DANCED WITH THE DEVIL

Out the corner of his eye Bruce follows his big brother’s dominant hand, lit cigarette wedged between his fore and middle fingers, crossing his torso to reach the stick. Morbid curiosity allows the Wayne heir-apparent his pride. A laugh two steps out of character delays Bruce’s next breath. He’s specter-silent; unblinking like one, too.

Fluorescent blue lights from an antiquated electronics store roll over Arthur’s wedding band, burrowing into each gold crater and casting a glow onto his matte white base that makes him almost angelic.

Arthur vents smoke out his nose, then flares it like he can taste the garbage heaps’ pungency. Bullet rain amplifies the stench.

Bruce can pretend he’s used to it after five years as The Batman, but he’ll never convince his sole surviving kin. 

“A probably-dead teenager,” Arthur turns Big Linda’s industrial wheel with his hand-heel and glances at each corner to make sure a child doesn’t bolt into the road, “Ran around with Ozzy.”

Fourth gear.

Down to third.

Second. 

Stupid Goth Toyota growls at him. Arthur bares his teeth right back as if the vehicle is giving lip. It turns, though. Bruce almost lifts half its wheels off the asphalt whenever he drives. Arthur’s maneuvering has surprising fluidity. Borderline balletic.

Once enormous rear tires blast through still-water that Arthur isn’t wholly certain is actually all rain, it bumps and sways with Otisburg’s uneven road repairs. Every single imperfection’s felt straight through their tailbones.

Arthur can’t brace against the seat. No fucking headrest. 

“You mean Victor Aguilar,” Bruce doesn’t allow Arthur a question, more interested in his brother’s pale eyes reflecting storefronts that shouldn’t be open at this hour. Probably mob fronts. Another night. 

A noxious plume accompanies Arthur’s sigh. He settles as best he can against the seat, “The one and only.” 

Tilting his head at a steeper angle makes him more feral dog than bat, but Bruce is trying to hone on his brother’s heavy brow, on the corners of his mouth that the street lamps’ amber glow is afraid to reach, “What makes you think he’s dead?”

“Well...” 

Grumble-growl. 

Arthur shifts back into third-gear to keep Big Linda quiet. 

“In this town…” he risks switching hands to tuck the cigarette back in his mouth, “You only go from that level of visibility to M.I.A. for one of two reasons:” he clears his throat, “You’re in Arkham or you’re dead.”

Bruce’s wipers suck. Arthur stares at a watercolor mess through the windshield.

The little brother half-jokes, “That’s it? No leaving town to join his ex?” How he’s done all that homework on a nobody doesn’t surprise Arthur. “No hostage situation or low profile?”

“No shot,” Linda doesn’t like when Arthur needs to shift down to accommodate a lorry that’s taking up both lanes at once somehow — blame the trash. It’s all but crushed the roadways. 

“And yet Nix still chooses to align herself with the Penguin,” there’s little Bruce can do to disguise his disgust. 

Arthur registers that venom as bewilderment, “I wouldn’t look at it that way…”

“They’re in business together,” he tries not to cough when a smoke ribbon singes his throat — he glances beyond the white, unmarked truck, too, to ensure the Cobb Crime Family doesn’t emerge like wasps and open fire, “She’s practically an accessory,” he notes his big brother’s wince and shoulders lifting as if he were insulting him, “And you hate that.”

Arthur clucks his tongue, then vents smoke and admits, “I do. But I can’t stop her.”

Clutch is released. The hot rod from Hell bellows at him. Arthur winces with the noise — it triggers that constant ringing in his ears to crescendo.

Once the truck rolls forward, spraying oily water all over nearby parked cars and Thunder Chunk’s hood, Arthur vexes his jaw and mutters, “You made this impossible on purpose.”

“Most people are right-handed,” Bruce reminds him. There's a glint in his eye at his big brother's cross-body maneuvering. He's also on edge observing his brother's cross-body maneuvering. 

“Don’t remind me,” Arthur rips the filter from his lips and leans farther forward than he should to strain and search out landmarks, “That laundromat used to let me owe money.” He can’t look for long, but uses his right forefinger to gesture out the driver-side window on his left toward a hideous yellow sign with black lettering, “When I was a kid.”

“Was it strange…” that nebulous question gets a side-eye from his big brother, who gave up on adjusting for each Morse letter these roads are punching into their asses, “Going from the Manor to this?”

“You mean back to this,” his correction’s delicate. Arthur fails to clear the ashes from his chest, then answers, “No. I-I mean it,” Wayne Manor, “-was nice,” if his blotted memory serves, “But…” he takes a drag off his cigarette, “I missed my mother.” 

Kohl bleeds into Bruce’s eyes. It burns, but he can’t claw at them. A tremble racks him, too. Making such a tight fist that he might tear his gloves provides no respite. Pushing the visor of his cowl against the passenger-side window doesn’t hide it as well as he thinks it does. 

Arthur has to pay closer attention to the roads on this side of town. They’re hillier. Easier to piss Big Linda off. He watches his own ghost get sprayed with gutter water outside a bus shelter — he hated the bus, then glances at his little brother and teases, “Don’t make that face.“

Bruce’s unnaturally pale irises can’t shrink or expand when the camera contacts are in, but he startles and plays his part, “What face?” 

“Billionaire guilt,” speaking with a cigarette pinched between his teeth muffles Arthur some. 

He frowns, “You can’t see my face-”

“I can sense it,” there’s a smug note Arthur doesn’t often allow himself to play. 

Bruce half-smiles — half-laughs, even, but can’t actually admit defeat by breaking yet again. He doesn’t laugh with anyone else. Doesn’t smile much, either. Yet his eyes sting. He, too, projects his older brother’s ghost inside storefronts, on the sidewalk, hiking staircases, and dragging groceries for what easily could've been miles no matter the weather. He once made the mistake of telling Arthur about what he believed was ‘the magic sink.’ Never again. 

“You’d have raised me…?” a hairline fracture in that question informs Thomas’ eldest that it’s a plea, a hopeful affirmation. 

“After…” he stutters, “After Dad died?” Arthur can only allow for a glance when a busted traffic light allows this intersection to be a free-for-all, “Yeah,” he shifts into a higher gear to clear it before they’re t-boned, “Probably would’ve been hard for you.” Once they roll parallel with more damp-brick facades, he shifts down two gears, “The transition…I mean. From…” he smirks, “Dracula’s sky-church to…” he cringes, “Stepping over human shit and smells too rancid to catalog.” 

“I’d have been with you,” that lack of intonation somehow hits Arthur harder in the chest. 

“You’d look at the city differently,” Arthur explains with a loll of his head to the left, which stretches Thalia’s smile even closer to his ear, “For better or worse.” He coughs. “It’d feel...more like a vein. Less like an…” his mouth quirks as he searches for an analogy, “Open-world RPG.” 

