When she opens her eyes, painfully bright white meets them. This scene, this room, is far too familiar. And so is the scent of antiseptic.
Julia wakes up to observe the hospital room around her, and it's not long before they brief her on things. The nurses, doctors, policemen that visit; they tell her all about it.
Michael is dead. She knew that from when she heard him breathe his last, a soft sigh of a name. She asks who Samantha is. They won't tell her. They say that it wouldn't be good for her health. For her mental health, they mean. They tell her that she lost a lot of blood and lost consciousness, and they tell her that she might have a slight limp from the bullet's damage, and they tell her that she'll probably need a cane sometimes. Apparently, the bullet hit bone and cracked it. Badly. She's drugged out on morphine a lot of the time.
She almost died. One of the doctors tells her that someone upstairs must really like her. She smiles wryly and tells him that the only luck she's ever had came from way down below. He doesn't know how to respond to that. And so he doesn't. He leaves her alone.
Commissioner Gordon comes to talk to her. He tells her that he's sorry that she's gone through so much. She tells him that he didn't have control over it, because if he did, she'd have smacked him by now. He interviews her, though not too in-depth, and asks basic questions. She answers only a few, and dodges the rest. Before he can leave, she asks him to tell Batman 'thank you' if he ever sees him again. Gordon looks at her a bit oddly, but says that he'll try. He leaves, and she wonders if the Joker is finally through with her. She then looks down at her hands and begins to rub them raw with her bed sheets, trying to get off bloodstains that only she can still see. By the time the nurses catch her, she's already bleeding.
It's two months before she's allowed out of the hospital. A month to convalesce, another for rehabilitation. She has no insurance, and Nathan won't recognize her anymore, so an incredible sum of debt is now on her head; it's a huge weight on her shoulders, as she walks out of the hospital with a cane in her hand and a bottle of valium in her pocket. Reporters mob her for the second time in her life, shoving microphones in her face, screeching questions. Someone's let it slip that the battered woman on the newest Joker tape is alive and well. The bruises and black eye have faded, and her split lip has healed. She's a beautiful, tired, limping woman, swinging her cane now and then to cut a path through reporters.
The first thing she does when she gets out is look up 'Keegan'. She finds a Samantha Keegan. She lives in a small, ratty apartment in a dangerous neighborhood. Gunshots fire off in the distance as Julia walks up to the door, cane-less, since she doesn't rely on it to move around and only needs it on very bad days.
Samantha Keegan is Michael's sister, and bedridden. She's got some sort of disease that keeps her bedridden, a nerve disease that makes it much too painful for her to walk around but for a minute or two. She's also blind.
"Oh, hello, miss Julia." Samantha says, smiling, as Julia comes in. She was let in by the neighbor that helps take care of Samantha now that Michael is gone.
"Hello, miss Keegan." Julia smiles, walking in and standing near the door. Samantha laughs gently, her cloudy eyes staring ahead blankly.
"Call me Samantha. Miss Keegan is too fancy for someone like me."
"Alright, Samantha. Call me Julia." She answers, before leaning against the wall of the dirty apartment building.
"Julia…I always thought that was a very pretty name. Much prettier than Samantha, at least."
"Not at all, Samantha. Julia doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as Samantha." Julia laughs, and Samantha laughs with her. They spend an hour or two as Samantha talks about her brother, Michael, and about all the things they did together as kids. Julia never told Samantha what she came here for, and she was never told that Julia is Michelle King, the woman that shot her brother, but Julia is pretty sure that Samantha somehow just knows.
"He was saving up for an operation for me. Cataracts, you know. He wanted to fix them." Samantha explains, cheerily, smiling very gently. "I told him that it was fine, that I didn't need it, but he wouldn't listen. He wouldn't hear it. He wanted me to see again." She sits up in her bed, staring at-but not seeing-the bland-colored quilt draped across her. "I didn't lose my sight until college. They said that it's usually a disease just for older people, but it happens in younger people, too; Michael said that he was going to get me that operation to see again."
Julia smiles, very sadly, and says nothing, sitting in the chair she's pulled up beside Samantha's bed. Samantha reaches out and takes her hand, holding it tightly.
"He was doing bad things, wasn't he? He was doing wrong to try and get more money." The bedridden woman asks her, point-blank, and Julia blinks. How did she?
"N-no, of course…not…" Her voice cracks and she trails off at the end. Samantha smiles sadly, knowingly.
"You don't have to lie. I was always suspicious, ever since what money he got normally tripled. I asked him if he was, and he lied to me too. He said, 'Don't worry about it, Sammy.' He always said that when I was worried about him. I told him not to do anything dangerous, because he was all I needed. He laughed and said that I was being silly. And I believed him."
She turns her head, to stare at nothing across the room.
"And then one day, I guess it…caught up with him. It's Gotham City; you can't ever get away from what you've done, no matter how hard you try. It's always going to catch up with you. And whatever Michael did, caught up with him."
Julia can't talk. She's guilty. She's so damn guilty. She blames Michael, and at the same time, she wonders if she should've just let him kill her off instead of trying so hard to live. And what did she survive for? What did she throw away another person's life just to keep?
