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Chapter Text

It never stops raining in Gotham, Bruce couldn’t unstitch the downpour from his vision of the city if he tried. Up ahead, the road shimmers, a layer of water refracting the lights of the skyscrapers into disjointed patterns that expand and collapse in on themselves like dying stars.

Here, the buildings are the tallest on Earth, reaching up through a layer of impossibly low hanging clouds. You never see their summit, but if you squint you can see the UV brightness of the world up above, reserved exclusively for the super rich who make this place their home. Blade Runner bright, an aesthetic Bruce would normally assign to Seoul and Tokyo, the Far East blowing up the American east coast.

The stench of something bitter cuts through the ever present damp. Bruce’s reactions to the aberration are second nature, running through the composition of a functional gas mask in his head so that when he reaches for his utility belt it’s already there waiting for him. He gets the thing in his mouth with seconds to spare but the citizens of Gotham aren’t so lucky. They turn to each other with adrenaline fueled desperation and scream until their lungs bleed.

Bruce doesn’t save them. If he stops now, they’ll turn on him. The only reason he hasn’t been torn to pieces yet is that he keeps moving, darting between the planned gaps in the traffic.

Except the roads are almost clear. Bruce doesn’t smile. By the time he’s on his target he’ll have full control of the environment, Crane will have a job getting away from him this time.

The bike revs beneath him as he accelerates, its overlarge wheels putting up a wave of water that clings to the rubber of his mask and gloves. This thing can perform impossible feats, driving up walls and pivoting three hundred and sixty degrees in a second. Crane doesn’t have anything so versatile, he lacks the imagination. In a city of garish sports cars and sleek black limos, he travels in a rundown white van that’s more or less identical to the one the GCPD have him linked to. One of his lackey’s will be driving while he leans out of the passenger side to monitor the distance between himself and the Batman.

The road here is unnaturally long and straight, the crossing from Midtown to Downtown morphed into something that warrants a horizon. Bruce builds this space whenever he can, partly because he likes to test the limits of how fast he can let himself travel and mostly because no one can outrun almost anyone here. The bike roars, front wheel lifting momentarily off the tarmac and the little white van grows larger by the second.

Bruce could ram it off the road, but that would feel somewhat anticlimactic. Instead he kicks his feet back, hits the button for something he’s almost willing to call a turbo boost and lets the bike sail over his target. He takes the shock of impact without issue and wrenches the handlebars forward so that the vehicle flips its orientation and careens sideways towards the van’s headlights.

Coming to a halt across the dual carriageway, Bruce watches with smug satisfaction as the van struggles against its breaks, desperate to come to a standstill before it collides with him. It doesn’t make it, and the bike has the grip heavy tires and reinforced titanium skeleton to ensure that it doesn’t crumple on impact.

Bruce moves fast, hopping down from the bike and feeling the cape stick to the lightweight Kevlar armour he wears here. The ocean rushes beneath the bridge, sending up spray that catches the lights of the city and drenches the scene in an orange mist.

He starts with the passenger side and finds Crane struggling to stitch himself back together, the straw from his stuffing pouring out across the dashboard. The foot well is crammed full of fear toxin canisters, just begging for Bruce to try to use them against their maker.

They won’t work, Crane is much too smart for that.

“You.” Crane hisses, reaching down to plug the hole in his side with a broken broom arm. “I should have known.”

Bruce glances to the driver’s seat where the lackey is out cold. Whiplash won’t slow him down when he wakes, though it should. He gets his hand into the scruff of Crane’s sack cloth tunic and drags him from the vehicle.

“You’ve got to tell me how you’re doing this. I’ve been looking, you know. Out there in the real world. I don’t think you’re fast enough to tap my kit and get out of the way before I wake up, so is it a remote connection thing?”

The trouble with Crane is that in divesting himself of a flesh and blood body he limits Bruce’s interrogation options. He can still hurt, if you throw him on a fire or stand him in a field and wait for the crows to peck out his eyes but in the sodden streets of Gotham that’s rarely possible.

You have to trust that he care enough about the good will of his employers to not want to engage their wrath. “I hear you’ve been engaging with Maroni on the side.” Bruce growls. “Can’t imagine Falcone’s going to be impressed by that.””

Crane twists in his grip, spilling straw across the road. He must regret not giving himself proper hands at least some of the time. “Yes, well, no need to go telling tales. I’m sure I’m something is a linchpin in the GCPD’s investigation into the mob. I assume they already know about the drugs and the guns so if they’re not coming after me I must be important to them. I’m sure you don’t want to upset Gordon’s work.”

“If the police fail to bring in Maroni and Falcone, I can take them down myself.” Bruce replies. “You though? You’re months off being asked to cooperate. You might not have to spend a day in jail.”

“I’m sure that makes your blood boil.”

“Worry about your own blood. Specifically how much trouble you’re going to have keeping it in your body if either of your alliances should crumble.”

Crane makes a small dissatisfied noise at the back of his throat. Not that he really has a throat, or a voice box. Bruce has gone looking and found nothing but cotton wool where his windpipe should be. “What do you want to know?”

“I want to know about your new opiate supplier.” Bruce reaches down to rip the hessian head off Cranes shoulders. The neck stump he leaves behind is a stick picked from the edge of a forest in whatever dream Crane built himself in.

Crane – the so called Scarecrow – has a child’s idea of the terrifying. The battered puritan hat he wears is sewn into his forehead above button eyes with a lazily embroidered scowl. He has no nose, and his mouth is an appliqued strip of black denim that shifts eerily when he speaks. “He has an excellent product coming in from out of town. I’m supposed to be meeting him tonight to discuss business opportunities. We were- Wait, this isn’t where we agreed to meet.”

“I wanted a change of scenery.” Bruce grunts. “Who’s your contact?”

