The Knight of the irrors Mby Chris Dee CCAT--TTALES KKNIGHT OF THE MMIRRORS CCAT--TTALES KKNIGHT OF THE MMIRRORS By Chris Dee COPYRIGHT © 2016 BY CHRIS DEE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. BATMAN, CATWOMAN, GOTHAM CITY, ET AL CREATED BY BOB KANE, PROPERTY OF DC ENTERTAINMENT, USED WITHOUT PERMISSION KNIGHT OF THE MIRRORS “You look around and see a lot of negative things, and you can’t help but feel like you’re a part of something negative, and that maybe you're something negative.” The Wayne One engines hummed quietly in the background while Bruce studied the photograph that accompanied the quote. A boy in his early teens, about the age Tim was when Bruce had met him. About the age of the boys in the favela who’d played such a role in finding the so-called Gang of Six that were running Demon in Ra’s al Ghul’s absence. The boy was describing life, not in an impoverished shanty town in Brazil but in the housing projects of Gotham. You look around and see a lot of negative things… It was obvious why Lucius wanted this quote for the website, the quote and the boy were the perfect 5-second capsulation of what the Foundation was trying to accomplish with the Neighborhoods program. Throwing money at a school did nothing on its own, not when everywhere a student looked reinforced the message that tomorrow would be no better than today. A multi-tiered approach was vital. That’s why the arts and cultural programs had to stay, right alongside the health, education and conservation efforts. The picture, however… Bruce chuckled. He could see why Lucius wasn’t sure about it. The clean, pressed blue jeans and shirt might not conform to the public’s image of a kid from a Gotham slum, but they bespoke personal pride and a caring family. That wasn’t a problem. The contradiction that undercut the quote was that smile—and that gleam in the kid’s eye. He knew it was a good line. Whether he was wise as well as articulate or merely read the photographer’s reaction, he knew he’d said something tremendously insightful and he was, understandably, proud of himself. Beaming with satisfaction, in fact. It was not the face of a boy beaten down by his environment, it was a boy who knew he might one day get into Harvard. Not something to discourage, but they would have to use a different picture. A soft snore sounded from the sofa a short distance away, and Bruce glanced at Selina, opting for a nap when it became clear he was going to work during the flight home. He looked at the picture again, then at the clock in the lower corner of his laptop, then at his watch… Not quite seven in Gotham, too early to call Lucius… He shot off a quick email, approving the quote be used as the snapshot for the Neighborhoods program, but with a different image—and making sure that boy was invited to some event in the near future where there would be plenty of photo ops so they could put a smaller picture of him, shaking hands with the governor or something, elsewhere on the website. Bruce returned his attention to the spreadsheet with the Neighborhoods budget, but his thoughts kept returning to that photo… the pressed blue jeans, and the boys that same age in Brazil. Again he looked at Selina, relocated to the sofa where she lay, and gave her hip a nudge. Cat-Tales “Landing?” she murmured. “No, not for hours yet.” She adjusted and sat up as the confused kitten expression morphed into the ‘why do you plague me’ pout of the cat burglar surprised at an opened vault. “We could add a bedroom,” he graveled. “Most planes of this type have them. Paul Allen’s, Lau’s, Prince Alwaleed’s, even Redford Briggs’s.” Selina looked around suspiciously and then whispered “Are we alone?” And once he nodded: “’Cause waking me up to talk about putting a bedroom in the plane sounds like something the Fop would come up with.” That was answered with the unmasked version of the scowl Batman always gave when he denied his feelings for her and she called him out on it—which led to the satisfied purr: “So what do you really want to talk about?” He smirked. “I swore I was never going to tell you this, but when you lost that bet and I said you had to take Ra’s off my hands, I was joking. I never imagined you would actually do it.” “I know,” she said with the subtlest of smiles. “Why do you think I ran with it the way I did? It wasn’t to see the look on his face when I told him (although it was priceless); it was to see the look on yours. But that’s not really what you woke me up to say, is it?” “No,” he admitted. “I guess I just want to talk, not even sure where to begin.” “It’s okay,” Selina said softly. “Just… start. Let it go where it wants.” “When I began all this… ‘Batman’… Whatever it was I imagined it would be, it wasn’t… well, it wasn’t Joker and Poison Ivy and The Mad Hatter. I guess it was the alley. It was stopping the kind of crime that marred my life so that no one else would have to suffer the way I did. And as much as theme criminals in weird costumes are a departure from that original plan, Demon is a thousand times more so.” He fell into silence and, after a few seconds, Selina gently prodded him. “Go on.” “It’s the same with the Foundation. When I took over, it was with a Gotham focus: assistance for victims of crime and poverty. The economic conditions that foster desperation and violence among people who would have no inclination to anti-social behavior but for…” The expression that stopped him mid-sentence was a new one, never seen before in costume or out. “Alfred told me,” she said with a guilty smile that became a vibrant one when it reached her eyes. “It wasn’t long after the RISE party. Knowing now what we didn’t know then, he’d deduced that we’d become engaged. You were off with the League on that stupid Dark Matter thing in the Stellar Stream and…” “What’s he been telling you?” “Nothing that makes me love you less,” she said in a teasing murmur. “He said when you were young you would talk about the trust and what you would do with the money when you came of age. And you had a logic proof that established, line by line, that you can’t—what was the phrase—yes, ‘you can’t arrest your way out of crime.’” “He told you that,” Bruce said, the ominous gravel wavering into an unbelieving squawk. “He told you that I said that.” 2 Knight of the Mirrors “That nobody wanted to be tougher on criminals, of course, especially murderers, of course, but… yes, if the goal was to prevent victims, the only sure method was to prevent criminals. Q.E.D. any successful war on crime must include a war on the causes of crime, and Poverty is the big offender by a mile. Rich people steal and kill too, certainly, but money isn’t going to be much use on those fronts whereas with poverty…” She stopped as Bruce got up and paced angrily around the cabin like Shimbala at feeding time. “I don’t believe he would tell you that,” he said, adding in Batman’s gravel, “that he would tell you of all people.” “You don’t imagine it came as a surprise, do you?” Selina laughed. “Bruce, I’ve known there was more to you than ‘the fist’ since, like, four seconds after we met.” “He still shouldn’t have told you about that conversation.” “He was never prouder of you.” “I know. ‘A superb expenditure, Master Bruce, eminently worthy of your late parents’ name and memory.’ He rarely dipped into the pompous vocabulary back then. He was doing it to cover tearing up, and I pretended not to notice.” “You do realize you’ve saved the world a good eight or ten times since then, and he was never prouder of you than that day. So don’t be a jerk and growl at him for telling me. It will just lead to cold soup on the dinner tray and dirty socks left in little piles in the costume vault.” “Yes, well, my point was that I always intended the Foundation to have a Gotham focus much like I did the crimefighting.” “But?” she prompted. “But you saw those favelas,” Bruce said impatiently. “Hundreds of thousands of people living in abject poverty—and off the grid. It’s not only prime recruiting for Demon, it’s just… wrong. And I’m heading home, again, and just like when I trained with Dias the first time, I’m planning to write a check.” He paused, looking at her as if inviting another prompt. “And?” she obliged. “And there’s an email from Lucius, redoing the Foundation website. There’s a picture and a quote from a boy. It’s for the neighborhood revitalization projects, and it’s so… People who talk about income inequality in a place like Gotham, if they saw those favelas, their heads would explode.