The height of summer came and went, at least according to the calendar, but the intense heat refused to let up. Gotham suffered from several hundred-degree-plus afternoons over the next month, including a stretch of four days in a row that prompted the Mayor to institute extra precautions for the Labor Day parade downtown, in fear of heat stroke or exhaustion among the crowd. The spell was broken periodically by a heavy thunderstorm, but in the aftermath the pavement steamed as the water evaporated and the temperatures climbed back into the eighties or nineties, even as the sun was setting. The overnight lows were categorically higher than average as well, leaving Bruce feeling like he was trapped in a steam sauna inside the armor. He knew that six months from now, when his fingers and toes were going numb from single-digit temperatures at night, he'd be thinking back fondly of the summer—but for now, it was miserable.
Robin didn't seem to be as affected, although that might have been because his suit was an illusion rather than several layers of reinforced Kevlar. Or, perhaps, the novelty of reading lessons was still overshadowing anything else. For whatever reason, though, Robin was irrepressibly happy for weeks on end, bouncing around the Manor grounds in spite of the heavy, humid air and burning sun, chasing squirrels at the edge of the woods or snatching tiny fish out of the slow-moving creek in the southwest corner of the property. Bruce was temporarily uneasy, until he confirmed that Robin was not killing anything, but rather catching the animals for the sheer joy of the challenge and then immediately releasing them to go chase something else.
"It's rather like watching a new puppy," Alfred had admitted once, looking through a large window in the sitting room. "So much energy."
Bruce had glanced up from his newspaper to follow Alfred's gaze. Outside, Robin was dangling upside down by his knees from a tree-branch, a good fifteen feet off the ground, swinging back and forth and—apparently—holding a spirited conversation with a black and white woodpecker that was staring intently at him from a lower branch. It wouldn't have seemed that strange, albeit monumentally dangerous for a normal child, save for the fact that the little bird occasionally chirped back, as if it understood him.
"Puppies," Bruce said, with a wry twist to his mouth, "eventually wear themselves out and sleep, at some point."
Alfred conceded the point with a slight tilt of his shoulders. "Maybe he's getting it out of his system now, so that he can sit still at dinner."
Bruce didn't think that was likely to happen, but he left Alfred with his illusions intact and went back to his paper. He found a local fluff piece about an old, reopening diner and set it aside for Robin's daily reading lesson. They'd progressed from the alphabet to basic sentences in a remarkably short time, but with a distinct lack of children's books laying around the Manor Bruce had been forced to improvise. He would start Robin on old mission reports by the end of the week, if his progress continued at this rate.
Reading wasn't the only thing Robin picked up quickly, either. Prior to the breakout at Arkham, Robin had been exposed mostly to street crime or the occasional gang-related activity, which required reacting in the moment to a situation already in progress. There wasn't a great deal of planning ahead that could be done, if you weren't sure what the city was going to throw at you on any given night. (Bruce's solution, of course, was to plan for everything, which was more a product of his own need for control than actually useful, and he knew it.) With real villains to chase, a different approach was needed, and Robin finally got the opportunity to showcase some real problem-solving skills for the first time.
It was just after Labor Day. To Bruce's surprise, the parade had gone off without a hitch, and the rest of that week remained quiet all around. It made him nervous, like knowing there was a deadly spider in the room but being unable to find it. A holiday parade was exactly the sort of public, family-friendly activity he'd expect the Joker to ruin, but the clown was a no-show. With Bane having vanished—from the city, if not from Bruce's thoughts—the Joker had to be Bruce's first priority, but ever since the Arkham breakout there had been no sign of him, either. What could the Joker be planning that could keep his attention for the better part of a month?
Then a string of robberies and break-ins occurred over a period of several days, linked only by the fact that the thief had gotten past fingerprint locks, retinal scanners, and voice print ID's without triggering any alarms or leaving any sign of tampering in the systems. In each case, the records indicated that an authorized person—one of them actually the company CEO—had been the culprit. Even the cameras agreed, in the locations that had them.
"Clayface?" Robin asked, when Bruce showed him a copy of the video feed that Gordon had procured for them. It showed a pharmaceutical rep copying proprietary information from the secure file vault, while on another screen a different video with the same time stamp showed the same person standing in line at a gas station convenience store on the way home from work.
"Clayface," Bruce agreed. "He must have picked up some new skills in Arkham—he couldn't copy fine details like fingerprints or retina patterns, before. Just visible features."
Robin frowned and reached out, touching the computer monitor with the tip of one index finger. "Does he have to copy from a person?" he asked. The screen flickered, and Bruce's enhanced sense of smell picked up the slightest hint of ozone, like a lightning strike. A small blue spark jumped from the screen to Robin's finger, and he hissed at it in response, like a warning. The machine beeped once and then stilled. "The computer keeps pictures—that's how it matches them to the people, right? So maybe he could look close enough at those to see?"
Bruce thought for a moment. "He's copied actors from film before. I don't see why he couldn't copy from a computer file." He slid his rolling chair across to the recent-events filing cabinet, and began pulling reports. "If we can figure out how he's getting access to the computers, we can tell which places he's prepped to hit."
"We'll have his target list," Robin agreed. He grinned. "Then we just have to get there first."
Of course, finding Clayface wasn't the only problem; he was almost impossible to keep in custody. Bruce spent the better part of an hour explaining the difficulties involved in trapping a person who could more or less melt into a puddle and slide under a locked door, let alone out of handcuffs or through bars. They couldn't knock him out, either, because the fluid nature of his natural form absorbed most impacts and shrugged off all the knockout gases Bruce had tried—not that Bruce wanted to gamble on the unconsciousness lasting long enough to get him back to his specially-designed cell in Arkham, anyway.
Once they located Clayface's next target—a chemistry lab doing medical research—it became a matter of stakeouts and planning. Robin was confident that he would be able to spot Clayface, even if he was wearing a different face. He couldn't satisfactorily explain how, but he said he'd be able to smell the molecular breakdown in Carlo's cells, the same way he could smell old, cold crystal on Clark even after twenty-five years on this planet. (He tried to teach Bruce, but nothing came of it except a few sneezing fits, a dubious look from Clark, and Alfred's quiet head-shake.)
