Welcome to Gotham City, England, 1870.
Our story starts with a man by the name of Joseph. He came from a Coal mining family from Nottinghamshire, not well off but well enough for him to move to the city when his father eventually died in a cave in, his mother having died shortly after out of grief. Life in the big city had always attracted Joseph, he hated the smell, and the darkness, and the noise, but there was something about it all that made him feel like he was part of something bigger.
He started off in the city low, going door to door selling newspapers, though he loved the city its self he didn't exactly enjoy his life there. At mornings he would often find himself in some bar with no recollection of the previous night only knowing that he'd somehow managed to run up a debt he would never be able to pay off. It was during one such morning that he was approached by a man who introduced himself as Gus. This encounter completely changed the way he saw the city. Gus introduced him to the Gotham underworld.
Joseph still hated the smell, but he came to love the darkness and the noise. He learned the streets, learned the places, learned the learned the people. He came to pride himself on his knowledge of everything Gotham. He knew where to find the people with money, he knew how to follow them without being spotted, he knew where he could catch them off guard and how to, as he liked to put it, liberate their valuables.
This particular night was important, not that he knew it.
Joseph was trailing what looked to be an upper-class family of three. A moderately tall man looking to be in his 40's wearing a three-piece suit and a top hat covering his combed back black hair. Next to him was what appeared to be his wife, though knowing these upper-classmen it may be a mistress, she was wearing cheap pearls beneath her long flowing brown hair. Joseph knew he would have to be careful in his 'attack', if he were careless the pearls could spill out all over the street. Between them stood a boy, probably younger than ten. He wasn't a problem.
As the family turned down an alley Joseph made his move.
"Turn around slowly"
He said raising his most prized possessions, two Colier flintlock revolvers, imported all the way from the Americas. This was by far his favorite part.
"If you want to make it out of this alleyway alive, you'll do as I say. Take all your valuables, watches, rings, necklaces and put them on the ground"
The man kept his hands raised and took a step forward.
"Stop moving"
He took another step.
"Please, I can help"
Then another.
"You take another step and I shoot"
Then another.
Bang.
The man fell to the floor before the kid had even processed what was happening. The woman started to run but the boy was frozen to the spot. Another shot echoed through the street as the woman met the same fate as her partner. Pearls dropped and rolled towards the walls.
"Shit"
Joseph looked around the scene, nothing recoverable, a broken necklace and a shattered pocket watch. There was nothing else for him here. But the boy, he couldn't leave any witnesses. He walked slowly towards the kid and raised the pistol to his forehead. Yet when he looked down. He looked into the kid's eyes and there wasn't a hint of fear. There was simply pure, unadulterated rage the likes of which Joseph had never seen before and would never see again.
A sudden scream from the boy brought Joseph back to his senses. He leaped up and sprinted as fast as he could, he couldn't let anyone else see him after all. In his panic, he failed to notice his own pocket watch falling to the floor. Not that it mattered, he was never caught anyway.
It only took a few dozen minutes for police to arrive on the scene. The bodies were taken away as the boy sat curled up in the fetal position. The force inspected the alleyway every inch, but all they found was a watch with a name inscribed on it 'Joseph Chill'.
"I'm detective James Gordon, GCPD. I'm so sorry for your loss"
The boy looked up to see a twenty-something year old with messy brown hair and a mustache talking to him.
"It's Bruce, right? Your butlers on his way to pick you up"
Bruce nodded.
"Leave him alone Gordan, you won't get much out of him in this state"
Another detective spoke up, this one was clean shaven but, to put it nicely, horizontally larger.
"Regardless his carer's here to pick him up"
The first man guided Bruce to the car that had arrived to pick him up and watched it drive off into the distance.
"Hey, Gordan quit staring we've got a case to solve"
"Right, yeah, it's just, do you think that kid's going to be ok?"
"This is Gotham Gordan, course he won't"
Well this is my first journey into the world of fanfiction, I've had this nebulous idea floating around my head for a while of, to put it simply. What if Gotham by gaslight was the main batman continuity. This is hopefully going to be an ongoing series spanning years of the bat verse including many iconic events (e.g. knightfall, no man's land, etc) but changing up enough so that it feels fresh (I also want death to mean something so keep that in mind). I have way too much stuff on my plate, so this is kind of a side project for me, Sorry if I'm super inconsistent with updates. Think of this chapter as a taster for what's to come.
Next stop: Year one
Edit: thanks to Lord Grise (u/2207436) for pointing out the historical error of the pistol somehow being able to shoot twice without the necessary time to reload a flintlock pistol. I've now adjusted the story to state that Joseph had two pistols as then it would actually be possible for him to fire twice in the given time.