Burn

by HoistTheColours

It was a pleasure to burn.

7. Cauterize ll

Cauterize - Part ll

"Lay down

Lay down and wait like an animal."

—Charles Bukowski

*Reminder that Taylor is currently underage. If that makes you uncomfortable, here is a good place to stop.

Pine.

She smells that first. The cool, zesty burst of evergreen. Something else, then, too—damp earth, the shiver of wet leaves—and the chemical stink of smoke that creeps through her nostrils and snakes down her throat, making it burn. Making her eyes water.

Her head is throbbing.

Something warm trickles down the right side of her face, and when she tastes the bite of copper in her mouth, she knows it's blood. She whimpers, reaches up to touch her temple—gingerly, with just the pad of her fingers—and flinches at the sting. The wound feels raw. Wet.

She groans as she lifts her head, hears the feather-light tinkling of glass when she does. She blinks out over the warped dashboard, through the spider-webbed cracks of the caved-in windshield. The headlights are still on, casting a gauzy, yellow sheen through the haze of smoke and darkness, illuminating the tree that's nearly split the hood of the car in half.

She cranes her neck towards the driver's seat next, where the door has been left ajar, wide open to the night. The seat's empty.

"Ben?" Her voice comes out cracked, but all she hears is the hiss of smoke sputtering from under the hood. The hum of cicadas. Crickets. Night things.

She calls for him again—yelling, this time—and tries to ignore the tendrils of anxiety coiling in her belly, crawling up her esophagus. Saliva pools in her mouth that she desperately swallows back down. She feels like she's going to vomit.

Did Ben get ejected from the car? Is he hurt? Did he leave her?

It's painstaking, the effort of moving—her whole body aches—but she manages to unbuckle her seatbelt. Her door is caved in, and there's a tree so close she could reach through the broken glass and run her fingers over the wet bark, feel its calloused ridges, tenderly press her fingers into all it crevices and lines.

She peels herself out of her seat with excruciating effort, crawling over the center console, tasting more copper in her mouth while the interior of the car begins to tremble and blur around the edges of her vision. She's so tired, and it's hard to keep her eyes open despite the adrenaline surging through her. She's forced to give up halfway, too exhausted to continue, slumping over the console.

"Ben?" she cries.

What if she can't get out of the car? What if no one ever finds her? What if she dies out here?

Like an answered prayer, Ben appears only moments later, startling her as his presence fills up the opened door, his head ducked low, tucked just beneath the roof of the car so he can see her. She's never felt so relieved to see another person. Her eyes fill with tears.

"Taylor," he breathes. "Fuck." He looks frightened, his eyes sliding all over her, taking quick inventory of her injuries.

"Help me," she whines. Her anxiety is tangible now, pulsing in time with her thudding heartbeat.

"Just—hold on, okay? I got you." He ducks into the car, dipping a knee down onto the seat so he can reach across for her. He fits his arms beneath the crook of her armpits, pulling her forward, and she cries out at the sudden, tearing pain in her right wrist, a shockwave that shoots all the way up to her shoulder.

"Wait—wait!" she gasps.

Ben stops, brows pulling together, looking down at her arm like it's infected, like it's full of poison.

"Jesus. Might be broken," he says, panting. He tosses his head to shake the hair out of his eyes, damp with sweat. He has a cut above his upper lip and on his cheek, and she notices a swelling robin's egg above his brow bone that'll definitely bruise. The airbags didn't deploy. He must've hit his head on the steering wheel. "We should wait," Ben says. "I called an ambulance."

Her head jerks up, and fear cuts so sharply through her it's like being sliced open with a hot knife. For a moment, all she can do is gape. She feels as though the wind has been knocked out of her.

"What?" she finally manages, breathless. "No… no, no, no. I can't go to the hospital—"

"Why not?"

Because Mr. J will kill me, she thinks.

Her eyes dart back and forth between his, desperate. Searching.

"Because I don't have insurance," she blurts. "They'll want to take my blood and do tests—and I can't. I can't." She breaks down into sobs, still halfway draped over the center console, the hard plastic digging into her ribs, making it almost impossible for her lungs to fully expand.

"Just—stop, okay?" He shifts closer, dips his head low to get her attention, capturing her eyes. "It's gonna be fine. I can chip in—I'll, like, pay for all of it if I have to." He sounds just as afraid as she does, and it isn't exactly comforting. "It's my fault, okay?" He pauses, takes a shuddering breath as he bows his head, and then turns his attention towards the darkness of the backseat, tunnel-vision taking over. "Fuck, this is all my fault. Fuck!"

The intensity of his anger startles her, but she shakes her head at him, trying to get his attention again, tears sliding down her cheeks as she pushes up on her uninjured arm to take some of the pressure off her ribs.

"Ben, please, you have to call them back. Tell them not to come." She swallows to urge more moisture back into her mouth. She knows she sounds harried. Frantic. "You don't understand, I have to go home, I have—"

Even as she says it, the wailing cry of approaching sirens is unmistakable, and her entire body seems to deflate, shriveling in on itself. There's no stopping it now.

Everything happens so fast, after. Two paramedics manage to pull her out of the car, put her on one of those hard boards and then make her lay flat in case she has a spinal injury. She keeps trying to sit up, trying to find Ben in all the chaos, the noise. There's a firetruck and a police car, and she hates them both, has hated them since she was a child. The flashing lights and the ear-splitting cry of sirens, the way her heart always clenches in fear, lodging high in her throat when she hears or sees one approach, stealing her breath.

They always take her away from Mr. J, and this time is no different, only, Mr. J isn't here to watch. This time, there isn't snow on the ground flecked with blood. There's no Batman. No city on fire.

She jolts when a mask comes down over her nose and mouth, her eyes wild, darting. One of the EMTs—dark-skinned, with thick, heavy dreadlocks that she has secured in a low ponytail—lays a hand on her shoulder and pushes her back down, trying to calm her.

"It's just oxygen, okay? Breathe."

She tries. She really tries. But as they load her into the back of the ambulance after strapping down her legs and chest, her panic comes back full force, and all she can think about is Mr. J, how much of a mistake this was, how angry he's going to be when he finds out. She cranes her neck, looking for Ben, and spots him talking to a police officer while another circles the scene, shining a flashlight into the dark cavern of the car. Ben easily dwarfs the one officer in height, and Ben's arms are folded across his chest, head bowed low, like he's embarrassed. Ashamed.

The wreckage of the car behind him looks too grotesque to be real, jutting out from the forest of trees like an empty coffin that's been crudely unearthed. It looks staged, like something out of a movie.

"Ben!" She tries in vain to get his attention. "Ben!"

"Try to keep still, honey," the EMT says. She's wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her good arm, and then there's the krssssh of Velcro as the EMT undoes the cuff and opts for a smaller size instead.

The doors are starting to close. Taylor feels like her heart is going to lurch straight out of her chest. She rips the oxygen mask off and sits up.

"Wait, wait! Isn't he going to come?"

"We'll let him know where you're headed, okay? Come on, lay your head back for me, that's it…." She guides Taylor's head back down to the stretcher, and Taylor's eyes flutter, burning with more unshed tears as she stares up at the ambulance ceiling, the lights too bright, everything too much, her right arm cradled uselessly over her abdomen, lit up with pain. The sound of movement, doors slamming, shoes scraping over the hard floor, the static of walkie-talkies, the glow of red and blue lights swimming in her peripheral. Voices. Too many voices.

It's too much like before. When she was a child. When they dragged her kicking and screaming into the back of a police car. Slammed the doors on her, restrained her even as she screamed for them to stop. Talked to her in soothing voices, trying to get her to calm down when all she wanted was Mr. J.

"Bump that up to three liters, will you? And get some pressure on that head wound." The EMT is talking to someone on Taylor's other side. It's really hard to breathe.

"I—I have to go—go home," she manages to wheeze out in between gasps for air. Her breath fogs up the inside of the oxygen mask. She feels dizzy. "Please let me go home."

"Just lie back. Breathe. We're going to take care of you." Then, to the other EMT as she's ripping her stethoscope out of her ears, "Eighty-two over fifty. Get me an eighteen gauge."

Taylor shakes her head, but it only makes the throbbing in her skull worse, and her vision starts to blur. Hard to see straight, prickly black dots fuzzing in and out of her vision.

Everything will be okay. She remembers them saying that to her from before, feeding her that bold-faced lie, over and over again, almost as if saying it more for their own benefit than for hers. But everything wasn't okay. They made her forget him. Years of child psychotherapy, psychologists, speech therapists, counseling, specialists, all of it. Putting her in the foster system—no explanation as to the whereabouts of her parents—shuffling her from home to home like a naughty pet, like a dog that hadn't been properly housetrained. She was the kind of animal that frothed at the mouth when provoked, the kind that got kicked in the haunches until they went down, until they were properly subdued. The kind that needed occasional leashing in the dank underbelly of someone's basement when they lashed out or misbehaved. She got fed the rotten scraps. She curled up on old newspaper. She pissed in concrete corners. She trembled and tucked her tail between her legs, tried to make herself small. Palatable.

The truth hurt almost more than everything else—the truth that no one wanted her, no one could handle her—a burden she had been forced to shoulder for her entire life.

That is, until Mr. J.

He was the one to finally lift that weight from her. She remembers it with startling clarity, that frozen night on New Year's Eve, the pulse of the whole city thrumming to the same beat, her breath visible in the air, the feel of Mr. J's hand curling around her upper arm, the shock of being pulled back against the railing of the bridge, and then dragged over it, onto the safety of the other side. Taking the knife from him, the crackle of fireworks splitting the black sky. And then again, several months later, when he'd bent her over the couch, burned his name into her skin, laying claim to her in an irreversible way. Making it impossible to look at herself naked and not think of him, that secret thrill.

Mine, now.

It felt good to be wanted like that, to be wanted with an intensity that felt feral—untamed—like he'd do anything for her. He'd drain the ocean and lasso the moon. Pocket the sun and milk the stars, sprinkle the glittery remains over her so that she could bathe in lucent stardust. Nothing was too much.

And although he had stripped her of choice like so many before him, he'd given her something else instead—the ecstasy of knowing what it felt like to finally be wanted.

She belonged to him, and he belonged to her. That was their only truth.

She remembers—after the branding—how she'd felt so light, for the first time in her whole life. She felt like she could stand up a little straighter, felt like she could breathe without the threat of her lungs caving in. Mr. J wanted her. He wasn't going to abandon her like all the rest. He was different.

Now, though, everything was on the precipice of crumbling apart. Would they find out the truth of her and him—the Joker? Would they succeed in ripping her away from him again, and if they did, could she survive their separation? How long would it take for him to find his way back to her again?

Still hard to breathe. Something squeezes the flesh of her upper arm, too tight—a tourniquet—and the cacophony of sirens rings in her ears. The ambulance is moving now. She tries to reach over with her right arm to rip the tourniquet off, but the EMT on her other side urges her to keep still.

She frowns at them. "What are you—stop," she pants.

She watches the EMT's mouth move in reply as the woman hovers over her, but her features blur into something shapeless, and no sound emerges. The ambulance falls away suddenly, dissolving into thin air, revealing in its place a broad canvas of pitch-black sky, gauzy from the swirls of smoke suspended above her. Falling snow, ice cold as it slants across her cheeks, her eyelashes. She's shivering so hard her bones rattle. She can no longer feel her fingers. Her toes. Mr. J is in the back of the police car, staring at her through the window as she screams for him and beats on it with her fists. He's laughing at her, blood in his teeth, like he just took a bite out of something raw, but all she can hear is the ringing in her ears from the force of the explosion. Hands close around her shoulders, her arm, ripping her away from him, and all she can do is scream, save me, Mr. J, save me!

The ambulance bursts back into existence, like someone snapped their fingers and made it so, but she can't hear anything except for her own thudding heart and Mr. J's low, gravelly voice in her ear. It's just a whisper, something meant only for the two of them, but she hears it as clearly as if he were crouched right behind her. She can almost imagine the feel of his hot breath wafting over her ear.

I'm the only one who can save you now.

---

She wakes in the emergency room.

The lights are too bright again, and she groans, flinching away from it. Someone is lifting up her shirt, pressing something cold and sticky against her skin. She feels goose bumps light up over her arms and legs. It's cold in here.

Her eyes flutter open enough to see a nurse leaning over her.

"Hey," the woman says, offering a kind smile. She's young—tall—her brown hair pulled up into a nice ponytail. She has straight, shiny hair. Like Logan's. Her gloved hands move quickly over Taylor's chest and stomach as she presses stickers with metal nubs on them onto her skin. "Just replacing your leads for the heart monitor, okay?" She works fast, attaching a series of gray wires to the stickers she just placed. "Do you know where you are right now? How are you feeling?"

