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“Did you know, that Gotham has an average of about 75,298 deaths a year? And that at least thirty-two thousand of them wind up in a morgue? And then of that, about seventeen thousand or so get autopsied?” Finley sighed, taking a sip of the wine. “It can get crazy in a city like this, bodies just pile up. And sometimes we don’t even have room for them all.”
The girl’s fork had paused on its way to her pretty mouth.
Finley accidentally took a larger gulp of wine, coughing as he tried to act casual. “So that’s uh, that’s my job.”
“You said you had a medical degree,” Sharon said, horrified.
Finley shrugged. “All ME’s do.” They also had years of specialized training, but he got to skip all that, thank God.
Sharon set down the fork, swallowing uncomfortably at her steak. It glistened red and bloody.
Finley licked his lips, looking up at her, then back down, emptying his wine glass. He was probably not the dashing, charming doctor or whatever she’d expected.
He was once, as his mother liked to remind him. Finley fumbled to recover the conversation.
“Well, that’s… that’s very interesting.” Sharon pivoted faster, a set of whitened teeth peeking out behind her responsible red shade of lipstick. “What made you want to be a medical examiner?”
“I didn’t. I got the job after the last medical examiner got knocked off by the mob after testifying in court.” Finley grinned as he recounted the story, stabbing a fork into his salad. “I was just there that day, examining the medical examiner.” That story killed usually, but Sharon smacked her lips, one nail tapping the table anxiously.
Finley forced another smile, noting with no small amount of regret that they were out of wine. He cast wildly for something to say. “What’s the uh… craziest case you’ve had at a school?” Sharon was a guidance counsellor, or maybe a teacher?
“It’s an elementary school.” Sharon shrugged, making eyes at the waiter. “So not that crazy.”
What was he even supposed to say to that? “You, uh, like kids?”
“I love kids.” Sharon smiled, fully and her zygomaticus major muscle split in two, forming a lovely dimple. “They’re so sweet and innocent and I love working with them, you know?”
Not at all. Finley hated getting kids at the morgue. “Yeah. I love working with kids."
Sharon seemed to remember what he did, both of them settling into the most horrible silence of Finley's life, outside of when he came out to his mother.
Madly, he kind of wanted Gotham to work its usual magic and have some armed gunmen walk into the restaurant, or Poison Ivy to strangle him using the rose on their table or something.
His phone buzzed. “Oh, so sorry, one second.”
“Don't worry about it,” Sharon said eagerly and Finley awkwardly clambered out of his chair, wandering a small distance away.
It was his co-worker, Ally, whom he thought he had a decent shot with if she ever decided to move on from the shambles of her marriage.
“Hello?” Finley murmured into it, giving Sharon a thumbs up. Sharon nodded tightly, digging in her purse for something.
“Hey, I’m so sorry, but Andrea is stranded at band practice and it’s getting kind of late.” The worry was palpable in Ally’s voice. “I’m so, so sorry to do this, but can you handle the new cases?”
Finley could complain, but he knew how slammed the office was right now. Especially after their boss got arrested for that weird sex scandal. He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing a little. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Thank you so much, I owe you, big time.” Ally breathed over the sound of horns and rush hour traffic around her.
For you, anything. No, no, do not say that.
“Drive safe.” He said, ending the call and returning to his date. “So, I’m going to sound like a total douche, but I need to get back to work.”
Sharon looked incredibly relieved. “That's alright.” She waved a hand, red nails catching the candlelight.
Finley made a face, leaning forward. “I really like you though-”
“Mhm.” She waved down a waiter. “That’s so sweet.”
“-and maybe you’re free next week?”
“Next week is really busy for me.” She said quickly, beaming at the waiter. “We’ll split the bill, please.”
“Yeah.” Finley rubbed the back of his neck. “Understandable. It was really nice meeting-”
Sharon smiled, her chair screeching back as she stood up to slide her card against the machine. “So nice meeting you.” Then she staggered out of her chair, making her way out of the restaurant.
“And will you be paying with cash or card?” The waiter asked him.
"Card, and I can get another bottle? Thanks."
Finley got back to the station in time for the night shift change. The daytime cops were haggard enough and by comparison, the night crew was completely humourless, none of them returning Finley’s awkward greetings.
