Chapter Text
Arturo washed up on the unforgiving shores of Gotham City at the grizzled age of 17. He arrived with nothing. No family, no gang, no leader, no bike, no money. Just the clothes he'd been wearing - now torn and blood-stained -, bruises over every inch of his body, two ribs that may or may not have been cracked, an imprint of a boot heel against the side of his skull that never fully went away, and an ache deep within where his soul had been torn out and squeezed till it popped like an over-ripe fruit.
It didn't matter. None of it mattered. The seventeen years before didn't matter, never even existed. Only things from them he still had years later were that ache in his chest, a boot-heal indent you could still feel if you brushed your fingertips across the right part of a shaved scalp, a few faded tattoos he'd long since inked over, and a name he'd barely been using then and only used now in the privacy of his own thoughts. Everything else he'd shrugged off like the weighted chains they were and abandoned at the city limits. He'd hand-forged himself into something new there on Gotham's razor-strewn shores. He had to. It was that or let the city chew him up into gristle and splinters like it did hundreds of others each and every day. And Arturo hadn't gotten to where he was - abandoned and destitute two thousand miles and a country away from where he'd been born - by not being a stubborn asshole who'd head-butt the Virgin Mary herself to claw one more day away from the Angel of Death.
Only thing in his favor out of the whole shit-show was the good fortune in choosing to explosively detonate his old life right on the outskirts of Gotham City. Sure, Gotham back then was a crime-ridden hell hole, but so was every city in the Eastern US. The one thing Gotham had over other decaying metro-wastelands like Detroit or New York or Chicago was stability. The Five Families had spent decades dealing, wheeling, and murdering their way into a five-way division of the city that was solid as granite. Just the sort of thing a lost and broken kid could carve out a place for himself in. Some low-rung position in one of the Five Families where he could figure out just what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life now that everything he had been meant to be was smeared across a quarter-mile of interstate highway before he'd even hit 18.
Sure, there were always flare-ups of tension, skirmishes as one lieutenant took revenge for a decade-old slight or another tried to move his drug pushers a block over, but the intricate network of alliances and marriages and threats of mutually assured destruction ensured none of it would ever spill over into anything bigger. It would've taken the human embodiment of dynamite to so much as put a crack in it.
****
Here is the part Arturo hasn't ever so much as alluded to. With anyone. He's not even completely sure his suspicions have any truth himself. It's not like anyone was sitting there keeping track of every wild story told in every sleazy dive bar across the entirety of Gotham, then or now. And it wasn't like people hadn't been seeing shit in the shadows then going on fearful drunken rants about them since the City Founders erected their first work-tent. It was Gotham after all.
It's just a coincidence - he tells himself still, almost two decades later - that when he'd stumbled his way into the first place that looked like it'd be a good place to hunt for work in, - leather jacket wet with his own blood, his jeans torn from road-rash where he'd gotten dragged the final mile to city limits, probably still nursing a mild concussion if he's honest with himself - that the first conversation he'd been able to pick out over the dull din of a dozen overlapping voices was an old scrawny wharf-rat who was swearing, swearing, to his buddies that he'd seen the offloading of Maxon's latest smuggling shipment taken down by 'a massive bat that'd been birthed from the shadows like a demon of vengeance itself'.
That's just not the sort of thing you go around telling people. It'd make them nervous. It'd made Arturo nervous. It still made him nervous. He sat awake some nights, trying to figure out what it might mean. Did he say something while he screamed and raged, covered in his blood and the blood of those he'd called brothers? Had he sworn an oath of revenge? Spat a curse against all the angels and Almighty? Did he transgress so much that Hell saw fit to split open and unleash one of it's own upon the city? And if those were the thoughts he was having, well, he knew the kind of thoughts others would have. He'd be blacklisted for the rest of his life at best. Run through with silver daggers at worst. He knew his people. A bunch of superstitious fucks, the lot of them. Himself included.
So he didn't say anything to anybody and did his best to not dwell on the fact that the minutes when he was getting the ever-loving shit kicked and beaten out of him as a final farewell by his old club were the same minutes - according to every modern retrospective on the subject - that the first confirmed Bat sighting took place. The mass-brawl at the Tricorn docks had signaled the end of an era, even if no realized it yet.
The Bat Man would hit an unsuspecting Gotham City like the human embodiment of dynamite.
