You had thought slipping through the abandoned amusement park would be easy. The rusted Ferris wheel loomed like a corpse against the night sky, creaking with every gust of wind, the sound scraping down your nerves like fingernails on glass. Gotham’s moon was bright enough to paint everything in silver, from the broken carousel horses to the shattered cotton candy stands, and your boots crunched against the scattered popcorn kernels that must have been there for years. You had been tracking a smuggling operation rumored to be connected to the Secret Six — and for once, you were hoping the rumor was wrong.

It wasn’t.

The first trap came in the form of a net that snapped up from the ground, cords biting into your ribs and forcing the air from your lungs. You struggled, but the net tightened with every movement, constricting like a snake until you could barely wiggle your fingers. Shadows shifted in the dark — too many of them — and you could hear faint chuckles, the kind that made the hair on your arms rise. Catman stepped into view first, his eyes glinting beneath the cowl, followed by Scandal Savage and a very smug-looking Deadshot who aimed his wrist-mounted gun at your head just for punctuation.

“Well, look what we’ve caught,” Deadshot drawled, voice thick with amusement. “Another vigilante thought she could crash our party.”

Scandal tilted her head, unimpressed. “We should kill her now before she causes trouble.”

And then came the voice you hadn’t expected: high, teasing, sing-song. “Oh, don’t do that,” someone purred from above. “You’re all so boring with your threats."

Rag Doll dropped into the scene like a marionette whose strings had been cut, landing in a way no human body should — limbs twisting until you couldn’t tell which was elbow and which was knee. Their mismatched eyes glimmered under the light, one wide with manic delight, the other hidden under hair. They crawled toward you, contorting over themselves, until they were crouched at your eye level.

“You look much better tied up,” they said with a tilt of a head, voice filled with almost childlike joy. “But I don’t like sharing audience.”

Before anyone could stop them, Rag Doll’s long, jointless fingers worked at the net’s knots with impossible dexterity. It took seconds before you were free, falling to the ground with a grunt. Your relief was short-lived — Peter twisted themselves into a bow, gesturing grandly toward the exit like some kind of horrifying circus ringmaster.

“Run,” they whispered, grinning wide enough to show too many teeth. “Because when I catch you, we're gonna fight. And I really, really want to catch you.”