Chapter Text
The name Spector didn't clear the truck bed; it suffocated it.
In the headspace, the silence went white-hot. The raw, defensive heat from Jake and the sluggish misery from Steven vanished, crushed under the sudden, heavy return of the soldier. Marc didn't ask for the front. He seized it.
The handoff was a jagged, electric shock that made his left knee buckle. The loose, slouched posture of the cabbie snapped into the rigid frame of a man waiting for an mortar round to drop. A thin line of dark blood began to leak from Marc’s left nostril—the physical tax of three identity shifts in a body that was structurally falling apart.
He didn't look at the clipping. He kept his eyes locked on the lower edge of Batman’s cowl, measuring the distance. Five feet. In his current state, five feet was a mile.
"Spector died in the desert," Marc said. His voice was flat, dry, and stripped of Jake's Bronx gravel. It was the voice of a man who had cleared rooms in Fallujah and left no survivors. "The Legion buried the paperwork."
"They buried a name," Batman countered. He didn't drop the clipping, but his right hand remained near his utility belt, perfectly still. "They didn't bury the man who used it. Or the anomalies in his files."
Beside the truck, Catwoman let out a low, amused whistle, her boots scraping lightly against the wet tires. "Oh, Darling. You really know how to ruin a party. Here I thought I was dealing with a simple tomb robber, and you brought a whole infantry unit."
"Cat, get out of the yard," Batman said.
"And I usually ignore you when you use that tone," she said, though her eyes were already scanning the dark spaces between the containers. The harbor fog was rolling over the pier now, thick and gray, turning the distant gatehouse lights into faint, greasy halos. "But if this guy's a ghost from the Legion, he probably doesn't care about local ordinances. I'm going to find out where Maroni’s office is hiding the ledger before the circus truly starts."
She didn't flip or throw a smoke bomb. She simply stepped backward into the gray soup between two iron crates, her leather suit swishing softly against the metal, and was gone before the echo of her boots died.
Marc didn't care about the cat. His entire universe had shrunk to the white lenses five feet away.
“Marc, we can't fight him,” Steven’s voice was a frantic, chaotic pulse behind his eyes. “The internal bleeding... the left lung is compressing. Marc, please, don't throw a punch, you'll kill us—”
“Push him off the tailgate,” Jake growled from the right side of the brain, his practical anger dampened by the icy chill of exhaustion. “Grab the bar, Spector. Grab the bar!”
"I'm not here for a war," Marc said aloud, his breath hitching as a sharp spasm of pain rippled across his left flank. He didn't drop the steel crowbar; his fingers clutched the rusted iron tighter, using it as a cane to keep from collapsing into the straw. "I'm here for a stone. A black falcon reliquary. Maroni's driver moved it."
"The Eye of Khnum," Batman said flatly. "Stolen from the Cairo Museum during the riots six months ago."
Marc took a slow, agonizing step forward, his left hand pressing so hard into his ribs that he could feel the tissue clicking beneath the canvas wrap. "It doesn't belong in Gotham."
"Neither do you," Batman replied.
The Dark Knight stepped into the truck bed. He didn't draw a batarang. He moved with a clean, anatomical leverage that didn't require speed.
Marc swung the crowbar.
The strike was pure military discipline—short, direct, aimed at the knee—but his fractured ribs betrayed him. The sudden twist of his torso sent a white-hot spike of agony straight through his chest, slowing the swing by a fraction of a second.
Batman didn't flinch. His left forearm came up in a brutal, sweeping block, the heavy, scalloped gauntlet catching the iron crowbar with a sharp, metallic *shriek*. The force of the impact vibrated through Marc’s entire arm, the shockwave hitting his cracked ribs like a physical hammer.
The crowbar flew from his fingers, clattering loudly into the dark corners of the truck bed. Marc groaned, his vision going completely black for a half-second as he stumbled backward.
“Let me—let me have it—” Jake’s mind-voice slammed forward, trying to force the jaw to clench, trying to drive a left hook into the cowl.
But the system didn't slide. It fractured.
The psychological barriers, already rotted through by three days of isolation and static, gave way all at once. The front row of the mind collapsed into pure chaos.
