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As a rule, tours didn’t usually go to Gotham. It made managers nervous, venues were expensive as fuck, and bands inevitably fit into some gimmick or another and thus became the target of masked madmen.
So of course My Chemical Romance decided to do not one but two shows in Gotham: one in the large venue for the masses, and another smaller show the next night. The second show was mostly, Frank suspected, so that Gerard could wander around in a back alley in the hopes of seeing Batman.
“These kids deserve good shows,” Gerard had said in his best saving-the-world-one-rock-show-at-a-time voice, and the next thing Frank knew they were crossing one of the bridges into Gotham, the skyline menacing even in the polluted haze of midday.
They got lost at least twice on the way to the venue, even with the GPS – No Man’s Land’s influence could still be felt in the haphazardly redesigned streets – and after their impromptu tour of Gotham Frank felt confident that there was no good side of town.
“This was such a great idea,” Gerard announced as they stepped off the bus in the arena’s loading area. The place had been built recently, but there was still a sense of dinginess to it that Frank associated with worn-out buildings in the industrial district back home. It was like the place had given in to its environment.
“I feel like we’re going to get mugged inside our bus. This town probably comes with fuckin’ pickpocket ninjas in every corner.” Mikey gingerly stepped down off the bus step.
“Lucky for us we don’t have anything worth taking,” Bob said. “I think it cost more to get the permits to have these shows than we’re making this entire tour.”
“You’d think they’d want to encourage the local economy,” Ray observed.
“I think they’re trying to deter large gatherings of people,” Frank said. “The easier to avoid mass killings, my dear.”
“Don’t be a grumpy Gus!” Gerard said. “We might get to see a fuckin’ superhero.”
“We could have just gone to Metropolis. I think Superman does fly-overs just for photo ops,” Ray said.
“Superman, Shmuperman. He doesn’t compare to the motherfuckin’ Batman.”
Frank had to agree with Gerard there, but he wasn’t going to encourage his mania. It was bad enough they’d come to Gotham wearing marching band uniforms. He wasn’t sure what gimmick they fit into, but he was pretty sure that one supervillain or another would figure it out.
Soundcheck was mostly normal, if you didn’t count the detailed instructions they got on dealing with sudden evacuations, bombs, fires, and what to do if Smilex was pumped through the ventilation system. (Answer: enjoy your last few moments, since there wasn’t a single goddamn thing you could do. Frank really wanted to know why it was brought up at all in that case. To scare the tourists, he suspected.)
By the time they were getting ready, listening to the dull roar of the crowd and the opener, Frank was beginning to feel kind of ridiculous about how nervous Gotham had made him.
The show itself was explosive.
There was an energy to the crowd that Frank had never experienced before. It felt like the old Jersey basement crowds amplified to a thousand. In sharp contrast to the excited but ultimately tame murmur of Metropolis’s crowd, Gotham had a dark, violent energy that made Frank feel like a kid again, thrashing around in a mosh pit, bruising knuckles and elbows on dudes twice his size and loving every second of it.
Gerard was clearly soaking in the crowd’s energy, strutting from one side of the stage to the other, posing and preening and licking whoever got in his way. Mikey went as far as to prop his foot up on a speaker and do hair tosses, and Frank kept catching glimpses of Ray banging his head like he was back in his bedroom at his Mom’s house listening to Motorhead records. Frank could hear Bob’s laughter even past the noise of the crowd.
Frank himself could feel bruises forming where he’d thrown himself around. He didn’t want to leave the stage when the set was up, lingering after an unplanned encore before reluctantly running off stage after the rest of the guys, sweat soaked and exhilarated.
Backstage was darker than he remembered, and he tried to keep up with Bob’s blond head when suddenly backstage got a hell of a lot darker.
He faintly registered a pinprick of pain, then nothing.
*
“What, you don’t like your present?”
The words – hard-edged and in the same smarmy, asshole-ish tone Frank sometimes used right before getting whacked upside the head by Bob - were the first thing that cut through the strange haze of Frank’s stupor.
