For the umpteenth time since arriving at Shadowcrest, Rowan once again found himself wandering its ever-changing halls, only to eventually come upon a set of stairs leading down intodamp darkness.
"… Yeah, fuck that."
He made to pivot, only to pause upon hearing the clanking of shackles and the moaning of someone. A male someone at that too!
'Curiosity kills the cat…' He reminded himself, but soon found he couldn't bear to walk away.
He wasn't quite sure what he'd do with the information, but if Giovanni were keeping his gay lover chained up in the dungeon beneath his castle, he had to know!
And thus, after spending several minutes trying to muster the courage, he finally put one foot on the stairs. Ichor, meanwhile, continued tugging at his sleeve as if to tell him they weren't supposed to be doing this.
"Pfft, when has that stopped you?"
Rolling his eyes at the Shade, Rowan descended until he came upon rows of empty cells. The noises originated from the only locked door among them, which he silently approached.
Only then could he make out what the indistinct whining actually meant.
"PPPPPRREECIOUSSSSS! MY PREEEECIOUSSSS!"
"Oh, what the fuck?" Rowan muttered under his breath as he, against all rational thought and ingrained teaching, moved to unlock the door.
"What are you doing?"
He jumped, whirling around to find the Magician staring daggers at him, then immediately threw an accusatory finger his way.
"What am I doing? What are YOU doing keeping fucking Gollum in your basement?!!"
"Gollum?"
"There'd better be a good explanation for this, or I'm telling Bruce!"
The Magician's face squeezed tightly, seemingly caught somewhere between wanting to cry and wanting to laugh, before he pushed the heavy iron door open and revealed an emaciated 'creature' crouched within the darkness.
"He-Hey!"
It yelled excitedly while scratching at its arms like a recovering addict. It must have been quite some time since it'd last seen another person, because the creature seemed to be suffering from severe speech impairment. "Yo-You want mo-more cha-chapterssss?! Ju-Just join me Pa-AtrEeeeOn!"
"… What the fuck is that?"
Giovanni closed his eyes and turned his gaze away from the pitiful creature.
"Our… Lead writer."
"…"
"…"
"WRITER?!"
The word seemed to send the creature into a frenzy as it clawed at the cold, unforgiving floor.
"Write? Write! I gotta wri-wri-write! Yesssss… YeSssSh! I gotta write moaaaar!"
"What the fuck happened to him?!!"
"… The emaciation is from poverty. I had heard stories, but apparently writing is an exceptionally unforgiving profession. Nearly ninety percent of writers live on the verge of starvation."
"And the baldness? The white skin?! The fucking claws he's grown?!!!"
Giovanni's eyes squeezed shut, as though unable to bear the writer's devolved state any longer. "The baldness was caused partly by his failing organs after too many 5 AM deadlines and partly by his own hand whenever he encountered writer's block… The nails are from attempting to claw new words into any surface he can find after I confiscated his phone and notebook. The white skin is from a lack of exposure to the sun—"
"No shit, dude!" Rowan stomped his foot in outrage. "Let the fucking guy out to get some sunlight, for fuck's sake!"
"I would… His confinement was never meant to last this long. I intended to release him after a few days, once he had rested, but…"
"But?! But what?! Stop fucking stopping midway!"
"Then he began talking about—" Purposefully lowering his voice, Giovanni cast a wary glance toward the creature before whispering. "Power Stones and Reviews."
However, that did not seem to be quiet enough.
"Power Stones? Reviews?!! MAAAAAH PRECIOUSSSSSSSSSSH! MAH PRECIOUSUSUWU!"
"I had to chain him down so he would not hurt himself."
Horrified, Rowan brought a hand to his mouth, then growled.
"We can't leave him like this. We… We gotta…" Swallowing the lump in his throat, the sidekick slowly began approaching their writer despite Giovanni's attempt to stop him.
"H-Hey… Huntsman. You, uhm, you alright there, buddy? It's me, Rowan."
With wide, manic eyes, the writer looked upon his creation.
"Ro-Rowan?"
"Y-Yes, that's right, buddy. Rowan, remember?" He carefully reached forth, ready to free his creator, only for said creator to suddenly lunge for his fingers like a rabid animal.
