Chapter Fourteen
Feminine Rituals
(Part 1)
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Rose and Danni both needed to relax. Crystal could see that, even through the frosted glass of the shower door. But she wasn't the maternal one around here and she was busy trying to relax herself. She didn't really feel like dealing with her older sister and their best friend right at the moment. She wanted to enjoy possibly the greatest sensation in the world. Better than sex, better than ice cream, better than dancing, was the ecstasy of a blissfully blistering, luxuriously lavish, sensually scalding shower. And she was currently in a frosty glass and snow white ceramic box enjoying the heavenly hot water pounding down on her with the force of a fire hose.
"So, we need to worry about Sadie?" Crystal asked incredulously. Right. Granted, the little pixie had it in her to decimate the entire city of Gotham, one person at a time, but she'd never do it. There was too much trauma, too much of the timid little girl in her. The blonde had no fear whatsoever that her younger sister was going to blow anything up or drive anyone to suicide. If anyone was in danger of snapping and ripping the world apart, it was Crystal.
Maybe Danni. She was just so well adjusted to being homicidal.
The blonde woman grabbed her Herbal Essence Freesia and Honeysuckle shampoo and poured it on top of her head. The cool, pale pink gel globbed on the crown of her head for a moment before slowly beginning to slide down the slopes of her skull. Replacing the bottle on one of the shower wall shelves, she began furiously working the gel into her baby fine, golden blond hair, foaming it, lathering it, until every strand of gold glistened with soap bubbles. She wanted her hair as soft and shiny as when she'd come into work that day. Before it had gotten soaked by that jerk's blood.
"That's what the Dark Passenger said," Rose replied. The redhead was sitting on the toilet, her right foot propped up on the sharp edge of the bathroom counter, her corresponding knee bent so she could tuck it beneath her chin. She was painting her toenails.
If this had been a normal group of young, twenty-something women, the thought of giving one's self a pedicure after butchering almost half a dozen people wouldn't have occurred to any of them. But one thing the Damundo girls and Danni Spinelli had discovered over the years, was that looking pretty made you feel good, feel brave. Sometimes, it made them even feel reckless. So Danni and Crystal weren't surprised that the auburn haired woman was painting Veridian Venom polish on her toenails. She'd already applied the clear, nutritional base coat of polish, to strengthen the nails. After five coats of the acid green paint, she'd put on the Diamond Darling polish (somewhat sparkly top coat) and let it dry.
And then she would get the freaking shower, dang it. Danni could wait. Rose had bruises in places she didn't even know existed in this dimension. She hurt everywhere, that slow, soft throbbing ache that told you your body was just waiting for you to let your guard down before it wolloped you with whatever punishment it was trying to devise.
"How come we're not concerned about Clown Man?" The blonde in the shower demanded.
She turned around and tilted her head back, allowing the scalding spray to pound the soap out of her hair. Hot water sluiced over her body. The water was stained with fuschia swirls at it gurgled in the drain. Crystal let the steaming cascade scour away the maroon and brown and jet splotches of dried fluid, let it drip and rinse off of her skin. She basked in the wet heat of the shower... and did her best to ignore the clown. She could feel him. She hated that. Rose was right, she should've been working harder on maintaining and practicing on her shields. But the sheer blazing force of the Joker's presence broke down anything, any wall or hedge or shield she might try to conjure up in her mind. It made her eyeballs itch and her head ache.
"Because he's not a problem yet," the older woman stated calmly, almost blandly. As if she weren't fighting against exactly what Crystal was experiencing- the inability to maintain a psychic shield against the Joker's far-too-close presence.
Danni didn't even bother to try. She wasn't in anyway telempathic. She had neither gift. Her clairvoyancy wasn't something she needed to shield from... most of the time.
"Yet?" The brunette asked softly. She turned her head towards the bathroom door, and wiggled to ease the bite of the sink against her thigh. She was sitting in the sink bowl, kicking her feet idly, trying to maintain focus on both the conversation and whatever might be happening on the other side of that door. She could smell blood, sharp and copper sweet. It danced in her nostrils. But she wasn't sure if it was because she still reeked of the fluid, or that Crystal was trying to wash it all off, or that Rose had yet to wash herself and remove the maroon stains on her hands, arms, and face. It might have even been from the great room outside, where Sadie had stayed with the homicidal clown man in makeup.
