A Heart of Stone (Part 2)

Gordon and Barbara had a fight when he came home. Barbara had waited up for him until very late. She sat alone in the darkened room, the carefully prepared dinner on the table already cold. It had been meant to celebrate the purchase of their first home, but the most important person was missing from the meal.

Barbara knew Gordon was busy, but she knew even better that he was so busy not because he lacked the ability to finish his work, but because the place where he worked had no need for police at all.

Having stood by Gordon through it all, Barbara knew perfectly well that with his abilities, he would not have struggled so much in any city other than Gotham. More importantly, she knew that no matter how hard Gordon worked, it meant nothing. He could not save this place.

When Gordon returned, Barbara was sitting on the sofa, stroking a photograph. It had been taken after they finished their internships. In it, both she and Gordon looked very young, practically still children.

Neither of them had been twenty then. They had been together for less than two months, gotten completely drunk at a party, and talked together about their aspirations.

Barbara’s family was in a terrible situation. She wanted to make money and improve the lives of her parents and siblings. Gordon had been born into a moderately well-off middle-class family. A police officer had once saved his family, so he had dreamed of becoming a police officer who upheld justice ever since he was young.

Though their ambitions differed, they still fell in love. Even years of long-distance dating had not weakened their relationship.

But that night, emotions that had been piling up for so long seemed to erupt all at once. Barbara sat on the sofa and cried silently while Gordon stood at the door without saying a word.

It was not that he did not want to comfort Barbara, nor that he could remain unmoved while his beloved fiancée wept alone.

But he knew. He knew what Barbara wanted to say, and he knew he could not answer her question—why did he insist on staying in Gotham?

Gordon was not a Gotham native. He had been born in Chicago, and he had not grown up poor. On the contrary, he had been raised as a middle-class child in relative comfort. He was no super genius; most of what he had achieved came from hard work.

From his teachers and classmates to the fiancée who spent every day with him, no one understood why Gordon had given up such a promising future in the Chicago Police Department to come to this hellhole called Gotham—and then stayed for years.

Gordon had not achieved anything in the Gotham Police Department.

His promotions had come painfully slowly. After several years, he was still only the leader of a small unit. He had never solved any major cases, and even when he contributed to certain investigations, the credit never went to him. As for upholding justice or changing Gotham, that was even more out of the question.

But Gordon seemed possessed. He simply had to stay here. Whenever his former teachers and classmates mentioned him, they always wore looks of regret. In their eyes, if Gordon had learned even a little flexibility, he would have achieved far more than he had now.

Gordon walked over and wrapped Barbara in his arms. She kept crying, but she asked nothing, because she knew that Gordon had never given her an answer to the question she most wanted to ask.

Whenever faced with the choice between his badge and his beloved, Gordon had always answered with silence.

Gotham’s nights never lacked the sound of crying, but Barbara’s tears had to be different. Few people here wept for their lovers. The warmth in their chests was not even enough to keep themselves warm; they would not cry their hearts out over something as intangible as love.

Precisely because he had witnessed so much crying in Gotham’s nights, Barbara’s grief and tears hurt Gordon all the more. He felt like a murderer worse than those criminals.

He thought that once he had chosen to live in this Abyss, he should not have expected anyone from the surface to spare him a second glance. Even if there were such a person, her fate would only be to shed tears for him, like Gotham’s cold midnight rain falling upon him. But those tears would ultimately be shed in vain. Countless lovers’ tears were like countless fine raindrops; they could not change this unyielding stone.

The next day, Harvey came to visit Schiller again. Schiller found it somewhat surprising, because the lawyer had always cared greatly about etiquette and rarely showed up without an appointment.

Harvey said, "Gordon came to see me yesterday. He wanted me to find his fiancée a job as a legal consultant, preferably in Metropolis or another southern city."

"I thought his mental state seemed off, so I came to see you. I don’t think he and his fiancée merely had a fight. They had already bought a house and were even planning how many children to have, yet now Gordon looks like he wants to break up with Barbara. Something is very wrong…"

Schiller trusted Harvey’s instincts, but when he called Gordon, the call went unanswered. When he called Gordon’s precinct, his colleagues told Schiller that the diligent detective, who had worked overtime every day for years, had unexpectedly failed to show up that afternoon.

Schiller had a bad feeling. He hurriedly contacted Gordon’s partner—Batman.

Gordon had spent the entire previous night thinking. In the end, the next morning, he broke up with Barbara.

To get Barbara out of Gotham as soon as possible, he asked Harvey, the prominent lawyer, to find her a new job, preferably as far away from Gotham as possible.

Gordon was only an ordinary man. The emotional blow of breaking up with the girlfriend he had loved for years nearly crushed him.

At the precinct, he was unable to focus on work all morning, drifting through it in a daze. By noon, everyone had gone to eat, and Gordon could no longer bear to remain in the empty office.

In a mental fog, he walked out of the precinct. He only wanted to find somewhere with more people, somewhere that would keep him from drowning in that despairing grief.

But things went against his wishes. Just as he had expected, his troubles were far from over.

Not long after he left, he realized someone was following him. Gordon became a little more alert and wanted to return to the precinct quickly. There were guards there with heavy weapons; no one could easily break in.

But the people following him were cunning. When Gordon saw several ill-intentioned faces staring at him up ahead, he knew that continuing forward would lead to nothing good.

