Batman Unmasked: Furnace Room Goodbye

[Zev]

Takes place shortly after Nightwing 100, Titans Tomorrow, and War Games; ignoring Leslie Thompkins' role in the death of Stephanie Brown.





His ribs were broken. No doubt about it. Every breath reminded him of that fact and if he were a weaker man, Batman would surely be hallucinating by now. Perhaps Alfred telling him to come home or his parents, praising him or chastising him. It wouldn’t have made a difference either way. Phantoms had nothing to offer him.

But no. He wasn’t hallucinating. His eyes were blurring, but that was more from the rain than from anything else. With a grunt of exertion, he swung himself up onto the rooftop. He couldn’t remember the building it went to. Sometime during the night his internal geography had been jogged loose. He was lose in his own city. Even if he won, he’d have to call Alfred to pick him up. The thought made him giggly and Batman realized that his probably a symptom of something.

“You never give up, do you?” Red Hood asked as Batman rose to his feet, cape crackling around him in the howling wind. The rooftop brought them closer to the storm, letting it tear at them and chill them with all of its ferocity. Still no rain came. It rattled and threatened but remained crouching, like a predator waiting to pounce. “Except on me.”

“You sound disappointed,” Batman wheezed. He drew a Batarang and threw it, taking out one of Jason’s snipers even as his pistol was cocked. The youth went down, fifteen years old if he was a day. His domino mask was affixed to his face by a string in the back; it went lop-sided from the blow.

“You took the words right out of my hood.”

Batman wiped a thin trickle of blood off his mouth. Red Hood was disengaging the catches on his hood, tearing it loose of his collar and dropping it to the ground. It made a hollow sound when it hit. Three more of Red Hood’s gangbangers followed them to the roof. Their varied sports jerseys were red and green; Batman couldn’t place the team. The whole thing was a mockery, an ode to Jason’s twisted sense of humor. With Batman as the butt of the joke. Always Batman.

“You remind me of the Joker,” Batman said, trying to stop himself from woozily swaying from side to side.

Jason gritted his teeth in anger, instinctively raising a hand to his mask. “Finish him,” he growled, and the gangbangers surged forward. Batman threw two Batarangs at once, tripping the first two up, then snapped the last one to the ground with a hard right. Not as hard as it should’ve been. The gangbanger bounced right back up and hammered Batman in his chest; another spurt of blood from his chest reminded Bruce of his injury there. The other two were getting up. Batman grabbed his combatant by the scruff of his neck and threw him into the recovering gangbangers. All three landed in a pile at Jason’s feet.

“You’ll have to do your own dirty work,” Batman hissed out.

“Kill you? My mentor? I could never do that.” Jason looked down at the gangbangers, spotting them with his toe when they didn’t get up fast enough. “Boys, kill my mentor.”

The gangbangers rushed Batman, sneakers squeaking and jackets complaining. The second in line was drawing a gun from his jacket, probably against Jason’s orders. Batman shouldered past the first and throttled it away. When the gun went off, it hit the third man square in the gut. Jason shouted “No!” Batman hadn’t known he cared. The third man wasn’t used to taking shots. He went down as the second man dropped the gun to wrestle Batman to the ground. The first man began kicking Batman. Bruce heard more bones break apart, each one in turn, like a symphony.

When Jason pulled the men off him, Bruce felt like he had died. It wasn’t that he hurt too much to move. It was that he just couldn’t.

“Get Freddy,” Jason said to his remaining men. “Get out of here. Go!” They picked up the wounded man and dragged him towards the door, stopping to wake the sniper on the way out. Once the door had closed. Jason looked down at Batman with a confused, errant look in his eyes. Bruce recognized it. It had been glazed onto the boy’s face after he’d stepped out of the Batcave and into a new life. He hadn’t known what to make of a world that didn’t try to take advantage of him as a matter of course.

“What the hell am I going to do with you?” Jason asked, trying to stay angry and failing. With a renewed growl, he kicked Bruce in the ribs. “Huh!?” Then he bent down and struggled with Batman’s cowl, deftly outmaneuvering all the traps before wrenching it off. Under the mask, Bruce’s face was a grisly disguise of bruises and cuts. Jason huffed, his shoulders bobbing up and down as he looked down at the man he’d once thought of as a father.

“I hate you,” he said to Bruce’s face, before he opened his cell-phone and dialed 911.

 

[Zev]

Thunder crackled in the distance, the sound oddly magnified inside the stairwell. Renee Montoya had her coat on over her body armor. The call could’ve gone to any uniform. Shots fired on the rooftop, men wearing gang colors, but then that call about Batman… down and injured. It could be a crank. God, please let it be a crank.

“Montoya, slow down!” Bullock wheezed behind her. His slouch hat was still dripping rain and he held his shotgun like he was about to fall down on it, but he still rumbled his way up each step. Renee paused on the landing next to the roof access, gun drawn, and noticed wet footprints heading down the stairs. Between the parallel tracks were prodigious drops of blood.

“Hurry up,” Renee hissed. Outside on the curb, an ambulance was waiting for their word before they came up. If Batman really was hurt, then Bullock’s tardiness could be the difference between life and…

“I’m here, I’m here…” Bullock took his place next to her. “Always thought the Bat could handle himself. This isn’t going to do any favors for his rep.”

“Shut it, Harv. On three.”

Renee rested one hand on the doorknob, the other tightly clenched around her sidearm. Bullock nodded to her and she threw the door open. They piled out, Renee on the left, Harvey on the right.

“Police! Freeze!”

There was no one there. Even with no rain, the clouds remained dark and threatening. In the sun-starved darkness, it would’ve been hard to make out the man huddled under a black cape… if not for the pile of blood he was soaking in.

Renee was still processing it, still taking doubting baby steps forward, as Bullock raged into the radio for the EMTs to get their asses up to the roof. A shock of adrenaline hit Renee’s system, like bang, and she took off at a run. She slid to her knees at Batman’s side, finding the cut on his chest and pressing her hand against it to stem the bleeding. He looked pale and his face was swollen. If it had been anyone else, she never would’ve recognized him.

“Br… Mr. Wayne?”

Bruce Wayne coughed and said nothing.

***

Dick sat naked on his bed, the hands behind his head marginally softer than the pillow, towel bunched around his waist. Despite himself, he always found himself comparing his current location to Gotham. Against Gotham. In Bludhaven, he’d had to remind himself he wasn’t in Gotham each time he woke up. Whether it was his own apartment or his guest room at the mansion, Gotham had a charge. It was almost addictive. Violent, dark, uncompromising.

Qutar, on the other hand, was dusty. The heat was manageable, but constant and irritating. Everyone seemed to be covered by a thick sheen of sweat. A cold shower had bought Dick relief for about ten minutes, which he intended to draw out for as long as the crappy hotel AC would let him. Maybe catching Spellbinder before she could act as a hired gun against Israel wouldn’t save the world, but after Tarantula, after the embarrassment of not even being charged for his sins, it went a little way towards making up for his colossal failure.

There was a knock at the door and Dick, irritated, lifted his head long enough to ask who it was. If it was a maid, she could damn sure wait…

“It’s Roy,” came the answer.

“Come on in.”

Roy opened the door, raising an eyebrow at the sight of Dick reclining in nothing but a towel. “Mr. Grayson, we’re strongly considering your application to the Playgirl centerfold. Now, airbrushing or no airbrushing?”

Dick’s lips twitched in an attempt at a smile. “Funny. Tell me the Pequot is fixed.”

“We’re still debating whether we should go with unleaded or splurge for premium.” Roy held up four mini-bottles of brandy, each caught between a different set of fingers. “To commemorate the Outsiders’ gain.”

“Thought you didn’t drink,” Dick said, reluctantly getting up and gathering up some clothes to throw on.

“Yeah, but there’s nothing that says I can’t watch you drink. Hey, you mind going into another room to do that?”

Dick tugged on his boxers. “And leave you alone with the booze?”

Roy resolutely looked at the wall. “Wow. I didn’t know they had Thomas Kinkade paintings in the Middle East. No wonder they hate us. You decent?”

Dick pulled on his T-shirt. “Yes, broadcast television safe.”

“I think I speak for all the Outsiders when I say it’s good to have you back,” Roy said, turning around and tossing a mini-bottle to Dick. “You’re a good leader, a good friend…”

“You walk in on me naked, try to get me drunk, and sweet-talk me.” Dick unscrewed his mini-bottle. “You know, you can get stoned for that around here.”

“If I were only person in the room who had ever worn short-pants, I wouldn’t be throwing that kinda talk around.” Roy liberated a soft drink from the mini-bar and shotgunned the first third of the can down. “Affirmation, Dickie-boy. You never get any and that’s why you’re in the pits. So I thought I’d let you know that we all love you. Platonically. Except maybe for Grace, and she only wants you for your body.”

“You two still together?” Dick asked,

“Yeah. Now she’s starting to go through my family albums. What’s up with that?”

“Kory did that once, after reading some psychology to better ‘fit in’ to Earth. Ended up dressing like my mother and trying to sex me.” Dick took a long pull of brandy.

“Freaky.”

“Yeah.” Dick drank again and wiped his mouth. “She looked damn good in a circus leotard, though.”

“Overshare, Dick. Overshare.”

It took a few tries before Roy got the hint to leave. Dick wondered if he had felt the way Dick felt now. Unworthy. As many mistakes as Roy had made, he’d never killed anyone. He thought he had let Ollie down. Dick wished he could explain that there was a difference between being weak and being… bad. Ugly. Evil looked like the scarred side of a coin, the pasty-faced smile of a clown, the ruddy clay of a monster. He looked in the mirror and what he saw fit. His complexion was pale, his eyes bloodshot. Sleep. He needed sleep. But then the nightmares would catch up to him. Even halfway across the world, he couldn’t leave behind Blockbuster’s body… and Tarantula?

What about Tarantula? Had he led her astray? Bruce had brought in so many rogues, people full of anger and hatred and shown them a better way… and yet there must’ve been a seed of darkness in Dick, something corrupt that even Bruce couldn’t erase. Maybe he was just born wrong, like Black Mask. They could probably sense it, all of them. That’s why they all left. God, Barbara… he wished she still saw him as Robin. At least then he had potential. All he had now was wasted dreams.

“It’s Batman,” Roy said, bursting back into the room without so much as a knock.. “He’s in trouble.”

***

Technically, the Pequot wasn’t supposed to be flying. The shields and weaponry were still off-line. Dick wasn’t interested in dogfights, just in getting home. No matter how much the others grumbled, he needed this. Needed to be in motion, needed to be back, needed to see the speed gauge go all the way into the red. Even at supersonic speed it would be hours before they made it to Gotham. Dick wished he could’ve used the JLA teleporters, but he needed to be discreet. People accounted for things like teleporter use and he couldn’t afford for there to be any link between Nightwing and Gotham.

“What’s a Code Gorgon?” Roy asked for the fifth time, trying to coax some more speed out of the engines from the co-pilot’s seat. Dick’s obvious distress had soaked into him, making him clam up, but he was still determined to know.

“Identity compromised, in custody.”

“Custody? As in, police custody? Batman’s been arrested?”

Dick shot him a look made up of fear and worry and anger.

“Whoa. ****.”

“Yeah,” Dick agreed. “****.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Coded response. It’s… 1 P.M. in Gotham. I have until nightfall to put the plan in motion.”

“Plan?”

“I need you to be out of Gotham. You and all the Outsiders. As soon as I step inside those city limits, I’m no longer Nightwing, understand?”

“You’re quitting?”

“More like… being promoted,” Dick said tersely. “Promise you won’t try to help.”

Roy nodded. “I’ll take the team and clear out. But they’re not going to like it.”

“We never do. Buckle up. There’s stormy weather over Gotham today.”

***

Tim cleared the Pequot for landing in the same hanger the Batwing used. It was risky, considering the scrutiny the cops were sure to be visiting upon them, but necessary. He’d already traded out the plates of one of Bruce’s cars and had Oracle hack the DMV databases to show it as Dick’s. If anyone asked, Dick Grayson just happened to be visiting for the weekend.

So far, the police were giving them the run-around. They didn’t even know where Bruce was being hospitalized. It was madness. Bruce should’ve given Alfred a retrieve code. Instead he’d let himself be beaten into unconsciousness and nabbed. And Jason. Everyone always walked around on eggshells about the subject, but Tim hated him enough for all of them. Jason the martyr, Jason the saint, all his sins white-washed away in the nostalgia. Bad enough to do that to him in death, but in life it was unacceptable. If he were any kind of hero, he wouldn’t be doing this. He would’ve called Alfred to pick Bruce up. Not thrown him to the wolves. This wasn’t like the old days. Akins was coming down hard on vigilantes and Bruce’s arrest was adding fuel to the fire. With the Birds gone and Orpheus dead… and Steph…

Tim stood up from the computer. The Batcave seemed emptier every day. Hadn’t he told Dick that he was needed here? He’d spelled it out. Batman needed Nightwing. Even with most of the freaks locked up in Arkham, the Mob was still running rampant under Black Mask’s control. He was consolidating his position, taking out rivals, moving in support. And every second of his freedom was an affront to Stephanie’s memory.

He looked at the statue where Jason’s Robin costume was placed. Maybe he’d bought into it too, the hagiography of Jason. He should’ve seen the sights. How Bruce darkened whenever Tim was too martial, too aggressive. How he was willing to talk about some aspects of Jason and shied away from others with a brief “No one’s perfect” or “He had problems he struggled with.” It was the only time Bruce gave any leeway, to a dead body.

The Pequot landed and disgorged Dick with his bags. Dick had a few words with Roy, who Tim could see faintly through the windshield. Then the Pequot left, leaving Dick standing on the VTOL helipad. He looked at Tim and didn’t say a word in greeting, just jogged up the stairs to meet him.

“How bad is it?”

Tim sat back down in the computer chair. It was awkwardly throne-like. His feet didn’t touch the ground. “They caught him unmasked and in the suit. He was in critical condition, but police chatter shows that he’s been stabilized.”

Immediately Dick let out a sigh of relief. He didn’t think he could do this if Bruce was in active jeopardy. “Okay. First priority is Bruce. Find Alfred, have him get our attorneys working on this. We need to know where Bruce is and I need to see him. Second, the suit. We need to replace it.”

“Replace it?” Tim asked, skeptical.

“Yeah. With a Halloween costume, something.”

“They’re not going to be fooled by that.”

“They’ll think someone on the scene got a little ahead of themselves. But for that to work, there can’t be a shred of doubt that we weren’t involved. Get working on an infiltration plan.”

Tim brought up the blueprints to the police headquarters. “They’re going to have that entire floor locked down. I’m no cat burglar, but anything short of smash and grab is…”

“Wait.” Dick leaned over him, looking at the schematics. “Is Selina still active?”

“No, she’s on maternity leave. Of course she’s still active, she’s Catwoman.”

“Get her help. I don’t care what you have to give her, a grant from the Wayne Foundation, the Wayne Diamonds, a really big catnip mouse, just get her to help.”

“What about you?” Tim asked.

“They think Bruce is Batman. But even Batman can’t be in two places at once.” Dick looked at the costume vault. “And tonight, while Bruce Wayne is in the hospital, the Batman will be putting a stop to Red Hood.”

 

[Zev]

Freddy groaned again, this time with more pain than usual mixed into it. Jason felt like ripping his hair out. This couldn’t be happening. They were home, they were safe. Headquarters had medical supplies, guns, TVs, everything his operation needed. So how come Freddy wasn’t getting better?

“I can’t stop the bleeding,” Chop Doc said. He was a failed med student. “He’s gonna need a transfusion.”

“Stitch him up.” Jason poured more liquor down Freddy’s throat as the other gangbangers held the wounded boy down. “We’ll find some people with his blood type, do our own transfusion. Freddy, what’s your blood type?” Freddy coughed up his booze. “Never mind, we’ll find some universal donor… O, right?”

“Boss, by the time you find someone who knows his blood type, Freddy won’t be bleeding, he’ll by dying. We’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

Jason bit his lip. “Rodriguez, Arturo, load him in the Camaro. We’re taking him to the hospital.”

“Hospitals bring cops!” Arturo growled.

“We’ll work out a cover story on the way there. He was cleaning his gun and it went off. Something like that. Just get him in the car!”

***

The hologram of Bruce was startling real. It had been designed to help Cass train before she’d been shipped off to Bludhaven and thus had to have as much verisimilitude as possible so Cass could… Dick supposed the word was ‘trust’. Personally, he thought the eyes were a little dead and doll-like, possessing neither the natural intelligence or the darkness of the real thing. But it had been based on some motion-capture gizmo from Waynetech’s research division, so it was as close as the real thing as he could get.

“And now, kata sixty-seven. Use this to condition your legs towards mid-range kicks.”

Dick watched Bruce’s body flex and move, trying to mimic it as best he could. He had never doubled for Bruce before. Worn the suit, yes, but not pretended to be Bruce. The very notion struck him as… sacrilege. And yet, here he was. The suit was more armored than he remembered from his brief stint as Batman (his own Batman, not Bruce’s). The cape was a new material which didn’t rustle or flap as the old one had. That took some getting used to.

“Computer,” Dick said, calling the voice-activated interface to attention. “List user’s current case-files.”

“One: Pamela Isley.”

One. That was bad. Third-priority was a case to be developed when there was leisure time. Second-priority was high-profile. First-priority was a threat. Only priority was a catastrophe.

“Computer, has the user made any cross-references?”

“One. Kellner Aerospace.”

Kellner. They were a rather small outfit so far, but backed by powerful interests. For a start-up company, they had amassed some large capital and big names in science. But Bruce’s brief on them had left out any mention of wrongdoing or controversy. Bruce had even sunk a few dollars into it. So if they weren’t working with Poison Ivy, were they a target? And if so, why would Ivy be going after them?

“Computer, send high-priority transmission to Oracle. Research Kellner Aerospace, specifically environmentalist complains against.”

“Sent. Oracle acknowledges receive.”

This would be a lot easier if Bruce kept notes on his cases rather than keep them all in his head. That was the price of never trusting anyone. Even the computer could be compromised. Dick sighed and turned his attention back to the hologram, gesturing for it to go to the next lesson. It made sense for Bruce to withdraw into himself. Steph had been able to start the gang war thanks to the computer. So Bruce blamed her death, and everyone else’s, on his own openness.

“Kicks for mid-range range opponents,” Bruce said. His hologram lashed out against a hologram. Dick followed the kick’s style. Bruce was a tank. He used his movements as a means to an end. Dick was trained as an acrobat; the means were an end in themselves. He was showy and he had to rein that in. Six hours until nightfall. He had that long to condition himself. The Batman would have to be seen, but not seen too closely.

Which was just fine by him. He was perversely certain that if he stayed in the suit, it would somehow magnify whatever it was that was festering in him. Maybe he would end up like Jean-Paul Valley; homicidal, a betrayal of everything Batman stood for. More than he already was, at any rate.

“Master Grayson?” Alfred called from the top of the stairs.

Dick poked his head out of the holo-simulator to see him. “Yo.”

“Mistress Koriand’r is here to see you,” and no matter how many years it had been, Alfred still pronounced Kory’s name with the proper inflection. “Shall I send her away?”

Dick frowned and thought on it. “Have the lawyers found out where Bruce is holed up yet?”

“Not yet, sir. However, a hearing is underway to force the police department’s hands. Regrettably, the specifics are somewhat beyond my expertise.”

Dick waved a hand to shut off the holograms and started up the stairs. He’d stepped into the simulator for a light work-out and something to occupy his body while he familiarized himself with the Gotham situation again, but alone with his thoughts he’d spent a ridiculous two hours in it. He stripped off the T-shirt he was wearing and threw it in the conspicuously out-of-place Batcave hamper. It was soaked through with sweat and smelled it too. Definitely belonged alongside capes smeared with Ivy pollen and tights blotted with Clayface grit.

Alfred already had a bottle of water and a fresh towel waiting in either hand. Dick drank the bottle down in one gulp, water leaking out over his chin, and returned it emptied to Alfred. He moved through the secret entrance back into the mansion, toweling himself off.

“Tell Kory…” Dick pressed the towel against his face, mopping the sweat off. “Tell her I’ll be right with her, as long as it’s important.”

“She’s…”

“Give me a moment to get presentable. She’ll understand,” Dick interrupted, just as he walked into the drawing room.

Kory was waiting for him.

“She’s in the drawing room,” Dick finished for Alfred, who shrugged rather eloquently, all things considered.

Kory had accumulated to Earth since Dick had last seen her. While she was as beautiful as ever, apparently at some point she’d tired of wearing her armor day and night. In its place she had on an ensemble that wouldn’t be out of place on a businesswoman, bright red jacket over a white blouse buttoned up to the neck and trousers that stretched all the way down her absurdly long legs to black leather boots. Kory never did “get” high heels. Still, that and the Italian sunglasses and the bun that her legendarily unmanageable hair was confined in focused attention on her face and the gestures her hand made. Dick had known her for too long to think of her as anything but Kory, but he supposed the clothes made people look at her as a woman first and a *********ory fantasy second… a close second, Dick mused to himself before shutting that down in its tracks. Kory had suffered enough. She didn’t need him adding to it.

“Dick,” Kory said, standing up and taking off her sunglasses. Her green eyes were bright and happy to see him; the glows were easy to correlate to emotion once you got used to her.

