Chapter Text
Batman glared at the computer monitor. Trying to attach the mysterious “Oracle,” who had helped Robin fight the Scarecrow and offered further help in the future, to a real person had proven extraordinarily difficult. They were less of an Oracle than they were a ghost, with IP addresses leading to virtual machines hosted secretly on private cloud services. It had taken him hours to even find that much, and he wasn’t any closer to actually figuring out who Oracle was.
It was still entirely possible that they were an AI and not a person, although his gut told him otherwise. Something about the way they’d approached Robin suggested humanity.
He might have to give up trying to follow the digital trail and try to find Oracle by figuring out how they knew what they knew. They definitely had access to the GCPD’s files, but so did he, and he knew they hadn’t gotten all their information from that source. Then there was the matter of the help they’d given Robin at the school. How could they have known Scarecrow was lying about which group was getting a placebo instead of fear gas? Could they have bugs on Scarecrow, or in Rick’s school?
Scarecrow himself had never shown this level of aptitude with computers before, but it was possible that he’d found himself a hacker and was playing a long con… but that didn’t match his usual MO at all. Jonathan Crane was far more concerned with the human psyche than with machines, and was too arrogant to make a plan that presupposed failure. He especially wouldn’t plan on letting himself get within an inch of getting caught, like he had at the school. Some villains might treat Arkham as a sort of vacation home, but the Scarecrow loathed the place.
No, the most probable possibility was that Oracle was, or was working for, a rival of Scarecrow’s, and had suborned someone in Crane’s organization.
Which just led back to the most urgent reason he needed to ID Oracle: it was highly probable that some of the information they’d given him was false, but which parts? Everything he and Robin had been able to check against their own files or through other sources had proven to be true.
Bruce leaned back and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. A lot of things had fallen by the wayside lately. He wasn’t getting enough sleep, and he was overdue for a visit to Selina in prison. Somehow, maintaining his current level of friendship with her as Bruce suddenly seemed like too much of a risk to Batman; everyone knew about the link between Batman and Catwoman, after all. It was too late to fix it, really; it had been a minor scandal when Bruce stood by her through her sentencing and everything, although he’d managed to spin it as a combination of “Bruce is standing by a friend in a difficult situation, what a nice guy” and “Bruce still trusts her even though she’s a criminal, what a sap.”
The police scanner blared to life, and Batman scolded himself for almost hoping there was a crisis at hand to take him away from this Oracle headache.
“All units, please, oh god!” The officer’s voice was panicked. “Giant spiders, Garvey park, must be seven feet tall--their legs, don’t let them touch me!”
“Please clarify--” the dispatcher began, but was cut off.
“Spiders!” the officer repeated before dissolving into terrified sobs.
“Scarecrow,” Batman growled, and stood up from the computer. He pressed the intercom button. “R, cave in 10.”
Robin was suited up and ready to go in seven minutes. Batman gave him an approving half-nod as they got into the Batmobile.
“Scarecrow seems to have found another batch of experimental subjects,” he said as they sped out of the cave.
“Oh, great. Do we have enough antidote?” Robin asked.
“I stocked the car after the attack on your school,” Batman said. “We could inoculate half the city if we needed to.”
“Wish the stuff lasted longer,” Robin said. “Imagine if everybody could just get their flu shot and their Scarecrow shot every year.”
“Professor Crane would come up with something else,” he said grimly. “He’s resourceful. It wouldn’t work for long.”
“Yeah, but imagine his face the first time he tried to gas a bunch of people and they all just shrugged it off,” Robin said half-wistfully. The teen took two antidote pills, then gave two to Batman. The rest of the antidote was in preloaded syringes; it would be impossible to get pills into a bunch of panicking civilians with any speed.
“Are you suggesting we could inoculate the entire city without him finding out?” Batman asked.
“Shut up, B, don’t ruin the dream.”
Batman didn’t dignify that with a response.
The park was a mess when they got there. Lots of people had been having a nice Saturday picnic lunch, and were now variously trying to fight or flee from invisible things, trying to fight one another, or just rocking on the ground in the fetal position. Batman was fairly certain one of the latter was Commissioner Gordon, and hoped the man hadn’t brought his sidearm to the park.
“Gas masks,” he instructed Robin. “In case he changed the formula.”
“Paranoid,” Robin muttered, but they both strapped on gas masks.
Robin hopped out of the Batmobile with a load of syringes while Batman circled around to the other side of the park. They would both start administering the antidote to civilians, watching for Scarecrow as they went. Standard procedure for gas attacks.
Batman made a mental note to change up their standard procedures more often. If Robin knew what to do without needing to be told, it was possible that someone like Scarecrow could prepare for and possibly exploit the pattern as well.
A park at noon wasn’t exactly the environment he’d designed his costume for, and terrified civilians weren’t exactly the audience he’d intended it for, either. He’d been too busy trying to track down Oracle to sleep after patrol, which had only exacerbated the sleep deficit he’d built up chasing Ra’s al Ghul across the globe, and he’d been exposed to entirely too many chemicals and experimental bioengineered diseases lately.
All in all, he was in better shape than he usually was. The civilians were too afraid of their own hallucinations to fear him or to laugh at the incongruity of his costume in the sunlit park anyway.