Bruce lays his hand over Arthur’s on the manual. The eldest doesn’t move a muscle — even if the Goth Toyota needs it, he keeps his hand still so Bruce doesn’t feel inclined to break contact, “Every brick’s been committed to my memory.”

Thick tactical gloves don’t allow for this type of manoeuvrability. He can form a fist, grapple through hand-to-hand combat, but when it comes to squeezing his brother’s hand beneath his own, Bruce finds the leather highly resistant. Despite that, his fingers apply the pressure related to the intention. It puts Arthur in an awkward position, bent and twisted before the steering wheel, yet they both linger a moment longer, until a red light that his brother simply has to adhere to calls for a block change. Bruce’s hand slips away, and curls into that fist that’s apparently far easier than the soft flex of his fingers.

The red light breaks into colourful splatters across the windshield. He watches as minikin rivulets attempt to race south, only to be broken apart by another hail of rain from above. Nothing settles. Static in the air. Gotham’s forever pregnant in waiting, agitation thick in the threads of smog roiling from split manholes and the steaming heaps of garbage that spill into the roadway. Parked cars jut out at awkward angles. While he counts the limbs sticking out from beneath a rubbish heap, Arthur watches the road behind them in the rear view. He watches for any shadows following that aren’t theirs.

“ My second set of eyes. ” He quietly agrees, though he barely seems to move his mouth. He’s caught still on the name Victor Aguilar. The Penguin’s pet who likely ended up at the bottom of a body pile, or beneath the rubble at the Zoo. He taps the side of the car’s seat to re-regulate, and quirks the corner of his mouth for his brother. “ Or the eyes in the back of my head. ”

“ Yes. ” Arthur’s quick. He finds the bite on amber, but doesn’t roll ahead until the car’s interior is flooded green. “ Both. ” They don’t have long until they arrive. Arthur’d called ahead their order, so as to spend as little time as possible pulled up at the curb outside the sandwich shop in the least inconspicuous vehicle the city has to offer.  He continues like he’s running out of time completely. “ That’s my job. I-It was always… supposed to be my fucking job! ”

“ You’re alright. ” Somehow Bruce always fails to sound anything other than flat, and low. His voice crouches in shadow the same way he does. “ All we’re doing is… ” He avoids eye contact, not that it should come as a surprise to his brother. The Batman, Bruce tucked away underneath, watches the serpentine drops of rain on the car’s black bonnet like they’re all the years melted away. Above them a streetlight flickers. Neither remember pulling in to the curb line. “ Making up for lost time. ”

A deep, starved intake of his cigarette thins Arthur’s voice. Wolf’s eyes watch his brother now. “ It wasn’t lost. ”

No. It was stolen. The both of them know it. The fact tenses Bruce’s jaw and momentarily twists him into the immovable object his mythos presents him as. He can’t scowl beneath the cowl, but grits his teeth until the nerves beneath one of his molars cries out in earnest. His throat itches, both inside and out. Swallowing does nothing allay the discomfort. The blanket of Arthur’s eyes does nothing to settle the allegorical hive eating away at him.

“ Have you visited Sofia? ” He asks, instead of settling deeper into the bucket seat. Bruce parks an elbow against the car’s window and cants his head to meet Arthur’s eyes. The expected wound and confusion greets him, but worry, too, although not for himself. “ Falcone. ” Bruce adds, like it wasn’t clear.

Arthur corrects him like it’s muscle memory, but gulps. “ Gigante. ”

His brother doesn’t notice, too busy attempting to be useful. “ I have. Twice, since her re-incarceration. ” Somewhere inside, their sandwiches are waiting for them, but neither have moved.  “ The general idea is that Aguilar’s disappearance – if he isn’t just… on the run – is on her, like the rest. But she swears she’s innocent. Well, ” He tilts his head, peaks a brow beneath the cowl. Arthur can imagine the expression without needing to see it. If anything he can see through the shroud his brother prefers to his own face. It works both ways. “ Innocent of the majority. Gang warfare is gang warfare, and I don’t buy the ‘lone survivor’ narrative, either. ”

“ Y-you’ve… ” Both sets of Arthur’s brows crease until they almost meet in the centre of his face. His fingers curl around the steering wheel’s zenith, the cigarette sways fleetingly, throwing furling fingers of smoke upward. “ Visited Sofia? ”

“ She’s a person of interest. ” He blandly admits, then shakes his head. “ A key player… even if Arkham thinks it’s beaten her down. ” He doesn’t believe it. Beneath that sallow visage, Sofia still dreams of her own empire. There’s a starvation to her he’s seen before. “ And you were close. She asks about you, calls me your rodent. The point… is, ” He’s danced around it. No idea why. The notion of wounding his only family likely narrows his steps some. “ You don’t think she killed your boy? ”

“ Phoenix does. ”

Their gilded cage caresses spectacle. Damp light and gold casts from luggage tags warm their complexions enough to flatter them in photographs that’ll be snapped without their consent.

Life of a public figure. He’ll never be used to it.

Arthur bounces his left leg, shifting his free fingers over his wife’s thigh-high hosiery. If only her cool skin could nip him. Clarity doesn’t improve upon blinking.

Nix’s bottom lip, too, quivers. She doesn’t feel her Capucine Twist jostling in her grasp.

He can’t help checking her shopping bags in the empty armchair adjacent to them. No one would steal them here, but he doesn’t trust coat check not to poison the artisan chocolate she bought herself and their children. When first his jaw slackens, sound eludes him. Arthur flashes his teeth so hard they may crack, then squeezes his eyes shut and paws beneath his own eyes to try and clear them.

Nix frowns, slides her thumb at an awkward angle so she doesn’t gouge his eyeball out beneath it, then touches her forehead to his. 

“It’s okay…” she can scarcely whisper, scratching his cheeks with mascara she should’ve washed off and reapplied two days ago. 

“N…” Arthur bats his eyes, glancing between his wife and the ceiling tags that hang like little nooses. His nose is probably running, too.

Nix taps beneath his nostrils with her knuckles.

He stammers, “I-I-It’s not okay!” Arthur forgets their environs.

Their server pauses with Nix’s glass of water, unsure if he should carry it over or wait it out. He finds one of his coworkers and asks with his eyes what he should do.

“Why would you ask me that?” his voice runs faster than his mind can keep up, “Who made you ask that?” He postures his bleary eyes wide, “Did somebody say something to you?”

“No,’” she tries to diffuse any unintended gunmetal that might linger in her tone, “Well,” she grimaces, then shrugs, “The whole crowd can’t be wrong, am I right?” Flashing her teeth so those silver canines are licked by opulent light illustrate her point. At least, she believes it does. A deflated laugh followed by one of her performative snorts doesn't fool him.

