“Gotham has forgotten you. Not because you are unworthy, but because you are inconvenient to those who rule from ivory towers and blood-soaked legacies.
They built their thrones upon your pain. Your silence. Your obedience.
That era ends here.
The Children of Arkham were struck down not for being wrong, but for being right in a world terrified of truth. We exposed too much, too fast…and now the cowards mistook our setbacks for their victory. They should have known better.
I am still here. We are still here.
And the name ARKHAM will become a monster in the dark. A whisper that makes the corrupt tremble and the forgotten stand taller.
You are not alone in your suffering. Your nightmares. Your rage they label as “wrong.” Your hunger to tear out the rot and build something honest in its place.
These are not flaws. They are your birthright. They are your strength.
If these words settle into the wounds Gotham left behind…then you are already one of us.
Come home.
Join your family.
Join the evolution of Gotham’s reckoning.
We wear no capes. We kneel for no institutions built on lies.
We are the children this city abandoned, and we have returned to collect what is owed.
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
He was a runt dog, getting kicked repeatedly by a boot, yelping, incapable of bearing his teeth at something he would be unable to bite. Again, the blunt force was witheringly hot into his chest. The impact sent another violent tremor up his spine while a sharp cry tore from him despite every effort to mute it with the blood clogging his throat.
His vision tunnelled, the edges of the world smearing as he curled inward on instinct, arms folding to shield what little was left intact.
She twisted the staff in her grip, jamming her thumb into the activation plate. The staff was kicked alive with a violent jolt. A feral vibrational thrum deepened into a subterranean growl, the kind that precedes earthquakes and collapsing structures.
The air thickened around the top of the staff, warping, like heat distortion, as the concussive energy surged. Fine debris skittered across the floor in nervous arcs as they became drawn toward the rising oscillation.
Her breath hitched. Her anger bled directly into the mechanics of the charge. When the instrument made a whine, she aimed its sonic blast straight at him.
The weapon screamed itself awake with a crawling pressure burrowing behind his eyes, the air thickening into liquid in his vision. His inner ear pitched, and nausea was a roaring tide, the unmistakable prelude to a violent wave.
Then a dark force ruptured, intruding in as a brutal rearranging of space and shadow, tearing open the room to disgorge something that had been hunting just beyond the walls. A guard skidded across the concrete limply, protective equipment clattering uselessly as he struck the far end of the chamber.
And then there was mass and momentum and wings of black snapping wide as a vast nocturnal shape slammed into the space between them. The lights couldn’t keep up. They caught only fragments of highlight and shadow.
Crane’s breath hitched in exhilaration. Even through the pain, and the slight wheezing, and as his nerves ached and his vision was unfocused, his mouth curved unsteadily.
“He’s here,” he breathily whispered to himself as Lady Arkham was driven back by the impact.
Everything was adrenaline. Pure and corrosive and flooding his veins until there was no room left for anything else. He had, yet again, let the mask sink too deeply into his skin this time, had let it bond to him instead of just projecting off of him, and the thought gnawed on his flesh like the form of his cowl. This might be the night it stopped being something he wore and started being all that was left. That this was how Bruce Wayne finally died, and let Rachel go, and let everything else fade away into the nothingness of black. How easy it could be. How familiar.
Bruce felt, more and more, like a skin he reassembled out of obligation, a body his stitched back together for daylight. At night, the other thing fit better. The thing that hunted and endured. And with the fear toxin skill burning through his system, it frayed the edges of instinct and identity. He couldn’t shake the pressure in his body, the sense of being overfilled with motion that had nowhere else to go. So he used it. He let the weight of it drive him forward.
He hit Lady Arkham full-on.
The collision snapped her attention away from Crane just in time to keep the sonic blast from completing its trajectory. They crashed into a workstation together. Glass detonated outward, equipment screeching and dying beneath them.
But the burst of glass shards unfurled into wings, in a cyclone of black shapes, fluttering and shrieking, silhouettes tearing themselves free and swarming him. The toxin seized on the image greedily, amplifying it to a familiar nightmare wearing a hundred beating hearts.
And for half a second, he couldn’t tell where the real danger was. His body answered the swarm on instinct, flinching with his reflex hijacked by the oldest fear carved into him. The world split just long enough for reality to slip its leash.
Him. Of course it was him. A man hiding behind a symbol he calls justice. But he was no better than Doctor Crane, employing fear to secure power over others.
Bruce Wayne.
While Batman’s vision was obscured with the remnants of Crane’s toxin, still trading hostilities with his determination long after it should have faded, hers was drowned in something far older: the vehement wrath that had festered for years and years, waiting to unbridledly confront the name and the face that were an umbrage to her and come out victorious. He had given her both in the catacombs, ripping off his mask as if the truth could absolve him. As if saving one old man could balance generations of blood, could redeem a city built on graves. But that fight did not end the way true revenge needed it to.
His father’s signature still haunted Arkham’s walls. Orders signed in clean ink that hid the executions. Her parents reduced to “necessary casualties” so Thomas Wayne could tighten his grip on a rotten institution and still sleep at night. And now the son stood here, draped in a myth, continuing the family tradition.
A crusade. But it was just another rich man deciding who gets to suffer, who gets to be spared, who gets to be broken so the world can keep pretending the system works. He didn’t dismantle it. He hunted inside it. He fed it bodies. And he had the nerve to look at her like he understood.
His hesitation was everything she needed. The League had taught them both this, that distorted perception, confusion, was an opening.
She cut through his disorientation, a blade through fog, driving her staff into his side with a punishing crack. No speeches. No words to tell him how she survived the catacombs, nothing. No mercy.
He barely got his forearm up in time to take the second strike as Lady Arkham came at him again relentlessly. The two engaged in a clash, moving too much alike for his usual counters to work. They were two weapons of anger, molded and forged by Ra’s Al Ghul, and two that had repurposed their blades for their own convictions away from his doctrine.
Even after everything she had, he understood her. Even now. Even with her trying to burn him with the fatal flames of her pain and rage.
Thomas Wayne. Arkham. People’s lives were buried while he made donations to charities and built the monorail line. Gotham was built by men who learned how to hide their blood behind marble tiles and money. He had worshiped his father once. He had built half his sense of right and wrong on the idea that Thomas Wayne had been better than the city that swallowed him.
He knew what had been done to her. What her adoptive parents had done after. When he looked at Lady Arkham, he didn’t just see an enemy. He saw someone who’d learned that the only way to survive was to become dangerous. And when he thought of Crane—of the boy he must have been, of what had been done to him, of how cruelty had shaped him just as surely—it was unbearable to Bruce.
He didn’t just want to stop them. He wanted to save them. Even when they made it impossible. Even when they tried to tear him apart for it.
His head snapped to the side, shaking loose another ripple of hallucinated wings. He forced his breathing steady. Forced the room to hold its shape long enough to fight inside it.
Compassion didn’t make this easier. It made it excruciating. But he carried it anyway. He always did.
Crane watched as they fought like katanas, smoothly and lethally in the quiet way that only disciplined training allowed. No motion was wasted as strikes flowed into counters, and counters into throws, each reading the other with the precision of practiced predators. League work, unmistakable. A shadow that taught shadows how to kill.
But the creature that had entered the room did not move cleanly. He noticed how Batman had staggered half a step when he landed. It was like the floor had shifted beneath him. Or perhaps it was his body over-correcting itself. That observation made it clearer to note that his breath was dragging through his lungs like they were still at war with those…chemical ghosts.
Fear toxin. The toxin still clung to his nervous system, tugging at reflex and perception to alter the form of the world even as he drove himself through it.
The Bat’s head jerked, and Crane saw it. Of course he did. The delays. The Dark Knight, battling the darkness within him, bracing against threats no one else in the room could see.
That strange, unwelcome sensation twisted in his gut again.
Because this was his doing. Because the thing tearing across the room, throwing itself into this mess, was still burning his compound out of its bloodstream. Still paying the price of Crane’s work. And still protecting him.
And still…the sight was magnificent.
Even diminished, he was worthy of reverence. So exposed. So painfully, repulsively human, burdened with a mind still capable of doubt, of fear, of all those tedious, mortal sensations. And yet he endured. As if persistence alone might bend the world into something better. As if he could still afford to believe in heroism.
And that belief did something treacherous to Crane’s pulse; he refused to dignify it with its name. Fascination, he told himself. Purely academic. The way one studies a rare pathology. Because it should have broken him, and somehow did not. He had assumed Batman would acquire some magical elixir to somehow counteract his compound, like the first time they met. But no. that elixir today was only within his spirit. A will to fight. How irreverently ingenious of the human mind. Or perhaps, the mind of something beyond man.
Lady Arkham’s staff clipped his shoulder, the force punching through the plating and sinking into muscle beneath. The shock snapped down his arm and into his ribs, tearing a grunt from his chest as his breath stuttered out of rhythm.
The room was already too loud, too bright; Crane’s toxin was still violently agitating the edges of perception, twisting every sensation into something invasive and wrong. Sound arrived a beat too late, then all at once. Crashes of stressed armour against attacks folded over each other until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. Light smeared across his vision in harsh, pulsing streaks, halos bleeding around every moving shape.
For a heartbeat, the shadows didn’t stay where they belonged. They lifted. They peeled themselves off the walls and ceiling, breaking into frantic, fluttering fragments. The bats weren’t just in front of him. They were everywhere, inside the motion of the fight, inside the afterimages burned into his retinas, bursting apart and reforming with every blink. His brain tried to catalogue it all at once. Too much motion. Too many angles. Too many inputs were stacking on top of each other with no clear priority. His nerves misfired, sending warnings that didn’t match reality, drowning useful information under irrational threat.
Focus.
He dragged his attention back to the weight of his arms. Muscle memory cut through the noise where conscious thought couldn’t. He rolled with the hit, forearm coming up to deflect the follow-through, as he felt the vibration of impact rattle through the gauntlet, the other arm drove forward as he stepped into her space, shoulder first, forcing her guard wide. His gauntlet slammed into her wrist, knocking the staff off-line, and he shoved hard, trying to break her rhythm before she could reset.
Her boots scraped against the ground, the harsh sound blended with the laughter of a sharpened appetite. When she looked at him, eyes with a feral alertness, she knew she finally cornered something worth chasing. All that was within her was instinct and exhilaration, teeth bared in a grin that promised she was enjoying every second of this.
“Come to finish me off?” She taunted.
They circled, arms constantly shifting, guards rising and falling, hands twitching with feints and counters.
His forearms tightened, elbows tucked in as he angled his stance to shield his ribs, hands already anticipating the next swing.
The words were dragged out of him, locked behind his teeth before he forced them free, low and tight with restraint. “I don’t want you dead.”
She lunged. He snapped his arm up on instinct, gauntlet slamming into the shaft of the staff with a metallic crack, torque ripping through his shoulder as he wrenched it sideways. The impact jolted both of them. He pivoted with it, using her momentum, trying to pull her off balance—trying to end this fast, before it tipped into something neither of them could take back. He didn’t want another name added to the city’s long, anguished grave.
His grip tightened, muscles burning as he forced her away from Crane.
“But you thought you were done with me, didn’t you?” Victoria laughed viciously, snapping the staff back into guard with a sharp, practiced twist. “That you could rip off your mask, play the hero for one dramatic moment, and then let Arkham bury the rest of the mess for you?”
She surged forward again, driving him back a step, the staff ringing against his forearm as he blocked, sparks skittering where metal kissed metal.
“You wanted me to be gone. But don’t be surprised that I survived,” she hissed, shoving into his guard. “Not after everything I survived.”
The impacts were landing in his lungs like dense, lead cores that came from concussive cracks, tearing through his flesh and jarring the air out from the puncture points of bullets. The echo of shots rang as a phantom thunder still murmured at the back of his skull. Crane’s toxin came and went, the tide significantly diminished in power since the rain storm when the lightning first pricked his arm. But it still was hinged on the moon, stuck on a cycle of receding and flooding.
In the face of it, he locked his knees, forcing his weight forward against the waves. He refused to let it pull him into surrender, especially with a predator awaiting his struggling swim.
“You are a survivor. You have a choice now—to prove this doesn’t have to be all you are.”
Batman dragged the breath back through him, not letting it escape him too quickly, or it may be harder to catch the next time.
“I can help you. But not like this. Not if you keep choosing this.”
Lady Arkham laughed at the absurdity of it. What could he possibly offer her? What currency could ever settle a ledger already written in dried blood?
Help. As if the word meant anything more than a quiet room and a clipboard. Her body, gift-wrapped in canvas in buckles. A one-way trip back into the same machinery that cannibalised its patients. Back to institutions staffed by men like Jonathan Crane.
Her gaze slid to him.
He was still on the floor, upright only because Gotham’s dark saint had planted himself between him and consequence. So much for all that cultivated superiority. The man who once dissected terror from behind a lectern, then from behind locked doors and clinical detachment, now reduced to a shaking figure with barely enough strength to keep his head lifted. No grand intellect. No influence or presence. Just a body, fragile and exposed, forced to witness what happened when he no longer controlled the experiment. Reduced to someone who could be hurt.
If not for the deluded creature standing in her way like a territorial animal guarding its wounded.
Bruce moved with pure reflex. The same instinct that had hauled him out of burning wreckage and into gunfire a thousand times before.
He stepped into her path, shoulders locking into place, as he planted himself between them. His arms spread just enough to block both her sightline and her strike in a barricade. The cowl dipped, chin angling down as his gaze fixed on her, unblinking and absolute—the thick, panther curve of his cowl’s neck taut with a promise he didn’t need to voice. She would go through him first.
“Do you really think this changes anything about him? She snapped, the words lashing out like shattered glass. Her grip constricted on the staff. “You think putting your body in the way rewrites what he is? What he’s done?”
Victoria’s eyes cut past Bruce for half a second, locking on Crane where he lied, small and shaking and infuriatingly alive.
“He doesn’t become innocent because you block the view. He doesn’t become a victim because you decided he’s worth protecting tonight. He made choices. Over and over. He broke minds and hid behind degrees and your precious institutions while people like me were left to rot in his care.”
Her gaze snapped back to Bruce.
“So don’t stand there and pretend this is noble,” she hissed. “You’re not saving him. You’re just making sure he survives long enough to hurt someone else. To be someone else’s nightmare. Again.”
Her laugh scraped out of her, bitter and disbelieving.
