Chapter Text
Visit IKEA with brothers. Normal. Meet attractive college student. Normal for many people, albeit less so for Damian Wayne. Discover attractive college student has magic powers. Well, that was distinctly unusual. Get brothers banned from every IKEA on the eastern seaboard. A one-off miracle.
Damian spent the months following The Incident observing both Marinette Dupain-Cheng and his reactions to her, an investigation as scientific as that in a labs session on the biology segment of his university course. To the extent that the woman concerned was a puzzle, he refused to allow himself to become one in turn.
Meetings that might not have been dates progressed into meetings that were definitely dates – he was self-aware enough to credit his relative inexperience in that arena with his difficulty in noticing when one type blended into the other. Sensations he’d considered mechanically pleasing were, he discovered, more interesting with a partner, or perhaps more so with Marinette. They traversed campus together, him for the final year of pre-med, her for the second year of fashion and business (she had been exempted from first year on the basis of prior work submitted): they attended student events together, ones that Damian had avoided or considered risible before, but now accepted as a cost of Marinette’s company, and in some cases discovered he could tolerate. She persuaded him to join the Gotham U fencing team and to attend some tournaments: he met a few people at Gotham and rather more from other colleges who were worth his time to fight. They behaved like a normal couple.
Yet his brothers would not leave well alone.
Drake’s dissatisfaction was comprehensible in the face of his inability to utilise his usual resources to research Marinette’s background. Bruce had eventually employed a French private detective rather than allow Drake to visit Paris himself (and Bruce was wary of Paris. It showed in the tenor of his refusal. Damian noticed, even if Drake did not). He infected Grayson: the older man’s periodic interrogations of Marinette remained friendly, on the surface, but pointed. And whatever chance Damian had of soothing Todd’s fragile temper was nullified by Drake’s reinforcement: she is too strange, and strange things are dangerous.
He had attachments already. Duty to his father, and that which lingered to his mother. Obligations to his adoptive siblings. Fondness he allowed himself, for Jon and Cassandra and Barbara. More attachments were dangerous. They could be weaponised.
Maybe what he felt for Marinette was protectiveness, or possessiveness.
‘I will never again endanger anyone I love,’ she had whispered in French to her pillow one night. Damian, at that point, had itched to tell her a few secrets, ones that included ‘I can defend myself quite well, actually’, but he had kissed the back of her neck instead.
‘A relationship can survive secrets,’ she had said the next morning, ‘but it can’t survive lies. I’d prefer not to see yet another boyfriend walk out on me because of the things I can’t talk about, so please, please, don’t ask.’
He did not ask. That didn’t stop him collating information, from the private detective’s studies and his own observations.
Part French, part Italian, part Chinese; Paris-born and bred. One threatened expulsion from middle school, later rescinded: clear scholastic record otherwise. Had run a successful micro-business in fashion design since the age of fourteen. Chinese family successfully walked the fine line between commercial success in a number of industries and compliance with CCP demands. The only criminal records in the family were a handful of speeding fines (some in rather unusual countries) by her paternal grandmother and a gun licence violation by her paternal grandfather.
(Paris had… no relation to magic, surely. There had been superheroes there for a while. Or perhaps not. He should be able to remember why could he not remember –)
She had access to items that gave her luck-related powers. She lived in Gotham City proper for three months before she saw her first mugging, and had never been the victim of such. She had a bad Parisian habit of opening her window at night and chatting to heroes and vigilantes. When Robin found Superboy and Spoiler eating home-made chocolate chip cookies on Marinette’s balcony at one o’clock in the morning, he made sure to visit as Damian the next day and berate her.
“It might be a rogue next time!” She managed to look guilty before confessing that Poison Ivy had dropped by once to compliment her pot plants’ vitality. (Damian later found a small Tupperware box in the treats cupboard marked IVY’S COOKIES. The difference was apparently to do with cane sugar, heritage flour, and butter from grass-fed cows. The cookies were delicious.)
She did not use her powers again, from what he saw. Only her carefree explanation and his brothers’ paranoia remained as evidence that she had powers at all.
But Batman did not disguise his distrust of meta-humans. That it stemmed from his frank dislike of anything he could not understand and control was irrelevant. Marinette was, if not a meta, something very strange. Marinette was to be protected.
