Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If there's one thing the Riddler hates, it's a wasted opportunity. 

He hadn't been intending on escaping Arkham this time, really. But someone had set off some kind of EMP in his wing of the prison and, well…

He hates a wasted opportunity. 

So he's been free a week now and is sitting in a café on the east side, nursing chai that definitely came from a carton, watching the city bustle outside and wondering exactly what to do with this opportunity so as not to waste it. 

His mind slips to the Batman. To Bruce. He considers the hard drive of schemes that he has stored securely in a safehouse uptown. So many ideas, so much potential. 

So going to get him shipped right back to the asylum. 

Wasted. 

His first night back after Azrael’s defeat he'd confided in Croc: I'm tired, Waylon . 

And he is, he really is. He's not exactly young any more. He's past the point where running away from the man in black, where evading capture and risking injury seems thrilling. Exciting . He's past the point, even, where he remembers exactly why he'd found it so in the first place. Most of it, at least. 

He pulls out his phone and scrolls aimlessly down his newsfeed. His fellow escapees are already headlining; reports of Tetch apprehended with a collection of criminally gaudy stetsons and a few kilos of dynamite, of Waylon terrorising sewer spelunkers (and that one seems on them, really). They, at least, still seem to be enjoying themselves. 

But if he doesn't have his crimes, if he doesn't leave his clues, what is he? That's a riddle in itself. He sips his chai. There's a skin over it. He wrinkles his nose and pushes it across the table. 

He's making mental mind maps of all his potential skills and falling into a mild depressive spiral when he spots a familiar head of curly auburn hair out the window and everything, all at once, clicks into place. 

If you can't beat them, join them. (Or, really, if they beat you so, so many times, and you get sick of it and reconsider your entire career, join them. Semantics.)

He hops up from the table and bounds out of the café, into the street, eyes focused the entire time on that hair. He registers, with amusement, that the owner of the hair is wearing a long, brown trench coat. Really leaning into the role, it would seem.

He catches up to them and falls into step beside them, speaking before they get a chance to clock him.

“What's a nice girl like you doing on this side of town?” 

“This is the nice side.” Barbara Gordon responds. “What are you doing here?”

“Needed to stretch my legs. Wanted to check out that new coffee spot.”

“And you saw me passing and you wanted to just let me know you were heading straight home after? Or did you want to take me there myself?”

He notes, with glee, her careful obfuscation of where he should actually be. He's not sure if she's trying to not alarm passers by or if it's to prevent anybody seeing his face and hearing the word Arkham and managing to make a connection for his own benefit.

“I have a proposal for you.” He tells her in lieu of answering her questions. 

She gives him a distrustful side eye. “Can it wait? I'm meeting a client.” 

He grins, wide. “Ideal! I'll come along!” 

“You won't.” 

The grin only widens. “I'll be on my best behaviour.” 

Barbara stammers in her step, as if she's caught in weighing up her options; deciding whether to throw Edward against the nearest hard surface and handcuff him to be collected by the GCPD, or to skip any other steps and throw him into traffic instead. She settles, though, on growling annoyance and allowing him to continue following her along. 

“You wait in the lobby. You talk to nobody .”

“Yes ma’am. ” 

She glares at him. He's still grinning. 

It takes them another maybe five minutes of walking before they reach their destination. Edward's cane clacks against the ground with every step. He can feel Barbara’s irritation at him every time it does so. He feels the way she’s biting her tongue, refraining from saying anything. He knows that she knows that he has a million responses rattling around in his head for if she does. 

She stops suddenly in front of a towering apartment block and he hangs back to examine the building while she presses the buzzer. Twelve storeys with big, arched windows on each level. A converted factory, he’d guess. Old red brick and chipped detailing. Likely expensive rent, on this side of the city. The type of place to house inhabitants with more money than sense, who might take the smallest mystery and instead of even attempting to solve it themselves call in a P.I. to do all the dirty work. 

Barbara coughs at him, irate. She’s standing in the now open doorway, glaring at him as he apparently spaces out. He gives an apologetic smile and follows her inside.

“You wait down here.” She instructs. 

“Out of your sight? How do you know I’m not doing something criminal , Barbara dear?”

She gives him a look. “What happened to ‘best behaviour ’? Do you want to tell me your proposal or not?”

“Fair point.” He says. He ambles over to a couch against one wall of the minimally decorated lobby and sets himself down, crossing one leg over the other and resting his cane across his lap. “I'll sit right here the whole time.”

She squints at him, points to a security camera blinking red in the corner of the room, and calls the elevator. 

True to his word, Edward stays sitting. He plays Tetris on his phone and taps his toes on the ground until she exits the elevator a half hour later. He does a very good job of not giving in to the urge to commit any kind of minute cyber crime while he waits. 

She walks right past him, towards the door, leaving him to scramble after her. 

“Rude.” He says. She ignores him. She appears in an even worse mood than she had been in before entering the lift. He decides, very graciously, to not push her, electing to instead trot along beside her, cane tapping repetitively against the ground. 

His kind silence lasts a whole ten minutes before he gets bored. 

“Where are we going?”

“My office.” She's gritting her teeth, he can hear it.

“You seem tense.”

“Gee, I wonder why. ” 

He bites back a smile. “What, my presence doesn't cheer you up? I thought we were friends, Babs!” 

“We are not -” Her voice rises to a level inappropriate for a public conversation. He watches her cut herself off with pursed lips before restarting. “We are not friends.” 

“Well that's gonna make my whole spiel in a bit here just a little awkward.” 

They round another corner and Barbara leads him down a set of stairs to the metro. He follows and dutifully presses his fake pass to the gate on his way in, the chip inside allowing him access and refunding every person that had used it since the morning in one go, without alerting any kind of security. Really, they made it far too easy. 

He follows Barbara down to the platform and onto a train. There are no available seats, but he very pointedly clears his throat and taps his cane against the floor until a sheepish, spiky haired teenager gets up and offers him their spot. 

Barbara's office is two blocks from the central GCPD building, down a narrow side street made up of predominantly residential buildings in the type of general disrepair he'd expect of landlords focused only on turning a profit. There's an engraved bronze plaque next to the apartment number; Gordon Private Investigation . 

She turns the key in the lock and leads him inside, just barely holding the door open to stop it from slamming in his face. She leads him up an uneven staircase (there's no elevator in sight), slowing down to allow him to keep up even as his hip twinges with every upward step. 

Her office, on the third floor, has yet another engraved plaque on the door. One of the screws is missing. She enters, he follows, and he immediately collapses onto a slightly ragged brown leather sofa. 

“Nice digs, Investigator. ” He says, eyes darting around the room. It's small, cluttered, and bathed in orange from the overhead light. Across from the couch is a relatively grand wooden desk complete with green bankers lamp and stack of important looking papers. Behind that are filling cabinets and an overstuffed bookshelf. 

“Can you just - just give me like, five minutes before you start on whatever this is? Please?” 

Edward bites back on a grin. He holds his hands up in surrender and watches her drag herself through a door behind him into what looks like a tiny kitchenette. He gives her more than five minutes. He's getting very good at Tetris. 

Eventually she re-enters the room and deposits herself heavily into the desk chair.  

“I,” she starts. She's gripping onto a steaming mug declaring I've got my ‘I’ on you as if it might jump out of her hand at any moment, “have had a very bad day.”

“Never would have guessed.” 

“You have two minutes to tell me what you're doing here and why I shouldn't just haul your ass to the GCPD.”

“Now that doesn't seem like nearly enough -”

“One minute.”

He bites his tongue. Takes a breath. Opens and closes his mouth a few times until the words burst forth.

“I don't want to be the Riddler any more.” He says. 

Barbara blinks at him. That was, very clearly, not what she was expecting to hear. It wasn't what he'd been expecting, either. It wasn't a reality he'd allowed himself to even think about, let alone admit out loud. But there it was. An admission they'd both heard. 

“Is this some kind of joke?” She asks. 

“No.” Edward looks to the window, focusing on a dying aloe vera rather than Barbara's suddenly very intense gaze. The honesty makes his palms sticky. He feels… strange, sharing his feelings with her without the excuse of blood loss. “I'm not the kid I was when I started this. It's not - don't laugh, okay - it's not fun any more.” 

“ Fun ?”

“I told you not to laugh!”

‘I'm not fucking laughing, Eddie. You just told me you used to find hurting people fun.”

“Oh come on, you know that's not what I meant. The crime , Barbara. The thrill of the chase. Aiming for the stars, taking down my enemies, stealing millions. Putting together elaborate traps for the Batman and whatever other cosplay hero might try to stop me. That was fun. A few nobodies getting hurt was… an unavoidable consequence. And, really, if you think about it half of them were Batman's fault anyway. If he didn't have such a complex about it there would be no point to me kidnapping anyone for my plots. It's not my fault it was the only way of getting his attention half the time.”

“And you couldn't just ask him to dinner like anyone else?” 

He ignores the jab. He doesn't think about Egypt. Not for a single second. 

“The point,” he tells her, “is that I'm done with it. I want to put my talents to better use.” 

He watches it dawn on her face; eyes widening, mouth dropping, eyebrows drawing inwards. Horror, shock, dread. The type of expression not found on the emotion cards he'd been pushed into studying as a child.

“No.” She says, firmly. Her knuckles are pale around the mug.

“I haven't even asked yet!”

“Absolutely not.”

“At least think about -”

“We are not working together.”

“We've done it before!”

“Yeah, when I thought you were the only person in the world that could help me save Bruce.”

“And who's to say I'm not the only person in the world that could help you - what, find some poor rich fool’s missing cat?”

“Can you just go turn yourself in before I have to?”

“Stop being so dramatic , Barbara.” He holds a hand to his chest. “You should be happy! I'm changing! Growing! Therapy works!”

“And you want me to just trust your word?”

“Of course not!” He had been hoping for it, really. “I'm going to prove myself.” 

Barbara pinches the bridge of her nose, eyes scrunched shut under furrowed brows. “How?” Her question is monotone, resigned. He celebrates inwardly.

“Whatever case you're on right now, I'll work it with you. I won't even ask for a cut.”

“How generous.” He sees her think for a moment, then watches her groan loudly and press her palms to her eyes. “I shouldn't even be considering this.”

“But you are !” He beams. 

“Only because it's potentially the only chance anybody has at reforming you.”

“I'll take it.”

“And it's one case. Just as a test. If it doesn't work out I'm turning you in.”

“I'll take that too!”

“And if the cops - or Bruce - catch up with you I'm telling them you blackmailed me.” 

“And that. Come on Barbara, you can act at least a little excited. A team of two; lover and boat. And only with this will we stay afloat .”

Her left eye twitches. “Partnership.”

Chapter Text

The thing about Barbara Gordon is that she, despite herself - despite her father , even - likes Edward Nygma. 

She likes his sense of humour. She likes his smarts and his drive for answers. She likes talking to him, and that he listens to her. She likes their easy back and forth, that she doesn't feel she has to watch her words around him (most of the time).

And the fact that she likes him makes it all too easy to forget or ignore or discredit the fact that he is a criminal, a killer , a prime example of the bad a person has the potential to be. The type of person her father warned her against when she was a child. 

It makes it all too easy to forget all of it. Everything he's done. And think only about his potential . Those shining moments she's seen him help people. Do good. She's a terrible optimist, to her own detriment. 

Again, her father. Always look for the best in people, but assume the worst. 

So she looks at him, across from her, on her couch. Looking every bit like he belongs there already. Hair smoothed back, shirt pressed; all neat lines and sharp edges. And she agrees to his proposal.

He grins at her like a shark. 

“This is going to be a great partnership, Barbara Gordon.”

“It is not a partnership. You work for me. Not with me.” 

Edward doesn't seem to be listening. “I'm thinking Nygma and Gordon Detective Agency’. It has a nice ring to it, right?” He's holding his hands out in front of him, looking into the air like he's imagining his name in neons.  

She bites the inside of her cheek and rolls her eyes. As much as she'd never tell him, Edward is actually the first good thing to happen to her all day. All week, even. 

“And how are you going to keep the cops off you while you're here?”

“Oh, easy. I was on my way to reform already when I left - almost done with their little programme - I can just convince them I was let out… a little early. That everyone got so caught up in the prison break that they lost track of who was meant to be leaving and who wasn't. It won't be hard, the online systems at Arkham are child's play, and the physical filing system?” He shudders melodramatically. “Nightmarish. Even if they start looking for my release paperwork it'll take months before they realise it isn't there. If they don't just give up and assume it's been lost.” 

“Right. And Bruce? You know that won't work on him.”

“Yes. But I'm going to be good , Barbara. Brucie can't catch me on a crime I don't commit. He's got that strong sense of morality and justice. He would never lock up an innocent man.”

“I don't think you have the capacity for innocence.” Barbara mutters. “Fine. Alright. You can -  just come over here.” She stands and moves behind the desk, tugging open one of her scarcely filled drawers and pulling out the current case. She throws it down on the table and seats herself again. Edward is bearing down on the wood before she knows it, hands splayed either side of the document.

“Infidelity.” He reads, disappointment evident in his voice. “Nothing more exciting?”

“You said whatever case I'm on.” 

“I was assuming you had a higher standard.”

“I have bills to pay, Nygma. We don't all have stolen millions locked away in offshore accounts.” 

“Fine, fine. Infidelity.” He flips through the folder, eyes scanning the text at lightning speed. “Oh, he’s cheating on her.”

“Really? What gives you that idea?” Barbara laces her tone with sarcasm. “The constant overtime at work? The business trips out of state? The two month research trip he’s supposedly on right now that has no record of even existing?”

