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Joker never strayed away from the fact that his fireworks were always inspired by people around him while his thoughts and emotions manifested themselves in the method he organised the shows. Yet to the average viewer his craft was nothing but a flashy display of colours and various sparks and sounds that cut through the night above London. They did not see the stories behind them and the way he used the night sky as his canvas while the sparks and embers acted as temporary paint.
Miss Branley’s tales of her journey across the seas brought forth the vivid hues of the waves as the feathers of the sea would flutter down on the night sky. He would make sure to use as many shapes as he could to represent the colourful marine life beneath the surface, while copper chloride would colour the sparks blue.
His visits to the theatre would mimic the red curtains that greeted and said goodbye, with the glamorous pieces he would see through the lens of his opera glasses from the last rows of seats. Loud and flashy just like the operettas the troupe had rehearsed all summer for their grand seasonal reopening with a hint of purple here and there hidden in the shadows behind the brilliant limelight, wishing to break out of their confinement.
Within the colours of his show he carefully hid the arguments he had in a dressing room where he had gained access on accident and where his words would wound someone so deeply that the door would close in front of him for good, leaving him alone in the whiteness of marble and the red carpets.
Memories and feelings were scattered across the night sky for all to see. Fleeting moments that would disperse and melt into the darkness of the night as the embers slowly starved with nothing to feed them once they devoured their resources. When they were gone, they left nothing but the smell of burnt gunpowder that calmed his heart after the war in the sky ended.
It was what he needed to clear his thoughts and vent his feelings to an audience who would awe at his suffering the same way they react to his joy. He hid himself in the fire the same way painters hid their feelings in their works, putting his emotions on display at the entertainment of others.
However, recently he finally arrived at a standstill. Hunching over his notes in his workshop at the Crystal Palace, he tried to write up colours that would describe the frustration he was experiencing for the past few days. Despite being knowledgeable about most minerals he was unable to grasp onto the image he was looking for and his imagination seemed to fail him. The colours he wanted came close, but never truly reached a state where he was satisfied with their colourful sparks.
Next to him sat a box filled with labeled mineral dust and a small metal container meant to test the various reactions in a controlled environment, however no matter how many things he had burned up with a match, no purple, no green no orange would describe the feelings that swirled in his chest. At this point, he was not sure if they were even possible to bring forth.
But then again, he did not even really understand the feelings he wanted to grab onto, how would he succeed materializing them in the night sky?
Leaning back in his chair, he stared at the faded advertisement for old fireworks shows. Among them a few pamphlets were hidden for theatre shows he had seen, accompanied by the tickets he had brought with his hard earned money. He always believed those two would guide him, however he did not expect that eventually his attention would be caught by someone who did not belong to either of those worlds.
Cunning was the name of the man who saved him once from being robbed on his way home. The name that belonged to the protagonist of a cheap penny dreadful anyone could get at the newspaper booth to pass time. And without noticing he ended up as a side character in a story like that, making a connection he had never dreamt about in his life, but one that brought a bit of unpredictableness into his daily routine.
The man wearing the fox mask became one of his most common customers, but one who never paid a penny for his services. He would be dressing wounds, gathering information and helping him brainstorm over his cases only for him to leave not soon after with no promise that he would even return. Every meeting carried the last goodbye within itself.
Their mutual lack of communication was frustrating, but Joker was a born coward. His words simply failed him when he wanted to ask more about his mysterious visitor almost as if a curse had tied a knot on his tongue to prevent him from ruining the little secret that made his heart beat in excitement and dread at the same time. Prying into Cunning’s identity would have led him to conclusions he did not want to face and it would have meant that the two shared connections deeper than on and off meetings in his workshop.
And yet… he arrived to a moment when he wouldn’t have minded if that was the case. Despite being terrified, there was a force pulling him closer towards the vigilante while he himself was pushed away by his own surroundings through arguments.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have minded to be the protagonist of a book just once and be freed from the awkwardness of reality and helped him avoid thinking of the bridges he had burned on accident.
Bundling his feelings back into his heart, he stared at the open notebook as he reread his notes that were accompanied by a terrible drawing of a fox that looked more like a botched cat crossed with a weasel. It was a creature of frustration after he had spent several hours trying to come up with colours that would explain how he had felt about his visitor. However, the colours refused to bloom in his thoughts no matter how hard he tried to urge them.