So throughout fall and winter he shielded her from what small harms he could: kept as many of their meetings private (and hence out of the press) as possible, whisked her to his family Thanksgiving celebration and a small pre-Christmas dinner rather than the public Wayne Foundation events that she deserved to attend, introduced her to his sisters both official and unofficial, interposed between her and his brothers, told her anecdotes about his life that sufficed to explain his less-than-usual behaviour without revealing the family’s hidden business. He had been raised in a cult with no access to playmates. He had left that life aged ten, too late to learn minute social niceties. He had no contact with his mother by choice, though she occasionally tried to reinsert herself into his life.
And all the while, Robin patrolled the streets with his father and siblings, Drake or Barbara’s voice in his ear, through storms and attacks and foiled rogue plans. And, as the months passed, more and more often one of them spied a new cape on the horizon, a glimpse of some rogue or vigilante: never more than that glimpse by eye or camera, just an occasional high-pitched whoosh and a flash of scarlet, never interfering, always observing. Oracle’s best image suggested the newcomer was a woman on the grounds of short height and slim build. No Gotham vigilante would rely on such assumption.
And he waited. He was very good at waiting.
*
Light glimmered off icicles at street corners. Grimy snow-banks piled up in every alley too narrow to be ploughed, some covering dumpsters, or cars, or cardboard shacks. The raw grim energy Damian and Todd both sometimes saw flickering at the edges of their vision continued to drive Gothamite activity, but as the winter dragged on, Damian felt it become more anchored, more purposeful.
A trafficking agreement between the Inzerillos and the Hanoi Ten unravelled. Their web came apart in three different places on the same night, leading Batman, Red Hood and the GCPD’s least corrupted vice squad into an argument about who got to process which set of criminals first.
Snowdrops peeked their heads above melting slush in Gotham’s parks.
A corrupt DA was caught on camera to the extent even the best lawyers could not extract her from her predicament.
Pastel flowers sprang from bulbs around the Wayne Manor gardens.
A foster care racket was exposed: three dozen children were moved into decent homes with enough therapists to begin to address the damage.
Buds swelled on the tips of oak, beech, maple and ash trees.
Immigration officers drove up to harass anyone brown or non-American-accented on the Gotham University campus. They never saw who took potshots at them with a paintball gun, or who flattened their car tires, but in a week or two, they left for easier targets around the docks.
Bees and butterflies emerged from hibernation. Small birds, taking breaks from catching bees and butterflies, began chirping in leafy bushes and leafless trees, posing for Damian’s sketch-pad as they cawed their ancient arguments: my mate, my nesting spot.
A dozen neo-Nazi gang members who had joined the police force and been posted to the same Uptown precinct were chased out of the city by a gang of feral dogs.
Trees’ buds began to unfurl into neon-fresh leaves. Poison Ivy flitted through parks and wasteland, barely seen by vigilante or criminal alike, though once she waylaid Damian and Marinette mid-cherry-blossom-date to chat about biological pest control.
Drake caught his secretary with her hand in the till, a strange metaphor for a convoluted fraud scheme. The subsequent court cases promised to be long and multitudinous: Drake, meanwhile, pushed aside personal devastation long enough to select a replacement from the assistants’ pool. The replacement spent much too much time sucking up to one top executive after another to be able to start her own schemes.
Another Gotham began to assert itself: the Gotham where one could eat some of the tastiest food on the eastern seaboard, whether from a fancy restaurant or a street truck, then drop in to a cutting-edge modern theatre performance, or a self-consciously cool gig, or an evening session at that art gallery on 9th Avenue – a city of seething energy. He and Marinette flitted through that city, stray cats in the glowing night, often dressed in MDC-original baggy hoodies to disguise their figures, laughing like children when the darkness that seethed around them failed to make contact.
*
Spring opened into summer, in the shape of bright leaves unrolling to drink each drop of sunlight. The Martha Wayne Foundation began announcing its vacation activity program for children and youth (crime levels worldwide seeing spikes when youngsters, particularly boys and men aged between fifteen and twenty-five, had nothing constructive to do). Damian’s brothers had given up on their inquisition of Marinette, or at least had withdrawn it to a level he could not personally witness: useful for both of their stress levels as they approached end-of-year exams.
Vigilante work required him to drop in at Wayne Tower after labs one day. The level of emotional upheaval in the usually unflappable staff corps was palpable, and in direct contrast to the rest of the city’s air of ease.
