The meat shop squatted at the end of the lot, its walls weeping with black streaks that had properly soaked through the brick, its loading dock crusted in a brown rind of fat and grit no one had bothered to hose down in months.
Its sign hung half-loose on a single bracket, fluorescent strips flickering frequently enough to promise a migraine to anyone who kept their eyes on it longer than a few seconds. It was hard to believe a man as prim and proper as the Penguin, even if the propriety was just a distraction from his 'activies', would stoop to running anything out of a place like this, yet this was indeed where his black market had operated.
The thick blend of rancid tallow and copper riding on the decay of fleshy bits left to rot in a drain too long, hit the Rowan before he'd even cranked the windows down, causing the both of them to gag in disgust.
How anyone could endure the stench for any length of time, never mind stay long enough to build even a semblance of reputation among the city's thieves and robbers, Rowan couldn't say, but such was the price of covering up the illegal activities running beneath the facility…
Cobblepot hadn't picked a meatshop for the aesthetic, after all.
He'd picked it because nothing in Gotham covered the cat-piss tang of cooking solvents and ether quite as effectively as a few tons of spoiled offal sweating through a grease trap. Not that it had helped much in the end, since word of its existence had still made its way to the Batcomputer regardless.
He killed the engine and stayed put, watching the third strip stutter, catch, then settle into a sickly half-glow that bathed the place in ghastly light which all but screamed haunted. "Here we are…"
"So it seems."
Some part of him, the part that belonged to whoever he'd been before his Reincarnation was screaming at him to throw the van back in reverse. It was a faint scream, threadbare from being ignored so often, but it was there, and Rowan couldn't help finding it almost touching that the old him still bothered.
He didn't remember the man, not really… A few flashes here and there of paperback covers, comic panels, the occasional smear of a face he couldn't put a name to. But he was fairly certain whoever that guy had been, sitting on a couch somewhere reading about Gotham as fiction, he'd have taken one look at this place and fucking bolted. Hell, he probably wouldn't have made it within a block of the lot to begin with.
Yet here Rowan was, parked, engine off, half-smiling at the sight.
The dread didn't really land the way it used to anymore. How could it, when the worst thing in any room he walked into was usually the blood coursing through his own veins?
Hauntings tended to slide right off a man who'd become one himself.
'So the saying really is true.'
All fears, in the end, traced back to a lack of firepower, and Rowan was about as well-armed as a man could get.
Behind him, as if summoned by the thought, Ichor reared its ugly head from the seat, oozing up the dashboard in a slow sprawl before settling near the windshield. Lazing against the glass, its many eyes scoured highs and lows. Rowan usually couldn't understand the Stag nearly as well as he'd have liked, but for once he could tell exactly what it wanted, which was fresh prey, if only to reassert itself as the big dawg.
The week hadn't exactly been kind on its image, after all, considering every enemy they'd run into had come armed with religious objects of one kind or another…
"Comfortable?"
Ichor rolled one of its eyes back into its skull, which Rowan took as a yes as the passenger door cracked open, and Ivy slid onto the street without so much as a glance at the dark.
She stopped, hands on her hips, and looked the building up and down. "Charming as ever. I can see why he kept it off the brochure."
Rowan rounded the front of the van in quick strides, catching her elbow before she could take another step toward the door. "Hold on a sec. We don't know what's in there."
It could be Afflicted, could be a holdout of trigger-happy bouncers nesting inside with SMGs and shotguns, and she was too valuable for him to risk any harm coming to her… The city's wellbeing did depend on her staying alive and lucid.
"Let me clear it first…"
Ivy looked down at the hand on her elbow, then back up at him, visibly impatient, yet at the same time faintly amused.
"Sweetheart. I am what's in there."
She strode past him before his brain could put together a reply, vines unspooling from the shoulders of her leotard in lazy, exploratory tendrils that wiggled ahead. Rowan dragged a hand down his face at the sight, yelped when his own sharpened nails scraped across his fully exposed cheek, then overtook her with a sigh. "At least let me walk in front."
That, Ivy thankfully didn't object to.
Hurrying to the front of the door, Rowan threw it open and, after a small cough to clear his throat, pitched his voice up to something that wouldn't sound out of place from a kid, then poured every ounce of panic he could muster into a quivering, "H-Help!"
The green-skinned woman beside him shot him an odd look for that, though the reason for his theatrics revealed itself shortly after in the form of three Afflicted with bits of flesh, fur and gunk caught between their teeth, all of them giggling maniacally until their bulging eyes found the Demon at their door.
