"Gotham… is a page of black paper.
It is the white words you write upon that darkness — the road you chase and never stop falling down.
Like the first line of the last story you'll ever tell."
— Batman: Gotham Impressions
"...zzzt— The Gotham Gazette brings you breaking news. The standoff between the Ventriloquist and officers at the Gotham Evidence Bureau has now entered its third hour. Experts believe—"
"—this is nothing more than freaks attracting freaks. Following the mass Arkham breakout just days ago— because of Batman, you understand, he draws them, he always draws—"
"—Batman has still not arrived on scene. Which raises the question: is the rumor of Batman's death actually true? Is the GCPD truly so helpless that— wait. Wait, we have a development. It's Batman. He's here."
June in Gotham meant rain. It always meant rain.
The plaza outside the Gotham Evidence Bureau was louder than it had any right to be in weather like this — a wet, restless press of bodies pushing against each other in the grey drizzle, the kind of crowd that smelled like damp coats and frustration.
Ethan Cross hadn't even brought the Batmobile to a full stop before the reporters descended.
They came like flies to something dead — shoving past the protesters holding WE DON'T WANT BATMAN signs, elbowing past the cops trying to hold the line with batons and strained patience. Camera flashes strobed through the rain in irregular white bursts.
"Batman — your response to the rumors that Bane killed you—"
"—the Ventriloquist's challenge, do you have a statement—"
"—why show yourself so openly this time—"
"You freak! This is your fault! That lunatic in there, you know what you did, you attracted—"
"—grab him! Grab the car!"
The protesters who lunged for the Batmobile were put down fast by the officers nearby. Ethan ignored all of it.
He hit the release on the canopy. The split shell slid back, and the first breath of the rainy night came in — damp, cold, carrying the particular smell of Gotham in the dark: exhaust and wet stone and something faintly chemical underneath.
He exhaled slowly.
Alright.
There was a tightness in his chest that he recognized even if he hadn't felt it in a while. He'd spent his previous life as an actor. Crowds and cameras and the naked exposure of being watched — that should have been comfortable ground by now.
But this wasn't a film set.
Ethan Cross — formerly an actor, formerly a practicing psychologist, currently and inexplicably occupying the body of Bruce Wayne — looked out at the chaos and let himself have exactly one moment of private honesty.
He hadn't asked for this.
Transmigrating to the DC universe, fine. He was a comic obsessive; he'd back himself to navigate that. But waking up as Batman — as Bruce Wayne himself, the goddamn Dark Knight, the one man in the Justice League who had no powers and somehow ended up the most dangerous person in the room — that he had not accounted for.
I was supposed to latch onto someone strong, he thought. Not become the person everyone else latches onto.
The irony wasn't lost on him.
By every metric, Batman was extraordinary. The man had no meta-gene, no alien physiology, no magic ring. Just obscene wealth, a mind that bordered on terrifying, combat training pulled from every discipline on earth, and a will that had stared down gods and not flinched. The peak of what an unaugmented human being could become.
And none of that was Ethan's. Not really. Not yet.
He and Bruce Wayne shared exactly one thing: they'd both lost their parents.
An orphan transmigrating into an orphan, he thought. Genuinely poetic. I hate it.
The deeper problem — the one that had kept him up for three straight nights since arriving — was the timeline.
He hadn't just landed in the DC universe. He'd landed in Knightfall. The arc where Bane, who had spent months systematically exhausting Batman by releasing every Arkham inmate at once, finally cornered Bruce Wayne and broke his spine across his knee.
Not a metaphorical defeat. A physical one. Vertebrae. The man who couldn't be broken, broken.
Running had crossed his mind for about ten seconds before he'd dismissed it. Bane knew Bruce Wayne's face. Bane knew who was under the mask. Fleeing without a plan wasn't escape — it was just choosing the location of your own execution.
His gaze drifted to the lower left of his vision, where a line of silver text hovered, visible only to him:
[ Alfred Protocol: Active]
[ Warning: At least one anchor item required to synchronize Batman's memories.]
He suppressed a grimace.
