KNOCK. KNOCK.

“ 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.

Piano patters flurry like a distant memory. Strings hold their breath. A smoke-dark baritone timbre Nix knows in her marrow and Arthur recognizes as his own resounds throughout their living room. The chorus is driven downward at first, like stained glass about to catch flame. 

“Sanctuary—!” that vocal line drags at the vowels; fracturing and bending into survival, “Breathe it in, scream it out...!” the clip of Arthur recording in his home studio that Nix never captured herself plays in front of fifteen million viewers, “No one’s coming to save us...!” that note doesn’t shimmer for long. 'Past' Arthur drives it back down, leaning close enough to his microphone that every breath could destroy the track, “It doesn’t scare me!” luscious guitars smash against asphalt, “I’m with you all the way down...!” 

Nix’s pupils shrink. Her intake’s sharp. Piercing.

Clementine stirs at her mother’s wheezes that much mirrored her own when she was born. The newborn rests her head against her father’s bare chest, bulbous blue eyes focused on her father’s chiseled jawline. She smacks her lips, almost lulled by how her father’s inconsistent crescendo blends with guitar riffs that crash like a storm against glass.

That luminous register Arthur climbs to strikes Nix in the chest.

That song hasn't yet released.

Written for her.

That’s their home.

Footage she had no knowledge of capturing.

Suddenly that vent strewn on the hardwood is a reminder that she isn’t looking hard enough.

The clip cuts back to Delroy, who smiles directly into the camera and clasps his hands together as if he’s watching Arthur’s expression pale and his breath abandon him.

Nix, too, clenches her jaw and shakes her head when she and the late night talk show host make eye contact. 

“You were gonna give our airwaves this gut-punch anyway," Jack deduces without evidence, "Weren’t you, Joker?”

Delroy weaponizing that name’s an ice pick in Arthur’s chest. He braces. A tear slips from his left eye that ring light fixtures make all the more apparent.

Nix is a hair from standing on the daybed so she can bash the light out and search for the camera.

“Ah..!” Jack wags his eyebrows and pulls his smile all too tight, “You thought…” how he deigns to ‘point’ with his cue cards makes Nix want to boil her own skin, “-the invitation was for House on a Hill, didn’t you...?!”

Laughter from the live studio audience bubbles a laugh from Arthur that he doesn’t mean. He coughs, half-turns as if Delroy could take out a revolver and shoot his infant daughter through the screen.

The footage glitches.

Jack still smiles, “‘Sanctuary’…” he lets the song’s title drift into the rafters, “-isn’t... where you go to feel safe, Joker...” the abandoned kenning isn’t enough to make Arthur look away from the screen, “It’s where they decide,” the television’s glitch rips another tear from his beaten eyes, “What you are allowed to become.” 

All the light in the world…

Is there a point to even reaching for the remote?

Arthur rakes a hand through his hair, bleary-eyed and clutching Clementine close enough that the baby remains fastened to his side as the laugh tears the back of his throat out. Blood splashes onto his teeth as he finally risks turning from the monitor. 

All the love in your heart...

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

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.

Gotham, too, is removed. The Orchard and former Fleck apartment both haunt the uptown in Otisburg. Midtown’s neon grid has been reduced to an eyesore across the bay. Its seawall is not fully repaired four years following the flood. Veins of light streak repaired bridges and highways that wrap around each islet to try and bypass through traffic. Siren screams are shut out. Why the parliament chose one of Gotham’s toughest neighborhoods to roost is beyond Thomas Wayne's prodigal heir. They can’t truly watch the city below when peering out, though. Strategically placed architecture blocks the view. Peels back distraction. Allows for the middle island and the hive of helicopters cutting through low-lying cloud around it to blur into obscurity. Almost like they’ve hung a painting.

Thunder seldom bleeds past the glass. Even the raindrops refuse to rap at the panes. They strike like cat paws, then slide into oblivion.

Nix ignores the electric fireflies. She turns to face her husband.

Gotham both loves and loathes its uncrowned king. The parliament cushions him in a diffused glow that only his presence can warm.

