The snow was falling in thick clumps that made even the slightest bit of visibility questionable. The moonlight reflecting off of what had settled gave a slight glow to the city below but it was little help truth be told. At the very least, the blanket of white that had steadily been thickening over the past four days covered the nightmare that had become Gotham, and hid the gruesome truth that littered the streets. Mother Nature at her finest he supposed.
Patrol was far from safe outside of daylight hours, but if it could save even a single life, well… then it was worth the risk. No one else would be coming. The city was closed off, bridges blown to pieces, water and airways closed. No man's land all over again, and this time no pleas would change that… not that there were many pleas to be heard. When the infection had been released courtesy of the Joker and an unknown carrier he had set loose the government had been quick to cut them off like the disease the city had become.
Zombie apocalypse, something the world had laughed at, joked about, had become a reality in one of the worst places possible… and all because of a damned clown. It figured.
They had been merely concerned at first, after all it had not been the first time the Joker had come up with a new toxin, but they had learned all too quickly that this had been something over their heads when countless hours were wasted searching for cure that did not exist, and when those who had been injured mutated as well… it became a massacre, and suddenly there were bodies lying in the streets, and soon many of them rose up and became the problem themselves. What had initially been a twisted, laughable attack soon became a worldwide fear, and then the radio communication stopped. The rest of the country sat back and feared a second location outbreak. The other countries immediately swarmed to prepare.
And as for them?
Their numbers had slowly dropped.
His father had been the first of them to fall, at the very start, before they had truly learned what they were dealing with. After that is was a domino effect. They had split into groups, the first mistake of many, and one by one they had succumbed to the disease in one way or another.
Black Bat and Batgirl had gone off to the east quadrant. Four months in they had received word that Brown had fallen. Cassandra had stayed in touch when she could until the radio lines had gone dark. They had caught glimpse of her once ten months in, but since then there had been nothing. Short of coming face to face with her there would be no telling if she were still operative, and if not there was no saying how long ago she had been infected.
Drake had gone south to assist the commissioner. Though he had never stated as much, the assassin had gone with him. The GCPD officially was decimated and disbanded on the third month. By the fifth they had received word that Gordon had not made it. The radios had died the seventh month. Afterwards they had not heard from Drake. They had assumed the worst.
Oracle had based in Arkham after the mass release when the workers had fled. They had been slowly transporting survivors that had escaped infection to her ever since, after they had destroyed the bridge.
Todd fell off radar in the very beginning. There was no telling what the man had gotten himself into, or when, just that in the entire first year they had not seen nor heard of him.
He had stayed with Grayson. Batman and Robin until the very end, and to give them credit they had done a damned good job of evading certain death, far longer than they had even hoped.
He lost Dick on year three, shortly after a seventeenth birthday he had not acknowledged, in the dead of night. They had found a group of survivors. Unfortunately so had a number of the infected shortly after, and there had been nothing they could do for most. They had barely escaped. And by barely it meant only after a massive explosion, rock climbing in a collapsed tunnel, and scaling a building with no grapples, broken ribs, and fractured limbs. They had been in such a poor state by the time they had gotten to a secure location that neither of them had noticed the chunk taken out of Dick's calf until it had been too late. He had suffered through putting the man out of his misery only after he had already turned. He had truly grieved for perhaps the first time. He donned the mantle thereafter, forever carrying on both Grayson's and his father's memory.
Two months into his reign as Batman he had received quite the shock in the form of one Timothy Jackson Drake, no longer running the ragged rooftops as Red Robin, but alive all the same.
Admittedly, he would have never thought that he would be so glad to see him, nor that Drake would be so moved by his presence that he would embrace him.
From then on out it had been the two of them. He had learned rather quickly what had gone on in Tim's absence. As it would turn out, Cassandra had made it through the first year intact and almost halfway through the second. She and Drake had run in the same district for a time, until one day they had crossed paths and she had no longer been herself, and he had narrowly escaped with Prudence's sacrifice.
And Todd?
Somehow he had managed to keep going with no assistance save for Scarlet's, until even she had no longer been in the picture. He had run into Drake just three months after Cassandra and the assassin had fallen, and they had stuck together without killing one another until his death just two months before Dick's. Again a narrow escape gone wrong, except this time… in this case Todd had killed himself. He had gotten Drake to safety knowing that one had gotten him, and had put a bullet in his own skull before Tim's protests had been heard.
And as for Drake- Timothy?
He was no longer as intolerable as he had remembered. He was quiet, resourceful, and skilled. There was no longer any way to deny that with him having outlasted all save him. And as much as he had hated to admit it, and oh how he had fought it, he enjoyed his companionship.
Three weeks after they had joined forces winter had hit Gotham.
Three months into the seemingly endless blizzards, temperatures nearing forty below out in the elements, and pointless patrols in tattered and patched batsuits and tactical gear, they had caved. What had started as highly reluctant cuddling for warmth and endless bickering had become heated embraces, rocking pelvises, and breathy moans. They spent much of the winter holed up in the twenty-seventh floor of one tower, elevators cut and stairways blown, living off vending machines, defunct water coolers, fire made coffee, and fucking for warmth on nearly every imaginable surface to pass time. It had admittedly not been a bad life while it had lasted.
But inevitably the snow ceased, spring arrived, and they had eventually left their dwelling behind in search of more survivors.
A year later, nearly five years since the infection, and they were back to such conditions. Give it another week or so and they would have to put of the utility belts for the winter and shack up in yet another skyscraper after declaring it free of infected. He was looking forward to the vacation, and judging by how Tim moved to press against him and cocoon himself within his tattered cape with a sigh and nuzzle against his chest, so was he.
They would take what they could get until inevitably one of them fell he supposed. Judging by the fact that it had been so long already, and no one had come to wipe the city off the map taking the disease with it, the infection must have somehow managed to spread. Like in everything, life, or lack of it, found a way.
As per usual, Mother Nature proved to be a cruel bitch.