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How I would like to believe in tenderness ——
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, with its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way.
Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and The Yew Tree.”
—
“Sir.”
“Hm.”
“Sir,” Alfred says again, coal-voiced and entirely unsympathetic to Bruce’s concussion, his fourth in as many months. “I’m afraid I cannot allow you to waste any more of the day.”
“You could,” Bruce insists drowsily.
“You’re late for your meeting with Mr. March as it is.” Alfred rips open the curtain, and its rings shink against the curtain rod, fabric swishing heavily. The light knifes Bruce’s eyes; he groans.
“Who the fuck is that.” Bruce mumbles the words into his sheets. Alfred hears them anyway. Damn.
“The mayor, Master Bruce, don’t pretend as if — oh, heavens, how mature, truly, Master Bruce, hiding under the covers like a nine year old! I don’t wonder that the Gazette calls you a vampire — look at you, you’re melting,” fusses Alfred
“Am I a child or a vampire, Alfred?” Bruce asks, painfully drawing himself upright. “Make up your mind.”
Alfred harrumphs, but it’s fond, Bruce thinks, and he smiles despite the ache in his ribs. Just cracked, luckily. Just cracked.
“Be dressed in five and we might still maintain some sort of decorum beyond ‘fashionably late,’” Alfred says crisply, slapping the three piece laid neatly over the empty half of Bruce’s bed. His eyes are sharp and warm. “No excessive primping, this morning, I’m afraid, though you need it.”
“It’s hard to look good when you’re invisible in a mirror,” Bruce concedes tiredly, eyes falling, meaning to drop back into bed.
Alfred cuffs him upside the head before Bruce can go back to sleep. “Five minutes.”
—
The drive is silent, and the walk to the elevator is silent, too, but once he’s had two coffees and he’s in an enclosed space with Lucius, Bruce’s questions spill out. “What’s happening here?”
“Late night?” Lucius asks, eyebrows quirked like he’s an old man instead of a thirty-something business guru.
“Yes, as a matter of fact.” Bruce tilts his chin up in the shiny gold plating above the buttons. His concealed black eyes look puffy, but it’d be absurdly conspicuous to wear hangover glasses to a serious meeting like this. At least, Bruce had presumed that it would be a serious meeting. He’s yet unsure why he’s meeting with the mayor.
“It never fails to astound me that you can be out clubbing when there’s a mad clown running around Gotham.” Lucius flicks his gaze over to Bruce’s knowingly. There’s a beat. Bruce does his best not to shift. (Lucius knows. Lucius’s known from the very start, and Bruce’s known that Lucius knows from even before the very start, but it’s a very necessary part of their dynamic to pretend otherwise, and Bruce isn’t going to be the one to give it up.) Lucius finally shifts his eyes back to the front. “The meeting’s centered around the fulfillment of WE’s promise to — and I quote — ‘rebuild and reshape Gotham City for the future.’”
“When did we promise that?”
“Last month’s police gala. You gave that speech, asked for investors — ring any bells? March tried to set up this meeting then, but you stepped out for air and never came back.”
Oh, Bruce thinks, because he does remember now. Something about saying, ‘Tomorrow is only one dream away.’ Seeing Jim Gordon step away from the crowd and getting distracted reading his lips: How many stab wounds, God, I’ll be there soon. Making an excuse, finding the crime scene. A John Doe, strung up naked and with 29 knives in him like a human dartboard. Estimated TOD five days prior. COD was oral.
He hemorrhaged on his own blood. Each knife missed every one of John Doe’s arteries: the killer wanted to make him suffer very badly, for a long, long time. The knives were antique throwing knives, professional grade, grooved with mercury for steadier flight. Gold owl symbol. Bruce had lifted one from the crime scene.
“I was really drunk,” lies Bruce.
“Sure,” agrees Lucius knowingly. “But before that, you made a promise. And you — which is to say, WE — are going to keep that promise, because we need some good PR as bad as March needs numbers. Batman’s crusade hasn’t helped our stock numbers and it certainly hasn’t been good for March. A hyper-violent vigilante suddenly takes hold of one of the biggest cities in the US in the first term and causes billions in property damage — it doesn’t look great for him. For March. Or for Batman. But at least that guy’s got a Fortune 500 company covering his ass. March doesn’t.” The implication sinks like a ship. Neither of them acknowledge it.
“But is March worth cooperating with?”
“March is corrupt. His opponent in the primaries wants to remilitarize the police and reinstate the death penalty. Rock and a hard place. But we know that the rock listens to money; we have money; we choose rock. Got it?” Lucius points at him, looking every bit like the business whiz kid his resume promised he was. “…Got it? Bruce, you can’t pull your weird, indignant, self-righteous hypocrite thing here. No calling him an enemy of the people. I need you to say you got that. Tell me you got that.”
“Got it.” Bruce sighs, and pastes on his most amiable smile as the elevator dings pleasantly, opening smoothly to the smiling face of a broad-jawed man that Bruce presumes is Lincoln March. “Mr. March — a pleasure.”
—
Long, stupid story short, Bruce is so busy trying to be clandestine about slipping five ibuprofens while March’s back is turned that he misses the elevator doors sliding open again during the meeting. Lucius, luckily, is off with some members of the Chamber of Commerce, but the intruder sends a knife — another, identical knife — straight into the stomach of the security guard. Lincoln gets a long blade straight through the gut, which is a shame because he’d really been pulling at Bruce’s heartstrings with his blatant political wooing, vowing on his own mother’s grave to get Bruce gun control if he’ll just donate, sign on the line right here, my friend.
The intruder’s dressed in this archaic black thing, lots of metal, lots of knives, shiny amber goggles. Owl motif. Bruce doesn’t recognize him. It’s someone new. Someone fast.
March and the guard are whimpering on the shiny floor, so the wounds are probably nonfatal at the moment, but the armory the intruder has strapped to his left arm alone is stunning.
Can’t know who’s watching. Bruce sends lucky strikes, blows that look like they just barely made it. Solar plexus. Mandibular nerve. But the person sends a slash skittering across Bruce’s arms, and Bruce loses all traces of lightness. Pushes a hundred pounds of pressure on the windpipe. Absolutely nothing. The person bucks back, slams Bruce’s head into the wall, and he reels for a quarter of an instant: Are they on venom? Steroids?
A knife punctures his left pec, his right pec. Bruce doesn’t have a weapon, weighs the value of yanking a knife out to fight, decides against it when the thing —
The thing says, “Bruce Wayne, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to die,” and slams him through the window, and Bruce is falling four stories a second and accelerating, and the thing is falling with him.
