It's a Friday and 4:54 am, the first light of dawn is hitting Gotham city's shore. The air stinks.
Batman stands before a bend on the shore. Looking towards the seaweed on the salty lawn. Some girl tangled up in the thick green stuff. Blood drained from her perfect face. Frowning. Her auburn hair a dull shade of brown.
The scene and her body was clean. No marks on her skin, no blood under the fingernails, and certainly no calling card. Aluminum beer can squashed a few feet away. Sand fleas swarmed and ate her. All bending to simple animal instinct.
Batman looks at the fresh horizon for the thousandth time. Dawn after dawn. Skies hang along with grey clouds. The whitecaps up as early as him. He removes the tattered cowl from his head and lets it fall into the pulsing tide. Then walks across the sand past the bend.
It's Friday and 7:55 pm, Bruce Wayne hasn't slept for 45 hours. He holds his brow and looks over his mementos. A playing card with a tally of blood across it, Alfred's urn, and a picture of him and the women smiling in front of the carousel.
Bruce nearly cries at the sight of happiness. But he turns around instead, looking in the direction of the cave's elevator. Resisting, he sits down and uses the T.V remote controller, and as soon as the thing flicks on he is reminded why he never watches it. He presses the red button.
A call is made to his line. He picks the phone up on the coffee table "Yeah?" He covers his eyes with his palm.
"Bruce?" A familiar, firm and elderly voice sounds off.
"..."
"Did you hear about her?" Gordon leaned to the side of his office chair.
"Yeah," He sullenly said.
"She didn't drown," Gordon looked over the coronary paper. "Lungs were clear."
"Then what happened, Gordon?"
Gordon said mechanically "She must have entered the water after she had expired."
"I don't know what I can do." Bruce's hand clenched his sofa and his voice neared a tremble.
"Get some rest, Mr. Wayne." Gordon begins to take notes.
The phone cut.
Sometime earlier, Bruce Wayne enters a diner to meet somebody with money, but as things go, he is dragged off to some corner by a woman.
Her smell is sweet in this cramped, greasy place. She smiles quite a bit, and laughs. Bruce is taken aback at the amount of feelings he's actually feeling.
"So, who is this mystery woman?" His voice is flat.
"That's something my family swears on,"
"Swears on what?"
"Who we are, our name and our memories, we keep that close."
"Smart."
"Very," She chuckled.
There was a moment where Bruce had thought she'd cut the joke and tell him who she was, but that never happened. They simply charmed their way around each other till there was nothing left to speak about.
But Bruce searched for a key in this conversation. "Do you know who I am?"
"No clue."
"Bruce Wayne?"
"Never heard of the dude, is he cool?"
Bruce actually laughed, but coughed to interrupt it "Sorry."
"Did you just apologize for enjoyment?"
"Suppose I did."
"Who is Bruce Wayne?"
"A man with lavish tastes and an eye for women." Bruce attempted his rehearsed 'suave voice'.
"Sorry, still never heard of anybody like him, maybe you could introduce me?" Her eyes could glow in the right light. Those things were a beautiful grey that raced from thing to thing.
Bruce was given an address to meet her the following nights. So they met. Just talking at first about each other, then about the people around the Irish bar they met in. Funny little details. The little shows of kindness or disheartening cruelty
Then Bruce told her about his parents.
That was all he gave her.
She in return told him this
"There was a girl in my middle school, also a neighbor, anyway, she always wore bows in her hair, every day, she was nice and always stood up for me when I needed someone to, she never had any gain in helping me away from the little bully 'Tyler Buttface', but she did.
"One day she didn't show up to school," she gulped but continued "I thought it was weird, so I swung by her home and along the way I snooped into her house's barrels, smelled funny. Inside this garbage bin was the little neighbor girl that did nothing but her best, in little chunks.
"I screamed and ran home to mommy, and told her."
She cast her eyes down "It was a single father who could no longer deal, so he planned to kill his girl and then himself, but the fucking coward never was able to do the latter part. Idiot, had no other place to dump his own little girl's body, s-so she went in plastic grocery bags! Things a-are not fair." She practically hysterical as she finished the last sentence.
Bruce held her in that boothe. He almost apologized for doing that too. A few people stared, but that's how it is.
Then Bruce Wayne couldn't show up as often. Batman had to go patrol the rooftops and beat criminals half to death.
The playing card.
The twisted grin and the wrinkled milky white face. The Joker's black and grey eyeballs staring daggers. Fist bash his jaw, the bone snapping and crooking off tilt. The gun in his hands falling to the damp soil of the island. Another round of knuckles, this time cracking him across the temple. Skin broke and blood bled.
Batman kills the Joker and takes the card he had on him. Gotham PD never discovers the corpse left on that island or chooses to wipe the memory. All thanks must be given to Commissioner James Gordon.
One night Bruce Wayne enters the bar to find his companion is a no-show. He tries to tell himself that it was just because of his increasingly infrequent meets, but last time he had shown up, she was just as receptive as the first day they had met.
So then two days later, he searches a whole night for her, looking down alleys, old roads. Till he gave up and at his most weary moment, took a walk down the Gotham shore. Dawn's first rays raining in. And there she was, caught in a tangle of weeds before the bend. Near that carousel.
That was a good night. There at the carousel. They both tried to ride a single plastic horse. Bruce was weird about it at first, but she was crafty. So he boarded their shared steed. Lights were all around, twinkling. Kids were also riding. Laughing or nervous.