Title: Restless
Author: jordannamorgan
Fandom: Joker (2019)
Characters: Arthur Fleck.
Setting: Pre-canon
Rating: Mild PG.
Length: 200 words.
Summary: Many nights he didn’t sleep at all.
Notes: Also written for the prompt of “Insomnia” at genprompt_bingo.



For as long as he could remember, Arthur had never had a bed of his own.

The bedroom of the apartment was his mother’s domain. Its bed was hers: a frail woman’s sanctum against a harsh world. He could snuggle beside her to watch Murray Franklin, but he must never intrude on her sleep.

His place, then, was the living room couch, perpetually tangled with sheets. It was narrow, its cushions lumpy and hard beneath his bony back. Sometimes when he lay there, staring up at the ceiling, he thought it must have been what the inside of a coffin felt like.

He found no rest there, tossing and turning through the night, troubled by vague and menacing dreams.

So Arthur stayed awake. He watched old reruns on television, or sat scrawling new jokes and absent-minded thoughts in his journal. Many nights he didn’t sleep at all.

When he did sleep, he usually awakened to find himself slumped over his journal at the table. More often than not, he saw jokes there that he couldn’t remember having written. Even the thin, twisted handwriting was different.

Those jokes were always the darkest ones…

He thought they were the funniest ones, too.

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2022 Jordanna Morgan