Title: Counting Bodies Like…(3/3)

Fandom: Gotham

Pairing: Bruce/Selina
Rating: T

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Barton

The basement in the Mathis brownstone was no different than the basement of every other townhouse that lined their picture perfect street. There was no difference in size or placement, there wasn't even any difference in what it was used for, lots of kids Barton's age preferred the solitude of their game-room basements to the formality of their parents sitting rooms. Brass tacks, there really was no difference…

Well, no difference aside from the things Barty Mathis chose to keep down there.

The room was what a lot of people called 'unfinished' all exposed brick and dusty stone floors. When they had moved in and he had claimed it for his workshop his parents had offered to have it renovated for him. His mother had had visions of colorfully painted dry wall and neat shelves with rows of alphabetized boxes for all of his tools and sawdust. Barty wasn't exactly what one would call tidy. His mother had often said that it was a product of his brilliant mind; his father blamed it on his having the soul of an artist.

She wouldn't have stopped at the walls either. She'd wanted to fix everything. She'd even planned to install recess lighting, because she claimed it was too dark to try and work down here and that all that low lighting would ruin his eyes. But he liked working in the dark, nothing but a single chain pulled bulb above his head, the looming shadows hiding all of his secrets, his interests. He found comfort in the dark solitude, amongst the broken stone floor, the weeping walls and all of his tools. He could be himself down here. His true self. His father had understood that, and with his father on his side he had easily won that argument. His mother's plans weren't going to touch a thing. He hadn't been surprised, he was an only child, his parents' miracle baby, and he almost always won. His father made sure of that.

With his father moving to the forefront of his thoughts, Barty stripped off and discarded his gloves in the small waste basket he kept by his side. He sighed running a shaking hand over his face and breathing in the sharp remaining scent of latex as he pushed his chair onto its back legs and leaned away from his worktable and the project that sat opened on it.

He didn't like thinking about his father, or where his father's 'little hobby' had landed them. His father had never admitted it, but he knew that was why he had moved them to this fucked-up city in the first place. He was sure of it. Sure, his father had had connections, you couldn't dismiss the well placed fraternity brothers he had counted as acquaintances, but impressive people and a big city weren't good enough reasons to drag his wife and son half-way across the country to start life over in a Hellscape.

They had been living in said Hellscape for almost a year now, but he still hadn't accustomed himself to the jarring culture. Gothamites were, for lack of a better word, strange. Tragedy seemed to follow them around like an albatross. Everyone he had met, from the rich to the not so rich, all had had their own tale of woe.

For being touted as the center of the universe, as a city, it was just plain weird. It was like the entire city was caught in a time capsule, perfectly frozen and encapsulated inside a dystopian diorama. It was so odd, from their fashion to their way of speaking everything always felt upside down, as if he had been thrown down a rabbit hole.

He knew it was this chaos, this lawlessness, this no man's land type environment, that had drawn his father back here despite the man's cries of a new life. Well before his father had taken him on his first hunting trip, not the boring kind where you killed stock buffalo or some half-starved lion on a reserve but his first real hunting trip, Barty had known there was something different about his father. Despite his easy manners, there always seemed to be something hiding in his father's gaze, a haunting that the man couldn't shake and somewhere far beyond that a sort of latent violence.

However, Gotham's violence was anything but latent. It was obnoxious and powerful and stirred something deep inside him as he imagined it had his father. On his first day in this new city they had barely driven past the 'Welcome to Gotham' sign before he had witnessed everything Gotham had had to offer. Its famous skyline a mix of shiny new skyscrapers and old gothic-style buildings had done nothing to mask the depravity and inhumanity that was constantly loose in the city. He had sat staring out the back seat window of his father's car watching as deals were made on corners and people were reduced in alleys in broad daylight.

He remembered as he had been watching another person being mugged a familiar quote had drifted through his mind: 'Hell is empty.' he had thought. 'All the devils are here.' There was no denying that Gotham was certainly it's own Circle, but for a man like his father, a man like himself, it had all the potential to be a playground.

At the thought, Barty let the feet of his chair fall to the floor with an audible snap.

