Strange Dark Things
Disclaimer: Anything recognisable is not mine
If anyone ever asks her she'll tell them she died that night.
Gotham city is cold. Not so much in temperature, but in soul. Nobody cares for you in Gotham, just one more lonely soul drifting lost through the dark under-streets; another insignificant thread in the mindless pattern of the city.
Klava has lived here all her life. Grown up amongst the filth and the stench and the rot of human flesh; the slow drip drip of dying dreams that fall in putrid gutter waters. The city has sheltered her, taught her, been her guide and her friend as she'd listened to the man next door beat his whimpering wife for the fourth time that week.
It seems fitting that it should be her grave too.
Klava's mother had been a whore. Not an actual one, but sometimes she thinks it might have been better if she had been. A washed-up addict with stringy, bottle-blonde hair, chipped yellow teeth and a smile that could cut like a knife. A tall woman, proud of her Slavic heritage, with sagging breasts, paper-thin skin and eyes that might once have been beautiful.
She had fallen pregnant one day, by a man she couldn't remember and never cared enough about to try, and bore her baby to term in a haze of narcotic daydreams. A sickly, pale thing, with watery-blue new-born eyes and silent rasping breaths. A tiny, undernourished doll that an empty woman with once-beautiful eyes had looked down at and named Klava.
It was an odd name, harsh sounding on the tongue and damningly foreign in a place where shared suffering was the only universal language. It was a tribute to her ancestors who had farmed the Siberian wildlands; starved and died for their lords.
It hadn't been until Klava was eight though and she'd looked up her name in the library and learnt it meant feeble woman that she'd realised that her mother hated her.
Who names a child born into poverty and pain feeble? Who wishes upon it a lifetime of submission and weakness where only by being strong can you succeed?
She had grown up quickly in the Narrows, her mother often drunk in a world of her own creation and apathetic when not. A visual representation of neglect with spindly bird-bone limbs poking out of dirty too-big shirts and pale, transparent skin.
She'd raised herself when her mother was off fucking the flavour of the day for the next hit, or nursing the bruises and burns caused by fickle lovers. She'd cooked her own meals from the meagre rations her mother had managed to pick up and washed her own clothes, threadbare and worn as they were.
She'd learnt through the truest education a girl born into destitution can get to keep her head down and stay silent: to be no-one and want nothing.
She'd been a strange child: silent and wary with big eyes, a rounded face and sharp, pointed Slavic features. Delicate and small with years of underfeeding and perpetually hollow cheeks. She'd gone to school with all the poorest kids of the Narrows; sat in classes full of what would one day be the next generation of criminal filth and dead-eyed druggies. She'd kept her head down, been curious but afraid: studied, but not too hard, worked, but not for too long and hidden her eyes behind a curtain of greasy blonde hair.
She'd gone home every night to a filthy, cluttered apartment with needles scattered around the floor and learnt not to dream big.
No-one dreamt big in the Narrows. The biggest dreamers were those who aimed for the higher echelons of Falcone's mob or the high security wing at Arkham. Everyone here knew that the most they'd ever achieve was a shitty apartment and a shitty job and kids they couldn't afford.
When she'd been young, Klava had sometimes snuck onto the city trams and stayed on them all day, fascinated by the gleaming skyscrapers of another world and how normal people spoke to each other. Her favourites had always been the families: mothers with kind eyes and fathers with warm smiles, rambunctious siblings and doting grandparents. Things she'd never seen.
She'd loved how busy the city was, how purposeful the men and women were the closer you got to the centre, how invisible she became in amongst the sparkling towers and bright lights. But she was forever aware that this wasn't her world and never would be, was always aware of how much of a tourist she was in this strange, bright land.
And so Klava grew up a nothing and a nobody, a feeble woman with no ambition besides feeding herself that evening and no future besides a shallow grave buried underneath the trash.
Maybe that's why she was so interesting
~~~*8*~~~
It was a night like any other, dark and gloomy. The streets were lit by the orange witch-light of broken streetlamps and the puddles on the ground mirrored the smoggy sky. The air was chilled, an autumnal-almost-winter cold that might have been pleasantly crisp elsewhere but was darkly icy here.
