting glance to her left lands her attention on the bedroom door. Specifically she searches the small crack beneath it for any trace of movement, the shadow of Gigi's bare feet by the door while she listens in on a conversation she has no part in. She finds herself pleasantly surprised when a few studious seconds reveal to her nothing of the sort, though Sophie waits for an extended stretch, just in case her daughter's fancied herself to be a spy for the night. Satisfied when the cool blue glow of the night light remains unbroken from the inside, she settles herself.

Arthur's begun to shred that second face he seems to prefer over that which he works now to reveal. It runs from his skin in a kaleidoscope of colour, down his throat in rivers, and only partly into her sink to be whirled around the drain. Her temple shelves against the frame of the door while allows herself the slow exhale she's had locked inside her chest since she was still propped up against the back of her couch. Arthur struck like a match just mere moments previously, and has managed to snuff that allegorical flame out just as quickly as it had burst into life. Sophie isn't so skilled in burying the way her head feels thick and her eyes sting as they dry. She wipes at their corners with her hand-heel and, smiling, jostles her shoulders with a benign chuckle.

" Maybe that's just as well, " Scalping the last remnants of tear drops from her lash line clears her vision somewhat. It isn't as murky in this bathroom as she'd first thought, but still isn't ample enough a glow for him to get every shred of paint from his skin successfully. He's using his bare hands, too, and refusing to look into the mirror. Can't abide the ghost he thinks he is, or so she assumes. The notion alone threatens to strike her eyes like needles once again, so she jokes, " You're a light load's nightmare. " with a nod of her head to the rivers rushing down toward the collar of his shirt. He's caught what he can, but streams of white and cyan have climbed down beyond his wrists too.

Ignoring the mirror causes its own problems. His left temple still boasts that white Chromacake base layer. Since he refuses to use a washcloth, and has missed just that single shred of paint with every otherwise thorough sweep, Sophie shakes her head, and steps over the threshold.

" Excuse me, dog. " She says, doing her best to sidle past Sokol who, at the size he is, takes up the majority of the floorspace. From a short cabinet alongside the sink, Sophie sweeps up a folded wash cloth. It's freshly laundered, but far from new. She won't mind the loss of it, if indeed it even comes to that; Arthur's done well enough on his own. " I said use one, " She admonishes, though it barely sticks.

The cloth's dunked under the running water, which has since turned lukewarm so that he's ceased shocking his system with ice water against his skin, and then she douses a healthy amount of the Bioderma to the fabric. " You're missing a whole bit... " She tells him, then gently lays the folded flannel against that strip of white he'd forgone. " Just there. "

So as not to scare him off —as if he hadn't just been cradled in her arms a few short moments prior— , her hand retracts once his own covers the face cloth. Closer now, and without the make up that has all but become him now to the masses, it's almost uncanny to see the persona without its final touch. Pleasant for her, however, it is to see his face beneath it all. The man she'd known before the riots, before those bullshit Riddler streams told an entire story untrue and falsified. It's the first time she's seen him in years. She does her utmost not to hone in, Arthur won't feel like an open wound here, but she smiles at the sight nonetheless. 

Stepping back, dodging the wolf-dog again, Sophie asks, " You ever think about just having a lazy day? Skip the face and let the suit do the talking? Sometimes, " She leans in and lowers her voice to a stage-whisper, " I don't even put on foundation. " Her eyes bloom wide for the genial jest she tosses across the cramped space. Her smile pinches her lower lip between her teeth. " That is a lot of work. "

[halcyen]

S.D

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

But he was arrested. Thrown underneath Arkham State Hospital the same as his mother. A strange cherry-cola scent that’s likely filmed on Sophie's lips now dabs his hairline. He tries to inhale it, but charred lungs force a viscous cocktail of phlegm, blood, and smoke up his throat. Werewolf’s eyes stain bright red once his capillaries engorge. For a moment, her sweet face is buried under the weight of unshed tears.

His chest hikes. Joker’s nose is close to running if it isn’t already. He’d allow his focus to drift toward where he thinks that kitchen drawer is — where she buried all memory of him, how much he loved her, what she meant to him…how she’d saved him and vanished like the scent of that drugstore lip balm she’d borrowed from her daughter. He hasn’t breathed, yet tries to.

Warm lamplights augment her golden-brown skin. A few jet-black coils hang over her face. They’re coarse, yet pillowy beneath his fingertips and slip behind her ears with ease. She isn’t smiling as he’d always envisioned. Nothing he’s saying is funny or vaguely endearing, yet he keeps his head tilted at that stupid angle as if she’ll do it again. 

First to splinter his chest from within is a deep, nasal noise that slides into a laugh. He tries to kill it. Joker forces the sound out his nostrils and lurches forward. His chest collides with the back of the couch.