Every transmigration story he'd ever read followed the same template — show up, receive system, acquire cheat, conquer world. The lucky ones found a cave full of kryptonite and walked out as Superman. He'd spent three days in the Batcave going through everything he could find. Every piece of equipment. Every case file. Alfred's laundry. He was fairly certain he'd even opened a cabinet that turned out to be purely toilet supplies.
Nothing. Not a single sync.
The Alfred Protocol was real — in the comics, it was a physical device, a mechanical failsafe Bruce had built to prevent memory tampering. Here it had apparently decided to manifest as a retinal overlay with the manners of a passive-aggressive notification system, and it wasn't giving him anything until he found whatever it was calling an anchor item.
Which meant no inherited memories. No muscle memory of eight hundred martial arts disciplines. No mental map of Gotham's criminal underworld. No twenty years of case files instantly accessible.
He was running Bruce Wayne's body on manual.
"Batman!"
The voice cut through the noise. Ethan turned.
Commissioner Jim Gordon was crossing the plaza at a pace that wasn't quite running but wanted to be — a heavyset man in a raincoat that had lost the fight with the weather, his salt-and-pepper hair plastered flat against his forehead, two pronounced shadows under his eyes that suggested he hadn't slept since the Arkham breakout. He looked like a man being held together by caffeine and stubbornness.
He stopped a few feet away and stared.
"My God." Gordon's voice came out rough. "You're actually alive. I watched Bane break your neck. I watched it." He paused. "You are Batman, right? This isn't the Joker wearing a dead man's costume and pulling some kind of elaborate roleplay on me?"
"That theory isn't worth entertaining." Ethan kept his voice flat — the low register, the measured cadence he'd been practicing. "Don't let the rumors mislead you."
He'd caught the probe inside the joke the moment Gordon opened his mouth. The man was smart. Smarter than he let on, and the exhaustion didn't dull it. Ethan filed that away and moved on before the commissioner could find purchase.
Don't dig, Gordon. You're too good at this and I have no armor for it right now.
He turned his attention to the Evidence Bureau building, grey and silent in the drizzle.
So. The plan.
It wasn't elegant, but it was what he had. He knew Gotham's rogues gallery the way other people knew sports statistics — cold, encyclopedic, every weakness documented in someone else's writing that he'd absorbed over years of being a fan. Without Bruce's memories, he couldn't access the real investigative architecture. But he had two other things Bruce had never needed to lean on.
He'd been an actor. A good one — the kind of good that required understanding exactly what another person needed to see, and then becoming it.
And before that, he'd been a psychologist.
Which meant he understood how people came apart. What made them predictable. What made them cooperative, when the right pressure was applied in the right place.
The Ventriloquist was inside that building. Arnold Wesker — a man with a diagnosed dissociative condition who'd constructed an entire alternate identity around a scarred dummy named Scarface, and who ranked near the bottom of Gotham's threat hierarchy. Weak, suggestible when approached correctly, and currently in a state of elevated stress that made him considerably more workable than usual.
He'll do, Ethan thought. For now, he'll do.
He looked back at Gordon.
"Do you have what I asked for?"
"Oh — yes. Yes." Gordon reached into his coat and produced an evidence bag. Inside it: a wooden puppet, crude features, a jagged scar carved across one cheek.
Scarface. The Ventriloquist's prize.
"Give it to me."
Gordon hesitated — just for a beat, the instinct of a cop watching evidence walk out of proper procedure — then extended the bag. Ethan took it, and felt the older man's reluctance ease when he didn't elaborate or justify.
Good.
"The rumor about my death," Ethan said, because Gordon deserved something. "The Batman that Bane killed — it wasn't me. It was my apprentice. Azrael."
"Right." Gordon didn't ask follow-up questions. "Right, of course."
He was too tired to push, or too tactful. Either way.
Ethan held his gaze for a moment. "We'll revisit that conversation."
He reached into the back of the Batmobile and pulled out a large tactical bag, slung it over one shoulder, and turned toward the Bureau's entrance with Scarface in hand — walking openly, in full view of the cameras, the protesters, the cops, and the rain.
Under his breath, too quiet for anyone nearby to catch:
Ladies and gentlemen.
Props assembled. Actor in position.
Allow me the honor of announcing—
The doors opened ahead of him.
—the performance has begun.