Chapter Text
Tim leaps over a gargoyle, shooting his grapple down a streetlamp to close in on the criminals he’s pursuing. They’re just a couple of thugs— three common burglars in over their heads— but the same could be said of much of the crowd they’ve been dealing with recently.
The truth is, Gotham is trapped in a downward spiral; has been since Bruce’s death. The mayor has declared a state of emergency. The gangs have taken notice of Batman’s disappearance, and with the open war between Two-Face and the Penguin, and the newer gangs and villains developing, the city is ablaze with blood and discontent. Between them, the looting, rioting, and the police force quitting like dropping flies, Robin has his hands full; but even as he rounds up and kicks down the door to the abandoned house he saw the thugs walk into, he knows Gothamites won’t thank him for his service. Or rather, won’t be satisfied, not with the tides of brutality washing over them, wave after wave. The citizens of Gotham are looking for a saviour. For someone to take back the streets. They’re looking for the Batman.
Or a Batman.
The house is silent when he steps in, no sign of the clumsy thugs he’d been chasing earlier. Maybe they got out already? It’s large enough that he’ll have to check every room if they’re hiding, but he’ll have definitely lost their trace by then. He’ll have to tread carefully; this is starting to seem more and more like a trap.
The stench of blood hits him with such intensity that for a second, he feels like he’s being fear-gassed; he pulls out his flashlight, hoping to blind whatever villain lies there and take them by surprise, but there’s nobody here.
Nobody alive, in any case. In what used to be a living room, corpses pile up on top of each other in a horrible mound of charred, tangled, mangled flesh. They resemble broken dolls, articulations dislocated and fingertips burnt off, whatever sin they’re accused of branded on their chests: rapist, he reads, murderer, human trafficker. He wonders if these wounds were acquired post-mortem; knows, because this is Gotham, that they were not.
The worst, though, is the faces. For a second, he thinks they’re wearing masks— but the flesh is simply lying bare, skin flayed off as they lie contorted in eternal grimaces. All of their teeth and eyeballs seem to have been torn off and carved out, jaws wide open and dislocated, and some of them had their heads bashed in— on one of the corpses, the upper part of the head seems to have been crushed completely, as though run over by a truck. Tim steps around the puddle leaking from it.
And then, sticking out mockingly at the top, soaked in blood, twisting the revulsion and nausea in his chest even further : a note.
I am Batman.
No.
****
She’s lurking out of sight, in the shadows of the cave. The bats have retreated for now; they must be bothered by the fighting. Dick stands in front of the display case, almost touching the glass, like he could knock their foreheads together. The cowl is empty.
Clenched fingers— no, fists. Back hunched. Hard to see his face with the lamp in the case; like the light swallows him.
Tim is standing behind, wired like a string. Ready to snap.
“It has to be one of us, Dick.”
“We’ve gone over this, Tim.”
They’ve been going at it for a while now.
“Well, I’ve got a newsflash. Someone else has beaten us to it!”
“I’ve read the news. Fed-up citizens, playing dress-up heroes-”
“No. I’m talking about someone good, someone with experience. Maybe even someone we know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, just— something I keep thinking about… I can’t be sure until I’ve investigated but, what I’ve found; it was a massacre, Dick. We have a killer Batman on our hands, and one thing’s for sure; whoever this guy is…”
“…He’s no ordinary citizen.”
Unfair. Not fair. The evil that men do, lives after them. The good-
“What do you think, Cass?”
She blinks. She thought maybe they forgot her.
“Oh, um. The good- the good is oft.” Of-t-en? Ofen. Oft. Soft.
She clenches her fists.
“The good is oft in-terred with their bones.”
*****
Steph wakes up to an eerily blank mask a couple of inches from her face, which should probably feel disturbing—but she’s tired.
“Boo.”
“Oh, hey Cass… My shift’s like, in half an hour. What’s up?”
“I know. Wanted to- talk. To you.”
Steph rubs her eyes, sitting up and looking her friend up and down. Even without the cowl, it’s not exactly easy to understand what’s going on in her head, but still, she looks sad. She has been different since Batman’s death; they all have been, but Cass has been distancing herself, closing in on herself and avoiding Steph as much as she could. Now, she looks like she’s staring straight at her, clutching a bundle of clothes against her chest.
“Talk? Yeah, sure, okay, what’s up?”
“Okay, um, uh. Okay, so. Here.”
She shoves the bundle against her chest— a vigilante suit, she notices, black, the kind designed by Lucius Fox.
