SURPRISE MOTHAFUCKA!
I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me. At least for a little while.
God I am such meme trash.
-Static
/*\
Blood trickled onto the floor, leaking slowly from the long gash on the man's neck. The Warden stood there, bullwhip in hand, staring down at the forming red river. He should move out of the way. Soon it would stain his boots, and god were bloodstains hard to get rid of.
Despite his boots he chose to stay, staring down at the corpse until it vanished. He could just get the circus folk to clean up. They always did, for fear of being returned to the cells. He'd just call down a few of the acrobats. They weren't practicing right now. His counterpart wouldn't care, so it was a nonissue.
He asked the Harlequin to send down the workers and they cleaned. They scrubbed the floors voraciously, and a single terrified child gingerly picked up the clock and scampered away. They were tidying up like their lives depended on it.
He wondered why. Though the Warden didn't think of himself as a "nice guy" he certainly wasn't so cruel as to warrant this amount of fear.
But he knew someone who was.
"She's getting anxious." The Harlequin stated, materializing behind his counterpart. The Warden let his one eye lazily turn to his "twin".
"Is she now?" He asked.
"This part of the prison is just close enough for her to hear, but far enough away that she can't pick out fine details. She's wondering if you got hurt."
"And how would you know?" The Warden drawled. He wasn't particularly interested, but…
He was interested. How is it, that the circus clown can profile her so much better than he could? He could understand her, yes, but the Harlequin knew her better despite spending less time with her. Maybe….
Well maybe it was for the same reason that his sociopathic twin was so much worse. He was charming, yet cruel. He put on enough facades to fool his observers for years, but he never really felt anything. He could feel passionately, but could not appreciate any kind of simple pleasure. He knew nothing of how it felt to watch the sunrise, or to take the last piece of a favored sweet. He could not share in another's happiness.
He could not share in their pain.
The Circus Clown was emotionally barren, and it was this curse that allowed him to so intimately understand others.
The Warden yawned. It was for that very reason that he was the Warden instead of the Jester. He could draw lines, where the Harlequin would commit crimes that would make his other half vomit.
The prisoners were always pissing themselves when he let "White" take charge for the day.
"Black" turned away from the dissipating blood puddle.
"I'll go talk to her." He said, walking towards the center of the prison. "Make sure your slackers don't leave my floor stained. Completely ruins the look of the block." White waved him off and glanced down at his subordinates, who were all staring at him nervously. He smiled deceptively sweetly.
"You heard him."
/*\
The Dragon looked calm. She sat quietly in her giant silver cage. Her knees were folded under her, and her hands sat in her lap. Her wings were tucked neatly into her back, and not a single hair was out of place. Her eyes were closed and she was entirely still. At a first glance, she could have been mistaken for a perfect marble statue, but for the slight twitching of her tail.
She looked as though she were meditating, as peaceful as could be.
And that was how she wanted it.
The Warden loved to rile her up. He'd say anything that might get a rise from her. When he got the reaction he wanted he'd continue, poking and prodding until she exploded. In the beginning it worked. He could make her so angry that she'd incinerate any and all cell blocks surrounding her own tiny prison, and he loved it.
After the fifth incident, the Warden had decided that he needed to evacuate those blocks. He used them for the odd death row inmate, but that was it. Though she'd never actually say so, she liked having the extra privacy and he knew it. He would keep poking and prodding, and she had gotten absolutely sick of it.
Despite the promises made to her by Joker, she felt like an animal. Her cage looked far better fit for a beast than a person, with the tiniest private lavatory in the corner and walls made strictly of steel and silver bars. She was entirely isolated but for the odd conversation with her captor. When she wanted to sleep he would drape the cage in a large velvet curtain, as though she were a sensitive canary who would spook at the slightest spark of unanticipated movement.
The only positive thing she could say for this place was that the food was good. The food that was only ever delivered by a disguised servant.
She could hear the tapping of his boots against the cold stone floor. His riding crop slapping against the bars of the long-abandoned cells. Soon, she could smell his sweat in the room, and his presence seemed to almost taint the air. He'd arrived. She didn't need to open her eyes to know that he'd grazed his fingertips along the electrified bars separating them.
Why didn't they hurt him?
"Hello Warden." The dragon said, opening her eyes and standing up. Her captor inclined his head.
"Good evening, Alice." He answered. His tone was quiet, polite and tranquil. Something she once thought impossible for him.
"How are you?" She asked nonchalantly. It wasn't that she didn't care.
It was that she cared too much.
"I'm fine." He answered. He then switched his whip to his other hand and held out his wrist. "The blood isn't mine, though I'm sure you've noticed by now." Any normal person would think that the information bored Alice to the bone, but with that one flick of her tail, the slight relaxation of the muscles in her wings, the way her face just barely lost some of its tension, he knew.
She really had been worried.
How stupid of her.
But flattering as well.
"I know," she answered brusquely, "I am imprisoned, not disabled." And with that she turned her back to him.
