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Jack wakes up at five and walks to the butcher’s shop where he has been assigned meaningful and valued employment, as part of the Wayne fund’s community outreach program in the wake of the Joker Toxin cataclysm. He’s almost absurdly grateful for it, because the work keeps his body occupied during the endless days until—hmm. Until what?
He pauses, his key pressed up against the lock but not quite hard enough to slip inside. This is his life. These days will continue for as long as he lives, more or less the same, with small variations depending on his modest choices. He slides the key inside and unlocks the shop, hanging his hat on the rack by the door. He’s more or less given up on being identified at this point, of reclaiming some unremembered older life; the harried police woman had told him point blank, as they reviewed his case, that if no one had come forward by now then no one likely ever would. There is no until waiting for him. Except maybe for the one that awaits everybody.
He slips his gloves into his jacket and hangs that on the rack too. The shop is dark, except for one square of floor lit the thin red color of sunrise. He puts off turning on the lights for a while; he brings out the display wares, sweeps, primes the gumball machines for one free gumball the next time someone tries to turn the coinslot, and he carries in the shipment of wrapping paper from the stack out back. Then his boss arrives at seven, precisely, and orders him to turn the lights on pronto. So he slinks out from behind the counter and flips all the switches, blinking at the burn of white florescent.
His boss is a medium sized man, but he seems to fill the back room like an expanding gas fills a container. Jack understands implicitly that he’s been hired because the boss doesn’t like to waste time on the fiddly customer service stuff when he could be doing real work. This, of course, means that what Jack is doing must not be real work. Jack’s pretty okay with that, considering his other options are unemployment or a desk in a cubical.
At 8 AM, Judy Faragasso comes in with her order for the Bordeaux family, as usual. She slides it across the counter, but draws her hand away just a little too fast, as if she’s afraid to linger where he could reach for it at any moment.
“How’re you keeping?” she asks him. He can see a web-thin strand of hot glue on her bracelet, from where she’s fastidiously repaired some fallen crystal.
“Oh, pretty well,” he tells her with a smile. He always smiles at work, even on his worst days. He doesn’t find it hard. “How’s Mrs. Bordeaux?”
As he bends down to retrieve some bacon from the case, he can see her shoes shifting uneasily through the glass. She says, “You know how she is. She wants things a certain way.”
On the slip of paper, in Mrs. Bordeaux’s handwriting, each item is followed by at least one line of instructions re: the packaging and quality of the requested items. Today she has requested exactly thirteen (13) strips of bacon each packaged in groups of three with exception for the last one, which should be individual. He’s never met the woman, but he has some idea, yes.
“Do you think you’ll work for her forever?” Jack asks, as he comes up again.
“Well, I,” Judy starts. She shifts her purse to the other shoulder. “No, not forever, probably. Could you bag those for me, there’s too much today to fit it all in my purse like I usually do.”
Jack obliges. Judy makes hurried little observations about the traffic and his progress and the Bordeaux house until he’s finished ringing her up, at which point she bids him farewell and trots out of the shop without a backwards glance. Jack watches the bell over the door as it jingles shut, chin in hand above the display counter. He knows better than to try and open a dialogue with the customers now, but he still tries from time to time. Part of him finds pleasure in watching their uneasy withdrawals, the way you might tongue the open wound of a newly pulled tooth just to feel the tangy ache of it.
A few more regulars pass through, but he doesn’t really try to talk with anyone else. The bell above the door rings at ten, and he turns around with a smile to find himself greeting Commissioner Jim Gordon, in the flesh. The smile freezes brittle on his face.
Gordon is examining the coat rack, looking more tired than anything else, but Jack’s heart is cold with dread. It comes through him like it’s in his veins, and he’d like nothing more than to get out of here, rip off the apron and throw himself through the back door or the window if necessary, but he needs this job and if he runs out now the boss will never let him back in. So he clutches the top of the case and steadies himself while Gordon is pulling off his coat.
“How can I help you,” Jack says. His teeth click against each other in a way that he’s never noticed before.
Gordon looks up. He’s—well he’s got a haircut that would look more suited on a man half his age, but it does actually make him look younger. If it weren’t for the heavy sleeplessness of his skin, Jack might actually say overall it’s a good look for him. Jack has never met the man before, but he’s a landmark. He’s an institution. In Gotham there’s this whole cast of local celebrities, most of them infamous, and he’s heard plenty of customers chatting in low tones about The Commissioner and What He’s Going to Do About All This Business. People seem to like him, for the most part.
“Oh,” Gordon says, waving him off, “I’m not shopping. I’m on the clock. Do you have a moment to answer some questions?”
The back window is feeling really inviting, but Jack just nods. “Say, uh,” he starts, “aren’t you a little high on the foodchain to be doing this kind of grunt work?”
Gordon gives him a sharp little look. It’s the first time that Gordon has actually looked at him—at him, not at his clothes or his distinguishing features. The sharp look morphs into a flicker of uncertainty, and then he steps forward, leaving his coat on the rack.
