The night air was frigid. The skyline was bleak and dark, oppressively so. It was par for the course during winter in Gotham. Jim Gordon didn't care, though; he needed to be here on the rooftop of the GCPD building.
It wasn't a work thing. Well, not technically, anyway. He was here because he wanted to be; needed to be. For both their sakes.
Gordon shivered, and it wasn't just from the biting chill. Lighting a cigarette and pulling his coat tighter around his body, he attempted to ward off the cold.
He did not have to wait long. Within minutes of turning on the bright spotlight, an inky black swirl of shadow impacted the roof. Gordon switched the beacon off just as quickly.
At first, no one said anything. When Gordon eventually realized that he was going to have to start the conversation, he took a deep breath. "Batman. You know why I called you here."
There was no response.
"Look, I get it," the commissioner said after taking a long drag and slowing blowing a stream of grey air up into the sky. "I know how you feel right now. I've been there. When Barbara…well, let's just say I was practically beside myself."
One member of pair of white lenses perked up inquisitively.
Gordon chuckled mirthlessly. "If it were anyone else I'd take the cold shoulder personally. But given that it's you I'm talking to, and what just happened, I think I can let it slide."
The humor went unappreciated.
"Well, it was worth a try," Jim said, taking another puff. "Look, I can tell you're busy and would rather be out there doing something practical, so I won't hold you up any further. I just want to tell you one thing. It's both a warning from the GCPD commissioner and a request from a friend."
The rustling of a gossamer gape flapping in the breeze was the only response he got.
"When you find this guy," Gordon said, flicking some ashes away, "…and I know you won't rest until you do," he added with sly raise of his eyebrows, "don't cross the line. I know it will be tempting, unbearably so. My god, the feeling of rage…what I wanted to do to the Joker…it was pure madness. Stopping myself was the hardest thing I ever did. But I resisted the temptation by reminding myself of my principles, oftentimes every minute of every day. And you know what? I'm glad I didn't give in."
Gordon paused, took a long drag that finished off the cigarette, and stamped it out. He crinkled his eyebrows and looked off at the metropolitan cityscape of Gotham. "Just something to think about. I don't want to have to tell you this, but as the commissioner, I can no longer sanction Batman if he crosses the line." He turned back and stared at the other man straight in the eyes. "And I won't cover it up or look the other way on this, either. Gotham deserves a better Batman than that kind. And if you won't do it for Gotham, won't do it for what's right…do it for me. I can't bear to see you go down that dark path. And if you don't care about me either, then please, just remember one thing: it's not what they would have wanted. It's not what she would want."
If intense looks and near-silent fluttering of capes was a language, Batman would be speaking volumes.
Gordon sighed. "Fine. You don't have to say anything if you don't want to. Keep your silence. I just wanted you to hear all that." He abruptly turned on his heel and walked away, knowing that Batman had already departed with as much clamor as a ghost's shadow.
The park was dead silent. Empty, too. Not that it mattered. He could be invisible to the only other likely inhabitants of the park at this hour: thugs and drug dealers, if he so wished it.
Batman alighted on one of the large tree branches with ease. This had to be the location from which the shot had been taken, based off the trajectory of the projectile that he had mentally calculated with his photographic memory. The odds were good that the police hadn't been able to achieve that level of forensic insight. Archery-themed murder attempts were hardly a usual backdrop in Gotham, after all. Bullet wounds, stabbings, and bombs were things that the GCPD and local doctors understood. Anything exotic that required outside-of-the-box thinking fell under his purview.
In any case, there should still be undisturbed evidence at this spot which would give Batman a lead. There had to be something: finger prints, torn fabric, or possibly even a scrap of DNA.
After scanning the scene for several minutes, Batman picked up on the latter. It took the form of a collection of strands of hair that were embedded in the tree branches and leaves. Carefully, he bagged a couple of them.
Since that was all there was for him to find, Batman swiftly departed. There was no time to lose. Diana's attacker could be escaping at this very moment. For any possibility of enacting justice on the archer to exist, he needed to work at a breakneck pace.
