I am Invincible Chapter 2 — I hate that name (Patreon)

The first thing that came back was the pain.

It rolled over him in a single suffocating wave the moment consciousness returned, a deep, layered agony that started in his ribs and radiated outward through every nerve in his body until even his teeth ached. His thigh throbbed in time with his heartbeat, his shoulder felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through the joint, and the inside of his skull pulsed with a sickening pressure that made the darkness behind his eyelids swim.

For a long moment he just lay there and breathed through his nose, the way Ted had taught him years ago when he'd first learned what it felt like to take a real beating. In through the nose, out through the mouth. 

Push the pain down. 

Lock it. 

Move on.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling above him stone. 

Stone. Not plaster. Not drywall. Stone. 

That woke him up faster than any of the pain had.

The last thing he remembered was being on the rooftop, now he was in some damn cave. 

Mark sat up.

The motion sent a fresh wave of agony lancing through his ribs and he hissed through his teeth, but he didn't stop moving. He couldn't afford to, he had no idea where the hell he was. He needed to get out of here. He looked down and found IV lines taped to the back of his left hand, electrode pads stuck across his chest and a pulse oximeter clipped to his right index finger. 

He tore them off quickly and swung his legs off the side of the table and stood up. The floor was cold under his bare feet. Someone had stripped him out of his tactical gear and put him in a hospital gown and nothing else. His chest and ribs and thigh were wrapped in clean white bandages, which were expertly done in his opinion. But it begged the question, who did it?

He scanned the room.

It wasn't a room. Not really. It was a chamber, carved out of natural stone and outfitted with medical equipment that wouldn't have looked out of place in a hospital trauma bay. Cabinets of supplies along one wall. A sink. A surgical light folded up against the ceiling. Beyond the edge of the lit area the cave opened out into something much larger.

It actually was a cave...

He was in a cave.

Mark's pulse climbed and he felt the edge of his rage start to push up through the pain like a second heartbeat. He moved quickly, ignoring the protests from his ribs and thigh, scanning every corner of the chamber for threats and exits. There was a metal tray on a rolling stand beside the table. Forceps. Gauze. A small kidney dish with bloody cotton in it... and a scalpel.

He took the scalpel.

The handle was almost comically in his fingers, the blade no longer than his thumbnail, but he flipped it over once in his palm and adjusted his grip until it sat the way a throwing knife sat. 

It would do.

"You won't be needing that, sir."

Mark spun. The voice had come from behind him, from the direction of the cave's deeper darkness, he turned with the scalpel already cocked back at his ear, his weight shifting onto his back foot for the throw.

Though when he saw the source of the voice he stopped.

The man standing ten feet away was thin, perhaps in his late sixties, with neatly combed silver hair and a thinly trimmed moustache. He wore a black three-piece suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. He did not look armed. He did not look frightened. He looked, in fact, mildly inconvenienced, the way a man might look if a houseguest had tracked mud into the foyer.

"Who the hell are you," Mark said in a threatening voice, keeping the scalpel cocked back. "Where am I."

"My name is Alfred Pennyworth," the man said. He took a step forward, and then another, as though the weapon in Mark's hand were a piece of cutlery. "And you are presently in a secure medical facility belonging to the Batman. You suffered a rather considerable amount of damage last night, young man, and I would very much appreciate it if you would sit back down on the table so that I might check your dressings before you tear them open by waving surgical implements around."

"Where's Batman."

"Engaged at the moment. He'll be along shortly." Alfred had stopped a polite distance away. "The table, please. I shan't ask a third time."

Mark stared at him for a long moment.

The old man stared back, completely unbothered.

Eventually Mark set the scalpel down on the tray and sat back on the edge of the table.

"Thank you," Alfred said politely before he moved in quickly and started checking the bandages at Mark's ribs, peeling back a corner to look at the bruising underneath, then doing the same at the thigh and the shoulder. He clicked his tongue once at something he saw under the thigh dressing and made a small adjustment with fresh gauze from the cabinet.

"Two cracked ribs," he said as he worked. "One hairline, one rather more serious. The laceration on the thigh required eleven stitches. The bullet that struck your upper arm passed cleanly through the muscle and missed the bone, which I consider a small mercy on your behalf. The two rounds in the thigh were considerably less polite. I extracted both. You have a great many contusions, a mild concussion, and a respectable list of soft tissue injuries that I shan't bore you with. You are, by any reasonable measure, extremely fortunate to be drawing breath at the moment."

He produced a small paper cup of pills from somewhere in the medical cabinet and handed it over with a glass of water. "Painkillers. Take them. They will not impair you. They will simply make the next several hours considerably more bearable than they otherwise would be."

Mark nodded and took them. He was past the point of suspicion on this front. If Alfred had wanted him dead, the IV in his hand a few minutes ago would have done the job quietly while he slept.

"Where's my gear."

"Being washed and repaired. I have laid out a replacement set in the corner there." Alfred gestured with his hand to a folded stack on a chair against the far wall. "Get dressed please, and follow me. Your body has a great deal of mending to do, and the next stage of that involves a substantial amount of food."

Mark stood, slower this time, and moved to the chair. The clothes fit perfectly, though he wasn't going to ask how Alfred had done that. When he was dressed Alfred turned without a word and walked into the cave proper and Mark followed.

They moved through a passage that opened into something he could not properly see the edges of, only the impression of vast space and darkness above and the sound of water somewhere very far below. The only way he could see way due to the path being lit by lights set into the stone at various intervals. After perhaps two minutes the passage opened into a different kind of space entirely.

It was a lounge.

Mark almost stopped walking when he saw it. 

A lounge, in a cave. 

There were bunch of couches arranged in front of a wall-mounted television the size of a small car, an arcade cabinet against one wall, a console hooked up under the screen with a few controllers piled neatly on a side table. A long wooden dining table with eight chairs. A small kitchenette along one wall. And beyond all of it, set into the stone at the far end, the polished steel doors of an elevator.

"Sit please sir," Alfred said. "I shall return with your meal momentarily." He crossed to the elevator, pressed the call button, and stepped inside when the doors slid open. 

Mark sat down at the dining table, slowly, and put his elbows on it and dragged both hands down his face.

Fat Tony.

Fat Tony had been right there. Right there, on his knees, the muzzle of his own revolver pressed to the ridge of bone between his eyes. Two more minutes and Mark would have had whatever scraps of information that fat parasite had been carrying around in his skull. Maybe enough to find Luca. Maybe a name, a place, a thread to pull on. Maybe nothing. But maybe something, and something was more than he had now, and Batman had taken it from him.

Tony would go to ground after last night. He'd vanish into one of a dozen Falcone safe houses spread across the city, and he'd stay there with armed men around him until the heat died down or until Mark died. Tony would not be at the Estoria next Thursday. Tony would not be at any of his usual haunts. The window had been open for one night and Mark had fallen through it onto the damn pavement.

He could try to track him through the lower-level guys. Lean on Rocco's network, or what was left of it, and see if any of them had cousins or friends in Tony's crew. It would take weeks. Maybe months. And every one of those weeks was a week that Luca Falcone got to keep breathing... that was the part Mark couldn't stand, the part that lived under his ribs like a hot coal.

"Fuck," he said quietly. "Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!" He slammed his fist into the table.

The elevator dinged.

Alfred returned with one tray balanced on one hand and two on the other, he set them down on the table in front of Mark smoothly. 

In front of him now were three plates of food.

A platter of sliced steak still steaming, the edges seared and the centers pink. A mound of scrambled eggs the size of a softball. Roasted sweet potatoes. Steamed broccoli and spinach. Half a roast chicken on its own plate. A bowl of brown rice. A pitcher of water and a tall glass of orange juice and what looked like a protein shake the color of wet sand sitting in a tumbler beside it.

"Protein, iron, complex carbohydrates, leafy greens, and a great deal of water," Alfred said. "Your body is rebuilding itself and you will need every bit of it. Eat what you can. There is more if you require it."

Mark looked up at him. "Thank you."

"You are very welcome."

Mark picked up the fork and got to work. He had meant to go slow, to keep his guard up, to test the food the way a paranoid man tests food, but the first bite of steak hit his tongue and his body took over.... Then he was eating like he hadn't seen a meal in a week. The painkillers were starting to dull the worst of the pain so his stomach was a screaming void and the food was incredible. 

He cleared the steak plate. He cleared the eggs. He cleared most of the chicken. He drained the orange juice and then the water and then the protein shake, in that order, without even so much as pausing. When he finally set the fork down the plates were empty his stomach felt like a balloon. 

He stood up.

"I want to talk to him," he said. "Now."

Alfred, who had been standing patiently against the wall the entire time he'd been eating, inclined his head. "Of course, sir. This way."

The Batcave proper was something Mark did not have a frame of reference for. The lounge had been a surprise. The Batcave was something else. The passage Alfred led him through opened out onto a vast natural cavern that had been outfitted with the kind of equipment that should not have been possible to assemble in one place. Vehicles he could only half see in the gloom, including the unmistakable silhouette of the Batmobile crouched on a circular platform under a single column of light. Glass cases along one wall holding equipment and what looked like trophies. 

A forensics bench. A chemistry station. A forge. And dominating the center of the entire space, a raised dais on which sat a computer setup that made Eve's four-monitor rig look like a child's toy. A semicircle of screens curved around a single high-backed chair. 

And in its centre was the man himself. 

Batman.

"Master Mark to see you, sir," Alfred said.

"Thank you, Alfred."

Alfred gave Mark a small nod, turned, and walked back toward the lounge passage without another word.

Batman did not turn around immediately. He finished whatever sequence he was in the middle of typing, then rotated the chair to face Mark.

"How are you feeling."

"Fine."

"Your ribs?"

"Fine." Mark crossed his arms and immediately regretted it as the cracked ribs registered their objection. Though he still didn't move them. "Where's Fat Tony."

Batman didn't answer.

"I know you have him on something. You wouldn't have let him go without tracking him. So tell me where he is."

Batman watched him in silence.

"You screwed me!" Mark said. The word came out harder than he meant it to and he didn't bother to soften it. "I had him. I had him on his knees. Two more seconds and he'd have given me something, anything, and you—"

"You wouldn't have gotten anything from him."

Mark stopped.

Batman turned back to the keyboard, tapped a command, and one of the screens shifted to a file. "Anthony Fabaro hasn't been in Luca Falcone's circle of trust in over six years. He was passed over for a seat at the table after Luca went dark. He has handlers above him who deliberately keep him out of the information loop because they know he talks too much when he drinks. He doesn't know where Luca is. He doesn't know who knows where Luca is. He frequents the Estoria because his mistress works there. That is the entire reason. There is no Falcone-Maroni connection. There is a forty-two-year-old Bulgarian dancer named Vesna whose rent he pays."

Mark stared at him.

"You would have known this," Batman said, "if you had conducted an investigation rather than a manhunt. Instead you walk around in the dark firing a gun hoping you hit something worthwhile."

The words landed like punches, and Mark felt his face go hot underneath them, and the rage that the food and the painkillers had banked back down came roaring up the back of his throat all at once. "Go to hell," he said. "I'm not letting you stand there in your costume and judge me for breaking a few cockroaches—"

"Stop."

"—who have spent thirty years grinding this city into—"

"Stop what you're doing, Mark. Just walk away."

Mark laughed, it was an ugly sound, more bark than laugh, and it came out before he could control it. "Yeah. Okay. Sure. There's no chance in hell of that happening, so save your breath."

Batman tapped the keyboard again and the largest of the screens changed. Four photographs came up on it, arranged in a grid. Three men and a young woman. The men were Maroni soldiers, faces Mark vaguely recognized from the Estoria. The young woman he did not recognize at all. She had blonde hair and a college sweatshirt and was smiling at whoever was holding the camera in the photograph.

"Four people died last night," Batman said flatly. "Two of them were Maroni shooters who took rounds from each other on the dance floor. The other two were a college sophomore named Hannah Reyes and her boyfriend Devon Park, who were on the dance floor when the shooting started. Both of them were hit. Neither of them made it to the hospital. They were nineteen years old and had been together since high school."

