Family
Chapter 3: Gotham Nights
Disclaimer: all characters are property of their respective owners.
Spoilers: to the end of season 7 of Buffy (I'm not including the season 8+ comics in this continuity), general spoilers for Batman and mild spoilers for X-Men: Evolution season 1.
Author Note: the version of the Batman that will appear here draws from several versions.
A.N.2: I have added a section at the end of chapter 2 that segues into this one.
Wayne Tower
VIP Parking
"His eyes. That was what gave it away." Buffy said as they stepped out of the car.
"So, you're saying that Bruce Wayne playboy image is just that, an image?" Dawn said "It's a bit difficult to believe."
"Well, yeah." Buffy acknowledged "If I hadn't been looking him at his eyes when I mentioned Park Row I wouldn't have noticed."
Buffy took their luggage from the car's trunk and backseat, a big wheeled suitcase and a backpack for her, and another backpack for Dawn, who was taking her laptop and the keycard.
"And what do you think he is hiding?" Dawn said,
"You tell me, you are the one who have been researching the city since we got out of New York." Buffy said, as they started to follow the signs toward the lifts. "And how could you not notice that Park Row was Crime Alley?"
"Sheer bad luck..." Dawn shrugged, but she frowned and then added "...or maybe the Powers that Are Dicks at work."
"You've been hanging with Xander and Faith too much." Buffy said with a smile. "Not that you're not right about them being dicks. But going back to Gotham, did you discover something of interest?"
"Well, the city seems to have its own superhero, a guy who looks like or is dressed as a bat and goes around beating criminals. People has taken to call him 'the Bat', 'the Bat-Man' or simply 'Batman'" Dawn said, and looked at Buffy who had pursed her lips "Let me guess, you are thinking about Dracula."
"Yeah. He could transform into a bat. And the Master was quite bat-like." Buffy said, as they arrived to the lifts. The one they were looking for was a bit apart from the others, with a card replacing the panel with a card reader.
"You have a point." Dawn said as they entered the elevator. "But so far, he seems to avoid killing people, and I have seen no significant number of 'barbecue accidents' between the statistics. I called Andrew to see what the Watchers had on Gotham, though."
"And what the geek had?" Buffy asked.
"No idea, He hadn't answered, sent any message, skyped, or anything yet." Dawn said with a shrug. "I'll check again after we get installed."
"Let's hope that he didn't get involved into another WoW raid, last time we didn't see him again for two days." Buffy said, with an eyeroll.
"That's nothing, Xander told me that he has already organized a Warhammer 40000 tournament between the interns." Dawn said with a half-smile, as the elevator doors opened.
Buffy shook her head, but whatever witty reply she was going to make died in her lips as she watched the penthouse for the first time.
"Wow." she finally said.
It was not extravagantly opulent, in fact if anything it was in the austere side, but the furniture and the decoration that were present spoke of taste and money. They separated to look around, and get their luggage in their respective bedrooms.
"Dibs on the Jacuzzi!" said Dawn from the bathroom.
"Dibs on the gym!" replied Buffy.
After and Dawn tried the Jacuzzi, and Buffy made some exercises, Dawn sat down in the comfortable and stylish sofa in the living room, while Buffy was using an exercise bike that she had gotten into the room. Before powering up her laptop, Dawn took a Tylenol with a glass of water.
"Headache." Dawn said, answering Buffy's unasked question. "Let's see if Andrew have found something. And why don't you come here? This sofa is very comfy."
"Sorry, I'm feeling very antsy." Buffy said, dismounting "I think that I'm going to go on patrol tonight. "
"You know that is going to rain, do you?." Dawn said, looking at her.
"I know." Buffy said with a sigh "But I'm feeling... Don't know, it's like an itch I can't scratch. And not the kind that Faith has after going on patrol. I simply need to go out and kick some evilness."
"Weird." Dawn said, as she opened the e-mail client. Willow had enchanted the laptop so it would always have Internet access. There were a few new messages, including one from... "Andrew came through. Let's see what he has found."
She opened the e-mail, and she stood there, dumbfounded.
