No one else in my house stayed up 'til midnight, so I stayed up all on my own writing Batman fanfic and counting down the seconds with my laptop's clock. IF THERE'S A MORE PATHETIC WAY TO SPEND NEW YEAR'S EVE, I DON'T KNOW OF IT.

On the bright side, though, I finished the fic.

No pairings, Batman Begins/Dark Knight movieverse.


ONE

“Who are you?

“Watch for my sign.”

“You’re just one man.”

“Now we’re two.”

“We?”

Sergeant Gordon barges out of the rooftop-exit just in time to see the man – whoever he is – take a sharp left and accelerate towards the northern edge.

The air up here is like a jet of cold water to the face after the stuffy closeness of the station house, although it’s thick with the gritty smokiness that fades during Gotham’s night hours but never disappears. The roof is cluttered with as much of the station’s junk as could be possible expected to withstand the elements, unused equipment and superfluous fixtures boxed up and piled onto the gravel. Gordon barks his shin against a crooked wooden crate and stumbles, feet skidding on the loose pebbles. Behind him he hears back-up pounding out the door.

He drew his weapon the second he made the decision to chase after the intruder – an intruder with the guts to break into a station house and threaten a cop, not that that means now what it used to. But it’s when he notices the man’s outfit that he takes a real grip on the moulded wood and steel in his hands. It’s a familiar weight in his hands, but he’s seen too much to believe it will protect him in this city.

The guy’s dressed in black, some kind of bulky assortment of what looks suspiciously like moulded Kevlar. It’s all a mismatch, though, black matte vest and pants with golden belt and possibly a parachute harness, special-order forearm guards and the traditional crook’s ski mask. The outfit says money, and the plan says daring, but that mask says either desperate or amateur and either way that’s bad news. Either is liable to cause more collateral damage than a focused criminal.

“Freeze!” He hollers, fighting to be heard above the noise storm on the roof. Gotham’s night, like that of most big cities, is never silent. It’s a mess of thousands of blares, honks, shouts, screams, rumblings and crashing all jumbled together here five storeys above the dirty streets. If his voice reaches the man in black, he certainly doesn’t care. As Gordon and the two beat cops who followed him up stare, the man throws himself off the side of the roof. Giving Gordon a pretty clear idea of which category he falls into.

“What the hell was that?”

Gordon shrugs tense shoulders and slips his sidearm back into its holster. “Just some nut.”

TWO

Situations change at the drop of a hat, but it’s still surprising to Gordon how quickly the Batman goes from some nut to accepted ally of the police force, even if the trust behind the alliance is more brittle than graphite. But Gordon’s always been good at trust, particularly trust forged by necessity, and even more particularly trust in people who seem despite surface flaws to be fundamentally decent. He’s a master of dolling out just enough trust to prime the pump until the relationship can start producing its own. But he’s been wrong before.

The Batman’s signal is installed little more than a week after he shows up on the scene, all strength and money, and Gordon wants to believe that’s a good thing. Wants to believe this man has good intentions and, much more importantly, strong ethics as well as muscles. Because, after seeing the kind of equipment the man’s got to rely on, he knows Gotham’s police force is no match for him. They can work with him, or along side him, but if the situation turns and Batman becomes a threat, God help them all.

Since his promotion Gordon’s been spending most of his time behind a desk, although he tries to do a few patrols a week, more to keep an eye on his cops than the criminals. Even desk-bound though, he hears about the Batman; about entire gangs knocked out in their bases, about crimes stopped before they get started, about roof dives, flattened cars and holes blown in walls. All for good causes – for the best cause – innocent lives. The Batman is cleaning up their city. For now. Gordon may trust more easily than the average cop, but he’s not a fool and he can’t help but wonder if this really is the miracle it seems like, or whether it’ll turn sour and if so when. Can’t help but wonder if one day he’ll wish he had taken the shot when he had it.

He’s sitting at his desk thumbing through files on drug imports into the Narrows, fingers dry and cracking from too much manila, when he hears the screaming. A woman, voice ripping through the station, screeching to high heaven as if all the whips and chains in Gotham were tearing into her. Gordon’s on his feet in an instant, chair slamming into the too-close wall behind him, hand reaching for his sidearm. The screaming’s getting closer, and now under it he can hear the lower-pitched tones of the men and women of the station shouting. He’s almost to the door when it flies open of its own accord, and the sound seems to explode.

