Monkey See, Monkey Do [Jane]

[The Joker]

[ Apologies it's so incredibly short. :/ ]

The index finger slowly lifted to his lips and as the tip went into his mouth, he salivated over the mysterious fingerprints. His eyes seemed to wander around the glass wall aimlessly as he did so, though his attention was solely on the hallway that was often left empty. For a place that vowed to help those out of their minds, it was pretty empty. Twisting his head to the side, he pulled the finger out from his lips and immediately put it on the glass wall. Pressing hard, he pulled the finger downward to make the loud squeaking sound. For a brief few seconds, it was the only noise in his room. When the saliva ran out and the finger had no where else to go, he lifted the finger up and squinted at the marks he left behind.

He wasn’t sure how much more of this monotony he could take. Gotham needed him. Batman was roaming the streets, fighting the local piss while he sat here without purpose. Of course, it wasn’t that he couldn’t get out of here. It was a matter of when and how. Nothing was impossible as he often demonstrated, but Gotham needed a time to think it was back on its feet. Its people needed to think their world was back to normal, back in their perfect lines and order before he returned. Before he really got working. The corners of his lips twitched, flashing what looked to be a brief smile before he backed up from the glass. Glancing over his shoulder at the bed behind him, he turned back to the glass and licked his finger again.
0

[Jane Doe]

((Nuuuuu it was great! I hope mine is okay - this is my first post with her. ))

Jane didn’t know just when she had become so big a threat to the staff at Arkham. It was both amusing and frightening to think that other humans were this afraid of her; her, with her rocked-out Shirley Temple locks and her huge almost-innocent eyes. Perhaps it was the disconcerting way she could see to a person’s core and know in some measure just who they really were. She registered no emotion on her own face when the large male nurse slid out the locks on her cell door. She didn’t even smile when he twisted her cooperative arms behind her back and put the safety-fur lined cuffs on tight. But in her own small way Jane voiced her displeasure at being treated in such a manner by perfectly mimicking the way the nurse walked within five paces of leaving her old ‘home’.

He grunted at her, jerking down on the short chain that linked the cuffs and breaking her stride, which enticed a grunt just like his from her own lips and nothing more. Unnerved, the nurse quickened his pace. It didn’t take them long to descend to the lower, more secure levels of Arkham’s restrictive keep. When she realised where she was going she was too busy taking in her new surroundings to bother paying attention to her jailer. Blaring white walls so bright that they hurt her eyes right off pressed in on her, spacious and imperial. But perhaps the most frightening thing of all was the layers of thick, shatterproof glass that divided the room like invisible but permanent walls. There was no privacy. There was no sanctuary. There was nothing here to stop her from gorging herself on the monstrous mannerisms of her surrounding nut-jobs. Jane was a good girl. Jane was being rewarded.

“Come on, move it!” the nurse barked, pushing her forward roughly and startling her out of her ecstatic revelation.

“Come on, move it!” Jane parroted immediately, throwing her weight forward and pulling on the chains around her wrists every bit as hard as he had pushed on them. Blinking and looked bewildered, the nurse walked the corridor ignoring the looks and the cat-calls from the other inmates and shoved Jane into her new corner cell, getting the hell out of there. He didn’t mind worked at Arkham but he much preferred crazies that didn’t creep him out as much as the sick bastards on this level. It didn’t take Jane long to assess her new ‘home’. A bed, a potty and that was it. Her need to assimilate into her new situation saw her looking often into the cell next to her own, which was occupied by some man with longish hair.

Without thinking, she stripped her bed down to the bare essentials the way his was, rolling her offensive and unneeded sheets up in the corner as far from the joining of their cells as possible. Things were quiet and so she sat on her bed, her knees drawn up to her chest and watched. She would start with the person closest to her – him, in this case – and move on until she had collected the whole set available to her. She would take her time and do it properly. She didn’t want to mess this up one bit. He fascinated her. The casual slumping of his shoulders was easy, and she relaxed her collarbones almost to the point of jello immediately. The rest would be harder. He was a difficult subject. Even if the others proved to be too easy she wouldn’t regret not leaving the ‘best til last’. He would always provide her with some new skill, of hat she was certain.

Time melted into itself, boiling away the lumps that allowed it to be measured until it ran smooth and silky. Days passed and still she watched. Her food remained untouched until they came in with men to strap her into a straight jacket and a woman to administer some liquid sustenance. She didn’t move. She didn’t want her learning to be interrupted. She wondered how they would feel if her interesting stranger imposed himself on them. She tried to smile, attempting to twist her facial muscles into the grotesque but alluring grin that invaded the soft flesh of his cheeks. She couldn’t. She wondered how he had done such magic.