"Okay, this is really of the weird." Buffy said.
According to Andrew, the Council had noticed how, for a major city, Gotham's supernatural element was almost non-existent. A few magic users in the countryside, a periodic murder spree in the Narrows and the Bowery...
"Could it be a werewolf?" Buffy wondered aloud.
"It seems to happen every six weeks or so, so I would say no." Dawn replied, shaking her head "Though the council didn't had much other than the fact that it happens."
"Okay." Buffy said "Why didn't they investigate it? I can remember, like, three demons that need to kill people on a schedule without much effort."
"Gotham, home of the best and brightest, and the worst and craziest. That was the title of an article that I read on the way here, about how a lot of high tech industries and a number of genius in several fields live here, but also a bunch of gangsters that have done things that would made Angelus swoon or decry them as crass, not to speak of an abnormally big number of serial killers." Dawn said "Between all that crazy, and the fact that it started like two years and a half ago, I guess that by the time they took notice of it, they had their hands full with the Bringers and the First. And we all know how that ended."
"Caleb kabooming the Council." Buffy said, nodding. "When is going to be the next rampage?"
"If it keeps to schedule..." Dawn said while checking the dates of the last attacks, which Andrew had added to the document "This week."
"Of course it is." Buffy deadpanned "The Powers seem to have forgotten the meaning of the term 'subtlety'." She stood up and went to the bathroom "I'm gonna take a shower, change clothes and go on patrol."
"I'll contact Giles to see if he can send Rona or Vi's teams to help you." Dawn said.
Half an hour later, Buffy appeared back in the living room wearing a ratty grey hoodie, a quite worn belt purse, black baggy pants that had seen better days and somewhat worn out combat boots. Dawn made a double take, her very fashion conscious sister wouldn't be caught dead in such clothes, usually, unless...
"I'm in disguise!" Buffy exclaimed, after noticing the look that Dawn was giving her.
"Yeah, I can see that, nobody that knows you would identify you in those ratty clothes." Dawn said.
"Ha, Ha. Look, I thought that it would be better to be wearing something that didn't draw attention to poor me." Buffy said "Besides, Willow enchanted them to be waterproof, so I won't get drenched if it starts to rain."
"Take these at least." Dawn said, throwing her a bluetooth headset and a smartphone. "Willow gave it to me before we left. The headset is already synched with the smartphone, that also has an GPS locator, so I can give guide you through the streets."
"Cool. See you later, Dawnie." Buffy said, already walking to the door.
"Did you take your weapons?" Dawn said, before Buffy got out the door.
"Of course." Bufy said with an eyeroll "Three stakes, two knives, one silver, one cold iron, cross, holy water, a few charms for protections, and a first aid kit. Baggy clothes are a fashion disaster, but are good for hiding things."
Rooftops, somewhere in the Bowery.
Hiding in the shadow under a gargoyle, Batman had stopped a moment to think. Out of the blue he had found himself with two sisters, one of which was probably involved in activities related with the occult. What worried him, was how could this interfere with The Mission.
But it was no use to fret, prepare yes, fret no. He stepped out of the shadows, and climbed down a tube toward the street. Forty days ago, three people had been found here dismembered, another one of the series of what the press had come to call the Murders of the Bowery Ripper.
Like in all the other cases, no trace was found of the perpetrators, or rather, it was lost into the mountain of evidence. The few things that were determined by the forensic team were that they weren't killed here, that the dismemberment had been done postmortem, and very crudely done at that, and that they had suffered... He paused when his earlier thoughts allowed him to make a connection he had not made before.
'The victims had, as far as it could be determined, died from blood loss ... could it be so simple?' Batman thought.
But all thought related to the Ripper went to the back of his mind when his mark, a two-bit hoodlum from New York called Turk Barrett, stepped out of the cheap motel where he had been living since arriving to Gotham four months earlier. He was carrying a worn out suitcase, and a backpack, both filled to the brim.
Batman was well hidden from view, and Barrett was going to walk less than a yard from him. So he decided for the more direct course of br
Barrett suddenly felt a powerful arm taking him by the scruff of his neck and throwing him against a pipe. Before he could react, he found himself zip-tied to the pipe and then all thoughts of fighting fled him when he saw what had captured him.
