Chapter Eleven: Trust in Pairs

Strawberry: I've been waiting to share this chapter FOREVER. This is one of the ones I wrote like, second or third because the idea really came so quickly and I knew that this was how I wanted them to end up. Read to discover :D Oh, and the Joker may be a tad out of character in this chapter; I revised it A LOT from what it was and he's still a little rocky character-wise. He'll get better again, though, now this chapter's done. In twelve, he'll be good, you have my word :]

P.S.: I want to thank Something Girl for making me this pretty banner! You can go to her profile to see it. I really like it!!

He was raging. Steaming. Every possible form of anger and distress was burning in his expression. She could sense his pain, his agony…his fear. They were one in the same, and she shuddered to admit it to herself. She understood him, and even when she could not, she was constantly trying to, finding him excuses. She knew that he was changing her by listening and watching her. He was there, wanting to see what she was feeling and wanting to understand Fana Williams whom he knew to be deeply dangerous to him. She was a strange girl whose opinion was now valued in his mind. He hadn't valued opinion in years. She was a light in the darkness, a faint glimmer that showed something was normal…he was normal…

If she were to see him in such a state…he would lose every hope of her company. He hated normality.

Fana wanted to cry. Her forehead wrinkled, knowing well his pain and regretting instantly how devilish her own curiosity could be. She was trying to catch her breath, feeling a sob locked in her vocal chords, drying her throat and paining her. She could scarcely even see him through all of the pain he was suffering over what she had seen, though she had known he had just been out and around in the same state of bareness. She tried to get another look at him, but within a moment, he was forcing her into the wall, standing over her as though he were a guard. Their bodies were touching up until their waists. He was roughly grabbing at her face, flipping his knife out readily near her ear. She was not afraid, for her blind trust in him did not allow it. She simply stared at him, thunderstruck—or perhaps in awe—as his breathing quickened and his emotion stretched into her aura. He was out of his mind, and at this point, he truly looked as inhuman as she had ever seen him.

I don't know what I'm doing, he repeated over and over and over again until his mind was full to the brim. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, it's all…it's gone, I don't… He was breathing more heavily than he had in a while. He was panting almost, breathing into Fana's face, noticing ineptly the way she did not flinch but was looking at him with such pity. "What have…why is…" He couldn't piece together anything. He had just been outside, causing a huge riot in for the mayor, and he hadn't any makeup on. He had been undercover, he couldn't have had it on. But so many had seen him. So many must have noticed those disfigured three-time-cut scars on his face that marred and destroyed every aspect of humanity he had…it had all started with the time he had permanently ingrained them. That was when he had gone to the very end of his mind.

"It's…it's ok, it's me, I wouldn't…" She was lost. Fana put her hands on each of his elbows and gave him a tiny jolt that was enough to calm him but little enough to keep him from further anger. "Hey, look," she said firmly. She could hardly hear her own thoughts over his panicked breathing. He had turned his head to the side, and she fought hard to gain the trust of his gaze again. He was muttering, looking every which direction, drowning in the chaos of his own mind. "Look, I thought we'd…" She wasn't sure where she was going with her words. "I thought you knew that I wouldn't… I wouldn't be judging you. You made me a promise and you've kept it; it's been four days and you still haven't hurt or killed me. I…thought you knew I wouldn't say anything if you let me go. A-and that's not as bait. I told you I wouldn't be ignorant as a human being and I would listen to you. Look—listen!" She gave him a firmer shake and finally he was staring at her. "I don't care about the sc—"

"Don't…you…say it," he yelled into her face, letting his mouth turn upward in a momentary smile. He felt woozy as though he were losing his balance. He gripped her face tighter to keep from falling forward. "There is…no one in this entire world that anyone can trust. No one to believe in or try to understand. There is none of that. I can't…believe…" His head fell onto his chest as sickening disgust flooded from his lungs to his head. Fana could feel his hands shaking on her face. She had only experienced his disturbance about the scars once before, when he had first captured her. He had told her the story of how he had gotten them—from his own mother—and he had been angry. But something had changed within the time she had been there. He was different at least slightly from what he was when he had taken her. He was…somehow more sane. And at the same time, he was less sane.

