It was impressive what one night without rules could do to a city and its inhabitants. Sophie had left the house that morning after the incident and roamed the streets more or less aimlessly, taking in what has happened and gaping at the destruction around her like a child.

She wasn't the only one who wandered around and stared at the broken shop windows and winced at the sound the shattered glass made under their feet. In the course of an hour, she saw at least a dozen burnt-out cars and even a couple of houses that looked like they had been set on fire. The smoke that still hung in the air made her throat sore and her stomach feel hollow.

The other people who had come out to examine the damage that had been done to their city walked with the same hanging shoulders, carrying an air of confusion and despair around them. The aloofness on some of their faces was betrayed by the shock that was evident in their wide eyes.

Sophie saw and old couple talking to a police officer that looked like she hadn't slept for days. The grey-haired woman looked right through the member of the police force with empty eyes while her husband, who seemed to be on the verge of crying, almost shouted at the officer. It sounded as if they were missing their child or grandchild.

She remembered what Victor Zsasz had said about this: It seems fun.

Sophie wondered if she would ever understand how an outlook on life could classify this as fun.

Feeling a heavy pang of guilt in her chest that she couldn't quite understand, she quickly averted her eyes from the miserable couple and the pitiful policewoman and went back home into her apartment, where she could once again close the curtains and feel safe.

After the blackout, things in Gotham seemed to become crazier than ever. It was as if one night of darkness had resembled the crossing of an invisible barrier that had been intact before. At least that was how Sophie felt.

Although the days were getting warmer, the atmosphere in the streets remained cold. It was as if the rays of the sun couldn't reach as far as they should, leaving everything just a bit darker than it was supposed to be. It took a couple of weeks to fix everything that had been broken and to clean up the mess that had been left on the streets. But while things were quickly repaired in every technical sense, Sophie couldn't help but feel that the city didn't heal.

The craziness after the chaos had started rather slowly. A minor incident, at least for Gotham's standards, was that Oswald Cobblepot had disappeared under very curious circumstances. A not so minor incident was that he was declared dead soon after. Moreover, the criminal whom the newspapers called "The Riddler" had turned out to be the mayor's chief of staff – and it was also rumoured that he had killed his former employer.

While Sophie wasn't sure what to make of the fact that the mayor was dead, she was rather surprised to discover that someone like Edward Nygma, whose set-up back at the mayor's party had been horrendous, was able to design riddles as complex as the papers described them to be. The fact that he did not waste a lot of time before he targeted and kidnapped the then reinstated mayor Aubrey James led Sophie to believe that he might have had something to do with the death of Janice Caulfield and the hit on Randall Hobbs.

Perhaps she had underestimated Edward Nygma. Perhaps there was a great scheme behind all of this that all led back to him and only made sense for someone who was as brilliant or as insane as he seemed to be. For Sophie, it didn't.

There was also another thing she wondered about. For whom is Victor working now? Could it be that he had been working for Nygma all along?

The papers, however, didn't publish anything that would indicate that the bald hitman was doing anything gruesome and thus worthy of attention. There were no articles about traceless murders.

What she had read about was that the former captain of the GCPD - who had turned insane as well – was on the loose. But unlike Nygma, who seemed to have the ambition of becoming a super-villain, he appeared to consider himself a righteous vigilante.

After weeks of feeling confused about everything that was happening around her, she had, at some point, just given up. The overload of bad news, followed by worse news simply made her tired. The unpredictability and the insanity of this city were just too much for her to constantly take in. As a result, she had stopped.

She had stopped reading the newspaper every morning, she had stopped watching the news twice a day, she had stopped talking about the most recent political developments with her co-workers. Instead, she tried to fill the silence in her apartment with music and films - and the void in her mind with literature.

It was strange that sealing herself off from all the bad news felt so liberating.

Not worrying about the things she'd probably never understand, not worrying about the bigger picture any longer calmed her inner turmoil to an extent she would not have thought possible. Her nerves which had been on edge slowly but steadily started to calm down.

Feeling a twinge of conscience, she thought about her parents who always followed the news every day, their discussions at the dinner table, and how disappointed they would be if they knew that their daughter had abandoned their tradition. But whilst the politicians of her hometown discussed things like renovating the city hall or building a new bus stop, the politicians of this city were murdered.

While she had stopped occupying her mind with what was going on in Gotham, she had not been able to stop the appearances of Victor Zsasz in her dreams. But what had once filled her with a bad conscience, she now started to accept.

So what if he was a bad person. The night of the blackout had shown her that she was surrounded by horrible people. The extent to which she was interested in horrible things probably indicated what an awful person she was herself.

Not all heroes wear capes, and not all bad people commit crimes.

Sophie wanted to believe that the bald hitman's explanation that his nightly visit was induced by the fact that he had been in the neighbourhood was nothing but a downright lie. She wanted to believe that he came to ensure that she wasn't killed. If this was the case and Victor Zsasz cared about another human being, it would mean that he wasn't all bad. Just like she could not pretend that she was all good. There were no binaries in the world, just vast zones of grey.

So, instead of musing about good and evil while chopping vegetables at work, Sophie allowed her thoughts to drift towards her favourite criminal and wondered if they might at any rate ever become friends.

The time Sophie had spent with her head buried in the sand ended with a rather harsh life lesson and the conclusion that not picking up on something does not mean that it isn't happening.

She might have been one of the last citizens to hear about a peculiar red gas that had spread through the streets.

It was a phone call from Gina that would inform her about the 'Tetch virus' that had been unleashed in the union station and infected numerous people with a certain type of madness that would differ in almost every case.

Gina said that she had heard it brought out peoples' darkest sides. Sophie noted that her friend's voice which was usually relaxed and rather low-pitched was now trembling and had lost its tranquillity. Gina would take a train and leave Gotham as soon as possible - and she offered Sophie to come along to live with her relatives until everything in the city had calmed down.

Sophie had always found fear contagious. If people who mattered to her displayed any sort of uneasiness, she would almost always adapt the feeling. She had thought that this was a matter of empathy, that she was rather sensitive when it came to picking up on other peoples' emotions.

But now, she felt strangely calm as she listened to Gina's almost panicked voice. Without a second thought, she turned down her friend's offer, and told her reassuringly that she would find refuge at her own parents' place.

She made Gina promise to send her a text once she had gotten out of Gotham safely before she hung up and set her phone down on her kitchen table and contemplated what to do.

Sophie did not want to witness a repetition of what the young man called Jerome Valeska had initiated only a couple of weeks ago. For now, she was fed up with all this insanity, with having to anticipate violence, with being scared.

Leaving town seemed like a sensible decision.

Author's note: Thank you so much for your reviews and messages!