Fanfic #7 Batman vs Dexter by GazingAbyss

A complete story that has Dexter Morgan visit Gotham. A pretty good story with everyone in character.

Synopsis: While Batman searches for the Joker, Dexter Morgan starts cleaning up Gotham City in his own way.

Rated: M

Words: 60k

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/7822556/1/Batman-vs-Dexter

Here's the first chapter:

I drag the scalpel across his forehead, feeling the four vertical scars tug on the blade. The man in front of me, naked and held to the table by reams of shrink wrap, hisses in pain, regaining consciousness just as I push the knife into his skin, almost deep enough to scrape against his skull.

"Sorry," I say, not meaning it. "That's not where I'd usually start, but I couldn't resist."

"That mark will represent your life," the man, victor Zsasz, snarls.

"Yours, actually," I correct him as I bring the pipette to the wound. The blood obligingly defies gravity to race up into the glass tube. I touch the filled pipette to a microscope slide, and a perfect red circle forms on the flat glass. I press a thin cover slip to the drop of blood, preserving it, and set it aside.

"I also have to apologise for the lack of decoration," I continue, gesturing to the walls, covered in nothing but sheets of plastic tarps. "I'd prefer to let you know why you're here, but I think you can probably guess."

My eyes run over Zsasz's body again. He's covered himself in scars, all in the form of tally marks; one for each of his victims. Even his criminal record is vague on the exact number of people he killed, and I assume no one wanted to encourage him by counting. I tried to do a quick estimate earlier, and confirmed that he's killed far more people than I have, something which has become a bit of a rarity lately. Not that I feel unaccomplished in comparison; I've never been caught, while zsasz has been arrested quite a few times. For some strange reason he, like so many other local criminals, has been repeatedly found not guilty by reason of insanity, rather than given the death penalty I'm about to enforce. I've got to find out the names of some of the defence lawyers in Gotham, just in case.

I glance between his body and the variety of knives and saws I've brought for the occasion, looking for inspiration.

"I will kill you," he assures me. "I will feel steel dancing in my fingers as it slices through your throat, before the ecstatic pain of the cold metal in my own flesh."

I'm not sure whether to be annoyed that he's getting poetic or disgusted at how unhygienic that sounds, but my dark passenger chuckles and whispers a suggestion. I glance over the knives, looking for one that will work. They're all sharp enough to go through any flesh, but bones are more difficult. That either requires force, which is less precise, a saw, which is slower, or - my hand hovers over a long but razor thin blade - something small enough to wiggle through the small gaps in a joint.

I push the blade down into Zsasz's wrist. It easily slices through the skin, fat and muscle before it clicks against the ulna. I slide it down and shove it between the larger bones and the metacarpals, prying the two sets of bones apart. Zsasz's hand shifts away from his arm by a millimetre, just enough to look unnatural. To his credit, zsasz swallows the pain completely, refusing to make a sound and instead silently glaring at me. The hand, now moving unnaturally loosely with any nudge from the knife, is completely severed when I slice through the veins and skin still holding it in place. Blood spills forward, puddling around the cut and dripping over the side of the table.

"I hate to tell you this, but you definitely won't get to enjoy feeling a knife in your hands again," I say as a walk around the table to his other hand and start to slice into his left wrist. "As for that "ecstasy of pain" you were talking about? You're about to feel a lot of that."

Crouched deep in the shadows, I watch the unassuming door leading out from one of the imposing brick buildings lining the narrow alley. This particular building is the home of a former doctor, stripped of his license years ago, who provides medical services to those for whom going to the hospital means being sent to Arkham Asylum or Blackgate Prison as soon as they're fit to leave.

I've been waiting for over half an hour, and I'm beginning to think that my tip was a lie. I'm just about to stand up and head back to my informant so I follow through on my threat to break his arm when the door opens and a cold light from inside bathes the alley in white light for a split second. When the door closes and the alley returns to its normal shades of yellow provided by the streetlights, I can easily see the woman who exited.

She's average height, athletic, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and she's the exact person I'm looking for. She looks up and down the alley, scanning it distrustfully, her two bouncy pig-tails swaying as her head turns. Just as she lifts a foot to walk away from the door, I slam into her, shoving her against a wall. She squeals in pain as I lean into the hard cast covering her arm, which is raised by a sling wrapped around her neck.

After the initial shock I back up a few steps. Harley Quinn nearly doubles over in pain, holding her broken left arm with her right, and glares up at me.