Taylor frowns, dazed, her eyes sweeping over her surroundings. A pale, sterile room with walls the color of eggshells, the mint green curtain drawn closed to provide a semblance of privacy. A countertop housing a computer and some cabinets.

"What happened to my arm?" she croaks, without even looking at it. It feels so heavy. "Where's Ben?" She opens and closes her mouth a couple of times; it feels cottony, like the way it does after Novocain has worn off.

"Is Ben your dad?" the nurse asks. "We've been trying to get in contact with your parents. Do you have a number we can use to reach them?"

Taylor shakes her head, and her vision fuzzes a little when she does. There's a weird probe on her pointer finger and an IV in the crook of her arm. She traces the tubing with her eyes, sees the IV pump, the metal pole, the bag of fluids. The steady drip, drip, drip of the fluids in the little cylindrical tube. When she glances towards her right arm, the bulky, blue cast sends her heart clear up into her esophagus, stealing the breath from her.

Oh no.

Her memories come flooding back. She squirms and hurries to pull down her shirt before the nurse can finish, hyperaware of the situation now. She can't let her see the brand. Too many questions. Too many red flags. And even if she lies, somehow they'll know it was from Mr. J, and then the cat will be out of the bag, and nothing will ever be the same.

The nurse pulls back. "I didn't mean to embarrass you," she says. She offers a gentle, reassuring smile.

Taylor swallows and shakes her head again, but this time the movement sends a jolt of sharp, throbbing pain shooting towards her temple. "I—I have to go home," she mumbles. She tries sitting up, but there's wires and cords and lines tangled all over her, a blood pressure cuff secured around her upper arm. She irritably tries to bat everything out of the way, her heart racing as she slides the weird probe off her finger. Her voice is slurred—they must have given her something. She lifts up the arm with the cast. "What is this?"

The nurse frowns, stepping in to assist. The badge clipped to the 'V' of her scrubs dangles in front of Taylor's face when she leans over her to undo the blood pressure cuff. Tessa M., RN, BSN.

"Hey," she says, gently, "take it easy. It's okay." She untangles some of the cords so Taylor doesn't feel quite as claustrophobic. "You have a displaced fracture in your wrist. Dr. Wyle said you were lucky it didn't require any surgery. I gave you a little bit of medicine to help take the edge off. How does your arm feel?"

"Hurts," she mumbles, but the pain's definitely not as sharp as it was before. It mostly just feels numb now, like the weird, fuzzy weight of a phantom limb.

She barely remembers them drawing her blood and taking an X-ray, the young doctor who came in to fit her arm in the cast after the scan was done. It all feels like a faraway dream now. The medicine must've made her really sleepy. How long has she been out for?

"Your blood pressure looks a lot better now. I put some antibiotic ointment and some gauze on that head wound," the nurse is saying. She presses a few buttons on the IV pump. "You have a concussion, so you should definitely try to take it easy over the next few days. Dr. Wyle will write you a prescription for the ointment in the morning, most likely, but we really need to talk to your parents." She goes over to the counter to reach for her clipboard. Fishes a pen out of her scrub pocket. "Do you know their phone number?"

Taylor's heartbeat pulses in time with the throbbing in her head. The blood rush sends a wave of nausea through her, the room tilting on its side for a moment before it rights itself.

"I'm sorry—tomorrow?" She can't help the tremble in her voice. She glances up at the clock mounted on the wall next to the cabinets, squinting at it. It's almost two AM.

"The doctor wants to keep you overnight, since you were so hypotensive when you came in and lost quite a bit of blood. We'll recheck your hemoglobin in the morning."

Hemo—what? She shakes her head, and then winces. She really needs to stop doing that. "No, no," she says, "I can't stay. I have to get home. My—my uncle will be worried—"

The nurse's brows pull together in concern. "Do you have his number? I'll call him for you, let him know you're alright."

"I—I don't know it off the top of my head."

That part, at least, is true. She realizes suddenly that she doesn't know where her cell phone is. Her bag with all of her stuff was probably still in Ben's car. Would he bring it to her? Where was he? Why didn't he come in the ambulance with her?

"Taylor?"

Taylor blinks her attention back to the nurse.

"Do you know of anyone who might be able to give us the contact information for your uncle? What's his name?"

All Taylor can do is try not to cry, even as she feels the tears welling up in her eyes. She squeezes her eyes shut and wills them away. What is she supposed to say?

"I'm sorry," she mumbles, "I just need to talk to Ben."

The nurse studies her closely for what feels like a long time, and Taylor swallows back her panic. She feels bad for the woman—she's just trying to do her job—but this is so much bigger than her, than both of them.

"Taylor—" the nurse begins, but then another nurse is poking her head around the curtain, nodding towards something on the other side.

Taylor's eyes slide down to the floor, where the curtain stops to reveal a pair of men's boots. Black jeans.

Her heart leaps into her throat, and she's not sure if it's out of fear or relief. She knows it can't be Mr. J—there's no way he could go unrecognized in a place like this. But she also knows it's not Ben. He was wearing something different earlier—and she's never seen him wear boots like that. Did he go home and change?

"I'll be right back," the nurse says. Taylor watches her disappear behind the curtain, but not before pulling the sliding glass door shut on the other side so that Taylor can't eavesdrop.

Another pair of legs joint he first, this one dressed in scrub, but a different color than the nurse's. A doctor, maybe?

She watches under the curtain for what feels like ages. Her heart slams so hard and fast against her ribcage that it makes her chest ache. There's a laceration slit across her collarbone and neck where the seatbelt had sliced into her skin, and it stings every time she bends her neck, or when her shirt brushes up against it. She watches the footsteps disappear for a while, wringing her hands while she impatiently waits for Tessa to return.

Finally, the boots are back, and the sliding glass door opens.

"Sir, we really recommend her staying—"

"Let me see her."

Taylor's heart skips a beat. She knows that voice. Where does she know that voice?

The curtain is peeled back, the rings skirting against the rod with a metallic whine, and her eyes widen.

Ressling.

She forces her gaping mouth shut, but she knows her eyes are still wide. How did he find her? How could he have possibly found her?

The nurse clears her throat. She looks flustered. "Is this your uncle?" she asks.

Taylor swallows. Looks at Ressling. She understands that she's supposed to say yes, so she nods twice—quickly.

The nurse almost seems disappointed by this, or maybe she's just doubtful.

"Right," she says, gathering her bearings. She turns towards Ressling. "You'll have to sign the forms I mentioned earlier, sir."

Ressling gives a barely perceptible nod. He's all stiff and on edge—but Ressling's always been a little stoic, a little too serious. He is a tightly wound coil in comparison to Mr. J, who sprung loose from his jack-in-the-box a long time ago.

The nurse's eyes dart between Taylor and Ressling for a moment, and then she mumbles something about being right back, the glass door sliding closed behind her. The room is submerged in silence.

The last time she'd seen Ressling was when he'd picked her up from the mall that night that it had rained so hard, when her bus pass had expired. She can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times she's been alone with him, and each time is somehow more unnerving than the last. The way he's looking at her now makes her want to shrivel in on herself, like a withering flower that's been deprived too long of sunlight and water.

She watches him approach, his eyes sliding up and down and back up again. She pulls the blanket a little higher around her waist. She doesn't like him looking at her.

"Are you hurt?"

He smells like cigarette smoke and something woodsy, and his leather jacket is wet. His all-black ensemble is a stark contrast to the pale interior of the room, his presence like a black cloud. He's grown out his hair some since the last time she'd seen him, not shaved so close to his head anymore, but he still looks as hard and angry as she remembers. Penetrating, dark eyes. Mouth thinned in a straight line. Sharp cheekbones underneath a thin layer of dark stubble.

She watches a bead of water slide down the arm of his jacket, disappearing around the curve of his elbow. She swallows thickly.

"The nurse said I had a concussion."

"I know what the nurse said," he says, gruffly. "Are you hurt?" he asks again.

She shakes her head 'no'—slowly—and then tries not to squirm when he steps closer, standing over her now, assessing the bandage on her skull, where it seems to awaken, throbbing hotly under his scrutiny.

"How did you find me here?"

It should be concerning, the fact that he tracked her down so quickly—Does Mr. J know about Ben? Was the car accident on the news?—but mostly she feels relieved. He's going to get her out of here. Take her back to Mr. J. That's what he does.

Ressling doesn't answer. He steps away to retrieve his phone from the inside of his jacket, and she watches as his thumbs move across the screen.

Is he texting Mr. J? Is he letting him know that she's okay?

She swallows. Her mouth is so dry, she just wants something to drink.

A beat of silence passes—too heavy from the weight of her unanswered question—and she swallows again, this time to push down her burgeoning panic. She ducks her head a little, looking at Ressling from beneath the fan of her eyelashes.

"Is he mad?" she asks, barely a whisper. She has to know. She has to know what she's about to walk into.

Ressling pockets his phone. Heaves a sigh. His gaze sweep over the room, looking everywhere but at her, but eventually their eyes do meet, locking onto each other. She watches a muscle twitch along his jaw, like maybe he's biting back what he really wants to say.

"What do you think?"

His reply is all the confirmation she needs.

When the nurse comes back, she tells Ressling the paperwork is out at the desk for him to sign and that someone can help him with it if he has any questions. He frowns at this, looking between the two of them suspiciously, as if they're plotting something, but eventually steps out without another word.

Taylor watches the nurse retrieve some gauze and a Band-Aid from the cabinet on the other side of the room, and then she crouches on her haunches on the side of the bed next to Taylor, gently stripping the transparent tape off her arm so she can pull out the IV.

"Listen…" she says. Taylor can tell she's nervous, or maybe just unsure. "If you're not safe, or you don't feel comfortable going with your uncle, you know you can tell me, right? I won't let anything bad happen to you. I promise."

Taylor's face heats up despite her best efforts to remain unaffected, and she feels embarrassed, although she can't pinpoint exactly why. Maybe it's the sudden realization that she's more transparent than she thought. She wears her anxiety openly, like a second skin. It's her outermost shell, porous and soft, tethered so closely to fear there is no separating them, not without deliberate, painstaking effort, like trying to peel apart the white, stringy membrane from an orange slice without bursting the juice inside.

Is that all people see when they look at her? Just this frightened little girl too afraid to fight back, to stand up for herself? A little girl who needs to be sheltered from the world; is that why everyone is always so hungry to offer false assurances they can't keep? She's been at the mercy of the foster care system long enough to know: everyone makes promises, and no one ever keeps them.

"Taylor, does he hurt you?" the nurse's voice draws her back.

"No," she says, putting extra effort into making eye contact, wanting to sound convincing. Believable.

The nurse pats her arm, looking sad, but nods 'OK', and finishes taking out the IV.

She doesn't understand how she's able to leave with Ressling. He must've had to show proof that he was her legal guardian somehow, right? It's frightening to think of all the strings Mr. J must've pulled—maybe a long time ago, like in the months immediately after Nathan, that time she doesn't remember very well. Had he designated Ressling as her legal guardian in case of situations like this? Is that why Mr. J kept him around?

Outside, afterwards, the rain has started back up again. Steam rises from the wet asphalt, the pavement shimmery and black, winking under the street lamps that line the edge of the parking lot where the car is waiting. When he opens the passenger door for her, she's too exhausted to tell him she can do it herself. She slides into the cool, dark interior, already at ease with the rain gently pattering against the windshield. She just wants to go to sleep. The velour seats feel nice and soft underneath her bare thighs. She's still wearing her uniform from work, a white short-sleeved polo tucked into a black pleated skirt. Very schoolgirl—minus the plaid—now that she thinks about it.

She slumps into her seat and smooths out the pleats in her skirt, goose bumps pimple up and down her legs. She fights back a yawn as Ressling gets in.

"Get buckled," he says.

"Why do you care?" she mumbles. There's no bite to it, but it still sounds childish to her own ears after the words leave her mouth. What is she, eight?

Ressling starts the car. He's in no mood for games.

"Do what I said," he snaps.

Taylor rolls her eyes and clicks her seatbelt into place. She rests her casted arm across her abdomen and lays her head back against the headrest, turning away from him, towards the window. It's strange being back in a car after what happened. She sees a flash of mangled dashboard, the cracked windshield, and she forces herself to blink the memory away.

For a while it's just the sound of the rain pattering against the roof of the car and the rubber slide of the windshield wipers, the occasional, rhythmic clicking of the turn signal, like a metronome. Ressling checks his phone once or twice—she can see the reflection of it in her window—but she mostly keeps her eyes closed and lets the drive lull into a state of half-sleep.