Sophie gasps at first, but swings an arm around the backs of his shoulders and holds still as Joker, either sobbing or laughing or suffering a blend of both, keeps her cheek moulded to his palm. His dominant arm loops up and around to both fasten her upright and support his slight weight as gravity forces him forward.

Two-toned spectator shoes near-slip out from under him as he lifts high onto his knees, squeezes his eyes shut to let the tears leak, and half-burrows his face in the juncture where her neck meets her shoulder. Doubtless she’ll have a red and white smear to remember tonight by. Solidifies the decision she’d apparently made before they ever crossed paths.

His nose definitely runs. His clavicle hammers her own with every fractured inhale. Joker shakes. Neither his cradle against her cheek nor the mitt he’s woven into her hair from behind can remain still. Her scalp’s warm under his fingertips. Werewolf soothes the pads in and out in spite of his own struggle to breathe.

Her apartment’s margins both yawn and compress. He’s woozy, disoriented, yet unable to relent. Joker laughs so hard he coughs. If she calls the dead man’s name, he can’t hear it or know that his racket’s thrown her nine-year-old daughter from bed and sent her stumbling for the bedroom doorway. Joker faces the television, which still is a wall of white noise that has begun to take shape. A face seeps past the static. Its features remain largely indistinguishable, but Joker cry-laughs until he gags while watching the face in that television smile at him. It’ll laugh like swarms of bees flying directly inside his ear.

Gigi halts in her mother’s doorway, jaw agape that Joker is in her living room either cackling or sobbing in her mother’s arms. She receives the signal from her mother to retreat, yet also that all is well. Ambling circles cosset the back of Joker's head as he strains to breathe. He hasn’t since first that horrible piercing noise that neighbors throughout the complex so often would complain about and try to get him evicted…but this time is different. Her lower neck and shoulder are soaked. Keeping her breathing level is a chore. She tries. Sophie’s eyelashes bat to collect any potential waterworks that cheap mascara will burn and blind her.

Joker keeps his face half-hidden, bleary eyes locked on the face in the television screen yet his mouth agape. Sokol funneled between him and the back of the sofa to apply pressure to his chest and get him to breathe, but it doesn’t work. Sophie’s afro has all but knotted around his hand.

After a pleading nod from her mother, Gigi slinks back into the bedroom and shuts the door behind her. Joker hadn’t noticed their interaction. All but that featureless, albeit smug face in the television’s white noise stares back at him. A stranger's breath finds his ear now in ragged puffs.

He bares teeth, pushes his nose into the bend of Sophie's shoulder, then vaults forward so his hideous coughs aren’t directly against her flesh. 

[halcyen]

These howls she's heard before, the wounded lupine's cry used to peel through the air vents and strike through walls. Sophie imagines that it does much the same, now, though hearing Arthur strain close to her ear is nothing short of striking. His shoulders hike, muscles pulled taught. Even beneath the layers of his suit she feels his entire body strain for a hopeless hold on itself. She's the anchor, though knelt on soft cushions and hardly held upright herself.

A short glance throws her eyes toward her own front door. The bolt's slid across it, and the chain locked in place. She isn't like she once was. Should what few neighbours are left to feel disgruntled feel the need to search out the sounds cause, they'll face a bolted door and nothing else. None will see him. Not until he's ready to leave himself.

She doesn't know when that will be, and doesn't truly mind, but Sophie's aware that he's typically missed while away. She sighs, shoulders the next heave of Arthur's chest, then curls her fingers through the sodden hair at the nape of his neck. Without her combing, those broccoli green strands would stick to his skin. There's ink beneath those waves she's never seen before, and can't quite make out even when she's being held so close to him.

When he bends his head forward like he's bending to a great gust she cant feel, Sophie cups the back of his neck. Her thumb nests in his hairline, stroking short, gentle lines against his skin.

The wolf dog's rammed his head in the modicum of space between his charge and the back of the couch. His black-grey snout shimmies upward, jabbing Arthur's sternum momentarily while the dog whines to be given amble space. Sokol ignores her, as he's trained to, though can't ignore the barrier their awkward embrace puts in his way. Paws as large as Sophie's face stamp on Arthur's spectator shoes and squeak on impact. In spite of the fact he's been inside Anderson Avenue's haunted monolith for a while now, Gotham's rain has a habit of clinging to all it pelts.

" It's okay. It's okay... " She doesn't withdraw, but speaks close to his ear. In truth her voice is more likely to be netted amongst his hair more than anything, muffled and quiet so the door to her bedroom will remain closed and Gigi won't give into her curiosity and worry. Her hand climbs, to crown him. Like that she can wrap the rest of her arm over and behind his shoulder. She gives the dog space without splitting from the man in her arms.

