Seventh Conversation: Diana and Mister Terrific

Half an hour later: After giving her a crash course on what to expect on a bad night in Gotham, Bruce had disappeared to change into costume and then had grabbed a duffel bag which Diana gathered was one of several that Alfred kept pre-packed for such emergencies.

Now he was in Japan, and no telling when he'd come back. In theory, he could have planned on simply teleporting to and from the Manor at regular intervals, but Diana suspected he would regard that as fostering lazy and frivolous habits. One he was "on the case," he'd prefer to be ready, willing, and able to work around the clock, if need be, until the perpetrator had been subdued and handed over to the authorities.

After Batman left, Diana had eaten a six-egg omelet for breakfast—cholesterol was another thing immortal Amazons never worried about—and had informed Alfred that it looked like she'd be continuing to use the same room upstairs for a few more days. Then she had descended to the Batcave again, mostly to see if she'd left any personal items down there during her recent shifts in the hospital area. Now it was about time to keep her promise to her mother, but first . . .

She activated her own comm link. "Wonder Woman to the Tower."

It took ten seconds to get a response—there must have been another call to wrap up. Then Mister Terrific's voice said, "Tower reads you."

"Just letting you know I'm about to head home to Themyscira on urgent personal business. Consider me unavailable for anything less than an Omega-level threat until further notice. In fact: somewhere along the line, I'll probably have my comm link turned off for about an hour."

"Roger that."

"Also, I've promised Batman that after I get back, I'll concentrate on Gotham each night as long as he's halfway around the world in Japan."

"Duly noted." A brief pause. "I don't think we've ever had that happen before. Batman calls for League assistance if something massively dangerous happens in Gotham, but otherwise he just lets his hand-picked protégés—Batgirl, Nightwing, and Robin—handle things on nights when he's not going to be available."

She'd been wondering about precedents, actually. "Didn't I hear about a time before the founding of the League when Superman dressed up in a Batman suit to keep the lid on things in Gotham?"

"True—but as I heard it, that was something Robin and Superman cooked up between themselves because Batman was incommunicado. He didn't even know until it was all over."

"Ah." Diana felt a warm glow at the thought that she was the first teammate Batman had actually trusted enough to voluntarily leave the welfare of his city in her hands. Most of the time, he was so territorial about "my turf" that he made an aggressive male lion look no more than mildly possessive by comparison.

She hadn't been sure she was going to mention this, but now succumbed to the urge. "By the way, when you called him half an hour ago? You couldn't have realized, but your timing was execrable."

"I wouldn't know about 'execrable,' but it wasn't exactly my timing."

"Whose, then?"

"Yesterday afternoon, Batman called me up and begged me to keep an eye peeled for a certain signal from a beeper he'd have on his person for the next few days. Not his regular comm link; a backup. When I received the signal, I was to call him right back with 'breaking news' of an important mission, somewhere far away. So I checked the latest list of Justice Leaguers requesting the help of the World's Greatest Detective . . . there's always someone . . . and selected the unsolved case with the highest body count. That was Dr. Light's situation in Tokyo."

As soon as Terrific had said Batman called, Diana had sensed what was coming. By force of will, she'd kept her mouth clamped shut until he finished talking. One of Bruce's hands had been below the level of the tabletop just before that comm link buzzed in his shirt pocket . . .

Now she said tightly, "Thank you for explaining that," and cut the connection, not trusting herself to stay civil if this conversation went on any longer.

Diana prided herself on keeping her temper under tight control. But every rule had its exceptions, and this sure felt like one of them!

If she vented her outrage on any of the expensive equipment down here in the Cave, Bruce would notice when he returned. Even if she cleaned out the debris and replaced it with a new unit of the same model as the old one, she had to assume he'd notice the lack of a scratch on the casing, or the different serial number, or the fact that the new unit was a millimeter out of position, or some silly thing.

Besides, Alfred would probably be shocked by such "unladylike" behavior, even if he didn't say that in so many words . . .

She rose off the ground and flew off into one of the natural tunnels winding away from the cave. After three hundred yards, her boots touched down next to a hefty boulder which looked as if it had been sitting here for at least five centuries and probably weighed at least two metric tons.

She reached for it . . .

A few minutes later, she was wiping dust from her hands. There was now an estimated 1.999 tons of gravel carpeting the floor of this stretch of tunnel. Plus a couple of kilos' worth of dust still filling the air. Without any wind in here to keep it agitated, it would eventually settle.

Once back in the main area of the Batcave, Diana sprayed water over herself to get the rest of the rock-dust off, and reflected that it was encouraging, in a twisted sort of way, to discover that on the one hand, Bruce was willing to have a frank talk about personal matters with her—but on the other, he apparently didn't trust himself if the conversation went on too long! That suggested a man who consciously feared he was already teetering on the brink of abandoning some of his self-imposed rules in the face of temptation . . .

That thought comforted her all the way to Themyscira. This recent sojourn in Wayne Manor had already given Diana some new ideas for things to mention to the Goddess of Love and Beauty, and this fresh insight into Bruce Wayne's psychological condition tended to support her current plans for the conference her mother hoped to have today.

Author's Note: For anyone who doesn't remember: Superman dressed up as Batman while patrolling the mean streets of Gotham in "Knight Time," an episode of Superman: The Animated Series. As Mr. Terrific suggests in this chapter, Clark was being coached by Robin (Tim Drake) while Bruce was "missing in action" and hadn't approved the idea. So Wonder Woman is justified in feeling she's received a unique honor by being invited to take up the slack in Gotham in Batman's absence.

Coming up next! The final scene of the story; the "One on Themyscira" mentioned in the title.