The hall stretched long and lifeless, lit only by the few fluorescent panels that still flickered overhead, their ballasts dying in slow motion. Most had gone dark weeks ago, leaving pools of shadow between islands of sickly light.
Linoleum floors bore new scars alongside the old, fresh gouges from looted furniture dragged toward exits by desperate scavengers. The walls still wore their institutional beige, now decorated with graffiti claiming territory for gangs that he knew hadn't been there prior to the Fall.
Security checkpoints stood abandoned, their metal detectors dark and silent, gates propped open by whoever had fled through them last. The guards were long gone, along with anyone else who had had enough sense to leave when the Gates of Arkham swung wide open.
The air carried the scent of mildew and something worse, a combination that suggested the building's plumbing had failed sometime during the second week. The general office space on the third floor had been picked clean by looters, then vandalized by those who came after.
Cubicle walls lay toppled like dominoes, creating a maze of fallen barriers across carpet now stained with substances that were best left unidentified, while the desks sat empty, their drawers yanked open and ransacked for anything valuable, their cheap chairs scattered, brokem or missing entirely.
Strewn across the floor were case files; evidence and testimony that'd have made someone's career, now reduced to trash that crunched underfoot. The windows overlooking Gotham's streets had been smashed as well, whether by rioters or desperate people seeking escape routes, no one could say.
Wind whistled through the broken panes, scattering papers and carrying in the billowing smoke from fires still burning in the distance; too far for his eyes to see beyond the flickering illumination, and too close to provide anyone a sense of security or comfort.
The Chief Attorney General's office on the seventh floor had fared only slightly better, protected by its heavy oak door until someone with a crowbar had decided to see what lay inside. Dark wood paneling bore scratches and dents from the forced entry, while the built-in bookshelves stood empty, their leather-bound legal volumes either burned for warmth or looted by people who thought they might be worth something.
The massive oak desk had been overturned during the search, its surface scarred and splintered, the nameplate stolen along with anything else that looked like it was made of metal. The window behind remained intact but was absolutely filthy, coating Gotham's skyline in grime that made the ransacked city appear even more… Hellish, if that was even possible.
The portraits of all the previous Attorney Generals still hung on the walls, watching over the ruins with smiles that felt almost mocking.
This was supposed to be his office someday…
He was supposed to join those faces on the wall, watching over negotiations and phone calls with the same smug smile.
Harvey Dent studied his blurred reflection in the filthy window panel.
The shadow looking back appeared almost normal, stern-featured as any man touring the office he'd once coveted.
But as he turned and settled into the overturned chair, reality reasserted itself.
The charming attorney with dreams and aspirations existed only in memory now.
The golden brown hair he'd once maintained with vanity had completely burned away on one side, while his once unmarked skin had been replaced by a patchwork of scarred, fused layers of flesh that somhow managed to be black and green and gray and pink all at the same time… He would have blinked, if only to give himself brief respite from the sight, but his lack of an eyelid deprived him of even that small mercy.
'This can be fixed,' Everyone had assured him after he woke up in the hospital. 'You could use this to your advantage! Imagine the sympathy vote when you run for office!'
They'd practically salivated at the political opportunities his disfigurement presented.
His longtime friend Bruce Wayne had even offered to cover the surgical costs personally, but Harvey saw no point in accepting. All the procedures available could at best graft skin from other parts of his body in a futile attempt to cover up the damage.
He wouldn't look like himself afterward, just like someone trying to look like himself, a pitiful creature clinging to his old glory. He doubted he could have kept his position as District Attorney looking like that, much less aimed higher.
The best he could expect was a settlement from his insurance and the State, a few million in consolation before being relegated to yet another miser in Gotham's sea of misery. 'No,' Harvey had refused to accept such a fate. He even recalled thinking that if he was going to be a freak, then it was better to be one that'd make people recoil in fear than one they pitied from a safe distance.
And like all his aspirations before, he'd made it happen through sheer force of will.
Now, sitting in the office that had passed from attorney to attorney across generations, Harvey couldn't resist lighting a cigar to mark the occasion. This wasn't quite how he had imagined taking the position, but he'd gotten here nevertheless, and maybe that was all that had ever really mattered. No, that was all that could matter now. Everything else had become irrelevant the moment Maroni's acid hit his face.
He dragged on the cigar until only half remained, savoring each breath while he waited. His frown deepened as gunshots erupted from the lower floors, followed by screams that cut off too quickly. Then the sounds moved closer, spilling up the stairs, then out into the hallway just beyond his door. The Bat had come. He'd known, of couse. He'd known the vigilante would come the moment he heard of his return.
His lieutenants had pushed him to move to a more defensible location, somewhere with fewer entry points and better sight lines. But like the reconstructive surgeries they had all recommended, Two-Face just couldn't see the point.
