Author's note: It will be noted that this story, while striving to stay true to the spirit of the Golden- and Silver-Age Batman comics, takes a good deal of liberty with their specific details. I feel no particular guilt about this - as I've said elsewhere, I think it's inevitable when a fandom prides itself on being a modern-day mythology - but I suppose I ought to acknowledge it up front, lest it disappoint someone that Dick's arc here doesn't quite match that of 1940, or that certain villains whom Robin helped fight in their first appearances are here mentioned as already established. It is so done.
Disclaimer: It would take more courage than I possess to claim to own Batman - or Batman, for that matter.
"Tell me why you're crying, my son…"
Another distant explosion reverberated through the walls of Wayne Manor, and Dick Grayson curled up tighter under the covers. (He still didn't think of them as his covers; whatever Mr. Wayne might say, there was no way that something so luxurious and expensive could belong to a circus brat like him.) Somewhere out in the dusk, the latest in Gotham City's parade of flamboyant psychopaths was blowing up automobiles – with or without people in them, it didn't matter to this creep – at a rate of one every half-hour, apparently out of some diseased affection for horses. Everyone assumed Batman was on the case, but nobody had seen him all night, and public confidence in the Cowled Crusader was starting to ebb away – and, though Dick's own faith in the man who had brought his parents' killer to justice remained resolutely intact, that in some ways made the ordeal worse for him. Cynicism at least offers the relief of deriding the tarrying savior; when you still respect someone whose actions you don't understand, all you can do is wait and ache.
And there was plenty of aching for Dick to do. It had scarcely been three weeks since his own parents had plummeted to their deaths thanks to Blade Platt's gimmicked trapezes, and that hadn't been nearly long enough – he doubted his whole lifetime would be long enough – to dull the resulting sense in him of human life as a thing both precious and desperately fragile, and of its defense as the noblest task a man could give himself to. So every thunderous report that might mean another corpse, every thought of the five people whom the Equestrienne's obsession had already killed, was like a fresh slash in his heart, as though he were watching his mother and father fall out of the sky all over again – only, this time, with the added suggestion that their black-clad avenger had for some reason ceased to care about the innocents of Gotham and abandoned them to their predators. Hot tears stung his eyes, and he sent up a few angry thoughts to that God that Nerissa the Beast-Lady had kept trying to persuade him was real.
As he did so, he heard footsteps approaching in the hallway outside: a heavy, careless tread, not at all like a good English butler's. That left only one person in the Manor for it to be, and Dick's heart sank; he was sure that Mr. Wayne was a good man at heart – after all, he was a friend of Batman's, and one of whom the Dark Knight thought enough to entrust an orphan he'd saved to his care – but an incorrigibly frivolous millionaire playboy still wasn't the kind of person Dick wanted to have to deal with just then.
But he'd left the bedroom door open (another consequence of not really feeling it his own room), so the footsteps entered anyway and came up beside the bed. Then Dick felt the pressure of a hand on his shoulder through the covers – and, feeling it, he blinked in surprise, because there was a sober tenderness in it that he never would have associated with Bruce Wayne.
It was Mr. Wayne, though; the voice that spoke, a moment later, made that plain. "Hey, Dick," it said. "Thought I'd drop in and see how you're holding up. Rough night, isn't it?" And again, for all the studied superficiality of the words and the tone, there was an undertone of gentleness and empathy that, considering the source, seemed positively surreal. Dick wasn't sure what to make of it, but, between the hope that it was real and the desire to check the man's eyes in case it wasn't, it got him to wriggle out from under the covers and poke his head up at his new guardian.
As he did so, he became aware, with a hot flush, that his cheeks were still streaked with tears, and made a feeble effort to hold his head so that they didn't glint in the lamplight. He was pretty sure that Mr. Wayne could still tell, just from the way his eyes (which didn't, in fact, show any trace of insincerity) flickered over Dick's face, but all that the millionaire said was, "Scared?"
Dick managed a nod; there was no sense in denying that much, at least.
"Me, too," said Mr. Wayne. "I guess we all are, tonight. It's always hardest the first time one of these maniacs shows up – when you don't know anything about his habits or weaknesses, or even whether he has the guts to be a long-term threat, but just that there's someone else abroad who's so proud of being evil that she'll dress up in a fox-hunting costume and electrocute policemen with a riding crop just to emphasize it."
