Gifts - Part Three, Chapter One

by Marla F. Fair

            He opened his eyes on a world gone mad.   All about him a kaleidoscope of colors whirled and danced filling the small hot space.  He couldn’t get his bearings.  Couldn’t even manage to sit up.  Closing his eyes, he sought his center and tried to remember the things Bruce had taught him.  Even in the worst of circumstances, there was always a way out—a way to survive.  He counted slowly to ten and then stretched out his arms and legs and was surprised when he didn’t bump into anything.  Maybe the room wasn’t as tiny as he thought....  Still, the lights were disorienting.  He tried to stand.  Instead he stumbled and fell.  Resting on his hands and knees, he drew several ragged breaths and tried to remember how he had gotten where he was.  He had left Kory sleeping and returned to the duplex where he had found John to confront Two-face and the Pretender and had—

            Dear God, John!  He didn’t have to check the chronometer built into his suit.  The deadline had passed and Bruce was still alive.  That meant John....  Laying his head on his hands, he began to weep silently.  John.  By all that was holy, John....

            “Wakey-wakey.”

            He knew the voice.  Pulling himself together, he lifted his head slowly and glanced about.  Shadows shifted in every corner of the room, but he couldn’t tell if it was the crazy lights of if someone stood there watching. “Pretender?”

            The lean figure slid out of one of the patches of darkness to come to his side.  In its hand was the remote which activated the metal demons in his blood.  “Mustn’t move.”

            “Why?”

            “Need you here.”

            He glanced at the creature, frowning at the face, half-white, half tanned skin.  “Can I sit up?”

            One of the Pretender’s brows lifted in amusement and it said quite clearly,  “I don’t know—can you?”

            Dick closed his eyes and sighed.  It was playing child’s games.  He licked his lips.  “May I?”

            The Pretender laughed and ran a hand through its yellow-green hair so it stood up like soldiers on review.  “Yes.  You may.”

            Dick lifted his hands from the floor and tipped back into a seated position. Then he faced his foe.  It was the first time he had had a chance to really study the curious creature.  It did look like Harvey, but there was something else there as well.  Someone else...  “Who are you?” he asked quietly.

            The lean figure pointed its nose toward the ceiling and pronounced dramatically, “I am the Pretender....”

            “The pretender to what?  To some throne?”  Dick tried to keep how exasperated he felt from showing in his voice.

            It’s head tilted and its eyes—one blue and one green—fastened on him.  “Smart boy.  You get a lollipop.”  It’s long fingers hovered over the control pad and twitched with expectation as he flinched.  A moment later, it moved them away. 

Encouraged he tried another question.  “Why do you call Two-Face, ‘Father’?”

            It’s crooked face split with a grin.  “He made me.  Like he made you.  Now he is your father too.”  Then it laughed.  “Two.”

            “Made me?”

            “So, Grayson, I see you are awake.  I’ve brought you a present.”

            Dick looked up suddenly.  The movement made him gag.  Concentrating on the creature before him, he had forgotten the lights.  “A better present would be to turn that kaleidoscope off.”

            “Glad to oblige.” 

            A moment later the whirling lights vanished, their absence leaving him almost as disoriented as their presence. Then they were replaced by a news broadcast which filled the four blank walls of his cell.  He frowned as a reporter stepped aside and the cameraman zoomed in on an elegant casket being lowered into the ground.  Beside the open grave were two women, one slight and dark, the other broad-boned and madder-haired.  In the arms of the red-head there was a small child.  He gasped and rose to his feet and fell with his fingers against one of the walls.  John was alive.  But who was in the grave?  He spun about and managed to stay on his feet as he shouted, “What have you done?  Is it Bruce?  I swear I will kill you where you stand if— ”  Then he stopped as the sad figure of his mentor and friend moved into the frame.  Bruce dropped a handful of earth on the coffin and then walked away as the reporter began to outline the career of the late Dick Grayson, once known as Red Robin and after that, as Nightwing to a grieving world.

