Part 3 — Escape
Chapter 7
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Jim Gordon had decided on spaghetti bolognese the way a man decides on most things when he's tired — by eliminating everything that required more thought. He wasn't a bad cook, exactly, but the commissioner's schedule didn't leave much room for developing the skill, and spaghetti was reliable. It came out the way it always came out, which was fine, and fine was sufficient for a Tuesday evening.
The three of them sat around the dinner table, the serving bowl in the center, the sauce still faintly steaming.
Ben ate the way people eat when they've genuinely forgotten to do it for most of the day — with complete focus, the fork moving without pause, the plate in front of him treated as a problem that needed solving. He'd left school and gone directly to the hospital, then the docks, then the warehouse. Somewhere in the accounting of those hours, food had simply not come up. He was too hungry to be self-conscious about it, which meant he wasn't self-conscious about it at all.
Jim watched him for a moment with the concern of someone who has raised a child and recognizes the particular velocity of a teenager who hasn't eaten.
"Slow down, son. You'll choke."
Ben swallowed. "Haven't eaten since this morning. Been busy." He looked up briefly. "Sorry."
"Don't apologize. You need seconds, just say."
Ben handed him the plate, which was empty. Jim took it without comment, stood, and came back with it full. Ben returned to eating.
The table settled back into silence.
Barbara looked between her father and her project partner — one reading the room and the other entirely unaware there was a room to read — and decided that someone needed to make an effort.
"How was work, Dad?"
Jim set his fork down and exhaled. "You know I can't discuss that with you, Babs."
Ben looked up from his plate. "If you're worried about me, don't be. Being related to an attorney, I've heard my share of crime." He resumed eating.
Jim started to respond. Barbara cut across him, leaning forward slightly with the expression she'd been deploying on her father since she was eight years old.
"Come on, Dad. You have to tell us something."
Jim looked at her for a moment, then made the sound of a man accepting a minor defeat. "Nothing said at this table goes anywhere else. That includes both of you."
Both of them nodded. Ben set his fork down.
Jim leaned back slightly. "Since Carmine Falcone went down, the Gotham underworld has been quiet. Too quiet, in the way that usually means something is organizing underneath the surface rather than nothing happening at all. That changed three months ago. There's been movement — significant movement — and the pattern of it suggests someone new has taken the reins." He paused. "I knew the peace wouldn't hold. I just hoped it might last a little longer."
He let that sit for a moment, then added, "The mayor's position is that we're overreacting. He wants all available resources on the demons. The crime lord situation, in his view, is secondary."
Ben's head came up. "Why? The demons have been taking criminals off the street. Whatever they are, the results speak for themselves. That has to count for something."
Jim looked at him with the measured patience of a man who has had this argument before, in different forms, with different people.
"It may look that way from the outside," he said. "But over the two years these creatures have been appearing, people have ended up near death. The creatures don't make distinctions about proportionality or due process. Last month, an entire gang was found frozen solid in an alley. They survived because someone found them in time." He held Ben's eyes. "An hour later and that would have been a mass casualty event."
Ben remembered that night with the precise detail that the nights where things went sideways always retained. He'd been testing Big Chill's range, moving through the Narrows when the sound of planning carried to him through a wall — a gang calling itself the Dragon Snake, coordinating a hostage situation, the hardware visible through the window when he'd looked. What followed had been straightforward, or had felt straightforward at the time. He'd frozen all of them. They'd deserved it. The gunfire during the fight had apparently been louder than he'd calculated.
He registered the regret automatically and set it aside. Not for what he'd done. For the exposure.
"They had serious hardware and a building full of people targeted," Ben said, his voice level. "An argument could be made that the outcome was appropriate. That putting people like that on trial, running them through a system that sends them back out eventually, is what allows the cycle to keep going."
Jim and Barbara both stopped.
Jim set his fork down carefully. "Every person in this city — regardless of what they've done — is entitled to a fair trial. That's not a technicality. That's the foundation that separates a functioning society from something else entirely."
"Sometimes the line between functioning society and something that just looks like one from the outside is thinner than people want to admit," Ben said. "Real fear — the kind that makes someone genuinely reconsider — is more effective than any sentence length. The demons work because people don't know the limits. That uncertainty is the point."
"Ben." Barbara's voice was quiet but firm.
He looked at her. Then at Jim. He became aware of the quality of the silence at the table and what he'd done to it.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have — that was out of line."
Jim said nothing for a moment. Then he picked up his fork again.
The table returned to the business of eating, and nobody said anything else about the demons for the rest of the meal.
---
Jim washed and Barbara dried, the two of them moving through the kitchen with the easy choreography of a long-established routine.
Jim cleared his throat after a while. "Your friend is... quite something."
