Hey guys! I'm pumping out chapters faster than I want to upload them. But fear not, You can expect at least three a week. I don't own anything, Just Sybil and the story line. THANKS and do me a solid and review please!

I woke up late that morning, and without a word paced to the shower in the hallway. As I was taking off my clothes I felt the soreness in my knees awaken. My knees were swollen half way up my thigh and were decorated with swirls of green and purple. I started the shower on the hottest setting and stepped in. The warmth on my feet felt like I was reborn. Slowly, I stepped into the water. My wrists ached as I realized they were still wrapped from the hospital the day prior. I slowly peeled them off to see what the damage was underneath. Bright red marks intertwined with eight black stitches on either side. The hotness of the water seeped into them, but the pain felt good. I winced at the thought of pain bringing me joy. I felt guilty, but I also felt like doing it again. Maybe a little cut, just enough to draw blood. Enough to feel the endorphins course through my body and give me that euphoric high I so badly craved. I searched for something to use. My shaving cream sat in the usual spot with my razor. But this time my razor wasn't there. I shrugged it off and finished my shower, disappointed but thinking it was for the best. They might haul me off to Arkham if I started cutting not even twenty-four hours after I got out of the hospital.

My room looked different when I came back in to get dressed. The sheets to my bed were completely gone, and all that was left was the thick white down comforter my mom bought before I was born.

Maybe she's doing laundry. I thought. Perhaps, but not likely. She always made me do all the chores around the apartment. My closet was dismal as usual. Mostly black and tan clothes occasionally paired with the few scarves and belts-

…that were missing.

I finished putting on my clothes and settled on black leggings, a white t-shirt, and a hoodie. Rushing into the living room, I immediately spotted Corinna and waited for her to turn around. She was on the phone with a woman, talking about how much her granddaughters attempted suicide affected her.

"…I took everything she could do it with out of the house and tossed down the garbage chute while she cleaned up, I just couldn't TAKE another one of her episodes, and frankly she's just not trustworthy." My heart sank. The belts, the scarves, the sheets, and all of the knives and forks in the kitchen were gone. Every pill in the house was locked in Corinna's room. Except, I noticed, the morphine prescription I got from the hospital. It was sitting not three feet from her left hand and a glass of water. Typical.

I decided to do it that night. At some point, the first opportunity I had, I would run. She couldn't chase me, she's too old and would probably be too doped up on my morphine. But how? There's no way she would leave me alone anywhere.

She interrupted my thoughts of running away with her shrill voice.

"I need to go to the grocery store today. We're having a 'glad you survived party' tonight. I'm getting cake-" she paused, "but you shouldn't have too much." She said with a condescending look on her face. She looked down at my thighs, which were bigger than the average nineteen year old, but I worked out a lot. Basically all I did in my room was squats and doodle on scrap paper. In her mind, women should be thin and weak, and always depend on a man to do everything for them.

She wasn't always like this. Before my grandfather Abraham died, she Corinna was the picture perfect homemaker with southern roots. She would tell me bedtime stories about her childhood. She rode horses, was courted by handsome and wealthy men, and ran away from home when she was eighteen to be with my grandfather, who her family didn't approve of. He drank and smoked and gambled their lives away. Eventually Corinna had two children, and they had nothing. She has always been a very prideful woman, and the financial state they were in for the majority of her adult life was abysmal. What finally broke her was the death of her first daughter, my mom, Kristen. My biological father would be gone for days and gamble and drink just like my grandfather had done. She wasn't going to spend the rest of her life with a man who was just like her father. Eventually he got in bad with the mob and they started threatening us. They would leave fingers in our mailbox, and eventually my mom tried to leave. Earlier that day she dropped me off with Grandmother Corinna, just to make sure I would be safe in case he got violent with her. He stabbed her thirty seven times, and then took his own life.

After that, my grandfather went downhill medically. He would constantly complain about chest pains, and two weeks after my mom's funeral he dropped dead in the kitchen getting a beer. My grandmother found him later that day when she got home from shopping and picking me up from school. She had always been a careless woman, not accounting for other people's feelings. When my mother died she became stoic, and then after the death of her husband, she became a real maniac.

