Matthew Stafford.
No, not the quarterback.
This one wasn't out there slinging touchdown passes under Metropolis lights. This Matthew Stafford spent his nights ducking behind crates in Gotham's rust-laced warehouses, cutting backroom deals with men who smelled like gunpowder and bad intentions. He wasn't a celebrity. He was a shadow. A whisper behind criminal chaos. A slime-slick name passed between bloodied teeth and broken ribs—courtesy of Ethan's fists.
Ethan had scoured half of Gotham for him—well, this version of Gotham—and come up with nothing solid. No photos. No confirmed locations. Just fragments. Echoes.
But even echoes had patterns.
A name.
Matthew Stafford.
A connection.
Black Mask.
That one stuck.
That name hit Ethan like a sucker punch to the temple. Black Mask wasn't just some bottom-feeding thug with a penchant for cruelty—he was part of the DC tapestry. A name laced in blood and legacy. A villain of note. A real, tangible thread from a world Ethan once thought was fiction.
And if Black Mask existed here...
That meant others could too.
Batman. The League. The Rogues. The cosmic nightmares. Maybe even the endless multiversal heavyweights.
Ethan leaned back in his chair, the glow of his laptop flickering across his face like a dim interrogation lamp. His fingers clacked across keys, hunting deeper into the shadows of this twisted reality. He chased names. Wayne. Gordon. Arkham. Nothing turned up. No Wayne Enterprises. No billionaire vigilantes gracing tabloids. No Batmobile sightings. Just dust and disappointment.
"...Where the hell is Wayne Enterprises?" he muttered.
He scrolled. Clicked. Dug deeper.
A few stray forums popped up—obscure digital corners of this universe. One thread caught his eye:
"The Bat Returns? Gotham's Phantom Shadow Spotted Again"
Ethan's breath hitched.
He opened it.
Low-res photos. Grainy surveillance stills. Blurry outlines hunched on rooftops. Not much. But enough.
Pointed ears.
Cape.
Predatory posture.
"Finally," Ethan exhaled.
But then he frowned.
This Batman? He didn't move like Bruce. Didn't act like Bruce. Too brutal. Too unhinged. The reports were all over the place—this guy cracked skulls like coconuts. Let people bleed out in alleyways. Someone even claimed he used a battle axe.
A battle axe?
That wasn't Batman.
At least not his Batman.
The more Ethan read, the more he pieced it together—this wasn't just a different timeline. This was something else. A variant of a variant. A world rewritten, reshaped.
It clicked.
"The Absolute Universe."
The name bloomed in his brain like a scar reopening.
A world formed in the wake of Darkseid's death. One of the last great god-corpses had cracked reality open like a cosmic egg. Fragments of his power had rained down on a hidden universe, one untouched by Superboy Prime's eyes. A place outside the rules. A place corrupted from inception.
This... was that place.
Ethan's hands trembled slightly as he typed. He pulled public records. Searched for anything he could dig up on the Waynes.
Thomas Wayne: Elementary school teacher. Killed at the Gotham Zoo in a tragic shooting. The gunman? Joe Chill.
"Of course it's still him," Ethan murmured.
Martha Wayne: Social worker. Still alive.
Bruce Wayne: Civil engineer. Middle-class. Got into Gotham State University on a football scholarship, only to suffer a career-ending injury.
Ethan leaned back, trying to process it all.
"A middle-class Wayne family… Martha alive… Thomas just a teacher… and Bruce?"
He rubbed his jaw. His mind reeled.
"He probably faked the injury." It was the only conclusion that made sense.
If this Bruce shared even a fraction of the obsessive drive from the mainline Bruce, then yeah—college ball wouldn't have stood a chance. The cape and the mission would've taken priority.
Now he had a lead.
A location.
A target.
"I need to find Bruce," he muttered. "Tonight."
That night.
Ethan stood above Gotham's skyline, clad in his matte-black Dead Knight armor. The moon painted his silhouette in silver, wind tugging at his cloak.
'Where are you, Bruce?' he wondered.
He scanned the horizon. Eyes moving from tower to tower. That's when it hit him—what would he do?
'If I were a vigilante operating in a city crawling with rich bastards trying to hide their money… where would I set up shop?'
His gaze dropped to the high-rises.
The penthouses.
The empty crowns of Gotham's ivory towers.
'Bingo.'
The thing about Gotham's elite? They loved their loopholes more than their loved ones.
They bought skyscrapers and high-end penthouses under fake names, LLCs, shell corporations. All to shave zeros off their taxes. Some called it smart business. Ethan called it glorified money-laundering.
They'd claim these places as business investments. Rentals. Write off the repairs, the mortgage interest, hell, even the plumbing. It was all a game. A paper maze.
And if they ever sold one place and bought another?
There were ways to delay capital gains taxes. Legal sleight-of-hand. Swap one Gotham penthouse for another in Metropolis and tell the tax office, "Don't worry, I'm just investing."
Ethan knew the game.
And Bruce Wayne? He played it better than anyone.
He'd turned those empty, upper floors—the ones nobody used—into shadows. Hidden bases. Rooftop sanctuaries. Watchtowers without towers.
Somewhere above, in one of those towers...
A room lit by red monitors flickered in the dark.
Bruce stood hunched over a console, freshly stitched wounds tracing his arms. Sweat clung to his temple. His battle axe—a brutal, twin-bladed monster of a weapon—rested nearby, still dripping.
He stared at the screens. And paused.
A chill traced the back of his neck.
He wasn't alone.
He grabbed the axe, silent as a ghost.
"You don't come into my base uninvited… and get away," he muttered, voice cold as Gotham rain.
Outside, atop the next rooftop, Ethan crouched.
Watching.
Waiting.
'Whoo!,climbing this was hard...!" he said as he wiped some imaginary sweat of his armoured forehead.
He walked down a pristine hallway of white black marble. They luxurious penthouse wasn't really that furnished though....
Then he felt it.
Eyes.
The hair on his arms rose. Instinct screamed.
He ducked.
The battle axe split the air above him.
CLANG. It struck the wall and embedded like a thrown spear.
Ethan rolled, unsheathing his blade in one smooth movement.
Across from him stood Batman. This Batman wore thick armour adding to his already impressive frame.
He had a thick bat symbol on his chest that reminded Ethan of the Batfleck symbol and he had long pointed ears.
His suit was a mix of grayish white and black. His cape loomed a bit weird as if it was slightly ripped and...alive?
"You don't come to my base uninvited," Bruce said, voice lower than gravel and colder than tombstone granite. "Not unless you're looking to die."
Ethan smirked, blade still drawn. "Nice place. Bit aggressive on the welcome mat, though."
The Bat didn't smile. He stepped forward, the axe retracting into his hand with magnetic force. The two weapons clashed—steel and shadow. Sparks exploded.
Blow for blow. Strike for strike. They fought like titans carved from two philosophies. One, brutal and unrelenting. The other, cold and controlled.
Finally, Ethan disengaged, breathing heavy.
"I'm not your enemy," he said.
"No one who says that ever means it,"
Batman growled.
"Still an emo boy,huh?"