This is written as a sequel to the Batman: Gotham by Gaslight movie with the first chapter set immediately after the last scene. Aside from the characters that were in the movie, this chapter has a short epilogue that will introduce Victorian era versions of characters from the DC Multiverse that will have important roles in the next chapters.
Just like the original film, this fanfic will feature antiquated attitudes, not only in the characters' dialogue but also in the narration, that can be offensive to modern readers. If it can potentially offend you, please do not go on.
"Master Bruce, I've already prepared your belongings for a hasty retreat," Alfred notified the man at the back of the cart. "I have a contact who can take us across the Atlantic."
"Wait, Bruce? You mean, Bruce Wayne? Bruce Wayne is the Batman?!" Jason exclaimed.
"What? You only just put two and two together now?" Dickie smugly teased the younger kid. "The errand Alfred gave us clued me so I'm not surprised."
"I'm not too dumb to not know how to add but what does this have to do with numbers?" Jason retorted. "Besides, Tim didn't get it either. Right, Tim?"
"No… I actually got it," Little Tim replied. "Why else would Alfred go to all this trouble to save Batman if he's not Bruce Wayne?"
"Smartasses," Jason's shoulder's dropped, Bruce and Selina looking on with smirks of amusement.
"Too bad though. I thought that I'll have a stable life here in Gotham," Selina mused. "Oh well, it might be back to the circus for me."
Dickie was staring at Selina intently or more specifically, at an area being impacted on by the unpaved road.
"How about it, kid? Do you want to come with me to the circus?" Dickie's eyes went upwards to her eyes and she locked her gaze with his. "With your physique, I peg you for the type to soar high. You can become a trapeze artist, maybe?"
"I-I've hang from clotheslines before," the teenage boy replied coyly.
"We're not joining the circus," the Batman interrupted. "And we're not leaving Gotham either. There's an obvious solution to this."
oOo
Morning came and the fire that consumed the fair has been put out rather swiftly considering the affected area. Home went the firemen and it was the police's turn to investigate. However, their attention was sidetracked.
Bruce Wayne walked up the stairs to the Gotham City Police Department with hands behind his head. They see Bruce Wayne; they mobilize immediately, pointing their guns at the yielding convict. They jostled him to his knees and searched everything about his person.
"So you've come to surrender now, eh, Wayne?" Harvey Dent came up to him as coppers prepare to handcuff the supposed criminal. "Escaping like that… even if you didn't come here, the long arm of justice would have caught up to you just the same."
"So you say," Bruce defiantly pronounced. "Yet, I wonder. Had I skipped town, with clear indication that I did, and the killings continued, would you still point to me as the criminal or would another scapegoat be brought to the cull?"
"Wait!" From behind them is a distressed voice of a woman, that of Selina Kyle. "He's innocent. The true Ripper! He tried to kill me… in the fair!"
A pair of officers who were not roughing Wayne up took the initiative to help her as she stumbles in frantic appeal.
"Speak clearly, woman," Dent sternly demanded. "Though, whatever it is you may say will not hold weight as you are a woman of ill repute."
Selina glared back at him before continuing. "I was there! At the fair! I was pleading Wayne's case with Commissioner Gordon-"
"Pleading the case? Is that what they call it now?" Snidely, Dent said. Snickering ensued among the policemen yet Selina's frightened face soured.
"Shut up! All of you! The Ripper was right under your noses! It was Gordon, dammit!" She was screaming at Harvey Dent's face and the volume of her voice forced him backwards. "He suddenly attacked me and if it wasn't for the Batman, you would have had a new victim and not any closer to the real culprit! I was in shock and couldn't even properly communicate with the police that came to my house searching for Bruce."
"The Batman?" Harvey's tone shifted from demeaning to inquisitive. "The Batman caused the fire?!"
"Not him!" Selina testified. "I told you! Gordon was the root of this problem. His attempts to kill me and the Batman caused the fire!"
"Preposterous! I say we have her tried, too, as an accessory to the crime-"
"Allow me to take it from here, Mr. Dent," Chief Bullock stepped forward to halt the streetside Kangaroo Court. "Do you stand by your words, Ms. Kyle?"
"Y-yes, I do," Selina's voice softened from its earlier distress. "After delivering me from danger, he advised me to come here when morning comes and relate what occurred last night. Damning evidence, he said, is in a room beneath the staircase in the Gordon residence."
Chief Bullock raised an eyebrow and after taking alternating glances between Selina and Bruce, ordered his men, "We're re-opening the investigation. We'll go to Gordon's house. See what we can find."
"But didn't we already establish that Bruce Wayne is the Ripper? The evidence clearly pointed to him!" Harvey Dent objected loudly. "We already have him in our custody. What's the point of another investigation? This will be very irregular, Chief Bullock!"
