Archive of Our Own ^beta

'You know, it's a terrible idea to go into business in Gotham,' they'd told Jim when he'd said he wanted to up sticks and trade in one east coast metropolis for another.

It was just that Jim was tired of New York City: tired of the cookie-cutter development of the outer boroughs, but honestly also tired of the cookie-cutter development of Manhattan, too. He'd had his time, was Jim's conclusion: he'd built up a large firm, a large backlog of industry awards, and – most importantly – a large reputation that preceded him.

'You could go anywhere in the country,' people had told him. 'Anywhere in the world, Jim, and you want to go to Gotham City?'

'Yeah,' Jim'd said, having chewed on the idea for some years now like a particularly ruminant sheep. 'I do.'

So Jim prepared to go.

It wasn't going to be an overnight move, obviously. The firm – Calton & Company, that is – was staying put in the city, and it wasn't as though he intended to uproot it. It would be like transplanting a giant oak: it was an ecosystem of its own, with deep networks both above and below ground, and carting it over to Gotham would just have killed it. C&C was its own creature at this point, shambling along with Jim's name merely plastered on top of it.

Once upon a time, Jim had been an architect with a strong engineering aptitude who'd built small houses, then small buildings, then larger buildings. Then he was designing small residential towers, then bigger residential towers: ones that were more or less skyscrapers, with penthouse suites that sold for hundreds of millions. Then, one day, Jim hadn't been an architect or an engineer or even a project manager at all: he'd turned into some sort of puppet with everyone else's fingers stuck up his ass. What had he been doing for the last ten years of his life? Certainly not drafting. Jim's primary value to both his employees and his clients was in shaking hands and doing deals, talking the talk and reassuring the stakeholder horde that yes, the project would be done on time, on budget, to spec. Yes, it would be the most glamorous residential property on the market, with incredible views of the Hudson that they'd created by blocking out someone else's once-incredible views of the river. Jim knew the developers and the city officials so that he could get projects done, and he knew the real estate agents and the whales so that he could get the projects sold. He knew how to structure insurance packages and bank loans and amortisation and how to deal with really big, not-just-on-paper problems like part of an island slowly sinking and accidentally damaging underground transport systems.

Jim knew he was a veritable repository of experience in the field, that he was the reason C&C had a sterling reputation with a sterling bank account to match. Jim also knew that if he had to look at one more brief for yet another luxury tower block, he was going to lose it, somehow.

'So why Gotham?' his friends boggled at him over drinks in Jim's back garden, the little serene space he'd (actually) built for himself. 'It's just going to be more of the same, except worse, and full of crime.'

If there was anything constant in the universe, Jim reflected, it had to be the pissing contest between NYC and GC. The world could be a crisped husk of global warmth and even with 90% of their residential capacity torched, the two cities would still be fighting over which had the better post-apocalyptic skyline. Metropolis pretended to contend with both, but Metropolis was too goodie-two-shoes to really be in this sort of a fistfight.

'They don't know me there,' Jim said, leaning over so that someone could refill his glass. 'And I don't know them.'

'And how is that a good thing?'

Jim just shrugged. 'Maybe it means I'll get fewer knocks on my door to build condos and I'll get to, I don't know.' He gestured vaguely with his glass, the sankt laurent they were drinking painting a round, red horizon along its surface. 'Build a library. Design affordable housing.'

The air of incredulousness was so thick that he could have cut it with a knife. 'I'm done with the game,' Jim pronounced, feeling momentum bubbling up under his skin. 'I'm done with making money, I think building a "legacy" firm is pretty much egotistical bullshit at this point, and I want to go somewhere where I actually have to pay attention to what I'm doing – somewhere where my brain is more useful than my left hand, which if I keep at this any longer is going to just turn into a rubber stamp, all the better for signing documents with.'

'These day's it's e-sign, mostly,' came someone's hysterical laugh of a comment.

'You know they have the same challenges in Gotham, right?' was someone else's more reasoned and sceptical view. 'The ones who can afford it like their luxury condos as much as we do, when they're not worried about getting murdered.'

