Method Madness

Marcus Vale was not the first through the door. He waited—listened—for the shuffle and retreat of the last guy, let the cold linger on his knuckles a second longer, and only then stepped in.

The air was colder than outside. A single guttering candle trembled atop a stool, casting every surface in sepia jaundice. The walls closed in: soundproof foam over plywood, black-out tape haphazardly crosshatched over the seam of the window.

The glass was slicked with rain, each drop alive in the candlelight, melting down the pane in crooked veins. The only furniture: the stool, a battered mic stand, a coil of old ship's rope looped over an exposed beam like a dare.

The rest was shadow.

At first Marcus didn't see him—the silhouette in the far corner, posture boneless but predatory, face eclipsed by the darkness. Only when the thunder boomed and a slice of flashbulb revealed the high cheekbone and mess of salt-and-pepper stubble did he clock Denis Villeneuve.

The man did not rise, did not introduce himself. He simply sat, hands folded, eyes already locked on Marcus as if the audition had begun thirty seconds ago and he was the only one who hadn't noticed.

"Sit," came the instruction, not from the director, but from the space itself.

Marcus crossed to the stool. He didn't sit right away. He let his body hover—a tension held at the small of his back—before lowering himself, slow, measured, as if the furniture might bite.

His heartbeat was a moth caught in the glass. For a moment he felt his body the way an old sailor feels a new bruise: fresh, suspicious, already fading into memory. He ran his tongue along the edge of his bottom lip, tasted sweat. Not his, maybe, but it was his mouth now.

The System flickered at the edge of his vision, HUD-ghost overlay, a reading so clean it made the rest of the world taste analog.

ROLE: CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW // IMMERSION TEST

Target: Villeneuve, D.

Emotional Win Condition: "Death makes him laugh."

There was no camera crew, no producer, not even a reader to prompt his lines. Just the director and the watcher in the wall—a little red LED, maybe, maybe not, but it was enough to set his teeth on edge.

He leaned forward, elbows to knees. Already the bones in his spine felt looser, more pliant. His hair—still damp from the walk, and darker tonight, almost blue—clung to his jaw. He met the darkness where Villeneuve's eyes would be and smiled like the knife of a moon.

When he spoke, it was not in his own voice.

He heard himself drawl, the consonants soft as rotting rope:

"Well, well, well. If it isn't the ferryman himself. I thought they'd send someone… taller."

He let the line hang. No echo, not even from the back wall.

He rolled his wrists, eyes never quite focusing on one thing for more than a tick. Every object in the room became a relic: the coil of rope, the mic, the candle—each a marker of some fate he'd already lived and left behind.

He felt the urge to touch them all, to catalogue, but he held it, let the tension ride up through his shoulders instead.

He looked left, then right, pretending to peer past the light and into the black, and addressed the air:

"You've come for me, then. Finally. I'd half a mind you'd gotten lost on the way."

He let out a low, broken laugh. It wasn't pretty—it limped, then grew legs, then fell back on itself with a wheeze. He licked his lips, savoring the taste of the candle-smoke.

Villeneuve did not move. Not so much as a blink.

Marcus—no, Jack, but not yet fully—shook his head as if disappointed, and the accent deepened, mutinous now, alive with the spray of rain against glass:

"Don't look at me like that, darling. We've both danced on death's blade before, sweetness—only difference is, I'm still limber enough to make it look good."

He let his knees spread, leaning further into the space. The body was strange: hips loose, chest unguarded, hands always in motion—fingers tracing invisible maps, then curling into fists, then unfurling again.

For a moment he heard a second voice, colder, surgical, measuring his cadence:

Synch: 44%.

Increase slurring by 12%. Drop intonation at sentence end. Smile with teeth, not eyes.

He did as told.

"Tell me—what's a man to do, when he's outrun every gallows from here to the Devil's own kitchen?" The accent wavered, and then returned, three drinks in.

"Eventually, even the tide gets tired. Even the best ship sinks. Or so they tell me."

He eyed the candle, considered blowing it out, thought better of it.

The rain outside hit a new tempo, sharp and sudden. He used it—timed his inhale to the percussion, let his exhale ride the thunder that followed. He wobbled, just a hair, then straightened with a flourish that belonged to no one sober.

The System slid a new prompt to the surface of his mind:

JACK IS AT HIS END, BUT MAKES IT A SHOW.

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling, found the noose.

"Do you suppose they'll remember me, Denis?" The shift to the director's name was unplanned, but it suited the logic of the room.

"Or will it be all bluster and bones, like everyone else before?"