“Mm. The toupee. He's getting insecure about his age and thinks hooking up with his secretary will make him feel young again.”

“Lot of assumptions there.”

“That's always the case.”

“You watch too many telenovelas.” 

“Oh come on. People are predictable. They play out the same stories every day, person to person. Exactly the same.” 

“Speaking from experience?” 

“That's not the dig you think it is. It's human nature! We all look for grooves to fit into, plots to follow. Just with some of us, it's a little more evident. Like Mister…” he squints down at the paper, “Langstrom here.” Edward taps the photo stapled to the top sheet of paper. His nails are varnished emerald, chipped at the tips like he's been biting them.

Edward continues. “He's living his life exactly according to his script; study hard, get a good job, settle down with a nice girl, have two and a half kids - I mean, looks like he skipped that part but you get the idea! The next step is a midlife crisis and a hot, young affair partner,” His head tilts to one side, “who is probably in it for his money. It's almost laughable how textbook it is.”

“Right.” Barbara fixes him with her most unimpressed stare. “And now you have to substantiate those claims.”

“Easy.” Edward declares. 

She continues with the unimpressed look. 

He rolls his eyes at her. “It is easy.” He insists. “Security cameras cover seventy six percent of Gotham’s public areas. A quick algorithm and I can find everywhere our Langstrom has been in the past two weeks. Hell, give me a little more time and I’d be able to give you his life's story for the past two years .”

Barbara purses her lips. Another reason she likes him: he's smart. But…

“Already done.” She tells him. His eyebrows lift. He has a habit of underestimating everyone but himself. “You're not the only one with computer skills.” She pulls a battered laptop from a drawer lower in the desk and inputs the password before turning the screen and pushing it across the desk to Edward. He takes it and starts scanning through the footage, she sees it playing in double time in the reflections of his glasses. 

“What building is that?” He asks after a moment.

She looks over his shoulder. Her brow furrows. “The old Chemistry wing at Gotham U. It's been closed off for a few years now due to asbestos.”

“Now what would an ex-alumni like our buddy Langstrom here want out of a building like this?”

“How did you get this angle? I didn't have this footage.” 

“There were blank spots in the footage you did have, right? I know every surveilled spot of this city, including where people think they're able to go around unseen.”

Barbara frowns at him. He smiles back, dark intelligent eyes meeting hers with an unnerving intensity. 

“See, Babs! Making myself useful already.”

Barbara's eye twitches again.

Chapter Text

The old Chemistry wing is bordered by flimsy, half-broken fencing and coils of rusted barbed wire. A majority of the DO NOT ENTER, HAZARDOUS MATERIAL signs fell down a long time ago. Those that remain have been tagged and painted over enough times that barely any of the original writing is legible. 

The building has been closed eight years, with the initial plan being to tear the structure down and replace it with a newer, swankier, less carcinogenic building. The University put forward budget cuts before that could happen, and the structure has sat empty since, crumbling into cancerous rubble.

Barbara makes him wear a heavy duty face mask as they scout it out. He layers it with his own mask, olive green over the white of the P95. It's nine pm, late enough for there to be dozens of students heading in and out of dorms, and for nobody to care about two more bodies in the crowd. If anyone sees them squeezing through a hole in the fence, nobody calls them out.

They creep through the halls by torchlight, and Edward is immediately certain that infidelity cannot be at play here, not in the least because if a man invited him to a place this run down and cobwebbed he would have never made it past the threshold before turning, blocking their number on his phone, and forging a warrant for their arrest.

Striking that possibility off the list leaves several far more interesting potentials: serial killer, secret werewolf, drug dealer specialising in derivatives of the asbestos. He picks up his pace, scanning every inch of the place for signs of bodies or narcotics. But eventually it's Barbara that spots evidence of activity. An area of floor clear of dust, right in front of a row of lockers standing just a few centimetres out of line with the others. A detail he never would have noticed, he laments.

“Give me a hand.” She tells him. He obliges, dropping his cane to one side and copying her grip on the locker. It's light, thankfully, not requiring he put too much pressure on his bad leg, and rings out in a metallic whine when it scrapes the floor.

The door behind is the same as the dozens of others they've passed so far; wooden, top third windowed, with blinds inside hiding the room beyond from view. Barbara's hand settles on the handle.

“This would be a great time for that Gary Cooper of yours, Babs.” Edward whispers. 

“Didn't bring it.”

“You didn't bring it ?”

“It wasn't my choice to wear it in the first place, it was regulation”

Edward groans. “We both know it wasn't. ” He hisses. “You couldn't even keep it for - I don't know, symbolic reasons? Put the cancer between your lips and don't give it the power to kill, or whatever?”

She gives him a funny look. “No. I'm not debating gun control with you right now, Edward.”

“What control ‽ Can't control something you didn't bring !”

“That's not - look, just - just stay behind me, alright? I don't think we have anything to worry about. Langstrom has no history of violence, no known weapons experience. He's not a threat.” Barbara pushes the door before Edward can tell her that she's absolutely jinxing it. He tenses, fight or flight, hackles raised.

Nobody immediately attacks them, nothing reaches out of the darkness beyond. Barbara moves in, strafing as though she does have a gun, for all the good her movements will do. Edward hangs back, fiddling with the strap of his flashlight.

“Clear.” Barbara says. “Nobody here.”

Edward follows her flightily, head twitching every which way, alert for any sign of movement. Without the security of Barbara's pistol, he feels exposed and small, all too aware that his strength has never been physical. He grips his cane tightly and curses himself for not hiding any weaponry within. 

The room is a lab, cobwebbed equipment casting twisted shadows under the beam of his torch, shapes distorting and lengthening across the walls. Barbara is ahead of him, their lights criss-crossing and cutting into each other, carving the shadows out further. 

“This desk.” Barbara says, touching an area worn clear of dust. “He's been doing something here.”

“Not someone?” 

“Nygma.” 

“Sorry, sorry.”

“I think there's a - shine your light over here, I see a sw-” She doesn't finish her sentence. Before she can, the desk lurches backwards, knocking her to the floor, and a deafening screech sounds from the space it once was. Edward stumbles, surprised, and trips over his own feet onto the linoleum, a cold jolt running all down his bad leg. 

He yelps, grips his knee, and watches helplessly as a lumbering figure emerges from a hole in yhe ground where the desk used to be, shifting and moving to squeeze into the room. Edward's torch has fallen to the ground, pointing uselessly under a metal cabinet, but Barbara's, next to her prone figure, just about catches the edge of whatever’s coming through. He sees leathery skin pulled taught over bony limbs, creasing and wrinkling with every movement. 

No. 

Not just skin.

Wings.

The thing has squeezed fully out of the floor, and the wings spread to fill the room, wide as a bus. Bigger than any bird - than any natural thing that Edward has ever seen. 

It stops. The wings drop slightly. In the torchlight he sees it blink. Beady black eyes. Sharp teeth glinting in an open mouth. An upturned nose ending in a point.

A bat. An enormous, more than man-sized bat. It huffs and steps forward, and the flashlight rolls just enough that Edward is able to see the collar of a lab coat hanging from around its neck. 

“What the fuck.” He whispers without thinking.

The bat whirls in his direction with another screech, ears twitching in little circles. 

He holds his breath. It pauses, head cocking from side to side repetitively. 

It can't see him. The beady eyes blink again uselessly, blind in the low light. He releases his breath slowly. It doesn't react. 

A high clicking comes from its throat; a few in succession followed by the ears twisting in satellite movements. Echolocation. He stays as still as possible, breath slow and shallow. 

The creature shuffles forwards, coming dangerously close to Barbara, still (hopefully) unconscious on the ground (there's a lurch in his chest when he entertains the thought that she may be something more than unconscious). He feels lightheaded. His stomach hurts from tensing. 

Its foot is inches from Barbara's head. He calculates, as quick as he can. If he can kick the torch and get the angle right (which he knows he can), he should have about ten seconds of headway to run and get it away from her, provided his leg cooperates.

Before he can move, a car horn sounds from the street outside. The bat swivels immediately, ears twitching. It stills for just a moment, then screeches again and crashes through a boarded window behind it, sending shards of wood and glass flying back at Edward. He lifts his arms to his face in a meagre attempt at protection, and feels sharp pieces hit him and cut into the skin of his forearm and chest, a few lodging deep. He whimpers, biting back true cries of pain, still conscious of the beast flying away. 

He waits a minute, counting the seconds. Sixty is a safe number. The great flapping of wings has faded to nothing. He hears voices outside now that the window is naught but a hole in the wall, the city going on with no apparent notice of the monster flying above it. 

He lets his arms fall and slumps to the side. The cuts burn, adrenaline wearing away, but he doesn't pay any attention to himself. Barbara. 

She's still lying there, feet away from him. He can't see her breathing. He shifts and starts crawling towards her, pulling his bad leg behind him when it gives out after his first attempt at putting weight on it. He counts his hand movements. He reaches her on sixty, keeping them intentionally small. Sixty is a safe number. 

There's a shard of glass in her side. Blood over one half of her face, pooling in her eye socket. He can't see her breathing. 

Chapter Text

Her head is pounding. Mother of all hangovers pounding . And as soon as she tries to sit up, her stomach twists and she empties its contents into the space to her right. She hears a wet slap against plastic sheeting. That doesn't seem right. She tries to remember where she should be and her mind conjures images of dilapidated rooms and cobwebbed corridors. And Edward. 

Where's Edward?

She sits up again, this time managing to only heave a little, and opens her eyes. The room she's in is dim, minimally furnished but very much not dilapidated. There are no cobwebs in any corners, no cracks in the dark green walls. 

“Eddie?” She calls. Her voice is loud in her own ears and she winces, closing her eyes tight again against a fresh wave of nausea. She vomits to the right again. It lands, she realises now, on blue tarpaulin laid all over the floor around the single bed she's lying in. She lies back down, panting a little, becoming gradually more and more aware of small, sharp pains all over her body.

“Babs? Hey, hey. It's okay. I'm here.” Edward's voice comes along with the sound of his cane clacking heavier than usual against the floor. 

She goes to open her mouth to ask what happened, how he is, but the nausea has her shutting it tight and shivering immediately.

“It's alright. Don't stress yourself. Hold on. Let me just -” 

She feels him tug something connected to her hand. Sharp scratching. An IV? After a second or so and a lot of shuffling, he talks again. 

“There. That should kick in soon.”

She lies there for what she thinks is five minutes but could equally be a half hour, before whatever he'd dosed her with kicks in and she's able to open her eyes without her head throbbing and stomach threatening to empty again. He's replaced the tarpaulin and is sitting next to the bed with a patch of gauze over one cheek, wearing a loose black shirt.

“What happened?” She asks.

Edward laughs a little. “I, ah, don't know if you'll believe it, coming from me .” 

“Eddie.”

“Okay.” He breathes out through his mouth. “I don't know how much you remember.”

“The University building. We found a door.”

“Right. Hidden room. There was a table in there that stood out to you; it'd been used recently.”

It comes back to her as he speaks. The table. The small lever on the right hand side, recessed into the wood. The cracking and crashing and wave of pain before nothingness. 

“ I see without eyes, I hear what you can't. Some feed on insects and others on plants. Not feathered but winged, I hunt in the night. A vampire’s cloak, I’ll give you a fright.”

It takes her a second, with the drugs now taking full effect and addling her brain. “A - a bat?”

“I think it's safe to say our Langstrom was not unfaithful, unless he has a thing for fur and leather. And hey, I'm not one to judge!”

“You think… you think Langstrom made this bat?*

“I think Langstrom is the bat. Couldn't see a name tag, but there were the remains of a Gotham U lab coat around its neck. So unless any other staff or students have gone missing lately I think we've solved our case, Detective.”

Barbara lifts her non-IVed hand to her face and groans. “God, I was hoping this would be easy. That woman is impossible .” 

“I'd still say it's easy.” Edward says. “You tell the wife -”

“Mother-in-law.” Barbara interrupts. “The mother in law thought her daughter was being cheated on. And she's a nightmare to deal with.”

“Even better. Tell her her Son-in-law has been turned into a bat.” He pauses, Barbara opens one eye enough to see him tilt his head to one side. “A Bat-Man. No. A Man-Bat . And she doesn't need to worry about him. Boom, job done. Money paid. Nygma and Gordon move on to the next riveting case.”

“That's not -” Barbara groans. “I'm not leaving him out there . What if he hurts someone? What if someone hurts him? Chances are he didn't choose to become a… Man-Bat.” She cringes at the word.

Edward makes a petulant sound. “Can't our buddy in black deal with that?’ 

“He shouldn't have to.” She's thinking about the purple fabric hidden away in a drawer in her office. The potential of a new chapter she’s been thinking about opening. “I'm more than capable of dealing with this.”

“You have multiple lacerations to every part of you and just avoided a concussion.” He tells her. “You're not dealing with anything.”

It's a stark contrast from the last time one of them was incapacitated; Edward's shouting at Bruce for being unable to save his friend, pushing himself to the point of popping a stitch. 

Barbara forces both her eyes open and looks at him, really taking his condition in. 

As well as the gauze covering his cheek, she sees how he's hunching forward, as though he doesn't want to pull stitches over his chest. She sees dark bruising on one of his temples, and leaning against the bed next to him are a pair of crutches with elbow support, much beyond his typical cane. 

“You don't have to join me.” She tells him. “I - look, you passed the test. You can work with me, you don't have to do this too.” 

He gives her a tired smile. “You know that's not how things work for me.”

“I do. But I can't just leave him out there, I need to know I've done everything I can.” 

“I know.” He runs one hand backward through his hair. “Stay here, alright? I'll track us down a bat. You focus on being able to catch it when I do.” 