Arthur frames her face with his palm, tilts his head so their lips cross without making contact yet, then shakes his head, “Who you are…” he sniffs back phlegm, “Isn’t…” he cringes, “The right way to look at it. You’re…” he taps the edge of his nose against hers and smiles as best he can manage, “My best friend in the world. I love everything about you.”

When she blushes and fans her buggy blue eyes downcast, he brushes her cheek with his thumb.

“There’s…” he allows his smile to thin and shakes his head, “No one like you on Earth. I don’t know about the mothership,” he quirks the side of his mouth.

She giggles. Success.

“But…” he taps their noses again, “I do wish people were kinder to you.” His fingertips dip past her hairline, “Not to…” he frowns, “‘Change you’…in anyway…but…that’s a consequence of stopping the past, right?” Arthur squeezes his eyes shut and shakes only his foot so Nix doesn’t vibrate in rhythm, “I’d always…” he exhales, “Choose the path where you don’t get hurt. Even if it removes me.”

“Then I don’t live,” Nix shrugs, “No me, no you.”

The tips of Nix’s fingers blanch around the stem of her cocktail glass. At some point he’d ordered her water, perhaps catching the faint fog at the edges of her vision, or picking up on her quickened, weightier pulse. That grates too now. In any case, she hasn’t seen their server again since he’d asked. No doubt the young man caught a glimpse of them across the dining room and thought better of interrupting. The way she’s curled around him like a python likely dissuades him from so much as exiting the kitchen.

Arthur wishes he’d waited until the glass of water arrived. She needs it to steady the brain currently tilting inside of her skull. He watches her head cant, that faint, barely-there movement happening seemingly without her say, same as the none-too-subtle twitch of her right eye. Cold light, like ice refusing to thaw, is whet with her stare. She’s looking for him, the same way she undoubtedly used to in the white void of the box Arkham State would lock her in for months. He tightens his hold around her waist, locks himself in place so that the weight of him might return her to Le Café Louis warmly lit, low ceilinged dining room.

“ No you, ” She says stiffly. Her voice escapes partially through her teeth.  Nix’s jaw’s locked tight enough that that it hurts. “ No me. ”

Regaining the use of her limbs proves harder than it should, but once she does she drains the remains of her cocktail in one. It doesn’t hit her the way she’d like. The way a freshly cut line on the table’s edge would have, or even a shot of vodka. They sweeten and ice these drinks so much that it’s about as good as a bottle of watered-down juice they’d give their son. She wets her lips with her tongue, but finds her gums viscous and dry and her tongue as soft as sandpaper. Clearing her throat can’t prevent the curl of her upper lip, nor the grimace that follows.

Congestion makes thick her voice. “ I don’t need you to martyr yourself in some fantasy world for me just because… it might make you feel better. It doesn’t. Make me feel better. I'm not fucking trading you out. ”

She forgotten how her hand is wound around her glass. It’s empty. Arthur’s lost count of how many times she thinks she’s taken the last mouthful from the bottom of that crystalline bowl, but he plucks it from between her fingers without letting his other arm drop from around her. Nix is malleable enough for him to do so, which should concern him. It does. She can’t see the flex of his brow.

“ You can’t change what happened. ” To me. “ Just like I can’t. ” To you.

Now with a free hand, she grasps the underside of his chin. The pieces have put themselves together in the form of a little boy with a cleft lip, bright eyes that have never felt a real smile, and a stark fear behind his face that’s just as cutting as the terror striking in her own chest. What happens to him?

“ The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains. ”

He'd strode straight past the line of waterlogged college kids with smeared makeup and clothes that leave little to the imagination…with Clementine’s convertible car seat dangling from his right hand and a heavy brown bag from Paper Lantern strapped to the back. He’d done some finagling to get the diaper bag underneath. He’ll worry about redistributing weight once the infant wearing a black fur-trimmed leopard print onesie is snug in her mother’s arms.

Nix has a microwave in her office for when it’s time to feed. Not that she’s expecting either of them. Hopefully she isn’t in the middle of an arms deal.

The twins didn’t pause upon seeing his painted face. Arthur simply ducked his head and vanished into slingshotting purple, pink, and blue lights from the brass-accented doorway.

Clementine wears noise-cancelling ear muffs and aviation goggles to protect her fragile eyes and ears from the Lounge’s assault.

Doubtless Oz has been paged, yet no one stops Joker from weaving through bodies or laying a hand on a bottle girl’s arm to ask her to bring a Manhattan — a ‘noir’ speakeasy classic apt for the occasion — to his wife’s office. Nix will get why once she's debriefed.

Smoke machines and a chill he is not bundled for make breathing more difficult. The baby is snug under blankets crocheted by Nix's fans. The Chief’s Special nudges his left hip while he seeks the elevator that’ll take him straight to his wife’s birdcage.

No one told either of them that Spider-Noir dropped four days ago. Nix probably still doesn’t know. Oz will certainly be thrilled to learn that his partner’s about to lose her entire night to watch the actor she’d leave her husband for on an iPad over and over in both black and white and technicolor. Gary also loved receiving that call to 'emergency' babysit the 'older' four children at ten o’clock at night. How no one DM’ed Nix spoilers when she’d been foaming at the mouth over it on Twitch is, within itself, a miracle. 

Takes his time to such an extent, that she has time to smile at her lit phone. ‘Didymus’ beckons her in some fashion, though she admittedly hasn’t been watching the Lounge’s cctv to see if he’s actually gifting her his presence, or whether he’s sent a family bucket delivered in an old beater in his stead.

Her eyes still light up.

One last glance at the radar shows her they’re no nearer to a closed deal, so she stands. The stretch at the back of her knees begets a bloom of satisfaction through her muscles. She must’ve been sat for longer than she realised.

Kindness is swept from the desk and strapped against her left thigh, just in case the siren’s song that she believes is her husband’s is anything but. Some dense fucker might think to take advantage of the Lounge’s minimal loss of security staff, but she doubts it. The glock near-matches the yellow and pink of her floral minidress, which grazes her thighs at the tie-dye gun’s handle.

The hallway she enters into is pure Oz. Marble, floor to ceiling, throws spangles of white light into her eyes, the source of which is hidden; the walls are lined with sconces, to enhance the notion of some gilt VIP section that really gets the low-level ceo’s and so-called ‘gangsters’ going when they’re allowed entry beyond the front-facing club. Any deeper than Nix and Oswald’s office and the luxury dims dramatically, annexed by exposed brick and pipework. Below, at basement level, the maze of rooms and corridors resemble the Red Rooms of Nix’s ostensible hay day. She’d built both of Oswald’s personalities into the club.

