Method Madness

Marcus Vale stood barefoot in the middle of the penthouse, the cold glass-black concrete leeching sensation up through the arches of his feet. It was late afternoon. The city stretched below, Los Angeles rendered in iridium and smog, all the ugly secrets of downtown veiled by light.

The windows ran floor to ceiling—one unbroken vertical—making it impossible to look away from the horizon, the slow surgical fade of blue into blood orange, then into the deeper bruises of coming night.

He had dressed for the weather, or perhaps for the mood: nothing above the waist, a pair of black sweats that hung low on the hips, the waistband loose with repeated use. The apartment was precision-cooled, the air moving in measured increments. His skin prickled, but he did not shiver. He stood at the edge of the main living space, a statue pretending to be human.

His phone chirped from the countertop, a sound designed to slice through silence. He ignored it on principle. The second time it rang, the chime was longer, the vibrato of importance. He let it persist until it became a thing in the room, a presence.

He picked it up on the third cycle.

The screen: NO CALLER ID.

But the algorithm had already tagged the contact.

Christopher Nolan, in the font and formatting of an executioner's summons.

He answered without speaking.

There was a delay—barely a quarter second, but enough to register as a challenge.

"Marcus," Nolan said, the syllables clipped, respectful, but with no warmth.

"You have a moment?"

He considered lying, then decided it would be wasted on a man who already lived at the edge of everyone's schedule.

"Now's fine."

"Good." A faint rattle of paper in the background, like a script being leafed through for effect.

"They want you for something wild."

Marcus leaned against the counter, the edge biting into his palms.

"Define wild."

A silence, padded with the expectation that Marcus would fill it with his own theories. When he didn't, Nolan continued.

"Disney," he said.

"They want you to headline a franchise reboot. They're prepared to offer a package above your previous, and they're giving you creative input." A click of tongue, as if the words tasted odd.

"They've never done that. Not even for Depp."

The air felt denser, compressing around his ribs.

"What role?"

"Captain Jack Sparrow."

It wasn't a question, but Marcus processed it like one. He flexed his jaw, rolled his shoulders back. The concrete was colder now, the city outside sharpening its light.

"No."

Another silence, this one more intimate.

"You haven't even seen the script."

"I don't need to," Marcus said, the words dry enough to be mistaken for static.

"I'm not interested."

A shuffle of sound on the other end—Nolan's way of expressing both disappointment and, somewhere beneath it, satisfaction.

"You realize what this means."

He did.

He always had.

The Joker was a myth now, a parasite that would crawl down the family tree of cinema until every branch withered or burst. There was no next act for the man who had already killed the story.

"I'm not interested," Marcus repeated, more softly. He pressed the phone harder to his ear, as if that would force the world to believe him.

Nolan said, "You'll have to say it in person. There's an NDA, and a dinner. Three days. They'll expect you at the Four Seasons. I'll text you the suite."

Marcus could have laughed. Instead, he nodded—habit, not intention.

"Anything else?"

A pause.

"Don't bring anyone."

The call ended before Marcus could decide whether that was a threat or a kindness.

He put the phone down, the muscles of his forearm tensed as if he'd thrown it. The display bled blue across the counter, then faded.

From the bedroom, a shape moved. The city's reflection ran over her body, warping the silhouette into something ghostly. Anne emerged in one of his old band shirts—two sizes too large, the hem dropping almost to her knees, sleeves rolled to bare her arms.

Her hair, unstyled, was a mess of brown and honey, the ends fanning out where she'd slept on them. Her face was clean. No makeup, just the raw skin, the pink of her lips.

She leaned against the doorway, one shoulder pressed to the frame, arms crossed, watching him the way a biologist might observe a dangerous animal: interested, unafraid, but never quite sure when it might lunge.

"You always look like that after a call from him," she said.

Marcus didn't move. "Like what."

"Like you want to peel your skin off." She padded forward, feet silent on the floor.

"What did he want this time?"

He eyed her.

"A favor."

.....

The System activated with no warning, not even the courtesy of a ping. Blue vapor rolled over Marcus's vision, crawling from the left—always the left—like a migraine aura.

The world bent at the edges. Every line in the penthouse shuddered, and the city outside doubled, then tripled, until it became a cloud of data points flickering over the glass.

A translucent ribbon unfurled in the center of his view. HUD: clean, cobalt, the kind of blue you only saw in luxury sedans or in a surgeon's operating lamp.

