Chapter Text
Barbara was fretting over the saltwater in Dick’s lungs—and the concomitant cough, which likewise had yet to go away. Dick was fretting over the oxidation fuming over, blackening, her silverware.
They would both deal.
But right now it was Dick whose fingers were tremoring wildly, hitting against one another as he cleaned her silverware, Alfred methodology, stooped over her topmount sink. He needed to calm down. It was safe to calm down; was incumbent upon him, even. Bruce was back, and alive, and early at dawn the imposter had been defeated, brought low, brought into the sunlight. And Bruce had just. Let him go.
Three hours ago Dick had climbed through Barbara’s window with a translucent plastic bag, two white styrofoam boxes: Vietnamese. Half-drowned, with a persistent saltwater cough. There was still water in his ears. He would’ve sworn there was. You want to prove yourself, fledgling. You want to take me down and be the big man. Defeat me and make yourself the equal of your mentor. That would have impressed him, wouldn’t it? Defeating the man who bested Batman. Such a child! In the fridge was a keylime pie, Barbara had said, smiling softly, beautiful, so beautiful, holding Dick’s knee, where it bent by the windowsill. Go get it.
Now Dick’s hands were dunking under the hot water, baking soda, and salt again. It was bubbling, thin sheer white barely-foam obscuring the red bruises on Dick’s busted knuckles. Barbara had cut two slices. So on the table Dick’s sat untouched still, on the chipped deep-green faïence, and Barbara’s: precisely on its side, tipped that it might facilitate her bisection of the graham-cracker crust from the custard with her tarnished, black fork. I can handle that, he said, wild loop-dee-loop heartbeat strangling him. Handle what? she asked. That. He pointed.
So here they were. “The interstate home is going to be hell right about now,” she said, dinging her nail against the crystal lip of her waterglass, and looking up coyly. “You should probably stay the night.” This was a very nice offer. One Dick wanted badly to take.
Dick tore his hands out of the water and turned around to look at her for the first time since he had lurched toward the sink with her full silverware set in the wood and velvet box, wild. Her glasses were the color of sea kelp. It was half-past five, golden hour, the sun that burst through the open white waffle curtains hitting her face, the freckles and her shiny lenses, her light-brown eyes, itsy-bitsy pupils. She looked so beautiful. She was so beautiful. And in front of her Dick felt like a faulty, rusted-out tin robot, fingers wet and spasming against his thighs. Dick told her the truth.
He wasn’t going home.
“Oh, you’re not,” she asked, with an arch of the thin pale brow, the preliminary makings of a sly smile.
There was a long, taut silence.
“I’m going to the Manor.”
His voice came as a dark rasp.
“I see,” she said, a second off-beat. Her face had gone still. “And you’re just here to put it off.”
Dick braced his hands behind him against her countertop, her wooden cupboards. His raw knuckles sung, stinging, with the clenching curl-motion. “Alfred quit, you know,” he said, too loudly, abruptly, and the way it hit the charged air you would almost think he was changing the subject.
“I know,” she said patiently.
“And Robin has to—”
“I know.”
“And B—” Dick swallowed. His heartbeat was thick, dull, and hooping, something wild, something awful, at his temples and inside his throat, constricting his ability to get anything out. It was like there were ice cubes blocking his pharynx, pulsing, bulging with every heartbeat. He wasn't sure about the exact composition of it. It wasn’t all anger. It couldn’t be. “There was a second there where I thought—”
You killed him! You killed the Batman! There is only one true Batman and I am the survivor, I am the victor, and that counts for everything. Never! You could never be Batman!
But Bruce was fine. In the end calculation.
But it had been more than just a second.
The heir to the throne and the slighted prince! We fall together!
Barbara wrapped up the rest in aluminum foil.
-
Not exactly, hammerhead.
-
Tim was still there when Dick arrived. Had been anxiously waiting, to be relieved of his duty, the big Vigil, even if he wouldn’t admit that. Dick could tell. When his gaze landed on Dick, the fourteen-year-old smiled so big that Dick could physically feel his eyes have to re-focus to keep looking Tim in the face. Dick clapped him on the shoulder, squeezed his fingers into Tim’s acromial angle like an easter basket handle. “Been holding down the fort?”
Tim rocked forward on his feet. “He’ll be so excited you’re here.”
“Well,” Dick said. He wasn’t so sure about that. He made himself unpry his fingers, made himself slip another step down the stairs, past Tim, then another and another and another, and turned so that they were still looking at each other but Tim was higher than him now. Dick gazed up at him. There was some altercation with gravity and something heavier happening invisibly; it felt like there were wispy dark tendrils, suction-cup tentacles, tugging Dick’s body down that he would stumble backward into their embrace.
The Cave stairs were so steep they produced that effect, sometimes.
“You did good this morning, Robin.”
Better than Dick, certainly.
But for the first time, Tim faltered. His windbreaker rustled when he fidgeted, hands angling into his pockets. “It was my fault to begin with,” he mumbled. “I was the one in the first place who pushed for Jean Paul to be—”
At Dick’s dark look Tim’s mouth fell shut. “Don’t.”
Tim swallowed.
Okay, the kid mouthed tremulously, eyes big and bright and Goddamnit wet. Dick was the worst.
“Don’t do that.” Dick pushed on anyway. “Don’t blame yourself. You did good tonight. You’re alive, I’m alive. Bruce is alive. And the bad guys are,” Dick splayed out his hand, “down for the count.” For good measure Dick smacked a palm against Tim’s ribcage playfully, and Tim let out a hysterical giggle, curling in on himself where he was hit. “You did us all proud. Now get out of here and get some sleep, all right?”
Tim stood there a second longer; old red windbreaker, black backpack whose straps he was pulling on. “If that’s an order,” he allowed at last, and Dick said indulgent and solemn, “It is,” and Tim said reluctantly, “Dick?” and Dick said, “I’ll see you,” and Tim looked at him for a long time, and nodded sharply, and said, “Yeah.”
Which left Dick alone. The heels of his feet in midair, off the steep, jagged stone step his toes were on. Dick cracked his neck and rolled onto his tiptoes. Bruce was down there, listening, no doubt, his fist probably pushing against his prickly cheek as he reviewed footage, and most of all, he was not dead. Dick liked that. Bruce was not a stack of sparkling gray ash whistling and pouring out the eyeholes in the cowl, not dug up from the tomb. Bruce was down there in the Cave, eavesdropping on Dick and Tim from the guts of the shadows and probably still not shaved; Bruce was alive. Dick should be grateful for that. Dick was grateful for that.
But Dick had also been wrong about all of this, whatever it was, in the first place. So wrong it scrambled everything. Because the Promise had not come, and left his bones. Because Bruce had been crumbling, black-out collapsing, crashing down stairs, falling to pieces, and he quietly let Tim’s father’s doctor gill him to sleep with elephant sedatives. Bruce’s spine split apart over Bane’s knee, and Dick found out, 10 weeks later, from Oracle. Bruce had needed an understudy—and he had picked a schizophrenic college kid he and Alfred had scooped out of obscurity amongst Swiss snow and mountain rocks, over Dick.
It was a scale, a vehemence and unmistakability of rejection, of hateful disappointment and scorn, that even Dick who knew him so well, thought he knew him so well, could never even have conceived.
“I met,” called Dick at last, still swaying, backwards on the stairs, with his eyes screwed shut, “Harold.”
“I heard.” Bruce, from somewhere down below, stopped speaking. Dick felt his body gravitating toward where it had just come from. It was pathetic even now how much the sound alone of Bruce’s voice made Dick feel like, for a second, everything was rinsed-off, hopeful, and going to be all right. “He is very helpful. Did you like him.”
Dick opened his eyes.
“Yeah,” he admitted quietly.
He turned and made his way down the rest of the stairs. Bruce stood from the chair to meet him, the cowl pooling around his scratched neck. Black cape veining out among the stalagmites. Out to Dick Bruce held a thin dark green bar. Then Bruce splayed out his fingers, revealing there were actually two. Dick glanced between the offering and Bruce, and didn’t take it. “He liked you very much,” Bruce hushed. “He communicated that he wanted you to have these.”
“His…oh, his almond-fudge bars?” Dick laughed softly, and refused to let it turn into a cough. His chest ached; it was the smothered cough, and how touching the gesture was. Harold was a sweetheart. But it was also Bruce, Bruce there, right there, Bruce alive, Bruce who had at last revealed the true terms of whatever they had had: that he didn’t think Dick was good enough, was anywhere near, that anyone, even a hallucinating psychopath, deserved it more. Dick’s tongue felt like it weighed 200 million sour tons in his mouth. “How’d you even find him?”
Bruce’s crepe-paper face tightened, purse-seine wrinkles closing round the deep green-blue bruises under his eyes. “The Penguin,” he said, and Dick gently took and slipped the bars into the ripped mesh holder in his backpack, and Bruce removed the cowl fully. “Dick…”
“Well, besides Tim he’s about the best new addition to personnel—”
“I made a mistake.”
If Dick had still been going down the stairs, he would have tripped. He hadn’t expected Bruce to acknowledge making a mistake at all. Much less so bluntly.
As it was all he could do was stand stock-still, tensed, and pursue, not desperately, but as if he didn’t want it at all, this seemed-to-be-prey that had been laid at his feet, trying not to want, to expect, anything too much, trying to just be honest and gentle-touched, a confidant, a partner, even if now he knew, knew for certain, for good, that Bruce had never and would certainly now never, ever—: “With?”
“With Azrael.” Dick’s throat closed. Bruce shook his head, tight and furious. “With—chasing Shondra and leaving Gotham in his hands. It was a mistake. He was—”
Bruce broke off, wincing. The silence tore open. And Dick should have left it open.
“A violent lunatic,” Dick supplied for him instead.
It came out, humiliatingly, louder, faster, harsher than Dick intended, which he regretted, but the trajectory he couldn’t change, helpless to the way his voice came and kept coming, to the way it scraped toward ragged, wild, shrill, lower, unter—
“—who you just let go free this morning. Bruce, I know you must have had a reason, a good reason. But why would you choose him? And why would you just let him go? He could kill someone. Hell, he already got two people killed. He almost killed you! And what, you just… forgive him?”
Bruce turned abruptly, silhouetted by the white computerglow.
The light obscured the furrowing of his brow as he thought, staring down at the cowl in his hands.
“Yes.” Bruce said it haltingly—almost dreamily. “I suppose I do.”
Dick jerked like he had been struck, his face flooding with burning heat—now Dick was being scorned for not being compassionate or forgiving enough for the man who wrested Bruce’s mantle from him? another inadequacy, laid bare so obviously, so fresh after this last wound?—but Bruce intercepted him before he could pull away. Dick’s mouth went dry when hands wrapped around his own, black fingers scraping Dick’s calloused skin, then Dick’s pulsepoint. He swallowed, looking up at Bruce through his bangs, and all at once he felt like a mugger in an alley, caught frozen, redhanded, in the beam of a policeman’s flashlight.
Then Bruce’s hands dropped away, leaving Dick with the cowl.
It began to fall between the cracks of Dick’s slack, splayed-open fingers. The fall was barely stopped by the rough, sticky wraparound bandage on Dick’s hand.
The ragged tips of the cape pooled on Dick’s dirty sneakers like an oilspill.
“What is this?”
-
This time I’m making the right choice.
-
What a misfortune though you are made for fine and important works this unjust fate of yours always denies you encouragement and success; that base customs should block you, and pettiness and indifference. And how frightful the day when you yield (the day when you give up and yield) and you leave on foot for Susa, and you go to the monarch Artaxerxes, who graciously gives you a place in his court and offers you satrapies and such, and you accept with despair these things you do not want.
-
When Bruce at last took his leave, Dick stood in silence for a long time, glaring hot-eyed down at the cowl. Whose black left ear was shorter than the right. The end was missing. Valley had broken it off throwing Bruce into concrete. Dick covered the missing ear with his palm and turned his face up to the dripping stalactites, urging his furious, racing pulse to quiet down. But it wouldn’t.
Dick wouldn’t go as Batman. Not yet. Not tonight, when it was already almost midnight. Tonight it was all still too new, surreal, and sacred, freshly foisted-off onto him, the desperate second choice. The last choice. Tomorrow, and with Robin, Dick would go out as Batman, and he would not disgrace Bruce’s legacy. But tonight Dick couldn’t just let him walk free. There was simply no chance he was enfeebled and made harmless so easily, easily enough that he could just be forgiven so quickly. Dick believed in redemption; he did. But less than 24 hours ago, Valley had been the Batman, the Batman who drowned Dick and strangled Tim and almost killed Bruce. Less than 24 hours ago Dick had seen Bruce go down and thought that the heavens would pass away with a roar, and the elements would be dissolved with fire, and the earth and all the works that were on it, every last one, would be burned up. The world would have been over. But in the end calculation—
Well, in the end calculation, it was all right. But it wouldn’t have been. It might not have been.
So Dick slid off his bike, coughing down raggedly into the collar of his black sweatshirt, bringing it up to his lips. The ground underfoot was slushy black mud. The ride from the Cave to the East End had been a blur. There was a man in the next-over alley warming his hands by a fire in a trashcan, and there was trash on the ground, a shiny dark blue sodacan lapping at Dick’s ankle and rubber tire. It was quiet, except for the crackle of the close fire and the scattered slow late-night traffic.
It was dark. But when Dick leaned against the rough brick of the building across from his sights and looked up, Dick could see him through the closest window of the shelter.
The window was half-pushed-up and dirty, streaked but glossy, glass thick and laminated—the view into the room diffused, a smear of dirty red tile floors and green blankets and lamplight. Even indistinct, up there, the man who replaced Bruce, almost killed Bruce, was unmistakable. The blond head with the wiry glasses and the long, thick scabs—Dick felt a little sharp pleasure, smug satisfaction, doubled by the black eye—the third wire bed on the left. Drooped over, arms wrapped around himself, the man actually did look pathetic, enfeebled, unthreatening after all. At least for now, until a mask on his face would re-activate the System, when the sharp teeth and flames and metal needleclaw nails would burst forth.
Dick couldn’t bring himself to feel pity. Only something duller, and crueller, and far more contemptuous.
But then, too, standing here, really here, now, in the cold on the street looking up through the window, Dick’s analytical side, and Dick’s intuitive side, didn’t shrill with alarm, either. Valley was a serious potential threat. All it would take for it to start all over again would be a slip of fabric, with holes for eyes. Why had Dick come? To do the neutralizing himself? To throttle him till his bulging eyes burst out his wire glasses? Put the fear of God into him?
What, you just…forgive him?
Yes. I suppose I do.
