Grave

Part I:

Jack

or

- The Descent -

"For those whom God to ruin has designed He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind."

~ John Dryden

There were two cracks on the ceiling that interwove like yarn. They looked like one long strand of DNA, twisting and twisting, on and on across the stark white plaster that chipped and occasionally fell onto the bed below. Sometimes Jack would pick up the bits of plaster and run them between his fingers; sometimes the plaster was sharp enough, the paint dry and brittle enough, to slip underneath of his nails and make him regret picking it up in the first place. But he didn't regret that the plaster fell. He liked the design the cracks made in the ceiling. When he was younger he used to like to imagine that thousands of little plaster ants were working tirelessly, chewing away at the roof of his bedroom just to make those designs for him. Jack knew better by now, but it was still nice to look up on. Better than the plain white with dingy spots of water damage which made up the rest of the house. Jack thought that if he had to spend his life looking up at a plain white ceiling like his bedroom without those cracks, he might just go insane.

Something hard and heavy hit the wall to his room and a chunk of plaster fell from above, landing on his stomach. Dust floated down into his hair and landed on his face, and he had to throw his arm over his mouth to muffle his sneeze. Jack hated sneezing – he hated any sort of uncontrollable bodily function that had the annoying habit of interrupting his thoughts or his day. Most of all he hated anything noisy that brought attention to himself. At times like these it was best to blend into the background; it was better, when you lived in his house, to pretend you didn't live at all. In a way, nobody in Jack's house was alive – they were all dying or dead already. His parents, they were dead. They just didn't know it yet. His father, drinking himself into obscurity night after night; and his mother, a weak bystander who did not have the strength to break out of this abusive cycle. Yes, they were dead. There was no hope for them.

Jack was one of the dying. He hung onto life by a thread, as thin as those cracks that crisscrossed his ceiling. Day after day watching plaster fall in his room, hearing the same shouts, the same arguments: Money, money, money. Drinking, whores and shirked responsibility. And sickness. Death. So much about sickness and death. As if the very walls did not cry out that Death was approaching; as if the proof that one of the living was passing from the world didn't hang in the air like rotting meat. But he was constantly reminded. Because Jack was dying, but he wasn't the only one. He wasn't the actual one.

Somebody more cultured than he would reference the works of an esteemed author when speaking of the thin young girl that slipped into Jack's room at that moment. But Jack had never been one for English. He spoke well and knew how to write, though his penmanship was woefully messy, and that was all he needed to know. Books and poems held no interest to him. If he had read more he might have made some glorious comparison to make the girl's poor state of health seem like something less dreadful than it was. Perhaps he could have paralleled her bald head to something shining and luminous. Or maybe he could have waxed philosophic on the way her paper thin skin reminded him of velvet, or silk, or some other luxurious fabric. Jack wasn't entirely sure he remembered what velvet or silk felt like to begin with, so maybe he wouldn't have been able to say something like that even if he had been sophisticated enough to think of it.

Lola was still in this realm – this realm of the living. She and Jack – two children just waiting to die. Except Jack was healthy and strong; his hair and his skin and his height spoke of vitality and youth. Not even the Narrows could take that from him. He wished it wasn't so; he wished he could trade in some of his capable body parts for her trembling limbs. Who deserved golden-brown curls more than she did? But she wasn't the one who got them. Jack was.

She crawled into bed next to him, shaking as she did so. But she was always shaking. Trembling like a leaf. Lola didn't have much strength; not for something as trivial as moving, though she did try. Most of it, these days, was invested in speaking. Jack remembered the first time she had talked instead of getting up and moving around. She had just sat in her bed and jabbered on and on and on about everything. About clothes, about boys, about cars, about what she'd buy if she wasn't so poor, about what Jack would probably buy if he wasn't so poor, about what the Narrows would look like if those bigshots over at Wayne Enterprises came in with their fancy business suits and briefcases and remodeled the entire place. She had told him that there would probably be buildings made completely of glass, even the floors. They'd walk across glass floors all day, and maybe some of them would have aquariums underneath, so that you'd feel like Jesus walking across water. She figured those businessmen would like that. Feeling like Jesus. Because who wouldn't want to feel like Jesus? She had asked him if he ever thought about what it'd be like to be Jesus.

Jack had been in the middle of a science project and he was angry that she wouldn't stop talking. He had yelled at her, he remembered.

"Why won't you just shut up, Lola? Why won't you just shut the hell up, already? Stop talking."

