Chapter Text
Bruce silently cursed the inaccurate weather report as he landed on the roof of the GCPD building. Rain battered his face. Water sluiced down his cape and dripped off his nose. He could already anticipate hours of striding around in wet leather.
For twenty-nine minutes, he crouched under the spread-winged gargoyle on the northwest corner of the roof, glumly attempting to think dry thoughts.
The clock ticked past eleven. Finally, there was a creak and bang of a door. Footsteps crunched over wet gravel. Bruce rose and slid out from beneath one carved stone wing.
“You’re early,” said Gordon, raising a tired hand in greeting.
“You’re…not,” said Bruce, biting off the word he was going to say, which was late. That wouldn’t have been fair to Gordon.
The system they’d worked out was that whoever arrived first would wait for the other to show up, but lately, the one doing all the waiting had been Bruce. Ever since Gordon got promoted to Police Commissioner, he’d been one of the busiest men in the city. He had more important things to do than to stand around on a rooftop waiting for a vigilante to show up.
Bruce was mostly just relieved that he hadn’t ruined the man’s career by associating with him. For awhile, he’d worried that Gordon might taint his own future prospects by being GCPD’s designated ‘Bat wrangler.’ But Gordon — tenacious and upright and stubborn about doing good in a way that matched Bruce’s passion — hadn’t stopped believing in Batman. And now his gamble had finally paid off with the biggest promotion of his career.
“There has to be an easier way of getting ahold of you,” said Gordon, as he joined him with umbrella in hand. “Maybe I should set up a hotline for us.”
“Too easily hacked.”
“Anonymous letter box? Voicemail? Email?” Gordon raised his eyebrows. “I hate making you come all this way for minor updates.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“You sure you don’t want a coffee or a donut?” Gordon was cradling a steaming mug in his hands. Bruce noted the creases in his clothes, the scruffiness of his mustache, the tired lines gouged into his forehead. Gordon had been sleeping even worse than usual.
“I ate before coming out,” said Bruce. This was the closest he ever got to discussing his private life. Anything more would jeopardise the image he’d so carefully crafted.
“Funnily, I can’t imagine you eating,” said Gordon, giving him a skeptical once-over. “Guess even bats need sustenance, huh?”
“What have you got for me today?” said Bruce. Gordon meant well, but small talk of any kind made him want to shrivel up inside.
“Caught two more Nutters just this week,” said Gordon. He shook his head. “One was trying to take on two armed thugs by himself. The other almost killed himself falling out a window. These people have no sense.”
“Did you charge them?”
“With what — vigilantism? Seemed a bit hypocritical, especially for me.”
“How many this month?”
“Five. There was an uptick after you saved the mayor’s life again last month.”
The internet called it ‘Batman Fever.’ Ever since the Riddler flooded the city six months ago, Gotham has been in the grip of a furious preoccupation with its resident vigilante. Over the past several months, a spate of clumsy Batman lookalikes have sprung up from out of nowhere, infesting the city like woodlice. Several of them apparently liked to run around pulling sloppy parkour stunts and getting into ill-advised fistfights with criminals.
Bruce hadn’t yet encountered any in person, but Gordon and his men were beyond fed up.
“They’re going to give you a bad rep if this keeps up,” said Gordon.
“I don’t care.”
“It’s your name on the line. And if they piss off the wrong people, these dollar-store knockoffs are going to get themselves killed, or worse. You ought to issue some kind of statement.”
“On what platform?” said Bruce. “I’m not a public figure. I’m not officially affiliated with the police or the government. I can’t tell people what to do.”
Gordon grunted. “You’ve got a point there. But I need them to stop wasting police time with their antics. This can’t end well for any of them.”
Bruce shifted slightly, rearranging his cape. “I’ll see about…discouraging them. Did you have anything else for me tonight?”
Gordon took a folder out of his coat. “I’ve got reports that the Maroni Family is rising up to take Falcone’s place. Thought you might want to stay updated.”
Inside his head, everything in Bruce went still. Maroni. The name was now synonymous with murderer in his head. His father’s murderer.
“I’ve looked into him,” said Bruce, feeling his heartbeat quicken. This had been his side project for months now. “He’s gotten better at hiding his illegal activities under the guise of legal businesses, but are you thinking —”
There was a sound. Bruce stopped mid-sentence and pivoted towards it. A scrape of metal against stone. A gravelly scuffle. Then all at once, a figure in black cleared the parapet and landed on the roof.
Plated armor. Bat-eared cowl. Cape so matte it seemed to absorb all moonlight.
Gordon turned two seconds after Bruce did, and almost slopped coffee all over his own hand.
“Shit. Another one? That makes three this week.”
“New record for you,” said Bruce, without taking his eyes off the interloper.
This one immediately struck him as different. For starters, his suit was too sleek and sophisticated. This wasn’t some home-sewn budget Batman cosplay — this was functional armor, designed to absorb hits and stop bullets. It was also, Bruce couldn’t help but notice, much more waterproof than his. Rain was beading on the weave and rolling off in fat droplets, like he’d coated himself with something hydrophobic.
Bruce made a mental note to add that as a feature to his own suit.
The second thing was that this person moved like river water over stone. A dancer’s grace, infused into what should have been stiff plate armor. Bruce instinctively slid into a ready stance. He’d seen men like this before when he was studying with Ra’s al Ghul’s acolytes in Nanda Parbat. This was the sort of man that could kill you in two surgical strikes with a single finger.
And he was heading straight for Bruce.
“B? Is that you?”
There was a harsh, artificial growl overlaid on top of his voice that Bruce suspected was a feature of his souped-up cowl. It obscured his age, but it didn’t obscure how out of breath he was.
Bruce sank deeper into his stance.
— And the copycat halted immediately. His head swivelled, but the opaque lenses over his eyes made it impossible to tell what he was looking at.
“B?” the copycat repeated. When nobody answered him, he turned and said to Gordon, “I came as soon as I saw the signal. What’s going on?”
“Signal wasn’t for you, pal,” said Gordon, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “Wrong time to show up and play hero.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to get that…” He trailed off and turned in a slow circle. “Huh. This really is the wrong time.”
He put an odd emphasis on the word.
“I’m only going to say this once,” said Gordon. “But for your health and my sanity, take that silly getup off.”
The copycat was now poking at the circuitry on his gauntlet. The lights on it beeped and flickered. He looked distracted. “Honestly, I’d love to, Commissioner. But I’m not currently wearing anything underneath this, and I sadly don’t have a change of clothes right now. It’s gonna have to stay on for the time being.”
Gordon sighed and unsnapped a pair of handcuffs. “All right. You’re coming with me.”
Immediately, the copycat stepped back and raised his hands. Everything in him telegraphed surrender, but Bruce grabbed Gordon’s arm all the same.
“Wait.”
There was something off about this man that he couldn’t quite put his finger on— some sixth sense that warned him this man was dangerous. There wasn’t much to go on. But his subconscious mind had probably catalogued the clues too fast for his conscious mind to articulate. That happened sometimes.
The stranger shook his head slightly, like he was clearing it. Then he took a breath and stepped back. “All right. Everybody relax. I think there’s been a mixup.” He sounded almost apologetic, though it was hard to tell through the voice filter. “Look, I’m not actually Batman.”
“No shit,” said Gordon.
“Believe it or not, I don’t usually go out like this,” the copycat continued, gesturing down at himself. “I actually go by Nightwing.”
Gordon and Bruce exchanged a quick, baffled glance. Gordon raised his eyebrows to say, Does that mean anything to you? And Bruce twisted the corner of his lip to say, No, not really. It sounded like a 4chan username. Or maybe a pro gamer handle.
“Well, Nightwing,” said Gordon, keeping an admirable rein on his skepticism, “I don’t care what you call yourself. If you’re copying his costume, that’s going to be a problem.” He tilted his head in Bruce’s direction.
Nightwing just laughed. “Look, it’s clear to me I wasn’t invited to this party, so let’s pretend it never happened. Don’t let me disturb your tête-à-tête, gentlemen. Please, carry on.”
The whole time he was speaking, he continued moving backwards, hands still held aloft. He didn’t look behind him, or otherwise acknowledge that they were currently standing at the top of a twenty-story building.
“Hey, stop right there,” said Gordon, starting forward in alarm.
Bruce was faster. “Wait. Don’t back up any furth—”
But Nightwing was too quick for either of them. Before Bruce could say another word, the man had tipped himself backwards off the ledge like he was doing a trust fall into Gotham’s unwelcoming arms. Behind him, Gordon made a strangled sound. Bruce closed the distance to the lip of the roof in a burst of speed and aimed his grapple downwards.
Selina had kicked a man off a skyscraper in front of him once. The memory of it was still enough to make his heartbeat triple, eight months after the fact. Bruce had spent four months afterwards obsessively redesigning his grapple gun to make damn sure it could never happen again.
Thin, tensile ropes deployed faster than thought.
In theory, they could grab a man out of the air. In practice, it turned out that Nightwing was too fast to be grabbed. Before the ropes could touch him, his trajectory had changed.
Suddenly, he was flinging himself at nearly terminal velocity towards the Central Bank building. At the apex of his parabolic flight, he spun into a series of flips. On the descent, he redeployed his grapple and swung sideways in a smooth falling curve, tucking and rolling into a perfect landing atop the Grand Union Train Station. Then he took off running across the spine of the skylights.
Bruce gripped the stone ledge and stared. The tension in his shoulders wound tighter. He’d been prepared for this latest copycat to be an annoyance. He hadn’t been prepared for him to be a world-class athlete.
Next to him, Gordon gave a long, low whistle. “Damn. I take it back. This guy knows what he’s doing.”
Bruce squinted into the dreary night, doing his best to follow Nightwing’s progress across the city, but the falling rain soon obscured his vision.
Gordon took a drag of his cigarette. “Looks like you might have some competition,” he said.
Bruce shot him a narrow look. Was that a joke? He had a hard time telling sometimes.
“Better get his number before he one-ups you in the field.” Gordon tossed back the rest of his coffee like it was a shot of vodka.
“Put out an internal memo. Tell your men not to approach this ‘Nightwing’,” said Bruce, before snapping open the glider on his back and leaping off the building too.
He’d never really taken any of his imitators seriously, but that might have been a mistake. Nightwing was too skilled to be just some guy in a cape. Gordon was right. For the first time, the idea of someone marauding around in his city, wearing his insignia, disturbed him.
As a vigilante, Batman operated within a rigid set of rules. It was the only way he could maintain even an iota of legitimacy with the mayoral office; the only way the police could trust him enough to work with him. He’d poured blood and sweat into building up that trust. If an imposter were to go out there in his uniform, with no regard for his self-imposed boundaries, it could topple the delicate detente that Bruce had achieved.
And if this Nightwing killed someone? What then?
Bruce kept his eyes peeled as he floated between the skyscrapers of Midtown. But Nightwing’s suit was better camouflaged than his; he’d already melted seamlessly into the shadows of the city.
+++
The next time he ran into Nightwing, it was less than a week later.
It was past midnight, and Bruce had just finished breaking into one of Maroni’s offices. Now he was attempting to gain access to the condemned building next door, where Maroni was supposedly stockpiling his drugs, but he’d been perhaps a tad too ambitious. There were more guards than expected. A small mob had emerged to confront him. Bruce had just thrown himself into the fight when he heard the whisper of a cape.
Too similar to his own for him to miss it.
“Need a hand there, B?”
Bruce glanced behind him just long enough to see a second bat-eared shape wade boldly into the fray.
“Stay out of this,” he snapped, dodging a fist.
The fact that Nightwing was still in the batsuit irked him. Gordon had already warned him once. Was the man deliberately attempting to provoke him?
“You say that like it’s going to stop me,” said Nightwing with a laugh. Today his voice overlay was gone. Without it, he sounded younger, warmer. More carefree. “It’s like you don’t even know me.”
Bruce carefully avoided knocking a man’s teeth out as he punched him in the face. Six down, twenty more to go. “I don’t know you.”
“Sorry. Force of habit,” said Nightwing, still smiling. “I keep forgetting that.”
There wasn’t much talking after that, because they were both swept up in the battle, but Bruce managed to sneak glances at the other man between blows.
After seeing his aerial display the other day, he’d been curious about what other abilities the man might possess, but Nightwing surpassed all expectations. He had a fluidity that reminded him of Selina, and an aesthetic presence that reminded him of Khoa, but he also had a third, undefinable quality.
When Bruce fought, it always felt strenuous, no matter how efficient he was. But Nightwing made it look effortless. Like he didn’t have to even think about it. He moved like a figure skater flying over the ice, each movement transitioning smoothly and seamlessly into the next.
As Bruce watched, the man took down his opponent with an improbable backward flip-kick. Then he spun and knocked the next guy off his feet with a low hooking maneuver that immediately reminded him of something Ra’s al Ghul once taught him. Now he was just showing off.
It wasn’t so much that his movements were unnecessary. It was more that he always seemed to know just which marks to hit to display himself to the best advantage. Nightwing fought like a reality show contestant who knew there were sixteen cameras pointed at him at all times. Like he was planning on immortalizing this for TikTok.
“Don’t kill them,” said Bruce through gritted teeth, as Nightwing leapfrogged over two men, who promptly ran into each other and bashed their heads together. It would have been comical, if one of them hadn’t accidentally gouged a hole in the other’s face.
“Me? I’m barely lifting a finger. They’re doing all the hard work themselves,” said Nightwing with another laugh.
He was constantly smiling. At everything. Bruce guessed he might be around the same age as him. But his attitude was unmistakable: this was the school’s star quarterback, the company’s top earner, the movie’s biggest headliner, all rolled into one. Loud, brash, confident. He reminded Bruce of the proud, self-important C-Suite executives at Wayne Enterprises — the ones who talked too much because they knew they would be heard.
“You’re using excessive force,” said Bruce. He sidestepped one of the men running at him and used his momentum to knock him against the wall.
“Oh, please. I’ll tell you what’s excessive, and it’s that black greasepaint thing you’ve got going on.” Nightwing tripped another brute, sending him spinning face-first into the ground. “I’m slightly concerned about the amount of makeup remover you must be using every night.”
Bruce knocked his own opponent unconscious and turned to glare at him. As someone who had been thoroughly trained in all the deadliest of martial arts, he was often obliged to hold back in fights, especially when up against untrained thugs and incompetent civilians. It was too easy to kill someone by accident. So he pulled his punches, lest he hit someone too hard. But it was clear that Nightwing had no such scruples. Worse, he fought while laughing, which Bruce found distasteful. Fighting crime was a serious endeavor. Lives were at stake. This wasn’t a part-time gig; this was a vocation.
“Is this a game to you?” he demanded.
“It’s my Saturday night cardio, and I’m only just getting warmed up. Have a little faith in me, okay? I am a consummate —” he dropped the last man with a spinning high kick Bruce had never seen performed outside of a video game, “—professional.”
Bruce turned and surveyed the alley. There was a trail of collapsed, groaning men behind them. Their breaths rose in little puffs of condensation. A wave of relief settled over him. Minimal bloodshed. Nobody dead. Good.
He rounded on Nightwing, whose head was tilted like a question mark.
“You keep calling me B,” Bruce growled. “Why.”
Nightwing grinned at him. It felt wrong to see someone flash that much teeth under the cowl. “Isn’t it obvious? B is for Batman.”
Bruce frowned. Nicknames have been the bane of his existence since his school days. His latest gripe was the way the journalists and Gotham’s wealthiest elites all referred to him as ‘Brucie’, as if they were somehow old friends just because his parents used to be famous. It left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Gotham is mine,” he said, “and I don’t like interlopers.”
He got a cheeky smirk in return. “Oooh. Do I get a ‘stay out of Gotham’ edict? I’m so flattered. Next you’re going to tell me to stay out of your cases.”
Bruce snapped his own mouth shut. He didn’t trust people who smiled this easily, this often. It reminded him too much of the Riddler’s knowing, secretive smiles. Only nut jobs smiled like this.
This imposter’s behavior echoed the over-familiarity of the truly obsessed. Bruce could still remember what it had been like, to be the focus of the Riddler’s sick, stalkerish attentions. How grimy it had made him feel afterwards.
“Look—” he began.
That’s as far as he got before Nightwing suddenly closed the distance between them and shoved him. “Get down—”
A sharp — crack — blistered the air.
Suddenly, Bruce was eight years old again, staring down at a string of bloody pearls as they rolled, one by one, over the uneven gravel street, before falling through the gutter.
Plop.
Plop.
Plop.
“—atman? Batman! Are you with me?”
He blinked, and the world snapped back into focus. Someone was dragging him around the corner of a building. His back thumped against the brick wall. Nightwing raised the edge of his cape and flung it over both their heads like a makeshift shelter. Two of his fingers pressed against Bruce’s carotid artery to check his pulse.
Bruce batted the hand away. When he tried to peek around the corner, Nightwing pressed him back into place with one hand. For someone so slight, he was surprisingly strong.
“Stay behind me. Yours isn’t as bulletproof as mine.”
“Who—”
“Sniper. Five stories up, two buildings over.”
“How—”
“Infrared vision in my cowl. You don’t have that.”
“What—”
“I can get him, but I might have to leave you here. Are you good with that?”
Was he good with that? Was Nightwing asking his permission?
Three more shots sounded, and they pressed themselves flat against the brick. This time, Bruce didn’t flinch. He could stay cognizant if he was mentally prepared for it. It was only when he was taken unawares that sometimes, he got thrown back to that night.
“There’s a second shooter,” he says under his breath. “Lower down, near the —”
“I know. I saw. Hang on, I’ve got this.”
Without warning, Nightwing reached over, plucked the metal bat insignia right off Bruce’s chest, and hurled it in one swift motion around the corner. Three seconds later, there was a distant yelp.
Nightwing flexed his fingers in satisfaction, like a concert pianist. “Sorry I had to borrow yours, I was out of batarangs.”
Bruce’s eyes darted between Nightwing’s hand to his own chest. Batarangs? He hadn’t designed his insignia to be throwable. Hadn’t even known it could be aimed like that.
“Is he dead?” he demanded.
Nightwing stole a glance around the corner. “Nursing a shoulder wound,” he reported. “You have got to stop doubting me on that one, B. I know your rules front and back. It’s been tattooed into my brainstem. I promise I’m not here to kill any—”
Before he could finish, Bruce heard the tell-tale sound of a rifle being reloaded.
“I’ll go after the first shooter,” he said quickly. There would be time enough later to go over all this footage again, to parse the meaning of Nightwing’s words one by one. “You need to leave. I’m the one they want. You have nothing to do with this.”
Bruce was the one who’d incited Maroni’s ire by breaking into his office. He was the one with a grudge against this family. He wasn’t going let an innocent bystander get within breathing distance of a man as dangerous as Sal Maroni if he could help it. He’d learned his lesson after Selina. The fewer people involved, the better.
But Nightwing was already fiddling with his utility belt, counting something in one of the pockets. “Yeah, too late for that. I’m already hip-deep in this case. Here’s what we’re going to do—”
Bruce reached out and grabbed his arm to make sure the man didn’t make any sudden moves. Now was not the time for some desperate, hairbrained gambit.
But instead of pulling away, Nightwing lost his balance and stumbled. With a hiss, he awkwardly righted himself. That was when Bruce saw a dark patch on the ground. He hadn’t noticed it before, but when Nightwing moved, the patch caught the light and glistened.
Bruce squinted closer at Nightwing’s dark armor. There was a trail of darkness dribbling down his thigh. His eyes followed the trail back up, to his flank, where it originated. Bruce dragged the heavy cape aside to get a better look.
“You’re hit.”
“Just a tiny little bit,” said Nightwing. There was no strain in his voice, but the pitch of it had gone up. “It’s a nick, I swear.”
“You said your suit was more bulletproof than mine.”
“I said my cape is more bulletproof than yours,” Nightwing corrected.
Voices echoed down the ally towards them. Reinforcements. Sick of waiting for them to come out of hiding, Maroni must have sent more men in to find them.
Bruce was already recalculating his escape plan when Nightwing turned and said, very calmly:
“Listen. We need to split up. You’re going to go left while I go right. I’ll lead them on a merry chase, and then we’ll rendezvous at —
“No. You’re going to the hospital,” Bruce interrupted him. That was the only logical course of action. He wasn’t going to stand here and watch someone exsanguinate.
“Can’t. I don’t have ID here. Or citizenship.”
