DC – I am Batman

Mail came on a Tuesday, carried up the mountain by a League courier who moved fast enough that nobody saw him arrive and quiet enough that nobody heard him leave. A canvas satchel left on the stone bench outside the sleeping quarters. Letters and a package.

He brought them inside and sat on the cot and sorted them by handwriting.

Zatanna's was a fat envelope with a tea stain on the corner and handwriting that leaned forward, always chasing the next word. Three pages, front and back.

So I can talk to birds now. Not WELL. It turns out they're rude. Bruce, they're ALL rude. Pigeons are the worst. One on the fire escape called my hat stupid. I didn't even know birds had opinions about hats. Crows are okay. They respect that I tried. Sparrows don't listen to anyone, which, honestly, fair.

There's a boy in chem who keeps asking to study. Jared something. He has nice hair and no personality. I'm ignoring it. Don't say anything.

The handwriting got smaller for the next part.

I've been thinking about the garden wall.

Then larger, correcting, as if the pen had panicked:

WRITE LONGER LETTERS. I mean it. Two pages minimum. I'm counting.

She signed it Zee with a drawing in the margin. Speech bubble: I'm coming to find you if you don't write back.

Sofia's was a white card on heavy stock, careful handwriting, each letter placed with the same precision she used for everything.

Father took me to a dinner last week. The kind where nobody eats because eating would mean looking away. He introduced me to people. Used my full name. Kept his hand on my shoulder the entire time.

I'm being shown a door. I haven't walked through it yet.

Your father's clinic was on the news again. Dad didn't watch it this time. He turned off the television.

Carmine showing Sofia his world. Hand on shoulder, claiming her in front of his people. The door was the Falcone operation. Thomas's clinic on the news, and Carmine not watching meant he'd stopped measuring and started deciding. The television turned off meant Carmine had made a choice about the Waynes.

Julie's was on notebook paper. A horse doodle in the margin, rough lines, the kind of drawing someone does while on the phone.

Prom happened. Marcus Webb asked me. I said no and he was a kicked puppy and then asked Priya Kapoor instead so I think he'll survive.

Went with friends. Danced badly. Katie wore heels for the first time and fell into the punch bowl which was honestly the highlight.

Gotham feels smaller since you left. Not worse. Just smaller. Like the walls moved in a couple of inches.

Butterscotch is still alive. Still hates everyone. Dogs are still better.

She drew a small smiley face at the bottom. No signature.

Kate's was half a page on West Point stationery, blocky handwriting, ruler-straight margins.

Top of my class in marksmanship. Outshot every upperclassman. Don't fall behind.

- K

Sixty words. Sixty-two if you counted the signature. She'd probably counted.

Alfred's was cream paper in a cream envelope, the penmanship precise enough to engrave.

Thomas was running for city council. The East End redevelopment had drawn attention. Attention from other quarters, which in Alfred's vocabulary meant Falcone, and which aligned with what Sofia's letter had just told him from the other side. Mrs. Brennan was well. She'd enclosed her lamb stew recipe, which Alfred had copied in his own hand because Mrs. Brennan's handwriting was, per Alfred, enthusiastic but unreliable. The grandfather clock was still two minutes ahead.

At the bottom, in slightly smaller script: Martha asks about you every evening. I tell her you are learning. She asks what. I tell her everything I am permitted to tell her, which is not enough, and she knows it.

Julia's was a single page. Cream paper, precise penmanship. A photograph paper-clipped to the back.

Embassy reception in Geneva. The ambassador's wife called me dear. I let her.

Ducard sends a nod. His word. I added a handshake on your behalf. He said that was too much.

Paris is still Paris. The flat still leaks. Madame Villiers asks about you. The dog doesn't.

The photograph was four by six, glossy, slightly bent at one corner. Embassy event. Julia in a cocktail dress, dark blue, cut at the collarbone. Her hair was down. Longer than it had been in Paris, past her shoulders now. Professional smile for whoever was holding the camera. Her hand was at her side and the watch band covered the scar on her wrist.

On the back, in her handwriting: In case you forgot what civilization looks like.