He shuddered. "You know, I wasn't much older than you are when the first of them appeared: the Scarecrow, the Mad Hatter, a few others who aren't around anymore – and, of course, the Joker. It was harrowing, I tell you what – and the worst part wasn't even them so much, as what they did to the ordinary people of Gotham. It wasn't everyone, thank God, but an awful lot of people – especially the well-off, well-educated types – seemed to have some kind of sick admiration for them, as though anyone who believed in something enough to wear a flamboyant costume and devise elaborate criminal schemes for it automatically deserved more respect than our dull, workaday, uniformed police officers."
Dick mustered a smirk. "Well," he said, "if it's the GCPD…"
"Oh, they were compromised, sure," said Mr. Wayne, waving a hand. "Still are, a little, for all Jim Gordon's work with them. But that wasn't it, though a lot of people said it was. What was really going on was that the Gotham upper crust had plain and simple gotten bored with law and morality, to the point where they'd actually welcome someone who was trying to destroy their city and neighbors so long as he had… I don't know, emotional authenticity or something. That's why it made such a difference when Batman showed up: here was a guy who was obviously as passionate and individual as the worst of the monsters, but what he was passionate about was ordinary right and wrong." He chuckled. "As your peers would say, he made being the good guy cool again."
The mention of the Cowled Crusader brought a frown to Dick's face. "So where's Batman now?" he said. "Do you have any idea?"
"Actually, yes," said Mr. Wayne. "He had one of his little remote-controlled bat models drop a note on the Manor doorstep a little while ago; I suppose all the other Friends of Batman got one too, though I haven't heard anything about it on the news. Anyway, he said that he's analyzing the pattern of the Equestrienne's attacks; when he's deduced where she'll strike next, he'll meet her there and they'll have their showdown." He saw the disappointed expression on Dick's face, and smiled sympathetically. "I know, it's not as good as if he could just come swooping out in the Batmobile and punch her daylights out before she blew up her next Oldsmobile. But it's a whole lot better than having him run around like a fool without knowing where he's going, right? Even the World's Greatest Detective has to put some work into it; he can't just snap his fingers and know everything he needs to."
"I wish he could," Dick muttered.
Mr. Wayne smiled a little sadly, and reached out and pressed Dick's hand in his own. "Don't we all, Dick," he murmured. "Don't we all."
The room fell quiet, then, except for the faint chatter of the radio on the bedside table as WPPM News continued to keep Gotham current on the Equestrienne's depredations. Apparently a sixth person had died a few minutes before – an old lady who had been in one of the first cars to be attacked, and had finally succumbed to her injuries after a few hours' determined struggle – and the press was lovingly detailing her family's desolate laments and desperate pleas for justice. (Something in the reporter's tone made Dick think irresistibly of Nerissa's hyenas at feeding time – but maybe he was being unfair.)
Whether Mr. Wayne was listening, Dick couldn't tell. So far as anything on the millionaire's face indicated, his mind might have been at the other end of the world; only the pressure of his unexpectedly strong, callused hand against Dick's own betrayed that he was even aware of his surroundings. His eyes flitted vacantly about the walls of the room; his lips tightened, as though with remembered griefs of his own; and, as Dick watched, he heaved a sigh that seemed to swell from the very depths of his being.
"What?" said Dick.
Mr. Wayne shook his head. "Just thinking about the world you're going to grow up in," he said. "I don't know, maybe it was always this way; from what I've read about people in the past, I can't believe they were ever much different from people now. But the thing is, for every one way we find over time of making and bettering things, I think we find about six ways of destroying and perverting them – and we remember those longer, too.
"And don't ask me why it should be that way," he added. "Oh, I know the formulas: Alfred made sure I was a Sunday-morning regular growing up, and I still go when I think of it. But I've never understood it in here," and he patted his chest over his heart with his free hand. "Why do so many people not care about good things being destroyed? I've been surrounded all my life by the world's prize specimens of this mindset, and I still don't know how they can live in this city, with half the heritage of humanity at their fingertips and more real human lives under their noses than even the census bureau can count, and think, 'Oh, maybe Poison Ivy's right to want to turn the whole thing into a giant peat bog.' Don't they know that you never get things like that back? Every puppy the Joker strangles for kicks, every painting Two-Face slashes one of the Graces out of – much less every actual innocent person who gets killed in one of their twisted schemes… that's something irreplaceable that our elite have just let be thrown away for no good reason. Whatever they believe, however they think, why would they do that?"
It took Dick a moment to respond, as the passion in Mr. Wayne's voice had rendered him briefly speechless. He never would have expected a man of Bruce Wayne's wealth and reputation to show such a depth of empathy for the common people of Gotham; for a moment, he had sounded almost like a priest, or a Socialist – or, perhaps, one who had suffered some immense loss of his own. (The reference to it having been Alfred who had seen to his childhood churchgoing, rather than his mother or his father, took on a sudden grim significance.)