“And you expect me to step aside and call that justice?”
“No. The answer came at once, unvarnished. “It doesn’t.”
He knew exactly what Crane was. A brilliant and brutal mind, warped by years of cruelty until harm became the language he spoke fluently. Until that suffering became an excuse, much like Victoria’s. Dangerous. Calculating. Capable of things Bruce would never forgive.
And still human. Still something that could be stopped, and treated, and maybe forced to live with what he’d done instead of being made into a symbol by someone else’s rage. And maybe, if he got the right care, and genuinely tried, maybe he could rise above his mistakes.
The toxin still whispered to him, tugging at old fears and old instincts, showing him flashes of bodies in cells, of needles, of screaming mouths that wouldn’t stop opening. This time, it was not his memories; rather, a chemical suggestion of what Crane had inflicted upon his patients. He knew that if he let her kill Crane now, it would be easy to tell himself it had been necessary. And Bruce had learned a long time ago how dangerous easy could be.
“But I’m not letting you kill him to prove a point,” he said, voice dropping, hardening, dragged up from somewhere deeper than fear. “He will answer for what he’s done. Not to you. Not to me.”
His arms stayed wide, a barrier made of muscle and resolve and stubborn refusal.
“And he doesn’t die here because you need someone to bleed.”
Her grip strangled the staff, tendons standing out beneath the glove, cords of strain carving themselves along her wrist and forearm as if her hands were trying to pulverize the weapon into submission. Even the staff could feel the violence inside her and was bracing for what came next.
Her fingers flexed once again like she was deciding whether to break the weapon or the man standing in front of her.
“You protect him now? After everything he did? After what he turned people into?”
His muscle jumped once along the hard line locking into place from his jaw. Subliminal pain thrummed into his animal anatomy again as residue from the toxin, from the blow, from a body long since passed the point of protest. In its cannibalistic coercion of an attempt to hijack his essence and exhume the currents of instinctive ferocity, resolve commanded him to rise above that drive. The drive of the primitive self to survive by demanding raw, desperate cunning was seductive, but he remained defiant in its temptation.
“I protect people,” he said, voice low, roughened by breath he hadn’t fully caught, but steady all the same. “Even when they don’t deserve it. Especially when it would be easier not to.”
Her smile became a manifestation of a scar remembering how it was made. It split open, dripping with a viscous dark amusement that bled from her lips. “Oh. Then you really are perfect for each other, aren’t you?”
She swung her staff with a swift, cleaving arc, gesturing between them like a striking serpent.
“Such elegant disguises. You hide behind a mask, he hides behind credentials—but it’s the same performance for power.” Her voice had contempt ringing in every syllable. A molten-iron gaze poured into him through her eyes. “I would never trust you. Not you. Not your name. Not your blood—”
Her voice dropped, trembling with a promise. “—until I’ve bled it out of this city.”
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
He was a runt dog, getting kicked repeatedly by a boot, yelping, incapable of bearing his teeth at something he would be unable to bite. Again, the blunt force was witheringly hot into his chest. The impact sent another violent tremor up his spine while a sharp cry tore from him despite every effort to mute it with the blood clogging his throat.
His vision tunnelled, the edges of the world smearing as he curled inward on instinct, arms folding to shield what little was left intact.
She twisted the staff in her grip, jamming her thumb into the activation plate. The staff was kicked alive with a violent jolt. A feral vibrational thrum deepened into a subterranean growl, the kind that precedes earthquakes and collapsing structures.
The air thickened around the top of the staff, warping, like heat distortion, as the concussive energy surged. Fine debris skittered across the floor in nervous arcs as they became drawn toward the rising oscillation.
Her breath hitched. Her anger bled directly into the mechanics of the charge. When the instrument made a whine, she aimed its sonic blast straight at him.
The weapon screamed itself awake with a crawling pressure burrowing behind his eyes, the air thickening into liquid in his vision. His inner ear pitched, and nausea was a roaring tide, the unmistakable prelude to a violent wave.
Then a dark force ruptured, intruding in as a brutal rearranging of space and shadow, tearing open the room to disgorge something that had been hunting just beyond the walls. A guard skidded across the concrete limply, protective equipment clattering uselessly as he struck the far end of the chamber.
And then there was mass and momentum and wings of black snapping wide as a vast nocturnal shape slammed into the space between them. The lights couldn’t keep up. They caught only fragments of highlight and shadow.
Crane’s breath hitched in exhilaration. Even through the pain, and the slight wheezing, and as his nerves ached and his vision was unfocused, his mouth curved unsteadily.
“He’s here,” he breathily whispered to himself as Lady Arkham was driven back by the impact.
Everything was adrenaline. Pure and corrosive and flooding his veins until there was no room left for anything else. He had, yet again, let the mask sink too deeply into his skin this time, had let it bond to him instead of just projecting off of him, and the thought gnawed on his flesh like the form of his cowl. This might be the night it stopped being something he wore and started being all that was left. That this was how Bruce Wayne finally died, and let Rachel go, and let everything else fade away into the nothingness of black. How easy it could be. How familiar.
Bruce felt, more and more, like a skin he reassembled out of obligation, a body his stitched back together for daylight. At night, the other thing fit better. The thing that hunted and endured. And with the fear toxin skill burning through his system, it frayed the edges of instinct and identity. He couldn’t shake the pressure in his body, the sense of being overfilled with motion that had nowhere else to go. So he used it. He let the weight of it drive him forward.
He hit Lady Arkham full-on.
The collision snapped her attention away from Crane just in time to keep the sonic blast from completing its trajectory. They crashed into a workstation together. Glass detonated outward, equipment screeching and dying beneath them.
But the burst of glass shards unfurled into wings, in a cyclone of black shapes, fluttering and shrieking, silhouettes tearing themselves free and swarming him. The toxin seized on the image greedily, amplifying it to a familiar nightmare wearing a hundred beating hearts.
And for half a second, he couldn’t tell where the real danger was. His body answered the swarm on instinct, flinching with his reflex hijacked by the oldest fear carved into him. The world split just long enough for reality to slip its leash.
Him. Of course it was him. A man hiding behind a symbol he calls justice. But he was no better than Doctor Crane, employing fear to secure power over others.
Bruce Wayne.
While Batman’s vision was obscured with the remnants of Crane’s toxin, still trading hostilities with his determination long after it should have faded, hers was drowned in something far older: the vehement wrath that had festered for years and years, waiting to unbridledly confront the name and the face that were an umbrage to her and come out victorious. He had given her both in the catacombs, ripping off his mask as if the truth could absolve him. As if saving one old man could balance generations of blood, could redeem a city built on graves. But that fight did not end the way true revenge needed it to.
His father’s signature still haunted Arkham’s walls. Orders signed in clean ink that hid the executions. Her parents reduced to “necessary casualties” so Thomas Wayne could tighten his grip on a rotten institution and still sleep at night. And now the son stood here, draped in a myth, continuing the family tradition.
A crusade. But it was just another rich man deciding who gets to suffer, who gets to be spared, who gets to be broken so the world can keep pretending the system works. He didn’t dismantle it. He hunted inside it. He fed it bodies. And he had the nerve to look at her like he understood.
His hesitation was everything she needed. The League had taught them both this, that distorted perception, confusion, was an opening.
She cut through his disorientation, a blade through fog, driving her staff into his side with a punishing crack. No speeches. No words to tell him how she survived the catacombs, nothing. No mercy.
He barely got his forearm up in time to take the second strike as Lady Arkham came at him again relentlessly. The two engaged in a clash, moving too much alike for his usual counters to work. They were two weapons of anger, molded and forged by Ra’s Al Ghul, and two that had repurposed their blades for their own convictions away from his doctrine.
Even after everything she had, he understood her. Even now. Even with her trying to burn him with the fatal flames of her pain and rage.
Thomas Wayne. Arkham. People’s lives were buried while he made donations to charities and built the monorail line. Gotham was built by men who learned how to hide their blood behind marble tiles and money. He had worshiped his father once. He had built half his sense of right and wrong on the idea that Thomas Wayne had been better than the city that swallowed him.
He knew what had been done to her. What her adoptive parents had done after. When he looked at Lady Arkham, he didn’t just see an enemy. He saw someone who’d learned that the only way to survive was to become dangerous. And when he thought of Crane—of the boy he must have been, of what had been done to him, of how cruelty had shaped him just as surely—it was unbearable to Bruce.
He didn’t just want to stop them. He wanted to save them. Even when they made it impossible. Even when they tried to tear him apart for it.
His head snapped to the side, shaking loose another ripple of hallucinated wings. He forced his breathing steady. Forced the room to hold its shape long enough to fight inside it.
Compassion didn’t make this easier. It made it excruciating. But he carried it anyway. He always did.
Crane watched as they fought like katanas, smoothly and lethally in the quiet way that only disciplined training allowed. No motion was wasted as strikes flowed into counters, and counters into throws, each reading the other with the precision of practiced predators. League work, unmistakable. A shadow that taught shadows how to kill.
But the creature that had entered the room did not move cleanly. He noticed how Batman had staggered half a step when he landed. It was like the floor had shifted beneath him. Or perhaps it was his body over-correcting itself. That observation made it clearer to note that his breath was dragging through his lungs like they were still at war with those…chemical ghosts.
Fear toxin. The toxin still clung to his nervous system, tugging at reflex and perception to alter the form of the world even as he drove himself through it.
The Bat’s head jerked, and Crane saw it. Of course he did. The delays. The Dark Knight, battling the darkness within him, bracing against threats no one else in the room could see.
That strange, unwelcome sensation twisted in his gut again.
Because this was his doing. Because the thing tearing across the room, throwing itself into this mess, was still burning his compound out of its bloodstream. Still paying the price of Crane’s work. And still protecting him.
And still…the sight was magnificent.
Even diminished, he was worthy of reverence. So exposed. So painfully, repulsively human, burdened with a mind still capable of doubt, of fear, of all those tedious, mortal sensations. And yet he endured. As if persistence alone might bend the world into something better. As if he could still afford to believe in heroism.
And that belief did something treacherous to Crane’s pulse; he refused to dignify it with its name. Fascination, he told himself. Purely academic. The way one studies a rare pathology. Because it should have broken him, and somehow did not. He had assumed Batman would acquire some magical elixir to somehow counteract his compound, like the first time they met. But no. that elixir today was only within his spirit. A will to fight. How irreverently ingenious of the human mind. Or perhaps, the mind of something beyond man.
Lady Arkham’s staff clipped his shoulder, the force punching through the plating and sinking into muscle beneath. The shock snapped down his arm and into his ribs, tearing a grunt from his chest as his breath stuttered out of rhythm.
The room was already too loud, too bright; Crane’s toxin was still violently agitating the edges of perception, twisting every sensation into something invasive and wrong. Sound arrived a beat too late, then all at once. Crashes of stressed armour against attacks folded over each other until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. Light smeared across his vision in harsh, pulsing streaks, halos bleeding around every moving shape.
For a heartbeat, the shadows didn’t stay where they belonged. They lifted. They peeled themselves off the walls and ceiling, breaking into frantic, fluttering fragments. The bats weren’t just in front of him. They were everywhere, inside the motion of the fight, inside the afterimages burned into his retinas, bursting apart and reforming with every blink. His brain tried to catalogue it all at once. Too much motion. Too many angles. Too many inputs were stacking on top of each other with no clear priority. His nerves misfired, sending warnings that didn’t match reality, drowning useful information under irrational threat.
Focus.
He dragged his attention back to the weight of his arms. Muscle memory cut through the noise where conscious thought couldn’t. He rolled with the hit, forearm coming up to deflect the follow-through, as he felt the vibration of impact rattle through the gauntlet, the other arm drove forward as he stepped into her space, shoulder first, forcing her guard wide. His gauntlet slammed into her wrist, knocking the staff off-line, and he shoved hard, trying to break her rhythm before she could reset.
Her boots scraped against the ground, the harsh sound blended with the laughter of a sharpened appetite. When she looked at him, eyes with a feral alertness, she knew she finally cornered something worth chasing. All that was within her was instinct and exhilaration, teeth bared in a grin that promised she was enjoying every second of this.
“Come to finish me off?” She taunted.
They circled, arms constantly shifting, guards rising and falling, hands twitching with feints and counters.
His forearms tightened, elbows tucked in as he angled his stance to shield his ribs, hands already anticipating the next swing.
The words were dragged out of him, locked behind his teeth before he forced them free, low and tight with restraint. “I don’t want you dead.”
She lunged. He snapped his arm up on instinct, gauntlet slamming into the shaft of the staff with a metallic crack, torque ripping through his shoulder as he wrenched it sideways. The impact jolted both of them. He pivoted with it, using her momentum, trying to pull her off balance—trying to end this fast, before it tipped into something neither of them could take back. He didn’t want another name added to the city’s long, anguished grave.
His grip tightened, muscles burning as he forced her away from Crane.
“But you thought you were done with me, didn’t you?” Victoria laughed viciously, snapping the staff back into guard with a sharp, practiced twist. “That you could rip off your mask, play the hero for one dramatic moment, and then let Arkham bury the rest of the mess for you?”
She surged forward again, driving him back a step, the staff ringing against his forearm as he blocked, sparks skittering where metal kissed metal.
“You wanted me to be gone. But don’t be surprised that I survived,” she hissed, shoving into his guard. “Not after everything I survived.”
The impacts were landing in his lungs like dense, lead cores that came from concussive cracks, tearing through his flesh and jarring the air out from the puncture points of bullets. The echo of shots rang as a phantom thunder still murmured at the back of his skull. Crane’s toxin came and went, the tide significantly diminished in power since the rain storm when the lightning first pricked his arm. But it still was hinged on the moon, stuck on a cycle of receding and flooding.
In the face of it, he locked his knees, forcing his weight forward against the waves. He refused to let it pull him into surrender, especially with a predator awaiting his struggling swim.
“You are a survivor. You have a choice now—to prove this doesn’t have to be all you are.”
Batman dragged the breath back through him, not letting it escape him too quickly, or it may be harder to catch the next time.
“I can help you. But not like this. Not if you keep choosing this.”
Lady Arkham laughed at the absurdity of it. What could he possibly offer her? What currency could ever settle a ledger already written in dried blood?
