CHAPTER 14 – CLAIMING THE APARTMENT
The second time I walk up this block, it feels different.
Same cracked sidewalk. Same leaning streetlamp humming like it's got a headache. Same half-dead neon in the pawn shop window across the street, flickering over "WE BUY GOLD" like that's ever been true for people like me.
But this time I'm not just passing through.
There's weight on my shoulders: a cheap duffel bag with a folded blanket, a torn sheet, two trash bags I "found" near the shelter laundry, and a broken broom head I yanked out of a dumpster. Not much, but it's the most I've carried toward any building in Gotham that wasn't the shelter.
My stomach's doing that tight twist thing. It's stupid. It's just a room. Four walls, bad floor, too much air. There's no reason for my body to react like I'm about to break into a bank.
I stop half a building short and pretend to check my phone I don't have. Really I'm watching reflections.
Bus-stop glass: no one paying attention to me. Just a guy on his own phone, hood up, earphones in. Bodega window: only the owner, half-asleep behind the counter. Pawn shop glass: two kids arguing over a game console. Nobody cares about the skinny kid with the overstuffed bag.
Good.
I cross the street, cut into the side alley like I've done it a thousand times instead of… three.
The alley smells damp and sour, like wet cardboard and old piss. A pipe overhead leaks in slow, stubborn drops into a bucket that's already overflowed; a thin sheet of ice has crusted around it, shining under the weak daylight.
The building's side door is still where I left it. Peeling paint, rust freckles, no handle on the outside. My door. Kind of.
I let the bag slip off my shoulder for a second and crouch like I'm adjusting the strap, fingers brushing the frame where door meets wall.
The tiny paint chip I loosened last time is still there, balanced on the edge, just where I left it. If someone had opened this door since then, it would be on the floor or gone.
It isn't.
The breath I let out is quieter than it feels. Relief is a strange shape; light and heavy at the same time.
"Okay," I murmur. "Still empty. Still mine-ish."
"Mine" catches on something inside my chest. I correct it automatically in my head: not mine. Just available.
I slide my fingers into my hoodie pocket, find the mini-driver shaft and pliers in the Micro Tool Rig, and palm the driver. Toolkit in my pocket, brick wedge memory in my bones. Gemini of bad doors.
The keyhole is scarred, but the latch plate is the real weak link. It already didn't fit right; somebody forced it once and then gave up forever.
I put the driver into one screw head and turn just enough to give the latch more room to breathe—half a rotation, maybe less. Then I lean my shoulder lightly against the door and push.
Same slow groan as last time. Old wood complaining. Metal grinding that wants to be loud and isn't, because I don't let it. I time the worst of the noise with a bus down the main road, its engine rumble covering the door's protest.
The gap opens. The air inside that little corridor is colder than outside street air, which is impressive considering Gotham in winter feels like the whole city is a refrigerator someone left open.
I hook the duffel strap back over my shoulder and slip through.
The building swallows the noise as soon as the door closes. Everything inside is dust and echoes and the distant throat-clearing of pipes.
My footsteps on the lobby floor are softer than last time; some of that is the Silent Shoes v0.1, cloth and tape layers still holding up under rooftop runs. Some of it is me knowing where and how to land.
The dust on the floor looks almost exactly the same. No new tracks across it. The old sneaker prints that weren't mine are faded a little more, edges blurred. No fresh shapes.
If anyone's using the place, they're careful. Or they're ghosts.
Stairs wait behind the fire door, same dented metal, same flaking paint. I rest my fingertips lightly on it before I push through and feel for vibration. Nothing moving on the other side right now.
I ease it open and step into the stairwell.
The air changes again—tighter, colder, full of every sound the building makes when it thinks no one's listening. A pipe knocks somewhere above, slow, irregular beats. Concrete treads hold onto the chill like they enjoy it.
My body remembers the route even before my brain calls up the map.