It was during the second long night of watching the soon-to-be-robbed chemistry lab parking lot that Robin came up with the plan—one so simple, and so obvious in hindsight, that Bruce was actually mad at himself for missing it: They could use the lab facility itself as a temporary prison, by activating the bio-hazard containment system. A room designed to prevent the spread of bacteria or dangerous substances would have no trouble keeping Clayface inside, at least long enough for the police to arrive with the airtight holding tank they'd used to transport him to and from his court hearings.
Granted, Robin hadn't come right out and said, "I know! Let's use the chemistry lab for its bio-hazard containment system," probably because he didn't know what some of those words meant until Bruce explained the plan. But it had been Robin who had talked Bruce around to the idea.
What Robin had actually said was, "Somebody has to have a way of keeping liquids or gases locked inside a room. Like the Scarecrow guy! Didn't you say that all those chemicals and toxins and gases he uses can be really dangerous?"
Bruce had made the leap to the bio-hazard containment system from there, which made the actual capture of Clayface almost absurdly easy. Robin identified the body Carlo was using, Bruce maneuvered him into a secure lab, and Robin hit the angry red CONTAMINANT! button. Then it was just a matter of baby-sitting Clayface, ignoring his threats and insults until Gordon got there and they could slip away.
Using details of the situation to theorize a criminal's methods, and then extrapolating data from one problem to help solve a different one—both of those marked a significant step forward in Robin's abilities. Gordon had seemed strangely proud of him, too, when Robin told the story to him a few days after the fact. Robin was practically beaming, running his words together in excitement—although Bruce suspected that had been prompted more by the need to distract Gordon from asking too many questions about the start of the new school year than any real desire to impress him.
Bruce began to think that his half-baked idea to have Robin take over for him, after his death, might not be quite as impossible as it had once sounded. Quietly, without bringing attention to what he was doing, he began to expand Robin's training, under the guise of reading lessons or case file memorization, to include things like proper investigative techniques and long-term strategy. He began to explain how the Cave's lab analysis equipment worked, if not the science behind it. They were already doing situational awareness and threat determination drills, as a part of Robin's regular combat training, but now Bruce added logic puzzles, observation and memory-sharpening techniques, and some emergency first aid. He even got Robin to try meditation, as long as Bruce agreed they could do it on the Manor's roof, under the stars.
Whether it was the new knowledge and capabilities themselves, or simply the attitude adjustment Bruce had made—as Selina insisted, every time she ran into him, which seemed to be happening with alarming frequency of late, as if she was worried that without regular updates about Ivy Bruce would just show up at her penthouse apartment looking for a fight—it became easier and easier to think of Robin as human. Bruce stopped warning him about not leaving the Manor grounds, and started scolding him for not wearing any shoes in the garden and leaving muddy footprints in the kitchen after a storm. He stopped worrying about Robin breaking vases or destroying furniture because he was bored, and started warning him to quit running in the house, unless he wanted to fall and hurt himself.
The first time that had happened, Bruce had actually had a mini crisis about it. Robin was about as likely to trip and fall while running as Bruce was to voluntarily retire the Bat and live a quiet life in the suburbs. Even if he did trip for some unfathomable reason, a fall couldn't possibly hurt someone who had a tendency to casually jump off three-story buildings without the aid of a grapple or a gliding cape. The words had just come out, almost like a reflex—and that wasn't a reflex Bruce had ever expected to have, or need. It had stopped him in his tracks, uncertain and uncomfortable. When asked, Alfred just raised his elegant eyebrows and went about his business. Selina, on the other hand, thought it was hilarious, although it wasn't clear which part she found funnier—the reflex itself, or Bruce's mild panic at discovering it.
In mid-September Bruce finally broke down and got a television for Robin's room, like he'd thought about since the beginning. Bruce might be sleeping less than he had before, which had been fairly little even then, but he did still need a few hours every night. He probably shouldn't have felt guilty about leaving Robin to wander a sleeping Manor alone, but he did, and Robin wasn't quite ready for full-length novels yet—he'd have woken Bruce up every fifteen minutes with a vocabulary question. So early-morning television it was; even if it was mostly infomercials, it had to be better than staring at the walls.
Once Robin got the hang of how the TV set worked, though, Bruce began to find him draped over the back of a couch in the living room at all hours of the day and night, clicking through channels. Robin initially didn't seem to have a preference for one type of entertainment over the other, but instead had a tendency to study them all, cartoons and documentaries and soap operas alike, as if worried that there was going to be some kind of test later.
Sometimes, if Bruce wasn't busy or needed at the office, he would pause on his way through the room and sit for ten minutes, or thirty, or an hour, answering Robin's endless questions. Somewhere around the end of the first week, Bruce noticed that Robin had begun laughing at the sitcom or late-night talk show jokes along with the studio audience, which was something of a shock. Bruce hadn't been sure, until then, that Robin was capable of recognizing mortal culture and customs enough to understand those kinds of jokes, let alone appreciate them. He'd always had his own sense of humor, of course, often rooted in mischief—but now he was passably-human enough to catch the subtleties in behavior patterns that indicated a joke, even if he still had trouble with wordplay and understanding puns.
Not long after that, Robin graduated from understanding jokes to making them. The whole thing started when Robin stumbled across a cable-network marathon of old I Love Lucy episodes. He settled in on the couch downstairs after patrol one night to watch it, fascinated. Bruce found him still there the next morning, and he was sitting in the same spot when Bruce got back from the office later that afternoon, as if he hadn't moved in the intervening hours. For someone who usually couldn't sit still for more than thirty seconds before starting to fidget, it was quite a commitment. Bruce was more bemused than anything, right up until ten-o-clock rolled around, and Robin protested leaving for patrol because the marathon wasn't over until midnight.
Bruce insisted; they'd been following rumors of a monster in the sewers that he was pretty sure was going to lead them straight to Killer Croc, and Robin's speed and agility would be hugely beneficial in that fight. Robin had eventually been persuaded to come, but he'd grumbled and complained the entire night, even attempting to get Croc to weigh in on whether it was fair that he had been dragged away from the marathon, despite the fact that Croc had been making a serious attempt to rip Robin's arms off at the time. But the real retaliation didn't start until they were back at the Manor and out of their "work clothes." From that point on, Robin proceeded to enter every room for the next several days with a loud cry of, "Bruuuucie! I'm home!" in a surprisingly passable Cuban accent.
Bruce didn't fully understand the joke until Alfred, perhaps taking pity on him—or, perhaps, simply tired of hiding his startled smile behind his hand or a polite cough—silently pointed him toward a mirror. Robin had apparently placed a glamour on Bruce that turned his normally-black hair a bright, fire-truck red, as if someone had dipped him upside down in a bucket of garish paint.