Surgical precision both assembled the recessed perimeter light fixtures and positioned the cameras masked around them to capture Mrs. Wayne from all her best angles, yet she’s only carved in shadow.

Arthur would never accept that. He knots their fingers tighter. Drives her engorged clit and parted lower lips into the mattress that she assumes is intentionally cased in cream linen. Disguises the mark husband and wife will leave behind once more. Casts an illusion of comfort. Encourages Arthur to strip her bare and roll onto his back so twenty-four sets of eyes can watch her curved spine glisten with sweat and her breasts bounce as she mounts her husband and grips the upholstered headboard for leverage.

That dent has been taken away, too.

Nix’s upturned septum taps the corner of her husband’s mouth. He holds his breath in favor of kissing her. Instead he rocks forward so the bulge she grinds against pressures that pearl strand even deeper into her cunt. He’s hard. The red trousers she’s destroyed no longer swim on him.

A long, dark ringlet grazes Nix's cheek. She giggles, then pushes back against his pelvis and deepens the kiss.

Arthur bends his wife backward by the hair until the resistance in her lower spine becomes a touch too evident — she bristles — so he releases that blonde and black forest. Musician’s fingers settle on her damp ribcage. He settles into position like the fretboard of a guitar. Waxing crescent first. One by one his fingers settle, then sweep down to the First Quarter.

Nix gasps, lifts her backside so her vulva prints even deeper into his trousers. 

“Baby…!” her plea splinters in the right place. Nix keens into raising her backside high enough for her outer and inner lips to flush deep pink against him. “Did you…” she snaps her teeth when his lips brush the back of her shoulder.

Wisps of smoke cling to the exhale that blooms across her upper back. He kisses that bony slope until the bend of her shoulder dips. Softer skin sinks beneath the pressure of every kiss. Once upon her time, she was heroin-thin. One-hundred-and-twenty pounds soaking wet, yet could wield a bazooka. The mechanics have always been lost on him. Now she downs black coffee to try and 'bounce back' when she doesn't need to, yet socials stress the toll bearing five children has taken on her figure. Vultures. No one has the gumption to utter a word about Joker's wife when a .38's tucked in his waistband. He'll use it.

Nix tries to grip the fingers embedded between her own, but their ‘new’ mattress resists.

“Did you hear me, Baby?” she blushes with each kiss down her bicep.

Arthur noses her skin, secretly glad it’s still supple eight months postpartum. A lactonic note she’ll never fully lose seeps from her pores, too.

Nix’s lace bodice and sleeves will leave prints in her skin should he not fully strip her. Her arms are already free. He’s flattened her bare breasts to the mattress.

Those sick fucks on the other end of the spy cameras are likely hoping her nipples leak onto the linen. She’s often worn pasties to save herself the embarrassment, but not tonight. Not under him. Never under him.

Nix tightens her jaw and grunts when her husband dips three fingers inside her, strokes until that spongy button she loves pulsates back, then widens her entrance enough to make her whine. Arthur frames her vulva from the outside again with three fingers. His middle finger follows that pearl strand, pushing it deeper between her lips and rubbing back and forth. She grinds both the mattress and her husband’s hand, pushing her backside against his cock and abandoning all dignity with the noise that follows once he thrusts.

Husband and wife succumb to rhythm, to ruts that ruck the duvet beneath her yet he never penetrates. He’s still fully clothed.

The pearl thong’s lifted and slid aside so her cunt can clutch nothing as her husband grinds the bulge that belongs inside her.

This new mattress refuses to acknowledge the beast with two backs.

Arthur drives her palm into the bed, fully drops his weight onto her, and thrusts. She chafes from their new bedding. She’s soaked through the linen and tulle from her skirt that Arthur hasn’t fully been able to gather. 

While brushing the shell of her ear with his mouth, Arthur shimmies the cinched waist over her hips so the garment drops onto the rug. Not even the most strategically placed lens can capture her forbidden fruit. Arthur mantles back over her once her bare feet lift one at a time and wobble back onto the rug. His guidance is seamless, languid, and settles her back on the mattress with her cunt lifted just enough for the head of her erect clit to brush the espresso-threaded throw.