****
Just four months after Arturo's arrival, Gotham was on fire. Metaphorical fire - mostly - but fire all the same. The Five Families were down to Three and the survivors were splintering under the pressure of The Bat's one man war on crime. For the first time in decades, the cast-iron grip on Gotham's underworld was cracking and crumbling away. Entire districts were left uncontrolled; like the vast open spaces and unblocked sunlight experienced in a forest after the fall of a great sequoia. And as in the aftermath of a sequoia-fall, new growth began sprouting and clawing up towards the revealed sun almost immediately.
As the remaining Families fractured and the Gotham streets ran with gunfire, blood, and throwing-stars shaped like bats, a new kind of law-breaker was arising. Instead of organized gangs of hundreds bound together by oaths and family, they were solitary strongmen of vision and passion. They came with branding, garish outfits, signature gimmicks, and grand plans of extravagant larceny. In time, the survivors of this frenzy would be called Rogues and would go on to rule a new Gotham status-quo; but for now the chaos saw new names debuting and falling by the night. The press called them Arch-Criminals, and with each one demanding their own force of loyal followers, there'd never been more job prospects for people like Arturo.
Thank God for it. The Family he'd joined into had been the first to get torn apart by the Bat's crusade. He was barely two weeks past his 18th birthday and once again jobless, with all of his potential job references dead, imprisoned, or long since fled to the safety of other cities who were years away from acquiring their own more-than-human protectors. He'd never had to actually hunt for a job before. He'd joined his road club by just showing up when they went to leave town and refusing to leave. His position with a Family he got by managing to luck into a bartender willing to make a connection. On his third round, that luck wasn't repeating.
Then he met a guy. In a bar, naturally. While drunk, also naturally. When Arturo drunkenly explained his woes, the guy told him he might know somebody who could help. Someone who specialized in exactly this kind of thing. Someone who could hook you into a new crew with just a phone call and the strength of their recommendation. The guy even had a card with a number to call. Just ask for Maria Lupu, he said. The Facilitator.
*****
At the time, The Facilitator worked out of the bare bones of an overseer's office in the rough skeleton of a distribution center whose construction had been abandoned barely a quarter of the way through. It was all exposed wooden beams and weather-tight sheet metal walls. It's only contents were a few filing cabinets, a desk, a chair behind the desk - occupied by Ms. Lupu -, an uncomfortable chair across from the desk - occupied by Arturo -, and a bare bulb above them that gave the whole thing the air of an off-the-books police interrogation.
"On paper, you're barely passable." The woman examining him from over arched-rimmed glasses was pretty in the same stony grim-faced way some of the nuns who'd tried to school him had been. Looked like them too; a mestizo whose indigenous blood far outweighed the Spanish and had never met a problem she couldn't glare into submission. Arturo had instinctively sat straighter and curled his hands to protect his knuckles the moment he sat down.
"Fighting ability, middling." The Facilitator swept her cigarette holder to punctuate her words. The smoke trailing after it traced almost-patterns in the bulb-light. "Melee hampered by being too used to fighting people without guns. Gun use hampered by being too used to shooting at people only used to melee." She spoke in blunt snapped out facts in an accent he couldn't place. Russian-ish, maybe? Or German? He didn't have experience with accents that weren't found in northern Mexico or the southern America states. "Mechanics, middling. Two-wheeled vehicle handling, notable, but of little use in Gotham. Overall, unremarkable."
Arturo bit the inside of his cheek and didn't say a word. It wasn't anything he hadn't already heard from a dozen others in past weeks. She continued her dry, unbreaking eye-contact as she pulled the stack of folders she'd had to the side over in front of her.
"Understand then that the volume of job offers available to you does not reflect upon your skills or past service. It comes because of your intrinsic self. Do you understand what I mean?" Completely lost, he shook his head. The woman pursed her lips, then snapped her fingers. "Stand!"
Arturo found himself standing before he'd fully processed the order. Then he remained standing. She must've had a reason for telling him to.
Ms. Lupu nodded once with the smallest hint of satisfaction. "Before you arrived in Gotham, you followed someone. What happened to them?"
She spoke like the nuns too, with a voice that brokered no argument. "Yolanda Lopez. La Águila Sangrienta." His voice went hollow as he continued. "Lost control of her bike. Thunderstorm. Cops were chasing us. Went off an overpass." He'd felt himself crack open that night as everything he had been and might've been bled out across the tarmac alongside her.
Ms. Lupu nodded again and finally broke eye-contact to carefully pull a handful of folders from the stack before her. "You will never find someone like her again." Arturo opened his mouth to answer but she snapped a finger at him. "I am not being poetic. This is not metaphorical. You will not. You feel like your soul is gone; this is because it is. None of these," she spread out the selected folders in front of him, "will make you whole again. Nothing ever will. You cannot take a job from me in hope of otherwise. Do you understand this?"