“How I love killing Waynes,” the thing coos.
Bruce grabs onto a particularly grotesque gargoyle, sandy with age, pasting dirt onto Bruce’s wet, red hands.
The thing doesn’t.
It just keeps falling, crashes down to the ground anyway, onto some poor red minivan’s roof. Eighty-four floors down. It’s gotta be dead.
Bruce breathes hard, looks down at the knives in his chest, says, “Ow.”
—
Fact: Bruce should have worked more efficiently on researching the Court of Owls.
Fact: The best opportunity a prisoner has for escape is in the hours immediately following their being brought in. Processing is understaffed and tedious, and office-bound cops in general are no less corrupt or incompetent than regular old beat cops.
Fact: Two hours after the attempted assassination at the hands of the so-called Court and six hours after Bruce had just put the clown into custody, the Joker is back on the streets.
Fact: Bruce spends the next sixteen hours systematically disabling the Joker’s thirteen bombs and capturing the clown himself.
Fact: Bruce waits an additional two hours at the station to ensure that the Joker is securely transported to Arkham posthaste.
Opinion: Bruce is the most terrific plonker that has ever walked the earth.
“You are the most terrific plonker that has ever walked the earth!” seethes Alfred. Or maybe it’s less seething than the employment of a slightly raised voice. In any case, Alfred is mad. He’s even dropped the soft, polite English lexicon he usually puts on. Alfred’s from Essex, but now he sounds like he’s from Essex. He pulls the needle through Bruce’s skin with a forceful, unspoken rage, more an independent injury in itself than a redemptive suture. “What utter fool endures an attempted assassination and then decides, oh, he’s up for a romp around the town in a bat-suit to catch a mass-murderer!”
“I’ve got work to do,” Bruce says. He does. He does have work to do.
“No,” snaps Alfred. “You are going to sleep.”
“Okay,” Bruce says meekly.
—
He means to research the day after that, but Bruce doesn’t actually wake up until six in the evening the next day, and by the time he’s showered and Alfred’s rechecked and redressed his wounds, it’s almost eight.
That night is a usual Gotham night, which is to say that it’s entirely atrocious.
The West Side decides that it’s going to go to hell tonight, apparently. Probably Falcone covering something up.
This means Bruce hardly even gets to the East Side, where things are less organized crime and more gutwrenchingly gruesome: attempted arson at city hall; half-hearted bomb threat aimed at the 79th precinct by some disgruntled ex-cop; double-homicide at some foreign circus over in Newtown, with a missing kid on top of it; Riddler-affiliated robbery on Fulton Street with one reported fatality; three paintings on loan from the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad get snatched; and some sick fucks are robbing graves, supposedly even digging around in the St. Cloud’s mausoleum.
Bruce’s knuckles are worn to the bone, past the muscle, and he still doesn’t manage to stop any of that — too busy stopping petty crimes on the West Side. There is a sick feeling in his stomach, like his organs are being swallowed by a gaping lacuna. He gets in at six. He wakes up at noon. He still feels tired. He goes on patrol again.
—
Selina texts him.
It’s at least an actual address this time, on a non-obsolete form of communication. Last time, she’d faxed him coordinates at work.
If he’s being honest, he’s expecting an apartment, expecting her to have changed flats again, expecting some sort of chase. He looks up the address; it’s for some greasy canteen off of Hunt Street.
When he gets there, Selina’s wearing silver hornrimmed sunglasses and a blue scarf around her hair, like some sort of 1950’s movie star, a real vedette, totally incongruous with the murky, rusty dive they’re in, a tiny place called Céleste’s. She has two styrofoam cups in front of her: milkshakes. She offers him one. He declines. She’s got a sweet tooth; he can barely stomach bitter chocolate without it cloying.
“You know,” she says, smearing lipstick on the straw, “I’ve been hearing things.”
“Like what?”
“Rumors.” She swirls the straw around. “Weird shit, lately. That you’ve been fucking around behind my back with that alien from Metropolis. That there’s some sort of cringey cult based on a nursery rhyme making moves underground. That you — that you died. You haven’t been spotted on the East Side in a while. People were thinking about the Joker.” She tilts her head, takes off her glasses. Her eyes aren’t shiny. “I wanted to see if that was true for myself.”
Bruce purses his lips.
“Can I tell you something else?” She puts her glasses back on, but she doesn’t move to leave. She sips at the second milkshake. “When we met, I thought I was Marie and you were Mersault. But we’re not. I think we’re better.”
“That’s not hard,” Bruce tells her. “Meursault only wanted Marie for sex. For what she represented.”
“What do you want me for?” Selina asks, like she doesn’t already know the answer. Her rings clink together on her fingers.
“That,” Bruce answers. “And everything else.”
—
The other half of the bed isn’t empty in the morning. Alfred says, “Oh, dear.” Selina laughs.
The empty feeling in his chest persists.
He rolls over, the sheets hissing with the movement. “You stole the painting from the show downtown last week, didn’t you.”
“Listen,” she says. “It was Amrita Sher-Gil, you know how much I love her, I saw it and I couldn’t keep my hands off of it. That’s me. That’s who I am. Good art is to me what getting stabbed is to you.”
“You think I like being stabbed?”
“I don’t think you don’t like it.” She smiles, pressing her cheek into the pillow. Her dimples deepen, her grin broken by a yawn. She has a few thousand cavities and at least as many blackened silver fillings. “C’mon.”
“C’mon what.”
“You know what, Bat. Tell me about your week. Here. I’ll make it easy for you.” She clears her throat, pitching her voice down. “Report. I expect a debriefing of the events of the past 168 hours.”
Bruce almost smiles. “Uneventful. Only one assassination attempt.”
“Slow week. Who was it this time? League of Assassins? Deathstroke?” “The Court of Owls.”
Selina sits up like a ramrod. “What?”
“I got sentenced to die by the Court of Owls.”
She slaps his arm hard, hastening out of bed, violently yanking on her pants and her moto jacket. Then she shoves him again. “Why wouldn’t you say anything?” She looks around wildly, like she’s expecting someone to appear out of nowhere. Her eyes are big, black. “This is serious, Bruce. This is really, really serious.”
—
Bruce grew up in Gotham. Selina lived Gotham. He heard stories at prep school. She saw stories played out on the streets. She tells him about Talons. They’re watching all the time, like fucking Santa Claus, and as she’s speaking he gets more and more incredulous. This sounds like a fever dream.
