DC: All for One Chapter 19 — The Future Foundation (Patreon)

(Six Months Later)

"Welcome back to Late Night with Greg Carlin, folks," he said as the applause from the studio audience settled into a hush. "Now, before our next guest comes out, I want to take a moment to talk about something a little more serious than the bits we usually do on this show, because lately, well, you don't need me to tell you what it's been like out there. You live here. You've seen it. Crime in Gotham is at a historic high. Organised crime has stopped being organised at all and turned into a free-for-all turf war. The heroes are stretched so thin you can see through them. The GCPD is overworked, underpaid, and probably underwater on their mortgages too."

He paused for the timing and lifted his coffee mug in a small toast. "Personally, I am sad to report that just last week my third house was broken into."

The audience cracked up, and Greg let the laugh ride for a moment before he leaned forward over his desk with his hands clasped together.

"Three houses, folks," he continued. "I have three houses. They have all been broken into. At this point I'm starting to think I should just leave the doors open and put out a tip jar."

The audience laughed harder.

"But, you know, it's not all doom and gloom out there," he said, and the audience gave a cheer. "It really isn't. Because here's the thing about hard times. Hard times make strong people. It's the rough patches that bring out the folks who are willing to stand up and do something when everybody else is hiding under the kitchen table waiting for it all to be over."

He nodded along with himself and gestured toward the curtain at the side of the stage with one open hand.

"And tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I have one of those people right here with me. A young man who, when this city was at its lowest in years, decided he wasn't going to wait for somebody else to fix it. So he started fixing it himself. He set up food banks across the East End and the Narrows. He set up soup kitchens that have been running seven days a week since the gang wars started. He organised a community programme that puts trained volunteers on every block between schools and the bus routes so kids can actually get to class and back without getting caught in crossfire. He set up a free medical centre in one of the worst neighbourhoods in the city, staffed it himself, and started seeing patients without charging them a dime. And folks, just in case you think that wasn't enough..."

Greg paused and held up one finger.

"He has now started his own company. The first product line is an advanced smartphone that he is selling at a price so far below what Wayne Enterprises and LexCorp put their phones at that, he is practically giving them away for free ladies and gentlemen. The lines outside the stores when the preorders opened were wrapped around the block. I have preordered one. My wife has preordered one."

The audience applauded and laughed, and Greg waited for the moment to settle before he gestured fully toward the side curtain.

"You're probably wondering who this miraculous young man is, so let me stop teasing you. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the show, Mister Ethan Kane!"

The applause swelled into a standing ovation as Ethan walked out from behind the curtain. He was dressed in a charcoal suit cut close to his frame with a deep burgundy tie against a white shirt, he raised one hand to the audience a brief acknowledgement before he crossed the floor to the chair beside Greg's desk. He shook the host's hand across the surface of the desk while Greg rose halfway out of his seat to meet him, and when he sat down he buttoned the top button of his jacket with a single practiced motion before crossing one leg over the other and settling into the chair.

"Mister Kane, welcome to the show," Greg said warmly.

"Thank you, Greg," Ethan replied. "I'm happy to be here."

The applause died down naturally as the audience settled back into their seats, and Greg gave it another moment before he leaned forward on his elbows. "Alright, look, I have to ask, because this is what people want to know," he said with an exaggerated raised eyebrow. "Food banks, soup kitchens, medical centres, school escorts, cheap phones. You're, what, nineteen? Twenty? So what I have to ask is, what's the catch, son? Because nobody is this perfect. Nobody. Either you're an alien, you're a robot, or there's a basement somewhere I don't want to know about. Which one is it?"

The audience laughed and Ethan laughed with them.

"I'm kidding, I'm kidding," Greg continued while he waved both hands. "Mostly. But, in all seriousness, this is a lot. And it's expensive. And nobody does this much without there being some kind of plan behind it. So talk to me. What is the catch?"

Ethan let the laughter die down before he answered,

"Honestly, Greg, the catch isn't any more complicated than the perks of running a business," he said. "I charge ten percent over cost on the phones. That's my profit margin. Now, the reason that works is because I designed every component in those devices myself. The processor, the screen, the battery management system, the operating system, all of it. I also designed the machines that manufacture those components. And a significant percentage of the materials we use are recycled from electronic waste that we source through partnerships with municipal recycling programmes across the eastern seaboard. So the actual cost to produce a phone, when you control every step of the supply chain and you're not paying licensing fees to anyone else, is dramatically lower than what people assume."

