Post by HoM on May 5, 2009 16:07:29 GMT -5
I am a detective’s son.
So I know what questions have to be asked.
The… ‘important ones’… you could say.
“How are you alive?”
“How would you define ‘alive’? I mean, my heart is beating, I think I’m warm to the touch, but you have to ask yourself… is there more to it than that?”
“Stop dodging the question, you know exactly what I mean. For all intents and purposes you died. And now you’re alive. We need to know how.”
“And then you’ll help me?”
“We’re helping you right now. Please, answer the question.”
“Hahahahahaha…” I watch him. I know body language. He betrays nothing. I knew I always liked him. He got underneath Bruce’s skin. Made him laugh. I shouldn’t think about Bruce. I focus on the task at hand. He’s staring at me now. I watch him. “You need to really think what question you’re asking, kid. Because I have something to tell you right now…” He leans toward me. I don’t react. “… I didn’t die…” Charles Szasz. The Question. Justice League HQ designate: ‘the Hall of Justice’. “…I got lost. Not for too long. Not forever. But I was sent soaring up through reality and I landed in the middle of nowhere because I got in over my head. I had nothing to come back to. So I stayed lost.”
“…And then you came back.”
He smiles. I think I hate him for it. “And then I came back.”
I am detective’s son in spirit. A daredevil’s son in flesh. Dick Grayson, the new Batman, the former Robin, the Nightwing in limbo. To think I volunteered for this interview…
“You want to know what happened, you don’t want me to evade the question and give you musings and philosophies on vanishing, and I assure you, I can give you many a musing and many a philosophy if push comes to shove, but I understand the need for ‘full’ disclosure. I think I’m scaring the kids…” He laughs. I watch his every emotion, and try to figure out if it’s forced or faked or, heaven forbid, the truth. As always with this man, I’m left wondering. The walls have ears, they listen to what we say, they record and they think, and I’ll leave it to them for now. I’m just here to be a face. How ironic, considering the masks we all wear. But here, inside the walls of the Hall of Justice, the ultimate paranoid sits without his, the Pseudoderm mask lying limp on the table between us. He looks good, considering we all thought him dead until he resurfaced a few months back- fighting crime in Hub City, and then fighting side by side with the Justice League… whether they wanted him to or not. But with what he bought to the table, even Wonder Woman was thanking him by the end of things. “…I’m sure they’ll get over it. So. I’ll stop stalling. It’s been long enough. Here’s how I survived the end of my world:
Cadmus Branch: Las Vegas. Area 15, to some. This science-industrial complex resided in a complex tesseract attached to our reality by a computer equation devised by Japanese former-child genii kidnapped from their homes by CIA agents during the cold war. That’s how they rolled back then. Disgruntled twenty-somethings being forced into helping Uncle Sam in the war against… anything. The US government found a tesseract, so they filled it with all they knew how: science. Mad, mad science… and Dabney Donovan was in charge, insane, as you would expect any mad scientist in charge of a mad scientist government think thank to be…
(I’ve thought a lot about Dabney Donovan recently. About how he died. About his work in cloning. I dislike clones. They muddy the waters of identity and make it very hard to keep something that should be left dead… dead. So I thought about his work. And I did some digging… and I found him, walking down the street in New York, looking very young and with that same insane spark. I couldn’t arrest him. I couldn’t beat him up without reason. So I watched him for a while. And he, like me, vanished without a trace without a moment’s warning… I dislike clones)
… and they were kidnapping metahumans. Men, women and children. They were doing things that would make the atrocities committed in Unit 731 seem like a walk in the rain. Scientists driven to the edge, held back by nothing, egged on to do terrible things… Dick, that entire complex had been compromised and no one was going to stop them. The DEO couldn’t take them down, Cadmus were part and parcel of the government so it wasn’t like the Justice League were going to step in (of course, this was before America declared war on them. Ho. Ho. Ho.)
The metahumans were being harvested for parts. I… I knew about this and I went in to stop them. Brought in a team to do it. I have to admit, I’ve never been a good team leader. I can follow orders with the best of them, that’s why the Justice League never seems like a bad fit, but running an operation? We fell apart. I didn’t… I didn’t think it all through. Didn’t see the obstacles that could get thrown up. I…”
I’ve seen Charles Szasz at his low points. I saw him in Arkham Asylum, for God’s sake, after he broke down and was framed for the murder of his mentor. What could that do to a man? And now he claims that Aristotle Rodor is alive? And he has the evidence to back it up… but surely you can find evidence in a pack of cards if you want to say someone you love is still alive? He’s looking at his hands. He’s tearing himself up.
