Try to Remember

Chapter 18: Cave

—?M?—?M?—

A voiced gasp of horror tore itself from his lungs, as Mysterion twisted awake in a subconscious spasm of pain and fear. There was a sound of shattering china, and the yelp of a startled man. But Kenny was still miles away, enwrapped in the clammy coldness of a dream.

"Where the Christ-fucking shit am I." He blurted out hoarsely, taking in his unfamiliar surroundings in a panicked instant. Strange rough-rock walls like that of a cave, two cold chrome metal medical tables, bright sterile lights, and the chill of metal on his bare back.

He was lying on a surgical table, his shirt had been peeled from him, as had his pants, leaving him in only underwear and mask. Every injured inch of him was all bandages and gauze.

"I beg your pardon?" The voice, very startled and also very British, questioned him from across the room, adjacent to a door not unlike that of a prison cell door, iron bars and a heavy lock. The door itself was open and the speaker was standing next to it, a tall thin man dressed in black, wearing a full face mask that gave him the appearance of a particularly streamlined motorcyclist.

Tension mounting, memory of how he got here flickering, Kenny demanded. "Dude, I wasn't unclear, where am I?"

"Why, the Batcave." The answer shocked him with the memories of the tail-end of last night; stood on that rooftop, his strength fading, his patience with life wearing thin.

That didn't actually explain how he'd gotten here though, in all experience he should be waking up in his own bed. "Oh, of course." He bit out the words with a heavy spoonful of sarcasm. "Why am I in the 'Batcave'?"

The answer blossomed in his head, even as the masked Englishman told it to him. "You passed out from blood loss and Batman brought you back here to keep you alive, so I would mind your manners if I were you."

Aching with pain, and not in the best of moods seeing that his escape had been thwarted, Kenny shot back. "When I wake up in a dark-as-balls cave with some masked fucker watching me, manners are the last thing on my mind." He rose to a sitting position, subtly moving his joints and muscles, testing the extent of his injured state; how tight was this bandage, how deep this wound, how tired that side of his body, how much could he do.

"Well my apologies, perhaps you would be in better spirits if you were to lay back down, you've lost a lot of blood." To his credit the man's affronted attitude, stoked up by Kenny's sudden loud awakening no doubt, seemed to recede to a bedside manner.

If Mysterion wasn't so stubborn, he might've accepted the man's kind advice. Perhaps they would have gotten on better, but being as he was tired, pained, and frankly quite pissed off, Kenny rebuked him, saying. "That isn't a problem." After which he proceeded to struggle to his feet.

"Sit your arse back down right now, sir." The man's words, spoken with all the trained ease of someone who says such things on a nightly basis, incurred in Kenny a sudden compliance. It may have been his lack of energy hitting him, but Kenny sank back down onto the bed with barely a grumble of protest.

After a minute or two of silence the masked man put his hands, nimble and practised under their surgical gloves, to work in checking his bandages. It was during this that Kenny noticed the copious stitching that had been applied to his more severe lacerations. Feeling he was being more trouble than it was worth, he said. "I don't even need these, I'm fine." Brushing the man's hands away from his shoulder-blades, where a thin long cut stranded across his back.

With a tut-tut and an exasperated shake of the head, this masked doctor figure told him. "Medical science would beg to differ."

Feeling acerbic from all the stinging that various salves and wounds were giving him, Mysterion snipped. "Medical science can eat it out my ass."

"I'm sure Alexander Fleming would agree." The gentleman retorted smoothly, his easy conversational tone doing more to assure Kenny that whoever he was, he wasn't the Bat.

"Who?" He asked in reflect, not recognising the name.

"Inventor of penicillin." The Brit answered helpfully, beginning to wind a clean bandage around his upper arm while Mysterion was distracted with their talk.

"Oh… yeah…" Feeling a little dumb for his absence of such a simple piece of knowledge, Kenny allowed the masked man to finish his work.

