Chapter Text
The streets of Gotham sprawled like a map no one wanted to follow, alleys curling into themselves and brick walls leaning under years of soot and shadow. Moonlight sifted through the haze, catching on wet patches and the jagged edges of fire escapes, turning them into shards of silver against gray. A loose scrap of paper skittered across the sidewalk, tumbling like it had a mind of its own, carried by a gust that smelled faintly of iron and gasoline. Somewhere above, a cat yowled, and somewhere below, the distant clatter of a train rattled windows. The city breathed in half-steps, restless and patient, and all its corners were full of waiting: for footsteps, for storms, for voices that might never come.
There is a strange resilience that comes with growing up among weeds and the damned. Different for each walking upon the cracked streets, no doubt, but something unspoken, shared within millions who have come to live amongst it.
For Cyrus, a woman of thirty and worn at the edges, the resilience came in ritual. In meditative silence. In deafening music. In the steady drag of charcoal across paper. And, most of all, in the relentless rhythm of his fists against a sandbag.
The sandbag, at this point, was more patchwork than canvas. Half-roles of duct tape mummified the weak spots, and it had entirely split a few times now (which threw sand all over his cluttered living room), but he wouldn't replace it. The bag bore his history like scar tissue, and he treated it with the same blunt reverence: strike, breathe, reset. He had saved his extra earnings for months when he was twenty-four, and it had lasted the first four years swimmingly. It was only in the last year or two that the fraying of seams and the spots his knuckles continuously connected with were beginning to grate on the integrity of the thing.
It sagged under its own weight. Fists brushed the same, worn sheets of tape over and over again as he drove into it with a force, dull thuds in sync with the rise and fall of distant sirens. When the seams split or the holes inevitably reopened, he never tossed it—just sat cross-legged on the floor, scooping stray sand back in by hand, fingers blackened with the dust by the end of it.
There was also a release that came with scribbles in lined notebooks through quiet evenings, crosswords under the neon of the diner, more tender than adrenaline. It was a calm reprieve from the noise, the conflict, the spit and venom of others. On nights he forced himself to sit still, incense burning low, Gotham still found a way in. A scream cutting through the quiet of his neighborhood. A bottle shattered in an alleyway. He'd just sigh, fingers knit a bit tighter, and start over from the beginning.
On a daily basis, though, the nastiness had a habit of evading the inside of the diner during his hours. Cyrus was the ever-present soldier of the night at their run down, formica plated establishment: in plainer words, he was the only one on staff that wasn't truly unsettled by the idea of working nights alone in Gotham. There was a list of logical drawbacks to the position, but none of it seemed worthy enough to pull him away from a typically quiet, tepid routine of serving few and speaking to fewer.
His nights were woven into a fluid routine. Wipe the counters, then the tables, always in the same order and with the same motion. Circles, then long sweeps, even if no one had touched them. The air always smelled of burnt coffee and too-old sweets, something no amount of scrubbing could erase. Over time he grew almost fond of the familiar scent.
Still, the diner had its shadows. Dropheads too strung out to string words together, drunks half-collapsed in booths, the rare desperate pervert. The tangible ones were easy enough to handle. What unsettled him most was when the night turned too still, when the noise outside dulled and his mind filled the gaps with old corridors and cruel whispers. That was when the diner felt closest to Florence’s halls—the way shadows stretch long and children learn quickly who to hurt before they’re hurt themselves.
He could understand the fear for most of the others that worked there, though, the younger waitresses in particular. If the wrong kind of person showed up while one of them was working the graveyard shift, the consequences would be deeper than having to yell or threaten to call the police.
All of the girls had spanning examples of patrons being inappropriate during the day, and that was amongst the bustle of regulars and folks who needed a bagel in 5 minutes or less. In plain daylight. Cyrus was the only one of the women who worked there that hardly dealt with the flirtatious touches or presumptuous offers. The only men he got in that were interested in getting in his pants were ones with a desperation for anyone's touch, and they weren't often coherent enough to reckon with the type of woman they were flirting with.