Mark felt the room tilt by a fraction.

He opened his mouth. "I—" he said. The word came out smaller than he meant it to. "I didn't— that's not— I didn't mean for anyone like that to—"

"When you put on a mask," Batman said, cutting through him without raising his voice, "You have a responsibility. Every mistake you make, every unintended casualty, that is on you. You have to hold yourself to a higher standard or you don't put the mask on at all. There is no third option."

Mark looked at the screen. Hannah Reyes was still smiling at him out of it with her boyfriend around her in the photo.

The guilt hit him in a wave that he had not been expecting, it was more painful than all of his injuries combined and for one long moment he couldn't get a word out at all. Then the rage came back up underneath it, the way it always did, and it folded the guilt up and stuffed it into the same locked box where he kept everything else, his hands curled into fists at his sides.

"I'm sorry," he said, even though the words tasted like ash. "I am. I'll— I'll be more careful next time. I'll plan it better. I'll—"

"There is no next time."

"What?"

"There is no next time, Mark, because at the rate you are going there is no next month for you. You already have one foot in the grave. You took two rounds in the leg last night and one in the arm, and you lost consciousness on a rooftop in a pool of your own blood, had it not been me there things would've ended a lot differently."

"I don't care," Mark said. "I don't care if I die. If Luca Falcone goes down with me, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tonight. I don't care."

Batman went very still in the chair and looked at Mark for a long moment without speaking, the cowl made it impossible to read whatever was happening on his face, but there was a unease to the silence that made Mark's skin prickle.

"Your grandfather was right about you," Batman said finally. 

Mark's eyes narrowed to slits. "What the hell do you know about my grandfather."

"I've known your grandfather a great deal longer than you have. And I know that he would not approve of a single thing you've done in the last six months."

"My grandfather is a coward," Mark said. The words came out before he could stop them and once they were he realised he couldn't take them back. "My grandfather is weak. He sat in that apartment for years and did nothing while the people who killed my mother walked around this city eating in nice restaurants, and he has the nerve to lecture me about doing the right thing!"

Batman didn't say anything to that. He just waited until Mark ran out of breath, "Your grandfather loves you a great deal more than you deserve right now."

Mark took a step forward without meaning to, his fist already half-formed at his side. 

"Your grandfather asked me to help you," Batman said. "I owe him a great deal. So that is what I am going to do."

"And how," Mark said through his teeth, "are you going to do that."

"I'm going to help you take down Luca Falcone."

Mark opened his mouth to refuse on instinct, and the refusal was already forming, the I work alone, I don't need you, I don't need anyone, and then his brain caught up to the sentence and he stopped. "How could you help me..." he asked, though it was more of a growl. 

"Because I already know where he is."

The world stopped.

Mark was across the dais before he had decided to move, and he was standing over the chair with his hands flexing at his sides and his face inches from the man. "Tell me. Right now. Where is he!"

"No."

"Tell me!!!"

"No."

Mark felt the rage hit a level he had not visited in months. His vision went thin at the edges and he could feel his heart in his throat. He wanted, more than he had wanted anything in a very long time, to put his fist through the front of that cowl until something underneath it broke.

"I'll help you take down Luca Falcone," Batman said, completely unmoved, looking up at him from the chair, "but we do it my way. From beginning to end. Every step. If you can't agree to that, then get out. Alfred will see you to the surface."

Mark stood there, breathing hard as his anger filled every part of him. "I don't need your help... I was doing fine before you and I'll do fine after!"

"Don't be foolish Mark," Batman said as he turned to him. "I'm giving you an opportunity to get justice for your mother."

"You're offering a collar and a leash!" Mark shouted, loud enough that he felt his ribs ache. "I won't settle! I won't let you dictate the terms of my revenge."

Batman looked at him with what Mark could see was disappointment. "If that's what you want then fine." He then turned back towards the computer. "Once you're recovered I'll escort you back to the city."

Mark didn't answer, he just turned snd headed back towards the lounge. Despite not agreeing with Batman's offer, he was right about one thing. Mark had been sloppy and due to that people had gotten hurt. 

He couldn't let that happen again. 

He had to be better. 

He had to become...

_____________________________________

"You're an idiot."

"Eve."

"No. I've been sitting here trying to find a nicer word for it and there isn't one. You're an idiot."

"I'm not an idiot."

"You had Batman. The Batman. The Dark Knight himself, offering to train you, and you walked out. I don't even have the vocabulary for how stupid that is. I might have to invent a word."

"I don't need his training." Mark folded his arms. "Whatever he would have taught me would have come with a dozen rules. A dozen stipulations. A dozen 'here's how I do things and here's how you're going to do them from now on.' I'd have spent a year in a cave learning how to not hit people."

"A year in a cave," Eve said, "with Batman. Training you. Teaching you. Probably feeding you better than you've eaten in your entire life. That's the scenario you rejected."

"Eve."

"Maybe." She pointed at him with the hand that wasn't holding her mug of coffee. "Maybe. But also you would have gotten Luca. He told you he knew where he was, so if you played by his rules you could've finally gotten him."

Mark let out a long breath through his nose. "Not the way I want," he said. "Not the way he deserves."

Eve went quiet.

They both knew what he meant. They had known what he meant for five years. It had sat between them the whole time, unspoken and perfectly understood. Luca Falcone was going to die. It was not a metaphor and it was not a figure of speech. It was the ending of a story he had been writing in his head every night since the funeral of his mother. 

But everyone knew Batman didn't kill.

Not for a friend. Not for a cause. Not for Mark himself. For him there would never be an exception. 

He would have brought Mark to Luca and would have put Luca in a cell. Luca would then eat three meals a day in that cell for the rest of his natural life, and Debbie Grayson would still be dead.

Mark couldn't do it. He wouldn't settle for it. He'd rather spend another ten years hunting the man through the gutters of Gotham than deliver him to a prison.

Eve eventually broke the silence. "So what are you going to do?"

It was a good question.

It was a fair question and it was the one he had been trying not to ask himself since he'd walked off Wayne property. Fat Tony had been a dead end on two levels now. The street dealers he'd been working through for months before that had given him nothing useful. Every thread he'd pulled on for the last six months had come up empty, and the thread Batman had offered he'd thrown it away with both hands.

He needed a different door in.

There in lied the problem, how could he get to Luca when he couldn't even get to the proper members of the Falcone. 

Maybe he was looking at it wrong, maybe he should be so focused on Luca for now. Maybe he should focus on getting an in with the Falcones themselves. He thought about how they hired. He thought about the enforcers he had seen at the Estoria, the shape of them, the way they moved. Ex-military, some of them, but not all of them. He then remembered something important. 

The underground fight circuits.

He sat up on the couch.

Nearly major family in Gotham recruited out of the underground rings at some point. Ted had told him as much years ago. The rings were where you found men who could hurt people and enjoyed it and would do it for money and keep their mouths shut about who'd paid. The Falcones had to have hired firm there at some point.

If he fought in one of them and won, and kept winning, a scout would come, and perhaps bring him a step closer to getting to Luca. 

"Eve."

"Uh oh."

"I'm going to —"

"I haven't heard it yet and I already hate it."

"— I'm going to fight in one of the unlicensed rings. The Falcone ones. The feeders."

Eve set her own mug down. "No," she said.

"Eve."

"No. Mark. No. Absolutely not. That is the stupidest thing you have ever said to me, and I have known you since we were seven, and you used to eat crayons. No."

"Hear me out."

"No."

"Eve."

"I am going to keep saying no until you stop being a dumbass."

"Eve, listen." He leaned forward on his elbows. "The Falcones recruit out of those rings.  If I fight my way up in one of them and make the right kind of noise, somebody on their side comes looking. This could be a door into their inner circle."

"It's a door with a bullet on the other side of it."

"Not if I'm careful."

"Mark, these places are not legal. They don't have doctors. They don't have rules. People die in them. People die in them every day and nobody reports it."

"I know what they are."

"Then why are you even thinking about doing it."

"Because it's the only plan I've got."

She looked at him.

She looked at him for a long time. "I hate this," she said.

"I know."

"I hate this more than I have ever hated anything."

"Eve, I need your help on this," Mark said in a serious tone. 

Eve looked away from him for a moment before she huffed out a sigh and turned back to him. "I am not helping you because I think this is a good idea. I am helping you because if I don't, you'll do it anyway and be worse off. Be very clear on that distinction.."

"I'm clear on it."

"Good." She reached across the table and hit him on the shoulder. "Promise me something."

"Anything."

"Don't. Don't say anything. Don't promise me anything. You have to know what the thing is first. Promise me that if you get in over your head you walk away. You don't push it. You get out."

"Eve —"

"Promise."

"I promise."

She watched him for another second and then she nodded, and she picked her mug up and took a long drink and set it down again.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay."

She turned the mug a quarter turn on the table and she did not look at him when she said the next thing.

"Are you going to see your grandfather today."

He did not answer right away.... He had been thinking about it. He had been thinking about it since he walked out of the cave. He had thought about it on the bus. He had thought about it at Eves. He was thinking about it right now, which was a problem, because thinking about it made him think about the last thing he had said to the old man.

"Not yet," he said.

"Mark."

"Not yet, Eve."

"He's going to think you're hurt."

"He knows I'm not."

"He knows you're not in a morgue. He doesn't know you're not beaten in a ritch somewhere."

"Eve —"

"I'm just saying. You know. Don't leave it too long. You never know, with this city. You never know what's going to happen day to day. That's all I'm saying."

"I won't leave it too long."

"Mm."

"I won't."

She gave him a small look that said she would believe it when she saw it, and then she reached across and patted his hand, "Are you hungry."

"Starving."

"Move. Go sit on the couch and stay out of my way. You are a menace in a kitchen and I am not dealing with you today."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Get."

He sat on the couch as she cooked, they didn't talk about anything, they never neeeed to, usually they ended up talking about nothing. That was what they were best at, the two of them. They were not particularly good at talking about things that were important, or deep or heavy. They had tried, over the years, and they had never quite gotten the hang of it. 

What they were good at was this. This was the thing they had. Her moving around the kitchen in bare feet and oversized jumpers, him half-lying on the couch with the coffee going cold in his hand, the little running argument they'd had about whether onions went in eggs continuing for the eighth consecutive year without either of them ever winning. 

In the end she made eggs with onions in them and he would eat them anyway cause he'd eat anything. Neither of them would say the other had won and neither of them ever would.

She put a plate in front of him and sat down next to him with her own plate and tucked her legs up onto the couch and leaned into his shoulder while she ate, the way she always did when it was the two of them. He let her. He always let her. She was the only person in the world who got to do that and he was not going to unpack what that meant.

They ate. They did not talk about the thing they had already talked about. She made him watch an old movie he had seen four times before because she liked watching it with him. He watched it. He made the same comments he always made at the same places and she made the same comments she always made back at him. 

By five o'clock she had spent an hour on her computer and had a name for him. A low-tier room at the back of an auto-body shop on the edge of the Bowery. No affiliation stamped on it. Not officially. But she had traced the money three hops back and the third hop landed on a shell company that had a Falcone name on the incorporation papers, which meant it was a feeder, which meant it was what he was looking for. They took walk-ons on Thursday and Friday nights. Tonight was Thursday.

She sent him the address and watched as he read it on his phone.

"Mark."

"I know."

"Do you."

"I know, Eve."

She got up from the couch, crossed the space between them and put her arms around his waist and pressed her face against the center of his chest, they stood there in the middle of her living room for a little longer than was strictly normal between friends before she looked up.

"Be careful," she said.

"I'll be careful."

"Be more careful than careful."

"I'll be more careful than careful."

"Come back."

"Always."

He picked up his bag from where he had left it by the door and opened it before cross in through the threshold. 

_____________________________________

Meanwhile across the city, in a part of the East End that tourists did not walk through, Arginold Grayson was carrying a fifty-kilogram sack of rice on one shoulder and a box of canned goods under the other arm, and he was doing it in the rain.

He was carrying in supplies to the Shelter he ran. The shelter on Crane Street was a converted laundromat that he had bought twenty-two years ago for about eleven thousand dollars when nobody else had wanted it, and in the twenty-two years since it had grown into three adjoining buildings and a small back lot. 