There’s even a rhyme, not even a slant, an actual, unironic rhyme, something about a perch of granite and lime.
That’s the aspect that catches Bruce’s attention. He has found residue, dust from a metamorphic rock not unlike marble. Convenient. It’s an odd fact. Startling.
He has a hard time dismissing what Selina says. She has a way of getting under his skin, of creeping past his bones.
—
“Beware the Court of Owls, that watches all the time, ruling Gotham from a shadowed perch, behind granite and lime. They watch you at your hearth, they watch you in your bed, speak not a whispered word of them or they'll send the Talon for your head."
—
Fact: Gotham’s sewer system is constructed almost entirely out of granite.
—
It is, of course, not very romantic to travel through the sewers.
Selina doesn’t go with him. She doesn’t want to.
Part of what lets him know that all of this is authentic — isn’t just a folksong or some urban legend or, god forbid, a rumor — is the real, dark fear in Selina’s eyes as she talks about it.
Bruce thinks about Selina as he wades through the sewers, which is probably not a strike of genius, since the terrible echoes and egregious scent is pervasive enough to inflict some unfortunate conflations, and he really doesn’t want to associate Selina with the sewers, no matter how much he loves Gotham history. He’d like to think he has more control of his brain than that, in any case.
The brain, though, knows a lot more than anyone. For example, the eyes take in information beyond what's processed by our conscious vision. You see more than you see; you pick up on more cues than you realized — that’s how you can sense eyes watching you. Something about the amygdala.
It’s black in the sewers, the darkness tattered only by the skinny glow stick in his mouth, held between his teeth. There’s not much information for his brain to take in at all; still, he can feel someone watching him.
Then, he feels hands, rough on his body, snarling away his utility belt and his consciousness. The last sight is that of his glow stick, shaking to the wet ground.
—
He wakes up in a labyrinth. A sick, white marble labyrinth.
His training falls away after the eighth day. It’s hard to think of what Ducard or Ra’s taught him when everything here is blank.
One of his cowl’s lenses is bust.
There are shadows that lurk around in the maze, and he hides there. They want him to come out of the dark, but he won’t. He won’t. He’ll stay here. Where it’s safe. Safe from them. The owls.
But to stay in one place is to let them find him, so he can’t, so he doesn’t, but he always ends up in the same place anyway, the center: a massive, white owl statue — a fountain, pooling with clear water. He shouldn’t drink. Shouldn’t drink. Has to. He’s thirsty. He drinks.
Then he scurries back to the dark. Has to stay still. No rope to climb. No belt. Only the dark. Its blackness makes his eyes sting.
And then there is a pop. And he’s back in a room, a white marble room, with photoframe after photoframe —hundreds of red frames around pictures of insane, filthy people with bulging eyes. How can he be here again?
Because, he thinks, they’re telling you a story, Bruce. Room by room, part by part. And this part is all the people they’ve killed here in this maze — hundreds of people over hundreds of years.
He shivers. He needs to keep his head straight. He needs to go back to the dark. Where it’s safe.
The black engulfs him like Cimmeria, but it isn’t safe, isn’t enough anymore: a group of people — of things — with smooth white masks and wide eyes lurk there in lieu of any shadow. A violence curves through him like a riptide, and he lunges for them until they aren’t there anymore.
They can’t fool him. You can’t fool me.
The next room has words embossed on the walls and a small, flat white model of the city. But Bruce knows those rooftops better than anyone. They can’t fool him.
He traces his fingers against the engraved walls and steps on every little false fire escape.
The walls take him into the deepest room yet. There is a curl grooved on the wall — an abstract scythe, maybe, or a talon. A talon, he realizes, and the feeling is like ice. Across the floor, there are red wooden doors, like the tops of scarlet caskets someone buried. Each has a little window, gold framed and clear.
Then he realizes that the little windows are photographs. Photographs of children, from decades — centuries — ago. A blonde little girl in an empire-waisted white frock. A little boy in plaid with a steamboat behind him. He thinks, These faces. Children. Generations of children you turned into monsters, is that it? Young men and women you trained for years, so they would kill for you. And one open? And one missing?
The casket next to the open one. Its photo is new. The other photos — maybe the most recent is from the 1930s. This photo, though, could have been taken yesterday. It’s a boy: a grin, black hair, brown eyes, middle school age. His backdrop is different than the others, too. His is bright, whirling, with something like circus tents in the distance. There’s a sign there, too, cut off from the frame, and it reads HAL before the picture ends.
Everything in Bruce sinks, like a stone someone threw straight into the ocean and didn’t even try to skip. The double homicide at Haly’s Circus.
A clarity cuts through him, clean, sharper than rage, and he heaves the door off with his shaky arms.
—
“I know that I am sick to death of Owls.”
—
“My God. Master Bruce. Bruce. Bruce, God, you’re alive,” Alfred’s voice shakes, every note rough. “You’re — why are you holding a child?”
Bruce stumbles forward. His cape crackles, drags. His knees tremble.
”Password: Fairbanks,” Bruce whispers.
“Alfred…”
“Come here, dear boy.”
Bruce shakes the body in his arms. “He’s…he’s alive, isn’t he? Alfred, he’s alive, isn’t he?”
Alfred stares at Bruce for a long time, eyes wide, hand frozen in air. Then he softens, and his shoulders slump, and his mouth purses in pity.
Bruce crumbles. Deflates. The world sputters out of air.
—
He wakes up. He’s in his room. His room — not the white room, or the Talon chamber, or anywhere in the maze. He’s in his room. The relief that surges through him is pathetic.
Not everyone has the luxury, though, of being home. Not everyone has the luxury of even having a home any longer.
The boy is — is —
Twelve years old. Richard John Grayson. Son of the late Mary and Giovanni ‘John’ Grayson. Part of a world famous, European troupe of acrobats. By all accounts, a raucous, brilliant, whip-smart troublemaker of a child.
Bruce glances between the pictures of a beaming child — the publicity shoots, the family polaroids — with the almost-thing spread out on the cot.
Black veins are crocheted beneath Richard’s waxy pallor. In the photos, the boy has brown skin, but now the color is overtaken by a dreadful grayscale. His hair is too long. His front tooth is chipped, a familiar, humanish little rogue note amidst the silence of the semi-cadaverous form.
His teeth themselves are another thing. They’re a key. There’s an engraved metal tooth in the back of his mouth: Electrum, a highly conductive alloy of silver and copper. That tooth is a deposit for the electrum, and it’s seeped into his cells, into his blood over years. A walking conductor for the stuff. Bruce’s isolates a compound in his cells, something capable of reanimating dead tissue.
