DC – I am Batman

His knuckles were white on the railing before he understood why.

A man had come through the main gate on foot, which meant he'd walked the last two miles including the rock face, and he wasn't breathing hard. Compact man, maybe five-eight, the kind of build that disappeared in a crowd. Brown hair going grey at the temples. Face that could have been a contractor or an accountant or the guy behind you in line at a hardware store.

His hands were different. Thick, scarred, and they hung at his sides with a particular stillness that he recognized because Shiva had the same stillness. The resting position was the ready position. Cain's nails were trimmed to the quick and there was a callus ridge across his right palm that came from a specific grip. He was carrying a bag over one shoulder and nothing about it looked like it contained anything besides clothes.

Ra's met him in the central courtyard. Brief. Professional. Two men who worked in adjacent businesses and occasionally needed each other's services. Cain was freelance, League-adjacent, and whatever arrangement they had involved protection that Ra's extended on a transactional basis.

The girl was behind him.

Small. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Muscle on an underfed frame, the kind of body that happened when someone trained every day and didn't eat enough. Her clothes fit badly. Dark pants a size too big, a shirt with sleeves that covered her hands. Black hair cut short and uneven, like someone had done it with a field knife and not cared about the result.

She stood the way Shiva stood. Still, centered, weight distributed. But where Shiva's stillness was mastery at rest, this girl was just still. Nothing else to be.

Her eyes moved across the courtyard. Entry points. Distances. The two League students near the fountain, the one by the archway, Talia on the far balcony. Ranking them. The way other kids counted stairs or read signs.

He was on the upper walkway when Cain walked her through the gate. Thirty feet away, one floor up, behind a pillar. She clocked him in under a second. Micro-adjustment in her stance, weight shifting two degrees toward his position, and then she assessed him and dismissed him and went back to mapping the courtyard.

She'd assessed every person in the yard by the time Ra's finished talking to Cain. Under a minute.

Her name was Cassandra.

He knew that secondhand. From a screen. Cassandra Cain. David Cain's daughter with Sandra Wu-San, raised without language, without touch, without anything human except combat. Cain had stripped out everything that made a kid a kid and replaced it with one thing: read bodies, predict movement, kill. She couldn't read a face that was smiling at her. She'd made her first kill at eight.

He gripped the railing. Knuckles white. Jaw locked.

This was the worst thing the foreknowledge had ever given him. Worse than Darkseid, worse than any of it. A twelve-year-old girl standing in a courtyard in clothes that didn't fit, scanning for threats because threats were the only thing anyone had ever taught her to see.

Cain was under Ra's's protection. The compound was Ra's's territory. He was seventeen, a guest, training on sufferance. There was nothing he could do that wouldn't end with Cain disappearing her to somewhere he couldn't follow.

He went to the training yard. Found the heavy bag. Hit it until his wraps soaked through and his knuckles ached underneath and the bag had a dent at chest height that wasn't there before. Forty minutes. His hands were shaking when he stopped.

A League student walked through the yard while he was hitting the bag, looked at his face, and walked back the way he'd come.

Dawn.

He found her in the east courtyard going through forms. Alone. The sun wasn't up yet and the stone was cold and she was moving through a sequence that he recognized from Shiva's teaching. Shoulder to hip to oblique, the cascade chain, except she wasn't reading it on someone else. She was producing it. Clean lines, fast transitions, the technique perfect and the body behind it starved-thin and wound-tight. She was barefoot on the cold stone and her feet didn't seem to register the temperature.

He sat on the low wall about ten feet from the edge of her training space. Didn't speak. Didn't approach. Just sat. The stone was cold under his legs and the sky was grey and the technique was beautiful and the reason it existed was a crime.

She clocked him. The same micro-adjustment from the courtyard, a slight shift in her stance that told him she knew exactly where he was and had already calculated how long it would take him to reach her. She didn't stop. The forms continued.

He sat there for about thirty minutes. Then he got up and went to Shiva's session.

He went back the next morning.

Same courtyard. Different sequence today. Faster. The transitions were tighter and the strikes at the end of each chain had a snap to them, audible from ten feet away, her fist cutting air hard enough to make a sound. He sat on the same section of wall. She adjusted her stance by the same two degrees. A bird landed on the wall next to him, stayed for about ten seconds, left. The sun came up over the eastern ridge and the light changed from grey to gold and her shadow lengthened across the stones.

He was learning her by watching. How she planted before a turn. The way she flinched from nothing in the courtyard but flinched at a door closing in the building behind her.

The third morning, she paused mid-form. A full stop, feet planted, hands at her sides. Looked at him. Not the micro-adjustment, not the peripheral awareness. Looked at him straight on with dark eyes that had the same quality as Shiva's but younger, rawer, without the decades of control layered over the top.

He nodded. Small.

She held his gaze longer than anyone at the compound had held his gaze, including Talia. Four seconds. Five. Then she turned back to the forms and the sequence resumed and he sat on the wall and watched and the morning continued.

Snow had fallen overnight. A thin layer, an inch, covering the courtyard stones. His section of wall was clear. Brushed away by hand before he'd arrived, the edges too clean for wind, the stone underneath dry and cold but not snow-covered.

He sat on dry stone. She trained in snow. Neither of them said a word.

The anger from the heavy bag settled into something colder.

I'll come back for you.

Not today. Not tomorrow. Not while Cain was under Ra's's protection and he was seventeen with no resources and no name that mattered outside of Gotham. But someday he'd have the resources and the reach and the ability to find one man anywhere in the world and take a child away from him, and when that day came he'd come back and she'd have a choice. A real one.

The forms ended. She stood still in the center of the courtyard with snow on her shoulders and her breath visible in the cold air.

He got up. His section of wall was dry. Hers was white.

Talia found him in the corridor outside his quarters that evening. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the stone wall, his wraps in his hands, re-rolling them because re-rolling wraps was the kind of mindless task that let you think without thinking. The stone was warm. It was always warm.

She stood above him for a moment. Then she sat down next to him. A foot of space. Her legs crossed, her back against the wall, the braid over one shoulder.

"You collect broken things, beloved."

Soft. She'd seen the four mornings.

Beloved. First time.

He didn't correct it.

Her hand touched his arm. Light, half a second, her fingers on the inside of his forearm where the wraps had been. Warm. Then gone. Jasmine in the corridor after she left.

He sat there with the wraps in his lap and the stone warm underneath him.