The Bat. He stood there, all black and gray with pitiless white eyes that seemed capable to look into his soul. And when he spoke, he did it in a voice that seemed to be coming from Hell itself.
"Turk Barrett. From Hell's Kitchen, New York." The Bat said.
'Shit, shit, shit.' Turk thought. 'He knows who I am.'
"I want to know about the Red Hood."
"I... I don't know..." he started to say, frightened.
"'The Bare Beaver' strip club, past Friday. You and Smilin' Jack were sitting in the same table for half an hour." The Bat said matter of factly. "What did you talked about?"
Barrett gulped. The Bat knew. So he decided to cut his losses, he was leaving this crazy city anyway, and the number two of the Red Hood gave him the creeps. Nobody should be able to smile like Jack with those cuts in the face.
"Jack... Jack wanted to know if I knew somebody who had worked in Monarch Chemicals." Barrett said. "I gave him the name of a guy, one of the paper pushers."
"Monarch have been closed for months, after a fire. Why now?" The Bat said, after a pause.
"I asked the same to Jack, and the grinning asshole said that part of the former management was using the facilities as a drug lab. And he wanted a piece of the action." Barrett said.
"The name and address of the ex-employee."
Barrett gave them to him, but he added. "Not that it's going to be of much help. The whole building burned out."
"Anything else?" the Bat said, after a pause.
"I asked him if he wanted to hire some local guys, but no, he said that he had brought some talent from out of town, in case you appeared." Barrett said "And no, I didn't want to know who he had brought."
The Bat stood there, waiting. He tried to remember if there was anything else about his meeting with Jack, but he came out blank.
"Why are you leaving Gotham?." The Bat asked, after what seemed like an eternity had passed.
"Are you nuts?" Barrett said, clearly angry. "Of course you are nuts. You live here." He then started to rant "I came to Gotham because I heard that things were easy here for people like me, with half of the force on the take and the bosses ruling the roost. What they didn't tell me is that they're all fuckin' nuts!"
Batman retreated into the shadows, he had heard enough, while Barrett keep ranting about how honest crooks in New York weren't accosted by people dressed as a demon. He had left the ziptie loose enough that he could free himself in a few minutes, if he kept struggling like this.
The drug lab in Monarch was a real worry. If somebody started to produce synthetic drugs on a real industrial scale they could dominate the East Coast market easily. And who was the "out of town talent" Jack and the Red Hood had hired?
He used his grapple gun to climb back again to the rooftops and started to run. This part of the Bowery had been part of a big housing project built by his great-grandfather Solomon Wayne to house the people who was coming to the city to get employed in Gotham then booming industry. As a result, most of the buildings were roughly the same height, built in a simplified version of the same Neo-Gothic style than Solomon had favored, so there were arches and catwalks built over the alleys that crisscrossed the maze of brick and concrete buildings that had become one of the worst zones of Gotham.
He then heard it, soft steps. Somebody was following him over the rooftops. He didn't show anything and went toward his destination using the longer route. When he reached the edge of a building, over the street that separated the older part of the Bowery from the more conventional building that dated from the 40s, he took his grapple gun and without missing a step he fired it to a water tower in the other side, and jumped toward the other side.
After he landed the grapple line collected automatically in the gun, and he kept running without missing a movement, all the time keeping track of his mysterious pursuer. Once he reached the ledge, he heard his pursuer curse to him... to herself. The voice was clearly female, despite being too far for him to understand the words, and sounded familiar.
He heard her back down and started to run. Surely she wouldn't be thing of... Yes, she did. She had crossed the street in a single leap. He notched another item of his mental list of his pursuer qualities. Female, skilled at stealth, (probably) superstrong, and quite fit and fast, given the fact that she was gaining on him.
Could she be the "talent" that the Red Hood had hired? Doubtful, but he didn't discount the possibility. At the pace she was going, she would reach him in less than five minutes, so he decided that if she wanted a fight it would be in circumstances under his control.
TO BE CONTINUED...