“You blame yourself? When we run into battle, fight the good fight… if it’s against the Scarecrow or Despero, we do our best. We know the risks we run. And we do it. And we would die for our friends or for what we believe in, just because that’s what we know is right. You can’t blame yourself for that. Your friends knew what they were getting their heads into? Knew the inherent risks?”
“I know what you--”
“Did they know?” I push too hard. I know it as soon as the words leave my mouth. I should have played it quieter, but seeing him like this… he used to smile. Really smile, not just put on this façade, this cocky ironic gesture that seems to get him through the day.
“Yes. Yes they did, but that doesn’t stop it being my fault, and that doesn’t stop the reason for her dying from being my ego. Nothing you can say… can change that… okay? Anyway, I’m not here for confession, I’m here to tell you how the hell I survived that night. So let’s continue.
My team fell apart on the inside. Carrie… Vapor… she was the first to go. Taken down by the guards inside the building. I had hoped she had made it out. I still hold out hope that… somehow… nah. You know, what’s the point?”
“There’s a point. There’s always a point in holding out hope.”
“Sometimes. I brought her into the fold selfishly. Bug was the communications guy, had technology folded into his body that meant he was hardwired into electrical signals. Picked up all the information we needed on the inside. Hacking every computer without touching or seeing it. He got out. Turned off the electrical signals in my head for a split second and ran. Betrayed me. I hear the DEO still have him, extracting data from his head like he was a hard drive. But Carrie… she died because of me. I ask myself, why am I so paranoid? Why can’t I trust people? I mean, I see the connections in everything, in Hub City, I can see the corruption weaving its way from the ground up, into peoples lives and into the companies and I’m trying to clean it up but the place is wrong. Do you know about Hub City? Used to be a town called Bullet, back when the frontier was new and you could ride the train for hundreds of miles without seeing a hint of humanity. Bullet was a nice place, the very end of the line, and then something bad came to that town. They said the spirit of murder nestled into their soil, made everything that grew from there corrupt and nasty and… evil. And Bullet eventually got built over, Hub City grew out of it, Hub of everything, commerce, industry, all that, but still that stink of Bullet stayed, and Hub became that corrupt place that it is today… good can’t win in that place, but we try, and we fail, but can’t stop…
I’m rambling again, sorry.
Carrie was an old flame. Back in the good old days when these things could happen. We eventually parted, mutual decision, I was too wrapped up in the network, she wanted to pursue a career outside of superheroics, and she did well. We both did. We both dovetailed back into the business, but for those few years apart, we did good. Then my life fell upside down, I got dragged through the gutter and I woke up in Las Vegas with a conspiracy in my head and the means to do something about it. Considering the government were involved, and the League were based in America, you know the little cogs in my head told me one thing, so I didn’t involve the big boys. Didn’t involve the small leagues either, and I probably could have used the back up but the New Outsiders… they had their own problems, and I don’t like coming to people with mine unless I have to. That’s why we’re here today."
“Right.”
“So somehow Cadmus had got their hands on the skin of what they thought was Captain Atom. I think they were wrong. But Dabney Donovan, in his infinite wisdom, had this metal suit, hollow on the inside, like someone’s skin, and placed it on top of a bomb. And this suit and bomb combination resided inside a research lab. And you know what he did? He detonated the bomb. He blew this bomb up, and because of the skin and whatever it was made up of, the memory imprints of those scientists were cut up and fractured like a collage and sucked inside. The suit filled out. And a new life was created. Power levels beyond anything I’ve ever seen, emitting radiation as a defence mechanism constantly. And it was under the thrall of Donovan. Who, by the way, tortured the hell out of me. Not that I want to complain or anything, just trying to get you into my state of mind.
Anyway, I saved Bug. Beat up some people. The usual kind of gig, and we ran. He betrayed me. Escaped. I, on the other hand, woke up, and met that freak of nature that was murdering everything and everyone in the area with its ‘accidental’ release of high radiation. We chatted. Talked about identity. Apparently, it was calling itself ‘Fission’ or ‘Fusion’. I don’t want to call it him, or her, because it was neither. It was an abstraction, a collection of things, and gender wasn’t that important to it at that time. So anyway, I knew that if that thing got out Las Vegas would be dead by the time the League would get on the scene. And I had been tortured. And I was dying. So I did the only thing I could think at that moment to do. I unlatched the tesseract from its moorings, and sent myself, and that freak of nature, and the legions of dead inside the lab, hurtling through the upper atmosphere of reality.
