The Water Rooster is alone?but rarely experiences loneliness.
Cassie read the slip of paper stoically. She folded it. Once. Twice. She slid it back inside the untouched cookie shell. She tossed it and the cellophane wrapper into the trash. And she nodded with satisfaction, thinking of Stephanie. Stephanie said a fortune only counted if you ate the cookie. That’s why you should always read it first, and if you don’t like what you see, throw it away.
It was silly, of course. Neither of them believed a slip of paper from Peking Wok had any power to tell what would happen to them. It was just a bit of silly fun. How they laughed the time Stephanie got “Bad habits are hard to break, especially if you like them.” She said the bad habit was Tim. And then Cassie suggested several ways he could be broken, in all sorts of places, all while liking him. Cassie’s fortune read “Listen, observe, note facts, delay judgment and make your own predications.” It sounded so much like Bruce, Stephanie took the slip from her and read it over and over in a deep exaggerated voice, like Darth Vader.
It was silly fun. Silly was the strangest thing Cassie had encountered in the world outside her assassin’s upbringing. She didn’t know how to do it, but sometimes with Stephanie it just happened. She found herself giggling and spouting such nonsense. “Tim break easy. Foot here, fist up, bash bash, meet in center.”
A tear rolled down Cassie’s cheek. She never spouted nonsense now. She never giggled. She didn’t eat ice cream. She didn’t have anybody to go to the movies with. She went to see A History of Violence herself because the billboard she’d passed in Times Square made it seem like something she would enjoy. It wasn’t at all what she expected, which was usually the case when she picked a movie instead of Stephanie deciding what they would see. But the actor was very handsome, and if Stephanie was with her, Cassie would have stayed and giggled about his blue eyes and muscular arms. As it was, she left. She walked home alone, on the street not on the rooftops, knowing she looked like a target that way and hoping some kind of scum would notice and follow.
She missed Stephanie so much.
One time Tim asked if she wanted to “get a slice after patrol.” She said no. She wasn’t comfortable around him—around any of them but mostly him. Stephanie had talked about him so much, they had laughed so much together, it was weird to see Tim or Robin now and think how… anyway, she said no.
He never asked again. Not that it mattered. No need for extra carbs after patrol. But he never asked again.
It was so quiet now, after patrol, and before too. She’d gotten back into her old training cycle. There were barely enough hours in the day to train like she used to and do all the casework Bruce assigned and the schoolwork that Barbara gave her, and still manage to patrol, eat and sleep. She had enough to do to fill the day and then some. But it really didn’t feel like it used to. It was empty somehow.
Her father said training was its own reward, but she had begun promising herself little treats, like the ginger prawns and fried rice, for getting through a six-hour cycle. Then she decided to treat herself at four hours instead. And then three.
This concerned her very much. Discipline was everything. If she couldn’t make herself complete her training regimen…
She would have liked to talk to someone about it.
Bruce was away. He was coming back in a few days, but the fact that he was away now was enough for Cassie to scratch him off the list. She was a little afraid what he would say.
Barbara would probably tell Dick, and Batman had left Nightwing in charge. So it would be almost like telling Bruce.
Jean Paul had been awfully nice after Stephanie’s funeral. He talked to her for hours. He seemed to know how she felt better than she did herself. How she wanted to get away from people and not trust anybody, and not like anybody, and not feel anything ever again. He said it would probably have to be that way for a while, but she shouldn’t let it lead her to do anything drastic, because it would turn around. He said that one day, maybe sooner than she thought, she’d feel like herself again. And she’d be ready to reenter the world, so it was important not to “close any doors.”
Azrael started finding her during patrol, about once a week. They didn’t team up or anything, except for that one time when the drug case she was pursuing turned out to be some kind of Medicare fraud. There were computers and casefiles, and an FBI agent, and all kinds of paperwork that Cassie couldn’t understand. Jean Paul helped her with all the computer stuff, not doing it himself in a blur of typing and flickering data screens the way Oracle would, but really showing her what he was doing at each step. And Azrael helped too, explaining how the FBI were like the old world’s undersheriffs charged to keep the king’s peace in a specific fief. One addressed them as equals in rank, he said, but equals in the service of a lesser king. They pursued the same goal (i.e. the extermination of crime) and one respected their ways (i.e. their filing of reports and obtaining of warrants), but one must never compromise or subordinate our ideals to these practices of theirs, for to do so would place our liege and his interests (the Order of Dumas, or in her case the Batman and his cause of Justice) beneath theirs.
Cassie nodded, even when she didn’t completely understand. She had always respected Azrael as a great warrior, and there was a time she even felt a foolish adoration for him, an adoration that now seemed very frivolous. But she still admired him. And she was becoming comfortable with Jean Paul in a way she wasn’t with the rest of the Bat family.
(Tim never did ask her to go for a “slice” again after patrol)
But somehow that made it harder to go to Jean Paul rather than easier. She was losing discipline, losing her edge in training. What would he think of her???
That left Tim. Tim was pretty stuck up to go to for crimefighting advice. I’m Robin, I’m Batman’s sidekick, I have a car, none of the other Robins had a car.
Maybe she should just workout another three hours and avoid the whole question.
But she didn’t want to. She really didn’t want to.
Of course, Batman’s training included many activities her father’s regimen never cared about. Crimefighting, he said, was more than fighting and surveillance. She had all the stealth and combat technique she needed, he said. She should develop herself in other areas. And that meant more than knowing about fingerprints and carpet fibers, he said. Theme criminals tended to immerse themselves in pop culture. She shouldn’t go overboard, but a nodding familiarity with ‘what kids do’ would better prepare her to decode the deliberate clues villains like the Riddler sent to taunt them, and to recognize the accidental ones they left behind unwittingly.
Cassie always suspected this was a trick to make her go to concerts and shop for trendy clothes like “a normal girl.” So she got an iPod, the same kind Stephanie had, and a School Girlz Rock backpack. She wore them enough for Bruce to see, and figured that was that. But now she was reconsidering. Three hours of deadlifts and overhead squats or three hours snooping around St. Mark’s Place for a hip t-shirt or a bracelet or some incense. Maybe swing by MTV studios and Niketown before patrol too. It couldn’t hurt. You never know what might show up in a riddle.
Share your happiness with?others today
“HA HA HA HA Haaaa!” Fingers of a repulsively pasty white sat the fortune down on the table, and looked up at Harley with a dangerously malevolent grin. “What a deliriously delicious idea, HA HA HA Haha.”
“It doesn’t really say that, does it, Puddin’?” Harley squealed, running over to see. “Share your happiness,” she read over his shoulder. “Ooh, that’s not good news for Gotham.”
“No?” Joker grinned evilly. “Don’t be silly, Harls. Everybody loves to smile! HA HA HA HA hAAA. Let’s go out and paint the town laughing!”
Harley’s features set into a mask of thoughtful determination.
“No, Puddin’,” she said with hesitant firmness. “I don’t wanna go out tonight. I want us to stay in together and, and, play Whose Line Is It Anyway: The Home Version, and do jello shots.”
“What’s this I hear? The Nattering of a Naysayer??? Harls, let’s try again. Get your pretty round tush into costume, gas up the SmileX tanks and let’s go HA HA HA HA Haaaa share the joy!”
She stood firm, arms crossed defiantly.
“I said no, we’re staying in.”
“Or maybe,” Joker snarled, getting up from the table and stalking menacingly towards her, “I’ll start with YOU!”
“I SAID NO!” Harley screeched, producing a pressurized boxing glove, aiming it squarely at Joker’s nose, and pulling the trigger. His head snapped backward and his body swiftly followed. Harley pounced, pulling the lead weight from inside the glove and bludgeoning him over and over with it. “YOU ALWAYS WANT—GO OUT AND KILL—CAN’T WE EVER—STAY HOME—AND CUDDLE—”
Joker’s head—or what had been Joker’s head—now resembled a whitish green and red puddle of (ironically) pudding. Harley’s attack slowed as she grew winded. She finally stopped altogether, panting, and looked down with satisfaction at the disgusting pool of gore.
“That was fun,” she squeaked.
The mass of goo darkened and squirmed, then re-solidified into a human shape but of a normal pinkish skin tone, dark wavy hair, a softer jaw, and the rugged good looks of a movie star.
“Good to get that out of your system, Harleen?” he asked with a charming wink.
“Oh Matt,” she smiled, bending to kiss the tip of his nose, “that was the best ever. But you still haven’t quite got the laugh down. It starts off good, but then it warbles.”
“I’m working on it, Puddin’,” he said, stroking her hair affectionately. “I can’t quite find it yet. Can you tell me again, what’s my motivation?”
Harley shrugged.
“I dunno, Matt, I think yer overthinkin&rsqu o; it. Ya just gotta feel it. HeeHeeHeeHeeHee.”
“See, I like it better when you do it,” he leered roguishly. “It’s wicked when you do it.”
“I like your hair like that. Is that the Ghost Rider?”
“No,” In an instant his features melted and reformed. “Ghost Rider was dirty blonde with a permanent one day’s growth of stubble.” His face and hair morphed again into their previous form. “This is Captain Lance Starfire, Space-Rogue, gotta go half way to the galactic rim just to find a bar that will serve him.”
She giggled. “Hollywood is silly.”
He looked wounded. “I was nominated for two Golden Neutrinos for that role,” he sulked. “Got a lot of fanmail, too.”
“I’m sure you did,” Harley soothed. “And you wouldda won if your robot sidekick Quark hadn’t split the vote.”
“Robots are such glory hogs,” Matt grinned. “So, Miss Harley, now that you’ve killed Joker, what do you want to do tonight?”
“Rob a bank for excitement and some fun money, then a nightcap at the ‘Berg?” she asked girlishly.
“You got it, gorgeous.”
When you give sparingly?sparingly are you rewarded
Gladys Ashton-Larraby read the fortune aloud and sat it down triumphantly on the table.
“Pah,” her husband answered.
“Even the fortune cookie agrees with me, Randolph,” she insisted. “We simply can’t cut back on charitable giving this year. Think how it will look, with Randy starting Hudson U, everyone knows that means tuition and a large donation to the school each year. It will look like we’re over-extended if we suddenly take only half a table at the opera gala or skip the Wayne Cup at the polo club.”
“Why? If everyone knows we’re having an expensive year, the first of four expensive years, why can’t we cut back some?”
She sighed dramatically.
“It isn’t done, Randolph. The Ashtons have maintained a certain stature in Gotham City almost as long as the Waynes. We don’t have anything as grand as a foundation, but we do have an obligation to support other founding families.”
“And we can’t support them at a gold or silver level for a few years instead of always doing the top diamond-crusted platinum category.”
“No, we can’t,” Gladys answered firmly. “Randolph, really, we owe Bruce a great deal. I don’t have to remind you—”
“BUT you’re going to!” he sang out. “After ‘the unpleasantness with the foreigner’, Wayne came through and got you back on the A-list.”
“—in time for the Christmas round of parties, yes, Randolph. After you jeopardized our social prospects and those of your son, whom you insisted in numbering like a movie sequel, Randolph Larraby IV indeed, rather than letting him enjoy the distinction of the illustrious Ashton legacy.”
“And how much Larraby Chemicals money will you need this time to keep the illustrious Ashton name at the top of that diamond-crusted-platinum-caviar-foie gras-and-truffles list of donors?”
“The same as always, Randolph. Three tables at the gala, and…mmm-forty tickets for the Wayne Cup should be sufficient.”
Forgive your enemies, but don’t forget their names
“That’s mine,” Barbara announced, snatching the slip of paper from Dick’s fingers before he’d finished reading.
“Hey!” he blurted, grabbing it back. “No fortune swapping, you’ve got your own.”
Barbara cleared her throat and read from her slip with dramatic flair, “’Your mission is the luminous path that you follow, no matter how dark the night around you.’ Clearly, Dickie, this is yours.”
He laughed, handed over his fortune and took hers, reading it over to himself.
“Mission and the Dark Knight, that’s me alright, for one more night anyway. Bruce gets back tomorrow.”
“I know. Believe me, Oracle is counting the minutes,” Barbara said, collecting the Chinese takeout boxes, the chopsticks and cookie wrappers.
“You saying Nightwing isn’t keeping things under control?” Dick asked archly.
“You’re fine,” Barbara answered sweetly, “But Robin called in four times last night asking if I’d heard from B and if there was any change in plans on his return.”
“He really doesn’t like the double patrol. But it can’t be helped. The city is the same size it was last week, and there are five of us covering it instead of six. It won’t kill him. I pulled lots of those double patrols my senior year.”
“It didn’t have to be five instead of six if you’d let me call Dinah.”
“No way. For these few nights this is my team, Babs. Bruce made that very clear, I’m in charge, it’s my crew. And I can make my peace with Az being on it. He’s managed to stay not-crazy for quite a while, he’s patrolling as instructed, and seems like he’s doing a good job taking Cassie under his wing. I can deal with him, I can deal with Helena… Water under the bridge. But I won’t ever, EVER—There will NEVER be enough water under that bridge with Black Canary.”
“You’ve made that more than clear,” Barbara said stoically.
“She stood next to you at our wedding, Barbara. And Stephanie’s funeral. She went into his house… a dozen times… like nothing ever happened. That house I grew up in. That man who came into my room when I woke up screaming from a nightmare. That man who taught me to demand the best of myself, that the best way to honor them was to make John and Mary Grayson’s son the best man I could possibly be… He let her into the family—like you and Jason and Tim and Selina. There will never be enough water under that bridge.”
Barbara pursed her lips and sighed.
“You better get changed,” she said quietly. “Don’t want to be late for your last night as the big man.”
Your talents will be recognized?and suitably rewarded
“Tell me something I don’t knows,” Kittlemeier sniffed, tacking the fortune to the corkboard above his worktable with a steelhead sewing pin.
He disliked working late in his shop, ordering in Chinese takeout instead of stopping on the way home for his usual Jaegerschnizel and a little glass of schnapps. But it had to be done. He’d rescheduled Scarecrow’s fitting once already.
Horizontal straw, of all the ridiculous things he’d been asked to pull off. The man was a beanpole; there was no hiding it. The first two attempts at this new costume, Crane had looked like a particularly skinny haystack.
“Meester Crane,” Kittlemeier had told him when he saw his client’s obvious disappointment, “Yous the customer and if dis is th e look you wants, dis is what I gives you. But if you tell me what is effect you wants to achieve, maybe I can helps you better.”
Jonathan Crane regarded his skinny-haystack reflection. “Something that conveys absolute, primal terror,” he said definitely, “but with a sort of Old World, Errol Flynn swashbuckler charm.”
Kittlemeier raised an eyebrow.
“Dis is because of Mr. Blakes again, isn’t it?”
Ever since the Catman had transformed himself into a strapping, muscular ladykiller, half his clients had been in with lists of alterations, or complete redesigns, of their costumes—most of which were hopelessly optimistic about the slimming properties of black gabardine.
Finally deciding that Errol Flynn was perhaps “a little fancy pants” to arouse an appropriate level of terror, Scarecrow suggested a new inspiration.
“Maybe something in a straw man John Wayne,” he proposed, gesturing with a theatrical flourish before the mirror. “Something that says ‘don’t worry, I’m not gonna gas you…The Hell I won’t!’”
Kittlemeier nodded and told Crane to swagger back and forth in front of the mirror (careful, you got pins dere, Mr. Crane), and was pleased with the result. Crane had a surprisingly good swagger. Any cat lover—or blowfish enthusiast—would have recognized someone adept at trying to appear tougher than he really was, and Kittlemeier was truly inspired by the performance. He was certain this new design would suit the Scarecrow’s ambitions to perfection, if only he could find the time to complete it.
You will turn to your?mother for advice
Jervis pursed his lips into a prim but irate grimace and set the fortune down on his plate—noting as he did so that his pinkies were extended in a fussy effeminate manner. He angrily clenched both hands into a fist and grimaced all the more at the little slip of paper.
“Just because a man calls his mother on occasion,” he said defensively.
Edward Nigma raised a derisive eyebrow.
“Mamasboy,” he coughed, just as Two-Face once did the night the Iceberg was turned inside out because of his Auntie Maud’s visit. Jervis’s prestige among the rogues had never really recovered, even after he’d gone so far as to hat Killer Croc for an unprecedented crime spree.
“That noggin of yours is a 7-1/8, isn’t it Edward?” Jervis said teasingly. “I believe I have a Stetson back there in just your size.”
“Don’t threaten me, Pop-n-fresh,” Nigma answered pleasantly. “I’m bringing you business. Riddle me this: how do you expect to get paid if you pop a Panama on the brain brimming with lucrative larceny?”
“I’m all ears,” Jervis announced, perking up considerably.
“Bradley Raffle,” Eddie pronounced grandly, “which is just close enough to ‘baffle’ that it will yield a plethora of perplexing clues to mystify our mutual menace.”
Jervis nodded eagerly. “Who is he?”
“Batman,” Eddie said flatly.
“No, no, no! What are you, addled? I know who our mutual menace is. I mean this Bradley Raffle. We’re not going to rob, abduct or ransom some chap simply because his name makes a snappy clue.”
“One is never quite sure what you know,” Eddie muttered resentfully. “In any case, Bradley Raffle is only the inventor and patent holder of a fiendishly brilliant LENGTHY COO.”
Jervis sighed.
“And tha t would be?” he asked wearily.
“No puzzling spirit!” Eddie exploded. “Why have you no puzzling spirit? It’s no fun if I just TELL you!”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Jervis said quietly. “Edward, as the March Hare told the Jack of— Oh, never mind that. Point is, Ed: You seem a bit off.”
“Off?”
“Off. Or FOF if you want to make one of those word games out of it. FOO even. Edward, you are FOO.”
“I am not. FOO isn’t even—the anagram of OFF is not FOO. And I am not off. I am bringing you a wonderful chance to break out of your rut and strike out like the champion first-caliber rogue you once were.”
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there,” Jervis said sensibly. “What you brought me was kung pao chicken, which was very nice, but—”
“A PUN IN KEG CHOCK,” Eddie said mechanically.
“—But I don’t see why. You’ve never wanted to team up before. Now this chap has an interesting name for a clue of yours but you bring it to me.”
“Because of the technology, Jervis,” Eddie said eagerly, “LENGTHY COO is technology. He’s made a virtual reality helmet, don’t you see? Why, this is tailor made for you. Licensing it to some gaming company for a fortune—a fortune—he’s worth millions. And I bring this perfect opportunity to you, and all you can do is say I’m FOO.”
Jervis scratched his chin, and the verse he associated most with Edward Nigma sing-songed in his head:
Don’t state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things
With a sort of mental squint.
He mentally squinted at Edward Nigma. It was true, the ransoming of a wealthy inventor of a virtual reality helmet… Or possibly just hatting the guy and using him to insert some of Jervis’s own circuitry into the helmet itself before it hit the market—would make a perfect Mad Hatter scheme.
But Riddler already had a plan of his own, kidnapping the guy because of his name. He didn’t NEED Hatter to be involved at all. There was no reason to be bringing him in. He’d just be another rogue hanging around for the crime itself, another rogue present for the Bat encounter afterwards (there was usually a Bat encounter afterwards if you insisted on leaving clues like a trail of breadcrumbs) and another rogue standing there when it was over, expecting a cut of the proceeds. No, it made no sense! Why was Riddler practically giving him half the ransom for doing nothing more than being in the room when Batman came through the door?
“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it,” he muttered to himself.
There was a mystery here. And Jervis did not share Edward Nigma’s delight in unanswered questions.
“Be off, or I’ll kick you down the stairs,” he said abruptly.
“That’s a no?” Eddie queried.
“Yes, it is a No. ‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cheshire cat. ‘We’re all mad here.’ There is something you are not telling me, Edward. And you are most definitely off. Add it up, this misadventure you propose would be perilous, at best, for me. No, I thank you for the chicken, but I’ll pass on the Baffle guy and his helmet.”
“Coward,” Nigma spat.
“I’m very brave generall y,” Jervis quoted, “Only today I happen to have a headache. Goodbye.”
Eddie studied Jervis Tetch for a long moment, his eyes darting subtly as his mind raced through possibilities. When he satisfied himself that he was indeed at a dead end, he shrugged amiably.
“Your loss. Goodnight then.”
He turned to go, and Jervis walked his friend to the door. Before closing it, he paused inquisitively.
“Edward, what did your fortune say?”
“It was a quote,” Eddie answered with a strangely forceful resignation. “One you’ll recognize. ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’”
?
Although he had the vast resources of the Order of St. Dumas at his disposal, Jean Paul Valley never felt the need for a large apartment. Azrael favored the Spartan lifestyle of an ancient warrior, dismissing any form of luxury as a dangerous indulgence that softened the soldier spirit. And Jean Paul’s personal tastes were those of a man whose happiest years of life were spent in a college dorm. He was comfortable living on that scale. His furniture wasn’t cheap or deficient, but there wasn’t much of it. His bathroom and kitchen were clean and tidy, but they were small. Like so many Gotham apartments, his kitchen was small. It had never been a problem that he had no room to store full sets of dishes or cooking pans. He never needed them—until now. Now, he turned and twisted, looking for a free surface to set down the cutting board.
He relocated the wok, the teakettle, and the peanut oil to the cold stovetop and told Azrael to shut up.
I spoke not a word, Mortal, the angel pointed out.
Jean Paul set his grocery bag on the freed counter space, then picked it up again and set it on the floor, and put the cutting board on the counter.
“I said shut up, Az,” he repeated.
Mortal, you seem agitated. It is not wise to handle steel, be it knifeblade or sword, in that state of mind.
“Stir fry, Az. Gotta have everything ready. Onion, pepper, broccoli—where’d I leave the broccoli?—chicken—where’s the chicken?” he muttered.
In the refrigerator.
“Right. Refrigerator. With the dumplings. Oops, put the fortune cookies in there too. They don’t need refrigerated, they’ll get soggy.”
Mortal—
Shut up, Az, Jean Paul thought the rebuke rather than speaking it aloud. She’ll be here any minute. I gotta get this ready. Cooking together is big, it’s a new level. It’s kind of a—
Date. It is a date, Mortal. You have concealed from yourself for many weeks now that you have been dating Ms. Bertinelli—
We’re not dating!