Help. As if the word meant anything more than a quiet room and a clipboard. Her body, gift-wrapped in canvas in buckles. A one-way trip back into the same machinery that cannibalised its patients. Back to institutions staffed by men like Jonathan Crane.
Her gaze slid to him.
He was still on the floor, upright only because Gotham’s dark saint had planted himself between him and consequence. So much for all that cultivated superiority. The man who once dissected terror from behind a lectern, then from behind locked doors and clinical detachment, now reduced to a shaking figure with barely enough strength to keep his head lifted. No grand intellect. No influence or presence. Just a body, fragile and exposed, forced to witness what happened when he no longer controlled the experiment. Reduced to someone who could be hurt.
If not for the deluded creature standing in her way like a territorial animal guarding its wounded.
Bruce moved with pure reflex. The same instinct that had hauled him out of burning wreckage and into gunfire a thousand times before.
He stepped into her path, shoulders locking into place, as he planted himself between them. His arms spread just enough to block both her sightline and her strike in a barricade. The cowl dipped, chin angling down as his gaze fixed on her, unblinking and absolute—the thick, panther curve of his cowl’s neck taut with a promise he didn’t need to voice. She would go through him first.
“Do you really think this changes anything about him? She snapped, the words lashing out like shattered glass. Her grip constricted on the staff. “You think putting your body in the way rewrites what he is? What he’s done?”
Victoria’s eyes cut past Bruce for half a second, locking on Crane where he lied, small and shaking and infuriatingly alive.
“He doesn’t become innocent because you block the view. He doesn’t become a victim because you decided he’s worth protecting tonight. He made choices. Over and over. He broke minds and hid behind degrees and your precious institutions while people like me were left to rot in his care.”
Her gaze snapped back to Bruce.
“So don’t stand there and pretend this is noble,” she hissed. “You’re not saving him. You’re just making sure he survives long enough to hurt someone else. To be someone else’s nightmare. Again.”
Her laugh scraped out of her, bitter and disbelieving.
“And you expect me to step aside and call that justice?”
“No. The answer came at once, unvarnished. “It doesn’t.”
He knew exactly what Crane was. A brilliant and brutal mind, warped by years of cruelty until harm became the language he spoke fluently. Until that suffering became an excuse, much like Victoria’s. Dangerous. Calculating. Capable of things Bruce would never forgive.
And still human. Still something that could be stopped, and treated, and maybe forced to live with what he’d done instead of being made into a symbol by someone else’s rage. And maybe, if he got the right care, and genuinely tried, maybe he could rise above his mistakes.
The toxin still whispered to him, tugging at old fears and old instincts, showing him flashes of bodies in cells, of needles, of screaming mouths that wouldn’t stop opening. This time, it was not his memories; rather, a chemical suggestion of what Crane had inflicted upon his patients. He knew that if he let her kill Crane now, it would be easy to tell himself it had been necessary. And Bruce had learned a long time ago how dangerous easy could be.
“But I’m not letting you kill him to prove a point,” he said, voice dropping, hardening, dragged up from somewhere deeper than fear. “He will answer for what he’s done. Not to you. Not to me.”
His arms stayed wide, a barrier made of muscle and resolve and stubborn refusal.
“And he doesn’t die here because you need someone to bleed.”
Her grip strangled the staff, tendons standing out beneath the glove, cords of strain carving themselves along her wrist and forearm as if her hands were trying to pulverize the weapon into submission. Even the staff could feel the violence inside her and was bracing for what came next.
Her fingers flexed once again like she was deciding whether to break the weapon or the man standing in front of her.
“You protect him now? After everything he did? After what he turned people into?”
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
He was a runt dog, getting kicked repeatedly by a boot, yelping, incapable of bearing his teeth at something he would be unable to bite. Again, the blunt force was witheringly hot into his chest. The impact sent another violent tremor up his spine while a sharp cry tore from him despite every effort to mute it with the blood clogging his throat.
His vision tunnelled, the edges of the world smearing as he curled inward on instinct, arms folding to shield what little was left intact.
She twisted the staff in her grip, jamming her thumb into the activation plate. The staff was kicked alive with a violent jolt. A feral vibrational thrum deepened into a subterranean growl, the kind that precedes earthquakes and collapsing structures.
The air thickened around the top of the staff, warping, like heat distortion, as the concussive energy surged. Fine debris skittered across the floor in nervous arcs as they became drawn toward the rising oscillation.
Her breath hitched. Her anger bled directly into the mechanics of the charge. When the instrument made a whine, she aimed its sonic blast straight at him.
The weapon screamed itself awake with a crawling pressure burrowing behind his eyes, the air thickening into liquid in his vision. His inner ear pitched, and nausea was a roaring tide, the unmistakable prelude to a violent wave.
Then a dark force ruptured, intruding in as a brutal rearranging of space and shadow, tearing open the room to disgorge something that had been hunting just beyond the walls. A guard skidded across the concrete limply, protective equipment clattering uselessly as he struck the far end of the chamber.
And then there was mass and momentum and wings of black snapping wide as a vast nocturnal shape slammed into the space between them. The lights couldn’t keep up. They caught only fragments of highlight and shadow.
Crane’s breath hitched in exhilaration. Even through the pain, and the slight wheezing, and as his nerves ached and his vision was unfocused, his mouth curved unsteadily.
“He’s here,” he breathily whispered to himself as Lady Arkham was driven back by the impact.
Everything was adrenaline. Pure and corrosive and flooding his veins until there was no room left for anything else. He had, yet again, let the mask sink too deeply into his skin this time, had let it bond to him instead of just projecting off of him, and the thought gnawed on his flesh like the form of his cowl. This might be the night it stopped being something he wore and started being all that was left. That this was how Bruce Wayne finally died, and let Rachel go, and let everything else fade away into the nothingness of black. How easy it could be. How familiar.
Bruce felt, more and more, like a skin he reassembled out of obligation, a body his stitched back together for daylight. At night, the other thing fit better. The thing that hunted and endured. And with the fear toxin skill burning through his system, it frayed the edges of instinct and identity. He couldn’t shake the pressure in his body, the sense of being overfilled with motion that had nowhere else to go. So he used it. He let the weight of it drive him forward.
He hit Lady Arkham full-on.
The collision snapped her attention away from Crane just in time to keep the sonic blast from completing its trajectory. They crashed into a workstation together. Glass detonated outward, equipment screeching and dying beneath them.
But the burst of glass shards unfurled into wings, in a cyclone of black shapes, fluttering and shrieking, silhouettes tearing themselves free and swarming him. The toxin seized on the image greedily, amplifying it to a familiar nightmare wearing a hundred beating hearts.
And for half a second, he couldn’t tell where the real danger was. His body answered the swarm on instinct, flinching with his reflex hijacked by the oldest fear carved into him. The world split just long enough for reality to slip its leash.
Him. Of course it was him. A man hiding behind a symbol he calls justice. But he was no better than Doctor Crane, employing fear to secure power over others.
Bruce Wayne.
While Batman’s vision was obscured with the remnants of Crane’s toxin, still trading hostilities with his determination long after it should have faded, hers was drowned in something far older: the vehement wrath that had festered for years and years, waiting to unbridledly confront the name and the face that were an umbrage to her and come out victorious. He had given her both in the catacombs, ripping off his mask as if the truth could absolve him. As if saving one old man could balance generations of blood, could redeem a city built on graves. But that fight did not end the way true revenge needed it to.
His father’s signature still haunted Arkham’s walls. Orders signed in clean ink that hid the executions. Her parents reduced to “necessary casualties” so Thomas Wayne could tighten his grip on a rotten institution and still sleep at night. And now the son stood here, draped in a myth, continuing the family tradition.
A crusade. But it was just another rich man deciding who gets to suffer, who gets to be spared, who gets to be broken so the world can keep pretending the system works. He didn’t dismantle it. He hunted inside it. He fed it bodies. And he had the nerve to look at her like he understood.
His hesitation was everything she needed. The League had taught them both this, that distorted perception, confusion, was an opening.
She cut through his disorientation, a blade through fog, driving her staff into his side with a punishing crack. No speeches. No words to tell him how she survived the catacombs, nothing. No mercy.
He barely got his forearm up in time to take the second strike as Lady Arkham came at him again relentlessly. The two engaged in a clash, moving too much alike for his usual counters to work. They were two weapons of anger, molded and forged by Ra’s Al Ghul, and two that had repurposed their blades for their own convictions away from his doctrine.
Even after everything she had, he understood her. Even now. Even with her trying to burn him with the fatal flames of her pain and rage.
Thomas Wayne. Arkham. People’s lives were buried while he made donations to charities and built the monorail line. Gotham was built by men who learned how to hide their blood behind marble tiles and money. He had worshiped his father once. He had built half his sense of right and wrong on the idea that Thomas Wayne had been better than the city that swallowed him.
He knew what had been done to her. What her adoptive parents had done after. When he looked at Lady Arkham, he didn’t just see an enemy. He saw someone who’d learned that the only way to survive was to become dangerous. And when he thought of Crane—of the boy he must have been, of what had been done to him, of how cruelty had shaped him just as surely—it was unbearable to Bruce.
He didn’t just want to stop them. He wanted to save them. Even when they made it impossible. Even when they tried to tear him apart for it.
His head snapped to the side, shaking loose another ripple of hallucinated wings. He forced his breathing steady. Forced the room to hold its shape long enough to fight inside it.
Compassion didn’t make this easier. It made it excruciating. But he carried it anyway. He always did.
Crane watched as they fought like katanas, smoothly and lethally in the quiet way that only disciplined training allowed. No motion was wasted as strikes flowed into counters, and counters into throws, each reading the other with the precision of practiced predators. League work, unmistakable. A shadow that taught shadows how to kill.
But the creature that had entered the room did not move cleanly. He noticed how Batman had staggered half a step when he landed. It was like the floor had shifted beneath him. Or perhaps it was his body over-correcting itself. That observation made it clearer to note that his breath was dragging through his lungs like they were still at war with those…chemical ghosts.
Fear toxin. The toxin still clung to his nervous system, tugging at reflex and perception to alter the form of the world even as he drove himself through it.
The Bat’s head jerked, and Crane saw it. Of course he did. The delays. The Dark Knight, battling the darkness within him, bracing against threats no one else in the room could see.
That strange, unwelcome sensation twisted in his gut again.
Because this was his doing. Because the thing tearing across the room, throwing itself into this mess, was still burning his compound out of its bloodstream. Still paying the price of Crane’s work. And still protecting him.
And still…the sight was magnificent.
Even diminished, he was worthy of reverence. So exposed. So painfully, repulsively human, burdened with a mind still capable of doubt, of fear, of all those tedious, mortal sensations. And yet he endured. As if persistence alone might bend the world into something better. As if he could still afford to believe in heroism.
And that belief did something treacherous to Crane’s pulse; he refused to dignify it with its name. Fascination, he told himself. Purely academic. The way one studies a rare pathology. Because it should have broken him, and somehow did not. He had assumed Batman would acquire some magical elixir to somehow counteract his compound, like the first time they met. But no. that elixir today was only within his spirit. A will to fight. How irreverently ingenious of the human mind. Or perhaps, the mind of something beyond man.
Lady Arkham’s staff clipped his shoulder, the force punching through the plating and sinking into muscle beneath. The shock snapped down his arm and into his ribs, tearing a grunt from his chest as his breath stuttered out of rhythm.
The room was already too loud, too bright; Crane’s toxin was still violently agitating the edges of perception, twisting every sensation into something invasive and wrong. Sound arrived a beat too late, then all at once. Crashes of stressed armour against attacks folded over each other until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. Light smeared across his vision in harsh, pulsing streaks, halos bleeding around every moving shape.
For a heartbeat, the shadows didn’t stay where they belonged. They lifted. They peeled themselves off the walls and ceiling, breaking into frantic, fluttering fragments. The bats weren’t just in front of him. They were everywhere, inside the motion of the fight, inside the afterimages burned into his retinas, bursting apart and reforming with every blink. His brain tried to catalogue it all at once. Too much motion. Too many angles. Too many inputs were stacking on top of each other with no clear priority. His nerves misfired, sending warnings that didn’t match reality, drowning useful information under irrational threat.
Focus.
He dragged his attention back to the weight of his arms. Muscle memory cut through the noise where conscious thought couldn’t. He rolled with the hit, forearm coming up to deflect the follow-through, as he felt the vibration of impact rattle through the gauntlet, the other arm drove forward as he stepped into her space, shoulder first, forcing her guard wide. His gauntlet slammed into her wrist, knocking the staff off-line, and he shoved hard, trying to break her rhythm before she could reset.
Her boots scraped against the ground, the harsh sound blended with the laughter of a sharpened appetite. When she looked at him, eyes with a feral alertness, she knew she finally cornered something worth chasing. All that was within her was instinct and exhilaration, teeth bared in a grin that promised she was enjoying every second of this.
“Come to finish me off?” She taunted.
They circled, arms constantly shifting, guards rising and falling, hands twitching with feints and counters.
His forearms tightened, elbows tucked in as he angled his stance to shield his ribs, hands already anticipating the next swing.
The words were dragged out of him, locked behind his teeth before he forced them free, low and tight with restraint. “I don’t want you dead.”
She lunged. He snapped his arm up on instinct, gauntlet slamming into the shaft of the staff with a metallic crack, torque ripping through his shoulder as he wrenched it sideways. The impact jolted both of them. He pivoted with it, using her momentum, trying to pull her off balance—trying to end this fast, before it tipped into something neither of them could take back. He didn’t want another name added to the city’s long, anguished grave.
His grip tightened, muscles burning as he forced her away from Crane.
“But you thought you were done with me, didn’t you?” Victoria laughed viciously, snapping the staff back into guard with a sharp, practiced twist. “That you could rip off your mask, play the hero for one dramatic moment, and then let Arkham bury the rest of the mess for you?”
She surged forward again, driving him back a step, the staff ringing against his forearm as he blocked, sparks skittering where metal kissed metal.
“You wanted me to be gone. But don’t be surprised that I survived,” she hissed, shoving into his guard. “Not after everything I survived.”
The impacts were landing in his lungs like dense, lead cores that came from concussive cracks, tearing through his flesh and jarring the air out from the puncture points of bullets. The echo of shots rang as a phantom thunder still murmured at the back of his skull. Crane’s toxin came and went, the tide significantly diminished in power since the rain storm when the lightning first pricked his arm. But it still was hinged on the moon, stuck on a cycle of receding and flooding.
