#48 verse

The Joker swings down from the countdown mechanism, as the T-60 shines up into the clouds like a perverse bat symbol. The red numbers begin to tick down. The gold foil of the giant champagne bottle crinkles and wrinkles—Bats is wriggling again.

“Now now,” Joker says, shaking one gloved finger, “no point in that. You think I don’t know how to truss up my favorite toy after all these years?”

At his feet, scattered across the rooftop, the limp bodies of security guards gather snow and loose confetti. One of them lets out a soft moan. Joker taps his chin for a moment, thoughtfully, and then pushes the little blue bastard over the side of the building with one firm heel-kick. He listens for a moment, but—disappointingly—no one provides the Wilhelm scream.

“Oh well,” he sighs.

“Joker,” Bats growls, so sharp and low that it sends tingles down the Joker’s spine. “I’m the one you want, leave the civilians alone.”

“Oh, you are,” Joker says, strolling across the snowy rooftop, “but I already have you, don’t I?”

Oh, he’s so desperate, it’s so sweet. They both know he can’t do a blessed thing about who Joker does or doesn’t decide to play with up here.

Bats grits his teeth. He’s always doing that—he must have a hell of a bat-dentist tucked away in that collection of his. Above both of them, the countdown flashes its inexorable parade of numbers.

“This is a real new year’s, eh Batsy?” Joker says, rapping the green glass of the bottle with the back of his knuckles. “Snow, lights, champagne… a countdown—”

Bats is still wriggling in there, but Joker is confident in his ability to keep his darling enemy wrapped up good and tight. At least for the time being. The timer hits thirty second.

“I think I’ve just about got the whole thing covered,” Joker concludes, “just about everything but the kiss!”

He slaps the glass and whirls away, leaping from the platform to the railing around the countdown mechanism, coattails flapping in the night.

“Now I’ve never been one for new years’ resolutions,” he calls, as he scales the railing, “I mean, why fix it if it ain’t broke? But I’ll grant you that I’m looking forward to a new year of fresh mayhem! Too bad you won’t be there to see it, eh sweetheart?”

“Joker-!” the Bat growls, but it’s pointless and they both know it. They’re well past the stage of threats and bargains. Joker has everything he wants. Right here.

“Keep your eyes on me!” Joker calls to him. “You wouldn’t want to miss the big moment, would you?”

Of course he doesn’t want the Bat to die. What kind of fun would that be! What would he do then?  Oh, he fully expects that Batsy will wriggle his way out at the last second, just in the nick of time, save the day, yadda yadda yawn. But that’s the point of it. If Joker doesn’t try his damndest to eradicate the little rodent, it’s not really winning to beat him, is it?

Show me, Joker thinks, with his heart in his throat. Breathless and straining to the tips of his toes, Joker grips the rails. The stars pop and sparkle in his eyes. This is all he needs, all he’s ever asked for—to be part of the moment when Sampson brings down Delilah’s temple, when the man gives way to the myth.

Lights! The rumble of machinery! The fizzle and pop of champagne! Three! Two! One!

Outside the grand double doors to the balcony, he can see the first grey sigh of dawn building below the edge of the world. It’s six-something in the morning, and there is a beautiful, frazzled supermodel asleep in the chair beside the window, her long legs splayed like a raggedy-anne doll forgotten mid-tea-party. She lets out the tiniest snore, one foot bare and one foot still in its blue silk shoe. Jack muffles a laugh behind his glove so as not to burst the quiet lull in the penthouse.

The Wayne’s penthouse overlooks Gotham’s most fashionable neighborhood, although now in the early morning dimness it’s hard to make out the old world flourishes that its architects spent so much money on establishing. If he squints, he can just make out a copper water spout shaped like an ill-tempered fish.

He feels much more at home in the company of the city’s many, many gargoyles than he does among its resentful and borderline hostile populace. For now it’s just him and the grumpy copper fish and the snoring supermodel, and the gentle clink of glass bottles as Bruce Wayne—unaware of the company—stoops to herd yet another forgotten object into a trash bag.

“I thought you had people to do that?” Jack says; softly, so as not to wake  Melissa Van Horner, Elle Magazine covergirl two springs consecutively.

