Straying out of Sanity

My eyes shot open as soon as I hit a mattress, but to no avail because the room was too caliginous. I sat up on my elbows, and felt a burning sting from my right thigh when I tried to sit up, so I stayed propped on my elbows. I figured I'd must've done something to my wound when I freaked out. I'd get up and fix it in a minute but first I wanted to know where the fuck I was.

A light was suddenly switched on and my head whipped to the left, seeing that it's source was coming from a bathroom (or at least that's what it looked like from my position on the bed which was adjacent to the door) to the side of the wall.

Using the light, which dimly lit the rest of the room, I took in my surroundings. The bed I was on was at least one and a half times wider than it was long, and this was no short bed, and was furnished in expensive looking sheets and blankets with matching pillowcases and an overstuffed duvet. Despite the expensive look of the bed dressings, it looked as if the bed hadn't been made in at least the last month.

In front of the giant bed was a wide screen television that was at least as wide as the bed and easily dwarfed the TV Jay, myself, Tom and my sister were watching earlier. To the right of that was a complex system of surveillance screens that showed every nook and cranny of the interior and exterior of the mansion. Quickly scanning the screens I saw no bathrooms and smiled to myself, at least The Joker had some sense of privacy.

In front of that and some expensive looking curtains that hung from ceiling to floor that lined the far wall, which matched the bed furnishings, was what I guessed to be a sitting area though one of the couch's legs was broken off, leaving it lopsided, and the remains of a coffee table, which was split in two, lay splintered on the floor. Among the splinters of highly lacquered wood were dark stains and I had a bad feeling they were of blood.

The light suddenly switched off and I heard someone walk back into the room and suddenly the lights fixed on the walls in the room were flipped on and brightly lit up the whole room, blinding me temporarily. I squinted and shielded my eyes, noticing someone standing to the side of the bed and I looked up into the painted face that belonged to The Joker.

"Take your pants off," he stated plainly dropping a bottle of peroxide and a box of bandages onto the unkempt bed. I hesitated but didn't want to make him tell me twice because he didn't seem like he was in all that great of a mood. Snuffing my discomfort with this situation, I did as told and took my pants off for the man, noticing that I was indeed bleeding and had a stain on my pants from it. He took them and discarded them on the floor as he knelt down, taking off his purple gloves and trench coat, also discarding them.

"Come'ere" he muttered and I moved closer to the edge of the bed he was kneeling at, Joker staring at my bleeding wound as I did. It wasn't a malicious, anamalistic stare like some would have expected but a forced stare as if he was avoiding eye contact.

I guess I stopped short of where he wanted me because when I stopped he grabbed my left arm and leg with his freezing hands and drug me to the very edge of the bed so that I was half on, half off. I did my best to stay silent but he was really starting to scare me.

I bit my tongue to keep quiet when me grabbed my right thigh, after moving my left leg over the edge of the bed so he had better access to the bleeding hole in my leg. The next thing I knew he had the bottle of peroxide and was carefully pouring it over my wound. I took in a sharp breath as he did so and clenched my fists around the fabric of the duvet in a poor attempt of stopping the pain, tightly closing my eyes.

The sting lasted after he was finished with the devil liquid in my wound and worsened when he roughly slapped on one of the bandages before standing up, knocking the peroxide bottle and box of bandages carelessly to the floor with my discarded pants, his coat and his purple gloves. He then briskly walked over to the door leading to hall, which was about halfway open, and loudly slammed it shut. It made me jump, causing a bit more pain to shoot through my right thigh. I remembered The Joker telling me that I didn't have a reason to be afraid of him, yet. And I think I just gave myself a reason to be afraid of him.

"You told me..." I heard The Joker start and he turned around to face me. Yeah, I'd say I had a very good reason to be afraid of him.

"You told me that you'd be okay..." I turned away, pulling my knees up to my chest, ignoring the protesting pain from my right thigh, and stared at my feet. I heard him start to walk back to the bed I was on and what he could possibly be thinking about doing to me sent chills through my spine.

"Look at me," he growled. He wasn't yelling but his voice was equally as powerful. Instead of turning back to look at him, though, I only shifted my eyes to the left so I could see him out of the corner of my eyes.

He had stopped nearly three feet from the bed, a sick mixture of anger and content etched in his features under his face paint. "You lied to me," he said slowly, like he was enjoying this.

I shook my head 'no' and instantly regretted it. All of the content drained from his clown face and he took a quick step forward and, before I could move away, he seized a fist-full of my hair. He started to pull me, either up or towards him, I didn't have time to tell because once my hair was in his fist I blurted out, "I killed my dad! I was thirteen and I killed my dad!" hoping that's what he wanted to hear.

Whether it was or wasn't he did at least drop me back onto the bed, loosening his grip on my hair but not completely letting it out of his hand.

I looked up to him from my position on the bed, my right hand also in my hair with his right hand in case he decided to pull it again.

"Continue," he said with slight interest and I blinked, noticing my eyes start to water.

"I-I... I... H-he... He killed m-my mom," I said, at a loss of words. I'd only told two people that I had killed my dad before and those two were Mitch and Jay. Laurel doesn't even know, she was only four at the time. "U-uhm..." by now I was facing away from him, talking to a random spot on the wall under the giant TV in front of me. I felt his hand drop from my hair and mine soon followed.

"What happened?" he asked trying to drag it out of me. I saw him move away out of the corner of my eye, then coming into my view as he walked around the bed, undoing the buttons on his vest as he did and dropped it carelessly onto the floor.

"H-he... uhm... he used to g-get so mad all the t-time after Laurel was b-born..." I stated, wiping the tears from my face and resting my forehead on my knees, hugging them to my chest. "I guess it was b-because she was b-blonde and my brother and I w-were-"

"You have a brother?" he asked and I looked over at him. He had removed his suspenders from his shoulders and was working on untying his tie and unbuttoning his lavender dress shirt.

I looked away quickly and said, "Yeah... He's p-probably seventeen now... we both look t-the same, like our d-dad."

"And your sister didn't?' he asked and heard the bed groan slightly and glanced back over at him to see him sitting on the opposite side, staring at the wall in front of us.

"No, s-she looked like our m-mom," I wiped the tears from my face again and stared at the wall with him. "I d-don't think he wanted another k-kid either. I g-guess he thought s-she wasn't his k-kid."

I heard him sigh before he asked, "And you're feeling guilty and its giving you nightmares?"

"No. That bastard deserved what he got," I said confidently, my tears stopping briefly. "My brother sat there and watched it happen. And then he wouldn't leave with me and Laurel... He... T-they... They locked h-him in Arkham... He d-didn't do anything..."

"And you killing those gangsters brought this back to you?"

I didn't answer but instead buried my head in my knees, trying not to start hysterically crying because my head was filled with their deaths.

"You're exhausted, you need to sleep," Joker plainly told me, "Lay down."

I didn't want to. Me, half naked, sleeping in a bed with a homicidal clown didn't seem to appealing, not after I just told him what I did.

"Lay down," he repeated.

There wasn't anyway out of this for me.