Paparazzi

"Hello, I would like to report a kidnapping that happened earlier this night. At about 10:40 this evening," were the words Victoria awoke too.

"Kid, wake up," another voice said and promptly Victoria was kicked in the ribs.

"Uh!" Victoria had already felt sick and now she felt ten times worse.

"What's your name?" She heard The Joker ask her. She tried to look around but she found that her hands were bound behind her back as she laid face down on dirty, cold tile.

"Vi-ictoria Andrews," she muttered, still in pain and feeling as if she was going to be sick. Her eyes had watered up from the painful kick so she could barely make out the purple silhouette of The Joker. To make matters worse, she was both drooling uncontrollably and unable to wipe off her runny nose.

"What’s your age?" The Joker then asked Victoria.

"S-sixteen," she replied obediently.

"And where do you live?" He asked her and she told him. He asked a few more questions about her, like her parent's name, the house phone number, where she went to high school, little things like that, before relaying the information to the operator. Victoria felt The Joker sit down next to her and shove some material at her face.

"Mmhh," Victoria groaned and mover her face away from the cloth.

"How did I witness this?" The Joker asked the cell phone he was using, "Well... I witnessed the kidnapping because I'm the one who kidnapped her," he informed whoever it was he was talking to and promptly hung up. The Joker turned to Victoria then and asked, "So how are you?"

"Horrible," Victoria mumbled into the tile and felt herself being turned onto her back, which was very uncomfortable to her because she was now laying on her arms. The Joker replied with a nod and then continued to wipe Victoria's face. She felt quite embarrassed about having The Joker see her like this and having him treat her like a two year old, so she weakly fought the attention.

"Why did you do this to me?" Victoria asked once The Joker was finished.

"Why were you taking pictures of me?" The Joker countered, standing up again and tossing the rag across the room.

"You fascinate me," Victoria replied quickly.

The Joker laughed at her, which Victoria frowned at. "I never expected a girl to go Stockholm on me. Especially this early in a kidnapping, we haven't even got to the fun parts yet," he replied to her, cutting the bonds tied around Victoria's feet and roughly pulling her up. "I haven't starved you, I haven't beat you, I haven't cut you..." The Joker began, walking the dizzy Victoria down a narrow hallway connecting to the room she was previously in.

"I don't have Stockholm Syndrome, if that's what you mean," Victoria told him confidently.

The Joker stopped walking Victoria down the hall, turning to look her hard in the eyes. "Then you," he began slowly, still analyzing her before continuing down the hall, "have more issues than I do." He brought Victoria to a door, opened it and forced Victoria inside, which was immediately turned into a staircase leading down into darkness.

"I'm serious though," Victoria said before The Joker could leave. She was now staring up at him as he was higher up on the staircase. Due to the light flooding in behind him, The Joker's features were blacked out to Victoria. "Some girls have their actors... some their rock stars. But I have you. You... You're my rock star."

Victoria expected The Joker to laugh at her analogy but instead he remained silent before walking down to her and taking out a knife. Victoria did not flinch but remained calm with the presence of the sharp blade in her captor's hand. The Joker found this amusing and decided to test the sixteen-year-old's nerves. "You know, Vickie," he started smoothly before grabbing the back of Victoria's head and shoving the blade into her mouth, "Most 'rock stars' hate their... 'paparazzi'," He began, dragging his blade out of her mouth and along the skin of her cheek, applying enough pressure to get his point across but not enough to cut the girl's delicate skin. Still Victoria seemed unfazed. To The Joker, she almost seemed to be enjoying the attention.

This frustrated The Joker. He didn't want her enjoying this, he wanted her loathing every second his blade was on her skin. He wanted her trembling in his presence. Fed up with this nonsense he roughly grabbed the girl and harshly pressed the edge of the knife to the girl's jugular. "Most rock stars hate their fan girls," he growled and Victoria, as easily as she could without turning her head, stared up into his eyes.

"'Paparazzi' and 'Fan girls' don't care," she said calmly, as if she were trying to mock him. The Joker loosened his grip on Victoria, and turned her around to cut the bonds about her wrists, sensing he was loosing the battle at scaring this defiant girl. Without saying a word The Joker let her go, walking back up to the door and Victoria stopped him again. "They don't care because they love their rock stars."

Again The Joker paused, but did not turn around. Instead he sighed to himself, flipped a light switch and left the staircase, closing the door behind him. The light The Joker had turned on for Victoria had illuminated the staircase and the basement below, which held a few boxes of old junk, an ancient wooden stool and an abused looking bathroom.

It must have taken a day for Victoria to notice any life after The Joker had abandoned her in the dank basement, except, of course, the few moths that would flutter around the dim lights and the cockroaches Victoria spent her time killing.

She was afraid to even try and sit on the old stool, in case it would disintegrate under her. She also didn't know when she had received her last tetanus shot and other shots of the like that would keep her from getting diseases from this place.

Victoria had managed to clean off a small patch of cement enough to look temporarily livable and even found some old blankets in a few of the boxes, though they smelled extremely moldy. She cleaned off the bathroom sink as much as possible and tried to rinse them off, hanging them over the wooden beams overhead to dry. Other than that, Victoria didn't have much else to do besides sit on her cleaned patch of cement and wait for something to happen.

