DC – I am Batman

The trick to losing at chess was not the losing. It was the losing badly enough.

Alfred had taught him the rules on a Tuesday in late October, the board set up on the kitchen table because the study was being repainted. The smell of fresh enamel carried from two rooms away, sharp and chemical, and Mrs. Brennan kept opening windows even though it was cold enough that she had to wear a sweater over her apron. Alfred explained the pieces with the patience of a man who'd taught plenty of children plenty of things and expected this one to need the same three repetitions everyone else did. The knight moves in an L. The bishop runs diagonal. The queen goes where she likes.

He won in twelve moves.

Alfred's hand stopped halfway to his rook. He looked at the board. Looked at the boy. The boy looked back with a face he hoped said "lucky guess" but probably said something else, because Alfred sat very still for about four seconds, which was the longest four seconds of either of their lives, and then he said, "Well played, Master Bruce," in a voice that gave away nothing.

The next game, he lost in twenty-two moves. He fidgeted after move six. Let his eyes wander to the window after move ten. Made two mistakes that looked like a five-year-old getting bored and not like a five-year-old who'd calculated that losing by this specific margin on this specific timeline would register as "bright kid whose attention drifted" and not "adult intelligence wearing a child's face."

Alfred won and said nothing. He reset the board with the same unhurried precision he brought to folding napkins and said, "Another?"

"I'm bored."

"Of course you are, sir." He put the pieces away. When he stood to clear the table, his hand paused on the white king, his thumb pressing the top of the piece. He hadn't expected to lose it.

But he didn't say anything about it. Alfred never said anything about the things he noticed. He just noticed them and adjusted, and the adjustments were so quiet you could miss them if you weren't paying attention. The books that appeared in the study, slightly harder than the ones Mrs. Avery assigned. The globe that showed up in his room, unprompted, with a ribbon around it. A week later, the chess set migrated from the kitchen to the hallway table outside his bedroom, that neither of them mentioned.

The Leclercq dinner was in January. One of Thomas's charity things, held at the house because Martha liked hosting more than she liked being hosted, and because Wayne Manor had a dining room that seated thirty-two and most restaurants didn't. The Leclercqs were old Gotham money, or what Gotham called old money. Rich since before the last earthquake.

He sat at the children's end of the table. Shorter chairs, same table, and ate roast chicken and green beans and did not look at the strawberry tart that Mrs. Brennan had made because the body wanted it and he didn't and this war was ongoing.

Madame Leclercq leaned across the table and said something to him in French. He didn't remember deciding to answer. The words just came out, the pronunciation clean, the grammar correct, because he'd been absorbing French from a tutor for six months and quietly pushing the vocabulary further when nobody was looking, and the combination produced a five-year-old who answered a conversational question in fluent French at a dinner party.

The table went quiet. The particular quiet of twelve adults who all noticed the same thing at the same time.

"Mon fils le polyglotte," Thomas said, grinning. My son the polyglot. He was delighted. Showing off and didn't care who knew it, and his hand found the boy's shoulder and squeezed.

Martha, at the other end of the table, was not grinning. She was watching. Her wine glass was halfway to her mouth and it stayed there, and her eyes had that focused-but-still quality they got when she was collecting information, and the information was her son.

He knocked his water glass over three minutes later. On purpose. The scramble to mop it up covered the next five minutes and by the time the conversation resumed nobody was thinking about the French anymore. Except Martha.

Mr. Takahashi was a small man with square hands and a face that looked like it had been carved from granite. He ran a dojo in Gotham Heights, three blocks from the hospital where Thomas worked, and he charged a rate that meant his students were either serious or rich. The Waynes were both.

"Saw it on TV," was the answer to why Bruce wanted martial arts. Thomas bought it. Martha probably didn't, but martial arts was one of those activities parents approved of because it taught discipline and respect and other words adults put on brochures, so she signed the form.

The first class, Takahashi lined the kids up and told them to stand still. Feet shoulder-width. Arms at their sides. Just stand. The other kids didn't last long before they started shifting, scratching, looking around. One kid sat down. Another one started crying, quietly, because standing still when you're five is a kind of torture adults forget about.

He stood still for twenty minutes.

He didn't mean to. The body was comfortable. The position was natural. His breathing settled, even and slow and he was thinking about the Crime Alley timeline and whether the Monarch Theatre still showed classic movies and how old Joe Chill was right now, probably, walking around Gotham somewhere with a gun he hadn't used yet, and when he came back to the room Takahashi was standing in front of him, watching.

