The Vindictive & The Vengeful

Vindictive | ι

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Something In the Way

Li Harper

The bright, unsettling lights I've gotten ever so used to blared their flashy pattern as I slid out of the cramped patrol car and onto the glassy street below. Well, glassy is putting it nicely, more so a depressing slew of rainwater and god knows what else. The site always reflected Gotham in its true nature; this city has never known what it's like to be appealing, always keeping to the comfort of the filth that you find nearly every night on the news recap. And that filth, that keeps Gotham unwelcoming, is apart of my everyday job.

Ducking under the yellow tape, the scene etches itself out, the faint blood markings being it's own type of ink. Silent chaos befalls what I can only guess is where the victim lays with EMS leaving the area with that look upon their faces. The look is one often clad by this entire city -the Gotham Grimace as my colleagues have named it- a face filled with disbelief and hopelessness along with overwhelming shock.

"Harper," an all too serious voice calls out to me just ahead, motioning me over to the close knit circle of fellow GCPD and the forensic photographers.

I make my way over to Commissioner Gordon, and as I approach, notice another all too familiar sight along side him, one that sends my skin crawling.

Oh you've got to be shitting me, he's here.

"What's got everyone here for," I question before immediately shutting myself off. Before me, lay a man slumped in a pool of blood against the stairs to an apartment complex. Yet this wasn't a normal Gotham mugging, or hell even something that freak from Arkham did; not only was the man dead wide eyed in complete horror, but his shirt was torn to reveal a gruesome and jagged slice through his abdomen -that looked to had previously been stitched up in a shitty way-. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't muster the strength to look away, and the longer my gaze stayed glued, more I wished I could've turned. His wound had poured out blood before his untimely death, but despite the dark stains you could see where his skin met his abdominal wall and how truly gutted he had been.

A sudden tap on my shoulder snapped me back to my surroundings and to get my shit together. Commissioner Gordon retrieved a crimson stained baggy and began to raise it, "They fetched this from his abdomen, where it was stitched in."

Too bad he couldn't have stitched his mouth shut.

The note was barely legible enough to see from all that surrounded it, but you can tell the person who did this, wasn't just like a normal case.

"Who's the guy?"

The brooding voice I've grown used to against my will over this past year or so, emerged out of nowhere like he always manages too.

"Dr. Henry Birch," Gordon answers the man draped entirely in black material whilst handing over the bag, "he was one of the heads of Psychiatry at Arkham."

The name seems to radiate among my thoughts, clouding anything and everything that I needed to keep my head clear at this moment. "Should he even be touching that," I question to the Commissioner as the praised vigilante thumbs over the evidence before abruptly stopping.

"I have gloves," he retorts back, "and I'm helping. You don't seem to be." Before I can even try to reply back to him, he does what he always good at and oversteps. "Cross examine the handwriting," he addresses at a nearby forensic investigator and passes the item off as the scene begins to die down.