Harley Quinn Romance 3

Chapter 14: An Offer

"Could they be behind all this?" Bruce asked Alfred as he stood and began pacing the room, becoming a silhouette against the large window overlooking the front yard with Gotham's skyline in the distance.

"Sending in a rival corporation isn't normally their style," Alfred answered. "They're much more direct."

"Who are they?" Harley insisted.

"What about the killings to frame Batman?" Bruce pointed out. "Who else could make Clayface afraid?"

"I suppose it's possible," Alfred agreed.

"Do I have to smack one or both of you in the head before you tell me what's going on?" Harley demanded.

Bruce stopped his pacing and turned to face her. "Sorry, dear. Years ago, Batman met a group known as the League of Assassins. Their leader was a man named Ra's al Ghul. Although Batman convinced Ra's to pull the League out and leave Gotham for Batman to deal with, it seems they may have decided to come back."

"What does the League of Assassins have to do with Conglomerated Industries?" Harley pressed.

"When I met Ra's, he was an old man," Bruce clarified. "But, Ra's entered a pool of phosphorescent green liquid, and when he surfaced, he was younger than I was at the time. He's lived for centuries because of the regenerative nature of the pools that he calls Lazarus Pits."

"Mr. Lazarus," Harley muttered. "A bit obvious, don't you think?"

"Not unless he wants to be found," Bruce suggested. "I think Batman should pay Mr. Lazarus a visit."

"Sounds like fun," Harley agreed. "Count me in."

Bruce hesitated, and Harley recognized the look in his eyes.

"Don't worry; we'll be fine," she promised, patting her stomach. "Besides, I'm more dangerous than ever since I'm fighting for two."

Bruce chuckled and nodded his acceptance. Together, they headed to the cave to change for tonight's meeting with Mr. Lazarus.

                                                                                         ***

Batman and Batwoman used their capes to glide down to the roof of the office building Harley had infiltrated earlier in the day. The roof door had a lock, but it was old and quickly picked. The stairway behind the door lacked any form of lighting and descended down into utter blackness. The two heroes switched on their enhanced optics, seeing the interior space in shades of electric blue.

"Not what I was expecting," Batwoman remarked softly, but her words still echoed. "From the outside, I thought it would be bigger."

"Just a central chamber," Batman suggested in a whisper that still managed to reflect back from all directions. "Other rooms and corridors may surround it."

Batman and Batwoman stopped at the bottom of the stairs and waited.  No interior walls divided the floor into offices. No carpet covered the bare concrete under their boots. Nothing about the area even remotely resembled the top level of a corporate headquarters. The walls were covered over with featureless slabs of insulated foam. It reminded Harley of being inside an enormous padded room.

"I thought we agreed the League would stay out of Gotham," Batman said to the darkness of the empty floor, loud and commanding.

"Very good, Detective," an accented man's voice answered. "I wondered if I had left enough clues for you to follow. The break-in and the attack on my servant, I assume, was your partner?"

"How's her head?" Batwoman asked the empty air while looking for whoever she was talking to.

The man's voice laughed before the lights switched on. A hidden door opened on a wall and a man stepped out. Draped in flowing layers of vivid green, the tall man was both regal and menacing at the same moment. He was clean shaven except for the lower corners of his jaw where the remnants of a beard hung down like a pair of fangs. His hair was the blackness of night with only a touch of grey near his temples. A smile was on his face, but it was the smile of a predator. Harley noticed the man's eyes most of all as their electric blue color was unnaturally bright in the darkness of his cavernous eye sockets.

"She's recovering well enough," the man admitted. When he reached their position, he offered Batwoman a formal bow. "We have not met. I am Ra's al Ghul, and I offer you greetings. I am most delighted you accepted my invitation to come here."

"Three dead bodies and an attempted frame of Batman for murder is hardly an invitation," Batwoman said, forcing her voice to remain calm.

"It worked, did it not?" Ra's queried. "You are here. Besides, those I had killed were assassins and hardly innocent."

"We had an arrangement for the League of Assassins to stay out of Gotham," Batman reminded, his voice a threatening growl.

"Unfortunately, circumstances demanded it," Ra's admitted. "Their deaths were necessary."

"You sacrificed your own people just as part of a frame?" Batwoman asked.

"No, my good woman," Ra's denied with a slight shake of his head. "My people's lives are far too important for me to either casually or uselessly discard them. They were, in fact, traitors. They were hunting someone without my approval, so I had them eliminated before they could complete their task."

"The police and I checked their backgrounds thoroughly, and there was no indication of ties to the League," Batman pointed out.

"The League of Assassins has been around since before background checks were even possible," Ra's explained, casually adjusting one of the folds of his robe. "Many of our people are stationed in the very agencies where identification documents are manufactured, so it's no problem to create a few extra for our purposes."

"Why fake documents when you can produce the real thing?" Batman questioned rhetorically.

Ra's nodded.

"Who were the assassins after?" Batman asked.

"They were planning to kill Bruce Wayne," Ra's said, his eyes glittering as he stared hard at Batman.

The Dark Knight responded with only a single word.

"Why?"

"Because they knew that Bruce Wayne is Batman," Ra's told him.

Harley tried not to show any surprise, but had anyone been looking, they would've seen it clearly in her widened eyes.

"Further," Ra's went on, "they wanted to stop my plans to have you take my place and become the new leader of the League of Assassins."