He’d been drugged, he thought numbly, by good stuff, stuff that had reduced the last… however long… into a series of blurred images and dull pain radiating from Frank’s head. He could remember being tossed around, eyes gummy and shut, and managing to slowly open one eyelid to reveal an alleyway, and then just a quick flash of a cat on a fire escape, a lighted window blazing in the distance, Gotham’s jagged skyline, and finally a rusty maintenance sign on a thick metal door.
Frank held onto these images while he could; he knew from his own misadventures that all these things would fade quickly from memory if he didn’t try his best to keep them vivid and bright in the forefront. He tried to pretend this was one of Gee’s stories, the ones he and the rest of the band critiqued to find the holes before Gee submitted them to his publisher. What would a character do in this situation?
Not die, Frank’s brain helpfully supplied.
He was so busy trying to think of what he should be doing that it took him a minute to remember the voice that woke him up. There was still a conversation going on, he realized dimly. God, he was even more fucked up than he’d thought.
“You have to let him go.”
A different voice: younger, sharper on the syllables. Rich kid, Frank reckoned.
He realized that he was lying on his side, and that his shoulders were aching. His arms were tied behind his back, that was why. It seemed like it was taking entirely too long to notice things like being tied up, but Frank’s head felt fuzzy and thick, like he was swimming through Jell-O.
“But Robin, I thought you’d like it!” The harder voice again, still in full-on asshole mode. Frank tried to open his eyes. It took a few tries, but finally they cooperated.
He was laying on a rough, cement surface. Not a parking lot, rougher than that, and there was a ledge a few feet away…. He was on a roof.
The asshole was wearing thick combat boots, and there was a lump sticking out of one… a gun. The motherfucker had a gun.
The younger guy was wearing boots, too. Ninja-looking things, with… tights?
Robin, he remembered the asshole saying, and discovered that his mouth was taped shut only as he tried to yell for help.
He rolled a little to his side, turning his head to see Robin and the asshole. They were both staring down at him, Robin looking impassive (and fuckin’ young, kid couldn’t be older than seventeen, what the holy fuck was Batman thinking?) and the asshole’s lip curling, like Frank was a pile of shit he almost stepped in.
Super.
They were both wearing masks. Frank bizarrely remembered the pictures he’d seen of Gerard and Mikey LARPing, wearing masks that made them look like Zorro impersonators, and how he’d teased them for days, pretending to slice W’s into their chests with pencils, his cell, or whatever else he had in hand.
On professionals, it turned out, domino masks just looked freaky. Instead of eyes, white plastic glared out at him, and it reminded Frank of demons he’d seen in some horror movie.
“This is the one you like, right, Robin-boy?” the asshole continued, prodding Frank with a foot. “I went out and got him special.”
“Jason, this is inappropriate,” Robin said tersely. If the tape was gone, Frank would use a lot stronger language than ‘inappropriate’ to describe his kidnapping. Maybe Robin got guitarists tied up and presented to him on rooftop all the fucking time, but this was out of the goddamn ordinary for Frank.
Jason the Asshole snickered. “Inappropriate? Jesus, kid, stray from the script. Daddy won’t ground you if you show a little personality, promise.”
Frank tried not to acknowledge the fact that he and his kidnapper agreed on something.
“We have to get him back,” Robin said.
“We?” Jason said incredulously.
Robin continued without acknowledging the interruption. “You really shouldn’t have taken him! Seriously, Jason, what in the world were you thinking?”
Jason the Asshole reached into his jacket. To Frank’s surprise, didn’t whip out a gun or something. Instead he took out an envelope. “Give this to him.”
There seemed to be no question about who he was talking about. Frank didn’t even know these people and he knew they were talking about the Batman. Robin reached out and gingerly took the envelope, as if worried it was going to explode. “What’s this?”
“Just something I needed to say,” Jason said, and there was no asshole left in his voice at all. He seemed broken, like something had happened to him that he couldn’t fix, that no one could fix, but this was the first step towards redemption. “Just… don’t push it, kid. Just keep it between us Robins.”
He was what Robins turned into? No fucking wonder, with this town. Batman probably went through unhinged kids like flies. But there was a tension between the two vigilantes, something Frank couldn’t read, and Robin twisted his mouth, pained look evident in the way his brows furrowed over his mask. “I’ll give it to him.”