Greg clapped his hands together in genuine appreciation. "Wow," he said. "Wow. Okay. So, tell me a little more about the Future Foundation. That's the company, right? Future Foundation? Because that is a name with some ambition behind it. That's not a name you give to a phone company."

Ethan smiled. "It's not a phone company."

"Oh boy," Greg said, leaning back. "I knew there was more to it. I mean the phones are good, but they're not that good."

The audience laughed and Ethan laughed too. "The phones," he said when the laughter settled, "are only the beginning, Greg. I led with them because I believe, very deeply, that everyone should have access to the library of human knowledge that the internet represents, and right now they don't. Right now access to the internet is gated by carrier contracts that price working families out of the market and force them to choose between staying connected and paying their utility bills. With Horizon, which is the carrier service we've built into the phone at no additional charge, every Future Foundation device comes with unlimited calls, unlimited messages, and unlimited data, free, for the lifetime of the device."

"Free," Greg repeated.

"Free."

The audience, on its own this time without any prompting from the producers broke into applause. 

"But that's just the beginning," Ethan continued when the applause thinned. "The Future Foundation is going to be a place that helps move humanity forward. And when I say humanity, Greg, I don't mean the one percent who can afford to move forward already. I mean everyone. I mean the people in the East End who haven't seen a doctor in five years because they can't afford the copay. I mean the kids in the Narrows who have never owned a computer. I mean the veterans on Park Row who served this country and came home to find that this country had nothing waiting for them. If I can help it, nobody gets left behind."

Greg clapped his hands together again, and the audience joined him, the applause this time was the loudest it had been all night.

"Amazing," Greg said when it died down. "That's amazing. But let me push you on something, because I'd be a bad host if I didn't. You're talking about giving away phones, giving away internet, giving away medical care. You're rocking the boat, Ethan. You are rocking the boat hard. There are companies out there, big, established, very rich companies, who do not love what you're doing right now. Phone carriers. Phone manufacturers. Diffetent networks. Aren't you worried about putting them out of business? About the kind of people you're making nervous?"

Ethan considered the question for a moment before he answered. "I suppose so," he said. "But at the end of the day, Greg, I am more concerned about the people than I am about a company's profit margins. Does the CEO of X-Mobile really need a yacht? Does he really need five different houses across three different countries while there are families in Gotham who can't afford to heat their homes? I struggle with that. I struggle with the math of that. And I think, if a lot of those companies are nervous about what I'm doing, it goes to show just how much they care about their customers."

Greg leaned back in his chair with an exaggerated wince. "Ethan, Ethan, Ethan. That sounds a little communist, son. You're not turning red on me here, are you?"

The audience laughed and Ethan shook his head with a small smile. "I prefer to think of it as being consumer-friendly, Greg," he said. "The Future Foundation is going to focus on developing technologies that address societal problems. The profits we generate from the consumer products we sell are going to be reinvested into the charitable initiatives we've already established. The food banks. The medical centres. The school escort programme. Everything we earn goes back into the community that earned it for us. That's the model. I don't think there's anything particularly communist about a business that takes care of the customers it depends on, but if there is, well, you can call me whatever you'd like."

Greg shook his head slowly. "Folks, I don't even know what to say to that. That is amazing. That is, honestly, just amazing."

He let the moment breathe before he leaned forward again. "Alright, let's switch gears. Because the world has heard about the work, but they don't really know much about the man behind the work. Tell me about Ethan Kane?"

Ethan smiled, but the smile was a fraction smaller than the previous ones had been, and he uncrossed his legs and resettled his hands on his lap. "There's not much to tell, honestly," he said. "I'm a Gothamite. Born and raised. East End. I went to public school until I was fourteen, then I got a scholarship to Gotham Academy. I lost my parents recently. I've been making my own way since then."

"Your parents," Greg said carefully. "I'm sorry for your loss. The reports said it was a gang-related incident."

"That's right."

Greg paused, listening to a voice in his ear piece. He glanced down at his cards before he looked back up.

"I have to tell you, Ethan, my sources tell me there's a rumour going around. The rumour is that the gang-related incident that took your parents involved you directly. That you were there. That you, in some capacity, were part of what happened. Is there anything you'd like to say about that?"