"That's not what red hair looks like," Bruce pointed out, trying not to wince at his own reflection.
"Gosh, how would I know?" Robin said, grinning brightly, with an altogether-too-innocent tilt to his head. "The show's in black and white."
Short of using a Command or confining him to his room—which seemed a bit harsh for relatively harmless mischief, no matter how annoying it was—Bruce couldn't find a way to make Robin drop the unflattering glamour. It followed him all around the house, even when Robin was on a different floor. He was just thankful that it didn't extend beyond the grounds, or he would have been forced to wear a hat every time he went in to the office.
In return, Bruce dug out the driest, most boring quarterly-earnings reports he could find to use for Robin's reading lessons. It was oddly cathartic to watch Robin struggle through an entire paragraph of unfamiliar words, sounding them out one syllable at a time and sometimes asking for definitions, only to reach the end and realize that all those sentences hadn't really said anything of note in the first place. His growing horror at corporate-speak vocabulary and deliberately-obtuse mission statements matched Bruce's own, on his most cynical days. He was suspicious of every paper Bruce handed him for weeks.
In the end, Alfred was forced to ban all episodes of I Love Lucy, all unnecessary glamours, and all non-critical business documents from the house, in fear of some sort of escalating prank war. Bruce's hair went back to black, Robin's reading lessons went back to mission reports and the occasional newspaper article, and the television alternated between kid's cartoons, the movie channels, and nominally-educational documentaries on science and history.
"I wish I had been here to see that," Selina admitted when Bruce told her the story one morning, over the light brunch Alfred had insisted on preparing before she left the Manor. Either Alfred was warming up to her as a potential future Mrs. Wayne, or else he had finally lost all hope of any other woman putting up with Bruce for more than a few consecutive days at a time. Bruce just enjoyed the marked decrease in judging looks. "You, a redhead!"
Even Clark thought it was funny, which didn't seem fair.
"Now you're ganging up on me," Bruce grumbled, as Clark attempted to hide a manly giggle behind one hand. "You didn't see it; you have no idea." He shook his head, feeling a compulsive urge to find a mirror and double-check that his hair was the proper color. "My complexion isn't meant for red hair. It was awful."
This time Clark didn't bother to hide his smile. "How about that," he said, decidedly not as a question. He settled his large body into the spare chair down in the Cave. It looked somewhat ridiculous, with the gaudy red cape pinned underneath him, but if it was uncomfortable he didn't say anything. "Here I thought the pretty-boy Bruce Wayne playboy-thing was all just a cover. Turns out, no—you're actually vain."
Bruce glanced away from the computer, which was still running the correlation on the data Clark had flown over from Metropolis, just long enough to glare at Clark. He didn't say I am not, because that would have made him sound about four years old, but he thought his pointed look got the message across just the same. "It was awful," he repeated. "I was a half-step away from locking him in his room." He paused. "I made him read corporate tax summaries."
"Aw, cut the kid some slack, Bruce," Clark said. His voice had gone soft. "It's not like he has any friends to play with."
"He's not exactly a kid," Bruce said, mostly under his breath, not wanting Robin—who was on the other side of the Cave in the training area absently playing with the free weights—to hear him. "Not in the ways that really matter, anyway."
Clark raised his eyebrows, leaning his huge frame forward in the rolling chair. Bruce was briefly afraid it was going to snap under the stress of containing Clark's presence. "A kid is exactly what he is," Clark said, not unkindly, but firm. "In all the ways that matter."
The computer beeped, and Bruce hastily typed in the print command. "Your results," he said, gesturing across to the printer.
Clark waited a moment, but when it was obvious Bruce had nothing more to say, he got up and unhurriedly grabbed the paper as the machine spat it out into his broad hands. "There are maybe three or four places in Metropolis that match this profile, tops. The Toyman has to be holed up in one of them." He looked up and smiled. "You two busy this evening?"
Bruce rolled his eyes. "All that's left is the punching," he said. "You don't need me for that part."
Clark shrugged. "Didn't say that I did," he pointed out. "I just asked if you were busy."
Bruce sighed. Half of his escaped-villain list was still at large, but his only current lead was tracking the movements of several chemicals that could be used as fear toxin ingredients, which he was hoping would eventually lead him to the Scarecrow. He was still waiting on a shipping manifest to be faxed over from a pharmaceutical company, and unfortunately it wouldn't come for another day or two, at the earliest. His plans for tonight had been a quick patrol and a review of open case files from Gordon, maybe walking Robin through the ongoing investigations to see what he could pick up on. It was nothing that he couldn't put off for a night, and Robin had been pestering him about wanting to go along to Metropolis, the next time Bruce went over for an assist.
"Robin?" Bruce called, raising his voice. "You want to go to Metropolis to help Clark?"
"Yeah, sure!" Robin called back. There was a muted crash as he dropped the weights he'd been balancing on his head, and then he scampered over to where Bruce and Clark were waiting. "Can we fly?"
"No," Bruce said immediately. He got up from his chair and walked over to the storage case that held the armor. By the time he got changed, it would be dark enough to go out. You wouldn't know it from the weather, which was still stuck firmly in late-summer, but the autumnal equinox was only a week away, and the sun was finally starting to set a bit earlier. "I'm driving."
Robin said a word he must have picked up from late-night television, albeit without much conviction, like he hadn't bothered getting his hopes up. Bruce half-expected Clark to scold him for using that kind of word, given that aura of "Aw, shucks," Midwestern-style wholesomeness that surrounded him, but Clark was too busy staring dubiously over toward the garage section and the secret exit. "Does that thing even have a backseat?" he asked, sounding a little nervous.
"It's okay," Robin said, patting Clark on the elbow—which was about as high up as he could reach on Clark's huge frame—as he skipped past them, toward the car. As he went, his image shimmered, and his jeans and t-shirt were suddenly replaced with his colorful costume. "I'll tell it you're a friend, so it won't hate you like it did me at first."
Clark glanced over at Bruce and raised his eyebrows.
"Don't ask," Bruce said, shaking his head, and reached for his suit.
/~*~/
"Metropolis," Robin said, looking around with wide eyes, "is weird."
"Stay focused," Bruce admonished. "Just because they look silly doesn't mean they're not dangerous."