He stopped by the police car near the park to inoculate the officer who’d made the original call. The man wasn’t in any shape to do more than sit on the ground and shake with relief, but at least he hadn’t driven away and he hadn’t started firing his sidearm at his hallucinations.
Batman made his way to Gordon, grabbing civilians and administering the antidote as he went.
“Where’s your daughter?” he asked the commissioner as soon as he was coherent. There was no sign of her, and Robin would not be happy if Scarecrow had taken his best friend hostage again .
“Not here,” Gordon said, taking deep breaths. “I told her she was being paranoid when she didn’t want to go out. Guess the joke’s on me. How can I help?”
Batman was about to hand over some of the preloaded syringes he carried, but hesitated. A third person giving injections would be a huge help, but if this version of the fear toxin had longer-term effects that weren’t immediately apparent, or if Barbara had been taking hostage and Jim was compromised…
He shook himself and gave the man the syringes. There wasn’t that much harm he could do with them—an overdose of the antidote wouldn’t cause anything worse than temporary nausea and fatigue—and having Gordon’s help would cut down the time it took to calm everyone down and get them out of danger.
“Did you see where Scarecrow went?” Batman asked as the two of them worked their way through the civilians.
“I think he just drove away,” Gordon said. “It was weird, more like a drive-by than a science experiment, even by Crane’s standards. He threw a bunch of smoke-bombs out the window of his car, barely even slowed down. Black sedan, covered plates.”
“Hm.”
“I know that could have been part of the hallucination, but I wasn’t exactly afraid of Scarecrow leaving ,” Gordon said, a touch defensively.
He didn’t say what he did hallucinate, and Batman didn’t ask. That sort of thing was private.
(Before Robin, it had always been his parents, but after he’d adopted the boy it was Robin every time, dead in his arms, his fault. Gotham burned while he grieved, guilty and useless.)
Someone ran at him, screaming and punching wildly. Batman took her down as gently as he could, gave her a shot in the arm, moved on.
Oracle hadn’t warned them about this ahead of time. That narrowed down either their methods or their motives, though unfortunately not both.
“B, there are some toddlers here—” Robin began over the headset mic.
“Half-dose, don’t reuse the syringe, keep this channel closed!” Batman barked.
Soon there were more inoculated people and recently-arrived, unexposed police officers than there were affected people. The process went quickly after that, and soon Batman met back up with Robin.
“You didn’t have to tell me not to reuse the syringes,” Robin grumbled when they were back in the car. “I’m not new at this.”
“I shouldn’t have had to tell you to stay off the compromised comms,” Batman growled.
“What, and let Oracle in on the secret that we give a shit about toddlers?” Robin rolled his eyes. “Seriously, you’ve been even more paranoid than usual since you got back from chasing Talia. Did something happen?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.” Sad how that was almost true.
“Then I’ve got to point it out, B: The other possibility is that being exposed to Scarecrow toxin made you more paranoid than usual. It might still be affecting you somehow.”
“I took the antidote. The sample you got was chemically identical—”
“I know, I know. But could there have been, I don’t know, something that decayed quickly enough that it wasn’t still there by the time you tested the sample? Something else that wouldn’t leave chemical traces?”
“The first possibility would have left traces,” Batman said. “Whatever it decayed into would still be there. Any changes to the formula would leave chemical traces.”
“Well, maybe the sample I grabbed at the stuff you got hit with wasn’t actually the same,” Robin said.
“Possible,” Batman conceded. “You said you took that particular syringe at random, correct? From the same batch that your friend was injected with?”
“Yeah, and she’s been acting weird too,” Robin confirmed. “Jumpy, angry, convinced people are talking about her behind her back. Paranoid.”
“Hm.” He’d tested the needle itself as well, of course, but it was clean. There was no reason he should still be affected at this state. Even if the antidote hadn’t worked, the toxin would have worked its way through his system by now. Maybe Robin was the one who was being irrationally paranoid. “You’re sure you weren’t affected by anything?”
“I guess he could have released some kind of gas in the school while I was there, but I didn’t see any kind of setup for doing that,” Robin said. “Do you think the police department’s destroyed the canister of gas they took from the school? We could test that.”
“They should have. It’s not a good thing to keep lying around. Gordon knows that.” Batman considered. “I’ll take blood samples from each of us, see if there’s anything unusual going on there, but even if there is, that still leaves the mechanism a mystery.”
“Don’t know what to tell you, B,” Robin said. “Maybe homeopathy really works and whatever’s making the change is too diluted to sense, or something.”
Batman snorted, then considered. The old Sherlock Holmes adage that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” was pure nonsense and bad detective work; you could never eliminate every possibility but one. You had to actually have evidence for the truth. Still, eliminating possibilities, however slim they might be, was still helpful.
“I’ll send the sample to Zatara,” he said. “He should be able to test it for magical influences; those wouldn’t leave chemical traces. And I’ll put a gas collector in the car, so that next time Scarecrow hits we can take samples if we get there fast enough.”
“Magic?” Robin asked. “Ugh, that would be a pain.”
“It would imply that everyone in the park today, including Gordon, is under some sort of magical influence,” Batman said grimly. “And so am I. It’s unlikely, though. Scarecrow has never used magic before.”
“He’s never done a drive-by gassing of a whole park before, either,” Robin pointed out. “Something’s changed. Maybe he went to Hogwarts.”
“Let’s hope not.”