She blinks herself awake when the car comes to a stop. Goose bumps are quick to prickle over her arms and legs as she stares up at the house. All the lights are off. The blinds closed. It doesn't even look like anyone is home, but she knows better. He's there. Waiting for her.

Ressling startles her when the car turns off. The keys jangle as he pulls the keys from the ignition and tucks them inside his jacket.

"What are you doing?" she asks, a little panicked. He's never come inside before. Why is he coming inside?

He ignores her, opening his door and stepping out. Taylor's heart races when his door slams shut, leaving her in the dark silence for only a few precious, heart-pounding seconds before he swings open her door.

She slips out onto the wet pavement and stares at him, trying to figure out what's going on as he slams her door shut. The sound seems to echo throughout the quiet of the neighborhood like the reverberation of a gunshot, and it lights up her nerves, making her heart throb.

He doesn't look at her, but he waits for her to lead the way to the house, which she does, even as she desperately wracks her brain for a way to delay the inevitable. She feels like a newborn colt as her knees knock together. She's already shaking so bad.

On the small, concrete porch, she spins around to face Ressling, who is closer behind her than she thought. "I don't have my keys," she says, stupidly.

He gestures her forward with a nod of his head. "It's open."

Right. She swallows as she reaches forward, turns the knob.

It's dark inside, and she has to take a moment to allow her eyes to adjust. She nearly jumps out of her skin when Ressling gently ushers her forward, hand at the small of her back. The door clicks shut behind them. She stumbles a few steps into the kitchen, her wet shoes squeaking against the tile in a way that cuts so sharply through the silence that it makes her flinch.

It's warm, heady inside—almost humid—and she can tell that the two windows in the living room are open even though the blinds are drawn. Mr. J must've left them open all day. The rain's picking up, too, growing heavier, and her spine goes rigid at the low roll of thunder that rumbles in the distance.

She doesn't know what to do. What to say. It's weird having Ressling here, inside their living space. Only she and Mr. J have ever shared this space, and now he's invading it. It feels like he's breaking a holy sacrament just by being here. Like he's wearing his hat at the dinner table during a prayer, or stepping on a grave instead of around it, or staying seated during the national anthem. Little no-no's she remembers from her childhood, stuff that always felt like such a big deal.

She feels paralyzed—frozen—with him standing right behind her. She has no idea what she's walking into, but with the way her heart throbs, she knows it can't be good.

She finds her voice after too many lingering beats of silence. "Mr. J?" she calls, her voice tentative and soft in the darkness.

She doesn't have to wait long for him to appear.

His door opens slowly down the hall, the whine of the hinges sending goose bumps flooding over her skin as he emerges, filling up the doorway in a way that makes her breath catch. He's dressed to the nines. This startles her more than anything else, the fact that he's in his trademark attire. His greasepaint looks fresh.

"Mr. J," she says again, voice cracking, choking on the tears lodged in her throat, tears that won't come. She's too scared to cry.

She always forgets how big he is. How broad his shoulders are, the unnerving way he keeps them hunched close to his ears. She swallows as he steps into the living room, a thin sliver of yellow light silhouetted behind him from his bedroom. The door whines closed on its own, only halfway shut.

"Come here."

She shivers at the rumble in his voice, not at all unlike the deep roll of thunder outside.

It's a herculean effort, the act of moving, but she forces herself forward, step by step, until she crosses the partition that separates the linoleum from the carpet.

She's still a few paces from him—a relatively safe distance, all things considered—but she doesn't know if she can make herself go any further than this. She wants to reach out and hold onto the countertop for support, but she resists. The counter's on her right side anyway, and the most she can manage with that arm is cradling it against her abdomen; it hurts less than allowing it to dangle and having all the blood rush to her hand.

Mr. J doesn't move. She's still acutely aware of Ressling's presence by the front door, in the kitchen, but she doesn't dare turn around to look at him.

"Where. Have you. Been?"

He punctuates each word like they all belong in their own separate sentence. It's unnerving. Terrifying. Fear slithers along the curve of her spine. She reaches up with her left arm to cradle her right elbow, her palm resting along the edge of her cast.

"I'm sorry, Mr. J —we were just—I went for a car ride with a —a friend from work, and I was going to come straight home after, I promise I was—"

"I've been too lenient with you, haven't I?" he interrupts. Taylor blinks at him, surprised. He's starting towards her, slow and leisurely, prowling closer until they're only an arm's length apart. He leans down, leveling his face with hers. "Haven't I?"

She shakes her head 'no', but it's diminutive, like she's afraid that too sudden of a movement will jumpstart him into action. She doesn't know if she can trust herself to speak.

"I thought I was doing a nice thing," he goes on, "upping your allowance, teaching you to drive, letting you, uh, get a job…." He's circling her now, and Taylor's fear prickles along the back of her neck, all her hairs standing at attention. She's so wired, she feels like if he were to reach out and touch her, she might spontaneously combust into a firestorm of electrical sparks. "But I can see now that was a mistake. You need to be reined in." He's behind her now. Leaning in close enough for his body heat to bleed all up and down her back, lighting up the nerves along her spine. His mouth brushes her ear. "You need your leash tightened, don't you?"

She puffs out a shuddery exhale in response, every single muscle pulled taut, aching from the strain of anxious anticipation.

"What do you think?" he murmurs, circling around to her front. He slips a gloved finger beneath her chin, tilting it up until she meets his eyes, dark and glittering. "Is that what you need?"

She's trembling. She cups her hand tighter around her elbow, almost as if to anchor herself.

"I'm sorry," she shudders. It all comes out in a hasty rush of air, like she's been holding her breath this whole time. Her voice is barely a whisper when she speaks. She doesn't want to antagonize him. "I didn't mean for—for this. We were just out driving, and—and then, the rain, and the roads were really wet and—it won't happen again, Mr. J—"

He looks up sharply then, as if remembering that Ressling is still there. He keeps his finger nestled under her chin.

"Better call in tomorrow for our girl," Mr. J says to him, and her brows pull together in confusion. He wants Ressling to call out of work for her?

She looks at Mr. J imploringly. "But—but I'm not sick," she whimpers.

His dark, heavy gaze lowers back to her, and the way he grins at her makes her spine curl. It's all teeth, rotten and sour and full of malice. Furled scar tissue ripples along the sides of his mouth the wider his grin stretches, and it should be grotesque, but for some reason she can't bring herself to look away. When he steps closer, she stiffens, but then he's hunching down low, nosing along the line of her jaw, her neck, huffing hot breath all up and down the column of her throat, smelling her, like he's missed her taste.

"When I'm done with you," his hot breath wafts over her ear, "you will be."

She shudders audibly, fear cutting so sharply through her it's as though she's been split in half. She knows immediately that whatever he has planned, it's not something she'll escape from unscathed. It's not something she'll escape from at all.

She shakes her head at him. Tears are flowing freely now, blurring up her vision, streaking down her cheeks.

"Please, please forgive me…."

His mouth curls into a dangerous smirk. "You don't want to be forgiven," he sneers. His fingers bite deeper into her flesh, curling around her chin so he can yank her closer. "You want to be punished."

She shakes her head at him, breaking free of his hold, but his gaze is focused somewhere behind her, and when she stumbles backwards to put some distance between them, her back collides into something solid. Something warm.

She spins around to face Ressling, terrified, but he doesn't touch her, just looks at her with an expression that is as dark and unreadable as ever, and it's Mr. J who reaches for her first. He wraps a forearm around her waist and hauls her deeper into the darkness of the living room, away from the yellowing light that spills out into the hallway.

She tastes the frantic pulsing of her heart, snagged somewhere high and tight in the column of her throat, blocking her airway.

"Wait—stop!" She doesn't know what's happening. "What—what are you doing?" she pants.

Her question is met with a boom of thunder, and she exhales sharply when she's dragged through the living room and shoved face-first into the wall that the TV is butted against. She puts out her arms to brace for the impact, but there's not enough time to fully outstretch them, and her arms are crossed in the shape of an X when she slams into it. Her right arm takes the brunt of the assault, her cast colliding with the wall with enough force to make her cry out. A lightning rod of pain shoots up her wrist all the way to her shoulder, but even then she doesn't dare move, not with Mr. J's big hand nestled between her shoulder blades, holding her in place.

"Mr. J," she whines, touching her forehead to the wall, trying not to hyperventilate. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

She feels him press himself up against her from behind, caging her against the wall. She tries to swallow down her panic, overwhelmed by the heat of him, and when he leans downs over her, something hard and cold from the inside of his jacket brushes against her upper arm.

"You're not sorry," he says, "but you will be."

He's gone, suddenly, and Taylor can do nothing but pant against the wall, chest heaving. She's too scared to crane her neck to look behind her, so she doesn't. The rain pours down outside, accompanied by a gentle wind that rattles the blinds and makes goose bumps sprout over her arms and legs despite the humidity of the room. A sharp crack of thunder makes her jump against the wall, but even then she doesn't move, just waits. Waits.

Her ears prickle at the sound of steps behind her, boots on carpet, and then the distinct metal click of a belt being undone, the hiss of leather as it slithers through the loops.

"Y'know…" Mr. J says, somewhere behind her. She can tell he's turned away from her, talking to Ressling. "I was going to have you watch… but let's make this a little more fun, hm?" he says. "How about you do the honors."

Taylor doesn't understand what's happening, but Ressling must hesitate too long, and she hears Mr. J shift with impatience.

"Come, come, don't keep the lady waiting."

He sounds excited. She does look behind her then, slowly, glancing between the two men in confusion. Her gaze trails to where Ressling has a belt cradled in his closed fist, like a noose. Her face pales.

Her eyes dart frantically between the pair of them, where Mr. J stands slightly behind Ressling, off to the side.

"No… no," she says, horrified. She understands what her punishment is now—she just doesn't understand why Ressling has to be the one to give it to her. She shakes her head at them—both of them—and starts to turn around. "Please don't do this," she whimpers.

"Face the wall," Mr. J growls, voice full of gravel. "Don't make me tell you again."

Taylor gapes at him, tears sliding down her cheeks. She can't believe this is happening. She looks desperately to Ressling, trying to read his expression, but his face is inscrutable. Hard to tell if he's resigned or angry, his mouth pulled into a thin, tight line, and she can't see his eyes in the dark. What is he thinking?

She turns back to the wall and cries. She's shaking as she bows her forehead to the wall, feels the cool plaster against her skin. She can't believe this is happening. That he'd do this.

It's quiet for a long time, and she holds her breath, waiting, her whole body tense and clenched tight for what's to come.

"Come on, come on, come on," Mr. J says, full of anticipation.

When the belt finally snaps down over her ass, it feels as though the breath is punched from her lungs. It hurts more than she thought it would. Her mouth opens in a silent cry, and her fingers curl instinctively against the wall, looking for something to hold onto, to brace herself with.

The back of her thighs tense for the next blow, and it comes fast, with as little warning as the first, and she does make a sound this time, something that's ripped out of her, caught between a gasp and a sob.

She shudders as she waits for the next hit, and this one lands lower, biting along the backs of her bare thighs, leaving a hot stripe that burns.

She grits her teeth and curls her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms. It's humiliating. Why is Mr. J making him do this? Why does Ressling have to be here at all?

The one after makes her shout, and she pants desperately against the wall, trying and failing to catch her breath. Her face burns with shame, but it's nothing compared to the hot, stinging welts that are striped across the back of her bare thighs, the skin that her skirt doesn't cover.

"How many?" she hears Ressling ask, so quiet she has to strain to hear him.

"Thirty."

Her heart plummets.

Mr. J answers like he'd already thought about this, and she suddenly finds herself wondering how long he'd been planning this for. She doubts that having Ressling 'do the honors' was as spontaneous as he'd made it sound. He'd wanted Ressling to be the one to do this. As if the act wasn't already humiliating enough for her, Ressling had to be the one to dole out the punishment. Mr. J knew how much she hated him. He knew.

It feels like a long time before the next one comes, and she thinks, thirty as it lands, how am I supposed to make it to thirty?

She loses track after eleven, and when the next blow comes, a little higher than the last, it catches on her brand, and she bites down so hard on her lower lip she tastes blood in her mouth. It snaps again in the same spot immediately after, and she jumps against the wall, struggles to keep her mouth shut; she doesn't want to give them the satisfaction of hearing her cry.

As if Mr. J knows, she hears him say, "Harder."

Ressling does. The belt catches on the underside of her ass, and she shouts, her knees buckling against the wall.

