The winter breeze ruffled the leaf-bare trees, creating a sound much different, much sharper than the gentle hush of leaves in the springtime. An incessant banging noise filled the air inside the toastily warm house; a young toddler wanting to be let outside, making a wide range of odd sounds as it gazed at it's mother, eyes imploring. Whether it was merely unaware of the bitterly cold temperatures outside or it simply did not care was unknown, but the mother's answer was the same none the less. She shook her head, dark locks swaying with the movement, answering with a tired "No" that gave the impression that the pair had had this quarrel many times before. The baby glared at his mother, and merely banged on the sliding door harder. She let out a small sigh, gesturing to the blocks he had left scattered over the ground.

"Why don't you go play with them for a little while?"

This didn't please the child. He banged on the door again, slurring something angrily at her in his babyspeak.-

"How was the flight?"

The girl blinked in response to being disrupted from her train of thought, turning her gaze away from the passenger window to look at the person sitting next to her in the driver's seat. Her uncle Bryce was a beyond middle-aged man with light hair and pale blue eyes, wrinkles lining his forehead and smile lines marking his jaw. She remembered him faintly from her childhood: a man who stopped by once or twice for Christmas, but not much else. A man she would always only barely remember, but who somehow managed to slot right in to the family regardless. The last she'd seen of him had been when she was seven- about 18 years ago. He seemed to have aged a lot since then- going from a bright, energetic young man to someone who looked like they'd seen far too much for one life.

It was completely understandable. Her mum, Bryce's sister, had said that he hadn't been the same since his wife Maria had been shot while carrying their child. All for the pathetic ten bucks in her purse. Her mother had also warned her of Gotham City, the place she had fled from when she was 18. Looking out the windscreen, the young girl couldn't exactly blame her mother for her actions. The city looked dark and sinister. A startling contrast from the New Zealand countryside she had been raised in.

"It was alright," she responded, mentally scorning herself at how short her reply sounded, how it reflected her lack of social skills and ability to elaborate on answers.

She appreciated his attempt to break the silence, but on many levels she was much more content just to gaze out the window and become lost in her own imagination. The closer they got to Gotham, the further away she wished she was, and she felt the desperate need to tune out such thoughts now instead of dwelling on them for the rest of her stay there. A length of time that was, for now, undecided... she had come only to be with the grandmother she had never met before in her last moments, and then some time after for the funeral. She felt the need to keep an optimistic view if she wanted to survive in the infamous city for however long all of that would take, lest she be swallowed in the morbid cloud that seemed to hang over it.

It couldn't have been easy for Bryce, she began to realise. Having his wife and child so violently and swiftly taken from him, and then his own mother fading away to dust as well. Add that on to the fact that he had been stuck in this hellhole for all the years of his life... the girl could only imagine what he might have been forced to endure. His sister had been the favoured child, apparently. Their father had left for the army, and their mother had taken an unexplainable liking to her youngest child. That couldn't have been fair to Bryce, but in some ways their mother must've had her reasons. The girl simply could not fathom what those reasons were, much like she could not fathom any reasons as to why anyone would live in a place such as Gotham City by choice.

People were just a mystery, it seemed.

Bryce must have recognised the uncomfortable expression on his face- heck he had probably recognised it before on the poor souls that had likewise been forced to enter the place- because he kept his voice gentle and comforting when he said,

"It's really not so bad."

She merely nodded in response, not sure what better answer she could give.

Much to her relief, her grandmother did not live in the Narrows, as she had at one point feared. The most wondorous news the girl had received all day. Not to say the neighbourhood she did live in wasn't pretty rundown, though. As they were driving down the torn street, she began to take note of the amount of houses that looked as if they hadn't been lived in for years; many displaying broken windows, cracked bricks and shattered letterboxes. In fact, she actually wondered how many people lived in the neighbourhood at all. Surely they would have moved out by now? The conditions of the majority of the houses on the street were not befitting of any human life, no matter how poor.

She wouldn't be all that surprised if secret drug dealings and other illegal exchanges went on in them during the late hours of the night, either. It seemed like such an inappropriate place for an old lady to live. Especially an old, sick and dying one. Was this really the kind of place someone would want to pass away in? The last memories a person would have of a rotting neighbourhood no doubt filled with gangbangers and criminals?

"The depression hit a lot of us hard," Bryce said to her, his voice owning an edge of pain to it as he watched her in the mirror. "You'll have to be careful around these parts, Lorielle."