Sometimes the Warden felt disgusted by the Dragon's clothing choices. Well not disgusted, but he didn't want to think about what it really was. The admiration, the approval, the want… it was just better to pretend it was disgust. He once spoke up on the matter, but instead of getting angry as he'd expected, she had only shrugged. She'd stated that as a non-human entity, their rules did not apply to her, and ignored him for the next several time periods.
He hadn't known what to do with that.
The Dragon moved about her cage. Not at peace nor contented, but not the raving enraged mess that she'd been during her first few weeks. Alice had been so angry at them, him, whatever Joker was. She had murdered both Black and White multiple times, but they always returned.
Always. And she could not escape them.
Eventually she learned not to let his comments get to her. It was all bark, no bite. It hadn't taken long for him to grow bored. She had learned to reign in her annoyance, and to send her mild anger other places. She learned to school her face into an impassive mask, and she managed to force most of her nervous ticks out of existence. Her wings remained stony, her face completely blank. She became the pinnacle of indifference. He ignored her a while, let the Harlequin take his place as her conversational partner, and then he returned.
He was quieter, and far less bold in the words he used. He no longer swore around her, and acknowledged her properly. He was "kind" enough to address her as though she were a queen, rather than his captive.
When she didn't react he'd smelled confused. He'd smelled confused ever since, up until today.
"Then why did you look worried?" He asked, the ghost of a smile gracing his lips. Though the game was a little different, it was just as riveting, if not more so. He'd finally figured it out.
Once, Alice was a temperamental tsunami. The tiniest prod would devour seashores, and the smallest of sweet gestures would make her retreat back into the ocean, appearing as nothing more than a few tranquil waves. The calmest ocean to ever exist.
Now? Instead of a tsunami she was a volcano, spitting fire in her rare fits of rage, and remaining warm yet ever dangerous in her dormant demeanor. Her audience waiting for her to explode.
Just because she was different, it didn't mean it was bad.
"I wasn't." She answered, and then she smiled.
For a moment the Warden was dumbstruck.
He hadn't seen her smile since she was human.
Her face lit up exactly the same, the sharpness of her cheekbones offset by the youthful roundness her smile afforded her. She absolutely radiated warmth, a warmth that belonged to a Foreigner, not any of the things that they all had become.
It was different, though. Her reptilian eyes glowed a bright shade of blue, just a little too bright to truly mimic humanity. Her skin lacked color in its entirety, leaving her to look like a perfect porcelain doll if she stood still enough. Her incisors were too long, they should have cut right through her lower lip.
She was the same, but not.
To this day, Joker wasn't sure just how he felt about that.
"If I was worried about anything, it was that I might not get to eat well anymore." And with that, she turned away, her long whitish-blond hair completely masking the mischievous and triumphant smirk decorating her face.
"What do you mean?" The Warden asked, not giving her a reaction any more than she would give to him. This was a game for two, not one.
"You know exactly what I mean." She said flippantly. "You think a mere disguise can fool me?"
For several moments, there was no sound. For a moment Alice wondered if he'd teleported away. She was debating whether or not she wanted to check if he was there when she felt a hand touch her shoulder. She whirled.
Not once in the three months she'd spent as his prisoner did he intrude on her this way. She was startled and just a tad panicked. He'd agreed that he would not enter her space, if she did not use her power to exit the cage.
"I can't have my most distinguished prisoner eating slop." He answered, before smiling and vanishing into thin air. He was there one moment and then he wasn't, as though he were made of air himself. For a moment, Alice couldn't help but to bristle. She hadn't forgotten how it felt to lose, to have someone else assert their own power over her. At the same time…
She wondered why she'd come to trust him.
She hurled mental abuses at herself in irritation. He was her captor. He was the reason that she lived in a cage. He was the reason she couldn't see her friends or family. He was the reason she could not fly.
He was the reason she was so damn angry all the time. She whirled and marched back to her bed. He wasn't going to get the best of her, not in the slightest. She wasn't going to humor him anymore. She reached to pull down the covers and climb in when something caught her eye. A little pastry bag with a note on it.
Ace says you like these, "Your Highness."
-J
Alice tore off a piece of whatever was in the bag and popped it into her mouth. Rum cake. For a moment she was entirely still, and she collected herself. She took a deep breath, and turned her gaze to an abandoned cell, one of the only tiny rooms that still possessed furniture. One moment all was well and the next, well, it almost looked like someone had set off a bomb.
Except there was no one, with no bomb.
With that Alice let herself fall asleep.
And her captor watched from the shadows, the amused glint in his eye betraying himself.
/*\
Some behind-the-scenes for the portion of New Game where Alice has recently been imprisoned by Joker. I wanted to write about her time in the cage, and the conversations she might have with the devious duo, but at the same time I have other characters I need to stop ignoring. So here's my compromise.
New Game will go on as planned, and in return for your patience, I shall be writing this as well, though it probably will not tie in directly to New Game itself.
Enjoy!
-Static