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The city is shredding herself apart. It’s all Bruce can do to hold the line until a cure is fabricated, but hope is in short supply in the midst of all the madness. All the best scientists they know are working tirelessly with Pamela Isley for a solution. All Batman needs to do is push on until then.
It’s not even just the seasoned criminals wreaking havoc this time—it’s everyone. Friends and neighbors jump at each other’s throats. Children turn on their parents. Fistfights rage throughout the streets. Shootouts. Rapes. Murders in broad daylight. It’s utter mayhem out there, and Batman can’t stop it all himself. It’s too much.
The outbreak was Poison Ivy’s doing, but not her intent. A new villain, a mad scientist, he was the one who got his hands on her virus and unleashed it across the city. It’s in the water, in the air. It’s everything anyone can do to avoid being infected, and once it’s sunk its teeth in, there’s no shaking the effects. Even the strongest fall in seconds.
The only word Bruce can come up with to describe the infected is feral. Human beings are driven by their innermost desires and fears, reduced to nothing but animal instinct. The infection robs one of their inhibitions. They revert to their core traits: greed, need, hate, fear, desire. The crazy become crazier; the self-haters kill themselves. Resentful parents throw their children off bridges or drown them in the bathtub. Enemies rush at each other’s throats with whatever weapons they can get their hands on.
No one can lie, no one can hide. No masks. No pretenses. It’s utter chaos.
The only people with immunity to the horrors are those with hearts pure enough that they end up virtually unaffected by the infection. Most children cannot be infected. They’re too young to carry the hate in their hearts that the adults around them can’t tamp down once the infection has taken hold. In a city like this one, the immune are in short supply.
Gotham City is ripping itself to shreds. It’s impossible to keep the slaughter contained when even the city’s heroes are rendered helpless.
Jason made them lock him up in one of the Batcave’s holding cells as soon as it became clear just how widespread the virus had become.
“Please, Bruce, you have to promise. If I end up infected, you can’t risk me getting out of here. I don’t know what I’ll do. I can’t—I can’t kill you. Please, don’t let me kill anyone.”
So, Jason stays contained. Alfred brings him meals and books to read while the rest of the family scrambles to manage the madness outside the manor’s walls. The virus won’t reach him. Bruce won’t let it.
Dick is safe. No one knows if he’s infected or not. There have been slip-ups, moments where he got exposed and fought on like nothing happened. He wears his rebreather anyway, and no one asks. It doesn’t matter. Bruce was never worried.
Cass is the first of them to be infected. It isn’t her fault; the mob of vengeful civilians is too strong, too chaotic for one person to handle. Backup arrives several minutes too late. Her mask has already broken.
By the time Bruce reaches her, Cass has collapsed in a ball on the ground, unspeaking, motionless under the fists that rain down on her until Bruce and Duke manage to pull them off. She won’t even open her eyes.
Bruce has to carry her home. She broke one of his ribs fighting him off at first, and then, after realizing what she did, she shattered. She made her sign for sorry the whole way home, crying silently. She’s never been so quiet before.
No one has the heart to lock Cass in a cell, and after it becomes clear that she won’t lash out against anyone again, she is brought upstairs to her room in the manor. Barbara and Alfred check in on her regularly, staying with her and making sure she eats and drinks.
Tim hasn’t slept in days. Bruce can’t recall the last time he saw the boy without circles under his eyes or a coffee mug in his hand. He hasn’t left the cave since this whole mess began, insisting that it’s better for him to help out and run interference behind the scenes with Oracle. Bruce doesn’t question it. He won’t force anyone into the fray who doesn’t want to go.
Tim doesn’t have to explain himself, but he keeps trying. “Sorry, I just…with all the…and I’m…I can’t risk…” Bruce doesn’t push him to say it. Bruce would be frightened too if he were in Tim’s shoes, knowing what crimes his future self has committed in other timelines, seeing the monster he becomes under the wrong circumstances. He doesn’t know what the virus will do to him. He’s scared. No one blames him. They’re all scared.
“Bruce, you need to sit down. Please,” Barbara urges him, not for the first time today. Yesterday, too. How long has it been since the outbreak? Bruce can’t remember, but it doesn’t matter either way. Until a cure is fabricated, he has a job to do. He can’t let himself stop until it’s done. He can’t sit down for five minutes. He can’t eat unless it’s a quick bite taken while multitasking. There’s no time.
Bruce isn’t an idiot. It’s obvious that he’s been infected. Probably on the first day when the madness was just starting, when no one had any idea how bad this would become. It doesn’t matter. He has more important things to worry about than his own health.
Sleeping would be taking away time that could be better spent helping Gotham, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t rest, doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink water. Bruce doesn’t know when he last took off the cowl. He knows he must reek. He hasn’t showered in almost a week, but he can’t allow himself even a minute.
His feet bleed into his boots, blistered and raw from ceaseless nights. His knuckles are nothing more than bruised, swollen slabs of tissue at this point. There’s a stab wound in his side that he doesn’t remember receiving, but he’s changed the bandage twelve times in the past two days. What’s one more infection?
Duke gets infected one week into the outbreak. It makes him angry—angrier than Bruce has ever seen him. He’s aggressive, but he’s also desperate in a way no one expected. He pleads with the people who are locked in at their worst: men who hold innocents at gunpoint for a few dollars, friends killing friends over petty disputes from years ago, gang-rapes in the middle of the street simply because they can. Duke is always looking for the third way out, some way to quell the unquellable chaos.
