He came crashing through her window at two in the morning.

Devon jolted awake, a strangled scream lodged in her throat, as a shower of shards rained down upon her, scattering over her desk and the floor. A dark mass hurtled through the window, hitting her bedroom floor with a dreadful thud.

Mind reeling, she scrambled to recover the lost time in the gap between sitting down to study and falling asleep. Somewhere between antibody response and immunoglobulin antigen binding, Devon must've put her head down on her desk and drifted off. She caught the time on her computer screen.

A pained groan cut through the shock locking her limbs in place. The sleep-induced haze cleared instantly as she leapt out of her chair, sending more broken pieces of glass to the floor. Heart hammering against her ribs, Devon regarded the mess on her floor, panic lashing against her chest. She eyed the pair of scissors from the stationary cup on the corner of her desk. It wouldn't do much, considering she was a hundred and twenty pounds of skin and bones and sleep deprivation, but she would feel safer with something construed as a weapon at best in her hands.

She went for her phone instead, dialling 9-1-1 on instinct.

Until she heard his haggard breathing—the unmistakable, laboured wheeze of broken ribs and a collapsed lung—as he scrabbled ineffectually at the floor, rolling himself onto his hands and knees before her. Cracks ran through the top of his red mask, fitted over his head like a helmet, and a piece of it had come off, exposing a blood-shot eye that blinked slowly at her. His brown leather jacket clung to his shoulders in tattered shreds. Blood soaked his ribboned flesh, and what she'd initially thought were shadows cast over the hardwood floor was more dark blood pooling beneath him. When he sat back on his haunches, swaying and dazed, he glanced up at her, his broad chest heaving, the mountainous range of his shoulders sagging at an unnatural angle.

Devon blinked, and she saw her father, a blood-clotted and bruised mess on the ground, clutching the gashes in his underarms, pain wracking his entire body. After the fifth time, Devon had stopped thinking of her father as some undefeated protector of her childhood. They'ed stopped using the dining table for meals, and the medical kit was always full of stolen hospital supplies.

"Didn't run fast enough," drawled her mother's cold voice as she regarded the tangle of limbs and shredded clothes. She was still in her nurse's scrubs, smoking in the living room. Then she looked to Devon with a sigh. "C'mon, then, let's get to work."

She shook the mirage from her mind.

"Fuck. My bad," he rasped, his voice deep, surprisingly coherent, considering the blood loss. "Just point me to your front door."

Devon's gaze flicked between the hole in his cracked mask to the gun strapped to his muscular thigh. Gotham was a cesspit of villains and grey characters and bloodied bodies. Until proven otherwise, he could very well fall within the first category.

Am I aiding and abetting a criminal? She thought, mind racing through her options. Is that a real charge?

Eventually, she found her own words again in the cradle of her teeth, gaze tracking down the marred state of his body. "Not to state the obvious, but you're bleeding. Bad."

"I'm good," came the gruff reply.

"Stand up, then." Where all this bravado was coming from, Devon wasn't entirely sure. Maybe she did have a death wish, after all.

His visible eye narrowed, and though the rest of his face was covered by the mask, Devon could feel the incendiary burn of his glare. Out of spite, he propped one leg up, pushing down on his knee to lever his weight upward, breath hissing audibly between clenched teeth. Automatically, his hand flew to his abdomen, and Devon was willing to bet there was something there keeping him down. He wouldn't hurt her. Not like this. He was losing too much blood to see straight.

Keeping the desk chair wedged between them, Devon bit her lip, hesitation grounding her in place. A part of her wanted him out of her apartment. Another knew that if she moved within range, he could kill her. Or worse. This could be a ruse.

She could call the cops.

But to depend on the cops was to invite the same people who were hunting her mother in. She'd be opening the door to a whole host of complications. Besides, if they were still watching her apartment, staked out on the street below, there was no way they'd missed this entire spectacle.

"I'm calling an ambulance," Devon said, hitting the dial button on her phone.

A large, gloved hand engulfed her wrist. When she glanced down at him, he was back on his knees, clutching his bleeding abdomen with a hand, the other gripping her wrist with vice-like desperation. Before the dispatcher could pick up the call, he'd plucked her phone from her hand and hung up.

"No hospitals," he said, his voice strained. "No police either."

"You need to get to a doctor!"

"Please," he grunted, the word a foreign shape on his tongue.

Pain wracking his body, he caught the corner of her desk, and pulled himself shakily to his feet. He slanted her a defiant look. His gloved hand left a bloodied print on the wooden surface of her desk. Even shivering in agony, he dwarfed her easily, broad-chested and sculpted like a marble god.

Devon's stomach twisted. If he didn't get help now, he'd die. He could barely keep himself upright, as it was, and when he took a step forward, he swayed violently off-balance. Cursing viciously beneath her breath, Devon ducked under his arm to take some of his weight, regretting it almost immediately when she, too, nearly pitched over from the shift in gravity. He easily cleared six feet, his muscular frame a shelf of rock. He was warm to the touch, his breathing erratic, and there was something audibly clicking somewhere in his body. All signs pointed to reason for medical concern.

