"You're telling me you found Batman. In a plain white panel van. Parked on the street."
"Yeah. That's basically it."
"And you thought he was fake, so you tried to mug him, and then Batman's hand turned into a wheel and knocked you out."
"That's correct."
"Ha."
"Cuz, I know it sounds—"
"Shut up. You've been smoking too much. If there was actually a Batman in that van, I will eat this crowbar. Right now. In front of you."
"Don't go over there, man. I'm serious, there's actually a—"
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The cousin had barely finished his third knock before the door swung open from the inside.
The kid watched Batman step out, lock the van behind him with a key fob click, and then dissolve — starting from the feet, the mass redistributing and reshaping, the suit and the body underneath flowing outward and downward and expanding into something angular and mechanical and alive. Four seconds, maybe five, and where a man in a bat costume had been standing, there was now a vehicle — strange-looking, low-slung, built for something other than roads, its wheels already turning before it had finished becoming itself.
It was gone before either of them thought to breathe.
The wind off its passing stirred a candy wrapper on the sidewalk.
The two of them stood in the empty street for a long time.
Eventually one of them spoke.
"...What in the actual—" He stopped. Started again. "My whole life. My whole life, I thought Batman drove the Batmobile." His voice had taken on the quality of a man receiving a religious correction. "It never occurred to me, not once, that Batman is the Batmobile."
The cousin said nothing.
There was nothing useful to say.
Whatever the Tattooed Man's body language communicated, it communicated it completely.
He stood in the space between his teammates and Bane with his shirt off, arms loose at his sides, and the combined effect of the tattoos covering every visible surface of his body was — somehow — of absolute unhurried confidence. Not the performed kind, not the kind that needed someone to notice it, but the settled kind that came from a man who knew exactly what he was carrying and didn't feel the need to announce it.
Deadshot, who had spent a career reading threat assessments, found himself genuinely uncertain.
He looks like a gangster's sketchbook. He ran the visual inventory. Soft posture, no fighting stance, nothing in the movement that says trained. He worked through the evidence against it: but Croc didn't move him, and Cheshire didn't argue, and he's standing between a full-Venom Bane and the rest of us like that's a reasonable place to be.
Could he be hiding something substantial? People like that exist. I've met them.
Could he also just be an idiot?
Also possible. Frequently true of the same people.
Behind them, in the debris field where Cheshire had landed, something moved. She pulled herself out of the rubble with her weight forward, nothing broken — the landing had been bad but she'd managed the geometry of it, taken the energy across the right surfaces, traded a clean hit for a costly one. She dropped into a low crouch and started working through a controlled breathing cycle, hands flat on the ground, reclaiming the physical reserves that the last two minutes had spent.
The Tattooed Man's face changed.
Not fear — something more concentrated than fear, the look of a person moving something heavy from one place to another inside their own chest. His jaw set. His shoulders pulled back.
And then his skin moved.
Not a trick of the light. Not a hallucination. A Bengal tiger tattooed across his left side unpeeled itself from the surface of his skin — literally, the ink lifting and separating, the flat image thickening into volume and weight and breath, four hundred pounds of actual predator materializing in the space between one second and the next, landing on all four feet with a sound that the abandoned lot hadn't expected to produce.
It shook itself once.
Then it turned its head toward Bane and showed every tooth it had.
Deadshot's jaw had stopped working.
A metahuman. The category update arrived like a software patch — essential, immediate, retroactively explaining several things. He's a metahuman. The tattoos are the mechanism. I missed it because he moves like a civilian and dresses like someone's drunk uncle.
Bane took one look at the tiger and settled into a defensive stance — weight low, arms wide, the full commitment of someone who has stopped treating the situation as routine.
The tiger charged.
It covered the distance in three strides, explosive and certain, launched itself from eight feet out with all four hundred pounds committed to the leap—
Bane slid left. One motion, low, barely moving his feet. His boot connected with the tiger's ribs mid-air, full extension behind it.
The sound it made was not the sound a large predator makes when it lands. It was the sound a large predator makes when it is introduced to something significantly larger than itself without warning.
The tiger tumbled thirty feet and came to rest against a stripped car chassis. It did not immediately get up.
Oh, Deadshot thought.
