Hey guys! Sorry it's been so long. You know how life is. I'm on Christmas break now, so fanfiction might be moving a little faster than usual. Yeah, fingers crossed, right? ;)
Here's Tropical Torment, Chapter 6.
Some Death Note and Kuroshitsuji fanfiction on the way, hopefully. :D
Thanks for all of the reviews. They make me happy. I love you, readers.
Disclaimer: The Joker and the Dark Knight belong to Christopher Nolan and DC comics.
My OC and now-dead rabble of victims belong to me.
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Tropical Torment
Chapter 6
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It all came down to this. After all I'd been through and after all I'd seen...and done... this was the end of it. All I'd wanted was a worry-free trip on a cruise for spending precious time and effort on a stupid book, and I'd gotten the cruel severity of the world shoved right down my throat. I was choking on it now, suffocating, dying... and I had a feeling it wouldn't be a metaphor in just a few seconds.
I stared up at the Joker, the man who had, in one way or another, killed everyone on the Ocean Angel 5 except for me in less than three hours. I was the only one left... And I didn't deserve to be. Not only had I killed a man earlier, just because I was so pathetic and skittish and weak, but the girl who could've easily killed me was lying dead a few feet away from me. The Joker had killed her for some reason or another... I wasn't interested in knowing why. I was so far beyond why. I just wanted it to end now.
Every time I'd come close to death this day, I'd shied away from it. I'd panicked. I'd been constricted by fear, and my body usually took over in one form or another to try and save me. My mouth had spasmed with words I thought he'd wanted to hear. My mind had ruptured with images and choices I thought he'd wanted me to consider. My hands had tightened around a gun. My feet had carried me toward him and away from him numerous times.
I had just kept crawling back after I'd run away... I'd just kept returning, trying to redeem myself at all or make some sort of difference in this flaming Hell, but now I saw the futility of it all. I was standing on the edge of my short life, and I couldn't feel any more...any more anything about it...
I was at the end of my reserves. I was the last person left in his sick little game... I knew just as well as he no doubt did that I should've died a while ago... I didn't win his game. I hadn't fought bravely and wildly and unstoppably to defeat all of the other passengers of the ship. I hadn't intentionally taken a single life. I hadn't played by his rules. Why would he let me live?
I'd been shocked when he'd killed the girl who had been so close to ending my life, but now I kind of understood... Nothing mattered. None of us meant anything to him. Of course he would kill her. And of course he would kill me. There was nothing stopping him from killing me... Why would he resist? What was the point in letting me live?
I would probably die today... The thought was strangely not terrifying to me. It was like there wasn't any more fear left within me. It was like every emotion in me had reached its extreme and burned out. I was a charred, withered, blackened little wick, and it was time for me to get blown away. Oh well... I doubted I would've been able to readjust to a normal life after all I'd endured this day. The years of therapy would've been expensive for my parents... It was better this way... Sure...
My mind went blank. I was empty. I looked up at the Joker without a hint of emotion in my weary, stinging eyes. My lips were dry and parched, my skin warm and salt-crushed and burning... I basically consisted of pain – I was a being of pain, and I just wanted the pain to end. He seemed to know everything that I was feeling and thinking and being in an instant. The Joker stared down at me, still uncomfortably close to me, his black, sunken eyes boring into mine.
He was blocking out the sun for me, so all I could really see was him... He looked at me, at what I'd become, and he smiled again. His blood-red mouth stretched, his scars wrinkling and curling against themselves. His yellow teeth gleamed in the light, flashing briefly, like a hidden weapon being seen right before it was used. He then left my visual field. He walked away from me.
He walked away from me.
He just waltzed around me, as if I were nothing more than an object in his way, some useless obstruction to his casual, enigmatic path. Every step of his shoes moving across the sand sounded like a landslide in my mind...
Wait...what?
What was he doing? What the HELL was this?
Was he NOT going to kill me? After all of this CRAP, he WASN'T going to KILL ME?
What use was I to him ALIVE? I HADN'T won his game! I hadn't done ANYTHING worth living for!
I blinked, and life steadily began to return to me. My awareness flooded my mind once more, my body sparking with pain and heat and exhaustion. I was back, and I didn't know why. I'd been all ready to die. I'd sealed off my mind and body, left nothing but my soul for him to finally free, and he'd WALKED AWAY?
I mustered the will power to turn and gape at his receding form, my eyes wide, my lips trembling incoherently. The Joker was heading for the wall of foliage behind me, at the edge of the beach. His gait was still uneven, a kind of awkward, loping stride, as if nothing had changed this entire time... And then I realized that he'd done it. The one thing that I hadn't been expecting. That seemed to be what he fancied most when around me... He'd been able to see just how ready I was to die, so what had he done? Not killed me. He'd seen my emptiness and my capability to accept death, so he'd let me keep on living. I couldn't even think of a word vile and hateful enough to describe him right then.