I don’t remember much after that.
I remember wanting to live. I remember my life feeling as if it was nothing compared to this moment beyond the world. But I remembered that my overriding emotion was fear and the overriding thought in my head was ‘I want to live’. I woke up a bloody, ragged mess in the snow. Spat out from the tesseract as it hurtled to its demise where all alternate realities go to die.”
“The snow?”
“I wanted to live, Dick. And I was spat out in front of the one place, and the one man, who’d always saved my life when I was at my lowest. I had fallen through time and space and landed squarely in front of Nanda Parbat, at the feet of Richard Dragon.”
“He hasn’t been seen for years. He operated when… Hell, when the Justice Society first formed. Are you sure?” Bruce had mentioned meeting Richard Dragon once. It didn’t make sense to me then, and it doesn’t make sense to me now. I say these things, think them, and then I remember that I sleep with an alien princess, that my friend runs faster than sound, I sometimes live in a tower with a boy who can turn into any animal, albeit green, and… a vampire. What a life we lead.
“Time travels differently inside Nanda Parbat, Dick. I remember Bruce telling me of his own time there… how he stayed for six months, stepped out, and when he flew back to Beijing, only three weeks had passed. And apparently, the longer you stay there, the slower time moves…”
This piques my curiousity. “How long were you there for?”
“Long enough.” A reply with a wink, a knowing gesture. Did I say I think I hate him? More like know. Now I know how Bruce felt. Now I know why he kept him around whenever he came to visit.
“And you did what?”
“Relearned what it meant to fight. He trained me from the ground up after he nursed me back to health. I needed strength and he gave it to me. He’s a very harsh teacher. He used to ambush me, to keep me on my toes. Eventually it got to the stage where I used to ambush him. That’s when… ha… he laughed and told me he had taught me all he could. And that I had a life to lead in the outside world. So I packed my bags, and left. Walked a lot. Felt I needed to get away from technology for a while. China, the East mostly, putting what Dragon taught me to the test. Meeting old masters and learning new tricks. I was on the road for a year. Then I decided that all these fears I’d put into a little box in my head and locked away had to be faced. And the biggest fear of all? Something that kept me from my home for a damn long time? I was scared of Hub City. What it turned me into. So I bought a ticket, and I headed straight there.
And then Boston Brand paid a visit to me in the air.”
“Deadman?”
“Met him?”
“I know of him.”
He flashes a smile, a laugh leaves his lips. For a split second he doesn’t know how to react-- caught between the emotion and his state of mind-- but he lets it slide. Enjoys it. Weird. “Ambiguous…! Anyway, he told me what I needed to know. That the spirit of Hub City was broken and it needed fixing. And that’s what I intend to do. In and around fighting would be dictators and super villains. Or would be super villain dictators. I’m not picky.”
“Understandable.”
“So now we do what I need the Justice League for. I understand you aren’t my personal hit squad, I understand that we don’t follow personal vendettas, but I need help, and I don’t usually ask for that. I can’t do this alone. It’s bigger than me. And I can’t tear it down.”
“The League protects its own. And you are part of the League, and your family is our family.” We protect our own. Family. Diana wouldn’t hesitate in breaking some doors down and rearranging some faces if Alfred were in jeopardy so why wouldn’t we help The Question? Why wouldn’t we help Charles Szasz? “But you can’t be associated with this. You ‘killed’ him, remember? An animate in your shape beat him to death, and murdered several police officers. So if you were to go knocking on the door to his safe house, and his armed guards saw you, how would they react? So that’s why, whilst we’ve been talking, the League have been at work.”
That took him by surprise. “What?”
“It means they followed the leads without you, and they found me.” I’ve never seen a voice have such a reaction on someone before. Wait. That’s a lie. I’ve seen Bruce. And I’ve seen him be the Batman. And I’ve seen what that voice can do to people. This is different. Isn’t it always? Aristotle Rodor smiles, and Charles leaps from his seat. “Hullo, Charles.”
“T-Tot, I, what--” He’s shaking. Confused. He’s half walking, half running toward his mentor. “I missed you. And they…” He turns to me. “…Bastard! Smart little bastard, playing the game like this, I wouldn’t put this past Bruce, but you? Bravo, kid, bravo…” And then he’s done, and he’s hugging Rodor, and I leave them to it. I pass Green Lantern, who’s nodding at me as I go, and I nod back. A day’s work done. Now for the night. I head to the transporters, and think of Gotham, and home.
