Chapter One – "Be good and courageous and bold…"

"Live each day as if it's your last', that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you." David Nicholls - One Day.

Alex Spenser didn't question running straight into the line of fire, not for a single moment. The man she chased had committed murder and it didn't sit well with her to stand by and let him get away simply because he 'might' be armed. So she tore off after him. Everyone she worked with knew that she had some sort of a death wish. At first her colleagues had thought that she was out to impress, but the situations that she continually found herself in quickly changed their minds. Every time she left the office, Lieutenant Greeves would yell something to the effect of "No heroics!" but she knew that heroics were what it took to catch a criminal in this city. She wasn't changing the world or protecting the President of The United States of America, but surely someone's life prospects would improve if this man were incarcerated. She understood that what she was doing was right, even if her methods were a little dangerous. Five years on the New York Police Department's Murder Investigation Team had taught her rather a lot about intuition, and she often followed hers whether she felt it wrong or right.

She smiled to herself as she caught sight of him trying to find a path through the rush hour traffic to the other side. She picked up speed and swiftly slammed into the back of him, knocking him to the ground. He struggled a little, trying to roll over and knock her off his back in the process but she had him pinned down too tightly. She was reading him his rights just as a squad car came flying around the corner.

Sitting in a stifling interview room five hours later, Alex felt slightly apprehensive. She'd risked quite a few lives out on the street earlier. Her assailant had been armed, and if she hadn't pinned him down like she had, she was now very sure he'd have shot her at point blank range. He wasn't showing any signs that he wanted to co-operate, and she wasn't in the mood to try to prise information out of him. She sat silently and observed as lieutenant Greeves lead the interrogation. She wasn't sure she even wanted to be in the room with the man sat in front of her. Three young girls had been brutally raped and murdered over the course of the last seven months. She'd only been here for two of those months. She'd moved back to Gotham from New York to take up the position of Sergeant in the police department and she'd immediately been deployed to this case. She knew why. She'd been involved in many homicide cases in New York, and somehow the powers that be had thought she'd be able to aid the investigation. In fact, someone else had worked it all out; someone older with much more experience who'd lived in the city all of their lives. She felt that she was taking the credit of someone else's hard work. Yes, she'd caught him but that was just about the height of her input to this case. He had tried to plead insanity as soon as he'd realised that the evidence was circumstantial but Greeves had a degree in psychology, and he'd spent the last three hours developing a very good case against the man. Alex simply sat back and let him get on with it. She was already in enough trouble without saying the wrong thing. She still hadn't quite got to grips with how things were done here in Gotham despite her two month stay.

Later on that evening when she returned to her new apartment, she felt glad that they'd managed a result. The man had been charged, but she knew in a few weeks she wouldn't remember his name. She would attend the trial and hope that the judge and jury came to the right conclusion. But she wouldn't dwell on the discreet matters of the case because for some reason this case had unnerved her. She'd been working for Gotham City Police Department for just three weeks when the third body had been found. She had seen countless homicide cases before, but somehow she was frightened by what this case meant. Seven years ago she had left this city with her parents to live in New York and she had managed to carve a successful career. But what would have happened to her if she'd stayed in Gotham? Would she be a serving police officer? Or would she be doing something completely different with her life? If she had stayed, then she might have been one of those girls. At the age of twenty three she was the same age as two of the girls who'd been murdered. It wasn't so much that she might now be lying on a mortuary slab that frightened Alex, it was the fact that she might have become a completely different person.

Things could have been so different. Perhaps if they hadn't moved to New York her parents wouldn't have separated and she wouldn't have lost touch with both of them. Perhaps she'd have been able to pursue a career in writing, which she had dreamed of doing from an early age; and perhaps she would have managed to win the affections of the man that she had thought she loved all those years ago. Now though, she knew it was just a teenage crush. Heavens, there was no chance of her ever winning his affections now. She'd dreamed of becoming an award winning author who would attend all of the society's most glamorous galas and balls and that she would eventually be snapped up by the boy who had only ever been her friend. But now he was one of the richest men in America, and he owned half of Gotham. But Bruce Wayne was now completely unattainable. As a teenager she'd dreamt that one day he would turn to the girl beside him and realise that everything that he would ever need was staring him in the face, but she'd left with her family and she had never looked back. She had known that it was the only way to forget. And forget she had. She didn't think she'd ever be back here but ever since her parents divorced she'd felt an almighty pull towards the city that she'd loved as a child but in the seven years that she'd been away she hadn't thought about Bruce Wayne. Her mind had turned to college boys and careers.

