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Chapter 10 - First Rehearsal

At precisely 8:29, the table read room went radioactive.

Most rooms, in this city or any, were built for the containment of anxiety: padded doors, thick carpet, glass brick meant to let in light while keeping out threat.

This one was designed for the slow cooking of souls. Fluorescent panels buzzed overhead, striping the walls in prison-blue and cutting shadows across the raw particleboard conference table. On the table: thirty-seven scripts, each fanned just so. Around the table: an audience of the doomed.

First came the assistants—badges, lanyards, and the hollow-eyed look of the sleep-deprived. They kept to the room's perimeter, shoulders hunched, teeth clenching their first coffee of the day. Then the below-the-line crew, some in fresh-washed tees, others in zip-up hoodies with thumb holes worried ragged by anxiety.

The DP, all five-seven of him, sat at the end, tapping a pen against a notepad. The script supervisor, in a leopard-print blouse, muttered a mantra to herself as she annotated the master.

Each person walked in with the same braced-for-impact demeanor, that peculiar industry blend of anticipation and fear, and took their place in the ring.

Nolan entered a minute later, alone. He wore a grey scarf over his collar, the ends tucked like a noose inside a blazer. He surveyed the room, eyes skating past everyone, then sat at the head with a practiced elegance, stacking his own copy of the script atop a legal pad that had already been annotated to hell. He said nothing. He didn't need to.

It was the Joker who entered next.

Not Marcus—no, the transformation was past tense by the time the door rolled open.

Hair dyed and blasted into a corona of green, roots already shading toward black where the scalp caught the light.

Face a demolition: base white scoured onto the bone, black around the eyes smeared so haphazardly that it looked accidental, but the effect was surgical.

Lips: red, feral, overdrawn past the anatomical possible, curving up in a sick imitation of pleasure.

He wore a velvet coat of such density it swallowed the photons around it, purple so deep it threatened to tear through the spectrum and into darkness. Underneath, a tailored shirt in acid mint, and gloves—black, soft, creasing in perfect concert with the movement of his hands.

He walked the length of the table, a predator gliding on a frictionless axis. Each step placed with impossible restraint, shoulders squared, chin down, eyes scanning each face but landing on none. It was not a walk; it was a diagnosis.

Conversations at the table stuttered and died, oxygen leaving the room on a tide of silence. A runner carrying a tray of pastries tripped over nothing, sending a muffin rolling under a chair. The script supervisor's pen hung in the air, tip bleeding ink onto her cuff.

The DP's tapping stopped, replaced by a death grip around the pen's middle. Even Nolan, who had never once betrayed anything like awe, shifted forward, body angled in the Joker's direction as if dragged by gravity.

Marcus (the Joker, now, and forever after) did not touch the script in front of his seat. He settled in, back ramrod-straight, hands clasped on the tabletop, fingers lacing and unlacing in a slow, mechanical rhythm. His gaze flickered over the faces in the room, studying their micro-reactions as if auditioning a new gallery of victims.

The only sound was the drone of the fluorescents, a steady background radiation that made every small noise—a page turn, a cough, the soft tap of fingers on plastic—feel like a gunshot.

Anne Hathaway entered last.

She wore black, as always—a sheath dress with cap sleeves, heels so sharp they could have drawn blood, hair pulled into a severe knot at the crown of her skull.

She moved with confidence, but the instant she saw him, the momentum went out of her like a punctured lung. She froze at the doorway, eyes taking in the Joker at the table, every painted detail, every inch of his deliberate, coiled posture.

Her own mask faltered, just for a frame, and the room felt it.

Anne steadied herself, blinked once, then took her seat across the table from him.

She did not look away.

Neither did he.

The script supervisor glanced at Nolan, who gave a single, tight nod.

"Okay, everyone," she said, voice shrill but determined.

"Let's begin."

A chorus of pages fluttered, a shiver running down the length of the table as everyone found their place. Breaths were held, then released in unison—one, then all, as if the Joker's presence had synchronized their nervous systems.

He waited for the cue, fingers still drumming that slow, arrhythmic tattoo on the tabletop. Then, with surgical timing, he looked up and began.

The voice was not the laugh, not the shriek from the tape; it was lower, weaponized, modulated for effect. It entered the room like a sedative and a razor at once.

"You ever wonder what makes a smile real?" he said, and the way he stretched the vowel at the end—real—turned it into both a threat and a caress.

"Is it the lips, or the eyes, or the bit where you show your teeth?"

Every head in the room jerked up, each person caught mid-action. Pencils hovered, water glasses froze halfway to lips, hands tensed on the edge of paper. Even the temperature seemed to drop. The Joker's words filled the void, pushing out every other sound.

He held the line, letting the silence grow until it threatened to crack.

Then he smiled—a slow, involuntary gesture, the muscles working against the paint until the red split to show the real mouth beneath.

Anne's jaw flexed. She ran her tongue over her teeth, steadying herself for her line.

The script supervisor's pen left a trail of ink on the page, unheeded.

Nolan leaned forward, mouth half-open, as if trying to taste the next line before it arrived.

The room didn't breathe until the Joker allowed it.

And then, at the precise moment the silence became unbearable, he answered his own question, voice even softer, but somehow more alive than anything in the room:

"It's all in the anticipation."

The line detonated.

For a full three seconds, no one moved. No one even blinked.

The reading had begun, and the Joker had already won.

...

What followed was not a reading.

It was an exorcism.

Joker's lines, on the page, were meant to be set dressing—punctuations of chaos amid Batman's monologues, something to break up the self-seriousness. But Marcus—no, the Joker—delivered them with a deliberation that made every syllable into a threat, every pause a dare.

His voice would flatten into a whisper, then explode into a peal of laughter, then snap back, jaws closing on the last word like a bear trap.

He didn't blink.

He didn't swallow.

He did not once, not even for a breath, leave the body of the thing he had become.

Anne found herself stranded on the far side of the table, script trembling in her hands. She'd never lost her place in a reading, not once in a career that spanned two decades, but today the lines shimmered on the paper, slippery and unreal.

Her throat constricted. She reached for water, missing the glass on the first pass, then clutched it so hard the ice clinked a nervous tattoo. When she did speak, the words landed at half-volume, starved of oxygen.

Her first Selina line was supposed to be a challenge.

"That's not a real smile. You're only stretching your mouth so people think you're happy."

Joker replied with no break, rolling right over her:

"You know what they say about masks, don't you? Eventually the face grows to fit."

The way he said it—the smile wide, but the eyes so cold and intent—made her lose the next line. She glanced at the script, mouth already dry, and the Joker caught her with a tilt of the head.

"You ever get tired of pretending?" he said, unscripted. The table read was meant to stick to the book, but he'd already detonated that rule.

Anne tried to recover, but her own voice came out thready, the consonants half-swallowed.

"It's only pretending if you think there's something better underneath."

Joker smiled again, but this time, he let it run too long, the silence stretching past comfort and into something bottomless. The script supervisor, still holding her pen, had stopped writing entirely.

The only movement was the slow bead of ink, pooling on the margin, threatening to overtake the page.

....

[Okay, I'm thinking we could set targets going forward with power stones. I don't know much about what would be acceptable but we could figure something out. Let me know what you guy's think.]

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