"Yes," Rose replied. She carefully began the third coat of Veridian Venom on her left middle toe. "He's not a problem yet."
"What do you mean, yet?" Crystal demanded, groping blindly for the towel she kept draped over the top of the shower stall door. The sting in her eyes meant she'd poisoned her sockets and ocular appendages with shampoo dripping in. She found the lush hand towel and hastily wiped the moisture from her eyes, grimacing a little at the sting. "If he's going to become a problem later, that makes him a problem now. So we kill him. Now."
I don't think that's such a good idea, the Good Child mumbled. What if it doesn't work and he gets mad?
Oh, freaking jalapenos on a damn stick, shut up! Chicken little freak. Why are you even here?
Because-
Rhetorical question, Crystal snarled, feeling her innocence cringe. Shut up, dammit. Aloud, she added, "Seriously. Mind rape him and kill him. Hell, why should you do it? I'll do it!"
"No," Danni contradicted. "Don't. There's something more here at work. Come on, can't you feel it, Cryssie? Don't you feel the potential in this place now? It started electrifying, sky rocketing, the minute he stepped into the apartment. We can't kill him. And even if we tried, I don't think he'd die, honestly."
The sliding glass door of the shower sprang open almost as fast as a lightning strike. A head of dripping wet blond hair and streaked, wet, blue and black and red makeup peeked out, staring with wide, frigid violet eyes at the brunette woman sitting in the sink of the little bathroom. For a long, drawn out, almost comical moment, there was silence. Then, finally, Crystal yelped, "Are you on ACID?! What do you mean, he won't die!? If I stick something sharp and pointy in his heart, he's going to die!"
"He's going to help us," Rose said, unruffled in the face of her sister's incredulity. "Not because he likes us, but because it fits in with his plans. As long as our goals and his plans mesh, we need to keep him around."
"What happens when the meshing no longer meshes?" The blonde demanded.
Rose gave her a look full of absinthian fire and replied, "Then you can kill him."
The Dark Passenger shrieked in protest, but the red head ignored it and began working on the Diamond Darling top coat of her toe nails. Once that was over and dried, she could hop into the shower without ruining her very relaxing pedicure. That'd be nice.
"We need to go out there," Danni said suddenly. She turned inward. The inner demon is coming, Danni warned. She knew no one could hear her but the inner darkness deep within. But that was what needed the warning. That needed to be poked out of its sleepiness, needed to be woken up so everything would work out the way it needed to, which was- show dominance, square off, and hope she didn't get knifed.
Both Rose and Crystal jerked their attention to the brunette.
Inside her, that predatory jungle cat out of someone's nightmares lifted its head and began purring loudly, like a motorboat. Danielle could practically feel the contented cat sound vibrating through her body. Her eyes, stormy and lit with tiny lightning strikes of fire, were trained on the bathroom door as she levered herself out of the cream colored, porcelain sink and hopped off the counter to the floor. Her feet protested, but she ignored it.
I know, her leonine side replied, perking up its ears. If it had been a house cat, its whiskers would've swept forward with interest. I know our mate is coming.
What is this mate stuff we keep hearing about? The Dark Passenger said the same thing about the Joker before, to Rose.
It was strange, the conversations Danni had with herself. It wasn't like Rose, conversing with the Dark Passenger, or even Crystal talking to her repressed conscience, the one that she tried her hardest to disassociate from herself because being Crystal and having a conscience just wasn't realistically compatible without going completely nuts. But Danni's conversations... it was a coping mechanism. She knew that. It was disassociating a characteristic of her person- the urge to kill things in such a brutal, animalistic way- and giving it personification in order to help her focus and compute the information that characteristic, as well as her clairvoyancy, helped her to pick up. Now it was such a deeply ingrained habit, she didn't even pay it any attention anymore. There was no one to talk to, nothing there, but she didn't let that fact bother her anymore. It hadn't bother her since she was a little girl.
Don't know, her inner voice whispered. Can't explain it. Magnetism. Moth to the flame kind of thing.
We're not picking anything up, are we?
No.
Danni saw the knob of the bathroom door turn slowly. Her heartbeat sped up just a little. This was like something out of a horror movie, as the knob twisted ever so slowly, like the languid spiral of the solar system into super nova destruction. Unavoidable. Unstoppable. Coming closer.
