DC – I am Batman

"Global education," he said. Mrs. Brennan's chicken was good and the dining room was warm and he'd rehearsed this in the bathroom mirror for ten minutes like an idiot. "There are programs. London, Paris, Hong Kong. Languages, sciences, economics. Immersive. I'd graduate on time, just do it somewhere else."

Thomas put his fork down. He did it carefully, tines on the edge of the plate. Martha's fork hadn't stopped moving.

"You've been looking into this," Thomas said.

"For a while."

"Which programs?"

He named three. Two were real. The third was a framework he'd built himself by stitching together legitimate schools with the training gaps he needed to fill. He'd spent four months on the cover story. It was good. He knew it was good.

Thomas leaned back in his chair. His water glass was in his hand. He turned it twice, the ice clicking.

"You want to train," Thomas said. "You've been preparing for something since you were five years old."

The chicken was suddenly very interesting. He cut a piece. Ate it. Chewed more than necessary.

"It's a good education program."

"It is. It's also not why you want to leave."

Martha's knife scraped the plate. Clean, precise. She was cutting chicken into small squares. Even bites. Controlled motion. She didn't look up.

"Martha," Thomas said.

"The chicken's a little dry."

"Martha."

"Let him go."

Two words. She said them to the chicken, not to Thomas. Her knife kept moving. Cut, turn, cut. Her back was straight and she was paying for it. The crystal and the silver and the linen napkins and the chicken that was actually fine.

"I'll be okay," he said.

She looked up. Her eyes were dry and her chin was level and she said "I know" and she went back to cutting chicken and that was the conversation.

Alfred reported two days later, in the study, holding a tea tray he hadn't been asked to bring.

"Your mother has been reviewing the flower beds."

"At night?"

"Primarily between two and four in the morning."

Reviewing the flower beds. Crying. Martha Wayne didn't cry where anyone could see her, so she went to the garden at 2 AM and pulled weeds in the dark and the weeds were fine and the woman pulling them was not. He'd gotten that habit from someone, the not-letting-anyone-see-it, and now he knew who.

"She'll be okay," he said.

"She will, sir." Alfred set the tea down. "Eventually."

Julie found him at end-of-year assembly. Gotham Academy's gymnasium smelled like floor polish and body spray and the particular despair of four hundred teenagers in June. The headmaster was on stage saying something about horizons. A kid three rows up was asleep with his mouth open.

"So you're really going," Julie said.

She was in the chair next to his, same place she'd been since third grade. Her hair was longer now, past her shoulders, the brown that had never tried to be anything else. The horse pin was on her blazer. Different horse, same spot. She was chewing the end of her pencil.

"Yeah."

"For how long?"

"Couple years. Maybe more."

She nodded. The pencil went between her teeth. She bit down on it once, thinking, and then she pulled it out and looked at it.

"Don't change too much, okay?"

"I won't."

"You will." She said it flat, certain. A fact she'd observed and was reporting. "Just don't change into somebody I wouldn't recognize."

The headmaster said something about the future and the gymnasium clapped. The sleeping kid jerked awake and clapped two beats late.

Julie poked his shoulder. Her finger, firm, the grown-up version of the pencil-throw she'd been doing since the eraser theft in third grade. Agreement was a tap. Disagreement was a thrown pencil. This was goodbye, and she did it with one finger to his shoulder and a half-hug, one arm, quick, the most Julie thing. She smelled like pencil graphite and the stable.

"Write me," she said.

"I'll write you."

"You won't."

She was right. He'd mean to and he wouldn't and she knew it already. She picked up her bag and walked out of the gym and didn't look back.

Kate's letter arrived the third week of June.

White envelope, blocky handwriting that looked like it had been written next to a ruler. No return address, but the postmark was from New York. He opened it at the desk and the paper was plain and the handwriting was the same inside. Large, square, each letter standing up straight.

Bruce.

I'm at West Point. I've already outrun every upperclassman. I'm ahead of you. Catch up.

- K.

No filler. No information he didn't need. Left to right, grid cleared. He put the letter in the desk drawer on top of Zatanna's rabbit note and Sofia's birthday cards and the drawer was getting full.

Sofia chose the café. East side, near the bridge, the kind of place that had good espresso and bad everything else. He found her at the back table with her spine against the wall and clear sightlines to both exits. She was drinking espresso, not coffee, at fifteen, in a ceramic cup she held with her fingers on the rim, not the handle. Her hair was pulled back. Her clothes were expensive and plain and she wore them like a uniform she'd selected herself, each piece chosen for a reason she wouldn't explain.

She looked older than fifteen. Because of the stillness. She sat in the chair. Occupied it fully.

"You're leaving," she said. No preamble.

"How'd you know?"

"My father knows."

Carmine Falcone knew his travel plans before he'd told most of his friends. That meant what it meant.

"I came because I have something to tell you," she said. "Not because I wanted to say goodbye."

He waited.

"My father has been watching your father." She said it flat. "Thomas Wayne is building things Carmine Falcone considers his. The clinic, the East End development. The zoning changes. Your father thinks he's helping Gotham. My father thinks he's taking territory."

She picked up the espresso. Sipped. Put it down.