The atmosphere in the studio shifted. The audience was very quiet. But Ethan kept the smile on his face. "I'd say, Greg, that maybe whichever source told you that left out the part where my parents were buried in debt to a heroin habit they had been feeding for the better part of a decade. And the part where the gang they ended up being killed by was the same gang they had been buying from for those ten years."

Greg nodded slowly. "Iron Row, right?"

"The very same," Ethan said.

"Sounds completely understandable to me," Greg said.

"There was something else I was hoping you'd comment on, if you don't mind."

Ethan opened one hand in a small inviting gesture. "Please."

Greg looked down at his cards again before he met Ethan's eyes. "I've heard from multiple sources that the entire Gotham City Police Department has it out for you. Detectives, beat cops, command staff. Across the board. And when I had my team look into why, what they kept coming back with was the disappearance and subsequent reappearance of Detective Renee Montoya. The official record is incomplete, but the unofficial talk in the precincts seems to put your name in the room. Anything to say to that?"

Ethan inhaled and let it out slowly before he answered, and when he spoke his voice had a careful, measured quality. LI've only ever met Detective Montoya once in my life," he said. "It was at Gotham Academy, when she came in with several other officers to question the entire student body about an unrelated matter. I have no personal relationship with her. I have never hurt her. I have never attempted to. Whatever happened to Detective Montoya during the time she was missing must have been a harrowing experience, and I am genuinely sorry that she went through it. But I had nothing to do with it."

He let his eyes shift away from Greg and toward the camera, and when he spoke again. "Detective Montoya, if you're watching this, I'm sorry for what happened to you. I hope you find the closure you need."

...

In a small apartment in a building three miles from the studio, a glass beer bottle exploded against the wall beside the television in a spray of foam and shattered green glass.

"¡Hijo de la gran puta!" Renee Montoya shouted at the screen.

She was sitting on the floor in front of her couch with her back propped against the cushions. She was wearing the same grey tank top she had been wearing for two days snd was starting to smell. Her hair was pulled back in a knot at the base of her skull that had been put there at some point during the previous evening and had not been redone since, and there were three more bottles on the floor around her in a loose semicircle.

"¡Cabrón mentiroso!" she added at the television, and the version of Ethan Kane on the screen continued to talk to the host of the show.

She pushed herself up off the floor with her right hand braced against the edge of the couch and her left hand gripping the armrest, the world spun in a circle around her as she came up onto her feet, and she took a step toward the kitchen, her heel caught on the leg of the coffee table and she went down sideways onto the rug with a heavy thump.

"Oh you have got to be kidding me," she muttered into the carpet. "Ay, joder."

She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling for a moment before she pushed herself up again, more carefully this time, and made it the rest of the way to the kitchen by holding onto whatever she could find along the route.

It had been like this for months.

Renee had not been right since the day she had been released. The physical recovery had been straightforward enough; a week of rest, a few sessions with the department physician, some prescriptions that she had stopped taking after the first refill. The other recovery, the one that did not have a clear protocol attached to it, had not gone as well. 

She had come back to find that Harvey was dead. That a dozen of her closest colleagues from the precinct had died alongside him during the chaos of the warehouse district incident. That Batman was dead and that the city she had given her life to was burning down around the edges while the man responsible was being booked for talk shows.

She had tried to go back to work. She had lasted three weeks before she had been put on extended leave. It was suggested she talk to someone about how she was feeling. 

She had not gone to the therapist.

She had, instead, gone to the liquor store.

She had been going to the liquor store for months.

The worst part of it, the part that ate her up from the inside out and would not let her sleep, was that she felt responsible for all of it. She had been in the cell with Ethan when he'd talk to her. She had had the chance to get out, multiple chances, and she had not taken any of them, because she had convinced herself, in a strange way, that there was something redeemable in the boy who was holding her. 

That if she just talked to him long enough, listened to him patiently enough, found the right combination of words to reach the part of him, she might be able to turn him into something other than what he was becoming.

She had told herself she was working an angle. 

Building rapport. Playing the long game.

She had been kidding herself. She had been a docile prisoner who had let a monster walk away.

And now Harvey was dead, and a dozen others were dead, and the monster was on television like nothing happened.

She made it to the fridge and pulled the door open and stood there staring at the shelves while her brain caught up with what she had come there for. Another beer. There it was. She wrapped her fingers around the neck of one and pulled it out and pushed the door shut and turned around.

Someone knocked on the front door.

She didn't answer.

She turned the bottle over in her hands and started looking for an opener.