She watches him rise and slide his hands into the grips on the crutches. He turns from her and starts to leave, leaning heavily on his supports when he goes to use his bad leg. He's wearing a pair of green crocs, which would be funny in another circumstance. 

“Eddie?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Thank you.”

He tilts his head towards her and offers a small, genuine smile. “Couldn't let my only chance at reform die now, could I? Kinda think that defeats the point.” 

Barbara laughs. 

Chapter Text

Edward falls asleep on the couch, laptop in his lap. He wakes in the early hours of the morning with a bad back and a distinct feeling of being watched. Groggily, he sits up and cricks his neck, swinging his legs over the side of the couch. It takes him a second to realise why he feels watched. 

“Get out of the shadows, Bats. You don't need to skulk around in here.”

Bruce, without even the good sense to appear sheepish, floats forward into the light. “Nygma.”

“Found me, then?”

“Where's Barbara?”

“Asleep, I hope. She had a… rough time of it, earlier.”

“What did you do to her?”

Edward scoffs. “You really think I could hurt her?”

Bruce says nothing. 

“I don't know whether that's a compliment or not. But I didn't do anything. She was - we were working a case.”

“We?”  

“We. I'm on the straight and narrow, big guy. Trying my hand at the PI business.” 

Wordlessly, Bruce moves towards the bedroom. In the back of his mind, Edward laments that he'll have to retire this hideout, which is a shame. He likes it.

“Don't wake her unless you have to.” He instructs Bruce's back. “She needs rest, Bruce.” 

Bruce nods subtly, without turning. 

He's back within five minutes. “You did a good job stitching her up.” 

“I've had a lot of practice.”

Bruce looks almost awkward, standing there. Edward points to an armchair across from him. 

“Sit.”

Bruce sits. He removes the cowl. His hair is matted down, a sheen of sweat over his brow. Edward's single table lamp casts a warm glow over the angles of his cheekbones and a shadow above the swell of his Cupid's bow. 

“Here to cart me back to Arkham?”

“You weren't finished with the programme.”

“I had an opportunity.”

“The programme was an opportunity.”

Edward snorts. “The programme was the same as it ever is. Pump me full of drugs, send me to an underpaid, overworked therapist only motivated to make me see the moral wrongs I've committed, then release me with no support system and no way of getting a real job with my criminal record. It’s never been an opportunity.”

“There are schemes. I've funded them.”

“Your schemes focus on fitting in, Bruce. People like me? The minds locked up in Arkham? We can't fit in. Your society - your schemes - they're about conformity, not rehabilitation.”

Bruce looks at the floor. “What were you looking into, with Barbara?” 

“Infidelity.”

“What?”

“When a mommy and a daddy don't love each other very -”

“I know what it means, Nygma. What was the case?”

“Mommy wanted to know if her dear daughter's husband was being good and faithful.”

“And?”

“He was.”

“What happened to Barbara then?” 

“...He was also a ten-foot Man-Bat.”

“What?”

“So a bat is-”

“Edward.” Bruce growls a little. 

“Sorry, sorry.” He isn't. “We tracked him to where we thought he was having his affair. The old Chem wing at Gotham U. Babs found a desk he'd been using.”

“Using to..?”

“That's what I asked! Not sure, anyway. She found a lever to the side, but before she could pull it this thing came up from below.” He makes a gesture with his palm, striking himself in the forehead. “Wham.”

“Where did it go?”

Edward shrugs. “Flew away. Babs has me searching, she wants to go after it once she's… not predisposed.”

Bruce's brow wrinkles. “She can't take on something of that size.”

Edward shrugs again, exaggerating the movement. 

They're quiet a moment, the both of them knowing Barbara well enough to know that there's no point either of them trying to talk her out of this idea. 

Bruce clears his throat. “Did, uh. Did you get hurt by the… Man-Bat ?” He, like Barbara before him, winces at the portmanteau.

Edward smiles. “Nothing life-threatening. But I'd hardly complain about playing Doctor with you if you want, Bats.”

He sees the eye roll and the slight slump to Bruce's shoulders, relaxing a little. 

It's strange, their relationship. 

It's been six months since Azrael, and Bruce has visited him a handful of times. Mostly to halfheartedly interrogate him on what he knows about who was puppetting the Angel of Death. He knows already, Edward is pretty sure. Not that there's anything he can do about it. Nadira has covered her tracks incredibly well. With Flass dead there are no witnesses, no evidence that she had any involvement at all. Nobody but Edward. And even if he were inclined to testify (which of course he isn't) who would believe the Riddler? And yet he puts on a show of interrogation, of questioning. And Edward deflects and flirts and gives a hundred non-answers until Bruce leaves or turns conversation to Edward's progress on the programme , which is Arkham’s speed-release scheme, and - in Edward's opinion, at least - the city's primary driver of mental-health exacerbated crime. 

It's Bruce's way of showing he cares, Edward suspects. He would think it more a case of keeping an eye on him. But he could just as easily do that with the microscopic camera Edward saw him place covertly just above his cell door on his first visit. So, he cares. Edward doesn't know what to do about that. 

Bruce lifts a visor from the inside of his cowl and presses it to his eyes, the thing glinting and flickering in the low light. Edward waits patiently until he removes it again. 

“How about it, Doc? My insides look as pretty as my outsides?”

“Your hip has subluxed.”

Edward's hand lifts immediately to the area. “Thought it felt worse than usual.” 

“I can fix it, if you'll let me?” 

“Any chance to get those hands on me, big guy.” Edward speaks even as he places his laptop on the floor beside him. “How do you want me?”

“Lie on your back.”

“How forward.” Edward complies. He watches Bruce move across the room, shedding his gloves as he does, until he's standing over him. 

Edward should probably feel fear; the Batman towering above him like this. His enemy, a person that has caused him so much pain over so many years. But Bruce falls to his knees softly, and his hands land on Edward's leg carefully, and he feels safe.

“This will hurt.” Bruce warns him. “I'll be as quick as I can.”

“I can take it.” 

Bruce doesn't offer a real response to that. He shifts his hands to better positions and Edward feels his heart finally get the message that something painful is coming. He swallows around a lump in his throat.

“I'm going to need you to breathe in and out slowly, alright? Even when it hurts, just focus on breathing.”

“You're acting like I've never dislocated anything before.” Edward scoffs as well as he can. “Just do it, I can take it.”

“Breathe in.” Bruce instructs. Edward does, deep. “And out.”

As the air leaves his lungs, Bruce manipulates the joint back into its socket. His leg burns . Sharp, splintering pain zigzagging out from his hip and electrifying every nerve in his body until it's all he feels. 

“Eddie, breathe for me.” He catches Bruce's voice above the wave of pain and realises he's holding his breath, only releasing it in an embarrassing high pitched whine. “That's it, that's good.” 

Edward breathes. The pain dulls to an ache. He relaxes his body. Bruce's hand sits above his hip, on his stomach, cool through his shirt. 

“Feeling alright?”

“Play me for a crowd or on a roof. Viola, violin, or lute. Four strings sing, a bow tied of string. What am I?”

“A fiddle.”

“Fit as one, in fact.” His heart pounds in his ears.

Bruce doesn't dispute that. “Do you have painkillers?”

“Bathroom cabinet.”

Bruce disappears for a minute and returns with a pill bottle and a glass of water. He resumes the position on his knees.

Edward takes the pills and drinks the water. They sit in silence for a minute. Bruce lifts the visor back to his eyes and examines the area once again. From this distance, Edward can make out the reversed image of his own X-ray. 

“It looks good.” Bruce says. 

“Flirt.”

They sit another minute or so in silence.

“Eddie?”

“Bruce.”

“Don't… don't tell Barbara I was here, alright?”

Edward raises a brow.

“I'm going to find Langstrom. I don't want her to think I don't trust her to take her own case but…”

“You don't want her getting hurt.”

“I'll take him down. He would've gotten on my radar one way or another, anyway. I don't want to argue with her.”

“My lips are sealed.” Edward tells him. “I don't exactly want her going after him, either.” 

Bruce is quiet. He drops his hands from Edward's hip. 

“Thank you.” He says, finally. “I'll leave you now. Just try not to cause any trouble. I don't want to take you back, Eddie. I want to trust you, I really do.” 

Edward nods. “I'll try my best. I promise.”

Bruce moves to the chair across the room and lifts the cowl to his head. It feels as though their connection will snap as soon as the mask has been donned.

“Bruce?” Edward is speaking before he really knows what he wants to say. “Visit, alright? I'll be here. Come… make sure I'm behaving.”

Bruce turns his head under the cowl. Edward catches one brown eye glinting in the light of the lamp. 

“I will.” The mask goes on. “It'll give me a chance to check on that hip, too.” 

“Thanks, Doc.” 

The curtain sways as Bruce drops from the window ledge out into the city beyond. Edward listens for the thwip of the grappling hook as he disappears into the night. 

Chapter Text

The ‘don't tell Babs’ plan lasts all of ten minutes. 

Edward had dragged himself up and into the apartment's second bedroom after Bruce's leaving, and he shuffles into the living room at some mid-morning time to find Barbara sat on the couch with his laptop resting open on the arm of the chair and some police procedural on TV that she appears to be using more for white noise than entertainment.

“You shouldn't be up.” He tells her. 

She shrugs. Her hair is wrapped in one of his shirts - a nice one of his shirts, green silk with faux ivory buttons. She looks to have showered; there's a damp darkness to the collar of the sweater she's wearing (his also, though he can't really blame her for that when all of her clothes are caked in asbestos and dried blood). There's a notepad next to her, a number of pages flipped forward. She's scribbling on it as he sits himself across from her.

“How are you feeling?” He asks.

“Fine. What did Bruce want?”

“What?”

“He was here last night. Came in while I was out. I don't think he realised I woke up.”

“That's news to me.” Edward is a bad liar. 

She gives him a look. Yeah. He's a bad liar. 

“He probably just wanted to check on you. I tried to get you back here as discreetly as possible but, ah, you were unconscious. I imagine one of his little drones saw me hauling you into a cab and ran to tell Daddy.” 

“Right. He didn't say anything to you while he was here?” 

“Not a word.” 

The look becomes a squint, like she can't quite suss where the lie is. He takes that as a win. 

“Did you find anything on Langstrom?” She asks. 

“Didn't get much time, honestly. I was… tired.” That's not even that much of a lie. He still feels the crook in his neck from falling asleep mid-search. 

“That's fine. I've got some leads that I can follow. Where did you put my jacket? It has my house keys in it.”

Edward splutters for a moment. “You can't go after it now! It's only been, what, ten hours? You need to rest .”

“I rested. I feel fine. Where's my jacket?”

Edward scowls at her. “Oh my God, you're worse than me .” 

“Probably. Jacket. Now.” 

“Or what? You'll hit a guy with crutches?”

“I'll hit you with the crutches.”

“Funny. Can you lift them? I'll let you get a real good whack in if you can get your arms above your head right now.”

“You're - God you're a nightmare. This was a mistake.” She throws herself upwards off of the couch like she means to storm off and immediately staggers backwards like she's been punched in the gut, curling in on herself with arms around her midsection.

“Oh, you know what? I've changed my mind, you're obviously ready to go out and fight monsters!”

“Fuck off, Nygma.” Barbara walks woodenly back to Edward's bedroom, one arm wrapped firmly around her ribcage.

It takes about an hour before she returns. She shuffles to the sofa and sits gingerly. “Do you have anything for the pain?” 

He looks at her and bites back a snide remark. She's not meeting his eye, instead scowling at the floor by his feet. With her hair tangled, bruises shining across her cheekbones and forehead, hunching in on herself from the pain, she looks small and slightly pitiful. He would never tell her that. 

“Yes. But you'll need to eat something with them.” He stands, still leaning heavily on his crutches, and slowly makes his way to the kitchen. “What do you want? It's lunch so not a whole lot of delivery options.”

She waves him off. “I'm not picky.” 

He doubts that but says nothing. Barbara has had the kind of upbringing, in his mind, that allows for pickiness. He orders from his favourite breakfast spot in this area, grabs two isotonic tablets from a kitchen drawer to drop into glasses of water for the both of them and sits across from her. 

She's curled on her side, TV remote in hand, flicking through channels all showing the same daytime shows and fast food ads. He watches the colours of late stage capitalism flash in her glasses until she finally settles on a movie channel showing back to back blockbusters. They sit there, not talking, paying vague attention to the CGI on the screen, until the food arrives. 

Edward slides a tupperware of kothu parotta to Barbara, who opens it, sniffs, and grunts a thank you. He smiles a little through a bite of his own food.

Time passes achingly slowly, even with the two of them dosed on painkillers watching mindless entertainment. Edward gets through another few games of Tetris before he gets bored and downloads five more games onto his phone that he deletes as soon as they show him a single pop-up ad.

He doesn't realise he's dozed off until he jolts awake to Barbara cursing at the TV in four different languages. He almost falls off the couch from the shock of it, sending sharp pain through his still-bruised hip. 

“ Fuck . What?” He hisses.

“The fucking - Bruce.” Barbara gestures angrily to the screen and swears more.

‘Batman VS. Flying Monster’ is the headline running along the underside of the screen. The reporter is saying something that Edward can't make out with the volume low and Barbara's continued muttering, but there's a grainy video of two winged figures duking it out in the night skies of Gotham playing in the top right corner. Shit. 

“Did you tell him?” Barbara demands. 

“No.” The lie is in no way convincing. He glances over to find her glaring daggers at him. “I didn't! He must've - I left my laptop out here! He could have come in and used it.”

She groans angrily, which is immediately followed by a slight yelp and a hand on her side.

