I opened my eyes after a few minutes, but he was turned away from me. Still holding my arm with enough force to ensure my captivation, but his attention was elsewhere, giving me the perfect chance for an attempt to stop the inevitable.

I reached up with my left hand and grabbed his right. I carefully but quickly pulled the blade out of my mouth, and in less than a second he had turned back to me, mockingly frowned, and wrenched the blade from my grasp, slashing my palm in the process. I cringed from the pain and while my jaws strained against each other, he brought the knife up again and cut a small curve into my skin, from the edge of my mouth to the bottom of my cheek. Before I could bring my hand up to stop him, he did the same to the other side.

Then he let go of my arm, and I fell back on the ground. My hand shot to my mouth, smearing both the blood from my hand and my cheeks all around the lower half of my face.

"You know how I got these scars?" he asked, grinning, emphasizing the deep scars running away from his mouth. His tongue came out and wetted his cracked, dry lips again, and from some repressed portion of my brain came the desire to wrench the knife from his hands and cut the little pink slug right from his rotting mouth. I pushed the thought back, far back in my brain, where my conscious locked it away where it belonged.

" You see, I eh, I was doing some work for a known criminal, a real wise guy, you know, and uh, when he made a joke, y'see, you had to laugh, it was a… a rule of his… and I made a, a tiny error, and…" he stopped and rustled up his hair. Little flurries of light debris sprinkled out, and each of the few, thick hairs became many as the sweat and blood that held them together came apart.

"So he says to his boys… he says 'why don't you go in back and show our new friend how to smile'." He paused for a few seconds. "And here we are."

He smiled deviously again, to which I responded with a steadfast glare. He grinned, more widely than any normal man could grin, and said "Oh, just terrible, what happened to your… smile." I glared harder, if that's possible.

"You shouldn't frown so much." he said, his expression turning from a subdued threat into overt hostility. He raised his knife above his head, and there it stood, poised to deliver a fatal blow, when a bullet ricocheted off the pile of stone debris I had crawled backwards against.

"C'mon, let's go grab a bite." My captor said, as if un-phased by the bullet that had just nearly taken half his brain out, and grabbed my arm once again, pulling me to my feet and through the dark in an instant. I could see in the dark during the brief moments when the muzzle flash of the disembodied gun firing at us lit up the dark; but none of them lasted quite long enough for me to make out what building we were in.

I heard an angry cry from behind as I stumbled through the dark, pulled forward by a seemingly unstoppable force; it sounded angry. Our pursuer had lost us, or run out of ammunition, or, as seemed more presumably the case, both.

Then came a short period of stumbling through the dark, debris-filled corridors of wherever we had been. Whatever had happened here had done a number on my memory, I guessed, because how I had come to be where I was wasn't immediately clear to me.

I had to shield my eyes against the streetlights when we came out to the sidewalk My abductor pulled me behind him, his knife held out in front of him as if to warn off any threat from the shrouds of darkness that floated into every niche and cranny where the light couldn't quite reach. There was a mini-van parked directly in front of us; he dragged me right past it, and stopped at a station wagon with enough space to maneuver out of the tiny space here against the curb. The meter here was out of time, and a small paper had been slipped between the windshield and the wiper.

"Let's go." He said, and broke the window into the back seat before looking at me. I had hoped he would just climb in, giving me the chance to just run, but he was smarter than that. I should have guessed that much already, but I hadn't exactly had a lot of time to think things over.

I hesitated before jamming my elbow into the mirror; it wasn't quite well thought out on my part. The window shattered, but the bone in my elbow felt as if it had done the same. I slowly, and painfully climbed into the driver's seat.

I don't have a completely clean past, I must admit, so starting the car without a set of keys wasn't easy, but not impossible. It took a good few seconds more than it would have taken a more practiced car burglar, but I got the car on, and soon we were speeding along the desolate streets of Gotham, myself driving, and my captor sitting on the windowsill of the car door, hanging halfway outside the car, a terrible grin across his lips, as if taunting an oncoming car, or some other obstruction to stand in his way.

It was only a few minutes before I realized that I had no clue where I was headed.