"Oh, shit!"
"I warned you!" Giovanni called from behind, magically yanking Rowan back beside him before his hand could be bitten clean off. "There… There's truly no saving him now."
"There has to be something you can do, right, Teach?!"
"I… I'm sorry, Rowan."
Rowan's gaze snapped toward his actually snapping and salivating creator, then toward his mentor, then back again as he struggled to stifle his own mournful cries.
"Oh, Lord. I don't believe it. I won't believe this!"
He roared those final words before spinning around and sprinting up the stairs in the peculiar fashion of a large-breasted anime heroine, arms flailing helplessly at his sides.
If his chest were any bigger, it'd surely be bouncing…
"I CAN'T WATCH THIS!!!"
"MAH STOOOOOONEEEEESSSS! MAH REEEEEEEVIEWSSSSSSHHH!"
— — — — —
The roar of the Batmobile snapped Rowan awake on the spinning chair he'd fallen asleep on.
He groaned and turned on his side, only for a sharp pain to lance through his ribs and leave him breathless.
Twisting his neck toward the noise, he saw the back of the Batmobile pop open with a hiss.
He tossed himself off the chair, dragged his feet to the revving tank, and froze at the sight of the unconscious woman inside. "Selina?" What seized his attention immediately were the dark veins crawling beneath her skin, which were not unlike his own, though far more pronounced.
"Fuck." The realization caused his vision to darken as the burglar, by some miracle, abruptly phased through her restraints and lunged with a punch that felt as vivid and painful as every hit he'd taken combined. Rowan fell on his backside, tearing up from the sting on his nose while his muscles locked in preparation for the kicks and punches and lacerations that never came, for the attack had only happened in his mind.
And yet, he couldn't calm his hammering heart, nor the flood of adrenaline his amygdala demanded his body produce.
Slowly, he reached for the vial in his pocket while constantly reminding himself it was in his head and his head alone.
He hadn't a chance to inject the neurochemical when Selina's eyelids jumped open with giddiness, her lips curving ever so slightly as if his anger amused her.
Beneath him, Ichor flickered erratically while haunting music started to echo from the deepest depths of the Batcave, followed by the condescending whistles of one Selina Kyle who, to absolutely nobody's surprise, clearly remained strapped to the back of the Batmobile.
"Rowan the Demon, sitting in the dark,
B-U-R-N-I-N-G!"
He stabbed at the major artery in his thigh, features twisting in an ugly snarl that even Rowan couldn't tell the cause of.
Was it the sting?
The violent rage?
Both, and more?
"First comes the mask,
Then comes the act,
Then—!"
A violent heat surged from the injection site, racing through his bloodstream with the subtlety of a gut-punch, and every nerve it touched screamed in protest.
His vision blurred, not from the Toxin this time, but from the tears his body involuntarily produced as his stomach folded in on itself.
Rowan doubled over and dry-heaved onto the Batcave floor, palms flat against the stone as his arms shook beneath his own weight.
'Breathe. Breathe, you idiot.'
The music was the first thing to go.
It didn't stop so much as it fell apart, each note peeling away like paint off a rotten wall until all that remained was the familiar hum of the Batcave's generators and the quiet drip of water from somewhere deep in the cavern.
When Rowan finally lifted his head, the woman's eyes were shut, her body limp and restrained exactly as she had been when the Batmobile first opened. He breathed a sigh of relief, then looked down at the beeping watch strapped to his wrist.
A message had been sent no more than five minutes ago from Bruce asking him to bring Selina to a cell of her own.
Stifling a sigh, Rowan rubbed the crease between his brows and got to work declawing the kitty.
He probably didn't need to, but on the off chance she was carrying a cross somewhere on her person, he'd rather take manicured nails to the face than sharp, titanium-coated artificial claws.
To say he wasn't tense the entire walk to the cell would be a bald-faced lie, but he needn't have worried.
Selina Kyle, for all intents and purposes, was dead to the world and mercifully staying that way.
He left her a bottle of water—because he wasn't the TSA and very much doubted she could weaponize useless plastic and five liters of tap—before locking the cell behind him.
"Oh, a new friend!" Dick pressed his face against the glass with a grin that was all teeth and no warmth. "Catwoman's great and all, but she's not much of a talker, is she?"
