Night descended deliberately over Gotham. As soon as the sun sunk below the horizon, an invisible door in the ground seemed to open, and all the rot and the ugliness came pouring out.

By the time Devon left the emergency vet clinic, the sky had darkened and the city was soaked in neon and shadows. She stuck to the lit paths, street lamps and fruit stands, busy pavements flocking with businessmen scrambling to find the subway outlets. She hastened her steps past nightclubs and pounding music, averting her gaze from mean stares and scarred faces, tattoos and cigarette smoke.

Gotham was a city of direct proportions. The more potholes cratering the ground, the more malicious the people loitering in the dark.

Twenty years in this part of town, and Devon could say she was used to all of it. All the noise. All the gunshots and the sirens in the distance, the ambulances screeching past her on the street, the crooks come slinking out of the mouths of shadowed alleyways.

Up ahead, two people were emptying their pockets onto the pavement, turning themselves inside out with palpable fear. Devon caught the gleam of a gun and cut across the road to the other side of the street. Ducking her head down, she clutched the straps of her worn backpack tighter as she turned into her block. Her keys were tucked between her fingers, the way she'd been taught all her childhood. Around her, the buildings rose like rotting teeth jutting from the ground.

Outside a corner shop, a man in a sweat-soaked wife-beater licked his greasy lips and leered at her with beady eyes. Devon couldn't imagine what made her worth looking at in the moment. A long afternoon-to-evening's worth of assisting Claire, the vet at the emergency animal clinic she worked at part time during the academic year and full-time during the holidays, stitching up gashes on dogs that'd been gored half to death on fences, fixing a hamster's vaginal prolapse, and checking flea-bitten cats for other ailments, had her smelling like piss and wet dogs. Though, Devon supposed that men did what they wanted, regardless of logic.

A grey Subaru sat on the edge of her street, right in front of her apartment building. Through the windshield, she caught two silhouetted figures sitting in the front seat, and the gleam of what she'd come to recognise as the glare from a pair of binoculars pointed right at her.

The window was rolled down, the headlights flicked on.

"Hey, Devon," one of the men said, poking his head out the open window. "Any clue about your Ma yet?"

The GCPD had stopped sending uniformed officers to her door a couple weeks ago, after her mother disappeared. Plainclothes police came shortly after, haunting her route every step of the way. They couldn't touch her, not when she truly couldn't tell them anything. Even if she did know where her mother vanished off to, she wouldn't tell them.

Lips pursed into a tight line, Devon shook her head, continuing up the stoop.

"I don't believe you."

"Fuck off," Devon snarled, whipping round as the rage slashed through her, nerves ablaze. "The only reason you're here harassing me is because your entire department sucks at catching anything—even a petty thief—on your own."

Anger flickered over the driver's face. His lips pulled back in a menacing growl. "You—"

The moment the car door opened, she took flight, sprinting up the stairs, backpack bouncing against her lower back in protest, all the way to the fourth floor. At the top, she let out a shaky pant, heart thundering in her chest. While she wasn't completely out of shape, considering she walked everywhere, she definitely wasn't the epitome of fitness. If the lack of wind in her lungs and the time it took for her to finally catch her breath was any indication.

Devon ignored the angry red paint splashed over her front door and shoved her keys into the lock. The paint was wet, gleaming beneath the blinkering hallway light, rivulets of red streaking down the chipped wood. At first she thought it was blood. But Devon had seen blood before. The difference was in the viscosity, among other things. Even from the mouth of the stairs, the miasma of its noxious fumes smothered the stale air, hanging thick and heavy, a warning signal.

It would take her half a day to scrub off—both the paint and the shame—and though she felt the burn in her throat and the sharp prickle of pressure building up behind her forehead, she couldn't be bothered to deal with it now.

"They came this afternoon," a voice down the hall drawled, its vocal fry grazing Devon's nerves. "Screaming for your father. Woke my poor babies up."

Leant against her own doorframe, Ms Lilliana flicked cherry ash onto the floor, blowing smoke from her puckered mouth. Her bottle-dyed red hair was gathered into a tall do upon her head, and her leopard-print silk kimono sagged low, exposing half her UV bed-tanned cleavage. Botox had stretched the unnaturally shiny skin of her weathered face back into a permanently shocked expression, and her dark, microbladed brows were cocked into what Devon assumed was a mirthless scowl. On cue, a sharp, disgruntled yowl cut through the air as a fat tabby cat emerged from Ms Lilliana's door.

The apology was stuck halfway up her throat, and no matter what she did, her jaw seemed soldered into place, teeth clenched tight. If she spoke, she feared she might scream. Or worse, cry. Instead, she opened the door and stepped over the printed pictures scattered unceremoniously over her doorstep, leaving a dirty boot print stamped across her father's unsmiling face.

"Better clean that up before it dries!" Ms Lilliana called as Devon slammed the door shut with more force than required and deadbolted it. The thin walls shook from the impact.

Inhaling sharply through her nose, Devon screwed her eyes shut as she pressed her back against the door, and listened as Ms Lilliana clicked her tongue against her teeth and retreated into her own apartment. In the pounding silence of her empty apartment, something was unravelling, a stitch within her tightly-wound world coming undone. The inflated tightness in her chest had been there since she could remember, but in moments like these, she felt it most acutely.