“Have we met before?” Gordon asks him.
Jack’s heart stutters in his chest, heavy and painful and flooding his throat with tight panic. He needs to say something because if he doesn’t then how’s that going to look, he’s got to say something fast, but the longer he chokes on his own closing windpipe the worse and worse everything he could say will sound.
“Relax,” Gordon says, brows furrowing in what could be concern. “You’re not a suspect or anything. I’m canvassing the whole block.”
“I,” Jack says. He smiles around his gritted teeth, leaning over the case for better balance. “S-sorry. I—”
“Relax,” Gordon repeats. “I’ve seen it before. I’m not gonna slap some handcuffs on you because you stuttered too much.”
Jack takes a deep breath. Then two. He’s not entirely sure he believes that, but the lack of immediate violence is helping. As he’s forcibly coming back to himself, he thinks of Bruce. He thinks of Bruce’s weight in the darkness, his hands, his voice. He wishes Bruce were here. He survived for months without Bruce and he knows he can do it again now, but boy would it be nice if he didn’t have to. Gordon offers him a tissue, and self-consciously Jack blots at the saliva that's pooled around his lips while he was panting into the glass.
“Don’t like cops?” Gordon asks him, with a wry smile.
Jack looks up, mouth hidden behind the blossom of tissue paper. He feels a little safer this way, with his mouth hidden, but he also doesn’t like how that question puts him on the spot.
“It’s alright,” Gordon says. “There’s lots of people in this city who have a bad history with the boys in blue. It’s been ugly in this town for a long time, much longer than any of those costumed jokers have been around.”
Jack doesn’t think that’s it, that he’s had some sort of terrible awful run in with the police and just can’t remember it. Of course it’s possible. But that seems like it would feel clear and angry and certain, and all he feels is guilty and small. All he feels, really, is more of this same terrible looming sense that something is about to go very very wrong. The tip of the sword grazing his neck as it swings over him.
“That was before my time,” Jack says, truthfully. “I’ve only been living here for a little while.”
“Ahhh,” Gordon says. His smile is softer now, friendlier. “That explains it.”
“Explains… what?”
Gordon leans up against the case, his eyes settling on a middle distance that seems to be brimming with troubling memory. Jack can see his age better now than ever before.
“It’s hard enough for even the ones who were born here,” Gordon gives Jack a look that’s more pity than anything else, “then there’s guys like you.”
“Like me,” Jack echoes.
“New blood,” Gordon says, and then he winces. “Sorry. I don’t mean to sound like I’m soothsaying your doom or anything. Christ, I know I used to have people skills. Can’t figure when I lost them all.”
“No…” Jack says, slowly. He looks out the window, to the black pavement glinting in the sun—in Gotham they cut the asphalt with glass. “No, I know what you mean. You can’t make Gotham a home if you’re just… flesh and blood. It doesn’t belong to us.”
“Well, that’s what we’re fighting to change, I guess.” Gordon opens his notebook, effectively closing down that line of conversation. “I won’t take long, I just have some questions about what you’ve observed in the area over the last day.”
Gordon asks him some questions about his customers, what he’s seen on the sidewalks outside, any rumors he might have picked up, a few incomprehensible questions that sound more like they should come from a ghost hunter than a policeman. Jack has heard a rumor that Gordon has something to do with the original Batman. He spends most of the interview looking for a sign—he doesn’t know what kind—of the bat in this tired bag of nails. There’s something tough in there, no doubt, but somehow Jack doesn’t feel like it’s batman.
Gordon flips closed his notepad as if the motion takes about all the energy he has left. Those weren't the answers he hoped for, probably.
“You, uh, gonna be alright out there, chief?” Jack asks, licking the dryness from his mouth.
Gordon looks up again. There’s that same flash of scrutiny—is it recognition? Did they used to know each other? But Jack’s caseworkers are so certain that he hadn’t been living in Gotham for long before the accident, when would they have had the time?
It’s not just his caseworkers, apparently. Even Gordon can smell how out of place he is, small and alone in this huge city.
“Hey, I’ll be fine,” Gordon says. “Takes more than some old fashioned footwork to knock me out.”
Jack doesn’t mention that sending a high level police official out on street duty sounds a lot like a bid to get him into an early and permanent retirement, but there’s a tension in Gordon’s smile that says he probably knows it anyhow. The older man takes his coat off the rack with heavy, blunt movements and then turns back to Jack, his arm halfway down his sleeve.
“You take care of yourself,” he says. “It’s hard enough for us little guys, getting by. Don’t make it any worse than it has to be.”
Jack presses his tissue tightly against his lips again. People always seem to be looking at his mouth. He’s decided he wants Jim Gordon to look him in the eye. “Thanks,” he says.
There’s precious little kindness in this city, and cop or no cop, Gordon’s alright in his book.
After that, the shop hits the doldrums. There’s no work to be done inside, so Jack pulls his hat on—it’s a little old fashioned of him, but he burns like rice paper in the sun—and steps outside to sweep off the sidewalk.
