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Chapter Text

There was something in Gotham.

Nobody knew what, but there were criminals showing up on the doorstep of the GCPD more often than not, and none of the officers could explain it.

Then, there were sightings. Blurs, really. A black shape blotting out the stars on cctv, a flash of yellow in an alley, the swooping of wings overhead. Nobody could explain it, nobody could identify it.

Then, the criminals talked, about what had happened to them. A demon, they said. A beast, seven feet tall, with horns and claws. One that flew on leather wings and spoke like the devil himself. One that appeared and disappeared at will, vanishing into the shadows faster than they could blink. A demon. a monster. a Bat.

Then, the people spoke, about the thing that had saved them. A spirit, they said. An angel, seven feet tall, with pointed ears and fangs. One that flew on leather wings and spoke like a lullaby made of stone, velvet over steel. One that watched and waited and guarded those smaller than it. A spirit. An angel. a Bat.

It was given many names by many people. To the crooks and filth of the city, it was The Flying Devil. To the police and do-gooders, it was The Dark Knight. To the media, it was The Night’s Crusader. But it was, ultimately, The Bat.

But nobody had ever gotten up close with it.

Except for James “Jim” Gordon, newly made Commissioner of the GCPD.

—

GCPD Rooftop, 10pm

He had recieved a letter on his desk, no attached name, or address, or anything of the sort, not even writing. Just a picture of the building’s rooftop with an arrow drawn in red. Wildly suspicious, so while Jim did go up to investigate, he kept his gun close and Officers Montoya and Yin within his line of sight.

“Who’s there?” he called out, hand hovering at his waist, “Show yourself.”

Nothing.

But then, a flash of black, a distorted chuffing sort of noise, and-

Fwump

Something heavy and winged dropped out of thin air, its wings pooling around it like tendrils, though wrapped tightly around itself. Or, perhaps, it had no body, he really couldn’t tell.

Jim spun around and drew his gun instinctively, heart pounding. “What are you?” He asks firmly, “State your intentions.”

The thing, big and broad, barely visible against the unsettlingly clear black of Gotham’s nighttime. Weren’t there stars a minute ago? He could barely make out the outline of its head, horned- or, he thought they were horns- with a nearly skin-colored mouth, but not quite. A deathly, pallored pale, and he swore he could see blackish-blue veins tracing its face where only a corpse wore them. Its eyes were the only clear thing he could see, cutting through the dark as if it werent there at all, not glowing, just… there, as if someone had painted white over a canvas of black. Unblinking, impossible, white, and Jim honestly couldnt tell if the thing had pupils, or if its eyes were rolled back.

It didnt answer for a long, tense minute, until it spoke, in a voice a shade too deep to be normal, a hint too echoing to be human. a distorted, rough, demonic voice, stilted as if it wasnt used to speech.

“Help.” it rumbled, and pulled a dark, clawed hand from under its wings to point at Jim, “Help.”

It took Jim a moment to translate the voice, and another moment to translate the motions, “You… want to help me?” he ventured, and the thing rumbled in what he was pretty sure was a yes.

Slowly, perhaps foolishly, Jim lowered his gun, but did not holster it. He could see, in his peripheral, that Montoya and Yin also had their guns drawn, and he slowly gestured for them to lower as well. He didn’t dare move too fast.

“What…what’s your name?” Jim asked, and the thing tilted its head- if the eyes rotating was any indicator, and he couldnt decide if the thing was sizing him up, or just processing the question. The thing rumbled, low and unhappy. Right, no names then, understood. Jim glanced over his shoulder at Montoya, silently asking if she had any idea of what this thing was.

Montoya looked the thing up and down, slow and cautious, “Are you… the Bat?” It rumbled a confirmation, and Jim looked back to the thing- the Bat. He’d heard of it before, seen the headlines about it, took in the crooks it left knocked out on the front steps of the GCPD, but he’d never seen it. He was starting to think it didn’t exist.

Clearly, it did.

“Your helping the police with criminals.” Jim says, not quite a question, not quite an accusation, testing the waters. It rumbled a confirmation, and tilted its head the other way. Hesitantly, Jim says, “I’m Commissioner Gordon, these are Officer Montoya and Officer Yin.”

It rumbled an acknowledgement, bobbing its head in a rough approximation of a nod. It took a step back, blending further into the dark, its eyes the only visible part of it. “Wait-” Jim said, before the thing could leave, “If your helping us, how do we contact you?”