C.A.R.E. Community, Aid, Resources, and Education. 

It was on the sign over the front door in letters Arg had painted himself.

He had not planned any of it.

He had come to Gotham because of Debbie, before that he had been to a lot of places, more places than most men would've ever been, he had not planned on staying in any of them. He'd only come back to this place because he had fond memories of when he'd came here with his son.

When he came back he didn't plan to stay for long. He had planned on a month. Maybe two. Long enough to meet his grandson.

Then he had met them.

Debbie had opened the door of the little walk-up on Kane Boulevard with a seven-year-old on her hip and a smear of flour on her cheekbone, and he had known inside of about four seconds that he was not going anywhere. The boy had poked his head around her shoulder. Gap in the front teeth. Same eyes as his mother and the same kind of face as his father.

Needless to say Arg had stayed.

He had found the laundromat two months later. A woman had died of exposure three blocks from Debbie's apartment in the first winter he had spent in the city, he had read about it in the paper. It was then he decided to start up the shelter snd do what he could to help. 

For a long time life was pretty good. Then Debbie died... after that nothing had been what it was supposed to be.

He shook the thought loose and adjusted the sack on his shoulder and carried it through the back door.

"Mr. Grayson!" Carla was in the doorway, fifty-six years old and about five feet tall and, on the basis of nineteen years of close observation, the actual person who ran C.A.R.E. "Mr. Grayson, Jorge needs you at the truck, he says the pallet jack is jammed again."

"I'll be there."

"And we had three more families come in this morning."

"Put them in the west annex."

"The west annex is full."

"Put them in my office."

"Mr. Grayson—"

"Put them in my office, Carla. I don't need a damn desk and chair, I can find those anywhere."

She sighed and went off to do what he had asked her to do.

He set the rice down in the pantry and went out back.

The truck was a flatbed with half its load still on it.  Jorge was standing next to the pallet jack with sweat beading down his face and his muscles coiling we he tried to get it loose. Two of the other volunteers were trying to manhandle a crate of canned beans off the tailgate by themselves since the jack was not cooperating.

"Hold on," Arg said, as he came around to the back of the truck and stepped up onto the bed.

The crate was about four hundred and twenty kilograms, and it was on the edge of the bed, as Arg came up onto the flatbed one of the volunteers  lost his grip on the low end and jumped back, and the crate started to go.

It was going to land on Jorge.

Arg caught it.

He caught it one-handed, with his off-hand, more or less without thinking about it, and he held it there for about a second and a half before his brain caught up to what his body had just done in front of three people, he adjusted his grip and pretended to grunt in pain and said, "Jesus, Jorge, get out from under there, will you!?" and lowered the crate to the bed with both hands pretending to have strained himself.

Jorge was staring at him.

Martin was staring at him.

The other volunteer, a young woman named Alicia, was staring at him.

"Give me the pallet jack," Arg said. "Come on let me see it."

Nobody moved for a second.

"Yeah, boss. Right. Over here," Jorge said, as the moment passed and Arg stepped off the truck bed and went to look at the pallet jack.

Inside of about forty seconds he had fixed it with a screwdriver and a length of wire. "There we go boys, this'll last another couple weeks," Arg said with a chuckle before heading back to the building. On his way back through the side door his phone buzzed in his pocket.

He pulled it out and looked at it.

Unknown: We need to talk, usual spot.

Arg frowned. He put the phone back in his pocket and found Carla at the front desk. "I have to step out for a little bit," he said. "Supplier thing. I'll be an hour, maybe two."

"Mr. Grayson, we have the delivery and the west annex and the—"

"You've got it, Carla. You always do. I'll be back."

He went up the stairs to the second floor, past the offices, and opened the door at the end of the hall and went up the narrow set of stairs to the roof.

He looked around  to check that the roof was empty before he closed the roof door behind him, then stepped to the edge of the roof and shot up into the sky.

He rose about two hundred feet above the rooftop in the space of three seconds and hung there for a moment to orient himself, then he turned his body northward and started to fly across the sky .

He crossed Gotham at about seven hundred feet per second, keeping to the cloud cover where he could. He passed over the harbor. He passed over the financial district. He crossed the river and came in over the Gotham Heights neighborhood and descended toward the flat roof of an old brownstone on Oak Hill.

Right where Batman was waiting.

It was two in the afternoon and Batman was standing in the middle of a rooftop in broad daylight in the full suit, cowl and cape and all, and Arg, in spite of everything he had on his mind, could not stop the smile that started to pull at the corner of his moustache as he came in for the landing. "Well," he said, touching down about six feet away, "this is a first. I don't believe I've ever seen you outside before the sun's gone down. You feeling all right, Bruce? You need me to check your temperature?"

Batman looked at him.

"Should've brought a parasol," Arg said. "A nice wide-brimmed one. Black, maybe. Go with the outfit."

Silence.

"You know, if you turn a little bit to the left you could catch some Vitamin D. Might help with the temperament."

"Arginold."

"What's going on Bruce, why'd you call me here."

"I spoke with Mark."

"Mm."

"I offered to train him. I offered to help him take down Luca Falcone on terms I thought he would accept. He declined the offer and left."

Arg smile humourlessly. "Yeah," he said. "That sounds about right."

"I thought you should know."

"I appreciate that, Bruce. I really do." Arg walked to the edge of the roof and put his hands in the pockets of his work pants and looked out over the Heights.  "He's stubborn," he said. "Stubborn like his father is, and his father is the stubbornest man I ever met, which is not a short list when you consider my history. I didn't think Mark would take it. I hoped he would. Though if I'm

Honest I've been hoping for things with that boy for five years now."

"Have you considered," Batman said, "taking him off-world. A fresh start. Away from the city. Away from the Falcones. Away from everything that's reminding him of his mother."

Arg shook his head without turning around.

"This is his home, Bruce. It's the city he grew up in. It's the city his mother died in. You don't heal someone like that by taking him away from the only place he's ever known. I was sure you of all people would understand that. And besides he's not like me. Not yet."

"Not yet."

"He will be. Probably... There's a good chance."

Batman was quiet for a moment. "When?" He asked.

Arg shrugged without turning. "Who knows. Could be a year. Could be fifty. It depends on how hostile the genome is when it starts expressing, and how compatible his human DNA turns out to be with the rest of it. If the pairing's clean it'll come on gradually. If it's rough it'll come on fast and it'll be ugly for a while before it settles. But with his bloodline, I'd bet sooner rather than later."

"That's going to be a problem."

Arg finally turned around snd frowned.  "Don't," he said. "Don't you start drawing up contingencies on my grandson, Bruce. I've known you a long time and I know how your head works. If you go back to that cave and pull out a folder and start writing protocols on him, I swear to you we're going to have a different kind of conversation."

"He's already put people in hospital, dozens by this point. If he starts getting his powers while he's in the state he's in right now—"

"I know Bruce. I know what he could be. But he's my grandson.."

"I'm not trying to—"

"He's a boy. He's a hurting boy. He lost his mother, and before that he lost a father he never knew, he is not a threat, Bruce, he is a grieving child in a man's body, so I will handle it. When the time comes. I will handle it."

Arg then took a step closer to Batman. "Don't forget that you owe me Bruce, you owe me a great deal."

Batmans eyes narrowed for a moment before he breathed out. "Very well." Batman turned toward the edge of the roof. "I'll leave him to you. Argall."

Arg closed his eyes. "It's Arginold, Bruce."

"Mm."

"It's Arginold, and you know that, if you call me Argall one more time I'm going to put you through the roof of this building on principle."

However Batman was already stepping off the edge. The cape caught and pulled him sideways in an arc toward the next block over, and he was gone inside of three seconds.

Arg stood there on the empty roof for a moment with his hands still in his pockets, he let out a long sigh that had about twenty years in it. Then he stepped off the edge and went back up into the sky, and turned south toward the shelter. 

_____________________________________

The basement of the old Greenpoint Bowling Alley had been gutted down to its bones and rebuilt into something that belonged in a different century.

The lanes were gone. The pins were gone. The scoring consoles and the shoe racks and the neon signs had all been ripped out and replaced with concrete, steel-cage fencing, and industrial flood lamps that threw light down into a sunken pit at the center of the room that was about twenty feet across and ringed by a wall of chain-link that stood about eight feet high. 

The crowd pressed in around the cage on all sides, three or four bodies deep in places. Men with neck tattoos that marked them as Maroni foot soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder with Falcone corner boys and unaffiliated gangbangers from the Narrows and a scattering of women who looked like they had seen enough violence in their lives that it no longer registered as anything more interesting than weather. 

Money changed hands constantly, folded bills passing between fingers in a blur, side bets stacking on top of the main book that a skinny man with a tablet was running from a folding table near the entrance.

Inside the cage, a fight was just ending.

The big man had dominated for most of it. He stood about six foot four and had the thick, swollen build of someone who had been eating steroids with his breakfast for the better part of a decade, and for the first three minutes he had used every pound of that unnatural mass to batter the smaller fighter around the pit like a ball in a pinball machine. 

The smaller man was bleeding from a gash above his eye and his mouth and from both nostrils at once, two of the fingers on his left hand were bent in directions that fingers were not supposed to bend, and he had been on the ground more times than he had been on his feet.

Then someone in the crowd threw a knife.

It was a folding knife, cheap, the kind you could buy at any bodega in the Narrows for about eight dollars, and it sailed over the top of the chain-link and clattered onto the concrete about two feet from the smaller fighter's outstretched hand. The smaller man snatched it off the floor with his good hand and flicked it open while the big man was still coming forward, and he drove it upward from a crouch into the soft tissue just below the big man's neck with both hands behind the thrust and the blade went in to the hilt.

The big man's forward momentum carried him another full step before his body registered what had just happened, and then his legs buckled at the knees and he dropped straight down with the smaller fighter still attached to the handle, and as the big man hit the concrete the smaller man ripped the knife sideways through his throat in a single tearing motion that opened a gash and spilled blood from the wound in a flood that spread across the concrete. 

He was dead before the smaller man pulled the knife free and stood up.

Half the crowd erupted, cheering as loud as they could as they raised their drinks. Bills were waved at the skinny man with the tablet as bets were called in. The other half groaned and swore and crumpled up betting slips and threw them at the cage, some even spat at the dead man on the ground. 

The announcer, a wiry man in his forties with slicked-back hair, leaned over the top of the cage and smiled.

"AND THAT'S THE END OF IT, FOLKS! THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU COUNT A MAN OUT TOO EARLY IN THE PIT! THE BUTCHER GOES DOWN AND LITTLE MIKEY WALKS AWAY WITH THE PURSE AND A STORY FOR HIS GRANDKIDS! NOW DON'T GO ANYWHERE, DON'T YOU DARE GO ANYWHERE, BECAUSE WE'VE GOT ANOTHER CARD COMING UP AND THIS NEXT ONE'S GONNA MAKE THAT LOOK LIKE A WARM-UP!"

Near the back of the pit near the bar, Mark had been waiting for the fight to end. He had come through the entrance at the back, through a steel door that led down a set of steps into the pit. Now the fight was over he got up and started moving through the crowd with his hood up and his hands in the pockets of his jacket and his jaw set so hard the muscles in his temples stood out like cables. Every face he passed was the kind of face he had spent the last six months putting into hospital beds, and every one of them made the thing behind his sternum pulse a little hotter, but he did the smart thing and kept his eyes forward and his mouth shut.

He was trying to find the sign-up area when the first woman appeared at his side, a tall brunette in a crop top and heels, who pressed herself against his arm and ran her fingernails down the front of his jacket while she smiled up at him with pupils that were blown wide enough to swallow the iris entirely. "Hey, big guy, you looking for some company? I've got a booth in the back, drinks are on me, all you gotta do is—"

Mark shrugged her off without looking at her and kept walking.

A second woman materialized on his other side almost immediately, shorter, blonder, with a tattoo that ran from her collarbone down into her cleavage, she reached for his hand with both of hers while she stepped into his path and tried to slow him down.