It was a somewhat interesting thing, Cyrus's physical disposition. To him, at least. He'd always looked a bit too much like a boy. Jaw too sharp, hair too coarse, nails too square to belong to a girl, let alone a woman when he made it to that threshold. In his childhood home—if you could call it that—it was always a point of contention. Children, especially ones raised on the dirty floors of the Florence Catholic Home for Wayward Girls, needed someone they could feel was lower than them. Cyrus, lovingly given a traditionally masculine name as an infant, was an easy target as the buffer between those girls and the reality of where they were. Alone, at the bottom. In Gotham's long, long ladder, spanning from the strung out and homeless to the wretched and rich, children with nothing akin to love or family, and no place of serenity to be found, were on the last wrung. Cold hands grasping at splintering wood.
He had never met his father. And his mother died, within a week or so of his birth. He was certain, by now, the man must've kicked it too. There had been two things held sacred through his childhood, and only the sad-looking bear that had been given to him (or his mother?) at the hospital had held up over time out of the pair. He'd probably washed, sewn, re-stuffed, and added patches to it hundreds of times. It was another thing he couldn't bear to let go of, even if the oldest set of stitches in its neck persistently brought up the day one of the other girls had accidentally decapitated it during an argument. The contents of this conversation should have grown fuzzy after more than twenty years, he was certain of it.
But Cyrus wasn’t the type to dwell on the past. He wasn’t the type to dwell, period, he thought. Better to get it out or let it go. That’s what the sandbag was for, and the charcoal pencils, the hours of meditation, the late nights and early mornings at the diner. Beat it out, scrub it away, write it down, breathe until it breaks loose. This was a lesson he wouldn’t forget, but it hadn’t been taught to him by the ancient, angry bones of Florence or any of her nuns.
The truth was that Gotham always found its way back in. Sometimes in the scream of a stranger. Sometimes in the silence after closing. And sometimes in the soft drag of a cigarette smoldering where it shouldn’t be, or the sour cologne clinging to his clothes, reminders that even the walls he built for himself couldn’t always keep certain people out.
Cyrus let Gotham’s distant noise wash over him until he could quiet it with sweat and smoke. He sighed, rubbed the sleep from his eyes in vain, and began to wipe down the countertop again.
Just a few blocks away, the noise pressed differently. What Cyrus bled onto canvas and paper, Edward Nashton caught and caged. His notebooks weren’t reprieve but record—columns and riddles and rules written over themselves, the city’s chaos organized into lines so sharp they nearly tore the page. Where Cyrus exhaled, Edward inhaled and held it, tighter, tighter still.
Edward, who was about the same age as Cyrus, held his resilience in rigid structure. Counting the steps from his apartment to his car, from his car to the entrance of his work. Coffee at the diner—seven minutes, always seven, unless something pulled the whole equation out of line. Sit down at the desk, 7:57. Come back in from lunch, sit down again at 12:33. Turn in what was finished, exit the building at 5:02. Home at 5:22. Breathe.
He had begun keeping notes in ledgers, something that almost resembled journaling, in his early adulthood. He didn’t know when, exactly, but there were dozens if not hundreds stacked in his study by now. The habit of writing and recording the patterns he recognized had started before he had the means to keep any of it. Initially, it was scrawls of poetry and prayer in prose, in the backs of bibles, hymnals, and old textbooks. From this it developed into patterns. Numbers. Ciphers. Records. Tallies carved into wooden bed frames. Praying never seemed to change anything. But puzzles, riddles, numbers—all of it quieted his mind, gave him some sense of truth he could never find in the songs of God.
Edward could not bring himself to go and buy notebooks when he knew just how quickly they’d be filled up, and his work had a disgusting surplus of ledgers that went to waste at the end of each year. In the time after his shifts ended, most of his waking hours were spent writing out these entries. He preferred to do it by hand—pen scratching against thin, lined paper in a rhythm that felt steadier than his own beating heart. Typing was too streamlined, too risky. His thoughts needed to remain private.
It was methodical, the same way he did his work. He would sit at his desk with a chipped mug of coffee going cold at his side, the same lamp throwing the same jaundiced circle of light across the pages. He wrote about patterns, about numbers, about the small hypocrisies he saw every day but couldn’t bring himself to voice aloud. Sometimes the words slipped into rants, other times into neat bullet-point observations. Always dated. Always categorized. Each night ended the same way: ledgers stacked in careful piles, the pen placed exactly parallel to the notebook’s edge, the coffee poured down the sink.
