Hola Amigos, I'm back. 20 years later, I've got a new Batman tale to tell.
Take Note: this story is completely finished, and I'll be uploading a new chapter once a week.
This first chapters just a little epilogue to get your appetite wet, so stay tuned for next weeks chapter!
A triple axle flip with a double spin and a graceful landing. Three were knocked out from that one move alone. The air changes. Dodge back. The last thug threw his punch too hard. He threw himself off balance. He's spinning. He's tripping. He's falling. But his forehead recoils back as he descends to the ground. His trip down was met with a armored knee heading upwards.
The alleyway is silent.
Tim wastes no time tying the thugs up. It only takes 22.3 seconds. And now the police is on their way. Tim is long gone by time they get there. He's sitting atop a gargoyle, his favorite place to rest and think while on patrol, surveying the streets.
Within the hour, he's saved 4 near rape victims, stopped 7 muggings, scared off 5 would be thieves, and rescued a cat from a tree. And from all of that, besides the cat that had scratched him in the hand, he was injury-free. The cat got lucky because he'd had his gloves off. Rookie mistake. Wouldn't happen again.
He pressed his ear piece twice. Quickly. He waited. Static. No response from Batman. This was the third night with no response. He dreaded going home because no Batman meant no Bruce Wayne. He was unsure how to cover for the both of them. Keeping an appearance at night was easy enough. No one knew Batman was missing just yet. Few saw him anyway, they only saw his aftermath. Tim just had to do his job. Villains never expected Batman to be too far from him. They ran from Tim, because they knew he was never alone. Whoever messed with him, messed with Batman.
Keeping an appearance during the day was much harder. Bruce Wayne was nothing like Batman, and that meant that Bruce had no problem being in the limelight. His sudden silence, both publicly and with Wayne Enterprises was suspicious.
And the sudden, simultaneous muteness from Batman and Bruce Wayne would be a catastrophe. So Tim had to play both roles for now.
And that was hard, considering he was simply 18. Not 'only 18', because he'd proven that being 18 meant nothing less than, say, being 25. No, he was in no way 'only 18'. Just 'simply 18'. It was a fact. Not a privilege, but not a hindrance either.
He double tapped his earpiece once more. Static. He shook his head, standing up. It was late, and at the moment, he was a high schooler, nighttime vigilante, and CEO to a multibillion dollar company. He needed his rest.
He shot his grappling hook, and within a half hour he was dragging himself through the empty hallways of Wayne Manor. He held his mask in his hand as he climbed up the stairs to his bedroom. He already knew his shades were drawn (a habit he'd forced on himself), so he did not fear someone spotting him in half uniform.
Opening the door to his bedroom, he knew what he wanted to see. A clean, neat, OCD-approved, bedroom with vacuumed floors, alphabetized bookcases, and a bed made so tight you could bounce a coin off of it. That was what he was used to seeing. But instead, he entered a room of expected horror and mess.
Open files with papers spilling out of them lined his bed. His laptop was open, currently logged out, but Tim knew crime files were online waiting for him to obsess over. The floor was littered with photographs and broken equipment; things Tim had felt were important and recovered or photographed from the crime scene, before the police had arrived. His bookshelves and cases were out of order from his distracted reading and inattentive mission. He'd taken books down, flipped through them, and blindly put them back on the shelves without looking. It was things like that that he remembered as he was trying to fall asleep, and would bug and itch at him until he'd flip a light on and put his books back in order.
"Go to bed." he muttered to himself. "Go to bed. Go to bed. Go to bed."
Somehow, his speaking aloud to himself was supposed to do a better job at convincing him to listen to self reason. But even he knew he was speaking halfheartedly to himself, and he ignored reason. He closed his bedroom door (habit) and sat on the floor Indian style. There were so many photographs, papers, and scraps of equipment that his OCD threatened to take over and organize. But he pushed those thoughts to the back of his head, where he stored most of his childish and irrational thoughts and emotions.
He picked through the equipment, putting them into different piles. This was not irrational organizing, he reasoned, this was professional managing. Holding a scrap of ripped, black material, he knew immediately that it was part of the bat-suit. But he was never one to rely completely on himself, so after grabbing his laptop off of his bed and connecting to the batcave's main computer, he took his scanner out of his belt and ran an analysis test.
The test bleeped in 3.1 seconds and the results came back positive. This was a shred from Batman's suit. But while the material was sturdy, it was not so heavy. It was durable, strong enough to take on light to medium blows, very hard to rip, coated in fireproof material and had a stiffness to it that suggested not just lastingness, but a unintentional fashion statement as well. This was not a part of the suit itself, it was part of the cape. That fact made Tim feel better. When fighting strong or powered heroes, Batman often ripped his cape.