Red coloured by strontium salts would have fit Cunning as his attire had contained a remarkable amount of the colour sometimes blooming on the dark fabric of his pants and coat when he stumbled into his workshop like a man who just walked through war with nothing but a knife making his stomach drop when their eyes met.
The colours that hid behind the animal mask were bright, yet always had a tint of melancholy hidden in them like the skies in a spring evening. Blue was a rare and expensive colour to produce when it came to fireworks and his supplies of the mineral that burned with the radiant colour he wanted to achieve and they wouldn’t match the red chrysanthemum shaped fireworks.
But the hue was quickly ruined by the memory of bruises that Cunning carried on his body after each fight as a painful reminder for Joker of the violence that occurred while he fiddled in his workshop. His only payment was that he could freely run his hands over the toned muscles, allowing them to wander a bit alongside his thoughts as he applied the arnica cream on the colourful patches.
The next colour that appeared was purple, sometimes with a drop of red and green, but they held no positive memories. All of them were connected to the colour of bruises he had to treat while he barely learned anything about his visitor aside the fact that he refused to show his left leg, no matter the level of injury. He would rather cut the fabric around the wound or bleed out in the workshop. However, when Joker brought this up, all he got was a smile and a dismissing wave of Cunning’s hands.
“Don’t worry about it.”
What an impossible request! To not worry about someone who repeatedly kept hurting himself! What a dim-witted fool...
He huffed as he scribbled out the colours he had written down after red. They did not match the night sky anyway and they absolutely did not match Cunning even if these were the colours he had seen the most when it came to him.
Leaning back until the front legs of the chair were lifted from the ground, he set his gaze on the small print he had gotten from a friend who was supposed to put them on the walls reserved for advertisements. Despite the stormy start of their friendship Mike had always managed to give him two copies of the smaller posters, one for the wall and one for his personal collection of theatre related knickknacks and even offered some from his own collection.
The colours associated with him were not connected to bruises at least. There were no blues, purples and greens. But there were plenty of others that made his chest feel heavier as he thought back on their last conversation.
“Do you ever go home or do you have a bed hidden somewhere in your shop?”
The sudden question uttered in the silence of the Crystal Palace frightened him, making him lose balance as the chair slowly toppled backwards. The fall knocked the air out of his lungs and he was soon staring up at the lamp above his head gaping like a fish, before a familiar masked face leaned over the light, making him scrunch his eyebrows as he closed his eyes.
He did not greet his visitor on purpose, but accepted the hand extended towards him.
“No. But if I went home you wouldn’t have anyone to bother.” he growled as he put his chair back into its place and threw a quick glance at his visitor.
The feathers were missing from his hat and he looked like someone who had fallen into a pit of knives. His cape was torn in half and across his arms there were several smaller cuts, making the red undershirt visible with dark marks of blood seeping into the fabric. None of them seemed troublesome, safe for the deep gash that ran on his left thigh that would have required more professional care than what he could provide after a month of first aid training.
“Y-you, hah, look like a mess,” he managed as his face paled at the thought of having to do anything more than light patching up. Clinging into the headrest of the chair, he felt lightheaded.
“Thank you for the kind reminder. I can assure you, I feel like a mess too or I would not be here.”
“Is that it…? Then sit at the usual spot. Just push aside the firework shells and I will… bring some tea and the first aid kit,” the trembling of his body quickly rose to his throat, making it painfully obvious how nervous he was. Not like he could send Cunning away. He had tried it several times, but the man refused to seek professional care as if Joker was not one stitch away from medical malpractice.
Red, green and blue… They were indeed fitting, because these colours bloomed across Cunning’s side and back, ruining the even colour of his skin, messing up any sort of artistic vision, he might have had before.
The red at least soon disappeared from his torso as he kept cleaning off the blood from the small cut that ran from his hip to his ribs. Nothing dangerous, but it was in a bad enough to hurt whenever he moved and his muscles tensed up beneath his fingers as he tried to apply a medical gauze on it.
“You should be more careful,” he muttered, not even looking up at Cunning, who still wore his black mask, despite getting rid of his shirt and the half coat that was draped over his shoulder.
“Believe me when I say that I am. I try my best! Truthfully. But sometimes it’s hard to determine what fate throws at me, and alas in those cases, accidents happen. I am no seer to know when a bullet might hit me,” he shrugged, leaning back against the wall of the workshop, his muscles rising and falling as he took a deep breath and grit his teeth.