Bruce almost jumps—the bottles clink in his trashbag. When Bruce turns around, there’s a moment of such pure pleasure that it takes Jack’s breath away. Bruce’s eyes widen, his breath draws in sharply, and for a moment Jack is overwhelmed with how happy Bruce looks, how happy they both are in this spun-glass moment of simply existing. The two of them just look at each other, cans and confetti strewn between them; Jack with his hands in his pockets, Bruce with his bottles and bag.

If only the world could be this one moment—the light in Bruce’s eyes, the sincerity, the surprise of the joy itself—if only he could live in this moment forever, and never wonder again what his place or his purpose in the world should be.

“I, um,” Bruce says, and then clears his throat, breaking the stare. He shakes the cola bottle in his hand, still a little cola at the bottom. “I thought I’d get a jump start on it. I have cleaners coming in later today, but—this place is a catastrophe, to be honest. They’re going to be working the stains out of the carpet for ages.”

Jack gives the carpet a thoughtful look. He’s got a point. There are worse things than cola involved, at this stage.

“So I thought I’d,” Bruce says, “you know. Take care of the recyclables myself.”

“Nice thought,” says Jack, who would definitely never clean anything ever again if he could afford to pay someone else to do it.

“Honestly I didn’t expect—” Bruce puffs out a sigh, forehead creasing. “This is the first big social event I’ve thrown since they fished me up two months ago. I didn’t expect high society to be so…”

“Careless?”

Bruce shrugs, a little self conscious. “Messy,” he says.

Jack hums something like an agreement. He reaches down and fishes a piece of fine china from a pile of fallen streamers.

“What happened to you stopping by?” Bruce says.

“I am stopping by,” Jack says. The plate is broken, its translucent edges as sharp and brittle as a one-use weapon. “What else do you call this?”

“For the party,” Bruce says, exasperation barely covering the amusement Jack can still hear in his voice. “I hope you didn’t think I was kidding about the invitation. I would have loved to have you here for it. There’s only so much yes Mr. Wayne, no Mr. Wayne I can take before I have to fake a phone call from the CEO of the Oriental Trading Company and hide in my office.”

Jack purses his lips, flips over the china in his hands. “I don’t think your crowd woulda liked me very much. Anyways, I’da just hung onto your sleeve all night like some kinda limpet, and you don’t need to be babysitting me on top of everything else. But I wake up early for the butcher’s shop anyway, figured I’d come by and see how it all went off.”

Bruce frowns at him. “I wanted you to come,” he says. “If you hung onto my sleeve, I wouldn’t mind. I missed you tonight.”

Warmth gathers under Jack’s collar. He thumbs the glittering golden patterns on the china in his hands. “Yeah, well. Here I am?”

“You missed the glamorous part,” Bruce remarks, a sideways smile on his handsome mouth. He holds out the trash for Jack, who reluctantly discards the broken chunk of china with what appears to be real gold leaf. “All that’s left now is the clean-up.”

Jack cranes his head back, whistles at the mess hanging from the light fixtures. “No kidding,” he says.

“I’ll leave that for the professionals with the ladders,” Bruce sighs, a hint of a laugh breaking the edges of his voice. “If you’d like something to drink, I know we have left over wine in the kitchen. Just let me wrap up here and I’ll find you something.”

Jack hums again, considering the wreckage and the glitter and the way Bruce is still moving, still sorting, an automaton unable to rest. He’s got a feeling Bruce is going to crash hard later today, but not for hours yet. For someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Bruce sure doesn’t like to sit idle. Bruce likes to be working. Bruce likes to be doing.

Jack, who is so wound up with nervous energy that he slept perhaps two hours tonight, feels that he can understand that.

He rolls up his sleeves. “Don’t trouble yourself, bubelah,” he says. “Just find me one of those bags, and we’ll see what we can knock out before the cleaners get here.”

“You don’t have to do that—” Bruce starts.

“Pish posh,” Jack says, and shoot him a sparkling grin. “Two sets of hands are faster than one, right?”

Bruce eyes him uncertainly. Jack lifts his hands, all white leather and seams, and wiggles his fingers in what he expects is a charming, jazzy little gesture of intent. Bruce starts laughing.

Every time, every single time, his laugh makes Jack feel like something inside him has slipped home—a key into a lock, a loadstone into an arch—

“Come on,” Jack says, invigorated, plucking the bag out of Bruce’s hands, “you can tell me about what Ms. Van Horne over there did to deserve having one of her shoes launched into the ceiling.”