“This is good though, right?” Edward attempts to placate. “That thing is off the streets! Case solved!”

“Edward.” She speaks through gritted teeth. “You of all people should understand.” 

He sighs. “I do, Babs. That's why I'm - I get needing to see things through. I get the compulsions. You know I do. But you're going to kill yourself if you push yourself too far. Look at you! You've spent all fucking day trying to get out to look for that thing with no plan of what you'd do if you found it! You're hurt, and you're not taking it seriously.” He runs a hand down his face. “This? Right now? You're acting just like me.”

She's quiet. A moment passes. The TV drones on, now playing the weather forecast. Rain. 

“I need this work.” She says, finally. Quietly. “This case was - it was a chance I didn't even realise I had , and I blew it before it even started.”

“You can't blame yourself for that! How could you know Langstrom was messing around with whatever the fuck he was doing?”

“I could have looked further. I was cocky. I wanted to prove myself.”

“Then prove yourself by picking your ass back up and getting better .”

“But Langstrom -”

“Was caught by the Batman. He's not a threat to anyone right now.”

Barbara looks like she wants to disagree.

“Look, Babs.” He waits for her to meet his eye. “When you've recovered I will personally hack Brucie's computer and hand you every single file he has on that bat. But until that point, you're resting.” 

“Fine. Alright.” 

That's good enough, in Edward's eyes.

Chapter Text

It takes two days before she can convince Edward to leave her alone for longer than a night. He's persistent, annoying, and doesn't blink when she calls him out on it. 

He hadn't forced her to stay at his place the second night following Langstrom’s attack, and had insisted on calling her a cab back to hers himself. 

He showed up on her doorstep the next morning though, lukewarm coffee in hand. It would have felt like babysitting, if it had felt like Edward had any experience doing so. 

He at least had no qualms with accompanying her back to the university to explore wherever the creature had come from, this time armed with her father’s pistol and a pair of bulletproof vests. There’s no sign though that the Man-Bat had returned at any point since their encounter, and so they both make their way down through the jagged hole in the floor via a mostly unbroken ladder that Barbara secures in place very questionably with extension cords. 

The room below was maybe previously basement storage, but it’s been overrun by electrical equipment and stacks of cages lined with chicken wire. Some have been dashed against the ground and lie crushed in suspicious dark puddles. None of the electricals appear functional, computers shattered, wires torn. She struggles to make sense of the layout for the destruction.

The entire space stinks of death; the sweet, cloying scent of decay in varying stages. Edward gags behind her. Barbara hands him a mask from a pocket in her jacket, donning one herself.

“It's not much, but it'll help.”

“This is - Jesus, it's awful. ”

Barbara agrees. She peers into the closest cage, breath fogging up her glasses. Her torchlight catches on a matted mass of black fur, parts peeling downward from a stark white ribcage. She sees movement in the fur; some small, white insects squirming. Her stomach flips. 

“They're bats.” Edward says. She glances over at him where he's shining his own light over a row of cages lined up on a table across the room. The bodies within these appear less decomposed than the one in front of her. “All of them.”

He's right. Every cage that Barbara looks into holds a leather-winged corpse. Large and small, dozens of them. 

The ground is sticky with gore in places, from creatures crushed beneath their cages and others knocked down from experiments still laid out on desks. Barbara breathes shallowly, trying to avoid the most of it, searching the computers for salvageable memory storage and papers for notes. She finds nothing.

Edward mutters something about feeling green in the gills and scrambles up the ladder and out. She hears him retching. 

She's reached the other end of the room, where the smell of death is greatest and the damage is worst. Lightheaded, eyes streaming, she squints at a whiteboard half hanging from its supports. 

Francine, I'm sorry.

Chapter Text

Edward leaves her alone the morning after. She doesn't blame him. It had taken her an hour in the shower to feel clean after returning from the University.

She leaves the house early and walks gingerly down the stairs of her building. The cuts over her torso have started to scab, making every accidental pull on the stitches that much more painful. 

It's cold out, at least, and so nobody looks twice at her with her scarf pulled over her chin to cover the bruising there, and she manages to get to the library with minimal odd looks or staring. 

Barbara likes the library. She always has. It's been her solace, her space. Her slow, quiet moments away from the fast paced nature of the city. In college, it would be where she would spend most nights, huddled over piles of books, some relevant to her studies and some not, hungry for knowledge. And even after college, in the academy and then in the force, she'd come here to read and to study and to research for cases she was on. Sure, it's easier now to search on a computer; every piece of information ever made is available at the click of a button. But she finds it more satisfying with the books in front of her, easier to make notes and draw conclusions between different sources. 

She finds a seat on a comfortable chair in a secluded corner, marks her claim with her jacket, and heads to stockpile. She picks up any book she can find on man-made hybrids, human mutation, and even just bats as a whole. She ends up with a sizable pile on a table beside her and settles with her knees tucked under herself, soles of her shoes very carefully not touching the chair. And she reads. Her small notepad is quickly filled with messy notes and hastily copied diagrams. 

She stops around midday when her stomach reminds her that she hasn't eaten anything today, and checks a book out to read in a nearby café, leaving the rest of her pile with a librarian with the promise that she can return to it later. 

At lunch, she begins plotting her game plan. Langstrom was doing something in that lab, with those bats, and she needs to know what. If she figures that out before Bruce, it'll make up for her earlier mistake, for letting her guard down so stupidly. 

She's still planning as she returns to the library and heads back to her corner to once again claim her seat before collecting her stack of books. There's someone sat in that seat though, and she's turning to find another when the person in it calls out to her. 

“Oh, Barbara Gordon!” 

Her stomach drops. She turns back to the voice, to the man sitting there. Dark skin, close cropped hair, the smile of Gotham's most eligible bachelor.

“I wasn't expecting to see anyone here.” The lie slides off Bruce’s tongue silken. She knows it's a lie. He knew she was here. He knows where everyone is at all times. There's a Wayne ‘W’ emblazoned on almost every camera in the city.

“Mister Wayne.” She says. 

“Please feel free to join me.” He tells her. “I won't distract you, I promise.” Another easy lie. 

She sits across from him wordlessly and deposits her books on the table, spines facing deliberately away from him. 

“Homework?” He asks. “Your father tells me you've set up a new business, right? A, ah, a detective agency?” 

Jim Gordon hasn't had a conversation with Bruce Wayne in five years. At least, not a coherent one. This fake reality he's concocting has Barbara's shoulders tensing. She knows why he's doing it. What reason would they have to speak if not for her father? They have so little in common; a fifteen year age gap, a gap in lifestyle and in life experience. If he weren't the Bat and she weren't smarter than his disguise, her father really would be their only real connection. But it still makes her uncomfortable.

“That's right.” She tells him.

“Any interesting cases so far?”

“What you'd expect. Infidelity. Missing pets.” 

“Nothing more fun?” 

“Not really.”

“And I imagine you can't tell me what you're working in right now?”

A tight smile. “Client confidentiality. Sorry, Bruce.” 

“I understand, I won't push. You look tired, though. I hope you aren't working yourself too hard, you know there are always other people that can help out with these things. If you need a break you should take one.”

“Spoken like a man with money.”

“Fair point. I mean it, though. If you're tired, or sick or - God forbid if you get hurt. The work you're doing, it'll be impacted by that, heavily. You'll make silly mistakes, put yourself in danger.” The sincerity that had crept into his voice is swept away by a conspiratorial smile. “Believe me, I've been to enough board meetings after a long weekend to know just how stupid it makes you look.” 

The shift irritates her, but she gets his point. He's looking out for her. He could just have done so more honestly . She knows he was at Edward's safehouse that night. He could have just called her afterwards. A simple conversation, no Wayne façade, that's all she wants. To be treated as equals. 

“Well.” He stands and dusts off his perfectly pressed trousers. “It was good to see you, anyway.” He reaches out a hand. His shake is delicate, like he's afraid of knocking her injuries or further harming her. 

“Come by the office some time.” She tells him. “I'm sure you have a case or two I could take a crack at.”

“Only of liquor, I'm afraid. But I'll keep that in mind, thank you.” 

She watches him glide out of the library like he owns the place. Which isn't as far from false as it could be. 

Chapter Text

The lock on Barbara's office door isn't nearly as good as it could be. It takes Edward less than a minute to pick, and the cheap self install alarm system had taken barely more time than that to take offline before he'd even arrived. 

He's not breaking in out of any distrust for Barbara, or to slow down her Man-Bat sleuthing to force her to take more real time to recover. When Edward has a riddle in his head that he just can't solve, an issue that feels like it's pressing into the tissue of his brain, there are very few things that can help to snap him out of it. The quickest, ironically, is to find a new riddle to solve; just to take his mind out of the loop long enough to take the pressure off. He's trying to find her equivalent; a case she can solve until she's able to do something about the beast now presumably caged under Bruce's mansion.

He pulls the drawers entirely out of her filing cabinet and gingerly lowers himself to the ground among them to flip through. She keeps immaculate notes, of course, but as he goes through the dozens of folders he comes to a puzzling realisation. Other than maybe two drawers, her files are filled with cases from years ago, all of which have already been solved. All of which have been solved by Bruce. And yet the pages are covered with notes: detailed maps of crime scenes, relationship webs, research into local history, pages of scribbled out connections.

She's been solving them - trying to solve them - quicker than Bruce had.

“Oh, Babs.” He mutters. “We have got to get you a hobby.” 

He picks out a few recent unsolved cases and reassembles the drawers, but as he slides the lowest back into its place he hears a plastic wrapped thump from the cabinet and the drawer hits something soft. He pulls it out again and mutters prayers under his breath as he lies flat on the floor to reach in and feel around. 

He comes away with a bundle of purple fabric wrapped in clear plastic. On unwrapping, the fabric unravels into a full body lycra suit. Purple and yellow, the emblem of a bat emblazoned across the chest.

He lets out a low whistle. “A new hobby, maybe.” 

He'd been planning on heading back to Barbara's apartment after digging through her files to hand over his spoils and maybe bask a little in her indignation at him breaking into her office in the first place, but he instead finds himself back at his safehouse. He should have immediately abandoned the place on Bruce’s unannounced visit, but for not entirely sane reasons he's been dragging out the process of relocating, which plays in his favour at this moment. 

The text he sends Bruce is minimal and carries an unwarranted urgency. Barbara. Come now . Safehouse. 

Bruce is there in less than ten minutes. His chest is heaving underneath the suit’s sculpted pectorals. Edward often wonders if the attention to detail in the musculature of his costume is overcompensation for something, a thought that in that moment is interrupted by Bruce breathlessly asking what exactly is wrong. 

Edward holds up the suit.

“Do you think it'd suit me?”

“Where did you get this? Who made this?” 

“ I come after tea, sat opposite me. What am I? ”

“Edward.”

“What? You want me to believe you're not in on this? That's your logo, Bats.” He holds the fabric against himself. “Would green be too on the nose for mine?” 

“I had nothing to do with this. Where was it?” 

Edward gestures to the filing cabinet. “I was doing some research, it was hidden in the back. It's been a while since I last wore spandex. I'm sure I can still do pull it off.”

“Has she worn this? What was she planning to do with it?”

“Seems fresh outta the box to me.” Edward balls the suit up and throws it to Bruce, who catches it easily. “And I think she was reaching the logical conclusion to extreme disillusionment with the justice system.”

Bruce is analysing the costume, Edward can just about see lights blinking in the eyes of the cowl. He can actually almost make out shapes, words, images. He shifts closer, resting his hip on Barbara's desk and leaning in to watch the lights blur. 

He's reaching for the mask before he realises he is, hand moving on instinct to tilt Bruce's head to better make out the text reversed in the tiny screens. Bruce catches his wrist without looking, without speaking, and just holds it there while his scan finishes. His grip is firm, not tight. Edward gives an experimental pull and finds zero give. 

“I think she… I think she made this herself?” 

“That so hard to believe? We don't all have tailors with NDAs.” 

The hand on his arm tightens. “Edward. Not the point.”

“I'm just saying! I don't think it matters who made it, just that it was made .”

“She can't go out in this.” He lets go of Edward, who instinctively cups his wrist in his other hand, holding the feeling of Bruce's grip against himself.

“What, don't approve of the colour scheme? I will admit, it is a bit of an eyesore - and you've seen the things I used to wear.” 

“There's no protection on this. If she got hit too hard - if she got shot - she'd be down in a second.”

“Sounds like she needs something better, then.”

“She needs to not think herself a vigilante. The PI thing is dangerous enough.” 

Edward barks a laugh. “You try telling her that. This was inevitable, really, Bats.”

Bruce gives him a look.

“What, you think someone like her would grow up watching you and not take a little inspiration. I mean seriously, you just dealt with one fanatic. Count yourself lucky that you actually know this one. And that she's mentally well.” He tilts his head. “Mostly.”

The leather of Bruce's gloves squeaks as he balls his firsts. “Which is exactly why she can't be allowed to do this.”

“Oh come on, she's no Azrael. She's good , Bruce. There's nobody better. Just think about it.”

“No.” Bruce snaps. His whole body looks wound tight, every muscle tensed. “It's not safe.”

“You can't exactly stop her, big guy. Not even from using your IP. Should’ve filed for copyright. Rookie error.” 

“I have ways.” 

“Of ruining her trust in you, yeah. Look. No riddles, no more trying to lure you to the right answer. I'm just going to tell you: you need to let her work with you. It's the only way of keeping her safe. She can't afford the shit you can, Bruce. You're the only person in this fucking city that can give her what she needs to do this. I'll help you keep her benched while she recovers from this, but after that you need to let her in. Or she's going to get herself killed.”