"What else am I supposed to do?"

"I dunno! Get up, go outside! Go find that friend of yours and play with the sidewalk chalk I stole from that rich kid at the bus stop."

"I can't get up. I-I can't get up. I can't move my legs."

That day she couldn't, but most days she could. It happened once in a while when she got real weak, or when she spent too long running around outside with that girl who lived a couple buildings down. That girl was always coming over and dragging his sister outside, getting her worked up about clothes and lipstick and eye makeup that Lola couldn't have or looked stupid wearing. Jack hated that the girl was always dragging Lola around and making her feel like she wasn't different from the rest of them. Like she wasn't dying.

"I'm scared, Jack."

"Now don't be scared, Jack. Your sister is going to be f-fine."

"I hate it when Mom cries . . . I wish she'd stop crying . . ."

Jack wished she'd stop crying, too. She was lying. Lying through her tears as she told him that Lola was sick but that she'd be all right. He knew that. Jack was always good at reading people, and his mother wasn't really very good at keeping people from reading her. That's why his father could always work her up all the time; she was way too emotional. He guessed that this time she was probably right to cry. Jack knew just looking at Lola that she wasn't going to be fine. She was going to die. She was real sick and they didn't have any money, and she was going to die.

Back before Lola was sick, Jack used to take her down to the corner store to buy candy. He was ten and she was seven, and they'd always get a real huge bag of candy and split it between themselves. Jack spent all week long picking up coins from the gutters and sometimes even sneaking up on a homeless guy and taking them from his tin cup. Jack never felt too bad about it. It seemed to him that if the homeless man was more careful with his change he wouldn't be homeless anymore – so Jack was just teaching him a lesson, he figured. If Jack was sitting on the street begging for coins all day and that was all he did, he sure wouldn't be stupid enough to let some dumb kid come sneak up and take all his change to buy some candy. People who had money but didn't take care of it, didn't deserve it. It didn't matter if they were homeless or rich like a Wayne – if they were careless with their cash then Jack assumed they didn't want it anymore. So he took it. He put it to good use – Lola really loved that candy. Or maybe it was just being with him that she loved. But either way, Jack knew that he had used those coins in a more productive manner than that bum would have. Jack made his sister laugh and smile. How many people would that homeless man make smile, if he had kept those coins?

"Do you think that he'll hurt her tonight, Jack?" she asked. Jack said nothing. The answer was as evident as the muffled sobs that could be heard through the paper thin walls.

One thinly boned hand crept across his chest and gripped at his nightshirt. There was a hole in the left armpit and dried blood all down the front from the time his old man had come at him with a two-by-four. He was supposed to have used it to fix the wall in the bathroom, where the wood had rotted out. But instead he broke it in half on Jack's head, and broke Jack's nose while he was at it. The bathroom still had a gaping hole in it. Sometimes Lola would ask Jack to check to make sure there weren't any monsters lurking in the hole before she could go in and take a pee.

"Just check, Jack!"

"Jeez, Lola! It's four in the morning!"

"Jack, please, I thought I heard a noise. I thought I heard like a scratching noise. Like there was something with claws up in the wall and it was scratching on the pipes. I think it might be a demon. And as soon as I pull my underpants down it's gonna pop out and bite me on my butt."

"There isn't a demon in the wall, Lola. Go to the bathroom and leave me alone."

"Jack, I can't! Please, I really have ta go. I just wanna make sure it's not going to pop out and kill me while I'm peeing. I don't wanna die on the toilet, Jack."

"Why not? If it was good enough for Elvis, it's good enough for you."

"You aren't funny. You're not funny, Jack."

Nobody really thought Jack was funny. He didn't think it was because he was hopelessly dull or stupid. He just figured he didn't have much of a sense of humor. Or else it was his voice. Usually he was too busy thinking about other things to focus on telling somebody something with gusto. He guessed you could say that he didn't have any stage presence, if that's what it was. If it was him and another person, like that girl down the street, telling the same story, everybody would laugh at that girl and not one of them would laugh at Jack. That girl moved her hands around and her eyes lit up and her voice got hushed during the dramatic parts and high during the exciting parts. Jack's voice stayed pretty much the same all the time. Maybe that's why nobody really thought he was funny. Maybe it was all in the voice. He'd have to remember to work on that. Moving his hands more and making his voice something people would really remember; something people would really be fascinated by.

