That hurt.
Head-back-wall.
Fist-stomach. That just hurt.
It wasn’t the first time
I’d been hit in the stomach. It wasn’t even the first time I’d been hit in
the stomach by a friend. Whether that desensitized me or made the
moment that much worse wasn’t really something I could stop and ponder.
“We don’t know why you would want to
involve yourself in something like this, Catwoman.”
There was a more pressing
issue.
“What possible
difference could it make to you if this miserable mamma’s boy lives or
dies?”
After Batman, and maybe
Croc, Two-Face has the best right cross in town.
“Normally, we
wouldn't say no to having company on a job.”
He’d gone to Vernon
Fields’s bedside, satisfied that I was down and staying there.
“In addition to the ‘2’ principle, there is
your very tight ass, which we can never get enough of looking at.”
There isn’t much to work
with in a coma room. No crash cart or paddles.
“But not on this
one. This is personal. We wish to send aAAAARGH!”
But there was one of
those tables on wheels.
“AURNNGHHH!”
With the tabletop just
about crotch-height.
“oooounngh”
Then I kicked him.
“ooph”
Unfortunately, he caught
the leg and came down hard on my thigh.
“aorlg”
Then backhanded me onto
the floor.
He turned back to Vernon
like the whole tussle was nothing but a commercial break in the middle of
his favorite TV show. I wanted to stall him somehow, but another attack
didn’t seem viable. He was playing it casual and oblivious, but he
knew I wasn’t finished and he was on hyper alert. He’d know the moment I
started to move... so I tried words instead.
“That’s twice I’ve been smacked into
something hard, Harvard. I don’t remember any damn coin being flipped.”
This couldn’t really be
happening, could it?
Harvey?
It was supposed to be
Doctor Two-rants. It was decided. It was Dr. Crazy. He had a thing about
the number two. Who has a hissyfit about the number two?!
He didn’t have any scars,
but somehow he was the answer. Somehow he was the new Two-Face… not
Harvey.
It couldn’t be Harvey.
“It was,” he snarled
without looking my way. “It was flipped for Vernon, our personal Judas.
Your appearance here is, regrettably, covered by that flip. So do stay out
of our way, Pussy Puss. We would not wish to see that delectable ass
bruised from further collisions with that very hard-looking floor.”
“Covered by the Vernon
flip? You’re making this shit up as you go along, Harvey. Don’t think it
doesn’t show.”
“Two-shay. But as we
were saying, much as we would normally welcome a second on any job worth
doing, the extermination of this Vernon excrescence is a private matter we
will carry out ourselves. If you’d like to stick around, we would be happy
to bring you along for Part 2 of tonight’s festivities.” He turned and
displayed a slow, lascivious leer before adding “We know how you
enjoy a Bat run-in.”
It was him.
It was really him.
I couldn’t make my brain
believe what my eyes were seeing, but it was really fucking HIM!
Throughout his history as
Two-Face, no one has ever been able to accurately depict the division on
Harvey's face. Police sketches, “artist renditions” in the newspapers, and
even shape-shifters like Hagen and Martian Manhunter, no one has ever got it
quite right. Contrary to what most people assume and even what
eye-witnesses perceive, the division that separates one side of his face
from the other is not a perfectly straight line down the center. There are
little variances that only someone who has looked at that face for extended
periods of time can pick up on. When you're looking at the face behind the
double-barrel of a shotgun, I’m sure all you see is TWO-FACE: right-side
normal/left-side scarred. But when you've sat across the table for
hours during a poker game, you start to see the nuances—particularly when he
has three of a kind or a full house, and theme starts vying with greed.
Anyway, the dividing line is a bit jagged all the way down, shifting with
the contours of his face. It jogs a bit down the bridge of his nose, the
result of a few too many ‘Berg fights (speaking of Croc’s right cross) and
improper medical care (read: Crane or Hugo) attempting to fix the
nose-breaks. Then the line curves a bit under the nose, leaving Harvey's
original philtrum intact before curving back across the top lip. It doesn't
slice straight through the cleft in his chin either, but slants a bit about
halfway through.
