Chapter 29: La Famiglia del Pipistrello
Three very important things occurred in the hours between when the collection of superheroes in the old tunnels defeated The Undying and Black Manta, and the following morning, when enough law enforcement and armed service personnel had converged upon Gotham City to effectively stabilize it…
At 6:21 AM the following morning, two motorcycles, with Batgirl (in her old Batgirl armor she had retrieved from the display case in the Batcave) and Nightwing driving them, left the most populated areas of the mainland for a side road leading into the open marshes that bordered Slaughter Swamp. A rock face a quarter of a mile away from Wayne Manor held a tunnel, with a holographic camouflage routine concealing the entrance. And this is where Batgirl and Nightwing entered to go to the Batcave.
An hour later, Barbara Gordon and Dick Grayson emerged from Wayne Manor, getting on the motorcycle upon which they had come to Gotham City, heading home for Bludhaven.
Barbara drove. Dick sat behind her, holding her by the waist all the while. The sidecar that had carried Barbara on the way now carried their luggage.
Peering through the goggles on her motorcycle helmet down the open road, Barbara's face was… Resolute? Confused? Disturbed?
Whatever Barbara Gordon was thinking, she was in no hurry to share.
An hour and a half earlier, at 4:49 AM, before the sun had even risen, the Batmobile pulled up to Gotham Central station.
The on-duty officers, what few there were, were running about the main bullpen attending to business, now that the city was no longer under siege and superheroes had apparently filed into the city to aid them.
When Batman stepped into the bullpen, all motion stopped. He surveyed the room.
The cops were silent, their faces a mix of fear and antipathy.
They hated Batman.
They hated Batman for coming back, ruining the three halcyon years of having minimal to no accountability.
They hated Batman because a psychopath had made him the focal point of his rampage, endangering the lives of nine million people.
And they definitely hated Batman because he had saved the city, succeeding where they failed.
"I am to understand that Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy turned themselves in to this precinct?"
He took the next couple of seconds of hostile silence as an affirmative.
"I would like to see Harley Quinn in an interrogation room, please. Alone."
They still didn't say anything. But they gave him what he wanted.
Five minutes later, the door closed on a small interrogation room. Harley sat in a metal folding chair at a table. She was still in the Big Belly Burger t-shirt and cutoffs in which she had saved Catwoman from Scarecrow.
A moment of silence, before Harley spoke.
"S-So, um-"
Batman held up a hand to silence her. He turned to the two-way mirror.
"I know you're in there."
A couple of seconds later, both Batman and Harley heard a slamming door from beyond the mirror.
Batman took a small signal interceptor out of his utility belt, and placed it on the two-way mirror. Just in case someone on the other side had left a camera running, then that signal interceptor would disrupt the feed.
He finally turned to Harley.
"I'm going to ask you a very important question," Batman said. "Your answer will determine the tenor of the rest of the conversation. Are you ready?"
Harley, wide-eyed and mouth hanging open, nodded.
Batman put his hands on the table, and seemingly peered into Harley Quinn's very soul.
"Did you… have anything to do… with the murder of my partner?"
Harley squinted at him, blinking. "Ya mean Robin?"
Batman nodded.
Harley gasped.
"No!" she said. "I was in Arkham when that went down! Yeah, I was in love with Mistah J, but even then, doin' in a kid the way I heard Robin was done in woulda… just… No!"
"But that didn't stop you from running to his side later."
Harley sighed. "Co-dependency's a bitch, ain't it?"
Batman looked at Harley some more… and he was convinced she was telling the truth.
"I've become aware of the fact that you've been offering your skills as a therapist to your fellow patients at Arkham."
"Yeah?"
"How would you describe you success so far?"
Harley shrugged. "Hard to tell. Some people are easier to get a bead on. Like… I'd say you were sufferin' from adult antisocial behaviors and a negative mood cluster stemmin' from post-traumatic stress…"
Batman tilted his head at her, and she seemed to get a little more nervous than she already was.
"I-If I was to just eyeball ya, I mean. Some people are easier to eyeball than others. And-And even then, though? Not a lotta people in Arkham are, y'know, receptive to gettin' treatment."
Batman nodded. "And if someone were receptive to getting treatment… How well do you think you would do?"
Harley shrugged. "I dunno… I think I'd do pretty good. Why?"
Batman pulled out the chair on the other end of the table, and sat down.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, before he raised his hands.
