DC – I am Batman

The Mark of Zorro was a good movie. He'd seen it before, in a life where it was just a movie and not the last thing the Wayne family watched before two of them died in an alley. The Monarch Theatre had red velvet seats and a ceiling painted with clouds that were peeling at the edges, and the projector was slightly out of focus for the first ten minutes until someone in the booth fixed it. Thomas bought popcorn. Martha shared hers. The boy sat between them in the dark and watched the swordfights and tried not to think about what was coming after.

The movie ended late. The lobby smelled like butter and carpet. A man in a Monarch Theatre polo was sweeping popcorn kernels near the concession stand and whistling something off-key. Thomas checked his watch.

"I want ice cream."

Thomas looked down. "Ice cream? It's nearly ten, Bruce."

"There's a place on Seventh. The one with the mint chip."

"At this hour?" Thomas looked at Martha. Martha shrugged. She was already pulling her coat on, the pearl necklace catching the lobby light, and she was alive, and they could go get ice cream and drive home and everything that happened next could just not happen.

"It's a school night," Thomas said. He checked his watch again. "We'll cut through Park Row. Car's on the other side."

Park Row. The words hit the inside of his chest.

He opened his mouth. He could say something. He could say he was tired, say his stomach hurt, say he wanted to go back for his gloves, anything to change the route, to put them on a different street, to make them go around the block. Four years of countdown and the redirect was a sentence away.

"Okay," he said.

Because he'd tried. "I want ice cream" was the redirect. It hadn't worked. And the rest of the plan, the plan he'd had since he was four years old and staring at a bat nightlight in a room that wasn't his, was simple. Be there. Don't freeze.

Thomas pushed through the side exit. Cold. December in Gotham. The street was wet from rain that had stopped an hour ago, and the puddles reflected the theatre marquee in broken strips of light. Martha took Thomas's arm. The boy walked between them.

Park Row.

The alley opened on the left. Brick walls on both sides, close enough that two people couldn't walk side by side comfortably. A dumpster halfway down, green, rusted at the bottom. Two street lamps. One working. The other was dead and the bulb was broken and nobody had fixed it because nobody fixed things on Park Row. The working lamp threw orange light on the wet ground and made the puddles look like copper.

He knew this alley. He'd known it for four years. In the dark, counting ceiling tiles, staring at a bat-shaped nightlight. Park Row. Joe Chill. A gun. Three years. Two years. One year. Zero.

Thomas walked into the alley without hesitating because Thomas Wayne walked through Gotham like it belonged to him, and in a lot of ways it did, and that confidence was the kind of thing that kept you safe in ninety-nine alleys out of a hundred. This was the hundredth.

The man stepped out from behind the dumpster at about forty feet.

Average height and build. A jacket that was too thin for December, dark, collar turned up. His face was pale and sharp and he was sweating even though it was cold. His right hand was at his side and there was a gun in it, a revolver, and when he raised it the barrel caught the orange light from the working street lamp.

"Give me the necklace."

Martha's hand tightened on Thomas's arm. Thomas stopped walking. His body shifted, angling slightly in front of Martha, the reflex of a man who'd never been robbed but knew where his wife was.

Forty feet. The gun was pointed at Martha's chest. Joe Chill's hand was shaking. The barrel made small circles in the air, tight and jittery. He was scared. Scared people with guns were worse than calm people with guns because calm people made decisions and scared people made mistakes.

Four years. This was four years.

He moved.

Eight years old. Sixty pounds. No martial arts worth anything because Takahashi had been teaching him balance and breathing for two years and none of that was applicable to charging a grown man with a firearm in a wet alley in December. He didn't have technique. He didn't have a plan. He had the knowledge that a gun pointed at his mother's chest was going to go off in the next fifteen seconds and the only thing between here and there was the decision to close the distance.

He ran. The ground was wet and his shoes slipped on the first step and he caught himself and kept going. Forty feet. Thirty. The alley was narrow and dark and the man hadn't looked down yet because the man was watching the adults and nobody watches the kid. Twenty feet. His legs were short and his stride was short and the distance closed slow enough that he had time to think about what a bullet would do to a body this size and then he stopped thinking.

He hit Chill at the knees.