'But their challenges are more challenging,' Jim said with a flash of fang in his smile.

Silence.

'You know,' the group chorused again, 'it's a terrible idea to do business in Gotham.'

'They don't have the same federal protections, because...' someone started, and then it all came in a flood:

'They're broke and the National Guard isn't going to provide the same level of response to metahuman threats as here and in D.C., because –'

'The place just attracts psychopaths; they view it as a bloody challenge, because –'

'The building code's longer than the Bible, because –'

'What are you going to do when you can't get anything done for want of the site getting fucked because –'

'Only the best of the worst go to Gotham, because –'

Like a choral crescendo, they all finished with: '– of Batman.'

A breathless silence rushed into the void that that proclamation left in its wake.

'I know,' Jim said, simply. 'And I think that'll make it fun.'

His friends largely wrote him off as completely bonkers after that, which was fine by Jim. Fifty percent of them were workaholics and went back to being consumed by their careers, leaving them little time to further critique Jim's new life path, and the other half of them were the kind of idle rich who were going to cart themselves off on yacht trips and holidays to the fashion capitals of the world. Jim was well aware, with the sudden crystal clarity that comes when one is changing one's entire life, that he was going to lose some of them like chaff on the wind. That suited him better than he'd thought it would: it turned out that when you spent three decades obsessively building a business (and a fortune) to the exclusion of all else, you didn't make as many friends as you thought you did. You made acquaintances, really, especially when you found yourself a dedicated bachelor with no real interest in settling down to something as unthinkable as a nine-to-five where you silenced your phone in the evening hours.

Jim took his time with the move. His first thought – immediately discarded – was to simply open a satellite C&C office in Gotham. It was the easiest idea: he'd just take himself and a few of the firm's best and brightest over there and settle in. They'd probably have clients within the week. But then the C&C reputation would hang over his head like a sword of Damocles, and the clients would all want beautiful residential towers, just with better security and anti-grapple technology on every req sheet.

Alternatively, he could get a job. Jim hadn't had a job since he was... Who knew? He couldn't remember. He'd always had a career, but never a job. Jim didn't put himself on payrolls: he managed them. Maybe having a job on the ground would help him figure out why he wanted out of NYC so badly. Maybe it'd cure him of the urge to work municipal projects just to feel needed. And maybe it would be pleasant just for the novelty of it all.

But before that, Jim figured he also shouldn't be thinking about setting up shop of any variety in Gotham without first living in it for a little while...

He took a sabbatical. That was the professional term for "I need to fuck off for a while or I'll go crazy", and Jim had taken (and given) enough of those over the years that no one at C&C who didn't know of his grand plan so much as blinked an eye. People in the industry burnt out all the time: how could you not, managing projects with enormous budgets, high stakes, and inevitable yet unpredictable issues? No matter where you were on the food chain, there was always someone further up the tree henpecking you: drafters answered to seniors who answered to partners who answered to investors; builders answered to foremen who answered to project managers who answered to leads who answered to partners who answered to the city or state or, if things really went brown-coloured, some federal administration.

Part of what made C&C tick along like a well-oiled machine was Jim's ability to just say no. No, they were not going to do five projects when they ought to be doing three. No, you were not going to answer your phone past midnight. No, you shouldn't be running on no sleep and making mistakes. No, you're not allowed to be a hero.

There was nothing Jim hated more than cogs that were so important that the whole machine ground to a halt without them, and he'd spent the better part of the last ten years roundhouse kicking people like that out of the firm and making himself as replaceable as possible. He had other partners, who had junior partners, who had leads, who had seniors. You didn't, perhaps, earn the most fuck-you money possible in the whole wide world at C&C, but you went to bed more or less on time, you got to go on holiday when you finished big projects, and for some weird reason the quality of the firm's work just ended up speaking for itself. In the weird and twisted way the world worked, their relative lack of capacity made them desirable: developers liked having the Calton imprint on their projects. Private clients, too. Calton wasn't trying to reform the entire design-build-deliver ecosystem; Jim just wanted the firm to perfect its little corner of that universe. And he had.