A great wolf's head lays solidly against Arthur's abdominals. In what Sokol's been given between his charge and the couch, he's manages to sit back on his haunches, away from Sophie, and flatten his throat against his torso. That alone interrupts their otherwise locked embrace. It nudges Arthur backward barely half a step, which the dog quickly claims. He hikes up onto his back legs in a way that surprises her just enough for just enough time to formulate the final crack between she and Arthur's chest. It's no longer just the sofa separating them.

The dog's tall enough to lay both from paw's against Arthur's shoulders, pressuring weight down onto them in what Sophie assumes is an attempt to stop hyperventilation. He'd do far better than she would, after all, and still she cradles Arthur's elbow in her hand, reluctant to pull away and allow him to think she'd wishes to the entire time.

Sophie sniffs, but it does nothing to allay the stubborn ache in her throat. Her jaw, too, has locked itself in place while she purses her lips. Arthur's made far more a mess of himself, having lost shreds of his second face to tears and mucus. With her free hand, still somehow cradling the tea she'd made — she'll check the rug for stains later — she wipes her eyes with the underside of her wrist. Cheap mascara clings to the translucent skin one she withdraws, and she shakes her head at the sight before finally her eyes are forced to peel away from him. Sokol's busy working as it is.

Beneath the heaps of her schoolwork on the coffee table lies a box of tissues. She abandons her drink in its space and, while performing a twist of her torso to wend back around to face Arthur, rips a few from between thin cardboard teeth.

" It's really, really okay. " She tells him again, wafting her snatch of tissues about the bulk of the dog still hanging off Arthur's shoulders. They jump a little less now, wheezing might be beginning to settle in his lungs, but his eyes are red, and paint's peeled all the way down his throat. She likely wears it against her shoulder and sleeve too, maybe even in her hair. She doesn't mind. " I've got you. I just... I don't wanna smudge. " His face. Any more than it already is.

When Arthur manages to deftly pluck his prize from her in spite of the way his body seems to wage was just against breathing, she reaches across the back of the couch again. Her hand shelves against the slope of his neck, just above the collar of his shirt. There she untucks and untangles several wet strands of hair, repeats the combing of her fingers even when the job is done, and swallows thickly. " …Can I get you anything? Do anything? "

[jokemoved5thewrathofkhan]

“I thought you loved me,” his cadence is just as slow, measured, yet not barbed.

A pulpy wad of phlegm that he hasn’t swallowed muddies his voice. Werewolf tilts his head to admire the bend of her jaw and her lower lip that would tend to catch between her teeth whenever she laughed. At least, that’s how he envisioned it. Joker pictured Sophie having this deep, warm laugh rooted in her stomach that’d soothe him as much as it encouraged him.

“I thought…” though Joker’s slackened his jaw, no sound arrives.

Sokol whines and nudges his master’s hand to distract from how his eyes track each high corner. Joker's teeth chatter from a cold he cannot feel…but goosebumps collect on his skin. Another briny track slips from his left eye. He rocks back and forth, dissolving his nerves into a fluidity he can only achieve whilst on autopilot. Joker swings at the hips in subtle oscillations, slants his shoulders along, and smiles only with his mouth. His second smile tugs toward his ear on one side. Melpomene will continue to weep.

From across the room, Joker holds her eyes. They’re still kind. Trying to understand what dregs he’s given her of their alleged past. He coughs into his teal satin sleeve, sniffs back what tastes like rotten flesh, then chews on his bottom lip and rocks back and forth with one hip to a rhythm he’s devised on the spot.

“I thought…” he speaks in tune with his mental melody, “That maybe…” Joker sweeps his chin along with that beat, too, “Things were gonna turn around. For me, for you, for my mom…”

In silence he glides across the living room. Joker sidles behind the sofa. She’s propped her chin against the backrest. Two delicate fingertips sweep up and around Sophie's ear from behind and caress her hairline. Her perfume is understated; ‘work-appropriate’ so customers didn’t complain out of spite and prejudice. Her sick fuck of a boss would end up taking it out on her, too. Joker dips the pads of his fingers into her afro and cossets her scalp in languid circles. The backs of his free fingers trace from her chin to the forearm she’s lain her face on. Her face levels with his lower abdomen, where his waistcoat ends in sharp points. High-waisted trousers cast the illusion that he’s taller than he actually is.

“I would’ve taken care of you…and your daughter,” who he’d conveniently forgotten in every moment he thought they shared, but won’t divulge into that, “I wanted to. I had this…” His chest suffers a splinter from the inside. She might detect the jump in his pulse or how his abdomen flutters in and out. “D…” he makes a face like each word’s swamped in tar, then cups the bend of her elbow from behind and drops his hand from her loose coils to her face. “I built a life with you that didn’t exist. And it’s…” a hideous breathy noise fractures his laugh, “It’s not your fault. It’s only my fault. It’ll always be my fault, but to me you were real. It was all real. And…”

He prepares for Sophie to either recoil to stiffen like he’s pulled the revolver from his pocket. Joker hasn’t broken contact with her cheek or her arm. He only lolls his head and counts faint freckles on the tip of her nose.