Still, the question itself was a fair one, and Dick thought he might know at least part of the answer. "Maybe they don't know what they have," he said. "Or, I mean, they probably know, if they think about it, but they take it for granted. It doesn't make them grateful." (He thought, as he spoke, of all the times he'd taken his own mother and father for granted, and all the pangs of remorse those memories had brought him over the past few days.)
Mr. Wayne glanced down at him, and there was a gleam of pride in his eyes that made Dick's heart swell despite itself. "Grateful," he murmured. "Yes, that is the secret, isn't it? Not just happening to have the stuff, but actually choosing to say thank-you for it: that's what makes it mean something to you – makes it worth protecting." He laughed. "You're a smart kid, Dick, you know that?"
He might have said more, but, at that moment, there came a discreet cough, and guardian and ward both looked up to see Alfred standing in the doorway. "Sir?" he said. "Mr. Green on the private phone for you."
Mr. Wayne arched an eyebrow. "Already?" he said. "That was quick of him. All right, I'll be right there."
"Very good, sir."
Alfred exited as smoothly and silently as he had come, and Mr. Wayne turned back to Dick. "A new business opportunity," he said apologetically. "Probably means I'll have to spend the rest of the evening out on the town. Let's just hope the Equestrienne doesn't find my Rolls an irresistible temptation, hey?"
"Do you have to use a Rolls-Royce?" said Dick. "Couldn't you take something less conspicuous?"
Mr. Wayne chuckled. "No, with the kind of business I'll be doing tonight, I'm pretty sure I'll need the flashiest car I own," he said. "Got to keep up appearances, you know. Anyway, say a prayer for me if you're into that sort of thing; if not… well, just hope really hard, I guess."
"I will," Dick promised.
Mr. Wayne, halfway risen from the bed, paused, cocked his head, and looked thoughtfully at Dick for a moment. "Yes, I believe you will," he said. "Not just as 'oh, I'll do what Mr. Wayne asks to be polite', either. I think you really care."
This rather flustered Dick, since no teenage boy likes to admit such a thing. "Well, you know," he muttered, "if this city's like you said, Batman can't afford to lose any friends in high places, right?"
Mr. Wayne affected a wounded expression. "So it's just because I'm a Friend of Batman, then?" he said. "And here I was thinking you'd taken a hint from Batman yourself, and cared about people because they were people."
"I do!" said Dick. "It's not… I mean…" He fumbled for an explanation for a moment or two; then he decided that he couldn't justify himself without sounding pathetic, and just lowered his eyes and mumbled, "I do care."
Mr. Wayne nodded. "Good," he said. "You keep doing that."
And maybe it was the words themselves, or maybe it was the way he said them, or maybe it was simply that his voice was easier to hear when one wasn't looking at that famously tabloid-ready face. Maybe it was even because they'd just been tossing the name around – but, in any case, it seemed to Dick, hearing Bruce Wayne's voice, that he heard another voice as well: a voice that had whispered to him in his darkest hour, and given him hope and strength to face another day.
He looked up sharply, and stared at Mr. Wayne as the latter turned and walked from the room. Yes, it was possible; if you ignored the sauntering gait – and it was an old acting trick, he knew, to change the way you walked for a role – then the physique, the shape of the head, the carriage of the shoulders, were all compatible with his wild notion. The only thing that wasn't compatible was simply that it was Bruce Wayne – and he had already seen that there was more to Bruce Wayne than met the public's eye…
Dick sat stock-still, hardly daring to breathe. He had no idea what he was going to do if Mr. Wayne turned around and saw the surmise on his face; he'd feel like a fool if he was wrong, and if he was right… he couldn't even imagine. But he broke lucky for once: the millionaire's stride never altered, and in a few seconds the door swung shut behind him, leaving Dick to sink into the nearest pillow and try to persuade his heart to start beating again.
As he did so, he heard Mr. Wayne's footsteps passing along the hallway, and down the staircase to the parlor below. He stopped at the foot of the stairs, and Dick thought he heard him speaking – to Alfred, presumably – though he couldn't make out the words. Then the footsteps began moving again, toward Mr. Wayne's private study – but were they quite the same footsteps? Wasn't there something ever so slightly different about them now; didn't they resound upon the marble floor with a firmer, manlier, more steadfast and determined ring? –Or, then again, was Dick's excitement getting the better of him, and causing him to imagine differences that weren't really there? He couldn't quite tell – and then, frustratingly, another of the Equestrienne's bombs went off in the distance, muffling the sound even as it faded out of earshot.