“What-”
“Batgirl.”
Oh god.
“Oh, Cass. But… You’re not retiring, are you?”
She curls up on herself, letting herself fall on the bed like a deflated balloon.
“He…He wan-ted me… to give. To you.”
Well she’ll be damned, she definitely didn’t expect that. He wanted her to inherit Batgirl? The thought is a little heart-warming, in spite of everything. But, still:
“But what about you… Batgirl’s yours, he can’t just give it away!”
“He can. He was- was the one… to give it to me. And now you. Batgirl.”
She holds the cold in front of her, runs her fingers against the pointed ears. Does she even want it? She made Spoiler from her own two hands, in spite of everything. She never expected— after everything that happened, after Robin and Spoiler and Batman’s death— thought she’d never get the chance to earn this recognition.
Batgirl.
Yeah, maybe.
“And where does that leave you? Who are you gonna be, then?”
“I am… Batman’s. Daugh-ter, of Batman.”
But Batman is dead, she doesn’t say. Cass is grieving, she tells herself. To find herself in Gotham, after losing him, and losing the mantle…
Did he ever get around to adopting her, in the end?
“We can share,” she hears herself saying. Cass is back to looking anywhere but in her direction. “Who says there can only be one Batgirl?”
“What’s in- in a name.”
A whole lot, she thinks, bites her tongue.
“Well, you know you’re always gonna be my favourite Batgirl, right? Unless, of course, you’re afraid of the competition? I might just overshadow you.”
“Puh-lease.”
She snorts, taking off her pyjama top.
“There we go. Come on then, Batgirl, help me figure out how to put this thing on. My shift is starting soon.”
****
They halt the transfer bus at gunpoint, masked men and cars surrounding him as the leader steps forward, his silhouette an imposing shadow in the headlights.
“The prisoners won’t be sniffing Arkham’s new paint job any time soon. They can thank Calamity for that. But your freedom, my friends… Comes courtesy of me.”
“You… But you’re supposed to be dead.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be a free woman right now, Fright. But make no mistake, freedom comes at a price. Repaid to me with a little of your effort and a smidgen of your time.”
Astrid Arkham steps forward, baring her teeth at the man.
“With you as our leader? You should know that we wouldn’t believe you. That I wouldn’t follow you.”
Wreathed in shadows, the man smiles. It’s not a reassuring smile.
“I didn’t expect you to, dear Knight. Of course, we’re all going to need some… time, to adjust to the new order from now on. Make no mistake, things are different now. With the old Batman dead and the underworld ablaze… This city is ours to seize.”
An inmate rushes forward up to the man.
“Hey, didn’t you hear the lady? We’re not anyone’s followers!”
“Watch and learn, friends. M-32 activate.”
The inmate falls to his knees, clutching his face with a horrified scream as his flesh implodes from the inside out. Then, after a long, atrocious minute, he falls to the ground, lifeless, the remains of his head hitting the ground with a wet squelch. And finally, quiet.
“Each of you was given a chemical implant with your sedatives during your recent stay at Blackgate. The implant is radio-activated… And, well, you’ve seen what it triggers. Death.”
“You’d better have a damn reason,” Orca screeches, horrified.
“Heh, a reason? Batman is dead… Long live Batman. Light it up, boys!”
Behind the man, a building explodes. The brazier light, in the dark of the night, wreathes his silhouette in a halo of flames.
****
It’s Alfred who organizes the meeting, two hours after a wave of dangerous criminals breaks out on their transfer to Arkham and the situation grows from bad to utterly terrible.
“How’s everyone doing?”
Steph stretches like a cat in her new Batgirl suit. Dick should ask her about that sometime.
“Like we’re a beaver dam holding back the Atlantic Ocean. Thank god I got my rabies shot, I just had to arm-wrestle Man-bat away from a factory.”
“Civilian death toll is already at confirmed three, injured are fifteen and counting,” Barbara announces in the comms. “So far, I haven’t been able to figure out who organized the breakout, so we have to deal not only with the chaos of dangerous rogues in the current climate, but also contend with them potentially cooperating with an unknown player.”
“The pre- protests are. Diff, um. Uh, um. Difficult.”
“When it comes to the gangs, the situation isn’t much better on that front,” Tim sighs. “Someone interrupted an arms deal of Two-Face’s… with a rocket launcher.”
“Talk about overkill.”
“And they weren’t playing— put a bullet in the back of the head of anyone who tried to escape.”