—because it is always she who initiates the social encounter.
Suggesting we get a cup of coffee now and then isn’t initiating anything, Az. And going dutch to the occasional movie together isn’t exactly dating, either.
She is uncommonly aggressive for a female, Mortal. I have pondered whether it is wise for you to indulge her advances as you have, but now that you have at last taken the initiative—
Huge mistake, Az. Huge. Asking her over like that. Why didn’t I ever notice what a pathetic hovel this place is. We’re going to have to eat on the coffee table—shit, I should move the TV into the bedroom or she’ll think I eat in front of the TV like some kind of beer guzzling scratch myself slob—took half a n hour finding two non-chipped dishes that matched.
Mortal, may I remind you that you—
Are the man? I know Az, I know. I’m the man. I’ve gotta pull it together.
—Undoubtedly. But I was going to say: May I remind you that you still have several vegetables and a chicken to chop up in preparation for this ‘stir fry’ as well as setting the table, and relocating the television to the bedroom, which I concur would be most prudent in presenting yourself as a man of civilized habits. You should then change your shirt. The one you are wearing is somewhat wrinkled. It is a mark of respect always gleaned by the fair sex if you take pains to attire yourself well prior to meeting with them.
Az.
You should also shave.
Azrael… Have you got a little thing for Helena?
Nonsense, Mortal. I have every respect for her Huntress persona as a crimefighting ally, and it will behoove our crimefighting efforts to make any such modifications to your private life as will bring you fulfillment.
YOU’VE GOT A THING FOR HUNTRESS! WAY TO GO, AZ.
…Shave, Mortal. Our time grows short… Indulge not in that aftershave that smells of a spice market in Budapest.
Yessir, Az. Whatever you say.
Barbara heard the faint tone that indicated an OraCom unit coming online. She checked her panel to see, and it was Dinah’s channel. She watched as the “BC” on the panel glowed orange for five seconds, indicating the new arrival, and then faded to the same black as the other units that were active.
Barbara paused, her finger over the button to open the channel. She had no assignment for Dinah, it was still early, but once upon time, she would have buzzed in all the same to say “Hi.”
Instead, Barbara wheeled herself to the kitchen and started the water for another pot of tea. She had tried to stay out of it. She tried to support her husband and her friend, but the more of an effort she made, the clearer it became that her “friend” didn’t want to be supported. It was like Dinah expected Barbara to hate her, to be as angry and vindictive as everyone else. She was reading punishment into everything, from a surveillance assignment to a mail run to Cleveland, and she had become increasingly defensive, irrational, and bitchy.
But still Barbara let it all roll off her back. She let it pass night after night, snipe after snipe, because she thought she had to; she wanted to prove she wasn’t turning on Dinah just because Dick had. She tried as long as she could; she let as much of it pass—from both Dinah and Dick, neither one appreciating the position she was in, stuck between them—let as much of it pass as she possibly could. But that 20-minute crack was the last straw.
So Dick wasn’t forgiving and forgetting the way Dinah expected. He didn’t think she could be trusted, he’d been incredibly protective of Tim anyway since Jack Drake was attacked, and Nightwing had been left in charge of the team. So if he vetoed loud and clear her little proposition about teaming with Robin and Batgirl while Bruce was away, that was the decision. Was she only prepared to follow orders when it involved lobotomizing captured villains or mindwiping one of their own?
After 10 minutes of listening to Dinah complain as if she was the injured party, Barbara invented a shootout on the docks and closed the channel.
“Twenty lousy minutes”, that’s “all they took,” she said. Was she supposed to do penance “for the rest of her life?”
Barbara had tried to remain neutr al, she had tried to distance herself emotionally from the turmoil that was turning everyone else inside out on this, and it was at that moment, she realized she succeeded. Because at that moment she didn’t see “Dinah, her friend” or “Black Canary, the crimefighter”—she saw Norman Panks from the victim’s support group. Norman was a gambler, he ran up debts he couldn’t repay with people you don’t run away from. They went to his house, his wife died in the attack and he wound up in a wheelchair, bullet severed his spinal column, just like Barbara.
He was the most poisonously bitter and repugnant individual you could meet outside of Arkham or Blackgate. And after two months of meetings, Barbara finally realized why: Guilt. Norman knew he was to blame for his wife’s death. He felt he should be punished. So he sabotaged himself with everyone he met, bringing on the abuse and rejection he thought he deserved.
Dinah had been carrying on exactly like Norman Panks. She was sabotaging herself with Barbara and any sympathizers she might have left in the Bat-Clan, and the only reason to do that was guilt. And the only reason to feel guilty is if she knew she’d done something wrong.
Barbara had tried to remain neutral, and only now that she mentally dropped a weight onto one side of the scale and consciously “took a side” against Dinah, did she realize the neutrality was killing her. She’d had a sick tightness in her stomach, in her neck, and a sour taste in her mouth for months. Now, for the first time since the big confession, she actually felt… alright.
“He was off,” Jervis confided to Victor Frieze, Sly the bartender, and Oswald Cobblepot. “Crazy-puzzle-man has its place, naturally, here at the ‘Berg to celebrate a successful heist or impress the groupies. Kaloo to Ka-lay, if you know what I say. But this was a business dinner. This was a negotiation. There was no henchman or henchwench around to impress. It was very odd.”
“What did you do?” Oswald asked, “go full-bore Wonderland on him?”
“Yeah, Mr. Nigma’s always one of the first to point out how annoying that is,” Sly said—then winced apologetically at Jervis Tetch. “I just meant, you know, when you’re not expecting it,” he added weakly, mentally kissing his tips goodbye for the next month.
“Right, give it right back to him” Frieze insisted, ignoring Sly’s faux pas and thumping the bar vigorously with his finger. “You want to play the crazy-theme-villain hand here, Edward? Let’s go. I’ll guarantee I can out-crazy you any day of the week.”
“I tossed out a few,” Jervis said mildly, “but I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. I just wanted to hear his pitch and get on with it.”
“Was it any good?” Oswald asked shrewdly.
“Superb,” Jervis moped. “A million dollar job, technology tied to a helmet. Nothing less than you’d expect from The Riddler. Damnit. It would have made a for a frabjously fruminous felony.”
“Ak-hem,” Oswald coughed, since the annoying-theme subject had been raised so recently.
“Sorry,” Jervis apologized. “Anyway, it was a good target. Broke my heart to turn him down.”
Across the room, Edward Nigma watched the quartet and could guess the topic of conversation. Jervis was such a gossipy little fusspot. He really should have known better, going to a chatterbox like Mad Hatter with a scheme. Eddie reached into his pocket and pulled out the telling little slip from the fortune cookie. He read it over again as he sipped his drink. “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
It was the great riddle of his day. For a man of Edward Nigma’s temperament and profession, it was truly the ultimate question: Who is Batman under his mask? And now he, Edward Nigma the Prince of Puzzlers, had the answer: Bruce Wayne.
So now the great riddle was how to continue. How, knowing that secret, was he to continue BEING the Riddler, making use of the information and yet not making use of it? How to devise the perfect crime, the perfect clue, the perfect means of delivery—and then, how to execute that plan knowing the clue would lead the Bat to the crime scene, to him, into the confrontation and then—and then—and then that was the riddle! How to continue? He could no longer not know, he could no longer… It was Bruce Wayne under that mask—and having that knowledge in the midst of a Bat-confrontation was not as satisfying as he’d expected.
The fact that it was Selina’s boyfriend didn’t help matters, certainly, but even without that complication, there was something strangely… off balance… in the room now whenever Riddler and Batman met.
A teamup seemed the perfect solution. With a cohort present that did not know the secret, both he and Batman would be forced to pretend. Everything would be as it had always been—it would have to be—they would have no choice—at all.
A perfect plan, the perfect solution to the puzzle, everything could go back to normal—if only Jervis had gone along with it!
Rogue pride. Stupid rogue pride. Because he didn’t think it up himself, that’s why Tetch wouldn’t go along. They were all such self-absorbed shitheads, it would be just the same no matter who he asked, especially with Tetch now running his yap to any Rogue that would listen. No telling what bizarre theories or conspiracies that demented little toadstool was floating around about him at this point.
What to do, what to do, what to do?
There was a sudden, loud moan of disappointment from Raven’s podium at the door. A catgirl was being turned away… looking for Blake of course. She must’ve just learned he was up the river. Eddie winced as he saw her. Groupies…
hmm…
Groupies.
Now there was a thought.
Rogues were difficult to maneuver, but a henchwench, a henchwench would provide much the same cover. She wouldn’t know Batman’s identity any more than Jervis or Jonathan or Victor would. He would have to pretend, Batman would have to pretend—EUREKA—it would all be the way it was!
Yes, that was the answer. Riddler disliked burdening himself with armies of henchmen. It was undignified—besides which, such men were uniformly stupid and Eddie had to deal with enough stupidity as it was without inviting more right into his hideout and actually letting it in on his plans. Occasionally they were a necessary evil, but on the whole, he avoided hiring henchmen whenever he could.
But a wench, that was another matter. He used to like showing off for a comely lady or two. Echo, Query, Vestige, Doris, Mull, Muse, Puz—
Doris.
Doris who wouldn’t change her name—or put on a costume.
Doris who wouldn’t be a henchwench.
Doris who said crossword puzzles were no foundation for a lasting relationship.
Doris who had no interest in seeing him in the field, in seeing “The Riddler” do what he did best. Doris who had no interest in the baubles Riddler’s plund er could buy.
Doris who didn’t get off living in the hideout of the famous rogue from the newspapers.
Doris who didn’t get off seeing the face of the famous rogue in bed with her.
Doris who did get off though, quite spectacularly, when he’d…
Oh hell.
Well, a guy couldn’t stay on the floor forever. He’d had a bad year, between Harley and Doris and Clurissa and that greened one-nighter-from-hell with Poison Ivy. A bad year and he’d sworn off women for a while, but that was no reason to—
Doris.
She wouldn’t put on a costume or change her name or be a henchwench, but boy could she return a serve. Dancing together at the Halloween party… “Like in baseball (cha-cha-cha), those kids that hang in the dugout and manage the e-(cha-cha-cha)-quipment, what are they called again?” And literally without missing a beat, she followed his lead: turn-step- “Batboys.” Cha-cha-cha.
Batboys.
“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
Batboys.
Bruce gets Selina. Bruce the-freaking-Batman Wayne gets Selina, and what did Eddie get, hm? “Eddie, we need to talk.” A hazy memory of Poison Ivy looking royally pissed and a dandelion he couldn’t explain in his waistband. The Gotham Post making him over into a GenX Metrosexual on his 40th Birthday, and then… then Batman beats the living shit out of him all because… because…
“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
What a hopeless riddle.
Cassie sat in the corner of the Batcave medlab, shivering and breathing rhythmically into a paper bag. Several feet away, Tim held a bloodied bandage against the deepest cut in his leg, maintaining a firm, steady pressure just as Alfred had instructed. They both heard the calm, reassuring warble in the room beyond, as Alfred called a final status report into Nightwing.
“It’s happened to all of us, Cass,” Tim said kindly. “Y’shouldn’t worry about it.”
She glared at him hatefully and the paper bag puffed out violently from her sudden, angry exhale.
Alfred returned, checked Tim’s bandage, and cleared his throat.
“Very well then, you are both to spend the night here in the house. You will make your respective log entries in the morning, and Dr. Thompkins will examine you both at that time. Master Timothy, assuming your wound clots properly and remains free of infection, I would expect you to be cleared to resume patrolling as early as next week. Master Bruce will return tomorrow and make the final determination on when Miss Cassie may resume crimefighting activities.”
“C’mon, Alfred,” Tim interjected, “Ya don’t have to be so grim about it. She feels bad enough as it is.”
Alfred silenced him with a Bat-glare that made Bruce’s look like a cheery wink, then directed a similar look at Cassie.
“It is no trivial thing, young woman, to have proceeded as you did against a villain of the Scarecrow’s stature without waiting for proper backup. You are fortunate indeed that Master Robin was near enough to reach you when he did, and more fortunate still that the toxin to which you were exposed was the generic one for which we have an antidote. If it were one of his more ‘exotic’ blends, you would have to be sedated. As it is, I will still need to monitor your pulse and blood pressure throughout the night.”
“Couldn’t wait. Had hostage,” Cassie sa id simply.
“See, I told ya, Alfred. Cassie is a pro. If she went in alone, it’s ‘cause she had to. Like any of us would. And the fear gas, it’s like I said, it’s happened to us all, and it’s a lot to deal with. Can’t you guys leave her alone and save the lectures for later.”
Alfred’s face softened as he looked from Cassie back to Tim, then back to Cassie.
“Indeed. My apologies, miss.”
He left quickly, almost awkwardly, and Tim gaped in surprised horror, as if he hadn’t known his own strength and accidentally broke a window by tossing a paper ball at it. He looked at Cassie as if for confirmation that Alfred Pennyworth really had just raced out of the room like a clumsy pickpocket, and then followed the butler in confusion.
Helena Bertinelli smiled. She licked her lips seductively, although the trace of “spicy” peanut stir fry that lingered was remarkably bland. It had been quite a while since she’d been on a real date, and even longer since she felt this kind of comfortable with a man.
It had been building since the night they met by chance on the roof across from Barbara’s apartment: both summoned to a mysterious “attendance mandatory” meeting; both uncomfortable that it was held at Barbara and Dick Grayson’s home; both recognizing that the other was stalling, putting off the dreaded moment as long as possible, and for the same reason. They silently agreed to help each other through the meeting: arriving together divided the attention either would have received walking in alone, sitting together kept them from feeling like the poor relation that had to be invited to the wedding but whom nobody wanted to dance with, and leaving together… well that part wasn’t planned. But given the nature of the meeting, both wanted to talk afterwards, and both realized they wouldn’t be anyone else’s first choice for a confidant.
“What do you think?” Huntress asked as soon as they were back on the roof.
“Betrayal,” the Azrael voice boomed definitely, and then, in a strangely softer tone, “Pretty big betrayal too… And those guys don’t forgive.”
Huntress thoughtfully rubbed her left fist inside her right, as if massaging the knuckles with her fingertips.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you and I aren’t the bottom of the totem pole anymore,” she said shrewdly.
The next weeks proved her out. Oracle was calling her more often, with definite assignments, not random check-ins. She wondered if Azrael had been similarly ‘bumped up the food chain’, but she waited another week before (casually) asking Oracle his whereabouts. That led to the first of those “accidental” meetings.
He had located Ventriloquist and Scarface in some kind of toy factory by the riverfront, and it looked like they were moving into narcotics. Another set of fists always comes in handy in a situation like that. So she’d joined in—Blam—and they fought so well together.—Splotch—They fell into such a rhythm, no instructions needed, just a mutual sense of timing and instinct.—Skrunch—
And then they talked—well, she talked, he was pretty quiet. He struck her as the last guy in the world you’d draft into the crimefighting life. Shy, sweet, self-deprecating, a disarming aw-Dad way about him… Of course she realized that was the guy in the helmet, not the Azrael crimefighting persona, but even so, he seemed like he must be a poet or an artist. Quiet a leap from there to the Blam-Splotch-Skrunch of an arrogant, blowhard vigilante.
She found a way to ask, finally, without seeming to hint about names or day jobs, and that’s when the truth came out. He “sort of inherited the family business,” he said—and with that chance phrase, it all made sense. The daughter of a powerful mob boss, Helena grew up with countless men (and boys) who were cut out for other things, but who followed into a “Family” business because they had no choice.
It was when she told him that part of her own past that the masks came off—and that was quite a shock. He was downright handsome. Helena had been involved with four handsome men, including Grayson, and each turned out worse than the last. She had developed a positive aversion to attractive men: nice to look at meant hell to spend time with. The ego, the arrogance, the ‘sun sets on me’ attitude. But Jean Paul had none of that. She couldn’t believe it when “Azrael” took off his helmet and the man she’d come to think of as this modest, gentle soul looked like a Calvin Klein model. If he’d come up to her in civilian life looking like that, she would have blown him off immediately.
“Would you like some more?” Jean Paul offered, holding out the bowl of “spicy” chicken and broccoli.
“Sure, just a bite,” she smiled… The stir fry was bland, but so was Helena’s social life since becoming the Huntress, and Jean Paul Valley was decidedly not.
The Monarch of Menace’s entrance into the Iceberg Lounge was truly a piece of royal theatre. Raven, the hostess, was never impressed by costumes. She thought some of the doormen were far too quick to let any flamboyant outfit in if it was a slow Tuesday night, and that left her to deal them. The showy figure that stood at her podium was a perfect example, and she called the new doorman (Mark, was it?) in from his post to make her point.
“Okay, now look at this that you’ve sent me,” she hissed, pointing at the new customer’s back. “Head to toe in a red velvet cape and tunic trimmed with, what is that, Dalmatian fur? You send me Cruella De Vil in a Miss America crown and a purple mask.”
Before Mark could explain why he’d admitted the man who admittedly looked more Disney drag queen than Gotham rogue, the reason became clear. Harley Quinn bounced in from the coat check and curled her arm around his.
“Your scepter, Your Majesty” she announced, handing him a long gold stick. “They didn’t want to check it ‘cause it’s electrified and they got a lot a C4 and gunpowder in there already.”
“Harley please, you can call me Mr. M.” he nodded graciously, and she curtseyed and giggled.
Raven blanched and hurried back to the podium.
“Good evening, Harley,” she enthused. “I didn’t realize you two were together.”
“Hiya, Raven. Ooh, pretty blouse,” Harley chirped pleasantly.
Anxious to make up for her earlier lapse, Raven went all out to make the newcomer feel welcome. She offered them a table in the dining room, and when Harley said they only wanted a few drinks, Raven suggested they at least walk through the dining room on the way to the bar, so the Monarch’s outfit could be seen.
Harley was so exhilarated by the whispered buzz of speculation as they walked through the dining room, that she paused at the door to the bar and jangled her tassels for attention. Once everyone turned to see, she posed dramatically and declared, “Rogues of Gotham City, I present you with the Monarch of Menace!”
1537;
Alfred returned to the Batcave as soon as he had made up the Rose Bedroom for Miss Cassie. He escorted her silently up the stairs to the clock passage, through the study, across the Great Hall, up the stairs to the bedroom, and down the hall to the Rose Room. There he stopped and coughed, once. To Cassie, it sounded like a Bat-grunt, the kind that preceded a stern talking-to.
“I feel I should reiterate my too-brief apology, miss,” he said formally. “My remarks were truly out of place. I fear that I, as well as Master Nightwing and Miss Oracle, behaved rashly. We have all—”
“Because of Stephanie,” Cassie said with her usual brevity.
“Yes, miss,” Alfred said somberly.
“Stephanie was rash. Went in alone. Bad mistake.”
“Yes, miss,” Alfred agreed. “But your actions should not have been judged because of what happened to her.”
“Was different,” Cassie nodded sadly. “No choice, had hostage. Not rash but still. Went in alone. Still bad mistake. Nightwing angry.”
“Yes, miss, but not with you. We, all of us, still have a great deal of anger and sorrow and fear because of what happened.”
Cassie glanced anxiously down the hall, confirming there was no one around to hear.
“I know. Lied to Tim. Tim ask what I saw, from Scarecrow gas. I said ‘monster.’ Wasn’t. Was Stephanie.”
“I understand, miss,” Alfred said, his eyes moistening. He placed a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “Even without the Scarecrow’s fear-inducing toxins, most of us are all too familiar with that sort of vision.”
Never one to speak if she had nothing to say, Cassie stood in silence and waited to be dismissed. Alfred stood a long moment, analyzing the girl’s silence. Then abruptly he pointed into the room, the gesture and the words to follow harkening back to a time when Master Dick, and before him Master Bruce, tried to connive their way to staying up late on Christmas Eve.
“Off with you, now,” he said with mock severity, “I shall bring you a cup of milk with nutmeg and cinnamon, and after that, in bed and no excuses. You have a full day ahead of you tomorrow.”
With uncharacteristic tact, Oswald waited until Harley went to powder her nose before approaching the “Monarch of Menace”.
“So, a bank robbery,” he quacked, as an introduction. The whole bar had heard the story, how he and Harley Quinn had cleaned out some safe deposit boxes at the State Bank and Trust. “Not a lot of villains rob banks anymore. A pity, really-kwak. It’s such a lucrative activity.”
“Not bad,” the Monarch agreed.
“Of course they don’t keep as much cash around as they did in the old days,” Oswald continued philosophically. “Safe deposit boxes might contain a plethora of treasures but –kwak– you can’t exactly spend a diamond-crusted Rolex at the minute mart. You need a quality agent that can convert a wide variety of merchandise into something more -kwak- liquid.”
“Oswald Cobblepot,” Monarch said with an ironic trill in his voice, “We hereby grant thee official warrant for the sale of our sovereign spoils and dub thee King’s Fence.”
Oswald chewed his cigarette holder thoughtfully.
“Very smooth,” he pronounced like a connoisseur of Roguery and the accoutrements of criminal theme. “I knew the old Monarch,” he continued, to show he was old school and recognized the resurrection of a long-forgotten moniker. “The original Monarch of Menace was not smooth. He was –kwak– something of a buffoon.”
“I know,” the new Monarch murmured subtly through his teeth, just loud enough for Cobblepot to hear. “I look on him as an old, dated movie that was overdue for a remake.”
Helena’s eyes danced sharply as she read her fortune to herself before sharing it with Jean Paul.
“You will be fortunate in everything you put your hands to,” she read in a deliciously liquid voice. Her eyes locked on his, a sexy amusement he didn’t quite understand hanging in the air. “…in bed,” she added finally.
“Huh?” he blurted, his voice cracking.
“You will be fortunate in everything you put your hands to… in bed,” she repeated, with more impatience than seduction in her tone.
“Okay,” he grinned weakly.
“C’mon, don’t you know how to do this? You add ‘in bed’ onto the end of your fortune. Here, look, what did you get?”
Jean Paul gulped.
