This Devil's Workday: Modest Mouse
The Joker was out cold by the time Wayne pulled into the garage. Outside the wind was picking up again and stirring up the snowdrifts and sheets of snow floated across the road like ghosts. Wayne turned the car off and sat for a moment with his head resting on the steering wheel and listened to the silence. He didn't hear enough silence anymore. He hurt for it and still hurt for it and he breathed it in. The utter stupidity of his actions was beginning to dawn on him he breathed it in.
He breathed the cold in and admitted that he'd made his life even more spectacularly complicated than it was before. His previous mentor and/or temporary arch nemesis had once told him that his compassion was his weakness. And so it was. So it fucking was. Wayne took a deep breath and counted to five and out of the car. He had to count to five again and count to five again before he could open the passenger door.
The Joker was sitting with his head propped up against the window. His breathing was shallow and ragged and it seemed like he was going into shock. Wayne stood there looking at him, thinking about what his father would've said about the red stains on the seats. He was going into shock.
Fuck. Wayne grabbed the collar of the Joker's coat and dragged him out of the car. He briefly considered leaving his nemesis lying in a heap on the concrete and walking away like nothing had happened. But he couldn't. So despite his exhaustion and hangover and utter disgust with what he was doing, Wayne managed to get the Joker out of the garage and into the elevator. Outside the snowdrifts floated on and he breathed the cold in.
Wayne had a meeting in seven hours. He couldn't remember exactly what the meeting in question entailed, or what he was supposed to talk about, but he did know that the corporate clones at Wayne Enterprises weren't the ones sitting in his bathroom at two in the morning at two in the morning on a Sunday on the Lord's Day up to their elbows in blood. A bullet had grazed the Joker's ribs and the wound was proving to be a real bleeder and he was still dangerously close to being hypothermic. His skin was bleached white beneath the paint blood splattered and bleached white.
But once Wayne had dosed the Joker up on morphine and got the bleeding under control and turned up the heater, he took a moment to get some painkillers into his own bloodstream. His jaw was bruising and throbbing like hell's fire like someone had driven a nail into the bone and it was killing him. He popped two Percocet and taped up his knuckles and left the Joker lying on the bathroom floor, still unconscious and drugged all to hell.
Wayne decided that he had about half an hour before the Percocet kicked in, so he locked the bedroom down with every high-tech security device he owned and collapsed on the sofa in the living room. As he lay there, the oxycodone crept into his bloodstream and sent his head spinning and for a while he stared at the ceiling and listened to his iPod and forgot what a clusterfuck his life had become. He drifted off halfway his head spinning through The White Album before he started to wonder what the hell he had done and what it meant and what the hell he was going to do next.
A/N: So this chapter contains the first (but certainly not the last) instance of prescription drug use. i don't think that many of you will have a problem with this, but i just figured i'd warn you. Personally, i think that prescription drugs are far, far more harmful to people than natural ones. Cheech and Chong and are still alive, folks. Heath Ledger is not. So stay away from drugs, kiddies…and if you can't do that, at least stick to ones that grow outta the ground. Seriously.