Silently, though, Bruce agreed. Only in Metropolis would an investigation into a villain—even one with the relatively innocuous-sounding name of the Toyman—end with two blocks' worth of streets being overrun by over-sized, brightly-colored, falsely-smiling toy soldiers and wind-up tanks that just happened to be equipped with live weapons. Luckily the tanks were slow, so Clark was neatly ripping them in half and stacking them in tidy piles on street corners before they could get too far from the warehouse where the Toyman had built them. That left the toy soldier round-up to Bruce and Robin, with a hefty assist from the Metropolis cops, who—rather than try to arrest them or complicating things, as Bruce might have expected—had rolled up in their squad cars and actually asked Clark how they could help.
"Figures," Bruce had muttered at that point. The Gotham PD might not go out of their way to enforce that arrest warrant on file for the Batman, but it definitely existed, and outward appearances had to be maintained. If Bruce ever got cornered, even Gordon would have to bring him in, or risk going down with him. Not to mention the fact that there were cops who did want the Bat thrown in jail, or at least a psych ward—and not all of them were on the mob payroll, either. Two years of fighting for his city, and half of her citizens still didn't trust him. Meanwhile, across the Bay, the Metropolis PD had practically deputized Clark, and he'd only been doing this for a few months.
"It's the bright colors," Robin told him, very sagely, as he disarmed a toy soldier, flipped it into the gutter, and stomped on its face. The plastic crumpled and split apart, exposing the mechanisms that powered the automaton. (Robin had asked for permission, when the toy soldiers first appeared, wondering if they counted as killing people. Bruce had told him to cut loose, and now he was almost regretting it.) "The solid black is scary. People don't like it."
"The solid black is functional," Bruce insisted. He thumbed an electroshock grenade and dropped it in the front row of advancing soldiers, then leapt clear before it activated and fried whatever was powering them, disabling several at once. "We're supposed to stay hidden."
Robin took a moment to look pointedly toward the sidewalk nearby, where a rank of cops was holding a perimeter that the soldiers had so far not managed to breach. Just behind them was a crowd of mildly-interested civilians, seeming entirely unconcerned about the real bullets the toy soldiers were firing, including what looked like at least one van from every major news-station in the city. Quite a few of them were looking up, tracking what could be seen of Clark's progress against the night sky—mostly a red and blue blur, followed by a loud crash and the screech of ripping metal—but the rest were peeking around the police line and watching Bruce and Robin dismantle the jerky, poorly-balanced soldiers.
"Next time I'm staying in Gotham," Bruce said, feeling an urge to duck behind an overturned car.
In his ear, the longer-distance radio Alfred had added to the suit beeped at him. Bruce pulled back from the advancing soldiers, reached up to switch channels—Robin was close enough to hear him anyway, and Clark wasn't even wearing the ear-piece Bruce had given him, saying it kept falling out without a mask or helmet to anchor it—and activated his microphone. "What is it?"
There was a brief, heavy pause.
"You need to come home," Alfred's voice finally said, very quietly. "Now."
The entire world went still around Bruce, distant and dim and unimportant, a washed-out watercolor painting seen through heavy fog. He could hear his own heartbeat thudding in his ears, rapid and shallow. "Bane?" he asked, and it came out voiceless, a harsh whisper.
"No," Alfred's voice said.
Bruce felt a swell of both intense relief and furious disappointment. It lasted only a moment before Alfred spoke in his ear again.
"It's the Joker, sir. He's on the television, and he's asking for you."
Bruce paused just long enough to realign his brain from creepy-but-ineffective toys to extremely dangerous, extremely unpredictable clowns. "We're in the middle of a situation here. Can Gordon or the SWAT teams handle it?"
"Two hostages are already dead," Alfred's voice said, sounding apologetic. "You have one hour to show, or he'll kill another one."
Bruce closed his eyes. "Their names," he said thickly.
"Afterward," Alfred said, his tone gentle but allowing for no argument. "Right now you need to worry about the ones you can still save."
Bruce opened his eyes. "We're on our way," he said, and closed the second channel. "Robin! Disengage! We're needed in Gotham."
/~*~/
Never had the distance between Gotham and Metropolis seemed so great, even with Bruce pushing his car as hard as he could without endangering either their own lives, or the other motorists on the highway that he was speeding past. Luckily, Alfred was able to give them the details as they drove, so that even though they arrived in the city with barely five minutes to spare before the Joker's deadline, they weren't walking in entirely blind.
What Alfred had been able to put together was this: At around ten-thirty, as the local news-stations were gearing up to go live with the evening news, the Joker had somehow gotten inside one of the major studios undetected. By the time the program went on-air at eleven, the main pair of anchors had vacant eyes and stiff, rictus smiles, held upright in their chairs only by the rope tied around their torsos. The Joker sat between them, hands folded on the table in mock-sincerity, addressing the camera.
Alfred hadn't repeated the Joker's speech word-for-word, but had summarized its salient points—namely, that he was upset that he'd spent the better part of a year in Arkham and Bruce hadn't visited him a single time, or even sent a letter. (Apparently, he'd been writing weekly letters addressed to the Batman the whole time, which—even if his psychiatric team had let him send them—the postman couldn't have done anything with.) It was okay, though; the Joker would forgive him, if only the Bat would come out and play. That's when he gave the one-hour deadline.
The two anchors had already been dead when the cameras started rolling. The rest of the studio staff were hostages, some of which had been strapped to what had to be explosives controlled by the wireless transmitter the Joker kept shuffling from hand to hand. Based on what Alfred had been able to pick up on the police scanner, the Joker had somehow managed to barricade the doors, and the cops were afraid to breach and risk the Joker setting off a major explosion. No one doubted for a second that he'd blow the place with himself inside, if he thought he was about to be interrupted.
"So, what's the plan?" Robin asked, after waiting—patiently, for him—a whole three minutes after the end of Alfred's report.
"We go inside and see what he wants," Bruce said. "We get the hostages out before the fight starts, if we can."
Robin nodded. "Okay."
Bruce gripped the steering wheel so tight his gloves creaked. "Stick close to me," he added. "And keep your eyes open. He likes traps."
The studio was in the heart of the city, comprised of the top several floors of a large building, marked by the huge satellite dish and various broadcast antennas on the roof. Even with the police surrounding the building, it was relatively simple to get inside by gliding down from the next building over. Bruce didn't bother disabling or avoiding the hastily-erected camera watching the roof door; he needed the Joker to know he had come in before the deadline. He gestured for Robin to slip around it, though, not wanting to draw the Joker's attention to him just yet. Robin did so, and then stayed so close that Bruce's cape brushed against him with every step.