“My friends never did that,” he said honestly.
“Well you’re going to do it now. Let’s see what you’ve got there,” Helena ordered.
“We did do something like that in the dorm, though, but we added something different on the end.”
“Come on, Jean Paul, let’s see your fortune!” Helena demanded, reaching forward and tickling him until his hand popped open and she snatched the slip of paper.
“Oh my,” she grinned evilly and read aloud, “’You have unusual equipment for success, use it properly’—say it with me now, Hot Shot—‘in bed!’”
Jean Paul grinned sheepishly.
“My friends used a different phrase at the end, that’s all.”
“Oh yeah, I know. Some people say ‘between the sheets’ instead, but ‘in bed’ just works better somehow.”
“That’s not what we did,” Jean Paul said miserably.
“Well, let’s hear it. What did you use?”
“…with this new fully armed and operational battle station.”
Helena stared.
“We were geeks,” Jean Paul explained.
Helena burst out laughing.
“Well, that kind of works too. Seems a waste of the unusual equipment, though, you naughty boy.”
Jean Paul read his fortune again.
“You have unusual equipment for success, use it properly—with this new fully armed and operational battle station…”
He looked up, she looked up, and in unison they spoke the last two words.
“in bed.”
For all his mental grumbling, Dr. Leland Bartholomew enjoyed his work. The rest of society might look on Arkham as a place to shut away the problems it couldn’t deal with. For him, it was a chance to reach those the world had written off, to help those most in need. He became a doctor to be a healer, not a bureaucrat. Reports on patients were part of the job, he accepted that. Employee evaluations were another matter. Whichever ancient Arkham administrator decided that doctors should have a hand in evaluating the support staff must certainly have had counter-transference authority issues.
Bartholomew had put off the loathed task for as long as he could—a bit longer than he could, as it turned out. He’d been picking away at them all week, getting all the way from Abrami, Erica to Drognowski, Peter. That left 24 letters to go, but Bartholomew was confident he could finish up today. A Hugo Strange-Catman incident in the morning anger management session had eaten up most of his day, and he’d completed only four evaluations by five o’clock. It was strictly against policy to take the forms home with him, but Bartholomew couldn’t stomach the idea of working through the night in his office. The late hours were a necessary penance, he had succumbed to avoidance and procrastination, and now he must accept the consequences. He would work though the night to get the job done by the deadline, he would work through the night with no consolation but Chinese takeout. But he would do it at home, not at Arkham.
He’d long observed that Chinese restaurants fell into two categories: the good one and the one that delivers. Ming Chow, the place that delivered to Arkham, was only one sticky rice grain better than starving. The Hunan Wok, where he could stop on the way home for savory ginger and scallion shrimp, that was worth bending a few regulations.
With his last bite of shrimp, Bartholomew opened the evaluation for Tibideau, Rachel. He was happy to have reached the Ts, calculating that there were only 6 letters left in the alphabet and few surnames begin with U, X or Z. The end was in sight!
Unfortunately, he was at a loss to evaluate Rachel Tibideau, having only a vague recollection of who she was. He strained for some sort of comment, and failing to come up with anything he cracked open his fortune cookie.
One look is worth a thousand reports, it read.
Bartholomew chuckled, picked up his pen, and wrote hastily, “She works in admissions, she says good morning, and she didn’t quit when Croc broke her jaw. What is there to evaluate?”
He nodded, pleased with himself, and went on to the next form. Willory, Patrick. “After Joker escaped there was blood on the walls. After Willory’s shift next day, there wasn’t. What else is there to evaluate?”
Bartholomew nodded again, doubly pleased, and placed the dedicated Mr. Willory’s evaluation at the bottom of the stack as before, looking eagerly at the next form. Abrami, Erica.
Oh. It looked like he was done then. Well… Bartholomew skimmed his earlier comments on Erica Abrami’s performance. He clicked his pen a few times excitedly and added the notation, “Have you ever put Jonathan Crane in a straitjacket? She has! Give her a raise.”
Tim knocked nervously on the door to the rose bedroom.
Seconds passed, and he wondered if he hadn’t knocked a little too softly.
“Cass, are you awake?” he whispered.
More seconds passed before he realized the whisper was even softer than the knock. He glanced anxiously at Alfred’s door, wondering if he could risk a louder knock, when the door creaked open and Cassie stood there, blinking at him. Tim tried his best to remember how to talk.
“Thought you might, uh,” he managed. “Like I said before, we’ve all been through it, the Scarecrow gas. I figured sleeping in a strange bed in a big empty house isn’t the best medicine.”
“Not sleeping,” Cassie said frankly.
“This house can be a little creepy,” Tim pointed out.
“Room too pink,” Cassie agreed.
Tim laughed, and Cassie looked confused. It was unusual for anyone to laugh when she spoke. Then he stopped. It was very awk ward. The hall was dark and quiet.
“Wanna go down for some ice cream?” Tim suggested finally.
Cassie smiled—and felt embarrassed by it, she had smiled too quickly and too brightly—but she followed Tim downstairs to the kitchen.
The “Monarch of Menace” had followed Oswald back to his office, and Harley ordered another Diet Sprite. She knew from experience that she had a long wait ahead. Ozzy would have to examine all the goods from the safe deposit heist, and then they’d start on the negotiations. That could take forever if you didn’t have Mistah J’s knack for hurrying a meeting along. So Harley looked around the bar for some way to pass the time, and lucky-lucky there was Red getting seated in her special booth.
Harley marched over happily while the vines and shrubbery were still arranging themselves to form that curtain around the booth. Red liked to keep a little border between her and the rest of the Iceberg, left open like a tent flap if she was feeling sociable and closed if she wanted to be left alone.
With an expert eye, Sly noted when Harley joined Poison Ivy, and he deftly slid her tab from the bar stack and set it next to the one for Ivy’s booth. It was a complex system only he understood, but it enabled him to map the ever-shifting movements and alliances in the Gotham underworld and to read them at a glance.
Oswald’s office door opened and his boss waddled out, followed by the new fellow, the Monarch of Menace. Sly watched as Oswald surveyed the room, said something to Monarch, and the pair of them disappeared again inside the office. With the response time that rivaled the OraCom Matrix, Sly turned the Monarch’s tab slightly at a 5-degree angle, the upper left corner pointing towards Oswald’s office, indicating a client currently in favor in the Iceberg’s underground operations.
He needed a henchwench. Edward Nigma reminded himself of the fact for the sixth time as the self-important little nitwit prattled on with her “ideas” (if that was really the word to use for this treacle).
With a wench at his side, Riddler could face Batman knowing that neither he nor the Dark Knight could allude to the secret under the mask. It was necessary to get a wench, and of the groupies available on a given night at the Iceberg, well… beggars can’t be choosers.
This girl calling herself Alaskandra didn’t seem to know who he actually was. She knew “Riddler” as the name of a top rogue, but she didn’t seem to grasp the first thing about who he was or what he did. Her ideas about him, and indeed all rogues, seemed like their Gotham Post histories but viewed through a funhouse mirror of faux-intellectual, faux-PC pretension, kind of like Oprah in a homemade question mark leotard. As she spoke, Nigma found himself wondering how anyone could function inside such a mind. She seemed to have no inkling that she was dumb as a rock. She seemed, on the contrary, to think she was downright bright!
“So y’see, a trap that’s sprung from a trap door has a built in pun, and I figured you could use that in your clue, like if it had, like, an electrified shield underneath, you could warn about a ‘shocking pun’ ahead, get it?”
“Yes, I follow,” Eddie said dully.
It didn’t take long for Nightwing to find a target for his frustrations. He began with a petty drug dealer supplying the raves, moved on to the Spiked Skull gang, and finally finished off the evening with the Chinatown triad selling the Skulls guns. The activity left him with an aching fist and the 29th Precinct wit h an overcrowded holding cell, but it did little to thin the cloud of anger, frustration, and failure that congealed around him since the call came in: Batgirl gassed. Robin wounded.
Bruce would be back tomorrow. He’d entrusted Nightwing with his team, and ‘Wing was returning only 2/3 of it in operational condition.
Cassie had been gassed. Tim had been stabbed.
He radioed in to Oracle. It was getting to be Last Call at the Iceberg. Without any operatives to go and observe in person, he told her to tap into the traffic cameras and see what she could make out. Any intel she could collect would be helpful: who was closing the place, who left with whom, which direction they went. Anything he could show Batman to show they’d carried on, they’d gotten the job done. Anything to lessen the…
Cassie. Tim.
Nightwing made a ferocious fist and punched a brick chimney. He winced at the new pain throbbing down his knuckles into the wrist, devouring the older, duller ache from the evening’s earlier pummeling.
Cassie went in alone against the Scarecrow; she was gassed and stabbed Tim when he tried to help her. Would it have played out any differently if he’d let Black Canary partner them?
It was Gotham. They were crimefighters. Stuff was going to happen, they all knew that. But another pair of eyes, another set of fists, there was no denying that…
No.
No.
No. No. No. Black Canary could not be trusted; it was that simple. There can’t be teamwork without trust; Dick had known that since he was four. You can’t climb a ladder twenty feet into the darkness above the center ring, reach out for that trapeze dangling only twelve feet from the top of the tent, swing from that 1-1/2 inch of steel bar and then leap out into NOTHING without knowing—knowing, as sure as up is up and down is down, that those arms will BE THERE to CATCH YOU.
Those you trust that way are family, blood ties or not; they are family in every way that matters. His father, his mother, and Bruce. There was really little difference. You could leap into nothing and know.
Barbara too, after a time. Jason wasn’t around long enough to form that bond, but Tim was. You could leap and know.
And Cassie, Cassie was getting there. Wally. Roy. Donna. Hell, all of the Titans. It was family. And even if he’d risk his own back with someone like Dinah, he’d be damned before he’d risk his family’s. Tim’s or Cassie’s leap entrusted to that woman who came among them like she was one of them, when all the while she would stand by and let Bruce fall to the dust…
Just like his father had fallen.
Damn that bitch.
It was getting too late to expect more action. If he were on his own time, he would have called it a night. But seeing as he was covering for Batman, he decided on one more pass through the patrol route. If, as he expected, there were no more criminal scum to pound out his frustrations, he might wrap up the evening with a half-hour of Zogger.
Cassie giggled.
“Now it’s all over except the crying,” she smirked.
“U-oh,” Tim swallowed.
He’d taken her to the “movie room” behind the armory. The room with the giant plasma screen wasn’t used much since Dick had grown up, not officially. But he and Dick kept it equipped with the latest Xbox and PlayStation gear.
Tim figured Phoenix Ninja was the only cha nce he’d have to trounce Batgirl in a fair fight, and trounce her he did for the first 12 minutes of play. There was no body language to read in his avatar ShadowBird, none of the tells she reacted to with such deadly speed in a physical battle. Then she noticed how this wrist-twitch or that made his character move, and since then…
“All over,” she repeated as Tim’s ShadowBird lay inert on the digital rooftop while the spectacular backdrop of downtown Ginza reconfigured to proclaim SilentShogee the winner.
“’cept the crying,” she added, looking at him expectantly.
“Rassafrassin,” Tim muttered.
Cassie smiled. “Play again or movie?”
“Movie,” Tim declared, looking at the stack of DVDs.
“Coward,” Cassie teased.
“No,” he insisted, “We’ve got a lot to get through, that’s all. I can’t believe you haven’t seen Princess Bride or Blazing Saddles. These are the fundamentals that everyone must know by heart, Cassie.”
“You fear SilentShogee,” she said. “Beat ShadowBird again given half chance.”
Tim’s eyes locked onto hers.
“You think so,” he challenged with bat-like ferocity.
“Know so,” she nodded with certainty.
“Care to make it interesting?” he grinned.
She blinked quizzically. “Interesting?”
“A bet. If I win, you’ve got to… let’s see… You’ve got to bring me a slice from Gino’s every night during patrol for a week.”
Cassie’s head tilted slightly, confused.
“You not win. ShadowBird weak.”
“You so sure, put your money where your mouth is.”
Cassie’s stare pitchshifted suddenly, the endearing puzzlement blotted out by a ferocious bat-glare.
“I want Red Bird,” she announced.
“You want my car?” he gulped. “No way!”
“See, you know ShadowBird weak. Shadowbird lose. I get car.”
“If you win,” Tim said firmly, “IF, ‘cause you don’t have the sure thing you think you do, but if you win, I’ll bring you an ice cream sundae during your patrol each night for two weeks. See, you get two weeks if you win, and I only get one. I’m giving you odds, that’s how we know who’s really the favorite here.”
Cassie nodded her agreement, and Tim punched the reset, restarting the game.
“All over ‘cept the pain, Shadowbird” Cassie snickered.
“Not this time, SilentShogee,” Tim answered.
Nigma signaled furtively at the waitress. He really didn’t think he could get through another minute with this “Quizzix” woman without a stiff drink. She was “a go-getter,” the type you saw on those Apprentice shows, thought she could mastermind a Riddler crime better than Nigma himself: “As you can see by this graph I’ve made up plotting successful robberies against robberies stopped by Batman, you could raise your success ratio significantly, save time and fit in more robberies per month just by leaving out the clues.”
Nigma looked pleadingly at the waitress, pointing to his empty glass, while Quizzix went on to suggest, if he absolutely had to leave a clue, it should have nothing to do with his intended crime. Rather, he should send Batman uptown instead of down, to the east side instead of the west…
“Another Glenundrum,” Eddie told the waitress wretchedly.
“In fact, if you’re going to send clues, you could go all the way and send them pointing to other rogues crimes, like that Joker-guy.”
The waitress looked at Eddie pityingly.
“Just bring the bottle,” he suggested.
“You have a problem there,” Oswald advised the Monarch, nodding shrewdly towards Poison Ivy’s booth, where Harley sat chatting happily with her friend.
He ushered Monarch back into his office and closed the door. “Two problems, perhaps. Whether the Joker has any actual feelings for Ms. Quinn is, of course, a subject of some debate. I don’t really think a jealous outburst is likely on that score. But he will not like anyone else calling himself a ‘king’ among the rogues.”
“I’m not worried,” the Monarch announced calmly.
“Kwak,” Oswald answered, as if this unruffled confidence came as no surprise. “And Miss Isley,” he went on probingly, “She has been known to be jealous… possessive, territorial, and dangerously hostile to Bat and Rogue alike.” He paused and smiled fiendishly. “And yet you’re not worried there either,” he noted.
“No,” the Monarch answered.
“Might one ask why,” Oswald replied.
The Monarch smiled.
“I rather think you’ve guessed, Ozzy old boy.”
Oswald chewed his cigarette holder thoughtfully.
“Because SmileX and pheromones don’t have much effect when you’ve got no lungs or nostrils,” he said at last.
In response, the Monarch’s body swelled, drooped, and settled into Clayface’s unaltered form.
“You really will have a problem there,” Oswald noted gravely. “She hasn’t forgotten the potpourri incident.”
“I know. Why do you think I came back in disguise? I know I’m still blacklisted, but damnit, Oswald, I don’t care anymore. I’m sick of Star City and Keystone and Metropolis. I wanted to come home, and so I did. It’s not like she can do anything to me. Short of firing me into pottery, it’s not like any of you can do anything to me.”
“True enough,” Oswald conceded. “But then, why the Monarch?”
“It matches Harley,” Clayface explained. “King and court jester. Be a crime to change that look of hers, don’t you think?”
“Quite,” Oswald quacked.
“I like her, Ozzy,” he said simply. “I don’t have many pleasures left, since this.” He gestured, his hands and fingers becoming more solid and defined, then melting back into a viscous goo. “I’ve no blood pumping, no nerve endings. Touch, taste, and smell are all a memory. All I have left is looking. She’s pretty. God, the pleasure I can still get from looking at a pretty woman.”
Oswald continued to chew thoughtfully on his cigarette holder.
“You should still settle matters with Miss Isley before Joker finds out about the ‘Monarch’. They may not be able to harm you, but they can still do plenty of damage to my bar, especially if they’re both of the same mind to do you grievous bodily harm at the same time, if you see my point. You will, of course, be charged for any breakages at the usual rate.”
Clayface laughed heartily.
“It is good to be back in Gotham,” he declared, reshaping himself into the Monarch’s imposing form. “G ood indeed, to be back in the realm of Gotham.”
Nigma returned to his hideout alone. On the cocktail napkin in his pocket, he had the phone numbers of three groupies, written in silly neon green ink and positioned with girlish whimsy around the Iceberg Lounge logo. He set it on the desk, neatly pressing out all the wrinkles. He found a glass and filled it to the brim with the remaining scotch. He raised it high, toasting Alaskandra, Quizzix, and Cluedith in all their dimwitted glory. He took out a book of matches, also bearing the Iceberg logo, and with the grim severity of a high priest enacting a holy rite, he methodically struck a match against the side of the box, touched the flame to the napkin and watched the names burn.
Then he drank the scotch in a series of urgent gulps.
Bruce had Selina. You could say what you wanted about Batman, but he wasn’t a stupid man. He was the only mind in Gotham on par with Riddler’s own. And he’d found himself a smart woman, a woman who could challenge him, a woman who could keep up, a woman who…
How he missed Doris.
Dr. Bartholomew looked at his final notation on Johnson, Marion and wondered if perhaps he was taking the benevolent flippancy a little far. While it was certainly true that no one could do a better impersonation of Hugo Strange eating spaghetti, it wasn’t really the sort of thing Arkham should be encouraging in its staff.
The Chinese food was fine, Bartholomew reflected as he searched for the whiteout, but the gin was probably a mistake.
Azrael perched on top of the train station while rain began pelting the net of unconscious thugs he’d left suspended from a fire escape. The rain began as a mere trickle, but his ears did detect a rumble of distant thunder. If the police did not arrive soon to collect this criminal refuse, he would have to cut them down. The fire escape was metal. If the storm worsened, it would not do to leave living men, even criminals, tied to a lightning rod.
While he waited, Azrael eased open the door to his mortal psyche. Within that door, Jean Paul Valley glared at him with a murderous fury never before directed at an angel by a human spirit.
Boundries, Az, that’s all I’m saying, was his sole remark.
Azrael said nothing.
After several minutes of strained silence, the police van arrived and Azrael resumed his patrol.
You said Azraels do not participate in the human experience. Back when my father died and you emerged from my psyche, you said an Azrael is an angel, a creature of spirit, and takes no part in the host’s mortal life. You said—
I merely—
You said an Azrael is a creature of spirit. You said in the old days before the Order of St. Dumas could cook up the next generation in a test tube, you said the host fathered a child in the usual way and the Azrael persona just shut off and let him go to it in private.
I merely peeked.
YOU DON’T GET TO PEEK WHEN I’M HAVING SEX, AZ! You’re supposed to go take a nap or recite swordfighting stats or something, I DON’T CARE as long as you’re NOT IN MY HEAD!
It was that ‘Sex and the City’ program, my curiosity was very keen.
…
Ms. Bertinelli seemed very energetic.
I hate you, Azrael. I hate you and I will find a way to hurt you.
There is no need to be vindictive, Mortal. My indiscretion did no harm.
YOU KINDA WRECKED THE MOOD, AZ.
I did not hear the lady complain.
I’m going to find a way to hurt you, Az. I’m not taking this lying down.
…
…
Have you noticed, Mortal, that Ms. Bertinelli bears a certain resemblance to Charlotte the Virtuous?
I hate you.
Barbara approached the bed as quietly as she could and nudged her sleeping husband apologetically.
“Dick? Dick, I’m sorry to wake you, hun. You have to get up.”
He moaned and drove his head deeper into the pillow.
“Dick, I know it’s early but you’ve got to wake up,” Barbara tried again.
“Toorrly,” Dick murmured, pulling arm and blanket up over his ears. “Tell alfemem was uptll daw…patrllng…can’t goschooo t’day.”
“Dick,” Barbara said firmly, “I’m not Alfred and you don’t have to go to school. You do have to wake up now. Get the supertush in gear.”
Dick rolled onto his back and blinked up at her. Then he sat up and stared.
“What time is it?” he moaned, “Feels like I just got to sleep.”
“It’s early,” Barbara apologized. “It’s just after eight, but you’ve got to get up. Alfred called. Bruce changed his plans, he’s going to stay another day or two so—”
“Oh man,” Dick wailed, flopping back onto the bed.
“So you’re going to have to go out to the manor and play ‘dad’ while Leslie checks out Tim and Cassie. Go over their reports on what happened, and make the call.”
“M-kay,” Dick managed, puckering his mouth as if he really couldn’t concentrate on bat issues before brushing his teeth.
“I’m also getting reports on the police band about a Riddler clue left at the Batsignal,” Barbara added. “He usually lights the signal to announce one of those. This time he didn’t, so they just found it. You might want to stop by and see what’s up.”
“Great. Daytime appearance at the GCPD, Bruce’ll love that,” Dick yawned. “Okay, I’ll, ah, go out to the manor in civvies, get some breakfast there, I guess, change, and then stop at police HQ on the way back. Put a call into Wally, tell him change of plan, if he can make a zip through Bludhaven again tonight and tomorrow, I’ll make it worth his while. And tell him he owes me $20. Put Jean Paul and Helena on standby. It might be just the three of us out there tonight. Won’t know for sure ‘til I hear from Leslie and talk to Cass. You said just after eight o’clock, right? We’ll know more by the time they’re up.”
“Roger, Boss,” Barbara answered automatically in her crisp OraCom voice. Then she caught herself and looked up at her husband as he shuffled towards the bathroom while trying to slide his left foot into his right slipper.
“The big chair suits you, Dickie,” she said warmly.
“Feels pretty good,” he answered, stretching his upper body and emitting his regular morning bearcry. “I’ll still be happier when Bruce gets back.”
Lucius Fox sighed as he hung up the phone. He couldn’t say he was surprised; Bruce was always changing plans. It was part of being Lucius Fox, these early morning calls from Alfred Pennyworth saying Mr. Wayne was delayed in Metropolis, Tokyo, or Biarritz. Lucius pulled up Wayne’s schedule for the day as well as his own, displaying the two windows side-by-side and glancing down the timeline on the left.