The morgue, and by extension, everyone that worked down there gave cops the creeps. Finley wasn't in the mood for conversation right now either, wincing internally as he ran over the date in his head.
Just out of practice, he consoled himself. It's not like he spent his day surrounded by phenomenal conversationalists.
“Gordon was looking for you earlier.” Officer Gorsuch told him on the way to the elevator and Finley nodded, catching sight of the Batsignal through a window.
“Oh, did he say why?” He asked as he turned, one foot in the elevator.
Gorsuch wrinkled her nose at him, holding out her hands. “What do I look like, his secretary?”
Finley held his tongue about that, getting into the elevator with a sigh and jabbing the button for the morgue. He checked his phone. No messages from Sharon at all.
He chewed on his lip, blindly getting out of the elevator and heading to his locker. Should he write something? Apologize for putting her off her meal, and possibly off the idea of dating anyone she met on an app in Gotham.
He composed and deleted about five messages before stowing his phone in his pocket.
Not his finest moment, Finley decided as he got back into his scrubs. At least the office didn’t look as bad as usual, the beige walls were currently neutral and soothing rather than starkly washed out.
Probably meant the bulbs should get swapped out. Finley made his way to the file cabinet, still surprised to see them full of documents. Proper ME offices were careful and methodical with documentation.
Gotham’s ME offices? Lucky if they were allowed to keep anything. There were break-ins, and any case important enough was quickly sent to the DA’s office, or guarded by Major Crimes.
Finley thumbed through the names on the dividers, slightly amused to see some repeats. The staff in the Medical Examiner’s office rotated oddly too. He could never be sure who was a real staff member, and who’d been freshly deputized, or was some plant. There had even been some body thieves on the roster for an alarmingly long time until Gordon fired them as Commissioner.
He located Ally’s files and started flipping through them, retrieving the bodies onto steel gurneys from their freezers.
The first body was already off to a great start. A barista from the cafe he frequented. Pretty girl, studying for some arts degree. He finally knew her name, and now knew she’d been 24 for about a week.
Finley panned over the details of her death. Mugging. “Okay.” He whispered, grabbing gloves and the rest of the equipment.
Usually, staff didn’t do autopsies of people they knew. At least, that’s what was in that manual one of his old bosses had slapped into his hands during his third week here.
Not Gotham. This was a city of regret, that liked pettily shoving horrors in your face like a third grader with a worm.
“Thanks for that fern you drew me last Sunday.” Finley declared. He’d never asked her, but she did each time. Pride in her work, Finley could relate. He loved physiology and anatomy, and his autopsies were always top-notch.
“I didn’t know it was your birthday, sorry about that, I must have seemed like a real dick, didn’t even tip.” He chuckled, not awkward because he was speaking to a corpse– he did that a lot, or narrated Egyptian burial practices to the recorder– but because that’s how he’d spoken back when she could respond.
She didn’t, mercifully.
The room was sterile, always a touch too cold. There was a recorder, one that Finley often forgot to turn on at the start of the autopsy.
“You know one time, I didn’t remember it until the very end, and then I turned it on and faked doing the whole thing so there would be one. Caught a mistake too that way.” Finley said, reaching over to turn it on. “Let’s keep that between us, yeah?”
He hummed under his breath, glancing over everything to make sure it was in order. There was a trail of water, across the room, some of it emptying into the drain on the floor. It glinted under the bright overhead lights.
“I wonder if you knew what I did,” Finley mumbled, remembering her big dangly earrings and GU sweatshirt. “I can't remember if it ever came up. You probably would have reacted the same as Sharon. Maybe drawn me a skull in the next coffee, eh?”
God, he hated working down here sometimes. He liked the days he got to visit crime scenes and assist with investigations, get an odd peek into people’s houses, or their gambling den habits.
Instead of being down here with a kid that he should've been patching up in the E.R. instead of goddamn hiding here, in this horrible testament to this shitty city.
"It's rare," Finley said with a calm breath out. "That I get to go out though."
Usually, cops and fixers around here needed to edit or fake the crime scene too much for that kind of thing, so he got the bodies gift-wrapped in dark bags.
Down here, he got to play doctor, running X-rays sometimes, CT scans, tox tests, medical tests, essentially the same things used to diagnose living patients.
“Where’s the–” Finley frowned, wondering why the weighing scale that usually hung next to the gurney was absent. “Phenomenal. Okay.” He craned his neck, noting that the other one was still where it should be. “Please keep all arms and legs inside the ride at all times.”