"What do you want?" she asks through gritted teeth.

"The Joker," I answer. She doesn't blink. She had already guessed why I was here. "Where is he?"

"Why should I tell you?" Quinn tries to growl, but only manages to pout.

I move closer again, pushing against her arm. She lets out another shriek of pain. "He really hurt you this time. Don't you want to get back at him a little?"

"I can handle things myself." Now she does manage a growl. She's getting defensive. There's no way she's going to budge on this. Not right now. I don't like leaving her free, but she won't help me at all if I bring her to Arkham. I'll let her think about things a while.

"I'll be watching you," I say, and back away into the shadows. "Don't do anything stupid."

"Yeah," she says, watching me disappear. "Right."

Quinn heaves a deep sigh and trudges off down the alley towards the slightly-better-lit streets. As I watch her go I feel a subtle buzzing next to my ear. I touch the spot just under where my cowl extends upwards in an imitation of a bat's ear, connecting to whoever's contacting me.

"There's some interesting chatter from GCPD," the voice of Barbara Gordon, also known as Oracle, fills my ear. "There have been a few sightings of Zsasz, all within a block of each other. I'm sending you the address now."

"Thanks," I growl. "Anything else?"

"There's a body being pulled out of Slaughter Swamp, but it's pretty ripe. You might want to wait for a forensic report. I'll keep you updated and see if I can narrow down Zsasz's location."

Oracle disconnects and I grimace. I hate dealing with Zsasz.

It's hard to obey the speed limits after getting used to driving in Miami, but I've already passed a few police cars and I don't want to attract any attention while I'm driving around with a few garbage bags full of body parts in my trunk. This far into the aptly named Slaughter Swamp I'm the only one on the road, looking for roads that go well off the beaten path.

My phone, sitting on the passenger seat beside me, face up, starts vibrating. I'm about to ignore it for a few minutes, since I can't go to a crime scene before I get rid of my cargo, when I notice the name displayed on the phone's screen.

"Hi Deb," I say as I answer.

"Don't fucking 'hi Deb' me," my adoptive sister, the Lieutenant of Miami Metro's homicide department, answers angrily.

"What did I do now?"

"You didn't listen to me." Deb sighs, exasperated. "I told you not to fucking… you know… At least not while you're in Gotham."

Deb found out I was a serial killer for the first time months ago, when she walked in on me at the worst possible time. I was sure she would arrest me right then and there, but later she told me she never even considered it. She still hasn't accepted my habits though, and rarely acknowledges them out loud, instead censoring herself with 'you know's, and our relationship hasn't gone back to normal. Not much makes me sad, but the fact that it probably won't depresses me a little. I was hoping taking this temporary placement in Gotham would give her the distance and time she needs to recover a bit more, but judging by her tone it's not working.

"That's not fair," I say, doing my best to sound hurt. "I did listen to you, and you're right. People deserve to know that they're safe."

One of the things that surprised me the most after Deb had recovered the capacity for coherent speech was her indignation that I had made Travis quietly disappear. She'd been furious that Miami would remain in a panic for weeks, not knowing that the Doomsday Killer was unable to hurt anyone else. I think the fact that my actions had added to Miami Metro's abysmally large proportion of open murder cases may have also contributed to her righteous anger.

I signal to turn, even though I can't see any other cars on the road – safety first – and turn down an abandoned looking dirt road, finding a place in the swamp nowhere near any of the other spots I've used over the past few weeks.

"Then why am I watching a leg getting pulled out of the swamp near Gotham on the news?" Deb demands.

Whoops.

"That could be from anyone."

"That doesn't exactly sound like you're denying it."

"Deb-"

"Just listen to me for a second," she cuts me off. "I'm pissed about this, but mostly I'm worried." Her voice cracks a little, and I feel a tiny twinge of regret. "Can't you at least wait until you're back home? If this is connected back to Miami you're fucked."

Despite the sizeable blind spot Deb used to have about me, she is a great detective. It took one look at the cut on Travis' cheek for her to realize that James Doakes was not the Bay Harbour Butcher.

"Could you just…" Deb starts again. "Can't you just leave things to the professionals for once, Dex?"

"Deb, this is Gotham. Not even the professionals are leaving things to the professionals."

