Smoke and Mirrors

by Thyme In Her Eyes

Author's Note: My very first Batfic, which I felt I had to have a go at after watching Mask of the Phantasm again recently (great film). I haven't seen many fanfics based on it around here, so I thought I ought to contribute. Also, it goes without saying that this 'fic is spoiler-rich, so if you haven't seen the film yet, stay away. And then buy or rent a copy and come back. :) Anyway, this fanfic is set towards the end of the film, just before Andrea's confrontation with the Joker at the ruins of the Gotham World Fair, and explores her feelings at this point. Enjoy!

-- SMOKE AND MIRRORS --

--

One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –

One need not be a House –

The Brain has Corridors – surpassing

Material Place –

–– Emily Dickinson

If I need to understand what I am doing, if I cannot act without my own approbation ... then I will invent a morality that condones me. Though by doing so, I risk condemning all that I have been.

–– Margaret Drabble

--

How disgusting.

This place…it sickens me. Looks like one of time's sick jokes has played itself out here, too.

Elongated, gnarled shadows, thick and bruised grey clouds. Rusted metal and faded, peeling paint. Strange, towering sculptures that aren't recognisable to me any more. Quiet as the grave. A nightmare carnival. Dim lights, a sign of life, grinning through a series of windows in the distance. Abandoned, decayed and derelict, but with plenty of eerie, twisted echoes of what this place once was. A happy place.

I remember it well, but I barely know where I am. I feel lost, I feel sorrow, I feel hate. All I can see are visions of the past, of what I can't change. All I feel is the same pain, numbed to a sad, hopeless ache deep within me. Something that can never be healed. That, and rage. And resolve. Determination like steel.

This dead fair clearly doesn't belong to my past any more. My memories don't connect with what I see. It belongs to him. The Joker. The grey, filthy and desolate ruins of a fantasy landscape. It's a joke, after all – the future delivered by fate is a grotesque parody of the future that was promised here. This is the future's graveyard, complete with smiling skeletons. I don't find it funny. I find it sickening, revolting. I have to stop it.

Everywhere I go to feels just as much like a cemetery or ruin. Not the cemetery from my past where I found my way to Bruce and the happiest I've ever been in my life, but a land dead and utterly lonely – divorced from life and warmth. Chilling and grim. I drift through this lost world like a severed shadow. Or perhaps I'm the one divorced from life and warmth. I can't hear Mom's voice, can't imagine what she might say to me. It all returns to nothing. All of Gotham feels like this. It's missing Carl Beaumont, it's missing the innocent Andrea Beaumont I used to be, and the future that the lost Andrea and Bruce Wayne could have shared.

I remember the way these grounds used to be, the way I used to be. The rides, the pavilions, the features and shows all have a place in my heart because they point to a happier time. A time when this future was nothing more than a black and demented nightmare. We were all different people back then. The world was different. It was sane and warm. Everything was brighter, colourful, not grey and bleak, except for a group of small, dark blots – blots that eventually grew and consumed everything. Now the most colourful thing about the present is the Joker. Cruel colours I want to blot out forever.

Any young person attending the Gotham World Fair might remember that they were proffered a beaming future, but the brightest times in my life are all long gone – shimmering, colourful memories that can't bear up next to reality. The present reduces these treasured moments; crushes and degrades them. A present on the verge of ruin. When I was living it, living the life I used to have – a life imperfect, but happy and secure and so much lovelier than it had ever previously been – it was real, it was solid. It had weight. It was my world, all I wanted to build my life from. Reality tears that world to pieces, though. The Gotham I believed in, the happy life I thought I had, was never real. It was all smoke and mirrors all along. It makes me a sad ghost in my own life. All I see is isolation; people who will always be alone. It reduces all that happiness, promise and love to a memory, reduces it to a tiny, fragile bubble I can only escape into when I'm at my weakest. Weightless thoughts. Intangible, beyond my reach. But so heavy, such a burden.

Next to the force, the insistence of the present and its right to be acknowledged and dealt with, the past evaporates. It disappears the way I do – into the smoke. No matter how much I want to hold on to it, to change things somehow. I don't live there in the past; I can't live there, clinging on to memories of a life just waiting to be torn apart. I live in present; I fight in the present, I need the present. Only by acting in the present can I avenge the past. I can't escape it, so I avenge it. And the future? It doesn't figure into this at all. The past is more important. I'm not doing this for the future, to move on or to banish old phantoms – I do this because I need it so badly. You can't emerge from the wreckage of destroyed lives and just put it behind you. It haunts you, keeps you alone and cold and raw. I need revenge to sleep at night, to stop myself from going insane with hatred and grief. I'd be paralysed without it. It's all I have. I need it just as much as they need to be punished. I can't let them get away with it.