"Sir, your complexion is rather worrying. Do sit down before you collapse."
Rowan didn't look at them.
"Rude! You won't even look at your own family? After everything we've been through? That hurts, 'uncle.' At least wave, man. Just a little one."
The thuds came a few seconds after he turned. Normally, that alone wouldn't have been enough to make him stop, but there was a wetness to each impact, too thick and viscous to be anything but what he feared. He turned to find red streaks across the glass where Dick had and was still headbutting, and roared.
"STOP! STOP THAT RIGHT NOW, DICK, OR I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD!"
It took Ichor to pin the boy down long enough for Rowan to wrestle him into the padded restraint jacket he'd found in storage. "Hold still, you little shit!"
"Aw, you do care!"
Rowan cinched the straps tight enough to restrict movement but loose enough not to bruise, then wrapped the spare padding around Dick's head until the only damage the kid could do was tire himself out. The boy tested the restraints thrice, then slumped against the wall with a pout that would have been funny under other circumstances.
"You're no fun, Rowan."
He said nothing, locked the cell, and walked away before the trembling in his hands could betray him.
After delivering the three rations that Dick insisted he needed his hand to eat, Rowan absentmindedly retreated back to the main cave.
He resumed his earlier position, anxiously tapping the armrest with one hand and propping up his chin with the other. Every now and then, his eyes would flick to the clock, then to the entrance for a broody silhouette that never came, before inevitably drifting back to the empty glass stand where his suit should have been.
Below it, the drawers filled with spares of his uniform seemed to beckon like the One Ring.
He was sure it was only hallucinations though, as were the children with bloated, decomposing faces circling him. "Put the suit on, Rowan."
"Make it right."
"You're going to sit and watch again?"
Despite all rational thought, Rowan muttered, "I tried to help." It wasn't his fault the cops were bought back then, nor was it his fault they were taken in by Grin.
Yet it felt like it all the same.
"Did you? Did you really?"
"You couldn't save us, but you can still save them."
One of the children stopped circling and raised a trembling hand toward the cells.
"""Don't you want to?""" They exclaimed in unison, the orchestra of overlapping voices causing Rowan to wince and squeeze his eyes shut. By the time he opened them, he already had his legs in the suit and a belt around his waist. His sternum ached and creaked like the hinges of a door that hadn't seen maintenance in decades, as if protesting his decision, but he tuned it out along with everything else.
It wasn't that Rowan wasn't afraid.
He was badly injured.
There was a real chance he wouldn't make it back tonight.
But he'd spent enough of his life being tormented by guilt to know it frightened him worse than anything Gotham, in her infinite malice, could throw at him.
That, and death was honestly preferable to staying cooped up with them. Limping to the Batcomputer, he fished a small notebook, plus a ballpoint pen from one of its many drawers and silently scribbled on the blank page.
Every now and then, Rowan would giggle at what he'd written like a lunatic, only to catch himself and snap back to reality. An hour later, he'd filled almost a hundred lines.
The first thirty were mostly harmless, albeit ill-mannered pranks he had found funny in the past—harmless, juvenile things that would've made Dick groan and Alfred pinch the bridge of his nose in disapproval…
But the further down the page he went, the darker the 'pranks' became—bordering on felonies, and the more chaotic the handwriting grew, until even the sentences stopped making sense and the words grew senseless. 'I can't hold on much longer.' The thought alone was enough to drag him upright.
He slid the notebook into a compartment on his belt and leveled his glare at the cave's entrance.
Rowan doubted he could hold out until Bruce returned with an antidote, and synthesizing one himself sat squarely somewhere between laughable and delusional on his personal scale of confidence.
But as Andrew Carnegie once put it, 'Here lies a man who knew how to enlist the service of better men than himself.' Fortunately, he knew just the person for the job.
Come to think of it, 'I do need to pick that up.'
Limping through one of the Batcave's many tunnels, Rowan jabbed himself with yet another round of suppressants to hold the Toxin at bay, and found himself wondering which would give out first. His organs from overdose, or the thin scraps of sanity behind the wheel?
He didn't have to find out, thankfully, as his visor pinged, showing his position overlapping with the marker he'd set on the map.
