Ugh. I spent about twenty-five hours on homework this weekend. The week preceding it wasn't much better. This coming week...doesn't bear thinking about. My goal of 50,000 words this month isn't looking too likely (at all), but I'm still going to write as much as I can. This is one of the Max chapters set after Terry's disappearance. It occurs in approximately early September. The previous chapter occurred in mid June. It's confusing, yes, and I'll figure out a better way to arrange everything once it's all written. Until then, please enjoy anyway.

At times Max wondered if she had fallen into some sort of purgatory. It wasn't hell. For one, hell didn't get cool spells, or rain, and for another, she had yet to abandon all hope. It certainly wasn't heaven either. For one, heaven didn't let you get trapped in a white tee under a building's overhang in a downpour. Even the salvation was something of a mixed blessing.

"I must be crazy but…you want a ride?"

She turned towards the voice. A man. Young. Stubborn frown. Car keys. Large umbrella. Max didn't recognize him. The Bat had diligently researched the most secret and intimate facts of his life. But she was Max right now and so she blinked and looked suspicious and then questioning before she allowed a flash of recognition to cross her face. "You're that guy," she said, drawing together her brows and narrowing her eyes into hard, clear focus. "The one who"––quick half second to decide how much to insinuate––"caught his attention."

And Keller stiffened, gripping the handle of his umbrella. And while Max tilted her head and frowned, the Bat smiled inside. That had definitely caught his attention.

"You keep in contact with him?" he asked after a sharp intake of breath.

She shrugged, finally letting out the smile a little. "Once you enter his radar, you don't exactly leave it again. I did warn you not to try to unmask him."

Keller was an intelligent man. And intelligence was largely a matter of neural synapses firing more quickly in the right combinations. Keller, unfortunately, was a little more quick than he was intelligent. This resulted in a tactless character and a loud mouth. "You told him about me," he accused. Memories, repressed fear, revulsion (towards himself?) flashed across his face.

Max took it in but said nothing. Some things just weren't meant to be said. Not because it would be rude, or because the response was too obvious to merit saying, but because with omission came plausible deniability. Keller would never know for sure if she had told on him, like little bratty sis gone off spill the secret to Father Bat. This uncertainty would taint his thoughts of her. Perhaps she hadn't tattled, perhaps Batman had discovered him some other way and she had merely been the well-positioned pawn––but the thought that she might tell Father about his future actions would forever hang in the air. Yet at the same time that there was this trace of fear, there would also be a sense of camaraderie, because weren't they in the same boat? Weren't they both on the Bat's short leash?

This was all, of course, assuming that he didn't just walk away and never have anything to do with her again. She tightened her grip on her elbows and made herself look smaller. "That ride?" she not quite asked.

He not quite answered, "Why are you here? Did he send you here?"

The rather paranoid question merited an obvious response. "Yes, Keller," she smiled darkly, seeming to remember the name she had never forgotten. "He seeded the clouds and arranged for me to be here, stuck in this monsoon." She looked at him. "I'm here for the library research computers. You know that. We met inside that building when you woke me up. Are you giving me a ride or not?" Max looked away, clearly not expecting him to. The Bat knew something that Max didn't, though.

"...Come on." The umbrella tilted to cover her as well.

Keller had a little sister.

The conversation in Keller's car was one of those stilted ones. In it, the driver watched the road so as to pretend the passenger wasn't actually there and the imaginary passenger's hand constantly twitched until its master finally succumbed to the need to fiddle with the air and the sound system. It was one of those conversations where nothing was really said: no personal information divulged, no meaningful comments made—they didn't even talk about the weather. The words just sort of hung over them, weighing down, and Keller's car just wasn't the right place to talk about them. Neither was Max's apartment. The conversation waiting in the wings needed to be held on neutral ground.

So their conversation really only consisted of seven words: "You want to swing by that diner?" and a nod.

Ten minutes of silence later, they sat at the diner in the heart of the good part of Old Gotham for the second time. The rain had driven away the pedestrian crowd, save for those who had been in the restaurant before the downpour's start and were now waiting it out at the counter. The place was currently trendy, though, so those with cars found the wet weather only the mildest of deterrents. So, in essence, without the poorer work-weary locals to temper things, Gotham's little slice of yesteryear was packed with the loud, the lewd, the loaded, and two lovebirds curled up in a booth in the corner.

The smaller of the two birds, adorned with slightly damp pink plumage fiddled with her shake's straw. "So," she said in a clipped voice to her companion, under the din of the jukebox and the youthful riot but still loud enough for him to hear.

"So," Keller chirped back. He smiled a bit, but that just made the bags beneath his eyes bunch together more. In response, the Bat felt a twinge of guilt, if that were possible. Perhaps the methods undertaken to ensure that the man gave up the search for the Dark Knight's identity had been overly harsh. Kidnapping. Rape—of will, at least.

Blackmail. The recording that revealed Keller as "Batman" was safely stashed on an encrypted disk where theoretically it would never see the light of day. Theoretically. The threat, to Keller, his little sister, ex-fiancé what's-her-face, et cetera still hung in the air. All in all, it was adding up to an impressively quick onset of post traumatic stress disorder. Failure hadn't been an option, though, and what was done was done, so any guilt the Bat felt could only be expressed through calculated mercy in the here and now.

"What do you want to know?" she asked. Her hands folded and flexed to cradle her chin, and she watched his mouth open only to shut and his eyes close only to open and stare at the vid screen windows.

