Method Madness

The avenue was sealed off five hours before showtime, barricades stitched across the Walk of Fame like a suture, and still the air outside the TCL Chinese Theatre felt surgical—sterile, too bright, every surface wiped to a frictionless gloss that made the city look new and deeply, violently wrong.

The crowd had begun coalescing at noon, a slow coagulation of tourists, diehards, and the bone-hungry press, all shunted into pens by black-suited security that smiled with teeth but not eyes. Helicopters snipped shadows over the street. In the heat, the sidewalk started to sweat.

Marco Ruiz watched the entire ballet from his corner post, lens hood raised just enough to shade the scar above his left eye, the result of a lens duel with a celebrity handler two years and six million clicks ago.

He'd covered red carpets in every major city, chased A-listers through airports and burrowed under caution tape at three separate murder scenes, but tonight the air buzzed different. Even the light felt weaponized.

He rolled his shoulder, feeling the weight of the camera, the strap grown loose after a month of deliberate neglect. He told himself it was superstition, not laziness; every shooter on the circuit had a ritual, a luck totem, something to keep the curse of the dead battery or the jammed sensor at bay.

Marco's was his battered Nikon and the faded stretch of old-school press pass that still, somehow, opened doors. He tugged it out, checked the edge for frays, then stuffed it back under his jacket.

The doors to the theater—hell, to the entire block—had been locked since dawn. No one in, no one out. Marco counted at least four layers of security between the curb and the carpet: two LAPD, one private, and a final ring of Warner's own, each wearing an earpiece and the expression of someone recently briefed on the threat of live ammunition.

He scanned the crowd for familiar faces, cataloging the competition. Lena Chen stood thirty feet to his right, tucked behind the white press barricade, her mic in one hand and her phone in the other.

She was a pro, all sharp angles and peacock blue suit, the kind that didn't wrinkle even after eight hours in a news van. Marco watched her tap her press badge against the rail, then mutter,

"It's been too quiet since that thirty-second leak," to no one, or maybe to the algorithm.

Lena lifted her mic, scanned the darkened theater entrance as if she expected it to bleed. Her hair was perfect, her lipstick a perfect blood orange, and Marco had the fleeting sense that if she let go of the mic it would hover there, suspended on force of will alone. She caught his stare, arched a brow, then looked away.

A few feet closer to the velvet rope, a fan-blogger named Zoe Matthews recorded a rolling scream into Instagram Live. Her phone case, neon pink and bulked up with a tangle of ring lights, had a Joker sticker on the back—smile stretched wide, eyes crossed out in black.

Zoe wore the same purple blazer as the Joker, over fishnets and a pleather skirt, and a shock of green clip-on bangs drooped over her right eye. Marco watched her dance on the balls of her feet, the way her voice punched through the crowd with the shrill confidence of the truly unafraid.

"Listen up, clowns and clownettes! No cast interviews in weeks! Makes you think Marcus Vale never left that Joker persona, doesn't it?" She spun a quick circle, letting the camera catch the sky, the crowd, her own face.

"Hollywood's about to get what it deserves. And so are we." She stuck her tongue out, then threw up two fingers in a V, mouth open in a frozen cackle.

Marco's earpiece buzzed.

He thumbed the talkback.

"Ruiz, on site."

A bored voice, somewhere in the trailer behind the Roosevelt:

"Talk to me, Marco. Anything to shoot?"

Marco pivoted, swept his camera up to frame a scrap of handmade signage, taped to the shaft of a streetlamp across the avenue:

"WHERE'S THE REST OF THE CAST?" in fat black marker, underlined three times.

Below, a smaller sticker—crooked, half peeled—read: "LET THEM OUT."

He keyed the radio.

"Fan action is getting rowdy. Security's got the walk-up on full lockdown. Not even a whiff of studio PR out here. Still dead on the guest list?"

A sigh on the line, then:

"Zero confirmation. No press packet. Studio just says, 'Stay tuned.' God, I hate this meta shit."