Again, all she could do was nod. A sharp pang of sadness hit her at the sound in his voice, making her conclude that it had probably been during the depression that his wife had been murdered. Even years afterwards, the memory still seemed to torment him. Lorielle didn't even want to consider the trauma he must've gone through for it to leave such a permanent scar. Something told her, however, that Maria had meant a lot to him, and that baby even more so.

I wouldn't want kids if it meant my husband would love something more than me, some nasty voice snarled in her head, deciding to rear it's ugly head as it often did from time to time.

Bryce pulled up outside one of the better-looking houses, though in a place like this that wasn't saying much. Lorielle made note of the overgrown garden, the broken, rotting picket fence, the mouldy looking porch and the weeds that twisted themselves into the smallest most inconvenient places. She could only imagine what it would be like on the inside. Hopefully, it would be a lot better than this, or she would have serious concerns about her grandmother's wellbeing... and her own. Though on the plus side, Gotham did get points for being warmer than New Zealand... something possibly attributed to the fact that it was the middle of winter over there, and summer here.

Lorielle stepped out of the car (a faded blue stationwagon that had apparently served that family for some time) after Bryce, plucking her simple messenger bag from where she had left it on the floor and casually swinging it over one shoulder, letting it hang down her opposite side. She carefully closed the door after her, as if fearful slamming it to hard (as was her custom) would cause the entire door to fall off, and made her way over to the trunk where her uncle was fetching her other, heavier bags- only to be waved away.

"Don't worry, I've got it."

"Are you sure?" she asked him with a concerned frown, "I can take one of them if you like."

It was probably the most she'd said to him since she'd stepped off the plane. Still, he merely gave her what she supposed was meant to be a warm smile, and gestured towards the house.

"Go on and make yourself at home."

She didn't really think that was possible in such a busted up place, but she wasn't one to so rudely speak her honest opinion. Rather, she took a somewhat hesitant step away, turning around to awkwardly walk up the unfamiliar path to the front door. She did her best to ignore the grunts of her uncle pulling her luggage out of the back of the car, quietly assuring herself she would just get shooed away again, yet at the same time feeling somewhat embarrassed as she pondered the weight of the bags. Mustn't he wonder what kind of atrocities she had packed inside there? She didn't want to be pinned as a "typical girl" on the first day, when she was honestly anything but.

Typical girls didn't settle for a simple T-shirt and skinny jeans when going out with their boyfriend's, did they? She wasn't a TOTAL tomboy, but that didn't mean she'd really possessed the fashion sense to accesorise too much. It had always made her feel maddeninglyy self-concious. There almost certainly would've been times when girls looked at her and wondered how the hell she had a guy at all. Many judgements had probably been passed on her, actually. It was simply a matter of her teaching herself not to care, and coming to the inevitable conclusion that society was fucked up anyway.

Call her a misanthropist (even mildly so), but when all your old best friends turned into sluts and you realised your type of personality didn't fit people's expectations, it tended to turn people bitter. People seemed to think that, as you got older, you were meant to become more extraverted and put your silly, childish shyness away. That wasn't how it worked. She remembered her mother telling her when she was 16, "You're older now, you need to grow up!" just because she acted shy around a group of family friends, who then seemed to think of her as "rude." The memory was a despised one. It wasn't her fault. Society needed to grow up and realise that everyone thinks in different ways, and that this variation should be taken advantage of, not shunned and moulded together to create an "ideal" group of people.

It was almost ironic that they spent their entire childhood being told that they were each special, unique, individualistic people, yet when you hit the outside world, you found that there was only one "right" way, and that way ignored the introverts of the world, disregarded the feelers. It was a way almost solely paved for those of extroversion, who thought with logic, who were on-time and organised. The complete opposite of Lorielle herself.

There was a time when one grew older, and had to put away childish toys and childish things. It seemed that individuality was one of them. Almost like some overly-friendly guy in a suit walking up to say, "Oh, hello! Time to bring an end to that silly nonsense, that's not how things work around here!" Conformity. What a joke.

"Go on in."

Lorielle jumped at the sound of her uncle's voice, so wrapped up in her thoughts she had failed to notice his presence behind her, or that she was standing outside the front door looking rather stupid. She nodded and quickly turned away so that he couldn't see her blushing, carefully opening up the door and taking a step onto the threshold.

Not my best work. Didn't flow as much as I would have wanted but... oh well.