Gordon takes an instinctive step back as Batman strides in, cape whipping about him, dragging a woman behind him. Even after several decades in Gotham he’s retained some of the manners he was raised with, which is why he thinks woman and not whore. Her clothes were probably fashionable – or more accurately popular – a few years ago. Since then they’ve been soiled and altered and ripped and torn, usually tending towards shorter and skimpier, so that now mostly what she seems to be wearing is a tangle of rags. Her heels have worn down crookedly, forcing her to stand with bowed knees, and her stockings are more runs than nylon. Her hair, long strands bleached platinum blond at the bottom and ink black at the top, is a rats mess of snags and knots. From under the tangled skein watery red eyes flash with rage as she beats at Batman’s shoulder.

He’s got his gun levelled straight at the man’s heart even as it occurs to him there’s no way his revolver will pierce that armour. And it’s then that he realises the man isn’t dragging her, she’s clinging to him even as she shrieks and strikes at him.

“What the hell,” he begins, and stops.

From under the mask the Batman gives him a weary look, a weariness which Gordon recognizes; it comes from the heart rather than the body. He shrugs black shoulders, and Gordon sees why he’s doing nothing to hinder the woman’s abuse – his arms are full. With an infant.

The child – about three months old, Gordon estimates – is wrapped in a bundle of swaddling clothes which while not filthy are nowhere near as clean as they could be. The child itself is sleeping, red face scrunched up under an anonymous white cap. That it’s sleeping through this scene suggests there’s something wrong with it. Judging from the woman, quite possibly something badly wrong.

Gordon flicks the safety on and slips the gun back beneath his coat. As soon as the revolver’s no longer pointed at the infant the Batman takes a step forward and makes to pass the child to Gordon.

The woman spits and curses at the masked man, clawing long broken nails down the sleek sides of his arm guards, but a strong elbow keeps her back long enough for him to complete the pass.

The baby is a familiar bundle of warmth in his arms, no different than his own children at that age. As soon as the child is safe in his care, Batman restrains the woman, about to make a dive at him. “She’s been poisoning the kid,” the man explains over her head, “then selling the drugs they give her for whatever she can get.”

There are screams of protest from the woman, but they’re mostly curses rather than argument, and mostly incomprehensible at that.

The man, clearly feeling he’s said his piece, turns to push the woman towards the exit, and Gordon realises for the first time that they’re not alone. Half the station is standing outside his doorway, dim overhead lighting glinting off a an arsenal’s worth of small weaponry, not all of it official. He makes to wave, and then remembers the infant in his arms. “All right, that’s enough, all of you. Gussup and Edwards, take the woman into custody. The rest of you, back to your desks.”

There’s a general murmuring as the crowd begins to disperse, the two men named stepping forward to take the hysterical woman by the arms and lead her away. She’s clawing all the time, still screeching. But she doesn’t once look back at the child he’s holding. Gordon turns to make some comment to the Batman, and finds himself faced with an empty room, and an open window.

THREE

Gordon makes a decent salary; in the bad old days he made next to nothing because the city wasn’t paying for good men, just men, and Gotham had a surfeit of them. These days, an effort is made to at least clean up the upper ranks, which means finding men who can pass as decent even in poor light is difficult and as such they’re paid enough to keep them from defecting to less putrid Forces. Despite this, there are plenty of things he can’t afford, and apparently neither can the city. Things like standards which even come within a long stone’s throw of black and white, trust in his men which exceeds the depth of a shallow puddle, or genuine belief that half the men in the squad room have bank accounts filled from only one source. Gordon’s done his best to sweep out the mobsters and the druggies and the crooked cops and the ones who just enjoy taking several swings too many, but he’s well aware that he doesn’t have the power to clean this Force up, and that the men who do apparently don’t have the backbone or the funding. And he’s started to wonder, every time he flicks on the spotlight on the top of the MCU, how long it’ll be before the Batman gets tired of dealing with them. How long until a vigilante starts to feel dirty from contact with the official police units. To think that these are supposed to be the good new days, it’s almost enough to make a cynic out of him.

It’s a standard drug bust, only one of the small battles in MCU’s continued war on Gotham’s organized crime. In the scheme of things it’s minor, but it’s probably the biggest hit for the month, and Gordon’s come along to supervise. Gotham’s Dark Knight has an open-ended invite, but Gordon’s yet to see him. Of course, that’s how it always is.