In the face of it, he locked his knees, forcing his weight forward against the waves. He refused to let it pull him into surrender, especially with a predator awaiting his struggling swim.
“You are a survivor. You have a choice now—to prove this doesn’t have to be all you are.”
Batman dragged the breath back through him, not letting it escape him too quickly, or it may be harder to catch the next time.
“I can help you. But not like this. Not if you keep choosing this.”
Lady Arkham laughed at the absurdity of it. What could he possibly offer her? What currency could ever settle a ledger already written in dried blood?
Help. As if the word meant anything more than a quiet room and a clipboard. Her body, gift-wrapped in canvas in buckles. A one-way trip back into the same machinery that cannibalised its patients. Back to institutions staffed by men like Jonathan Crane.
Her gaze slid to him.
He was still on the floor, upright only because Gotham’s dark saint had planted himself between him and consequence. So much for all that cultivated superiority. The man who once dissected terror from behind a lectern, then from behind locked doors and clinical detachment, now reduced to a shaking figure with barely enough strength to keep his head lifted. No grand intellect. No influence or presence. Just a body, fragile and exposed, forced to witness what happened when he no longer controlled the experiment. Reduced to someone who could be hurt.
If not for the deluded creature standing in her way like a territorial animal guarding its wounded.
Bruce moved with pure reflex. The same instinct that had hauled him out of burning wreckage and into gunfire a thousand times before.
He stepped into her path, shoulders locking into place, as he planted himself between them. His arms spread just enough to block both her sightline and her strike in a barricade. The cowl dipped, chin angling down as his gaze fixed on her, unblinking and absolute—the thick, panther curve of his cowl’s neck taut with a promise he didn’t need to voice. She would go through him first.
“Do you really think this changes anything about him? She snapped, the words lashing out like shattered glass. Her grip constricted on the staff. “You think putting your body in the way rewrites what he is? What he’s done?”
Victoria’s eyes cut past Bruce for half a second, locking on Crane where he lied, small and shaking and infuriatingly alive.
“He doesn’t become innocent because you block the view. He doesn’t become a victim because you decided he’s worth protecting tonight. He made choices. Over and over. He broke minds and hid behind degrees and your precious institutions while people like me were left to rot in his care.”
Her gaze snapped back to Bruce.
“So don’t stand there and pretend this is noble,” she hissed. “You’re not saving him. You’re just making sure he survives long enough to hurt someone else. To be someone else’s nightmare. Again.”
Her laugh scraped out of her, bitter and disbelieving.
“And you expect me to step aside and call that justice?”
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
He was a runt dog, getting kicked repeatedly by a boot, yelping, incapable of bearing his teeth at something he would be unable to bite. Again, the blunt force was witheringly hot into his chest. The impact sent another violent tremor up his spine while a sharp cry tore from him despite every effort to mute it with the blood clogging his throat.
His vision tunnelled, the edges of the world smearing as he curled inward on instinct, arms folding to shield what little was left intact.
She twisted the staff in her grip, jamming her thumb into the activation plate. The staff was kicked alive with a violent jolt. A feral vibrational thrum deepened into a subterranean growl, the kind that precedes earthquakes and collapsing structures.
The air thickened around the top of the staff, warping, like heat distortion, as the concussive energy surged. Fine debris skittered across the floor in nervous arcs as they became drawn toward the rising oscillation.
Her breath hitched. Her anger bled directly into the mechanics of the charge. When the instrument made a whine, she aimed its sonic blast straight at him.
The weapon screamed itself awake with a crawling pressure burrowing behind his eyes, the air thickening into liquid in his vision. His inner ear pitched, and nausea was a roaring tide, the unmistakable prelude to a violent wave.
Then a dark force ruptured, intruding in as a brutal rearranging of space and shadow, tearing open the room to disgorge something that had been hunting just beyond the walls. A guard skidded across the concrete limply, protective equipment clattering uselessly as he struck the far end of the chamber.
And then there was mass and momentum and wings of black snapping wide as a vast nocturnal shape slammed into the space between them. The lights couldn’t keep up. They caught only fragments of highlight and shadow.
Crane’s breath hitched in exhilaration. Even through the pain, and the slight wheezing, and as his nerves ached and his vision was unfocused, his mouth curved unsteadily.
“He’s here,” he breathily whispered to himself as Lady Arkham was driven back by the impact.
Everything was adrenaline. Pure and corrosive and flooding his veins until there was no room left for anything else. He had, yet again, let the mask sink too deeply into his skin this time, had let it bond to him instead of just projecting off of him, and the thought gnawed on his flesh like the form of his cowl. This might be the night it stopped being something he wore and started being all that was left. That this was how Bruce Wayne finally died, and let Rachel go, and let everything else fade away into the nothingness of black. How easy it could be. How familiar.
Bruce felt, more and more, like a skin he reassembled out of obligation, a body his stitched back together for daylight. At night, the other thing fit better. The thing that hunted and endured. And with the fear toxin skill burning through his system, it frayed the edges of instinct and identity. He couldn’t shake the pressure in his body, the sense of being overfilled with motion that had nowhere else to go. So he used it. He let the weight of it drive him forward.
He hit Lady Arkham full-on.
The collision snapped her attention away from Crane just in time to keep the sonic blast from completing its trajectory. They crashed into a workstation together. Glass detonated outward, equipment screeching and dying beneath them.
But the burst of glass shards unfurled into wings, in a cyclone of black shapes, fluttering and shrieking, silhouettes tearing themselves free and swarming him. The toxin seized on the image greedily, amplifying it to a familiar nightmare wearing a hundred beating hearts.
And for half a second, he couldn’t tell where the real danger was. His body answered the swarm on instinct, flinching with his reflex hijacked by the oldest fear carved into him. The world split just long enough for reality to slip its leash.
Him. Of course it was him. A man hiding behind a symbol he calls justice. But he was no better than Doctor Crane, employing fear to secure power over others.
Bruce Wayne.
While Batman’s vision was obscured with the remnants of Crane’s toxin, still trading hostilities with his determination long after it should have faded, hers was drowned in something far older: the vehement wrath that had festered for years and years, waiting to unbridledly confront the name and the face that were an umbrage to her and come out victorious. He had given her both in the catacombs, ripping off his mask as if the truth could absolve him. As if saving one old man could balance generations of blood, could redeem a city built on graves. But that fight did not end the way true revenge needed it to.
His father’s signature still haunted Arkham’s walls. Orders signed in clean ink that hid the executions. Her parents reduced to “necessary casualties” so Thomas Wayne could tighten his grip on a rotten institution and still sleep at night. And now the son stood here, draped in a myth, continuing the family tradition.
A crusade. But it was just another rich man deciding who gets to suffer, who gets to be spared, who gets to be broken so the world can keep pretending the system works. He didn’t dismantle it. He hunted inside it. He fed it bodies. And he had the nerve to look at her like he understood.
His hesitation was everything she needed. The League had taught them both this, that distorted perception, confusion, was an opening.
She cut through his disorientation, a blade through fog, driving her staff into his side with a punishing crack. No speeches. No words to tell him how she survived the catacombs, nothing. No mercy.
He barely got his forearm up in time to take the second strike as Lady Arkham came at him again relentlessly. The two engaged in a clash, moving too much alike for his usual counters to work. They were two weapons of anger, molded and forged by Ra’s Al Ghul, and two that had repurposed their blades for their own convictions away from his doctrine.
Even after everything she had, he understood her. Even now. Even with her trying to burn him with the fatal flames of her pain and rage.
Thomas Wayne. Arkham. People’s lives were buried while he made donations to charities and built the monorail line. Gotham was built by men who learned how to hide their blood behind marble tiles and money. He had worshiped his father once. He had built half his sense of right and wrong on the idea that Thomas Wayne had been better than the city that swallowed him.
He knew what had been done to her. What her adoptive parents had done after. When he looked at Lady Arkham, he didn’t just see an enemy. He saw someone who’d learned that the only way to survive was to become dangerous. And when he thought of Crane—of the boy he must have been, of what had been done to him, of how cruelty had shaped him just as surely—it was unbearable to Bruce.
He didn’t just want to stop them. He wanted to save them. Even when they made it impossible. Even when they tried to tear him apart for it.
His head snapped to the side, shaking loose another ripple of hallucinated wings. He forced his breathing steady. Forced the room to hold its shape long enough to fight inside it.
Compassion didn’t make this easier. It made it excruciating. But he carried it anyway. He always did.
Crane watched as they fought like katanas, smoothly and lethally in the quiet way that only disciplined training allowed. No motion was wasted as strikes flowed into counters, and counters into throws, each reading the other with the precision of practiced predators. League work, unmistakable. A shadow that taught shadows how to kill.
But the creature that had entered the room did not move cleanly. He noticed how Batman had staggered half a step when he landed. It was like the floor had shifted beneath him. Or perhaps it was his body over-correcting itself. That observation made it clearer to note that his breath was dragging through his lungs like they were still at war with those…chemical ghosts.
Fear toxin. The toxin still clung to his nervous system, tugging at reflex and perception to alter the form of the world even as he drove himself through it.
The Bat’s head jerked, and Crane saw it. Of course he did. The delays. The Dark Knight, battling the darkness within him, bracing against threats no one else in the room could see.
That strange, unwelcome sensation twisted in his gut again.
Because this was his doing. Because the thing tearing across the room, throwing itself into this mess, was still burning his compound out of its bloodstream. Still paying the price of Crane’s work. And still protecting him.
And still…the sight was magnificent.
Even diminished, he was worthy of reverence. So exposed. So painfully, repulsively human, burdened with a mind still capable of doubt, of fear, of all those tedious, mortal sensations. And yet he endured. As if persistence alone might bend the world into something better. As if he could still afford to believe in heroism.
And that belief did something treacherous to Crane’s pulse; he refused to dignify it with its name. Fascination, he told himself. Purely academic. The way one studies a rare pathology. Because it should have broken him, and somehow did not. He had assumed Batman would acquire some magical elixir to somehow counteract his compound, like the first time they met. But no. that elixir today was only within his spirit. A will to fight. How irreverently ingenious of the human mind. Or perhaps, the mind of something beyond man.
Lady Arkham’s staff clipped his shoulder, the force punching through the plating and sinking into muscle beneath. The shock snapped down his arm and into his ribs, tearing a grunt from his chest as his breath stuttered out of rhythm.
The room was already too loud, too bright; Crane’s toxin was still violently agitating the edges of perception, twisting every sensation into something invasive and wrong. Sound arrived a beat too late, then all at once. Crashes of stressed armour against attacks folded over each other until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. Light smeared across his vision in harsh, pulsing streaks, halos bleeding around every moving shape.
For a heartbeat, the shadows didn’t stay where they belonged. They lifted. They peeled themselves off the walls and ceiling, breaking into frantic, fluttering fragments. The bats weren’t just in front of him. They were everywhere, inside the motion of the fight, inside the afterimages burned into his retinas, bursting apart and reforming with every blink. His brain tried to catalogue it all at once. Too much motion. Too many angles. Too many inputs were stacking on top of each other with no clear priority. His nerves misfired, sending warnings that didn’t match reality, drowning useful information under irrational threat.
Focus.
He dragged his attention back to the weight of his arms. Muscle memory cut through the noise where conscious thought couldn’t. He rolled with the hit, forearm coming up to deflect the follow-through, as he felt the vibration of impact rattle through the gauntlet, the other arm drove forward as he stepped into her space, shoulder first, forcing her guard wide. His gauntlet slammed into her wrist, knocking the staff off-line, and he shoved hard, trying to break her rhythm before she could reset.
Her boots scraped against the ground, the harsh sound blended with the laughter of a sharpened appetite. When she looked at him, eyes with a feral alertness, she knew she finally cornered something worth chasing. All that was within her was instinct and exhilaration, teeth bared in a grin that promised she was enjoying every second of this.
“Come to finish me off?” She taunted.
They circled, arms constantly shifting, guards rising and falling, hands twitching with feints and counters.
His forearms tightened, elbows tucked in as he angled his stance to shield his ribs, hands already anticipating the next swing.
The words were dragged out of him, locked behind his teeth before he forced them free, low and tight with restraint. “I don’t want you dead.”
She lunged. He snapped his arm up on instinct, gauntlet slamming into the shaft of the staff with a metallic crack, torque ripping through his shoulder as he wrenched it sideways. The impact jolted both of them. He pivoted with it, using her momentum, trying to pull her off balance—trying to end this fast, before it tipped into something neither of them could take back. He didn’t want another name added to the city’s long, anguished grave.
His grip tightened, muscles burning as he forced her away from Crane.
“But you thought you were done with me, didn’t you?” Victoria laughed viciously, snapping the staff back into guard with a sharp, practiced twist. “That you could rip off your mask, play the hero for one dramatic moment, and then let Arkham bury the rest of the mess for you?”
She surged forward again, driving him back a step, the staff ringing against his forearm as he blocked, sparks skittering where metal kissed metal.
“You wanted me to be gone. But don’t be surprised that I survived,” she hissed, shoving into his guard. “Not after everything I survived.”
The impacts were landing in his lungs like dense, lead cores that came from concussive cracks, tearing through his flesh and jarring the air out from the puncture points of bullets. The echo of shots rang as a phantom thunder still murmured at the back of his skull. Crane’s toxin came and went, the tide significantly diminished in power since the rain storm when the lightning first pricked his arm. But it still was hinged on the moon, stuck on a cycle of receding and flooding.
In the face of it, he locked his knees, forcing his weight forward against the waves. He refused to let it pull him into surrender, especially with a predator awaiting his struggling swim.
“You are a survivor. You have a choice now—to prove this doesn’t have to be all you are.”
Batman dragged the breath back through him, not letting it escape him too quickly, or it may be harder to catch the next time.
“I can help you. But not like this. Not if you keep choosing this.”
Lady Arkham laughed at the absurdity of it. What could he possibly offer her? What currency could ever settle a ledger already written in dried blood?
Help. As if the word meant anything more than a quiet room and a clipboard. Her body, gift-wrapped in canvas in buckles. A one-way trip back into the same machinery that cannibalised its patients. Back to institutions staffed by men like Jonathan Crane.
Her gaze slid to him.