So he was an undocumented immigrant. Or a foreign national. That wasn’t a problem. This was Gotham, where plenty of unscrupulous doctors would do any surgery you wanted, for the right price. And Bruce had money.
“Come on,” he growled. He put his shoulder under Nightwing’s arm and pulled him deeper into the darkness of the alley, keeping close to the walls for safety. From memory, he conjured up the locations of the three closest medical centers, and tried to figure out which was the easiest one to reach.
“No hospital,” Nightwing panted as they hurried through the streets. He had to half-hobble, but even hurt and bleeding, he managed to keep up with Bruce’s gait.
More gunshots echoed behind them. The idiots were just firing at random now. Their voices were growing louder too. Bruce could move twice as fast if he ditched Nightwing, but he wasn’t going to leave behind a man who’d taken a bullet meant for him.
“B. Hey. B? We’re going to need a smoke grenade or something soon, because they’re going to be here in ten seconds.”
“A what?”
Nightwing sighed. “…gotta do everything around here myself,” he grumbled as he awkwardly fumbled with his belt, found what he wanted, and threw it behind him with a wince.
Seconds later, the concussive force of his grenade hit. The air rippled around them. There was a series of crashes. Smoke billowed up and outwards — an acrid stink. The voices turned to yells of outrage and confusion. Bruce craned his neck around in alarm, but Nightwing kept pushing onwards, steadily and inexorably, without faltering.
“Eyes up, B.”
“You’re bleeding out.”
“No vitals hit. You should be more worried about —” he heaves a short, pained breath “—the blood trail I’m leaving. It’s like I’m posting up road signs to our location.”
His voice was slowing down, even if his movements weren’t. Bruce told himself that was probably just due to the pain. Should he offer him a bandage? Tape to temporary stem the bleeding? Bruce kept a small first-aid kit in his utility belt for emergencies, but there was nothing in it that would help a gunshot wound. Was there enough time to actually stop and see how bad it was?
“We need to find a secure location.” The smoke grenade was only going to hold them for so long.
“Yeah. Go up — go high. On — the roofs.”
Bruce tilted his head back. “Up?”
There were no tall buildings around them — nothing that would get them of range of a sniper on the fifth floor.
“That one, there — look —”
Bruce followed the line of Nightwing’s arm. The building was two blocks down, jutting up from behind a row of shorter buildings — twenty-four stories of gothic architecture. He froze.
“Wait. Don’t tell me you don’t have a grapple.” Nightwing halted and shot him an incredulous look.
Bruce did, but his grapple maxed out at eighty yards. Based on eyeball triangulation alone, he’d need a line at least a hundred and twenty yards long for this.
“Too far,” he said.
Nightwing muttered, “Holy early days, Batman,” under his breath as he shoved something that looked like a black baton into Bruce’s hands.
Bruce felt his pulse pick up. He’d never done this with another person riding pillion before — it had always felt too dangerous to attempt. His mind blitzed through the options. Carry him? Impossible with only one free arm. Piggyback? Did Nightwing have the strength to hang on?
“Now, B. Now,” said Nightwing, voice jumping in panic just as six men appeared out of the smoke in the mouth of the alley behind them.
There was nothing for it. Bruce tightened his grip and took aim. A hand closed over the other end of the baton, and suddenly Bruce understood. It would work like a trapeze bar, with his weight on one side, and Nightwing’s on the other. The line would deploy out the middle. They’d have to balance perfectly so that the other person didn’t slide off, but this way, Bruce wouldn’t have to take all his weight. Nightwing hooked his free arm around Bruce’s waist and plastered himself close to minimize drag. What had seemed like an impossible maneuver moments before now seemed… doable.
Bruce hit the button and jumped.
His arm was almost jerked out of its socket as line retracted at shocking speed. His stomach dropped. The acceleration on this thing was at least double his grapple. The windows of the buildings next to them blurred. It felt like they were hurtling towards certain death.
The only thing grounding him was Nightwing’s voice in his ear, breathlessly giving instructions. “— release at the same moment, for balance. There’s going to be a bump at the apex, that’s our cue — remember to tuck and roll —”
Bruce only half-listened as they shot past the lip of the roof. Right at the apex, Nightwing let go and tucked into his own roll. Bruce copied him instinctively, letting his body guide him into protecting his head and vitals. He hit hard and rolled thrice. His momentum was arrested by his cape catching on something sharp. There was the sound of fabric shredding. Bruce staggered to his feet, caught his balance, and realized in dismay that his cape now had a massive rip down the middle.
Given their velocity on entry and their combined weight and the difficulty of the maneuver, Bruce was surprised he hadn’t cracked open his skull. The wild hammering of his heart almost felt like exhilaration. Not bad for a first try.
Nightwing had fared worse than him. He’d lost control of his trajectory, rolled right into one of the giant air conditioning units, and was now lying in a crumpled heap.
Swiftly, Bruce went to his side and crouched down. With a grunt of effort, he rolled Nightwing onto his back, till he was lying flat. Up on the roof where there was more ambient light, the sticky redness coating his armor was bright and garish. There was more of it than he’d expected. A lot more.
“You lied,” said Bruce accusingly. “You were hit twice.”
“Wasn’t lying. Didn’t say how many times I got hit,” Nightwing retorted. He seemed to be trying to suppress a fit of coughing, without much success.
“Stay still.” Bruce applied pressure to the worst wound with both hands.
Nightwing dragged in a desperate breath and panted, quick and shallow.
Bruce swung his gaze around the forlorn rooftop. Escaping up high had gotten them temporarily out of sniper range, but it was a double-edged sword. It was going to be even harder now to get to a hospital from here.
“There’s a clinic only six blocks from here —” he began.
“No. No clinics. Take me to Alfred,” said Nightwing through chattering teeth.
Everything in Bruce stilled. “Who?” His entire face went utterly numb. It was like all the nerves there had died.
“Alfred? Your butler? The one who knows basic surgery and can do perfect field stitches?” He coughed again, and arched his back with a low groan when Bruce accidentally pressed too hard.
He knew.
The thought looped wildly through Bruce’s head as he woodenly went through the motions of emergency first-aid. His hands knew what to do, but his head was retreating rapidly into the upper stratosphere. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a siren was shrieking. A part of him wanted to keep Nightwing talking, so that he’d at least have continuous confirmation that the man was still alive. The other part of him wanted Nightwing to shut up so he could think.
“You know Alfred?” he said.
“Of course.” His voice had gone faint and scratchy, but he was definitely still lucid. “Used to work for MI6. Likes his Earl Grey with a splash of milk, no sugar. Makes great pancakes, but not-so-great waffles. Can still beat you at the Sunday crossword by thirty seconds every week.”
“Alfred’s waffles are fine,” said Bruce, feeling the incongruous urge to defend him.
“I’m still three for four.”
“Stop talking.”
Nightwing started to laugh, but it turned into a wet cough instead. A shudder ran through him. “Oh, wait. I did lie about one thing.” He swung his head around more fully, like he was centering his gaze. Catching him in his crosshairs. “B is for Bruce.”
All the muscles in Bruce’s body stiffened at once. He was frozen in his crouch, unable to even jerk to his feet. The confirmation hit like a kick to his solar plexus.
How?
None of this made sense. The Alfred angle concerned him the most. After receiving the Riddler’s explosives-laced delivery last year, he was now hypervigilant to all the ways Alfred could be hurt — all the ways he could be hurt, if Alfred was hurt. He’d sworn to himself he’d never let it happen again. Everything about this man posed a monumental risk to his life.
But Nightwing had leaped in front of a bullet for him.
“Who are you?” Bruce whispered through numb lips.
“If the last thing I see is you, I’m okay with dying,” said Nightwing, slurring heavily now.
“You’re not going to die,” said Bruce firmly.
Blood bubbled up from beneath his fingers, which is how he realized that his hands had gone slack in his shock. Immediately, his reflexive jolt of panic slid away, swallowed up by a even greater fear. Compartmentalize. Box it up. He could think about this later. There was a human life on the line right now, and nothing else mattered in the face of that — not even his secret identity.
If anything, it made his next decision easier.
Bruce tapped the comm link in his ear. “Agent A?”
It felt like an eternity before he heard Alfred’s voice come back, gruff and disgruntled. “Yes. What do you need?”
“Bring me the chopper. Medevac. Now.”
Chapter Text
The second bullet was easier to remove than the first one.
Bruce stood by, feeling useless, as Alfred bustled around the gurney and stitched torn skin and flesh back together. It made him realize afresh how little he’d appreciated his father’s profession. The only time he’d ever seen Thomas Wayne put blood back into a dying person and bring color back into their face was that fateful midwinter night when Falcone had stumbled into their house.
On days like this, Alfred reminded him so much of his father that their faces blurred together in his head.
Ever since Bruce learned about the Maroni-Falcone-Wayne connection, his memories of his father had become grainier — almost pixelated, like an old TV screen losing fidelity. Even in his dreams, Alfred’s face would sometimes replace his father’s. More than once, Bruce had jerked awake in the early hours of the morning with his heart hammering in his chest, swamped with an anger that was equal parts longing and grief. His father’s presence was fading slowly, inexorably from his memory, and Bruce felt powerless to stop its progress. It felt like betrayal — like disloyalty — though he wasn’t sure to whom.
“It’s done,” said Alfred, tying off the last stitch.
Turning away, Bruce went to hose himself (and his uniform) down in the lower levels of the Cave. There was enough blood on him to tint the floor tiles red. It was more blood than he’d seen in a long time. He closed his eyes against it and pressed his gloved hands against the ceramic walls.
When he returned to the makeshift surgery theatre, he found Alfred speaking quietly with his patient.
“If you want me to check your head, I’m afraid the cowl’s going to have to come off.”
Nightwing’s head lolled slightly to the side. “S’okay. Go ahead,” he murmured sleepily.
Alfred raised his eyebrows. “I reckon that’s the fastest anyone’s ever capitulated to that request.”
“Mm.” His voice was syrupy slow. “Bet Bruce fights you tooth ‘n’ nail, huh?”
Alfred’s eyebrows climbed even higher.
Nightwing reached up to unlatch something under his chin. There was a faint click. “S’fine. I trust you.”
Gingerly, taking care not to jostle him, Alfred peeled his headgear off.
Dark hair spilled out of the cowl.
Despite himself, Bruce leaned in out of curiosity. His first thought was that Nightwing would not have looked out of place on a billboard, or a TV screen, or a movie poster. Could he be an actor? A musician? A celebrity of some kind? Bruce didn’t keep up with the entertainment scene, but this man had exactly the sort of face that teenagers would pin up in their bedrooms and pine hopelessly over.
Bruce catalogued the salient aspects of his features for future reference, then he quickly looked away. Beautiful people were distracting; it took concerted, continuous effort to ignore their looks — to not allow their aesthetic appeal to bias his opinions or distort his logic. When it came to his work, Bruce preferred to stick to useful facts. Such as this: he’d guessed Nightwing to be around the same age as himself, and he’d been right; the man appeared to be in his mid-to-late twenties.
“Mild laceration,” said Alfred, as he inspected his scalp for injuries. The fingers of his gloves came away bloody.
Nightwing didn’t answer. He was back to breathing in and out peacefully, every muscle relaxed. Conked out again.
Bruce waited for Alfred to finish putting an IV into his arm before he drew him over to the far side of the cave.
“Will he be all right?”
“It’s not the first time he’s been shot, if his scars are any indication,” said Alfred dryly. “If no infection sets in, he’ll be fine.” Bruce let out a quiet breath of relief, but Alfred wasn’t done. “Why on earth didn’t you bring him to a proper hospital?”
“He asked for you, specifically.”
Alfred frowned. “Me?”
“I thought perhaps… he might have been someone you used to know. From before.”
Bruce had spent the last two hours running through every possibility, and the only theory that made any sense was that Nightwing was an MI6 agent. That would explain almost everything about him, from the swift, professional way he’d dispatched those thugs to his shockingly high-tech gear. Bruce had been raised on Alfred’s stories of legendary British spooks; he knew what a seasoned agent was capable of. Even while bleeding from two bullet wounds, Nightwing had been level-headed enough to construct an escape plan. Civilians didn’t act like that.
But Alfred shattered that idea when he frowned and shook his head. “I’ve never seen him before. If he’s an agent, he was after my time.”
“Does the name ‘Nightwing’ ring a bell?”
“No. But his code name could have changed a dozen times over his career.” Alfred did one of his British shrugs — a synchronized tilt of the eyebrows and the head. “He does fit the profile of a former spy. It would explain how he’d gotten all those old injuries.”
Bruce’s unease grew. If Alfred didn’t know him, then why had Nightwing spoken about him in the language of an old friend? The specifics he’d mentioned were too on the nose. Some of them were things that only Bruce would know — like the fact that Alfred could still beat him at the weekly crossword. It was such a mundane thing, but Bruce had been doing the Sunday crossword with Alfred every week since he was eight, and he’d always cherished it as a private ritual of theirs — one that he’d never shared with the public. There was no way a stranger could have known.
“I’ll get to the bottom of this,” Bruce promised as he shuffled towards the elevator.
“If I’m on babysitting duty, then you’re eating the supper I saved you,” called Alfred from behind him. “Mutton pie, vegetable stew. You clean both bowls.”
Alfred drove a hard bargain, but Bruce was too tired to argue. He sighed in defeat and trudged upstairs.
+++
Bruce returned to the Cave the next day, making sure to put on his uniform.
He spent the morning studying the circuitry on Nightwing’s cowl. The thing had electric wires running through it like a series of nerves, connecting it to almost every other part of his suit. A marvel of engineering.
At around two in the afternoon, Nightwing finally stirred from his sleep. “Oh, hey,” he croaked in greeting. “Thanks for the save, B.”
Slowly, laboriously, he sat up. There were six bandages on him, including the complex dressing taped to his side, but otherwise, he looked unfairly spruce for someone who’d lost three pints of blood and gotten eight stitches less than twelve hours ago.
It took Bruce several frozen moments to generate the most socially-appropriate remark. He was out of practice. “How do you feel?”
“Not bad. Thanks for asking.” He reached for the thermos of hot tea Alfred had left him and gave Bruce a quick smile, like he was trying to reassure him. “Don’t worry. I bounce back quick.”
He looked entirely unselfconscious as he leaned his back against the wall next to the bed and sipped his tea. Even stripped to the waist, with his face bared, and his body injured and vulnerable, he looked utterly relaxed. There was no wariness in his body language. No concern at being held in some private, undisclosed, underground location. He didn’t even seem put off by the fact that Bruce had secured one of his wrists to the metal bedframe with a long-chained metal cuff. (He noticed it, and gave it a rueful look, but otherwise did not remark on it.)
“So this is your Batcave, huh?” he said after a moment.
“My what?” Bruce belatedly killed the monitors on his desk as Nightwing’s eyes roamed around his surroundings curiously. His countenance brightened when he spotted the vehicle parked in the distance. “Is that the Batmobile?”
Bruce glanced over at his custom car, which he was still carefully re-tooling. He’d been hoping to add several new functionalities to it this year. Its outer appearance hadn’t seemed all that important to him. Its name, even less so. Batmobile?
“Not everything I own is Bat-themed,” he said.
“But wouldn’t it be more fun if it were?” Nightwing waggled his eyebrows.
Bruce stared. Was he twelve? “Where did you get this from?” he asked, pointing to the cowl in his hands.
It was too high-tech to be an off-market model, and he didn’t know any private company or manufacturer advanced enough to create something like it. But a foreign government certainly could.
“You’re not even going to guess?”
Bruce tamped down his spike of frustration. He’d had enough riddling from the Riddler to last him a lifetime. “Are you with the Circus?” he asked abruptly.
Nightwing’s expression slipped. “How did you — wait.” The corner of his eye twitched and he put his thermos down. Bruce got the feeling he was thinking very, very hard. “Why do you ask?”
“Alfred noticed your past injuries when he was stitching you up. That, coupled with your skill set and your…” Bruce nodded at his gear, “…resources, indicate government backing.”
“Ohhhh.” He drew the word out to four syllables. “You think I’m with the Circus.”
For a long moment, silence stretched between them. Bruce just waited. Nightwing’s jaw worked from side to side.
“All right. Before I start explaining myself, I have one teensy request. Could we have this conversation when you’re not in uniform?”
Bruce shifted in his seat and narrowed his eyes. He was more comfortable in the cowl, especially when dealing with strangers. But what struck him as unusual was that Nightwing had called his suit a uniform. Nobody else referred to it that way. Certainly not Gordon or Alfred, who called it his caped costume and his battle suit, respectively. The public oscillated between vigilante getup and fetish gear, depending on whether they were trying to be serious or snarky. Only Bruce thought of it as a uniform — part and parcel of his sacred duty, his life’s mission. And for some reason, so did Nightwing.
“I showed you mine.” Nightwing pointed at his own face. “You show me yours? Fair’s fair, right?”
“Where did you get this?” Bruce repeated, tapping the wired-up cowl.
Nightwing sighed. He looked resigned. “I got it from you, Bruce. It was yours first.”
“From…me.”
Nightwing raised a hand to forestall his next words. “I’m going to take a gamble and be absolutely honest with you. But fair warning: you’re not going to believe me.”
And Bruce, caught flat-footed by how easy this was, found himself listening with mounting incredulity as Nightwing dumped the story into his lap.
It was a story worthy of an Arkham inmate.
Bruce didn’t believe a word of it.
+++
“What do you know about string theory, Alfred?”
Alfred didn’t look up from his afternoon tea. “Something something quantum physics, something something parallel universes. Did you want a book on the subject?”
Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the Gothic windows of the Grand Foyer in the Wayne Tower Penthouse. Alfred pushed a cup and saucer across the dining table towards him.
“I don’t have time to become an expert,” said Bruce. He downed his coffee in two scalding gulps and reached for the pot to pour himself seconds. “I just need to know how far along we are on multiverse travel. Is it feasible yet?”
And then he recounted the salient points of Nightwing’s tale.
Alfred gave him a skeptical look. “That’s his cover story? Definitely not one of ours, then.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Bruce, recalling Nightwing’s reaction when he’d brought up the Circus. There had been something there. An odd hesitation.
“What else did he say?” Alfred asked.
Bruce fiddled with his saucer. Every time he circled back to the question Nightwing’s origins, he found his logic hitting a wall. He couldn’t quite come to grips with it. The whole thing felt so implausible, he felt ridiculous even saying it out loud.
“He told me he knows another version of me.”
“Where I come from — we were partners,” said Nightwing.
Bruce subconsciously recoiled at the word. Partners? The sheer intimacy and familiarity infused into that one word was so off-putting that it made his skin crawl. This was textbook stalker behaviour, on the same level as the Riddler imagining himself his bosom friend. Except not even Nygma had been deluded enough to think himself romantically involved with the Batman.
His face must have contorted, because Nightwing quickly amended:
“Not that kind of partner.” He looked deeply amused. “You can hit pause on the heart attack, B. It was more like a…business partnership.” He tilted his chin towards the cowl that sat on Bruce’s desk. “We were in the business of protecting Gotham, you and I. They called us the Dynamic Duo. Batman and…Nightwing.”
“I give him points for originality,” said Alfred dryly. “But no real spy would try a story that absurd.”
“He knows things about you, too,” Bruce continued. Alfred raised an eyebrow. “Not the details of your former career, just. Your habits. The way you take your tea. Your favourite London barbershop. The way you insist on cufflinks. Your dedication to gentlemanly comportment.”
“The fact that you can say the words ‘gentlemanly comportment’ with a straight face is probably the closest I’ll actually get to putting you in a gentleman’s suit,” Alfred muttered.
“You know raw wool makes my neck itch.” It was an old argument of theirs.
Alfred let it slide. “So he’s possessed of knowledge he shouldn’t. What do you make of it?”
Bruce studied the dregs of his coffee. This was a puzzle unlike any he’d ever tackled before. In theory, he had no real objections to parallel universes — as a theory. Bruce considered himself open-minded when it came to scientific phenomena; nothing was impossible in a universe this vast. There was simply too much that humans did not know they did not know. Bruce was prepared to accept the existence of aliens, otherworldly creatures, and eldritch beings that were beyond his ken.
What actually strained his credulity wasn’t Nightwing claiming to be from another world; it was the idea that his Other Self had selected a partner for his vigilante work.
Batman worked alone.