It wasn't long before Batman was back in his car, placing the hair strands into a special receptacle. "Computer," he growled, voice sounding horribly deadened, cold, and animalistic, "run these samples against all known DNA databases in the world."
Obediently, the supercomputer flashed through a seemingly endless list of DNA profiles in several seconds. "No match," it declared in a synthesized monotone.
Batman's fist lashed out and practically dented his dashboard. He grunted furiously. The pain was intense but he blocked it out, body groaning protests which his mind viciously slapped away.
Calm, his inner voice of reason advised. Discipline.
Batman breathed deeply, pinching his nose. When he was adequately calmed, Batman opened his eyes and looked at the console once more.
"Blonde…" he murmured to himself. Neither Bruce nor Batman had any known blonde enemies. There was Selina Kyle, the Catwoman, of course, but she was not such a cut-and-dry villain as his usual rogues. Sure, she was attracted to Batman, but Kyle didn't know that he and Bruce were the same person. Therefore, there was no reason for her to be jealous of Diana. Not that murder was even her usual M.O. anyway. In fact, did she even know how to shoot a bow? Probably not.
That left…all of no one on Batman's list of suspects. Based on the genetic profile of the hair sample, the owner was female. Narrowing the possible attackers down to half of the people on the planet was hardly a useful leap of progress.
Could it be that one of his business opponents hired an exotic assassin to take out Bruce Wayne? It was feasible. Not that this revelation was very profound. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of secret killers from all over the world whose profiles were not archived on any sophisticated databases. It was not a stretch of imagination to think that one might favor the bow and arrow as a method of elimination. Thus, this line of thinking was also going nowhere.
Batman was focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of speculating motive, he should be studying the weapon itself: surely that would reveal something about the would-be killer. Luckily, he had already retrieved the weapon from the GCPD's evidence room, where it had been placed after being found abandoned near the crime scene.
With the screeching peal of tires, the Batmobile rocketed off back to the cave. Before long, Bruce was there, leaping gracefully out of the driver's seat like always.
He deliberately ripped the cowl off, revealing the face of a haunted man. Bags were under his eyes, which were themselves bloodshot. An unkempt five o'clock shadow adorned his face, and frown lines were practically becoming stains in his handsome visage.
"Computer, analyze this object for chemical and physical composition," he ordered, placing the massive war bow inside a larger version of the compartment in his car. It barely fit.
After a short delay, the cheerful-yet-empty voice of the supercomputer replied. It gave a litany of scientific information, most of it utterly inconsequential. A few things did stand out, though. For one, the weapon's material was an extremely rare type of wood derived from a tree that went extinct in the era of the ancient Greeks. Moreover, the density, weight, and volume measurements of the bow were all contradictory. Lastly, the sturdiness and strength of the material far exceeded what should be physically possible for that species of wood, let alone a mundane object of this variety.
"Magic," Bruce breathed with almost palpable disdain.
Clearly, this bow was not made by mortals. Well, not non-magical mortals, at any rate. Technically, that alone didn't shorten the list of suspects at all: there were hundreds of cabals, enclaves, and organizations that practiced magic on earth, not to mention independent magi. When combined with the fact that the wood last existed around the same time Themiscrya was historically created, though, the natural conclusion seemed obvious.
This was an Amazonian bow.
Bruce could hardly say that he was shocked. The amazons obviously held no love for him. In fact, it was highly likely that they, to a woman, despised him more than any other enemy in their long and sordid history. It was not outside the realm of possibility to think that one zealot might have taken her fervor too far and attempted to kill him, wounding Diana instead.
That complicated things. An attempt on the life of any citizen of the United States, let alone a high-profile celebrity and beloved philanthropist such as Bruce Wayne, by a foreign power constituted a declaration of war. The reaction would be even more severe considering it was Themiscrya they were dealing with: the U.N. was already clashing with them over the Amazon's unreasonable environmental policy demands and other such details. Without Diana to foster trust, cooperation, and understanding as the official ambassador anymore, the results could be extremely deadly if knowledge of this ever broke out.
