Alex was a misdemeanor prisoner.
Before entering Wayne's private prison, he'd been a member of the Falcone organization—which sounded impressive on paper but in practice meant he was just the most insignificant minion in Gotham's largest criminal empire. A name on a roster. A pair of hands that did what needed doing. The kind of person the bosses never learned to recognize by face.
When Alex first arrived in Gotham three years ago, he'd wanted to find legitimate work. He'd really tried. Filled out applications, showed up for interviews, smiled at hiring managers who looked at his East End address and his lack of connections and told him they'd "keep his resume on file."
Gotham didn't give him many options.
He'd suffered through a whole year of legitimate employment—retail stock clerk, overnight janitor, food delivery driver, any job that would take someone with no experience and no references. The money he earned was barely enough to support himself and his mother. Barely being the operative word.
The expired oatmeal distributed by the relief station was hard to swallow, but it was free. His mother's asthma medication could only be afforded through black market generics that may or may not have been the real thing. The extra rent their landlord collected wasn't really rent—it was protection money for a gang, the price you paid for not having your windows broken or your door kicked in. There were thugs stealing wallets on the subway. Robbers running out of alleys at night. A pervasive sense that the city was designed to extract every dollar from people who had none to spare.
He'd heard that Wayne Enterprises was researching some clean energy initiative that would reduce industrial pollution. But it was too late for his family. The exhaust from the chemical plants in the East End had been pervasive for decades. His mother had arrived in Gotham with healthy lungs. Within a year, she'd developed asthma severe enough to require daily medication she couldn't afford.
That's how the city worked. It took healthy people and ground them down until they had to make choices no one should have to make.
Alex's first contact with organized crime came when he was desperately trying to raise money for his mother's medical expenses.
A colleague—another stock clerk at the warehouse, a guy who always seemed to have a little extra money despite the same minimum wage paycheck—told him about a way to make extra cash doing odd jobs. Not too dangerous, the colleague promised. Good money. Easy work if you had a strong stomach.
Did Alex want in?
Of course he wanted in. His mother was coughing blood into tissues and trying to hide them from him. Of course he wanted in.
The colleague dragged him to a casino after their shift ended. For a terrifying moment, Alex thought he was being recruited as a gambler—that his desperation was that obvious, that predatory. But there was no one in the casino at the time, and his colleague wasn't taking him to the tables.
They were there to clean.
The main floor looked like a slaughterhouse had been relocated to a gambling establishment. Large pools of sticky blood, already congealing at the edges. Metal bullet casings scattered across the carpet like macabre confetti. Drag marks through the blood leading to the back exit—something heavy being pulled, leaving a trail. Bloody footprints tracking patterns of panic and flight. A poker table split down the middle, splintered wood jutting at angles. Broken glasses. Spilled liquor mixing with blood. Shredded pieces of clothing, some with holes that told stories about their former owners.
But there were no corpses. No injured people. No witnesses.
"Brother, it's safe." His colleague patted his shoulder and laughed like this was the most normal thing in the world. "A scene without any living people is the safest kind. We don't even need to deal with bodies—we have special scavengers for that job. All you have to do is help clean up this place."
The colleague gestured around like a contractor explaining a renovation project. "Sweeping, wiping away the blood, collecting the bullet casings, burning the scraps of cloth, moving the broken furniture to the disposal truck. These are all small tasks. Do them quickly and efficiently, ask no questions, and you're golden."
He grinned. "Most importantly? The employer is generous. Pays cash. No questions asked. Isn't that enough?"
So Alex became a black-market cleaner that day.
And he began to be able to afford rent without skipping meals.
Gradually, the work expanded. He began to help move corpses—the "special scavengers" sometimes needed extra hands for heavy lifting—and then he could afford food, clothing, and basic household expenses for both himself and his mother.
Finally, he joined the Falcone organization officially. Became a made member, low-level but legitimate in the eyes of the family. He could rent apartments through the organization's internal channels without paying protection fees to other gangs. Could access bulk medication through family connections at a fraction of black market prices.
And thus, finally, he could afford his mother's asthma medication.
He did this dirty work day after day. Month after month. Cleaning crime scenes, moving bodies, asking no questions. He told himself it was temporary. Just until he saved enough to take his mother to a real hospital for treatment. Just until he could afford to move out of the East End. Just until Gotham gave him another option.
Then one day, he was stopped in his tracks by a corpse.
It was the body of an old woman, hunched over even in death, wearing simple gray clothes that were obviously cheap clearance items from some discount store. Her expression didn't show pain—the bullet hole was in her forehead, death probably instantaneous. Mercifully quick, as these things went.
But she was so clearly not a gangster. Not an enforcer or a dealer or even a civilian caught in crossfire while doing something shady. Just an old woman in cheap gray clothes who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The gray reminded Alex of what his mother wore.
"Alex, what are you doing?"
His companion came over to see what had frozen him in place, then understood immediately.
"Don't look at it too long, Alex." The other man's voice was tired, worn down by too many scenes like this. "This is probably just an ordinary old lady who got caught in a gunfight. This kind of thing happens all the time in Gotham. Sometimes it's young people, sometimes kids, but this time it's an old woman. She was unlucky. Got hit in the head by a stray bullet."
