DC – I am Batman

The hairpin was on his pillow.

Silver, plain, functional. One of six she used to pin the braid for training. He'd watched her pull them out last night, one at a time, the braid unraveling in sections while she stood at the edge of the bed and didn't look at him and knew he was watching.

This was the third morning. The first he'd woken with her still there, half-curled against his side, knife hand slack, mouth slightly open. She'd been embarrassed about the mouth. The mouth had bothered her more than the nakedness or the mess on the covers or the fact that he'd been inside her three hours earlier. Her mouth being open while she slept was the thing she couldn't stand having been seen.

The second morning she was gone by the time he opened his eyes but the covers on her side were still warm and the jasmine was everywhere. Today: gone, covers cold, hairpin on the pillow.

The sheets smelled like her. Warm, specific to her hair. The silk was ruined again. Third set. Somebody in the compound was laundering his nights and not commenting on it.

The bite mark on his left shoulder had darkened from red to a dense purple. Three nights running. Same spot. She was maintaining it.

He sat up and his right trapezius pulled. Sore from the angle she'd held his arm at, or from sleeping half-pinned under her weight with his shoulder wrong because she was on his chest and moving would have woken her and he wasn't going to move.

He dressed. He kept a change of clothes in her room now, folded on the chest under the window next to the whetstone she used for the short blade. That arrangement had happened without discussion. The second night he'd walked back to his quarters in the dark and a student coming around the corner had flattened himself against the wall and looked at the floor. The third night he'd brought the clothes.

The training yard smelled like dust and cold stone. Sun just clearing the eastern ridge, the compound's shadow retreating across the flagstones. Students sparring in the northwest corner. Two more running drills along the wall. One sitting on the ground rewrapping a knee, the tape wound too tight.

"Your wrap's too tight. You'll lose feeling by the second round."

The student looked up. Looked at the wrap. Looked at the ground. "Yes. Thank you." Flat. Careful.

Six feet of clearance. Every student he passed gave it now. The gap had started on the second morning and widened by lunch. People who'd sparred with him last week nodded from a distance. The student he'd helped with the wrap wouldn't meet his eyes.

Talia was on the east balcony. Full armor. Green bodysuit, utility belt, boots laced to the knee, braid pinned tight with five of the six pins. She was talking to a logistics officer about supply routes. Her posture was ramrod straight and her voice was clipped and professional and colder than it had been when she'd whispered against his neck at three in the morning.

She turned when he crossed the yard. Her eyes found him, held, and the tension around her eyes loosened. A ring of muscle relaxing for a beat. Over before the logistics officer could have caught it.

Then the mask came back. Stiffer than before. She turned to the officer and said something about the northern route and her voice was ice.

The overcorrection was worse than no correction. Anyone who'd known her more than a week could see the costume didn't fit today.

He kept walking.

Shiva was already in the ring.

"You're late."

"Two minutes."

"One minute and forty seconds. We'll add it to the end."

He wrapped his hands. The tape on his right was stiffer today, his knuckles swollen. He thought about why and stopped.

Shiva watched him wrap. Her eyes on his hands, his shoulders, his weight distribution. He might as well have been a page she was reading.

"Begin."

He moved first. She'd taught him that. First motion was data, but waiting gave her more. Better to feed her a chosen opening than let her accumulate from stillness.

Jab, cross. She slipped both. His front kick was already coming and she checked it with her shin and fired back, a hook placed exactly where his guard was thin, and his ribs remembered it. His return cross was a half-beat slow and she punished the gap with a palm strike to the solar plexus that emptied his lungs for a second.

Ten minutes. Longer than usual. Long enough that the real patterns would surface.

She stopped him with an open palm on his sternum. He went back two steps and his lungs were working and his right shoulder was pulling.

"Approximately four percent slower than your baseline." She let her hand drop. "Right shoulder compensating for trapezius soreness. Weight favoring the left leg by about two degrees. Attention splitting between the yard and the dining hall entrance."

She let that sit.

"Your hip flexors are tight in a way that training does not produce. The bruise on your left shoulder has been maintained over consecutive days. Your right forearm has superficial scratches consistent with fingernails, layered. You slept facing left. The pillow crease is on your left cheekbone and your right side is your default."

The yard had gone quiet. A student on the far wall had stopped mid-rep.

"She can't afford you distracted," Shiva said. "And neither can I."

"Yes, Sifu."

"Again. Elbows in. Drink water first. You're dehydrated."

He drank water. His shoulder throbbed. Shiva had just said the quiet part to anyone smart enough to read between clinical lines, and at this compound that was everyone.