Down the way, some neighborhood kids are playing a game with a red ball that practically clangs every time it bounces up off the pavement. There’s an empty lot there, even though half the time they seem to be using the street as an outfield. He watches for a while, looking up from his sweeping now and then, as the kickers cycle through. He likes kids pretty alright. The ones at the center where Bruce volunteers never seem to have a problem with him the way adults do, although when Bruce is in the room they don’t particularly care about anyone else. Jack can sympathize with that.
The ball goes wide this time, ricocheting off the top of a parked car and singing right over the intersection. Without thinking much about it, Jack takes a couple steps to the right and puts up his hands, and the ball sails right into them. He blinks down at it. The things his body does constantly startle him.
“Hey!” one of the kids calls. She barely takes a look down the road before she hops across it, probably nine years old and apparently bulletproof.
“Hey,” he says back.
He smiles. She doesn’t seem to mind. She holds out her hands, wordlessly.
“I feel like there should be a please in here somewhere,” he muses.
The girl keeps her hands out. She’s dishwater blond and wearing cleats that could probably aerate concrete. He thinks he’s seen her around before. “Give it back or I’ll put a hit out on you.”
“Uh.” Jack continues holding onto the ball, although he kind of doesn’t want it now. “You must have a lot of money for a third grader.”
She doesn’t crack. “Tom says his brother works for the Penguin and we can all have as many people shot as we want.”
Jack takes a look at the kids milling in the empty lot. He doesn’t know for sure, but he’s pretty sure that the gang grunt families don’t hang out in this neighborhood. It’s a gut feeling. These kids are all solidly bourgeois. His common sense belatedly starts to catch up with his bewildered logic center.
“Ah,” Jack says. “I… can see you’re well connected. Here.” He drops the ball into her still-waiting hands. “I don’t think the Penguin is the scariest thing in this city though. Tom might want to come up with something better.”
“My cousins say the Joker is dead,” the girl informs him, a non sequitur that stumps him for a moment and then, to his unease, clicks into place. “My cousins say if he didn’t come back to finish things then Batman must have left him in a sewer somewhere.”
“Er,” he says, “well, hopefully they’re right.”
She nods, serious as a heart attack, and then skips off just as a slick black car comes idling up to the curve, pausing in its tracks to let her pass. This city is as brutal as it is bizarre.
Kids, he thinks. They are the future…
The slick black car pulls up against the curb, and Jack is watching it out the corner of his eye in case something awful is lurking there. But all that happens is that Bruce Wayne pops up over its roof. Jack hides his face behind his hand and laughs at himself for nearly swooning while Bruce waves at him and smiles and is basically perfect in every way. The sun was already out, but suddenly it really feels like it.
“Surprise!” Bruce calls. “Can I take you to lunch?”
Jack’s heart sinks a little. He’ll have to ask the boss. Not that the boss is likely to say no, it’s just… asking. He’d rather talk to another policeman. Okay, that isn’t true, he would not.
“There’s this little place in oldtown I think you’ll like,” Bruce is saying, as he locks his car behind him. “Andrew’s? I want to be the first person to take you there.”
One side of Jack’s smile pulls higher than the other. “You’re the only one who takes me anywhere, Mr. Wayne.”
“Oh, we’ll fix that eventually,” Bruce says, with the easy confidence of a man who’s been welcome everywhere since the day he was born. It’s nice. It’s almost infectious.
Bruce follows him into the shop and hovers like a good luck charm in the door while Jack negotiates for an hour off, sweating despite the fairly cool spring. The boss gives in with a couple meaningful little disapproving noises, but he gives in all the same. Bruce hooks an arm around Jack’s hip as they leave the shop, and whoever Julia is or was, Jack has no earthly idea how she gave this up.
They park in the closest space they can find, which is about two blocks down at this time of day, and Bruce helps him out of the car like an absolute gentleman. It’s a nice part of town and reserved, in a masculine businessy kind of way, but Jack is still reluctant to let go of his hand.
They’ve been dating for a couple months, and Jack still feels sort of like he’s breathed in some mind altering poison cloud and is hallucinating every time Bruce shows up in the daylight. In Gotham, it’s less unlikely than you might think. Everything is less unlikely in Gotham.
Specks of glass flash in the pavement that runs along beside them, as they walk. It’s nearly blinding when the sun is this high.
“Isn’t it funny how it glitters?” Jack says to Bruce, a hand above his eyes as he peers at the asphalt stretched on ahead.
“Funny?”
“In a city like Gotham,” Jack explains, twisting a hand towards nothing in particular. “How poor and loud and ugly this place is, but the streets! Mmm, in the new world the streets are paved with diamonds. All that wealth buried in pitch, where no one can touch it.”
“It’s only glass,” Bruce tells him.
“Ah, it’s the look of the thing. You know the first ones were put down outside Wayne Corp, did you have anything to do with that? Part of your glamorous public image?”
