DC – I am Batman

The bed was cold on her side and the jasmine was already fading when he opened his eyes, which meant she'd been up for a while.

Talia was at the table across the room. Dressed. Dark pants, boots, the high-collared tunic she wore when the compound needed to see the Demon's daughter. Hair braided tight and pinned. She had papers in front of her and a pen in her hand and she was writing without looking at him.

His pack was on the floor by the door. Clothes folded on top of it. His clothes. She'd packed it while he slept.

"There's tea," she said. Still writing.

He sat up. The silk was ruined. His body ached from three rounds. Deep, warm soreness that reminded him of every position and how long he'd held it. He swung his legs off the bed and the stone was warm under his feet. Always warm. The Lazarus depth below. He'd sleep on cold floors for the next year and miss this one.

He drank the tea. Lukewarm, which confirmed she'd made it when she got up and hadn't remade it. The room smelled like sex underneath the jasmine underneath the stone.

She was still writing. Her pen moved in clean strokes and whatever she was working on wasn't about him. Logistics. Troop rotations, supply manifests, whatever kept an organization of killers fed and housed and pointed where her father wanted them. She'd woken up and put the armor on and by the time he opened his eyes she was running the machine again.

"Your route is south through the Mahalangur range to the border crossing at Kodari," she said. Pen still moving. "I've arranged transport from Kathmandu. A man named Dahal will meet you at the Boudhanath stupa. Red canvas bag. Limp. Don't take the first vehicle he offers."

"Why not."

"Because I told him to test you and I want to know if you pass."

He pulled on the clothes she'd laid out. The shirt was clean and fit differently than it had when he arrived. Tighter across the shoulders. Months of training and Lazarus proximity had added density, there in how the fabric sat, how the sleeves pulled when he raised his arms.

"Will you write?" he asked.

She put the pen down. First time she'd stopped since he woke up.

"I'll do more than write."

She picked the pen up and continued.

He shouldered the pack. Lighter than the one he'd arrived with. She'd replaced the worn items, added a medical kit with League-grade supplies, currency in four denominations, papers he didn't check because Talia's forgeries were better than most countries' originals. Practical. All of it. Everything she did for him was practical and none of it was only practical and she would have argued the point and been wrong.

Ra's al Ghul was at the gates.

Hands clasped behind his back. The morning light hit the compound walls at an angle that turned the stone gold, and Ra's was positioned exactly where the light would fall on him. Six hundred years of living taught you where to stand. Two soldiers flanked him, armed and decorative. The gates were open behind them and the trail down the mountain started where the stone ended.

"You have been an exceptional student." The voice carried. Meant to. The upper balconies had people on them, students and soldiers and the compound's invisible machinery of cooks and cleaners and the woman who sorted mail who he'd spoken to exactly once because her station was near the east courtyard. "The world will test what we built in you."

What we built. Ra's language for what he owned. The blessing was real. So was the leash.

"Thank you," he said. And meant some of it.

Ra's inclined his head. A fraction. One of the flanking soldiers shifted his weight and the morning light moved on the blade at his hip.

Shiva was waiting between the gates and the outer wall.

She must have come from the training yard. Fresh wraps, chalk dust on her left knuckle. Red bodysuit. She held out a knife. Training blade, wood handle, tape worn from use. Handle-first.

He recognized it. Hers. The one that had put the scar on his forearm the first week, drawn blood through his shirt the third month, demonstrated the cascade reading at close quarters.

"Mine," she said. Lending, not giving.

He took it. The wood was warm from her hand. His fingers found the grip marks she'd worn into the tape and his hand fit them badly because his hands were bigger and the marks were hers.

"If you forget the reading technique," she said, "I'll know."

She looked at him. The assessment from his first morning in her training yard, when she'd looked at him like she was deciding whether to finish the sentence. The woman who'd watched her daughter leave from the eastern wall and hadn't followed and hadn't spoken about it once in ten months.

She walked back toward the training yard. Boots on stone, unhurried. She didn't look back. Last he saw of her here: shoulders straight, chalk dust on her knuckle, walking toward the thing she understood.

He wrapped the blade and put it in his pack. Handle up.

Nyssa was on the upper balcony.

Far enough away that her expression was geometry. The high collar, the dark hair, the jaw. Alone at the railing. Two hundred and fifty years old and she still stood like nobody was coming.

She raised one hand. Palm open. Fingers spread.

He raised one back.

