The night air was thick with tension, the abandoned city cast in eerie silence, save for the distant crackle of flames and the occasional gust of wind that carried the stench of smoke. Aguni Morizono stood in the shadows of a crumbling building, his body rigid as stone, fists clenched so tightly at his sides that his knuckles whitened. He hadn't meant to overhear your conversation. He hadn't been following you—at least, that's what he told himself. But now, as he stood frozen just beyond the threshold of the ruined structure, the weight of your words crashed over him like a tidal wave.

"You don't understand," you whispered urgently to your brother, your voice barely audible over the wind that howled through broken windows. "I didn't plan for this. I never meant for it to happen."

"Then why are you still with him?" your brother's voice came, sharp and accusing. "You know what you are. You know what you represent. And yet, you let him love you, let him believe—"

"Because I love him!" you snapped, your voice cracking with raw emotion that cut through the night. "I love him, and I didn't want it to end like this!"

Aguni's breath hitched in his throat. His pulse thundered in his ears, drowning out the distant sounds of the city. Love? Was that supposed to mean something now? When every moment you'd spent together, every whispered promise in the darkness, every touch that had made him feel alive again—had been built on a lie?

The Joker. You were the Joker. The revelation sent a chill through his bones that had nothing to do with the night air. Suddenly, everything—the way you had always seemed so calm amid chaos, so unshaken by the horrors of the Borderlands, the way you had looked at him with something deeper than just desperation to survive—made a cruel kind of sense.

He had trusted you. He had let you in when he'd sworn he'd never let anyone close again, let himself believe that in this brutal world, he had found something—someone—worth holding onto. And now? Now he was staring at the truth, and it burned like acid in his veins.

Unable to listen anymore, he stepped forward, his combat boots crunching against the rubble beneath him. The sound was deafening in the silence that followed, and your head snapped around, eyes widening as you saw him standing there, his expression carved from stone.