CAT-TALES IIDENTITY EELEMENT CAT-TALES IIDENTITY EELEMENT By Chris Dee Edited by David L. COPYRIGHT © 2005 BY CHRIS DEE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. BATMAN, CATWOMAN, GOTHAM CITY, ET AL CREATED BY BOB KANE, PROPERTY OF DC ENTERTAINMENT, USED WITHOUT PERMISSION IDENTITY ELEMENT My first Hell Month with Bruce, I didn’t even know what was happening. I knew Batman was agitated and erratic in January. I knew because all the others said so; I had never encountered him much myself. Once Bruce and I got together as a couple, all that changed. He started getting crazy emotional a few days after the new year. The sex got angrier too, but that was as much my fault as his. I was panicking. During one of those emotional spasms, he’d called me the love of his life, and kitty cat hit the panic button. It all came to a head on the 21st. I didn’t understand why; I didn’t know it was the anniversary of his parents’ deaths or that he was getting ready to visit their graves. All I knew was that the nightmares were getting worse and I mentioned it, I expressed concern, and he took my head off. I’d never seen him that way—deliberately vicious, deliberately cruel. It wasn’t the Bruce I knew, or the Batman either, for that matter. Once I found out the truth, it all made sense of course. He gets worse and worse as that day draws closer. Even Alfred walks on eggshells. Last year, he sent me away. It was his Christmas present. He sent me on a shopping spree in Paris, but it was really sending me away from him during Hell Month. It wasn’t what either of us wanted and I wound up coming home early. We were together on the dreaded day. I like to think it was maybe a little better for him, not being so isolated and alone. I can’t be sure. I was in such a fog the whole time. I wound up seeing that other part of him, that Hell Month Bat the others talk about. It was because of Nightwing getting kidnapped. We had to search for him, there was no other way. And I saw that force inside of Bruce that isn’t even human. It goes beyond “driven” or “determined,” it goes beyond the intensity that drew me to him from the start. It even goes beyond the vicious cruelty I glimpsed during that first Hell Month fight. I don’t know what it actually is, but I know it comes from raw human pain. I’ve never been afraid of him, and now I know I never will be. Because I’ve looked on the beast, and all my eyes will ever be able to see there is the pain, the hurt it must take to wreak a fury like that out of Bruce. That was last year. I thought that was as bad as it could possibly get. Heh. Gothamites are a provincial lot. To the rest of the world, Elongated Man going public about his identity in the mid-80s was a huge event. So was Ray “The Atom” Palmer’s divorce from Jean Loring almost a decade later. It was the former story that produced the phrase “media feeding frenzy” and the latter which accomplished the Cat-Tales then-impossible feat: ousting Monica Lewinsky from the cover of People Magazine for three weeks running. But in Gotham, those were the silly escapades people in other cities got worked up about. No colorful cape, no Superman or Wonder Woman or Flash, could ever rank in importance with a denizen of Gotham City, and no exploit of the Justice League, no matter how cosmic in scale, would ever be as interesting as the happenings between the Hudson and Gotham rivers, between Wayne Plaza and the 10th Street Bridge. When Sue Dibny was murdered, it was news, of course: The wife of Ralph Dibny, Elongated Man, murdered in her home. It was treated in the Gotham press like any other sensational murder involving a famous person with no ties to Gotham: It was a headline. The funeral, peppered with mourners in masks, capes, and spandex, produced an extraordinary photo above the fold. Diana, Princess of Themyscira, gave the eulogy—and the 42nd Street Borders pulled her book REFLECTIONS from “Last Year’s Releases” next to the discount bin and put her back in the display window for a week. Those were the only visible effects of Sue Dibny’s death as far as the public Gotham was concerned. In more private corners of the city, it was different. There were stirrings, quiet ones. Nothing that could foreshadow the potent and terrible repercussions this one event would bring… Criminals ducked in and out of the Iceberg Lounge. It was Hell Month and nobody wanted to risk being seen, most years they would have left town altogether by now. But everyone was anxious to hear the speculation: Batman was insane in January, every January, it was like he went on some kind of jihad against all crime and all criminals. Would this make it worse—or might it make it better? The wife of a long- standing member of the Justice League was dead: on the one hand, Bats might go straight over the edge and decide to wipe all criminals off the face of the earth. On the other hand, he might be so busy with this one case that he wouldn’t have time to put half the rogues gallery in traction. More than a third of them might reach February 1st without a leg cast, more than two-thirds without a neck brace… At the Gordon-Grayson home, there was a different undercurrent, just as tense with uncertainty… Dick had gone to Bludhaven for Hell Month, not because he was avoiding Bruce, simply because Batman’s tempers always drove more criminals across the river at this time of year. Bludhaven is where he was needed right now—the fact that it got him away from Bruce was a bonus. Or it would have been except that with Barbara left behind in Gotham, Dick’s situation hadn’t really improved. Every outbreak of the Hell Month Psychobat on the OraCom led to a sequel when Barbara called Dick in ‘Haven to say goodnight… It was January, Dick knew that. It had been like this since he was twelve. They would all get through it. But then Sue Dibny was killed, and Dick really didn’t know what to do. A death in the hero community—in the “family” of the hero community—in Hell Month—and so soon after Stephanie. Bludhaven still needed him, but Dick couldn’t help wondering if maybe Bruce needed him more… In Wayne Manor, Bruce had “gone to Maui” as soon as the news broke about the Dibny murder. Batman had completed the initial survey of the crime scene before Ralph Dibny had even signed the paperwork at the funeral home. While Ralph was selecting his wife’s coffin, Bruce was organizing dozens of small glassine bags filled 2 Identity Element with carpet fibers, hair, ash, clumps of dust, lint and crumbs harvested from the murder scene. While Ralph selected the flowers to lay atop the coffin, Bruce was printing out a floorplan of the Dibnys’ living room. Ralph decided against the white lilies the sympathetic funeral director had suggested. He went with red roses, because there was a red rose on the lid of that first Valentine’s Day box of chocolates he gave Sue, the one in which she kept her mementos… Bruce marked up the floorplan to indicate the location where each specimen and fingerprint was taken. Ralph tried to remember the name of Sue’s high school for the obituary notice… Bruce used mobile phase chromatography to isolate trace vapors captured from the crime scene. At first, Selina kept her distance, sensing that he needed space both physically and emotionally. She ventured into the cave only when CNN began covering the arrivals at the funeral. She found him in the cave, of course, but dressed casually, not in costume except for the gloves, and standing before a long worktable dense with neatly ordered clusters of forensic evidence. The large main viewscreen that dominated the cave flickered with the same image displayed on the smaller monitor at workstation 1: the left half of the screen cycled through slides from an electron microscope, the right from an infrared spectrometer. A transparent grid was superimposed over these, and it sputtered wildly with a blur of digits and moving crosshairs as the Batcomputer executed incomprehensible analyses. Selina stood quietly for a moment, waiting for Bruce to acknowledge her arrival. He went on preparing a slide for the microscope. When he set down the tweezers and still didn’t speak, she did. “It’s on the news,” she said softly. “The arrivals at the funeral. It sounds like they’ll at least have some privacy inside the cathedral, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. You know what the press is like. Look, I know you don’t want to watch this, but I did think—” Bruce wordlessly moved to the workstation, punched a few buttons, and the CNN coverage appeared in a small window on the main viewscreen still dominated by the refractive indices and birefringence values of Sue Dibny’s turtleneck. “I’ll check the video later,” Bruce growled, “to make sure the fools who went in costume didn’t expose anything in front of the cameras.” “Well they couldn’t very well go in their secret identities,” Selina pointed out.