"Come on, handsome, don't be like that, my girls and I have a whole setup over there, you won't even have to—"

He stepped around her without breaking stride and pushed through a knot of men who were arguing about the odds on the next fight and emerged on the other side of the crowd near the announcer's platform, which was just a wooden pallet raised about a foot off the ground with a microphone stand bolted to it and a folding chair behind it.

Mark stepped up to the edge of the platform and looked up at him. "I want to sign up."

The announcer looked down at him and his eyebrows went up and a grin split across his face that showed a gold cap on one of his canines. "Well, well, well," he said, leaning down with the microphone still in his hand, though he had the good sense to angle it away from his mouth so the speakers didn't pick it up. "Look at the size of you. What are you, six-six? Six-seven?"

"Six-seven."

"Jesus. And what do you weigh, son?"

"Enough."

The announcer laughed and he dropped down off the platform and stood in front of Mark and looked up at him with the grin still plastered across his face. "Alright, big man, here's how it works. There are no rules. You fight, you win, you get paid. You lose, you get paid less, if you can walk out to collect it. Killing is allowed, though not required, but if the other guy's trying to kill you then you better be ready to return the favor. Pay is five hundred for a win and fifty for a loss, cash, end of the night."

Mark frowned. "That's it?"

The announcer let out another laugh, this one longer and louder, and he spread his arms wide and gestured at the room around them. "Look around you, kid. Does this look like the fucking Ritz? This place is filled with the lowest tier of trash and gang muscle that Gotham's got to offer, and every one of them is here because they can't get in anywhere better. The high rollers, the real money, the guys who bet five figures on a single round, they're at the finer establishments. Private clubs. Invite only. You want those purses, you gotta earn your way in."

"How do I get an invite."

The announcer looked at him for a long moment with his head tilted slightly to one side. "You got guts, kid. I like that. Here's the deal. You get in that pit and you put on a show that gets this crowd on its feet, and word travels. It always travels. The scouts from the bigger rings come down here to watch the fresh meat, and if you're exciting enough, if you're violent enough, if you make these people remember your name, then sooner or later somebody taps you on the shoulder and hands you a card. But first you gotta survive, and that's not a metaphor. You saw what just happened in there."

"I saw."

"Good. Then you know what you're walking into." The announcer pulled a crumpled card from his back pocket, and he scribbled something on the back of it with a pen he produced from behind his ear. "You're fighting later on. Your opponent's name is Grinch, don't ask me why, I didn't name him. You'll know him when you see him. Head down to the lockers, last door on the left before the boiler room. Show this to the guy at the bottom of the stairs and he'll let you through. Get warmed up. You're on in about an hour."

Mark took the card and turned toward the back of the basement.

...

The locker room was worse than the pit.

It was a narrow corridor of rusted metal lockers and wooden benches that had been bolted to the floor  stained with enough blood and sweat and other fluids that the original color of the wood was no longer determinable.

Fighters sat on the benches or stood at the lockers in various states of preparation. Some were wrapping their hands with tape. Some were stretching. Some were sitting with their heads down and their eyes closed. A few of them looked up when Mark came through the door, others didn't care. 

At the far end of the corridor, against the wall near the boiler room door, two men in stained coveralls were loading a body onto a plastic sheet that had been laid out on the concrete floor. The body belonged to a man who had been large when he was alive, though the specific dimensions were difficult to determine now because his face had been beaten into something that no longer resembled a face. 

Mark watched the process for about three seconds, then turned away and found an empty locker near the middle of the row. He pulled his jacket off and hung it on the inside hook, then reached down and gripped the hem of his shirt with both hands before pulling it up and over his head in a single motion that revealed the dense, hard-packed architecture of his upper body. He hung the shirt beside the jacket and rolled his neck slowly in each direction until something at the base of his skull popped quietly, then began working through a warm-up that started in his shoulders and moved downward through his chest and arms and into his hips and legs.

"Hey. Meat."

Mark turned his head.

The man on the bench two lockers down was about forty, with a face that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts and then reassembled after someone had taken it apart with a pipe wrench, he was sitting with his forearms on his knees and a roll of tape in one hand. "First time?" the man asked.

"Yeah."

"Thought so. You got that look." The man tore a strip of tape with his teeth and started winding it around his right hand with the practiced ease of someone who had done it a thousand times before. "Let me give you some free advice, meat. Don't set any expectations about this place. Don't expect your opponent to fight clean. Don't expect anyone to tell you the truth. Don't expect the crowd to stay out of it, because they won't, they throw shit into the pit all night long and half of it's sharp. This is the most degenerate kind of pit fighting you can get in Gotham, and that's saying something, because Gotham's got a lot of degenerate pit fighting. Expect lies. Expect cheating. Expect backstabbing. Expect all of it, and then expect something worse than all of it, and you might make it through the night."

Mark looked at him for a moment, then nodded. "Thanks."

"Don't thank me," the man said, going back to his tape. "Thank me if you're still breathing at the end of the card."

Mark turned back to his locker and continued warming up, rolling his shoulders through their full range of motion and then dropping into a deep squat and holding it while he worked the stiffness out of his hips and the tightness out of his hamstrings, and he stayed there in the yellow half-light of the locker room for what felt like awhile, listening to the muffled roar of the crowd above him and the sounds of tape being torn and hands being wrapped and, from the far end of the corridor. 

But soon it was his turn. 

...

"BRUTUS BIGSHOW!"

The announcer's voice hit him like a wall of sound as Mark came up the concrete steps and through the gap in the chain-link that served as the fighter's entrance to the pit. The crowd had swelled in the time he had been downstairs, and the noise was enormous, a sustained roar of voices and clapping and stamped feet that vibrated through the concrete under his boots.

Brutus Bigshow.

He didn't like the name. He didn't like a single syllable of it. But in the end it did not matter what he was called in a basement full of criminals who would never know his real name, so he let it go and walked to the center of the pit and stood there with his fists at his sides while the blood from the previous fight was still drying in the cracks between the concrete slabs under his feet.

Meanwhile the announcer was whipping the crowd into shape from his pallet platform. "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND WHOEVER ELSE IS IN HERE TONIGHT, WE HAVE A TREAT FOR YOU! A BRAND-NEW FACE IN THE PIT, A BIG MAN, A REAL BIG MAN, STANDING SIX FOOT SEVEN AND LOOKING LIKE HE WAS BUILT IN A GODDAMN FACTORY! LET'S SEE IF THE NEWBIE'S GOT WHAT IT TAKES!"

The gate on the opposite side of the cage opened.

Two men walked through it.

Not one. Two. Both of them were large, one about six foot five and the other about six foot four, both thick through the chest and arms, both covered in the kind of prison ink that told you exactly where they had spent the last several years of their lives. The taller one had a shaved head and a jaw like a cinder block and fists that looked like they had been used to demolish small buildings. The shorter one was leaner but looked no less dangerous.

"AND HERE'S THE TWIST, FOLKS! BECAUSE WE LOVE OUR NEWBIES HERE AT THE PIT, WE'RE GIVING BRUTUS BIGSHOW A SPECIAL WELCOME! IT'S A SURPRISE TWO-ON-ONE! IN THIS CORNER, WEIGHING IN AT A COMBINED FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY POUNDS, THE VETERANS OF THE PIT, THE MEN WHO'VE SENT MORE FIGHTERS TO THE MORGUE THAN THE FLU SEASON, GIVE IT UP FOR SLEDGEHAMMER STEVE AND BONE SAW BILLY!"

The crowd went berserk. Money appeared in the air like confetti as bets were shouted and grabbed and settled and re-placed, and the noise climbed another octave as the announcer fed it.

Mark stared at the two men across the pit.

The anger flared behind his sternum, because the announcer had lied to him, because the card had said one opponent and there were two, because this entire setup was a con designed to feed a new fighter to a pair of experienced killers so the crowd could watch him bleed. The rage that surged up through his chest and into his arms made his fists tighten until the knuckles went white.

He would deal with the announcer later. Right now, right now there were two large men standing fifteen feet away from him who intended to beat him until he stopped moving.

"FIGHTERS READY?" the announcer bellowed. 

"THREE! TWO! ONE! FIGHT!"

They charged him together.

Mark exploded forward off his back foot to meet them, closing the distance before either of them could set up properly, and he drove his right boot straight into the center of Sledgehammer Steve's chest in a front kick that connected with the sternum hard enough to stop the man's forward momentum dead and send him stumbling backward three full steps. Mark used the recoil from the kick to launch himself off Steve's chest and into the air, cocking his right fist back and driving it forward in a superman punch aimed squarely at Bone Saw Billy's jaw.

"OH MY GOD! DID YOU SEE THAT? HE JUST USED ONE OF THEM AS A GODDAMN LAUNCHPAD!" the announcer screamed into the microphone, his voice cracking with genuine disbelief.

Billy was faster than he looked. He got both forearms up just in time to catch the punch on his guard, the impact driving his arms back into his own face hard enough to bruise the skin on the bridge of his nose, but the block held and he immediately countered with a rapid combination, a left hook that whistled past Mark's jaw as he pulled his head back and a right hook that he didn't quite avoid, the knuckles grazing the side of his skull hard enough to send a flash of light across his vision. Mark deflected the third punch, a straight right aimed at his mouth, by slapping the wrist aside with his open palm, and in the same motion he drove his own right fist deep into Billy's liver with a short, brutal hook that sank into the soft tissue below the ribs and compressed the organ hard enough that Billy's face went grey and his mouth opened in a silent gasp.

Mark seized the opening and grabbed Billy by the back of the skull with both hands, his fingers digging into the shaved scalp, and he wrenched the man's head downward while simultaneously swinging him sideways in a violent arc that turned Billy's body into a battering ram aimed directly at Steve, who was just recovering from the front kick and coming forward again with his fists raised.

Billy's body collided with Steve's incoming shin kick at the exact moment Steve had committed his weight to the blow, and the impact sent all three of them staggering, but Mark had been ready for it and the other two had not, and he used the half second of confusion to reset his stance and get his hands back up.

Steve roared, a deep, guttural sound and he lowered his shoulder and drove it into Mark's midsection like a linebacker and shoving him backward across the pit. At the same moment Steve jumped back and reached out with one hand and grabbed Billy's wrist and whipped him around in a wide arc, using his partner's momentum like a weapon. Billy's body swung out wide and then crashed into Mark's side with the full combined force of both men's weight behind it.

Mark hit the ground hard, his back slamming against the concrete with enough impact to drive the air from his lungs in a grunt, but he was already rolling before the next blow could land, tucking his chin and throwing his legs over his head in a backward roll that brought him up onto his feet just as Billy aimed a stomping kick at the space where his head had been a quarter second earlier. 

Mark jumped up from his crouch and drove his knee upward with everything in his legs behind it, and the knee connected cleanly with the underside of Billy's chin in a flying strike that snapped the man's head back and sent a spray of blood and spit arcing through the air as several of his teeth cracked under the impact.

Billy staggered, and Mark did not let him recover. He unloaded five punches in a sequence so fast that the crowd could barely track them, each one thrown with his full weight rotating through his hips: the first buried itself in Billy's stomach and folded him forward, the second drove into his liver from the same angle as before and turned his legs to water, the third cracked against his sternum with a sound like a baseball bat hitting a watermelon, and the fourth and fifth landed on either cheek in rapid succession, left then right, each impact snapping Billy's head to the side and opening deep cuts across both cheekbones that immediately began sheeting blood down his jaw and neck.

"THIS KID IS A MACHINE! HE'S A GODDAMN MACHINE!" the announcer was screaming. 

Steve hit Mark from behind.

The big man had circled while Mark was working Billy over, and he hooked his enormous arm under Mark's right elbow and wrenched it upward into a standing armlock that torqued the shoulder joint to the edge of its range. At the same moment Billy, still bleeding and staggering but nowhere near finished, found his footing and started driving punches into Mark's exposed midsection, one after another after another, each one landing with a meaty thud that compressed the abdominal muscles and sent shockwaves of pain radiating through Mark's core.

