Method Madness

(A Few Days Later - Back at his New Apartment)

Marcus woke in a gasping hush, skin tacky with sweat and mouth pried open to swallow air that didn't taste of bleach, or blood, or foundation. There was nothing in his head. No laughter. No low, curling threat running beneath the hum of waking thought.

For the first time in months—maybe years, if he counted the life before (which he can't remember)—there was only silence, broad and alien, the hush of an empty cathedral after the last mass has let out.

He lay on his back in the massive bed, sheets tangled about his hips like the remnants of a night gone strange and hostile. The bed was king-sized, handstitched black linen, four-hundred-thread-count, and it made his frame look smaller than it was.

The mattress conformed to his body with industrial memory, as if the indent of his long, lean form was something it expected to keep for years. The headboard was a slab of matte graphite, imported from Belgium, the kind of touch you only noticed if you understood how much it cost. It was cold against the nape of his neck.

Everything in the penthouse was like this—brutally expensive, aggressively restrained.

He turned his head.

A single, mechanical groan of bone against pillow.

His hair—a black curtain with that subtle bruise of violet only visible under the right light—spilled over the edge of the pillowcase, nearly touching the floor. He blinked at the ceiling, high, unfinished concrete, sprayed once with white to suggest cleanliness, then left bare.

The air-conditioning, set to a precision-cool sixty-eight, funneled icy breath through invisible vents, raising goosebumps on his exposed chest and arms.

He reached for a voice, a punchline, even the hint of a snarl in his own thoughts. But there was nothing. Just the clatter of his own blood, loud and raw in his ears, a noise so wet and animal it made him sick.

He pressed the heel of his hand to his brow. Waited for the world to reassert itself with color, with story.

The System didn't even ping. Not a single HUD flickered behind his eyes. For a moment, he thought he might be dead—some flavor of brain trauma that let the body run a last lap around the block before slumping for good.

He rolled out of bed.

The soles of his feet hit the floor. Polished black concrete, smooth enough to feel like glass. The cold climbed his calves, reminding him of childhood winters that didn't exist, of hotel lobbies where nobody slept.

He padded forward, a predator out of context, and the only sound was the slight suction of his skin against the sheen of the ground.

The penthouse looked different in dawn light. Not softer—nothing here was soft—but more exposed. Windows on every exterior wall, floor-to-ceiling, each one framed in brushed steel. Outside, the city was still dipped in the blue milk of morning fog; the high-rises vanished into it, shapes becoming silhouettes, then nothing at all.

He knew, theoretically, that he was forty-one stories above street level. That the world kept grinding along, honking and cursing and fucking, down where the smog settled. But from here, it could have been the last apartment on the last block in the last city to survive.

He walked, slow and careful, toward the main living space.

The room was vast—open-plan, no walls to break up the line of sight, as if the architect wanted you to feel always on stage. There was a couch: black, Italian, like a monolith of velvet. A table: glass, so clear you had to mark its corners with blood or lose them entirely.

There were books, stacked in nervous, artful towers, each one about something nobody read for fun—true crime, esoteric psychology, treatises on performance and torture and the ethics of masks.

And there was a mirror, perched against the far wall. Full-length, antique, its gold frame sanded raw, like a stolen relic from a funeral home. Marcus avoided it.

He passed the kitchen—designer, unused, all empty space and aggression—and moved instead toward the windows. Each step a slow recalibration of gravity, as if his bones had been lightened for a role he didn't get to audition for.

The city below looked hungover. Thin bands of mist curling up from the rooftops, garbage trucks humming along their circuits, and the distant shimmer of a sunrise that only rich men and junkies got to see. He pressed his palm to the glass and watched his own reflection appear, faint and double-exposed on the city.

He expected the Joker's sneer to surface, some echo of that smile that watched back.

But his lips were just lips, pale and chapped. His eyes, cold green and ringed with the kind of bruises only insomnia can breed, stared out with no malice, no hunger. Just the hollow, forensic curiosity of an addict denied his chemical.

He let his forehead rest against the glass. The cold was bracing; it made him think of hospital windows, the ones you pressed against in the middle of the night to prove you were still alive.

Was he still alive? He didn't feel real. Every movement felt rehearsed, like an actor hitting marks in a dream he couldn't direct. He lifted a hand, flexed the fingers, turned it palm-up to see the veins stutter beneath his skin. He'd painted these hands a hundred times—white, then red, then white again. They looked wrong without the costuming.

