"theres a lady who knows
all that glitters is gold . . ."
in which a wannabe hero leaves the safety of her own life to help a girl
with a very strange problem.
...
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T/W for blood and gore
DJ WAS NO STANGER TO EMOTION.
She was no stranger to experiencing every emotion on the spectrum, all at once, so intensely that no one knew how to handle it; least of all DJ. All she could do was succumb to the meltdown, crying and screaming at someone out of love, confused and conflicted as hell, which only made it worse.
But feeling absolutely nothing? This was new.
The horrible pain of loss was still thumping along with every beat of DJ's broken heart, something that would probably never leave her aching chest. But even with the chokehold of sadness wrapped firmly around her throat, there was also a numbness radiating through her tired body, dousing her world in a black and white filter as everyone around her in the precinct went on with their day.
DJ's ears had no choice but to listen to the phones ringing, and the coffee machines going, and the conversations going on, joking and laughing and telling stories of their police escapades. The night shift of Gotham's central police precinct, beat cops spending the late hours behind their desks, waiting for the next run of the mill Gotham Rouge attack; waiting to drink their black coffee from their foam cups while chatting away next to some woman's husband, strangled to death by enchanted plants, or some kid's mother brutally tortured for not answering the riddle correctly.
This cesspool of a city. So used to the waves of crime crippling their people that these useless fucking pigs just let them get away with it because Batman will take care of it. Anyone fucking else will take care of it, so they could sit on their asses, eating donuts and chatting about their days at one in the morning instead of patrolling the streets and actually doing their jobs.
How were they so... alive? Talking, breathing, walking, drinking, laughing, listening? Why weren't they hunkered down in their office chairs, blank and dreary as the grey sky above their heads, silent and wondering how such a terrible thing could happen? How could anything close to peace, or happiness, or routine, ever touch Gotham City ever again, with one of its greatest protectors brutally murdered in the same hour? Murdered while trying to make their lives better; safer. How was the radio station playing the same upbeat pop songs, telling jokes during commercial breaks, announcing Robin's death with a moment of silence, they going back to their regularly scheduled programming.
If DJ could break through the haze of heartbreak that had completely numbed her to anything but pain, she might have felt angry. She might have greeted the nonchalance of these officers with a rage-filled scream of sonic violence; another crazy story they could embellish and tell each other in the fucking hospital after DJ was done with them.
But she couldn't. The chains of the worst possible feeling were dragging her so far into the deep black void of grief that she didn't have the strength to feel angry. There was so much weight cuffed to her heart; an anchor composed of the pain from her past, her present, and now her bleak and hopeless future. She was so tired. So tired of fighting and losing over and over again. Her broken down body could do absolutely nothing to stop the light fading from view as she fell deeper an deeper into the black hole.
