Chapter Twenty-Four
Acid In the Blood

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Burning.

Burning, like poison, like pleasure, like pain.

Burning in her veins, burning in her muscles, burning in her eyes, burning in her fingertips and her skin and her mouth and her chest.

Like acid in the blood.

That's all it was, a dull burn throbbing through the backs of her legs, leather straps swinging and smacking against her pale, sensitive skin. Her arteries ached, her veins shuddered, her blood pounded like beating fists. Her muscles cramped violently. She ignored it, shoving the discomfort aside in her mind, and swung her leg up, foot slicing through the air. Her arms flew up over her head, and she sank down onto one knee, feeling her tendons scream, her joints creak, her blood sizzle. Her head throbbed, her temples lancing with pain, but she jerked her chin anyway, feeling her brain slam into the sides of her skull, exploding like a smashed pumpkin. She drew in a shuddering breath and let her head snap forward, her dark hair falling forward to hide her face behind a sable silk curtain. She closed her amber eyes, dragging in a breath. Her body burned.

"Miss Sadie?" A cultured, British voice inquired softly.

Sadie lifted her head and looked up to see Alfred Pennyworth watching her with some concern. In his hands was a towel, an energy bar, and a water bottle - luxury, ambrosia, nectar. She got to her feet, feeling her legs tremble with sudden weakness, and staggered over to her boss's butler, who also helped run the Queen of Swords. Alfred's job, when he wasn't seeing to Bruce, was caring for the top dancers of the vaudeville club, who often shoved themselves into their jobs so ruthlessly that they wore out their bodies with too little rest and support. Alfred's job was to make sure that didn't happen.

Feeling her stomach rumble, the pixie-faced dancing girl grabbed the energy bar from the worried looking butler with a grateful smile, ripped open the wrapping, and wolfed it down like a savage. She swallowed quickly, already feeling better, and took the proffered water bottle. This she drank more slowly, not wanting to make herself sick with it. The ice cold water cooled the burning of her throat where the harsh air had set her flesh aflame. She let a little of it dribble onto her sweaty face, relishing the tiny, icy splashes of water on her burning hot skin. Acid burned through her veins, seared her nerves, but she ignored it. She didn't care about the pain - she just wanted to dance. She wanted to sing, to dance. She wanted to throw all of her heart, mind, and soul into the moves and lose herself in the moment, the motion, the movement. She wanted to get lost, lose her thoughts, her sanity, her soul.

But she couldn't do that if she didn't eat. She'd collapse from physical exhaustion with her mind still to alert to grant her any real peace. So she gobbled down the second energy bar Alfred offered her, and washed it down with a few gulps of water. Then she bounced what in another century might have been a curtsy to the older British man and threw herself back out onto the dance floor.

Bass pounded, brass snapped, and acid flooded her veins, hissing and sizzling in her blood. She threw back her head, sweat flying like needles of boiling rain, hair flying around her head like a tenebrous explosion of sable silk. She moved, thrust her body forward, slicing with her thin frame through the air, as dancing pulsed in her feet and called out to the music throbbing from the big black speakers against the walls.

Alfred watched Sadie Damundo ripping her body, frail and delicate as hollow, paper-thin porcelain, into tiny shredded bits with the ferocity of her dancing. She almost never spoke aloud, never said a word unless it was in the privacy of her own, to her sisters and Danielle Spinelli, or unless she had words engraved on her tongue in black ink and gray memory. But she spoke when she danced. No, not spoke. She screamed. She shrieked. She raged at the world as her body twisted like a serpent, rippling and flowing like water, pale and white and translucent from malnutrition and trauma. Her hip bones cut against the waistband of her white dancing leggings, black shadows against the marble whiteness of her thin, bruised looking skin. Her sweat-dampened clothing clung to her thin frame like spider webs to prey. It hurt the Wayne family butler to look at her, at her tense face and rigid muscles, her shadowy flesh littered with smudged pain, her hands clenched into furious fists, her eyes burning, always burning, amber gold poison, hemlock wine…

Acid in the blood.

Sadie landed in a sweating, shuddering, stinging heap on the mat and watched from the corner of her eye, behind the curtain of her hair, as Alfred turned and walked out of the gym. She watched him go, eyes like sweet honey. Her mouth quirked into a tiny smile, a rarity, lacking vicious teeth or smirking hellish amusement. There was only the curve of pale lips tugged gently into the ghost of an expression of faint affection. Then the music changed, and it became a song of murder and adultery and liquor, seduction and jazz and fast, loose dancing.