But Gotham had its blunt ways of intruding. A siren would cut sharp through the night, making him pause mid-sentence. The couple in the apartment below him would scream profanities, shatter glass, or exchange something intimate made vulgar loud enough for him to hear. Edward would set the pen down, fingers often hovering over the scrawled text, and let his jaw tighten or rip skin from his fingers with his teeth. It wasn’t for the noise, really, but the way it pulled him out of his rhythm. His routine was built on sameness, on control. Even the smallest disruption left him staring into the dark with a knot at the base of his throat, the words on the page suddenly too messy, too imperfect to stand.
What steadied him one day threatened to strangle him the next.
The coffee had taken nine minutes instead of seven that morning, and Edward knew from that alone the day would sour—confirmed, minutes later, by the unwelcome variable of a new co-worker. They were young, fresh, and wielding their enthusiasm like a weapon. Time would wear them down soon enough, but for now they were eager and entirely unaware of the hell they were unleashing. Their first entries were disasters: expenses misclassified, invoices without dates, figures that refused to balance. Each error meant another ledger for him to rework, another stack of trial balances to unwind, another hour spent redrawing neat columns from someone else’s crooked math. By mid-afternoon the weight of it pressed behind his eyes, his pen dragging slower, his irritation carving grooves into the margins of the page.
He forgot about lunch at first. Sat back down at 12:36, the same young face now looming at his desk once more. More papers, another page from a task they didn’t fully understand.
Why take the job if you can’t fathom how it’s done?
Don’t be rude, Edward. He’s new. Just out of college.
Numbers aren’t survival for him.
He could no longer afford the polite smile, but he still tried not to let his voice slip into the quiet anger he was surely emanating by now. He took the ledger, scratching underlines and trying to explain equations. Eventually he let the kid go, telling them it was no bother, he could clean it up and they would go over it again in the morning. It was easier just to fix it and show them the results than stand there and try to verbalize any of it with the bristle of interruption stuck in his skull. He wasn’t the type to teach. Ink had stained the sides of his hands, and his desk was littered with shreds of eraser.
He had begun writing out an entirely new ledger by the time the clock struck 4:30, keeping notes for the new hire on what equations had been corrected. He was still writing at 5:44. By 7:16, he’d found another series of mistakes in one of the other things they needed looked-over. Each new problem pulled him further from the rhythm he clings to. Numbers, his numbers, flow as naturally as hymn from a choir boy, precise, repeatable, perfectly balanced. Edward had prided himself in keeping pristine records and turning in well-organized ledgers for years, it all moved through him in a quiet symphony of precision. These mistakes, missed transactions, payments recorded twice, numbers left off balance sheets—all of it cut through his orchestra like a fire alarm or the static of an old television. Each time he corrected something, it fell into further correction in dependent sheets, re-checking and re-revising. Over and over again. Until the automatic light finally clicked off in his office, and he noticed the time.
He didn’t count the steps. Didn’t consider the distance from work to the apartment. When he reached the front door to the building, he stopped. All of it was biting, screaming, writhing. What was he to do when he got inside? It was 11:28. He had no time to journal. No time for puzzles. Entering his space would mean an immediate shower, and then a restless few hours of sleep. Edward let his eyes linger on the doorknob for a few moments, before letting out a drawn sigh and tucking his keys back into his pocket. Everything was already scattered for the day, there was no salvaging it. Gotham was as quiet as he expected it to get that night, a distant conflict between the downstairs lovers audible from the entrance already.
The diner was less than a block away, its neon-framed window beckoning him gently, no visible movement inside. He let himself feel his mind crash into nothingness as he began walking over, hands balled into tight fists in the pockets of his jacket. The bell above the door rang somewhat pathetically at his entrance, and he thought for a moment that the yellow lights may have been left on by accident—it only took a few seconds for him to register the sounds of rummaging from under the counter, though. He sat on one of the stools in anticipation of the same puddle-faced woman that took his order every Thursday morning popping her head back up over the counter, maybe she’d look a bit more tired and worn down than usual by this hour.
Instead he was greeted by dark hair pulled tight, metal glasses, and a stare lost somewhere past him. Edward faltered. He didn’t recognize this clerk. What had he come in for, again?