There was a shriek and a crash, and Lola's hand clutched spasmodically at Jack's skinny chest. There wasn't much meat on Jack. Once, Lola had told him that she wished he was fat because then she could curl up next to him and pretend she was sleeping on a walrus. For some strange reason she'd always wondered what it'd be like to sleep against a walrus. She told Jack that she figured it'd be pretty funny, with their mustache blowing around as they snored and their blubber jiggling as they breathed. It was her biggest disappointment that her brother did not resemble a walrus. Sometimes it was his biggest disappointment, too. He tried to grow a mustache, once, but it turned out all patchy. And blond. Jack didn't think that walruses had patchy blond mustaches. He figured their mustaches were black and full. That girl down the street had laughed herself silly when she saw he'd shaved it off. Once he realized he wasn't going to grow a huge black 'stache, he had given up the fight and taken his dad's rusty old razor to his upper lip. He had nicked himself at least twelve times and had to answer the door that morning with bits of cheap dollar store toilet paper stuck all over his face. She told him he was hilarious, and he smiled like he'd done it on purpose, for an act. She was the only one who thought he was hilarious.

"I told you to stop throwing that in my face. You just like making me feel like dirt, huh? You just like feeling like the maaan of the house. But you're not. You're just a stupid little bitch. A stupid, worthless whore!"

Lola covered her ears and buried her face into Jack's shirt. He could feel wetness where her face pressed against the thin fabric, and he wondered if it was tears or blood. Sometimes when she got real upset, like when she heard their parents fighting, she would get a nose bleed. Once she even started coughing up blood and it took Jack yelling himself hoarse for his parents to realize something was wrong. She'd coughed up a bucketful of the stuff before his dad had put down his fist and his mother had picked herself up off the floor to go check on her daughter.

"Are you bleeding?" Jack asked his ceiling. His ceiling didn't talk back; Lola did.

"No." Her voice was muffled and she picked up her head from Jack's chest, and then dabbed at her nose. "Maybe. Yeah, I think so. Is this blood or snot?"

She held up her hand for Jack to check – crimson, slipping down her fingers with a consistency just a bit thinner than honey. Back when he was really young, before he lived in the Narrows and before Lola was born, even, he remembered his mom used to make him peanut butter and honey sandwiches, sometimes with banana slices. And when he ate the sandwich he'd get honey all down his hands, and the golden droplets would slide down his fingers just the way the blood was sliding down Lola's. His dad hated it because when he came home from work (this was when his dad had a job) he would sit down at the table and put his elbow up, right in a sticky patch. He said it ruined all his suits. Jack bet that blood would ruin suits just the same way his dad said honey did.

"Blood. That's blood." Jack pulled his shirt up over his head and Lola put hers back and pinched at her nose. When he pressed his bundled up shirt to her face her hands were covered in scarlet blood, the paleness of her skin standing out against the violently bold color of her life seeping from her face. Her hands were trembling and droplets were falling onto his sheets, but those were already stained with blood so it didn't matter. His blood, her blood, his mom's blood . . . he didn't care, the sheets were filthy anyway. That girl down the street, she said that she'd buy him some new sheets soon, because his were so gross she didn't want to sit down on them. Maybe she would. He hoped that she let him have used ones. Maybe they'd be from her bed. Maybe they'd be decorated with those tiny yellow flowers she liked so much. Maybe they'd still smell like her a little.

"Should I break them up? Do you need the hospital?" Jack asked. Lola shook her head violently. Jack had to reach up and grab her skull between his hands to keep her from shaking her eyeballs right out of their sockets.

"Nah, it's just a nosebleed. I feel all right, tonight." Lola snuffled a bit and folded the tee shirt over so that the wet, bloody part was facing inward. She wiped her hands off. By the time she pressed the shirt back to her face, there was a line of scarlet streaking down over her lips, past her chin, sliding down her neck. Her skin was so white. Chalk white. It almost glowed a little. It was almost scary to see something so dark running down such white, white skin. It was almost like somebody had taken paint and tried to make some horrific art piece out of her. In a way Jack thought it was sort of beautiful. That blood flowing down her face like that, standing out so clearly against her skin. He knew that no matter how old he got, whenever he saw fresh blood on a person's face he'd think of his sister.

"I just wanna sleep with you. I don't wanna go back to my room."

Jack shook his head. Lola's eyes were wide, peeking at him from over the bloody shirt still shoved against her face.