For no reason he could immediately think of, Dick initiated the requisite bear hug. She was only a few inches taller than him, but her grip was deceptively strong. Thankfully, the days of almost literally bone-cracking force were behind her. He patted her on the back a few times and they parted, her still beaming at him.

“Hey, I…” Dick was distracted for a millisecond by her scent. He was so used to perfume and cologne that her smell, natural to the point of savagery, took him completely by surprise. “I’m a little busy at the moment.” Then, because he never could say no to her: “Is it important?”

She nodded.

He moved to sit down with her on the couch, but Alfred cleared his throat. Sweaty half-naked men not allowed on the furniture. It was probably posted somewhere. So with a deliberate look at Alfred, he led Kory upstairs. Alfred took the hint and left, no doubt to phone for an update on Bruce’s legal status.

“This is going to sound crazy,” Kory said. Some of the luster had left her eyes, but there was still a defiant glimmer in the center of them. Hope.

“Crazier than a planet full of people who wear clothes over ninety percent of their bodies?”

Kory giggled lightly. “Yes, your notions of modesty are rather risible, if you don’t mind my saying so. I must admit, I am a little confused over why your skintight leather is more acceptable to small children than my armor.”

“If it’s any consolation, I’d let you near small children a lot sooner than I would me.”

“Thank you. They’re delicious,” Kory said, with a little quirk to her lips that made it obvious she was joking. She had developed a wicked sense of humor since she came to Earth. Bad influence, Dick guessed. Somewhere, Gar was laughing his head off.

The nearest bathroom was on the second floor and Kory, with alarming accuracy, guessed his intent. She leaned next to the doorframe, eyes smoldering. “You know, I don’t mind the way you smell. I rather enjoy it, actually.”

Kory wearing actual clothes had the perverse effect of making Dick remember what she looked like without them. Actively remember. He ducked into the shower and closed the door to all but a slit. “So, where were we before the banter?” he asked as he turned on the shower.

“’This is going to sound crazy’.”

“Right.” Dick kicked off his pants. “Shoot.”

Kory took a deep breath and said, in her most earnest voice, “I went to the future and Batwoman said you… needed me.”

Dick poked his head through the door. “In the future, Batman’s a woman?”

“No, it’s Bette.”

Dick pulled back into the bathroom. He had been waiting for the water to heat up, but on second thought, better make it a cold shower. “Bette Kane? The girl who used to broadcast radio programs about superhero sex lives?”

“Apparently she matures since then. After that. X’hal, your English has inferior tenses to deal with quantum mechanics; have I mentioned that?”

Dick stepped through the shower curtain and repressed an outcry at the cold suddenly needling his skin. “So, the future Batwoman told you that sometime in the future, I’m going to need you?”

“Yes,” Kory said, suddenly right next to him.

Dick whirled around. The shower curtain still stood between them, but now Kory was perched on the sink in a weird blend of human and Tamaranian posture. Her feet and hands were both balanced around the rim, but she seemed perfectly stable.

“Well, I appreciate your concern,” Dick said as he groped blindly for the shampoo. He thought better of it and looked. Someone might detect a difference in smell between him and Bruce. What kind of shampoo did Bruce use? He had about a half-dozen of them, plus conditioners. Alfred must have kept them there in case any number of people needed a shower. “But, uhh…” Dick picked Head & Shoulders at random. “I’ve got everything well in hand.”

“Dick, do you really think I haven’t known you long enough to detect falsehood in your voice? Or to know when something is amiss?”

Dick pulled the curtain back just enough to poke his head out. “Nothing’s amiss.”

In a heartbeat, Kory was standing next to him. She took the shampoo from him, squeezed a generous portion out onto her hand, and began kneading it into his scalp. Dick was split between enjoying it and trying to conceal how much he was enjoying it.

“I worry about you,” Kory admitted, her voice low, her eyes dull embers. “When I’m not there for you. I wish to protect you from harm.”

“We all want to protect… the things we love,” Dick said lamely. A memory of him and Kory showering together, lathering each other up with suds and that weird French moisturizer Kory liked until they had slipped in the shower and fallen, Dick on top of Kory. Then Kory had closed the drain with her foot and they’d let the bathtub fill up, shutting the water off when the tub was filled to the brim.

Kory washed her hands of the shampoo lather in the shower stream. “I love this planet. I love its people. Its cultures. Its tastes and scents and sun.” She wiped her wet hands off on her trousers. “But most of all…” Unable to finish, she backed away. “Can I stay the night?”

“Yeah, sure,” Dick said as noncommittally as possible before he closed the shower curtain again.

***

“I hope these accommodations are to your liking,” Alfred said as he showed Kory to her room. It was in the east wing of the mansion, the left wall brimming with long patio windows that made it the sunniest room in the mansion. Kory melted in a beam of sunlight, stretching like a cat awakening from a long night. Alfred tugged at his collar. Sometimes, he wished he were a young man once more.

“They’re wonderful!” Kory enthused.

The meeting with Dick hadn’t been, what was the phrase, a ‘best-case scenario’, but he hadn’t completely gone back under the Batman’s shadow. She couldn’t begrudge Batman his… unorthodox parenting. She could hardly claim the best childhood either, sheltered from the ravages of the real world until it was too late. But she’d put her tragedies behind her. Dwelling on the past could only sour the present. Dick, on the other hand, clung to his anguish like it was armor. It had a perverse logic to it, like most of Gotham’s heroics. Center yourself on the hurt and it won’t come as a surprise when the hurt comes back. It was a defense mechanism that had served Kory well during her enslavement.

But Dick wasn’t enslaved. He was free! Free to be happy, free to be loved, free to be his own man. If only she could make him realize that he was only hurting himself by trying to avoid being hurt. And there was something else, something beneath the surface. Usually it took something to set Dick off like this. Jason’s death had worn heavily on him, as had other… bad memories. But he always rallied, always fought back! This seemed to linger on him, like a bloodstain. Even as he took action, he stayed in the darkness. It made her fear that he would never escape from it.

“Mr. Alfred,” she began, jolting out of her own reverie.

“Please, ma’am, a simple Alfred will do… although I do beg that you refrain from a diminutive such as ‘Aflie’ or ‘Al’ or even, heaven forbid, ‘Fred’.”

Kory nodded and sat down on the four-poster bed, leaning against a bedpost. The mattress was soft and downy. It would be a joy to sleep in. “Alfred, have you noticed anything unusual about Dick lately?”

“I fear the nature of your shared line of work virtually guarantees that sort of troubled nature,” Alfred said, deftly avoiding the question.

Kory nodded again, vining herself around the bedpost as if she could draw strength from it. “Do you think he needs me?”

“Mistress Koriand’r, at this point, I believe that Dick needs anyone who cares about him to be in his life.” His beeper rang. It was a lesser concession to modernity than a cellular phone. Alfred had adopted the technology reluctantly and had stubbornly refused to evolve to cell-phones, preferring the network of landlines and car-phones available to him. Alfred reticently looked at it, with an apologetic smile to Kory.

“It’s Bruce,” Alfred said without preamble. “We have him.”

 

[Zev]

Jason sat next to Freddy’s bed. The boy was swaddled in bandages and surrounded by machines, beeping, whirring, pumping, doing God knew what to keep him alive. Jason had never found out what they did. He was uncomfortably reminded of the Brown girl.

It wasn’t the same. These kids weren’t on a leash like Stephanie had been, like he had been. Jason gave them the tools to go all the way. They weren’t hampered by hypocritical, idiotic morality like Bruce’s. They were soldiers. Good soldiers, all of them.

Arturo was waiting in the doorway. He looked uncomfortable without the gun Jason had bought him. Jason beckoned him inside and he came, closing the door behind him. Freddy reminded him of someone else too. Bruce must be holed up somewhere too, licking his wounds. Because of Jason.

“We’ve conquered sea, we’ve conquered sky, we’ve conquered space. There are no more frontiers to pierce. Now we must look inward, to the soul. Why does a man do what he does? The average person, walking by on the street, bombarded by a thousand pressures, wound up like a clock from birth, lusting after a new goal with every second.” Jason reached out and squeezed Freddy’s hand. “I unmasked and left for dead the only man who ever cared for me. Why would I do something like that? I had to have a reason. Only bad guys do things for no reason. I’m not a bad guy. I’m not.”

***

At long last something besides pain entered Bruce’s world. It was a number. He had categorized every type of pain he had encountered and this one was entirely new. In vain, Bruce tried to tackle the number, but it flittered away. Something new entered Bruce’s world. The pain was folding in on itself. It was still there, blotting out his viewscape, but now he could see the edges of it, like a cigarette burn. The second something was light. Not metaphorical, but literal. His eyes were opening. Well, eye. One was either swollen shut or bandaged, which meant left for dead or hospital. He raised his hand to check and found it constrained by both handcuffs and an IV line. Hospital.

Akins.

“You gave us quite a run-around,” Commissioner Akins said. He was leaning over the foot of Bruce’s bed, hands resting on the footboard where Bruce’s chart was posted.

Bruce was, for a terrible moment, unsure whether he had his mask on or not. “Commissioner…” He looked at his reflection in Akins’ horn-rimmed glasses, saw himself. Not a pretty sight, but not the Batman either. “What run-around? Have I been in a car accident?”

“Don’t play dumb, Wayne.” Akins pronounced the surname with the same inflection he might use for some particularly loathsome kind of sexual predator. “Good cops are dead because of you. Twenty-seven of them. My friends.”

“I’m sorry for the loss,” Bruce said, meaning it. His head was swimming with something that was turning the pain into so much white noise. Painkiller. And Akins was interrogating him with it in his system. Bastard. “Would you like me to write a check for the policeman’s ball?”

It was too flip by half, but the sneer of rage was reward enough. Until Akins started listing names. “Daniel Ortega. Corey Finch. Mary-Louise Epstein. David Louis…”

Bruce recognized the names. They replayed night after night in his dreams, the worst of them, the ones where he was trapped in a graveyard with no end, his crusade against crime filling up coffin after coffin, his body count dwarfed only by the roll call of those he had failed to save. But he had been rattled worse by better interrogators and even through the fog of the drugs he kept his reaction confined to the mental space where he lived.

Akins finished his recital. If he was disappointed by Bruce’s neutral, mournful expression, he kept it buried between the anger distorting his face. “I’ve got you this time, Batman.”

“I want to see my lawyer,” Bruce said, enunciating precisely and clearly through the narcotic haze. “Because if you intend to keep harassing me while I’m hospitalized, I will sue you for every cent you’re worth.”

Akins sneered, demonstrating exactly how much contempt he had for Bruce at that moment, and took his time ambling to the door. “You’ve got a visitor,” he said before leaving. The door hadn’t flapped once before Leslie and Dick were inside. Dick closed the door, barring it shut with a chair that Leslie handed to him.

“Dr. Tompkins. Mr. Grayson,” Bruce said.

Dick grabbed a second chair. Full of nervous energy, he spun it around and straddled it. “Hey, Bruce. How you feeling?”

“Drugged.” He slurred the word; Dick must’ve noticed, because he made a face.

“Painkillers,” Leslie said, placating him. “And from the looks of things, he needs them.” She continued giving Bruce a quick but thorough medical exam.

“You have the time?” Bruce asked pointedly.

Dick held up his watch and pressed two buttons on the shine. The clockface lit up. Green. No bugs or listening devices in the area. They could talk safely.

“Bruce, I…” Dick put his hands in his pockets. “I need to know anything you remember about the Isley case.”

“Isley?” Bruce rattled his handcuffs, remembering. “I’m sorry. Everything’s jumbled, blurry…”

“That’s not uncommon with severe concussions,” Leslie said. She was shining a small penlight into Bruce’s eyes. “Frankly, I’m a little surprised you’re able to talk.”

“C’mon, Les, when has a little concussion slowed him down?” Dick rubbed his hands on his pants, unable to get the sweat off. “Are you going to be… okay?”

“I can handle Akins,” Bruce said in no uncertain terms. “You have better things to do than talk to a cripple in a bed?”

Dick faltered.

“Then attend to them. Gotham needs you.”

Dick nodded and stood. He paused by the door before turning back. “Get better, alright?”

Bruce nodded grimly and Dick left.

“Well, that was a fine thing,” Leslie said as she checked Bruce’s heart rate. “All the boy wants is to know you’re okay and you send him packing.”

“He has duties,” Bruce reminded her. “My duties.”

Leslie crossed her arms archly. “All I know is that you have so few people left who care about you. It’d be a shame to start pushing them away too.”

“Dick is one of us. He understands.”

“Just because he understands doesn’t mean he likes it.” With a heavy sigh, Leslie turned Dick’s chair right-side-around and sat in it. “Dick reminds me of you. Not as you are now, not even as you were then, but that angry young man I used to patch up between fights. He’s hurting, Bruce.”

“We’re all hurting, Leslie.” Bruce held up his hand, although whether it was to demonstrate his handcuff or his IV line, Leslie couldn’t tell.

“Not all of us can deal with it as well as you can. Sometimes we need to let our pain go.”

Bruce shook his head. “Dick isn’t like me. He can lead a normal life. Is leading a normal life.”

“Bruce, I’ve known you a long time, so I’m going to put this gently.” Leslie patted Bruce’s hand reassuringly. “When was the last time you pulled your head out of your own ass long enough to take a look at the world around you?”

Bruce quirked an eyebrow. “I keep track of everything that could impact…”

“I’m not talking about quotients and efficiency. I’m talking about feelings. Human emotions.” Leslie sat back in her chair. “Tim’s walking wounded and he thinks that suppressing the pain like you is the best way to manage it. Dick doesn’t even bother to suppress it. Alfred doesn’t know what he can do to ease their pain and it’s killing him. And Steph… Bruce, you should’ve seen what happened to Steph coming.”

“I take responsibility for my mistakes,” Bruce said in a quiet voice.

“Yes. You just don’t learn from them. You’ve been part of God knows how many teams, but I honestly believe this is the only family you have. And they’re falling apart, with or without you.” Leslie stood and looked at the door. “You have no problems being a great man, Bruce. That comes naturally. But I think you could try being a good one.”

***

Dick watched Leslie leave, lost in thought. Seeing Bruce humbled had delayed the confrontation he knew he had to get out of the way. But was Bruce in any condition to hear what Dick had to tell him? Then he felt a shadow fall over him.

“Need a hug?” Jason taunted.

Dick was on his feet immediately, arms moving in short angry bursts before he stopped himself. He was still nose to nose with Jason, boiling with rage. Jason didn’t wince, but did coyly lean his head back.

“Nice hospital they’re running here,” he said. “Very clean. Well-lit.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Your man,” Jason lisped, “put one of my boys in the hospital.”

“He deserves to be in a morgue,” Dick growled before he could stop himself. “All of you do.”

“So that’s a no on the hug?” Jason nodded glumly. “I understand.” He took a step closer to Dick, who instinctively tensed. But all Jason did was whisper in his ear “Bruce is going to hang. Nothing you can do about it. But you don’t have to be dragged down with him.”

“This the part where you go all ‘join me or die’ on me?”

“Oh, I hardly think you need my help to over to the Dark Side, Bludhaven.” Jason snarled. “I’m trying to do you a favor. Bruce doesn’t love you anymore than he did me. You think he cares about you? If it had been you in that coffin, he wouldn’t have avenged you either.”

“Vengeance isn’t love.” Dick turned away. “And Bruce knows that isn’t what I would want.”

“Bull**** it isn’t! You want to be more to him than those faceless civilians he saves every night. You want him to go further on your behalf than on theirs. But he never will. He. Doesn’t. Care.”

“Liar!” Dick wasn’t comparing Jason to the angry-eyed youth that once haunted the mansion like a ghost before his time. He was comparing him to Tad, the psychotic vigilante Dick once thought he could temper into his very own sidekick before he learned to see “Nite-Wing” for who he truly was. He was comparing him to Tarantula, her eyes squeezed shut in ecstasy, back arched in orgasmic repose as she mumbled endearment after endearment into unhearing ears. He was comparing him to Blockbuster, just before the gunshot splattered his gray matter all over the walls.

“It’s a small city,” Jason said dismissively. “You want to prove me wrong, I’ve no doubt you’ll get your chance. See you soon.”

“Sooner than you think,” Dick spat at Jason’s back as the other man turned the corner. He would never be like that. Never. He’d kill himself first. He wanted to ram his fist into a wall, but if he broke his knuckle-bones he’d be no good to anyone.

It was no good resisting. The Mission was his faith and Bruce was his confessor. He had to beg for forgiveness. Without any further ado he threw open the door and walked into Bruce’s room.

“I made a mistake,” he said, penitent.

Bruce looked at him keenly, his face slightly sympathetic for all its inscrutability. “Did you make a mistake or an error?”

Dick felt like falling to his knees in shame. “An error,” he bit out.

Bruce gestured to the chair. “Sit.”

Dick fell into it. “He’s dead.”

Bruce sat up as best he could. “Who?”

“Blockbuster. Roland…”

“I know.”

“It was my fault.”

Bruce looked at Dick as if discerning his very structure, the ratio of elements that went into his being. “Tarantula killed Blockbuster. You put her in jail.” He said it with a crushing finality, brooking no disagreement.

“I let her.”

The words hung in the air. Bruce’s jaw tensed, once, twice, as if words were swarming just below the surface but left unspoken. Finally, his lips parted: “Tarantula killed Blockbuster. You put her in jail-“

“I got out of her way!” Dick stood, his entire body feeling like it was on fire. “She shot him because I let her.”

“You weren’t in your right mind,” Bruce argued fitfully. “You were drugged, mind-controlled…”

“I was as rational as I am now. I made a decision. I made…” a grim smile flittered across his face, “an error.”

“You have a job to do. Get moving.”

Dick staggered back, resting his weight on the back of his chair. “I can’t! I’m not…”

“Get out.”

 

[SoulManX]

Zev Im digging this story.

 

[MaskedManJRK]

Hot damn, digging this story, Zev. Can't wait to see what happens next! t:

 

[Zev]

Dick walked through the front door the manor in a daze; dead man’s march. Kory was waiting for him, her boots off and jacket hung in the closet. Dick stared down at her bare feet on the hard wooden floor before raising his face up to look her in the eyes. It wasn’t by his own design. She had a hand under his chin, forcing him to make eye contact no matter how much he tried to turn away. Her thumb rested on the corner of his lip and Dick’s tongue snaked out, licking the fingertip. Kory pulled him into a tight hug, letting her body warm him, feeling the racking sobs which began in his chest and shook his whole body.

“Everyone leaves,” he said softly. It was a kind of explanation.

His hands wandered over her back, clawing into her blouse and untucking it from her waistband. Kory felt herself be guided, almost like a kind of dance, into the drawing room. She registered the details of the place in a blur, letting herself be led to the window seat. The blinds weren’t drawn and through the chill glass she could see the first drops of rain start to hit. A storm had been brewing all day.

The manicured lawn flinched in the wind and rainfall. Great blocky shadows fell over the front yard, spreading and merging like ink-blots, bringing the rain with them. Just a light drizzle, not even a fraction of what had been promised. Dick’s lips were cold as they traveled over her lips, the line of her jaw and the side of her neck. Cold fingers undid the top button on her blouse and shucked her collar, exposing where her neck became her shoulder. His kiss there was airy, as strangely subdued as his touch on her thigh or between her breasts. It was possible, likely even, that he was expecting her to take over now as she always did.

His hand was against his chest, pushing firmly. Dick broke the kiss. Kory looked even more unknowable in her mild dishabille, bare shoulder gleaming at Dick until she fixed her collar, clutching it shut. Dick stared at her. Their eyes met. Hers were so darkly jaundiced they could have been black.

“You don’t love me,” Kory said, flat as dirt.

Dick breathed in. “If this is about Barbara…”

“You don’t love her either. You don’t love anyone. You don’t even love yourself.”

It was just about the most condemning accusation a Tamaranian could deliver. Dick sputtered weakly, his hands over her arms, trying to find a spot where he could make a connection. “I thought… I mean…”

“I can tell,” Kory said, vitriolic. “I can tell when you mean it and when you’re just going through the motions. The first time I lied to myself. I thought you actually needed me instead of just a warm body to lie next to. The second time I thought,” she was chagrined at her own ignorance, “you were making a commitment to me,” she finished bitterly. “But I don’t mean anything to you. You just use me and I let you because… because I love you. Still. After all this, I love you too much to let you…” She scrubbed at her eyes as the sickly sweet aroma of her tears filled the room. “It hurts too much.”

“I never knew,” Dick backed away from her as if she were made of something toxic. “I thought you understood.”

“I understand perfectly.” Kory hadn’t even realized how angry she was until she began speaking. The words tumbled out of her like a dam had broken somewhere inside of her. “I’m your release valve. Anytime you’re feeling bad you come to me. Doesn’t matter what I’m doing or how I feel or who I am!” she shouted. “I’m what you do when you can’t find a supervillain to beat up. And just because your emotional repression involves sex instead of self-mutilation, you think you’re well-adjusted. You’re not. You’re just like Bruce.”

“Don’t you dare compare me to Bruce!” Dick growled, his hands balling into fists. “I am nothing like him! I could never be…”

“No. You just wish you were.” She pushed past him to the door, stopping to look back at him. “I had hoped this time you really did need me. Guess the future isn't what it used to be.”

***

“Am I a good man?” Dick asked, his voice flat and hollow, as he looked in the mirror. Despite the padding, the suit of Batman made him feel like a little boy playing dress-up in his father’s clothes.