            “I didn’t touch a precious hair on your one time guardian’s head, but I have killed him.  Look at him,” Two-face snarled, almost dancing with triumph, ‘old and gray, bent with grief.”  He turned and looked at Dick and his twisted face seemed to writhe with a sick joy.  “Just imagine what it will do to him when I kill you again!”

            Now it all made sense.  In the years since he had destroyed Wayne Manor and fled the city and the States, Two-face had been working to perfect a technique of creating clones and transplanting memories into them, hoping to restore himself to what he once had been—to recreate Harvey Dent, whole and undamaged.  The grinning gargoyle that watched him must have been one of his experiments he chose to allow to live.  While it was  obvious Harvey’s DNA was involved in the creation of the Pretender, there was something else there.  Its body was long and lean—not stocky like Dent.  And it had an almost feminine grace.  Still, with its disfigured visage—something Harvey had to have subconsciously chosen to recreate—and twisted mind, it was the perfect child for his demented alter-ego.

            Dick sighed and shifted so his hands encircled his knees.  Apparently in the midst of his quest, it had dawned on Harvey that he would be able to reproduce people other than himself.  He couldn’t yet transfer memories—that was why he remained in the form God had given him that had been warped and damaged by fate—but he could plant dead bodies at strategic places—like he had his—or send duplicates in as victims of amnesia or mind-wiping.  In this way he had planned to take over key positions in the government, to steal vast fortunes and to generally wreck havoc on the world that had betrayed him—until the day he had seen that news broadcast and realized his old enemy had survived both the destruction of the Manor and the holocaust that followed.  From that moment on, it seemed, he had begun to plot Bruce’s death, and when he had heard the rumors which had flown through the criminal grape-vine of Koriand’r’s return and Dick’s own death and resurrection, he had begun to plot the ruin of the man who had ruined him.  He meant to take from him what mattered most, and do it not once, but twice.  Like Bane, he would break the Batman, but he wouldn’t bother with his already weak and aging body—

            He would break his soul.

            Dick glanced at the Pretender.  The creature sat across the room playing with the crazy-quilt teddy bear, showing it the keypad that controlled the invisible bugs which infested both him and his son.  He frowned.  The name still bothered him.  The pretender to what?  Harvey’s empire?  He didn’t really have one.  Closing his eyes, he sighed and ran his fingers through his black hair.  At least John was safe and away from here.  By now Bruce had probably figured out that he was infected and would have done all he could to remove the nannites from his body.  Or to make them inert.  The fact that the child was at the funeral...his funeral seemed to support that.

            Dear God, he hoped there was a way to make them inert.

            He opened his eyes and realized his jailer was watching him.  Its eyes shone with a demented light and it smiled while waving the little black box.  He waved back.  God, he had to get out of here.  It wasn’t just that he feared for his life—if it would have saved anyone else, he would have given it gladly—but at this point he knew his death would do more harm than good.  Bruce had buried him once.  That had probably about killed him.

            If he had to do it again....

            “So what do you get out of this?”  he asked suddenly.

            The creature cocked its head.  “What?”

“You?  What do you get out of this?”

Its eyes narrowed and its thin finger’s arched.  “No tricks.”

            He held his hands up, palms open.  “No tricks.  Two-face kills me again.  Bruce cracks.  Old half-and-half is happy.”  He paused for effect.  “What’s in it for you?”

            “For me?”

            “For you.  What do you get?” 

            The twisted mouth crooked into a smile.  “Plenty.”

“Plenty?”  He shrugged.  “What exactly?  You get to watch?”

The tall rangy creature rose and crossed to where he sat, towering over him. It fixed him with both eyes, blue and green.  It’s scarlet lips pulled back to reveal pearl white teeth. “I get to own what cannot die.  And what in dying destroys him.”

            Dick frowned.  Those were full sentences, not the sing-song garbage it had spoken before.  Was it’s simplicity another pretense?  “Own what can’t die?  What is that?”

            The creature bent at the middle to whisper in his ear.  “You.”

Continued in Chapter Two