The collarbone where the dress cut. The watch band. The hair past her shoulders, loose, the way he'd only seen it once at the auction on the Left Bank. Her eyes were on the camera and the smile was professional but the angle of her jaw was less guarded than anything he'd ever seen from her in person.

The door opened.

Talia stood in the frame. Her eyes went from his face to the photograph in his hand and her jaw set.

"Let's go."

She turned and walked toward the south yard and he put the photo back in the envelope and followed her.

The sparring lasted an hour. She hit harder than she had in two weeks. Every strike had extra behind it and she wasn't pulling at the end of combinations. A knee feint turned into a real knee that caught his hip and he felt it through the next three exchanges. When she swept him and he went down she stood over him for a full second before resetting, her breathing tight, her mouth a line.

He got up. She came again. More aggression than technique. He caught her wrist on the fourth strike and redirected and she pulled free harder than she needed to.

"You're hitting angry."

"I'm hitting accurately." Her jaw was tight. "Again."

He didn't mention it. She didn't mention it.

The safehouse was in the village two miles down the mountain. Stone building, one room, a wooden table and two chairs and a cold woodstove that someone had stocked with kindling but not lit. The window faced east and the afternoon light came through it at an angle that put a stripe across the table. He got there early and made tea that tasted like the water, which tasted like the pipes, which tasted like copper.

Julia arrived at three. Different from Paris. Sharper in the face. The baby fat that had still been there at nineteen was gone and what was underneath was angular and clear and watching everything. She wore a field jacket over a dark shirt and her boots were muddy from the trail and she looked like she'd walked the two miles from wherever she'd parked without slowing down.

Her hair was past her shoulders.

"You've gotten broader," she said, looking at his shoulders. Held the look a beat too long. Looked away. Pulled out the chair across from him and sat down like she'd been sitting across from him at tables her entire life.

"And you haven't cut your hair."

"I should."

"Don't."

It came out before the filter engaged. Just the word, flat, more honest than he'd intended. She had one hand on her teacup and the other on the table and her fingers stopped moving.

"Operational recommendation?"

"Something like that."

Her mouth pulled sideways and she poured tea she hadn't been offered and they sat across the wooden table. Same as Paris, except they were both older and the table was worse and the tea was worse.

Three hours. She was sharper than Paris and the sharpness suited her. She'd been running operations in Geneva, the kind she couldn't name and he didn't ask about. Ducard had sent her on a solo job in Lisbon that went sideways and she'd extracted herself and two assets and broken her wrist doing it. The wrist was healed. She flexed it once to show him, rotating it slowly, and the scar under the watch band was still there.

"Ducard says you learn too fast."

"That a complaint?"

"From him? Highest form of praise. He said the same thing about me once." She drank her tea and made a face. "This is terrible."

"The water tastes like the pipes."

"The water tastes like a war crime."

He told her about Shiva. About the cascade reading, the forty-second fight, the sixty-two BPM that shouldn't have been sixty-two. She listened with her chin on her hand and her tea going cold. When he finished she said "You're doing the thing again."

"What thing?"

"Telling me the training without telling me why."

He drank his tea. She was right and he didn't have a version of "Everything" that worked for Julia. Julia wasn't Talia. She operated at the scale of one person across the table from her.

"I tell Alfred you're not what he sent me to watch," she said. "You're something else. I haven't figured out what yet. But whatever it is, it's not the boy he described in the letter."

"What did he describe?"

"A good lad with a peculiar intensity about preparation." She did Alfred's voice. Nailed it. "He wasn't wrong. He just wasn't complete."

The light from the window was going orange. She stood up. Put on her jacket. The hair fell across her shoulder and the ends curled slightly from the humidity and she pushed it behind her ear with two fingers.

"Same time next month?"

"Yeah."

She walked out. The tea was cold. The chair across from him had a scuff on the back where her jacket button had rubbed the wood.

He sat there for a while. Then he walked back up the mountain in the dark. The compound lights were visible from about a mile out, small and warm against the black slope. He went to his quarters and took out the journal from the bottom of his bag.

Year Two.

The photograph was still in the envelope. He left it there.