(Edited with Grammarly 6/18/2026)
'I really need a hobby.'
It felt like Albert had been stuck on repeat with that thought, stretching his body once more for what felt like the tenth time in under five minutes. Anything to resist falling asleep in some shady alleyway and not waking back up again. Whether from a wandering addict slitting his neck for the twenty bucks in his pocket or the frigid weather that had dropped down into the territory where he could feel his nose begin to run. Finger tips feeling as if pins and needles were dancing along them. That same numbing sensation was crawling up his legs, forcing him to move every so often just to avoid falling over if he needed to take flight at any given time.
Was that blink too long? He didn't know, but there was no way he was going to risk it.
Hopping up once more, he quickly kicked his knees up. Hands against the rough brickwork as he tried to get blood circulating through his sluggish body. Pulling away from the sweet embrace of eternal sleep. After a few more reps that sent a stream of warmth through him, the teen took the time to peer through the alleyway once more.
Night had long since fallen, and the natural hubbub of Gotham hadn't slowed in the slightest. In fact, the base thumping through his chest from the club a few buildings down was proof that this city never slept. Flashing neon lights streamed through the constantly opening door, where a long line of scantily clad people shuffled forward while talking equally as loudly as the music. Each trying to hear the other through the chaos. And at its entrance, twin bouncers, dressed in too-tight black shirts and jeans, stood like a muscle-bound wall. Their stern or blank countenance wasn't going to fool him.
They were a perceptive pair, he found. From the few times they'd glance his way whenever he moved too quickly or whenever a clubgoer seemed like the sort to cause trouble. Neither of them appeared armed, but who was he to risk that?
So instead, he dropped further back into the alley until it was just the hotel entrance he could see. There hadn't been much activity since his target entered. A few customers here or there, but some of them were a bit weird. Most people, when renting a hotel room, often spend the night. But there had been plenty of times where pairs or even triplets went in, and often one would come out about an hour later, while the other left soon after. Each going in their own direction.
The first time it happened, he could ignore it. But the third? Yeah, and when he saw the same women come and go three times, all with different people, it became very, very clear the sort of place this was.
Maybe it was a spot for prostitutes and hidden affairs? Some place for people to get their freak on without judgment before leaving as if nothing happened?
Whatever the case, it really didn't look good for Isaac's marriage going forward.
Throughout this little stake-out, he took note of a few more things. Often, most rooms remained dark and only really became lit for about an hour or two before falling dark once more. The tint must not be all that good, whether a purposeful action to avoid having the rookie cops snoop around or just to cut a few corners. But there was only one room that remained alight throughout all this. About three stories up, and the farthest window closest to the club. He'd been able to see a few shadows moving beyond the curtains.
Not really enough to be for sure, but it should give him a reference point if he ever decides to go in.
Movement caught his eye suddenly, and flickering down, he saw a figure come nearly stumbling out of the building. Their silhouette was clear in the light for but a moment before the door slammed shut behind them, an old backpack slung haphazardly over their shoulder, and the scarf he'd seen nowhere in sight.
Even from far away, Malaya didn't quite look...right? From the way she swayed and stumbled, with a visible limb, and the way her head looked as if it was spring-loaded, from the way it bobbed and bounced every which way. And when she passed under a street lamp, leaning heavily on it like she was prepared to stay there all night, just the way her skin looked so….moist? Sweaty with a pale pallor to her brown skin, a visible flush, and maybe some puffiness to her cheeks.
She collected herself for a few moments, legs visibly fighting her as she finally forced herself forward. One step, a sway to the hips, two steps, another stumble before nearly rising back into a hop. Like some sort of jittery gallop. Until eventually, the woman almost fully collapsed onto the bench. Head leaned back, exposing the very visible dark marks near her nape.
It felt like a punch to the gut, and he didn't even have a relationship with her, already empathetic to the incoming news. And he could feel it then, a weight settle on his shoulders. It was clear what had happened, clear that all of Isaac's fears had been realized. And now it was Albert's job to shove the truth right in the guy's face...He just hoped the man wouldn't follow in his footsteps or anything else rash.
His client was still young after all; there would always be more fish in the sea. It might be a bit difficult due to how long he'd been out of the dating game, maybe it wouldn't be too bad…
'You speak as if you have any experience.'
He could feel that snort well up from within, a derisive thing. What right did he have to walk around, even thinking about advice like that? He was no dating guru nor anyone really to take advice from when it came to instances like this.