Sixty pounds of eight-year-old into the legs of a man who wasn't expecting it. The impact was wrong. His shoulder hit the kneecap instead of the back of the knee and the angle was bad and it hurt and Chill stumbled but didn't fall. The gun jerked. The sound was enormous. The muzzle flash was white and orange and it lit the alley for a fraction of a second and then it was dark again and there was brick dust in the air and the bullet had hit the wall six inches above Martha's head.

Chill's knee came up and caught him in the chest and he went down. Hard. The ground was wet concrete and his elbow hit first and the pain went from his arm to his jaw and his vision blurred.

Thomas hit Chill from behind. Two hundred and ten pounds of former college athlete who'd just watched his son throw himself at a man with a gun. The tackle was better than the boy's. Chill went face-first into the wet concrete and the gun skittered out of his hand and spun across the ground and came to rest against the base of the dumpster.

Martha was screaming. Thomas was on top of Chill with his knee in the man's back and his hand on the man's wrist and he was saying something but the boy couldn't hear it because his ears were ringing from the gunshot and everything sounded like it was happening underwater.

He sat up. His elbow was bleeding. His chest hurt where the knee had hit. Martha was already moving, pulling her phone from her purse with shaking hands, and he got to his feet and took the phone from her.

"Park Row, between Monarch Theatre and Fifth. One man, he had a gun, my dad has him pinned. We need police."

His voice was too calm. The 911 operator asked his name and he said "Bruce Wayne" and she asked if anyone was hurt and he said "No" and she said units were on the way and he said "Thank you" and hung up and gave Martha her phone back.

Martha was staring at him. Her hands were shaking. The pearls were on her neck, the clasp at the back catching the street light. She was alive. Thomas was on the ground with Chill pinned and he was alive. The bullet was in the wall. He could see the mark it had made in the brick, a pale gouge about the size of a dime, six inches above where Martha's head had been.

Four years of counting ceiling tiles and the margin was six inches and a child's shoulder hitting a kneecap at the wrong angle.

He sat down on the wet ground. His legs gave out.

There was a cat sitting on top of the dumpster, watching all of this. Orange tabby, one ear torn. It hadn't moved during any of it.

The police came fast. Two squad cars, lights on, no sirens. Chill was handcuffed and put in the back of the first car and he didn't say anything. Thomas was standing by the second car talking to a detective with a mustache and a notepad. Martha was sitting on the curb with a blanket around her shoulders that a paramedic had given her and she was holding the boy's hand and she had not let go since the police arrived.

Someone put a shock blanket around him too. Orange, crinkly, the kind that doesn't actually keep you warm but makes the person wrapping it around you feel like they did their part. He sat on the curb next to Martha and the blanket crinkled every time he breathed.

He was shaking. His hands first, then his arms, then his whole body. The elbow had stopped bleeding but his shirt was torn and there was concrete dust on his pants. His chest hurt where the knee had landed. His ears were still ringing.

He didn't think about that. He thought about the cat on the dumpster. The torn ear. How it hadn't flinched.

A car pulled up. Black. The engine sound was wrong for the police cars, quieter, better maintained. Alfred got out. He didn't rush. He walked across the wet street with the same unhurried pace he brought to everything, and he looked at the police cars and the detective and Thomas and Martha and the boy on the curb in the shock blanket, and his shoulders went rigid before he straightened them back, and he sat down next to him.

He didn't say anything.

He just sat there. His knee touching the boy's knee. His hands folded in his lap. The street lamp threw orange light on both of them and the shock blanket crinkled when either of them breathed. A paramedic came over and Alfred waved him off without looking.

After a while the boy stopped shaking.

Thomas came over. He crouched in front of them, his knees on the wet ground. His jaw was tight and his eyes were wet and his mouth kept starting words that didn't come out. He put his hands on the boy's shoulders and squeezed once, hard, the way he'd squeezed Carmine Falcone's hand at the benefit except this time he meant it, and then he pulled the boy against his chest and held him.

"You're okay," Thomas said. His voice was thick. "You're okay."

He was. He was okay. His elbow was scraped and his chest hurt and his ears were ringing and his hands were still shaking and his mother was alive and his father was alive and the bullet was in the wall and he was okay.

Martha came and sat on his other side and put her arm around both of them and nobody said anything for a while and the cat on the dumpster cleaned its torn ear.