Again, chaos.
The quiet whispering of the people behind me suddenly made an instantaneous crescendo. Some people applauded, family members of the Joker's victims. Others began to protest simply because I got the Insanity Plea, as if Arkham Asylum wasn't worse than going to prison. As if I deserved the death penalty rather than Arkham. But they didn't know any better. Hell, I barely knew. I had only been to Arkham once when helping Batman detain Bane, who I was sure was still in the facility somewhere. But the place was ancient. Plants on the grounds were hardly taken care of and left to grow and spread all over. Pieces of buildings were missing, the bricks having been so old that they would sometimes crumble. But no one ever cared because the only creatures that resided there were the worst of any of the villains around Gotham, the ones that dressed up in costumes and gave themselves names. The crazy ones.
I shook my head in disbelief, refusing to take in what had just been said. People were still crowded around the courtroom. Police officers wrestled to get people out before they could climb over the gate to get to me. Why? I wasn't the Joker. I hadn't done anything I was charged with! I was never there when the Joker killed someone. He had never killed anyone in front of me.
But maybe I was the closest thing they could get. Maybe they figured that I would suffice in his place, at least for now, able to be someone people blamed. But I was still innocent.
When I was finally able to look up into the crowd of people, my breath caught in my throat. A few people were still remaining quiet and standing still. One of them was Bruce Wayne, and he looked straight back at me with an expression that I could not read. I dared not break eye contact with him until I was finally ushered toward the court exit to be immediately transferred to the asylum. Bruce looked away too and exited the room before me. I swallowed hard to avoid calling out to him. With the court nearly empty, I could be escorted out without any problem, except someone in the corner of the room caught my eye.
| Joker |
He stood in the far left corner of the room, out of the judge's view from his bench. A pale smile cracked the make up that covered his gleaming scars. Between his lips rested an unlit cigarette. He wore the same navy uniform as the day of the parade, his newly washed hair tucked underneath the cap. And just as an extra precaution, he tipped his head forward the whole time during the trial, as if someone might recognize him.
Of course, that didn't stop Rose. Just as the court cleared and she walked by, Jack brought his head up again. His teeth ran slightly deeper into the cigarette as she stared at him. He could see the scars and the paint being brushed across his face in her eyes; saw them widen out of recognition. And all he did was wink.
As a matter of fact, he had known about the tampered evidence, having seen the real interview himself in person. Rose didn't give him enough credit when it came to being clever. And Jack would have been lying if he had said that he wasn't upset about her sentencing, only because he would have to be the one to bust her out of Arkham. And then it would be a new game of Cat and Mouse between himself and Rose and the Batman. The more he thought about it, the more the idea vexed him. And the better the thought of leaving Rose at Arkham began to sound. Did he really have to come to her rescue? She had spent most of the time with him trying to prove how much she didn't need him. Why should he play hero now? Was she just going to come begging for help? Well that wasn't the way he did things. Besides, "Who am I to toy with the jury's decision?" he thought, his lips curving into a rather amused smirk.
A moment later, though it felt so much longer, he saw one of the officers dragging Rose try to place handcuffs on her. The smirk became suddenly darker, as if it could, as Jack watched Rose take out the two policemen with ease. When the second fell, out cold, onto the floor, he couldn't help but chuckle. "You're going to get in some trouble for that, Princess."
She stepped over them and walked to him, plucking the cigarette out of his mouth and dropping it to the floor. "What are you doing here?"
"Came to watch the show," he replied, placing his hands in the navy pockets and leaning against the courtroom wall again.
"Glad you enjoyed it," she muttered. Her voice was dripping with sarcasm.
"Oh, but I did," he marveled. "Huge turn on to see such a pretty thing take the blame for me."
She ignored the would-be compliment. "It's your fault my hospital records were blown up."
Jack only laughed again. "Oops."
She scoffed and turned to walk away. Where was she planning to go? Cops and reporters and proud families surrounded the place. Jack grabbed her arm before she foolishly walked right out the front door. So much for contemplating letting her rot in a mad house. She cringed as his fingers squeezed her arm, but he ignored it. His free hand snuck around her waist. If anything, he just wanted to see if a certain prediction he had was true.
He kissed her. Not too hard at first, but Jack wasn't one to wait for permission for anything. However, he began to hear voices coming closer from outside of the courtroom. And sure enough, one of his crew came in through a side door just as he pulled away from Rose. "Boss, we gotta go!"