And now he was saying no again, he supposed. No to staying at the helm of the ship until it controlled him more than he controlled it. No to trying to be the biggest fish in a pool full of piranhas. No to the well-regulated, heavily-protected city of New York, New York, which had metahuman watchdogs, Special Administrative Area designation, and an excess of the well-heeled looking to avoid the chaos that came with living in places like Central City, Metropolis, and - most of all - Gotham.

So, first things first: find somewhere to live. Jim spent his mornings jogging, his afternoons researching neighbourhoods, and his evenings bemoaning how none of Gotham's boroughs really seemed to hit the spot. He wanted some privacy, abundant natural lighting, and enough room to house a library and some friends. Those requirements, combined with a lifelong ethos of never sleeping where he shat so to speak, left out most of the core of Gotham. He spent so long waffling over it that Jim began to wonder if he even wanted to move at all.

That said, the island boroughs weren't the only option. The city was less landlocked than Manhattan, and connectivity to the suburban "outer boroughs" of the New Jersey mainland (not a term you used in polite Gotham company) was much better. Jim started looking there, but got distracted during the course of his research by a YouTube video on Gotham's urban planning and fell down an old and beloved rabbit-hole of researching city development.

Gotham had laid itself out from the very beginning with plans to grow as both a residential environment and a place of industry. Centuries of commercial growth had filled in its city blocks, but modern economic depression had left the average Gothamite struggling. Wayne Enterprises was a powerhouse generator of jobs, but it hadn't been enough to keep the city completely propped up. Crime rose, worsened by the advent of an era of caped criminals and crusaders. Jim's personal theory was that metahuman first contact had broken something in some people; something about the centrality of humanity to the universe being overthrown. Whatever it was, it'd pushed those who'd eventually become the residents of Arkham Asylum over the edge. As usual, government then lagged behind reality, and you got Superman and Batman stepping up to take up mantles that police departments didn't know how to put on. Unlike some of his young hires, Jim remembered full well how much had had to change after that. Insurances companies had been the first ones to bail out of places like Gotham, increasing the cost to insure to the point where most Gotham residential policies had laughable coverage, assuming their residents could afford coverage at all.

Then the Great Earthquake had hit, destroying significant sections of the city and leaving large portions of it in a ruinous state. That and the abandonment of Gotham which had followed had been, putting it mildly, a shitshow of the likes that Jim didn't think he'd see again in his lifetime, but the government had a special way of surprising him and all its other private citizens. Money had always talked, even in the good old days when fewer people had been wearing spandex and even fewer people were literally from Mars, but these days it shouted. Gotham, had it been anything other than Gotham, should have been left to sink into the ocean after that crisis, but being adopted, championed, and partially conceived by the 19th century scions of Wayne Enterprises makes a lot of difference for post-disaster recovery.

Ah, the Waynes. The story of how the the family had left New York in the 1800s for climes that they could engineer to suit themselves was the stuff of foundational urban planning history books. That the Waynes had never left Gotham since, and were in fact quite stubbornly attached to the place, was a bounty that few other cities could match. The speeches Bruce Wayne had made in Congress lobbying the government for aid could incinerate your eyebrows even if you were just reading them in transcript. And so, on yet another sleepless night spent pondering the move, Jim went and watched old C-Span videos of them.

If Wayne's voice could be weaponised and sold, Jim was pretty sure that New York wouldn't need laser- and missile based meta-defence systems anymore. Eating crackers in his pyjamas, Jim watched Wayne, across multiple sessions, rip apart Senators and Representatives for forsaking their constituents, deliver an acid-tongued analysis of the decay of public safety nets and disaster relief, and basically more or less accuse the entire U.S. government of being a puppet with the hand of Lex Luthor shoved up its asshole before declaring that the state of New Jersey ought to be ashamed of itself and then walking off in disgust. (It certainly made Jim feel better about his own, much smaller, problems.) It wasn't quite Jim's thing to fawn over the rich from afar – he knew too many of them in NYC up close – and so he wasn't familiar enough with Wayne's character to know if the mixed look of grief, despair, and anger on the man's face was typical. He suspected, keenly, that it was not.