Mark roared and grabbed Steve by the throat with his free hand, his fingers closing around the thick column of muscle and cartilage like a vice, and he shifted his hips explosively and wrenched his body sideways and brought Steve up and over and down in a single violent motion that ended with Steve's back hitting the concrete.

Billy came in swinging while Mark was still bent over from the throw. A right cross that caught Mark flush on the jaw and rocked his head sideways, followed by an uppercut that snapped it back and opened a cut above his left eyebrow that started leaking blood into his eye immediately.

Across the pit the crowd was losing its collective mind, the noise hitting a pitch that made the chain-link vibrate and the bare bulbs in their caged fixtures flicker from the stamped vibrations running through the concrete.

Metal clanged against the floor.

Weapons had started coming over the cage. A length of chain. A broken bottle. And a baseball bat that rolled to a stop about three feet from Billy's boot.

Billy smiled and picked it up.

He came in fast, swinging the bat in a horizontal arc aimed at Mark's ribs, but Mark threw himself backward just far enough that the bat whistled past the front of his body by about two inches, close enough that he felt the displaced air against his skin. Billy reversed the swing and came back from the other side, and this time Mark could not avoid it entirely as Steve was behind him again, up from the ground faster than a man his size should have been, and Steve wrapped both arms around Mark's torso from behind in a bear hug that pinned his arms to his sides.

The bat cracked against Mark's left side just below the ribs. Mark's vision flared bright for a second before it came back. He tried to twist free of Steve's grip, his muscles straining against the arms locked around him, but Steve held on desperately. 

Billy swung the bat again, this time aiming for Mark's head. Mark jerked his skull to the side and the bat caught him on the shoulder instead, the impact numbing his left arm from the deltoid to the fingertips and sending a bolt of pain down through his collarbone. He kicked forward into Billy's knee, then jumped up off the ground and drove both boots into Billy's shins, using Steve's own grip as leverage to lift himself and then slam his weight down. Steve's hold loosened for a fraction of a second and Mark ripped his right arm free and caught the bat on its next swing, his fingers closing around the wood just below Billy's hands.

For a moment they stood there, both men gripping the bat, their faces inches apart, but finally Mark managed to wrench the bat free. He brought it down across the outside of Billy's knee with a short, chopping motion that had every ounce of his fury behind it, and the kneecap gave way with a sound like a thick branch being snapped over someone's leg. 

Billy screamed, a high ragged sound that tore out of his throat and went on and on as his leg folded sideways at an angle that legs did not fold and he collapsed to the concrete clutching the ruined joint with both hands.

Steve mounted Mark from behind, wrapping his arm around Mark's throat and squeezing, trying to lock in the choke, and Mark tried to roll him off but the angle was wrong and the bigger man had his weight distributed and his hooks in. Mark dropped the bat as he tried to get free from the chokehold.

Billy was trying to crawl toward them, dragging his broken leg behind him, one hand reaching for the bat. 

He soon got it. 

The bat came down on Mark's chest. 

Then his shoulder. 

Then his head.

That one turned the world into a single flat tone. His vision went to static for what might have been two seconds or ten, and through the static. Mark fell to the floor and started getting hit and stomped on as Billy and Steve beat him as hard as they could. 

Mark curled up and tried to protect himself, but in truth he couldn't even see the ring anymore. But that didn't mean he didn't see anything. He saw something much worse. 

He saw the apartment.

He saw Luca's hand in his mother's hair.

He saw the gun against her forehead.

He saw the shot.

The rage that he kept within himself did not pour over gradually. It did not creep in from the edges. 

It detonated. 

A white-hot concussive rage that flooded every nerve in his body at the same time and burned away everything that was not pure, blinding fury.

"RAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!"

Mark turned and caught the bat on its downswing, his hand closing around the wood with a grip that made the tape compress and the grain creak under his fingers, he ripped it free and brought it across the outside of Steve's kneecap in a single savage swing that shattered the joint with the same wet crunch that Billy's had made. Steve's scream was lower and rawer and it ended in a gurgling choke as his leg gave out and he collapsed sideways onto the concrete, clutching the ruined knee with both hands while the blood from the torn skin soaked through his fingers.

Billy tried to mount Mark from behind as he scrambled up, but Mark threw his hips sideways and flipped the bigger man over his body in a hip toss that sent Billy crashing onto his back on the concrete, and then Mark was on his feet.

The crowd had gone from roaring to screaming.

Mark stood over both of them, the rage filling every part of his body like it was his very blood itself. 

He went for Billy first. He dropped onto the man's chest with both knees, the impact driving the remaining air from Billy's lungs in a wet explosion of spit and blood, and then he started hitting him. Not with the bat. With his fists, he wanted to savour this. 

He drove his right fist into Billy's face with a punch that flattened the already broken nose into a cratered mess of cartilage and blood that sprayed outward across the concrete on both sides of the man's head. He followed it with a left that split the skin over Billy's orbital bone and collapsed the socket inward with a crack that was audible even over the crowd, the eye underneath swelling shut immediately as blood pooled in the ruined tissue. He hit him again, and again, and again, each punch landing with the full rotation of his shoulders and the full weight of his body behind it, and Billy's face came apart under the assault in stages, the jaw dislocating with a wet pop on the fourth punch, two more teeth skittering across the concrete on the fifth, the other cheekbone cracking inward on the sixth with a sound like a walnut being crushed under a boot heel.

Billy stopped moving after the seventh punch. Mark hit him twice more to make sure.

Steve was trying to crawl away across the pit, dragging his shattered knee behind him and leaving a smear of blood on the concrete that widened with every foot he covered. Mark stood up from Billy's ruined form, turned, and crossed the distance in three strides. He grabbed Steve by the ankle of his good leg and dragged him backward across the concrete, Steve's fingers clawing at the floor and finding nothing to hold, and then Mark flipped him onto his back and dropped the point of his elbow straight down into Steve's sternum with enough force to crack the bone underneath.

Steve's body arched off the ground and a sound came out of him that was barely human, a shattered wet howl that dissolved into a series of hitching, bubbling coughs as blood welled up from somewhere inside his chest and spilled from the corners of his mouth.

Mark picked up the bat.

He brought it down on Steve's right hand with a two-handed swing that crushed every knuckle against the concrete and turned the fingers into a mangled mess of broken bone and torn skin that no longer resembled a hand. Steve screamed again, the sound thinner now, weaker, his body trying to curl into a ball but unable to because Mark was standing on his other arm. Mark reversed the bat and drove the heavy end into the meat of Steve's good thigh, once, twice, three times, each impact landing with a dull thud that left deep bruises blooming under the skin and finally cracked the femur on the third hit with a sound like a gunshot that made even the crowd flinch.

Mark stood over both of them, chest heaving, the bat hanging from one hand, his knuckles split open and dripping blood onto the concrete between his boots. Billy was unconscious and barely breathing, his face a mask of blood and swollen tissue that no longer had recognizable features. Steve was conscious but not moving, his body broken in enough places that movement was no longer something his nervous system could coordinate. 

"AND THAT'S IT! THAT'S THE FIGHT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! BRUTUS BIGSHOW WINS! BRUTUS BIGSHOW GODDAMN WINS!"

Mark dropped the bat. It clattered against the concrete. He turned and walked out of the pit through the fighter's gate without looking back, the crowd's roar crashing against him from all sides. 

When he returned to the locker room it was a lot  quieter. Most of the other fighters had cleared out or were upstairs, and the corridor was empty except for the bench where Mark sat with his forearms on his knees and his head down and his blood dripping onto the concrete between his boots, where it mixed with the blood that had been there before he arrived and the blood that had been there before that. His hands were shaking. Not from fear. From the adrenaline that was still flooding his system and from the pain that was starting to assert itself now that the rage was receding.

The door opened and the announcer's voice filled the room. "Kid! Kid, that was incredible! I haven't seen a crowd go that crazy since—"

Mark was on his feet before the man had finished the sentence. He grabbed the announcer by the front of his shirt with one blood-slicked hand and pulled him forward until their faces were about four inches apart, the announcer's grin dissolved instantly into something much less confident as he registered the look in Mark's eyes. 

"Give me one reason," Mark said quietly, "why I shouldn't snap your neck right now."

The announcer stared at him for about three seconds, and then, incredibly, he started laughing. It was a nervous laugh at first, but it gained confidence as it went, and by the end of it the man was grinning again. 

"It's nothing personal kid, people just love surprises. Especially this crowd. You think they come down here to watch two guys have a fair fight? They come here to see blood and chaos and the unexpected, and you just gave them the best show they've had in months. That two-on-one is what's gonna have people talking about you tomorrow. That's how names get made down here. That's how you get noticed."

He reached into his back pocket and produced a fat envelope, the paper already spotted with something that might have been beer, and held it up between two fingers. "Fifteen hundred. Two-on-one pays triple. Count it if you want."

Mark held him there for another long second, then released the shirt with a shove that sent the man stumbling back a step. He took the envelope and thumbed it open and looked at the bills inside.

The announcer straightened his shirt with both hands and ran his fingers through his slicked-back hair to reset it. "I want you back here, kid. Next week. Same night. I'll put you on the main card this time, top billing, the crowd's gonna be twice as big after tonight, and the purse goes up with the crowd."

Mark shoved the envelope into the pocket of his jacket and picked up his shirt from the locker and pulled it on over his head. "I'll think about it," he said, and walked past the announcer and up the steps without looking back.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

...

He went back.

He told himself after the first night that he would think about it, and he thought about it for about an hour, and then he called the announcer on the number scrawled on the back of the crumpled card and said he was in for the following week, because the truth was that there had never been anything to think about. The underground ring was the only door he had found that might lead somewhere, and walking away from it would have meant going back to hitting corner boys in the Narrows and waiting for a lead that was never going to come.

So he went back.

He went back every week for three months, and every single one of those weeks tried to kill him.

The fights did not get easier. They got harder. The announcer, who Mark had come to understand was less an announcer and more a ringmaster who treated his fighters the way a man might treat livestock he was fattening for a particular kind of slaughter, had taken a liking to the spectacle that Brutus Bigshow provided and had adjusted the programming accordingly. 

The opponents got bigger. 

The odds got higher. 

The surprises got worse. 

In the fourth week they gave him a man who had razorblades taped between his knuckles. Which Mark had not known until the first punch opened a four-inch gash across his forearm that went down to the muscle and bled so badly he had to finish the fight with one arm essentially useless, gripping the wound shut with his free hand between exchanges. 

In the sixth week they put him against a former bare-knuckle champion from the Dublin circuits who had killed eleven men in the pit and who fought with a cold, surgical precision that was nothing like the wild brawling Mark had been getting used to, and who broke two of Mark's ribs with a body shot in the second minute and very nearly choked him unconscious in the fourth before Mark had managed to reverse the hold and drive his elbow into the man's temple hard enough to shut the lights off.

In the eighth week they gave him another two-on-one, and one of the two had a knife. He won that one, but the knife found his side twice before he got it away from the man, and the second wound was deep enough that he could feel the blade scrape against the bottom edge of a rib as it went in.

The walk back to Eve's apartment afterward was the longest walk of his life, each step pulling at the wound and sending fresh blood seeping through the wadded-up shirt he was pressing against it, leaving a trail of dark droplets on the pavement behind him that the rain would wash away before morning. It was here that he decided to bring a medical kit with him next time.

Eve was waiting for him at the door that night, the way she was always waiting for him on fight nights, she had not said a word when she saw the state of him, she had simply pulled him inside and sat him down on the kitchen floor and gone to work with the medical kit, the one she had assembled specifically for this purpose over the course of the first month, the one that had grown from a basic first-aid box into something that would not have looked out of place in a field hospital. 

She had cleaned the wounds, closed them and bandaged them and given him antibiotics and painkillers and water and food, and she had done all of it calmly with eyes that were red at the edges but dry, as she had decided at some point during the first month that she would not cry in front of him about this, and she had not, though he suspected she did it after he fell asleep.

She wanted him to stop.

