Page 55 of Twice as Twisted

“She doesn’t want us,” Duke says glumly.

“But she needs us,” he says. “She needs the Joker as much as Batman does.”

“I said I loved her, and she didn’t say it back.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

“Because I do,” he says, giving me a look.

“Now she has the power,” I explain, trying to keep my patience.

He keeps looking at me like I’m missing something obvious to normal people. I wait for him to tell me what it is. I don’t like being at a disadvantage, but I am, when it comes to humanity. Duke is the half of us that fills me in on these things.

“She always had the power,” he says flatly.

“No, she doesn’t,” I snap. “I overpowered her the other day. Twice.”

“I’m not talking about brute strength,” he says, genuine patience in his voice, the way it appears every time he wants me to understand some emotional response I can’t quite grasp. “I’m talking about… The intangible. We had the power, and she knew it, so she changed her name and left. But when we started looking for her, it flipped.”

“When I found her, I took the power back,” I counter.

He nods. “Yeah, partly. But she was right the other day. She didn’t come back for us. We hunted her down.”

I don’t like that he’s right, and that I can’t see where I slipped up to give her the upper hand. I think it’s the same as when I fuck someone. The one who wants the other loses face, loses power, while the other remains a superior being, above such baseness. The one who doesn’t want the other has the power. I just need to put us back on equal footing.

“You made her beg like a dog,” Duke says. “That’s something. You humiliated her.”

I don’t like that he’s trying to console me.

“But she was begging me to stop,” I say, nodding as it clicks into place. “She wasn’t begging for us to fuck her. Thatwould have given us the power. Because she would be the one who wanted us.”

“And we both know Mabel will never beg for dick,” he says, his gaze holding mine. “Unless we force her to.”

I shake my head. “She still won’t mean it, so it’s a hollow victory.”

What he doesn’t say is that she will never want us. But she can love us. We just have to show her that we’re worth loving, just as we’ve shown her that she is by going to all the trouble of tracking her down, hunting her, and now, claiming her.

That’s as much as we can do. She is ours. She always has been, and she always will be, no matter how many times she runs and how far she goes. We can claim her, but we can’t beat her. That’s why we’re here. That’s why she’s worth more than all the other girls we’ve ever fucked combined. That’s why we need her.

Because we took out her heart, and now she’s a monster like us.

And that’s what I truly want. Not a girl I can cow and bully and break. I want a partner. An equal. Someone as unfeeling as I am, someone who never grovels or becomes pathetic. If I wanted a doll to play with and discard, I’d content myself with Jane. Superior people naturally seek to control their inferiors. A truly great man seeks to understand so that he might better control his inferiors. The greatest among us cannot be controlled. Not by their superiors, because they have none, not by their attachments, because they understand they are illusory, not by their own urges and emotions.

Leaving Faulkner on her own proved that Mabel was among this class of people.

It did the same for me.

Despite what I said to Duke, I don’t need him. I’m not Batman, and he’s not the Joker. That’s a fantasy, and though it’sone I let him continue because he needs it, I’ve long outgrown it. Just because I don’t need him, that doesn’t mean I don’t want him, though, or that he’s not essential to me. He just helped me see this whole situation clearly much faster than I would have on my own.

“She loves you,” I tell my brother, because that’s what he needs to hear. “She just didn’t want to give you the power.”

“You really think so?” he asks, searching my eyes, as if he can find the truth behind my glasses, as if he doesn’t know that people like me are the reason polygraph tests are no longer admissible in a court of law. Lying comes easy when you know truth is arbitrary. And still, I don’t lie to Duke. It’s in my nature, but against my moral code.

“I know it,” I assure him. “She’ll tell you right now.”

Inside, I find Jane burrowed under the covers in Duke’s bed. I toss her over my shoulder and carry her down the steps into the basement, dumping her on the hard floor. She whimpers and curls into a ball, and I have to wrench her arm away to snap the cuff onto it.

“Can I have a blanket?” she asks, quaking with cold.

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