Gods Among Men

[Flashback to the night of the premiere]

They came in droves, a species of their own, gathering in the mineral darkness outside the Arcadia Grand. Midnight, and the air was too thick to breathe right, syruped with ozone, gasoline, sweat, and the cheap sugar of food trucks that lined the boulevard.

The theater loomed above them, columns backlit in a sickly violet that bled through the rolling fog. Tonight, the world's only religion was here, massed on the wet concrete with their phone torches lifted like relics at a crusade.

Hundreds—maybe thousands—pressed against the stanchions and rented barricades, faces painted in the geometry of the New Faith: eyes ringed in black, lips painted white or crimson, even the occasional glimmer of green hair that shimmered in the headlight haze.

They wore tattered concert tees or thrift-store suits, fishnets shredded on purpose. Some had slashed their own smiles in lipstick, wide and anatomical. Some wore the old Joker, the Mark II, the Phoenix, or the Ledger variant, but you could tell in the way they stood which denomination they worshipped.

A group of them huddled at the foot of the steps, hands joined, murmuring Marcus's name. They whispered it the way monks might recite forbidden scripture—soft, hypnotic, intimate with pain.

Every so often one would break, the word fluttering up in a cracked giggle or a bark of nerves, and the rest would hush them, pat the shoulder, keep the liturgy pure.

To one side, a shrine: homemade, propped up against the base of a lamppost. Candle stubs jammed into empty Monster cans, a bouquet of artificial lilies shot through with needles, a hand-drawn sign that read "MARCUS IS THE CURE."

Photocopies of Marcus as Joker, all angles and teeth, were taped around the pole in a corona of devotion. Someone burned stick incense in a thrift-store votive, the smoke making slow ghosts in the air.

Every few minutes, a new convert stepped up to add an offering—an expired bus pass, a lottery ticket, a Snapple lid with a confession scrawled inside.

Across the street, a pair of influencers livestreamed the vigil, their faces made up with the kind of precision that said they paid for professional help. They huddled together, noses nearly touching the phone, voices pitched to carry but still sound breathless.

"This isn't just a movie premiere," one of them said, dark eyes glittering under the ring light,

"it's a cultural awakening. Vale is literally—no, actually—changing everything. Look at this."

They panned their camera across the mass of bodies, catching the edge of the line where a girl—no more than fifteen, maybe—sat cross-legged on the curb, knees hugged to her chest.

She wore a jacket so oversized it nearly swallowed her, sleeves trailing on the ground. The hood was up, hiding most of her face except for the mouth, where the lipstick smile was painted with surgical care.

Around her neck, on a silver chain, hung a glass vial. Inside it: a strip of film, the real kind, each frame lit gold in the city's neon.

She rocked back and forth, gentle as a metronome, eyes fixed on the theater's closed doors.

Closer to the entrance, a group of fans knelt on the wet pavement, arms raised in a silent wave, phones lit in tribute. The sidewalk shimmered with oil and rain and the weird, polychrome light of so many screens.

Some wept openly, tears streaking the makeup into something more honest. Others held hands, or took selfies, or just stared at the marquee as if it might speak to them.

Security staff, rented by the studio and all dressed in clone-black suits, tried to keep order. It was like herding cats with a death wish. Every time one of them barked a command, the crowd surged forward a few inches, some making a play for the velvet rope, others just wanting to get closer.

They were desperate, but not violent. It was the kind of hunger you only saw in churches or stadiums.

At exactly midnight, the theater's front doors cracked open. The reaction was instant—an exhale, a tidal pull. The mass pushed forward, all the lines collapsing into a single, howling vector. Security tried to hold, but the velvet ropes snapped like dental floss, sending two guards sprawling.

A chant started up, low and rising:

"Joker, Joker, Joker—" but it had nothing to do with the character. It was a summoning, a spell.

The girl on the curb stood up, wiped her face with her sleeve. She touched the glass vial, held it like a rosary, kissed the film strip through the glass. She didn't run; she walked, slow, letting the tide of bodies part around her. She mouthed the words under her breath:

"This is the moment. This is it."

You could tell she meant it.

Inside, the lights were already down, the first pulse of overture vibrating through the lobby glass. Ushers yelled, but no one listened. The crowd spilled in, a river of faces transformed by purpose.

As the doors closed behind the first wave, someone—maybe the girl, maybe not—let out a laugh. It cut through the other sounds, bright and sharp and unafraid. The line outside paused, then redoubled, as if the sound was a key and the rest of them had been waiting for permission to lose themselves.

On the steps, the shrine burned hotter, wax melting down onto the sidewalk in strange, bright puddles.

In the street, the influencers stopped recording. For the first time all night, they just watched.

