Chapter 412: Awakening
Neither Daredevil nor Wolverine said anything for a minute after Batman spoke. The weight of a potential mass casualty event -- one they may have caused, organized under orders they could no longer remember from a man who may have already been compromised -- was not a thing that processed quickly.
They did not have the luxury of taking longer.
A few minutes after Luke and Jessica had gone, something red moved past the apartment window and stopped there. A knock on the glass.
Batman opened it.
Tony Stark's new armor was different from the Mark VI -- different enough that Batman registered the change immediately. The previous suit had been built around sharp angles and the inverted triangle motif, everything pointing downward and inward, the whole silhouette carrying a kind of compressed aggression. This one was rounder. Not softer -- the distinction mattered. The curves were the kind produced by high-density fabrication over heavy internal structure, the way a densely muscled body looks rounder than a lean one even though neither is soft. The suit read as substantially more massive.
Tony dropped through the window and the floor felt it.
"Mark VII," he announced, reading Batman's expression accurately and with evident satisfaction. "You mentioned the Helicarrier and I decided to come dressed for the occasion."
"Good."
Tony's faceplate was still up, his actual face visible, the armor framing it in red and gold. He turned toward Daredevil and Wolverine.
"I'm not going to pretend I wasn't listening from outside the window, so skip the introductions -- I know who you both are." He looked at Wolverine. "I don't know if you've been offered a drink yet, but I'm guessing the answer is no, given the complete absence of anything resembling a bottle in this apartment."
Wolverine looked at him the way a man looks at something he has decided he does not want to engage with, and said nothing.
Tony turned back to Batman.
"Walk me through the full picture. I'm not flying into a government facility without knowing exactly what I'm walking into."
Batman ran it cleanly and without unnecessary detail: the two-years-ago mission, the collective amnesia, Latveria's capital, the reported casualties, the convergence of evidence pointing toward Fury as the organizer, Hawkeye and Black Widow's silence since returning to S.H.I.E.L.D. over a month ago, the HYDRA name list recovered from Nathan Garrett.
Tony's expression went through several transitions during the account and arrived at something that was not his usual register. The easy surface humor was gone. What replaced it was a version of Tony Stark that people who only knew him publicly rarely encountered -- focused, cold, and quiet.
"My father was part of building S.H.I.E.L.D. into what it became," he said. "If the organization is as thoroughly compromised as you're describing -- if Fury used it to run an operation with a four-hundred-person body count and then erased the memories of every operative involved -- then the institution he helped build has become something that needs to be dismantled." He paused. "The Raft has vacancy. Quite a bit of it, as it turns out."
Wolverine, who had been visibly disengaged from Tony since the moment he walked in, looked at him properly for the first time.
The principle was right. The delivery was irritating. Those were apparently two separate assessments and Wolverine was willing to hold them separately.
"One more thing," Tony said. "Captain America is easy enough to identify -- shield, no further description necessary. Hawkeye, bow, same deal." He turned toward Batman. "Black Widow. Red hair. How would you characterize the overall--"
Batman raised one hand and held it at a specific height and then indicated a general shape in the air.
Tony considered this for exactly one second.
"I understand completely."
The faceplate snapped shut. He stepped to the open window, stepped through it, and was gone. No delay, no further comment. Whatever he felt about the situation, he had converted it directly into motion.
Daredevil stood.
"I'll be in the field," he said. "Contact me when you have something."
Batman nodded. Daredevil went out the same window without breaking stride.
Wolverine surveyed the now-empty apartment.
"You can stay here," Batman said. "Temporary. The building is secure."
"I've got somewhere to be," Wolverine said.
"Where?"
"Bar."
He walked out the door.
Batman let the apartment settle into quiet for a moment. Then he left as well.
Back in the City Hall Batcave, Batman took off the Gargoyle suit and began a careful examination of the armor's surface damage -- the claw marks Logan had left across multiple panels. He noted the depth of each line, the material behavior at each point of failure, and cross-referenced it against the suit's structural integrity data.
Then he turned his attention to the interior of the suit's gauntlet seams, where traces of contact material from the fight had been deposited. Among them, caught in the micro-gap between two armor sections, was a short coarse hair. Dark. From Logan's jaw.
He extracted it, ran it through the Batcave's analysis equipment, converted the molecular data into a format Dr. Otto could work with, and transmitted it to North Brother Island.
Dr. Otto's acknowledgment came back in under a minute.
Batman sat down at the coding station and resumed work.
He had been incrementally completing the Alfred AI's foundational code layer for weeks, building it in sections between operations. The hardware components were the remaining bottleneck -- chip fabrication was still in progress through Parker Industries' acquisitions pipeline. But the software architecture was something he could advance independently of the hardware, and he had been doing exactly that every time a window opened.
Shortly before dawn, the last line of the base code layer was written, tested, and committed.
He sat back.
The chip shortage was the only remaining barrier. Parker Industries' semiconductor acquisitions were moving, but the custom fabrication specs he had given CEO Alice required time that no amount of money could fully compress.
He was still working through what he wanted to ask her about the timeline when the incoming call routed through the Batcave's intercept.
Metropolitan Hospital. Early morning.
He answered in Peter's voice.
"This is a call for Peter Parker. We're pleased to inform you that Professor Miles Warren has regained consciousness. He's awake and responsive."
"Thank you," Batman said.
He had been expecting this call eventually. Professor Warren had been in a coma since the events at Ryker's Island -- one of the threads he had left open, waiting. The man knew things that were potentially relevant to several ongoing investigations, and he had been inaccessible for months.
Batman moved to the suit display and considered his options for a moment. He chose neither. The Gargoyle suit was logged and stowed in its deployment container. The Arkham suit went into its place in the display column alongside the original Spider Killer suit, the Arkham suit, the Anti-Venom configuration, and the Vulcan armor -- the full progression of what he had built and fought in since arriving in this world.
He opened the wardrobe, selected a white shirt, a gray wool vest, a long charcoal jacket of similar tone, and dressed without deliberation.
The Audi R8 was where he had left it. He brought it up through the City Hall tunnel and merged into the early morning rush with the rest of Manhattan's commuters.
The drive to Metropolitan Hospital took almost thirty minutes through the morning traffic. Batman threaded the car through gaps with the economy of someone who had no patience for sitting still but enough discipline not to create problems.
The hospital's main entrance deposited him into a lobby that smelled of floor cleaner and warm coffee from the staff area. He had barely crossed the threshold when a familiar voice caught up to him.
"Peter Parker."
Dr. Helen Cho was already moving in his direction at a half-jog, her white coat open over scrubs, a tablet tucked under one arm. As the attending physician on Professor Warren's case, she had clearly been watching for the arrival of someone matching Peter Parker's description.
Her expression when she confirmed it was him was the expression of a doctor who had been waiting a long time to deliver good news and was pleased to finally have the occasion.
"The hospital called and let you know -- Professor Warren is awake," she said, falling into step beside him.
Batman turned toward her with Peter's easy, warm manner and smiled.
"They did, Doctor. Thank you."