Chapter Text
His voice is soft. Pleading. Desperate. He tries to suppress those feelings, but she knows his game all too well by now.
“Sofia.”
His voice echoes off the cement walls in her narrow cell. She doesn’t bother to even look at him.
Doctor Julian Rush remains uncannily still, holding his wrist. His wide, black eyes drill into her. She keeps her head tilted up against the cement wall, her eyes vacant.
“You have a visitor,” he says eagerly. Pause. “I think he might be able to help you.”
Still, she ignores him. As she ignores everything. Then it strikes her.
Sofia Gigante turns her head. “ Him ?”
If any one, she would have expected this Selina Kyle person. But a man?
“Not Oz,” she says, searching Julian’s expression. She leans back, thinking. “That henchman of his?”
“Victor Aguillar hasn’t been seen in weeks,” he says. “Nor has Oz. Not since that interview.”
The interview on GCN in which he blamed the bombing on GCN. It was quick. A throwaway. Because it’s just so easy to blame the Hangman. Just another tabloid.
He dressed up for that interview. Wore a top hat. A monocle. It was very strange and off-putting.
She quirks an eyebrow. “Who?”
Julian gets uncomfortable.
She looks away from him, muttering, “I can’t imagine who it could be that it would be helpful.”
He shakes his head and turns away, thinking. Finally, he says, “It’s not optional.”
She looks back at him. Curious now.
The handcuffs are tight on her wrists and ankles. The pigs force her to trudge along down the dirty gray hallway. Men follow her with guns trained on her back. If she were to make a sudden movement, they’d all stagger. Maybe one of them would shoot her. Right in the spine. Put her out of her misery.
Her, the pale self-harmer with an emaciated frame. Surrounded by men in Kevlar with heavy artillery. Scared shitless of her. Terrified. Yet she has no power. She knows that Arkham patients have a tendency to escape in theatrical fashion, but there’s no more running for Sofia Gigante. Just waiting.
As the guards guide her down the hall, she feels eyes burrow into her from all sides. It’s through the slot in each cell that the inmates watch her. They stare at her with a skin crawling intensity. She smirks, but only for a moment. When she looks straight ahead at the cell she’s being led to, she blanches.
Waiting for her besides the iron door is Lieutenant James Gordon speaking discreetly with Chief Mackenzie Bock. Gordon notices her first and signals Bock to stop talking.
Firstly, from Gordon’s sheer presence, she now knows exactly who waits for her on the other side of the door. Secondly, there’s a resonant disgust in their gaze. They look at her like everyone else in Gotham does.
Hangman. Always Hangman. She just wishes people hated her for the crimes she actually did commit.
Gordon gets behind her. Starts working her cuffs off. She frowns.
Chief Bock leers at her. He wheezes, his voice born from decades of chain smoking. “You behave, answer the man’s questions, and tell no one about this, things could go better for you.”
He steps back and holds out his arm, gesturing for her to go inside. Gordon finishes with the cuffs and opens the door, and she trudges into the cell.
The room is dark. A single fluorescent beam hangs over her, emitting a pale, metallic light. A dusty plexiglass barrier splits the room in two. Opposite her, it’s completely dark. Though as time passes, her sights adjust, and she sees more and more of him: The haunting eyes. The strong, pale jaw. The black plated armor. The bat insignia. But until then, she’s just staring into the dark..
Sofia kicks one leg over the other and gets comfortable, grabbing her ankle.
“Who do you want to see?” she says plainly. No response. “The psycho who wiped out the Vitis and the Falcones in one fell swoop? The crazy bitch who blew up Crown Point?” Still silence. “Ah.” She smiles brightly. “Hangman.”
The Batman takes a step forward. The light briefly escapes onto him. She can’t help but marvel at the sight, and she wonders what the Hell it is that created a man like him. Who turns to this as their salvation?
Thump.
He tosses a manilla folder through the slot in the wall. Pictures slide out in a fan formation. Blown up pictures of strangled women with purpled throats. The images, so familiar to her now because of Summer Gleeson, disturb her. She attempts to suppress her revulsion, to keep it away from the watchful eyes of the Dark Knight, but she can’t suppress her knee jerk reaction.
She looks up at him. It seems he didn’t notice. So dedicated to this narrative of her, he is.
He speaks barely past a whisper. “I want whoever did this.”
Her lips curl in disgust. “I am not the Hangman.”
He merely stares at her with the same disbelief most people meet her with. She can’t take it. Not from Gotham’s last hope.
“My father was,” she snarls.
The Batman stays very still. Impossible to read.
She continues. “Taylor Montgomery. Yolanda Jones. Nancy Hoffman. Susanna Weakley. Devri Blake. Tricia Becker. Summer Gleeson.”
The Batman’s eyes slowly scroll from right to left, the victim’s name practically projected over his eyes.
And then she says, “Isabella Gigante.”
His eyes scroll right to her. They narrow.
He watches her, inspecting every last facial tic. It makes her feel like an animal at the zoo, but she holds strong. Puts the truth in her eyes.
The Batman speaks. “Annika Kosolov. Maria Kyle.”