"If new evidence can attest to his innocence, then there is a miscarriage of justice that must be corrected. If there isn't, what do we need to fear considering, as you said, we already have him? He should be detained until we reach a proper conclusion," The chief walked down the stairs and the other policemen followed while Dent was left behind with the policemen who escorted Bruce Wayne inside their station.
oOo
"Gotham Police, we're here on official business. Please open the door," A cop announced their arrival at the doorstep of the Gordon household and knocked. A minute later and no reply, "What do we do, Chief?"
"Well, keep knocking!" Bullock yelled. "On second thought, get out of the way. I'll do it myself!" Continuing where the other policeman left off, his hands pounded on the wooden board like the Orientals would with their rounded, loud instrument of noise. "Please, open the door! We'll let ourselves in otherwise!" He gave a hand signal for them to bring it down but the door swung and out came James' spouse.
"Thank goodness you're here! That damned bat intruded last night and… How rude!" The missus have come to receive them, in her apron over her house clothes and draped with a shawl in spite of being indoors.
The last phrase could have been referring to the Batman or the police who just walked past her, as if to insult the woman's role as the keeper of the house, and began their raid. "Official police business. Excuse us," Bullock said, quickly flashing an arrest warrant which Mrs. Gordon barely laid her eyes on.
"The Batman told me that the Commissioner had a secret room under the stairs," Selina said as she followed them inside. "He said that it would be easy to find, as he left one of his important tools."
The Chief nodded and as if beckoning him, he saw something embedded in the wooden wall under the stairs gleam. He recognized it as the bat-shaped boomerang that has appeared in crime scenes where the vigilante was involved. Dislodging it, the secret door gave way. Immediately, a few policemen flooded the room. The widow Gordon tried to interfere but to no avail. Displayed in front of them are newspaper clippings, surgical tools, dissected animals, and organs of indeterminate origins.
"Good Lord," The chief uttered.
"M-my husband served as a doctor in the war. He pursued work in law enforcement but his true passion is in medicine," She tried to pass off her husband's paraphernalia as a veritable collection like a curator to a museum. "What you see here are the forceps he used to bring our daughter to this world. Unfortunately, she was stillborn. Still, I cannot forget the exemplary skill he displayed when he sewn my..."
The woman rambled on in deranged fanaticism of her husband's aptitude yet Bullock's focus had settled on a little book that he began to read, his eyes widening at the content. He turned to face her and interrupted her soliloquy. "Is this your husband's?" He showed the book to her with a page facing forward.
Barbara took a look and gasped. "That's not his. I haven't seen that before. I would know. He tells me everything, that compassionate man," However, as she read through it, "No… That's not possible. No, give it back!" She lunged forward and tried to claw at the Chief but two attentive policemen held her back immediately.
"This journal! Why, it describes the Ripper's killings in their full, disgusting details from the eyes of the murderer himself!" Chief Bullock pointed at the content of the book and waved it like an overzealous preacher.
"But that couldn't be his! I tell you! As his wife I would know!" Struggling against the policemen, the only physical contact Barbara managed with the Chief is sputum overshot as she yells. "When he comes home, I'm sure he can clarify it for you."
"Though this is his handwriting, is it not?" Bullock's question darted sharply at the woman. "Also, I regret to inform you that your husband will no longer come home tonight. An informant told us of how he burned at the fair. If I am to believe the evidence, which I actually do, he perished just as he lived; Like a devil in hell."
"You're lying! My sweet husband couldn't have..." She fell to her knees and with that, her shawl came off.
It was then that Bullock noticed the strange deformity on the left side of her face. He bent down and turned her face to take a closer look. "What has that fiend done to you?"
Barbara tried to bite his hand but he had retracted it in time. "Fiend, is it? He was doing you lousy so-called enforcers of decency and order a favor by getting rid of vagrants and pests, like that woman who dolls herself up like the Whore of Babylon to drag its victims to the pit!" She pointed spitefully at Selina. "You have allowed this disease of society to spread. Come Doomsday, your heads will roll first!"
"We'll take that as a confession. Men, bring her with us," Bullock instructed. "Blackgate or Arkham, the decision comes later."
Barbara was unwillingly taken by the cops. How long ago was her will no longer her own? Selina thought. From a woman to another, she pitied her. What could a man do to break a woman's mind that much? Before he was the Ripper, he was a husband. Before the women on the streets, she was his first victim. To witness the man you loved descend to insanity until you, too, succumb to it; Selina couldn't bear to imagine.
oOo
"What do you say about it, Bruce? Lend her to me when I feel like it and I promise I'll pull on my connections to help reduce your sentence."
Harvey had been taunting, no, tempting Bruce since the others had left to investigate. He's sitting in a chair with its rails facing forward and his torso leaning on it.
