The Ventriloquist sat with his back against the wall.
He held the gun loosely, the way a man holds something he isn't sure he wants anymore — like a prisoner waiting for a door to open that he's no longer certain he wants to walk through.
Anyone seeing him for the first time would have had trouble squaring the image. A balding white man somewhere in his mid-fifties, slight, trembling faintly at the shoulders. Not dangerous-looking. Not even particularly present-looking. The kind of man you'd pass on a sidewalk and immediately forget.
The hostages crouched nearby, bunched together against the far wall, none of them moving unless they had to. They were Evidence Bureau staff — clerks, mostly, and one security guard who was laid out on the floor with half his uniform soaked dark red. He'd gone for his weapon when Wesker had first come through the door. He hadn't gotten close.
"Oh, Mr. Socky…" Arnold Wesker was speaking to his own left hand, where a white wool sock had been stretched over his fingers and thumb, its crude face working open and shut as he manipulated it. A stand-in. Scarface's understudy, improvised from whatever was available when the real thing wasn't. "Was it right to hurt him like that?"
He glanced at the guard on the floor. His voice was small, apologetic.
"He's bleeding."
"Enough of that, Wesker. Don't be pathetic."
The second voice came from somewhere deeper — not his throat, not his mouth, which barely moved at all. The sock puppet's jaw worked in rhythm with it, opening and snapping shut with a dry, papery sound.
"Without the hostages, what do we trade for Scarface? Think, you moron."
The sock swiveled on his wrist, surveying the room like a suspicious animal.
"Sentiment is a liability. This idiot got shot because he made a stupid choice. As long as the rest of them cooperate, no one else gets hurt. That's fair, isn't it?"
"But… but he's—"
"Shut up. Stop wasting energy on this. Batman could come through that door any second—"
Wesker's chin dropped. He made a soft, wounded sound — something between a suppressed sob and an apology — and then, in spite of everything, turned toward the injured guard and whispered it anyway.
"I'm sorry…"
Three hard knocks landed on the door.
The sock snapped upright. Wesker's gun arm straightened, barrel leveled at the nearest hostage. When Mr. Socky's voice came this time it was lower, something that had lost the last of its pretense — the sound of a confined thing being provoked.
"I said — if anyone comes through that door, I will put a bullet through—"
"Knock knock. Batman here."
Every hair on Arnold Wesker's body stood up at once.
He knew that voice. Three decades of Gotham had burned it into him — the flat timbre, the controlled cadence, the way it carried without rising. That was Batman. Unmistakably.
But Batman didn't use the front door.
And Batman didn't knock.
Mr. Socky flooded Wesker's muscles with adrenaline, coiling every tendon tight. He dropped low, gun raised, angled at the door frame. The moment it opened, the first shot would—
"Come on, open up. Let Bat-Daddy in to pour some sweet, righteous milk of justice into your life~"
"…"
The words hit Arnold Wesker's brain and produced nothing. No threat response, no muscle memory, no contingency. Just a blank, buffering silence — the cognitive equivalent of stepping on a stair that wasn't there.
Which was, of course, the point.
The door swung open. Ethan Cross stepped through without taking a single bullet.
"Batman, what are you—"
Wesker snapped back. The gun came up again. Fast — faster than it should have been, from a man his age.
But the moment had already gone.
"Scarface."
The wooden dummy was in Ethan's hand, held between Wesker's gun barrel and everything else in the room. Arnold's finger froze on the trigger — a full-body seizure of hesitation, reflex warring with reflex, the gun pointed at the one thing in the world he most wanted back.
"Let go of him, you—"
Then a new voice entered the room.
Not Mr. Socky. Not Arnold. Not the muffled ventral rasp that Wesker used when Scarface spoke.
Something else. Something that seemed to come from the puppet itself.
If Mr. Socky had been a violent drunk stumbling through a bar, this was the thing sitting quietly in the back corner deciding who was going to leave in an ambulance. Bottomless. Patient. The voice of whatever lived at the center of Arnold Wesker's darkness when it wasn't wearing a mask.
Wesker straightened. The shuffle left his posture entirely. He pulled his shoulders back, spine lengthening, and in the space of two seconds the frightened little man vanished and something else stood in his place — something that wore the same body but inhabited it differently, like a hand filling a glove.
The sock worked its jaw. The voice resonated off the walls.
"Return Scarface to us—"
"No." The voice from the puppet. Calm. Certain. "Don't. I've already spoken with Batman."
Wesker locked up.
Ethan kept his mouth closed.
You think you're the only one who can do this?
Ventriloquism was stagecraft. Misdirection wrapped in muscle control — a practiced actor's trick, nothing more. In his previous life, voice mimicry had been a basic professional skill. He'd spent two days in the Batcave's audio archives listening to every recorded instance of Scarface he could pull up. The cadence. The register. The particular way the dummy's voice clipped consonants to account for Wesker's barely-moving lips.