“I don’t remember,” Bruce admits. His frown comes and goes, insubstantial. “But it’s a good way to recycle the windows that are always breaking around here, and I’m not surprised the city wants to cut costs with the way criminals tear up the streets on a monthly basis.”
As they pass underneath the shade of an ancient overhang, part of a hotel probably as old as the street, Jack grabs the black rod of a lamp post and swings over a patch of pavement. He lands with a showy little flair on the other side and turns back, delighted with the panache of that move, to find Bruce frowning again. Bruce looks down at the square of concrete between them, a little darker than the ones on either side.
“How did you know to do that?”
“Do what?” Jack asks, his smile fading.
“Skip this.” Bruce toes the edge of the square with one beautiful loafer, and the rubber of his sole immediately begins to bubble. “Have you walked this way before? We don’t have to eat here if you’ve already been.”
Jack feels like a bit of a country bumpkin, staring wide-eyed at the bubbling rubber, but he can’t seem to help it. “I, um,” he says, “I didn’t. It just seemed… like the thing to do?”
Bruce gives him a long look and then steps carefully over the pavement. It would be easier to just go around it (Jack imagines that’s what most people do), but Bruce rarely ever goes around things and this is no different. He stops beside Jack, who is still staring at the ground behind them, and considers him for a moment in silence. There are no cars. A little ways ahead, a gaggle of senators are unpacking from a hallway they shouldn’t all have been able to fit inside.
“Jack,” he says, “I know your case workers all think you must have been visiting here from somewhere else when the accident happened, but— Have you considered—”
He stops, like he’s not sure whether it might be bad luck to say this out loud. Jack knows, Jack feels the tug of uneasy balance too.
“You might be from Gotham?” Bruce finishes, at last. He shrugs, self-conscious of the anti-climax in his announcement. But for Jack it’s not anti-climactic at all. It's like a slow, crashing disaster he can’t seem to get out from underneath. This alien, resentful city, with its strange citizens and its secret languages, his home? To be lost in an unfamiliar land would be one thing, but to be lost in your own home?
Jack looks down at his shoes. They’re black on white leather, rusty with dried viscera around the instep, and suddenly he feels sick. It comes like panic in his stomach, dizziness, his mouth watering with a sweetness that signals disaster.
“Hey,” Bruce says, taking his shaking shoulders, “hey, Jack, talk to me? What’s going on?”
Jack does nothing but swallow for a whole minute, until the worst of the sickness passes. At first he thinks that he’s still dizzy because his vision is all blurred, but then he realizes that’s only his eyes watering. He takes a shaky breath.
“Sorry,” he manages.
“Shhh, no,” Bruce says, drawing him forward into an embrace. Gosh, Bruce is huge. Jack is a tall guy, but Bruce is… encompassing. “What do you need?”
“Just a minute,” Jack says. He laughs, but it's wet and it’s not very enthusiastic. “Gee, if Arkham wasn’t such a, heh, madhouse, I’d have them check me in.”
“You’ve got a brain injury,” Bruce says, severely. “Whatever you’re implying, don’t.”
Jack is thinking that if a brain injury was all he had wrong with him, it ought to have stopped making him sick by now. He doesn’t want to tell Bruce anything else, though, because Bruce loves him (he shivers into the man’s dress shirt) and Bruce would want him to see a doctor, and Jack just—just can’t. Bruce has already been on him to see somebody about his anxiety. What’s the worst that could happen, Bruce had asked him. I’m committed and I never see sunlight again, Jack replied, still flipping pancakes.
Bruce hadn’t liked that answer. Jack insisted it was a joke, but some part of him—the anxious part? The paranoid part?—can’t stop feeling like he’s only surviving by the grace of a system that doesn’t know about him yet. It’s the part of him that panics at the sight of a badge. If he’s discovered, everything will catch up with him at once in a single terrible lunge.
Here, now, Bruce tucks Jack’s chin into his hand and says, “Do you still want lunch? We can go if you’re not up to it.”
They could go, but. Where is he going to go, home? To his grim apartment? Back to the shop? No. No, anywhere with Bruce is by far preferable to any other place.
“Hey,” he says, rapping Bruce’s solid chest with his knuckles, “I’m the life of the party. I can go anywhere.”
Bruce pulls back. They’re getting looks from the gaggle of senators, but this is oldtown Gotham and apparently nobody likes to be direct about anything in these circles. Bruce has made it clear he doesn’t care one way or another, but for Jack it’s just another grating reminder that he doesn’t belong anywhere. Doesn’t belong in his grim little apartment, doesn’t belong in his boss’s old family business, doesn’t belong here on this glittery street with a Wayne holding him slightly too close for anyone’s approval.
Doesn’t belong in Gotham. Can’t leave Gotham. Doesn’t belong anywhere.
Jack swallows it down with practice and no little bit of effort. He stays steady until they reach the restaurant, and then for a while he’s too busy listening to Bruce rhapsodize about the hamburgers to worry too much about anything.