The companion shrugged. "But if that bullet had been a little off, she might have died a very painful death. At least this was quick."
"Are we just going to get rid of her like this?" Alex's voice came out hoarse.
"Yeah, there's nothing else we can do, right? What's the alternative?"
"What about her family?"
"Who knows?" The companion spread his hands helplessly. "They could be alive, dead, on either side of the shootout. Maybe she has no family. Maybe they're the ones who'll file a missing person report that goes nowhere. Anyway, the boss's order is to clean up the scene completely. We can't keep her body. We have to dump it in Gotham Harbor like always."
Alex stood there, silent and motionless. He looked at the body and saw his mother's gray clothes. Saw his mother's hunched posture from years of factory work. Saw the future where some other cleaner would dispose of her body after she was caught in crossfire she had nothing to do with.
"I know this might be hard for you, Alex." The companion sighed and began moving the body with practiced efficiency. "It's hard for me too sometimes. But we're family, and the family's interests are most important. Besides, this kind of thing happens constantly. I'm used to it. You'll get used to it sooner or later."
Can you get used to it?
Alex didn't know. But his numb mind drove his body to move anyway. His hands helped lift the old woman. His arms helped carry her to the car. His back helped lower her into Gotham Harbor, weighted down so she'd sink to the bottom with all the other inconvenient corpses the city wanted to forget.
The next day, Alex passed that street again.
Everything was back to normal. The casino was operating like nothing had happened. The street was calm, pedestrians walking with the hurried indifference of people who knew better than to notice things. There was no news about it on television. Instead, the channels were broadcasting Bruce Wayne's latest romantic scandal, the Romans' high-society charity gala, and footage of Superman saving people in Metropolis.
Gotham was as peaceful as any other day.
Until a few days later, when a missing person notice for an elderly woman was posted in the corner of a newspaper and flipped past by commuters who didn't have time to read about other people's tragedies.
From that day forward, Alex began paying attention to the bodies he moved.
Some were in their forties and fifties. Some in their twenties and thirties. Some were teenagers who should have been in school instead of bleeding out on casino floors. Some looked like him—young men from the East End with no options and fewer prospects. Some didn't.
He even started checking the information when he could. Wallets left in pockets. Identification cards. Social media profiles pulled up on his phone while his companions weren't looking.
Most of them were gang members who lived in the poor East End, just like him. A few were mid-level operators who'd managed to afford places in the slightly more prosperous Otisburg. There was never anyone from the upscale Burnley district or the Diamond District where Gotham's actual elite lived.
The people who died in gang wars were always people like Alex. The people who cleaned up after gang wars were always people like Alex. The people who profited from gang wars lived in penthouses and never learned the names of the disposable people who bled for their enterprises.
Every night after that, Alex began waking from dreams. Nightmares, really. He dreamed corpses covering the ground, all of them crying out to him with his own voice. He dreamed his hands and body were covered in blood that wouldn't wash off no matter how hard he scrubbed. He dreamed the people lying dead on the floor all had his face, his clothes, his mother's gray jacket.
Perhaps most of them had been no different from Alex. Just unlucky. Just didn't survive.
It was from that day that Alex began refusing to carry guns. He avoided gang fights whenever possible, found excuses not to be present when violence was planned. Because he did such good work collecting bodies—efficient, discreet, never asked questions—he managed to avoid the fate of becoming an enforcer.
Of course, everything has a price.
Alex, who stopped being muscle, lost any possibility of climbing the organization's hierarchy. And he acquired a nickname within the family that followed him everywhere.
Coward.
That's what the others called him. The ones who carried guns and didn't mind using them. The ones who hadn't yet moved enough bodies to start having nightmares.
Alex didn't correct them. Being called a coward was better than becoming something worse.
Then the war between Gotham's two major crime families suddenly began—at least in Alex's eyes it was sudden, though the tensions had probably been building for years.
The mid-level members of the Falcone family were arrested and thrown into prison like dumplings into boiling water. Then the upper-level members. Then the lower-level members, the foot soldiers, the cleaners, the corpse collectors.
Including him.
On the day he was arrested, Alex felt a strange sense of relief that he'd been caught while cleaning up a scene rather than participating in violence. At least his mother wouldn't have to watch him being stuffed into a police car. At least she could maintain the fiction that her son worked legitimate odd jobs for legitimate employers.
"I know you're going to send me to prison," he said to the bearded Commissioner processing his arrest. "A private prison, right? Wayne's new facility?"
The Commissioner looked him over with eyes that had seen too many young men just like Alex making the same choices for the same desperate reasons.
He nodded.
"Could you please let me call my mother?" Alex's voice cracked slightly. "Let me talk to her before... before I go?"
The Commissioner studied him for a long moment. Then his expression softened just slightly—not much, but enough to suggest he was human under the professional detachment.
"Yeah, kid. You can make your call."
Alex reached for the phone with shaking hands.
"But don't leave any last words," the Commissioner added, his voice carrying a strange mixture of cynicism and something that might have been kindness. "The years in jail might be the most human years you ever live. At least in prison, nobody expects you to move corpses for rent money."