Klava was returning home from work. Navigating through the empty, dank alleys with the kind of apathetic carelessness that comes from having no expectations for the future. She avoided the puddles, and the stains that smelt like piss and blood; turned a practiced blind eye to the woman moaning in pain and ignored the raucous laughter of gangsters down the streets.
All the locals knew that in the Narrows it was best to just pretend that things weren't what they were: heroes died tragic deaths here and were only remembered as fools. Everyone knew the best paths to take at night were the hidden, black ones: no-one out at night in the Narrows meant anything good and silence was golden.
Klava worked at a cheap mob-owned hotel on the way out of the Narrows, near the bridge that led to the old part of the city. She was paid not to be too curious and to ask no questions, something that by now she excelled at. She cleaned the rooms, along with two other girls with haunted eyes and broken smiles: skinny waifs with bruises and worn hands. She had no friends -no point making them when they could be dead next week- and made enough to get by. The manager was a sleaze, they all were, but Klava was too skinny and empty for his attentions. A hollow husk of a woman with unnerving blank eyes and an eerie pale face.
Few people bothered to talk to her, and she liked it that way. Her loneliness was her private space, her solitude her home, and she kept her thoughts and non-existent dreams locked up firm behind the doors of her pale, chapped lips. She drifted; approached each day with no expectation of a tomorrow and no hope for anything else.
Wandered back at night to her apartment, empty since her mother died, and fell into dreamless sleeps.
Tonight was no different, and she walked through the alleys with whimsical ease; idled herself by counting the broken balconies above her head. The world was dull and echoing, ghostly shadows and rotting smells, hidden corners and air that tasted of damp dirt.
Klava pulled her thin coat closer to her skin as she walked, meagre protection against the cold and puffed out breaths of misty air onto her chilled fingers. Her hollow cheeks were milky pink in the bitter air and her eyes bright and watery.
She picked her way past the trash and the wet dust, kept her head down past the ragged homeless in dark doorways and followed her route home.
Her path took her past Arkham Asylum. A large, Victorian building with a hundred thin windows that hid a thousand dead minds. It had been built almost a century-and-a-half earlier in the centre of the industrial slums as a hospital and home for the poor. As time passed however, the building had gradually been repurposed to hold the city's worst criminals and most damaged minds.
Gotham being Gotham, it had more than most.
She had always had a rather disturbed fascination with it. A morbid curiosity for the people locked away inside, and a strange desire to reach out and touch the bricks, as if by touching them she could absorb the feeling of a hundred years of pain. It was a tortured building, the very air around it exuding a poisonous miasma, infecting the surrounding homes with a deep gloom.
It was alive tonight though, rows upon rows of cop cars with their violent flashing lights and whining sirens lit up the dark. Men in uniform and SWAT teams swarmed the building like flies to a corpse and the night was loud with shouting. The windows were lit up, rows of artificial incandescence across every floor and wing, the old brickwork bathed in the yellow glow.
Klava walked past, barely giving it a glance as she hugged the steel railing marking its borders. She'd learnt over the years that what she didn't know, couldn't hurt her and so studiously ignored the chaos at Arkham.
She did, absently, wonder what had happened, the city had been stirred up lately, the criminal gangs disquieted and wary in a way that shrouded the Narrows in anticipatory anxiety. She guessed that it might have something to do with the Batman: Gotham's newest crazy. An idealistic vigilante running around the city dressed as a bat. Klava had little do with it and didn't care, it didn't affect her and she only paused sometimes to wonder how long it would take this one to end up behind the walls of Arkham.
She dove back into the choked alleys of the Narrows and breathed a quiet sigh of relief as she left whatever was happening at the asylum behind. The streets grew tighter then as she approached her home, her apartment being in one of the oldest, most cramped of the dated tenement buildings.
Her night had been an average one, the rooms at the hotel were rank and disgusting, the smell of sour sex and defecation, the blood barely hidden on the walls. One of the customers had stared at her all night, following from room to room in a way that would have unnerved most other women. But Klava had taken one look at his shiny, unfocused eyes and odd lank limbs and known that he wouldn't touch her. He was the type to look and not touch, the type that somewhere, deep down, knew they were too mad to really know what they wanted with a woman.