"Don't move," Mr. J warns, "or I'll make it fifty."

She swallows and tries to straighten, every muscle in her body pulled taut, too tight.

"Please, please stop," she gasps.

The anticipation is almost worse than the blows themselves, just waiting for the next one to come, not knowing where exactly it's going to fall as her heart thunders so hard in her ears, drowning out everything else but the labored sound of her own breathing, the rapid rise and fall of her chest.

She wonders what they're thinking as they stand there behind her. Is Ressling ashamed? Does he like it? Does Mr. J?

You know this hurts me more than it hurts you.

She doesn't know if that sentiment still rings true anymore. Not after this. She used to think he felt sorry any time he had to punish her, that he didn't want to—but she realizes suddenly how naïve she's been to think that. How stupid. Of course he isn't sorry—he likes it.

The belt comes down again, and again, and again, and she squeezes her eyes shut and cries, teeth clenched so hard it feels like her jaw will crack.

She's wrecked when he's finally done, trembling so hard she can barely stand, her whole body drenched in a cold sweat. She hears the clink of the belt buckle as it clatters to the carpet, and she lets herself cry even harder now that it's over, even as she struggles to catch her breath, tries to get her muscles to unclench. Her backside is on fire. She sucks in a shuddering breath, the welts on the back of her thighs singing with pain, snot dripping down her nose, drool bubbling at her mouth. She thinks he might've broken skin, but she can't tell if it's sweat or blood that drips over the backs of her thighs, right below her ass. The taste of salt and copper bleeds over her tongue where she'd bit down on her lip, and the wall is wet from her tears where she'd smeared her face against it.

All she thinks is that she feels humiliated, broken in a way she's never felt before, not even after Nathan. The rape.

This feels different somehow. Nastier.

She thinks, as she stands there and cries, that maybe it's different because she feels somehow complicit in all of this. She could've done more to stop him. She could've run. But she didn't even try—she didn't even fight it.

Why didn't she fight it?

"Very good," Mr. J rumbles. She shivers at the sound of his voice. Only then does she allow herself to crumble to the floor, turning onto her left side, shoulder to the wall as she slides down, down, all the way to the floor, onto her knees. It hurts to sit like this, her ass nestled on the back of her calves, but the effort of standing is exhausting, and she can't do it any longer.

She bows her head, pitifully cradles her broken arm against her abdomen and shudders through her broken sobs. She's glad for the curtain her hair provides. She hates that Ressling has to see her like this, that he made her like this. She doesn't look up even when she feels the weight of Mr. J's shadow hovering in her peripheral, standing directly over her.

"What do we say?"

She swallows down the saliva pooling in her mouth. She feels like she's going to be sick. The medicine they'd given her at the hospital has definitely worn off by now.

She cranes her neck to look up at him through a hot blur of tears. "What?" she croaks.

Mr. J crouches next to her. There's sweat beading along his brow, and his eyes are fire bright. She flinches when he takes her chin in his hand—gentle, this time—and directs her gaze towards Ressling.

"I said… what do we say?"

Her jaw slackens. She's disgusted he would ask this of her. But she makes herself look up at the man who'd just turned her ass beet red, belted her until she'd sobbed for mercy, brought her to her knees, and she wipes the snot from her nose with the back of her forearm and says, "Thank you," and then her eyes blur with tears again and she has to look away.

Mr. J hoots with laughter—that shrill, breathless laughter she hates—and then hunches down close to cup her face in his hands, brushing her tears away with his thumbs, cooing at her.

"There's my good girl."

It's condescending. She knows that. She sinks her teeth into her bloodied lip, making it bleed again, and Mr. J wipes that away, too.

And in that moment, kneeling there with him as he murmurs to her what a good job she did, what a good girl she is, she feels something in her chest clench, some heart valve that's clamped itself shut and won't open back up, and she thinks, I almost hate you.

Almost.

---

Afterwards, she sleeps for almost fourteen hours. It's nearly dark when she wakes, her room warm and the air a little stale. The last tendrils of daylight slither away as blue-grey dusk pools in through the half-open blinds. She hears the hum of the city outside, the rumble of cars from a nearby exit ramp. The sounds are comforting. Familiar. They ground her in a way nothing else ever will, a reminder that Gotham is carrying on as it should, as it always does, shouldering its countless burdens, the secrets that sluice through its crevices deep at night. Gotham reminds her that time stops for no one, least of all little orphan girls that have been forgotten about. Abandoned.

She lies in bed for a long time—she'd slept on her belly, more comfortable, that way—and stares at the long, simmering shadows that ripple across her closet door. Shadows that glide over the furniture, the carpet. It's pretty. Relaxing. Kind of like being underwater at the bottom of the pool with your eyes open, neck craned back, looking up at the sky through the gentle swell of the water's surface. The way the world on the other side seems to undulate, everything slightly out of focus and hazy. The way sound is dulled and kind of faraway. And then that moment you catch yourself wondering what it'd be like to never resurface, daring yourself to hold your breath for as long as you can. The sick thrill of wondering what it feels like to drown.

She peels back her covers. The urgency of her bladder is too painful to ignore, and she cries as she gets out of bed. Everything hurts.

Mr. J's bedroom door is open, and the house is quiet. Not home then. She's relieved for the privacy. She doesn't want to see him right now. Doesn't think she could face him. Doesn't know what she would say.

She hobbles to the bathroom. Closes the door. Lowering herself over the toilet is excruciating, and the porcelain is ice cold against all the parts of her that are on fire.

She wraps her cast in saran wrap and a plastic grocery bag when she's done, stepping into the shower. She keeps the water tepid, shying away from the spray at first because when it pelts her ass and the back of her thighs it stings. It's hard to wash her hair with one hand, but she does her best, lamenting the fact that it's her dominant arm that's been rendered unusable.

She wipes her face off with her towel when she gets out, and as she goes to wrap it around herself, she catches sight of her reflection in the mirror. She turns— tentatively, almost as if afraid of what she'll discover—and gazes at herself from over her shoulder. It's hard not to flinch as her eyes roam over the extent of the damage. It's like looking at a nebula, a starburst of busted blood vessels, her ass and thighs mottled with bruises, stripes of purple and blue. Her face floods hot with the shame of memory, and she swallows. It looks ugly.

It's going to be impossible to sit for weeks.

She's never going to be able to look Ressling in the eye again, either. And Mr. J, letting him do that to her. How could he? she thinks, for what feels like the hundredth time. The rancid aftertaste of betrayal pools in her mouth, a wet, sour coat for the bed of her tongue, and she struggles with what to do with it: does she spit it out or just keep swallowing it down, like she always has?

She thinks about the way it felt to have the two of them standing there behind her while Ressling had whipped her, the vicious bite of Mr. J's belt on her ass and thighs. The way she'd begged for them to stop, her face hot with humiliation and the burn of her own tears. Being brought to her knees in utter exhaustion, and then being made to say thank you afterwards, like she'd asked for it. Like she'd wanted it.

And she thinks about Mr. J drugging her, months' worth of violent mood swings, the constant need for naps, the frequency with which she was plagued with nightmares. Did he have the power to control, those, too? Did he plant her nightmares like seeds, knowing they'd sprout into something terrible, something frightening, knowing that she'd come crawling for the solace and comfort that only another person's presence could provide? That only he could provide?

And she thinks about the way Logan had looked that one afternoon in history class, so pale and afraid when she'd said, "my brother goes to GSU," while the university burned right there in front of their eyes on the TV. The flames had looked so hot and the smoke so black Taylor could practically taste them, could feel the blister of flames licking their way up the interior lining of her throat, the smoke flooding her lungs, scorching her from the inside out. That fat knot of terror that'd wound itself around her intestines, tangling around her diaphragm. Hard to breathe. Hard to do anything but stand there and gape like an open-mouthed bass.

And she thinks about the aftermath of the school dance, hundreds of dead classmates and a handful of teachers, the memorial service she'd been forced to attend at school, the guilt that had sloshed around in her belly while she'd listened to the names of the dead solemnly murmured into the microphone. Leaving the ceremony halfway through, bursting through the auditorium doors like she was coming up for air after being wrestled underwater. Sobbing in the handicap stall afterwards in the empty bathroom upstairs—the same bathroom she'd gotten ready in for the dance—digging her fingernails into her scalp until the pain was sobering enough to reroute her. Pacing back and forth in that small cubicle, thinking, it's all my fault, it's all my fault, it's all my fault. Survivor's guilt, but also the guilt of responsibility, for not seeing the bigger picture until it was too late, for not begging Mr. J to put a stop to the wheels she should've known were in motion. Shouldering the dead weight of this unspeakable burden that no one but her could possibly understand. Had she allowed it to happen? Had she made it happen? Maybe if she hadn't gotten to the dance, he wouldn't have targeted her school.

She feels angry all over again, an anger that bubbles and froths in a place so deep inside her that's it never been touched before—not even Nathan was capable, not even the promise of revenge against him could incite the rage she feels right now.

She has to see Ben.

She doesn't even know if he's alright, or what happened to him after the night of the car accident. She doesn't know why he hadn't come to see her at the hospital.

They hadn't exchanged phone numbers prior to the accident, so she has no way of getting in contact with him—not like she has her phone, anyway. She thinks about tracking down a pay phone and calling the diner, asking for his number there, but she's afraid of getting him in trouble, or maybe incriminating him somehow. She doesn't know if anybody at work knows about the car accident yet. Ben might not want people to know that he hurt her.

She stares at the glowing green numbers on her nightstand . It's almost midnight by the time she crawls back into bed. She'd stood barefoot in the kitchen for a long time, hip cocked against the counter while she'd devoured an entire sleeve of stale Saltines, and then chased down the salt with lukewarm water from the tap. Now she stares wide-eyed in the darkness, her skull throbbing from where it'd been slammed against the window. Her arm itches inside its cast.

It's almost six AM when she jerks out of a feverish, dream-fueled sleep. She frowns into her pillow at the sound of a cabinet door slamming shut in the kitchen. It feels like she's only been asleep for five minutes.

It's pale outside. Light that is gray-blue pushes itself past the cracks in her closed blinds. The morning traffic is a little quieter than usual. Saturday. Everyone still in bed, no work to rush off to. She wonders where Mr. J was all night, what sort of things he was doing. What he's thinking about right now.

She smells him before she sees him, gasoline and sweat wafting into her bedroom before he's barely even opened her door. The stench clings to him like a noxious cloud, filling up her nostrils as he rounds to the other side of the bed. She keeps her eyes shut, feigning sleep, trying to make the rise and fall of her chest look natural. Even.

His footsteps are heavy as he approaches—he must be tired, to be so carelessly loud—and for a long time, he just stands over her, completely still. Her chest tightens in fear the longer the seconds drag, but she keeps her breathing nice and steady where she lays on her left side, her casted arm draped near her head, next to her pillow.

She keeps her ears perked, too, trying to discern any movement, any sign of what he could be doing, but he's just standing there. Staring.

It should make her uneasy. But it's been so long since she last slid into bed with him, and she… she's missed this, the silent comfort of his presence when there's no pretenses to adhere to. When she can be vulnerable around him without the fear of consequence.

He stands there so long she almost forgets he's there at all, and she finds herself drifting back to sleep for real. She almost thinks she's dreaming when she hears him finally shift, crouching down low over her, heat rippling off him in waves. And then two gloved fingers, feather-light, sliding across her slightly-parted mouth, following the curve at the corner of her lips and smoothing up. His fingers skirt across the skin of her cheek, all the way up to her ear.

Half of a Glasgow.

She doesn't have to wonder what he's thinking about after that. She already knows.

---

Ressling does call out of her work for her—indefinitely, as she finds out. She catches the bus to the diner late in the day, when she's finally mustered up the courage to leave the house. Mr. J's been gone for hours, and the longer she waits for him, the longer her anxiety pulses inside her like an electric current, her wires unearthed and exposed—frayed—and she feels like she should be walking around with a sign that warns 'HIGH VOLTAGE'.

She can't think about the repercussions of her actions, not when she's like this. All she knows is she has to see Ben. She has to make sure he's okay. She has to talk to him. She'll tell Mr. J she went for a walk, maybe bring something home for him, like a snack or something, so he doesn't get suspicious.

Just went to the store, Mr. J. Lost track of time.

That'll be fine.

Ruby spots her immediately when the cheery little overhead bell announces her arrival. The older woman is on the opposite side of the diner, standing over a booth with two customers, taking their order, maybe, but it's always a little hard to tell; she never uses a notepad like the other waitresses do. How she remembers everything, Taylor will never know.

