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The silence is shallow, the dust heavy, his breath jagged and disturbed. He looks at his own face held in the palms of his hands. The mask of his identity, that he must put away, if only for a small time. To hide himself, and stay hidden. He needs to stay.
Stay with her.
Perhaps, what he is is a coward. Hidden in the damp darkness of the funhouse basement. His quiet laughter falls flat on the cold concrete below his feet. He doesn’t want to hide, it would be fun to run. Jump ship, leave the city, like he has done so many times before. Kirk would come with him, and they would have laughed with every sprinted step taken farther and farther from the LSPD, from the rest of the clowns who misunderstand the value of loyalty.
Moose knuckles, Ember… Bon Bon.
A quiet creaking above him stops the rapid descent of his thoughts and straightens him to attention. Someone is in the funhouse. Wrench in hand he ascends the brittle stairway. Listening carefully to the shuffling movements above. The intruder's steps are heavy, clumsy, possibly frantic. He knows the layout of the funhouse like the inside of his mask, and whoever is above him is stumbling to the bathroom.
Slowly, his wrench raised he follows hissed mumbles through the main floor. It's almost astonishing the rapid succession of curses leaving the bathroom as he approaches.
A conflicted astonishment hits his chest, “Ray Mond?”
She turns to him quickly, “Chatty?!” The exclamation leaves her wincing as she folds her posture to better accommodate her discomfort.
His vision blurs at the scene. Bloodied bandages cover the sink, her hands halfway around her waist as she struggles to wrap them neatly. Her braids are almost undone and the stray hair sticks to her forehead with sweat.
“What the yuck happened?” His voice is a menacing panic.
Ray Mond relays everything through gritted teeth. Tears line her eyes but a heavy determination held in her expression keeps them back. He’s watching her. Her fumbling hands, her wavering voice and the uncharacteristic quietness, a misery that emanates from her bloodied hands.
His hands are shaking harder than hers, but he takes the loose end of the gauze from her anyways. Chatterbox tightens and tucks the bandage neatly in place and takes a step back swiftly.
“I should have been there, Ray Mond. You shouldn’t be here putting on your own bandages.” He scratches lightly behind his ear in that nervous way he denies.
“You should have been.” Her voice is harsh with hurt. But she inhales slowly, nodding her head like she has thought carefully about what she is going to say next. “But it isn’t your fault. The cops are after your head.”
“Yuck the cops!” His voice catches after days of no use, “Where’s Kirk? Twinkles? Why are you here by yourself?”
Her sigh is quiet, “I am not here by myself Chatty. Ursula is staying the night too, she helped me with my bandages before bed. I didn’t want to wake her up. ” Her eyes flit down and she directs her attention to the mess she made. Busying herself she continues slowly, “I wanted to go somewhere safe.” A soft silence fills between them. She hesitates, “I-I wanted to be with you.” The second half of her sentence is rushed with an endearing urgency. He twists his lips to stop them from quirking and he lets the warmth in his chest cool at the sight of her trembling hands cleaning the sink.
“You’re safe here, a-and you know you can stay, For as long as you want.” He steps towards her slowly, invading her position in front of the sink. She moves back and leans against the thin peeling walls, watching him. His fists clench against the dirty porcelain. He bunches the red bandages into his ungloved hands less disturbed by the blood than the fact that it’s hers.
Ray can see it in his movements, his mind is in an unpacifiable place, a place far from here. He is agonized by an ache that her new, but familiar, place in his life fortifies. An old hurt that her blood on the bathroom floor aggravates. Her injury pushes into an old wound that has been festering on his soul.
She knows he lost his wife. It is a history she had a difficult time believing belonged to Chatterbox. When she had known him at a superficial level, when she still believed that the clowns were the wrong sort of crazy, the type of crazy she had been trying to convince herself and others she was not. It is a stinging truth, that way she was (and perhaps still is) so susceptible to prejudice. But then again, so is he, he had confessed that much in the mines.
The mines. Where she decided to place total trust in a silly old clown. One who had the audacity to whistle his way down the mineshaft like it was funny (it was.) A musty, damp and dark silent place where there had been nowhere to run. He thanked her for coming alone but she hoped that the very fact that she stumbled down there with its boarded walls and forced proximity, that he realized she was trying to keep him in her life. She let her ability to run away be inhibited.
Why?
She couldn’t have said at the time. Only a few days prior, she was promising her roommates that she only associated with the clowns, with Chatterbox, to keep herself safe. They were a deranged unseemly group, with forever smiling faces and Bon Bon was one of the good ones. That was the only reason she answered whenever Chatterbox called. So why? Why was she so adamant to speak to him after one cold phone call? Why was she so sorry that he and Mr. K would never get along? Why did her chest ache when he put off her concerned (albeit accusing) questioning with drunken deflection? It was all to stop them from hurting her, it was to ruin them from the inside. Right? She only ran with them, smiled with them, laughed with them, cried with them, hurt with them, to survive. It was for her survival. Ray Mond looked at the man in front of her scrubbing with meticulous diligence, he cleaned as though removing the evidence from the sink would erase the fact that it had ever happened. She bore her soul to him, the most she had ever told anyone in the quiet of a mine shaft because he had asked her. No one had ever really done that before. No one cared where she came from. People- people like Benji, saw a pretty face, saw that she was loud but in the fun way. They saw that she was crazy but in the hot way. And they never really cared to see any farther than that.
At what point did this “survival” shift from physical safety to something far more integral, something far more horrifying and severe? She needs him. Not with the flattering tolerance that kept her from being victim to nefarious pranks. No, she needs him like he is part of her, like he is somehow capable of undividing her soul.
“I needed you today.” She whispers and his hands still eerily.
It is a truth that still holds true in the fortress and security of the funhouse, she needs the clowns to survive. She needs Chatterbox.
“I’m sorry,” His voice is low, it’s intonation formed by a particular type of remorse that can only be instilled by grief. If this grief is new or old, reminiscing or anticipating is not something Ray Mond can bring herself to reconcile right now. So instead she lifts her arms weakly, feeling like a beggar hoping he will comply.
Chatterbox steps towards her slowly, and suddenly he is the only thing holding her together, stopping her from bleeding out on this floor.