Hey guys! So sorry that it's been so long, but summer's giving me some free time and things should be moving a little faster now. Thank you all for the wonderful reviews. It makes my day every time. So here you go, the next chapter of Tropical Torment. Finally, right?
Disclaimer: I do not own Batman or the Joker or Gotham or anything. They belong to DC comics and Christopher Nolan. I do own my OC and – wait, the victim rabble's dead. Okay.
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Tropical Torment
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Chapter 7
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The dead leaves, sticks, and various other debris of the forest crunched lightly under my feet as I walked. Part of my mind was tracing the patterns of the ever-shifting squares of light on the ground, the speckled dance of the sun streaming through the trees high above me... and the other part of my mind was in a sort of maddened, panicked daze. It was the kind of daze you go into after you've just witnessed a car crash, or gotten your leg blown off... or, in my case, witnessed the murder of hundreds of people and even accidentally partaken in it yourself.
I expected that it might take a very long time for the reality of all of this to finally settle into my brain with complete and utter coherency – even though I'd had reality slapping me across the face since the day began. A demented giggle made me look up. The Joker had tripped a little on a low, hooked branch and was gushing amusement as he stumbled and whirled before continuing on his way.
I felt my lips stiffen, my skin crawl, and my stomach twist all at the same time. Yes, he was still here... I was still on a deserted island with the Joker. That element of reality was one that I could not escape, as much as I kept wishing that this all was just one big fat horrible nightmare... I was on an uninhabited spit of land in the middle of the ocean with no one but a mass-murdering psychopathic clown for company... I fought down the bile that rose in my throat whenever I thought about my current situation too deeply. I was still having trouble believing just how ridiculously awful I felt... I was sick to my stomach and sick to my soul, and I couldn't escape it.
I was an emotional ruin, and I just couldn't address it all at once or else I would explode... I had to stifle it, or it would overwhelm me beyond recovery. I had to take it slowly, try to process it one or two elements at a time. I rubbed my eyes, realizing that I was very tired – killing someone and running like Hell around seventeen times in one day could be considered exhausting.
I sighed, swallowing and tucking a stray lock of sandy, blood-crusted hair behind my ear. Would it always be this way? Would I always feel this disgusting and filthy and vile? My eyes prickled a little, but no tears flowed. It was almost as if I was out of them for the day. I supposed that could've been considered a good thing... I didn't like it when people saw me cry. Especially freakish murderers like the one walking in front of me.
Even my own thought processes sounded strange to me as I reviewed them, but then I supposed that the situation may have brought out a different, unexplored side of me. This was all certainly unknown territory for me... I felt like I may have taken a few mental steps backward from the slight conviction that I'd found before on the beach, believing that there was hope as long as the Joker and I were both human, both mortal, both having a single thing in common ever at all. I might've just taken a few mental steps in a big circle, reaching no clearer conclusion or resolution within myself at all...
I tried to put my own mental state of being out of mind and think practically. I tried to think about the availability of supplies from the wreck of the boat, how my clothing could come in handy, what I would need... I began to review all of the movies and documentaries I'd seen about being marooned on islands and surviving in the wild. I was pretty sure I was clear in the area of talking to a volleyball... and yet it wasn't all that consoling to me, seeing as that in no way ensured that I would stay remotely sane before this was over. I wasn't sure if there even was an end in sight. I had no idea what to do.
Finally, addressing my lack of preparation and knowledge concerning the situation seemed to open a floodgate of questions that I had no answer for. I couldn't hold them all back anymore.
How long would this last?
Would the Joker kill me, ending it at any moment, or... would this go on for years?
Would we be able to survive that long, or would we die of our own human limitations?
Did he have any sort of plan or any preparations for this?
...Again, why the hell was I here and what did he want with me?
Food? Water? Clothes? Sun protection? Anything at all?
It really struck me then how I may have no more access to the outside world. If I didn't get off of this island, I might never see a city or a town or a computer or a car for the rest of my life. I might never see civilization again... I never realized how much I'd taken for granted concerning the facts that I had friends at school and a laptop to type my stories on and a warm bed with blankets at night and a family that loved me and a life. I knew I was still alive, but... So many things had been taken away from me all at once today... Something inside of me seemed to have died.
