Chapter Text
It all started with a burst of white.
White hallways with white floors that seemed endless.
It wasn’t a familiar location by any means. It was too clean to be Arkham. Too new.
He was walking, evident by the slight passing of tiles and the occasional door.
Sometimes, the hallway branched out. Yet his path was straight as an arrow.
The closer he walked to wherever his destination happened to be, the sound of a ticking clock began to steadily echo out in the background.
Then the white began to change. The walls and floor came to have green perpendicular lines crawling up their walls- the buzzing noise bouncing off of them more annoying than the persistent ticking clock.
The lines of green looked not too dissimilar to that of a circuit board and it covered every wall in sight. But why?
What was he looking for here?
A door far too different from all of the others revealed itself as the end of the unfamiliar hall- the white replaced with a sterling silver or aluminum type alloy. It too had those strange circuit tracks lining it- even more so than before.
There was text slathered across the door- a plea or a promise- in bright glowing green text.
It looked too much like the pits for it to be discounted.
“ Find Him.” It read out. A clock chimed somewhere in the distance.
The second he reached for the door handle, the world fell apart.
He woke up safe and sound in his ratty and mildew-ridden apartment. The noise of his alarm going off barely a forethought as the peculiarity of the wildly dream sat at the forefront of his thoughts.
Jason sat up slowly- silencing the alarm mid-ring- to contemplate just why his dream had changed so drastically.
—-
For the next week, he’d had the same dream. Just as slow and methodical as always, but with minor changes each and every time.
He'd initially dismissed it as a nice reprieve from the warehouses and blood that plagued his nightmares most often.
Jason knew better now.
The first time was just the hallway.
The next, he’d noticed white blurred shapes passing by the crossways-to which the dream self had hidden away from sight as best he could, only to continue on after they were gone.
The end of the week was the first time that he’d been able to open the door without the dream ending.
And he wasn’t sure what to make of the room.
Every wall was covered in chess boards. The pattern they were in wasn’t normal either and sometimes they would end abruptly.
In the center of the room, sat an oversized chess piece - a black king - that stood only about 3 foot tall. On the floor in front of it was the same cryptic green text as before but this time
It said “Save Him”.
There was also a king piece shown on the map behind it, with a black knight standing at the opposite end of that particular board.
There was only one other black piece on the chess board pattern, but a rook and it was on the opposite end of the building. Every piece except the black knight and the black king moved near constantly.
He took a step forward and the black knight mimicked his movement one space forward.
The world fell apart on the very next step.
—--
It had nearly been a month since the very first of the strange dreams at this point, and he had finally figured out the meaning behind the chess boards all over.
It was the layout of a building- a map.
Almost immediately, he’d copied down the layout to a sheet of graph paper and noted down the room that the Black King piece was within. The white pieces were in reference to the white blobs he’d seen traveling past those times he’d hidden if he were to wager a guess..
And he was the black knight- which meant he was an ally to the rook and the King.
The King was kept in the center-most room. Someone was wanting him to find this ‘King’ and save them.
He didn’t have many clues as to who he was saving nor who was demanding he do so ( they definitely weren’t the same people from what Jason can tell), but he didn’t want to ignore such blatant cries for help.
He just didn’t want to do so blindly.
So he’d taken the copied map with him to the bat-cave and began searching their database for any matching building layouts, since it was more expansive and up-to-date than his own.
He just hoped he could find the building before any of the others-
“What are you doing, Jason?”
-Show up….
He didn’t turn to meet his company’s eyes, keeping his gaze on the layouts he was searching. “ Investigating, Replacement.Investigating." He paused a moment to glance at the time-clock on the edge of the screen. " What are you doing down here?” He clicked over to the next map, only to dismiss it right away for being too small.
“ Same thing. B has been getting reports of some weirdly powerful batteries being found all over the place." Tim leaned over the computer, peaking at the maps Jason was still looking with. " Pretty sure I’ve figured out the group behind the batteries, but I wanted to double-check.”
This was news to him. Enough of a surprise for him to turn away from the maps and actually give Tim a raised brow.
“And that would be?” Maybe-just maybe….
“Look up the GIW or Ghost Investigation Ward for me. They have a building that was recently built near the edge of the city.”
Ghost Investigation Ward? Jason raised a brow at the younger but relented in tabbing the folder of building maps to instead look up this weird group.
There were tons of articles detailing their exploits, laws made at their request ( they were government funded apparently), and even some complaints about damages that occurred in Amity Park from their unwanted presence.
He stored that bit of information away for later.
Staring at the articles for a moment, a feeling burrowed in his gut before he tabbed over to pull up the GIW’s nearby location layout.
He held up his hand-drawn map to compare.
It was a perfect match.
He looked back to the articles- questions flitting about his brain.
“What’s that?” He had forgotten Tim was standing there. Now Tim was reaching for his hand-drawn map-to which Jason just moved it out of his reach.
The memory of the rook flashed in his mind. Could that one be…
He glanced back at the replacement and just gestured to the map on-screen.” I’ve been having strange ass dreams where I was walking through their building.”
“Really?”
“Do I look like I’m joking right now?”
“You are one of the few in this family that can be joking with a complete poker-face.” Tim looked back over the hand-drawn map, brows furrowed and lips pursed.
“Soooo why is there a crown on here then?” Of course he would ask about that.
“ There’s…someone. Someone’s being kept there and something was requesting I save this person. In the dream, the person was represented by a king piece on the chess board.” He didn’t want to show the younger that there were other pieces shown with different representations, but they might also be important. “ Everywhere else but in this room specifically, there were white chess pieces-pawns mostly. Everywhere but in this room and one other. This room had the black King and myself, and then across the building was a black rook.”
The brat gave off a hum, eyes flickering between his map and Jason with visible gears turning in his head. He quickly took control of the mouse and keyboard, typing in a blog name to then start scrolling through it. “ There’s not much known about the Ghost Investigation Ward, but this group is actively against everything they do.”
Jason turned to look at the blog page, titled “Retribution for the Ghosts of Amity Park.”, and began looking over the posts with Tim. TechFreak, the more technical of the voices, in not so simple terms had described their uniforms as ‘Men in Black knock-offs but with reversed colors.’
That didn’t fully explain why Tim even bothered pulling up the page in the first place but he could guess. “ You’re thinking that the GIW employees are the white pawns.”
“It would make sense.”
“Too much sense.” Jason pulled himself out of the chair, now satisfied with the acquired information.
He was halfway to his parked bike when he heard. “So….You gonna go break in and rescue them?”
He didn’t turn to face the younger at first.
“How dare you insinuate that I would ever ignore a cry for help like that?” He was smirking. He knew that he was. “ You in?” He offered the olive branch. If only because his dreams insisted that there was another there with him.
There was an unspoken agreement there as well. It would only be them. No one else was to be allowed into the loop unless they were in a desperate situation.
“Heck yeah! I still have to figure out how the batteries are being made. Do you know how crazy powerful those things are?”
He heard a locker open and close. Kid was ready in 3 minutes top.
“Then let’s go, Rook-ie.”
“That’s your pun tone. How was that a pun? Why is rookie a notable pu-Wait, was I a rook in your dream, Hood?”
He continued smirking.
“I’m the rook, aren’t I?”
He continued getting his bike prepped, lips sealed shut.
"What piece were you?"