Outside edge of the first step, near the wall. Avoid the shine in the center where rubber has worn it smooth. Second step: weight on the inner third. Third step: skip where the crack spiders out. Fourth step: hug the rail and shift fast over the sag.
The really bad one—cracked all the way through with that hollow "don't" sound—I don't even touch. There's a scuff mark near it from last time where I caught myself; I steer around it like it's labeled.
It's smoother now. Dangerous familiarity. My feet know where to go. That scares me a little.
It takes less time to reach the top floor. I pause before the last turn, pressing my shoulder lightly into the wall, listening.
Below me, somewhere two floors down, a TV mutters behind a closed door, sound bleeding through thin plaster. Someone coughs. A toilet flushes. Thin evidence of life. Up here, nothing but building breath.
The hallway up top is just as I left it: gray light leaking in from a dirty window, dust, a plastic grocery bag dead in the corner. My door waits at the end, number plaque still missing, just those two rusted screw stumps.
I check my marker again—a tiny wedge of paint I loosened above the frame this time. Still there. No scrape marks around the handle. No new footprints leading up.
My hand closes on the knob.
Last time, this was reconnaissance. Ruin inspection. I could tell myself it was just structural curiosity. Today there's a blanket digging into my shoulder and a stupid, dry feeling in my mouth that tastes like commitment.
"You walk in with stuff, that's moving in," I think. "Even if you pretend it isn't."
The thought feels too honest, so I pretend I didn't think it.
Mini-driver out again. Quick little twist on the strike plate screws, just enough slack. Then I push.
The latch slides past with less complaint this time. I step over the worst board in the threshold without even looking, weight landing in the narrow patch that rang solid last time.
The door shuts behind me with a muted click.
The sound is small, but it's the loudest thing in the room.
I drop the bag beside the wall, careful to set it on boards I already trust, and straighten slowly, looking around.
Same wrecked couch frame. Same dead cabinet on its side. Same dirty light smearing in through a cracked, cloudy window, making everything the color of old teeth.
The difference is me.
Last time I stood here, I was measuring angles and risks. Today I'm also measuring where a bed could go.
I hate that I notice that.
I start with the glass, because that's what will hurt the fastest.
The window is still spiderwebbed on one side where some genius used it as a punching bag. The floor underneath glittered yesterday; today it's just as bad, catching the thin light in hundreds of little shards. Tiny razors waiting for a barefoot stumble.
I don't intend to walk barefoot here ever, but intention doesn't stop accidents.
The broom head I rescued from the trash is more plastic than bristle, the kind of thing a shelter would toss instead of bothering to fix. I fish it out of the duffel and then look around for a stick.
Takes me three minutes to find something close. The closet by the bathroom has a busted hanging rod, splintered on one end where it pulled out of its bracket. I test it for rot, flexing it under my fingers; it holds. Good enough.
Duct tape from the Micro Tool Rig pouch wraps the rod to the broom head. The tape squeals when it peels, loud in the hollow room, but there's no one here to complain. I wrap it tight, overlapping layers until the joint doesn't bend.
It looks terrible. It doesn't have to look good. It just has to move broken things where I want them.
I set my feet on the boards I trust and start pushing.
The glass obeys gravity, rolling and skittering into a growing pile near the wall. Some of it crunches under the broom's edge in a sound that crawls up my spine. I sweep nails, screws, chunks of plaster with it, anything that could shred fabric or skin.
By the time I'm done, my hands ache from the vibration. I find an old plastic storage tub half-buried under the couch frame and kick it loose. The crack in one side means it's useless for water. For glass, it's perfect.
I angle the tub on its side and herd shards into it, listening to them tinkle and scrape. It's like emptying an hourglass made out of bad decisions.
When it's mostly clear, I take off one glove and run my fingertips gently over the floor by the window. Little rough spots catch, but there's nothing big enough to slice anymore.
It's not clean. It's just less dangerous.
That's fine. That's the job.
The couch frame goes next.
