Author's Note: I can't believe this is over...I'm very sad. Here is the epilogue I've written a very long time ago, for your viewing pleasure. I've probably lost so many readers in my months-long hiatus but again, thank you SO much to everyone who stuck with me, and all the wonderful reviews I've received recently. I'm so glad you enjoyed this 'fic as much as I enjoyed writing it. I'm really in love with the outcome of it...I don't want it to end. I'm even toying with the thought of a sequel, but who knows? I need to continue the other 'fic I started while writing this one, "Don't Fear the Reaper." But enough of my talking...here is the very short epilogue toanswer the cliffhanger in the last chapter. :)
Love,
xxnadsxx.
Dark Humor
Epilogue
"What doesn't kill you, only makes you...stranger."
--The Joker
She woke up breathless, a gust of air caught midway between her lips as her dreams subsided into reality. Almost mechanically, she pulled her aching body from the mattress and pushed aside the blood-soaked sheets with careless abandon. The TV was a blinding static light, a pinpoint against the otherwise pitch darkness—yet she didn't really mind it, gliding across the barely visible room as if it were a part of her.
The TV crackled before adjusting its shaking picture onto the desired channel. She could overhear the news anchor speaking as she felt her way towards the bathroom, hysterical laughter booming from somewhere along her bed where she had just awakened.
"Batman: Dead or alive?" The caption rang along her ears. Her stomach twisted to the point of nausea as she fumbled for the light switch.
Batman.
He was alive, of course; he never really died. He was probably patching himself up right now, resting and recuperating in his sniveling little hovel somewhere. He would be back, stalking the streets of Gotham once again, hunted by police who needed a scapegoat for the former D.A.'s apparent murder. Batman wasn't a human, not like them. He was a symbol of something fabricated and fanciful. Hence: the wings, the cowl, the persistence.
She was human in all her primal urges.
She was more human than she had ever felt in her entire life.
With a sigh, she found the switch, flipped it upwards. The light fell in harsh blinding fluorescence across her body, highlighting every angle, every curve. A stranger stared into the mirror before her—naked, bloody, scarred, dark hair a mess around a makeup-smeared face. Who was the girl looking back at her? She didn't know who it was, yet it was staring at her, staring through the mirror, posing as her. She wanted to find her pistol, shoot the glass away until she found her true self staring back.
Then, as she gazed down at the countertop, a stroke of genius hit her.
She could hear his chuckling at her bedside—he drank in the broken pictures that glazed the broken television, in shades of red and war and blood and death. It was hilarious, how people still fought for a noble cause, when all the world knew it was only a front to give into the lust for the kill. Blood masked as nobility; as justice.
What the hell was justice?
She didn't know what it was. Didn't even care for it. Maybe the girl in the mirror did, her eyes wild and her hair disheveled like a beast. Maybe she did, still straining to be so civilized in all her naked, bloodied glory, despite the fact that you could never really be civilized, not underneath the fabrications of human culture and restraint, where your heart lay, where your blood ached to spill free.
She knew better than that.
And as she raised the razor to her pretty pristine face, she knew it was better to be scarred and destroyed and free than that creature staring at her through the mirror.
She cut precisely, in long, agonizing strokes, relishing the hot fluid that seeped in her mouth, that dribbled down her chin and along her throat, her nerves tickling and her red lips and the tearing muscles of her skin and cheeks raising upwards in a giggle at the agonizing pain, at the feeling that each stroke, each deeper cut was setting something free within her, something genuine that stung at her nerves as she swallowed blood and laughter and watched the girl staring back at her laugh and laugh and laugh as her mouth, chin, cheeks, became stained in sticky, hot, delicious red—
The razor clattered to the floor, and the girl staring at herself finally saw Rachel, with her Glasgow grin dribbling blood across her burning cheeks and throat.
And for once she felt alive.
She smiled at herself. She would always smile. And, with a flourish, feeling pretty as she licked stray droplets of blood from her fingers, she skipped across the bed into awaiting arms and the fit of cackling laughter in the never-ending darkness.