"She wouldn't do it if I just ask her myself but she'll listen to you. I'm sure she'd been with other men before and one other man wouldn't hurt. Although, you are the one who can attest so tell me if I'm wrong." He moved closer by staying seated and paddling with his feet, the chair screeching as it scratches the floor. "Isn't this a good deal? I mean, afterwards, you'll be together. Won't you do it for a friend, for old times' sake?"
"I'm not… the Ripper," Bruce replied tersely.
"Get him out of there," Such were the words of the Chief as soon as he entered the premises. "The lady's information is right. Gordon was the Ripper."
"B-but how? The case against Bruce Wayne was perfect!" Harvey immediately came up to him.
"Gordon has a written account of his crimes," Bullock replies as he seated. "Nothing can trump that."
Bruce Wayne was let out of his cell and Selina Kyle met him with an embrace. She slid her elbow around his and they were leaving the precinct together when Bullock came in front of them.
"Forgive our wrongful arrest, Mr. Wayne. We'll see to it that your innocence will circulate in the next morning's papers." Afterwards, he tipped his hat and left them to their own.
"H-hey, Bruce," They met Harvey on their way out. "No hard feelings, right? I was just doing my job. I would be a lousy lawyer if I didn't-"
Giving no opportunity to finish his sentence, Bruce socked him across the face. "You're lousy either way. Also, that wasn't for me. See you in the Dionysus."
Alfred was standing alongside the carriage and he politely bowed as soon as he saw the two of them. "Welcome back. Master Bruce, Miss Kyle."
"Nice acting," Bruce complimented Selina as they sat opposite each other.
"Well, it's what I do," She said with a smile. "Though to be honest, I was scared last night alone at home and had to put on the thickest skin I could muster to mislead the police that came to investigate. I knew that I had to trust in your plan. Thankfully, Gordon wrote that journal. If not, you'd still be branded a criminal."
"He didn't," Bruce's reply caused Selina to tilt her head. "I did. It's part of my investigative method to narrate the crime as if I'm the one that did it, to take a look inside their mind. I just rewrote it with the forged handwriting I imitated from Gordon. Or specifically, the handwriting from his right hand; he wrote the Ripper's messages with his left, hence the difference. It's what I did while hiding since when the police searched my house last night until this morning."
"You faked the evidence?" Selina said with momentarily widened eyes. "Well, he was the real culprit but that's a very deceptive ability and startlingly devious of you. Still, how did it get into that room?"
"Before I surrendered, I sneaked into his house and placed the book and batarang. I forced Barbara to sleep with an incapacitating gas that I believed would last until the time for the police to get there."
There was a silence between them, Selina shifting uncomfortably in contemplation. Then she spoke, "If you are not in the side of good, it would be incredibly frightening."
"It's a rather useful ability and would be so for a few more years with the current rate of progress in forensic science. I know it's wrong but I need to take advantage of it inasmuch as the real crooks do," Bruce extended his hands to hers rested on her lap. "But more importantly, you don't need to worry about my allegiances. I'll be on the right side for as long as I live."
"I trust you, Bruce," Selina left her seat and sat beside him. She put her head on his shoulders and closed her eyes, about to doze off… until a question came up. "What's a batarang?"
oOo
For the first time in a while, the Ripper roamed neither the streets of Gotham nor the Earth that night; yet evil resides not in one man…
Two women are trapped by six men in one of the many dark alleyways of Gotham. Cornered in a dead end, the men approached them with crazed looks in their eyes and flames in their groins. The predators are craving their prey but their meal will have to wait.
"If you want to live, leave them be," From behind them, a boy warned. He is bald, of short stature, has almond-shaped eyes, and the color of his skin blends with the streetlamp.
They all turned towards him and one of them asked, "Huh? What would a little Chinaman like you do?" The same man flicked his forehead.
"I ask you. If you want to live, leave!" He said again but the men have surrounded him instead. The same man just laughed and flicked his forehead again, twice.
"Even the Buddha, after three times-"
He hasn't finished his muttering when his forehead was flicked again. His reply was a quick slide of his foot under the man's legs and push with both of his hands that tossed him across the street. The other surrounding men tried to attack him but they were pushed away with a flurry of kicks and punches. They scampered with the limping ones being helped to their feet by those lucky enough to still be able to walk.
He walked to the women but instead of thanks, they stared angrily at him. They cursed in unison, "You meddling son of a bitch… You let my prey get away! Grrraaaaaaaaaaaa!"
The two women's clothes vaporized and their bodies began to meld into black goo, amorphous at first but soon resulting in an eight-limbed monstrosity that resembles a giant spider with a head sticking out from both ends. "Here you will die and be my food!"
"Oh?" He crossed his arms and grinned. "But this humble one will not presume to fight you alone."
From the shadows, a man in a green overcoat with a homburg hat and domino mask emerged. He slung a pocket lamp chained to a ring in his middle finger; with a click, it ignited with a green fire. "Let's get to burning, Kai-Ro."
"Right with you, Mr. Scott."