He buzzed Gail, his senior assistant, and told her to cancel his 11:30 with Finance, move the 12:15 with Simmons to the afternoon, and reschedule the 1:30 with the Hudson trustees for later in the week. He would be taking Mr. Wayne’s place at this lunch meeting with Councilwoman Montoya. It wouldn’t do to cancel out on the city council, after all.
Gail confirmed her instructions, and Lucius closed the intercom before she could hear him grumble.
“SOCCER WEEDS DR SEW!” Nigma announced, pounding frantically on Jervis Tetch’s door. “SOCCER RED DEW SEWS, DR SEWS COERCES WED, SCREWED SO SCREWED, JERVIS, OPEN UP, IM SCREWED, SO VERY VERY SCREWED!!!”
Jervis Tetch opened the door to his lair only a fraction of an inch, and he peered out at his hysterical visitor with sleepy disdain.
“Galoo-GoAway, Edward. I have company,” he hissed through the crack in the door.
“I DON’T CARE,” Nigma screamed, pounding ferociously on the door. “I’M IN TROUBLE, MAN! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT, YOU RASCALLY LITTLE TOADSTOOL! IF YOU’D HELPED ME WITH MY BAT PROBLEMS, I WOULDN’T BE ‘DEC EVER RYE VOSS WRY’ SO VERY VERY SCREWED!”
Jervis hurriedly opened the door, hissing at Nigma to, for heaven’s sake, control himself. His neighbors thought this was a respectable business, a showroom for novelty ball caps. Eddie accepted the rebuke calmly since he was getting in the door—when the sight of Jervis’s “company” set him off again.
“Cluedith!” he gaped, recognizing the groupie from the Iceberg. “You said you wouldn’t look at a man who didn’t have a riddling spirit. You said a mind that doesn’t—”
“A-hem,” Jervis coughed mildly. “If you recall, the Mad Hatter of Wonderland fame did pose a riddle to Alice, a famously unanswerable riddle if you wish to—”
“Not the raven and the writing desk!” Nigma exploded.
“—make comparisons,” Jervis concluded while Cluedith pronounced “The raven and the writing desk” with breathy adoration.
Eddie looked at Jervis in disgust.
“You hatted her, didn’t you?”
“I did not,” Jervis barked, insulted.
“He did not,” Cluedith spouted, outraged.
“NOBODY UN-HATTED SWOONS OVER THE RAVEN AND THE WRITING DESK, LADY!” Eddie cried hysterically.
“Edward, Edward, calm down. Just sit yourself down there and let Cluedith and I say our goodbyes. You stay right there, I’ll be with you presently.”
He ushered Cluedith to the door, then returned to Nigma with a worried grimace.
“Now then, Edward,” he began, but was immediately cut off by an angry rant.
“’I think you might do something better with the time than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.’ That’s what Alice told that Hatter and that’s what I’m telling you, Jervis. ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk,’ that’s not even a real riddle!”
“Now then. Edward,” Jervis repeated firmly, brandishing a ballcap. “Would you care to tell me voluntarily why you’re out-madding the maddest of hatters? Or must I take matters into my own hatters. Hands, that is. Just look, you’ve got me doing it now.”
“I’m ruined, Jervis,” Eddie grumbled miserably. “Ruined. Ruined. NUDER I. Ruined.”
“Want to talk about it?” Jervis as ked politely, “Or would you like a drink?”
Eddie raised his hand solemnly and declared, “Never shall a drop of alcohol touch my lips again. I tried to drown my frustrations last night, and that’s what led to my present state of Ruined, Screwed, and Doomed.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Edward. You couldn’t have gotten that drunk or you’d be hungover now.”
“I am hungover,” Eddie assured him.
“You’ve been shouting and pounding on things since you arrived. That’s a funny kind of hangover.”
“Jervis, my once-able cranium is like a giant exposed nerve throbbing inside a honeycomb of razorblades. The only thing more excruciating than the glare of sunlight on the walk over here is the nails-on-a-chalkboard screech of your voice and mine. I am in agony. I simply don’t care anymore. Because the hangover is nothing compared to the disaster I’m looking at if I can’t get that letter back.”
Dick went down to the Batcave while Leslie Thompkins completed her examination of Cassie. Despite Barbara’s comments about “the big chair”, he bypassed Batman’s workstation and logged in at Workstation 2. He pulled up the previous night’s logs and then paused, closed the window and stared at the screen. The wallpaper had a purple leather texture. Dick sat for a full minute chuckling at it and shaking his head in amused disbelief.
He returned to the logs and read Batgirl’s report on her encounter with the Scarecrow. He remembered his own first exposure to fear toxin. He was quite sure his account wasn’t nearly this detached or thorough. To have made this entry a mere twelve hours after the toxin was a startling feat for one as young as Batgirl, the discipline and courage it must have taken to relive it all so soon… Dick noted that she did withhold the details of her hallucination, but he could understand that. He had done the same his first time, although Bruce had guessed.
Dick closed Batgirl’s log and opened Robin’s. He had been the closest to Batgirl’s location, but by the time he arrived at the scene, Scarecrow had made his escape and Batgirl had been gassed. In her hallucinatory state, she’d stabbed him with a batarang before he could administer an antidote. Dick considered this. Given Batgirl’s deadly fighting abilities, he would have opted for a tranquilizer dart rather than attempting the antidote first.
He would have to point that out when he spoke to Tim. It was easy to second guess, and Dick hated whenever Bruce had done it, but in this case, there was a faulty strategy involved and Robin got himself injured unnecessarily. Dick would give him a chance to realize his mistake, but if Tim didn’t see the error on his own, then Dick would have to coach him.
Behind him, Dick heard a respectful cough, and he noticed a mug of coffee and an English muffin had appeared on the desk beside him, just as a plate of cookies and a glass of milk often did when Dick was a boy, studying in his room.
Rather than ignore it or murmur “Thank you, Alfred” without turning his eyes from the computer screen, Dick turned to the butler and beamed with gratitude. “Thanks, Alfred, you’re a lifesaver,” he enthused, picking up the muffin and taking a large, eager bite. “I so needed this,” he added while he chewed.
Alfred ignored the breach of manners and looked past Dick to the logs displayed on the computer screen.
“Dr. Thompkins has concluded her examination on Miss Cassandra and has proceeded to Master Tim,” he reported dryly. &ldqu o;When she is finished, will you come upstairs and meet with her in the study, or would you prefer to receive her down here?”
“I’ll come up,” Dick said brightly, wiping butter from his chin. “I’ve done all I can down here.”
“Very good, sir,” Alfred nodded, producing an extra napkin.
“You need to get that letter back,” Jervis noted grimly.
“Ya think?!” Eddie wailed.
“Yes, well,” Jervis fussed with imaginary lint on his cuffs, “The fact is, unless you want an electronic hangover remedy, I don’t see what I can do for you. Sneak-thieving isn’t in my line. You know who you really want to get for something like that is Selina.”
Eddie glared hatefully.
“Selina isn’t really an option,” he growled.
“I don’t see why not. You and the Cheshire Cat are such friends, I’m sure she would help you out-oh, unless… I see, you don’t want a woman to know your dignity’s gone down the rabbit hole. Hmm.”
“Selina really isn’t an option,” Eddie repeated.
“You wouldn’t have to tell her the whole history,” Jervis insisted. “You could just say there’s an envelope with a question mark that got away from you when you had a few too many at the Iceberg, and now you need it back!”
“Not… an option,” Eddie fumed impatiently. ““How many ways can I say it Jervis: A PINTO NO TON, PAINT ON TOON, TINA PONTOON… NOT AN OPTION!”
“But why not?” Jervis cried happily. “I’m sure the Cheshire Cat would help you.”
“Her cell phone doesn’t answer,” Eddie grumbled. “I think she’s out of town.”
“Oh,” Jervis deflated. “But you haven’t made sure? You should make sure. Call the house, or even better, go out to see her in person. That butler of Brucie’s is a perfect Walrus. I said so the day we went out there to tell him the cat-rules, remember? You, me and Harvey…”
Eddie propped his head on his elbow and sat in self-pitying silence while Jervis prattled on.
Cassie sat in the Wayne Manor study in a deep chair pulled from across the room to sit in front of Bruce’s desk. Cassie had never applied for a loan or been called to the principal’s office, but she recognized instinctively the deferential placement. Dick sat behind the desk and studied her critically.
“In your log, you don’t mention what you actually saw as a result of the fear toxin,” he noted. “I gather you perceived Robin as a threat. Maybe he was King Kong in a bright yellow cape or…” he left the sentence unfinished, hoping she would take the cue and offer some sort of detail. She didn’t, she just looked down at the floor.
“Cassie?” Dick prompted.
“Very sorry hurt Tim,” she said.
Dick rose and came around to the front of the desk, leaning against it in a kindly, casual manner.
“I didn’t tell anybody either,” he said sympathetically. “The first time I breathed that stuff, I was back at the circus. I knew there was something wrong with the trapeze, I knew someone had sabotaged the gear, but I couldn’t find my parents to warn them. I kept trying, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t reach them… and then they fell.
“Cassie, I’m not upset because you went in without waiting for b ackup. I saw in the logs how it all happened. You did the right thing.”
She looked up instantly.
“Then am clear? Go out again tonight? As Batgirl?”
Dick sighed.
“I don’t know. It’s absolutely your right to keep it to yourself about what you saw. If that’s what you want, it’s not my place to order you to share something that personal. But I don’t know if I should let you back out there if you’re going through some kind of trauma by yourself.”
“Always work alone,” Cassie answered. “Is better.”
“No,” Dick shook his head. “It’s not. I work alone in Bludhaven, and on a team with the Outsiders and here in Gotham. It’s different, but neither way is better. If you can trust the people on your team, they can help you through stuff like this.”
Cassie bit her lip nervously. It was practically the only time Dick had seen her behave like a teenage girl. It made him think he was handling this the right way—either that or he was screwing up a young girl’s life and Batman’s finely honed team in one stroke.
“Saw Stephanie,” Cassie said at last. “Told Alfred. Saw Stephanie. In Robin cape. Very mad. Very dead. Said my fault. Not friend. Friend wouldn’t let die. Stephanie-Robin very mad. Very violent,” then her whole manner changed and she looked up at Dick, speaking with much greater animation. “Was funny, too. Fight better that way. Ghost-Robin-Stephanie fight much better than real Stephanie. Would not have died maybe if could fight like that.”
She gasped suddenly, and blurted the rest though tears.
“Could have taught her fight like that. Know how. From four years old, father teach to fight. Like that. Very fierce. Very fast and strong. Could have taught her. If taught her, Stephanie not be dead.”
Dick took a step back as Cassie went on, a flood of impassioned words forcing through a stream of bitter tears.
Dick betrayed his own strategy and did exactly what Robin had done, raced forward to comfort this sad, frightened child without any thought to the deadly abilities she possessed or if she could control them in her present state. Fortunately, with no batarang at hand, the violence of Cassie’s response was confined to a strong but tiny fist landing repeatedly on his shoulder while she sobbed.
When her tears were spent, Dick put a fatherly hand under her chin and tilted her head upward to look at him.
“Come down to the cave,” he said in a stern rooftop voice.
A minute later, they were standing in front of the case displaying Jason Todd’s costume.
“I had all those same doubts after he died,” Dick said softly. “So starting tonight you’ll be partnered with me. Leslie says Tim is laid up for ten days. So you and I, Nightwing and Batgirl, are partners for the next ten days. After that, you can resume your regular solo patrols in Gotham, but Robin is going to introduce you to the Teen Titans.”
Jervis Tetch ran excitedly from the apartment building. From his vantage point across the street, Eddie shook his head as Jervis remembered the hatted doorman, doubled back and knocked the rigged hat from his head, then resumed his hurried escape.
“If that’s a master criminal, there’s hope for every ape in Africa,” he thought acidly.
Jervis ran up to him, eagerly waving a green envelope sealed with a gold qu estion mark.
“Kalloo-Kallay, success I say,” he announced happily, handing over the prize.
Eddie tore open the envelope and read feverishly. “Mr. Kittlemeier, I know this is short notice, but I’m going to need another dozen exploding—What the fuck! This isn’t what I wrote to Doris, this is… this is…” He looked at Jervis in bewildered horror.
“I’m not breaking into Kittlemeier’s,” Jervis told him definitely. “No way, no how. We get caught, we’re banned for life.”
“My life’s become a Seinfeld episode,” Eddie grumbled.
Lucius Fox was surprised when he gave his name at the Shun Lee Palace and was told “the ladies” had already been seated. As far as he knew, the lunch meeting was with Councilwoman Montoya alone. He hid his grimace as the host led him to a table where Renee Montoya was seated with Gladys Ashton-Larraby.
“Ladies, I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long,” he said politely, taking his seat.
In the time it took for the cold duck appetizers to arrive, Lucius had acclimated to “the Ashton-Larraby experience” (as Bruce referred to it in his less charitable moments). She was bitterly disappointed that Bruce himself wasn’t coming to the meeting—until she found out why, and then her ill-concealed pique transformed into ill-concealed joy. He was out of town with that darling Selina. Of course, the young lovebirds. Of course they would want to prolong their getaway together, who could be so selfish as to deny them that, weren’t they the most splendid couple that ever was and when were they to finally announce the happy news and treat Gotham society to another splendid Wayne Manor wedding.
With the arrival of a sizzling rice cake soup, Lucius tried to transition from talk of Wayne’s absence to talk of the Wayne Foundation, which was of course the reason for the meeting. He was thwarted by a figure not even present at the table, a person he didn’t know existed, a person called “Randy-quad”. After enough repetitions of this name, Lucius gleaned what any member of Gotham high society evidently knew by instinct: Randy-quad was Gladys’s son, Randolph Larraby IV, and preparing to start Hudson U in the fall. Since Mr. Fox was an officer of both Wayne Enterprises and the charitable foundation, he must surely have some valuable insights on the matter. Randy-quad’s father (who insisted on numbering the poor boy like a movie sequel rather than letting him enjoy the distinction of the Ashton name), had wanted his son to attend Wharton, or perhaps the Harvard School of Business, but the Ashtons always went to Hudson U—why, the family was older than the college itself and, in fact, when Gotham was first settled, what’s now the Hudson U. campus had been Jeddah Ashton’s apple orchard. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, Randy-quad is starting Hudson U and wants to study business, but with a focus on not-for-profits like museums and theatres and charities—which doesn’t please his father either, I can tell you…
Lucius answered what questions he could, but he also noticed out of the corner of his eye that Renee Montoya wasn’t eating. He could well guess the reason: though a charming and respectable woman, Renee Montoya had been a beat cop before her appointment to the City Council. He doubted Harvard vs Wharton debates figured much into her life experience. With the arrival of sea bass braised in hot bean sauce, he tried yet again to steer the conversation to its intended topic. After the requisite “Councilwoman” “Call me Renee” exchanges, they at last got to the point of the meeting.
“So many of these neighborhood revitalization projects go nowhere,” Renee complained calmly, “because they just amount to erecting some ‘upscale’ condominium without any infrastructure to support an influx of upscale residents. I’ve discussed this with several other councilmen and we are simply not prepared to approve any more of these initiatives without a full program in place to really make it work: low-interest business loans so all the new restaurants and drycleaners and nail salons can get started.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you,” Lucius said, for her point was valid. “But the Foundation has its hands full underwriting all the new housing. We’re certainly not prepared to put in more money and manpower into a, what shall we call it, a business incubator program.”
“That’s where Mrs. Ashton-Larraby comes in,” Renee said with a checkmate smile. Lucius seemed to feel a bear trap snap shut around his ankle, but at least it answered the question of why someone like Renee Montoya would have invited someone like Gladys Ashton-Larraby to their meeting.
“Mr. Fox,” Gladys pronounced dramatically, “What are three tables, more or less, that the Ashtons have always purchased for the Wayne Gala? This year, Randolph and I want to make a real difference. Let us put together a separate fundraiser solely to provide additional funds for this business development initiative.”
Lucius stared, somewhat puzzled by the offer.
“I, it, um,” he struggled, trying to make sure it wasn’t all a horrible mistake, and that Glady Ashton-Larraby had actually proposed a semi-good idea. “I would have to see some details, of course,” he said, stalling while he brain raced ahead. “But, eh, I imagine…” he trailed off while Renee Montoya cracked open her fortune cookie.
“Help, I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery,” Renee read with a smile.
She looked expectantly at Gladys Ashton-Larraby, while the waiter hovered over her with two remaining cookies remaining on the salver. She studied them like jewels in a case, and selected one finally. Lucius took the sole remaining one—and the check—off the waiter’s salver and wondered how it was that Bruce, who had barely a fraction of Lucius’s mental acumen, managed to always extract himself from these frightful social tangles.
Mouse in trap will gnaw off its own leg, his cookie read, but second mouse gets the cheese.
Jonathan Crane struck a menacing pose and regarded his reflection. Then he took several steps back and rushed at the mirror, waving his arms. He froze in position and tried to envision what it would look like to a fear-crazed victim. Then he turned and regarded his reflection’s profile. Without any thought at all to the imagined fear-crazed victim, he puffed out his chest and sucked in his stomach. Then he turned to the other side and did the same.
“Most satisfactory,” he pronounced—although Kittlemeier had stepped out and there was no one in the little fitting room to hear.
“Isten-ban mennyország,” Kittlemeier exclaimed, “Vat eez dis? Vat is Mister Nigma sending meez?”
Scarecrow peeked out of the fitting room. “I haven’t gone overtime, have I?” he asked, hearing the commotion. Kittlemeier’s rules about appointments were notorious, and even the Joker kept them.
“Nos, nos. Yous fine,” Kittlemeier waved him back. “Next appointment not for hours yet. But whats is dis package from Mister Nigma. Wh y he sends me robot dog with little hat?”
Beneath his Scarecrow mask, Crane raised an eyebrow. Kittlemeier always gave the impression that you had to keep to your allotted fifteen minutes because the next appointment was due within minutes of your walking out the door. Now it turned out the next appointment wasn’t for hours—or at least not for one hour, Kittlemeier having a tendency to pluralize words when he got excited.
Crane leaned forward and examined the box covered with question marks.
“A robot dog,” he agreed, peering in at its contents. “In a hat.”
Kittlemeier reached in and took out the little mechanized creature, holding it up and turning it this way and that. “Sony Aibo?” he read off the bottom.
Suddenly, the door burst open like an old-fashioned speakeasy raid, and Riddler ran in screaming “I CAN EXPLAIN!”
He froze when he saw Kittlemeier holding the Aibo and Scarecrow in full costume looking on.
“Hey, Jonathan,” Riddler panted.
“Hello, Edward,” Scarecrow answered.
“Horizontal straw,” Nigma noted. “Very sharp.”
Mad Hatter came running in, finally, far more winded than Nigma, and looked at the other three in horror.
“I tried to stop him,” he squeaked when he saw Kittlemeier’s angry glare.
“Mistake,” Nigma blurted, still trying to catch his breath. “Mr. Kittlemeier, I am terribly sorry to have burst in without an appointment. Jonathan,” he added formally, “I am most awfully sorry to have interrupted your fitting. Nice straw, really suits you. Now then, since I’m here,” he paused, gripping his stomach as his exertions caught up with him, “I sent you a letter by mistake. I need it back, I need…” He trailed off as his eyes zeroed in on the mechanical dog.
“No,” he breathed. “No,” he repeated in sick shock. “That’s not a letter. That’s the… Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”
His eyes darted wildly, and then rolled back into his head. Jervis jumped excitedly out of the way rather than trying to catch Nigma as he fainted.
“My Delectable Puzzlemuffin,” Nightwing read in bewildered disgust.
Commissioner Muskelli made no comment; he merely waited grimly while the vigilante examined the envelope.
“Puzzlemuffin,” Nightwing repeated thoughtfully, considering the term for the kind of wordplay Riddler favored. “’Fizzle’ is in there, and ah… so is ‘pun’, there could be a pun involved. We’ll have to analyze this phrase for all possible anagrams that might shed light on the clue inside.”
Muskelli nodded.
“My men didn’t break the seal,” he mentioned. “Standard operating procedure with these Riddler clues. Batman always prefers to run his own preliminary checks for trace explosive or other contaminants.”
Nightwing nodded and slid the envelope into a glassine bag.
“As do I,” he grimaced, heading for the window. “I’ll open this under controlled conditions and let you know what I discover. Thank you, Commissioner.”
Gothamites who studied the hawks over Robinson Park would have noticed the one now circling the northeast corner was not especially graceful. Clayface relied on muscle memory for so much of his non-clay movement, and not having been a bird in his pre-clay existence, he’d had to improvise a good deal. Still, he liked animal disguises on the whole. They were perfect for casing a target or for those occasions when rain threatened and he didn’t want to risk his total body-mass.
Or in today’s case, when he was going to see Poison Ivy, a woman who despised him, who’d had him blacklisted from Rogue society for giving her a stupid little box of potpourri at a Christmas party, and a woman who would sic those miserable plants on him again if she saw him coming. It wasn’t fatal, her plant-attacks, but it was the ickiest sensation he’d experienced since being fitted for a latex body cast in Space Tempest. Those plants of hers sticking their hungry roots into him, sucking out all the minerals, it was NOT PLEASANT and he did NOT mean to let her do it again. So he opted for the hawk, figuring that was the safest way to approach her lair. But he hadn’t figured on the other hawks, which had noticed him and were taking far too much interest in him, real hawks that were far better at the flying. In desperation, he dove towards the ground and, in something of a panic at the female pecking at his tail-feathers, he quickly assumed the one human shape that memory said would be a safe one in which to knock on Ivy’s door.
He walked the last sixty yards in a gruff, manly stride that solidified into a more familiar and comfortable bodymass by the time he reached the entrance.
“Ivy,” he began, but got no further when the rapturous gasp that greeted him stopped him cold. He realized, with the levelheaded prudence that comes when one is no longer being pecked at by a pair of angry hawks, that his present disguise was—
“HARVEY!”
—a monumentally stupid mistake.