He had to push embarrassingly hard to get the thing moving, horribly out of breath when he managed to get it there. The smell of formalin and decomposing bodies reached his nose and Finley exhaled. You never got used to it, just used to waiting until the nose got so overwhelmed that it shut down, scent receptors dying off.
It wasn’t that bad most days, about the same as some of the ward rotations he’d done.
He showered all the time though, that smell stuck. No matter how many times a day the staff wiped down the linoleum floors and every surface with harsh disinfectants, how much ventilation they had, it never quite left.
The smell lingers in clothes and hair long after you leave, to the dismay of hot teacher dates and loved ones everywhere.
“Atrocious really, the smell of a decomposing body.” Finley said to the dead girl. “We’re usually quite good at controlling it, but man, things got crazy when the Riddler flooded the city. Power outages, bodies in advanced stages of decomposition.” He shook his head, getting some new blades for the scalpel. “I mean, the backlog, was ridiculous. It’s still ridiculous, what with all the chaos lately.”
Finley really shouldn’t have dwelled on the memories of Riddler’s time, because now they wouldn’t leave. The smell was dense and wet and nearly sweet.
“Butryic acid is the main culprit.” He informed no one in partiular. “Also associated with rancid butter, bad breath, stinky cheese.” Every time he smelled it was weirdly comforting now. “You might ask, don’t bodies decay slower when they’re wet?”
Janine didn’t, her normally lip-glossed lips grey and unmoving.
“They do, initially. But once removed from the water, the rate of tissue breakdown jumps up.” Finley knew a therapist was sorely needed, it was bad that he got so sucked into the memories, that he couldn’t leave until he’d rationalized and categorized them all.
He decided to spare Janine the other things he remembered. Grave wax. Waterlogged coffins, bloated, soapy bodies. “I’m stalling.” He admitted, and got to work, kicking himself for forming more associations with someone that he could’ve autopsied with less grief.
The ME’s office investigated if someone died unexpectedly, violently, or without an obvious cause of death. Which summed up just about every death in Gotham.
“Except yours, you were a mugging.”
But technically an ME was on call anytime someone died unexpectedly without a doctor present, and then depending on the circumstances, an autopsy was ordered.
Finley dug out the bullet with forceps, dropping it into a metal tray. He got to see bodies before the funeral home makeover, at their worst.
Finley sorted her out fast, creating her death documents and certificate. Maybe they’d catch whoever it was, he consoled himself.
It was still surreal actually writing up the documents.
Before Gordon had any kind of authority to clean up departments, Finley routinely filed death documents and then destroyed them. Destroyed the certificate of the medical examiner, and shredded the external examination report.
He remembered the last set he’d dumped. Annika Koslov’s files, summary autopsy report, detailed autopsy report, toxicology report, blood samples he’d taken. That was four days before Gordon had arrested the medical examiner.
Finley washed his hands in one of the sinks, one everywhere you turned, flicking his eyes over to the next file.
“Next up, Michael Anderson.” Finley opened up his locker. Man, Ally had a full caseload. Probably so she could avoid going home to her shitty husband.
Bodies got opened with a Y-shaped incision at the front of the torso, deep enough to fold back the skin and fat layers, in order to expose the internal organs. The internal body was examined for broken bones, surgeries and excisions, pregnancy, and other diseases.
Michael had a few rib fractures that Finley made note of, missing appendix and missing gall bladder, and most damning, the knife wound in his gut. But there was a process to these things.
Like removing the organs, one by one, heart, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys, intestines– uterus and ovaries if they were there– and others. After the organs were removed, they got examined for condition, weighed and measured, and sometimes sectioned for microscopy.
Tissue and fluid samples could get taken too, all part of the large puzzle Finley got to solve: what was the cause of death?
“Man, smoking would have killed you if that knife hadn't.” Finley scolded, turning over the lung in his hand. Lots of tar buildup, and some nodules that looked cancerous potentially.
He looked for other signs, water inhalation, cirrhosis of the liver, heart malfunctions, blood clots, innappropriate stomach contents, cancer, intestinal blockages, and inflammation. Especially in Gotham, you had to get creative and find the other abnormalities because there were usually a few.