The entire night seemed to still, and the thing tilted its head, then nodded down at Jim’s feet. Jim looked down, brow furrowed, and found a folder at his feet, the laminated edge stained with something black and splattered, a phone number painted crudely ontop of the lamination. Not a Gotham number, not even a New Jersey one, but when he looked back up to ask the thing about it, it had vanished. The three officers were the only ones on the rooftop once more.

Slowly, Jim picked up the folder, and inputted the number into his phone as ‘Bat’. He didn’t expect it to work, but he wasn’t about to argue with…whatever that was. He turned to Montoya and Yin, brow furrowed, and said, “We saw nothing, understood?”

The two women glanced between eachother, and nodded, mouths drawn into tight lines. Whatever this thing was, it was capturing criminals faster and easier than any of his men ever had. If it wanted to help Gotham, it was free to, Jim wasn’t foolish enough to pick a fight with something potentionally demonic.

He just hoped it stayed on his side.

Chapter Text

Life in Gotham continued. Criminals kept cropping up, tied and bound in front of the GCPD, and occasionally to some random lamp post or fence, called in by random civillians. The police kept failing to do their jobs properly. The politicians and judges and system stayed as corrupt as ever.

The Bat continued to stalk the night.

But new things began to stalk as well, things that contested the Bat, that spilt blood through the streets and struck fear into the innocent. There had always been gangs and mobs in Gotham, the wretched place had been built by long-living crime families, but these things, they were different. Less structed, less explainable, less human.

The Joker was the first thing to be given a name.

It was also the first to get a body count over twenty. In one night.

—

Arkham Asylum, Intake Room, 12:45am

Dr Dorian Vale was a man of many traits, but his greatest strength was, in his opinion, his unflappableness. He prided himself on being calm and collected at all times.

This was not one of those times.

There was a thing in his Intake Room.

Not a thing the way The Bat was said to be, but a thing that triggered a bone-deep instinct within him, something that made him want to run just by looking at it.

“Anybody in there?” the thing in front of him taunted, still bound in the strange, impossibly strong rope-like stuff that The Bat used on its captees. Its voice was simply impossible, layered but not echoing, as if a crowd of people spoke at once, all slightly out of sync from one another. Its pitch dipped and rose at random, each layer of its voice a different pitch, causing a headache of a sound whenever it spoke. It leaned forward in its bindings, the officers who hauled it in keeping a tight but cautious grip on the ropes.

Dr Vale cleared his throat, white-knuckle gripping the clipboard in his hand, “Name?” he asked, doing his damndest to stay clinical and professional, despite the thing before him.

It laughed, a layered, shrieking, almost glitched laugh, like a scratched record caught on a single, looping noise. “I have plenty of those!”

Vale winced at the sound, and took a slow, steadying breath. “A name?” he tried

The thing hummed like buzzing lights and rocked back on its heels at an angle no human could stay balanced at. When it answered, a dozen names spoke at once, and Vale couldn’t decipher any of them. J-something, maybe.

“Jay?” He tried cautiously, but the thing only laughed gratingly. One of the officers step forward, and pull a tarot card from his pocket.

“This was found on it when we arrived at the scene.” the officer, Cash, supplied, handing it to Vale. Vale turned it over to find The Fool, upside down. Vale did not know Tarot particularly well, but he knew the meaning of the Fool- reckless, foolish, impulsive, risky, caution, a warning.

When Vale looked up, he was nose to nose with the thing, and leapt back, hitting the table behind him. The officers dragged the thing back by the ropes, and finally, Vale actually looked at the thing. It was tall, too tall, but seemed to fold itself in ways no human could possibly manage, as if it lacked a spine or ribs. Its skin was white, not the pale white of a person, but the white of a corpse, pallor and veiny, though he swore the texture of its skin was like thickly applied makeup, its lips blood red and its eyelids blue. Its hair was an unnatural green, long and limp, giving the appearance of being drenched despite being completely dry.
And its eyes- god, its eyes- a pin-pricked green that shifted from acidic to forest to pale, pale green with every blink. It stood wrong, like gravity only slightly applied to it, rocking and swaying at impossible angles, its arms wrapped around itself three times under the ropes, disturbingly long, thin fingers poking out between the cords.

Vale glanced between the thing and the tarot card. The Fool. The Jester.

“The Joker.” Vale said aloud, meeting the thing’s eyes, “You're The Joker.”

The thing grinned with too many, too-yellow teeth, its canines sharp and stained with old blood. It laughed, twisting and gleeful, “If you say so, Doc!”