Rather than head all the way back to the manor, Nightwing opted for the satellite cave under the Wayne Tower. He extracted the Riddler clue carefully from the evidence bag and slid it into a pressurized canister. He accessed a pre-programmed battery of tests from the main control console, and dropped the canister into the waiting chamber. The lid slid shut and as the hum of simultaneous spectrometry, chromatography, electrophoresis, ion mobility, energy dispersive xrays, and electron scanning mechanisms whirred to life, Nightwing checked to see if there were any munchies left from the days when Cassie, Stephanie, and Black Canary were using the satellite cave as a clubhouse.
He found a prehistoric Snickers bar… and a tube of Pringles that didn’t seem too ancient. He returned to the console while the tests continued to run, and opened up the main OraCom gateway. Only a still, grayed out, Oracle head greeted him. It was just after noon, not a time of day Barbara would normally be operating as Oracle, but he had assumed since she knew about the Riddler clue that she would be standing by to assist. He opened a phone line and called home the regular way.
“Hey Ora-kewl,” he began with a grin. “A/S/L Want to cyber?”
..:: Dickey, what the hell? I thought you’d bring it home. ::..
“No, too many tests to run before I can open it. Hop onto the Com, okay?”
..:: Slavedriver. I’ll be right there. ::..
He hung up, and almost immediately the Oracle image flickered from its inert gray state into an animated green.
“Hey, Gorgeous,” he winked at the screen. “Preliminary tests are just finishing up, but you can get started on the phrase from the outside of the envelope. My Delectable Puzzlemuffin.”
..:: Shoot, ::.. the Oracle head answered.
“I figured run the anagrams first, and all of the standard numeric keys, assigning values to letters and—”
..:: Right, Rid dler 101, all the usual stuff. ::..
“…”
..:: Dick? C’mon, I’m waiting, what’s the phrase? ::..
“My Delectable Puzzlemuffin.”
..:: THAT’S what’s written on the envelope? ::.. she laughed.
“I told you that already,” he grumbled, sounding a bit like Bruce.
..:: I thought I was the delectable puzzlemuffin. I thought you were, you know, being you. ‘Ora-kewl, want to cyber.’ ::..
Dick sighed.
“No. ‘My Delectable Puzzlemuffin’ is the opening clue. Now please run the standard analyses.”
..:: Oh Dick, don’t be so dense, ::.. she laughed. ..:: Tell me that you do not have a four million dollar computer system spectro-analyzing a letter addressed to ‘Delectable Puzzlemuffin.’ ::..
“It’s a Riddler clue, Barbara.”
..:: It’s a love letter, you nitwit. He probably misses Doris. Been a while since I snooped on the rogue’s IM network, but I’m pretty sure it was this time of year they broke up. ::..
“He is not going to leave a letter to Doris at the Batsignal,” Dick pointed out.
..:: He’s not going to leave a clue for Batman addressed to ‘Puzzlemuffin’ either, Dickie. ::..
Dick stared at the OraCom screen for a long moment.
“Oh my god,” he croaked.
Behind him, a discreet, cheery ping informed him that the spectrometry, chromatography, electrophoresis, ion mobility, energy dispersive xrays, and electron scanning of specimen alpha was complete.
For centuries, those privileged to serve the cause of righteousness as host of an Azrael were an obedient and docile class, programmed from birth via ‘The System’ for the great honor that would pass to them on their fathers’ deaths. The Order of St. Dumas was confident in their methods of indoctrination and in the spirit of unquestioning fealty to the church that pervaded their time.
As the world changed, the Order of Dumas did not, and the ancient programming of the Azrael persona never incorporated, as an example, any mindset to respond to strong, confident, free-spirited women of the sort who might don a costume and become a catburglar, and who might contrast said Azrael unfavorably with other crusading knights of her acquaintance, particularly with respect to sexual attraction or the lack, who would in fact take his inability to generate sexual tension as a personal insult and a mark of his inferiority to the aforementioned knight and indeed all men.
In the years since the original Azrael mindset was devised, the world had changed, but the clerics of the Order were too removed from that world to adapt the System accordingly—with one exception. In the 1790s, after the British colonies in the New World had rebelled against their sovereign king and the peasants of France actually beheaded theirs, with the church in France forced to undergo radical restructuring, it occurred to one Brother Louis of Navarre that the absolute and unconditional loyalty of the Azrael hosts might not be as absolute and unconditional as had always been assumed. On his own initiative, he inserted a latent directive to activate should the mortal host show signs of “rebelliousness, defiance, unruliness, mutiny, or sedition”. On activation, the Azrael was to observe the subject, probe for the extent of his corruption, and report the situation to his superior.
It was assumed the superior would always be the High Lord Father of the Order of Dumas.
For the present Azrael, it was Nightwing.
Nightwing.
This was simpl y not an acceptable person in which Azrael could confide his dilemma, yet his program made it impossible for him to choose another or for him to keep silent.
He watched his fickle host Jean Paul Valley shave and privately begged the man to reconsider his position.
He resolved to “probe” one last time, praying for a new type of response that would express the absolute, unwavering loyalty to the System and the Ways of Dumas that would release Azrael from his compulsion. In the interests of not having to report to Nightwing, Azrael was willing to take almost anything short of “DEATH TO DUMAS” as an expression of absolute, unwavering loyalty. If only the mortal would abandon this new mindset of his and cooperate.
Mortal— He began, when his thought was cut short and his hopes dashed by a knock at the door and the arrival of a dozen long-stemmed roses.
“Look at that, she sent flowers,” Jean Paul exclaimed, tickled. “Az, look, she sent flowers. Damn, what a woman, huh?”
Azrael tried to respond that it was unseemly for the woman to usurp a man’s role, such as this sending of flowers following an amorous encounter… when he saw that Jean Paul’s mind was not ‘receiving’ his thoughts as it ought.
Mortal— He repeated, more forcefully than before to break through Jean Paul’s cloying preoccupation with the flowers, but by now, the mortal had opened the card and had moved on to a whole new level of disloyal musings.
“See that? ‘To Jean Paul.’ That’s me, Az, not you. I’m the one she went to bed with, and I’m the one that’s going to call her for another date—without you, we clear on that? No more Dumasian three-ways. Because I meant what I said, buddy, I’ll hurt you. I was chewing on it all night while you were patrolling, and I’ve got the kryptonite to put an end to your interference with me and Helena once and for all. So don’t make me use it, Az, or it’s death to Dumas, you hear what I’m sayin’?”
Yes, Mortal, Azrael sighed. I hear you loud and clear.
Dick sat at home, on his couch, the still-unopened envelope sitting on the coffee table. He stared at it. Barbara sat on the far side of the table, her eyes shifting rhythmically from the letter to her husband. After several silent minutes of this, she spoke.
“I can’t believe what a wimp you’re being.”
“Bruce is out of town,” Dick explained in terse, coiled tones. “I’m in charge. And if that’s a Riddler clue, it has to be dealt with according to Hoyle. Thoroughly analyzed—”
“Which you’ve done,” Barbara noted.
“Decoded if necessary, and solved.”
“Agreed,” Barbara said. “It’s not a clue, it’s a love letter, but I completely agree you should open it anyway, ‘just in case’, and you’ll feel much better.”
“But I won’t feel better. ‘Cause if it’s a love letter—and I’ll admit Puzzlemuffin, delectable or not, leans it in that direction—Babs, if it’s a love letter, it’s gonna be Catwoman all over again. Worse, it’s going to be Catwoman without the part where she’s the incredibly hot villain, and more like she’s the annoying villain that leaves freakin’ riddles as clues to his crimes.”
Barbara started laughing.
“You want me to read the scary love letter for you, Dickie,” she asked, opening it with a light grin, “so you don’t suffer any kind of Catwom an-related flashbacks.”
“Joke all you want, you weren’t there. Shameless in front of the impressionable teenage sidekick. You know what it’s like going back to take-down-the-bad-guy-business as usual after she’s heard your voice crack? It was never the same after that, against Catwoman, I mean.”
“Which has nothing to do with Rid…” Barbara began as her eyes glanced over the page. As she trailed off, her eyes widened and the color drained from her face. Then she sat the letter down abruptly. “It’s a love letter,” she said matter-of-factly.
Dick’s lip twitched.
“You’re quite sure. You’re sure you read enough to be absolutely certain?”
“I’m sure,” Barbara pronounced fiercely. “I definitely read enough. You can face Bruce when he gets back knowing you did not blow off a Riddler clue. You have official Oracle-confirmation that that,” she pointed, “is a love letter.”
“Mhm,” Dick nodded smugly. “And now you’re never going to think of Riddler the same way, are you?”
“There are phrases that are burned into my memory,” she admitted, closing her eyes to blot out the pain.
Dick sighed.
Barbara sighed.
“Well, it’s not a clue,” she said finally. “What do we do now, give it back?”
“Nohohoho, no, no, no,” Dick answered fanatically. “Only thing worse than my actually reading that letter is if he thinks I’ve read that letter. No, this is—”
“Dick, we really need to get this back to him. This isn’t a puzzlebox announcing a crime spree. This is personal stuff.”
“And how do you figure that would go, Barbara? ‘Here’s your letter, Nigma.’ ‘Here’s your clue, Nightwing.’ ‘Now let’s just be men, look at our feet, and leave the rooftop.’”
“There has to be a way,” Barbara insisted.
“I told you. Never going to think of him the same way again.”
Every year, Jervis Tetch rigged the Rogues’ Secret Santa drawing, and that year, Ivy had somehow offended him in late November. He decided to ‘punish’ her, in his slippery way, by pairing her up with a man on whom her pheromones had no effect. It was a short list, the men Ivy couldn’t have her way with chemically. Joker was the only other candidate, and if he’d drawn Ivy’s name when it was common knowledge that Jervis rigged the drawing, the weaselly little Hatter wouldn’t have lived to see the New Year. But Clayface, Clayface must have seemed the perfect choice: There was no bad blood between him and Ivy, not like there was with Joker. She simply couldn’t control him—and Ivy hated not being in control.
Well, it happened. Matt gave her potpourri, looking on it as a “flowery” gift, not as “dead flowers”. It happened. It happened. It was time to get the hell over it. She’s been dealt worse slights by other men. The potpourri flowers were dead when he got there. He didn’t kill them; all he did was buy them and wrap them up in green foil with a big silver bow. She let vengeance for Ivan go in a shorter time, and Clayface couldn’t help thinking he would have been forgiven long ago too if she wasn’t so fundamentally threatened by a man she couldn’t green over into a helpless slave.
Well, he’d had it. Enough was enough. He’d gone i n there prepared to be polite but direct, just like the contract negotiation for the Dragon Raider sequels: He liked Gotham, he liked Harley, and he was staying. Period. End of story.
That was his plan (and it would have worked, he knew it would, just like the Dragon Raider sequels). It was his plan right up until a moment’s panic reshaped him into Two-Face to enter Ivy’s lair safely, without quite realizing…
“HARVEY” she had squealed, squealed like a schoolgirl. Ivy, the queen bitch, squealing in girlish delight.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR FACE!”—which made NO sense at all. Harvey’s divided features that inspired his nom de crime Two-face, wasn’t something any self-respecting shapeshifter could get wrong.
“YOU’RE BACK!”—and then a liplock that would have done Sharon Stone proud.
Matt Hagan, playing the role of a terrified Harvey Dent (or perhaps it was best to think of it the other way around), backed up in horror.
“No,” he breathed gently. “So sorry. Big mistake. Um, let me explain…” He looked around helplessly, and then swelled, melted and drooped into his natural state. “Ivy, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean—” he managed to say before she screamed. Matt was ready to morph into a bird again to escape the reach of her attack-plants, but she was far too agitated to order them into action. Instead, she leapt on him herself, flailing away with her hands, her fingers liberating chunks of muddy glop and hurling it behind her.
Clayface stood, silent and still, with a patient, almost bored expression as he waited out the storm. As a handful of his person was flung against the wall, he would calmly slide it to the floor and inchworm it across the lair to rejoin the bulk of his main body.
“Pamela,” he tried when it seemed like the violence and hysterics had gone on long enough. “I only picked a form—” Here he had to stop and slap a mud-gag across her mouth rather than suffer another round of screams and probably a few terse orders to her attack plants. Her reaction to the gag was such that he had to continue the ‘mud pack treatment’ until she was fully bound.
He then waited with renewed patience for her writhing and muffled cursing to subside. When she was exhausted, he resumed.
“I only picked a form I thought would get me in the door without you trying to kill me,” he explained. “I wasn’t trying for a tonsil massage, and if it makes you feel any better, I got nothing out of it. Ivy, I came here because we need to talk. I’m done being shunned because I gave you dead flower-heads one Christmas—which by the way, was a gift I picked out because I thought you might like it. It’s been a few years but, from what I remember, flowers smell nice.”
There was another round of squirming and muffled objection, which Clayface waited out without lessening his hold.
Nightwing watched and waited while Batgirl carried out her mission. He had been absurdly hesitant to send her in alone even though, as she said, she’d always worked alone. She was perfectly capable, but tonight she was his partner and somehow that changed everything.
She’d infiltrated the Iceberg Lounge before, on her own, going undercover as a groupie. Simply beating a few answers out of the bouncer without even venturing into the nightclub was child’s play. But Nightwing watched nervously all the same, until his peripheral vision caught movement at the rooftop level, approaching on the horizon.
He tensed as, even at this distance, he recognized the figure heading towards him, and he snapped the control opening the OraCom mic.
“O, did you give Azrael my location without giving me a heads up, or is this an astonishing coincidence about to land on the roof beside me?”
..:: Yeah, I did, Wing. And I didn’t tell you because he said he would explain when he got there. Some Dumas thing. ::..
“Wonderful. Nightwing out,” he barked irritably. Then he returned his gaze to Batgirl twisting the Iceberg bouncer’s arm, and found he was enjoying the sight more than before. Before long, Azrael joined him on the roof, and he too watched Batgirl in silence for a time.
“She is a fearsome interrogator,” he noted.
“She’s not bad,” Nightwing agreed proudly. “We needed to find Riddler’s current hideout, and if the rogue grapevine gets hold of it, we need it to be known that it was Batgirl that’s looking for him and that she was alone.”
Azrael’s helmet tilted, as if these strategic intricacies were beyond his understanding, or at least beyond his interest. If he wanted to know an infidel’s location, he too would find that infidel’s associates and coerce answers in just this way. If other infidels saw and spoke of the encounter, he cared not.
“What can I do you for, Azrael,” Nightwing said brusquely.
There was an unpleasant pause. An old tension seemed to vibrate across the roof, like a loud, distant stereo throbbing the baseline of a song you couldn’t quite make out—but knew you wouldn’t like if you heard it. Nightwing recognized that tension; he hadn’t felt it since those first encounters with Azrael after the AzBat disaster.
“I come to you as my commander and superior,” Azrael stated formally—which, despite the implied deference, did nothing to dispel Nightwing’s “AzBat” apprehensions.
“O-kay,” he said cautiously. “Y’know, B is back in a few days if you’d rather wait.”
Azrael paused again.
“Nay,” he said at last. He understood that Nightwing must find the situation as unpalatable as he did, but the System did not permit needless delays. “I am compelled to report at once symptoms of disloyalty in my host, before they might proceed into acts of overt rebellion.”
Nightwing’s eyes narrowed.
“Your host? You’ve got a problem with Jean Paul?”
“I am compelled to report to my superiors any signs of treachery or portents that the host might rebel against myself or the System.”
While Nightwing’s eyes remained narrowed in a suspicious Bat-glare, his mouth dropped open in wonder.
“Az, if there’s some friction between you and Jean Paul, what makes you think I’d be on your side? I mean given the history…” He trailed off into an ambiguous gesture, pointing to the night sky in the general direction of the Batsignal.
Azrael stood mute for a full ten seconds, then at last he spoke in a strained voice hauntingly reminiscent of the AzBat gravel.
“I expect to find no friend or ally in your person, Nightwing. I am compelled, nevertheless, to make immediate report to my superiors of what has occurred. I have been threatened by my host. I am compelled to make my superior aware of the particulars.”
Nightwing’s mouth puckered thoughtfully.
“Jean Paul threatened you? Jean Paul Valley? Blonde guy, about your height, owner of the body, we’re talking about the same guy, right? Jean Paul threatened you? Azrael, how wo uld that even work? What do you do, punch yourself in the mouth?”
Azrael said nothing.
Nearly a minute passed, and Nightwing began to realize he was approaching this all wrong. The Azrael he’d always dealt with, and even the one he’d fought as AzBat, was an integration of the System programming and Jean Paul Valley’s mind. This thing before him now was all System without any Jean Paul. He was a set of commands and protocols, and ‘Wing was trying to talk to it like a person. But you couldn’t converse with a computer program. You needed to let it carry out its instructions, even if, in this case, those instructions seemed to be tattling on Jean Paul because of some inner-helmet squabble.
“Okay, sorry,” Nightwing coughed, his manner becoming serious and markedly more Batlike. “Make your report.”
When Poison Ivy finally got tired struggling, Clayface cautiously released his grip. He assumed the shape of Grant Gifford, defense attorney battling to save the woman he loves from the gallows, the most earnest and sincere character he’d ever played.
“Look,” he said frankly, “Harley and I are involved. I like her. Who wouldn’t? Flaky, yes. Voice gets a little irritating at times. Most incompetent burglar I’ve ever seen in my life. But you look at rogues as a whole, and then you look at her, all bubbly and sweet, with the cute little tassels bouncing up and down—she jumps around a lot, too. What’s not to love?”
Ivy spat at him.
“You’re slime, Hagen,” she screeched bitterly. “You took up with Harley to get back at me.”
Clayface’s entire frame rumbled in anger, condensed into a smaller green blob and then morphed into an image of Ivy herself.
“How about we try it this way,” he said in her voice, “Since it’s all about you no matter what, maybe this way I can get you to listen. I like Harley. It has nothing to do with you. I am back in Gotham to stay. THAT has nothing to do with you either. All you can do to me, Ivy, is force me go to the Iceberg ‘incognifty’ because people would rather say no to me than to you. That’s all you’ve got. And all you’re going to do if you play that card is make Harley miserable—again—because you can’t get along with the guy she’s with, as usual.”
Although she had never read Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting or studied The Method at the Actors’ Studio, Ivy gave a convincing performance of a thoughtful and considerate listener. Matt Hagen’s true weakness, she knew, was his vanity, that actor’s ego. It would please him to think he had found a way to reach her.
“Incognifty,” she said with a gentle, amused smile. “That’s a Harleyism. You must be spending quite a lot of time together.”
Beneath the calm, still beauty that concealed the deadly flytrap, Poison Ivy seethed. This CREATURE that she DESPISED, that didn’t even respond to the lures of NATURE HERSELF (i.e. whom she couldn’t control with her pheromones), this SLIMY GOOEY THING had infiltrated HER PARK, had COME into HER LAIR, had gagged her, bound her, HUMILIATED HER! Gotten her to reveal vulnerabilities she’d rather not have revealed, and was talking to her in a less than adoring manner! Clearly he had to die. He had to DIE, DIE, and DIE AGAIN!
“It is easy to like her, once you get to spending time with her,” Ivy went on, a vision of the loyal friend charmed by one who could appreciate Harley’s fine qualities.
He had Harley on his side now. And Harley was obsessive. If she’d somehow gotten over her pitiful and disgusting obsession with Joker, she might very well fixate on this walking dunghill. The only time Harley made time for her was when Joker was unavailable, either in Arkham or more often –damnit– because he’d beaten her and thrown her out. If Clayface were to buck the trend and treat Harley properly, Ivy might never see her at all.
Clearly the mudheap had to die.
But how? How…
“Take that catfight thing on Kazaa,” Clayface was saying, having resumed his regular form. “Roxy’s a showbiz gal, she knows the only bad publicity is no publicity. She reveled in it. What did you do? Something about raising the dead and zombies marching on Riverfront Park, that’s how the Opal City grapevine tells it anyway.”
…If Ivy had learned one thing from the disasters that followed that awful catfight, it was to stop acting impulsively. Impulse brought gargoyles and black mists, hell lords and dying trees, a Whitman sampler and a viciously mad Selina ready to scratch her eyes out, no Harvey and no Harley, nothing but an empty hideout and a pair of green Jimmy Choos. But patience, the calm and knowing patience of the gardener, that would make her life bloom again.
She would allow Clayface to reintegrate into Gotham society, treat him with polite but queenly disdain, not fill Harley’s head with all the reasons they shouldn’t be together.
And then…
when the talking mudpie least expects it…
she would strike.
Azrael’s report to Nightwing was interrupted by Batgirl’s joining them on the roof. She had successfully learned the location of Riddler’s new hideout, in what appeared to be an eyewear manufacturer. Nightwing and Azrael accompanied her as she followed her lead, and it was only once the trio arrived at the corner of 91st and Ipswitch that they saw the sign reading Crynovich Optical Supply had been altered to read merely Cryptic.
Batgirl went down alone, as planned, and radioed in a minute later to report that Nigma wasn’t in but she was positioned in the shadows near the door where she was sure to spot him on his return.
Nightwing gave a satisfied grunt. The Batlike composure with which he’d received Batgirl’s report melted into helpless amusement as he returned his attention to Azrael.
“Okay. So,” he began, making a considerable effort to control his grin, “You—No, not you… Jean Paul had a date with Helena, and she spent the night, and you… peeked,” the last word blurted through his lips in a spasm of semi-laughter, not unlike a reaction to SmileX. “You peeked,” he repeated, regaining control of his voice and breathing. “And Jean Paul was—understandably, I’d say—upset by this.”
“And it was this dissatisfaction which led to the act of defiance and threats I am compelled to report,” Azrael declared, resuming his account.
“I can’t wait to hear this,” Nightwing said under his breath.
“He has devised a method to prevent my emerging when he is occupied with Miss Bertinelli.”
“GOOD!” Nightwing blurted. “Good for him.”
“You approve this defiance? In the history of the Azrael, no host has been permitted to block, hamper, or incapacitate the Azrael persona. It demonstrates a dangerous and subversive independence of spirit, does it not?”