One of the other men opened the window wider, and leaned outside to drop a cigarette stub, still smoldering, down to the sidewalk. If someone were walking underneath at that moment, it could have fallen on their head, a little girl’s braided scalp, a mechanic on his way home’s oil-smudged skull, and burned a hot orange burnhole into their head. And the man just didn’t get it, didn’t care. And there were three million more just like him, in Gotham alone. And there was Valley, no, Azrael, just like him, or maybe not like him, even worse, not even indifferent, desirous of inflicting pain and terror. When the man closed the window, Dick got a glimpse of something colored and thin wrapped around his cracked, peeling palm: The rosary was a shiny white string with dark blue plastic beads.
Yes, I suppose I do.
“No more beds tonight,” said the man by the fire near Dick loudly, interrupting Dick’s thoughts. Dick glanced at him, startled, freezing hands digging into his hoodie pockets to escape the bitter cold, and ball into fists. “Or so they said to the last several who tottered up. Not that one must feel obliged to enter into such a place in any case. That place has rules, you know, cruel ones, cruel and insipid ones, that hot insistent word sobriety ever spoken, those cold words yours or mine never spoken. You’re most welcome to stay the night with me here, lovely boy. Here where there are no conditions.” He kindly handed Dick a newspaper, which Dick accepted with ginger, cold fingers; the man had a Gazette draped over his legs, like a Hoover blanket. “I shall protect thee.”
Dick glanced up at the window again; with the window down the whole scene was translucent and smudgy, but the impression was that someone was pulling a lampstring by the window. At last it went dark inside. Dick could still rip Valley’s palatine bone out of his face like he planned. The dark, the other people, the pathetic scared put-upon posture and scabs, they needn’t stop him.
Yes, I suppose I do.
Dick shut his eyes tightly. Bruce just hadn’t been right to forgive him, to set him free: Of that Dick was sure. But the premises Bruce had used to get there to that conclusion (enfeebled—not a danger right now), they weren’t…they didn’t here and now seem…wrong. Valley wasn’t an active, current threat, not like this. Irrespective Dick wanted to kill him a little. Yes, Dick supposed he did. But what he wanted didn’t matter that way.
Yes. I suppose I do.
It never seemed to matter that way.
An unavoidable, painful paroxysm of coughing sprung up in Dick’s throat, wracking his body. Dick couldn’t taste salt in the back of his mouth. But his brain kept telling him his mouth was full of bubbles and the Atlantic. When he stopped, he tried to hand the newspaper back to the man, whose nose crinkled and who politely refused. Dick smiled apologetic, helpless, and rabid, and obeyed the gestures that told him to feed the paper into the fire, which leapt up a little, in both heat and light. “Oughtn’t Batman be the one protecting thee?”
“Faugh,” scoffed the man. “Batman. Batman, I could tell you many-a-thing about Batman. I was formerly a psychologist. The world’s very worst psychologist, but one, yes, certifiably, nevertheless. Batman, what do you know about Batman? Could you get a message to Batman? I, and I remind you I was a licensed clinical psychologist, have been meaning to try to get this list of diagnosticals to a Mr. Bat Man, for four years now. Unfortunately, I have never come across him. And almost certainly never will.” He looked at Dick, and squinted, appraising him with a legitimately penetrating gaze. “...Well, could you?”
“I could try,” Dick indulged, drooping at last and sinking down to pull his knees up to his chest in front of the trashcan. His voice was raspy and raw. The air from the fire was hot on his face. “You’ve been very hospitable to me.”
“Oh yes, well, in the ancient Near East hospitality was a most important value.” The man babbled as he fumbled around his belongings, the occasional ding of empty or wet glass bottles and rustling paper. “Although,” and these words were tossed over his shoulder, “I must admit, that is not wherefrom my values are conducted to me—ah!” He thrust a scrap up in the air triumphantly and grinned at Dick, to whom he most gingerly transmitted the document, a folded-up purple slip of torn construction paper. “I would be most in your debt if you were to deliver this to Batman. Ideally the old one. The new metal one with the claws, well, he frightens me. And arouses, I admit. But mostly frightens. You may read it.”
Dick glanced up at the man skeptically before unfolding the paper. The firelight turned the man’s red-flushed skin and strawberry nose the color of a lemon wedge, shadowing the hollows of his cheeks and, after several still seconds where the grass needles and newspaper burning in the trashcan crackling was the only sound, the dimples that suddenly appeared there, too, as Dick read the note under the man’s expectant watch. Dick smiled faintly down at the paper, which he refolded and tucked into his sleeve. “I’ll try to get this to him,” he promised the man quietly as he stood, adding: “The old one.”
The man’s eyes sparkled. “Thank you.”
Dick paused for a second then dug into his jeans pocket for his wallet. Inside was an expired credit card, his very nearly expired New Jersey drivers license, a 2x3 photo of Kory from their first year together, and $40 cash, in four torn, washed-out tens. These tens along with Harold’s bars from Dick’s backpack the man accepted thoughtfully. “I shall spend this on drink,” promised the man, “posthaste.”
Dick half-smiled helplessly, charmed. “Take care of yourself,” he murmured and pressed a quick kiss to the man’s wrinkly forehead as he stood. “Ah, all this for an old nichts?” blushed the man.
-
Your soul seeks other things, weeps for other things; the praise of the people and the Sophists; the hard-won, invaluable Well Done; the Agora, the Theater, and the Laurels. For how can Artaxerxes give you these?
-
I handled it all wrong. But that’s the way it always is, isn’t it?
I don’t know what you mean. The way what always is?
The landline cord was stretched taut from Dick’s kitchen counter all the way around the bend of the door to Dick’s bathroom. In which Dick was scrubbing out on his knees the bloodstains in his mint-green acrylic bathtub, the phone pressed between his bare shoulder and his ear, and scoffing in disbelief. The scoff pulled at his wrapped-up oblique—late-night scimitar to the side. “You shouldn’t even be entertaining his calls.”
“I don’t recall asking you what I should be doing.”
“Right,” said Dick, hands hot with bleach. “I only seem to remember you telling me that I should go play house with the man who tried to kill us last year.”
“Not playing house. Evaluating. He asked for you, in particular. But if you’re tied up in a previous engagement, then I suppose Tim would suffice.”
Eyes flaring wide, Dick stopped, knees tensing on the white tile. “Barbara—”
“Don’t use that tone with me, former boy wonder.”
“He strangled Tim in midair, Babs,” Dick spat, lurching to his feet and snapping the plastic white showercurtain closed so he could walk back into the kitchen. “He stole Batman. He almost killed Bruce. He was so detached from reality he didn’t even think he was as good as Bruce; he thought he was better? And you would send a fourteen-year-old—?”
“He’s repentant, and docile as a little puppy these days, Bruce says. So long as he’s not wearing the you-know-what.”
“No, I don’t know what. And I don’t care. My answer is no. Goodbye, Barbara.” Dick stabbed the phone back onto the receiver. And shut his eyes. And picked it up, and re-dialed, and leaned his back against the wall as it rung. In purified form, the things that punk kid’s name being brought up could get Dick to do, fuck, Goddamn.
-
Again Azrael charged him, and missed. Dick could have made quick work of him like this. But this was an evaluation. So instead of winning, Dick was only. Evaluating. Dick blocked a (good) high kick with a raised gauntlet, and Azrael let out a wrangled grunt-scream of frustration. “Music to my ears,” Dick laughed for the first time all day, light and high, until his skull was suddenly cracking against the ground and there were 250 pounds of ex-graduate student in sweated-through 600-year-old golden armor crushing him down to the soft hot grass and dandelions. Furiously, Dick pushed him off and jumped into the air, only to be followed up—and also down. Dick wasn’t evaluating anymore. He spun a high kick to Azrael’s neck and traced the 90-degree, shutter-kneed collapse with his eyes.
The till-then constant whispers of their audience of Valley’s friends, Lilhy and the familiar Brian Bryan, came to an abrupt stop.
“...Nightwing?”
“He’s fine,” assured Dick over his shoulder.
“Of course he is,” said Lilhy. “He’s the Azrael.”
Dick toed the Azrael’s intercostals with the tip of his boot. At first nothing happened. The Azrael looked pathetic down there, lying supine. He really had been good, skilled. But not what he had been in Gotham. It was impossible to think of them having been so troubled by someone like this. So someone else, something else, the really talented part, must have been latent, or something, now. So Dick applied pressure harder. Then a brilliant red hand shot up and seized Dick’s ankle in a constrictor grip. So tight it turned numb.
Despite himself Dick smiled for a second, a sharp, surprised take of breath. A splinter of adrenaline, Dick’s most favorite feeling in the whole world. “There you are.”
Azrael’s hood obscured his white eyes. But the fingers slackened around Dick’s ankle. Dick kept his foot in place for several more seconds, then moved it, till it was over Azrael’s metal sternum.
“You had enough?” Dick asked him. “You got what you need?”
Azrael’s head inclined in a nod, and Dick slunk back several steps to let Azrael get to his feet in the grass and stand. There was amber pollen and dandelion fluff on the black of Dick’s own suit. Dick swiped at it. “For now,” Azrael said. “Tell me, Nightwing—what do you think of my performance?”
Dick looked up. It wasn’t coming off. And Dick’s skin was hot underneath the costume in the beating summer daylight. He could feel his hair sticking to the back of his neck. The bandages from last night’s blade wound sticky, pulsing. Although he wasn’t as poorly off as Azrael, fully cloaked in metal and dark red jacquard. Dick eyed him, and tried to be only analytical, unbiased; would the Azrael in front of him be able to fool anyone as Bruce for a night, much less six months? Would the Azrael in front of him have been able to dangled them off the Sprang and plunge both of them into Gotham Harbor? It was an obvious and deleterious downgrade, or maybe fall from grace. “You’re not bad,” Dick said at last, honestly. “No. You are good at fighting. But you’re not what you were when you were wearing the Bat—”
Azrael brought a finger to his mouth, shushing him. Which how dare he? Dick’s lips fell closed indignantly before he glanced back at Bryan and Lilhy, who didn’t know, watching the two of them anxiously from behind the hosereel. Dick’s eyes slit.
“You’re not what you were last year,” Dick concluded. He stripped off his top and ducked toward the hose; Lilhy stepped aside for him to access it, and turned it on for him. “Thanks,” he murmured to her as he washed off. “Can’t believe the heat today. You’d think it was—”
“Mr. Nightwing, if I understand you, Azrael is a highly trained martial artist but not superhuman—as he has been on occasion, correct?”
Dick frowned at Bryan’s question, glancing back at Azrael, who was watching him intently. “I don’t agree that he was ever super.” Dick gazed down at the deepening red mark around his own wet wrist, which would no doubt turn into a chromatic bruise by Friday, and then out at the crushed flowerbeds and ripped-up grass from their spar. He turned off the water. “But I saw him do stunts Olympic athletes wouldn’t dream of,” he admitted.
“Yes,” said Brian eagerly, wide-eyed. “I did, too, but only when he was activated by danger, or intense emotion.” He turned to Lilhy expectantly, but Lilhy was staring deeply at Dick, who quickly toweled off and shrugged his suittop back on. “Lilhy?” Her mouth parted.
“I thank you for your time, Nightwing.” Azrael loudly interrupted whatever she had seemed poised to say, striding forward with an outstretched hand. It glinted in the bright sunlight. Dick could see his reflection in the gauntlets. Grassstems stuck inside the filigree.
Dick stared at it for a second, and then took it. “Hey,” he said. “Was fun. But I’ve got chores back in Gotham.” Dick released Azrael’s hand, and stepped back.
Lilhy quickly appeared at his side. “If it is permitted, I would like to accompany you to your vehicle,” she said. When Dick nodded, she linked her arm with his as they wound back to the cobblestone driveway of Kinsolving’s would-have-been estate. She failed to unlink it when they stopped at his motorcycle. Instead, she drew closer, studying him carefully as he leaned against it. “Nightwing...May I ask a favor of you?”
“Name it.”
“Kiss me.”
Dick blinked. Lilhy was beautiful. And cunning. In a way that reminded him of Barbara. And she had just broken out of a cult. Cults made you feel less than human. Desperate to feel human. And when Dick thought of being human, he thought of little tokens like this. Thought of Roy, with strange rapt green eyes wide, giddy, even, kissing the inside of Dick’s knee, bringing himself over Dick’s body, in Dick’s memory a misty tan shadow faint like a rainbow in a fountain. He didn’t normally—but— “Well. Sure.”
The second it ended Dick pulled his helmet over his blushing face and kicked the kickstop. She reverently touched her mouth. She was smiling.
“See you.”
-
“Your verdict?”
Glancing up at the red light, glowing and lighting up the nearby green signs against the dimming sky, Dick removed his helmet and unwrapped a piece of Black Jack gum, popping it into his mouth. He winked at a police officer staring open-mouthed at Nightwing from the middle lane. “He’s no puppy. He’s a sweaty adult guy with a technoreel brain.”
“Don’t chew gum while you’re talking to me. On comms your cute face can’t get you out of things.” She scoffed harshly. Dick quickly got the gum out of his mouth and put the helmet on, smiling even though his face was warm. “You liked him? He impressed you?”
“It would be nice to have a redemption success story right about now, huh?” Dick paused, leaning back seriously. “I wish I could give you that. I don’t know, O. He was polite enough. Professional. He wasn’t trying to kill me this time. That’s about what I can say. That and…his friends seem nice.”
“Oh. Gosh. A polite young man. You know, I think I may have read about those.”
Dick leaned forward, revved his bike, and laughed.
He was sunburnt.
It was a mystery how it had happened, having kept the mask on every second he spent outside, before, amidst, and after the spar with Nightwing. The mask was a necessary condition for the evaluation. Without the full costume, he wasn’t Azrael. And even with the mask, now, it seemed he was less than what he had once been, or ought to have been. Or maybe not ought to have been. He didn’t want to have been it ever. But somehow to have mysteriously had his hands forcibly pried open, to have lost it now—
His eyes locked with his reflection in the mirror. The hot afternoon sunlight fell through the window blinds in bright slats. The slats of light made yellow stripes on his face. But the rest of his face was bright red, sunburnt, especially the highest pitches of his cheeks and his ears. His damp hair clung to the sides of his face, darkened by sweat.
He gripped the edges of the sink; his heart was still beating fast from the spar, the left-behind adrenaline fuzz of Azrael’s potential, Azrael’s skills in combat, Azrael’s somber thrill in fighting.
Jean Paul put his head down.
He suddenly didn’t want to look in the mirror anymore.