“How did you change the environment? What kind of equipment are you using?”

“A name, Crane. You can get by with other suppliers better than you can get by without your head.”

Crane pauses like he might have meant to shrug if he still had shoulders. “No idea.”

“I could drop you in the ocean. I’m sure it takes a while to drown when you’re made of sack cloth.”

“I’m serious. I’ve never met the guy face to face before, so to speak, and no one gives out his real name, just an alias.” Crane is irritatingly calm. For a slimy drug slinging low life he’s very good at managing the fictional pain inflicted on him here. Still, Bruce moves to the edge of the bridge and holds him out over the crashing waves below. If he were to drop him here the surface tension of the water would likely pull what’s left of him apart.

“Then give me the alias.”

Crane chuckles low in the throat he doesn’t have. His face is stained dark with the rain, hat pulling against the wind that whips Bruce’s cape up around the both of them. “Ra’s al Ghul.”

Bruce throws him over his shoulder to land on the road. His head makes a fork in the water cascading over the tarmac.

Perfectly flat tarmac, designed for driving on. Roads like this don’t exist in big cities, they wear down too fast.

Returning to the bike, Bruce opens the control panel behind the seat and reaches for the button that triggers the kick in the other end of the line. “See you around, Crane.”

“Yes, I expect so.” Crane drawls. “To my eternal irritation.”

Bruce hits the button and the silver screen vibrancy of his dream vanishes like so much smoke.

Chapter Text

As you fall asleep, your heart rate and breathing slow right down. The brain is more than capable of processing this change in gear and yet it sometimes gets it wrong, and instead of allowing you to drift away it misinterprets the steady winding down of your body as a precursor to death. In a desperate bid to save itself, it jerks you awake with as much force as it can muster, pushing you back from the edge of the cliff towards wakefulness.

In dreaming science, the kick is designed to imitate this sensation. Bruce slams back into consciousness and though he’s intimately familiar with the ensuing rush of adrenaline it still leaves him disoriented for a full five seconds.

A faint bark of something that might be laughter echoes through his skull, the last traces of whatever he left behind in the dream. 

He struggles to his feet from the camp bed tucked into the corner of the study and goes straight for the curtains the heavy curtains, finding the grounds still more or less swallowed by the night. The sound of rain hitting the patio echoes through the time worn glass, the moon obscured by cloud cover. Autumn is the one time of year that Gotham weather matches the rest of the east coast.

Bruce scribbles the name Crane gave him on a scrap of paper sticking out from under the printed police files smothering his desk. Razalgul. Probably a codename, something to be dissected. He slides into the office chair that is so incongruous in design with the rest of the Victorian era décor and debates getting to work. He should boot up the computer and start looking for local instances of anyone calling themselves Razalgul. He’ll probably have to spend time in the library pouring over possible translations, just the thought of it all makes his bones ache and his eyes sting from interrupted sleep.

The grandfather clock on the far side of the room tells him it’s three in the morning. Bruce couldn’t say how long it’s been since it was wound but it’s probably more or less accurate. In the dream it had felt like he was chasing Crane for days.

Hessian face, trying to grin up at the Batman in the midst of a landscape it had yet to realise it hadn’t painted for itself. A wave of nausea washes over Bruce. He dislikes Crane immensely, and though they’ve only ever met in dreams, he recognises the shape of his sliminess. Police reports have Crane down as an overzealous, opportunistic drug dealer who has cornered a shockingly large corner of the East End market.

Bruce fails to stifle a yawn. He needs to sleep, really sleep. Dream free silence for as many hours as he can salvage before the sun rises. His footsteps echo through the empty halls of Wayne Manor as he makes his way to bed. He has never been big enough to fill this much space, even with Alfred hovering over his shoulder. To turn on the lights would feel an extravagance so he shuffles through to the atrium in the dark, catching glimpses of himself in the various mirrors draped across the walls, looking like a ghost. There are deep grey circles sitting under his eyes and accentuating the aquiline line of his nose below a mop of dark hair in need of a trim.

He slogs his way upstairs, into his stark bedroom and collapses into his four poster bed where the sheets have sat undisturbed for the past two nights. The drapes fall closed behind him like so much smoke, cradling him in a nest of blank nothingness that proceeds to open wide its jaws and swallow him whole.

Gotham is a grey, boxey little city that likes to elect mayors who think there is something significant about this waste bucket of a town. The factories shut down over a decade ago and the docks were never able to plug the gap in the job market they left behind. At night, downtown struggles to lure customers into its pitiful selection of clubs and restaurants that never do as well as the strip joints that have slowly been encroaching over all available property for the past ten years.

The rain could drown you at any time of day. Gothamites put up their umbrellas on instinct as soon as they step out into the street. A good anorak is an essential investment.

Jonathan doesn’t much like getting wet, but he’s getting used to it. He no longer believes there’s any such thing as a dry pair of shoes and he naturally assumes that whenever he steps out of the rain his clothes will cling to him in damp desperation. His doctor thinks he has a condition. A runny nose and a wet cough that doesn’t want to budge. He wishes his would be minions inspired the kind of confidence in him that he didn’t feel compelled to take to the streets and handle his business himself, but the few times he has let them get on with the sales side of things he has been worried to the point of distraction that they’re misrepresenting his brand. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Not that you can see it from behind the clouds, but the sun has barely started to paint the town a grimy shade of grey when he sets out. It looks nothing like the dream city he had been so rudely shoveled into the night before; that whole escapade is going to wind up costing him days’ worth of valuable time and so its going to wind up costing him money. The enigmatic foreigner purporting to be peddling an unmatchable product seemed unphased when he called to reschedule, but Jonathan doesn’t like the idea that he came off at all unprofessional. 

He’ll feel stupid for worrying about professionalism if he’s handed bogus samples, but still.

