Title: Poison Tale
Summary: There are memories and fairy stories meant for Rogues painted everywhere and Ghoul just gets more and more sickened as Delia moves to painting outside, whispering the stories in her manic stage. Twinning one-shot.
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, I don't own the franchise, I make no money off of this.
Warnings: Hints at Batman TAS, gore, murder, slash, etc. The usual.
Dedication: To Rose Midnight Moonlight Black once more, for writing up a trade off and for enjoying Twinning (one of the only people) and giving me tips and such on other things. Cheers.

-:-
Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles...
-Mark Twain.

Everyone—higher up and lesser organism alike—had cleared out of the Blue Rose and were to stay gone for the next twenty-four hours if they didn't want to be…throttled, hung by their jolly-knockers, dragged across the highway while tied to the back of a truck. Any of the above choices would do to put the fear of god in the Jokerz for the evening.

Ghoul was torn between being happy for the time being that he was left alone—save for the Boss of course—to work on his computer, or a little terrified that he was actually alone with Delia. He had given Woof the evening to himself and Jack to enjoy themselves and had begun regretting it since the splicer had gone off in his freshly washed clothes.

The first five hours hadn't been bad—they never were—as it was the calm lapping of waves against the beach before the massive hurricane of a storm. Delia had basically just wandered about the hotel naked as she usually did, but with a throbbing headache she tried to ward off with drinking an entire gallon of straight goat milk and downing half a bottle of aspirin tonic (even if it didn't do jack shit for her) she had nabbed from the good pharmacist in the heights of Gotham.

Now, however, Ghoul was twitching as she was talking to herself—or him, he couldn't tell as she never looked him in the eye at this point—quoting stories that Deidre had told the boys on boring days in this awful, low whisper that would cause little children to wet themselves. She had hacked a hole into the kitchen wall with a hatchet (that he would not think about where she had gotten it) some time ago, polished it into a somewhat lovely square with those sheets of sand paper Ghoul remembered the handymen his mother used when hired around the house and had set about to painting red roses and black, dead leaves inside.

"Just when I thought she couldn't be much worse after setting fire to a whole pig carcass…" Ghoul muttered to himself, closing his computer and swiftly following after her at just ten feet behind the raving witch as she put her hair—'Good god, Medusa probably had that exact coloring,' he sighed inside his head—into a tail, pulled on a pair of her ripped short-shorts and one of J-Man's wife beaters and carried out all of her paint cans along the spread of her arms and two for her ankles; also dragging the massive, thirty foot ladder out from behind the hotel to stand in front of it. Her paintbrushes were held between her teeth and some of the large ones fit into her shorts.

Ghoul took off his hat and hung it on the handle of the hotel door—this was the one out back once used by the staff to use on their smoking breaks, not the one out front that spun in a circle and should have been in a corporate building—dark eyes watching Delia as she set down all of her paints (house paints, water sets, interior design cans, the crap that models used for clothing) and started gibbering not so much under her breath anymore. Now she was speaking clear as day with a narrator's tempo, opening up a dark red paint can, 'Royal Love', and letting all of her brushes accept the badger hair one crash to the ground.

It was the story of The Ragdoll and The Prince.

Ghoul's stomach tightened, as if there were rocks settled on the inside. Deidre had started telling Ghoul and Woof that story whenever she had felt vaguely cheery (a rare sight before she left; like a blue moon or the finding of a diamond that fit into the scepter of the queen of England) and they had only made it to the middle, never the end.

It was wrong to hear it from a manic Delia, but he wanted to hear it.

Starting at the top of the latter, Delia could feel the words coming out of her mouth, but she did not acknowledge them. It was a little like biting her tongue and losing blood; you know that it's happening, but you pay it no mind because it'll be over as soon as it starts. At the moment she had to start painting a jester cap at the very end of the ladder.

"Once upon a time in a kingdom that had no real time of year because the sun was too ashamed to look at it, there was a castle that hardly anyone went to, because all of the inhabitants were cursed. Not in completely bad ways, but some of them could never recover, so they relied heavily on the sorcerers and enchantresses that came and went; some saved the people, some could not, some of the magic left them and they became cursed. It went on and on.