He stepped around the sweaty pile his costume made on the tile to pull up the blinds on the high window. He buried his chin in his arms on the windowsill and looked out onto the estate Bruce had intended for his Dr. Kinsolving. It was beautiful. Jean Paul felt maybe even more out of place here than in the Order, than in Bruce’s mansion. The best Jean Paul had slept anywhere since his father died in his apartment’s twin bed had been on a cot in Bruce’s Cave, whittled down to unconsciousness by the wild, full-body zeal of patrols three nights in a row. He bit the inside of his cheek hard; it bled. There was cold sweat against his neck. His fingertips felt cold and remorseful where the Batman suit’s claws had been. But he wasn’t there anymore. He wasn’t doing anything wrong anymore. He was sorry, sick with how sorry he was. But he wasn’t there. He was here. The brilliant emerald green tile in the bathroom, the garden with the pink and white flowers and the running water in the stone fountain, the pebbled driveway where Lilhy and Nightwing stood now, two dark slender figures in the mid-ground, close enough that Jean Paul could still see the brown tint their hair took on in the sunlight; that their mouths were moving as they spoke, though he could not hear what they were saying. Lilhy’s arm was looped with Nightwing’s as he leaned against his bike, their touching feet the vertex of a 15-degree angle between their faces. The sun was catching on the shiny magnolia leaves, rustling in the wind. There was a bumblebee bobbing by the glass, wings straining against the soft wind, faint hum. Jean Paul wanted to feel the warm air.
Jean Paul pushed up the window so it was with the blinds. The sun was baking hot on his face. “—a favor of you.”
“Name it.”
“Kiss me.”
“Well. Sure.”
Jean Paul slammed the window shut. The windowframe vibrated with the force of it. He stumbled back.
By the time he straightened up and re-dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans, his mask in a backpocket, his glasses, their visitor was long gone, and it was only the three of them again. Brian’s voice stopped short when Jean Paul drew into the drawing room. “Ah, Jean Paul, we were just discussing you.”
“Yes. You were.” Jean Paul gripped the door. “Lilhy, may I speak with you in private?”
Lilhy clasped her hands together. “What is it?” she asked, gesturing toward the gardens; Jean Paul followed, shutting the french doors behind them tightly so that Brian couldn’t hear. Through the glass panels he could see Brian’s curious face, although the man respectfully remained away from the window on the far couch.
Jean Paul’s heart was racing. Doing loops.
“I saw you. Earlier.”
Lilhy looked up at him.
Jean Paul’s face screwed up.
“With Nightwing. Kissing him.”
She pursed her lips. “This disturbs you?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. Yes. Yes. It isn’t right. He’s a stranger. He had no right. To kiss you. That way.”
“Jean Paul,” said Lilhy, pausing. “Neither you nor I have any idea of what’s right or wrong in these matters. Until a month ago, I never set foot outside the ice cathedral. And you were also denied a normal life.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with—”
“Listen to me,” she said. He did, falling silent and staring down at her, wide-eyed. Without the shadow her hood cast on her face her eyes looked pale blue, instead of shining, mysterious, and dark as they had in the stone halls when first they had met. “We are children, you and I. Children in the bodies of a man and a woman. Suddenly, circumstances force us to be something we are not—adults. It is natural that we are both confused.”
“I am not confused. It’s just that…kissing strangers isn’t… proper.”
“Jean Paul,” said Lilhy. “Do you want to kiss me?”
“Me?” he asked, genuinely startled. “...You?”
Lilhy’s brow furrowed, like that wasn’t the answer she had expected to hear. She opened her mouth to reply. For some reason Jean Paul felt like he had been ripped naked in a crowd of one-million spectators. All at once his stomach twisted, plunged, icy cold, sick, and crawling. He wanted to throw up. He turned around and ran. He only stopped running when he felt the reason for his hyperventilation transition, identifiably, from Lilhy to the exertion of running desperately through the trees. He collapsed behind a bush and raggedly pulled out Azrael’s mask, and dragged it over his head, desperate to be strong again.
-
“No negotiation: instead, the age-old ritual of carnage,” said LeHah, who gasped out a grunt when Azrael shifted from where he was thrown to the ground and raised himself onto his hands. He turned upside-down to kick his legs up high and strike hard at the thick neck of LeHah, who shuttered to the ground. Elbowing up, the demon vessel spat the green cape caught in his mouth out. “You have learned a new agility since we last met.”
“I have learned many things.” Azrael availed himself of a spear on the armour wall. “Agility is not one of them.”
“And death, someone has taught you this? No? My lesson to give, then.”
-
The day Bruce Wayne had wrested the mantle back from him, Jean Paul was led through tunnels, increasingly dark and narrow, until Jean Paul had in order to get through to shuck off his shoulderplates, then his boots, then his chest armor, gold and red and midnight blue, scrabbling through the dirty, depleting passage after Batman—the false Batman, the first Batman— and at last the long sharp ears prevented him from breaking off aboveground. So he ripped the cowl off, and stumbled out to the sunlit and perfect grounds of Wayne Manor, tears of rabid shame suddenly surging down his face as the System bled away, leaving him trembling, exposed, and wracking with sobs on his knees in front of Batman. Who helped him up. And forgave him. And said he would be free.
And Jean Paul staggered and ran away.
-
It’s time for both of us to leave the dark. You were wrong when you said you’re nothing. You just don’t know who you are—what you might become. But you can learn. It won’t be easy, and you might fail, but you’ve got to try.
Then…you…you forgive me?
-
Go now. And don’t ever look back. I wish you well.
-
Lilhy giggled as they pulled open the freezer doors of the ice-cream aisle. Jean Paul smiled into his collar. Brian had been waxing poetic about organic unsalted peanut butter that you had to stir in the bread row somewhere that might have been a million miles away when Lilhy had caught sight of the frozen aisle and begun wandering, with a hand outstretched toward the door. So Jean Paul had followed. “It’s like—” she said, and cut off, catching Jean Paul’s gaze in the reflective, frosty glass. His glasses fogged up. Her smile lessened.
“It is,” he said, nodding vigorously to show that he agreed. “Do you—?”
Lilhy’s eyes flicked back to the ice cream cartons. “I don’t know what they are.”
Jean Paul’s hand went to his jacket pocket. Inside, safe, he could feel it, was the white paper envelope full of cash. After Azrael had delivered the cure to the Clench that Brian had found in the smuggled Order parchments to Gotham, Batman had stared at him, closely and deeply. There had been a weariness to him, different from when Jean Paul had first met him, had first handled the mantle—a new, wild, creaking traction in his shoulders, an alive, desperate, deep, terrible look in his eyes. It was more than the Clench and Gotham. It was about Robin. Who was all right now. But who nearly wasn’t. Batman wasn’t Robin’s father. Batman was Robin’s mentor, like he was to Jean Paul. But for Robin Bruce cared more deeply than Jean Paul exactly knew how to characterize, and for Robin Nightwing cared so intensely that it almost felt inappropriate to intrude by even beholding it. And it was Robin who Jean Paul as Batman had wronged most of all.
It was difficult to come to grips with what he had done in the hazy, fiery white delirium of his months as Batman. He didn’t remember all of it. Maybe most of it. He remembered the early black suit and training and the haircut, the soft swoosh of hair between scissors; his new armor scraping, hot gemstone gold and brass sparks against dirty asphalt and cement curbs; scrambling after Catwoman through the January nighttime and the dark, slippery dreams he dreamt after that make him wake covered with racing sweat; Saint Dumas, glowing brilliant white, surrounded by white four-point stars, wracking Jean Paul’s brain with pain and orders; burning, singing, metal symbols into cowardly ribcages; the bursting underground tunnels; the power, the righteous fear, theirs, his own, the adrenaline —cold bricks and Robin interfering, wrapping green fingers round his wrists. He was sorry. He was so sorry. He wished he could take a rhodium bath, and acidburn off all of his—
“Vanilla bean!” said Brian, bumping Jean Paul’s hip hard with the metal cart. He jolted. “Oh, grab vanilla bean, there we are, Lilhy, my dear, that one. Good girl. Ah, how wonderful. Yes, and now we ought to get root beer to go with it—to christen our Jean Paul’s new home.”
“Old home,” corrected Jean Paul softly, hand wrapping around the envelope in his pocket once more. It was Bruce who had made it possible for him to get back the studio he had stayed in, only ten minutes from campus, before. Before his father fell to his knees on the doorstep, before Nomoz showed him the gold medallion and the System sunk fully its teeth that had been pressing into him his whole life at last into his brain, before Azrael wrapped his arms around him and swallowed him whole, like a blue whale. The lease had been paid for five years in advance. The table had been set with a large manila envelope with $500,000 in cash. Which Jean Paul had split among many small white paper envelopes, like the one in his jacket pocket right now.
“Root beer?” Lilhy’s eyes widened in concern, and she glanced worriedly at Jean Paul. “Brian, I thought that you were—”
“Non-alcoholic, my dear,” assured Brian.
“Oh.”
They checked out with a loaf of white bread, one jar of peanut butter and one of strawberry jam, a 12-pack of store-brand root beer, one carton of vanilla-bean ice cream, a box of almond-fudge KIND bars, and a single grapefruit. The cashier squinted between the conveyor belt and the three of them huddled closely together, Brian in his striped tracksuit, Lilhy in one of Jean Paul’s old sweaters and too-big blue jeans, and Jean Paul with taped-together glasses holding a single limp $100 bill awkwardly between his fingers.
“Did you all…find everything all right?”
“Right as rain!” said Brian, at the same time as Jean Paul fumbled with the bill and stammered, “Um.”
Lilhy said nothing at all. She was looking at the magazines. Brian followed Jean Paul’s gaze to her and promptly clipped with two fingers a copy of the National Enquirer, the title of which said BATMAN’S HOT & COLD GAY LOVER TELLS ALL! and laid it atop the single grapefruit. At Jean Paul’s look he tutted defensively. “A man has certain beliefs and theories. And frankly a man has eyes. Can you begrudge his pursuit of knowledge? Lilhy, dear, did you want one?”
Lilhy swallowed visibly and then pointed delicately toward a magazine with a golden-skinned redhead’s out-of-this-world streetlooks and where to find dupes! and then quickly at another tabloid and last at Vogue. Brian dutifully peeled them all down, then gestured Jean Paul with a flourish toward the cash register. “Gentlemen first. Us rogues and ladies: second,” he winked and linked arms with Lilhy.
“Um.” To the cashier Jean Paul held out the $100 bill. It flopped in half. “Here.”
She sneered.
“Do you know?” Brian whispers an inch from Jean Paul’s ear, squeezing Jean Paul’s shoulder tightly as they passed through the glass doors with paper bags. “I think the cashier was flirting with you!”
Jean Paul went pink.
-
From across the table Jean Paul watched raptly as Lilhy sipped at her root beer float, gingerly paging through one of her magazines, and invariably quickly backpedaling and paging back, totally engrossed, the blue plastic straw dropping out of the side of her mouth. Most of the ice cream had melted over the ice cubes in Jean Paul’s, barely touched. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Jean Paul fiddled with his straw.
From behind them on the lounge chair with his own magazine in the living area, Brian read: “‘Batman tops’? No, no, no, that’s not right at all!”
-
Afterward, when the cathedral, the Order, was collapsing, candle ice, stone rubble, and gemstone glass crashing into the snow and they were standing, barely afield, watching it—Lilhy turned to him. Her eyes were bright. Her hair was long. The longest, darkest thing in sight, among all the endless white and the blurring pale wind. She was clutching the venerable gold head of Saint Dumas to her stomach, the metal and rubies reflecting amber and glowing into her white t-shirt, speckled with falling snowflakes. “It’s like—” she said, and Jean Paul nodded vigorously, helplessly, his skin feeling hot in the snow. His hair cold where it whipped against his burning face.
“It is.”
Afterward, in Mexico, in Gotham City, in the asylum, after, after, after, Jean Paul thought about it all the time: that moment. Immediately afterward in Mexico City she cut her hair short, shorter even than his and Brian’s. It was beautiful on her. Brian oohed and ahhed over it. Jean Paul’s face burned over it. She had cut it herself. In the bathroom, leaving little needles of stray dark hair on the porcelain sink. It was even. The last person to cut Jean Paul’s hair had been Robin. That had not been even.
But she didn’t know about any of that. About Robin, about Harold and Nightwing and Alfred, about Batman. The two of them, Lily and Brian, they didn’t understand that Jean Paul could not just sneak into Arkham as Azrael for the Abbott; that he, he especially, had to seek permission first from Batman. They didn’t understand what it meant to promise Batman something. No one but you leaves Arkham. So Jean Paul went to Arkham for the Abbott, and he returned empty-handed. He couldn’t betray Batman. Not like that. But that meant betraying them. Or at least failing them.
“Your mission, Jean Paul. Was it a success? Did you bring me the person known as Charles?”
“No,” he confessed—and her face changed. And Jean Paul thought about her in the snow with the glowing reliquary, in the ice-cream aisle among the no-sugar-added fruit popsicles. It’s like—
“You decided not to? And who are you to be making decisions? I am the brains; you are the muscle. The muscles do what the brain commands. I hope we’re clear on this. I’ll call you when I have need of you.” When Lilhy clasped Luc’s wide tan hands, Jean Paul thought about her with her dark hair thrashing in the snowflakes and the crystals.
When she kissed Luc, his hands jingling among her platinum chain and freshwater pearls and the hollow of her throat, Jean Paul squeezed his eyes shut and turned away. It’s like—
-
Did you meet Luc?
Yes. Lilhy was…was…well, sort of—kissing him. Only not sort of. Really a lot. You know?
I do. I was young myself. Once. Difficult though that may be to believe. I will confess my greatest fear to you, lad. It’s this. Lil is no longer interested in dismantling the Order. Rather, she seems to be rebuilding it. And I fear Luc might be part of that.
But well, Brian, you’re a psychiatrist. You know about people and…kissing…and…are they together?
…I’m sorry, Jean Paul.
-
“I thought you might have something for me to do.”
“Why would you think that?”
Jean Paul floundered. The metal accoutrements of his four-fingered gloves clicked as he knit, and unknit, them together nervously. Inside the half-moon platform before the enormous monitor were the Batman, Bruce, and Alfred, who stood slightly afield, white knuckles round the silver tray he held with a simple white enamel mug, from which a line of translucent steam was rising to the stalactites, the stalactites that were breaching, puncturing the negative space which had, once, not so long ago, been filled entirely by hallucinations, hallucinations Jean Paul knew now, white and radiant and crushing, of hot stars and Saint Dumas. But now there wasn’t any of that, nor was there any booming voice, nor any staticky wet-hot agony in his eardrums.
There were just the dark wet stalactites. And under them Alfred and Batman. Bruce. Whose ears alone seemed two meters long, basked in the glow from the computer screen.
Because the platform was elevated Jean Paul had to look up at Bruce, who sat upon the chair up the stairs before the monitor like it was a kiseh, fingers draped off the ends of the chair’s arms like a painting, King Solomon in prison: pointing.