After another short few minutes, the fellow went back over to the entrance of the room, where a china cup lay on the floor, shattered and forgotten from when Kenny's awakening had shocked it out of the man's hands. The masked doctor, after having removed his surgical gloves and depositing them in a bin, proceeded to clean up the small mess, before proceeding to address him with renewed cordiality. "Here, if you're going to refuse sleep, then perhaps you could drink something?" He produced from a nearby cupboard, a glass, which he filled with water from a sink set in a counter that ran one wall. He handed it to Kenny, and turned to leave, saying. "I will inform Batman that you have awoken."

"… Thanks…" Kenny mumbled, taking the glass thankfully and downing its ice cool contents before the man had even left the room. Feeling the water flood down his dehydrated throat made Kenny blurt out something before the stranger rounded the corner. "Sorry, for telling you to fuck off and stuff."

Turning back to regard him, the masked Brit bowed slightly and said pleasantly. "That is quite alright. I admit Batman and young Master Robin are usually a little more… conservative when expressing their discomfort, but I accept your apology nonetheless."

"Who are you then?" He asked quickly, out of curiousity more than anything, looking to get a handle on who this person was to Gotham's Dark Knight. "Their butler?" He added with a huff of sarcastic laughter.

"I suppose so." Then the butler turned on his heel and left the room, leaving Mysterion feeling rather nonplussed.

—?M?—

"How are you feeling?" Batman entered the small medical cell with little announcement, sweeping in, his cape whispering behind him like a second shadow.

"Fine…" Mysterion was sat up now, his legs dangling over the edge of the table, his half masked face watching Batman closely. "Thanks I guess. For bringing me back here and shit." Most of his superhero bravado from the previous night had deteriorated, leaving the barest glimpse of Mysterion left. Now the torn rags of Kenny McKormick were left to function in his frazzled brain.

"You collapsed." Batman elucidated, now standing like a gargoyle at the foot of the table. "For people in our situation hospitals are complicated." For all his intimidating stature, the Bat did sound sympathetic.

"Complicated, yeah." The truth being that for Kenny, it was anything but, since anonymity was only a trigger pull away.

"You collapsed off the side of a building. If I hadn't been there you would have died." So much for a bedside manner, Kenny noted with a small cuckle. As much as the Dark Knight could empathise with Kenny's plight, he stated the facts about as bluntly as was possible.

"Ah…" Now came the awkward part, seeing as from The Bat's perspective he'd saved Kenny's life, little did he know there wasn't much to save, metaphysically speaking. "Well, thanks again then."

As an unsettling quiet drifted between them, Batman seemed to consider something for a moment, before seemingly continuing his previous thought. "… Or would you?"

Kenny's mouth dried up, and the hairs on the back of his neck and arms rose to attention. The moments of silence between them, wherein only the dull buzz of the sterile lights above them could be heard, now echoed even louder with the implication of words as of yet unspoken. "Say what?" Was all Kenny could muster as a stunned reply.

Keeping his stare trained on him, Batman reiterated his question for Kenny, this time making his thoughts patently clear. "Would you have died?"

Drawing in a sharp hiss of breath, Kenny quietly cursed out words of hastily concealed indignant confusion and anger. "… What the fuck is this."

"Your reaction tells me that maybe you wouldn't have."

Stunned somewhere between shock and panic, Kenny could only ask him how. "… How do you know?"

"Know what?"

"That I…" Half way to a tirade of questions, Kenny was brought up short by a sudden, suspicious realisation. Something cued in him by his meeting at the Hallf of Justice, where Batman, Kent Nelson and Black Canary had questioned him. It was Canary's means of subtle interrogation that reminded him of what the Bat seemed to be doing. "Wait, you don't know. You just suspect."

Not caring about concealment of his techniques of information gathering, Batman asked him plainly, with the tone of someone whose patience, while not thin, is fraying on a matter of importance. "What sort of powers do you have, Mysterion."