The lock clicked anyway, and the door opened, and Renee looked up and saw Commissioner Jim Gordon step into her apartment with a brown paper bag of takeout in one hand and a deeply unimpressed expression on his face.

"Montoya," he said as he closed the door behind himself and set the lock back in place, "you should really put that key somewhere safer than under the mat."

She didn't answer, she just took the bottle to the kitchen counter and found the opener in a drawer and popped the cap off, and she took a long swallow of it before she turned around and leaned against the counter.

Jim looked around the apartment. There were dishes piled in the sink that had been there long enough to grow their own ecosystems. There was a pile of laundry on the armchair that might have been clean once and almost certainly was not anymore. There was a smell, faintly, of stale alcohol and a takeout container that had not yet been thrown out.

He walked across the living room and pulled the curtains open, the late afternoon light spilled into the room in a hard yellow wash that made Renee throw one arm up across her face and curse. "Joder, Jim, what are you doing, knock it off."

"You haven't seen sunlight in a week, Detective," Jim said as he started picking up bottles from the floor and carrying them to the kitchen counter. "It's medicinal. Take it like a vitamin."

"Leave me alone."

"Not particularly inclined to."

He set the bottles down beside her and took the takeout bag off the counter where he had put it and pulled out a styrofoam container that he set in front of her with a fork balanced on top. "Eat that," he said. "I don't care if you're hungry. Eat it."

Renee looked at the container and then at him and then at the beer in her hand. She took another swallow of the beer instead.

Jim sighed and pulled out one of the stools at the kitchen counter and sat down across from her. "You can't keep doing this, Renee," he said quietly. "I've been letting it run because I thought you needed the time and I still think you needed some of it, but it's been months and you are not getting better. You are getting worse. And every day you spend in this apartment is a day that the rest of us are out there short one good detective."

"Don't," Renee said.

"I'm going to."

"Jim, I swear to God, don't."

"Harvey wouldn't want you doing this," Jim said.

Renee slammed the bottle down on the counter hard enough that the foam bubbled up over the lip and ran down the side. "Harvey is dead, Jim. Don't tell me what Harvey would want. Harvey can't want anything anymore, because Harvey is dead. Do you want to know who else is dead? Jack Forrester is dead. Eddie Liang is dead. Mike Patton, dead. Sarah Velez, dead. Rosie Choi, dead. Tom Parker, dead. They are all of them dead, Jim, and the kid that did it, the psycho, the smiling little piece of shit that did it, is on Late Night with Greg Carlin. They put him on television. They are parading him around this city like he's some kind of saviour, and he is laughing right in everybody's faces while he does it."

She pushed off the counter and started pacing in the small space between the kitchen and the living room, the bottle still in her hand. "He let me go in broad daylight. Do you understand that, Jim? He let me and Robin go. Bruised and naked and dumped on the gravel like trash. And we cannot do a thing about it. Not one thing. We can't even file a report that doesn't get buried, because every time we try to put his name on a piece of paper somebody upstairs makes the paper disappear. He is doing this in front of us. He is laughing in our faces. And we cannot touch him."

"Renee."

"He is laughing, Jim!!!"

"It's more complicated than that," Jim said quietly.

"Don't you dare tell me it's complicated!!"

"It is, though." Jim replied. "Ethan Kane had a public alibi for the day you and Robin were released. Multiple eyewitnesses placed him at a charitable event in the East End for the entire window. The DA's office has looked at this file three separate times, and three separate times they have come back with the same answer. We do not have anything that will hold up in court. It's your word against his, Detective."

Renee stared at him for a moment with her chest rising and falling and then she let out a sound that was half a laugh and half giving up.  "My word," she said. "My word. I have given eight years of my life to this city, Jim. Eight years. I have been shot. I have been stabbed. I was kidnapped and stripped and held in a goddamn cargo container for over a week. And my word, the word of a Gotham detective with an eight-year service record is not worth shit?"

Her voice broke on the last word, and she sat down hard on the couch with the beer bottle still clutched in her hand, the tears came up fast before she could do anything to stop them.

Jim let her cry. He didn't try to comfort her. He didn't try to fix it. He just sat across from her at the counter and waited, and when her breathing started to even out he rose slowly from the stool and walked over and sat down on the couch beside her at a respectful distance.

"I know how you feel," he said quietly.

She didn't answer.