Chaos is like gravity, all it takes is one little push.

And it sent her over the edge. She became hot-headed, mean, and spiteful. She had a vendetta. She had deaths to avenge, and she did so by making everyone else around her miserable. She worked her warped wheels of justice, and hated everything that reminded her of my mother or grandfather. I've been told that I'm a lot like my mother, and for that, I was to be punished. She tried to beat it out of me, burn it out of me with her Virginia slim cigarettes, break me mentally, and scar me physically. Little did she know all of these things pushed my closer to my mother. I was strong like her, mean like her, smart like her, cunning like her, and most of all, I saw the world just as she did. It was a beautiful tribute and a sad excuse for a reunion.

"I need to go to the store, and now that you don't have anything in here to hurt yourself with, I'm going to leave you here." She turned to look at me, and scared me out of my deep thought. Her hair was greyer than before, faded from her usual permed raven hair. Her wrinkles are like canyons, carved by years and years of river like tears. She was the shell of a person standing before me, and the best of her had left. The remaining woman that stood before me was comparable to the Gotham city criminals that we saw on TV every night. She was cruel, torturous, keen on revenge, and over the years, became a sucker for seeing others in pain. It's like it gave her a strange internal calm. Like her storm ceased when violence was in front of her. Maybe that's why she loved to watch the news so often. The Mob was always killing someone, the Joker was always robbing someone and killing several someone's. The uproar was her life force. The chaos, the very breath she breathed. Part of me couldn't blame her for becoming who she was. I can't say I'd be completely sane if I had been thrown into her circumstances.

You would think, though, that you could have some sort of control over what kind of person you become, even in the face of tragedy. Monsters are always inside us, but they only become who we are if we let them.

"Don't worry about locking the door behind me, I put a deadbolt on the outside." And with that and a wink, she left. Little did she know that would be one of the last times I saw her.

. . .

The door was no use, and it had been only fifteen minutes since she left. She would be back within another fifteen. I looked around and shoved the last thing in my backpack, something I almost forgot. A small black leather book with a moonstone on each corner, and in the middle it read "Sybil" in fancy lettering. My mother got this foe me on my fourteenth birthday, and it was the last gift she ever gave me. I wrote her letters in that book. It wasn't a traditional diary, but it was the closes thing I had. Every time I would feel sad I would write to her, hoping with all my being that it would somehow get to her.

I was fully packed, including some protein bars and bottled water. I only had two extra outfits and the kicks I was wearing. That would have to be enough. I still didn't have a way out, so I scrambled around trying desperately to find a key or a hanger to undo the deadbolt from the outside. That's when I saw the window. There was a fire escape. I threw open the curtains, and in the cloud of dust that followed, I saw that there was no lock on the window. I threw it open fairly easily and stuck my head out onto the black grate platform.

My heart sank as I realized there were no stairs leading down. Tears started to form in my eyes as I thought I would never be able to leave. I climbed all the way out and shut the window, just the way it had been before. The stairs to the roof were my only option. I looked around for my grandmother's car, and when it was clear to climb, I did.

The roof was large and sprinkled with cooling fans throughout the grey, seemingly never ending landscape. Gotham city was large, and so the buildings were built in such a way that they were never too far away from each other. I crept closer to the edge of the roof, afraid that I would be seen or heard. Heights scared me. I could stay on this roof forever, but they would come looking for me eventually. Corinna would never expect me to roof jump, so I had to do it to get away. I spend ten seconds assuring myself that it was only a three feet jump, and then took the leap. I fell for what seemed like forever before I hit the grey concrete of the neighboring building.