“You always seem so…busy,” Jean Paul said faintly. His ears burned. It sounded unimaginably silly as he said it out loud.
Even sillier when Batman did. “Busy,” he repeated. His voice was like rocks sloughing off a mountainside. “I take it your business with the Order is finished.”
Jean Paul removed his mask, and rent it between his hands. He wet his lips. Lilhy, with the golden head, her eyelashes crystalled with snow: It’s like—
“I guess it is. Sure.”
The silence hummed between them for what felt like hours. Throat thick, Jean Paul glanced up at Alfred, desperate to avail himself of whatever help the old man might provide. His knees almost knocked when the man took pity on him: “Perhaps you could tell us the details.”
Jean Paul eagerly shifted on his feet. “Well…as you know…we destroyed the Order’s home base. The ice cathedral. Then Brian said we should finish off the remnants. But something happened to Lilhy. She got—interested in money. She got bossy. Sort of nasty. And she met this guy, and they’re friendly,” he looked up to impress the seriousness of this upon them, “like serious. They’re boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Alfred’s mouth puckered. Like he regretted something. Or like he was mortified on someone’s behalf. “I see.”
“I decided not to stay. So I came here.” Jean Paul faltered, swallowing, looking up sincerely. “Because I didn’t know where else to go. I…I was hoping I could be useful.”
Batman rose. Like a black and gray Colossus. And gazed at him for a long time.
“Jean Paul,” he rumbled at last, slow, cold, and surgical, and not unkind, but not kind either. Jean Paul flinched. “I work alone, except for Robin. There’s just no place for another person in my operation. I’m sorry.”
But what about Harold? And Nightwing? And Oracle? And Alfred? And the Catwoman? And the Commissioner? Jean Paul stood there in silence for several moments more. “I understand,” he whispered instead, staring down at the ground.
“I’m very sorry,” reiterated Alfred wistfully. “I wish we had something for you to do.”
“I do.”
Alfred jolted violently. The contents of the mug sloshed out. Staining Alfred’s starched white cuffs. Which were cast in deep emerald light from the sigil, a jutting, green alien face. “Miss—!” Alfred glanced at Jean Paul. “Miss Oracle. You frightened me. I must request you refrain from—”
“You’re Oracle?” Jean Paul stepped up, wide-eyed. They had spoken before, more than a handful of times, but to see her…?
Only the face on the screen didn’t move. Its eyes were still, glowing white. “So I am, bright eyes. Now have you counted the cost of your desire, and asked the heart if it is willing?”
Jean Paul blinked, confused.
“What?”
“Do you want your task, or not?”
Then Jean Paul paused, and turned toward Batman and Alfred. He pointed to the monitor. “She’s inside there…?” Batman and Alfred slowly nodded. “Does she need help getting out?” Jean Paul asked urgently, taking another drastic step forward.
Alfred held out a palm to stop him, mouth puckering more, suddenly looking as if he had a migraine coming on. “No.” He rubbed his temple. “I don’t believe she does.”
“Inside,” said Oracle directly into the comm in Jean Paul’s ear, where no one else could hear; he stiffened, “but not that kind of inside. I’m as corporeal as you or Bruce. Now Bludhaven, wellness check, pollen and vampires. Possibly. You up for that sort of thing?” Jean Paul’s eyes widened.
Batman’s white eyes slit. “Oracle.”
The face on the computer screen flickered, and her voice returned to where Bruce and Alfred could hear, too. “Well?” Jean Paul nodded. Then realized she was only a voice, so he opened his mouth to answer. But she must have had cameras—but cameras there in the Cave? this most secure, sacred of all places? how?—because before he could speak, she did. “Excellent. And Boss, so great of you to spare one of the new cars.”
-
Hurtling down the dark, mostly desolate highway toward Bludhaven Jean Paul touched his earpiece tentatively. “Oracle? Me.”
In response her voice crackled at full-volume over the car speakers, sending a hum up Jean Paul’s throat. “I know.” She laughed softly, like it was silly how obvious it was, but it felt halfhearted and distracted, moreso than mean or judgemental, not that there was much of that in the first place. Still he swallowed, glancing at the coordinates on the blue screen in the dash that had been there since he awkwardly climbed in, glancing uncertainly over his shoulder at Batman in the Cave. He wished he could at least see her sigil here, like he could in the Cave. “My favorite avenging angel.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Jean Paul tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Why couldn’t you tell me the details around Bruce and Alfred? What’s happening in Bludhaven? And…vampires?”
Oracle was quiet for a moment; she had been typing intermittently before even when she wasn’t speaking, but the keyboard clack was gone now, too.
“Let’s say a rather private mutual friend of ours moved there recently.”
Mutual friend? Jean Paul felt a franticness rise in him at just how empty he was coming up for possibilities. Friends weren't really something that…he had. Well, Jean Paul had Brian…and Lilhy…and maybe Nomoz…and possibly because she was making it sound that way Oracle…and Batman was of course his mentor. That was the full breadth of his social world, able to be ticked off on the fingers of one hand. A mutual friend? Besides Batman, no one came to mind. Best to act like he knew what she meant. “...And this friend, they’re in danger?”
“Oh, perpetually, and enthusiastically.” He heard a smile in her voice, fleeting. “It’s not like I film him in the shower that much or catalogue every single last breath he takes. But we talk. I check in on his location on patrol, on occasion. Furnish information for his cases, like I do for you and the boss. The past two weeks he’s been working on this case with this murder, exsanguination-style, and this residue, made from these—drugs, from this biotech company, Centhyra. And last night, his tracker signal clipped off, at the coordinates I sent you. Which in itself. Isn’t so unusual. And his emergency beacon never activated. He doesn’t like having eyes from Gotham on him.”
“But,” began Jean Paul, brows furrowing, “then why do you still want me to—?”
“I just got this awful feeling,” said Oracle, “that he was planning on doing something stupid.”
-
Jean Paul had barely registered the electronic keypad beside the entry when the numbers gleamed white, chimed, and the small bars clicked open. “Thank you,” he told Oracle, wide-eyed, keeping his voice low, pianissimo, slipping inside. The ventilation system was exactly where Oracle’s schematics had indicated. Jean-Paul removed the grate. It exposed a narrow, dark-inside metal shaft that forced him to crawl, and he had to concentrate such that only the swooshy red jacquard and re-enforced padding of the costume brushed the sides, and not the wide, hard metal plates of his armor. Soundlessness was time-consuming, worse still because each pulse longer he lingered over any sheet of galvanized steel in the duct ultrified the chances, great already, the metal would creak. “Bright eyes?” said Oracle. Jean Paul dared not respond; someone was audibly below him in the hallway, the click-drag of loaferheels. He pressed his tongue up to the roof of his mouth. “Stay still and look pretty if you can hear me.” Jean Paul froze, holding his breath. Please don’t creak, he silently begged the metal. The crawlspace was midnightish, but he was poised exactly above a vent, through which he could watch the person—tan, dark-haired, labcoat, with poor posture and a drooped head, Jean Paul couldn’t help but imagine Brian noting with a click of the teeth—pass underneath the cool white halogen lights. “Good boy. You can move now,” there was a smile in her voice. Weirdly Jean Paul almost decompressed, like a released spring, at the sound of it. “Heat signatures are showing a bunch of them rushing down fast, underground down. Something’s happening. Signs and signals cut out down there. Dollars to donuts that’s where Nightwing is.”
Jean Paul stiffened. “Nightwing?” he repeated incredulously. That was who he was here for? Nightwing had moved to Bludhaven? Oracle considered Jean Paul a friend of hers in the same manner as Nightwing was a friend of hers, and moreover, she considered Jean Paul and Nightwing to be established friends in the same manner? Jean Paul almost felt lightheaded, touched. To learn he apparently had many more friends than he had thought…!
He only realized he had spoken out loud when the man passing in the hallway snapped his head toward the vents and went totally still, posture transmuting toto coelo. It was a young man. Someone was clapping and laughing: It was Oracle, Jean Paul understood dimly. The panic—caught!—had somehow not yet sunk in. On his hands and knees in the vent he was frozen, like Battus. For several heartbeats Jean Paul and the young man stared intensely at each other through the metal slats in perfect silence.
“I got the surveillance footage covered. Get down.”
Robotically Jean Paul removed the plated vent and dropped down to the linoleum in front of the man. His armor hit the edges of the vent on the way down, clinking, a hard, empty metallic resonant noise, like silverware cracking on the lip of a teacup.
Even as it was sinking in Jean Paul still almost didn’t recognize him—not until dark eyes flung closer to his in the hallway as Jean Paul was thrown vigorously against the wall, hard knuckles breaching the bevel hollow of his throat and thusly in preparation for the threat Jean Paul splayed his fingers and palm out, flat, against the reinforced wall, bracing for…?—but strangely his counterpart did not break forth, overwhelming in furious retaliation and resentment; in fact it seemed not to break forth at all, as if Azrael simply felt at no point he had been in any way provoked, was undisturbed. So it was Jean Paul whose occipital lobe cracked audibly against the wall, and post-flinch he carefully re-focused, blinking, his eyes on the person in front of him.
Nightwing was not now dressed like a shiny black and blue heal-all, nor even in a mask, but in rumpled clothes and a snow-white labcoat evidently too large for his frame. His tan skin was sallow, his pupils huge, shiny, black, and very dilated; a fresh candy-apple-color bruise ringing one eye. But his grip was very strong around Jean Paul’s collar. And also this: His hair was shorter. It had been as long as Lilhy’s had once been, looped back in a long sleek dark waterfall the last time Jean Paul had seen him; now it was shorn short, soft, messy brown-black ringlets that barely went to his eyebrows, and rung out in crescent wings at his nape. Without the mask he was strangely more, and not less, dangerous-looking and adrenaline-inducing. Jean Paul felt confusion.
“Azrael,” Nightwing hushed, “why the hell are you here?”
“Oracle said—” and just this was sufficient for Nightwing’s tremoring fingers to unclench around his collar. Jean Paul realized Nightwing had been holding him off the ground this whole time only when his bootsoles fell flat on the ground with a soft whoosh of displaced air and rubber on sealed concrete. “Oracle sent me. You vanished from her radar.”
“Her radar,” Nightwing scoffed without any real heat—he did not seem to have any such reserves. He was swaying where he stood. “That was intentional,” he remarked faintly, screwing his eyes shut as if to restabilize himself, back against the wall. “I needed to…” He staggered.
“Were you drugged?”
“Yes. No. Not with the…they just sedated...” Before Nightwing could fall, Jean Paul grabbed his elbow, and Nightwing jolted and his eyes flew open. He slapped Jean Paul’s hand away hard, scowling, and sedulous. “I got this,” he told Jean Paul.
“They’re coming back up from the basement,” warned Oracle, and Jean Paul’s hand flew up to his earpiece. Nightwing’s eyes—which were very large, dark, and clear, and also strangely arresting, all of this despite the apparent sedation—narrowed as they followed the motion.
Nightwing grabbed for it. “Give that to me.”
“Hey, pay attention to me here, choirboy: They’re on their way. You boys need to get fucking moving.” Pause. “Does he look jealous?”
Jean Paul hesitated, cupping the comm in his ear protectively to lower his voice. “...What would that look like?”
“Irritated, twitchy. Blushy.”
“Oh. Um, yes.”
“Perfect.”
“Azrael. Give it to me.”
“Don’t.”
“I can’t. She said no.”
“What?” Nightwing asked sharply.
“She said no, I can’t.”
“Why would she say that?”
“She just did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well,” said Jean Paul. “She did.” Footsteps thundered from around the bend of the corridor and Jean Paul didn’t wait. He snatched Nightwing’s wrist and began to sprint. Nightwing came along with minimal force. But Jean Paul wasn’t so sure that was a good sign.
-
It was in the car that Jean Paul noticed the dark red sluggishly blooming across the stolen labcoat. Nightwing’s head tipped back in the passenger seat. “O?”
Jean Paul felt his earpiece be remotely powered off: a cease to the till-then constant faint electronic hum in his ear. For a second he felt bereft. Then Oracle’s voice chimed out once more from the center console and speakers.
“You nearly gave us a scare there, beautiful.”
Nightwing’s dark, clear eyes flickered over to Jean Paul’s, scraping over Jean Paul’s exposed face—annd the red mask laid over his knee—and silently transmitted a look that said Jean Paul ought not say anything. Nightwing’s chest, and the blue bungee-corded stolen identification badge laying flat upon it, rose and fell gently. But he didn’t say anything for a long time, cheek pressed lazily, bonelessly to the leather.
Then slowly from the labcoat’s sidepocket he drew out his hand. His fingers were long and slender and honeycomb-color, contused green or deep pink at the knuckles. Off his pinkie finger dangled a delicately glinting metal chain with a flashdrive. Between his middle and index fingers was a sealed ampoule with lyophilized powder; it looked like confectioner’s sugar. The glass scintillated as the car screeched past a streetlight flickering on the street. Slowly Jean Paul realized Nightwing had begun to smile, faint but unmistakably there, unmistakably boyish and crooked, ultrified by the fact that his head was still dropped back—and for a second, in the sodium-vapor light, he looked like a mischievous little child, like Robin on the first night Azrael ever met him, like Robin when he had shown Jean Paul his haircut in a white plastic mirror and patchily smothered his wild giggles. Young. Very young. Nightwing was probably only Jean Paul’s age. Whatever that was. “I didn’t need rescuing,” he rasped at last, still smiling faintly, sharp and inexplicable. He had dimples, on either cheek. “Getting captured was part of the plan.” He swung the flashdrive on his finger, and caught it. “But,” he said, eyes locking with Jean Paul’s. “Thanks, anyway.”
“So you were captured,” Oracle interrupted.
“And sedated,” Jean Paul added hushedly, regaining his balance and glancing at the road briefly before shyly turning back to stare more out of the corner of his eye.
“Sedated?”
“Yes. In a planned manner.” Nightwing gingerly restored the items to his pocket and reached over to the console to stab into it, with confidence, albeit an uncharacteristic doubtlessly drug-induced undeftness of fingers, an address. When he was done he splayed his whole hand over the screen like a leisurely jungle cat, covering it. “Go there.”
“Where? Oh. I see . ” Oracle sounded like she was smiling. “Get him home safe, all right, bright eyes?”
“I praaaise the Pythia’s words,” Nightwing murmured dreamily, as if reciting something. “She has spoken well.” There was a small pause. “O?”
“Yes?”
“I…”
“What is it, honey?”
“Don’t tell him.”
When Barbara spoke again, it sounded like the smile was gone. She sounded let-down. “I won’t.”
“Thanks.” But before Nightwing had finished speaking, the line had been cut. Nightwing didn’t seem much to notice, bracing the heels of his palms over his face.
Jean Paul glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, and when they got there, illegally street-parked.
