The numbers on the bedside clock had been stuck at 3:17 for so long Anne began to suspect she'd died, some undetectable slippage, a clot in the mechanism of her own life.
The blackout curtains were drawn, but the Hollywood light managed to blade in around the edges, throwing a faint grid across the carpet and the upturned heel of her foot. The hotel suite was climate-controlled to an inhuman chill; she could see the goosebumps stippling her arm, but her skin still sweated, thin as mist.
Her pulse flared and faded in her neck, as if trying to wriggle out from under her own collarbone.
She lay cocooned in the sheets, legs tangled at the knees, left shoulder pressed to the mattress like an accusation.
The sheets—Egyptian cotton, the kind they sent up for "executive" guests—clung to her shins, damp from a restless, half-febrile sleep she could neither sink into nor escape.
Her head ached.
Her eyes burned.
The muscles behind her jaw wouldn't let go.
A half-empty glass of water sweated on the nightstand, leaving a ring that would probably outlast her tenure on this film.
She ignored it, and instead reached for her phone, feeling the shame crawl over her before her fingers even touched the device.
The lock screen pulsed a desperate blue; three new notifications blinked at her from the dead zone of midnight to now. She ignored those, too.
Instead, she scrolled past the script, the studio emails, the cluster of group texts from "Set Girls" and "Chez Chez"—her home circle—until she found the video.
She'd deleted it after the first watch, then re-downloaded it from the same private link, again and again.
The title was just a string of numbers and letters, a placeholder from some assistant's dropbox, but the thumbnail was unmistakable: the blurry, predatory lean of a man whose name wasn't supposed to exist outside of rumor. She felt her lips go dry.
She plugged in her earbuds, even though no one was around to hear.
The video was only forty-seven seconds, compressed to artifact and motion blur. Whoever had filmed it had done so covertly; the image bobbed and jerked from inside a blazer pocket, the lens occluded by a single thread of black hair for the first five seconds.
The casting room was a box of light and linoleum. A figure sat dead center, arms at his sides, unmoving.
She pressed play.
For the first ten seconds, nothing happened. The man—Marcus, she reminded herself, the name so new it was still soft on the inside—sat like a cadaver on display.
Even through the phone camera, the sense of inertia was monstrous: the body was still, but you could see the breath riding under his shirt, just enough to remind you there was an animal in there, waiting.
Anne inhaled, unconsciously mirroring the motion.
Onscreen, the man shifted. It was a minimal movement—a tilt of the head, a flare of the nostrils—but it rippled outward, changing the entire gravity of the shot. Even the camera operator must have felt it; the frame stuttered, as if the person filming had flinched.
Then the laugh came.
She was ready for it, or thought she was, but it still struck her: not a bark, not a cackle, not even the trademark shriek every director demanded from a Joker. It started low, a hum, then tripped into a shuddering wheeze, and finally broke into a high, sustained pulse that sounded, for one split second, like honest, animal panic.
She felt her heart clutch.
The glass on the nightstand vibrated with the sound.
The man onscreen did not smile. His lips moved, but the rest of his face stayed slack, like the muscles had been detached and rehung by a blind puppeteer. His eyes—impossibly green, the only color that survived the compression—did not blink once.
The laugh faded. The man said nothing. In the background, the casting room was silent, and Anne recognized the kind of silence you only heard in two places: church, and the moment before someone confesses to a murder.
She let the video finish. Then, hating herself, she scrolled back and pressed play again.
This time, she watched for the tells. The body language, the micro-expressions. She was a professional; she had spent a lifetime reading men for the instant when the switch flipped from performative to real. Marcus didn't flip. He just hovered in the space between, so present and so absent that Anne couldn't help but feel she was the one being auditioned.
A bead of sweat rolled down her sternum. She pressed her thumb hard against her collarbone, grounding herself.
She watched his eyes. In the frame's last ten seconds, something changed—not a smile, not even a twitch, but a subtle, decaying focus, like he was looking out from the other side of the glass and searching for the person who couldn't look away.
Anne's breath caught. She squeezed the tip of her tongue between her teeth, not realizing she was doing it until her jaw ached.
She rewound the video again, this time to the moment before the laugh started. She watched the man's face, the way he let the mask of civility loosen, the second he gave up trying to look human. She'd seen actors do this, of course. She'd done it herself, breaking eye contact, letting the lips part, all the textbook manipulations.
But she'd never seen someone do it with so little effort. It was as if the Joker had been drawn in pen, and the man just erased himself to let it show through.