Ruby's head cranes towards the door when she enters, and Taylor sees her arch a thin brow, catches the slight narrowing of her eyes.

Taylor quickly ducks away, cradling her cast almost as if to protect it from the burning scrutiny of Ruby's gaze.

She keeps her head down as she skirts past the customers at the counter and the booths butted against the windows. She catches more than a few glances as she passes; she might as well be toting a rainbow flag behind her to announce her presence. Her cast is bright blue and obnoxious, and there's no hiding her busted lip and the gash on her head, her hair still a little matted with the leftover crust of dried blood. The attention—all these curious eyes—makes her face turn hot, but she tries to ignore it as she approaches the double doors leading into the kitchen, heart thudding, pushing against the cage of her ribs.

Ben. Ben. Ben.

He should be working today. He always works Saturdays.

She bursts through the kitchen doors—making more noise than she had intended as the doors bang against the walls and then swing closed behind her—and her eyes find him immediately. She exhales in relief, and Ben turns to look at the source of the noise, his eyes widening when he sees her.

"Taylor," he says at the same time she says, "Ben."

Her voice is all broken, warped from the sudden itch of tears lodged in her throat. She goes to him as he quickly shucks off his rubber gloves, draping them over the edge of the big metal sink.

She doesn't know why she's crying all the sudden, but she stands there like an idiot, arms limp at her sides, wishing Ben would just reach out and envelope her. Hug her, damn it.

His eyes dart around the kitchen for a moment, but the two of them are mostly hidden behind the bulk of an industrial-sized refrigerator. He is quick to usher her out of the kitchen, ducking out of his apron as he goes. He tosses it over a metal folding chair in the breakroom, and then guides her out the backdoor.

They spill out into golden hour. The sun—a trembling, bright yellow disc—hangs sandwiched between the mouth of the alley, the whole sky bleeding behind it, orange and warm and somehow achingly familiar. It ignites a primal instinct within her—seeing the sky this color—awakening some long-forgotten ancestral link, something inside her that's been dormant for a long time. Had her mother's mother gazed upon a sunset like this? Experienced this same velvet warmth, a sunbath of gold, like being glazed in honey?

Taylor wraps her arms around Ben's waist before the door is even finished slamming shut behind them, and Ben hugs her back, holding her so tight, tighter than Mr. J ever has. She cries into his t-shirt even though he's sweaty, stinking of Clorox and wet food. She catches the tendrils of some minty aftershave along his jaw.

"Hey, hey," he soothes. "Are you okay? What's wrong?"

She melts into his concern—concern that she knows is genuine. She feels like she can be herself around him. Like he really cares. She knows she can be honest with him, let her guard down with him in a way that her survival instincts won't allow with Mr. J.

The sun and Ben's strong arms are comforting and warm along her back, and it feels good to melt, like she's thawing out after the icy burden of a long, hard winter.

"I just—" she hiccups, crying even harder. She clings to the back of his t-shirt, white-knuckled, the muscles in her forearms taut and straining. Her right arm throbs inside its cast. "I'm so glad you're okay," she sniffles into his chest. "I missed you."

For a long moment, Ben doesn't say anything, and her heart falters. Was that too much, saying that she missed him? But then, after a moment, he slips an arm around her waist and rubs her back with his other hand while she cries, his big palm sliding back and forth between the sharp hunch of her shoulder blades. She can hear the slight smile in his voice when he speaks.

"Of course I'm okay," he says, releasing a prolonged exhale. "And I missed you, too." His hand slows some, dipping a little lower down her spine, tracing it with the pads of his fingertips, feather-light. "I tried calling the hospital to see how you were, but they wouldn't tell me anything."

She pulls back after a moment to look up at him, and Ben pulls back too, his arms falling away. He squints and has to shield his eyes from the sun when he looks down at her.

"Why didn't you come to see me?" she asks, swallowing to urge more moisture back into her mouth. She wipes her tears away with the back of her forearm. "I was so scared, and I… I wanted you there."

Ben's face crumbles, and he bows his head for a moment to stare at the cracked asphalt beneath their feet. She studies the dark fan of his eyelashes pressed against his cheeks, the bony prominence of his overlarge nose. His smattering of beauty marks and slapdash of mismatched freckles. Such a hurried quality to all of his features, she thinks, like God was running out of time when he made Ben.

"I wanted to come," he says. He scrunches up his face, looking up, squinting at the big ball of the sun suspended behind her. "But the cops were grilling me about the accident, and what we were doing, and like, you're so much younger…." He palms at the back of his neck, eyes sliding up, towards the drooping power lines that are tethered between the diner and the laundromat, glittering like gold chains. "It just looks bad, you know?" He cringes a little, like he doesn't like the way it all sounds, like he could've phrased it better.

Taylor bites down on her lip, tastes the copper-crust of old blood. "Oh," she says. Her cheeks flush at the insinuation of something more than just friendship kindling between them, something she's tried not to give too much thought to.

Ben seems antsy all the sudden, craning his neck over his shoulder to look back towards the back entrance to the diner. "Listen," he says, "why don't you come over after I'm finished here? We can talk some more. I've gotta give you your phone back. Maybe I can sign your cast." He smiles a little, watching her.

Taylor laughs, the first of the day. "What, like an autograph?"

Ben rolls his eyes. "Like, art shit. I'm pretty good at that stuff."

Her eyes snap up to meet his. "You draw?" She can't believe they've never talked about this before.

He cocks his head at her. "Yeah… do you?"

She bites her lip again, but this time she's grinning. She nods her head with barely-contained excitement.

Ben smiles back, too. That broad, goofy grin that showcases his canines, and the happy folds of skin along the sides of his mouth. "Then it's decided. You're definitely coming over."

She hangs out behind the diner until the end of his shift, sitting on the stack of wood pallets with her back pressed against the brick wall. She watches the sun dip below the horizon, the silhouette of skyscrapers looming in the distance, like black, quiet giants, so patient and still as they anticipate nightfall, waiting to come blinking alive in the darkness. Hundreds of lamplight eyes, the fireflies of the inner city.

He brings her a vanilla milkshake a little while later, and a napkin cradled with a handful of curly fries. She devours them both.

It's dark by the time he gets out, backpack slung over both shoulders, his apron peeking out where the bag's unzipped at the top. They walk to the bus stop together, and it feels familiar—comforting—and she can almost forget about the car accident and the lingering shame of her punishment, how her ass is still sore from Mr. J's belt.

She tries not to grimace when she takes a seat next to the window on the bus. Ben slides in next to her, his knees pressed up against the seat in front of him as he spreads his long thighs.

"You practically need your own seat," she teases.

Ben smirks, scoots closer to her so that she's forced up against the window, giggling. "Lucky you're so small you barely take up any room at all."

They ride in comfortable silence for a while, even though there's so much to say. The weight of it hangs in the air between them, but she doesn't mind. She feels happy to be pressed up against him like this, the bus dark and empty save for the two of them. The windows of the bus are wedged open, just a crack, just enough for the warm breath of the city to slither in and send loose tendrils of her hair tickling against her jaw. Gotham glimmers at night, resplendent, passing by in a golden blur of honeycomb. The bus takes them beneath an overpass, and in the patch of momentary darkness, she imagines laying her head on Ben's shoulder. She wants to—but would that be weird? Would he shrug her off?—and by the time she finally works up the courage to do it, the brakes are hissing to a stop, and the two of them shuffle off the bus.

She keeps close to Ben as they walk the handful of blocks it takes to get to his apartment. Ben lives in Old Town, better known as the slice of Gotham that'd been left to rot after the financial district had fallen into decay and was transplanted somewhere nicer back in the 80's. He explains it all to her as they walk. Now all that's left is the flagellated corpses of old buildings—beautiful structures, some of them, the kind of old architecture that had been carved out of stone instead of the more modern glass and steel. They walk pass what used to be City Hall, its beautiful, Corinthian stone columns still intact, though now marred with graffiti. Beyond that, the doors and windows boarded up. She spies more than a few sleeping bags lumped beyond the columns, spread out on the concrete. She shakes off the intrusive thought that that could one day be her if anything were to ever happen to Mr. J. She'll be out of the foster system's hair officially when she turns eighteen, even though she's been skirting its boundaries for close to two years now. It's strange to imagine having nowhere to go, no one to hold her accountable, no one to be responsible to. That level of independence is almost a little frightening, if she's honest. What would she do with all of it?

Off to the right, there are two men leaning against the barred windows of a pawn shop, passing something smoky back and forth between them, and her heart flutters when Ben loops an arm around her as they pass, keeping her tucked close to his body.

A few blocks later, Ben unlocks a waist-high iron gate, and then she is following him up a long flight of stairs, into a red brick building with vines crawling up its sides. Threadbare carpet, and a long, narrow hallway with doors on either side. As they pad down the hall, she hears voices coming from a TV turned up too loud, and the sounds of a verbal spar, the sharp crack of shattered glass. More yelling. Ben seems to ignore it as he shoves his key in the lock and heads in first, holding open the door for her.

The lights are already on when she enters, and her eyes are drawn first to the cramped galley kitchen just off to the right. There are dishes piled high in the sink—stacked like a tower of Jenga blocks—and food left out on the counter: bottle of mayonnaise and mustard, a loaf of bread with the bag left open, a round pack of Oscar Meyer bologna. Dirty pans occupy every burner of the stove, and she also eyes the spatula crusted with dried egg, a half-eaten jar of Skippy peanut butter, and the cabinet doors that have been left wide open, a weird pet peeve of hers.

The rest of his living space is in equal disarray—there's a small dining area with a basket full of unfolded clothes on the dining table, joined by a pile of junk mail, more unwashed dishes. No art on the walls. No framed photos of family or friends. Everything kind of monochrome and beige, not even one of those tacky 'Great American Landscape' calendars you get for free from the post office every year to adorn the walls with. There are some coupons clipped to the fridge, the only real source of color.

She glances into the living room and is surprised to find someone camped out on the futon. He has a video game controller in hand and his legs are propped on the coffee table—which at second glance is actually an overturned laundry basket.

He spares her an uninterested once-over and then goes back to his game without saying anything.

She turns to Ben, a question in her eyes. He never told her he had a roommate.

"We can go to my room," he says quietly, closing and locking the door behind him. The chain over the door rattles as he slides it into place. "Just give me a minute, okay?"

She nods, and the look Ben casts over her shoulder to glare at his roommate is loaded. A warning.

"I'll be right back," he mumbles. "You can help yourself to whatever." He nods to the kitchen as he backs away.

She watches him lumber down the hallway, opening a door on the left and then disappearing from sight.

She's left standing awkwardly in the doorway, cradling her cast as she takes in the apartment, trying not to openly stare at Ben's roommate. He looks to be about the same age as Ben, maybe a little younger. Brown hair—buzz cut—skinny and milk-pale. He has a thin mustache on his upper lip and hollowed cheeks. She stares at the tattoo of a snake curled along his skinny right bicep, and upon closer inspection, she sees the snake is coiled through the eye sockets of a cracked skull. Gross. She shifts her gaze towards the empty beer cans on the floor near the couch, scattered around a pile of magazines. The TV console is loaded with DVDs and video games, which spill out onto the carpet.

"So how long have you and Ben been fucking?"

Taylor's eyes widen. He doesn't look at her when he asks, and she can only gape at him, fumbling around her reply.

"We're not—I mean, we don't—" she huffs. "That's none of your business," she says, hotly.

He turns to look at her, silencing her with his arctic blue eyes as he pulls his headset off, letting it dangle around his neck. She recoils when his eyes slither up her legs, lingering on her chest for just a beat too long before meeting her gaze. She crosses her arms a little higher, for what little good it will do her.

"My bad," he says, but he smirks when he says it, like it's only a matter of time before Ben has his way with her. He goes back to his game, thumbs moving rapidly over the controller with the kind of ease and familiarity that only regular practice can award. She can't really see the TV from here, but it looks like he's playing some kind of combat game, the kind where you prowl through dark tunnels with rifles and stuff. She can hear the rapid fire of gun shells clinking against the concrete even through his headset.

She pivots awkwardly in the doorway, glancing back into the kitchen, wrinkling her nose some, feeling put off. Uncomfortable. Maybe it was a bad idea to come here.

"You must be one of the new ones, huh?"

She turns to look at him. "What?"

"From the diner. I swear, they go through them like fucking panties over there."

"What are you talking about?"

A door opens down the hall, and Ben emerges a second later. His eyes dart between the two of them—almost suspiciously, she thinks—before he is standing behind her, hands on her shoulders, guiding her towards his bedroom.