This was the real show, and it had only just begun.

[Current Day (3 weeks after the premiere)

The sanctum of higher learning was always cold, always lit in surgical fluorescence that made every surface look sterile. But today, in the upper lecture theater of the National Institute for Dramatic Arts, the air was colder still, the silence even more absolute.

The only warmth in the room came from the massive projection screen, alive with frozen frames of Marcus Vale's Joker, the color bleeding out of his image and pooling in odd, dirty shapes on the faces of the students below.

Professor Harlow stood at the podium, remote in one hand, the other cupped loosely at his throat as if to steady his own voice. He was a legacy hire—old Hollywood, former enfant terrible turned institutional prophet—and he wore his authority like an expensive suit: black, understated, impossible to ignore.

On the screen, the infamous ballroom scene flickered to life. A thousand heads in formalwear, the hush of moneyed menace, and at the epicenter, the Joker—still as a photograph, eyes downcast, one corner of his mouth notched up as if he alone knew the script. It was Vale's signature scene, the moment he didn't so much take the air out of the room as swallow it whole.

"Now." Harlow's voice was a whisper, and yet it silenced the last rustle of notebooks.

"Watch what he does here. Wait for it."

He thumbed the remote. The Joker looked up. The room, on screen and in the lecture hall, flinched. The man didn't even move—didn't blink, didn't flex a muscle—but the violence in his gaze was so complete that it seemed to rupture the fabric of the film itself.

A minor character—the mayor, or maybe the mobster—shifted his glass and the Joker smiled. A whole life lived in that smile.

A student in the third row began to tap her pen, realized it, and stopped.

"You see that?" said Harlow.

"He lets the moment rot. He gives the audience nothing, and they give him everything. Stillness before the violence. That's how you own a scene."

He paused the film.

Marcus's face, mid-smile, filled the screen.

There was something sexual in it.

Something fatal.

The professor turned to the class.

"Vale has redefined performance itself. We're not looking at the old method here—not DeNiro, not Daniel Day. This is something else. The post-identity actor. The Role that Eats the Man."

A boy near the back raised a tentative hand.

"Is it true he never broke character? Even off set?"

The professor smiled, but there was nothing gentle in it.

"He didn't have to. The story is, he spent the whole shoot convincing the rest of the cast that the Joker was the real one—that Marcus was just a rumor. Even the director bought in by week three. Complete surrender."

A murmur rippled through the rows. The students were all here for the same thing: to witness the miracle and maybe, if they took enough notes, to replicate it. But the closer you looked, the more obvious it became that replication was impossible.

Vale was a virus.

You caught him or you didn't.

On the screen, the moment advanced: the Joker, now standing, floating almost, glass of champagne balanced perfectly in his left hand. He crossed the floor, every movement a chemical reaction. The mayor tried to speak—failed.

Joker offered him a toast, then smashed the glass in his palm, never breaking eye contact. The room watched, held hostage by the anticipation of what he'd do next.

Harlow let the scene play out for a minute, then killed the projector. The silence in the hall was thick enough to chew.

He waited, as if expecting applause.

A girl up front, curly hair and anxiety, raised her hand.

"How do you teach this? How do you even start?"

Before the professor could answer, another student—older, voice gone to gravel from too many open mics—spoke over her.

"You can't. You can't teach this. It's not method. It's... I dunno, like quantum. He's both alive and dead, both himself and not, at the same time."

Harlow didn't correct him.

"Maybe not. Maybe we're just lucky to witness it."

He cued up the next clip: a close shot, no music, just the Joker holding a knife to Selina Kyle's throat, the blade catching her pulse in the harsh moonlight.

Anne Hathaway's Catwoman looked less like an actor than a woman caught in a moment she didn't script. The terror was real. Or, at least, no one wanted to believe otherwise.

Harlow froze the frame, the edge of the blade bright as a lie.

"This," he said, "will be studied for generations. And not just by us. The neuroscientists, the psychologists, the AI programmers. I guarantee you there's a team at MIT right now trying to decode the synaptic pattern of that smile."

The students leaned forward, as if getting closer might reveal the secret. Some scrawled frantic notes. Most just stared, transfixed, at the frozen image: Marcus's Joker, beautiful and monstrous, holding the world together with nothing but a pair of eyes and a hunger you could feel in your bones.

"Remember this," said Harlow, voice suddenly soft.

"When you're chasing your own ghosts on stage, or in the audition room, or alone in your car at night, remember this moment. Because this is what it looks like when art stops pretending and just... becomes."

He let the silence stretch, then clicked off the projection, plunging the room into afterglow. The students didn't move.

Above them, the HVAC kicked in, a low mechanical laugh that echoed in the ducts.

Class dismissed.

.....

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