Alfred adjusted his cowl minutely. “You’re an upstanding young man, Master Grayson, and any family would be proud to have you.”

“But am I a good one?”

Alfred clapped him on the shoulder. “I believe that is a question you must answer for yourself.”

The Batmobile rotated into view. Of the dozen or so Bruce kept on hand, it was one of the more fearsome, all wicked fins and chiropteran contours. It came online, console lights glowing, engine revving up, afterburner jet igniting. Dick stepped into the light of its flames, feeling the heat on his face overtaken the dankness of the cave.

“Will you be needing anything else tonight, Master Grayson?”

“No, Alfred.” Dick climbed into the cockpit, careful not to sit on his cape. “That will be all.”

***

The storm clouds gathered over Gotham coalesced, blotting out the moon. Streetlights came on, fighting valiantly against the darkness. And deep in the bowels of the city, the guttural roar of the devil’s car was heard.

It was a well-known fact that you didn’t go out in Gotham after dark. You didn’t. Even drivers lived in fear of carjackers, so the streets were relatively clear. Dick drove twice the speed limit, easily dodging the sparse traffic. No pursuits in progress on the Batmobile’s computer, which received items from the police scanner and categorized them for his perusal. But there was a report of a pawn shop being robbed on East McEntire. He could make it in two minutes. Once there, he killed the lights in an alleyway half a mile away and set the hologram, turning the Batmobile from a death-ride into an odd collection of garbage bags and dumpsters.

From there, he took to the rooftops. The grapple-gun worked fine and his hearing worked better. It was like a sixth sense, relying on your five senses. This time, Dick heard the crunch of their feet fleeing, the panting exhale of their breath, the detritus they disturbed in their wild flight. He moved off, leaping from roof to roof. Didn’t even need a de-cel line. He caught up to them in the shadow of a meat-packing plant. They stopped to catch their breaths and Dick gave them a bare moment to wallow in fear, playing the yowling cat sound effect from his belt.

“What was that?” one of the two asked. Music to my ears.

Dick moved in, shadowing them as they ran into the moon of jaundiced light from a streetlamp. There they tried to act nonchalant, one of them looking at a pile of wooden milk crates as if trying to determine if they would make a good seat. He was more out-of-shape than the other. Abandoning stealth, Dick was among them in the blink of an eye. He flipped the athlete into the milk crates, smashing them to bits with a sound like bones breaking.

As soon as he’d moved the slob had gone for his gun, so in the same motion as the judo flip Dick kicked the gun out of his hand, up into the streetlamp. It broke, cascading small bits of glass onto Dick’s cowl and shoulders. The strobing light lit him demonically, an effect so frightful that Dick let it take hold for the few seconds it took for the slob to take him in before making a break for it. Dick didn’t let him get far. His arm shot out, grabbing the slob by the collar, and bashing his face against the stalk of the street lamp. He slumped to the ground to join his partner in unconscious.

Dick handcuffs the two of them to the streetlamp and remote-called the Batmobile to him. Once it got there, he pulled a bulb from the trunk and screwed it into the street lamp. The new light source cast a bat-signal on the cuffed thugs, spotlighting them for Gotham’s Finest to collect. An oldie, practically Year One, but a goodie.

Satisfied with himself, Dick climbed back into the Batmobile and drove off. Those two would swear up and down that there was no way Batman was in the hospital that night. But he had more impressions to make.

***

“I’m Batman,” Dick said into the rear-view mirror as he drove. Voice a low rasp. It didn’t sound right.

“I’m Batman.” Kory had been right. He had no idea she had felt that way, which made her doubly right. The thought that he could so casually hurt someone and just stroll away… he’d known supervillains like that. Hell, he’d known superheroes like that. After Roy had gone through detox, Dick had sworn he would never be like Ollie. Never treat someone less than human. Bang-up job so far, Grayson. Blockbuster he’d treated as a cockroach to be exterminated, Tarantula he’d treated as a scapegoat for his own guilt, and Kory he’d been treating as a sex doll for longer than he cared to think about.

“I’m Batman.” What about those robbers? Had he injured them? Paralyzed them? Killed them, even? He didn’t know. He felt sure that he hadn’t, but his certainty was eroding by the moment. Sure, he thought he had used the minimum amount of force necessary, but what if he had miscalculated. He hadn’t thought he was hurting Kory either. He had to know for sure.

It was still early, the crime board was dark. Dick sent the Batmobile into a rolling 180 and took off back the way he came.

***

The Batmobile pulled up at the curb. The robbers weren’t covered in blood or unearthly pale, which was a good sign, but Dick hopped out of the cockpit to check their vitals anyway.

“Returning to the scene of the crime?” Catwoman asked in her intimidatingly husky voice. She was reclining on the streetlamp’s arm in a Cheshire cat pose, lazily letting a hand dip into the light cast by the lamp. “I’ve tried it. Not that hot.”

“Selina,” Dick said, not sure if that’s what Bruce would say or not.

Catwoman hung from the streetlamp by her knees like a preschooler on a jungle gym. It brought her to eye-level with Dick, breasts bouncing a little. Which Dick was sure was part of the intended effect. “You have me at a disadvantage. You know my name but I don’t know yours.”

“I’m Bat-“

“Puh-lease.” Catwoman reached down and stroked the unconscious robbers across their bruised chins. “Bruce would’ve taken them down in four seconds, you took twelve. You showboated.”

Dick considered saying something in protest, but the fact of the matter was that she was right. But here it served a purpose. He needed for there to be word about Batman out, but he needed for it to be nonchalant too… as if nothing had happened in the past twenty-four hours to throw him off his game. Jesus, where were the days when he just had to defend himself from giant-prop-wielding clowns while Batman punched the Joker?

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Selina was now sitting on the headlight of the Batmobile, seeming to get some satisfaction from the warmth of the light against her crotch. Dick raised an eyebrow. Barbara had mentioned that chicks dug the car… “So, who are you, v2.0? An imitator or an officially-licensed replica?”

“I’m Batman,” Dick shot out like the word cut his throat.

“You certainly are,” Selina said as she gave him a once-over. “Obstruction of justice, conspiracy to commit, aiding and abetting… I like you already.”

“So you’re going to help?”

Selina rolled over the hood of the Batmobile into a fifties cheesecake pin-up pose. “You’re not as much fun as your predecessor. I need a straight man to play off of; you’re in on the joke.”

“I’m nothing like you.”

“Now you sound like him,” Catwoman said, dismissively rolling her wrist. “But if I’m to help you with your little identity crisis, what’s in it for me?”

“Name your price,” Dick said without hesitation, taking a step next to the Batmobile.

Catwoman rolled next to him, now sitting on the edge of the hood, legs splayed so he was in-between her thighs. “Oh, I’m sure we can think of some reasonable compensation…” Selina drolled, tracing the symbol on his chest with a single clawed finger.

“Funny. You’d think people would pay you for that pleasure.” Their banter wasn’t very Dark Knight-y, but it was less stifling than… everything else.

“Oh, they have. Make sure you have some of those Bat-Cuffs on hand, ‘honeybunny’.” And with an acrobatic handspring, she was off and running into the night.

Dick shook his head. He knew Catwoman well enough to know that blackmailing men into sex was way beneath her. Her real price was in there, couched in something else, but he would pay it gladly if it got Bruce off the hook. Hopefully she didn’t need any internal organs he was overly fond of.

***

It was like the city was holding its collective breath. The few crimes he’d foiled were pitiably low-profile. Of all the nights for Gotham to have a low crime rate. The city’s perverse sense of humor knew no end. With nothing better to do, Dick angled the Batmobile toward Arkham. If Poison Ivy had a scheme in the offing, it was a guarantee that one person would know the game plan.

The lights of the city, such as they were, gave way to what meager starlight could make it through the pollution. Trees battered by the wind. Pine needles falling. I have to stop thinking about it Dick thought. He’s thought of Blockbuster’s oversized head bursting open so many times that he could give a presentation on it. Like a conspiracy theorist on the JFK assassination. Where the bullet entered, where it came out, what it passed through… even the caliber. He actually went back and looked that up. .45 Parabellum. Pretty standard stuff. Not at all exotic.

I have to stop thinking about it. Does Two-Face think about it, when he kills someone? Does he obsess over it or does he let it go? Christ. Maybe he belongs up here, with the crazies. Maybe he always belonged here.

He parked the car and got out, smelling it in the air. Madness.

***

“I ain’t telling you nothing about Mr. J!” Harley said, shaking her head. She was playing gangster moll today, her blonde hair in curls. The hospital scrubs (or whatever they are) have black crayon marks down the front and sides and back, like a zoot suit. Dick had read her file. She wasn’t allowed to have her crayon if she wrote on the walls, but the suit was okay.

“I don’t want to know about Joker,” Dick growled. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but if anyone was even looking through the security camera to wonder who Harley was talking to, they didn’t care. “I want to know about Poison Ivy.”

“Red?” Harley squealed, excited. “Is she planning something? Are a lotta people gonna die?”

“You tell me.”

“Red doesn’t tell me anything. Well, she does, but that’s because she likes to monologue. Blah blah blah, despoilers of the earth this, rapists of the rain forest that. No wonder she only works with Feraks, they’re the only ones who could put up with her yammering! ‘Cept for me!” She smiled winningly.

“You’re a smart girl.”

“Ph. D!”

“I’m sure you can put the puzzle pieces together. Remember something.”

Harley quirked her eyebrows, suspicious. “What’s with you tonight? You’re not acting mean or nuthin’. Usedta be you would’ve threatened to mess with my meds if I didn’t tell you stuff.” Her baby-doll voice was getting old fast.

“I loosened up. Went to a spa.”

She laughed, giggled, hit the wall so hard it shook. “That’s funny! Mr. J was wrong about you, you do have a sense of humor!”

“What’s Ivy planning?”

“Stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Ivy stuff.” Harley pressed herself suddenly against the glass, making a face at Dick.

His eyes narrowed. “You want me to mess with your meds? Keep it up. Dopatrixine, odelaine, rotamine…”

“No, no, I’ll be good, promise!”

“Tell me what I need to know.”

“Kellner. The plane guys. She doesn’t like ‘em.”

“I already know that. Why doesn’t she like them? EPA likes them just fine…”

“They built their plant on the old forest land.”

Dick remembered. Thornton Pharmaceutical cleared that forest five years ago. They folded in one year. Although Batman had stopped Ivy’s plot against them, he’d also exposed corporate fraud all the way up to the boardroom. Since then, the industrial park they’d been constructing had laid half-finished… until Kellner moved in to resuscitate it.

“Kellner didn’t chop down those trees.”

“Red don’t care. They’re still profiting off of it. That makes them equally guilty. Aiding and abetting, just like me with Mr. J.”

Dick gritted his teeth. Of all the…! Why did the crazies have to be so crazy? “You know what she has planned?”

“Nope!”

“Do you know when it’s going down?”

“No! But she did say it had sumpthin to do with the launch tomorrow…”

Launch… the test flight of Kellner’s new passenger plane. Dick had seen the press release, accompanied by a photo of a former astronaut grinning with the announcement that he would be flying. Its hover-system was adapted from alien technology provided by Tamaranian refugees, providing a safer and faster flight. He remembered it as pillow-talk. Kory had tended the deal in exchange for a place for her people to colonize on Earth. Right now they were somewhere in New Mexico, in a reservation they were terraforming into a replica in miniature of Tamaran. He’d visited once. Nice place to raise a family.

“Do you know anything else?”

“Red said if I helped her, we could play dress-up!”

Dick sighed. Cajoling information out of her was like herding cats. It was easy with the crazies who were just… well, crazy, not crazy. They could be bribed, threatened. People like Harley, sometimes their psyches were so fractured that the information just wasn’t there.

“Thanks for your time, Quinn,” Dick said, turning to leave. His cape billowed. “I’ll show myself out.”

***

“Hey Current Dark Knight.”

Dick had been wondering if it was too soon for him and Barbara to be starting in with the pet names again. Apparently not.

“Hey Hacker Wonder,” he said with a warmth he didn’t feel. “What’s shaking?”

“Look. Up in the sky.”

Dick did. What he saw up there he would’ve sworn up and down would never be seen again.

Someone had turned the Bat-Signal on.

He’d heard that Akins had destroyed it. Smashed the spotlight in with a sledgehammer and thrown it in a junkyard. A janitor had swept up the glass. Seeing the light back in the sky made him feel good again. Made him feel like he belonged. He put the pedal down to answer the call.

***

Red Hood didn’t look very heroic. Oh, the domino mask was vintage superhero, but the black leather jacket, the turtleneck under it, the black jeans, the steel-tipped boots… he didn’t look sleek or cool or retro. He looked dangerous.

Jason liked looking dangerous. Even with the red hood kinda ruining the effect, but that was an in-joke for him and the family. He couldn’t be head-to-toe Matrix because he wasn’t just some creep with a .45 and sunglasses. He was a superhero. He needed to sell it a little.

Like a lance, the beacon shot up into the sky and burst against a cloud. The Bat-Signal, like lightning shooting inside the cloud it hit. With a scowl, Red Hood started towards it. If no one else would answer, he would. And if someone did answer, he would answer them.

The Bat would not leave a legacy.

 

[SoulManX]

Catwoman momma mia

 

[Zev]

“I don’t like this,” Bullock said, pitching his voice higher to be heard over the omnipresent hum of the spotlight. Akins gave him a look as if to ask what he could possibly find wrong with what they were doing and Bullock ignored the implied 'shut up' to answer “It seems shifty, taking advantage of a guy’s goodwill.”

“Like he took advantage of my men’s goodwill during the mob war?” Akins asked ruthlessly. The memory still rankled. “No. I don’t care how idealistic or good-natured he is. Tonight, he answers for his crimes. In whatever guise he chooses to wear.”

“If you say so, Commissioner.” Commissioner. Never ‘commish’.

Akins stared at the spotlight. It didn’t really prove anything. No. It did. If Batman showed up… he had to show up! That was his mortal weakness. Although he knew all odds were that it was a trap, although he must know he was taking his life into his own hands by coming, he would still answer. Because there was a chance, however slim, that Gotham really did need him.

And Akins hated him for that. Batman was evil, if not in character than in effect. And to persecute a good man for being evil… it rankled at him. He didn’t ask for this job, but he would execute it to the best of his abilities.

And apparently someone intended to execute him, for gunfire leapt out of the darkness above him. Bullock tackled him to the ground but not before Akins realized he wasn’t the target, no, it was the light, the light was being pulverized by a stream of bullets…

Downed, Akins looked up to see the starlight reflected in a red hood. A man atop the air conditioning tower that sprawled, through air duct tentacles, throughout police headquarters.

“Lights out,” Red Hood said from the high ground, and swung the smoking barrel of his machine gun over the two policemen.

All Akins heard was a rustle of wings passing overhead and then, a blank space of darkness against the stars, then solid boots were impacting against Red Hood’s chest. The villain went down and the machine gun clattered down an air duct with aluminum pings. Batman! Out of instinct, Akins went for his gun.

***

Dick was disengaging his glider, the wings softening back into his cape, when he heard “You’re under arrest!”

Terrific. Paris Hilton gets to check into jail when it’s convenient and I have to get locked up right in the middle of a battle.

“Sorry Jay,” Dick whispered when he and the Red Hood locked together again. “I can’t play anymore.”

“No jokes!” Jason said as he threw Dick into the maze of air ducts. Batman landed on one, smashing it half-closed. “Batman doesn’t make jokes!”

A shot hit Jason between the shoulder blades and was absorbed by his flak jacket. Jason casually flung shurikens back at Akins like a card shark dealing a hand, then jumped down to Dick’s level. Batman rolled out of the way as Jason touched down, caving the air duct in.

“I’m not Batman,” Dick confided, blocking as Jason jumped toward him and aimed a kick at his face.

“Damn right you aren’t!” Jason landed into a leg-sweep which Dick jumped over. “Take off that mask! You’re not worthy of it!”

The leg-sweep terminated abruptly against another duct and Dick fell back down to earth, dropping his knee on Jason’s outstretched leg. It didn’t break, but it hurt like hell. Jason yowled and rolled away, scampering over the duct and back onto his feet. Dick vaulted over it as well, into another dropkick to Jason’s chest. Staggering back, Jason twisted into a new combat pose. Batman regarded him for a moment.

Dick had better training and more experience, but Jason didn’t care who lived or died. His gloves had lead weights in the knuckles; they bruised whenever they hit. And any moment now… yup, Jay’s pulling out the knife.

“You know, he wept like a stuck pig when I bled him with this.” Jason said, letting the moonlight catch the blade.

“Try it twice.”

There were few spots on Batman’s suit that weren’t armored. Jason knew him; he had aimed for the underarm where the armor was lighter to ease movement. It worked on Bruce, it didn’t work on Dick. Batman moved in close and trapped the blow under his arm, the knife well behind his back. He delivered a series of headbutts, spiderwebbing cracks in the helmet, as Jason stabbed ineffectually into Batman’s armored back.

Just as the hood cracked enough for Dick to catch sight of one hate-filled eye, the knife penetrated the armor. Dick mustered his strength and threw Jason aside, gritting his teeth in agony. He had just managed to pull the knife out, its metal rasping against his wound and chafed armor, when Jason hit a dropkick into his chest.

“How do you like it?” Jason demanded. The knife clattered to the ground, fallen from its suspension in the air. Jason ignored it, preferring to stomp a mudhole in Dick’s ribs. Dick tried to roll away, but the boot ended up coming down on his stab wound and he cried out. Seizing the opportunity, Jason knelt down on the wound, driving his knee into it. Dick felt sure his teeth would crack from grinding together so hard.

“Mask off,” Jason said, his exposed eye furiously tracing the contours of Batman’s all-wrong jaw. He tugged at it, cutting himself on the horns. “Take the mask off!”

Dick rolled over, sending new surges of pain ricocheting throughout his body. He scooped up the knife and was upon Jason before he could recover, jamming the knife into the eyehole. The tip stopped an inch from Jason’s pupil.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t.”

Jason stared at the edge, unblinking. “Because you can’t. You’re afraid you’re gonna hurt me. Afraid you’re gonna kill me like you killed Rollie!” And with mechanical inertia he moved toward the blade, just as Dick ripped it away. A cold laugh filled the air and brass knuckles hit Dick’s chin, where the armor didn’t even try to cover. It felt like his jaw was ripping in two. He tumbled away, blood already oozing over his lips from where he’d bit his tongue, and Jason was back up. The knife blazed light in his hand.

“Maybe we should have a team-up,” Jason taunted as he danced the knife over his knuckles, the blade pinging against his dusters. “We’re working the same case on Ivy, dontcha know? Family business.”

“You’re not my family. And if Bruce were here he’d say the same.”

Jason launched himself at Dick, passing him, the knife flashing across Dick’s ribs. A clean line, blood trickling down over the pouches of his utility belt. Dick sagged, spun, as Jason passed him again, tracing a thin line of blood across his shoulder. Even as Dick was applying pressure to the wound, Jason was slamming a steel-toed boot into his gut. The breath exploded from his lungs and Dick was falling, hitting a duct, listening to the whine of metal as it wrapped around him.

“Two Batmen in as many nights,” Jason noted with satisfaction. “My kinda town.”

The cape was plastered to him by blood and all Dick could think about was how much DNA he must be leaving here. Jason had the knife to his throat.

“So what was the plan, Dickie-wing? You were gonna beat me up and leave me for the G-men? You know I’d just turn state’s evidence, because Akins would much rather have Brucie and Timmy and Babsie…”

“You say Barbara’s name again, I’ll kill you.”

Jason pressed the knife up under Dick’s chin, earning a few gulps of blood down the blade. “That would be one hell of a good trick…”

Dick didn’t even hear the whip, that’s how good Catwoman was. The end of it was just wrapped around Jason’s neck, a surprised expression overlying it, and then Jason was yanked back. Everything happened at once. The sudden sound of a helicopter entered the area and there was Akins babbling something through a megaphone, SWAT teams swarming around him. Jason said something in with a lot of hard consonants and Selina was pulling him to his feet, his bruised mug reflected in her goggles.

“Hey Catwoman,” he said as they ran towards the edge of the roof. Akins must’ve given the free-fire order, because bullets were pinging all around them. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Then they were diving off the rooftop, Catwoman hanging onto him as he turned the cape into wings once more.

***

Her hide-out was cramped and smelled vaguely of cat-littler. Dick suspected it was from the days when Selina had been one of those villains that liked to have themed henchmen along for the ride. What had their names been? Kit and Kat? Meow and Mix? Captain Catnip?

Anyway, the ceilings were low and Dick felt drywall scrape away onto his horns (and then on his cowl and shoulders) every time he stood to his full height. It made him feel even more like a failure. Batman never would’ve been beaten by a two-bit punk like Jay… Red Hood. Dick wasn’t Batman.

Tim was dressed in a hoodie and baggy pants, gang colors prominent. Dick didn’t ask. Tim looked happy to be stripping off his doo-rag, sunglasses, and needless Band-Aid from his face.

“Cunning plan?” Dick asked.

“Very cunning.” Tim slapped a med-patch onto Dick’s back to join the ones on his side and shoulder. Dick rolled the shirt of his costume back down. “You should have Alfred take a look at that.”

“Yes, Mom.” Dick turned to Selina, who was lasciviously licking the back of her hand and running it through her mussed cowl-hair. “What about you, how’d you make out?”

