Patchwork

The delightful high Sarah had gotten from blowing up the building wore off quickly. It was hard to keep a buzz going when riding in silence alone in a van with a maniac.



And the Joker was certainly acting the maniac now. He licked his lips almost constantly as he tore through the streets, alternating mutters with insane laughter. At every corner he jerked the wheel as if he were breaking someone’s neck. More than once they’d taken a turn on two wheels.



Sarah clung to the seat, glad not to be in the empty back of the van; she was getting tossed around enough as it was. She didn’t speak a single word as the van whipped through Gotham, instead keeping a wary eye on the clown.



It wasn’t until they crossed the invisible border into the Narrows that the Joker slowed down to a more sedate fifty miles an hour. Those people still on the streets at this hour (and there were quite a few), followed the old Narrows habit of pretending not to see anything, and kept their eyes away as the van barreled through.



The Joker whipped around a sharp corner and came to a sudden stop in an alleyway. Sarah looked around, trying to identify what might have caused him to stop here. There was nothing special. The buildings on either side of the alley were two or three stories tall and one of them looked like it might have housed a restaurant at some point. Other than that, it might have any alley in any city in the world.



She turned her head back to the Joker, intending to ask him a question, only to find him staring intently at her. She closed her mouth with an audible snap.



For a full minute, the Joker just stared at her. Fear began to build in her chest, but she tamped it down. Finally, he moved, holding out his hand.



Sarah just looked at it, uncomprehending. Seeing her confusion, he ordered, “Hand.”



Slowly, she put her hand in his. Unsure if he was about to drag her out of the van or chop off her fingers, she closed her eyes and braced herself for pain.



Instead, he flipped her hand over and pressed something heavy and metallic into her palm. Opening her eyes carefully, one eyelid at a time, she saw it was her knife. When had she lost it?



“Don’t disappoint me in there, sweetcakes,” the Joker said, his voice heavy with amusement. He closed her fingers over the knife handle and let go.



Sarah stared at the knife in her hand for a moment before enlightenment hit her. The Joker expected her to prove herself, somehow. Without looking back up at him, she slipped out the van door.



She kept the knife in her hand as she followed the Joker up a fire escape. She couldn’t help but think of the last fire escape she’d seen, and was tempted to giggle at the thought. A delicate fizzing in her nerves returned with the memory.



The Joker stopped at the third floor window. Without a moment’s hesitation, he kicked the window in, sending shards of glass skittering across the floor. He swept in, holding his hand out like a gentleman to help Sarah inside. She couldn’t help but snort with laughter.



The apartment, if that’s what it was, seemed to consist of a single large room, furnished only with a large table, with two doors leading off of it. One, she assumed, led to the interior of the building. The other?



The Joker was already there, pounding on it. After a few seconds, it was pulled open from the inside and a greasy man peered out.



“Joker!” he exclaimed, clearly less than pleased and perhaps even a little frightened. Sarah couldn’t blame him. She knew from experience how terrifying it was to wake up to the Joker’s face.



“Jerry,” the Joker replied, the smile on his face changing until it had a sick twist to it. “We need to have a little chat.”



The man edged past him into the main room, stopping on the other side of the table from Sarah and the smashed window. He noticed the window first, letting out a small noise of dismay, before his eyes fell on her. Sarah glared, her thumb running gently over the edge of the knife blade.



The man leered at her from the other side of the table. She glanced at the Joker, who correctly read her expression and shrugged, grinning.



“Go play with your toy, sweetpea,” he said, nodding at the knife in her hand. Sarah’s fist tightened on the handle, then relaxed. He was being condescending, but it didn’t matter. Soon enough, her mind told her, and she smirked back at him. Soon enough.



Oblivious to their exchange, the greasy man hadn’t taken his eyes off of her. Licking his lips lasciviously, he spoke to the Joker.



“Looks like your new friend is going to have even more scars than you,” he said, his eyes never leaving Sarah’s face. “She’s all sewn up like a patchwork doll. That what you get her for, Joker? Little doll to play with?”



He cackled. The Joker’s eyes caught hers briefly. She read his look as expectant. This must be what he had meant. She was going to have to take care of this herself.



Sarah flipped the blade idly between her fingers, showing off the glint of sharpness while she waited for the man to stop laughing. Smiling into his eyes with a show of bravado that she didn’t feel, she said, “I do have a lot of scars. In fact,” she flipped the blade into a ready position, holding it up and pointing the tip at him threateningly. “I think I have a few to spare. Want one?”



“Your friend kidding?” he said to the Joker with a little laugh. Sarah caught a hint of nervousness to his chuckle. She knew she was going to have to prove herself to the Joker; he had made that much clear. Now seemed like an opportune moment.



Sarah slid across the room so quickly the man couldn’t react. Slipping one hand around the back of his neck like a lover going in for a kiss, she pressed the tip of her blade to his throat.



“How about right here?”



Being this close to the man made her want to vomit. He smelled like stale cigarettes, alcohol, and gasoline. She suppressed the bile rising in her throat, focusing instead on holding his eyes. She made her gaze ice cold, turning her eyes into frozen globes that bored into him and made him believe that she was willing to slit his throat.



A warm presence pressed up behind her. In her ear, the Joker purred, “Do it.”



The man’s eyes widened. “Joker, man, come on, Joker, I-”



The Joker’s gloved hand closed around her own on the knife handle, the purple leather soft against her skin. She didn’t even mind that he was touching her as he took control of her arm. Pushing the blade more tightly against the man’s throat, he applied enough pressure to dent the skin, but not break it.



The man whimpered. From behind her the Joker’s voice said calmly, “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. You sold me a bad detonator. I had to waste two perfectly good associates fixing it.”



Sarah watched dispassionately as the Joker controlled her hand. Ever since he’d touched her, she had felt like she was watching the situation through a glass wall in her mind. Physically, her mind was there, her hand on the knife, feeling everything. Mentally, her higher faculties viewed it from a distance, akin to watching a murder on television. It was happening, but it didn’t really matter because, after all, it wasn’t real.



The knife pushed at the man’s flesh, dimpling it deeply before finally slicing in. It was something like cutting into a peach, her mind observed distantly. The flesh of his neck separated easily before the sharpness of her blade, dropping a spurting waterfall of blood onto his body and hers and the Joker’s hand. Faintly, she heard the man gurgle, but she was more focused on the feel of the knife cutting through his flesh.



His death seemed to take forever. She didn’t even realize when he started to slip to the floor, until the Joker’s other hand came around to help her hold him up. If she’d been looking at his eyes, she might have seen them blur and turn dark, but her eyes were locked on the deep red of the exposed flesh in his throat.



It was the most beautiful color she’d ever seen.



That thought broke the glass wall, and suddenly her whole mind was there, holding up a dead man with her knife still in his throat. And the blood. Dear god, the blood was everywhere. It coated the front of her body, her arms and hands, and splattered her face in a viscous coat of warm, stinking fluid.



She started to shake. The Joker stepped away from her back, letting her drop the dead man to the floor. The knife pulled out of his throat with a sucking sound, and the noise of the body hitting the floor was sickening. She kept hold of the knife, and brought her hands up in front of her face. The coat of red-black blood turned her hands into something else, something that wasn’t a part of her anymore.



The Joker moved around in front of her, stepping over the body as if it was no more than pile of trash. And really, a part of her mind said distantly, it wasn’t any different, was it? Not anymore. She looked into his eyes, catching the excited gleam and the broad smile.



“Get used to the feeling. There will be a lot of blood on your hands if you stay with me.”



Sarah’s eyes dropped back to her blood-soaked palms, and the Joker laughed.