FLASHBACK

"Hey Jaya, do you know the muffin man?"

"The muffin man?"

"Yeah, he lives on drooly lane."

"Ewwww!" Jaya scrunched up her nose and glared at her brother. "That's gross."

"Yeah, all the people who live there"-

She tackled him, and they both fell to the ground as she hit him with her tiny fists. "Stoppit. Gross."

Laughing, he just pushed her off him and stood up, grinning at her before grabbing her wrist and hauling her up off the ground. "All right, I won't finish."

She smiled at him and, for an instant, she saw herself reflected in his eyes and she looked like their mother. How strange. "I look like mama."

He blanched, and his face whitened. She froze as waves of feelings flowed over her, through her and yet they weren't a part of her, they were not her own thoughts. Whose were they? Guilt and overwhelming fear, the flash of a dozen black flying somethings in her mind. Her knees buckled and she crumpled to the ground, eyes wide. What's happening to me? What is this?

"J-Jaya?" Her brother's faltering voice answered everything.

"Calm, Bruce." she said in her mind, shoved hard at the feelings threatening to overwhelm her, drown her.

This time, it was his own eyes which widened and he visibly relaxed, his shaking gone and the color returning to his face. He knelt beside her and they stared at each other, speechless.

"It's all … gone."

"What?"

"Everything bad in my head. At least for now."

"Whadda's it mean?"

"It means you're …" he paused, and she looked at him worriedly-is it bad, what I did? I am bad?

"you're special," he finished with a slight smile.

It was the right thing to say. She beamed at him and opened her mouth to ask if they should tell Alfred, and instead what came out was "I'll make all the bad go away all the time then, okay?"

He gave her a sad half-smile, one side of his lips curling up a bit before his face slid back into its usual expressionless mask. It was only around her he laughed sometimes, and not very often. She'd been lucky today. But now all was back to normal.

Except somehow she felt what he did.

Whatever she could do, whatever it was, her ability to sense what he was thinking and push any bad thoughts away, even talk to him in her mind sometimes, only improved.