Still, Mr. Wayne would have to pass that way again as he left the manor, since the parlor lay directly between his study and the front hall. Dick raised himself up on one elbow, pressed his ear against the bedframe, and waited for his new guardian to conclude the call with Mr. Green and head out for the evening.
But the minutes passed, and no footfall sounded below. Dick couldn't think what was taking Mr. Wayne so long; whether his evening's business consisted of fighting robbers or of fêting capitalists, still he had to go out to do it, didn't he? He couldn't just stay holed up in his study all night.
When a quarter-hour had passed without any trace of the millionaire's tread, Dick's curiosity at last got the better of him. Quietly and cautiously, he rose from the bed and tiptoed out of the room, down the hall and the stairs, and across the ground floor to the sturdy mahogany door of Mr. Wayne's study.
The door was locked, of course, but there was enough of a crack below it for Dick to see through. After checking to make sure that Alfred was nowhere about, he dropped to his hands and knees, put his eyes to the crack, and, over the course of several minutes, painstakingly examined the study's interior from every feasible angle. No glint of Mr. Wayne's shoes revealed itself to him, nor did he hear any sound from the room that might have indicated the activity of an occupant; by the time he was done, he was morally certain that the study, which Mr. Wayne had never left, was wholly empty.
Decidedly, this called for further investigation. Dick took a minute out to scurry to the dining room and scrounge a toothpick; returning with this, he picked the lock (a skill he'd learned from his father, who had dabbled in escapology as well as acrobatics) and eased the door open just far enough to slip inside.
Once in, he took a few seconds out to inhale deeply and bolster his suddenly ebbing nerve (had he really just broken into Bruce Wayne's study?), and a few seconds more to run his toes through the luxuriantly silky shags of the carpet that covered the study floor. These things attended to, he squatted down and prowled with delicate step the length and breadth of the room, trying to find some trace of the path by which his new guardian had evaporated into thin air.
For a long while, his search proved fruitless. The carpeting was trodden down too thoroughly and evenly (hard as it was to imagine Bruce Wayne pacing back and forth about his study, absorbed in restless thought – or hard as it would have been, a few short hours before) for any single track to stand out, and there was no hint of a break or seam in it that might have indicated a trapdoor. Moreover, both it and the gold-traced wallpaper were so soft and thick that they absorbed nearly all sound, making it effectively impossible to tell by tapping whether there was extra space behind the walls or beneath the floor. And, as for levers, buttons, or dials that might have opened hidden panels – well, of course they might have been hidden themselves, inside the locked drawers of the desk or in the safe on the wall, but, short of that, Dick would have been willing to swear that they didn't exist. He even checked behind the books on the shelves that lined most of one wall; it took him a painstaking twelve minutes, and he ended no wiser (save for having discovered a few interesting reading possibilities for later) than he began.
Then, as he was replacing The Education of Henry Adams on the shelf, the grandfather clock at the other end of the room struck the half-hour. Dick started; it had still been a few minutes short of nine when he had left the bedroom, and he hadn't realized he had been down for a full half-hour. He turned to look – and then he did a double-take, for, according to the clock's face, it was at that moment half past, not nine, but eleven.
For a few wild moments, Dick wondered whether he really had been searching for hidden levers for two and a half hours – or whether Mr. Wayne, for some bizarre reason of his own, deliberately kept the grandest of his timepieces some two hours fast. Then another possibility struck him, and he looked around wildly for another clock against which to test his conjecture. Sure enough, there was a dainty little china piece ticking demurely on the desk, reading a reasonable seventeen minutes past nine; Dick snatched this up and carried it over to the grandfather to make comparisons.
He stole a glance at the wall behind the grandfather clock as he approached, but it was purely perfunctory; he didn't expect any kind of crack or opening to be visible, and it wasn't. With a dismissive shrug, he concentrated his mind on the discrepancy between the two clocks. "All right, let's see," he muttered under his breath. "Seventeen past nine versus half past eleven makes a difference of… um… two hours and thirteen minutes. So is it just a matter of setting it forward that far?" He frowned, and shook his head. "No, that's not how locks like this work. There must be some specific time you're supposed to set it to, just like on a safe you're supposed to point it to specific numbers. But the question is, what time?"
