The call was from Wesker.
He had one piece of news: Deadshot was quitting.
Ethan stood on the rooftop of the GCPD building in the pre-dawn cold and felt the specific exhaustion of a man who has just survived a Bane encounter and is now being asked to perform human resources management.
This is not how games work, he thought. In games, recruited allies have loyalty meters. In games, the number tells you where you stand. In real life, Floyd Lawton has a daughter and his own set of priorities and did not sign a multi-year contract.
Gordon, who had the practiced tact of a man who had spent decades around Batman, stepped to the far edge of the roof and found something in the middle distance to examine.
Ethan let Wesker hand the phone over. He took a breath, settled his throat into Lawton's own register — that specific flat baritone, the voice of a man who has decided that most things aren't worth the energy they'd cost — and let the voice do what voices do when they come from inside a person's own head.
"All right," he said. "You want out. I respect that. You want to go home to your daughter, and that's a reasonable thing to want. But before you go — hear me out."
Silence on the other end.
"Are you satisfied with where she's headed?"
The silence changed quality.
"Listen to me, Lawton. I looked into her situation. The family she's with — good people, I'm sure. Not wealthy. She'll go to the local school. You know the one — the kind where half the class is already making decisions that are going to define the next twenty years of their life, and not the good kind of decisions." He kept his voice even, factual, the tone of a man delivering a weather report rather than an attack. "She'll manage. Maybe she'll be fine. Maybe she'll be better than fine. But the doors that open for the daughter of Floyd Lawton — convicted felon, wanted in eleven countries — those doors have a particular shape. They don't look like the doors you'd want for her."
"Shut up." The words came out compressed, the way words come out when someone is pressing down on the thing underneath them. "You don't get to—"
"The money you've made — it's real money. But black money has a conversion rate. By the time it's clean, you're looking at fifty cents on the dollar if you're lucky, and that's before the tax implications of a financial history that doesn't quite add up." He paused. "And even if the money's clean — you can't go to parent-teacher conferences, Lawton. You can't show up at her graduation. You can't be the father who's there, because being there means being findable, and being findable means every organization that has your name on a priority list knows exactly where to send someone."
"I said shut—"
"I can give her a letter of recommendation from Bruce Wayne." He let that land. "Or from Jim Gordon. Either one opens the right doors at the right schools. I can run the two hundred million through a financial structure that makes it Zoe's legal inheritance — clean, documented, untouchable. I can build her a life that doesn't depend on you staying invisible." He let a beat pass. "Or you can walk away, and she gets what she gets. That's a choice too. I'm not judging it."
The line went quiet for a long time.
Floyd Lawton, sitting in a Gotham alley with broken ribs and someone else's blood on his jacket, looked at the wall across from him.
He was not, he reflected, a good person. He had never been a good person, and had stopped pretending otherwise at approximately age nineteen. The love he had for his daughter was not the clean, selfless love that people wrote songs about. It was possessive and irrational and it wanted things — wanted to be in the room, wanted to matter, wanted the specific dignity of being someone's father rather than someone's classified file.
That was not a virtue. He knew that.
But it was true.
"You can actually do all of that," he said. Not a question.
"I can actually do all of that."
Another silence.
"...Fine." The word had the sound of a door closing on something that had been open for a while. "I'm in."
"What do you call me?"
A pause. The particular pause of a man who has just surrendered a negotiating position and is deciding how to acknowledge it without making it worse.
"...Boss," Deadshot said.
Ethan closed the channel.
He stood with it for a moment — the transaction completed, the logic of it clean enough. Deadshot needed leverage applied to the right place. The right place was a seven-year-old girl in a foster home who was going to need a future that her father's profession couldn't provide through conventional means. That wasn't manipulation, exactly. It was alignment.
And when Bane is handled, he thought, the deal is honored and everyone goes their separate way and none of this was personal.
He looked across the roof at Gordon, who had just taken a radio call of his own and was rubbing the bridge of his nose with the expression of a man adding items to a list that was already too long.
And on the subject of the National Guard, Ethan thought, turning back to the more pressing logistics — if Krol deploys regular military into a city with active Arkham escapees, the collateral outcome projections are—
"Batman." Gordon turned. His face had the look it got when something had moved from the category of manageable to the category of I need to tell someone who handles the unmanageable things. "Wait here a moment."
He went down the stairs. Came back two minutes later with a document envelope. Extracted a file, handed it over.
"Three days ago," he said. "Stellar Labs. A kidnapping — one victim, Dr. Harold Goldblum. Chemistry professor, lead researcher in GothCorp's biochemical division. Specialist in biological and chemical weapons applications. Top-tier expertise across biochemistry, botany, and toxicology." Gordon produced a photograph. "Bald guy. Very smart."
Ethan looked at the photograph.
Something in his chest did a thing it did when he recognized a shape before his brain had finished naming it.
"This should have been a priority response," Gordon continued, "but at the time, Firefly had just set the Elmore Docks on fire. And Firefly has this thing where he—"
"Watches the fire," Ethan said. "And doesn't stop watching until someone makes him."
"Right. And while we were dealing with Firefly, Amygdala started something on the east side, and then Two-Face—" Gordon made a gesture that encompassed several hours of police response, three separate incident reports, and the specific indignity of a department that was being used as a distraction mechanism. "The short version is that the Goldblum kidnapping got deprioritized."
"And now?"
"Forensics recovered damaged security footage from the lab. Cleaned it up technically, got a partial image." Gordon passed a second photograph. "Poison Ivy didn't act alone."
Ethan looked at the photograph.
Standing beside Ivy — red hair, green costume, the particular posture of someone who had long since stopped needing to perform threat and simply was threat — was something that had been a man once and had resolved that ambiguity in a specific direction. Bark-textured. Tall. The kind of wrong that plant life produces when it decides to approximate a person from first principles.
"I know him," Ethan said. "Jason Woodrue. He calls himself the Floronic Man." He looked at the photograph carefully. "He reverse-engineered the accident that created Swamp Thing — Alec Holland's accident — and applied the mechanism to himself. He's not fully plant, not fully human. He's become a low-level avatar of something called the Green."
Gordon stared at him.
"The Green," Gordon said.
"An elemental force. It connects all plant life — every root, every cell wall, every photosynthetic organism on the planet, networked into a single system. The Green is the plant kingdom's version of consciousness. Woodrue can access it. Ivy can too, to a lesser extent." He paused. "It's opposed by two other forces — the Red, which connects all animal life, and the Rot, which connects death and decay. Together they're the three foundational forces of organic life on—"
"Stop," Gordon said.
Ethan stopped.
"You said magic," Gordon said.
"I said elemental forces."
"You said avatar."
"I said low-level avatar."
Gordon looked at the photograph. Looked at Ethan. Looked at the photograph again.
"I need you to explain to me," he said, with the careful precision of a man who has been a police detective for thirty years and is experiencing the specific discomfort of a category error in real time, "how we went from a kidnapping and a lab break-in — which is a crime, which is a police matter — to a conversation about the metaphysical consciousness of plants."
"Gotham," Ethan said.
Gordon opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"...Fair," he said.