This was one of Batman's secondary safehouses — one of dozens scattered across Gotham, each stocked, each functional, none of them the cave under the Manor but all of them capable of handling the operational requirements that arose when the main base was too far away or too exposed to access.
The Mad Hatter had been inside the transparent holding capsule for sixteen hours.
It was an oversized oval chamber — thick polycarbonate walls, no seams on the interior, environmental controls that kept it just uncomfortable enough to discourage complacency. Jervis Tetch sat in it with the expression of a man who had made a series of escalating decisions and was now at the end of that particular road.
His plan, post-Arkham, had been straightforward by his standards: reassemble his workforce, distribute the mind-control hats to a fresh batch of unwilling participants, establish a sufficiently theatrical venue, and host another tea party at a scale befitting his ambitions. Then he'd had something else in mind — something involving information he'd acquired, a specific address, a test he'd wanted to run.
None of that had happened. Deadshot had arrived with what Tetch could only describe as excessive efficiency, the hat-controlled workforce had been loaded into police vehicles, and Jervis had been placed into a Bat-safehouse holding cell before he'd had time to finish his opening monologue.
The one mercy was that he'd surrendered fast enough to avoid the treatment his henchmen had received. He was intact. Relatively.
Relatively turned out to be doing significant work in that sentence.
The lights came on.
Tetch pressed his eyes shut and waited for them to stop being offensive. When he opened them, the polycarbonate door had swung inward, and Batman was standing in the opening.
Ethan looked at him.
Jervis Tetch, he thought. Mad Hatter. Per the Knightfall storyline, he caught Bird's surveillance bird — one of the actual birds Bird uses for reconnaissance — noticed the tracking potential, put a device on it, and has been sitting on Bane's location ever since. He was going to use it to orchestrate some elaborate scenario. He didn't get the chance.
But he has the address.
He was still organizing his approach when Tim Drake, standing three feet to his left, jumped forward and hit the Mad Hatter in the face.
Then kicked him down.
Then produced a crowbar from somewhere — Ethan genuinely did not know where Tim had been keeping a crowbar — and began using it.
"Talk."
"OW OW OW OW—"
"Talk. TALK—"
The crowbar connected with the top of Tetch's head three times in quick succession, producing a sound that was more rhythmic than it had any right to be. Tetch's hat went sideways. His wig shifted. He made sounds that were less words than pure physiological response.
Ethan stood very still and watched this.
This is, he thought, the third Robin. The academic one. The detective. The one Bruce apparently chose specifically because he was the most intellectually capable of the three. He watched Tim Drake wind up for another swing with the focused energy of a teenager who had been sitting in handcuffs for three days and had opinions about it. And he is currently using a crowbar on a prisoner with what I can only describe as enthusiasm.
Bruce Wayne is an extraordinary parent.
"I DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY," Tetch wailed, from the floor.
"THEN I'LL KEEP GOING UNTIL YOU DO—"
Tim Drake, age fifteen, delivered this line while smiling in a way that Ethan found genuinely unsettling. There was drool involved. There was the crowbar. There was a specific quality of focused joy in the expression that suggested Tim had been storing this particular energy for some time and was now releasing it in a controlled environment.
The rhythmic impacts continued.
Tetch crawled across the floor and grabbed the edge of Ethan's cape with both hands, looking up with the expression of a man appealing to a higher power.
"Please," he said. "Please stop him."
Tim delivered one final emphatic blow to the posterior region that produced a sound that will not be described, and a result to the crowbar that also will not be described.
Tetch's scream reached a register that Ethan had not previously known the human voice could access.
"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME."
Ethan looked down at the man clinging to his cape. Looked at Tim, who was looking at the crowbar with an expression that suggested he was evaluating its continued structural usefulness. Looked back at Tetch.
He realized, with a small internal wince, that he had not yet asked Tetch anything.
"Tim," he said. "That's enough."
Tim stepped back. Cheerfully. Like a person who had completed a satisfying project.
Tetch trembled on the floor. He had the specific quality of a small animal that has experienced something large and is still deciding whether it has survived.