He had a general range, of course. If Mr. Wayne had used the clock to leave the Manor, then it must have been set to the combination time when he left, which meant that the combination had to be two hours and thirteen minutes later than some time within the twenty minutes or so that Dick had been fruitlessly listening for footsteps – and probably earlier rather than later, though that wasn't absolutely a given. But, as Dick didn't know exactly how long he'd spent listening, and also didn't know the exact time he'd come down, that still left a pretty broad range of possibilities; if he just turned the hands back to the earliest time possible and then started inching forward a minute at a time, it might well take him as long to find the right position as it had to search the room thus far – and he was still a little nervous about what might happen if Alfred went up to check on him and found him missing.
He scowled at the clock face, willing there to be a clue in it somewhere – and then he noticed something odd. In every other clock he'd ever seen, the hour hand started the hour on the appropriate numeral and then spent the next sixty minutes inching toward the next one; therefore, at the half-hour mark, it should have been exactly halfway between the two. But the hour hand on the grandfather clock was more like three-quarters of the way to the 12.
This started an intriguing train of thought rolling in Dick's mind. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that whatever mechanism was rigged up to this clock required its hour and minute hands to be on disconnected gears, so that each moved – and was moved – independently of the other. The natural thing, then, when Mr. Wayne was setting it to the special time that made it do its trick, would be to point the hour hand directly at the numeral representing the hour, rather than replicating the exact position a normal clock would have at that time. (This would have the added advantage of being a position that the clock would never assume in the course of its own working, and thus keeping it from revealing its secret automatically twice every day.) In which case, and assuming the clock had been working normally since its reset, the magic time would have to be about three-quarters of an hour earlier than the time it was reading now – i.e., somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter to eleven.
Breathlessly, Dick reached up and nudged the hour hand widdershins till it pointed exactly at the numeral 10. Then he guided the minute hand (which had, indeed, been unaffected by the other's adjustment) deasil around the clock face until it reached the figure 8; after waiting for a moment to see whether, just possibly, twenty minutes to eleven was itself the combination, he inched the hand successively forward a minute at a time, with only the briefest of pauses in between resets. Sixteen minutes till… fifteen… fourteen…
Then, when he reached thirteen minutes to eleven, he felt a shudder go through the clock, and jumped backward instinctively. Smoothly and soundlessly, the clock swung forward like a door (how the hinges and rollers had been hidden, Dick had no idea) to reveal a shadowy stairwell behind the wall, where a broad, steep helix of steps led downward to… well, to whatever hidden lair it was from which Bruce Wayne sallied forth to avenge the innocents of Gotham upon the heartless and the cruel.
Dick occasionally wondered, in after years, what would have happened if he had simply shut the clock again at this point, reset it to the proper time, and turned and gone back upstairs – if it had been enough simply to know that he was right, without having to put the china clock down on a nearby side table and step forward into the darkness of the stairwell. But it didn't happen often, and his answer was always the same: that a person who could have walked away from the entrance probably would never have found it in the first place – and, in any case, certainly wouldn't have deserved to.
As the clock swung shut behind him, Dick was abruptly plunged into an isolation as deep as that of any prisoner in his oubliette, or any moth in its cocoon. The walls about him were so thick and so expertly muffled that no faintest hint of sound from the outside world could reach him; the Equestrienne could have blown up her next car right there in the study, and Dick would assuredly have been none the wiser. And this intense silence was accompanied by an equally intense darkness; apart from the faint luminosity of a few controls lining the sides of the doorway (clockway?), the whole enclosure was as black as the bottom of a mine. Dick shivered, remembering the steepness of the stairs he had seen from the study, and clung tightly to the brass railing beside him as he began his cautious descent.
The steps went down, and down, and down some more; Dick went so deep that he began to shiver from the cold, and wish that he'd thrown something over his pajamas before leaving the bedroom. But then, after a while, he was mildly surprised to find it getting warmer again, until, by the time the spiral stairway had completed its twentieth bend or so, the air was almost as well heated as in the Manor proper.
Shortly thereafter, the stairs at last leveled out into a platform, and Dick found himself standing before a high sliding door embedded in the wall of the stairwell shaft. With an effort (for the solid sheet-iron portal had never been meant for the use of thirteen-year-old boys, even if they were lifelong acrobats), he slid this aside, and was briefly dazzled by the sudden blaze of light that met his eyes – which wasn't really very bright, but still made for a dramatic contrast with the near-total darkness of the stairwell. He blinked away the floaters from his eyes, and then stepped forward into the tall rectangle of light, and thence into a subterranean wonderland more splendid than any his boyish fancy had ever conceived.
