a/n: terribly sorry to anyone who's been following (plus a very big thank you for doing so). Well, first it was two jobs, now it's settling into first few weeks of term, and between all that it's been hard to even pop by the forums. This though I've been playing around with in my head for a while, so churning it out as a celebration to half of registration done for courses wasn't too much of a problem. So let's throw some complications into the mix!

Chapter 17

Lillian Keens sat at her desk powdering her nose. Having just got back from her journey beyond the office tower's glass double doors, she pondered yet again why she continued patronising the lousy hot dog stand from across the road. For that matter, why she continued living in Gotham, land of poo, when she could ask for a divisional transfer to Metropolis instead. The midsummer heat seemed to be extending into late autumn and was turning the streets into a glorified stench of rot and sweat as disgruntled white collars tugged at the supposedly dry-fit nylon apparel that stuck like flypaper to the back of their necks. The air felt like it was on a warpath to slowly fumigate the city, while the dredges contributed to it by night with the damp trash they burned in the under roads and passes winding through lower Gotham. No matter how immaculate the shining towers of the central business district looked as they climbed towards the sky, you only had to walk through the streets to feel the heavy decadence that sank into your clothes and never came out.

Just as she was about to bite into the hotdog simmering in front of her, the doors were pushed open and the still imposing figure of Bruce Wayne stepped through. Lillian considered him. Like an aged demigod, he still looked as if he was cut from fine marble, or at least granite, only instead of crumbling away, the edges just seemed to get sharper. Bruce Wayne approached the desk, and looked down at Lillian's hot dog paused in its journey to her half open mouth, arching his eyebrows, making him look all the pointier. Lillian found herself unable to speak. Looking down at the name plate, the arch of his eyebrows flattened slightly as he made eye contact. He cleared his throat briefly.

"Lillian, is it?"

Lillian blinked.

"How long is your lunch break, Lillian?"

"Ha-half an hour, sir?" she stuttered.

Bruce Wayne's eyes narrowed themselves as he focused on the clock on the wall over and behind Lillian's head.

"Much too short." Bruce Wayne took out a pen (he carried a pen!) and a small notebook from his coat pocket, tearing a slip of paper off cleanly and scribbling down a note before signing it off. "Hand this to your department's head. It's about time Wayne Enterprises rethought its employee work hour expectations, I do think." A dumbfounded Lillian took the note and placed it under her keyboard, not quite registering the fact that there was drying, handwritten ink on her desk, not the least that it came from Bruce Wayne, owner of the company she'd been working for since her graduation.

Bruce himself straightened his already immaculate self and went through the corridor towards the lifts again. He had been making a point of utilising the main building lifts instead of his private one, getting to know some of the staff again, becoming a face instead of a name on a place holder or in the news every so often. It helped some, built a quiet loyalty you would otherwise be an unknown figure to. After years of reclusiveness and Powers slowly poisoning the money that was the Wayne legacy along with the workers under its care, there was more to be done than just dragging the company out of shady deals. The company had to move with him, willingly. Powers never understood that, just like Luthor before him, and any corporate despot before and after that. People who bred battery farm loyalty through fear and corruption, corruption that had seeped through every level of his company and was taking its time to get weeded out. Under table handshakes, and under-the-tables of the less tasteful variety. Anyone would've told you, 'This is Gotham, what can you do?'. Bruce would grind his teeth and growl 'not in my city'.

So here he was, trying to reinstate the work-life balance of the regular white collars that Wayne Enterprises used to be well known for, bringing back the scholarships programmes to attract well deserving talent. Once upon a time he wouldn't have cared, not given a dime. Let the prodigal that was Gotham itself destroy it, he'd had enough caring, he'd done enough, and he'd failed enough. Now though... he wanted something more than the old crumbling house of his fathers to pass on.

"Oi Terry, remind me again why we're here?" Dana called over Terry's shoulder as he panned away from her to the grey walls across the street.

"You said we needed to spend more time together," he mumbled into the camera he was peering through.

"Yeah," Dana replied, flipping her hair off her face in annoyance, "together. Not you, me, and a very uninteresting landscape that seems to hold your attention more than I do." She punctuated the last word with a sharp jab between his shoulder blades. A spot between his shoulder blades that just happened at that point to feel like it had been smashed through by a meat tenderiser. Terry yelped. He cast a wounded (no kidding) look to Dana, before sighing and moving to sit on one of the street benches.

"You're right," he said. "It's just... the old man really needed some stuff done, and..." he cast an exasperated hand out stretched to the sky as he leaned back to look up at it. They were so close. Just off the main central District and into the older part of Gotham, where brutalist architecture seemed to creep in on even the alleyways and post boxes. Frustrating enough that he didn't know what to look for, but the wait, the fact that all this would have to wait for hours after he got back to the cave and Bruce developed the photos properly was eating into him. And he wasn't doing Dana any favours. A doleful smirk alighting on his mouth, he looked to Dana and gestured to the spot beside him. "Let's just sit here a while, yeah? I think I've got what I've needed for now."

The place was not a popular one, at least not in the day, which gave them a reasonable amount of peace and privacy. True to Gotham's form, that peace was shortly interrupted first by a scream, then two. Dana shot up ramrod straight from where she'd been leaning on Terry's shoulder and gripped his arm.

"You hear that?" she asked. Terry was already poised to run to the source, one hand ready to push off from the stone bench underneath him, muscles tense.

