She arrived fifteen minutes before call, as always, even though no one was ever on time for a 6:30 rehearsal. The street was dead, still hungover from last night's shoot; her cab had glided up the block with no headlights, the driver not bothering to hide his yawn.
Anne let herself in with the security code, then climbed the stairs two at a time, pulse fluttering a measure off-tempo from the effort. She didn't need a mirror to know her eyes were rimmed in red, lids puffy, cheeks raw at the corners from what the makeup girls called "glycerin rash."
The tears in yesterday's scene had been real.
The ones after had been worse.
The rehearsal studio was on the second floor, above the dead sushi place and beneath a half-legal acupuncture clinic.
The hallway was cold, the floors hosed down but still sticky in spots; the kind of place that never lost the smell of old bleach. She swiped her badge, heard the pneumatic 'thwunk' of the door, and stepped into the room.
Inside: half-light, every surface somehow blue and gray at once. Overhead, a grid of fluorescents buzzed in uneven relay, so the corners of the room were in perpetual shadow but the center glared like an interrogation lamp.
At the heart of it all, a loose circle of folding chairs—twelve, though no more than six would ever be occupied. In the middle, a battered card table, script pages already spreading outward in a paper corona.
She went for the table first, picked out the stack with her name on the top. "Hathaway, A." The pages were thumbed and crimped at the corners, as if someone else had already rehearsed them, suffered them, folded and refolded them like a prayer. She tucked them under her arm, then hovered for a moment at the edge of the circle, unsure which chair to claim.
Two crew guys were in the corner, not looking at her but watching, one eye each, through the mask of routine. A woman with a headset swept the floor with a kind of punishing energy, like she could erase the residue of the Joker from yesterday's set if she just scrubbed hard enough.
Someone else—intern, maybe, or a very young PA—stood by the window, staring down into the alley, hands buried deep in the pockets of a fake leather jacket.
Anne sat, third from the left, near the script supervisor's customary perch. She set the script on her knees, folded both hands over the top, and tried to breathe slow and even. It did not work. Her chest felt knotted, the space behind her eyes still heavy with the ghost of the scene.
She blinked hard, once, then again.
The words swam on the page, even though she had them by heart.
She kept her head down, but she could feel the crew watching. Not with cruelty; just with the helpless curiosity of people who'd seen a car wreck and now wanted to know if anyone had survived.
The door slammed, once, loud enough to crack the silence.
He entered without looking up, no makeup yet, just the bones of the Joker inside the frame of a man. Marcus wore the clothes: pinstriped slacks, shirt open at the collar, hands in black gloves even though the heat was already climbing. His hair was wild, shot through with oil and what might have been the leftovers of green dye, not so much styled as corralled.
The way he moved—nobody missed it. Not walking, not stalking, but a sequence of slides and pivots, like someone who'd practiced on a wet floor and learned never to trust friction. He did not acknowledge the crew, the intern, not even Anne herself. He just entered the circle, stood at the head of the table, and regarded the room with a silence so total it infected the air.
A beat.
Then another.
He bowed, slow, like an actor at the end of a ruined play. The grin that followed was wide and elegant, but the eyes above it were cold, empty of all but calculation.
"Good morning, darlings," he said. Not loud, but pitched so it stuck to the walls.
No one answered.
Anne felt her hands start to sweat.
She pressed her palm into the script, leaving a half-moon of dampness on the cover.
He moved to a chair, second from the right, and sat. The act itself—sitting—seemed like a decision made only after every other possibility had been considered and rejected. He perched at the edge, back straight, one leg crossed over the other, as if daring the rest of them to relax first.
She tried to look at him without looking at him. The fluorescent lights hit his face from two angles, casting lines so sharp across the cheekbones that his profile looked carved. In the shadow, the hollows beneath his eyes went deep, predatory, almost hungry. The mouth—unstained by paint but shaped by habit—rested in a smile that never quite went away, even when the lips closed.
A silence held, dense and unbreakable. Crew swapped glances; the PA at the window vanished without a sound. The woman with the headset stopped sweeping and watched from the back of the room, arms folded, as if expecting a gun to go off.
Marcus let the silence stretch, then folded his hands in his lap and looked straight at Anne.
The room followed, as if on a wire.
She felt it—the old rush, the flush of attention, but it was tainted now, cut with a new awareness. The Joker had changed everything. Even the act of being seen was dangerous.
He cocked his head, just a shade, and the effect was immediate: everyone else seemed to shrink a little, space tilting subtly to frame him. He spoke, this time softer, but with the same precision.
"Ready when you are, Miss Hathaway."