For one thing, it was a cave. Not a mere overgrown cellar or hollowed-out chamber, but a real honest-to-God cave like the Forty Thieves', with stalactites and rustling bats' wings and even the trickle of a hidden stream underfoot. Who would have dreamed that the mountains along Gotham City's northern limits had left so delicious a gift directly beneath Wayne Manor? Not Dick Grayson, certainly.
But this cave was better than the Forty Thieves' – for, instead of gold and jewels and suchlike (to Dick) girlish trifles, it was filled with maps and diagrams, notebooks and scientific apparatus, and all the paraphernalia with which a millionaire detective might have been expected to fill his secret hideout. One substantial portion of the cave wall was even taken up with a huge automatic computing machine, like something out of the Pentagon; Dick, who had never dreamed of seeing such a thing in person, tiptoed in awestruck wonder toward the blinking, buzzing behemoth, its very incomprehensibility serving only to make it yet more wondrous in his eyes.
As he did so, there came a crinkling noise from beneath his foot, and he looked down and found that he had trodden on a five- or six-foot-long sheet of paper that was lying in jumbled disarray on the cavern floor in front of the computer. It was evidently a printout of some kind, filled with algebraic formulae and complex topographical diagrams that conveyed nothing whatever to Dick's mind – but he couldn't help noticing that it was headed with the words "PROGRAM: QSTRN-ROUTE", and that the last few rows of equations were printed in bright green ink, in contrast to the stoplight-red of all the others.
"Mr. Green," Dick murmured. "Cute."
He spent a few more minutes admiring the inscrutable workings of the huge machine, and then turned his attention to the rest of the sights in the cave. He walked across a steel ramp streaked with the tracks of four very distinctive tires; he passed through a workshop full of bat-shaped lock-picks and flying cameras in various stages of completion; he saw a cluster of shelves crammed with what he could only presume were mementoes of great battles and gifts from grateful civilians. With every step, a fuller pride in his new guardian burgeoned within him; it was one thing to watch the man in action, a black shadow of justice swooping through the Gotham night, but to see him from the inside this way – to get a glimpse of the mind and heart and work ethic that went into producing the legend – lent a whole new dimension to Dick's admiration for him.
And with that admiration came a hot sense of his own unworthiness to be such a man's ward. The youngest of the Flying Graysons had been instilled almost from birth with the belief that life, no less than the circus, was an earnest communal endeavor in which there was no excuse for not pulling one's own share of the weight – not even being born a completely limbless freak of Nature, like that fine old sideshow gentleman Dr. Worm. And now here he was, living gratis and utterly idle in the home of not only one of the richest men in America, but also, it turned out, one of the greatest heroes of the 20th Century. It was like a flea finding out that the dog whose lifeblood it was sucking was the one who had saved all those people in the Swiss Alps – an honor in one way, but also a stark reminder that it, itself, was just a flea.
Doubtless it was something less than fair to expect great and fruitful labors from a boy who had lost his parents less than a month before and barely been in his new home a week, but Dick wasn't interested in making such excuses for himself. With every minute he spent in the cave, there grew in him a hunger to somehow contribute to his guardian's crusade, and a sense that, unless he found a way to do so, he could never truly belong in the Manor, and certainly not in the secret fortress of justice that he now knew lay beneath it.
After a while, this feeling became so strong that he couldn't bear to remain longer in the cave; moreover, he remembered that he was supposed to still be up in the Manor, and that Alfred might get suspicious if he disappeared for too long. So, with a little pang of regret, he passed back through the door in the wall and drew himself carefully up the darkened stairway again.
Upon reaching the top, he examined the glowing panel of controls more closely than he had before, and found to his relief that they were above as intuitive as controls got. There was essentially one large, bat-shaped button in the center, and above and below that some puzzling displays that Dick eventually decided were radar images intended to tell whether there was anyone near the study. (At that moment, there wasn't.) As there was no other visible way of opening the clock-door from the inside, Dick concluded that the button was the means of doing this, and gave it a brisk, solid press.
Nothing happened.
Frowning, Dick tried pressing it again; then he tried pushing on the door; then he tried pressing the button and pushing on the door simultaneously; then he tried pounding both button and door repeatedly with his fists while hissing imprecations through his teeth. As all of these successively failed to work, he grew more and more alarmed: had he somehow managed to break the release mechanism on his way in? Or was the door so designed that anyone could open it from the outside, but on the inside you needed some special key that only Mr. Wayne possessed? What kind of sense did that make?