"You know you can't. You know Dad likes to come beat on me for a while, after he finishes with Mom. Go back to bed. Bleed anymore and we'll have to take you to the hospital again. We don't have any money to go to the hospital again."

"Maybe he won't come to hit you if he sees I'm here. He don't hit me. Maybe if I just throw myself across your body then he'll realize what a monster he is, and he'll stop drinkin' and he'll get a job, and he'll never hit you or Mom again."

Jack smiled. He reached out and wiped off a fleck of blood from his sister's cheekbone. It smeared across his fingertip like red paint. Back when Jack was young he used to love to finger painting. Red was his favorite, because he loved the way it looked splashed and smudged across that plain white canvas. It was so much more dramatic than blue or purple or green or even black. Red was violent and loud and Jack loved it. Lola's blood reminded him of that paint. Her blood against her skin was like red paint against a fresh white canvas.

"All right, all right, I'll go ta my room," Lola grumbled. She stood up shakily, her shoulders hunched and the shirt still pressed to her face. She turned and looked back at Jack, sitting upright on his bed with his head bowed. "Can I keep the shirt? It reminds me of you. It'll make me feel better when I hear him come in here . . ."

Jack looked up at her. "It's all bloody."

"So? You're always bloody, too. That's why it reminds me of you."

"Jack, why are you covered in blood?"

"Not always . . ." Jack mumbled.

"Yeah, always. You never come home without a scratch. You've been so beat up I don't think you feel anything anymore. I bet you a piranha could get you right on the nose and you'd just laugh because it wasn't nothin' compared to when dad got that two-by-four."

"What happened?" his mother asked anxiously, hurrying to get a dish rag. Jack held his right palm over his left arm and mumbled something incoherent. "Say that again. I didn't catch your explanation for this."

"I said I got scraped by a nail." He hadn't. Some boys had made fun of the night his dad had come back from the bar and passed out in the middle of the street. They'd gotten into a fight and one of them had sliced Jack with a piece of glass from a broken alcohol bottle that littered the street. "I was running around with that girl who lives down the street. Lola's friend. And there was a nail sticking out of one of the buildings and it caught me right on the arm. We were playing cops and robbers. I was the robber."

"You're a little liar, Jack Napier. Who taught you how to make up those stories?"

"I think I might feel a piranha chewing my nose off," Jack replied, though he really couldn't imagine anything hurting more than that night, and that two-by-four. His nose used to be a lot less squashed than it was now. "What are you waiting for? Get to your room. And don't let them see you."

Lola snuffled a couple of times, like she was trying to get it all out of her system before she went into the hall and crept back to her room. Jack didn't really have a room, even though he still called it that. He slept in the little utility-room-slash-closet that used to be for all the towels and storage and stuff. The hot water heater was tucked away in a corner at the foot of his bed and whenever anybody wanted to take a shower, even if it was at five in the morning, they'd come and yell at Jack to wake up and mess with the stupid machine so that they wouldn't have to shower in the cold. Jack knew how to get the hot water heater to work but nobody else in the house did. He was always good at rigging up mechanical things. That's partly why they stuck him back there, but mostly it was because they said that Lola needed her own room. Jack didn't think Lola needed her own room, and neither did Lola. She would have liked having Jack near, and Jack would have felt better knowing that if Lola started coughing in the night he could make sure that she wasn't going to choke on her own blood and spit. But their parents didn't like the two of them together. His mom said that boys and girls shouldn't be in the same room past the age of ten, no matter how sick the girl is. His dad said that they were ungrateful little heathens, plotting against him, and that he didn't want to give them a chance to plan anything.

"You and that sickly brat are working against me. You're tryin' to think of a way to get me outta here. Little bastards, the both of you! Plotting and planning . . . I kn . . . know you are."

"We're not . . . we're not . . ." Jack was bleeding so heavily he was sure he would die. He'd never bled so hard in his life. It was like it was everywhere, the blood. It was running from his nose, from his mouth, from his forehead. It was in his nostrils and his eyes and he was choking on it. He could feel it all over his arms and his neck and his chest. And he could see the sticky slickness of it on the floor next to him, staining the cheap yellow linoleum. Crimson looked so ugly against yellow.

"You ARE!" his father roared, and swung the piece of wood again, like a Louisville slugger. Jack threw up his hands and it caught him on the elbow. Fire erupted in his bones. "I can hear you in there at night, whisperin'! I know yer plannin' somethin'!"