His fingers brushed the side of his cowl, causing the connective plates to part.
Bruce Wayne removed his cowl, and set it down on the table, before locking eyes with a clearly shocked Harley Quinn.
"Because I need your help, Doctor Quinzel."
Forty-five minutes later, after Batman had left, and Harley was taken back into the small holding cell that neighbored the one of her partner, Ivy asked Her what it was that Batman wanted.
Only for Harley to tell her that what they talked about was covered under Doctor-Patient Confidentiality.
However, the most important thing that happened was something that happened mere seconds after the first wave of heroes had either run or flown out of the sewer entrance of the construction site.
Atop an abandoned building in The Cauldron, overlooking the site, there was no one.
In the next instant, with only the echo of snapping fingers acting as their herald, two figures appeared.
The one on the right was a woman, gorgeous and statuesque. She had long and lustrous black hair, and she was dressed like a 1940s pin-up model, with red shorts and a flower-patterned halter top. She had a big floppy sun hat, and her eyes were covered by vintage cat-eye sunglasses. In her hands, she held a copy of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which she was reading. She was chuckling to herself warmly, as though she were reading a six-year-old's poorly spelled attempt at interpreting Proust.
The one on the left was her opposite in almost every respect. He was roughly three feet tall, which didn't seem to matter as much to him, as he was floating next to her instead of standing. He was clad in an ugly orange jumpsuit with purple shoes, belt, and highlights. Tufts of white hair extended from either side of his bald pate like dying weeds achingly leaning toward the sun. Atop his head was a small purple derby hat with a daisy sticking up from the hat band. And a cigar was sticking out of the mouth in his exceptionally homely face.
If one were to describe the fellow on the left, the most common noun employed might be… "Imp."
The Imp took the cigar out of his mouth, and looked about himself with a expression of confusion.
"I don't think… I don't think I've been here before. Sugar, have we been here before?"
The beautiful woman looked from the book to her companion. She opened her mouth to say something, but decided to use the least amount of effort at the last second, and just shrugged her shoulders instead, before going back to her book.
The Imp looked back out over Gotham.
"Yeah," The Imp said. "We haven't been here before. This place still has that New Universe Smell."
SIX DAYS LATER…
The previous six days passed with little out of the ordinary of note, for a city recovering from a hostage siege situation.
While Mayor James Gordon and the GCPD figured out what to do with the thirty percent of officers who abandoned their shifts to hunt Batman independently, the National Guard had been dispatched to Gotham City to maintain peacekeeping duties. Supplemented, of course, by whatever superheroes within the Justice League and without could spare at least two hours in a given day to patrol.
On Day Two, Mayor Gordon held a press conference, wherein he gave the people of the city a two month window to replace the depleted officers on the force, at least provisionally, with officers from nearby cities and towns. Once this two month window had expired, Gordon would resign his office as Mayor and rejoin the GCPD as Commissioner, leaving Deputy Mayor Mattia Bardolo in charge.
In fact, the only event that might be considered noteworthy in terms of its strangeness was when Maxie Zeus tried to start a lightning fight on Day Three.
The escaped inmates of Blackgate Penitentiary and the patients of Arkham Asylum, by and large, surrendered without incident. This, of course, was after the nature of the situation had been made known to them. That not only did they have to compete with Batman on the streets of Gotham, but Superman could swoop down and pick them up. Black Canary could shatter their eardrums. Beast Boy could turn into a gorilla and smack them through a wall. There was even talk of Doctor Fate out in these streets, turning people into toads if they got all mouthy. It wasn't true, but that didn't stop the superstitious and cowardly from talking about it.
But Maxie Zeus wanted to start a lightning fight.
He was holed up in a warehouse on Snyder Avenue on Miagani Island when a collection of superheroes doing a sweep found him. It should be noted that Maxie Zeus was, in fact, not endowed with any superhuman ability at all. He was just a man under a severe psychological delusion that he was Zeus: the Greek god of thunder. He did, however, have a lightning gun that he had procured from the inventory room once he had escaped from Arkham. This lightning gun, sadly, had no batteries in it.
It was his misfortune, however, that the person he had decided to start his little lightning fight with was Crazy Jane.
Crazy Jane, whose real name was Kay Challis, was a member of the Doom Patrol, which operated out of New Jersey. Crazy Jane was perhaps insensitively named such because she suffered from Dissociative Personality Disorder. Each of her sixty-four different personalities had their own powers.
