March 2029-Gotham State University Campus
First that psychiatrist and that mobster's mislaid plans. The Scarecrow and the Roman. He had them, however, to thank for his hard won freedom. And justice had not been blind: his captors had become captives themselves, rotting in anonymity in Arkham Asylum. But he'd barely just begun when along came the warpath and chaos of that deranged Clown. All throughout the Joker's reign of terror he had lain low, skulking in the shadows, painting with the Narrow's sick, tired and poor where his subtlety would go unappreciated, swallowed by the madman's brash acts and explosive wrath.
His was a higher aesthetic, and required the proper staging and ambiance. Where the Joker had painted his pictures to fit the canvas, he was forced to scour the city for the right hour, right place, right woman on which to work his masterpiece. Artistry, Victor Zsasz knew, was unappreciated. He lamented the birth of the cynical, postmodern world. He wept to hear that art—like so many Greats before her—was dead, another victim of the scheduling and scrutiny of the twenty first century
Dead. Death. Zombies all. He sneered with contempt at these Contemporary artists and their abstract works, either a mess of chaotic brush-strokes, or art subdued, Conceptualized, brought under yoke and chain. He laughed at the thought of man making it a machine: art turned both harnessed and harvester.
Art—true art—was not tool. It was merely a medium of expression.
No, the purpose of art was not capturing the fragility of a flower permanently in photographs or still life watercolors. The beauty of artistry—like the fleeting, evanescent essence of life—was solely in the spirit. Jack the Ripper, the media said in attempt to turn gross sensationalism to profit. Gotham's own grotesque serial killer. But his work was nothing compared to that madman's butchery, and how they'd all walked away disappointed, discontent in their desire for the macabre!
…no, the beauty of art—like the tragedy of life—was in its imperfections and impermanence. And only through realization could humanity ever hope to appreciate how delicate, how precious human life really was.
The woman was walking home alone. Streetlamps gave splintering shadows and the soft rain a scintillating reflection, a fitting stage upon which a star-crossed lover could fall. She spoke on her blue-tooth phone as she went, harried and busy with her briefcase and books, too preoccupied to notice him, to notice the ethereal shapes lent the city by the night-time shower. Middle-aged. Professional. Jaded and weary with the weight of urban living. All her life until now trapped in a cage of her own making, like a bird, staring languidly out the bars and wishing for freedom. She twittered her sad song into the telephone as she walked, a lament for her suffering.
Zsasz took pity on her, pity on all of them, these stray, midnight masses in need of shepherding.
…so he freed her.
Gently he held her. Stroked her sleek hair as she bled out silently. And only then, once that last, heaving breath was over, did he gouge a long, gaping swath of flesh from his forearm.
Sixty-one.
Next Chapter: Even an early morning walk can't clear Alfred's mind.