Family

Chapter 5: Method and Madness

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.

I wish to give thanks to JediKnight from Twisting the Hellmouth for betareading and general creative input.

The rooftop of an abandoned building in Gotham City industrial district

Batman looked at her askance after she had done that announcement.

"How do you know?" Batman asked. It was clear, from his tone, that he wasn't too thrilled to hear this news.

"A sixth sense for supernatural baddies, courtesy of the Slayer package. " Buffy explained with a shrug, "So, what do we do?"

Batman didn't answer at first, weighing the alternatives, and remembering what he had on the Red Hood.

"This stand-off won't last." Batman said, finally. "Get ready to jump into the fray when I give the signal."

To his relief, Buffy refrained from making an smart-ass remark, just nodding and looking down to the crowd with a rather predatory look.

The entry to the Monarch Chemical plant

Sam Welles wiped the sweat from his face. He had been a R&D guy here, developing cosmetics to give a new lease of life to the old plant, after Thorne Industries had bought everything. It had worked, it had worked… until the fire.

He had not been here when it happened, being down with a cold. But he could well imagine how things had gone down. The local management had complained upstairs that the security systems were old and not up to standards, but Thorne had turned a deaf ear to those complains.

Afterwards… everything had gone to hell. Thorne had managed to shift the blame on the local management, and all of them had found themselves on the street, unable to get another job thanks to the spin doctors paid by Thorne. Hell, not even Lexcorp or Von Doom Industries, who were not very scrupulous in their hiring practices, wanted to touch any of them with a ten feet pole.

The idea of using the old plant clandestinely to make a living synthetizing drugs had started as a joke, as a mad idea in one of their reunions. But the more they discussed it, the more sense it made, or at least the more sense it made to a handful of angry men at the end of their rope. Joe, bless his heart, hadn't wanted anything to do with that, trying to become a stand-up comedian like he had always wanted, but he had been the only one not to join..

And all of that had led them here. The fucking Red Hood was here. He rechecked his weapon again, and then one of the Red Hood men waved threateningly a submachine gun toward him. He aimed at him, as if to daring him to proceed.

But before it could escalate Jack looked at the man who had started it and shook his head, before turning toward them. Sam gulped. Everybody had heard of Smilin' Jack, the executor and right-hand-man of the Hood, but he was even more ghastly in person that what the rumors had made him to be.

"Well, well, well. It seems that we are in a small quandary." Said Jack, his eyes wandering between the people in front of him. "You see, all of this…" he said, waving her hands around, as if to encompass the entire district "…is Red Hood territory. Do you want to set a drug lab here? You'll have us as your partners."

"And if we don't want to?" he said, trying to not make his voice waver with fear, and not having much success.

"Things will get messy." Jack said, with a broad, very unsettling smile, just before the Red Hood put his hand on Jack shoulder.

Jack turned, his smile vanishing as the Red Hood said something to his ear. Jack looked at him, smirked, nodded and turned back to face them.

"The Red Hood has a magnanimous one-time offer. We do the distribution and you retain a fifty percent of the profit." Jack said "If you say no, well…" he shrugged. "You have one minute."

After Jack's announcement all his people turned to him, and Wells gulped. He didn't like the responsibility, but without Syd or Vance here, he was the guy in charge, the guy who had to take the decisions. He looked at the gang for a moment, the Red Hood was waiting there, his arms crossed, while Jack was using a switchblade to clean his fingernails, and then his eyes went to the only person in the crowd not wearing the Red Hod colors, a tall man with white hair, with a skin so pale that he looked almost like an albino, and who was looking at everything with a sardonic expression behind stylish sunglasses.

"We accept." He said, his voice cracking.

"What have you said? I didn't hear you." Jack said, with a smirk.

"I said that we accept your proposal." Wells said, more forcefully.

"Good. You are a smart guy. Now…" Jack started to say when the albino guy looked up and interrupted him.

"The Bat is here, and he brings company."

And suddenly everything was swallowed by darkness.

'What the…?' Buffy thought as she jumped out of the roof, only to find that she couldn't see anything. Fortunately this wasn't the first time she had to fight without being able to see, and the gangbangers were doing enough noise to wake a cemetery.