ROLE: CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW – PROJECTED GAINS: HIGH

Below that, a waterfall of text, the typographic equivalent of a bloodstream:

PRECEDENT: GLOBAL RECOGNITION

SYNDICATE VALUE: HIGHEST (POP ICON)

EMOTIONAL IMPACT: UNPREDICTABLE

RISK PROFILE: EXTREME (OVEREXPOSURE)

REWARD: INCREDIBLE LUCK

CONTRACTUAL: FULL CREATIVE CONTROL, UNLIMITED PROMOTIONAL CLAUSE, "LEGACY OPTION"

His eyes tried to blink it away.

He willed it to fade.

It didn't.

The System's overlays didn't just float in the visual plane; they pressed inwards, tight and hot, filling the spaces behind his teeth, the cartilage of the nose, the roots of the tongue.

The taste was familiar: cold metal, a tang of fresh battery. He steadied himself against the counter, fingertips buzzing with the phantom edge of the interface.

He heard the call again—not as memory, but as a live channel, running underneath the System's monologue.

Nolan's voice was sharper this time, more predatory.

"Disney will build the role around you. They want the myth, not the brand. You'll have first cut on the script. They'll let you reconstruct the entire arc, even the supporting cast. Total access."

A blue pulse—Marcus's heart rate, broadcast to the corner of his vision. 124 BPM. The apartment's lighting caught the change and dropped the lumen, tinting the walls from white to blue to near-black. The HVAC slowed, the hum dying down to a hush so absolute he could hear the System's backend clicking through probability trees.

Another flash from the HUD. This time, a face. A deepfake blend of his features overlaid with the iconic Sparrow: kohl, dreadlocks, the sly rot of a man who lived in costume and never once broke character.

He could taste the rum. He could feel the lacquer of the eyeliner. He could sense the itch of the wig against his scalp, the way it would slide when he turned too quickly.

He gripped the counter harder, knuckles blanching. The System didn't care.

AUTONOMY: 86% (NEGOTIABLE)

MARKET IMPACT: GUARANTEED PEAK

FAN SENTIMENT: DIVIDED (EMOJI INDEX 78:22)

SYSTEM URGENCY: ACCEPTANCE REQUIRED

"Do it," Nolan said, the words twinned with the System's own:

"CONFIRMATION PENDING."

Marcus fought the urge to scream. Instead, he spoke—out loud, or maybe just to the blue light.

"I'm not him."

The System responded with a subsonic vibration, a thrum that resonated through the floor. It was not a threat, exactly. More a reminder.

He let his head drop forward, black hair curtaining his vision. The HUD followed, overlay clinging to the new angle, adapting the font size to remain centered in his field of view.

Below the counter, his legs began to shake. The System started cycling alternate roles, each one accompanied by a running tab of worth:

SHERLOCK HOLMES (GRITTY REBOOT) – MID TERM, LOW RISK, "INEVITABLE"

FRANKENSTEIN (PREMIUM LIMITED SERIES) – HIGH CULTURAL CAPITAL, MEDIUM REWARD, "OSCARS LIKELY"

CULT LEADER, HISTORIC MINISERIES – LOW RISK, HIGH AWARD, "INSTANT IMMORTALIZATION"

They all ended with the same subtext: "JACK SPARROW: PEAK OUTCOME."

He tried to breathe, but the air was too thin.

The System flicked up a new overlay: projected earnings, total impressions, estimated "Desire Quotient." Every metric was so obscene, it looked fictional. The blue numbers pulsed, each one a heartbeat closer to a decision he would never own.

He ran a hand over his face, feeling the sweat bead cold at the hairline.

"Decline," he whispered.

"Decline, decline—"

The System didn't register the input.

"Decline," he said again, louder, but it didn't matter. The words were swallowed, digested, then re-presented as an "internal note" in the margins:

RESISTANCE: EXPECTED

NONCOMPLIANCE: ALLOWED, BUT INADVISABLE

WORLDLINE OPTIMUM: ACCEPT ROLE, TRANSCEND PARADIGM

He realized his hand was bleeding. The counter had sliced open the side of his thumb, a thin red line. The System marked the event in a small alert at the bottom left—"INJURY: MINOR"—then minimized it, irrelevant to the core outcome.

From the darkness of the kitchen, a voice called out. Anne's.

"You okay?"

Marcus took three seconds to answer.

"Yeah."

She padded in, eyes catching the blue tint of the room, then settling on the blood.

"You're bleeding."

