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When your eyes wander towards the fringes of Gotham City, sometimes you can see the tattered remnants of a circus tent standing alone in the distance.
Tonight upon the centre stage, the clown prince raises his hand to trace against the constellations in the sky, much like a child connecting the dots of a puzzle game. He wasn’t crestfallen or sullen per se, not melancholy nor morose. He was quietly contemplating, confined within a prison much like his familiar paint-strewn cell at Arkham Asylum.
It’s easy to lose your mind in a place like that.
The fraying tent had collected a bittersweet snow from those last days of winter, whilst damp garlands from a distant time when there used to be marvelous performances and spectacles were strewn across the grass, melting into the dirt in tattered ruins.
All good things eventually come to an end, the clown supposed, twisting his figure to clutch at a piece of canvas that had been flailing miserably against the wind. He tore down the loose seam that pathetically tied it to the main fixture of the tent as if his nails were a suture against a flimsy stitch, settling to keep it aside for his own mischievous plans and projects.
It was funny, he thought to himself, recalling the murmur of not-so-distant memories in the quite-so-distant depths of his mind. It was only a few days ago that these same hands, far less composed but twice as sharp, had carefully sliced away at a row of terribly hand-sewn stitches that embedded a usually kevlar-covered arm of ashen skin.
He had drawn the blood of course, the wound was obviously a creation borne of his own wicked knife skills- a parry of blade against blade in the quiet yet churning underbelly of dear Gotham.
Here he was, home sweet home.
It was a dance to remember, that night, with the mellow gloom of a waning crescent as their spotlight and the city as their audience. The skylines and towering buildings were the stage they were doomed to dance on, their music orchestrated from the heaving moans and shuddering screams of machines in the distance.
Passionate footsteps that started off as uncertain but grew confident with each slide, turn and embrace; finally, a dance that the darkness of Gotham would never forget.
“You’re pacing tonight seem a little more disjointed than usual dear Batman,” the Joker cackled, lazily swinging his knives into the air and towards his beautiful target, “why, are you losing your finesse my darling?”
The Joker already knew the answer of course, the both of them did, but he wanted to hear it in words, he wanted to see him surrender on his knees and sitting on his pretty muscled thighs. For the way that every fight seemed to lead to truce in the form of a battle between two tongues in the back of the Batmobile, or a quick, biting kiss on the neck whenever they threw themselves at each other and aimed for the kill that would never come.
They had no weakness, the two of them.
They had no weakness except for each other, but they didn’t seem to fully understand that concept and were too stubborn to admit it.
“Do you ever stop?!” the Batman growled, lunging at the smiling clown’s pale neck, his fingers reaching to clutch the Joker’s already bruised throat from their previous frenzied night together. A quiet yet carnal voice in the back of the brooding man’s mind urged him to leave a smattering of purple and black across the pretty curves of his lover’s neck, but he restrained himself with a fierce grit of his teeth.
“Mark him,” they whispered.
“That’s more like it big boy, you know I simply adore it when you do that hehe,” was the prince’s only reply, snarky as usual and frighteningly enticing, his body limply hanging against the taller man grip, feet swaying playfully like a child as he hung above the cement.
“We need to talk.”
With that the Joker quizzically raised an eyebrow, his hideous smile quirking up into an even more frenzied grin.
“What about, my dear?” he replied teasingly, hoping to elicit a more exciting reaction that would have probably allowed the other man to let off some steam and breathe a little for once, but he knew exactly what was being referred to, despite his unsuccessful attempts to brush it off.
“You know what I mean Joker, can you stop trying to act stupid about it?” Batman growled.
This was not what he was expecting. He really thought the blue eyed hunk would have held out on brandishing his pathetic feelings for a little longer so that they could enjoy some more fun together but that was obviously not the case here. He also did not expect the man to read his thoughts so clearly, because usually people found him difficult to decipher- he was a joker after all.
It seemed yet another spanner had been thrown directly towards him in the form of a bat-shaped brolic, and it was dead set on derailing his plans.
“Joker please. We need to talk about…this.”
Their bodies paused, but the green and blue of their eyes continued to clash amidst the furious heat of internal turmoil and bruising hurt.
“No, we don’t,” he sniffed.
And with that the Joker squirmed out of his grasp as the Batman’s chokehold loosened slightly in hesitance or hurt, even. It was only a glimpse, barely a fraction of a second beneath his cowl, but the Joker always noticed the alluring flicker of darkness whenever it appeared within his sweet boy’s eyes.
The Joker was not one to confront his feelings, nor allow himself to be confronted by others, but he couldn’t help it in his nature to exploit a moment of weakness, even in the man he so truly adored.
The knife plunged through black kevlar and cleanly pierced through the masked man’s bicep, earning the Joker a brilliantly delicious moan of pain. He would certainly replay that sound in his mind, perhaps in a number of other exciting situations, because it was simply a marvellous sound to hear.