Bruce stalks towards him, looming over, pressing him back against the desk. Edward stands his ground. He feels the heat radiating from the suit, the frustration radiating off of Bruce himself.

“Killed by someone like you. ”

“Probably.”

“How do I know that isn't your plan?”

Edward feels a pang of genuine anger at the suggestion. He shoves at Bruce and glares upwards into his eyes. “I would never hurt her. And anyway . I'm fucking retired.”

“I don't believe that.”

“That's not my problem.” They're chest to chest, the both of them practically snarling. Bruce's breath puffs out over Edward’s cheeks.

“I should cart you back to Arkham now .”

“ Try .” Edward grins. “I'll just escape again. That's the problem with people like me. People like you can't keep us locked up.” 

Bruce's hand is around his wrist again. There's contemplation in his eyes alongside the anger. And Edward, despite the vitriol in Bruce's tone, feels safe, pinned securely as he is.

They're breathing into air that feels thick and frozen. Time is in strands being pulled ever tighter as the moment drags on. Bruce is leaning into him. The back of Edward's thigh is digging into the desk. He doesn't move.

“I don't want her to get hurt.” Bruce's voice is quiet. His shoulders slump a little. The tension shifts. 

“Then help her.”

“The best way to do that is to stop her.”

Edward snorts. “You can't preach abstinence while you fuck, Bruce.” 

Bruce's hand leaves his wrist. He pulls away. Edward's body curls after him, following for a second before halting. Edward watches him head to the window. 

“Just think about it, Bats.” 

There's the glint in the eyes of the cowl over his caped shoulder, and Batman disappears into the night.

Chapter Text

Edward knocks on Barbara's door at six the next morning. She answers, dishevelled, and does nothing more than roll her eyes when she sees him at her doorstep. He follows her inside when she turns, and gives her a moment to slouch comfortably against her kitchen counter and mess with dials on a coffee machine while he takes his shoes off before he starts speaking. 

“Good morning to you too.’

“Sleep is one of the most important things in healing after an accident.” She tells him. 

“You weren't sleeping. You've been on your laptop since four.”

“You hacked my laptop ?” 

“I just tracked your mouse movements, please. Just so I know you're not pushing yourself. I'm not even looking at what sites you're visiting!” He gives a flourishing gesture. “And I was tempted to! But I'm a good friend.”

She looks doubtful. He waves her off.

“We have some catching up to do, Babs.”

“It's been two days.”

“ You'll hide in plain sight, with the look of another. Put me on, try it out, what a story you'll discover. ”

“What?”

“Come on, it's an easy one.”

“...A costume.”

“Right on the money.”

“It's six in the morning, Eddie. Just talk to me normally.”

“Boo. Fine. I found your little craft project. At your office.”

“My -” Her eyes widen. “Why were you in there ?”

“I was trying to help! I wanted to find a case we could work. Get your mind off Langstrom.” He gestures to himself. “Good friend things!”

“You - Edward. Tell me you didn't tell Bruce.” 

He conjures his most genuine sheepish expression. From her response, it's a weak attempt. 

She groans. “Fuck. That's just what I needed.”

“You had his insignia emblazoned across the chest, Barbara. I thought he was involved!” 

“I hadn't… talked to him about it yet.”

Edward scoffs. “How am I the only one that seems able to communicate here? I literally talk in riddles. And yet I have to be the one telling both of you to just talk to each other.” 

“I can't just -”

“No, you can. You're just worried he'll say no - which he will! By the way! You hiding this until the very last moment isn't going to stop him from thinking you're doing something stupid! The both of you need to sit down and discuss this like adults .” 

Barbara is quiet for a moment. She picks up her mug and cradles it between her palms. 

Eventually, she sighs. “You're right.” It sounds reluctant. He feels like he's just scolded a teenager. “I'll - I'll talk to him later.” 

“You’ll talk to him in -” a glance at his watch “-four hours. Over brunch.” 

Barbara balks. “ Brunch? ” 

“I checked his schedule, he's busy for the rest of the day.”

“Does he - did you organise this with him?”

“Nope! He'll answer when I call, though.” I hope . 

They arrive at the café Edward has picked out at quarter to ten. He's made his choice strategically; it's in an affluent enough area that a diner like Bruce Wayne won't stand out all too dramatically, without being a place frequented by paparazzi. The tables are spread out and the noise dampening is minimal, meaning their conversation will be nothing but white noise to other guests. And the area they will be dining in is tucked away behind faux rustic columns and potted plants.

He and Barbara are seated for ten minutes before Bruce arrives. He can tell Bruce has arrived not from sight or sound but the energy in the building. It feels as though the place grinds to a halt for a second as the door clicks shut. And then quickly visitors return to their meals, servers return to their work, all with the hush and hurry of people deliberately pretending to have not noticed anything out of the ordinary. 

Bruce rounds the corner and double takes when he sees Barbara. Edward smiles, wide and bearing teeth. 

“You got my invitation then.” Edward steeples his hands on the table and taps his forefingers against each other.

“You told me there was an emergency .” Bruce looks unimpressed. “That's the second time this week.”

“And I wasn't lying! Come on, sit down. I'm hungry.”

The table is round; the three fit around it in a perfect triangle. Bruce smiles at Barbara. They order their food. The clamour of the restaurant fills their ears. Edward lets the uncomfortable silence sit until their food arrives, and then proceeds to stare down the two of them as they pick up their forks. 

“So neither of you want to start talking?” 

“I have no idea what we would possibly want to talk about, Nygma.” 

“There's a jammer in my pocket and everyone in here is at least three bottomless mimosas in. Nobody's listening to us right now, Brucie.” 

Bruce clears his throat. “We should still be somewhere more… private.”

“Nowhere private has bottomless mimosas.” Edward doesn't have a drink in front of him, but he feels like that's beyond the point. Plus, he's not necessarily the one that'll be needing one. Unless they drag this out for too long. 

Barbara clasps her hands over her plate. “Fine. Bruce, I know Edward told you about my… project.” Her eyes are darting over his face. “I want to apologise. For not asking to use your, ah, branding. I should have.”

Bruce nods once, slowly. 

Barbara continues. “Before I do ask for - for anything. I need you to understand that I'm not doing this to - I don't know, prove a point? Get back at the cops that threw me out? It's - I want to help people. I want to do what my dad tried to for so long.”

At the mention of Jim Gordon, Bruce's shoulders slump slightly. His carefully blank mask slips and Edward sees flashes of understanding and doubt. 

“I want to work with you, Bruce. Please?”

No answer. The mask has been forced back into place. Edward watches him breathe deeply. Watches his eyes, scanning Barbara's face, flicking to Edward's. 

“I need to think about it.” He says, eventually. “I'll… we can talk about it later, okay?”

“Okay.” Barbara nods. “Thank you, Bruce.” 

Edward watches him reach over and squeeze her hand.

“We'll talk later.” 

There's quiet for a moment; a moment that drags on and on. Bruce and Barbara are both looking at the table, contemplating. Edward is left staring from one to another.

“Great!” He announces, startling them both. “Now that that's over, finish your food before it gets cold.” 

Barbara rolls her eyes but picks up her cutlery. There's a different air about her now, even Edward - inept as he may be with body language - can see the weight lifted from her shoulders. 

“He's right.” Bruce says. “Why don't you tell me how business has been going while we eat? We haven't had the chance to sit down together like this. Not… properly, at least.”

Barbara straightens up further. She launches into a series of stories about cases she's worked. A majority are mundane, easy, but she's able to recount them all with remarkable detail. Edward, for once, sits quietly and listens. 

He feels… secure. It's a strange realisation to come immediately following such a tense conversation. And yet he does. 

Bruce and Barbara have been the only stable things in his life for the past two years. It's an uncomfortable reality to accept, especially considering that stable in this case only means that they have neither died nor tried to kill him, though the second of those he knows is likely solely due to the Bat’s whole ‘no-kill’ rule. He's absolutely certain that were Bruce inclined to kill him, he'd have no problem doing so with even just his bare hands. That thought hatches a strange breed of butterfly in his gut. 

He watches them talk comfortably and wonders how often they would do this while he was locked up. If they would at all. There's a preening part of him that's fairly certain that he's their lynch-pin. He's what brings them together. 

It's a half hour before Bruce's watch buzzes, alerting him of some flavour of criminal activity, and he leaves with an apology and another promise to Barbara. He'll think about it. 

Chapter Text

Bruce is thinking about it for a week. Barbara knows she shouldn't be holding her breath, and she tries not to think about it too constantly.

Edward makes it… easier. In a way. He's settled into their partnership like a deep-rooting weed; digging through every last dark corner of her unfinished cases and establishing himself quickly as a part of her business that she'll have trouble removing. 

She realises, irritatingly, that as much as he's annoying and abrasive and self-centred to work with, he really is a huge asset. His ability to think in ways she can't leads to cases she's been working on for weeks being closed in an afternoon. And, again, despite herself, she likes him. It's nice having someone to work with, she didn't realise how much she'd missed it. 

Going straight from an institution like the police, with at least a dozen colleagues in every single day to a job where she had nobody had been - not that she'd realised at the time - emotionally fucking devastating. She feels more at home in her office in the week with Edward than she had in the months before, even with his ‘reorganising’ the space in every moment her eyes aren't on him. 

When Bruce finally calls her, she's actually almost stopped thinking about Langstrom. She's down to only once an hour, at least. Eddie is huddled over her desk, attempting one of her Batman cases, treating it like a game and writing out his own messy methodology over a few pieces of grid paper. After reading through his ideas and unsuccessfully trying to convince him of the inherent value of human life, she rules both torture and murder to be cheating.

She hasn't been to Wayne Manor since Azrael's attack on Edward. Bruce tells her to announce herself to the computer system at the gate and she'll be allowed in automatically. With a begrudging gruffness, he adds that she's welcome to bring Edward. She hadn't even asked. 

She does bring him. Partly because she feels as though she owes him for getting Bruce to even consider working with her, and partly because she doesn't want to deal with the consequences of not inviting him. 

Alfred greets her warmly at the door, offering Edward a tight, icy hello and then entirely ignoring him to lead them to a secret elevator down into the depths of the cave below the estate. 

She allows herself awe as the elevator glides down along a metal track in the open space. She's been down here only a few times and the Batcave has found new ways to leave her breathless each and every one. The stalactite structures hang precariously, as though at any moment they could come free and crash into one of the metal platforms below, sending them and everything on them down into the darkness below. 

When the elevator reaches the platform, she steps out, Edward trailing only a little behind. 

“Bruce?” She calls. Her voice echoes.

“Barbara! Over here!” His voice comes from somewhere to her left, along a narrow, fenced walkway onto a larger platform with a solid metal floor. She follows it, footsteps echoing in the open space. The platform is edged by a large expanse of wall on one side, and she spots Bruce's figure in a smaller cave within, surrounded by humming machines and flashing lights, hunched over what looks like a WayneTech prototype. 

As she gets closer, she hears laboured, animal breathing among the sounds of the machines. Over Bruce's shoulder she sees a large metal cage, inside which the hulking figure of the Man-Bat lies sedated, wings strapped to its back with thick, leather-wrapped chain. There are wires and tubes webbed around it, the ends nestled into thick fur over the beast. It's tongue lolls out the side of its mouth, open around an endotracheal tube. 

“Now that's a face only a mother could love.” Edward whistles behind her. 

“Nygma.” Bruce says, turning to face them. “You brought him, then.” He doesn't sound angry.

“Way to make a man feel wanted , Bats.”

“He would have followed me here regardless.” Barbara offers in lieu of an apology. She comes up next to Bruce and looks down at the console. The screen is an overwhelming amount of information and, as much as she's sure she could make sense of it given time, she looks to Bruce for explanation.

“It's taken me this long to reverse engineer an antidote.” He explains. “He changed his body at a molecular level. His DNA is so meshed with that of a bat’s that I had to run a code for the entire thing and find enzymes to react with each individual protein. The notes in what was left of his lab helped, but only so much.” 

“What happens if you got something wrong?” Edward asks. He's settled himself on the other side of Bruce, resting against the console and obscuring one of the screens. His eyes are firmly set on Bruce. As they always are when the two of them are in the same room. 

Barbara doesn't think he means to. It's something she's noticed him doing a lot. Even in the group therapy tapes she'd liberated from Arkham after his arrest. When she was searching for any reason, any remorse over the wound she thought he'd inflicted on her father. When he's in a group, even one as small as three people, his attention is drawn to only one. She'd theorised it to be the person he's most comfortable around, but Bruce.. ?

His eyes follow Bruce's hands on the console as he taps rapidly through a series of options. They flick to his face when he speaks. She thinks maybe it's the opposite. Bruce is a threat, after all.

“I haven't.”

“So you have no backup plan?”

“I have a backup, Nygma. But I haven't gotten this wrong.” He punctuates his sentence by punching a code into the console and a series of machines at the side of the Man-Bat’s cage begin to buzz. 

Barbara watches intently as the dials on the machines tick steadily upwards. There's a crackling of electricity in the air. She sees the tubing looping beneath the Man-bat’s skin bounce and shake as the machine begins pumping liquid through it. The body stiffens, chest pressing forward until the strain of doing so has it shaking, rattling the machinery against the bars of the cage. The creature’s eyes roll back, half covered by near-translucent eyelids. A choked screech pushes past the tracheal tube, pained and guttural. 

“Time for that backup yet, Bruce?” Edward calls. 

“I know what I'm doing.” Bruce snaps. Barbara catches Edward's satisfied smirk as she glances over, but her attention quickly returns to the creature. 