“It’s the second attack this week; either everyone’s rallying against him, or someone has it bad against Two-Face. Word is on the street, Penguin is upping the hostilities, wants to take advantage of the uproar to take out his biggest competitor.”
“I’m afraid we may also have a grave problem on the personal front, Master Dick.”
Dick’s heart jumps to his throat, turning to the old butler in panic.
“Is Damian okay? Did something happen?”
“Master Damian is much alright, though he did attempt to borrow the Batmobile for an outing earlier tonight; you may consider having a conversation with the young master at some point, I’ll hope. No, I am far more concerned by the fact that someone managed to break into the Cave while you were all away and patrolling.”
“Did he hurt you? How did he manage to avoid the surveillance equipment?”
“He did not. I was not in the cave at the moment, but I was able to recover camera footage; our guest has made no effort to shield himself from sight.”
With that, Alfred exposes the feed on the bat-computer, and Dick feels his breath catch in his throat.
He doesn’t recognize him immediately, despite how often he’s engraved the memory of this face behind his eyes. The figure on the screen, for lack of a better word, looks destroyed.
He’s emaciated, his cheeks hollowed out and his shoulders hunched forward, body shaking in the kind of tremor usually seen in alcoholics quitting cold-turkey. He looks smaller than the last time he saw him, his muscle mass thinned out like a molten candle, wearing dirty, ragged clothes. He stumbles into the cave more than anything else, scrambling up and holding onto the wall for support, breathless. He looks like he’s screaming, or like he’s trying hard to breathe in a room full of smoke.
He carries his weight to the array of cases in the back of the cave, looking everywhere around him like a wounded, hunted animal. Then, abruptly, he throws himself against the glass of a case in the corner, again and again and again, using his shoulder like a fucked-up battering ram. Eventually, the glass cedes, and he throws himself in as crystal comes raining down, tearing the fabric from its hanger like a starving animal grasping at its prey. Then, seemingly unconcerned by the bleeding cuts all over him, he cradles the suit into a bundle against his chest and runs out of the cave with renewed energy.
He isn’t wearing any shoes.
“That’s…”
“Jason.”
“Oh, god.”
“Bat-man. The. Um. The cowl is gone. Batman is- gone.”
“But… How…”
“Gone.”
Dick turns away, unwilling to face the light of the computer screen anymore. In the dark corner of the cave, the missing suit is a shadow glaring down at him, the broken glass like a black hole draining out all the light.
“I should have known something would happen when he refused the invitation to the cave to listen to Bruce’s will. I heard he’d been struggling since the Outlaws broke up, but…”
“You had a lot on your mind, Master Dick; it’s quite alright. When Master Bruce… When Batman left us, he left behind a void— in this family, just as in this city. Nobody is expecting you to take charge of everything by yourself.”
“You think… You think he did it?”
Dick’s shock must be evident on his face as he turns around, because Tim takes a step back.
“Look, he’s clearly not in his normal state, is he? And he’s been known to go a little… off the rails during mental breakdowns before. Like, don’t tell me it wouldn’t fit his MO—brutally going after rapists, murderers and traffickers, stealing a vigilante’s identity… It’s almost… perfect.”
“Perfect?!”
“I’m just saying!” Tim raises his hands in front of himself, but then squares his shoulders up. “Look, I may not know him the way you do, but I know the facts: someone, a skilled, trained killer has been going around murdering people in Batman’s name fitting Red Hood’s MO. As we’ve just seen, Red Hood is a wild card right now. And, however we may feel about it…”
Tim takes a deep breath, closes his eyes. When he opens them, staring straight at the array of cowls, they are full of steel.
“This city is bleeding out of every wound right now. If we want a shot at saving it, we can’t let our judgment be clouded by our emotions. Gotham can’t afford it. We let ourselves get carried away? People die.”
Wordlessly, Cass leaves the cave.
Nobody follows her.
****
In his penthouse, the Penguin paces.
“So, Two-Face thinks I scorched his deal… Me, eh? I wish I’d done it. Only to see the look on half his face… Ha!”
He puffs out a deep breath from his cigar, watching the flutter of a bluebird’s wings dissipate the smoke in flight.
“But if I didn’t rip ol’ Two-Face off, then who did? Some psycho with a death wish, perhaps?”
“Our insider says Two-Face thinks it was you who freed those prisoners from them Arkham buses.”
“Heh-heh-heh. Moi? Paranoid, anyone? Well, one thing’s for sure… We can expect some kind of strike against us. And if he’s low on ammo, it’s better for us to strike first. Bossworth, I want you to find out which lunatic I can thank for this generous gift. Then kill him. He obviously doesn’t understand the rules around here.”