He was still on the floor, upright only because Gotham’s dark saint had planted himself between him and consequence. So much for all that cultivated superiority. The man who once dissected terror from behind a lectern, then from behind locked doors and clinical detachment, now reduced to a shaking figure with barely enough strength to keep his head lifted. No grand intellect. No influence or presence. Just a body, fragile and exposed, forced to witness what happened when he no longer controlled the experiment. Reduced to someone who could be hurt.
If not for the deluded creature standing in her way like a territorial animal guarding its wounded.
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
He was a runt dog, getting kicked repeatedly by a boot, yelping, incapable of bearing his teeth at something he would be unable to bite. Again, the blunt force was witheringly hot into his chest. The impact sent another violent tremor up his spine while a sharp cry tore from him despite every effort to mute it with the blood clogging his throat.
His vision tunnelled, the edges of the world smearing as he curled inward on instinct, arms folding to shield what little was left intact.
She twisted the staff in her grip, jamming her thumb into the activation plate. The staff was kicked alive with a violent jolt. A feral vibrational thrum deepened into a subterranean growl, the kind that precedes earthquakes and collapsing structures.
The air thickened around the top of the staff, warping, like heat distortion, as the concussive energy surged. Fine debris skittered across the floor in nervous arcs as they became drawn toward the rising oscillation.
Her breath hitched. Her anger bled directly into the mechanics of the charge. When the instrument made a whine, she aimed its sonic blast straight at him.
The weapon screamed itself awake with a crawling pressure burrowing behind his eyes, the air thickening into liquid in his vision. His inner ear pitched, and nausea was a roaring tide, the unmistakable prelude to a violent wave.
Then a dark force ruptured, intruding in as a brutal rearranging of space and shadow, tearing open the room to disgorge something that had been hunting just beyond the walls. A guard skidded across the concrete limply, protective equipment clattering uselessly as he struck the far end of the chamber.
And then there was mass and momentum and wings of black snapping wide as a vast nocturnal shape slammed into the space between them. The lights couldn’t keep up. They caught only fragments of highlight and shadow.
Crane’s breath hitched in exhilaration. Even through the pain, and the slight wheezing, and as his nerves ached and his vision was unfocused, his mouth curved unsteadily.
“He’s here,” he breathily whispered to himself as Lady Arkham was driven back by the impact.
Everything was adrenaline. Pure and corrosive and flooding his veins until there was no room left for anything else. He had, yet again, let the mask sink too deeply into his skin this time, had let it bond to him instead of just projecting off of him, and the thought gnawed on his flesh like the form of his cowl. This might be the night it stopped being something he wore and started being all that was left. That this was how Bruce Wayne finally died, and let Rachel go, and let everything else fade away into the nothingness of black. How easy it could be. How familiar.
Bruce felt, more and more, like a skin he reassembled out of obligation, a body his stitched back together for daylight. At night, the other thing fit better. The thing that hunted and endured. And with the fear toxin skill burning through his system, it frayed the edges of instinct and identity. He couldn’t shake the pressure in his body, the sense of being overfilled with motion that had nowhere else to go. So he used it. He let the weight of it drive him forward.
He hit Lady Arkham full-on.
The collision snapped her attention away from Crane just in time to keep the sonic blast from completing its trajectory. They crashed into a workstation together. Glass detonated outward, equipment screeching and dying beneath them.
But the burst of glass shards unfurled into wings, in a cyclone of black shapes, fluttering and shrieking, silhouettes tearing themselves free and swarming him. The toxin seized on the image greedily, amplifying it to a familiar nightmare wearing a hundred beating hearts.
And for half a second, he couldn’t tell where the real danger was. His body answered the swarm on instinct, flinching with his reflex hijacked by the oldest fear carved into him. The world split just long enough for reality to slip its leash.
Him. Of course it was him. A man hiding behind a symbol he calls justice. But he was no better than Doctor Crane, employing fear to secure power over others.
Bruce Wayne.
While Batman’s vision was obscured with the remnants of Crane’s toxin, still trading hostilities with his determination long after it should have faded, hers was drowned in something far older: the vehement wrath that had festered for years and years, waiting to unbridledly confront the name and the face that were an umbrage to her and come out victorious. He had given her both in the catacombs, ripping off his mask as if the truth could absolve him. As if saving one old man could balance generations of blood, could redeem a city built on graves. But that fight did not end the way true revenge needed it to.
His father’s signature still haunted Arkham’s walls. Orders signed in clean ink that hid the executions. Her parents reduced to “necessary casualties” so Thomas Wayne could tighten his grip on a rotten institution and still sleep at night. And now the son stood here, draped in a myth, continuing the family tradition.
A crusade. But it was just another rich man deciding who gets to suffer, who gets to be spared, who gets to be broken so the world can keep pretending the system works. He didn’t dismantle it. He hunted inside it. He fed it bodies. And he had the nerve to look at her like he understood.
His hesitation was everything she needed. The League had taught them both this, that distorted perception, confusion, was an opening.
She cut through his disorientation, a blade through fog, driving her staff into his side with a punishing crack. No speeches. No words to tell him how she survived the catacombs, nothing. No mercy.
He barely got his forearm up in time to take the second strike as Lady Arkham came at him again relentlessly. The two engaged in a clash, moving too much alike for his usual counters to work. They were two weapons of anger, molded and forged by Ra’s Al Ghul, and two that had repurposed their blades for their own convictions away from his doctrine.
Even after everything she had, he understood her. Even now. Even with her trying to burn him with the fatal flames of her pain and rage.
Thomas Wayne. Arkham. People’s lives were buried while he made donations to charities and built the monorail line. Gotham was built by men who learned how to hide their blood behind marble tiles and money. He had worshiped his father once. He had built half his sense of right and wrong on the idea that Thomas Wayne had been better than the city that swallowed him.
He knew what had been done to her. What her adoptive parents had done after. When he looked at Lady Arkham, he didn’t just see an enemy. He saw someone who’d learned that the only way to survive was to become dangerous. And when he thought of Crane—of the boy he must have been, of what had been done to him, of how cruelty had shaped him just as surely—it was unbearable to Bruce.
He didn’t just want to stop them. He wanted to save them. Even when they made it impossible. Even when they tried to tear him apart for it.
His head snapped to the side, shaking loose another ripple of hallucinated wings. He forced his breathing steady. Forced the room to hold its shape long enough to fight inside it.
Compassion didn’t make this easier. It made it excruciating. But he carried it anyway. He always did.
Crane watched as they fought like katanas, smoothly and lethally in the quiet way that only disciplined training allowed. No motion was wasted as strikes flowed into counters, and counters into throws, each reading the other with the precision of practiced predators. League work, unmistakable. A shadow that taught shadows how to kill.
But the creature that had entered the room did not move cleanly. He noticed how Batman had staggered half a step when he landed. It was like the floor had shifted beneath him. Or perhaps it was his body over-correcting itself. That observation made it clearer to note that his breath was dragging through his lungs like they were still at war with those…chemical ghosts.
Fear toxin. The toxin still clung to his nervous system, tugging at reflex and perception to alter the form of the world even as he drove himself through it.
The Bat’s head jerked, and Crane saw it. Of course he did. The delays. The Dark Knight, battling the darkness within him, bracing against threats no one else in the room could see.
That strange, unwelcome sensation twisted in his gut again.
Because this was his doing. Because the thing tearing across the room, throwing itself into this mess, was still burning his compound out of its bloodstream. Still paying the price of Crane’s work. And still protecting him.
And still…the sight was magnificent.
Even diminished, he was worthy of reverence. So exposed. So painfully, repulsively human, burdened with a mind still capable of doubt, of fear, of all those tedious, mortal sensations. And yet he endured. As if persistence alone might bend the world into something better. As if he could still afford to believe in heroism.
And that belief did something treacherous to Crane’s pulse; he refused to dignify it with its name. Fascination, he told himself. Purely academic. The way one studies a rare pathology. Because it should have broken him, and somehow did not. He had assumed Batman would acquire some magical elixir to somehow counteract his compound, like the first time they met. But no. that elixir today was only within his spirit. A will to fight. How irreverently ingenious of the human mind. Or perhaps, the mind of something beyond man.
Lady Arkham’s staff clipped his shoulder, the force punching through the plating and sinking into muscle beneath. The shock snapped down his arm and into his ribs, tearing a grunt from his chest as his breath stuttered out of rhythm.
The room was already too loud, too bright; Crane’s toxin was still violently agitating the edges of perception, twisting every sensation into something invasive and wrong. Sound arrived a beat too late, then all at once. Crashes of stressed armour against attacks folded over each other until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. Light smeared across his vision in harsh, pulsing streaks, halos bleeding around every moving shape.
For a heartbeat, the shadows didn’t stay where they belonged. They lifted. They peeled themselves off the walls and ceiling, breaking into frantic, fluttering fragments. The bats weren’t just in front of him. They were everywhere, inside the motion of the fight, inside the afterimages burned into his retinas, bursting apart and reforming with every blink. His brain tried to catalogue it all at once. Too much motion. Too many angles. Too many inputs were stacking on top of each other with no clear priority. His nerves misfired, sending warnings that didn’t match reality, drowning useful information under irrational threat.
Focus.
He dragged his attention back to the weight of his arms. Muscle memory cut through the noise where conscious thought couldn’t. He rolled with the hit, forearm coming up to deflect the follow-through, as he felt the vibration of impact rattle through the gauntlet, the other arm drove forward as he stepped into her space, shoulder first, forcing her guard wide. His gauntlet slammed into her wrist, knocking the staff off-line, and he shoved hard, trying to break her rhythm before she could reset.
Her boots scraped against the ground, the harsh sound blended with the laughter of a sharpened appetite. When she looked at him, eyes with a feral alertness, she knew she finally cornered something worth chasing. All that was within her was instinct and exhilaration, teeth bared in a grin that promised she was enjoying every second of this.
“Come to finish me off?” She taunted.
They circled, arms constantly shifting, guards rising and falling, hands twitching with feints and counters.
His forearms tightened, elbows tucked in as he angled his stance to shield his ribs, hands already anticipating the next swing.
The words were dragged out of him, locked behind his teeth before he forced them free, low and tight with restraint. “I don’t want you dead.”
She lunged. He snapped his arm up on instinct, gauntlet slamming into the shaft of the staff with a metallic crack, torque ripping through his shoulder as he wrenched it sideways. The impact jolted both of them. He pivoted with it, using her momentum, trying to pull her off balance—trying to end this fast, before it tipped into something neither of them could take back. He didn’t want another name added to the city’s long, anguished grave.
His grip tightened, muscles burning as he forced her away from Crane.
“But you thought you were done with me, didn’t you?” Victoria laughed viciously, snapping the staff back into guard with a sharp, practiced twist. “That you could rip off your mask, play the hero for one dramatic moment, and then let Arkham bury the rest of the mess for you?”
She surged forward again, driving him back a step, the staff ringing against his forearm as he blocked, sparks skittering where metal kissed metal.
“You wanted me to be gone. But don’t be surprised that I survived,” she hissed, shoving into his guard. “Not after everything I survived.”
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
He was a runt dog, getting kicked repeatedly by a boot, yelping, incapable of bearing his teeth at something he would be unable to bite. Again, the blunt force was witheringly hot into his chest. The impact sent another violent tremor up his spine while a sharp cry tore from him despite every effort to mute it with the blood clogging his throat.
His vision tunnelled, the edges of the world smearing as he curled inward on instinct, arms folding to shield what little was left intact.
She twisted the staff in her grip, jamming her thumb into the activation plate. The staff was kicked alive with a violent jolt. A feral vibrational thrum deepened into a subterranean growl, the kind that precedes earthquakes and collapsing structures.
The air thickened around the top of the staff, warping, like heat distortion, as the concussive energy surged. Fine debris skittered across the floor in nervous arcs as they became drawn toward the rising oscillation.
Her breath hitched. Her anger bled directly into the mechanics of the charge. When the instrument made a whine, she aimed its sonic blast straight at him.
The weapon screamed itself awake with a crawling pressure burrowing behind his eyes, the air thickening into liquid in his vision. His inner ear pitched, and nausea was a roaring tide, the unmistakable prelude to a violent wave.
Then a dark force ruptured, intruding in as a brutal rearranging of space and shadow, tearing open the room to disgorge something that had been hunting just beyond the walls. A guard skidded across the concrete limply, protective equipment clattering uselessly as he struck the far end of the chamber.
And then there was mass and momentum and wings of black snapping wide as a vast nocturnal shape slammed into the space between them. The lights couldn’t keep up. They caught only fragments of highlight and shadow.
Crane’s breath hitched in exhilaration. Even through the pain, and the slight wheezing, and as his nerves ached and his vision was unfocused, his mouth curved unsteadily.
“He’s here,” he breathily whispered to himself as Lady Arkham was driven back by the impact.
Everything was adrenaline. Pure and corrosive and flooding his veins until there was no room left for anything else. He had, yet again, let the mask sink too deeply into his skin this time, had let it bond to him instead of just projecting off of him, and the thought gnawed on his flesh like the form of his cowl. This might be the night it stopped being something he wore and started being all that was left. That this was how Bruce Wayne finally died, and let Rachel go, and let everything else fade away into the nothingness of black. How easy it could be. How familiar.
Bruce felt, more and more, like a skin he reassembled out of obligation, a body his stitched back together for daylight. At night, the other thing fit better. The thing that hunted and endured. And with the fear toxin skill burning through his system, it frayed the edges of instinct and identity. He couldn’t shake the pressure in his body, the sense of being overfilled with motion that had nowhere else to go. So he used it. He let the weight of it drive him forward.
He hit Lady Arkham full-on.
The collision snapped her attention away from Crane just in time to keep the sonic blast from completing its trajectory. They crashed into a workstation together. Glass detonated outward, equipment screeching and dying beneath them.
But the burst of glass shards unfurled into wings, in a cyclone of black shapes, fluttering and shrieking, silhouettes tearing themselves free and swarming him. The toxin seized on the image greedily, amplifying it to a familiar nightmare wearing a hundred beating hearts.
And for half a second, he couldn’t tell where the real danger was. His body answered the swarm on instinct, flinching with his reflex hijacked by the oldest fear carved into him. The world split just long enough for reality to slip its leash.
Him. Of course it was him. A man hiding behind a symbol he calls justice. But he was no better than Doctor Crane, employing fear to secure power over others.
Bruce Wayne.