Finley was extra careful with the bowels, he couldn’t keep track of all the times he’d accidentally nicked one and had it explode in his face. As a precaution, he put on the safety shield.
The knife wound was weird, Finley decided after looking at all the evidence. He’d figure out some sciency, more compelling reasoning later. He proceeded with the internal examination, opening up the guy’s head.
The brain was… liquefied. Finley took a steady breath, trying to keep his Caesar salad where it belonged. He calmly grabbed some photos and an evidence bag. Great. He’d have to bring this to the lead detective’s attention and keep the body for further examination.
For a moment, Finley got out of the way of the camera he knew was in the room, letting it capture details.
Then he glanced at the plastic bag he’d put the other organs in. Guess we have to keep those too. The mystery was exciting, and Finley wondered what on earth had reduced the brain to this.
He'd have to ask Gordon for the truth later, but he had a few theories. Finley smiled as he scooped up some barely-solid brain for samples.
Jeez, Finley sighed, shaking his head. Maybe it was for the best that Sharon ran for the hills. He wished he’d thought to tell her some of the better parts of the job, but the good parts had started only recently.
At one point Finley had been a fresh young trauma surgeon. He went to dinner parties, was waiting to marry a nice guy he'd met, and had enough presence of mind to mind his weirdness. But it got to him, night after night, telling their parents and family how he'd failed. How their kid had died, how he couldn't fix it.
He had an ego, and it took a hit, and he got scared and sloppy and took himself out of the equation before exhaustion or terror made him screw up. A coward's way out, but it was safe for him.
With the dead, all he owed them was respect and answers. He didn't have to feel personally responsible, terrified of messing them up.
Finley knew he'd been mere years away from getting hollowed out in the way Gotham was so good at doing. The city would have chewed him out until he was just another one of the uninterested, vacant, terrified little robots that played by its rules.
And the ME job had security too. Insulated, thick bulletproof walls under a bullpen of cops? Sure, it had its moments of being dangerous, but it wasn't half as bad as being a banker, doctor, or hell, anyone else. Kept him off Gotham's streets most nights.
All for the low, low price of his morals. Finley wiped security footage at his boss' behest. Buried evidence and got rid of bodies. He was getting good at routing unwanted bodies to be accidentally cremated. Turned a blind eye when mobsters gathered to do send-offs.
Finley knew how to keep his mouth shut, his eyes down. Gotham conditioned you to be a certain way and hide, and it had for decades. Rather than face Gotham's streets on nights like Halloween, Finley would gladly kip in one of the morgue body drawers
The Bat had changed that. Finley checked his watch, deciding to call it a night. He wondered if they were coming in tonight. It was too late for him to consider going home, but he could do his usual thing, and hide somewhere.
So he did, popping open the wine bottle and pouring it into the stupid cat mug James kept in the staff room. It was unlikely they'd show up tonight, but maybe. He left his notes for them, all his observations about the brain-goo gangster underlined.
It gave him a thrill of excitement, leaving them clues, delaying the mistakes his former boss ordered him to make, and buying them time to fix this city.
He’d torn up his resignation a month after Batman and the first Robin joined the scene. Things felt better, the renewed, fragile hope reverberating all the down to the ME’s office.
It had been years of the stupid game Finley played with the Bats, but he couldn’t help it, even if he’d stopped scouring the precinct for that impressive jawline.
He’d been there for Batman’s start, the first Robin–
All the way back when Finley had still been new-ish, when he could be called young by old ladies in the street. Finley had strongly suspected that a body in the morgue had been mauled by an alligator or something. That had been a hard sell for his second boss that month, who made him get a drug test.
But that night… when he'd woken up in the small room right next to the morgue, intrigued to hear voices from the morgue. There was a small window connecting the rooms, half hidden by a shelf someone had clumsily dragged into the room.
“Whoa, an alligator did this?” The kid-- Robin-- asked, flipping through Finley’s notes. He had a mess of dark hair, and big curious eyes behind the green mask.
“Crocodile.” Batman corrected quietly, mumbling something about snout differences and teeth marks. “Part human.” He gestured to the human handprints on the victim’s arms.
An odd thing to bring a kid to, particularly one in brightly coloured shorts, but the child looked bewildered and strangely excited.
The good old days.
–-pretty soon another boy joined up, who always tried to be serious and failed, buzzing with energy, prone to touching things to prove how brave he was. And a redheaded girl too, who’d swanned in and out, clever and overly familiar with the station.
