It started with the wallpaper.
The production designer had sourced it from a defunct psychiatric hospital outside Sacramento, back when people still cared about that sort of authenticity.
Cream and rose, floral in the way only state institutions dared to be—cheery, but with a pattern that repeated so tight it could drive you mad in an afternoon.
The paper went up over walls made of nothing, just plywood and a hope that it would hold until the next reset. Beneath the wainscoting, everything was hollow.
The furniture: childhood relics. A half-size rolltop desk, the wood scarred with old ink stains. Brass-framed photos, all filled with faces that didn't exist.
Every item dusted, placed, then replaced according to the production bible. Someone had left a music box open on the bookshelf; the tune (Swan Lake, second movement) caught the air whenever a PA passed close, then died back into the ether.
At 6:40 AM, the Barbara Gordon set was perfect.
Not a hair out of place.
By 6:45, the spell was broken by the arrival of Marcus.
He didn't walk onto set so much as leak into it, trailing an entourage of nobody—no PA, no makeup, no minder.
He wore the full Killing Joke—Hawaiian shirt in orange and acid blue, crisp-creased purple slacks, white leather loafers.
The hat: green porkpie, rimmed with sun-faded felt, perched at a sly tilt.
In his right hand, a black Leica camera, battered and gaffer-taped at the edges. On his face, the full paint—white so stark it blue-shifted under the fluorescents, lips painted in a rictus grin, but the teeth visible beneath were very real and, at the moment, clenched.
He spoke to no one.
Not in the way of divas, but with the monastic silence of a man preserving a secret.
He didn't look at the lights or the gaffer or the dozens of soft-foamed mics dangling from the ceiling. Instead, he moved to his mark in the fake hallway, shadowed in the blue of not-yet-scene, and stood with both hands folded behind the camera, letting the room arrange itself around him.
The crew watched, but not directly. It was the kind of attention reserved for bear traps and broken wires.
Nolan stood by the monitors, arms crossed, lips slightly parted as if waiting for a storm to arrive and wanting to taste the first rain. His voice, when it came, was measured and delicate, pitched so only the chosen would hear.
"Let's get Barbara prepped."
Eliza—no last name yet, a single-noun phenomenon, the kind that agents dream of—sat in the kitchen set, running her lines in a whisper. She wore a pale blue cardigan, the kind that said "girl next door" in four different eras, and her hands trembled around the dog-eared script.
The makeup team hovered, fixing a strand of hair, dusting invisible shine from the bridge of her nose. She looked up at Nolan with the wide, helpless eyes of someone who knew what was about to happen and still couldn't believe it.
"Do you want the chair moved closer to the window?" asked the script supervisor, a woman with hands steadier than most doctors.
Eliza shrugged, but did not speak.
"Camera one, go tight on the bookshelf," said Nolan, voice soft.
"I want to see her flinch before he ever crosses the threshold."
The DP, a veteran of six wars (three in the field, three in Hollywood), dialed the lens, then held up a thumb for focus.
The room held its breath.
Marcus, still in the shadow, adjusted his grip on the camera. He turned it over twice in his hands, as if checking for a pulse, then let the strap fall against his hip. The Hawaiian shirt fluttered when he breathed; the motion was almost imperceptible, except to those who watched for it.
At 7:10, the sound tech—an ex-bassist, pale as the moon and twice as anxious—fumbled with his boom. He wiped sweat from the back of his neck, then wiped it again, catching a drip before it could fall onto the cashmere of Barbara's armchair.
"Speeding," he called out, but the word caught in his throat and died in the insulation above.
Nolan gave a final glance to the line of monitors: three angles, each with a perfect crosshair on the center of Barbara's world.
"Eliza?" he said, eyes never leaving the image.
"Are you ready?"
A beat.
She nodded, but the motion was as tight as a wince.
Nolan gave the signal.
"On your mark. Action."
The shift was instant.
Marcus—no, not Marcus now, never again on this set—stood absolutely still at the edge of the hall, weight balanced in the arch of his foot, hands loose, camera hanging like an ornament. For a long moment, he only watched.
The painted mouth was fixed, but the real tension was in the eyes, green and cold and so bright the iris seemed to leak into the whites. The stillness was predatory, total: nothing moved, not even the blink.