At four, the glitter of pavement outside goes dark all at once and he peers out through the glass, up past the tops of buildings, to where a swarm of bodies so small they appear to be a single rain cloud at first are blotting out the sun.
The customer beside him swears, fast and breathy over and over like a mantra, as she abandons everything but her car keys and shoots out the front door. He glances down at the steaks she’s left on the ground. They’re still wrapped. He picks them up and brings them back to the refrigerator, while the sounds of car alarms and distant sirens pick up outside. There’s a faint buzzing out there too, getting louder.
“Boss?” he calls into the back, over the sound of the processor.
His boss lifts his head, scowling. “Jacky, I’m workin’ here. Do your job.”
“No, no,” Jack says, shredding a piece of wrapping paper under his uneasy fingers. “It’s not a customer problem. We’ve got a supervillain headed this way, by the look of it?”
Boss turns off the processor. He wipes his hands off on his apron, utterly silent, and then pushes out past Jack into the front. The air outside has only grown darker, and the buzzing is louder too.
“Shut the blinds,” Boss says, at last. “Lights off.” He flips the sign in the door to closed as he says it. “You been in a hold-up before?”
Hold up, Jack has learned, includes everything from bank robbery to alien invasion around here. He shakes his head.
“Lucky you,” Boss says. “Better not make this your first time. I’m going out the back and I’m driving home. I’ll be back tomorrow to tally up the damages. Do what you want, but don’t go out on that street until the sky clears up. I expect you in by nine if the shop’s still standing.”
His boss isn’t a bad man. Jack watches him go, his heavy shape blocking the light through the back door and then disappearing behind white metal. He’s harsh and unfriendly and he makes Jack jumpy just by narrowing his eyes, but he’s not a bad man. Jack’s guess is that he’s been held up one too many times. It’s a city that isn’t kind to its street level citizens, the flesh and blood ones who bleed and die on the glassphalt. That’s what Commissioner Gordon meant. Jack understands.
Jack turns back to the window. All the glitter has died down now, leaving just the black tar. Should he leave? He hasn’t got a car, but he knows enough to guess that cars aren’t always that much of a help, when you’ve got three blocks of people all trying to leave at once, and anyways a big enough monster could tip a car without much trouble. His other options are cowering here in the dark with the frozen meats for what could well be the next few hours, or begging anyone who hasn’t already taken off to give him a ride. The latter is, if he’s honest, set on bad odds. The way people just don’t seem to take to him? In an already panicked situation, he doesn’t think he’s likely to do any better. And the other option…
He lifts his coat from the rack, examines his gloves for a moment. Jack has been living in a haze of ebbing and waning fear since he woke up in that hospital bed with the unfamiliar needle buried in his wrist, has known the sick frothy crests of anxiety and the black certainty of despair, but somehow, he’s not afraid of this. Jack pulls on all his things and buttons up his coat. He’s afraid of cops and the dark and his boss, and he’s afraid of tomorrow, but he’s not afraid of this.
Jack walks out into the street, as dark again as it was this morning when he arrived, and looks up at the sky. Between the thousands of tiny bodies, there are flickers of light.
He turns when he hears a sound like metal clanging against stone, and he follows it back to the abandoned lot where the kickball game was going on earlier. There’s a stack of ripped up planks lying against the wall at the back, and as he circles it he can see a small tennis shoe sticking out from underneath it.
“That’s not going to protect you,” he informs it, “that wood is basically rotten.”
“We’re not going!” a small voice shouts back. “Damn off!”
Jack has no idea what to say to that. Instead, he walks around the side and peers underneath the rough triangle of coverage. There’s three of them down there, and it’s the girl from before who’s got the others crouch behind her like a protective mother bird. Jack has a hazy idea that children are not usually this altruistic, and so he considers himself appropriately impressed.
“Kiddo,” he says, “you oughta get home.”
One of the crunched up little ones wails that it’s too far, and the other one wails that they can’t, and then they’re just wailing for the heck of it like a couple of fog horns. Jack jams a pinky in one ear to mitigate the sudden spike of noise.
“Blondie,” he says, looking at the girl. “You got a home to go to?”
“I’m not going,” she says. “They’re my reading buddies and that means I have to take care of them.”
Jack doesn’t bother to ask what the most holy institution of reading buddies entails exactly. He offers a hand into the darkness, his glove white against the shadows. “Okay, well don’t hang around under this death trap. I’ll unlock the shop for you and you can all hide in there.”
They’re not budging. He puts on his best neutral face and adds, “If it turns out to be zombies, you’re gonna want some walls between you and them.”
That gets them moving. He helps them out one by one and then points them at the butcher’s shop, trailing behind as they tumble across the grass and over the street. He looks up again, as they go. Best as he can tell, it’s concentrated above their block, which explains why the road is so ghostly empty. The dim but thick cacophony of horns is spread around them like the eye of a tornado, where the population has emptied itself outward.
