DC – I am Batman

The text came at 2:14 AM.

He was lying in bed with his phone on the nightstand and the ceiling above him and the taste of chamomile fading on his tongue when the screen lit up. Zatanna's name. Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Disappeared. He watched the dots cycle four times and each cycle lasted long enough that she was typing entire paragraphs and deleting them.

The first message arrived: I don't regret it.

Then: I'm not ready.

Then: Don't you dare be weird about this.

He lay in the dark and looked at the three messages and the distance between "I don't regret it" and "I'm not ready" was the exact shape of the problem and she'd identified it in eight words and he was going to respect both halves.

He typed: Wouldn't dream of it.

Then, after a minute: The books were a nice touch.

Middle finger emoji. Then a rabbit emoji. Their thing, since she was nine and he was eight and she'd pulled a stuffed rabbit out of his sleeve at a birthday party and sworn she hadn't put it there. He'd kept the rabbit for three years. It was in a box in his closet. He didn't think about that.

He smiled in the dark and put the phone down and didn't sleep for a while.

The next day he didn't go to her apartment.

He knew Zatanna. She processed by pacing and talking to herself and doing card tricks until her hands stopped shaking, and if he showed up at her door she'd have to perform composure she didn't have yet and that would cost her energy she needed for the actual processing. So he gave her the room.

He went to the cave instead. Worked on the vehicle chassis for three hours. The welding was meditative: heat, light, metal joining metal. Julia's hard drives were integrated into the system and her Falcone reorganization was already paying off. The compromised dock source was quarantined. New verification protocols running clean.

At ten he drove to Wayne Enterprises for a board meeting that Thomas had been preparing for all week. Lucius presented the quarterly R&D numbers. The polymer composite was ahead of schedule. The fuel cell needed another round of funding. Dr. Isley's botanical department had filed for an expanded budget, which the CFO was pushing back on because plant research didn't have a clear commercial application.

"The commercial application," Bruce said from the back of the room, "is remediation. Soil decontamination, water purification, carbon capture. Dr. Isley's department is sitting on three patent-viable applications that nobody in this room has looked at because they're filed under 'botany' instead of 'cleantech.'"

Thomas turned in his chair. Lucius adjusted his glasses. The CFO opened his mouth and closed it.

"I'll review the budget request this afternoon," Lucius said. He looked at Bruce with the expression of a man who had just recalibrated an assumption.

After the meeting, Pamela Isley's email was waiting on his phone. The contamination study had traced hexavalent chromium from Robinson Park's aquifer back through the groundwater table to three industrial sites. Two were owned by companies that had been Wayne Enterprises subsidiaries before Thomas restructured in the nineties. One was still active under a shell company that hadn't been properly decommissioned.

The shell company was called Janus Environmental Solutions. Bruce didn't recognize the name. He searched the corporate registry. Janus had been created by the previous board, before Thomas, and its sole purpose appeared to be holding liability for contaminated sites so the parent company's balance sheet stayed clean. It was still technically a Wayne subsidiary. It was still technically dumping.

He forwarded the email to Lucius with a note: This is ours. Fix it before Dr. Isley takes it to the Gazette. Then he called the legal department and told them to begin voluntary disclosure to the EPA. The lawyer on the other end sounded like he was having a stroke.

"Mr. Wayne, voluntary disclosure would-"

"Would be the right thing to do. Start the paperwork."

He hung up and drove to GU.

Alexis Kaye was in the seminar room early. She was sitting in the third row with a stack of books that hadn't been on last week's reading list, and when he walked in she looked up and slid a folded paper across his desk without saying hello.

"What's this?"

"Since you think you know bad answers, here are worse ones." She went back to her book. Red pen in her hand, annotating in the margins. Same red nails. Same black hair, straight, chin level. The most precisely angry person he'd ever met.

He unfolded the paper. A reading list. Twelve titles. Schmitt, Sorel, Fanon, Luxemburg. Heavier than the last one. The philosophical framework was shifting from reform-critique toward direct action theory. She was reading about justified violence.

"These are escalation texts," he said.

"They're primary sources."

"Sorel's Reflections on Violence isn't a primary source on political theory. It's a manual for how to justify breaking things."

She looked up from her annotations. "And you've read it."

"I've read all of them."

"Have you." The red pen stopped. She turned in her seat to face him fully. "When."

"During a period of my life when I was surrounded by people who thought they had the right answers and the violence to prove it."