So while Maxie Zeus did not use real lightning, Crazy Jane (then under the dominant personality designated by one Doctor Niles Caulder as "Sun Daddy ") did in fact use real fire.
After the altercation, Maxie Zeus was apprehended, and taken back to Arkham Asylum for treatment.
The orderlies have taken bets among themselves as to when Maxie's eyebrows are going to grow back.
Bruce Wayne stood in black slacks and a white button-up on the deck of his yacht in Gotham Harbor as the sun went down. He swirled amber liquid and ice in a glass he was holding.
Most would think it was whiskey.
It was just apple juice.
He stood and stared at the skyline of the city he had helped save, absently sipping his drink, until he heard Selina walk up the ramp and board the yacht.
Bruce turned to her. She was wearing black leggings and a black leather jacket over a black tank top.
They didn't say hello. They just looked at each other.
"What's the name of this boat?" Selina asked.
"Doesn't have one," Bruce said. "It's just a serial number."
"Y'know," Selina said, "when I go to rich people places like this, whenever I have the chance, I always dress like I am now. So I'm all inappropriate and underdressed. So I look how I feel."
Bruce nodded. "The rest of the world might be over dressed. You ever think about that?"
Selina smiled, and looked at her feet. When she finally looked back up, she said:
"I'm not your partner."
Bruce just looked at her.
"Or I should say," she said, "that I'm not your sidekick. I'm a completely independent entity that may or may not team up with you every now and then."
"I'm not going to ask if you'll stay on the right side. I know you will."
Selina snorted. "Please. It's not like there aren't bad people I can steal from. Yeah, I could rob law-abiding Richies and have the cops shoot at me, but they don't mean it. They don't mean it because they know I'm tight with you, and there'll be Hell to pay later. Now stealing from guys like Falcone and The Penguin? They mean it when they shoot at me, so… I can get my thrill-seek on, and still be on the side of the angels. Which I apparently am."
Bruce nodded. "Speaking of sidekicks… How's Stephanie?"
Selina sighed. "We start training tomorrow. I still can't believe I stepped in this."
"Don't quit on that girl," Bruce said. "If you do, she's just going to go out there on her own in an outfit she made herself out of construction paper. It won't end well."
"I know."
"So if you're Catwoman, does that make her… Catgirl?"
Selina looked at him as though he'd just belched at a funeral.
"Your punishment for saying something so silly is to go home and google 'Catgirl.' You will never sleep again."
Bruce smiled.
"I just think I should have my head examined for doing something this stupid," Selina said. "Know any good shrinks?"
Bruce furrowed his brow. "Funny."
"I'm not the funny one," Selina said. "I'm not the one having therapy sessions with Harley Quinn."
"I need help," Bruce said. "It's not like I can go to Doctor Jones down the street and tell him I'm Batman."
"How did she react to that, by the way?"
Bruce folded his arms. "She said… 'I was right the first time.' Do you have any idea what that means?"
"Yes."
"Are you going to tell me?"
"No."
Bruce nodded. "Anyway, I trust her. She seems to want to make a go of things. Stick to the rules, and all that by not telling anyone who I am."
"And if she decides to tell everyone Bruce Wayne is Batman, she's Harley Quinn, and no one will believe her," Selina said.
"Yes," Bruce said. "That too."
"So how's it gonna work?"
"An hour a week on Thursday nights at Arkham," Bruce said. "Four AM. It'll be the last thing I do before I hang up the cape for the night. I checked the hourly rates on the highest paid shrinks in Gotham, and upped hers by twenty percent, putting it in escrow. When Harleen Quinzel leaves Arkham, she's going to be a very surprised, very wealthy woman."
"You're not telling her you're paying her?"
"And miss the look on her face when I hand her the check?"
Selina smiled.
"It's… It's a damn sight from perfect," said Bruce.
"Who said anything about perfect?" Selina asked. "It's just better than what you had."
Bruce sighed. "It's just… I can't offer redemption for people who do wrong when I'm the way I am now."
Selina looked down at the deck of the yacht, put her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket, and walked toward him.
She was still looking at the deck when she began to speak.. And she spoke softly.