On the third day she felt emboldened. He was standing at her glass. She was looking right at him but he was in his own world. She got up and moved to the inches thick glass, pressing herself against it in exactly the same position he took. The shadows of his larger form on the brighter side of the wall warned her of his movements and she let her head fall to the side as his had done. The squeak, barely audible, made her crane her neck all the more to see what he was doing. Her eyes widened slightly when she saw the finger streak down the glass. Oh, oh! she moaned internally. She watched intently, seeing how much pressure he used on his fingertip by how white the flesh was pressed to glass and how long he made his mark. Instantly she stuck her finger in her mouth. Beginning exactly where he had and using as close to the same pressure as possible, she slid her own finger along and felt a tempting thrill in her stomach.

She had found a friend.

[The Joker]

[ Sorry this took so long .. ]

He had taken no obvious heed of the new fan across from him, who moved quickly to mimic the circumstances of her cell to his own. His feigning of disinterest of her was ultimate sign of interest when it came to his persona, for while he never once looked into her cell, he knew every inch of it was similar to his by her own hand. He knew, also, that while he never once moved to inspect her posture, she was quickly learning his own unceremoniously slumped position. He hadn’t quite figured out whether this obsessive attempt to portray him was a compliment good thing, or not. But what made that scarred smile on his face so utterly appropriate was the idea that she was trying to copy someone whose life philosophy was chaotic and untamable. She was, in effect, trying to copy a human entity of disorder. That, in itself, was quite a joke.

By the third day, he had begun to wonder her intentions whenever her face drifted through his thoughts. Her transfer to his domain of Arkham was dually noted, for those that occupied these specific cells were good at what they did – whatever it was they did. Should this be her talent, that of knowing a human and copying their moves, she thus had to maintain an articulate and obsessive personality. By the time her finger reached the glass and perfectly mimicked his own motion, he concluded in his mind her learning process.

His eyebrows furrowed suddenly before turning to face her, his glazy eyes dazed in interested. He began to lean forward, closer to the glass until his lips nearly kissed it. His breath created a light fog that blurred the vision of his face but disappeared just as quickly. He waited, letting his breath build upon the glass until the fog took longer to disappear. After a few minutes, his breath had become steady and quick enough to keep the fog in place and that is when he lifted his finger from its original position. Pressing into the glass, he make a dot in the fog and soon another adjacent to it. Quickly, his finger moved to a spot close to the second dot and pressing, he pulled the finger in a lower curve under the two dot. A quiet, little laugh popped out of his mouth as he stared through the smiley face into the cell of the girl.

[Jane Doe]

As soon as he turned to her and began to lean forward, Jane felt her pulse increase. She could feel the pumping of blood and adrenaline as clearly as an enemy vessel would show on a submarine sonar and it thrilled her. She watched. Baby steps, she reminded herself. She needed to take him in slowly, drink him up like the last precious droplets of wine from a classic vintage, not that she had known such luxuries in her existence. When his own act was complete and his hand dropped, she took her cue. Leaning forward in a credible impression of him, she forced into her head visions of him lurking in shadows. It helped, she found, to think of him as a night-time monster. When her own breath was wanton and steaming on the glass she waited just as he had. Their faces were close together and he was watching her through his masterpiece.

The deliciousness of the situation enveloped her. She would not need to eat again for weeks if he continued to indulge her like this. She stared into his eyes. It was not the cold hard stare of them, the questioning and almost pitiful stare of those who thought they could ‘help’. Neither was it the fleeting nervous glance of someone who was intimidated or frightened of him or the wide-eyed stare of his victims who daren’t look away unless it was the end of him. It was nothing more or less than his own emulated intelligence and being reflected through her dull brown gaze to his own. How successful she was, Jane did not know. A learning curve allowed for plenty of breathing space and growing room, and practice made perfect, that was for certain. Practice made her someone else.

When she felt as though she had waited long enough, she lifted a finger to the glass, feeling the slickness of the condensation beneath her fingertip as she made out two identical dots the way he had done, only below his own art so as not to anger. She kept her eyes resolutely on his and then, because even though she itched to make her next line predictably perfect, Jane steered herself alarmingly towards the perverse. She could see that he was a creature of little limits who pushed the table as well as the envelope sitting on it. Instead of drawing a lower curve, then, Jane drew one straight across. When she lifted her finger from the glass she was ultimately pleased with her efforts. The seemingly indifferent face reflected a part of her she had not ever shared with another living soul. She didn’t care what they did to her anymore. She had left a long time ago. having come to this realisation, she offered him a sheepish upturn of her lips - not quite a smile, but not quite a straight line either.

