I made a mad dash for train, which sat, idling and empty, at the platform. Even from here I could see the slowly closing doors, the shifting gears as it pulled forward…and away. "Stop!" I yelled desperately, praying futilely to whatever unseen god was nearby that the damn driver would wait for me. That's when I remembered that those things were automated. Stupid Wayne Industries and their lack of personal touch, not, I conceded, that a driver would have heard my desperate pleas anyway. "Goddammit!" I yelled to the empty platform, taking advantage of the opportunity to fully articulate my current emotional state by swearing loudly and kicking a metal support beam. There wouldn't be another train for at least thirty minutes, and that was barring one of those 'disturbances' that shut down the night trains with annoying regularity. I looked at my watch. 2:47 am. I grumbled more vulgarities under my breath then resigned myself to my fate. Here I was, a woman alone on a rusting train platform in one of Gotham's shadier areas with absolutely nowhere to go. All the shops were closed and securely barred this time of night and the hot spots near here that were open weren't exactly the sort of places that I wanted to enter.

My choices were limited. I cracked my knuckles and slowly sat down on a bench, checking first to make sure that the graffiti sprawled all over it wasn't fresh. I closed my eyes and leaned back, weighing my options. Fights were probably still going on back at the club, but I didn't really want to push my luck by returning. Win some, lose some, mix it up, then run away with cash in your pocket. Those were my rules. Being too good or too bad got you noticed, and the people that bet on fights didn't like to think that they were being ripped off. I tapped the crumpled wad of hundred dollar bills in my pocket with detached pleasure. Of course I always made sure to win just a bit more that I lost. The danger in that, of course, was that by now some steroid junkie that I'd beat the living crap out of was probably drunk off his ass, injured in both pride and body, and had gathered a large group of his similarly drunk friends so that they might hunt me down and 'teach me a lesson' about fighting dumb, drunk males with inferiority issues. Nope. It was probably safest to stay here, at least I would hear them coming and be able to make a good run for it. I yawned and pulled out my notebook and pencil, which lay next to my bloodstained fighting gloves at the bottom of the duffle bag.

I was drawing the Joker. Gotham's homicidal psychopathic terrorist clown wannabe was, in my humble opinion, interesting enough to be drawn. Even since he had shown up a year ago, making insane threats and then acting on them with disturbing success, the entire city had become an even bigger metal mound of human suffering and chaos. There was a great deal of speculation over who exactly was responsible for the many crimes attributed to him, since some of them had been committed while he was locked away, but overall I didn't doubt that he had a couple of fingerprints on all of those cases. The dude had spurned the mob, taken over most of Gotham's crime lord groups, blown up the police station, and nearly destroyed half the city all in a matter of months. I still wasn't sure if he hadn't destroyed the city, since now everyone lived in a state of abject terror and distrust, but the point was that he was insane, but he was smart too, and insane smart people freaked me out to no end. You never knew what they were going to do but you did know that, when they did it, they would probably do it very well.

The Joker also had the sort of manic determination for his cause that drew followers to him like moths to a raging bonfire. His crew consisted of a great deal of the crazies freed from Arkham Asylum, but nothing seemed to stop regular people from joining him as well. Young adults in general had a morbid fascination with his brand of chaos. They dressed up like him, they spray painted smiles and ha ha ha's all over Gotham, they talked about him in hushed whispers and discussed his inexplicable intentions over coffee at Starbucks. It was madness. They loved the idea of destruction for the sake of destruction; they liked seeing the fear in their parent's eyes, and, as long as the madness didn't directly affect them, they were all too happy to worship him from a distance like some war god.

There were those that did directly join the Joker. I knew a few of them. Lost kids with no purpose in their lives and the belief that this nut job could somehow fill the void. None of them ever seemed to understand that the Joker didn't really care about them, their sob stories, or their need for an outlet. They just wanted to be part of something greater than themselves, even if that something made no sense to any of them, and probably made no sense to the Joker either.