"I was dead in that tunnel," she said. "For all intents and purposes, I died, and the last thing I did with what little time I had left, was stand between Black Manta and Dick Grayson. To take the hit for him, even though he was gonna take the hit later. And then I lived. Zatanna put me back together, and I kicked me some ass, but that second that I knew was dead stayed with me. And I've tried to put on a whole bunch of explanations for it. Tried to find a way it served me, a way it played to my advantage, tried to filter it through all seven deadly sins and I just can't do it. I even had a choice in the matter. I could have walked away and had a couple of more hours of life, and I didn't take it. Not because I wanted to show Black Manta how awesome and fearless I was, but because Dick needed help, and I was the only one who could do it."
She sighed, before finally looking at him.
"How the hell did you know who I was before I did?" Selina asked. "You've been telling me for years how good I was deep down, and I didn't find that out for myself until a few days ago. I'm one of the good guys, and… and that doesn't feel weird to me anymore. Because it's the truth."
Selina put her hand on his arm.
"I can tell you I love you, and I don't feel like I'm giving anything up. I love that you know me better than I know myself. I love that you never gave up on me. I love that you never left me. I love… that you're an irritating, pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud chronic do-gooder who never lets me have any fun, and is best friends with a dweeb like Superman. And I'm happy you're doing the therapy thing, no matter who it's with. Because that means it's my turn to not give up on you. And I even love that I know you're shrinking on the inside right now because you don't like hearing good things about yourself."
Bruce ran a hand through the thick black hair of Selina's pixie cut.
"I love you too."
They stared at each other a moment longer.
"That word still kinda tastes funny," she said.
Bruce nodded.
Selina grabbed him by the collar, and brought his head down. They kissed just as the sun finally disappeared behind the immense buildings of Miagani Island. Her lips were arm and full against his. Bruce remembered when he was a kid, his mother told him that if he kept making funny faces, his face would get stuck like that. He wished it were true. He wished if he and Selina stayed like this, they'd be statues on the deck of this boat, lips forever touching, his arms eternally around her.
He knew he wasn't going to abandon being Batman just to shack up with Selina forever. But he felt that just having the option made a world of difference.
They broke the kiss, and she rested her head on his chest with her eyes closed.
Breathing in the sweetness of her hair, Bruce wondered if this was how it was like for everyone else. This sense of lightness. This warmth. Because if it was, then he got here too late.
"Say something stupid," she said. "I still have some vanity left, so say something completely dumb and ruin the moment, so I can laugh at you. Just let me forget how happy I am for one hot second, while I still know what not being happy looks like."
"You don't like the moment?"
"I don't want to wear it out."
"Okay," Bruce said. He thought for a moment, and said:
"Think of all the fun you can have as Catwoman when you have WayneTech prototypes to play with."
Selina raised her head from his chest, looked him in the eye with an expression that bordered on the dreamy.
"That is the sexiest thing anyone's ever said to me."
Bruce laughed.
"That is… like… the total opposite of what I told you to do," Selina said.
He put his arm around her shoulder, and guided her to his side, so they could both look at the city together.
"I need to be better," Bruce said. "I need to be more than what I have been."
"Eh, you're doing pretty okay so far."
"I mean as Batman," Bruce said. "The people of this city turned on each other instead of protecting one another. If that's the sum total of my influence, then I've failed. I can't be the light at the end of anyone's tunnel they way I am now. I can't leave people with broken bones in a pool of their own blood and tell them, with a straight face, that I hope they get better. It needs to change. It has to start with me being a good man. To you, to Dick, to Barbara. To everyone. If the city reflects the people that protect it, then I need it to reflect that. I need it to come back to me. The people of Gotham City need to look out for one another. Maybe… just maybe… it'll bring more in."
Selina looked up at him quizzically. "More people? You mean superheroes?"
Bruce nodded. "If I stumble. If I fail. Then I can't be the only one the city can look to."
Selina blinked. "So… You're raising an army?"
Bruce shook his head. "I can't be a General. I need to be a resource. There are so many ways the people of a city can look out for one another. Sometimes it means working at a homeless shelter. Sometimes it means being the one honest cop in a dirty department… And sometimes it means dressing up in a goofy outfit and beating the hell out of some very bad people."
He looked down at her. "I'm pretty good at that third one."
Selina smirked. "So I noticed."
She worked her way out from under his arm. She took him by the hand and tried to guide him to the stairs that led below deck.
Bruce didn't move.
"What are you doing?"
She looked at him. "Oh, I'm sorry, let me rephrase the question."
