A Heart of Stone (Part 2)

Gordon and Barbara had a fight when they got home, and Barbara waited for him until very late. She sat alone in the dark room, a cold dinner laid out on the table—a meal Barbara had carefully prepared to celebrate their upcoming purchase of their first home. Sadly, the most important person was missing from this dinner.

Barbara knew Gordon was busy, but she also knew that Gordon was so busy not because he was incapable of doing his job, but because the place where he worked didn't need police at all.

Barbara, who had been with Gordon all along, knew very well that with Gordon's abilities, he wouldn't have had to go through such a difficult time in any city other than Gotham. More importantly, Barbara also knew that even if Gordon worked so hard, it would be meaningless; he couldn't save this place.

When Gordon returned, Barbara was sitting on the sofa, stroking a photograph. It was a picture they had taken after their internship, in which Gordon and she looked very young, almost like children.

They were both under 20 at the time, and had only been dating for less than two months. They got drunk at a party and talked about their ambitions.

Barbara's family situation was not good, and she wanted to earn money to improve the lives of her parents and brothers. Gordon was born into a middle-class family with some wealth. Because a policeman once saved his family, he dreamed of becoming a policeman who upholds justice since he was a child.

Despite their different aspirations, they still fell in love, and even a long-distance relationship that lasted for several years did not diminish their feelings for each other.

But that very night, it was as if all the emotions that had been building up for so long burst forth at once. Barbara sat on the sofa, silently shedding tears, while Gordon stood at the door without saying a word.

It wasn't that he didn't want to comfort Barbara, nor that he could stand by and watch his beloved fiancée weep alone.

But he knew, he knew what Barbara was going to say, and he also knew that he couldn't answer Barbara's question—why did he have to stay in Gotham?

Gordon is not a native of Gotham; he was born in Chicago. He was not from a poor background; on the contrary, he was a middle-class child who grew up in relative wealth. He is not a super genius; most of his achievements come from his hard work.

From his teachers and classmates to his fiancée with whom he spent every day, no one understood why Gordon would give up a promising future with the Chicago Police Department to come to this godforsaken place, Gotham, and stay for several years.

Gordon did not achieve anything within the Gotham Police Department.

His promotions have been incredibly slow. Several years have passed, and he's still just a team leader. He hasn't solved any major cases, and even when he contributes to some, the credit never goes to him. Let alone anything like upholding justice or changing Gotham.

But Gordon was as if he were bewitched; he insisted on staying there. All his former teachers and classmates always looked regretful when they talked about him. In their opinion, if Gordon had known a little more flexibility, his achievements would have been much greater than they are now.

Gordon went over and hugged Barbara. She kept crying, but she didn't ask anything because she knew that Gordon had never answered the question she most wanted to ask.

When faced with the choice between his police badge and his lover, Gordon has always remained silent.

Gotham's nights are never short of weeping, but Barbara's weeping must be special. Few people here shed tears for their lovers; the warmth in their hearts isn't even enough to warm themselves, let alone cry out for something as ephemeral as love.

Having witnessed too much crying in Gotham's nights, Barbara's sadness and tears made Gordon feel even worse; he felt like a murderer worse than those criminals.

He thought that once he decided to live in this Abyss, he should no longer expect people on the surface to look at him. Even if there were such people, their end would only be to shed tears for him, like the cold rain falling on him in the dead of night in Gotham. But those tears were ultimately shed in vain. Thousands of lovers' tears are like thousands of drizzles, unable to change this inflexible and stubborn rock.

The next day, Harvey visited Schiller again, which surprised Schiller, as the lawyer was always very particular about etiquette and rarely showed up without an appointment.

Harvey said, "Gordon came to me yesterday hoping I could find his fiancée a job as a legal counsel, preferably in Metropolis or another southern city."

"I noticed something was off about his mental state, which is why I came to see you. I feel that it's not just a simple argument between him and his fiancée. They've already bought a house and are even planning to have a few kids, but now Gordon seems to want to break up with Barbara. This is very strange..."

Schiller trusted Harvey's intuition, but when he called Gordon, his number went unanswered. When he called Gordon's police station, his colleagues told Schiller that the hardworking detective, who had been working overtime every day for years, hadn't come to work that afternoon.

Schiller had a bad feeling, so he quickly contacted Gordon's partner, Batman.

Last night, Gordon thought about it all night, and finally, the next morning, he broke up with Barbara.

In order to get Barbara out of Gotham as soon as possible, he asked Harvey, a top lawyer, to find Barbara a new job, preferably one as far away from Gotham as possible.

Gordon was just an ordinary person; the emotional shock of breaking up with his girlfriend of many years nearly drove him to a breakdown.

At the police station, he couldn't concentrate on his work all morning, and by noon, everyone had gone to lunch, leaving the empty office unbearable for Gordon.

He walked out of the police station in a daze, wanting only to find a place with more people to stay, so that he could stop immersing himself in that despairing sadness.

But things didn't go as planned; just as he had predicted, his troubles were far from over.

Not long after he left, he realized someone was following him. Gordon regained some composure and wanted to get back to the police station as soon as possible, where there were heavily armed guards and it wouldn't be easy for anyone to break in.

But his pursuers were cunning. When Gordon saw several menacing faces staring at him on the road ahead, he knew that continuing on would not end well.