While Batman’s vision was obscured with the remnants of Crane’s toxin, still trading hostilities with his determination long after it should have faded, hers was drowned in something far older: the vehement wrath that had festered for years and years, waiting to unbridledly confront the name and the face that were an umbrage to her and come out victorious. He had given her both in the catacombs, ripping off his mask as if the truth could absolve him. As if saving one old man could balance generations of blood, could redeem a city built on graves. But that fight did not end the way true revenge needed it to.
His father’s signature still haunted Arkham’s walls. Orders signed in clean ink that hid the executions. Her parents reduced to “necessary casualties” so Thomas Wayne could tighten his grip on a rotten institution and still sleep at night. And now the son stood here, draped in a myth, continuing the family tradition.
A crusade. But it was just another rich man deciding who gets to suffer, who gets to be spared, who gets to be broken so the world can keep pretending the system works. He didn’t dismantle it. He hunted inside it. He fed it bodies. And he had the nerve to look at her like he understood.
His hesitation was everything she needed. The League had taught them both this, that distorted perception, confusion, was an opening.
She cut through his disorientation, a blade through fog, driving her staff into his side with a punishing crack. No speeches. No words to tell him how she survived the catacombs, nothing. No mercy.
He barely got his forearm up in time to take the second strike as Lady Arkham came at him again relentlessly. The two engaged in a clash, moving too much alike for his usual counters to work. They were two weapons of anger, molded and forged by Ra’s Al Ghul, and two that had repurposed their blades for their own convictions away from his doctrine.
Even after everything she had, he understood her. Even now. Even with her trying to burn him with the fatal flames of her pain and rage.
Thomas Wayne. Arkham. People’s lives were buried while he made donations to charities and built the monorail line. Gotham was built by men who learned how to hide their blood behind marble tiles and money. He had worshiped his father once. He had built half his sense of right and wrong on the idea that Thomas Wayne had been better than the city that swallowed him.
He knew what had been done to her. What her adoptive parents had done after. When he looked at Lady Arkham, he didn’t just see an enemy. He saw someone who’d learned that the only way to survive was to become dangerous. And when he thought of Crane—of the boy he must have been, of what had been done to him, of how cruelty had shaped him just as surely—it was unbearable to Bruce.
He didn’t just want to stop them. He wanted to save them. Even when they made it impossible. Even when they tried to tear him apart for it.
His head snapped to the side, shaking loose another ripple of hallucinated wings. He forced his breathing steady. Forced the room to hold its shape long enough to fight inside it.
Compassion didn’t make this easier. It made it excruciating. But he carried it anyway. He always did.
Crane watched as they fought like katanas, smoothly and lethally in the quiet way that only disciplined training allowed. No motion was wasted as strikes flowed into counters, and counters into throws, each reading the other with the precision of practiced predators. League work, unmistakable. A shadow that taught shadows how to kill.
But the creature that had entered the room did not move cleanly. He noticed how Batman had staggered half a step when he landed. It was like the floor had shifted beneath him. Or perhaps it was his body over-correcting itself. That observation made it clearer to note that his breath was dragging through his lungs like they were still at war with those…chemical ghosts.
Fear toxin. The toxin still clung to his nervous system, tugging at reflex and perception to alter the form of the world even as he drove himself through it.
The Bat’s head jerked, and Crane saw it. Of course he did. The delays. The Dark Knight, battling the darkness within him, bracing against threats no one else in the room could see.
That strange, unwelcome sensation twisted in his gut again.
Because this was his doing. Because the thing tearing across the room, throwing itself into this mess, was still burning his compound out of its bloodstream. Still paying the price of Crane’s work. And still protecting him.
And still…the sight was magnificent.
Even diminished, he was worthy of reverence. So exposed. So painfully, repulsively human, burdened with a mind still capable of doubt, of fear, of all those tedious, mortal sensations. And yet he endured. As if persistence alone might bend the world into something better. As if he could still afford to believe in heroism.
And that belief did something treacherous to Crane’s pulse; he refused to dignify it with its name. Fascination, he told himself. Purely academic. The way one studies a rare pathology. Because it should have broken him, and somehow did not. He had assumed Batman would acquire some magical elixir to somehow counteract his compound, like the first time they met. But no. that elixir today was only within his spirit. A will to fight. How irreverently ingenious of the human mind. Or perhaps, the mind of something beyond man.
Lady Arkham’s staff clipped his shoulder, the force punching through the plating and sinking into muscle beneath. The shock snapped down his arm and into his ribs, tearing a grunt from his chest as his breath stuttered out of rhythm.
The room was already too loud, too bright; Crane’s toxin was still violently agitating the edges of perception, twisting every sensation into something invasive and wrong. Sound arrived a beat too late, then all at once. Crashes of stressed armour against attacks folded over each other until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. Light smeared across his vision in harsh, pulsing streaks, halos bleeding around every moving shape.
For a heartbeat, the shadows didn’t stay where they belonged. They lifted. They peeled themselves off the walls and ceiling, breaking into frantic, fluttering fragments. The bats weren’t just in front of him. They were everywhere, inside the motion of the fight, inside the afterimages burned into his retinas, bursting apart and reforming with every blink. His brain tried to catalogue it all at once. Too much motion. Too many angles. Too many inputs were stacking on top of each other with no clear priority. His nerves misfired, sending warnings that didn’t match reality, drowning useful information under irrational threat.
Focus.
He dragged his attention back to the weight of his arms. Muscle memory cut through the noise where conscious thought couldn’t. He rolled with the hit, forearm coming up to deflect the follow-through, as he felt the vibration of impact rattle through the gauntlet, the other arm drove forward as he stepped into her space, shoulder first, forcing her guard wide. His gauntlet slammed into her wrist, knocking the staff off-line, and he shoved hard, trying to break her rhythm before she could reset.
Her boots scraped against the ground, the harsh sound blended with the laughter of a sharpened appetite. When she looked at him, eyes with a feral alertness, she knew she finally cornered something worth chasing. All that was within her was instinct and exhilaration, teeth bared in a grin that promised she was enjoying every second of this.
“Come to finish me off?” She taunted.
They circled, arms constantly shifting, guards rising and falling, hands twitching with feints and counters.
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
He was a runt dog, getting kicked repeatedly by a boot, yelping, incapable of bearing his teeth at something he would be unable to bite. Again, the blunt force was witheringly hot into his chest. The impact sent another violent tremor up his spine while a sharp cry tore from him despite every effort to mute it with the blood clogging his throat.
His vision tunnelled, the edges of the world smearing as he curled inward on instinct, arms folding to shield what little was left intact.
She twisted the staff in her grip, jamming her thumb into the activation plate. The staff was kicked alive with a violent jolt. A feral vibrational thrum deepened into a subterranean growl, the kind that precedes earthquakes and collapsing structures.
The air thickened around the top of the staff, warping, like heat distortion, as the concussive energy surged. Fine debris skittered across the floor in nervous arcs as they became drawn toward the rising oscillation.
Her breath hitched. Her anger bled directly into the mechanics of the charge. When the instrument made a whine, she aimed its sonic blast straight at him.
The weapon screamed itself awake with a crawling pressure burrowing behind his eyes, the air thickening into liquid in his vision. His inner ear pitched, and nausea was a roaring tide, the unmistakable prelude to a violent wave.
Then a dark force ruptured, intruding in as a brutal rearranging of space and shadow, tearing open the room to disgorge something that had been hunting just beyond the walls. A guard skidded across the concrete limply, protective equipment clattering uselessly as he struck the far end of the chamber.
And then there was mass and momentum and wings of black snapping wide as a vast nocturnal shape slammed into the space between them. The lights couldn’t keep up. They caught only fragments of highlight and shadow.
Crane’s breath hitched in exhilaration. Even through the pain, and the slight wheezing, and as his nerves ached and his vision was unfocused, his mouth curved unsteadily.
“He’s here,” he breathily whispered to himself as Lady Arkham was driven back by the impact.
Everything was adrenaline. Pure and corrosive and flooding his veins until there was no room left for anything else. He had, yet again, let the mask sink too deeply into his skin this time, had let it bond to him instead of just projecting off of him, and the thought gnawed on his flesh like the form of his cowl. This might be the night it stopped being something he wore and started being all that was left. That this was how Bruce Wayne finally died, and let Rachel go, and let everything else fade away into the nothingness of black. How easy it could be. How familiar.
Bruce felt, more and more, like a skin he reassembled out of obligation, a body his stitched back together for daylight. At night, the other thing fit better. The thing that hunted and endured. And with the fear toxin skill burning through his system, it frayed the edges of instinct and identity. He couldn’t shake the pressure in his body, the sense of being overfilled with motion that had nowhere else to go. So he used it. He let the weight of it drive him forward.
He hit Lady Arkham full-on.
The collision snapped her attention away from Crane just in time to keep the sonic blast from completing its trajectory. They crashed into a workstation together. Glass detonated outward, equipment screeching and dying beneath them.
But the burst of glass shards unfurled into wings, in a cyclone of black shapes, fluttering and shrieking, silhouettes tearing themselves free and swarming him. The toxin seized on the image greedily, amplifying it to a familiar nightmare wearing a hundred beating hearts.
And for half a second, he couldn’t tell where the real danger was. His body answered the swarm on instinct, flinching with his reflex hijacked by the oldest fear carved into him. The world split just long enough for reality to slip its leash.
Him. Of course it was him. A man hiding behind a symbol he calls justice. But he was no better than Doctor Crane, employing fear to secure power over others.
Bruce Wayne.
While Batman’s vision was obscured with the remnants of Crane’s toxin, still trading hostilities with his determination long after it should have faded, hers was drowned in something far older: the vehement wrath that had festered for years and years, waiting to unbridledly confront the name and the face that were an umbrage to her and come out victorious. He had given her both in the catacombs, ripping off his mask as if the truth could absolve him. As if saving one old man could balance generations of blood, could redeem a city built on graves. But that fight did not end the way true revenge needed it to.
His father’s signature still haunted Arkham’s walls. Orders signed in clean ink that hid the executions. Her parents reduced to “necessary casualties” so Thomas Wayne could tighten his grip on a rotten institution and still sleep at night. And now the son stood here, draped in a myth, continuing the family tradition.
A crusade. But it was just another rich man deciding who gets to suffer, who gets to be spared, who gets to be broken so the world can keep pretending the system works. He didn’t dismantle it. He hunted inside it. He fed it bodies. And he had the nerve to look at her like he understood.
His hesitation was everything she needed. The League had taught them both this, that distorted perception, confusion, was an opening.
She cut through his disorientation, a blade through fog, driving her staff into his side with a punishing crack. No speeches. No words to tell him how she survived the catacombs, nothing. No mercy.
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
He was a runt dog, getting kicked repeatedly by a boot, yelping, incapable of bearing his teeth at something he would be unable to bite. Again, the blunt force was witheringly hot into his chest. The impact sent another violent tremor up his spine while a sharp cry tore from him despite every effort to mute it with the blood clogging his throat.
His vision tunnelled, the edges of the world smearing as he curled inward on instinct, arms folding to shield what little was left intact.
She twisted the staff in her grip, jamming her thumb into the activation plate. The staff was kicked alive with a violent jolt. A feral vibrational thrum deepened into a subterranean growl, the kind that precedes earthquakes and collapsing structures.
The air thickened around the top of the staff, warping, like heat distortion, as the concussive energy surged. Fine debris skittered across the floor in nervous arcs as they became drawn toward the rising oscillation.
Her breath hitched. Her anger bled directly into the mechanics of the charge. When the instrument made a whine, she aimed its sonic blast straight at him.
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
His lips parted in a weak, amused gasp that twisted the air of his exhale. It raked across his throat raw before collapsing into an involuntary cough. His body folded slightly with it, his ribs still echoing the rattle they were traumatised by, and spitting up blood from where it shouldn’t leave. A bit of that viscous red was swallowed and coated his throat in a tackiness that made him choke. His lungs laboured to gather enough oxygen to carry his voice.
“You…you don’t…don’t want justice.”
Crane lifted his eyes to her through the haze. Words were unsteadily pushed out of his mouth.
“You want permission. To displace your own…suffering…onto someone else. To…believe that relief is righteousness. What a…remarkably pedestrian impulse. Born of fear, untreated…injury, and arrested maturity. At least have the honesty to call it what it is.”
The restraints on the straitjacket of her mind snapped open, unleashing the madness previously thrashing within it. Her arm thrusted her staff and struck him again with nothing but momentum and ferity. She channelled every call to ferocity and let her body be possessed by it, an animal’s snarl shoved out her teeth by a harsh slide off her tongue.
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
Concrete slammed the breath from his chest as his knees gave way and the rest of him followed, momentum dragging him down into an ungainly sprawl. His glasses tore free and skittered across the floor, spinning uselessly before coming to rest somewhere beyond reach. Without them, the world dissolved into wavering smears of light and shadow. Blood flooded his mouth. He coughed, a wet, involuntary sound as one hand scraped weakly against the floor to anchor himself. Each breath came shallow. Above him, the ceiling pitched and swam, sounds stretching until they reached him as if filtered through water. He felt submerged, where pressure was everywhere. Where direction was nowhere.
A storm had come through. A fury like surf crashing again and again against something already eroded. And he let it take him. He let those waters roll over his head, let them fill his lungs, because this was the point. Weather was the blows and the pain. The real punishment was the surrender. The choice to remain there. There came the clarity only water could provide. A thirst he recognized. He drank it down like a dying man reaching for seawater, knowing it would finish him, but needing it anyway.
It felt right to deserve this. To be reduced to something worthy of her wrath. To matter enough to be struck. He did not regret what he had done in Arkham. Not in the way remorse was supposed to function, but he understood that it had been wrong. That he was wrong. Perhaps he had always been inherently, existentially…wrong.
“And then—” the sound of her laughter shattered like harsh light through fractured glass, and the sound scattered through and singed his ears in its own sharp delight. Her voice wavered wildly. It swallowed him whole and burned like acid. “You dare stand in front of me and pretend like you’re any different from him?”
“You’re a torturer. Your victims deserve retribution.”
Her mouth twisted as the corners were caught on a realisation, “But you’d enjoy it if I hurt you, wouldn’t you? You feed on pain. You crave it.”
She leaned in close, the air feeling poisonous to consume.
