"Is it because you've done it before?"

I stared at him, horrorstruck.

He stared back at me and grinned like the devil he was, and suddenly I understood what all of this was about. I was stupid not to have recognized it before. The skeleton in my closet. The Joker daring me to kill him. Wanting to know if I'd killed before. Wanting to know if I'd 'repressed the memories'.

He had no fucking idea.

It was too late to hide my expression, that telltale look of dawning comprehension—the knowledge that the gig was up. Like a child being caught in the middle of telling a lie. Too late to play stupid now.

"How do you know about that?" I breathed. "How could you possibly know?"

"Found your little box," he said, raising his brows and quirking his mouth in that way I hated, like he was proud or something. "You reeeeeally should keep your dirty secrets somewhere a little more safe. You never know what bad things might happen if they were to fall into the wrong hands."

A tear slipped down my cheek, catching along the line of my jaw. I brushed it away with the back of my hand at the same time I got up from the couch, full of righteous anger, intent on fleeing to my bedroom. The box—it was under my bed. I needed to see it. Needed to make sure it was all still there.

He caught up with me in the hallway, shoved me against the closed door of the spare bedroom.

I snarled at him, pushing up on my toes so our differences in height weren't so pronounced.

"What are you going to do, huh? You going to air out my dirty laundry, tell all my coworkers so they can point their fingers and mock me? So they can ostracize the 'crazy' lady who killed her boyfriend?"

The Joker's eyebrows raised at my admission that I had killed, but then he caught his lower lip between his teeth, pondering. "Dirty laundry," he mused. "That seems rather flippant, don't you think? This is murder we're talking about. I mean," he paused to lower his gaze, "just look at these hands," he said, and before I knew it he was reaching for my wrists, easily snaring them in his grasp. It hurt, like he wanted to snap my wrists clean in half. His demonstration of power was alarming. I tried pulling away, but he shook his head and tsked. "Hands of a killer," he went on. "Never would have pegged someone like you to be ballsy enough to pull the trigger." He stared at me then, narrowing his eyes, licking his lips and stepping a little closer. It was like he was trying to see inside me. "What made you do it? Hm? What was the final straw?"

I viciously ripped my hands from his grasp and tucked them behind my back so he couldn't get to them again, glaring at him.

"That's none of your business."

Dangerous words to say to a dangerous man. But I'd successfully managed to shove down the memories of what had transpired eleven years ago so deeply inside me it was almost as if they had been buried inside another person entirely. That woman—that girl—didn't exist anymore, the one who had killed her boyfriend, point blank, in front of all her family and friends. The girl who had become a pariah in her Midwestern small town, the girl who had been ostracized, the girl people side-eyed in the street, the girl people gave a wide berth too, like she carried some contagion, a virus they didn't want to catch.

That girl who stopped going to church. Wasn't invited to town functions anymore. Parties. Didn't graduate from college. Sunk into a depression so deep that when she finally came out of it, it was like waking up from a coma that had lasted decades. Like being rebirthed, like being a newborn all over again, the painstaking and arduous effort of having to relearn how to talk, how to walk, how to hold a spoon, how to wipe her own ass. How to function in the world like a normal human being.

And then, as if God wasn't satisfied enough with how much that girl had punished herself over the years—how much she'd suffered—the diagnosis came. Stage fucking ll. Fucker.

It was a gut punch. Routine visit to the doctor's, and a week later a phone call from the office, some abnormalities in your blood work, can you come in?, and then crying on the floor in the exam room, threadbare carpet digging into her knees, her mother struggling to hold her up, hands under her armpits, and the doctor yelling for the nurse, people rushing in. Fade to black. The diagnosis had threatened to send her back over the edge again, down into the dark abyss she had spent the better part of her life crawling out of. Had it all been for nothing? Was this the meaning of life? To live for just a fraction of a second only to be pushed back down on your knees, like, down, doggy. Yes. Just like that. Keep your face down in the dirt. Hold your breath. Wait. Don't come up until I say you can. Don't even think about it.

If there was a god, he wasn't a benevolent one. Her parents had a hard time swallowing that pill—rather, they had a hard time acknowledging the fact that that was a pill she herself had chosen to swallow.

In the beginning, during those first couple of years, they did everything the Good Book said to do. Laid their hands on her in prayer. Went to church every Sunday, even if she couldn't go herself. Hung that ridiculous wooden cross in her bedroom, Jesus's sad, forlorn eyes tracking her every movement, so she felt guilty even to masturbate—not like she had the energy for it anyway. She was practically comatose.

They held prayer meetings and potlucks. People from church sent cards that her mother carefully arranged on her dresser, like they were precious relics from the Lord himself, like the sympathies and prayers and well wishes scrawled inside those cards might transcend their two-dimensional prison and float over to Riley, slither down inside her marrow and make her well, breathe new life into her, suck up the cancer like a vacuum and put it somewhere else.