He had only brought one gun. The magazine was full, but a pistol had limited stopping power. Relying only on his familiarity with the terrain, he turned right into an alley with his gun in hand and hid in a blind spot around a corner.

It did not help. The people following him clearly knew the area just as well. The moment they saw Gordon turn right, they immediately followed.

The footsteps outside the alley drew closer and closer as the sky gradually darkened. Gordon silently calculated the timing. When the footsteps reached the alley entrance, he fired a shot at it, taking advantage of the instant when dusk turned to darkness, when human vision was at its worst.

When he saw that his bullet had missed, Gordon immediately abandoned his first plan. He knew the people on the other side had to be trained Assassins; poor visibility would not affect them.

He immediately put away his gun and ran deeper into the alley. Two shots rang out behind him. What puzzled Gordon was the muffled sound of suppressors. He understood at once: these people were not Gotham locals.

Gotham Assassins did not put suppressors on their guns. There was no point. No one in Gotham reacted especially to gunfire. It was like putting earplugs on a deaf person.

With that thought, Gordon formed a new plan.

The people behind him chased ever closer, clearly superior to Gordon in both stamina and explosive speed. Gordon ran to the end of the alley, then quickly climbed up an outer wall.

Just as he reached the top of the wall, his pursuers arrived. At that exact moment, when Gordon’s movement stalled, a gunshot rang out. Gordon was hit, and he used the momentum to flip over the wall and fall into the yard beyond.

The bullet struck his arm and did not cause a fatal wound. Gordon clutched his arm and continued running, shouting as he ran, "The Black Tower Gang is making a move! They fired! They fired!"

The yard belonged to a nightclub. At those words, people immediately rushed out, and the man pursuing Gordon was instantly surrounded by gang enforcers.

He had just climbed to the top of the wall as well, caught in that inconvenient instant of movement. Three or four bullets struck him on the spot.

Gotham’s rule of action was simple: whether you could see them or not, whether you knew who was on the other side or not, shoot first. Talk after they hit the ground.

But Gordon’s crisis was not over. There was clearly a group after him. The first man he had shaken off was merely an appetizer. Soon, after he ran through the alley and reached the road, he saw a car charging toward him.

It seemed they had several plans, or perhaps they had intended from the beginning to use that man to drive Gordon onto the road and run him down.

Gordon rolled directly to the right. The car indeed missed him, but a black gun barrel extended from its window.

Gordon had barely regained his footing before he was hit again. This bullet struck his back, and Gordon let out a scream.

However, since the shot had been fired from a speeding car, it had not struck a vital spot directly. It only grazed him. Blinding pain swallowed Gordon, but his will to survive kept him running.

The worse the pain became, the clearer Gordon’s mind grew. He knew that if he kept running like this, he would be caught within minutes. Enduring the agony, he pressed one arm tightly against his chest while blood continued to pour from the other, which had been shot.

Following the route in his memory, Gordon ran to the back door of an apartment building. The lock on that door was broken and had never closed properly. He yanked hard on the lock with one arm. The wound in his chest made every movement unbearably painful, and Gordon’s breathing grew heavier and heavier.

Soon, the door was pulled open just enough. Gordon was neither tall nor powerfully built, and he could just squeeze through the gap.

After getting inside, he did not stop. He took a short flight of stairs two at a time, tore open the nearest hallway window, then desperately climbed through it. He shut the window behind him and hid on a protruding awning outside the second floor.

When he heard the sound of someone battering down the door below, Gordon gritted his teeth and slid down the awning, dropping straight onto another canopy. Fortunately, since he had slid down on his back, he had left no trail of blood.

After landing on the canopy, Gordon used the last of his strength to roll down, letting the garbage bags below cover him. After a while, he heard the footsteps inside the building fade away. They had not found him. It seemed they had left.

Gordon lay amid a pile of garbage, feeling every breath carry a heavy stench of blood. That bullet had injured his lung.

His arm had begun to go numb from blood loss, but he could still clearly feel the engagement ring on his middle finger. His body heat was gradually becoming one with the cold metal band.

He recalled Barbara’s expression when he broke up with her—her disbelief, her utter heartbreak.

He thought Barbara had been right. He was an idiot, a hopeless idiot, an idiot who would never learn to compromise, an idiot who deserved to die alone.

Gordon felt an irresistible chill sweep over him, followed by a warm current rising from within his body. Blood from the gash on his temple, received when he fell, ran down his forehead and into his eyes, staining his vision crimson before covering it in a veil of black mist.

Soon, it began to rain in Gotham again. There was nothing special about that day’s rain. Like every night rain in Gotham, it was fine and cold.

Gordon’s consciousness gradually blurred. Like a trapped beast lying in the Abyss, these lovers’ tears falling from the sky could not save his fading life. But the rain that reminded him of his beloved’s tears stirred an even firmer emotion in his heart. He thought:

If he had been born an idiot incapable of compromise, willing to exhaust every shred of living vigor in this mire, with a heart as hard as dead stone—

Then let him die here alone. Let the rotting wind blow over his dry bones until it carried away every trace that he had lived. And when faced with this endless darkness, let the last shred of his soul still resist stubbornly, refusing to kneel.

Gordon thought—

Then let him stand here, one against ten thousand, until dawn.