Chapter 26: How The Batman Died
Bruce felt the gray morning light warm his face before his eyes registered it from beneath his closed eyelids.
He felt warmth from beneath the covers next to him. There were days he was surprised to find he was married, even fifteen years after the fact. He'd not only been alone, but had made a point of being alone for such a portion of his lifetime that there was a woman who loved him so deeply in spite of himself became a pleasant surprise on some days.
Not one to simply laze in bed once he was conscious, Bruce rose, letting the covers fall down his bare chest and into his lap. He felt a couple of bones in his spine pop, and he cleared his throat quietly, so as not to wake Selina.
Too late.
Selina's delicate hand arose after him, and she traced vague nonsensical patterns about his back with her index finger.
Bruce Wayne was fifty-one years old.
Bruce Wayne was eight years old.
It was a Saturday morning, and he was up with the sun. His eyes shot open, and he bounded from bed like a coiled spring finally let loose.
He bolted over to the mirror atop the dresser over in the corner of the small East Wing bedroom.
Last night, Bruce had been out in the rain before bedtime, and went to bed with his hair still damp. The results of such actions on this bright Saturday morning was a rampaging case of bedhead. To Bruce, it appeared as though his scalp was attempting to give painful birth to a black octopus.
Bruce scowled at his own reflection and tugged the collar of his burgundy PJs, before he went to the chair next to the dresser. Sitting there were the clothes that Alfred picked out for him the night before.
His attire snugly under his arm, he left the bedroom and padded down the hallway to the bathroom, where he would take a shower.
He'd save brushing his teeth for afterwards, though. He didn't want the minty aftertaste while he ate his breakfast.
Alfred was making scrambled eggs.
Cullen was making french toast.
Of the domestic duties that Cullen Row had inherited from the late, great Alfred Pennyworth, it was cooking with which he had the hardest time. For Alfred had actually gone to school to attain his culinary expertise. Cullen just had Youtube tutorials.
Not that if affected Bruce any. For he forwent the toast, as he did meals every morning, opting instead for the cup of strong coffee that he made himself.
Cullen, in his sharp gray suit, turned off the stove, and placed a plate of french toast in front of Selina, who was sitting across from Bruce at the kitchen island. She too took the strong coffee Bruce made every morning. He had to remind himself every once in a while to make two cups. Decades of self-imposed solitude and selfishness had ingrained some habits that were hard to break.
His wife sat there in a gray pantsuit and a white silk blouse with three undone buttons. The gloomy light streaming through the window behind her brought out the fake gray streaks in her long and lustrous black hair. She was checking her phone.
Bruce Wayne was not one of those soppy romantics. He didn't forget to breathe or think when he was around Selina. In fact, Selina inspired some of his best thinking, though he'd never admit as much to her.
Selina's green eyes caught his. She looked from him, down to the promise of cleavage that he almost open shirt seemed to hold, and then back to him.
"Too much for City Hall?" she asked.
Bruce shook his head. "You're fine.
"You're fucking A right I am."
"I wouldn't dream of telling you what to do."
"You're fucking A right you wouldn't."
She looked over at Cullen, who was cleaning up at the stove. "You holding up okay, Cullen?"
"Yeah," Cullen said. "I'm fine."
She furrowed her brow. "I seemed to detect a whiff of something when you brought me my food."
"Oh yeah?" Cullen asked. Bruce seemed to detect a creeping redness in his face.
"If I didn't know any better," Selina said, "I'd say… Polo by Ralph Lauren?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"First," Selina said, "Do we really pay you so little that you have to resort to Ralph Lauren?"
"I like Polo," Cullen said. "And it's not Polo, and shut up."
"And second," Selina said, her full lips creeping back for a smile, "it seems our butler wants to impress someone."
"Don't tease him," Bruce said.
"I'm not teasing him," Selina said.
"You are too," said Cullen.
"I am not. I just want to know the name of the fellow who won our little Cullen's heart."
"You don't get to know."
