Chapter 19: Perspective

Allison Burns stared at the ‘Commissioner’ plaque sitting on her new desk, caught between entirely too many different emotions to really sort out how she felt about the implications. She’d never imagined rising to this position, let alone doing so in Gotham. She might be a native of the city, originally, but she’d started from a negative point with the law. That was what happened when luck or fate gave you the dubious honor of being born to two chemists working for the Falcone Family.

Joining the GCPD had been her rebellious attempt to escape those chains, once she’d understood them. Which had lasted right up until she’d found out one of her early partners was working with Two-Face, of all people. She’d turned him in, of course. Which, in Gotham where half the force was corrupt, had resulted in her basically being run out of town by the rest of the precinct she’d been working in. The corrupt officers of the GCPD didn’t tolerate ‘rats.’ Worse, her background had given them every excuse they’d needed, making it hard to fight back.

She’d refused to be deterred entirely from her life choice to make good and ultimately transferred to Central City to work for the CCPD.

There, her firm stance against corruption had actually proven valuable. As had her ability to be unphased by weird shit in the way only natives of Gotham ever really managed. The combination had seen her rise through the ranks based not just on her detective skills, but on her ability to work with the Costumed Crowd. Several adventures where she’d had to deal with not only the Flash, but also several of the Rogues, had given her a reputation. One that had seen her as a bit of a rising star in the CCPD.

She had not expected three suits, each from entirely different agencies, to walk into her office in the CCPD and push for her to take over the GCPD as its new Commissioner.

Still, when ranking members of Shield, the DEA, and ATF all three approached you with a suggestion, you’d be an idiot not to take it seriously. So she had, looking into the state of the GCPD, and discovered that the entire department had been, in a word, gutted. Now former Commissioner Grogan was in federal holding, awaiting trial, along with something like fifteen percent of the total GCPD. The federal agencies had apparently been dying for a chance to rip the GCPD apart, and had been given that opportunity by the actions of a new hero group called Overwatch.

The damage done by Star Knight cutting the GCPD out of the loop and getting major international and federal agencies involved in Gotham busts had started the snowball rolling. That snowball had grown to a boulder when Nocturne, a licensed X-men affiliate, had turned over copies of reams of evidenced she’d submitted to the GCPD involving several high-profile people in the city. The fact she’d kept meticulous records of what she’d submitted and when she’d done so had doomed those who’d ‘misfiled’ or ‘dismissed’ the evidence.

The current mayor, faced with a political quagmire, publicly made promises to ‘clean up the GCPD.’ The problem with that, of course, was that Sebastian Hady was and is incredibly corrupt and subject to a number of investigations himself. Meaning that the larger agencies were unwilling to accept his candidate and let the cycle start all over again. Instead, they’d pressed him for an alternative arrangement where they selected the commissioner, in exchange for immunity from some minor misuses of power they could already prove. The mayor had tried insisting that it be a Gotham native with a history of competent police work in the city, thinking that qualifier would still insure someone he could work with…

The agencies had countered with Allison Burns.

Which is how she how found herself sitting in the big office, in charge of a depleted police force that she knew was still rife with corruption, despite the feds and Shield cleaning house. They’d caught most of the idiots and a few more besides, yes. The ones that were smarter and better at hiding their corruption? No. Those would be up to her to sort out, without the help of the mayor. Who was more likely to quietly try to trip her up at every turn. You know, rather than offer help which might just end up landing him in jail if any of the investigations into his office went anywhere.

“Alright, no pressure Burns. You just have to hold the city together long enough to turn the corner, right? Assuming a gang war doesn’t erupt now that Overwatch utterly stomped all over the False Facers and Batman arrested Black Mask again. That’s a hell of a power vacuum.”

Not liking the thought, but hardly being able to blame the new hero group for ripping the gang out by the roots after that broad daylight assassination attempt on Star Knight, Allison forced herself up out of her chair. Gotham wasn’t going to fix itself, and there were at least a few officers she knew were on the straight and narrow that she was going to need to promote. With them filling up a few of the empty upper rank positions that had been gutted, she might just be able to stem some of Gotham’s problems before the backlash caught up to all of them...

… … …

Bruce Wayne was aware his agitation was irrational.

It was, unfortunately, something he suspected that Barbara didn’t understand. He knew Dick had understood, with that very understanding being why he’d moved to the opposite side of the country. He’d understood that Bruce himself understood some of his own positions weren’t rational ones. There had, in fact, been a heated argument that Barbara remained ignorant of, before Robin had left to become Nightwing. One in which Dick had pointed out, correctly, that if he truly wanted to change Gotham, the most efficient method of doing so would have been to have long ago sponsored a full Hero team to move in.

It’s not like Bruce Wayne didn’t have the money, technology, or influence to do just that, after all.

Yet, the compulsive part of him that had created Batman in the first place, rather than continuing Thomas Wayne’s approach to attempting to fix the city, couldn’t accept that. It could accept working with others. Bringing first Dick, then Barbara onboard. Working with numerous vigilantes like White Tiger or magic users like Jason Blood. He could accept, as it were, accepting help.

What he’d never been able to manage was accepting that it might be someone else that would ultimately fix his city.

It wasn’t quite egoism. Instead, it was tied intrinsically the fact that fixing Gotham had always been his parents’ dream. One that he’d taken on himself, even if he’d added a new dimension to the methods used to do so. It was why, despite what he knew Barabra still thought, he wasn’t unaware of the fact his actions and compulsive inability to work with agents not directly aligned with him had caused problems. Had, in fact, driven away a number of people that could have helped.