So I know what questions have to be asked.
The… ‘important ones’… you could say.
“How are you alive?”
“How would you define ‘alive’? I mean, my heart is beating, I think I’m warm to the touch, but you have to ask yourself… is there more to it than that?”
“Stop dodging the question, you know exactly what I mean. For all intents and purposes you died. And now you’re alive. We need to know how.”
“And then you’ll help me?”
“We’re helping you right now. Please, answer the question.”
“Hahahahahaha…” I watch him. I know body language. He betrays nothing. I knew I always liked him. He got underneath Bruce’s skin. Made him laugh. I shouldn’t think about Bruce. I focus on the task at hand. He’s staring at me now. I watch him. “You need to really think what question you’re asking, kid. Because I have something to tell you right now…” He leans toward me. I don’t react. “… I didn’t die…” Charles Szasz. The Question. Justice League HQ designate: ‘the Hall of Justice’. “…I got lost. Not for too long. Not forever. But I was sent soaring up through reality and I landed in the middle of nowhere because I got in over my head. I had nothing to come back to. So I stayed lost.”
“…And then you came back.”
He smiles. I think I hate him for it. “And then I came back.”
I am detective’s son in spirit. A daredevil’s son in flesh. Dick Grayson, the new Batman, the former Robin, the Nightwing in limbo. To think I volunteered for this interview…
“You want to know what happened, you don’t want me to evade the question and give you musings and philosophies on vanishing, and I assure you, I can give you many a musing and many a philosophy if push comes to shove, but I understand the need for ‘full’ disclosure. I think I’m scaring the kids…” He laughs. I watch his every emotion, and try to figure out if it’s forced or faked or, heaven forbid, the truth. As always with this man, I’m left wondering. The walls have ears, they listen to what we say, they record and they think, and I’ll leave it to them for now. I’m just here to be a face. How ironic, considering the masks we all wear. But here, inside the walls of the Hall of Justice, the ultimate paranoid sits without his, the Pseudoderm mask lying limp on the table between us. He looks good, considering we all thought him dead until he resurfaced a few months back- fighting crime in Hub City, and then fighting side by side with the Justice League… whether they wanted him to or not. But with what he bought to the table, even Wonder Woman was thanking him by the end of things. “…I’m sure they’ll get over it. So. I’ll stop stalling. It’s been long enough. Here’s how I survived the end of my world:
Cadmus Branch: Las Vegas. Area 15, to some. This science-industrial complex resided in a complex tesseract attached to our reality by a computer equation devised by Japanese former-child genii kidnapped from their homes by CIA agents during the cold war. That’s how they rolled back then. Disgruntled twenty-somethings being forced into helping Uncle Sam in the war against… anything. The US government found a tesseract, so they filled it with all they knew how: science. Mad, mad science… and Dabney Donovan was in charge, insane, as you would expect any mad scientist in charge of a mad scientist government think thank to be…
(I’ve thought a lot about Dabney Donovan recently. About how he died. About his work in cloning. I dislike clones. They muddy the waters of identity and make it very hard to keep something that should be left dead… dead. So I thought about his work. And I did some digging… and I found him, walking down the street in New York, looking very young and with that same insane spark. I couldn’t arrest him. I couldn’t beat him up without reason. So I watched him for a while. And he, like me, vanished without a trace without a moment’s warning… I dislike clones)
… and they were kidnapping metahumans. Men, women and children. They were doing things that would make the atrocities committed in Unit 731 seem like a walk in the rain. Scientists driven to the edge, held back by nothing, egged on to do terrible things… Dick, that entire complex had been compromised and no one was going to stop them. The DEO couldn’t take them down, Cadmus were part and parcel of the government so it wasn’t like the Justice League were going to step in (of course, this was before America declared war on them. Ho. Ho. Ho.)
The metahumans were being harvested for parts. I… I knew about this and I went in to stop them. Brought in a team to do it. I have to admit, I’ve never been a good team leader. I can follow orders with the best of them, that’s why the Justice League never seems like a bad fit, but running an operation? We fell apart. I didn’t… I didn’t think it all through. Didn’t see the obstacles that could get thrown up. I…”
I’ve seen Charles Szasz at his low points. I saw him in Arkham Asylum, for God’s sake, after he broke down and was framed for the murder of his mentor. What could that do to a man? And now he claims that Aristotle Rodor is alive? And he has the evidence to back it up… but surely you can find evidence in a pack of cards if you want to say someone you love is still alive? He’s looking at his hands. He’s tearing himself up.
