DC – I am Batman

The hands were wrong.

He knew that before he opened his eyes. The sheets were too smooth, cool and slippery against his skin in a way that meant real silk, and his fingers were too short when they curled into the fabric. Kid fingers. He opened his eyes and held them up against the light coming through curtains he'd never seen before and counted them, because that seemed like the kind of thing a person should verify when nothing else made sense.

Ten. All there. All about three inches long.

The ceiling was white plaster with crown molding. His ceiling had a brown water stain shaped like Florida and a smoke detector with a dead battery he'd been meaning to replace for four months. This ceiling looked like it cost more than his apartment.

He sat up. The bed was enormous. He was in the middle of it and his feet didn't reach halfway to the end. A canopy overhead, dark wood, carved with something. Birds, maybe. He didn't care about the birds. He cared about the portrait.

Over the mantle, in a gilded frame that probably had its own insurance policy, a man and a woman smiled out at the room. The man stood behind the woman with one hand on her shoulder. Dark suit, strong jaw, easy confidence in how he held himself. Doctor's hands. The woman sat with her ankles crossed and her chin slightly raised and looked like she was privately amused about having her portrait painted. Pearl necklace. Dark hair.

Thomas and Martha Wayne.

Alive.

His stomach dropped and kept going, straight through the mattress and into the foundation. He looked at the small hands again. Looked at the portrait again. Looked at the window where morning light was pouring through curtains that probably cost more than his car had been worth.

Had been. Past tense. Because his car and his apartment and his ceiling with the Florida stain were somewhere that wasn't here, and he was sitting in Bruce Wayne's childhood bed with Bruce Wayne's childhood body and the Wayne family portrait was staring at him from above the fireplace like a pop quiz he hadn't studied for.

He didn't scream. Points for that.

He did sit very still, breathing, listening to the house settle around him. Distant clock ticking. Closer, the sound of shoes on hardwood, a measured pace that he'd later learn was Alfred's.

Then he got out of bed, because staying in it wasn't going to unfuck any of this, and his feet hit cold floor, and he was maybe three and a half feet tall, and the door handle was at his eye level.

Great.

The manor had sixty-some rooms. He lost count after forty because the east wing kept folding back on itself and two of the hallways looked identical and he wasn't entirely sure the third-floor landing wasn't haunted. He cased it. Exits first. The front door, the kitchen entrance, a side door near the garden that stuck when you pushed it, a servants' entrance around back that nobody seemed to use. Windows that opened and windows that didn't. Which stairs went where. Where the hallways dead-ended.

Nobody was watching, so none of it had to make sense for a four-year-old.

The kitchen was warm and smelled like bread. A woman with floury hands and a red face looked down at him from a height that seemed impossible and said, "Up early, little master. Biscuits aren't ready yet." Mrs. Brennan. He'd learn her name properly in a few hours. Right now she was just the woman who called him little master and pressed a glass of milk into his hands like it was medicine.

He drank it. The body wanted milk. He was going to have to figure out which wants were his and which were leftover. The milk was fine. Cold, whole, a little sweet. He drank it standing in the kitchen doorway with his too-small feet on the tile and thought: I am drinking milk in Wayne Manor. In Gotham City. In whatever this is.

The milk didn't help with that.

In the study, he found the grandfather clock. Tall, dark-cased, pendulum swinging behind beveled glass. He watched it for a while because he knew what was behind it, or under it, or whatever the geography was. The cave. Years from now. But the clock face was what caught him. He checked it against the carriage clock on the desk and then against the mantle clock in the sitting room across the hall. The grandfather clock was two minutes fast.

Everyone always thought old clocks ran slow. This one was ahead by exactly two minutes, and from the consistency of the offset it had been that way for a while. He stood on his toes and looked at the face and the second hand and counted, and it was two minutes fast, and that was a small wrong thing in a day made of wrong things, and for some reason it was the detail that made him feel like he could breathe.

Alfred found him by the breakfast table. Or rather, Alfred materialized in the dining room, already holding a tray, already knowing the small person would be there. Toast, eggs, fruit. A jar of strawberry jam with a silver spoon in it.

"Good morning, Master Bruce."

The voice was British. Obviously. Dry, warm, precise. He set the tray down and the jam jar caught the light from the window and for a second the red was so bright it looked fake.

"Morning." His voice came out high and soft and not his. He'd been avoiding talking.

Alfred's eyes stayed on him a beat too long. Adjusting to a measurement that didn't match the one from yesterday.

Then it was gone, and Alfred was pouring juice.

He spread jam on the toast without thinking about it. Muscle memory that wasn't his. The strawberry hit his tongue and it was sweet and seedy and the body lit up with the small animal pleasure of a favorite food, and he didn't want it. He didn't like strawberry jam. Had never liked strawberry jam. The texture, the seeds, the way it sat. But the hands kept spreading and the mouth kept chewing and the disconnect between what the body wanted and what he wanted was so specific and so small and so relentlessly weird that he put the toast down and stared at it.