He penetrated the executive floor with minimal difficulty – Drake was meant to have improved security: his efforts did not show – and bypassed his brother’s secretary gossiping at a water cooler. “Did you hire ghosts for extra floor patrols?” he greeted Drake.
His brother nodded to him, too crisply for the amount of caffeine his doctor said he was meant to be drinking each morning. “To what do I owe this unspeakable pleasure?”
Damian closed the door and glanced to the security cameras in each corner. “Ears?”
“Off while I’m in here.”
“Purpose Avenue.” Commissioner Gordon suspected some dishonest police officers of selling on automatic weapons that had been confiscated from rogues and gangs, and had sought Batman’s help for a stakeout on Purpose Avenue the previous night in lieu of finding an honest detective on the force. “My suspect passed the south flank of Wayne Tower at nine minutes past three in the morning. I wish to access last night’s surveillance footage.”
“I’ll share the file with your basement computer.” In that, he referred to the Batcave. He minimised his browser with the quick flick of a man who had something to hide, and busied himself with Damian’s requirement.
Another unsatisfactory episode promised to arise. He would access Drake’s browsing history, he would find more incessant communication relating to Marinette, Drake would respond defensively, Damian would threaten to stab him, and Father would become annoyed again.
“Please do not attempt to pretend you are doing anything other than wasting your time cyber-stalking.”
Drake’s fingers rattled against his keys. “It’s called due diligence.”
“It passed that stage several months ago.”
“I just worry that you’re being taken for a ride.”
With some difficulty Damian restrained his temper. “Drake, I am aware you consider yourself the only true authority on investigatory matters, but rest assured that I am capable of evaluating my own safety.”
“She’s had more relationships than you –”
“This is not the nineteenth century.”
“– and because of that,” the idiot continued, “you’re less likely to see any warning signs.”
“Signs such as what?” He leant over Drake’s desk, stretching into every one of the extra inches he had on the older man. “She does not take advantage of my position, or yours, or Father’s. She does not dally with other men. She does not demand expensive gifts.” He had given her a few, but some of the custom clothing pieces she had made for him, such as a tastefully-embroidered and kevlar-lined black tie suit, were gifts just as valuable in return. “She asks of me my time and company, which is accepted practice in a relationship. That is all.”
“She watches. She’s clever. She’s probably memorised a dozen sensitive area entry codes by now.”
Damian folded his arms. “And what would she do with them? This fashion designer who you maintain could be a master criminal – there has been no unusual change in corporate espionage, either a rise or a fall, unless you count your incident as unusual.” He, personally, did not. Strange, given Tamara Fox’s personality, but not unusual.
Drake rubbed his eyes. “I know, OK. I know it would absolutely burn if one of the tiny number of women you’ve ever shown romantic interest in – one of the tiny number who appear to be interested in you instead of your surname or bank balance – is a rogue or working for one. But there are just too many things that don’t add up.”
“If you had, throughout your acquaintance, made the slightest attempt to be civil to Marinette, perhaps your curiosity would have been sated via rational conversation!”
The door swung open without warning. “I got that forecast from Pharmaceuticals, Mr Drake-Wayne,” Drake’s new secretary prattled. She set a large coffee replete with excess cream on his desk, and smiled shyly at Damian. “I’m sorry, Mr Wayne, I didn’t know you were still here. I should have brought one for you.”
“I am not staying.”
Drake glared at him. “Thanks, Erica. Send over the report when you have a second. I’m expecting a call from Dragoslav in fifteen minutes, so don’t let anyone else in unless you’re sure they’ll be quick. How’s Tech?”
“Calmer.” Erica pulled a concerned face. “Ms Cates wanted to speak to you. Something about her mother? That can’t be right. I’ll stall her till your meeting with Mr Milanic is over.” She withdrew.
“What happened in Tech?” Damian enquired. Drake’s glare intensified, but he did not answer. “Have we found a Mother Box, or lost one?”
“Potential anomalies detected. It’s more likely a situation for our Metropolis friends than for us.” A dissatisfactory response, but, under the circumstances, the best he could expect. He nodded, and made to leave.
“Damian.”
He looked back. “Drake?”
“I know you. You’re intense, I get it, and you’re into her with all that intensity. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – don’t hang your emotional stability on someone who might not even be here when you open your eyes tomorrow.”