"Jervis." Ethan crouched down to his level. "Don't be afraid."
He paused.
That was a terrible opening.
"Robin is—" he began, gesturing behind him.
Tim hit the crowbar against the floor once. A single sharp clang. Tetch flinched so hard he fell sideways.
Ethan abandoned the reassurance approach.
"You caught Bird's surveillance bird," he said. "One of the actual birds he uses for field reconnaissance. You recognized what it was, and you put a tracker on it before you released it. You've been holding Bane's current location for days." He watched Tetch's face. "You were planning to use it — not directly, but as a piece in something larger. You were going to find someone with the right capabilities, give them the address, and watch what happened. A test." He paused. "You never got to run it."
The face below him had stopped pretending to have no information.
Good, Ethan thought. There it is.
"Jervis," he said. "My patience is a specific and finite resource."
Behind him, Tim Drake picked up the crowbar again. Just held it. Quietly.
Tetch looked at the crowbar.
Then he gave them the address.
Forty-five minutes later, Ethan was on the phone.
"Gordon. You need to move before he realizes what's happening. Full deployment — yes, heavy ordinance. You're not going to talk Bane into anything, so don't try. Pin him down, evacuate the surrounding area, then use everything you have to keep him stationary. The Guard has the resources, they just need—" He listened for a moment. "Yes. If he breaks toward the officers, pull back to the second perimeter and redirect fire. The goal is containment, not engagement. Just make sure he can't—"
He listened again.
"Right. Go."
He closed the channel and allowed himself a brief, private moment of satisfaction.
When Bane opens his door and finds himself looking at an armored column, Ethan thought, his face is going to be genuinely worth seeing.
The funeral was short.
Jean-Paul Valley had no family present — none that knew him as himself, anyway. The Order of St. Dumas did not send representatives, which was unsurprising. What he had were Alfred, a priest from St. Brendan's who had known him briefly, and two figures standing at the far edge of the cemetery under black umbrellas.
It was raining. Gotham had specific opinions about timing.
Ethan stood beside Tim and watched the coffin go into the ground.
In the original continuity — the one he'd read, the one he carried in his head like a parallel map — Jean-Paul Valley had been part of something larger. He'd taken the cowl when Bruce was broken. He'd won. Then the winning had done something to him, or revealed something that was already there, and by the time Bruce came back to reclaim what was his, Jean-Paul had become a different kind of problem entirely.
The Order of St. Dumas had spent years building a weapon inside a man. They'd done it patiently, systematically, the way cults do — through ritual and isolation and the gradual replacement of every value Jean-Paul had formed on his own with values they'd installed instead. By the time he came to Gotham, he was capable of extraordinary things, and the extraordinary things were resting on a foundation that had been engineered rather than chosen.
In this timeline, he'd found the costume before he found the mission. He'd put it on alone, in the Manor, while Ethan was somewhere on the other side of Gotham doing something else. He'd gone out.
Bane had found him within four hours.
The headless body had been returned to Wayne Manor the following morning, addressed to Bruce Wayne, which was either a message or a confirmation or both.
Ethan didn't feel the loss the way he probably should have. He hadn't known Jean-Paul Valley. He'd read about him, which was a different thing. The man in the ground was a stranger who had died in his place, and the fact that the man had been carrying a bomb inside himself for years — the Order's conditioning, the Azrael identity, the slow erosion of who he might have been — made the grief complicated in ways Ethan didn't have the emotional infrastructure to navigate right now.
Tim had gone quiet beside him. The cheerful violence of forty minutes ago was entirely gone. He was looking at the grave with the expression of someone who had lost a specific person, not a concept — who had eaten meals with Jean-Paul and traded information with him and had, apparently, genuinely liked him.
The coffin was down. The priest finished.
The rain kept going.
Tim placed a small bunch of flowers at the base of the headstone — carefully, deliberately, the gesture of someone who wanted it done right — then straightened and looked at Ethan with an expression that had moved from grief into something more deliberate.
"Bruce," he said.
Ethan said nothing.
"There's something I need to tell you."