I twitched, finding a rejection of that manner of thinking as if I couldn't handle it in my current state. My mind kind of switched paths, as if it were trying to protect me without my conscious effort. I wasn't dead. I had to believe that. A part of me was gone, but I was not dead. Maybe a little less naïve... maybe a little less innocent... maybe a little less myself... but not dead. I couldn't take death right now. Which made my entire awareness of the Joker less than ten feet in front of me all the more repulsive.
He was just walking, as if he had not a thought in his head or a goal in his mind. I tried not to speculate too deeply about what he was thinking. His brain was definitely something I wasn't too keen about getting really in tune with... and I doubted that I would understand it anyway. I continued blankly on, letting myself get lost in the patterns of the sunlight streaming through the leaves high above, finding no death or insanity in that naturally beautiful dance... I didn't know what to do, now. And that wasn't how I liked to do things. I preferred sense and order – I carried a planner nearly everywhere with me during the day. I didn't always handle change well, and that led to me having another mental burst of "WHY ME?"
I sighed rather heavily, almost getting annoyed with myself. Despite the difficulty of the situation before me, I was certainly aware of how continuing to freak out about it and not taking any action would probably not help me at all. Was I just wasting energy with all of this panicking nonsense, or was it was actually helping me find a solid mental ground to stand on and prepare myself for what was to come? I still didn't really have answers for myself, and my frustration remained. And to make matters worse, the Joker heard me sigh. He stopped walking, and I would've ran into him if I hadn't noticed his shadow stop moving and leer creepishly in front of me.
"Weary with the world-uh...are we?" he asked, looking at me with uncomfortably-attentive focus. I suddenly became aware of how horrible I looked all over again, with the sand encrusting my body, the dried blood everywhere, the tears and tatters in my clothing, the cuts and gashes all over me, and the dazed yet tremulous look in my tired, stinging, aching eyes... all because of him... I also saw how his face was still criss-crossed with the dried scabs that I'd left after I'd clawed the hell out of him... At the presently-addressed sight of him, the daze that enveloped my mind began to tremble and shiver and split at the seams. I was losing it all over again, just looking at him.
"...It's not like you're easing my mind at all – I might be a little less weary if I wasn't stuck on a deserted island with you, without any food or water or supplies or anything!" I yelled back at him, only partially aware of how unnecessarily loud my voice was, indicating how I was probably beginning to lose touch with social acceptability in some situations... If most people were spoken to in the manner that I'd just spoken to the Joker, they most likely would've been rather put out by my tone and possibly expressed some signs of dislike toward being yelled at and an apprehension toward talking to me any longer when I was in such a currently inhospitable mood. But, unfortunately, I realized yet again that I wasn't talking to a normal person by any means.
"...Well, you don't have to be here now, do you?" he murmured in an almost hissing whisper, his giggling, care-free mood vanishing in an instant. The ramifications of his words twisted dangerously in my mind, and the anger drained from my face. He continued to speak, very unexpectedly engaged by what I had yelled at him. He was giving it the thought that I was too afraid to give, and he wasn't holding back...He came closer to me, his footsteps disturbing the sunlit patches along the sand, his gaze darkening frighteningly before me.
"Not only could you be dead by now, but you could've been somewhere else on this island, uh, many times... and yet you just kept coming back... Huhh, beautiful? Now, why – is – that?"
His words twisted like a knife in my brain, making my bottom lip tremble. He was right, so right that he didn't need to explicitly cite examples of my short-comings this day... I'd come back so many times, trying to be valiant, trying to be brave and make a difference, and probably not succeeding in any way, seeing as I was the only person that had survived the wreck of the Ocean Angel 5. He hadn't killed me – and there was a big, fat, bloated, disgusting, terrifying YET at the end of that sentence... What if he killed me right now? How would I feel about everything then? This was too much. My life was held up so high on such a fragile, strained little strand right now. The precariousness of my life was overwhelming, and there was almost nothing I could do about it.