As the last kid stumbles through the door, the buzzing takes on a new pitch. He pauses with his key in his hand, and it’s as if he has stepped out of the self of this morning and into a dream world, where everything is just similar enough to be uncanny. There’s something bubbling inside of Jack, silvery as mercury, and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s serenity. Everything is different now, in this ghost town under this roiling sky—he’s still driving, so to speak, but the roads have changed beneath him. He pulls the door to, slowly, and locks it, as the shriek of the living atmosphere reaches an improbable crescendo. There’s a soft thud behind him.
He turns to find Scarecrow stepping down from the swarm, with something like the monster offspring of an ambulance and Frankenstein’s laboratory just behind him. Scarecrow—Jack knows the name without thinking. Of course, Scarecrow is one of those giants astride the earth, and everyone in this town knows his name or else learns it fast. With the grotesque sackcloth over his head, who else could he be?
“Ooh, look,” the monster says, “a civilian.”
This is the moment that Jack expects his deferred panic to finally crash in. He’s had two attacks already today, not a record bad but pretty high, and like lightning strikes, they just seem to attract each other. And yet—nothing. Jack lifts his hand, curiously, making a fist and then opening it again. Nothing. He reminds himself that he could die here.
But Scarecrow doesn’t care to kill people in cold blood, not unless he has to. Jack is certain of this, too.
“Afternoon,” he says. “Welcome to the neighborhood.” He pockets his keys.
Scarecrow sidles closer, the wicked injectors of his gloves’ fingertips tracing through the air like the curl of a predator’s tail. “Thank you,” he says.
There’s a terrible, strange moment when the words pop into Jack’s head. He knows just what to say, how to turn, if he wants to get out of here in one piece. The trick is to be boring, unafraid, and waste no time—if giant lizards latch onto movement, then villains latch on to demonstrations of personality. It would be relatively simple to turn and walk away, and probably that would be the end of it, but the strange thing—the terrible thing—is that his mouth is already moving. It’s still him driving, but the roads on the map all seem to lead to the same destination.
“What brings a swell fella like you to a place like this?” Jack asks, smiling brightly.
“I’m testing new… equipment,” Scarecrow says, inching a little closer. “What about you, hm?”
Jack looks up at the buzzing sky. “Closing up shop,” he says, “neighborhood’s coming down with a roach problem, heh.”
“You don’t seem to be particularly bothered by them,” Scarecrow observes.
“Guess not. You’ll get me next time, kid, don’t you worry.”
Scarecrow breaks off, pacing left like a circling cat. If he keeps up like that, he’s going to end up behind Jack, which isn’t a problem except that behind him is where the door is, too. Jack feels his hand twitch in his pocket—the keys jingle against themselves. It’s such a little thing, but Scarecrow’s head snaps down towards the sound.
“What are you protecting?” he says, tilting his head as he goes.
“Ah, you got me,” Jack sighs. “There’s about fifty bucks in the register.”
Scarecrow dips his head in closer, and at this distance the milkiness of his eye-filters is a glittering solid white. That mask must be airtight, underneath the canvas. “Do you think me a petty criminal?” he demands.
“I might call you a criminal,” Jack responds, tapping his chin with one gloved finger. “Now, petty? I don’t know you that well.”
Scarecrow stops. Every little movement of his prowl halts, unnaturally still, and then he reaches out one hand ever so slowly. The needle tips of his fingers scrape Jack’s jaw.
“It’s you,” Scarecrow says, “isn’t it.”
“Sure it’s me,” Jack says, puzzled. “Who's that, though?”
Even as he says it, the impact of that phrase is starting to make its way down into the part of his brain that isn’t running on autopilot. The implication—out of everyone in this city, Scarecrow recognizes him? The first little bubble of panic pops in his gut.
“It is you,” Scarecrow says. His voice isn’t mild anymore. “Did you think a palette swap was going to fool me? Do you think me an idiot?”
Jack makes a little spinning gesture with his fingers. “Let’s rewind here, how do I know you?”
Scarecrow grabs his chin and squeezes. The injector tears open his skin and jams against his bone, and he can feel something hot trickling down from the grind of pain. Gee, he hopes it’s just blood.
“But you don’t know me,” Scarecrow is murmuring, twisting his grip for a better look. “So this is what’s left of you, then.” He switches his grip, one hand around Jack’s throat now and the other prying the corner of his lips upward, needle talons scraping gums. He seems to be comparing the view with another in his mind.
Jack makes a wary noise, but that’s about all he can articulate like this.
“Were you that afraid of death?” Scarecrow muses, tugging at the flesh. “Afraid enough to survive like this?”
Jack’s mind is running fast and getting nowhere. He doesn’t want to know. He had told Bruce, at the pond on that first night they met, that he didn’t want to go back. Part of him had still wondered, and maybe that was the thing that made it so scary—that he kept picking at the question, and soon it was going to bleed awfulness onto everything he had struggled to rebuild. He kept asking, and he doesn’t want to know, but he keeps asking and he keeps being relieved when no one can tell him anything, and he keeps being disappointed too.
