Sleep didn't come.
Will lay on the holding cell's cot staring at the ceiling while the woman in the next cage talked to herself without pause, the man across the corridor snored like something industrial, and his cellmate — the only one who hadn't yet announced his presence through noise — watched him.
Watched him the way a hand slides across a surface. Patient. Unhurried.
Will turned his head.
The guy was young — maybe his age, maybe a little older — with dark hair slicked back with enough product to waterproof a boat. His eyes were a sharp, clear blue, set above a nose that curved out in a pronounced hook. He was dressed in a suit two sizes too large for his frame, sitting upright on the edge of the cot with one leg crossed over the other, perfectly at ease, as though the holding cell were a waiting room he visited often.
Their eyes met.
The young man spoke first.
"Name's Oswald. I work for Mr. Maroni." A pause. "You?"
"I don't know." Will turned back to the ceiling. Tomorrow morning, Arkham. The thought sat on his chest like a concrete block. He pulled his knees up and rolled onto his side, putting his back to the conversation.
Oswald did not take the hint.
"Great build on you, by the way."
Will went rigid.
"What."
"Relax, relax — joke." Oswald flashed a wide grin when Will spun back around, all white teeth and zero remorse. "Mostly. But seriously, you're exactly the kind of guy I've been looking for. Good frame, clearly knows how to handle himself. I'm recruiting. You interested in joining the Romans? Come work for the Senate, build yourself a real future."
"The Romans."
The name tugged at something. Will turned it over.
"You're telling me you don't know the Romans?" Oswald looked genuinely scandalized. "Gotham-born and you've never heard of Mr. Carmine Falcone?"
He had, actually. Falcone — the Roman, head of Gotham's most powerful crime family. The name was one of the few that had made it into Will's secondhand DC education. And if this kid worked for Maroni, that put him somewhere inside that organization — a lieutenant's errand runner, maybe.
Which meant Oswald was inviting him into the mob.
He hadn't found Batman. He hadn't found any kind of plan. And the alternative to saying yes was a psychiatric evaluation and a one-way trip to Arkham.
"If I agree," Will said carefully, "can you actually get me out of here tonight?"
Oswald spread his hands. "We run errands for Mr. Maroni. You think a police station gives us trouble?"
The footsteps came almost on cue — heavy, unhurried — followed by the metallic shuffle of keys. The door swung open, and a guard with a gut straining his uniform stood in the frame.
Oswald stood, smoothed his lapels, and pointed at Will. "Him too."
The guard's eyes moved to Will and back. "That's a different price. Gordon personally processed him."
"We pay your precinct every month, on schedule." Oswald's voice stayed pleasant. "That question goes to your captain, not me."
"He's not affiliated. It's a separate arrangement."
"Ah." Oswald nodded slowly, as though reconsidering. "Fair enough."
He reached up and unclasped his watch.
It was gold — solid, heavy, the kind of thing that doesn't come from a department store. Will watched him turn it over in his palm and started calculating what it was worth, touched briefly by the idea that this near-stranger was pawning something valuable for him—
Oswald slid the watch over his right fist and hit the guard hard enough to double him over the doorframe.
The cells erupted. Catcalls, laughter, someone banging on bars.
Oswald stepped over the guard, added a kick for emphasis, and glanced back at Will.
"You're free."
That was three months ago.
Since then, Will Quinn had become a Roman — specifically, an associate of Maroni's crew, which made him the subordinate of a subordinate, the bottom rung of a ladder that stretched up into boardrooms he'd never see.
The Senate, Oswald called their building. He'd named it himself, after the Roman Senate — with full conviction that one day every man living inside would be a true elder of a unified Gotham underworld.
The building was a two-story wood-frame tenement in the lower East Side. The floorboards hid roaches and pill bugs in the gaps beneath them. Every step produced a small crunch.
Will found it difficult to share Oswald's vision.
Still, three months in, he'd found a rhythm. Collecting rent from businesses under Maroni's protection. Standing guard at card games. The occasional street brawl with a rival crew — nothing cinematic about it, just cold concrete and bruised knuckles and the specific humiliation of eating black bread on a curb afterward while the adrenaline wore off.
Gang life looked better in films.
What kept it tolerable was Oswald.
He was a strange person — calculating in ways that surfaced unexpectedly, prone to grand speeches about destiny and empire while eating vending machine crackers — but he looked after his people. He'd talked Will through the worst of the adjustment period with a patience that didn't quite fit the rest of his personality. Without that, Will wasn't sure he'd have made it to month two.
He was still running water over his face when he heard the knock.
Oswald was already in the hallway when Will opened the door, dressed, hair lacquered into place, looking like a man ready for business at — Will checked — not yet seven in the morning.
"Job tonight. Maroni's casino, security detail until three AM." He held up two fingers. "Two hundred each."
Will nodded.
"That's it? No reaction? This is your first job outside the lower East Side, you might even get eyes on Maroni himself—"
"Yeah. Good." Will pulled up a smile. It didn't land right and he knew it.
Oswald studied him for a moment, then let it go.
Back in his room, Will pulled open the wardrobe.
The camphor smell hit him first. Inside hung a single black suit — joining the Romans required one, pressed and fitted, hair slicked back if possible. The aesthetic demanded it. Living in a condemned building while dressing like a Prohibition-era accountant.
He lifted the jacket off the hanger.
Something fell from the inner pocket and hit the floor.
A comic book.
Will stared at it.
He didn't read comics. He was fairly sure he'd never owned one. He crouched down and picked it up — the cover showed a dark figure against a Gotham skyline, the title visible across the top.
Batman.
He sat down on the bed.
Three months in this city. Three months since that newspaper in the gutter. And this was the first time he'd seen that name anywhere outside his own head.
He opened it.
The story followed a Dr. Hugo Strange — a biologist, a researcher — who had borrowed from Maroni to fund his experiments. When he couldn't repay the debt, Maroni's men humiliated him. Strange retaliated. He showed up at Maroni's casino with three subjects — the comic called them bio-humans — and tore through every person inside, leaving the floor empty and the tables cleared.
The panels were detailed. The casualties were not named or faced. Just figures, falling.
The story ended there. Everything after was blank pages — clean white, no ink.
Will closed it slowly.
Casino. Tonight. Security detail.
He wasn't slow. He pulled the thread.
The reason the story had no ending was because he and Oswald were going to be in that casino tonight. Faceless figures in the background panels. The kind of characters whose deaths the story doesn't bother to acknowledge because they were never meant to matter.
Two hundred dollars.
That's what they're paying us to die.
He turned the comic over in his hands. No publisher. No issue number. No logo.
"So this is how the system works," he said to the empty room. "No quest markers, no minimap. Just a picture book that stops before the part where I get killed." He pushed both hands into his hair. "Fantastic. Truly. An open-world experience."
Options, then.
Tell Oswald the truth — hey, I found a comic book that predicts we're both going to die tonight — and watch Oswald's face go through several unflattering stages before landing on no.
Fake an illness and stay behind. Possible. But Oswald would go without him. And Oswald had knocked a prison guard unconscious with a watch and then kicked him for good measure, which meant Oswald thought he could handle himself — and maybe he could against normal problems. Bio-humans weren't normal problems.
Will owed him. Not in a way he could easily quantify, but the math wasn't complicated. Oswald had pulled him out of that cell for nothing, given him work, lent him money for the suit. In Gotham, that wasn't small. That was the whole ledger.
He wasn't leaving him to walk into this alone.
Fine. Go. Figure it out when you get there.
He tucked the comic into the back of his waistband, shrugged on the jacket, and checked his reflection in the window glass.
Vampire in a suit.
Close enough.