"Come on," Devon gritted out. "You're not going to make it further than the stairs like this. Any pains?"

"Why do you care?" He bit, a cornered animal.

"I shouldn't," Devon snapped, irritation grazing her tone. "But you're the one bleeding all over my apartment. If you die, I'll be implicated, too. Last thing I need is more cops on my tail, so, for the love of God, let me help you. So. Answer me—any sharp, more noticeable pains?"

"Jesus, it's everywhere, man. Uh— my chest? It's like I'm getting stabbed there again and again."

She led him to the living room and laid him on the couch, kicking aside boxes and bits in the way. He didn't resist, thankfully, and Devon suspected his compliance had more to do with the fact that he was haemorrhaging his body's worth of blood onto the couch and the Persian rug. From a cupboard in her bathroom, she drew out the medical kit—still fully stocked—and one of the bottles of cheap vodka her mother kept in the kitchen, and set up her station.

Knelt before him, Devon winced as she surveyed the damage.

"I'm going to have to cut you out of your shirt," Devon said, her mouth pressed into a grim line.

"Not even going to take me to dinner first?" His words were more slurred now.

Devon cut him a flinty glare. "This isn't the time for jokes."

"At least," he said, dryly, with a shuddering breath, and when she went to check his pulse, his heart rate had weakened considerably, "you think I'm funny."

She might not have much medical experience at all, but she'd spent her whole teenage life helping her mother patch up her father's wounds. Besides, how different could it be from treating an animal? She'd seen her fair share of broken bones and bullet wounds in her time. People could be cruel around animals. Just yesterday someone had come into the clinic, shaking and wet from the rain, carrying a matted mass of fur and blood, begging them to save the dog he'd accidentally run over.

"He came out of nowhere," the man had said, weeping inconsolably. "I swear, I didnt see him until it was too late."

She'd shadowed and assisted Claire in hundreds of emergency surgeries. Had helped her mother staple shut a skin-splitting cut on the back of her father's head more times than she could remember. The only concern here was the blood loss. Considering the blood bags her mother stole from the hospital reserves might not even be there anymore, her only option was to beat the clock.

Without ceremony and fuss, she slashed through the fabric with a pair of scissors, peeling off his shirt strip by strip, until he was bare-chested on her couch. Three gaping gashes were scored into his torso, one slashed across his sternum, just over his liver, and his muscular arms were criss-crossed with vicious lacerations. With each effortful breath, his abdomen rippled, sending a surge of blood to the surface of each wound. Upon first glance, it didn't seem as though any major arteries were hit. No spurting, no alarming gushing, nothing of note except that the wounds seemed deep. She worried, mostly, about whether any of his internal organs might've been nicked on the process. That was a whole other world of problems she wasn't equipped to deal with.

As she doused him in the alcohol quickly, ignoring the way he shuddered with pain, biting back screams, Devon swallowed the lump in her throat. What would Mama do? She thought, the floodwaters of panic rising in her chest once more. She doused her hands, too.

She pressed a pad of folded-up towels to his abdomen. "Put pressure on this." It wouldn't do much in the long term, but Devon had learnt how to suture fast. She'd tackle his bleeding problem first. "I don't have any anaesthetic. This is going to hurt. You need something to bite down on?"

"I'm good. Just do whatever."

As she started stitching up his gashes, his eyelid drooped shut. It snapped open almost immediately, and she could see the vicious fight against the darkness setting in.

"What's your name?" He asked, his voice a strained whisper.

"Devon. What do I call you?" Devon asked, fighting to keep him conscious.

Unlike in the clinic, here in her living room, there were no monitors to read life in the patient, no feedback as to his body's response to her valiant efforts to restore him to better health. She wasn't her mother, who had her entire life's worth of nursing experience to bring someone back from the brink of a stroke with nothing but her hands and a needle. But she was her mother's daughter. She would figure it all out.

"Peter," he said, after a moment's deliberation, the name ill-fitting in his mouth, a plastic veneer in place of the truth. "You can call me Peter."

Chest tight, Devon nodded. His lips were turning blue, his skin a shade paler than before. She tied off the first sutured wound and began rethreading the needle. The next one was much shorter, and like the first gash, it didn't seem to hit anything critical. Just ran deep enough to require more effort. Of course, she'd much rather ship him off to a real medical professional so his death wouldn't be on her hands, but these weren't wounds she hadn't seen before. Including the gunshot wounds.

"Look, Peter," Devon said, musingly, "I'm on a student budget, and you owe me a new window."

"If I die, then what?"

Scowling, she tugged on the thread with pointed force, drawing a hiss from him. "Hero or villain, I'll drag you back from Hell myself."

"Not a hero," he said, solemnly. "Never a hero."

"A villain, then?"

"I don't know."

"Oh," Devon said, "one of the grey-area ones."

"Maybe."

They were silent for an endless moment, his words sinking in. Devon had always known Gotham was a viral host site for a litany of characters standing on all points of the moral axis. In truth, she wasn't all that much interested in the purpose of Peter's crusade. She wasn't thinking too hard about it, either.

