The eighth course was dessert.
Small, precise, sweet—the kind of thing that existed at formal dinners to signal that the serious business was finished and the polite fiction of an ordinary evening could now resume. Bruce waited until the plates were cleared before speaking.
"I'll be in contact through Commissioner Gordon about the arrangement. I can't make a final decision tonight—I hope you understand. Truthfully, I'm a little concerned that the losing party might take the news poorly." He glanced between both ends of the table. "If there's a commotion in the manor, I'll be quite troubled."
He stood and led both groups toward the entrance hall.
"One last thing," he said, as the doors opened. "When you both came tonight, you each took a group of hostages as insurance. As you can see, neither the GCPD nor Batman interrupted the evening. I hope you'll release those people when you're safely home."
The Riddler nodded. "Of course, Mr. Wayne. We're not animals." A slight pause. "Most of the time."
"I think I killed all my hostages before I came." The Joker shrugged with the vagueness of a man trying to remember whether he'd left the stove on. "I'm fairly sure. I'll check when I get back."
Bruce looked at him.
Even after everything he'd seen—everything the Joker had done to this city, to people Bruce couldn't save—the flat casualness of it still produced something in his chest that was not quite anger and not quite grief and was both.
He said nothing. The doors closed.
The ninth course was coffee.
Bruce sat alone at the long table while Alfred brought it, and accepted the cup with both hands, and drank.
"Thank you, Alfred. For all of it."
"Think nothing of it, sir." Alfred settled into the chair across from him—a thing he rarely did, and only when he'd judged that the occasion warranted it. "Though I'll confess it was a rather singular experience in the service profession. Your mother would have been appalled that we sent guests away after dessert with no sherry."
"She would have been appalled well before dessert."
"Yes, Master Bruce. That is also true."
A notification came through on the secure channel—a brief message, no header, the kind that arrived from a source that had clearly given thought to operational security.
Joker's hostages are alive. Already released. —Also, when you wire the money, make sure the Riddler's cut is generous enough that he gives the rest of us a raise.
Bruce read it twice, deleted it, and breathed.
"Alfred." He set down the cup. "I was close to choosing a side."
Alfred said nothing, which was his version of asking.
"That host on the news—Frank. I kept dismissing him. But he had a point, underneath the noise. If this war continued, if people kept dying at this rate, if I didn't have—" He stopped. Started differently. "If Jude hadn't been able to pull together enough allies. If Chuck hadn't been flying rescue runs every day. If there'd been no way to reduce the casualties to a level where the war could actually end—" He looked at the window. "I was going to join the Riddler. Turn the balance enough to collapse the Joker's side quickly. Accept the cost."
Alfred was quiet for a moment. "And Mr. Chuck?"
"Would have been on the wrong side of that calculation." Bruce picked up the coffee again. "So yes. I owe Jude a conversation."
"Indeed." Alfred's tone carried the specific warmth of relief that had been held at a distance for some time and was now being permitted to exist. "It seems Mr. Jude's talent for persuasion is quite remarkable. Getting along with that particular collection of personalities—and then quietly turning them—I can't imagine what he's offering that outweighs what the Riddler and the Joker are paying."
"Money and threats get you compliance," Bruce said. "They don't get you allegiance. Not from people like that." He turned the cup in his hands. "Jude seems to understand what each of them actually wants. Better than they understand it themselves, maybe."
"One does wonder where he developed that skill."
"He communicated the plan to me through the usual channel—three paragraphs, very efficient." Bruce's expression shifted to something that was not quite admiration and was definitely calculating. "He asked me to find a wealthy private citizen who didn't want to see Gotham destroyed, and have that person pay Deathstroke and Deadshot to cooperate with Batman voluntarily—lose the mission deliberately, without technically betraying their employers. Mission failure, not betrayal. As long as the number was right."
"And the number was right."
"The number was right." He paused. "He's also working on Oswald. Apparently Oswald was Falcone-affiliated before the war, and Jude's argument is that a man with real ambitions doesn't stay permanently loyal to a clown. If the Joker falls, Oswald inherits. That's a better deal than any loyalty payment."
Alfred nodded slowly. "And within the Riddler's camp?"
"Two there as well, already in agreement. He's being careful about a third—worried about exposure. Even if that one stays put and simply pulls back from active fighting, it's enough to change the weight of both sides to something I can actually handle."
Six super-criminals. Two heroes. Kite Man, who had earned the category by now. A third force, assembled quietly in the middle of a war, from the inside out.
"Alfred," Bruce said, "which university in the UK did you attend?"
Alfred's expression achieved the specific equilibrium of a man who had been unexpectedly complimented and was pretending he hadn't noticed.
The Riddler acted quickly, as he always did when the logic pointed clearly in one direction. The hostages were released. The conscripted civilians were let go. After Bruce's transfer cleared, the smoke and gunfire across the city began—slowly, then more rapidly—to thin.
The Joker didn't fold. He commanded his remaining super-criminals and the core Falcone loyalists whose compliance he'd secured through leverage, and he kept fighting a battle that was losing mass by the day. But without the full weight of both armies grinding against each other across the Park District, the conflict compressed into what it had always actually been: a confrontation between super-criminals, with Batman as the variable neither side had successfully solved for.
Which was a problem either side could face.
It was not a problem that burned down neighborhoods.
Three days later, the Riddler called Bike Stripper and Scarecrow into the main hall. The bandage on his shoulder was fresh—Alfred's work, Jude noted, was holding up well.
"Bike Stripper." The Riddler looked at him with the expression of a man who had made a decision and was satisfied with it. "Tonight, you and Scarecrow are going into the Joker's territory. Reconnaissance. Your mobility on that bicycle and your—" a brief pause that communicated the Riddler had genuinely not found the right word yet "—survival instincts make you the right person for this. Take Scarecrow with you."
Jude looked at him.
He looked at the shoulder.
He looked at the Riddler's calm, recovered face—the face of a man who had spent three days healing and had in the process apparently also healed away the memory of the events that made the wound necessary.
Boss, Jude thought, you have really, truly forgotten the pain now that the wound has healed.