Finley got used to letting the kids, because there’d been more, and the Bat break into the ME’s office all the time. He loudly announced the bodies that might go missing in Gordon’s earshot, delayed transport, cast a blind eye, and gleefully pretended to be another Gotham incompetent.
He wondered if they were what Gordon used to keep showing up to work, keep trying to pull this city back from the next brink it inevitably found itself at.
Gordon knew all about it, Finley suspected. That the bats broke in all the time. Hell, Gordon had asked for a copy of the keys. But none of the Bats ever used the keys.
Batman himself emerged from nowhere, while the kids were a bit more obvious. Batgirl had found a window on the second floor that wasn’t hard to get through.
The Robins had found a vent. There was a neat little equilibrium for a bit until both the boys vanished. The Bat had too, for months. Then returned to the game with another, paler child, like nothing had ever happened–-
By that point, Gordon snuck Batman in there anytime they shared a case, and kept Finley on call to explain findings. It was one of the only times he got to honestly report on what happened.
“--so as you can see here, someone tried to make it look like a murder, but toxicology shows us it was an overdose,” Finley explained to the Bat more than Gordon, beyond excited to meet his hero. “The new drugs that our friend Mr.Mayor's newest funder is accused of peddling. Right-”
At that moment, the Robin next to Batman, who had unblinkingly been staring at the corpse for the last four minutes went pale and fainted.
Batman caught him with ease and Gordon looked stunned and concerned.
“I’m just tired.” The kid insisted, taking long sips from the juice box, but Batman had already forced him to sit on a chair outside the room. Finley didn’t blame the kid one bit.
"You know on my first shifts, I just kept having to leave to go vomit." Finley informed him, both of them ignoring Gordon lecturing Batman in the morgue. "Not everyone can deal with it, you know. My boss even gave me this stupid little nickname--"
"Her nails." The kid said, wrapping his shaking arms around his knees. "My mom used to paint her nails that colour."
"--just kids!" Gordon was saying exasperatedly. "I thought after what happened you might rethink that."
The kid on the chair shot up, just in time for Batman to storm out of the morgue without a word.
"Bye." Robin said, following his boss, or mentor in a flash, both of them vanishing into the dark.
Finley eyed Gordon, who was leaning against the desk, eyes dark-ringed.
Those were dark days.
–-Finley often wondered what happened to the older two, Batgirl disappeared too, two other girls eventually taking her place.
He got some answers when the vent creaked one night, someone huffing as he muscled his way down. Trickier now to get down without being a short child.
"What'd I tell you, O, way better than that stupid window." The guy breathed, pressing one hand to his ear. His hair was longer, costume different, but Finley would always recognize the first Robin, knew that bright grin anywhere.
It was like seeing an old friend, and it made Finley feel shockingly old. He didn’t leave the adjacent room he tended to hide in, knowing better than to ever really show himself.
People who spied on the bats didn't get off scot-free. Finley had already been personally questioned by the Bat and did all the appropriate squealing and flailing.
But despite his best attempts, one of the girls, the little quiet one, caught onto him fast. Finley ignored her spying for a long while before she started handing him things and scaring the living daylights out of him when she was just there, listening to the nonsense he muttered on the recordings.
Finley started leaving her candies and she left little sticky notes in return. Identified knife types by wound, and taught him some hand-to-hand.
She listened sometimes, sitting cross-legged on another gurney while Finley completed an autopsy. Once or twice he voiced that maybe she shouldn’t see such things, to which he got an empty stare back.
She probably saw worse on the streets every night. But she never told him about that. Instead, between painstakingly slow words, drawings, and written stories she told him funny details about patrol. The snowman she'd made with someone she called Penny-One. The pretty street art she showed him a polaroid of. A teddybear some kid had handed her or the tea the old ladies in Chinatown gave her after she beat up a crook.
It was jarring seeing the city through her eyes. Gotham wasn't pure evil, nothing was, according to Cass.
Sometimes she told him about her brothers, especially a little menace that Finley associated with knives and spiky hair.
He’d had the pleasure of meeting that one. Once the GCPD came under attack, because a prisoner from Arkham was stashed in this very precinct. One of the kids, the newest little Robin was keeping an eye on both Finley, and bound and gagged Tetch, while a firefight raged upstairs as followers tried to get the guy out.