Alfred noticed. Alfred noticed everything. He didn't say anything about it.

Mrs. Avery arrived at ten. Thin, gray cardigan, glasses on a chain, the kind of posture that suggested she'd taught children who misbehaved and had strong opinions about it. She was his tutor, apparently. She set out blocks and picture books and asked him to sort shapes and name colors and tell her about the pictures in a book about farm animals.

He got the cow right. The pig. The horse. He said "chicken" for the rooster and she made a note. She asked him to count to twenty. He counted to twelve and pretended to lose track. She asked him to stack the blocks as high as he could. He built a tower of six and knocked it over on purpose, because a four-year-old would knock it over, and she made another note with a line between her eyebrows that meant the six was too many or the twelve was too quick or both.

"He's very focused," she told someone later. He heard it through the study door. "I'd like to have him assessed."

Flag one. Manage it. He spent the next session getting the cow wrong on purpose and scribbling outside the lines and asking to go to the bathroom twice.

Thomas Wayne found him at the grandfather clock in the afternoon.

He was standing on his toes again, looking at the face, not touching it. The pendulum swung and the tick was deep and steady and he liked the sound of it for reasons he couldn't name. Footsteps behind him, heavier than Alfred's, and then a large warm hand ruffled his hair and a voice said, "Fascinated by that old thing, huh?"

He turned and Thomas Wayne was looking down at him with an easy grin, kind eyes, the jaw from the portrait. So thoughtlessly alive. He had no idea how close he'd come to not being.

"It's fast," he said. The observation slipped out in a child's voice before he could catch it. Thomas blinked.

"Fast? No, I think your grandmother said it always ran a little slow. Being two minutes late was a Wayne family tradition, she used to say." He crouched down. Eye level. His hand still on his son's head. "Are you sure?"

"It's two minutes ahead of the one on your desk."

Thomas looked up at the clock. Looked at the study. Stood and walked in there and came back half a minute later with his eyebrows up.

"Well, I'll be damned. It's been fast this whole time and she never checked." He was grinning now, shaking his head over this small stupid thing, and he ruffled the boy's hair again and said, "Good eye, Bruce."

"Thank you, s-"

He swallowed the rest of it and turned it into a cough that wasn't very convincing.

Thomas didn't notice. Thomas was already heading back toward the study, shaking his head about his mother and the clock.

Alfred, standing in the hallway with a stack of folded linens, heard the catch. He kept walking. His hands shifted on the linens. Then he rounded the corner and was gone.

Martha came at bedtime.

She sat on the edge of his bed with the lamp low and the curtains drawn and she smelled like soap and flowers, and her hand was cool when she pushed his hair back from his forehead. She had dark eyes that didn't move past things quickly.

"You've been very quiet today," she said.

"I was exploring."

"Mm." She looked at him. Directly. "You know you can tell me if something's bothering you."

"Nothing's bothering me."

"You sat on the garden bench for twenty minutes this afternoon without moving." Her voice was light, but the observation wasn't. "You just sat there. Looking at the house."

He'd done that. The bench under the big oak in the garden, afternoon sun warm on his arms, and he'd looked at the manor from the outside and thought about how large it was and how many rooms and how many years and how all of it was real in a way that the milk and the jam and the clock were real, solid and physical and present, and he was in it. The bench had bird droppings on one end that someone had tried to scrub off. He'd sat on the clean end.

"I was thinking."

"About what?"

"The house." True enough. "It's really big."

The corners of Martha's mouth softened. She was reading him. Getting the details wrong about what she found, probably, but right that there was more to find.

"It is big," she said. "But it's ours. All the corners and hallways and rooms with the weird wallpaper. Even the bats."

"Bats?"

"In the garden sometimes. At dusk. Your father thinks they're wonderful." She leaned down and kissed his forehead and her lips were cool and dry. "Goodnight, Bruce."

"Goodnight."

She turned the lamp down further and left and the door stayed open a crack, and light from the hallway cut a thin yellow stripe across the floor.

He looked at the ceiling. Counted the tiles. Twelve. One had a crack running diagonally from corner to edge, hairline thin. Another had a faint water stain near the corner.

There was a nightlight plugged into the wall near the door. Shaped like a bat. Stubby wings, round body, two little ears. It cast a warm orange glow on the baseboard and made the bat's shadow stretch long across the floor.

Three years. Park Row. Joe Chill. A gun. Two people asleep down the hall who didn't know any of that was coming.

Three years to be ready.

The bat nightlight hummed against the outlet.

He stared at the ceiling for a long time.