Work Text:
Batman landed in Muncie, Indiana at midnight, following strange reports of a missing cartoonist.
He tapped his communicator as he surveyed the worn suburbs outside of Muncie.
“Oracle, any update on Jon Arbuckle’s private records?” he said.
Barbra Gordon, Batman’s Batgirl-turned-world-class-information-broker, didn’t answer for a concerningly long minute. Oracle always had the answers Bruce needed.
Oracle said, “I had to call in a favor with the Gotham library, none of Arbuckle’s records are digitized. They’re coming through now… okay, He was born in 1945, graduated from community college with a degree in illustration, parents died in the early 2000’s, but otherwise nothing of note. No family left besides his estranged brother, no spouse or kids, no honors or spelling bee ribbons, not even another comic strip outside of ‘Garfield.’”
Isolation wasn’t a hopeful omen.
Bruce usually didn’t pay much attention to missing person cases outside of Gotham, but this small-time cartoonist, Jon Arbuckle, was Bruce’s son, Damian’s favorite. Concerningly so. Mr. Arbuckle’s unpopular comics printed in a local paper, which was only distributed in Delaware county, Indiana, and: one 1980s news rack in Gotham which Damian passed on his way home from school. The comic detailed the life of a sarcastic, apathetic orange cat and his owner, a low-life cartoonist. Batman wasn’t sure the comic “Garfield” was the best influence on his antisocial Robin, but when Bruce read the comic over Damian’s shoulder, it gave the father and son something to talk about. They rarely found common ground outside of detective work, and the mundane humor was a nice distraction from Batman’s unending onslaught against crime.
Bruce missed it.
Seven weeks ago, the comic’s spot in the funny pages was replaced with the same repeating strip.
“Garfield: There is nothing happening.
Jon: I finally got the wildfire in my sock drawer under control!
Garfield: Out of the ordinary, I mean.”
In the latest paper, the editor added a small advertisement asking for any information about Mr. Arbuckle’s whereabouts, and announced an indefinite hiatus on “Garfield” until its cartoonist was found. Damian had bawled through breakfast. Bruce and Alfred were shocked. Being raised by assassins, Damian never showed emotional vulnerability, and Bruce had once seen his youngest kid take a bullet to the leg with a stiff upper lip.
The mission to find the missing cartoonist was updated to priority Alpha-1.
Batman knocked on the front door of 711 Maple Street. No answer. He looked in the windows, (those without drawn curtains) but saw nothing out of the ordinary: orange cat fur, a recently eaten pan of Lasagna, plain yellow walls, and milquetoast furniture from the 90s -it all seemed perfectly lived in.
Bruce knocked again, nothing. When he tried the land line, it went straight to a full message box.
Picking the lock took seconds.
Batman tread cautiously, quietly, but the one-story rambler was empty. He had discovered dozens of horrific scenes in his career as Batman, but had never come across something so depressingly ordinary. The green-tiled kitchen, with its sparse fridge and dirty dishes, sucked the adrenaline out of Bruce, leaving a hollow feeling of futility.
Bruce felt the same gravity when he fought the Joker, or when another Arkham outbreak was announced on the news. Gotham couldn’t see the ruts behind the danger, but in this house, the hopeless cycles were obvious. There were scuff marks in the tile where one chair moved back and forth from the kitchen table, over and over again from a thousand meals eaten alone. Bruce ran a finger along the decades-old cat scratches in the table legs.
Not entirely alone, then.
He pressed his com link, “Oracle? Anything new?”
His stomach turned to ice when he heard nothing over the line. Oracle was always working, and her tech was infallible.
Batman pressed the button again and listened closely until he heard a faint rumbling sound. Snoring. Bruce pinched the bridge of his nose. Goddamn it.
Oracle had been up for the past three days running com links for Batman as he dealt with the latest Arkham breakout, of course she passed out on the second a duller mission came along. Bruce was exhausted from the three-day jaunt himself, and approaching that odd headspace between “three am gas station run” and “practicing a board room presentation with a head cold.”
He sighed and sank into the only used kitchen chair. What was he doing? Damian would get over “Garfield” the same way he got over his obsession with Tchaikovsky and maple syrup.
A cat sniffed Bruce’s hand.
Batman startled. He hadn’t seen the cat approaching, hadn’t even heard its steps.
The orange Persian tabby stared at him with wide eyes, the whites eerily apparent, almost like a human’s.
Bruce reached out to scratch the cat behind its ears, but the creature backed away, sitting on its back legs and tucking its forepaws over its rotund belly, like an old man reclining after a meal.
“Hello,” Bruce said.
The striped cat said nothing back.
Bruce filled the cat’s water dish and made a mental note to call a local animal shelter if Mr. Arbuckle wasn’t found in the next twenty four hours.