Pushing those dark thoughts away, more movement caught his attention. From the club, the bouncers could be seen forcing out a few people who argued and shouted as they were manhandled. Tossed out onto the hard sidewalk with barely anyone giving them the time of day. They stayed for but a moment before cowarding under the twin glares of violence given flesh and slinking away like beaten dogs.
One of them, in their haze, glanced up and seemed to lock onto the lone woman on the bench. A look passed over his face before his lips peeled back into a smarmy smile. He tapped on the rest of the pack, two others that looked just as out of it as he did, before leading the way like hyenas stalking prey. Their shoulders leading, stumbling with hands clasping and unclasping as though unsure what to do with their digits.
Albert, feeling a sick sensation in his gut, didn't hesitate before slipping out of the alley. Taking care not to fully enter her sight, he took a more curved path. Crossing the street much faster than they could close the distance until his back was right up against the leading street light, highlighting the bus stop in its yellow hue.
At first, they didn't really take note of him. Their eyes were still locked onto the woman, still with her heads in the clouds, with a gait that would take them a few moments to reach them. Maybe he was overreacting, maybe they were just passing by, but it's better to be safe than sorry here.
Lifting his shirt, the trio didn't stop at first. Their trajectory was clear as snow, at least until one of them, possessing more well, actually glanced down. He could see it then, that confused expression speckled with lust slowly turning into a dawning sense of realization. Maybe that sudden spike of adrenaline broke through their drunken haze.
As the man halted, he whipped out both hands to grip the shoulders of his two friends. His head craned back at the club as though seeking the aid of the bouncers, but if they noticed anything, they didn't show it.
"What-what the hell dude?!" One drunk slurred, trying and failing to shrug the grip off. The smell of urine, sweat, and cheap beer wafted off him in waves. Strong enough that it suddenly made a lot more sense why he'd been thrown out in the first place. Who could relax or enjoy their evening with someone smelling this terrible near them? "I saw her first! Why're you tryin' to keep her to yerself?!"
"Ignore my friends here," The man, sobering with every passing moment. His bleary eyes turned sharp as he bounced between the cold iron and equally frigid brown eyes. "He's drunk! We mean no harm, we're just passing by. We don't want any trouble."
"I'm not giving up my wallet!" The other drunk hooted, squaring up in a loose stance that didn't look all that effective, especially when he was visibly swaying on his feet. "You're gonna h-have to kill me for it!"
Albert quirked a brow silently at them, zeroing in on the spokesmen with his gaze. He didn't need to speak here; his youthful voice would surely completely shatter the tension, and he would have no choice but to actually fire shots just to make sure they knew what lines not to cross. So instead of breaking that spell, he simply cocked his head to the side in a very meaningful way.
His message was clear.
"Yeah, yeah sure buddy!" The spokesman nodded rapidly, dragging his pals away. "We'll be out of your hair."
With that, he dragged his protesting pals across the street. Head turning back every once in a while to make sure they weren't facing down the barrel of a small section of the yawning end. The teen stood there, back ramrod straight, with his gaze locked onto the trio. Never allowing them to leave his sight until they reached a bend and disappeared behind a building.
He counted silently, jaw set firm for what felt like forever. And only after he was almost one hundred percent sure did he finally allow his shoulders to droop all at once. Dropping his shirt back and leaning up against the bus stop, feeling as if his heart was ready to explode at any given time.
Chelsea, despite being such an awful client, had taught him a very valuable lesson. The people of Gotham didn't fear knives. Didn't care if he flashed a couple of inches of steel and wouldn't give a damn about it unless he had it right up against their kidney. Knife wounds, while painful and could leave behind a lot more damage, were often less lethal than a gunshot.
Sound reached him, the familiar melody of something large bumbling its way. Looking around the enclosure, he spotted the same bus slowing to stop. And with this chance, he glanced at his target to check up on her condition, and from what he saw, it wasn't looking very good.
If she'd been aware of the altercation, she didn't show it. In fact, she appeared just as oblivious as she had when first stumbling out of the hotel. He'd honestly hoped the cold would have done something or really anything to bring back her wits, but it seemed that was nothing more than a pipe dream.
As the bus hissed to a stop before them, doors swinging open with the same mechanical and jerky ease as before, Malaya rose on unsteady feet. Her back bent suddenly as she did so. Rising to an airy walk so light that he honestly expected a gust of wind would be enough to completely whisk her off her feet. Long, dark brown hair fell down her shoulders in waves. Frizzed and tangled, damp from the sudden smell of shampoo assaulting his nose.