Richard had been frozen. Frozen in that little wood box in the ground. Bruce doesn’t know how long. Long enough that an ordinary person would have died. That an ordinary person’s cells would have shattered with the cold.
Twelve days between his parents’ murder and now. Bruce would guess — would hope that he just stayed frozen, sleeping, and that the Court never put him through the maze or trials or injections. But the color and the definition of his veins says otherwise. Says that the tooth has activated enough Electrum to inflict something permanent.
Bruce spends the night fluttering between the boy’s bedside and researching the case. Both cases. All the cases. The Grayson murder case. Everything that the world has ever seen that can be connected to the Court of Owls. But his gaze floats back to the boy, and he feels so angry he can hardly breathe. This is a child. This is a child, not a weapon.
He doesn’t wake up. Alfred says that’s to be expected. “Even if your regenerative theory proves true, his prolonged exposure to the cold would have weakened him substantially. Be glad for that,
sir.” Alfred pauses. “…I’m unsure what we should do with him once he’s woken up.”
In the midst of tragedy, people tend to drift. Bruce did. And in the midst of trauma, people tend to cling. Bruce did that, too. Bruce clung. To Alfred. To Talia. To Richard, now; to the idea of having someone else that experienced that same thing: being orphaned and surviving the maze, too.
Richard, though, does not cling. When he wakes up, he scrabbles back, inhumanly fast, and he shudders away from the brightness of the room. Bruce is struck by a familiar thought: The dark. Where it’s safe. Safe from them.
“Richard,” he says, and Richard passes out. A drifter, then, Bruce concludes.
He moves to leave, to let the boy be, but he hesitates. He doesn’t know why. He grabs a hardcopy of his files, sits down forever. Or at least until the boy wakes up.
—
The next time, when the boy wakes up, Bruce is more well-versed in the structure of the Court.
He’d already assumed that they’d stolen him to be a Talon, but the exact why is unclear. Regardless, Bruce knows of the Grandmaster now, of the Parliament, and he can extrapolate the measures employed by whatever trainers they have. The trouble is that Bruce can’t be sure what was and was not done to him.
Twelve days is a short but significant time. Bruce doesn’t even know what drugs he should be looking for in his system, doesn’t know exactly how to treat this mysterious, haunting trauma. Though, to be fair, Bruce is certainly no expert at dealing with trauma in the first place.
Richard wakes up. His pupils are dilated. He looks ready to scream.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay. No one’s going to hurt you, Richard,” promises Bruce. “The Court doesn’t have you any longer. You’re not a Talon. You’re not there. They can’t fool you. They didn’t fool you.”
Richard doesn’t say anything; his countenance doesn’t change at all, and Bruce reassesses. Maybe he doesn’t want to scream; Bruce recalls the way he himself had kept silent to hide from the Owls. The hardness of his eyes is wariness then. Maybe. It’s difficult to read the emotions of a frozen child.
His eyes narrow. He doesn’t skitter backward, but his knuckles go white curling around the thick blanket he woke up in.
Bruce has withstood hours and hours and hours of interrogative torture. Has been waterboarded. Had four fingernails ripped out at once. Gotten classically strung up and stabbed, electrocuted. He didn’t talk then. He could’ve gotten more and not ever spoken a word.
Now, Bruce is compelled to do something he’s never done: he talks.
“My,” he starts, “my name is Bruce, Bruce Wayne,” and then he doesn’t stop.
—
“This isn’t the Court,” Bruce tells him, for what has to be the millionth time. “It isn’t.”
Richard is still wrapped in the blanket, clutching it close to his skin, and he looks away, pinning the ground with his gaze, until he finally meets Bruce’s eyes like he’s facing his biggest fear. He speaks hoarsely. “Where are my parents?”
“They’re —” Bruce falters. “They’re dead.”
He doesn’t react. “Was it the Court?” His voice shakes.
Bruce pauses again, trying to think of all the right things to say, and settles on honesty. “No. I don’t think so. It was a mobster. Named Anthony Zucco. He wanted protection money. He killed your parents as leverage.” Bruce lets his eyes dart away. “I’m sorry. I know how you — how it feels. I lost my parents, too.”
Richard wraps his arms tight around his knees, presses his chin down. His bones jut out like knives and his skin stretches thin. “…What — what did they do to me?”
“I,” says Bruce. “I don’t know. We. We can figure it out, though. Together.” He gingerly puts his hand on Richard’s shoulder, and his own hand is trembling before it ever reaches the boy’s body, and the boy jerks violently but moves back and then he starts to cry. Richard leans into his chest, and Bruce — Bruce holds him.
—
That doesn’t happen again. Richard doesn’t let himself be touched after that. Much more lucid. Too lucid, maybe. He doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes, but he watches everything, and his eyes flicker between wide and narrow. Whenever he sees Alfred, he pulls into himself. He doesn’t like needles. Barely tolerates Bruce.
He doesn’t seem particularly inclined to go upstairs. Probably extrapolating something about the murky darkness of the cave being a foil to the stark, bright whiteness of the Court of Owls. Bruce understands that to a degree — the cave is always an escape from the world above: a place to learn. That said, it’s been days. He feels almost caged. Can’t imagine how a kid feels.
Bruce says, “You need to eat.”
Richard says, “Are you taking me back there?”
“No. Never. Not ever.” Bruce means it as a promise. It isn’t taken as one.
The boy’s eyes narrow again, glinting. He tilts his head to the sound. The pale light washes his skin, underlining every dark-tinted vein, casting shadows under his eyes. He presses away, against the wall, but his brows go defiant.
“I’m not lying. I won’t lie to you.”
“I don’t even know you. For all — for all I know, this could be a test.” Richard curls his nails tight into the skin of his palm. “This is a test. You’re trying to fool me. Lull me. It won’t, it won’t work. Fr-freeze me if you want, Cobb, but —”
Bruce steps forward; Richard flinches violently, knuckles white and eyes pressed closed — a horrible, abused sound comes out, and there’s a second before there’s a, “ Please, please, please, I didn’t mean it, please don’t —”
—
Initially, Bruce tries to cut back on patrol, to focus on Richard. This is not a viable plan. He learns this very quickly. It is April. Crime is bad in April.