The brunette supposed this was just another example of how she was a freak. Some part of herself was telling her that a normal person ought to be frightened by the psychotic entity on the other side of that door. A normal person would gasp softly and whimper in utter terror as the doorknob turned. They would view the bathroom door as a portal, a black gateway to an infernal hell through which something six-hundred, sixty-six times worse than Lucifer his own damned self would enter, intent on bringing about the Apocalypse. That's what part of her was saying. And she wasn't feeling or thinking of any of that. Yet another symptom of her freakishness. Because the only thing Danni experienced as she watched the door latch unclick and the rowan wood door begin creaking open was heart-racing anticipation as she hopped back up onto the counter to give herself the advantage of a well-placed leg.
The Joker tried to walk in. Danni's foot shot out, stopping the swinging motion of the opening door. The bathroom door slammed backwards and hit the clown in the face.
Crystal wrung out her hair and whipped it over one shoulder.
Rose's slowly moving hand ceased its brushing movements, and she pulled the nail polish brush away from her foot, her eyes darkening to midnight jade shards of jagged, cutting glass as she focused on the door.
Danni put her foot down.
The Joker pushed the door open, slowly this time, and took his time scanning the little bathroom. Cramped as it was, the women within were all incredibly close together. Rose's bent back was scant inches from the glass door of the shower. Behind that door, the blonde killer with eyes like indigo ice stood at just such an angle that everything was hidden behind a well placed leg and a curtain of hair. Danni sat perched on the edge of her seat, which consisted of the miniscule inches of plastic counter top between the counter's edge and the sink's rim. Three pairs of feral eyes watched a tiny trickle of blood dripping from the clown man's nose.
"That wassss..." He hissed the sibilant 's' sound, like a humanoid serpent. He paused, as if searching for a word. Finally, he found it. "Totally... uncalled for," he said slowly.
Danni felt something in her stir at the peculiar emphasis he place on his words. She knew what it was- aggression, anticipation. She wondered vaguely if the Joker realized there was a more controlled, feminine clone of himself in this tiny room with him. Because more than any of the rest of them, Danielle Spinelli was closest to the chaotic psychosis the painted man represented. And she was the one who anticipated, with incredible, blood-singing eagerness, the snapping, the loss of control, because then it would be like finally having a little brother (or an older brother, she wasn't sure) to play with.
And she wanted to play. Her current life was so damn boring.
"Who," he went on, and the brunette shivered like an excited school girl staring up at her movie star crush. "Who," he repeated, flicking his tongue across his crimson slashed lips. "Kicked that, that door at me?"
Rose bent her head and went back to painting her toenails. She was on the last toe. The others sparkled with a diamond glass sheen, thanks to her favorite brand of top coat polish. Thanks to the soothing, pedicurial ritual, she could ignore the throbbing of her ear. The burn, where they'd cauterized the wound with the hot Zippo lighter, pulsed in time with her heart, like an attention whore child tugging at its mother's skirt. She needed to wash the powder off of the wound soon, before infection set it.
Crystal glanced through the glass door at Danni.
Dan?
I've got it covered, the brunette thought at her. So the blonde went back to her hair, grabbing her Herbal Essence Sweet Pea Conditioner and pouring a huge glob of the pink crystal-flecked, white cream onto her head. She worked it into the glistening, wet strands, anxious to keep her baby fine hair texture.
Danni regarded the clown man calmly, and said, "I did."
"I... see," he said. He rolled his eyes up in his head, as if thinking of some divine problem from back across the ages, a puzzle of divine import regarding Providence and the Heavens. His forehead wrinkled, leaving flesh-colored lines in the chalk white grease paint. He tapped his chin thoughtfully with his index finger, still in the plum colored leather gloves. He flicked his tongue across his lips. Danni felt a tiny thrill in her chest, and tried to ignore it. "And, um... you, uh, wanna tell me why, exactly, you decided to, uh... hit me... with a fucking door?"
"You need to learn to knock, dude," Danni replied. She kicked her feet against the wooden cabinets under the sink.
Crystal laughed behind the glass shower door, a tinkling laugh like silver bells and glittering wind chimes.
Rose choked back her own laugh as she finished the final stroke of her right pinkie toenail. She screwed the lid on the little pot of polish and set it carefully on the counter beside the black and red porcelain cup that held their four toothbrushes.