She had wanted him to stop since the second week, when he had come home with a fractured orbital bone and a concussion that made him vomit three times on her bathroom floor before his vision settled. She had asked him to stop after the Dublin fighter broke his ribs. She had told him to stop after the knife fights. She had, on one occasion in the ninth week, sat across from him at her kitchen table and laid out every reason why what he was doing was unsustainable, from the accumulating injuries to the risk of being recognized to the simple statistical probability that sooner or later one of these fights would end with him on the floor of that pit and the men in the stained coveralls wrapping him in plastic and carrying him out through the boiler room door.

He had listened to all of it.

He had agreed with most of it.

He had gone back the following week anyway, because he had come too far to stop, stopping now would mean that every broken bone and every stab wound and every night Eve had spent on her knees on the kitchen floor stitching him back together had been for nothing.

Though he understood why she was so worried. The fighters in that pit were not the street-level dealers and corner boys he had been beating up for the last year. These were men who had been fighting and killing in cages like this one for years, some of them for longer than Mark had been alive, men who had survived dozens or hundreds of fights against other men who were trying to end them, men who had refined their violence into something deeply dangerous, even if they weren't as good as Mark was. 

They did not panic when they were hurt. They did not stop coming when they were bleeding. And every single one of them would do whatever it took to win, whether that was biting or gouging or pulling a weapon they had smuggled in or paying someone in the crowd to throw one in at the right moment, because in that pit there were no rules and the only thing that separated a winner from a corpse was the willingness to cross every line the other man would not.

Mark crossed them all.

He crossed them because he had to, it was the price of staying alive in a place designed to kill him, and because somewhere in the middle of the second month the part of him that might have hesitated at certain things had gone quiet in the face of the thing he was trying to accomplish and had not come back.

The only good part of any of it, the only measurable return on the blood and the pain and the sleepless nights and the look in Eve's eyes every time he came through her door leaking from somewhere new, was that it was working. Or at least the first part of it was working. The name was spreading. Not Mark Grayson, which nobody in that world knew or would ever know, but Brutus Bigshow, the giant who had shown up out of nowhere and had not lost a single fight in three months of the worst pit combat Gotham had to offer. 

He heard the name in the crowd, shouted by people he did not recognize. The announcer mentioned it with increasing frequency and volume, playing up the mythology of it, the undefeated newcomer, the monster in the cage, the man who would not stay down.

He still hated the name.

But the name was doing what it was supposed to do, which was make noise, and noise was the thing that traveled upward through the layers of Gotham's underworld until it reached the ears of people who mattered.

...

Three months in, on a Tuesday night, Mark sat on the wooden bench in the locker room with his shirt off and a medical stapler in his right hand and his teeth clenched so hard that the muscles in his jaw stood out like iron cords beneath his skin.

The stab wound was on the left side of his torso, just below the last rib, about four inches long and deep enough that he could see the dark red glisten of the muscle beneath the parted skin when he pulled the edges apart to clean it. It was the third wound he had taken tonight, the other two being a split on his eyebrow that had already clotted on its own and a deep bruise across his lower back where one of the three men he had fought had caught him with a kick that had driven him into the cage hard enough to bend one of the chain-link posts inward.

He had won. 

All three of them were currently somewhere between unconscious and hospitalized, and the crowd had been so loud at the end that the announcer's microphone had actually cut out from the feedback.

Though none of that mattered at all right now because the wound in his side was still open and bleeding and the only way to close it in this room with the tools he had was the stapler.

He positioned the first staple at the top of the wound, pressing the edges of the skin together with the fingers of his left hand while his right brought the stapler down and squeezed. The steel bit into his flesh with a painful sting that radiated outward through the surrounding tissue and made his stomach clench involuntarily. 

He exhaled hard through his nose, waited for the initial flare to subside, and then repositioned the stapler about a centimeter lower and squeezed again.

He was on the fifth staple,  when the locker room door opened behind him and the announcer's voice preceded him into the room. "Bigshow! Hey, Bigshow, you decent? I got somebody who wants to meet you."

Mark did not turn around. He squeezed the sixth staple into place, hissed through his teeth as the metal punched through the skin, and then set the stapler down on the bench beside him before he finally looked over his shoulder.

The announcer was standing in the doorway with his usual grin, but he had stepped to one side and was gesturing with an open palm toward the man standing beside him, and the man standing beside him was not the kind of man you usually saw in a basement locker room.

He was about fifty, with silver-grey hair combed neatly to one side and a clean-shaven face. His suit was charcoal, cut close to the body, with a silk pocket square that matched his tie, and his shoes were the kind of Italian leather that cost more than most people in this building made in a month. 

He stood with his hands folded in front of him and  moved his eyes over Mark's battered body. 

"Brutus," the announcer said, stretching the name out the way he always did, "this is Mr. Corsetti. He's a talent scout for a rather more upscale operation than this humble establishment of mine, and he came all the way down here tonight specifically to see you perform, which you did in spectacular fashion, as usual. I'll leave you two to talk."

The announcer gave Mark a wink, clapped Mr. Corsetti on the shoulder in a familiar way that the suited man did not appear to appreciate, and then slipped back through the door and pulled it shut behind him.

Mark looked at the man.

"Mr. Bigshow," Corsetti said. "I won't take up more of your time than necessary. You're clearly in need of medical attention and I suspect you'd rather be anywhere but here right now."

"You'd be right about that," Mark said.

Corsetti inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment and then folded his hands behind his back. "I represent an organization that operates a number of private fighting events throughout Gotham and its surrounding areas. These events are considerably more refined than what you've been participating in here, the venues are better, the purses are substantially larger, and the clientele are, shall we say, of a different caliber entirely. High-profile individuals, business leaders, certain figures within the city's more prominent families, people who appreciate the sport at its highest level and are willing to pay accordingly for the privilege of watching it."

He paused, and his eyes met Mark's directly.

"We recently had a vacancy in our roster. An unfortunate accident during a private event last week, the details of which are not important. We've been looking for a replacement, and when we asked around for recommendations, your name came up with considerable enthusiasm from multiple sources. I came here tonight to see for myself whether the reputation was justified."

He let that hang for a moment.

"It was."

Mark held the man's gaze without blinking. 

"Are you interested?" Corsetti asked.

"Yeah," Mark said. "I'm interested."

Corsetti smiled, it was the kind of smile that did not reach his eyes but was not trying to. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and produced a card, matte black with raised silver lettering, and extended it between two fingers. Mark took it and looked at it. An address. A date. A time. Nothing else.

"One more thing," Corsetti said, as Mark turned the card over in his hand. "The name. Brutus Bigshow is, if you'll forgive me, a bit crude for our events. Our fighters typically go by something with a bit more refinement. Is there something else you'd prefer to be called?"

Mark looked up from the card. "That's fine," he said. "I never liked the name anyway."

He tucked the card into the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging from the locker door beside him, and then he looked back at Corsetti.

"You can call me Invincible."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

_____________________________________

Corsetti walked back through the basement the way a man might walk through a sewer. When he exited the lockers the crowd pressed in around him from all sides, their bodies slick with sweat and beer and substances he did not care to identify, the stench of them hitting him in layers as he navigated the narrow gaps between clusters of tattoed thugs and their various companions. 

A woman with smeared mascara and a top that had given up any pretense of covering anything stumbled into his path and grabbed at his lapel with sticky fingers, and he sidestepped her without making contact the way one might sidestep a puddle of something piss on a sidewalk.

The announcer caught him near the exit, materializing at his elbow with that gold-toothed grin and the particular odor of cheap cologne layered over stale sweat that Corsetti had been enduring since their initial introduction two hours ago.

"So? We got a deal? You taking my boy? Don't forget who pointed you in his direction, Mr. C, I expect a finder's fee on this one, you know how it—"

"We'll be in touch," Corsetti said, removing the hand from his shoulder with two fingers the way one might remove a piece of wet garbage from a countertop, he then turned and walked up the concrete stairs toward the door without looking back.

The night air hit him the moment he stepped outside, and he stood there on the cracked sidewalk for a long moment with his eyes closed and his hand pressed flat against his stomach.The smell of the place was still in his nostrils. The sweat of the crowd and the reek of the announcer's breath and the thick, humid stink of the poor people.

Corsetti straightened his tie and smoothed the front of his jacket with both palms, erasing the wrinkles and  began walking toward the black sedan larked at the curb twenty yards down the block.

The only part of the evening that had been worth the indignity was the fighter.

Invincible.

Corsetti turned the name over in his mind as he walked, and alongside it the image of the man himself, sitting shirtless on that filthy bencht. The body was extraordinary, that went without saying, the kind of physique that belonged on a statue. 

But it was the face that had stayed with Corsetti the longest, the dark eyes and the strong jaw and the way the blood streaking down from the cut on his eyebrow had somehow made the whole picture more striking rather than less, the way certain paintings looked better with age and imperfection.

A very attractive man, even with all that blood. Perhaps especially with all that blood.

Corsetti sighed quietly through his nose, it only he were not married to his bitch wife, who would sooner see him in the ground than see him happy, and who had made the last twelve years of his life a masterwork of misery. Perhaps then he would be able to touch that vision of human perfection. 

The driver was already out of the car and standing beside the rear passenger door with one gloved hand on the handle by the time Corsetti reached the curb. The door swung open smoothly and Corsetti ducked inside, settling into the leather seat. 

He sat in the quiet of the cabin for a moment, allowing the climate-controlled air and the faint scent of the leather conditioner to push the last traces of the Greenpoint Bowling Alley out of his sinuses, and then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and withdrew his phone and dialled a number. 

"Yes."

"Mr. Falcone," Corsetti said. "I've filled the vacancy."

"Is he a suitable replacement."

"I believe he is. He's undefeated in three months of open-circuit fighting, and his performance tonight against three opponents simultaneously was the most impressive display of raw combat ability I've seen in the seven yeare. But regardless, the fighting itself should determine that. It always does."

"Good," Luca Falcone said. "I want prime specimens ready for him. The best we have. If he's what you say he is, I want to see it for myself."

"Of course, Mr. Falcone."

Corsetti lowered the phone from his ear and held it in his lap for a long moment, looking out through the tinted window at the streets of Gotham sliding past as the sedan pulled away from the curb and merged into the late-night traffic heading south.

_____________________________________

"I don't like it."

Eve was in her computer chair with her feet pulled up underneath her and three of the four monitors filled with search results and database queries and archived records that had turned up precisely nothing of value in the four hours she had been looking. The fourth monitor displayed the matte-black card Mark had brought home from the locker room, photographed from both sides at high resolution and run through every image-recognition and text-matching algorithm she had access to. The address on it corresponded to a warehouse in the garment district that, according to city records, had been vacant for eleven years. The name Corsetti had produced exactly two results in the GCPD database, neither of which matched the man Mark had described.

"There's nothing," Eve said, spinning her chair to face him where he was leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen with a glass of water in his hand. "No records, no filings, no business registrations, no liquor licenses, no event permits, no noise complaints, no utility bills at that address. I can't find Corsetti in any database I have access to, and I have access to a lot of databases, Mark. Whoever these people are, they've been scrubbed clean or they never existed in the first place, even illegal operations have a business front or a shell company they run their money through."

Mark took a sip of his water and shrugged. "They're probably just the secretive type. High-end operation, rich clientele, mob money. They're not going to leave a paper trail for someone like you to find. That's the whole point."

"That's exactly my point. If I can't find them, I can't watch them, and if I can't watch them, I can't watch you." She pushed her hair back from her face with both hands and held it there for a moment while she stared at him. "We need to find out more before you go in there. We need something. Anything. A name, a layout, an exit route, some kind of leverage. You can't just walk into a building you've never been in, run by people you've never met, to fight opponents you know nothing about, with no backup and no extraction plan."

"Eve—"

"No. I'm not budging on this. You go in blind and you could end up on a table in a basement somewhere with nobody coming to get you." She crossed her arms and her jaw set in the way that told him this was not a negotiation. "Ask Ted."

Mark's head tilted back against the doorframe and he let out a slow breath through his nose while he looked at the ceiling. "Ted's going to give me shit for this."

"Good. Maybe you'll listen to him."

"I doubt it."

"Ask him anyway."