Arturo swallowed thickly and nodded. He wanted to argue-
He wanted to argue, to scream and rage. He wanted to throw fists and lash out with chains, break the faces of those who told him to move on, to accept someone else leading the club. He wanted to demand what was wrong with them that they didn't act like they'd had the center of their world grind itself into bloody meat that glistened in police lights.
-but regardless of whatever else could be said about him, Arturo wasn't someone who needed to learn the same lesson twice. So instead all of that he just said "I understand." He did. He just wished he didn't. "I'm not looking for that." He was. He always would be, even if he never found it. "I'm just looking to get paid."
Then, because even as young as he was he still recognized the danger that coiled from the woman like the smoke from her cigarette, he added "Ma'am."
She nodded. "Good. You will always have the hurt, but take strength in it. It flows from that thing which everyone," she tapped the folders with carefully tended nails, "is wanting. Strict, incurious obedience." Arturo shifted on his feet. He really felt like he should argue the point, but... Aside from his blowout in the wake of Lopez's death, it was how he'd always approached authority. "You are best when following orders without question or complaint and it is this which will ensure you will never lack for work or pay in this city. Now. Sit." He did. "And read. These are the four that will fit you best, but the final decision remains yours to make. This time."
***
It was Arturo's first encounter with The Facilitator. Not that he called her that. Not that day, when he still wasn't sure if it was a job description or an alias, nor later. He strictly called her "Ma'am" or "Ms. Lupu". And sometimes, in the privacy of his own mind where he was almost certain she couldn't overhear, Doña Tiburón. In those early days, when players fell as quickly as they rose, he found himself sitting opposite Ms. Lupu in her ever-changing office often. He'd sit and try not to squirm as her stony eyes dissected him and decided which new brand of crazy to latch him onto next. There were many.
He'd chosen his first; a Boss whose actual name he still didn't know years later. The man called himself False-Face. It was before the False-Face Society, or the False-Face who'd rename himself Clay-Face after his true nature became wildly known, or any of the other knock-offs that'd come after. Or was his Boss a knock-off and one of the others was the original? Arturo didn't know. He hadn't understand Gotham as it was back then, much less its years and decades of history before his arrival.
The Boss seemed like a straight-forward man to work for, at least compared to the other options. A counterfeiter looking to step up his game. To Arturo, that promised long nights manning printing presses, guarding boxes of what only looked like hundred-dollar bills, and escorting plainly dressed accomplices as they made bank deposits or small purchases that required an awful lot of change back. Something he wouldn't have to spend too much thought on. Give him time to ruminate on what his life had turned into.
Arturo still hadn't understood Gotham.
It became quickly apparent False-Face's interest in counterfeiting wasn't the result of financial costs vs gains vs risk calculations. Far as Arturo could tell, it was a full-on institutionalizable obsession. He was barely a month in before he went from manning machines churning out twenties to sourcing life-like celebrity masks for the rest of the guys to wear as they headed out to steal famous paintings that'd been the subject of forgery scandals. Then there was all the business with the fake diamonds, or the round of stealing near-perfect replicas of jewelry and replacing them with genuine pieces. He knew the thing with the robotic Batman "counterfeit" was bad news, even before the real one broke through a skylight and put everyone involved behind bars or in the ICU.
Still. One of the sanest bosses he worked for during those years. Amicable, even if he never did take his mask off. Gave him the henchname of "Lustig", which remained one of Arturo's favorites.
****
Two days after some back-alley meat-mechanic declared his fractured collar-bone healed, Arturo found himself in a different abandoned construction project in the same uncomfortable chair while Doña Tiburón looked into his soul and tapped a single manicured fingernail against the table. Finally, she blew out a puff of smoke and shifted forward, "So then. What did we learn?"
Arturo blinked. Then blinked again. She asked like she had intent, but he had no idea what her intent could be. He stumbled blindly for an answer. "Uh, watch the skylights? Ma'am?"
Ms. Lupu flashed the smallest indulgent smile. "An undoubtedly fine lesson. At least until someone manages to neutralize that particular problem. But more generally. What skills did you learn? What lessons? How has your time with False-Face improved your," her cigarette smoke traced her attempt to find a suitable word, "resumé?"