"Sup." Rowan greeted, and angled himself slightly to one side to make room for them to come right on through. "Y'all gonna fuck off on your own, or am I gonna have to make you?"
Truth be told, he could put all three down without breaking a sweat, but in a situation where the good and the bad were all jumbled together, it was simply wiser not to dish out concussions to everyone he came across until they'd given him a reason to, since he doubted Bruce would appreciate the hospital bills if he just went in swinging.
Though, if he was being honest with himself, Rowan really, really wanted to, since like Ichor, the week had not been kind on his street cred either…
Fortunately, it seemed his name hadn't been entirely dragged through the mud just yet. That, or he genuinely looked terrifying enough as the Son of Trigon that the group of three, opted to leap straight through the windows and bolt down the street instead of taking the door. "… Smart."
Television had a way of making it look effortless, but as someone who'd smashed through his fair share of windows, Rowan knew all too well how painful the maneuver could be. Granted, going by the angles they'd taken, he doubted any of them would walk away with more than a few scrapes and small cuts, yet he hollered after them all the same. "Remember to tend to your cuts!"
"My, my. The little hero strikes again." Ivy teased, only to realize he'd stepped well into her personal space.
'He has nice lashes…'
Honestly, Rowan's might even be fuller than hers, though it might've been a trick of the light, or just how strikingly the white played against the blood red of his skin.
'Is he taller again?'
"I won't be 'little' much longer, Red."
"…" She shoved him back, swallowing a noise that came out far too girlish for her femme fatale persona, then flicked her hair over one shoulder. "You're redder than me." She knew it was weak, he knew it was weak, yet rather than seize the easy dunk she wished he would have, Rowan instead drew attention to the darkening of her cheeks.
"Doesn't look like it where I am, Red."
Normally, Ivy would have fired back with a biting and probably flirtatious remark of her own, but—'How old even is he?' He'd looked to be in his mid to late teens when he first came to her for help, and Pamela doubted he was a day past seventeen. Villainess or not, it simply didn't sit right with her, regardless of the fact Rowan had somehow compressed his teenage phase into a handful of hours.
Powerless against a male member of the species for once, Ivy stormed toward the freezer, then stopped short when she realized she didn't actually know where the secret door was. It couldn't be helped… The black market had been mostly reserved for low to mid-level criminals. Most people of her caliber typically just rang one of Cobblepot's many secretaries and had their orders delivered.
Truth be told, she wouldn't have had the faintest clue where the place even was if Rowan hadn't agreed to bring her along for the ride.
"Here." Rowan shot her a glance as he strode past and dropped to a knee beside one of the metal grates set into the floor. "Let me."
God, how infuriating that smug little smirk of his was…
She'd been expecting him to take a knee and pick the lock like a sensible thief, but noooo!!! The vigilante simply had to flex by ripping it off the grate altogether.
Pamela would sooner bite off her tongue than admit it to him, or to anyone else for that matter, but her eyes did absolutely wander to his biceps, and to the veins straining the seams of his suit. She tried telling herself it was just the fabric creasing along the muscle, but deep down, she knew they couldn't have been.
The drop was steeper than it looked from the floor above, with the rusted ladder shedding flakes of orange paint at every rung as Pamela followed him down.
The tunnel at the bottom opened into a cavernous, low-ceilinged sprawl that had to run the length of at least three city blocks beneath the meatshop and its neighboring lots, with concrete walls bowing inward under the weight of decades and a ventilation system clattering somewhere overhead like loose teeth in the mouth of a great and terrible beast.
Half the overhead bulbs had blown, while the rest gave off a feeble, jaundiced glow that left the corners shadowed and the spaces between aisles murkier still.
Calling the place 'trashed' would have given it too much credit, since trashed implied it had once been clean, and even on its best days, the black market had clearly been run with all the standards of a frat basement, which was to say none at all. Rowan stepped over an industrial scale on his way past the first row, and silently scanned the market's layout.
Cobblepot ran the place sparingly, with weeks between openings, since stocking it any more frequently would have been an open invitation to the GCPD or, worse, Bruce himself.
And even then, the doors only opened for those who'd already been vetted or invited, since any street-corner pusher who tried to wander in off the sidewalk would've been shot before he made it to the back of the meat shop.
Those already in the know would get a message a few days ahead of an opening, with a window of time, an entrance, and not much else, while the rest of Gotham stayed blissfully unaware of its existence.
"Bigger than I thought," Ivy muttered as she stepped down beside him, vines fanning out on her behalf.