That’s the face I was
looking into. Every detail.
It was really him.
“And do we flip for
that?” I asked, just for something to say to keep his attention on me and
off Vernon for a few extra seconds.
“You can be the bait, and
we'll swing the sledge hammer,” he said (which apparently meant no coin flip
for Batman). “But for now, we’ve got some unfinished business with the
vegetable.”
He held up a
vicious-looking dagger.
“Two-pronged, double
edge, double blade,” he declared unnecessarily.
“Bullwhip,” I said,
matching obvious for obvious.
I aimed for his forearm
and snared it neatly before getting to my feet. I tugged hard, forcing his
weapon from his hand. It landed on the floor, but too far away for me to
pick up or kick out of his reach.
“Bad move, Kitty,” he
said, flicking something at me with his free hand. I felt a dull poke in my
upper left arm, and the realization hit a split second before I saw the
blade sticking out of it—he had a second knife.
“That one’s only
double-bladed,” he said apologetically, yanking the whip free from my other
hand and throwing it out the window.
“We didn’t want to do it
this way,” he said, picking up the original two-pronged weapon and pointing
it at me. “And we won’t tell you a second time to stay out of things that
don’t concern you. We would get no pleasure stabbing you twice.”
He looked at the handle
of the blade sticking out of my arm, and then at me. The silent threat was
as clear as the spoken one, and I took a step away, keeping the arm out of
his reach. We locked eyes. There was no question that it was Harvey’s
face, but there was no trace of “Harvey” in those eyes—and there was no
doubt he was ready to make good his threat.
My arm was really
starting to hurt. There wasn’t much blood yet, but there would be if I
didn’t get it seen to. There would be if the blade wedged in there was
yanked out violently. And there would be if another exchange of blows
started my heart pounding faster and harder.
Without warning, Two-Face
lunged for my arm, but this time, when I moved away, he was ready. He
countered mid-lunge, ramming his head into my chest and forcing us both back
against the wall. Then he put his hand on the blade handle, and as he
started pulling it out, he was ever so slowly giving it a twist.
It hurt.
A lot.
I was starting to see
white, when I heard a cry of pain that wasn’t mine. I fought down a sick
breathlessness, trying to focus. At first I couldn’t feel anything but a
pulsing nausea that rose and fell with my heartbeat and the excruciating
throbbing in my arm. Then I realized it was a man’s cry that I’d heard,
Two-Face’s cry, and that he was holding his right forearm in his left hand,
cursing a blue streak and stamping his foot to blot out some serious pain of
his own. Now the details came in a flood as I saw there were three
batarangs protruding from his arm, a batline dangling outside the window,
and flashes of movement whirring in front of me. Batman’s fist was pounding
Two-Face step by step across the room… until the rhythmic smacking sounds
stopped when they reached the far wall, the exact point farthest from both
Vernon and me.
Then came the menacing
gravel, soft and ominous.
“Stop now, Two-Face. Or
you’ll regret it.”
I could barely make out
the words. Batman knows that quiet and menacing is infinitely more
effective than the angriest shouts. But even the calm, insistent menace of
the Psychobat was a bit off. I’m sure no one else would notice, even to
Two-Face he must seem like the Bat in full Bat-mode. But I knew it was
Bruce under that mask, and I knew he was seeing the same irrefutable details
that I had. I knew that’s why his jaw was clenched exactly as it did when
he found me at Cartier’s. I knew that’s why he had to shift his weight
after the final punch, because his recoil left him slightly off balance.
To the world, that was
just Batman being Batman. But to me, it was the man inside reeling from a
recognition nut-kick.
Two-Face only laughed at
the threat:
“We've had your best,
Batman. No beating you can dish out is too high a price to pay, not for
this. Not for sweet vengeance, not for ending Vernon Fields once and for
all.”
“I’m not talking about
physical retribution,” Batman said darkly. “I mean your worst
nightmare—worse than your nightmares, Two-Face. A fate so terrible,
for you, that the possibility has never even occurred to you, not in your
blackest imagined hell… You’ve become Harvey Dent’s patsy.”