"Please?"
"His name is Nunya Bidness, and he hails from the sovereign nation of Kissmyassistan."
"Fine," Selina said, still smiling. "All I'll say is that the hot tub room in the West Wing is soundproofed. Paid for it out of pocket. Go nuts, young man."
"Jesus H. Christ," Cullen said before he walked out of the kitchen.
"I'm in my fifties," Selina said. "I'm allowed to meddle."
Bruce felt himself grinning against his will. "What's the news?"
Selina looked at her phone, and sighed. "Rumors about the death of Superman."
Bruce sighed, his grin disappearing. Avesta and her little goblins over at ARGUS had apparently not been able to scrub all of the phone footage of Conner falling into the ocean the day before.
"Have you talked to your daughter?" Selina asked.
Bruce felt the minute temptation to tell her that, because of the way adoption and marriage work, Cassandra was her daughter too, but neither Selina Wayne nor Cassandra Wayne looked at each other in such a way, though they looked upon each other most warmly. And Stephanie Brown was back in town, and that made things muddier pertaining to which of the two young women that Selina would call "Daughter."
"I tried to," Bruce said. "She didn't want to hear it."
"Hmm," said Selina.
"What is it?"
"Just… seems familiar, that's all."
"I know," said Bruce. "I'm proud that she does the job. I'm proud that she throws herself into it, but…"
"But what?"
Bruce set his coffee aside, and folded his arms on the table. "I just wished she'd learn from my mistakes."
"In what way?"
"I've been surrounded by people who cared for me for about thirty years, now," Bruce said. "I didn't notice it for about twelve of them. History does not repeat itself, but it does on occasion rhyme. Thinking I was alone in all of this, taking my anger with me every night… It hurt the city. And I don't want that to happen again."
Selina, who was about to take a bite out of her french toast, put it back down on the plate, and looked at him.
"If I asked you, as your wife, to put that armor on and be Batman again, would you do it?"
"Barbara would like me to," Bruce said. "Very much so."
"Barbara Gordon said some awful shit that she can't take back," Selina said. "And when I see her, I'm busting her head to the white meat. But you didn't answer my question."
She leaned back in her chair.
"I'm fifty-one," she said. "You ask me when I'm seventeen what I'd be like when I'm fifty-one, I'd say I'd be in my housecoat and slippers, handing out Werther's Originals to grandkids who didn't want them. But look at me now. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in. I take these fake gray streaks out of my hair, and Tim Drake looks older than me."
Bruce felt that was unfair to Tim… He also felt that it was true.
"I thought I'd be in prison at fifty-one years of age," Selina said. "Except I'm the CEO of my family's company. Famous the world over. Lived a hundred lifetimes in just the one, and I ain't done yet. Tell me at seventeen that age ain't nothing but a number, and I say suuuuuuuuure. But I'm fifty-one, and I know it's true. And you? You don't look so bad either."
"Thank you."
"If this were a table instead of an island I'd be playing footsie with you right now, just so you know."
Bruce found it in him to smile. "Would you be Catwoman again?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because Catwoman without Batman is just an answer without a question," Selina said. "A floating idea, free of context."
She leaned in again, bringing her elbows up to the island's surface.
"You have unfinished business, just say so," Selina said. "Say it in front of the one person on Earth who won't judge you. Who will support you and love you no matter what."
She let that hang in the air for a moment before she asked her question a second time.
"You gonna be Batman again?"
"I won't," said Bruce.
"You will," said Alfred. "It's too high and too flimsy. The structure will not hold."
Bruce, sitting at the kitchen island, had piled a not insubstantial amount of fluffy golden scrambled eggs atop a triangular piece of buttery and diagonally cut sourdough toast.
It was young Bruce's mission to open his mouth wide enough to fit it in and take a bite.
Bruce failed, and failed immediately. The peak of his mountain of eggs careened into the tip of his nose before it even got to his mouth, sending pillowy wads of the stuff down to the hardwood floor.