“Look at you,” Scarecrow says. “You used to own this city.”
Jack thinks, inanely, of Bruce’s shoe. The bubbling rubber. The poison cement that they all just lived over, going on with their lives.
“I wonder what makes a thing like you tick,” Scarecrow murmurs. The black liquid in the injector hisses through the needle, down out of sight. “I wonder what you’re afraid of.”
Jack claws at the hands clutching him but his gloves have nothing to claw with. His eyes water, his tongue tastes like blood and bleach. He staggers back as he’s dropped, smearing at his lips and chin, eyes wide. There’s weight in his pocket, and then he catches the jingle of his keys as they flash up into Scarecrow’s palm. Oh no, no no no no.
“So,” he manages, spitting blood and saliva. “Petty after all?”
“Hardly,” Scarecrow replies. “But I’ve never met a man who would sacrifice his sanity for fifty dollars.”
A list of things that Jack can hear: the swarm of insects (are they insects?) above them, the soft click of a lock unlocking, his heartbeat in his eardrums, the scuff of boots as they slide over a threshold. He struggles to detangle them from each other as he pants, one knee planted in the concrete. The world is full of so much noise and so much light and all of it is a single snarled unit clinging to him, dragging at him, the strange amber sky and the dirt that glitters like diamonds when light flickers over it.
Boots, boots, why is that sound of boots important—
Jack comes up, unsteady on his feet and grasping at nothing. He is thinking about a day maybe two months before, a single moment on repeat that begins and ends with Bruce’s smile in a perfect loop—the youth center, there is a drawing of a flower in his hand, Bruce’s smile, these images are out of order and repeating in kaleidoscopic patterns—this is the day that Bruce tells him about the past he can’t remember. The parents he can’t recall saying goodbye to. This is the moment (smile) that Bruce turns to him and says, you understand what I’m doing here, don’t you (smile)?
Jack is not a hero. Jack is a nervous wreck who can’t even qualify for a driver’s license, a coward, a no name nobody, but (there’s always a but, there’s always always a but isn’t there) he knows that Bruce is never going to forgive him if he doesn’t do something now, and a world without Bruce is a world he no longer knows how to contemplate, and besides. Death has never really been the thing he’s afraid of (that he can remember).
It’s kind of euphoric, the conclusion. What’s the worst that can be done to him now? He staggers across the sidewalk and into the dark, hand slamming against the doorway for support. Everything is fuzzy. He giggles. He likes the sound of that. He’s still laughing as he pushes into the shop, his eyes watering now from the force of it.
The haze that is Scarecrow (probably) turns back to him. “Oh,” he says, “this is interesting. What are you seeing, I wonder?”
Green. Green is what he’s seeing, green like the chemical depths of the sea where nothing can live but radioactive microorganisms. His jaw clicks under the strain of his laughter. He reaches out, knuckles knocking against the glass of the case, hand twitching and fumbling until it finds the handle of a knife and drags it up from its block. The tip squeals across the glass.
Scarecrow draws back. “Aggressive reactions known to occur in unprimed patients,” he mutters, as if he’s recording notes for himself. “However, current subject does not appear to be targeting a hallucination.”
Jack struggles for air, the desperation of his lungs choking out everything but the odd giggle, and pushes forward regardless. He is seeing Scarecrow through a film, but seeing him nonetheless.
“You,” Jack gasps, “you look a little, heh, nervous there.”
“Current subject appears cognizant of my presence,” Scarecrow hisses. “I am going to withdraw.”
In the unlit glass of the case, as Jack passes, he sees himself reflected—his lips smeared with blood and venom, he seems to wink—and understands dimly that there is something terrible inside him, something that even Scarecrow is afraid of.
“Come examine me,” he croons, dragging himself closer. “Tell me what I am, don't be shy.”
Scarecrow jerks backwards, finds himself cornered, and crouches down as if he’s getting ready to lash out. Jack smiles at him.
“You should be scared of me,” Jack says, and throws his whole weight behind the point of the knife, burying it in the plaster of the wall as Scarecrow rolls and scrambles out from underneath him. He leaves it buried there. Scarecrow is skittering backwards towards the door, low to the tile, but Jack is following. “I’m scared of me,” he tells the man, gleeful and eager, a child sharing a secret.
All this time and the terrible thing dogging his footsteps, the nightmares, the shadows, the darkness seeped into the walls of his bedroom—this is funny! The whole time, it was only this! His fingers slide down the side of his coat and into his pocket, where the heavy weight of—yes, he always carries it with him, he tries to leave it behind in the mornings and finds it there anyways, like another awful dream—his pistol.
This is fear that transcends fear, an oroboros that consumes itself, this is anything and this is everything, all possibilities. He can feel the chambers click under the press of his thumb. Forget the knife. Forget all of it. He wonders why he waited for this so long?