Anne flung the phone onto the bedspread. The screen blinked out, but the image stayed, etched against the insides of her eyelids.
She wiped her palms on the duvet, then kicked free of the covers, legs bracing against the cold air. The digital clock now said 3:21, but she doubted it.
Time was a hoax in these rooms. She let her feet hang over the edge of the bed, toes curled against the berber, waiting for the shudder in her hands to stop.
She wanted to laugh.
She wanted to cry.
Instead, she sat there, letting the city's hum creep in through the walls, and tried to name the thing that was clawing at her inside.
She couldn't.
The phone vibrated again. An email this time, the subject line a bland "Monday Schedule Update," but the name at the bottom made her chest go tight.
It was from Christopher Nolan, time-stamped 3:18 AM. Anne didn't open it. She didn't need to. She knew what it would say: that the read was perfect, that she should come prepared, that Marcus would be on set at first call.
She knew that what she was feeling wasn't just fear. It was anticipation, cut with something sharp and sweet and wholly forbidden.
Anne lay back down, this time on her side, knees pulled up, sheets bunched between her thighs. She set the phone on the pillow next to her, screen up, video paused at the exact frame where the man's eyes found the lens.
She traced a fingertip along her throat, the skin still electrified from the earlier jolt. Then she closed her eyes, hoping that sleep would drown out the sound of the laugh, knowing that it would only come back louder in her dreams.
In the dark, the numbers on the clock changed, one by one, but Anne did not notice.
She was waiting, still, for the punchline.
.....
She gave up on the bed by four, the sheets now so knotted it would take a crime scene crew to untangle them. The hotel room felt both too large and too airless, the kind of space you could only belong in if you were actively fleeing from somewhere else. Anne pulled on a robe—hotel-issue, thick and overbleached—and drifted to the window.
Outside, the city ran on ghost logic: sodium vapor lamps, the cool stripe of traffic on Sunset, the faint shimmer of pool water lit like an aquarium three stories down. No people, just the sense of millions, each alone in their separate rooms. Anne touched her forehead to the cold glass, grounding herself in the sensation.
She dialed Nolan before she could change her mind. It was something you just didn't do—no one, not even top-billed, called the director at this hour. The phone barely rang before he answered.
"Anne," he said. Not a question, not even a greeting. Just: Anne.
She stared at her own reflection in the glass, the robe's lapels gone askew, hair coming loose from its braid and fanning out around her ears. She looked like a ghost of herself, and maybe that was the point.
"Sorry," she said, though she didn't mean it.
"I had to."
Nolan's voice was glass: sharp, clear, but with a dangerous edge.
"I haven't slept, either."
She found herself grateful, which made her angry.
"What the fuck did you do to him, Chris?"
Nolan exhaled. She pictured him in his office, the shades drawn, tie loosened but never removed.
"I didn't do anything to him, Anne. He did it to himself."
She pressed her lips together, watching the city's lights stutter in the glass.
"Is he method? Or broken?"
There was a pause. In it, Anne heard the whir of distant servers, the click of a pen on a legal pad, the universe adjusting itself to accommodate a new anomaly.
"I don't know what he is," Nolan said.
That was worse than an answer.
She listened, waiting for more, but the director seemed content to let the silence grow. Anne broke first.
"I can't stop watching it."
"Neither can I," said Nolan.
"I've watched it twenty-three times. I keep looking for the moment when he loses control, but it never comes. He's always in control. Even when he's falling apart."
Anne's hand tightened on the phone. The plastic dug into her palm, grounding her.
"I've done reads with psychos, Chris. They always want you to see the seams. This guy—" She stopped, unable to finish the sentence.
Nolan rescued her, in his own way.
"It's something I've never seen before. He's not playing it as chaos. He's playing it as inevitability."
Anne shut her eyes, the city a smear of color behind her lids.
"Is he dangerous?"
Nolan considered.
"Not unless you try to make him be anything else."
She didn't know what to say to that, so she didn't say anything. Nolan waited her out, then spoke, softer this time.
"Are you scared?"
Anne forced herself to breathe. She licked her lips, surprised to find them dry.
"I don't know," she said.
"Should I be?"
Nolan's laugh was a single, humorless puff.
"I'd be more worried if you weren't."
They both hung in the silence, two signals bouncing through the night.
"I'll see you at the table read," he said, and Anne could hear the fatigue, the tremor of excitement barely contained beneath it.