She drops her jaw and mewls into the mattress. Blanched knuckles grip the rucked duvet. Nix's painted toes burrow into the rug’s taut fibers.

Arthur tilts his head over her shoulder. Long, dark hair sweeps her throat once he almost meets her head on the mattress. Those locks tickle her.

A wrench twists in her stomach. She barely contains her laugh when his white-dusted eyelashes fan downcast for a kiss. Nix moans into it, both riding the ridge protruding from his upper left thigh and teasing herself on the mattress. Her eternal bridal gown’s somehow not crushed beneath his two-toned spectator shoes.

Arthur reaches under her, pinches then rolls her shaft in tune with his tongue curving alongside hers, then purrs, “We’ll just make a new one,” into the proscenium of her mouth.

Her grin’s too wide. Toothy and trapped in a haze this museum display won’t allow. Nix risks reaching behind her to unzip his trousers...but Arthur claims that other wrist and pins his weight on it, too.

Their fingers knot on either side of her head, digging ravines in the mattress.

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. ”

Their table lamp’s scarlet shade cuts her cheekbones, yet splashes their apples with a warmth she can’t always radiate. She is blushing, though. Kiss-bitten lips tremble when he leans in. Her lush folds ripen and pulse around nothing. Not even a strip of lace can soothe the ache — she went backless.

Nix squeezes her thighs and tries lifting her backside to numb the pain. Maybe the dining room’s meat locker ambiance will dry the sweat that’s collected like dew beneath her breasts and made her inner thighs even more slick.

Arthur smoothes his blazer over his wife’s shoulders and reaches for her hand. The cool compress his cratered wedding band applies to her knuckle sends a chill up her spine.

Nix almost shaves his tongue by vexing her jaw. A damp, heady noise takes root in her core.

One by one her husband’s fingers tangle between her own…and his right hand roams the valley between her crossed thighs one fingertip at a time, then plunges between them. The lace is slick enough to lift like gossamer from her skin when he moves it aside. There is no back to collect every creamy rope she stains the plush banquette with, but he catches the next ribbon and coats her inner folds in it. Meandering circles both part her inner lips and rub them together.

She cries into the proscenium of her husband’s mouth, slackening her jaw and curving her tongue past his teeth without composure. Ends up spearing the roof of his mouth.

He laughs. It’s a rumbling noise that rolls from his throat and into hers.

She squares her shoulders, squeezes the fingers he’d soldered between her own, then grasps his wrist to anchor it between her legs. Nix’s stiletto lands with a clack to the black walnut floor. Her knuckles sink into the backrest once his weight drives forward.

His back’s to the dining room. Arthur needs to turn his shoulders at the very least, even though Gotham is on the complete opposite side of the Hudson. The edge of his nose brushes her cheek with each sweep of his tongue alongside hers, though he has a care to tug her upper lip. Two fingers hook inside her just enough for her cunt to spasm around nothing. Nix's own honey drips down his fore and middle finger. A creamier decadence blends with her watermelon body mist. It belongs beneath his tongue and they both know it. Arthur breaks a kiss to tuck those same sodden fingers in his mouth.

Nix’s pupils blow. She knocks her knee against his to part her legs further. Cries when her own nectar transfers from his lips to her own.

His inhale’s deeper than usual. Arthur's heart is mid-marathon.

Should she drop a hand to his groin, she’ll feel the bulge that belongs in her. Rutting. Bruising. Stretching. Emptying. Sooner rather than later. Now. She doesn’t care. Blonde and black hair extensions puff like a helmet beneath his blazer and muss from the sweat soaking through her sweater. Nix keens and drives his wrist further between her legs, entrenching his fingers in her vulva that otherwise would only grind a scarlet cushion. That smear’s already dampened her backside and left slick stains on her skirt that the staff will no doubt notice once she stands. She risks her own exposure by releasing his wrist to raise her skirt and look down. Her hood’s thick and dusky, stiff from the lounge’s cool environs and the welcome burn his skin kneads into it.