They’re down on the docks, Team Alpha hunched in the alleyway between a warehouse holding plastic bathroom fixtures and the target building, supposedly dealing in glassware. It’s actually a holding centre for a low-ranking syndicate run by Joe “Barker” Ibraham. It’s taken them nearly half an hour to get into position, situation not aided by a series of communications failures between themselves and Beta and Gamma teams. Gordon fiddles with the dial on his goddamn radio – things were new just last month, Gotham’s smog probably already eating into them – and signals them to move in. As soon as he’s finished, he motions Edwards to move in, man raising his gun and nodding before kicking the door open and rushing in. The squad flows in through the narrow side door, thick jackets and Kevlar scratching against corrugated tin, thick rubber soles pounding on cracked concrete.

“This is a Police raid; hands on heads; nobody moves!” Gordon would like to see the day when someone’s got a free hand on one of these busts to carry a megaphone, but until a police raid doesn’t spark immediate crossfire no one’s going to carry that extra weight when they could be carrying a gun instead. As such Gordon settles for merely hollering into the chaos, trying to identify the most hostile areas while keeping his head low, an eye to the exits, and an eye on his people. There’s a reason he goes home with eyestrain after these raids.

The other teams have already made significant inroads, though, mobsters being slammed into crates of their own drugs even as the odd fighter struggles to shoot his way out of a corner, quickly nailed by the more lively men. Gordon’s just lowering his own sidearm when he feels more than hears the disturbance behind him and swivels, raising his weapon as he does. On the ground behind him one of his cops, Terrance, is sprawled on the ground with a bloody temple. The Batman is standing over him, arm still upraised. Gordon’s got his pistol drawn on him even as he eyes the man on the ground; unconscious but alive. He gives the Batman a look.

“You’ve still got some thinning out to do,” says the man in the gruff voice that can’t be easy to maintain. “He got pulled in by Barker in his teens.” He glances down to indicate Terrance, now stirring feebly. Terrance’s weapon is lying a few feet from his limp hand.

“And?” says Gordon, awareness that this is going to force him to allocate trust, to choose either one of his own men or the vigilante. In front of the rest of the squad.

“And he was about to shoot you in the back.”

Gordon looks past the man to Joyce and Halkias, watching the confrontation with wide eyes and raised weapons. “Well?” he barks, forced to hold a court session in the middle of a drug bust with highly biased witnesses and only himself for judge and jury. Joyce twists awkwardly, whether out of a conflict of loyalties or simple ignorance Gordon has no idea. But Halkias raises the muzzle of his gun a hair and nods cautiously.

“’s true, Captain. He just barged in out of nowhere with his gun up. I thought he was heading for the door,” he indicates the entrance they came through, “but then he stopped cold right behind you. If the … he hadn’t dropped him … sorry Captain.” The gaps are filled in easily enough. Gordon sighs and lowers his own weapon.

“Alright. Take him into custody. We’ll see if we can round up any witnesses after we get the rest of this mess sorted out. I suppose there’s no point asking you,” he stops himself before he wastes the breath on the rest of the sentence. However well he doesn’t know his men, he knows the Batman less. But apart from the fact that he can trust him, Gordon’s come also to know the man will never be around for the end of a sentence.

FOUR

It’s been a good week for Gordon’s career; he’s put away some of the biggest mobsters in town. Unfortunately this has the opposite affect on his life, since he’s now the target of half the lower-level scumbags in town.

He’s putting the garbage out when he sees the shadow move out of the corner of his eye. The bag’s on the ground and his gun’s in his hand before he’s got time to think about it, heart pounding painfully cold ice through his veins to wake up his muscles.

Batman stares at him from underneath the cowl, unimpressed. “Getting a bit jumpy, Captain?”

Gordon rolls his eyes, puts his sidearm away with nearly steady hands, and hosts up the straining bag. Batman doesn’t offer to help.

FIVE

The SWAT teams are moving into position, his own men creating a perimeter around the building along with whatever off-duty cops they could rope in. Gordon’s got his mind full trying to organize it all as the only man present with a rank higher than sergeant. And on top of that, the knowledge that in building opposite Harvey Dent, Gotham’s already burnt White Knight is in the hands of that maniac. Harvey Dent, the man with the power and the backbone to force through the reforms he’s wanted for so long. Harvey Dent, whose girlfriend – Gordon’s own friend – he couldn’t save. Harvey Dent, the man he couldn’t protect. Gordon’s got every man he could raise out here, has pulled all the strings he could tear up, is putting all his pieces into play, because he cannot fail again. Cannot fail Gotham, cannot fail Harvey, cannot fail himself.

And, maddeningly, terrifyingly, that’s not even the weight that should be resting most heavily on him. Because out there on the water are two ferries crammed to capacity, ready and waiting to blow sky high.

They have a plan, a plan he knows and understands and can hold responsibility for. A plan that will save the hostages, Harvey included. A plan that will stop that white-faced bastard.