Sneaking out of the manhole and onto the street, Rowan narrowly avoided a pack of howling teenagers smashing everything in sight before slipping into the alley beside an unassuming brownstone building. 'It's stuck.' He concluded upon inspecting the lock, then stifled grunts as he tried to unstuck the door quietly.
After three minutes of that, Rowan finally lost his patience and ripped the door clean off its hinges.
The noise was enough to wake half the street, but so what if it did?
'Yes… What do you have to fear?' The serpentine hiss coiled into his ear, settling there like it had always belonged, and stayed with him even as the door gave way to an endlessly stretching hall. He slammed the metal behind him so hard it bent and morphed around the frame like tinfoil, and strode in.
Inside the walls, rats chirped and skittered at the sound before falling into a silence that felt equal parts reverent and fearful.
"Francine?"
Rowan called out into the dark.
Between his x-ray vision and the night sight he'd been born with, the hall lit up like midday, with every crack and stain rendered in perfect detail, including the two skeletons intertwined beneath the floor.
One was slighter in build and unmistakably female, while the other was grotesquely elongated with a pronounced hunch—Kirkland. And judging by the rhythmic bouncing, a heartfelt hug was the last thing happening down there. Far be it from him to kinkshame anyone, but there were lines, and then there were LINES.
A tousled mop of green slid into his peripheral, trailed by a grin smeared bloody. 'Oh, don't look so surprised… How do you think I landed Harley?'
Paying the hallucination no mind, Rowan descended to the basement.
Francine probably wasn't of sound mind either, but if there was even a slim chance she could help, he would take it.
The air thickened the further he descended, clogged with a musky, animal stench that clung to the back of his throat and mixed with the sharp bite of antiseptic. Wet, rhythmic sounds echoed off the concrete walls, punctuated by guttural grunts that were too bestial to belong to anything human, and yet half of it did.
'It's always the nerdy ones…'
Rowan pressed himself flat against the wall at the base of the stairwell and peered through the gap. Man-Bat was restrained with thick metal cuffs, and Francine on her knees before him with her lab coat pooled on the floor, one hand pumping something Rowan immediately thanked every deity he didn't have a clear line of sight of from his angle.
The last few days had been hellish enough already…
"Ehem."
Rowan didn't realize the infected could still blush, though perhaps that was just a Francine thing.
"Do you mind?" She hissed.
Yet his eyes never strayed from her. Or more accurately, from the dark veins threading across her neck and face. "I'm going to turn around now. Fair warning, these fists are rated E for Everyone."
Predictably, the moment his back was turned, Francine bolted for the restraints.
She'd have freed the struggling beast too, if not for the Shade that had already entangled hers.
"Ha… This fucking city."
Roared the blonde as she thrashed against the hold, but her strength proved utterly irrelevant before Ichor, who had sprouted two more arms for the occasion.
"Le-Let go of me!!!"
"You asked for my presence. Well," Kneeling before the doctor, Rowan tugged her coat over her nakedness. "Here I am. If there's any shred of sanity in there,"
"Ro-Robert! Help me!"
"I need your—"
"HELP!!!"
The scream instantly drove Man-Bat feral with a sonic howl.
By the time Rowan and Ichor composed themselves enough to check, two clawed fingers had already hit across the concrete. Man-Bat's right hand had not fared much better with all its flesh and skin flayed to the bone where he'd wrenched himself free.
Had this been several hours ago when he was sleep-deprived and completely depleted, such an attack might really have taken his life.
Unfortunately for Kirkland, "[Shield]."
The Spell shuddered as the sonic blast washed over it, then buckled further when fangs pierced through the Arcane energy. If Ichor hadn't left Francine and rushed to slow the Meta's momentum, Kirkland might've broken through regardless. The only silver lining was that the circular shape of [Spectral Shield] had dislocated Man-Bat's lower jaw and halved his bite force as a result.
To the back, Francine snatched a flask from the shelves before he could react and hurled it his way.
Ichor, with its attention pinned on Kirkland, had to strain just to split a strand of itself off to flick the chemical aside, only to be rebuked. 'Are you stupid?! Don't!' If the acid so much as grazed the chemicals lining those shelves, the resulting fumes would choke the air from their lungs. And that was assuming the burns didn't kill them outright… 'Switch!'