“Don’t worry,” he said to the cat, “I’ll find him.”
Again, the cat said nothing, grinning smugly. It tucked together its paws, and Bruce noticed the cat’s polydactylism. Its front paws had five toes instead of four, making the great round creature look like it had little thumbs.
Batman wondered if Mr. Arbuckle had a dog like his comic counterpart, but the only evidence he found in the front rooms was a dusty collar on the mantle labeled “Odie.”
Bruce was careful to look for possible signs of struggle and mull over every bit of evidence indicating an unplanned flight from home, but the shoes at the front door had enough dust on them to warrant weeks of unuse, and Mr. Arbuckle’s car keys hung rusting on their hook.
He moved to the office, where a traditional drafting table was set up with inks and specialty rulers. Paper was littered everywhere, but in such a fashion that Bruce suspected this was the cartoonist’s usual modus operandi for work. The trash can was full of crumpled sketches, and on the desk was a stack of completed comics. The orange tabby sat in its owner’s chair and pawed at the edge of the desk, as if pointing. The top strip was the last Arbuckle had published in the paper. “There’s nothing happening,” the cartoon cat read.
Bruce shuffled through the comics below, but each was a copy of the first. Not a xerox, not traced, but redrawn painstakingly each time. Nineteen times.
When he’d scoured it all, Bruce was left with nothing else. He dreaded exploring the room furthest from the front door, the one with all its outside curtains drawn.
The bedroom door was already cracked when he approached.
Bruce knew what he would find: an old, depressed cartoonist, lying dead in his bed, with an agonized look on his face from an aneurism or a heart attack. Bruce would have to fly back to Gotham and tell his son that their favorite cartoonist had passed peacefully in his sleep. Damian wouldn’t cry like last time, he was already embarrassed by his last display of emotion. Instead he would say, “Thank you for letting me know, Father,” and he would retreat to his room again until Batman called him to the cave for their next mission. Bruce would have nothing to talk with his son about at breakfast, and when Damian turned sixteen, he would leave like all the other Robins.
Damian would build a life for himself away from home, make friends, travel the world, blossom into the brightest version of himself away from Gotham and Bruce.
And Bruce would be in Gotham still.
He would answer the bat signal, make the same mistakes, take the same hits, and lock the same criminals up again and again, for the rest of time.
Bruce opened the bedroom door.
The orange cat sat grinning beneath Jon Arbuckle’s hanging body, ripping off a chunk of flesh and dropping it into a lasagna pan.
Jon was hung by a noose made of bed sheets, and he was one toe away from being completely picked to the bone.
“Hello, Bruce,” the cat said.
Batman said, “Why didn’t you talk earlier, Cat?”
This wasn’t the first time a villain had known Batman’s secret identity.
It wasn’t even the first time in his unending vigilante-hood that Batman had encountered hallucinogenic gas, a scientifically enhanced creature, or a magical talking cat. Batman had seen everything; he was old in that regard, though grey never touched his temples.
He stared at the hanging body for only an instant before surmising what must have happened. His hands trembled.
“How rude. You know my name,” the cat said.
“Garfield,” Batman replied. The word hung in the air with the weight of an unanswered prayer.
“I’ve never spoken in front of anyone besides Jon,” Garfield said, “It drove him insane, thinking I was just a voice in his head.”
Batman tried his com link again, but there was only static.
Garfield rolled his eyes. “I hate Mondays. That’s when Jon decided to be done with it all, seven Mondays ago,” he said, “He couldn’t deal with being stuck in this box. Drawing out a pattern of jokes until his hands shook. Me, I liked it, living forever.”
A tingling dread in the back of his mind grasped at Garfield’s cryptic riddles and understood them, while his conscious mind desperately closed its eyes, for once terrified of solving a crime.
The world spun for Bruce, a fever dream, as Garfield’s monotone voice wrapped around him, until he was staring down a long, straight hallway, broken only by dark lines on the floor. Batman wasn’t supposed to be afraid, but it was the fear that cleared his vision, and at last, from his knees, he looked up at Jon’s skeletal frame. Jon’s hollow eye sockets pleaded, unseeing. Batman reached for a batarang at his belt.
Bruce wondered if, when he was dead, Damian would suffer his father’s fate: solving Gotham’s crimes until he looked like Jon Arbuckle, or worse- like Bruce.
In the moment before Bruce let go of the batarang, at the peak of its swing, he imagined a life outside of Gotham and Batman.
He would call his children together and apologize for the ways he was stuck. He would cook Alfred a grand meal, order Oracle to take a vacation, get Damian the best therapist money could buy.
He would leave Gotham.
“The Lasagna’s not done yet,” Garfield said, “and I’m hungry.”