The first trap was in the fire-escape stairwell, and not particularly well-hidden. It was almost a friendly gesture, an easy opening salvo to warm them up. Bruce put a hand on Robin's shoulder to halt him, which ended up not being necessary; Robin was already pointing at the trip wire. After disabling it, Bruce checked the trap—and found that it would only have sprayed them with bright yellow paint, if it had triggered.
"Acid paint?" Robin suggested. "Or maybe it's poisonous!"
Bruce silenced him with a gesture and kept moving.
They reached the main studio without incident, finding the entrance suspiciously unlocked and unguarded. It was arranged as one giant room, with two stages: one with the main desk, the two dead anchors still horribly displayed in their seats, and a second, larger one with a screen background that had to be the weather station. The rest of the room was dark, leaving the brightly-lit stages adrift like twin islands surrounded by a black sea of shadow. Equipment and cables littered the sides and floor, running to and from cameras and several bullpen-style rows of desks, with a wall of phones and printers and fax machines on the far side, for keeping abreast of developing information. The lights themselves were heavy, bold spotlights, hanging from the ceiling in a movable, suspended rig. Bruce considered breaking them to plunge the room into darkness, but there were too many individual bulbs; it would have taken too long to hit them all, somewhat defeating the point.
Bruce didn't enter just yet, but stayed crouched against the hallway wall, peering around the door frame just enough to see. He did a quick head-count, making note of all the potential hiding places under desks and in obscured corners. The sharp line between bright stage and dim shadow made it difficult; without Robin's powers enhancing his eyesight, Bruce might not have been able to see them at all. "How many hostages?" he breathed, hardly making any sound at all.
Robin didn't speak, but instead pressed his hand against Bruce's shoulder and varied the pressure—three longer pushes with brief respites in between, and then three quick pulses—using one of the non-verbal codes Bruce had taught him. Five, Five, Five, One, Two, Three. Eighteen, in total. That matched Bruce's tally of the visible ones, with the possibility of a few more that couldn't be seen from this angle.
Most of them were bunched together in five separate groups of three or four, with one person in the middle duct-taped to an explosive device. Each of the surrounding hostages had their rope-bound hands resting on an arm or knee of the bomb-wearing one, which must have been the Joker's way of making sure they were in range of the blast if he triggered it. He'd probably threatened to shoot them outright if they tried to back far enough away to spare themselves. Everyone had a strip or two of tape across his or her mouth, preventing them from talking easily to each other or calling for help, although the Joker had probably been more concerned about one of them messing up his big speech, earlier.
And there, in the center of the main stage, sitting cross-legged on the top of the desk and fidgeting impatiently, like a kid waiting at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning, was the Joker. He was no longer talking to the cameras, probably because he knew the network had preempted him with the emergency broadcast signal some time earlier. The wireless transmitter was in his left hand, just as Alfred had described over the radio, and there was a large revolver in his right. Bruce could see that his finger was already on the trigger, rather than waiting safely on the barrel, and his other thumb was resting lightly against a big red button on the transmitter. That had no doubt been a Joker after-market addition, his own little touch of theatricality. If he was going to blow something up, he wanted a giant red button to push to do it.
Bruce briefly considered trying to use a projectile weapon or a knockout-gas canister from here, but he didn't like the odds of the Joker going unconscious quickly enough to prevent an explosion, or even a wild gunshot. He'd have to take his chances, see if he could draw the Joker out, or at least garner enough of his focus that Robin could either get the hostages out of range or steal the transmitter from him. Assuming it didn't have a dead-man switch of some kind.
Bruce turned to Robin. "Stay invisible as long as you can," he said, so quietly that it couldn't even qualify as a whisper. They'd found out through a lot of trial and error over the months that Robin's invisibility glamour didn't work when he was actively fighting—too hard to hold the concentration, Bruce assumed—but it lasted right up until the first punch, most of the time. "When you get a clean chance, take it—but be careful."
Robin nodded. For once, he wasn't smiling, as if he understood the severity of the situation. His glamour rippled, resolving into the image of the bare-chested, barefoot, slightly-inhuman-looking boy that had first appeared in the garden months ago, which was how Bruce's brain interpreted Robin's invisibility, given that the binding wouldn't let him hide from his master. "Ready," he said, at a normal volume now that his voice couldn't be heard by any ears other than Bruce's own.
Bruce rounded the door, and in one smooth motion threw a bat-shaped throwing star so that it embedded itself into the wooden newscasters' desk about two inches in front of the Joker's knees. The Joker didn't even flinch, but if it was possible his manic grin got wider.
"Batsy!" he screeched, in that grating voice of his. He waved, which was somewhat disconcerting given that there was a gun in his hand when he did it. "You came! I was starting to think you were going to leave me hanging."
Bruce stalked forward, making his body-language as aggressive as possible. "You have my attention," he said, in his flattest, most threatening voice.
Some of the hostages were clearly in too much shock to react, even to the Batman showing up unexpectedly in their midst, but others began to murmur behind the tape over their mouths. A few even began to move, although Bruce couldn't tell if they were trying to come toward him, expecting him to protect them, or if they were scared of him, too.
Nobody got very far, though, because the Joker unfurled his lanky legs and jumped down from the desk, scratching at the back of his slicked-back, green-colored hair with the base of the revolver. "No, no, no," he said, and without fail the hostages froze. Even the ones who had never moved at all seemed to grow even more still. "You can't leave yet. You're vital pieces!" Then, with a suddenness that gave Bruce whiplash, the Joker spun to face him and perked up again, excited and happy. "It's so good to see you, Bats! I missed our little games, you know." He cocked his head. "Did I mention how glad I was when I found out that you weren't really dead? All that bragging by Bane—brag, brag, brag, brag; it was insufferable—and yet here you are, safe and sound."
"Here I am," Bruce said, still moving deliberately forward. "Let the hostages go."
The Joker shook his head, instantly furious. "Weren't you listening? They're vital pieces! How can we play a proper game if we don't have any pieces to play with?" His cartoon-ish smile pulled into a pout, and then with frightening rapidity his demeanor shifted again, into something sharp and serious and smart. "Ah, ah, ah—that's far enough, Batsy," he said, lifting the transmitter and wiggling it back and forth slightly. "You come within punching distance, and every single one of us gets an all-expenses paid trip to the morgue, as bloody confetti."
