What: Reveal When: Sins Plot Warnings/Rating: None
He didn’t necessarily remember the moment when he’d decided to get up off the bar and leave the flapper girl behind with the bottle of pink champagne. Some invisible force had lifted him, something hooked in his guts that pulled him out of the diner and down the staircase. He had trailed gold glitter in his wake as he tripped out of the hotel, and along the way his rubber apron and lab coat were replaced with a soft flannel button-down and black jeans. He glanced down at his chest, half expecting to find a gaping hole in his shirt where the masked man’s knife had cut him open - and breathing out a soft whoosh of air when he found nothing out of the ordinary. No blood. No white shawl generously gifted to him by the flapper girl. No sticky pink-red fingers, reeking of sugar and bubbly booze and old blood. His mechanical creatures were gone, and with them his delusions. He was no genius, only a madman. He could tinker all he liked, but he would never amount to greatness or the purity of creation. He was little more than a mechanical brain and bits of frayed wire.
He looked up, and found that he was standing in the middle of the casino floor at the Bellagio – exactly where he’d been when the compulsion had first started to draw him towards the hotel. And there was an open blackjack table.
He reached one hand up to his chest and placed his hand flat over the place where he had been cut only minutes before. It ached, dull and distant like a healing scab, and a small voice in the back of his mind wondered if he would have a scar there when he undressed.
That voice. It was surprisingly subdued, and he spared a moment to wonder what the man in his head had gotten up to at the party. He received no images, and he didn’t even hear a snarl or a vicious joke uttered his way. That was… unexpected, certainly, and unusual on top of that. He would have thought the other man would be quick to spill all the gory details of his own adventures. The fact that he was quiet made Jonah all the more worried.
He would deal with the clown later. Right now, it was time to play.