Her body tensed, almost against her will. She felt her strings being yanked hard, almost cutting through the thin flesh of her body, her tissue paper armor sodden and weak with so much blood. Her breath whistled through her teeth. Her toes curled in her flat ballet slippers, her fingernails bit through the plastic of the crayon blue mat into the foam padding inside it. Her sweat dripped in tiny rain-rivers down her cheeks, over the swell of the tip of her nose, off the point of her chin. Her throat burned like acid. Her blood screamed for her to move, to go with it, to flow, to rage, to just MOVE. She bit back a cry of pain as her muscles cramped and protested, and she shoved herself up off the mat, ignoring the way her knees lanced with red fire, and she spun, spun, spun, into the music, into the song, and remembered what she had been trying to forget since coming to the Queen of Swords….

.... Hands.

He had such wonderful hands. She was staring at them as he washed away the clown paint, watched the tiny trickling streams of thin white-wash and blood-tinged water and gray soot-muck that ran down his face and dripped onto the pristine white counter, into the white sink. She watched the way the flesh shifted as his tendons tensed, saw the way the light caught the short, pale gold hairs on the back of his hands. She liked the lean, knife-like bones of his wrists, that threatened to cut her eyeballs if she stared too long. She loved the callused knuckles, the creases black with pitch dark grease paint, rough from what had to be countless fist fights. She loved his fingernails, short but not to the quick, not ragged or bitten, immaculately clean, pink and white. She liked the scar the ran like a choppy thread from the back of his hand and down, over the wrist, disappearing into the cuff of the shirt sleeve.

She fixed golden eyes like wet bee pollen silk on his hands as he grabbed a straight razor and lathered up his cheeks. The edge of the razor gleamed like a rictus smile on a pirate corpse. Sadie stared avidly at the silvery sheen of the ultra thin, razor sharp, needle-bite blade, at the competent, lean hand gripping it as the blade came up to the pale, stubbly cheek ragged with golden brush.

The dark haired pixie of a woman sat in the bathtub at an angle most people would beg not to be in, her tailbone slowly grinding down against the pale bottom of the tub, her left knee bent, her right foot pressed against the edge of the bathtub. A bottle of Daphne Diamond-Yellow polish was next to her butt, which was clad only in a pair of black gym shorts and the invisible pair of black panties with gold angelfish swimming through their sable, faux oceanic depths. She slowly drew the tiny polish brush down the length of her right pinky toe, coating it in this, glittering gold. It gleamed like ground up glass floating in congealing bile. The crow-haired vaudeville girl didn't have to look at her foot to know that she had not yet accidentally brushed the sticky polish against her skin. She could give herself a pedicure in her sleep.

You do it because you are afraid….

The wicked whisper breathing against the shells of her ears made her shiver, but still she made no mistake with the polish. She only clamped her hand tighter around the handle and dipped the black haired brush back into the bottle, ignoring the poking, prodding whispers breathing against her skull. She bit her lip, eyes now zeroing in on her twitching pinkie toe as she applied the third coat of sickly sweet smelling polish. The taste of chemicals was acrid on her tongue, but it helped distract her a little from the voices.

Why seek distraction? Why do you fear this man? Open your shields. Let down your walls. Do not fear him. He is ours, don't you see?

She saw. Of course she saw. How could she not see? Every voice she had ever heard screaming, shrieking, shredding her brain, all the voices of her broken mind that had plagued her all of her pathetic life had roared like a lioness in heat when she'd first seen the psychotic painted man's face two days before in the mob owned bank, when she'd been trapped beneath Shmuccatelli's desk, choking on the violating smell of musk, tears pouring down her face as his hand tightened its yanking grip on her short hair. In the moment when her eyes had slid almost possessively over the cruelly sensual, made up features of the man in the gray suit and clown makeup, her entire being had stilled, sucking in an agonizing breath and fluttering madly to catch his attention, even though she had known then that for him to see her would mean her imminent death by shotgun. She had pressed herself against the underside of the desk, her body aching, her throat burning and her tongue screaming at the disgusting taste assaulting it, and had listened with pounding heart and tingling nerves to the voice of the man who had saved her from Joe Shmuccatelli, poisoning him and freeing her to finally take a breath, crawl out from under the desk and breathe freely for the first time all day, just as soon as the robbers had disappeared or died.