Bruce halted. He was about three feet from the lip of the stage, with another four feet to the Joker beyond that. Somewhere behind him, Robin would be moving in a slow, careful arc through the room, trying to get as close as possible to the Joker's back without risking losing hold of his invisibility.
"All right, then," Bruce said, keeping his voice even and calm, the way he might have spoken to a skittish animal or a traumatized child. "What game are we playing?"
"I'm so glad you asked!" The Joker struck a dramatic pose, back straight and head lifted, and held the transmitter to his mouth like a walkie-talkie—or, no, like an old-fashioned game show host's microphone. "It's time for … drum-roll, please?" He threw his other hand out wide, making several of the hostages flinch as the gun briefly swung toward them. "Which! One! Should! We! … Kill!" He actually spun around in a little circle as he said the final word, dragging the syllable out for an entire second, and stopped when he was facing Bruce again. "So, what do you say, Big Bad Bats?" he asked, still grinning eager and bright. "Can we play?"
"If I win," Bruce said slowly, trying to give Robin the time he needed to get in position, "then nobody else dies?"
"Ugh," the Joker groaned, throwing his head back. "You are no fun."
"Joker …" Bruce said, threateningly.
"Okay, okay, fine," the Joker spat, glowering at him. "Be that way. You win, and nobody dies. Boring."
Out of the corner of his eye, Bruce saw the barest outline of Robin's form, shrouded in shadows, creeping along the side wall. "Are you going to tell me the rules?" he asked.
The Joker was immediately bright again, practically humming with excitement. "Oh, you're gonna love this." He held out his revolver, first pointing it at Bruce like he was planning to shoot him—and Bruce tensed, wondering if he should try to dodge, or go loose-limbed to let the Kevlar and Robin's gifted resilience absorb the impact—but then the Joker turned the gun, showing him the side of the barrel where the cylinder was located. "This holds six bullets," he said. He shook it a little, which made Bruce uneasy, since the odds of the safety being on were absolute zero. "But I only loaded it with five!"
"Russian roulette?" Bruce asked, flatly unimpressed. "That's the game?"
"No, no, no, have a little faith in me, Bats," the Joker said, sounding mildly insulted. "You see, of the five explosives our lovely audience volunteers are wearing—you're doing splendidly, folks; keep up the good work—only two are real. The other three are just some putty and wires."
Bruce had a sinking feeling he knew where this was going.
"Now, here's the exciting part," the Joker continued, and leaned forward, dropping his voice to a stage-whisper. "I can either shoot one person, with a five-in-six chance of killing them—or I can randomly activate one of my explosive fashion accessories, and have a two-in-five chance of killing three or four people at once!"
Bruce's stomach turned at the glee shining out of the Joker's wide eyes. "What's the point?" he asked quietly. "Why do this?"
The Joker seemed taken aback. "I'm curious," he said, as if that explained everything. Maybe to him, it did. "Which one will it be, Bats? Better than fifty-fifty odds of saving everyone here, but risking a higher body-count if you lose? Or hoping for that one-in-six chance because it guarantees the fewest casualties?"
Behind the Joker, Robin stepped lightly up onto the stage in a crouch, completely silent. It was disconcerting to be able to see him under the super-bright lights, but have him cast no shadow in any direction.
"How do I know you're telling the truth?" Bruce asked, readying himself to leap forward when Robin made his move.
"Now, that hurts my feelings," the Joker said, pouting again. "It wouldn't be a very fun game if you didn't have a chance to win, would it?" He threw his head back and laughed, the sound just as eerie and chilling as it had always been in Bruce's half-remembered nightmares. "So, which will it be, Batsy?"
Robin was almost in position; a few more steps and he'd be close enough to strike. There was a strange look on his face, something almost afraid, as if the Joker was unsettling enough to bother even him—but he visibly shook it off and began moving forward again.
"Batsy? Hello? Tick-tock!"
Bruce snapped his attention back to the Joker. "What if you miss?" he asked, attempting to stall for just a few more seconds. "When was the last time you fired a gun? I can't imagine they let you have one in Arkham."
"Oh," the Joker said, a little taken aback. He cocked his head to the side, thoughtfully. "Good point." He nodded decisively and lunged sideways, jumping off the stage just as Robin was stepping into striking position behind him.
Robin froze, but the Joker didn't seem to have noticed him—it was just bad timing.
The Joker landed at the nearest group of hostages and kicked out at one of them, saying, "You!" as he gestured with his revolver.
Bruce reflexively started to move in that direction, but the Joker waggled the transmitter at him and made a series of warning sounds, so Bruce stilled. Meanwhile, the hostage obediently got to his feet, shaky and uncoordinated either from having his hands bound, or just from terror. The other two in that group, not counting the one who was strapped to the explosives and therefore probably afraid to move too much, flinched back from the man who had been singled-out, as if worried they'd get caught in whatever the Joker was doing by proximity.
"Good," the Joker said, and gestured the man to take several steps back toward the stage. "Be sure you stand very still, now," he said, with disturbingly genuine-sounding concern in his voice. "Batsy here was worried I might miss, so you're going to help me out by being a good, easy target. Okay?"
The man babbled something desperate but unintelligible behind the duct-tape over his mouth, his eyes wide and hysterical as they stared pleadingly at the Joker. His knees were shaking so badly that Bruce was afraid he was going to collapse.
"I said, stand still," the Joker repeated, sounding exasperated. He smacked the man in the shoulder with the butt of the revolver, not particularly hard but in an effort to get his attention. The man's garbled cries got higher-pitched, and he cringed away. "Come on, it's not that hard," the Joker told him. "Just stand still."
"Joker," Bruce called, harshly, trying to recenter the Joker's intention on himself rather than an innocent bystander. "That's enough."
The Joker sighed, heavily put-upon. "It's so hard to find good help these days," he said, shaking his head. Then he raised the gun and pulled the trigger.
The sound was impossibly loud in the enclosed space, followed by the sharp smell of gunpowder and a moment's breathless silence. In the space between his heartbeats, Bruce was somewhere else—a dark alley in the rain, cold and unforgiving—listening to his mother scream as he watched her white pearls crash down into a puddle on the black pavement, one by one. Then his heart thudded again, and he blinked away the memory, struggling to focus.