He blinked. Opened his mouth. Closed it. Blinked again. All the while she just watched him with the same stone-faced expectant expression. "Well... Heists, I guess?" Cigarette smoke wove interlocking circles in the air as she gestured for him to continue. "Never did actual breaking into somewhere for something specific before. So I guess that. Uh, museum security stuff? Disguises. How to look like specific people. How to use a counterfeiting press. Bunch of stuff about how jewels and jewel forgery works, stuff about paintings. Some wiring basics from helping with the components of the robot Batman project?"
She nodded in satisfaction. "Good. Gotham isn't like your motorbiking gangs. It is doubtful you'll ever be under someone long-term, especially given current circumstances. You mustn't look on these placements as ends to themselves. You must be learning, always learning. The only jobs you fail are the ones where you cannot walk away saying you now know more than you did before. Yes?"
Arturo shifted uneasily under her stare. He understood her words, but there was something bigger there that she was talking around. Something he couldn't see the shape of. But he was used to not fully understanding what someone else was talking about. If all he could make out was surface of the words, then that's what he responded to. "Yes, Ms. Lupu."
She nodded again, looking like a stern dog trainer pleased that a puppy had sat on its first try. "Let us not give you too much a change this first time. A Mr. Gumm is looking for competent hard-working underlings. I suspect you and he will be an excellent matching." She held out a slim folder to him, but pulled it back just as Arturo started reaching for it. "Remember. I will want to hear what you have learned from him the next time we meet like this. Yes?" He nodded slowly and she let him take the folder from her hand. "Until next time."
That was the meeting Arturo realized Ms. Lupu never called him by name. It meant something; he knew it did. Fifteen-plus years later, he still didn't know what that something could be.
****
Boss Gumm - or Colonel Gumm as he insisted on being called towards the end - was also a counterfeiter, but focused specifically on stamps. Obsessed with stamps as it turned out. Still, Arturo breathed easier. It wasn't like you could build a robot Batman out of stamps, right? How much harm could a man do with stamps?
As noted before, Arturo still didn't understand how Gotham worked. Yet.
His henchname that time was BLOCK. All-Capitals. His two work-buddies on the job were PRESS and RETURN. Good solid guys. Helped drag him out the back exit after he got his leg broken in two places during the Bat's inevitable appearance. Ran into them multiple times over the years after, always under different names and different Bosses. It was just how it worked back then. His report to The Facilitator - he was now almost certain it was a proper Also-Known-As. He still never used it. - included a literally insane amount of knowledge about stamps, stamp collecting, stamp misprints, what museums specific one-of-a-kind stamp misprints were displayed in, and so forth. On the skill side, he now knew how to wield piston-powered guns made out of stamp-press parts, how to build piston-powered guns out of stamp-press parts, how to pull off proper smash-and-grab heists, and how to (partially) dodge the frighteningly savage kicks, punches, and spinning flying tackles of the insane demon child that'd started appearing from the Bat's shadow like some demented joke. There was also that plan to somehow turn Batman into a giant life-sized stamp, but Arturo hadn't understood a single damn thing about it and he was pretty sure that wasn't on him for once.
Later, there was Louie the Lilac, ex-mob lieutenant turned perfumer who'd somehow gotten his hands on giant man-eating lilacs years before Ivy showed up on the scene. Henchname: Arbutus. Things learned: Way too much about the care and growing of lilacs. How much he hated mind-control pollen. How to steal animals from the Gotham Zoo. Who among the Gotham elite had very specific kinds of exotic pets. How to harvest perfume ingredients from exotic pets. And that any scheme to take over the city which involved mind-controlling stoned college dropouts was bound to fail with or without The Bat showing up to put a stop to it.
From Minstrel - electronic music genius, also focused on mind-control for some God damn reason. Henchname: Bass. A good one. - he learned about wiring and circuitry and audio equipment. Also got crash courses in leading impromptu mobs of mind-controlled ravers against police, rival Arch-Criminal gangs, and eventually - inevitably - masked vigilantes.
Minerva - loved fur-coats and drugging Gotham's elite at her high-priced spa so they'd reveal profitable secrets. Henchname: Atlas - gave him service industry skills, janitorial, how to muck out mud baths, how to give massages, how to turn down old men wanting a handjob without punching them in the mouth, and how to fight insane preteen kids with blood in their domino-masked eyes with just mops, buckets, and a hose hooked up to giant mud vats.
