The costume department lived in a bunker beneath the studio's west stage. The air was filtered and dry, the lights calibrated to surgical intensity, every surface lined with glass, steel, or black granite so polished it doubled as a mirror.
Marcus stepped through the automatic door, instantly tracked by a half-dozen sets of eyes. Most were shielded behind acetate-rimmed spectacles or the veils of their own precision; the rest flared wide, as if some small animal instinct knew a predator had entered the room.
He wore no makeup, no pretense—just skin paled by the lack of sleep and the strange, ascetic diet of the last week.
His hair, longer than most remembered from the audition, fell around his jaw in wild, blue-black arcs.
The veins in his hands traced up and vanished under the rolled cuff of his shirt.
He carried nothing.
The head of costume—she of the immaculate platinum bob and the measured, almost priestly cadence—rose from her table without a word.
She signaled with a single lifted finger, and her team responded in silence: a junior with a ring of thread spools, an intern balancing a mood board of fabric swatches and test dye strips, a makeup artist with a brush roll slung like a bandolier.
"Marcus," said the head, voice pitched not quite to a greeting. She pronounced the name as if it were a diagnostic label.
"We're ready to begin."
The others drew close. There were tools arrayed on every surface: calipers, rulers, razors, spools of neon elastic, tape measures wound in nervous spirals.
On the back wall hung three prototype Joker costumes, each rendered in a different dialect of madness—one a riot of acid greens and checkers, another in blood-red leather with silk skull piping, the last a severe, tailored purple that caught the light in a way that almost hurt to look at.
He surveyed the array.
The tension in the room rose and fell with the movement of his gaze.
The head costume designer extended a hand, open-palmed, a gesture of invitation and plea.
"Would you like to look through the options?"
He nodded, though the decision had been made before he entered. He walked the line of costumes, trailing his left hand along the spines of the hangers.
Each fabric gave something up as he touched it—one slick, another spiked with dry heat, a third almost living. The moment his fingers found the velvet, the nerves in his arm lit up.
A flash: laughter behind a wall of glass, the sound of teeth shattering, the wet slip of blood on his own tongue. The memory was not his, but it belonged to him all the same.
He let his hand rest on the coat.
"This one," he said, voice softened by the gravity of the moment. He did not need to raise it; the soundless suction of attention in the room carried the words to every ear.
"Of course," the head said, then added:
"May we take your measurements?"
He stepped onto the circle of tape at the center of the floor, not needing to be told where to stand. A junior with trembling hands unwound the tape, whispering the numbers to herself with each pass: shoulder, chest, waist, inseam.
Marcus held still, not a fidget or breath wasted. The tape hissed as it retracted. The junior's fingers brushed the inside of his arm; she recoiled as if stung, then colored, then forced herself to continue.
The process repeated: wrist, neck, shoulder slope.
Behind the junior, the head designer checked off boxes on a battered iPad. The makeup artist stood at a distance, one eye already painting white onto his cheek in her mind.
The intern with the mood board snapped reference photos, then stopped when she realized he was watching her through the mirror, not turning, not even blinking.
When they finished, the head of costume gestured to a slim stool beside the dressing partition.
"You can change here," she said, "or—"
He moved to the dressing area with the economy of someone who'd been here before, which, in a sense, he had.
The curtains closed, and for a moment the only sounds were the shift of fabric, the click of a metal hanger, the hiss of the velvet sleeve as it slid along his arm.
He emerged in the full coat, the sleeves ending with precision at the bone of his wrist, the lining a shock of acid green that flashed with every minor movement.
He wore it with the posture of a king returned from exile—no exaggeration, no swagger, just total occupancy.
The room went still.
For a breathless span, no one moved or spoke.
He walked to the full-length mirror, turned once, then twice, the coat fanning out in a deliberate, almost languid gesture.#
He looked at his own reflection, then past it, as if inspecting the fit on a body he no longer inhabited.
"It's right," he said, finally.
The head costume designer exhaled. She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath.
The rest of the team relaxed, tension draining away as they took in the image before them. The intern with the camera fumbled for the shutter, hands unsteady. The makeup artist, now emboldened, stepped forward, her gaze hungry for the blank canvas of his face.
But Marcus's eyes never left the mirror. He watched as the velvet transformed him, as the color and silhouette condensed all the signals he'd been transmitting since the first day: the stillness, the containment, the sense of barely suppressed violence.
He reached up, adjusted the collar with two fingers, and the movement refracted through the room—copied, admired, feared.
The head designer drew closer, her voice dropped to a whisper:
"Anything you'd like us to change?"
He shook his head.
"It's perfect."
She let herself smile, just a fraction.
"You know, I think you were meant for this."
He looked at her, eyes sharp and unblinking.
"That's what they keep telling me."
In the silence that followed, the only thing alive was the fluorescent throb of the lights overhead, and the slow, electric hum of anticipation leaking into every corner of the room.