“Putting a towel on the door while he’s strumming Huntress’s quiver, no. No, that’s pretty standard operating procedure, Azrael. Guy’s within his rights, and if you ignore that towel, I do believe he’s entitled to lock you outside the apartment wearing only your socks—but in your case, I guess he’s going to have to be a little more creative with the payback.”
“He is that. That is the reason for my report. He has, as I said, devised a means to thwart my emergence and threatened me with it should I act in opposition to his wishes.”
“Yeah?”
“You wish me to disclose it?”
“We’ve come this far, Az, mustn’t stop now. What’s the threat?”
“He likened the Huntress’s costume and appearance to that of the Catwoman.”
“Oh my god,” Nightwing gasped, his head snapping back with a laughing snort.
“He had a number of points of comparison, and he said focusing on these thoughts would in no way lessen his exhilaration.”
“No, I don’t imagine they would,” Nightwing managed.
“Should I emerge again while he is engaged in such activities as he does not wish me to observe, he says he shall focus his mind relentlessly on these points of similarity.”
“Azrael, we’ve had our differences, you and me and Jean Paul. I’ve never liked you much. But I’ve gotta say, this is turning me around. When you started your little tale of woe, when you said ‘Jean Paul and Helena’, I thought to myself, she’ll eat him alive—not in the good way. I mean, I’ve been there and it’s not pretty. That woman is a handful. But any guy who can come up with fixating on Catwoman to keep you at bay while he’s taking care of business, he’s gonna be alright.”
Azrael didn’t move, and certainly his helmet betrayed no expression, but the atmosphere abruptly shifted.
“You… have ‘been there’?” he asked in a charged gravel.
“Oh,” Nightwing waved his hand dismissively, “ancient history, years ago, was nothing.”
“I was not aware of this,” Azrael intoned.
Dick wasn’t surprised. His brief affair with Huntress wasn’t unknown in Bat-circles, but their chief source of gossip had always been Barbara (or “Radio Free Bat” as he called her when she first began her efforts as Oracle). She obviously wouldn’t have been spreading that particular news item, and the others who knew had been careful not to discuss it in front of her or over the OraCom. It would be easy for someone like Azrael to remain in the dark.
“He is not aware of this,” Azrael added, a pleased, sinister tone creeping into his voice.
“Az?” Nightwing asked, sounding (had he but known it) a bit like Jean Paul.
“Silence, Mortal,” Azrael snapped. “I must consider this new information.”
Batgirl had been trained to read the subtlest body language as a means to predict an enemy’s attack. There was no subtlety in the Riddler’s approach as he neared his hideout. He had the gait of a man who was beaten down enough to be dangerous beyond his strength if fought into a corner, but who would withdraw from the fight completely if given the opening.
As such, she stepped from her place in the shadows so he could see her clearly as he approached the door, rather than waiting until he was trapped with only the locked door of the lair behind him.
She stood calmly and silently, waiting to see what he would do. He paused only a second when he registe red the sight, the petite but fierce bat agent waiting on his doorstep, and then continued as before, approaching with a weary movement not consistent with rogue bravado.
“Well?” he asked when he reached the door.
Batgirl mutely held out her hand, holding out a green envelope.
Riddler looked at it in wonder, then looked again at her.
“Found this,” she said flatly. “Big words. Not read.”
“THANK YOU!” the words rang out from the street below. “THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!”
From their vantage point on the roof, Nightwing and Robin looked down.
“He’s happy,” Robin remarked.
“Yeah,” Nightwing agreed, then winced, turning away. “And now he’s in pain, but still happy, I’d think.”
..:: What happened? ::.. Oracle asked anxiously.
“Well, he was dancing around on the final thank you, and it looked like he tried to kiss her, so she slugged him,” Nightwing reported.
Oracle laughed, and Nightwing said he’d be home soon. He closed the com and turned to Robin.
“You’re supposed to be off for ten days,” he said severely. “If that didn’t look like the old ‘coolant bag wrapped around a nested bowl to keep the hot fudge sundae intact coming up the flyline’ trick, you’d be grounded right now, young man.”
“What gave me away?” Robin asked.
“Just the hundred and sixty of those things I delivered over the years. I know the location of every 24-hour Dairy Queen in the city. There’s one right down on 89th and you came from that direction.”
“Yeah, well,” Tim murmured sheepishly.
“How’d it happen? Foozball? Arm wrestling?”
“Phoenix Ninja,” Tim answered.
“Bro!” Nightwing laughed, “A videogame, you lost on a video game. You dishonored the mantle by losing to Batgirl on a video game?!”
“If you delivered a hundred and sixty of these losing at foozball, sounds like I’m holding up the tradition of the mantle just fine, Bro.”
“Why I oughta,” Nightwing grumbled jokingly as he stood. “She’ll be back any second, so I’ll leave you to the groveling. Tell her tomorrow night, we’ll meet up on the Moxton building at ten sharp.”
“Will do, Bro.”
“Phoenix Ninja,” Nightwing said, firing a line and swinging into the night.
“Foozball,” Robin shook his head sadly.
::This is Oliver Queen, I’m not in right now so leave your name and measurements and I’ll get back to you—unless you’re not a hot woman, in which case how did you get this number…::
Dinah hung up without waiting for the beep. She felt ashamed for even dialing the number, ashamed and foolish. He would never change. “Leave your name and measurements”, he would never change! She once joked his answering machine message should be “Look, you can’t prove it’s mine. I’m not taking any kind of test, so don’t call back—beep!”
Barbara and Stephanie had laughed, but Dinah herself, despite her bright smile, didn’t really feel like laughing. It was the kind of joke you made to pretend you didn’t care. The fact was he cheated, time after time. He would cheat again, too. If they tried again, he would cheat again. Some pretty thing would come along, and he’d flirt and cajole and be Mr. Wonderfu l. She’d find it charming; they usually did the first time around. And that would be that. Not a thought to any promises made, no thoughts of loyalty or love, of the good thing he was wrecking—or the good woman he was hurting. Just a chance to fire off his arrow –patoinggg– that’s all he’d think of, the rat.
That’s what would happen, she KNEW that’s what would happen, why was she even THINKING of calling him?
She went back to her dinner, cold by now, but she liked the Szechuan spice better that way. She picked out a large chunk of chicken with her fingers and bit into it thoughtfully.
Did she just call because she was lonely? Was she that pathetic?
Or was it Ollie himself that she missed?
She threw the rest of the chicken back into the carton and then crossed her arms angrily.
It was all such a mess. Such a hopeless, impossible mess.
Her eye fell on the fortune cookie in its wrapper, and in a burst of rage she smashed it viciously with her fist, rupturing the plastic and sending a spray of crumbs in all directions.
“Great,” she mumbled, feeling more of a fool than before as she herded the crumbs into a neat pile at the edge of the table and then swept them gently into her free hand for disposal.
The fortune itself sat unread and unnoticed on the remains of the wrapper.
Before you can see the light, you must deal with the darkness.
Barbara awoke the next morning in a cold, empty bed. After a brief search, she found her husband asleep on the sofa with their cat, Bytes, and a “Love the Librarian” mug balanced on his stomach. The cat’s nose was nestled inside the mug, and Barbara guessed she had finished whatever hot milk had remained there. She took the mug delicately from Dick’s fingers and then tussled his hair.
“I can explain!” he gasped, scaring the cat, who promptly decided his left shoulder provided the quickest way off the couch and swiftly used it as an escape ramp. Dick’s eyes darted around, fell on Barbara’s amused smile, and he relaxed. “Nightmares,” he explained.
“Would have been my guess,” Barbara answered, waving the mug. “Want to talk about it?”
“Well, Bruce came back. It was like: you know those old Kaufman and Hart plays with all the lunatics and crazy eccentrics running around in different subplots? It all builds to this explosion of absolute chaos at the end of Act II, just when the bank examiner, the cops, or the stodgy future in-laws walk through the door.”
Barbara chuckled. “Dick, you’re doing a wonderful job managing the team,” she assured him. “You really don’t need to be worrying what Bruce is going to say when he gets back.”
“Azrael and Jean Paul were fighting a duel over Cassie, Tim had been greened or hatted or something and was running around to all the rogues taking orders for ice cream deliveries, Whiskers and Nutmeg were stuck in the case with Jason’s old costume, Nigma comes in wearing a chef’s hat asking where Alfred keeps the muffin pans, Bruce looks over the whole thing, glares at me, and asks why the giant penny is sitting in the driveway.”
With effort, Barbara kept her light chuckle from erupting into a full belly laugh.
“Well it’s all over now, Puzzlemuffin, ELFIN FIZZLE PUN.”
“What?” Dick blinked.
“FUN FUZZ MIZZLE PUFF,” Barbara repeated flirtatiously, batting her eyes—which suddenly had question marks in them. “LUMPEN PLUME MUZZLE,” she purred seductively, as her entire body, apart from the gold question marks in her eyes, blushed into Oracle-green.
“Nuzzle Puff!” Dick gasped, sitting up in bed with a start. His heart was pounding and he’d twisted the bedsheet into a tight coil, but apart from those details, everything was fine. The bed next to him was empty, though; Barbara must already be up.
He found her in the living room, a book in her lap that she couldn’t read because Bytes was curled in it. She was petting the cat sadly, and looked up at him.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said simply.
Dick’s eyes narrowed.
“Because of her,” he growled disapprovingly.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Barbara answered, turning her chair and wheeling towards the kitchen.
Dick followed, undeterred.
“Babs, I know you had words with Black Canary last night. Son of great detective, remember; remember who trained me? Com was tied up right around midnight, and after that you sounded funny. Preoccupied, like something was bothering you. Now you want to tell me what happened or let it stew?”
“I gave her an out of town assignment, that’s all,” Barbara declared, spooning cat food into Bytes’s bowl.
“And?” Dick prompted.
“And nothing. She complained about it. She always complains now, about everything.”
Dick’s eyes darkened into a Bat-like interrogation glare.
“Everybody complains. Tim grumbles about extended patrols, and Cass gets that defiant little head-tilt, Jean Paul evidently squabbles with Az, and Helena probably curses under her breath. You tap your fingernail on the wristrest when Bruce does something you don’t like. Heck, even Alfred probably has some secret butlerish form of protest, like not putting a doily under the dinner rolls or something.”
“And what do you do?” Barbara smiled.
“Make jokes mostly,” Dick admitted. “Point is, everybody grumbles about work, Barbara, but not everybody upsets you to where you’re losing sleep over it. Tell me what happened on the Com last night; what did the bitch do now?”
Jean Paul awoke in a cold sweat.
“Az?” he called out, forgetting he didn’t need to speak to the angel out loud. “Az, where are you and what are you doing?”
Go back to sleep, Mortal. You have not rested long enough to restore your human faculties.
“Azrael, we’ve talked about the dreams. You don’t sleep. You don’t dream. Whatever you do to pass the time while I sleep tends to come out in my dreams. I’ve gotten used to the sword fights clanking away back there while I’m in a rowboat trying to ask Sally Fellingbrook to the prom. I got used to the one sitting in the lecture hall at MIT, realizing I’m in my underwear, and then when Professor Whitman tells me to stand and complete the equation on the board, hearing you booming about “a swift stroke of Divine Flame to purge the heresy from your soul!” I’ve even adjusted to the one where I’m stuck in that hole at the back of the Batcave, like Winnie the Pooh with Batman and Nightwing, Robin and the rest of them underneath all pulling on my legs, Bane and half the rogues in Gotham above ground pulling on my arms, and what are you doing, Az? You’re stepping through “The Devotion to the Most Glorious St. Dumas by Way of the Sword.” But I’m used to it, all of it. But this? This was—this was—kinky! This was perverse! Huntress and the arrow and the sword and the purple teddy, with the wind blowing up the, y’know. And Catwoman and Charlotte—Was that Nightwing with Charlotte from Sex and the City? Az, this whole thing has gotten completely out of hand.”
Calm yourself, Mortal. Human dreams are a necessary—
“It’s out of control, Az. This whole thing. We’ve got to settle it. It’s that simple.”
Dinah Lance had never been a superstar in the kitchen, but she liked baking. Cooking a meal was drudgery, but baking something simple, like scones from a mix, that was something she always enjoyed, a wonderful way to relax after a rough case. When they were together, Ollie was the serious cook, almost as impressive in the kitchen as he was in the field. He introduced her to the relaxing properties of the kitchen. They used to do it all the time, him making a complex chicken carciofi while she cut up potatoes, he’d splash some wine over the chicken and offer her a taste, pull her in when she reached for the bottle, say “Not so fast, Pretty Bird” and kiss her with the sweet tang of chardonnay clinging to his moustache.
It wasn’t the same now, of course, cooking on her own. But it had become a habit, a way to decompress after a rough case.
And this had been a rough case. Internet porn, for godsake! At first, she thought it was a joke, and not ha-ha funny but how-ridiculously-psychotically-Brucelike-vindictive-was-everybody-going-to-get funny. She’d blown up at Barbara when she got the assignment: It was bad enough that they sent her out of town as much as they could and had Batgirl keeping tabs on her whenever they couldn’t. She was a member of the Justice League, how dare they, how dare they presume to send that little girl to tail her like she was some kind of witless CRIMINAL! And NOW, now the great cyber-goddess Oracle had come up with a new cheap, petty way to insult her—let’s send her to Canada to investigate Internet porn. Ha-ha-ha, Barbara, I’ll bet you and Dickie-the-dick were up all night cooking this one up!
It was a childish outburst, a bitter and humiliating outburst, and Dinah realized the moment the words left her lips that she’d lost control. But rather than answer in kind, Oracle had only waited quietly until the venom spent itself, and then she waited a moment longer—either collecting herself, or else making sure Dinah had really finished.
..::We’ll obviously have some personal matters to discuss when this is finished,::.. the crisp Oracle voice said calmly over the receiver. ..::Right now, a man named Waters, an architect and father of two living in the suburbs outside Keystone, was sent an email by a coworker. The email contained a link to a video on a website in which his daughter who ran away a year ago last November was ‘appearing’. He contacted INSIDER, one of those TV news magazines, and they assigned one Harold Piskiter, an investigative journalist, who tracked the website as far as a ‘data center’ in Canada and hasn’t been seen since. Now if the disappearance and possibly the kidnapping or murder of a journalist is beneath Black Canary, seeing as you’re a former member of the Justice League and all, then I’ll give the assignment to someone else.::..
“No,” Canary answered abashed. “I’ll… take the case. Barbara I-”
..::Good. Transmitting the details to your com now. Oracle out.::..
Dinah paused her recollections to test the consistency of the scone batter. It seemed a little sticky, which was how she liked it. She loaded a healthy dollop onto the fork and dropped it onto the waitin g baking sheet.
“Who do you think you are?” a voice graveled accusingly from the window.
Dinah slammed down her spoon angrily. “Don’t come into my home uninvited, okay, Dick? And don’t stand there talking to me like I’m some criminal you’ve rousted or—”
Something stopped her from speaking. Her voice simply seized, mid-word, and not from any telepathic pulse or mystical stripping of powers, but from a look. A look of such loathing and disgust, a look of absolute primal hatred. Nightwing pointed to his temple.
“See this, this is a mask,” he said gruffly, “Mask on, it’s Nightwing. It’s business; it’s not personal. If I decide to be personal in my dealings with you, I take off the mask, and then you can call me Dick. That’s the kind of distinction and respect I was taught, because I was taught how to live in this life, taught by the best. Taught by a man of honor and integrity, a man you betrayed.”
Again Dinah tried to speak, but found her voice was utterly frozen.
“Just like that cheating Ollie of yours. No loyalty. Not a thought to the good thing you were wrecking or the good people you hurt.”
No longer in her kitchen, Dinah found herself back at the old satellite Watchtower, the Oracle hologram hovering before her.
“So Ollie cheated on you,” Barbara’s voice said mockingly. “You don’t deserve any better, Dinah. You’re a coward. You were a weak, miserable coward when you didn’t take a stand on Dr. Light. You were a weak, miserable coward when you attacked Bruce, when he did what you wouldn’t. You’ve been a weak, miserable coward every day since, pretending. Hiding from yourself what a corrupt, deceitful coward you really are…”
Dinah found her voice at last, erupting into a fierce, uncontrolled canary cry that echoed off every surface in the satellite as the whole structure began to shake uncontrollably. Only the Oracle hologram remained still and stable, as computer consoles sparked and bits of support beams fell from above.
“Taught by a man of honor and integrity,” Nightwing’s voice repeated in a deep, ominous voice not overwhelmed by her canary cry. “A man none of you are good enough to serve with, no matter what kind of powers you have.”
On the word ‘powers’, Dinah felt her cry fall back into her throat, choking her. Her chest heaved, and she found herself bolting upright in bed, the ‘canary cry’ sensation in her throat transformed into a tense ball of nausea. She raced to the bathroom, heaved a few times, and then made her way, weak-kneed back to the bed. She sat for maybe a minute in a daze of cold-sweat and self-loathing. Then she took a deep breath, stood, and got dressed.
Azrael located Huntress staking out a Goth club in the East Village.
There she is, Mortal, he said stoically. But I warn you again, this plan is not sound.
No, no it’s not, Jean Paul agreed. She’s going to think I’m the freakiest psycho she ever made the mistake of having coffee with, and I’ll never hear from her again.
Then why are you resigned to this course of action, knowing it is doomed to fail?
Nightwing, that’s why. Nightwing and Catwoman. Assured mutual destruction, Az, that’s where we are now, thanks to you and your Nightwing-slept-with-Huntress maneuverings. If I think of Catwoman while I’m with Helena, you’ll produce thoughts of Nightwing’s lips touching Helena’s—ew, oh, my eyes, don’t even go there, damnit, Azrael. And that’s it; if that happens, we’re both out of the game. She’s gonna be laying there all by herself, and if you think the bat clan can hold a grudge over something like a mindwipe—ha.”
I fail to grasp the analogy, Mortal.
Assured mutual destruction, Az; like Tic-Tac-Toe and Global Thermonuclear War, the only winning move is not to play.
I concede that something of a stalemate has been reached. Nevertheless, asking the lady to ‘choose’ seems to be a flawed course of action.
Yeah. Yeah it is, Az. Because we’re going to have to tell her the whole thing: the Order of Dumas, the System… Right now, she thinks I’m a guy in a mask who can kick butt. An hour from now she’s going to think I’m Norman Bates.
…
Unless you’ve got a better idea, Az.
Mortal, as you well know, I am gifted with the sum knowledge of the Order of St. Dumas. That wisdom, regrettably, is rather spotty where women are concerned.
Something you might have considered before you stuck your nose into my lovelife.
Such recriminations are pointless, Mortal. You should take it as a mark of the lady’s charms that my interest was piqued as it was, and a compliment to your own taste and judgment in choosing such a woman.
She is something, Jean Paul agreed. She quotes the Godfather in bed, Az. That’s what we modern men call ‘a keeper.’
That was the part about ‘ leaving the sword’—
And bringing the cannoli, yeah. What a woman, huh?
Indeed.
Oliver Queen kicked the door angrily when it didn’t open far enough in response to his furious pushing.
“Damn damnit damn,” he growled.
“That famous temper,” an amused, familiar voice cooed behind him. “I’ve missed you, Ollie.”
He started, seeing that he had an unexpected visitor.
“Pretty Bird,” he smiled approvingly. “You’re looking good.”
“What set you off?” she asked while he ushered her in and switched on the lights.
“I taped the Rebels game,” he growled anew, “Going through hoops all night to avoid hearing the score or any details. Last thing coming home, I stopped to gas up the cycle, and this blasted Officer Chattybadge spouts off the whole thing—lost in overtime—damn fascists.”
“Poor Ollie,” Dinah laughed, then as she went on, she segued into an uncanny impersonation. “But since when you care about sports? I thought they were all ‘a bunch of Neanderthals trying to prove their manhood in grotesque displays of one-upsmanship, nothin’ but a Who’s-Got-The-Bigger-Swinging-Johnson contest.’”
“They are,” he nodded crossly, although he was pleased she remembered his bluster in such detail. “Besides which, free agency ruined the goddamn game,” he added. “But I had a few dealings with one of the players last year, Pellosovich, his son was kidnapped. Decent guy. Been following a bit since then.
He looked her over again, annoyance forgotten.
“You’re still a slooow drink of whiskey, pretty lady.”
Dinah’s cheeks glowed. She felt better in those ten seconds than she had in months.
“So how’s Gotham; want some wine?”
“Um, sure,” she said lightly. “Gotham’s, you know, the same.”
“Same as what, Berlin in the thirties?”
“Not exactly,” Dinah said softly.
Ollie looked up sharply. His remark was the norm; her reaction was not. There was no smiling roll of the eyes, no dismissive smirk; there was an undercurrent.
“What’s the fascist done now?” he asked, handing her a glass of chardonnay. “Usual decrees about his city, or has he moved on to strip searches and wiretapping.”
“No, it’s nothing,” she hedged. “And not Bruce.”
“’Nothing’ and ‘not Bruce’ are two entirely different things,” he pointed out sagely. “’Nothing’ means nothing is wrong in Gotham and you just came to see me because you missed the incomparable Queen charm. ‘Not Bruce’ means there is something wrong that doesn’t happen to involve Bruce this particular time around.”
He affixed her with that lovely, loving gaze that told a woman she could confide her innermost secrets to this sincere, caring soul. When he spoke next, Dinah knew the voice would match the eyes, a tender, loving caress.
“What happened?” he asked gently.
“It’s Barbara. Well, Dick too, but Barbara is the one that stings…”
She told the whole story, being sent out of town so often since the mindwipe came out. Then this new case she’d been given, internet porn, how she’d blown up at Barbara, how she’d… she’d completely lost control of herself and screamed at Oracle like a brat throwing a tantrum or some kind of raving psychopath.
Ollie frowned.
“Go on,” he said simply.
“She didn’t punch back,” Dinah said, ashamed. “She waited, either collecting herself or making sure I was done spitting venom.”
“Don’t tell me,” he said, taking a healthy swig of wine, “she’s disappointed in you.”