[The Joker]

As his own work of art faded from the glass, his eyes pressed onto the scene before him as he awaited her reply. Unknowingly during the silence, his tongue had lashed out to wet the dried and cracked lips, his lips had contorted at the edges twice and his head jerked to the side in a half-attempt to crack his neck. Many of these slight oddities had become so engrained in his everyday actions that they were now as involuntary as breathing or his heart beating. Though perhaps he hadn’t noticed these movements because he was solely focused on the girl who now moved as he had seconds earlier. She peered at him without hesitation, without the wonderment of staring at something freakish or horrifying like a car crash, and without wanting to analyze him. Others condemn him to unstoppable insanity while others struggled to discover some supercilious cure to retire on. Her look was entirely different and addicting; she wanted to know more about him, to be him, not to judge him. It was entirely flattering and too enslaving for such an obsessive personality as his own.

His eyes wavered over her fingers as they began to mark the glass the same manner as his own and his breath held. He watched in anticipation though his body was all too entirely calm. The tip of the finger paused and he stared. Lacking oxygen, he stared at the tip of the finger. Should it curve down, he would be finished with her for the interest in watching someone repeat your own actions doesn’t last long. But he hadn’t had the chance to even worry over that (not that he would have) for the finger plainly moved straight across in a neutral manner. The lips of the face were complete, drawing up a manner of a complete lack of emotions. His eyes squinted momentarily at her work before he saw her own sheepish smile behind it. His lips parted as he let out of the air he had been holding in, which quickly transformed into a very audible laugh. That had been the funniest thing he had seen since his admission into Arkham Asylum.

Content with her and her choice, he moved away from the glass to sit on the edge of the bed. His fingers began to press against each other as the laugh started to diminish and his hands naturally fell between his legs. Slumped of the edge of the bed, Joker kept his head facing her cell and his eyes pressing inwards at her. As he winded down, he pushed out a few “hee”s and “ho”s before letting out a long and exaggerate sigh.

“I had this dream. Once,” he started before smacking his lips together and swallowing, as if the words were mixed in his mouth and he had to move them around for correct syntax. His eyebrows lifted as his eyebrows briefly looked down to the ground, as if the story was difficult to recall. “I had a suit. And, the – the – the colors were awful. Just awful. I worked like them – them,” he emphasized with his hand that flew out, gesturing towards the camera. “I worked and worked and worked and – and it was boring. So. boring.” Shaking his head, he let his eyes dance over the smaller frame in the next cell, as if the rest of the story was somehow said in that tiny movement of his neck. And in his own, jumbled manner, it was telling her she was normal. That her, behind that glass, meant nothing when compared to the world of suits and perfection. Nothing.

[Jane Doe]

Jane watched her new objet d’art closely, noticing the miniscule folds of skin that doubled back over themselves around his eyes as he contracted his muscles there in the smallest way. Up close she could better see the scars that ripped upwards over his cheeks, taking the tendons of his lips with them. Such a network of now inflexible tissue that told her such stories as she followed their directions, stories that thrilled and enchanted her all the most because they were true; their was no falsehood in their tale, no happily-ever-after. The honesty implicit in these scars was affronting but she took it in the way one observes a fresh, unorthodox abstract and stored each line, each raised portion of lighter skin, in her photographic memory. Tonight when the lights were out she would feel her face. If only she had something sharp.

But she mustn’t! Such a statement on her face would prevent her from taking in the others! She was getting too far ahead of herself, slipping and sliding down the muddy banks of his insanity where she would happily wallow with him were it not for her unsatisfied compulsion. Perhaps she should have started with one of the more boring subjects. Perhaps if she hadn’t already been taken in, she would have switched her friend out for a substitute and left him her grand finale. But none of the others mattered now, she knew, as she laughed on the other side of the glass. A high, chilling sound, like a winter breeze pattering the pressing needles of a pine against a window pane. How she longed to let him in out of the cold.

Jane watched him as he moved away to his bed, far from disappointed. She went to hers and adopted his posture, sitting casually with her head up instead of down, like his. She daren’t stop watching, for when she did that’s when he would perform the true magic. His intermittent laughter teased her like the fluttering of a candle the cold winter breeze would soon snuff out. There was a sigh. Jane sighed too. She liked to sigh, and had precious little other opportunity to do it. She made sure it was a good one. Then, he spoke. She watched, transfixed, a child glued to the set for the duration of her favourite show. She didn’t notice the guard who had wandered along down the corridor until he spoke.

“Hey!” he tapped a thick baton on the glass of her friend’s cell. “Pipe down!”