“I replaced the Batsuit with a Halloween one. I hope you don’t mind that it’s a woman’s version.” Off Dick and Tim’s evil looks: “I was joking! Damn, you boys won’t let a gal have any fun.”

“Where is it?” Dick demanded.

“In a safe place. And as soon as I get my payment…”

“Which would be?”

Selina gazed at Tim. “The kid’s useful. I don’t suppose I could keep him?”

“No.”

Selina stood and, with a sidelong glance at Tim, was in Dick’s arms. “I take it you’re not up for the event?”

“I prefer my cats declawed.”

Selina grinned devilishly. “Liar. Don’t worry about it. Bruce lied too.” She sat down on the arm of a sofa and crossed her legs. “One night. No interference from you capes. Just me and the city.”

“A crime spree?” Dick repeated, aghast but not surprised.

“For old time’s sake. Come on, mouse. Bruce’s freedom is worth more than a few… trinkets.”

And maybe it wasn’t to Bruce, but it was to Dick. If Bruce didn’t like it, tough. And if that decision made him unworthy of his mantle... so be it. “Done. Where’s the suit?”

“Trunk of your car.” She pulled her goggles up. “The Batmobile. Do you name your other cars?”

“There are no other cars,” Tim said on his way out, grabbing Dick by the arm. The stairs led down to a bookcase that opened when The Cat Who Walked Through Walls was picked up. Old-school Dick thought admiringly.

“He’s not going to like this,” Tim said when they were out of Selina’s earshot.

“What’s he gonna do?” Dick asked with grim humor. “Fire me?”

***

The ride in the Batmobile was quieter and smoother than usual, not so much as a pothole to mark their progress. Robin sat in the side-seat and missed his cycle. Dick was trying to sit in a way that his wounds wouldn’t make uncomfortable and failing. The storm had broken, firing rain into the city like a wave of arrows. Hail and thick fat raindrops bounced off the windshield, chipping and splatting at the glass.

“So, you and Selina…” Dick began to jibe.

“We talked about Steph,” Tim said quietly.

Dick nearly stepped on the brakes. Instead, he took a deep breath and focused on the road. “Well?”

“It’s my fault.”

Lightning split the sky like a tree taking root. This time Dick did step on the brakes, throwing the Batmobile into a 90-degree turn that took them into a small, dark alley. As a vagrant and some stray cats fled the alleyway, Dick killed the lights. The engine let out a soft moan as it throttled down.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No,” Tim said hesitantly.

“Too bad. Consider it an order.”

“You’re not,” and for a moment Dick wondered whether he was going to say Bruce or Batman, but in that moment Tim fell silent. He found his voice again, drifting over the sound of rain like a fine mist. “She was trying to… impress me, Steph was. She thought I would be proud of her if she pulled the war game off. She told Selina alllll about it.”

“She made a mistake.” Hail now, chipping at the car like a thousand tiny chisels. “It’s not anybody’s fault, really…”

”It’s all of our faults!” Tim shouted. The sound of hail magnified, but didn’t grow, as if their hearing was suddenly more sensitive. “If I hadn’t quit, if she had followed orders, if Bruce hadn’t been such a paranoid freak…”

“Don’t you talk about Bruce like that.” Tim didn’t comply, but shot him a challenging look. “You haven’t earned the right.” Tim let loose a high, crisp laugh. “You sound like Jason.”

“Maybe Jason’s right,” Tim said.

Dick turned the key, revving the engines. No matter how far down he pushed the pedal, he wouldn’t be able to outrun what needed to be said. Desperately, he tweaked the crime board. Avoiding Tim’s accusing stare.

“Steph died because she wouldn’t pull the trigger. And none of us pulled the trigger, so Black Mask just keeps doing what he’s doing. Selina says…”

“Selina is a criminal.”

Again, that high and crisp laugh. A little insane, now that Dick came to think about it. “We’re all criminals, Dick. Maybe it’s time we start playing the part.”

“We don’t kill.” Dick poked Tim in the chest, right on the Robin symbol. “Period. Bruce’s rules and if you want to play Robin for much…”

“I’ve earned a little--” Tim tried to interrupt.

“--my rules too!” Dick yelled over him.

“Bruce is done.” Tim seemed sad to even be admitting it to himself.

“Tim,” Dick said, sympathetically. The windshield wipers squawked as they beat back the rain.

“Even if he skates on this, you think he’ll be able to keep it up much longer? He’s, what, forty years old?”

“Close,” Dick said. Had he really not noticed? How many of Bruce’s birthdays had he missed, ignored, blown off because they were feuding at the time? Too many.

“Well, then he will be soon! It’s going to be our time soon and…”

This wasn’t right. Dick wasn’t supposed to be the authority figure, the hypocrite, reasoning for things he only half-believed. What would Alfred say? “As long as we follow his orders, Bruce stays with us.”

“Even when those orders don’t make sense,” Tim said bitterly. His arms crossed and for a moment he looked like what he wasn’t, a teenage boy having a snit.

“They make sense!” Dick insisted, jaw clenched. “You just don’t want them to make sense.”

“No, I want them to make sense. More than anything, I want them to make sense.” The cords in Tim’s neck stood out as his anger flared up again, directed at Dick. “You’re the one who doesn’t want killing—“

“Murder.”

“—to make more sense!”

“You want to keep talking like this? You want to be Jason?” Dick pressed a control and the Batmobile’s hatch slid open. “There’s the door!”

Furious, Tim unbuckled his safety belt and climbed out. He was instantly soaked through with rain, hair plastered to his skull. “Steph would still be alive if I’d done this sooner!” he shouted into the car.

“And her boyfriend would be a murderer!” Dick shouted back, peeling off into the night. The wheels kicked up thick scads of water as they galloped. In the rear-view mirror he caught a glimpse of Robin, half-obscured by exhaust, watching the Batmobile go before disappearing into the night.

Hot tears ran out his eyes, sliding over and under his cowl’s eyeholes. He wondered how Bruce dealt with being unable to wipe them away. Bruce probably never cried. The crime board lit up and metamorphosed into the Oracle funerary mask. He accepted the priority transmission.

“Yeah Oracle.” She couldn’t tell that he’d been crying. She mustn’t. “What is it?”

“The news.” Barbara sounded frazzled, without even the voice scrambler between her and her emotion. Involuntarily, Dick bent closer to the radio like an iron filing towards a magnet. Even now, hundreds of miles between them, he wanted to hold her, comfort her.

“What news?”

“There was a leak, someone talked… oh, Dick, I’m so sorry.”

“What news?” Dick insisted, louder this time.

Barbara was unable to answer. Instead, there was a burst of static as she cued another channel into the transmission. Then Dick heard the words he’d been dreading ever since he was twelve years old.

“…sources close to the investigation report that billionaire Bruce Wayne is accused of being the masked crimefighter Batman…”

 

[SoulManX]

Zev this is a great story you are one hell of a writer.

 

[Zev]

The report went on. Things like how Wayne could be liable for billions of dollars for damages, the jail time he could do if the cops murdered during the gang war were ruled as Batman’s fault. His teeth gritted, tears forgotten, Dick pressed the gas pedal closer to the floor and sped into the night. He wasn’t even driving anywhere, just being in motion. It brought no relief. He was supposed to be up there, in Bludhaven even, flying without wings and jumping without nets. This was insanity.

Somehow, the Batmobile’s Pratt & Whitney F100 turbofans brought him to the docks. He drifted the Batmobile into a controlled stop, leaving skidmarks on the road like a monster’s claw rakings. Without even waiting for the hatch to fully open, Dick was out of the cockpit and vomiting up Alfred’s dinner. The rain washed it away. Even when his stomach was emptied, he kept heaving up air. His legs threatened to betray him with each step as he staggered back to the Batmobile, landing on the hood. Bruce. Accused of murder, the murder of innocent policemen. Bruce never killed anyone! Dick wanted to shout in the ears of anyone who would listen. It’s me, I’m the one, don’t take him, I’m the murderer!

Then it hit him. That weird pumpkin-innards/compost pile scent he’d nearly been smothered in, crushed in, beaten to death with. Feraks. They could pass it off as a cologne, but when you’d fought one of them sweaty, the nightmares lasted for a week and the memory lasted forever. Dick locked the Batmobile down and followed his nose.

The scent was coming from a bar, The Salty Sailor. A Popeye-but-for-copyright-infringement sailor was stumbling drunkenly on the sign. Underneath which lurked the Ferak, its just-left-of-human features concealed by a ball cap and sports jacket for the Gotham Knight. Maybe even Ivy was catching football fever. It was standing watch at the door and there was no way it wouldn’t recognize Batman trying to get in.

At a distance, in the pounding rain, and with his cape held just so, Batman could appear to have the silhouette of a man in a trenchcoat. He did so now, sneaking past the bar and catching a closer look at the Ferak. Definitely a plant-man. Its jaw had whiskers that were more underdeveloped roots than hair and its teeth never came out from behind its dull pink lips. Dick knew that if that mouth ever opened, the fangs of a Venus Flytrap would be trying to devour him.

He circled around the Salty Sailor. No other exits, which was a violation of Gotham fire codes. If only there were a superhero named the Fire Marshall I could call in Dick mused as he left a small noisemaker around the corner from the Ferak. He jogged back to the corner, coming up on the Ferak’s other side. With a small press of the console on his belt, the noisemaker left loose a loud bang and a gasp of smoke. The Ferak turned and Dick was upon it without making a sound. A needle drawn from his utility belt found the Ferak’s neck and, with a pneumatic hiss, concentrated weedkiller was injected into what passed for a bloodstream. Specially developed by Waynetech. Harmless to humans, deadly to plant creatures. The Ferak keeled over and swiftly decomposed into mulch. Dick dragged what he could out of sight atop its clothing, hiding that in the dumpster around back of the bar.

Bruce wouldn’t have walked into the bar in full regalia. He would’ve used a disguise, ferreted out information, kept his knuckles clean. But that was in the days when urban legend was a useful cover. Maybe it was time to stop playing by those rules. Tim was just angry, but his words had a kernel of truth. Dick could afford to be his own man… his own Batman (Ugh, Grayson! Thought we outgrew the puns! he chided himself).

He shoved the swing door, enjoying the attention brought to him by the ominous creak of ungreased hinges. Shedding water, he stepped inside. As soon as he did, a strong scent nearly overwhelmed him. He didn’t even have to smell to know it was the wet grass and rich soil smell of Ivy… she was sitting at the end of the bar atop a man who looked familiar, but was obviously under her control. Dick had seen the glassy eyes and neutral facial expression far too many times to not recognize it.

Her raincoat was thrown open to reveal her long bare legs and the green leotard that either grew on her or out of her. It barely covered her gorgeous breasts. Dick shook his head like a dog trying to dislodge a bit of water. He didn’t usually think about Ivy like that. Sure, she was beautiful, but he wasn’t Roy. Psycho villainesses with double-digit body counts did nothing for him (No, just the single-digit body counts, eh Grayson?).

“Isley,” Batman said, barely wavering. “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this… instead of a place like Arkham?”

“I was released early.” Ivy sipped her drink. Water. Some of it ran down her chin, beads of it defying the hollow of her neck and dripping down the slopes of her breasts… rising and falling gently as she breathed; the sight was practically hypnotic. “Bad behavior,” she concluded with a smile.

Dick swallowed uneasily. The leaves rustled over Ivy’s cleavage as she mimicked him teasingly. God, the way her throat moved was beautiful… “Why don’t you come quietly?”

“Ahh, that’s not half as fun as coming loudly.” The leaves of her costume opened up down to her belly button, an outie with a tiny little sprig growing from it. It stood at attention like a tiny erection and Dick wished there was a way to wipe the sweat from his brow. The sides of her breasts with pale with just a tint of green, looking as succulent as fresh fruit, just waiting to be picked…

Dick went for his Batarang. Before it cleared his hand someone was on top of him, grabbing him from behind, pinning his arms to his side. Dick threw his head back, heard a nose shatter like glass, then threw the body over a pool table. It hit someone else. They were all ganging up on him. How many men were in the bar? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? He hadn’t counted. Sloppy. (Sloppy like when you didn’t tell anyone you saw Zucco messing with the ropes, sloppy like that?)

“Pheromones, Batman,” Ivy said, running a finger over the lip of her drink as Batman dashed over the bar. “Pollen, sweet smells and good tastes… plants use them all the time to propaganda their seeds.” She stood and the man she had been sitting on sighed with dismay. Batman was fighting with the barman, a beefy specimen with tattoos up and down his muscular arms. She lowered her voice orgasmically -- “Like bees to nectar.” -- and even in the middle of the fight men moaned softly. Dick almost joined in the chorus.

Batman threw the barman over the bar, tripping up three men with pool cues, then tossed a small bomb over his shoulder. It landed in a shelf of bottles and Batman ducked as it exploded. The mobbing barflies were sprayed with flaming alcohol and shattered glass. As they fell back, Batman jumped the bar once more and charged them. Yes, that’s it Grayson, fight your way out. So much easier than thinking, isn’t it? So much easier than getting to the roots of your problems. Only fighters are good at fighting and you’re good at fighting and fighting’s just a step below killing and you’re a killer, Grayson, oh yes you are…

The men overwhelmed him, punches slipping through his defenses. Enraged, he’d compromised his own defenses to take out as many as possible. Now, that strategy was backfiring on him. His flank was unprotected and a pool cue broke across his back. Batman tackled a man onto a pool table and rolled onto a table, kicking anyone who got close in the face.

Someone had brought a gun.

A shot rang out and Batman went down, his armor denting inwards. I’m not shot, he reminded himself, with a rib bruised. The armor held. But oh, if only it hadn’t! Then I’d be dead, a martyr to the cause, like Jason, without flaw. That’s what you want, isn’t it Grayson? Then the world was kicks and stomps and after what seemed like an eternity in hell Dick was lifted up and held down on the pool table. The mob parted to allow Ivy to approach. She climbed up onto the table and crawled on all fours over Dick. He writhed under her, half in struggle and half in anticipation.

“Do you know where alcohol comes from, Batman?” Ivy asked, and her breath was the sweetest flower… “I’m sure you know about fermented yeast and all that. Wine comes from grapes, of course… I’ve thought of retiring to California, opening up an orchard or a winery with Harley… but of course you’d come for me. You and your mammalian ilk.”

Yes, we would, we’re terrible, we’re monsters, please, Ivy, forgive us and release us and

“What have you… done to me?” Batman gritted out, nearly panting. Ivy’s sheer proximity was coaxing an erection from him and Ivy ran a finger up and down it, just as she had done with her drink earlier. Dick quivered and shut his eyes, hyperventilating.

“Alcohol is a natural depressant.” Ivy’s voice had lost her sultry, promising undertone. It was sheer menace and hate now, the scientist in her beginning a lecture. “A barbiturate. And with just a little tinkering, it can be so much more than that. After all, what’s the point of ordering around mammals if they’re not miserable while they follow you? Look at these men. All the existential ennui of a pressed flower or a potted plant. Ever-lasting torment even as they join the ranks of my army. However, it is still in the testing phases, so you can understand if I don’t get the dosage exactly right.” She smiled, her lips viridian. “Let’s see what an overdose looks like.”

Ivy straddled him and ran her fingers over his lips. The taste of strawberries was just at the tip of his tongue. Involuntarily, inevitably, he opened his mouth and a tube was forced down it. Ivy held the funnel like Amalthea with her cornucopia.

“Bottoms up,” she toasted him, and the men began pouring into the funnel. Dick gagged for half a moment before why bother? and then everything faded into murkiness.

Bruce, help me!

 

[Zev]

“Well, that’s interesting.” Poison Ivy released Dick’s eyelid, letting it snap shut over a dilated and furiously trembling eye. “Heart rate increasing dramatically, mild seizure…” Dick had a coughing fit, rolling over and away from her. “And coughing. It’s like some kind of low-level cardiac arrest. Fascinating, but hardly speedy.”

She left him gasping on the pool table and returned to her companion at the bar, who was rubbing his crotch through his pants. Ivy smiled at him. “Boys,” she said over her shoulder. “Chain our new friend up and throw him off the docks.”

“Aren’t you curious who Batman is?” her companion asked.

Ivy took hold of his wrists, stopping his *********ion. “You all pretty much look alike to me.”

***

And Jason, with sly and sneaky eyes, watched as Dick was borne out of the bar like a funeral procession, fifteen men as pall-bearers. He had followed Dick out of nothing more than morbid curiosity, wanting to see how the fortunate son made it as replacement Batman. Not very well. No, not very well at all. Already the new Robin had bounded off into the night, leaving a wake of broken bones that Jason found very interesting. And the vomit… Bruce never would’ve vomited. Nor Jason. Jason was tough. Nothing he’d seen as Robin had been half as bad as the crack dens he’d stolen from or the ****ehouses he’d live in.

Inwardly, Jason debated with furious zest. Save him or let him die? Wasn’t it going against his own credo if he let Dick live, because Dick would just come back to haunt him. But if he let him die, then what was he? He would be what they said he was, a villain. He was a hero.

Alfred’s phone number rung once, twice before he picked up. Alfred must be getting lazy in his old age. “Hey, Alfred? You might want to check on Dick. He’s run into a spot of trouble…”

***

The Earth was vast and multi-faceted. On the lawn near Wayne Manor, a piece detached from it and broke free into the starless night sky.

***

Dick was bound, hand and foot, with the nautical ropes that tied boats to piers. He resisted in only the most arbitrary way, jerking randomly and mumbling in his dead sleep. His own name was lost, DickNightwingBruceBatmanRobin, and something else lived inside him. The creature crept around his spine like ivy growing, flushed the courage out of his body, spoke words with his lips that were lost in the driving rain. The ropes wound around his wrists and ankles and were tied into knots, tied so tight it had to pain him, but the hurt was lost in a bolt of lightning. Dick screamed against it, the rain evaporating on his feverish face.

***

Kory didn’t know where the pier was. She didn’t need to know. She dropped like a stone out of the clouds and pulled up at the last moment, scanning the shoreline. Lightning struck a power line in an explosion of shocks, revealing the world before forgetting it. Batman was seen, painted white in the explosion, before being thrown into the dark, churning waters.

***

Lightning struck the power line with a thunder so close on its heels that they were the same thing. Starfire was seen, rain pelting her armor and bronzed skin, then night fell and still she was seen in the green light dancing over her hands.

Without a word the barrage began. Starbolts hit the pier, splashed in the water, split planks, and blasted flesh. A second bolt of lightning overpowered the glow from her starbolts. All the men were down. Without a second thought Starfire flew into the water where Dick had sunk. She broke the surface and was chilled to the bone in an instance. Above her, lightning clashed to send bursts of light through the water. Dick was there, cape bilging around him. Kory was next to him, the phosphor light in her fingers cutting through his bonds. Then she was pulling him to the surface, back out of the mute water, into a world of thunder and howling wind and crashing waves.

As soon as they had touched down on the beach’s sodden sand, Kory had his cowl ripped off. Underneath it, Dick’s lips were blue and his cheeks pallid. She tried to breathe life back into him. Her hands flashed green and sizzled through his armor as they pumped his chest. Her eyes dimmed. She forced air into his lungs, beat at his chest with clenched fist. Dick coughed up water and for one shrieking moment of incomprehensible fear was awake, his eyes wide, his nostrils flaring, a scream dying half-voiced as he slipped back under.

***

The Batcave’s med-bay, astonishingly, managed to capture that sterile hospital smell. Bruce had added it after the Clench. It had full quarantine, diagnostic, and treatment capabilities. None of which came as much comfort to Kory, even after Alfred finished a spiel that sounded like it came right out of a sales brochure.

Kory’s gaze wandered to the pile of wet clothes in the corner, wet boots standing upright with a utility belt in-between them. She was toweling off Dick, crushing his fingers beneath the blue towel which by now stunk of sweat and the sea. Seawater had gotten into his wounds and she would move on to cleaning those soon, but for now she let Alfred carry out his examination. The man himself was swathed in bedsheets, as much for warmth as modesty. His body remained trembling and pale despite how long he’d been dry.

“Twenty million dollars’ worth of equipment and you’re checking his heart rate with a stethoscope.”

“I’m old-fashioned,” Alfred said. “I would think a perceptive young lady like you would have noticed by now.”

“I may have noted it in passing,” Kory shot back. She began cleaning out the wounds, wincing in sympathy with each pained motion Dick made but holding him down all the same. Alfred raised an eyebrow at her bedside manner, but said nothing as he checked the IV line. Broad-spectrum anti-toxins were kept on hand for just such an occasion as a run-in with Poison Ivy, as well as Scarecrow, Joker, and a host of other villains. Alfred gave the diagnostic readout a look, then squinted his eyes at it.

“He’s not responding to the anti-toxins.”

“No, he is responding.” Kory finished bandaging the last wound and crossed over to his head. “But it’s not the toxin that’s hurting him. Look at his eyes.”

“Rapid Eye Movement,” Alfred observed. “He’s dreaming!”

“Yes.” Kory quickly moved over Dick, checking pulse points all over his body. Each touch hit her with a brief dose of psychic pain. “The venom is gone, but the poison remains, now in his psyche. The Gordanians used a similar technique to break unruly slaves. I believe I can cure him, but I most have absolute privacy.”

