Notes: I borrowed some ideas/characters from B:TAS and Year One. Further, since this is based on the Nolan-verse movies, I did not feel obligated to stick to non-movie canon. Okay? Okay.
Big thanks go out to Barb for the beta and the geniusness. :)
Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes.
- Carl Sandburg
No one is going to come.
He watches the storefront anyway. He's got a good angle on it: Not directly across the street, but on a clean diagonal, two buildings down. He's on the roof of his building and the store is on the street level of its. It's a corner building so he can see the front and back at the same time. He has binoculars and night vision.
No one has come or gone all night.
There's supposed to be a meeting inside – some of Maroni's players that slipped through the fingers of Dent's crusade six months ago. He wants to catch these guys. He wants to send them on their way to jail and finish Harvey Dent's last righteous act. The East End is going downhill fast enough, buckling under the weight of Narrows transplants and its own rotten core; it doesn't need desperate packs of mobsters.
He checks the storefront through the binoculars and puts them away again. Nothing.
Even here, the streets are almost empty in this magic hour, when the criminals and party people are staggering home and the early shift is just beginning to wake for another day at the grindstone.
Dawn is still hours off, and the streetlights along this stretch are doing an indifferent job in driving back the night. Good for him – he has plenty of places to hide, even on the rooftop. Bad for seeing trouble sneaking up in the shadows.
But he's not truly worried. No one is going to come. He can handle them if they do.
Wasting his time bothers him, though. The information was intercepted from a usually reliable source. He knows better than to hope that an empty meeting place means there's nobody left to meet; more likely, they went somewhere else or changed the time. More likely, his source was wrong.
He'll find out. In the meantime, he'll stay here until the sun rolls up and all good nocturnal creatures disappear.
A few cars drive past – taxis, delivery vans, overly cautious drunks. Would-be johns cruising in vain. Anxious tourists in the wrong neighborhood, trying to find an escape. Gangsters with their bass thumping.
Foot traffic slows to a trickle. A pack of men meander past the storefront and he tenses, but they're talking, half-arguing, half-joking, and exploding into raucous laughter. Not his mobsters. They walk on and their voices fade.
Silence returns. It doesn't last.
Someone screams.
High, shrill, terrified. A woman. And close.
He leaves his surveillance post and stays in the shadows, going to the edge of the roof. The woman is standing in the mouth of an alley on his side of the street. He sees a lot of skin and not a lot of clothes: A prostitute, a party girl, a woman looking for trouble walking alone around the East End like that.
And she's found some. She backs up a step, shrieks again, and turns and runs.
No one comes out of the alley. No one chases the woman. A few lights go on in windows up and down the street, but no one looks out. Except for the woman, the street is deserted.
He looks at the storefront. He thinks about the cops, who've sometimes tried to bait him in these past few weeks. Gordon has been undermining his people's efforts by giving advance warnings, but he may not have had the chance this time. If this is a trap –
It doesn't matter.
He jumps down to the fire escape and from there to the pavement. The woman is running hell-bent away from his position, high heels clattering, skin flashing pale, long fair hair swinging.
She hasn't gotten far; maybe half a block. He considers stopping her, then decides to instead learn what sent her into a panic. His first suspicion is Scarecrow. Crane's operation is over – he's seen to that – but there's always someone else in the shadows.
He approaches the alley carefully. There's no sound, and nothing to set his instincts off. The woman's purse lies abandoned on the sidewalk, half in and half out of the light. The alley is entirely dark. He sees dumpsters, trash cans, graffiti, a junked-out car that was stripped down to its rusty frame a long time ago.
And a body.
A small body, curled up even smaller where it lies on the filthy concrete.
One little hand is stretched out toward the street, reaching, it seems, for the light. For help.
He crouches and puts two fingers on the child's neck. He finds a pulse and is surprised at the rush of relief he feels. The child is unconscious but alive; he didn't expect that.
But the child – it's a boy, unkempt hair and dirty smudges on his face – may not be alive for much longer. He checks the boy's eyes, sees they're dilated and glassy, takes in the pale, sweating skin and the shirt crusted with vomit, and makes the only decision available to him.
"Alfred," Batman says. He carefully picks up the boy and is surprised again, this time at how feather-light the burden is. How old is this child? Four? No more than six, surely.
"Yes, sir?"
"Call Lucius. I need his help."