Then suddenly she'd found herself buying a new apartment in her childhood home and starting a new job. She had been offered the same position in New York, and she'd been tempted to take it, but her cousin had called from Gotham and told her that the same position was open there. She'd jumped at the chance to have a valid reason for leaving New York. She adored New York, but ever since she'd lost contact with her parents things hadn't been the same. She was forever terrified of bumping into them in the street or on the subway and she didn't think she was emotionally ready to handle another argument. Another thing she had discovered that she wasn't emotionally ready for was a relationship. She'd had two short term relationships in New York. Both had taught her a lot about what she needed in her life from any potential relationship, and also what she didn't need. The first guy had been a complete idiot, and she'd fallen for his charm. He was really only looking for a bit of fun but he had felt the need to lie to her to get it, and Alex had never forgiven herself for being so weak minded that she had believed him. Her parents had just divorced and he'd played on the fact that she felt insecure and unhappy. He'd taught her to believe nothing that a man ever said to her. In the end she had heard rumours that he had cheated and she had decided that there was no point torturing herself. She simply didn't trust him so she called it a day. The second guy, he was nice. That was all that there was to say about him. He was a decent guy and because of that she felt that she had to at least give him a chance but there was just something missing. They had nothing in common and he was just a little too nice. He didn't have a dark side; a part of his life that wasn't perfectly normal. He didn't have hidden secrets that upset him or baggage that he hadn't offloaded yet. Alex was sure he was ideal for someone else, but just not her. She felt inadequate next to him because she had so many issues inside her head that she needed to work through and he was clearly not the one to help her. So she had ended it quickly so that she wouldn't hurt his feelings.

And here she was, at twenty three with no close friends nearby and virtually non-existent family ties. It dis-heartened Alex a bit, when she really thought about her situation. She understood that if someone had really truly cared for her then they would have made an attempt to be a part of her life. But now she felt that she had the chance to start again. She was now living in uptown Gotham, just a few blocks away from her cousin Jenny. Jenny had been the one constant support in Alex's life. At twenty five, Jenny should realistically have taken on the role of older cousin and tried to set the example but Alex had found herself taking up that position. She'd been the one who Jenny would call in the middle of the night when her boyfriend had walked out, and she also found herself wiring money to Gotham Central Bank when things got tough for her cousin. Jenny also had issues with her parents that were as yet unresolved but she had a more consistent relationship with them than Alex did with her parents. As a result of this, the two cousins had been constant absent companions. They had emailed almost every day for the last seven years and although this afforded Alex some sort of familial comfort, she still felt somehow disconnected. She hadn't actually spoken to Jenny on the phone in three years, and although the emails were regular, they became disjointed. Both women had their own jobs and their own lives to lead and it was an unspoken agreement that the communication was more out of courtesy than anything else. But now, with her friends back in New York, Alex held onto the hope that she and Jenny could somehow rekindle the friendship that had kept them both sane ten years ago.

Seeing her cousin again was one of the strangest occurrences she'd ever had. Jenny had thrown herself into Alex's arms. They'd both sobbed for a good fifteen minutes on the sidewalk before being pushed roughly to the side as Gotham rush hour kicked in. Talking about old times had been slightly painful for Alex, but she didn't tell Jenny that. She sat politely and listened to all of her cousin's news and when it was her turn to share the news she simply shrugged, finding that the things that had occurred in her life over the last seven years were not really that important to someone like her cousin. Jenny worked in television. She'd started out as the coffee fetcher, but now she'd worked her way up into the position of producer thanks to her boyfriend of five years who just so happened to own the television company.