Another scrape drags her other heel over the burnished wood.

Soft, dark lianas silhouette Arthur’s angular bone structure. She’s yet to find his natural part. It doesn’t tend to want to lay center. Almost twenty years later, she gave up and just lops it to the right. Blame the widow’s peak.

Nix kisses the hairline scar above her husband’s top lip, then squares her shoulders as if he can see her chest through her top.

The soft, flat plane of his tongue roves over the misspelled throat tattoo that she doesn’t bother covering, up and under her jaw. He pauses upon detecting her pulse. Two fingers frame her plump outer lips, then part them as his middle finger plunges to the knuckle. His mouth’s on hers before her cry punctures the rambling saxophone soundtrack. That silky cry darts his eyes to hers. They glow like foxfires. It tightens the knot in her core and leaves her limp under him. Almost like the poison’s been injected through his beckon-curls.

Nix’s kisses have become clumsy. Her thighs shake, yet another grate from her heel across the oak makes Skylar pause with their cocktails. Their server hesitates at the top of the zebra-striped stairs, glancing between the bartender and the hostess for instruction. Mrs. Wayne’s hidden behind the table and her husband’s body. 

“I don’t want anyone to hurt you,” Arthur pleads again, gripping her hand hard enough for his wedding ring to bruise. 

“They can’t,” Nix peppers kisses along the bend of his upper lip and taps another beneath his septum, “You got me.”

His hand-heel tucks under her shaft just right and caresses up and down.

Nix comes close to breaking his nose from trying to watch. A moan splinters her brain right down the middle.

He kisses her forehead, slips his middle finger free, then abates pressure to pet her inner lips in slow circles, parting the folds and dragging his middle finger between them until she snaps her teeth and spasms. 

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.

Arthur doesn’t need to glance at that cracked, dirty glass to spot his and Penny’s dead skin performing one last waltz. Harmony lies beneath it, filmed in plaster, black sludge, and moist subfloor that may just give way should one of them step wrong. How many times did he fix the grout? Now it’s veined and furry in places. Hollow cracks beneath their feet shift the broken tiles with him.

Nix mars her brow as her husband begins to sway.

The ballroom melody bounces in the way one enters a room without permission. It’s diffident, yet polite. The piano’s keys have become both slick and sticky from the same vitreous jelly that lines the bath. Light strings drift in pitch, then warble. It tries to swing in tune with this unit’s former occupant and the life that almost was.

Nix can feel her name scrawled on the linoleum. Perhaps it already is and lurks behind a peel. Wallpaper hangs like damp, tattered skin. Were they to pull those green flaps, they might just find more than the declaration Arthur’s writ in his own blood. 

Plink.

Another brown droplet escapes the bathtub’s mineral-crusted faucet. 

Bloop. 

The sink’s faucet remembers to match pace. 

Plink.

Bloop.

Combined with the gritty percussion of Arthur’s usually weightless steps crushing tiles too brittle to remain intact, 8J composes a siren song of its own…yet can’t wholly remember. The track loops.

Nix feels an artery in her own chest draw tight, then snap back in place.

Arthur senses that spring in his back somehow. He bristles. Melpomene weeps as a tremble he can’t kill betides him. He’s cold, but won’t say it. Smoker’s lungs are arid, yet stuffed with rot and phlegm he can’t expel.

She’s closer to the door, but Harmony’s calling to her from beneath the window. Part of her wonders if that’s the lure.

Arachnoid fingers capped with nails that have overgrown and chipped yellow entrench in the sides of her neck. They aren’t Arthur’s. His grip remains around her waist, burrowing in a waistline that’s too soft these days for her sanity. Had their life together begun when they were young, she’d be on their eleventh child by now. Likely more. All crammed in a hovel that offers no warmth, yet demands it from everyone trapped inside.

A scratch on the record neither spouse can locate drags a needle across the bathroom.

The handgun’s moved a hair to the left. Filmed in plaster and grayish stickers like they’ve lived here a week. The ‘sunbeam’ has retracted its performative balm, too. Deep blue competes with a sodium vapor flood lamp’s jaundiced gleam. 