The fluid flowing into the beast now tracks iridescent patterns below its fur, just bright enough to be visible in the low lighting of the cave. As she watches, the entry points of the tubing seem to bubble up. 

The bubbles begin flowing over the Bat’s body like a simmering pot, rapid enough to rock the body side to side on the metal below. It's nauseating and disconcerting to watch; the animal becomes the roiling bubbles. Barbara can't tell it's head from its feet. Even its wings, she realises, have started melting at the edges, distortion running through them like deep frying.

She's so distracted by the shifting masses below the skin that she actually almost misses when the thing begins to shrink. Down and down, from its lumbering ten foot mass to the size of a man. 

And then smaller. And smaller. Lights below the surface and skin rolling and swelling like a storm at sea, it shrinks smaller than the smallest man. Smaller than a boy. Smaller than a baby . Until it is the size of Barbara's head and the bubbling is so intense in its small form that it begins rolling over one way or another.

Eventually, the machines whir to a halt and the movement below the skin follows suit. 

The three of them stand there. Barbara, Bruce, and Edward (now removed from the console and facing the cage, watching intently). In front of them, the Man-Bat has become a small, brown mass of fur. Barbara sees it taking quick, unsteady breaths. 

“...is that…?” Edward tilts his head to the side quizzically. “Did you hit reverse?”

“There is no - this shouldn't be possible.” 

Movement glues Barbara's eyes to the cage. The furry mass has started crawling on what Barbara suddenly recognises as winged arms, dragging itself deliriously along the ground. Its wide eyes scan the room, two big, black marbles on its fox like face.

It’s a bat. She watches its wings begin to flutter, lifting it a few inches off of the ground before failing. 

Bruce has rounded the counter and unlocked the cage in a matter of seconds following its first unsuccessful attempt at flight, and scoops it up carefully from the ground.

“It’s a fruit bat.” He says, bringing it towards them. He pins its wings to its sides carefully with one hand. Dazed and exhausted as it is, it makes no effort to fight him off, accepting its fate with eyes ringed by whitish fur scanning Barbara and Edward blearily.

“So, what. We Princess and the Frog it? Or can we go in for round two?” Edward sounds equal parts fascinated and impatient. 

“I need to check the machine.” Bruce says. “It shouldn’t have done this.” He turns his head towards the console and raises his voice. “Computer, message to Alfred: Please bring holding unit type D4 to containment three. Thank you.”

The computer chimes an affirmative, and Bruce carefully manipulates the animal into a more comfortable position not requiring both of his hands. He moves back over to the console and begins typing slow commands with his free hand, Edward follows. Barbara, having not moved at all from her initial position, remains where she is. 

Edward crouches behind the computer array, so that his eyes are on a level with the bat’s. Bruce ignores him. Barbara watches him watch it, head twisting this way and that to take in every angle.

“Do you have photos of the creature before? Close ups of the face?” He says, suddenly.

Bruce frowns at him, hand stilling on the console. He gives Edward a quizzical look. 

“Just a hunch.” 

Bruce leads them back towards the central computer in the cave, meeting Alfred on the way, who opens a sliding grate on what looks like a glorified rat trap and takes the bat from Bruce. At the computer, Bruce hunches over a keyboard while Edward pulls up an elaborate rolling chair and settles next to him, visibly relieved to be off his feet. Barbara moves to Bruce's other side, staring up at the largest screen as he navigates through encryption after encryption. And then eventually the entire computer fills with images of the Man-Bat. Every monitor showcasing a different angle. 

“That one.” Edward points to an image on one of the smallest screens. Bruce taps a few times and suddenly the pictures swap, and the face of the monster is before them. 

Barbara wouldn't call it ugly. That would suggest the potential for a creature like this to be beautiful, and she struggles to picture that. Its features resemble the bat's to an extent, but there's something grotesque about them. A pressure behind the skin, like the entire thing would burst if it had grown any larger. Like it can't quite fit within itself. 

Edward makes a contemplative noise. 

“What?” 

“That's not Langstrom.” 

Barbara blinks at him. “What?”

“The nose. It's not - hold on.” He pulls a crumpled notebook from the inner pocket of his jacket, uncaps the pen with his teeth, and flips through pages of almost illegible scrawl punctuated regularly by twisting question marks. When he reaches clear paper, he begins scribbling. “Langstrom’s nose was like… this.” The scribbles join into a triangular amalgamation that looks more like a wasps nest than anything else.  

Barbara stares down at the page, then up at the screen. She sees the difference, and the more she looks at Edward's shaky drawing the more it morphs into something more familiar. Bruce seems to get it at the same time she does, and runs a search on one of the lower monitors, scrolling down through image results until he comes up with a photograph of a nose that doesn't look all too different from Edward's drawing. 

“Vampire bat.” Bruce says. 

“Fitting.” 

“If that wasn't Langstrom,” Barbara presses her fingers to her temples, “where is he?”

Chapter Text

Edward and Barbara don't leave the cave that night. The three of them sit at monitors around the central console and manually go through hours of CCTV footage. Bruce is running a constant algorithm to pick up any potential sighting of the Man-Bat, but with the broad scope of his search they're having to sort through a slog of pigeons taking flight and plastic bags that look just a little too winglike. Bruce has a speaker system down here, but he refuses to play anything that might distract them, so the backing track to their work is the white noise of the cave and the repetitive clicking of their mice. Both of which only asslist in driving Edward into a trance of scanning the screen with his eyes, clicking ‘No Match’, and moving on to the next stream. His eyelids start dropping at some point and when Bruce’s watch beeps at four am he jolts in place and blinks himself back to awareness. 

Bruce hums, a rasp catching in his throat from lack of use. “We need to rest.”

“Go rest, I'll keep going.” Barbara says. Edward twists in his seat and sees her hunched over the keyboard, squinting at the screen with what he's sure has to be migraine-inducing intensity. 

“Barbara.”

“Bruce.”

“This is cute and all, Babs, but he’s right.” Edward admits. “You’ll be more efficient once you’re rested.” 

Begrudgingly, she stands and follows them upstairs.

“So!” Edward says, after only a moment or two of their footsteps being the only sound in the house. “Sleepover?”

“I’ll have Alfred make up rooms for you both. Wait in here.” Bruce pushes open a door and gestures them inside. The room beyond is smaller than Edward had expected of the mansion. Bookshelves line one wall, and a desk sits strewn with papers before a grand window. An office. He enters, Barbara following, and spins in place to take the entire room in as the door shuts softly behind them. 

There are disappointingly few interesting titles on the bookshelves, a majority being records of old Gotham legislation and land ownership. Which - he’d admit - would have been interesting to him a few years ago. And so he turns his attention to the desk. The papers lying over it, he quickly finds out, are fliers. Each emblazoned with the Wayne crest. Most of them are familiar to him. He picks one up. 

‘What the Arkham Rehabilitative Scheme Can Mean For YOU!’

And in smaller text below the title: funded in full by the Wayne Foundation.

Barbara joins him at the table and picks up another of the fliers, flicking it open with one hand 

“It’s just another in a long line of Wayne-funded distractions that does nothing to address the real issues in this city.” Edward mutters.

“He’s doing his best, Eddie. You can’t expect one man to be able to change every single deeply rooted socioeconomic system.”

He groans. “I know . I do. It just drives me fucking insane when people expect these things to work for everyone . Like we’re all the same.” He crumples his flyer and drops it flatly to the table.

“I was in behavioural classes as soon as I started school.” He tells Barbara. And maybe he's delirious from tiredness, because the words start to spill out of him. “... Which were never to help me . They were to help everyone around me . They were to make me fit in so I stopped making people uncomfortable . So my parents would stop arguing about it every single time I got into any kind of trouble. They stopped making me go once they got divorced. My father would say that there was no point any more.”

Barbara's face scrunches into the same expression he's seen on every Arkham psychologist he's ever tried to discuss this with. 

“That shouldn't have been put on you.” And the same words come out of her mouth as would come out of theirs. He sighs. 

“You wanna know the thing though?” He asks. “It doesn't really bother me.” This is the point the psychologists would frown at him, note something down, and ask him to continue. He doesn't wait for that from Barbara. “I know it should . But it just isn't… logical. Their marriage was crumbling long before I showed any sort of defect. They hated each other long before I came along. I just gave them something new to blame. They did the same with N - with my sister, before me.” He taps his thumb against the tips of his fingers. “The classes were to teach me emotions . How I should talk. How I should look. Meeting people's eyes . Thinking about their feelings. Memorising these expression cards to act as though I could recognise them in real world scenarios, to act in ways that made everyone else comfortable. Even if it looked the same to me.” He smiles wryly. “I'm a very good test taker. I've been doing it my whole life.”

Barbara looks into her lap. “I - I could never begin to even pretend to understand what that feels like, Eddie. But I've… I've spent the last few years watching a man refuse every bit of help offered to him. When you don't have any alternative, is it really worth fighting back against a system that is trying to help you?” 

He runs a hand down his face. He knows his exhaustion must be showing. He knows it's in Barbara's nature to be optimistic, to try to find the one good bud in the garden and guide it until it blooms. He doesn't quite have the heart right now to bicker with her over systemic reform. 

Bruce returns to them after a few minutes, Alfred in tow, and shows them to a set of rooms down a grand hallway and up a spiral staircase. Edward feels fatigue weighing him down with every step, and his hip starts aching that much more. He wishes Barbara goodnight as she staggers into the room next to his. His feet pull him forward, brain so dulled to the world around him that he doesn't realise Bruce has followed him in until he clears his throat behind him. 

He turns, blinking himself back to reality. 

“I wanted to thank you.” Bruce says. “For… helping me get my head out of my ass.”

Edward waves a hand at him. “I think it's still pretty far up there.”

“With Barbara. Thank you for making me give her a chance with this. It's… nice to work with people. I forget sometimes.”

“Doesn't fit well enough with the stoic loner thing you've got going on.” Edward's feet have carried him to the bed. “You could do with a rebrand though. Ever thought of adding a little green to the costume? Changing that logo up a little?”

Bruce rolls his eyes. He's smiling. “It's… it's nice working with you again.” 

Edward flops backward. He's smiling back. “The start of a good partnership.” He says. “I'll send you the invoice in the morning. For the services of the Nashton and Gordon Detective Agency. ”

He hears Bruce snort. “ Nashton and Gordon ? How does Barbara feel about this?” 

“She'll come around.”

“Goodnight, Eddie.” 

“...Night, Bruce.” Edward is tired enough that when the pang of don't leave rises into his throat, he almost lets the words out. Almost. 

He hears the door click shut as the Batman leaves. And then he crawls under the covers and falls into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

Barbara awakens to her phone chiming. For a moment, she's confused as to where she is. Why the bed she finds herself in is so much nicer than her own.

After the realisation hits, she practically launches herself out of bed and down the hall to the library, where she finds Edward and Bruce. Sat on opposite sides of the same couch, as much room between themselves as humanly possible. On her entry, Bruce shifts further still from Edward. Not much. Enough that it could be incidental. She squints at them.

“Barbara! Sleep well?” Edward asks.

“How long have you two been awake?”

“A half hour.” Bruce tells her. “I wanted to let you get as much rest as possible.” 

“But he wouldn't let us go downstairs without you.” Edward huffs dramatised annoyance. His eyes on Barbara glint. 

“We should get breakfast, first.” Bruce suggests. 

Barbara bites her tongue. What she wants to do is protest, claim she's just fine without food and that the case is more important; the longer they spend without combing through the footage, the more footage will accrue. But she feels the pit in her stomach and she knows that as much as she wishes otherwise her performance will suffer if she doesn't pay attention to her body's needs.

Begrudgingly, she sits in an armchair to one side. A little voice in the back of her head asks why neither Edward nor Bruce took this spot, considering that they clearly do not feel comfortable sitting together. 

“He's unlikely to come out in the daylight.” Bruce says, once they've eaten. “We should be able to go through the rest of last night's footage without having to worry about any additional piling on.” 

It takes three hours before they finally come up with something. Barbara spots it, scouring through footage of industrial debris and discarded shopping bags fluttering in the sea breeze around the Somerset Flats along the mainland coast. It's just a rapid, jagged shape to begin with, but she's quickly able to find other angles and triangulate the beast’s movements to a dilapidated warehouse. 

“Well.” Bruce says. He's resting on her chair, leaning over her to peer at the pixels as though he'll be able to see the Man-Bat’s exact current location if he just squints hard enough. “I'll send out a drone to scout for heat signatures. If he's there…” He trails off. Barbara looks up at his chin, cutting a sharp angle of shadow above her. “We should be ready to bring him in.” 

We . She feels something swell in her chest.

Chapter Text

In theory, field work appeals to Edward. He likes getting to play cop, at the very least. This, though… isn’t quite that. It is very literally field work. He’s lying on his stomach on the grass, dew soaking through the thin material of his shirt. The air is cooling quickly with the sunset. Bruce’s armour, where it touches him, is tepid at best. He shivers.

Wordlessly, Bruce slings his cape around him. Edward searches for a snarky response and comes up short. The cape isn't much, but it blocks the breeze, which he knows will count for something as the night grows colder still.

“Thank you.” He mutters, instead. Bruce grunts acknowledgement and the quiet falls again. 

“See anything with that Bat-vision of yours?” Edward whispers. The silence is, as usual, immediately oppressive to him.

Bruce hushes him and doesn't respond. 

The drone had shown just one heat signature within the warehouse, of the approximate size and temperature expected of Langstrom. Bruce had spent the rest of the day planning, organising his equipment, ensuring everything was up to scratch. And doing the same for Barbara. 