Chapter Text

The next thing- dubbed Rogues by the media- was a thing that called itself The Riddler, an almost-human figure who had to be blindfolded when it trapped three seperate officers in its gaze and forced them to answer riddles. When the officers had gotten them wrong, they simply dropped dead on the spot. It, too, was put in Arkham, and kept in a blacked out cell so nobody could meet its eyes, and kept far away from electronics, after it proved its ability to project its face and voice onto them without ever touching them. When it was captured, it was found with the upside down tarot card of The Moon.

Some minor, distinctly human crooks tried to play dress up to scare the police away from their crimes, but each was swiftly handled by The Bat, and strung up to poles and fences, one Joker impersonator was even left dangling twenty feet in the air by a garogyle.

And then, The Scarecrow was caught after a week of city-wide fits of terror, caused by a sickly, green gas. The Scarecrow itself was a corpse, no doubt about it, with its too-long limbs and too-thin body, a cut noose tied tightly around its throat, its body made of burlap and fabric, but with the boney physicality of a rotting corpse. Its mouth was wrapped shut as soon as it got to the Asylum, after an officer dropped dead from fear when it produced that damn gas from its cloth mouth. In its restraints was the tarot card of The Devil.

Then another, The Ivy was contained at the Gotham Botanical Gardens, after claiming ten lives through… well, pollen-related means. It- though it resembled that of a vaguely humanoid woman- was eventually transferred to the Asylum, once the officers got it to hide in a large flower, which they dug up and transplated into a controlled, nature-mimicking cell. The Ivy itself was green, consisting of leaves wrapped in the shape of a person, decorated with vines and ivy, the only other color being its petal-like hair, which was blood red. It did not bleed when attacked, it just reformed. In its cell, despite nobody stepping foot into it, was the tarot card of The Empress.

A few months passed without issue, the Rogues stayed in the Asylum, under heavy, cautious watch, and The Bat continued to stalk the night, allowing only the Commissioner to witness it properly.

And then, something terrible happened.

A person became a thing.

Its name used to be Harvey Dent.

—

Gotham General Hospital, 7:24pm

Nobody knew when he stopped having a proper face. No cameras picked it up, no staff had noticed, nobody had any idea when it started happening.

But Harvey Dent no longer had one face.

Dr Mira Locke was the first to realise. She had been on her rounds, checking patients, when she got to the room of the recently injured D.A, an acid attack by a mobster in the middle of a court sentencing. He had been awake for a few days now, but his mood had become increasingly agitated. She really couldn’t blame him, with the scarring he was left with.

But when she opened the door to his room, she stopped dead in her tracks.

His eyes werent right.

They were still there, still in the right place and the right amount, but… reptilian, almost. Slitted, sharp, unblinking.

“Hello, Harvey.” She said, keeping her tone kind and even. She didnt dare point out the eyes, she knew better than that.

“Dr Locke.” he rasped, his voice rough and painful from the attack. She approached the side of his bed, but he didnt turn his head.

He still looked right at her, however.

It was like being surrounded by mirrors, she could see his head was facing forward, but standing at his side, she could still see both sides of his face staring straight at her. She backed up, going back towards the door, and the face followed her movements without moving his head, no matter where she stood, the two sides followed.

“Is there a problem, Dr Locke?” he asked, but his voice was different. Rough, but not from damage, rough like an avalanche, like the hardening of magma. Wrong, demonic, inhuman.

“N-no, no, sir, there isnt.” Locke tripped over her words, trying to look away from him, but when she turnd her head enough to break eye contact, it was pulled back by an invisible force, keeping his face in her peripheral vision. She swallowed nervously, and faced him straight on. He- it?- moved in slow, ragged movements, like a marionette being puppeted, as he picked up a small, burnt coin from the bedside table, and held it up to his face. She blinked, and his face changed. No longer were both of his eyes slit, the one on his unscarred side had become the coin, though it still sat in his hand.

She stayed frozen in place, heart pounding against her ribs. She was no longer looking at a man, she was looking at a Rogue, she knew it in her bones. Her frantic mind scrambled for what she knew about the things, each different, but each found with a-

“Do you judge me, Doctor?” it asked, its voice distorting further with every word, cutting through her thoughts like a gunshot. Locke shook her head frantically, and it tilted its head, “are you lying to me?” She shook her head more frantically.

A hum, almost a growl, like crunching gravel, left its throat, and it rolled the coin over its knuckles. Slowly, hesitantly, she asked, “What… are you doing?”

The thing met her eyes, and flipped the coin high into the air, “Deciding your fate.” It answered as the coin dropped into its hand, a crackle as it is smacked onto the back of its other hand. When it drew its hand away, the coin was not there.

The card of Judgement stared up at her.

Her back hit the door.

Two-Face lunged.