Bruce nearly kicked himself as he drove an old Toyota with tinted windows toward the first of the several suspected hide outs of Danielle Black and her son. He had trekked all over the damn country in search of the psychotic bitch and her little bastard only to find out that the pair had probably been within walking distance of his house all along. There were four suspected hide-outs: an abandoned old hospital in the slums, a row home in the slums, a house just outside the city limits, and a mansion he had passed almost daily for decades.
He had decided to start with the hospital and methodically work his way out toward the house just outside of the city limits. From Gordon's almost disturbingly detailed reports he had ascertained that Danielle's mother, Flower, had died of cancer in that very hospital. Several months after her mother's death she was expelled from Quincy Jr. High in Gotham. Several more expulsions and a move later she was sent to a juvenile detention center for gouging out a classmate's eyes with her bare hands. That was when all record of Danielle Black disappeared.
From this Bruce construed that her mother's death had driven a young Danielle to some kind of psychotic breakdown. Since she had all likelihood watched her mother die a slow painful in the hospital and psychotics often return to places that are somehow significant to them, it did not seem a far stretch to Bruce that she would have taken her son to the place where she had experienced so much pain. The fact that it was the closest to Arkham, abandoned, and probably of all of the locations the best to hide made it seem even more likely. The only people who frequented it were drug addicts and dealers and they certainly wouldn't report her regardless of the heinous acts she committed.
Bruce wished that he could don his bat suit as he exited the Toyota. While he felt insecure and naked without it, he knew that subtlety was key. While the bat suit was anything but subtle, a dirty man dressed in ripped up jeans lurking around in a beat up car was ignored by the majority on principle. He put his hands and his pockets and his head down as he walked up the block toward the old hospital.
It was a relatively small and dilapidated old building that stood only two stories high. It had been built as a gesture from a local politician in the fifties, but as his funds petered out so did the hospital. The door nearly fell on Bruce as he tried to open it and barely caught it. He slipped inside with a flashlight brandished and gleaming in the dark. The lobby he entered was empty aside from a wild-eyed young woman sitting alone heating a spoonful of heroin by moonlight. Many pairs of footprints had been trodden in the dust and led this way and that. All of the furniture that was there years ago had been stolen.
Bruce quietly walked up to the woman. The flame of her lighter cast eerie shadows upon her face. She took no notice of him as he inched forward. Her quiet curses reverberated off of the walls as she burned her fingers with the lighter again and again.
"Why don't you make some fuckin' use of thuh light and hold it on me?" She barked and Bruce froze. The last thing on earth he wanted to do was help a poor woman shoot up, however, he figured that next to impersonating FBI agents to take advantage of the mentally unsound indirectly helping a junkie get their next high was nothing to worry about. He contemplated how far he had fallen as the woman flicked the lighter with shaking hands and held the spoon above it. Her dark eyes were pained and strained with concentration.
"You seen a woman 'round here?" He asked quietly and she snorted.
"Lot's come around here. Why? You lookin' for a fuck?"
Bruce cringed. "Yeah."
A mirthless smile twisted her prematurely lined face. "Well then, how much you got?"
"I'm lookin' fuh a tall bitch with blonde hair. Seen her?"
"Sounds like you lookin' for a fuckin' model. All we've got is the homeless and hookers. Useless fuckers." She said as she took a needle out of her pocket.
"You know if anyone else is around?" His voice cracked and she sighed impatiently.
"Take a fucking look around if you're so god damned interested in this shithole!" Bruce turned away as she began putting the Heroin in the syringe. With his flashlight held high he turned a corner. A floor nearly stripped of tiles and paperless walls greeted him. The darkness deepened. for what felt like an eternity he walked down hallway after hallway and opened door after door to find nothing emptiness, decay, and the occasional group of homeless people. Several times he had mistaken unconscious bodies on the floor for the joker only to find angry drunks and on one case a corpse. He exited the hospital two hours later thoroughly convinced that neither the joker nor his mother were present.
Next came the old row home that Danielle Black had spent all of her early years in. It was only twenty minutes away from the hospital and almost ten by the time he arrived at Number 9 Caina road. The majority of the windows were boarded up and trash was scattered all over the dead long-fingered lawn. He walked up to the specified row home and his heart began to pound upon hearing bloodcurdling scream after scream emanate from within. Despite his urge to heroically burst down the door, he recognized the need for subtlety and quickly picked the lock. He raced into the tiny house and up the stairs as silently as possible. As light flickered and increased and wavered rapidly and the screaming suddenly stopped. All Bruce could hear was his heart beating in his chest as he drew his knife and inched closer.
Bruce soon realized that he had not walked in on the joker being tortured by his mother, but an old Hispanic man watching CSI: Miami and eating Chinese take-out. With the torture scene at its peak a bright commercial started rolling and the man burped loudly and started to scratch his behind. Bruce gritted his teeth as the screaming gave way to a commercial jingle for Pepsi and the man belched yet again.
Within seconds Bruce was speeding away in his old Toyota. He fumed as he prepared for the drive to his next destination, a mansion within walking distance of his own.
AN/ Review Replies:
Sorry that I haven't updated in so long. Not only have I had a wicked case of writer's block, but I am honestly just not very good at updating. If you are a faithful updater of your stories than you probably read my last statement and went "What the fuck?". If you, like me, can't seem to keep commitments of any kind, do anything in what others deem 'a reasonable amount of time', and never seem to have the logic to back things up that made sense to you at the time-good for you. You can join my proverbial club of people who do not operate like lubricated cogs in the epically tight pocket pussy which is the collective reality that the big whigs have built upon the illusion of control, so they can continuously thrust their shiny happy pieces into it and groan as they cum destruction on the evanescent middle class, using their tears as lubricant.
pride1289: Right on. Right on.
andaere: Glad you are enjoying it. I would be happy if the Joker lived too, as I want to marry him, have lots of wild sex, and then bear his children. However, It seems that I really can't write a happy story as a couple of years ago I wrote a House Md-LOTR-The Ring crossover comedy and I am pretty sure that at the end half of the characters in it died a horrible death. It was hilarious in a dark sort of way, but not even remotely happy. Sorry about your braces. I remember when I had those. Sucks pretty hard. The only upside is that they leave interesting patterns in skin and it hurts people even worse when you bite them-not that I am condoning biting others of course…..