She held it. Then the hand came down and she turned and went through the door behind her. The balcony was empty. A bird landed on the railing where her hand had been, stayed for a moment, left.

He almost missed Cassandra.

The archway between the outer wall and the trail was deep, the stone thick enough to hold shadow in the morning light. She was inside it. Present and still and readable only if you already knew to look.

Small. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. The underfed frame had filled in but the clothes still fit badly and her hair was still cut with something that wasn't scissors. She stood like her mother. The stillness, the weight distribution. Except Shiva chose to be what she was. Cassandra had been built into it and didn't know the other thing existed.

He stopped.

She looked at him. The direct gaze from the east courtyard.

She tapped her chest twice. Two fingers, over her heart. Light. Deliberate.

I see you.

He tapped back. Two fingers.

Her mouth moved. The lips parted and the jaw worked on a shape and the sound that came out was half a breath and nothing else. A word her throat knew how to start but couldn't finish. A word David Cain had cut out of her before she'd had the chance to learn it was hers.

They stood in the archway with the trail right there, dirt and gravel and the mountain and everything after.

He wanted to tell her he'd come back. That she deserved words even if she couldn't make them yet. But the compound had ears and Cain was League-adjacent and a promise spoken aloud in this place was a promise someone could use against both of them.

He nodded. The small nod from the east courtyard.

She watched him go. The assessment was in his back. The micro-reading of his gait and his posture and whatever her body-reading told her about the man walking away. He didn't look back because looking back would have ended him for the walk out.

Talia caught him at the gate.

Past Ra's, past the soldiers, three steps onto the dirt. Her hand closed on his collar from behind and pulled and he turned and her mouth was on his.

Hard. Her hand on the back of his neck, fingers in his hair, pulling his head down. The kiss lasted and every second of it was public and every person on the upper balconies and the courtyard and the walkways saw it. Her tongue, her teeth on his lower lip, the grip in his hair that would leave a mark if he bruised the way normal people bruised.

He kissed her back. His hand found her waist. The tunic stiff under his palm, the body underneath warm and familiar and his in a way the word beloved had made true.

She pulled back. Eyes dry. Jaw set. Her hand released his collar and smoothed the fabric where she'd grabbed it. Wreck it, then fix it.

She turned around and walked back through the gates. Her boots on the stone, even and deliberate. He waited for the pause. The half-turn, the backward glance she wouldn't want anyone to see.

He didn't hear her stop.

The gate closed behind him. The compound sealed. The trail went down.

Coming up ten months ago, the altitude had sat on his chest and every step above fourteen thousand feet had cost him in his lungs. The pack had been heavy. He'd stopped twice in the first hour to breathe and the thinness of the air had been a ceiling pressing down on each inhale.

Now the air was just air. The altitude didn't register. The pack sat lighter on his shoulders and his legs moved without burning and his pulse held steady in a range that ten months ago would have required sea level and rest. The Lazarus depth, the training, the whatever-it-was that Shiva had diagnosed in public and Talia had logged in private and that he didn't think about because not thinking about it was easier. His body had changed. It kept changing.

The trail dropped below the tree line. Rhododendrons, thick-trunked, growing at altitude because nothing else wanted to. Red flowers on gnarled branches. A few had fallen on the trail and his boots crushed them and the petals stuck to the tread.

Two hours out, the compound wasn't visible. The mountain had folded around him, ridge after ridge, and the sky was a blue that only happened up here and a raptor was circling high, riding a thermal, just moving.

Three hours. A stream crossing. He soaked his feet and drank water and ate a pressed date bar from the pack. Better than it needed to be. League-grade rations. She'd given him the good ones.

A goat stood on a rock up the slope, watching him eat. Unimpressed. He raised the date bar in a toast. The goat turned around and left.

Four hours out, the trail leveled where a saddle connected two ridges. He stopped. His legs locked and his lungs paused and the reason was the smell.

Jasmine.

On his shirt. On his skin. In his hair. Under the collar where her hand had grabbed him and deeper than that, in the pores of his neck where her mouth had been last night, in the fabric she'd laid out for him which had been in her quarters long enough to absorb it. Ten months of proximity. The jasmine was in him. Under the sweat and the altitude and the hours of walking, it was there.

He stood on the saddle between two ridges with the wind coming up the valley and the compound somewhere behind and above him, invisible behind the folds of the mountain.

He breathed.

The jasmine mixed with the cold air and the rhododendron and the dust of the trail.

He kept walking.