"That's all you've done, suspect. Just letting the answers come to you…" It was all Kenny could do to admire the ease at which this method seemed to bring the Dark Knight his answers, letting all the puzzle pieces fall onto the table before attempting to arrange them, getting an idea of how big the picture was before trying to piece it together.

"I still need to know, if the League is going to allow you to help." Batman's level, serious tone washed over Kenny having little to no effect. Incensed the young vigilante pushed himself off the table and staggered a bit, before facing Batman defiantly.

"Help with what…?" Distracted from the revelation for a moment, Kenny let out a dry huff of laughter and continued. "You saw me after I fought Joker - heck, look at me now!" Kenny threw his arms wide, his muscles flexing and in doing so highlighting not their strength, but the fact that they were heavily wrapped in damp, blood-stained bandages. "I'm a a wreck. He's just a crazy guy with a knife, I could barely do shit." Dropping his arms in defeat, Kenny looked at Batman indignantly.

Batman's eyes narrowed, the material of his mask tightening around the brow, warping different shadows onto his masked face. "If there is one thing I know about Joker, it is that he is never 'just' anything. You stopped his operation, and despite all those wounds you're still standing here showing all the physical signs of injury, but none of the consequences. You should be in immense pain right now. You are not. I want to know why." As forthright as ever, Batman demanded only the facts, an attitude Kenny, despite his raised defences, could appreciate more than if the Bat had decided to be overly circuitous in his questioning. It was this that caused him to pause, breathing shallowly as he considered something. Meanwhile Batman continued to press him for information. "What is it, Mysterion. Accelerated healing, magic, nanotech, what is it that lets you survive these-"

Not for the first time, Kenny confessed, for all the good he knew it would do.

"I can't die."

Batman was struck silent, for once cowed into stunned paralysis rather than contemplative consideration. It was nice, Kenny consoled himself, to see the Bat simply lost.

"There…" Kenny ground the word between his teeth turning it into bitter, defeated dust. Then he began rolling that speech around in his head. A speech which he'd delivered in one form or another to countless people over the course of his life; to his parents, his siblings, his best friends, girlfriends, blind drunk homeless people, he'd even spotted it to complete strangers at times of particular distress. "That satisfy your curiosity? i can't die…" He didn't need to assume the masque of a disconnected dark arbitrator of justice, didn't even need to put on the voice of Mysterion to convey his utter heaviness when it came to these matters. Even so, he began to tear the bandages from his body, the sound of gauze peeling off of skin slithering through the silence. One by one he began to remove them, letting the first one fall uselessly to the stony ground. With the raw pink cut exposed to the cold air, Kenny began a list that was as ingrained into his mind as a tattoo is onto skin. "I've been stabbed, shot, burned, decapitated, disembowelled, shredded, dissolved, hit by bikes, cars, trains, trucks, planes, rockets, UFO's, meteors. I have died more times and in more ways than I can count, and every time, after the pain, and shock, and fear, and horror… without fail I wake up a few hours later, in my bed, wearing my same old clothes…" His voice ran along the same level, evading monotonousness and instead burying itself in a deep tone of defeated self-loathing raggedness. "I don't know how, or why, or for what purpose if there even are any of those. But I just do it, I cheat death every time. Or maybe death cheats me, I always change my mind on that one…" The final sodden bloody bandage flopped to the ground, landing on the others with barely a sound. "Point is…" Kenny continued frankly, almost seeming amused by the situation, so casual was his manner. "In this crazy fucked up world with alien supermen, magicians, gods, ninjas." Somewhere between Gods and Ninjas, Kenny lost his cool, his next words exploding out of him like a landmine. "And all that, fucking, bullshit…" He took one, deep, casing breath, feeling every single wound on his body as the still, cold air pricked against them, exciting every tender mark. "In this world, can you actually believe me? Don't answer. Because even if you do, it doesn't matter. Because what I haven't told you, is that no matter how bad it is, no matter how brutal, violent, sudden, random, strange, or public it is… After I die the real killer is, no one remembers a thing… I can't die… And no one knows, no one can ever know."

