a/n: I'm really sorry for not updating this sooner. Between exams, assignments, flat issues, and life, I haven't had time to work out this chapter even though I knew what I wanted to put into it. Also, this is slightly more experimental than what I usually do, influences including James Joyce, and plays with chronological shifts without having an explicit time marker. Big thank you to those who've been commenting on the previous chapters, they've really helped encourage me to get this thing going again. Once again, comments and criticism are more than welcome (they fill me with fluffy, happy joy), and thanks for reading!
Chapter 25:
They landed on the south side of the building, the balcony three floors down from their intended goal. Batman gave a soft grunt as he landed, fingers splayed on the ground with one hand, the other arm stretching behind him to retract the grapple. His feet were silent, and the sky behind him wasn't a churning red, but a deep angry purple of clouds reflecting the city lights and now the Batsignal. No moon tonight, as assured, even if the skies were to clear, it would just be more dark expanse. But Batman only registered this peripherally. It would not do tonight, to peer at empty fathomless skies. His gaze was focused on a hunt. The hunt.
Then he ran.
He is running and running and the skies were black and deep and red and angry gaping gashed open they are so many self inflicted claw marks over scalp and throat – insanity breathing the air and spewing it back cancerous and awful – aweful – but he cannot stare all he sees is the tunnel the blackness past the overgrown web of weeds which has taken over the takenover take no vermin the building the old building the old cragged building with the iron gate he has just crashed through two minutes ago two seconds two spots of minutiae like blood like pearls which he will not shall not cannot remove from his mind.
The pearls that were their eyes.
He remembers.
-Check there. I'll take the other side. He says to her. She had paused there.
-You hear that? She says.
-Music. Singing. He replies. To thin shrill air the wind a papercut blade. Fists clenched. Teeth on edge. Edge of cliff of precipice of falling deeper deeper deeper into a cave.
Entrance spewing fire and brimstone. Cold burning hail in the form of marbles rigged with explosive acid. Stronger than the bile threatening to tear out his gut. Deadly toys. Toys, men, toymen. Toyman. Diana, about to crush him. Now him. Madder than a Hatter. Madder than the Hatter. Unparalleled insanity. Diana's grip around Toyman's throat. Blinding rain. Blinding agony. Snap like a twig, he would. Blinding anger. If anything has happened to Tim he'll break him in two he'll break him he promises he'll break him in two in two into. Too. He'll break. He has broken he is broken. He was broken the moment he was baptised in the blood of two Gothamite martyrs, and what for? What for he asks himself what for. Baptised in blood wherefore and staked with lead cold hard lead his suit all Kevlar and nomex, old model, two years ago, still good for Gotham, not so good for interstellar. Who care's what's beyond the stars anyway, when here, here, vileness breeds. Suit fits, clings, wraps itself around him. Encased, like lead. Might as well be lead. He'll hammer him to pieces. His heart hammers in his throat. Hammers. Hammers of Justice. Kitsch. Stupid souvenir shops in the downtown, capitalising on crime, on crime's battles, on wars. Who doesn't. Mercury running through his veins, frothing in his stomach. Poison. They're all poisoned. Poised like tin soldiers ready to crash and burn and fall and break and break and break in two. He runs.
He ran.
The suit held. He felt wind rush past his face as a flash of gold shot beyond his shoulder. Diana's tiara, aimed straight for a line of fixed security machinery along the wall path, did its work. They clattered to the floor in a shower of stainless steel and copper. Droids rounded the corner up ahead in front of them, steel bodies glinting in the half dark. Batman, the aged, felt a boyish giggle start to fester in his gut. That wouldn't do. He lifted his arm, took aim. The projectiles did the rest of the work. Cemented foam, wet to eat through circuitry. Air pressured firing mechanism. Low-tech. One needed alternatives in a world where a technological consciousness could infect your circuitry like a well trained contingent of assassins. Be prepared. Clark would be proud, if he weren't still throwing a hissy fit. The droids protested, sending low whines as they drooped forward. Their protests were denied. They were rendered useless.