"Devon?" He breathed, a note of panic running beneath his tone as his eyelid shuttered, his breaths lengthening. "No hospitals. Promise."

"Okay," Devon said, softly, her tone much more gentle than she was used to. "I promise."

He was out in an instant.

For a moment, Devon listened to his breathing as she worked, finishing off the third set of sutures and wiping the blood off his shockingly toned torso. Then she pressed a hand against his pulse points, panic gripping her when she couldn't find his heartbeat, until she felt it in his neck, the weakened flutter rising to meet her desperate touch. She let out a relieved exhale. Then she surveyed the rest of the tapestry of pain.

Three bullet wounds, one shot clean through his shoulder and the other two still embedded deep within his arm. The cuts on his arm weren't deep. Not many of them hit muscle tissue, but the placements were odd. From the nature of his wounds, his opponent must've been incredibly skilled with a blade, well-versed in anatomy. They wounded to incapacitate, going for weak points, tendons, just barely missing vital organs and veins. Each cut was focused, strategic, made not in haste but with deadly precision and purpose.

The tendon in his right elbow was only half-severed, still hanging on by a thread. By right, he shouldn't have been able to use either of his arms, but as she recalled the moments in her room, it struck her as odd, how utterly inhuman his resilience was.

Someone had been toying with him before they went in for the killing blow. How he'd escaped, she couldn't begin to guess. But if he'd been careless about it, he might lead them here. Silently cursing herself for not thinking of this sooner, Devon glowered at the half-dead man on her couch. If her mother were here, she'd be furious with her.

She started on the bullets first, digging them out with a pair of forceps, pretending the metal pellets were simply maggots or botflies waiting for extraction, the blood too slick to catch ahold of them. Every now and then, she checked on his breathing. She took a momentary break once she was finished sewing up all the wounds cross-hatching his arms, which were surprisingly more difficult to mend, considering she had to sew through muscle and tendons, her mind constantly flitting to all the lessons her mother had taught her with her father's pulverised body laying half-lucid on the dining table.

His lungs were a different story. His ribs weren't broken, but there was definitely a history of bone trauma. What had her mother said about collapsed lungs? When was the last time she'd dealt with one? It hit her like a swift punch to the gut—fifteen years old, her father dragging himself home on his hands and knees, crumpled against the door with his eyes swollen shut.

"There isn't much you can do," her mother had said, her tone flat, cold, as she regarded her husband's body, snapping a pair of blue surgical gloves onto her hands, "outside of a hospital. But if it's bad, you can use a catheter. See the way he's breathing? Feel his heartrate. Blue a skin of his lips. No doubt, chest pains."

"What happened to him?" Devon had asked, her voice small, not her own. At the time, she'd felt like crying, but she couldn't let herself succumb to it. Not in front of her mother.

"Gambler's fate, sweetie," her mother answered, fishing a long, thin needle, encased in a long strip of sterile plastic, from a bag in the medical kit. Her father let out a groan, his breath strained and his chest constricting visibly, but her mother kept talking, as if he wasn't there at all. His shirt had been flayed open, and he was just another body. "You get what you give, and if you owe anyone in this world a thing, they'll do anything to make it known. Now pay attention to me. This is how you fix a collapsed lung. See this point?" She tapped a sunken spot between a pair of rib bones. "Insert the catheter here. You'll need to be swift and decisive about it. He'll be in a lot of pain, but you can't afford to hesitate."

As the memory came flooding back, Devon found her hands moving of their own accord, as though drawn by reflex. The needle she'd found was old, but clean, its plastic packaging still intact. Peter was out cold, but his breathing, though laboured, seemed to stabilise the moment the catheter punctured the skin of his lung. There was nothing much she could do about his ribs, which, after a moment's examination, didn't seem broken after all, but badly bruised. She laid clean bandages over his stitched wounds, wrapping his arms entirely, after applying a salve to each.

She considered his cracked mask. His single, visible eye, framed with thick lashes, the thin skin of his eyelid spiderwebbed with dark veins. Up close, he smelled like gunsmoke and metal.

The urge to remove it was there—at least, to check for a concussion, but there wasn't much she could do about that either, considering he was unconscious. Granted, as her fingers ghosted the edge of his red mask, something in her chest twisted, halting her movements. Devon had little to no experience with the protectors and antagonists of Gotham, but she knew that their identity was meant to be a best-kept secret. Something so intensely personal that people died for it. Peter could've been a nickname, or a fake one. Either way, whatever he'd given her wouldn't be enough to uncover much of anything.

Unmasking him while he couldn't stop her felt wrong—felt like a violation. Besides, it'd only get her more enmeshed in this business, and Devon wanted nothing to do with that darker side of Gotham.

Despite her curiosity, she recoiled immediately, and the urge fled without resistance.

By the time the first light of dawn began to trickle through her living room window, Devon was too tired to drag herself to her bed. Instead, she lay down on the floor, set an alarm for 9AM—which was when her first lecture of the day was—and simply passed out there and then.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

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