Far from letting the silence hang, Batman followed up with a question, cutting straight to the point he intended to make. Admirable, Kenny thought, a valid means of distracting himself from the confession the young hero had just given him. If Kenny cared to gamble right now, he would bet that the Bat was weighing up the possibility of Mysterion just being one of Gotham's many dangerous, unstable, lunatics who were better off in Arkham Asylum. "And you wake up without any physical trauma…" The fact that, if his words betrayed the truth, Batman was actually taking him seriously excited in Kenny a rare spark of something, if not hopeful, at least brighter than nihilism. "Which is why you didn't fall off that rooftop, you jumped…" The Bat's voice turned sorrowful for the merest inflection, a hasty marshalling of emotions that Kenny could recognise only because he practiced it himself more often than was perhaps healthy.

Something behind the Dark Knights hidden eyes made Kenny roll his own, visible ones. Sometimes you didn't need to see someone's eyes to tell what their soul was feeling. "Don't give me that look. You think i haven't killed myself before?"

Batman was once more, speechless. In a rare show of emotion he closed his eyes and bowed his head, whispering something to himself that sounded almost like a prayer. If Batman even had any religious affiliation, the fact he was seemingly willing to believe Kenny, told him that even if he didn't, he'd need to do some thinking. But he was given no time to think, as an electronic beeping sounded from further out in the cave. Giving him a look that told him to wait where he was, Batman rose and walked out of the room.

While Batman was absent, Kenny had a chance to control his own psyche. He drew his hands up to his face and pressed his palms against his sluggish eyes. He took in a deep breath, drawing a calming air right down into the centre of his body, before expelling it with a sigh of twisting consternation. Why had he told Batman? Though his thoughts were straining from the dull pain that ricocheted around his body, the answer was still patently clear. He needed to tell someone, he wanted someone to know. Kenny held within this head a great many secrets, but the only one he wanted to be rid of was his own, his oldest, closest secret. The one he could never tell anyone, not even for lack of trying, though despite the futility of the action, every now and then Kenny needed to turn the tap and release some of the pressure less he actually explode.

When Batman returned the air between them was uncertain, sombre with a strange sense of cordial distance. With Batman's mask, Mysterion was left unsure what his reaction to the information had truthfully been. He said he believed him, but saying and believing were two different things.

For his part the Bat seemed to be feeling the strange atmosphere as well, remarking. "The Team is gathering for a mission debriefing. You can use the Zeta-tube to return to Gotham, or, If you truly are impervious to pain, then you can come to the Team's Headquarters."

The formality with which Batman spoke did give Kenny some indication of how the Dark Knight reacted. So taking a leaf out of the older hero's book, Mysterion replied. "I'm not impervious to pain…" The truth in that statement was all too plain, and while his brain was still fried from pain and emotion, he could feel himself giving out again. "Just used to it. All the same, I think I'm just gonna go home."

Batman wavered, torn between letting Mysterion go, and keeping him within sight. Torn in his mind between believing the boy, and not believing him. Times gone by, even Batman would have dismissed Mysterion's claim out of hand, but being that he was governing a team of super-powered teenagers that included an alien, a clone of an alien, an Atlantean, and a boy who could move faster than a bullet train, the Bat couldn't come even close to disregarding the boy's confession.

The two ventured out silently into the main space of the Bat-cave, and Kenny looked around at the cathedral sized chamber. There was too much to take in with just one sweep of the head; raised platforms, training dummies, computer screens, vehicles painted in sleek black colours with the occasionaly splash of red accompanied by a telltale capital R. It was everything a superhero hideout should be, everything that Kenny didn't have. All he had was an old suitcase full of crap, even if it was his crap. As they crossed a catwalk Kenny looked below and saw a pool of water, small rivulets of water running down form several points in the caverns walls, revealing to him the places natural nature.

