Night in Gotham, a perilous prospect at the best of times, and these were hardly the best of times.
A lot had changed in a short time, and little of it for the better. Right now, the man stumbling through the streets found what he missed most were the streetlights. The glow from distant Bludhaven and Metropolis were enough to drown out most of the stars, yet not quite sufficient to replace them and in most of the city true Night had returned.
Dark places had always been dicey in Gotham. And the man was hardly surprised when three younger men melted out of the shadows, though he still started walking a little quicker.
"Hey, where you going man?"
"Nowhere." He replied with just a hint of a posh accent.
"Waste of time goin' nowhere," one of the young wits commented, "especially when you could be going somewhere and making yourself useful. Don't you want to be useful?"
The man cocked his head. "... No."
One of the young men rushed ahead of him, whirling to face him and walk backwards.
"Of course, you could die." There was the unmistakable snick of a switchblade, and the man stopped cold. "Ah, now we have your attention."
"What do you want?" Inwardly, he was calculating distances. Both in terms of the neighborhood and to his attackers. It should be close enough, but one never really knew for sure. Best to stall for time.
"What're you good at? All kinds of uses for a pair of hands, heh, or maybe a mou--urk!"
The funny thing about darkness is that all kinds of interesting people can lurk in it. Content that the man before him was removed as a factor, the man whirled and made a looping run at his left-hand assailant, trying to keep the young tough between him and his friend while he showed off what Her Majesty's Special Air Service and innumerable pub crawls had taught him of fisticuffs.
Swift as he was in putting down his opponent, the last man was still laid out on the ground unconscious before he was done. There was always something bittersweet in the pupil surpassing the teacher, but he had had a long time to grow accustomed to the feeling.
"Are you alright, Alfred?"
"Not a scratch, sir." He would not use the Master's name, no matter how incapable their fallen foes seemed of hearing and recalling, that was just good practice.
"What have you learned?"
"Perhaps we should discuss matters in more salubrious surroundings?
Interlude: The Dark Knight Returns
It pained Bruce Wayne to ask for help, it always had, or at least since he was a child. Still, after two days of detailed surveillance and study of the blockade around Gotham he had concluded that there were only two real options for getting back to his city. The first involved an infiltration of a military base, already something that would require further days of observation and planning, and finding the right combination of bribe, threat or force to hijack a patrol helicopter with none the wiser. The second was to make one phone call to Clark and be in Gotham within the hour, no risks or delays.
And if it rubbed at his pride, well he'd swallowed far worse to get the job done.
He had been concerned, of course. Not worried, he never worried, having always believed if you had time and energy to fret you could could better use it improving your situation. The Big Blue Boy Scout wasn't exactly known for subtlety, and while he could normally fly into Gotham faster than the eye could see but doing so with passengers was... problematic. Terrestrial humanity still needed to breathe, and had an astonishingly limited tolerance for high-Gs compared to their Kryptonian cousins, something Clark had become all too painfully aware of. Clark said he could fly around the air patrols unseen. Bruce was skeptical, but if anyone had seen them, they'd known better than to try and enforce the no-fly zone against Superman.
"You're absolutely sure you don't want more help?" Clark had asked, as cluelessly well-meaning as ever.
"I need information, first and foremost. Your usual style is a problem."
"You do realize I can see and hear everything in this city for the low price of paying attention?"
"Hn. Even so." He didn't mention the real reason he wanted his friend as far away from No Man's Land as possible. The same reason he refused to allow Nightwing and Robin to get involved. He was concerned (he was never, of course, afraid) of what he would likely need to do to save Gotham. Concerned that they would shun a very ugly side of him, or worse, that they'd approve and be dragged into the muck with him.
"So in conclusion, Master Bruce, the rivers are indeed thoroughly mined, and while Bookworm claims sovereignty over the entire city his grasp is tenuous in Eastend and all the city south of Burnley, with the noted exception of Tricorners whose populace cannot sing his praises loud enough."
"That will be the new bridge he's building." Indeed, people seemed unable to shut up about the bridge being built by giants. He had even seen over a hundred people engaged in a sort of synchronized rocking, to test one of the dampening pendulums, a concrete block the size of a car.
He was just wondering at the point of building it now.
"Just so, I think. Along with some supplies he's been delivering. Chinatown appears to openly belong to the street gangs, no one who enters Robinson Park emerges, and the South Power Station has become just one segment of an enormous ice castle."
"Freeze."
"That would seem to be a reasonable assumption, yes. How fared your reconnaissance in the north?"
"Diamond District is largely ruins and squatters. Otisburg abandoned save for some street gangs. Old Gotham has power, water, and food and are distributing it but expecting people to work." He paused. "I saw Oracle. She was walking home from GCPDHQ. Unaided."
"Surely, this is wonderful news!"
"Yes. But what else might have happened?" He was... concerned about this, recalling that not long before the Cataclysm he and she had discussed the very issue of the sheer range and variety of mind-control methods available to Bookworm, which made it troubling that she was now working so closely with the new mayor. Oh, Jim and the rest of the GCPD too, but they were hardly as intimately knowledgeable of his secrets as she.
Alfred gave him an old-fashioned look. "Either way you won't find out until you talk to her."
There was that. He keyed in a familiar frequency.
"I'm back. Thought you should know."
"'Hi Oracle, how have you been?' I'm great! 'Really? That's good to hear, what with the quake and the quarantine and all.' I swear, if I find out you were just waiting for us to fix your fancy spotlight so you'd come back..."
"Talk to me. What has Bookworm been up to?"
"Trying to hold everything together, and doing better than I'd have expected. Still seems a little flaky at points, but so far he really is holding it together. I'm a little impressed despite myself."
Well, she certainly didn't sound like she'd been overcome by love, awe or devotion for the man, nor like she was pausing to receive instructions, so that was something. Still, there were a wide variety of forms of mind-control, including many with subtler effects.
The thing of it all being, Bookworm had only used mind control half a dozen times or so that he knew of. But he had to be prepared for the possibility because say what you will, the book wizard was to intelligent to pass up such a flexible and powerful tool when it had worked so well for him before. It was that subversive potential that concerned him, far more than all the grandiose death rays and localized time-tops.
He'd just have to expect betrayal from all parties, at least until he could get people alone for a smudging. He could do that, it was, after all, the only way he'd survived his time in the League of Shadows and as Lady Deathstrike's pupil. But it was an exhausting way to live.
Or... he could just cut to the chase.
"Where is he now?"
"He left late this afternoon to check out the Robinson Park situation. Haven't heard from him in a bit, actually." She paused. "Listen, you might want to think carefully about how to approach things. Right now, Bookworm is the most legitimate authority in the city. If you just take him down, you'd best have a plan to replace him in a hurry or things will get a lot uglier."
"The plan is just to talk." For now. Gather intelligence, decide on the best course of action, then act. If need be, propping up Bookworm's regime was the least of several ill-advised compromises he'd come prepared to make for Gotham.
But could the man take it?
The Batman set out for the central green fields of Gotham, with a rueful eye to the many fallen or unreliable buildings that slowed his progress to a relative crawl. He never was scared, or confused, or worried. But he was increasingly concerned about a great many things.