Of all the things Daniel wanted, this was never one of them.
It creeps up behind him at night, not unlike a shadow, or even an aching vigilante hiding behind a wall of latex and lies. Always lurking, always there. That feeling, like there was something hanging just out of grasp. He would have called it a forbidden fruit, but that tasted gaudy and somehow lecherous on his tongue. No, it was just a feeling, one that had a tendency to sneak up on him when he was out trying to make the city a little bit better. There was no cause, just a solitary symptom, like an old wound that never fully healed, sore and itching in a strange sort of way. He knows that is has something to do with the mask, not his own, but the face his fellow conspirator belongs to. Something about it just hurts. It was sort of like those smokers who carried around a tank of oxygen; his partner wore that mask because he needed it to breathe, to live. It was never supposed to be like that. They weren't supposed to need it, because they were the ones who were needed. But they never really were, were they? They wanted to be needed. And really, that's all anyone ever wants, but they did it to the extreme, the way they did everything. But the facts were facts; they stopped being needed when they decided they were justice. And it all started with a man with a shifting face, for whom justice would never be enough, or maybe it was too much. Maybe it was everything.
That was what he hated about it all, about the man with the inkblot face: a mask, a midnight run, the breaking of a criminal's fingers can't be everything to him, to anyone. For some reason he couldn't explain, he didn't want it to be.