When he’d embarked on this endeavor, he’d sworn that Gotham would always come first. The mission demanded everything. All his devotion, all his concentration. As long as Gotham remained his first priority, he would never have time for love, or friends, or family, or a “normal” job. The idea that someone like Nightwing would willingly join him in this harsh and punishing way of life was absurd. Utterly unthinkable. No sane person would do that. And even if they had, Bruce wouldn’t have let them. This path was a form of self-immolation — it required sacrifices. It wasn’t meant for anyone but him.
That’s why Batman had to work alone. Why Batman would always work alone.
And yet.
“I don’t know what to believe,” he admitted.
“Tell me this, at least. Is he trustworthy?” Alfred gave him a pointed look.
“If you’re from another world, how did you end up here?” Bruce asked, prodding at the holes in his story.
“Not a clue. Maybe the universe is more porous than we thought.” Nightwing shrugged. “This lil’ trip took me completely by surprise too. Rest assured, I’m not here to blow your cover, interfere in your work, or mess up your city.”
“So why were you at Maroni’s last night.”
For the first time, Nightwing looked uncomfortable. “Would you believe that I missed you, B? I went there hoping to see a familiar face. I never planned on getting involved. But when those thugs started coming out en masse, I just couldn’t help himself.”
Earnest, hopeful eyes met his. Nightwing hadn’t been fazed by murderous thugs, flying bullets, or amateur surgery by an ex-MI6 field agent. But he looked vulnerable now. Like he wasn’t sure if he’d said too much, or too little.
Bruce felt his mouth twist. “Nothing about him adds up.”
“That wasn’t my question. Where he comes from and how he got his intel is secondary compared to whether he means you harm.” Alfred’s gray eyes bored into his, and Bruce was abruptly reminded that this was a man who’d spent a decade sifting for truths from a haystack of lies.
“How do I trust him when I can’t substantiate his story?”
“Modern science has its limits.”
Bruce couldn’t deny that. He had neither the equipment nor the know-how to prove or disprove anything. There was no litmus test for this.
“I suggest you set aside the issue of feasibility for now, since it’s a moot point,” said Alfred. “The only thing you should be concerned about is whether he’s planning on endangering you or your mission.”
“Once I have more information—”
Alfred waved that away impatiently. “You’ll never have all the information. Trust is not a mathematical outcome you derive after you’ve input all the variables. Human beings are too complicated for that. Trust is a decision you make with imperfect information. That’s how we all do it.”
It was difficult to square that with his instinct for caution. Nightwing was even more of a question mark than the Riddler.
And yet.
“You jumped in front of a bullet for me,” said Bruce. “Why?”
Nightwing dragged a hand through his hair. “For context, there are actually quite a few people I’d jump in front of a bullet for. You’re not that special, B. But when it comes to you… it’s just reflex, okay? I didn’t even think about it.” He shrugged in a ‘what can you do?’ kind of way. “Sorry.”
“It was reckless. You could have died.”
“I’ve survived worse.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I knew you wouldn’t have left me to die.”
“So this was a ploy to gain my trust?”
Nightwing laughed softly. “You know, it’s strangely comforting to know that you’re this persistently paranoid no matter where I go. The one constant of the multiverse.” He threw a warm smile in his direction as he gingerly eased himself back down on the bed and snuggled under the covers. “Never change, B.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his cheek as he considered the sum of the man’s actions thus far, weighing them on the scales in his mind. The risk was 50/50, and he hated gambling. But Alfred was right: at some point, he would have to make a choice.
“I’m still not sure he’s entirely sane.” Here he took a breath. “But I don’t think he means me harm.”
“I certainly hope you’re right,” said Alfred. “Because it’s far too late to release him back into the wild now.”
+++
The following day, Bruce went down into the cave with his cowl off.
Nightwing smiled at his entrance, said, “Morning, B,” and went back to his meal without another word.
It was so anticlimactic that Bruce felt slightly foolish.
Alfred had given Nightwing a sliding table so he could eat in bed, just like an actual hospital patient, and by the look of things, he was delighted with the setup. At the moment, he was intently demolishing the buffet spread in front of him. Alfred had brought him a selection of foods from the WE canteen — two bowls of soup, two kinds of stew, lots of fluffy rice, and three kinds of cake and pudding for dessert.
“I’ve run your blood for DNA analysis,” said Bruce. He hadn’t intended to ask for permission, but Alfred had reminded him that it was polite to notify the subject in question. Especially if you wanted their cooperation later.
Nightwing continued eating, unperturbed. “I thought you might. Did you learn anything new?” He sounded genuinely curious.
“No.”
Bruce had spent several hours last night hacking every database he could find to see if he could get an ID, but so far nothing has turned up. Frustration made him try facial recognition, but even that failed to get any matches. He’d been about to pull fingerprints off the sleeping Nightwing when Alfred intervened and told him in no uncertain terms that he was invading the man’s privacy.
“Interesting,” said Nightwing, tapping his chin with a spoon.
“You could speed up the process if you just told me your real name.”
“Love to, but can’t.”
“Why not.”
“Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff that I don’t want to mess with. I’m still not sure whether this is a time travel thing or a parallel universe thing. A lot of events here don’t line up with mine. You may have already missed the window for meeting me, but I have no way of knowing for sure.” He made a helpless gesture, as if his hands were genuinely tied.
“Meeting you.”
“Assuming I exist, of course. But things are already so different here that it’s hard for me to predict anything.”
Bruce had to give him this: Nightwing was certainly committed to his narrative. There was nothing he could do but play along for now. If he kept this up for long enough, eventually he might find a hole big enough to strangle him with. Bruce still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this was some colossal scam — some cosmic joke at his expense.
“By your logic, just you being here might have already altered things beyond recognition. Isn’t it already too late?”
Nightwing winced. “You’re right. I’ve seen this kind of thing go catastrophically wrong before, so I’m being extra cautious. You’ll just have to trust me, B.”
“Difficult to do, when you keep lying to me.”
“I’m withholding information from you. That’s different from lying.”
“You’re worried you’ll, what — create a paradox?”
Nightwing did a head-tilt shrug that reminded him of Alfred. “Or worse. I might accidentally rewrite your fate.”
Bruce snorted. There was little danger of that. “I don’t believe in fate.”
“Well, I do. And I’m not going to jeopardize your life or your city, Bruce. I won’t.”
He slid his tray aside. The conversation seemed to have sapped him of his appetite completely.
+++
On the third day, Bruce came down the elevator find Nightwing sitting up in bed, tapping at the buttons on his gauntlet. It had thrown up a holographic display for him to peruse. Text was scrolling down the display.
“What are you doing?” Bruce demanded. He paused on the stairway.
“Checking the internet.”
“How did you get on the internet.” He’d been militant about keeping Nightwing away from any electronic devices while down in the cave.
“Your WiFi password is, ‘The arrow of justice flies true’ but in that ancient Nepalese dialect you learned from Ghostmaker,” said Nightwing absently as he clinked into a different link. “It was either that, or ‘IamvengeanceIamthenight’ with no spaces.”
This wasn’t even hacking — this was straight-up mind-reading. Bruce felt like a stranger had just casually walked through a bricked-up door into his misspent youth and excavated it. Even Alfred didn’t know about Minhkhoa Khan.
“Who told you that.”
“You did. Other you.”
Every time he heard those words, Bruce had to repress a reflexive twinge of unease. “Get off my network.”
Nightwing’s eyes flicked up at him. Then he exhaled and shut off the device. “I’m sorry. I should have asked first,” he said, which took all the wind out of Bruce’s sails. “It’s just that I’m starting to go stir-crazy down here. Any chance you could give me something to occupy myself with? A puzzle, a riddle, a case — anything?” His eyes roved around, until they landed on the car. An enterprising light came into his face. “What if I—”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“Okay, but I’m going to have to use the can at some point, B.”
“You can use the latrine.”
“So you’re saying I can walk across the twenty-five feet of Batcave necessary to reach the latrine, but you won’t let me admire your Batmobile, which is literally only ten feet further away?”
Bruce could feel a migraine coming on. The sheer inanity of this argument was going to make his brain dribble out of his ears. Quickly he went to his desk, found the sheaf of papers he’d printed out a few days ago, and shoved them at Nightwing.
“If you want to make yourself useful, read this.”
“What am I looking at?”
“They call themselves the Fearmongers. This is their private forum. Quite a few Batman impersonators seem to be members.” Bruce paused. “I initially assumed you were affiliated with them.”
Nightwing read through the thread twice, with keen attention. Then he set it down and frowned to himself.
“What can you tell me about them?” Bruce asked.
Gordon had asked him a second time to dissuade the Nutters from their nighttime activities, and so Bruce had looked into it. Very quickly, he’d stumbled onto the online forum where they all congregated. To them, Batman was an icon — a role model who kept the crooks in line by inspiring fear. That was their goal, in the end: to spread his influence throughout the city by imitating him and evoking the same fear.
Some of them, however, took it to worrying extremes. One user, in particular, had written a six-page screed on ‘putting the fear back into Gotham,’ and ‘cleansing it of its criminal element with perfect terror.’ Disturbing stuff.
Nightwing looked like he might say something, but he bit the corner of his lip and looked away. There was a long silence. Finally, begrudgingly, he said, “You might want to look into this ‘CraneDoctor’ guy. He sounds pretty unhinged.”
Bruce had been about to do that anyway. That screed had been rattling around at the back of his mind for a couple days now. “Any particular reason?”
“…I can’t tell you. You’ll have to trust me.”
This, thought Bruce, was infuriating. This man and his non-answers was going to drive him slowly insane. “If you know something about him, just tell me.”
Nightwing sighed. “Don’t give yourself a hernia, B. You don’t have to take my word for it. Check him out, or don’t. This is your Gotham. I leave the choice entirely up to you.”
+++
Bruce spent a day thinking about it, and then he started digging into the identity of the CraneDoctor. A few hours later, he’d unearthed his IP address, which appeared to be linked to a server that used to belong to now collapsed company called Futurchem.
Futurchem’s factory had closed three years ago, but the disposal of hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical waste was still underway. But when Bruce went to do some preliminary surveillance, he found that the cars in the parking lot appeared to be bringing cannisters in rather than taking cannisters away. Worse, a quick reconnoiter showed that the chemists working onsite were still working. As in, stirring up vats of new chemicals.
Armed with photographs, Bruce broke the news to Gordon. Then he sat back and allowed the long arm of the law to take over.
Whatever they were making there, it couldn’t be anything good. And when the police discovered that Dr. Jonathan Crane — a Professor of Psychology at Gotham University — was ‘recruiting’ homeless people to be his lab rats, the case broke containment and landed on the front page of the Gotham Gazette.
“Mad Psychologist Kills Twenty-Three in Unethical Scientific Trials,” Nightwing read off the newspaper Bruce handed him. He gave an impressed whistle. “Wow. That’s quick work, Bruce. Like, lightning speed.”
It was the fastest Bruce had ever gone from ‘possible suspect’ to ‘successful arrest.’ Start to finish, it had taken him a mere ten days.
“Your intel was good,” said Bruce, giving credit where credit was due.
“Well, I have been doing this a lot longer than you,” said Nightwing, with an enigmatic smile. He went back to doing some sort of yoga pose on the exercise mat. He’d been twisting himself into increasingly complicated pretzels in order to regain his former range of movement.
Over the past ten days, one of his wounds had gotten infected, which meant Alfred had to send Bruce out for stronger and stronger antibiotics, while he tried to keep the man’s fever down. Nightwing ended up on bedrest in the Cave for over a week, which meant every time Bruce came back from his nighttime patrols, there would be someone snoring softly from the little cot bed in the corner.
At first, it startled him each time he realize he wasn’t alone in the Cave. He was used to spending sometimes twenty hours there at a stretch, digging into old archives and collecting evidence. Even Alfred had learned the futility of trying to interrupt him when he went on these info-gathering binges, and rarely bothered him as a result. Having someone there, especially someone who, between bouts of fever, would wake up and insert a remark here or there, was a new experience for him.
The first few days, it gave a him a jolt whenever he heard Nightwing’s sleepy voice speak up. By the fifth day, however, he was almost used to it. It did not escape his notice that almost everything Nightwing said ended up being advice in one form or another.
“Take a gas mask with you if you’re breaking into his sketchy factory.”
“Be sure to seal off the basement exits. Crane likes to go to ground when he’s trapped — literally.”
And the one that actually got Bruce through his up-close, in-person encounter with Crane —
“If you get a whiff of whatever he’s cooking, don’t panic. Remember, the fear is synthetic. Your heart rate will shoot up and your airways will shrink, but whatever you see is just a hallucination, got it?”
At the end of ten days, Bruce came home and sweated the chemicals out. He ended up with screaming nightmares that night, but that wasn’t all that different from his regular nights, so he couldn’t even say it was Crane’s fault. Nightmares were a regular feature of his irregular sleep schedule. Anyway, he’d suffered panic attacks before that were worse.
Nightwing, meanwhile, had finally recovered enough for Alfred to pronounce him infection-free and on the mend. It was also enough time for him to start hobbling around (on crutches) again and start doing some light physiotherapy on the mats. Sometimes, Bruce would swing around in his swivel chair and see him doing customized yoga stretches, and wonder.
In the aftermath of Crane’s successful capture, Bruce said to him, “You don’t seem as pleased as I thought you’d be.”
“Just hoping I didn’t make a mistake and invoke the wrath of the dimensional gods,” said Nightwing. “You know, by interfering with your timeline.”
“You did a good thing.” His intel had saved lives. How could anyone — dimensional god or otherwise, fault him for that?
“Yeah, but at what cost?” Nightwing murmured.
+++
Two weeks after Nightwing first arrived, he said, “You know, if you keep me down here long enough, I might eventually die of Vitamin D deficiency. Which would be a pretty sad way to go.”
“You can’t die from that.”
“I could be a reverse-vampire, for all you know. Or an alien species. The kind that needs sunlight to live.”
“Those don’t exist,” said Bruce.
“Don’t be so sure of that.”
It was the first time Nightwing had actually complained about being stuck in the cave. Recently, Alfred had been giving Bruce pointed reminders about the Geneva Convention. Keeping a man in the dark for two weeks, without sunlight, apparently constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Who knew?
He gestured for Nightwing to follow him to the elevator. The man obligingly grabbed the crutches he used to get around the cave and hobbled after him.
Just before getting on, Bruce paused to remove his Batboots. No. He quickly backtracked. His boots. He’d gotten too much into the habit of hearing of Nightwing append ‘Bat’ to everything. A dangerous habit.
When he looked up, Nightwing was already casually punching a code into the elevator control panel, one-handed. The light flipped to green and the mechanism inside began to move.
Bruce stared at him. He wasn’t sure he was surprised anymore. “You knew the code all along.”
Nightwing’s bright blue eyes danced, like he was laughing internally. “Yep.”
“You could have left at any time.”
“Yep.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Nightwing gave him a look that was all impish charm. “So I can savor the hilarious look on your face, B. I don’t often get to see it anymore.” The metal doors opened and he inclined his head. “Shall we?”
+++
Upstairs, in the Grand Foyer, Alfred was in the middle of setting out the service for lunch. When he spotted Nightwing, he smoothly added a third place setting, as if that had been the plan all along.
“Glad to have you join us upstairs,” he said as they all sat down together in front of the Mediterranean-themed spread.
“It’s hard work, being a creature of darkness,” said Nightwing. “I was starting to miss my natural tan.”
“Yes, we could all do with a bit more sun in our lives,” said Alfred, flicking a pointed look in Bruce’s direction, before he eyes went to Nightwing’s side. “And how is your wound feeling lately?”
“Better by the day. Doesn’t even hurt that much anymore. Your stitches were impeccable.”
“I do like the opportunity to keep my hand in. I take it that Master Bruce is relaxing the conditions of your stay?”
“Seems that way. These are scrumptious by the way. My compliments to the chef. You should try the bread sticks, B. You’ll like them.”
Bruce nibbled at a small wedge of bread as Nightwing continued to chatter nonstop for the next forty minutes. Every so often, he would nudge a dish of food in Bruce’s direction, leave it there until he removed a single morsel, then move it back to the center of the table. Bruce watched him out of the corner of his eye, but Nightwing did it in such a subtle, artless way that he didn’t even look like he was aware he was doing it.
Once they’d finished the meal, Nightwing made five circuits of the Grand Foyer, just to stretch his muscles. Then he stood before the largest floor-to-ceiling window to bathe in the sunlight like a cat and observe the world.
“Is that a picket fence down there? And are those protesters?” He tipped his forehead against the glass and squinted.
“Those are the Wayne Enterprises employees protesting the mismanagement of the Renewal Fund,” said Alfred.
“How long have they been down there?”
“On and off for the past six months,” said Bruce.
“Wow, there’s like, quite a few showing you with your head cut off,” said Nightwing, sounding impressed. “Some have ketchup coming out of the eye sockets, too.”
Bruce winced internally, but he’d seen too many versions of those by now to be surprised.
The fallout from the Renewal Scandal had much further-reaching effects than anyone had anticipated. Thomas Wayne had meant for the money to be shared amongst WE’s non-profit arms and a wide array of local charities and institutions like schools and hospitals. When people discovered that gross mismanagement of Renewal had robbed them of a billion dollars in funding, resources, employee benefits, and promised pay hikes, they took to the streets to protest. And they were the reasonable ones. The more strident groups (of which there were many) spent their days tearing him apart online, demanding boycotts of Wayne-related Enterprises, and screaming for his blood.
Nevermind the fact that Bruce had never had much say in the day-to-day activities of WE — that was the CEO’s job. Privately, he’d never even really thought of his father’s company as his. But the public needed an outlet for their rage, and Bruce, as the last holder of the Wayne name, was the easiest target. For the last six months, he’d been Public Enemy No. 1 for being the face of the third biggest embezzlement case in the country — right behind Enron and Madoff.
Nightwing watched the protestors thoughtfully while he stretched and did small calisthenics. “I hope nobody’s assaulted you physically,” he said.
“I believe the only reason we haven’t been egged yet is because the price of eggs has skyrocketed,” said Alfred.
“Last month they got creative and threw burning trash instead,” said Bruce.
“Oh yes, can’t forget that,” said Alfred.
“No wonder you’ve been hiding in your bunker,” Nightwing murmured.
Alfred began clearing the table and stacking the plates. “Incidentally, do you have any family to contact?”
“Hm? Oh, you mean me?” Nightwing rubbed the back of his neck absently. “None that I can reach at this moment.”
“Perhaps you ought to use one of the guestrooms for your recuperation, then.”
Bruce gave Alfred a sharp look, but Alfred met his eye blandly and mouthed, ‘Geneva Convention’ again. Bruce wasn’t sure what that had to do with sleeping in the Cave. The bed down there was actually very comfortable; he’d spent many nights on it himself.
“Anywhere you want me to put me is fine,” said Nightwing.
Alfred got up and went to the linen closet, as if the matter was settled.
“We’ll need your name if you’re staying upstairs,” said Bruce, seizing the chance to pump him for more information. “We can’t call you ‘Nightwing’ in front of the rest of the staff.”
The man in front of him visibly went through a whole process of trying to come up with a different pseudonym. It was extremely obvious. He bit his lip in two places. His eyes darted.
“How about Robin?” he said at last.
“Robin…?” Bruce fished for a last name.
“…Hood?”
“Of Sherwood Forest, I presume,” said Alfred, returning with a stack of clean towels, a set of pajamas, and a monogrammed toiletry set from the hotel downstairs.
Bruce sighed. “Look here, Mr. Hood—”
“Please. Mr. Hood is my brother. I’m just Robin.”
“—Let’s not be too obvious about your dubious origins,” said Bruce.
“If your staff can turn a blind eye to your odd hours and your mysterious injuries and the occasional misplaced piece of Bat paraphernalia, I don’t think they’re going to have a problem with me.” The glitter of amusement on his face did not fade. As before, Bruce got the feeling the man was laughing at him.
“Too true,” said Alfred. He deftly handed everything to Bruce. “Perhaps the Cerulean Room in the West Wing?”
“Fine.” Bruce slanted him a narrow look. “Come along, Robin.”
Something about the way the man’s eyes lit up at the name made Bruce revisit the idea of it being a pseudonym. Perhaps ‘Robin’ was closer to his true name than he thought.
Chapter Text
As the days passed, it became easier and easier to talk to him. Robin did not seem to take offence at anything he said.
“You talk too much,” Bruce observed one day.