"Eve—"

"Ask Ted or I don't cook for you. That's the deal. No information, no dinner. You can eat protein bars and cold pizza for the rest of the week."

Mark looked at her with an expression that was, for a man of his size and general disposition, remarkably close to a pout. "You wouldn't."

"Try me."

He stood there for another few seconds and sighed the sigh of a man who had learned over the course of many years that there were certain arguments with Eve Wilkins that simply could not be won. "Fine," he said. "

"I'll ask Ted."

Eve got up from the chair and walked across the room and stood directly in front of him, tilting her head back to look up at the full height of him. "Promise me."

"Eve, I just said—"

"Promise me, Mark."

He sighed again, longer this time. "I promise I'll ask Ted."

"Today."

"Today. Yes. I promise. Today. Can I eat now?"

"After you ask Ted."

He made a sound at the back of his throat and he pushed off the doorframe and grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door and shrugged it on over his shoulders while Eve watched him with her arms still crossed and the smallest hint of a satisfied smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.

"I'm going," he said.

"I know."

"I'm going right now."

"I can see that."

He opened the door and stepped into the hallway and turned back to look at her one more time. "You're extremely difficult, you know that?"

"I know," she said, and closed the door in his face.

...

Grant's Gym looked the same as it always did, which was to say it looked like it had been built during the Great Depression. Mark pushed through the glass door and the bell jingled above him.

He dropped his bag on the bench by the lockers and stripped off his jacket and his hoodie and opened the locker he had been using since he was fourteen and pulled out a compression shirt and a pair of shorts, because if he was going to be here he might as well get some work in. 

He was pulling the compression shirt over his head when a voice came from behind him.

"Well, well, well. Look who finally remembered where the gym is."

Mark turned around with the shirt halfway down his torso and found Dinah Lance leaning against the end of the locker row with a towel over one shoulder and a water bottle in her hand and an expression on her face that was approximately sixty percent amusement and forty percent accusation.

"Hey, Dinah."

"Hey, Dinah, he says. Like it hasn't been four months." She pushed off the lockers and walked toward him, shaking her head slowly while her blonde ponytail swayed behind her. "Four months, Mark. No calls, no texts, no showing up to get your ass kicked by Ted. I was starting to think you'd finally gotten smart and found a real hobby. Or that you were dead. One of the two."

"I've been busy."

"Busy. Sure. Too busy to come hit a bag? Too busy to let your favorite sparring partner work on her right hook?" She stopped in front of him, close enough that he could smell the coconut shampoo again, she tilted her head and looked up at him with one eyebrow raised. "Or were you just avoiding me because I beat you last time and your ego needed a few months to recover?"

"You didn't beat me last time."

"I beat you last time."

"It was a draw."

"It was not a draw, Mark. You were on the canvas. Draws don't involve the canvas."

He opened his mouth to argue and then closed it, because she was right and they both knew it, and he pulled the compression shirt the rest of the way down over his torso and reached for his shorts.

Dinah's expression changed.

It happened in the space between one breath and the next, the teasing warmth in her eyes shifting into something more focused as her gaze tracked across the landscape of his body in the half second it was up before the shirt had covered it. She had seen what was underneath. The scars. The fresh ones that were still pink and raised across his ribs. The staple marks along his left side. The bruising that had faded to a yellowish green along his obliques but was still clearly the remnant of something that had hit him very, very hard.

"Mark."

"Hmm?"

"Where did you get those."

He didn't look at her. He pulled the shorts out of the locker and started to change. "Just a couple of accidents."

Dinah's right foot came up behind his left knee and kicked it forward with a  strike that buckled the joint and made him stumble forward a full step before he caught himself on the locker door.

"Hey!" he said, spinning around.

"Sorry," she said, in a tone that contained precisely zero apology, her arms crossing over her chest while she looked at him with anunimpressed expression. "Accident."

"Dinah—"

"Be serious with me, Mark. What happened to you."

He stood there for a moment, leaning against the locker with one hand, he looked at her face and saw the concern underneath the irritation and knew that she was not going to let this go. 

He sighed. "I've been fighting in the underground rings."

Dinah's eyes widened. Her fist connected with his upper arm before the sentence had fully settled, a solid punch that would have staggered a smaller man and that made even Mark's shoulder rock backward from the impact.

"Are you out of your goddamn mind?" she said, 

 her voice had climbed a lott and her blue eyes were blazing.

"Dinah—"

"Which one?"

"The bowling alley."

She hit him again, harder this time, in the exact same spot, and this time it actually hurt. "The bowling alley! The one in Greenpoint with the slimy announcer with the gold tooth! That's the worst one in the city, Mark! People don't come out of that place! Think, Mark! Think! Why in the hell would you go there?"

"I needed to."

"You needed to." She repeated the words back at him like they were the stupidest three words ever arranged in that particular order in the English language. "You needed to get stabbed and beaten half to death in a basement full of criminals for what? Money? Glory? A death wish?"

"It's over now."

Dinah stopped mid-breath. "What do you mean it's over?"

Mark considered not telling her. He considered it for about two seconds before he looked at her face again, he understood with absolute certainty that she would physically wrestle the information out of him if she had to.

"I got scouted," he said. "One of the high-end establishments sent a man down to watch me fight. He offered me a spot on their roster. Private events, richer clientele, the whole thing. That's actually why I'm here today. I need to talk to Ted about it because he used to fight in those places when he was younger, and I need to know what I'm walking into."

Dinah looked at him for a moment without speaking, her arms still crossed. "Which one?" she asked.

"I'm not sure. I've got a card with a date and a time and an address. That's it."

"Come on," Dinah said, and she grabbed him by the hand, pulled him away from the lockers and started walking toward the back of the gym where the ring was, dragging Mark behind her like a very large, confused dog on a leash.

Ted was in the ring, leaning on the ropes and talking a young welterweight through a combination. Dinah walked right up to the edge of the ring and looked up at him. "Office. Now."

Ted looked down at her, then at Mark behind her, then back at her. He let out a slow exhale through his nose that communicated a great deal about his feelings regarding being interrupted. "Give me five minutes, I'm in the middle of—"

"Now, Ted."

Ted looked at her for another second, then turned to the kid in the ring. "Hit the bags. Work the jab. I'll be badk in a few minutes."

He ducked through the ropes and dropped to the floor and walked past both of them toward the small office at the back of the gym.  Ted dropped into the chair behind the desk and folded his arms and looked at Mark. "Well, well. The prodigal son returns. Four months, kid. Four goddamn months without so much as a phone call. I was starting to think you'd—"

"He's been fighting in the underground rings," Dinah said.

Ted's expression changed the way a sky changes when a storm front rolls in. "You idiotic dumbass," Ted said.

"Ted—"

"You braindead, reckless, thick-skulled, idiotic dumbass. The underground rings. The ones I told you about when you were fifteen years old because I wanted you to know what they were so you would never, ever, under any circumstances, go near them. Those rings?"

"It's not as bad as—"

"Shut up. The hell were you thinking? You got a gym, you got a trainer, you got talent that most fighters would cut their own hands off for, and you're down in a basement getting stabbed for pocket money? What's the matter with you, kid? You need money? I don't have a lot but I'll help you out if that's what this is about, you know I will, you just have to—"

"I don't need money, Ted." Mark's voice was quieter now. "It was for personal reasons. I needed to be there."

Ted stared at him for a long time without speaking, his arms still crossed, but before he could say anything Dinah stepped in. "There's more. He got scouted. Someone from one of the high-end rings came down and offered him a spot. He's got a card with an address and a date and nothing else. We were hoping you might know something about the operation or the man who recruited him. Guy named Corsetti, well-dressed, Italian, mid-fifties."

Ted's hand came up to his face and he scratched slowly along the line of his jaw. "High-end fighting rings in Gotham," he said slowly. "There's really only three that matter. One's run by the Russians out of Brighton, one's run by a private syndicate that caters to the old-money Gotham families, and one's run by the Five Families jointly. By the sounds of what you're describing, the venue, the secrecy, the way the recruitment works, you've gotten yourself into the third one."

"So the Mafia," Mark said.

Ted nodded, but his expression did not lighten. "Yeah. The Mafia. But that's not what's going to be your problem. Despite being criminals, everything in those rooms is run fair. You won't find any cheating. No weapons thrown in, no rigged matches. The families have too much money riding on the outcomes to let anyone tamper with them. The fights are clean." He leaned forward in the chair, his elbows on the desk. "No, the problem you're going to have is what's standing across the ring from you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean the fighters, kid. Those low-class pit fights you've been fighting in, those are filled with the desperate guys. The washouts. The ones who never made it and never will and are fighting because they've got nothing left and nowhere else to go. But the high-end rings?" Ted's voice dropped. "Those are filled with champions. Real ones. Masters of their craft who have been doing this their whole lives. Guys who have trained under the best coaches in the world and who fight at a level you haven't seen yet. I fought in those rings back in my prime, Mark, and I struggled. I struggled against a lot of them. These are trained killers who really know what they're doing, and they do it with a precision and a technique that makes the brawlers in the basement look like children slapping each other on a playground."

He let the words settle for a moment, then said what he had been building toward since the conversation started. "Mark, you're a good kid. You've got talent, real talent, more raw ability than anyone I've trained in forty years. But you are not ready for this level. Not yet. Maybe not for a while."

Mark felt the heat rise in his chest, the old familiar stubbornness pushing up against him. "I'll get better," he said.

"Kid, getting better takes time, it takes—"

"I'll get better, Ted."

Dinah put a hand on his arm, "Mark, listen to him. He's not saying you can't do it eventually. He's saying the gap between where you are and where these fighters are is bigger than you think. You've been winning in a pit where the other guys fight dirty and sloppy and desperate. These people won't fight like that. They'll be skilled and disciplined and they'll take you apart if you go in there."

Mark looked at her hand on his arm and then at Ted's face behind the desk and then at the photograph on the wall behind Ted's head, the one of a much younger Ted Grant standing over a fallen opponent in a ring.

"I'll fight," he said. "And I'll win... no matter what."

Ted closed his eyes for a moment and let out a breath. "At least let me work with you first. Let me teach you properly before you throw yourself into it. Give me a few weeks and I can—"

"The fight's next week."

The silence that followed extremely awkward and lasted long enough that Mark felt like he needed to get out of there.

"I appreciate you both worrying about me," Mark said, and he meant it. "But I've got this. I'll be fine." He turned and headed for the office door.

"Mark, wait."

He turned back. Dinah was already grabbing her jacket from the back of the chair where she had thrown it and her gym bag from the floor beside it, slinging both over one shoulder as she crossed the small office. 

Mark looked at her with his brow creased. "What are you doing?"

"What, two friends can't hang out?" She raised an eyebrow at him as she came through the doorway and fell into step beside him. "Or are you too busy for that too?"

"I don't really hang out with friends."

"Yeah, I'm not surprised." She reached down and took his hand and started pulling him toward the front door of the gym. "Come on. I'm going to show you how it's done."

...

The Thai place on Baxter Street was small, loud and smelled so aggressively of lemongrass and chili that Mark's eyes watered before they had made it through the door. It was also, by Dinah's account, the best pad thai in Gotham, a claim that Mark was not in a position to dispute because he had eaten Thai food approximately four times in his life and all four of those times had been from the same takeout place near Eve's apartment that Dinah informed him, with considerable feeling, did not count.

They ordered at the counter and took their food in paper containers and ate it on the street because Dinah said that was the only proper way to eat street food, and Mark, who had never eaten anything on the street that wasn't a hot dog from a cart, did not argue because the pad thai was, in fact, very good. 

They walked through Chinatown with the paper containers steaming in their hands and the late-afternoon light cutting through the gaps between the buildings. 

Somewhere around the second block Mark realized that he was actually not thinking about Luca Falcone or the fighting ring or the black card in his pocket.

He was not sure when the last time that had happened was.

"You know what's weird?" Dinah said, spearing a piece of chicken with her fork and gesturing at him with it. "We've known each other for years. Like, what, five years? Six? And I feel like I don't actually know you at all. I know you hit hard, you don't talk much and you like plain cheese pizza and you're allergic to fun. But that's about it."