He pressed both hands to the window and exhaled, watching the fog bloom on the other side, then fade.

Still nothing in his head.

Not even the urge to laugh at the cosmic punchline of it.

He looked down at the city, then at himself, then back to the city.

Somewhere out there, millions of people were waking to lives they thought mattered, brushing their teeth and petting their dogs and checking their phones for the morning's tragedy. And somewhere, some part of himself wanted to care.

He stepped back, let the glass reclaim its chill.

He turned toward the mirror.

He would look.

He would force the world back into order.

But not yet.

He stood there, suspended between the city and his own reflection, letting the silence fill him up until it felt like a second skin.

.....

Marcus drifted from the edge of the window, the blue hush of morning still wrapped around his shoulders, and made for the bathroom. He did not turn on the lights. The penthouse floorplan was seared into muscle memory; he could navigate the architectural maze without sight, his body tracing the same lines every morning for the last three months. Each step a kind of pilgrimage, a sacrament to what he had become.

The bathroom was a gallery—white marble veined with charcoal, a twin set of vessel sinks, and a glassed-in shower like an upright coffin. The far wall was mirror, unbroken and unmerciful, stretching nearly ten feet across.

The bulbs above the mirror were off, but the city's dawn had crept in, cold and uncertain, lighting him from below. He liked it better this way. The absence of fluorescence made him look more human, less sculpted.

He stared at himself.

Not a glance—an autopsy. His gaze crawled over his own features, looking for a mask that wasn't there.

The eyes were what stopped him first. They were always the first thing people commented on: that sick, frostbitten green, rimmed in a whisper of grey. Once they'd been described as "venom in a goblet of ice." (Some publicist's fantasy, but he'd written it down, anyway.)

Now, unframed by makeup, they just looked tired. The veins around them were blue, almost purple, as if painted on. He hadn't slept. Not really. Not since the wrap.

He ran a hand back through his hair. The black was true-black, a rich genetic ink that could only be improved with weekly salon toners and the subtlest smudge of violet. Even now, the dye held, the streaks catching faintly as the window-lit mist filtered through the glass.

The strands were long, thick, almost feral. When he was still shooting, the team would either tame it into a low bun or let it flare out, wild and banshee, depending on the scene. He preferred it down. It made him look less like someone's project, more like himself—or whoever that was now.

His torso was bare. The tattoos, all meticulously placed, were stories in their own right - memories forgotten: a geometric band coiling his bicep, blackwork wolves at his collarbones, a mandala webbed over his sternum.

There were newer ones, too—commemorations of the role, discreet symbols layered along his ribs and the inside of his forearms. The skin beneath was pale, almost paper, haunted by the shadow of the Joker's old foundation. No amount of scrubbing could get it all out.

He stared.

Waited for something to blink.

His left hand trembled on the marble. He gripped the edge of the counter until the shake stopped, until his knuckles burned.

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Tried again.

The tongue felt wrong in his mouth, like he was imitating a foreign accent he'd only half-learned.

"Good morning," he said.

The sound was flat. A rasp, but not the delicious, poisonous snarl people expected. Not the Joker's basso-profundo seduction or its switchblade cackle.

Just... Marcus.

A boy who had once woken up in a world that forgot to give him his memories.

He licked his lips, ran the line again, this time trying to drag the old cadence up from the roots.

"Good morning." Lower, hungrier. He shaped the vowels with intent, bent the phrase into a smile.

Still nothing. It was paint-by-numbers. He could feel how bad the impression was, even before the air stopped vibrating.

Hollow.

Mechanical.

Like watching a fan video, or worse—a deepfake.

The anger came up in a slow, clean pulse. He gritted his teeth. Why now? Why after all these months—after the wrap, after the press, after the impossible red carpet—did the voice vanish? Why did it feel like the very thing that had animated him had been surgically cut away, but the scar refused to close?

He splashed cold water on his face. The temperature shocked his nerves awake, the droplets turning crystalline as they beaded on his skin. He stared at himself, water streaking down the line of his jaw, pooling in the hollow above his collarbone.

He braced his hands on the counter, bowed his head, let the chill roll through him.

He whispered the word again, so softly it wasn't even a word anymore.

Morning.

The mirror was unkind.

It didn't return a smile.

.......

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