“I’m disappointed in myself, Ollie. I’ve been running from it for months and that was the last straw, it all came pouring out.”
“As well it should, damn Bats and his harping on the past. You’ve every right to be pissed, Dinah.”
“Do I? It was a real case, Ollie. TV news show had a guy investigating the porn; he followed a lead to Canada and disappeared. Turns out he’s dead. It was a real case, and I bit Barbara’s head off because I assumed it was a punishment. Why do you think that was, Ollie? Why do you think I’m expecting to be punished by the bat clan?”
He ran a hand gently through her hair. He looked at her critically for a long moment, stroking her hair soothingly, but behind the tender manner, wheels were turning and a debate raged.
“Which answer do you want, Dinah? You said you’ve been running from it, well here it is, turn and face it: You never really know who you are in this world until you have your illusions stripped away. Then you give up, or you step up. It was a League decision and the League acted on it. I happen to think they made the wrong choice, and so do you. But that was the vote, and that’s what we did. And now you come here with this story and ask why you’re expecting to be punished, and there are two answers. Do you want to give up, or step up?”
“Step up,” she said decisively.
“Shit,” Ollie cursed.
Dinah raised an eyebrow.
“I hoped you’d say give up,” he said. “Give up answer is: ‘Because they’ve all got sticks so far up their asses that they’re tasting wood. If the y can’t get past it and see all the good you’ve done, then screw’em. Come back to Star City, where you’ll always have a home, you’ll always be welcome, and you’ll always be accepted.’”
“I see,” Dinah said with a smile.
He refilled her glass.
“It is appealing,” she admitted.
He refilled his own.
“And if I came back, how long would it be before I found you in bed with three groupies and a bottle of Stoli?”
“Stuck in the past, just like a Bat,” Ollie grumbled, emptying his glass in a series of urgent gulps.
“What’s the step up answer, Oliver?”
“Remember Seattle?” he said musingly, “We’d get in around three, get naked, put on the TV, channel 6 had those Murphy Brown reruns back to back until six.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Remember the one where the distinguished older anchor had a laughing fit on the air?”
“No, I don’t really remember the shows, Ollie. Just the quiet time, cuddling ‘til dawn.”
“You should remember this one. It’s important. Jim, the old anchor, has to report a news story that Bush got a bee sting in his fat republican tuckus. Typical sitcom, everybody else has their yuks when the story’s coming off the wire, but he won’t. He thinks it’s undignified. So he goes on the air and cackles like a hyena. Then he goes into hiding because he thinks that’s the only thing people will remember about him, that one moment in his long distinguished career. His friends eventually find him and talk him out of it, because if he quits now, that is the only thing anybody will remember. That’s why you’ve got to step up, Dinah. You’ve done a lot of good in the Birds and in the League. You quit now ‘cause of this, then it’s gone. Cancelled out. This is all you ever were.
“The give up answer is they need to get over it. The step up answer is you do. You haven’t really faced up to it ‘til now, Dinah. What we did, what it means. Well, now it’s out there. No more illusions for anybody, them or you. The question is if you can rebuild those relationships, now, as this new person—that still looks like a slow drink of whiskey, by the way.”
When Azrael first showed up, Huntress was glad of the company. She explained how she learned of the Goth club from one of her students. Several boys had new tattoos that were more disturbing than the usual stuff meant to raise parental ire. She had nothing solid, no real evidence of drugs or a gang or… or anything really, but something seemed wrong, so she was keeping an eye on it.
Azrael spoke admiringly of her instincts, truly the greatest attribute any crimefighter or crusader might possess, and not one that could be learned either. While instinct could be improved through training and experience, the raw ability was a gift of nature.
“Since it’s all surveillance at this point,” Jean Paul said pointedly, “no fighting on the horizon or any other activity that relates to crimefighting, I figured this would be a good time to talk.”
“Oh shit,” Helena hissed softly.
Within Jean Paul’s mind, Azrael pounced on the unfavorable reaction.
Listen well, Mortal, the lady has no interest in your declarations. She undoubtedly wishes to focus all her energies on the righteous task before us.
Jean Paul ignored the outburst.
“It’s not that kind of talk,” he said gravely. “I wanted to explain what Azrael really is, and then if that doesn’t weird you out too much, I’ve got an important question to ask…”
Ten minutes—and 800 years—later, Jean Paul concluded his story.
“So when my father died, Azrael emerged just like always. I didn’t want to be an assassin, tried to ‘buck the system.’”
Helena chuckled and beneath the Azrael helmet, Jean Paul’s mouth dropped open.
“You’re the first person ever to laugh at that joke,” he said with a pleased timidity.
“I know a thing or two about fathers and the family business, remember?” she reminded him with a grin.
Jean Paul smiled back even though she couldn’t see it under his helmet. She really was a kindred spirit. Maybe, just maybe, this could work out after all.
“Anyway, everybody knows the next part. I tried standing in for Batman, and the bat mantle and the System didn’t exactly mesh. But that’s when Azrael started to seem like something ‘different’ from me, separate… Back then it was an actual apparition, in the armor, talked like my father. I know that sounds really nuts… I guess it kinda was.”
He grew quiet and waited for some kind of response.
None came.
Within his head, Azrael had gone quiet as well, and Jean Paul had never felt quite so alone.
“Anyway, after, y’know, Batman, I thought of Az as a, a kind of program, bunch of mandates and psychological conditioning, all programmed into my head. But then little over a year ago, I started to see it differently. He likes different movies than I do, different pizza toppings, even different video games. He’s not a program, he’s more like a person… that just happens to live in my head.”
“I see,” Helena said carefully.
“No, you don’t. I know I sound crazy. But the fact is, Az is a separate person—and we both like you. And, well, we kinda need you to choose.”
“Choose?”
“Who you want to be with.”
“Be… with,” she repeated.
“Yeah. Like to date ‘n’ stuff.”
“You mean fucking,” she said flatly.
“Uh, that too,” Jean Paul squeaked.
“Okay, well, I’m going to think this over and I’ll get back to you,” Helena answered sweetly.
“Mhm. Okay, g’bye then,” Jean Paul said with sad resignation. “It was really special, Helena. I don’t regret a moment of it.”
Helena sucked in her cheeks, squelching the impulse to deny she was breaking off the affair.
“Goodbye, Jean Paul,” she said graciously. “It was a good night, and I, I’m glad I got to know you.”
Jean Paul turned to go, and then Azrael turned back.
“I too found it a privilege and delight to know a woman of such estimable quality,” he pronounced grandly.
“How… nice?” Helena managed as he took her hand and bowed over it formally.
Again he turned to go.
“That man leaving the club,” Huntress announced suddenly, “He has the same tattoo as my student.”
Azrael returned to her side and peered off the edge of the roof. There was a faint whirring sound as the lenses in his helmet changed focus.
“A skull warrior bent over the body of a vampire courtesan, it is the Kult der Schwarzen Freiheit, but they were dissolved centuries ago and their mark has not been seen since.”
“Well, kids will do all kinds of sophisticated research for their own purposes,” Huntress explained drawing on Helena’s classroom expertise. “It’s only if you try and drill the Treaty of Paris into their heads that you can’t get them to read five pages.”
“Yeah, but if they’ve been gone for centuries,” Jean Paul pointed out, “then it’s not something you could just Google.”
“You never know what turns up in Wikipedia,” Helena mentioned, “Especially if it’s mentioned in a comic book or something.”
“Nay,” the Azrael voice boomed dismissively, “The mortal is ‘a geek’, remember. If the Kult der Schwarzen Freiheit showed up in comic book, video game, or science fiction/fantasy novel, he would know of it.”
“Hmmm,” Huntress said thoughtfully.
“Let us confront the individual that wears the mark and compel him to tell us where he got his tattoo,” Azrael began, then shifted tone. “Or maybe it’d be faster if you ask him, nicely, y’know. Beautiful woman goes up to a guy and admires his ink, he’s ready to brag a bit, don’t you think?”
“That could work,” Huntress said smoothly.
“It could indeed,” Azrael agreed.
“Beautiful, eh?” Helena asked with a blush.
“Gorgeous,” Jean Paul affirmed.
The Gotham Times and the Farmer’s Almanac agreed that sunrise would occur at 6:32. At 6:22, Raoul pushed his coffee cart into position at the east side entrance to Robinson Park. At 6:25, he switched on the heating element to boil water for that first pot. And at 6:29, as the sky began to glow a hazy cherry gold, he remembered the fortune cookie. He rummaged in his pocket, found the slip he’d kept from the previous night’s kung pao, and tacked it to the side of his cart, right above the price list. It read: Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to.
For a man like Bruce Wayne, there was no experience quite like returning to Gotham. The city had a quality like no other, an intensity, so many people, so many lives, so much emotion, ambition, anxiety and vigor, packed so densely into such a confined space. It produced something, an energy that hung in the air, an essence of pure distilled humanity.
Whenever Bruce left Gotham, even for a short time, he felt the drop off. Other cities, whatever their charms, felt dead to him. That aura of charged human energy was so thin, almost non-existent. Arthur once likened “surface life” to mountain climbing: if someone lived their whole life in an oxygen tent and then climbed to the highest peak in Colorado. They could live, they could function, they could even enjoy the view, but they couldn’t help noticing the vacant thinness of the air. Each breath adding to that vague sense of emptiness: something is missing. That’s what life out of the water was like for Aquaman—and that was very much what the world outside Gotham was for Bruce. Xanadu and the time alone with Selina was fulfilling in other ways. But coming home to Gotham was still coming home to Gotham. That palpable intensity everywhere, pervading every building, every street, and every person. To Bruce, it wasn’t a good vibration or a bad one, it simply was. It was the norm, that powerful aura –GOTHAM– surrounding him on every side.
Bruce wasn’t conscious of the phenomenon, he merely walked, briskly, from the coffee cart towards Wayne Enterprises, feeling pleasantly balan ced, centered, and energized as the excited buzz of the city pulsed around him. Parking so far uptown was unusual for him and a trifle absurd. There was a garage beneath Wayne Plaza reserved for Wayne employees. It was ridiculous parking all the way up 59th Street just to stop at Raoul’s “Kafe-Kart” for an espresso. But Bruce was feeling nostalgic. Returning to Xanadu with Selina evoked memories, a flood of memories, good memories—which was somewhat astonishing for Bruce, for whom remembering the past was seldom a pleasant exercise.
So he had stopped at the cart just as he had that morning… that morning. The woman from the stage of the Hijinx Playhouse, the woman the program called Selina Kyle, the woman he knew from a thousand encounters was the real Catwoman, lived in an apartment across from the park and that cart. She regularly came down for a morning coffee; it was the one way to approach her anonymously.
The woman the program called Selina Kyle… There was no reason to think that was her real name (although she might be just brazen enough to use it)… she still lived in the apartment she’d kept during the run of Cat-Tales, she hadn’t moved or disappeared after the show closed. It was the one way he could approach her anonymously and without a mask.
The woman the program called Selina Kyle… After the coffee, Bruce had stopped and bought a newspaper while he waited. …The woman the program called Selina Kyle… Batman too found himself calling her Selina in their encounters since Cat-Tales, and she responded naturally enough. She’d never corrected or discouraged it. So… Selina. Selina Unknown, possibly-Kyle, likely but unconfirmed, still lived in the apartment building across from the park and regularly came down to the cart for a morning coffee. It was the one way Batman could approach her anonymously and without a mask (for Batman, ‘anonymously’ meant without a mask). And this needed to be anonymous; this needed to be Selina and not Catwoman. He had to make that clear before opening that door. If they were going to do this, then all parts of her life were open for—
If they were going to do this.
It was crazy. Every time since that first kiss, every time that he’d considered the possibility, his saner, sensible self made him see reason: It was weak, it compromised the Mission, it was allowing his desires to override his judgment. Catwoman was a thief; none of that had changed. Why was he suddenly standing there in his civilian identity, sipping a coffee and waiting to slip a note in her purse?
What had happened? What had taken Catwoman from this very private dream in a very private corner of his thoughts into the part of his mind that dealt in hard, practical reality? He was really doing this. He was standing there with a note in his pocket, having observed her routine and devised a workable strategy for delivering it undetected. He was delivering a note summoning her to a rendezvous with Batman that served no purpose towards the Mission, no purpose whatsoever except to… to get to know her better. Even as he was preparing to set his plan in motion (with all the confidence and determination with which Batman approached everything), a part of him couldn’t quite believe he was doing it.
It was at that moment in the past, when his thoughts had twisted themselves into this impossible logic knot, that Selina Kyle appeared from under the canopy in front of her building, heading straight for the coffee cart. In the present, the doorman stood alone at his post, fidgeting like he wanted a cigarette. In the present, Bruce took a last sip of coffee, and that most private corner of his mind, a corner he would n ever fully admit existed, called his former self a jackass.
It was a short and pleasant walk to Wayne Enterprises. Bruce’s mood was only slightly dimmed by the incident with the keycard…
This morning he’d awakened in an empty bed, no Selina beside him or across the hall exercising in her suite. Alfred had brought a tray with only one cup of coffee, one newspaper, no pastry. It was hard not to think of the past when that was the norm. Downstairs in the dining room, a loose-leaf sheet from a daily planner sat next to his plate, with his appointments written out in Alfred’s meticulous handwriting—no similar sheet rested across the table where Selina would sit. Alfred would not suggest a dinner menu for Bruce’s approval; he would simply fix whatever he thought best. Around 7 o’clock, he’d begin nagging Bruce to eat it and would continue most nights until Batman left for patrol. It was the old routine: No pastry on the breakfast tray, no menus, eating alone, returning from patrol to an empty cave and an empty room and an empty bed… It was hard not to think of the past when that was the norm. And absorbed in those thoughts from the past, he’d fallen back into his old habit with the keycard.
It was a holdover from the fop performance, fumbling absently with the card in the reader. If he didn’t make a conscious effort now, he would automatically run it through the wrong way—once, twice, then flip it to scan properly and gain admittance to the executive floor. It came as a shock when he’d first abandoned the fop act and discovered these lingering habits. He was halfway through the old keycard routine before he even realized it. Even now he was fidgeting with a pen in a similar fashion, while Lucius briefed him on the week’s business.
None of it was news. Bruce had downloaded several Wayne Enterprises and Wayne Foundation reports, as well as the Batcave logs, to Wayne One and read over them on the flight home. He preferred being prepared for catch-up meetings like this, and the one to follow with Nightwing.
Bruce checked his watch subtly… he would give WE another three hours of his time, then Bruce Wayne would “go to lunch” and he could meet Dick in the satellite cave.
“…other than Mrs. Ashton-Larraby,” Lucius was saying, “I was about to say you owe me one there, Bruce; ‘the Ashton-Larraby experience’ was all you said. But I see karma anticipated me. This last minute addition to your schedule, a lunch meeting. Gail says the lady was quite—”
“No, no I can’t,” Bruce said, refocusing his attention hurriedly on Lucius’s last words, “I… have a lunch appointment already.”
“I think you better break it. This Miss, eh… Lance, was quite insistent.”
“Lance?” Bruce asked, a subtle gravel deepening his voice.
“Yes,” Lucius checked his papers again. “Dinah Lance.”
“Made an appointment—to see me for lunch?” Bruce demanded.
“This started out a good day,” Bruce spat as the elevator door opened into the satellite cave.
Dick performed a gymnastic twist in his chair at the workstation to smile a greeting at his mentor, then returned his attention to the computer where he had been playing Sudoku on the giant screen.
“Hey Puzzlemuffin,” he noted, shutting down the game. “I figured there was a development when you said to get down here an hour early. Welcome back, by the way. What’s up?”
&ldquo ;You tell me. Was there a Black Canary incident you and Barbara are keeping out of the logs?”
Dick raised an eyebrow.
“You’ve already read the logs,” he noted, shaking his head wearily. “Jesus, Bruce, whatthe— Are you genetically incapable of leaving all this behind for a few days without constantly checking in? Is it impossible for you to separate yourself for a few measly days and take an honest-to-god—dare I say it—vacation? Or do you have to ruin it for yourself and everyone else by still being ‘on the job’ even when you’re not on the job? I mean, really, Bruce, what’s the point of taking a break in the first place if all you’re going to do is worry about what’s going on or spend every ten minutes checking up on how things are going back here? Or is that what this is about—you having to check up on me; you not trusting me? Here I thought we were finally at a place where you could leave town, go off to a nice tropical island somewhere and boink your girlfriend like, y’know, a regular guy. But no, no, god forbid we leave Dick in charge for a few days without checking up on things, he’s probably let the city get overrun with giant hamsters or something.”
Bruce produced a severe Bat-glare—which was returned with one equally fierce—and then he sighed.
“We are at that place,” he declared forcefully. “I did leave town. I did leave it all behind for a few ‘measly’ days. I did leave you in charge. I did ‘boink’ my girlfriend, as a matter of fact—and incidentally she sent a package for Barbara that you’re supposed to take home with you. And, Richard, I did not find it necessary to check up on you. It’s a long flight back. I pulled your logs and Lucius’s reports and read them on the plane. Do you think I was ‘checking up’ on him too? Do you think I don’t trust Lucius Fox by this point?”
Dick’s glare downshifted, but he didn’t speak.
“It wasn’t a question of trust. I prefer knowing as much as I can before these catch-up briefings,” Bruce said, answering the question that had only silently been asked. “Makes for a shorter meeting.”
“Well,” Dick sighed.
Bruce’s lip twitched.
“Puzzlemuffin,” he noted dryly.
“Oh man, that was an all-time low,” Dick grumbled lightly, defensiveness forgotten and a trace of his old Robin persona taking its place. “I mean I thought that time with Catwoman when my voice cracked was as weird as it could get—and by the way, I still don’t accept ‘it’s just teenage hormones’ on that one; that thing with the whip is vicious and a guy wants to, y’know, have kids some day.”
“Dick, two things you might want to keep in mind,” Bruce said loosening his tie as he settled in at the workstation, “First, I have heard all this before.”
“The whip thing is vicious,” Dick repeated under his breath.
“Second,” Bruce went on firmly, “I just got back from an extended vacation with the lady in question, and she sent your wife a care package, so maybe you should just get over it about ‘the whip thing.’”
Dick stared in wonder. The words themselves, the idea expressed, and even the manner was not that extraordinary, not coming from anybody but Bruce. Even from Bruce, they weren’t that exceptional—now. But at one time they would have been impossibly light, teasing… and human.
“Have you ‘gotten over it’?” Dick asked with a wry grin.
“I just got back from an extended vacation with the lady in question,” Bruce repeated, a ‘between men’ undercurrent in his tone.
“Meow,” Dick noted dryly.
“So what’s the story with Black Canary?” Bruce asked in Batman’s gravel as he rose from the chair and headed for the costume vault.
“I have no idea,” Dick replied, loud enough to be heard in the vault. “There’s nothing in the logs because we officially had nothing to do with her while I was leading the team. I know she and Barbara had words; Babs won’t tell me what was said or what it’s about. I figured not really my business if it’s nothing to do with the team.”
“That’s ‘officially’,” Batman said, exiting the vault in full costume apart from the cowl and gloves. “What about ‘unofficially’?”
“I’m pissed that she upset Babs,” Dick said. “Beyond that, I really don’t give a damn.”
“Okay, well, she’s coming here in 15 minutes,” Batman noted.
“What, WHY?” Dick gaped.
“I don’t know, but she called my office first thing this morning and made a lunch appointment with Bruce Wayne.”
“What a nerve,” Dick growled bitterly.
“She and the others are prohibited from using any Justice League resources, including the communications network. The OraCom is Barbara, and if she wanted to give you two a wide berth…”
“I guess,” Dick admitted.
“Dick, it’s up to you, but I think you should stay and be a part of this conversation.”
He looked thoughtfully into the distance as he considered the idea.
“Yeah,” he said at last, thinking of the trapeze… You can’t climb a ladder twenty feet into the darkness, reach out for that rope dangling from the top of the tent, swing from that 1-1/2 inch of steel bar and then leap out into nothing without knowing those arms will be there to catch you. Bruce was someone you knew, absolutely knew, would catch you. Always. And Dick would honor that by making sure he was always there for Bruce. “Yeah,” he repeated, nodding with grim resolve, “I’ll stay.”
Not having access to the private Wayne Penthouse elevator, Dinah entered the satellite cave as she and the others always did, through an underground maintenance passage between the 48th and 46th Street subway stations. She was discouraged but not completely surprised to see that Dick was present, and also that Batman was in full costume.
“I see Mr. Richard had to make sure he talked to you first,” she observed acidly.
“So did you, apparently,” Dick noted wryly.
Batman merely cleared his throat. Dinah ignored Dick and spoke directly to him.
“Catwoman was a thief, right? I know she’s a cat, no apologies and all that crap, but she did steal, and that’s against the law and it hurt people, right? That emerald necklace was all Mrs. Whoever had to remember her beloved Grandmother Wilhelmina by, and now it’s gone and some lowlife somewhere has his dirty fingers on her memory. And we’re all fine with it. Because that’s not who Selina is anymore, right? A person should be given the chance to set a new… damn… can’t think of the word, I had it before when I rehearsed this.”
“Selina never pretended to be anything other than what she is,” Dick said, firm and calm. “I don’t know about Batman, but the first time I saw her, she was downright piss ed—not that we accused her of stealing, but that we implied she was stealing something cheap, pedestrian, and beneath her talents. Yeah, she was a thief, Dinah; she not only admits that, she owns it.”
“What I mean,” Dinah insisted, now switching her focus back and forth between Batman and Dick, “is that who you were is not necessarily who you are, or who you will be. You accept that she’s changed when she stole for years. With me, this one thing, this one stupid mistake that was years ago—”
“DON’T compare yourself to her!” Dick yelled. “This isn’t one mistake years ago, you two-faced bitch. This is every day since then that you pretended to be one of us: you pretended to be a big sister and a hero crimefighter, you pretended to be part of this family, when you knew what you’d done, you conniving, backstabbing traitor!”
“And how long am I supposed to pay for it, huh Dick?!?”
