After Edward had been dragged from the room, Strange carried on with the psychological evaluations exactly as planned. He worked through the rest of the roster.
When he was finished, he emerged from the temporary counseling room with his assistant at his heels. Bob was waiting in the corridor outside, and Strange greeted him.
He praised the East End officers, highlighting their unconventional resilience, unique psychological coping mechanisms, and admirable ability to compartmentalize under sustained professional stress. He added that he would submit a full assessment report to headquarters within the week.
Before leaving, he shook Bob's hand and thanked him for his cooperation.
To anyone watching, it looked like a routine consultation that had gone well.
Only Dr. Quinzel, who had been glued to the surveillance monitors for the better part of two hours, caught the flash of anger that flickered behind his glasses.
She tracked him on the monitors until he disappeared around the corner and out of the building.
"He's gone," she said.
Marco had just come back into the monitoring room. He leaned against the console, rolling his shoulder.
"So the crisis is over? Edward's going to be fine?"
Dr. Quinzel turned her chair around to face him properly.
"That's hard to say."
Marco frowned. "What does that mean?"
"Psychological intervention is not like turning off a faucet." She folded her hands in her lap. "You cannot just tighten it and expect not a single drop to leak through. Especially not with the kind of language Dr. Strange uses."
"What kind of language?"
"Seed language." She stood up and moved to the window, looking out at the corridor where Strange had just walked. "He did not force anything on Edward. He exploited Edward's pride and his hunger for intellectual recognition, and he used both of those things to sketch a blueprint in Edward's mind. The concept of a more perfect inner companion. For someone like Edward that concept is not just appealing. It is intoxicating. He will not believe it immediately. He is too rational for that. But the concept has been planted, and his mind will do the rest on its own. That brain of his never stops working. It will find the idea in quiet moments and start feeding it without him even realizing."
Marco crossed his arms.
"You're saying it's like a virus. It just sits there until conditions are right."
"More or less. He might be fine right now. But late at night, alone, when he is staring at a puzzle that will not solve itself, or when he feels that particular frustration of being the smartest person in a room full of people who still do not understand him... who can guarantee he will not remember Dr. Strange's words? That he will not think, even just for a moment, 'what if there really were someone who could understand everything about me'?"
Marco rubbed the back of his neck. "Okay. So can't you do something? Counter it somehow? Dig the seed out before it takes root?"
Dr. Quinzel exhaled through her nose. "I wish it worked like that."
"But you're a psychiatrist."
"Yes, which means I know exactly why it does not work like that." She sat back down, elbows on her knees. "First of all, you are aware that my introduction to Edward did not exactly go smoothly. There is no trust between us. On a good day, what we have is mutual toleration with a side of his biting sarcasm. On a bad day, it is hostility. In that environment, any direct psychological intervention from me would make things worse. He would wall up immediately. Worse, it might push him further toward the fictional ally Dr. Strange constructed for him, because it would remind him exactly how little the real world understands him."
"So you cannot help him."
"Not directly." She held his gaze. "Psychological healing requires a foundation of trust. Right now, there is a wall between Edward and me. I cannot dismantle it by force."
Marco was quiet for a moment. He had been tired before this conversation started, and now he felt tired in a different way. It reminded him of the feeling after a long interrogation where you got everything you needed but still walked out feeling like you had lost something.
"So what do we do?"
"Watch for subtle behavioral changes. If he starts displaying expressions or mannerisms that do not quite fit his normal pattern, you tell me immediately. And give him recognition. Let him feel that the real world still has people worth connecting with. That is what weakens Dr. Strange's seed. The more Edward feels seen and understood out here, the less attractive the idea of retreating inward becomes. Right now, the people around him matter more than any intervention."
Marco absorbed that, and then let out a long breath.
He straightened up and extended his hand to her.
"Thank you. If you had not caught what Dr. Strange was doing when you did, Edward might have..." He stopped. The end of that sentence was not something he particularly wanted to say out loud.
Dr. Quinzel looked slightly startled by the formality.
"You are welcome, Captain." She shook his hand. "Being able to observe Dr. Strange's methods up close, and watch Edward's defensive structures in real time is an extraordinary case study. I have learned a great deal today."