Finley had been on the verge of pissing his pants, while the kid snappily took charge and fought off the mind-controlled victims who managed to fight their way downstairs. He'd saved Finley's life, and looked absolutely irritated about it.
Finley smiled at the memory, leaning back in his chair as he tipped the wine bottle down his throat. Cherished memories. He never had any issues missing potential date nights, or pulling overtime, not when he knew he was on the right side.
The last time he’d seen them all… well it had to be a bit over a year ago--
A larger, broad-shoulder man in a red helmet had accompanied many of the kids, darkly commenting, “Home sweet home.” as he took in the morgue. Finley didn’t know what to make of that, and the kids responded with varying levels of amusement and annoyance.
"This the guy?" Nightwing asked, pulling open a locker.
"No." Red Hood said, barely leaning over to look. He was messing around with the weighing scales, tugging down the recorder, threatening the little Robin with the hose. That level of movement, the cocky tone...
If Finley didn't know any better, he'd have put good money on that being the middle one.
A snap made them all jump.
"Sorry," Cass said, voice muffled.
"Jesus, Orphan, what are you eating?" Red Robin squawked. "Oh, thank God, candy." He laughed, a little too relieved. "Wait-- where the hell did you find those? Please, please tell me not off a dead person."
"You... want some?" Cass asked.
"Why are you avoiding the question?"
"Would both of you shut up?" Robin asked, flipping through the files in the cabinet aggressively.
"This the guy?" Nightwing asked with a sigh.
"Nope."
Nightwing huffed a little, opening the next freezer. "This one?"
"Bingo." Red Hood checked the name. "John Doe. This is him, Dickhead. So, we stealing this body or what?"
That was new.
"Yeah, someone grab the bag. Oh come on, he doesn't have eyes!"
"Let me see!"
"Oh, that's gross."
"You're all children."
Finley knew better than to intervene but he nearly had that time. It was nice seeing them all back at it, investigating some new crime.
But they hadn’t shown up in a while. Not since the Bat put up a photogrammetric camera that Finley dutifully ignored. Cass kept dropping by. Leaving him notes, and gifts.
It was getting late enough to be slightly early. Finley cracked his back, straightening up. Hopefully most of Gotham’s crazy had tucked itself into bed by now.
Right as he made for the door, there was a clatter.
Finley frowned, looking into the office. Then he pushed open the door, rushing in. “Cass?” He asked, watching her support her sister, the one who always dressed in purple.
The other girl’s exposed blue eyes widened, then narrowed, before she charged forward, slamming Finley into the lockers.
Cass made a sound of annoyance.
“Cass?” Spoiler demanded, a Batarang at Finley’s throat, her expression a mix of suspicion and anger. Blood dripped off her shoulder onto the floor. “How the hell do you know that?”
“He's a friend!” Cass declared, tugging Spoiler back by the uninjured shoulder in one powerful motion.
“Friend?” Spoiler groaned, taking her hands off Finley. “What the fuck do you mean, friend? He’s a grown-ass man!”
Cass turned to Finley, who waved, relieved to see her. He knew she wasn't dead, but he worried every time a girl matching her description showed up here. “How are you?”
“Good,” Cass said, as always. “How are you?”
Finley raised his eyebrows. She was getting better and better. “Can’t complain, but your sister doesn’t look too good.”
“Watch it.” Spoiler growled, clutching her shoulder, face pale. “Cass you don’t think it’s a bit early for me to be in here?”
“He can help.” Cass insisted and Finley frowned as he caught on.
“Whoa, whoa.” Finley held up his hands. “Cass? It’s kind of been–”
“You were a surgeon.” She said, looking just desperate enough that it wormed its way past the decade of insecurity Finley had built around his skills. Spoiler listed against a gurney, blood soaking thickly through her costume.
“Fine.” Finley got her to get onto the gurney, ignoring the deep mistrust in the girl’s eyes as he got fresh supplies. “So, uh, what happened?”
And the body talked back, elbowed sternly by Cass. “We were stopping a guy from knocking over a diner and I got shot.”
