The city greeted morning with practiced indifference.
Steam rose from grates like exhaled secrets. Commuters poured into the streets, eyes forward, shoulders set, each person wrapped in a private urgency that left little room for anomalies. Gotham liked its problems obvious—crime in alleys, corruption in offices, violence that announced itself loudly enough to be named and feared.
He moved through it quietly.
Daylight changed the rules. Shadows retreated but did not disappear; they merely shifted, clinging to corners, folding themselves beneath awnings and stairwells. He adapted to the new geometry without conscious effort, positioning himself where movement blurred recognition. Crowds were cover, but only if one understood their flow.
He understood.
By midday, he had secured what passed for stability: food enough for another day, a place to rest, and routes memorized well enough to evade notice without panic. It was not comfort. It was sustainability.
And yet—
Something tugged at him.
Not hunger. Not danger.
Curiosity.
The sensation was faint, almost apologetic, like a knock at the back of the mind. He ignored it at first, redirecting attention outward. Curiosity led to mistakes. Mistakes led to attention. Attention led to escalation.
But the pull persisted.
It grew strongest near a derelict subway entrance half-sealed behind fencing and graffiti. The station had been closed for years, its tunnels flooded or collapsed, its name scraped from maps and memory alike. People passed it daily without seeing it, their eyes sliding over the space as if instructed to forget.
He stopped.
The city did not object.
That was unusual.
He stood before the entrance, listening. No footsteps below. No voices. Only a low, steady hum that did not come from machinery. It resonated faintly with the pressure inside him, like two notes nearly—but not quite—in tune.
This is a mistake, something in him warned.
Another presence—older, quieter—countered without words:
This is inevitable.
He stepped closer.
The fencing bent inward slightly, not enough to be noticed by anyone who did not expect it to move. He touched it with two fingers, careful, testing resistance. The metal yielded without complaint, reshaping itself to allow passage.
He froze.
That should not have happened.
He withdrew his hand. The fence remained bent.
Space around the entrance felt thin again, thinner than before. The world here did not resist his proximity; it welcomed it, like a lock recognizing its key.
His heart beat faster now—not from fear, but from the strain of holding back something that clearly wanted expression. The pressure within him surged, coiling tight, brushing against awareness with insistence that bordered on impatience.
No, he thought, sharper than before. Not here.
But the door—if it could be called that—had already opened.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
The space beyond the fence deepened, shadows stretching inward, swallowing light without reflection. It was not darkness. It was absence shaped like invitation.
He understood then, with clarity that cut deeper than memory:
What he had touched before—the hollow behind space—was not random. It was not an accident.
It was part of him.
A function, not a flaw.
His vision blurred at the edges as the world leaned toward that absence, gravity shifting subtly toward a place that should not exist. The pressure inside him surged violently now, straining against containment, demanding alignment.
For one terrible moment, he considered letting it happen.
Just to see.
Just to understand.
The consequences flickered before him—not images, but weights. The collapse of structures not built to bend. The tearing of boundaries meant to hold stories in place. Attention drawn from places far worse than Gotham.
He stepped back.
The act required more effort than anything he had done so far.
He grounded himself again, breath measured, posture locked, awareness spread wide and anchored to the present. He forced the pressure inward, compressing it until the sensation of vastness dulled into heaviness once more.
Contain.
The word echoed like a vow.
Slowly—reluctantly—the space firmed. The shadows receded. The entrance returned to its neglected anonymity, fence bent but unremarkable.
The city exhaled.
He stood there for a long moment, heart pounding now, sweat cold on his skin. He had not crossed the threshold.
But he had found it.
And that knowledge changed everything.
He turned away from the subway entrance and walked back into the noise of the city, shoulders tight, jaw set. The pull faded with distance, but the awareness did not. Something inside him had marked the location, filed it away as both temptation and warning.
Above, beyond the reach of sky and story, Dream closed a book that had never been open.
So, he thought, not unkindly.
You've found the door.
Death, passing by, glanced at him sideways. "Should we be worried?"
Dream considered the question, stars shifting faintly in his eyes.
"Not yet," he said. "He chose restraint."
Death smiled, warm and sad all at once. "They always do," she replied. "At first."
Below them, in a city that would never know how close it had come to something it could not survive, a boy walked on—nameless, unwritten, carrying a door inside him that reality itself had failed to lock.