At last, exhausted, frustrated, and more than a little scared, he gave up and accepted his fate. Somehow, he'd managed to get himself trapped inside his guardian's secret lair, and now there was nothing else for it but to wait until said guardian returned, discovered his trespass, and, hopefully, let him out. If in the process he ended up sent back to the circus, kicked out onto the street, or demoted to Wayne Manor scullery boy for the remainder of his natural life, well, that was the bed he'd made himself, and he'd just have to man up and lie in it.
With a sigh, he turned and headed back down the stairs. If he was going to be stuck in a hidden chamber for an hour or so, he was at least going to spend it in the part that had light and heat and a computer to stare at. Maybe he could even find something to read while he waited; hadn't there been a book of some kind on the trophy shelf?
There had, indeed, but it turned out to be the most turgid waste of paper that Dick had ever encountered: 400 pages of baseless maunderings about the mystical symbolism of Alice in Wonderland, all written in a faux-Victorian style of such flowery pretentiousness that it made him want to retch. Why Mr. Wayne should give such drivel a place of honor in his citadel was more than Dick could imagine – unless maybe J. M. Tetch was some old flame of his, or something.
So Dick ended up just pacing restlessly among the tool chests and Bunsen burners and glistening limestone walls, until at last he heard the faint but unmistakable sound of a 600-horsepower engine roaring through the abandoned tunnels of Sikes's Folly (as the locals, he had discovered, called Gotham City's abortive subway system, after the late mayor who had destroyed his career by making it his pet vanity project). Given how thick the tunnel walls were, that meant that the vehicle had to be pretty close by – and, sure enough, it wasn't more than a minute later that a gleaming black missile of a car came streaking out of the darkness up onto the steel ramp, where it stopped as smoothly and instantly as though it had seen a gorgon and turned to stone.
The door opened, and the driver stepped out; cowled eyes met Dick's, and a quietly ironic smile curved the Dark Knight's lips. "Well, now," he said. "Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Grayson."
Dick mustered all his bravado and managed a cocky smile in reply. "How'd it go?" he said.
"No complaints," said Mr. Wayne. "I reached the Newmar Parkway just as the Equestrienne was preparing to detonate her next bomb; we had our little skirmish, I subdued her, got the crop out of her hand – and what do you think she did then?"
Dick shrugged. "Swore?"
"Cried," said Mr. Wayne. "Just started bawling right there on the sidewalk, like a baby who'd had her favorite rattle taken away. Even her horse looked embarrassed for her." He shook his head. "No, I don't think we'll be hearing from this one again. Even if she escapes the chair with the usual insanity defense, I doubt that the Joker and company are going to be inviting her into their little support network – and, without that, there's no future for a costumed crook in this town."
"Well, that's good," said Dick fervently.
Mr. Wayne nodded, and passed a thoughtful gaze over Dick's face. "So what tipped you off?" he said.
It took Dick a moment to realize that he'd changed the subject. "About you, you mean?"
"Mm-hmm."
Dick hesitated. "I'm not sure," he said. "I think it was something in your voice as you left – like you were carrying the whole city in your heart, and every person in it." He blushed at the sappiness of his own words, but soldiered on nonetheless. "It just sounded more like Batman than like the person you were pretending to be – and then when I didn't hear you come back out of the study, I put two and two together, and decided to look into it."
Mr. Wayne cocked his head. "Is that so?"
Dick nodded. "Yeah, that's it," he said. "Just a lucky guess, really; nothing special or profound…"
"I beg to differ," said Mr. Wayne. "I can name a hundred people in this city, as wise and upright as any you'll ever find, who couldn't have heard what you did in a thousand years. It's what we were saying earlier: they've never chosen to be truly grateful, never put that fire inside themselves that can make a man care for a stranger or a city street as though it were his own heart and lungs – so, naturally, they can't recognize it in others even when the evidence is put before them. But you could," he said, with a pleasure in his voice like that of a miner who'd struck gold. "And that's a good sign, Dick – a very good sign, indeed. Let's see if the other signs are as good."
Before Dick could ask what he meant by that, he drew up his right glove and lowered his mouth toward some kind of silver apparatus on his wrist. "Well, Alfred?" he said. "How did he do?"
"Quite well indeed, sir," came Alfred's voice. "He did indeed have the lock-smithing skills you hypothesised, and employed them with skill and dexterity; he showed great readiness of wit in determining the combination of the grandfather clock; and his conduct within the Cave, both before and after he found the exit barred, united sobriety and bravado in quite admirable fashion. All in all, I think it would be hard to better…"
"Wait… wait a minute," said Dick, who had been standing speechlessly agape from the beginning of this soliloquy. "You mean this whole thing was just a test – a setup? You knew I was going to figure out your secret?"