"Really," he said. They were laughing at him? Didn't they get what was going on here? Didn't they know-
"We know a lot more than you give us credit for," the blonde in the shower called. She ignored the looks leveled on her by Rose and Danni. They knew she'd read the Joker's mind, and she'd done it on purpose. It wouldn't have been loud enough and clear enough for her to answer in such a way that she'd gotten the reaction she'd wanted- pissed off, slightly bewildered, intrigued- if she hadn't done it on purpose. And that meant she was interested in the guy.
He's scary-
He's a psychotic clown. But I'm Crystal Damundo, and I don't give a shit about scary, she thought acidly, and ducked her head back to rinse out the creamy conditioner from her hair.
Aloud, she added, "You have a plan for us. Well, we have a plan for you. You can swim through our heads, because you're smart. We can swim through your head, because we're psychic. And we can kick each others' asses for days, and neither side will come out on top because we're all bat shit loco and handy with sharp, stabbity objects. But we also have common enemies, so me might as well work together. Don't you think?"
The Joker blinked. She'd stolen the words right out of his mouth. They did have common enemies- the Mob, at least. Gambol, specifically. He had a hunch about that mob shooting, and that it had everything to do with Rose coming with him after the black mobster had informed him oh so politely of the bounty on his head. And maybe... maybe they all hated the Bat, too. Maybe they'd help him expose the flying rat man in rubber.
But he couldn't let them get away with this crap. Not for too much longer. That wasn't in the plan. They were monsters. He liked monsters. But they were going to be his monsters, and his possessions didn't talk back like that. He'd have to train that out of them.
The petite brunette interrupted his thoughts by calling to the blonde, "Crystal, are you done yet? Crap! Some of us reek of bodily fluids and death, too, ya know!"
"Don't complain to me if you bought crappy perfume," Crystal sniped back, but her hair was completely rinsed and all the blood had been washed off of her body, so she turned off the water. She pulled the door open a few inches and groped wildly for the black towel hanging on the rack . She grabbed it, hauled it in the now silent shower with herself, and shut the door again, so she could hastily towel herself off without giving anyone an eyeful of naked blonde. However, she was still silhouetted against the glass, a fact she was cruelly reminded of when, as she bent over to dry off her long, lean legs, the Joker gave a lewd wolf whistle.
"All right, clown boy," the blonde snarled, reaching for her razor with one hand and the handle of the shower door with the other. "That does it!"
If having a ravishing, naked blond woman lunging for him with a straight razor- who shaved their legs with a straight razor?- was anything unique, the Joker didn't show it. Danni and Rose simply watched as the blonde woman lunged for the painted man, and he grabbed her by the wrists, laughing maniacally. The blonde slammed her forehead into his nose, snarling like a rabid beast, but it's not as hard as she could manage. Something inside was holding her back. But what? She wanted to filet this guy like a fish. She wanted his guts for garters. She wanted to see his blood, more of it than what was streaming from his nose. The only reason his nose wasn't broken was because some indefineable thing had stopped her from slamming it with everything she had.
"You think this is funny?!" She screamed. He only giggled.
"Will you two knock it off?" Rose demanded, hopping off the toilet. She wiggled her toes to make sure the nails were dry, and then grabbed her sister's wet, blond locks and hauled on them until Crystal was forced to back up.
The Joker didn't release her wrists, so the blonde hauled down on one arm, bringing his fist wrapped around her wrist down to her mouth. Her teeth sank into the back of his hand, drawing blood. She tasted the crimson copper of it, and the meaty salt taste of his skin, and the faint undercurrent of gunpowder. Her entire body gave one convulsive shudder. The painted man groaned, and only tightened his grip on her wrists. Crystal jerked her head back and stared into his eyes. She could feel the stinging of Rose's grip on her hair, but knew that if the older woman thought there really was a problem, she'd instantly release her sister and come to her aid with teeth and fists. Danni would be there as well. But that didn't stop the tiny quiver her muscles had picked up somewhere as she stared at the Joker, their gazes locked.
"Let me go," she hissed. Her eyes were like morphine and opium. Poppy petal eyes frozen in blocks of ice. The Joker shuddered again and growled, his voice a hellish snarling, "Do that again." She jerked against his hold, and he gripped her harder, feeling her bones grinding under his fingers. She pulled, but her spirit wasn't in it. The rage was there, burning and flaring up like a bonfire, but she didn't want to break free of this shackling grip.
"Enough," Danni said, and leveled a swift kick to the Joker's knee. He released Crystal and hunched down instinctively, backing out of the bathroom.