When he comes back from patrol in the early morning, though, it seems to indicate a dawn. Or a dusk. Bruce isn’t sure. Richard seems to be using patrol as a means to set his circadian rhythm by, though, in any case. Once, Bruce comes back to see Richard writing furiously in shaky Cyrillic handwriting in some leather-bound notebook in the dim light. When he asks Alfred about it, Alfred says it’s a way to keep track of the days that pass. He only lost twelve days, the man explains with wet eyes, but it is quite terrible to lose anything half so precious for that amount of time.
The sound of pen cutting across new paper is a distraction from Bruce’s typing of reports. It’s hard to focus on the details of the latest fentanyl run when he’s wondering about the contents of the journal — probably an incredible insight into the torture, into the Court, probably fantastic evidence. It’s a temptation, heavy like soap.
Night for the boy presumably assumes when Bruce returns. Gradually, the sound of writing dies. Bruce finishes his report later, means to head upstairs to get a cold compress, hesitates. Hesitates again. Doesn’t know why. He walks back over to Richard. Bruce finds his gaze pulled to the journal, closed haphazardly. His hand hovers over its cover. Bruce sighs. He moves his hand, presses Richard’s shoulder gently.
“Hey.”
The boy shifts away from the touch, wakes up with hard eyes. He doesn’t say a word. “It’s.” Bruce pauses. “It’s warm upstairs. Come on.”
“Okay,” the boy says meekly.
—
He sets Richard up in the room across from his. Alfred’s in for a shock in the morning if Bruce isn’t awake then. (He probably won’t be.)
The next morning, Bruce wakes up early: ten o’clock. Alfred hasn’t even rushed in to tear open his curtains and mock his legendary thirst for plasma yet. That’s a dire measure reserved for times after noon when Bruce has a meeting scheduled at noon. The door across from his is closed.
Bruce doesn’t know exactly what to do with it, has to weigh privacy and well-being.
He raps on the door with his knuckles, which is an extremely stupid choice because it tears the new scabs over his knuckles. Blood smears onto the cedar. Bruce rubs at it with his thumb. It doesn’t come off. He sighs.
“Richard? Can I come in?”
There’s a quiet sound. It’s not a word, even. Bruce construes it as a Yes. He opens the door slowly.
There’s no deadly scene waiting for him. The room is softly lit by the clear light fuming through the window. Warmth pours in. The curtains are open, drawn as far to either side as possible. Richard’s sitting with his knees drawn up on the window seat, staring directly out at the skyline. It’s not a particularly impressive landscape, not like the sleeping, eldritch view of the city that Bruce’s office has, not even matching the front parlor balcony’s pleasant, uniform stretch of topiary. It’s the back of the house — this room faces the woods, the grounds behind the Manor. There are tall trees and tall grasses and an ocean of pale light. Bruce tilts his head; in a way, actually, now that’s he’s looking, it is sort of ghastly and pleasant and magnificent: the dark greens against the white clouds and the black dirt.
Richard looks back at him, pupils like pinpricks.
“Are you all right?” Bruce — superfluously — asks.
“Yes.” His voice is faint. Richard takes a deep breath. He hugs his knees tighter. “It’s so — it looks so — I know I must have seen it before. I must’ve.” He lets out a frustrated breath. “But it’s different now. It hurts my eyes. The sun is so white.”
Bruce blinks. “Richard —”
“Dick.”
“Pardon?”
There’s a new, seeping calmness in him now. It’s hard to reconcile it with the shaking boy with lightning-colored skin. In the daylight, the effects of the electrum are almost hidden, somehow. The quiet glow obscures the darkness of his veins, his features. “Would you — you can call me Dick. If you want.”
“…Dick.” Bruce tries not to show his distaste for the name. Either vulgar or magnificently old fashioned. He doesn’t linger on the name; the other matter at hand is too important. He doesn’t want to address it, but letting the trauma lurk isn’t any better. No. The best solution is to solve the case and close it for good, forever. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but I do have a question to ask you: how long were you there?” How long do you think you were there?
The calmness doesn’t disappear so much as the metaphorical curtains crash shut again; he shuts down, almost. His shoulder square, going up and down jerkily. “I don’t know. A few months. A year.”
That is not a good number, and it is not a good approximation. “You were there for almost two weeks. Almost.”
“No, I wasn’t.” Dick is shaking his head hard. “I was there for months. I was there forever. You’re wrong. You’re wrong.”
“Dick —”
“I was there forever,” Dick says again, faint, faint, faint. “He said I was going to be there forever.” “Who? Who said that?”
“They did.”
“Who is they? Dick, I’m only —”
Dick interrupts again; it’s a character trait maybe. It doesn’t seem intentional. He doesn’t even seem to really be there. His eyes are flat and unfocused, and his voice is still ghostlike. “They did. He did. Haly. Cobb. The, the grandmaster. That’s what they told me. They told me that.”
The words ring. Haly. Haly is a part of the exchange, then — Haly is complicit. The thought cuts; Bruce only delved shallowly into the Grayson case, and only for Dick’s sake, but Haly had struck him a victim of violence, not a perpetrator. A certain disillusionment settles in his chest, and dread fizzles in his throat.
“They said I’d be there frozen until they needed me. Until they needed me to — they wanted me to kill people. Cobb said I needed to. He said that it was my bloodright. That’s what I was born for, raised for.”
“He was wrong,” Bruce says seriously. He doesn’t know who Cobb is, but he hates him with every last fiber of his being. “Dick, he was wrong. That’s not true. That was a lie. We are who we choose to be. That was a lie.”
“It wasn’t. Haly sold me to them. I — I trusted him. I trusted them. My parents gave me to them. I thought they loved me. Why would they sell me —” His breath cuts off in a hitch. “They lied to me. They fooled me. They didn’t love me.”
Bruce hesitates. Wants to say, That’s not true, they did love you, that’s what parents are for.
He doesn’t, though. He doesn’t say that.
He isn’t sure what to say. Bruce has been trying. He really has. But he’s always been much better at withstanding the torture than he’s ever been at talking.
—
Selina texts him again. He wishes she would just call this time. She uses the texting lingo of a teenager from 2007. She asks, in heavy, dialectical pseudo-English, if he’d care to attend a gala for some animal rights nonprofit upstate as her date.
-- No. Regards, Bruce.
-- why
-- I have plans that night. Regards, Bruce.
-- i have never seen u go out. u cant tell me batman has a social life
-- him OR bruce wayne
-- most people in gotham don’t even know who u r.
-- ur going. or else im telling lucius
--You don’t even know who Lucius is. Do not contact him under any circumstances. Leave him out of this. Regards, Bruce.