"Not that you would," said Mr. Wayne. "But that you might, yes. And if you did, and if this proved to be the night, we wanted to have some way of telling quickly what you were made of. Not that I didn't have a pretty shrewd guess already – after all, there were other Friends of Batman I could have entrusted you to – but, in a case like this, guesses aren't enough."
"So you had Alfred lock me in here and spy on me via radar?" said Dick. "Seems a little questionable for Batman, don't you think?"
"No more questionable than breaking into your host's locked study," said Mr. Wayne equably. "A detective can't always afford to be a perfect gentleman; that was one of the things I wanted to make sure you understood." He sighed, and added, "And I'm glad you did."
"Why?" said Dick.
"Well, I wouldn't like this to go any further," said Mr. Wayne, "but I've come to find, over the course of the past couple years, that this job I've taken on is really too big for a single man. It's only a matter of time before the Gruesome Fewsome realize that I can't be everywhere at once, and start pooling their efforts to try and wear me out for good. As it is, Alfred's already had to save my bacon more than once – for which I'm grateful, but this isn't rightly his mission, and, at his age, there's only so much he can do anyway.
"What I really need is a second pair of hands – young, nimble, energetic hands, and the right sort of heart and mind behind them. I'd come to that conclusion a while back, and I'd been keeping an eye out for possible candidates, but, knowing how many rare things any partner of mine would have to be, I wasn't really holding out much hope of success. And then, lo and behold, along comes some ugly business at a traveling circus, and drops an orphaned boy acrobat radiating love of life and zeal for justice right into my lap." He chuckled. "Strange thing, Providence, don't you think?"
Dick's eyes were wide. "You mean… you want to make me some kind of junior Batman?" he said breathlessly. "Cape, cowl, whole nine yards?"
"Well, you'll probably want to figure out a distinct costume of your own," said Mr. Wayne. "Otherwise, all the papers are bound to dub you Batboy, and I have to believe you can do better than that. But, so far as the nature of the job goes, yes, that's more or less what I'm offering. It's a dangerous life, of course, and you'll never get any credit for the good you do, but it has its…"
"When do we start?" Dick demanded.
Mr. Wayne laughed. "Well, not this minute," he said. "It's already half past ten, and you've had quite enough excitement for one night – and I haven't exactly spent the evening crocheting, myself. Let's both get a good night's sleep, and we'll start figuring out the details in the morning, hey?"
"Fine," said Dick.
"Good." Mr. Wayne turned aside and slipped into a cleverly concealed recess in the cavern wall, from which he emerged a minute or two later wearing his civilian clothes and carrying a miniature flashlight in one hand. "All right, Alfred," he said into his wrist device, "deactivate the override on Mouth I's release mechanism, and we'll be up directly."
He switched the flashlight on, and held out his hand to his ward. "Best stick close, Dick," he said. "I'm sure you've noticed how tricky these stairs can be."
Dick smiled, and took the proffered hand. As his palm nestled itself against the other, and he felt the firm, watchful pressure of his guardian's grip, he felt the tension evaporate that he had been carrying about in himself for weeks; the fact of his parents' death was still poignantly sad for him, and he supposed (and hoped) that it always would be, but it had ceased to be mixed with an anxious fear that he, by surviving them, had lost the only rightful place he would ever have in the world, and that the rest of his life was doomed to be as painful and useless as a pebble wedged in a rotor blade. Against all odds, he'd found a new home, a new role in the world – and, if not a new father (for those weren't so easily replaced), at least someone who could carry on the legacy of love and challenge that John Grayson had begun. No doubt there would still be trials and sorrows ahead, but now, at long last, he could begin to believe that all, in the end, just might be well.
"Stick close," he repeated. "Right."
As they were ascending the stairs, he happened to ask how Mr. Wayne had gotten into the Batman business in the first place. As a result, the two of them had spent a long time sitting and talking in the study, and it was past midnight by the time Dick finally made it back up to his room.
He opened the door with a tired little sigh, and glanced around at the luxurious furnishings with a blissful smile. The last time he had entered this room, he had been a homeless orphan, his guardian had been a decadent millionaire playboy, and a maniac horse-fancier had been spreading misery and terror throughout Gotham City. And now…
"Happy ending," he murmured – and then added, with a laugh, "No, no. Happy beginning."
And he tumbled into bed, snuggled up amid his covers, and lost himself in contented dreams.