Still laughing, Bruce hides his mouth behind his fist and follows Jack’s gaze up to the single stiletto heel, satin blue, wedged into the plaster ceiling by the spike as surely as if it had been heeled with a real stiletto. “Oh god,” he wheezes. “How did they do that?”

Dawn is welling up at the edge of the world; the night is melting down into the storm drains of the city, draining from the sky like rain; in the courtyard a young woman stumbles into the waiting cab of a taxi with her shoes slung over her fingers.

It must be a pain to dust in here. The old boy’s not as spry as he used to be. Why don’t they hire a maid to do all that, it’s not as if they don’t have the money. Right?

Jack runs his hands over the cool marble skull of some philosopher he’ll almost certainly never be able to name. His fingers itch too, now, with the same suppressed panic that has been building in him for a day now. What is he looking for? Will he know it when he finds it?

Underneath the splashes of new life in this room, there are the dusty underpinnings of the Bruce who lived here before the accident. Delicate velvety bodies of bats pinned underneath glass, wings splayed for analysis. Obscure texts by long dead scientists. Jack looks again to the Mona Lisa smile of Martha Wayne, searching for some answer in her spectral face. The Bruce of before strikes him as a kind of Byronic figure, pacing the walls of this gloomy parlor. He grows monolithic and strange in his seclusion. His sadness. Jack can imagine where that sadness might come from. Maybe there’s nothing behind Bruce but this sadness.

He lifts his fingers. Maybe he is imagining it all. A cold uncertainty runs through him, as he overlooks the room. Maybe all he’s sensing is his own guilt crystalizing between them, growing stronger with each person who seems to know more about him than he knows about himself. He drops into the chair behind the desk, groaning, and spins absently.

As he drifts to a stop, he spots a business card wedged underneath one of the eccentric little paperweights. It’s Kent’s. He’s a journalist, Jack knows now, which explains how he knew just the wrong things to say. As he picks it up, Jack eyes the half-open door to the parlor. Bruce clearly didn’t want him involved in whatever Kent is investigating, but every instinct is screaming at him that these things are one and the same—Bruce’s secrets, his vague warnings, Kent’s connection to them both.

Jack pockets the card before he can convince himself not to, and quickly leaves the parlor behind.

What he really needs to check out, he decides, are those R&D documents that Bruce is so obsessed with lately. Jack has always suspected there is something lurking beneath the surface of Wayne Enterprises. It’s time to see the face of it.

-x-

It’s remarkably difficult to get his hands on those documents, as it turns out. Bruce is pleasant but firm about confidentiality, and he never leaves them unattended on the table or in an unlocked drawer. The more Jack tries to get close to them, the more he realizes that Bruce is actively guarding them. After being thwarted for the umpteenth time, Jack gives up for the day and wanders out of Bruce’s office entirely. He hardly notices that he’s made it to the elevator until he’s already on it. He studies the grid of buttons for a moment, first blindly and then with dawning interest. What if he….

Jack hits the button for the basement, and then rides the long trip down to R&D in a nervous fit. He has no idea what he’s doing.

The hallway down here is sparse, when he steps off the elevator. They don’t have the marble fixings of the office floor or the stylish steel minimalism of the lab floors. It’s just a hallway, concrete and florescent lights, and at the end of it: a door.

Jack presses his hand against the scanner, but no dice. Down here there’s not even a retinal, which is kind of weird. From the way Bruce was handling those documents, Jack expected high security. Could it be something as simple as embezzlement hiding in those papers, nothing truly strange or unusual at all? He couldn’t get square with the idea. There was something in his bones that wouldn’t let him rest.

As he was tapping at the pad, looking for any buttons he could fuck around with, the elevator slid open and revealed the shape of Lucius Fox, in the process of tugging his lab coat on.

“Oh,” Lucius says. He comes down the hall at a brisk but unworried pace, hands in his pockets. “Mr… Ah, Jack, wasn’t it?

Jack waves at him. “Lucius, buddy, how are you?”

“Living on caffeine, same as always,” Lucius says. He seems a little taken aback at the familiar address, but he rallies quickly. Jack wants to apologize for the misstep, actually, but Lucius rallies so quickly there’s no good place to do it, so Jack just… keeps smiling. You can’t go wrong with a smile.