That meant Bruce effectively couldn't touch whoever had put Diana in the hospital and nearly destroyed the one good thing in his life. Sure, he could beat them up, but there would be no official arrest, no trail, no sentence. The only permanent justice he could impose was death.
Right about now, breaking his one rule seemed like a very enticing offer.
"Agghhh!" Bruce screamed, pounding the keyboard. What was he thinking? Was he even wrong to think this way? What should he do? It was an impossible situation and his mind was a maelstrom of hurt, anger, frustration, powerlessness, and determination. He didn't know how to deal with such complex, contradictory feelings and convictions other than to fight; to break something. He'd never had to deal with it before. Love did this to him, and it was too late to take that love back. Once the heart was opened, it couldn't be closed again.
Bruce panted and sweat for several long minutes, head cast downward while he focused intently on maintaining his composure. The whole time, he could feel that he was one slip of concentration away from letting rage get the better of him and going ballistic. It was a rampage he knew that he might not ever escape from. By some stroke of divine luck (or perhaps pure skill) he was able to steady himself. He trembled visibly with the effort, though.
He was getting ahead of himself. There was no clue as to the individual identity of the archer other than their race. It was still very little to go on. And even if he did know who it was specifically, there was no obvious indication as to where she fled after missing the shot.
"Balance of probability. Assess emotional condition," Bruce stated mechanically, listing steps of the deductive forensic methods he had studied while becoming Batman. Without more evidence to go on, this was a puzzle that he would have to solve with pure reasoning and accurate recall of past observations.
For this reason, Bruce was glad that Alfred was passed out from exhaustion up above him in the mansion. He needed to be alone. He also hated the idea of his adoptive father seeing him distraught in this manner, as Batman had never been before. If only the butler knew that Bruce was seriously considering wringing the life from Diana's attacker once he found them.
It would surely crush him.
With a start, Bruce snapped away from his mental maze of thoughts and back to reality. He was supposed to be thinking. He closed his eyes tight, fighting through the emotional pain and turmoil that clouded his rationality.
The odds were good that the Amazon who had shot Diana would be extremely emotionally distressed at nearly killing her ex-champion and princess…unless, that is, Diana had fallen so far from grace that no one cared any longer. If Bruce was being honest, though, he knew very little about Amazonian psychology or politics. There was no way he could accurately answer this question. Another dead end.
Unless the archer was still nearby, that is, continuing to stalk him for the kill or crippled with regret and concern. Either possibility boded well. Driven people were predictable. If he could just figure out where she might have gone to ground…
Wait. He did know the whereabouts of one Amazon in Gotham. Hippolyta. She was certainly emotionally distressed, and her being the attempted murderer would explain how she became aware of the accident so quickly. Moreover, the queen had been quick to supply an excuse for why she was there without even being asked first. And what was it she had said in the hospital room? 'I'm sorry?' At the time, he'd assumed that she'd meant 'I'm sorry that I put you here and that I couldn't protect you', but now Bruce was not so sure. Hippolyta had seemed awfully guilt-stricken and internally distraught beyond simple grief. Hippolyta also had more reason than any other Amazon in the world to hate him: she was Diana's mother and therefore the one who would logically be the most incensed by his "violation" of her.
"No, it's not possible!" Bruce gasped, eyes going wide. He knew it was very possible, though. All the pieces seemed to fit together in a way that satiated his suspicions. For her not to be the archer would take a coincidence of cosmic proportions.
Still, Bruce didn't like assuming things based on hunches, especially when there was simple test that he could do to confirm his conclusion. Furiously typing into the keyboard, he summoned the genetic profile of Diana that he'd saved to the Batcomputer. He then opened the analyzing device and placed one of the blonde hairs from the crime scene inside.
"Computer, run a DNA comparison between this sample and Diana Prince."
Several lights flashed over the course of a few seconds. Then, a page of results appeared on-screen.