Since that instant, when she'd seen him, and her brain had fizzled like frying bacon and began shrieking like a banshee, she'd known he was the one. He was the one, the very one, for all of them, all four of them. He was nothing to fear.

He was the only thing to really fear.

The clink of metal against porcelain brought her back to herself, and she jerked back to the present, realizing she'd moved onto the seventh of her ten toes some time ago. Startled, she looked up and realized that the eyes like smoldering emerald coals were pinning her to the wall, spiking through her nerves, thrusting into her chest to clutch her heart and hold it still. Suddenly, she couldn't quite catch her breath. Her lungs burned like acid. Her heart tripped and stuttered. His eyes were like hammers, pounding away at her skull until chips of bone began flaking away, revealing pain and knowledge too intimate to describe. He was stripping the pale, white flesh from her thin, glass bones with his stare. She gulped, tasted only the staleness of the nothing-air caught in her mouth and her own saliva. Her skin crawled, but not with revulsion. Her limps ached to move, to get up, to dance. Her throat worked convulsively, and she didn't know if her body was trying to force her to vomit or sing.

He took a step toward her.

With a sudden rush of foresight, Sadie replaced the brush to the bottle of golden diamond nail polish and twisted the cap on tight, so it wouldn't leak. She didn't want to spill one of her favorite colors onto the nice, clean bath tub. If that happened, it would take weeks to scrub out. She had more important things to do right this moment.

Like drown in eyes like pools of venomous acid. Like shudder with delight as he reached out his pale, scarred hand with its soft, golden wisps of hair gleaming in the harsh, fluorescent light and waited for her to take it. He could crush her slim little paw in his lean, iron-braced grip. She knew it. He could snap her wrist like a pencil. He could turn her bones to powder. He could, with the cold efficiency with which she or any of her sisters swatted a fly, slit her throat with the straight razor and then take pleasure in violating her still-warm corpse. He could violate her first and slit her throat afterwards. He could hold Crystal and Danni off that long, she was certain. And it wouldn't matter what Rose would do to him when she came back from work and found Sadie dead and cold in a pool of congealed blood in the bathtub. The dark haired cabaret girl would still be dead.

Her soul shoved her forward. Her brain screamed. The Whisperers chanted, yes, yes, yes, yes! Touch him, touch him, touch him. Her body flushed, her ice white skin suddenly tinged pink like blood speckled snow left to melt in the sun. Her lips parted. Her breath was moist and warm. Her eyelids slid half-closed, her lashes like shredded black curtains over psychic windows of amber-tinted glass, hiding nothing, but tantalizing all the same. Goosebumps cut through her skin.

She put her hand in his.

He wrenched her forward, into his arms like steel bands. Her mouth, half open to get enough air, was suddenly pressed hard against the purple silk vest covering part of his shirt. Her lips could feel the silken hammer of his pulse against flesh and cloth. She tasted death and bones under her tongue as his hand cupped the back of her head. His fingertips burned like the smoldering ends of cigarettes, but she couldn't move. His other hand tightened on her wrist, squeezing, until the bones ground together, a sweet sound like wind chimes shattering escaping Sadie's mouth as pain rocketed up and down her arm. His other hand fisted in her baby-fine hair and ripped her head back. Her breath caught in her throat as her eyes found a gaze like an inferno, twin pools of emerald hell, burning with some perverse, sickening need she couldn't name, couldn't fathom, only wanted to fulfill….

He wrenched her around so that her back was pressed against his chest. The buttons of his shirt bit into her skin. One hand held her arm tight to her belly, easy to escape, but she didn't want to. The bare skin of his wrist blazed like a beacon against her arm. His breath scorched the sensitive skin of the side of her neck, just beneath her ear. Her body tightened, tense and rigid. The short hairs on the nape of her neck stood on end, crackling with the electric tension snaking around and between them. The stringy strands of chrome green hair brushed her chair. She bit back what might have been a plea, or a sob, clamping her lips shut tightly against any sound that might come out.

Yes….

