Paper Planes

VI

"Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness?"
—Grant Morrison

|•|•|•|

Ember didn't get much sleep that night.

Although she was fairly comfortable in her favorite pair of teal and white checkered pajamas, everytime she closed her eyes, Noah's dead body flooded her mind.

They'd required her to identify the body. He was nearly unrecognizable, half of his body severely charred by the explosion, his skin melted off in several spots, empty eyes agape in fear. She could still remember the shiny black wedding band that sat neatly perched on his finger, a finger that had be deteriorated to nothing but muscle. 

Painful sobs wracked through her chest as she screamed into the pillow, her hands clenching into fists as she relived the worst memory of her life... a memory that was only aged a whopping six months.

Everyone seemed to leave after Noah died. Her adoptive parents stopped calling, her friends did too. Nobody wanted to spend time with the sad, thirty-year-old widow. No one wanted the burden.

All Ember ever would be was a burden. Her birth parents didn't want her, her friends didn't want her.

No one would ever want her.

|•|•|•|

The Joker sat at his desk, his bare face in his hands as he tapped his foot irritably.

Several photographs of the infamous Batman illuminated the computer screen, articles upon articles questioning his whereabouts following Harvey Dent's death on display.

"Batsy, Batsy, Bat-sy." The madman sighed, his fingers shuffling through the stacks of papers covering the surface in search of something, anything to lead him to the masked man.

"Fuck." He grumbled, his gaze flickering over to the clock.

Five-thirty AM.

An hour and a half ago, he'd given Ember two gym bags full of her own clothing. She, however, would hopefully never find out about the mess he made in her house, the photographs of herself and her hubby mutilated, his eyes blacked out in the frames, along with a red smile covering his lips.

He'd perfectly staged her departure. A typed note had been mailed to the little boutique she worked out, by the name of Charlie's, announcing her official resignation.

To Gotham, Ember Laine DeLoughrey no longer existed. She'd simply up and left, migrated to a new life in a new city, courtesy of her husband Noah's untimely death.

If all went well, Joker and his men would be terrorizing the streets of Gotham tonight, and he could hardly wait. The thought of him causing mischief for the first time in over half a year actually made his dick quite hard.

Maybe... just maybe... if he caused just enough mischief, a Batman would come out to play...

He giggled quietly at the thought, a black ink ball-point pen held between his thumb and pointer finger as he scribbled several potential "plans" in the margins of a lined slip of paper, a grunt escaping his lips as he hastily crossed it out almost immediately, the pen toppling from his grasp as it collided with the wood of the desk.