A pigeon had gotten into the yard and was sitting on the wall near the weapons rack, head tilted, watching the sparring with total disinterest. It was going to be disappointed.

Ra's al Ghul ate dinner at a table that seated twelve and used two chairs.

The table was dark wood, polished. Pomegranates split open on a brass plate, lamb in a ceramic bowl, flatbread, a carafe of something that smelled like cardamom. The pomegranate seeds were red and wet under the lamplight and Ra's picked them out with his fingers, one at a time, without staining himself.

"Your father's political ambitions have progressed."

His eyes on the pomegranate.

"City council race. Last I heard."

"More than that, I think." Ra's placed a seed on his tongue. "Thomas Wayne has the profile for higher office. Doctor. Philanthropist. Old money without the stain of having earned it recently. Gotham loves a name it recognizes."

"He hasn't said anything about going higher."

"He wouldn't. The man reads a room before he speaks. You have that from him." Ra's paused. "Or perhaps he has it from you. I confess I can't always tell the direction."

The lamb was good. Rich, slow-roasted. Better than the mess hall. This was someone's careful work, prepared for an audience of two.

"Your progress has been noted," Ra's said. "Shiva speaks of you, which she does not do lightly. My daughter speaks of you, which she does too often." The faintest pulling at the corner of his mouth. "You understand the distinction."

"Shiva's feedback is direct."

"And Talia's is not." He selected another seed. "She is remarkable. Perhaps the most remarkable thing I have built in five centuries. Languages, strategy, networks, combat. There is nothing I gave her that she has not exceeded." He looked up. "But she is her father's daughter. The tools I built her from are my tools. The architecture is mine. When she builds, she builds on my foundation." He ate the seed. "This is useful to me. Whether it is useful to her is a question she has not yet learned to ask."

Ra's was watching him. The pomegranate juice was on Ra's's fingers, still unstained.

"She built the queen herself."

Ra's held his gaze. The lamp made his eyes very dark.

"She told you that."

"She showed me."

Ra's smiled. Genuine. That was worse than the evaluation.

"Thomas must find you confusing," Ra's said. "A son who builds structures the father never drew."

"Thomas keeps up."

The word sat between them. Thomas. Seventeen-year-olds don't call their fathers by their first names. He heard it too late.

Ra's returned to the pomegranate. "Of course," he said. Mild. As if he hadn't just picked up a stone and put it in his pocket for later.

"My father keeps up," he corrected.

"The lamb is from the northern pasture," Ra's said. "The shepherd has been with us for thirty years. He knows the animals by name. I find that admirable in a man whose employer does not share the sentiment toward people."

The pomegranate seeds were gone. Ra's poured the cardamom drink. The conversation moved to supply logistics and nothing personal, and the stone in Ra's's pocket didn't come up again.

Dinner in the main hall was forty students, eight tables, food that came in pots. He sat at the third table. Two students on his left, one across. The conversation was about a supply delay on the southern road. He half-listened, ate rice, drank water because Shiva was right about the dehydration. His shoulder had settled into the kind of ache that would be worse tomorrow and better the day after and she'd probably bite the same spot again tonight which meant the timeline was academic.

Talia entered from the east corridor. Armor, braid, boots. She walked the long way around the hall. The direct path would have passed his table.

The long way curved behind his bench.

Five fingertips. Starting between his shoulder blades, pressing through his shirt, dragging down. One vertebra. Two. Three. Four. Five. Slow. Firm enough that the heat of her fingers burned through the fabric into the muscle underneath. Hidden by the angle of her body, the movement of her walk. Anyone watching from the front would see a woman passing behind a bench.

His fork stopped halfway to his mouth. The heat spread from the five points of contact down his spine, into his stomach, lower. He made himself complete the motion. Fork to mouth. Chew. The rice tasted like nothing.

She kept walking. Sat at the officers' table, unfolded a napkin, said something to the man beside her about the northern road while her fingerprints were still burning on his back.

Across the hall, at the far end of the officers' table, a woman he'd seen but not spoken to was watching.

Tall. Dark hair, lighter skin than Talia. Straight-backed, the posture built into the bones. She held a cup near her mouth without drinking.

Nyssa Raatko.

Ra's's other daughter. The older one. Born around 1775, which put her at about two hundred and fifty and looking thirty-five. She had her own Lazarus Pit, her own network, her own reasons for being at this compound that had nothing to do with her father's approval.

She held his gaze. Three seconds.

Then she lifted her cup. Small. Precise. Drank. Looked away. The cup went down.

He looked at his rice. His back was still burning where Talia's fingers had been.

Another al Ghul daughter was watching.