Two black eyes and a bright red slash of a smile are what she sees.
"So…whatever Michael did…don't blame him for it, please. Blame me." Samantha says, softly, and she smiles again, though she turns her head away from Julia so that her guest can't see her crying. "I told him not to do anything that could get him killed. He didn't listen."
"Don't worry…he's forgiven." Is all Julia can muster, her smile very slight, and forced.
Soon after, Samantha and Julia say their goodbyes. And Julia just…walks. She doesn't even know where she's going. She just walks. She walks down every sidewalk she sees, turning whatever corner is ahead, crossing what streets she comes across, never stops. She eventually finds herself at the top of a tall building, staring down. The sun is setting far in front of her, a burning light that remains one of the few that Julia can even see anymore. She stands on the edge of the building, staring down, down, down, four or five stories to the street and cars below. The people walking by on the sidewalk. She wonders what would happen if she takes a single step forward and plummets to her death. Would it be news? Would anyone care? Another poor sap can't take it all anymore and decides to step off a building. Cleanup. Curtains.
Another life slips by in Gotham. And nobody cares.
She stands there for hours. Just watching. And by the time the sun is setting, someone walks up behind her.
"So, are you going to jump? The anticipation's been killing me."
She looks back and sees the terror of Gotham City stroll up to stand at the ledge, slightly behind her and to her left. He has his hands behind his back, and isn't looking at her, but out at the skyline. Julia looks out at the setting sun as well, the cool wind whipping her hair out of her face and blowing it to the right, a long golden curtain twisting in the breeze.
"It depends. Swan dive or running leap?"
"How about a cannonball?"
They are silent for minutes that feel like days, before she glances up at the barely-visible stars high above her. "Has Gotham always been like this?"
"It depends. Are we talking about how they see it, or how I see it?" Joker asks, easily, and Julia doesn't have to see him to know that he means the people, small as ants, walking along the sidewalk below them.
"Surprise me." She answers, and there is neither sadness nor joy in her tone. She is empty. He climbs onto the ledge beside her, staring down. He looks as if he's done it many times before.
"Gotham's been like this since the first little man decided to build a city here. It's just hidden behind their-" He taps his boot on the ledge twice, "-protective veils. They don't see it like we do, because they'd go gibbering mad if they did. We see this city…this animal named Gotham for what it is."
"And what is that?" She glances sideways at him, and sees that he's staring down at the street below, scars painting a smile where there is none, and he's thinking about taking that one extra step.
"A sane asylum."
The two of them stand there for what feels like an eternity, before the sun sets and they are sunk in darkness. Lights, pinpricks like diamonds, light up the pitch-toned Gotham night.
"I killed a man." She says, suddenly, and he nods his head slightly.
"I know. Did you like it?"
"…I don't know. I hate the aftermath, though."
"Ah, everybody does."
She stares down at the ground again, and lifts her foot to take that last step. She sets it back down a moment later.
"Can't win for losing in this damn city."
Joker glances sideways at her, and he's trying to read her blank expression. "No…nobody wins. We just lose in different ways."
A moment later, Julia steps off the ledge, and back onto the building. Joker does as well, standing beside the ledge instead as he watches her take a few steps forward and stop.
"I had a dream. It was the one that made me decide to run away again, that last time." She keeps her back to him, staring off into the distance. He leans against the raised ledge, watching.
"Oh? Care to share?" He asks, casually, and she puts her hands behind her back, clasping them together.
"It was snowing, and I was standing on a ledge. And I decided to walk off."
"Sounds like a pretty good dream to me."
"One of the best I've had in years."
She turns around, and walks up to him, slowly. Her bright blue eyes, though their color is fake, meet his black pair, and he watches her quietly.
"Is it always this hard?" She asks, softly, and he stares off at the moon, distantly.
"It's never the same for two people. Sometimes, we have to be driven to it, slowly. Sometimes, we just snap. Other times, we just wake up one day and decide we can't take it anymore. Madness is a funny sort of thing; it's kind of like Heaven, you could say. It's easy once you're there, but it's hell to actually get there."
Julia walks forward, slowly, almost drunkenly, and leans against his chest, loosely wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder. Joker lets her do this, because he knows that it's a hard transition from the people walking the streets below them to what he is. It's losing all your faith, and throwing aside everything you ever believed in. It's giving up on ever living a normal, quiet life, the white picket fence and the American Dream, if anything as stupid and fabled as that even exists. It's losing yourself and putting the pieces back together in a new order.
It's a rebirth in fire.
The Joker sits on the ledge and lets Julia lay against him, loosely circling his arms around her waist. He can't tell if she's laughing or crying into his chest, and he'll never know. She'll never tell him that she's not doing it for herself, she's doing it for him for having to do this all alone.
Saccharine and Strychnine, high in the Gotham night.
((So...what did you guys think? I really like this chapter, and I think it's one of my better ones, but that's just me. What did you guys think of it? Good? Bad? You-suck-and-need-to-jump-in-a-volcano? I'm eager to hear.^^))