"... Oh, is your confidence, uh, failing you now..?" he asked with chillingly accurate curiosity, the blackened smudges on his face bulging as he widened his eyes in mock surprise, "Running out of steam in the blame game – especially after you're the only one left, and you may have given me a few new scars, uh, in the process?" My nerves ached with the strain of facing the truth. He knew it, and he smiled at me then, the movement making his face wrinkle and stretch. It pulled some of the scabs free, and I watched in horror as fresh blood began to well up onto the surface, a few thin streams dribbling hauntingly down his face. He knew how much I didn't want to be anything like him, and I could see the ghastly, oily black amusement in his eyes.
I was left speechless, wallowing emptily in my own failures and weaknesses and fears once again. He could see every scar I had, whether it was visibly marring the outside of my body or located somewhere deep within. I felt so naked and vulnerable all of a sudden, and I hated how quickly he could destroy the walls within me that I had erected in a pathetic attempt to protect and preserve myself. If things kept going at this rate, I didn't think I could take much more... Something flashed in his eyes, as if he knew just how on the edge I was. He then proceeded to lunge forward and reach for me all at once, a burst of startlingly unexpected speed that brought his bloody face and glistening mouth far too close to me.
A scream died in my throat, and my heart threatened to explode. I lurched against him, feeling his gloved hands claw at my shoulder blades as I twisted and attempted to escape. I felt something warm and wet scratch across my cheek, and choked when I realized how close he'd come to me with his bloody scars. I dropped to the floor and kicked at his legs, making him falter just enough to allow myself the time to bolt to my feet and run like hell into the surrounding woods, gasping and wheezing with fear and repulsion as I went. The leaves whipped across my face, stinging my wounds and smearing the blood on my face, but I merely moved faster. I heard him laugh wildly as I fled.
I stumbled quickly and unevenly away from him, my heart rate slowing more and more as I increased the distance between us. Thank God... I had to get the hell away from him, and felt instantly better when I had. He'd come far too close to me, and I'd escaped with a smear of make-up and blood upon my face... Ugh. I wiped it disgustedly upon my sleeve, grimacing at the reddish, grotesque smear. Unfortunately, all of this emotion and action had made it almost impossible to return to my little dazed, sun-dappled state that I had been in earlier... I'd survived yet another confrontation with the Joker and his manic, boundless unpredictability, mainly by running away from it all, and I wasn't sure how many more I could take. I hated handling anything by running away, and I'd done that so many times today...
Getting away from him and once again fleeing from my emotions seemed to result in my brain being more able to think clearly. I returned to rationality and self-preservation, alone, on this island, somehow... I was so tired, but certainly not too tired to keep walking in a direction that was opposite of the way that the Joker was traveling. No. I wasn't sure if it was possible to be too tired for that. My head was pounding, reminding me unnecessarily that my mental and physical reserves were running low for the day. I had to get somewhere safe... That was my objective. I figured that was the most important. I had to rest my body before I could fix anything... If I found food and water on the way, then great, but if I didn't, I would start looking in the morning. Hopefully I wouldn't regret that decision. I'd gone to bed without a lot of food in my stomach before, and it was quite a light-headed emptiness that greeted me in the morning.
I realized that things would most likely get much more grueling than that, seeing as I wasn't at home with constantly available food and water and shelter from the sun and the rain now... I sighed, hating the sound of my own situation in my head. Questions about my capabilities and competence were beginning to roar through my brain, and I was getting overwhelmed with the journey before me. I was not built for such a drastic change in lifestyle... but I supposed that I was still alive and that, by that fact, I was granted the potential to try... Yeah, I'll hang on to that, right? With a bitter smile, I assumed I would see how lively and ambitious I felt after night fell when I was stumbling around in the dark being stalked by jaguars...
I side-stepped a low-hanging branch and was careful not to trip over some randomly splayed tree roots, finding some tiny sense of accomplishment that I hadn't fallen on my face. There was some strange nostalgia within me, seeing as I remembered vacationing with my family a few years back in the Florida Keys, where the sand was soft and the sky so blue, just like it was now... and also walking through the woods around my house as a child, where I'd tried so hard to be stealthy, toning my balance and movement in such a seemingly wild area... I'd come so very far, and yet I still wasn't ready for this at all... The world still seemed like a vastly different place to me, now, and I wasn't sure I would ever see it the same way again.