"Yeah," she said.
"See you there."
He hung up first. Anne set the phone down, hands trembling.
It didn't take long for the messages to start.
The first was from an old friend in casting—three lipstick kiss emojis, followed by:
"Girl, is he for real?" Anne didn't reply.
Next came a group text from the set designer:
"He's got… that energy."
One of the PAs chimed in:
"Be careful with this one."
Someone else, anonymous, sent:
"This is not normal."
She stared at the last one, the words burning white against the phone's dark mode.
Her thumb hovered over the keyboard, uncertain how to answer. The world expected Anne Hathaway to be unflappable, to have a smart take, a joke, a meme, a quip about being licked by the new Joker. But her hand wouldn't move. There was no script for this.
She looked up, back to the window. The reflection stared her down, unblinking, the eyes in the glass too bright, the skin too pale, the jaw set just a little too hard.
She wondered if she was looking at herself, or at something else entirely.
She stood there, phone limp in her hand, letting the city move and shift below her. The room felt colder, the robe suddenly insufficient. She wrapped her arms tight around her waist, bracing against a chill that had nothing to do with air conditioning.
It wasn't fear, exactly. It was the sense of falling into an orbit around something with a gravity she couldn't measure.
Anne finally typed a reply—three dots, then erased them. She shut the phone off, set it screen-down on the sill, and pressed her forehead to the glass again, eyes open, daring her reflection to look away first.
Neither of them did.
...
She gave up on sleep entirely by five. The east-facing sliver of window had started to smudge from black to bruised blue, but in the hotel suite it was still night—lamps off, room cold, the only light the spectral glow from her laptop balanced on her knees. Anne hunched over it, a silhouette in the dimness, her robe gaping at one thigh and the skin there rising in gooseflesh.
She opened a private window and typed "Marcus Vale actor" into the search bar. The results were bleak, almost insulting: a handful of agency resumes (half of them broken links), one YouTube clip from a student film so pixelated it could have been anyone, and a single thread on an acting gossip forum, mostly speculation about his age and sexuality.
Anne scrolled, relentless, reading every comment. Most were about his looks—too thin, too pretty, probably gay—but none of it lined up with the man who had licked her palm and stared through her like he was taking inventory of her bones.
She tried "Marcus Vale Joker," but all that surfaced was a copy of the same audition tape she'd already watched.
Some Redditor had slowed the footage down to 0.25x speed, tracking the exact moment where Marcus's face transitioned from human to something else.
The comment upvoted most read:
"He doesn't blink. Not once. That's not acting."
She closed the tab, then opened her script, flipping to the scenes between Selina and the Joker. She'd read them a hundred times, rehearsed every line, but now the dialogue felt loaded, unsafe.
Every page bled double meaning:
"You like playing with fire, Selina?"
"Only if it's hot enough to melt the mask."
The lines were meant to be flirtatious, playful, but after last night's read, Anne could only hear them as threats, or invitations, or both.
She caught herself tracing the outline of her lips with a knuckle. It was the same gesture she'd made in the audition, a nervous habit, and she remembered—clearly, now—the way Marcus's eyes had tracked the motion, the way his nostrils flared as if the scent of her skin was a provocation.
The moment replayed in her mind, looping: the wet stripe of his tongue, the sudden grip of his hand on her wrist, the heat of his breath when he leaned in and called her kitty.
She let the memory settle in her body, not fighting it. She found herself shifting in the bed, legs folding and unfolding, toes curling in the thick carpet. She pinched the flesh at her thigh, just to feel something real.
The script slid to the floor. She closed the laptop with a snap, the sound too loud in the quiet.
For a minute, Anne just sat there, pressing her palms into her eyes, counting backward from ten like her therapist had taught her. It didn't help.
She whispered to the dark:
"This is just acting."
The words tasted like a lie.
She reached for her phone again, more desperate now than before. She dialed up the video, not even bothering to plug in her earbuds this time. The laugh came through tinny and distorted, but it still made her stomach flip.
She let the video run, then ran it again, and again. At some point her hand drifted down the line of her collarbone, pressing into the hollow at her throat. The skin there was hot, pulse rabbiting beneath the surface. She didn't know what she was waiting for, but the anticipation was its own kind of pleasure.
When the sun finally crested, Anne was still awake, still watching the screen, the Joker's laugh chasing itself around the walls of her suite.
She never did find the punchline. But by then, she wasn't sure she wanted to.
.........
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