"Hey Ben, you actually gonna keep this one around?" his roommate calls to him from the couch. Taylor doesn't have time to ask what he means by that before Ben is grumbling something under his breath, pushing her into his room and shutting the door behind them.

"Shit. Sorry about Kyle," he says. "He's an asshole." He scrubs a hand over his face, smoothing over his jaw for a second. "Did he say anything to you?"

Taylor shakes her head. She doesn't want to tell Ben he'd asked if they'd fucked. Too embarrassing.

He steps around her and goes to his nightstand. "Should have your phone in here somewhere," he mumbles.

She takes the opportunity to catalog his room. It looks like he'd spent the past five minutes shoving everything under his bed and into his closet in order to clear a path to the floor. There's a visible cloud of body spray hanging in the air that makes her eyes water and her throat itch. AXE, maybe. She bites her lip and stares at the clothes that peek out from underneath his bed, other odds and ends of junk threatening to spill out from the closet, the door of which he couldn't get to close all the way. It's clear his bed was hastily made, and although his dark blue comforter is lumpy but soft-looking, it's also a size too small for the queen-sized mattress, the edges falling several inches too short from the floor. The wooden desk underneath the single window is piled high with junk; CDs, notebooks, scattered pens and pencils, a Mason jar of loose change, some single-issue comic books and DVDs. A car manual and a pile of clean socks he hasn't matched yet. He's got a baseball hat perched on top of a bowling pin dated '1998' in black Sharpie, and some miniature toy cars, old sports trophies, stuff he'd had as a kid.

She studies the posters on the walls, bands she's never heard of, some film she's never seen with Al Pacino, a dart board with a single dart right in the center of the bullseye.

It looks like a typical guy's bedroom, not that she has many to compare it to. She'd ventured into Nathan's room only once—snooping because nobody was home—and remembers feeling nauseous as she stared at all the pictures of bikini-clad women taped to his walls. He'd taken the liberty of scrawling crude words over their bare tummies and breasts, words like "FUCK" and "SLUT", crossing out their eyes with angry black squiggles until you couldn't see what was underneath anymore, drawing exaggerated 'O's over their mouths so it looked like they were caught in a perpetual state of shock. It was frightening, this unadulterated anger he harbored towards these faceless women he didn't even know, women who clearly only served one singular purpose for him.

"Think the battery's dead," Ben says, drawing her out of her thoughts. She lets go of the edge of his desk. She hadn't realized she had been gripping it so hard. "Didn't have a charger for it."

"That's okay." She takes her phone from him, runs her fingers over its smooth surface, feeling glad that it's still intact and the screen's not busted from the accident.

"You can sit if you want to." Ben gestures to his bed with a nod of his head, so she does. She props herself gingerly on the edge of his mattress, trying not to flinch, trying to school her features into some semblance of passivity. Ben, thankfully, doesn't seem to notice.

He flops heavily into his desk chair, turning it to face her, stretching out his long legs with a sigh. He looks kind of goofy sitting there like that, so big and oversized in such a little chair, drumming his fingers on the armrests like he doesn't know what else to do with them.

For a few moments, he just stares at her, and Taylor bites her lip and tugs the hem of her sundress a little lower, careful not to expose the backs of her thighs.

"You got banged up pretty good, huh?"

She looks up, catches his gaze lingering on her cast. His eyes are full of guilt when he raises them to meet hers, and she shrugs.

"It doesn't really hurt that much," she says, quietly. It's not a complete lie—it hurts less than her ass and thighs do, so that's something.

"Yeah," he says lamely, looking away.

They lapse back into silence after, and it's strange, this heavy quiet that keeps laying its head down to rest between them. Normally the two of them run their mouths until they're forced to stop, and even then it's hard, almost impossible, but this silence now stretches so far and wide it's like they're standing on opposite ends of a lake.

"I like your room," she finally says, after the silence has stretched on for too long.

Ben smiles a little, like he knows she's only commenting on it for lack of nothing else to say.

"You wanna see some of my drawings?" he asks, hopeful.

When she nods yes, he grins and springs to action, happy to have something to busy his hands with. The bed dips when he sits down next to her, a spiral-bound notebook in hand as he sheepishly hands it to her.

"They're mostly just doodles and stuff. I don't really have time to draw anymore like I used to."

She's only half-listening, eagerly flipping to the first page, eyes sweeping over the faces of characters she's never seen before, characters she doesn't know. She's surprised to discover it's mostly anime as she flips through the first several pages. Characters with big, round eyes and tiny mouths stare back at her. Sweet-looking girls with soft hair and baby doll dresses with puff sleeves. She flushes at some of the more explicit drawings—anime girls with body-defying proportions—watermelons for breasts, waists so tiny you could encompass them with just one hand. Tiny pleated miniskirts and white knee-high socks, the little shoes that buckle. One girl crouched on her knees, her thighs spread wide, eyes crossed, glassy and wide, and her pink tongue poking out, where she pants like a dog.

She quickly flips to the next page, embarrassed, but she can't help but think of Nathan again and the naked women pinned to his bedroom walls. Do all men look at women through the same narrow lens, through the gaze of fantasy—explicit desire—and does it color their every interaction with the opposite sex?

Ben's lines are clean, though, much cleaner than hers. He's light with the pencil, and she can tell he strokes the paper softly, like a caress, almost. She, in comparison, is all hard, smudged lines, lines she retraces over and over until they're thick enough to be the width of her pinky finger. There's intention behind her strokes, frustration and impatience, but with Ben there's just an easy lightness, an unexplainable air of tranquility. There's room for smaller details in his work: the splatter of freckles and the little glimmer in someone's eyes, the lace around the collar of a dress, the delicacy in which he draws the wavy, loose tendrils of someone's hair, so that you know it's meant to be blowing in the wind.

She's drawn towards a character in full body armor—some kind of warrior princess—wielding a blood-stained scythe while a long, tattered cape flows behind her, caught in the whisper of the wind. Sharp, curved spikes protrude from her gauntlets, and the breastplate of her armor has an intricate, circular insignia on it, almost like a labyrinth. Metal horns jut out from either side of her helmet, like the horns of a bull. Her long hair spills out from underneath her helmet, too. It's decidedly feminine, but the warrior is all gnashing teeth. Through the slit in the warrior's visor, Taylor can see that her eyes are narrowed with determination, the sort of fierce, uncut bravery she has always secretly longed for.

"I like this one," she murmurs, tracing over it with the pads of her fingers, needing to lay her hands on it for some inexplicable reason, like maybe she could absorb the warrior's powers through touch alone.

"That one's pretty good," he agrees. "What kind of stuff do you draw?" he asks as she flips through the rest.

"Everything." She thinks back to her sketchpad, which she hasn't touched in almost three months, maybe even longer. "Well, I used to draw everything. I was working on anatomy right before I… before I stopped." She frowns, her eyes trailing away to fixate on a bald spot in the carpet near his desk.

Ben looks at her. "Why did you stop?"

She tugs her lower lip into her mouth—habit—and then winces. She keeps forgetting about the raw, scabbed skin there. Why does everything have to hurt? Why does everything have to serve as a constant reminder of what she's been through—what she's going through right now?

"I mean, I just got busy with work, I guess, and—and…." She trails off, her frown deepening further. She hadn't stopped to consider until now why she had stopped drawing, but she realizes suddenly it's because of what Mr. J had said to her all those months ago, not good enough, and the realization hits her like a gut punch. She hadn't even realized his words had cut her so deep until now. She had stopped because of him.

She doesn't want to lie to Ben, but how can she possibly tell him the truth without ruining the fragile, tender threads that tether her to Mr. J?

Tears sting behind her eyes all the sudden, and she lifts her hands to her eyes to shield them from him, trying to stop the waterworks from coming, not wanting him to see. She's struck with an acute sense of shame knowing that so many people have seen her cry, have witnessed her in such a state of vulnerability. He must think she's pathetic, crying for the second time in front of him like this.

"It's just… it's my uncle," she chokes, and in the back of her mind she thinks, Oh, God, I'm really doing this.

She lowers her hands—no point in trying to stop the tears now—and looks at Ben through blurred eyes. His notebook still lays open in her lap, forgotten.

"What about your uncle?"

"I just… he's just so… so mean sometimes," she says, her voice all breathy, strung high and tight from the raw, bloody sentiments that are cradled against the spine of her words. She has to pull them from her mouth by force, one by one, crank open her jaw a little wider, stick the pliers in, find the words and tear them out, like an abscess, like a rotting thing, something that's been festering for far too long.

She tells him the comments he made about her art, and some of the other disparaging comments he's made to her—innocuous stuff, really, nothing with any real meat to it—and Ben listens attentively, brows pulled together in concern.

"I know he cares about me," she says, sniffling, "I mean, I think he does, but sometimes he… he hurts me, and I still love him, and I… I have to, because he's all that I have." She's crying again, thinking about how much there is to say. "And sometimes I don't want to love him anymore, but it's like I can't help it, and then sometimes I think if I could just do better, if I could be better, then maybe he'll… he'll love me back." It all comes out in a rush, and she tries to catch her breath through her tears after. "And then I always think, maybe if he loved me enough then maybe he wouldn't hurt me anymore, and it—it all just feels like a vicious cycle, like I'm trapped or something and I can't get out." She's crying so hard she can't even see straight, so hard that Kyle probably hears, but for once she doesn't care what anybody else thinks. She's finally gotten the words out, after three long, arduous years. She's finally birthed this secret truth known only to her.

It should feel good, right? Unloading this secret, untangling herself from the vice-like coils it had wound around her rib cage, compressing the bones down until she thought her organs might puncture or burst.

She can breathe easier now without the enormity of this weight, her ribcage finally allowing for the full expansion of her lungs, but she also trembles under the knowledge of having told Ben one of her most intimate secrets. It feels like she's just handed him the master key to a room full of doors. Which will he open first?

He waits until she's finished before pulling her into his chest, looping his big arms around her, anchoring her to him. She clings to his t-shirt and cries while he rubs her back, lays his cheek down against the top of her head.

"Why doesn't he love me?" she sobs, crying ugly tears, the kind where spit and drool bubble at her mouth, snot dripping down her nose. Ben's shirt is wet from where her face is pressed against it.

She repeats the mantra over and over again in her head—why doesn't he love me? Why doesn't he love me?—until she has no more tears left to cry, until she's all dried up, her insides hollowed out, only an empty husk remaining.

"Hey," Ben says, he pulls back some so he can look at her. "Hey, listen to me. Don't worry about him, okay? Fuck him for treating you that way. Fuck him for hurting you."

Taylor swallows, looking up at him through a cascade of tears. Her eyes widen slightly at his expletives. She didn't expect him to respond with so much righteous anger.

"You deserve better," he says, the angry tremor in his voice vibrating through his chest, where she can feel it. "There's nothing wrong with you. He's just an asshole who doesn't deserve you."

Taylor's heart clenches because of how wrong he is, because of how her and Mr. J may be the only two people in this world who truly do deserve each other.

"You don't know the things that I've done," she says. She squeezes her eyes shut tight, fresh tears spilling onto her cheeks. She chokes on her words as she forces them out. "I'm—I'm not a good person, Ben."

Ben's jaw is locked tight. "Does he tell you that?" he asks. "Because that's not true." He cups the back of her neck to draw her eyes up to his, and it's different from the way Mr. J does it. Softer. "It's not true. And you shouldn't waste your time waiting for him to love you."

She shakes her head, knowing that Mr. J is the only person capable of loving someone like her. That's why she needs him. He'd told her from the very beginning that no one would want her, that Gotham would eat her alive only to spit her right back out, and he was right. Only he is capable of giving her what she needs.

Right?

"You shouldn't let him treat you that way," Ben goes on. "Don't take his shit—dish it right back to him. Stand up for yourself."

Taylor's grip slackens some, not so white-knuckled as she considers his words. Could that really work? Would Mr. J loosen up some if she could prove to him that she's stronger than he thinks? If she could show him how tough she is, maybe he'd like her more? Maybe he wouldn't feel the need to protect her so much?

"You deserve better," Ben says again, pulling her back into his chest. "Fuck him."

He holds her for a long time as she sniffles into his t-shirt. He continues rubbing soothing circles into her back, tracing his fingers up and down along the knobs her spine, petting her hair. But even as she sits there with him, curled up and basking in the warmth and safety of his arms, her thoughts can't help but drift to Mr. J.

---

The Joker checks his phone for the seventh time in the span of the past hour.

Still in Old Town.

His lip curls in irritation, eyes narrowing. He is sitting at his desk in the dark, elbows propped on its wooden surface, hands steepled over his nose and mouth, staring into black nothingness.

