Tim Drake sat in Batman's chair.
He was wearing handcuffs and ankle restraints — both Bat-grade, rated for metahumans, fastened with the resigned precision of someone who knew exactly what they were — and he had the expression of a man who had received news he fundamentally refused to accept and was processing it through the medium of pastry.
"Alfred," he said, with his mouth half-full of taffy, "something is wrong with Batman."
Alfred set a second box of assorted confections on the console beside him with the practiced serenity of a man who had managed this household through circumstances considerably more dramatic than a chained-up teenager.
"Toffee or chocolate, Master Timothy?"
"Both." Tim took two of each. "I mean it, Alfred. Something is genuinely, structurally wrong." He swallowed. "The handcuffs — you know what he said? He said, and I'm quoting, 'Ignoring Batman's instructions is practically a Robin family tradition, so I'm afraid I'll need to secure you for your own safety, Tim.' And then he held out his hand and waited for me to—" He stopped. "I actually just gave him my wrists. I just put them out there. Like an idiot."
He slumped back in the chair.
"I've been hitting him for two hours straight. He won't break."
Alfred poured tea with the same expression he used for everything. "Striking your guardian with intent to compel confession is an unusual investigative method."
"It's a classic Robin investigative method." Tim stared at the ceiling. "The point is — whatever is living in Batman's body right now, it is not Bruce Wayne. I've run forty-two identity verification checks in the last three days. Iris scan, fingerprints, DNA sequencing, gait analysis, biological AI pattern matching — I built a custom behavioral logic model and ran his last seventy-two hours of recorded actions through it." He gestured with a chocolate. "Every single check comes back: Bruce Wayne. No anomalies. No interference. Biologically, genetically, he is Bruce."
He set the chocolate down.
"But no one told his behavior that."
Alfred waited.
"Bruce is extraordinary," Tim said, and the lightness had gone out of his voice. "I know that. We all know that. But Bruce is also a person. He has limits. He has bad days. He has the specific and very human quality of being frightening in the way that very driven, very damaged people are frightening." He paused. "What's in that body right now is frightening the way a natural disaster is frightening. It doesn't seem to have a source. I looked at him yesterday across the cave — he wasn't even doing anything, he was just standing there reading a file — and I felt my heart stop."
He leaned forward, elbows on the console.
"Bruce has never made me feel like that. Not once. Not even the time he caught me going through his private files and didn't speak to me for four days." He shook his head. "Whatever this is, it's playing Bruce — and it's playing him better than Bruce plays himself. Even Basil Karlo couldn't pull this off. Karlo needs source material. This thing is improvising, and it's winning."
He picked the chocolate back up. Finished it.
"And then there's the retirement talk. Alfred." He looked at the old man directly. "Bruce Wayne is never going to retire. We both know that. He can't. He's not built for it. The closest he's ever come to admitting he might stop was when he was lying in a hospital bed with a broken spine and even then he spent the whole recovery period designing contingency plans." He spread his hands. "And this imposter looks me in the eyes and tells me — sincerely, with genuine emotion — that I deserve to fall in love with a girl who'll take my name, and that we should both get out while we still can."
A long silence.
"It nearly worked," Tim admitted quietly. "That's the worst part. It nearly worked."
Alfred set down the teapot.
"What do you intend to do, Master Timothy?"
Tim looked at the handcuffs. Looked at the console. Looked at the toffee.
"I intend," he said, "to eat the rest of these, figure out how to pick a Bat-grade lock with a piece of taffy wrapper, and then find out exactly what happened to Bruce Wayne." He selected another piece. "In that order."
Ethan Cross climbed down from the debris mound.
His heartbeat was still elevated. He was breathing carefully — the measured, controlled breathing of someone who had learned in the last sixty seconds that the gap between performance and ability was a cliff edge, and had just looked over it.
It worked, he thought, with the particular relief of a man who had gambled a bluff against an opponent who could physically dismantle him and had somehow pulled it out. Bane ran. He actually ran.
The analysis came quickly, because it had to: Bane was not gone. He was reorganizing. The Exhaustion Gambit was wrecked — Ethan's refusal to engage with the Arkham chaos had stripped the original plan of its mechanism — but Bane was adaptive. He'd already demonstrated that tonight by moving ahead of schedule. He would recalibrate. He would develop a new model. And the next time he moved, it would not be an ambush against a contractor unit.
It would be against Batman directly.
But not tonight, Ethan thought. And not tomorrow. He needs to be certain first. He needs to confirm what he saw up there — whether it was real strength or theater. He'll watch. He'll wait. He'll build a new picture.
That gives me time.
He was six feet from the scattered debris of the ambush site when the notifications started.
Silver text materialized in the lower left of his vision, stacking quietly:
[ WARNING — Anchor Item Detected: "Gunter Braun's Shattered Javelin"]
[ WARNING — Anchor Item Detected: "Christopher Weiss's Beloved Broken Rope"]
[ WARNING — Anchor Item Detected: "John Oakes's Severed Hand"]
Ethan stopped walking.
He stood very still in the abandoned lot, surrounded by the wreckage of the evening, and looked at the three notifications.
Then he looked at the wreckage more specifically — what it contained, and who it had recently been.