“You drink too much coffee. It gives you hallucinations.” He strode off the executive floor, brushing past Erica Carbone’s desk as he went.
Still seething, he headed to Marinette’s block. By the time he’d marched up five flights of stairs to her tiny one-bedroom apartment, the exercise had calmed his mind somewhat.
“Come in: it’s open,” she called when he knocked. He scowled.
“Lock the door!” he roared back.
“Heard you coming,” she answered, somewhat muffled. She had put a pin into her mouth. If only she wouldn’t put pins in her mouth. She would hurt herself.
After requisite neatness at home, including that trained into him in his youth, it always piqued his soul to enter Marinette’s creative chaos. Notebooks lay on coffee table, desk and kitchenette bench, some open to show design sketches, and fabric rolls were stacked against most walls. More fabric, already cut, was stacked on a shelf, and a black-and-purple blouse with jagged-cut edges was in progress at her sewing machine, shimmering in large part with intricate beading.
“Coursework?” he enquired, gesturing to the work in progress.
Marinette, kneeling beside a dress form with a fake-leather-and-denim jacket wrapped onto it, applied a couple of pins to her piece. “Commission, though I can count it for course credits as well. This is phase two.”
“I trust the client approved of phase one.”
“Already in use.” She jerked her head towards the staircase. “What happened? I heard you three flights down: please don’t pretend nothing’s wrong.”
“Merely my most infuriating brother.”
She screwed up her freckled nose, an oddly aesthetically-pleasing sight. “I wish I had any idea what to say to – not make up with him: build a bridge that’s never been there, I suppose.”
“He resents your privacy skills.”
“Blame my stalker.”
He paused mid-stride. “Stalker?” Instances of violent or sexually obsessed men usually went along with that word.
“Just a jealous wannabe. She periodically tries to fill the internet with something that’ll ruin my reputation – AI porn, or fake tabloid gossip or something. I have a friend who’s good with computers. He runs searches for me from time to time and clears it all out.”
That sounded slightly less bad than his initial conception. “I had wondered,” he remarked, “why you have no design website.”
“I get enough work for now as it is without advertising. Half the Scandinavian music scene seems to be sending me commission requests, and my big-name clients pay very well. But, yes, it’s easier to curate abuse on Instagram than it is to try to keep a complete website online when it’s being attacked every five minutes.”
“That explains it.” Drake would be able to review assorted website alterations, both to defame Marinette and to remove the defamation. He might be able to begin to understand. “He finds it absurdly difficult even to research your prior schooling –”
Her expression cleared. “Oh, that’s still going on? Well, you can tell him from me that particular problem isn’t personal – to him or about me. It’s to do with Paris.”
He frowned. “Why?” Paris had no relevance. It – irked him.
Bruce was unreasonably wary of the place…
“That’s why.” She tapped the side of his head. “That reluctance to even think about a major capital city. It’s unnatural, and before you ask, I didn’t cause it.”
“Some enchantment? It must do wonders for footfall at the Louvre.”
She paused partway through filling her tea kettle. “Perfect. The Louvre’s always been a good place to start. Chai, oolong or green?”
Back home later, he lay back on his bed, stared at the ornamental cornicing around the ceiling and thought.
Paris. Paris.
The Louvre.
The Mona Lisa. Half a dozen other da Vinci works. The Winged Victory: if only her head had survived. One of the world’s biggest collections of ancient Egyptian artefacts. A decent collection of historical weaponry (study it, see how the ancients progressed in their knowledge of how best to kill each other).
That glass pyramid on a hundred tourist posters.
The glass pyramid.
There. An inconsistency rubbed at the inside of his brain, as if he’d part-forgotten how to think, as if words or concepts were rendered meaningless and crept to him only in fragments.
A childhood memory of the Louvre’s pyramid, stark and bleak under the baking sun. A recent poster of the Louvre’s pyramid, nestled into a flower-sea. They did not match.
Any city could cover itself in ornamental flowerpots and dig up half its streets to create cycle paths. But the greenery resolutely inserted itself into his memory, as if he himself had smelt the blooms and heard bees buzzing at the great museum’s entryway. They had not been there. They had not been there.