Marcus Vale stood in his new skin, the purple velvet drinking in the light, and waited for the rest of the world to catch up.
.....
The makeup bay was more confession booth than beauty salon, every mirror framed in an exoskeleton of cold white bulbs, each surface wiped and re-wiped to sterility between appointments. Marcus sat as directed, legs splayed in the oversized barber's chair, hands loose in his lap.
In the mirror, his own gaze refracted a dozen times between the workstations. From every angle, he caught sight of the man about to be unmade.
The head makeup artist, a woman whose entire forearm was tattooed in grayscale roses, approached with the powder-dry grace of a taxidermist. She carried a palette loaded with creams and a fan of brushes that, in the wrong light, could be mistaken for surgical tools.
"Foundation first," she said, but the words were a formality.
She reached for his jaw.
He intercepted her hand, fingers gentle but absolute.
"Let me," he said.
She blinked, but did not protest. The rest of the staff, arrayed at the periphery, paused to watch. There was no protocol for an actor commandeering the transformation; this was a department where hierarchy, like pigment, ran deep.
He took the brush, loaded it with pure white, and began to paint.
Each stroke was slow, deliberate, as if erasing his own face molecule by molecule. The room's nervous energy condensed behind him. Even the wall clock seemed to hush, its tick damped by the absorption of attention in the room.
Marcus used the largest brush first, dragging it down his cheekbones, under the eyes, then across the forehead in wide, clinical swaths. His free hand steadied his own chin, thumb braced just under the point of his jaw. The line was unwavering.
As he worked, flashes came—not memories, exactly, but instants of violence and chaos that seemed projected onto the mirror from somewhere behind the glass.
A hand slick with blood, fingers pressing into a cheek not his own. The arc of a knife through air so cold it shattered. Laughter, again, but spliced through with the sound of wet meat hitting linoleum.
He paused only to breathe, nostrils flaring as the scent of greasepaint gave way to the iron sweetness of an old wound.
The audience was silent.
He finished the base, then switched to a finer brush. Without asking, he dipped into a pot of carbon black and ringed his own eyes, first the left, then the right, a gesture as old as warpaint.
The pigment pooled in the crease of his lid, then he dragged it down, letting it smear in uneven shards toward the top of his cheekbones.
"Don't blend it," he murmured, voice so low only he could hear. The woman with the tattooed arm shivered anyway, though she did not move.
He traced the line from the corner of his mouth to the edge of the cheek, the way he had seen it done on a hundred internet forums, but with a precision none of them could match. He switched to a smaller brush, dipped it in a blood-red paste, and painted the mouth—not just the lips, but the skin around, carving a smile so wide it threatened to dislocate the jaw.
He added a ragged edge to the lower lip, then caught the splatter with his thumb, smearing it further down. The color bled into the white, making the illusion more organic, more obscene.
A flash: a face in the mirror, but not his.
A grin so wide the teeth looked like piano keys, the gums weeping red.
Someone screaming, the sound clipped at the top like a laugh track gone feral.
The edge of a window, a rain of glass.
He set the brush down.
In the reflection, the Joker stared back—not the one from the old movies, not even the one from the script pages, but something new, built out of the hard geometry of his own skull. The white base magnified the green of his eyes, the black rimming pulled them forward until they seemed to float, disembodied, on the painted face.
The head makeup artist stepped in, her voice a whisper.
"It's… perfect," she said.
"But we still need the hair."
He met her gaze in the mirror.
"Green," he said.
She hesitated. "Your base color—"
"Whatever it takes."
The crew converged, now that the painting was complete. They fitted him with a cape, covered every inch of skin below the jaw with cellophane and tape. The head of hair, so dark it read as negative space, was sectioned and pinned, then doused in bleach. The ammonia burned the eyes, but Marcus did not so much as flinch.
He watched the transformation in the mirror, minute by minute, as the color lifted from black to the jaundiced yellow of overripe fruit. His scalp tingled, then stung, but he sat through it, eyes never leaving his own.
They rinsed, then painted the base in a luminous acid-green, massaging it down to the root. The process took hours. He sat unmoving for all of them.
"Freeze them before you cut," he said at one point, unprompted.
The stylist, startled, looked to the makeup artist for reassurance. The woman nodded, and the crew pressed on.
The green took; they blow-dried it into a wiry, electric corona, then back-combed and teased until it stood up in jagged waves. Someone suggested a wig for future shoots, but Marcus ignored the idea, running his own hands through the shock of green and watching the way it reflected in the mirror.
A junior staffer, emboldened by the hours of proximity, asked, "Does it hurt?"
He considered the question.
"Only when you stop."
The girl didn't know if he was joking.
The final step was the lacquer—a glossing spray that fixed the color in place and gave the hair an unhealthy, radioactive shine. Marcus inhaled deeply as they coated him, and the smell triggered a sense memory: a locker room, wet concrete, the burning bite of cleaning solvents. He smiled, and the painted mouth cracked into a hundred tiny fissures.