“NO!”
“Yes. I’ve been to the
Harvard Club. I’ve been to the North Gainsly Parking Garage. I’ve been to
the apartment on 23rd Street.”
“NOOOOmph!”
“Shut up.”
Batman silenced the
outburst with a gut punch, and then continued as casually as Two-Face had
earlier.
“You have no reason to
hate Vernon Fields, Two-Face. He made you. That’s why you never tried to
kill him before, isn’t it? You propose the crimes and Harvey opposes. But
why would you propose going after Fields? If it wasn’t for him, you never
would have seen the light of day. This is Harvey’s vendetta.
He’s the one that hates Fields.”
The silence held for
frozen, breathless seconds before Batman said:
“He’s the one that tried
to murder Vernon Fields once already.”
“What?” I gasped.
“Catwoman, you’re in a
hospital. Go get your arm patched up,” Batman spat.
“Fuck that. What’s this
about Harvey killing people?”
Two-Face cleared his
throat and looked… embarrassed.
“Ah, Cat, maybe you
should go,” he agreed meekly.
I took a step closer to
both of them, despite having lost enough blood by now that I was a bit
wobbly.
“Why? Something you
don’t want a fellow rogue to hear, Darth?”
Poison Ivy did not like
detective work.
Her objections were more
philosophical than Catwoman’s. Roaming around like this was an attribute of
the animal kingdom. Plants, by their superior nature, took root where their
needs could be met. They drew what nutrients they required from their
surroundings and gave oxygen, beauty, and calm serenity in return.
Animals hunted. Male
animals especially, when it came to humans. They were the hunter-gatherers,
forever roaming and seeking like beggars. The vagabonds of nature, that’s
what they were, hoping to get lucky and stumble upon something they could
consume. It was so undignified. When plants were predators, they kept
their dignity, drawing in their prey with a pleasant lure. That is the kind
of hunting she was suited to: presenting her beauty to the helpless male in
all its leafy glory, until he came close enough to inhale her scent and know
the irresistible craving for the green. Not this degrading walking
all over town: walking over concrete, walking through the least organic
parts of the city, walking in shoes that got caught in the subway gratings.
It wasn’t the first time
Ivy had to find someone or find out about someone. When a publisher or a
manufacturer went too far, strip mining a beautiful meadow or raping an
ancient forest, she found them. Deed transfers, articles of incorporation,
annual reports, and then reverse directories, Who’s Who in American
Business, or sometimes, the social register. She found who, she found where
they were and how to get at them, and she seldom had to go farther
than the Internet café across from Riverside Park to do it. Occasionally,
she had to venture out to a public library, but then she only had to find a
receptive librarian. Her newly devoted slave would conduct all the dreary
research on his own and bring the results to her in her lair (often with
some little trinket or love token, such as the contents of his savings
account or his wife’s jewelry).
Finding executives had
never entailed this kind of legwork. Compared to the John Forbes and Bruce
Waynes of the world, Harvey was proving ridiculously hard to track down.
If I hadn’t been busy
trying to keep Vernon Fields alive, stay alive myself, and figure out what
the hell Batman was talking about, it might have occurred to me before then
that we’d all been making a fair amount of noise and no one from the
hospital had come to investigate. I realized now. Either Two-Face had
found a way to harness dumb luck, or he’d arranged a diversion to
keep the staff occupied on the far side of the building.
He’d arranged a diversion
to cover what he expected to be a simple, two-minute murder, not a
protracted confrontation with Catwoman and then Batman. His time ran out,
the door swung open, and that doctor, who had a two-fixation to start with,
came running in before he saw what he was getting into.
When he saw a room full
of Batman, Two-Face, and Catwoman, he froze. Two-Face seized the moment,
punched Batman, and lunged at the doctor, swinging him into a choke hold. The batarangs still wedged in his arm pressed against the doctor’s throat,
and Batman’s manner shifted instantly from Dark Avenger to hostage
negotiator.