He had it.
The first exchange should have ended with a bullet in his skull. Wesker had the angle, the instinct, and every tactical reason to pull the trigger the moment the door opened. He hadn't — because Ethan had given him half a second of genuine confusion, and half a second was all the opening he needed.
Now it was his stage.
Mr. Socky felt the shift. The sock barked orders — shoot him, now, shoot — while Scarface issued contradictions in the same breath, and Ethan's imitation ran underneath both of them, weaving between the two voices like a third current in a river.
Four distinct voices overlapped in the confined space: Wesker's own thin tenor, Mr. Socky's guttural aggression, Scarface's dark authority, and Ethan's version of Scarface running counter to all three — calm, reassuring, telling Arnold he was a good man, that the crimes had never really been his fault, that Scarface was telling him to listen to Batman.
"That wasn't me — I'm the real Scarface, and I'm telling you to shoot—"
"No. As Scarface, I'm ordering you to lower the weapon—"
"He's lying, he's not Scarface—"
"I am Scarface and I say—"
Wesker's expression cycled through states that had no names — confusion giving way to something deeper, a foundational destabilization, the look of a man whose internal architecture was being dismantled one load-bearing wall at a time.
While the voices tangled, Ethan reached into the tactical bag with his free hand and opened it.
Hand puppets. Dozens of them — every shape, size, and design he'd had Alfred pull together in the twelve hours before this. Animals, caricatures, abstract shapes. The bag was full of them, a chaotic plush avalanche waiting to happen.
Wesker's eyes tracked the movement automatically.
"What… what is that?"
Ethan's arm shot forward.
"Damn you—"
The gun swung up — pure reflex, the barrel finding the underside of Ethan's jaw in under a second, finger curling toward the trigger.
But Scarface's voice — his version — fired a counter-order at the exact same instant.
By the time Wesker's fractured mind sorted out which instruction to obey, the sock was already off his hand.
He stood there, weapon still raised, pointing at nothing.
The room was quiet.
"No—" Wesker looked at his bare left hand. Then at Ethan. Then at his hand again. "No. Mr. Socky—"
The scream that followed was not a small sound.
Ethan watched him without expression. Then he held up Scarface, met Wesker's eyes, and with both hands, twisted the dummy at the waist until the wood cracked — and dropped the pieces on the floor and ground them under his boot heel.
The sound Arnold Wesker made was not a word. It wasn't really human. It was the sound of something structural giving way.
He hit the floor reaching for the fragments.
Ethan let him get two seconds of that. Then he reached down, grabbed the man by the collar, hauled him upright, and slapped him twice across the face — sharp, deliberate, the kind of impact designed to interrupt rather than injure.
"Stop."
Wesker blinked. His eyes were wet, his mouth still open around a sob that had nowhere to go.
"Look." Ethan turned him toward the bag and tipped it over.
The puppets spilled out across the floor in a heap — dozens of them, blank-faced and waiting.
"The old ones are gone." He released Wesker's collar and stepped back. "Pick a new one. There are plenty."
Arnold Wesker stood over the pile of puppets with the expression of a man who had just survived something he hadn't processed yet. His hands moved without instruction, reaching down into the pile — the gesture automatic, as instinctive as breathing.
His fingers closed around one.
A beat of silence.
Then, from somewhere beneath his sternum, a new voice began to form.
Ethan had thought through the psychology of it carefully.
Wesker's condition was severe — a dissociative disorder that had calcified over decades into something the clinical literature wasn't fully equipped to describe. The alternate personalities he constructed weren't random. They were protective. Mr. Socky, Scarface, every identity he'd ever built and inhabited — they existed to shield Arnold, the original, the frightened man underneath who had never developed his own defenses. The puppet was always the guardian. Arnold was always the one being guarded.
Ethan had just destroyed two of those guardians in under four minutes.
Under normal circumstances, Wesker would have collapsed inward. Catatonic, or close to it. The unprotected core exposed.
But the instinct to construct — to reach for something and make it speak — that instinct didn't switch off. It was too deep. Too automatic.
So: what happened when you stripped away the old identities and immediately handed the exposed, unguarded, frantically-constructing psyche fifty blank templates to choose from?
Ethan watched Arnold Wesker's hand move over the puppets, and waited to find out.
Meanwhile, he turned toward the hostages — who had been watching all of this in collective paralysis — and jerked his head toward the exit.
"You're clear. Go."
They went. All of them, including the guard who thirty seconds ago had been convincingly unconscious, now scrambling upright and outpacing everyone else to the door, injured hand held aloft like a trophy.
The room emptied.
Ethan stood alone with Arnold Wesker and a floor covered in puppets, and let the silence settle while the new voice found its shape.