"Has to be." Rowan jerked his chin toward an exit at the far end, where a faded arrow pointed up another set of rungs. "There are at least seven to eight of these scattered around the city with different entrances, different schedules for different clienteles so the high-rollers and the small fry never had to bump elbows down here."
"How thoughtful of him."
"Penguin was nothing if not customer-oriented."
The brief exchange behind them, the two got to work without much further fuss.
Ivy took the lead with her list in hand, muttering reagents and concentrations under her breath while her vines spread out in preliminary scouting and Rowan handled the heavy lifting, as whoever had ransacked the place before them had apparently made a sport of putting the bulkiest furniture into the worst possible positions.
He set his shoulder against the shelf and shoved, the wine-red of his arms swelling as the hunk of metal skidded aside, while Ivy made a great show of pretending not to look.
Her vines, damn them to hell, did no such pretending, with one of them even coiling appreciatively around his bicep before she snapped at the offending tendril and sent it slinking back into her sleeve. By the time they'd worked their way down to the third row, her vines were laden with bottles, every last one of them carefully cradled and cushioned beneath layers of leaf and vine.
The added weight slowed her children noticeably, but she didn't have the muscular strength to lug chemicals in such volume herself, and Rowan, for his part, hadn't offered to carry any either. In all fairness, Rowan had offered up his… Shadow for the work, but as twitchy and airheaded as the Demon looked, Ivy wouldn't have trusted it with a dog.
"Phenol, check. Sodium thiosulfate, check. Acetone, double-check, since the second bottle's half-gone. Hydrochloric acid…" Pamela trailed off as she studied a shelf, then plucked a sealed brown bottle that she held to the dim light. "Cobblepot really did stock everything, didn't he."
"Surprised?"
"Mildly. I'd assumed half this list would have to come from Ace Chemicals."
"Yeah, well." Arms crossed, the vigilante shrugged. "Place's been on fire for two days."
"Of course it—" Ivy didn't get a chance to finish sassing before something clattered at the far end of the market, dragging their attention in that general direction.
"… Could be a rat?"
"In Gotham? Right…" Sure, there was always the slim chance it really was scurrying rats, but if there was a single lesson either of them had absorbed over the years, it was that Murphy's law operated at peak efficiency within the city's limits. "I'll go take a look."
Ichor tensed underneath him, shimmering across his feet as Rowan lifted his fist for the Wisp to clamber onto.
He had barely cleared a few feet when a second sound echoed behind them, this one closer to the soft, mechanical hiss of pressurized air bleeding from a tank, synced with the clanks of several hundred pounds of steel slapping against the floor. And then the surrounding temperature began to plummet.
"Pamela."
A new voice rolled out of the dark, sonorous and distant and filtered through old microphone technology. It certainly gave the man a menacing edge, though given his history, Rowan doubted it had been Victor Fries' choice to pick that particular set. "Forgive my intrusion… I was not expecting company, but I'm afraid I'll have to ask the two of you to surrender the goods."
He lifted his freeze gun, the red of his goggles catching the dim light in twin glints.
Suppressing a shiver, Ivy reached for the energy of the Green and the handful of beans cradled in her palm bloomed at once. "Or what?!"
"Hey, hey, let's all breathe—" Rowan slid himself between the two of them, both hands lifted in the universal gesture of peace. Aside from Ivy, Victor was about the only villain in this city Rowan figured he stood a real chance of swaying to his cause.
"Nobody's gotta freeze or get strangled today."
"If the two of you do not hand over these chemicals, someone will have to."
Like a cat with its tail stepped on, Ivy bristled, yet stayed her hand, if only because the pleading look on Rowan's face was a sight pleasing enough to indulge. "Fine." She threw her hands up, then leaned against the wall and swept her hand as if to say, 'Work your 'magic' then.'
The whole time, Victor's freeze gun stayed pointed at Rowan's chest. "You're an admirable man, Doctor Fries. Smarter than most, and more principled than half the people in this godforsaken place. Gotham's been worse off losing you to a su—"
"Spare me the eulogy, boy. Gotham did not lose me. Gotham watched me drown and went on about its evening, and I haven't forgotten the faces who turned away while I sank."
Unlike Ivy, who at least still kept a soft spot in reserve for the children and the fairer half of the city's population, even if the latter often dunked on her for her choice of clothing, Victor Fries was a man with a single mission and no real interest in anything outside of it. He would not be talked down. Not without considerable effort at least.