A man's voice from the kitchen doorway. "Pick it up, Bruce."
Bruce looked up to see his mother Martha and father Thomas standing there. They were both wearing matching white bathrobes, which meant that they themselves had just emerged from the shower.
The eight-year-old Bruce Wayne didn't know how they did it. There was only one shower in the bathroom adjacent to the master bedroom. Unless they went into the shower together, a prospect that young Bruce regarded as utter insanity. Not to mention gross.
"But dad," Bruce said, "we have a butler."
"It's not a butler's job to save us from ourselves," Thomas said. "You made the mess, you clean it up."
Bruce's face fell. "Okay."
By the time he had picked the eggs up from the floor barehanded, threw them away in the waste basket next to the sink and sat back down to his breakfast, Thomas and Martha had already seated themselves to their own plates of eggs and toast, as well as cups of coffee.
"Thank you, Alfred," Martha said.
"You are most welcome, Missus Wayne."
As Martha salted her eggs, Thomas fixed Bruce with a gaze.
"Bruce?"
"Yeah?"
"What's that movie you like so much?"
Bruce blinked. "I like a lot of movies."
"Okay," Thomas said, smiling. "Fair enough. But the one I'm thinking of is in black-and-white."
Bruce knew what he was getting at. "The Mark of Zorro!" he said, feeling his own face light up.
"You know," Martha said, "most children your age like Star Wars."
"I like Star Wars," said Bruce.
"But you like Zorro better?"
Bruce, who had stuffed his face with eggs, nodded enthusiastically.
"Why, t hough?" Thomas asked.
Bruce had swallowed his food.
It would be both unwise and unkind to ask such questions concerning film criticism of an eight-year-old boy. Bruce didn't have the faculties to rhapsodize about the distinct sense of unreality that the black-and-white 1940 20th Century Fox production instilled in him. The imitation of nineteenth century California that, even to eyes as untrained as Bruce Wayne's, was obviously not nineteenth century California. How everything was bright and clean, and how Don Diego Vega, as played by Tyrone Power, fought the bad guys and did good from beneath a mask.
Finally, Bruce said "I just… do."
Thomas nodded. "Fair enough."
"Where did you even find that movie?" Martha asked.
"It's one of mine," Alfred said. "I taped it from The Late, Late Show on Channel Thirty."
The VHS tape from the library, with the title "The Mark of Zorro" written upon the label in Alfred Pennyworth's small-yet-flowing penmanship, was one of Bruce's most prized possessions. He had taken to carrying it from room to room throughout the mansion, even with no intention of watching it. He just liked having the tape around.
"But you always watch it by yourself, though," Thomas said. "Why is that?"
A flush of embarrassment came over Bruce. He felt himself shrink.
"I watched it with mom," Bruce said. "But she makes me watch My Fair Lady afterwards."
Thomas' blue eyes floated over to his wife. "Why must you abuse our child with Audrey Hepburn?"
"I'll have you know," Martha said, brushing a lock of light brown hair behind her ear, "that My Fair Lady is a classic."
"My Fair Lady is a temporal anomaly," Thomas said. "It's three hours long, but lasts a hundred years. It is the worst form of time travel."
"It won eight Oscars," Martha said. "Including Best Picture. The Academy has spoken."
"I looked it up, babe," Thomas said. "Dr. Strangelove and Mary Poppins were nominated, too. You know good and well My Fair Lady did not deserve that Oscar. Hell, I'd have even given it to Becket. That was nominated too."
"The. Academy. Has. Spoken," Martha said. Then she reached out and ruffled Thomas' still-damp black hair.
He smiled. "Anyway, Bruce, your mother and I are very pleased with your grades at school."
It did not occur to Bruce to voice his gratitude. He just said "Okay."
"And I figure," Thomas said, "hard work deserves a reward."
"Okay."
"And tonight… I have booked a theater in town tonight, and they will be showing The Mark of Zorro just for us."
