Veronica Peterson was six years old, and first grade was turning out to be difficult.

Sure, her teacher was nice. As usual, her 'ability' permitted her to traverse social obstacles with grace. And yeah, the environment in which she lived was rather the same shade and color and flavor as it had ever been.

But Veronica had jumped so rapidly from school district to school district, elementary school to elementary school, and kindergarten to kindergarten, that some of her basic foundation skills were sub par. When she brought home her first poor grade on a homework assignment, her father took an interest in rectifying the situation. Mr. Peterson inspected her handiwork, and listened to her vent her troubles, and realized he'd done a gross disservice in moving her around so much. So it happened that he set to tutoring her.

"That's good," he encouraged. "V-e-r... now do the 'o'..."

Veronica concentrated hard on her lined paper, on which she had been practicing her letters. She carefully sketched out the n-i-c-a that concluded her name, and earned a loving squeeze from her parent. He'd paid close attention to her reading and writing, which were the areas in which she had suffered the most, and her numbers, where she had suffered the least. The two of them would read her school books together.

One thing Veronica liked about the current state of affairs was that her father would take her out to visit the state metro-parks on the weekends. There, he would tutor her in science and ensure she received plenty of exercise. He brought her to see caves, canoe in rivers, catch frogs, play jump rope, ride bicycles, hopscotch, collect leaves, watch birds, and enjoy the flowers. When the rain trapped them inside their house instead, he put playing cards into her hands and taught her to do little magic tricks and sleight of hand. Now of course Veronica had always been close with her father, but these new activities gave her a lot to look forward to and helped balm the sting of so many moves.

For the first time since Marcy Adams, Veronica Peterson's life felt like it was at peace. Her only regret was that, this time, her father didn't seem as interested in getting involved with the school. But why? Perhaps he had invested too much of himself in Marcy Adam's educational institution, and couldn't bring himself to conjure a repeat performance. Instead, he occasionally showed up near the school to keep an eye on her, particularly during recess and gym.

Veronica never liked it when her father came; He watched her with dark eyes, neither smiling nor waving. If she smiled or waved at him, he would usually duck out of sight. She knew the other kids found him creepy. The whole experience unsettled her. She asked her father about this habit one evening, but he cleverly steered her out of the subject over and over again. He was good at changing topics. Veronica learned from him and experimented on her classmates and teachers; it turned out she was good at changing topics, too, if she practiced at it.

She didn't like her father's unrest, though. She felt like someone other than her father came to watch her on the school playground. And in those times, the school fences felt like prison walls, only she couldn't tell who they we trying to contain. The thought of that scared her, but she didn't tell him so. She was more afraid of what might happen if he didn't come. There was a part of Veronica that suspected her dad really needed her.


Collaboration Tables were neat inventions. An enormous touch pad of sorts, they were designed for the meeting rooms of large, paperless, corporate enterprises. Twenty pairs of hands—or more, depending on the size—could engage with the surface all at once, whether to call up digital documents from the cloud, or collaborate on a large 3D projections. A well-designed table had no set '3D sweet spot' meaning that the surface appeared three dimensional no matter where a person was sitting or standing.

Mr. Wayne's collaboration table had cost him a pretty penny. It was larger than his grand dining table, and had more computational power than some ISPs.

Of course he didn't really need the collaboration aspect of it, because fewer than five people had ever touched it. And sometimes the 3D illusion was a bit of a distraction—especially to a man who was so good at detecting illusions and seeing through them. But the real reason for owning such a fantastic table was that he could splay out the whole of the digital domain on a physical surface, draw relationships between it's elements, and manipulate data and documents by hand without ever printing them out. That table was for one man and one man only ( well, okay, Fox used it, too ), and he presently had countless bits of information strewn across the whole of it.

Bruce stormed around the table, throwing documents violently back and forward, drawing relationships and then striking them from existence, pulling up files and websites and documents only to smack his hands in frustration down against the glass a moment later. He needed a clue. This sudden disappearance act had been unnervingly perfect; the 'Adams household' had simply disappeared into thin air. Or, more accurately, into an escape tunnel leading into the sewers. Bruce thought back across the whole of the last year, once again scraping through memories he had already scoured religiously for hide or hair of his quarry. Left bereft of lead, he started dwelling on even older and more violent times.

"You're making yourself sick over this," Alfred protested softly. Bruce glanced up and found himself wondering if his old butler had aged at all, or if the man were simply immortal. Alfred had been old when Bruce was a child, and he seemed precisely the same as ever now. "Master Wayne," he pleaded.