'Yeah, those are hickeys.'
This up close, those marks on her neck were suspiciously lip-shaped. Light welts where fingers once gripped, matching the bruises on her wrists.
So lost in that hue of reality, she didn't even notice her backpack was left behind, discarded on the bus bench in her wake. Its rough appearance with a few loving patches here and there somewhat spoke to him. How had he'd felt when his old bag had broken? How long had it taken for him to get used to the next one? With its straps either too tight or too loose. Its fabric is wrong both in texture and in smell.
Letting out a sigh, he lifted the bag over his shoulder before making his way onto the bus after her. But not before he felt a gaze fall onto him. Turning his head to the side, he locked with a pair of small, beady blue eyes. A rough and tough-looking bouncer with a full face of facial hair, while lacking even a single strand on top, stood near the club doors as his partner let in a few other clubgoers. The bouncer simply nodded once, maybe recognition or respect. But whatever it was, the look was only for a split second before his head turned back to the crowd.
With the moment passing, he focused back onto a familiar face scrunched up with suspicion. The same bus driver from before looked down at him, glancing at the clearly off woman before her gaze landed on the bag slung over his shoulder.
Her thin lips turned down into a frown, but if she wanted to say anything, the heavy bags under her eyes spoke volumes of the already long day.
Actually getting on the bus, he instantly noted exactly how eerily empty everything was. While there hadn't been too many people on the bus during his first trip, the harsh lights overhead exposed the clear and empty seats from as far as the eye could see. Mix that with the dark streets acting as a backdrop, and it felt like the perfect setup for a horror movie.
At the very front of Malaya sat. Her face pressed up firmly against the glass, head rolled back as she gazed up at the night sky. And honestly, seeing how she was acting didn't help with the whole ghost analogy. He'd half expected her to snap her head around suddenly, to be smiling so wide that the corners of her lips were split open with blood dripping down them. All highlighting a set of rows upon rows of needle-like teeth, a long, slimy tongue uncurling from her mouth to lap at the air.
Shaking his head, he took the seat one row back and opposite her. Close enough that he could take more notes while also far enough that even if she did collect her wits about her, his presence would most likely be ignored.
With a sudden hiss, he could feel the vehicle rise a few inches or maybe a full foot above the ground before it began to pick up speed. Sending another glance at the woman's back, he took the time to fully rummage through her bag.
An invasion of privacy, but he'd already kinda done it before. Inside, there were a few items of note. First, a thick, leather-bound wallet that had a hefty weight to it, and actually opening it revealed a photo of the married couple. Both younger and more awkward, but close. Their faces frozen mid-laugh, with her arms wrapped around his waist tightly. Their heads pressed lovingly together, probably just mere moments from kissing.
'Why?'
Setting aside the wallet, his mind began to spiral. He knew photos couldn't really be trusted to give a clear image of how a relationship or situation actually was. A photographer's job is to take good photos. Appealing photos that could be placed in frames, pasted onto a postcard, or slid into wallets to be looked at when days got rough.
Despite knowing this, he couldn't help but feel that they were happy in this photo. So deeply in love that it would probably take the heat death to finally tear these two apart. Just looking at it filled his heart with an illogical spike of envy. This was the exact thing he wanted more than anything in his old life, something he'd often dreamed about and something that had avoided him like the plague. He could hope that this life would be different, that maybe in this life he wouldn't be so alone. That he could one day have someone to hold him like that, someone that he could cherish and would be cherished in kind.
It's why cheating never really made much sense to him. Why did infidelity hit him so close to home? After all, why would someone toss away something he'd been willing to trade an arm and a leg to experience? Was it truly so worthless to others? Was it something easy that 'normal' people could get at any time? He'd often heard about how rough the dating market was, so that couldn't be the case.
Logically, he could think of plenty of reasons why someone would be unfaithful. Maybe someone was in an abusive relationship, and they cheated out of fear of what could happen if they dared to leave. Or maybe they felt like their needs weren't being met, or maybe they felt that they hadn't crossed any lines. Or maybe it was out of some form of retaliation.
But no matter the facts or studies, he just felt like it would be easier to just leave. He knew it wasn't always so simple. Life often never was. What if their partner's family is all they have? What if they had children together? What if they're financially dependent on their partner?
So many complications, so many hiccups, and reasons why just leaving for a lot of people was never an option.