He begs them to rethink, to find themselves, to not make him do this. And when they inevitably ignore him, Duke loses it. Bruce has witnessed Duke in action endless times before. He trained him. He knows what the kid is capable of. He’s just never seen it used to this degree.
Shadows swallow people whole. Light blinds them until their corneas bleed. The virus renders Duke an unstable, unstoppable force of nature. It’s agonizing to watch him so unmoored.
Five hours later, Duke is sheltered away in the holding cell beside Jason’s where he can’t hurt anyone and no one can hurt him. He leans into the darkest corner he can find in the small space and stays there, cloaked from view with a haze of shadow he’s manipulated around himself. He doesn’t talk to anyone.
Damian is the last of them to be infected. It takes Bruce eleven brutal hours to find him.
In that time, nineteen people have been killed by Damian’s hands. The only reason it isn’t more is because, while Damian takes criminals down ruthlessly the way he was trained, he also guards the innocent like his life depends on it. His uniform is tattered and bloodstained from fights he won by the skin of his teeth and times he threw himself into the line of fire to protect civilians. His left arm was snapped at the wrist at some point. He fights with it anyway.
In the eleventh hour, Bruce finally finds Damian in the deepest basement of a foreclosed building, empty of life but for the boy and for the bundle he’s got cradled in his lap. He’s drenched in blood. Bodies are strewn across the floor surrounding him—men with their limbs broken, their throats severed, their mouths dropped open in endless silent screams.
Damian curls around the threadbare blanket in his arms, sobbing at Bruce’s approach. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he whimpers, his eyes shut tight like he’s expecting a backhand.
“It’s okay, baby,” Bruce murmurs. He doesn’t care what Damian has to say. There’s nothing he could do that Bruce wouldn’t forgive him for. “You didn’t mean it. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
“They were hurting them,” Damian whispers. At the shift of his broken hand away from the bundle, Bruce finally gets a glimpse at the family of baby raccoons he’s got wrapped up in the blanket. Most of them have singed fur and burn marks from what looks like a blowtorch.
Bruce has to sedate Damian in order to get him to move from his hiding place. He carries his son and the rescued babies to the car and brings them all home, whispering soothing things to Damian the whole ride. Damian hasn’t stopped crying since Bruce found him.
He joins Duke and Jason in the holding cells when it’s made clear that he can’t be left alone. They have to confiscate his gear and any sharp objects from him because, once there are no criminals left to hurt, he turns his violence on himself. Alfred resorts to strapping soft mitts to Damian’s hands after he tries taking his own skin off with his fingernails. His arm, broken in three places, is placed in a sling until Dr. Thompson can take a look at it.
After hours of wailing alone in his cell, Damian finally settles after Bruce lets the raccoons in with him.
Dick stops Bruce at the garage when he’s about to leave again for the city. “Don’t go, Bruce.” There’s blood leaking from somewhere under Bruce’s chest armor. He discovered a blade stuck in his shoulder this morning that he figured would be easier to leave in than try prying it out of the stubborn muscle. “You’ve done enough. Let someone else take a shift.”
“I have to go. They need me.”
“They need you.” Dick gestures widely at the house behind them, at the cells where three of his sons now reside, isolated and afraid. “You’re in no condition to be out there. Let Alfred check you out. Eat some food. Sleep for a few hours.”
“I—” Bruce is so tired. He’s exhausted physically and mentally, but he can’t just stop. If he stops, he’ll die. They’ll all die. Gotham is dying. “I can’t. They need me. They need Batman.”
“So, let someone else do the job. Just for tonight.” Dick lowers Bruce’s cowl to reveal sweat-drenched hair and inches-long stubble. “Please. Don’t make me knock you out.”
Bruce’s bloodshot eyes close in defeat. He sighs, raising a tired hand to cup Dick’s cheek. “I love you so, so much.” Because he has to say it. They have to know. A city he’d die for and children he’d kill for.
Dick smiles softly. “I know. Go get cleaned up. You smell like a sewer.”
Bruce gives in after some additional prodding, but he doesn’t go upstairs to bed like everyone wants. He takes the fastest decontamination shower in the history of the world. He scarfs down four sandwiches and two cups of tea at Alfred’s insistence.
He doesn’t fight it when Dick locks him away in Jason’s holding cell, wisely guessing that this is the only thing that could keep Bruce from sneaking out again on his own. He’s situated exactly where he wants to be between Duke and Damian’s cells, pressing his palm to the wall keeping him from Duke’s shroud of shadows. Cass has built herself a blanket nest outside of Duke’s cell, sitting back-to-back with him through the glass. Damian is right in Bruce’s eyeline in the other cell where he’s feeding one of the baby raccoons from a bottle.
Dick has taken on the cowl and the burden that comes with it, just for tonight. Bruce isn’t worried about it. He knows Dick will be okay. He’s perfect. Distantly, Bruce can hear the sound of Barbara’s fingers tapping away at her computer. Tim’s tired voice directs all of Gotham’s vigilantes who are on the Bats’ frequency, coordinating them from one crisis to the next.
Gotham is breaking apart. People are dropping like flies. But tonight at least, Bruce’s family is okay. And, selfishly, he’s okay with that. Let Gotham burn if it means he gets to keep this. Let them all burn.
Bruce holds Jason in his arms, feeling like if he lets go for even a moment, everything will crumble apart. He’ll shatter into a thousand pieces. Either Jason knows that, or he doesn’t have it in himself to shove Bruce off of him. Bruce doesn’t care.
One week and two days after the outbreak, Bruce sleeps.