Dawn in Gotham is the brightest time in the city. The dark clouds have not had time to cover the sky, so a bright, blinding red sun hangs on the horizon, like those fresh and re-beating hearts.
Batman took Scarecrow and Penguin to the Gotham Police Station, and Peter was responsible for bringing back a group of people from the underground cold storage in Bludhaven.
Before Peter left, Jason, who was still in the cage, stopped him. Peter looked back at him and said, "I'm sorry, but you can't come out yet. It will take time for the symbiote to repair your body."
"Get that thing out of here." Jason said in a hoarse voice: "I don't need him to give it to me..."
"This is Batman's order." Peter shook his head and said, "He hopes this thing can heal your wounds, but he is worried about alien life running around outside the cage, so I'm afraid you have to stay here until it is repaired.
Finish."
"And as you can see, I have no way to change his decision, and I don't have the key to the cage. The symbiote will provide all the energy you need, so you won't feel hungry or thirsty. Maybe after a sleep, everything will be fine."
It's in the past."
"Batman's pug, huh?" Jason stared at Peter and said, "You listen to him in everything, will you kill for him?"
"I don't kill people." Peter turned his head back, adjusted the equipment on his wrists, and said: "Normally I don't argue with him, because it's meaningless. I will do whatever he asks me to do."
Jason's lips turned white, and he shook the bars of the cage vigorously. Seeing Peter turn around to leave, he finally took a deep breath, lowered his head and lowered his eyes and asked.
"Has Batman really changed? Because of me?"
"I don't know, he was like this when I met him."
"He asked you to cut open Penguin's body and put poison inside?"
"You sound a little surprised, but as far as I know, this Mr. Oswald is not a good person, and he doesn't shed tears until he sees the coffin. In this case, no one is in a position to accuse Batman of going too far.
extreme."
Jason choked and thought, I accused Batman of being too extreme? Ever since I met Batman, there hasn't been a day that I didn't accuse him of not being extreme enough.
"Have you ever seen a person with a mental breakdown?" Peter finally turned around completely, stood in front of the cage, looked at Jason through the railing and said, "Have you ever visited a mental hospital?"
Jason shook his head slowly, but still looked at Peter with stubborn eyes and said: "You can't convince me, boy, you are the latecomer to Batman, and you have nothing to stand up for in front of me.
ism.”
"I'm just describing a fact." Peter lowered his head slowly, as if he was recalling something, and showed a trace of hesitation, as if he didn't want to say anything.
Jason stared at him, annoyed by his attitude, and said, "Do you think there's anything I can't accept until now? I spent a year being tortured by the Joker, and I still can't.
Is there anything worse than this?"
"What would you think if I said that the Joker didn't actually treat you seriously at all?"
Jason's hand holding the railing had blue veins. Peter still maintained that expression and said: "His opponent has been Batman from beginning to end, not you. You are just a means of torturing Batman."
"Of course, you will think that I must be bragging." Peter slowly licked his lips to relieve his nervousness, but he continued: "One day, I came to a person just out of complete curiosity.
In the bottomless abyss of thinking.”
Peter's body movements obviously increased. He first lightly shrugged his shoulders upwards, and then turned his hands open with palms facing up, showing that he was not hiding anything.
"You can understand that it's part of the Joker, and that's the most important reason why I actively associate with Batman."
Jason was attracted by what he said, and he knew that Peter was telling him that the appearance of this young man named Peter Parker in this world was not accidental, and that all of this might still be related to the Joker.
"But he's not exactly a clown, he... I don't know what he is, maybe he's human, maybe he's not."
Jason was a little confused by Peter's confusing words. He finally lost his patience, patted the railing and said, "What on earth do you want to say?"
Peter pursed his lips and said, "Death is not the best reward for evil, but you have the ability to turn this into a gift."
"What?"
“Have you ever seen someone who had a nervous breakdown?”
Jason finally understood that Peter would not give up until he got an answer, so he slowly shook his head.
"I have seen madmen." He replied: "Evil, cruel, indifferent, and unreasonable."
"No, I am not referring to this kind of people." Peter denied. He said: "Those people are perverted and born bad species. No matter how crazy they are, they are not worthy of sympathy. I am referring to those human beings who have been completely defeated mentally.
.”
Jason stared at him, with a bad premonition rising from the bottom of his heart. Peter put his hand on the table beside him, pressed his knuckles slightly, pursed his lips repeatedly, and then said.
"I saw a piece of Schiller's memory there. Maybe he showed it to me, or maybe he kept it there for everyone to see."
"What?"
"A child died. It was his patient. He was a very poor child with congenital heart disease. He was very unfortunate, but lucky. His parents allowed him to receive treatment in time."