How long have they been here?

Arthur shivers, says nothing, yet sinks his teeth into his wife’s lower neck.

She wishes he’d break skin. Let the contamination flow from his throat and into her instead. Nix sniffles, wipes her nose against her husband’s wet collar, then kisses his nape just behind his ear.

For the first time in recent memory, he’s clammy. Waterlogged like his mother’s stiff, yet mottled skin.

Mold tries reclaiming Penny. The longer Nix looks, the older her mother-in-law appears. First, ten years weathered a face Arthur can never truly blot from his retinas.

Penny remains, she’s certain, the most enchanting creature Arthur has ever laid eyes on. Such is evident in the wraith's eyes, which have been earth-eaten and absorbed by this apartment so little more than faint pinpricks glow within her sockets. He’d put a pistol in his mouth if he knew.

Arthur does mould around his wife, though.

Nix bristles upon feeling his fingers sink deeper into her skin. She’d let him flay her. Nix drags her mouth behind her husband’s ear, where he tends to spray that amber-dominated cologne. Any trace of him has been replaced with a musty, damp, flat odor that doesn’t belong to him. Didn’t belong to Penny either. Opium by YSL was her favorite fragrance. Also amber-dominant. Aromatic. Sultry and seductive. Arthur, once he had the means, chose a cologne that mimics it in a manner that can turn every head in a room…because it loves his skin.

Nix pushes her wet nose behind his collar to see if she can taste where the water couldn’t soak.

Arthur noses her hair. Strains to breathe when the inevitable laugh shunts through. It’s a sharp, ripping sensation in his sternum that crying won’t alleviate. He shifts from foot to foot, blinking so the rotting pink tile and peeling wallpaper aren’t exposing more damp.

Black and green clouds have formed their own insulation, their own ecosystem that has been keeping his personal Hell warm for his return…and welcoming the third occupant who was stashed in that cabinet that now poorly hangs from hinges time forgot. 

Compression-like pumps distort the diatonic harmony. Like the track’s struggling to recall its own existence, its own place in time.

Nix wilts beneath that crackling record, closing her eyes and allowing her cheeks to soak. She doesn’t know where the music is coming from…yet it hisses at her plain as day.

Arthur’s caught the harmony. His left side bumps a little more languidly than the right…aiding the apartment in threading a tune it can’t truly remember. He does. He still dances to the degraded ballroom loop.

Nix can only cringe at how often mother and son danced to it. Alone. In the dark. Where none but the television’s blue glow could watch her lips brush his and his fingers trail the curvature of her waist. 'Mother-son.' If only she could choke Penny twice. This time with her bare hands. Until the monster's eyes burst and her neck completely crushed like a beer can in her hands. Then she could let the maggots harvest her skull.   

A dark frame shades Arthur’s periphery. He uses his own face to nudge Nix’s towards the medicine cabinet. ‘MOTHER FUCKER’ haunts him there, too.

Nix shifts her focus to that fogged glass, the dust that’s eaten away at it until it was given its pound of flesh. That sink’s enough to make her vomit, but Nix kisses the apex of her husband’s cheek and turns toward it. 

“I don’t want to live here,” he reminds his wife, nose stuffy and vision too blurred to see her face. 

Nix braces, duly aware that 8J has eroded anything the public would find beautiful about her into a fetid, tear-puffed mascara-smeared mess, “But...you won’t let her go.”

“I can’t,” the resignation in his stage whisper seems to flay him from the inside. He takes the brunt of an ache, buckling on himself and succumbing to a laugh that’s brittle and rooted in his core. Blood splashes the backs of his teeth and pools on his tongue from trying to contain it. He keeps trying. Bright red rivers bloat in his sclera to cement his failure. 

‘Go back there,’ the music insists. 

Arthur risks facing the bathtub.