Edward isn't annoyed that he didn't get any fun toys to play with out here. He gets it. Truly. He's still dangerous to them, hovering in the limbo of uncertainty, his words sincere but simply a lack of time preventing him from proving that. He can't be trusted. Not yet. He squirms a little.

If he's honest, he doesn't trust himself yet. 

His phone buzzes in his pocket. He shifts to reach for it, expecting Barbara. 

UN: It will hear you. Text only

From an unknown number. He tilts his head to Bruce, quizzical. He's tapping his fingers in front of himself, eyes of his cowl shining with a dull oil slick. 

He texts back. 

YOU: You DO have ny number saved! 

YOU: *My

There's a huff from Bruce, barely anything, but Edward sees his lips quirk upwards, a smile.

UN: Just try to stay quiet, please.

The message comes across strained, like he's aware he's asking for the impossible from Edward. Unfortunately for him, he's just provided the perfect outlet for Edward's discomfort with the current silence. He saves the contact as Brucie . 

YOU: ¿Can you see anything though? 

B: No, not yet. I think he's in the submerged area. 

YOU: ¿Remind me why we're not just going in and throwing a net over him while he sleeps? :?

He watches Bruce tap his fingers and then wave his hand; typing and then deleting the sentence.

B: You won't be going in anyway. You're staying out here. But the building isn't safe. The pressure of the silt on the basement levels is causing dozens of weak points in load bearing supports. If we startle him while he's below the waterline and he hits the wrong point we'll be buried in less than a second. 

YOU: ¿You don't think you could save us with those big strong arms of yours, Brucie? Or the bulletproof cape maybe. Jyst a thought

The conversation fizzles. Edward plays Tetris in its place, until a text comes through from Barbara. 

Ɛ: Movement

He holds his phone up to Bruce, who nods and waves it back. He got it too. 

B: Moving in. Nygma, keep watch

YOU: Aye aye captain

Bruce is up and off the ground almost silently, heading towards the building with his cape billowing behind him. With the air now on his skin, Edward shivers. He watches Bruce’s retreating figure and sighs. He could have at least left him the car keys. 

Chapter Text

This is it.

Barbara hops deftly over the sill of an empty window, landing with a soft thud on the silt covered ground within the building. Through her mask, the world is shades of green. Projected onto the world around her she sees the structural damage of the building highlighted in red. She carefully avoids areas of the ground that sag dangerously beneath the sediment and makes her way out of an office space into the central hub of the warehouse. The building was used to maintain ships, decades ago at this point. She sees evidence of that in the thick support jousts that still stand in the centre of the room. The floor in the centre of the building is made up of two metal sheets, chains connecting them to winches hanging from the ceiling below that would have lifted them to ninety degrees in order to allow boats entry for service during a high tide. Now, one of the two has a gaping, rusted semicircle cut from it by time and a persistent leak. Disturbed silt provides the only evidence of any entry through this point. 

Bruce is across the room. The computer in her mask places a mark on him that shifts into an arrow when she moves her head away, constantly alerting her to his position. Between them, though, she sees a huge heat signature lumber out from underneath an upended dinghy. 

She switches the augmentations to her mask off and blinks in the relative darkness. Moonlight shines dimly through Gotham's ever present cloud layer and what remains of the warehouse roof above the platforms making up the second floor. The Man-Bat snorts and presses its face to the ground. There's a wet, creaking sound. 

She shuffles closer, slowly and carefully pulling a dart gun from the holster on her waist. It's bulky; Bruce learned a lot from his grapple with the previous beast, namely that it has incredibly thick skin. The needle attached to the dart is laser cut and razor sharp, a good two inches long. The tranquilliser within could easily take down a horse, and would prove lethal to a human. The gun therefore has two safety mechanisms that must be flipped before it's even operable, and the trigger is stiff enough that an accidental knock would be no concern. 

She sees the dark shape of Bruce parallel to her, making the same motions closer to Langstrom.

The bat is eating, she realises. Tearing chunks from the carcass of some poor creature half the size of itself. A cow, maybe. Edward was certain that the thing's eyesight was too poor to be of any concern, and she imagines the sounds of flesh being torn and bones being snapped right in its ears would entirely block any noise either she or Bruce would make, but she still moves cautiously and on her toes, turning on the structural alerts within her mask and avoiding weak spots and shattered glass. 

She's close enough to smell it now; the thick, sickly stench of blood, the mange and musk of a feral animal. The air is warm with it. She doesn't gag. It's hard not to, but she doesn't.

BW: Clear shot?

The text pops up on the right hand side of her vision. She fiddles with the haptic feedback of her glove, writing and rewriting her message until it's legible. The text system takes some getting used to, and she's had all of four hours to practise.

YOU: Almost. Need to get behind. Wings in the way

BW: Same here. You aim for the back, I'll find a vantage point to the front. Stay a safe distance away, we don't know how long it will take to kick in. He's bigger than the other one. 

He's right. The creature from the lab had been maybe two thirds the size of this one. The wings cloak a large part of it, making it difficult to tell just how big it is, but the body of the animal beneath it is dwarfed by it. Barbara shifts further, moving now through an open area of the room. She treads carefully, letting the computer in her mask lead her through the safest route. It takes a minute; a minute of her heart in her throat, listening out for any change in the Man-Bat’s behaviour, before she’s at a point where she can make out its spine between the thick wings. In her vision, the computer alerts her to Bruce’s position, hanging from a rafter in front of the animal. She lines up her shot and clicks the first safety back into place. Then the second. She takes a breath, her aim is steady. 

BW: Take the shot as soon as you have it. 

That’s all she needs. She squeezes the trigger and watches the dart fly free. It hits the Man-Bat square between the shoulder blades and it wails, wings spreading in an instinctive display. The dart remains trapped there; a blinking blue light all Barbara can see of it as the beast thrashes back and forth, trampling its meal with a series of sickening cracks. It beats its wings a few times, head shaking as its mournful cries mingle with echolocative clicks. It sways dangerously in the air, the sedative clearly kicking in. Barbara holds her breath. Any second now. Any second. 

The bat shakes its head again, gives a slurring click… and launches itself out through the open roof of the building.

Fuck. 

Barbara’s legs are carrying her before she even realises it, ignoring the warnings of broken glass and barely paying attention to damaged flooring she scrambles her way back towards the mainland, leaping over holes in the ground and ducking and weaving around rusted machinery. In her periphery, she sees Bruce making the same motions. 

A phone icon pops up in her vision and she swipes up to answer, not reading the caller ID.

“Babs! Please tell me you tranquilised it! I’m watching it fly right now and it does not look good.”

“I got it, I got it. Where’s it heading? Can you follow?”

“Sure, make the disabled guy run after the giant fucking monster. Great idea.”

“Eddie.”

“It’s… not really heading anywhere, honestly. It’s kind of just flying in circles.” 

She leaps through a shattered window, barely scraping through without cutting herself on the jagged edges of the glass. Edward is right, the creature is spiralling in the air, clearly disoriented. She hears a snap up ahead and sees Edward’s silhouette against the backdrop of the coastline. The Man-Bat clicks rapidly, head twisting mechanically, pausing its spiral to sway midair. 

“Fuck. Didn’t see that fucking - that was loud, huh?”

“Get back to the car. Now.” 

“Way to tell us you’re on the call, Bats.”

“Nygma. Car. Now.”

The bat sways once more and then lunges, plummeting towards Edward’s figure like a misshapen cannonball. Barbara watches powerlessly, legs glued to the ground as, horrified, she watches the Man-Bat slam into the dirt where Edward stands, landing with a crack and a deep thud. 

The call is static in her ear. 

“ Edward! ” Bruce yells, no longer through her earpiece, snapping her out of her stupor. She lurches into a sprint, tearing up the hill to where the beast’s body has fallen, Bruce reaching it just before her; crouching next to it and shoving it with his body weight, feet slipping on the silted ground. “Edward! Fuck!” 

Barbara just watches, stomach rolling and twisting, bile rising into her throat. There’s a picture of Edward behind her eyelids when she blind. Sitting on the couch in her office. The look on his face when he’d told her I don’t want to be the Riddler any more .

Bruce has managed to hook one arm beneath the Man-Bat’s wing and has thrown it over its back, letting it fold in against itself. Barbara sees its chest rise and fall with deep, steady breath. It, at least, is alive.

There’s a cough from behind it. A groan.

“Don’t roll that thing onto me, fuck.”

The knot in her stomach flips. Bruce lets go of the bat. The wing swings back down to the ground. The two scrabble around to the other side, where Edward lies on his back, left side plastered with mud, glasses nowhere to be seen, but miraculously alive and apparently unharmed. 

Barbara falls to her knees next to him and throws her arms around him. 

“Shit, Babs. Didn’t realise you cared about me that much.” He huffs. He lifts his clean arm and squeezes her back. “I’m fine. I promise.” He says, quieter. “Nothing bruised but my pride… and my hip.” 

Barbara rises back to her feet and goes to hold a hand out to help Edward up, but Bruce beats her to it. He pulls Edward to his feet and steadies him with a hand on his shoulder that doesn’t move as he looks him over for injury. The eyes of his cowl glow blue. Barbara knows that were she closer, she’d be able to see the reflected image of his display in them. He slides his hands over Edward’s arms, ignoring the mud he smears with them, and then tilts Edward’s face up to peer into his eyes. It’s - weirdly intimate, the way he leans his head down into it, flashlight on the cheek of the cowl blinking on to shine into Edward's eyes. She looks away, diverting her attention to the Man-Bat. 

Up close, the thing is easily ten feet, with a wingspan of maybe fifteen. She circles round to its head and crouches next to it. Its breath comes in snorting puffs against the ground, eyes to the back of its head, occasionally rolling forward with an unseeing stare before returning. The crash doesn’t seem to have hurt it, but she imagines Langstrom will have a hell of a body ache when he returns to himself. Beneath it, she sees the source of the loud crack Edward had caused; a faded plastic panel that has shattered into dozens of segments. It may have once been sheeting for one of the machines within the warehouse, but time has worn it weak. A single step, the pressure from one of Edward’s boots, had been all it had needed to explode outwards. 

“My hero .” She hears Edward say, tone dripping with sex and sarcasm.

She chances a glance back at him and Bruce. Bruce has hooked an arm around Edward's waist, Edward with one arm over his shoulders, keeping the weight off his bad leg. Bruce is staring at the side of his head, eyes hidden behind the mask, expression as inscrutable as ever, but for a small quirk of his lip upwards. A smile.

Chapter Text

Edward watches Bruce and Barbara rig the Man-Bat up on a sling attached to two of Bruce's more hardy drones from the warmth of the Batmobile. He's peeled off his wet shirt and pulled on a spare jumper of Bruce's that had been stashed behind the passenger seat. The collar hangs loose around his neck but the material is soft and well worn. Bruce says nothing when the mud from his trousers smears against the hem at the waistline. 

It takes the better part of fifteen minutes for the other two to get the sling set up. Bruce redoses the creature with a sedative midway through, just in case , and it doesn't stir once, even as they both shove it into position to get it flying. Once it's in the air, the three of them watch it until it's solidly out of view, melting into the low clouds above. 

“How are you feeling?” Barbara asks, coming to rest against the car door beside him. Bruce is on the phone to Alfred, updating him on the status of their catch. 

“Fine, really.”

“You got lucky.”

“I'm a lucky guy.” Edward shrugs. “Draw me or push me, you'll ever be testing me.”

“Sure. So.” She crosses her arms. The gloves of her suit are black, lined with purple stitching to match the body. They creak against her biceps. “What was that earlier? With Bruce?” 

“ Which earlier?”

“When he was looking you over.” 

“He does that a lot. You haven't noticed?”

“Eddie.”

“He's a hypochondriac! Or - no. He has, ah, health anxiety by proxy.”

“He really doesn't. The two of you have been acting strange around each other. Stranger than usual, I mean.”

Edward feels his hackles raise. “We've gone from enemies to coworkers . Isn't that strange in itself?”

Barbara squints at him. “Hm.”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing.” She says, with a tone that suggests something . 

Bruce rejoins them before Edward can get more defensive. 

“The drones will reach the cave before we do. I've asked Alfred to put the creature in containment for us.” 

They bundle into the car, Edward relinquishing the passenger seat to Barbara for no reason other than to spread out over the entire length of the back seat. Not at all to avoid the look she's giving him and Bruce. Not at all.

The drive back is quick and uneventful. In the back seat, Edward can feel the growl of the engines beneath him as Bruce ignores every traffic law imaginable and tears through the city. They enter the Batcave through a sewer grate that opens up into a well worn tunnel and further into the main chamber of the cave. Bruce parks them up and comes around to help Edward out of the car, steadying him with an arm once again around his waist. 

Barbara looks at them but says nothing. Edward allows Bruce to lead him towards the cage where the Man-Bat lies prone. Were it anyone but Bruce, he thinks he would feel embarrassed by needing the help. But Bruce is. Different. He refuses to think about that. About the worry lining his mouth as he'd assessed Edward for injuries. About the devastating way he'd muttered I thought we’d lost you.

He accepts Bruce's help and leans into the heat of his suit. He's deposited carefully into a chair and Bruce moves over to the console before them. He tugs the cowl off his head and Edward stares at the curls plastered to his scalp. 

“It’s going to take a few minutes to calibrate; it needs to adjust to his mass.” Bruce presses a series of buttons and the machine begins to hum, running a grid of lights up and down the Man-Bat’s form.

“How long until the sedative wears off?”

“I had Alfred run an IV, it should be out until the transformation is complete.” Bruce turns to Edward and Barbara. “I need to assess Edward’s injuries in full. Barbara, can you stay here and keep an eye on this?”

“Gladly.”