The East End hasn’t seen much in the way of new development in over a decade and the crumbling tenement blocks house all kinds of junkies. The stuff Jonathan carries assures him safe passage through this gangland nightmare, if he were cut out of the supply chain people would riot. The police don’t really patrol round this way save to round up stragglers at the end of the quarter to meet their arrest quotas. Jonathan has never been stupid enough to stay out in the open when he sees them coming.

But he hates the rain anyway, and all his best clients stay tucked up safe in their self-made prisons. No one really bothers to lock the doors round here anymore, there’s only so much a flimsy piece of metal can do to stop someone intent on accessing your property. He slips in to the first apartment block on the far edge of fourteenth street and starts knocking on doors, waiting for haggard faces to peer out from the cracks they create into their collapsing lives beyond. Jonathan no longer bothers to recognise individual faces. He recognises need, that’s enough.

Hands twitching as he hands over their poison of choice, Jonathan smiles out from underneath the hood of his anorak, condensation forming on his glasses. They hand over wads of cash, everything they can scrape together and they thank him. They’re so grateful. They never bother to ask why he doesn’t dress himself better, why he doesn’t have a nice car, why he doesn’t have any underlings. No one seems all that interested in finding out what he does with the money.

Jonathan sells only the highest quality product of course, and when he gets hold of the supposedly better ingredients coming in from out of town he'll sell event better. No one wants the watered down shit the mob touts. He’s surprised it took so long for Falcone and Maroni to start eating out of his hand.

“Evening.” Jonathan says to a scrawny black teenager with a smack addict figure and a lost look in his eyes. “Keeping busy?”

The kid almost nods as he hands over a few bills. Jonathan holds out heroine. It’s all well and good.

God, this drug is magical. Leave your customers desperate and dying without it, but too weary and weak to do anything to you if you try to rinse them. The business side of things really isn’t what attracted him to this profession but it’s a delightful bonus to keep in his back pocket.

It takes the best part of the day to canvas three blocks before Jonathan heads to the top floor of what is affectionately known as the Empire State in this neck of the woods. He knocks on the door up to what had once been the penthouse and waits for a stick thin man of questionable ethnic origin with a shock of electric blue hair to open up.

“Heya Scarecrow.” Rally says. He’s wearing a lab coat and a pair of beach shorts, both stained with unnameable chemicals.

“Afternoon, Rally.” Jonathan nods and follows him up into the unlit room beyond. Palms sweating with excitement, heartbeat racing as the stink of escaping soporifs hits him. Rally is perhaps the only person Jonathan has known for more than three years without spontaneously deciding that he is an untrustworthy heathen, and that’s only because he’s such a notorious shut in with no friends.

Chemically enhanced dreaming isn’t illegal. The mass market dream machines and soporifs are just pathetically inadequate for anyone with a real passion or addiction for the stuff. Jonathan hasn’t paid any attention to dreaming laws in years.

Rally stops in front of the plastic sheeting leading through to the den itself. The room is lit by dingy grey light coming in through a filthy window, highlighting his blown pupils and permanently stunned expression. He likes crystal meth, but calling him an addict would be unfair for now. He gets a kick out of putting people down for days on end, though, and Jonathan can sympathise with that.

“You got my order?” Rally needles him in the ribs.

“Depends. Do you have mine?”

Rally nods. “Couple of old folks from down near Middlemarch. Jeannie and Betsy or some shit like that. Came here all on their own. Stupid cunts.”

“Excellent.” Jonathan pushes past the plastic curtains and into the den. Once upon a time, the penthouse was all clean walls and stylish concrete flooring. Rally has draped this section in last decade's favourite mass market Indian inspired rugs and blankets, right up to the ceiling, making it feel closed off and quiet. Like a womb, Jonathan always thinks, ready to birth people into the world inside their heads.

“These two?” Jonathan gestures to the two old women laid up un the back row, asleep but not plugged into the machine.

“Yeah, yeah.” Rally’s eye twitches. “Where’s the stuff?”

Jonathan dips into his bag and pulls out five canisters of his super strength soporif. The stuff that sticks under your skin and makes the break of day look like hellfire. He never uses it himself, of course, but people talk about the after effects with stars in their eyes.

Rally breaks into an unsteady grin looking down at his hoard. “Great! That’s great. I’ll probably need another delivery in a couple of days. Might be able to rustle up some new recruits for you by then.”

“That would be very kind of you.” Jonathan smiles at him, opening up the hidden pocket at the bottom of his bag that contains his samples for the day. This, right here, is his real passion. This is what it’s all really about.

While Jonathan works and the dreamers dream, Rally babbles. He can be overly friendly at times, warbling on about the conspiracy theories he fills his spare time with. Irritating, but a small price to pay for a ready supply of guinea pigs.

“I’m just saying!” Rally squawks. “If everyone had their own robot there would be a lot less war in the world.”

Jonathan grunts to show he’s listening and doesn’t look up. Rally leans in closer, eyes trained on the blank faces of the nameless body Johnathan is working on. “Yo, Scarecrow. You heard of this new guy in the neighbourhood?”

“Maroni?” Jonathan raises an eyebrow. Maroni’s hardly new, but his concerted efforts to garner local influence certainly are. If that idiot thinks he’s going to take Gotham from Falcone over an issue of public image he’s got a lot to learn.

“Nah, not the Italians. This guy’s Cuban I think. Real weird little dude, thinks that if we all band together we could take down the government or some shit.”

Or some shit. Jonathan snorts. High minded street preachers using politics in place of religion are hardly news round here.

“Could be trouble.” Rally continues. “He wants to like, help people get clean. And stuff. He’s poached a few guys from the big players and all, might get to work on our client base soon enough. Or your client base, mostly.”