Selina does go on to call Lucius, who schedules a brunch with her where they probably conspire against Bruce. Lucius absolutely loves to tell one story in particular, wherein Bruce showed up late to a dinner party in Germany with a neck brace and a turtleneck that he’d been on enough morphine to think hid the injury, so there is almost no chance that Selina isn’t unaware of that story, which is an especial shame because any credibility he had is now effaced.
After the brunch, though, Lucius doesn’t tell him that he has to attend the gala, but mostly that’s because they both know that Bruce only truly answers to Alfred. Lucius and Selina can sway him, but they can’t make him do anything.
Lucius does, however, ask exactly what sort of plans Bruce has that night.
“The usual,” Bruce prevaricates, clicking a cheap pen he found in Lucius’s office as he sits across from his CFO.
“The usual what, Bruce,” Lucius asks, stealing the pen out of his hands with an annoyed look, sliding Bruce another folder of clandestine designs from a military contract that never came to fruition.
Bruce forces out a light little laugh. “Listen,” he says. “Contrary to what the Gazette reports, I do have responsibilities.” He thinks of Gotham, the slick, wet skyscape; he thinks of Dick Grayson, the trembling kid that’s somehow lost a year in just twelve days — the little boy with nightmares. “I’ve got responsibilities.”
Lucius stares at him for a long moment. Then, his gaze peels to the latest edition of the Gazette, open to business page, drilled with stock numbers that don’t mean anything to Bruce.
Coincidentally, the business page is directly to the left of the society page. There’s a glaring absence. No mentions of drunken shenanigans or further PR crises for WE.
“You’re cleaning up your act.” Lucius says it like it’s some clinical observation, some scientific fact. He steeples his hands, and then he tilts his head. “I like that. God knows Stacy’s got better things to do than redeem you in the press all day. Just…just remember that the company’s one of your responsibilities.”
“I know.”
A silence sets in briefly, broken by: “…Lincoln March has been asking after you. I visited him in the hospital the other day. And he called the office yesterday. He wants to see you.”
“Why?” Bruce frowns, sitting up in his chair. “It’s not as if our last meeting went well for either of us.”
Lucius makes a face. “I think it’s fair to say he received the brunt end of what happened, Bruce. He was hospitalized for almost two weeks. He just got out.”
“The people of Gotham received the brunt end of what he did by budget cuts to —”
“God, not this again —”
“— education and transportation. ”
“We already had this discussion. I’m not having it again. And that? Don’t do that. People don’t like that. People don’t like politics.”
“He’s a politician. He probably loves politics.” But Bruce sighs, acquiesces. “Fine. Schedule me a meeting.”
Lucius’s eyebrows lift, and his forehead creases with the movement. “I’m not your secretary. Go find Allison.”
“Allison still works here?” Bruce asks, moving to stand up, pressing the folder of schematics into the inside of his sports coat. “I thought she was going backpacking through Europe with her boyfriend.”
“They broke up last week. He went; Allison didn’t.” Lucius rolls his eyes, gets back up on his proverbial soapbox. “You’d know this if you were ever here to talk to your employees, instead of tied up with all your ‘responsibilities.’”
Bruce pushes the door open, flashing a sardonic smile at Lucius as he leaves, has already set foot in the hallway when Lucius calls again.
“And, Bruce?”
“Yes?”
“I want to meet the kid when they’re up to it. Anyone who can melt your cold, dead heart —”
Bruce slams the door closed. Paranoia pounds in his head. There’s no way Lucius could know; there’s no way. His voice slips into something dark, damn near the growl he uses at night. “How do you know about him?”
Lucius doesn’t flinch. He grins. “We just had an honest-to-god pleasant conversation, Bruce; we just made small talk. Besides, I have a newborn. I know what people who have kids look like. I know what parents look like.”
He draws his shaking hands off of the table, back up to his pockets. He forces the hard rush of something to recede. “Okay, he’s not a — he’s not a baby. He’s twelve. And I’m not a — I’m not a that.”
—
Lincoln March is back at work. The stitches on his forehead haven’t even dissolved yet, but he’s back at his office, eyes clear as amphetamine. There’s an edge to him, now, a sharpness to the way that he moves. “Brucie!”
“Lincoln.”
“I know, I know, I know — I look terrible.” Lincoln laughs. “You don’t have to say it.”
“I didn’t,” replies Bruce, feeling defensive and cross and altogether entirely suspicious. Then a theory occurs to him. He means theory not in the common sense but in the scientific sense: a well substantiated explanation of some aspect of the world. He churns through his will to create a genuine-looking smile, tries to keep a mean glint out of his eyes. “Although, I have to admit, the Court of Owls really put you through the ringer.”
“The what.” The smile wavers on March’s face.
“The Court of Owls,” says Bruce. “They sent a Talon for my head, you know. It’s a shame you got in the way.”
“A…a Talon? Like the nursery rhyme?” March breaks into a chuckle. It’s entirely inauthentic, a little bleary with the shock. “Bruce, that’s absurd. It’s a bedtime story.”
“Tell that to Cobb.” Bruce strikes — waits.
“Hmm.” March’s face is neutral. “Hmm.”
—
“What is that?” Bruce asks gently, leaning over Dick’s shoulder to look at the journal. The boy doesn’t jump, doesn’t flinch. Vaguely, Bruce feels proud.
“Gotham.” It’s a rendition of the city, done in trembling black pen. Artistically speaking, the form isn’t good. In terms of accuracy, though, it’s astounding: Bruce knows these streets, these windows, these fire escapes. He certainly knows these roofs. It’s difficult to fathom that Dick could have memorized the city like this. Bruce doesn’t even know if the boy has been outdoors, much less in the grooves and hooks of the city, since before the — since before Zucco struck.
“It’s good.” A thought occurs to him suddenly, and he stares at the drawing for a moment more, silent: it looks like the little white model in the maze. There is a phantom pressure on Bruce’s sternum, pushing down on his chest. “Can I show you something?”
“Yeah.” Dick’s voice is quiet. Bruce knows that it’s the nature of trauma to distort things, but he always finds it so hard to reconcile the boy — his contemporary hurt — with the confident, spiky raucousness that he had supposedly possessed before.
It’s the low-light laser model of the city, casting a dusky blue glow. He uses it for projections, mostly. It’s just a hologram; it isn’t good for much else. He turns down the lights to see it better, and Dick’s shoulders visibly relax. There is comfort yet to be had in the dark. Bruce knows that.
“What do you think?” Bruce asks, sitting down on the floor, trying not to groan as the movement pulls at the soreness of his thighs.