"Get back—no, no, don't—" Steven's voice tore from the throat, but it was hitched, broken by a sudden, gravelly Bronx syllable from Jake before snapping back into a high-pitched London panic. The body convulsed, the left eye twitching violently as Marc’s rigid military stance melted into a helpless, shivering wreck.
Batman’s hand closed around the stranger's right wrist, twisting it down to pin him against the metal wall of the truck.
But the man didn't fight back.
Steven's hands went completely limp in Batman’s grip. His head dropped back against the iron siding, a violent, terrified sob tearing from his throat. His chest heaved, the breath coming in short, high-pitched gasps that sounded like a drowning bird.
"No... no, that's not... Marc—don't—" Steven wept, his voice high, nasal, and shaking with an unmistakable accent that had no business being in a mercenary's throat. He didn't look at Batman's eyes; he looked at the dark emblem on the man's chest, his fingers twitching in the straw. "We're not... I don't... we need the box. Please don't... the static... it won't stop if it stays here... it keeps scratching at the back of the box..."
The Batman froze.
His grip on the wrist didn't loosen, but he didn't apply the pressure to break the bone either. The white lenses of his cowl scanned the stranger's face. The pupils were dilated completely. The sweat on the forehead was cold, and the throat muscles were seizing in a pattern that matched severe, acute dissociation, not tactical deception.
He wasn't looking at a threat anymore. He was looking at a broken machine.
"Who else is in there?" Batman asked. The mechanical baritone was gone, replaced by a low, quiet intensity that was entirely unreadable.
"I don't... I'm just the archivist," Steven choked out, a tear mixing with the rain and blood on his cheek. "I don't know how to use the knife. I don't... please. We just want to go home."
“Get us out of here, Steven!” Marc’s voice was screaming internally, a muffled echo behind a thick pane of glass. “He’s going to lock us down! Push off the wall!”
“Shut up, Marc, he’s going to kill us!” Steven thought back, his panic completely freezing the body's motor functions.
The silence in the back of the truck stretched for three long seconds. From the gatehouse, the distant sports talk radio faded out, replaced by the low, regular wail of a ship's horn out in the bay.
Batman slowly released the wrist. He didn't offer a hand to help Steven up. He didn't pull the zip-ties from his belt. He took two steps backward, his heavy wool coat sweeping the straw aside as he descended from the truck bed into the mud of the pier.
"You're going to a hospital," Batman said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion or pity. "If you're still on the docks in ten minutes, the GCPD transport will take you to Arkham's medical wing."
He didn't give an address. He didn't mention Maroni. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small, black disk no larger than a coin, and tossed it into the straw near Steven’s boots.
"If the artifact is in this city, I'll find it," Batman said. "Stay out of the way."
He turned his back to the truck. He didn't fire a grapple. He simply walked into the gray soup of the pier, his massive coat swallowing his outline until he was nothing but another shadow among the iron cranes.
The fog rolled over the empty space where he had stood.
Steven sat alone in the straw, his chest still heaving, his left side throbbing with a dull, sickening heat.
“He left a another tracer,” Jake’s voice cut through the fog of the mind, cold and sour as he pushed himself toward the front. “The disk in the straw. He’s tagging us, Steven. He expects us to run straight to a hideout.”
Marc’s presence slid back into place, heavy and dark. “He thinks we're a liability. He's going to clear the field himself.”
Steven didn't look at the tracer. He reached out with a trembling hand, his fingers brushing against something else hidden in the cedar shavings near the corner of the empty Cairo crate. It was a crumpled sheet of paper—something Catwoman had dropped or left behind during her quick exit.
Steven pulled it into the light of the distant floodlamp. It was a copy of a shipping manifest from Maroni’s main office, with a single address circled in thick, black grease pen: 412 Bleecker Street.*
"He didn't give us the address," Steven whispered, his voice shaking as he looked down at the paper. "She did."
Jake took the front with a hard, sudden twist of the shoulder, ripping the gray hoodie down to hide the blood on their neck. He grabbed the black tracer from the straw, dropped it into the back of the idling box truck, and kicked the truck door shut.
"Then we get to Bleecker Street before the Bat does," Jake growled, his jaw setting as he forced the body to move through the freezing rain. "And we take what's ours."