It's your first year living on your own, and you're in Gotham. You've been here for four months now, and terrible things have happened all over, but you're almost used to it. You just try to avoid the news in the morning, so that your day won't seem so dark.
You're at the mall. You skipped your biology lecture class today, but you doubt your professor will notice; there's nearly 200 other people in your course, and you don't think you've made much of an impression on her yet. You're looking for a gift for your mother. You're going to surprise her next week, because you haven't told her that you have a break that overlaps with her birthday.
Gotham may seem grungy sometimes, but when it looks to impress, it impresses. You stop in front of the large fountain in the center of the mall and check your cell phone. Your friend Monique hasn't texted you back yet, and for a second, you worry, because you know her apartment is in a sketchy neighborhood. She's told you stories about the heroes and villains you hear about on the news. The Joker and his sidekick who dresses like a sexed-up jester, the Penguin and his weird obsession with umbrellas, the Catwoman who runs around in stilettos stealing jewels… and the Batman, looming over the city like a shadow, beating the hell out of all of them.
If it wasn't for the pictures on the news, you wouldn't think they were real.
You're startled out of your reverie by the vibration of your phone. It's Monique, telling you about how rude the cashier at the grocery store was to her. You laugh and shake your head before texting her back. Why were you so worried? There must be a one in a million chance of getting caught up in those messes; otherwise, why would the reporters always be so excited? Nobody gets excited about cops making a normal arrest, but you throw in a lunatic in a suit, that's exciting. That's rare.
You put your phone in your pocket, turn away from the fountain, and your blood chills. You've seen that purple coat in high-definition. You know the way that face contorts even though you're thirty, maybe forty feet away. You hear his laugh before he opens his mouth and drowns out your frantic, whispered curses.
You turn to run while someone else screams, and on the other side of the fountain is his jester sidekick. All you can manage to think is that Monique was right, she does look ridiculously perky in that stupid suit. Are those implants?
She turns to look at you, and everything goes to hell. Explosions rock the mall, and you duck, covering your head to protect yourself from the glass raining down to the ground. The shards make little rainbows in the fountain. They make little cuts in your arms. You want to get up, to run away, to do something productive, but there's glass in your hair and on your arms and on the ground, and you're not wearing good running shoes, and the building is still shaking, and people are still screaming, and this woman in the jester suit is cartwheeling up to you like it's nothing, her hands protected by her little gloves.
She hops up right in front of you, and you stumble backward. Glass shakes out of your hair, digs into your palms. "It's rude to stare," she chastises you. She looks like a Playboy bunny, but she sounds like a cartoon one, like one of those after-school children's shows with the animals that taught you how to tie your shoes. You keep staring.
She pulls out a gun from somewhere, somehow, and you can't comprehend where she might have hidden it, and your phone vibrates with another text from Monique, and she levels the barrel of the gun with your forehead and you're pretty sure you're going to die. Your heart stops beating for a second and then comes back beating in triple time. You wish you had at least bought your mother a birthday present before you died. That would be a good story for her. 'My kid died, but at least I got a good gift out of it.'
Tears stream down your face, your own blood pools around your hands, and for the second time today glass rains down upon you. You shut your eyes against it, because you don't want to die shot and blind, but you hear a scream that can only be the jester's from the way it scratches through your ears. There's thumping, and the crunch of footsteps on glass, and God, more explosions, but they sound so small.
A hand touches your shoulder and you nearly have a heart attack, falling backward in surprise, cutting your arms and elbows too. "Calm down! You need to get out of here, you're bleeding. We'll take care of it." His voice sounds young. Like someone who could be in any of your classes.
You open your eyes, and his face is framed by the sunlight coming through the shattered skylight of the mall, like an angel, if angels were sweaty, wore black bands over their eyes, and had stitches where their lips got split. "Your hair's good, though," you say in a daze, and he snorts. He stands up straight, and you realize his outfit is as uncomfortably revealing as the jester woman's, that you're at crotch level, that he's running to the other end of the mall and his suit is disguising nothing and you didn't even learn his name and Jesus, you're bleeding, you're bleeding all over your sweater, there's glass in your wrists—
A woman runs past you, does a double take, and comes back to grab your shoulder. "Don't just stand there, run!"
"But—"
"Do you want to die, too?"
Your stomach drops and you rush to follow her, and the other stragglers, out of the mall. You look straight ahead, and not into the broken stores. You focus on the mall entrance and ignore the fluorescent lights falling from the ceiling, the rubble on the ground, the stinging in your arms.
You burst through the doors with everyone else. The sunlight makes your blood seem too red. Sirens wail and tires screech as the police, the paramedics, and the fire department all arrive at once, pouring out of their cars and trucks like they've done this thousands of times before. Guns look more fake in real life than they do in pictures.
You let yourself get pushed to an ambulance. The EMT puts himself directly in front of you, blocking the mall from your vision, asking you questions that just sound like the droning of bees to you.
The mall erupts with gunfire.
You look up at the EMT.
"I really hate Gotham."