"Am I a good man?" Dick asked, his voice flat and hollow, as he looked in the mirror. Despite the padding, the suit of Batman made him feel like a little boy playing dress-up in his father's clothes.

Alfred adjusted his cowl minutely. "You're an upstanding young man, Master Grayson, and any family would be proud to have you."

"But am I a good one?"

Alfred clapped him on the shoulder. "I believe that is a question you must answer for yourself."

The Batmobile rotated into view. Of the dozen or so Bruce kept on hand, it was one of the more fearsome, all wicked fins and chiropteran contours. It came online, console lights glowing, engine revving up, afterburner jet igniting. Dick stepped into the light of its flames, feeling the heat on his face overtaken the dankness of the cave.

"Will you be needing anything else tonight, Master Grayson?"

"No, Alfred." Dick climbed into the cockpit, careful not to sit on his cape. "That will be all."


The storm clouds gathered over Gotham coalesced, blotting out the moon. Streetlights came on, fighting valiantly against the darkness. And deep in the bowels of the city, the guttural roar of the devil's car was heard.

It was a well-known fact that you didn't go out in Gotham after dark. You didn't. Even drivers lived in fear of carjackers, so the streets were relatively clear. Dick drove twice the speed limit, easily dodging the sparse traffic. No pursuits in progress on the Batmobile's computer, which received items from the police scanner and categorized them for his perusal. But there was a report of a pawn shop being robbed on East McEntire. He could make it in two minutes. Once there, he killed the lights in an alleyway half a mile away and set the hologram, turning the Batmobile from a death-ride into an odd collection of garbage bags and dumpsters.

From there, he took to the rooftops. The grapple-gun worked fine and his hearing worked better. It was like a sixth sense, relying on your five senses. This time, Dick heard the crunch of their feet fleeing, the panting exhale of their breath, the detritus they disturbed in their wild flight. He moved off, leaping from roof to roof. Didn't even need a de-cel line. He caught up to them in the shadow of a meat-packing plant. They stopped to catch their breaths and Dick gave them a bare moment to wallow in fear, playing the yowling cat sound effect from his belt.

"What was that?" one of the two asked. Music to my ears.

Dick moved in, shadowing them as they ran into the moon of jaundiced light from a streetlamp. There they tried to act nonchalant, one of them looking at a pile of wooden milk crates as if trying to determine if they would make a good seat. He was more out-of-shape than the other. Abandoning stealth, Dick was among them in the blink of an eye. He flipped the athlete into the milk crates, smashing them to bits with a sound like bones breaking.

As soon as he'd moved the slob had gone for his gun, so in the same motion as the judo flip Dick kicked the gun out of his hand, up into the streetlamp. It broke, cascading small bits of glass onto Dick's cowl and shoulders. The strobing light lit him demonically, an effect so frightful that Dick let it take hold for the few seconds it took for the slob to take him in before making a break for it. Dick didn't let him get far. His arm shot out, grabbing the slob by the collar, and bashing his face against the stalk of the street lamp. He slumped to the ground to join his partner in unconscious.

Dick handcuffs the two of them to the streetlamp and remote-called the Batmobile to him. Once it got there, he pulled a bulb from the trunk and screwed it into the street lamp. The new light source cast a bat-signal on the cuffed thugs, spotlighting them for Gotham's Finest to collect. An oldie, practically Year One, but a goodie.

Satisfied with himself, Dick climbed back into the Batmobile and drove off. Those two would swear up and down that there was no way Batman was in the hospital that night. But he had more impressions to make.


"I'm Batman," Dick said into the rear-view mirror as he drove. Voice a low rasp. It didn't sound right.

"I'm Batman." Kory had been right. He had no idea she had felt that way, which made her doubly right. The thought that he could so casually hurt someone and just stroll away… he'd known supervillains like that. Hell, he'd known superheroes like that. After Roy had gone through detox, Dick had sworn he would never be like Ollie. Never treat someone less than human. Bang-up job so far, Grayson. Blockbuster he'd treated as a cockroach to be exterminated, Tarantula he'd treated as a scapegoat for his own guilt, and Kory he'd been treating as a sex doll for longer than he cared to think about.

"I'm Batman." What about those robbers? Had he injured them? Paralyzed them? Killed them, even? He didn't know. He felt sure that he hadn't, but his certainty was eroding by the moment. Sure, he thought he had used the minimum amount of force necessary, but what if he had miscalculated. He hadn't thought he was hurting Kory either. He had to know for sure.

