One day, at the Gotham City Public Library, college student Barbara Gordon finds a book she's never seen before. The moment she touches it, her mind floods with memories of the future. Her legs paralyzed in a car accident. The Joker's bullet shattering her spine. Every tragic event that would end her career as Batgirl.
'No. Screw this. I'm changing this future.'
The first tragedy was just 24 hours away: the car accident. Barbara desperately tries to avert her fate. But the more she sees the fu
DC: Batgirl — In the Breach of Fate - Unbreakable Will, Lies of the Clock Tower
Consciousness surfaces.
Cold. Rough concrete against her back.
Dusty air. The smell of rusted iron.
Barbara Gordon pried open heavy eyelids.
Vision blurs. A few blinks. When focus locks in, exposed pipes on a dim ceiling rush into view first.
This place is—
Abandoned amusement park. Starlight Park. Underground.
Memories return in fragments. Joker's laughter. Kathy's confession. The truth of her sister's death. Everything was a lie, everything a trap. And then—emotion vanished.
Barbara slowly sat up.
Sharp pain races through her ribs. Her right flank burns hot. Where Joker's thug hit her with a metal bat last night. The Batsuit's chest armor is warped. Kevlar fibers torn. Every breath brings pain like bone shards stabbing her lung.
"Nn... gh."
She stifles her voice. Sweat trails down her forehead. Traces the old crescent scar on her left temple.
No mask. The right half shattered in that day's brawl. Her bare face exposed to the underground's cold air. Red hair matted with sweat and dust. Green eyes bloodshot.
She scans her surroundings.
Underground storage of the abandoned park. Rusted steel shelves line the walls. Old park supplies piled in chaos—a broken carousel horse head, faded balloons, dust-covered plush toys. Once, this must have been storage for a place filled with children's smiles.
But now, something else dominates it.
A metal case. Placed in the center of the room.
Barbara's gaze locks onto it.
A digital timer is embedded in the case's top. Red numbers count down. Quietly. Precisely. Second by second.
Remaining—91 minutes, 35 seconds.
A bomb.
34 seconds. 33. 32.
Her pulse quickens. No—it should be quickening, but she can't feel it. No fear. No panic. Nothing. Emotions feel distant. Like someone else's business. Temporal erosion. The precognition book's side effects have already progressed this far.
But her mind alone kept moving.
Barbara presses a hand against the wall. Staggers to her feet. Ribs creak. Pain whites out her vision for an instant. She grits her teeth. The taste of iron in her mouth—no, no taste. Just a hard sensation.
She approaches the wall.
Paper covers it. Entirely.
Dozens of sheets. Arranged neatly. Like thesis appendices. Dates. Times. Action logs. Location data. Where Barbara Gordon went and what she did this past week—campus lectures, library study sessions, visits to her father's apartment, late-night patrols—all meticulously recorded.
Joker's surveillance log. Watching her.
Barbara's hand reaches for a printed image.
Her breath stops.
It's—footage of herself. From the future.
Rain on Trigate Bridge. A black car overturned. Herself crawling out, covered in blood. That precognitive vision. But the angle is different. Different from her memory. Different from what the Chronocodex showed. Shot from farther away. Surveillance camera zoom quality. Her terror, cropped out.
Second image.
The future where Joker shoots through her spine. A cold smile. Batgirl collapsing. A spreading pool of blood.
Third image.
Herself in a wheelchair. A face unable to smile before her father.
Fourth. Fifth. Sixth—
Seven still images. Pinned to the wall at equal intervals. Multiple futures of ruin. Shown by the Chronocodex. Joker obtained these somewhere. Printed them out. Arranged them neatly. Like specimens.
"...What do you want."
Her voice didn't tremble. Flat. Emotionless. So mechanical it surprised even her.
Barbara mechanically checks the images. One by one. Moments of ruin. A catalog of her death and defeat.
Then—
Her eyes stop. On one point.
The right edge of the screen.
A background element. Present in every single image.
The ruined clock tower.