She had cleaned the same way she usually did, quick and efficient, the bare minimum. Clients at the hotel weren't looking for five-star luxury, or really anywhere decent to sleep: just a bed to fuck on or table to do drugs, chairs to conduct business and a room in which to hide.
She had changed the sheets, vacuumed the floors and cleaned what she could of the bathrooms. And, satisfied that her job was done, clocked out and left.
She was just turning onto her street though when she heard it. A small, masculine moan, followed by quiet pained whimpers and rasping fast breaths. At first, she thought it was just another man and unlucky woman, another lonely tragedy on a dark night. But the sudden agonised shout of a deep voice gave her pause and she took a few cautious steps closer to the noise.
Years of prudence and careful living told her it was stupid to walk towards the sounds -it was the opposite of what her good sense was telling her- but something about her felt strangely curious.
The groaning seemed to be coming from a little further down the street, behind an ugly mould green dumpster and bags of overflowing trash. She crept toward it warily, not quite willing to abandon all her justified caution, and manoeuvred her feet around pools of fetid water and broken tarmac. As she grew closer, she reached into her pocket to wrap a cold hand around the handle of her switchblade, feeling slightly safer knowing that she could defend herself if she had to.
Rounding the dumpster, she managed to catch sight of the source of the noise.
It was a man, or at least it looked like one in the dark, lying there, resting against the black trash bags and week-old vomit. His head was tilted back, staring sightlessly at the blank city sky and rows of balconies with his arms and legs spread out like the Vitruvian man. He whimpered, little tormented cries of pain that were soft and desperate after the whirring sirens at Arkham, and flinched every few seconds, gasping, "No, no, stop!" as if he were being attacked.
Klava had seen enough bad trips to know what this was. This man was obviously drugged to high heaven if his twitching limbs and invisible enemies were anything to go by, and after her mother, Klava had very little sympathy for those who hid their fear behind chemicals. She was just about to leave him, just about to dismiss this incident as yet another desperate soul in the Narrows when something, she couldn't say what, stopped her.
She walked closer to him, like a puppet led by a higher power, towards his limp, collapsed form and peered down at him, loosening the grip on her blade. There was something about this one, he didn't look like the normal addicts she found on the streets. He was thin, but not skeletal; his arms and body lean rather than wasted from neglect. His clothes were probably better quality than any she had ever owned: a smart suit, shirt and tie, damp and stained from the muck in the streets but of noticeably good quality. Klava fancied he looked quite erudite, with his brownish suit and wavy dark locks; his face was nice too: high, sculpted cheekbones and a sharp jawline, a little feminine with his full lips, but not unattractive.
She knelt next to him, overcome with an uncharacteristic burst of courage and a jolt of the curiosity she'd thought long dead, and studied him more. He had a gash on his forehead, close to his hairline on the top right of his face. It steadily dripped blood down his skin in a trail of carmine, down past his ear and into his hair. His hair looked soft, Klava had a strange impulse to touch it, to run her fingers through the dark waves, but she wasn't that stupid. He kept flinching and shivering from whatever it was that he was seeing, and closer now, she could hear him murmuring under his breath, something about birds. She wondered how he had ended up here in this state, weak and helpless on the ground, and was strangely interested in him and his story.
The night was growing colder, and she suspected it must be close to midnight by this point; she needed to be going soon, lest she risk her own safety. But before she left the man to his fate, she wanted to touch him -a strange tactile impulse towards this odd stranger-, wanted to feel the smooth looking skin of his pale hand, odd as that may be.
She reached out slowly, cautious although it was probably too late now for that, and extended her cold white fingers towards his. But the moment her skin brushed his, his eyes snapped to hers
And
Oh.
She breathed in a gasp of shock and her eyes went wide. He had the most beautiful eyes she'd ever seen, a chilled glacial blue, clear and piercing and sharp. They looked straight at her, unseeing in their drugged daze yet paralysing in their intensity. She was spellbound for a second, gripping this strangers hand in a dark alley, staring into his eyes and she felt a blush bloom across her chilled cheeks. They really were beautiful, bright and intelligent, so many thoughts behind them, a compelling mystery for her to solve.
She would suppose later that it had been the sheer beauty of that blue that had prompted her to do what she did next, but maybe she was just being exceptionally foolish that night.