It was still early, the crime board was dark. Dick sent the Batmobile into a rolling 180 and took off back the way he came.


The Batmobile pulled up at the curb. The robbers weren't covered in blood or unearthly pale, which was a good sign, but Dick hopped out of the cockpit to check their vitals anyway.

"Returning to the scene of the crime?" Catwoman asked in her intimidatingly husky voice. She was reclining on the streetlamp's arm in a Cheshire cat pose, lazily letting a hand dip into the light cast by the lamp. "I've tried it. Not that hot."

"Selina," Dick said, not sure if that's what Bruce would say or not.

Catwoman hung from the streetlamp by her knees like a preschooler on a jungle gym. It brought her to eye-level with Dick, breasts bouncing a little. Which Dick was sure was part of the intended effect. "You have me at a disadvantage. You know my name but I don't know yours."

"I'm Bat-"

"Puh-lease." Catwoman reached down and stroked the unconscious robbers across their bruised chins. "Bruce would've taken them down in four seconds, you took twelve. You showboated."

Dick considered saying something in protest, but the fact of the matter was that she was right. But here it served a purpose. He needed for there to be word about Batman out, but he needed for it to be nonchalant too… as if nothing had happened in the past twenty-four hours to throw him off his game. Jesus, where were the days when he just had to defend himself from giant-prop-wielding clowns while Batman punched the Joker?

"I'm right, aren't I?" Selina was now sitting on the headlight of the Batmobile, seeming to get some satisfaction from the warmth of the light against her crotch. Dick raised an eyebrow. Barbara had mentioned that chicks dug the car… "So, who are you, v2.0? An imitator or an officially-licensed replica?"

"I'm Batman," Dick shot out like the word cut his throat.

"You certainly are," Selina said as she gave him a once-over. "Obstruction of justice, conspiracy to commit, aiding and abetting… I like you already."

"So you're going to help?"

Selina rolled over the hood of the Batmobile into a fifties cheesecake pin-up pose. "You're not as much fun as your predecessor. I need a straight man to play off of; you're in on the joke."

"I'm nothing like you."

"Now you sound like him," Catwoman said, dismissively rolling her wrist. "But if I'm to help you with your little identity crisis, what's in it for me?"

"Name your price," Dick said without hesitation, taking a step next to the Batmobile.

Catwoman rolled next to him, now sitting on the edge of the hood, legs splayed so he was in-between her thighs. "Oh, I'm sure we can think of some reasonable compensation…" Selina drolled, tracing the symbol on his chest with a single clawed finger.

"Funny. You'd think people would pay you for that pleasure." Their banter wasn't very Dark Knight-y, but it was less stifling than… everything else.

"Oh, they have. Make sure you have some of those Bat-Cuffs on hand, 'honeybunny'." And with an acrobatic handspring, she was off and running into the night.

Dick shook his head. He knew Catwoman well enough to know that blackmailing men into sex was way beneath her. Her real price was in there, couched in something else, but he would pay it gladly if it got Bruce off the hook. Hopefully she didn't need any internal organs he was overly fond of.


It was like the city was holding its collective breath. The few crimes he'd foiled were pitiably low-profile. Of all the nights for Gotham to have a low crime rate. The city's perverse sense of humor knew no end. With nothing better to do, Dick angled the Batmobile toward Arkham. If Poison Ivy had a scheme in the offing, it was a guarantee that one person would know the game plan.

The lights of the city, such as they were, gave way to what meager starlight could make it through the pollution. Trees battered by the wind. Pine needles falling. I have to stop thinking about it Dick thought. He's thought of Blockbuster's oversized head bursting open so many times that he could give a presentation on it. Like a conspiracy theorist on the JFK assassination. Where the bullet entered, where it came out, what it passed through… even the caliber. He actually went back and looked that up. .45 Parabellum. Pretty standard stuff. Not at all exotic.

I have to stop thinking about it. Does Two-Face think about it, when he kills someone? Does he obsess over it or does he let it go? Christ. Maybe he belongs up here, with the crazies. Maybe he always belonged here.

He parked the car and got out, smelling it in the air. Madness.


"I ain't telling you nothing about Mr. J!" Harley said, shaking her head. She was playing gangster moll today, her blonde hair in curls. The hospital scrubs (or whatever they are) have black crayon marks down the front and sides and back, like a zoot suit. Dick had read her file. She wasn't allowed to have her crayon if she wrote on the walls, but the suit was okay.