And despite Isaac's retelling, Albert only really knew one side of this story. He didn't really know the guy, beyond the fact that he didn't seem to be a physical threat. He'd been emotionally distant from his wife, leaving her to wallow in that grief by herself when she needed him the most. So while it was clear he did care, he himself admitted to not bearing witness to this process.
Because at the end of the day, cheating is never an accident. It didn't matter how drunk someone got or got caught up in the passion of a situation; everything had to start somewhere. A touch that lingered too long, fantasies that edged too close to reality, a text message here, a letter there. A lingering hug before a surprise kiss that all parties involved knew was coming a mile away. But no matter which path this affair took, they ended the same way. With lies. Endless lies and cover-ups to keep both relationships afloat.
'There you are.' He resisted the urge to let out a whoop of joy as his fingers grazed a small flip phone in one of the side pockets. It was a cheap-looking thing, plastic that showed a bit too bright with a retractable antenna, which kind of made it appear like a toy.
Flipping it open, he began to scroll through the device. Instantly noting the strangeness of all this. Here he was, not even six feet away from someone while snooping through their phone, while they remained completely unaware of well...everything.
It felt wrong, like he was taking advantage of the situation. A sick feeling welling up from within, tasting of bile and shame.
He could do nothing but force that down; now wasn't the time or place to analyze that feeling. The first thing he noticed was the complete lack of anything of note in the phone. No notes. No games, no contacts, or even any actual media like videos or photos. Instead, there was a single number present in both the call history and text messages.
Scrolling through the call logs, he traced it back all to late last year. Beginning on the tenth of October, the call lasted well over an hour. A rarity, it seems, as every other call after that was barely five minutes long and was often either during the early afternoons or late at night.
Besides that, he noticed that all the way up until half a year ago, there had only ever been incoming calls, but after that, there seemed to be an overwhelming amount of outgoing calls to this phone number.
Taking note of this, he turned to the one thing he was kind of dreading here. He'd often spent his time reading cheating confessions and stories from all over the internet, and those often boiled his blood enough to keep him up the whole night tossing and turning with a sick ball of hate spinning away at his gut.
If those posts had affected him so much, how in the world could he keep his composure here?
But if he'd expected anything really insightful, he would've been greatly disappointed. As most of the text history only went back to about a month or two ago, and all of them were just a single phrase.
Come here.
That was it. Just an endless wall of that same text just repeated almost on a bi-weekly basis. No long paragraphs of sappy love, no raunchy retelling of the affair, not even a simple hello or anything.
'What in the world... is this some sort of weird BDSM thing?'
Maybe he just wasn't really experienced in all this emotional or sexual stuff; this didn't really feel right. It felt demanding. It could be a part of their play, he had no idea, but he really didn't know even the most submissive of people to be at the beck and call of another like this.
Life happened, and if someone genuinely cared about another, they wouldn't constantly drop whatever they were doing just to get in a romp. Here, she was acting like...like a slave.
He only looked up as somewhat familiar buildings began to stream by, the bus slowing to a near crawl as the same bus stop from earlier that day came into view. Meaning his window was quickly closing, and so with a bit of effort, he forced everything back into her bag. Trying to put everything back to how it was before, but he really didn't think she would notice either way.
But before he placed the backpack next to her, Albert, following his gut, pulled out the same black scarf she wore that day and stuffed it into his pocket. It was just a feeling, a twisting in his gut that didn't quite match the disgust he automatically felt for her. It was colder and more foreboding, like icy fingers reaching up from his stomach to put his heart in a vice grip.
She wouldn't miss it anyway, and if it came down to it, he could always just pass it along to her husband...well, maybe ex-husband by the end of all this.
Malaya, aware enough to recognize her stomping grounds, stood suddenly. Using the seat as a springboard, she rose to her full height, her head dropping low to look at the bag in the seat beside her. A genuine confused expression broke through that haze, but only for a moment before she took the bag as it had always been there and departed the bus.
Following at first, Albert barely stopped, had time to come to a stop before the bus doors suddenly hissed shut right in his face. Separating him from his target, who even now was making her way farther and farther away.
Glancing up at the bus driver, all he saw was a cantankerous sneer. Her features curling up into something attributed to a fairy tale crone.
"I don't know why you're following that poor girl," She started, the bus rising and picking up speed. Not even waiting for him to ready himself, either, as she sent him a one-eyed glare. "But you've got until I get to the police station to tell me. And if I don't like what I hear, you can explain yourself to them and see if they let you go."