Barbara kept her eyes on the plate in her hands. "Don't take it personally. He's from Metropolis. He was there when it happened." She set the plate down and picked up the next one. "Whatever he saw that day — I can only imagine what it does to how you see things."
Jim turned that over quietly, the water running, and said nothing more.
---
In Barbara's room, Ben lay on her bed with his shoes off and his eyes on the ceiling, his jacket folded over the back of her desk chair.
He looked at his left wrist. The bandaging was still in place.
Fear was the answer. It had to be. If Darkseid had encountered something he genuinely feared — not opposition, not resistance, but fear — the calculation would have changed. The invasion would have been a different kind of consideration. Fear was the only currency that couldn't be negotiated around or waited out.
He turned that thought over in his mind, the way he turned most things over, until it settled into the same place it always settled.
He was right. He knew he was right.
He stared at the ceiling and held onto that.
---
Arkham Asylum stood at the edge of Gotham like something the city had built to contain what it couldn't face directly.
The main building was Victorian in origin, its stone facade darkened by more than a century of Gotham weather, the kind of staining that went past the surface into the material itself. Four stories at the main block, with wings extending from either side, the roofline broken by towers that served no functional purpose but had been part of the original design and had never been removed. The grounds were surrounded by a perimeter wall topped with coiled wire, the gatehouse permanently staffed, floodlights mounted at intervals that left no shadow along the fence line. A sign at the gate read ARKHAM ASYLUM FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE in letters that had been repainted enough times to be perfectly legible.
Inside, the hallways smelled of antiseptic and old stone, the floors polished to a shine that reflected the overhead lights in long, unbroken strips. Orderlies and staff moved through the corridors on rotation, the building running its systems with the practiced normalcy of an institution that had processed extraordinary things long enough to have procedures for all of them.
It had procedures for most things.
It didn't have a procedure for this.
The orderlies were on the floor.
They lay in the corridor in the particular stillness of people who were not going to get up, the blood from the nearest of them already spreading to the grout lines between the tiles. The lights above them ran without interruption, indifferent.
From around the corner came the sound of boots on polished floor, then the flat, consecutive sound of gunfire, then silence, then boots again.
Two figures came around the corner walking side by side, assault rifles held with the easy familiarity of people who had been carrying them long enough to stop noticing the weight. Black long-sleeve shirts, black trousers, combat boots. Behind them, more — filling the width of the corridor, some of them moving in pairs, some in threes, their number totaling twenty. Several were women, though the clothing and the movement made the distinction secondary.
Every one of them wore a clown mask.
They moved without speaking. Not the silence of discipline exactly, but something closer to the silence of people who had been given a single instruction and were executing it without requiring conversation. Two of them had a woman between them, a doctor by her coat, her hands shaking as they moved her forward through the corridor she knew by memory in circumstances she had no frame for.
They stopped at a cell door.
The door was heavy iron with a keypad lock, the kind installed after the third escape attempt, reinforced again after the fifth. One of the masked figures stepped back and pointed at the doctor, then at the keypad. The gesture was economical and clear.
She walked to the panel. Her hands were still shaking when she entered the code, but she entered it correctly, and the door released with a heavy mechanical buzz and swung open.
The figure inside was facing the wall.
Whatever he had been doing before the door opened — and the wall in front of him bore evidence of sustained and varied activity — he stopped. He stood very still for a moment, the green of his hair visible even from the corridor, the white of the institutional clothing he'd been wearing long enough to have adjusted to.
Then he turned around.
The Joker's face was white — not pale, not wan, but the specific depthless white of something that had ceased to be a normal skin color long ago, though whether that was chemistry or theater or something that had simply set over time was a question nobody had been able to answer definitively. His hair was green and wild, the kind of green that wasn't found in nature and didn't try to be. His mouth was wide, the smile a permanent structural feature of the lower half of his face, red in a way that suggested it had nothing to do with cosmetics. His eyes were bright and attentive in the way of someone who finds everything genuinely interesting, which was its own category of terrifying.
He looked at the open door. At the masked figures in the corridor. At the doctor standing between two of them, her face communicating everything she was feeling whether she wanted it to or not.
Something in his expression shifted, the way a face shifts when a joke has just arrived at its punchline — a private delight, a recognition of something only he had seen coming.
The laughter came from somewhere deep and came out all at once, filling the cell, filling the corridor, carrying through the walls and down the hallway and out into the Gotham night like something that had been waiting a long time to be released.
( To those who haven't figured it out, this version of Barbara Gordon and Jim Gordon, are from ....
The Batman ( 2004 ) animated series.
I tried searching online if jim Gordon can cook, but despite searching I couldn't find anything, so I just assume he can)