Talking a few clear minded idiots into joining a hopeless cause is one thing. Talking knuckle dragging junkies into putting down their needles is something else. Jonathan fills a syringe with the bright orange liquid he’s been pouring all his resources in to for the past three months. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

He grabs the old woman’s arm and slides the needle into the crook of her elbow. The plunger drops and it takes less than a minute for the first scream to rip through her body as she convulses on the broken down stretcher she’s lying on. Twisting in on herself, begging to fall apart.

Nothing breaks. She screeches in pain and it’s not enough to wake her. Rally’s eyes stay trained on her face with a look of slack jawed wonder and Jonathan smiles down at the fruits of his labour. This feeling of peace is beyond any substance known to man.

Bruce wakes and immediately wishes that he hadn’t. He doesn’t want to know what time it is, too early and too late all at once.

There aren’t supposed to be any cameras in the Manor, save for the brief flashes of debauchery that get leaked to the press after Bruce’s more extravagant parties to remind the public that he’s just as stupid and harmless as they’ve always suspected. This lack of surveillance begs a lot of questions about the quality of Alfred’s service, such as how he always manages to be exactly where he’s needed without ever being asked.

More specifically, how he’s able to arrive in Bruce’s room with a fresh pot of coffee every morning no more than ten minutes after Bruce wakes up.

“Good morning, Master Bruce.”

Bruce hears the door swing open and tries to burrow into his duvet. “It’s still morning?”

“Barely. If you hop out of bed right now you might catch some midday sun.” Alfred sets the coffee down on the dresser and goes to open the curtains. Bruce flinches back but it’s really not so bad. Just more grey. When he opens up the drapes on his bed he can see water staining the balcony beyond his bedroom window.

“Did you find what you needed last night, sir?” Alfred hands Bruce a mug of coffee and goes to pour one for himself.

Flashes of the dream return to Bruce. Already, it feels far away and foggy and yet he can clearly recall the line of the streets he drove down to get to Crane. With pinpoint accuracy he can identify the buildings he enlarged to create the Gotham off his dreams and the lies he told his sleeping mind to bring about an environment he could move in.

He wrote everything important down on a piece of paper sat next to his computer. He’ll be fine. Bruce nods, yawning as he struggles into a sitting position, keeping tight hold of his coffee. The ceramic of the mug heats up fast, scalding his palms and shocking him awake.

“Enough to take to the commissioner?” Alfred prompts.

Technically, anything is enough to take to the commissioner. Jim Gordon would probably be very happy for another lead to follow. But the police are slow with these things, and unwilling to venture into the more unsavoury parts of the city without hard proof that their efforts won’t be wasted. “No.”

Alfred purses his lips like he thinks he’s being lied to and Bruce doesn’t have time to indulge his irritation. He takes long sips of his coffee and revels in the way it makes his throat shriek with the heat. “Do I have plans for the day?”

“Well, sir. You are supposed to be meeting that charming Miss Westholm for dinner but otherwise you may do as you please.” Alfred leans slightly too hard into the word ‘charming’ and Bruce smirks into his cup. Kitty Westholm is a budding popstar with next to nothing between her ears and Bruce hates having to spend time with her, but she’s as good for his image as he for hers.

The people want a big stupid celebrity of their very own. One that can’t be traced back to any Far East terrorist cells or backdoor university programmes. As far as the people know, when Bruce Wayne dreams he does so for recreational purposes. He’s the kind of rich that can afford that.

“That’s at eight, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

With a groan, Bruce drags himself out of bed and towards his dresser, only to decide that the gym clothes he’s pulling out of it are more or less identical to his pajamas and might as well not bother.

“I have a lot to do today, Alfred.”

“Well then, you best be getting on with it.”

To Bruce’s eternal chagrin, brainless celebrities are supposed to look like walking Gods. Left to his own devices he's wiry, his metabolism operating at super speed, he has to fight for the chiseled look. If he could have his life all over again he’d go back and pick a better cover.

Alfred hovers at the edge of the home gym Bruce has built into the basement, ready to spot him on any weights and pass him overblown protein shakes. While he waits to be made use of, he checks the phone records Bruce currently has tapped to be sure nothing was missed overnight. “Looks like it was quiet out there while you were otherwise occupied.”

The dull crackle of radio static echoes through the basement, a poor replacement for the onerous dance music that typically plays in public gymnasiums. It would be so easy for Bruce to tell the GCPD where the abandoned radio tower that the criminal elements of the city run their transmissions through is and it would be shut down by the end of the day, but he’s become reliant on the information the radio occasionally spits out. The system is simple – vague plans and veiled dream coordinates are shared over the airwaves and plans are made in dreams.

It’s not illegal to talk about illegal things in a dream. Even if someone were to spy on one of these meetings, and it’s not like police the world over don’t regularly try to. You can’t prove in a court of law that the things you saw weren’t subconscious imaginings.

“Does the name razalgul mean anything to you?” Bruce asked around snatched breaths from the treadmill.

Alfred shakes his head. “No, sir. Should it?”

“I don’t think so. It’s a codename for Crane’s new supplier.”

“I was under the impression that Mister Crane had yet to start doing business with this mysterious character. Seeing as how you disrupted their meeting last night.”

“They’ll start work soon enough.”

Alfred carefully raises an eyebrow. “Well, sir. If you were to interrupt them every night, they’d never be able to meet and we would have solved your problem.”

“You’re the one who’s always telling me I need to spend more time in the real world.”

“Touché, master Bruce.”

The occasional burst of voices over the radio tells Bruce nothing interesting. Along with the more hard worn gang members and independent actors in Gotham, kids sometimes tap into the frequency to arrange parties around parental locks on their other devices. A few local radio stations are just close enough to this frequency that they surface here every now and then, the conspiracy theorists, the wannabe talk show hosts cutting their teeth on uninspired interviews with minor local celebrities, the preachers who still think enough people listen to the radio that they can put the Good Word out here.

