It took so long to get this chapter out, and I hope it doesn't disappoint. I'm afraid only half of it is the Joker, the other half is Violet's musings. With the counting down of the days until school will reign my life again, I started to become uninspired to write because I knew that Junior Honors English is going to try it's hardest to keep me from fanfiction. I might have a bit of writer's block for the next one, I have to get a lot of planning done to initiate actions in chapter 7. I'm open to any suggestions, critiques, and comments on what I should do and improve on. Please review or PM me with them. Really, reviews are what drive me to write more, and I'm open to anything. Other than my insisting for reviews, enjoy the chapter! P.S. My apologies for the awkward title change in the story, I honestly don't know how Behind Criminal Lines went to Behind Enemy Lines.
What was I going to do? The panic ate away in the dark recesses of my mind, fist clenched and unclenching, expecting the imminent attack on their unarmed possessor. My new brown eyes swerved, searching the dimly lit room and landing on my guns. They were left unguarded, as was the plan I spotted in the Joker's eyes. It was all a test; he had tasted my slipping guise on the tip of his defiled tongue. I had to prove how cruel I could be, how cruel Lacey had to be. I sent a silent prayer up into the cracked ceiling through the rapid thoughts twisting and reforming in my head.
I was going to have to kill.
It's what his thumping, evil-ridden heart desired. I had to form the attack quickly through agile contemplations, for one of the masked clowns lunged at me with the bottom of his caliber. I ducked before he had the opportunity to launch a round of bullets into my abdomen, hooking my heel around his ankle in a fleeting second. The audible sniggers rang in the air of my attack, almost beckoning me to inflict more pain.
The second one came at me from behind.
I couldn't play the game as happily and excitedly as the Joker would have liked. My combat movements were in full concentration, each duck planted into my brain a millisecond before their move. I was knocked forward, but well prepared to reach out for his gun blindly and steal it from his hands. The trigger shook underneath my nervous fingers. It couldn't have been possible to execute if I did it slowly, with thought. I was pulled even further backwards when I fired the loaded gun, gasping at the power I induced into the fatal blow.
It was hard to believe that I, Violet Whitman, the Chief Detective of Gotham City for God's sake, delivered death with intention.
It was self defense. My conscience fired back at me before the sick, criminality of guilt thinned my disguise. It was without thinking that I stood vigorously and turned on the wounded man, pressing the full weight of my body into the unharmed one I took with me to the floor. My nostrils flared in rage at what the Joker cost me to prove that there was a callous, uncharitable woman in front of him.
"My, my…" he giggled, kicking at listless body sprawled out at my feet. The masked lackey under my heel groaned under the pressure, disturbing the approved silence of the Joker. "Welcome to the gang, Lace. Ya know," he pointed a purple-gloved finger in my direction, a suspicious surveying of my visage mutating his crimson grin. "I was, uh, suspicious for awhile. I mean, look at you!" The Joker waved his hands in all his glory at my shaken figure, crossing over the limited space we had away from each other. "You're so… nim-ble." He lightly slapped the side of my cheek, grabbing a fistful of my hair and shoving me back onto the chair I stirred in minutes ago.
Holding his circling stance around me, born to intimidate the intimidated, he bent down so that I felt his heated breath at my ear. I sent out a low hiss, shaken from the inside but stern and unbreakable outside. However, my movements were halted.
"I can see it in your face. How eeassily you can break. You can't hide it from a man like-uh me." His voice dissipated. "However!!" He growled, startling me into reality. His tongue peaked out of his wet lips, forking over to graze his scars and taste the humid sweat of the anticipation in the air. Leaning in so close to my face that I was about to turn away as the scorching, deep brown of his irises proceeded to burn a hole in me, he laughed in shrill unsympathetic will. "I'm just so cur-i-ous at your violence. Your rage is beautiful music to my ears." Joker exhaled, rolling his eyes to the back of his head in his own twisted pleasure.
He dragged his trusty switchblade along the disfigured trail of raised flesh down my neck.
I struggled to catch my breath, my voice in a state of frozen fixtures. "I came here, to work for you. To see if murdering my father all those years ago," I swallowed down the lie like a lawyer defending the guilty: easily and perfectly at ease with myself over my years of practice, "was worth a life to control by my own rules. Knives, bullets, death. I love it all." The Lacey in me grinned, wide and confident, into his face.
"It must, uh, be your lucky day toots." The Joker closed shut his switchblade, whistling nonchalantly as he pulled at the dead man's arm, dragging him out the door like disposing garbage.
The deal was made that night, nearly written in my own bloodied hands. It was a relief to know all his working clowns were sent home for the day, their own assuaging reliefs having been gifted to survive another day in the presence of the Joker. His position moved, like Williams had promised, because we were given an unspecified address to assemble at by twelve in the afternoon tomorrow. My heart leapt up into my throat when I felt his stare piercing the back of my neck the moment I left. He didn't trust me, not yet. The test wasn't over with, and I had a feeling it was only beginning to settle its fever inside of me.
I knew by natural instinct I would have to continue following his heinous wishes whether I liked it or not.
The face of Lacey Fowlson would live to stay plastered on me for another day. It had potential to reign for months. I paced down the streets restlessly, the guilt pressing in on the temples of my head. I killed someone, for game. The thought of it washed unknowingly over me—I was unfamiliar to the form of violence matching up with the Joker's pleasured games. Unconsciously scratching away at the crusted blood that oozed from my head wound, I pondered over what deranged images I'd have to face next.
Would I be forced to murder hundreds of people at once? Watch their life slip away in a blink of a second and laugh about it? I remember the night of the ferry experiment the Joker concocted. How he expected, after all Gotham's citizens experienced on a daily basis that their selfish minds would cave in and take lives for the safety of their own. Would the plan in the tempting dawn of tomorrow be as grotesque as that one? Or would it be minor, hostage-snatching to taunt the city. The latter built up inside of me—he was going to provoke Batman to come out.
That night, when I was in the safety of my covers, having not bothered to remove the rat's nest of blonde hair nor the chocolate darkness of my eyes, I didn't feel alone. I felt watched, followed, and stared at in the vast black of my bedroom by the evils that haunted me. There was a compulsion pulling in my heart, a need to get under the Joker's skin. His horribly scarred demeanor fascinated the weaving labyrinth of my thoughts—I felt compelled to think like him at times, figure out why he did the things he did. It was when I neared the edge of reality and dreamscape that I saw a stretching black cape swoop out of sight below my window: the Bat's eyes glinting off the sparkle of the gas lamps outside, watching over me.