The bullet had struck the hostage right between the eyes, snapping his head back and leaving him almost dangling in the air, arched slightly backward, until gravity won over momentum and the body fell boneless to the floor with a solid thump. There was a brief crescendo of startled cries and half-choked screams, quickly dissolving to whimpers and quiet sobs when the Joker turned his attention back in their direction.
The worst part of it, though—no, that wasn't fair. The worst part was that there was a third dead body in the room, that yet another Gotham family would be forced to grieve someone taken from them before their time. Bruce wouldn't diminish that, or place his own guilt and motivations above those of the people who would be directly effected. That would be selfish, and arrogant.
The worst part of that moment, though, for Bruce, was the look on Robin's face. The shock had been so great that Robin had lost his hold on his invisibility, and now stood silhouetted in the bright stage lights in his colorful costume, utterly still and perfectly exposed. He was staring at the Joker with a sort of horrified understanding, like he had just figured something out, and it had fundamentally shaken him right down to the core.
Bruce had a sudden, fierce wish that he'd left Robin in safe, silly Metropolis, ripping apart tinker-toy tanks with Clark.
"Honestly," the Joker said, shrugging with both arms and seemingly unconcerned about the blood beginning to pool around his purple dress shoes, "some people just can't follow directions." Then he seemed to remember the gun in one hand, and held it up, grinning as he looked at the faintly-smoking tip. "Hey, look at that," he said, smiling at Bruce. "We got a live one, first try!"
By some miracle, the Joker hadn't yet noticed Robin standing a few feet to his side, but he would at any second. They were out of options, and Bruce was done stalling and waiting for the Joker to kill someone else.
"Robin," Bruce said, putting just enough power into the name to break through the boy's lingering shock without really hurting him, a sort of mystical equivalent to lightly slapping him on the cheek to wake him up. A little start went through Robin, and thankfully his expression cleared from whatever awful realization had taken hold of him. "Now."
Things began to happen very fast, then.
Bruce and Robin moved together, converging on the Joker from two sides, ninety degrees apart. Robin was both much closer and fractionally faster, so he got there first. He was already reaching out, obviously trying to snatch the transmitter before the Joker could set off the bombs. It should have been doable—Robin was only a few feet away, and he could be lightning-quick on the move, leaving the Joker no time to react even if he spotted him coming—but the loss of Robin's invisibility, and Bruce's use of his name, must have been all the warning the Joker needed.
By the time Robin was within grabbing distance, the Joker was already turning, and Bruce—still a good ten feet away, albeit closing fast—braced himself for an explosion. Surprisingly, though, the Joker's first reaction wasn't to press the giant red button, but rather to drop the transmitter entirely so that his hand could sneak inside his suit jacket to reach for something. Robin faltered, trying to adjust on the fly from grabbing the transmitter out of the Joker's hand to catching it in mid-air as it fell.
Just as Robin's nimble fingertips snagged the bulky transmitter box, maybe eighteen inches from the stage floor, the Joker's unnaturally-white hand reappeared from his suit pocket. He was holding a green-and-purple-checked pocket handkerchief, which was folded over around a lump of something in its center. As Bruce made the eight-inch jump up onto the stage, the Joker pinched one corner of the handkerchief between two fingers and flicked it out in Robin's direction, like someone shooing away an annoying insect.
Robin flinched back, startled, but he wasn't fast enough. He gasped in alarm as a small cloud of dark gray dust came puffing out of the little cloth square, hitting him squarely in the face. Bruce was a little more than two strides away, now, and even from there he could smell it: a sharp, bitter tang on the back of his tongue, like old blood—and he went cold with sudden dread and understanding.
It was iron. Specifically, it was a handful of iron shavings, like the ones used in schools to teach kids about magnetic fields. It could have come from any toy or hobby store in the city, cheap and innocuous.
Robin screamed.
The Joker began to laugh maniacally. He danced back, getting out of Bruce's path so that he had an unhindered view as Robin fell, hard and graceless, like someone had suddenly increased the local gravity a hundred-fold. The transmitter hit the ground with a reckless clatter, forgotten as Robin clawed frantically at his own face, thrashing around on the stage.
Bruce's heart was in his throat as he cleared the last step between him and Robin. He had the brief, nonsensical thought that he'd been somehow dosed with the Scarecrow's fear toxin without realizing it. "Robin?" he asked, skidding to a stop on one knee, half an instant too late to keep the boy from cracking his head on the stage floor as his back arched uncontrollably.
Robin just kept screaming, although the sound was rapidly spiraling down into a rough, hoarse screech. A moment later, Bruce understood why, as between Robin's clawing fingers he started to see blood pouring from the boy's face. It was primarily coming from his eyes and nose, leaking out around the white lenses and drenching his domino mask, but also beginning to spill out of his mouth and run down his chin. Across his cheekbones, his golden skin was raw and angry and burned where the iron dust had hit him—and that's when Bruce remembered his startled gasp, and realized that Robin had inhaled some of it. It was eating at the soft tissue of his nose and throat, the same way it was attacking his eyes; that's where all the blood was coming from.
Bruce's hands were suddenly on the transmitter, though he didn't remember picking it up, and he barely registered the spark of electricity as he ripped out the wires and rendered it harmless. Somewhere, underneath the panic, the Batman part of him was still functioning—and he clung to it, desperately needing that calm clarity. That same part of him was tracking the Joker's movements, now at the edge of the stage and watching the proceedings with rapt interest, utterly gleeful at the damage he'd caused.
"I thought you might bring your little demon," the Joker was saying, unaccountably proud and excited. "I'm so glad I took my time and figured out how to properly say hello." He laughed again, high and uneven. "Oh, isn't it adorable? You should have brought it out to play a long time ago, Batsy. Think of all the fun we could have with it!"
"His name," Bruce growled, "is Robin."
The Joker cocked his head, inquisitive. "Say, do you think it's going to die?" he asked, sounding genuinely curious.
Bruce's attempts to wipe the iron dust residue from Robin's face weren't accomplishing anything except getting the boy's blood all over his hands, turning his black gloves shiny under the harsh stage lighting. Robin was still screaming, but there was a gurgle under the sound now as the blood started to pool in his throat. Bruce reached for him, feeling utterly helpless, and tried to hold him down through his uncoordinated flailing and kicking. Robin finally stopped trying to claw at his own face, and instead fixed a death-grip on the folds of Bruce's cape that hung down over one shoulder as Bruce crouched over him.