Alfred glared at her for a moment, then shook his head and went to adjust Dick’s IV drip. “My dear, I will not leave one of my wards while he is in jeopardy.”

Kory spun him around. “Your medicine is useless here. You treat the body while his soul desiccates!”

“The boy’s soul is rather outside my realm of expertise.”

“Not mine.” Dick had to be held down as he had another spasm. Kory and Alfred looked at each other over his convulsing body. “You yourself said Dick needed me. Let him have me then!”

The butler made a quick decision. “How much time do you need?”

“In one hour, anything I do further will make little difference.”

Dick’s body gave one last surge and collapsed, a half-closed fist lapsing off the table. Another string of babble filled the air, too low to be heard, and Dick’s head lolled to one side.

“One hour then.” Alfred rolled down his shirt sleeves and picked up his jacket. Even as he folded it over his arm, he looked at Kory. “Please, Mistress Koriand’r, assist him…”

“I mean to try.”

Kory watched him leave, the glass doors closing and darkening behind him. She gave him a twenty-count to vacant the area, then melted the lock shut with a precise starbolt. As if in symphony with the keening sound, Dick moaned out loud. He was so close, yet his mind was miles away. When he shivered now, it wasn’t from the cold. Kory rolled him onto his side. Counted his vertebra, ran two joined fingers down his spine. This wasn’t her specialty. Her hands were callused and dull to all but the most intense of muscle contortions, but she felt well enough to identify the tenses. With patience and a few measured rubs, she began to relax him. His whimpers subsided into a barely audible mewling. Kory’s hands brushed over his nipples, rubbed heat back into his arms and cheeks. Beyond that point, Dick was dead to the world.

“Forgive me for doing this without your consent,” Kory said as she peeled her armor off. “But there is no time to respect your wishes in this.”

She pulled the sheets back and was once more surprised by how frail Dick looked without his armor. His closed eyes were squinting and nearly opening, while his arms gave a small flail at her touch. It might have been a protest or just a random outburst. Regardless, her arms wrapped around him in a tight hold. He grunted and she pulled him against her, intertwining their legs. Dick shook his head, nearly catching Kory in the nose. She laid her cheek against his and threw one leg over his hip, embracing him with as much of her body as possible.

Like a broken radio receiving a signal, she was able to discern broad thoughts, emotions now. Unsurprisingly, he was in too much pain to be receptive to her. With both a physical and mental embrace, she broached into his surface thoughts. Blurred and indistinguishable from the other.

“Let me in Dick,” she whispered against his ear with what vestiges of her consciousness were still animating her body. “Please. I just want to help.”

His subconscious acknowledged her, rebelled at the prospective dependency as all healthy minds do. She moved against him in a full-body motion and he moved back, his muscles unconsciously responding to the stimuli. With another motion his eyes held still for just a moment and his lips parted, as if to speak.

Kory? That you?

“Yes!” she said aloud. “It is I!”

Don’t come in!

“I must.”

I don’t want you here!

“Yet I must.”

He put up defenses and she wiled at them, whispering comforting words into his ear. Her hand wound in circles over his chest and stomach. Almost involuntarily, Dick’s muscles gave up their tension. His mind lapsed and in a moment of stillness she slipped within. Kory’s teeth bit down on the back of his neck and she was within him.

 

[Zev]

“Is this what you came here to see?” Dick asked. He was dressed in his Nightwing suit again, but it was stained with blood like a butcher’s apron. It crusted his face where his domino mask should be. The blue was completely overwhelmed with red.

Kory took in her surroundings. A stairwell, it looked like. Mist was hanging in the air, drifting up on hazy tails from guns that littered the floor. Kory stepped over them, waving the cordite-scent away from her face. Dick tried to stand up as she sat down next to him on the stairs, but she was too quick. Her hand wrapped around his and pulled him back down.

“Please. Sit. We don’t have to go any further if you’re not comfortable.”

Dick pulled at his hand, but here she was stronger. With a resentful look he gave up and let himself be seated. “What are you even doing here? Are you a dream? A hallucination?”

“I’m as real as you are. And we are as real as nothing else is.” She blew at the gunsmoke and it returned immediately, as thick as ever.

“So this is a dream?”

“Think of it more as a prison for your mind. The cause is chemical, but by now it is self-propagating. Your mind feeds on itself, regurgitating pain, regrets, guilt… anything negative and powerful. Naturally, men with pasts such as yours are particularly vulnerable.”

“Oh, great. Can I stand up now?” Kory released his wrist. Dick stood to wade through the smoke, nearly disappearing before he turned and paced back to Kory. “So how are you here?”

“Touch telepathy. Instinctively it seeks out the language center of the mind, but with training it can be used to find memories and feelings. It all depends on the degree of… physical intimacy.”

Dick cocked his head. “So in the real world, we’re… what?”

“Naked.”

He guffawed. “Of course.”

“It is Tamaran’s most time-honored ritual. None of my husbands have embarked down this road with me.”

Dick held his hand over his heart and smiled snidely at her. “I’m honored. Now would you mind beaming us up or however we get out of here?”

“It’s not that simple.”

Dick sighed. “Of course not.”

Kory floated to her feet and took his hands in her own. “All we must do is neutralize the guilt within you. Then your mind will no longer be in conflict with itself and…” she tapped his forehead. “You will awaken.”

“Oh, so it’s that simple.”

Kory frowned at the sarcasm in his tone. “I know that is just the negativity engine talking. You are a good man, Dick. You have nothing to fear from your…”

“Nothing to fear! Have you looked around this place?” He breathed in a lungful of gunsmoke and coughed into her face. “This is who I am.”

Kory followed his advice, looking around the room. “Stairs. Gunsmoke. I do not understand.”

Dick hopped up on the safety railing and pointed down. Keeping one eye on Dick, Kory looked down. Then up. The ceiling was so far away that it was veiled in darkness, although blood was dripping down from it. Below, blood was filling up the stairwell. Bubbling, frothing, reaching up each stair like a great liquid hand.

“We must hurry!” Kory said as she pulled Dick to his feet again. “Quickly! Up the stairs!”

“Or what? I take a bath in imaginary blood? Bruce is right about all this metaphysical crap…”

“This is your subconscious, Dick. The blood is a symbol and symbols have power. In this case, it symbolizes death.”

“Whoa.” Dick took a few steps back from the railing. “How can this kill me? It’s just a nightmare or something!”

“You can slow your heart rate to one beat a minute. You can focus your eyes in the darkness. Just as you can control your body, so too can this force. You must take back control if you are to survive.”

“And the control room’s up the stairs?”

Kory shrugged. “Beats the alternative.”

“Fine.” He gestured to the staircase. “Lay on, MacDuff.”

He followed her up the stairs. Blood dripped upwards, occasionally arcing to splatter against the walls next to them. As they climbed, Kory licked her hand and scrubbed at Dick’s bloody face.

“I’m in a hallucinatory coma and you still can’t keep your hands off me,” Dick muttered, just loud enough for Kory to hear. “This is why people don’t like me, you know.”

“I fished you out of freezing waters. Believe me, you have nothing to brag about.” When she licked her hand again, her expression shifted. “This is not your blood.”

“No, it’s his.”

They had stopped in front of a disembodied arm, three times the size of a normal man’s. It tapped its fingers impatiently. Dick picked it up one-handedly and dropped it over the railing, watching as it disappeared into the swirling blood.

“Someone you failed to save?” Kory asked. Dick was mute, his back to her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“You’re so sure…” Dick’s voice was cruel and mocking. He didn’t look back at her. “Come on.”

They started up the stairs once more. Dick came across another giant body part, a hand this time, and he repeated the process with it. Kory didn’t watch, but instead heard the splash as it fell in the blood. She tried to fly him up, but they got no closer to the top. Only when they walked did they pass the telltale body parts. And only after Dick had thrown a malevolently grinning head into the ever-rising blood did the end of their climb appear. It was a simple door. Kory thought it bore a curious resemblance to the ones at Wayne Manor.

“That’s what you came here to see, right through there.”

“You mean that’s what you came to show me,” Kory corrected. She stopped by the door. “Do you want to… tell me something? Prepare me.”

“It speaks for itself,” Dick said coolly. He turned the knob and gave the door a slight nudge to open it a crack.

With a quick look at Dick, Kory opened it the rest of the way and stepped through.

“Querido…” a voice whispered, over her shoulder, and Kory spun to catch it. Dick was climbing through the doorway with heavy steps. “You and me, querido, you and me…”

It wasn’t hard to see them. They were the oasis in the desert of the rooftop. Dick and another woman, naked, bathing in blood like pigs wallowing in mud. Kory followed the scarlet thread from the pool they were bathing in to a giant’s corpse.

“I killed someone.” Dick was behind her. His voice was so cold she jolted to hear it. “Me. And look at me, rutting like a dog in heat. That’s who I am, Kory. I’m no better than the people we fight.”

And suddenly he was open to her. She saw it from the beginning. Blockbuster, his campaign against Nightwing, the secret identity, the bombing, the carnival, the fire, Tarantula, and death… always, always death.

It could have been hours later, it could have been seconds. Dick stood statue-still, watching his double and Tarantula as they touched and lubricated each other with blood-slick fingers.

“She raped you,” Kory realized.

“She didn’t—“ Dick wheeled on her, suddenly furious. “It wasn’t like that. I wanted her to… I mean, I didn’t… you know how I come to you, how I need someone, anyone…”

“That is nothing like what we had!” Kory said vehemently.

“What does it matter!?” Dick’s shouts grew in chorus to his double’s passion. “I still killed a man. Whatever happened after doesn’t change that!”

“Do you remember when we were brainwashed, Dick? Raven seeded us, making us do things we would never have done under normal circumstances.”

“I didn’t have a Trigon seed within me then. Look at me!”

The doppelganger climaxed within Tarantula, who cooed and fell against his chest. They exhaled as one. Sated and painted with another’s blood.

“I see a man who is not in control, being taken advantage of by someone who is,” Kory pronounced. With a soft hand she turned Dick’s head towards herself. “Now look at me.”

And, with no sound greater than a breeze through curtains, they were on the slave-ship. Kory wasn’t supposed to do this, bringing him inside her memories. It turned what was too much into what should be. This was a rescue, not lovemaking, and even if it were the latter this was hardly the type of memory to be shared and pored over. It was a bad memory, Jjgrn, but one she remembered clearer than all the other Jigrns. This was the first, the transition from her pampered life to one too brutal to be real. Even today, far away from Gordanians and chains, she didn’t know whether she would keep it or discard it if she had the power. In a perverse way it had made her stronger, and Komand’r would have laughed at her for not valuing that.

“You can’t believe…” Dick was aghast and enraged at the sight, his fists tightened into rocks despite the certain knowledge that he couldn’t affect the past. “You can’t compare that to this.”

Her point made, Kory let the memory fade. The sounds and feelings slipped away, only to be retrieved in nightmares. “I was unwilling. You were unwilling. The specifics do not matter, only what was taken by force. I could have fought back, but like you I was scared. And alone. And confused and part of me did enjoy it. The mechanical part of it, nothing else. This is sex without love or lust, only power. And just because the mechanics of a thing bring us pleasure does not mean we welcome it.”

Dick didn’t answer her, not directly. But his shoulders sagged a little, admitting defeat or just accepting something, and she laid a hand on them to remind him she was there. It was a stolen memory that Dick snatched right back up. They were on Tamaran now, the Tamaran of Kory’s childhood, peaceful and strong. Dick looked congruously out-of-place in his bloody costume, while Kory fit in like a puzzle piece with her skimpy robes that were designed more for movement than modesty.

“What is this?” Dick asked again, shielding his eyes from the sun and its rays which had never touched human skin.

“It is the most intimate ritual of Tamaran,” Kory confessed. “I am completely open to you and you are completely open to me. There are no secrets between us, not if I did not wish it so.”

“So what’s to keep you from violating…” Dick rubbed his chin and reworded himself. Kory pretended not to hear the faux pas. “You must be curious about certain things.”

She sat down in the shade of a great alien tree, its long branches weighted down by fruit to waist-level. Dick sat down beside her and plucked one of the fuzzy orange fruits, which released the branch like a catapult. It twanged dully as it straightened. Kory showed him how to peel the fruit open with his fingernails, making a gooey mess of their hands. “You trust me. And are you any less curious about me?”

Dick took a bite and the taste was as vivid as if Kory had eaten it yesterday. “The wedding. Why’d you say yes? You had to have known I wouldn’t… couldn’t go through with it.”

“Hasn’t that question been answered?”

And in the shade of the strange tree, Dick wished it had. Wished he could sit here with Kory and not say anything. But in the distance he could see a red river overflowing its banks and he knew time was short. “Not to my satisfaction.”

“Always the detective,” Kory said playfully, licking the juice off her fingers. It astonished him how quickly she had left the memory of her rape behind. But then, when he’d first met her, had she given him any indication that she had been traumatized so recently? “Let me show you something from both our memories.”

The rustle of curtains again, a feeling in the back of his mind like he had forgotten to remember something but he didn’t know what, and they were back in Titan Tower. The first Tower, the one that Vic’s dad built. So real, so intensely real, that Dick felt that if he walked out of the room, he would come across Gar serenading anyone who would listen with a corny joke or Donna swooning over Terry Long.

Not that he would have left. How could he? Kory was there, Robin beside her. Her beauty hadn’t matured yet. She was so constantly excited, so enthusiastically undignified that he found it hard to believe she would one day be a warrior… or was one already. Dick wondered how his younger self looked to Kory. Ridiculous, probably. How had he ever thought short-pants were a good idea?

The young Robin was teaching the young Starfire how to throw a Batarang. Dick remembered that. It had been a Thursday.

“A useless skill for one who can summon flame from her fingers,” Kory commented.

“An excuse to be close to you.”

“Is that what you remember it as?”

“No.” Dick crossed his arms and turned away from both her and the Batarang that looped back into his younger self’s hand. “As a mistake.”

“I remember it as hope. Hope of a new and better life…” She bunched her hands together at her waist. “With you.”

“Me?”

Again the Batarang whistled out and returned to Robin’s hand. ‘Now you try it,’ the echo said. “You had to be cajoled out of your shell then too,” Kory said over the youths’ flirting. “I thought you had outgrown old behavior. But I guess we never truly do.”

“Regression?” Dick looked at Robin. He looked so much like Jason had. Like Tim didn’t. All of them matured into something more than just Robin. “I would much rather be that boy than the man I grew up to be.”

“The man I love?” Kory placed hands on his shoulders and a memory of hers slipped across, the electric contact as Robin taught her how to throw the Batarang. Guiding her hands into the distinctive pitch to put the proper spin on it.

Dick broke away from her touch. “Love. That’s a funny word for it. Every time I turn around you have a new husband and every time I turn back around he dies on you. Kind of puts a damper on our epic love affair, doesn’t it?”

Kory didn’t answer that. How to explain it to him? How to explain that even she had doubts, uncertainties, that even she could need a companion to fight back the loneliness that seemed tied to her existence with thread as strong as the stars? They’d both hurt each other so much that it seemed pointless to try to salvage anything from their many failed relationships.

“I’m tired of the trip down memory lane,” Dick said. His voice was weary, tired and pained. “Come on. What do I have to do, tap my heels together three times? I want to go home.”

Kory’s lips trembled. The blood was flowing into the room, ankle-deep. The young Robin and Starfire continued their innocent flirting, oblivious to the arterial sprays they kicked up with each step.

“You have to want to come back,” she said haltingly. “Deep down, you have to… oh, Dick…” She embraced him.

He was as rigid and cold as marble. Even the blood on him had run cold. “Guess I don’t have all that much to live for.” He sat down and waited as the blood climbed up him. “Maybe I deserve this. Sorry Kory. You can’t help me. No one can.”

“Except yourself,” she whispered. He didn’t hear her. She sat down across from him, the blood up to their waists. It was warm and sticky and she imagined Dick wouldn’t be in much pain as he went under. Then she shouted “I lied!”

Dick looked up sharply. “What?”

“When I said I came back because you needed me. That was a lie. I came back because I needed you.”

Dick shook his head. “You don’t need me. You’re Kory. You don’t need anyone.”

“That’s your ideal. Not mine.” She scooted over to him until her knees were touching his. “It’s not weakness to need people.”

“I know that…”

“But do you believe it? Do you ever think your life would be better if you didn’t need people? Or that you would be a better man, a better hero, if people would just leave you alone?”

He reached out to her with a red-garbed hand. Nothing to take hold of. His hand paused in mid-air, pointed at her like he was afraid it was a loaded weapon and would go off. “I could never be a better man with you leaving me alone.”

“Then can’t you just…” She was almost crying and then his hand was in her hair, closed like he would never let go and she was crying. The blood was up to their chests and she was about to lose him, not until he swaggered back into her life with a grin or a problem or a hard-on, but forever. Forever was too long to be without him. “If you can’t forgive yourself, let me.”

“I wish I could,” he said, sounding genuinely regretful. Beneath the blood her body moved against his, arms wrapping around him. Not as tight as before, but with a wistful looseness. “Oh, God, Kory please, don’t let this be your last memory of me, ‘kay? Think of something beautiful. You deserve something beautiful.”

She sobbed against his chest and he concentrated, willing himself anywhere but there. And with a rustle of curtains she was curled up against him, post-coital or just morning, but he could smile at her without the undercurrent of fatalism.

“See, Kory, see? Remember me like this…” Although he couldn’t quite place the memory. The bed was way too small and the room was… a hospital room? Some superhero’s from the looks of it, but he didn’t recognize it as either Titans or Justice League. And Kory wasn’t the teenage nymphet of the past, but the woman he’d been talking with just the… other… day…

“Kory… Kory…” he whispered gently, stroking her back. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

 

[Redwoods Wolf]

Very nice. Keep me posted.

 

[Zev]

“Kory… Kory…” he whispered gently, stroking her back. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

She looked up at him, then a brief look at the rest of the med-bay, then she was hugging him so tightly he thought for sure he would need to stay in bed until his bones healed.

It was five minutes before they manage to get dressed, five minutes where she was so happy to see him she couldn’t stop kissing him and Dick wondered whether they were going to have sex or not. Then she broke away with a little mousy grin and Dick crossed his legs.

“Alfred will be back soon,” she said. “We have time to spare, but not that much time.”

She was putting her armor on so slow it was practically a striptease, even in reverse, so he draped the cape over her and concentrated on getting to a shower without disturbing the toga he had turned the bedsheets into. He grabbed some clean clothes from a cupboard and used the shower in the chem-lab. The curtain that encircled it went from calf to shoulder, so he was able to see Kory was she walked out of the med-bay. It’s not just the way she was dressed that put her out of place in the cave. There was a lightness to her that he couldn’t get enough of. He couldn’t look away from her. She was intoxicating to behold.

“I’ll understand if you’re not comfortable…” Kory was saying, not looking at him.

Dick turned off the shower and started changing into his fresh clothes. “Not comfortable with what?”

“Anything. Everything.”

“Could you be a little bit more specific?”

“Us.” She looked at him. He paused, hoodie halfway zipped up.

“There… is an ‘us’… right?”

“There would pretty much have to be.” Kory laughed uneasily. Dick laughed with her, more uneasily.

“I know that was an intimacy neither of us was ready for and that was forced upon you--”

Dick held up a hand before she could go any further. “You did the absolute right thing. Saved my life, right? I was drowning and you threw me a rope.”

“You would’ve done the same for me. X’Hal, you would do the same for anyone.”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

Dick started for the exit but Kory was quicker. With one great leap she was in front of him. They stood on the staircase, looking up and down into each others’ eyes. Kory reached out her hand and after a long moment Dick took it. She sat down, stretching her long legs out. He felt ridiculous, standing and holding the hand of someone who wasn’t, but what was there to do? Already, he could feel the inevitability of what would happen if he sat down next to her -- As they once had under the stars, atop Titan Tower during the long cool nights when neither of them had anyone else in their universe, at least not close at hand or in their hearts.

“Dick…” Kory was squeezing his hand. “One momentary lapse does not negate a lifetime of good.”

“Doesn’t it, Kory? Doesn’t it?”

“Then let one moment redeem that lifetime,” Kory pleaded, not for herself but for him. “A moment here, with me.”

He sat down next to her. Felt, with a turgidly poetic inner monologue, her hand touching the shoulder furthest from her and running across it to his neck. Where her hand stayed, thumb hooked over his ear. He turned her hand over with his fingers, kissed the back of it on the slender vein that ran all the way up her forearm. She shuddered, not unkindly, and moved in closer to offer up more of her arm. He kissed up to the crock of her elbow and nipped there. With a slight moan Kory found herself sliding down, onto her back, and Dick throwing a leg over her. Her arm coiled over his head, biceps tensing under his lips, and Dick gave up all pretense of crawling over her and just laid on top of her, body to body, lips to lips. Her eyes were slow-burning embers, half-lidded with lust.

Kory was a girl made for kissing. Her full mouth, her plump lips, they begged for it… slightly parted and moist, they demanded it. He obliged. He obliged, he obliged, he obliged.

Just like with Ivy he wasn’t thinking, couldn’t think. Dick didn’t mind. He knew, intuitively, that the logic all lined up. There were all the reasons in the world for this and all the reasons against were just dust, pale skeletons that crept up but didn’t offer anything new. Her body was the same paradox of voluptuousness and hardness that he remembered, her countenance vaguely leonine as she regarded him both regally and with enthusiasm that had never even heard of decorum. She signaled her approval with an enthusiastic purr from the back of her throat, a slight bearing of teeth when he displeased her. She didn’t undress him, but instead unzipped his sweater all the way and wrapped her hands around his back, so they were between the two layers of clothing.