It took several seconds for Bruce's mind to process what he was seeing before his eyes. Even with his prior deductions, it was nearly impossible to believe.
The computer screen was flashing the phrase "matriarchal match" in bold, red letters.
Bruce practically reeled. Even his cynicism was not strong enough to take this damning pronouncement in stride. He didn't know whether to feel rage, pain, sadness, pity, or take a page from the Joker's playbook and simply chuckle at the dark, ironic madness of it all.
Underneath this haze of emotion, there was a rational voice. It spoke to him a grim truth: that any action against the queen of the Amazons would only widen the divide between their nation and the rest of the world even more so than retaliation against a random Amazonian zealot. Truly, Bruce had found an impossible situation for himself.
Yet there was one way he could easily resolve this tension. It was to simply stop caring about the wellbeing of Diana's people. Why should he care if things escalated between Themiscrya and other nations? The sick, regressive, misandrist ideology of the Amazons had put his beloved in a hospital bed, hanging on to a scrap of life with an uncertain future. Perhaps they should all be nuked. Their bodies can burn to a crisp in the nuclear inferno of a hydrogen bomb for what they did to Diana, from what they did to him.
She was more than he had ever asked for, more than he deserved, and the only shred of normalcy and happiness that he had ever possessed since he was 8. He had vowed to scratch and claw his way through any hell in order to keep and protect her. It was only now that he added "avenge" to that list. Seeing the Amazons suffer, preceded by Hippolyta's last, dying breath struggling to escape from her lungs would be a delicious pleasure.
"No!" Bruce screamed, pounding his desk again. The whole thing shook and rattled as if an earthquake was happening. "I'm not like that! I can't…I won't…" he spat through grit teeth, trying to will the dark thoughts away.
He didn't know if he was asserting the truth, or simply trying to convince himself.
Hippolyta would have cried were it not for the fact that she'd already done enough of it lately to totally deplete her body of water. The tears refused to keep coming, as if her body was putting its foot down and demanding that she take care of herself; to rest and drink and eat.
The queen ignored it, though. Instead, she merely stared blankly at the hotel room wall, fighting to keep her panicked breathing, racing pulse, trembling hands, and pounding headache under control. It was a losing battle.
She should be back at Diana's bedside, watching over her. A little late for that now, Hippolyta's conscience told her. It was a fair criticism. Her actions clearly indicated a lack of genuine concern for her daughter's well-being. Truly, saying that she felt like a colossal fool was the understatement of the millennium.
Do I even deserve to be by her bedside? Hippolyta honestly wondered to herself. I tried to kill a man whom she loves so deeply that she would sacrifice her life for him. And not only that, but in doing so, I may have just killed her. And that is the worst scenario. In the very least, she'll suffer a great deal of pain and be unable to walk for weeks. I deserve this. I deserve to be miserable, and more. I probably don't deserve the title of 'queen' either. What kind of queen makes such a severe error of judgement, nearly killing not only a devoted subject, but a former champion and her very own daughter? Apparently, the answer was simple: her.
How could she honestly say she loved Diana after doing this? How could she ever look her daughter in the eye again? How could things ever go back to normal after all Hippolyta had done, after all she had taken from Diana? Piercing her chest with an arrow was simply the final insult. She should have seen this escalation coming. For all her thousands of years of wisdom, she had acted like a base animal driven by senseless and misguided emotion.
"Goddess," Hippolyta said, putting her hands over her face.
That was the other thing that troubled her. How could the five (or rather, three, now) endorse her behavior? Did they, even? The possibility that they did was perhaps more alarming than her potential fall from divine grace. What kind of deities could decree an ideology whose logical extension had driven her to such an atrocious, cowardly, and selfish act as this?
For the first time, Hippolyta was having a crisis of faith. Nothing seemed real, permanent, or sensible anymore. Her world was a land of utter confusion where everything she had built on Themiscrya felt illusory. Simply put, Hippolyta was lost and didn't know what she believed: about herself, about the five, about the amazons, about men, about Diana, about right and wrong. None of it.