I stood up in a violent, disorientating rush, on the ground in a pathetic heap one moment and a rigid tower of irrational fury the next. The sun seemed to lace my skin, heating my flesh, appraising my anger, fueling my rage. How dare he do this to me and everyone else! How dare he put us through everything, and then make me keep going! A tiny portion of my brain was still grateful to be alive, happy for life, but the vast majority of my being was snarling with indignation. I'd been ready to die. I'd been so ready...
I was basically pissed that I'd done all of that preparation only to have death walking casually away from me. I was pissed that I was still alive, as ridiculous as that was. Maybe I would be able to be grateful later. Maybe I would have the time to collect my wits later. Maybe there would be solace – and death – for me later. But all that existed within me at the moment was pain and fury.
My hands shook in tight, bloody fists, the salt all over my skin stinging in my wounds. My tangled, crusty hair hung raggedly in my face, sticking to my flesh, coating my neck and my bare back where my shirt had ripped and peeled away in places. My joints felt like they were on fire, searing origins of potential. My jaw ached from how severely I was gritting my teeth. My breathing began to escalate, keeping time with my racing heart. I was like a burning fuse, and I wasn't exactly sure how I would explode...but I got my answer soon enough.
My hatred for the man walking away from me drove me forward, toward him with frenzied, pounding steps. I wasn't aware of when I started running, but I was just moving all of a sudden. He got closer and closer, continuing to walk away from me until he must've heard my footsteps. He turned to face me, and I lunged with a savage scream. I slammed into him, roughly jostling both of us with the conflicts in our speeds and directions. We fell to the sand, hitting the ground with simultaneous sounds of pain, his a grunt and mine a gasp. Before I even knew what I was doing, my nails were raking across his face. I clawed the hell out of him just like I'd wanted to do all day. Fire roared through my veins, and each of my movements felt effortless, as if my hands were moving of their own accord and I was just trying to hold onto myself to prevent my arms from flying off.
It was like I was trying to control some great machine, or a fussy vacuum, one that was trying to run away from me, fighting my grasp all the while. My arms moved back and forth wildly, my fingernails biting deep. I felt the makeup coating his face on my fingertips, and soon, I felt warmth flowing along my hands. Something rippled in my flaming consciousness, and my arms finally fell back under my control. Gasping for breath, I stared down at the Joker's face, now crisscrossed with vibrant red lines, dozens of them, glistening and red as the bloody splash of paint along his ever-grinning face. I then looked down at my hands, and watched that all-too-familiar crimson fluid, the essence of life, drip down my fingers and pool in my palms. His blood. I'd drawn blood, in my fury and in my rage, and now his blood was on my hands.
His blood was on my hands.
The phrase had a strange weight to it, one that plunged so heavily into my heart that I gasped with surprise and sudden breathlessness.
I looked back down at him, searching and terrified, and he slowly but steadily smirked at me. His tongue trailed across his lips, licking up some of the blood that the scratches I'd created were still leaking. I trembled at the sight of it all, at the warmth and the wetness on my hands, and the rush coursing violently through me.
Good God, what have I done?
He didn't provoke that – I mean, not directly... That was all me...
Look what I'd become... Oh God, help me...
I couldn't take it. I couldn't take the way he was smiling at me. I just couldn't take it all. I whimpered, covering my face with my hands without thinking. I felt his blood against my skin, warm and wet and horrifying. It was all over me now, dripping and flowing and dying... My throat closed up, as did my eyes, but that didn't stop the tears or the sobs. I broke down, crumpling into my own trembling embrace, the blood mixing with the tears and all streaming down my face and arms in a disgusting cascade. I wished so hard for death, for the end of this beast I had become, for the end of it all...
But it seemed it wouldn't be mine just yet.
I felt something grip my wrists, and then my hands were ripped away from my face. The light flooded back in, and I opened my eyes with a gasp of shock to see the Joker's face only a few inches from mine yet again. He'd sat up so quickly, I hadn't had time to notice his movements until now. His hands wouldn't release mine, and when I panicked and struggled, he wrenched my hands down and buried them in the sand, forcing me to lean forward even more. I suddenly became aware of how I was straddling his waist, and just how close his blood-smeared mouth was. It felt like ice cubes were wedged in between the disks of my spine...and yet flames licked at the edges of my mind.
My eyes burned with my tears and his blood. I felt the sand sticking to my bloody fingers as well as I shifted them, searching for a solid surface for support in my attempts to escape. But there was nothing. Nothing but I and the devil that wouldn't let me go.
"Mmm-hmm... I, uh, knew you hadit in you..." he slurred darkly, his voice like hot tar flowing across my skin. I winced, words abandoning me and leaving me to whimper in his restraining grasp. My breath was weak, my head swirling dizzyingly. His superiority was terrible, so suffocatingly present and possibly-true to my frazzled, desperate mind.
"How does it feel, huh?" the Joker continued, his black eyes seeming to burrow deep into my skull and spear my brain. His hands tightened around my wrists, making my fingers stiffen, letting me feel how his blood flowed against my skin and clumped in the sand all over again. I felt another bloody tear dribble pathetically down my chin and drip off of my sunken, weary, contorted face. He probably knew all too well what the adrenalin and warmth and fire were doing to me, seeing as I was far from his first victim.