Bruce is familiar with most of them; he has to be. The few times he’s mistaken an overzealous amateur for a threat is somewhat embarrassing. There’s a new guy on this morning, preaching political enlightenment in a thick Latin accent. Soon enough he’s wiped out by the steady buzz of nothing as they ddrft back in to static.

Alfred sighs and opens up the morning’s Gazette. “Don’t suppose you’d be open to me switching to Radio 4, sir?”

Bruce wishes. He powers down the treadmill and moves on to the weights to round off his workout.

Raz algul yields a Romanian translation of ‘once a year’. Rassallgul is Estonian for ‘scarlet’. Ras el gol is Spanish nonsense and rassel gul is similarly incomprehensible in Russian.

Bruce runs the sound through his teeth, testing the stress of different syllables to see how they fit into his understanding of world languages. He’s starting to suspect it’s Arabic, which is annoying because he’s never formally studied Arabic. He’s more than passable in Urdu and Farsi, which has plugged the gaps in the multi lingual circles he moves in whenever he meets native Arabic speakers. In a fit of stubborn resentment, he leaves his Arabic dictionaries to the very last.

The day is marching on, the muddy light of early sunset already bursting through the library windows, throwing the shadows of the bookcases into sharp relief. Not for the first time, Bruce wishes he had a space big enough for all his equipment, but Alfred won’t let him get to any of the bigger rooms in the Manor and his servers won’t fit in the library comfortably. He’s toyed with the idea of setting up some space in the caves below the Manor but poking around in the porous space below the foundations seems like a recipe for disaster.

Surrounded by towers of books, Bruce lets his spine cur ever further forward as he loses himself to the process of translation. He reaches for his twin Arabic dictionaries and flicks through to grammar pages of one, while using the other to search for vocabulary. It’s a tricky process when he’s not sure exactly which spelling or declension of each word he’s supposed to be looking for and once he thinks he has a reasonable translation put together, he has to give himself a refresher course in Arabic naming conventions.

He’s pretty sure no one is actually called this. It’s strange, megalomaniacal, and exactly the kind of thing he’s come to expect from people fashioning themselves as supervillains. Ra’s al Ghul – The Head of the Demon.

A cursory Google search reveals a host of Gothic music groups and satanic cults. Not the sort of people Bruce would expect to be in bed with drug dealers but you can never be sure. He starts categorising groups and their leaders, prioritising groups stationed close to Gotham and groups with any obvious connection to drug activity and working out from there. He gets distracted by a PDF of a book on Arab resistance during the first crusade, particularly a note in the appendices that is careful not make any claims about early dreaming science but implies that a man calling himself Ra’s al Ghul held off the papal forces by inducing nightmares. The extract is short but when he searches for the author he finds that Talia Head is a professor of medieval Arab history with a borderline academic interest in Middle Eastern literature on the women’s campus of King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. She has given interviews in English in the past and there’s a direct number to her office on the university website.

Bruce runs the time difference in his head, wondering how much she’d despise him if he tried to call her now, when Alfred comes marching into the study.

Bruce looks up. “Is dinner ready?”

“No, Master Bruce. Though if you don’t get a move on you’re going to miss yours entirely.”

He agreed to take that ridiculous paparazzi bait diva out tonight, if only he’d just up and forgotten. Bruce stalks out of his study to get changed.

“We’ll call it fashionably late, shall we sir?” Alfred calls after him.

“So then, like, I didn’t know what to do with that? Like, why would she call me when she knew I was going to be at the premier? You can’t do that and then get angry at me for not picking up.” Kitty Westholm brushes aside a perfectly curled strand of her naturally blonde hair and takes a sip of the bright pink drink Bruce has bought for her. Objectively, she’s very pretty. Wide, blue eyes, plush lips, a rather dainty nose set into a heart shaped face over an hourglass figure that she always dresses to emphasise. Tonight’s number s midnight blue, form fitting and low cut. If nothing else, Bruce likes the view.

She’s rambling about a disagreement between herself and another Gotham socialite, both of them trying to make a name for themselves at a national level. Bruce does his best to pay attention and to offer something that looks like sympathy for her troubles. “She’s probably jealous.”

Kitty preens visibly. “You think?”

“Sure. You’re beautiful, you’ve got the world at your feet. Why wouldn’t she be?”

The flash of something shrewd that crosses Kitty’s face doesn’t escape Bruce. “And you’re so rich and handsome. I bet you have plenty of people jealous of you.”

“Naturally.” Bruce smirks.

They make inane small talk over plates of exorbitantly priced snack food that come arranged in little parcels designed to be Instagram ready. Crash is a new restaurant, decked out in white and silver but with enough yellow lighting that the room doesn’t feel cold, just daring its patrons to wear something heavily patterned so that they stick out from the stark background. The clientele swing young and trust funded, five years ago Bruce wouldn’t have been at all out of place here and Kitty might as well have tenure given  the number of gossip rags that have caught her using it as a base for nights out on the town.

They say she’s seeing several men at once. They say it like any of the men involved are supposed to care. It’s fine. She’s the cover and Bruce is the money.

He excuses himself sometimes after the fifth bite sized course has been brought to them and makes his way towards the bathroom. He passes tables packed with the children of old friends of the Wayne family, reminding himself that they are old enough to drink the cocktails they’re throwing back these days. He supposes they’re more his peers than their parents, but he’s had a stake in the Wayne Enterprises bottom line since he was a teenager and he’s watched them all grow up under his nose rather than at his side. A few of them wave to him and he can’t help feeling like an uninvited grown up at a child’s sleepover.

The bathrooms are ridiculously decadent, complete with individual towels to dry your hands that have to be deposited into a laundry basket by the door for cleaning. In an attempt to grant customers privacy at the urinal, Crash has dulled the lighting to the point that it’s hard for Bruce to make out what he’s doing.