"Glad someone came out ahead." Marco released her hand and waved it off. "Either way, I owe you one."
Dr. Quinzel's eyes lit up immediately. She took a small step closer.
"That sounds very interesting." She tilted her head. "I did protect your most valuable asset today. And I spent two hours watching surveillance footage and stress-eating Anna's snacks. Surely there is some recognition for that kind of contribution?"
"Here is what I can offer," Marco said. "If something like this comes up again, I will consider bringing you in. On the condition that you follow direction, you do not put yourself or anyone else in danger, and you do not treat any person in that building, including yourself, as an experimental subject."
"Done!" She grabbed his hand and shook it. "That is completely acceptable. You have yourself a deal."
Marco raised an eyebrow. "You agreed to that faster than I expected."
"I am a woman of science, Captain. I recognized a good deal."
He shook his head, smiling slightly. He turned to leave, then paused at the door.
"One more thing." He glanced back. "Hypothetically. If someone were to try that seed language thing on me, how would I deal with it?"
Dr. Quinzel was already squeezing past him through the doorway, grabbing her bag from the hook on the wall.
"That particular technique does not work well on people who are genuinely straightforward," she said cheerfully, patting his arm as she passed. "The seed needs fertile ground." She smiled at him over her shoulder, already moving down the corridor. "I am going to find Raven. Bye-bye."
"Yeah. Bye."
Marco watched her go, then stood in the empty doorway for a moment.
---
He made it back to his office, dropped into his chair, and stared at the ceiling. His plan was to close his eyes for twenty minutes. He had learned in his first year on the job that twenty-minute micro-naps were one of the few useful tools available to a patrol officer on a bad shift.
He was three minutes into attempting this when the system chimed. He blinked at the notification that materialized in the edge of his vision.
[You have altered the fate of Jack Napier in a minor way. Skill Point +1]
Marco stared at it.
So the guy had followed through on the comedy thing. He had half-expected it, but seeing it confirmed was still strange.
He was still thinking about that when he noticed something wrong with the notification.
The golden text was fine, but beneath it, in black lettering that looked like it had been forced through a crack in the interface rather than displayed intentionally, was a second line:
[But you cannot change the Joker's fate]
He read it twice.
Then he sat up straight and read it a third time.
He had seen the system do a lot of things, but he had never seen it add unsolicited commentary to its own notifications.
What does that even mean? he thought. Is that a warning? A threat? And why is my own system acting like it is not on my side?
He filed the matter away as a problem to deal with later and shifted his attention to the unavailable skill.
The interface displayed its status clearly.
[Skill Level: 3]
[Required Points: 1/5]
[*******************]
Without hesitation, he invested four skill points into it.
[Skill Level: 3]
[Points Required: 5/5]
[Prodigal's Return: You may delete previously selected skills and reclaim the invested points for reallocation.
Cooldown: 36 hours
This skill cannot be upgraded]
A reset tool, huh?
It was more useful than it appeared, like a reliable undo button on a computer. It was not flashy, but it could prevent countless disasters.
He made his first decision.
He opened the skill menu, located Even Match, and deleted it. The system returned one skill point immediately.
Twenty minutes was all he needed.
He leaned back and closed his eyes once more.
---
Across the city, on the rain-slicked roof of Gotham University's psychology building, Gordon's voice came through the earpiece.
"Two of my best officers went to ask a few routine questions about Dr. Morris. One of them is now in a hospital ward, muttering to himself. The other one nearly strangled his own partner in the elevator on the way out. Batman, Crane is not just a professor anymore. He is..."
The transmission broke up for a moment, static filling the gap, and then the sound of Gotham's rain swallowed the rest.
Bruce stood at the edge of the rooftop. The rain ran off the cowl in sheets, pooled in the grooves of his gauntlets, and soaked through the outer layers of the suit until the cold found its way in.
The psychology building was one of Gotham University's oldest structures, and it showed. The stone facade had darkened over the decades.
He went in through the access door and moved through the top floor corridor. Crane's office was at the end of the hallway, and the door lock gave way in under four seconds. Inside, papers spread across every surface, covered edge to edge in dense, cramped writing and diagrams.
