DC – I am Batman

Fourteen seconds.

He pulled his hands out of the lock and set the pick on the table and the shackle swung open and the whole thing had happened in the dark. Blindfolded, hands behind his back, the pins giving up their order by feel alone, and his fingers had known where to go before the rest of him finished thinking about it.

Doggett was sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAY-EST GRANDPA. He'd been watching. His eyes went to the boy's hands, not the lock.

"Day three," Doggett said.

"Yeah."

His previous best student had done the same lock blind in forty-one seconds and that student went on to crack safes for the federal government. Doggett closed the lock, put it in the drawer with the others, and went to make more coffee.

The cabin had three deadbolts on the front door and every one of them was for the bears. The windows were single-pane. The stove burned wood and the outhouse was forty yards downhill and smelled like pine and, on bad days, bear. Rural Appalachia. The nearest paved road was seven miles of gravel out, and the nearest locksmith was in a town called Elkins, about which Doggett held opinions he shared with nobody.

Doggett himself occupied a space between fifty and seventy that he didn't clarify and nobody alive was going to ask about. Thin. Tall. Long fingers that moved with a patience that made surgeons look careless. He talked even less than Kirigi, which until three weeks ago had seemed structurally impossible. First day: a padlock on the table, a pick set beside it, and the words "Everything is a lock." Then he walked out the front door and didn't come back for two hours.

The padlock took four minutes. When Doggett came back he put a harder one down and walked out again.

Six weeks of this. Pin tumblers, disc detainers, wafer locks, tubulars. Handcuffs behind his back in pitch dark, wrists at different angles, standard and double-lock. Sealed rooms with the window nailed shut and the door barred from outside and three ways out, and the answer was always the ceiling because everyone forgot about ceilings.

His hands were built for this. The dexterity from Shiva's cascade work and Kirigi's form drills and three years of gripping and releasing and adjusting had made his fingers fast and sensitive to changes in pressure that shouldn't register through skin. And whatever his body was doing on top of all that, the thing he still wasn't looking at, made him better than fast. Doggett noticed. Doggett didn't ask.

The work was meditative in a way that fighting wasn't. A lock was a puzzle that wanted to be solved, and the pins had a correct order, and his fingers learned the order, and the mechanism clicked, and the shackle popped. Clean and small. He liked the smallness. After three years of people who operated at the scale of assassination and global politics, a padlock was honest work. A padlock had no interest in measuring his soul or cataloguing his potential. It was a lock. He picked it. Done.

He slept on a cot in the back room that was harder than Grant's guest bed, which was harder than Dragon's bamboo mat, which was harder than Talia's silk. The progression was headed somewhere geological.

Thursday of the fourth week, Doggett dug a hole.

Six feet. He spent most of the morning on it and didn't ask for help and didn't want it. The coffin was plywood, screwed together by hand, air holes drilled in the lid at intervals Doggett had calculated based on body weight and lung capacity. Pine sap smell from the fresh cuts.

He climbed in. Lay down. The wood was close. The lid about eight inches from his face.

Doggett put the lid on. The first shovelful of dirt hit the wood and the sound went through the plywood and through his sternum and his entire chest said get out. The dirt kept coming. Heavier with each load, duller, the light around the lid edges disappearing in stages. Sides first, then the ends, then a sliver near the top right corner where the fit was bad, and then that went too.

Dark. Total. His eyes kept trying to adjust and there was nothing to adjust to. He lifted his hands and the wood was there. Spread his elbows and wood on both sides. The space was exactly the space his body occupied and nothing else. Every breath came back to him warm.

He found the lock on the inside of the lid by touch. Pin tumbler, standard, but his hands were shaking and the air was already stale from his own breathing and every exhale hit the lid and came back wet against his face. First pin. Set. Second was stiff, he overshot, had to back off and start again, and the starting again cost him a breath he'd been saving. Third pin, fourth, and then his hands stopped shaking because his hands did what they did regardless of what the rest of him thought about the dirt and the dark. The lock opened. The lid rose against the weight of the dirt and he pushed and the dirt gave in a collapse of soil and small rocks and he came up out of the ground with earth in his mouth and his hair and packed into his ears.

The sky was grey. The trees were wet. The air tasted like pine and his lungs grabbed it.

Doggett was sitting on a stump with his coffee.

"Just under four." He sipped. "Previous best was seven."

He stood in the hole. Dirt in his teeth. Pulse sitting where it sat now, the number from Grant's barn, the number from the lemonade catch. It had no business being in a body that had just clawed its way out of a grave.