“Hey! Pipe down!” mimicked Jane, her voice the exact booming and deep Italian-American duplicate of the original. The guard looked at her and walked back along to the guard station. She didn’t know if she should talk to him yet. She didn’t know how long it had been since she had said something that came from her and not from someone else. She watched him a while longer, giving in to another compulsion and rocking herself ever so slightly on the edge of the bed the way she was used to doing when deep in thought or otherwise perplexed. She could compromise.

“I had this dream. Once, I had a dress.” She smacked her lips together the way he had done. “It was white and printed all over with pink flowers. And, I – I – I hated that dress.” She balled up the memories in her head, trying to get her point across. “I wore it because I had to. I took it off because I had to. Now the dress is ruined.” She shook her head and her lank, bleached-blonde locks chafed her shoulders. In her way, she had just explained the only part of her life before she became this empty husk that had any sort of coherent meaning, and even that meaning was sinister. She wanted him to know, deep down, that they were the same. They both were used at some point and discarded.

[The Joker]

The loud clank that the baton caused against the glass must have mimicked the noise a fish felt when a bratty child needed to say hello. It echoed in the air-tight room and the noise itself seemed to have a physical effect, as if bouncing off the walls and slamming into his person. It reminded him of a tank, long ago, set up in a rich home of a mobster. It had been a salt water tank with expensive fish. The tank was the focal point of the room where he had conducted a lot of business, gave orders and even beat people that were out of line. The fish became symbolic, emotionless jury that watched you bleed, cry and beg for your life without blinking. They came to represent the one thing the mobster didn’t harass, embarrass or touch; he loved them and took great pride in them and they quickly became a fascination to our local criminal. Their world was safe, perfect and contained … something that bothered the Joker immensely.

A quick flicker of a grin in the corner of his lips marked the flashed memory of a glorious evening. They were celebrating a successful sabotage of another rising mafia, heading to his home for drinks, a party and what would inevitably end in someone saying something stupid and getting their ass kicked for it. But as the front door flung open, as big boy George walked through the door and as the conversation quickly died, their eyes all pried on the hundred (possibly thousand) dollar fish, tied to strings and hung from the ceiling sporadically around the room, as if swimming in the air. It was a small gesture of freedom for the fish at the price of their lives while the true enjoyment had come from watching Georgie boy break down. It was the beginning of the road that led Joker to this very spot.

Minus the grin, all that moved in his demeanor at the tapping were his eyes. They snapped into position to stare at the guard and he made sure to memorize his face, body, name and shoe size. Control was fleeting and erroneous. False security led to false arrogance. With the guard’s information locked into memory, Joker’s lips began to part when a female voice jumped the gun. The eyes moved again, snapping to her. Interesting. She was interesting. A fact that didn’t change when the story began to repeat itself with small, manipulated words. His eyes squinted at her as the story progressed somewhat parallel to his with minor divots. However fascinating it was to see her amazing talent in mimicking, he couldn’t help but test her.

Therefore, he didn’t move. He stared. And stared. Watching. Waiting to see what she would do when she had nothing to go off of.

[Jane Doe]

Jane was not to be discouraged. She had toiled for years at this sport, honing her ability the way a born athlete would cultivate their physique in a gymnasium. It went without saying that she mimicked his grin but it was with little pleasure; the effect was lost when she had not the sculpted lacerations that decorated his face like a well earned war medal. When he was still she was still. Her bulbous eyes remained trained on his and she found herself wondering where his suit was now. What facet of his mundane life had lead him on this path to righteous freedom that he now walked with such obvious abandonment?

He was her model, and her body was the medium with which she would create her finest piece of art yet. Although her gaze never wavered from his face she took in his aspects through the corner of her eye, the smallest flicker of movement detected. A subtle tightening around his eyes or a miniscule flaring of nostrils were observed but not copied; this wasn’t part of the game and Jane liked to play fair. In a lifetime long before this one, someone had taught her that in cheating the only person who was cheated was yourself. Jane believed this.

The tiny confines of her frame were held rigid, poised next to the common glass of their cells as she waited like Alice before the rabbit hole. She could jump in, she could ruin it, set herself back the days she had already spent cataloguing his nuances. The insignificant yet undeniable things about himself that made him him. Now that he was still she was centre stage. Perhaps it was more of an opportunity than a test. Perhaps it was both.

Falling back on what Jane knew best, she shuffled away from the glass and began pacing her cell. This same action had been performed by him just hours after her arrival on her very first day and she had watched him for long enough that there would be little doubt as to who’s gait she now adopted. Her shoulders hunched and stooped forward, her face pointed at the ground only to lift sporadically as though to look for oncoming traffic. Halfway through pacing, though, was the crowning glory of her performance. She threw back her head, emitting a high, broken laugh that sounded so like his very own that one of the nurses looked up sharply from their station.