"I'm not allergic to fun."

"Name the last fun thing you did."

Mark thought about it.

"That's what I thought," Dinah said, and ate the chicken.

"It is strange, though," Mark said after a moment, turning his fork through the noodles. "Six years. You'd think I'd at least know your middle name by now."

"It's Laurel."

"Laurel... weird."

"What's yours?"

"Sebastian."

"Mark Sebastian Grayson." She tested it on her tongue and then nodded. "That tracks. That's a very serious name for a very serious person."

Mark rolled his eyes. 

They turned a corner and walked past a row of fish markets, Dinah tossed her empty container into a trash can without breaking stride and wiped her hands on a napkin she produced from her jacket pocket. "You know what I remember?" she said. "I remember the first day you showed up at Ted's. You were, what, fourteen?"

"Thirteen."

"Thirteen. God, you were tiny. You were this scrawny little kid with arms like sticks and this look on your face like you were going to fight everyone in there. Ted put you on the bag and your first punch barely made it swing. You remember that?"

"I remember."

"And now look at you." She glanced sideways at him, the look was brief but it traveled the full length of him, from his shoulders down through his arms and across his chest.

Mark smirked. "Not so small anymore."

"No," Dinah said quietly, her gaze lingered for a moment longer than it needed to before she looked away. "No you're not."

They walked in silence for a few steps before Dinah let out a sudden laugh that startled a pigeon off a fire hydrant. "Oh God, do you remember the shower thing?"

Mark groaned.

"You do! You remember!" She was grinning now, the full version, the one that made her eyes crinkle at the corners. "That time when Santos, DeVito and that other kid, what was his name, the one with the ears—"

"Morales."

"Morales! When the three of them were trying to watch me through the gap in the shower partition, and you came around the corner and just went absolutely ballistic on all three of them at once. You were like a feral cat. A very small, very angry feral cat."

"I beat them up," Mark said.

"You did not beat them up, Mark. Santos was twice your size and he hit you so hard you went through the door of the supply closet. You got back up and he hit you again and you went into the mop bucket. And you got back up again. And he hit you again."

"And then I beat them up."

"Only because you literally would not stay down. Santos told me afterward that he stopped hitting you because he was worried you were broken somehow. Like, mechanically. Like whatever part of the brain tells normal people to stop getting up had just been left out of you."

Mark shrugged and tossed his own empty container into the next trash can they passed. "I wanted them to stop doing something. They stopped. A win's a win."

Dinah giggled, a light, genuine sound that seemed to surprise even her, and she shook her head while they walked. "I was always surprised you didn't try to join them, honestly."

Mark looked at her. "Why would I?"

Dinah raised an eyebrow. "Why would you. Because I was an eighteen-year-old woman in a shower and you were a teenage boy with functioning eyeballs. Why do you think?"

Mark looked at her with an expression so perfectly deadpan that it might have been carved from stone. "Dinah," he said. "I'm gay."

Dinah's eyes went wide.

"I — oh," she said, and her cheeks flushed a shade of pink that was visible even in the golden afternoon light. "Oh, Mark, I'm sorry, I didn't...I had no idea, I would never have... God, all those times I was... were you uncomfortable when I... I mean I was always kind of... oh shit, I'm so sorry, I—"

The smile started at the corner of Mark's mouth and spread slowly across his face until it cracked into something wide and deeply amused, and then the laugh came. 

Dinah stared at him.

Then she hit him.

"You absolute bastard!" she shouted, her fist connecting with his upper arm hard enough that it actually made a sound, Mark was laughing too hard to dodge it, his shoulders shaking and his eyes squeezed shut. "I was having a genuine crisis! I was rethinking every conversation we've ever had!"

Mark stopped laughing eventually, though the smirk stayed fixed on his face like it had been welded there, and he rubbed the spot on his arm where she had hit him and looked down at her with the kind of warmth in his dark eyes that she was not accustomed to seeing there. "I was tempted to look," he said. "I'll admit that. But I decided that if I had to resort to something like that to see a naked woman, then women were probably right to stay away from me."

"I doubt women stay away from you," Dinah said with a raised brow. 

"You'd be surprised," Mark said with a laugh. He threw his napkin into the next bin they passed and shrugged. "I've spent so long turning myself into a—"

He stopped.

The sentence had been going somewhere and he had caught it just before it arrived, and Dinah saw the catch happen, saw the way his jaw tightened and his eyes went somewhere else for a fraction of a second.

She reached out and touched his arm. "Mark," she said. "You can trust me. I'm your friend. I know that's not a word you use a lot, and I know you don't let many people in. But I'm here. And I want to help you."

Mark didn't say anything.

They kept walking. The shops of Chinatown thinned out and gave way to residential blocks and then to the edge of Robinson Park, where the old iron gates stood open. They went through the gates and down one of the gravel paths that wound through the trees and past the pond. They found a bench near the pond that was dry enough to sit on and they sat down. Mark sat with his forearms on his knees and his hands hanging between them and he looked at the water and was quiet for a long time.

Then he told her.

He told her about his mother. He told her about Luca Falcone. He told her about what he had spent the five years since then doing, and why, and what it had cost him, and what it was going to cost him still. He told her about the Narrows and Rocco and Fat Tony and the Estoria and the two college students who had died because he had started a war in a nightclub. He told her about Batman and the offer he had turned down and why he had turned it down, the real reason, the one he had not said to anyone except Eve.

He told her that Luca Falcone was going to die.

He told her that the fighting ring was not about money or glory or a death wish. It was a door. The only door he had left. And he was going to walk through it no matter what was on the other side.

When he finished the light had changed and the sun was just disappearing over the horizon and Dinah was sitting very still beside him with her hands in her lap.

"That's unbelievably dangerous," she said, after a while. "You know that."

"I know."

"You could die."

"I know."

She sat with it for another long moment, Mark could see her turning it over behind her eyes the way he had seen Eve turn things over, weighing the arguments against each other, measuring the gap between what she wanted to say and what she knew would actually be heard. "I understand," she said finally. "I don't agree with all of it. But I understand."

She stood up from the bench and looked down at him and held out her hand. "Come with me."

Mark looked at her hand and then up at her face. "Where are we going?"

"Just follow me."

...

Dinah's apartment was on the third floor of a converted warehouse on the east side of the Bowery, when she unlocked the front door and pushed it open Mark understood immediately why she had brought him here.

The space was enormous, a single open-plan studio that took up the entire floor, with exposed brick walls and tall windows. One corner held a bed and a small kitchen and the normal furniture of a life lived indoors, but the rest of it, the vast majority of it, was a gym.

Mats covered the central floor area in, the kind of high-density foam that you trained on when you were serious about ground work. 

A heavy bag hung from a reinforced beam. A speed bag was mounted on a platform near the window. A rack of free weights stood against one wall.

"Why are we here?" Mark asked.

Dinah tossed her leather jacket onto the back of a chair and pulled her hair out of its ponytail and re-tied it tighter and higher on her head. She was already rolling her shoulders and loosening her neck as she walked toward the matted area in the center of the room.

"I'll support you," she said, turning to face him as she stepped onto the mat. "I'll support what you're doing, and I won't try to talk you out of it. But you have to agree to something first."

"What."

"You take lessons from me."

Mark snorted. "Why would I need lessons from you. I win forty percent of our fights."

Dinah laughed. "Mark. Sweetheart. I've been going easy on you."

"Bullshit."

"I've been going easy on you for three years."

"I don't believe you."

Dinah pulled her shoes off and dropped them beside the mat and started stretching, her long legs folding into positions that demonstrated a flexibility Mark had never fully appreciated. 

She looked at him from the middle of a stretch that had one leg extended behind her and the other bent beneath her at an angle that should not have been comfortable. "Get on the mat," she said. "I'll show you."

"I just ate."

"So have I."

Mark looked at her for a moment, then he sighed and pulled his shoes off and his shirt over his head and stepped onto the mat across from her. "Fine," he said. "But when I win, you—"

She moved.

The first thing Mark registered was that she was no longer standing where she had been standing. The second thing he registered was that her leg was already in the air. The third thing he registered was the bottom of her foot connecting with the side of his jaw in a spinning kick that came from an angle he had never seen in any of their previous sparring sessions, an arc that started very low down and whipped upward in a motion that used her entire body as a lever, her hips rotating through a full revolution while her supporting foot pivoted on the ball and her striking leg extended to its full length at the exact moment of impact.

His head snapped sideways. He staggered but did not fall, and he immediately raised his guard and stepped in to close the distance the way he always did, throwing a heavy right cross aimed at her shoulder to drive her back.

She wasn't there.

She had dropped beneath the punch entirely, her body folding at the waist into a crouch that put her center of gravity somewhere around his knees, and from that position she launched into something that he could only later describe as a kind of sweep that used her entire body weight in rotation, one leg scything across the mat in a wide arc that hooked behind his ankle while her hands planted on the floor and her other leg came up and over in a cartwheel-like motion that ended with her boot cracking against his ribs from below. The sweep took his footing and the kick took his balance and he hit the mat on his back hard enough to feel it in his teeth.

He rolled and got up immediately and he came at her again, faster this time, with a combination that started with a jab and transitioned into a hook and a knee strike that would have ended most fights he had been in.

Dinah redirected the jab with a circular motion of her forearm that used his own momentum to turn him slightly off-axis, and in the same breath she stepped inside the hook and caught his arm at the wrist and elbow and guided it past her body in a flowing motion that looked almost gentle and was absolutely devastating, because by the time his brain registered what had happened she had his arm locked at full extension with her hip pressed against his elbow joint and her body rotating away from him in a way that threatened to hyperextend the joint if he did not follow, and he followed, and she used that compliance to send him stumbling past her while her trailing leg swept up in a high crescent kick that caught him across the back of the skull and put him on the mat for the second time.

He got up again.

She put him down four more times in the next ninety seconds.

Each time was different. Each time used a technique he had not seen from her in seven years of training at the same gym. Her legs were weapons of a completely different order than anything he had encountered in the pit, kicks that came from angles he did not know existed, launched from positions that should not have generated power but somehow did, spinning and flowing and chaining into each other in sequences that felt less like a fighting style and more like a language he did not speak. 

When he closed the distance she redirected him with joint locks and throws that used his own strength against him. When he created distance she closed it with footwork that was faster than his eyes could track.

After the sixth time he hit the mat she stood over him, not even breathing hard, and she placed her bare foot gently on his chest and drew it slowly downward along his sternum before lifting it off and smiling down at him. "When we spar at Ted's, it's usually boxing and a bit of Muay Thai," she said. "But that's not really my game, Mark. I'm a kicker."

Mark lay on his back on the mat and looked up at her and felt the very specific cocktail of annoyance and respect that came from being beaten by someone who had apparently been holding back on him for three years. "You've really been holding back on me," he said.

"I wanted to get better at punching," she said with a shrug that was entirely unapologetic. "You're a good partner for that."

She extended her hand down to him and he took it and pulled, when he got up she didn't let go of his hand immediately. She held it for a moment and looked up at him. "The kinds of opponents you're going to face in that ring are not going to be boxers and brawlers, Mark. They're going to be like me. Skilled. Trained. Versatile. And if you walk in there with nothing but power and a straight right, they're going to take you apart."

Mark let out a long breath and looked at the mat beneath his feet and then at the ceiling and then back at her. "Fine," he said. "I'll take your lessons."

"Good."

"But I don't see the point. The fight's next week."

Dinah sat down on the mat beside him and crossed her legs and leaned back on her hands and smiled, she reached over and tapped her finger against the center of his chest. "You're probably going to lose," she said.

Mark scoffed and looked down at her. "I won't lose," he said.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Didn't you know... I'm—"

(AN: Title Card. Anyway chapter 2 is done, only around 2 more chapters until the end of the prologue. I just wanted to set an origin for Mark and introduce some important character. I'm trying to take things a bit slower than I did in Life can Change and that means more time with Mark without his powers. But don't worry it wouldn't be Mark Grayson if he wasn't a Viltrumite so he'll be getting them soon. Anyway who likes Black Canary? She's pretty sexy no?)