Bruce's heart caught in his throat. He would be watching his favorite movie on a big screen for the first time ever.
But something halted his reverie, and his state of mind must have shown on his face.
"What is it?" Martha asked.
Bruce looked down at his dungarees and his blue and red striped shirt before he looked back at his mother.
"Do I have to wear a suit?" Bruce asked.
Thomas smiled some more. "Yes, Bruce. Yes you do."
"But Tommy Elliot doesn't have to wear a suit to go to the movies."
"Tommy Elliot picks his nose and eats it," Martha said.
Bruce laughed. Partly because those words, in that order, coming out of his mother's mouth was instinctively hilarious to him. And partly because it was true. Bruce had in fact seen his friend Tommy Elliott go mining for green gold and his subsequent feasts upon the bounty, be it sticky or crusty.
"But still, though."
Thomas got his stern face on.
"Bruce," he said. "Not everyone has what you have. Not everyone has a butler who makes them scrambled eggs in the morning. Not everyone has a dad who can just call up 20th Century Fox and ask if they have any thirty-five millimeter prints of an ancient Tyrone Power movie they made just lying around. Some people have to work three jobs. Some people can't eat at all."
Young Bruce Wayne felt his stomach sink.
"Now we're Waynes," Thomas said. "Some people will love us for no other reason than that. And some people will hate us for no other reason than that. As much as there will be days where you wish you can escape it, you never will. So the least you can do, the very least you can do… is not lie about it. We come from great privilege in a city where so many others are far less lucky. And that means wearing a suit at times when you don't want to. Because we have to tell the world who we are. It's the only way to be honest. It's the only way this works."
Bruce wore a dark blue suit and gray shirt with no tie.
But he opted to drive his wife to City Hall in his pick-up truck. Both he and Selina thought it would buy at least a little cred with Mayor Yeoh, who had apparently been on the warpath against capes since the attack on the Gotham Royal some nights before, if Harper was to be believed. Selina being the former Catwoman, she had to be questioned at the very least.
They both listened to the radio silently. The news report informed him that the fires in the Amazon in Brazil had finally died down.
He felt Selina's hand slowly creep down his right thigh.
Bruce took his eyes off the mainland street for the briefest of an instant to look at his wife, who was smiling.
Selina actually liked the pick-up truck that Bruce used to go to his incognito construction jobs. She had said that the flatbed in the back was, in her words, "just the right size."
They had taken the truck out for a night in the woods a year or so back. The flatbed was, in fact, just the right size.
Bruce's eyes lazily went back to the street, looking for the turn on Fairfield Dr-
BOOM!
A great force collided with the driver's side of the truck, sending the vehicle flying. The crumple of metal and the crash of shattering glass before…
Darkness.
It lasted both an eon and a second, and as Bruce came to, he felt his arms dangling above him. The truck was upside down.
He looked to his right.
Selina's arms were also dangling. Her eyes rolled back in her head before they finally closed. And a cut along her hairline had dyed a gray streak in her hair red.
Bruce steadied himself and unbuckled his seat belt. His head thundered against the roof of the car. He coiled to get upright, and brought a hand to his wife's face.
"Selina?"
She stirred. She asked, weakly:
"Sailor...?"
He unbuckled her seat belt, and tried to get her down the ground as softly as he could. He unlocked the passenger door and kicked it open.
Whatever had hit them had knocked the truck from the middle of the street to the sidewalk in front of the Fairfield Drive Applebee's. Bruce looked for any pedestrians who might have been hit, but all he saw were tools from the back of the truck that had been knocked loose from the impact.
He knelt down and worked Selina's right arm over his shoulder, and tried to get her standing. Selina's head was hanging limply from her neck, her scalp was spewing blood, and she was essentially out on her feet.
But after forcefully bringing Selina up, he looked over what was left of his truck to see what had hit him.
Through the thin mist, he saw the delineation of the vehicle that had collided with the truck. It was an armored personnel carrier, military grade, though he couldn't see the color.