“What brings you down here?” Lucius says.

Jack glances up. “Bruce is driving me home,” he says. And then, hit with a burst of inspiration, “But it feels like I’m underfoot today, so I thought I’d take a walk around and make myself scarce. You have a second to give as guy a tour?” Lucius looks at him. Looks at him hard, and Jack is becoming suddenly aware of how suspicious he must sound when Lucius gives him a shrug and plants his hand over the scanner.

“Alright,” Lucius says. “I don’t have a whole lot of time to squeeze you in, but you can have a look around if you like.”

The door rolls back to show something that reminds Jack, inanely, of a tire store. It’s got that rubber and grease smell, a room that looks darker than it is, light bouncing off the metal edges of cases all around. Jack darts into the thick of it before he can think twice, circling a display case at the center of the room which glows with blue electronic lights, a tower of folded metal behind glass.

“Ah,” Lucius says, somewhere behind him, “the turbine battery. Just the prototype, of course. The first gen model is on display at a conference in Europe at the moment….”

Lucius says it in a particular hanging sort of way, like maybe he’s waiting for Jack to ask more questions about it. But Jack wouldn’t even know where to start, and anyways he’s distracted by an actual tire on display at the back wall, over the sprawling holographic presentation table (which he ignores).

The treads are deep enough to hide several fingers and the circumference is enough to sit an eighteen-wheeler on, and there’s something elegant about the shape of it all that fills Jack with a delightful déjà vu. He runs his fingers over the swoop and curve of the treads. The display shelf is on eye level with him, and when he looks up into it like this, he can almost feel—

“That one’s a bit of a relic,” Lucius observes. “Military tech moves fast. That model is already obsolete.”

Jack traces the outline of a tred. “It was on the batmobile, wasn’t it,” he murmurs.

There’s a change in the air. It only lasts a second, but it startles Jack out of his revere. He draws back his hand like he’s afraid the rubber will burn him. When he turns back to Lucius to apologize, though, Lucius looks the same as ever. “I don’t see how it could have been,” the man says, hands in the pockets of his lab coats.

“Right,” Jack says quickly, “sure, my mistake. I’ve never even seen the batmobile.”

Lucius gives him a strange look. “What are you interested in?” he asks, leaning against the projection table. “I could give you a pinpoint tour, if you don’t mind being in and out pretty quick.”

Jack furrows his brows, puzzling it over. “What, uh,” he says, “what is Bruce interested in?”

Lucius considers him for a moment, and then he crooks a finger for Jack to follow. He bustles over to a stacked shelf and digs out a scale model of a monorail car, which fills his arms like a big cat as he lifts it. “Bruce is always most interested in the city improvement projects,” Lucius says.

Jack takes it into his arms like it really is a big animal, warm with affection for his boyfriend. Again he thinks to himself, how could I have doubted him? What was I expecting?

“Do you have a background in engineering?” Lucius asks, as he reaches over and flicks the switch to make the little motor run. The wheels chug right along. “Not a bit,” Jack says, poking at the wheels. “Couldn’t wire my way out of a locked car.”

“Not even a car? You seemed pretty familiar with the x29 tred.”

Jack pauses, in the middle of flicking the little model doors open and closed. “I dunno what I was thinking there. I just thought I remembered seeing it before.”

“Maybe some other military vehicle,” Lucius suggests. “We sold a lot of them five or six years back.”

“Maybe,” Jack says, thinking that the closest he’d ever been to a military vehicle was being kidnapped by Scylla and Charibdis months before. And he had no idea what that car looked like, because he’d been blindfolded.

No, the more he thinks about it, the more certain he is. He almost definitely remembers looking up into that tread pattern, like maybe—like maybe he was on the ground? Like maybe it almost ran him over? But the memory isn’t scary. It’s more like a happy memory. Like a Christmas morning memory. Not that he has any of those to compare it to.

“Anything else I can show you?” Lucius asks, which is funny because he’d seemed a lot more hesitant standing at the door five minutes ago.

Jack looks up at the ceiling, at the projector table, at the door to the back room. He feels kind of stupid for bothering Lucius now. How would he know what he was looking for in here, even if he found it?