He puffs out another breath of smoke in the face of a passerine, holding onto its body to hold it in place.
“Everything in Gotham runs through me. In the meantime, Henleys, let us prepare to organize… A little tour de passe.”
*****
Jim Gordon stares through the blinds at the angry crowd at the feet of the GCPD.
“Commissioner, you really see a connection between the disrupted transfer and the homicides at the docks?”
“Given that the bullets recovered at each crime scene matched each other, I’d say hell yeah.”
“Meaning Oswald Cobblepot would be behind the Arkham breakout? Isn’t that a bit of a stretch?”
“When you work in Gotham as long as I have, you’ll learn to trust your hunches.”
The man frowns, leaning over the photographs of mangled bodies sprawled across the desk with their bones exposed and torn out necks over puddles of blood and gore.
“I’m the new district attorney, Gordon. There are protocols that need to be adhered to. I just can’t go around wire-tapping and arresting people on a hunch.”
A shadow crosses over the old commissioner’s glasses. The shadow of the blinds draws dark bars over their silhouettes.
“We’re talking the Penguin here, with all due respect, Hampton. A criminal mastermind engaged in a bloody war with Two-Face. What do you think was in that deal he intercepted? Twinkies?”
“There’s a lot of gang violence in Gotham City, but your office has yet to pin down any larger organization between these gang wars.”
“Then we’ll just wait until some innocents get killed. That’s what you’re saying, right?”
“Maybe if you waited for proper procedure once in a while, you’d have some of these guys locked up already. Just my opinion here, but you relied far too much on Batman and not enough on your own men. What we’re seeing now is a sign, commissioner, and I don’t like what it reads.”
“A sign of what, Hampton?”
“A sign that maybe that maybe some new blood is needed in Gotham… We’re not dealing with garden-variety criminal minds here. Hanging around Batman all that time has suckered you into thinking these guys are something special. He scared you. Just like he scared the rest of this city.”
Jim Gordon pulls out a pack of cigarettes.
“After what Freeze put me through, nothing scares me anymore.”
A tremble courses through his fingers, jolting as he drops the little box and watches the cigarettes tumble out of his grasp.
“If you want me to ask the judge for a wiretap, you’ll need more than some bullet holes for me to connect this to Cobblepot or anyone else. So if you don’t mind, I’ll show myself-”
Hampton is interrupted by a tremor on the ground and a bright, fiery light as the front of the station explodes.
“What the-”
“Let’s move, fast!”
Before the two men can escape, the door slams open to a man in a police uniform holding up a gun.
“A message from Two-Face. He’d like to extend the proverbial olive branch.”
Then, he fires. Jim dives behind the desk as Hampton screams and collapses, blood bursting out of his torn-out trachea.
Walking out of the building, the brazier a warm crackle in his back, Henleys grins in satisfaction as he throws the uniform in a garbage container.
That’s Two-Face taken care of.
****
The kid waits until the alley is quiet before peeking out of his spot behind the dumpster. These past few days, the streets have gotten exponentially more dangerous, and he almost got caught in a shoot-out just now. But it’s not like he has much of a choice, so he scurries out into the dark of the alley, quite as a mouse, and lowers the hand clamped against his mouth, carefully side-stepping the shards of a broken glass bottle glittering on the asphalt. He sticks close to the walls, which stink of blood and dog piss and a thousand nasty things, and draws the hood of his sweatshirt over his head as much as he can.
It’s okay. He’s done this before. He’s got this.
The bell chimes as he slides into the little Walgreens, crude electric light flickering hesitantly from a naked bulb hanging from a single wire on the ceiling. He moves swiftly, tracking the red dot of the camera in the corner, angling his head so it never catches his face.
The clerk is sprawled, half-asleep, on the counter-top; perfect. The man is quite a lot bigger than him, but he’s nothing if not scrappy, and can surely slip between the cracks as long as the clerk doesn’t notice him. His hands move with a deft, practiced choreography, finding the box of medication, nimble fingers slipping it in the pocket of his hoodie. After a second of hesitation, he grabs a pack of cigarettes as well— it’s been a stressful couple of days. Besides, he’s hungry.
The clerk startles awake as the alarm rings, blinking heavily, but he’s already through the door, ill-gotten gains clutched tight against his chest as he runs as far as his little legs will take him, breathless, and disappears into the night.