Jason grinned, angry-sharp, and said, “Have fun with your toy, Robin.”
Then he motherfucking jumped off the side of the building.
Frank’s eyes were as wide as they would go, and he waited to hear a sickening thump. Or a scream of some sort. Or maybe some concern from the supposed superhero standing in front of him.
Instead Robin sighed, looked at the envelope with suspicion before tucking it away somewhere under his cape, and knelt beside Frank. “This is going to sting,” he warned, then jerked the tape off Frank’s mouth.
“Motherfucking balls!” Frank yelped. The tape had thoughtfully relieved him of all the hairs he’d missed when shaving, and he sent up a silent prayer of thanks that he’d shaved his beard.
“Are you okay?” Robin asked. There was a coldness to the kid, like he was somehow separated from the world in a way Frank had never been. He suspected that he had a lot more in common with the cocksucker who’d kidnapped him, which gave him an unsettled feeling in his gut. (He was ninety-nine percent certain that Gerard wouldn’t be thinking uncharitable thoughts about the goddamn superhero rescuing him, even if it was a sidekick.)
Frank almost said “Yeah,” just out of habit, but as he tried to sit up, the world around him started spinning at an alarming rate.
“Not really, no,” he said instead. “Dizzy. Drugged.”
“I’ll get you to help,” Robin said, cutting the zip strips that held Frank’s wrists together. His thick gloves held Frank’s hands a few moments longer than required, and Frank dimly remembered that Jason the Asshole had presented him to Robin as a gift.
“You know who I am?” Frank asked, and Robin finally seemed human as his cheeks turned bright red.
“Sorry that you got caught up in this,” Robin apologized. “He’s kind of off his rocker, and thought…”
“That I’d be a good damsel in distress?” Frank asked. He felt bizarrely complimented. Gerard had never been fucking kidnapped because a costume had a crush on him. Frank was going to use this as his “hottest in the band” trump card forever, fuck Mikey and his superpower for getting phone numbers, fuck Gerard and his lead singer mojo.
Robin went even redder. “No! I mean. Maybe.”
When he let his awkwardness shine, Robin didn’t seem such a bad kid. Frank grinned at him, and tried to climb to his feet. This was thwarted by the fact that the building seemed to have been built in a zero-gravity zone, and Frank ended up back on his ass.
“Help is on its way,” Robin told him, then hesitated. “Are you going to play your show tomorrow?”
“If gravity comes back,” Frank replied.
The kid smiled at him, tight-lipped and self-conscious. Frank didn’t think the kid let his emotions shine through often. And then he was gone, in a flash of green and yellow and red against the murky depths of the Gotham night, and moments later there were paramedics bursting through the door that Frank had glimpsed during his kidnapping.
Then there was the familiar blur of hospitals and doctors, bright lights and gurneys and cold hands and colder instruments, and Frank was surrounded by his band, haggard and relieved to see him.
“Frankie!” Gerard kept saying, giving Frank careful hugs, clearly conscious of the IV taped to Frank’s arm. “Tell me about Robin! I’m so jealous you got to meet him.”
Bob punched him in the arm. “Don’t tell kidnap victims you’re jealous of them, Gerard. At least, not where strangers can hear you.”
Frank grinned and stuck out his tongue. “He totally had a crush on me.”
Gerard let out a strangled sound. “That is so unfair!”
Frank giggled, and Mikey perched on the side of his bed and curled around him in a way that made him feel safe. Gerard kept a stranglehold on his hand, and Ray popped in with a bag of smuggled food and a dvd that he and Bob managed to find a player for.
Frank kept glancing at the window, but he never saw any strange movements.
The second show was delayed by a day, and if Frank thought he saw a strangely solemn kid in the crowd, a kid with intent eyes that seemed apart from the mass around him… well, he didn’t say anything, though he did blow a kiss of gratitude in that direction.
As they left, Gotham faded behind the tour bus like a sunset. Frank watched in the rearview mirror, thinking of the gritty rooftop and the feel of Robin’s gloves on his wrists.
He hoped they’d visit again. He wanted Gerard to somehow meet the kid, to bring a real smile to his too-serious face.
There was just something about Gotham.