A playground.

He sniffed at the idea. That was how it was supposed to be, how his father had planned it, but he had learned early in life that things rarely were how they were supposed to be and that unless executed perfectly, plans didn't mean shit.

Just like the plans his father had had for that little bitch.

He had wanted her heart, for reasons that after being explained a dozen and a half times Barton still didn't understand. His father was a doctor, had been, a doctor he reminded himself.

Had been.

Past tense.

Because of Her.

Guilt and rage and something very close to despair rolled around in his stomach and he had to drop the tools he had in his hands because they were shaking so badly.

He breathed out slowly, resisting the urge to swipe his work table clear. Yes, rage had turned his blood to lava, but losing his temper would gain him nothing. It certainly wouldn't make his world right again.

He mirthlessly snorted at himself as he thought back to the days after everything had gone to hell. The hours after he had found his father had been filled with hot tears and phone calls and driving too fast on blacktops made white with ice and snow. He had had to quickly push down his grief as he had worked quickly to take care of everything to try and put things right.

Almost an entire day had past before the full impact of what had happened had finally sunk into him. The potential repercussions of his father's favorite pastime and his own bad decisions had played over in his head like a broken record. He remembered the trembling in his hands and the ice cold dread and nausea that had taken up residence in his stomach.

She'd gotten away. Somehow, someway, she'd gotten away.

On reflection he didn't know how, but he knew it had probably started with him. Him and his failed attempt at duplicity. Even now, he could remember it all so clearly. He had just entered the woods- the cold stinging his cheeks and the pain in his jaw radiating through the side of his face where the little bitch had socked him- when he had heard the gun shot. With a smile on his face he had immediately started running, bloodlust bringing his tired feet to life as he had anticipated watching his father at work. He remembered how he had hoped she was still alive so he could watch the expression on her heart shaped face as his father strung her up. Because if any of those assholes his father had collected over the last few months had deserved to get gutted it was that little bit of gutter detritus.

But his father hadn't been to work on her, he'd been lying beside the icy creek, a face so much like his own covered in blood. He had stood there, shock having rendered him immobile as his flashlight illuminated the ice and snow around his father's motionless body slowly turning red.

A gust of cold wind and reality had snapped him back and before he could breathe he was half-sliding half-falling down the valley wall and his thoughts had been focusing on the only other person who was out there. The only person who could be responsible for what he was looking at.

Feet planted firmly on the frozen ground he had swung his flashlight left to right but he had seen nothing but the flakes of snow that had refused to let up. There was no girl, no footprints, not even a blood trail. He wasn't sure how or if his father had injured her at all.

The wind had howled, an awful mournful sound, and he had quickly abandoned any ideas of trying to find her, in that moment, in that terrible moment, it hadn't mattered. But that was then.

In those first few days after that night he had watched the news obsessively. Fear having had grown so tight in his belly that there wasn't room for anything else. He had been expecting a cop's knock on the door. Or a big haired anchor informing him a girl had been found in the woods or maybe wandering by the roadside. A girl covered in blood and rambling about a boy and his father because if his father's face was any indication the girl had to have been covered in it.

At first his only hope had been that she had died of exposure, her leather jacket and ripped pants no match against the deathly blizzard that had covered nearly every inch of land for miles. But soon he hoped he didn't hear anything at all. He hoped she was still out there somewhere, all alone and waiting to be found.

He often found himself fantasizing about it. The moment he would find her. The moment he could see the recognition cross that smug face. The moment she would be laid out before him.

The work would be painstaking. Cracking open the chest cavity, getting past the breast plate without damaging too much skin was going to be difficult but not impossible. He would be able to do it and he owed it to his father to get it right. He couldn't wait to have her open on his table, and glide his fingers across all that white-gold skin.

He would rather do it properly, to freeze her and take his time, but that wouldn't be an option. He needed to keep her breathing as long as he could, to make her suffer for every minute of pain she had put his family through. But he was realistic; he new the human body couldn't survive that long without skin. It wouldn't matter, preparing her would be a torture all its own.