I grab one end and pull. The thing protests with a screech of metal and wood that probably woke someone three floors down, but the sound dies quickly in these walls. The floor underneath sags more than I like when the weight moves—just a breath—but it tells me what I need to know.
"This patch fails, you're going down into somebody's ceiling," I think. "And they're going to have questions you don't want to answer."
I drag the frame so it sits over the worst part, close to the wall. If the floor wants to give, it can do it under empty furniture, not under my spine.
The dead cabinet becomes a table against another wall. It lists slightly to the left; I shove a broken bit of tile under one corner to level it. The urge to keep fussing with it—perfect alignment, no wobble—flares up hard. I shut it down.
"It doesn't have to be perfect. Just usable."
That feels like a lie, but it's one I can live with for now.
Once the big hazards are out of the way, I clear a path.
Door to corner. Corner to bathroom. Bathroom to kitchen. I sweep each strip until the boards show through the dirt. The broom makes a soft shh-shh noise with each stroke. Dust rises in lazy ghosts, caught by the light, then settles on my hoodie and into my lungs.
I cough once, then cover my nose with the inside of my sleeve and keep going.
By the time I'm done, I've carved out three narrow rivers through the debris sea. Everything outside those lines is still chaos, but at least I know where my feet go.
I run through them once: from door to the corner I'm eyeing, back to door, down the hall to the bathroom, back again. My body memorizes the pattern. One-two-three boards, slight shift to the left, step over the hairline crack. Inside of my head, I mark the bad planks with red Xs and the safe ones with dull green.
It's a poor man's HUD. It works.
Next problem: the cold.
I can see the drafts before I feel them.
The plastic on the bottom half of the window—someone's old half-attempt at weather-proofing—ripples with each breath of wind. The gap where the glass is missing is dark around the edges; the frame's swollen and pulled away from the wall, leaving a jagged line you could probably slide a coin through.
I put my hand close to it and hold still.
The air knifes through my fingers, narrow but sharp, like the building is wheezing. It has that metallic wet smell, the one that gets into your bones and stays there.
Under the door, a steady, lower draft slithers in, carrying hallway cold and faint dust stink. From the bathroom, there's another leak—a vent or a crack I haven't mapped yet; it brushes against the back of my neck when I stand in the doorway.
I pull my hand back and shake off the numbness.
"Okay. Priorities: don't cut yourself, don't freeze, don't suffocate."
Suffocation is last because there's already enough air coming in to keep ten people conscious whether they want to be or not. But I still need something I can control.
I dig into the duffel again.
Blanket. Thin, but whole. Sheet, torn along one side but still big enough to do something with. Two black trash bags, the heavy kind from the shelter bins that didn't make it into the can. A roll of tape that's more cardboard than adhesive. I saved it from the shelter's "useless" pile. They have different definitions of useless than I do.
I start with the window.
The plastic that's already there is brittle near the edges. I peel it off carefully, so it doesn't shatter into smaller, more annoying problems. It fights for a second, then rips free with a long, plasticky sigh.
Cold blasts in harder through the exposed gap. My eyes water.
"Yeah, yeah. I heard you." I talk to the draft like it's a complaining neighbor. "Give me a minute."
I spread the sheet out on the floor and cut it with the wrapped scissor blade from my rig. Long strip first, to tape across the top of the frame. Then wider panels to hang down and cover the missing glass.
The tape doesn't love the cold wood, but it loves the fabric more than the bare paint, so I anchor the sheet to itself as much as I can—looping it over, taping sheet to sheet with the frame caught in the sandwich.
When that's up, I layer one trash bag behind it, split open so it's a broad, black rectangle. Plastic for the wind. Cloth for the noise. Between the two of them, the draft slows, goes from a knife to a dull shove.
I leave a small gap up high, near the top corner where the wall meets the ceiling, no bigger than my palm.
Air still has to move. Sealed rooms kill people slower than bullets but just as thoroughly. I've read enough stories and seen enough news segments; I'm not going to be a cautionary tale because I got overexcited with tape.