He was blinded by feelings, and feelings he hated. Perhaps he might have just yelled up at the ceiling, but he was not sure how to. He could feel the aching to do so, the urge to sob and throw a fit upon the ground and yet…he could not summon the tears nor the sobs. He spoke to his feet, though he was addressing her. He knew he had to say something. Fana had done something. She was not a helper or someone who was part of the crew. She was not just someone who wouldn't turn him in. She was…someone he wanted to talk to. Someone whom he genuinely wanted to hear his views. He had watched her calm behavior and discovered that there was something that knew him. She could relate to him, whether she knew it or not. He knew she was so different that it almost pained her, and everything she had felt was being suppressed. Fana Williams might have been just like him. To his horror, he realized that he was deathly afraid of what might have happened if she had been just like him. She had been stronger. She had overcome her insanity. She had stuffed it away well, not just until it exploded, but buried under light and goodness and perfection. Everything that a good human should have been. A true human…the first humans in the world were perfect until they were destroyed. Fana had embraced the purity of Adam and Eve and shoved away the snake. However, he himself had been too weak to deny the snake that tempted him with things that may have been better or easier.

"Goodness."

Fana stared. What had he said?

"I don't…what?" His breaths were wheezing, but he finally lifted his head. She took the chance to cautiously examine his face. Stringy pieces of tinted hair were framing his cheekbones. She could suddenly notice the smell of aerosol paint radiating from him: it was not grime or chlorine. It was merely hair spray. His skin was an even, dull tone that was golden in shade and gentle. His forehead had creases of anger or worry. Perhaps annoyance or even laughter. His eyebrows were light brown and thick, whereas they had been nearly unnoticeable for the black that had stained them. Dark circles lingered under his eyes, but not from makeup. It was the appearance of a man in distress, a man who was constantly running from something that could never be escaped. He was tired. Something was tiring him. Even with that mild look of danger in his brown eyes, he still looked perfectly plain and normal until…

His lips.

"I…" he started, carefully keeping watch on her gaze, wondering what thoughts were swimming in her mind as she looked at him. "Me, I'm…weak. That's how you're making me." Fana's eyebrows rose at the center of her forehead. Her level of pity might never have been so escalated as it was at that very moment.

"Weak?" she repeated softly, sparing him as gentle an expression as she could manage.

"Weak." He tried to stop himself from shaking, but his hands only trembled more against the soft skin of her cheeks. "I want…I want it, I want…" He tilted his head back and then down again to try to make any sense of his thoughts. "I know you, Fana Williamssss," he hissed. "I know…I know what you are, I know…who you're pretending to be. You fixed yourself, huh? You can't tell me you aren't the same…But I like that. I like the fact that you saved yourself. It's very…noble of you…mhaha. But don't worry." He nodded. "I still know. You're…you're distorted." Her eyes were bloodshot. He could not comprehend his desire to make them clear again. He laughed lowly, just halfway in an unsatisfying fashion. "Like me. I'm a monster, Fana banana," he told her. She blinked. "And you were, too, but you didn't want to be, hm? So gimme a lesson, huh? Tell me…how you did it." She looked at the scars across his mouth as massive and painful they looked. His mouth curved downwards; he was finally serious. "Fix me."

She was not sure what had happened to her before she had tilted her head and craned her neck towards him until she had touched his lips with her own.

She didn't check for his reaction. It wasn't about his reaction. It wasn't about her strange curiosity. It wasn't that she loved him or was infatuated. She did not love him. She was not infatuated, though her ominous curiosity made her wonder of her feelings. It was about the scars. How they felt against her mouth, what they said to her heart and soul, and what it felt like to him to have someone feel them so intimately. Was it even his lips she was kissing anymore? She was so curious about his face that she could not help but search for the scars until she'd reached the end of one of them. They had not been stitched. They had never looked stitched, but they had sincerely been mended with only more skin. Had there been stitches, the scars might have been less ridged or prominent.

He was standing in shock. He felt like a rag doll with a child who cared for him enough to smother him to the point where he was not sure what was happening and what would follow. If anything, he was only breathing harder…and faster…more uncontrollably.

"If you can say you need to be fixed," she said quietly against the side of his face. His cheeks were warm even in the cold of the icehouse. "…then you don't need mine or anybody else's help." He was in awe. He moved his hands very slowly from her face and dropped his knife into his pocket. He hesitated a moment. No feeling he had ever known was quite like his immense confusion as he wondered whether he would act in response. He simply wanted to understand. He touched her waist with one hand curiously. When she exhaled, her breath swept over his neck. He felt uneven.

Fana could tell without looking that he was lost. He might have been afraid, not knowing what was happening or what he felt towards it. She tried to not to analyze him, for she knew she could easily have been wrong about anything she guessed. If anything, she had made his feelings worse and more conflicting. She was unsure of how she could possibly fix the discomfort without having to let go of him. In fact, all she managed to do was pull him closer. She did not understand him as they stood there against one another. He was a man that she knew to be something, and something indeed, but the something must have been unknown still.