“So I’ve been told,” said Robin with a grin. “But it’s a feature, not a bug.”
Every time Bruce told him to ‘Be quiet,’ he would sweep him a mocking bow — the type a court jester might give an unreasonable king — mime zipping his lips, and give him a double thumbs up. Then he’d go back to minding his own business.
Mostly, that business was a self-devised course of physiotherapy that looked far more involved than anything Bruce had ever seen before. There was some kind of yoga, mixed with some acrobatic kind of pilates, mixed with what looked like a really ferocious version of Tai Chi, but with a lot more balancing. Mixed in among those moves were a few moves that Bruce clearly recognized.
“You’re League-trained,” he said, when he couldn’t keep that observation to himself for a second longer.
“Not really. Me and Ra’s al Ghul never got along. And by that, I mean I would happily kick him off a cliff given half the chance.”
“I thought you didn’t kill people.”
He snorted. “As if Ra’s would die from a fall like that.”
For the umpteenth time, Bruce wondered how they had met in that other life. Had Robin come into his life the same way Khoa had? As a rival/friend/brother-in-arms? Someone he could test himself against, improve his technique with? Robin reminded him of Khoa a lot, actually — minus the psychopathy. They had the same joyful, unrestrained approach to life that Bruce secretly envied. But Robin’s morals aligned much more closely with his, and he actually did what Bruce told him to do, which really was a first for him.
Even after days of being in his company, Bruce still wasn’t sure what to make of him. It had never taken him this long to get the measure of a man before. Robin was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and each time he felt he was getting closer to figuring out who he really was, the man would side-wind away from him.
+++
One day, about a week after the Crane’s arrest, Robin approached him and asked, apropos nothing: “What are you doing next Saturday?”
Bruce stiffened. “Why.”
“There’s going to be a gala. I’m 99.9% sure you’re invited.”
Bewildered, Bruce took a moment to recalibrate. “What about it?”
“I got bored, so I did a little investigating into Maroni on my own. He’s planning on resuming his drops business now that Falcone is out of the picture. Before, he had a whole network of delivery people to rely on, but Falcone scuppered that. So now he needs to either reinvest in a new fleet of trucks, or find some alternative mode of transportation.”
Bruce quickly compared that against the info he’d gathered himself so far. It tracked. He’d hacked Sal Maroni’s private network while in his office, and quickly scrolled through his email logs. But what with one thing or another, he hadn’t actually had time to sift through all the raw data yet.
“How did you learn this,” he asked.
“I have my ways. I’ve been doing this longer than you. Vigilante for fifteen years, remember?”
This had to be a joke. Unless Robin had discovered the Fountain of Youth, there was no way he could’ve started his career as a twelve-year-old. Bruce just sighed and rolled with it.
“Now. About this gala. It’s called the Rebuild Gala, and it’s going to be thrown by Mayor Reál.” Robin said her name with an odd lilt, like he wasn’t quite sure of the pronunciation. “It’s meant to be a celebration of the Rebuild Project she spearheaded — you know, the flood relief fund she set up last year?”
“I know about the fund.”
“Oh. Good. I was afraid you might be even less up-to-date than me.”
When Bruce just stared at him, Robin plunged onwards. “Sal Maroni is going to be there. I found the invite list. He’s a Platinum Donor for the Rebuild Project — most likely a show of generosity to tilt public opinion in his favor and to differentiate himself from Falcone.”
“So?” Where was he was going with this?
“And so, there’s a good chance he’ll be more verbose if you corner him at the gala. I’ll bet my two front teeth that you’re the only other Platinum Donor. He’ll definitely talk to you.” Robin leaned forward with an anticipatory grin.
Bruce tried and failed to contain his own grimace. The only thing he wanted to do to Maroni was sock him in the face. The idea of talking to him, peacefully, in evening suits, with champagne in hand and chandeliers overhead, made him feel physically ill.
“What’s your connection to Maroni?” he asked instead. “Why are you so fixated on him?”
The gaiety slipped off Robin’s face and he looked down at his hands. His throat bobbed twice, like there was something unpleasant stuck there. “Let’s just say I’ve…lost someone to him too.”
The instance of pain that crossed his face looked genuine. There was a flavor of anguish there that echoed Bruce’s own — he saw the same expression on his own face often enough in the mirror to know. Like recognized like.
“So you want to confront him public.”
“What? No. Haven’t you been listening to me? I want to gather info and find out what his plans are.”
“I don’t go to galas,” said Bruce firmly.
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing I can learn as Bruce Wayne that I can’t learn as Batman.”
“If you think Bruce Wayne can’t be three times as persuasive as Batman under the right circumstances, then you haven’t unlocked all his abilities yet.”
He made it sound like Bruce Wayne was a playable character that just needed to level up enough to earn some new special moves. Good grief. Bruce was pretty sure real life didn’t work like that. “Maroni isn’t going to talk about business matters in a public setting.”
“Maroni thinks Bruce Wayne is young and stupid and impressionable and easily led. He’s also arrogant, old-fashioned, and desperate to brag about his exploits. Think of what you could do with that combo.” He spread his hands with an exaggerated flourish, like he was a game show host presenting a title card on TV.
Bruce frowned. “I thought you were trying not to interfere in my affairs anymore.”
“I’m not going after Maroni. I’m just helping you go after Maroni.” He blinked with faux-innocence. “I mean, isn’t that your goal?”
“I don’t have time to waste on social events,” Bruce muttered. He had his own line of inquiry all planned out. One that involved a dark room, some rope, and a few intimidation techniques he’d been working on.
“Think of it as a mission, B. It’s low-risk, high-reward. Show up, flash some ankle, make some small talk, and then BAM— before you know it, Maroni will be drunker than a pig’s uncle and ready to spill his drug trade secrets into your lap.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.”
“And you sound like you’ve never done this before,” Robin shot back. He sounded almost frustrated.
Bruce had a deep-seated distrust of galas that went back to his childhood. They always felt like such a huge waste of time. These games of high society posturing never failed to get his hackles up with their shallowness and insipidity. That was why he hadn’t attended one in over ten years now.
He might have gone to the “right” schools, and mixed with the “right” people, and he’d even attended one or two galas as a teen — usually after weeks of unsubtle psychic prodding from Alfred. But for all that he had been born to this, galas still made him supremely uncomfortable. The idea of having to stand around, awkwardly making conversation with strangers for hours on end, made him want to claw his own eyes out.
Robin gave him a look that was equal parts pity and amusement. “Look, you have the psychological advantage here. Maroni will never see Bruce Wayne coming. You should have done that to start with, instead of ransacking his office as Batman. Now that he knows Batman is onto him, he’ll be hiding his most incriminating shit. It’s going to be even harder to send him to Blackgate from here on out.”
While he spoke, Robin began tidying his lunch tray, stacking each plate, bowl, cup, and spoon in Alfred’s preferred configuration for how dirty dishes should be arranged. Bruce had learned to do this as a child — now it was merely one of a thousand habits. He didn’t think Robin was doing it consciously. He wasn’t even looking at his hands.
Bruce ran through what Robin had just said and was forced to acknowledge that he might have a point. Perhaps he’d jumped the gun by breaking into Maroni’s office. At the time, it had been a logical move, but in hindsight, it had been reckless. He’d been too hell-bent on making the man pay.
“Think about it, okay?” Robin called after him as Bruce swept upstairs. “Let Bruce Wayne use his powers for good, for once!”
+++
“Did I get an invite for a gala this month?” Bruce asked Alfred later that day.
“I’m surprised you noticed. The Rebuild Gala is happening this coming Saturday.” Alfred went to retrieve the invitation from the pile of mail by the bar table.
“Robin asked me to go.”
“Together? Wonderful. You should be going anyway, date or no.” Alfred handed him the thick, creamy card stock with the pale sage green ribbon tied around it. “Bruce Wayne needs to be seen to be publicly supporting the Rebuild Project, now more than ever. Only you can reassure the city that this is something they can truly believe in. The Wayne name needs a clean slate after the Renewal catastrophe, and Rebuild is something that needs more good press. Mayor Reál is counting on you. She’ll do good things for this city, but she needs strong people backing her. And you have one of the strongest voices in the city, if only you cared to use it.”
Oddly, Robin had said something similar earlier. Maybe there were some things he could do as Bruce Wayne, that he couldn’t do as Batman.
+++
The day of the gala arrived.
Bruce resigned himself to the nightmare of going. He’d allowed Alfred to dig out the haute-couture suits he hadn’t worn in ten years and send them to the Italian tailor to get them re-fitted. He’d allowed his PA to send his Rolls Royce into the shop to be waxed and polished. He’d even gone to the trouble of putting on a layer of makeup, to cover up the still-fading bruises that the skirmish with Crane had left him with.
But until he saw Robin trotting down the stairs in a three-piece Prussian blue suit with brocade lapels, he had not actually thought that anyone would be accompanying him.
Robin, who had by now recovered most of his mobility, only needed a cane to go up and down the stairs. (Alfred had lent him one of his fancier spares — it had a golden eagle’s head at one end.)
“What are you doing?” Bruce demanded.
“I’m your Plus One.”
“I didn’t RSVP with a Plus One.”
“You didn’t RSVP at all. Alfred had to do it for you. And if you knew anything about these sorts of galas, you’d know that important people always bring their entourages. It’s expected. You’d look weirder without me than with me.”
He tucked his gold-tipped cane under one arm while he finished slicking his hair back with something waxy. He looked like an overdressed game-show host, almost Willy Wonka-esque in his finery. There was a mustard-colored bowtie at his throat, and a matching gold square in his breast pocket. He might have just stepped off the set of a cologne commercial.
“You look ridiculous.”
“This is technically yours. Alfred bought it ten years ago on a swell of optimism. It would be a waste if nobody ever wore it.”
Bruce grimaced. “This isn’t going to be some fun event. The reporters — they’re going to try and nail me for willful malice. Gross negligence.”
“I know. I did read up on the news. They’ve been crucifying you for financial mismanagement for the last six months.
“And I deserve it.”
Bruce couldn’t fault the papers for printing what was true. Renewal had been his family’s legacy, and he’d let the city’s most corrupt officials glut themselves on it. A billion dollars, swallowed piecemeal over twenty years. The responsibility lay squarely with him. If he’d paid more attention to the accountants, the lawyers, the members of the Board of Directors who’d tried to sound the alarm, things might not have become that bad.
Over the past few months, Bruce had donated the dregs of Renewal to Mayor Reál’s Rebuild Project, but it didn’t feel like enough. Nothing felt like enough. He would never be able to forgive himself for this. While he’d been busy trying to change the city as Batman, he’d been ignoring all the things he should’ve been doing as Bruce Wayne.
Robin had been right.
Alfred had been night.
“It won’t be pretty,” Bruce continued, relentless. “You don’t want to be in the middle of this.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about.”
Bruce made one final, last-ditch attempt at warning him off. “They’re going to think you’re my date.”
Robin just laughed. “Let them.” Off Bruce’s look of dismay, he said, “Come on, B. After six months of listening to them drag your family name through the mud, don’t you want to make their tongues wag about something else, for a change?” He raised his eyebrows in challenge.
+++
The entrance to the Baycourt Club, where the gala was being held, was inundated with reporters and photographers. The line of cars rolling up the curved driveway stretched a quarter of a mile down the street. The Baycourt property was set on a hill overlooking Bristol, and it was a grand manor house with white columns flanking the front entrance. Its location meant it was one of the fortunate few historical buildings that had escaped the flooding unscathed.
This was the biggest event in the city since that disaster. In honor of the occasion, the staff had rolled out the red carpet for the cars coming up the circular driveway. The city was so starved for excitement and pageantry after the previous six months of calamity that there was even a good-sized crowd of gawkers outside.
“I’ll be outside waiting with the car,” Alfred told them from the driver’s seat.
Bruce tried to keep his stomach from lurching in panic as the car rolled to a stop. The noise level from outside was already impossible. Robin passed him a pair of protective shades.
“You didn’t bring a pair?” said Bruce.
Robin laughed. “The spotlight can’t hurt me. I live for it.” Then he opened the car door and stepped into the blinding brightness.
Nobody reacted to Robin as he stepped out. He held the door open, and when Bruce emerged moments later, blinking hard, a hundred lightbulbs went off. People started shouting. It took Bruce a few dizzying seconds to realize that they were all yelling his name.
He had to squint against the glare of the lights. The noise made him nauseous. The reporters, abandoning propriety, surged towards him from all sides. The press of people seemed to shrink the air in his lungs. His throat constricted. This was worse than anything he breathed in while chasing down Crane, worse than whatever fear gas he’d been cooking up. Probably he would asphyxiate before he even made it into the ballroom. Gordon would have to come rescue his corpse from the vultures before they tore it apart.
“Bruce Wayne! What are your plans for compensating the people who should have benefitted from Renewal—”
“—Was your father responsible for hiding this from the public?”
“—Did the Riddler target you because he knew the Waynes were defrauding the people of Gotham?!”
“—Were you aware that Renewal funds were used to fund a drug empire resulting in over five hundred tragic deaths—”
Scratch asphyxiation. He was going to vomit. Despite not having eating anything all day out of nerves, his stomach heaved. A cold sweat broke out on his neck. The level of mental overwhelm was reaching critical mass. He could feel himself shutting down in self-defense. Everything was noise and chaos.
And then, as he stumbled forward, he felt a hand at his back. The press of the crowd had pushed Robin right up against him, and Robin had curled himself around Bruce’s shoulder like a shield. The cane in his hand became a makeshift barricade. The constant, steady pressure of Robin’s hand against his spine was the only thing moving him forward.
“Wow. The piranhas are starving tonight,” he said as they waded through the gauntlet. “Focus on my voice, okay? You’ll be fine. We’re almost there.”
It was difficult to tell if they were making progress or not. Dozens of people jostled and shoved at him from all sides, but despite how much Bruce wanted to simply turn around and retreat gracelessly back into his car, Robin wouldn’t let him stop moving forward.
He seemed miraculously unaffected by the hubbub. His voice was a low, calming murmur in Bruce’s ear; the hand at his back felt like the only real thing in the universe.
“Stairs, B. Three steps. That’s it. Don’t worry, I’ve got your back. The next person who tries to shove a camera in your face is going to get a knee to the stomach.”
And then someone got too close — shoved too hard — and Bruce felt something scratch the back of his hand. Some piece of filming equipment obviously had a sharp edge. Bruce brought his hand up absently to find a cut just above his knuckles. Alfred was going to eviscerate him for getting blood on this suit.
Robin caught his wrist and yanked — and suddenly, they were past the red cordons where the security guards were waiting. The reporters were forced back by the line of uniforms. Gradually, their strident voices dissolved into background noise.
“B, wait, hang on.” Robin had produced a handkerchief from nowhere.
For moment, they stood there — Bruce catching his breath and trying not to retch while Robin blotted the blood from his hand. And then, from his pocket, he whipped out a bandaid and applied it over the cut.
“There. No blood on the suit. You’re safe.”
“Why — do you have — a bandaid.”
“This suit comes with extra-dimensional pockets, it’s great,” said Robin. “Alfred made me bring everything but the kitchen sink, so tonight I’ll be playing the part of your personal Mary Poppins. Need anything else?”
“I — you —”
“Here.” He unwrapped a piece of hard candy and pressed it into Bruce’s hand.
The bright burst of tangy citrus on his tongue gave him something else to focus on. It also cut the nausea in half. The hand patting him on the back helped too, though Bruce could not say why. Slowly, by increments, he wrestled his heart rate down to 70bpm.
“Bruce, listen to me. Renewal was not your fault. You couldn’t have known. There’s a reason they were able to hide what they were doing for twenty years, and that’s because they were pros. Trust me, there was nothing you could’ve done about it.”
A part of Bruce wanted to deny it. It was his fault. Renewal was his family legacy. He should have cared enough to watch over that money. The other part of him latched onto Robin’s words like parched man in a desert being offered a drink of water. He hadn’t known how much he’d needed to hear those exact words until someone finally said it to him.
When he looked up, Robin’s eyes had nothing but compassion in them.
Bruce’s heartbeat slowed further still. He crunched his candy. It would have to be enough to get him through this wretched gala.
+++
The whispers that followed them once they were inside were no less virulent, though the guests inside the main ballroom had the decency to be more restrained. The crowd was a blur of unfamiliar faces to Bruce. It was difficult to recognize anyone he knew in this sea of gaudy finery.
Robin beelined straight for the open bar at the back.
“I don’t drink—” Bruce began.
“I know, B. Trust me. That’s why I didn’t pick up anything from the circulating trays.” Robin waved the bartender over, then leaned over the counter to whisper into his ear. Two minutes later, the man returned with a tall glass of what looked like bourbon over rocks, and a flute glass of something bubbly. Champagne?
“Ice tea for you, ginger ale for me,” said Robin.
Bruce felt instantly better. There was a social cost to not drinking sometimes, especially at events like this, and he didn’t need any more odd looks tonight. But he appreciated the solidarity of Robin choosing not to drink too. It made him feel less alone.
“Nobody has to know but us,” said Robin with a wink. “Cheers.” He clinked their glasses together and threw back his drink.
Bruce leaned his back against the lip of the marble countertop and tried to ignore the eyes boring into him from every direction. It made his skin crawl. Where were the restrooms again? He’d knuckled through the mental prep for this event by memorizing all the exits and counting all the load-bearing walls, but it would probably be good to know where to go if he actually felt the urge to vomit again.
“—B? Are you listening to me?”
“I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can. You do this all the time.”
But it was different when he was Batman. Never before had he wanted so much to be wearing the cowl, right at this moment. His uniform was armor against not just fists and bullets, but against social censure as well. Batman was allowed to do and say things that Bruce Wayne would never be — and nobody would judge him for it. When he was Batman, he didn’t have to worry about how he sounded. Didn’t have to worry about being polite, or politically savvy. Didn’t have to bother with social niceties. When he wore the cowl, he could be all the best parts of himself without second-guessing how he was coming across.
Being in his own skin made him feel exposed, peeled open — his guts on display for all to see. Every nerve ending in him was jangling in alarm. It didn’t help that the lights in the ballroom felt too bright; the noise level too loud; the mix of expensive perfumes and bespoke colognes too suffocating. If he thought too hard about it, the floor would start to tilt under his feet.
“This was a mistake,” he said. Everything in him wanted to be somewhere else — immediately, post haste, yesterday. “It doesn’t matter what I say tonight. The tide of public opinion won’t turn, and they have a right to be angry. They already believe that I’m either too stupid or too self-centered to have done anything about the embezzlement, and they’d be right—”
“Bruce. Stop.” Robin tapped the foot of his cane against the side of his ankle. Bruce felt himself shudder back into his own body.
Robin turned so that they were standing shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the bar, facing the crowd.
“Listen to me,” said Robin. He made an idle gesture at the ballroom. “People are making assumptions about you because you have given zero interviews since the Riddler thing went down. For the last ten years, you have kept yourself out of the public eye. You’re a mystery to them. These people aren’t your enemies; they just doesn’t know who you are.” He tilted his head slightly and smiled. “But the Bruce Wayne I know is a good man — the very best man I know. He’s devoted his life to this city. He is dedicated and principled. He stands for truth and justice, and he will do whatever it takes to make this right, even if it was never his fault in the first place.”
Bruce shook his head — a reflexive jerk of the chin. Robin had to be talking about the Other Him; the one that only existed in his mind. “That’s — I’m not this person you keep talking about.”
“Yes, you are. I believe in your values. I strive for your goals. Your good opinion means the world to me. And I am telling you that you are a good man. So who do you believe — them or me?”
Bruce couldn’t quite bring himself to believe him. But it came to him — swiftly and suddenly — that he wanted to. He wanted to be the man Robin thought he was.
“What are you planning to do?” he asked.
Robin surveyed the room like a general surveying battlefield. There was a high color to his cheeks. A determined set to his jaw. A fierce light to his eyes. He looked like a man ready to go to war.
“I’m going to show them the Bruce Wayne I know. I am going to make them see who you really are. And you’re going to watch me do it.” Without waiting for Bruce to agree, Robin picked up his refilled flute of ginger ale and pushed off the bar. “I’ve got this, okay? Trust me, you’ll be fine. Now come on.”
Trust me, Bruce. Just trust me. Please trust me. Trust me, okay?
And Bruce thought, what the hell. He might as well. It wasn’t like he had a better option.
