Eli Mercer still went to work.
He always did.
The city hadn't changed since the docks burned the night before. Gotham never lingered on violence—it absorbed it, paved over it, pretended it had always been that way. The only proof anything had happened was the faint smell of smoke and the way people avoided meeting each other's eyes.
Eli clocked in, pulled on his gloves, and lifted crates like nothing was wrong.
But something was wrong.
It started as a pressure behind his ribs, not pain, not sickness—more like a direction. A pull. Every time he turned his head toward the east, toward the edge of the city where concrete thinned and wetlands crept in, the feeling deepened. His muscles tightened, not in resistance, but recognition.
As if something out there knew his name.
The sensation worsened near water. Near soil. Near anything alive that pushed through decay. When Eli brushed past a cracked planter on the docks, the dead weeds inside it twitched, roots shivering faintly beneath the dirt.
He froze.
No one else noticed.
This wasn't like the strength. The strength had felt blunt—heavy, physical, almost simple. This was… quiet. Old. Patient.
By the end of his shift, Eli's hands were shaking—not from exhaustion, but restraint.
He didn't take the bus home.
He followed the pull.
The swamp sat beyond Gotham's forgotten edges, where maps stopped updating and roads sank into mud. Most people avoided it. The air was too still there, too thick with rot and growth happening at the same time. Gotham had plenty of bad places, but this one felt like it watched you back.
The moment Eli stepped onto the soft ground, the pull became a certainty.
His boots sank slightly into the mud. The gray of his skin darkened, veins faintly glowing with a muted, earthen green. He exhaled—and the mist around him shifted, curling closer.
He felt welcomed.
Memories surfaced without warning.
His mother's voice. Soft. Tired. Laughing despite everything.
She'd worked late shifts when he was young, sometimes taking shortcuts home through "the marsh," as she'd called it. She'd been pregnant with him then. He remembered—no, he felt—the nights she'd stopped there, resting a hand on her stomach, breathing in air that smelled like wet leaves and rain.
Doctors had said the gray skin was congenital.
They were wrong.
The truth was older than medicine.
Eli hadn't been born this way.
He had been claimed.
Deeper in the swamp, something massive stirred.
Vines shifted. Trees bent without wind. From the shadows rose a towering shape of moss, bark, and bone—eyes glowing with a deep, knowing green.
Swamp Thing.
He did not attack. He did not speak at first.
He studied Eli.
"You are not the corpse," the creature finally rumbled, voice like roots tearing through stone. "Yet you carry his echo."
Eli swallowed. "I don't know who that is."
Swamp Thing stepped closer, the ground rising with him. "That is why you are different."
Images pressed into Eli's mind—visions of Solomon Grundy: mindless rage, endless death, power bound to rot and forgetting. Then—another image. Eli himself. Standing. Rooted. A part of the cycle, not its mistake.
"You were touched before death," Swamp Thing continued. "Before corruption. The Green reached you through your mother—through life, not decay."
The pull intensified, dragging Eli's gaze toward the heart of the swamp.
Something slept there.
Not the Green as it was—but as it had been. Ancient. Vast. A seed older than names, buried long before Gotham existed. Power that did not merely animate dead flesh—but commanded growth, rebirth, and dominion.
"Solomon Grundy is bound to the swamp's curse," Swamp Thing said. "You are bound to its potential."
Eli felt it then—the truth settling into his bones.
He didn't rise from death.
He rose from life brushing against something eternal.
If he surrendered fully, the swamp would not just make him strong.
It would make him a god of the Green.
Eli took a step back.
"I don't want that," he said.
Swamp Thing's gaze softened, just slightly. "Then you are already more than Grundy ever was."
The swamp did not release him—but it let him leave.
As Eli walked back toward Gotham, the pull faded, though it never vanished completely. Roots withdrew. Mist thinned. The city's lights reclaimed the horizon.
Tomorrow, he would go to work again.