The sentiment scared Alex a little. Jenny had got where she was now by batting her eyelashes and wearing a very tight pencil skirt, whereas she'd grafted to get to where she was today, not that it was a position to write home about. She knew she'd have to go a long way before she was earning anything near what Jenny was now earning. She had thought her cousin would have had a bit more sense about her. She'd tried as a teenager to stimulate the older girl's morals a little and she had tried to encourage her to branch out and think about a career that she could sustain for a lifetime. But Jenny now worked in an industry where beauty was key. Her cousin was bottle blonde with legs that went on forever, and she looked like she used every facial cream on the planet. Her skin had a healthy glow and she looked like she wasn't a day over twenty one. Alex knew however, that Jenny had perhaps ten, or fifteen years left in the industry before someone younger and prettier, if the latter were possible, under cut her. She'd be shafted to the back offices where the buzz of live television would be constrained to a monitor and she'd have to make her own coffee. It would lose its appeal and within a few years she'd be a housewife desperately trying to have the children that she should have focused on conceiving earlier on in life instead of her career. She felt sorry for Jenny. But she felt angry at herself. Jenny would live to see her ninety's. Alex would not. She cursed herself for the risks she took whilst on duty, but she couldn't help it. It was the thrill of the chase. Alex knew just how much danger she put herself in every day, but somehow it didn't matter to her anymore. If she'd been a shrinking violet she wouldn't have joined the police department in the first place, but over the course of the last five years on the job her hardened exterior had diffused into her head. When it came to catching criminals; Alex was of one mind. If she didn't catch them, they would go back out into the world the next day to target their next victim, and if another person were to be hurt it would be her fault because she had been too frightened to give chase. At the beginning of her career she had been more mindful of the fact that she could also potentially be putting the lives of her colleagues or the public in danger as well as herself, but that had slowly given way to adrenaline.

For Alex, life in Gotham slowly developed its own routine. At work she was known as the girl without a conscience and a Friday night would find her secluded in a booth at Layton's Cocktail Bar with Jenny. At first she had spent a lot more time with Jenny, but slowly she had begun to realise that it was bad for her already unhealthy mind-set. When she was with Jenny, Alex felt like the fat friend. Jenny was beautiful; the kind that would be any man's type and so Alex was virtually invisible when they went to bars or clubs. She didn't feel any animosity towards Jenny because she knew that the attention was unwanted and she was grateful to her cousin, for introducing her to a lot of her friends whom she soon began to think of as friends too. Most of them were male, and Jenny had perhaps wanted Alex to see more potential in them than just friendship but she found that life was a lot easier when you weren't worried about what a guy really thought of you. Alex had been the girl who never gave up for seven years. Although she had everyone convinced she was happily single she'd spent every night out wondering if that night in question would be the night that she'd meet someone and it had become an unhealthy obsession. This was another side of her unhealthy mind-set. Gotham was in so many ways a new start. Flushing that unhealthy mind-set down the toilet; or at least some of it had been the plan and the first aspect to go had been the constant search for Mr Right. She was now sure that she could live a reasonably happy life with the things she had come to care about most; her job, her books and her new friends.

She saw him in a newspaper or magazine every day. He was on television almost as often. When she'd known him as a teenager he'd been a completely different person. He had always been Bruce Wayne with his mansion and his money but as a young man he'd had a different view on life. Back then she had seen him as someone who would be settled down, married and be having children before his mid-twenties. She thought that this view she had of him might be because his family had been ripped from him as a boy and she understood that family was something that he craved. But now he seemed to have distanced himself from that boy. Alex knew it was down to the impact that money had created in his life. Because of the money that he inherited from his parents he seemed to have become immune to those feelings that she knew he had experienced as a teen. Now he held the main frame of his father's huge industry and although he was required to attend meetings and oversee the general running of Wayne Enterprises she knew that he really did very little at all. His party lifestyle had overtaken and everyone knew that he fell asleep in meetings daily and often took interrupting calls from many of the women that were frequently a part of his party lifestyle. In the two months that she had been back in Gotham she had counted seven different women in total; and that was almost one every fortnight. There was no doubt about it, Bruce Wayne had changed. But whilst the whole city seemed to have interpreted the billionaire as a playboy with an empire at his feet who had every right to delegate the running of his company to well payed assistants because he simply hadn't the interest, inclination or intelligence to do so himself, Alex knew different. It shocked her that a man so devoted to the memory of his parents would deliberately shun the running of the empire that his father had built in the hopes that his son would revel in taking control of it. She knew that Wayne Enterprises had been efficiently run by Lucius Fox and other members of the board whilst Bruce was young, but she had thought he would have wanted to take control and put his own stamp on his company. She knew Bruce was intelligent and that he truly did respect his parents memory, so she was confused as to why there were so many stories of his negligence circulating in the press. The playboy attitude she felt she could understand. What young billionaire wouldn't enjoy actresses and models throwing themselves at him from every direction? She therefore decided that she would believe that everything she heard and read about him had been blown out of proportion and that somewhere, he was still the Bruce she had known and loved. Despite all of that, she didn't dwell upon her old friend too much. She wouldn't allow herself to. It wasn't likely that she would ever meet him again, and she doubted he'd remember her even if she did.