He moved through the wreckage. On the floor near the window, a picture frame had been knocked over and the glass shattered. Behind the cracked glass, Crane's face in the photograph was smiling.
There was a second door inside the office. He worked the lock with two tools simultaneously and felt the mechanism give after about thirty seconds.
The storage room beyond was larger than it had any right to be.
At the center stood a crude raised platform, and on it a battered dentist's chair with restraint straps hanging loose from the arms and legs. The straps were stained. The chair's headrest was worn smooth. And around the platform stood mannequins in tattered clothing.
The walls were papered floor to ceiling in cutouts. Words appeared and reappeared through the layers: stimulus, response, threshold, inhibition, fear.
At the far end of the room, several chemical workbenches were connected by tubing to a network of glass apparatus. Inside the apparatus, yellow-green liquid moved slowly.
Bruce stood and looked at all of it.
Jonathan Crane had not been studying fear. He had been manufacturing it.
He moved toward the workbenches, reading the labels on the flasks.
Test Subject A.
Concentrated Volatile Agent.
Threshold Batch 3.
He reached for the nearest flask to examine it more closely. As he shifted his weight, he heard a faint sound beneath his boot.
Click.
He threw himself backward immediately, but the ceiling was faster. From four vents he had not noticed, yellow gas billowed out in dense, pressurized streams that crossed, merged, and filled the room completely before he had covered two meters. He held his breath and drove himself toward the door, but his skin was already reporting the problem. A strange numbness crept inward, penetrating the outer layers of his suit.
He had maybe ninety seconds before it hit the central nervous system.
He reached the door.
His hand closed on the handle.
And the door became something else.
The steel shifted under his grip, taking on the texture of living tissue. The scratches across its surface deepened into mouths and stretched into screaming faces that opened and closed without sound. He knew that this was the toxin constructing hallucinations from his sensory input. But knowing did not help.
Move, he told himself.
But the floor was already changing. The rubber mat beneath his boots dissolved into cold cobblestones. The chemical smell of the room faded, replaced by the damp air of Gotham on a November night thirty years ago.
He watched his father fall.
Time slowed the way it always did in moments that mattered most. His father stumbled backward. The pearl necklace snapped. Pearls scattered across the stones.
Then his mother fell.
Joe Chill stood between them, and he turned.
The face that looked back was not Chill's. It was his own. His own features framed by the cowl, staring at him from within the nightmare.
"Look at what you have become," his own voice said. "A monster who wears a mask and calls it justice. You brought all of this on yourself."
The pearls at his feet rolled toward him and stopped. When he looked down, they had become two pale, hollow eyes staring up from the cobblestones.
He stepped toward the figure, and the alley vanished beneath his feet.
He fell.
Wind tore past his ears as he plunged into darkness. It was not the darkness of night.
Sound and motion surrounded him. Red eyes ignited one after another, as if some vast creature were drawing breath. Then came the sound.
The colony descended.
Wings beat against the air. Membranes brushed his skin. Claws struck his cape and scraped against his cowl. They passed through him like specters, leaving behind a cold that sank deep into his bones.
A child screamed.
The sound echoed through the cavern. It was his own voice at eight years old, the scream he had swallowed in the real cave. Now it tore free.
Beneath it rose another voice.
You could not save them.
You cannot save anyone.
Gotham will drown. And you will drown with it.
He had endured enough since the cave, and even before he first wore the cowl, to recognize his fears when they took shape. He knew the toxin was real. The cave was not. The red eyes were nothing more than a chemical illusion, assembled from his own memories by a compound Crane had spent years perfecting.
He knew all of that.
The cold around his heart tightened anyway.
His heartbeat was too loud inside the cowl. He staggered, and his back hit something.
From the shadows in the corner of the room, a figure slowly emerged.
Crane looked worse than in the photographs. His frame was thin and gaunt.
Batman tried to lunge forward and subdue him, but his body felt heavy. Blood-red distortions flooded his vision. Crane's form split into countless copies that circled him from every direction.
The world collapsed into darkness filled with distant screaming.
He dropped to one knee, bracing himself with a hand against the floor, struggling against the torrent tearing his consciousness apart.