“You should, you should, you should…” she begged, forgave, accepted. Her fingers dove into his flesh and rendered his shirt out of the way.

He was kissing her, feeling through his body the contrast between her warm body and the chill metal that made up her armor. Through his pants he felt the warmth of her thighs and the hardness of her boots, on his chest he could feel the metal pressing into him and the flesh between it, the hard bracer over her upper arm and the harder muscle beneath it.

“Stop, stop,” someone was saying, and with a start Dick realized it was him.

“Is something wrong?” Kory asked. Their lips were still inches apart. Dick rolled off her.

“No. Everything’s perfect. The same way it was last time and the time before that and the time before that…” After a long look at the stalactites of the ceiling, he looked over at Kory. She was sitting up now, her legs drawn to her chest. The neckpiece that bound up her armor was half-undone, loosening her clothes with just enough slack to make him remember how tight it normally was… and what it was tight over. But that was the kind of thinking that had gotten them into this mess in the first place. “You see the problem, don’t you?”

“I think so.” But she wanted him to say it.

“We rush into things. It was a problem with me and Barbara too, but there it was tempered because she was always cautious... for both of us. You and me, we're two peas in a pod…” And here Kory mouthed the unfamiliar expression before catching his gist. “You’re impulsive and I’m impulsive… we get each other, yeah, but we’re also blind to each others’ faults.”

“You truly believe we don’t belong together…”

“No, no, no, not that.” He straightened and grabbed her shoulders. “Nothing like that, not anymore. I just think that this time we should take it slow. Actually… build something instead of just assuming that it’s there. Hell, when was the last time I went to see you and we’ve gone ten minutes before having sex?”

Kory tilted her head to the side. “In Tamaranian years or Earth years?”

“Earth years.”

“The 90s.”

Dick tossed his hands in the air. “Ha!”

Kory grabbed him quickly, as if afraid he was about to leave. Her hands tightened on his ribs, warm and familiar. Warm. That was the word he kept coming back to with Kory. She was warm, like the sun… his own personal sun…

“On Tamaran, we do not waste time with pleasantries and talk when love is obvious.”

“That’s just it, Kory. It’s not wasted time. It’s building on that love, strengthening those feelings… getting to know each other. That’s what we both want, isn’t it? To be part of each others’ lives.”

Kory smiled and the cave lit up. “More than anything.”

“So let’s do that. But slowly. One step at a time.”

***

Batman hated guns. Jason loved guns. It was a simple equation.

There were, of course, the standard psychological factors. Jason was above that. He took more pride in his skill with a kris. That was a weapon to be proud of. The gun was… shiny, but had a tendency to jam and reloading was such a pain after a lifetime of Batarangs that returned to your hand.

Still, he wasn’t going to engage a meta supervillain like Ivy without some artillery.

He had tailed her since the Salty Sailor. From there she’d done a midnight parade through every low-life bar and scum-pit in Gotham, bewitching the men with her charms and then leaving them to stew in misery. Sleeper agents. Them, plus the tainted liquor and the pheromones he’d overheard about, equaled a big plan. Not that Jason needed to figure it out, to “foil” it or whatever. Nope, just two in the chest, one in the head. Bye-bye, Ivy. Better luck in the next life. Maybe you’ll be reincarnated as a flower.

He needed her alone to do what needed to be done. And so he followed her, and her entourage of Feraks and carnival of drunks, as they all went to the next bar over. Finally, Ivy was alone. She had adjoined the bar to the backalley and seemed to be encouraging a stain of moss that lived stubbornly on the brick wall behind the dumpster.

“Isley,” Jason said as he stepped out of the shadows, punctuating the word by chambering a round.

Ivy swirled in a confused bustle of leaves and forest detritus, her gaze settling on him. Below her green eyes, her mouth quirked into a smile. “Isley… only the very unofficial lawmen call me that. Which one are you? I don’t recognize your hat…”

“Red Hood.” Jason introduced himself with a small, mocking bow. “I’m your executioner.”

“Are you now?” Ivy’s fingernail drew a cross over herself and the leaves over her heart obediently wilted. Her breast was proud and vibrant. “Shoot me then. Don’t miss.”

“Sorry. Prep time: My helmet filters the air out of any… impurities. Not as ‘cool’ as a domino mask, but it works for me. Function over form.”

Ivy looked down at her scanty clothing as if noticing it for the first time. “Oh, this old thing? I only throw this on when I don’t care what I look like. But even without my pheromones, you must admit that I’m quite the flower. I’m sure we could come to some arrangement, considering how precious my life is to me… and how much it would be worth to you?”

“The seduction routine?” Jason laughed. “All you gal villains are the same. Think you can sex your way out of a tight spot. Tell me, has any hero ever gone for that?”

“Your ‘brother’ did. He’s somewhere at the bottom of the harbor right now.” Ivy pouted coquettishly. “Oh, I can see you’re not surprised. Is this the black sheep of the Vespertilionidae family?”

Jason fired. The gun exploded in his hand, not at the barrel but at the magazine. His heavy leather gloves protected his hand, but more than a little blood joined the damaged gun on the ground. In the pile of blood and gun parts, some squealing thing of vines and teeth grew out of the gunpowder before Jason found the presence of mind to stomp on it.

“Oh, you killed my pet?” Ivy said, still in the furious pantomime of fear and seduction. “Now I’m really intimidated. My pet’s airborne spores find gunpowder especially fertile. It takes a while to grow, but it is very handy when killers like to talk.”

Jason went for his kris, but already strong wooden arms were forcing his arms behind his back and popping his hood off.

“I do recognize you. One of those Robins the Bat likes to play with, right? Oh, you’ve lost the baby fat, but I definitely know your story. Ironic that you should criticize my sexuality when your Talia can’t ever seem to stay away from that flying rodent you used to call boss...”

“Don’t talk that way about…” Jason bit down on his anger and renewed his struggle against the Feraks holding him in place, while all around Ivy’s praetorian guard of tough drunkards hooted and hollered.

“Who? The Bat or the *****?” Ivy shrugged. “I must admit, I really don’t care for your petty squabbles. But when someone of your obvious expertise and dubious will drops into my lap, well…” she drew close to him. “Finders keepers.” Her lips puckered. “Give us a kiss, won’t you?”

 

[Zev]

The drawing room of Wayne Manor seemed persistently grim, possibly an outcropping of the mood that hung over the cave to which it was attached, but it brightened the moment Dick and Kory walked out of the Batcave to find Alfred in nervous wait for them, his black jacket off and his bowtie a little slack.

“Dick!” Alfred cried jubilantly, leaping to his feet and clapping Dick on the shoulders. It was such an unguarded moment that Dick smiled happily on instinct. Kory was expecting a hug, but Alfred just regained his composure and nodded, very pleased.

“Any news on Bruce?” Dick asked, his mouth suddenly dry. He noticed Alfred offering him a bottled water and laughed. Typical Alfred. If you aren’t dead, perchance you may be thirsty?

“The doctors have pronounced him mentally fit (I’m told he has them thoroughly hornswaggled, to borrow a quaint word) and his arraignment is tomorrow.”

Under the arm not holding a bottle, Alfred had Kory’s civilian clothes. They were cleaned and neatly folded. Kory took them and left Alfred’s field of sight, pulling them on over her armor.

“Arraignment?”

Dick could see her, but he felt obligated to keep his eyes on Alfred as the butler explained: “A legal term. The criminal charges against Master Wayne will be presented, he will plea guilty or innocent, and his bail will be set.”

“He’s pleading not guilty, right?”

Alfred gave him a look as if to say you even have to ask?

Dick nodded. Good. “But the judge hasn’t ordered the thing thrown out yet? I mean, I was out all night as Batman…”

“I’m sure the DA has thought of a ringer being used. All we can is hope is that the jury doesn’t.”

“The suit…” Dick began to say, when a more pressing issue came to the forefront of his mind. “Oh God, Tim! Has he checked in?”

“Master Drake has disabled the tracking devices in his costume after issuing a strongly-worded note of protest to me regarding our current ventures. He seemed quite put-off.”

“He thirsts for battle,” Kory said as she laced up shoes in place of her knee-length purple boots. The shoes were a bit more inconspicuous. “Even I, only having met him briefly, could sense that. His anger demands a target.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of,” Dick said. “Kory, you mind going to look for him? I’d better check in with Bruce to see if I can get to the bottom of this case.”

“Following his being taken into official custody, Master Wayne has been denied any visitors. I’m sure this has something to do with it…” and he held up the evening edition of the Gotham Gazette, with a huge picture of Bruce in his hospital bed plastered on the front cover. The colored ink showed each of his bruises in nauseating detail. “One of the nurses, the police assure me.”

Dick scowled at it as Kory placed a consoling hand over his shoulder. “This is good, right? Mistreatment while in police custody. Invasion of privacy. Our lawyers can use that! Wait, evening edition? How long have I been out?”

“Several hours, I fear. Mistress Koriand’r did not leave your side for…” but Dick was already throwing open the curtains, watching the setting sun with horror etched into his features.

“Alfred, how long until the Kellner press conference begins?”

“An hour, sir.”

Dick checked his watch. “Damn, it’ll be tight. Kory, find Tim if you can, but meet me at that press conference.”

“What about you?”

Dick was already setting the hand of the grandfather clock to the hour Bruce’s parents had died. “Guess.”

***

The police now had two men at the door and a SWAT team around the corner, ostensibly in case any supervillains tried to make a run at Bruce. Another instance where fortunately Arkham was locked up safe and tight. Black Mask had considered making a play, but deep down he knew that no one as incompetent or puttering as Bruce Wayne could really be Batman. So the police sat and drank coffee and flirted with nurses. A nervous intern checked Bruce’s vitals, a gruff cop watching over his shoulder, and pronounced that if Bruce’s rate of recovery held constant he would soon be in condition to start physical therapy. Bruce nodded grimly before remembering to crack a joke about his tennis game. Everyone laughed, even the gruff cop with the bristle mustache. Then the senior nurse chased everyone out of the room, even the guard who Akins had personally appointed to sit at the foot of Bruce’s bed, and told Bruce to get some rest.

Bruce had had his rest for the day. He ran through a series of simple exercises to build up his muscle power, then meditated on his circumstances, then gave up on that and started watching TV. Although details of life before the concussion dragged over his memory like an anchor looking for purchase, nothing leapt out at him. The most recent thing he could remember, besides the fight with Jason, was shaking hands with Lucius. That was a couple weeks ago…

With a gutted sound, the TV went on the fritz. Bruce frowned at it. Not that he had been paying much attention to the all-news channel’s Brucewatch, but the background noise had made thinking easier. And damnit, he was the richest man in five states. He had the right to expect a certain quality of care, given how much he had donated to this hospital…

Then the static cleared and it was himself smiling at him. No, not Batman. Dick. Immediately, Bruce scrutinized the video. The background was a rooftop and the video was live… the rooftop was familiar, which meant…

Bruce craned his head. Through the window he saw Dick on the neighboring rooftop, standing in front of a camera tripod.

“Hey Bruce.” Dick tapped the earpiece built into his cowl. “I’m listening to you via laser mic, so I can hear whatever you say.”

“That’s novel,” Bruce said, raising an eyebrow.

“Thanks.” Dick paused and, for lack of anything to say, adjusted the camera. “About Blockbuster…”

“You made the call you had to make.”

“Bruce…”

“Just listen, Dick. After Jason died, I was consumed with rage. I wanted to kill the Joker. Murder him.”

“But you didn’t,” Dick said sadly.

“Only because Superman stopped me. We live close to the edge, Dick. Always have. Always will. We rely on each other to pull each other back from it. I wasn’t there for you. I apologize for that.”

“I thought I could handle Bludhaven on my own.” Dick looked pathetically fallible in the costume, like it was itching him terribly to keep it on. “I wasn’t… you.”

“Dick, I’m not me. I know people build me up to be more than a man, and I encourage that. But I never thought that you bought into it.”

Dick smiled at that, just a tiny bit. “Bruce? Sir? With all due respect, where have you been? Everyone buys into that, from the JLA on down.”

Bruce shrugged. An easy, human shrug. Dick was, for the first time, aware that not only was Bruce truly… mortal, but he was old. Tim was right about that. His hair was peppered with gray and his eyes had small wrinkles at the corners, like stones that had cracked.

“My mystique has its uses. But I never intended for it to… replace me. Or to come between the two of us.”

“Tim left,” Dick confessed. “He wants revenge and I don’t know if I can stop him. Poison Ivy’s planning something to do with the Kellner debut tonight and I don’t know what it is. Jason’s on the loose and I don’t know if I can stop him. Please, Bruce. Help me.”

***

Poison Ivy looked at herself in the mirror. To any mammalian standard, she was beautiful. From a gardening perspective, she was lush and healthy. Although there weren’t many similarities between the two viewpoints, both valued the products of water and sunlight. The retro air stewardess uniform was pushing it, too kicky and sexist to ever get by in a post-millennial world, but what was the point of making a point if you couldn’t look good doing it?

“Jason, doll,” she cooed to her new companion, who stood silently by the door. He could see her out of the corner of his eye and within that narrowness his vision caressed her. “Do me up, would you?”

Eagerly, precisely, his fingers zipped up her uniform. Ivy gave herself a quick look in the mirror, checking her teeth for any stray morsels. Then she smoothed out her mini-skirt, tossed the end of her white scarf over her shoulder, adjusted the cleavage visible through her plunging neckline, and slightly fixed the pillbox hat on her head.

“How do I look?”

“You’re a…” the first two words came rushing out with venom quickness, but then Jason went to war with himself and with a lovesick sigh he finished: “goddess.”

“I know. Are you unhappy, pet?”

Jason grumbled indistinctly.

“Tell ya what. How about after we finish, I feed you to one of my little darlings?” The massive plants, hearing their mistress call their names, gnashed their teeth together. “They get so hungry…”

***

“I had the computers analyze the chemical make-up of the compound Poison Ivy used on me.” In front of the camera, Dick paged through the print-outs. “Now there’s no way to be sure without knowing what a regular dosage is, but I think it would have worn off in time if I hadn’t ODed on it.”

“Possibly a binary compound?” Bruce suggested. “Is there any way you can get those papers to me?”

“Sure. What’s your fax number?”

Bruce frowned. Apparently admitting to being a “mere mortal” had done nothing for his sense of humor. “If it’s a binary compound, what would the trigger be?”

Dick flipped to another page in his report. “According to the police logs, Poison Ivy hit several bars, infecting the patrons with the same compound. The victims were examined by doctors, but they came to the same conclusion. The stuff wore off.”

“They were sent home!?”

“Yeah, why?”

“If the targets are all spread out, Ivy will need a way to trigger them at roughly the same time.”

“The airplane!” Dick suddenly remembered where he had seen the man Ivy had been with at the bar. He was the pilot in the press release. The one who’d be flying the hover-jet. “Like dusting crops. She could cover all of Gotham in the trigger chemical before a single jet could be scrambled.”

“Dick, she’s not going to destroy the plane.” Bruce sat up painfully. “She’s going to hijack it!”

***

Somewhere, Ivy and the pilot were passing through security checkpoint after security checkpoint. The pilot explained her presence away and Ivy’s pheromones did the rest, strengthening the urge to accommodate the beautiful woman and dampening the urge to follow regulations. Although Ivy had to submit to searches and lustful leers, she bore it all with dignity. Soon, it would be her time.

Somewhere, Dick sped towards Archie Goodwin International Airport in the Batmobile. Patrol cars took off in pursuit, cherry-tops blazing red and blue. Dick made no effort to shake them.

And here, Kory found Robin handcuffing a man three times his size to a bicycle rack. The man’s nose was smashed in, leaking blood over his mouth and the front of his greasy shirt.

“Robin,” Kory said. Which he was and wasn’t and the entire concept of using names other than your own was still strange to Kory, but she knew that was what he wished to be called.

“Starfire,” Robin said, strangely respectful. He tightened the cuffs, eliciting a groan from the man with the broken nose.

“You seem troubled.”

“How did you find me?” he interrupted with her words barely out of her mouth.

“I followed the trail of bodies.”

“Cops must be slow tonight.”

“The alive bodies.”

“No one deserved to die tonight.”

“And when someone does?”

Tim jutted his jaw out challengingly, boyishly, like Dick once had. “I’ll kill them.”

“Sit.”

“No,” Robin said, already hurrying away.

But the force that powered Kory’s flight was faster than his legs and quickly she was behind him, holding onto his cape.

“Stop that.”

“Stop running.”

“Make me.”

Kory lifted Tim up by the cape, easily dangling him from it. His feet kicked impotently and he gave her his most batty death glare.

“You are nowhere near mature enough to venture down the path you choose for yourself.”

“And you were? Any of you?” The Titans. They did have that in common.

“We didn’t kill people,” Kory said sagely.

“But you wanted to, didn’t you? And if you had, people wouldn’t have died.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Certainly, if we had killed Deathstroke on our first encounter, we would have come to regret it. Likewise we regretted the death of his son, even though it was an accident.”

“One villain turned out to have some good qualities. Will you put me down?”

“Will you run?”

He shook his head no and she set him down gently. He stayed put.

“Just because one man isn’t absolute evil doesn’t mean others aren’t.”

“So these absolutes of evil, they deserve to die?” Kory asked softly.

“Yes! Obviously!”

It hurt her to hear such rage coming from someone who should be, if not innocent, at least not despoiled. “And what is it that makes you so worthy to judge the caliber of a man’s soul?”

“You’re telling me that the Joker deserves to live? That the Black Mask deserves to live?”

“Perhaps not,” Kory agreed after a short pause. “But what of the ones after them? Two-Face, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn? And after them, the muggers, the looters, the rapists, the murderers? Will you judge all of them with the same accuracy you judged your first victims?”

“Don’t you dare use the word victims for…”

“That’s the word you yourself used.” Kory pointed a finger at him. “Remember? We saw the future. You killed indiscriminately. You swore you’d never become like that.”

“So what if I did?” Tim sneered. “Maybe I’ve wised up since then.”

“Or grown more foolish.”

“Steph is dead!”

“As our my parents, my world, and all who I once loved! And yet if I had allowed myself to become warped around a vendetta, would I be any better than my sister Komand'r?”

“You would be justified!”

Kory shook her head. “Perhaps. But from a mile away, would you be able to tell which of us was justified and which of us was evil? Which of us deserved to die?”

“I could tell…” Tim said, his voice shrinking. “Steph didn’t deserve to die.”

“No. She didn’t. But she died for something and you dishonor her memory by dishonoring the cause she fought for.”

Tim looked up at her, his face warring between shame and rage. Finally, he covered his eyes and took a step backward. Tried to, at any rate. He tripped and fell, only stopping when Kory grabbed hold of his wrist. He looked up at her again and she lowered him to the ground where he sat as Kory answered the summons on her communicator.

***

The highway that ran past Archie Goodwin International Airport had been blockaded by the police, sa****ses and squad cars blocking every lane of the road. The officers on duty heard the chase before they saw it. First the familiar whine of sirens, although never before in such numbers. Then the faint roar of engines and the fwoosh of jets. Then the first flashes of red and blue crested the horizon, followed by two bright stabs of light.

The Batmobile roared into view, pursued by a dozen cop cars. As if any help were needed to find it, a copter-mounted spotlight pinpointed it. In that same helicopter, Commissioner Akins leaned out the side-door and held a bullhorn to his lips.

“Batman, this is the police!” he announced unnecessarily. Hell, it played to the cameras. The media had always been able to field more helicopters than the PD and now there were half-a-dozen news choppers all jockeying for the best angle of the chase.

As if in answer, the Batmobile throttled its jet engines once more. The flames from the exhaust went from red to blue-hot.

“Batman, you will come to a complete stop and submit to arrest! This is your last warning.”

The Batmobile suddenly veered towards the police helicopter hovering to its left and, although more than sixty feet both horizontal and vertical separated them, Akins felt the pilot’s wince transmit into a slight jerk.

“Hold her steady, you moron!” he shouted to the pilot, then held up his CB radio. “Archer, Fitzpatrick, he’s had his chance. Take ‘em down!”

The two lead pursuers had joined the chase halfway through on Akins’ specific orders. He knew his men and those two had no sympathy for the Bat. They had lost friends and partners during the gang war.

The two cars pulled up alongside the Batmobile, boxing it in. If Batman braked, he would be quickly surrounded by the pursuing cop cars. If he accelerated, he would be splattered against the roadblock. The zero options he had were rapidly diminishing, as in the car on the Batmobile’s left Officer Kurtz finished loading his shotgun. He leaned out the window and aimed at the Batmobile’s tires. Bang!

Akins grinned wolfishly as he saw the tell-tale puff of gunsmoke and the heart-stopping noise audible even over seven choppers, twenty cars, and all the noise Gotham could spare. The buckshot hit the tire, some sparking off the hubcap and some shredding into the rubber. For a moment the Batmobile lurched to one side, like an off-balance drunkard, but then there was a hiss and the rubber seemed to heal itself. It inflated once more and the Batmobile picked up speed. Now only a half-mile remained between the Batmobile’s snub nose and the police blockade.