“And...you never were. And I don’t know why. I don’t even know if you’re here right now,” he feels his lower jaw shake, pauses his ambling strokes upon her cheek, then looks beyond her at the television set, “Please lie to me if you aren’t.”

Joker bites down on the inside of his own cheek and nods along to that conjecture. Sokol could easily follow an instruction to ‘greet’ her, but Joker doesn’t dare chance that. Instead he waits for the hybrid with thick black fur to sit and wait for a cue to intervene. His foot shakes. The wolf-dog rakes his paw over his two-tone spectator shoe to try and get it to quieten. Another weak staccato cages the laugh currently slashing up his insides. It hurts to release. Hurts even more to rein it back. Pressure mounts against the back of his throat. Joker emits the noise in little bursts that cane him. 

[halcyen]

The low, orangey glow of the lamp behind her head illuminates two faces at once. Half of Arthur has already slipped down his cheek in cyan rivulets which are impossible to ignore. That side, his mouth appears to slope into a downward curve that's confused by the beaming red grin he had painted on, which hikes higher up toward his ear to match the asymmetry in his eyes. Both glow, but only one sheds tears while the other seems to swell with misplaced hope. Misplaced, because right now he worries that his fingers card through thin air, instead of skating over her skin.

Sophie remains for him in the quietude. Only fleetingly do her eyes flit from his slipping visage to the door she can see at the end of the shallow hall behind him. Gigi will sleep through the storm raining what sounds like hail against their windows, but should she turn over in bed to spy molten eyes watching her through even the subtlest of cracks in the curtains, she'll no doubt propel herself into the quaint living room and hurl right into Arthur's back. There's no movement she sees, no shadows dancing in the slight aperture of the open bedroom door. A subtle illume yawns out from a nightlight on the bedroom's far wall. She watches for dancing shadows and sees only the ghost of the sheet rain.

Then her attention drops to his hands. Arthur cradles her twice, perfectly moulding the bowl of his palm against the side of her face, and beneath the only part of her arm which hangs from the sofa's back. Like this he seems taller than usual, and those spectator shoes he wears only give him an inch at most. She just feels as if she's sunk into the cushions.

He'd stolen her breath, and then the next, and the next. Uncertainty lies in wait like a coil to spring in her chest, but she doesn't reel away from him. " It's okay. " He's presented her a wound, this peeled-open vulnerability in his honesty that she doesn't wish to carve into, no matter how heavy responsibility sits against her shoulders. " I'm okay. " She isn't even sure if it is hers to feel, yet buckles beneath it nonetheless.

" I'm sorry, " Her lips purse. The balm she'd thieved from Gigi earlier in the night is supposed to resemble the flavour of cherry cola, but it's much too sacchrinine and false. Like plastic. Her wince is fleeting, all the while both she and Arthur are somehow adrift. That great wolf-dog at his side is so silent that he might as well be a figment of the imagination, too. She resists the urge to part her lips with her tongue, on account of her daughter's cheap balm she won't steal again, but creases her brow. " I wasn't that person. You, " When Sophie swallows she feels like she's taken in water. " You should have had someone. You deserved that someone. "

Gentle, slow and measured so he won't think she repels from him in disgust, Sophie leans into his hands, rocking forward just enough that the gradual jab of her elbow against his hand's heel might prove what she's about to say. " But I'm real. I was real. We met in the elevator, on the stairs... you rescued my keys before I could drop them down a drain outside. " She smiles, then skews her face like she remembers the embarrassment. " I'm real, Arthur, " He winces every time she says that, subtle jars from his fingers remind her. There's that wound she's just poked with her finger. One of many, she gauges, just from looking at him. Another, she thinks she's about to pour salt clean into. " I just... wasn't that person for you. "

Ere he can recoil, Sophie straightens her spine without sending herself backward on her cushion or throwing her tea across the rug. " That doesn't mean I can't worry about you, or I'm not real. I saw everything that happened... " The stubborn memory fog clouds her vision for a moment, and her eyes drift toward the kitchenette. Top drawer on the left. " I got your letter, your gift. You fed us that week, took care of us, and you'd have never known. " She pulls herself up with her free hand so that she 'stands' on her knees, and, returning his cradle, cups his cheek.

Sophie lays a kiss to his hairline, careful to avoid paint she doesn't know won't smudge from the contact. " I wanted you to. We'd have talked, but... " She saw everything that happened.