"I'm telling you this because you should know. Not because I'm choosing sides."

"Are you going to have to?"

Her mouth pressed thin. Same mouth that had almost smiled over pastries at the civic center. "Everyone in Gotham chooses sides eventually."

She reached into her jacket and took out a phone. Small, prepaid, cheap. She slid it across the table to him.

"Personal number. Separate from anything my father sees."

He looked at the phone. Looked at her. Fifteen years old, running a separate line her father didn't know about.

"In case you need someone who doesn't ask questions."

"Thank you, Sofia."

She nodded once. The espresso was finished. She stood, buttoned her jacket, and left. No hug. No goodbye. She walked out the front door and a black car was at the curb and someone opened the door for her and she got in without looking back.

He sat in the café for another five minutes. The espresso machine hissed. A man at the counter was reading a newspaper with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, the wrong pair, squinting at the sports page. The coffee was bad. He drank it anyway.

Zee came the last day.

She showed up on the terrace without Giovanni. First time. He didn't know if she'd walked or appeared. With Zee either was possible. She was wearing the denim jacket again, still too big, and her boots, and her hair was down and it was longer than last March. Past her shoulders. Past the spot where it had been when he'd last seen her.

He was taller than her now. The growth charts had done what growth charts did.

She didn't do the height check. She noticed, looked at his chin, looked away.

"So," she said.

"So."

A sugar bowl was sitting on the terrace railing from tea earlier. It wobbled, once, and then lifted about two inches off the stone and hovered there. Zee wasn't looking at it. She was looking at the garden. The bowl drifted, tilted, and settled back down.

"Leaking," he said.

"I always leak when I'm-" She stopped. Started over. "It happens. It's a- it happens."

She was fast-talking. Since the gala, since the coin trick and the royal dragon card game. Except now the fast-talking wasn't filling space. It was covering nerves.

"Dad says he'll visit Thomas in September. I'll come. Probably. I mean, you won't be here, so there's no- I'll come see your parents. Martha said I could- anyway."

"Zee."

She stopped talking. The sugar bowl lifted again. She pushed it down with her hand, physically, pressing the lid.

"I'm going to miss you."

She said it straight. Looking at the garden wall. The old brick, moss on the north side, crack near the gate. The wall where their hands had gone through in March. She said it without performance or cover and it cost her. Her jaw was set and her eyes were bright and she was holding very still.

"I'm going to miss you too," he said.

She turned and hugged him.

Her arms went around his neck. He was taller now and she had to reach up and her chin fit in the curve of his shoulder like it had been measured for the spot. Her hair was against his jaw and this close she smelled like static and something sweet, the same, and his arms went around her back.

Two seconds past friendly.

He counted. Her pulse was quick against his collarbone. Her fingers curled into the back of his shirt. The sugar bowl on the railing behind them was six inches off the stone and rotating slowly.

She let go. Stepped back. Her hands went to her hair, pushing it behind her ears.

"Your handwriting's terrible," she said. Her voice was half a register too high. Same retreat as March. "If you write me and I can't read it, that's on you."

"My handwriting's fine."

"Your handwriting looks like a doctor's. Which, Wayne family, I guess."

She was already walking toward the garden gate. Her shoulders were tight. She didn't look back.

The sugar bowl settled on the railing with a quiet clink.

He stood on the terrace and watched her go through the gate and turn left toward the drive. The garden wall was solid. The crack was still there. The moss was still on the north side. His shoulder was warm where her chin had been and he put his hands in his pockets and breathed.

The trunk appeared at eleven.

Old leather. Brass fittings, tarnished. It was sitting at the foot of his bed when he came upstairs after dinner. Mrs. Brennan's roast chicken for the last night, because Mrs. Brennan expressed love through poultry and tonight's chicken had been her masterpiece and he'd eaten two plates and she'd watched from the kitchen doorway and hadn't said a word.

He opened the trunk. Practical clothes, folded tight. A military first aid kit, compact, the real kind with sutures and painkillers and a field tourniquet. An emergency transmitter, shortwave, the size of a deck of cards. A phone with a Paris number programmed into it.

At the bottom, under everything, a leather journal. Dark brown, worn at the corners. He opened it to the first page.

Alfred's handwriting. Small, precise, perfectly level.

Notes on Master Bruce - Year One.

Alfred was standing in the doorway. He'd been standing there the whole time, probably.

"My daughter," Alfred said. "Julia. She'll keep an eye on you." A pause. "Don't tell her I said that."

"You have a daughter."

"I have many things I haven't mentioned, sir."

He closed the journal and put it back in the trunk. His throat was tight, the same tightness from the folder and the tea at thirteen.

"Thank you, Alfred."

"You are a good person doing a necessary thing."

He'd said that before. Two years ago. The folder and the tea and the entries all ending with Noted. It sounded different now. Heavier. Or maybe the same, and the boy hearing it was older.

"Goodnight, sir."

"Goodnight."

The door closed. The grandfather clock ticked. Two minutes fast. He sat on the edge of the bed with the trunk open in front of him and Mrs. Brennan's chicken warm in his stomach and the phone with the Paris number in his hand.

He closed the trunk. Latched it. Brass fittings clicking.

He had work to do.