Officer Kurtz stared at the tire. Aside from the scarred hubcap, there was no indication he had just fired a shell into it. He was just about to pump another round in when he noticed that the cockpit of the Batmobile, its glass, was no longer opaque. It was translucent and through it, Batman was looking. At him.

With utterly no expression, Batman made a left turn signal.

After 9/11, a moat had been built around Archie Goodwin International Airport. It ran in-between the airfield and the highway to prevent people from doing exactly what Batman was about to do.

Which was what Kurtz realized just as he screamed for his partner to hit the brakes.

The Batmobile turned on a dime, cutting in front of the police car so close that the heat from its exhaust melted the front tires. The cop car sagged forward, what was left of its tires throwing up sparks where they met the road. It was in that state when it bumped to a stop against the police barricade, scrunching up its hood and adding one more set of repairs to next month’s police budget.

The Batmobile, with a burst from its jet engines, jumped the moat and hit the cyclone fencing on the other side like it wasn’t even there. Its wheels touched down and its speed stripped the fencing off it. Within thirty seconds the vehicle had weaved its way through the busy runways, deftly avoiding taxiing and landing planes to approach the hanger where the hover-plane was about to be unveiled.

It braked, turning around 180 degrees to face the police helicopter pursuing. Akins watched in disbelief as a panel opened on the Batmobile’s hood and a large gunbarrel emerged.

“He wouldn’t,” the police commissioner said, slack-jawed.

***

Dick fired, watching with satisfaction as the missile hit the helicopter’s tail rotor and forced it into an embarrassing, but harmless, crash landing.

“Bruce is going to kill me,” he said with a wide smile.

 

[Zev]

The security checkpoint just outside the hanger had two guards, with more stationed inside the terminal due to airport security concerns about them. One guard was peacefully admitting the flight crew and technicians into the hanger (the press corps had already been seated) while the other was privately arguing with the first real problem of the night.

“I’m sorry ma’am,” the guard was saying. He was part of the elite private security outfit hired by Kellner Aerospace on Batman’s advice. Despite the woozy, intoxicated feeling he got from looking at the pretty air stewardess, his orders were clear. “No admittance without proper authorization.”

“Come on,” the pilot slurred, winking as if they were in on the same big secret. “’s not gonna hurt anyone…”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine waiting for you until the demonstration is over, sir.”

The guard would never know how close he came to death, for even while Ivy struggled to make up her mind over how excruciating his execution should be, the Batmobile was rumbling to a stop outside the hanger. The authorized personnel ran for it. The reporters ate it up.

Without another word to Ivy or the pilot, the guard ran towards the Batmobile. His companion joined him, barking orders for reinforcements into the radio on his shoulder. With a shrug, Ivy prodded the pilot into the hanger. At her touch, he became fully aroused.

***

The Batmobile’s cockpit slid open, a hush falling over the crowd as soon as the squeal of hydraulics was heard. The guards took aim at the shadows within the cockpit. And the shadows moved, streaming upwards until they took on the form of a cloak and a man within the cloak.

“You are all in grave danger,” Batman said. “For your own safety, you all must…”

The .50 caliber high-explosive bullet that hit the Batmobile was the size of a magic marker. It was launched with a sound that could be heard for miles. It traveled half a mile at supersonic speeds. It didn’t simply hit the left rear tire, it destroyed it.

Everyone in the vicinity instinctively ducked. One of the guard’s guns went off, the bullet traveling harmlessly over Batman’s head as Dick somersaulted out of the cockpit and took cover behind the Batmobile. Already his acute senses had discerned where the bullet had come from. The second shot merely confirmed it, mutilating the left front tire beyond even the capacity of the memory rubber to restore.

“Sniper!” the guard who hadn’t accidentally discharged his weapon said. He had been in the Army before becoming a security guard.

Another shot shattered the windshield of the Batmobile. Dick scrambled for thought. He was a good fifty yards away from the hanger. In the old days, he would’ve been able to call in back-up to deal with the sniper.

The hanger doors were rattling out now, letting out the oppressive hum of the Tamaranian engines. They were intensifying, too fast and too jarring to be proper. Dick barely heard another shot sheer the fin off the Batmobile. It clattered to the ground, smoking along its amputation. The hover-plane taxied out of the hanger. The undersides of its wings were glowing with purple energy that cackled against the ground in occasional sprouts of lightning.

Dick drew a remote from his utility belt and pressed a button. Instantly the Batmobile shot out a thick smoke, coating the area in mist. A blind shot put a pothole in the runway. Dick took off at a run for the taxiing hover-plane.

Through the cloud of smoke the sniper must’ve caught a glimpse of movement, because two more shots rained at Dick’s feet. One tore a hole in his cape. He redoubled his run. It took him through the chorus of energy under the wings, but aside from a brief feeling of vertigo and a weird tingly sensation he was unaffected. Then, up ahead, the landing gear. From there he could climb into the fuselage and stop Ivy. It seemed like he had done it a million times…

Just as his hand stretched out for the strut, a shot sparked against the landing gear. The ricochet stripped the skin from his palm and Dick lost his footing, tumbling head over head to the ground. The hover-plane passed over him, revealing now sky and the airport hotel where the sniper was nested. Dick knew with cold certainty that the sniper was, even now, taking aim on him.

Then a volley of starbolts splashed across the hotel’s façade, striking an entire floor. With a whoop of delight so strong it surprised even him, Dick saw Kory and the red contrail of her hair streak out of the clouds. She touched down next to him, purple armor gleaming, hair unbridled, looking every inch the warrior he remembered her.

“Batman,” she said with a secret little smile.

“Starfire,” he returned. “You’ve got to get me to that sniper. Think you can manage it?”

She grabbed hold of his wrists and he did the same to her. “Hold on.”

And they were airborne.

More puffs of gunsmoke, like smoke signals. Coming from a window shattered by Starfire’s attack. Kory angled toward it like an owl catching sight of a field mouse, then dived. Dick hung on, feeling the nostalgia sensation of his cape howling in the wind.

“Just like old times, eh Robin?” Kory spoke his thoughts.

“You’ve filled out a little since then,” Dick flirted. He would never be Batman. He couldn’t act like Batman. All he could be was… Nightwing?

The fifty-seven-inch rifle hollered against, sending out a bullet that Kory actually dodged. More .50 cal slugs followed, but Kory was changing course too fast to be targeted. At the last possible moment, with a final squeeze of Dick’s wrists, she released him. It was perfect, just like back in the Titans, just like back in the circus. Dick spun in mid-air, burning off his momentum enough to hit the window feet-first…

And Jason flew backwards from the dropkick, dropping the rifle. He was hit so hard that he crashed right through the apartment door and slammed into the apartment opposite his. Dick tucked and rolled and came up in a defensive stance. Not Batman’s. His.

“Get to the plane,” he barked over his shoulder to Kory, who nodded curtly before she flew off. Dick turned to regard Jason, who was warily rising to his feet.

Jason looked like hell. Small lattices of ivy, like a spider-web or… roots, had crawled up his body and stitched his skin. Although Dick couldn’t see all of the infection, Jason’s right hand and the right side of his face were both covered with the stuff.

“It increases my strength,” Jason said. “My agility, my… reactions. It lets Ivy can control me.” He jerked into a fighting stance, a puppet with its strings being tugged on. “I can’t fight it, Dick. I’m stronger now. I’m so sorry, but you’re going to die…”

He threw himself forward with impossible speed. Batman dodged and the fist that had been meant for him instead tore a hole in the doorframe. Dick looked at the splintered wood, amazed. He jumpkicked Jason into the hall. The last vestiges of civilians were evacuating down the stairwell, scared off by Kory’s attack and Jason’s shooting. The bootprint stay in Jason’s chest, a stain. The blow had punctured something and fluid was leaking out in the shape of Dick’s foot. All of the roots that had set up shop on Jason’s skin now rustled in symphony.

“She put it inside me, Dick…” Jason’s head ticked to the side a few times before his neck cracked it back upright. “A seed that’s growing!”

He crossed his arms, then lashed out to either side. The walls shook and cracked open where he struck them. Dick took a step backwards before drawing two extendible batons from his belt.

“They won’t save you…” Jason moaned before leaping forward.

His kick came down like a crescent moon and Dick blocked it, crossing the batons under his leg. Jason landed on his other foot. With a grunt of exertion the man brought his foot down, breaking right through Dick’s parry. The floor buckled where his foot struck. Dick spun on his wheel and kicked Jason in the leg. But Jason’s leg was like cold steel; the sound that came from the move wasn’t bones breaking but, again, the noise of the roots crawling over Jason’s flesh.

In desperation Dick slapped his right baton across Jason’s face, once, twice, three times. Jason’s hand blurred and the baton snapped in mid-swing. The amputated portion flew past Jason’s face to smash against the wall. The noise brought a rictus of a smile to Jason’s lips.

The blow that hit him was so fast Dick didn’t even see it. One moment he was tensing in anticipation of a strike, the next he was falling with pain blossoming through his chest. Jason dwindled into the distance as Dick flew. The vigilante’s fist was still outstretched when Dick came crashing down.

***

I will stop the plane, I will stop the plane

Kory circled the plane back and forth, trying to think of a way to follow through on her determination. With a sudden burst of speed she accelerated after it. Hover technology, that’s all it was. On Tamaran, the hover-sleds would slowly pick up speed as they gained altitude, finally reaching a leisurely speed to make the two-or-three-day voyage between cities.

With a Tamaranian warcry on her lips, Kory latched onto the tail of the hover-plane. She wrenched both arms around it just above the fins, then put all of her energy into moving the opposite way. The hover-plane seemed to coarsen in mid-flight and then was actually being dragged backwards. The hover-engines glowed more purple and shone with energy, casting a violet aura over the night.

What Kory hadn’t counted on was that she wasn’t on Tamaran. The hover-plane, although powered by hover technology, also had four General Electric CF6-45A2 turbines. Two on each wing. They chugged and whirred and the plane tugged at Kory like a dog on a leash. The metal of the fuselage began to slip through her arms, the tops of rivets sheered off against her rippling muscles. With a groan of metal that made Kory fear the plane would break in two, the plane slipped free of her. She bounced off the horizontal stabilizer and spun in place, trying to regain her equilibrium.

In the struggle, however, the plane had jerked to and fro. Now released, it sped towards the airport hotel. The pilot frantically attempted to change course.

***

Dick fought his way to his feet. Ahead of him, Jason was jerkily taking steps down the hallway.

“Go!” he shouted through his teeth. “Run! No… wait… come a little closer…” His stride smoothened and his arms swung freely at his sides. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Dick ran at him. Kicked off the left wall, half-second ahead of the punch which demolished the wall underfoot. He flew past Jason and lashed out, a quick kick to Jason’s side. Jason thudded against the wall, adding to the explosion of plaster he had started.

No sooner had Dick landed than Jason was whirling around, throwing chunks of plaster in his face. Dick blocked with his forearm, but a foot jammed in his midsection doubled him over. Jason’s palm slapping down on the back of his neck finished him off. Dick hit the ground on all fours and lunged forward, tackling Jason’s feet out from under him. Both men went down, Dick to his stomach, Jason to one knee.

And when Dick turned back, Jason’s mask of rage had slipped to something child-like. “I never meant for it to go this far. Tell Bruce I’m… I’m…”

“Tell him yourself,” Dick said, not unkindly. “Fight it!”

Jason blinked. When his eyes opened they were as green as emeralds. “Fight what?”

Dick was ignoring the pain burning through his bones when he heard it. The oscillation of an approaching aircraft had been steadily growing closer and just now he was noticing it… the second before its wing smashed into the building he was in like a wrecking ball. It torn down the hallway, a horizontal earthquake, and Jason tensed as if about to run before throwing a half-hearted punch at Dick.

Dick danced away, cape slapping against his boots, and realized “You have to fight me. It’s your orders.”

Jason’s face purpled with rage, his breath coming in hot gasps. He forced himself towards the stairwell door.

Dick kicked him. The part of him that had stepped aside for Tarantula was alit at Jason’s predicament. “Where you going? We ain’t done yet!”

The wing continued down the hallway, tearing through a food cart. Jason roared with agonized fury and launched himself at Dick. Dick gave as good as he got, defending instead of attacking. Each blow he blocked left a bruise and pushed his bones towards their breaking point, but he didn’t have to keep it up forever. Just fifteen more seconds.

Ten seconds. Dick was definitely getting the worse of it. Jason was becoming more frenzied, panicked. Although he was compelled to fight, everything he was wanted to flee. The blows that slipped through ended in Dick’s face, sending blood streaming out of his nose and out his lips. With another slip of the mask, Jason turned to look over his shoulder at the tidal wave of the wing. Dick took advantage, drawing a rope and attached Batarang from his belt. He looped it around Jason’s arm and neck, chicken-winging him, then threw the Batarang up to embed itself in the wall. Jason was tethered to it as the devastation rushed to meet him.

“You always were a good soldier.” Dick ran for it.

Jason screamed as the wing bore on him, barely noticing when Dick flew a Batarang backwards to sever the line holding him up. The wing rammed into him, knocking him down and out, then passed over his comatose body like the shadow of death.

***

Kory shuddered in a kind of frustrated momentum as she watched the hotel being cleaved through. There were people in there and even though she knew the wing hadn’t plunged deep enough to threaten the building’s stability, this damage was more than enough. She sped after the plane, contrail gleaming as it died behind her, and caught up to find a creature shoving the airplane’s door open. It was several hundred pounds in weight, built to withstand the massive force of high-atmosphere pressure inequality. The Ferak threw it at her.

Kory backhanded it towards open sea, where hopefully it would splash down without hurting anyone, and returned fire with a handful of starbolt. It blew a hole clean through the Ferak and continued on to scorch the plane’s hull. The Ferak had the same reaction to both: nothing. A moment later, heavy bark armor grew over its entire body, including the gaping hole in its torso. Kory fired off another starbolt. It burnt the Ferak’s armor, but otherwise had no effect.

Fine then. Kory surged forward, teeth bared and hands curled into fists. She would do this the hard way.

***

A small pool of blood had formed around Jason’s head and he was coated with debris, but a quick look over Batman’s shoulder showed the chest to still be rising and falling steadily. The same couldn’t be said for Dick, who was huffing and puffing with exertion. Jesus Christ, how did Bruce move in this thing? And why the hell did they make hotels so damn long?

Ahead of him, the window was growing like a plant in time-lapse photography. Dick drew a long length of nylon cord from his belt, capped with a grappling hook that he pronged. Dick ran ahead of the wing, nearly deafened by the sound of the building being ground up behind him. Electrical wires snapped and crackled, plaster detonated successively, timber split and fluorescent lights sparked.

The window had gone from seedling to mighty oak, to continue the unfortunate metaphor that flittered through Dick’s adrenaline-high, and Dick threw himself through the trunk. Arms crossed over his face as the window shattered around him, then arms out and legs together in a dive.

Like a cat he twisted in mid-air, throwing the line straight up. The grappling hook’s edges sparkled in the moonlight, hanging there pregnant and poised before the airplane wing scythed its way out of the building. The wing hit the line, which obediently coiled around it. Halfway down the building, Dick was yanked out of his descent and towed behind the hover-plane like a fish on a hook.

“Bruce would’ve planned what to do after this,” Dick muttered to himself as he was pulled through the air at seven hundred miles per hour. But then, improvisation was all part of the fun.

The Ferak clambered over the plane’s fuselage, as slow and ungainly as… well, a walking tree. But whatever it was using for feet were managing to remain glued to the hull with each precarious step. And what was that in its arms, struggling as its writhing mass was coated in tendrils…

Kory!

Dick stopped waiting for the belt-winch to pull him up and started climbing hand over hand, ignoring the wind that slashed at him in its passing. The air that rushed passed was playing havoc with his cape, here pressing it to his body, there making it flare out like a hellish shadow. The Ferak caught sight of him as it shoved Kory, unconscious (please, just let her be unconscious) into the plane. With a sudden leap it had made its way onto the wing, narrowly avoiding the nearest turbine’s intake.

An insurmountable length of rope separated Dick from his objective. The Ferak tried to cut through it. Its clawed at the rope with its sharpened root fingers, reducing the threads with each swipe. Dick shook as the rope gave way a little. He wouldn’t make it in time. He quick-drew his grapple-gun and fired it through the Ferak’s chest. As luck would have it, the sharp point passed through where Kory had previously blasted a hole. And so it easily pierced the hollow armor… and did nothing else. The Ferak continued sawing away at the rope.

Dick fired the grapple-gun again, angling his wrist this time. The grapple-gun passed through the Ferak again and arced to the right, ending up in the blades of the turbine. The grapple-gun’s stock of rope quickly began to unspool. Dick telescoped out a baton and shoved it through the trigger guard of the grapple-gun, then released it. The gun ran out of rope, leaped towards the Ferak with the force of a General Electric CF6-45A2 turbofan.

The rope snapped and Dick was cast off, whipped away by the drag of air. Somewhere in the recesses of the Ferak’s rudimentary mind it felt a sense of satisfaction of a job well-done. Then the baton stuck through the grapple-gun hit it, dragging it off its feet and into the turbine.

Below, flying on his winged cape, Dick watched as a trail of plant matter was spewed from the now-flaming turbine.

“You’re mulch, amigo.”

***

Kory stared at Ivy. Ivy stared back.

As she’d anticipated, a simple chloronic ragixine had broken down the alien’s biochemistry. Although the alien was obviously exerting massive amounts of willpower, the only movement she could manage was the occasional flexing of a random muscle.

“You should be helping me,” Ivy lectured.

“Five minutes to landing site,” the pilot said.

“Proceed,” Ivy said dismissively before turning back to the sole occupant of the first class section. “They say you live in harmony with nature on your world.”

“In harmony, yes. We do not let it dominate us!”

Ivy shrugged. “To each their own.” She buckled Kory’s seatbelt for her. “Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

 

[Zev]

Dick glided in a sloping motion. The plane inexorably parted from him. Now Dick was dipping below the skyline. Dick grunted and angled towards an office building, shattering the nearest window with a Batarang. He hit the ground running. The glide had given him time to catch his breath, such as it was in the freezing night, but now the old flame had ignited again in his lungs. If he survived the night, he was definitely going to rethink either his costume or his exercise regime.

“Alfred, activate the Batwing,” he barked into his communicator, sprinting through a cubicle farm. The other side of the building loomed ahead of him and through it he saw the hover-plane receding into the distance. “Send it to Finger River.”

He barreled through the window and his cape bloomed into a parachute once more, gliding him down to the rooftop of the much shorter neighbor building. He touched down and put on another burst of speed, legs knifing through the air and into the ground.

This was exactly what Bruce had warned him not to do. Pushing himself too hard. Being the lone wolf. Taking too many long jumps that his leg-bones would never forgive him for. But no matter the risk, he couldn’t bear the thought of never being able to fix all the mistakes he’d made with Kory. Let her hate my guts forever, just don’t let her go.

Another jump and his feet slapped down on gravel. Residential district now. He side-stepped a pigeon coop and kept running. The plane was just a crest of purple energy in the distance, its winged light reflected in the river under it. But it was sticking to the river’s contours, which…

Dick’s mind clicked into overdrive, the final puzzle piece fitting into place. Whatever she was going to use the plane to disburse, she couldn’t have brought it with her. She would have to load it onto the plane. That meant she had to land and that meant landing field… it didn’t have to be big, the plane was by no means a jumbo jet, it just had to be a clear stretch of… road.

Ahead, the superstructure of the Finger River Bridge shot out of the river like the horns of some great aquatic beast. There were no headlights passing over the bridge. Road closed. Although he knew it wouldn’t make any difference, Dick sent a transmission to Alfred, telling him to send police to the Finger River Bridge. As if Ivy would leave enough time for that.

Behind him, the whine of the Batwing’s engines split the night. Batman didn’t slow, but let the Batwing came to him. A rope ladder dropped down and he scrambled up it, not bothering with footholds, just clenching each rung in turn with another gloved hand. After a panting, dizzy labor he was in the cockpit. This he knew. He switched the Batwing to manual control and brought his ship down close to the riverbank. Ivy wouldn’t know what hit her.

***

“Hurry up, hurry up,” Ivy said. There were over thirty Feraks that had closed down the road with fake construction signs and cars, but they were taking their sweet time in loading the cargo holds with tanks of AnKo. It was so hard to grow good help these days.

“You won’t get away with this!” Kory swore from inside the plane.

Ivy, who was standing in the open doorway (the one her Ferak had ripped open), looked back at Kory. “Is that line still fresh on Tamaran? Because here it’s been done to death.”

And then Ivy heard, as if it were a distant thunder, the spinning of something mechanical from small noise into full-bore whine.

“Mammals,” she hissed.

Machine-gun fire rained down from the Batwing as it strafed the bridge. Its bullets unerringly cut down four Feraks like wheat at harvest-time. Their mutilated bodies hit the ground and curled up, graying a little at the edges like rotting fruit. The Feraks growled and grabbed guns from the cars. They couldn’t shoot well, but they could shoot, and it was their programming in the event they couldn’t actually lay hands on an attacker. Their gunfire usually missed by a mile, but a few shots found the Batwing and was repelled by the armor without consequence.

The Batwing accelerated into the sky, jets burning, before looping around a skyscraper for another pass.

“Get this thing moving!” Ivy barked to the pilot, who grinned dopily and throttled up the engines. Barely half the AnKo had been loaded onboard. It would have to be enough.