The door is next.
The gap under it is big enough to slide half my hand under. That's a problem in both directions. Cold in, sound out.
I roll the old blanket into a thick cylinder and stuff it along the base, wedging it tight between the bottom of the door and the floor. It bulges when the draft pushes at it, but it stays.
Still too much rattle.
I find the brick I brought—pocket-sized, chipped along one edge. The first thing I grabbed in Gotham. First tool, first wedge, first lesson: doors don't have to be the way they are.
Feels right, bringing it here.
I slide it behind the door, angled just so, so if someone tries the handle from the hall, the door moves an inch and then hits the brick. Not enough to jam it—if I need to leave fast, I can kick it free. Enough to stop random drafts and hallway ghosts from pushing it open.
I test it a couple times from the inside. Door, brick, door. The noise it makes is small and controlled, not the loud slam I used to get in that first alley doorway.
Better.
The bathroom vent is a smaller problem. I stand on the threshold and feel where the cold snakes around the frame. It's not lethal, just annoying.
Takes one trash bag scrap and three pieces of tape to cut it down.
I stand in the middle of the room again, listening.
The city is still there—distant cars, far-off sirens, someone's bass turned up too high. Inside, the building has quieted a little. Less whistling. Less rattling from the window. The drafts on my neck are mostly gone.
It's still cold. But now it's the kind of cold you can fight with layers and movement and a decent blanket, not the kind that crawls straight into your lungs.
I flex my fingers. They tingle as blood comes back.
All of this could be explained as risk reduction. Less glass = fewer injuries. Less draft = less risk of getting sick. Brick wedge = fewer surprises in the night.
That's the story I'll tell if anyone asks.
But standing here with dust in my hair and tape on my fingers, what it feels like is something else.
It feels like I just did what you're supposed to do when you move into a place.
I don't like that thought. I don't throw it out either.
I just… set it on a mental shelf and walk around it.
The corner chooses itself, but I pretend it's a calculation.
Window wall: no. Draft risk, glass risk, silhouette risk. I don't want to sleep with my spine against that.
Opposite wall: too far from the door. If something goes wrong in the hallway, I don't want to cross a whole room of questionable floor to reach it.
The middle is a joke. That's where the worst sagging is, the boards that complain loudest. Sleeping there would be asking to meet my downstairs neighbor through their ceiling.
That leaves the far corner, where the interior wall meets the wall that backs the stairwell. Two solid directions. Floorboards sound deeper and more honest under my heel. From there, if I angle the bedroll right, I can see both the door and the boarded-up window without lifting my head too much.
I walk over and stand with my back pressed into the angle of the walls.
Paint flakes under my shoulder blades. The plaster is cold but solid. From here, I hear the building differently—less echo, more direct sound. Water ticking in pipes, the faint, barely-there hum of someone's refrigerator many floors below, wind in the plastic over the window like distant surf.
It's not cozy. But it's… contained.
"I've slept in worse," I think. That one, at least, is definitely true.
I unroll the blanket onto the floor, then reconsider. The boards are uneven, and my ribs already hate me. I rummage in the hall closet and find a flattened cardboard box, the kind you get with bulk groceries. It's damp at the corners but mostly intact.
I lay the cardboard down first, overlapping pieces until I have a rectangle big enough for one person. Blanket on top of that. I smooth it out with my palms, feeling for hidden splinters or sharp bumps. A small nail head catches my skin; I work it back down with the scissor handle until it sits flush.
Pillow is just my extra hoodie rolled tight, shoved into a pillowcase I don't have, so just the hoodie. That's fine. It smells like detergent and shelter air. Familiar.
I sit, then lie back slowly.
The floor creaks under the shift in weight, but not in the "you're going through" way. More like an old person complaining just to make sure you know they're still there.
From down here, the ceiling looks higher, the room bigger. Cracks spider across the plaster where water once found its own paths. Someone tried to cover one with tape years ago; the tape has peeled and is just hanging there, a sad gray tongue.
