DC – I am Batman

His room smelled like laundry soap and stone.

Four days in Talia's bed and the soap smelled foreign. Her sheets had jasmine worked into the silk from years of her sleeping in them, and the scent had gotten into his skin, his hair, the shirt he'd left folded on the chest under her window. Now he was lying on cotton that smelled like the compound's detergent, which was industrial and vaguely chemical, and his body kept reaching for a warmth that wasn't on either side of him.

Talia was running a coordination meeting with the southern cell. Logistics chains, safe house rotations, something she'd mentioned once and then stopped mentioning because operational details lived in a compartment he wasn't cleared for. She'd kissed him before she left. Brief, closed-mouth, her thumb pressing the corner of his jaw for one second. Then the braid swinging and the boots on stone and the jasmine fading from the hallway.

He'd gone to his own room because there wasn't anywhere else to go. The compound at night was corridors and closed doors and students who gave him six feet of clearance and didn't look at his face.

The Lazarus warmth from two days ago had faded to almost nothing. Maybe a trace. He'd stopped checking for it.

The ceiling was stone. Rough-cut, unfinished, a crack running along the mortar line where the wall met the ceiling. A vent in the left wall was pushing air that smelled like the mountain. His bare feet were cold on the mattress edge. The lamp had been off for an hour.

A water pipe behind the wall made a sound every few minutes. Expanding or contracting, metal settling as the temperature outside dropped. He'd been listening to it long enough to predict the intervals.

Single knock. Hard. Knuckles, not palm.

He wasn't asleep and whoever was knocking knew that. The knock was a formality.

He pulled on a shirt and opened the door.

Nyssa Raatko. Her hair was down.

He'd only ever seen it pulled back. Braided or pinned, always controlled, the severity of the style pulling her face into angles that matched the posture and the voice. With her hair down the jaw was the same bone but the lines around it were softer, younger, and the darkness under her eyes was more visible without the severity framing it away. She was wearing a loose sweater, dark, and trousers that weren't military-cut, and flat shoes that made no sound.

"May I come in."

He stepped aside.

She walked past him and the cold perfume came with her. Pine and mineral water. Clean and northern. The room was small enough that it filled the space in a few seconds. Sharp where jasmine was warm.

She looked at the bed. The chest. The bare walls. The lamp he'd turned off.

"Spartan."

"The League's not big on throw pillows."

"The League furnishes whatever my father instructs. If he wanted you comfortable, you would be. He keeps this room austere because he wants you hungry." She sat on the edge of his bed. The mattress dipped. "Hunger is his favorite tool. He applies it to everyone. Daughters included."

He closed the door. There was nowhere to sit except the bed, and she was on the bed, so he leaned against the wall across from her. Two and a half feet of dark air between them. The vent was still pushing mountain air across his arms.

"My father is running you as a potential successor."

Flat. No vault tour this time.

"I'm seventeen."

"You're seventeen and you've spent eight months training with the two most dangerous women alive and sleeping with his heir and eating pomegranates at his private table while he discusses dynasty." She uncrossed her ankles. Crossed them the other way. "He doesn't see a boy. He sees raw material. A body that responds to training in ways Shiva publicly flagged. A mind that reads rooms faster than it should. A Wayne. The name alone means Gotham, and Gotham is the city he's tried to crack for a century."

Her voice was precise. Every sentence complete, measured. But the sweater was loose and her hair was down.

"You're further along in his evaluation than anyone in the last fifty years. Maybe longer. He won't tell you this because telling you would reduce his leverage."

"And you're telling me because it increases yours."

The barest pull at one corner of her mouth. "Perhaps."

The water pipe behind the wall ticked. Metal contracting.

"Talia," he said.

"Yes."

"What about her."

Nyssa's hands were in her lap, folded. The knuckles on her right hand were slightly red. She'd been hitting something tonight. The heavy bag in the east wing corridor, probably. The calluses on the first two knuckles were old, layered, maintained by decades of the same habit.

"My sister is more invested in you than anyone I've watched her care about. Fifty years. Possibly longer." She let that sit. "The overcorrection tells everyone. She's been rigid and professional for three days and every person at this compound has decoded it because nobody applies that much discipline to something they don't care about. Cold in public is a confession in a place like this."

"You told me she chose well. In the Lazarus chamber."

"I told you she chose well. Now I'm telling you she's in love with you. Those are different things." She looked at the wall behind him. "A smart choice and a total investment are different categories. She made a smart choice. She followed it with everything she has."

A gecko was on the wall near the ceiling. Gray-green, motionless, one eye visible. It had been there when he turned the light off and it was still there. He wondered what it ate in a room with no insects and no light and then stopped wondering because it didn't matter.

"I'm leaving the League," Nyssa said. "Within the year."

Her voice didn't change. But her hands in her lap shifted, the fold loosening and re-tightening, the precision re-established after a lapse that lasted about two seconds.