-
When Nightwing turned the lights on, Jean Paul’s eyes reflexively adjusted, and he quickly cast his gaze over the tiny studio, foggy glassblock wall to the north and smoky plaster drywall everywhere else, criss-cross wood floors interrupted only by the kitchen counters, the scratched white fridge, the rough-looking monoplegic cream-colored berber couch, and the mattress on the floor with unmade, but brilliantly white, sheets and blanket and no pillow. There were three neat and relatively high stacks of old variegated rainbow paperbacks on the ground and the counters were crowded with a variety of machines and parts—unsterile laboratory equipment and old computer parts books-on-a-bookshelved against a daunting stack of newspapers, four saran-wrapped and veiny cranberry muffins, a steel carafe, and what looked like a sparklingly new carburetor—and three large, colorful variety-pack boxes of tea. “Is this your safehouse?”
Nightwing glanced up at him.
“Something like that.”
Jean Paul inched closer to the fridge. Pinned to it with cheap magnets were many photos. There weren’t any of Bruce. Jean Paul looked. But there was one with Alfred and a little boy, and there was another of bare-faced Nightwing and a teenager with gapteeth and spiky hair who must have been Robin grinning at what looked like a hockey game. And most of them were of Nightwing and people whom Jean Paul did not recognize at all. There were sticker magnets with individual words, which someone had arranged to say:
super man ought two be my magic morning world dad chance enough meeting tomorrow !
And below this:
so to night far be distant & good night sweet friend so lie further off , lest I B over power -ed ?
“...This isn’t your safehouse,” Jean Paul realized, accused, really, softly, twisting his neck back around. “This is your home.”
“Safehouses are coming. They’re just…a work in progress.” Even as his voice hardened defensively, Nightwing winced. He carefully set the items from Centhurix on the counter and grabbed from a messy drawer an orange pill bottle, from which he shook out and palmed a handful of chalky white pills. He swug a drink of water from the sink to down them and then shrugged out of the lab coat then the stolen button-up. “I’m still getting set up here.”
Jean Paul removed one of the word magnets from the fridge at random. It said before. He thought about the Cave and Wayne Manor, where he had lived, an animal not yet, and truthfully never to be, adapted to its environment, slowly warping, beak molding, sharpening, dullening, changing, for several months in respectively catacombic and opulent conditions, hardwood and arches and inches-thick indian-blue carpets and twinklingly clean silverware and Géricaults and flatscreen-sized computers and a state-of-the-art training gallery and training and gymnastics facility and hundred-thousand-dollar microscopes and woolly brown bats with little fuzzy pink noses and shrill trilling caw-warbles all night long. This place with its dry fine air and grimy stove burners was much more like Jean Paul’s studio apartment in Gotham during graduate school, mildewy cut-pile carpet, late-night Anki, and wrist braces. And during that dreamlike, twilighty interlude after Dr. Orchid’s island, with Lilhy and Brian, with root beer floats in plastic cups and stir-peanut-butter sandwiches and the National Enquirer when Jean Paul for just a little while had no longer possessed Azrael inside him, had no longer been Azrael.
Jean Paul’s mouth suddenly tasted like rock salt.
He turned abruptly, just in time to catch Nightwing dropping a dark Gotham Knights jersey over his till-then bare chest. Which at some point since Jean Paul had been facing away from him, he had also taped with sticky, coarse-looking sugar-color bandages. Through which there was already dark red speckling breaking through. In the overhead apartmentlight and in what must have been now his own clothes which suited him much better, Nightwing simultaneously looked much more alive and hale, and also much more likely to collapse to the ground entirely into a pile of slender tan unconscious limbs, never to wake again. There were dark enormous ringpits around both of Nightwing’s eyes, not only the bruised one, and this was to say nothing of the translucenty sedation-glaze on his eyes themselves. Yet even now he was plugging, stabbing, the flashdrive from before into a sleek-looking black laptop by the sink. Jean Paul blinked. As if somehow activated by the smallest twitch of Jean Paul’s eyelids alone, Nightwing’s eyes jumped to his.
“Detective work,” Nightwing answered, as if he had already known Jean Paul had intended next to have asked him what are you doing.
Jean Paul’s next breath congealed in his throat at being preempted so quickly, and from the singular, disorienting, displaced-pressure-sensation-inducing attention being cast upon him. It wasn’t like Batman’s gaze. It was Batman’s gaze.
“Oh.”
They stood on opposite ends of the kitchen, Jean Paul still holding the magnet between his fingers. Slowly the realization came.
“You’re planning on going back.”
Nightwing paused typing. “Detective work,” he remarked quietly at Jean Paul’s words, chin tilting and eyes narrowing in appraisal, and Jean Paul wasn’t sure if it was praise or mockery but it made his cheeks burn all the same. “Yeah. To-morrow.” Nightwing checked the time on his phone by tapping the shattered screen and looked up wryly, the bottom of his jaw glowing white from the phone light, correcting: “To-night, I guess. They still have my suit there. Got to get that, and shut the rest of this thing the hell down.”
“Why not right now?”
“Cause they loaded me up with about 200 mcg of dexmedetomidine and I don’t know if my building super couldn’t beat my ass into next Tuesday right now,” he rasped intensely, and stabbed one final key hard into the keyboard without looking away from Jean Paul. Who said: “Oh.” At the same time that Nightwing added: “And I have work in a couple hours.”
Jean Paul instantly straightened up, interested. “You work?”
Nightwing hesitated.
“...Yes?”
Jean Paul lit up.
It was almost something Jean Paul hadn’t even considered. Bruce Wayne worked—primarily at least as far as Jean Paul knew across social engagements and quarterly board meetings, which meant his schedule was flexible around Batman. And now that he was thinking about it, Robin must have been in school, school for something, middle school, high school, who knew. But these were really the only such cases Jean Paul had to study. The past year—his father clawing at his door, Nomoz and the ice cathedral, the System, LeHah and Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, the Order, his baby brother wet with solutions, sticky with glass shards, dead—it had been all-consuming, unceasing. A blown-apart salt mandala, cyclone-speed.
There had been a time, back in graduate school, where COBOL and UNIX and mainframes still mattered, when he’d slink away from classes and chew cinnamon gum so the loud, empty wringing of his stomach would hurt less and go to the record store on 5th to pick through their clearance and think about what he’d buy when he was in a position to make some money. After graduating. But he wasn’t ever in a position to make money, exactly. There hadn’t ever been time for that. He was just a vessel for the Order, and then a pox, a plague-spirit and tarnish, upon Bruce Wayne’s mantle, and then an on-the-run traitor to the Order and a desperate sometimes-supplicant to his mentor, for resources, for guidance, for help, most of all for help.
Being with Lilhy and Brian…their rare joined trips to the grocery store or, early on, to clothing stores for Lilhy who had come away from the only life she’d ever known with not even her vetements, their walks in gardens, washing rainbow-unicorn coffee mugs in sinks…these had been flashes of normalcy that Jean Paul soaked up anxiously, even at the time. He and Lilhy would forever be bound by the Order, and what it had done to them. And Brian, precious sweet, clever, theatrical, well-intentioned Brian, had met Jean Paul at his very lowest, unwashed, burning, delirious, violent, shoeless, and hung on tightly, dearly. Always moving, being chased, being cornered, being taken. Fiery swords and desiccated heads and coarse rope nets and beasts and dead baby brothers in broken tubes. Their situation was different from other people’s.
His situation was different from other people’s. But somehow he had never supposed that there were people like Nightwing, whose situation was also different, but who nevertheless led normal lives half, no, most of their lives. The thought of it was more than intriguing, impossible, touching, it was addictive even; he found himself impossibly curious about it, like a clueless baby playing with sand for the first time unable to even conceive of how it could be slipping through its fingers.
“What’s it like?”
Nightwing blinked. “Working…at a bar?”
“Yes!” said Jean Paul excitedly, too loud, and too desperate, and promptly cringed at how awkward that must have sounded, and also at how it wasn’t exactly all he wanted to know. “Or. Not working. Or. Not just working. The other stuff, too. I mean, what do you do each…each…?”
“Each?”
“Day.” Jean Paul held his breath. “What do you do each day?” he asked more steadily, to compose himself, but then couldn’t help himself. “Or each week?”
“I—” Nightwing looked at him curiously. “Well. I…go grocery shopping? I guess I…do crosswords? I do the Gazette ’s crossword first thing when I wake up. Then I go to work and basically pour beers for off-duty cops, and listen to a lot of fake war stories and a lot of fake sob stories. And some really good ones, too, sometimes. And some real ones, sometimes. And…I do the LA Times crossword first thing when I get back home cause Oracle does that one during her nighttime business hours and I like to tease her about the clues. And I read a lot of long dumb random shit for cases, a lot. And a lot of it goes nowhere at all. And I do a lot of surveillance for cases. And some nights,” Nightwing’s nose crinkled. He tilted his head. And his voice gentled: “ Most nights,” he corrected softly, “I get to go out and bust some heads. Which I confess I like. I really, really do.” He hesitated, and then lowered the laptop screen, a 30-degree angle. “What about you?”
Jean Paul rent the before magnet in his hands. “It’s hard to say. Everything’s changed very quickly. It keeps changing.”
The last thing Jean Paul expected was for Nightwing to light up. Or—not light up. But laugh, short, hard, abrupt, and surprised. The sound wasn’t happy, exactly, but it was unmistakably sympathetic, and somehow it was delivered with a clean, unresentful, pure but sharp edge, as if that had unexpectedly struck a chord. Nightwing’s eyes crinkled, along with his nose, the dimples revealed in his cheeks again; the sight made something in Jean Paul’s stomach tug. “Mm,” Nightwing agreed at last. Jean Paul saw when he stuck his tongue against the inside of his left cheek; tracked the motion. “That’s the way it always seems to go.” He appraised Jean Paul, a finger-by-finger drum on the laptop. “...How are your friends?”
“Oh.” Jean Paul rubbed his gloved thumb over before and cast his gaze to the floor. “Well. The Order is destroyed. Brian is all right. Lilhy met someone.”
“Oh, mazel tov,” Nightwing congratulated softly, surprised, and Jean Paul quickly shuftied up with a morose look on his face. Nightwing winced. “Mazel lo tov?” he tried.
“I saw them kissing. Sort of a lot,” Jean Paul hung his head again. “They’re pretty much boyfriend and girlfriend now. And Brian thinks Lilhy is interested in remaking the Order. She’s different. It’s different. That’s why I came here, why Oracle…I didn’t know where else to go, or what to do; I didn’t have anything to do. And I wanted to be—I want to do something good, something useful. I think Azrael could protect people, not just avenge. I just couldn’t stay there and run errands anymore and get bossed around and…” he faltered, and quickly stuck the magnet back on the fridge. “I want to be free.” He bit his cheek. “I want to be useful.”
Nightwing shut the laptop the rest of the way, with, at the end, a small click.
At the sound Jean Paul looked up.
Nightwing gazed at him for a long time, a long time, like he was going back and forth on something.
At last he sighed, and dropped his spine against his counters, arching an eyebrow.
“...You any good at detective work?”
Jean Paul’s heart leapt. Was he inviting him to work with him on the case? “No. It’s what I’m weakest at by far,” he said eagerly, with honesty.
Suddenly Nightwing’s face resembled Alfred’s in the Cave. “I thought Robin said he gave you a crash-run way back when,” he said, dragging his hands through his hair.
Jean Paul’s stomach swooped in shame at the reminder. “I don’t remember very much from that time,” he admitted. “I remember that, though. That was before—” the hallucinations. “But I think Robin’s very…” he searched for the word, “intelligent. And clearsighted. Cerebral! The casework, and the clues, they all came very naturally to him. It doesn’t. Not to me.”
Jean Paul didn’t know exactly what he had said right. But he roved over what he had just said, combing over every word to try to figure out what it was because something just then had been exactly right, exactly perfect, because then it happened again, the twisting feeling in his stomach, when`Nightwing smiled luminously, slow.
-
“The good news is: It’s very learnable.” Jean Paul watched from where he was seated politely on the couch as Nightwing returned from the closet with a bundle and briefly scanned the stacks of paperbacks by the kitchen before zeroing in on one large book in the center, pulling it out. He dropped both the clothes and the book on Jean Paul’s lap. “Because two and two make…” He looked at Jean Paul expectantly, bouncing on his toes, looking very excited, exhilarated, as if the sedation was waning or whatever pills he had downed in the kitchen earlier were kicking in.
Jean Paul slowly straightened under the attention. “Four?”
“Four, and not…” Nightwing trailed off, eyeing him meaningfully, waiting for him to finish the thought.
“…Five?”
“Not sometimes, but all the time,” Nightwing corrected, slapping the cover of the book he had dropped on Jean Paul’s thigh hard with the open palm of his hand. Jean Paul jumped. Nightwing regarded him with a quick look of confusion and concern before the excitement carried him off again: “That’s all in the book. You know who said that?”
“Said,” asked Jean Paul dazedly, swallowing; his mouth was dry from the sudden adrenaline, “said um, what?” The book was very thick, perhaps 1,000 pages, and extensively yellowed and dogeared. Half the front cover was torn off and missing but what remained said ACHINE OMNIBUS Jacques Futrelle. Jean Paul tentatively dug a finger into one of the creased-over pages and pulled it open. And there it was.
‘It’s perfectly miraculous!’ I exclaimed.
‘Logic, logic, logic,’ snapped the irritable little scientist. ‘You are a lawyer, you ought to know the correlation of facts; you ought to know that two and two make four, not sometimes but all the time.’
“Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, PhD, LLD, FRS, MD, MDS,” burst Nightwing, practically vibrating, “but his most important title is…the Thinking Machine.”
Jean Paul looked up blankly.
Jean Paul had no idea who that was. This was either apparent on his face or Nightwing had anticipated the question or Nightwing had an irrepressible spiel that would not be stopped no matter Jean Paul’s input now that it had been triggered; Jean Paul could not determine which of these it was, nor did he really have time to because Nightwing did not take even one breath before he leapt to the next word, which was “he,” but specifically the contraction “he’s.”
“He’s this total asshole genius scientist who’s just upset, and crabby, and bossy and—frustrating all the time. But he’s the best there is, and he has actually such a soft heart, he just never shows it, and he’s always making his housekeeper, Maria, take the money he earns off his cases to charities. But he’s such a fucking jerk. But so brilliant.”
Nightwing watched Jean Paul’s incomprehension not change, and he slowly wound down, not gesturing wildly anymore. One corner of his mouth strung up, almost shy, cheeks luminously pink.