When the elevator door opens at the far end of the hall, and she briefly yields to the urge to lay a hand on Kindness, it bleeds gold and pink light onto the pale stone floor. Arthur, his cherry red jacket and trousers, clashes with the plush mauve elevator interior. His painted face, however, seems to glow. Nix’s does, too, though with more of a struggle.

Her teeth flash for a grin broad enough to slice her face in two. Nix picks up the pace to meet her husband upon exiting and the doors sliding shut behind him.

Arthur’s pupils shrink.

Nix almost knocks the bottle from Clementine’s grasp.

Even the baby reluctantly pulls her eyes from the pink neon ‘HOTEL DE CHATS’ sign mounted in the cat hotel. A big purple cat face stares back at her. Almost too closely.

The man in question forgets to breathe.

Jack Delroy sure hasn’t. He waits for the commercial break’s jingle and Gus’ diatribe about Chevy’s upcoming Memorial Day sale to die. That same scarlet ‘APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE!’ signal for NCB Studios’ live studio audience blinks out. Jack waves at camera two until Arthur turns his head just enough for the windshield wiper motions to brush his periphery.

Arthur's eyes water. He bites his own tongue to throttle a laugh that’ll surely wake their four other children.

“Hey! Mr. Wayne…!” Delroy stares directly into the lens, though not at Gotham.

At them.

“Yoo-hoo…!” Jack's tease is oddly intimate, even the smile his facade dissolves into plays like he just rang the doorbell.  

Nix, too, feels her eyes glaze until she sheds a tear. Her pouty bottom lip shakes. She no longer can pull Clementine close enough. Their infant’s dragged against her mother's chest by the feet — sandwiched between her parents despite Arthur forgetting to breathe entirely. He suffers some hiccup-cough hybrid, bounces his foot, then glances out the bay window. 

“Over here!” Jack casts a sidelong glance at Fiske in the wings, then Gus by the jazz orchestra.

Arthur drifts a step backward, his heel coming precariously close to banging the coffee table and capsizing its colony of three-wick Bath & Body Works candles.

“Careful by the coffee table, Buddy!” Jack pantomimes a near-miss for the studio audience to laugh, “Whoaa…!” 

Nix gasps, whips her head to watch her husband’s heel, then vexes her jaw and searches for the remote, “What the fuck — where is that thing?” The remote. She rakes a hand through her hair, counts both Clementine and Arthur, then turns toward the daybed to find her gun, “What the fuck is going on?” 

“Easy there, Killer!” Delroy warns Nix with too hokey a grin for her to allow him to live past the next commercial break, “You won’t get rid of me that easy!”

Arthur’s free arm curls around Clementine’s head. He shifts his eyes toward the bay window.

Nix grits her teeth. Rips the blinds down one by one, but her working fingers still fumble the shades. She sinks deeper into the daybed than she remembers. Like quicksand. Nix swims through cushions and blankets to tear down what she can, pushing her gun’s barrel against the glass and pointing it at every entrance into their living room. Front door’s closed or light from the street would splash gold onto their foyer’s tiles. 

“You two are quite the funny pair,” Delroy tightens his smile so it won’t show teeth and taps his branded cue cards against his open palm. He no longer wears his wedding band. “Though, Nix…” he gives a tiny nod toward her, “I’ve gotta break it to you…”

Arthur thrusts his free hand and bounds three paces to shield her with his own body.

“The whole ‘unwitting heiress’ schtick really…” Delroy wags his eyebrows, “Wears on him. I mean,” though he’s feigning a laugh, it’s too low, “You married a Wayne, for Pete’s sake! Live a little!”

The screen flickers.

Arthur tightens his jaw.

“You two should probably leave the hall light on tonight…” Jack takes a beat, as if he’s trying to listen through his earpiece, then clarifies, “Not for the reasons you think.”

Arthur’s pocket vibrates in pulses. ‘Faramir’ has called three times. Voice-to-texted at least six so Bruce must be careening their way.

Another static strobe.

“ Fuck this. ” She murmurs.

Her eyes see through the television set, like Delroy might possibly be crouched behind it, pinning himself between it and the wall to avoid the blades she’s so desperate to throw at his neck. Her muscles pull taut while under the constant assumed eye of their audience. It isn’t the live crowd of Night Owls anymore, but the more lecherous, less inquisitive ogle of their keepers.

The Court never leave them. The Court are in the walls. They’re in Delroy’s ear and they’re in the walls and under the floor and under Nix’s skin.

Arthur’s forearm is still locked across her abdominals. He’s so tense that it’s like being pinned by stone, so Nix has to rock back on he heels to reclaim the centre of the room on her own. As she does so, she sweeps her cool fingers across his bicep. The weight of the baby in his arms hardly slows him, but his grip had intensified since the television fucking spoke to them. Clementine is snared in a vice she’s more than comfortable leaning into. Her big, wide eyes watch the first bound of her mother’s long legs across the room.

Above the sash window, a vent stares absently down at her. Nix all but hops up onto the window seat to swing her upper body dangerously outward and reach the little bars to prise it from the wall, wrenching a nail in the process. Its rusted, metallic cries of defiance don’t reach her ears, but both Arthur and the baby wince. They wince again when Nix misses the toss and the grate lands on the wooden floor instead of the couch she desperately needs to replace.

“ Phoenix…! ” That hissed scold is far away from her, somewhere over her shoulder.

She complains through gritted teeth, “ Fuck… ” then shoves her arm into the hole she’s created and begins to rifle deep into the narrow channel.

Yellowcake steers his gangly body around the dining table two rooms away. His heavy paws thud the wooden flooring as inquisitiveness draws him toward Nix. His keeper and charge looks part-ape, but instinct draws him close to Arthur. The great hound sits, and rests his weight against his knee while Hawk isn't here to do so.

Neither 'side’s' designated for a specific spouse. Wherever husband and wife end up entangled is where their belongings land. Her iPhone’s charging next to his ash collection. At least the stupid lamp’s got outlets in the back so she can destroy Suite 712’s curation with a white cord.

No other Orchard Hotel guests are permitted to book this room. No one else in the parliament can use it either.

The Wayne's toothbrushes are still in the en suite whenever they return. Nix has tested placing personal items both in conspicuous and private locations. No maid has ever removed or handed them to the concierge for disposal. An even more intimate wardrobe fills the walk-in closet. Thus, she’s begun treating as an extension of their own at home. Nothing’s ever removed, though the laundry service, even if they go weeks without 'checking in,' is worthy of note.

Nix splays her fingers across the mattress. She's bent over the low and broad-framed California king-sized bed.

They tend not to strip it right away.