When they came to the largest bank of screens and computer equipment, Kenny saw the suited Brit waiting for them, a set of clothes folded over his arm. "I took the liberty of acquiring you some new clothes, sir. I thought you might need them."

"Thanks, Jeeves." Kenny said, smirking wryly at the man, but nodding in genuine relieved thanks as he took the clothes from him. He hadn't fancied walking home looking like some sort of stripper who'd just landed a bit part in the latest zombie movie.

"Not the first time i've heard that one. Won't be the last. Unfortunately." The Bat's assistant, masked though he was, was easier to read than the Dark Knight. His own acerbic humour coming across in his voice, much to the relief of Kenny who chuckled good naturally as he quickly pulled on the clothes.

Not entirely to his shock, Kenny found that they were probably nicer than anything he'd ever worn before. They weren't fancy clothes by any means, but their quality was undeniable. A white collared shirt, black sweater, navy slacks, with shoes and socks to boot. Despite their quality, their fit left something to be desired. But if there was one idiom Kenny could say he knew better than anything, it was that beggars can't be choosers. Another thing the Brit handed him, much to his relief, was Mysterion's utility belt and cloak. The cloak to his surprise had been cleaned and repaired, thin lines of stitching showing skilful needlework had been applied to them.

"Thanks. I appreciate this." Mysterion thanks the man, smiling at the Bat-butler, who merely nodded in return, clearly used to being the most convenient and useful man around.

Then he turned to Batman, who had been busying himself typing into a nearby holographic keyboard while he donned his borrowed outfit. Sharing a nod the two began approaching a large ringed structure that Kenny took to be a more proper construction of a 'zeta-tube'. It was definitely tubular if nothing else. Before Batman stepped into the teleporter's embrace though, Kenny made the decision to call him out. He wanted to know, after all, if his latest attempt to divulge his secret had even been worth it. "Do you really believe me."

The Bat paused, considering for a second before responding monotonously, not meeting Mysterion's eyes. "Whether it is true or not, Mysterion… I think you need help."

"A shrink?" Inferring hsi meaning, Kenny sighed out in disbelief. "Is that what you've taken from our little conversation?"

"No…" The immediate response settled Kenny's sparked worry that Batman was closer to thinking him insane than sane. His next words though didn't flare in him any particular response however. "I want to introduce you to the Team, formally."

His initial answer was simply to utter one pleasantly surprised syllable. "Oh." He didn't know what he thought about that. He hadn't really paid too much attention to them when they'd briefly met before, other than to attempt to work around them. Robin was alright he supposed, even if he was a little like what he imagined an annoying kid brother might be. The archer girl was fun, their motorcycle chase had been adrenaline pumping and he'd enjoyed playing the experienced vigilante to someone better armed but clearly less weathered than he. Also she was hot, no doubt in his mind. As for the others, well, he'd have to think about it. "I'll have a look at my diary and see when I can fit a playdate in." He was being snide, but this time it wasn't in anything but a good-nature.

Stepping into the tube ahead of Batman Kenny turned to face the older vigilante, saying with an honest seriousness. "Anyway… Thanks, Batman. See you around." Before uttering the words the zeta-tube whisked him away.

—?M?—?M?—

A/N: My oh my, this chapter felt like threading a needle. I tried to reason which way that conversation between Kenny and Batman would go, and there were in the end a lot of different ways it could've gone. But given what Batman has seen, and given what he knows and suspects of Mysterion, I think I settled on the right one. Also gotta show some love for my fellow Brit, Alfred; the hardest working butler in the world.

I'm interested to know what people thought of this chapter and the direction it went. There is still a lot up in the air as to what Batman is thinking about all this, and what he will remember about it, but that's for the future chapters to elaborate on.

Thanks for reading, there are about four hundred of you following this, which constantly enthuses, alarms and excites me, so thank you for that! Leave a review with any questions and comments, I always like hearing them. I'm on Tumblr to answer questions with greater expediency, the link you can find on my profile.

Until next time - Faff.