She often wondered what kind of impact she had on The Joker when she told him that she loved him, even though he must have understood it as a "fan girl obsession" due to the circumstances of their conversation. She also wondered when someone would come down and check on her. Or possibly beat and rape her or whatever happened to teenage girls were abducted.

What Victoria wasn't expecting was The Joker to enter the dank basement, carrying a paper bag from a fast food joint. Victoria smiled as a greeting for him and The Joker didn't seem happy about the fact that she was smiling. He was expecting her to have broken down by now, she should be crying and to be begging to be let go.

"You brought me food?" Victoria asked him, sitting up straighter. "Whatever happened to starving and torturing me?"

"I want to talk," The Joker replied blandly and plopped the bag down in front of her. Victoria took it and looked inside. There was a regular cheese burger, some chicken nuggets and some fries. Victoria took a few of the fries into her mouth before pulling out the box of chicken nuggets.

"Talk about what?" Victoria asked him but The Joker remained silent. Victoria stared up at him silently waiting for a reply as she ate the chicken nuggets.

"You aren't suspicious?"

"Suspicious?" Victoria asked.

"Of poison or...?" he asked, trailing off, still staring at her.

Victoria shrugged and continued to eat. "Guess not. If it is poisoned I'll probably die of the filth in this room before I die from this poisoned food. There's gotta be thousands of mold spores in the air and diseases thriving allover on this floor. Not to mention all the cockroaches I've seen. You're lucky I don't have Entomophobia."

"You're a lot smarter than your stupidity shows," The Joker replied, sitting in front of the girl. Victoria's smile faded and she shrugged.

"Is this what you wanted to talk about?" Victoria asked him, feeling slightly insulted by the love of her life.

"I wanted to talk about why you were taking pictures of me."

"That wasn't clear to you when you first left me in here?" Victoria asked him.

"The reason why you chose me wasn't."

"It started as a way to attempt to do the impossible. You're rarer than Batman in this city."

"You have pictures of The Batman then?" The Joker asked Victoria and in a split second she decided to try and toy with this man.

"Maybe," was all she replied.

"How would you have taken them?"

"Same way I took yours."

"Sitting in a coffee shop and waiting to hear news of him on your little police radio?" The Joker asked her, menacingly and Victoria looked up from her food to meet his eyes.

Victoria was silent, wondering if he had found this out himself or if it had been relayed to him by one of his clowns. "You stalked me?" she asked, prying for an answer.

"Maybe," The Joker mocked the girl.

"I never took pictures of Batman, only you," Victoria clarified, understanding she was being mocked, and fully accepted it.

"Figures, you seemed like a one-man kinda girl," The Joker smiled at her, a twisted jealousy fading in his abdomen. Victoria felt her heart race at the sight of his scarred, disfigured smile, but tried not to let the man notice. "So," The Joker continued, "You couldn't stop at one? You wouldn't be in this mess if you had."

"I told you, I love you. That picture made me fall in love with you," she replied, finishing the nuggets and saving the fries and burger for later because she did not expect to be given food again.

"You are not," The Joker started to laugh before roughly grabbing the frail teenager behind her head and tightening his free hand around her throat, finishing off his sentence in a low growl, "in love with me."

Victoria fought her panic but at the same time could not help but notice how close he had brought her, only a few inches were between the pair. "How would you know?" Victoria asked quietly, his grip not tight enough around the girl's throat to constrict her words.

The Joker had no answer to her question. He had never fallen in love before, he never had nor wanted that kind of human contact. He loved killing people, so he knew the emotion, but didn't love the people themselves. So the concept was completely obscure to him. Still he was able to come up with an indirect answer for Victoria. He loosened his grip on her throat and brought the girl forward so he could whisper into her ear, "Fan girls are delusional and unrealistic."

Victoria felt his scars against her own smooth skin and felt sorry for the man, unable to imagine how painful his scars mush have been. Still, she closed her eyes, savoring the non-violent contact between her and her rock star before whispering back, "This is real."

The Joker pulled away from Victoria so he could look her in the eyes, trying to figure this girl out. Victoria couldn't help but notice how much more close he had gotten to her, she would barely have to twitch and she would be kissing the man. She kept her eyes locked on his scarred lips, afraid to move, while The Joker continued to try and read the girl and, unwillingly admitting, he was afraid she was going to kiss him.

As Victoria started to decide that the consequences would be worth kissing the man he abruptly stood up, letting go of her. With a defeated sigh she looked up at The Joker but he was already on his way up the staircase.

"Where are you going?" Victoria asked, hurriedly standing up.

The Joker paused, halfway up the stairwell and sighed. "That's none of your concern."

"Yes it is," Victoria said and tried to follow the man but he was already out the door and it was locked when she tried the handle. Defeated the teenager turned back around and slowly made her way down the staircase, back to the depressing cellar. Catching a full view of what must be where she'll die she collapsed on the stairs and cried.

Thus The Joker found the only way of cracking the teenage girl and it was in no way under the conditions which he had wanted. She had also found a way to annoyingly stick in his mind the rest of the day. He couldn't function properly because she was distracting him, almost in a worrying way. Before the day was over he had cracked, but only a little, and had ordered his henchmen to move Victoria into a more livable space. They had furnished one of the many empty rooms The Joker had with a bed, a couch and an old television he doubted even worked. And not to mention a security camera to settle his nerves, almost like parents using a baby monitor.