I walked for what felt like hours, and moved through a seemingly endless maze of woodlands and palm trees and sand. Clouds swayed and billowed slowly overhead, contrasting with sharp laziness in comparison to my frenzied, freaked out state of mind. The sky was always changing, but the forest kept looking the same. The place was a lot bigger than it had seemed from the boat... Occasionally I found the shoreline, and walked along that for a while before I usually re-entered the forest to escape the sunlight. I felt like my sunscreen had melted off long ago, and wasn't keen on getting roasted on my first day as a castaway.
Eventually, I came to a stretch of sand that jutted out into the sea, kind of a natural pier that was slightly elevated above the waves for a short while before ending in a short, rocky, rugged little cliff. It dropped off into a slightly deeper part of the shore, ruining the smooth transition from sand to steadily deepening water that the majority of the rest of the coastline seemed to follow. I walked to the edge of it, peering down into the deep blue surface below. There were a few larger white specks that I expected were shells and a few darting streams that were tiny fish, no use to me and my hungry stomach with my lack of fishing materials...
Unsatisfied in every way, I stood up and turned, looking back toward the mainland – and my eyes widened. Spearing up from the trees to the north was a rocky mountain range, a general rise in the elevation of the land that ended in a high peak. It was relatively small as mountains went, but I was still rather surprised that I hadn't noticed it sooner. Well... I'd seen it from the boat, of course, but it just hadn't struck me as useful until now. Mountains could mean shelter from the elements – a cave would be positively brilliant. I wasn't afraid of the dark at least... Now it was just a manner of getting up there.
Oh well. It was kind of my only option at the moment, unless I wanted to make some weird tent thing out of leaves and sticks in the forest, and that didn't sound very stable to me. I headed inland again, staring up at my potential home and noticing as the barest hint of orange from the coming sunset began to paint the jagged rock face. I was running out of time now. God only knew what came out at night on this island. I knew some of the most dangerous creatures in the world were nocturnal, and my heart began to pulse faster. A sense of urgency overcame me, though of course it wasn't like the whole freaking day had been more urgent and fast-paced and dangerous than I could handle, normally. I swallowed another world-weary sigh and quickened my footsteps.
It wasn't long before I came to the base of the rock formation, finding that it was a little bigger than it had looked along the coast. It was very daunting already, but it was rather refreshing to have such a simple task in front of me. I could take this one thing at a time, now. I could almost make myself forget that the only other person on the island with me was the Joker himself. I could almost forget that civilization might be nothing but a faintly remembered dream to me now... I could almost forget it all. Right now it was just me and the gigantic rock that I had to climb, possibly in order to survive. I could wrap my head around that easily, and I started my ascent.
The footholds and handholds weren't too sparse at the start. It was more of just jumping to and from and lifting myself onto different large rocks, but it got quite steep after a while. The sections that I used to land on got smaller, forcing me to stop after a while. Thankfully, there was a jutting platform that I was able to rest on and catch my breath. I wasn't used to this kind of strenuous activity, and my muscles began to tremble and ache, making climbing any further even scarier than before.
I'd always enjoyed rock walls as a kid, at fairs and festivals and fishing shows, and I knew how useful my straining body got after a while, and how I would fall slowly to the floor with my harness to try again after catching my breath. But I didn't have a harness this time. Falling would certainly mean death, now. I didn't know what to do. I was above the trees now, and didn't fancy climbing back down in my current state any more than I fancied climbing higher... Crap... The sun was still going down. I was bathed in fiery orange light that seemed to be quickly fading.
My aching muscles would have to just suck it up – I couldn't just sit here all night. There was a good chance that I would roll over sleepily to my death, and that was just something I could not be okay with for all eternity, especially after all I'd been through today... I had to keep going. Just get somewhere safe – then you can collapse due to exhaustion. But God, it was easier said than done... My fingers were screaming as I grasped for ledges to haul my moaning body up even higher with my groaning legs. As I got further up the side of the rock face and began to feel my weakness all over again, I rather wished I'd stayed on the ledge and risked death in my sleep, instead of death mid-climb. The sweat moistening my brow was beginning to be coolly kissed by the approaching night.
If I survived this, I was going to be immensely proud of myself, I decided. I hadn't felt good about much of anything all day, and if this didn't kill me, damn it, I was going to feel good about it. Just having a good feeling to look forward to seemed to help a little bit, but only a little bit... This wasn't looking good. I reached up again with a monumental effort, wincing as I hauled my body up the rest of the way as well, feeling my strength withering away with finality. I wasn't somewhere safe... not now...