"That boy lived in my house, Renee. He sat at my dinner table. He dated my damn daughter. I let him in. I let him all the way in. And every day for the rest of my life I am going to wake up and remember that Harvey came to me, more than once, and told me that something about that kid did not sit right with him, and I dismissed him. I told him he was being paranoid. I told him to drop it. I told my best detective to drop it, Renee, and now my friend is dead."

He looked down at his hands.

"If anyone's at fault here," he said, "it's me. Not you."

Renee wiped her face with the back of her wrist and didn't say anything for a long time.

Jim let the silence sit before he continued. "He's going to slip up, Renee. They all do, eventually. Men like him, they get comfortable. They start believing their own press. They start thinking they're untouchable, and the moment they think that, they get sloppy, and the moment they get sloppy, we will be there to put the cuffs on. I promise you that. He doesn't get to do this and walk away. Not on my watch. Not on yours."

He turned slightly on the couch to face her. "But to do that, I need you. I am not telling you that because I'm trying to make you feel good, Renee, I'm telling you because it's true. The department is on its knees. The bullpen is two-thirds empty. I have rookies running cases that should be on senior detectives' desks because there are barely any senior detectives left to put them on. I need every good cop I have left, and you, even drunk on a Tuesday afternoon are still one of the best detectives I have left. So I am asking you please come back."

Renee didn't say anything.

She looked at the bottle in her hand and it shook slightly.  She thought about Harvey, and about the cargo container, and about the smiling face on the television screen.

For a long time she did not move at all.

Then slowly she set the bottle down on the coffee table.

She would not rest. Not for a single goddamn second. Not until that smiling little bastard was either behind bars or in the ground.

"Get out of my apartment, Jim," she said quietly. "I need to take a shower."

Jim nodded and rose from the couch. "I'll see you at the precinct in the morning, Detective."

_____________________________________

Back at the studio, the audience had filtered out of the seats and the cameras had been powered down, but the noise level in the corridor behind the stage had not decreased, because Ethan's agent was in the middle of taking Greg Carlin apart.

"That was not the agreed line of questioning, Greg," she was saying as she walked alongside the host with her tablet held against her chest. "We had a sheet of approved topics. The Montoya question was not on the sheet. The parents question was not on the sheet. If you think for one second that we are going to let this go without a formal complaint to your producer, you are out of your mind."

"Maya, look, the producer added them at the last minute, I didn't have a chance to—"

"That is not my problem, Greg. That is your problem. We had an arrangement. Your show has just demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to honour an arrangement. The next time your booking team calls our office, and they will call our office, the answer is going to be informed by what just happened in there."

Greg held both hands up in front of him in a gesture of complete surrender. "Maya, Maya, please. Look. Tell Ethan I am genuinely sorry. The questions were a producer call. I take responsibility. He handled them like an absolute pro and the segment is going to be the best-rated thing we've aired this year, you know it and I know it. Let's just—"

"Maya."

Ethan said as he arrived from the stage, having heard their conversation.  "It's fine," he said. "I was expecting him to go off-script. Hosts always do, especially this late in the booking cycle. Let it go."

Maya turned to him with the look of indignation. "Ethan, it absolutely is not fine. They blindsided you with two of the most legally sensitive questions—"

"I handled the questions, Maya."

"That's not the point."

"It is, though." He gave her a small smile. "Let it go."

She held his gaze for a moment longer, and the colour in her cheeks shifted, very slightly. She looked down at her tablet and cleared her throat and nodded once.

"Fine," she said quietly. "Fine. But we're flagging it internally."

"That's fine."

Maya Velazquez had been twenty-four years old and a year out of Gotham City University with a business degree that she had not even started paying off and absolutely no employment to show for it when Ethan Kane's people had reached out to her about an interview. She had sat in that interview convinced that it was a prank. The job description had read like something out of a magazine; salary roughly four times the average graduate offer in Gotham, full benefits, equity stake in the company, a department of her own to build out. She had asked, very directly, what the catch was. 

The man across the table had told her that the catch was that the job was extremely demanding, that the hours would be brutal, and that the work was going to involve a great many people who would prefer that the Future Foundation did not exist. She had said yes within thirty seconds.

Ethan had spent six weeks researching her before that interview. He had pulled her academic records and her financial history and her social media activity going back nine years. He had read every paper she had submitted at GCU, including the senior thesis on systemic corruption in mid-tier accounting firms that her advisor had given a B+ and that, in Ethan's assessment, deserved a great deal better. 

