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CHAPTER ONE / GOTHAM CITY SUBWAY.
♠
GOTHAM CITY HADN'T CHANGED ONE BIT. Vincent hated it and how much he was thankful for it.
The subway still ran 'on time'—that is, three and a half minutes after the schedule dictated—and the lights still danced and flickered every time the carriage shook. Vincent watched through the scratched windows as the train raced through the underground subway system, graffiti and blood splatters alike sprayed across the walls. Every few minutes he would catch a glimpse of a ghost through the glass: a cloud of fog shaped in the imitation of a human, as if whatever had brought them back to Earth had made mistakes at the pottery wheel and never taken the care to shape them out.
And every few minutes, he would catch the teenage boy sitting two rows away staring at him.
Vincent was more than used to being stared at, the tingling feeling of eyes watching him permanently engraved in the grooves of his spine. Childhood had shaped him into an outsider, adolescence had forged him into something worse. In the small towns he frequented as a runaway, he had always been the odd one out. The stranger from out of town, just mysterious enough to be pretty and just pretty enough to be mysterious. Some people stared at him like he was a book they wanted to read, others a corpse they wanted to autopsy. He never gave them a reaction, never a lasting impression. Staring was one thing, but witnessing—being a witness—was another.
Vincent cut the young boy a cold glance, stripping the emotion from his expression until all that stared back at the boy was a blank slate. The boy averted his eyes quickly, thin fingers tightening around the strap of his backpack. It was the middle of the afternoon, and a boy his age should have still been in school. But skipping class was far from the worst thing young boys did in Gotham City. Vincent would know. He was the blueprint, the poster child for adolescent misbehaviour.
The train halted. Had Vincent not been expecting it, he would have been sent flying; he had remembered by instinct to brace his feet against the sticky floor as soon as the station came into view. It was a choreography engraved in his bones from a lifetime of practice, and the years away had done nothing to erode it. The deja view made him sick to the stomach. Or maybe that was the cheap whiskey, chugged ceremoniously as he had driven across the New Jersey border and merged onto the highway leading into Gotham City.
The stolen pick–up truck had been abandoned on the side of the highway just two miles out of the city, with a few crumpled $50 bills in the glovebox to apologise for stealing it. It had been a small act of mercy, leaving the car outside of Gotham. Vincent may have had to walk to the nearest subway station, but at least some innocent driver from Minnesota didn't have to cross into hell just to get their car back. It was all part of a charade to make Vincent feel better about himself.