The bulky silhouette of the driver emerged from the fog.
It was the Arkham Knight.
And she was carrying a rocket launcher.
"Are you ready?" Martha asked.
"Yup," said Bruce.
Thomas and Martha, dressed in elegant formal wear, had bought their young son a hot dog from a street vendor before they were to arrive at the theater. After he had finished it, however, there remained the issue of the napkins and the flimsy paper in which the morsel of food had come.
"Go," Martha said.
Bruce, in his black suit and tie, did a little shuffle on the balls of his feet before yelling "JORDAN FAKES LEFT!" and throwing the wadded up paper refuse.
It landed in the wide open maw of a silver steel trash can in an alley. Bruce raised his arms in triumph.
"OHHHHHHHHHH!" Martha yelled. "A THREE AT THE BUZZER! THE CHICAGO BULLS WIN THE NBA FINALS IN SIX GAMES!"
Bruce pumped his little fists in triumph as his mother, dressed in a sequined black gown, a fox stole, and a pearl necklace, waved an imaginary microphone in front of her son's face.
"Mister Jordan," Martha said. "What were your thoughts as the fourth quarter wound down?"
Bruce automatically parroted the one thing he ever remembered from NBA post-game interviews. "I'm just one man out there, trying to give a hundred percent for the team."
Martha laughed, and tousled her son's hair.
Bruce knew that he lived in a state of oddity, his mother being into sports unlike the mothers of all his friends. Basketball was her sport, unlike Thomas, who was a baseball guy.
And Thomas, wearing a black suit and tie identical to his young son's, did not look amused.
"What's your problem?" Martha asked, still smiling.
He looked at Bruce. "Couldn't root for a Gotham team, there, squirt?"
"The Guardsmen don't have Jordan," Bruce said.
To which his father replied "They would have Jordan if the owner weren't such a dumbass."
"Hey," Martha said. "Isn't that dumbass a donor to the hospital?"
Thomas, who was the chief cardiac surgeon at Gotham General Hospital, said "Yes, he is. He can buy MRI equipment, but he can't buy brains."
Martha smiled, and kissed her husband.
"Ugh!" cried Bruce. "That's traumatizing!"
Thomas looked at Bruce with a broad beam. "Do you even know what that word means?"
"Sure I do," said Bruce. "It's like 'gross,' but fancier."
Martha laughed at this.
"Never let it be said my boy isn't smart," Thomas said. He put his arm around Bruce's shoulder. And they walked to the theater.
The Monarch Theatre occupied a square block of real estate (which included both the structure itself as well as the parking lot) in Gotham City's East End. It had been erected in 1922, during the neighborhood's hey-day. Then the depression hit. People moved out. Crime moved in. But the Monarch Theatre, in some way or shape or form, still remained.
At present, it was an art house and repertory theater showing the finest in independent and foreign films as well as reissues of Hollywood classics. It was the home of the Gotham City Film Festival every March, which was funded by the Wayne Foundation.
The Monarch's owner, one Morris Delaney, was in the cramped retro lobby when the Waynes entered. He wore a light gray suit, white shirt, black tie, and gold-plated name tag. He shook Thomas' hand.
"Thank you very much for doing this for us, Morris," Thomas said.
Morris smiled. "Not a problem at all. The show will start whenever you're ready."
Thomas smiled back, and looked down at his son. "Still hungry after that hot dog?"
Bruce nodded.
"Want some candy? Something to drink?"
Bruce nodded again.
Thomas fished a twenty dollar bill out of the interior pocket of his suit jacket, and handed it to Bruce.
"To your heart's content," he said.
"Thank you," said Bruce, and he walked to the concession stand.
Two attendants, one male and one female, were dressed like the hotel bellhops that Bruce had seen at that fancy hotel when his dad had taken him to Metropolis six months ago, complete with matching burgundy pillbox hats. They stood at attention like soldiers.
Bruce put the twenty on the counter. "May I have a small Coke and a box of Hot Tamales, please?"