The camera tracked him in, slow, moving through the soft blur of the wallpaper's flowers and onto his face. In the frame, he looked like a figure from a children's nightmare—vivid, garish, but fundamentally wrong in a way no child could ever articulate.
He watched Eliza.
Not the character, not Barbara, but her—head to toe, mapping the lines of her collarbone, the way her hands hovered over the script, the pulse that jumped just below the jawline.
He did not speak.
Eliza tried to read, but her eyes kept darting to the spot where he waited. She bit her lip, then set the script down, folding it neatly on the coffee table. Her hands found each other in her lap, fingers fidgeting the hem of her sleeve.
The Joker entered the room.
He did not walk so much as drift, body carving a perfect vector through the space. When he reached the edge of the kitchen, he stopped again, this time closer, just inside the line of comfort but outside the reach of defense.
Barbara looked up.
The eyes met.
Another long, brutal pause.
The Joker smiled, but did not move.
Nolan, behind the monitor, leaned forward. The crew, sensing the importance of the moment, shrank into the walls, reducing their own presence to zero. Even the boom op, sweat now streaming down his cheek, held the pole perfectly still.
The Joker cocked his head, a dog hearing a high frequency. He let the silence fill the room. Only the music box, in the far corner, played its fractured tune, the notes colliding with each other and dying in the air.
Eliza's line was next, but she missed the cue, eyes wide and mouth slightly open. She tried to recover, started the line, but the words tangled in her throat.
The Joker advanced a single step.
No sound, not even the squeak of a shoe on fake tile.
He raised the camera, pointed it at her.
Through the lens, she was prey.
He pressed the shutter, but the flash was off, so the only evidence was the whirr of the motor and the sound of the iris closing. He took a second shot, then a third, never moving the camera from her face.
"Who are you?" Eliza whispered, voice tiny in the space.
The Joker lowered the camera. He grinned, and this time, the smile seemed to peel the paint from the walls.
"Just a fan," he said, voice so soft it barely traveled.
The line was not in the script.
Nolan, at the monitor, let the silence continue. He motioned to the DP, and the frame tightened, closing on the Joker's face until the audience would see nothing but the painted lips and the impossible eyes.
The Joker stepped closer, until the hem of the Hawaiian shirt brushed the arm of the chair. He did not touch her, but leaned in, so the brim of the hat cast a sickle shadow across Barbara's face.
He raised the camera again, one-handed this time, and took a photo from less than a foot away.
The sound of the shutter was a gunshot.
Barbara recoiled, the motion so real the chair nearly toppled.
The Joker caught it with a gloved hand, steadying the backrest with infinite delicacy. He held her gaze.
"You have beautiful bones," he said, and the words landed with the weight of a prophecy.
Another line not in the script.
Eliza, breathing hard, tried to speak.
The Joker waited, smiling.
The sound tech, hands trembling, dropped the gain by a full decibel, just to kill the heartbeat thundering in his headphones. It didn't help. Sweat dripped onto the lav mixer, pooling at the base of the knob.
The Joker withdrew, slow, letting the moment stretch until it threatened to break.
He tilted the hat in a gesture almost polite, then drifted back through the kitchen, into the hallway, and out of frame.
In the silence that followed, Eliza stared at the spot where he had stood. Her hands were knotted in her lap, but her whole body trembled.
Nolan let the cameras roll, letting the moment decay on its own.
Finally, he whispered:
"Cut."
Nobody moved. The room stayed frozen, as if the Joker's absence was a weight heavier than his presence.
Then, one by one, the crew exhaled. The boom op lowered his pole, the script supervisor made a tiny, silent note, the makeup artist dabbed at the sweat beading on Eliza's upper lip.
Marcus did not return to the set. He remained in the hallway, hat down, camera at his chest, waiting for the next mark.
In the kitchen, Eliza stared at her own trembling hands, waiting for the world to start again.
Behind the monitor, Nolan smiled.
It was all going exactly as he'd hoped.
.....
[Okay I've decided to put a target out there! If you want more chapters then gotta trade for power stones! I don't know if 50 per extra chapter is fair but let's start with that for now. You can complain here if it's not and let me know! Next I will also trade youa chapter per 5 extra reviews... seems excessive but we can change it later if it's too much but it seems achievable if you really want extra chapters.
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