He had noted, in particular, the way she had spoken in those papers about the people her thesis subjects had defrauded. There was a real, simmering anger in the writing. A hatred for the kind of person who took advantage of others. He had also noted that she was extraordinarily competent. The kind of competent that did not come from school. The kind that came from having to figure things out on her own.

She had been the right person for the job. And she had also, as it had turned out over the months that followed, come to have a very large crush on Ethan.

"He's expecting you at the gala tonight," she said as they reached the back exit of the studio. "The Crowne-Berkshire was originally last month, you bumped it for the Robinson Park event, and they have been very gracious about the rescheduling. You need to go. There will be three sitting senators, the editor-in-chief of the Gotham Gazette, the CEOs of four of the firms that are currently most aggressively trying to buy you out, and approximately a hundred million dollars of potential donor goodwill in the room. You. Need. To go."

Ethan nodded. "I'll go."

"You'll go in a tuxedo."

"Yes, Maya."

"And you'll smile."

"Yes, Maya."

The back exit opened onto a side alley where a black sedan was waiting at the curb with its engine idling. A very large man in a dark suit stood beside the rear door, and he opened it as Ethan and Maya approached. Ethan slid into the back seat first and Maya followed. 

"Boss," the driver said as he pulled out into the street, his eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror. "Three men attempted to attach explosive devices to the underside of the vehicle while you were inside the studio. I disposed of them. Bodies are in the dumpster behind the Wong's on Cleveland. Devices are in the trunk for analysis."

Maya choked slightly on the bottled water she had just opened.

"Who sent them," Ethan asked.

"Same as last week, sir. Best guess is X-Mobile contracted out to the McKinley crew, and McKinley subcontracted to a low-tier outfit working out of Burnley."

"Send me the names later."

"Yes, sir."

The car pulled out into the early evening traffic and merged onto the main thoroughfare that ran through the entertainment district toward the bridges, Maya was just beginning to settle her breathing when the rear passenger almost shattered.

Maya screamed and threw both arms over her head as the rapid, percussive pop-pop-pop-pop of a fully automatic weapon discharging from the vehicle alongside them rang against the side of the sedan, and the bullets that struck the reinforced glass spread their force across the laminated layers and stayed where they were.

The driver did not so much as flinch. He held the wheel calmly and accelerated and simply changed lanes. The vehicle that had pulled alongside them tried to keep pace for another two blocks before the driver clipped its rear quarter panel and sent it spinning into the side of a parked truck with a satisfying crunch.

"I am never going to get used to this," Maya said into the floor mat she had pressed her face against.

"It's the price of changing the world," Ethan said calmly.

"That's a great line, Ethan, you should put it on a fucking T-shirt."

He almost smiled.

The sedan moved through the rest of the city without further incident and eventually crossed into the industrial district, where the buildings grew taller  and the streets emptied of pedestrians, and the streetlights began to fail at irregular intervals along the route.

The car pulled to a stop outside a fenced compound that occupied the better part of two city blocks. Ethan unbuckled himself and reached for the door. "I'll see you tomorrow, Maya. Take her home, please."

"Wait," Maya said as she pushed herself upright and adjusted her hair. "Let me come in. I have always wanted to see the factory floor. I've been your partner for four months. I haven't been past the gate. Let me just—"

"Another time."

"Ethan—"

"Another time, Maya."

Maya let out a breath and nodded and settled back into the seat. Ethan stepped out of the car, closed the door behind him, and tapped the roof twice in a signal to the driver, and the sedan pulled away from the curb and disappeared down the industrial avenue.

Five men stood in formation at the entrance to the compound. They were dressed in dark utility clothing without any visible insignia. They straightened as Ethan approached, and the lead man, a wiry veteran in his early fifties with a salt-and-pepper beard and a prosthetic right hand that he flexed slightly as Ethan walked through the gate, gave him a respectful nod.

"Evening, sir."

"Evening, Reyes. Anything I should know about?"

"Quiet day inside the wire, sir. Two attempted incursions on the eastern fence line. Both of them tourists. The new shipment of polymer arrived an hour ago and has been moved to bay seven. Mister Lawson wanted me to flag that the third generator is running a little hot and he'd like to discuss replacement parts when you have a moment."

"Tell him I'll come down before the gala."

"Yes, sir."

Ethan walked past them into the compound proper, and the gates slid closed behind him. 'It's strange how things can change,' he thought, as he made his way along the central avenue between the rows of warehouses and factories that filled the compound.