She took care of two that ran into her, when suddenly she found herself in a clearing of the darkness confronted with the demon she had identified before.

"You're not the Bat." He said. Now that she could see him clearly, his skin was so pale that it looked almost white, and both his teeth and nails looked metallic, not too speak of his almost pointed ears.

"Nope." She said, putting herself in a defensive stance. "I'm the Vampire Slayer."

"A Slayer, it has been a while since I danced with one." He said, licking his lips.

"'Danced', really? Not even Spike at his worst would have used that line." She said. "Where did you learn to banter, old action movies?"

"Shut up, bitch! I'm Blackout, of the blood of Lilith, Mother of Demons." He boasted, before launching himself toward her.

"Sure you are." She said, avoiding him easily. Despite not showing it, this worried her, she had heard of Lilith, an ancient demon, close in power to an Old One, and of her brood, every one of them a powerful demon on their own right. Suddenly she found herself again in darkness.

'Of course, a guy called Blackout control darkness. It's a good thing that he seems to be a one-trick pony.' She thought, dodging another attack, guided by her hearing and managing to connect one of her own.

"Are you sure that you are a descendant of Lilith? I have met fledglings that gave me more problems than you." She said, dodging another attack, and hitting him in the ribs.

"Fuck yo…" he started to say, before Buffy kicked him in the mouth.

Buffy heard Blackout recoil drunkenly after being kicked in the teeth. Without giving him a moment of respite, she went and punched him in the gut, followed by kneeing his groin. Then, while he was still stunned she proceeded to methodically demolish him, targeting his knees and shoulders with hits designed to dislocate them, and then, after a punch to the head that would have killed a normal man. Blackout finally fell, unconscious, to the ground.

Batman, as soon as he found himself surrounded by darkness, switched the vision mode of the goggles built into the cowl to infrared, and proceeded to deal with the Red Hood mooks that were in the way. When he reached where Jack and the Red Hood had been, he found that they were gone. Suddenly the darkness vanished, as he was considering what to do. He switched again the goggles to normal vision and saw Buffy standing over a bloodied and very unconscious Blackout.

"Hey Batsy, do you have some rope?" Buffy said, flippantly "I'm gonna tie this dork up. I may have to have a few words with him later."

Without talking to her he threw her a line from his utility belt, all the while surveying the situation. Besides Jack and the Red Hood, one of the gang members was missing, but all their cars were still there. The darkness hadn't been on so much time that they would have had time to disappear through one of the side streets, so they could only have disappeared one way, into the plant.

He ran toward the entrance of the plant, finding several people dead of knife wounds. Jack's work, he guessed. He then heard some shouts and continued running in that direction.

"I'm telling you it's not safe to go there!" he heard a voice saying, full of fear "All the crap that spilled the day of the fire is still down there, mixed with who knows what! For all that we know, just breathing the air it could kill everyone of us. And even if we could enter, there are no railings! A bad step and we'll fall on that…" he suddenly stopped.

"Do I look as if I give a damn?" he heard Jack saying. The only thing he could hear in answer was a gurgle. "I thought so. Come on, guys."

By the time Batman arrived to the scene the man that Jack had been talking to was dead, his throat slit by a very sharp blade, Jack's knife, presumably. The corpse was at the entry of an access to the plant underground waste storage, where the residues of what had survived the fire had been stored.

It should have been pumped out and disposed of by now, but the legal battle between Thorne and City Hall about who had to pay for the damage and to dispose of the chemical waste of the plant had paralyzed everything.

If he remembered the plans of the plant correctly, once you passed the vats, you'd end in the small adjacent building that housed the pumps. In short, they would escape. So, being who he was, he dashed behind them, jumping over the heavy coat that he identified as the one the Red Hood had been wearing.

The stench was almost overpowering, so he donned a respirator. On his way, he could see that a utility locker had been pried open, presumably to take the masks inside. As he was about to turn a corner, he heard a voice he had not heard before. It was the voice of a young man, partially muffled, as if wearing a mask, and looked to be exhausted.

"Jack… wait." Said the man between wheezes.