"It's here, I know it is," Bruce told him with a sigh. "I'm not looking for it right, but it's here."

"What, sir?"

Bruce said nothing, gritting his teeth and shaking his head with irritation.

"A clue on where to find your long dead nemesis?"

"I know what I saw, Alfred. And everything since has proved me right." In one light.

Alfred frowned, taken aback at this stretch of the truth. "You are looking for the Joker. That unfortunate character perished five years ago, sir. You watched it with your own eyes, you did."

"I've watched him 'die' many times before that, only for him to show up again soon afterward," Bruce Wayne muttered.

"For God's sake, Bruce. He was buried. You and Commissioner Gordon had the body tested, and had a positive DNA identification. That was the Joker—what was left of him. And you believe that a couple of-"

"It was just another trick," the bat disagreed with a raised voice. "One of millions, and no stranger than any!"

Alfred was silent a very long moment.

Bruce glanced at him and then winced slightly, because the look on Alfred's face told him that he sounded possessed and irrational. But that face had been unmistakable, even without the tell-tale scars, and 'Mr. Adam's' reaction to seeing him had been proof enough in its own right. Well, Alfred had put up with worse obsessions before, and he'd put up with this one.

"I see, sir," said Alfred at last, his tone making it very clear that he disapproved. Then, surprisingly, he did not leave. "Do you remember the movie, 'A Beautiful Mind,' sir?"

Bruce lifted a brow, slightly amused. "Ready to turn me in to the men in white coats, Alfred?" he asked with a wry smirk.

"Here you stand with newspapers plastered over your table tops and walls, drawing lines between every missing child case in the country, circling phrases in articles as 'clues,' chasing blind correlations through countless unrelated bank accounts..."

"The Joker was one of the most dangerous and destructive creatures I ever faced. He was a danger to Gotham, to the country, to everything and every one he came in contact with. Even though the circumstances of his reappearance are bizarre, it is still my duty to follow any lead I find, to find him and put a stop to him."

"... And yet your foundation claim for this wild goose chase, sir," the butler continued, and it seemed as if he was holding back tears of frustration and concern, "is that your infamously destructive Joker... has lived out the last five years quietly and harmlessly... posing as an average man, a father, and a fervent contributor to a Parent-Teacher Association."

Bruce held Alfred's distressed stare for a very long moment. He let the insane sound of these claims sink into him, down to his bones. But, all the same, he calmly nodded.

"Alfred, I'm not doing this because the story sounds plausible," he said as evenly as he could. "If I was, I would have killed myself following a thousand leads that came out right after his 'death.'" Bruce leaned back from the table. "I'm doing this because I made eye contact with my mirrored opposite, with the Joker, and we knew each other instantaneously. There was no doubt. I hadn't any real uncertainty. I saw him there that day, and he fled with a little girl, and now I need to figure out why."

"But-"

"Think about it. Why did he run if he didn't recognize me? Why did his 'house' have an escape tunnel into the sewers? Among the possessions I found in the warehouse were explosives, knives, makeup kits, and unusual quantities of green glitter. The Joker found out that Batman and Bruce Wayne were one and the same, and the only reason he never revealed that information was because he enjoyed 'playing' with me too much. But he would have easily recognized me and known I'd recognized him, and that is exactly why he ran. It was him."

Alfred looked at him. And Alfred thought to himself: 'You will never settle down and just be happy, will you? You stand there still so strong and young, so sure of yourself, but possessed of such a terrible dark flame.' The old butler let out a resigned sigh. "Very well, Master Wayne. But perhaps if your 'Mr. Adams' is going to continue behaving so contrary to regular expectations, you might try and ascribe a motive to him."

Wayne looked back to the table. "I'll ask him when I find him."

"Not what I meant, sir. You are looking for an effect in those papers, but you haven't guessed at a cause."

"All I know is that he's managing to hold on to some money, and that he stole a girl."

"That's not quite true, sir." Bruce glanced back at him. "You know he stole a girl he was sending to elementary school."

"I've already run ten thousand school picture databases against the girl's face. She isn't showing up."

"Sir, education here in America is mandatory. If a child goes missing from a school, now that's a big thing. It attracts attention. People put their faces on walls and milk cartons. If he runs away at the toss if a dime... but he doesn't want to leave behind a string of missing child claims... Then he has to call back and formally withdraw her within a reasonable time-frame. It's not a lightning-fast process, either. Might even have to fax in some forms, sir."

Bruce hesitated. He looked down at his table, eyes wide. How the devil had he missed that?

Well, Alfred was the only one of them who had raised a child.

He leaped back to the table with renewed vigor.