The Killing Joke

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“Light many lamps and gather round her bed

Lend to her your strength life’s blood and will to live

Speak to her rouse her and you may save her yet

But death replied “I choose her” and so she went

There was silence in the lonesome night”- Revised version of Sassoon’s “death bed”

Death is only the beginning some say. Death is a revelation of the elementary truths that one has lived by and has ultimately died by. She had wanted to save people, to heal them of their pain and injury, and ultimately she wanted these things because no one was there for her when she was in pain and was hurting. She wanted to be better than what her father had taught her to be. Than what her family had ever taught her to be. It’s funny how life takes your plans and destroys them.

Staring up at the star filled night sky as her blood leaked into Gotham’s great bay, she smiled to herself. Here she was with the sight of stars finally in her sight and it was the last sight she would see. It was a good way to die; stabbed in the chest by the man she loved, kissed before he let her down into the water, and she floated away onto her back. Now here she was still floating aimlessly she had to say she didn’t mind so much to die. It’s living that was hard, she didn’t hate her love for doing this to her. She understood him on a basic level few people in his entire life had ever understood him and so she didn’t blame him.

He was a man that would burn in the very fires he had created just so that his goal was accomplished and he was a man that couldn’t acknowledge that he could love. He was her equal in all things but one single thing. She couldn’t bring herself to kill him, the holder of her heart; he had brought himself to kill her. He was far better at being heartless than she was. That was her one downfall in all of this; she had no matter what had happened managed to keep her heart and empathy. Perhaps it made her stronger than him in one way or another. 

She loved him for all that he was: insanity, anarchy, chaos, death, destruction, and tragedy. She was one of the few that actually knew the tragedy that had been his life before he was known as one of the most terrifying men in Gotham. He had never told her and yet she had known with her uncanny ability to read people and find out their past. She was glad she was able to provide him with whatever comfort he wanted for as long as he wanted.

She hoped he would read the letter she had slipped into his jacket pocket when he had stabbed her. She had known this would be the ultimate end when he had first kissed her. She knew then he had stolen a small piece of her then cold heart with those dark as death eyes. She could never go back and change it and didn’t want to if she could.

She smiled up once more at the star filled sky. Her green eyes never once left the sky as more blood seeped from her wound with every beat of her heart. Her heart wasn’t there after all it was with him as it had been for a while now. She let herself take one more breath before her world went dark.

Her breath left her with a name “Jack” it was much like a sigh.

The most gentle death sigh the world had ever heard, if all the world had been there to hear it. Even the darkest of souls and hearts would have wept at the tenderness in that one word. The name of her killer and her lover, the man that had been her world and had ultimately destroyed her. Jack was bent on destroying the world and everyone in it; and he was the man that would forever remember her.  Her jack forever and always.