#also another thing

Check.

The second on his list was marginally easier. 11:01. He turned south, towards Burnley District, and found the library crammed between a nondescript apartment building and a restaurant squashed under the weight of a million and one offices. The assistant greeted him by name when he walked in. Jason politely ignored the thinly veiled judgment when he walked out five minutes later with a random Agatha Christie, poorly paired with Anderson Cooper’s Astor.

Check.

Third. 11:17. He walked into a pole, and somehow, that reminded him that he’d intended to swing by the manor to take advantage of the decent weather and rooftop access. Since that felt like a long walk—roughly eleven miles, half an hour, partially without sidewalk—he instead opted to stroll first east, to the footpath hidden under the wide main road, and then southwest, towards the beach under the Schwartz Bypass.

Partial check.

It was jagged and dark, just like the rest of (aptly named) Gotham. The black sand, glassy in texture and incalculable in abundance, caked the frayed edges of Jason’s boots. Every step sank inches deep until he found the cobbled platform supporting a wrought iron bench looking out into Sprang River’s inky waters. It was an offshoot of Gotham River, albeit much smaller. The sewage treatment plant hid somewhere behind Arkham’s massive facade, painting the water with an iridescent sheen and tinging the air with the scent of chemical something.

11:20. His eyes glazed over the moment he sat down. Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds sucked him in faster than expected, and the world dissolved around him as he alternated hands: coffee, book, coffee, book, so on. Jason felt rather accomplished. Granted, little wins in the grand scheme of things, the fact that he managed to pull himself out of bed at all—not to mention, shower, get dressed, and interact with a person outside of his family—was more than he’d been capable of in literal weeks. It was for that reason that he allowed himself a break, so to speak.

He couldn’t recall what that fourth thing on his list had been, anyway.

He read until the sky bruised green, and then purple, and then dark—until the clouds whorled overhead and the scent of chemicals faded into something more pungent as the plant workers abandoned their jobs for the evening. It was the fetor that broke him from his spell first, and the sound of shuffling second.

6:59. Jason turned, the bench creaking under his weight as he shifted back and forth to follow the noise. Slowly but surely, like an old car refusing to start, his brain sputtered to life, and his lazy grasp on reality finally sharpened. A welcome change. Out of all the things he’d wanted to do that day, never mind what he’d actually accomplished, none of them came anywhere close to the thing rising from the vile depths of Sprang River.

Long, spindly legs, ending in frog-themed rain boots much too large for their wearer. Pleather skinny jeans solely apropos to the likes of Vince Neil. An orange raincoat, a Burger King crown, a tie knotted over a shirt with bedazzled lettering. Jason squinted at the text. It was a QR code.

They only noticed his eyes on their back after emptying a good five pounds of silt—and probably human waste, too, knowing Sprang River—out of their pockets. It met the sand with a wet, semi-solid thump, which appeared to confirm Jason’s momentary theory, and there was no backdrop to the sound of them struggling to rearrange the vinyl lining inside their inside-out pockets. It took them two full minutes to grasp the concept of a square, and three more for them to untangle their waterlogged clothes. The silence that pervaded afterwards hung thick in the air, just as palpable as the scent of sewage blanketing the stranger.

Jason blinked one eye at a time. The person opened their mouth, an explanation ready on their lips, and—

That was what he wanted to do today! Laundry!