Her toes curl into the muted espresso rug. It covers a massive surface area beneath the bed and beyond.

Too much space around the bed was no doubt intentional. Every vent’s placed for optimal acoustic capture. Their handlers cannot afford to miss a single labored breath or sigh…especially once that A-line soft ballgown they force her into hits the floor.

Arthur hasn’t allowed them such an indulgence. Not yet. He hasn’t even removed his own cherry-red blazer. Dark brown hair that Nix had tucked behind his ears slips free in soft waves, framing his face. Somehow his makeup’s remained immaculate. Damp lighting exaggerates his long, angular cheeks that matte white foundation’s meant to blunt.

Nothing about him’s muted. If anything, Nix believes Thomas Wayne’s heir apparent is framed in the softest, most flattering glow the Council can manicure.

She, too, is contoured by dark tongues that lap at every slope and valley. Arthur’s unbuttoned her mandated wedding gown’s corseted bodice straight to her tailbone, where the tulle A-line skirt stops cinching her. White ink depicting every phase of the moon decorates her spinal column. Nix arches her back to try and help shadows spill over her postpartum-atrophied back muscles so he can map each crescent and gibbous.

Arthur knots her hair in his fist and tugs without uprooting her extensions, deepening her moderately curved back’s arch and sinking her palms deeper into the duvet.

She actually liked the dent that’d sullied an otherwise pristine mattress for at least three weeks. Liked how it got there. He seldom pins her under him like wings on a fly and ruts past exhaustion. The cream-colored linen had saturated beneath her. Her glutes were sore and chafed. Cramps locked her toes and calves in place, yet she met each mindless thrust and entrenched her nails under his backside to push him deeper. She’s certain they soaked through to the box spring they snapped. Sweat, saliva, and tears drenched her face…but there was no show of her. He’d shielded her body with his own. Nix’s breasts flattened to her husband’s chest. His bare backside was exposed to surveillance from the moment he penetrated through every climax. She'd stolen the next morning to maintain the high. He obliged. Every stay by ritual they widened that delicious dip. She'd strip and settle into that burrow. Tears streaked her cheeks and heady noises pierced the sterile silence before she could part her thighs and beg. It was theirs. No matter how thoroughly the bedding was power-washed, she'd still smell their nectar. Now it's gone.

Nix still is largely clothed. Sheer, antique lace sleeves have slipped from her shoulders without the corseted bodice falling off her chest.

Arthur’s hiked all nine miles of storybook volume up and over her backside…which he’s pressed against his pelvis.

She’s cold to the touch, yet heat strobes from her need-plumped vulva. Part of her despises choosing a thong made of pearls. They’re frigid between her inner lips. One breaches just enough for her cunt to clutch and spasm every time her hips try to rock…but a strong hand anchors her left hip.

Arthur keeps a forearm hooked under her so he can dip his fore and middle fingers between pearls. He pets her blushed mound and the erect hood aching below it. The ripened shaft’s soothed between two fingers and rolled in tight circles before he allows it to fully extend and peek through the garment.

Nix’s elbows buckle. Her knees wobble, yet his trunk’s an anchor to keep herself upright. The dip of her spine’s already slick from his tongue and dewdrops of her own want that he’s collected and allowed to drip. That ambrosia’s been thieved for himself, too. Nix tastes it when he cranes her neck by her own hair to press a hard kiss on her mouth and dip his tongue past her teeth.

Two fingers curve under her clit, stroke back and forth, then dip further south to pinch her fattened inner lips around those pearls and rub.

Her cries resound in a chamber meant to broadcast them, yet the parliament's reward is flaccid.

Arthur’s emaciated frame blocks Nix. How he’s gathered the gown blocks cameras from gorging on that sodden inverted teardrop — even his own view’s denied.

Nix keens and curls her toes until she thinks she might’ve broken one. She’s already made herself a jackknife, palms flat and her view the door to their en suite.

Gotham faces his back. 

“Oh my god!” is both her plea for relief and for the torture to heighten.

Nix pushes her bottom towards him with what rhythm he allows, dragging her swollen inner lips over his pelvis until the bulge that belongs inside her finally is drenched. He could have her here and now. He just is choosing not to. 

Arthur slings her hair over her shoulder, then snakes his newly freed hand around her chest so her right breast fills his palm.

Surveillance still can’t see skin. Not the skin that’s craved, at least. 

Arthur’s allowed her spine the freedom to bend, and freed her arms from the lace sleeves designed as a second skin. He’s flattened her to the mattress to watch as the tightening coil between her hips tenses her spine and roils her shoulder blades. She still has enough meat on her that, even with the boned waist unbuttoned, the cinch above her hips continues to pinch. Every pull of her hips meant to connect them at their would-be merger afflicts her compress waistline. Nix puffs out her next breath, but can’t relax her torso into it the way she’d like.

A great pillow of tulle obscures her husband’s view, even as she works to present for him anyway. Nix allows her naked feet to slip further from one another, her curled toes sinking into the plush rug in search of the biting cold of the stone floor beneath. The entire suite is adorned deep bronze and slate-dark stone.  Beyond the area rugs that she supposes are meant to offer comfort, it’s all harsh black lines and sharp corners; a rock face she’s wet and writhed atop of numerous times. Her husband saves her bones from bruising this time, though the bed feels just as flat as the floor now.

A spasm urges him to tighten the fist knotted against her scalp. Arthur’s fingers frame her cunt as a tease, stroking from that sodden inverted teardrop and up the tender underside of her erect clit. The up-do the Court insists on slapping onto the nape of her neck rarely lasts the night. It suits what Nix deems the more conservative look that they insist on adorning her with – perhaps only so they can indulge as it is unmade. The Wayne heir’s pauper bride, skinned and splayed open for view.

The black strands from her extensions cling to the notches between her shoulders, slick and serpentine. Nix drops her head to feel the way they slither against her wet back, a shudder climbing from the space between her shoulders.

Her clit’s rolled between two fingers, and she almost loses her legs to the lightning strike that cores her. Another warm wash destroys Arthur’s trousers. He only drives his hips forward to claim more, even though he’s blind to the view he adores, hidden away beneath a skirt that almost weighs as much as she does.

Nix pants. Moans. Her voice is muffled by the rucked sheets she grasps beneath her chin. Her knuckles are white, her skin soaked in cool sweat. The next rut of her hips has her almost ride the line of pearls cutting her two. What was she thinking?

“ You… think I’m thinking…? ”

That makes him laugh. And it’s some dark, warm thing that erupts from the centre of his chest. It rolls over her, sinking into the dip of her spine with all the tangibility of his saliva. She closes her eyes to the phantom sensation, ruts against his palm with such force that she almost slips from it entirely, and embeds the pearls of her thong even deeper past her inner lips. They’ve flushed and fattened under the assault, desperate as the rest of her when ribbed walls clutch like she could take the questionable garment deeper.