The old clock tower. Once Starlight Park's symbol. Destroyed in the Arkham riot eight years ago. Left abandoned since. Clock face cracked. Hands rusted—but moving.
First image. The clock tower's hands—2:17.
Second image.
11:43.
Third.
6:02.
Fourth, 9:55. Fifth, 3:28. Sixth, 12:19. Seventh—4:51.
All different.
Something snapped inside Barbara.
Electricity races through her mind. Footage Joker captured—but the clock tower times in the future "stills" he showed are all different. If the future were a single determined path, the times should be identical. Same moment. Same future image.
Different means—
These are separate futures.
Branches.
The Chronocodex didn't show one future. Multiple possibilities exist simultaneously. Has Joker not noticed this contradiction? Or is he deliberately ignoring it? Either way, his own records destroy the premise of his "experiment."
The future is not fixed.
Not speculation. Now, before this wall, a fact proven by physical evidence.
Deep beneath the emotional numbness.
A small flame ignites.
Faint heat. Born in the center of her chest. Not yet warm. But—it's there. Definitely.
"...I see."
Barbara pulls out her smartphone.
Taps the screen. Opens the photo folder. The crescent pendant Kathy dropped in the final moment at the abandoned park that day. An 8-digit number engraved on the back—47281836. Barbara photographed it then. Without understanding its meaning. She didn't want to believe it was Kathy's final message—but her intuition alone screamed at her to preserve this.
She glances at the bomb's keypad.
8-digit disarm code.
The pendant's number is also 8 digits.
When Joker ordered Kathy to plant the bomb, she must have had some way to learn the disarm code. The woman who kept betraying Barbara in exchange for the truth of her sister's death—still, in her final moment, planted this number.
But the number as-is may not be correct.
Recall Joker's psychology.
The timing of the park lights all blazing on at once. Henchman placement. The timing of forcing Kathy's confession. Everything at perfect timing. With perfect symmetry. Staged. That man is insane—and simultaneously obsessed with pathological symmetry.
47281836.
Barbara flips the number in her mind. Left-right reversal—63818274. Front-back reversal—same. An 8-digit sequence doesn't read the same either way. But Joker wouldn't be satisfied with simple mirror reversal.
Mirror-reverse each digit.
4 is—still 4? No. What does a digital "4" look like in a mirror? No, simpler—reverse each digit physically. As a mirror image.
4→mirror image of 4? No. Think in terms of keypad digit shapes. Mirror a digital "4" and you see a left-right reversed shape. But that doesn't form a digit. Wrong approach.
Simpler.
Read the number sequence straight backwards—63818274.
No.
Joker obsesses over symmetry. Bilateral symmetry. Front-back symmetry. Then—reverse each digit by keypad position? Or—
Joker's voice resurfaces in Barbara's mind.
"Perfect symmetry."
47281836.
Does the number sequence itself possess symmetry? 4728, 1836. Sum the first and second halves? No—
How would each digit look in a mirror? To return to digit shapes—
4 is asymmetrical as-is. But mirror-reversed, still 4. 7 reversed doesn't look like 7. Reverse a handwritten 7 and you get a shape curving the opposite way. 8 is symmetrical. Reversed, still 8. 1 is symmetrical too. 3 reversed becomes a backwards 3—unrecognizable as a digit. 6 reversed becomes 9.
That's it—the 6 and 9 relationship.
Joker would use 6 and 9 as symbols of symmetry.
47281836.
Change 6 to 9, 9 to 6—there's no 9 in this sequence. Only 6. Change 6 to 9.
47281839.
No—input the 8-digit number itself, mirror-reversed? Digit by digit, by digital number shape—
No.
Think simple. The symmetry Joker favors is perfect left-right mirroring. If so—read the number sequence straight left-right reversed. Meaning, read it backwards.
63818274.
Enter that into the keypad.
Her finger trembles above the 0-through-9 buttons. Still no sensation. But her fingertip alone moves. Independent of will.
6.
3.
8.
1.
