AN: A brief one shot that morphed from an idea I had - of seeing a pre-Joker Jack through the eyes of an anonymous spectator, which explains why she has little to no personality (she's just a medium for now, but if this evolved into a full story, I'd turn her into a fleshed out character). I'm thinking of continuing it into a full-length someday, when this writer's block goes away. Enjoy!
Anyway, some of you may get that this isn't some straightforward love story. Some of you may see it in a different way. But what you see and what I intended may be different. Perhaps.
EDIT: Thanks so much to HoistTheColours (the famous authoress of Clockwork!) for her insight! She pointed out a few things that helped a lot and I revised a few things that might have seemed a little out of character, even for pre-Joker Jack.
And just a hint - this is not really a love story. It's more of a theory, if you catch my drift. ;)
Disclaimer - I don't own the Joker. He belongs to DC Comics.
He doesn't listen to me.
Not anymore.
That's the bottom line. A line that seeps through his head unnoticed. Another heap of garbage that is sifted through the chaotic underworld that is his mind. There's no reason, there's no defined image of a man or a monster…merely a creature torn between the two. A hybrid, if you will.
I was a simple girl. A disciple of literature and ancient languages, long since dead to us. Perhaps it was my simplicity that drew me to Jack, whose intricate workings were like a puzzle that no one could ever dare to even attempt to solve. He frightened them. And though he tried, at times, to invite them to listen to his myriad of scientific theories and predictions , they wouldn't listen.
He never told me he loved me. I don't think he knew how. It was just the way he was, blind to society's expectations. Instead, he flourished in another place altogether, and sometimes, when we sat on a park bench together, listening to the hum of passing time, he'd permit me a glance into that brilliant mind of his.
He would point to a doomed cyclist as he passed by, ignorant to his unkind fate - I have calculated a theorem that will predict the exact moment in which the momentum of the wheeled contraption will collide with an immovable force – in this instance, a rock. The force of the impact will interrupt the inertia of the contraption which will, in laymen's terms – upset the cyclist and have him head over heels in a millisecond!
But this was in the early stages of our relationship. When his attempts at flirtation were awkward and bumbling, successful more in making me laugh than wooing me with his masculine charm. When walks on the beach and the typical Friday night movies were traded for carousing in anonymous places, where little surprises awaited if I'd just thought to pull back the reality veil and reveal their true worth.
A mere city fountain became Jack's fish tank, a haven for flourishing life.
A park bench became the center of the world, where you could watch the entirety of the world walk by if only you looked a little deeper beneath the city's careful mask.
Jack was always so eager to share his secrets with me, and I was all too willing to accept him – if only for the way he was, and not the way he could be.
Jack Napier.
Not even a man, not a boy…just paper walls, painted with the half-grins and shy eyes of his shameless youth and the omnipresent dusk of his future. Sometimes, Jack would be the morning – a mirage of sunlight, twinkling and spreading across the grounds of the university like a secret wildfire that only I could see, only I could feel. His wild gold hair spread their rays through my fingers, but they did not burn me – I was, at first, exempted from the erratic motions of his intermittent temper.
I was his voice of reason.
I was his beginning and his end.
September 26, 2000. A day that would go down in history. At least, as long as my short and inconspicuous history would allow – memory. It is the only account of our live that we have, a chronicle of our place in this world and how we fit into the grain of it. It lives only as long as we do. Legacies are hard to come by.
It was the day I met him.
Class had already started. Pens were scratching against paper and sighs of discontentment shifted through the heavy air. This was a required course for some, a necessary path that was to lead off into some other devised destiny. Every hope of self-discovery was invested in this course for me, however – I wanted to be a writer. A journalist. A servant to the written word. My pen scratched harder and faster not out of duty, but of enthusiasm. This was what I'd worked so hard for.
He walked in fifteen minutes late. His shoes were soggy and the onslaught of excessive moisture seemed to affect even the layers of sodden socks he wore, uneven, as if he'd feared one foot would get colder than the other. It was the first we heard of him, as he lurked through the empty halls.
When he walked in, he was muttering – late, late, late. No good to be late. His dark eyes were distant, unseeing, even as the professor at the head of the class gestured to an open seat. He still seemed to hum to himself as his fidgety steps led him to the open desk, perfectly content with staying in his own world, even if that meant shutting out the encroaching borders of reality.
"Mr. Napier, I'd assume?"
"Oh, yes sir. Definitely. Jack, though. My name is Jack. But you know what it is they say - every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it."
A few giggles circulated around the cramped room. Their subdued laughter was heavy with the scornful inquiry - what the hell is that supposed to mean? Jack gave a small tick, his head snapping to the side, as if to ward off an unseen pest.
"Jack, then," the Professor replied. He cleared his throat and motioned to the whiteboard behind him. "I assumed you've read the assigned reading assignments for the Bell Jar?"
"Uh…" Jack emitted a low, barking laugh, as if the answer should have been obvious. As if the question, in his mind, had been a waste of breath. "Yeah. Lit-er-ature may not be the ah - strongest gravitational pull in my solar system, Professor, but I uh - ha...I can read."
The Professor's brow rose. "Oh? Then I should like a five thousand word essay on the subject. On my desk, tomorrow morning. I'm sure, since you are so confident, that it will be no problem for you."