"I don't want to know about Joker," Dick growled. He wasn't supposed to be there, but if anyone was even looking through the security camera to wonder who Harley was talking to, they didn't care. "I want to know about Poison Ivy."

"Red?" Harley squealed, excited. "Is she planning something? Are a lotta people gonna die?"

"You tell me."

"Red doesn't tell me anything. Well, she does, but that's because she likes to monologue. Blah blah blah, despoilers of the earth this, rapists of the rain forest that. No wonder she only works with Feraks, they're the only ones who could put up with her yammering! 'Cept for me!" She smiled winningly.

"You're a smart girl."

"Ph. D!"

"I'm sure you can put the puzzle pieces together. Remember something."

Harley quirked her eyebrows, suspicious. "What's with you tonight? You're not acting mean or nuthin'. Usedta be you would've threatened to mess with my meds if I didn't tell you stuff." Her baby-doll voice was getting old fast.

"I loosened up. Went to a spa."

She laughed, giggled, hit the wall so hard it shook. "That's funny! Mr. J was wrong about you, you do have a sense of humor!"

"What's Ivy planning?"

"Stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Ivy stuff." Harley pressed herself suddenly against the glass, making a face at Dick.

His eyes narrowed. "You want me to mess with your meds? Keep it up. Dopatrixine, odelaine, rotamine…"

"No, no, I'll be good, promise!"

"Tell me what I need to know."

"Kellner. The plane guys. She doesn't like 'em."

"I already know that. Why doesn't she like them? EPA likes them just fine…"

"They built their plant on the old forest land."

Dick remembered. Thornton Pharmaceutical cleared that forest five years ago. They folded in one year. Although Batman had stopped Ivy's plot against them, he'd also exposed corporate fraud all the way up to the boardroom. Since then, the industrial park they'd been constructing had laid half-finished… until Kellner moved in to resuscitate it.

"Kellner didn't chop down those trees."

"Red don't care. They're still profiting off of it. That makes them equally guilty. Aiding and abetting, just like me with Mr. J."

Dick gritted his teeth. Of all the…! Why did the crazies have to be so crazy? "You know what she has planned?"

"Nope!"

"Do you know when it's going down?"

"No! But she did say it had sumpthin to do with the launch tomorrow…"

Launch… the test flight of Kellner's new passenger plane. Dick had seen the press release, accompanied by a photo of a former astronaut grinning with the announcement that he would be flying. Its hover-system was adapted from alien technology provided by Tamaranian refugees, providing a safer and faster flight. He remembered it as pillow-talk. Kory had tended the deal in exchange for a place for her people to colonize on Earth. Right now they were somewhere in New Mexico, in a reservation they were terraforming into a replica in miniature of Tamaran. He'd visited once. Nice place to raise a family.

"Do you know anything else?"

"Red said if I helped her, we could play dress-up!"

Dick sighed. Cajoling information out of her was like herding cats. It was easy with the crazies who were just… well, crazy, not crazy. They could be bribed, threatened. People like Harley, sometimes their psyches were so fractured that the information just wasn't there.

"Thanks for your time, Quinn," Dick said, turning to leave. His cape billowed. "I'll show myself out."


"Hey Current Dark Knight."

Dick had been wondering if it was too soon for him and Barbara to be starting in with the pet names again. Apparently not.

"Hey Hacker Wonder," he said with a warmth he didn't feel. "What's shaking?"

"Look. Up in the sky."

Dick did. What he saw up there he would've sworn up and down would never be seen again.

Someone had turned the Bat-Signal on.

He'd heard that Akins had destroyed it. Smashed the spotlight in with a sledgehammer and thrown it in a junkyard. A janitor had swept up the glass. Seeing the light back in the sky made him feel good again. Made him feel like he belonged. He put the pedal down to answer the call.


Red Hood didn't look very heroic. Oh, the domino mask was vintage superhero, but the black leather jacket, the turtleneck under it, the black jeans, the steel-tipped boots… he didn't look sleek or cool or retro. He looked dangerous.

Jason liked looking dangerous. Even with the red hood kinda ruining the effect, but that was an in-joke for him and the family. He couldn't be head-to-toe Matrix because he wasn't just some creep with a .45 and sunglasses. He was a superhero. He needed to sell it a little.

Like a lance, the beacon shot up into the sky and burst against a cloud. The Bat-Signal, like lightning shooting inside the cloud it hit. With a scowl, Red Hood started towards it. If no one else would answer, he would. And if someone did answer, he would answer them.

The Bat would not leave a legacy.