“I’m good,” he says. “Thanks for your time, Bubala. I know you got work to do.” Lucius takes the model from his arms when he offers it, and puts it away. “You know Bruce has had a fair number of girlfriends over the years,” he remarks, 

“but you’re the first person to come down here in the flesh.”

“Huh,” Jack says. “You’d think they woulda taken more of an interest.”

“Bruce knows which kinds of people take an interest,” Lucius says, with a meaningful look over his glasses.

“Yeah?” Jack says, nonplussed.

“Bruce might seem like a carefree spoiled sap,” Lucius says, “but he knows more than people think.”

“You sure you’re allowed to call your boss spoiled?” Jack says, uneasily.

“Come back any time,” Lucius says, pressing the button to open the heavy door. “But don’t expect to find anything.”

Jack inches out the door, not quite sure what direction this conversation has derailed in.

“And next time?” Lucius says. “Get a guest pass.”

At the edge of the kitchen, Jack slumps against the door frame and gives everyone a bleary hello wave. “What’s the commotion?” he says, eyes drifting from the uneaten toast on the counter to Bruce’s pinched expression and crashing to a sudden stop on the stranger behind Alfred. The fumes of some uncomfortable and inscrutable moment drift over them all.

“Uh,” Jack says. He is very awake now. “Sorry—am I interrupting something?”

The man leaning at the counter gives him a bemused once-over, horn rimmed glasses slipping down over his nose. He has a boxy look to him, like somebody hung a powder-blue suit jacket on one of those football tackle dummies. Then he pauses, with his eyes over Jack’s chest, and shoots Alfred an urgent probing look. Alfred pressed his lips together and turns, deliberately, away. Some dire conversation is passing silently between them, far beyond Jack's reckoning.

“I should go,” Jack says, all at once self-conscious about whatever it was the huge stranger was looking at. His shirt? Oh god, Bruce’s shirt.

“It’s fine,” Bruce sighs. He slides his uneaten toast across the counter top, on a paper napkin of course because Bruce never has time for plates. “Mr. Kent, this is Jack. Like I was saying earlier, it might have been better to meet at the office. We weren’t expecting visitors.”

“I’m sorry for the intrusion,” Kent says. He sounds genuinely apologetic, and warm, and slightly Midwestern around the vowels. He turns his attention to Jack again,. “I was just answering a call that your—boyfriend?”

Jack nods, heart pounding.

“That your boyfriend made earlier this morning. He’s looking to get back into an old business venture—?” This time Kent looks at Bruce for confirmation.

“Considering,” Bruce says, carefully. “You don’t need to bore Jack with the details. We can talk about this later, in a more professional setting. Jack, you can go back to bed. I’ll be up in a moment.”

Jack lingers uneasily for a moment, watching the silent stalemate between Alfred and Bruce—their cat-rigid wariness—and Kent’s considering, almost sympathetic otherness. There’s something heavy in this room, something secret that no one wants Jack to be a part of. For a moment, Jack thinks, he’s cheating on me. But that thought is gone as soon as it appears. Bruce is too good for something like that, to honorable. It has to be something else.

“Right,” Jack says. “Okeedokie. I’ll just… go.”

It’s something about Wayne Enterprises, Jack is almost certain of it. It’s a secret that belonged to Bruce before the accident, the insects’ eggs floating just beneath the surface.

Jack shuffles back through the halls, running his fingers through his messy hair. But what could Bruce want so badly to keep from him? From Jack, of all people, who is hopelessly devoted—of all the people on this earth, Jack, who would walk out into the desert and never be seen again if Bruce only were to ask him for it.

There’s a sound of throat clearing. Jack startles, twists to find Mr. Kent standing just a few feet behind him, looking apologetic.

“Sorry,” Kent says. “I’m told I’m pretty light on my feet for someone my size.”

Jack at least tries to look like he’s relaxed. The paranoia is butting in, with its own ideas about what is going on here, but- He reminds himself that this is Bruce’s house. Anyone who wants to take him away will have to go through Bruce first. Or at least—god, he hopes so.

“You seem,” Kent says, and frowns as if he’s not quite sure what he means, “...happy here.”

“Well hey,” Jack says, sliding back a step, “who wouldn’t be?”

“He can’t stay like this forever,” Kent says. “You understand that, don’t you? We’ve all tried at one point or another, and it never works. And when it happens, I just want to know… what will you do?”