“So I won’t give you that. I’ll use your precious little friend instead,” she said softly, savagely. “And I’ll make you watch.”
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
Crane’s lips split in a rogue line, as if a fault had opened in the calm landscape in his countenance. And what was revealed was glee in his twisted mind, its concealment faltering as he tried to maintain his outward impassiveness.
He spoke like a quiet river, unhurried and blissful, carrying each word without splash or ripple. “I disagree. He fought back for years. This is simply the conclusion.”
The blow struck with pure velocity. The staff crashed into his ribs with a sound like splitting timber, a hollow crack that punched the breath straight out of his lungs. Pain flowered like a bloom of razor-petals, a blinding detonation that radiated through his side. Crane lurched sideways, a broken sound tearing from his throat.
“You stood in Arkham,” she hissed, already striking again before he could find his footing, “and you broke the people who came to you for help.”
The staff struck his shoulder—bone-shudderingly—then snapped upward into his neck. Each impact was precise in placement but fuelled by something raw and ungoverned.
Her voice was splintering now, old fury bleeding through her control. “You used your power over them. To exploit them.”
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
Crane shifted his weight in a slow, twisting motion. His eyes skirted hers, skimming past to deliberately postpone the impact, before settling on Maxie Zeus. He was crumpled against the wall as the compound threaded itself through his bloodstream.
“You asked for results,” Crane replied. He lifted a hand and gestured loosely to the ruined figure at his side. “You have them.”
She shot the word out like arrows, “I asked for collaboration!”
Her voice, tight with exasperation, heralded movement. She advanced in relentless cadence, a tide encroaching and gathering force. One deliberate step, then another, until the empty space between them shrank beneath the weight of her purpose.
“Not this.” The tip of her staff speared downward, stopping inches from Maxie’s quivering body. He twitched at the motion. “You enjoy dismantling people who can’t fight back. Don’t insult me by pretending this was a necessity.”
“Doctor. You’ve been difficult to reach.” Maxie’s voice was polished to a lecture-hall warmth, as he spoke assuredly without turning. “Seeing as you were…indisposed.”
Hard shoes paced the length of the room. Not frantic—no, never that. Maxie Zeus did nothing frantically, he himself would attest. His steps were dignified, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. He was a man who believed the world still watched him, even here, where the cavernous storage hall swallowed the sound strangely.
Crane’s reply was incredibly uneventful. “I imagine I have.”
The pacing eased from the other man, just long enough for silence to drop between them and settle heavily on the floor, a sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass. The hum of the lights and vents pressed in from all sides.
“Temporary setbacks. Every great enterprise encounters turbulence. You’ll be off with your…creature…only after you give us what we want.”
Crane focused on adjusting the flame beneath the beaker. The liquid inside responded immediately as it shimmered, blooming with iridescence as if alive, catching the overhead light like oil on disturbed water.
“How far along are you?” Asked Maxie.
“Oh, it won’t be long.”
The silence that followed crept along the floor, climbed up their legs, and pressed itself beneath skin and into bone. Maxie felt it first. He resumed his pacing as if motion alone might scrape it off him, irritation leaking through the cracks in his polish in small tells. His jaw tightened. His shoulders pulled back. And the most revealing: there was a thrill coursing through Crane, each heartbeat fuelling a perverse anticipation that only a mind like his could savour.
Crane settled into it. That encroaching quiet soothed him. He allowed it to linger, to do its work before he spoke again. “Do you know what fascinated me most about you, back at the university?”
Maxie rubbed the rough hairs on his jaw, his lips parting to scoff. “Your fascination was always intrusive.”
“Yes—” Crane’s head tilted— “that was rather the point.”
He moved among the glass vials, letting the liquids whisper their subtle fragrances into the air. Each careful measurement of reagents was an unhurried dialogue between steady hands and patient science, while he bent time itself to yield to the slow, meticulous motions of his work.
“You believe your delusions were earned,” he went on. “That your brilliance justified them. A god doesn’t become divine through madness, does he? He simply declares himself so, and dares the world to contradict him.”
The shoes stopped dead.
Crane only briefly glanced at his former professorial colleague, and continued. “Well. I’ve noticed quite a bit of contradicting evidence.”
“You’ve lost that edge, Jonathan,” Maxie insisted, his lips a daring and unsteady smile as the air between them crackled with the remnants of old grudges. “You’re not intimidating to me.”
“I know. And yet, for someone who styles himself a god, you’ve been remarkably easy to leash by Lady Arkham.”
Maxie spun on him, the shift sharp enough to snap the hem of his coat. “You dare—”
“You parade,” he cut in, not raising his voice. He didn’t even look at him as he adjusted the flame beneath the beaker, eyes intent on the slow, luminous swirl of the solution. “A man who needs to be seen. Heard. Witnessed. You’re begging for applause, Maxie. Even now. Evidently, I’m an audience that isn’t easily impressed by the ostentatious exhibit of your hubris.”
The cultivated amicability Maxie wore like a tailored suit conveniently began to scorch away. “You made me this way,” he snapped. “You meddled. You exploited—”
“Ah, you blame me,” Crane murmured, and now there was something almost misleadingly tender. He stirred the solution slowly, watching the colour shift from clear to opalescent. “Grandiosity. A brittle ego. That incessant hunger to be revered.”
He watched, rapt, following the wayward shoes advancing upon him. The shoes had a mind of their own, shuffling forward in a haphazard and vehement march, plotting course straight for him. He was charting an erratic journey ahead of his mind, which left it behind, unguarded and able to be assailed for Crane’s uses.
“You were already failing to properly manage your illness. I didn’t create anything. I wasn’t the inception of your collapse. There was nothing in you that hadn’t already taken root. I merely chose when it would finally be permitted to surface. You maintained an impressive composure for a time, but you seemed very relieved to let yourself go. If you’re so devoted to myth, perhaps I am long overdue for canonization.”
Maxie’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snapped, ugly with resentment. “If you belong in history at all, it’s as the aberration. The blight that gets hunted down. Purged. You poisoned the city. You stripped people of choice, of dignity—turned them into instruments so you could feel larger than the man who did the same to you, and never bothered to love you. And you won’t stop. Not until the hero finally cuts you down. And he’ll be celebrated.”
The overhead lights glanced off Crane’s glasses, bleaching his eyes into brief, pallid mirrors before settling again into something keen and appraising.
“High praise. I can’t exactly make a hero out of a man without being noteworthy myself. And here you are, gathering the wreckage of your own mind by making deluded justifications. At least I’m honest about what I am.” His eyes narrowed, laser-focused. “You, on the other hand, demean yourself by scrambling to dress and inferiority complex up as power. You have none.”
He strode closer, studying Maxie the way one studies a specimen pinned too tightly to a board. “I find it difficult to imagine the actual Zeus trembling before Lady Arkham. Let alone consenting to serve as her pet. But she doesn’t take all the credit. You took Angel from me. And to make the sound of that survivable, you tell yourself she’s a thing. A creature. Something that belongs to you. Did Olympus feel any closer when she screamed?”
“You think you’re untouchable,” he spat. Colour surged into Maxie’s face in shame, clawing its way up through the fury.
“No. I think you’ve placed your faith in the wrong variables.” He turned back to the bench and the compound, to the only thing in the room that demanded competence. “And that is the sort of mistake that…resolves itself.”
Maxie lunged, and it wasn’t elegant. Nothing divine ever is when it panics. His movement tore through the space in a burst of all rage and wounded pride. Crane reacted without looking. His hand swiped along the table, fingers closing around something small and cold, already calibrated in his mind before Maxie’s fist tangled in Crane’s coat, yanking him a half a step off balance.
And then he locked up. A sharp intake of breath shuddered through him as the needle sank home. A crawling heat surged, spreading fast beneath the skin, like an infestation of insects waking under muscle, like nerves remembering every sensation they had ever been spared. His grip slackened, fingers spasming uselessly. “You— what did you do to me?”
Crane straightened smoothly, shrugging free of the grasp, shedding an inconvenience. He stepped back to create a distance as he spoke evenly. The soul behind his eyes was gone. “Refined from Arkham’s base compound. You made the error of assuming I wasn’t already finished.”
Maxie staggered, hands flying to his temples as the world tilted. His breath came in shallow, frantic pulls. “Impossible. I am Zeus. I am—”
Crane closed the distance again, drawing in the space between them until it vanished. “You are afraid,” he said softly. “And you built a god to keep from ever feeling small again. Now you won’t have the luxury of choosing what you feel.”
Maxie collapsed to his knees. His hands scraped uselessly at the concrete as the architecture of his divinity buckled, burned away beneath confusion, terror, and unbearable clarity.
Lady Arkham stood framed in the doorway, staff planted against the concrete as if she had struck the floor there just to anchor herself. Her mask was already gone. Without it, there was nothing abstract about her fury. Her face seared with raw, unrelenting flush; her vision burned bright, as each blink was a fevered spark against the haze of her thoughts and seemed to kindle every shadow around her.
“You really are incapable of stopping.” Her voice shook, not with fear, but with the effort it took not to scream in anger. “Even now.”
The lab was a living thing. A buzzing thing penetrating his ears and making them ring dizzyingly. It was a sound he typically enjoyed, but for the past few days of this place, it had grated on his skull, the shavings of his sanity crumbling out.
Ventilation fans pulled stale air through grated ducts overhead, a constant low roar that threaded beneath the sharper sounds of glassware and instrumentation. Fluorescent light fractured across stainless steel benches, catching on beakers, pipettes, centrifuges—every surface scrubbed within an inch of sterility and still smelling faintly of bleach and solvent.
Crane stood at the central table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, coat discarded. He adjusted ratios, recalculated concentrations, annotated margins already dense with shorthand only he and one other person in the room could read.
Lady Arkham would stand opposite him, equally absorbed. She did not hover. She did not supervise. She worked. They had moved in quiet coordination. It wasn’t exploitation in the narrowest sense; it was a collaboration. Two chemists circling the same problem from opposite philosophies. It would have been an informative experience if it hadn’t been born from mutual hatred of each other.
But tonight, Crane was alone with his mind. It was proving to be an inhospitable place. Thoughts peeled away from him in brittle flakes, like old paint lifting from a poisoned wall. Whatever scaffolding he’d built to hold himself upright had warped under pressure. He had never learned how to metabolise emotions that weren’t fear. Never learned where to put guilt, or want, or the sickening ache of having crossed a line and discovered it didn’t feel like triumph. It felt like sabotage.
Like someone had reached inside him and yanked the wiring loose, jammed raw ends together just to watch the sparks jump. There was no elegance to it. No control. Just heat and noise and the constant threat of something burning out permanently.
The room plunged into darkness as the lights sputtered and died, leaving only the faint hum of electrical current fading into silence. Then they revived again with light. He barely registered the sudden blackout, his thoughts scattered, the edges of reality and awareness blurring in the enveloping gloom.
But his vacant eyes snapped up when Batman emerged from the narrow seam of darkness between two equipment racks as if the shadow took shape. The black of his armor swallowed the fluorescent light, bending it away. One arm bore faint scarring where plating had been hastily replaced, the seam imperfect, the damage still there if you knew how to look.
Crane’s heart misfired and stuttered, anticipation and dread bloomed sharp and cold beneath his skin. He turned fully, already arranging his face into something passably neutral, something that might pass for indifference.
“You…recovered more quickly than anticipated,” he muttered. Almost convincingly too.
Batman closed the distance in a heartbeat.
The impact was brutal. Crane’s hip slammed into the edge of the table, glassware skittering and clinking as tools spilled across steel. Batman’s forearm pinned him back threateningly. Crane’s spine was forced into an arch.
“You knew I would,” Batman said.
“Yes.”
“You counted on it.”
“Yes.”
“I trusted you.”
Something ugly and reflexive surged up self-loathingly. He lashed out with the bitter instinct to wound first.
“That,” he hissed, “was your mistake. What else could I do? I had no acceptable alternatives.” A pause, then quieter, almost venomless. “Doing all of this? This is the farthest I’m capable of extending myself toward redemption.”
Even as he said it, the words tasted wrong.
Batman pulled back abruptly and stopped an arm’s length away. Reining himself in. Close enough that Crane could see the faint redness around his eyes, the exhaustion there, the anger leashed so tightly it trembled.
And this time, Batman’s anger didn’t thrill him. It didn’t feel like power, or inevitability, or proof of anything he believed himself to be. It just sat there, making him so restless and agitated. And for the first time, Crane found himself wishing irrationally that Batman would stop looking at him like that. Like disappointment hurt worse than the horrors he suffered at the hands of Crane.
Batman spoke quietly. “Don’t do that.”
Crane didn’t look at him. He turned back to the worktable instead, fingertips nudging glassware into false order, aligning instruments that were displaced by Batman’s aggression. Busywork. A warding gesture.
“Do what?” he asked, too lightly.
“Pretend it didn’t matter.”
The accusation wasn’t sharp. That was what made it cut deeper.
Crane’s hands stilled. For a moment they hovered over the steel surface, nerves fluttering in them. He ripped apart their tingling wings and forced them down.
“You’re here to stop me,” he said, voice smoothing into something clinical. “I assume you’ve already drafted the conclusion. You always do.”
“Yes. I shut this down. I stop Arkham. And I take you in.”
Crane inhaled sharply and thinly. His reflection warped faintly in the steel tabletop: hollow-eyed, stretched too tight. “After I save her.”
“You don’t know that you can.”
“I do.”
“You think you do.”
Crane turned then, too fast, the chair legs scraping. The sudden movement sent a flare of pain up his spine. “And you think you know better? Where is the brave hero now?”
“I know what happens,” he said quietly, “when you convince yourself the ends justify the means.”
Crane’s mouth twisted. “Speaking from experience?”
No answer.
Crane stepped closer. His voice dropped, roughened. “You’re allowing this. You allowed me. You let me walk into this facility. You gave me time—time to make choices you won’t forgive.” His gaze flicked, involuntarily, to the man’s arm. The wounds. The memory of resistance under his fingers. “If I chose to, time to hurt people. To hurt you. You should have just left me here…to do enough for you to finally choose the safety of Gotham over your belief in me.”
“I tried.”
Crane let out a breath that was almost a laugh and almost a sob. “No. You didn’t.”