One day, sent to the castle by the people who had taught her magic, a tiny little enchantress came to lend aide. The witches and wizards that dwelled there sent her to look after a particular flock of the cursed people. They would not speak to her though, except for the one that called himself a Prince. The enchantress listened to him and could understand why the others had sent her to him as he was so happy on the outside—and he showed it in the color of his skin, lips and hair and smile!—that he could make her laugh without really trying, but was so sad on the inside that it infected her without even a touch.

Convinced that none of the cursed flock would talk to her without her having a greater understanding of them, the enchantress played a trick on them and everyone else in the world.

In the dead of night, she put a spell on herself that would last until she helped all of them out of their cursed states. She made herself to look and act like a cursed one; changed her figure to look like a jester clothed ragdoll that smiled and smiled and, even though she would be thrown and hurt, would always be alright, in a way.

This was not without a catch. She had to appear to love the Prince first, as he was the most powerfully cursed. She took him away from the castle and, for a while, caused a great lot of mischief. This was not always in good clean fun, but that was okay, because the kingdom had a Black Night to protect it in different ways and all the time. The Black Night took them both back to the castle, but that was okay, because now the Ragdoll's work could really begin."

Ghoul's eyes misted over in what could have been utter and absolute sadness, but could be easily mistaken for allergies. Listening to her was awful; her eyes were unfocused and she was just smiling as she finished the picture of a young woman that looked like she couldn't be more than twenty-two, with bruises and bite marks over whatever little there was of her skin, wearing a jester's cap and a torn jester's garb, smiling delicately and, perhaps, falsely. She was crouched down over the beginning of a tableau of a neo gothic kingdom, perched on a high stone wall with one arm draped over her knees and the other allowing her head to rest on it.

She looked a little like Deidre or Delia, only older and…he would not contemplate more on it.

Delia started up again, picking up a metal container of 'Ebony Blue' and a very large brush to move beside the Ragdoll's crouched position. She had already stated painting the Black Night—looming over the kingdom like some proverbial god with slits of eyes and sharp ears. Ghoul was a genius, but he didn't have to be to guess who the Black Night was modeled after.

"The Ragdoll spent years listening to the flock. Despite herself, she learned to understand and listen to them, gaining empathy with their higher understanding of society and the universe. She made friends with a Scared Crow—not scared of the world, but of himself and his own unworthiness—and a Mad Hatter that seemed to warm up to her with their constant barrage of questions. Them and a Green Question who stayed mostly among themselves in a private tea party.

And then, there was the Red Ivy, who had no affection for animals such as the Ragdoll or the villagers of the kingdom—or any other for that matter—but bountiful amounts for green flora. She became reliant on the Ragdoll and the Ragdoll reliant on her when the Ragdoll's Prince suffered various problems with his own curse. It wasn't friendship, but it was familiar and needed.

More familiarities were to come, but none that could help the Ragdoll as the curse of the Prince grew worse and more horrible for every year he lived with it. He became obsessed with a rivalry between himself and the Black Night; who himself had grown a small family of Birds and Bats and a Voice that came from the universe and mechanics abound. The Prince began to hurt her more and more until often times there were days that she had to hide for a while so she could heal. But, still, she tried to at least keep the others safe from him, in her own way. Stealing his own potions and lessoning their effect, making slight changes to contraptions he made to capture other beings and so on…

But, the ending came too soon, because the curse enveloped him completely and he set a trap that, at first, she thought would be harmless, because he only wanted to steal the Black Night's youngest bird and keep him for a son; she thought he was changing for good.

…She was so very wrong."

Delia paused a moment, looking up towards the sky line and Ghoul almost twitched with anxiety, of the chance that she would break her neck in just staring at nothing. And it was a nothing she was looking at. No clouds in her vision, neither black of her eyes flickering at reality, but at the thoughts and voices—and yes, he had grown to accept there were after all voices—in her head.

One whole finger nail had been removed from its place on her finger when she had slapped a line bordering the beginning of a smiling demon in a royal purple king's clothes and cloak lying in a rather painful looking slump upon the ground Delia had painted in colors of murky water with little bits of bloody skin and rags sitting atop. One of the demon's arms was reaching up, up, up towards a bolt of lightning that would either kill him or be tamed by him. His ruby red smile gave the illusion that he could tame it.