“Anyway.” He slapped Jean Paul’s hand away from the page to close the book once more, and rapped the torn cover with his knuckles. “They’re just stories. Good stories. They can give you a sense of how, I don’t know, to go about things. What questions to ask. How to make deductions in criminal situations, and other situations, too. It’s surprisingly true to life. Two and two make four not sometimes, but all the time is his catchphrase. Says it all the time, like almost every page. But it’s true. If there’s something not adding up, it’s because there’s a piece you don’t have. Everything can be worked out logically. The world looks very complicated and messy. But it is whole. And there are these lines running under it. You just have to be able to grab them. Find them. And put them together. But that also means you have to have the skills to put things together, an extensive grasp of practical and impractical knowledge, and facts, and principles, and rules, and etiquettes, and languages, and math—”
“The System,” blurted Jean Paul.
When Nightwing stopped talking to look at him, his face was so patient, kind, and expectant, Jean Paul felt himself flush with embarrassment at interrupting.
Jean Paul gripped the spine of the book.
“It—” Nightwing tilted his head alertly at the syllable. Jean Paul wet his mouth. He brought the backs of his knuckles to his temples, brushing the soft skin there. “I know things. Things like that. The System, it knows things I never learned—languages, German, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, how to build things…”
Nightwing considered this thoughtfully. “You have access to this information all the time?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know, exactly.” Jean Paul’s mouth ticked. “When I’m Azrael, I do.”
“But you’re not Azrael all the time,” supposed Nightwing.
Jean Paul bit the inside of his cheek.
“I don’t know,” he confessed quietly, anymore.
Nightwing’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean? You’re retaining the skills, the strength without wearing the mask these days?” Jean Paul nodded: sometimes. Most of the time. It varied. “What about the information?” Jean Paul looked up helplessly. “Hm.” Nightwing looked down at him thoughtfully, mouth twisting. He was very beautiful, Jean Paul realized faintly. Very much so. Jean Paul wasn’t startled, exactly, by the fact. As though it had been in the back of his head, but not unearthed in consciousness. But looking up at Nightwing, the narrow oval shape of his face and his large dark doe eyes, it shouldered to the front. Then Nightwing pointed two fingers at the clothes he’d handed Jean Paul earlier and said: “Go shower. You smell really bad. And there should be another razor in the pack under the sink if you,” he gestured vaguely at his jaw, which unlike Jean Paul’s own was clear and clean. The abrupt switch in conversations took Jean Paul by surprise, and a little alarm, which must have shown on his face because Nightwing said, not unkindly, “We can pick it up after.”
-
Nightwing’s bathroom was very small and very clean, green- and white-tiled. It smelled faintly of bleach. A small white LED bar, which flickered and buzzed violently like insects trapped inside streetglow, was the only light. It was just like the one they had in the shared bathrooms at the men’s shelter. But here Jean Paul was alone, and in the shower here his skin nearly degloved from the boiling high-pressure water that shot down from the shower, which portrayed a capacity to produce only that one temperature, approximately ten trillion degrees, Fahrenheit, even when Jean Paul frantically shoved it to the coldest setting. On the edge of the green tub were a few dented bottles. Carefully standing out of the spray Jean Paul hesitated, and opened one. It smelled very good, like green apples—like Nightwing, he realized belatedly, staring down at the broken cap. Another, some kind of translucent gel, smelled like menthol. When he got out his skin was bright red but he smelled like apple blossoms and peppermint. The flush made his unshaved face more dramatic, pin-like blond needles across his flushed cheeks and chin. He found the razor cartridge Nightwing had been talking about and shaved and felt better, better still when the soft dark-colored pilled basketball shorts and sweatshirt Nightwing had given him for the most part fit. The t-shirt underneath however clung to his skin tighter than was ordinary, hems a few millimeters shy of the circumference of his arms and waist. He wiped the foggy mirror with his damp towel, picked up his glasses from the sink, and looked at himself.
But the steam chalked his lenses up.
-
Nightwing yanked at his shoelaces; one one foot was braced flat against the wall, knee by his ear. On his jerseyed shoulders was now also a worn flannel and an even more worn-looking and too-large black leather jacket, brittle and cracking at the deep folds. His tan face and the crescent-moon curls of his hair round his face shined with water beads, like he had splashed water on his face over the kitchen sink, when he grinned wildly over his shoulder at Jean Paul, keys jingling on the shiny red carabiner sickle to a beltloop on his jeans. “Hey—!” he switched feet, hopping.
Jean Paul swore his heartbeat slowed, and drooped.
Jean Paul wilted. “You’re leaving?”
“Work,” explained Nightwing, bunnyearing his bootlaces and finally dropping down. Had that much time passed already? Jean Paul looked. There was light outside. “Morning shift for the night shift 12. Seven to three but I usually stay through shift change so I’ll be back to fill you in on the case by four, probably.” His speech ran along a breakneck, almost musical tempo, vibrating with energy almost as much he did physically. What the waxy white lenses of his mask had in the past obnubilated was how wide and frenetic and flickery his eyes were, zigzagging everywhere as he seemed to check every detail around him every few seconds lest he find it magically suddenly changed. The lenses had given him a laidback, even cold air—a one-to-one with the total, perfect haunting ozonic stillness of Batman, in moribus et artibus. Which was manifestly neither the manner or art he had now.
“Weren’t you—?”
“High drug tolerance. Plus some safe stimulants.” Nightwing arced a large extensively plastic-wrapped muffin from the counter to Jean Paul, who hastily caught it, cupping it in his hands. Azrael’s jungle-cat instincts barely registered as Jean Paul shifted it in his grasp to catch the file folders that followed in the air. While Jean Paul readjusted his new hold, Nightwing snatched a pair of black sunglasses onto his dark head. “Get some sleep. Read those. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Not that there’s. Much. Three tasks. You can do that?”
“Here?”
“Where else?”
-
“Graaayson! Grayson! Hey, cutie!” A swaying woman dropped her uniform cap on Nightwing’s head and dragged it down to his ears, disheveling Nightwing’s dark curls. Nightwing only smiled, almost shyly, and ducked behind the bar with it still on, shrugging off his jacket. “We’ve been waaaiting for you! Harry said you’d be coming tonight.”
“Oh, sergeant.” Nightwing— Grayson? Was that his name?—laughed softly. “It’s not tonight anymore.”
Jean Paul heard her breath stutter as she slowly, clumsily leaned across the bar and straightened the brim of the hat. The end of her black tie slugged along the waxy pitted bartop. Grayson gently intercepted her fingertips and pulled off the hat, tugging it onto her head instead, where her hair was spiraling out of its low slicked-back knot. Her soft-looking white hands fell slackly to the bar. “Why, what time is it?” she murmured, so close to him.
“Morning.”
“What!” she cried, jerking backward. “Noo, no!”
Nightwing glanced at Jean Paul like they were together in on some inside joke, and winked. Jean Paul shifted on his stool. The woman followed Grayson’s attention toward Jean Paul and started, jolting and looking frenetically, back and forth between Jean Paul and Nightwing. When she withdrew her palms from the wood before she pulled away, they made a sticky suction noise.
“You’re all pink.” Jean Paul turned his head around from where he was watching the woman stumble back to a table with three other women. “What do you want?”
“Want?”
Grayson crossed his arms on the bartop and buried his chin in them, watching Jean Paul for a moment. The bar was quiet, hued in dark green, with 1970s-y little yellow-orange triangle acrylic lights dangling on precarious black rubber ropes. On the walls were memorial photos and framed newspaper headers behind glass as well as at least eight or nine paintings of beagle puppydogs. It was early morning: ‘So it’ll be pretty empty,’ Nightwing had explained on their 25-minute walk here, pulling his knees all the way up to his chest when he jumped over the cracks in the sidewalk like a little boy, ‘just the nightshift people, and maybe some stragglers.’ The crowd was indeed sparse. There was a man with a bushy moustache and a stringy, cordy rag over the shoulder who had clapped Grayson hard on the back of his neck when they entered, and a man in dark-blue windbreaker staring listlessly at the wall, and the quartet of still-uniformed women at a crackley leather booth who emitted a smell distinctly like sweat and powder-scent deodorant amid the larger scape of old wood, chalk, disinfectant, and lemons and limes—and apples, ozone, and peppermint. And that was it, that was everybody. Except Jean Paul. Who blinked down at the drink Nightwing had put in front of him. And then up at Nightwing himself.
Who smiled.
“Just ginger ale.”
“Oracle said vampires,” began Jean Paul, and Nightwing’s expression instantly turned tortured— “Not here.”
The man in the windbreaker had instantly glanced their way. Nightwing smiled thinly. The man didn’t return it. “The Henderson shit?” the man asked severely. He was graying at the temples, and had so many wrinkles the skin fell in deep plaits round his eyes.
“Henderson?” asked Jean Paul cautiously.
The man scrutinized him.
“You new? Haven’t seen you before.”
“He’s not a cop,” Nightwing intervened, pushing Jean Paul’s ginger ale closer to Jean Paul’s hand with just his fingertips. “Just a friend of mine from back home.”
“The Henderson thing had to do with vampires?”
“Might as well’ve.” The man’s canines were crooked. His eyes slanted toward Nightwing. “City’s going to shit, Grayson, first one freak then another.”
There it was again, that name. Grayson. Who looked at the man for a couple seconds with his pink tongue poking, a little, out of his mouth as he seemingly thought deeply about something before he turned to Jean Paul to explain, “They found some bodies by The Spine that were totally dried up.”
“Empty snail shells,” added the man. “Vacuum-shrunk skin rouuuund the fat and bone.”
“So what was going around was that it was exsanguination.” Nightwing blossomed out his fingers: “Thus vampires. But last I heard the coroner said all the blood was still there—it was just, what did Cal call it, Martinez, a hypercoagulation event? Something had made all blood in the bodies clot all at once, mass compression, like the blood was magnetically or chemically pulled into a singular hard dense bulgey red lump left of the sacrum. But it was all still there. Not drunk out of them.”
Martinez tapped the hairy cauliflower shell of his ear. “You’re quite the retentive listener, aren’t ya, Grayson?”
“Well, Harry doesn’t pay me cause I’m good at pours,” Nightwing said easily, as if the suspicious tone had simply rolled right off of him. Narrowing his eyes he pointed at Martinez with two fingers. “But I will be.”
As if he couldn’t seem to help it Martinez looked charmed. He turned his face to obscure his smile and languidly shoved his empty glass down the bar toward Dick with a rough scoff that sounded like a muffled two-note laugh. “Hope so. Cause this last one was all head and no beer. You think I’m paying for the bubbles?”
“I’m getting better. Look at that one.” He pointed at Jean Paul’s drink. “That one’s perfect.”
“That’s ginger ale, I’m not deaf, Grayson.”
Nightwing sullenly took the glass and rolled his eyes as he turned, affecting aggrieved Muppet-like grumbling noises under his breath in the perfect cant of Martinez’s words. Jean Paul let out a startled laugh. Nightwing peeked over his shoulder innocently at the sound to look at Jean Paul curiously.
“Not blind either,” groused the man. Nightwing’s expression soured at that, head snapping back round to the taps, where Jean Paul couldn’t see it, and Jean Paul didn’t know exactly why.
-
“You don’t have to stay the whole time,” Nightwing said, glancing around. “It’s pretty dead.” It was ten o’clock now. Jean Paul had had no less than four conversations so far, four more than his running daily average with anyone who wasn’t Lilhy, Brian, or Nomoz. People were mostly nice, gruff, foulmouthed, and open to indulging brief, awkward salvos of conversation with Jean Paul about their day (invariably poor) or the weather (intermittently cloudy then sunny). They without exception adored “Grayson,” ribbing him over his Gotham Knights jersey and reaching over the bar and asking him to consoooooole theeemmm. One man had even shown Jean Paul a photo of his daughter, bright-orange-lifejacketed at girl scout camp. It had been nice. Had been lovely. “You must be bored.”
“I’m not.”
Nightwing’s eyebrows rose skeptically. From his carabiner he quietly handed Jean Paul a dull brass key. “You must be tired.” This Jean Paul took as a dismissal. So Jean Paul also took the key.
-
As it was Jean Paul didn’t even register the strange fatigue until he was passing out of the doors of Hogan’s and onto the sunlit sidewalk. Stringy gray clouds were passing quickly overhead. So sometimes the sun disappeared behind them and reappeared just as fast. There were old Modelos and cigarette stubs roly-polying lazily by the curb. Terrible sounds broke from the enfilade of traffic—speeding old, rumbling cars with vibrating speakers and hairy, silkshirted arms hanging out of windows. Jean Paul glanced back at the bar, with its shiny polished full-blackout windows, and then down at his feet, which were six inches from a plastic white Dunkin Donuts bag full of dozens of empty, rotting orange peels.
His fingers clenched around the key. His other hand dug into his borrowed jacket pocket, for the Azrael mask. It was hard to say if having the mask eased his chest or made it tighter. It didn’t make sense for it to do both things at once. But it did. He felt his index finger penetrate one of the eyeholes. Someone on a motorcycle barrelled past him on the sidewalk, nearly knocking him over. A furious cold stirring, someone else, bulging, rupturing wetly out of his throat: KNOW THAT—
Jean Paul frantically yanked his hand away from the mask. Scraping his fingers on the sharp buttons on his jacket with his haste. In the air his bare hand tremored, icy-hot fingertips twitching, spasming.
His other hand, with the key, balled tighter. He glanced tightly over his shoulder, and pushed his glasses up on his nose before beginning the walk back.
-
There was mail piling up on Nightwing’s counter next to the files that Jean Paul had left there.
Jean Paul’s fingertips slid off of the files slowly.
Richard Grayson, or CURRENT RESIDENT
1013 Parkthorne Avenue, 3A
Bludhaven, NJ 08204
—the address, under the plasticky window in the white envelope cover, read. It looked like it was probably a bill. The bill’s corner was covered by the large dense muffin Nightwing had thrown at him this morning. Which Jean Paul unwrapped—there had been an excessive amount of cloudy Saran wrap put to this purpose—and took a small bite out of. It wasn’t good. The cranberries were sour, hard, and dry on his tongue.
He mouthed at the top because he was hungry and in the fridge there was only cheesesticks, raw chicken breast, and putrefied apples in a ziptied plastic bag so he gave the muffin another chance, which was equally bad, before he gently put it down and picked up the first of the files. The apartment was hauntingly quiet. The wind had picked up; it was loud outside. But inside it was muffled. There was a persistent hum from the refrigerator, like something was broken inside. Otherwise: quiet, and because of that, strange. He was tired, eyes struggling to stay open. That was probably adding to the strangeness.
He toed off his pinchy borrowed shoes by the front door and sunk into the couch with three of the topmost files Nightwing had thrust at him. He sleepily stuck his fingers inside the paper cover of one to pry it open. Then he paused, and laid the files aside, reaching for instead the book from before, gently opening it on his thigh, and beginning to read.