One of them, the woman with the name tag that said "Claudia," smiled, and said "Sure thing."
They operated with military efficiency. And once he had his soda and his candy, he said the words that his father taught him to say when he was interacting with the work-a-day folks of Gotham City:
"Thank you very much. And keep the change."
With his mother and father flanking him, Bruce entered the dimly lit theater. The Wayne family took their seats in the middle row on the right side.
The theater went dark. And the familiar orchestral sound of the 20th Century Fox fanfare sounded as the screen came alive.
There was an immense pain in Bruce Wayne's side. Were he fortunate enough to see an afterlife, he would perish a second time from an acute embarrassment that he was an old man whose chief factor in his inability to get away from a crazy woman with a rocket launcher was a broken hip.
It couldn't have been that bad, Bruce reckoned, but it still hurt and it slowed him down. Slowing him down further was Selina, who was concussed, bleeding profusely, and could barely walk.
For her part, however, the Arkham Knight was content to saunter behind them as she loaded her rocket launcher.
Bruce hobbled, holding Selina all the while, down Fairfield Drive. They came to Finbar's Irish Pub, which fit snugly into the bottom floor of a red brick building on the corner of Fairfield and Ninety-Fifth-Street.
Two ruddy-faced white men, both in thick cable knit sweaters and both on the husky side, exited the pub, and saw them.
"Jesus," the one on the right said. "Are you two alright?"
Bruce, dazed, pained, and almost out of breath, said "Move!"
"What?"
"MOVE, N-"
The high whistle of a rocket launcher, and the floor above Finbar's exploded in a deep crimson haze of pulverized red brick.
Bruce hit the concrete, taking Selina with him.
By the time he came back up, ears ringing, he saw the carnage. The corner of Fairfield and Ninety-Fifth was a scarlet wasteland decorated by two dead bar patrons. One of whom was missing everything above the waist.
Through the high keen in his ears, he could hear the Arkham Knight calling out to him.
"No talking in class, Bruce! Anyone you try to help gets spanked!"
And the low metallic thunk! of another rocket being loaded.
Bruce looked down at himself. He was smeared in red dust from head to toe. Selina was very much the same, though the cut in her head was dousing her face with a wetter coat.
He worked her arm back around his shoulder, and groaned through the pain as he got them both to their feet.
And the slow-motion pursuit began anew.
Bruce cut left…
...into an alley.
Bruce cut into imaginary soldiers of the evil and dastardly Alcalde with an equally imaginary rapier as he and his parents left the theater. Thomas thanked the owner of the Monarch yet again, (with Bruce repeating those words) before they found themselves on the narrow sidewalk next to the street.
In the hundred or so minutes since the Wayne family entered the Monarch, Gotham City had decided, in its infinite wisdom, to start filling in the potholes in front of the theater.
Surveying the noisy construction equipment in front of them, Thomas said "Shit."
"Bad word," said Bruce.
"Sorry," said Thomas.
"Can we get back to the car some other way?" Martha asked, gently massaging her pale collar bone beneath her pearl necklace.
Thomas scratched his chin, which was something he always did while he was thinking.
"There's an alley behind the building," Thomas said. "We can cut over, take the long way 'round."
"Sounds good," said Martha, and off they went around the corner, into the alley.
The buildings on either side of young Bruce seemed as tall and insurmountable to him as the walls of the Grand Canyon, or trenches in the Death Star. The concrete at his feet was still wet from the previous night's rain.
"I don't think I need to ask you whether or not you liked the movie," Martha said.
Which was true. Bruce had sat, open-mouthed and enthralled, through all ninety-four minutes of the feature, the thirty-five millimeter print of The Mark of Zorro so pristine that, projected on a screen as large as the Monarch's, seemed to have in inverse three-dimensional effect on young Bruce. It was as though he could leave his seat, walk up to the front of the theater, and leap through the screen to join Zorro in his fight against injustice in all its monochrome glory.