That was why I had to draw the Joker. Not out of some sort of angsty villain worship, not because I thought he was cool, but because he was something real that represented something that wasn't physically real. I closed my eyes and pictured the now famous face, plastered on every T.V. screen in Gotham. The horrible scars, the black eyes, and the crazed smile of utmost sadistic mirth were common fodder for the 6 o'clock now that Joker had escaped police custody again and was once more loose in the city. Everyone was on edge, waiting for him to resurface, waiting for something to blow… My pencil flew over the page, the drawing illuminated only by the hazy, florescent glow of the dying lights above me.

Then there was the Batman. Now there was someone with problems if I ever saw one. The guy was obviously trapped in some sort of childhood fantasy of being a superhero. He seemed to truly believe that in real life the good guys could always save the day and that, at the end of the show, he'd be able to ride off into the sunset. I had to admit that they guy had skills and class though. And money. Lots of money. Enough to buy all that fancy gear and enough to pay lip service to the police, which he surely had to be doing to keep up this charade.

I was a bit hesitant to believe the stories that he had killed off the dirty cops that aided the Joker in capturing the DA Harvey Dent and his little girlfriend. Batman just seemed to be too into his whole superhero fantasy to be able to actually kill someone in cold blood. It didn't fit with his usual pattern of just beating people to within an inch of their lives then hauling them in to be arrested. This seemed to be profound enough to strike terror into the heart of Gotham's underbelly, no killing necessary. I sighed. As a tiny part of Gotham's underbelly I was rather prone to think of the Batman as a nuisance who took care of the upper level criminals, the guys that paid me, but didn't bother with little lower level freaks like me.

I looked at my drawing. The Joker stood, arms crossed and grinning, holding a gun with a little BANG! sign hanging out the from the front of its smoking tip. It looked like something ridiculous from a comic book. I sighed and erased the BANG! sign, leaving the smoking gun in the Joker's hand.

"That's pretty good." Said a slow, slimy voice from somewhere behind my right shoulder. To my credit, I didn't jump out of my skin and run away screaming into the night, but I did grit my teeth and tighten all my muscles in shock. How in the bloody hell had this guy snuck up on me?

"You should put the little sign back though." The owner of the voice giggled. It was one of the most disturbing things that I'd ever heard. "I liked that part."

I relaxed and slowed my breathing, preparing myself for a fight. My right hand tightened on the pencil while the left inched slowly toward the switchblade in my pocket. I was a scrappy, dirty little fighter, and whoever this guy was he was going to get a knife in his gut and a pencil to the eye if he didn't back up immediately.

"Um. Thanks." I said, not turning around, my pencil frozen on the page, my eyes staring into the sunken eyes of my drawing. I was trying desperately to send this creeper the mental vibe of back off or his insides would become his outsides but he didn't seem to be getting the message.

"I have...what you might call… a proposal." He said, sliding around to sit next to me on the bench. He stank of cheap cologne, sweat, blood, and…something else that I couldn't place. I resisted the urge to shudder and continued to stare at my drawing. My left hand had locked onto the hilt of my knife and my breathing got slower and slower as I prepared to strike the instant this guy made a move.

"I was watching you tonight. You're a good fighter. I need more of those. This city seems to be having a shortage of smart, competent people." He paused, presumably to look over at me, because I could feel him staring. "I suppose that it isn't entirely their fault that they're all out of their tiny. Little. Minds. Hah Eh he." He coughed. "At any rate… I've heard good things about you. They all tell me you are the best of the best, that you can find things for me, that you somehow manage to procure even the most heavily guarded items. I figure, this city is mine, and you are part of this city, therefore you are mine, so my proposal is this: You work for me," he paused, tapping his fingers on his thighs. His hands were stained with white paint, dirt, and what might, conceivably, have been blood. "and I won't kill you."

I blinked, taking that in.

"I'll let you think it over for a bit, can't rush decisions like this you know." He stood up and laughed. The sound was high pitched and manic, and I felt the hairs on my neck stand on end.

"Here's my card." He said, dropping something in front of me. "Call me when you've made your choice."

I swallowed and stared at the joker card sitting on top of my Joker drawing.

"I'll be watching you." He said in a singsong voice, then laughed again.