"Tomorrow we do it with handcuffs," Doggett said.

A beetle was working its way up the side of the hole, losing ground on the loose soil, climbing again. He watched it for a few seconds while his breathing settled.

"Great."

Sofia called on a Thursday evening.

The phone was on the wall in Doggett's kitchen. Rotary. Brown plastic, the kind that weighed enough to use as a weapon. It rang and the sound was so loud in the quiet cabin that a jar of tension wrenches on the counter vibrated against the wood. Doggett looked at the phone, looked at him, and took his coffee out to the porch.

"Hello?"

"It's me."

Two words and he knew. Sofia's voice on the phone was different from her voice across the café table. Across a table she had the posture, the sightlines, the exits, the espresso held with her fingers on the rim. On the phone she had her voice and nothing else, and underneath the control there was a tightness he had to listen for.

In five years of birthday cards and white-stock letters and one café meeting where she'd warned him about his own father, Sofia Falcone had never called. She didn't waste channels. A call meant the cards and the letters weren't enough.

"How's the weather?" she asked.

Sofia Falcone asking about weather.

"Cold at night," he said. "How's Gotham?"

"Mrs. Cavallo's hydrangeas won the flower show. She put the ribbon on her front gate where Maroni's guys have to drive past it every morning. My father thinks it's territorial."

A beat. He waited.

"I made orecchiette last night. Turned out acceptable."

"You're burying the lede, Sofia."

Quiet on the line. A car horn somewhere on her end, muffled, the sound of Gotham at evening. She stopped circling.

"The Maroni family has proposed an arrangement."

He leaned against the counter. The kitchen light was off, just the small bulb over the stove, and the phone cord was twisted and he wound it around his finger while she talked and the plastic was cold.

"What kind of arrangement."

"The kind my father can't refuse without starting a war he'd win but doesn't want."

Her voice was level. Sofia got loud when she was angry. She went quiet when she was scared. She was talking about a marriage arrangement to a Maroni son like she was reading off a weather report and her voice was very, very quiet.

He closed his eyes. Worked through it. Carmine owed Thomas Wayne his life. The shooting, the operating table where Thomas had kept his hands steady for six hours while Carmine Falcone bled out from three gunshot wounds. Thomas never talked about it. Carmine never forgot it. The debt sat between the two families and neither could remove it without bringing down everything built on top. Carmine couldn't move against the Waynes. Couldn't touch the clinic or Martha's charities or their son. But the Maronis didn't owe anybody. An alliance through marriage gave Carmine leverage he could use through a different name. Through his daughter. Through a family that had no surgical debts to Wayne.

Carmine loved Sofia. He'd be telling himself this was protection. That a Maroni marriage gave her standing independent of the Falcone name, that he was building her a life outside the war he expected to fight with everyone else in Gotham. He'd believe it because he needed to believe it, and people who needed to believe things were the best at it.

Sofia knew better. She'd been watching it happen to other people's daughters since she was old enough to recognize the pattern.

"I'm asking if I have a choice."

The line was quiet. The car horn was gone. Her breathing on the line and the absence of Gotham behind it, which meant she'd gone somewhere private to make this call. Somewhere Carmine's people couldn't hear.

"You always have a choice. I'll be back soon."

One hitch in her breathing. A catch on the inhale that lasted less than a second and then her voice was level again and controlled and pressed flat.

"You sound like your father."

She hung up.

He stood in the kitchen with the receiver against his ear. The dial tone hummed. Outside, Doggett's boots had stopped pacing on the porch. An owl was calling from the treeline, or something that wanted him to think it was an owl.

He'd been planning months more. Doggett, then solo work. Gotham when the skill set was complete and the timeline felt right. Months of locks and sealed rooms and the slow accumulation of every tool he'd need to do the thing he was going to do underneath his parents' house.

Sofia had called him on a rotary phone in a cabin in Appalachia and asked if she had a choice and he'd said yes. Yes meant being in Gotham when it mattered. Yes meant now.

He hung up the phone. The plastic was warm where his hand had been holding it.

Doggett was on the porch when he opened the screen door. Coffee in one hand. The mountains were dark against a sky that still had some light in it and the porch bulb was yellow and the moths had found it and were doing their work.

"Heading out?"

"Yeah."

Doggett sipped. He had a way of looking at the mountains while you talked that made it unclear whether he was listening or had forgotten you were there.

"Go pick some different locks."