+++
Within ten minutes of them diving into the shark pool, Bruce became aware that Robin had a whole entire skill set he’d never revealed until now — the ability to liven up any conversation, to navigate any topic, to make anyone laugh.
They started with the easy crowd: WE’s new C-suite roster. Lucius Fox managed to conceal his shock at seeing him.
After exchanging a few careful remarks, he asked, “And will you be joining us for the new General Assembly next week?”
“No, because he’ll be meeting with me,” said Robin, stepping in smoothly. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Fox.”
Fox shook his hand reflexively. “And you are…?”
“An angel investor. Mr. Wayne approached me with an idea for a new charity, so I just had to fly over to meet him in person.” Robin turned to the rest of the cluster and said, with all sincerity, “Mr. Wayne has been telling me about your efforts to restructure the company for maximum transparency — a truly commendable endeavor. I’m thrilled to see that WE is in such good hands again.”
The C-suite execs were all new to their titles — Bruce had replaced the entire team after the Renewal scandal. But what surprised him was that Robin had pulled the deepest, most inexpressible thoughts right out of his head and verbalized them out loud. The more he talked, the more his audience unbent and smiled at Bruce, too. Even these jaded veterans of industry seemed charmed by Robin’s forthrightness.
“I didn’t catch your name…?” Fox said towards the end of their chat.
“Oh, I prefer to remain anonymous at this time. Literally, in this case.”
Robin made his excuses and dragged Bruce away by the arm.
And so it went with each new group they migrated to. His remark about staying anonymous would set the tone for the rest of the evening. Each time they approached someone new, Robin would introduced himself as someone completely different.
“I’m a distant cousin of his. From the Kane side of the family, you know?” Robin said to a group of elderly matrons.
“We did an internship together in Central Asia,” he told the wealthy financiers who wanted to know which country he was from.
“Me? I was his roommate at boarding school. Yes, the one in London. Very posh place,” he told the gaggle of young socialites and scions who had come to gawk. “We almost flunked out of Latin, didn’t we, old chum?”
When one of the heiresses laid a hand on Bruce’s arm and got too far into his personal space, Robin immediately stepped between them with a flirtatious smile. Within five minutes, he’d succeeded in tugging her away for a dance.
Since Bruce didn’t have to talk much, he was free to observe Robin at work. It soon became apparent that Robin was attempting to make up for ten years of media silence in one fell swoop. Despite the fact that he was switching identities almost faster than Bruce could count, quite a lot of what he said was actually true. Each of his stories touched on an aspect of him that — taken together, would paint a flattering portrait of an orphaned billionaire. Somehow, his stories made Bruce seem eccentric but ultimately relatable. More importantly, they made people laugh.
By the one hour mark, Bruce no longer felt like he was going to asphyxiate. Neither did he have to duck away to the gent’s. There was a strange comfort to knowing that Robin was there to handle any interaction he didn’t want to touch, and that he’d do it with aplomb. It was like he’d suddenly acquired an extremely intelligent, ultra-alert guard dog. A doberman wearing the skin of a golden retriever.
To his immense surprise, only three people were belligerent enough to get in his face and accuse him of gross incompetence and general stupidity. Each time it happened, Robin would nod at them politely and say, “This is neither the time nor the place,” and then drag Bruce away. Whenever the subject of Renewal came up in general conversation, he would step in like an ally providing covering fire. “It’s been a nightmare. Bruce is furious at every last person involved. The fact that they had the gall to misuse his parent’s last bequest to the city? The Waynes are probably turning in their graves — can you even imagine?”
By the time they ran into Vicki Vale — one of the handful of reporters who’d received an official press pass to join the gala itself — Bruce had relaxed enough to nibble at the hors d’oeuvres circulating around the room. Sometime over the last two hours (had it only been two hours?) his stomach had finally unclenched enough to allow for more than just liquids.
Vale, who was looking for juicy gossip more than a scandal, zeroed in on Robin. “And who’s this handsome stud you’ve brought along with you?” she purred.
“Oh, me? I’m Mr. Wayne’s ballroom dance instructor, here to make sure he doesn’t step on any toes while doing the foxtrot.”
Bruce had to suppress a snort of laughter as Vale listened, agog, to Robin’s description of Bruce’s ineptness on the dance floor.
“Tripped over himself three times in three minutes, I kid you not. I’ve never seen anyone that clumsy,” said Robin with a laugh.
“Is this true, Mr. Wayne?” Vale asked, looking absurdly delighted by this, as if she’d landed the scoop of the season. Ironically, her single-minded focus on the mundane made Bruce feel more magnanimous towards her. It was refreshing to finally find someone who was more interested in his personal foibles than in his failure with Renewal.
“I did bring him along for a reason,” Bruce said with a hapless shrug. “I didn’t want to embarrass myself too completely.”
“If you don’t mind bruises on your feet, you could take a turn around the dance floor with him,” Robin suggested.
Vale laughed prettily. “Another time, perhaps? I am still on the clock, you know. Even my drink’s only soda water.”
Bruce had assumed it was a gin and tonic. “Mine’s iced tea,” he offered, and Vale got that sparkle in her eye again that meant she had seized upon another tidbit to write about. Bruce didn’t mind.
Of all the roles Robin had played tonight, dance instructor was the most amusing one. He was still internally smiling at the idea ten minutes later when someone bumped into him.
“—Ope, I’m so sorry.”
Bruce turned and looked up. Behind him was a very large, bespectacled man in an oversized brown suit. He was the most square-shaped person Bruce had ever seen. He also looked more nervous and flustered than Bruce did, which was a first. There was a press pass hanging around his neck.
“Mr. Bruce Wayne? Might I have ten minutes of your time to ask about the Rebuild Project and how it differs from the Renewal Fund?”
“You should talk to the Mayor,” said Bruce, instinctively angling his body away. To his horror, the reporter scuttled around to cut him off. This man moved faster than anyone his size should be able to.
“But — if I may? I’d like to hear your opinion of it, since you are currently the biggest donor to the Project at this time —”
Robin reappeared at his side with two freshly made drinks. “Mr. Kent?” he exclaimed. He openly beamed at this reporter in a way he hadn’t at Vale.
The man cleared his throat and adjusted his thick glasses. “Oh, uh, yes. Sorry. Clark Kent, Daily Planet. Have we met? I, um, wasn’t expecting anyone to know my name.”
“I’m Mr. Wayne’s PR Manager,” said Robin, smoothly passing Bruce his drink. “I know everything.”
Kent’s right eyebrow twitched up. “My apologies. Are you the Catherine Lin I’ve been corresponding with these past few weeks? You look different from your LinkedIn profile picture.”
Bruce detected no change in the man’s tone of voice, but something about the slant of his mouth suggested a sardonic bent to the question. The wattage of Robin’s smile went up by about 10%. Bruce cleared his throat. “This is Robin. He — um. He’s only been with me for a few weeks.”
“I’m brand new,” Robin confirmed. Then took Kent by the elbow and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “But I can arrange an interview for you with Mr. Wayne whenever you’re free. How is next Tuesday looking for you?”
Bruce threw him an alarmed look. But Robin merely mouthed, trust me, at him over his shoulder as he led Kent away. A flutter of panic bubbled up in Bruce’s chest. There was no telling what commitments he was going to end up with if he let Robin take the reins. He’d just made up his mind to intervene when a familiar voice called to him.
“Bruce! How’ve you been? I wasn’t expecting you to make an appearance, old chap.”
Bruce turned and loosened his death-grip on his iced tea. “Harvey?”
“God, those reporters outside almost eviscerated you just for showing your face today, huh? You’re a braver man than me.” Harvey gestured to the lady perched on his arm. “Remind me — have you met my wife, Gilda?”
Bruce was abruptly reminded that he had been unable to attend their wedding last year. Was it too late to apologize for it now? Would it be gauche to bring it up, or would it be gauche not to. Every decision felt like the wrong one.
“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” said Bruce, giving the woman his attention.
“So pleased to meet you. Harvey’s told me so much about your school adventures,” said Gilda as they shook hands.
“All good things, I promise,” said Harvey, with a wink.
Despite himself, Bruce found himself relaxing. Good old Harvey Dent. There was a timeless quality to their friendship that had remained unchanged over the past decade. Bruce was terrible at staying in contact with people. This meant that sometimes, quite without meaning to, he’d go years without seeing Harvey. Fortunately for him, Harvey was always willing to pick up wherever they left off. No matter how much time had passed, he’d always treat Bruce the same way he did when they were still in school. It was what Bruce appreciated the most about him.
An pleasant silence settled over them while Bruce struggled to come up with an appropriate remark. He was saved when Robin reappeared at his side.
“Congratulations on your appointment to District Attorney, Mr. Dent,” he said.
Yes, that had been one of the things he’d meant to say. He’d simply forgotten to, when confronted with his friend’s face.
“I’d say thank you, but it still doesn’t seem real yet,” said Harvey. “The whole situation’s still a bit…delicate. For now my goals are modest: don’t go out the way the last one did.” He pulled a face — a bit of black humor at his own expense.
“Oh, I’m sure nobody wants that,” said Robin with an agreeable smile.
“Just between you and me,” Harvey confessed to Bruce in a subdued undertone,“I think I only got the job because nobody else wanted it. Not after what happened to — well, you know.” He tossed back the rest of his drink with a grimace. “It’s a messy legacy to inherit.”
“You’ve always wanted to make a difference. And this is your chance,” said Bruce. “You can finally change this city for the better in a way Coulson couldn’t.”
They both paused — a moment of grim silence for the corrupt D.A. who had been blown up by the Riddler — before Harvey sighed and clapped Bruce on the back. “I’ve got my work cut out for me. The one bright side is that my predecessor set the bar pretty damn low. At least I know I’ll never be worse than he was.”
He shared a wry, self-deprecating smile with his wife. Robin’s eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. Bruce waited for him to insert some clever comment, but all Robin did was cram a canape into his mouth.
“You’ll make a great D.A.,” said Bruce. Of this, he was confident. He had rarely met anyone as smart, as principled, and as devoted to his work as Harvey.
Harvey plucked a fresh wineglass off a server’s tray so they could raise a toast. Robin lifted his own glass and said nothing.
Eventually, Gilda sailed off to the buffet table to refill her plate and her husband followed her. Robin watched them with a thoughtful look on his face. Bruce gave him an inquiring glance.
“Something wrong?”
“They’ve run out of those mini wagyu slider things.” Robin gestured to his half-empty plate. “Trade you two thimbles of caviar for your scallop carpaccio?”
Bruce proffered his plate and let him take whatever he liked. He didn’t come to these things to eat, even when the food happened to be good. He’d filled his plate mostly as a prop, for verisimilitude. Look, it said, I’m a real gala attendee with real social skills.
But coming here with Robin had made the performance feel effortless, for the first time he could remember. Standing next to him, Bruce felt like a different person. Robin brought out a wittier, less self-conscious, and more honest version of him. Usually, when he performed the role of ‘Bruce Wayne,’ he had to do it alone. But tonight, he had a costar buttressing his efforts, showing him off to the most flattering effect. He hadn’t known it could be this easy.
He felt a sudden swell of gladness that Robin had come tonight.
“You’re good at this,” he said. “The…mingling.”
“Of course I am,” said Robin. “I am a professional. I come prepared to these things.”
While he’d been researching exit strategies, Robin had probably been looking up the actual guests and digging into their pasts.
“I hope you didn’t promise that journalist anything.”
Robin gave him an enigmatic smile. “You have a two-hour lunch date with him on Tuesday.”
“What?”
“Just give him a chance, B. He might turn out to be a really great guy! You can’t judge a book by its cover, okay?”
At that moment, there was a stir. Everyone in the vicinity stopped talking and turned.
Sal Maroni and his entourage had arrived.
+++
By the time they maneuvered themselves into Maroni’s circle, the man was thoroughly sloshed. As Robin had predicted, the man had taken advantage of the open bar as soon as he arrived and was now on his sixth whisky.
“Bruce Wayne,” he said when Bruce approached him. “All grown up, I see. What’s brought you out of hiding, eh?”
There was something hungry and malicious in his piggish eyes that put Bruce on edge at once. He wasn’t sure how well he was doing at hiding the antipathy in his own expression. Robin’s face was wiped blank and his posture had gone stiff.
“And who’s this?” Maroni asked, turning his gaze to Robin. There was a sneer at the edge of his lips. “New boyfriend?”
Bruce started to answer, but Robin beat him to it.
“I’m his bodyguard.”
Robin stood with one hand behind his back, legs wide enough to be a stance, cane planted on the floor between his feet. Though he wasn’t dressed like a bodyguard, there was an aura of menace to him now that even Bruce could detect. His body language suggested barely-leashed violence. Maroni’s bodyguards seemed to believe him because they all reoriented themselves towards him instantly. Two of them gave him a professional once-over.
Maroni wasn’t bothered. “Smart move, getting yourself some security. Must be a lotta people out there with killer grudges, eh?” he said to Bruce. “That Wayne name not doing you any favors these days, I guess. You might wanna be careful walking down the streets these days, kid. Never know if someone will jump you.”
“You mean the way my parents were jumped, twenty-one years ago?”
“Exactly. Wouldn’t want this city to lose its very last Wayne before you can redeem himself. You gonna pony up a billion dollars, to make up for what was lost?”
“You should offer up that money, since you benefitted so much from Renewal.”
Maroni threw back his head and laughed. “Think you might have me confused with Falcone, kid. That ain’t my area. Falcone got all the dirty money, thanks to, ah, your mismanagement. That’s how he funded his empire.” He curled his lip in disdain. “But me? My companies never touched that stuff. I do things the right way.”
Robin cut in before things could escalate further. “I heard you donated quite a generous sum to the Mayor’s fund. I was surprised at the amount.”
“Yeah, well. I live here too. The flooding didn’t do nobody any good. Bad for business, you know? ‘Course I had to help out any way I could.”
“Bruce Wayne?” A new voice said.
Bruce half-turned as the Mayor came over to join them. She was dressed in a sober grey gown, though there was a splash of green on her neck in the form of a peridot necklace. Green was the symbolic color of her Rebuild Project.
“Mayor Reál,” said Maroni, raising his whisky glass to her in a sloppy salute.
She beamed at Bruce first. “So glad you could make it. Your RSVP came so late that I had quite lost hope. I’d been hoping we could spend some time catching up.” Then she turned to Maroni and the smile on her face went flatter. “Your donations have a been a great help to us. But I didn’t think you were one for parties, Mr. Maroni.”
Everyone in the city knew who Salvatore Maroni was. He went to great lengths to keep public perception of him evenly balanced. Outwardly, he owned at least seven legitimate companies. But he’d also avoided prison three times now, each time only because some one or other of his subordinates had taken the fall for him. Blackgate Prison was crowded with former members of his ‘family.’
For the most part, he’d kept his head down these past ten years because of Falcone. Now that Falcone was dead, it was inevitable that someone would step in to fill the power vacuum. And Maroni was doing his utmost to convince them all it wasn’t him.
Shutter bulbs flashed behind them. Vicki’s Vale’s photographer had found them.
Maroni and the Mayor both straightened unconsciously, aware that this was a moment that might be immortalized. The Mayor instantly put more space between herself and Maroni. Bruce suspected that she might have been obligated to invite him due to his enormous donation, but that she hadn’t approved of the idea at all.
“I’ll be looking forward to what else you plan to do for this city,” she said coolly.
“You’ll thank me for this, then,” said Maroni, reaching into his inside jacket pocket.
Bruce felt rather than heard Robin tense. Belatedly, Bruce reached out and snagged a handful of the back of his jacket. Surely, surely, this man would not do anything stupid with so many witnesses present. Two of the Mayor’s aides shifted forward protectively.
But all Maroni brought out from his jacket was a couple slips of golden paper.
The smile he gave everyone was smug, serene. He pretended not to notice the tension he had clearly caused. “Relax, relax,” he murmured, in the tones of someone used to being the only relaxed man in a room.
He spread the slips of paper in his hand into a fan, and Bruce saw that they were tickets.
“Thought I’d take the opportunity, since I have the attention of our esteemed Mayor and Bruce Wayne himself, to invite you both to the show I’m sponsoring. This city is starved for entertainment. The flood has dampened everyone’s spirits — pun intended. We all deserve some fun, don’t we?”
A slip of golden paper was proffered at him. Bruce took it after a moment’s hesitation. The camera bulb flashed.
Embossed onto the surface of the ticket was a stylized flag and a clown’s beaming face.
Admit One to Haly’s Circus, Monday 8:00pm
“Feel free to take two. You’ll want your, uh, bodyguard there with you, I expect.”
Maroni handed him a second ticket, then turned to give four to Reál.
“Bring whoever you like. Admission and drinks on me, of course. Maroni’s got you covered.”
“I didn’t know there was a circus coming to Gotham,” said Reál, in the tones of someone who felt she should have be told about this.
Maroni shrugged. “Bit last-minute, I know. But I managed to divert them to Gotham for a week. Thought this city could do with some fun for a change.”
Several other guests approached, drawn by the presence of the Mayor and the mention of a travelling circus. One of them was a young couple who looked flushed and tipsy from the wine. Bruce noted the matching wedding rings on their hands and the clothing that obviously spoke of wealth. Both had come in snazzy period wear that evoked the roaring twenties, the wife in tassels and sequins and lace trim, the husband in checked tweed.
“Oh, your children will love it, Mrs. Mayor,” said the wife. “We have tickets for the same night, and we’re bringing our little boy as well. He’s so excited.”
The husband looped an arm around her waist. “Happily, we managed to snag the good seats near the front. There were a surprising number of tickets left.”
One of the aides whispered into the Mayor’s ear. She gave the couple a courteous smile. “I’ll look forward to see you there, then, Mr. and Mrs. Drake. Thank you again for your donation to the Rebuild Project.”
Maroni coughed and took a cigar out of his pocket. “Fantastic. Looking forward to seeing you folks there. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got plenty of these to distribute before the night is done. Never say I do nothing for this city.” He stuck the cigar in his mouth and strode away.
Everyone watched him depart. There was a palpable sense of relief once he’d left. An invisible tension dissipated; people let out inaudible sighs. But when Bruce turned to Robin, Robin was still staring at Maroni’s back with a strange intensity. There was nothing but cold fury on his face.
Chapter Text
“This was a coup for you, I think,” said Alfred the next morning.
The front page of the Gotham Gazette showed three semi-famous individuals in the foreground, standing just behind the red cordon, waving. In the background, halfway up the red-carpeted staircase, was Bruce. He was backlit against the bright lights of Baycourt Club. Robin, whose back was to the camera, was bent over his hand in a very serious manner. It was the moment when he’d applied the bandaid, though the camera’s angle didn’t catch that detail.
The headline read, “Gotham Elites Donate $158M to Reál’s Rebuild Project.”
“No two people could corroborate Robin’s name or his actual relationship to you, so they named him your companion and left it at that.” Alfred flicked an approving smile at the both of them. “Most people seem to think he was your protection detail.”
“It did go better than expected,” Bruce admitted. He took a galvanizing sip of coffee and thought about the way Robin had stepped between him and every uncomfortable interacting last night. Something warm settled in his stomach.
“You seem to have made quite the splash last night.”
“That’s Robin’s doing.” Giving credit where credit was due, he directed his next words at the man sitting across from him. “You’re much better at this than me.”
Robin, who had not yet touched his plate of pancakes, did not appear to attend. His chin was propped up against one hand. His gaze was abstracted and his fingers were tapping an offbeat rhythm against the glass tabletop. There were dark smudges under his eyes and an uncharacteristic paleness to his pallor. Bruce would think he was suffering a wicked hangover, except he knew Robin hadn’t touched a drop last night.
“Are the pancakes not to your liking?” said Alfred.
That made him take a couple of desultory bites. But even as he chewed, he continued staring at a point somewhere over Bruce’s left shoulder. He looked about a thousand miles away. His face was disconcertingly expressionless.
“Robin?” said Bruce. When he got no reaction, he repeated it louder.
Robin dragged his gaze around. “What was that?”
Bruce just tilted his head pointedly.
Robin shook himself. “Sorry, sorry. I’m listening, I promise.”
The catering staff had dispersed and gone off to tend their other duties, and the doors of the dining room were closed, so Bruce felt safe enough to broach some more confidential matters.
“I did some research last night. Several things don’t add up.”
Robin washed his pancakes down with a gulp of coffee, but the grimace he made afterwards made it seem like he’d swallowed bleach. “Is this about Maroni?”