Jim shut his laptop and pondered the results of Wayne giving the federal and state governments the finger. Wayne Enterprises had withdrawn itself from a large number of government programmes, that he and everyone else knew very well. The money had moved in other directions: more towards the International Justice League programmes, even though the Waynes had previously been famous for keeping their investments domestic. A not insignificant chunk of that money had gone into municipal coffers, too: when Lex Luthor had stood up to come to Gotham's aid even after (or because of) Wayne's excoriating takedown of his political string-pulling, it sent Wayne into overdrive. The Wayne Foundation, even before the disaster, was very keen on municipal and public works, and it had seemed like the two titans of industry had gone to a weird sort of proxy-war during the rebuilding. LexCorp funded the reconstruction of industrial and commercial occupancies while Wayne Enteprises and the Foundation had gone to work on public-private partnerships to fix things that municipal and disaster relief funds should have covered. There was a joke that, if you turned over a manhole cover in Gotham, you'd see Wayne's face on it, but every skyscraper's building plaque was dedicated to Luthor. All in all, whether dick-comparing competition or not, all of it combined had helped make up the deficit that arose from Gotham voters choosing to take less federal funding in an equivalent (if self-sabotaging) fuck-you and taxes being lowered to encourage a return to the city.

In all honesty, Jim hated the newer downtown boroughs, the ones that the earthquake had damaged too thoroughly for anything to be salvageable. They'd been rebuilt from the ground up, squeaky clean and new. Luthor was in love with glass and reflective materials, which in an increasingly warm climate made negative sense and was mostly about, as it was with these people, massive ego. But putting building aesthetics aside, it was undeniable that a combination of Metropolis sensibilities and Wayne more or less getting to (once again) plan Gotham out afresh had led to a spectacular case study of twenty-first century urban planning. If this move went horrendously wrong, Jim would have no problems pivoting to teaching and running a course at Gotham Architectural about the principles of New Urbanism that had driven the re-wiring of the city.

Okay, so it was very tragic that they had lost some gargoyles, but Gotham City had tried to stand itself back up by getting its transportation network re-laid on modern tracks first, then worrying about other planning needs later. The bus/train/subway systems and dispersed street networks sketched out the boundaries for Gotham's revised grid layout, which then led to the ability for smaller-scale planners to turn their eye to walkability and mixed neighbourhoods, focusing on human-scale design. A focus on design! The ability to go from theory to reality on a mass scale! A planner's wet dream, even if Jim was aware that applied theory could often lead to future nightmares. But there was so much new ground still left to break, because Gotham was still, relatively speaking, in tatters. And wasn't that just another great tenet of New Urbanism, too? Reclaiming neglected spaces, transforming deterioration into creation? Luthor had rebuilt the business district and Wayne had filled many industrial and residential gaps, but many parts of the islands were still fighting for rejuvenation.

Fuck, Jim realised. Was that why he wanted to move to Gotham? Underneath all his career angst, did he just want to get back to that feeling he'd had as a kid, when sketching out a building felt like it was about changing the world instead of just paying the bills? Like he was out to play at being a sort of... urban design Batman?

Jim snorted.

Then he got up, dusted cracker bits off of himself, and wandered back into his kitchen. Only the barest diffuse glow from hidden under-cabinetry strip lights lit the space, casting strong down-shadows across his bare countertops.