Why, he thought, with a sense of dawning horror that had nothing to do with Bane, do I get anchor items when my teammates* die?*
He turned the logic over. It held. Every anchor item so far had come from a moment of significant loss — the Ventriloquist's shattered personalities, and now three men who had worked for him, two of whom were currently distributed across a larger geographic area than was ideal.
The system converts crisis into currency, he thought. And the most crisis-efficient thing I can apparently do is stand near people I've hired and wait for Bane to happen to them.
He stood with that for a moment.
I am, he concluded, the most expensive loot goblin in the history of Gotham.
He looked at the javelin fragment. He thought about Gunter Braun's face when he'd said this is the best day of my life. He thought about the big house, the wife he'd been planning on, the retirement that had been three minutes away.
He felt something in the vicinity of his sternum that he chose not to examine too closely.
No. Absolutely not. I will not do this.
He stood firm for approximately four seconds.
Then he picked up the javelin.
Batman punches his own allies unconscious on a regular basis, he told himself, with the practiced speed of a man constructing an ethical framework in real time. It's practically a Justice League tradition. I am simply maintaining continuity.
[ Gunter Braun's Shattered Javelin: He won four Olympic gold medals with this. The tip is gone, but what remains is structurally sound enough to serve as a very good flagpole.]
[ "This javelin is my wife."]
Ethan stared at the last line.
He had assumed Javelin's retirement speech was hyperbole. He now understood it had been biography.
Of course, he thought. DC villains. Every single one.
[ Christopher Weiss's Beloved Broken Rope: Christopher Weiss trusted nothing and no one. Except this rope. In quiet moments — late nights, long jobs — he kept himself company with it in ways that this system will not elaborate on. Whenever he bound someone, a small private smile crossed his face.]
[ "Oh — oh — oh — the rope answered me — I knew it would, I always knew—"]
Ethan set that one down. Picked it back up. Set it down again. Kept it.
I am never hiring this man's replacement, he thought. Whatever this vacancy creates in the operational structure, I will find another way.
[ John Oakes's Severed Hand: An ordinary merchant sailor before a bar fight sent him to prison, where he met Abel Tarrant and everything changed. He kept the anchor tattoo from his sailing days on his forearm — the only ink that predated the powers, a reminder of who he used to be.]
[ "You have to understand — the deck was wet. I'm telling you, it was genuinely wet—"]
[ Crisis Energy Units Converted: 10]
Three people. Ten units. Same as the Ventriloquist's complete psychological collapse, spread across three deaths.
So it scales to something, Ethan noted. Not raw mortality. Something about the weight of what's lost. A broken man's last personality isn't worth less than three lives. The system is measuring—
He stopped himself. He would think about the system's internal logic later, when he wasn't standing in a lot that smelled like explosives and regret.
The notifications weren't done.
[ WARNING — None of the three current anchor items have located a targeted Batman. Initiating random match: low-tier candidates only.]
[ Match 1 of 3 — Baby Bat]
[ In a Dark Multiverse nearing its end, a dying Batman transferred his consciousness into an infant body to survive. The infant's head proved too heavy for its neck. It fell down a staircase during its first attempt to walk upright.]
[ Threat Classification: Unrated]
[ Consume 1 Crisis Energy Unit to synchronize?]
Ethan read it twice.
No, he thought. Absolutely no. Under no circumstances. I will not spend the rest of the Bane confrontation as a baby.
[ Synchronization declined. Data archived. This option remains available at any time.]
[ Initiating second match…]
[ Match 2 of 3 — Bat-Lord]
[ A Dark Multiverse Batman purchased the entirety of Gotham City and converted it into a feudal estate. He was subsequently identified as a supervillain by Superman and killed.]
Ethan thought about this one for longer than he'd expected to.
Two hundred million dollars in contractor fees, he reflected. And somewhere in the Dark Multiverse there's a version of me who bought an entire city and got killed by the most powerful being on Earth for the crime of excessive real estate investment.
No.
[ Synchronization declined.]
[ Initiating third match…]
[ Match 3 of 3 — Mayor Bat]
[ A Dark Multiverse Bruce Wayne retired from vigilantism and ran for Mayor of Gotham City. He won. His severed head was subsequently mounted on a gargoyle on Wayne Tower as a warning against opposing organized crime.]
[ Threat Classification: Unrated]
"..."
Ethan looked at the description for a long moment.
He looked at the three critically injured people lying in the rubble around him.
He looked back at the description.
At least the Mayor got elected first, some part of him offered, faintly.
He sighed, put the notifications aside, and walked toward Deadshot, who was still partially pinned under a chunk of foundation and staring at the sky with the expression of a man conducting a very serious internal review of his life choices.
Ethan crouched beside him.
Deadshot looked up.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"So," Deadshot said finally, his voice carrying the specific flatness of a man who has decided to table every emotional response until a more convenient time. "That was Batman."
"That was Batman," Ethan agreed.
Another silence.
"The reinforcements," Deadshot said. "You were the reinforcements."
"I was the reinforcements."
Deadshot closed his eyes. Opened them. Looked at the sky again.
"Get this rock off my leg," he said.
(Chaper End)