"This is so much fun!" I said with my hands in the air, but I flinched, realizing I had yelled it out loud. I took no time to rest as I jumped buildings, three feet at a time. After eighteen buildings, two close calls, and having to jump upwards three feet to meet a building, I decided to take a break near the edge of the roof of my current building. I pulled out a protein bar and counted the rest of them. Five. How was I going to live off of five little bars of food? Whatever I had to do to get food was better than living there. At nineteen, the most noteworthy thing I had done so far was, well, run away from home. "Home". Bullshit. That was never my home. Corinna made my life a living hell from the time I stepped foot there. The second my mother died she made it her mission to hurt everyone around her in an attempt to punish life itself for taking people away from her. People she didn't even value in the first place.

The sun started to descend into the horizon, and the sky was graced with deep hues of purple and pink. I laid my backpack on the ground so that I would have a makeshift pillow, and I pulled my jacket off to use as a blanket. I pulled out my book and started to re-read the letters I wrote to my mom. Something she told me rang in the back of my mind.

"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people."

Before my mom dropped out of college, she was a psychology major. Carl Jung was one of her favorite.

My eyes slowly acclimate to the darkness and I slowly sip a bottle of water while enjoying my new-found freedom. The breeze was just enough to cool me off but not make me cold. I snuggle up in my jacket for comfort, not warmth. I drift away into a dreamless sleep.

What seems like five seconds later I awoke to the sound of a heavy metal door slamming. I could hear feet shuffle and smell menthol cigarettes. There was the sound of a radio, and then a light whisper.

"Yeah, it's all clear boss, courtyard is dead." I slowly peered over the edge to see a very large man dressed in a snazzy black suit. Despite his obvious physical strength, he looked worried.

"Good," the man on the other end spoke slowly and confidently. For some reason, that voice sounded…-

The sound of someone's foot hitting the metal door shattered through the entire block. I expected people to wake up and shout through their windows at whoever was down there. That's when I realized I wasn't surrounded by apartments anymore, I was in the industrial district of Gotham. I was, in fact, standing on an old abandoned warehouse. I curiously peeked over the edge of the roof in the other direction to see boarded windows and graffiti. Aside from the obvious fact that people were coming out of it, anyone would think it was a normal abandoned warehouse.

The voice that next hit my ears made me freeze, grow cold, and heart race halfway with excitement.

"Take NOTE boys-ah!" I creeped my head over the ledge of the roof to get a look at who was speaking and what was going on. The Joker. The Joker. He was dressed in a long purple overcoat. His purple pants and dress shirt were a little lighter than his coat, though they matched each other. His black shoes were decorated in blood, and left a toe print of his left shoe everywhere he stepped. His arms were flailing about in a way that let everyone else know he was in charge.

"THIS is what, uh, happens" He eyed the men one by one, his glare destroying any sense of security any of the men even dared to have. "When you DON'T do your fucking job. Ah, right boys?" Everyone nodded in sync, and another man brought out one of the Jokers men. He was tied up with a gag in his mouth, and looked like he had already had a severe beating. This congregation the Joker put on was just to send a message to his men.

"You…" The Joker trailed off and no one dared interrupt him or look him in the eye. He was like a rabid dog, looking him in the eye was a challenge, and he would win. "single handedly ah, got me put in that hell hole."

That's right, The Joker was in Arkham for a little over six months during his most recent stent. He waved his arms around with a knife in hand making sure this man knew exactly what was happening before he met his end. Suddenly, like lightning, the Joker punched his former employee in the jaw, and a loud crack echoed the walls.

I gasped and moved my hand up to my mouth. I knew what that kind of hit felt like and it was shocking and exciting to see someone else be the object of violence and mental torture. Everything moved in slow motion, and in the process of bringing my hand to my face I nudged a nail and it teetered over the edge. It was falling for what seemed like an eternity before it hit the ground with a metallic cling.

I froze and my blood ran cold. One by one all of the men gathered around the joker and his punching bag turned their heads slowly. I was frozen and I couldn't move. The Joker was the last one to turn his head, and when he did he let out a laugh, the likes of which I will never forget as long as I live.

It was as if a lion met the next sheep for slaughter.

Tell me what you guys think! I'm excited to know how everyone likes my writing style for this story, and where they think it's going.

Let me know! See you in a day or so.