And the last words Bruce Wayne would ever say to his mother and father were:
"It was awesome."
The sound of wet street beneath heavy boots came from behind the Waynes.
They were not alone.
Bruce and his parents turned to see a man in a corduroy jacket and jeans staring them down from beneath hooded brows. The rest of his face had a pale, malnourished quality to it, with sunken cheeks and thin, chapped lips. A thinning forest of unkempt brown hair swirled about the top of his skull.
When he was eventually apprehended, Bruce learned that his name was Joseph Raymond Chilton, but he was known by his underworld confreres as "Joe Chill."
"Can we help you, friend?" Thomas asked.
And that's when the gun came out.
Thomas immediately yanked Bruce behind him. But Bruce could still see events unfold.
"Your money or your life," Joe Chill said as he drew down on them.
Bruce could see how rigid his mother had gotten, seemingly unbreathing.
"Friend," Thomas said, putting his hands up and trying to keep his voice steady. "You don't have to do this."
"Your money or your life," Joe Chill said again, his gravelly tenor reverberating off the walls of the alley.
"You need help," Thomas said. "I can see that. But if you do this, you can't walk back from it. I can be the man you kill, or I can be the man who helps you."
Bruce heard a hissing sigh come from Joe Chill's mouth. "I'm not getting your money, am I?"
Young Bruce Wayne was aware, even at his young age, of his father Thomas' penchant for bad jokes at the worst possible times. In public when he was with his family, he was respectable and more than a little stern, but when they were in private, Thomas Wayne had the habit of lapsing into occasional spells of goofball.
So with his final words, Thomas Wayne showed a levity that his eight-year-old son would never possess in the ensuing forty-three years of his life when he said:
"Sure you are. You take MasterCard?"
BANG!
Joe Chill's bullet caught Thomas Wayne at center mass, right through the heart. He hit the ground not knowing he was dead.
Finally loosed from her adamantine torpor, Martha Wayne tried to shove Bruce further back behind her as she yelled "THO-"
BANG!
Joe Chill's second bullet hit Martha Wayne at the neckline, painting the pavement behind her red, and severing the cord of pearls around her throat. She too dropped to the concrete.
Four seconds within the minute of 10:47 PM was all it took the world to fully extricate itself from the continued living presence of Thomas and Martha Wayne.
It was as though the blinders of Bruce Wayne's existence had been drawn back with the power of bottomless, searing pain. The world beyond him, once so enticing in its variance and mystery, became a blank and unending void.
There was this.
There was only this.
Bruce fell to his knees upon the damp pavement, stray pearls, and his parents' blood.
Looking up from the inferno of his very life, he saw Joe Chill level the gun on him, apparently decide against it at the last minute, and turn to exit the alley.
The man had just murdered his parents, and not only did no outside force governed by a just and caring world stop him from doing so, it was not going to stop him from getting away with it.
Still in the grip of a cowardice for which he would hate himself for a majority of his life, Bruce Wayne called out silently to some force greater than he to stop Joe Chill in his tracks. To bring him to justice. To turn back the irreversible course of time itself to bring life and air and blood back to Thomas and Martha Wayne.
Bruce did not call to God in his pained and horrified silence.
He called to Zorro.
The alley was a dead end.
For all intents and purposes, anyway. The street to the left was blocked off by a large, green dumpster. If Bruce was at tip-top shape, he could move it. But Bruce was not at tip-top shape. There was a pain in his side, he was holding up his uncomprehending wife… and he was fifty-one years old.
But he was going to try. He was going to set Selina down. He was going to try to move that dumpster with all the strength left in him. He was going to-
"Well."
Bruce's head snapped to the sound of the voice.
The Arkham Knight was standing in the mouth of the alley, her shadow looming large from the gray dreariness of the street.
And the Arkham Knight… dropped her rocket launcher before she started slowly advancing.
"I just want you to know," the Arkham Knight said, her voice coming from her helmet in an electronic distortion, "that I didn't plan this. How was I supposed to know you'd go running down an alley?"