“Two-Face, don’t do
anything rash,” he said, stretching out his fingers so we could see he
wasn’t palming a batarang. “You’re only here in this hospital because of
Harvey. Don’t let his agenda force you into anything.”
Rather than go out the
door (the non-Rogue, ordinary criminal’s move that brings a SWAT team and a
camera crew from Channel 6), Two-Face simply walked Dr. Yarling across the
room and then threw him into me. Before any of us could react, he’d gone
out the window on the batline Batman left hanging there.
It’s a good trick. I’ve
done it myself.
Naturally, I never had
the chance to see the look on Batman’s face on those occasions.
I saw it now. Not a
pretty sight.
He took a second he
really didn’t have to look over Yarling, my bleeding arm, and Vernon’s bed,
before he followed Two-Face out the window.
The Gotham
Intercontinental Hotel. It wasn’t a park, but Ivy found it something of an
oasis in the midst of all the concrete and car exhaust. How often had she
and Harvey actually stayed there, four times? Five? Not enough to be
sentimental about. It was just a quiet place to stop for a few minutes and
rest her feet, that was all.
She didn’t even like
the hotel at the time. “Fresh flowers flown in daily from Holland,” the
sick bastards. “Toiletries from the finest cologne makers in France,” as if
grinding up the rarest blossoms nature could produce was something to brag
about.
She’d held her tongue, of
course. She had a cover to maintain. Harvey had picked the hotel because
it was near the courthouse, handy for a matinee or to meet for a quick drink
in the Scampi Lounge (where the wholesale massacre of fruits and berries
really got out of hand). They’d meet for a drink as if they were about to
set off for a night on the town, and once or twice they actually did go out
instead of slipping upstairs to the room she’d booked as Daisy Chloris of
Persephone Pines, Montana.
If anything, the
associations from those days were negative. She certainly wasn’t stopping
back at the Scampi Lounge for sentimental reasons. She certainly didn’t
want to remember that first fling with Harvey. He was nothing but a
useful convenience back then, a city official to be enslaved, used, and then
disposed of. She had no affection for him.
And the only reason she’d
taken up with him later when he became Two-Face was for the novelty, not
because of any lingering attachments or fond memories of the man he had
been.
She and Two-Face had no
special places. It wasn’t that kind of a relationship. So there was
absolutely no reason to be sitting here now, other than resting her feet.
If one has to be stabbed,
I’d have to say doing it in the middle of a hospital is the way to go. If
you also have the chance to help a surgeon to his feet when he’s just been
in the middle of a hostage standoff, so much the better. Alfred couldn’t
have been more solicitous stitching up my arm than this Dr. Yarling. He was
a brain surgeon, literally, but he wouldn’t hear of sending me down to the
emergency room to be treated by lesser mortals—not when I’d been wounded by
that thrice-damned two-headed monstrosity. He had to do it himself.
Naturally, I was expected
to join in his wholesale condemnation of the “thrice-damned two-headed
monstrosity.” The beast had thrust a knife into my arm and then twisted it
for fun. I knew what I was supposed to say, I knew how I was supposed to
behave… but I couldn’t really get into the spirit of it. Harvey was
Two-Face again. And Two-Face was toting a mad-on that would make Genghis
Khan suggest an anger management program might be in order. The question of
HOW THE HELL IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED screamed in my head, shouting
down a chorus of quieter but more practical questions like What
now? What did this mean? What was the backlash going to be after all those
months of a fully healed Harvey? Was the new Darth-dominant Two-Face a
permanent thing or would he eventually get back to the
half-psycho/half-lovable-ol’-Harvey that everyone knew?
I had too many questions
to join in with the righteous indignation Dr. Yarling expected. He chalked
it up to trauma and blood loss. Tactfully changed the subject to something
I would find easier. He asked about my claws: the way the gloves were
made, the slit in the top where the points came through. It was pretty
amazing really, the way he faked an interest. I guess a brain surgeon
doesn’t get a chance to do the whole “bedside manner” bit very often.