“I think I like this one better.” He doesn’t say exactly what he likes it better than. Bruce extrapolates. He likes this one better, too. Then Dick sits down next to him. Curls his knees up and wraps his arms around them. He always does that. In terms of body language, that’s defensive, but Bruce has no room to be gauging appropriateness because he only has the vaguest idea of those twelve days or the previous twelve years.
Then it’s just Bruce and the kid, on the ground, staring at a projection of Gotham.
“It doesn’t hurt my eyes.” Dick’s cocking his head to the left. He squints experimentally, then he looks at Bruce, meeting his gaze with startling directness. His pupils look almost normal.
Bruce nods, pressing his weight on his palms as he leans back. “I made it almost six months ago. I’d had — my eyes were inflamed. I had a conjunctive hemorrhage and —” Bruce pauses, trying to think of how much physiology a twelve year old might know. “Anyway. Low level laser illumination is therapeutic for the eyes.”
A silence hooks out.
“…Does it really look like this?”
“It’s less clean, but there’s this realness to it,” Bruce starts; he is interrupted by a loud, vile thump from above. Someone’s trying to get in. Someone’s trying to get into the Manor. “Dick, get to the cave.”
“Why —?”
“Get to the cave, Dick. Now.”
And then the things are in his house, crawling over his home like Herculean ants. The first one slices Bruce across the face, across the arm. The Talon’s hands seem impossibly like claws, white and gnarled and sharp.
“This is it, Bruce Wayne,” the thing says. “There are no more barriers to keep us out.”
“You can’t stop the Court.” Another Talon materializes, gleaming like a sword. Another. Then another. “You can’t hold us back. And we have come to claim what is ours.”
There’s dozens, bright-eyed and sallow — cockroaches, children that Gotham swallowed whole. Another slash to Bruce’s arm. Chest, back, ankle.
His bare feet smash against the first thing in a high kick, but their sheer numbers overwhelm him, corral him like a fish into the cave.
“The armory, Alfred! Get Dick inside!” he calls, sees a glint of someone young and someone old vanishing behind the metal doors.
Fact: Talons dull in the cold, fall into pale smears of themselves when the world freezes.
Fact: The cave has a number condition-controlling mechanisms for calefaction and infrigidation. The cave has the capability of going subzero.
Fact: The armory does not. The armory is the warmest place in the damn house, glistening with fire.
Rime hardens; Bruce runs to warmth, lets the Court shatter in the cold.
—
After thawing, Bruce slides the hardcopy of the file across the table. Dick’s hand moves impossibly fast to intercept it. He looks up at Bruce, looking confused.
“It’s the case. Your parents. The Court.” It’s all one big case.
Dick opens it gingerly. Bruce can see his fingers shaking, can see the place where he has bitten the nail edge off down to the bed. He skims over the photos, glossy and blurry, but he flips through the pages so quickly that Bruce doesn’t think he could possibly be reading them.
Bruce watches him graze over the coroner’s reports: his mother, his father, and a few of the Court’s more notable victims.
“For what it’s worth,” Bruce says, and then stops. His throat feels warm, sore, like he’s doomed for a fever. “From what I’ve seen, I don’t think your parents knew.”
“Cobb told me that they did. They didn’t love me.”
“Cobb’s a liar.” An anaphora crowds his mouth. “That’s not true. They did love you. That’s what parents are for.”
Dick scoffs softly. “People aren’t angels just because they’re family.”
Bruce thinks of his own parents. They were as good as people can be, or at least as good as rich people can be. There is, he thinks, some degree of goodness innate in relations with families.
Bruce goes to speak. Dick interrupts him.
“Cobb’s my grandfather. My great grandfather.” His voice is steady, fluted like a pillar.
“Oh,” Bruce says.
His voice is rising now, and it loses its steadiness. “I don’t remember very much from the night. I don’t know why. I think I forgot that they ever even died for a little bit. I only remembered the Court. But when — when they died, he found me and he told me I was his grandson. He looked like my dad, I guess. I shouldn’t have believed him. But I did. Haly said he was telling the truth. I trusted them. I, I told you the rest: the bloodright stuff. Said I needed to come with him.” He takes a shaky breath. “I shouldn’t have gone with him. I shouldn’t have gone with him.”
Bruce tries to keep his tone soft. The anger is back. This is a child. “You didn’t know any better.”
Dick says, “If I could go back to that night —”
Bruce says, “I know. I know. I know.”
And the case is closed now. It’s closed, for good and forever.
—
“Did I always look like this?” Dick asks one night, out of the blue.
Bruce frowns. “What?”
“I didn’t always look like this, did I?” He gestures at himself: his eyes, his face, his arms — the shiny, xanthous irises; the tight, inky veins; the skin like brown wax. “They did this to me.”
“You — they —” Bruce’s words sled clumsily over his tongue. “Yes. They did. You looked different before..”
“Okay,” Dick says, but there’s an element there that Bruce can’t really assign an articulate meaning to. “I couldn’t remember.”
Bruce thinks of the photo on the red coffin, the picture of Dick looking normal. “Would you like to see?”
“See what?”
“Photos. From before.” Bruce moves to stand, get the photos.
“No,” says Dick quietly. “No, thank you.” Bruce shutters back to his seat. A beat passes, thick as cement. “I just wanted to know that I did. Sometimes — sometimes, it feels like I never even existed before the Court.”
“You did,” Bruce tells him, “you existed.”
“I know.” He sounds frustrated. “But that’s over. I remember it, I think. I’ve got to remember it. But it’s like — it’s like it all happened when I was a baby or something. I know it happened, but I don’t — I don’t —” Dick’s words stop suddenly, austerely; there’s no crack, no thunderclap, just a cessation. The reticence is broken by Dick again, but his voice is so quiet it only seems to add to the silence, somehow: “I don’t remember.”
For a terrible, selfish moment, Bruce feels jealousy. He identifies it immediately, and he tries to banish the feeling, but it retorts with a viciousness he doesn’t anticipate, reminding him of the sight in Park Row: his mother on her back, his father on his side, the quiet shine of the blood on the wet, black ground. God. God, Bruce wishes he didn’t remember.
But Dick doesn’t remember the things before, and that’s worse. He told Bruce about the night they died; he at least remembers that. He knows who he is, but. But. Maybe the memories are like bulletpoints, short and skinny and curt. Abridged. There’s no mnemonic here. Not here.
“What do you remember?”
“I remember him. Cobb. And I remember them. I remember the months — or the, the twelve days, but it couldn’t, it just couldn’t have been days, it couldn’t have been, I was there.” Dick shakes his head, eyelids casting shadows that color the yellow glint in his irises almost brown. “But everything before seems…” He never finishes.