"My own network. My own resources. Independent of my father, independent of the League, independent of Talia. I've been building it for decades. The infrastructure is nearly complete."

"And you're telling me."

"I'm telling you because you are the only person at this compound who has not attempted to use me for something."

He looked at her. Dark room, cold perfume, the sweater making her look smaller than the military jacket did. The shadows under her eyes deeper without the pulled-back severity to distract from them.

"You've had two conversations with me."

"I've had two conversations with you and neither produced a consistent behavioral model. Everyone else I can profile in an evening. You I have spent two conversations with and the data contradicts itself." She was watching his face. "You think like a man twice your age. You observe like someone who's done this before. You say things about my family that no one who's known us for eight months should be able to say. And none of that matches the background."

She stopped.

"You're the first variable I can't solve."

"Three pieces of information," she said. "Ra's has plans for you. Talia has feelings for you. I'm leaving. You should have all three before any of us decides to present them in our own framing."

The vent pushed cold air. His forearms prickled.

"Will you cry when I leave?"

The question came out before the filter engaged.

She went still. Her breathing was the same, her posture was the same, her hands were in the same fold.

"I don't cry," she said. "I stopped crying a long time ago." Her voice level. Her eyes on the wall behind him. "I calculate."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

Her hands separated. The fold came apart and her fingers spread on her knees and then laced back together, tighter, the knuckles whitening for a second before she eased the pressure.

"My sister," she said. She was looking at the wall again. A different spot, higher, where the crack in the mortar ran along the ceiling. "She loves with everything she has. When she commits there is no partial version, no reserve, no contingency. She gives you every part of herself and expects every part of you and if it breaks." She paused. "It breaks completely. She doesn't know how to lose at half-measures."

"You're warning me."

"I'm giving you information."

"You're warning me because you love her."

Her jaw tightened. Left side, one muscle, the same one from the Lazarus chamber. Visible for half a second before she controlled it.

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what."

"Don't be perceptive about things I haven't said. You did it in the vault and you're doing it now and I find it deeply unpleasant."

"Sorry."

"No you're not."

He wasn't. She was right about that.

The gecko hadn't moved. He checked. Better than looking at her face.

"You're the first variable I can't solve."

Same words. Her voice was different. The first time had frustration in it, the precision of someone used to reading people hitting a wall. Now the words were quieter, and the frustration was still there, but underneath it her voice had a weight she hadn't meant to let him hear.

The foreknowledge sat heavy in his chest. A woman born in 1775, Jewish through her mother, alive in Europe in the 1940s. What the camps did to the people inside them. A father who had the resources to find her and the network to extract her and didn't come. A century after that, rebuilding a person out of whatever pieces survived the thing that should have destroyed her. The children she couldn't have because the Lazarus Pit restored everything except the one thing she'd wanted it to restore. Two hundred and fifty years of building the ice. The last time she'd let it crack, she was in a camp and the person who should have come for her didn't.

He didn't say any of it. He sat against the wall with his arms crossed and his feet on the cold stone and he carried it quietly because it wasn't his to say and she hadn't given it to him and saying it would break something she'd spent longer than his entire lifetime building.

The water pipe ticked. The gecko's one visible eye caught the faint light from under the door.

"I should go," she said.

"Okay."

She stood. The bed frame made a sound when her weight left it. Her hair moved over her shoulder, heavy, and in the dark it was the same color as the room. She walked to the door and her hand closed around the handle and she stopped.

"The east wing quarters are nicer." She didn't turn around. "I'm sure my sister has mentioned it."

"Goodnight, Nyssa."

She opened the door. The corridor light was dim but it was enough. Her profile for half a second when she turned to step through. The composure was back. The posture straight. The jaw set.

"Goodnight."

She pulled the door closed. The pine scent stayed in the room, thinner by the second, fading back to stone and soap.

He lay down. The bed was narrow and the pillow was flat and the sheets were clean and they smelled like nothing.

He stared at the ceiling. Stone, not tiles. Rough-cut. The crack along the mortar line.

Wayne Manor had twelve ceiling tiles with one crack and a water stain shaped like a hand. He'd counted them his first night in this life. Four years old, wrong body, wrong world, counting the ceiling because it was the only thing that held still.

This ceiling was stone. The crack ran about three feet from the left wall to a point above the door. No water stain. A discoloration where moisture had gotten in at some point and dried out, leaving a faint yellow outline that didn't look like anything.

He closed his eyes.

He was seventeen. He was carrying a woman's two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old grief in his chest because he'd read a Wikipedia article about a fictional character in a life he didn't live anymore, and the woman was real and the grief was real and the Wikipedia article had gotten the broad strokes right and the broad strokes were enough.

The water pipe ticked. He counted the intervals. Eighteen seconds. Twenty-two. Fifteen. No pattern. Metal contracting without a schedule.

He listened to it until he didn't.