"I'm not! I'm NOT! I don't plan anything!" Jack shrieked, his voice cracking, and he heard Lola sobbing and coughing and spluttering from somewhere near. Maybe in the next room. She was watching the whole thing. Jack bet that she thought he was going to die, too. "I don't plan anything . . ."

He didn't plan anything. Jack had learned long ago that planning things was a huge waste of time. What was the point of making plans to go out with that girl down the street and your sister when you weren't sure if your dad would come home drunk and angry and decide to start a fight? The best way to keep yourself from being disappointed was to set your standards low, and to never plan on things. That was what Jack believed. And Lola was the perfect example for his philosophy. Who better than a terminally ill girl to prove the point that nothing in this world is planned? The idea that a person – the idea that he, Jack, could control things . . . it was laughable. Jack could plan all he wanted, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference at the end of the day – Lola would still be sick and dying, and he, Jack, would still be stuck in the Narrows with no way out. Dying, just like his sister. Except slowly, slowly. He hated that the process of dying was so slow. When he died he wanted it to be fast; he wanted it to be a rush of wind and noise and maybe some elation. That'd be how he would want to go.

That girl down the street, she wanted to die in her sleep. She said that she wanted to close her eyes on the night sky one day, in her comfortable bed, and drift away into heaven so softly that she didn't even recognize it as dying until she was already gone. Jack had stared at her blankly when she told him this.

"That's boring. Why would you want to die in such a boring way?"

"It's not boring, it's nice! Why wouldn't you want to die in your bed, looking up at the stars?"

"How would you look up at the stars when you're in bed? You have a roof, don't you? Is your bed outside?"

"No, my bed's not outside."

"Then how are you going to see the stars when you die?"

"Maybe I'll get a sky light. Who said I'll have to die in the bed I've got now? I'll get a sky light and sometimes when I'm bored I'll stick my head out of it and sing to the birds on my roof. And they'll sing back and become my friends, and help me dress in the morning."

"You're crazy."

Jack really thought she was crazy. That girl was always going on about things that didn't make any sort of sense – that's where Lola got all of her off-the-walls ideas. He bet that the girl had even put the idea of sleeping on a walrus into Lola's head. It'd be just like that crazy girl from down the street to go talking about sleeping on walruses. She drove him berserk sometimes because of all the things she said and did, and because of the way she was always pulling his sister outside and dressing her in low cut dresses that didn't fit her because she didn't have a chest, but telling her she looked sexy anyway. And because she didn't understand chemistry like Jack did, and thought that him messing around with chemicals was stupid and a waste of time. And because she laughed all the time. She laughed at anything. That was why she believed Jack was funny – because she thought everything was funny. She was always smiling. She drove Jack nuts sometimes, she was so annoying.

"What the fuck are you doing in there?" His door swung open and his father glowered at him from the hall, his fists clenched. "Christ. Covered in fucking blood again. Goddamn piece of shit . . . you, yer worse than that SLUT out there. She's useless, but you . . . youuu. Yer like a fuc. . . fucking runt in a litter of puppies. Shoulda drowned you . . . shoulda got rid of you when you were still small enough to bury in the back-yard. Ain't no one woulda missed you."

That girl down the street drove Jack crazy sometimes. Most of the time.

"Are you listenin' to me? ARE YOU FUCKIN' LISTENIN' TO ME?"

She drove him crazy, most of the time, but Jack still couldn't stop thinking about her whenever his dad came at him like he was coming at him now.

He wondered why that was.

A/N: So this is the first story I've ever written on this site (or in the Dark Knight category). This is definitely branching out a bit for me, format-and-character-wise, but I've got a clear vision on how I want things to go . . . . Basically, there will be two parts to this story. The first will be told in third-person Jack (the young Joker)'s POV. You can tell that in this first chapter he's young (think around fourteen), but the story will skip around in time and in the next chapter he'll be around sixteen. It'll follow his deterioration into the man known as the Joker. The second part of the story will be told from the third-person POV of "that girl", who will be further explored and properly introduced in the next chapter. Basically we're looking at a JackNapier/OC / Joker/OC type story. It will get progressively darker as the story goes on. This story is very plot-driven. If you want meaningless OC/Joker sex, this might not be for you.

** In case you were confused, long bouts of italics signify something that has happened in the past and will sometimes interrupt the present-time actions or dialogue in the first couple of chapters.