Batman is dead, and John Blake has risen as the unchallenged successor to Bruce Wayne's legacy. Nine months have passed since the attempt to destroy Gotham, and the city has struggled forward without a protector, reeling in the wake of Talia al Ghūl's path of destruction. In the absence of its greatest saviour, the dark underside of Gotham City has begun to surface once again, and the decimated police force is powerless to overcome the wave of anarchy that sweeps through the streets. But while Jonathan Crane instigates a full-fledged attack on the weak and unstable people of Gotham, the new Caped Crusader has been locked away beneath the former Wayne Manor, honing himself, waiting. From the shadows, the Batman emerges...

THE DARK KNIGHT ENDURES

Part One: Proving Ground

James Gordon stood alone, silent, his lips clamped around a cigarette, hands in his pockets. Weary eyes surveyed the boroughs of Gotham over the top of his glasses. Above him was a blanket of grey cloud. The sun's attempts to break through the sheet, while futile, resulted in the sky being a brilliant silver that managed to illuminate the city. A chill nipped at Gordon's exposed face, seeping into every tired wrinkle and furrowed line.

"What the hell you doin' here, Jim?"

Gordon turned on his feet to see Detective Bullock staring back at him, his expression unreadable. Removing the cigarette from his mouth and exhaling, Gordon turned back around and slumped over the edge of the GCPD building, arms folded, launching his cigarette into the air and down towards the abyss. He sighed quietly.

"You can't keep comin' up here, Jim. You don't work here no more."

Gordon's head swayed. "Well, I have nothing better to do. If I'm going to waste my time, I might as well do it out in the fresh air. Fresh as it gets, anyway."

Bullock's heavy-set frame sidled over the rooftop next to his former boss. "Look, I know what you're feelin' right now, we've all been feelin' it, but you gotta let it go sometime, right?" His thick Brooklyn drawl elicited no response. "I mean... everybody downstairs has been worryin' about ya, since you... well, we don't even know what happened. I mean, we don't even know if you quit or you got fired or what..."

"I figured I should probably get A over with before B had the chance to rear its head. Now what do you want, Harvey?" Gordon snapped. "Free goddamn country, and I practically lived on this spot for ten years anyway."

"I don't know... you wanna grab a beer?" Bullock already knew what kind of reaction his half-hearted suggestion would be met with.

Gordon snorted. "No, I don't wanna grab a beer. I do enough of that at home."

An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them.

"Listen, Jim, if you ever wanna..."

"I want to what, Detective?" His eyes drifted past Bullock's wide self, over to a familiar friend, tucked almost out of view, covered in dust: a searchlight, stylised image of a Chiroptera emblazoned boldly across its surface. The sight of it brought a twinge to the back of Gordon's mind.

Bullock's beady eyes followed Gordon's line of vision, and both men found themselves staring at the Signal, both losing themselves in the past.

"I thought you smashed that thing?"

"I found it, months ago. Got a package in the mail, led me right to it."

Gordon remembered that day well. His hand had caressed the cold metal of the bat, and his heart had filled with hope for the first time in years. He had felt twenty years younger that day. But with each passing month, that shining ray had been reduced to a dim lightbulb, then to a glimmer, until it resembled the sky above: dull, forgotten, the light taking a backseat to the gloom. Now he wasn't sure if the light was even there anymore. And he doubted it ever would be again.

As the disgraced former police commissioner of Gotham City mused on the empty void that was his life, several miles away - and more than a few feet beneath - a shirtless young man in green sweatpants performed his two-hundredth crunch of the day with his legs wrapped around an iron bar, arms folded, exertion dripping out of his hair.

It was almost time. But not just yet.

A/N: So, yeah... hi. Looks like I've had this account for like five years now, but now I actually have something to post! Yay! Well, that's not true, I've done one or two other fanfics, I've just posted them elsewhere... but I digress. This is pretty much my "Batman 4". Like, if Warner Bros. called me up one day (a man can dream) and said "We want you to pick up where Chris Nolan left off. Have at it, sonny-Jim!", this would be it. Except this is in prose form, because screenplays can be kinda dry to read.

Basically, how this fic is gonna be structured is like so: there will be multiple stand-alone storylines under the banner title of "The Dark Knight Endures", with each story being broken down into bite-size chunks. If you're familiar with the original series of Doctor Who or the way comic book story arcs are structured, it's pretty much the same idea. The individual story arcs will be divided primarily by antagonists, e.g. once a villian is captured or otherwise out of the way and the plotline revolving around them is wrapped up, a new story will begin with its own situations and sub-parts. For example, the above is the first part of the first storyline, and (spoilers! But not really because it's in the intro) the antagonist is Scarecrow. I'm doing it this way for a number of reasons:

1. I see "The Dark Knight Endures" as being one great big whole at the end of the day, so the individual stories that make up TDKE are a way of making it more manageable as a piece of work. It's not like the separate story arcs are completely closed-off from each other - there will be quite a bit of continuity between them - so I thought that dividing it up in this way would make the journey less daunting for both me and the reader (which, hopefully, is you).

2. I have a whole bunch of scenarios, ideas, plans, and characters for the new Dark Knight to tackle, so giving each individual storyline its own subtitle helps to identify when a particular "chapter" is over and a new one begins, despite it all being the ongoing saga of Robin John Blake. Just think of each storyline as being one episode of a TV series split into chunks, or one issue of a comic book storyline that will eventually be collected in a trade paperback.

3. I'm lazy, so this is a great way to update without having to do all of a story arc at once.

So, to sum up, each chapter is an issue, each Part is a graphic novel, and it's all The Dark Knight Endures. And so it begins...