When he had first walked Sofia, Mindy, and Ivy through Sanctuary on the night of the Arkham breakout, the industrial district above them had been a collection of shuttered properties he had quietly purchased over the previous year through a network of shell companies.  That had changed. All of it had changed, and the speed of the change had surprised even him.

Sofia had been the engine of it. Ethan had not, in his initial assessment of her, anticipated that she would turn out to be the most strategically valuable of the three women he had broken out of Arkham, but in the months since her arrival at Sanctuary she had revealed an instinct for recruitment that bordered on the supernatural. 

She knew who to talk to. 

She knew what to say. 

She knew exactly the kind of person who was looking for what they were offering. The first round of recruits had been the homeless population of Gotham, which was larger than most outsiders realised and which contained, as Sofia had pointed out during their first session on the subject, several specific sub-populations that the conventional charitable infrastructure of the city had completely failed. 

Roughly sixty percent of the city's chronically unhoused were veterans, men and women who had served the country and had come home to find that the country was not particularly interested in them anymore. The remaining forty percent were more varied in their circumstances, but the assumption that they were primarily drug addicts and the chronically mentally ill had turned out, on closer examination, to be wildly inaccurate. 

A significant portion of them were people who had been reasonably stable until a single bad event had pushed them over an edge that the social safety net had been too thin to catch them on.

Ethan had cleaned them up, he had given them places to stay in the converted warehouses of the industrial district. He had healed the worst of their injuries and addictions through the application of his own abilities and the medical infrastructure that the Future Foundation's public arm had established. He had given them purpose, and structure, and a cause, and the chance to become something more than what the city had decided they were.

They had given him their lives in return.

The organisation now had a name, and the name was the Saviours, and it had grown to a strength that the police department was trying to not acknowledge in its public reports. 

Over the past six months they had gained control of the industrial district outright. They held a substantial portion of the Narrows. The streets in those territories were cleaner and quieter than they had been in years, and the crime statistics in those neighbourhoods, had fallen by margins that should have been impossible. 

Mindy had been the engine of that particular accomplishment. Whatever restraint Ethan had been concerned about in the early days had turned out to be unnecessary; she had taken to the work of killing criminals with an enthusiasm that bordered on the ecstatic.

The Saviours had replaced Iron Row as one of Gothams Crime syndicates even if they committed very few crimes. 

Ethan walked past the factories and the warehouses and the converted living quarters where his people moved through their evening routines, they greeted him as he passed respectfully. Some of them saluted, the older veterans, mostly. Some of them gave a small bow of the head. Some of them simply said his name. He acknowledged each of them with a small nod of his own, and made his way toward the concealed entrance to Sanctuary that lay beneath one of the central warehouses.

He passed the small grove of cherry trees that had become Ivy's particular favourite over the past several months, and the cluster of training equipment in the cleared section near the eastern wall where Mindy spent most of her downtime and he made his way through the corridor that led to the western wing, where his lab and his office were located.

He pushed open the door to his office.

Sofia was already there.

She was draped across his couch that occupied the wall opposite his desk with one leg bent at the knee and the other extended straight along the cushion, and she was reading a book. She was wearing a short silk robe that was tied loosely at the waist, and beneath that, very obviously, very little else. Her dark hair was loose around her shoulders. "You're back," she said after looking up. 

Ethan made no comment on why she was there. He shrugged out of his suit jacket and walked across the room to the coat hook beside his desk and hung it carefully. Then he loosened his tie and rolled his sleeves to the elbows before he turned to face her.

"You'll need to get ready," he said. "The Crowne-Berkshire gala is tonight. You're going to be accompanying me."

Sofia closed the book with a thump and let it fall to the floor beside the couch. "I don't want to go."

"Mm."

"I'm not comfortable in those rooms, Ethan. You know that. I haven't been in a ballroom since I was eighteen."

"I'm aware."

"Then take Maya. She'd love it. She'd buy a dress and everything."

"I'm not taking Maya. I'm taking you."

Sofia sat up on the couch slowly, and the silk robe shifted. "Why?"

"Because I did not pay half a million dollars to bribe a circuit court judge into expediting your release on a procedural technicality so that you could spend the rest of your life lying on a couch," Ethan said. "You have a name, Sofia. The fact that you have rejected the family that gave it to you does not mean the city has rejected the name. The Falcone name still opens doors and closes mouths in this city, and I have a use for both of those things at this gala. I need you in that room. I need you on my arm. I need the people who will be at this event to see you with me and to draw the conclusions they will inevitably draw from that. Do you understand what I'm asking?"