"...But you're still-uh, fighting it... And, though I, uh, don't ever like to be wrong as much as the next guy...you may just make this more fun than... I ever expected, beautiful," he said to me, licking his lips again in a slow, savoring manner that made my flesh crawl. I closed my eyes and shuddered, listening to the sound of my blood pounding in my ears, hoping I would be lucky enough to experience a brain aneurism right at that opportune moment. I hoped for anything but him...
The silence stretched, and I kept my eyes closed until I felt something brush against my cheek. I started, my eyes snapping open just in time to see the Joker's bloody glove pulling away from my face. He'd wiped my tears away. I gaped at him, utterly unaware of how to take such a tender action when it was delivered by a monster like him. He merely stared back at me, his smile no wider than the normal stretch of his scars, his eyes indefinable pools of blackness.
Then my mind leaped to the fact that he had released my hands, and that now I was just sitting on him without being forced to. I blushed scarlet and choked on my ragged intake of breath and then threw myself off of him, wanting to be as far away from him as possible. I hit the sand and rolled, feeling the grains stick to the remaining fresh blood on my face and hands. He sat up easily, his green, sandy hair lolling in his face. His expression was still empty, bizarre.
"...Why?" I whispered simply, brokenly to him, feeling the warm tropical breeze brush against the trails of various fluids all over my face. My lips trembled with my barely-restrained sobs. I wanted to understand something about him. Anything at all. I just wanted to understand something, no matter how horrible or unbearable or brutally honest. Anything...
He looked at me, his mouth contorting as he probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue in an absent-minded manner. I waited, swallowing the lump in my throat and feeling the weight of the silence in which only the sounds of the sea washing on the shore and the sea birds calling on its swells could be heard. After all this, he wasn't going to answer? I wasn't sure I could bare that.
"Why?" I asked again, stronger and fiercer now, my extreme anxiety making my voice crack. The Joker swallowed audibly, and then got awkwardly to his feet. Sand rained down from the disappearing folds in his clothing. His face was still vibrantly bloody, the patches of white and black now streaked with bright red. He looked at me, his black eyes voids, though this time they drew me in, as if wishing to use me as material to fill the holes inside him. It made me blinked with surprise – I never would've thought of him lacking anything or wanting something more than death or chaos. I never would've thought such a profound thought could be his. And then I realized that I'd thought of him as capable of true emotion a little too soon.
"You're asking for a reason...and, huheh, I'm not exactly a master of reason, now am I?" he asked me playfully, his yellow teeth glimmering in a crooked, unsettling smile. His black eyes were glimmering again, crackling like malfunctioning fireworks of dark energy. Whatever I thought I'd seen...it wasn't there anymore. Perhaps it was never there. How could someone like him possibly feel anything like what I thought I'd seen? I doubted it was ever there...
He was crazy, psychotic, and I wasn't getting the understanding that I was searching for so easily. My hopes for an answer withered and died, my mouth lowering in a disappointed frown. I looked away from him, sitting up straighter on the sand and wiping my face with the back of my sleeve, trying to get as much of the blood out of my eyes as possible. As I sat there, the Joker turned and started heading into the woods. I glanced up at him curiously, wondering where the hell he thought he was going on a deserted island.
"Where are you going?" I asked suspiciously, voicing my frustrated thoughts aloud. He stopped, turned back to me, and fixed me with a disturbing look and a smile that matched. I winced slowly at the sight of him, and his smile widened even further, a repulsive giggle slipping from his bloody lips.
"To take a little look around," he replied simply, shrugging and turning away from me, swinging his gun around his finger like in an old Western and heading once more for the woods. I blinked, realizing both that I'd guessed he hadn't searched the island before choosing it, hadn't planned a head all that much, and that I hadn't ever considered that he would be practical enough to evaluate his surroundings, even if it was a little late... like a human. He was a human. And maybe there was more reason in him than he gave himself credit for. Just maybe...
I had to hold on to that little hope – the one that said I didn't know this guy all the way through, that there was stuff about him that I totally didn't understand yet, and that there was a small chance that he would die of heat stroke or of starvation or dehydration like any other person. If I didn't hope that he was mortal and vulnerable just like me, then I was alone on an island with a psychotic, mass-murdering freak that was stronger, crazier, and more limitless than I would ever be, and then I didn't know how long I would last. I was on the verge of something terrifying and uncertain and unknown, and I could not have been more aware of it.
I was on a deserted island with the Joker, but I wasn't dead yet. I got up off of the sand, picked myself up after yet another of my many falls from grace, and headed into the foliage behind him, my eyes searching the foliage for any possible sources of food and water.
Just maybe...
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Yaay!~
This one was kind of spur-of-the-moment, but I still enjoyed writing it.
I hope you all enjoyed reading it just as much.
Read, and review, and thanks! 3