Chapter Text
Batman was exhausted.
Not the shallow exhaustion of missed sleep or aching muscles, but the kind that settled somewhere deeper. The kind that hollowed a man out slowly, methodically, until even his thoughts felt heavy. Gotham had a way of doing that. It peeled at people layer by layer until there was nothing left but instinct and obsession.
Sixteen women were dead.
Not missing. Not injured. Not recoverable.
Dead.
Their photographs had been scattered across the Batcomputer for weeks now, burned into the back of Bruce’s mind with grotesque clarity. Different races. Different professions. Different neighborhoods. Different lives. One had been a nurse. Another a graduate student. One worked nights at a casino lounge downtown. Another had vanished three blocks from her apartment after buying groceries.
No consistent victimology. No clean pattern. Nothing except the markings.
Symbols carved carefully into skin and bone with surgical precision. Not random mutilation. Not the work of a sadist spiraling out of control. Ritualistic. Intentional. Ancient.
Occult.
Even saying the word irritated him.
Batman believed in evidence. Blood spatter. fibers. digital trails. Human behavior. Gotham was insane enough without entertaining supernatural nonsense, and yet every lead in this case dragged him further into something old and rotten that refused to fit neatly inside logic.
Victim number seventeen lay motionless beneath the fluorescent lights of Gotham General’s morgue.
Jane Doe. No identification. No fingerprints in any database. No dental records. Nothing.
The coroner had gone home an hour ago after mumbling something about needing sleep and stronger whiskey. Batman had barely acknowledged him. He remained where he stood at the edge of the autopsy table, cape hanging heavy behind him, gloved hands stained faintly with dried rainwater.
Outside, the storm battered Gotham relentlessly. Rain hammered against the high morgue windows in violent bursts, accompanied by distant thunder that rolled through the city like something alive.
The room smelled sterile. Bleach. Formaldehyde. Cold metal. Machines hummed softly in the background.
The girl looked young.
Too young.
Long dark hair nearly black beneath the fluorescent lighting spilled around her shoulders in damp waves. Her skin had that unmistakable stillness death created, pale in a way makeup could never imitate. Her lashes rested against hollow cheeks, and despite the brutal Y-incision carved into her chest, there was something strangely peaceful about her expression.
Twenty-three, maybe twenty-four.
Bruce had seen thousands of bodies.
Children pulled from alleyways.
Gang members torn apart by turf wars.
Victims of Joker toxin with frozen smiles burned onto their faces.
But this one unsettled him. Not because she was dead.
Because she looked like she shouldn’t be.
He turned away from the table, already running through next steps in his mind. Return to the cave. Re-examine the crime scene photos. Cross-reference the symbols again. There would be no sleep tonight. There hadn’t been real sleep in days.
Then he heard it.
A soft rustle. Plastic shifting somewhere behind him.
Batman stopped instantly.
Silence swallowed the room again.
Slowly, he turned his head toward the autopsy table.
The girl remained exactly where she had been. Motionless. Dead.
His jaw tightened beneath the cowl.
Fatigue. That was all. Even he had limits, and this case had been grinding against them for weeks.
The air conditioning kicked on overhead with a low mechanical hum.
He exhaled slowly and turned back toward the exit.
Then came the sound.
An inhale. Sharp. Wet.
Wrong.
Batman froze. Every instinct inside him sharpened violently at once.
He turned.
The body on the table convulsed as air flooded suddenly into dead lungs. Not theatrically. Not like some horror film resurrection. It was uglier than that. More human. A body forcing itself to function after it shouldn’t have been capable anymore.
Bruce crossed the room in two strides.
Impossible. He had checked for a pulse himself. The coroner had confirmed time of death. She had been cold.
But now her chest rose unevenly beneath the open incision, trembling as breath returned piece by piece.
Then her eyes opened. Green.
Not glazed over with confusion or terror. Annoyed.
That was the part that stunned him most.
She blinked slowly against the fluorescent lights like someone waking after an inconvenient nap rather than a confirmed death. Her gaze drifted upward toward the ceiling before lowering lazily to her chest.
There was a long moment where she simply stared at the autopsy incision.
Then, with genuine displeasure, she muttered, “Oh. That’s not cute.”
Batman said nothing. For the first time in a very long time, he found himself completely, utterly unprepared.
Her eyes finally shifted toward him. She took in the cape. The armor. The towering silhouette standing over her in silence. Most people reacted to Batman with fear before anything else. Fear was immediate. Instinctive.
This woman looked at him the way someone might look at an exhausted paramedic at the end of a very long night.
She frowned slightly.
“You look worse than I do,” she said hoarsely.
And Batman stood there, motionless beneath the sterile morgue lighting, staring at a dead woman who was no longer dead at all.