Time spent retreating was time not spent preparing to fight, and he'd rather die in the office he'd claimed than survive by abandoning it. Not that preparation seemed to matter much now. "—One down! One down! I nee—" The transmission died in a scream and the wet impact of fists against flesh, sounds so visceral Two-Face could visualize the brutality even from here.
"—Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit!"
Panic flooded the next broadcast, proving more infectious than any disease while his lieutenant shouted commands that no one was following anymore. And then silence claimed his lieutenant as well, the comms going dead except for the faint crackle of an open channel and foosteps that didn't belong to any of his men. From the radio and in the hallway.
"Come in." Harvey greeted, hand drifting toward the shotgun he'd placed within reach as the door swung open without so much as a knock. "Evening, Bat."
For a moment, he felt like his old self again, like the handsome, silver-tongued attorney who'd fearlessly challenged Gotham's corrupt establishment and paid the ultimate price for his courage.
There at the threshold stood the city's boogeyman masquerading as its hero. The hypocrisy almost made him laugh. As if the Bat had ever done anything beyond feeding his own ego and satisfying some twisted need to punch his trauma into other people.
Dent wasn't much different in the end, but at least he had the self-awareness to acknowledge it, even if only in the privacy of his own thoughts. "Harvey." Intoned the Bat, his voice eerily familiar.
But he recognized the tone well enough…
Even through the modulator and theatrics, he recognized the pity.
"Give up, Harvey. It's over."
Taking another drag from the dimming cigar, Two-Face gestured toward the portraits lining the wall with his free hand.
"I was meant to be among them."
He exhaled slowly, smoke escaping from lips that could no longer fully close and drifting toward the water-stained ceiling above. "And now I'm in one of the case files instead. Funny how life works out, don't you think?"
"You could've been great." The Bat accused.
"I WAS great!" Two-Face roared, blood boiling in his veins. "I tried! I tried to help this godforsaken city, and look where the hell it got me!"
"You still could've been great."
"Looking like this?" Harvey's hand swept up to gesture at his ruined face. "I sacrificed everything to protect an order that never existed in the first place. I had the Maronis in my palm, had them dead to rights! I could have brought them to justice, but justice doesn't exist in this city, does it?"
It would have been worth it, all of it, if he'd managed to put them behind bars where they belonged.
But his friend, the one person he'd trusted with all the evidence he'd spent months gathering, had disappeared into the night instead, leaving only a broken Harvey behind.
"So you decided to join them instead? To become part of the chaos that ruined you and take it out on the city?" The Bat's voice rose, anger bleeding through the control. "Look around, Harvey! This destruction is your own doing! You string people up for trying to make Gotham better! Where's the justice in that? Where's the fairness?!"
"There's no fairness, Bat, no justice. Only chances." It had been chance that dealt young Harvey a father who drank, gambled, and beat his family for existing in his presence.
Chance that he'd encountered someone who spoke of the good an attorney could accomplish, the innocent lives he could save through the legal system.
People might argue his path had been predetermined, orchestrated by forces beyond his control, but he could just as easily have become a corrupt official or a lawyer who sold justice to the highest bidder. "All that exists rests on a coin toss."
He flipped the coin, mesmerized by how it caught the dim light before settling into his waiting palm.
"I cannot win in a fight against you, but you cannot change the man I've become, so I propose a game. Choose a side. Any side. If you choose correctly, I'll concede and leave crime behind forever. If I choose correctly, you beat me unconscious, throw me in Arkham, and wait for the night I break out so we can play this song and dance all over again… What do you say?"
"I'm not playing this game, Harvey."
"Come on, you'll be saving lives if you win, Bruce." Two-Face smiled with half his mouth, watching the name land and detonate.
"You knew?"
"It wasn't hard to figure out, Bat." Harvey's scarred face twisted into something that might have been a smile. "Bruce Wayne was always conveniently absent when Batman appeared, and vice versa. I was a prosecutor, remember? I noticed patterns."
Silence descended upon them at the revelation, and just when Harvey thought Batman would reject the offer outright, the Bat spoke up. "Regardless of the outcome, I'll help you, Harvey. I swear it."
For a moment, the costume seemed to fade away, and so did Harvey's disfigurement, leaving only two friends who used to share great dreams and even greater ambitions; men who wanted to give to their city rather than take from it.
"Three-to-five?"
"Three-to-five."
Bruce took a seat across from his friend, watching as Harvey poured them each a glass of wine from a bottle he'd apparently been saving.
"A good bottle of Chianti, just like old times."
His paranoia roared at him to leave the glass untouched, yet Bruce lifted it to his lips regardless, the mask's lower half sliding away. The wine tasted of dried cherries and old leather, earthy and rich. It reminded him of nights when they had been allies instead of adversaries.
If it was poisoned, Harvey would be poisoned too, he reasoned. And unlike the crime boss sitting across the desk, Bruce had a universal antidote concealed in his utility belt that, while not as potent as one tailored to a specific toxin, should be sufficient. "Reminds me of college… Head or tails?"
