DC – I am Batman

The heavy bag was old enough that the leather had gone soft in patches and the chain creaked on every swing and the barn was hot enough that sweat ran down his back before the first combination landed. Tuesday afternoon. Fifth week. The chickens had retreated to the far side of the barn where the shadow was thickest and Frazier was sitting on a hay bale watching him with one eye.

He'd been on the bag for an hour. Hooks, crosses, the liver shot Grant had been drilling into him for five weeks until his body threw it without asking. The barn smelled like hay and leather and baked wood. His wraps were soaked through and the dust on the floor caught the light coming through the gaps in the walls in flat columns that didn't move because there was no wind and hadn't been all day. Outside, the corn was high and still and the road was empty and it was the kind of afternoon that sat on the landscape and didn't intend to leave. A wasp had built a nest in the upper corner of the nearest stall. He'd watched it work for three days. Methodical. Single-minded. He respected the wasp.

He threw another combination. The bag swung and the chain complained and Frazier watched.

Yolanda came through the side door carrying lemonade.

Grant's daughter was sixteen and had her father's jaw and none of his interest in fighting. She'd been polite to him. Functional, without enthusiasm. She carried a tray with a glass pitcher and two glasses and she was halfway across the barn floor heading for the stairs to the hayloft landing where Grant kept the towels and the first-aid kit.

Her foot caught the bottom step.

He was already turning.

His body had moved before she stumbled. Before the tray tipped, before the pitcher shifted, before the glass on the left side began its slide toward the edge. He was six feet away and facing the wrong direction and his hands were wrapped and his shoulders were mid-rotation from the last hook and none of that mattered because his body was already there. Already turned, weight transferred, left hand catching the pitcher by the handle, right hand flat under the tray, the glass that had started to slide resting against his thumb like it had never moved.

The lemonade didn't spill.

Yolanda was on one knee, her hand on the step where she'd tripped. She looked at the tray in his hands. She looked at the pitcher. She looked at him.

Grant was in the doorway of the barn. He'd been coming in from the house with a towel over his shoulder and a glass of bourbon and he'd stopped walking.

The barn was quiet. Even Frazier had stopped.

He set the tray down on the sawhorse and put the pitcher next to it. His pulse was sixty-two. He checked it against the inside of his wrist, two fingers on the radial artery, Shiva's technique. Sixty-two beats per minute. After an hour on the bag. After a catch that should have been impossible from six feet while facing the wrong direction with wrapped hands.

Sixty-two.

"Thanks," Yolanda said. She got up. Brushed her knee off. Looked at him one more time with her eyebrows pulled together and her mouth slightly open, then took the lemonade up the stairs and across the landing and out the back door and the screen door banged and she was gone.

Grant hadn't moved from the doorway. The bourbon in his glass was still. Six feet. Wrong direction. Wrapped hands. Before the glass started moving.

He went back to the bag. Threw a combination. The chain creaked.

Grant watched him for about a minute. Then he put the towel down and picked up the mitts.

"That wasn't reflexes."

They were at the pads. Grant had put his glass down and picked up the mitts and they were working combinations and the conversation was happening between strikes because Grant didn't know how to have a conversation without hitting something.

"Adrenaline." He threw a cross.

"Bullshit." Grant caught it on the pad. The sound was flat and loud. "I've been in the ring with speedsters. I've watched Jay move. I know what fast looks like when it's natural and what fast looks like when it's weird and you were weird."

Cross. Hook. Cross.

"You moved before she fell. Your body was turning before her foot caught the step. That's not training and that's not adrenaline. That's something that happens to people who aren't regular people."

He hit the pad and Grant absorbed it. They went again.

"Jay used to tell this story," Grant said. Pads up, steady. "Sixty-eight. Bank job on Third Street in Keystone. Four armed guys, hostages. Jay gets there and the building's on fire because one of them had an incendiary that went off early. He's standing on the street looking at a burning building and the math says the stairs are gone and there's no way up." He held for the cross. Caught it. "His body ran up the side of the building. Three stories. Straight up the brick. His brain didn't decide to do it. His body knew it could and went."

Pad. Cross. Pad.

"Afterward he told Joan he had no idea he could do that." Grant lowered the pads. "His body knew and his brain didn't. Whatever you are, kid. You're not just a guy who trains hard."