The next morning, the room was graced with the aura of the Professor's wounded pride and Jack's unguarded complacency.
It should sound unsettling, even in my own head, to admit that I watched him after that. But in all actuality, my intentions were innocent – I held no malice in my quiet observations, no assumption of anything except unspoken wonder. Jack was an enigma, all wrapped up in the gauze of human skin to keep him at an arm's length from the prodding and probing of the simplicity of life and its miscalculations. It was safer for him there, where humanity couldn't ruin him. He was perfect the way he was.
It was late when I left. Stars were already waking in the night sky and the coverlets of shadows were thrown over the restless city, coating the grounds of the university in misshapen shards of light and gloom. There was not a soul in sight, and so I had missed him, lurking behind the comforting obscurity of the dark.
I'd had not a moment of warning. He came bounding up to me, his golden hair awry and wild as ever, and forcefully taken my hand. All prior thoughts of innocence were dashed to pieces as he dragged me into the realm of shadows, his hand over my mouth and his strength overwhelming my endeavors to escape.
"Sh!" He hissed in my ear, the thrumming excitement pouring out of him in little shudders. "You'll frighten them away! Quiet down and I'll release you."
I saw the outline of his young face even in the lack of light, the corners of his mouth stretched across his freckled cheeks. His eyes were black, but even now I could picture the spark – that little flash of child-like wonder that had never seemed to falter in him. He carried it with him always.
He released me, like he'd promised, and again hushed me as his finger pressed against his eager lips. At first, I'd been so silly as to think he intended to kiss me, the way he leaned so close that I could feel his warmth pouring over me in insistent waves. But his neck craned over the bushes, little ticks tearing through the stretched muscles of his throat.
At last, he looked down at me, his face clearer in the darkness. "Lampyridae. From the family of insects in the beetle order Coleoptera. They use bioluminescence to attract mates or prey, usually residing in temperate or tropical environments and prefer marsh-like habitats, in which their larvae may find food."
I followed his eyes, finding a soft, cold glow emanating from a cluster underneath the campus oak tree. Fireflies. I'd never seen them in Gotham before.
"What are they doing here?" I whispered.
He looked at me curiously, but did not say anything. Again, as if the answer should have been obvious.
He'd taken to calling me firefly. At first, I hardly had a clue as to why, but indulged him and simply basked in the glory of winning his favor and, not to mention, his attentions. He was certainly the oddest boy I'd ever come into acquaintance with, but it was certain that, if I was with Jack, I was never bored. It seemed he didn't have a dull bone in his body and an unspoken charisma wove into his awkward communication, his undeniable genius.
And when I finally worked up enough courage to ask him why he would insist on calling me such a strange nickname, when I was sure that I would not lost his affections and our strange understanding grew to camaraderie, he looked at me in that strange little way. He wrinkled his nose and his brow burrowed deep into his eyes, casting them into thoughtful shadows.
Why, I think it should be obvious. Your eyes… He had lifted his hand, as if to prod them, and I shied away. They emit the same bioluminescence. Why, it is almost a strange semblance to the thermonuclear fusion a star radiates to maintain its ability to remain visible and maintain its primary source of energy.
Such simple concepts to Jack. And though they weren't exactly the most remarkably romantic notions I'd ever heard, I took them to heart…it was Jack's manner of saying I was beautiful.
In his own eccentric way.
And they stared because they just didn't understand.
They laughed because they couldn't see.
It was after I told Jack I loved him that stranger things began happening, deviations from the young, innocent face I'd come to know – darker things. The steps were agonizingly slow and first, it was only the abandonment, in which he withdrew from most semblances of normalcy and severed ties with society. After a while, he stopped attending classes and our meetings on the park benches altogether, where he'd taken me to watch the people walk by and explain to me the genetic makeup of each person that passed, at least was was visible to his perceptive eye. He forgot the proximity of the stars and the novelty of fireflies. He forgot his knack for science. He forgot.
I waited, and I waited until I could wait no more. The waiting in darkness was killing me slowly - I struggled for light.
In most ways, it was a mistake. Perhaps, in all ways. I should have known that Jack was probably never a person, a tangible reality, but a beautiful abstract – almost like a dream. It was a disguise, holding behind its walls an entirely different creature. A distorted truth behind the vision of falsehood that I'd fallen in love with so blindly.
As the years wore on after his descent, Jack became nothing more than a fragile memory. Each act of violence, each considered tick and turn, pushed the humanity deeper into the pits of ancient history. Jack had no legacy - his existence amongst the human race was too brief to establish roots. The monster in him killed them before they'd had a chance to grow. He's dead, now. He slipped into darkness and never came back.
Somehow, I find myself following him, despite what he did to me. I suppose my logic was that it wasn't him at all, but the demon that had somehow possessed him. The cruel darkness that washed over him and drowned him beneath such cold, calculated rage and plunged him into the descent. It was enough to purge the pain of losing him, the pain of losing everything.
Jack is different now. No longer Jack at all. He wears a painted face, a horrific emptiness that seems to emulate the ghost of a man long since passed. He hides behind his grease paint, eyes hollowed, but he smears his lips with haphazard red – a reminder of his first step over the vague line that separates the land of the living and the lost.
He chose lunacy long ago.
But I remain his forgotten voice of reason.
I was his beginning....
...I was his end.
.THE END.