It was past midnight by the time Nolan finally barricaded himself in the edit suite, a windowless cell at the back of the post-production offices, lined wall to wall with black sound-dampening foam.
The desk, custom-built, spanned half the room; on it, five monitors displayed competing realities. One ran the Barbara Gordon take, looping the moment the Joker's face entered the kitchen. Another, a security feed from the set, showed Marcus pacing the hallway in full costume, hands folded, head bowed.
Two more screens split the raw dailies from every angle, timecode numbers burning like stock tickers in the corners.
At the center, a single lamp illuminated a patch of desk, the glow cut through by the flick of Nolan's pen. He kept the old tools—Pilot G2, black, fine-tip—and used them even now, filling a leather-bound journal with page after page of cramped, tight notes.
The words marched up the lines, each observation layered with arrows and corrections, a forensic analysis of his own growing obsession.
He paused, letting the pen hover an inch above the page, then wrote:
Inhumanly still.
Emotionally overwhelming.
He pressed so hard on the final g that it tore through to the next page, leaving a ghost of the word for tomorrow's entry.
On the desk, beside the journal, the coffee had gone cold. He touched the rim, felt the chill, and slid it two inches to the left, out of his peripheral vision. The desk was otherwise pristine: not a single extra cable, not a crumb from the sandwich he'd inhaled seven hours prior.
The only other object was a small brass hourglass, the kind he'd used as a child to time his chess games, filled now with black sand. He flipped it without looking, letting the grains hiss against the glass as they measured the death of another minute.
He clicked to the audition tape, his fingers moving with surgical precision. He'd queued it to the exact moment—the frame where Marcus, not yet in makeup, first let the Joker surface. He had watched it twenty-three times. It did not get easier.
The first thirty seconds were the normal rhythm of an audition: the actor entered, shook hands, smiled just a shade too wide, tried not to betray nerves. Then, a pause—barely perceptible. The body stilled, every tic smoothed out as if erased by force of will. The silence was bottomless.
That was when it happened.
Nolan watched, frame by frame, as Marcus's entire demeanor rewrote itself. The eyes, previously glassy with nervousness, focused into pinpoints. The jaw squared, cheekbones hollowed as if by sudden dehydration.
He did not blink for twenty-seven seconds. When he did, it was deliberate, a gunshot of movement in a world otherwise paralyzed.
The voice was the next change. Not the laugh—that came later—but a kind of hush, a modulation that dropped the register by a half step and then let it linger, humid, in the air.
Nolan scribbled in the margin:
TRANSITION: 1:33:07—check for visual artifact. (Note: was there a flicker in iris?)
He rewound, slowed the playback to 0.25x speed. At the exact mark, there was a ripple across the pupil—a refraction, maybe, or a trick of the lens, but for a moment the eyes caught the light like an animal in a burrow.
He ran the footage again.
Still there.
Nolan leaned in, ignoring the crackle in his lumbar, and let his gaze blur. He counted the micro-expressions: a pulse at the temple, a twitch in the lip, the briefest dilation and constriction of the nostrils. He logged each one in the journal, a binary code of intention.
He wondered, not for the first time, if it was possible to teach this. If what he was watching was the product of some ancient suffering, or if it was just an aberration of chemistry and luck. He added, in a cramped side column:
Is this acting—or something else?
On the monitor to his right, the Barbara Gordon footage looped again. Eliza's hands, shaking in her lap. The Joker's approach, the way he bent the world around him.
Nolan watched her eyes for signs of a break—tears, terror, the moment she stopped being a professional and started being prey. He played it back, then again, each time searching for the moment the reality of it became too much.
He found it: a hitch in her breath at 17:04:55, right after the Joker leaned close and whispered in her ear.
He wrote:
Her face—unmistakable fear. Note: this is not a performance.
He let the pen roll, drumming his fingers in the shallow trough between the keys of the keyboard. Normally, Nolan was glacial. He prided himself on composure, on never letting the clock or the budget or the idiocy of studio notes provoke an outward sign.
But tonight the armor was gone. He caught himself fidgeting—adjusting his glasses with a touch too much force, flexing his jaw until it clicked. He loosened his tie, then undid the top button, a sacrilege in twenty years of editing rooms.
He scrolled to the second security feed. Marcus was still in the hallway, pacing the same five-meter strip, always counterclockwise, always with the left hand brushing the wall. Nolan counted the cycles: six, then seven, then eight. On the ninth, Marcus stopped dead, turned to face the camera, and held the stare for ten full seconds.
Nolan watched, pulse thumping in his ears.
He wrote:
He knows he's being watched.
The hourglass ran out. Nolan flipped it again, a tic now, and let the black sand start over.
He sipped the cold coffee, winced at the bitterness, then set the mug back down, a little too hard. The porcelain clinked against the brass of the hourglass, a discordant chime.