When I was stitched up,
he called a dermatologist up from the third floor to consult on the best
ointment to prevent scarring. While we waited for that prescription to be
filled, he brought me a cup of coffee from the doctors’ lounge instead of
letting me drink the cheap swill from the vending machine. I think if I’d
asked, he’d have peeled me a grape.
Of course, the downside
of having a very attentive surgeon patch you up and then escort you through
the hospital is that it virtually requires you to leave by the front door.
I only barely managed to escape the wheelchair treatment, and I suspect that
was only because he’d seen my claws up close and knew they were too sharp to
argue with. But I was in still costume and it was still daylight, yet there
I was strolling out the front door into midday traffic. The best I could
manage was to do the thank you-and-goodbye bit with Dr. Yarling, pretend to
hail a cab, and then sprint around to the back of the building and go back
inside through the emergency room.
The emergency receiving
area is filled with TVs, and that’s when I saw the Batman/Two-Face pursuit
was all over the news. GCN was looping footage of the Batmobile chasing a
stolen ambulance up 5th Avenue (and omitting the part where their
own helicopter caused the traffic snarl that enabled the ambulance to get
away).
It took me ten minutes to
get up to the roof, and only then could I check for messages. There were
two. One from Bruce saying we’d be at the penthouse tonight. One from
Batman saying the ambulance was found abandoned at the corner of Fleeting
and 2nd. If that was a joke, it was Harvey’s and not Batman’s,
that’s for sure.
I took a rooftop route to
the penthouse and was surprised to see Bruce had beaten me.
“I brought sesame
noodles,” he said dryly.
Really, when you stopped
to think about it, it was perfectly natural that Ivy was thinking more of
that first, brief affair with Harvey than the longer, tumultuous
relationship with Two-Face. She was visiting their old places: Bistro SoHo,
Fusion, New Paradise, and even Scampi at the Intercontinental (although just
to rest her feet).
She was going back to all
their old places, and she was wracking her brains trying to remember more.
Not just the spots they visited together, but places he had mentioned. So,
of course, she was thinking more of the milquetoast D.A. than the volatile
rogue. It made perfect sense. There were two Harvey Dents, after all, and
the one she was seeking bore a greater resemblance to the first one. Now
that he was “Fullface,” he was going back to his old habits and avoiding the
Two-Face crowd. He wouldn’t be at the Iceberg (or Catty’s ridiculous
substitute, whatever it was called), he would go back to Bistro SoHo and the
Scampi Lounge.
There was nothing
sentimental about it. This was the proper way to look for him.
The meal was somber. It
began in near silence, apart from a request to pass the soy sauce and a
cough. Then Bruce wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin and took a
sip of water. In those few seconds, the density shift occurred and Selina
knew the next words she heard would be spoken by Batman.
“Well, it could have gone
better,” he graveled.
“Ya think?” she replied.
Silence returned for
another few bites. Then Selina sighed.
“I can’t believe it.
Harvey…”
“That wasn’t Harvey,”
Bruce said quickly. “It was Two-Face and only Two-Face. It’s Harvey’s body
but that’s it. That’s why he’s not flipping the coin. There’s no
dissenting opinion in his head, no opposition that has to be satisfied.”
“Okay, wait, reality
check. Two-Face is a part of Harvey. I mean, I know we all talk
about him like some freeloading Neanderthal cousin who’s been staying on
Harvey’s couch for too long, but he is part of Harvey Dent.”
“Not in Harvey’s mind.
For years, he separated himself from his own worst instincts. You remember
the Leonard Berlander mess. He’d been thinking ‘Harvey-good; Two-Face-evil’
for so long, he’d forgotten that, pre-acid, he had flaws like everyone
else.”
“Yes, I remember… It was
memorable.”
A stiff silence followed
as they both replayed a fight they’d had in the course of that episode, the
first since they’d become a couple, and the worst. After a moment, Bruce
reached out and took Selina’s hand.
“I’m sorry but we do need
to focus on this.”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “‘For
years, separated himself from his own worst instincts,’ continue.”