It takes Oracle less time to dig up the ownership of a few suspicious buildings near where Zsasz was sighted than it does for me to reach the area of Gotham she's researching. This neighbourhood is poor, and all the buildings are dark, but most of them checked out. With one exception.

The small house I'm standing in front of has passed through a few different sets of hands in the past few months. The last owner, before the current one, was a corporation. I recognized the name. It's a dummy corporation owned by the Broker, who sells buildings to criminals too recognizable to find a legitimate real estate agent.

The current owner has a name I don't recognize. That doesn't mean anything. That's expected from a place sold by the Broker.

From outside I scan the dark house with an infrared camera. No living thing larger than a rat is inside. I enter from a window on the second floor. I can't see a thing until I turn on the night vision goggles in my cowl.

The window opened into a squalid room, covered in trash, with a small stained mattress lying in the corner. I creep out into the hallway. One way leads to a door, the other to some stairs downwards. I check the door first. It leads to a small bathroom as grimy as the bedroom. I'll come back for DNA samples and fingerprints after sweeping the rest of the house.

I head back into the hall and go down the stairs. The downstairs hallway is just as dark as the one upstairs. The front door is in front of me. Down the hall a few feet is an opening. I can see a stream of yellow light, leaking in from the window looking out onto the street. I only need to look in for a second to know it's empty.

So far this looks like where Zsasz would live.

The next door is another bathroom, this one even smaller than the one upstairs. Not worth closely examining just yet.

The end of the hall opens up into the largest room in the house. That's not saying much. The room looks like a kitchen, with a counter and cupboards on the back wall. The kitchen extends to the right by the width of the stairs.

I step inside and scan the kitchen. My eyes immediately lock with Zsasz's.

I tense, preparing for a fight, when I realize his eyes are staring straight ahead and glazed over. It takes me another fraction of a second to realize his head isn't attached to a body. It's just staring at me from a spot on the counter. Four vertical scars run up his forehead. They're old and healed over, unlike the open wound running across them. A rivulet of dried blood runs down the new line to his chin.

I press a few buttons on the inside of my right glove to make a call.

"Did you find Zsasz?" Oracle asks after a moment.

"Yes," I answer. "He's dead."

"What happened?" she asks, sounding more concerned than usual.

"I don't know yet. Send some officers to my location."

"On it." The line goes dead.

I hope the officers Oracle sends will be GCPD as I approach the head. Since Gotham City's crime rate had reached what the FBI deemed 'unacceptable levels,' Gotham had been declared a national emergency. Dozens of detectives and forensics experts had been sent from police departments all over the city for backup, nearly doubling the Major Crime Unit's numbers.

So far the crime rate has yet to decrease.

Upon closer inspection, the fresh tally-mark appears to be inflicted before death. Knowing Zsasz, it was probably his last victim. I make a note to search the area later for any fresh bodies.

I rock the head back a few inches, looking at the cross-section of his neck. If I had to guess, I'd say it happened just after he died. A small amount of blood has dripped out onto the counter around the gaping hole. It looks like most of it drained before the head reached this spot.

I take a small vial from my utility belt and scrape some of the dried blood into it before I place Zsasz's head back where it was and turn around, carefully scrutinizing the kitchen floor. There's no blood anywhere. Whatever happened to Zsasz, it doesn't look like it happened here.

Down the hallway, someone pounds on the doors. I disappear into the shadows before the door is kicked in. Two young, nervous looking police officers creep slowly down the hall in front of me, trying desperately to see using tiny flashlights, aiming it where their guns point.

"There's no one here," I say quietly, trying to startle them as little as possible, bracing myself to grab their guns if either tries to shoot. The one who entered second swings back to look at me, panicked, before he spots my mask and cape and relaxes a little.

"Thanks, sir," he sighs in relief.

"But," the one leading stammers, looking down the hall towards the kitchen, "protocol-"

"I know," I nod.

He nods as well and turns back around to finish the sweep. I see him start as he looks into the kitchen. He's noticed Zsasz's head. He points it out to his partner before they turn back around and head upstairs for a few minutes.

"There's a lab geek with us," the one who saw me first says as he comes back downstairs and holsters his gun. "Should we let him in?"

I nod again, and one of the officers goes back outside. When he returns, he's followed by someone I've never seen. I groan inwardly, realizing he's not local. Unlike most of the outside help the MCU has received, he seems unsurprised to spot me, instead raising an eyebrow, looking slightly nonplussed. His ID tag identifies him as Dexter Morgan