From my chosen corner, I can see:
the door, with its brick wedge and rolled blanket, a dark outline against the lighter hall;the window, shrouded in cheap cloth and plastic, tinged dull orange by whatever light manages to squeeze through;the makeshift table-cabinet, tilted slightly but solid enough to hold my rig if I decide not to sleep with it on me.
I don't close my eyes at first. I just listen.
Pipes. Wind. Distant TV. A muffled argument two floors down that ends before it really starts. Somewhere far away, a siren cycles up and then fades.
It's quieter than the shelter. No snoring from three different directions, no random kids yelling in their sleep, no fluorescent hum that drills into your skull at two in the morning.
My body doesn't quite know what to do with the silence. It keeps waiting for someone to call my name, or for Harris to knock his cane into my bunk frame, or for staff to make an announcement about curfew.
Nothing happens.
The tightness in my chest is different here.
At the shelter, it's about crowding. Voices. The knowledge that one bad mood in the wrong person might turn the whole room into a problem.
Here, it's about the fact that if something goes wrong in this room, it's on me.
Nobody else is responsible. Nobody else to blame. Nobody else to fix it.
Weirdly, that makes it easier to breathe.
"This is better," I think, and I hate that I think it in those words. "Colder, yeah. But better."
Control over chaos is all I've ever really wanted. Not comfort. Not really. Just the ability to decide.
Having that… feels close to dangerous. Like wanting more might jinx it.
My eyes drift to the door, check the brick again. To the window, check the movement of the sheet. Back to the door.
I reach out and place my hand on the Micro Tool Rig beside me, fingers closing over familiar shapes.
Screwdriver shaft. Pliers. Scissor blade. Needle case. The little weight of it is as comforting as any blanket.
If someone bursts in, I can move. If a pipe bursts, I can fix it. If the floor changes its mind about staying solid, well—there's only so much anyone can do about gravity.
I feel the word rise in my head, uninvited:
Home.
It lands and sits there, bright and wrong and tempting.
Too big. Too heavy. Too breakable.
"Base," I correct, quietly, to myself. "It's just a base. Backup plan. Crash spot."
The lie is thin. But it's a layer, like the sheet over the window and the blanket under the door. Enough to cut the draft.
I stay there for another minute, counting breaths, listening to the building's bones.
Then I sit up.
I don't sleep here. Not yet.
Not because it's worse than the shelter—it isn't, not where it counts—but because moving in completely on the first day feels like asking for the universe to notice and take it away.
Instead, I do a last walk-around.
Check the window covering. Check the door wedge. Check that the glass tub is pushed somewhere no bare ankle will ever find it. Double-check the paths.
On an impulse, I pick up a small piece of plaster and drop it just inside the doorframe where no one would step naturally. If it's moved when I come back, I'll know someone else came in. It's not much. But it's a sensor, of a kind.
At the threshold, I look back once.
Blanket in the corner. Tools on the crate table. Plastic over the window breathing slowly with the wind. The room still looks like a ruin, but it's a ruin with… edges. With intentions.
"It's not yours," I remind myself under my breath. "Not really."
The other voice that's getting louder lately, the one that thinks in longer sentences, answers back before I can shut it down:
No. But it's the first place in Gotham that doesn't belong to anyone else more than it belongs to you.
I don't know what to do with that, so, as usual, I do nothing.
I step over the dangerous board, close the door behind me, and wedge the brick from the outside just enough that it still looks like a stuck, useless door to anyone else.
By the time I'm back in the stairwell, my face is blank again. By the time I hit the side alley, I've folded the whole afternoon into a smaller story:
Tested structure. Reduced hazards. Established secondary fallback location.
That's all.
I walk back toward the shelter, hands in my pockets, hood up against the cold, and don't look up at the dark window that hides the corner with my blanket in it.
Not on purpose, anyway.