“Oh.” Finley registered that, using forceps to dig out the bullet. Spoiler cut off a yelp and Finley nearly smacked himself. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I forgot about pain meds. Jesus. Uh.” He glanced around the room. “Wait, wait, Cass, if you get to the evidence locker, there’s some there guaranteed. Look for anything called morphine, ketamine or-or lidocaine but if you don’t find those–” He pressed down, hard on Spoiler’s wound to tamp down the bleeding. “Mepivacaine or cocaine would work too.”
“Cocaine?” Spoiler demanded through gritted teeth.
“It used to be a commonly used amino ester in fast-acting local anesthetics.” Finley waved Cass away. The girl vanished like a shadow.
Spoiler breathed out roughly, her other hand wound tight over the edge of the gurney. Finley caught her deep terror as she looked around the morgue. Felt his own building anxiety with every millisecond Cass took to get here. Please don't die, please don't die, please don't die--
“How do you two know each other?” Spoiler demanded, impressively scary despite her condition.
“Long story,” Finley replied, not even a little put off by her variant of the Batman growl. “But she– I don’t care who she is, she’s just a good friend.”
Spoiler narrowed her eyes, wary and mistrustful. Finley had a feeling his entire life was going to get dissected before the new day was over. “I don’t think I have to tell you, you ever do anything, anything to even get close to hurting her and I will end you.”
Finley held off on telling her exactly how many years they’d been friends, how many years he’d babysat one of her brothers, preventing them from tripping alarms or getting caught by cops in here. “I won’t ever do anything like that.”
Spoiler didn’t seem to care about that at all, staring him down. “You sure you can handle this, doc? You smell like you’ve been drinking.”
That had to be a few hours ago now, that was an impressive ability.
“I’m fine. I had a pretty rough night too.” Finley blurted and Spoiler glared at him from behind the mask covering her mouth, focusing again. “Yeah, a date. It didn’t go well.” He waited for her to weigh the gunshot wound to not getting laid.
“Guys your age go out on dates?” Spoiler asked.
“I’m not that old,” Finley said feebly to the teenager, possibly very young adult in front of him. “I just–”
“What went wrong on the date?”
Finley had not planned on that. “We’re just… very different people. She’s a school teacher from the Diamond District–”
“Fancy.”
“Very.” Finley breathed, relieved to see Cass return, arms full of everything he’d asked for. “Press down here.”
He titrated the lidocaine before applying it, and then started stitching up the wound. “Pain?”
“I can take it,” Spoiler replied, voice gruff and Cass held her hand, dark eyes worried.
Finley was much more careful now, throwing the kind of stitches he’d seen a plastic surgeon demonstrate once. Doubtful he’d be any good at it, it had been a while since he’d had to worry about what he was doing. The dead didn’t usually mind if not everything went back where it belonged.
His hands didn’t shake at least, no matter how disconcerting it was to work with warm flesh instead of cold. Soon enough, the wound was holding, blood not coming out of it anymore.
Finley glanced at Spoiler's face, relieved to see it shifting through microexpressions, feel the pulse through her skin.
“Thank you,” Cass said, shoulders slumping down. She was eating from the candy stash he kept for her. Spoiler refused them, still glowering at him as she tugged her sleeve back up.
“Come on, we’ve got a patrol to finish.” She said, casting one final look around the room as she left. The medical advice Finley was going to add died in his throat.
“Bye,” Cass said, standing just outside of arms reach. Somehow despite the hood back over her face, Finley knew she was intently staring at him. “Can I still come here sometimes?”
“Always,” Finley said automatically, then shook his head. “Actually, I’ll get you a copy of my shift schedule, do not show up here always. Also, it’s– you’re getting better at, um, talking?” He hoped that wasn’t mean. Or offensive.
Cass laughed. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Finley said, eyeing the bloody gauze on his tray. For more than he could say. “Be safe out there.”
“You too,” Cass said, putting the empty tin of candy back on the file cabinet before leaving.
Finley breathed out, then spotted the small pile of stolen drugs with a groan. “Oh shit.”
He glanced, very clearly at the photogrammetric camera wedged into the wall. “You better not let Spoiler do anything to me, you see the kinds of things I have to put up with? Goodnight. If you sleep, ever. Batman, sir." He waved at the camera, bundling up the drugs into his pockets.
One clattered onto the floor and Finley cussed, tucking it into his sleeve instead.
“They’re not for me. I will return them, somehow.” He announced loudly, turning off the lights as he headed home.
The Batsignal was still up, to his relief.