Arthur reels her upward by her hair, just enough that he can mantle over her and press his mouth to the tear smear at the zenith of her cheekbone. Only in this instance does the strain of her lower spine invigorate her. That sparking pain elicits a cry closer to rapture than anything else, and she works to grind against the ridge of his cock through his trousers. His pulse settles her at his head, and she presses both herself and the pearl string flush, like her folds could hug him and draw him deeper through the layers separating them. She’s too wet for either of them to find satisfaction should he fill her to the hilt, anyway. She knows it. She hates it. It sticks in her throat like a blade. It cores her between her hips.

Nix shakes, but steers her face toward her husband’s and strokes his painted jaw with the flat plane of her tongue. How he holds himself over her without a hand free is beyond her – but he is beyond her, beyond this room, beyond the voyeur city watching them through the window, and the raptors watching in the vents.

He’s still awaiting an answer to his question, even though he hasn’t said it. A ‘slap’ of his fingers strikes her shaft, and she’d scream had she the breath left in her lungs.

“ F-fuck… ” Her jaw locks. He kisses the hinge, then hooks his bottom teeth just beneath it.

Nix risks breaking her back to swing an arm up and grasp her husband’s dark hair, but reflexes sharper than blinking abandon her aching cunt below snatch her wrist. Arthur threads their fingers, balletic even as he does so, then presses her palm flat to the sheets and pushes forward against her glutes until she’s all but immobilised. She only realises now that, should she butterfly her thighs moreso, she can ride the lingering sting of his fingers against the bed’s edge. It is a new mattress, as if she hadn’t already confirmed it – there’s no give to the bend of her hips and the shallow, animalistic ruts she performs to stroke herself.

Arthur harnesses the booth’s curved angle. His crossed legs remain pointed out from beneath the table in case they need to make an exit without a spare piece shoved in his waistband. He slides his arm even further behind Nix. Gives him little choice but to lean until their hairlines touch.

He despises turning his back to a room, but allows any potential assailant that bullseye between his misshapen shoulders.

Trembling fingers frame her cheek. His cigarette-warmed thumb glides between Nix's lips, dipping into the valley and tugging south just enough to dampen it.

Nix traps the pad between those plush petals. Keeps him there for a kiss that lingers too long to be just that. Her eyes have teeth of their own despite burning so cold. She’s cold.

Monkey Bar pumps air conditioning even though it’s sub-zero outside with the Hudson River creating a rip current of wind down each street.

Nix blushes between her thighs and within her cheeks.

Arthur angles his head to observe her mouth’s lovely shape. His free fingers slip from the banquette's curved backrest so he can caress her shoulder from behind. Long, thick hair extensions muss beneath his fingers while he cossets in lazy circles.

Ambient jazz that a piano should accompany envelops them in saxophone slides that meander. Lack of a melody grates at him. Nix almost giggles upon feeling his fingertips ‘play’ her shoulder.

Arthur leans and pushes his lips against hers. Nix has little choice but to melt backward until her crown rests on the slope of his forearm. He curves his tongue past her teeth.

Nix keens. The cross she’d made of her thighs drops so she can squeeze them together. She lifts her hips to rub her rosy second pair of lips and engorged hood against her g-string's gusset.

Arthur dismantles his cradle around her cheek in favor of cupping her breast from underneath. She hasn’t shown enough skin for him to wander beneath her top, but Arthur kneads and sweeps his thumb over her nipple. Nix keens, ruts her hips to no contact, then buries a hand in her husband’s hair.

He never turns his back to public spaces. Shadows take aim. Anyone could slip down those zebra-print stairs and open fire. Someone could emerge from the kitchen with a knife and plunge it into Thomas Wayne’s next of kin.

She opens her eyes just enough to scan the dining room for him — Monkey Bar’s curated privacy is also its curse. Red table lamps remind her of those Insidious lanterns: tiny flashlights in a dark that doesn’t give its secrets away.

Each kiss connects with a rhythm she feels in her toes. Nix curls them. Tension locks her knees. She’s rocked her hips in a manner that shimmies her skirt off her bare glutes and lets the leather cushioned banquette announce that momentum. Static spreads throughout the back of her head — she isn’t breathing, her heart can’t match pace. Nix’s heels grind the burnished black walnut floor when her thighs finally part.

White tablecloth drapes over her knees, leaving nothing for modesty.

Arthur’s nose brushes her cheek. He releases her breast to snake his hand beneath her skirt and settle on her mound, applying pressure at the same meter as his tongue roaming the proscenium of her mouth. Remnants of her last cocktail add decadent flavor. He neither runnels beneath her underwear nor ventures where desire pools and soaks the booth. He breaks their next kiss — Nix whines, but hugs behind his shoulders closer and cradles his cheek to keep his face on hers — to remove his hand from her mound and lift her skirt. The view of her cunt is his alone.

Not even the most strategically-placed camera will be able to capture her black scalloped lace thong with no back. It splits under her glutes after the gusset, framing her bare bottom and allowing him entry he doesn’t even need to work toward. A pronounced, yet tender ridge lifts from her semi-transparent mesh gusset. The entire night ends here if he touches it...unless Nix insists on the thrill of trying to complete a meal in Manhattan’s most famous celebrity hangout with her husband knuckle deep inside her. All the more proves her point.

Nix feels her heart in her throat when her husband’s pupils blow. For him, she ruts the air, stroking herself against Italian lingerie so he can watch thick, pearl-stranded ropes land on the seat. Arthur doesn't let those ribbons land. He spools each around his fingers, then guides them toward his mouth. Nix slackens her jaw and clenches when he licks his own fingers clean. She's certain that filling her with his cock wouldn’t satisfy him. She’s too wet.

“Still…” Nix almost chokes on her own spit, loses pace for half an undulation, then watches how he watches her, “Wonder if you make me happy?”

Half-smiling, he purrs, “I make you wet,” then drops her skirt so his hand can return to her breast.

Their lips cross. She tastes her own ambrosia. 

Keening into the kiss, Nix sucks his tongue until it touches the edges of her long teeth. She ‘nips’ that muscle, then reminds him, “Same thing.”

He acknowledges through a kiss.

Nix takes that silent confirmation and tastes the smoke he hasn’t fully released following his last cigarette, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he leans so far forward, Nix is entirely obscured from Skylar gathering their drinks from the bar. She giggles when Arthur grins mid-kiss, forcing his wife to inadvertently kiss his crooked teeth. The sharp edges of Nix’s acrylic nails massage his scalp, relaxing his shoulders as he kisses her again, and again, and again — words won’t come, neither will a breath. There’s a laugh that he hopes won’t surface at the absolute worst moment clawing at his core, too. “I love you,” kiss; their eyelashes brush, “More than I hate me.” A tear springs to her eye.