The Shade instantly relinquished its hold and pivoted toward its designated target, while Rowan ran toward Man-Bat and uppercut his dangling jaw close. Then Rowan threw himself onto Man-Bat's back, hooking his forearms around the Meta's thick neck in a chokehold that his arms barely had the reach to manage.
Man-Bat bucked and raged until his claws found Rowan's skull, prying the vigilante loose and hoisting him into the air.
The triumphant grin lasted only until two Batarangs sank into his wrist, but his other hand was still free, mangled and flayed as it was, and already reaching. In response, a dark cloud spiraled from Rowan's wrist and onto Kirkland's.
The Wisp hissed, sinking its fangs into what flesh that remained while Rowan hooked up the ceiling.
He braced his knees against it, thankful the material was solid and not the styrofoam garbage passing for construction in half the houses across the US, then kicked off with enough force to split it wide. An explosion of concrete dust swallowed the basement whole as Rowan's fist imprinted itself on Kirkland's face.
The Meta twitched thrice and went completely still, leaving nothing but Francine's screams to fill the silence.
"No, no, no! What have you done?! Robert! Robert, honey!"
Rowan stared at Kirkland's crumpled form, hand pressed flat to his ribs and against his sternum. Only when he was sure Man-Bat was done and dealt with did Rowan dare turn to acknowledge Ichor and Francine, the latter of whom was still being held captive.
The first, meanwhile, was staring at him for instruction, bloodlust oozing from its burning sockets and begging for the kill it knew he'd deny it once more.
"I'm not here to hurt you two..."
'Hah! Could've fooled me!' The Joker hallucination cackled, wandering off to a shelf he shoved to the ground.
"You requested a meeting, remember? Something about your husband's condition, and a Serum."
"So you're here for our hard work... Well, you can't have it! You can't have it!!!"
Naive of him to expect rationality from someone Afflicted with the Joker Toxin, he supposed, but every now and then, even Rowan had to hope. He sighed, rubbing his eyelids.
There were ways to make Francine cooperate—none of which would be advantageous to fostering a friendly relationship. And even if she agreed, could he trust a word she said in this state? The memory of what Alfred and Dick had done to him while Afflicted was as fresh as the wounds littering his form.
'No.'
He concluded.
"Knock her out. And make it quick," Rowan's eyes swung from the Shade, and to the manic scientist as he pivoted on one heel. "Make it painless."
Putting her muffled screams out of mind, Rowan dropped into a nearby chair and sat with his thoughts for a while. He wasn't even sure what he was mulling over, only that his brain needed the moment.
Before the stillness could settle into something lazier, Rowan forced himself up and began tearing through the lab, searching high and low for the Serum. HIS Serum. If Francine's expertise was off the table, the least he could do was walk away with something to show for the night. Yet, "Where's it? Where's it?! Where's my FUCKING shit?!!"
Solid metal warped beneath his gloved fists as he let the rage take the wheel, basking and drowning and allowing it to engulf him whole, until a hand found his shoulder.
Nose scrunched, he turned slowly to find the Shade fidgeting on its feet like a child bracing for an alcoholic father's backhand.
"What?!" Rowan spat, then caught himself, palm dragging down his new, and already scratched-up helmet. "Fuck. To hell with this world… To hell with this miserable, wretched fucking city and the sordid, frothing fucking lunatics inhabiting it! To hell with it!!!"
He roared, sinking to his knees as his already smeared vision blurred some more.
"… What now?"
He couldn't wait…
And given the length Dick had gone to in his madness, those three couldn't either.
"What now, Ichor? What do we do?"
He asked, and the darker piece of himself answered by shoving a syringe into his palm. There it was… The Serum he'd been pining for all this time, yet even it couldn't lift his souring mood. He lifted his head, watching the Shade drift toward a dead decorative plant, which it carefully plucked, and offered to him.
The brittle thing looked like it might crumble into dust at the slightest touch, yet a faint, stubborn pulse thrummed within its dry fibers.
There was life.
There was the Green.
Rowan's eyes widened behind his visor as the answer to the crisis came to him.
"Isley."
— — — — —
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