Mrs. Avery would have reached for her notebook. Martha would have searched for the thread that connected this to everything else. Takahashi just looked at him. Unhurried. His eyes moved from the boy's feet to his knees to his spine to his shoulders, checking alignment he'd never taught, and his mouth was a flat line.

"Good," Takahashi said. Just that. Then he moved on to the next kid.

He started fidgeting about halfway through the next session. Let his weight shift. Scratched his ear. Looked around the room. Takahashi noticed that too. Noticed the change. His eyes came back to the boy one extra time during the cool-down stretches, and they stayed a beat longer than they needed to.

A woman in the strip mall parking lot was arguing with a vending machine when he came out. Really going at it, slapping the side panel with her palm, saying something he couldn't hear through the glass doors. She got her drink on the fourth hit. He watched the whole thing for no reason.

Martha found him in the library at midnight.

He hadn't heard her coming, which was the first problem. The second problem was that he was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Gray's Anatomy open on his lap, and not the television show, because this was 1985 and that show didn't exist yet, but the textbook, the real one, the one with the anatomical plates and the detailed descriptions of the musculoskeletal system, and he was on the section about the rotator cuff, and he was five.

The light from the hallway fell across the carpet and he looked up and she was standing in the doorway in her robe with her hair down and her arms crossed and she was looking at him with an expression he couldn't dodge.

"I couldn't sleep," he said.

"You're reading Henry Gray's anatomy textbook."

"It has pictures."

"Of the rotator cuff."

He didn't have a good answer for that. Neither of them said anything for a few seconds and his cover was coming apart, all the careful work of the past year and a half, the deliberately wrong answers and the fidgeting and the knocked-over water glasses and the cow-chicken swap, and none of it was going to survive Martha Wayne finding her five-year-old reading medical texts at midnight with the posture of someone who understood what he was looking at.

She crossed the room. Sat down next to him on the carpet. She was warm next to him and she smelled like soap and that same floral thing from before and her knee touched his and she looked at the open page and then she looked at him.

"You're a very old little boy, aren't you?"

She said it fondly. A dog smarter than it should be. A house with more personality than the people in it. An observation she'd been sitting on since the garden bench, or since the chess, or since the French, or since the very first morning when he'd sat too still at breakfast and Alfred had noticed and she'd noticed Alfred noticing.

He didn't say anything. His throat was tight and the book was heavy on his lap and she was right. She was so close to right that the truth was practically touching the back of his teeth.

"It's okay." She took the book. Closed it gently. "Some children are just like that."

She stood and put Gray's Anatomy on the top shelf. The very top shelf. The one a five-year-old couldn't reach without a stepladder, and the stepladder was in the kitchen, and she knew that.

"Bed," she said.

He went to bed. She watched him walk down the hall and her eyes were on his back the whole way, and when he turned the corner he heard her pick up the phone in the hallway and dial and say, very quietly, "Thomas? No, everything's fine. We should talk about Bruce."

He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. He didn't need to count anymore. Twelve. He knew.

The cover needed work. Getting things wrong on purpose was only half of it. He had to get things wrong the right way, at the right frequency, with the right body language. An adult pretending to be a child who was pretending to be normal. Any layer slipping would bring the whole thing down.

Mrs. Avery still wanted him tested. She'd brought it up twice more since last year, and each time Thomas had said "He's just bright, Sandra" and Martha had said nothing, which was worse than if she'd agreed. The French at the dinner had been sloppy. Lazy. He'd let the words come out without filtering them and the result was a five-year-old producing a sentence in French that a five-year-old shouldn't have been able to produce, at a table full of people who'd remember it. The chess had been stupid. Twelve moves. He might as well have held up a sign.

And now Martha had a data point she wouldn't forget, because Martha didn't forget things, and the book on the top shelf was going to stay there like evidence she was too kind to use and too smart to throw away.

He was getting better at it. The stumble. The deliberate mistake. The wrong answer delivered with the right body language. Writing badly enough. It was its own kind of skill, harder than being smart, because being smart just meant knowing things and the stumble meant knowing things and then convincingly pretending not to. In front of people who loved you. Who were paying attention because they loved you.

The hard part wasn't the performance. It was making the performance invisible. And the quiet terror underneath it, every time Martha looked at him as she had on the library carpet, that she'd stop being kind about it and just ask: Who are you?

The nightlight by the door threw its bat-shaped shadow across the floor, longer in winter because the angle was lower. Two years.