“And I am no medic, but you seem eager to think I am one.” he stopped, pushing the wet cloth against a bruise with more force than he should’ve and made Cunning jump.
He wanted to tell him how much he hated their current setup, how much he hated seeing him being hurt, but the fear that this would push the man away for good lurked in the background. His movements halted once he went through the wound with antiseptic.
“Truth to be told, I am still not sure why you keep coming back to Fire Guy,” he avoided saying ‘me’, but he did not miss the frown beneath the mask that covered half of the man’s face. “You could do this for yourself and be more effective or even quicker than me playing doctor over something I know nothing about. I am a pyrotechnic, Cunning.”
“True, I could,” he nodded, as he took a sip from the tea Joker served in a polka dot cup. “It’s true that I could easily take care of my own injuries. But then I wouldn’t have you as my company and suffering alone can be pretty miserable at times. I like listening to your ramblings about your day and the workshop, even if I am not familiar with fireworks. Somehow they sound almost comprehensible when you are the one talking about them.”
“If you want company then you should just visit me without looking like you were hit by a train. I know it’s surprising, but you don’t need to make me worried to have me talk about these sorts of things,” he deadpanned, but couldn’t help a small hint of redness appeared on his cheeks as a smile forced itself into the corner of his lips. “At least, you could order some fireworks so I can keep the shop running.”
“If you want London to burn down again, then sure. But I’d rather have you go into details about how you recreated Shakespeare with fireworks. It… helps me ground myself in reality and it’s nice to see you get so excited over your job.”
Cunning’s words spread an unusual warmth to his chest and suddenly his company being required put their previous meetings into a completely new perspective. Being needed, even welcomed into a secret only the two shared. A feeling that pulled a comfortable veil around them whenever he visited, but prevented Joker from seeing the full picture of the man.
The colour of red, calming yet alluring, suited him far too well.
“I need you to take that off or at least cut it or something,” He pointed at Cunning’s pants as he stood over the wound, trying to do the impossible and treat it while trying to fend off the fabric.
“I did not believe you would be the first person who would attempt to cut my pants off of me,” Cunning leaned forward, his voice seemed to be more tense than usual, when he noticed that Joker trying to push the fabric aside.
“It’s… Not…” Joker looked up at him, those blue eyes stealing the words he was about to throw at his visitor. Even in the dim light of the workshop he was sure he had seen glimmers of the sun hidden in the man’s irises, the colour that he wanted to catch on the night sky reflected back at him. Those eyes that made his heart skip a beat if he gazed at them longer than he should have.
Perhaps if he was less of a coward, he would have taken a step forward to take a leap into the unknown, listen to the tiny voice in his head that urged him to take some sort of reward for everything he had done.
But he was afraid. A simple action would bring consequences he wouldn’t be able to face. At least not yet, when he barely knew anything about the man sitting in front of him.
“...I did not mean the whole thing, of course,” he focused his attention back on the wound in front of him, holding a new towel and a small brown bottle filled with carbolic acid that he got from the pharmacy and soaked the fabric with it.
Cunning seemed to consider his words, but just shook his head. “Try working around it instead. Please.”
“It would be easier if you did this for yourself, then,” Joker suggested, but Cunning just made faces in response making it clear that he would probably treat the wound lightly or not at all. “Fine.. I’ll see what I can do.”
Looking at the darkened blood that still did not have enough time to dry Joker felt a heavy weight being lifted from his chest when he realised that he wouldn’t need stitches to hold the wound together. He felt like a pervert as he lifted the fabric that was stuck to Cunning’s skin by blood, but decided to keep the comment to himself as he worked his way around the wound cleaning its surroundings, before getting a clean fabric and a new dose of antiseptic.
At the direct contact Cunning’s entire body froze and from the corner of his eyes Joker could see his knuckles whiten as he clutched the edge of the workbench and let out a groan through his closed mouth as he threw his head back from the pain.
He was about to say something, however when he looked back on the wound at hand, he noticed a familiar yellow against the skin. A curious shape that started to look like a petal with its veins painted on the skin with artistic contours, with his fingers beneath the fabric, he pushed it away from the skin while Cunning was wriggling from the burning sensation the towel against his wound had caused.