She felt his lips touch the corner of her mouth. For a moment he seemed frozen, until she felt with a tickle his lips moving against hers. "Why do you bother?" he whispered, his mouth curving upwards against her face. He continued on: "You know I'm…already too corrupted to be sane. I love it that way. Stop…stop trying to help. You're just…making things difficult. Who are you? Who am I? I never learned anything. No, I learned it all wrong…good…" Too many thoughts were racing through his head. So often this was the case that he became even more shocked to know that this time, he was handling it so horribly. He was bound in chaos and perplexity. He acted only in body but not in mind. He was the puppet come to life, yet he hadn't been given a brain. Fana's skin was soft with comfort. He knew himself to have been speaking for some time, mumbling off the top of his head, as it was the only place that seemed to have any idea of what was going on. He knew that she was listening, yet her hands were moving between his shoulders and spine, further distracting him. It tired him, though as she continued to embrace him, he recalled only having returned her affections a few times. For the majority of those long lost moments, he was simply exhaling. He could not inhale but to smell her scent—a teasing bastard of a scent that drew his face into the nook of her neck every so often, just to breathe in.

Fana, Fana, Fana Williams…

Fana jumped slightly when she felt his fingers clench against her back. She moved away from his face and noticed how much wearier he looked than he had before. In his mind, everything remained still, a swimming void of emptiness. That is, until he felt her hand gently touch his face. After all, how much longer would it take for him to have understood what she wanted in return? Maybe she was trying to teach him something: he was learning. Maybe she was trying to make him search his thoughts for what he meant by it all: he was searching. And maybe—just maybe—it was nothing like that at all. Perhaps her only objective was to awaken his affection, no matter how empty it was:

She had awakened it.

He tried his hardest not to toss his saliva as he skittishly felt his scars within the flesh of his cheeks. Fana's hand was stroking his face knowingly as if she were reading and interpreting his every thought better than he could ever have hoped to. Unsurely, he tilted his head to the side, intending to return to her what she was asking of him, or at least invite her to recognize him. Her index finger was running along the length of the scar on the right side of his face. He could sense her compassion as he inched closer to her dry, barren lips as his own moved slowly in facial analysis. He thought of guns and punishment…and how beautiful those things were to him. They weren't the norm, and that was why they were perfect. How dare she try to toy with his mind to make him think that all of those things weren't exactly what he wanted?

He wrenched her against him, unable to stop himself. He knew that she might have been startled but ignored it. Fana could feel the tickle of closeness, but she was too preoccupied with the depth of his eyes that had not been there before. He had been an empty person prior to this meeting. There might have been moments where he had been human and human alone, but for most of their acquaintance, he had been unreachably absent. When he kissed her, she melted into the kind of finality that might have satisfied a person for the rest of their life. Somehow she felt accomplished, like already she had gotten through to his human side. To be frank, she believed she must have found emotion if she could have gotten him to kiss her. She had to have done something.

How he hated Fana Williams for trying to take away his smile…

He was gentle, she noted. Though everything about his conduct suggested viciousness, he touched her as delicately as though she would break in half. They were two people kissing as butterflies fluttering their wings against each other. He was an empty man, she told him mentally. He could be filled, though, with all the good things. He did care for her. He cared for people and himself and what he'd become because of something that had happened in the past. Her fingers danced around his neck, which only made him more nervous. He felt as though he might have been entirely corrected at any moment, though he wanted to believe she had enough care for him to leave him to himself.

It was immersing. He was simply so full of secrets that he had captured her interest and would not relinquish it. The knowledge that there was a heart beating behind that twisted smile and broken face captivated her in the way that she was certain could never change. He had to know what she was, had to know what had happened in her past to make her identifiable, and he had to have…

He thought first of money. No, he didn't need any of those superficial things. Power, dominance, happiness… Yes, happiness. That was it. All along he'd thought he knew happiness when all he really knew was some morbid sort of twisted fun. But that was happiness! Though he knew it, he couldn't help but wonder what Fana would teach him if she bothered at all. She'd made him aware of its existence: some new kind of happiness. Hunger, he thought, breathing in the scent of her saliva, is more than a craving. It's a NEED…

Before he knew what had come to him, Fana had yanked herself away from him, their mouths making a smacking sound as they jerked. He scrambled himself together and tried to back away from her, wondering if she'd already decided she had been wrong and that he was a hopeless case. Well, he was. She was smarter than she looked. He let his mouth curve up on one side slyly. He wanted to let go of her, give her space, if there was anything in her mind that was changing. But if he did…wouldn't things get worse? Would they?