Gotham. Batman. Of course there was Batman to think about. Jim sat on one of the counter stools and turned that over in his head. Factoring vigilante justice into his choice of where to live hadn't really been a priority: Gotham, compared to New York, was always going to be a downgrade in terms of safety. It was infamous for all the wrong reasons. Jim was ready to accept that. It was just how the world worked these days, in his opinion. Not that Jim was anything but a capitalist himself, but if anyone was asking his opinion on why there were so many more caped crusaders and evil villains running around now than there had ever been in history... Well. You had to have a lot of money to do that kind of thing, didn't you? Especially in a place like Gotham, where metas were so famously unwelcome. Villains didn't just happen to have toxic Fear Gas laying around in their basements: they had their own support systems, same as everyone else. Either they were funding it, or someone was funding them. Jim would wager his entire life savings, his entire business, that if he walked into Bruce Wayne's wardrobe, he'd find – if not the Batman – then one of the Bats. The internet certainly had a lot of theories. Or maybe Wayne was the Joker – that would make nearly as much sense, considering his traumatic origin story or whatever.

And Jim'd repeat that wager across the whole of the country: Luthor, the Queens, the Kanes. Those people made money in the fourth derivative: the earnings on their earnings on their earnings made them richer every year than entire city blocks. What did you do when you were a man or woman who has everything? You went and found something to challenge yourself. To change the world all over again. To be known, in ways that your public persona couldn't be known, because businessmen had to talk a certain kind of talk for their boards and investors and lost themselves in the process.

Jim should know. He was doing the same thing, wasn't he? Without cape and cowl, obviously, but he was there: he'd played the game and, by so many measures, won. But he didn't have any other sort of anchors – no real personal life, no close family, no children: all the things that careers-people gave up in exchange for becoming very rich and slightly mad. Now he wanted to regress: regress to his childhood dreams of things that were simple and good. In some ways, he figured that was part of the essence of what Batman was: someone acting out their core belief that all crime can be stopped. Jim didn't doubt that other people wanted to regress to childhood dreams that were ambitious and cruel, and did: the Jokers who joked, the Scarecrows who scared.

Now that Jim had started thinking about it - about Batman's indelible imprint on Gotham over the last few decades and the gallery of rogues he battled - Jim found he couldn't stop thinking about it. You didn't move to a coastal area and not think about the sea. You didn't go up into the mountains and not think about the thin air. If he was moving to Gotham, then by god was Jim going to build like a Gothamite. If he was going to build Gotham, then he was going to build it with the Gothamites. Because it took more than just riches to be Batman: it took an army. Someone out there was building this man tunnels, designing him safehouses, and helping him identify which bits of a building he could grapple onto without killing himself. Maybe Jim could be one of them; sign up for this army. He'd be a good soldier.

Maybe, to start out, Jim'd name the new firm he'd have to establish something very annoying. Cave Designs, maybe. It'd take a while for it all to get rolling: he'd have to get re-certified in some things, learn the Gotham City Building Code backwards and forwards, start schmoozing with the city council, figure out all of his ins with the city's established firms and buy a lot of expensive dinners, call up the teams he knew at the Wayne Foundation, get some hotshots to get him a dinner invitation with some board members. Get that job he'd been thinking about, just as a way of putting his foot in the door

Jim wondered how long it would take before the Bat came calling. If he did all of that, got established, started working on some urbanism projects in Gotham's seedier, cheaper areas. Poked his nose into the new Crime Alleys of the city. Worked with developers who knew that the most sustainable way to build a building was not to build one at all, but to rehabilitate one of the hundreds of structurally sound but compromised units littering Gotham's streets. What would happen if he started innovating on pro- and anti-vigilante design elements, which NYC with its federal protections had no market for, but that the rest of the country increasingly wanted. Jim was good at this. Jim knew he was unhealthily competitive, wildly independent-minded, in sound financial condition, and good at this. It wasn't going to be an issue of if. It was going to be a question of how fast.

Jim went and fished his phone out of the bedroom, then came to stand by the large picture window that faced out from the kitchen. Backlit from behind, Jim let his eyes trail over New York's glittering, too-perfect, too-finished skyline. 'Jennings,' he said, when his ever-faithful executive assistant picked up the phone despite it being midnight. 'Let's find some land in north Gotham for me to settle down in. Yeah. Somewhere near the Wayne Manor, that sort of neighbourhood. Yeah. And Jennings? If you don't want to come with me, do you know anyone out there who might be interested in your position? Some EAs who've worked with the Waynes before, maybe? Yeah. Yeah...'