He could give the crying routine another go, though somehow he doubted Victor Fries shared Ivy's apparent weakness for a weeping sidekick… And even if the man happened to, 'Hell no.' Once was already one time too many. 'Change of plans.'
"I—Batman can help fund the research for the cure."
That, at last, brought a change of expression to the man's face. "What cur—?"
"The cure for your wife," Rowan interrupted. "The cure for Nora."
Whether Victor Fries was willing to admit it or not, much of what had befallen him had been authored by his own hand…
He could've taken the twelve million dollar offer and sold his research, or he could've signed the environmental deal that would have funded his work in full. But no…
He'd wanted all the fame.
He'd wanted the credit.
He'd wanted it all for himself, and he'd believed every bit of it would come his way in time!
Until a colleague sat down and ran the numbers properly, only to discover his life's work would cause catastrophic mutations in every form of sea life, and, evidently, in human too, given his current predicament.
And just like that, a once-famous, once-awe-inspiring scientist slash environmentalist had his name dragged through the muds, never to recover again.
And true to the saying 'When it rains, it pours,' just five months after all the money and fundings had dried up, Nora Fries would collapse from her bizarre illness, not that anyone outside their household had realized as much. Most people, or at least the corners of it that knew the name Victor Fries just thought the man had outright murdered his own wife in a fit of rage before slipping into a life of crime.
And honestly, who could blame them? The Fries couple certainly hadn't been the first such case in Gotham, nor were they likely to be the last…
Hell, not even Bruce had managed to piece together the real reason behind the man's crime streaks, his profile concluding only that Victor wasn't the type to murder his own wife.
And once again, Fries' pride proved his undoing, since he refused to even elaborate, much less reach out to the one source of help most readily available to him, the Batman, in spite of the many clashes between them.
"Ho-How do you know?!"
"Oh, I don't just know about her illness… I know you've had her frozen while you work on a cure. I know you need the money to figure one out yourself. I know it's tearing you up to be that close to her without being able to touch her, to talk to her and never get a word back, to see her face every day without the smiles she used to give you on your worst ones."
"HOW?!" Victor roared, the gun shaking in his grip.
Rowan swallowed, a crooked smile tugging at his lips as the people waiting for him back at the Batcave came to mind. He did not love any of them the way Victor loved Nora, and still it killed him to see them in the state they were in, so what kind of pain it had to be for Victor?
He dared not guess…
"You've seen the kind of car Batman drives, haven't you?" He chuckled. "We have the resources for this. You won't have to beg, you won't have to rob, you will never have to hurt anyone anymore… We can help you, Victor… Let us help you." Then slowly, Rowan reached forth like Bruce and Alfred had once for him, palm up as though to soothe a frightened animal.
"I… I—Why?!"
"Everybody likes a good love story… But a happy ending? People love those even more."
After what felt like ages, Victor's gun finally began to dip shakily, much to Rowan's relief and Ivy's surprise. Arms crossed, she stepped forward and let her gaze drift over her fellow supervillain. Like most others in the city, she had assumed he was just another egotistical maniac. The egotistical part might still hold up given what she'd heard of Victor Fries over the years, but maniac? Not so much.
But then he raised the gun again, and the Shade that was already on standby immediately sprung into action, wrapping its fist around the cryogenic gun that had already risen past their heads instead.
She turned, and so did Rowan as three shadows began to dwarf theirs.
'Oh, right…' Rowan remembered, in that moment, exactly what he'd been meaning to do in the first place.
He'd been on his way to track down the 'rats' that had been making all those noises…
He'd thought it was Victor, only Victor had come in from the opposite direction, hadn't he?
'Those are some huge fucking rats.'
"How touching."
The man at the front of the trio was a wall of heaving muscle, with green veins straining the surface of his neck and his temples.
A pair of crude tubes ran from a pack at his hip into the crook of each elbow, constantly pumping luminescent green in sync with his pulse. Even while hunched, the supervillain dwarfed Victor in his rig by three heads. And behind him stood two equally juiced thugs that warped and creaked under the weight of their own bulk.
Rowan threw himself at Ivy and shoved her clear of the horizontal uppercut that would have killed her on impact, and caught the blow with his ribs instead. Immediately, the world around him began to tilt as he shot through shelf after shelf, before coming to a stop atop a splintering chair.
—————
A/N: You know, I find it super fucking ironic that Dr. Freeze's real name is Victor Fries. I guess freeze-fry is a thing? Is it? Someone check that shit for me please. Pay no mind to the instructions beneath if you're humans, lol.
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