The Bane of Our Existence [The Dark Knight Rises]

Prologue

Bría engaged her core as the ambulance made a sharp right turn. Her rock steady hands attached the IV drip into his arm with ease, for she had done this thousands of times before. Although Gotham City was very large, she recognized this man. He had terminal cancer, she had learned the first time they got the call from his home from his frantic wife. Bría looked at his sunken cheeks, hollow looking eyes, and sighed. She grabbed a thread and needle so that she could begin to stitch the wounds along his wrists; the first one was long and steady, very deliberate. The other one was shaky, for it was near impossible to cut both wrists and succeed in killing ones self.

"Oh Patrick." Bría wiped the seat from her brow on her dark blue uniform. It was hot in the back of the ambulance, especially when working like she was. As always, Gotham was short on paramedics, nurses, and doctors. The crime and death always bypassed the amount of those able to help.

She had already worked forty hours that week, and it was only Thursday.

"How many times are we going to do this?" She asked Patrick. He was fifty-two; too young to be dying of cancer.

"Until I succeed," he groaned.

Pressing her lips tight together so that the colour began to drain, she inhaled deep through her nose. The small metal hoop in her right nostril shifted position when she released the exhale. Although she had only been a paramedic for four years, this was not an unusual sight. Too many people could not afford good healthcare, the medication they needed and they instead chose to die, slowly. It was cruel, she believed, that men like Bruce Wayne could throw their money into cars and posh restaurants that charged four hundred dollars for a meal for two while everyone else starved.

She understood that people worked hard for their money, but some people worked equally as hard and got nothing back. It was unjust, she believed, but that was why she had come to Gotham, to America, to help better the world. The world was filled with the corrupt, and she wished to make it better; only, she had been here for two years and did not feel that she had made the world a better place, no matter how many lives she saved.

Outside of being a paramedic, Bría worked at the free clinic, and she went home after those shifts conflicted. She was helping those in need who could not afford it, but she also saw the horrid conditions that these people lived in. The bottom of the barrel, the shallow end of the gene pool, so to speak.

She knew what she needed to do.

"Patrick, you're going to continue this, no matter what?" She asked.

The ambulance turned another corner, and the man groaned. Then, he nodded. "Pills, booze, a knife, a shotgun, I'll do it."

"Why?"

"To spare my wife the pain of seeing me crumble, to spare myself from that pain. Bría, I can't live like this. It isn't right!"

Nibbling her lip, she thought long and hard. "You're in pain?"

"It never stops." His voice broke.

She bowed her head, wondering how quickly she'd be caught. Then she acted fast, for the hospital could not be far now. She needed to make sure Patrick was deceased before they could resuscitate him, although she knew he had a DNR. Grabbing a fresh syringe, she ripped it out of the package and then grabbed the tubing of his IV. Glancing at him, she gave him a compassionate look, the last look he would ever see.

He nodded and smiled; the look that she was giving him was not pity, sympathy, or disgust. It was something he had longed for ever since he was diagnosed; she could see him for what he was beyond the cancer that consumed him day after day.

She injected the air into the tube, and watched as it disappeared from sight, and watched as Patrick began to writhe, the heart attack consuming him. When he was dead, she discarded the syringe safely, and then sat back on her seat. It was not fool proof, they would find out what she did in no time at all, but she felt for the first time that she had done something right, that she had made the world a better place.

She'd eased one person's pain, made them suffer less, and that sat right with her even if it didn't with the law.