Pity he couldn't interface with thermal and visual sensors. Didn't matter though. The klutzes capering down the steps past the corner were creating enough of a ruckus like the good little boys they were. No finesse, no subtlety. No charm. Pity. Batman heard the footsteps crash closer, then let his fist shoot out from behind the corner. The subsequent thud to the floor was satisfactory as he moved from his concealed position, Diana flanking him. He let his fist fly, teeth flashing for a moment as an unbidden grin graced his face. It'd been too long.
"You're having too much fun," Diana muttered, lips quirked upwards in a pouted smirk. Admirable sort of smirk, that. More admirably, she cast her lasso like a net, then drew it in around two sets of shoulders. The hoods were reintroduced to a force induced blackout as they were accelerated into the left wall. They moved closer to the stairs.
"Am I?" Batman said, half spinning to avoid a hook and landing his own back fist half a second later. The thug crumpled to the ground, holding his head. Batman decided to put him out of his misery with a well aimed heel to his temple. Not enough to kill. Enough to hurt when he came to, eventually.
Diana saw, and commented even as she crushed strewn blasters with the sole of her foot, "Oh yes, definitely too much fun." Further conversation was broken by the ray that shot from the top of the staircase. They ducked, and Batman felt the whiplash of wind as it took the air past the top of his head. Sputtering and harsh whispers came from its source, and Batman's ears pricked at the scuffles. Polyurethane soles on epoxy flooring. Foolish little children. A nod from Diana and they moved up the steps. Swift, silent, calm. Glancing through the banisters. Listening for heavy breathing while silencing his own breaths. The shadows swallowed him.
The shadows swallow him. The flickering lights of the projection playing out before his eyes in grotesque parody of a silent film. Narration provided. Of course. By him. Of course. "Bruce," comes the condemnation, the judgement, in the form of the laughing herald of his hell. Batman's eyes narrowed in anger, in hate. He leaps with despair fuelling him, rage igniting, plunging towards the laughing maniac separated by a glass. Shatters easily, glass. They fall in a shower of tinkles. Jagged chimes spellbound in an orchestration terrible. The shadows lengthen, cast all the more starkly by the lights which flickered incessantly from the decanted projector, spools of film, innocent as they are, depicting frame after frame of agony and torture and madness and evil. Falling faster to the floor, in snaking crumpled heaps. So do the both of them, tumbling down into the grotesque funhouse-home-pen of the soul.
He'll break him in two, he thinks. The maniac grins further, a skull of skin bleached with death, then stabbing pain forces his leg to buckle. He falls. Ribbons of time, of muscle and sinew, rent in two like the snippets slipping into a pool in the room above. The maniac laughs: gleeful, mocking, psychotic.
Drip. Drop.
Psychotic. That's what Tim had thought as he writhed and pulled against the restraints cutting into his wrists, his ankles. Anything, anything to get away from the mad laughter overhead, underneath, within. That was what scared him the most. The evil within. Bright, psychedelic, maniacal laughter, said he would make a son out of him, a little Junior Joker, which would at least be a step up from his current state as Junior Joke. The wonders of a suffix, eh, my boy? The wonders of a little roll of tongue. Tim bit down on his own in an effort not to scream.
Against the sickening flow of cream filled taunts, he thought of a voice black as coal, harsh like the soot that used to get stuck in his eyes in his days on the street. Enough to make grown men whimper and shake in fear. He thought of that voice, as an all avenging guardian. His all avenging guardian demon of the night. They didn't know, out there. His father, his true father, blood and flesh and DNA, would never know beyond the shadow of the bat. Didn't know that the voice, at moments, less so now than before, could modulate into rich chocolate. The sort that made you turn back into five years old, three, even, and curl up in a blanket, propped on a strong knee and moulded into the crook of an arm, as a voice above lulled you with its baritone.
He thought of that. Then the pain increased, wrenching a gasp from his lips. He saw the garish red lips against the pasty white face, gleaming in the gloom. He tried to envision Bruce, to ground himself, to shut out the pain, but the name came out in a howl of agony, and then it didn't matter, because now the Joker was laughing, and he had lost, and the tears soothed nothing, stinging all the more with their salty spears.