"The operation was very successful. It is foreseeable that as long as subsequent rounds of operations are completed using the same method in the next few years, he will grow into a healthy child."
"But things didn't develop like that." Peter shook his head and said, "His parents gave up on him."
Jason's attention couldn't help but be drawn. He looked at Peter and asked, "Why?"
"Unreasonable, right?" There was a hint of anger in Peter's tone, but it quickly disappeared. He said, "I have long realized that everyone's love is limited, and some people are particularly limited."
"When they are peaceful and well-off, they are not stingy in making kind decisions, or kindness itself protects their reputation and brings benefits to them."
"But once the situation changes, not even if it endangers themselves, but if kindness cannot bring them enough benefits, they will make the opposite choice."
Jason understood what he meant. In fact, he had always been very smart, and was even the opposite of Batman in understanding and empathizing with others.
Or maybe he should be like this, because he is not a pampered rich young man. He was born at the bottom of Gotham and has been mixed up in the most chaotic and evil areas of the city for a long time.
The kindness he has seen is very limited, but he has seen countless moments when others abandon kindness.
"That's it, this child's parents gave up on treatment." Peter blinked and said, "While they still had the energy to do so, there was even no need to do so."
"Doctors will feel angry, right? Usually they will be sad, helpless, and disappointed with human nature. It is a very bad feeling to watch the life they desperately saved disappear due to the indifference of others."
"But there's something special about this doctor." Peter rubbed the edge of the table with his fingers and said, "This is the first time he has known society and humans in this way."
"He didn't feel sad or helpless, he was just curious. He wanted to know if they could behave so indifferently under any circumstances, so he did an experiment and used his expertise."
"Perhaps it's not that professional, at least... I didn't learn the professional ethics part."
Peter's narrative was too cryptic, and it took Jason a moment to understand what he was talking about. He asked, "You saw the doctor's memory and what he did to those parents, right?"
Peter nodded and said, "I won't tell you what I saw, and I won't tell anyone, but I can describe to you what happened to those parents."
"Are they having a nervous breakdown?"
"Yes, and it is entirely a human influence. The way to do this must be much simpler than you think. It can be said to be a piece of cake."
Peter took a deep breath, reorganized his mind, and then began to describe what he saw.
"At the beginning, they would tear off their own clothes with extreme movements, bang their shoulders or heads against the wall, dig into their skin with their nails until their flesh and blood were bloody, and put their fingers into any crack that the other party could reach.
Among them, just to tear off one of their organs."
"In the second stage, they began to become confused and no longer made loud noises such as roaring and roaring. Instead, they stayed in one place and cried continuously for more than 20 hours, keeping an extremely weird and uncomfortable posture motionless.
If someone pulls them, they will scream and cry as if they were attacked, which is completely unhuman."
"Then they begin to hallucinate, constantly running away, or waving their arms and kicking legs with enough force to harm themselves, facing empty air, solid walls, or other objects that impede their movement."
"They began to regain the ability to speak, but the language had no logic. They kept mumbling one sentence, or describing hallucinations in a toneless tone, and kept mumbling about a certain period of their lives, talking intermittently for several hours.
"
"In the end, they begin to become like an ignorant baby, losing all the abilities that a social person should have, seeing everything in front of them as thin but equal, and blurring all understanding of objects."
"They will completely lose their sense of shame and morality, lose all the acquired things that society has taught them, have no awareness of what they are doing, and rely on instinct to explore anything. They have no sense of smell or taste, and they can see but cannot recognize.
I remember it but I don’t have any idea.”
Peter's tone was shaking uncontrollably, and Jason could hear that he was trying to suppress his fear, because he was the same way. He couldn't imagine what could torture a human being like this.
"What scares me the most is..." Peter took a deep breath and said with the same trembling movement.
"When I see such a person jumping from a tall building and falling into a bloody flower, I want to thank God from the bottom of my heart, thank Him for his forgiveness, and praise His mercy."
His hair stood on end, and cold sweat poured down the hair on the back of his neck like a waterfall. Jason could almost hear the sound of blood coagulating in his veins, which made him feel as if he had fallen into an ice cave.
"So..." Peter took a step forward, just separated from Jason by a cage. He said, "Don't complain about anyone not being cruel enough. Please, this world really doesn't need more cruel things. Someone has already done it."
What you can’t see is where humans suffer the torture of breaking through the bottom line.”
"If you take not killing people as your bottom line, then if something makes you angry and crosses the bottom line one day, you are just giving them a good time."
"And if your bottom line is to kill to stop killing, then sooner or later you will meet someone who makes you feel that death is not enough to make up for his crimes."
Peter took two steps back, shook his head and said, "Then you will embark on such a path - death is not the best evil reward, you have the ability to turn it into a gift."