Flat Character
Summary: When I'd imagined falling into a fictional world, I'd imagined that I'd appear with some sort of edge. I'd never imagined I'd end up with nothing. A fiction written in short snippets.
Disclaimer: I own nothing of The Batman franchise.
One:
To be a part of something greater, if only in your own mind.
(because everyone has entertained this thought, no matter how fleetingly.)
-Anonymous
Gotham was a city. Like New York, London, Sydney. But it was also more. It was a place of extreme opposites; of bedtime heroes and waking nightmares. Its crimes were more violent, its fear: an actuality. Insanity cultivated by hopelessness. Like a mother who didn't care for its offspring, it left its residents destitute.
And then there was me. Child of white tipped mountains and thin, crisp air, I was cast into her filthy, unfeeling arms without warning; without cause.
I had nothing. Not even clothes on my back. The policeman had bluntly informed me that streaking was a punishable offence, neglecting to mention how dangerous it was to be naked in negative three degree weather. That I had been found buried in a snow drift, built up by days of snowplows, was left unsaid.
Unquestioned.
After a haggard on-call medic outfitted me with a shock blanket and assured the bored-looking police officer that his charge was free of the effects of hyperthermia and would not, in fact, need hospital assistance, I was then unceremoniously shoved into the back of a patrol car.
The station had been warm, the threadbare clothes ill-fitting and the paperwork unsympathetic. No one came for me. No one talked to me. After my fingerprints and photograph were taken (an unflattering mug-shot I would later discover), I was given a pen and a standard identification form. I filled it out to the best of my ability and handed it in to the officer at the front desk, struggling to get by the sudden rush of uniformed bodies that streamed though the front entrance. The secretary distractedly mentioned that the department would do a follow-up sometime in the next week, gesturing hurriedly at a bulletin board on the far wall. It was littered with cheep apartment listings, potential job opportunities and the addresses of a few homeless shelters who might take me in until I got my feet. Then I was shown the door.
The empty, ice encased steps looked treacherous, the freezing streets: bleak. Even the buildings overhead seemed to loom, dark with something I could not bear to name.
And though I could wax infinite poetic descriptions of the place I now found myself in, reality pushed aside shock long enough for me to feel the cold wetness of the snow enveloping my ragged, miss-sized sneakers, taste the sharp bite of the cold winter air and hear what had caused the commotion in the GCPD.
They'd caught Him.
They'd caught The Batman.