Selina let go of his hand, grabbed him by the waistband of his slacks, and tried to lead him below deck.
"Selina, no."
She let go of the front of his pants, hunched over, and threw her head back; the signs of an adult throwing a tantrum.
"Oh, come ooooooooon," Selina said. "You're gonna make me wait three dates to kiss you the right way, and we haven't even gone on one yet."
"What is it about me that tells you that I've been in a normal relationship ever in my life?"
"Well I've been on a lot of them," Selina said. "You're not missing anything. And that deafening silence you hear is both me dying of thirst, and my ass unable to spank itself. C'mon, it's Batman's cheat day."
Bruce just looked at her. Selina sighed.
"Fine," she said. "When can we go on the first date?"
"Does right now work for you?"
"Right now works great for me," Selina said. "And an hour after that works great for the second one."
Bruce was about to smile, and tell Selina that there was a movie theater not even a block form here, when the evening air was assaulted with the sound of microphone feedback.
And an all-too-familiar voice sounded from every hijacked audio frequency in the city.
"Greetings, Gotham City, it is I: The Riddler! Back from my sabbatical in Star City! Returning home to a grateful populace ever eager for me to match wits with The Dark Knight himself!"
Bruce furrowed his brow. Selina handled the situation far less stoically.
"Oh, GODDAMMIT, EDDIE!"
"Now then, if a particular Caped Crusader happens to be listening in, lives depend upon his paying attention… What is at the end of a rainbow?"
The sound of feedback erupted again, signalling the end of the transmission.
"The letter W,' Bruce said.
"Right," said Selina, "but what does… Oh, duh, The Riddler's attacking Wayne Tower. Big building with a W on the front… Eddie's gonna try and jack your shit.""
"Are you alright to get home?" Bruce asked.
"Actually," Selina said, "I brought my Catwoman crap in a suitcase on the back of my Ducati. Because I planned on having a good time tonight, so I just knew some stupid bullshit was gonna happen."
"I have a Batsuit below deck."
"Of course you do."
Bruce shrugged. "I guess the first date's going to have to wait."
Selina rolled her eyes, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, and kissed him again.
When she broke it off, she lightly patted him on the cheek, and said:
"Sailor… This is the first date."
Daylight is not kind to Gotham City.
That which glimmers heavenly in the moonlight, from the gothic grandeur of Gotham Village, to the gleaming skyscrapers of the Financial District are rendered quaint at best, or tacky at worst by the unforgiving sun.
But she is glorious by night.
Its odds and ends, its ramshackle tenements, its solemn cathedrals, its vast towers, its places of business, all interlock like pieces to an odd yet absorbing puzzle.
And the people. The models on the catwalk at tonight's fashion show in the Tynion Ballroom. The dealers on Saginaw Street in the East End, shoving their stashes deep in their pockets as soon as the squad car rolls past. The bored-looking teenagers manning the counter at the Big Belly Burger on Devereaux and Finger in Founder's Island, watching swells and tourists file past the window.
Even the guests are intriguing: like the visitors from far-off flyover places like Kansas and Nebraska, eagerly looking up at the skyscrapers, slowing their pace, and pissing off the locals behind them on the crowded streets. Which is to say nothing of the fine folks from the Army Corps of Engineers, surveying the damage on Bleake Island, thinking of effective ways to erect new bridges after the mob blew them up.
A CEO here, a cop there, vagrants, sex workers, clergy, athletes. Some rich men, plenty of poor men, a platoon of beggar-men, and an army of thieves.
All manner of sterling specimen and crude side-effect of The American Experiment roam the streets of Gotham City. Rubbing shoulders with each other and ignoring each other. Sharing comfortable silences and exchanging heated invective. Making love to each other and robbing each other blind.
If you can't find something beautiful in Gotham City, step five feet to the left.
And if you can't find something tragic, do the same.
It was upon this strange, this curious, this fair-looking and foul-smelling mosaic, that Bruce Wayne wished in the same manner that naive children wish upon stars.
That if he could be a good enough man, in the guise of Batman and out, then the people of Gotham City would follow suit. They they would help their fellow citizen instead of turning on them. Stay their hands instead of raising them in anger.
And among their number, in the kind of foolish and silly hope that Bruce Wayne would only utter aloud to the woman he loved, a few would rise. They would join him in a fight never-ending, in an ideal that was so much greater than any one person that it would require others. Those under their own helm. Those who would risk life and raise fist against the darkness.