Ghoul took a step forward to possibly steer the woman back inside the hotel, but as if she were a butterfly on a flower stem startled by a loud slap of thunder, she twitched back into motion. If she had wings, he'd imagine they would have shook twice as she grabbed some more paint—beige and black and some more red—and moved to the very end corner of this fairy tale, this nightmare in physical form, this masterpiece concocted for lunatics by their queen from within the rabbit hole of her mind with nowhere to put her warped Wonderland.

This was the ending he wanted to hear, and yet, for all of his yearning, for the moment he just wanted to take a candle and pour wax down his ear canals.

"In the final confrontation between the Prince and the Black Knight, the Ragdoll was not present, no, not to see what really happened, but to figure it out later…After. But, there is a moment of clarity that reminds her what led up to it. An invitation to the long abandoned castle left to the elements by the other cursed and the other manipulators of magic; the home they had made out of it was anything but and then there was the Black Night and his Voice from the universe before she ascended and looked more like a smaller Night, with lady legs and yellow for a cloak. They confronted each other and the Prince revealed the small Bird they had caught, ruined and broken and cursed himself.

The Night was enraged and so was his Lady. In the fighting, the Ragdoll and the smaller Night separated from the men and the Black Night and Prince went forth into the castle, wild electricity running through it like the first stroke of danger birds feel in their hearts before being struck by lightning and water in large glass containers hanging from wires and chords like hearts and organs. The last the Ragdoll saw of the Prince—alive—was him being chased by the Black Night and laughing wickedly.

The Lady Night and the Ragdoll fought at the edge of a wide abyss leading into a fall of air and water; small spikes and pikes of metal slanted from where the earth converged, and stones the sized of human beings jutted out like benevolent hands that didn't mean to, but did more harm than good. It was through that abyss that the Ragdoll and the Lady Night fell—the Lady catching one of those benevolent stone hands and the Ragdoll long enough to try and pull them both to safety…

Sadly, the Ragdoll's own clothed hand betrayed her and she fell…and fell…and fell. The Lady Night and the Black Night would think she died, but fate, as the world would never know, really, unless they were there, would be kind.

The Ragdoll hit many things on the way down, so many bits of lead and iron and stone that she was so very broken when she finally hit the bottom; one very large slab of stone meeting her back, along with water from a small river against her legs.

But, that wasn't the end of her story. The Ragdoll would live, but she herself would be cursed forever as a result of a week before the Prince's invitation to the castle. In a moment of her desperate compassion to allow the small Bird to leave and the Prince's vile anger at her saying any such thing, she was given a little piece of him to carry around for nine months; how it lived after her fall was beyond science and magic and she would not know about it until she crawled aching and broken from the abyss and away from the kingdom.

For forty-two years after her failure, the Ragdoll remained hidden in a very quiet place that could see the broken castle, but could not be seen by it or anyone else that didn't know where it was—and that was a privilege given only to three others besides the Ragdoll. One was her own Little Cursed Princess that died twenty-six years after conception and birth and of her own volition and design in blaze, real name kept only in the Ragdoll's memory. The other two were a pair of tiny little dolls that had their own magic—one like a Little Princess and one like a Bisque Doll.

But, even then, after a while, those two little dolls went away from the Ragdoll, in hesitation and in delight to get away.

And the Ragdoll? She died, but not without those secrets, spells and curses guarded so carefully over the years being buried way down deep where nobody could find them.

The last piece of vanity she had left…"

Finishing the bottom of the painting—a wide tunnel that had, at its end, a small cottage, a sickly yellow tree and two figures that stood no bigger than a pair of robins, one red and one white—Delia dropped the brushes without grace and just looked for a moment.

It was beautiful in a way. And ugly. And Frightful. And Sad. It was Gotham and it was the truth that nobody knew about. Not even Ghoul standing five feet behind her, admiring it, avoiding her like an infectious disease, and thinking it only her ravings.

She would let it stay that way. For the moment, walking to the door with a wanton expression, Delia would just go to the kitchen and fish out that pure red apple she had hidden at the foot of her bed; next to her absinthe and needles.

Her mouth widened in a yawn, arms stretched over her head, popping every bone in her back and flexing ever muscle like putting on a new skin, hair waving like tendrils of wool on a spinning wheel, and feet red and swollen from dancing about like she was wearing shoes of red hot iron in her painting. She opened the door to go into the Blue Rose and after she ate her apple, she would sleep the rest of this cycle until reality woke her up.