"Robin," Bruce said again, struggling to keep the boy from slamming his head back into the stage floor again as he writhed through the pain. "I need you to be still."
In his arms, Robin's scream finally faded out, replaced by wet, hacking coughs.
"Ooh," the Joker said, swaying forward in renewed interest. "That doesn't sound good, does it? If you don't get that iron out of its system fast …" He didn't finish, but trailed off with a series of disappointed tongue clicks. "Shame. I was rather looking forward to playing more games."
"Robin, breathe," Bruce ordered, in his sternest Batman-voice. He managed to turn the boy on his side, hoping that the blood would spill out instead of choking him. Should he try to flush out Robin's nose and throat with water, or would that risk the iron getting into his stomach and causing internal bleeding? He had some poison countermeasures back in the Cave that were basically glorified emetics, to induce vomiting; maybe that would be safer. "Can you hear me?"
"I know!" the Joker said suddenly, and there was a muted thump as he jumped off the stage somewhere behind Bruce. "It's not quite the game I had planned, but hey, I'm adaptable."
Bruce wrenched his attention away from Robin, briefly looking over his shoulder. The Joker was climbing back up on the stage again, and bringing another hostage with him this time. He still had the gun—how had Bruce forgotten the gun?—and leveled it steadily at the woman's temple. She had tears streaming down her cheeks, but she'd apparently learned from her unfortunate coworker and was doing an admirable job of standing relatively still despite her shaking knees.
"See, here's the thing," the Joker said, peering over the woman's shoulder and grinning at Bruce. "Get your little demon to medical attention fast enough, and maybe it won't die on you. Maybe." He paused for another round of laughter, head thrown back. "But to do that, you'll have to leave little old me here in a room full of innocent people. And you know how I get when I'm bored."
At that, the hostage very deliberately closed her eyes.
Meanwhile, Robin's thrashing had started to quiet, changing over to frantic shaking. Bruce didn't think that was a good sign.
"Or," the Joker said, drawing the word into a loving croon, "you can walk away. Leave the little birdie right there in a pool of blood for me to play with, and everyone else can walk away with you, no worse for wear."
Bruce's hands tightened on Robin's shoulders.
"You can think about it," the Joker said, mock-graciously. "But don't take too long! That thing dies, and the offer comes off the table."
A month ago, Bruce might have hesitated. Three months ago, it would have been difficult to decide which outcome was preferable. Five months ago, Bruce would have been relieved to let someone else take care of his homicidal little problem for him. But that was before midnight tag on the rooftops. That was before reading lessons, I Love Lucy, and quiet meditation under the stars. That was before one awkward hug. That was before Robin stopped being it, and started being him.
"B—B—B?"
Bruce looked down at the shaking boy in his arms. He couldn't tell if Robin was struggling to say Bruce or Batman, not that it mattered; the intent was clear either way. "I'm right here," he said, quietly, with no trace of Batman harshening his tone. "I'm not going anywhere."
Robin's small hands clutched at him, moving down from the folds of his cape to his utility belt. At first Bruce thought he was just seeking reassurance, clinging to something familiar, but then Robin's clever fingers plucked a bat-shaped throwing star out of the holder and retreated, pulling it to his heaving chest. He blinked his white lenses several times, still shaking uncontrollably, and managed to get just enough blood out of them to look at Bruce, more expressive than blank white circles had any right to be. Underneath the terror and pain and blood, Bruce could see something else, something steady and sure.
Robin spoke again, or tried to. The word was swallowed by a thick gurgle, but from the shape it had to be either No or Go. Then Robin pushed Bruce's hands off his own shoulders with arms that twitched and jerked in spasms. The whole time, he stared intently at Bruce, seemingly trying to communicate without words. Slowly, he held up his green-gloved fingers, struggling to keep them still enough to see. Three?
Bruce blinked behind his own lenses, scrupulously ignoring the way the world briefly went blurry. He laid a hand on Robin's head, straightening the sweat- and blood-soaked black curls above the domino mask, fiercely proud and more afraid in that moment than he'd ever been in his life. "Two," he said, in a low voice only Robin could hear.
"Well?" the Joker asked. "What's it gonna be, Bats? The demon brat, or the room full of innocent people?"
Robin's white lenses winked out as the boy closed his eyes behind his mask. Bruce suspected that there was no point to keeping them open; the blood-flow was beginning to slow, meaning the iron dust had already destroyed all the soft tissue. "One," Robin whispered, in between wet, choking coughs.
Bruce got to his feet and turned, leaving Robin on the floor alone—blind, bloody, and impossibly brave. "Neither," he said.
Behind him, Robin rolled up on one shoulder and whipped the stolen throwing star into an arc that slammed it into the Joker's gun-hand, right on target between the tendons coming up from the wrist. The Joker yelled in shock and pain, dropping the gun and loosening his hold on the hostage. Bruce was on him a fraction of a second later, shoving the hostage to relative safety and planting a fist into the Joker's jaw that made the other man flop backwards and tumble right off the stage altogether with another indignant shout.
Bruce automatically picked up the gun, hands cycling through practiced motions as he dismantled it and sent bullets clinking to the stage floor. Then he threw the disarmed weapon as hard as he could, oddly satisfied by the crunch it made when it struck the outer wall, leaving an impressive dent behind.
By then, the Joker was two-thirds of the way to the door and moving fast, throwing star still embedded in his hand. Bruce could have chased him, probably would have caught him in the hallway, gotten him thrown back in Arkham—but he had other priorities, at the moment. Let the cops worry about detaining him, if they could.
Instead, Bruce returned immediately to Robin's side. The boy had flopped onto his back after his impressive stunt with the throwing star, clearly having used up all his remaining strength and focus. The shaking was slipping into a full seizure, now, his white lenses back open to bare slits as what was left of his eyes rolled up behind them. Still, he scrambled for a hold on Bruce's cape and managed to cough out a single, broken word.
"S—safe?"
Bruce picked him up, cradling Robin close to his chest. "Yes, Robin," he said. "It's safe. He's gone."
Robin shook his head, deliberately this time, Bruce thought. "The—them," Robin coughed out, obviously desperate. "Safe?"
"Yes," Bruce repeated. The world had gone peculiarly blurry again. "They're all safe. You saved them."
Robin shuddered once and went limp in his arms.
Bruce held him tighter, and began to run.
/~*~/