The word was a long, drawn out sigh, hissed on the sibilance of a thousand tongues, spit from a thousand mouths, echoing a thousand desires. This was where she was supposed to be. His arm crushed her fragile ribs, but the glass bones didn't snap. Her milky pale skin turned bluish beneath the bruising force of his embrace. Shivers poured out of her, rose off of her in wisps like evanescent steam, misty phantasms. The Joker inhaled, long and loud, and growled low in her ear. Her entire body went rigid. Her teeth sank into the stitches on her bottom lip, and she winced. Burning cold fingers touched her pointed chin, touched her mangled lip where her teeth drew tiny wells of blood that threatened to spill over and roll down her chin in small scarlet streams. Fingertips brushed the corners of her mouth, traced the ragged wound the stitches held closed, pressed so that the loops and whorls of his fingerprint were suddenly crimson against the pale skin, so that wetness gleamed on his skin. Sadie sucked in a breath and arched her body, almost against her will. This was like a dance, a seductive and sweetly poisonous, sinful dance. She would die doing this dance. She could feel it. But she didn't care. She would die in this sinful, delicious dance, walking the tightrope of razor wire until too much blood had been spilled and she fell to her death. Then the grim reaper in clown paint and a purple suit would take her soul to hell.

Sadie sank against him, allowing his fingers to bruise, his buttons to bite, his hair to caress her cheek. She could smell him, not the revolting, hateful smell of musk. Not the cloying perfume of death and decay, nor the thick, copper stench of blood. She smelled metal, and ice, gunpowder and smoke, the tang of sweat and something that might have been AXE spray three or four days ago but was now just a wisp of a scent.

"What is your name?" He demanded in a growl. Velvet bondage rubbed against the cabaret girl's ribcage, inside her skin, where her heart was. The black fur of a beast brushed against her heart. His fingers bit until blue darkened to twilight purple against the moonbeams of her translucent flesh. He whispered something that sounded like shush bight might have been something else against her hair before nipping at her earlobe. "You smell so good," he snarled into the silken sable strands of Sadie's hair. There was something both eldritch and infernal in his voice, but she ignored it, focusing instead on the feel of his hand on her arm, crushing the tiny veins so they burst in sprays of blue and violet underneath the pale whiteness of her skin, focusing on the fingers threatening to crush her jaw as he forced her to turn her head, to look at him, looking into his absinthian eyes of molten need. "What is your name?"

She swallowed. Would he hit her? Would she let him? Or would she speak? She swallowed again, tasting ashes. Her throat ached. Could she speak? Could she sing? Could she say anything? Her heart thumped, skipped, slammed, skipped twice. She wanted to speak, to tell him something, anything….

"To the gentlemen, I'm Miss Fortune…." She whispered. "To the ladies, I'm Sir Prize…."

"Really? Miss Fortune?" He grinned, showing teeth yellowed by mistreatment. "I bet I have a better name for you. You beat a man to death with a shovel once, didn't you?" She immediately tensed, all trust in him vanished, eyes suddenly bright with an animal's consuming terror, trying to wrench herself out of his grasp. His very breath burned her body, blistering her beneath the skin. Her mind shrank away from him, but no sound emerged from her mouth. She gritted her teeth, reaching for something, anything, a weapon, a safe place, anything, but the Joker gripped her until something cracked, and lancing pain shot up Sadie's arm. She froze. She couldn't afford to damage her limbs. She needed them.

"It's true, isn't it? Teeny, tiny you beat a man to death with a shovel. You've got a little fight in you. I like that."

She immediately became boneless, pliant, almost sleepy looking in his arms. She glanced up at him, her eyes suddenly wild shy, and nodded slowly. She had beaten her science teacher to death with a snow shovel in the fifth grade. She and Danni. Danni had beaten the teacher as well, but only to hurt. Sadie had killed him. She had been splashed with blood, with brains, with so many disgusting things and she had just kept smashing down with the shovel until there was nothing left except fragments of bone and-

She made a soft sound of distress and tried to pull away, but he shushed her gently, whispered, "You're not a monster. You're just a freak… like me. It's all right to be a freak. We're ahead of the curve. He was a bad man, wasn't he?" He spoke gently, as if talking to a small child. She looked up at him, her acid eyes so huge in her face, golden pools of corrosive pain and fear. She was tripping, slowly, falling into a trap few had ever escaped from. She didn't care. She just wanted to curl up in his arms, basking in the frenetic energy of the painted psychotic holding her like a lover. She shivered at the suppressed violence in his grip on her arms.