In the midst of it, the hammering emptiness, the vacuous cavity of her apartment and its ever-peeling wallpaper, the lick of resentment blossomed like a wound. And though she couldn't picture her father's face after all these years, she remembered him on his knees, tremorous hands grasping hers with a tenacity that could only come from desperation, his pleas shattering right through to her heart.

This is the last time, baby, I promise. I just need a little bit more. Fifty bucks. I'll turn that into thousands. You'll see. I'll get us out of here. I'll buy you everything you want. We can finally pay for college. I just need whatever you have. This will be the last time.

But there were a million "last times"—these magic words uttered throughout her childhood, vanishing her father bit by bit until she'd come home from school one day and he was just gone. She assumed he'd just taken a trip to the mahjong tables with friends of friends, as he always did, but something felt off this time.

Something in the air had shifted, curdling the silence. Her mother had been sitting at the dining table nursing a glass of cheap wine. Her piggybank of savings lay in shattered pieces on the floor in the vestibule, only a couple pennies lying in the midst of the plastic pieces where it'd been at least half-full before. When Devon asked about him, her mother simply shrugged. After that, there was no body, there were no calls to the house, and it seemed as though the street had simply swallowed him up. It wouldn't take long for her mother to follow.

"Get over it," Devon murmured, cuttingly, forcing slow breaths through her lungs, though it did nothing to dissipate the pressure chamber between her ribs, slowly pulverising her organs. "Get the fuck over it."

When she opened her eyes, the world was still. And the vestibule was dark, and there was nothing for her here. And it seemed like everyone who had ever inhabited these walls knew how to leave—except her. All she knew was the haunting silence. Sometimes Devon wondered if she would die here.

Devon scrubbed her hands over her face and smoothed over the wrinkles in her navy blue cable-knitted sweater. As she shucked her navy blue Converse off and placed them onto the shoe rack, the routine took over like a well-oiled automation.

The apartment was small, cluttered and without charm. Stacks of newspapers were piled up against the walls, along with unopened cardboard boxes of old pictures and paraphernalia. The couch in the living room was swarmed with more. These days, nobody sat there, and Devon had sold the TV to pay the bills last month. Though the impression of her mother's body was still there, it'd been cold for weeks now. Now, Devon used the space in the living room to dry her clothes. The laundry rack was spread out in the middle, her washed clothes draped over the bars. She'd done the laundry this morning, and the apartment smelled like lavender soap.

A single, framed photograph was mounted to the wall in the corridor, just opposite her bedroom. Devon stopped to straighten it, jaw tight as she avoided looking at the four beaming faces staring back at her. Then she turned away, retreated into her bedroom, and dumped her backpack at the foot of her bed. She draped her sweater over the back of her desk chair.

The shower was quick, efficient. Beneath the cold spray, between cursing out the shitty water pressure and emptying the last of her shampoo into her palm, Devon ran through her mental list of things she needed to get done by the end of the week. At the top of her list was the lit review due next Wednesday, of which she'd only just managed to pool the first of her resources to cobble together a coherent thesis statement.

Dinner was a handful of pork and chive potstickers sizzling over the stove, soy sauce and boiled udon. It wasn't as quick and easy as instant ramen, but Devon had learnt her lesson from last month's frankly traumatic experience of scooping clump after clump of her own hair out of the shower drain.

Chopsticks clipped between her teeth, Devon took her steaming bowl of food into her bedroom, stepping over piles of books, and set it down on her desk. She flicked her desk lamp on. It crackled to life immediately, its bright, halogen bulb casting a lurid glow over her cramped room. Her room was neat, her bed always made, and her desk—pushed up against the window—perpetually uncluttered and clear of distractions. Her stuffed hippo sat atop her pillow, its surviving, beady eye peering at her pleadingly. Only her wooden-tiled floor suffered the bulk of her stress-induced messiness, jackets and single socks pooled in a corner. From her backpack, she pulled out her chunky dinosaur of a laptop and a blue notebook.

She drew the curtains open, and between too-salty bites of noodles and fried dumplings, she booted up her computer and dove straight into her Immunology and Animal Health and Disease readings. Devon cracked her notebook open, and snatched a pen from her stationary cup on the corner of her desk.

Amidst the city-song of distant sirens and gunshots peppering the silence, the whirring of her computer fan and the gushing of the pipes in the walls, Devon carved a neat path through the words on her screen.

Time slipped through her ink-stained fingers, the minutes swallowed like coins in a sofa. And with it, chunks of text on T helper cells and cytokine reagents, the clamour of her neighbours fighting next door, the heaviness beginning to tug on her eyelids, paper after paper on recombinant proteins and monoclonal antibody probes. Her notebook filled with bullet pointed scribbles, notes in the margins, blue ink smudged under the underside of her aching left hand.

Bit by bit, article by article, paragraph by paragraph, the red paint on her front door and the pictures of her father vanished into a small corner in the back of her mind.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
happy tuesday! we have a glimpse into devon's life as a lonely, lonely gal who may be suffering from very high functioning depression haha chapters for this fic will be quite short.

next one we get to meet jason LOL i'm so excITED FOR THEIR DYNAMIC!!!!!