He had been there, in his blood-soaked year, trotting along bare pale flagstones towards the pyramid at his mother’s side (nobody suspected a woman and her young son visiting a museum of any ill intent whatsoever), passing statuary and palatial masonry, petrol fumes heavy in the air alongside the scent of too many sweating people. The two images collided in his head, the flowers were there versus they definitely weren’t: Mother would have worn a floral scent that day instead of a musky one had Paris already been covered in street gardens.
In his memory, they waved to the Winged Victory as young boys and their mothers might naturally do, before heading through the Egyptian Antiquities section to reach Near Eastern Antiquities. In his memory, a pink-haired half-woman half-rabbit dressed in white and blue spandex waved from her spot enthroned between the Great Sphinx of Tanis’s feet, and laid a finger across her lips. Her wink said, I wasn’t there that day, no more so than those flowerbeds outside.
Something cracked, deep inside his mind. The memory-flowers withered and wisped away on the wind. Well done, said the pink-haired spandex wearer as she leapt from the Sphinx. Well done, said a nine-tailed kitsune trotting along Himalayan paths towards the sky. Well done, said an idealised painting of Marinette, crowned with red, white and blue stars.
Paris. Papillon, Hawk Moth, self-renamed Monarch. And who had opposed Monarch?
The Miraculers, said the memory behind the cracks.
He sat up, opened a fresh browser window and, ninety blank seconds later, spoofed his IP address to make it seem as if he were in France.
*
“Paris changed,” he said to Marinette the following afternoon in a coffee shop, after she’d let him win their usual game of who got to sit facing the door with their back to the wall. (He always took his victories as a sign of trust.) “In an – unnatural way.”
She nodded and sipped. Froth gathered on her lips. “A conflict ended. New beginning.”
In a moment he would scratch that itch to wipe the foam off her lips and then he’d be too distracted for this. “The internet updated to backdate the changes. My memory tried to backdate the changes. That is not possible.”
She tilted her head to one side. “If you could make your wildest dreams happen, wouldn’t you make them consistent? Maybe this is the creator in me, but if I did the impossible, I’d tidy up after myself.”
Not in people’s brains!
“It still doesn’t make sense. One moment the news was all, Monarch threatens Paris and then suddenly Monarch is defeated. Monarch – as Hawk Moth – nearly started a nuclear war. There should have been fanfare. There should have been parades, celebrations, a week of international defence meetings with Ladybug, months of analysis from arms experts and superhero experts and whoever knows what. Instead, there was muted celebration in Paris alone, we’re glad it’s over: now, let’s carry on as we were.”
“Hmm.” Marinette stared intently into the wall tiling beside his shoulder. “Someone’s taking pictures. Three tables back and one to my left: your right.”
Damian glared in the surreptitious voyeur’s direction. “Good catch.” He should have caught that himself. Situational awareness!
“Tricks I picked up when I was dating Adrien – though the police deleted any photos his fans took. French privacy laws. It might be worse for him now: he’s switched to acting.” She shrugged her jacket back on. “Come to mine?”
They spent the few minutes walking to her apartment in silence, watching for imminent threats, but as she unlocked her door, he said, “Why didn’t the Justice League help with him?”
“A few of Ladybug’s colleagues suggested calling them.” Her mouth pursed in an embarrassed little expression. “There were risks and benefits to bringing them in. But then the Monarch situation resolved, in such a way that most people worldwide forgot his akumas altogether, and then – the new situation was very uncertain. Much less of an obvious threat that the League might have been inclined to counter.”
“Meanwhile Ladybug’s team was left to clear up.”
She pushed aside a pile of half-worked fabric and settled them down onto her fluffy grey couch. Potted vines trailed down the window frame behind her, as if reaching for an earth goddess. “They were used to that. I don’t know how they would have reacted if anyone else had come in and taken over. The Parisian police tried at first – you can find video of the Stoneheart incident online, if you use a French VPN – they learnt quickly that they could help best by keeping civilians away from battles.”
“Did you know any of her team?”
“Chat Noir and I grew quite close: he would come to my balcony to talk. I think he was lonely in his civilian life.” She sank back against her cushions and drew her knees up to her chest, staring at a sketchbook of costume designs that lay open on the coffee table. “I miss him… Ladybug’s first Bee bullied me at school: I only know because she revealed her identity. The others never unmasked to the public. Hawk Moth unmasked a few of them once, but Ladybug’s Cure wiped civilians’ memory of who they were. She said in an interview once that most of her team never knew each other’s true identities, or even told their families. I imagine the dating couples confessed to each other – you can’t kiss your girlfriend under the Eiffel Tower during Paris Pride and then pretend to be single outside the suit, or keep claiming you have a partner you can’t produce. But, no; in general, they hid themselves.”
