"God, am I like the rest after all?"
~Tender is the Night~
The darkness was slowly seeping out of Danny's eyesight while the coldness clung to him like leeches. The other side of his bed was empty leaving him plenty of room to stretched, but the icy touch of his sheets kept him stiff in his mattress mold. There hadn't been another body in his bed long before he realized he needed his and hers toes and fingers to count exactly how many months it really was. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, lingering like a rest deprived mother of a newborn, beneath a quilt crafted by his own grandmother. The alarm clock on his nightstand faded in and out between the distant sirens of Gotham's crime fighters leaving Danny no choice but to pull the covers off himself very much in the quick fashion he used to rip off his friends Band-Aids' when they weren't looking. With the speed of a bullet the frigid air pierced him through and through as he greeted the emptiness of his chaotically quiet life.
3rd and Melrose is one of the most dangerous intersections of the South Bronx, but Isla knew these blocks like she knew the circumstances of her father's life, too well. Except she didn't live here anymore, six years and she felt like a stranger even though Mookey at Mookey's Deli remembered her clad in pigtails, a lollipop in one hand and a baseball glove in the other. She showed none of those traits now with her chestnut brown curls wrapped up in a black elastic band. Her hands weren't dirty like they used to be, back then she was the biggest tomboy going. She chuckled to herself thinking "you can take the girl out of the darkness, but you can't take the darkness out of the girl". She was always roughing around, dirtier than a dog rolling around in the mud. Today, however, she was showered, properly attired and holding a generic cup of starbucks. Walking towards the corner, she took one last look, one last sip before chucking almost all of her coffee into an unusually empty trash bin, but the day was still young. She descended the steps into the tunnels of the 4 train and headed into a different kind of fray, Manhattan's.