And then I climbed up over the edge of the handhold and was surprisingly able to roll for a few feet before contacting another wall. I blinked with surprise, looking around and realizing that the flat surface I was on curled further up the mountain and further down, almost like a trail. Are you kidding me? There was some semblance of a PATH to get up this thing? And I'd basically scaled the side of it for NOTHING? I groaned on the floor and rolled against the wall, pounding it with my fist and hissing in pain as my strained fingers burst into flaming agony. Stupid stupid stupid... and yet a bit of a story of my life, at this point...
I sighed heavily, and just lay there for a few minutes, feeling my body pulse and sting all over with the remnants of my semi-wasted efforts... Oh well... Maybe the pathway wouldn't last forever, though I hoped it did even if I felt ridiculous right now, just because it would make things easier later... If there even was a later. It was getting dark now, the sky and stones and just general surroundings looking grey and shadowed and rather frightening with their ferocity and the feral mysteries they hid from me... I was so out of my element here, it hurt, both literally and figuratively. I sat up slowly, so as to not get a head rush and risk tumbling to my death over the edge of a cliff, and then stood upright, bracing myself against the rock face beside me.
I wandered down the pathway, heading toward the lower elevation, testing the ledge with my feet. It seemed quite stable. I rounded the bend in the rock, and realized that the trail went roughly half way down the mountain side, so I would've had to climb something one way or another – it just could've been a hell of a lot easier... Not wanting to dwell on that fact too much, I then turned and headed back up the trail, crossing the ledge that I'd climbed up on in the first place and continuing past it. It looked more jagged and cavernous higher up, which made me believe the thing that I wanted was more likely to be closer to the clouds instead of closer to the ground. And sure enough, I was right.
As I climbed, I began to see holes and crevices in the rocks. They weren't exactly what I was thinking of, but a few of them were deep enough to work if I really couldn't find anything else tonight... I wanted to make sure they were a last resort, though, and continued on past them up the mountainside a little further. A dark shadow caught my eye, and I nearly squealed with delight when I saw that it was the opening to a cave, easily taller than me. Then I reigned in my initial joy and thought rationally. There could be something else inhabiting it. I doubted that there were bears or wolves or anything on a tropical island like this one, but I didn't want to take a chance and risk getting mauled by a wild animal after I'd climbed so high and gotten so far.
I cautiously approached the entrance, keeping close to the edge of the rock face and staying out of the line of sight of anything inside the cave until I got to the very edge. Carefully and quietly, I curled my face around the edge and peered inside. It was quite dark, but I could partially make out some shapes in the shadows. It was easily big enough for me to live in, much bigger than any of the crevices and craters I'd passed coming here. There was some lump-ish thing against one of the walls, maybe where part of the wall had collapsed in a little rock-slide. Some cubic things were in the back, oddly perfect to be created by natural means...
I stooped and picked up a pebble near my feet, tossing it into the mouth of the cave and hearing it click and clatter as it fell. The sound reverberated clearly out to me, and I waited for a minute, seeing if I disturbed anything that may be dwelling within the cave... There was nothing. No response. I debated for a while with myself about entering it or not... It seemed clear. Was I willing to make that gamble, that any beastie inside of it wasn't just a heavy sleeper that I had to trip over in the dark before it woke up? ... I then decided that I was tired, and that I was going to go to sleep here if it was the last thing that I did, hungry wildlife be damned.
... It was rather sickeningly funny that I chose to think in that way, about sleeping here even if it killed me, in response to what happened next. I entered the cave, slowly and carefully in the dark just to make sure I didn't trip and fall on my face. As my eyes began to adjust to the blackness, the lump-ish thing and the cubes began to take on strange shape and form... The lump seemed to be a pile of small, fluffy looking things, ovals and squares of different shapes and colors...Pillows? And the cubes were certainly wooden crates, human made boxes without a doubt. ... What on earth..? I took a step back, and ran into something that hadn't been there before. My blood ran cold when I heard an all too familiar voice.
"Welcome home, beautiful..."
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Okay, there you go! Please read and review and lemme know what you think. The next chapter's already underway. Thank you again!