Now I know how my daughter felt, she remarked to herself.
That was it, then. Her own flaws and extreme foolishness had led her down an ironic path of tragic destruction, just like the traditional Greek dramas she was so fond of. If only she had stopped to think about this sooner. If only she could take that arrow back, somehow…
Dreaming was pointless. The current reality was the situation she had found herself in; she had to be responsible and accept it. That meant facing Diana's judgement, the judgement of her people, the judgement of the gods, all of it. There would be consequences. Hippolyta prayed she had enough courage to face them, as well as whatever punishment was bestowed upon her.
Not that there could be a punishment in the universe as intense as her own self-loathing and regret. The sensation was hard to describe. It was like intense psychic torture blended with existential angst, utter emptiness, brutal nausea, and blood-thrumming stress. Dying would be preferable at this point. It would be the easy way out. But it was one Hippolyta would not take, unless Diana died. She feared that even her boundless courage would not be strong enough in that case, and she would have to swallow poison to escape the soul-shattering pain.
Hippolyta spent several hours with these types of thoughts on loop. It was a nightmarish recursion that stole the non-existent possibility of restful sleep from her. She sobbed a little more and stared at the wall in anguish. Her temples pulsated a rhythm of pain. Her eyes ached from crying so much and her body was wracked with exhaustion. Yet she still refused to sleep, both out of self-punishment and endless worrying about Diana's status. Quite simply, she didn't see how it was possible for her to relax long enough to rest, and that was ignoring the question of whether she even deserved it while her daughter was struggling for life on a hospital bed.
The queen was shaken from her stupor when a large mechanical object flew through the open window and into her room. It was a flying contraption with a set of quiet rotary blades keeping it aloft. An electronic tablet was attached to its underside.
With a click, the object was released, falling to the floor of the hotel room. Just as swiftly as it had entered, the remote drone left the room. Hippolyta marveled at the strange event for a split second, then leaped up to investigate the tablet. Picking it up, she saw a typed message on the screen.
H. This is B. I know it was you. I'm talking to you this way because I fear that I would not be able to control my actions were we ever to meet face-to-face again. I phrased that statement that way because I'm banishing you from Gotham. I'm warning you to leave immediately. I can take care of and watch over D myself. I promise to have you updated as to her status. But you must leave. A diplomatic incident would be disastrous for the both of us. Moreover, D cannot learn who did this. It would crush her spirit. Going by her own recollection of her last conversation with you, she doesn't want to see you ever again anyway. Frankly, I feel the same way. You have brought nothing but ruin to us.
You have 24 hours.
Twin bolts of shock and fear shot through Hippolyta. She began to cry again, somehow finding a hidden reservoir of emotional energy and tears. Batman was right. She was a terrible mother. It would be best if she simply left Diana alone and stopped interfering with her life before she caused even more harm.
It was time to face facts: Diana was happy with Bruce. Hippolyta was still unable to understand it, but she had newfound, hard-learned respect of it. All of her doubts about the sincerity and authenticity of her daughter's feelings had been dispelled in one painfully lucid instant by Diana's selfless act of protecting Bruce's life at the potential cost of her own.
Clearly, there was something in Bruce which warranted this kind of devotion. Hippolyta didn't know what this could be, either, but she trusted Diana's judgement. She didn't have the conviction to question her daughter anymore. Not after seeing the gruesome results of doing so first hand. In any case, Diana's beliefs had to be more valid than her own. The exiled princess hadn't tried to murder someone in cold blood and accidentally wounded a fellow Amazon instead, after all.
Perhaps one day Hippolyta could atone for what she had done. But until then, the knowledge of what had transpired and the stress of not being near her daughter was a well-deserved anguish. As such, she welcomed it.
Tossing the tablet aside, the queen collapsed on her bed. Tomorrow she would depart Gotham without a backward glance.
Curling into a ball, Hippolyta eventually drifted off into a nightmare-tormented sleep.