He closed his eyes, just for a second, and let the day's images flash behind the lids. The Joker, the hat, the white paint cracking at the temples, the smile too wide for the face. Anne Hathaway's hand clamped over her mouth, the set gone dead with fear. The final shot: Marcus, blood at the corner of his mouth, smiling at nothing, then walking away with the calm of a man who'd already won.
He opened his eyes.
The journal page was covered, every margin dark with annotation.
He turned to a fresh page, hesitated, then wrote in capitals:
THIS IS THE FILM.
He boxed it twice, drew a line under it so heavy the page buckled.
He sat back, exhaled through his nose, and watched the five screens as they marched through the next minute, then the next.
Outside, the world had gone dark.
Inside, the only thing alive was the footage. And Nolan, caught in its orbit, unable to stop watching even as the edges of his own mind began to fray.
He pressed play, one more time.
The laugh, when it came, was exactly as he remembered. Only now, it felt less like a performance and more like a confession.
He wrote, in smaller script, just below the last line:
I think he remembers it, too.
...
At 3:41 AM, Nolan abandoned the desk for the far corner of the suite, hands knotted behind his back, body in constant, agitated orbit. He paced the length of the floor, from the blackout-curtained window to the glowing wall of monitors, and back again. Every ten strides, he'd stop, turn, and glare at the screens as if daring them to blink first.
It was the only movement left to him. His mind, usually so cleanly subdivided—editor, director, architect, surgeon—had collapsed into a single, twitching impulse: Watch. Observe. Understand.
He watched the loop of the Barbara Gordon scene, then switched to the multi-cam grid, replaying the same sequence from three, four, five angles at once. Each time, he focused on something different: the turn of Marcus's head, the way the camera op's hands quivered on the rig, the trickle of sweat down Eliza's neck as the Joker drew near.
He muttered as he paced, voice low and fraying.
"Frame's off axis… too much negative space, but it holds. Light level—good. Shadow here, but intentional…"
He clicked his tongue. #
"Playback again. Slower."
He advanced the sequence, watched as the Joker moved through the kitchen, the Hawaiian shirt a flare in the institutional blue of the set. He paused at the frame where Marcus first locked eyes with Eliza, then rewound three seconds, then let it play again. Each time, the dread in the room was palpable, as if the camera itself was afraid of what it was filming.
He made another lap of the room. When he reached the desk, he collapsed into the chair, then immediately stood up again, unable to endure the stillness.
He returned to the journal, which now looked less like a notebook and more like a crime scene: pages torn, ink smeared from the sweat of his palm. He wrote:
Everyone is terrified.
Not just the crew.
Even the cameras are shaking.
Is this acting—or possession?
He stopped, pen hovering. The word looked absurd on the page. Possession. He underlined it anyway, then circled the whole line. He tapped the journal, one-two, one-two, as if it might pulse back a signal.
He replayed the take. This time, he let it run past the cut, into the aftermath—Eliza in the chair, mascara pooling at her jaw, the makeup artist frozen at the edge of frame, the boom op's hands trembling so hard the mic dipped into shot. The room was dead quiet; even in playback, the absence of sound was oppressive.
He noted the sequence:
Minute 1: Eliza's hands start to shake.
Minute 2: Crew at the edge of frame visibly withdraws.
Minute 3: Joker breaks, but crew does NOT relax.
He scrawled in the margin:
Is he safe? Are any of us?
He looked up at the monitor, at the looping image of Marcus in the hallway, pacing the same strip of floor, hair still neon under the utility lights, makeup now smeared with the sweat of three hours' performance. The security cam was black and white, but the contrast made the eye sockets look hollow, the smile even more obscene.
Nolan rewound, played it back at half-speed. He tracked the Joker's steps: five paces, turn, five paces, turn. Each time, at the pivot, Marcus would glance directly into the camera, holding the gaze for a heartbeat too long.
He thought of the classic stories—Kinski and Herzog, Brando and Coppola, all the cautionary tales of genius tipping into madness. He had always believed he was immune, that with enough planning and discipline he could coax a masterpiece from the jaws of chaos. But watching Marcus now, he felt that assumption dissolve like sugar in water.
He replayed the Barbara Gordon scene, this time with the sound off. The silence made it worse. The body language told the story: Joker, unblinking, advancing; Barbara, shrinking; the crew, contracting to the edges of the room. He studied the freeze-frames, watching the way tension rippled from one face to another, a contagion of dread.
He wrote:
This is not a performance. This is a viral load.
He leaned back, hands shaking, then caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection on the center monitor. The image was warped, flattened by the angle, but it was unmistakable: the hair mussed, the eyes rimmed red, stubble crowding the jawline.
He looked ten years older than the last time he'd seen his own face, and it was.
....
[Okay I've decided to put a target out there! If you want more chapters then gotta trade for power stones! I don't know if 50 per extra chapter is fair but let's start with that for now. You can complain here if it's not and let me know! Next I will also trade youa chapter per 5 extra reviews... seems excessive but we can change it later if it's too much but it seems achievable if you really want extra chapters.
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