“No one can hide that part of themself forever.”
He could not hide Robin forever.
His phone pinged: Cassandra. Her text merely said SEE YOU LATER, but it served as a reminder that the pair of them had patrol tonight and he needed to go home to prepare.
“I’m hiding truths from you,” he said abruptly.
She nodded. “I know. And I expect they aren’t all your secrets, and whenever you’re ready to share, I’m here.”
As he drove across the bridge out of Gotham City proper towards the manor, he contemplated having to work with Batman without knowing who was under the mask, or trying to live with his siblings and hide his secret identity from them. Or, indeed, hiding from Alfred. Alfred was invaluable to their work.
If Marinette somehow learnt that he was Robin, even if he didn’t tell her that his father was Batman, she’d likely work it out from there, and…
What luck that he might expect a chance to beat up a mugger or two this evening.
Damian parked in the upper garage, then evaded all trace of siblings on the way up to his bedroom. He sighed at the sight of a folded paper propped against his pillow. Again. He pulled his driving gloves back on, retrieved the paper between finger and thumb, and withdrew to the upstairs workroom and ran it under the mass spectrometer. No trace of any of the ten most common letter poisons, or any other contaminant barring ink.
Some of his family would advise him to throw the thing straight in the shredder unread: others would prefer to find out whatever whoever it was wanted to say to him. He fell into the camp of preferring to know, even if it was another of the letters asserting Marinette was cheating on him with all his brothers and the cow: one day he’d find a fingerprint on one of those.
He unfolded the note.
TICK-TOCK
Some threat letter this was. Not even original. He’d received an identical one a week ago.
“Pennyworth,” he called down into the hall, “did you see this arrive?”
The butler glanced up at the paper in Damian’s hand and sniffed. “Master Damian, if I had seen it arrive, you would not have done so.”
Damian harrumphed, and reviewed the corridor security camera and an outside camera trained near his window, and again, and again. Concern spread across his belly with each repetition.
Nobody had entered his room since he had left it that morning.
*
“Father,” he said during training the next day, “at what point in a relationship would you consider it safe to reveal your true identity to the person concerned?”
“I wouldn’t. Those of my lovers who know the truth worked it out for themselves. I would never tell anyone the truth unless they were already allied with us.” He returned his practice bokken to its stand. “Should I have cause for concern?”
“No. I value your advice.”
“Understood.”
*
Marinette got called away to California three days later (“Fashion emergency!”). Damian dropped her off at the airport, prepared to negotiate public prurience in the main departures lounge, wrong-footed when she beelined for the FBO terminal instead. She had a small pink backpack of her own necessities and three heavy suitcases for her client. (“I may as well take what I have of phase two. Saves on courier charges.”)
“Are you sure you can’t come with me?” she said as a harried attendant loaded her luggage aboard the tiny private jet.
“I wish I could reschedule my commitments here.”
“I understand.” She kissed his cheek. “Good luck with everything. I’ll be back… probably on Tuesday. I hope my fingers haven’t turned into pincushions by then.”
The sky seemed a little cloudier when the plane door had closed on her.
“I hear your girl’s playing groupie on a rock tour,” Drake said sourly that evening as they prepared for patrol. “Surprised you’re not crawling up the walls.”
He had not told any of his family that Marinette was leaving, or where, or why. Of course Drake would ferret. “Why should I? She will return in a few days.”
“It must be a strange experience for you to trust someone.”
Robin tightened his mask. “Not that you would know much about that either.”
*
Marinette texted Damian at lunchtime on Tuesday announcing that she would be back just before four. He, in turn, announced to Alfred that the manor would need one extra cover for dinner that evening. It would be a well-attended meal: Grayson was in town, lining up with one of Todd’s infrequent supper appearances. They could be persuaded to play nice for a few hours.
His labs session ran until five. Marinette, a pastel zombie, staggered into his arms on the chemistry block’s steps, practically crushing a cardboard box she carried. He tapped the bags under her eyes, seemingly as large as the one on her back. “Have you been awake ever since you left?”
“Turns out I can’t sleep as well on coaches as I could when I was younger. I napped on the plane back. I dreamt I was that English leader guy who died when we lost at Trafalgar.”