He paused, and for the first time, looked at the director—not the shadow, not the absence, but the exact center of Villeneuve's face.

"I'm tired, old friend. Tired of running. Tired of the mask. And most of all—" he paused, let the candle gutter, "—tired of waking up to the taste of someone else's lies in my mouth."

The smile that followed was all Jack: bravado, desperation, an urge to consume and be consumed in equal measure.

He stood, without warning, and the stool skittered backward. The force of the movement was raw, less theatrical than animal. He loomed a moment, body at an unfamiliar slant, and pointed one finger dead at the director:

"But you knew that, didn't you? That's why you came, love. That's why you're here. You want to see if I'll break, or if the ocean's taken that from me too."

The thunder hit again, louder, so close it rattled the tape on the window.

He turned, then, and addressed the watcher in the wall. He stepped up to the mic, ran two fingers along its shaft, then gripped it, knuckles bloodless.

He inhaled, and when he spoke, it was quieter, but still made for stage:

"I got no more tricks. No more songs. You want a show, you got it. But I won't go silent, not for you, not for them." He jerked his head at the darkness, as if the world beyond the room could hear. "So do your worst. I'll still be laughing, darling, long after you've run out of ways to kill me."

He let the silence stand. The candle's flame stretched, then stilled.

The System hovered, silent, satisfied.

Marcus—Jack—stood unmoving in the pale orange, a man who'd been hanged three times and made a date with Death for dessert.

He waited for the verdict, but it was already written.

....

The silence in the room was not a void; it was a membrane stretched to transparency, and as Marcus inhaled, he felt it cling to the insides of his lungs, foreign but necessary.

He was supposed to wait for direction, for a nod or a cue. Instead, he let the next words spill, unplanned.

"You know what it's like, don't you?" The voice—Jack's voice—was silk over gravel, and for the first time there was a quiver of intimacy in it.

"To sail so far you forget which port you left behind. To chase a horizon, not because you believe there's something out there, but because stopping would be the same as drowning."

He let the candlelight chase the line of his jaw, then dropped his chin and turned it, inviting the shadow to drag his features half to sea.

"It's all right to fear her, you know. Death. She's a stunner up close. Smells like salt, and good rum, and the way your mother used to laugh before she learned to hate you."

He winked, and the wetness on his cheek might have been sweat, but it caught the light with a suspicious honesty.

Villeneuve still had not moved, but Marcus—no, Jack—knew the game now. He rocked forward, fingers first, then toes, rolling his entire frame until it threatened to topple the mic stand.

"Most men bargain with death like they're clever. I've made her laugh, Denis. Made her blush, even. But you want to know the secret?"

He paused, eyes alight with the next line. The System hovered, a ghostly tick at the top of his vision:

Increase unpredictability. Build toward escalation.

He obliged.

He swiped at the air, as if to clear a fog, and when he spoke again the words tumbled out, faster, desperate but still in character:

"The secret is, she always wins. Every time. She lets you believe you're escaping, but all you're doing is sailing in a circle. Round and round, until the water runs out and you're drinking your own reflection."

His hands shook, subtle at first, then more pronounced, like the aftermath of too much liquor. He played it, made it the character, but it wasn't acting anymore.

The System was pushing, immersion deepening, microtremors radiating down his arms, through the tension in his jaw.

The candle's flame guttered, casting the rope's shadow like a second noose over his left shoulder.

He grinned at it, then gestured to Villeneuve, eyes glinting through the fringe of damp hair.

"Maybe you're her, mate. Maybe you're the final storm before she takes me." He shrugged, casual but bone-deep.

"Wouldn't be the first time I've been seduced by a stranger."

He laughed, high and brittle, then dropped it instantly to a whisper:

"But I'm not ready, not yet. There's always one more trick, one more escape."

He moved away from the mic, pace uneven, like a drunk rehearsing his own eulogy. The rain intensified, streaking the window so hard it looked like the glass would buckle.

"I know you, Death," he said, voice thick now, the accent edging toward the farcical, every word trembling on a knife's edge between hilarious and horrifying.

"I know you better than I know myself, which is to say, not at all. But let's not be coy—let's get to the bit where you offer me a deal, and I say yes even though I don't believe it, and then you laugh and laugh and laugh—"

He caught the edge of the stool, gripped it, knuckles whitening, and faced Villeneuve directly.

"But I still laugh last. I always do. Because you never expect it, do you?"

He waited, tongue pressed to his canine, breath jagged. The System pulsed:

IMMERSION LEVEL: 68%

He could taste metal on the back of his teeth. The body, no longer entirely his, shook with adrenaline.