The faint thrum of music from the nightclub next door buzzes through the wall. As Bruce washes his hands, he stares into the muted fire of his eyes reflected in the mirror over the sink and starts to slip into a daydream.

Back out in the restaurant, the conversation is loud but never loud enough to block out the people at the table over from you. Bruce looks towards Kitty and sees her smiling down at her phone, looking more interested in the screen that she has in him all evening.  

Everyone looks so happy, like while he was gone each table was treated to the funniest joke of the evening. Bruce smiles slightly and starts back towards Kitty but hasn’t gone more than two steps before he’s overcome by the urge to head to the bar.

He shouldn’t. It would typically be considered ruse, but it’s not like Kitty needs him to have a good time.

The design of the bar is very reserved, decked out in what looks like illegally imported hardwood but that he already knows the management will swear is a repurposed antique. The rows odd bottles lining the back wall are dimly lit and there don’t look to be any menus. The more he looks at it, the more hopelessly old fashioned and out of place it seems.

Bruce has been running with old timers since he was old enough to pick out his own suit. He slides into the empty seat at the top of the bar, a couple of seats down from the only other occupant who’s nursing a gin and tonic, straggles of oddly coloured hair obscuring his face. Unusual hair colours are in, or so the papers say.

Bruce cranes his neck, looking for the barman but he can’t see anyone close at hand. He frowns and settles back in his stool, weighing up how long he can wait against the tedium of having to engage Kitty in another hour or so’s conversation. His fingers tap out a rhythm on the bar top and the texture of lacquered wood reminds him of the grand piano sitting in the drawing room of Wayne Manor, barely touched since his mother died.

“This guy’s slow, but worth waiting for.” The other man at the bar says. His voice is weirdly pitched, just the wrong side of grating and his accent isn’t from Gotham.

Bruce blinks at him. “Really?”

“Yeah. He doesn’t stinge on the booze, always says that his hand slipped.” The man’s voice cracks over a laugh that slips out at the end of his sentence like an afterthought. “But hey, the booze is right there. If you’re in a rush you could always hop over and make yourself a little something. I won’t tell.”

“Most bars don’t actually keep their alcohol up front. It’s probably just coloured water.”

The man sniffs his drink and takes a sip. “Seems like booze to me.”

His shoulders are hunched up around his ears and the cut of his suit is too long to be fashionable. Ratty leather gloves squeak against the side of his glass and the longer Bruce stares at him, the greasier his hair looks. The understated lighting makes it hard to pick out his outline.

But he has a point, and Bruce really wants a drink. With a cursory glance over his shoulder to be sure no one is looking, he hoists himself up and over the bar. The floor on the other side is creaking wood, they didn’t bother to tile it over when they did the rest of the restaurant. Bruce’s pulse picks up, the minor thrill of stepping out of bounds catching up to him.

He straightens up and starts rifling through the spirits. Whiskey. He wants whiskey. He wants to make a cocktail with really high quality whiskey, just to spoil the flavour.

“What are you making?” The man asks.

Bruce shrugs. “Whatever I can find the ingredients for.”

“They have the ingredients for most things. What do you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mint julep?”

“No.”

“Old fashioned?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You want a Manhattan?”

The spirits are framed by a runner of silver coloured brass, polished to a high sheen so that you can catch your reflection on the warped surface. Bruce spies the dark edges of his profile out of the corner of his eye while reaching for something aged and Scottish and has to pause to take a closer look. His jawline is interrupted by a line of rubber, bleeding into a mask that covers his face save for the hole left for his blacked out eyes. The ears of the cowl twist in strange directions in his reflection, like looking into a funhouse mirror.

Bruce freezes. This is all wrong.

“You wanna know how I got these scars?”

Bruce rounds on the man at the bar and when he sees him can’t be sure if he screams in terror or is struck dumb. The man is smiling, his badly cut purple suit and greasy green hair draining the humour of his grin only for the spark in his eyes to pull it all back in. He is a mess of colour, indistinct points that Bruce can’t focus on, whirling together around a pair of scars that match but aren’t identical, carving the tail end of his grin into his face for safekeeping.

“Who-?” Bruce starts, only to feel the sharp tug on his diaphragm signalling the start of the kick.

The man smiles ever wider and waves at Bruce. “So long.”

The bar vanishes. The restaurant vanishes. The empty space around him starts to dissipate and Bruce is falling back into a body that is not necessarily ready to retrieve him. It’s almost-

He comes to just outside the bathroom door, looking out across the restaurant to where Kitty is furiously texting someone, her mouth drawn into a thin line that does nothing for her appearance.

“Are you alright sir?” A waiter asks, passing by with a tower of tiny snacks balanced on one hand.

Bruce reaches for the wall, trying to hide the shaking of his legs. He scrapes a hand across his eyes, trying to wake himself up. He had been in the bathroom, he had been washing his hands.

The waiter’s smile drops a notch, evidently not prepared to deal with a legitimately ill customer. Crash probably doesn’t pay him enough for this nonsense. Ever so gently, he steps towards Bruce and it’s practically possible to see the words ‘not part of my job description’ hovering over his head. “Is there anything I can do?”

No, not at all. Bruce pinches the bridge of his nose and wills his brewing panic into a dark corner to be dealt with later. “I’m fine, thanks. Think I had a little too much to drink.”

“I’ll bring some water to your table.”

“Thanks.” 

The waiter slips away and Bruce carefully peels himself away from the wall. Kitty is looking up from her phone at him, thoroughly confused.

“Where were you?” She asks when he drops into his seat.

“There was a queue for the bathroom.”

She looks unconvinced. “You know, if you need to slip off to do a line or whatever I’m not really in a position to judge. You might even think about sharing.”