Carm’s Farm felt perfect when Nix had been hunting on Google for something special, yet lowkey, like her daughter. Evelyn strides, not ahead, but just in front of her parents, her long blonde braid her father tied for her swinging with every bounce begotten by her knees. She’s excited down to her bones, Nix thinks with a relief she’s trying not to show, but the girl’s delicate enough to contain herself and remain patient. Her new pink riding boots barely scuff the gravel of Carm’s driveway – she’s either being extra careful with her birthday present, or has taken after Arthur and now floats like he does.

“ So, ” Nix locks the fingers that work on her right hand around her husband’s left as they walk. Then she raises their joined hands to kiss his knuckles, “ We got a date with the bunnies first. ”

Their eight-year-old – a fact her father’s trying desperately not to choke on – lifts her bucket of carrot sticks and leafy greens above her head. The sight makes Jodie giggle.

“ I’m armed! ” Evie declares.

Nix squeezes Arthur’s fingers as best she can with her half-dead hand. In her other she swings the matching riding helmet to Evelyn’s boots. The pale pink cover is velveteen, and will likely last all of about one riding session while pristine, but Evelyn’s eyes had lit up at the idea of a full matching set, and so neither of her parents could possibly deny her what Nix has been calling ‘the whole Paris Hilton’. The shades on her face, Nix’s old heart-shaped ones that she’d gifted the girl through trauma they both shared on her first ever day of school, complete the look perfectly. She’s grown enough that they don’t slip all the way down her nose the second she drops her head.

Nix takes a breath, and ignores how her husband’s hand trembles in hers. Withdrawal or he’s shellshocked – or both.

She works her jaw, “ Then all the Black Phillips, ” Goats, “ And the camel. They have a fucking camel, baby – ” Her eyes roll to try and entertain Arthur’s own. He’ll watch her brows leap toward her hairline. “ That’s not what the helmet’s for. ” She assures him, lifting the aforementioned. “ That’s for after lunch. They’re putting on fuckin’ lunch. ” Her voice has lowered to a whisper while Evelyn counts her carrot sticks to ensure she has enough. Incredulousness tinges the reveal, like she’d forgotten the surname attached to herself and her husband when she’d booked. Pride outside of that, perhaps just for the surprise of her own organisation skills, fills her cheeks.

Nix blushes, bites her bottom lip, then giggles and looks away like he passed her a note in class.

Arthur’s thumb roves over hers. If his middle and ring fingers bend just right, her wedding and engagement rings will leave prints in his skin. Heat’s likely made her supple enough for the bleeding heart wedding band’s floral diamonds to carve trenches in her skin.

Nix squeezes his hand tighter, then scrunches her nose and pokes her tongue between her teeth again once Arthur stops a hair outside the bunny pen…hut…whatever that barn is.

The straw reeks, though he hates barn smell in general. Calico, white, black, and caramel blobs hop along his periphery. Nix has his Ray-Ban’s…somewhere. Likely hanging from her waist. He won’t ask for them despite how midday sun stings his pale eyes. 

Jodie opens the enclosure’s gate for Evelyn first. Their guide doesn’t need her hat now that the…barn…shades them, but doesn’t bother messing with it.

Evelyn turns to her parents to ask them without outright stating she wants them to join her in the rabbit den.

Barn smell knots Arthur’s insides. He highly doubts the enclosure’s been picked clean of feces…and if Evelyn’s walking on it, that means it’ll track back into the house and he’ll smell it. He coughs by reflex.

Nix snorts, glancing between her husband and the bunny encounter he’s dreading. Straw and that musty hay note doesn’t bother her the way it does him. 

Pressing her lips against his cheekbone’s high point, Nix promises, “I’ll power wash our shoes-"

“And bag them,” his pupils shrink ere he adds, “Before you do.”

The tremor his left hand adopts pulls Nix’s lips into a frown. A tear springs to her eye, dissolving her smile’s toothless once his left foot starts shaking. 

“Pinky promise,” she can’t hook her pinky through his own, but lifts their knotted hands to her lips and kisses his knuckles, “I’ll throw them in the dryer afterward, too. How’s that sound?”

He turns his eyes downcast, then nods without realizing Jodie had asked for Mr. and Mrs. Wayne to enter the enclosure.