“Lord Nelson?”
“Mmm, him. It was great. I was dying, so I was allowed to sleep anywhere I wanted.”
“You should sleep more.” Other people should care for her more.
She wiggled her eyebrows at him. “What’s good for the puppy is good for the kitten.”
“In English, we say, ‘what’s good for the goose is good for the gander’.” He had commitments. He had patrol, case reports, detective work. She had been sewing for someone who could afford other seamstresses.
“Oh, birds.” Her dimpled smile robbed the words of unintentional offensiveness. “You mentioned dinner?”
“I’m driving.”
He drove, on his motorbike, after checking it for sabotage (none. There was a reason he left it at Wayne Tower every day rather than at campus parking), with Marinette blissfully humming into his jacket and the cardboard presentation box perched precariously on the pillion, across the bridge and away from industrial gothic, past wetland rich with bird life, into his latter-day elf-kingdom, the greening vista of state forests and moneyed turf.
Marinette managed to fall up the steps to the front door. Damian caught her in one hand and her box in the other, and ushered her inside before any calamities could strike. Her gross motor coordination left much to be desired at times. Strange, when her fine motor control was so precise.
“Good afternoon, Alfred,” she burbled as the butler moved to intercept them. “I hope you’ve had a lovely week!”
“Why, yes, Miss Marinette. All the better for seeing you.”
Damian divested Marinette of her jacket and handed it to Alfred. “Is Richard here yet?”
“I believe he is in the den with Miss Stephanie.”
“Hey, Alfred,” a familiar voice said behind them, accompanied by familiar footfalls running up the steps. “Do you know how full the gas tanks –”
Drake stood in the doorway, a robot on pause, staring at Marinette in something less than dislike. Before she could parse the expression, Damian led her away and to the den.
A regular family party had assembled there, embedded in what passed for cosy comfort in a billionaire’s house. Todd was stretched out on one sofa, reading: he scowled when Damian and Marinette entered, but did not speak. Stephanie, in main possession of the other sofa, was giggling to Grayson about someone’s dreadful new hairdo while she and Cassandra, who was playing chess with their father to one side, finalised their plans for the evening using Sign. She brightened when Damian and Marinette entered. “Hey, Nettie. Did you have fun? Wow, you look tired.”
“Very much a working trip. I’m not heavy on souvenirs, but I did stop off at Xenon on my way back from the airport.” She retrieved her box from Damian.
Drake, entering behind them, loosened his tie and dumped his laptop bag on the side table by the door. “How was Nevada?” he enquired.
“Dessicated. I preferred California.” She passed Stephanie an eclair. “Luka says hi.” Her sidelong glance at Drake was more barbed than usual. “Didn’t you tell everyone he was my ex?”
“Don’t grind your teeth,” Damian advised Drake. “The dentist will ask awkward questions about workplace stress.” To Marinette he added, “I trust he is well.” Not that he cared for her ex-boyfriend. Playing the game of manners when Drake failed to do so suited him.
“He is. He’s playing the Knights Stadium in a few weeks, and…” She sent him an impish smile. “I now have tickets.”
Drake sighed. “I’ll bite. How many?”
“Enough for all of us.” She peeked across at Bruce uncertainly, like a much younger woman. “Would you like to bring a plus one? I got comped a box.”
“How?” Todd demanded.
“Luka and I decided a long time ago it’s beneficial for exes to stay friends.” She smiled as if that explained everything.
A broad grin spread across Bruce’s face, as if he couldn’t see Drake making ‘no, no!’ motions behind Marinette’s back. “That sounds like an excellent idea. I’ll speak to my girlfriend: I’m sure she’d love to come.”
Whole family outing, to a rock concert, with Selina Kyle in tow. This sounded about as auspicious as that IKEA trip.
*
“The Clay trial got postponed again,” Commissioner Gordon said to Batman later that night on the roof of Gotham City’s central police station. The lamplight that glinted off his glasses frames left Batman in shadow, difficult to see on the inevitable CCTV cameras trained on them. Shouting and sirens and occasional bursts of music echoed through the streets around their rendezvous point, obscuring the sound of their voices. “Successful defence plea to submit new evidence. Eight hundred pages of it. The prosecution had to move to postpone to give themselves time to study it.”