But I don't hide and cower in the past. Its luminescence makes it more painful than comforting. I use the past, channel it. It feeds a darker part of me, makes me capable of anything. I make a weapon of it, of my grief. My sickle-blade strikes for a dead future, slashes for loved ones long lost, stabs for things that can never be made right. I use the past to make me strong, furious, merciless.

I refuse to accept fate. A sad twist of fate isn't responsible for everything falling apart – people are. I've known them, endured them, and I've waited. There are people to blame, people who have to pay. Monsters that've had it coming for a long, long time. And I've been so patient. I know how to bide my time.

I am more than I once was. How much of me is genuine and how much is feigned? I've deceived so many people by now that I'm not sure. I obscure myself, as if I could use my smoke tricks as Andrea Beaumont, and cloud the judgement of those closest to me. But I'm still human. It'd be easy to say that living out there on the edge and alone took that away, makes me feel barely human, but it isn't true. It's not the case at all. I feel very human. Tenderness, regret, hurt, longing…those feelings are more than just smoke and mirrors. They're not stage tricks. They have substance and reality. So do my darker feelings.

I'm not a naïve young girl, a headstrong daughter, a woman in love – I am a creature. I won't spend the rest of my life hurting and mourning. I know how to ease this pain. I am dangerous and destructive. I've proven that I won't be just a shadow – a shadow from the past, remains of a shattered life. I have substance, strength, will. I have a core of steel. They gave me that. I'm not a memory, but a living body, with a mission. I won't drift like a wailing ghost, I'll fight back. Take from them what they took from me, from my father. I burned myself down and rebuilt from the one thing I had left: revenge. A life for a life. I made a vow to become an angel of death to all four of them.

I became something powerful. Something terrifying. Something without clemency. Something ruthless. Something unavoidable, inevitable. As inevitable as punishment, or death. I've preyed on any form of conscience Chuckie Sol and Buzz Bronski had, any faint nightmares they might've had entertaining the notion that perhaps they were sinners, and that one day their crimes would catch up with them. I wanted to be the personification of their guilt, their stained hands and black hearts. I wanted them to see me and know. The shadow of death was hanging over them, looming menacingly, and at last they were going to pay.

I knew how to do it. For years while we were on the run, death seemed to haunt my father and I. It dogged our footsteps, leapt out and lunged for us every time we slowed down, every time we let our guard down, every time we began to think we were safe. Initially, we couldn't settle anywhere for long without being traced, could never feel secure. We always evaded them in time, barely, but the shadow of death followed us closer each time. We lived in fear, the fear that one day we wouldn't run fast enough, couldn't get away in time. The spectre of death sat at our table with us, shared our food, our homes, our thoughts and our lives. The threat of discovery was our constant companion. Daddy and I learned to eat, drink and sleep death. We breathed it in, felt it all around us, grinding us down. We learned to live with the fear, to be constantly vigilant, and even then I burned with wanting them to feel the same fear. It made Daddy and I closer and drove a horrible wedge between us at the same time. We both suffered the same living that harsh lifestyle, but seeing the other cope with the strain – Daddy coping with my broken heart, my lost youth, always blaming and cursing himself, and me coping with my father's ruin, his fears for both of us, his increasing inability to take it – made it worse. Love made it worse. Love made it harder to bear.

I couldn't even think about Bruce. If someone had told me the night we were engaged that I wouldn't see him again for over ten years, I would've found it too painful to bear. It took too long for me to finally realise that I wasn't coming back to Gotham, and that I'd left behind a broken heart. I'd let him open up to me, trust me, love me, and then I'd left him completely. Realising that was pain. And Daddy knew, and he blamed himself, when the blame always rested elsewhere.

But in the end, Daddy and I pulled through, or so I thought. I thought we could manage, that we'd finally lost them, and that we could salvage some semblance of a life, of happiness. All we had was each other, but it was enough. Until –

I hate them. I hate all of them. They…they destroyed everything, took everything… Daddy…

I appeared with shadows, dust, and smoke. I hunted with tendrils of smoke and mist. Columns of smoke rising and twisting. I was an inscrutable enemy, just like they were to my father – all smoke and mirrors. Now it was my turn to confuse, panic and petrify. I was incomprehensible to them, inconceivable. I dared go after them. I appeared every bit as uncompromising as I was at heart. I exuded doom, like a potent scent. I heard no pleas, and pitied no fear. There was no trace of humanity in my death's head. I spoke with a generated imitation of my father's voice, and hoped it was recognised. You reap what you sow. I pursued them like an inevitable retribution. I cut them down like a scythe. Like death, I delivered them.