“That is as pure logic as two and two make four; there is no need to argue it."
"Well, of course, I didn't argue it," said Grayson.
"Then Miss Winthrop did," declared the Thinking Machine finally, positively; "unless we credit the opposition, as you call it, with telepathic gifts hitherto unheard of. By the way, you have referred to the other side only as the opposition. Do the same men, the same clique, appear against you all the time, or is it only one man?"
"It's a clique," explained the financier, "with millions back of it, headed by Ralph Matthews, a fair-haired and bespectacled young man to whom I give absolute credit for being the prime factor against me." His lips were set sternly.
"Why?" demanded the scientist.
"Because every time he sees me he grins," was the reply.
-
Someone was singing so softly, barely more than humming, under their breath.
“Vente, gresle, gelle, j’ai mon pain cuit—”
Someone was stopping.
“Oh, you’re up.”
Jean Paul blearily dragged his eyes open. On the waterstained popcorn ceiling was an ugly brass light fixture. Warped diaphanous icecube shadows and light from the glassblock windows were casting upon it. There wasn’t much of that, the strange underwaterish light, so it must have been approaching evening, past five, perhaps past six. Time had passed. He didn’t remember having fallen asleep. There was a low halting, grind-shuffling mechanical noise—the old refrigerator, the icemaker—it all came back to Jean Paul slowly. He sat up and turned his head, cheek snuffling against the rough pale berber of the couch.
Sitting upside down on the mattress on the floor, legs vertical in the corner of the wall, was Nightwing. He was doing a crossword with a very small, worn-down yellow pencil the size of a lollipop stick. The eraser was still perfect.
How had he known that Jean Paul was—?
“By your breathing.”
Nightwing crossed out a little line of text. The pencil made a soft hissing noise. From this angle Jean Paul could see the crown of his head, the long soft-looking thornshapes of his lashes, and the slope of his nose. Nightwing tilted his head back and smiled, and their eyes met. Nightwing gently pointed his socked toes.
“What’s your name?”
The question slipped through his teeth before Jean Paul had even consciously formed the intention to ask it. It had pedaled through his head before, of course, at the would-have-been Kinsolving estate, at the lab, here, in the bar. But he didn’t know why it was coming out now, out of his clumsy, sleepy mouth. It mysteriously wasn’t embarrassing to ask, just calm, swaying, soft, and curious, but it should have been embarrassing that he was occupying this man’s time and falling asleep on his couch and still knew so little about him, still didn’t know his name.
Nightwing; Grayson ; Richard Grayson, or CURRENT RESIDENT.
Nightwing’s legs dropped down. Nightwing sat up straight, bracing his palms on the mattress as he turned around to frown directly at Jean Paul. Little scores appeared between his brows.
“You know B’s name.”
Was this a trick? “Yes, Bruce Wayne.” He tensed, doubting himself. “Right?”
“You lived in the Manor.”
Mostly underneath. But: “Yes.” Then Jean Paul’s mouth grew mealy, and dry. “What does your name have to do with the Manor?” He was missing something—he didn’t have all the information—he was sure of that. What information did he know about Nightwing? He knew Nightwing was Batman’s prodigy and trusted ally, more obscure and far more paces apart, away, than was Robin, although there were respects in which the ways that Bruce spoke about Robin and Nightwing were uncannily similar. There were also grave differences— I work alone, except for Robin. There’s just no place for another person in my operation. I’m sorry. He knew Nightwing had for whatever reason expected to be Bruce’s successor, Batman, but that Bruce had not even passingly entertained the idea. At least, as far as Jean Paul knew. It had never come up. Jean Paul was growing more and more nervous.
Nightwing’s expression was unreadable. The bruising round his eye had turned orange.
“Nothing, I guess,” Nightwing said. “Dick Grayson.”
-
Dick Grayson. Jean Paul ran it over in his head, silently practicing the occlusives behind his teeth. Nightwing, Dick Grayson, put the crossword to the sheets and climbed out of bed. The pencil, too, dropped off the side of the mattress. Jean Paul traced the path it rolled on the scuffed floor with his eyes. Dick Grayson was yanking something, two somethings, metal and plastic, out of a drawer, tossing them into the air and catching them in his palms. He looked at Jean Paul.
“You had the chance to do some reading?”
All the calm scattered. Frightened, Jean Paul looked up—a strange and mysterious lump rapidly forming in his throat. The Thinking Machine omnibus he had been reading had tumbled under the couch while Jean Paul slept. The files lay strewn in sight around him. They didn’t look totally untouched and unread. He couldn’t possibly be a disappointment so early.
“Yes,” Jean Paul lied.
Dick tossed Valley the respirator in his left hand.
Valley caught it cleanly, clutching it to his chest.
“They’re very stingy with it. We shouldn’t come across any of it out of containment, especially not aerosolized, cause that would be dangerous for them, too, but just in case. Don’t let your eye mucosa, nose, or mouth get exposed, and it shouldn’t penetrate intact skin, so don’t get cut, and use that at all times—and you should be fine. As long as you pretty much stay away from all traces of it.”
“Lie further off, lest I be shrinkwrapped.”
Dick blinked, and let out a high, startled laugh. “That was really funny,” he told Valley warmly, surprised.
Valley looked at him with blank blue eyes, as if confused; as if it was obvious. “I know.”
Dick immediately sobered, spiteful. Fuck him for real. “Well, I didn’t know you were funny. On account of last time I met you you were trying to kill me.” Valley’s face instantly crushed in like a beercan under a tire. Dick’s mouth went sour with guilt. He tried to salvage it: “Not the last time. But the time before that—or—” no, that was the shelter, then the evaluation, and after that was the Clench, “—well, the time before the time before that.”
Dick’s skull gonging against the rusty iron bridge, the cold sparkling black saltwater rushing over the raw scrapes crossing his whole left temple and cheek, golden clawed fingertips breaching through the thin material at Dick’s wrists, scratching the skin. Fingers round his throat. Not exactly, hammerhead.
Valley flinched, flinching inward like a butterfly collapsing its wings into a vanishing line. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Dick sighed, grabbing his head and burying his face in his hands for several seconds. The respirator pressed, cold plastic, against his forehead. Sometimes Dick felt so lonely he thought he was made out of the material of red-hot iron stovetop coils, like he was rusting through and corroding into something even thinner, even worse than he already was. It was hard to remember sometimes what it had been like waking up in Kory’s warm arms to a day bright with Donna, Joey, Victor, dinnerdates and sock pairs split up among his laundry and Donna’s and down-to-the-minute-regimented trainings. He was such an asshole now, all the time. He hadn’t always been, not when he’d been around people, the bravest, most loyal, extraordinary people, they’d made him more patient, they’d made him so much better, and now his efforts were squandered, for nothing, because he was a cold, unfeeling, remorseless, treacherous, kindless cruel villain, an insensitive bastard like Bruce, except worse than Bruce, worse by far, because Bruce had earned the Misanthropos privilege, Bruce was good enough to be that way. Dick was just a failure, and a jerk to boot.
Who lived alone, and also lived solo in an apartment. Habitually late to his shifts at Hogan’s. Encore un lapin pour Clancy, ça fait six. Barbara’s calls racking up on his landline, never-ending tickertape texts on his cell. More brain-damaged in five months here—head skinting off fire escapes and parapets and billboard grips and the sides of pistols—than any time since he was Robin; and now his skull was every second filling up with this agonzing pulsing cephalee, every splinter of light through his eyelids, every noise, relentlessly stoking the ache like a poker rod in a fire. Fucking his vocal chords over screaming at the top of lungs at Bruce, when he came to visit or “socialcall,” in disguise, Matches or Batman, or as himself, Bruce, who didn’t even care but always looked hurt anyway just to punish Dick for his categorical trespasses, failures.
He was the king of the castle here.
It wasn’t all miserable. Cause there were moments. Cool moments, good ones, when his spine bending would sound like bubblewrap when he lay flat on the dirty rooftops among the tar buckets and rust stains, the steam rising through vents, and look up at the stars—and if it was there that night, or that morning, the morning star Venus—giggling stupid and wheezy and wrung-out into his knuckles about something, nothing, something silly a goon said after saving somebody or clicking handcuffs shut on a bad guy. And Haven was his, and no one else’s, his very own. For all that it didn’t want him. For all it screamed and kicked and fought him every inch of the way. And part of that was the city’s immune response; dirty money cut off, interests interrupted; it was logical, natural, that it would render opposition; it was kicking him cause it hated him. But it was kicking him, sometimes he thought, too, the way little babies kicked at anything and everything cause everything was new and terrifying and it didn’t know anything else, wasn’t even capable of anything else, yet. It wasn’t all miserable, no, of course not. But it was all lonely.
Dick thumbed at the respirator still in his palm, frowning.
Dick was sorry, too.
“We need to check that this seals properly under your mask,” Dick said at last.
Valley nodded. Hesitantly grabbing for the Azrael garb where it lay folded, nicely, to do what Dick had said.
“Cause trust me,” Dick added roughly. “I’m not the one you want to get involved with if you get exposed. If you don’t like me now—”
Valley looked up, and frowned deeply. The red robe draped over his thigh.
“I do like you now,” Valley interrupted.
Dick frowned back. Even deeper.
-
There was a weird air between them as Dick knocked his fingernails against the seal of Valley’s respirator. Valley wore the red Azrael mask scrunched up on his skull, banding round his forehead. Little fluffy, dry, thin loops of blond curls flared out under it. His skin was very fair, faintly pink at the edges, and the middles of his eyelids and his nose shone with an oily gleam. Most of his nose, except for the topmost part of the bitable curved-out bonebridge, was covered by the respirator. Wait. Dick stepped back quickly, dropping down off of his tiptoes.
“Now see if it seals,” he ordered hastily.
Valley hesitated, fingers wrapping round the bottom edge of the mask.
“What?” Dick demanded, still residually flustered. “What is it?”
“Well—” said Valley. His mouth ticked. “When I do I’ll be him.”
Dick tempered slowly. “But you can take it off. And then you won’t be him.”
Valley’s eyes flickered.
“It’s like I don’t have a will when I’m him.”
“Or…I can take it off,” Dick offered. Almost just to fill the silence. But Valley’s eyes met his with interest. “And then you won’t be him,” Dick finished softly again.
“You don’t need to do that. I can take it off when I choose to. It’s other things I don’t have the will to do when I’m Azrael.” Dick almost expected Valley to curl into himself or flinch when he said the name, like summoning something unforetold and terrible, but he didn’t; it came out easily, albeit in a worn-down voice. “It’s only that I…I just liked being Jean Paul today.” The words came out of the plastic filter of the respirator.
Dick’s mouth was dry. He wet his lips with his tongue but his tongue was mostly dry too so it was a lateral move. But before Dick could summon an answer Jean Paul screwed his eyes shut, long blond eyelashes disappearing into the crinkles around his eyes, and yanked the red mask over his head and over the respirator, which bulged but fit. Instantly Jean Paul’s posture changed, stiff and then hard and braced yet fluid, an instant transference of spectacular skill. Dick recognized it instantly.
“Azrael?” Dick asked in a low voice, painfully conscious of the fact that he was unarmed, unarmored, and well-within strangling distance. But he didn’t move. He stayed perfectly still, there, weight balanced on the balls of his feet.
Azrael’s head cocked to the left. Then like lightning-strike electrical static— “NIGHTWING.”
Dick gently shifted his weight to his right foot, and Azrael’s head snapped rightward. The bright white eyes lasered in on Dick’s face. The look would have been silly, the Azrael mask over Jean Paul’s borrowed casual clothes, but for the ozonic, displaced-air-pressure sense of the room, and the fact that any second he could—
“We’re working together tonight.” Dick kept his voice low and calm. “There’s a few things I want you to understand about that. Tonight you will not kill, and you will not take off the respirator or mask.”
“IT IS THE DUTY OF THE ANGEL AZRAEL TO BRING THE WICKED TO PUNISHMENT. YOU ARE NOTHING TO ME.”
Damn. Dick remembered at once how not-fun this was. He was not looking forward to this evening. Although, this seemed to be an undilutedness of Azraelness that Jean Paul had not much at all portrayed on that first night in the lab, when he seemed mostly, well, normal, if strong, deft, and a little more polysyllabic than regular—there must have been gradients, the way this worked must have rocked back and forth, sometimes more extreme, sometimes less; sometimes Jean Paul there lingering, sometimes not. Now: not. Dick glared at Azrael’s lumpy mask. “I want Jean Paul back.” At least Jean Paul could be reasoned with, and at least his voice didn’t make every hair on Dick’s body stand on end.
“NO. IT IS ME HERE NOW.” But magically two pale hands were reaching upward.
Dick caught them between his own, clasping Azrael’s—Jean Paul’s—wrists. Firm but gentle. Azrael didn’t move to break the grip.
“Azrael,” Dick warned. Now he squeezed the wrists tightly, so tight a normal person would scream and writhe. Azrael did not. “I mean it. No killing tonight.”
Azrael’s head tipped toward their hands, and Dick understood that Azrael was gazing at and referring to the lock Dick had around his wrists. “THIS HAPPENS BECAUSE I INDULGE YOU ONLY.”
Dick did not doubt that.
-
“So be it,” said Dick.
He released Azrael’s hands, which flew upward to wind back the red mask. Jean Paul’s face appeared, long blond hair rumpled, and for once Dick was glad to see it. Shaking his hands vigorously, Jean Paul also yanked off the seal-tight respirator and exhaled raggedly. His cheeks were bright pink. There were indentations left behind there.
And on the bridge of his nose.
-
“Loud entry at the north entrance, draw fire, containment; destruction of data cores first, fermentation tanks and chemical stabilizers last,” Jean Paul chanted nervously under his breath, dal segno al fine. He had memorized it at least two chants ago but either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care cause he kept going. Dick didn’t stop him. It was nice to work with somebody who cared about the details that Dick had relayed to him while he got suited up in one of his spare Nightwing suits. It was nice to work with somebody.
And after the brush-reminder with Azrael, Dick felt comparably much more affectionately toward that somebody being Jean Paul.
“Just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Dick summarized for him kindly, and then smiled, tipping his head back encouragingly. “Unless it looks like fun.” He glanced at Jean Paul’s all-but-masked-up apparel, and the red mask in his fingers, and felt reticent for a second. “Just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he corrected quickly.
Jean Paul looked at him fretfully, and pulled the mask on.
Dick buckled his last shoulder strap slowly and cautiously and watched.
“Azrael?”
“Yes?” said Azrael in Jean Paul’s voice.
Dick’s shoulders slumped with relief. “That one, too,” he said, pointing at the respirator.