Bruce knocked back the glass and intoned, "Tails."
The coin went up, tumbling through the stale air before landing in Harvey's palm. "Heads. Looks like Lady Luck's not on your side tonight, Bruce."
"There's an operation that—"
"Don't. Don't sell me false hope." Harvey's voice went flat, dead. "I've seen burn victims, Bruce, and I'm not going to be one of those pathetic cases clinging to miracles. Heads or tails?"
"Tails." Bruce leaned forward slightly. "You haven't even tried."
Again the coin went up, spinning in the emergency lighting. "Tails." Harvey caught it smoothly, examining the result with his functioning eye. "I'm a crime boss now. If I'd wanted to, I could have the best surgeons flown to Gotham." He paused, something bitter crossing his ruined features. "I did have the best cosmetic surgeons flown to Gotham. From the Korea to the slums of India, and they all agreed the chances of me ever getting my face back were closer to zero than one."
It wasn't that they were unskilled, but the chemical burns left scarring too deep for grafts to hide.
The skin would be bumpy and disgusting unless they removed all the flesh beneath, and such a surgery was too risky for any surgeon to stake their career on. And the ones willing to risk it didn't even know how or where to begin.
"Be that as it may, is this really the life you want for yourself?"
Two-Face's fist squeezed tight around the coin. "Heads or tails?"
"Heads."
Up it went. "Hmm. Tails." Harvey examined the result and smugly said. "I'm one up on you, Bat. Heads or tails?"
"Tails."
The coin tumbled through the air once more, and tails it was.
"We're on equal grounds now."
"Last one to determine our fates."
"Heads."
Bruce called his choice and tensed in preparation for the fight that would follow, though he knew his old friend wouldn't pose much of a challenge. Harvey flipped the coin high, his unlidded eye following its movements until it landed on the back of his scarred hand. Several seconds passed in heavy silence before Harvey found his voice, the fight seeping out of him with each breath, yet it was not with rage that he welcomed his defeat; it was relief.
"Looks like you won."
As expected, Harvey immediately lunged for the shotgun, but he didn't swing the barrel toward Bruce. He shoved the cold steel into his own mouth, his eyes wide and vacant.
"No!"
It was only thanks to Bruce's timely interventiom that the shot veered upward, punching a crater into the ceiling as the weapon was torn from Harvey's grip. But as if possessed, the crime boss bolted for the open balcony, throwing himself over the railing like the concrete below promised salvation rather than destruction.
"Let go, Bruce. It's too late for me… Please allow me this last shred of dignity."
"No! There's still time! You can still turn back!" He'd pull his friend to safety, haul him back from the edge, but deep down Bruce knew he'd only be delaying the inevitable. "So that's it…? Maroni wins? He gets to destroy Harvey Dent completely? You're just going to let them have this?!"
Rage briefly crossed his features, but helplessness swallowed it soon enough. "It's over for me, Bruce." He'd been too weak to overcome his own disfigurement, too weak to defeat the Maronis, and now too weak to live with his own crimes.
"If you're not going to live for yourself, then live for Gotham! Fix what you broke!"
Harvey's gaze shifted from Bruce to measure the drop. "I can't. No one will trust a crime boss to have changed…" Especially not after everything that had happened.
"I do! I've always trusted you! I've always trusted you'd get through this!" Tears squeezed from Harvey's eye, running down the ruined landscape of his face as shame consumed him for what he'd done and what he'd let himself become.
"Toss the coin."
Bruce's grip tightened to the point of pain. "Toss that coin and let it decide if this is where your story ends. Heads or tails?" Harvey stared at the coin in his palm, decided in the privacy of his own mind, then flicked it upward where the Symbiote caught it mid-spin and drew it in Bruce's hand.
"Heads or tails?"
"… Tails." Harvey called.
"Heads." Bruce said it with certainty.
He knew his friend too well.
Tails was the end, the completion, death itself.
Heads was the beginning, redemption, a new chance at life.
As a prosecutor, Harvey would naturally call for his own execution.
Had Bruce blindly called out that result, Harvey Dent would likely be found dead before morning. It was all speculation, of course. Only Harvey truly knew which side meant what in his fractured mind, while Bruce could only hope he'd read his friend correctly.
Behind him, his sentient cape moved to eject the shotgun's shells and conceal the bullets somewhere Harvey wouldn't find them. "You're not lying?"
"See for yourself."
Bruce pulled Harvey up and pointed at the coin on the railing.
"Head to the GCPD, Harvey. I'll visit you after the night's over."
Pretending he had forgotten about the shotgun in the urgency of the moment, Bruce turned and headed for the door. Outside, he pressed himself against the wall and waited, listening for the click of the empty gun that would tell him Harvey was still trying to die. The dreaded sound, thankfully, never came.
— — — — —
Quick notice: Chapters 54–62 are completely free to read on Patreon . com / Regularrr. No membership required if you'd rather not wait to catch up.