I don't feel pity for old men, retired mob bosses, old monsters past their prime, any more than they felt pity for my Dad. I hack down men in their twilight years. My Dad would be enjoying comfortable retirement now if it wasn't for them. They've all had ten years too many. Their desperation didn't touch me any more than Daddy's desperation touched them. They wanted blood at any cost, and I became that cost. The price of Carl Beaumont's blood. I want interest compounded in blood, too. It'll never bring Dad back, never undo the toll those hard, desperate years took on us, never repair what I could have had with Bruce, what the two of us lost, but the blood of the guilty will do. It's far better than nothing; than just living with the pain and loss.

Nothing intimidates me any more. Nothing frightens me. It still hurts to remember, to know what I am, but this is all I have. This is my life now. I don't have anything to lose. Nothing touches me now.

Except –

Bruce. Will he unravel this? See through the smoke and mirrors? Bruce…I'm sorry. How did I get him into this? How did I pull him into this macabre quest?

I never wanted to hurt him; not again. I tried not to, but I couldn't stop myself from getting close to him again, couldn't stop myself from letting my guard down and embracing a measure of happiness. Letting us lick each other's wounds. A moment of weakness; a longing, a love. What can't be. Just look at what they did to us, what they transformed us into. We're not even people anymore. All we really have are sabotaged dreams and memories. We're both connected to worlds of pain by tragedy; worlds that mirror each other and sometimes touch.

But I love him. I always have. If I had lost that then these years would be easier, hurt less.

Last night…it was a snatch of the past that eased so much for a while, and made everything worse at the same time. It was enough to make me reconsider throwing over everything and trying for a future. Can we be a part of each other's lives? I still want to make it work, I still love him so deeply, but I can't. I'm different now. My life is different. I'm not who he thinks I am. I want this. I can't let go. I was robbed of Sal Valestra; I'm not about to let go of the Joker too. I have to do this, I have to. Or die trying. One more will make it right. Somehow it will.

But I know he won't understand, not really. He'll see my pain and my anger but he'll never condone my choices. I'll be a killer to him. I know him too well to entertain thoughts that he'd help me if he were to find out. We have so much in common, but we're so different. Once, that contrast was magical. Now, I know we'll crumble. We can't survive this. I never stopped loving him, I know that, but what I'm doing is worth being alone.

I'm a world away from him. I can't go back. Funny, how I could never see the line until I'd crossed it, until I'd gone too far to go back, until after I could see what I had become…but now that I have crossed, I can easily see the world where I came from. Like a parallel universe.

I was happy to cross this line. Who cares about right or wrong anymore? He could have crossed over, too – why hasn't he? I'm a shadow of what he could have been.

What would Bruce and Dad say if they could see me now?

Ridiculous. It doesn't matter. Dad's gone, and Bruce…I know him, even after all this time, I know what he's like. He says he believes in justice, but he could never see. It's unbelievable. Maybe it's not right or sane, but it's justice. Don't think death knows no justice. I won't let him stop me, won't let him persuade me to step back. This isn't his fight. Scum and monsters, that's all I'm ridding this city of. They were notorious criminals. Human life meant nothing to them. They can't take and take and take and destroy lives. Someone had to do something, had to strike back with all their grief and anger, had to show them that they couldn't walk away without retribution. Not indefinitely. I may be a killer, but I've killed for justice. I've made Gotham a better place. I will make Gotham a better place.

The Joker played the angel of death to my father. Now I'll play it to him. Nothing beyond that matters, and Bruce…so long as he can't stop me, it doesn't matter. He can't deny me this death, can't say that the mad slime living in this run-down mockery is worth sparing. If he doesn't understand, then I'll be alone.

I don't need to understand what I'm doing, don't need to feel it's right. I can overlook that. I don't need my own approval. I do what I need to do. It doesn't matter anymore if I've destroyed everything I used to be, the girl I was before. It doesn't matter if I destroy what I rekindled with Bruce; it'll be the price I'll have to pay. Haunted? Condemned? It won't matter. It's so quiet now. No more tears, Andie. It ends tonight.

Maybe it's not sane, but I know how to stop evil. He doesn't. I can go where he can't. I'm better than him because I can do what he's afraid of. I'm all that I can be. I can be what he's afraid of becoming. Shatter the glass. Enough of the smoke and mirrors.

I am Vengeance.

I am the Night.

I am the Phantasm.

-- FIN --