Anne swallowed. Her throat was dry, even though her mouth was full of the taste of adrenaline.
She forced a smile, small and professional.
"Page nine?" she said, voice steady but an octave above normal.
"Where else?" he replied, and the room, the whole world, fell into orbit.
The script in her hand trembled, just a little, but the words waited on her tongue, as faithful and lethal as ever.
She found her line.
She read it.
The Joker, across from her, did not blink.
The rehearsal had begun, but the audition never truly ended.
.....
They started with the script, but it wasn't the words that mattered. It was the war of attention.
Anne read her first line—Selina's, but it may as well have been her own—delivered with the practiced, neutral energy of someone bracing for a blow.
"You ever wonder why people lie?" she asked, voice softer than she meant, but clean at the edges.
Across the circle, Marcus did not move. He held the script, but only as a prop; his eyes stayed on her, irises unblinking, pupils contracted to the sharpest pinpoints. Even in the fluorescent glare, his focus felt like a weight, pinning her to the cheap vinyl seat.
Anne breathed through her nose, slow and deep, felt the air catch at the top of her lungs. She tried to reset, to find the rhythm Nolan always said was "the pulse of the scene."
But the pulse was off.
She could sense her own arrhythmia in the tremor of her hand, the way the script pages wobbled as she found her next line.
"Some people just want to see how much they can get away with," she read, and it was meant as an accusation, but the words landed as an apology.
Marcus's mouth twitched, just a shade, but the rest of his face stayed locked. When he replied, the voice was modulated, a thin thread of humor wound around steel.
"You ever wonder if we're the only ones pretending?"
It was not in the script. The line was a scalpel, and it left a clean, cold line down the center of her chest.
She tried to hold his gaze, failed, then dropped her eyes to the page. The lines swam, then resolved. She found her cue and pushed through.
"I'm not pretending. Not with you."
The silence that followed was not a pause—it was an act of violence.
Marcus leaned forward, elbows on knees, spine so straight it looked unnatural. He did not need to speak; the body language was louder than any line.
Anne's throat closed, just for a second. She could feel the crew at the edges of the circle, every one of them pretending not to stare, not to flinch at what was happening.
She tried for bravado, the old Selina muscle memory. She lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, forced the next line out in a whisper:
"You don't scare me."
This time, he smiled. Not wide, not theatrical, just enough to show the teeth.
"Maybe not yet," he said.
She heard the blood in her ears, the distant high whine of anxiety.
The director's chair was empty, but she could imagine Nolan's note in the margin:
"Let it breathe."
Let what? The scene, or the panic?
They ran it again, and again. Each time, the script fell away sooner. Each time, the space between them shrank.
On the fourth run, Marcus broke the circle.
He stood, moved around the table, his steps silent on the scuffed linoleum. He circled her once, slow, then stopped directly behind. Anne felt the heat of him at her back, the static in the air as the hairs on her arms lifted.
He did not touch her. Not even close. But when he spoke, the sound traveled through her skin before it reached her ears.
"You know what I see when I look at you?" he asked.
She did not answer.
"I see someone who would burn the world just to keep warm. Isn't that right, kitten?"
He let the word linger, soft at the end.
Anne's pulse tripled. She tasted adrenaline at the back of her tongue, metallic and sweet. The pages in her hand shook, the tremor visible to everyone in the room.
She tried to reply, but her breath caught. The world shrank to the diameter of the circle, then to the space between her ear and his mouth.
Marcus moved, slow and deliberate, around to face her. He dropped to a crouch, knees nearly touching the edge of her chair. He looked up at her, eyes unblinking.
The line in the script called for confrontation. For Selina to spit a curse, throw a punch. Instead, Anne just stared at him, frozen.
She could feel her pupils dilate, the world blurring at the periphery. A single tear, hot and embarrassing, tracked down the right side of her face, catching at the edge of her mouth.
She felt her lips part, ready to answer, but nothing emerged.
Marcus waited, then leaned in so close she could smell the faint, sterile tang of makeup remover and the residue of sweat.
"You'd burn the world just to keep warm, wouldn't you, kitten?"
This time, the line was not a question.
Anne's body answered for her: breath stuttered, hands clenched tight on the script, spine arched as if resisting the gravity of the moment.
No one in the room moved. Not the crew, not the PA, not the script supervisor, who had set down her pen at some point and now sat with both hands in her lap, watching as if afraid to break the spell.
Marcus held the pose, then, with a gentleness that made the moment worse, reached out and touched her knee. Just two fingers, gloved, barely a graze.