Ressling is at the ready to intervene, should the Joker beckon him, but he isn't ready to chase her down just yet.

He wants to see what she'll do.

He leans back in his chair, taking his phone with him, sliding a little farther down to make himself comfortable. Props his ankle on his knee, opens up the app that mirrors her phone to his. No new messages. No outgoing texts. He puts down the phone, tongues at the inside of his cheek, thinking. He picks it back up a handful of seconds later, against better judgement, pulling up the picture she took in the dressing room, the one he's looked at a hundred times now. Her in that fucking green dress, and a muscle in his jaw twitches as he looks, and looks, and looks. Her eyes are downcast in the photo, like she was too embarrassed to meet her own gaze in the mirror, and it's so quintessentially her he can't help but marvel at her transparency, how openly she bares herself to the world. Hard not to think about the way she had pressed up against him that night at her little dance, tilting her head back against his chest, staring up at him from underneath the fan of her eyelashes.

I wanted you to see me.

She has no idea of her power, no understanding of the strength she could wield if she wanted, all the ways in which she is a force of a nature, like the moon and the tides, the startling force of her gravitational pull. The way in which she had come bursting into his life all those years ago, like the white-hot flash of a solar flare, blinding him with her verve, her honeyed sweetness, disrupting so many of the fundamental truths he thought he knew.

But she is easily undone—even if she still clings to that obstinate tendril of inherent goodness that is rooted somewhere deep inside her, someplace where even he can't reach. She's unyielding in that regard—incorruptible—even after all the shit he's put her through, even after all the things he's done. Her goodness is the last thing she has left, and he hungers to strip it from her, bare her down to her marrow, lap it up from the bone. He wants her in his mouth—her sweet temperance, her righteousness—wants to know just how good she tastes when the two of them finally come together, when her blood is mixed with his.

He knows she's almost ready for the final push. It's taken longer than he thought it would, and he'd be remiss to admit his patience has been wearing thin. Sometimes physical distance is the only method of restraint he has to employ, and he makes himself scarce—desirable—so that he knows she'll miss him in his absence.

She doesn't wait at the door for him to return like she used to though, no longer a well-trained puppy, but a dog—a dog who no longer allows itself to be tugged around on its retractable leash. No, she wants the muzzle off, wants to run in fields without fences, wants freedom, panting after it with a single-mindedness that borders on reckless. He has to be careful—precise—in how he awards it to her.

But she must know they're on the brink of something—a steep precipice—and once they go forward, tumbling off the edge, there will be no going back.

In the beginning, it was amusing watching how she handled her newfound independence, seeing all the ways in which she wined and dined herself with the money her gave her—and, oh, how sweet she was when she'd come to him asking for it, how bashful, like she thought she was putting him out and that ashamed her.

But he noticed all the little new things she bought for herself, the clothes that actually fit, the little things for her room, string lights and a baby succulent for her nightstand; the smear of blush on her cheeks. Shoes that were no longer held together by duct tape.

But even more fascinating than that was the discovery of the things she was doing with all her burgeoning desire, her pent-up need, the buds of which he's been tending to for quite some time. How careful he's been not to overwater, vigilant in the way he shields her from too much direct sunlight.

But if she is a flower, it's possible that she is one that blossoms only at night, aided by darkness. He delighted in listening to her touch herself at night, watched her browse through porn, of all things—rolling his eyes as he watched her type into the search bar, and then backspace, and type again, his sweet, good girl, so embarrassed, even in the safety and comfort that being alone in the dark provided. It didn't take long for her to start making sounds on her own, unaided by any external titillations, and that he especially enjoyed—her finally coming into her own—and then her traitorous blush first thing in the morning when she padded barefoot out of her room, meeting his steely gaze with her bashful one, even though she had no idea all the things he'd heard. All the things he'd seen.

His phone pings with an update, and he opens a text message from Ressling.

00:04

Just left. Boarding bus. ETA 30 minutes.

Good.

Ressling would follow the bus, make sure she didn't make any more unplanned detours, and then depart once she'd made it back.

He checks the tracking app to be certain, and sure enough, there's movement. He wonders what things she's been up to with her little new friend, Ben.

There are risks, of course, in allowing her to be so close to him, in letting her go to his apartment where the Joker's eyes don't reach, but he also knows there are certain safeguards in place that will prevent Ben from doing anything, uh, untoward.

He's confident Ben will misstep soon enough anyway—without any external prompting from himself—so the need to intervene is unnecessary. For now. He wants to watch their little friendship crash and burn of its own volition. Ben is temperamental—a loose cannon—and the Joker only has to make sure that Taylor doesn't get caught in the resulting debris of his inevitable explosion.

He may even comfort her after—she'll want to seek solace after her friendship with Ben clots off and then ruptures—and he is overdue to give her some. She's much more compliant when he feeds her a few morsels of affection, anyway, and she always laps it up so eagerly.

He tongues at the insides of his cheeks as he waits, tongue prodding at the gnarled bump of scar tissue there, but the longer time ticks on, the more his anger begins to mount, morphing into something fire-hot, something no longer palatable, making it impossible to sit still. He gets up to pace.

When he hears the crunch of her key in the lock, an excited shiver rolls down his spine, awakening a still-tender bruise from earlier that day, courtesy of a blow to his left kidney. He doesn't mind. Just so long as he gets to close his eyes later and imagine it was Batman and not his little bird. He has no interest in playing head games with Batman's inept successor—or whatever Nightwing is supposed to be.

He watches her from the hallway when she comes in, so quiet. She thought she could sneak in without him noticing. Maybe she thought he wouldn't be home. Either way, he tastes her trepidation and it is sweet.

It's bold of her to be out so late, especially given the events from the other night. Her subsequent punishment. She's really pushing him—gas pedal all the way to the floor, accelerating like she can't get to where she's going fast enough, like there's no consequences to her actions.

She startles when she sees him, her little sharp intake of breath like music to his ears. He likes when he takes her by surprise, when she's so openly afraid of him. There's something fascinating about the juxtaposition of her fear when it's so inexplicably intertwined with her inability to stay away. How she just can't help but be drawn to him, more than just moth to flame, but something else, something deep-rooted. Ingrained. Science or soul magic, he isn't sure, but he knows she would've found her way to him even if she'd had to crawl through the narrow aperture of space and time. Even then, she would've found a way to pave herself a path straight to him.

It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. In the living room, the plastic blinds are slanted just enough to allow the light from a nearby streetlamp to slither through. Sallow, yellow light stripes the carpet, parts of the coffee table and couch. He wonders how that light would look striped across her bare skin, how it might look when it's crisscrossed over the constellations of bruises that he knows are stained along the back of her ass and thighs.

He approaches. Slow.

"You really have an itch, don't you?" he says. "You just can't seem to sit still." She stares at him, her green eyes always so big and expressive, even in the dark. He feeds off her fear, coming closer, cocking his head. "Where did my girl run off to this time?" he murmurs. "Where did she go?"

He knows, of course. But he likes watching her flounder—and he's curious to see if she's brave enough to try and warp the truth.

She swallows, her eyes darting behind him for a second, almost as if she expects someone else to be there, but there's no Ressling this time. Just the two of them.

"I just needed some fresh air," she hedges, like maybe this isn't the first time she's tested these words on her tongue, but now that she's said them out loud, she isn't so sure about how he'll interpret their legitimacy.

He makes a show of glancing over his shoulder towards the clock on the stove. He knows it's almost one AM, but he delights in drawing this out. Making her nervous. Without turning his head, his eyes crawl slowly back to meet hers. He hums thoughtfully, taking the opportunity to step closer still, so she's forced to take a stumbling step back towards the door.

"Did you uh, get some?"

She nods like she's not sure if that's the right answer.

He mouth splits into a grin. Oh, his good girl—so precocious—but she'll always be a bad liar. It'd almost be cute if it weren't such a detriment to her own safety.

"Why don't you try that again?" he says, smile gone.

She frowns at him, brows furrowing together. "Try… what?"

"Telling me a lie that's a little more convincing." Her breath catches, and his eyes drift briefly down, watching the bob of her throat when she swallows. He leans down over her, closing the distance between them until he can feel her hot puffs of breath against his jaw. "I know you didn't mean to insult my intelligence…"

"—I didn't!"

"Then maybe you'd like to tell me the truth, hm?"

She searches his eyes for a long moment, one half of her face bathed entirely in darkness, the other in shadow. She shifts her weight to her other foot. Something in her expression seems to harden as he waits for her response.

"I don't see why that matters," she says, so quiet he almost has to strain to hear, "it's not like you don't already know."

Well. He draws back from her, turning his head, looking at her from the corner of his eyes. She does surprise him sometimes, doesn't she?

She watches him carefully, trying to read him, trying to figure out how this is going to go. "That's how you knew I was at the hospital, right?"

He wasn't quite ready to reveal that card to her yet, but he supposes the cat's out of the bag now; no point in trying to fight to put it back.

He closes the distance between them, so she's forced up against the door. He takes her chin in his hand, maybe a little too rough.

"Just looking after what's mine," he says. "Or did you forget?"

She surprises him when she yanks her chin out of his grasp, her eyes narrowing while his own flash red in the darkness.

"Is that what you're calling it?" she asks, full of teenage sarcasm, the kind that makes his spine prickle with want to bend her over something and set her straight. Give her an attitude adjustment.

He allows silence to stretch between them for a long moment as he runs his tongue over his top row of teeth. Works his mouth to the left side, staring.

"Are you done yet?"

She folds her arms across her chest—as best she can, anyway—looking ridiculous with her bulky cast. "Done with what?" she snaps.

He leans down over her, eyes full of heat as he places the flat of his palms against the door on either side of her head. "Being a brat."

Her nostrils flare, fists clenched until her knuckles are all shiny and white, and it's beautiful. He watches the murky, darkening pools of rage forming in her eyes, and he thrills at having reduced her to a baser thing, finally having successfully unshackled her from her usual reservations. He wants her feral and frothing and sharp. Wants her anger so pungent he can taste it coating the back of his throat. Show me your claws, little girl, he thinks, giddy. Bare me your razor teeth.

She huffs at him, turning her head away, and he thinks, that's it, just a little bit further now.

"What's got you so riled, hm? Still mad about your punishment?" he prods.

It takes a minute, but she does turn back to look at him, and this time there are tears shining in her eyes. "You made him hurt me," she says, her voice catching, some of her earlier bravado starting to recede.

"Oh, sweetheart," he coos. He's smiling when he releases her from the cage of his arms, moves to cup her face in his hands instead, tilting her head up to meet his. "You're not mad that I let him hurt you. You're mad that it wasn't me hurting you."

He watches her eyes widen, the telltale parting of her mouth, just slight, and he knows he's hit the nail right on the head. Her lower lip trembles as she looks up at him, so helpless, so fragile, and for a moment he thinks she's going to cry, but then her eyes are hardening again, her brows pulling together in anger, and she's vicious when she shoves him off her, forcing him back.

"Stop it!" she screams. His pulse jumps excitedly. "Don't—don't put that stuff in my head!"

He stares after her, grinning, as she backs away. "What 'stuff'?" he purrs, like he doesn't know.

She's in the living room now, yellow light slashed across her bare calves and the hem of her sundress as she watches him approach. If she thinks she can keep running away from him, keep putting distance between them, she's dead wrong. He'll close that gap. He's about to rid her of it permanently.

"You just—" She presses a hand against her head where her wound is, looking stricken for a moment, like it's hurting her. "Ben said you would do this. That you would try to manipulate my feelings."

The Joker stops dead in his tracks, a muscle in his jaw pulling taut.

"You told him… about me?" He has to grit out the words, like there's sand caught between his teeth.

"No!" she says quickly, holding up her hands, as if she means to fend him off in case he should pounce. "No," she goes on, quieter now, "I just—I told him you were a friend. He doesn't know you're… you. I wouldn't do that."

His blood's boiling. Of all the things he had expected her to say, it was not that. The knowledge hits him like a freight train. She had confided in him—she had told Ben about their relationship.

"What else did Ben tell you?"

She looks at him hesitantly, like she doesn't want to say. "He—he said that I deserve better. That you're lying to me when you tell me I'm worthless," she says, in a small voice.

The Joker's shoulders turn rigid, and he instinctively hunches them up, closer to his ears. His hands curl into fists at his sides.

"If you ever speak to him again—"

Taylor's face crumbles in an instant, and she shakes her head at him. "Mr. J, please, I need him!"