She stared at him. Running the math on that, trying to fit it into the profile she'd been building. Bruce Wayne, billionaire's son, GU engineering student, who'd read Sorel and Fanon and Luxemburg and lived among people who'd applied them.

"Thursday," she said. "Café. Bring counterarguments."

"I always do."

"Bring better ones."

Professor Achebe walked in and the seminar started and Alexis turned back to her books and her red pen and didn't look at him again for an hour, which was itself a form of communication she hadn't learned to control yet.

Sofia called at seven.

He was in the cave reviewing Pamela's contamination data when the phone rang and Sofia Falcone's name appeared and his hand paused on the mouse before he picked up.

"Bruce." Her voice was careful. Controlled. The voice she used when she was being watched.

"Sofia."

"The arrangement is postponed." A pause. The careful voice stayed careful. "My father is reconsidering the timeline."

The arrangement. The marriage to the Maroni heir that Carmine had been engineering since Sofia was sixteen. The alliance that would cement the Falcone-Maroni partnership and deliver Sofia as a political asset in a wedding dress.

"Reconsidering," he said.

"Reconsidering. That's the word he used." Another pause. "I didn't ask why. You don't ask my father why."

He thought about Talia. About the intelligence she'd dropped during their last call. She knew about the Falcone network. She knew about Sofia. If Talia had disrupted the Maroni arrangement because she'd read the situation and decided to protect a woman Bruce cared about, she'd done it through channels so clean that Carmine Falcone thought the delay was his own idea.

"How are you?" he asked.

"I'm." She stopped. Started again. "The door my father was showing me is still there. He's just decided to leave it closed a little longer." Her voice thinned. "I don't know if that's better or worse."

"It's time. Use it."

"Use it for what?"

"For figuring out what you want to do when the door opens and you're the one standing in front of it."

She was quiet for a long time. Someone in the background was speaking Italian, a television maybe, and traffic noise came through an open window.

"You sound like you've been thinking about this," she said.

"I've been thinking about you."

She didn't answer for five seconds. When she spoke again the careful voice had cracked at one edge and warmth had come through.

"Be careful with that, Bruce. My father has ears everywhere."

"I know."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Sofia."

She hung up. He sat in the cave and looked at the contamination data on the screen and thought about doors and timing and a woman whose father showed her a room she didn't want to enter and then gave her a reprieve she hadn't asked for, delivered by a woman on a mountain who'd never met her.

Julia's package arrived by courier the next morning.

Padded envelope, no return address, no postmark. Hand-delivered to the manor. Alfred accepted it with the neutral expression of a man who knew exactly who it was from and would discuss it with no one. Inside: two encrypted hard drives, a USB stick, and a note on plain white paper in angular handwriting.

For your dungeon. Gotham power structure - political, criminal, financial. Cross-referenced. Current as of last Tuesday.

The Narrows source is compromised. Don't use.

PS: Tell my father I said hello. Or don't. He'll know anyway.

He laughed. Alone in his room, holding the note, he laughed because Julia Pennyworth had sent him a complete intelligence dossier on his own city from wherever she was and had called the Batcave a dungeon.

He took the drives to the cave. Plugged them in. Julia's data was meticulous: every major player in Gotham's power structure mapped and cross-referenced with financial networks, political connections, criminal associations. The Falcone organization was in there. The GCPD command structure. City council voting patterns. Wayne Enterprises board relationships. She'd built him a map of the battlefield before the war started.

A sticky note fell out of the envelope when he shook it. Same angular handwriting:

You owe me dinner. The real kind. Not cave food.

He put the note in his wallet. Next to Harleen's card and Barbara's card and the space where his life was getting complicated in ways he couldn't organize with intelligence files and spreadsheets.

His phone buzzed. Zatanna.

I'm going to do a show tonight. The Iceberg Lounge booked me for a private event. Come if you want. Or don't. No pressure.

I mean some pressure.

Come to my show, Bruce.

He texted back: What time?

Rabbit emoji.

8 PM. Wear something nice. And don't sit in the back row this time.

He put the phone down. The cave was quiet. Julia's data was loading. Pamela's contamination report was on the second monitor. Alexis's reading list was in his jacket pocket. Sofia's voice was in his head. And Zatanna was doing a magic show tonight and she'd invited him and the rabbit emoji meant they were OK and that was worth more than everything else on his desk combined.

He got dressed. He wore the blue suit. He didn't sit in the back row.