“You blame yourself? When we run into battle, fight the good fight… if it’s against the Scarecrow or Despero, we do our best. We know the risks we run. And we do it. And we would die for our friends or for what we believe in, just because that’s what we know is right. You can’t blame yourself for that. Your friends knew what they were getting their heads into? Knew the inherent risks?”
“I know what you--”
“Did they know?” I push too hard. I know it as soon as the words leave my mouth. I should have played it quieter, but seeing him like this… he used to smile. Really smile, not just put on this façade, this cocky ironic gesture that seems to get him through the day.
“Yes. Yes they did, but that doesn’t stop it being my fault, and that doesn’t stop the reason for her dying from being my ego. Nothing you can say… can change that… okay? Anyway, I’m not here for confession, I’m here to tell you how the hell I survived that night. So let’s continue.
My team fell apart on the inside. Carrie… Vapor… she was the first to go. Taken down by the guards inside the building. I had hoped she had made it out. I still hold out hope that… somehow… nah. You know, what’s the point?”
“There’s a point. There’s always a point in holding out hope.”
“Sometimes. I brought her into the fold selfishly. Bug was the communications guy, had technology folded into his body that meant he was hardwired into electrical signals. Picked up all the information we needed on the inside. Hacking every computer without touching or seeing it. He got out. Turned off the electrical signals in my head for a split second and ran. Betrayed me. I hear the DEO still have him, extracting data from his head like he was a hard drive. But Carrie… she died because of me. I ask myself, why am I so paranoid? Why can’t I trust people? I mean, I see the connections in everything, in Hub City, I can see the corruption weaving its way from the ground up, into peoples lives and into the companies and I’m trying to clean it up but the place is wrong. Do you know about Hub City? Used to be a town called Bullet, back when the frontier was new and you could ride the train for hundreds of miles without seeing a hint of humanity. Bullet was a nice place, the very end of the line, and then something bad came to that town. They said the spirit of murder nestled into their soil, made everything that grew from there corrupt and nasty and… evil. And Bullet eventually got built over, Hub City grew out of it, Hub of everything, commerce, industry, all that, but still that stink of Bullet stayed, and Hub became that corrupt place that it is today… good can’t win in that place, but we try, and we fail, but can’t stop…
I’m rambling again, sorry.
Carrie was an old flame. Back in the good old days when these things could happen. We eventually parted, mutual decision, I was too wrapped up in the network, she wanted to pursue a career outside of superheroics, and she did well. We both did. We both dovetailed back into the business, but for those few years apart, we did good. Then my life fell upside down, I got dragged through the gutter and I woke up in Las Vegas with a conspiracy in my head and the means to do something about it. Considering the government were involved, and the League were based in America, you know the little cogs in my head told me one thing, so I didn’t involve the big boys. Didn’t involve the small leagues either, and I probably could have used the back up but the New Outsiders… they had their own problems, and I don’t like coming to people with mine unless I have to. That’s why we’re here today."
“Right.”
“So somehow Cadmus had got their hands on the skin of what they thought was Captain Atom. I think they were wrong. But Dabney Donovan, in his infinite wisdom, had this metal suit, hollow on the inside, like someone’s skin, and placed it on top of a bomb. And this suit and bomb combination resided inside a research lab. And you know what he did? He detonated the bomb. He blew this bomb up, and because of the skin and whatever it was made up of, the memory imprints of those scientists were cut up and fractured like a collage and sucked inside. The suit filled out. And a new life was created. Power levels beyond anything I’ve ever seen, emitting radiation as a defence mechanism constantly. And it was under the thrall of Donovan. Who, by the way, tortured the hell out of me. Not that I want to complain or anything, just trying to get you into my state of mind.
Anyway, I saved Bug. Beat up some people. The usual kind of gig, and we ran. He betrayed me. Escaped. I, on the other hand, woke up, and met that freak of nature that was murdering everything and everyone in the area with its ‘accidental’ release of high radiation. We chatted. Talked about identity. Apparently, it was calling itself ‘Fission’ or ‘Fusion’. I don’t want to call it him, or her, because it was neither. It was an abstraction, a collection of things, and gender wasn’t that important to it at that time. So anyway, I knew that if that thing got out Las Vegas would be dead by the time the League would get on the scene. And I had been tortured. And I was dying. So I did the only thing I could think at that moment to do. I unlatched the tesseract from its moorings, and sent myself, and that freak of nature, and the legions of dead inside the lab, hurtling through the upper atmosphere of reality.