The inevitable question came: "What does he want from me?"

Everything.
"Nothing. Probably. I wouldn't know."

He laughed. The bags doubled in prominence. "He wants something. I can feel him following me. At night, when I'm out, from the windows."

Whether this was true or not, the Bat wasn't telling. "You're probably imagining things."

"Probably?"

She threw up her hands and leaned back. "I don't exactly keep tabs on him. It's more the other way around."

"That means you are in contact with him." This smart comment earned him a frown. Clever boys were something like pitbulls. Quick to bite, and then they never let go. What was worse, they always had to be right.

"He likes to keep his friends and enemies close," she let out with a sigh.

A little bit of a gleam entered his eyes. "Friends close and enemies closer, you mean."

Always right. Men, honestly. "No," she said firmly. "Both the same distance. So you're never quite sure which one he thinks you are." That deflated him instantly. In truth, she had goofed the old quote, but he did not need to know that for so many reasons. Mainly because she couldn't allow him to grow cocky, but cockiness came natural to this boy, so to give him an inch would spell his doom. Terry—Sean—had been cocky, and now she had no clue what had happened to him, but she knew that it had been nothing good.

She couldn't risk using Keller if he was going to be an overconfident jerk. She had lost one of those already.

And she needed to use Keller because, damn him, he was smarter than she was. But she'd be damned before she let him know that. "You still have that piece of crap identity finding program?" she asked.

The man across the tabletop managed to look like she'd had him kicked by a horse. "I worked on that program for years. Look, I deleted everything I had on him. Hell, I did what he wanted. But he can't expect me to destroy––"

"Destroy?" She looked at him with wide questioning eyes. "Who said anything about destroy?"

Two nights later, Keller fell asleep slumped in one corner of his bathroom, the only room in his apartment with no windows, good light, and a door that locked from the inside. He started awake after the Bat had gently removed the wrench from his fisted hands and turned on the shower. "Get cleaned up," was all the dark behemoth said by way of greeting as it gestured to a change of clothes set on the closed toilet seat. "Your first night on the job starts in twenty minutes. We wouldn't want to make a bad first impression."

Twenty minutes later, wet haired and sheathed in a pair of jeans and a turtleneck he normally wouldn't have dared to look at until November, Keller finally worked up the nerve to unlock the bathroom door, open it, and walk to where Batman was waiting in the living room. As things turned out, he managed to open the door, but a breathing mask drawn over his face and one sharp inhalation of gas knocked him out before he could take a step forward.

He awoke for the second time to the same mask, a different smelling gas, and a chill in the oddly damp air. He was in a chair, a small and rather spartan one. As if the bathroom floor hadn't done a number on his back already. He coughed when the mask was removed and his lungs were assaulted by the musty air. He opened his eyes to a cave.

"Is this––"

"No," the Bat precognitively answered. "The predecessor of my predecessor built it for a protégé who needed to be kept separate from the rest of the brood. Didn't wear a mask, ran the risk of exposing any colleagues she came in contact with—I hope your brain is drawing the connection here, Keller."

He only stared, still half-stupefied. "What am I doing here?"

"You've been hired," he was told plainly. "Flexible hours, room for advancement, strict non-fraternization policy, with friends or enemies. Do try to keep up. Now: your first assignment." A portable hard drive was pressed into his hands and his chair swiveled a quick 180 degrees. Keller stared up at a massive bank of computer screens that displayed the familiar opening query of his identity program. "There's a monster in this city who hides his true face, Keller. His name is Kahn. He makes me look like an angel of mercy in comparison. You are going to stay the hell away from him. Do you understand me?" Keller didn't make a sound. "Do you understand me?" The voice dripped with blood and acid.

"Y-yes," he stammered.

The Bat smiled tightly. "Good." A gloved hand covered Keller's and maneuvered it to push the hard drive into a slot in the computer console. "But just to make certain, we are going to sit and we are going to watch and learn exactly what Kahn did to a detective he caught snooping. And then you're going to snoop until you find out who he is. Let's get started shall we?" A button was pressed and the screen sprang to life.

From inside the suit, Max closed her eyes. Part of her felt guilty about lobbing this at Keller: the Max part. The Bat knew that she was spread too thin right now, and that she needed someone who hadn't burnt out to focus on finding Kahn (and through Kahn, Terry). She could carry on two lives at the same time—the ease with which she could scared her sometimes—but she knew better than split herself three ways at once. She needed Keller to lighten her load because tomorrow she was going to infiltrate the organization that had caught Terry and locked him away. Tomorrow she had an interview with the silver-haired, glacial-eyed leader who already knew of her and seriously disliked her, and she was not going to screw up her one measly chance.

The clip playing on the computer was full audio. As the screams started, she tightened her grip on Keller's shoulders and told him not to look away. The dark cavern of the suit's mouth, a fine, breathable mesh molded over her teeth, her tongue, and all the way to the back of her throat, filtered her voice into chilling male tones as the sound passed through. There was a calm, competent edge to that voice, there because there had to be. She had to know what she was doing because she had just pulled an innocent (albeit ass of a) man into a guerrilla war zone, and if anything happened to him, it would be marked in blood on her soul.

She had to know what she was doing because tomorrow she was conducting the final interview for an internship in the GCPD's genetics crime lab, and she had kicked the original Batman out of his own cave. Barbara Gordon, the woman who had aided Bruce in his fight for more years than some of his other protégés had lived, was going to be pissed.