@inkstainmuses || { cont'd from here }
A puppe-teeeer. This one had a thing for poetics, clearly. And where was there a line between the poetry and theatre? (Smirking semi-absently from a stool where he was, quite literally, looking down on the man.)
"Y'know," Joker pulled up both knees and sat his elbows across them, this little knife coming out with a soft shink while he leaned, pointing with it, "I can, uh, empathize," (ha-ha,) "with your strength of vision. Mm? Oh, and, you know your way around a metaphor. I'll give you that: you see things. 'Hum-an-ity,' " waving the knife to demonstrably expand the subject of its pointing, "as you'd like it to be. Hm? You think it should be.
"See . . ." And he shrugged, so wholehearted his resignation it went from shoulders to brows, knees, hands. ". . . I don't blame you. It's a funny world we live in. Bu-tuhh. . . . I mean. Look outside, hm? Me, I see things, too. Mhm. But what I see - they're not visions. These pretty, happy little pictures people all paint for themselves." There was something deeper in his register, there; in Joker's smile. When he waggled his fingers, he did it softly. Spreading pixie dust. "You talk about sculpting, yet, what have I done but turn the ma-ter-i-al back on its basic form?"
Had him essentially chained to a pipe through the floor, this guy. Whose floor? Whose house? Where house? Well, that was anybody's guess. (An argument against the idea of its being a house at all may too be viable, but whatever it was, certainly, it was dilapidated as The Joker's apparent state. And barren.) Joker, chin cut low, had his eyes tilted in their highest corners to watch him. Pointier than that knife.
"It's the people who pretend," he said, "who'd like to keep their lives hidden out of sight from the rubble of the masses, who're destructive. They want the state of things to, uhhh, atroph-y. So as not to disturb their pretty pictures - like yours." He cocked his brows, like, Sounds like some-bo-dy you and I both know, hm? like, somehow, he really did know him all too well. Despite only being face-to-face here and now. Because of it.
But something unexpected played between Joker's incalculable features. Subtle movements disrupting day-old grease paint whilst it slips. He came up off his stool - the motion of limber legs spanning floor perhaps surprisingly fluent, if not exactly fluid - then crouched, shoulders settling, leaning low. No more than a foot's distance between two faces.
Joker hummed, eventually, "Does it discomfort you?" Referring to the chain? His eyes were steady as pins. Anybody's guess. "You-sually-y, in my experience, physical discomfort isn't on peoples' heads."