"You're useless. The Bat is hot on our heels and you want to sit down?" he heard Jack saying, before sighing and saying. "You…" he said, accompanied by a snapping of his fingers "Go and try to keep the Bat busy."

"But…" another voice started to say, before the noise of an spring knife "Okay, okay, okay, I'll do it."

As soon as he heard him close to the corner, he went and hit him in the head, then in the gut before taking his head and crashing it in his knee. After leaving him there he advanced toward…

"Don't." Jack said, holding a knife to the neck of the other guy. By the red cloth on the ground, he assumed that the thin man was the Red Hood, and given the wounds in his face, that he could see now as the mask was in the ground, Jack had already been "playing" with him. "Or this little bitch dies."

"Isn't he your boss?" Batman said.

"Ah, yes, the infamous Red Hood." Jack said with a chuckle "Everybody thought that the gang boss was him, but it was me, Jack!"

"So, the Red Hood was always a figurehead and you were the real boss all the time."

Jack only grinned and started to walk back, to the portion of the passage that was between the open vats of chemical waste. Batman tried to advance but Jack moved the knife closer to the other man throat.

"No, no, no. Look Bats, can I call you Bats?" he said "If you give another step I'll start cutting."

"Please, my wife is pregnant…" the man said, pleadingly.

"Joe, you are a fucking loser, you know that?" Jack said, as he kept walking backwards with his hostage. "Besides…well, Bats, I'm sure know, so why don't you give him the bad news."

"What bad news? What the hell are you talking about?" the man said, before a look of horror crossed his face "What has happened to my wife?"

Batman looked away. He had checked what Barret had said, and it hadn't taken much to confiorm what he had said. The worst thing was that it seemed to have been an honest-to-God accident, no foul play involved.

"So you know." Jack said, interpreting correctly Batman hesitation. "Come one, Bats, you know what is going to happen. Why don't you tell this worthless piece of shit the bad news?"

He said an address, but the hostage interrupted him before he could continue.

"That's where I live!" the man said, struggling in vain against Jack.

"There was an electrical fire, faulty wiring apparently, in that building." Batman slowly said "There were no survivors."

"No…No…No. It's all you fault…ALL YOUR FAULT!" he said struggling against Jack so strongly that Jack lost his footing, and fell by the side, still clinging to the other man, who fell with him into the vat of chemical waste.

Before he could do anything or even see if any of them had survived the drop, he heard the cocking of a revolver behind him and instinctively dropped to the ground when the shot was fired.

He didn't need to look back to guess that it was the thug he had dropped before confronting Jack and the Red Hood. Judging by the noise of the shoot, he was carrying something heavy… too heavy for the light armor he was using right now. Adding to that that the air down here was so saturated by the flammable vapors of the chemical mixture in the vats...

He cursed silently and started to run toward the other end of the passage, where he could glimpse a safety door. He zigzagged, as much as he could in the narrow passage, to make more difficult for the thug to aim. He had just passed the vats and noticed, in passing, that one of them, either Jack or Joe, was climbing out of the vats, while kicking the other down, trying to avoid for the other to follow him.

When he reached the emergency exit, he stopped, trying to open it, giving the thug behind him, who had already reached the other end of the vats, the time to aim. Unfortunately he didn't realize what he was going to unleash, as soon as the gasses from the ignited propellant left the case, the air itself around him seemed to catch fire.

Batman quickly ran through the door he had just opened and closed it behind him, just as the flames reached it. He looked around, there was heavy machinery around, pumps, and he realized, probably the ones that should be used to empty the vats. There was no use on looking inside, nobody could have survived that.

After a couple minutes of search, he found a ladder that went up as well as a non-functioning lift. As he stepped up the ladder, he saw that he was on the opposite side of the plant where he had entered, and that the flare up had caused parts of the plant to catch fire. He pursed his lips and called Alfred.

"Alfred, make a call to emergency services, and warn them you have heard shootings and what sounded like a large explosion at the Monarch Chemical plant." He said.

"An anonymous call, I presume, Master Bruce?" Alfred asked.

"Yes, the usual protocols apply." Batman said.

"'Master Bruce', so the Batman was you all along, Brucey?" said a female voice with a Californian accent to his back.

TO BE CONTINUED...