Klava took one last look at the man and decided he couldn't stay here in the gloomy night, defenceless and alone. His features were too feminine, his bones to delicate, his state too helpless for anything good to come out of it.
And, well, she'd been impulsive enough tonight already, what was one more thing?
She let go of his hand and leant down next to him, disgusted by the smell and the feel of the trash surrounding him, the rotting refuse layered on the ground and the still, sodden rainwater. She wrapped her arms under his shoulders, her face close to his and counted to three in her head before hauling him upright. She stumbled back, tripping over her feet and his weight -he wasn't a large man but he was certainly larger than her- and almost fell backwards onto the wet, cracked tarmac. He staggered, his limbs ungainly under the influence of whatever drug, and struggled to find his footing as he twitched and gasped close to her ear.
Once they were steady, she led the two of them off down the alley toward her home. She could feel his wet breath on her neck, the warmth of his body close to hers and she shivered slightly at the sensation. Klava felt oddly giddy at the feeling of a man so close to her, she had never experienced anything like it before, and was slightly embarrassed at how off-kilter it made her feel: her cantering heart beat and sweating palms. She also briefly considered how stupid she was being, letting an unknown man so close her and leading him back to her home.
But, somehow, Klava was strangely okay with it. She had no idea who this man was: he could be a murderer, a rapist, a serial killer: anyone, but oddly Klava didn't care. She had long ago made peace with the fact that she would probably die young, having achieved little and affected nothing; accepted that she would most likely end up murdered, her body tossed into the bay. But Klava had had a long time to think those thoughts and they no longer had the power to scare her, if they ever had to begin with.
Klava was strange and she knew it, and thought, perhaps, maybe there was something morbidly romantic about being murdered by this stranger with the beautiful eyes.
It didn't take long for the two of them to reach her building, and she struggled to haul him all the way. But for a man, he wasn't too heavy. If it hadn't been for his nice clothes and the firm leanness of his torso, she'd think that he hadn't enough to buy food.
Her building was an old one, tall and thin and looming with dirty soot-stained red brick and narrow staircases. It had been built for the dock workers of the late 1800s and still today reflected the poverty and neglect of those early years.
Her apartment was on the third floor, a tiny closeted thing with two rooms and a bathroom. It was a lot cleaner than it had been when her mother had lived there and the rooms were neat and orderly. Her furniture was chipped and ancient: mismatched pieces that she had salvaged from others as they threw them out and odds and ends from the goodwill stores that lined the entrance to the Narrows. It was always dark inside, her windows tiny and thin, but the loss wasn't too great; other than the street, there wasn't much to look out at anyway.
She pulled the man up the stairs, one step at a time, straining her weak muscles and panting loudly with the effort. She didn't eat enough to do this much exercise and her body was making its complaints known. She tried hard to make as little noise as possible, struggling not to knock against the walls or doors, shushing the man under her breath when his moans became too loud and silently praying that they didn't fall back down the stairs. Eventually though they made it to the tired wooden door of her apartment, tucked up in a corner off the stairs.
She fished around one handed for her keys and, once finding them, unlocked the door and lead them inside.
The first thing she did was switch on the light
Her apartment looked the same as it had when she'd left hours before, but she did a quick, cursory scan over the room to make sure that it hadn't been broken in to -you never knew in the Narrows after all. The dirty bowl she'd had thin soup in earlier was still sat out on her tiny rickety table and the ancient porcelain sink still dripped irregularly in the corner. The opened letters containing her bills were still scattered haphazardly across the small surface she used to prepare food and her random clutter still piled high against the wall.
Klava breathed a small sigh of relief and nodded to herself, satisfied, before stumbling with the stranger across the room and into her bedroom, laying him carefully on her bed.
She took a step back to watch him and analyse the situation. He twitched and cringed, eyes staring blankly, wide with fear at the flaking plasterwork of her ceiling and his skin was wet and clammy with cold sweat. His clothes were filthy, saturated from the rainwater he'd been lying in on the street and flecked in places with blood while he murmured, incomprehensibly, at some unseen monster.
She'd had enough experience with her mother in this state to know there was nothing for it but to wait it out, to hope that the drug worked its way through his system rather than causing a full psychotic break.
But first she needed to get him comfortable.