Drip. Drop.
The darkness amplified the nervous scuffling, just round the staircase corner. As before, Batman didn't even feel the lack of night vision. No, that would just encumber, diminish the fine-tuned alertness to sound and smell. Besides, these little scampering, baby rats, were already drowning in their own growing hysteria. Let them. Better perhaps. Or not, charity, perhaps, was in order. Putting them out of their misery. He stopped. Waited. Patient. Arguing among themselves now, pulling invisible shortest straws to see who would be the lucky one to go check out the Bat.
To be a man.
A light squeak drew a little too close to the shadows, as the sole of the shoe twisted hesitantly. Batman pounced, claiming his prey, letting the gun clatter a noisy applause down the flight of steps. Diana sidestepped daintily beside him. He heard rather than saw the glint in her eye: the hunter's gaze. This is what it's about, boys. No mistaking.
No mistake. Come alone, they always said. Tell no one, they always said. Personal invitation to witness the doom of your protégé. A bargain you cannot resist. He felt the weight of the Exo-suit as it perched on his back, underneath the trench coat, an unassuming old man. The trench coat felt like a poor substitute for the black cloak he would have preferred. It didn't billow, it lay in panels, reaching to the ground, pinning each movement, each footstep, as he stepped through the echoing corridors of the building, wondering if the boy was dead, wondering how he would explain himself, wondering how he could have made this mistake over and over again. A female Clayface, more devious, perhaps. Certainly more dangerous. He wished with all his heart that he was young. He wished with all his heart that his heart would hold out just once more.
No mistake. The girl had chops, he'd give her that. One of those too young, too fresh, bright-eyed, pink-haired techno-intuited, techno-living geeks. She annoyed him. She reminded him vaguely of Barbara, with her nosy tendencies, with her naivety, with her ignorance for all the intelligence and brilliance and spunk she had been endowed with. The spunk was a detriment: she was brash, brasher than Barbara. No, of course, she was neo-age, self proclaimed and all revealing, walking into a room of Tees without so much as a disguise.
To be fair, neither did he, but to be fair, they would come out of it fearing his face, if they in their inebriated, half shot up state, remembered it at all. Maxine, the girl, with her shocking pink hair attempting to shock and deviate and distract, would only draw attention to herself, mark herself the next time she walked downtown, if she walked downtown at all. But she had chops, this was true. And where she functioned as a distraction, albeit unknowingly, it would be a distraction away from his identity.
The problem with Maxine, he had thought to himself, as they were making their way to the subway, the problem with Maxine was that she lived in a world too blurred between the virtual and the real. This was an arcade game, this was a quest for Grail Maximus Solarium three-cee-jay-oh-hundred. This was not going after a man who had the power to create earthquakes by twisting a dial on his wrist. The problem with Maxine is that when he looked at her, he saw again the bullet marks that had bit into Barbara's shoulder. When he saw that mace spray, he thought of an Andrea unembittered by the loss of her father, pulling little self-defence tricks on the unsuspecting. Then the bullet marks, again, there in the petite frame. He could not have that. She could not have that. Not another child lost to his tragedy.
This he thought about, as he channelled his rage and suppressed any possibility of panic into a well directed glare at the slimeball in front of him. He let his mind drift away from the shock of pink hair for a while as his narrowed eyes pierced into the now wide, frightened ones of the youth in front of him, as the rest began to back off towards the wall, out of the room, yes, even the big lump. He relayed once again in grimmest detail the wonderful intricacies of human anatomy, particularly in relation to pain, as he pressed not so lightly into a pressure point he knew would hurt, then numb, while lecturing on the process of induced localised paralysis.. He knew his voice could captivate. He captivated women, and it wasn't just because of the money. But perhaps the money helped to project that power, or was it the secrecy? The unknown? He projected the fathomless, and what were these punks more afraid of than that? Blithering, blubbering baboons, the lot of them.