A series of tiny explosions left a trail of potholes half a step in front of the taxiing hovercraft in what was obviously a threat. Kory tilted her head back and laughed at Ivy’s obvious rage. Poison Ivy wheeled on her, her face running through indignant anger to a more devious grin. As more dying Feraks flew apart behind their plane, she sauntered down next to Kory.

“Alien,” she said in her most winning voice, “would you care to do an eensy-weensy favor for me?”

***

Dick checked the sensors again. The targets were still corpse-warm; Feraks, if they even counted as alive. Hard to target them without hitting the plane. Of course, just one shot in the right place and you can put an end to Ivy’s plan for good.

But if he put a shot in the wrong place, the whole plane would go up. He couldn’t risk that. Ivy may be a crazy plant-woman, but it wasn’t his place to pass sentence on her. And the pilot was innocent…

And Kory… mustn’t forget about Kory…

Dick switched to the high-incendiary rounds and went in for another pass.

***

Ivy was straddling Kory’s leg now, her stewardess uniform open to the waist. All that covered her pert breasts was a slender vine that acted something like an underwire, creeping around the woman’s cleavage in branching dividends. With a bit-lip groan, Ivy eased herself down Kory’s leg. Kory felt the liquid heat of the villainess’ core on her bare thigh.

“Whatever you want from me, you won’t get it,” she said, the words sounding less sure to herself than they had in her head moments ago.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” Ivy took hold of Kory’s face with both hands, palms damp and soil-soft. “I can be very persuasive.”

***

It was bizarrely soothing the way the incendiary round lit up like struck matches when they hit the pavement. And it was soothing in a wholly different way when they thudded into a Ferak and lit them up into an inhuman torch.

Then Dick saw a hustle of movement in the plane’s doorway. A flash of golden skin and a glimmer of purple armor. Kory.

He threw the Batwing into a horizontal VTOL motion, keeping pace with the plane as it picked up speed. In the doorway Kory was standing stockstill, Ivy behind her with an arm around Kory’s waist and a lip to Kory’s ear. Dick stabilized the Batwing as best he could and switched to rubber bullets, then zoomed in the target reticule as far as it would go. Hitting Ivy from here and while in motion would be a tricky shot, but not impossible… never impossible.

Then he saw a flash of green light glowing brighter and brighter and the Batwing shook and warning klaxons shrieked in his ear. Kory. No! He tried to pull up and another starbolt rocked the jet, giving the wing another piercing. Every kind of siren imaginable was ringing in his head. With nothing better to do, Dick angled the Batwing forward and hit the eject button.

***

Ivy released her hold on Kory as soon as she heard the Batwing hit the water. The change that went over Kory couldn’t have been more dramatic. Her face crumbled into pieces of its former beauty, eyes struggling to express both a profound sorrow and world-ending rage. What her eyes couldn’t contain, her body couldn’t obey. As Kory spat out nothing but the inarticulate gibberish Kory allowed her, the Tamaranian sat back down and buckled up.

“What was he to you?” Ivy asked, wiping a tear from Kory’s face and sucking it off her finger.

***

Dick pulled himself over the bridge’s hand-rail, right into a leafy punch swung by the nearest of five Ferak. He nearly went back over it, but he managed to bounce himself off the hand-rail despite the sudden pain in his jaw and end up in the middle of the road. At the other end of the bridge, the hover-plane trampled over the Road Closed signs and sa****ses. Dick tried running after it, but a Ferak grabbed hold of his cape. Dick beat it off with a heel to its square jaw, but two more Feraks had taken its place and the sound of the hover-plane was quieting with distance…

But a new sound was growing, the revving of an engine and the growl of wheels on pavement. It roared overhead and Dick caught a glimpse of a yellow cape blanking out the sky before the Robin-cycle touched down. A laugh unceremoniously shoved its way up Dick’s throat as Tim spun the motorcycle in a semi-circle, spraying the Feraks with weed killer in the exhaust. The Feraks’ skin was marred like aged paper as they fell back.

“You came back,” Dick said joyously.

“Just because I don’t believe in Bruce, doesn’t mean I don’t believe in you.” Robin hopped off the bike and offered it to Dick. “I’ll handle this, go! Save Kory! Tell her she was right!”

With a terse nod, Dick straddled the bike. The design hadn’t changed much since he’d been Robin. Classic. He hit the gas and with a hellish squeal of rubber was off, leaving behind Robin and the Feraks.

Ahead, the hover-plane was ready for take-off. The flaps were gesticulating the smallest amount and the wings brightened so hot it hurt to look at them. It was in oncoming traffic now and cars swerved to avoid it, causing a number of fender-benders and tiny wrecks. One car swerved too far and launched itself over a parked car on the side of the road. Dick slid the Robin-cycle under it; the sound of the car crashing behind him was like an explosion.

The front wheel of the hover-plane left the ground.

Dick hit the nitro.

The rear wheel began to take off. Dick was two meters from it, the motorcycle trying to fight him off with its shaking. He climbed up onto the seat, his legs bunched under him. With each passing second the landing gear was going further out of reach. The Robin-cycle beeped, having exhausted its supply of afterburner. To hell with it. Dick launched himself forward.

He hit the landing gear wrong. The spinning wheel seared at his chest, ripping open the costume to the armor. He grabbed hold of the strut and slipped down accidentally, now with his face inches from the wheel. With an immense feat of strength he managed to keep the two separate. His grip was failing and the ground was simplifying into toys below him. Dick let go with one hand and drew his cape around his chest. The landing gear wobbled, perhaps about to withdraw into the plane. That would surely scrape Dick off.

He thrust himself onto the spinning wheel again, letting it tear through his cape and chest armor as he dragged himself up onto the strut. The landing gear began to retract and the accompanying jerk nearly knocked him loose. But he rolled himself into the landing gear bay and felt the swamp-like heat of the engines on his face, a refreshing change from the howling winds of the altitude he was at.

Swamp-like? Make that sweltering. The engines were turning the compartment into a sauna. Dick’s cape was caught in the bay doors. How in the hell did Bruce live with that thing? Dick unclasped it. He crawled forward. There must be a way into the main cabin from where he was, otherwise maintenance would be impossible. There, ahead, a small door! Dick crawled towards it, stumbling over a thick red pipe as he did so. He gave it a closer looks.

The fuel line.

***

Ivy smelt a bead of sweat rolling down Kory’s neck and sucked it up with her fingertip, watching as her hand coarsened in color. She released another dose of pheromones under Kory’s nose, watched as the alien’s eyes fluttered before refocusing on Ivy’s face with baleful intent.

“When I escape from here, you will die,” she said simply, her voice devoid of the lust that was making her heart beat faster and her chest heave.

“Since you’ll never escape, I doubt that will be a problem.” With a feather-light touch she made Kory’s lips purse. Another sweat-drop ran off Kory’s brow and between her eyes. Ivy took the sweat-drop off Kory’s nose with the tip of her tongue.

“I think you have to be at least a mile up before you can join the club,” Batman said as he stepped through the curtain into first class. “No frequent flier miles for you.”

His chest armor was tattered, the symbol shredded. His cape was missing. Ivy sneered at him.

“Rough night?”

He nodded a bit. Then went rigid as Ivy pulled Kory to his feet. The alien’s eyes lit up.

“Dick! You’re alive!”

“Don’t get used to it,” Ivy said. She held Kory in front of her. A vine pilloried Kory’s wrists and neck like a weird feather boa. “In five minutes, this plane will release my pollen on all of Gotham.”

“And what will that do?” Batman took a few haltering steps forward. “What is the binary agent? Poison? Mind-control agent?” A hint of humor entered his voice: “Aphrodisiac?”

“Hardly!” Ivy laughed. “You forget that I’m not some supervillain. I’m an agent of change. No, this reaction will trigger an evolution.”

“The men you infected earlier…”

“The vectors, you might say. When the pollen hit them, it will have no apparent effect. But quickly the change will spread. I don’t know if it will make it past the city limits, but within weeks the entire city will be under my control. Human-plant hybrids, like myself, living in harmony with nature. We’ll turn this metropolis into a beautiful garden, a new Eden.” Ivy frowned and rested her chin on Starfire’s shoulder, a pale green hand tugging on one of the straps that ran up Kory’s abdomen. “You’re welcome to join us, although I suppose you’re too set in your ways to join us.”

“You suppose correctly.” Batman tried for another step forward, stopping when the vine tightened around Kory’s neck like a noose.

“You mammals, all alike. Refusing to give up your creature comforts for the greater good. Screw the planet, you need your SUVs and wide-screen TVs and AC and all the rest of your alphabet soup.” Ivy’s fingernails dug deep scratches into Kory’s stomach. “You sicken me.”

“Feeling’s mutual. Let her go.”

“I don’t think so.” Ivy scooped up the blood trickling from Kory’s wounds and licked it off her fingers. “I must admit, I’m a little uncertain as to what to do with her. While I do have a fair amount of curiosity as to what sounds a Tamaranian makes while she’s being dissolved in the belly of a sentient plant, that would be a waste of such fertile soil.” She moved the strap from Kory’s breast, exposing a coral-pink nipple atop bronze flesh, and blew at it until it stiffened into a hard nub. “No. I think I’ll keep her as a pet. I always have been a cat-person.” She chuckled at her own joke and moved the second strap aside. “We haven’t had time to get up to anything too naughty, what with you barging in at such inopportune moments, but perhaps…”

“While you weren’t being too naughty…” Dick said, his voice awash in anger. “I was down below.” He took several steps down the aisle, barely caring that the vine was painfully constricting Kory’s throat. He took a small cylinder from his belt. “I set explosives on the fuel lines.” There was a glass cover over a red button on top of the cylinder. Dick opened the glass cover. “One press of this button and we all go up in flames.”

Ivy made a hmmph sound, considering it. Around them, the plane banked subtly. The cabin skewed to the left.

“I know you’re willing to die for your crusade, but are you willing to kill for it?” Ivy asked after a long pause. “Because our alien friend here won’t survive that. Neither will I.”

Batman made a disparaging sound at the notion of Poison Ivy dying. Ivy tightened the vine enough to make Kory gasp. Batman’s clenched-jaw determination shifted from Ivy to Kory and back again. “You think I care about her?”

“Please! I can smell it on you, boy. Your heart pounds, your pulse races. You love her, don’t you? And so we come to the eternal choice. Save the city or save the girl. What’s it gonna be, Batman?”

Dick’s eyes roamed the cabin. Nothing there. No last-minutes escapes, no one flying in to the rescue. Just him.

“Your arm’s shaking,” Ivy said.

Dick froze his hand, thumb still poised over the trigger.

“You think I won’t do it?” he asked.

“I know you won’t do it. I can smell your fear.”

“You’re a warrior, Dick. You know what you have to do…” Kory said, with just the slightest tremor entering her voice.

“I can’t… not you…” Dick shut the glass cover over the trigger. “I can’t lose you too…”

“I knew he wouldn’t do it,” Ivy said as the vine loosened, letting Kory gulp in oxygen. “He’s a mammal. He could no more destroy his mate than he could ever truly replace his mentor. It’s a biological imperative. At least, for another thirty seconds. Welcome to the new world.”

Dick fell to his knees. The detonator felt like it was weighting more each minute. He was weak. He couldn’t do this. Bruce could’ve done it, but not him. Never him.

Outside the windows, lazy white clouds were floating by like mobile castles.

“I would rather die than be her slave,” Kory said. Her voice didn’t waver this time.

Dick looked her in the eye, nodded, and mouthed three short words. He got to his feet. The vine tightened so close that they could hear Kory’s neck begin to crack.

“Hey, Pam.” Batman flipped the cover open. “Make sure your tray table’s in the upright and locked position.”

He pressed the button.

A roar like a boiler overheating, furnace room goodbye, and the world turned to ashes.

 

[Arsh]

Whoa.

 

[Zev]

The first thing Dick noticed was that he wasn’t dead.

The second was that he was deaf.

Memory returned with sound. The way the explosion had ripped through the airplane, the high-pitched squeal as the hover-engines went kaput, the choking sputter as the turbines stalled, and the champaign-cork pops of the oxygen tanks above the seat vomiting up flame.

Kory had been bathed in flame but was not burnt. Her ruddy skin was nigh-invulnerable. Ivy hadn’t been so lucky. Her high-pitched scream had continued all the way down after she was sucked out the hull breach.

He remembered, as well as felt, strong arms enveloping him and a keen sense of warmth that persisted even after the heat of the explosions faded. Was persisting even now.

He opened his eyes.

Kory smiled at him.

“Are we dead?”

She kissed him and the buzzing in his ears went down a few notches.

He sputtered when she pulled away. “What’s that burnt-hair smell?”

“Burnt hair,” Kory mouthed, because his ears were still ringing too loudly for him to make out her words. And indeed, some of her voluminous hair had been burnt away. The curls were like just-extinguished candle wicks.

He looked down. The city was below him, lights and not much else. So far off he couldn’t see the grime. Above it, his feet were dangling. The explosion had blown one of his boots off.

“I’m not in any pain,” he realized, which meant he was either very, very lucky or very, very dead.

She kissed him again. So hard it hurt. A good hurt, the kind that reminded him he was alive.

He kissed her back and together they spun through the sky, the sounds of the city far below them.

***

The hover-plane crashed two miles outside Gotham City. The pilot was found alive, although hospitalization was required.

***

It was believed that Poison Ivy landed in the Finger River, where most of the initial debris was fished out. A parachute was found, but no body. The morning after the crash, the surface of the river was covered in lilly pads.

***

Jason wasn’t found, although a doctor two blocks away from the Red Hood’s last sighting reported treating a man for a mild concussion and severe rashes, consistent with poison ivy.

***

Bruce sat in a three-piece suit, four if you counted the cast on his arm. There were still a number of butterfly stitches over his face and the bruises were slow in fading, but he looked as if he’d just had a rough night instead of spending a few days in the hospital.

“Mr. Wayne,” the judge began, looking at the defendant through drooping half-moon spectacles, “are you sure you’re well enough to be tried?”

Bruce straightened his tie. “I’d like to get this out of the way, your honor. If it has to be from here instead of a hospital bed, so be it.”

“Very well.”

The charges were read, the lawyers and attorneys made arguments, and the judge calculated a bail amount. Something that would put a dent in Bruce Wayne’s pocketbook. Then he asked the question all of Gotham leaned forward to hear.

“Mr. Wayne, you stand accused of… well, I’ll just say the pertinent part. Being Batman. How do you plea?”

Before Wayne could answer, there was a commotion from outside the courthouse. Bruce craned his head to face the door, as did everyone else. There was some muffled shouting and the doors flew open.

Batman walked in.

“Excuse me, your honor,” Batman said. “I hate to disrupt your courtroom but I feel I would be remiss to allow you to waste any more of the taxpayers’ money.” He looked at Bruce, who looked back. Father and son made eye contact. Dick winked. “This man is no more Batman than you are.”

By this time a number of bailiffs, not to mention policemen, had surrounded the erstwhile Batman.

“Arrest that man!” Commissioner Akins shouted. His back was still aching from the helicopter crash.

The judge cleared his throat. “Mr. Akins…”

“Commissioner!” Akins interrupted.

“Commissioner,” the judge corrected with a nod. “Am I now to understand that it’s illegal to wear a Batman costume?”

“No, your honor,” Akins said hastily. “But you heard him, he just admitted to being Batman.”

“I thought Bruce Wayne was Batman. Are you telling me you arrested the wrong man? In addition to misplacing the costume you claimed was a smoking gun?”

Akins scowled. “So there are two Batmen—“

“Three!” a voice rang out, and indeed a third Batman stepped through the door.

Dick caught side of a red eyebrow peeking through the mask’s eyehole. “Roy?” he mouthed.

Roy came to a stop next to him. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, son, but I can’t let you take the fall for me. Judge, I’m Batman and I take full responsibility for my actions.”

“Roy, you said you weren’t going to get involved!” Dick said under his breath.

“I lied,” Roy replied.

“Sorry I’m late, line at the bathroom.” A fourth man had entered the courtroom, dressed in jeans, a cowl, and a black T-shirt with a yellow Bat-symbol.

“Who are you?” the judge demanded.

“What are you, dense? Are you ******ed or something? I’m the goddamned Batman!” Kon shouted.

“Excuse me, your honor,” a rather mild-mannered Batman said as he X-rayed the judge’s bloodstream. “But I really do think you should cut down on your cholesterol intake. It’s really getting to be a risk…”

The judge banged his gavel. “Case dismissed.”

***

“Bruce,” Superman said, handing the Batman costume back to his friend.

“Kal,” Bruce said, taking it from him.

The rest of the superheroes, as well as Tim, were seated in the living room of Wayne Manor. Alfred served them tea.

“I would just like to say how thankful I am to you,” Bruce said, with a look to Dick. “All of you. I think a, dare I say, reasonable doubt has entered Gotham as to my… proclivities.”

“Far be it for me to overstep my bounds, sir.” Bruce gestured the butler onward. “But it occurs to me that a tour of Waynecorp’s European branch might be, ahem, ‘just what the doctor ordered’.”

“Just so long as Batman’s active on the homefront.” Bruce gave Dick a look. “I assume you’re satisfied with Cass’s progress in Bludhaven.”

“Yeah, she’s doing fine…” Dick said, surprised. “But me? Really? You don’t want… someone else.”

Roy raised his hand. “Are you hiring? Because I can be Batman. I can throw stuff.”

“No,” Bruce said in no uncertain terms.

“Batarangs, ropes, pointy sticks…”

“God no.”

“It’s just…” Dick paused for breath. “I trashed the car and the plane. In the same night.”

“You saved the city.”

“I told Selina she could go on a crime spree.”

There was a clatter from the other room. Bruce limped his way to the door to find Catwoman, standing over a broken vase.

“Butterfingers,” Selina said as she shoved some silverware into a great burlap bag.

“Kyle…” Bruce said threateningly.

“Na-huh!” Selina held up a finger. “One day. No interference from you or your buddies. Your boy-toy wonder there gave his word, didn’t he?”

Bruce slowly turned to look at Dick as Selina happily rolled up a painting.

“It was either that or have sex with her!” Dick said helplessly.

Bruce turned back to Selina, who was stripping the Rolex from his wrist. “You know I’m just going to come after those as soon as the day is over.”

“It’s a date,” Selina said with a smile. “Where do you keep the good china by the way?”
Escaping the festivities (and the rather icy looks Bruce kept casting his way), Dick found his way upstairs. He didn’t feel much like partying. His joints still ached and he was beginning to despair of ever hearing again in his left ear, despite Alfred’s assurance that the eardrum was merely temporarily inflamed.

“It is old, but a truism,” Kory said, waiting for him just around the corner. “Every party does require a ‘crapper’.”

“That’s pooper,” Dick corrected. He looked at the costume Kory was wearing and wondered by what narrow margin she had been convinced not to go to the courthouse. “You do realize how much seeing you in a Batsuit is going to warp my sexual fantasies?”

“Your sexual fantasies revolve around myself, a voyeuristic childhood crush, and a woman who runs around shooting people with a crossbow. I’d say your sex life is a lost cause.”

“How did you…” Dick nodded. “You know, next time you’re in my head, you could at least try not to snoop around.”

“You were only thinking about it every ten seconds. And in such various combinations as well…”

She took off the cowl. It only fit because her hair hadn’t grown back yet. “Get dressed nice. We’re going someplace fancy.”

“Where?”

“It’s your hometown, Dick. Surprise me.”

Dick, confused, followed Kory into her room. An evening gown was laid out on her bed. She took off her cape and Dick marveled at the way a utility belt could set off someone’s hips.

“If you don’t mind?”

Dick shut the door. And unzipped Kory’s Batsuit.

“Thank you.”

“Not that I’m exactly despairing at a chance to see you naked, but any particular reason for this?”

“It’s Friday night,” Kory said as she pulled the dress slowly up her bare legs. “And you owe me a date.”

“I thought we were in agreement that we would take things slow.”

“Slow, not glacial.” The dress covered her ass, the boy-panties she liked so much she had tried to convince boys to wear them. “We have a lot of lost time to make up for and even more to talk about. So, date.”

Dick stood and began mentally picking out a wardrobe for himself. “I’ll see if I can get any reservations.”

And, for no other reason than because he could, he took a step forward and stopped the dress’ ascent. Kory held its shoulder straps on her thumbs; it hung around her body, not yet being worn. For no other reason than because she could, she lowered the dress down to her waist. The back of her bra was eggshell-white, looking like a tan line on her otherwise perfect body. Dick wrapped his arms around Kory and embraced her the way she did him, smelling her shortened hair and kissing the top of her head.

“I meant what I said on the plane.”

“Technically you didn’t say anything.”

What was there to say? That she had saved him? That she had been the only one whose forgiveness he could accept? That it had meant more to him than life itself to see her safe and happy? She had to understand that his sentiments couldn’t be captured in a thousand words, not in a thousand thousand words. And she did, so he pressed his lips to the back of her neck and sent everything he felt at her. Touch telepathy. Of all the things he’d regained during his rebirth from the flaming wreckage of the hover-plane, the sense of touch was what he welcomed back the most.

Her smile lit up the room, leaving not a trace of shadow.

 

[Dark Guardian]

...
Its very hard to find the right words to express my amazement at the complexity, maturity and overall great writing that is the above story.

So thus I can merely say that you have made my day and I eagerly await any further exploits of yours.