The vigilante sighed. “I’ll see if I can find someone to keep Clay in the news every week or so till the new trial date. If they can’t face trial in a court of law, they can face it in the court of public opinion.”
“That compromises a legal trial – but I see what you mean. Any progress with the Williamson issue?”
“I’ve a friend up in Amnesty Bay who’s keeping an eye on the Georges Bank traffic. He thinks we’re close to some solid evidence. Probably fentanyl rather than cocaine, though it’s a roundabout route they’re taking.”
“Roundabout’s fine by them if they can put capsules inside some apparently legitimate haul for the Gotham market.”
Batman grinned. “Got any cops who need a face-full of fish guts?” Jim smiled back, though he didn’t really feel like it.
Even Batman didn’t always understand the nuances in his world. One beat cop made nice with gangsters and rogues because he was out for a cut. A second beat cop made nice with gangsters and rogues because nobody, but nobody, was better at finding an off-the-rails hitman or a new-to-town drug operation than a crime king whose street cred was at risk. One beat cop bailed prostitutes out of jail because she moonlighted as their pimp. A second beat cop bailed prostitutes out of jail because they were her confidential informants. Actus reus did not equal mens rea.
“I’ll see you later, Commissioner. Got a planned breakout to foil.”
“You couldn’t have invited me?”
Batman’s smile was grim. “This one won’t meet legal standards of intervention.”
“But how did you –”
Batman was no longer there.
He should have brought up Officer Tipping earlier in their conversation: some extra detective work on the case would have been welcome. Officer Tipping had been killed in a training accident. Tragic business: armourer sent for retraining after blank and live bullets had been mixed up, according to the state investigator, but when Jim had asked for the case records, Gotham PD’s internal affairs department had been unable to find them. Bureaucratic mix-up. The kind of thing that happened all over the place.
Except that Officer Tipping’s last investigation had been the reported gang rape of a woman by three fellow officers. Those records were missing too.
The Wall of Silence had been erected again.
On some nights, nights like this when the moon pressed close and the city glow seemed thick enough to choke a man, he wondered how human nature could divide as it had, rule-making, rule-keeping, rule-breaking, all in a tangle of moral filth, leaving him trying to clean a sewer with a mop and bucket. He had made a deal with himself a long time ago never to be worn down by futility. Yet here he now stood.
Arrest one minion and nothing happened. The kingpins and queenpins remained untouchable. Clear a gang off one street, and a week later another gang would have taken control. They didn’t have enough clean police officers, even with all his work, to manoeuvre the big players out of the way at the same time. And that was before the glacially progressing legal system got to work, or more accurately, did not, allowing so many to escape justice on one technicality or another, including that the system had run out of time to charge them.
And the technicalities were important, for the rule of law was critical to defence of the innocent.
But if only, if only, he could speed up the process… could know that he could rely on every one of his colleagues on the force and in the DA’s office…
It wasn’t as if criminals’ crimes came neatly printed on their faces for anyone to read.
(But what if they could?)
Impossible.
(How much is impossible? You know magic exists: you’ve seen it. Poison Ivy didn’t get that way by science alone.)
Actus reus did not equal mens rea. To assault, or even to kill, could be done legally in self-defence. Law was not morality, and the morally inclined could feel deep guilt for an act of violent self-defence that did not break the law. Equally, the morally inclined could feel zero guilt about breaking immoral laws, even if by law they were criminals – and an immoral person could feel zero guilt in any circumstances, even, for instance, congresspeople and DAs who took bribes disguised as campaign funds so that no law had been broken. Mens rea did not equal actus reus.
(But if… if there were a foolproof way of using supernatural powers to connect criminals to their crimes, criminal bosses would face much quicker routes to prosecution. If it were proven that, say, a crime written on a criminal’s face was an accurate description of what had happened, the justice system would have to accept that as evidence.)
That was an awful lot of ifs. Pointless ifs, too. Nobody had that kind of power.
(Actually, they do.)
– nobody he knew had that kind of power: none of the Justice League with whom he had come into contact had it. The closest was Wonder Woman, who could compel anyone to tell the truth, but that was always the truth as the speaker saw it, which missed all required nuance. He needed nuance. He needed facts, even if verifiability required honest mystics.
(There are honest mystics in this world. One could find you.)
Nobody was that lucky.
(You are that lucky, James Gordon. You are that lucky.)