Klava felt strangely blasé about the whole situation and she hummed to herself softly as she fetched an old knitted comforter from the top of her tiny wardrobe. Strange things happened all the time in Gotham and she lived by a sort of que será será attitude and so little perturbed her.
She placed the comforter on the bed and took a look at her guest, she'd have to get him out of his clothes, they were cold and wet and he'd catch a chill. She'd also need to clean up the wound on his head and make sure he stayed warm; human contact would do wonders too.
She reached over and pulled off his shoes, holding them up in the light to run impressed eyes over the expensive leather, they were nicer than any she'd ever dreamt of owning and sturdier too. She then removed his wet socks, exposing delicate, pale feet and then his tie and blazer, her eyes wandering over the fine bones of his clavicle. She paused for a moment then, wondering if it would be entirely appropriate to go any further, but shrugged the thought off as soon as it came. He was already in her home, would it really matter if he was undressed?
He was still shaking and flinching, his eyes wide and roving blindly up at the water stains on the ceiling. His breathy cries of fear and pain whispered their way to Klava's ears and made her heart lurch. They were so similar to her mother's, and the memories of her shuddering and whimpering on the same bed swam in front of her eyes.
She shook her head violently to rid herself of the visions and returned her focus to her guest.
Klava observed him silently, watching as his chest rose and fell. Luckily for her, whatever drug he was on seemed to render him almost catatonic, making it easy for her to lean over his trembling body to undo his shirt and pull off his trousers. It was a little harder to wrangle the shirt off his thin torso, his dead weight difficult to balance in her thin arms as she pulled the wet cotton from his skin, but she managed.
When she was done, he lay there, shivering, atop her old washed-out duvet, his milk-white skin pure and clean against the drab grey.
He had such pretty skin, she noticed, pale and lovely and unmarked by the grim track lines so many had in the Narrows. She tilted her head in a curiously birdlike gesture as she ran her eyes over the curvature of his arms and legs. There was a quiet strength to him, for all his thinness, and she knew that he'd easily be able to overpower her when he awoke. But Klava was long passed the point of caring.
Feeling curious, Klava absently ran her bony fingers along his arm: she had never touched a man before. His skin was warm, feverish, and clammy, but there was a firmness to him that she felt that she herself lacked. She had always felt so paper-thin in her skin, so insubstantial and transparent, as if a strong breeze would just blow her away.
Her guest though, he had muscles and veins and tendons that she traced with bitten nails, and curious faded scars that scratched a tapestry into his flesh. She smiled emptily to herself at the feel of them: even those with money wore their tragedy it seemed.
She pulled the duvet over the top of the man, threw the comforter on top of that and gathered up his sodden clothes into her arms. She tiptoed neatly over the creaky wooden floors and into the main room, dumping his clothes in the basket in the corner where all her own laundry sat waiting. She hadn't a washing machine of her own, so she couldn't do anything about them now, but come morning she'd take them to the communal laundrette in the basement to get them clean.
Through the thin walls she could hear the thumping beat of music, angry rapping railing against the injustices of the world, and from the window, distant shouts echoed down the alley. Klava had long ago learned to live with the sounds of a careless world, and it barely affected her now when she heard gunshots in the night.
Sighing to herself, she grabbed the old bowl she used for washing up and a ratty flannel from her pile of clean towels and headed to the broken sink. The thing squeaked as she turned on the cold tap, and she hissed in shock as she put her hand under the icy water. She filled the bowl, wetted the towel, and headed back into the bedroom, dragging her single dining chair with her.
Pulling the chair up to the bedside, she placed the bowel on the chipped bedside table and carefully mopped the sweat from her guest's brow with the flannel. She watched curiously as tears ran unchecked from those beautiful eyes and reached out to wipe them away with her thumb. He shook and flinched, breathing heavy and fast, the fear stark on his face. How alive, she thought, how real. She hadn't seen such clear emotion on her own face in years, nothing in the mirror but her pale, blank expression and big eyes.
She didn't care if this stranger killed her when he woke up -her life was worth little and meant less anyway. She had nothing and no one to live for, no one that would miss her and she felt pretty sure no one even knew her name. But she wondered, maybe, if through the act of dying, she would finally feel alive.
She laid the cool flannel across the stranger's forehead and settled back for a long night.