Now she’s going to get into a huff about non-existent drugs. Great. Any plans Bruce might have had to take her tome tonight have flown out the window.

Laughter drifts across the restaurant. Bruce sits up very straight and looks round in the direction its coming from, over by the bar.

Except there is no bar, the bar was a dream. Someone knocked him out in the bathroom without him realising and he dreamt about a man at a bar. The fast decaying fragments of the dream that have followed him out of the somnosphere don’t give him much idea of what the man had looked like, save for a bloody smile. Bruce couldn’t pick him out of a line up to save his life.

The empty space at the back of Crash is laughing at him. Bruce turns back to Kitty and is tempted to snap at her for scowling.

She wrinkles her nose. “Whatever you took, it’s making you act weird.”

“I didn’t take anything.” Bruce snarls and immediately regrets it. The last thing he needs is the local papers running a story about how he has something of a temper. There are enough unfounded rumours flying around about his bad bedroom etiquette as things stand.

Kitty flinches, her eyes widening in surprise. Her mouth flaps open. “I- Whatever you say.”

“I’m not staying out tonight.” Bruce tells her, reaching for his wallet and signalling at passing wait staff to bring him the bill.”

Shock morphs into anger. Kitty makes a noise somewhere in between a growl and a cough and stands to leave. “Yeah? Well you might as well stay in every night from now on, because you won’t be hearing from me again.”

Just loud enough for everyone to have heard, not so angry that she’s going to look like the bad guy. She's good at the public image thing. If they had anything in common, her and Bruce could have fostered a very productive business relationship.

Bruce holds her gaze and doesn’t insult her by rolling his eyes. He nods. “Ok.”

“And you’re paying.” Kitty leaves in a huff and Bruce hands over his card to a thankfully silent waitress who he tips handsomely. He’s still on edge, twitching at every blip of laughter that bubbles up through the conversation surrounding him.

They’re probably laughing at him, he thinks. They probably think they know him. What they think doesn’t matter though; anyone stupid enough to cross the Batman like that is already on the other side of the city, laughing it up with their compatriots.

The crack of the ice beneath his feet is terrifyingly real. Bruce flounders, trying to draw breath before the water closes over his head. Not for the first time, he wonders what would happen if he were to die in a dream. Ostensibly, he’d wake up, but would he be able to unremember what it felt like to drown?

In theory, with enough mental fortitude he should be able to dream the water away. But he’s relatively inexperienced next to the people he’s training with and all he can really process in the moment is blind panic. He falls down into the frigid lake and sees the ice overhead shining with an eerie blue light.

The hole he fell through vanishes immediately, filled in by the parts of his brain that are determined he should die down her and fragments of ice drifting back in to place. His only hope is that Ducard will show him the way back to dry land.

It doesn’t happen, it’s not coming. Bruce holds his breath till it feels like his chest will burst, banging on the ice ceiling overhead. Soon enough, he will be subsumed.

From up atop the Madonie Mountains you can watch the sun be swallowed by the sea as the day drifts lazily towards night. No more than an hour outside Palermo and the land has been given back to nature, the shrill hum of crickets cutting through the noise of children playing in the street. Birds dip overhead to catch the last of the day’s insects and the first of the night’s. It’s peaceful beyond belief here. Carmine never wants to leave. When he was a kid his parents told stories of the old country that were as disparaging as they were homesick. Sicily was beautiful and vibrant and the food was the best in the world, but it was also poor and filthy and no place to raise a child. Carmine would nod when his father cursed the name of the town that had raised him, then he sat back and watched his parents work themselves to early graves.

They were wrong about everything. Sicily is parasdise and hard labour is a losing game. To think his father used to duck and hide whenever the mob came by to offer him opportunities to make real money. Testing his desperation against his drive to earn an honest buck.

They stayed desperate. Carmine’s mother was barely in the ground when her son pushed his way past the security guards at a painfully lacklustre downtown strip club and offered his services. He can hardly be blamed if they didn’t realise he was the threat they had failed to guard against. Gotham is a shithole and it’s easy enough to maintain control of the scene if you give half a damn about your business.

Sicily is a pipedream. Carmine’s only really been here twice but both times he’s felt almost supernaturally connected to his father’s hometown. Someday he might give up the life he’s built for himself, let Maroni roll in like he so wants to and come live the rest of his days in the mountains.

In the dream the sunset lasts all night and the smell of sewage that occasionally blows through town in the real is absent. Carmine sits on the edge of the world sipping limoncello and waiting for power to come to him.

Predictably, Maroni shows up half an hour early. He’s wearing a suit plucked straight out of his day to day business and his hair has been over-gelled into a ridiculous wave. He signals the barman to bring him a whiskey and drops into the seat opposite Carmine. “Evening.”

Carmine could shoot him straight out of the dream but then he’d be stuck waiting for him to plug back in. Salvatore Maroni has time to spare and he’s petty enough to leave them all waiting for his arrival till the end of the night.

“You gotta check your watch.” Carmine tells him without looking up. He offers Maroni a hand and waits for it to be shaken.

“What?” Maroni’s grinning, Carmine just knows it. Sitting back in his chair and smiling like the world belongs to him. “It’s a nice dream, Carmine. Can’t blame a guy for wanting to make the most of it.”

“That’s Don Falcone to you.”

“Whatever you say.”

They’re supposed to slip into a stilted and awkward silence, but Maroni likes to talk. His favoured power play is to keep people’s mind on anything but the business at hand while he needles you for information. He’s good at it, Carmine will give him that. And anyone would be lucky to have him as a high ranking general. But he has none of the gravitas of a leader.

So Carmine lets him talk, responding only when it would be past the point of impropriety not to. Maroni’s attempts to trick him into revealing sensitive information are mostly centred on the Gotham drug trade, but he slips in a few references to counterfeit designer clothing being brought in from Bangladesh. Port towns – you gotta love how easy it is to run a racket through them.