Better a ripped cape than a dislocated shoulder.
Batman's cape in particular was especially designed to aid him in fights against strong enemies. It was long, but did not stretch much, so in times of need, Batman could easily use it to choke enemies, cover their heads for a short time while he performed some form of attack, shield him against blows, explosions, and far off gunshots.
Ripped capes did not worry Tim.
His own cape, for example, was different. Batman usually handled the large and dangerous villains, and Tim mostly dealt with damage control. Something he silently protested, because he was just as skilled as Harley Quinn at this point, and everyday he was only getting better. But Batman gave the orders, and so he had no use of a heavy cape like Batman.
Instead, his cape was lightweight, stretchy, padded, and flexible. It's main purpose was to protect him against the elements and his environment. Fireproof, bulletproof, but lightweight enough not to slow him down, his cape could easily open up to slow his descent, matte so that it did not reflect light should he be hiding, soft enough to cushion him in case he fell backwards, and short enough so that villains could not use it to choke him or use it too much to their own advantage.
Batman's cape helped protect the innocent. Tim's cape helped protect him.
He set the ripped material to the side. A small bzzt made him turn his attention to a broken and now defective batarang. The black bat-shaped object was broken right down the middle and little white and blue sparks jumped out of the wires opening. Tim hadn't found the other half of the batarang at the crime scene, but he'd supposed that that really hadn't been an important object to obtain. He only took this piece because it reminded him that their had been a fight.
Clearly a struggle.
And the use of batarangs suggested that either Batman was fighting someone who he felt needed to be injured before he approached, or he had needed to turn off some electrical outlet, like a light, from afar. Finding the other half of the batarang would have helped Tim figure out more of the case, but since he hadn't been able to find it, this half of batarang told no story.
He set this aside too. A small tale was unfolding. Slowly, but surely. There had been no security tapes, no recorded audio, no outgoing or incoming transmissions. Just a blown warehouse. If Batman hadn't of disappeared, there would be no suggestions of an interesting crime at the scene at all.
Tim turned his attention to his computer. He went through the bat-computers records of criminals and matched that to the GCPD's records of jailed and escaped baddies from Arkham. The Joker was behind bars, but Harley wasn't, so that could mean something. Penguin wasn't behind bars, nor was Catwoman (who never had actually been caught, but was still wanted). The Creeper was lose, Scarecrow was lose, Two Face was lose, Poison Ivy was lose, and Killer Croc was lose. That was a whole gang escaped from Arkham.
In his spare time, perhaps he should look into upgrading and updating Arkham's security. Security was tight, but it was nowhere near perfect. And for so many villains to be lose right now meant it was further than he'd thought.
The grandfather clock in the main foyer downstairs chimed, signaling it was 3 o'clock, and with great self restraint, Tim cleaned up his room. It took him nearly an hour to get everything to a level of cleanness that he could sleep in, but once in bed, he lay restlessly, staring at his ceiling. His large room had scared him when he'd moved in, when he was 13. In just a few months time, he'd have been a Wayne for 5 years. And yet, he still felt like a Drake.
Which in all honesty meant nothing.
True, his parents had had money. But that was the only legacy they'd left him. His father had secretly been a crooked thief. And not even a thief worth mentioning. Compared to the thieves Tim faced, his father had been pathetic. Not even close to the big leagues. Not that that would have been something to be proud of, of course. He put criminals small and large alike behind bars.
But yet again, none of that mattered. His parents were dead. Poisoned some years back on a business trip by some Voo-Doo psycho. Batman had taken care of it, so he was told not to worry. But he couldn't help sometimes hating that he hadn't been apart of the takedown of his parents murderer. He'd already been Robin when the case was solved, but Batman felt he was too involved, and so like always, Tim had obeyed without a moment's hesitation.
How did he get on that train of thought? If he was going to be up all night, he needed to be thinking intelligently. He pushed his stupid childish thoughts to the back of his mind. He was no baby. His parents hadn't even loved him, really. They'd run off on their business trip and left him at a boarding school. And when they'd died, and he received the news in a letter, stuck in a dorm room with a boy who ate way too much cheese, he hadn't cried. He'd just folded the letter up, put it in his dresser, and went to class.
He was good at bottling his emotions.
But nevermind that, he told himself, think intelligently. Think about Bruce. What had he been doing in that warehouse?
Sooooo, what'd you think? Leave a review and let me know. PM me or just favorite and follow this story. Even though I've finished writing it, I still love feedback and inspiration, so don't leave me hanging dudes!
_TheForgottenName