Hi everyone! I'm too lazy to follow all the Joker/Batman week prompts, but here I am with a little story for every J and B' fan. It's a pretty hard story, really, I don't know where I pick such sad themes, but I hope you'll like it. Spread love, to your family, your friends, your lovers and your characters. Let it be cheesy or harsh, sweet or brutal, it is. And that's enough.
Be my Valentine
Waiting for the tide
You spent your first Valentine's Day with Jeannie.
You went out for dinner in a resteaurant, a real resteaurant with perfumed-haired waiters and soffused lights glowing on faded mirrors; she wore a red dress and her mother's pearls. Later you walked for long, wrapped tightly in your coats against the indifferent winter of Gotham, talking and looking at the threads of paper hearts hanging from the park trees. You stole two of them, giggling like kids, and returned home holding hands; when you undid the red dress, they were already crushed in your pocket.
That day was gentle, clean and thoughtless like all your projects, like a red paper heart. It was caring and clumsy, careful not to hurt, like Jack. But you aren't him anymore; you're son of the night an the cold womb of the alleys, of the asphalt stars of this city and of its faults. You're Gotham demon and at the same time a man who'll always burn too much for Jack.
So it's right that this Valentine you are here, the gash in your stomach gnawing like some ugly smile and the life laughing over your broken body. The life that has waited, has retreated before every blow and that now is ready to pour on you all her strenght, as the backwash.
Breathing is getting harder, you're rolling your eyes around. The room is bleak and decent, wallpapers with tiny blue posies, brown carpet, a little television buzzing with a telesales; and then the scent of every motel, greasy plates and cheap prayers and above all the blood, the one that soaked your bones and is the first thing you smell in the morning.
But that isn't what makes you alive.
Bats is about a step from you, on the floor, and he hasn't made a noise although the knife smashed half his throath. With the arms resting next to his body and the head bent he seems a bird, a huge bird shot down from the sky, spreading his wings for a last stubborn flight. Not to fall in the dark, but to fly into it.
The cops are swarming about the room, a blur of drawns pistols and scared children' eyes; the two rogues who attacked you are shaking the cuffs, cursing the death, you, the game they didn't understand.
You breath a wheezing laugh. Soon the paramedics will arrive, trying to talk to you, drowning you with the IVs and the morphine and the lights jabbed in the eyes, look at me do you hear me look at me, till the ritual is done and they can let you go without regrets. And then you can't pretend to be a bird or a demon anymore and you'll be just two corpses, two tangles of innards badly sewn into the skin. Atoms that tied for an heartbeat and will hurry to crumble and wave away and settle again in a rapist's sweat drop or a lily's petal, in another unique unintelligible irrilevant show.
And so again and again and again.
You feel a rustle near you, an obstinate breath under the screams and the sirens.
-J- a cough. -J, I'm here. Gordon's men will help us, wait a minute. We'll make it through, we'll...-
-It's all right, Batsy. It's all right.-
-No, you haven't undestood, you don't understand.- When you check him a lump of blood and bile fills his lips, drips under the cowl. -They arrived, we made it. We'll set it right. We'll set it right.- There's something in Bats's voice, a cold and tame thing, like a tear. No, it can't be, Bats can't cry, Bats can't quit hoping, because that's the last miracle you believe in. Oh the irony. He never undestood that in the end you was taken in too, that you too began to think that you would become two ratty grampas sitting on the porch.
There is an abyss between having no hopes and knowing that they too can die.
Your hand slids on the carpet, over the blood nets, over the old stains of gin and vomit, until you know that it's next to his. -It's alright, Batsy. Really, it's alright.-
A moment passes and then his fingers move, slowly, intertwining with yours. And they're just two cuts of flesh, atoms that will never meet again, but it's enough.
May the backwash come and swamp all, it can't take this from you.
You turns to the ceiling, smiling. You don't have to watch him.
-Bats.-
-Yes?-
The hands squeeze each other, waiting for the tide.
-Happy Valentine's Day.-