To his credit, Maroni rarely lets anything slip. Impressive, given how averse he is to shutting his damned mouth. What he does give away is a profound anxiety about his newest supply line, dancing around the issue with just enough purpose that Carmine’s certain he doesn’t realise that the Scarecrow is working for both of them.

Crane is a horrible little man, but useful. He moves with military precision and always delivers top quality product. Carmine suspects that the GCPD are already on t him but lack the evidence to bring him in.

Gambol and Chechen arrive together at the agreed time. Gambol is wearing a rather fine suit and a ridiculous quantity of gold jewellery, Chechen is in designer jeans and a worn leather jacket, followed by the pack of dogs that accompany him wherever he dreams. Carmine stands to greet them, shaking hands before inviting them to sit.

“The food here’s excellent.” Carmine assures them. It’s his dream, it will taste as good to him as it does to them.

Chechen grins and calls over a waitress who’s definitely one of his projections, far too blonde and well endowed for Carmine to have bothered.

Gambol shrugs. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather we get down to business.”

“Business? Please! We’ve got all night.” Chechen protests. “This is a nice place you’ve got here, Don Falcone.”

“Thank you.” Falcone smiles at him. He doesn’t like the man, but he likes his money and how gloriously predictable he is. “I see no reason that we can’t discuss business over food.”

“Right.” Maroni agrees. “No calories here, gentlemen. You gotta make the most of it.”

Calories. What kind of a man worries about calories? Maroni spends a godforsaken amount of time at the gym, running his body through drills that only serve to keep him slim and attractive, so than when he takes a paid for date to bed the gasp she makes as she peels off his clothes is real. Disgusting.

They all have the lamb, which comes from the kitchen as bloody as Carmine remembers it, and exchange small talk over the more mundane aspects of their recent ventures. Gambol deals primarily in arms though he keeps a few high stakes poker games running around the city. Chechen runs the ports, keeping them all in stock and letting his people move the better counterfeited branded merchandise. Maroni's still flapping about with protection rackets and marijuana, leaving the Falcone contingent to handle the classier drugs, the fraud, the forgery and most importantly, the money laundry.

Carmine has worked hard, paying off the right people and investing in the right accountants, to make him the only game in town able to handle everyone’s accounts unnoticed by the feds. He has clients as far north as New York City.

Gambol is the first to turn their collective attention to more important matters. He lacks appreciation for the fine art of conversation but he’s smart enough to learn. His street credentials are otherwise impeccable. “I’m telling you, firepower don’t matter when you’re losing people. This new dreamer dude, he knows a little something about poaching from other people’s stables.”

“New dude? What new dude?” Chechen shrugs, plucking a cigar from a pocket. “Hard to be threatened by a man if you’ve never seen him.”

“On the contrary, it’s much easier to be threatened by a man you know by reputation alone.” Maroni replies. “Take Carmine here. I’m sorry, Don Falcone. Ask around the streets and everyone’s pissing themselves at the mere mention of him, but once you get to know him you see that he’s a very reasonable man.”

Reasonable. If Maroni thinks that’s an insult then Carmine doesn’t much care. He likes to think of himself as steady, dependable, someone you can have a drink with before he blows your brains out. That’s important.”

“Gentlemen, we’ve all heard stories of something strange going on in our combined territory and I think we’re in agreement that something needs to be done. Personally, I’m eager to find the guy responsible as soon as possible and make an example of him.” Carmine holds out his hands for the tacit agreement he knows will follow.

“You wanna propose a strategy?” Maroni asks.

Carmine shrugs. “We’ve all worked with each other for some time now, I would hope that that alliance will hold and we can pool our knowledge, so to speak.”

“And when we have this knowledge, how will we use it?” Chechen blows out a perfect smoke ring that hovers in the air over their heads. In the dream, the cigar doesn’t stink so rotten as it would in the real.

“We find the guy and we go to town on him.” Gambol replies, like it’s obvious.

“We do.” Carmine agreed. “But we do it in a dream.”

For the briefest second, Maroni’s unbearable cocksure aura vanishes to be replaces by the awe of a pupil looking to the master. “Oh man.”

“A dream?” Gambol scoffs. “How’s this shithead supposed to learn his lesson in a dream? That shit ain’t real.”

“That shit ain’t illegal.” Chechen grins. “He comes to our people through dreams, we come back to him through dreams. I think maybe his charisma and persuasion won’t be such a problem with his eyes closed.”

“We screw up his mind.” Maroni’s face is lit up like a kid on Christmas. “And I know just the guy to do it. He can do this thing in a dream, scares you to shit. Reckon it could scar you for life if he really let loose.”

If Carmine hadn’t known about the Scarecrow situation before tonight, he would have brought a world of pain down on Maroni for talking like that. As things stand, he’s content to watch things play out, to drop the knife at the last moment. Flies can be caught with honey, but foxes are easier to snare with live bait.

So he nods, like he’s doing the guy a favour by using his intel. “Good. Are we in agreement, then? We wanna track this guy down and ambush him in a dream?”

Maroni and Chechen are quick to nod. Gambol takes a moment, considering his options. “You sure we can do some real damage that way?”

Carmine smiles. “Son, if we play our cards right we’ll rip every weapon this sorry son of a bitch has straight out of his hands. No one falls in line behind a man who can’t carry himself.”

Under Sicilian skies, painted pink by the perpetually setting sun, four men shake hands and settle in to discussions on the particulars of their joint venture. They smile and scheme on the veranda of a restaurant that really exists but not like this. The low hubbub of the diners that Carmine likes to imagine are always here drifts through from the room beyond, people talking over some of the best food they’ve ever eaten in their entire lives. Sometimes it really does feel like you could have it all.