The clinking of glass as Crane rearranged vials and instruments punctuated the room, sharp against the steady hum of the ventilation. Outside, distant boat horns drifted across the water, mournful and almost swallowed by the concrete walls. Every subtle sound seemed amplified—metal scraping, paper shifting, the faint sigh of air through a vent.
Footsteps echoed beyond the door.
The change in the other man was instantaneous. Every line of him shifted, recalibrating into the Bat.
“Hide,” Crane murmured, his voice tight. “Now.”
Absolute stillness reigned, broken only when Crane’s head whipped around, propelling his gaze toward where the man was next to him.
“I told you to—”
The Bat was gone. Like he just evaporated into the air and was swallowed whole.
The door slid open, metal protesting softly, reluctant to comply. Lady Arkham stepped through first, flanked by guards whose boots struck the floor in a crisp echo.
“Backup generators are a little redundant, aren’t they?” She began lightly, her voice smooth as lacquer. “Between the time the lights turn off and the generators turn on…well, it’s just long enough for something inconvenient to slip in from the darkness. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t anticipating a disruption of some kind.”
Lady Arkham did not acknowledge the request. Instead, she lifted a gloved hand, and the guards fanned out, sweeping the room. Their rifles angled beneath tables and behind equipment, into the creases where the shadows clung.
“Too shy?” she mused, eyes flicking lazily across the space. “Or perhaps you two prefer your privacy. By all means. Just remember…misbehaviour has consequences.” Her gaze slid toward the door. “And she is remarkably fragile.”
The lab was a living thing. A buzzing thing penetrating his ears and making them ring dizzyingly. It was a sound he typically enjoyed, but for the past few days of this place, it had grated on his skull, the shavings of his sanity crumbling out.
Ventilation fans pulled stale air through grated ducts overhead, a constant low roar that threaded beneath the sharper sounds of glassware and instrumentation. Fluorescent light fractured across stainless steel benches, catching on beakers, pipettes, centrifuges—every surface scrubbed within an inch of sterility and still smelling faintly of bleach and solvent.
Crane stood at the central table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, coat discarded. He adjusted ratios, recalculated concentrations, annotated margins already dense with shorthand only he and one other person in the room could read.
Lady Arkham would stand opposite him, equally absorbed. She did not hover. She did not supervise. She worked. They had moved in quiet coordination. It wasn’t exploitation in the narrowest sense; it was a collaboration. Two chemists circling the same problem from opposite philosophies. It would have been an informative experience if it hadn’t been born from mutual hatred of each other.
But tonight, Crane was alone with his mind. It was proving to be an inhospitable place. Thoughts peeled away from him in brittle flakes, like old paint lifting from a poisoned wall. Whatever scaffolding he’d built to hold himself upright had warped under pressure. He had never learned how to metabolise emotions that weren’t fear. Never learned where to put guilt, or want, or the sickening ache of having crossed a line and discovered it didn’t feel like triumph. It felt like sabotage.
Like someone had reached inside him and yanked the wiring loose, jammed raw ends together just to watch the sparks jump. There was no elegance to it. No control. Just heat and noise and the constant threat of something burning out permanently.
The room plunged into darkness as the lights sputtered and died, leaving only the faint hum of electrical current fading into silence. Then they revived again with light. He barely registered the sudden blackout, his thoughts scattered, the edges of reality and awareness blurring in the enveloping gloom.
But his vacant eyes snapped up when Batman emerged from the narrow seam of darkness between two equipment racks as if the shadow took shape. The black of his armor swallowed the fluorescent light, bending it away. One arm bore faint scarring where plating had been hastily replaced, the seam imperfect, the damage still there if you knew how to look.
Crane’s heart misfired and stuttered, anticipation and dread bloomed sharp and cold beneath his skin. He turned fully, already arranging his face into something passably neutral, something that might pass for indifference.
“You…recovered more quickly than anticipated,” he muttered. Almost convincingly too.
Batman closed the distance in a heartbeat.
The impact was brutal. Crane’s hip slammed into the edge of the table, glassware skittering and clinking as tools spilled across steel. Batman’s forearm pinned him back threateningly. Crane’s spine was forced into an arch.
“You knew I would,” Batman said.
“Yes.”
“You counted on it.”
“Yes.”
“I trusted you.”
Something ugly and reflexive surged up self-loathingly. He lashed out with the bitter instinct to wound first.
“That,” he hissed, “was your mistake. What else could I do? I had no acceptable alternatives.” A pause, then quieter, almost venomless. “Doing all of this? This is the farthest I’m capable of extending myself toward redemption.”
Even as he said it, the words tasted wrong.
Batman pulled back abruptly and stopped an arm’s length away. Reining himself in. Close enough that Crane could see the faint redness around his eyes, the exhaustion there, the anger leashed so tightly it trembled.
And this time, Batman’s anger didn’t thrill him. It didn’t feel like power, or inevitability, or proof of anything he believed himself to be. It just sat there, making him so restless and agitated. And for the first time, Crane found himself wishing irrationally that Batman would stop looking at him like that. Like disappointment hurt worse than the horrors he suffered at the hands of Crane.
Batman spoke quietly. “Don’t do that.”
Crane didn’t look at him. He turned back to the worktable instead, fingertips nudging glassware into false order, aligning instruments that were displaced by Batman’s aggression. Busywork. A warding gesture.
“Do what?” he asked, too lightly.
“Pretend it didn’t matter.”
The accusation wasn’t sharp. That was what made it cut deeper.
Crane’s hands stilled. For a moment they hovered over the steel surface, nerves fluttering in them. He ripped apart their tingling wings and forced them down.
“You’re here to stop me,” he said, voice smoothing into something clinical. “I assume you’ve already drafted the conclusion. You always do.”
“Yes. I shut this down. I stop Arkham. And I take you in.”
Crane inhaled sharply and thinly. His reflection warped faintly in the steel tabletop: hollow-eyed, stretched too tight. “After I save her.”
“You don’t know that you can.”
“I do.”
“You think you do.”
Crane turned then, too fast, the chair legs scraping. The sudden movement sent a flare of pain up his spine. “And you think you know better? Where is the brave hero now?”
“I know what happens,” he said quietly, “when you convince yourself the ends justify the means.”
Crane’s mouth twisted. “Speaking from experience?”
No answer.
Crane stepped closer. His voice dropped, roughened. “You’re allowing this. You allowed me. You let me walk into this facility. You gave me time—time to make choices you won’t forgive.” His gaze flicked, involuntarily, to the man’s arm. The wounds. The memory of resistance under his fingers. “If I chose to, time to hurt people. To hurt you. You should have just left me here…to do enough for you to finally choose the safety of Gotham over your belief in me.”
“I tried.”
Crane let out a breath that was almost a laugh and almost a sob. “No. You didn’t.”
The clinking of glass as Crane rearranged vials and instruments punctuated the room, sharp against the steady hum of the ventilation. Outside, distant boat horns drifted across the water, mournful and almost swallowed by the concrete walls. Every subtle sound seemed amplified—metal scraping, paper shifting, the faint sigh of air through a vent.
Footsteps echoed beyond the door.
The change in the other man was instantaneous. Every line of him shifted, recalibrating into the Bat.
“Hide,” Crane murmured, his voice tight. “Now.”
Absolute stillness reigned, broken only when Crane’s head whipped around, propelling his gaze toward where the man was next to him.
“I told you to—”
The Bat was gone. Like he just evaporated into the air and was swallowed whole.
The door slid open, metal protesting softly, reluctant to comply. Lady Arkham stepped through first, flanked by guards whose boots struck the floor in a crisp echo.
“Backup generators are a little redundant, aren’t they?” She began lightly, her voice smooth as lacquer. “Between the time the lights turn off and the generators turn on…well, it’s just long enough for something inconvenient to slip in from the darkness. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t anticipating a disruption of some kind.”
Lady Arkham did not acknowledge the request. Instead, she lifted a gloved hand, and the guards fanned out, sweeping the room. Their rifles angled beneath tables and behind equipment, into the creases where the shadows clung.
“Too shy?” she mused, eyes flicking lazily across the space. “Or perhaps you two prefer your privacy. By all means. Just remember…misbehaviour has consequences.” Her gaze slid toward the door. “And she is remarkably fragile.”
The lab was a living thing. A buzzing thing penetrating his ears and making them ring dizzyingly. It was a sound he typically enjoyed, but for the past few days of this place, it had grated on his skull, the shavings of his sanity crumbling out.
Ventilation fans pulled stale air through grated ducts overhead, a constant low roar that threaded beneath the sharper sounds of glassware and instrumentation. Fluorescent light fractured across stainless steel benches, catching on beakers, pipettes, centrifuges—every surface scrubbed within an inch of sterility and still smelling faintly of bleach and solvent.
Crane stood at the central table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, coat discarded. He adjusted ratios, recalculated concentrations, annotated margins already dense with shorthand only he and one other person in the room could read.
Lady Arkham would stand opposite him, equally absorbed. She did not hover. She did not supervise. She worked. They had moved in quiet coordination. It wasn’t exploitation in the narrowest sense; it was a collaboration. Two chemists circling the same problem from opposite philosophies. It would have been an informative experience if it hadn’t been born from mutual hatred of each other.
But tonight, Crane was alone with his mind. It was proving to be an inhospitable place. Thoughts peeled away from him in brittle flakes, like old paint lifting from a poisoned wall. Whatever scaffolding he’d built to hold himself upright had warped under pressure. He had never learned how to metabolise emotions that weren’t fear. Never learned where to put guilt, or want, or the sickening ache of having crossed a line and discovered it didn’t feel like triumph. It felt like sabotage.
Like someone had reached inside him and yanked the wiring loose, jammed raw ends together just to watch the sparks jump. There was no elegance to it. No control. Just heat and noise and the constant threat of something burning out permanently.
The room plunged into darkness as the lights sputtered and died, leaving only the faint hum of electrical current fading into silence. Then they revived again with light. He barely registered the sudden blackout, his thoughts scattered, the edges of reality and awareness blurring in the enveloping gloom.
But his vacant eyes snapped up when Batman emerged from the narrow seam of darkness between two equipment racks as if the shadow took shape. The black of his armor swallowed the fluorescent light, bending it away. One arm bore faint scarring where plating had been hastily replaced, the seam imperfect, the damage still there if you knew how to look.
Crane’s heart misfired and stuttered, anticipation and dread bloomed sharp and cold beneath his skin. He turned fully, already arranging his face into something passably neutral, something that might pass for indifference.
“You…recovered more quickly than anticipated,” he muttered. Almost convincingly too.
Batman closed the distance in a heartbeat.
The impact was brutal. Crane’s hip slammed into the edge of the table, glassware skittering and clinking as tools spilled across steel. Batman’s forearm pinned him back threateningly. Crane’s spine was forced into an arch.
“You knew I would,” Batman said.
“Yes.”
“You counted on it.”
“Yes.”
“I trusted you.”
Something ugly and reflexive surged up self-loathingly. He lashed out with the bitter instinct to wound first.
“That,” he hissed, “was your mistake. What else could I do? I had no acceptable alternatives.” A pause, then quieter, almost venomless. “Doing all of this? This is the farthest I’m capable of extending myself toward redemption.”
Even as he said it, the words tasted wrong.
Batman pulled back abruptly and stopped an arm’s length away. Reining himself in. Close enough that Crane could see the faint redness around his eyes, the exhaustion there, the anger leashed so tightly it trembled.
And this time, Batman’s anger didn’t thrill him. It didn’t feel like power, or inevitability, or proof of anything he believed himself to be. It just sat there, making him so restless and agitated. And for the first time, Crane found himself wishing irrationally that Batman would stop looking at him like that. Like disappointment hurt worse than the horrors he suffered at the hands of Crane.
Batman spoke quietly. “Don’t do that.”
Crane didn’t look at him. He turned back to the worktable instead, fingertips nudging glassware into false order, aligning instruments that were displaced by Batman’s aggression. Busywork. A warding gesture.
“Do what?” he asked, too lightly.
“Pretend it didn’t matter.”
The accusation wasn’t sharp. That was what made it cut deeper.
Crane’s hands stilled. For a moment they hovered over the steel surface, nerves fluttering in them. He ripped apart their tingling wings and forced them down.
“You’re here to stop me,” he said, voice smoothing into something clinical. “I assume you’ve already drafted the conclusion. You always do.”
“Yes. I shut this down. I stop Arkham. And I take you in.”
Crane inhaled sharply and thinly. His reflection warped faintly in the steel tabletop: hollow-eyed, stretched too tight. “After I save her.”
“You don’t know that you can.”
“I do.”
“You think you do.”
Crane turned then, too fast, the chair legs scraping. The sudden movement sent a flare of pain up his spine. “And you think you know better? Where is the brave hero now?”
“I know what happens,” he said quietly, “when you convince yourself the ends justify the means.”
Crane’s mouth twisted. “Speaking from experience?”
No answer.
Crane stepped closer. His voice dropped, roughened. “You’re allowing this. You allowed me. You let me walk into this facility. You gave me time—time to make choices you won’t forgive.” His gaze flicked, involuntarily, to the man’s arm. The wounds. The memory of resistance under his fingers. “If I chose to, time to hurt people. To hurt you. You should have just left me here…to do enough for you to finally choose the safety of Gotham over your belief in me.”
“I tried.”
Crane let out a breath that was almost a laugh and almost a sob. “No. You didn’t.”
The clinking of glass as Crane rearranged vials and instruments punctuated the room, sharp against the steady hum of the ventilation. Outside, distant boat horns drifted across the water, mournful and almost swallowed by the concrete walls. Every subtle sound seemed amplified—metal scraping, paper shifting, the faint sigh of air through a vent.
Footsteps echoed beyond the door.
The change in the other man was instantaneous. Every line of him shifted, recalibrating into the Bat.
“Hide,” Crane murmured, his voice tight. “Now.”
Absolute stillness reigned, broken only when Crane’s head whipped around, propelling his gaze toward where the man was next to him.
“I told you to—”
The Bat was gone. Like he just evaporated into the air and was swallowed whole.
The door slid open, metal protesting softly, reluctant to comply. Lady Arkham stepped through first, flanked by guards whose boots struck the floor in a crisp echo.
“Backup generators are a little redundant, aren’t they?” She began lightly, her voice smooth as lacquer. “Between the time the lights turn off and the generators turn on…well, it’s just long enough for something inconvenient to slip in from the darkness. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t anticipating a disruption of some kind.”