The petals were connected to a stem with small thorns. Same yellow dyeing the skin further and further. He was sure that the pattern ended in several roses and if he closed his eyes he could even see the familiar pattern and their petals glistening from the make up their owner applied on them.
Only one person had anything the like, and he was pretty sure that person hated him from the bottom of his heart.
In that moment, he felt the world go silent and his own heart seemed to stop for a moment, before it returned louder than ever, his heartbeats drumming in his ears as he looked up and his eyes met a worried glance and a hand that was ready to catch him in case he lost his balance.
The mesmerizing, fabricated lie he had fallen for.
In the end, he just shook his head, forcing a weak smile to his lips.
“My-My apologies. It must have been the antiseptic, I think I breathed it more than I should have and the sight of that… wound did not really help either.”
“Wait, are you sure? I deeply appreciate your help, but I can take care of this by myself. Besides your barely touched your tea.”
Joker nodded, finally taking his own cup to his hands as he slumped down onto the wooden chair next to the workbench. The tea had gotten cold, but he did not really care anymore, his attention was on the visitor.
Cunning did not seem to notice a subtle change that went through him, nor the way he looked at him when he picked up where Joker had left the gash on his leg, just where the rose was hidden by the darkened fabric. That traitorous pattern that suddenly served as a key to open the door Cunning intended to keep locked for god knows how long.
It led to a room Joker had known like the back of his hand and the familiar colour of red, gold and white suddenly surrounded him no matter how hard he tried to ignore them.
“Your thoughts seem to wander a lot today,” he heard Cunning’s voice gently shoo away the silence that enveloped them.
“Do they, huh? I did not notice,” Joker straightened his back with an awkward smile.
“Yes. Usually you talk a lot more about your day and Anne and everything that happened to you between our meetings. I hope you know, if something bothers you, I can listen. That’s the least I can offer for keeping me company,” the man gestured, still sitting on his work bench.
“Well I… I think I am just tired. Yes. That’s it,” he tried to reassure himself as his gaze fell into the reflection that looked back at him from his drink. “You see, recently I’ve gotten into a fight with someone. He is a stubborn mule, but then again, so am I. I’ve thrown some cruel words at his head that I’d rather not recite and words that he did not necessarily deserve even if he can be truly insufferable at times.”
“You? You do not look like that sort of person,” Joker saw as Cunning’s brows rose a bit beneath his mask with feigned surprise.
“I guess, we can all say stupid things in the heat of the moment.”
Cunning listened, closing his eyes as he digested the words aimed at the person he probably knew far too well. The corner of his lips hitched up into a small smile, taking Joker by surprise.
“If you want my opinion, if he knows you, he will know that you did not mean it. I am sure he knows this too. But you really shouldn’t lose sleep over a mere argument no matter how serious it seemed,” he shrugged as he hopped off the bench and reached for the tattered red shirt. Perhaps he had felt that if he stays longer the identity he intended to keep hidden would eventually reveal itself by accident.
Probably Cunning had felt the balance tipping too, because he hurriedly dressed himself, leaving the empty cup far away from its saucer just like someone else used to do when he dropped by his workshop.
“Oh and Joker,” he turned back from the entrance once as he tried to salvage the feathers on his hat then he bowed slightly before he put it back on his head. “I know I never really said it, but thank you.”
His footsteps grew more and more distant as he walked through the darkness of the crystal palace leaving Joker alone with his own thoughts until he grew annoyed by them and sat back to work on his plans with a pen in hand.
Red, and blue were part of Cunning. It was only a matter of perspective how one would see these colours manifest themselves into something more and what they would represent in the night sky.
Blue was not only a colour of bruises, but it also belonged to the gaze that allowed him with a strange sort of melancholy. Words that had to be halted before he would learn far too much about his visitor. The impossible yearning for honesty while keeping a secret.
Red… Red however changed a lot in an hour. He no longer saw darkened blood pooling on the floor of his workshop, but a brilliant stage with its scented programme fans. The artistry hidden in Cunning’s gestures that were closely connected to the limelight he was never allowed to step into.
And among these the last colour finally bloomed in his mind, its golden petals scattered across the sky as they gently shimmered while they fell, bringing a light he had searched for so long but failed to see beneath the darkness Cunning had covered himself with in order to protect himself.
But now he had a secret only he knew. A secret that eased his frustrations by providing a much needed key, but flooded his heart with newfound worry.