Closed Starter for @anotherwayout
Bernard Dowd was not about to let this opportunity go to waste. On a night like this one, where Gotham’s smog was thick and cold, where the grey haze coated the city in a veil, as beautiful and ethereal as a drop of ink in a jar of water, he knew that the long shadows and the starless sky were like beacons to the criminals who lurked just underneath the city’s surface tension.
Nights like this one were the type that burst through that barrier, that blew it to kingdom come and back again, as everyone with a dirty secret decided that the shade was safe enough to crawl into, heavy enough to protect them from the light that might make them vulnerable.
And perhaps that meant—since he decided to be one such thing that went bump that evening—that he risked running into someone with a too-big smile, or a syringe full of nightmares, or a hat that stole his mind from him. But perhaps, if he, too, veiled himself in the tenebrous fog, in the unoccupied shadows, then he might, conversely, run into a living myth—a living myth that shouldn’t exist, but that Gotham was lucky enough to give a home to anyway.
He thought that there were eight total in Gotham—unless some of them were the same person. He knew that there seemed to be at least one for each borough, though some of them worked in pairs, and most of them did not go out on the same night. He knew that there was at least one for the daytime. And he knew that a ninth had claimed a whole city for himself.
Gotham knew them, too, of course. This was all old news; Gotham had become accustomed to having them around. Gotham loved them.
And Bernard was nothing if not a loyal Gothamite.
With a video recorder in hand, a tape recorder in his backpack—along with a notebook, a pencil bag, a police scanner, a few home-made flash bangs, and his last, most desperate line of defense: a discarded birdarang from the time Robin had saved him, which the guy hadn’t caught him swipe from the ground, thank god—Bernard was prepared for a sleepless night. He clutched his camcorder in one hand, and a thermos of coffee in the other, as he locked his car, after parking it on 2nd and 121st, around the corner from Robinson Park. He was in the heart of the city itself, and as he pulled himself up and onto a fire escape with a view of the GCPD headquarters, he could feel Gotham’s pulse like his own—though maybe that was just his blood rushing with adrenaline. The GCPD was a hotbed of activity on nights like this—and was therefore the perfect place to sit, wait ,and “batwatch”.
Bernard grinned to himself. This was going to be awesome.