"Jealous, Dan?" Rose asked casually, releasing her hold on Crystal. The petite brunette looked from the trembling blonde to the red head and scoffed.
"No. Why? Are you?" Danni asked, and picked something off of the rack in the bathroom. It was Crystal's plush, black bathrobe with the shiny satin trim, and her initials embroidered on it in electric violet. Custom job from Victoria Secret's Christmas catalogue. She handed the robe to the shivering blonde, who immediately donned it and tied it shut.
Crystal didn't want to think about what had just happened. Something had stopped her from fighting. Something had fought against her natural instinct to fight to the finish, go for the throat, and end it all with a messy, viciously violent kill. And that something wasn't Rose grabbing her by the hair, or the cold, calculating look in Danni's storm gray eyes as she thought about whether the Joker was going to live to see the dawn. It was the clown himself, that burning gaze like sugared anarchy and heroin fire in his black-rimmed sockets. Even thinking about it gave her the screaming shivers.
"Shut up," Rose said to Danni, who went into the bathroom.
"Shower's mine now, thank-you-very-much," the petite woman called before shutting the door. Learning from past experiences, she locked it.
Ignoring everyone, Crystal glided over to the left-hand sofa and sank down onto it, grabbing one of the pillow-cushions, a red velvet thing with golden embroidery and fringe, and hugging it under her head so she could relax.
She needed to relearn how to breathe.
How did a predator like her get so thrown off balance by a clown? What was his deal? He was psychotic, that was all. She'd plummetted twice into his mind- though the first time had been worse, she'd been drowning, devoured by his gaze and the intensity behind it- and she still didn't understand him. She could barely read him. Not because she didn't have the ability or the strength. Not because he had natural shields. He was the most unshielded person she'd ever come across. It was because being in his mind was so disorienting, so confusing. Up was down and black was red (not white, but red, like freshly spilt blood and exsanguinating roses with dripping thorns). She didn't have time to read him before the sheer magnitude of his mind began crushing her.
And that was the problem. And it was a big problem. She couldn't afford to be thrown off balance like this. He was just a man. He was just a simple human- a male at that- and therefore, she was stronger, sleaker, deadlier. She didn't have the time, the energy, or the lifestyle to accomodate being afraid of any man, much less one who wore makeup.
A pressure on her knee, which was peeking out of her bathrobe, jerked her out of her reverie. She looked down to see the black haired head of her younger sister laid on the top of her leg where it was bent over the edge of the couch. Sadie held herself at an angle with one hand, and the other slim appendage was laid across Crystal's other knee. The slender, dark haired girl's very presence radiated peace and contentment, and it soothed the blonde, allowed her to sink back from the massive, irritating introspection long enough to begin construction on her ice walls again.
She ignored the Joker as he flopped back down in the black recliner. She ignored Rose, too, who was heading towards the kitchen. It was only when Rose picked up the phone that Crystal called, "What are you doing?"
Popping her hip and jazz bouncing to soundless mental music, Rose replied, "Ordering dinner."
"I want Chinese," the Joker said without looking away from whatever fascinating thing he'd discovered about the ceiling of their apartment. Rose looked at him for an incredibly long, breathless moment. Her face switched between rage, amusement, mild affection, and something that might have been black hatred. Then she looked at the phone, as if she wanted to beat it to death with a shovel.
And then punched in a number. She heard a voice on the other end.
"Peking Palace?"
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Okay, if I hadn't broken this chapter in half, it'd be almost 10,000 words. Too long, because it would stick out funny against all the other chapters. So here's part 1. Anyway, reviews? I like them. They make me happy.
Thanks to:
Queen of All Canines, Alys98, Giggi02, Gamine Madcap, and sleeplessly for reviewing my latest chapters! Woot!
And thank you, Bleeding for You, KatxValentine, RedJackPirate, and Alys98 for being such great writers! Check them out, everyone, their Joker fics rock!
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Next time, on Five Queens and a Joker:
Chapter 14.5: "So, uh... how do you lovely ladies feel about... the Batman?"
Chapter 15: "I'm the only one born this way. The only mad one. The only killer born through murder. And I've been killing all my life. Try to top that, Mr. Joker."
Chapter 16: She ran to him, ran straight into his arms, eyes streaming, bleeding diamond salt down her cheeks, and pressed her face into his chest. When she heard the snick of the switchblade popping free, something in her shivered, and she clung to him even tighter, a little girl and her monster.