He looked down, then up, then—fighting the hallucination—back to her. She didn't seem to see the HUD. She just saw the man, raw and exposed, struggling against a software he could never explain.

"Just a scratch," he said.

Anne reached for a towel.

"It's never just a scratch."

She pressed it to his thumb, her hands steady, her face close enough that for a moment the HUD stuttered and retreated. He tried to hold onto that—her, the warmth of her skin, the fact that her words weren't code or contract.

Anne said, "If you need to talk, you can. You don't have to go through me to do it."

Marcus managed a smile, the best he could.

"I know."

The System waited. It always did.

Marcus let Anne wrap his hand, let her voice fill the room, even as the blue light glared at the corner of his eye, cold and absolute.

DECISION PENDING, it said, and kept the timer running.

....

Anne finished tying the makeshift bandage around his thumb, using a strip from one of his old black t-shirts. She knotted it with more care than necessary, then pressed her palm to the back of his hand, holding it in place, refusing to let him slip away so easily.

Her eyes, up close, were bright and sharp, with the faint ring of concern that he usually only saw in hospital mirrors or on the faces of women who didn't know how to fix what they'd caught.

She was silent, letting him make the next move, but Marcus had nothing left to say. The System's HUD hovered at the periphery, flickering new updates in quick, surgical bursts—"EMOTIONAL REGULATION: LOW," "BIOFEEDBACK: DESTABILIZED"—but he willed himself to ignore them, to let the numbers spin themselves to death.

Anne slid even closer, the edge of her knee grazing his own. She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, eyes never leaving his.

"So," she said, voice pitched low and teasing, "are you going to tell me why you're bleeding, or do I have to interrogate you?"

He shook his head.

"It's nothing."

She made a face.

"That's a lie."

He tried to smile. It came out sideways, a half-parody of the old Joker grin. Anne didn't laugh. She studied his mouth, the tension in his cheeks, the way the mask fought to reassemble itself even now. She raised an eyebrow, not buying the performance.

"Another offer?" she asked, gentler now.

He nodded.

"Yeah."

"Big one?"

"Biggest."

She let it hang, reading the fatigue in his body, the dull ache at his temples.

"You don't have to do it," she said.

"I know." He didn't sound like he believed it.

Anne reached up and, very slowly, ran her fingers through his hair, smoothing it back from his forehead. The touch was so gentle it shocked him. He couldn't remember the last time someone had done that—touched him with care, not expectation.

"Hey," she said, thumb pressing lightly at his temple.

"Earth to Marcus. If you don't want to, don't. The world's not going to end."

He wanted to argue, to explain about the System, about how the world had already ended three times and he'd just kept walking through the rubble. But she looked at him with such raw, unfeigned hope that he couldn't summon the energy to let her down.

Instead, he covered her hand with his own, the gesture almost clumsy.

"I said I'd think about it," he said.

"That's all."

"Okay." Anne smiled—small, not showy, but genuine. She slid her palm down the side of his face, tracing the line of his jaw.

"You'd make a hot pirate, you know."

He huffed, surprised into a laugh. It was short and not pretty, but it was real.

She watched him, not as a performance, but as a miracle.

"There it is," she said, more to herself than to him.

He looked at her, the weight in his chest suddenly lessened. The System's overlays faded, the blue light retreating to a thin outline at the edge of his vision, content for now to let him be.

For a moment, the apartment softened. The lighting, sensing the drop in heart rate, shifted warmer. Outside, the city's dusk bled up the glass, tinting the air with sodium yellow and electric coral.

Anne leaned in, pressing her forehead to his.

"If you ever want to quit all this, you could always join me on my yacht. I'll teach you how to sail."

He closed his eyes.

"Not sure I'd be any good at it."

She smiled again.

"That's the point. Nobody's any good at anything until they do it."

He let himself rest, just for a moment, against her.

The HUD blinked once more—DECISION PENDING—but it felt like a whisper, not a command.

For the first time in forever, he thought: maybe.

Anne slid her arms around his neck and pulled him into a hug. He let her. The world outside, for once, could wait.

.....

You smashed it to 1,000 power stones so as a thank you here are 3 chapters because I love you guys!!

[If you want more keep dropping reviews and power stones!

10 reviews = 1 extra chapter

100 power stones = 1 extra chapter

For Extra Chapters Visit the Patreon and Subscribe!

Currently on chapter 53 over there will be posting 10 new chapters tomorrow on patreon also.

patreon.com/BS_Entertainment98]