First he would take so much pleasure in taking down her measurements, the length of her legs from hip to toe, the circumference of her throat.

Inches and centimeters of street trash.

Barty cracked his knuckles at the thoughts, enjoying the loosening of his overly tight joints. Soon. It was going to be very soon. He just had some ducks he needed to get in a row and he knew just the people to help him do that.

The men his father had employed, his snatchers, had found them well before the cops had even started looking for his father. He had expected the nondescript "curators' as his father had had affectionately called them to have shown up eager to cut and dispose of anything that would have lead back to them, but they had only wanted instructions, ready to keep the rather generous deal they had struck with his father.

They had wanted lists. A list of their next three quarries, a list of dates to deliver the product and a list of paydays when they would get the cash they were owed for a job well done. But while he had no need for any more product, he had plenty of other jobs for them. Jobs that he simply couldn't do.

The cops had been another story. He had been dizzy with fear as he had opened the door for two well dressed officers that had finally coming a knocking. Everything inside of him, every logical part, had been positive that his number was up. To his surprise and relief, they had not come to arrest him, but to offer their condolences.

Some motorists had finally found his father's car where he had left it abandoned and ablaze and against the trunk of a tree. The car accident had been a foul but necessary answer to a delicate question. He had done his research, he had known the exact amount of time, the amount of heat, it would have taken to destroy a body. The constant slow burn would have reduced the large automobile's interior and everything inside it to ashes.

He had never paid that much attention to the man, but as he had shaken their hands and seen the tears in those officer's eyes he had finally considered that his father was probably a lot more popular than he had ever given him credit for. He had planned then that he would play the grieving son as he kept one ear on the news and another on the GCPD.

Exhaling, he reached over grabbing another pair of latex gloves from the box his father had brought him home from the hospital. He would think about all of this later, for now he needed to get back to work. His little pet project could wait no longer.

He stifled a laugh at his own word usage. It would do no good for him to wake his mother at this late hour. With the line of people that had paraded through his house the day of his father's funeral he had thought he would've had at least a couple of days of freedom before his mother would have noticed it missing. But those eagle eyes of hers had noticed its absence immediately.

Fortunately for him, it had taken only a sympathetic tilt of his head and an offhanded suggestion for her to believe that Sprinkles had run off, probably snuck away when a door was left open by a distraught mourner. Still, he was aggravated that he had been forced to postpone his art by a couple of weeks.

He took out his Tailor Tape, his hand gently moving through the small dog's thick fur as he measured the body, mentally noting its measurements. He absently stroked its cold body as he picked up his pencil and wrote down everything down to the exact millimeter. That was the key. He had to be exact.

Barty didn't like being exact, it went against his artistic principles, but he understood the necessity for it. It was like cataloging, it was tedious and it sucked, but it was important, it was vital. His father had shown him the value in it.

It had taken him a week to go through his dad's diary and to find his old man's box of trophies. The former had been filled with stats and faces, recipes and regrets. It was obvious his father had done a lot of research before he had gotten these targets snatched up. He had kept a dossier on everyone, newspaper clippings, school transcripts, hospital records, even police reports. There were things in those files that he wasn't sure any of those poor bastards even knew about themselves. If the cops had ever suspected his father, his office would've yielded enough evidence to start building a very solid case. Well, that and the box of souvenirs.

When they had been brought in, his father had taken a token off of each one, a single diamond earring from Rana, a music player from the swimmer. He had remembered seeing the girl's bracelet and immediately knowing that she must've stolen it. No way could a girl like that have afforded the kind of craftsmanship that had gone into that bracelet or the charms that had been hanging from it. Not only was such a thing well out of her price range, she would have had to have stolen it from someone with a lot of money. Even his mother had only been gifted those kind of trinkets on special occasions.

It was also had been the only solid piece of evidence he had found that his father had run into her that night. The same bracelet he had watched her wrap around her wrist, had been lying beside his father's outstretched hand and before he had lifted his father's body over his shoulder he had absently pocketed it. It wasn't much, but it was something.

