Tap. Tap. Tap.
Someone was knocking on the van window again.
Ethan rolled it down.
The same kid from earlier had come back. He'd brought friends this time — six of them, arranged in a loose semicircle behind him, holding machetes and crowbars with the posture of people who had decided that a second attempt was strategically sound.
"You really think dressing like Batman makes you Batman?" The kid's voice had the specific register of someone who'd spent twenty minutes rebuilding their confidence after losing it. "You actually had me going for a second back there, but now I'm thinking—"
Ethan didn't say anything. He extended his left arm out the window, and his hand dissolved from the wrist down — replaced in an instant by a tire, hub and all, spinning freely in the night air.
He swung it into the kid's forehead.
Not hard. Enough.
"Leave."
He watched them go — the full sprint, the dropped crowbar, the sound of running feet on wet asphalt fading fast — and shook his head.
Machetes. In Gotham. Against someone in a Batman suit. He rolled the window up. The threat assessment in this city is genuinely broken.
He picked up the microphone, adjusted his posture, and pinched his throat into Cheshire's register — cool, precise, faintly amused.
"Testing. Good — you can all hear me."
Then he shifted smoothly into Deadshot's flat baritone:
"I'm glad none of you did anything irreversible back there. That was the intended outcome. Now — cut Croc loose."
Deadshot's expression didn't change. He didn't ask who are you — which Ethan had marked as a sign of professional maturity — but his eyes did a calculation that was visible even through a camera feed.
The ropes came off.
Killer Croc erupted off the ground with every tooth showing, arms wide, the full threat display of something that weighed three-quarters of a ton and had just been humiliated in front of witnesses. Deadshot's gun dropped to low-ready. Nobody moved.
Then Croc's eyes found the money.
The threat display evaporated. He crossed to the nearest truck at something between a run and a scramble, dropped to his knees, and began collecting bills from the ground with enormous, careful hands — picking up each one individually, examining it briefly, and placing it back into the truck as though handling something irreplaceable.
"Two hundred million dollars," he murmured, to himself and no one. A sound escaped him that might, in a different context, have been called tender.
"That's so unfair," Captain Javelin said, from nearby, watching with the expression of a man being slowly devoured from the inside. "Why is my fee only—"
Ethan switched into Javelin's voice:
"Don't envy Croc. He just drew four years of base salary in advance." A pause for effect. "I am a generous employer. Complete the contracts I issue, and I guarantee every person standing in that lot tonight goes home with nine figures. This is a once-in-a-career operation. The only question is whether you have the nerve for it."
Silence.
Then Deadshot made a decision — Ethan could see it happen across the feed, the small shift in posture that meant a man had resolved an internal argument. He wasn't doing it for the money, Ethan suspected. Deadshot was the kind of professional who got bored between jobs, and something about the evening's architecture had apparently interested him.
What followed was, by Ethan's own private admission, not his finest oratory. He cycled through three voices doing the work of a motivational speech — I have resources, you have skills, the payout is real, Croc is proof of concept, the alternative is standing in the cold arguing — and the words themselves were nothing special.
But the two tons of physical currency ten feet away did most of the heavy lifting.
Slipknot manufactured a smile that didn't reach his eyes. The Tattooed Man slapped his own stomach and made a sound of general enthusiasm. The atmosphere in the lot shifted from potential firefight to reluctant team meeting, which was the best available outcome.
"Great employer!" Javelin announced, with the conviction of a man who had just revised all of his career priorities. "Truly generous! Unprecedented!"
Deadshot looked at him. "I thought you were retiring."
"I changed my mind."
Deadshot said nothing, but his expression covered the relevant ground.
"One last thing," Ethan said. "You're a temporary unit. I've already named you." He let a beat go. "The Suicide Squad."
A pause.
"That's a terrible name," someone said.
"I'll add a hundred thousand to whoever said that."
"That's the best name I've ever heard."
Ethan set the microphone down and leaned back in the driver's seat. The coffee had gone cold. He didn't care.
One piece at a time, he thought. Croc secured. Squad assembled. Bane is next.
He exhaled slowly and let himself have a moment of something that felt almost like calm.
On the monitor, Deadshot appeared to be doing the same thing — shoulders dropping a fraction, the professional threat-awareness dialing back to a sustainable level. The man had a daughter. He wanted to go home to her. He'd do the work, collect the pay, and leave. Clean and simple.
Same, Ethan thought. Exactly the same. We're not so different, Lawton.
He was reaching for the cold coffee when Captain Javelin started talking again.