-
That loud entry at the north entrance to attract the guards, preempt their attention, draw their fire, and seal them off from the rest of the building? It went well. Equally so their reunion and destruction of the data cores, vis-a-vis the data scrubbing and deletion and a virus to corrupt offside data with spoofed credentials to take out the backups without alerting any larger network—all swimmingly—although it did culminate in Azrael, and his flaming sword, melting the hard drives, horizontally, into hot slag. Dick rolled his planned but unused thermite charge between his left hand’s fingers and slowly flashed a thumbs up with his right when Azrael glanced back at him, the edges of his draping red hood glowing in the sparse illumination from the sparks along the computers and the sword at his side, flames spitting, audibly, humming and molten, against the sealed cement floor.
“...Economical,” Dick murmured in praise, rolling the device back into its container by his flank. Good explosives could get pricey.
Where they ran into trouble was when they separated once more. Dick froze mid-chemical-denaturant-spray by the fermentation tank in lab 2 at the twin pigsqueal of screaming and white heat through yellow fat.
Dick broke into a sprint to lab 3. “Azrael!”
It took a full-body tackle at full-speed to get Azrael off of the technician tremoring on the cement by this lab’s fermentation tank. Dick’s exposed skin lit up with warmth from the close brush of the sword, hell, he even felt the heat singing the tips of his hair.
“I had one rule for you God damn it, Azrael!” Well, two. But it was taking all of Dick’s strength to keep Azrael’s legs together between his knees, all, all, of his armstrength to pin Azrael’s wrists—including the one with the flaming gauntlet sword attached—to the ground. It crackled wildly. The technician howled behind them. Sweat was already running down Dick’s hair from the close, eye-watering heat of the sword. And Dick’s legs were quivering from the strain already. He needed both hands around Azrael’s wrists to hold him or else—
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MAN WAS DOING? DO YOU KNOW WHAT HE DID? LIVING BODIES AS CRUCIBLES, FLESH AS VESSELS—”
“Yes! I do!” hissed Dick. “The sex pollen is why we’re here!”
“DEFILER, YOUR SOUL IS FOUND WANTING! YOU ARE BEYOND REDEMPTION AND IN THE NAME OF SAINT DUMAS I PASS JUDGEMENT!”
“Azrael—!” Underneath him as soon as Azrael began to speak Dick could feel that Azrael was preparing to lunge upward and so Dick pulled the full weight of his body to the left—in a feint. When Azrael anticipated the left move, Dick yanked to the right and surged upward, stealing in one almost absurdly surgical motion the red mask off of Azrael’s head just as Azrael’s thick gold-gauntleted arm threw against Dick’s ribs, throwing him across the room. Dick’s back hit first. Then Dick’s head cracked into something glass and broke it. He felt a shard dig into the shell of his ear. Another had cut through his side. The blood pulsed, impossibly hot and sticky, down his face, the nape of his neck.
The crackling sound slowly died.
Numbly Dick drew his hands down to his flanks and scraped until he found his chemical denaturant storage. In a trembling, slow daze he covered the container he had just bodily broken with the denaturant to break down the active agents. His fingers were tremoring. They were also covered in fine white powder. Like chalk scraped from a bone. His heartbeat was ragged, thready, and jumpy.
“...Nightwing?”
“Don’t.” Dick squeezed his eyes shut tightly. “Don’t. Don’t. I—”
He swore he could already feel the blood congealing in his veins. There was suddenly a hand around his elbow pulling him up, and Dick exhaled shakily, knees jolting. Lab 3. Dick staggered. Dick’s chin blindly caught on someone’s shoulder and his stomach swooped. Lab 3 was the last lab. They were there now. Dick wrenched away from who was holding him and was immediately wracked with violent radical shivers, his teeth chattering wildly, but he stumbled over to where the burned-open technician was, grabbed the technician under the arms, and began to drag her out to the exit, where the EMTs could find her.
-
There was still white powder in Jean Paul’s eyelashes. Which were yellow, and soft, and long. Lovely soft butterflies where they fluttered against Dick’s temples, Dick’s neck. Dick barely remembered seeing a glossy dark smudge of red and blue lights in the distance, barely remembered the high-speed rickety race home. Mostly only remembered the feeling of alternating between being frostbitten and burned alive in hell. They’d kissed first off of Halyard Street open-mouthed, clumsy, desperate, and wet teeth clicking against one another for probably every last second. Could’ve felt if you pressed your palm to the bottom of his jaw his jackrabbit heartbeat, tremoring, skin practically vibrating. Less-than-barely remembered falling through the window of his third-floor apartment.
It hurt.
“I’m going to—I want t—” Jean Paul’s voice stuttered, and despite himself, and the boiling heat spreading across his face, his insides, Dick scoffed, smiled, dark, delirious, it was ridiculous. But this was the wrong move, smiling; at the sight Jean Paul’s eyes darkened, mouth bending desperately. Dick had been pressing his thighs together hard, but suddenly he found himself with his shoulder blades scraping against the wall, Jean Paul’s hard armored thigh rocking hard up against Dick’s lap, between his legs, so hard that Dick was almost on his tiptoes to not be off-balance.
Dick’s breath caught in his throat. His face felt like it was on fire.
“I want you,” he said, the words tremulous, almost delirious, desperate. “I want you so badly. I can’t—I’m going to—”
There were fingers scrabbling around Dick’s collar, scraping in search of the release to Dick’s suit, and Dick was boxed in by Jean Paul’s arms, or Azrael's, or somebody's, his, and Dick’s knees were weak and Dick’s head was spinning, he was sick with desire, gasping with every rut. He turned his face up toward his ceiling, open-mouthed as he desperately tried to catch his breath.
“No,” said Dick hazily, shoving at Jean Paul’s shoulders, to no effect. “…No, stop, it's—”
“We,” gasped Jean Paul, hot breath fanning over the side of Dick’s jaw, spilling goosebumps all over Dick’s skin. “I—”
This was going to happen, Dick realized with distant, feverish, glazed-over panic, it was only a matter of how. Jean Paul’s burning hot face was burying itself into the exposed sliver of skin on Dick’s throat, above his collar, and Dick shuddered all over, swallowing, swallowing hard, mouth parting.
“I never—I’ve never—”
It only lasted for a second but there was a chill that ran over Dick’s whole body and he pushed Jean Paul hard enough that their bodies parted where they had been flush before. Dick stared. Jean Paul’s eyes were dilated, swallowed with black, and his face was pink. Dick could still physically feel the heat radiating off of him. Jean Paul was trembling. “You’ve never…?” Dick breathed. He couldn’t possibly mean—
Jean Paul’s shoulders heaved.
“No.”
“Oh, fuck,” whispered Dick, slumping back against the wall, taking a hand through his hair, which was sticking to his forehead, wet with sweat. Dick’s knees were shaking. He wasn’t sure he could support his own weight, was in danger of sliding down to the ground when Jean Paul said, near tears: “I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, it feels like I’m going to die. I—” he cut off, wet, and Dick stared at him through hazy vision.
Dick’s heart was jumproping, supersonic and sluggish all at once. He squeezed his eyes shut and tore his other hand through his hair, too, so both were gripping his head. No antitoxin. Exposure, without intervention, meant "shrinkwrapping" within hours with a regular dose; but with what they had been directly exposed to—Dick’s mouth already tasted radically dry, like pure salt, he could barely swallow. No antitoxin. No antitoxin, which left shrinkwrapping or intervention.
Slowly, Dick slid the rest of the way down to the ground, onto his knees.
Jean Paul was watching him with dark, enormous, inscrutable eyes.
“I’m going to—” Dick couldn’t finish. Instead, silently, he lay his hands on Jean Paul’s thighs. The tips of his fingers fell lightly on Jean Paul’s hipbones. It must have been almost silent, except for his breathing, their breathing, ragged, but Dick felt like he could only hear his heart hooping, vibrating, in his skull and throat. “Okay?” he asked softly.
He was waiting for the response, everything was contingent on that, but Dick barely began to say the last syllable before Jean Paul’s hips bucked forward, a pulse of motion, and he rasped out, “Yes.”
Dick swallowed thickly, hesitating for a second, a long second, before he began to trail his nails down, rucking the lower half Jean Paul’s armor, his pants, down till they were at his booted ankles or clattering to Dick’s floor, until Jean Paul was only left in the upper half of his armor, and his damp black briefs, and his bare exposed cream-color skin.
Dick was at level with Jean Paul’s hips, which jerked forward minutely as Dick stilled again, staring directly ahead. Even Jean Paul made a small sound, like sobbing, Dick still didn’t dare look up at his face.
Dick’s skin felt like lava, his brain felt like lava, and with a choked-out moan of his own he jerked his head forward, and impulsively ran a short wet stripe with his tongue on the inside of Jean Paul’s white inner thigh, which pulsed under his tongue, and in an instant Dick’s skull was cracking against the wall as Jean Paul clumsily, seemingly involuntarily rashed forward, hands coming up to clamp against Dick’s wet hair, fingernails undeftly slicing against Dick’s scalp, and suddenly, desire, or delight at exhilaration, or something else, something giddy and dangerous, was piano-keying up Dick’s vertebrae and he huffed out a small, choked laugh, smiling only very faintly, wild.
Dick’s tights felt like they were going to cut off circulation. His cock straining desperately against his jock. But Dick braced his hands instead, and ran his mouth up the inside of Jean Paul’s left thigh again, and this time he gently, only barely, scraped his lower teeth against the skin, and Jean Paul jerked so forcibly Dick found his eyelashes fluttering against Jean Paul’s briefs—in which he had apparently at some point earlier come. First exposures had that effect and for a second the thought, the memory of being 13 and suddenly humiliatingly crazy, rabid, with desire curled up in the fetal position on a dirty wet Gotham sewer grate made him feel topsy-turvy sober, chest constricting. But it was barely any time before Dick’s stomach flipped with desire again, coiling, painful, extraordinarily painful. He slowly brought his mouth up to the fabric, lips parting and the sound Jean Paul made made Dick want to grin, to laugh desperately again. He sucked on the cock bulging through the fabric, tongue again, then faintly his teeth again, and Jean Paul’s nails were scoring fine lines into the soft skin and congealed blood cuts behind Dick’s ears but that was fine because Dick was scraping red, sour-cherry red clawmarks down Jean Paul’s thighs.
Unsteadily, shaking now, Dick shifted on his knees and rocked forward, sucking with more force until he removed his mouth from the fabric, a faint wet suction sound, and gazed up, past Jean Paul’s still-covered but straining cock to Jean Paul’s face, which was like nothing Dick had ever seen, which was looking at Dick like Dick was—well, Dick didn’t know.
Dick didn’t break his eyes away from Jean Paul’s as he dragged his fingers up Jean Paul’s thighs to finally pull down the briefs. Didn’t when Jean Paul’s tremoring fingers clumsily pulled hard on Dick’s hair again. Didn’t when he slowly brought his closed mouth to the tip of Jean Paul’s cock, pressing his lips there, like a kiss, almost, would-have-been-but-for-this, all of this, chaste.
They locked eyes until Dick, trembling, parted his mouth and Jean Paul braced a hand against the wall above Dick’s head and inexpertly jerked his cock hard, fast, into Dick’s mouth, scraping Dick’s teeth, throat, almost making Dick choke, no, actually making Dick choke, a buried shaky hum-noise as he adjusted to the weight, the bitter salt taste, in his mouth.
Then Dick shut his eyes, and drew back slightly, leaning back on his haunches, intending to drop back forward immediately but as if Jean Paul didn’t know that, thought it was being taken away, lurched forward again, boot accidentally coming between Dick’s leg, pressing hard against Dick’s aching-hard cock as he thrust into Dick’s mouth.
Dick’s jaw spasmed open briefly at the sudden pressure between his legs, a keen, and then Dick was rucking against the boot, and that was when Jean Paul seemed to understand the expected rhythm of fucking Dick’s mouth, someway out and then, forcefully, all the way back in, desperate and hard and fast, Dick desperately trying to rake in breaths through his nose, it lasted only 40 seconds before Jean Paul was coming, heat flooding Dick’s mouth, Dick swallowing desperately to try to keep up, and mostly succeeding but also failing, and when he was done, and Dick pulled his mouth off his cock, Jean Paul was gasping, tears running down his face, and dropping down to the floor beside Dick and seizing Dick’s neck, shaking him, and then kissing him deeply, so hard they were toppling over, Dick’s back against his stupid criss-cross wood floor, thrusting up into the heat of Jean Paul’s body, desperate to get off, like a stupid fucking dog, unable to catch breath, crushed by the enormous furnace-hot weight, weight of armor and man and mouth, on top of him.
It hurt so bad, Dick wanted to get off so bad, he needed to, he needed to, but he was being kissed, mouth taken by force, clumsy and unpracticed plunging tongue and hard teeth crashing into his, over and over again, but it was passionate, and it was nice being desired so much, wanted so much, so nice that Dick was giggling feverishly but the giggles were arching into gasping sobs as Jean Paul’s armor, body, were shutting down all of Dick’s attempts to reach for his cock, the only friction through Dick’s jock, costume, no skin-on-skin, no other beat, and the thrilled delight melted into panic and Dick with all the force in his body concentrated into the blow swung knocked Jean Paul unconscious. And then it was just Dick alone.
Breathing raggedly, chest rising and falling rapidly, hyperventilating in the frigid cold air of his dark studio, Jean Paul supine, shut-eyed still, beside him. Dick gasped breaths up to the ceiling. His skin was blazing. It still felt like his insides were melting. He forced himself upright, and staggered, staggered to the bathroom, the shower, and lurched the handle to the hottest water, till it was boiling and stripped out of his suit under the spray and wrapped his hand around his cock, wrist tremoring with the force of his thudding, thread pulsed, and then he was coming with a ragged breath, forehead slamming against the cold gray shower tile. He didn’t grab a towel. He barely turned the shower off before he stumbled out to his bed, shivered, and collapsed, wet, into the sheets.
He was lucky it wasn’t so high up. It was only a mattress on the floor.
-
Dick woke up dizzy and soreheaded. The pollen he knew instantly now had worn off, and abandoned him with this terrible certainty of impending doom, a rapid heartbeat, and a bitter taste in his mouth. He opened his eyes to the ceiling, where light was passing over in quiet, lazy washes. Barely a meter from him was a body breathing softly, audibly, in sleep. For the seconds just before Dick broke into actual consciousness Dick knew he had heard that sound and felt something dully satisfied, contented by it. Dick bit down hard on his knuckles.
Surely even Dick couldn’t be this fucked up.
Surely even Dick wasn’t this lonely.
Surely even Dick could not have fucked up this bad. He sat up slowly, digging his fingers into the scabs on his knees. The building ache in his skull burst out at full intensity. Dick slowly pressed his dry tongue out between his cracked lips. He could feel his temples pulsing.
He covered his eyes with the heels of his palms.