But Gotham City is a strange place. It is every bit as strange as it is terrifying, as it is unique, as it is welcoming, as it is damning, as it is beautiful.
It is the city that Bruce Wayne wished upon.
And it is the city that would grant that wish…
Tim Drake was one of the first people airlifted off of Bleake Island after Batman stopped The Undying. He was taken to the mainland and had to wait a day at an outdoor staging area set up by the GCPD until Superman and Supergirl were able to remove the cars clogging up the bridges to MIagani Island, where he lived.
He had spent the intervening four days leading up to this point being waited upon by his father Jack and his mother Janet, so happy and relieved were they that nothing had happened to their boy in the time the city was under siege.
"You don't have to do that," Jack said to him as Tim was washing the dishes after dinner. He had taken off one of the yellow rubber gloves to actually pick off a tough spot of food from a plate with the nail of his left thumb.
"I know I don't," Tim said, "but I want to. I'm gonna go nuts around here unless I do something."
He put the plate down in the sink.
"Look, dad, I appreciate that you're happy I'm alive and everything, but if nothing happened, then you'd yell at me for not doing the dishes."
"But something did happen, Tim."
"I know," Tim said, "but do the math here. The Undying had magic powers and Black Manta on his side, and he only managed to hold the city for thirty-nine hours before Batman stopped him. That's really not a whole lot of time."
"It felt like an eternity," Jack Drake said.
"For you, maybe," said Tim. "I spent most of it watching anime on a rooftop with a couple of Bleake Island kids."
And yeah, he was almost killed by a deranged movie buff, but Tim felt his father didn't need to know that.
Jack was about to say something, but he stopped himself. Tim dried off that last plate, and put it away.
"Now if you'll excuse me," Tim said, "I'm gonna go to my room and look for a new job."
Jack sighed. "Tim, if you need money…"
"If I need money, then I'll make money. That's what you told me to do when you told me to get a job in the first place."
Jack shrugged. "I'm just glad my son's home, is all."
Tim powered past the guilt trip. "I'm glad to be home, too, Dad."
He walked past his dad, out of the kitchen, and down the apartment hallway, to his room.
Tim sat down in his chair at the folding table that he called a desk, next to the window.
Before he put his hands to the keyboard of his PC to open Google Chrome and begin the search for his next place of employment, he looked at the shelf of DVDs and Blu-Rays next to his TV.
The faded yellow of the DVD case that his parents had gotten him when he was little called to him. He reached out a hand and pulled it out.
The Best of Haley's Circus.
There in the corner, underneath the clown and next to the tiger, were the smiling faces of The Flying Graysons.
The youngest of which he'd met days prior. Before he'd helped Batman save the city for the umpteenth time.
Tim Drake looked out the window, holding the DVD case, thinking of nothing in particular.
A Lyft pulled up to an apartment building in Tricorner, and after paying her driver, The Soldier stepped out.
She stood on the street in the evening air, running a hand through her short red hair and tugging on the shoulder of her green jacket.
The Soldier usually looked better than she did right now. People from money often did. But she'd been away from Gotham for a year training. She hadn't even been home yet, where all her good clothes were. But this was the stop she had to make.
She walked up the concrete steps, and buzzed for Apartment 826.
"Who is it?" asked a man's voice over the speaker.
The Soldier pressed the button. "You know who it is."
A few seconds of silence before the man's voice returned "I'll be right down."
Minutes later, a tall man with thinning brown hair and a pinched, weathered face opened the front door of the apartment building, and regarded her.
"Soldier," he said.
"Colonel," she replied.
"You know he's back, don't you?" The Colonel asked. "He called off his little sabbatical a few days ago and saved the city from an undead former politician."
"Good for him."
"Batman is back," The Colonel said. "You don't have to do this."
The Soldier set her suitcase down. She took her right arm out of her green jacket. Among the well-defined muscles and the odd tattoo was a startling series of scars, bruises, and welts.
"Your daughter didn't get dressed up for nothing," The Soldier said.
The Colonel sighed. "Follow me."
They walked into the apartment building, and took the elevator up to the eighth floor. The Soldier set her suitcase down next to the door as soon as they were in the small confines of apartment 826.
"I have to use the commode," The Colonel said.
"Classy."