Evelyn’s already found a Holland Lop. It’s caramel. Smaller than he thought it’d be. Evelyn squats and smooths her hand over the bunny’s crown before offering it a carrot stick. She scrunches her nose and giggles as the rabbit accepts her offering with enthusiasm.

Nix uses her teeth to cling to the new riding helmet’s chinstrap as she rummages through her pocket and fishes out her iPhone.

Arthur hooks a pinky through the helmet’s strap, then uses his own face to nudge Nix’s. A lilac Holland Lop’s hopped up to his shoe. It’s on thin ice.

Nix snaps photos while prompting Evelyn to turn and smile at her while Jodie locks the enclosure behind them.

Perfect segue for a serial killer to pick them all off. Arthur glances between the gate and the chicken wire spread across the fence to keep foxes out and the rabbits from escaping. Anyone could fire at them from afar through here…but Gotham’s an hour north. No one but Queen Latifah lives in Colt’s Neck.

All he sees when looking at their eldest are the tracks on her forearms from immunoglobulin transfusions. Bruce now has them too…from donating plasma and having his antibodies harvested to keep his niece alive.

Nix works her jaw without active thought. The motion sends her whet metal canines see-sawing into her lower gums. Arthur notices the swell in her cheek, the subtle pinching of her lower eyelid as she tries to concentrate on something close to neutrality. She’s fighting something though, and even she can’t name it. As if she’s ever had the ability to read any inch of herself.

It’s better than the cocaine. Nix thinks that even as she sniffs and tries to clear her philtrum of any historic white residue. That groove above her cupid’s bow holds nothing. It’s been years. Yet her nerves still yearn for that blissful tensity, that spark, and the delicious void to follow. The tips of her fingers trace tiny drops of condensation on the outside of her cocktail’s glass. It is better than the cocaine. In some sense.

Arthur would disagree. Through the fog of a perpetual cigarette he only ever watches some picture of desperation as though it were of his making. He won’t say it disappoints him – he hasn’t now – but she knows. There’s that light in his eyes that isn’t close to a spark so much as it is meltwater. The grip his fingers have around her own, and now wrapped around her ankle, too. The ice pressures her bruised skin in a way that’s supposed to bring relief, but her husband’s fingertips should never be cold. He’s warmth and sanctity. The sun grazes his skin the way any paramour would – the way she does. He picks up the chill from her.

That notion alone drags her glass to her lips. The Scottish Sling hides behind an apple juice mixer, subtly sour enough to wake the nerves in her eyelids. She’d accidentally timed her sip with her husband’s next drag.

“ My liver, ” She cants her head so that her eyes swivel girlishly toward him, “ Your lungs, Baby. ” Timbre’s a delicate tease. She bats her lashes once but won’t do him the disservice of dropping eye-contact. Meltwater. He might as well reach across the scant space between them and knife her. Nix manages the sting. “ Together we might make one whole person. ” The bridge of her nose wrinkles without the giggle to accompany it. “ If you squint. ”

It doesn’t satisfy him. She wasn’t stupid enough to think it ever would. The nerves in Arthur’s chest likely flutter the same way his heart does when it stumbles over itself just to function. So often now she can feel that muscle stutter beneath her palm splayed across his chest. Several times now she’s sworn she’s watched his pulse dance unevenly in his throat. Between that and what she’s diagnosed privately as everlasting bronchitis, it’s amazing they’ve made it as far as they have.

“ Nixie… ” There’s a bare thread at the end of his tone, some warning she’s never been particularly good at heading.

Ere he can worry himself to stress, Nix reminds him, “ I love you. ” With a matter-of-factness akin to simply breathing. She sets her glass down, then lays that hand over his at the ice against her ankle. She gently tries to rescue him from freezer burn, but he doesn’t budge. Slotting their fingers together, she squeezes. “ Eyeballs to entrails, remember? Since Checkers. ”

Something cracks in his chest. She was eighteen then, and years have passed them both, torturously, but that lost look behind her eyes returns as though it never left.