Marco smiled, dry.

"It's not meta. It's a magician's trick. They want us to look at the left hand so the right can stab us in the back."

The voice on the other end snorted.

"Just get the shot. If Vale so much as breathes, I want a feed in five seconds."

"Copy," Marco said, and cut the line. He didn't add that if Vale did anything but breathe, he'd be the first to run, not the first to shoot.

He slouched back against the barricade, eyeing the fans pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the sweatbox behind him. Some wore Joker paint—thick, cracked, running in the heat.

Others had gone DIY: purple hoodies, thrift store suit jackets, thrifted sashes with the word "QUEEN" or "PRINCE" inked in marker. Every tenth face had the haunted glaze of someone who'd watched the leaked teaser too many times and not slept since.

He caught the gaze of a girl maybe sixteen, pale as milk, eyes rimmed in green shadow, the word "SMILE" written across her cheek in lipstick. She looked at him, really looked, then offered a twitch of a grin, as if she knew exactly what he was and why he was there.

He raised the camera, snapped her picture. She didn't flinch. He gave her a nod, then let the camera fall again.

Time passed, measured in the melting of ice from the portable coolers and the fidgeting of security. The only movement came from the news choppers, and the intermittent flares from the cameras when someone in the crowd tried to sneak a selfie with a celebrity lookalike.

Lena Chen drifted closer, thumb typing on her phone, and planted herself next to Marco with the practiced ease of a woman who'd learned the art of unignorable presence.

"Who do you think they'll send?" she said, not looking up.

"PR says it's a surprise," Marco replied.

"I'm guessing not the full cast. Vale, probably. Maybe Hathaway if they want a big splash."

Lena snorted.

"If she shows, I'll eat my badge. She's not been seen in public for a month."

"Neither has he," Marco said.

Lena finally looked up, and there was something sharp and hungry behind her mascara.

"You think he's gone full Joker?"

"I think he's whatever they tell him to be. Some people are just built for myth."

Lena tapped at her mic, running her tongue over her teeth.

"Did you get the shot of the sign?"

He nodded.

"Nice. People are going to lose their minds."

He watched as she composed a text, then sent it off with a flick. Then, almost as an afterthought:

"You ever see one of these go bad?"

Marco considered.

"Bad like violence?"

"Bad like the line between fantasy and real snaps, and nobody notices until it's too late."

Marco shook his head.

"People want to believe. Even the pain is part of it."

Lena arched her brow.

"That's poetic, Ruiz. You should try the other side of the lens."

Marco smiled, quick and toothless.

"I prefer watching."

Behind them, Zoe Matthews was now on her knees, streaming her own face in extreme close-up, tongue out, eyes bugged, holding the phone so it distorted her jaw into a cartoon rictus.

He caught the whole thing in one frame, the fan, the sign, the barricade, Lena's perfect hair, and the silent theatre behind them all.

The crowd murmured, then rose in volume as the hour drew closer. Heat shimmered off the street; the sky bled from gold to bruise to night.

A flash of movement on the far side of the carpet: a trio of men in black, walking with the compact stride of those who did not expect to be stopped. Marco tensed, raised the lens, and tracked them as they conferred with the main security post.

A brief exchange, a flash of badges, and the doors to the TCL cracked, just barely, letting out a single strip of icy blue light.

The crowd sucked in a breath, almost in unison.

Zoe Matthews screamed, "It's happening!" and the phones all went up, a field of screens catching the moment, digitizing it for the world.

Marco pressed the shutter, slow and steady, as the door opened wider, just enough to frame the night's first shadow.

He keyed his radio again, voice low.

"Showtime."

On the other end, silence, then the faintest crackle of a laugh.

The red carpet waited, empty and perfect, for the arrival of whatever it was that Hollywood had built, and whatever, or whoever, the Joker was going to be.

........

We hit 1k collections and also I've had some really good feedback that will help when I go back through and edit so felt like i should drop a new chapter 

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