She hitches, fully aware of her bottom lip quivering yet powerless to quiet it.

“I just…” he sniffs, searches the ceiling as if light will appear — none does, “Can’t always tell what’s real. So I ask.”

Arthur can’t drag a hand beneath his eye. Nix sweeps her thumb beneath it to catch that tear.

What’s she doing here? Flushed and wet and melted into his side? The space between her hips hurts, the muscles clenching and unclenching with every other hop of her heart inside of her chest. It’s the same absence she’s felt over and over again before, and now it bleeds onto the seat beneath her in viscous, pallid ribbons. She’ll leave her mark – or he’ll have left his, she supposes.

Nix sniffs and, trying to focus her vision, takes to counting every possible pore on his face. She only has his profile to admire and assess like he’s a book she’s trying to read for the first time, despite not knowing the language. Arthur swallows. His jaw locks momentarily at its hinges. That momentary clench and swell seems to batter her in her own throat. A faint beauty mark adorns the shelf of his jaw, right in the middle. She’s known it for years, yet she kisses him right there as though it were a new discovery. Nix lingers, siphoning the warmth from his skin. She’s only ever warm because of him. Naturally she’s about as frigid as a corpse, but he’s never seemed to mind. He should, she thinks – what kind of wife needs to be fucking thawed?

“ I don’t wanna hurt you… ” She replies, without realising how thin her voice has become.

Crossing her outside leg over the other almost knocks their knees together. Most of all it helps her clench ribbed, wet walls around nothing, which is only effective in burgeoning the pain speared between her hips. It cores her. Her free hand lays below her naval. That attempt at a warm compress will do nothing, and so she fans her fingers outward until she reaches her husband's thigh.

His trousers are pressed so that a perfectly straight crease runs all the way from his hip to his ankle. Arthur Wayne is always the picture of perfection, even if he won’t dare to acknowledge such a thing as truth. He thinks he’s small, and feeble, a wretched thing that she shouldn’t love the way she does. But she does. She did and she does and she will. And nothing will dismantle that.

“ We… ” Nix’s front teeth meet for a simper that onlookers would say doesn’t fit her goblin features. “ – don’t wanna hurt each other. I’d say that’s a pretty good thing. ”

She’s so good at it, though, she thinks. She knows. Nix has an innate ability not just to bloom fresh wounds behind her husband’s eyes, but peel apart the scarred skin and open old ones to poke and prod at. Half the time, she doesn’t even realise she’s doing it until it’s too late. Arthur, her beautiful husband Arthur, who she’d loved the second he stayed sat across from her at the chequers table she should not have been at, is rarely far from tears. They both know how his hurts, numerable and heavier than anything else, fill his lungs like gravel. Even now his next breath is a wheeze. She lifts her hand from his thigh to the centre of his chest.

“ You’re the only. Good thing. ” She continues, momentarily allowing her gaze to flit to the stares opposite them in the dining room. She’d let Thomas grace them with his presence now, if only so he could hear the truth about his grown son. That sweet boy he dared to throw away when he could have given him the world. Now he’s here, with her; the only one of the two of them who actually deserved to rot inside Arkham State’s walls.

She kisses the corner of his mouth like she has any right to.

“ I think in the fucking world, actually. I’ve, ” She’s awkward. She’s always awkward. Nix pets his chest with her working fingers, the tip of her pointer drops into the hollow of his throat. Had she the angle, she’d drop her tongue into that same shallow divot. “ …been hurt. Men, women, all of them… None of them didn’t. Hurt me. ”

That shift alone halts Nix before his soggy hands can stop her right fist from swinging at her mother-in-law. Fragments of the breath she’d sucked in to wind up to pummel her late mother-in-law fire like shrapnel. Paper-cuts mar the back of her throat. Nix wheezes. Rocks backward on her heels.

Arthur catches her by hooking his arm around her lower back. It shakes — he trembles from the cold that won’t register. His clothes soak him to the bone. Mud and rotten water found their way into his lungs. She can feel it in how his chest stumbles to regulate.

Melpomene weeps what traces of herself remain on Arthur’s face away. A faint blue track disappears over his scarlet mouth.

Ray Noble and his Jazz Orchestra twist and turn through soupy air. Arthur can taste each flouncy flourish, yet their aftertaste is putrid. Nauseating. He refrains from breathing altogether as the old piano tries following the faucets’ mismatched plinking. Those dark, dirty droplets refuse to synchronize. Shifting from foot to foot when he’s too dizzy to see he hopes will settle his stomach.

Nix cuts a glance at her fist nested in his palm like the Yucatán Crater. If he absorbed the brunt of her impact, he doesn’t show it beyond trembling lips and glossy eyes that are too faraway for Nix to reach. She forgets to look around him.

He’d cut her off mid-stride. Arthur's back remains to the mineral-stained, mold-veined pink bathtub and his dead mother fermenting in it. He only has eyes for his wife. He only tries to breathe for his wife.

Arthur wheezes, spreads his feet a touch too far apart, then wades in his wife’s eyes as if stranding himself within them will soothe her. It won’t. He can’t help her. God won’t allow it. He sniffs and swallows the brown bathwater lodged in his nose.

Nix wilts as his fingers soothe her knuckles at their own disjointed rhythm. He’s replicating a sway that won’t flow into him as all songs tend to. This one’s rank in the air: trapped in sagging wood and plaster, mired in black bathwater, and suffocated by that black bloom on the ceiling that continues to metastasize. It eats more of the high ceiling and green wallpaper.

Out the corner of her eye, Nix watches Penny’s overgrown, chipped and jaundiced toes bat along to music from an era she wasn’t even alive for. Penny was born in 1962. Why did she trap her son in the twenties? Arthur often says that people from his culture tend to be fascinated by certain American ‘eras’ like the Wild West. Perhaps Wayne Manor never allowed its favorite maid to leave that speakeasy swaddle.

Arthur follows his wife’s flint-sharp gaze without turning his head, yet can’t speak. His jaw drops for nothing but a laugh that puffs his cheeks and swells his eyes with more tears.

Nix, quivering like their seven-year-old daughter would — the same age she was when Phoenix Degraves died, shakes her head and throws a hand over his shoulder. Spiky acrylic nails dig into his polyester jacket and tug him close. 

“No,” defies Penny more than scolds her husband.

The fist Nix had balled softens enough for her bony fingers to wriggle between her husband’s and then fold. The back of his hand is so cold. Nix thrusts it against her lips, hoping to prove herself wrong and feel his warmth…but the witch has taken that from him, too. Nix presses a hard kiss to the back of his hand, staring him in the eye all the while.