King Tut - Professor from one of the universities, snapped, decided that as a 280 pound white man he was obviously the reincarnation of the only Pharaoh everybody knows the name of, that Gotham was his "Modern Day Thebes", and that whatever attractive starlet or heiress on the front page that day was his Cleopatra to be. Henchname: Sethos - taught him enough Egyptology to properly understand how ahistorical everything he did was, how to be an insane Boss' Number Two, the subtle-art of translating what needed to be done into Boss-Decipherable speak, and translating the Boss' commands into something the rest of the guys could actually accomplish. Also how to organize, fund, and pull off lavish bacchanals because, everything else aside, the guy knew how to throw a party. Unlike most of his Bosses of the time, Tut managed to receive a clean bill of mental health and release from Arkham Asylum for another round. Twice! Then Arkham suffered its first round of reforms, "For the Criminally Insane" got added to the sign, and Boss Tut's third lockup proved permanent. Arturo still kept his Sethos getup in the back of the closet, though. Just in case.
Egghead - Self-Proclaimed "Smartest Man in the World" and damn well might've been. Also had an enlarged egg-like head, which Arturo was almost certain was unconnected to the smartness. Along with the head came the inevitable obsession with all things eggs. Henchname: Benedict. - taught him how very much he hated egg-puns. Or puns in general. Also how to cook almost every egg-related dish known to mankind. How to basically tear out an entire secret hideout's HVAC system and rebuild it from scratch so the Boss could superheat a prehistoric dinosaur egg. Learned about the square-cubed law, how it worked, and why some giant rampaging prehistoric monsters could just ignore it. Also...
****
Arturo paused, looking like he was trying to rack his brain for something else. Because if Doña Tiburón had chosen to smile at that point, finding out her teeth were as sharp and pointed as her mental namesake would've been the less surprising outcome. She'd worn that smile before - every time he laid out what his last round of henching had taught him. It worried him. Because there was something else his latest Boss had taught him. On purpose. Explicitly. Or "Eggxplicitly", he supposed.
Mr. Heed had taught him how to think.
Not that Arturo had been an idiot! He knew stuff. He understood facts. Every time he got a new Boss with their own special fixation, he knuckled down and learned it inside and out. If they told him their banquet hall needed a specific style of pillar or had a passcode set to the year the upside-down flying plane stamp was printed, he wouldn't need to ask followup questions, he could just get what needed doing done.
It was the putting together of facts into bigger facts that escaped him. Or how to recognize what the unsaid words were when people talked around them. Or how to predict the cascade of consequences that'd spill out from an action beyond the first few steps. Or how to recognize that something was going to happen before it did even without the full picture. "Eggstrapolate from what you do know, my dear Benedict."
For a guy who knew everything and was flamboyantly nutter about showing it off, the Boss was surprisingly non-patronizing to his hench. Which Arturo appreciated. So when the Boss approached him one day and delicately danced around how peculiar it was that his dear Benedict could have no problem remembering whatever information got thrown at him but never seemed to understand the implications of all the various pieces put together, the Boss managed to do it in such a way that Arturo didn't feel an urge to punch him in the face even once.
After that - well, up until the whole thing with what was obviously not a dinosaur even if everyone kept calling it that -, Mr. Heed offered him regular lessons and advice on how to "Eggage your brain properly to think something through to the yolk of the matter", along with plenty of '"eggxamples" to practice with. Arturo also suspected there might've been some sort of brain steroid that got slipped into the omelets the Boss cooked up for him during the weekly "Weggsday Brunches" the Boss threw for them. But he was told not to worry about it. So he hadn't.
What he did worry about was Ms. Maria "The Facilitator" Lupu and the way she smiled at him like she knew a private joke where he was the punchline. He worried about why she never called him by a name. Any name. He worried about why she had always been in disguise whenever they met; bits of tacky glue or a misbrushed stroke of obscuring makeup around the ears pointing to concealed wigs, fake noses, and altered cheekbones. He worried about her ever-changing office locations and how distant they all were from anyone who might hear something and how each one came with predug pits too deep and dark to see whatever might've been thrown into the bottom of them. He worried about the way her cigarette smoke smelled like Boss Lilac's chemistry lab and how her voice would sometimes burr like Boss Minerva's questions or Boss Minstrel's music. He worried about how twice she'd pulled him out of other jobs to have him prepare for Boss Tut's return days before the paperwork for his releases had been signed. There was a lot he worried about, now that he knew to.
After a moment of contemplation, he finished off with "And I'm pretty sure I could win any bar night trivia contest I get taken to after this." Doña Tiburón nodded with satisfaction and slid him a new folder with a self-assured smile. Arturo took the folder, nodded respectfully, and left her office.
It was the last time he would ever see The Facilitator.