DC – I am Batman

The Gotham Gazette ran it on page three. WAYNE HEIR SAVES PARENTS IN PARK ROW MUGGING. The photo was from a charity event two years ago, the whole family in front of the manor, Thomas in a suit and Martha in the blue dress and the boy between them looking like a boy. The article was mostly the mugging, some about Thomas's business, a couple of lines about Gotham's crime numbers. One paragraph about the boy. "Bruce Wayne, age eight, reportedly tackled the assailant." Reportedly. Like there was some question about whether an eight-year-old had thrown himself at a man with a gun.

Channel 8 ran a segment. Channel 4 did a longer one with a graphic of Park Row and a red dot where the alley was. A man from the Gotham Gazette's editorial board called the house and asked if the boy was available for comment and Thomas said no in a voice that could have frozen the phone line.

The phone rang for three days. Thomas handled most of it. Martha handled the rest. Alfred handled the ones Martha couldn't face, which was a number that grew each day and neither Thomas nor the boy mentioned it.

Thomas's response was money. It was always money, because Thomas Wayne was a man who fixed things by building better versions of them, and Park Row needed a better version of itself. He put funding into streetlights, zoning appeals, a free clinic on the corner of Fifth and Park. The plans came in folders that piled up on his study desk, and the boy saw them when he passed the open door at night. Renderings. Blueprints. The word FOUNDATION in block letters on every other page. Thomas stayed up later than he used to. The study light was on at midnight now, which it hadn't been before the alley.

Martha's response was different. She started the Wayne Crime Victims' Fund on a Tuesday, two weeks after the alley. Her project. Not Thomas's money, not his name. Hers. She made the calls herself and set the first meeting for the following Thursday and she came home from it with red eyes and a set to her jaw that the boy recognized from the library carpet. She went to four meetings in the first week. Five the next. She was turning the worst night of her life into a department and she was very good at it and the boy watched her do it. The way he watched Alfred check locks.

Detective Sarah Essen came to the house on the fourth day. Short. Compact build. Kept posture. Dark hair cut practical, no earrings, no ring. She sat in the study with a notebook and a pen and asked questions in a voice that didn't waste words. Had the boy seen the man before. Had the boy heard the man say anything besides "give me the necklace." Had the boy noticed anyone else in the alley. Had the man seemed to recognize the family or was it random.

No. No. No. He didn't know.

She wrote each answer in the notebook without looking up. Her handwriting was small and fast and she pressed hard enough that the pen probably left marks on the page beneath.

"Walk me through what happened when you ran at him."

"I hit his legs. He didn't fall. The gun went off."

"You hit his legs."

"His knees. I aimed for the back of his knees. I hit the front."

She looked at him. Her pen stopped moving.

"You aimed."

"I guess."

She wrote something else. Closed the notebook. Looked at the boy longer than the questions required.

"That was brave," she said. Flat.

"Thank you."

"You're eight?"

"Yes ma'am."

She looked at Thomas, who was standing by the desk. Then back at the boy. Her mouth pressed thin for half a second. Then she stood and shook Thomas's hand and left. The notepad had a coffee ring on the cover.

Thomas hired a security consultant the following week. A man named Sykes, ex-military, who walked through the manor room by room and made notes on a clipboard and suggested things like "reinforced entry points" and "motion-triggered perimeter lighting" and other phrases that sounded like they belonged in a different house. Sykes had a short firm handshake and shoes polished to a shine that said military even louder than the clipboard did. He spent three hours measuring windows and testing door frames and the boy followed him for the first hour, noting which entry points Sykes flagged and which ones he missed. He missed the service entrance and the garden door that stuck. The boy didn't mention it.

Martha said yes to all of it. Thomas said yes to most of it. Alfred said nothing about any of it and then doubled his own patrols without telling either of them.

Martha held him too long at bedtime.

She'd been doing it since the alley. Sitting on the edge of his bed, pushing the hair back from his forehead, but then not leaving. Staying. Her hand on his shoulder or his arm or just resting on the blanket next to him, and the lamp low, and the door cracked, and five minutes passing. Maybe ten. The room smelled like her soap and the laundry detergent Alfred used on the sheets and the faint electrical warmth of the bat nightlight.