By the time she had given up on god, she was coltish and thin, knees knocking, bones clicking, bumping into furniture, bruising easily. Soft and too pale, bluish green veins visible beneath paper-thin skin. She didn't have an appetite anymore, and everything tasted bland. Even her favorite foods were suddenly gross and unappealing.

Sometimes old friends would stop by—the same ones who had stopped talking to her after the murder—but it was out of a self-righteous sense of pity, like they had to pay their respects and tie up loose ends before she kicked the bucket. They both knew that she knew that, too, and that uncomfortable knowledge hung suspended above them like a beefy, black storm cloud. She stared at the ceiling when her friends came, imagined sticking a needle into that storm cloud, let all the juice—the rain and the thunder—come gushing out. Let it fill up the room and drown them fucking both.

Her parents didn't understand the relinquishment of her faith. They told her that only Jesus could heal her, and if she didn't accept him back into her heart then there was nothing they could do for her anymore. They would be forced to turn their backs.

The catalytic follow-up, then, the screaming match in the living room that one afternoon. Their grand finale. The summertime rain outside, drumming against the windows. God's tears, like maybe he was sad for her, for once, even while the earth eagerly soaked it all back up. The blanket of steam rising from the cul-de-sac pavement afterwards when it was all said and done, the smell of wet grass and hot, wet asphalt, the slither of sunlight through the rain-soaked trees while she paced in front of the house, clutching her backpack to her chest, hyperventilating.

That was the girl who didn't exist anymore—the one whose memories I had worked so fucking hard to repress. And now the Joker was sinking his claws down into my gullet, down, down, down, pulling up the roots of my trauma from the underbelly, demanding me to remember, goddammit, to unleash the nasty truth.

He cocked his head, and his eyes burned me. Meeting his gaze was like touching an open flame. "What did you just say to me?" he asked.

"I said—" I shoved on his chest for emphasis, but he didn't even budge, "—I—I said—"

But I couldn't say it again. I was crying so hard. Snot dripped down my nose. I tasted salt in my mouth. I hung my head as a sob was torn from my throat, as if he'd pulled it from me by force. My whole body shook with the intensity of my cries. I sunk to my knees on the carpet in front of him—pitifully—kneeling at his feet, staring at his muddied shoes through vision that was blurred with tears.

"Don't make me say," I blubbered. "I don't wanna—wanna go back." Back to being comatose, back to being a shell of a human—even more so than I already was. Back to staring at the TV for hours. Days. Pissing the bed. Being fed all my meals through a tube in my stomach that made my bowels cramp. Shivering. Sweating. Ad infinitum.

The Joker crouched down low in front of me, spreading his knees wide, so there was room for me between them. "There, there, now," he cooed. "Don't fuss." He pet my hair, slipping his gloved hand through a knotted strand. Tucked it behind my ear. "We'll get it aaaalll out," he promised. "You'll feel better afterwards."

I felt delirious with his hands on me, cupping my jaw, sliding through my mess of tears, running up and down over the goose pimples on my arms, like he could attempt to smooth them out. I allowed myself to collapse forward into his chest, burying my face in-between his collarbone and the crook of his neck, smelling the dried sweat and the sharp bite of gasoline clinging to his shirt, his skin. This was probably the closest to him I'd ever been—even closer than when he had put his hands around my neck and choked me, or when he had kissed me, brief as it was. He felt safer than I had imagined. Warm. It had been a long time since I had allowed myself to be this vulnerable, since I had cried like a baby in the presence of another person. Even Nancy had never seen me cry like this. But I was afraid—terrified—of what he wanted to pull out me, all the trauma I had worked so hard to repress. I was living on my own now. And holding down a job. And keeping a journal. I had a friend. I had Nancy. A place to call my own. He was threatening to take all of that away from me without even realizing it. He had no idea how dangerous memory could be.

Or did he?

"What are you so afraid, hm?" His chin bumped along the top of my head, like he was nuzzling it, and his arms slipped around me, pulling me against his chest. I tensed for a brief moment, thinking again about how he had nearly choked me to death, but then I relaxed, going completely boneless in his arms. I couldn't fight him even if I'd wanted to. "What are you afraid of?" he murmured, asking again—but it wasn't soft or coaxing. It felt predatory. Like he wanted to find the exact point where I'd be most prone to splintering, and then stick the blade of his knife there, extend the cracks even further until I shattered into a million tiny pieces.

I cried, open-mouthed, against his chest, drooling onto his shirt, fisting my hands into the thick, heavy material of his coat. I breathed him in, and then I breathed him out, and it was all I could do to keep from hyperventilating.

"You," I managed. The admission came stumbling out, tethered to the back of a shuddering breath. "I'm afraid of you."

I felt his mouth widen against the side of my head, where his cheek was pressed. His grin was unmistakable.

"Good," he growled. "You should be."

Author's Notes: I'm back?

Not going to rewrite this story even though I'm unhappy with it. It's been six years. I made some minor changes to some past chapters. Deleted a chapter in the Joker's POV that I felt was unnecessary.

The only way forward is onward… so onward we shall go—that is, if you're still interested.