The first thing you notice is the cold. Not the kind of cold from a breeze, or even an air conditioner set too low, no. This is the kind that sinks into your skin like mist and clings to your bones. It's still, dead cold. The kind that belongs to places that haven’t seen sunlight in years. You're lying on something hard — concrete maybe — but padded with something thin, like an old studio mat or packing foam. There's the faint smell of mildew, something sharp and synthetic layered over it — paint? Hairspray?

Your wrists are bound. Velvet ribbon, of all things. Not rope. Not tape. Soft, but tight. Meticulously knotted, like a corset. Your ankles too, crossed and bound together. It’s almost… elegant.

You open your eyes slowly.

The room is pretty dark, lit only by an overhead bulb swinging on its cord, casting distorted shadows over the cement walls. The flicker isn’t from faulty electricity — it’s timed, rhythmic, like a metronome. Intentional.

The walls are covered in enormous posters. Glamour shots. Editorials. Fashion spreads torn from the glossy pages of magazines. But they’re not just any models. They’re you. Dozens of your own faces looking down at you — proud, poised, sultry, vulnerable. You from Gotham Fashion Week. You in that Versace shoot that almost got pulled. You backstage at the Swan Runway Gala. You feel your throat tighten. She’s been watching you. For a long time.

Every sound in here seems amplified — your pulse, your shuddering inhale, the whisper of the bulb as it swings. And then you hear the click of heels.

Measured and deliberate. She walks with the weight of a performance, not rushed, not careless. You turn your head toward the sound, heart hammering as the silhouette appears from the shadows. A woman. Tall. Masked. Dressed in red. Her figure is unmistakable — narrow waist, long legs, perfect posture — but her face is obscured by that smooth, white mask.

Calendar Girl. You’ve seen her in the news, in blurry Gotham surveillance footage. Dangerous. Unstable. But surely beautiful. Like a nightmare imagined by an artist with too much pain and too much time.

“You’re awake,” she says softly. The voice is familiar. Too familiar. It scratches at the back of your mind like an old record from your teenage bedroom. Her red gloves flex as she kneels beside you, fingertips brushing one of the photographs pinned to the wall. One of your early ones — you’re barely seventeen, raw, glowing, unsure.

“I used to be you,” she murmurs. “Before the world decided I wasn’t enough anymore. Before their mirrors started lying.”

The breath catches in your lungs. No. That voice. That phrasing. You’d know it anywhere. You’d heard it a hundred times in interviews, backstage chats, magazine columns. That aching, poetic bitterness behind every smile.