Barron's exit had been fast and shapeless — through the far canvas, into the gap between buildings, gone before Oswald could close the distance. The truck he'd arrived in was still in the lot. Oswald emptied most of a magazine into it.
This accomplished approximately nothing in tactical terms and was not intended to.
When the slide locked back and the lot went quiet again, he stood in the settling dust with the specific expression of a man who has been forced to swallow something alive and hasn't found a way to name what it was.
"Why," he said, to the general situation, "does this keep happening to me specifically."
"Don't." Will already had Dick in both arms. The boy's weight was the weight of someone who had stopped holding himself up, and his shirt was completely red from the collar down. Will's hands were shaking — he catalogued this and kept moving. "Car. Now."
The drive to the hospital was Oswald narrating the financial damage at increasing volume: the blood on the upholstery, the windshield replacement, the hood repair, the fuel cost, and the prospective hospital bill — which, as Will confirmed on request, would be theirs.
Both hands came off the wheel to express the full dimensions of this outrage.
The steering column caught the first impact. The airbag took the second.
The car swerved, corrected, and continued.
Oswald sat in the driver's seat with a deployed airbag deflating in his lap and a very specific expression.
"I'm fine," he said, to no one.
Gotham had twelve hospitals for a city that shouldn't have needed twelve hospitals. Will had been to two of them. The third had the same emergency waiting room architecture as the others — rows of people organized by the logic of pain rather than priority, the specific hierarchy of Gotham's nighttime medical economy visible in who was waiting and who was pushing.
Two large men were at the nurses' station when Will came through with Dick. They had the build and the casual bleeding of people accustomed to both, and they were arguing about who had been waiting longer with the intensity of men who had found a target for energy they couldn't otherwise direct.
Will stepped between them and asked the desk nurse to take Dick immediately.
The two men made their feelings about this known with their eyes.
Oswald appeared behind Will's left shoulder and made his feelings about their feelings known with a firearm.
The two men discovered that their injuries were significantly less urgent than they'd previously assessed, and relocated to the far end of the waiting room with their associates, where they sat in thoughtful silence.
The nurse processed Dick's intake with the efficient calm of someone who had been through this sequence many times.
Will signed the forms and paid the deposit and went to find Oswald, who was no longer where he'd left him.
He was at the nurses' station.
Specifically, he was at the portion of the nurses' station occupied by one of the nurses — younger, with dark hair and the composed expression of someone who had chosen this profession because they were good at remaining stable when the people around them were not. She was applying antiseptic spray to the bridge of Oswald's nose, where the airbag had expressed its opinion, and she was doing it with considerably more gentleness than the situation strictly required.
"The way you handled that," she was saying, in the voice of someone who had found something genuinely surprising. "You didn't hesitate at all."
"Hesitation," Oswald said, with the air of a man quoting himself, "is a luxury I've never been able to afford." He winced slightly as the gauze went on, and recovered quickly. "Has anyone told you that your name sounds like something from a song?"
Will stood at a distance and confirmed that he could, in fact, detect the specific atmospheric pressure of romantic potential even from fifteen feet in a hospital waiting room.
He turned away.
He looked at the ceiling.
He looked at the clock.
When Oswald returned, he was walking with the particular gait of someone who has just had a better ten minutes than the preceding hour deserved.
"Her name is Grazia," he reported, unprompted.
"I know. I heard."
"I have her number."
"Good."
A pause.
"I'm still furious," Oswald said, returning to the previous register.
"I know."
"Barron walked away."
"He did."
"He murdered three people on my territory."
"Yes."
They went outside. The night air was doing the overcast thing it had been doing all week, the city's thermal output holding the cloud cover from dispersing. Will leaned against the hospital wall and put his hands in his pockets.
"He might not be your problem to deal with," Will said.
Oswald looked at him.
"The boy," Will said. "Dick. He lost everyone today. He has no institutional affiliation. He has no support structure. He has the physical capability of someone who has been doing professional acrobatics since early childhood, and he has a very specific target." He paused. "I'm not going to stop him. I'm not going to help him. I want to see what he is when no one's managing his direction."
Oswald processed this.
"That's cold."
"Gotham is cold. Sympathy is real but it's not a resource." Will straightened up. "He'll either survive what he does next or he won't, and what he becomes on the other side of it is information I need."
Oswald's phone produced a sound — the specific buzz pattern of his message tone, distinguishable from calls by the sustained quality of it.
He looked at the screen.
The change in his face was not gradual. It was the change of a light going through a dimmer too fast — present, then different.
"Maroni," he said. "All fifteen lieutenants. Tonight."
Will didn't ask. He already understood the arithmetic: Charlie's body had surfaced, exactly as predicted, in the port area downriver, and the recovery had triggered whatever review process Maroni kept for anomalous events in his organization. An unscheduled full assembly meant the information was both confirmed and significant.
"I can't come," Will said.
"I know you can't."
"You can handle this."
"That's easy to say."
"It's also true." Will put a hand on Oswald's shoulder and kept it there. "Listen. You're afraid, you're rattled, and you're going to walk into a room with a man who is specifically good at reading fear. I know what that feels like. Here's what I also know—"
He waited for Oswald to look at him.
"You pulled a gun in an emergency room to protect a kid you'd never met because someone was going to make him wait. You shot two of Barron's men because they killed someone on your street. You handed me the gun at Falcone's table because you trusted me in the worst thirty seconds either of us has had." He kept his voice level, no theater in it. "That's not a man who runs on fear. Fear is just what it feels like before you do the thing. You always do the thing."
Oswald's jaw was working. Something behind his eyes was going through a recalibration.
"Strong men cut toward the strong," Will continued. "Weak men cut toward the weak. Are you going to tell me you shot those two back there because they were smaller than you?"
Oswald said nothing. But the light had changed again — the dimmer going the other direction.
Will had heard many versions of this speech in a previous life, delivered by people who were optimizing for quarterly targets. He'd despised most of them. The difference, he had decided, was whether the person speaking it believed it themselves, and whether the outcome they wanted was the same as the outcome they were describing.
Both conditions were currently satisfied.
He leaned in.
"One more thing. If you get in there and you feel like the situation has moved past talking — when you genuinely think it's over — say this."
He spoke quietly enough that only Oswald could hear it.
Oswald's eyebrows moved.
"That's it?"
"Say it until it works."
Oswald looked at him for a moment, then looked away at the hospital entrance, then at the street, then back at Will.
"Okay," he said.
He walked toward the car.