He only carried one gun, and although the magazine was full, the pistol's lethality was very limited. He could only rely on his familiarity with the terrain to turn right into the alley and hide in a blind spot around a corner.

This action had no effect; those who were following him clearly knew the terrain well, and when they saw Gordon turn right, they immediately followed.

The footsteps outside the alley grew closer, and the sky gradually darkened. Gordon silently calculated the time in his mind. When the footsteps appeared at the entrance of the alley, taking advantage of the moment when the sky turned from dusk to darkness and people's vision was at its worst, Gordon fired a shot at the entrance of the alley.

Seeing that his bullets missed, Gordon immediately abandoned his first plan. He knew that the opponent must be a well-trained Assassin who would not be affected by his field of vision.

He immediately holstered his gun and ran back. Two gunshots rang out behind him. What puzzled Gordon was that the gunshots had the muffled sound of a silencer. Gordon immediately realized that these people were not locals of Gotham.

Gotham's Assassin don't equip their guns with silencers; it makes no sense. Nobody in Gotham reacts to gunshots anyway; it's like putting earplugs on a deaf person.

With this in mind, Gordon devised a new plan.

The pursuers were getting closer and closer, clearly having more stamina and explosive power than Gordon. Gordon ran to the end of the alley and then quickly climbed up an outer wall.

Just as he reached the top of the wall, his pursuers arrived. It was the instant Gordon's movements faltered that Gordon was shot. He then tumbled down the wall and fell into the yard.

The shot hit his arm, but wasn't fatal. Gordon clutched his arm and kept running, shouting, "The Black Tower Gang gang has made their move! They've opened fire! They've opened fire!"

The courtyard was the backyard of a nightclub. Upon hearing this, someone immediately rushed out, and the person following Gordon was surrounded by the gangsters.

Just as he climbed to the top of the wall and was in a moment of immobility, he was hit by three or four bullets.

Gotham's operating principle is: regardless of whether you can see them or not, regardless of who the other person is, shoot them first, and talk to them only after they're down.

But Gordon's crisis was not over. It was clear that he was being chased by a group of people. The first person he shook off was just an appetizer. Soon, as he ran through the alley and onto the road, he saw a car rushing towards him.

It seems they had several plans, or perhaps they originally intended to use that person to drive Gordon onto the road and then run him over with a car.

Gordon rolled to the right, and the car did not hit him, but a dark gun barrel protruded from the car.

Gordon had barely regained his footing when he was shot again, this time in the back, Gordon let out a scream.

However, because the shot was fired while driving at high speed, it didn't hit a vital spot; it was a graze. The intense pain overwhelmed Gordon, but his will to survive kept him running forward.

The more pain he felt, the clearer Gordon's mind became. He knew that if he kept running like this, he would be caught up in just a few minutes. He endured the intense pain, clutching his chest tightly with One Hand, while his other arm was bleeding profusely from the gunshot wound.

Gordon followed the route he remembered and ran to the back door of an apartment building. The lock on the back door was broken and it was never properly closed. He pulled hard on the lock with one arm, but the wound on his chest made every movement excruciatingly painful, and Gordon's breathing became heavier and heavier.

Soon, the door was pulled open a crack, and Gordon, who was neither tall nor strong, was just able to squeeze through the gap.

Once inside, he didn't stop. Instead, he climbed up a short flight of stairs in twos and threes at a time, tore open the window of the nearest corridor, and then desperately climbed up. He closed the window and hid on a protruding roof on the second floor.

Hearing the sound of the door being rammed from below, Gordon gritted his teeth and slid down the eaves, landing straight on a awning. Fortunately, no blood was left when he slid down on his back.

After falling onto the awning, Gordon used his last bit of strength to roll over and let the garbage bags below cover him. After a while, he heard footsteps in the building disappear. The other person hadn't found him and seemed to have left.

Gordon lay amidst a pile of garbage, feeling the heavy stench of blood with every breath he took; the bullet had wounded his lung.

His arm was already numb from blood loss, but he could still clearly feel the engagement ring on his middle finger; his body heat was gradually merging with the cold metal ring.

He recalled the incredulous and heartbroken look on Barbara 'Barbara face when he told her he wanted to break up.

He thought Barbara was right; he was a fool, an incurable fool, a fool who would never learn to be flexible, a fool who deserved to die alone.

Gordon felt an overwhelming chill, followed by a surge of warmth from within his body. Blood from the fall, which had broken his forehead, flowed down his forehead and into his eyes, turning his vision crimson and obscuring it with a layer of black mist.

Soon, it started raining again in Gotham. This rain was nothing special, just like every nightly rain in Gotham, fine and cold.

Gordon's consciousness gradually faded, like a trapped beast lying in Abyss. The tears of lovers falling from the sky could not save his life from slipping away, but the rain that reminded him of his lover's tears stirred a more resolute emotion within him, he thought.

If he was born an inflexible fool, he would rather exhaust all his vibrant life in this quagmire, his heart as hard as a stubborn rock.

Let him die here alone, let the rotting wind blow over his withered bones until it takes away all traces of his life, and then, in the face of this endless darkness, let his last wisp of soul still resist stubbornly, refusing to kneel down.

Gordon thought—

Let him stay here, fighting against ten thousand men, until dawn.