She glares at him. “...Right.”
The Batman leers at her curiously, gawking at her with a fascination that makes her skin crawl. Whether or not he understands the discomfort he causes her, she can’t tell. He comes at his work with a single-minded devotion that leaves no stone unturned. He’s lost in a personality, running away from the problems at hand. It all feels so clear to her. That he’s broken.
“Show me your hands,” he whispers.
Taken aback, she soon remembers that the Hangman’s victims fought to live in their final moments. If she were the new Hangman, there would be fresh scars on her hands, from the scratching.
Rolling her eyes, she rests her wrists on top of the folders. She pushes her hands out, the cuff of her sleeves pulling back slightly, just enough to reveal the dark scars recently carved into the length of her arms.
The Batman hangs on those scars longer than she’d like.
So she withdraws her wrists, gently pushing the folder back through the slot in the wall with her fingers. The Batman holds his gaze on her.
“There,” she says as if the matter were settled. “It’s just some copycat criminal using my father’s M.O. to put the heat on me and not the actual killer. Sounds like an amateur. You shouldn’t be hard pressed finding him, Batman.”
His name feels strange on her lips. This is the world she had been so close to leaving forever. Now, it’s her vernacular.
The Batman doesn’t respond at first. It’s as if she said nothing at all.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
It is like she said nothing at all.
She stiffens. “I don’t think I need to answer your questions, detective.”
“No,” he says faintly. “You don’t.”
Silence.
She collects her thoughts. Despite almost every one of her compulsions telling her to leave, there remains this desire to be understood. She sees something in him that’s akin to her. Something that understands true pain. She can tell just by looking at him that despite the punishment he’s delivered, he’s not desensitized. Every wound tells a story.
“The journalist, Summer Gleeson, came to me with questions,” she says. “I told her to fuck off, but that wasn’t good enough for Dad. He wanted undying loyalty… so he had me committed. Got the whole family to make statements certifying how mentally ill I allegedly was. They locked me up in Arkham for ten years. Said I wasn’t fit to stand trial. He did it to me overnight. One night, he tells me he wants me to lead the family instead of Alberto. The next, he’s institutionalized me.”
She reflects on her situation, smiling through it all. “Of course, now I belong here.”
“Most of the inmates don’t,” he replies.
“Yet you send them here,” she says. “You might be a vigilante, but to me, you’re just as responsible for this city as the GCPD.”
The Batman doesn’t reply. Internally, he seems to be deciding whether or not it’s worth continuing this.
“You think I belong here?” she asks.
He looks right at her, his lip curled in disgust. “You killed Salvatore Maroni’s entire Bliss operation, and you orphaned a little girl.”
She tenses. “I saved that little girl.”
“You traumatized her,” he growls. “She’s hurting herself.”
Sofia flinches. So The Batman talked to little Gia. “You don’t know these people like I do,” she says. “They’d sell anyone out to save their own skins. I did my best for her.”
Her iron-lined voice empowers her, though it curdles in her chest, making her feel ill. Making her feel like her father. Just long enough for her to reconsider everything again, and her jaw goes slack.
“I am not my father,” she says.
“I see no difference,” he replies.
Her jaw slacks in dismay. She collects herself. “I am a Gigante.”
“You killed more people as Sofia Gigante than your father did as the Hangman.”
She almost snarls at him, the vindictive Falcone in her rising up… but she suppresses it. Tries to reach somewhere more honest. She rears back, trying to untense.
“I really did what I thought was best for Gia, Batman,” she admits.
“You were sorely mistaken,” he says, his judgment cast.
“Then what was I supposed to do? Let the Falcones and Vitis take Gotham? Let them poison the city with Drops?”
He stares at her, thinking. “There’s always another way.”
“Then tell me,” she pleads. “Tell me what I was supposed to do.”
“I can’t,” he says. “You already made the decision.”
Her heart sinks. “She needs to have a good life. I promised her that much.”
The Batman’s eyes slowly scroll from left to right, and he frowns. Maybe scowls. He looks back at Sofia, a decision in his eyes.
“She does,” he says with some emotional distance.
She isn’t sure what to say at first, and then it doesn’t matter because The Batman disappears. It happens very quickly. He slinks back into the shadows. The darkness crawls over his armor, escapes onto his face, and he vanishes.
She sits alone in the dark for some unknown amount of time, wondering just what the Hell happened. Eventually, she finds this time quite soothing.
But then, alas, her solitude ends. The iron door opens, and James Gordon barges in.
“Hey man, we really gotta get her back to—” He freezes, staring into the darkness. “Where did he go?”
Sofia shrugs.
Chief Bock storms in. “Everything alright in here, Gordon?” He peers into the darkness too. “Where the Hell did he go?”
“I don’t know,” Gordon replies, his eyes locked on Sofia. “My man does that. I had a case to discuss with him too… let’s get her out of here.”
Bock grabs her wrists from behind. Forcefully jerks her to her feet.
Snap! go the handcuffs. They don’t bother her much. He marches her down the halls, back to her cell. Somewhere along the way, she realizes something:
Julian was right. Batman did help her.