Bruce nodded. “You mentioned the other day that he was looking for another way to transport his drops.”
“Right. Yes.”
“Haly’s Circus,” said Bruce. “You see the connection, don’t you?”
“The…connection?”
Bruce tapped the table in front of him impatiently. “Gotham was added as a stop on Haly’s route only four weeks ago. Very last-minute, for shows of this scope and scale.”
The whole thing had been incredibly suspicious. Traveling circuses these days sold their shows up to a year in advance, to make sure that their investment of time and energy would be well repaid. For a notable circus like this to announce a new stop with only a month to spare was unheard of. No wonder the tickets hadn’t sold very well. It had been added to the schedule so late that they’d had no time to advertise locally in Gotham. Hardly anyone knew they were coming.
Possibly, Maroni was just a fan of circuses, and had given them a hefty financial inventive for stopping in Gotham. But Bruce didn’t believe in coincidences. There was something else going on here.
He could see that Robin was coming around at last, though it seemed to require a monumental effort. “So they weren’t meant to stop in Gotham this year?”
“I checked their touring schedule. Usually Haly’s stops at each city for four to eight weeks. For Gotham, they’re only staying three days.”
“Very odd,” Alfred agreed, when the silence went on for too long.
“Why go to all the trouble of sponsoring a circus, then keep them here for only three days? Why resort to handing out free tickets?” Bruce answered his own rhetorical question: “Because Maroni wants them to have a reason to come back, season after season. He’s making sure they’ll have a full house. Haly’s travels with at least thirty-four large trailer trucks. Maroni needs a transport system for his drugs. It’s the perfect arrangement.”
Silence fell. Bruce watched Robin chew the same bite of pancake for the next minute and a half. He didn’t seem to be entirely there.
“Do you understand?” Bruce prompted.
“Absolutely,” said Robin.
“Circus trucks are above suspicion, and three days is more than enough time to pick up a shipment of illegal cargo,” Bruce continued. “If Maroni secures Haly’s as a part of his logistics network, he’ll be able to —”
“Yes. I get it, okay? No need to explain further; I’m not stupid.”
Alfred raised his eyebrows at his sharp tone. Bruce crossed his arms and frowned. Robin rubbed his eyes with one hand and made the ‘go on’ gesture.
Bruce went on as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “I’ll be investigating them tomorrow evening. Poke around the trucks, see if they’ve hidden anything illegal.”
Robin’s head jerked up. “Tomorrow? But your ticket is for Monday.”
“They have four days to set up. Tomorrow is the last day before the opening night. If they’ve struck any deals with Maroni, I’ll find out.”
“Four days is a hell of a rush job.”
Bruce nodded, pleased that Robin had done his own research. “According to an interview Haly did last year, their standard setup time is 8 days. This means they’re doing a scaled-down show in Gotham.”
Robin had stopped moving his cutlery. His throat bobbed, like he was having difficulty swallowing. His eyes darted left and right. He looked like he was doing sums in his head.
“Tell me what’s wrong, said Bruce. Robin was too distracted, too unfocused. Nothing about his behaviour added up.
“Nothing’s wrong. Your logic is sound.” Robin tried to smile, but it flickered and then slid away, like he didn’t have quite enough internal wattage to sustain it today. “We both know Maroni is a weasel and a liar. It’s worth looking into.”
“Yes. That is the plan.”
“But whatever you find, I recommend you see the show on Monday anyway. Don’t let that ticket go to waste. I hear the performers are quite good.” Abruptly, he stood up and pushed back from the table. “Excuse me, Mr. Pennyworth. I need a — I’m not feeling well.”
“By all means,” said Alfred, watching him with a raised eyebrow as Robin fled dining room.
+++
Investigating a circus under cover of darkness turned out to be much more difficult than Bruce anticipated. The workmen whose job it was to set up all the various tents were working all through the night in alternating shifts. The activity at Amusement Mile was so furious and concentrated that Bruce could not move around undetected.
He ended up sitting crouched atop each trailer truck, waiting for the workmen to take a break, before slipping inside to investigate its contents. The process was incredibly tedious. It took all night for him to check just twelve of the trailers, and he came up empty-handed each time.
Finally, in an effort to expedite the process, he broke into the trailer that Mr. Haly was using as a mobile office while the man went to make his rounds.
There, he hacked the man’s laptop and checked his most recent emails. He hit pay dirt about fifteen minutes later, when he found a string of threatening messages from one of Sal Maroni’s lieutenants — a man who signed off as ‘Z.’
Apparently, Haly wasn’t cooperating with Maroni’s demands. In fact, the tone of the emails made it clear that Haly wanted nothing to do with Maroni and his ‘special cargo.’ Interesting.
The very last email in the chain was clearly a threat. Comply or face the consequences. Bruce frowned. What exactly could Z do to a circus that was here for only three days?
Bruce copied the relevant information into a thumb drive and then swiftly slipped away before Haly could return.
This, at least, explained why he hadn’t found any traces of drugs in the trailers. But threats were not things the police could act on. There was nothing to do at this point but to wait.
+++
On Sunday night, Bruce awoke in his room at a small sound. A door creaked close. Finger-light footsteps pattered down the hall. The maids had been instructed not to move around the penthouse after midnight. So this could only be one person.
Bruce checked the clock. 2:42am. Soundlessly, he rolled out of bed, put on his velvet slippers, and crept stealthily out the door and down the hall. What the hell did Robin get up to this late at night when he thought everyone else was sleeping?
Eventually, Bruce reached the doorway the led onto the kitchen. A single orange light glowed from within — no doubt the over-sink lights. He could hear the hum of the microwave working.
“Robin?” Alfred’s scratchy voice asked. “What are you doing up this late?”
“Sorry. Couldn’t sleep. Did I wake you?” said Robin.
Bruce stopped outside the doorframe, just before his skin met the light. Here, swaddled in the darkness, he did not have to strain very hard to hear the conversation. Alfred’s bedroom lay beyond the kitchen — a feature that echoed the floor plans of the ancestral Wayne Manor his parents had once lived in. It was the kind of layout that would allow the staff to access the kitchen without having to cross into the “public-facing” side of the Manor. An outdated and obsolete design.
“No need to apologize,” said Alfred. “I was just about to make myself a mug of hot lemon-honey water. Soothes the throat on dry nights like this. Helps with sleep too, if you’d fancy a cup.”
“I — yes. I would like that.”
For a few minutes there was nothing but the sound of the kettle heating up, the clink of spoons against ceramic, and the pop of the honey jar being opened.
“Mr. Pennyworth, can I ask you something?” said Robin eventually.
“You may certainly ask. Though I cannot guarantee the quality of my answer at three in the morning.”
Robin chuckled and then his tone of voice changed to something quieter and more contemplative. “Hypothetically, if you go back and change any turning point in your life, would you do it?”
“Do you mean a regret? Something I wish I hadn’t done? Or something I wish I had?”
“Let’s call it an… event. If you could change a painful event to get a different outcome, would you do it?”
“An odd question for someone as young as you to ask.”
“I might be young, but I feel like I’ve lived five lifetimes.” There was the sound of a lemon being squeezed.
“Does this have anything to do with your distracted countenance of late? I’ve noticed you’ve been… troubled, since the gala.”
“I’m at a crossroads,” Robin said. The words came slowly, like he was picking his way through a minefield. “Should I use what I know to change events to my liking? Or should I sit back and let the cards fall where they may? My mind has been going in circles.”
“For the purposes of this conversation, are we assuming you know the future?” said Alfred dryly.
“Yeah, let’s pretend I’m the Oracle of Delphi.”
Alfred chuckled. “Very well. If there was an event I could change, I suppose I would ensure I was there to protect the Waynes the night they walked home from the theatre.”
Bruce’s breath caught. Everything in his body went still. That was not an answer he’d expected. He wasn’t so self-centered that he didn’t realize Alfred had a life before he came to work for them. He would’ve wagered good money that Alfred’s deepest regrets and hurts in life did not concern the Waynes at all. But perhaps he was wrong. Given the same choice, Bruce might have ensured his parents never walked through the alley at all — but the fact that Alfred had echoed the spirit of his sentiments made his chest ache. Sometimes, he forgot how much Alfred had loved them, too.
“It sounds like you were very close with them,” said Robin.
“They were more than just my employers.”
“So how did a British operative end up working for the Waynes, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oh? Is this where your oracular foresight reaches its limits?”
Robin laughed. “You’ve got me there. Enlighten me.”
“It’s an odd story, with a couple of twists and turns. You asked me about painful events. At my age, there are very few people who don’t have a dozen or so of those under their belts. And perhaps I have more than most. After all, I spent my formative years as a spy. The worst mission I ever undertook was one where I had to go in blind with my team. Six of us went in, only I came out. It was nobody’s fault. My superiors never blamed me for it. But the guilt ate me alive afterwards. Five of my friends perished, while I got away with only a ruined foot and a permanent limp.
“Because of that mission, I quit the Service. Left England. Washed up in America a shell of a man, with no clue what to do with myself. And here, I met a man called Thomas Wayne.”
Someone moved around and refilled the kettle with fresh water. They both sipped their drinks. The fridge opened and closed. Bruce leaned back against the wall and held his breath.
“Would you change anything about that mission?” Robin asked.
A contemplative silence fell over them. Then Alfred said:
“That mission ruined my career in ten different ways. Ruined me, I should say. I was paralyzed by guilt. Self-loathing. It made me useless in the field. But would I go back and tell my younger self not to go on it?” He paused and made a soft, indefinite sound. “The truth is, coming to America is still the best decision I ever made. Meeting the Waynes changed my entire life. Out of the ashes of that disaster grew something…good. I don’t know if I could give that up, knowing what I know now.”
There was the sound of him refilling their mugs with freshly-boiled water. Robin murmured a quiet ‘thank you.’
“I’m sorry if that doesn’t answer your question, young man.”
“No,” said Robin, very faintly. He cleared his throat and took a shaky breath. “No, you answered it.”
+++
On the day of the circus performance, Bruce pulled on his uniform, geared up the Batmobile, and waited for the sun to go down.
Sunset was at 5:00. Fortunately, the show started at 8:00, which meant he would have plenty of time to get there and check the tents before the performance started.
Robin found him inside the Cave as he was carefully memorizing a printed map of the fairgrounds for his own reference.
“You’re…going as Batman?” he asked in disbelief.
“I need to make sure Maroni doesn’t pull anything dangerous,” Bruce explained.
When he turned, he saw that Robin was clutching a thermos. His other hand was gripping the metal railing for support as he navigated the stairs. His limp was almost entirely gone by now; he barely needed to use the cane anymore. Yet the expression on his face still gave Bruce the impression that he was in some kind of pain.
“Dangerous?” Robin repeated.
“He made threats to Haly that were vague enough to be interpreted in a number of ways. I’m worried about explosives planted in the tents. Or in the crowds.”
Robin squinted at him for a long moment. “If Maroni’s goal is to keep the circus coming back, he’s not going to accomplish that by blowing up the hometown crowd.”
“That’s assuming he handles Haly’s rejection in a rational way. Most men don’t.”
“It’s the first day of their three-day run. He won’t make a move tonight.”
“I can’t afford to make assumptions. You know that.”
Robin bit his lip and looked away. His eyes pinched tight at the corners. “If you’re that worried, you should take my suit instead. It’ll offer more protection than yours.”
Surprised, Bruce glanced over at the uniform that lay neatly folded next to his. “I thought you’d want to wear it yourself.”
“One man skulking around in a cowl is enough. We don’t need two.”
“You could come with me,” said Bruce, after only a moment’s hesitation. A good portion of Haly’s Circus was devoted to midway games, exotic animals, and other attractions. According to the map, there were at least a dozen tents to explore. It would be difficult for him to search them all by himself. A week ago, he wouldn’t have imagined he would ever admit as much out loud. But now he found himself saying, “I wouldn’t mind an extra pair of eyes.”
Robin immediately shook his head. The motion was jerky. “I can’t go with you,” he said.
Bruce mentally shrugged. In his mind, it was always easier to work alone. One less variable to account for. But just a week ago, Robin had been eager to weigh in on his every mission, and had insisted on attending the Mayor’s gala with such force that it had been impossible to refuse him. This sudden about-face struck him as odd.
Acting on an instinct he couldn’t quite articulate, Bruce said, “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Oh, the usual stuff, you know,” Robin muttered, avoiding his eye more obviously than usual.
“You’ve been acting off for days.”
Robin ran a tired hand through his hair, making it even more disheveled than before. Bruce noticed he’d bitten through his lip. There was a small smear of blood at the corner of his mouth. “I’ve got residual trauma from Amusement Mile,” he declared — a forced confession. “Better if I don’t go anywhere near it.”
Bruce pulled on Nightwing’s bat-cowl, swirled his midnight-black cape over his shoulders, and strode towards the Batmobile. “Suit yourself.”
As he roared out of the Batcave, he looked into the rearview mirror. Robin had both hands braced against the metal railing and his head was bowed. His body was one unbroken line of tension.
+++
Bruce arrived at the fairgrounds at a little before 5:00. After stowing his car, he clambered over the fence and crept across the fairgrounds. The sun was low enough in the sky that only a few rays of golden-yellow light fell upon the blue-and-yellow striped tent canvases. Bruce easily avoided the crew members checking tent supports and sound systems and stage mechanics. Everyone was too busy with their own preparations to look at him twice. The ones who did catch a glimpse of him thought nothing of it. Batman, in full Bat-regalia, actually blended in better with the circus performers than expected.
For almost an hour, he moved from tent to tent, scanning for anything or anyone that didn’t fit in. Nothing struck him as obviously out of place. The animals inside the Wild Safari Tent looked bored and unconcerned. The midway games were too bare-bones to rig — most seemed to be operated by a single lever or button.
Eventually, having cleared the main avenue, Bruce moved to the trailers assembled at the back of the yard. He wove between the large trucks to see if he can pick up anything interesting. For about thirty minutes, he perched atop the center-most trailer and, shrouded in the deepening gloom, watched the circus staff at work.
The workmen were still hard at work — everyone’s faces gleamed with sweat and exhaustion. Even this late in the evening, just a couple hours before showtime, they were still wheeling out stage props and specialized equipment and pushing them towards the Big Top. A rush job indeed.
Then Bruce spotted someone who was out of place. He alone didn’t look tired or out of breath. Though he was dressed the same as the rest of the workmen, there was something furtive and secretive about his movements. As Bruce watched, the man moved from trailer to trailer, glancing from side to side. He did not seem satisfied until he reached one trailer in particular and slipped inside. Ten minutes later, he emerged, straightened, and then sauntered back the way he’d come, whistling softly under his breath.
He’d brought nothing in with him that Bruce could see. And he’d brought nothing out afterwards.
Bruce tapped the side of his head and pulled down both the night vision and the telescopic overlays on his cowl. Nightwing’s suit was an engineering marvel. It was going to be difficult to go back to using his own cowl after this.
The man put his hand inside his jacket. Something glinted in his hand. It disappeared too fast for Bruce to get a read on what it was. The next second, he’d slipped back into the crowd of workmen, blending in perfectly. But his gloves had given him away. Everyone else was wearing heavy-duty utility gloves. This man’s gloves were thin and delicate, like kid leather.
Bruce kept still for another five minutes, waiting for the area to clear out. Then he swung down, hurried across the trammeled grass, and then slipped into the last trailer he man had vacated. The inside was pitch-dark, but with his night vision flipped on, Bruce could see that space was crammed in all manner of odds and ends. Dozens of hula hoops. A massive tangle of silver rigging, which might have been the disassembled pieces of a skeletal pirate ship. The walls were hung with giant skeins of rope, including several reels of nets of various grades and thicknesses. Impossible to tell if anything was missing. Equally impossible to know if anything had been planted.
He sniffed the air. No smell of gasoline, but that didn’t mean anything.
If he were Maroni, he’d arrange for the colorful striped tents to burn. Plant an incendiary device. Start a fire. A three-alarm conflagration could set the circus back by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stop them from completing their tour. Diminish their future earnings enough to make Haly desperate.
So why would someone be sneaking into the storage trailers instead? Surely Maroni would want to keep the vehicles intact, so he could extort Haly for their use. But it was too late now to hunt down the suspicious-looking man and question him. Intuition told him it was better to be safe than sorry.
It was time to talk to Haly.
Bruce left the trailer and slipped once more inside Haly’s personal office. It had been repurposed out of a smaller trailer, and it was filled from top to bottom with trinkets and momentos. Award plaques for ‘Best Show of the Year’ lined the walls.
Bruce could feel the tyranny of the ticking clock pressing down on him. Depending on how big of a fuss Maroni was planning to make, disaster could be waiting just around the corner, or it happen three days from now. There was no way to tell.
Twenty long minutes later, Haly came trundling in. Bruce unfolded himself from the shadows and straightened to his full height.
To Haly’s credit, he didn’t startle easily. He scowled, pulled the cigar out of his mouth, and spat a plume of smoke in disgust. “Maroni sent you, did he? Answer’s still no. Get out of my office.”
“Do I look like one of Maroni’s men?” Bruce asked quietly.
Haly picked up a spiky metal ornament off his desk and brandished it like a weapon. “You look like one of his hired killers trying to dress like a carnie, but I run a circus, pal. Your sex-dungeon-gone-wrong look isn’t scaring anyone.”
“Maroni didn’t send me. I came to warn you.” Batman reached up belatedly to switch off the voice overlay. The harsh, artificial growl had little effect on a man who had spent his entire life working in showbiz, but it was the principle of the thing. He had no desire to scare innocent citizens. “Someone suspicious snuck inside one of your trailers earlier. He could’ve been one of Maroni’s stooges.”
Haly looked entirely unimpressed. “Who are you again? And don’t give me your stage name.”
Bruce ignored his question. “The only reason I haven’t called the police myself is that there’s no proof yet.”
“Proof of what?”
“I know Maroni’s been threatening you. And I know you turned his offer down. But now he wants payback, and you don’t have the first idea of what he’s going to do.”
Haly’s furious silence was answer enough. After a moment, he said, “…What did you say this man looked like? The suspicious one.”
“He went into several of your trailers —”
“They’re called wagons.”
“Wagons, yes. He could have planted an incendiary device. Or stolen your trade secrets. Or sabotaged your equipment. I’m not sure yet.”
“How do you know he wasn’t one of the crew?”
“His behaviour and clothing were off. You may have to cancel the show tonight.”
Haly barked a laugh. “You kidding me? The show must go on — haven’t you heard of that? I’ve been in this business for twenty years, and I don’t bend over for nobody, least of all arrogant mafiosos. I’m sure as hell not going to start canceling shows on account of one man’s threats.”
“You may want to rethink that.”
“If anybody messes with my circus, I’ll send ‘em packing.”
“People might get hurt. Your crew. Audience members.”
“Get out of my office. This is my final warning.”
Bruce hesitated. Through the thin walls of the trailer, he could hear the loudspeaker music swing into something cheerful and upbeat. Distantly, the front gates creaked open. The attendees for tonight’s revelries were arriving.
It was clear he wasn’t going to change Haly’s mind. He was running out of time.
“And stay off my fairgrounds,” Haly added, jabbing a meaty finger at him. “You want to stay and see the show? Buy a ticket like everyone else.”
Bruce turned and swept out of the office. Time for Plan B.
+++
The crowd of circus-goers outside had already begun to swell by the time Bruce slipped inside the Big Top. This was by far the largest tent, built to seat over two thousand. The air inside was silent and still. Dust motes swirled inside the beams of light that cut diagonally across the circular stage.
If Maroni wanted to sow maximum chaos and confusion, it would probably be in here. So Bruce gave it his full attention as he combed the space for anything that might be a clue.
His job was made harder by the fact that there was a lot of specialized circus equipment stationed around the perimeter of the stage and in the control room booth near the back. Nevertheless, he swept the aisles carefully and then checked under the fold-down seats. The built-in signal detector in his (Nightwing’s) gauntlet was supposed to alert him if it picked up any usual devices, but it remained silent.
Outside, the noise level ramped up. By now, he could hear the shrieks of excited children, the blitz of arcade sound effects accompanying the midway games, and the chatter of Gothamites, finally getting to relax for a night.
Bruce moved faster. A thorough sweep of the control room in the back yielded nothing unusual. The stage, though, proved to be the most difficult area to tackle. There was just too much intricate mechanical equipment under it, and Bruce didn’t want to inadvertently break something.
