Dark Knight of the Soul
She is my city. I hear her voice on the night wind as I lie in my bed far away. I put my true face on over my mask and I come to her. She is my mother and my bride and one day she will be my murderer. For now, I watch over her.
The night is clear and the moon is full as I roam my city's dark places. I do not go where the lights burn bright and her favoured children play. I hunt the underbelly where her orphans and rejects huddle. I remove her parasites and vermin, I am a cleanser.
Always I am drawn back to this place, this crooked narrow street. This is the womb where I was born, and I can never come to my city without paying homage here. Usually, all is dark and quiet, but tonight there is something different, something wrong. There are strange sounds and lights, shouts and screams. Evil has come again to this place, but this time, I am here.
In the alley are three people – kids, no more than seventeen or eighteen – two boys and a girl. The girl is small and slender with a long brown plait; both the boys are tall, though the red-haired one is taller than the dark one. They stand back to back, holding sticks in their hands. Surrounding them are a dozen figures, all adults, cloaked and masked in white, also holding sticks. They shout words, and flashes of light and flame fly from the sticks, to scatter against silvery shields. The kids are also shouting words and firing light and flame. Magic, then; I've dealt with magic before, it doesn't worry me.
The kids are doing well, two of their attackers are already down. But they're outnumbered, and their opponents are full-grown. In my experience, the stronger side of a fight is never the good side. In my book, people who attack kids are always wrong. There is no need to hesitate or watch.
The darts leave my hand, and four more white robes fall. In the time it takes me to cross from one roof to another, the kids take two more down. But the girl has fallen and now the boys stand over her. I sling a line down and hoist a white-robe up to me, leaving him huddled and broken on the rooftop. The others are looking around them now, searching for the new danger. There is fear in something striking from the dark, but now is the time for terror. I let them see me.
Some of them know me. I hear my name called in a high wail and I am on them. One goes down straight away. A blast sears past my shoulder as one of the kids sends another into the gutter. The last one faces me, yelling insults. He's British, so he probably doesn't realise what's going to happen to him. He's a big man, but he still wants to use his wand. He's too close to me for that and his arm gives a satisfying crack as I take it off him. Something inside tells me to stop with the arm. I ignore it.
I turn back to the kids. The redhead boy bends to the girl and casts a spell. She stirs and he helps her to her feet, tenderly. I can see how things are between these two and it gives me a pang of warmth – a rare thing to be treasured. The dark boy is watching me. His eyes are vivid green and the look in them is familiar – I see it every day in the mirror.
I ask him his name and he tells me – Harry Potter. I tell him mine and he says he knows, he's read about me in the 'Muggle' papers. I ask what a Muggle is and he says someone like me, not a wizard or witch. While we talk, he searches the body of the big wizard until he finds something – a heavy, old medallion with Celtic script around a dragon.
Harry tells me about the war he's fighting in. About a Dark wizard, the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters who want to plunge the wizard world into darkness, then attack my world. He tells me how this Dark Lord has hidden fragments of his soul in various objects – horcruxes, he calls them – and that the medallion, which once belonged to Merlin, is one of them. Harry needs to destroy the medallion, but there's a scroll that says no force of Earth can break it.
Well, I know a force that isn't of Earth and can break anything. I turn my face up to the sky and call His name. He hears me, He hears everything, and He's suddenly there. He comes when I call, not because we're friends – we're not – but because we are on the same side in the same fight, even if our weapons and methods are different. He knows Harry by sight, which doesn't surprise me but does Harry. We explain about the medallion and He takes it in His hand and stares at it. Heatflash. The sound of a long, thin scream and molten metal hisses as it hits the street. He nods once and is gone, only the flying papers and the girl's hair whipping in the wind to show His passage.
Harry's eyes still trouble me, so I ask him and learn that the Dark Lord killed his parents, tried to kill him. So I take him further down the alley, away from his friends, to the spot where it happened. I tell him how I was born here in the flash of twin gunshots, her pearls rolling and bouncing along the sidewalk as everything I was, and had been, and might have been, ran into the gutter with their life's blood. I tell him some, but not all, of what I've been since, and I see the pain in his eyes and I'm pleased because I know it's for me, not himself. I don't need his compassion, but he does.
I ask him if he has a home, and he tells me about a gloomy old house in London where an odd little creature waits loyally for him. Then he tells me about another house; a rambling, ramshackle home deep in the English countryside. A place full of poor but generous people who've taken him to their hearts and made him one of their own and I realise he's talking about his real home. I ask if he has anyone to love and he says maybe and glances at his friends – the boy not the girl – and I smile. His best friend's sister, of course, and I feel sure of him now. When I ask him what he'll do after the war, he tells me what an Auror is, but he also talks about a home and a family and that's what matters.
Then he tells me he should use magic to erase my memories of tonight. But he says that he might not win this war, and if he doesn't, some Muggles at least need to know about the Dark Lord and be ready to fight him if we need to. I tell him I won't tell anyone unless the need arises and he nods.
We go back to his friends. They say goodbye and thank you like polite English kids, then turn on the spot and vanish with a bang. The place is dark and quiet again. I go to a high place and look out over the city.
She is my city. I hear her voice on the night wind as I lie in my bed far away. I put my true face on over my mask and I come to her. She is my mother and my bride and one day she will be my murderer. For now, I watch over her. Her name is Gotham, and I am the Batman.