Under the click of metal, he hears something like a hiccup. Or a sob. He freezes, twisting his head to look over his shoulder. There’s a tennis shoe peeking out from behind the doorway to the back hall. There’s the girl, one eye visible, watching him.
She is the clearest thing in this room, impossibly clear, rendered perfectly in his shaky vision as she seems to fill everything, her one eye wet and dark and reflecting a Jack that winks again, that steps down onto the pitted tile, spins the chamber of the revolver like a showman announcing the odds of the roulette; the terrible thing that knows him and waits for him and is coming now, even now, the man who this girl is seeing—
The moment shatters like so much glass under his hands, gouging and dangerous as it goes to pieces, unrecoverable.
There’s a mad scuffle of motion that tells him Scarecrow is gone, but his eyes are too fixed on the floor to check. His knees are aching though he doesn’t remember hitting the ground. He digs his nails into the skin around his mouth, presses his palm harder into the tile, finds himself making desperate little keening sounds as he tries to force a shout from his throat like a terrified sleeper. His whole body shakes with the effort.
Jack comes down in a nightmarish haze, he doesn’t know how much later. The sky is empty and clear again, when he finally can look up, but growing a little amber with late afternoon sunshine. The city is remarkably quiet. He carefully runs his hand over the dried tackiness of the monstrous mixture on his chin and cheek, and his glove comes away dark with powdery flakes of blood.
He lifts up off his hands, every muscles aching in a new way, and looks back to the doorway where the kids had huddled. They’re still there. One of them looks like he’s asleep, or at least catatonic. Everybody is in one piece.
Jack takes a deep breath, so deep that he feels for a second like he’s going to vomit from the pressure of it, and coughs it back out again. Okay. Okay. So, all collateral aside, mission accomplished. He lifts himself up on shaky legs and makes his way back towards them, stalling out uncertainly when the girl flinches away from him. Okay. He’s not going to try getting any closer. That's—that’s fine.
He asks her for a number he can call. A parent, or a sibling, or something. It takes her a couple of tries to remember. He gets the shop phone and slides it across the floor to her when she flinches again, drawing back from his attempt to simply hand it to her. Her fingers are small and they have trouble punching the ancient square buttons.
Jack simply stands in the doorway while she sobs incoherently into the receiver. If she can’t get the information out in another minute, he’ll take over. Just a minute. He just needs a minute. His fingers sink into his pockets and then snap back out, as if burned. His pistol is still there, real and cold and heavy.
Lately he keeps thinking about taking up smoking. Any excuse to hide his mouth behind his hand, to focus his energy on something small and manageable, like the movement of smoke in and out of his lungs. But he knows that if he picks it up he’ll never be able to stop. He’s too nervous by nature. So he only stands there and thinks about it.
In the end, the girl is still sobbing so Jack takes the phone away from her and gives directions to her frantic parent, and then they all wait in exhausted silence until the woman arrives. She hardly even looks at Jack as she flies by, which probably explains why her thank-yous sound so desperately, sincerely grateful.
Jack watches her smoothing her fingers over her daughter’s wild hair. He thinks about the home they’ll go back to. He thinks about his reflection in the meat case. He thinks that he’s always suspected there was a reason why he belonged nowhere.
What can he do? He’s always known there was something terrible behind him, something waiting to be uncovered with just the wrong backwards step. He still doesn’t know what it is, but he certainly knows what it feels like now. He’s nauseatingly certain that the next time he tries to look another human in the eye, he’s going to remember that awful ocean of power and powerlessness, the fear and laughter, and he's going to be sick.
“Uh, hey,” he manages, hiding as much of his face behind his hand as he can, “can I—can I have the phone back?”
The mother pushes his phone into his hand, apologizing much more than needed. Jack swallows, stares down at it. It takes him a couple tries before he can take his hand off his face to hit the buttons.
There’s the usual ringing. For a moment he thinks it’s going to go to voicemail, but then, there he is—
“Jack?” Bruce says, urgent, no hesitation. Jack sinks into it gratefully.
“Huh-hi, Bruce,” Jack says. “Sorry to—heh—bother you twice in one day, but—”
“Where are you?” Bruce says, immediately. “I’m coming to get you.”
Jack smears tears away from his cheeks with the heel of his palm before they can leave pathetic tracks in the mask of gore. For the millionth time, he wonders if Bruce can actually be real. Nothing so good can be real.
“Still at the shop,” he says, “you know me, always working overtime.”
“Right, of course,” says Bruce, who probably has caller ID. “Hold still. I’m ten minutes away.”
Ten minutes seem like an awfully long time. Jack laughs wetly into the receiver. “Could you stay on the line?”
“Sure,” Bruce says. Jack thinks he can maybe hear the sound of an engine starting up. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Jack turns, looks at his reflection in the dark glass of the display case. It looks back at him with watery, nervous eyes. Whatever Scarecrow stirred up in him, there’s no trace of it left now. It’s never left him though, not before and certainly not now. That much is clear.
“Oh, I’m okay,” he says. “I just—got held up, that’s all.”