"No," he snarls. "You need me." He closes the distance between them so fast she has no time to escape. His hands clench around her upper arms with a vice. He shakes her so hard he imagines her bones rattling. She looks up at him with wide, terrified eyes. He can see her better in this light, can see the wet trail her tears have left behind, shining on her cheeks. "You think you need him because he makes you feel better about yourself, makes you feel like a good person. You're so wracked with guilt over Nathan you can barely stand to look at yourself in the mirror." He sneers at this, like he finds this pathetic. "But Ben makes you feel good, doesn't he? Like you're not a piece of filth spit out by Gotham."

Tears stream down her face as she looks at him. "STOP!" she screams. "Stop! He told me that I'm a good person—I'm—I'm a good person," she wails.

"And you bought into his artifice, didn't you?" he sneers. "You ate that shit right up." He is quickly losing control of the situation as his fury threatens to reach a boiling point. He's practically blind with rage when he takes her and shoves her into the nearest wall again, hard enough that the back of her skull cracks against it, and she cries out, blinking back more tears. He curls his hand around her throat, forcing her head back and up, so she has to meet his eyes. "Let me tell you something," he growls. "He wants one thing from you. All men do. You live in that shadow. You will always live in that shadow." He shifts so he can invade more of her space, so she can breathe only him. "Don't mistake his lust for love," he says, spitting out the word as if it were filthy, as if it had left a sour coat on his tongue.

Taylor looks at him, and looks at him, and if he weren't so angry he might be able to enjoy the rapt attention she fixes him with. After a moment, she swallows against where her throat is encased in his palm, standing up on her tip toes some to raise her head up so she can talk.

"Maybe I'll just give him what he wants then, huh?" she spits, her earlier bravado back, so bitter, even through a steady track of tears.

His frown deepens. "Will you?" he says. So ballsy of her to threaten him, as if she would ever actually go through with something like that. He cocks his head at her, voice full of gravel. "Maybe I'll make you wish you were never born."

She laughs—laughs. "Too late for that." She's starting to struggle in his grip, her hands gripping the forearm that keeps her pinned to the wall via her throat. "I've been wishing I was never born since the moment I met you," she hisses.

The Joker's eyes darken, narrowing into dangerous slits. He's heard enough.

She must see it, too, because he catches the unadulterated terror that mars her features in the split second it takes for his grip to tighten around her throat.

Then he is hauling her away from the wall, towards the couch. She fights him the whole way, and when he sits on the couch and tugs her over him, bending her over his knee, her eyes bug.

"Mr. J, no! No!" She's writhing so hard she is almost able to dismantle, but he puts a hand between her shoulder blades and viciously shoves her down, towards the carpet. "You do this every time!" she screams. "Every time I say something that you can't counteract and you know that I'm right!" She continues to fight him as he gets her where he wants her. "You just beat it out of me," she pants, chest heaving. For a moment, he feels her little heart thudding furiously against his thigh before repositioning her, and something about that makes his cock throb. He can hear the fear in her voice as she continues. "Every time you feel your control slipping—"

"Think I liked you better when you weren't such a spoiled brat," he interrupts, snarling.

When he flips her sundress up, baring her ass and thighs to him, she writhes with renewed vigor.

"Stop!"

His whole body trembles with anticipation as he rips his glove off with his teeth, wanting to feel the heat of her bare skin against his own. He rips her underwear down her thighs, and his eyes are full of fire as they rake over all her bare flesh. He gives her no warning before he spanks her, just once, hard enough to make her cry out. He relishes in seeing his red handprint on her left ass cheek, right alongside her other assortment of mottled bruises.

"What's this about, hm?" He's stroking her ass with one hand, so gentle, feeling the angry, red heat of her skin bleeding through to his palm. She's so soft. "I don't love you like he does? I don't care for you the way he does?" He runs his finger down the crack of her ass, feather-light, and she whines underneath him, squirming. "He makes you feel all fluttery inside and I don't?" When he cranes his neck to glance at her sex, he inspects it almost clinically. It's been a long time since he's looked at her like this, and he allows himself to take his time as his eyes devour her, raking over her bare skin like hot coals. After a long beat, his eyes narrow suddenly and he snarls. "Or maybe you just want to get fucked."

His punctuates his words by shoving a hand between her legs, cupping her sex so hard the movement jostles her forward some, so she has to brace her hands against the carpet. She gasps in shock, cheeks burning, her whole body jerking up like she intends to get away, but he holds her fast. She's not going anywhere.

"Hm, am I getting warm?" He curls his fingers some, the palm of his hand flattening against the burning heat between her legs, her breath leaving her in quick, shuddery exhales. "Oh, there we are," he coos, feeling around. "There's the nerve that needed to be struck."

Taylor can't speak, immobilized—stunned—by the sensation of his bare hand moving between her legs.

"I know you've wanted this," he says, lowering his voice until it's just a rumble, "that you think about this at night, alone in your bed. That you think I can't hear you when you touch yourself. That I can't see you."

An exhale of indignation escapes her in response, and he chuckles, stroking his fingers through the lips of her sex, relishing in the way it feels, how soft she is. She's not as wet as she was when he had her menstrual blood to help slick the way, but he slides his fingers through her folds anyway. He's getting her there, and he'll have her slippery-soaked by the time he's done.

"You didn't really think I wasn't watching you, did you?" He'd installed the camera in her room after the incident with Tetch, so he could watch her when he was away. Make sure the Alice in Wonderland-obsessed nut job didn't come back to consummate their relationship. "I told you… I always see you."

She's panting hard into the carpet, white-knuckled and panicked, nothing to hold onto. "You—you watched me?"

He hums, knowing she can feel the vibrations when he does. "I like watching you." He thinks about how the camera was both too much and yet not enough, how he wishes he could be with her everywhere; how badly he wants all of her, all the time. "You're insatiable in more ways than one, aren't you?"

"You're disgusting!" she cries. She squirms in his lap, but there's nowhere to go. Her arms tremble from the strain of having to bear the weight of her upper body, where her hands are braced against the floor.

The Joker groans in response, a guttural sound that's pulled from somewhere deep within his chest. "Did you think of me, when you touched yourself?"

She's too quick when she shakes her head 'no', indignant, but he knows that she did. He's always known. He smiles to himself, letting out a little puff of laughter, breathing out through his nose.

"Did you think about me touching you just like this?" He slows his movements, taking a moment to prod with his middle finger, finding the bud of her clit and circling. So gentle. He lowers his voice an octave. "Or maybe you imagined me inside you."

"P—please," she gasps, sounding like the plea has been punched out of her.

He smirks, shifts on the couch. His cock could cut fucking diamonds with how hard he is right now.

"I told you you'd beg for it," he says. "I told you you'd want it." He feels wired, electricity surging through him, an undercurrent of buzzing heat that's dizzying in its intensity. He has to close his eyes for a moment to right himself. "Do you remember?" he asks.

He remembers. Their little conversation in the park. The way she'd looked at him, the sun tangled in her hair, standing there by the pond, looking so broken and fragile, how wracked with guilt she'd been—with doubt—afraid that she wouldn't be able to exact revenge on Nathan, that she wouldn't have the courage to follow through with the Joker's plan.

He remembers her revealing to him that she wasn't angry with Nathan, but sad. She'd felt violated by the things he had had done, the way he'd rutted between her thighs every night until he'd reached completion, using her body for his own release. But he'd never penetrated her, never left anything behind that could be traced back to him.

He remembers telling her that he'd take that from her first, her innocence. Remembers when she had asked him, "What if I don't want you to?"

He marvels at how far they've come.

"Don't worry, sweetheart." He licks his lips, panting, and then leans down and spits between her legs. It makes her jerk up in surprise. "Don't worry," he murmurs. "I'll take what's mine." He sets to work with renewed vigor, spreading his saliva through her folds, working her like an instrument, knowing exactly what strings she needs pulled, fueled by her soft little gasps. Her moans. He knows what his girl needs.

"You weren't going to let him fuck you," he goes on, talking about Ben again, circling back to her earlier threat. "You can't even bear the thought of him touching you." That stupid fucking kid, stuck in a man's body, probably couldn't even properly fuck his own fist. "Only I can touch you. Only I can give you what you need."

"Uhn," she says, as he slicks his fingers through her, picking up the pace. He smiles at having reduced her to complete incoherency. Jesus. Nothing has ever tasted as sweet and as good as her compliance.

He feels feverish—fire-hot—as he removes his hand and pulls her up suddenly by the back of her neck, flipping her onto her back, spreading her out on the couch. He needs to see her. Needs to catalog her pleasure.

The coffee table is too close and in the way as he maneuvers her exactly how he wants her. He growls when he bumps into it with his thigh, and it takes only a second for him to grip the edge of it with one hand, angrily flipping it onto its side, away from him, and the whole thing shatters, falling apart in a brilliant rain of glass. The lamplight catches on all the broken shards after, like the yellow slivers of a ruined sun scattered across the carpet.

Taylor doesn't even turn to look, her eyes fixated only on him as she opens her thighs for him, spreading her bent knees so he can fit himself between them. He rucks her dress farther up, revealing her belly button and the soft, gentle swell of her waist. He swallows as he devours her bare skin, taking it all in. When his eyes slide up to meet hers, hers are blown wide as she stares up at him. Glossy. Black. Impossibly pretty. He doesn't think he's ever been this hard in his goddamn life.

He keeps his eyes on her face as he lowers his hand back to her, circling her clit with his thumb. Her right arm, the one with the cast, is thrown up, over her head, resting along the armrest, while her other arm dangles uselessly over the side of the couch. Hair splayed behind her like halo, her cheeks ruddy, hot with her blush. She whines when he starts to work a finger inside her, lifting up her hips to help him, keening as she squeezes her eyes shut.

"We're not going back after this, to what we were before," he tells her. He wants that to be clear. He needs that to be clear. His middle finger slips in up to the knuckle, and it's a tight fit. She pants raggedly, trying to adjust to the intrusion.

"I—I don't know what that was," she says, gasping uselessly when he scrapes up against her front wall, stroking her there from the inside.

He punctuates his words with a sharp thrust of his finger inside her. "Denial. Selfishness. Avarice. You're always letting people put their hands on you, aren't you? Letting people take advantage of you."

She tries to shake her head, voice breathy. Shot. "I wasn't—"

"Call it what you want."

She gasps when he introduces a second finger, arching her body towards him, head thrown back. He knows it feels good. She's so tight around him, he can feel her clamping down, squeezing. He strokes her from the inside, gently, letting her adjust, and it doesn't take long before she is shamelessly humping his hand, chasing the pleasure of his long fingers, chasing her own release.

"J—" she whines. Not Mr. J, but J.

He stares at her wet cunt, the slide of his fingers. In and out. "That's a good girl," he says. "Let it happen. Just like that."

Her hips work in tandem with the pressure of his fingers. She lifts them to meet his thrusts, chasing pleasure that keeps climbing and climbing and climbing. How much higher can she possibly go?

She's blissed out—emotional—as she looks up at him. "J, I—I love you," she gasps.

The Joker's vision whites.

He looks up at her sharply—her flushed cheeks, parted mouthed, forehead creased from the intensity of her pleasure—and he feels invigorated.

"Say it again." He sounds like a rabid animal. Panting, mouth full of froth, wild-eyed. Needy for something to sink his teeth into. "Say it again," he growls, impatient, crooking his fingers, reaching another place inside of her that's never been touched.

"Please, please don't stop," she whines. "I love you." She lifts the arm that was dangling over the side of the couch and uses it to clutch his forearm, digging her nails in, feeling the muscles there jumping beneath his skin as he works her nearer to completion. "I love you so much."

"Yes," he breathes, staring at her, their eyes locked. "Yes, you do love me." He's manic, working his fingers faster until she's crying, pent up with the need to come.

She falls apart, finally, with his fingers inside her, his thumb on her clit, and he watches her the whole time as she arches into it, her thighs trembling, head thrown back so he can see the jutting column of her pale throat. He knows it feels different than when she does it herself. The cry she lets out is wrenched from her, the muscles in her abdomen contracting, eyes squeezed shut against the world, and it stirs something inside him, seeing her and hearing her like that.

Afterwards, blind with pleasure, reeling from the afterglow of her orgasm, she struggles to catch her breath, his body caged over hers, his jacket draped over her like a cocoon, trapping their shared body heat and sweat. They're both panting.

In the semi-darkness, he watches as her gaze slides down to where he is clearly straining in his slacks.

She bites down on her lower lip, meets his eyes with a look that can only be described as coquettish, and makes to reach towards him.

He slaps her hand away. "I'll take care of that," he says, voice tight.

Except, he doesn't—and he won't.

He's not going to come until he can do it inside her.