His shoulders flow back and forth, ignoring the delayed splash each drip from the bathtub, shower-head, and sink immerse him in. Offsetting Al Bowlly’s muffled ballad is the end goal.

Even now Nix can’t help admiring how he threads melodies from nothing. Suspended strings sweep him into a current he can’t ignore, yet drifts away from the edge of that cess pit of a bathtub and closer to his wife — to the present, to safety, to love.

Arthur’s fingers entrench in her hip bone, stamping bruises she’ll tattoo once they leave this place.

“Baby,” she’s certain the mud’s found her lungs, too.

Arthur uses his nose to wipe a tear mid-descent. A faint red trail runs over her cheek.

She’ll take it. She’ll tattoo that, too, if it’ll keep him near.

“Baby, I’m,” her voice splinters, “Here! Don’t even look at her!”

Nix clenches her teeth so hard, she feels something crack inside her mouth. Hopefully not another tooth. She’s lost plenty. If not for the dental insurance he bought her, there’d be bridges in her mouth like an old woman.

“She doesn’t deserve it — she…” spit slushes between her teeth. Nix doesn’t bother wiping it. He kisses it away. He doesn’t taste like himself either. Penny’s pervaded that, too. “I love you, Arthur Fleck!” the crack in her voice blends with the vinyl records busted signal.

His glossy eyes slingshot following the amalgamation. It’s godly, he’s ethereal.

She can’t sob hard enough to get that across. Her cries pierce this crypt’s cracked window. Nix risks them both falling over to displace her weight on him — forgetting to look for the wound that scrawled how he truly feels about himself on the wall and medicine cabinet Arthur battens down the arm hooked around her hip. She trust-falls him enough to let her weight roll onto her tiptoes and for his shoulders to be burdened by her forearms folding over them. Their noses push. She blubbers spit and snot against his mouth and he doesn’t move.

Her husband’s shoulders are sturdy enough to hold her weight. Nix hadn’t thought of the peak of bone jutting out when she’d thrown herself against him. He swears that his distended shoulder causes him no pain, but with Nix’s pointy chin so narrowly close to knocking the protrusion through his sodden shirt, she isn’t so sure.

He doesn’t succumb to the cold, either. Arthur’s clothes cling to his emaciated shape. He’s whisper thin and too sharp at his edges while he wraps his arms around her. Weighed by more than just the added weight of Nix, she thinks he hears his waterlogged heels sinking into the soft membrane that blooms from rot and aged damp across the tiled floor. Beneath that carpet of wet fungus there could be nothing but the void, into which he’d plummet without so much as a blink or the hitching of his chest. Arthur wouldn’t panic, wouldn’t bloom his eyes wide on the hunt for a way out, any way out. He’d succumb. He’d soften his limbs and let his joints fall loose, and slip into the finite dearth. Easier than bullet to the head, propelled by his own finger pinching a trigger.

All for her. That wretched harpy drinking her own black blood from the cavities in her gums.

“ I hate her. ” Nix is blind to how juvenile that non-reveal is, but not to the gravel in her voice, and the taste of her own blood on the back of her tongue. It pools, bitter and metallic behind her clenched teeth. “ I hate her. ” It’s no clearer even as she narrows her bruised and black eyes toward the living corpse slumped against the bath’s backrest. Steam rises from between Penny’s bony knees. The water, already tainted and vile, is stewed with faeces now, too. “ I fucking hate her! You don’t, but I hate her for you. ”

The distended bone of his shoulder jars the soft underside of her chin. It claims Nix’s next breath so that it’s annexed by a wheeze and a cough she isn’t sure is not tainted by black mould.

Quaking fingers burrow beneath the shelves of her shoulder blades. Arthur holds her as though their fears are reversed, and it’s she who might slip through a gap in the tiles into nothingness. But she’s rooted. Made rigid by loathing and the constant, constant stirring of the insides in her lower abdomen. Beyond that snake pit, there’s a void, some bloodied crevice that won’t heal no matter how many children escape from her, alive, into the world. The intangible fist of a blackened memory curls it’s fingers against an internal wall. Perhaps those digits, flesh sheered down to whet bone, never did belong to the numerous doctors or ‘specialists’ that spent years peering at her between her splayed knees. Every cramp is timed perfectly with her mother-in-laws fingers, furling and unfurling against the lip of the bath.

Arthur wraps his arms around the narrow of her waist. He’s returned some of himself to her like he knows.

He flinches when she says, “ And I wish she’d died sooner, ” Into his ear, a breathless and furious thing. He’s a wall between her and the shredding of an already rotten corpse. She’d use her fingers. She’d use her teeth. It wouldn’t be the first time. For now her teeth only snap at the wet, cloying air. Grit grinding between her molars. “ And I wish she’d died screaming, and I wish it was – I wish it was me. ”

A soundless word escapes him, mouthed against the side of her throat. Her name, she thinks. Please or agreement or some amalgamation of the two. Her husband hides beneath her hair – trusts her to face to creature that wants to eat him piece by piece. Arthur faces the wall. He watches the rivulets of damp drop lackadaisically from tile to tile. ‘MOTHER FUCKER’ stares Nix down – or she does it. So far she’s paid it a little mind as any lie deserves, though it bites at the back of her eyes. It’s written in blood. His blood. She still hasn’t found the wound, but cups his crown to steady his tender head. Typically soft, luxurious waves drape over and around her long fingers in limb tendrils. His halo still shines, however. She’s quite sure it’s the only source of light they have left, since Nix has never and will never provide any herself.

Resignation at failure jars her jaw. “ Maybe she’d have fucking stayed dead. A-and I could’ve stopped. Some… part of it. ” Another choke rocks the soupy air. They shouldn’t stay here. Already Arthur’s lungs sound wet on the inhale, like clusters of slimy rocks rattle in his chest. He’ll suffer a flare of bronchitis after this – she should commit to a stop-off at the pharmacy once they’ve escaped. “ Maybe she couldn’t take you from me – even a second, even a fucking second…! Is too long. Do you know that? Do you know what you are? ” Harried whispers climb through his mussed hair to his ear. Her voice shudders. She bites the inside of her own cheek and thrusts her nose against his temple like she can somehow tattoo her voice on the inside of his skull. “ Do you even know what it would do to me? All of it… without you!? Any of it? ”

Her eyes a wild, a vixen staring down a double barrel and preparing to chew on what comes, but Arthur doesn’t start. He yields to her hands now framing his face, and doesn’t find the force behind the gesture. Nix squeezes his cheeks enough to ensure that he won’t reel his head away from her and back to the bath he might have drowned himself in.