Edward rolls his eyes. “I’m fine! I just hit my hip! It's just bruised. I think.”

“I just need to make sure of that.”

“God, okay Doctor Wayne.” He pulls himself up from the chair and takes Bruce's offered arm with a melodramatic sigh. 

The medical bay is a platform over. Bruce sets Edward down on a cold metal bed and pulls over a monitor system, keying in a code of and pulling one of the smaller screens down to Edward's hip. He's still wearing the suit, kevlar and leather creaking with every movement. He's taken the gloves off, though. Edward watches his hands as he taps on the screen. There's a faint scar across two of his knuckles, just visible when the light hits them. The low pulse and whir of the machine scanning the Man-Bat echoes through the cave.

“I'll have Alfred find you some pants.” He says, distractedly. “Can you take those off for me?”

“Always trying to get my clothes off.” 

“I can see through them, it'll just be -”

“It's fine, Bats.” Edward huffs. He hops up onto his good leg and shimmies the trousers down. The wetness from the silt has soaked through to his underwear, and the bench is colder still when he sits back down. 

“It'll be quick.” Bruce crouches in front of him and presses the backside of the monitor to his hip, cold metal digging into his skin. Edward shudders. 

There's quiet as Bruce runs the machine along his leg from hip to knee. He pauses at the juncture below the jut of hipbone, where the fabric of his shorts covers the skin. 

“Looks normal.” He says. “Inflamed, but normal.”

“Gee, thanks Doc.” 

“Alfred will be down soon with a change of clothes.” Bruce pulls away the monitor and swings the rig away from them. He doesn't get up from his position on the ground, just shifts his focus from Edward's leg to his face. Dark eyes bore into him, searching. 

Edward stares right back. Bruce's pupils under the fluorescence have contracted. There’s no change to the colour of them; smooth, even rings all the way around. 

“Searching for signs of brain damage?” Edward says, when the eye contact lasts just too long.”

“No.”

“What, then? Something on my face?”

“The last time we worked together, you said you weren’t interested in being good .”

Edward rolls his eyes. “Can you imagine what it would have done to your ego if I even hinted at considering a change of heart? Your head’s big enough as is.”

A crooked smile. “You were considering it, though.”

“Is this your way of telling me you believe it?”

The smile softens. “Don’t make me regret it.”

Edward’s stomach does something funny.

Snappy, even footsteps echo from across the cave and Bruce blinks and stands up, clicking his knuckles as he does. Alfred arrives shortly, hands Bruce a neatly folded set of clothes and Edward’s cane, and turns on his heel without acknowledging Edward at all. Bruce laughs, shakes his head, and sets the clothes next to Edward. 

He pulls the pants on, steadying himself on the bench to do so, and replaces the jumper from the car with a slightly despicable red-blue cable knit that he’s sure Bruce thinks makes him appear refined. 

“Shall we?” Edward gestures to where the hum of machinery has died down. Bruce is still looking at him with that lopsided smile. 

“This… detective thing looks good on you.” He says. 

“Are you - are you flirting with me?” Edward splutters.

Bruce turns with a shrug, taking broad steps back towards Barbara. “The machine has finished calibrating. 

“ Bruce. ” Edward snatches his cane from the bench and follows as quickly as he can. “You can’t just - that’s my bit!”

Bruce is a good few feet ahead. He doesn’t reply.

Chapter Text

They’re back where they started. Edward on the chair this time with Bruce bent over the control panel to his side, Barbara watching from behind the two of them. Bruce once again inputs a code, presses enter, and the machine springs to life. 

The transformation is even more violent this time. Barbara holds her breath as the giant form spasms and rolls, shrinking in sickening instruments. The fur over its body fizzles and curls, falling off in clumps onto the floor of the cage. The skin greys, pinkens, goes from taught to too-loose to taught again. Until before them is a naked, bruised middle aged man. He’s breathing heavily, eyes rolled back in his head like the Man-Bat before. The machine zaps him once more, jolting a gasp from him before powering down. Nobody moves. Langstrom is limp but for his breathing. 

He groans.

“Second time’s the charm, apparently.” Edward says. Barbara releases her breath.

They load Langstrom onto a gurney and wheel him over to the med-bay, Bruce donning his cowl as they do so. His vitals are mostly steady, heart rate fast but steadily decreasing. There are hairline fractures throughout the bones of his forearms, likely - Bruce posits - due to the dramatic shift in length during his transformation. 

“There are older ones here, too. Difficult to say how old, but probably from his first transformation. They’ve healed… remarkably well, considering how recent the transformation was.” He splints and wraps both arms tightly.

“Unless they’re from him changing back once before. We don’t know that our buddy here hasn’t done this before .” Edward hums. He’s leaning heavier than usual on his cane, but Barbara is relieved to see he seems otherwise entirely unaffected by the earlier attack. …Other than the odd looks she keeps catching him directing at Bruce when his back is turned.

“We’ll be able to ask him about that soon enough.” Bruce sighs. “I’m going to stay down here until he wakes up, you’re both free to leave.”

“And let you have all the fun?” 

“Eddie’s right. We’re staying here.”

“You got three hours of sleep.”

“I’ve done more on less.”

Bruce looks less than pleased, but relents. He pulls over three chairs and they settle back to wait. Barbara scratches at the wrist of her suit. It fits almost too well, a far shout from her own creation, still sitting in her office, stowed away. The purple of the main body is deep, catching the light just a little with a criss-cross pattern of aramid fibre. It’s almost exactly like the one she’d designed herself, just… a little more refined. Less like a Halloween costume. The dull yellow emblem over the chest conceals one of Bruce’s batarangs; all blunt edges but equipped with a tracker and short-range EMP were she to need it. 

At first, she’d felt like she was being placated. Like a child in the backseat of the car, equipped with a wheel to copy their parents motions. To feel more in control. But she’s becoming more and more certain that he has accepted her alongside him. That he does see this as a viable option for her. She’s no damsel in distress, she’s not the woman to be protected while he does all the work. 

She glances over at him. He’s on his phone, lenses of his mask reflecting a wall of text, eyes scanning rapidly. He looks like an actor during a break in filming; the phone completely out of place, the swivel chair under him comically low-tech compared to the suit. This is more Bruce Wayne than it is Batman. 

He glances up for a moment. Past the glare on the lenses, she sees his eyes find Edward before flicking to her. She thinks about the way Edward focuses his attention on Bruce. Keeping an eye on the most dangerous person in the room . 

Or, probably, something entirely different. 

Langstrom stirs with another groan. “Franc…ine.” 

Bruce bolts to his feet and to the bedside, immediately pulling up a panel on the monitor system. Barbara and Edward follow.

“Kirk. Don’t panic, you're safe.”

The man’s eyes flutter, opening wide and sudden. “Francine! You need to get away from here, I’m sick, any moment I could - I’m dangerous!” He moves to try and rise from the bed but winces and falls back as soon as he pushes down on his arms. His eyes are unsteady, unable to focus on the world around him. “Fuck!” 

“Kirk, please. You’re in no danger any more.”

“I am the danger! I was trying to fix - the isotope, it was unstable, and -” He’s struck by a sudden spasm, muscles tightening, neck craning backwards suddenly, eyes rolling back. 

“He’s seizing! Move back.” Bruce’s voice booms through the cave. Barbara and Edward shift as a unit, freeing space for Bruce to round the bed, tapping panels and screens as he goes. Langstrom continues to convulse, thrashing on the bed, splinted arms slamming into the thin mattress Bruce had put down for him, head cushioned by a pillow. Bruce’s cape swishes behind him as he moves, his motions sure and precise. 

The seizure stops after a minute or so, leaving Langstrom twitching and panting, eyelids closed but fluttering. A weak moan slips from his lips.

“Is he going to be alright?” Barbara asks.

“Not sure. I need to do some scans, the time he spent as that creature… it may have damaged his brain.”

“How long will that take?”

“I’ll run them now, shouldn’t be longer than an hour.”

“Sure. Sure.” Barbara leans against the wall. 

“Barbara, when he wakes… you ask the questions.”

“What?”

“It’s your case. You talked to his family, you know what they want to know. You sure as hell know what we want to know.”

“...Thank you, Bruce.”

The scans aren’t fully conclusive, but they’re enough for Bruce to adjust the dose and exact medication in Langstrom’s system, and within two hours they have him awake and mostly lucid,

Bruce tilts the head of the bed up further. Langstrom’s eyes are clear now, none of the mania present from when he’d come to previously. 

“Let’s start from the beginning. You said you were researching?” Barbara says, pulling up a seat beside him.

Langstrom takes one deep breath and sighs. “I was diagnosed with a form of Ménière's disease two years ago. They were able to medicate me to control most of the symptoms; the vertigo, balance issues. But the hearing… it’s progressive. They gave me three years before all I would have is the tinnitus.” He smiles sadly. “My Francine plays piano, I almost couldn’t bear the idea of never hearing it again. But the - it wasn’t the loss that drove me to this. It was the ringing .” He gestures to his ears and winces at the use of his forearms. “Having to hear that for the rest of my life with no respite? No other sound?

I began researching six months after my diagnosis. I only wanted to fix the tinnitus, but when I had my breakthrough - the use of bat DNA to break down and reestablish the nerve system of the inner ear - I realised I could cure it all! For everyone, not only myself! I tried to get funding, but the idea was shunned. There was no way to test it, of course. So I had to work by myself. The university has a number of buildings they’ve closed due to budget cuts, and I knew they wouldn’t have the money for demolition for a number of years, so I established myself in the basement.”

“And started by transferring DNA between bats.” Barbara 

Langstrom nods. “It was slow work. It took me over a year before I had anything even resembling progress. But over the last month I - or, I don't even know if it was last month, it's all… muddled, at this point. I did it, I isolated the exact proteins required for the transformation, tested it on a species of bat without the echolocative traits; a fruit bat. Pteropus personatus. And it worked! I saw it in real time, the physical change to the inner ear. There was a thickening and change to the shape of the stylohylal bone that brought it into ideal contact with the tympanic. Everything was going perfectly.” He looks down, his face a mask of mourning. “But my condition deteriorated quicker. They gave me three months. The ringing was maddening . I couldn't take it. The subject had been stable for two weeks, so I…” He trails off, looking down at his arms. His eyes are distant. “The ringing went.” He says. “For the first time in - in years I could hear clearly. And slowly my hearing came back too. 

But the subject… I came down to the lab to find it ransacked, cages shattered, so much destruction.” He pales. “So much blood. The cameras I'd set up to monitor while I was away were shattered, but the footage was intact. By the time I'd watched it through I could already feel myself changing. I think because I was larger, the isotope destabilised quicker within my system. I - I closed down the lab with the time I had left. I couldn't get the animals out, but I could trap myself. I didn't know what I would be capable of. How many people I could -” A cough interrupts his speech. 

“You didn't kill anyone.” Barbara assures him.

“Nearly did.” She hears Edward mutter behind her, and then a hiss. “Ow! Did you just elbow me?” 

Bruce shushes him. 

Langstrom continues. “I don't remember anything much past that point. Primal instinct, perhaps. The driving desire to hunt. To eat. To live.” He makes weak gestures with both arms. “And now. This.”

“You told your wife you were on a two month research trip. Why?”

“I didn’t want her to worry. I knew that something could go wrong, I just wanted to give myself time to figure it out if it did. I told her it was an expedition into an isolated location, so she wouldn’t worry if I suddenly cut contact.”

“It’s been a month and a half, Kirk. Her mother hired m- a private investigator to look into the possibility of you cheating on her.”

Kirk looks up at her with wide eyes. “I would never! Francine knows that.”

“Your mother in law doesn’t. I think you need to go home and tell Francine. Tell her everything, I’m sure she’ll understand.”

Kirk looks back down, contemplative.”

“Did it work?” Edward pipes up. “The experiment? Did it cure you?”

A sad smile. “Only time will tell.”

Chapter Text

Edward watches Bruce load Langstrom into the Batmobile. He’s run every test possible on him and deemed him able to continue treatment in a hospital setting. Langstrom had experienced two more fits, with the probable cause being frontal lobe damage from oxygen deprivation due to the Man-Bat’s respiratory system being underdeveloped. Bruce had pulled out an anti-seizure medication from somewhere , and so far it appears to have halted them. 

Francine will meet them at the hospital. She’d had no idea about the private investigation. Kirk had cried when she’d told him that her trust in him had never wavered. 

Barbara leans against a sleek black submarine to Edward’s left. She’s wearing her suit, as she has every time she’s interacted with Langstrom. She doesn’t have a voice to go along with it like Bruce, but she holds herself differently; back straight, chin up. Heroic. 

“Are we calling this case closed?” Edward wonders out loud. 

Barbara shoots him a pained smile. “I don’t think we’re getting paid for this one, Eddie.”

Edward scoffs and waves his hand in the air. “Come on , it’s not about the money. It’s about solving the riddle.”

Barbara laughs. The Batmobile roars out of the cave, engines echoing as it swerves up and up a winding path around a grand stalagmite and up into the city above. 

Once the echoes have cleared, Barbara speaks again. “Thank you, by the way. For your help. If you hadn’t been here I would have died at the university.”

Edward shrugs. “You would have done the same.”

“I know. But you… wouldn't always have.” 

There's an odd feeling in his chest at that. An acknowledgement that he's changed. He has the impulse to argue, to explain why that's not true. She's important, she means something. To the city.

To him.

He bites it back. They stand quietly for a moment. 

“I'm hungry.” She says. “Do you want to get lunch? We can discuss our next case.”

“Next case?”

“...Cheating husband.”

Edward follows her towards the stairs. “This one better not be a fucking monster .”

“No promises.”