The Tattooed Man did not appear discouraged. A mammoth unfolded itself from his back — the full shape, tusks and all, somewhere in the neighborhood of six tons — and lowered its head toward Bane.
Bane walked into it.
Three punches, all of them to the skull. The third one left a depression in the bone that the skull hadn't had before. The mammoth went down and didn't come back up.
A pack of wolves. Gone before they'd fully committed to a direction.
A chimpanzee — which Deadshot thought showed creative lateral thinking, since great apes were technically more cognitively comparable to humans than most of what had come before, and therefore arguably more dangerous.
Same result.
"Okay." The Tattooed Man wiped his forearm across his face. He turned to Deadshot with the controlled expression of a man rationing his available dignity. "Cover me. I need time for the big one."
"How much time?"
"Twenty seconds. Maybe less."
Deadshot looked at the dragon tattoo on the man's chest — currently writhing against the skin, the lines moving like something alive trying to push through from the other side of a membrane. He looked at Bane. He looked at Cheshire, still on the ground, still rebuilding herself.
Twenty seconds. He did the math. Against that.
"I can buy you thirty," he said. "Maybe sixty if Cheshire helps."
Cheshire's voice came from the ground, recovered enough to carry: "Thirty seconds if I avoid direct exchange. Sixty if Deadshot runs interference." She paused. "And if I don't have to close with him again."
Deadshot was already moving. His guns came up.
"GO."
Bane brought his fist down on the pavement.
The concrete didn't crack so much as surrender — a web of fracture lines radiating outward from the impact point, chunks of it lifting and resettling like a shockwave in slow motion. Cheshire was already airborne, the crack finding only the space where she'd been, her body moving in a trajectory that made the physics of it look accidental rather than calculated. A fragment caught her shin and she turned the stumble into a roll and came up running.
"Cheshire." Ethan's voice arrived through the earpiece with the slightly compressed quality of someone transmitting from a moving vehicle. "The jellyfish toxin — does that work on Bane's Venom compound?"
Cheshire's nose wrinkled under the mask.
"I don't have jellyfish toxin." She vaulted a piece of debris, came down, cut left. "I've never had jellyfish toxin. Cats and jellyfish are not a natural combination."
"Wait — you don't?"
"No."
A pause. Then: "...I misremembered. Apologies. Keep moving."
Misremembered, she thought, ducking a car door Bane had used as a projectile. The man is running an operation against Bane with misremembered intel about his own contractors. She filed that away for a later conversation about rates.
"OPEN FIRE," Deadshot said, to himself as much as anything, and committed everything he had left to the next sixty seconds.
It was not a dignified sixty seconds for either party involved.
Deadshot understood, technically, that he could not stop Bane with the weapons he currently had available. The earlier exchange had established that. What he could do was create enough noise and motion and incoming trajectory-variation to make Bane spend cognitive resources on tracking, which was resources not being spent on closing the distance to the Tattooed Man.
He shot at Bane's eyes. His face. The tubing. He moved constantly, abandoning every position the moment he fired from it, keeping angles unpredictable, making every approach a problem rather than a foregone conclusion. He was not winning. He was making winning expensive.
"Where the hell is Wesker?" he shouted, at no one and everyone. "The old man, where is he? He should be—"
An engine sound. Something moving fast, getting louder.
"One more minute," Ethan's voice said through the earpiece, and this time the wind noise underneath it had resolved into something more specific — road noise, acceleration, a vehicle pushing hard through streets that were not designed for that speed.
"One minute and you'll have backup."
Deadshot nearly laughed. He bit it down.
"With what?" He fired twice, changed direction, fired again, watched Bane rotate toward him with the expression of someone who has stopped finding this interesting. "What backup? Who in this city — what exists in this city — that handles that?"
He watched Bane palm a piece of structural rebar out of a collapsed wall section like he was picking up a pen.
"Batman?" He said it the way people say things they don't believe. A placeholder for the absence of any better answer. "You're going to tell me Batman shows up?"
The rebar spun end over end in a flat arc toward his head.
Deadshot was already moving.
In his chest, behind the dragon-shaped scar tissue of an old tattoo, something reptilian and ancient continued to push against the boundary between symbol and fact — not yet free, not quite, the membrane still holding, but thinning with every second the Tattooed Man had to work with.