Homeward
Julia answered on the second ring.
The payphone at Gotham International had a cracked handset and a cord sticky with what he hoped was just old soda, and the terminal was mostly empty at ten PM. A janitor pushing a mop in wide arcs near the gate. The coffee kiosk was shut. The woman behind the pretzel counter was reading a paperback with her feet up and hadn't looked at a customer in a while. The fluorescent nearest the phone bank buzzed at a frequency that sat behind his teeth.
"You're coming back." Julia's voice was alert. Second ring, and she hadn't been sleeping. Whatever hour it was in Paris, she'd been awake, and she'd picked up a call from a number she didn't recognize because that was the job.
"Gotham."
A pause. International static on the line and underneath it her breathing, steady and measured.
"I have leave in three months."
The doorway in Paris. Her hand on the frame, the scarf he hadn't taken. The cocktail dress and her hair past her shoulders and the scar under the watch band and Julia, not Miss Pennyworth said in a voice that had already decided what it meant before the words came out.
"I'll be here."
"I know."
She hung up. Julia hung up first in every conversation they'd had since the bridge.
The cab smelled like pine air freshener and the vinyl seats were cracked and the driver was playing talk radio loud enough that he'd either forgotten his passenger existed or didn't care. Gotham slid past the windows.
Four years. He'd left at fifteen and the city was wearing the time. Thomas's campaign posters still clung to some of the light poles along the expressway, bleached pale, his father's face washed to a smear. New construction in Midtown where the Monarch Theater used to be, cranes lit against the sky. The bridge over the Narrows had new guardrails and the old ones were rusting in a stack on the shoulder. A billboard for Wayne Enterprises was up near the Kane exit, something about medical technology, Thomas's name on it in blue letters that were newer than anything else on the highway.
The East End looked like it always did from a highway, which was bad, except the block around Thomas's clinic was lit and the buildings flanking it were cleaner and that was his father's work, visible at night from a moving cab. Past the clinic the street went dark again, the kind of dark that meant someone had told the people who maintained the streetlights to stop.
The Falcone block was darker than he remembered. Same buildings, fewer working streetlights. More cars parked at angles that said business. A neighborhood that had been told to keep quiet.
Nobody had asked him to do this. He'd chosen it, eyes open, and every mentor who'd taught him had done so because he'd shown up at their door and asked. Eleven of them across nine countries. Kirigi. Shiva. Talia. Dragon. Ducard. Grant. Doggett. A surveillance specialist in Buenos Aires who worked from a wheelchair. A disguise artist in Marrakech who wore a different face every day. A forger in Istanbul whose name he never got because the forger said names were the first thing you threw away. Their lessons were in his hands and his body and in how he'd walked through this airport without a head turning despite being six-two and broad enough that his jacket pulled at the shoulders.
The driver changed the station. Sports. The Gotham Knights had lost.
The Manor was quiet.
The front door was unlocked, which meant Alfred knew he was coming. The foyer smelled like lemon polish. The chandelier threw shadows on the floor he remembered from when he was four and too short to reach the handle, and the floor creaked in the spots it had always creaked, and his feet found them without trying.
An umbrella with a broken spoke was in the stand by the door. He'd noticed it the day he left. Four years and nobody had thrown it away. One of Martha's scarves, blue, was folded over a coat hook like it had been put there on the way out and forgotten on the way back.
Alfred's note was on the table. Cream paper, the penmanship exact.
Welcome home, Master Bruce. Your blue suit will no longer fit. Adjustments in the morning. Shortbread in the tin by the kettle.
He stood in the foyer for a minute. The house made sounds at night, the old kind, wood and stone settling into the temperature.
His room. The bed was made. The curtains drawn. The portrait of Thomas and Martha above the mantle and they were younger in it than they were now. The ceiling had twelve tiles and the crack shaped like a hand. He'd counted them his first night in this body, in this room, and the room was his now and the body was his now and the crack was still a hand.
He opened the trunk. Four years of accumulation packed tight. Clothes that had fit the person he'd been at each stop and wouldn't fit now. Training wraps, stained soft from use. Shiva's knife in its cloth, the blade still sharp because he maintained it as she'd shown him even though he hadn't used it since Nanda Parbat. The medical kit Talia had packed, half of it used, the suture thread on its last spool. Doggett's pick set in a leather roll, worn smooth at the grip ends. A small book of pressed flowers from a market in Marrakech that he'd bought and couldn't remember why.
The letters were at the bottom. All of them. Every letter from four years, kept in order, bundled with rubber bands from post offices in countries he'd already left by the time the bands dried out.
He put them on the bed and sorted.
Zatanna's stack was the thickest. Fat envelopes, tea stains, handwriting that leaned forward chasing every thought before it got away. Rabbits in the margins: rabbit with backpack, rabbit in top hat, rabbit reading a book, rabbit wearing Zee's stage coat. The early letters were singed eyebrows and light constructs that held for six minutes. The middle ones were London, a pub called the Hollowed Flask, a stage the size of a kitchen table. The later ones were real magic and indoor snow and a child catching flakes on her tongue. I wish you'd been there was halfway down the stack, the ink darker where she'd pressed. The handwriting got smaller toward the bottom of every page because she always ran out of room before she ran out of things to say.
Sofia's was smaller. White card stock. Careful handwriting, every sentence doing double work. Birthday cards at the bottom, two sentences per year since he was eight. The napkin from the café with call underlined twice. The later cards were coded intel disguised as small talk: Carmine's movements and Thomas's clinic and Maroni territory shifts threaded through comments about weather and orecchiette.
Julia's photograph was paper-clipped to one of the embassy letters, her in the cocktail dress with her hair down and the watch band across the scar. Single pages, cream paper, precise penmanship that never varied. The top half of each page was operational. The bottom half was personal. The white space between the halves had gotten narrower over four years. Paris misses an argument partner. In case you forgot what civilization looks like.
Kate's was thin. Half-pages, West Point stationery, blocky handwriting. Top of my class. Don't fall behind. - K. She'd probably counted every word.
Julie's was notebook paper with horse doodles and the warm voice of a girl who wrote about prom and the cat that still hated everyone. Gotham feels smaller since you left. Not worse. Just smaller. Like the walls moved in a couple of inches.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute.
He went downstairs.
The study was dark. Thomas's desk, the leather chair with a dent worn into it, bookshelves, a lamp with a dead bulb nobody had replaced. The room smelled like old paper and the faint memory of Thomas's coffee. A coaster with a ring stain on the desk where his father's cup sat every evening.
The grandfather clock. Tall, dark-cased, the pendulum behind beveled glass. Still two minutes fast. He listened to the tick. Deep and steady and behind the tick was the case and behind the case was stone and behind the stone was limestone and behind the limestone were caves. Natural caverns. Running water. Ventilation through the bluff face. Bats.
He'd known since before he came to this house. He'd never gone down.
He stood in front of the clock for a while. The tick filled the room. The pendulum swung behind the glass and caught the faint light from the hallway and the brass flashed and went dark and flashed again.
He ate two pieces of Alfred's shortbread from the tin by the kettle. They were perfect. He ate a third. The tin had a note under the lid in Alfred's hand: Mrs. Brennan believes she makes the only shortbread in this house. I see no reason to correct her.
He went upstairs. The letters were on the bed in their stacks. He moved them to the nightstand, Zatanna's on top because it was the thickest and because the rabbit on the top envelope was wearing a top hat and looking up at him with two ink dots for eyes. He lay down and the ceiling had twelve tiles and the crack shaped like a hand and the house settled around him, creaking in its joints, adjusting to the cold.
He slept well for the first time in weeks.