Oh yes, he could still strike fear into the hearts of criminals. He wondered if his own would have held out more if he'd simply turned to easier methods of interrogation. Ones not so… physically taxing. He wondered if the satisfaction he reaped from it now was only because of the substitute it was for the raw vengeance he had once allowed to leak out at various times. No, it was truly satisfying, he thought, then with his smugness walked out with only a perfunctory answer to Maxine's pestering.
The problem with Maxine, was that she would not have been able to even witness him interrogate a suspect. She might not have been pampered any more than the rest of the average, even sub average teenage populace, except in terms of unreality. In this world, you could not just run up a programme to determine who was the serial killer in your school, the psychotic counsellor, the feared gangster, you needed a plan to stop them, and valedictorian would mean nothing in a fist fight. She breathed the virtual, he breathed dirt.
That, and she annoyed him.
He had no time to babysit her, ease her into the world she'd only just thought she got a glimpse of because of whatever impressions the boy had been giving her. How could the boy even let her know? To admit it? Secrecy was the essence of his identity. He had not even told Barbara until a belated effort to regain his ward back into his fold. No matter. He had no time to babysit, to nurse the wounded feelings of angry young men. That's what he had told himself then. He would ensure their physical wellbeing as much as possible. You could not ask for more than that.
He had been wrong, then. He would never admit it. Dick had said he was a prime manipulator, of emotions, of intents. Making kids believe that it was their choice, while he attached the puppet strings to limbs and joints, twisted and controlled them with the finest of disapproving frowns, finest marbled frozen unexpressiveness which he had gained over his years in the field. Masks on many levels, coverings, protections. Now he walked unprotected, cane in hand, with a black girl into a subway looking for all the world like a lost old man. Genial, lost old man, perhaps. Was that girl attempting to sneak onto the tracks? Was that allowed? Dick said he manipulated, perhaps it wasn't so bad to play to type.
The tunnel was cold, but the tracks weren't. He saw the scuff marks, the tell tale signs of human steps and prints, the condensation on the floor. He sniffed the air, alert once more. The grip on his cane increased, as he stuck to the walls and padded his way slowly forward, his black attire blending with the gloom. He took on the darkness, took on the cavernous expanse, posited himself into it, made himself part of it. This was what it was about. No mistaking. And the boy would be fine, the boy would be fine. He had to be.
He would make sure of it.
He made sure to let himself utter a low laugh as he emerged from the stairwell, knocking the nearest thug off his feet while allowing Diana to cover for any bullets shot by the frantic fools. They charged forward. Distraction, all of it, distraction, he thought to himself. No, surely he wouldn't want them blasting holes through his mogul palace of capitalism, not now, he was too vain for that. This foe, he wanted to be unruffled and frozen in time while the rest of the world succumbed to chaos. Already from the streets below Batman could hear the wailings of police vehicles, fire engines, and paramedic vans. How much time had passed between their arrival? Ten minutes? Less. Possibly less. Clark and Wally, Barbara against the rest of the city. They would have to manage. Land-lines in operation. Morse code. Low tech. Simple.
Perhaps Diana should've gone with them. But no. He appreciated her there. He wanted her there. He'd learned a lesson, a reason among many others why he was barrelling through human scum and wet-eared punks towards a young man not even out of his teens. He'd learned, perhaps, that good things came in twos. Or perhaps, not all good things, Dick would say, or Wally, or one of them, like alliterative names in Gotham. Huang Holdings. He reached the double doors at the end of the corridor, after having slung two pressurised batarangs at the faces of the guards and watching them fall. Guan Gong. Ignoring the spate of breathlessness, attributing that to adrenaline, to vigour, to life, he applied his heel to the middle of the doors in a well aimed sidekick, feeling the wood (for it was wood) splinter and break and yield.
Guan Gong. Batman crashed through, and landed with a halt, Diana beside him. Batman stood, shoulders heaving, glowering in a half crouch at the masked man who turned slowly from the windows to look at him. Impeccably dressed, hands clasped behind his back. The modern renaissance man. Guan Gong.
Yeah, sure.
Batman sneered, and uttered with unconcealed menace, "Luthor".