But beneath his gray skin, something ancient had awakened—not a curse, not a corpse—
—but a choice.
And somewhere deep in the swamp, the Green waited, patient as only something timeless could be.
Eli made it home just before dawn.
The apartment greeted him the same way it always did—the flickering light in the hallway, the hum of the radiator, the faint smell of old dust and boiled coffee from somewhere below. It should've felt grounding. Familiar.
It didn't.
He sat on the edge of his bed and stared at his hands. The gray was unchanged, but the feeling beneath it was not. His skin felt… alive. Not in the way flesh usually did, but deeper, like soil warmed by sunlight. When he pressed his palm against the cracked wall, he felt the vibrations of the building—pipes, insects in the walls, roots far below the foundation.
Roots.
That was new.
He closed his eyes and breathed. Slowly, carefully. The cold weight that had once settled in his chest—Grundy's echo—was still there, but it no longer dominated him. It felt contained. Anchored. Like a stone wrapped in vines instead of sinking endlessly into mud.
"I'm not dead," Eli whispered to the empty room.
The words mattered more than he expected.
He lay down without turning on the light. For the first time in years, sleep came easily. No dreams of falling. No sense of being buried.
Just darkness—and something patient watching over him.
Gotham did not sleep.
By morning, chaos rippled through the city like a cracked mirror finally giving way. News vans clogged streets. Police scanners screamed. Gangs moved where they shouldn't have. Fires burned in places no one could explain.
And somewhere on the city's edge, the swamp had stirred.
High above Gotham, a dark figure stood against the skyline.
Batman.
He watched the city through lenses that parsed heat, motion, and energy patterns invisible to anyone else. Something had changed. He'd felt it before the docks exploded—an imbalance, subtle but wrong. Now his sensors confirmed it: a surge of bio-mystic activity radiating outward from the wetlands.
Swamp Thing.
Batman adjusted in his cowl, eyes narrowing. "What are you doing this time?"
The feed showed movement—trees bending, the Green flaring briefly like a heartbeat. But there was something else. A gap. A presence that should have registered and didn't.
Someone had been there.
Someone who left no signature.
That bothered him more than the chaos.
Before he could move, an alert cut through his systems—shrill, mocking, unmistakable.
JOKER BROADCAST DETECTED.
Screens across Gotham flickered to life.
"Batsy!" Joker's voice sang through the city, layered with laughter and static. "You always miss the best parts when you're sightseeing. Thought I'd wake the city up with a little… surprise!"
Explosions blossomed in three districts. Not massive—deliberate. Controlled chaos.
Batman turned from the swamp without another word, cape snapping as he vanished into the air. Whatever was happening out there would have to wait.
Gotham was bleeding now.
Eli stepped back into the streets as the sun dipped low, Gotham's neon bleeding into the night.
He walked without direction, letting the city move around him. Sirens wailed in the distance. Helicopters thudded overhead. People ran, shouted, laughed too loudly in places they shouldn't.
Through it all, Eli felt something new.
Not fear.
Awareness.
Where before Gotham had been noise, now it was a web—steel, stone, people, rot, growth, all layered together. He could feel the stress fractures in buildings, the way weeds pushed through sidewalk cracks, the hidden green fighting to exist beneath the city's cruelty.
He passed a shattered storefront. Glass shifted under his boots, but didn't cut him. A vine crept along the broken wall, leaves trembling as he walked by.
It leaned toward him.
Eli stopped.
"Don't," he murmured.
The vine stilled.
He kept walking.
Somewhere above him, Batman raced through the night chasing a madman's laughter. Somewhere beyond the city, the swamp waited. And beneath Eli's skin, something ancient and powerful remained quiet—not absent, not asleep—
—but listening.
Gotham didn't know it yet.
But a new force walked its streets.
Not born of death.
Not driven by madness.
Just a man with gray skin, heavy footsteps, and a city that was about to learn the difference.