Tipping his hat as a small gesture to her, another smile cracked on his face, letting the scars show through a bit below the make up. "That's my cue, Princess," he mused before backing up from her to go out the same door. She turned to face the door where voices could be heard growing. No doubt it was more police officers, seeing why she had not yet been dragged out of the courthouse. But when she looked back at him, the way her blue eyes widened, he had to stop. Even the smirk on his face had been wiped away. There was something he had never seen before in her gaze, the one thing he could never actually inflict on her, no matter what he tried: fear. The kind that made one freeze in their tracks and start to quiver, possibly even scream or cry.
Sure enough, by the time the doors to the courtroom were thrown open to show police officers with their guns drawn, Jack could have sworn he saw a tear slide down her cheek. He was out of view of the officers, but he could still see Rose. And he saw her immediately make the biggest mistake she could; she tried to run.
There were several doors that led out of the courthouse. There was the side door that Jack now stood behind, watching the scene in front of him. There were the main doors, where the audience of the trial had exited afterward, and there was the door where the judge entered and exited from before and after the trial. Since the main entrance was blocked and going through the side door would have led the police directly to him, she ran back toward the judge's bench. She leaped over it with surprising speed and aimed to go through the door and out a different way.
Jack was being begged by his men to get out of the place. It was beginning to become swarmed with police. But he paid no attention to them. "Get out, then!" he finally growled to one of them. "Go back to the hideout, and make sure you're not followed, or I'll put a bullet in the both of you myself!" Hearing this, the two of them finally backed away, leaving him to go back out the side of the building out of the fire exit and to the van that was parked outside of it.
Inside his jacket, Jack pulled out a gun that was fully loaded. Rather than heading out the same as his men, he went down a side staircase that would eventually lead to the same exit through the judge's quarters. Carefully, he listened to the footsteps of those in front of him, trying hard to distinguish Rose's from the others. She was still ahead of them, and in a few short seconds, he could have pulled her in through the door he was hiding behind and gotten her out of the building before the police could even figure out where she had gone.
But gunshots came first.
Not just one, but several. He heard them through the walls. Through the door he was about to walk, he could see the dark brown locks of Rose's hair spread out on the floor. A desk covered the remainder of her body, and she lay sideways facing away from Jack. Her right arm stretched out. Blood began to pool on the ground below.
Jack had seen so many people die. He had caused so many deaths himself. But none of them had ever had such an impact on him. He was still far from feeling extreme sadness, but shock was something he had never experienced before and now felt like a stab with his own blade. The blood spread too quickly for him to comprehend. Rose fell too fast for him to imagine, and not because she was putting anyone in danger, but because she was running… Because she was afraid.
The Joker was not one to experience remorse or regret or feelings for anyone. He just didn't. He was a psychopath. He could not feel love or passion for anyone. Nothing but the adrenaline rush of a fresh kill gave him pleasure. Nothing ever made him sad. But seeing his princess die was enough to make him angry, angrier than he had ever been before.
In following weeks, Joker stared at his own face on the news several times. Without Rose, the world would never know who he truly was. Gotham quickly began to spin back into chaos, with more death and robberies than ever before. Joker grew smarter. He hired more men and even some women. On the day Rose was shot, he came back to the apartment and killed his own men, just out of pure anger. The first few days after, he robbed five banks by himself, killing anyone who got in his way. Hardly anyone was surviving his attacks anymore. Batman and the police forces were having trouble even keeping up with him, knowing what he would do next or where he would go. And that was what fueled his smile, the screams, the gunshots, the blood, the explosions, the bodies, the kills. Soon, he would forget why he continued to kill more and more, until months later when someone else's face would finally show up on the news.
|| Rosaline Jacoby ||
"Rose?"
It took a while for my eyes to open in response to my name. When they finally did, they felt extremely heavy, as if they did not want to obey my mind. If anything, they hurt, and so did the rest of me. My vision remained blurry for several seconds before I was finally able to see the bright light that shined down on me clearly. Though it made my head ache horribly, I squinted to look beyond it. A woman I recognized stood over me, wearing a doctor's uniform.
The tight bun that held her dull, brown hair back brought back memories of her seated at the prosecution side of the courtroom. A dark maroon lipstick covered her lips, and black eyeliner was beginning to become rubbed off of the surrounding of her eyes. For a moment, I just stared at her, not knowing quite what to do. I was disoriented, confused, yet I had the urge to reach up and strangle her, just wrap my fingers around her neck and squeeze, with my nails digging into the flesh…
"She can be transferred to a room now."