"I didn't mean to…."

"He was a bad man, wasn't he? A bad man. And you killed him. You beat him to death with a shovel. How did it feel?"

She shook her head, refusing to think about the electric thrill of power racing up her spine, shooting through her body, kissing her nerves, as the shovel came down on the teacher's face, down and down, smashing and crushing…. She shook her head, biting her mangled lip, trying to drown out the agony of remembrance. She didn't want to think about it, didn't want to think about it at all. She wanted to forget the whole thing, forget the blood spraying across her face, forget the pulpy mess mixed with the sand beneath the playground equipment, forget the bloody mouth with its broken teeth crying out for something that might have been mercy.

Joker grabbed her chin and forced her to look into his eyes. She fell silent. She hadn't even realized she'd been whimpering until he put a finger over her lips.

"It felt good, didn't it?"

"N-no…."

"Yeah, it did. Yeah, it did. It's okay, yeah, it did. It's okay. It's good. You're human. You're ahead of the curve. You know that killing is good, it's okay, it felt good to kill him. It's okay, Sadie. Everyone feels it. They just deny it because they think it's wrong. It's not wrong. You liked it, didn't you? Feeling his skull cave in? The sound of his bones breaking? His pleas for mercy? You liked it didn't you?" His lips were a breath away, burning her mouth. "You liked killing him, didn't you?" Every time he spoke, his lips brushed against her mutilated mouth, so that tiny beads of blood caught on his mouth. "You liked hurting him. You liked killing him. It's okay."

"I… I…."

"It's okay, tell me. Tell me, pretty girl. Doll face. That's what you are, huh? My little doll face." She found herself nodding along with him, despite her sense of his finely spun threads of razor wire closing all about her. She was a moth, he was a flame - she couldn't look away, couldn't flee. She just wanted to hear him talk. His voice was lilting and sexy, playful and damning. She wanted to listen and listen…. "Say it," he said, holding her chin in place. "What's your name?"

"S-Sadie-"

He slapped her. Hard. She tasted blood in her mouth, and pain, but no fear. There was no fear for some reason, only chilling lightning strikes in her blood. She couldn't look away. Damn him to hell for eternity but she could not look away.

"What's. Your. NAME?!" He snarled. His voice was full of tenebrous caverns, gossamer pain, and infernal abysses. She felt her body flush hot, turn the color of blood-stained milk, as heat seared her. She whispered, "Doll face."

"That's a girl."

She smiled, a big, happy, doofy grin he answered back with one of his own rictus grins. Her expression ripped a stitch, and she tasted more of her own blood.

"And you liked killing him, didn't you?"

Her smile evaporated, and she hugged herself, hunching, wishing she were invisible. He gripped her chin again and forced her to look at him.

"Answer me."

She opened her mouth, her blood as cold as death, her fingertips numb, her mind screaming, the voices crying out in her head, when someone pounded on the bathroom door. Crystal screamed, "Get the hell out of the bathroom! I need to wash my hair! Stupid clown!"

The moment was shattered. The door opened, and Sadie bolted out of the bathroom and to her own room, slipping out of sight into the dark confines of her closet….

The dancing girl shuddered. Yes, she hadn't wanted to remember. Hadn't wanted to remember any of it - the conversation, the sensation, the memories of the day she'd killed for the first time, any of it. She had not wanted to remember any of it. It was why she danced with wild abandon, ignoring the throbbing pain in her mouth or the way her elbow protested when she flung her left arm too sharply. She didn't want to remember any of what had happened that morning.

Especially not her unspoken answer. Crystal's timing had been perfect. It had been the only thing keeping Sadie from making that damnable admission: she had not liked killing her science teacher that day.

She had loved it.

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The line "to the gentlemen I'm Miss Fortune, to the ladies I'm Sir Prize" is from "When You're Evil" by the gothic singer Voltaire. This was 4600 words - are you happy with it? Let me know. I go off to get a filling and hopefully get a nanny job. I love kids, believe it or not. =D Anyway, reviews make me smile. Bye!

PS - I've decided I'm not going to write from the Joker's POV anymore. I don't do it well enough, so I'm gonna focus strictly on my five queens. Bye!