He picked up the towel. Wiped his face. His pulse was still sixty-two. He checked it without thinking, Shiva's technique, two fingers on the inside of his wrist. After rounds and a conversation about precognitive speed, sixty-two was wrong. An athlete's resting rate could drop low. Sixty-two after all of that was a number that belonged to a different body.

"Three more rounds."

Grant looked at him. Then he raised the pads.

They did three more rounds. The combinations landed clean and hard and the barn got hotter and Frazier eventually lost interest and went outside and the wasp kept building its nest in the corner and Grant threw his hooks between sentences and didn't bring up the catch. Neither did he. They hit things until the conversation became unnecessary.

After, Grant sat on the ring apron with the bourbon and he sat on the floor with water and they didn't talk for a while. The barn was cooling. The light through the gaps was going orange. The chickens were coming back in from the yard.

"My kid's never going to mention that," Grant said.

"No."

"Good. She's smarter than both of us." He drank. "You want dinner or are you going to sit in the dark and think about it."

"Dinner."

"Liar." Grant got up. "Eggs."

"You're going to burn them."

"I always burn them. Doesn't stop me."

He couldn't sleep.

The guest room was small and the bed was firm and the window was open and the corn made a sound at night when the wind moved through it, a dry steady rustling that almost resolved into a pattern and then didn't and then almost did again. A moth was bumping against the screen. Persistent. Grant's house at night was quiet in a way that the mountain never was. The mountain had stone settling and wind and the hum of the Lazarus depth below everything. This was a different quiet. Flat land quiet. Nothing between the house and the next sound except corn.

Zatanna's letter was on the nightstand. The one with the indoor snow. The rabbit on this one had a top hat. He'd read it three more times since the porch, once before the bag, once after dinner, once just now. He could hear her voice in the handwriting now. The rush of it, the letters leaning forward, chasing what she wanted to say before it got away. Three readings ago it was a letter from a girl he knew. Now it was the sound of her talking, every word arriving before the last one finished and the excitement underneath making her handwriting smaller and smaller until the bottom of the page was nearly illegible and he had to hold it closer. The rabbit had a star on its hat and the star had five points and she'd drawn it carefully enough that he could tell she'd drawn it carefully and that mattered.

He put the letter back on the nightstand and turned onto his back and looked at the ceiling.

The evidence was there. It had been there for years and he'd walked past it every time because walking past things about himself was what he did best. His body did things and he looked the other direction and now he was lying in a guest room in central Illinois with the corn rustling and the evidence stacked up where he couldn't step around it.

Shiva had been first. The healing, the speed compensation, the cascade reading at a rate that shouldn't work in a body his age. She'd diagnosed him on the arena floor in front of the whole compound and he'd let it pass because the fight was more immediate than the diagnosis.

Talia had logged the density in private. Her hands on his chest in the dark, feeling mass that didn't match what she could see. How fast the bruises faded. She'd been collecting data on him for months before she said a word.

Nyssa had used the word interesting and meant what Shiva had meant. She'd read it off him in the Lazarus chamber without being told.

Kirigi never said anything. He just assigned bigger sparring partners after the bruise healed overnight. Kirigi's method was to change the conditions and watch.

Dragon noticed and moved past it. "The body is a vehicle." He cared about drivers.

Grant. The liver shot recovery. The cut that vanished overnight. And now the lemonade catch, his body turning before gravity had finished its work on Yolanda's foot. Grant had stood in the ring with Jay Garrick and he'd put the kid from Gotham in a neighboring category and hadn't blinked.

Six people who knew more about bodies than he did and every one of them had seen it before he did.

The moth hit the screen again. The corn rustled.

Sixty-two. He pressed two fingers to his wrist in the dark. Sixty-two beats per minute. Resting heart rate after a full training day, after lying awake running through every piece of evidence he'd been ignoring for years. The same number from the barn. The same number after the catch. The same number right now.

He tried to put it away. Push it down. Put it in the drawer with the rest.

The drawer didn't close.

He lay in the dark. The corn. The moth.

He didn't sleep well. The moth kept hitting the screen. The corn kept almost finding its pattern.

Sixty-two at dawn.