When they finished, he stood, wiping the last streak of pigment from his hands onto the towel. He stared at the assembled faces, now reflected behind him in the wall of mirrors. Every one of them looked haunted.
He rolled his shoulders, felt the paint stretch and settle on the skin.
"Is that all?" he asked.
The head makeup artist nodded, unable to meet his gaze.
He left the chair and crossed to the door, each step echoing louder than the last.
When the door swung shut behind him, the only sound left in the room was the nervous exhale of the staff, and the faint, buzzing memory of laughter.
...
The corridor leading back to the wardrobe was deserted. Even the echoes of his own footsteps sounded altered, as though the world itself was adjusting to the emergence of something new. Marcus paused outside the double doors, inhaled, and let the Joker settle into his bones.
Inside, the light had shifted—overhead fluorescents dialed down to a duskier, more forgiving temperature. The velvet coat waited on a custom hanger, its shape impossibly elegant, the color so rich it seemed to consume the shadows around it.
Beside it, the checkered vest and mint shirt, perfectly pressed, the collar points sharpened like little knives.
The room was empty, but he could feel eyes on him from the glass wall that partitioned the space from the workroom beyond. The junior designers had gathered in a loose clot at the far end, half-hidden, watching through the reflection.
He shrugged into the shirt, the fabric cool against the skin. Buttoned the vest, slow, methodical, aligning each check with military precision. Slipped the coat on last, rolling his shoulders until the fit was absolute. The sensation was close to religious—something between armor and anointing.
He walked to the mirror.
The Joker stared back, complete.
The hair, luminous and obscene, flared out in vectors from the scalp, the acid-green a perfect frame for the white and black architecture of the face.
The eyes—no, the gaze—was animal, impossible, every instinct in the body screaming that this was not a man to trust with sharp objects. The mouth, blooded and raw, curled upward at an angle that suggested delight, but the rest of the face told a different story: hunger, calculation, the anticipation of a punchline no one else could hear.
He tilted his head, studying the reflection. The collar needed a two-millimeter adjustment; he made it with a flick of his thumb and forefinger. The lapel on the left side drooped infinitesimally lower than the right; he pinched it into submission. The coat's vent, when he spun, opened with a perfect, predatory flutter.
He smiled, and watched the smile as it mutated. He tried different configurations: the rictus, the lopsided leer, the near-silent grimace. Each one left a different residue on the glass.
Behind the mirror, the staff had materialized—more than a dozen now, including some he'd never seen before.
No one spoke.
The room was a monastery, the mirror an altar.
He put a hand to his chin, turned this way and that, testing the face for weaknesses.
He found none.
He cocked his head at a forty-degree angle, then leaned in, so close that the paint almost fogged the glass.
In this new light, the details came alive: the micro-cracks in the foundation, the way the black at the eyes bled outward like wildfire, the faint green stubble that was already beginning to erupt at the hairline.
The effect was, if anything, more disturbing for its authenticity.
He flexed the painted mouth, pulling it into a scowl, then a snarl, then a mockery of heartbreak. Every emotion read as true, but none of them stayed long enough to matter.
He turned from the mirror and faced the assembled crew. The room tensed as one organism.
"Is it right?" he asked.
The head designer nodded, then swallowed hard. "It's… beyond right."
He held her gaze for a fraction too long, then let his eyes drift over the rest of the team. Most looked away. A few—braver, or more curious—stared back, unwilling or unable to break the contact.
He rolled his shoulders, and the coat moved with him, a purple ripple. He stalked the length of the room, not walking but gliding, the shoes whispering against the linoleum. He came to a stop at the far end, spun on a dime, and let the momentum carry him back toward the mirror.
As he passed the staff, someone whispered:
"He's not acting."
He let the words land.
He wanted them to.
He paused in front of the glass again, just out of reach, and for the first time, he let the Joker's laugh out.
It began as a stutter—barely audible, a tremor at the back of the throat. Then it grew, sharpened, accelerated, until it filled the space with a sound so alien it set the teeth on edge. It was not the laugh from the audition.
This was something else: higher, more controlled, but with a vibration underneath, a subsonic threat.
It built, fractured, then doubled back on itself, refusing to resolve. At its peak, it was almost beautiful—then it cut off, sharp as a guillotine, and the silence that followed was absolute.
Two of the juniors flinched, one knocking a spool of thread to the floor.
No one moved to pick it up.
He watched the effect ripple through the room, then smiled—not the Joker's smile, but something softer, more secret.
He leaned into the mirror until their faces overlapped—his and the Joker's, indistinguishable.
"You look good," he said, and the reflection agreed.
He stood that way, motionless, as the staff filtered out, one by one, each marked in a new way. No one would say what they'd seen, but they would all remember it.
When the last of them was gone, Marcus remained, alone with the mirror.
He waited for the boundary to dissolve, and when it did, he let the smile hold, perfect and unbroken.
The Joker stared back, and for the first time, he smiled like he meant it.
.........
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