“Well I don’t know, Dinah, how about we take how long you hung around since it happened and multiply it by how long you WOULD HAVE GONE ON keeping your guilty little secret if the truth hadn’t come out on its own! How about that long for starters!”
“Enough,” Batman graveled with soft but insistent finality.
“Oh, here it comes,” Dinah exclaimed. “You let your attack dog call me every name in the book, and now you come in all magnanimous like the voice of reason, right? What is this, the ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine? This isn’t some bad 80’s cop show, Bruce.”
“You’re not doing yourself any favors,” Batman observed. “That’s twice now. First you go for the gut shot by invoking Selina’s name the way you did, which I can only assume was a purposeful attempt to provoke me. Then, when Nightwing was the one to respond, you shifted the crosshairs toward me again instead of responding to him. Is this why you called my office at dawn insisting on an appointment; you wanted to pick a fight?”
“I- What- No- I-”
Batman glared pitilessly.
“I wasn’t looking for a fight, but I was expecting to talk to you alone,” she insisted, glaring daggers at Dick. Then she returned her attention to Batman. “Ollie said I should confront you directly. He said they all follow your lead anyway, so—”
“That’s bullshit on a stick,” Dick replied spitefully. “And you’re one to talk about following leads. Do you always do what your precious Ollie tells you, you traitorous—”
“Dick,” Batman growled at his former sidekick. “That’s enough.” He half-nodded his head abruptly to the side, indicating that Dick should leave.
“I’ll be up in the penthouse,” Dick replied flatly after a tense moment.
They waited in silence until the elevator doors closed behind Dick, then Dinah smiled contemptuously.
“That was certainly an interesting display. Do you two practice that routine or does it come natural?”
“Practice? Like that rehearsed diatribe about Catwoman you started out with?” Batman intoned flatly without a hint of malice in his voice. “You may think that your self-righteous indignation with Nightwing or any other member of my team is justified, but when it comes to me, you lost that right the moment you took that vote.”
Another tense silence passed between them, then he slowly reached up and removed his cowl.
“Queen doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does,” he declared finally. “He doesn’t know Gotham, and he certainly doesn’t understand any of us. Your problem with Barbara you have to settle with Barbara; I can’t do it for you.”
“And wouldn’t if you could,” she spat.
“No, that’s perfectly true,” Bruce answered, calmly refusing to be baited. “I gave them all the choice to go on working with you or not as they chose once they had all the facts.”
“They’re not ‘working’ with me. They rub it in every chance they get: out of town assignments and all these subjects that nobody will talk about in front of me because one thing leads to another and it’ll just remind everyone, ‘til pretty soon you’re uncomfortable just saying good morning.”
“What did you expect?” Bruce asked. “Did you think if they chose to work with you again it would all be the way it was before?”
“They shouldn’t have said they’d work with me if they didn’t mean it,” Dinah insisted.
“If you’re getting assignments, they are working with you,” Bruce pointed out.
“They don’t trust me,” she said bluntly.
“Of course not. Why would they?” came the equally blunt reply.
“You don’t trust me either,” she noted.
The Bat-intensity spiked suddenly, but the tone remained calm and direct.
“No. Why would I?”
“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked, hands on hips.
He stared at her for a moment. “Well, obviously being obstinate and petulant hasn’t worked, so maybe it’s time for a different approach.”
She glared back at him, then dropped her hands to her sides. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Start from the beginning,” he said simply, his manner—had she but known it—similar to that in which he’d first trained Dick.
“How am I supposed to work with people that won’t trust me?” Dinah asked, complaint still in her voice, but a note of sincerity finally emerging underneath the question.
“You can’t. You have to earn back our trust.”
Nightwing’s words from Dinah’s dream echoed back in her ears: I was taught how to live in this life, taught by the best. There was no more grievance behind her next question, only genuine curiosity.
“And how am I supposed to do that, Bruce?”
“The same way you did it the first time… only harder.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said wearily.
“Back in the early days of the League, back in your early days in the Justice Society, you didn’t want to be accepted only because of your mother’s accomplishments. You wanted to earn that trust on your own. But the only way to do that was to work with those people that didn’t trust you. You’ve done it before; do it again.”
“But it’s completely different this time.”
“Of course it is. This time, you don’t have a blank slate. You’re not starting from zero. You have debt to work off first. It’s the same process; but it’ll be harder this time.”
She sighed. She looked close to tears.
“That’s pretty much what Ollie said,” she murmured.
Bruce raised an eyebrow.
“He should know,” he noted.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Dinah asked archly.
“Only that, since the issue is trust, your own situation with Oliver might offer more insight than I—or anyone else—can give you.”
Dick had never lived in the Wayne Penthouse as he had the manor. He never spent much time there except for a brief period when he attended Hudson U, when he used it as a quieter alternative to the dorm (with a well stocked refrigerator). He hadn’t seen the penthouse since the night of his bachelor party, and he walked around it now noting a number of small changes: paintings had new frames, some hung in different locations, there were new throw pillows, different knickknacks, a spray of silk flowers, and—almost as a signature on these alterations—a cocktail shaker that Barbara had given Selina as a thank you for being a bridesmaid at their wedding.
The elevator pinged discreetly and Dick waited, expecting to hear Bruce’s heavy tread on the marble floor of the foyer. Instead he heard a light, feminine step, and he tensed; Dinah walked in, and he glared.
“Knock, knock,” she said with sarcastic cheer.
“Why don’t you give it up?” Dick asked without animosity. “You’re finished here. You’ve wrecked it. Stop thinking some magical heart-to-heart conversation is going to make it all better.”
She nodded thoughtfully.
“I know that now,” she said frankly. “I know it was unrealistic to think there was any kind of shortcut or quick fix. Come to think of it, a quick easy fix is the way this started, with Dr. Light and all.”
“You really want to be bringing that up?” Dick asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Yes, I do. I’m done running from it, Dick. As hard as it is, for me and everybody else, I’m done being afraid of the subject. What we did was wrong. Most of us admit that now. I know that’s not enough for you. It is a start. We, all of us that were a part of the mindwipe, have to somehow come to grips with—”
“I don’t care about ‘all of you,’ or ‘most of you’, Dinah. You were the one standing next to her at our wedding. You were the one with her the night before too; she told me about that, the crying jag, her last minute doubts. She told me you drove her to the OB/GYN that day after the shooting too, when she found out she couldn’t have children. So don’t stand there and say ‘all of us that were a part of the mindwipe’. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Hawkman or Atom or your precious Ollie. It was you she trusted, and through all of it you knew what you’d done to Bruce.”
Dinah blinked away a tear, said nothing for a long moment, then took a deep breath and spoke.
“Ollie cheated on me seven times that I know about. I’m sure there were more; I just don’t know the particulars. I stayed, and then I left, and then I went back—knowing in my heart it would all end in tears—and it did. He cheated again and I left again, around and around. So you see, Dick, I do understand a little that no pretty speech at this point will make it all better. I’ve been on the receiving end too. I know nothing I can say will make me someone that didn’t do what I’ve done.
“Ollie cheats, so he’s a cheater; he could and probably will cheat again. It isn’t because he doesn’t care about me. Underneath it all he loves me and he’ll always love me. But he cheats—because that’s who he is.
“I’m someone who voted to mindwipe Bruce. I stood there while it happened, and in all the years since, I said nothing, did nothing. I am sorry, Dick, sorry it hurts you and that it hurts Barbara. That is part of who I am.”
“Do you want me to say that underneath it all, Barbara loves you and alway s will?”
She shook her head.
“You don’t need to say it. I know that she does. I know this hurt her, and that my behavior the past few months made it worse. And I know that under all that anger and frustration and pain she still cares about me the same way I still care about Ollie, in spite of everything.”
“I see,” Dick said. “Just checking: this isn’t the ‘pretty speech’ that you know won’t magically fix everything?”
She nodded, picked up the cocktail shaker, and ran her finger around the sealed rim.
“I don’t drink much so I use mine as a bud vase,” she remarked. “Dick, I know the only way to rebuild a relationship is with time and effort on both sides. I can do what Ollie does, give Barbara some time, gently remind her now and then that I’m still here, but leave her alone until she’s ready to let me back into her life. I can do that here, working to get all of you to accept me again, or I can go back to Star City and see if I can learn to trust Ollie again.”
“See, that’s the part I don’t get,” Dick stated bluntly. “Why would you go back to that when you know it’ll only end up… No, never mind. I know why. It’s like you said: Ollie’s the cheater, that’s just who he is. And you’re the one who takes him back time and again. Because that’s who you are.”
Dinah nodded slowly but said nothing.
“But you have to know by now that Barbara’s not like that. She’s not just going to accept you back like nothing ever happened.”
“No?” Dinah questioned. “She did with you.”
“With me? What are you…”
“Huntress.”
Dick glared at her, barely containing the explosion behind his eyes. “You know, for someone who’s trying to get back into my good graces, you’re certainly hitting all the wrong buttons.”
“Maybe so,” she replied levelly. “But that still doesn’t change the fact that Barbara did eventually accept you again, even after what happened with Helena. I know her better than you think, Dick.”
“…”
“…”
“I know her better,” Dick said meaningfully. “And it took us a long time get to a place where we were comfortable enough to even think about a relationship again. And even now, it’s not the same as it was before. To this day, I still notice that hint of distain and sadness in her voice when she says Helena’s name. Those divisions will always be between us.”
“And I know things will never really be the same between her and me either. But I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make her trust me again. Just like you did.”
“It took me years, living on my own in Bludhaven…”
“Which is why I’m choosing Star City—not because I don’t value my friendship with Barbara or because I think it’s hopeless here in Gotham, but simply because a little physical distance might help. And, there’s a better reward in Star City if I succeed.”
Dick inadvertently grunted, and then, disliking the sound, he enveloped it in a cough.
“Seems like a reasonable decision,” he said politely.
“I figured you’d like it. Gets me out of your life, out of your field of vision… and out of his city.”
“Actually, it wasn’t the aggrieved son talking but the contented husband. I do think it’s better for everybody if you leave Gotham. But I also agree that a ‘good relationship’, m aybe even a happy marriage, is the bigger carrot if you can pull it off.”
“I’ll come over tonight if I may, explain to Barbara.”
“Fair enough. I’ll be going out early, patrolling with Cassie these days.”
“Then I’ll say goodbye now.”
She offered her hand, Dick looked at it for a moment before shaking it. She held the handshake and stared directly into his eyes.
“Dick, I’m sorry. I really am.” She finally released his hand before adding, “For everything.”
He nodded tersely.
She attempted a weak smile. “I hope we can bury the hatchet, work together again one day.”
“The hatchet, sure. Working together, I doubt it.”
Barbara had opened her “care package” from Selina, laid out the contents on the table—and reminded herself sharply that this was not a puzzle clue from a theme criminal but a present from a friend. A number of presents, actually, for the box contained three pairs of sunglasses, a purple leather jacket, a belt with a large square buckle, and a packet of bath salts.
She had amused herself looking for the sunglasses on the Internet, and located them in the online catalogue for a prestigious Gotham department store. She was just comparing the picture on the screen to the pair in her hand when Black Canary arrived. Their greeting was tense and awkward, and Dinah began to wonder how she would possibly get through this… when her nervous jittering took her eyes past her friend’s shoulder to the contents of the computer screen behind her.
“$200!” she gasped. “$200 for sunglasses; Barbara, are you crazy? That’s—Wow, I didn’t even know they made ‘em like that. Since when do you shop at Bergdorf’s?”
“I don’t,” Barbara laughed. “Are you kidding me? These are a gift—from Selina. Missoni, La Perla, YSL. In light of recent events, she’s decided they’re too ‘goggle-ish.’”
“Poor Kitty,” Dinah laughed.
“The jacket,” Barbara added, “despite being purple leather and a Roberto Cavalli, is a zip-up and now strikes her as too similar to the black catsuit horror in the Post. Ditto the belt with a big square buckle, that one’s Gucci… Gotta admit, the lady has taste.”
“Mmm,” Dinah noted, feeling the leather appreciatively. “And a billionaire boyfriend. Too rich for my blood, that’s for sure. Quite a score for you.”
“It’s an ill-wind,” Barbara remarked, trying on a pair and examining her reflection in the computer screen.
“What exactly happened to her anyway? All I heard was some kind of… anomaly?”
“Details are sketchy,” Barbara answered. “From what I gather, Wayne Manor was ground zero for some sort of severe cross-dimensional instability. And for some reason Selina had to enter a kind of alternate reality to stop it. The ‘alternate’ part involved a costume not that different from the thing in the Gotham Post, and she’s quite spectacularly unhappy about that. Hence the getaway with Bruce, bath salts from Xanadu, and divesting herself of all worldly goods even vaguely resembling the Gotham Post Cat.”
“But what was this alternate whatever?” Dinah exploded, burning with curiosity. “What actually happened?”
“I don’t know,” Barbara said candidly. “Bruce told Dick and me what I’ve told you—with the stipulation that it is considered Arcanum-confidential, on level with secret identities and access to the Batcave confidential.”
Dinah whistled.
“Something sure went down then.”
“Yeah,” Barbara agreed. “Superman and Batman both sealed the file—independent triple encryptions—can only be unlocked with the passwords transmitted from the Batcave and the Fortress of Solitude simultaneously, they’re that serious.”
“Wow,” Dinah shook her head. Both women were silent for a moment, then Dinah looked up and met her friend’s eyes for a tense count of five.
“Does this have anything to do with Zee losing her powers?” she asked pointedly.
Barbara turned her head thoughtfully, then answered just as pointedly.
“I don’t know.”
“If you did, would you tell me?”
Barbara studied her friend.
“It’s okay, Babs. You can tell me, straight up, if the answer is ‘no, no way in hell would I trust a backstabbing traitor like you with intel like that.’”
Barbara answered with a sad blink-nod.
“Superman and Batman sealed the file,” she repeated. “If any of you don’t like that, I’d say, given the history, you can lump it.”
“Fair enough,” Dinah said, preparing to go. “I don’t know if Dick told you, I’m going back to Star City. It’s time for a fresh start, and I’d rather do it there with Ollie.”
“Good. It’ll be good for both of you, I’m sure,” Barbara said politely. “I hope it works out this time.”
“Yeah,” Dinah said.
“Yeah,” Barbara answered.
“This is it, then,” Dinah noted.
“Yes,” Barbara answered.
“Yes,” Dinah echoed.
After another strained moment, she sprang forward and enveloped her friend in a long, warm hug.
“Be well, Barbara,” she whispered.
“You too, Dinah.”
Dinah turned to leave, then paused and turned back.
“Barbara, I… I’m…” she began weakly.
“Don’t,” Barbara cut her off. “I know, Dinah. I know. Go to Star City. And make that man behave this time.”
Dinah nodded and moved toward the window. Barbara called after her.
“Wait! Honey, for heaven sake, I don’t need three sets of sunglasses. Take this pair, souvenir of Gotham. Catwoman’s very own they’re-not-goggles-damnit designer sunglasses.”
Dinah laughed, put them on, and meowed.
“Oh god, don’t do that,” Barbara chided, “Hon, maybe it’s the bird thing, but you haven’t got the knack.”
“Just as well,” Dinah noted, heading out the window. “It’d just give Ollie an aneurysm.”
Alfred brought a laden tray down to the Batcave, and with the reserve of a well-trained butler, hid his despair at finding Master Bruce already in costume standing before a hologram map of the city, marking off points with a lightpen. The At-Large list was open on the workstation monitor and the giant screen that loomed over the cave.
“Just put it on the table, Alfred,” he mentioned casually.
“Dare one hope, sir, that Master Dick’s performance in tending to crimefighting concerns in your absence was such that you might abandon your hologram for a few moments and attend to the meal I have prepared.”
“Scarecro w is still at large,” Batman muttered. “So is Nigma, but there are no clues pending that would indicate he’s active at the moment.”
“The steak sandwich is open-faced, and the butternut dumplings—served with brown butter, parmesan, and sage, sir—as well as the green salad require the use of utensils.”
“Nightwing is working with Batgirl; he thinks it would do her good to pursue the Scarecrow case. He’s probably right, after toxin exposure, it’s wise to ‘get back on the horse’ quickly. I would have liked to talk to her myself though.”
“I had expected, you see, to be serving in the dining room.”
“What?” Bruce said, turning from the hologram to study his butler just as intently.
“Your dinner, sir. I fear it is not as ‘portable’ as you are accustomed to when eating in the cave. I think you will find it worthwhile to come away from the lightmap, sit down, and eat it properly.”
“I’ll get to it… shortly,” Bruce declared firmly.
“Of course, sir,” Alfred said mildly.
Bruce returned his attention to the hologram, then began speaking more conversationally.
“Dick planned to check up on Bludhaven tonight, but evidently he can’t because of patrolling with Batgirl… One of those bets, Robin and Batgirl, here we go again. So if Nightwing goes to ‘Haven, she goes along and Robin won’t be able to deliver her ice cream at the end of the night. Dick feels it’s worthwhile to give them that time together.”
“You don’t approve, sir?”
Bruce considered this, walked over the tray and picked a bite of steak off the sandwich with his fingers. Ignoring Alfred’s fierce glare of disapproval, he considered it further while he chewed.
“It’s fine,” he decided at last. “It’s good for Cassie to have some kind of normal relationships.”
“Agreed, sir, and yet you hesitated?”
Bruce helped himself to another bite of steak.
“There’s a fine line between accommodating a teenage flirtation and taking an intrusive interest in personal matters that have nothing to do with crimefighting,” he said. “One of Dick’s log entries regarding Azrael was—well, I’d suspect it was a joke if he didn’t know better than to play pranks with the logs.”
“Indeed, sir. I would add that, were Master Dick to indulge in such pranks, surely Mr. Valley would not be his chosen subject.”
“No,” Bruce agreed, selecting a dumpling.
Alfred picked the fork and napkin off the tray, polished the one with the other, and then pointed it fixedly at Bruce like a surgical nurse presenting a scalpel. Bruce glanced at it, took it, and savagely pierced several leaves of lettuce in the salad.
“Were there any other developments of note in Master Dick’s report, sir?”
“Harley Quinn’s taken up with a new player, the Monarch of Menace. No details apart from the security footage from the bank they hit. It’s definitely not the old Monarch, moves like a younger man. I’ll check out the crime scene personally between patrols.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Oddly enough, the most alarming item came from Lucius Fox’s report, not Nightwing’s: Mrs. Ashton-Larraby organizing a fundraiser for the Wayne Foundation. She has yet to decide her ‘theme’.”
“You fear that Mrs. Ashton-Larraby’s theme might correspond to some criminal’s?”
“The words ‘Mrs. Ashton-Larraby’ and ‘theme’ are a fright all by themselves, Alfred.”
Alfred coughed discreetly by way of agreement. Bruce hurriedly ate another few forkfuls of the dumplings and then finished the sandwich, while Alfred hid his incredulous joy in the amount of food being consumed in relation to the amount of urging that preceded it. He busied himself tidying workstation 2, where Master Dick had worked in Bruce’s absence. Noting the purple wallpaper, he introduced the one remaining topic of conversation he had prepared, thinking he would have to spend a full hour at least lingering in the Batcave persuading Bruce to eat.
“I do hope Miss Selina is enjoying the accommodations at the Xanadu resort, sir?”
Bruce’s lip twitched. “She is. She’s picked out a number of facials and spa treatments, particularly the ones that emphasize cleansing and purifying after her ‘exposure’ to ‘the goggle-horror.’”
“I was under the impression that it was not her physical body, if I might so phrase it, sir, that crossed into the other dimension. That is, I had thought she merely occupied the form of each alternate dimension’s Catwoman?”
“It’s feline logic, Alfred, you can’t argue with it,” Bruce pointed out wearily. “She says it’s the principle of the thing, and as long as it makes her feel better, what does it matter.”
“A wise philosophy, sir. One hopes you also took advantage of the opportunity to relax and enjoy yourself?”
A far away look overtook Bruce’s features. After a long, silent moment of this, he grunted.
“One should take that as a ‘yes’?” Alfred asked archly.
“It was very strange,” Bruce said, his voice distant, as if he was talking to himself more than answering Alfred. “So much has happened since then. All I could think as the plane was landing was how we hadn’t even taken the masks off when we went there the first time. She was so quiet when got to the bungalow. I’m sure she was thinking of it too. I know she needed the getaway after all that dimension-hopping. It messes with your head, all those possibilities: if I’d said this or hadn’t gone there, how would my life be different now? In retrospect, Xanadu was probably not the best place to take her in that state of mind. We should have gone somewhere new, not… not anywhere with that kind of history for us.”
“Sir,” Alfred asked carefully. “Is Miss Selina… quite alright?”
“She’ll be fine when she gets home,” Bruce said with determined zeal. “We’ll plan something special,” he added, leaving the remains of the salad and hurriedly gulping a bottle of water. “Some kind of homecoming, see what you can come up with, Alfred, make it up to her for the whole magic, alternate timelines, and Gotham Post-goggles mess.”
Alfred blinked.
“I confess, sir, I am somewhat at a loss as to what I might ‘come up with’ to compensate for inter-dimensional anomalies involving the garb of a lurid tabloid’s limited and rather demeaning portrayal of a great lady.”
Bruce reached for his gloves and cowl, and put them on as he spoke.
“Just look at where we were before I took her to Xanadu the first time, where we are now, keep in mind that—Alfred, keep in mind that it’s mostly her doing—and see what you can come up with.”
With a butler’s reserved control, Alfred’s expression did not betray any emotion. He merely nodded, once, somewhat curtly as he said “Very good, sir.”
Now fully costumed, Batman headed for the Batmobile, then he stopped and sharply turned back.
“Say that again,” he graveled in the deep Bat-voice with which he seldom addressed his butler. “Alfred, say that again, about the tabloid.”
“I merely observed, sir, that the Gotham Post’s depiction of Miss Selina has been an ongoing source of annoyance and disappointment for her, and being forced into contact with the trappings of that image—”
“That’s it,” Batman said, a cunning, calculating smile creasing his lips—a frightfully unnerving phenomenon almost never seen in the cowl. “That’s a very good idea.”
©2006, Chris Dee