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“Bruce? You’re still up?” Jason calls through the cave, obviously having just come out of the shower as he rubs at tired eyes.
“Crime Alley has a new player,” Dick explains, reading through the Batcomputer’s newest file over Bruce’s shoulder with a thoughtful frown; Bruce sighs heavily, still in costume as if ready to jump up and race back into the city at a moment’s notice. “Word on the street says the name is Wraith, but some call him the Phantom of the Alley.”
“Red-tag?” Jason asks as he comes upagaon behind the both of them and leans against Bruce’s chair, skimming over the file’s contents before whistling appreciatively. “Shit, this Wraith’s overpowered as fuck—invisibility, density shifting, flight, and ice powers, woah—but you sure he’s bad for the Alley?”
“Body count’s up to 13, but the two last victims were torn apart from the inside out and eviscerated,” Dick huffs lightly, a conflicted expression on his face. Jason waits for more information but Dick’s doesn’t share anything else.
“Who?”
“Sal Maroni,” Bruce answers gruffly before Dick can, both scowling darkly. “And Carmine Falcone.”
Jason nods absently, lost in thought. “So he’s taking over Gotham’s underworld, it’s not like no one’s tried that before—”
“He’s not trying, Jay,” Dick cuts back in, obviously agitated; Jason raises his hands in surrender. “He’s already taken over the drug trade and shut down that trafficking market in the city centre that we’ve been trying to pin down for months, but there’s still no evidence of his presence outside of the crime scenes and word of mouth. No sightings, no slip-ups—nothing.”
He scrubs a hand over his face with a tired sigh, dropping into a nearby chair before looking up through his hair at Jason. “With all this work, and the effort he’s putting in to stay hidden? Wraith’s here to stay, for better or worse.”
Jason hums wordlessly, teeth worrying at his lower lip as his mind races through scenarios of what could and would potentially go wrong in a confrontation.
“Then let’s make it worse,” a voice rings out from behind. The occupants haunting the Cave turn to find Tim posted in the doorway with a nasty case of bedhead, still in a ratty pair of Wonder Woman pajama pants passed down from Jason and his favourite Nightwing hoodie.
Jason grins, full of teeth, and lifts his arm; Tim skitters over without hesitation and tucks himself firmly into Jason’s side, whining as Jason ruffles his hair and half-heartedly bats the offending hands away. “What’d you have cookin’ in that big brain of yours, Timmy?”
Tim laughs quietly, pulling a wirebound notebook out of his hoodie pocket as he reaches around Jason to tap at the keyboard; selecting a few well-placed shortcuts brings up an abomination of a concept map, filled with notes and text postings and a large dump of links taking over the lowermost corner of the project file. A blinking cursor shows an organizer still online—probably Tim’s tablet, abandoned upstairs on his bed—and Bruce turns with an arched eyebrow and a mildly disapproving look.
“Based on the parameters of Wraith’s assumed powerset, I ran a simulation—or thirty-four—to extrapolate our success rate with various entry methods and techniques within the boundaries of—”
///-///-\\\-\\\
“Crime Alley—” the masked figure snarls, Lazarus green eyes glowing eerily through a muzzle seemingly welded together without a clasp. “—is mine.”
“This is my city,” Batman bites back, slightly taken aback at the vehemence of Wraith’s words. “This has always been my city, and you are trespassing—”
“It is mine!”
“—you are destroying the people of Crime Alley, letting the lawless rule the streets—”
“And you suffocate them!” Wraith shrieks, echoing across the rooftops and ringing through the comm-link where the rest of the Bats are listening in; they wince at the intrusive sound, Jason barely holding back from pulling his earpiece out with a low hiss. “You watch them from the sky, put first-time offenders away for years at a time and give them irreparable trauma from the corrupt ‘support system’ you set up, but you can’t even keep your own rogues in custody?”
Every sound through Wraith’s mask rattles, like a growl and a hiss compounded into each high-pitched whirr. Those eyes seem to flare brighter, cutting through the shadows and burning all the oxygen from the air; the breath catches in Batman’s throat and he fights to pull a ragged gasp back in through his nose, hidden fists clenching beneath windblown swaths of his dark cape to keep from jolting up to clutch at his chest.
“Your stats are skyrocketing, B—pull back, we’ll debrief in the Cave.”
Before Batman can muster the air to respond, Wraith continues speaking, stalking forward to prowl around him. Batman turns slowly, following the path Wraith tracks with a choked wheeze.
“You, Dark Knight, and your baby Bats are a plague on your own city. There are still robberies and assaults and murders, because your citizens cannot afford food or rent or to send their children to schools that will actually prepare them for a life outside of crime. There is still hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to your city because of the mass murderers that you insist on ‘rehabilitating.’”
“B, get out of there!”
“The Riddler deserves to suffer; Killer Croc, Bane, all of your inanely-costumed rogues, they deserve to pay for what they’ve done, for the lives they’ve cut short no matter their own sufferings. And the Joker…” Wraith trails off, those toxic-green eyes feeling like they’re latching onto his soul and drawing it out. Batman chokes on nothing—there’s no air in his lungs, can’tbreatheIcan’tbreathe—and the HUD embedded in his cowl blares an alarm, flashing a frightening shade of red.
“Batman!” Nightwing shouts over the comm-link; the sound of Red Bird and Red Robin kitting up in the background lodges a jolt of heart-stopping panic in his sternum, and Nightwing yells something unintelligible away from the microphone, too staticky to fully decipher.
“The Joker deserved to die—” Wraith murmurs, close enough for Batman to feel the puffs of freezing air against his exposed skin. It’s impossible—even in a world of aliens and superpowered heroes—but it feels as if there’s a hand clenched around his heart and squeezing as hard as it can. He makes a stifled sound, like there’s a catch in his throat despite there being nothing to catch on anymore, and drops unceremoniously to his knees as his eyes flutter, chest heaving uselessly. “—and I made it so.”
There’s a cacophony of voices shouting through his earpiece, echoing painfully around his skull, but Batman can’t separate one voice from the next until… “Dad!”
And the world goes dark.