"The plans are on the coffee table in the living room," The Colonel said as he walked down the hall. "Fix yourself something to drink."
The Soldier walked the couple of feet into the living room. There was a bottle of scotch on the coffee table (Ardbeg, Dad's favorite, of course) next to a couple of glasses and a green three ring binder.
She poured herself a finger of scotch and opened the binder to a random page.
It was a sketch by The Colonel, purely an idea. A black skin-tight suit with a black mask to fit snug over the face. Red boots and a red belt. A black cape with a red lining.
And a big red Bat over the chest, of course.
The problem The Soldier had was the long red wig. The notes next to the sketch said it was detachable.
As she walked over to the screen door to the balcony that looked out over this tiny stretch of Gotham City, Kate Kane took a drink.
The Homeless Girl was in Gotham City again.
She had been here once three years ago. She'd have stayed, but the Batman left. She saw no purpose in it.
The Homeless Girl, seventeen years of age, walked into The Spetz Diner on Washoe and Sixteenth, about eight blocks north of Chinatown on the mainland. She pulled the hood of her black hoodie down over her greasy black hair to obscure her dirty face, and she walked briskly past the other diners, so they wouldn't react to how bad she smelled.
But even at her quick pace, she could read the six people in the main dining area as easily as she thought others could read books.
The fat man in the trucker hat at the counter was loose and slow with the movements of his shoulders and hand as he talked on his phone, like the few drunk people she had met in her nine years on the run, after…
She didn't want to think about that, so she didn't.
A waitress walked past, favoring her right knee in a way that she imagined must have been near-imperceptible to others, but glaringly obvious to her. A kick at a quarter of her strength, and that waitress would never walk on that leg again.
The Homeless Girl sat down in a red vinyl booth, and scooted all the way over to the window.
She hoped she wouldn't be given a menu, as she could not read. She scanned the rest of the restaurant, and looked for other people eating, so when asked what she wanted, she could just point to it.
Failing that, though, she did know one phrase that she could use in a restaurant whose meaning she could comprehend.
"Surprise me."
The Homeless Girl hoped it wouldn't come to that, though, as she could barely talk. Not only was she woefully unprepared for any follow-up questions, she was quite insecure about how her voice sounded. She knew that what she looked like did not match up with how she sounded. She was an Asian girl who barely rose above five feet and four inches, yet when she opened her mouth to use one of the few words to which she knew the meaning, out came this raspy bass croak that made her sound thirty years older than she actually was.
Such is the way it must have been for someone who hadn't used their voice for most of their seventeen years on Earth.
The Homeless Girl did have money to pay for her meal, though. It had been given to her not an hour before by a woman whom she had saved from two muggers four blocks up. The Homeless Girl had every intention to walk away, but something in the way the woman held herself told her that it was best that she take her money.
But The Homeless Girl wasn't wise to how money worked, though. She had paid for something once, and the man whom she had paid had yelled at her when she wouldn't let him give her more money in return, different money with pictures of old white people on them, as well as a collection of little metal discs with yet even more visages of old white people emblazoned on their fronts.
Whatever that meant. No, she'd just slap the bill on the table when she was done, and walk out.
There were many things The Homeless Girl did not know.
She was trained to fight, yet not taught how to read.
She was trained to kill, yet not taught how to speak.
She didn't even know that her name, given to her at birth by the man who trained her, was Cassandra Cain.
But she knew that Batman was back. He was here, in this city. If there was a way forward for her after what she had… done … then it was though him.
Above Gotham City, in the clear night sky, shone the Bat Signal.
And though they all saw it, they each saw different things.
Tim Drake saw it, and saw a world that made much more sense than the one in which he lived.
Kate Kane saw it, and saw a chance to serve the common good that was denied her so many years ago.
Cassandra Cain saw it, and saw an ideal and a redemption, both wrapped in one perfect emblem.
On Third Street on Miagani Island, the buildings on either side of the street forming a cavern around her, Catwoman tore down the street on her motorcycle.
She chanced looking away from the road, just for an instant, to look up.
Above her, gliding through this cavern of concrete and glass, was Batman, his cape erect behind him. He fired his grapnel gun to gain altitude. To go faster.
A thought occurred to Catwoman as she looked back down to the road. A thought so absurd and yet so perfect and right that it made her laugh. The proudest and most liberating laugh she'd had in years.
She was chasing him.
Y'know… For a change.
TO BE CONTINUED