Sofia studied him for a moment from the couch, and the expression on her face shifted from petulance to something more thoughtful. "They know," she said.

"They know what?" 

"My family. They know I'm with the Saviours. They know about All for One. They've been making inquiries. The cousins on my mother's side reached out to me through a back channel three weeks ago. They are not happy. They want a sit-down. They have made it very clear that if I do not present myself for that sit-down voluntarily, they are prepared to escalate."

"I'm aware of that."

"Then you understand why I would prefer not to walk into a room full of every powerful person in this city wearing a target on my back."

"They will not move on you at the Crowne-Berkshire," Ethan said. "It would be a violation of every protocol the old families still observe, and even your cousins are not stupid enough to do something that public. And if for some reason they decided to attempt it anyway, I will be standing next to you."

A slow grin worked its way across Sofia's face, and the petulance came back, but with a different flavour to it now. "My protector," she said. "My very own knight in shining armour. It must be so romantic, being the bodyguard of a Falcone heiress."

"Sofia."

"What?"

"Was there anything you needed?"

She let out a small sigh that suggested she had not quite finished enjoying the moment, but she sobered as she swung her legs off the couch and sat upright. "Yes. Same problem as last week, and the week before that. We are not moving any product in our territory. Every other organisation in the city is, and people are starting to notice. The dealers who used to work the corners we now control are quietly migrating to the Burnley crews and the East End splinters, because those crews are still selling and we are not. We have, by my last count, somewhere north of forty million dollars worth of cocaine and heroin sitting in the storage on level three, and we are doing absolutely nothing with it. I keep asking what we're waiting for. I keep getting told to be patient. I'm going to ask one more time, Ethan. What are we waiting for?"

Ethan walked across to his desk and sat down in the chair behind it. "It's not ready yet."

"What isn't ready?"

"The product. Trust me on this, Sofia. It's almost there. When it's ready, you'll know, and when it's ready you and your distribution network are going to be very busy. I've been working on it for six months. A few more weeks. That's all I'm asking for."

She held his gaze for a long moment, and then, slowly, she nodded. "Fine. I trust you."

"Good. Now go and get ready."

She rose from the couch with a motion that the silk robe did not entirely cover, and she walked toward the door with a sway in her hips. She paused at the threshold and looked back over her shoulder at him.

"You're going to have to actually dance with me at this thing, you know. People will notice if you don't."

"I'm aware of how galas work, Sofia."

"Mm. We'll see."

She left, and the door swung closed behind her leaving Ethan was alone in his office. He sat for a moment and then he pushed back from the desk and rose and walked through the side door that connected the office to the lab.

The lab was larger than the office by a considerable margin. The walls were lined with equipment that had been assembled from a combination of legitimate scientific suppliers and a few less legitimate ones, the central workspace was dominated by a long stainless-steel bench on which a series of carefully labelled vials and beakers had been arranged in a grid. 

Ethan walked to the bench and pulled up a stool and sat down in front of the apparatus, and he reached for the lab notebook beside the central beaker and flipped it open to the page he had been working on the previous night.

He had been holding back on drug distribution in his territory for a very specific reason.

For six months, in the hours between the public-facing work of the Future Foundation and the operational demands of running the Saviours and the personal work of training the trinity into a functional command structure, he had been quietly altering the chemistry of the product in storage. 

The cocaine and the heroin he had inherited from the warehouse seizures and the various intercepts his people had run on rival shipments. He had been working through them molecule by molecule, isolating the compounds that produced the worst of the side effects, the cardiotoxicity, the respiratory depression, the dependency cascades, and methodically engineering them out of the formula.

The latest test results had come back that morning. The product, as it currently stood, was non-lethal at any plausible dose. Overdoses, in the conventional sense, would become functionally impossible. 

However he had increased the addictiveness by 150% and potency by 40%

Sometimes he felt disgusted at himself for becoming a supplier of drugs... but he had a plan... making the drugs more addictive weren't the only changes he was making to the drugs, and once he was the biggest supplier in the city he could move on to the final stage of his plan.  

The moment where he ushers in a new world.

(AN: So bit of a time skip. Ethan's new gang is called rhe Saviours I think it's a decent name since they aren't really a gang. What's Ethan up to? What's he doing with his large supply of drugs. Find out next time on.)