Jack’s paranoia abruptly switches directions. No, this isn’t someone here to commit him. This is someone here to undo his uneasy peace, to scoop those eggs up to the surface where they can finally suck their first greedy breaths. He runs his finger through his hair and pulls them tight, curling in on himself.

“Why can’t he?” Jack asks. “Why can’t we stay like this?”

“There are people who need us,” Kent says. He says it softly, like a parent to a distressed child. “At the end of the day, Bruce won’t be able to ignore people in need. Training or not, it isn’t in his nature. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“But—” Jack mutters, “but I need him. I love him. Aren’t I enough?”

Kent stiffens. He draws back, and then he reaches forward, his hand hovering uncertainly in the dimness, the sun leaking under the heavy closed doors, the dust never quite purged from the air. “Ah,” he says. “I think—I never understood what it was with him and you. I think I just got it.”

Jack looks up, from between his fingers. “You recognize me?” he says, surprised and not surprised. It seems like everyone knows him better than he knows himself.

“Obviously,” Kent says, lifting an eyebrow. He taps the space over his heart. “That’s familiar too, but your face hasn’t changed that much. And I know all about familiar faces.”

Jack stops, slides his hand down his forehead, touches the skin beneath his eye with his fingertips. His face?

Kent sighs. “Part of me still thinks—for what you did to us, there at the end—there ought to be consequences.” He looks tired now, with his wide shoulders and his big unfashionable glasses and his model-perfect skin. “But you were always Bruce’s problem, and I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“You must have been friends,” Jack says, trying not to sound so jealous, “if he told you about me.”

Kent pauses. He narrows his eyes uncertainly behind his glasses. “If he—” Kent breaks off. “You know who I am, don’t you? The box, with the toxin—it was mailed to Clark Kent, I know you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says, “did you say I mailed you—?”

“No, hold on,” Kent says, waving a hand. “Your heartbeat—are you telling me you actually don’t remember?”

“Bruce and I were in the same accident. Everything from before that is just… gone.”

Kent pulls back into himself. He cups a hand over his lips, brows pinched. Jack is just trying to catch up, trying to understand. So many people seem to know him, and yet, no one ever came forward. It's been a year since the accident, and not a single person has come forward to claim him. He digs his nails into his arms, drawing red welts up through the pale skin. Bruce's people seem to know him, but only tangentially—it's as if he only existed in Bruce's shadow. He feels like a ghost. He feels like a paper man.

"Do you know?" Kent says. He's staring hard at Jack now, some deep but inscrutable emotion on his face. "Has anyone told you?"

Jack's vision starts to blur. He realizes belatedly that his body is shaking. He watches the expression on Kent's face morph from apprehension to concern without understanding it, as the world goes hollow around him. Paper people. Paper house.

"I'm getting Bruce," Kent says. Jack blinks and then he's gone, and he doesn't want to think about how he's losing time now, too, but his brain won't stop looping over and over, you're losing time you're losing time

Bruce races in ahead of Kent by several seconds, catches him around the back and pulls him in.

"I'm fine," Jack says, teeth chattering, "I'm fine."

Bruce pulls away just enough to look over his shoulder. "What did you say to him?" he demands, clutching the back of Jack's head like he's holding it together.

"I... don't know," Kent says. "I don't think I understand anything about this."

Bruce makes an irritated noise deep in his throat. Jack shies away from it automatically. "You should go," he tells Kent. "Alfred will show you out."

Kent winces, but he has enough grace to back away, retreating carefully from the scene. He gives Jack one last glance, regretful and confused, and then he ducks through the door and is gone.

"I can't do this," Jack mutters into Bruce's shoulder, "I can't keep...."

Jack looks up at the man he loves, has loved, will die loving. He can’t live like this. They can’t live like this. He has two options, and only one of them offers a chance of this life, the life Bruce is offering him. The other is always waiting for him, at the bottom of the rest, and he hopes to god he never has to go back there.

Jack buries his face in Bruce’s shoulder. He breathes in pajama shirt smell, fingers clutching at the fabric over Bruce’s shoulder blades, and thinks the familiar old refrain.

Bruce never ought to know about this. Bruce should carry on in the sunlight, unburdened with such awful things. Jack will take one more darkness into himself, back into himself, and hope that this will be enough to end it once and for all.