"Stay here, Dana," he said, voice soft but edged like a knife.

"No Terr-"

"Stay here," he repeated, eyes softening as he looked at her before steeling themselves again, "Or better yet, get up to Gotham Central. Call the police." Terry turned away from the pleading eyes of Dana, "Someone's in trouble, Dana, I gotta do something." He ran off. Dana sat there a moment, paralysed by the shock in turn of events, before shakily taking out her mobile and dialling Gotham police. A chill wind contrary to the previous blazing heat swept through the street, and Dana shivered, pulling the still warm jacket Terry had left in a discarded heap towards her as she stood up.

The screams had come from the corner of a deserted lot just round the corner. Terry saw a pair of hoodlums edging in on two girls backing into an enclave. The roar of cars on the highway overhead which blocked the light crashed like waves about his ears, but once again the screams pierced through that as clear as a bell. Gritting his teeth, he crept as silently as he could in the shadows, watching the backs of the attackers, no, would be attackers, listening to their taunts, observing their build. On the scrawny side, really, if you considered it. Easy takedown, no different from the street brawls he used to get himself into.

"Leave us alone!" one of the girls shrieked, swinging her handbag at them. One of them, stooped over and with longer arms laughed sickly as he caught it in his grip with one swipe, and tugged hard. The handbag was yanked cleanly into his possession. The girls stepped further back, making contact with the wall behind them. Just as the hoods looked about to pounce, Terry moved in, knocking one out with a pebble he'd picked up on the approach, and launching himself at the other, bringing him at the girls' feet with a satisfactory crunch. He let the adrenaline course through him a while as he inhaled deeply. It'd been a while since he'd done anything without the suit, let alone take down two thugs with less than ideal light with which to do it.

"You girls okay?" he asked as he made to get up.

"Sure," one of them said, the flippant manner causing him to pause.

"Oh yeah, real sure, more than sure," said the other. Terry's eyes widened, and he looked up to see two grins and hear a metallic crackle before blinding yellow and pain exploded behind his ears.

"I think we're more than okay, aren't we, Dee Dee?" said Deidre.

"I think you're right, Dee Dee," said Delia as they tore wigs off their heads to reveal shocking ginger locks of hair. "I can't believe that old trick worked, Dee Dee."

"Well, Dee Dee, guess old Nana's attic's good for some stuff after all."

When they had first appeared on Terry's vidlink, Bruce didn't want to believe it. Now that he was seeing them in person, he couldn't help the feel of ants trying to crawl their way through his skin.

"So debonair," one said, giving him just enough time to produce enough lack of reaction for him to curse himself for later.

"So dapper." Air forced out of him as a knee was accurately applied to his solar plexus. Sparks, yellow and angry, were already beginning to tear at his vision.

"So decrepit." And he was flung like the rag dolls these two demon children dressed themselves as into the hard plastic of the stage which chafed his knuckles and jaw as he skidded over it. He supposed he should be grateful that all that was in Woof was splicing DNA and not a retractable rotary saw. Then he saw the Joker appear through the smokescreen, and past, present and future-past seemed to collide. He heard Tim's helpless screams, raw and jagged and hoarse. He saw yellow, furious, intense yellow as it reached its long whiplash tentacles and wound around a wrist, an ankle, and heard someone else scream, someone he had long thought he didn't know but since the year before had taken on the face of one Terry McGinnis. The acrid smell of burning, agonised flesh found its way to his nostrils and he retched uncontrollably.

Then he woke up. Trembling hands found their way to a clammy forehead as he in shook away the remnants of the dream. They were... embellishing themselves, he thought with distaste. When Terry had first arrived at his gates, the nightmares of running through that damp ruin of Arkham intensified, the sound of buzzing electricity followed by screams growing louder and louder. The charred stench really only came in after he had decided to dig out a heavily encrypted voice file at the back of an old, partitioned drive in the cluster. Now these dreams just seemed to coalesce in on themselves. Tim, Dick, Barbara getting shot, his parents getting shot, but Terry mostly featured these days. The thought that he had seen him die, even another him, caused his stomach to churn even as he sat at the top floor of Wayne Enterprises in his office suite, sun shining down on him not warming his skin a bit. Here, in a darkened room with heavy curtains and austere if ascetic furnishings, the thoughts would only get heavier, colder. Knowing the possible futures, he had decided to let another young person wreck havoc in their own lives in the name of healing. His father was a doctor in his time, that was healing. This... this was...

But no. That Terry- that Batman hadn't had the time to be trained as he had ensured Terry was, because that Bruce had never seen his protégé die, was never haunted not just by the failure of those still living, but of one already dead as the entire universe broke apart before you. This time, this was different, it would be different. He'd made sure of that when he trapped Chronos in his own making so many years ago. He wouldn't tell Terry. What the boy didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

'Or would it?' The niggling voice would taunt him.

He ignored that voice in favour of answering the phone that was ringing. So much for naps. The voice on the other hand gave him pause, and the words stopped him cold.

"Bruce, it's Barbara. It's Terry." Two words, and he dropped the phone to the floor. It bounced harmlessly onto plush carpet even as an anvil seemed to drop on his skull.

"Not again..." he didn't even know the words were pushing their way through clenched teeth as he sat down on the bed and gripped the sheets in his massive, aged, useless hands.

Not again.