8.
2.
7.
4.
The moment she presses the final button—
Beep.
The keypad glows green.
The timer stops.
Remaining—23 minutes, 18 seconds.
Silence.
A ringing silence fills the underground storage.
Barbara sinks to the floor. Leans her back against the wall. The concrete's cold seeps through her back—no, it should be seeping through, but she can't feel it.
But.
Heat builds behind her eyes.
The next moment—something lukewarm trails down her cheek.
Tears.
One drop. Then another. Overflowing without end. Not an explosion of emotion. She still can't clearly feel fear. Or relief. Or joy. But—the tears alone keep falling. Unbidden.
The temperature of tears on her cheek—faintly, warm.
"...Warm."
Her voice trembles. For the first time—the first time, she felt temperature. A sensation completely lost these past few days. The heat of coffee. The chill of night wind. She couldn't feel anything.
But now, the warmth of her own tears alone. Definitely. Here.
Emotions are starting to return.
Anger? Sadness? Relief? She still can't tell. All of them mix together. Swirling like a muddy current in her chest. Can't sort them out. But—the very act of feeling something is certain.
Barbara doesn't wipe the tears.
Just sits against the wall. On the floor. Unable to move for a while.
She thinks about Kathy.
She thought it was all lies.
That meeting at the café that night. The gentle smile. The moment their hands touched. "[gentle] This became our fight." —all for the mission. To leak Chronocodex intel to Joker. In exchange for the truth of her sister's death.
But the pendant's number wasn't a lie.
Even forced to confess by Joker, Kathy planted this number. At rock bottom despair. Hoping Barbara would find it. Entrusting something, even to the person she betrayed.
Whether she can forgive her—she still doesn't know.
The anger hasn't faded. The pain is still raw.
But—
At the top of the Ferris wheel, Kathy still hangs.
Caught in Joker's trap. Wire biting into both legs. Bleeding. Exposed to the cold pre-dawn wind. Left like this, she will definitely die.
Going to save her isn't about trust.
This is—something she chooses.
Barbara re-zips her broken Batsuit. The warped chest armor digs into her ribs. Pain makes her vision flicker. But—it doesn't matter.
She stands.
An escape hatch in the underground storage ceiling. The iron grate is dislodged. Faint light seeps through. Joker probably dropped her underground through here.
She grips the grate.
Sensation still faint. But—not zero.
"...Let's go."
Emotion still hasn't caught up to her voice. But the words alone solidify her resolve.
She pries open the ceiling grate. Crawls up to the surface.
The abandoned park's cold pre-dawn air brushes her face.
The eastern sky is just starting to pale. Thin blue bleeds through gaps in thick clouds. Dawn will break soon.
In the distance, the Ferris wheel's silhouette.
A massive iron framework. Towering black in the pre-dawn half-light. At its peak—a small shadow. Motionless. Kathy. Suspended by wire.
Still alive.
Barbara checks the Batsuit's communicator. Broken in the brawl that shattered her mask. Only static—bzzzt—echoes in her ear. No external contact. She has to move alone.
She quietly observes the abandoned park.
Near the entrance—two thugs still stand guard. Clown masks. Stun guns in hand. Looking sleepy, yet scanning the area without dropping their guard.
No sign of Joker himself.
She doesn't know where he is.
That is the most terrifying thing.
Barbara suppresses her rib pain. Assembles a route in her mind. The shadow of the ruined carousel. The collapsed game booth wreckage. The support pillars of the abandoned roller coaster. In the pre-dawn dim light, they maintain an eerie stillness.
To the Ferris wheel—about 150 meters.
Avoid the guards. Reach it unnoticed.
Not impossible.
Barbara runs silently. Toward the shadow of the ruined carousel.
Killing her footsteps. Holding her breath. Moving from shadow to shadow. Every time her ribs scream in pain, she grits her teeth. Sweat from her forehead traces the crescent scar.
Behind the collapsed wall of the abandoned game booth, she pauses once.
One of the guards yawns.
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