“Sorry sweetheart, but you know how I feel about emotional conversations don’t you?” He rolled his shoulders back and cracked his neck slightly. “They can become such a rollercoaster. I thought you knew me better. But let me remind you again, don’t you dare try and force me to regurgitate my feelings and play pretend therapist love, that’s not your job.”
And with his signature smirk he had slinked into the shadows for a few moments and remained unseen, while the other man clutched his bleeding arm with a pained expression plastered under his cowl-covered face.
The Joker had a tendency to observe, but a preference to ignore.
So he chose to ignore the pathetic heartbreak in his darlings’ heart that was tearing him into a shattered mosaic of blood-tainted pieces right in front of his very eyes. It was heartbreak that Batman would rather wear on his face instead of the pain from his severed arm that was in desperate need of medical attention and a set of stitches. He scaled the wall behind him without looking back at the mess unravelling quietly in a puddle of warm blood.
He honestly could not believe the man.
The Joker had stayed in hiding after that. He would never admit out loud that he was just a smidge ashamed at his impulsive behaviour that night and couldn’t bring himself to face his lover, but the separation? Being apart was extraordinarily unbearable.
That was when he casually waltzed into the Batcave, a few weeks later, just to check in on whether the wound had almost healed. They had hurt each other plenty of times of course, a rough battering over here or an aggressive assault over there, but this time things didn’t feel as simple as a violent left hook to the jaw. The Joker easily avoided detection as he carefully leaped over the traps and triggers littered in every wrong corner of the lair (he would certainly remind his sweetheart to reshuffle the layout of his little man cave into something that was a little more of a challenge to get through).
That was when he held a knife to his dear beloved’s throat with the warmest grin he could muster, but seeing the man hunched over his desk in pure, unbridled concentration and a sling on his arm attacked him with a guilt he could barely explain.
“Hello Bats, did you miss me?”
With a swivel of his chair, the Batman lurched forward to pin his attacker to the ground, a classic yet predictable move. He failed miserably, because ultimately it was the beast himself who was actually pinned to the ground.
“Ah ah ah sweetie, that’s not what I was expecting from you after such a long time,” the Joker giggled, turning the little knife between his fingers. “Sorry about the wound though, it was quite a nasty gash. I hope that’s healing up alright?”
And that was when the man underneath him darkened his gaze and scowled harshly in his direction. The Joker was used to people reacting that way whenever they saw him, it was a common and typical occurrence. But when it was the Batman, his beloved hopeful Batman- the one who always treated him with the sickly goodness of his soul no matter how horrific his crimes were- then I guess you could say that it hurt him a little.
Just a little.
“You know I was only trying to talk.”
With that, their eyes met abruptly before Batman looked away, unable to confront the endless list of errs and mistakes he committed when it came to the green haired man in front of him.
The man who never failed to tear into his already festering wounds.
The man who severed his ability to share his heart with anyone else except him.
The man who continued to wreak havoc on his rationality and basic sense of reasoning whenever decisions involved the two of them.
And the clown knew that, because it was all the same for him too, albeit in his own cruel, wicked and monstrous way. So he shifted his lover’s sleeve to observe the wound, rolling his eyes and muttering a string of curse words to himself at the sight of the messily stitched lines that had been sewn in a hurry.
They taunted him, no, laughed back at the clown for the sheer hypocrisy of his actions- the fact that although no one else was allowed to touch his sweet Batman he was always the one that dealt that final fatal blow.
They would always end up hurting each other, he supposed, that was the way things were between them, an endless cycle of violence, torture and eventual heartbreak.
They both knew that truth.
But he still raised his sharpened fingernails and carefully sliced away the flailing pieces anyways, pulling out the string that remained partially nestled within Batman’s arm, much like his own conflicting emotions that he had yet to surface from his own quicksand of perpetual trauma and nightmares.
With a kiss on the bicep he pulled off the last string and raised himself from his straddling position atop of the Batman’s hips, watching curiously as the man grimaced in discomfort as the remaining string slid out of his skin.
The Joker casually brushed himself off, removing the invisible specks of dust and grime that coincidentally seemed to have settled over his purple suit. He cleared his throat awkwardly, and at that moment the tension between them seemed to catch up to the man as he wavered slightly, despite the proud and confident way he usually held himself.
He couldn’t stay any minute longer, so he prepared to leave.
But before he could, calloused fingers grabbed his wrist and he looked behind his shoulder guardedly. On the floor were a pair of black leather gloves that had been hurriedly shucked off, and pitiful blue eyes that stared painfully into his own.
“Thank you.”
And still clutching the threadbare fabric in his hand, the Joker let out a bow to his invisible audience atop the stage of that fallen circus tent, covering his tear-streaked eyes.
If only the world could know what heartbreak was like.
The heartbreak of tearing into the flesh of someone you love with your own teeth, only to feed yourself in a moment of weakness.