Bruce swallows. “Like it happened a long time ago?”
“Yeah.” Dick unfolds his legs from under him. “Or maybe...it’s like someone told me a story and I imagined it but it wasn’t ever real. It was just something I made up.”
“It wasn’t. It wasn’t. You didn’t make it up.”
“I guess so,” Dick agrees quietly, a crack in his voice.
And that’s the moment that Bruce decides — or realizes, maybe — that he’s going to do what it takes for him. What it takes.
—
A few years ago, Bruce knew a custody lawyer. A good one. He calls the law office and schedules an appointment even though he’s perfectly rich enough to get away with a walk-in.
“…Bruce.”
“Amal,” Bruce says coolly.
“Why are you here?” Amal straightens her suit jacket, standing from her chair.
“I was wondering.” Bruce tries to project his most charming smile. It tugs painfully at a shallow cut in his lip. “What it would — hypothetically — take to get custody of a non-biological child.”
“You never mentioned wanting kids before.” Amal squints. She slips her hands into her bespoke pants pockets, leaning back.
“Yes, well. People change.” A twinge pangs in his chest, whip-like, as he thinks about people who have changed, about people like Harvey. He pushes the thought away; it isn’t pertinent. “People do change.”
She laughs. There’s a note to it. “Could’ve fooled me.”
Bruce doesn’t bother filling the gap with any words. He isn’t a traumatized twelve year old boy. He lifts an eyebrow.
“...If that’s really the only reason you’re here, then,” Amal stops abruptly, tilting her head. Then she laughs again, a nervous tic. “It’s, it’s a lot of steps. A lot of months. Especially with someone like you, it’s going to be hard.”
Bruce drums his fingers against the table, shrugs. He prefers things that way.
—
It’s a quarter to noon when he gets back from the law office with a series of very thick manila folders detailing all the reason he would be a very bad guardian and how to become one anyway.
Alfred’s out front criticizing the gardener to his face, sparing Bruce a singular look before continuing to upbraid the skinny, Dutch man with hedgeclippers for his apparently inadequate topiary-shaping.
There’s two beat up cars in the driveway, which means the gardener’s partner is probably faffing off somewhere.
Bruce sighs. He wants to sleep. He can’t, though — not only because he has things to do, not only because there’s strangers around his home. There’s also a sound uncommon in the manor: talking.
Selina’s voice is ricocheting through the hallway. “— and, I mean, the eyes, they’re sickening, it’s amazing, really, it’s some Cat Clausen shit. Cat Clausen. You know who that is?”
“No.”
“She’s an artist, and she does these, well, I think she’s the best thing since John Singer Sargent, which, I know, okay, Yeah, right, Selina, but she is, she does these portraits, right, and it’s like she’s not even painting, it’s like she’s clothing these people with color, with just ribbons and ribbons of color, dressing them right up. Important people, too, like Abe Lincoln or Yoko Ono or Einstein. And she always does these weird, light eyes, always chooses yellow or lime for the eyes, and it’s weird, it’s wrong, it’s perverse, even, but it’s so cool. And when you’re the one dressing up Abe Lincoln, giving him orange eyes, like, what are you saying — I don’t know, but it’s never been done, it’s powerful, and she knows what she’s saying and what she’s choosing even if no one else fucking does.” She chews on her gum, quiet for a moment. “And that’s what they remind me of. Your eyes.”
“...Thanks,” Dick’s voice says. “I think. Um. You’re a lot less scary than you look.”
“Oh, I know.” Selina laughs, dragging her long, sharp nails along the tabletop. “It’s all the eyeliner, right, makes me look mean. I am, though. I am mean, but I like having fun more than I like being mean, anyway. And, you know what, I could say the exact same thing to you.”
“Oh,” says Dick. His confusion’s audible. “I’m mean but I like having fun?”
“No.” Selina pops her gum, a loud, startling sound like a pink gunshot. “You’re a lot less scary than you look. Not that you look all that scary. You just look cool.”
“Really?” There’s an eagerness treading the water of his voice. Something in Bruce’s chest aches. “It, it doesn’t look normal, though. I didn’t used to look to like this.”
“I didn’t used to look like this, either, but I do now.” Selina’s voice goes soft, and Bruce almost has to strain to hear what she’s saying. “It’s less clean, right, but there’s a — there’s a realness to it. At least, that’s what —”
“That’s what Bruce always says,” Dick finishes. They go quiet.
“...Yeah. Guy’s got a thing for strays, I guess.” She pauses. “He’s a softie. And I just started figuring out that he’s not as smart as he acts sometimes. In fact, Lucius — you know Lucius? Oh, man, you gotta, he’s, like, hypercompetent — told me this story where there was this dinner party in Berlin and —”
Bruce feels his veins thrill with embarrassment, and he dumps the folders into a nearby velvet chair to swing the door open. “What are you doing here, Selina?”
“The man of the hour arrives,” she whispers loudly to Dick, like Bruce isn’t even there, like they’re just watching some silky play dripping with dramatic irony. Then she directs her attention to Bruce, eyebrows lifted, eyeliner uneven, eyes soft: all black. “Took you long enough.”
“Didn’t know you were coming.”
“Wasn’t planning to.” She tilts her head, like she’s considering. “Just got a feeling.”
Her gaze is unblinking, then she jolts her head back straight, grinning roguishly. “And look who I met: the cutest little boy in the world!”
“I’m twelve,” says Dick, wrinkling his nose, and there’s a note to his voice that sounds his age, sounds fire-eating, sounds alive. “And I’m taller than you.”
“Oh, congratulations to you and the other seven billion people on earth, you’re all taller than me — really, congrats.” Selina clicks her teeth, rolling her shiny eyes back into head.
“She’s sensitive about that,” Bruce tells Dick a little belatedly. Dick raises his eyebrows in mocking surprise.
“I’m not sensitive,” Selina says sharply, “I just aspire to live in a world where height does not matter, where a person who is 5’1 can live just as richly as some 6’4 bastard.”
“Is that, is that me?” Bruce asks, at the very same moment that Selina says, “That’s you, Bruce, I’m talking about you.”
And Dick laughs — loud and high and dangerous — the way he should, the way he’s supposed to, the way he used to; Dick laughs in the stinging, hoary light of noontime.
Bruce thinks about coming out of the dark, about staying here, where it’s safe and it’s safe from them. He thinks, They didn’t fool me. They didn’t fool him either.