I don’t remember much after that.
I remember wanting to live. I remember my life feeling as if it was nothing compared to this moment beyond the world. But I remembered that my overriding emotion was fear and the overriding thought in my head was ‘I want to live’. I woke up a bloody, ragged mess in the snow. Spat out from the tesseract as it hurtled to its demise where all alternate realities go to die.”
“The snow?”
“I wanted to live, Dick. And I was spat out in front of the one place, and the one man, who’d always saved my life when I was at my lowest. I had fallen through time and space and landed squarely in front of Nanda Parbat, at the feet of Richard Dragon.”
“He hasn’t been seen for years. He operated when… Hell, when the Justice Society first formed. Are you sure?” Bruce had mentioned meeting Richard Dragon once. It didn’t make sense to me then, and it doesn’t make sense to me now. I say these things, think them, and then I remember that I sleep with an alien princess, that my friend runs faster than sound, I sometimes live in a tower with a boy who can turn into any animal, albeit green, and… a vampire. What a life we lead.
“Time travels differently inside Nanda Parbat, Dick. I remember Bruce telling me of his own time there… how he stayed for six months, stepped out, and when he flew back to Beijing, only three weeks had passed. And apparently, the longer you stay there, the slower time moves…”
This piques my curiousity. “How long were you there for?”
“Long enough.” A reply with a wink, a knowing gesture. Did I say I think I hate him? More like know. Now I know how Bruce felt. Now I know why he kept him around whenever he came to visit.
“And you did what?”
“Relearned what it meant to fight. He trained me from the ground up after he nursed me back to health. I needed strength and he gave it to me. He’s a very harsh teacher. He used to ambush me, to keep me on my toes. Eventually it got to the stage where I used to ambush him. That’s when… ha… he laughed and told me he had taught me all he could. And that I had a life to lead in the outside world. So I packed my bags, and left. Walked a lot. Felt I needed to get away from technology for a while. China, the East mostly, putting what Dragon taught me to the test. Meeting old masters and learning new tricks. I was on the road for a year. Then I decided that all these fears I’d put into a little box in my head and locked away had to be faced. And the biggest fear of all? Something that kept me from my home for a damn long time? I was scared of Hub City. What it turned me into. So I bought a ticket, and I headed straight there.
And then Boston Brand paid a visit to me in the air.”
“Deadman?”
“Met him?”
“I know of him.”
He flashes a smile, a laugh leaves his lips. For a split second he doesn’t know how to react-- caught between the emotion and his state of mind-- but he lets it slide. Enjoys it. Weird. “Ambiguous…! Anyway, he told me what I needed to know. That the spirit of Hub City was broken and it needed fixing. And that’s what I intend to do. In and around fighting would be dictators and super villains. Or would be super villain dictators. I’m not picky.”
“Understandable.”
“So now we do what I need the Justice League for. I understand you aren’t my personal hit squad, I understand that we don’t follow personal vendettas, but I need help, and I don’t usually ask for that. I can’t do this alone. It’s bigger than me. And I can’t tear it down.”
“The League protects its own. And you are part of the League, and your family is our family.” We protect our own. Family. Diana wouldn’t hesitate in breaking some doors down and rearranging some faces if Alfred were in jeopardy so why wouldn’t we help The Question? Why wouldn’t we help Charles Szasz? “But you can’t be associated with this. You ‘killed’ him, remember? An animate in your shape beat him to death, and murdered several police officers. So if you were to go knocking on the door to his safe house, and his armed guards saw you, how would they react? So that’s why, whilst we’ve been talking, the League have been at work.”
That took him by surprise. “What?”
“It means they followed the leads without you, and they found me.” I’ve never seen a voice have such a reaction on someone before. Wait. That’s a lie. I’ve seen Bruce. And I’ve seen him be the Batman. And I’ve seen what that voice can do to people. This is different. Isn’t it always? Aristotle Rodor smiles, and Charles leaps from his seat. “Hullo, Charles.”
“T-Tot, I, what--” He’s shaking. Confused. He’s half walking, half running toward his mentor. “I missed you. And they…” He turns to me. “…Bastard! Smart little bastard, playing the game like this, I wouldn’t put this past Bruce, but you? Bravo, kid, bravo…” And then he’s done, and he’s hugging Rodor, and I leave them to it. I pass Green Lantern, who’s nodding at me as I go, and I nod back. A day’s work done. Now for the night. I head to the transporters, and think of Gotham, and home.