“And once Jason ‘healed’
him, once in his mind Two-Face was gone because the scars were gone,
he went back to living as Harvey Dent, but not the Harvey he had been before
the acid. The Harvey he’d become.”
“Two-Face’s opposite,”
Selina whispered.
“Yes. He’s been
suppressing every negative thought and impulse without realizing it. It was
a psychological powder keg. When he saw Vernon Fields again after all those
years, it went off.”
“That’s what you meant
when you were talking to Two-Face, about Harvey trying to—”
“To murder Vernon Fields,
yes. I spent the day going around to Harvey’s favorite haunts. I had to go
back to the Harvard Club to talk to the dinner shift, and I hit rush hour
traffic. There’s a human tidal wave of commuters coming out of the 23rd
Street station heading for the East City Park hub, and they all pass right in
front of the Harvard Club window. It reminded me of a notation on the
Vernon Fields paperwork at Gotham General, a handwritten notation because
his insurance hadn’t processed a change of address. Six weeks ago, Vernon
Fields moved to a new apartment on 23rd Street.”
Selina moistened her lips
thoughtfully.
“So he could have walked
right past the window while Harvey was sitting there,” she murmured.
“And Harvey snapped,”
Bruce said darkly. “I went to the apartment. The clean up was good but…
rushed. It was obviously the true scene of the crime. I didn’t take the
time to harvest evidence, but I sealed it. I’ll send Robin tomorrow for
that. It’s good experience for him.”
“If you’re farming it out
to the sidekicks for experience, that means you already know what it will
turn up.”
Bruce swallowed hard
before answering; he stared darkly into space, his mind’s eye locked on the
one crime he hated more than any other.
“It will reveal all the
forensic markings of a homicide. Blunt force trauma to the head, and when
the victim was prostrate, kicking. Fields’s injuries were always
ambiguous. There was no reason to doubt the hit-and-run at the time because
there was a police report. But the police never spoke to a witness who
actually saw a vehicle hit Fields. All they had was a 9-1-1 call that
reported a hit-and-run, and a body in the middle of a newsstand that had
obviously been totaled by a mini van. There was plenty of transfer paint on
the remnants of the newsstand, but none that I’m aware of on Fields
himself.”
“And you found the van at
this parking garage?”
“No, that was a guess.
Two-Face would have no trouble stealing any car he wanted, but he wouldn’t
take something off the street. Moving a body, he’d want the cover of a
garage. And he wouldn’t want to go far from the apartment. So…”
“‘You say ‘the garage in
North Gainsly’ and he assumes you’ve been to wherever he got the van.”
“Correct.”
“You said Two-Face
would have no trouble stealing a car. What happened to ‘Harvey’ as your
would-be killer?”
“I believe Harvey found
himself in Vernon Fields’s apartment, looking down on what he thought was a
dead body. He’s never been able to accept the realities of his dark side.
He couldn’t face the truth of what he’d done: he himself, the ‘good guy,’
not ‘Darth Duality,’ had killed a man. So he took refuge in Two-Face. He
flipped a coin. His scars returned…”
“And everyone would
assume Two-Face had done it. Two-Face, the patsy.”
She let out a low
whistle.
“To his way of thinking,
it is the perfect alibi,” Bruce added. “But I believe the ‘alibi’ was the
secondary goal. His primary purpose was to hide from the truth of what
happened. To hide it from himself, not the rest of us.”
The Scampi Lounge
mimosa. As if it wasn’t enough to take an orange, so unique and fragrant
and perfect in its natural state, and grind its poor defenseless body until
it was pulverized, eking out the last drop of its precious nectar to satisfy
decadent human cravings. As if that wasn’t enough savagery for one day,
that beast of a bartender must then pour in the essence of champagne grapes,
just as rare and perfect in their natural state and just as cruelly ripped
from the mother vines that gave them life, just as cruelly pressed and
processed until there was nothing left but liquid… Then, finally, adding
insult to injury, they dropped in the lifeless corpse of a red raspberry for
no reason whatsoever. Just to be mean. Their “special touch.” May the
bastards rot in hell for eternity.