Unlike the hospital, no questions were asked to make sure I had not suffered from amnesia. However, I was in a hospital-like bed, now being wheeled to a different area. The bright lights that had originally been shining over me disappeared, and my surroundings became significantly darker. When my eyes got used to the change of light, I looked around, recognizing the Secure Transit area of Arkham Asylum. My immediate reaction was to sit up. But when I tried to lift myself up with my hands, I found that they were handcuffed to small, metal railings on the bed.
Within a few seconds, I began to panic. I remembered running from the police back at the courthouse, and then the gunshot… But how long had it been since then? I didn't know, and I didn't want to ask either. I didn't want to know.
A few more minutes of sitting there, wallowing in my own shock, and the handcuffs were unlocked. The blanket below me was picked up and transferred onto a bed in one of the resident rooms. Not even the doctor said anything to me before walking back toward the door. But I had questions, so many of them. They just weren't coming to the surface of my mind yet, but I knew they were there. I tried to sit up, to stand and run and ask for someone to come back and tell me what was happening.
Then I felt pain in my ribs, a stinging that seared when I moved. Looking down, I saw that I was wearing a variation of the "Arkham" uniform. A bright orange top had been put on me, with the sleeves ripped off so that it was in the shape of a tank top. It was a button-up, with a few of the things missing off the top. I couldn't even close my shirt all the way. I was relieved to have at least been given pants with it, but my shoes and red outfit were gone. Under the layer of orange, there was a bandage wrapped around my entire torso, ending below my chest. A few spots told me that I had been previously bleeding through it. But the brown color of the dried blood also told me that it had stopped a while ago.
I had forgotten about the injury for a moment, and I was forced to lie back down from the pain. Trying to breathe easily, I turned to hear the door opening again.
"Rosaline Carter Jacoby," said a man in a doctor's uniform. I had no idea who he was, but he seemed to know a lot about me. "The second-wealthiest heir in Gotham City, next to Bruce Wayne himself. Also known as the crimson cameo that no one ever seemed to notice until she teamed up with the Joker out of boredom."
The way he said it, his tone of voice. It didn't sound like something a doctor would say, someone who was trying to help me. It sounded like just another person who thought I was guilty by tainted evidence. "That's a lie," I said, weakly, having spoken for the first time since I woke up.
"You know, recently," he started again. "Things have gotten a lot worse. He's killed even more people than you think by now, blown up more buildings than the city can fix. He's gone crazy, completely crazy."
I struggled to sit up again in my bed, my stomach aching and searing with the pain that I had no medication to get rid of. Wasn't that against the law? To leave a patient in agony when one is a licensed doctor? "You're lying. That's impossible."
"How?" he said, turning toward me. Getting a good look at his face, I saw a few scars on his right cheek, and signs of a pretty severe burn. He was older, and balding rather quickly, it seemed. One of his eyes opened wider than the other, and I had a feeling this man was biased against my innocence. "How do you know how long it's been since you were shot?"
Looking away, I remained silent. There was nothing I could say to answer the question because, truthfully, I didn't know how long it had been. But he didn't say anything either, just stood at the edge of my bed and looked at me. My fingers began to twist around the sheets, playing with them. Still, he did not say anything. He was waiting for me to answer the question. "I guess I don-"
"Exactly!" he interrupted me, grasping my chin between two fingers and making me look back up at him. "You have no idea what he's done since you were locked up, and all because he thinks you're dead!"
I tried to get out of his grasp, tried to push him away, but he was too strong, and grabbed both of my wrists in one hand. He pulled me forward more and made me keep looking at him. I cringed, feeling his nails dig into the skin on my arms. "Stop it! You're hurting me!"
"You don't know anything about what being hurt feels like," he snarled, and finally let go, pushing my face away with enough force to twist my neck a bit too hard. "But you will," he continued, a bit softer, walking back toward the doorway. I held onto my neck, watching him, shaking because of what he had done to frighten me. "Starting tomorrow, you'll know exactly what pain will feel like."
"You can't do this to me," I shouted back. "It's illegal! You'll be put in prison for torturing a patient-"
He interrupted me again. "We both know you're not a patient here." He reached for the light switch and, with a flick of it, made the entire room go black. The only light that came in now was from the hallway, and that was not very much.
"Then you'll be put in prison for torturing me anyway!" I continued shouting, pressing my hands against the railing, trying to lift myself up from the bed. But I couldn't. I could no longer support my own weight. It was as if I had been trapped without food or water as the Joker's prisoner again. It hurt to even try to move at all. He shut the door, and I fought the tears that began to well up behind my eyes.
"Everyone thinks you're dead. No one will miss you. No one will come find you. No one will hear you scream."