The contact was electric. Anne jerked, involuntary, and the pages of her script slipped from her hand, fluttering to the floor.
She looked at him, and for the first time, he blinked.
Then he smiled, stood, and walked away, leaving her to gather herself from the debris.
The silence in the room was total.
Anne stared at the dropped pages, at her hands, at the space where the Joker had been. She wiped at the tear, smeared it across her cheek.
Nobody said a word.
There was nothing to say.
She knew the scene was over, but it would take a while before her body believed it.
...
After he left her in the silence, Anne lingered in the aftermath, the tremor in her body refusing to subside. She stared at the fallen pages—her lines, her script, her entire reason for being in this room—and wondered if she had ever actually memorized a single word. Her hands hovered over the mess, unsure whether to gather or to flee.
Somewhere behind her, a chair creaked, the movement abrupt and guilty. The crew had not moved, but she could feel their attention like a second skin—hot, prickling, impossible to ignore. No one spoke, not even the script supervisor, who looked at Anne with an odd mix of compassion and abject fear.
Marcus had not gone far. She heard the click of his boots in the hallway, then the faint exhale as he leaned against the wall just outside the rehearsal space. She tried to imagine him breaking character, removing the gloves, running a hand through his ruined hair. She could not.
Anne reached for the script, hands unsteady. The first page slid across the linoleum, crumpling against the leg of a folding chair. She bent to retrieve it, and in that moment—somewhere between standing and kneeling—she felt the change.
It was like a wave. Like the electric aftershock of a punch that had landed just beneath the ribcage, delayed but absolute.
She stood, knees a little too quick, heart banging. The room felt smaller, the walls closer. Without warning—without thinking, even—she crossed the distance to the door and flung it open.
He stood in the hallway, head tilted back against the cinderblock, eyes closed. The Joker was gone, or maybe just dormant; his face was slack, the line of his mouth a perfect, unreadable mask.
"Marcus," she said.
His eyes opened.
They were clear, green, and so alive it hurt.
She reached for him, hands trembling, and caught the collar of his shirt in both fists. Pulled him forward, the motion too sudden to be staged, too desperate to be anything but real.
She kissed him.
Not gentle, not theatrical, not for show. The kiss was hungry, confused, a question she had never been allowed to ask. Her fingers dug into the fabric, wrinkling it, her body flush against his. For three heartbeats—exactly three—he did not move.
Then, just as abruptly, he stepped back. The line of tension in his neck was a steel cable; he regarded her with the calm of a man watching a storm from a locked room.
She tried to speak, but the words got lost somewhere between her tongue and her lungs.
Marcus smiled, a small, private thing, and ran his thumb across her lower lip, smudging the lipstick even further.
He said nothing.
He stepped past her, gliding down the hallway, his walk pure Marcus now—loose, easy, as if the entire Joker had been shrugged off in the time it took to close his eyes.
Anne watched him go, breath hitching. The door at the far end closed with a softness that made the sound obscene.
She stood in the hallway for a full minute before returning.
The rehearsal room was different now. The crew looked away as she entered, each person suddenly and fervently engaged in their own little tasks. The script supervisor pretended to write, then gave up and just watched Anne with something like awe.
Anne moved to the center of the room, still shaking, and sat. She pressed her hands to her thighs, feeling the heat rise through her skin. She saw her reflection in the mirror by the door—hair wild, makeup smeared, eyes still red from the earlier scene. She looked like someone who had been caught mid-transformation.
She gathered the script, page by page, hands clumsy, paper torn at the corners. She found the line she'd lost, the one that was supposed to end the scene.
She read it in her head:
"You can't escape what you are. Not really."
She closed the script, tucked it under her arm, and went to the bathroom.
The light inside was brutal, white and unfiltered. She stared at her reflection, searching for herself. The woman in the glass was familiar and not, both Selina and Anne, neither at rest. She turned on the cold tap, cupped water in her hands, and pressed it to her face. The shock of it brought her back, just a little.
She breathed, once, twice, slow.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket—a calendar reminder, some trivial appointment. She ignored it, then pulled the phone out anyway. Her thumb hovered over the text icon.
She typed, then erased, then typed again.
Finally, she wrote:
I don't know where Marcus ends and Joker begins.
She stared at the words, thumb trembling over the send button.
She pressed it.
The message whooshed out, the soft sound amplified by the tile and the echo in her skull.
She leaned against the sink, eyes closed, and tried to find herself on the other side of the glass.
For a while, it was quiet.
Then, in the hallway, she heard laughter—not loud, not manic, just the echo of something alive and moving, waiting for the next line.
...
[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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