How many of those
wretched beverages had she consumed when she was with Harvey? Just because
the Lounge made it a specialty and just because their breakfasts were a
bliss without which no overnight stay at the Intercontinental was complete.
“You have to try the Belgian waffle” (with more raspberry corpses, oh joy)…
or the pancakes (lingonberry bodies this time, for variety). Even their
afternoon quickies, they’d order room service and more champagne and
strawber…
This was pointless.
Goddesses were not suited
to nostalgic reminiscence any more than plants were suited to hunting.
Why did she even care
what became of Harvey Dent? He certainly never cared what became of her.
He only came to see her that one time after his face healed, and that was
only to end things his way instead of Two-Face’s. As if it mattered. Her
relationship with him pre-Two-Face was nothing but a lie and a con so she
could use him and then kill him. If anybody was going to leave it at “fuck
you, bitch,” it should have been him. Of the three of them, he was the one
most entitled to be nasty, but rather than leave it where they…
Oh dear.
Harvey was quite a
wonderful man.
“So we’ve really lost
him,” Selina said softly.
“No,” came the instant
reply, and Selina was surprised to hear it spoken in the Bat-gravel.
“Harvey might have tried to vanish completely into Two-Face, but he’s still
in there.”
“Not based on anything I
saw,” she said, touching the bandage over her stitches.
“Selina, you said you
were in Gotham when he ran for D.A. Do you remember his campaign slogan?
‘I believe in Harvey Dent.’ All the corruption back then, the mobs running
the unions, the dirty cops, the dirty D.A.s… And he stepped into the middle
of it, without a mask. ‘I believe Harvey Dent can look Evil in face and
win.’”
“He didn’t. Bruce, he
looked Evil in the face and Evil took a bottle of acid out of its pocket and
scarred up everything Harvey Dent was and dreamed of being. You dropped out
of the picture. You didn’t really know who he was after the acid. You’re
in no position to judge what he—”
“And you dropped
him after the healing, Selina. When we first got together, Harvey was your
best friend among the rogues. After his face was healed and Two-Face was
out of the picture, you started spending more and more time with Nigma.”
“That’s not true, I
just… shit, I guess it is true.”
“I think I understand why, but it doesn’t
change the fact that if I ‘don’t know who he became after the acid,’ you don’t know who he’s become in these months since
he got his life back. I’ve seen a lot more of him, I’ve talked to him as
Bruce and as Batman, and I am in a position to judge. It was true then and
it’s true now: I believe Harvey Dent can look evil in the face and win. He
didn’t then, you’re right. But he can. He has the courage to beat this.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not
trying to be difficult here, but I just don’t see where you’re getting
this.”
“A punctured lung. One
of the complications when Fields reached the hospital. Someone had
performed CPR hard enough that they drove a piece of his ribcage into his
lung. Someone was fighting like hell to save that man’s life, and it
certainly wasn’t Two-Face. It wasn’t anyone at the scene of the staged
hit-and-run, I checked. It had to be Harvey. When he realized Fields
wasn’t dead, he fought his way through Two-Face—through a Two-Face he
himself released only minutes before, a Two-Face that was a hundred times
stronger than he’d ever been after being pent up all that time—Harvey fought
his way back to keep Vernon Fields alive. He’s still in there, and there’s
still good in him.”
“Why am I not convinced?”
Selina sighed.
Bruce suppressed a lip
twitch as a line from the past suggested itself.
“Because one of us has to
be the brooding vortex of despair.”
“Ah. No wonder you scowl
so much. This sucks.”
“A naughty grin suits you
better,” Bruce admitted, kissing her cheek lightly.
She forced a smile, then
said “I don’t make a habit of this, but I’m going to get drunk tonight.”
Bruce froze for a second,
a chain of thoughts falling like dominos.
“Oh my god,” he graveled
as the final thought fell into place. “Two-Face’s last hideout… Vault!”
To be continued…
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