He steadied himself, but the next words came out ragged, more Marcus than Jack:

"I don't want to go. Not yet." He let the confession hang, naked and unwelcome.

The thunder returned, rolling a split-second after the words, as if the weather itself had been cued.

He dropped to his knees, suddenly and hard, the impact sending a shot of pain through his left patella. He barely felt it. He clung to the mic, forehead pressed to its head, and muttered: "Please."

The System flickered—glitching, recalibrating, drowning out the edge of his vision with blue-white static.

Villeneuve was standing now, the chair scraping back, but Marcus couldn't look up. He felt the candle's heat lick the side of his face, smelled the wax, the burning, the old rope overhead.

He lifted his head just enough to speak, and this time, the voice was pure pirate, mangled and raw:

"Where's me rum?" The accent was thicker than ever, the vowels chewed and spat.

"Why betray me, mate? You said you'd wait."

He tried to stand, but the System wouldn't let him. He stayed there, hunched, hair falling forward to hide the mess of his face, and for a moment the world narrowed to the radius of his own breath, the sweat on his brow, the sick twist in his gut.

He sobbed, once, and the sound was muffled, but it was there.

The overlay floated up, crystalline in its judgment:

IMMERSION LEVEL: 78%

He smiled, because there was nothing else left to do.

The room held its breath, the rain a drumroll, and in the center of it all: a man pretending to be another man, breaking apart so convincingly that not even the System could tell where the acting ended.

...

The silence snapped clean as a wishbone.

Villeneuve's chair scraped back, the movement sudden and surgical, but he approached not as a man closing distance, but as a naturalist inching up on an unstable animal.

He circled the puddle of candlelight, eyes never once blinking, mouth set in a rictus halfway between horror and hunger.

He stopped just short of Marcus, who remained kneeling—hair a curtain, hands still gripping the mic as if it might float him out of the room. The director crouched, slow, until they were nearly eye-level. His voice, when it finally emerged, was lower than before:

"We're done here."

He turned, half to the wall, half to the presence behind the two-way mirror.

"Cancel the rest of the day's appointments," he said. It was not a suggestion.

A faint movement, the shuffle of shoes, a closing door somewhere beyond the wall.

The director leaned in, and for a heartbeat Marcus saw the future: rewrites, endless press cycles, a new tattoo somewhere on his ribs. He shuddered, but the body did not respond as he wished; the immersion was still hooked in him, deep as a tooth.

Villeneuve extended a hand, fingers elegant, scarred. Marcus looked at it, then up at the face—searching for threat, for cruelty, for any hint this was still a test.

"Take your time," the director said, a quirk at the edge of his mouth.

"You don't have to leave the character so soon. I find it's best not to."

Marcus let go of the mic. His hand, when he reached out, trembled in three separate places: at the wrist, at the first knuckle, at the pale blue veins along the back of his hand. He let himself be pulled up.

The world tilted; he steadied on the edge of the stool, and looked around as if seeing the room for the first time. He wiped at his mouth, left a streak of damp on his palm, and tasted candle smoke at the back of his throat.

"Do I—" he started, then stopped. The words were not his.

"Do I come back?" he said, finally. The accent lingered, slurred, but the eyes behind it were clear.

Villeneuve nodded.

"I will call you. I will call only you." The gaze flickered, sharp as a scalpel.

"If you can keep this alive until first table read, I'll rewrite everything. You'll see."

Marcus nodded, slow, the room catching up to him frame by frame. He blinked, once, twice, and with each closing of the eyelids the pirate vanished a little more. Still, the gait was off; he rocked side to side as he crossed to the door, hand drifting to the old rope out of reflex, fingers testing its weight.

At the threshold, he hesitated. He looked back at the stool, at the melted candle, at the puddle of wax where a shoeprint had smudged the line.

Then, in the old voice, hoarse and gentle:

"Thank you, mate."

He pulled open the door.

The hallway was raw with fluorescence. He flinched at the brightness, at the chill, at the way the sound of rain was amplified by the old metal fire escape. He descended in half-steps, holding tight to the rail, body still fighting the ocean in his veins.

Halfway down, he stopped, pressed his forehead to the glass, and tried to recall the last five minutes as a sequence of choices rather than a single, unstoppable wave.

The System pinged, softly this time:

AUDITION NODE COMPLETE.

He smiled, just barely, and let the rain drown out the rest.

Back upstairs, in the candlelit room, Villeneuve stood perfectly still for a full minute, then another, before blowing out the flame with a short, controlled breath.

He left the rope swinging. He left the stool where it was.

Already, he was rewriting the ending.

.......

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