He knew he could be like his father. He could do his research. He could play at detective. He could always bring it into the shop he knew sold those charms, find out when or who had purchased them. But he doubted that kind of leg work would help him. He would just find out who she had stolen them from, and that didn't give him any idea of where she could be now. And his interest in her had nothing to do with her past, only her present, and the future he planned to end.

He hadn't thought he'd been built for revenge, but before his father had brought him out hunting for the first time, he'd assumed he hadn't been built for violence either. But violence was like sushi, you didn't know if you were going to like it, until you tried it. And soon he found himself face to face with a new purpose, discovering a facet of himself that he hadn't known existed. It had been standing right in front of him all along.

Life.

Power.

A human being.

A real human being.

A real human being that he could do whatever he wanted to do to it and no one and nothing could stop him. The potential and the possibilities were endless.

His father must've seen the hunger in his eyes, a hunger that somehow didn't match his own. He had tried to explain to Barty what they were doing out there, that it was important to honor their kill, it dying so they could live. But Barty personally thought his father's reasons were complete bullshit.

Even if his father had never admitted it, the man had enjoyed killing. Shit, he probably loved it. Who wouldn't? It was absolute power at its very base. He was the thing that stood between life and death, the thing that stood between another sunrise and oblivion. The feeling that exploded inside him at the though was something akin to attraction, to wanting, to aching.

The mere idea of it was starting to make him feel things that his father most certainly wouldn't approve of. He nearly shook just thinking about watching life leave that girl, watching her gasp and struggle.

He remembered the first time he had see that girl, that Cat, as they had called her. His father had picked him up, had brought him directly from school that day, not even giving him the chance to change out of his school uniform. He had brought him down those concrete steps and through those thick doors; Barty could even recall the whine of the door hinges and the eerie silence that had greeted them. Her cell had been the first, and he could remember as he'd looked inside that cell, at the small circle of light provided by his father's flashlight and thinking that he honestly couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

Whether it was her dirty hair or the week's worth of muck on her he remembered thinking that she was… Okay. But not exactly a head turner. His mother would've probably described her as having a pair of 'fine eyes' and he had to admit that despite the filth he could tell her skin was a nice color and smooth but he had still needed to know what his father found so fascinating. It was when she had stared down the barrel of his father's gun, not even a tremor in her hoarse voice as she had answered him, he had known.

He had seen it in her eyes. That bitch was all fight through and through.

He may not have picked up much from frolicking around the forest with his father, but he knew who to contact now, he knew how to find the curators, he knew which police offers to pay to look the other way. They had found her once. They would find her again.

She would be his first. His first try at preserving a human. He quickly shook off that idea.

Yes, she would be his first, but, before he had his fun, he would honor his father.

He would carry out his plan. Finish what his father had begun. He had to.

The needle and thread dropped from his hand as he began to imagine it as he fell into that fantasy again. He would start with her eyes and then…

Her heart.

Super short chapter I know, but it's kind of crazy that I could write so many words and not really say anything. ; ) Anyway, if you're still reading: Hooray! We made it through the trough together! I'm a little nervous to finish up the next few chapters, because I feel that you guys will either love them, hate them or worse not feel anything at all toward them, but I just hope they don't disappoint. I'm SO excited to get to the next stage of this fic, but sad to know that it's so close to the end. : (

Also, I'm really sorry for being late with my update and not having responded to reviews in the last two weeks, you're not here for my personal life, but I just wanted you guys to know that it was a personal issue and hopefully that things will be turning around soon, but if they don't I will do whatever I can to finish this story. : )

Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to review: Lala-chan39, claire-loves-music, krsa, Byzinha Lestrange, FanWriter83 I hope you all got my PMs.

AnnieC- Thank you so much and I'm glad you liked their little banter and yes, poor Bruce and his overactive mind. Guest 1/6/17 Thank you so much for your kind words. I'm so glad you're still reading and enjoying it. I hope you enjoyed this one as well. Guest 1/11/17: Thank you! I hope the year has been treating you well and I'm so happy to see you enjoy my characterization of those two great characters. Guest 1/18/17: Hope this tides you over. : )