"Once I've saved enough," Javelin was saying, to nobody in particular, the dreamy quality of a man narrating his own future, "I'm going back home. Big house. My wife and I—"
The sound was very small.
Pfft.
Ethan looked at the monitor.
Captain Javelin's head was gone.
Not figuratively. The man had been mid-sentence, one hand raised to gesture at something, and then a single enormous hand had appeared from the dark at the lot's edge and closed around his skull — and the sentence had ended, and the hand had opened, and Javelin's javelin clattered off the asphalt.
The Batman plush hit the floor of the van. Coffee went across the monitor screen. Ethan's head connected with the van's ceiling hard enough to see stars, and he was already standing — or trying to stand, in a van — before his brain had fully processed what his eyes had just told him.
On the feed, everything happened at once.
Cheshire's voice split the night — a sound she made in her throat that didn't belong to language, pure alarm, raw enough to strip the professional composure right off it:
"CONTACT—"
Deadshot's eyes had gone wide. He was tracking something at the lot's edge that the fixed cameras couldn't fully capture yet — something large, moving with a certainty that had no urgency in it because urgency implied the possibility of being stopped.
Then the arc lights found it.
The upper body was bare except for the mask and the tubing — thick green lines running from the base of the skull down both arms, pulsing faintly with each heartbeat, the Venom compound moving through him like something alive. Every muscle beneath the skin had its own geography, ridged and defined and entirely excessive, the kind of physical architecture that stopped being about strength and became about statement.
The mask looked back at the lot with no expression and infinite patience.
Bane.
Bane moved through the parking lot the way weather moves — not fast, but occupying every inch of the space it decided to occupy.
There was a version of this moment that lived in the back of his mind like scripture. He had carried it since the pit — the image of the bat-creature standing above him, and the long road that ended with him standing above it instead. The creature had sent its servants to find him before he could find it. That told him everything he needed to know about where the fear lived.
He would walk through those servants. He would find the creature. And when he broke it — when he felt the spine give way beneath his hands the way he had in the tunnels — the last weight he had carried since childhood would finally, finally leave him.
But first.
Killer Croc came off the ground like a launched projectile — three-quarters of a ton of scale and fury, all of it aimed at Bane's head. No technique. Pure animal.
Bane stepped to the inside of the swing, rolled his shoulder, and drove an uppercut into Croc's jaw from below.
Croc went backwards. His feet left the ground. He landed eight feet back and the asphalt cracked under him.
"I thought I'd already finished you." Bane looked at him, on the ground, trying to push himself upright. "I'll correct that now."
Croc got up anyway.
He always got up. That was the thing about Waylon Jones — he had no complicated relationship with pain, no pride that needed protecting, no part of him that could be reached through humiliation. He hurt, and he got up, and he came back, because that was the only mode he had.
He threw himself forward again, jaw open, claws raking.
"You want to rule Gotham?" Croc snarled. "You? Without your juice you wouldn't even rate as competition—"
Bane's fist hit the side of his face.
Croc's head snapped right. He stumbled.
Another punch — straight down, driving Croc's skull toward the ground, shards of loose asphalt scattering on impact.
A third. Croc's face hit the concrete. He stopped trying to get his hands under him.
Bane reached sideways and lifted the shell of a stripped car with one hand — the chassis, frame intact, several hundred pounds of folded steel — and raised it overhead.
"Insects like you don't require Venom."
He brought it down.
Crack.
"I am Bane."
Crack.
"The nightmare of every obstacle."
Crack.
"The ruin of everything that breathes."
CRACK.
Croc screamed — a sound that was more sensation than language, something that came from the body rather than the mind. The chassis buckled around him, metal folding, welds splitting.
A gunshot.
Bane moved before the round arrived. His body was already rotating — a motion too clean for something his size, the kind of reflexive precision that Venom didn't create but amplified past its natural ceiling. The bullet passed through the space his head had been occupying.
He turned toward the shooter.
The lot stretched out before him — the arc lights, the money on the ground, the scattered members of whatever unit the bat-creature had assembled. The shooter was already repositioning. The woman with the knives was moving. Others were finding angles.
Bane regarded them with something that might have been patience, or might have been recognition.
More servants.
He settled his weight, let the Venom finish the surge it had started when the first gunshot landed, and felt the familiar cold clarity come over everything.
The bat-creature was somewhere in this city, watching.
Good, Bane thought. Watch, then. Watch what happens to everything you send against me.
And then come face me yourself.