“What are you doing here? I thought we weren’t supposed to be on stage yet,” a voice broke the silence.
Bruce spun around.
A little boy had appeared behind him. He looked about nine or ten years old, at most. He must have popped out of the curtain that led backstage. Bruce almost mistook him for a guest, until he realized that the boy was wearing a very colorful and intensely sparkly bodysuit. There were feathers and sequins sewn to it. His entire face was painted in dramatic stage makeup. Oh, a performer.
The boy skipped right up to Bruce and grinned. “Are you new? I haven’t seen your costume before. It looks great! Is that a bat on your chest? Are you going to open the show for us today?”
Bruce cleared his throat and felt his mind go blank. This boy wasn’t local; ‘Batman’ wouldn’t mean anything to him. In desperation, he blurted, “I’m with OSHA. I’m…here to…inspect the premises. To check if anything is out of place.”
“Oh, so you’re like Health and Safety?” The child tilted his head. “Man, you guys must be worried. You’re the second one today!”
“There was another one?”
“Yeah! He came about an hour ago. We were just finishing up rehearsals then. But I got off early ‘cause I nailed my routine today. On my first try.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Bruce. He could feel the pride radiating off this boy. The corners of his mouth twitched up. “What did the other OSHA person look like?”
“Wow, you ask a lot of questions, Mister Bat. Do I get anything for telling you?”
Bruce reached into his utility belt and pulled out a caramel lollipop. Pure sugar, but most of the street kids seemed to like them.
The boy’s eyes brightened. “Oooh! Yum! Can’t eat it right before a show, but I can save it for later!” He plucked it out of Bruce’s hand without hesitation and then gave Bruce an exaggerated stink-eye. It looked almost comical under the stage makeup. “You know, I’m starting to think you can’t be OSHA, because the other guy wasn’t wearing pointy ears, or a cape. He was just in regular clothes. And he wanted to check that our rigging was safe to use, so I told him to check Wagon No. 5. That’s where we acrobats keep our gear. And he really did his job! But you’re in the wrong place, Mister Bat. Who are you really?”
Outside, over the loudspeakers, they announced that the Big Top was going to open for seating in five minutes.
From behind the stage, someone called, “Dick?”
“Oops, gotta go!” The boy twirled away on light feet. “Bye, Mister Bat!”
Bruce glanced up as light flooded the aisles. He could already hear hundreds of feet clanking up the metal stairways outside, ready to file into the Big Top. With nowhere else to go, Bruce shot a line onto the sprawling rig directly over the circular stage and let it pull him up into the darkness. From there, it was easy to slip through one of the four tent flaps they’d left open for ventilation. Outside, he skidded down the stiff canvas like it was a slide. When he reached one of side support poles, he hooked his grapple to it and swung the rest of the way down. The tent was taller than it looked — almost equal to a six-story building.
Bruce landed on the soft grass outside, out of the glare of the many spotlights illuminating the fairgrounds. When he turned around, a hand grabbed his arm.
“What the hell are you doing, B?” Robin hissed.
It was the second time tonight someone had surprised him.
“I thought you were too traumatized to come,” said Bruce.
Robin was dressed in an oversized black sweatshirt over navy jeans — the very picture of a respectable civilian. There was a gray backpack slung over one shoulder.
“Are you done looking?” Robin asked. “Did you find anything?”
“No, but—”
“Great. Let’s go watch the show then.” Robin pulled Maroni’s tickets out of his pocket. “You left these at home.” Then he shrugged off his backpack and yanked out a second set of civilian clothing . “Hurry up and change.”
“I’ve still got work to do,” said Bruce.
Robin made a frustrated noise. “Nothing’s going to happen tonight, okay? I saw Maroni come through the VIP entrance earlier. He’s here in person. He’s not going to plant explosives and endanger himself.”
Maroni was here? Bruce frowned and peered out across the fairgrounds. Maybe if he managed to catch the man alone, he could have a word with him.
“B. Are you listening to me?”
Bruce shook his head. “I need to stay alert.”
“Everyone is expecting you to attend as —” he mouthed the next two words soundlessly, “—Bruce Wayne.”
“I don’t care.”
“Please, B? Just this once, can you listen to me and just —”
“I’m not here for fun and games,” Bruce hissed. “I don’t have time for that.”
Robin dropped his face into his hands. Exhaled hard through his fingers. A slight shudder ran through him. When he looked up again, there was something wild and desperate in his eyes.
“You said you’d trust me.”
“And you said you wouldn’t interfere with my work.” Bruce gestured to himself, in full Bat regalia. “I’m at work. And I have a mission tonight.”
And then he swept away, leaving Robin standing open-mouthed behind him.
+++
For the next hour and a half, he went through each of the twenty-seven semis still parked near the premises. There were no drugs to be found, though he did have to brave two cars full of exotic animals, none of which seemed to take a shine to him. Clearly, in the interests of saving time, Haly hadn’t bothered to put up his Reptile Tent.
Still, he kept one ear out for what was happening in the Big Top. Fortunately, the music from the performance was loud enough — and the applause from the audience rowdy enough — that he had a good gauge of what was happening, even though he wasn’t physically there.
Robin messaged him every ten minutes with entreaties to join him, but Bruce ignored him.
It was nearing 9:30 when — oddly enough, he saw the notification light blinking on his gauntlet. Someone had left a message in Batman’s inbox. He tapped it.
“Batman? This is Gordon. Not sure if this will work or not, but thought I’d give it a try. Listen. About two hours ago, I got a call from Nightwing, if you can believe that. You remember him? Well, he told me he’d gift-wrapped a criminal for me, man by the name of Tony Zucco. I had my boys go take a look, and whaddaya know, they found him hanging from the third lamppost outside of Amusement Mile, just like Nightwing said he’d be. We brought him in for questioning. And he’s just cracked.”
Bruce stopped everything he was doing and spun slowly in place. Tony Zucco. Z? The man confessed? To what?
“Told us he’d been hired to sabotage the Haly’s final act. To cut their safety lines, or something. Zucco still had a pair of gardening sheers on him when we picked him up.” Gordon made a disgusted sound. “I’m going to send a couple uniforms over to Haly’s to check. Hopefully, nothing’s gone wrong yet. But I just wanted to let you know that at least one of your impersonators turned out to be a good ‘un. This Nightwing is really something, you know?”
Bruce frowned to himself as he tried to make sense of this. Two hours ago, he had been searching the Big Top. If the man Gordon had now was the same man Bruce had spotted sneaking into the wagon earlier, that meant that during an extremely narrow window of time, Nightwing had… gone after the mysterious saboteur? He even succeeded in capturing him, evidently. But how would Nightwing know to go after this particular man?
Did Bruce’s cowl send the footage back the cave, where Robin was? Even if that were the case, there had been no proof at the time that Zucco had done anything criminal in nature. At least, Bruce hadn’t found any. So why would Nightwing tie him up and tell Gordon about it?
Something else occurred to him.
Bruce’s blood thickened to sludge in his veins.
Wagon No. 5. And a little boy saying, “That’s where we acrobats keep our gear.”
In the distance, he heard the pop of a canon going off inside the Big Top.
The next announcement was loud enough that Bruce could hear it through layers of canvas, all the way across the fairgrounds.
“And now, for our Grand Finale! I present to you, the Flying Graysons!”
Thunderous cheers followed.
Bruce turned and ran.
Chapter Text
Bruce reeled himself up to the top of the Big Top. By the time he slipped back through the tent flaps, and final act had already begun.
The music had spun into a pounding, intense beat that made the canvas vibrate around him.
“No nets for the stars of our performance tonight! Experience the magic without anything blocking your eyes!”
Below him, two of the three Graysons were balanced precariously atop the highest platforms in the Big Top. Between the platforms swayed a series of trapeze bars so light and delicate that they barely looked strong enough to hold up a man. The third Grayson — the little boy from earlier — was warming up the audience by swinging from one of the bars.
All three of them were too intent on their routine to notice the shadowy figure crouched ten feet above them. Also, the music was exceptionally loud. The last thing Bruce wanted to do was startle them into doing something unexpected, especially when there was a fifty-foot drop under them.
Without warning, the music tripped into something even harder and faster. At some unspoken signal, the other two acrobats were off. The noise level was loud enough to mask the three of them yelling things to each other — things they had to time to a fraction of a second, so that each swing, each spin, each jump, would perfectly align with the next.
This trio of trapeze artists was the last act of the night, which meant they were the starring attraction. And Bruce could see why. The jumps they were making looked difficult even to him, and he’d seen a lot in his time. The two adults were mesmerizing to watch, but it was the little boy who was the true marvel. The audience was riveted, and Bruce could not tear his eyes away, either. This was worth the price of admission alone.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we present, for the very first time in America, the Quadruple Somersault! Only two people in the world can perform it, and heeeeere’s one of them!”
Bruce frowned to himself. That sounded like an exaggeration, that only two people could do it. He was pretty sure he’d seen it quite recently…
For this maneuver, the little boy donned special gloves — no doubt to prevent the tremendous force of his own spin from ripping the skin off his palms. Then he took three quick breaths for courage and leaped.
The crowd held its breath as the boy launched himself off the trapeze and into a tight spin. He shot right past Bruce, just under his feet — spinning so fast he was almost a blur — and then caught the arms of the man swinging upside-down towards him.
The crowd exploded into applause, but only Bruce heard the boy’s whoop of joy as he successfully completed the maneuver.
Bruce looked across the tent and spotted the Premium Box Seats. He flicked on his binocular overlays. His eyes slid past Mayor Reál and her kids, past Harvey and his wife, past Sal Maroni and his aide. At the end of the row were two empty seats.
So Robin had left after all —
— No wait, there he was at the very back of the tent. Bruce squinted. Robin was pressed right up against the curtained doorway, his shoulders illuminated by the glowing EXIT sign. Half his body was turned away from the stage, as if he expected to duck out at any second. Both his hands were pressed over his mouth.
Bruce heard it before he saw it.
The telltale — snap — made his blood freeze. Below him, one of the trapeze lines flew free.
For one heart-stopping moment, Bruce understood exactly what was about to happen.
The acrobats understood, too. Even as they lost control of their flight path, both were starfishing in midair — increasing drag — in a desperate attempt not to land on the crowd. Their trajectory was on the verge of taking them directly over where the audience was sitting, and they both knew it.
Bruce anchored his grapple and deployed it.
Six lines shot out in tandem, tangling with falling limbs — gently arresting their sideways momentum. The couple, possessed of spatial awareness instincts only lifelong acrobats would have, immediately stretched their arms up to grasp the grapple lines themselves and tucked their legs up. Then they crashed together and began spinning.
Their trajectory reversed, pulling them back over the small stage. For several moments, they swung from side to side like a slowing-descending pendulum. The anchor jerked against the rigging, but Bruce held it fast with his own hands. After three swings, the grapple lines — not designed for the weight of two people — snapped too.
This time, the fall was five feet rather than fifty. They tumbled onto the stage in a heap, stripped of grace. The crowd gasped as one, unsure if this was part of the act or not. Five frozen heartbeats later, Bruce saw the two acrobats twisting weakly as they struggled to disentangle themselves from the lines, and he heard the roar of his own heartbeat again.
Bruce glanced towards the high platform. The little boy was frozen in place, both hands pressed over his mouth in a posture that looked suddenly, horrifically familiar.
“Dick,” he said, remembering the name he'd heard the boy responding to earlier.
Slowly, the boy’s eyes were dragged towards him, like an unwilling magnet. He flinched when Bruce moved into his line of sight. The rigging was merely a grid of metal; it wouldn’t hide him from the audience’s eyes. But up here, so far above the crowd, it was just the two of them.
The music had abruptly changed to something softer and slower — no doubt a signal to the crew that a real accident had taken place. All the spotlights had swivelled downwards, so no one was looking at them. Below them, technicians and crew members were swarming down the aisles.
“Mister Bat?” Dick whispered.
“They’re okay,” said Bruce. “They’ll be fine. Do you want to go down to them?”
“Y-yeah. But I, but I—” The boy could barely speak. He was shaking like a leaf. He was in absolutely no shape to climb down a fifty-foot rope ladder.
“I’ll come to you. Can you hold onto me?” Bruce carefully made his way across the rigging, and then swung down to perch next to him. The platform was painfully narrow.
In answer, Dick immediately wrapped his small arms around Bruce’s waist and put his own feet on top of his boots. Bruce secured his arm around the boy’s middle, said, “Hold on tight,” and grappled down onto the stage.
By this time, Haly’s on-site medical staff had rushed onto the scene. Two of them were snapping orders and shouting at the other crew members.
In the far-off distance, Bruce could hear sirens approaching. Someone must have called 9-1-1. But rising above the sound of approaching sirens was the slow, gradual swell of applause.
The audience was getting to their feet, one by one, to give them a standing ovation. Some people still looked too shocked to react, and more than a few very young children had started crying in confusion, but overwhelmingly, the response was riotous cheering.
The clapping only grew as Bruce released Dick and the boy elbowed his way through the swarm of personnel crowding the stage.
“Mama! Papa!” he shouted.
Bruce felt his heart twist violently inside his chest.
After a few minutes of conferring with their heads bent together, the medical team helped the two adults slowly to their feet. Both of them had sustained lacerations from the ropes. The woman looked like she might have a broken leg, and the man was gingerly holding his ribs. But they were alive.
Alive.
The applause reached a tremendous volume. People were whistling and stamping their feet. Flowers were being tossed at the stage. One boy who looked about four years old broke free from his mother’s arms and rushed down the aisle to deposit his bouquet at Bruce’s feet. His mother — he recognized Mrs. Drake from the gala — came down to scoop him back up.
Amidst all this hubbub, amidst the ministrations and attentions of the medical staff, Dick’s father nodded gravely towards the audience — a gracious gesture of gratitude and acknowledgement. After a moment, his mother did the same.
But Dick Grayson swept a full stage bow — hands spread wide, one foot tucked behind the other, nose pointed to the ground. It was the bow he would’ve used at the end of a successful performance. And he didn’t do it facing the audience, but facing Bruce.
A couple more bouquets landed at Batman’s feet. Gothamites knew their vigilante; he’d earned their trust after last year’s flood.
From behind the stage curtain, the rest of the performers slowly re-emerged. Most were still in full makeup and costume — they’d probably been waiting for the final curtain call. Though their postures were hesitant and concerned, they were too well-trained to break character. Improvising on instinct, they performed their bows now with their hands linked together — first to Batman, and then to the audience. Every single one of them managed to smile and wave.
The nose level in the tent soared.
But Bruce was scanning the audience, his eyes on the four different EXIT’s at the back of the tent.
Robin was nowhere to be seen.
+++
He found Robin outside, under the cool night sky, quietly having a panic attack,
Nobody else was around.
The audience inside the Big Top still hadn’t moved. Most likely, the staff inside were keeping people in their seats to make sure the aisles would be clear for the arriving EMTs. The somber ‘something’s gone wrong’ music was still playing.
Ambulances pulled up in the parking lot — Bruce could see their flashing lights.
So he was alone when he found Robin at the back of the yard, beyond the line of porta potties. He was kneeling on the patchy grass, hands braced against the ground, fingers curled into the dirt. Every part of him was trembling. The sounds coming from him were so broken, so guttural, that Bruce felt his own insides lurch in sympathy.
Bruce swallowed and cautiously approached. The heavy hand of realization was on him now, and this time, there was no escaping it. The reality of who this man was washed over him. The knowledge felt forbidden; too arcane for the likes of him.
“Dick?” he tried.
For a long moment, he got no response. Robin’s shoulders were heaving so hard he looked like he was about to shake apart. He was gasping for breath, too close to hyperventilation to form a single word.
Bruce crouched down in front of him, and Robin finally looked up at him with wild eyes.
“—B—?” he wheezed.
Sweat was rolling down his temples. He looked cornered, like a fatally injured animal expecting to die.
Telegraphing exactly what he was going to do, Bruce stretched his arms towards him. Robin latched onto his wrists like a drowning man grabbing a lifesaver.
“Breathe with me,” Bruce instructed quietly. “Inhale. Hold it. Exhale. Ready? Again.”
For an interminable time, they simply crouched there and breathed together. The music from the Big Top smoothed out into something more soothing. Eventually, a voice came over the loudspeakers, apologizing for the technical failure and thanking the crowd for their patience.
Safely hidden out of the way, Bruce listened as the audience dispersed at last. It took around twenty minutes for everyone to leave, and during that time, Robin’s uncontrollable tremors eventually settled into intermittent hitched breaths.
When Bruce made to stand, he was stopped by Robin lunging forward and gripping his shoulders. Surprised, he had to quickly suppress his own flight-or-fight reflex. Usually, people didn’t grab him while in uniform for innocent reasons. But all Robin did was press his face against his chest, right over the bat insignia, and sob like a child.
“Dick?” Bruce repeated.
After a moment came the muffled reply. “Y-you figured it out, huh?”
“I’m a detective,” Bruce reminded him. Hesitantly, he patted his hand over Robin — Dick’s — hair.
Some things were obvious to him now. Until this moment, he had never quite allowed himself to believe the man’s story. There had been too many unknowns, too many variables. So he had put off his own verdict by reminding himself that some things could not be proven. He’d repeated Alfred’s maxim to himself: that trust and belief were two different things. He could trust this man without believing his story — he’d clung to that.
Now, he felt like the metaphorical scales had dropped from his eyes. He’d been a fool. Dick had been telling him the truth the whole time. But he’d resisted believing all this time, not because it had been too strange, but because it had been too wonderful. He hadn’t believed the universe could be like that because he couldn’t. The idea of someone willing to be his partner, to fight by his side, to follow his precepts and principles — it had been simply too good to be true. So he hadn’t believed it.
Dick started laughing through his tears. “Should’ve figured,” he said as he sat back on his heels. “When did you realize?”
“The quadruple somersault.”
“That one blows my cover every time,” Dick muttered to himself. He wiped his face absently with the back of his hand.
Bruce stared down him, at the situation he’d put himself in, and couldn’t understand. “But why…why force yourself to…?”
“Someone had to be there for him, B. If it couldn’t be you, then it’d have to be me.”
He remembered Robin begging him to watch the show, and all the times he’d refused. “I’m sorry. I — you shouldn’t have had to see that again.”
“But I didn’t. Because you saved them, B. You saved them.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Bruce, “is why you didn’t save them yourself. You knew it was going to happen. You hunted down Zucco, but only after he’d cut the ropes. Why didn’t you say something?”
Dick turned his face away. Too late, Bruce realized how angry he sounded. He just didn't understand. If those had been his parents, he would’ve — would’ve —
In a hoarse voice, Dick said, “I did the math, B. I ran all the numbers, spun out every possible outcome, tracked every bifurcating future I might accidentally create from changing this one event. And in the end…”
“In the end?”
“I realized there are events too important to deviate from.”
Bruce could feel his anger mounting with every word. It bubbled up from his chest, spilling into everything else.
“You know now how things went in my world now, don’t you?” Dick asked.
“I can… hazard a guess.”
“For me, they died that night. And then a kind billionaire stepped in and took me in. I became Batman’s partner. Gotham’s Boy Wonder.”
Bruce had surmised as much. But being told the truth brought it to life in his mind in totally new way. Until tonight, he’d always assumed that perhaps he and Robin had been similar-age companions in that other world. Somewhat like the intense friendship-rivalry he’d had with Khoa. But this was something else.
“He… he raised you, didn’t he?”
Dick nodded without lifting his eyes. “He trained me to lead heroes. To fight monsters. To right wrongs. There are so many lives saved, who would otherwise have died if I hadn’t been there. I didn’t want to create a world without Robin, do you understand? Because Robin is who I am. Who I’ll always be. Who am I to change the timeline as I please?”
Bruce was already shaking his head. “You don’t know those things will happen the same way. You told me this is a different universe. There’s no guarantee it’ll follow the same patterns.”
“You’re right. But there was another reason, too.”
He looked down at his hands and took several careful breaths. It was what the littlest Grayson had done, too, right before leaping off the fifty-foot-tall platform. Three breaths, for courage.
“The truth is,” Dick said, “I didn’t want to lose you. I didn’t want to lose this.” His eyes flicked up to meet Bruce’s. “What we had — that was magic. You gave me some of the happiest years of my life. And it felt like a betrayal, to give that up. To not give the ‘me’ in this world a chance to have that, too.” His body looked heavy, weighed down by resignation. “Without you, I can’t even imagine who I would be,” he confessed. “Everything I am today is what you made me, Bruce.”