“ I stopped. ” She says. And somewhere across the dining room some Faceless cracks a joke that makes his whole table laugh. Nix doesn’t raise her voice to beat the noise. She’s for Arthur. “ All the bad shit? I stopped. ”

Messages 2min Faramir After an 8 year wait...Mer de Noms but hits differently

Arthur’s iPhone pulses on the table. He hasn’t glanced at its flashing screen. Nix dialed down the backlight to keep his eyes from straining and scrambling letters. He’ll still use Siri to dictate or pass the mobile to his wife to bypass a headache.

Messages 1 min Faramir Should be available in Scotland. It’s out globally. 

Messages 30s Faramir Can you show me the tabs when you’re back home?

Messages 12s Faramir By the way…Lilac said her fitting is on Wednesday. Not sure if you remembered. I’ll take her so Nix doesn’t eat your head. 

Messages Now Faramir I love you. 

Despite the warm golden landscape that casts the dining room in a soft glow, Nix’s features cut. Her eyes devour any setting. Arthur has caught Callum admiring those sharp blue hooks. He doesn’t blame their server. He, too, loses focus in her downturned pout, the lipstick shade she spent an hour poring over compared to three other tones in the same range, and how her cheeks are fuller than she’d perhaps like them to be.

One article after another stresses she’s yet to ‘bounce back’ after giving birth to their fifth child. ‘Is This Soft Silhouette Here to Stay?’ say the headlines. Anything to plunge a knife into her chest.

Arthur rocks the makeshift ice pack back and forth, settling his wife’s fingers between his own so he can use his own face to nudge her. He’s erred. Arthur forgets to breathe upon dropping his cigarette on the edge of a plate so he can sweep voluminous blonde extensions behind her shoulder and kiss her pulse point. She’s cool to the touch.

A chill shoots up her spine. Nix drapes her arm across the backs of his shoulders. A knoll from his winged scapula burrows into her skin. Nix turns, taps her nose against his warm brow, and waits with a tremble for him to speak.

Her ankle’s cold.

Condensation from the ice drips onto the hardwood beneath them.

Arthur will shrug his blazer off as soon as he has a free arm.

Muted glass clinks from the bar and footfalls that carpet runners can’t fully absorb snag his attention. Werewolf cuts a glance across the restaurant, then incenses himself with the faint salty sheen of sweat and dried watermelon body mist on her skin.

She’s turning on herself, shoulders caved and her expression softened with a diffidence no one overseas will believe suits her. 

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” he says upon lifting his eyes, then atones, “I’m sorry.” 

“No! You…” Nix doesn’t wince, but averts her eyes so he can admire the twinkle from her eyeshadow, “You should.” The smile her full lips tighten into could crack the table in half. She tries to hide her silver canine implants while reminding him, “’Coke whore,’ remember?” with a self-depreciative snort that sours him, “Gotta watch out.” 

He frowns, then reminds her, “Those aren’t…” batting his eyes doesn’t erase the past five seconds, “My words.” He shakes his head, “They never were.” His free fingers dip beneath her hair to soothe her nape in languid circles.

Nix melts into them like a cat. Slings her thigh across his crossed legs so he'll drop a foot to the floor and allow her that perch. He does, predictably.

Nix tilts her head so a curve of light kisses her liquid highlighter and looks him in the eye as his sweet, whispery, “I love you,” makes her blush all over.

She doesn’t bother pinching her thighs together. If she pools on the squelchy tan fabric beneath them, so be it.

“Drink your god damn cocktail,” he adds with a smirk, then kisses her upturned septum, “Drink seven. It’s our wedding, I love you.” Blinking only further blows his sclera red. “Please,” his cadence is slow, yet his breathing hastens and shallows simultaneously,  “Don’t…think I’m judging you-" 

“You love me…?!” she’s blended flat fact and revelation in a gush that makes her all teeth.

Arthur kisses those long ivory rows, then nods and drops his face in the nook where her throat greets her clavicle. He kisses the bone that doesn’t protrude as much as it used to — and never may again if the armchair clinicians are to be believed.