“It’s not that simple. With the Joker, it never is.” It doesn’t matter that he knows the voice, would recognize the forced growl even in the pitch darkness where it’s often heard. No one else on this roof would speak to him, Commissioner Gordon, like that.

“What’s simple is that every second we don’t take him those people on the ferries get closer to blowing each other up!” Gordon waves his hand at the ferries, twin beacons of light in the dark harbour. They might as well be glowing with all the souls at stake

“That won’t happen.” There’s no room for uncertainty in the man’s tone, and right here, right now, that’s maddening because the Joker is uncertainty.

“Then he’ll blow both of them up!”

“I need five minutes alone.” It’s not a request. Not even a demand. Just a statement of fact. He’s walking towards the roof edge, God damn him.

“No! There’s no time!” Gordon’s got his gun out, because that’s the only way he knows to emphasize anything with this man, and even that is nearly meaningless to the vigilante. He might as well be mute, or screaming into a void. Batman sweeps right past him; he’s not ignoring the pistol, he hasn’t even noticed it. Gordon turns to follow, shouting in his frustrated rage. “We have clear shots. Dent is in there with them. We have to save Dent! I have to save Dent!”

Batman reaches the edge and without a pause leaps off the roof in a flutter of cape. For a tenth of a second, Gordon thinks back to that shot he didn’t take. He turns to the SWAT leader beside him. “Get ready.” He’s hardly thought of the shot before he regrets it, watching the only man left with Gotham’s best interests at heart and the power and backbone to act on it swoop over the empty street below.

“Two minutes.” He tucks his gun away.

THREE POINT FIVE

“I want to meet him,” the Mayor had said. “I want to see the man everyone tells me is cleaning up our streets for us.”

But no one gets to be mayor of Gotham by throwing a clear vote in with any one party; it’s a job for the born fence-sitters who can put a finger in every pie without withdrawing from any. An encounter with a vigilante on a police rooftop that does not end in an arrest is out of the question. So, with a bad taste in his mouth, Gordon sets up a meeting for the Mayor, which he can’t help but think of it as Garcia’s attempt to add another tick to his celebrity acquaintances list.

Garcia’s not comfortable going anywhere too dark, too enclosed, or too far from a station house, which at least shows some survival instinct. Batman doesn’t want to be in anything better than poor lighting, or in the open, and in fact doesn’t want to meet at all. Gordon, feeling very much like a beat cop with two howling sergeants and an uncertain chain of command, finally gets them to settle on a relatively open alley a block away from the 23rd precinct which the Mayor has old ties to and Batman has no prejudices against.

Gordon shows up with Garcia on time, takes a quick look around to make sure there’s no one lingering, and finds no one. He’s about ninety percent sure Batman’s here already, and has chased off any drunks or bums. He returns to Garcia and stands tensely, feet already cold, shoulders stiff. Garcia is eyeing the wide entrance, but Gordon’s got his eye on the back exit, a tiny alleyway mostly obscured by steam rising from the underground pipes. In the end, though, the Batman beats them both, and simply drops in from above.

The Captain’s plenty used to Batman’s acrobatics by now, and only takes half a step back before he identifies the man now standing in the shadows. Garcia has no such training, however, and scrambles back behind the officer, stumbling over an empty box. “Your gun, Gordon,” he barks with fear in his voice, latching onto Gordon to steady himself, and not letting go.

“It’s alright,” says Gordon, leaving off the Mayor since there’s no point advertising the fact even in this almost certainly clear space. “It’s just him.”

“Christ Gordon,” hisses Garcia, staring at the shadows. Gordon chooses not to take that as an order.

“You were the one who wanted to meet him,” he points out, struggling to keep a reasonable tone.

Batman takes a step out of the shadows, dim light from the streetlights at the corner of the alley glinting off the ears of his cowl. “Well?” he says, entire demeanour giving away nothing, although Gordon suspects if it were anyone else half cowering behind him the man would not make any effort to hide his lack of amusement.

At this, though, Garcia pulls himself together and steps away from Gordon, although not too far away. “So you’re the man I’ve been hearing so much about,” says the Mayor in his usual no-nonsense tone, fright forgotten or just well-hidden.

Gordon stands silent, and tries not to let the thought what a waste of time show on his face. Of course Batman, the lucky bastard, has a mask for that.


EDIT: This means I have to cast eyes on Rakuen's other fic page again, doesn't it? Doesn't it. Man, I cannot finish splitting this stuff up FAST ENOUGH.