“Not everything,” said Bruce. He tilted his head towards the Big Top meaningfully. “In many ways, you’re still the same person you were at nine. I should have recognized you in that little boy, but his stage makeup was too thick for me to see the resemblance. In every way that matters, you’re the still the person your parents made you.”
Dick laughed once, though his tears continued trickling down his cheeks in a steady stream. “Do you understand now? Why I had to—” He swallows roughly. Chokes out the last five words, “—let history take its course?”
“Don’t be stupid. It may be history to you, but it’s the future to me. And the future can be changed.”
“But what if we've changed it for the worse?”
Bruce just stared at him, driven to a furious, perplexed silence. He bit his tongue before he could say anything in anger. He needed to think through his next words carefully.
Dick dropped his hands and heaved a sigh. His eyes were faraway again. “In a way, either decision would have been selfish of me. I wanted my parents alive. I wanted to be your Robin. I wanted both and I knew couldn’t have both. So I picked based on the greater good.”
“Fuck the greater good.”
Dick’s head snapped up, his eyes wide.
Bruce dragged Dick to his feet and pulled him over to where they could both look out onto the yard. Someone had switched off the bright floodlights around the fairgrounds, so that the only illumination now came from the smaller, dimmer lights from within each tent.
Three medics were wheeling the two adults across the grassy expanse to what was previously the Gift Shop. It was now a provisional medical tent. Three EMTs were standing by, though from their calm demeanor, the prognosis was probably good. The smallest Grayson trailed behind this crowd of people, looking anxious but not overtly so.
“Does that boy look worse off to you?” Bruce demanded.
“…No,” Dick admitted softly.
Bruce turned him gently by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. “Every night, I wished I could’ve saved my own parents. If I had the chance to go back and save them, I’d do it in a heartbeat. What makes you think I wouldn’t save yours?”
Dick’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. Speechless was a new look on him.
“When I saved them, I hadn’t yet realized who they were. I didn’t know if Grayson was a family name or a brand name. I didn’t know if they were your trainers or your mentors or your parents. But even if I’d known everything you knew, even if you’d told me they had to die for the good of the universe, did you really think I could just let them fall, after what happened to me?” Dick flinched away from his wording, and Bruce felt his anger melt away. “I would have saved your parents a thousand times over, in this or any other universe.”
Wordlessly, Dick leaned his forehead against Bruce’s shoulder like he was an anchor, a fortress to shelter in. For the second time that day, an arm snaked around his torso. A hand pressed against his upper back. Bruce was usually too touch-averse for this sort of thing; it had been years since he’d let another adult try to hug him. But for some reason, Dick didn’t set off the usual alarms in him. Something was building in his chest, something that felt like it might explode.
It took him a few moments to understand the near-inaudible thing Dick was whispering, over and over again, voice muffled against his armor.
“Thank you, Bruce. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
+++
“You should talk to him,” said Dick much later, as they peered into the opening of the medical tent from a distance.
John and Mary Grayson were still weathering a battery of tests by the circus’s medics. A doctor and a nurse from a private clinic nearby had arrived to give a second opinion. The smallest Grayson was running circles around the tent, his energy too boundless to be contained. One of the medics had taken a stuffed elephant off a display shelf and give it to him in hopes that he would settle down.
“And say what?” Bruce asked.
“Just tell him what I told you.”
“You don’t want to talk to him yourself?”
“I want to give him a chance to get to know you.”
Bruce liked children in general. For the most part, he liked them more than adults. But he’d been a very unhappy child growing up, so he really only knew what to say to children who were sad or hurting. Happy children were a mystery to him. They seemed like aliens from a different plane of existence.
“Trust me,” Dick continued, “you’ll do great.” He patted Bruce on the shoulder. “Go practice your social skills, okay? I need to speak with m — his — parents. Alone.”
“Not afraid you’ll mess up the timeline even further?” Bruce asked dryly.
“It’s already in shambles, thanks to you. There’s no way I can make it worse.” But he was smiling again.
The shadows between tents were deep, so nobody noticed Batman. In fact, most of the circus performers had immediately gotten roaring drunk immediately after the show ended. Everyone was celebrating the fact that they’d come within a hairsbreadth of tragedy. Spirits were high.
Bruce waited until the little boy ducked out of the medical tent, then he approached him.
At some point, the littlest Grayson had changed into regular clothes and scrubbed the makeup off his face. But his smile was the same bright smile Bruce had been seeing for weeks now.
“Mister Bat!” he exclaimed.
Bewildering, to think that this dimply, bouncing, blue-eyed creature was going to grow up into the man who’d saved his life. Looking at him gave Bruce vertigo. This was two versions of the same person, across what had to be almost twenty years of time. It was a bit like watching a time-lapse video, forwards and backwards, at high speed, in real time.
“I can’t believe you’re still here!” Grayson cheered. “Everyone told me you’re called Batman and that you usually disappear right after saving someone, so I thought you’d be long gone, but here you are! Are you planning to save someone else tonight?”
Bruce took a deep breath and tried to get a word in edge-wise. “Are your parents all right?”
“Oh yeah, don’t worry. It’s not super serious. Mama has a fractured leg and a small head-bump, and Papa has a sprained rib and a pulled arm muscle. The nice doctor says everything should go away in six to eight weeks,” Grayson replies, spinning in a circle while he spoke. “They’re talking about physiotherapy now, but Papa knows more about that than the doctors. He’s been injured like, a thousand times. This isn’t the worse he’s been hurt during practice.”
“That’s good. I’m happy to hear that.”
“Did you want to talk to them?”
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”
Grayson turned and shouted something in a foreign language towards the tent. His dad yelled something back. The next thing Bruce knew, the boy had grabbed his hand and was tugging him away.
“See, I think you should’ve told me you were Batman from the start. I’ve never met anyone who did circus things outside of a circus before, but the townies tell me you go around swinging from ropes and stuff all over the city. Which sounds exactly like what we do!”
Bruce looked around wildly, trying to figure out where Dick had gone. He was beginning to feel like he’d need an extraction soon. Would Dick come to rescue him from the enthusiastic attentions of his younger self if things really got out of hand? How on earth had his other self raised a child this chatty? And then, just as quickly, it dawned on him that that Dick had probably been a totally different child. Dick had seen his parents die; Grayson hadn’t.
“…So why didn’t you stay after the curtain call? Everyone wanted to toast you for saving my parents.”
Bruce cleared his throat. “My identity is a secret. I’m trying not to draw too much attention to myself.”
Grayson blinked up at him. “Then you really shouldn’t dress like that.”
The kid had him there. The next thing he knew, Grayson had pulled him into a tent that smelled strongly of African safari.
“Come meet Zitka! She’s one of my best friends.”
A curious elephant poked its trunk out between the bars of its cage, and Grayson absently petted it.
“Listen,” said Bruce, leading the boy to a bench where they could sit down. “I need to tell you something serious. Something about what happened tonight.”
“Okay." Grayson scooped up a handful of hay and handed it to the trunk that was tapping him on the shoulder.
Bruce didn’t pull any punches. “What happened to your parents wasn’t an accident. The ropes your family uses were cut. Someone wanted them to fall.”
The boy’s eyes went round. His jaw dropped open in naked outrage. “What!? Who was it? Who did it!?”
“Nobody you know, I promise. And that man is in prison now, don’t worry.”
“Oh.” The outrage subsided only marginally. But Grayson’s face was now creased into a scowl. “Do you guys have the death penalty in this state?”
Behind the cowl, Bruce felt his eyebrows climb up. Were kids this age always this bloodthirsty? “Not my area,” he said.
“So he wasn’t — wasn’t one of us? He wasn’t from Haly’s?”
“No.”
“Then how did he even get inside the yard to…” The boy broke off with a dramatic gasp. “The other OSHA guy! He wasn’t from OSHA either!”
Grayson was quick on the uptake, Bruce had to give him that. Not surprising, considering who he'll grow up into. “No, he wasn’t.”
The boy’s face morphed into horror. His hands flew up to either side of his head. “Oh no oh no oh no. But I told him! I thought he was—”
“It’s not your fault,” Bruce said hastily. “But next time, maybe direct people claiming to be ‘official persons’ to Mr. Haly, okay?”
Grayson was silent for some time, his feet kicking the air furiously. His scowl deepened. “Do my parents know about this?” he asked at last.
“My friend is telling them all about it. We want you to be safe. All three of you will have to keep an eye out for this in the future.”
Bruce had initially balked at the idea of telling a kid that someone had it in for his parents. It seemed a ghastly bit of knowledge to burden someone with, especially a boy this young. But this instruction had come from Dick himself. I would rather have known, he’d said. I’d rather be given the chance to be extra-careful in the future, rather than live in a bubble where nothing bad can happen.
Bruce reached into his utility belt and took out a card. “I want you to take this. If you ever run into trouble, that’s how you can contact me.”
“What is this?”
“A business card.” With his new voice message number printed on it. So far the only one with it was Gordon.
“Wow, it’s just like in the ones in old movies! Do people still use these?” Dick took out his own cellphone and said brightly, “Could I add you to my ChatApp?”
Bruce felt himself smile in spite of himself. “Go ahead. But I also want you to memorize my number, just in case.”
Dick had been firm on this point. I used to lose stuff all the time, with all the moving around we did in the circus. Toys, books, souvenirs, and photographs came and went. But I never forgot anything I had to memorize.
Bruce sat there until Grayson could rattle off the number to the tune of ‘Old McDonald had a farm.’
“You can always call me. Anytime, anywhere, for any reason. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Dick had gotten shifty when Bruce asked why he was adamant that he give the boy his number. All he’d said was, There were certain forces colluding to make me an orphan that I didn’t learn about until much later. I don’t know if those forces exist in this universe. But I want to give him a safety net anyway. Just promise me you’ll take care of him, if anything happens.
And Bruce, taken aback his steel-eyed vehemence, had said, Of course. The alternative had never even entered his mind. Now, as he listened to the boy’s chatter, he felt anew the rightness of his own decision.
Grayson had gone back to beaming. “I wish we could stay a bit longer in Gotham, but I think we’re packing up by Wednesday. Usually there’s at least one free day when we can go exploring in the city, but I don’t think we’ll have the chance this time. Will you come see the rest of our shows, Batman?”
“I did see a bit of tonight’s. You were excellent. Your parents taught you well.”
“We’re the best. Everybody says.” Grayson put his chin in his hands and looked down at his own swinging feet. Wistfully, he added, “But you know, you were more amazing. You saved them, and I couldn’t have done that. I wish I could do what you did.”
Someone appeared at the entrance of the tent and pushed the flap aside. Bruce looked up to see Dick watching them, one hand on his hip. The wistful expression on his face was a mirror image of Grayson’s.
Dick said something to the boy in the same foreign language he'd spoken earlier, and Grayson jumped to his feet in surprise. They exchanged a few quick words, and then the boy waved to Bruce.
“I gotta go, Batman. But thank you!” And then he darted out of the tent.
The elephant moved her trunk to Bruce’s head, and the snuffly end of it prodded curiously at the ears of his cowl. Bruce scrambled upright before she could steal what was left of his dignity.
“I see you've met Zitka,” said Dick, approaching with a smile on his face.
“I would like to un-meet Zitka. She doesn’t like me.”
Dick laughed and ran his hand down the length of her trunk, while Bruce dusted himself off. Then he leaned his head through the bars of the cage and gave the elephant a kiss on her forehead.
Bruce hummed. “Unhygienic.”
“You can’t get cooties from elephants, B. Everyone knows that.”
Outside, they watched Grayson’s parents emerge from the medical tent. Mary was using crutches, and John was wrapped in bandages and moving gingerly, but that didn’t stop them from gathering up their son in a hug when he ran at them.
Bruce heard Dick sniff. When he glanced over, Dick was pressing a closed fist to his mouth and looking like he was on the verge of bursting into tears.
“Sorry,” Dick chokes out thickly. “I’m just.” There was a pained expression on his face as he took in the tableau before him. His younger self was chattering a mile a minute to his parents, arms flinging wide to illustrate his point. Mary ran her hand through her son’s hair. Then Grayson performed a backflip, from a standing start, just for the joy of it. His father tossed his stuffed elephant toy to him and he caught it with a laugh.
Dick covered his mouth to muffle a sob.
“I thought you’d be happier,” said Bruce quietly. If those were his parents, saved at the last minute from certain death, he’d be thrilled. Ecstatic. Over the fucking moon.
“I am, I swear.” Dick watched his younger self with a strange expression on his face. Then his expression flickered and he looked down at his feet. “Still, I can’t help crying for the person that boy will never be. The one who built his entire life around you. And I can’t help crying for the person that I could have been. The happy circus boy who could’ve grown up with his parents.” He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I don’t know whether I’m happy or sad. It feels like I’m ping-ponging between the two. Delirious joy and absolute devastation. It’s very weird. I don’t recommend it.”
He dragged in a ragged breath. Squeezed his eyes shut. Silent tears ran down his face.
“You’re thinking too hard about this,” said Bruce. “We did a good thing today.”
Dick gave him a ironic look. “You did, anyway.”
“We did. You’re the one who caught Zucco.” Dick was the whole reason why he’d figured out the connection in time. “We did something good, and isn’t that enough?”
For a long time, they watch the little family in silence. John and Mary, noticing them, wave and smile.
“They wanted to thank you in person, but I told them you were shy.”
“Shy.”
“Are you telling me you’d be up to two enthusiastic people telling you how much they appreciate you for the next…” he checked his watch, “forty five minutes?”
“No.”
“Exactly.” After a moment, Dick heaved a sigh, shuffled his feet, and turned to go. Bruce followed his lead. Together they walked back across the fairgrounds, back to where Bruce had stashed the Batmobile. The ride home was filled with a blessedly contemplative silence.
Dick broke it first.
“You know, seeing you now — the way you used to be, before you met me — made me realize something. You changed the entire course of my life. But I think… I think I changed yours, too, Bruce. Raising me gave you gray hairs, but it made you happier. More relaxed. Less shy. So what happens now?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happens to you without me there to change your life?”
Bruce snorted. “You’ve already changed my life.” At Robin’s startled look, he continued, “I wouldn’t have a Batmobile or a Batcave without you.”
Dick burst into laughter. “Don’t forget your Batarangs.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh! That reminds me. Still gotta show you how to aim those. There’s a trick to it.”
Bruce listened to him prattle on, but in his heart, he thought, Everything you’ve done is already burned into my heart.
He wasn’t going to become the Bruce that Dick knew, he was certain of that. He was on a different path now — one that didn’t include raising ten-year-old circus orphan. But in exchange, he’d gained the memory of giving young Grayson a happy life, and that was going to stay with him forever. Just the fact of Dick being here had opened up possibilities to him that he would never have thought possible —a dream he’d given up after he and Khoa fell out.
A partner in fighting crime.
He’d never hoped for one. He’d never thought the universe would work like that. But maybe the universe was more mysterious and more generous than he’d first imagined.
So you see, Dick, he thought, meeting you already changed me, for good.
+++
On the day that Bruce was to have his interview with the Daily Planet journalist, he found Dick on the rooftop garden. Wayne Tower had been built to promote and encourage greenery, so the entire top of the skyscraper was carpeted with flowers, trees, and bushes.
There was nobody else there at this hour, so they had the whole place to themselves.
Bruce squinted against the bright sunlight as Dick turned to greet him.
“Sorry for such short notice,” Dick began, “but I don’t have much time left.”
“What do you mean by th—”
His outline wavered. Bruce automatically reached for him, and felt his fingers go through his arm on the first go. On the second go, he managed to grab something solid. Dick let out a shaky breath. They both stared down at his arm.
“This started happening last night,” said Dick, wiggling his fingers under the sunlight. The first two fingers went transparent even as he spoke. “My theory is that we’ve nudged the timeline so far off-track, there’s now no possibility for me to be here. Essentially, I’ve erased myself from this universe. So now it’s erasing me.”
“What’s going to happen to you?” Bruce’s rising panic felt fluttered under his ribs.
“My atoms will snap back to my original place, hopefully.” Dick gave him a crooked grin. “So let me say my piece before I go, okay?
“First, thank you for everything. You reminded me why we do this. Why I do this. I don’t know what’s going to happen in your future, not anymore. It’s all changed, now. But you don’t have to do it alone, okay? You will meet people who will take up your mission, who will fight by your side, who will be your family in every way that matters. All you have to do is let them in. Promise me you’ll do that?”
“Dick —” he says, but his voice breaks on the next word.
“No, don’t talk. For once, just listen to me. There’s no time. I owe you so much, Bruce. You took a chance on an orphan and you taught me so much, and I—” He swallowed. “We didn’t always get along, or like each other. And we’ve had some truly epic fights. But I still wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
Bruce’s next words come without any conscious thought from him — a long-held suspicion finally given shape and form. “Your Bruce is dead, isn’t he.”
“I — what? How did you know?” His eyes go wide.
“Why else would you be wearing the cowl?” He knew he was right when Dick blinked hard and looked away. “I saw the way you looked at John and Mary Grayson, and I realized. That’s how you look at me, sometimes. Like you’re seeing someone dead come back to life.”
“Don’t overthink this, B,” Dick warned quickly. “Your future won’t look like that anymore, trust me.”
“I know. And I’m not afraid of death. But seeing the way you work? I think he’d be proud of you.”
“Stop it, you’re going to make me cry and I have no time for that. Listen. You have in you the ability to make someone happy, okay? One day you’ll find people who’ll love you more than life itself, I promise.”
His outline grew thin again, transparent and see-through.
“But always remember: I loved you first.” Dick went up on his toes and kissed him on the forehead. When he drew back, he laughed at the expression on Bruce’s face. “Don’t look at me like that, this is the only time I can get away with saying the L-word to you. I’ll never have the chance again. So: I love you, Bruce. Don’t be sad, okay?”
He leaned in and whispered something into Bruce’s ear.
And then he was gone.
A shocked tear slid down Bruce’s face. His hand plunged through empty air as Dick dissolved before his eyes.
+++ EPILOGUE +++
Four years later, he’s in the middle of testing the Batmobile’s newest engine when it suddenly stalls out in Crime Alley. Steam boils out of the front hatch. Bruce gets out with a sigh, checks under the front hood, then looks up the closest auto-repair shop. There’s nothing for it. He’ll have to fix it right here, out in the open.
Sometimes, these things happen. He sweeps away to pick up the replacement part for his car.
When he returns, he finds a small boy jacking his tires. In the forty minutes while he was gone, the boy has already removed one tire. He’s now diligently working on the second.
The boy is on the small side, eleven or twelve years old at most. His clothes look threadbare and his sneakers are scuffed and stained. He’s got thin, ungainly limbs, but very strong fingers.
Silently, Bruce moves closer and perches on the elongated hood of the Batmobile to watch him work. He’s impressed. Stealing the tires off the most famous car in Gotham takes some kind of guts. Even career criminals would think twice. A soft chuckle escapes him.
The boy spins around at the sound and jerks to his feet in alarm. The loose wheel in his hands hits the ground with a heavy thump. His throat bobs. Then he hefts the tire iron in both hands and takes a defensive stance.
“I’m going to need you to put the tires back,” Bruce says calmly.
The boy flinches back automatically as Bruce stands to his full height. But the fire in his eyes doesn’t dim. If anything, it burns even brighter than before. Despite his fear, he doesn’t back down.
“Look, I’m just trying to make a buck here. What’s it to you, huh?”
“It’s my car,” Bruce points out.
“Maybe you shouldn’t’a parked it in Crime Alley, then,” he sneers. Then he hurls the tire iron at Bruce.
Bruce catches it in a firm grip and tosses it aside. By the time the iron hits the ground, the boy is already swiftly scrambling away.
“Wait,” Bruce calls after him. Slowly, gradually, a long-buried memory begins to surface. “…Jason Todd?”
Halfway down the alley, the boy spins around and freezes in place, panting. His eyes are wide. This is clearly the last thing he expected. “H-How do you know my name?”
For the first time in years, Bruce feels his heart lift. A smile tugs, unbidden, at the corners of his mouth. “A little Robin once told me so.”
Notes:
Now with fabulous Cover Art by TheyReapWhatWeSow that captures the essence of the fic beautifully! It is gorgeous. Please gaze at it with me 💛
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