She got her Glock from the holster on the left thigh of armor.
"But this," the Arkham Knight said, "this is poetic. You, Bruce Wayne, are gonna die with your wife in some random, shitty alley. Gunned down like dogs. Just like your Mom and Pop."
Bruce's mind hung on one of her words.
Poetic.
History does not repeat itself…
He could hear Astrid Arkham take a deep sniff of air beneath her helmet and let it out through her mouth in satisfaction.
"I want to commit this to memory," the Arkham Knight said. "I want to remember every last bit of texture. Every drop of blood. I want to know the temperature. I want to memorize the scene. I want to recall everything perfectly when I reminisce about the time I killed my mother's murderer, and the thieving whore he married."
"I didn't kill your mother," Bruce said.
The Arkham Knight finally leveled the gun at his head. "As far as last words go, those are terrible. Try again."
Bruce took a deep breath.
Batman always had a way out.
But Bruce Wayne was not Batman anymore.
So Bruce Wayne did not.
For the first time in his fifty-one years of age, he was in a lethal situation in which there was no way to win.
Bruce did not believe in God. But if there were a place where all he had lost throughout his life had holed up, never aging, riding out the existence of the universe in a location beyond the mundane trappings of time and space, he would like to take his wife there. To see them all.
Alfred.
Dick.
Mom.
Dad.
He did not have time to wonder whether the looks on their faces would be that of joy or shame at a life wasted, a bad situation made immeasurably worse for all the lives he had inexorably tangled in his crusade. But he wondered anyway.
He looked at Selina. Her eyes were half open. Her face was a slick mask of blood. Her clothes were coated in rusty red dust.
And she was still, somehow, the most beautiful person he had ever had the privilege to lay his eyes upon.
"I love you so much," Bruce said.
Selina blinked her left eye about a half a second before she blinked her right.
She couldn't hear him.
"Cute," the Arkham Knight said. "But pointless."
Bruce looked over, and stared down the barrel of the Arkham Knight's gun. Thomas Wayne's death took him by surprise. But Bruce Wayne would not suffer the same fate.
He would not blink.
...but it does on occasion rhyme.
So caught up was Bruce in his reverie that he almost did not notice the small chunk of metal that had embedded itself in the brick wall next to the Arkham Knight.
But the Arkham Knight did.
She turned her head to look at it just as it exploded in light of an azure translucence, coating her armor.
And all of the lights on that armor instantly went out. Bruce could hear rotors winding down, grinding to a halt.
The Arkham Knight was helpless statuary, holding a gun on Bruce that she could not fire. And from beneath her heavy, useless armor, Bruce could hear Astrid Arkham crying out beneath, free of her helmet's electronic distortion:
"What the fuck?"
This is when Bruce Wayne looked up.
A shape descended to Earth. A shape of such all-consuming blackness that it seemed to be a lesion in reality itself.
And the first thought that came to Bruce's mind was every bit as foolish as it was sudden.
It took him forty-three years, but Zorro finally showed up.
The black shape hit the pavement at the Arkham Knight's feet before it rose. Two large protrusions from its head, like horns or elongated ears, extended from its head. And a cape spread out behind it like the wings of a great and terrifying beast.
Like a bat.
Bruce felt weariness and pain, both physical and mental, expelled from every pore in his body. He imagined it as a foul invisible steam, ethereal impurity left to wither and die on the air itself. And that anguish was replaced with… with…
Exultation?
Bruce would not have assigned such an adjective to himself even under the best of circumstances, but there it was, blooming in his mind like a field of wildflowers.
Reality had interjected itself both on his behalf, and on the behalf of his beloved wife. From the brink of annihilation, they were granted a sudden and joyous reprieve.
Is… Is this what it feels like?
From her position before the Arkham Knight, his daughter looked over her shoulder without moving her feet.
"RUN!" Black Bat yelled. "NOW!"