"I want your trust," she said airily, maintaining a straight face and a firm volume to assure him she was not going to let him beat around the bush. She needed beyond anything in the world to know what was behind him and what still lay in front of because of the past. She could not be distracted nor could she let him be distracted from the fact that it was time she started a genuine sort of…interrogation.

He blinked very humanly and immediately had to shake his head to remind himself that he was not allowed to blink in such a simple way. Not yet, at least. In ways, he did want to change, but only slightly, just enough so that he could hear her, but that lone part of him that was slowly losing dominance was still screaming for power. Power was beautiful, as was control. He needed those things, and if Fana was going to tear them away from him, she was against him. You're wasting your time,he thought.

"Do you trust me?" Fana repeated into his face. Her nose gave a noticeable twitch. From such a distance, he could see the array of colored flecks in her golden irises, glinting with expectation. Half-heartedly, he nodded, still frustrated and feeling air-headed. "Say it," she demanded. "I want to hear it." For a moment, his throat seemed to have acquired a dryness that enabled him no sound. The sheer expectance in Fana's face was enough to bring him to his health.

"Yes…" he whispered hoarsely, moving closer to her again. She held him back with one hand on his chest, stirring his insides.

"Tell me."

"I trust…you." He turned his head away darkly, soaking in the vision of the creature he knew himself to be. In the confines of his mind, he wondered briefly what life might be like if everything stopped being so humorous. He had been violently certain that he had understood life to its fullest and had become a master of the minds of himself and the rest of the world. He had become invincible to reason and guilt. Always—always—he had wished to just die. He had never thought about for what reason he'd lost any thirst or urge to live. He just wanted to do things, do whatever he pleased to show that rules simply tied you down. Was it because of his twisted views that he wanted himself dead? Did he know that he was a danger, and that he was a disturbed kind who did not deserve to remain on the earth?

Had he known himself so well, even, that he could not recognize his own knowledge?

He let his arms fall to his sides. He sneered at the wall behind Fana's head, thinking of the time when he had highly supposed to receive Harvey Dent instead of a therapy session. He was aching with feelings of all sorts, feelings he could not bare to categorize, lest he fall back to that desperate confusion. He knew what he wanted; he always knew. He wanted to be in control of himself and everyone, and he was. Fana wasn't going to change that, no matter what she did.

He repeated his name over and over again in his head. It was a name he felt barely recognizable to his utmost pleasure. He tossed his saliva, and Fana shut her eyes briefly, mentally avoiding lashing out at him for not quieting himself when she knew well he could.

"You don't trust me." Fana eyed him suspiciously. She tried to fix her gaze upon his eyes but could not seem to tear her attention away from his curving mouth for whatever reason. She simply squinted at him, silently asking for his reasoning but not secure enough in herself to sincerely wonder. "That's good," he edged simply. "You shouldn't." His following smile made Fana fearfully wonder if any progress she credited herself with having made might have been destroyed, but when he laughed, it was less heavy and had and air of awkwardness, as though it were an attempt at a real, genuine laugh rather than a psychotic one. "You want to…" he said, raising his eyebrows. "But you shouldn't."

"I want to know," she said. There was no need she say any more, for he knew just what she meant.

Gone completely empty, he was dragged behind her until they had reached the loveseat in the lobby downstairs. He was seated gently as she planted herself beside him. He did not dare look at her with every hideous thought that was crossing through his mind. God, he wanted to wrap his hands around her neck and apply pressure for long enough to finish her. The danger in him was feuding, screaming for him to just kill her then and there and forget it had ever happened. He had been living with a smile for so long. It was too much to have to change his ways now, and for some woman he did not know.

But when he looked at her, all he could say was, "My mother was first. My uncle stitched them..." He smacked his lips together. "Then my father did it. It was never stitched because after that, he killed everyone else. They laughed at me, and I hurt. I grew up, got bigger, got a wife…and then I tried to save her by doing it to myself for the third time. Then she left. Everyone left. So anyone else in the way had to die. That's when I started…" He grinned at the thoughts of all the things that had happened. Even as he battled with the dejection and the losses he'd suffered, he couldn't help but speak of it fondly.

Fana's lips were lightly parted, but not with surprise or fear. Her eyes were endearingly calm, and he wished for nothing more at that moment than for time to repeat itself so that she would let him hold onto her again, and he hated himself for it.