There were always excuses. Some of them even entirely valid.

The biggest one was that Gotham is a complex, layered, mess. There were no ‘simple solutions.’ Deep rooted crime families, mixed with Slaughter Swamp being a major nexus point for the Green, mixed with multiple curses laid on the city over its existence. All of it meant that trying to keep a lid on Gotham, let alone fix it, was something that required a careful, nuanced touch. Bruce, as Batman, had slowly managed to grapple and grope his way into seeing the full picture, or at least most of it. His actions were planned with that full picture in mind. Someone else stumbling and bumbling about, smashing things with a hammer, upset his surgical attempts to fix the situation.

At least, that’s what he’d always told himself. Even if he’d known that was really only part of why he clashed with other Heroes in Gotham.

Which made it incredibly frustrating that Star Knight’s ham-fisted approach was actually working.

Of course, there were reasons it was working. Some of which he suspected Star Knight herself was utterly unaware of. Such as that fact his contacts within the magical community had told him they’d noticed her crashing into the web that was Gotham weeks before she’d taken her first direct actions. Something about Star Knight’s powers made her virtually immune to the various curses laid down on Gotham, which in turn apparently made her stand out to those in the magical community. She had, unknowingly, nearly caused a bit of a minor magical war as several different groups tried to isolate where the disruption was coming from.

Madame Xanadu, of all people, had uncharacteristically stepped out of her passive role guiding people from her shop and put a stop to the attempts to find and use her. In doing so, she’d reminded several powers that she was far more dangerous than she pretended to be. He wasn’t sure exactly what she’d done, but whatever it was had caused a half-dozen factions to back off, leaving Star Knight unmolested on the magic front. At least for now.

The other reason it was working so far, of course, was that she was unquestionably powerful.

Bruce had enough of Gotham under observation that he’d managed to make a far more detailed assessment of Star Knight than he suspected anyone else had managed so far. Even if she wasn’t quite up to the same tier of power as Wonder Woman, Batman would eat his cowl if she wasn’t at least in shouting distance. Which was giving her a degree of leverage that Bruce himself just didn’t have.

He could still be swarmed if he tried to take on a sufficiently dangerous nest or too many things at a time. KGBeast, just as one example, was someone Bruce felt he could have dealt with…alone. Dealing with him while also dealing with dozens of others would have required at least Batgirl to help. Possibly both Batgirl and White Tiger.

Star Knight had been able to solo the entire dug-in base, coming out without a scratch.

In fact, so far as he’d been able to tell, no one had successfully injured her yet.

Bruce did his best to clamp down on the agitation he was feeling, as he went over the details he’d gathered on the newly formed ‘Overwatch.’ The addition of Talia Wagner in particular was going to legitimize their team. As was the fact that the larger agencies were clearly trying to prod pieces into position to help the girl solidify a Team here in Gotham. They’d wanted such a team in place for a long time, primarily because of Solmon Grundy. So their quietly removing stumbling blocks the fool girl probably didn’t even notice wasn’t a surprise to him.

Bruce was just going to have to suppress the itch having another group operating in Gotham was causing under his skin. At least for now. It remained to see if their attempt would survive the inevitable backlash that was to come. Crippling Black Mask’s entire organization, or very close to it, was going to create a power vacuum the Crime Families wouldn’t be able to resist moving in on.

He would do his best to prevent the inevitable chaos from spilling over on the innocent. As he always did. Hopefully, the new team would survive the inevitable target they were about to become. With them so obviously avoiding him, there was nothing he could do to help them with that. That was the simple truth, even if part of him was afraid he was just telling himself that out of a desire for them to get out of his city when Gotham bit back…

… … …

“So what’s the verdict?”

A coin lazily spun in the air, flipping repeatedly, without its owner catching it. The other two men in the room, Oswald Cobblepot and Santo Cassamento, waited patiently after the single woman asked that question. Sofia Falcone was as dangerous and unstable as Two Face himself was, if in somewhat different ways, and neither of the other men were stupid enough to set the two off. Thankfully, Dent didn’t leave them waiting for long, a hand snaking out to catch his signature coin in mid-fall.

It was something that those who knew the man’s fractured mind, knew meant he’d reached his yes or no decision point.

Contrary to popular perception by most Gothamites, Two-Face didn’t use the coin to guide his entire thought process. Instead, it was reserved for either moments of moral confusion, or moments after the still-intelligent man had already worked through the pros and cons of a problem. The latter was the case now, with Dent having listened to the other bosses of their own families make their pitch. The three of them represented some of the more powerful crime families in the city, though hardly all of them. It was unusual for them to reach out to Two Face, as the man was an independent. But for this, they needed his particular connections among the more…colorful…elements of Gotham.

The coin was slapped to the back of Dent’s free hand, and they waited for the verdict. Two-Face looked at it, then leveled a grotesque and bloodthirsty smile at all of them.

“It seems we have an accord. Now, let’s talk details…”

... ... ... ... ... ... ...

A/N 1: Some outside perspectives were, I think, needed. Alyssa isn't omniscient and certainly hasn't predicted ALL of the effects of what she's doing. Even if she believes she's doing a better job of it than Batman. In some ways she is...in others, she's just gotten lucky or hasn't realized how much help she's getting from other quarters.

A/N 2: I may not like Batman (the modern versions of him anyway) very much, but I tried to be REASONABLE in his perspective, rather than making him a totally incompetent asshole.