She didn't say anything during the extra time. That was the part that made it heavy. If she'd said something he could have answered it. If she'd asked if he was okay he could have performed okay. But she just sat there, breathing, her weight making the mattress dip slightly toward her, and sometimes her hand found his hand under the blanket and held it, and her grip was tighter than it used to be.

One night she stayed until she thought he was asleep. He wasn't. He kept his breathing even and his eyes closed and he listened to her sit there for twelve minutes by the clock on the nightstand. When she finally stood, her knees cracked, and she whispered "goodnight" to what she thought was a sleeping child and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder and left. The hallway light cut a stripe across the floor and then the door clicked shut and he was alone.

She hadn't worn the pearls since. The pearl necklace was in a box on her dresser. He knew because he'd looked. The box was velvet, dark blue, and it sat next to a bottle of perfume and a photograph of Thomas on their wedding day. The pearls were inside, clasped, intact. They hadn't broken. In the story this was supposed to be, the necklace broke and the pearls scattered on the concrete and Martha Wayne died wearing them. In this story, the necklace was in a box and Martha Wayne was alive and she couldn't look at the pearls without her hands starting to shake.

He caught Alfred at two in the morning.

He'd woken up because the floorboard outside the bathroom creaked. Third on the left, near the baseboard. He knew all the floorboards by now. The creak was quiet enough that it could have been the house settling, except the house settled in the east wing and the creak was in the west hallway, and Alfred's room was at the end of the west hallway, and when he opened his door and looked out, Alfred was at the far end of the corridor, checking the kitchen entrance.

The boy watched him work. Front door, side door, kitchen, garage, service entrance. Alfred checked each lock with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything else, turning the deadbolt once and then testing the handle, moving to the next one. He'd always checked the locks once at night. Since the alley, he'd been doing it twice.

"You already checked those," the boy said from the doorway.

Alfred didn't startle. His hand paused on the service entrance bolt and then he turned and looked at the boy standing in the hallway in pajamas with bare feet on cold hardwood.

"I find a second pass provides peace of mind, sir."

"Yours or theirs?"

Alfred's mouth pressed into a line that could have been a smile if it had committed. "Mine, I expect."

They stood there. The hallway was dark and the floorboard creaked again under the boy's weight.

"Goodnight, Alfred."

"Goodnight, Master Bruce."

He started the journal a week later.

A composition notebook from the school supply closet, black and white marble cover, seventy pages. He wrote in a cipher he built himself. Language substitution layered over a positional key that shifted every third line. It wasn't unbreakable. A real cryptographer could crack it in a few hours. But it would look like gibberish to Martha if she found it, and Martha was the one who would look.

The first entry was a list. Names. Events. Threats.

Joker. Bane. Darkseid. Trigon. Brainiac. Ra's al Ghul. The things he could remember from a life that felt further away every month. Vague. Movie-level knowledge, fragments of storylines, the shapes of disasters without the details. He didn't know dates. He didn't know specifics. He knew the Joker existed or would exist and that the Joker was the worst of them. He knew Bane broke Batman's back in a story he'd half-watched at a friend's apartment. He knew Darkseid was alien and cosmic and the kind of threat that killed people by the millions. He knew there would be a man in blue who could fly, and a woman with a lasso who was stronger, and a kid who ran faster than light, and none of them would be enough by themselves.

The gaps in what he knew were bigger than the things he knew. But the gaps didn't change the math. The things were coming. This world needed someone standing between ordinary people and the things coming for them.

The second entry was shorter.

The Bruce Wayne this was supposed to be became Batman because his parents died in an alley. He had the grief to drive him. The rage. The obsession. I didn't have that. My parents were asleep down the hall and the pearl necklace was in a box on my mother's dresser and nobody died.

I was doing it anyway.

Because someone had to be ready. And I was the one who knew what was coming.

He closed the notebook and put it in the back of his closet, behind the Takahashi gear bag and a box of comic books he'd outgrown but kept because throwing them away would be what a kid would do and he was performing a kid and performing kids kept their old stuff.

The nightlight hummed. He'd outgrown it but kept it plugged in.