Gifts - Chapter Three

by Marla F. Fair

“Dick?”

Thin-skinned knuckles rapped on the heavy wooden door and long fingers showed through the crack as it opened into the room. A dark head followed and then the slender ramrod-straight frame that carried it, swathed in deep green and gold.  A silken waistcoat  flashed momentarily as the cape was swept aside, like a summer sun settling in the dark night’s embrace.   “Dick, the meeting has begun and Mar’i said….”

Ibn Al’ Xuffasch hesitated just inside the door.  His keen eyes, deep in color and razor-sharp as a falcon’s, surveyed the empty room noting the open window and the perfectly preserved bed linens.

The son of the bat sighed. 

Then he smiled. 

The night they had brought Dick to the manor, wounded, perhaps dying, he had listened to the doctors, to his father and to the older man’s wife.  Even to his lover. Still, he had argued against the decision they had made.  He knew Dick too well.  He understood their fear, even shared it, but it was wrong.  Dick was a man.  A man among men.  This was his child.  His son.

He had a right to choose.

Slowly Ibn backed out of the room and closed the door, turning the knob.  A moment later as he descended the broad staircase into the elegant entry of the newly restored manor, he literally ran into the one he had claimed for his own.  She was looking towards the parlor where the might of the several worlds was gathered and not watching where she was going.  He halted and caught her in his arms as she stumbled and lost her footing.  Her jade-green eyes were bright and her black hair fell about her shoulders in an ebon wave.  She smiled and reached for him.

After a slow kiss, she pulled away.  “Where’s Dad?”

Ibn’s eyes met hers.  “Asleep,” he answered quickly.

“You should have awakened him.  He wanted to be here….”  She started to move past him, towards the hall that led to her father’s room.  He caught her lavender-covered arm.

“I tried.”  His piercing eyes held hers, searching them.  “Did you drug his food?”

Nightstar looked down.  She knew his opinion on this.  “I didn’t.

“Then someone else?”

She bit her lip and nodded.  “The butler.”

The young man tilted his dark head and almost laughed.  “The butler did it?”

She hit him on the chest.  Hard.  “One of those mechanical things Grandpa programs.  You know, the Alfred clones.”

“Oh.”  He took hold of her arm and began to walk her down the steps.  As she protested, insisting she should go to her Dad’s room and try to rouse him, Ibn took her by the waist and whispered, “Let him be.  The choice has been made.”

Some time later as they sat in the immense dining room of Wayne Manor, half a dozen of the galaxy’s mightiest heroes gathered at one long mahogany table, something began to gnaw at the back of Nightstar’s consciousness.  She sat with her fists to her chin, listening to the report of Big Barda’s daughter and her friend, Avia.  She was facing her grandpa and Clark and Diana.  Avia reported that her mother was doing well and that she had managed to remember one minor detail.  Just before falling unconscious she had seen the house grow unnaturally dark and she had heard a sound, like the wind, or some sort of beast howling.  Then the light on the Bat-bots outside the window faltered. 

After that she remembered nothing.

Her Dad’s surrogate father then spoke up informing them that the Bat-bots had been infected with the same infinitesimal nannites that were threatening the life of his son. They had disrupted the complicated systems, working their way through the built-in defensives, literally shutting the giant guardians down.  He mentioned as well that he had found indications that something had been placed over the windows and a noxious substance introduced into the ventilation system, traces of which still clung to the fibers of the new carpet.  A substance which when ingested was deadly, but when inhaled produced either hallucinations or a mild form of amnesia.

Clark and Diana spoke next, reporting that they had flown far and wide for three days without finding anything.  The beautiful Amazon was still speaking and had begun to  draw something from a small pouch tethered to her white gown,  when it hit her.

Nightstar’s head came free of her hands and she turned to glare at Ibn.  Her fists came down on the table hard enough to rattle the boards beneath its carved feet.  Everyone in the room, except her lover, looked at her as if she had gone mad.  Diana stood open-mouthed, a small piece of paper dangling from her fingers. .

Bruce rose slowly and looked at his grand-daughter.  “Mar’i?”

She was fuming.  Her breathe coming in short gasps.  “Ibn, you tell him.”

Slowly all eyes turned to the sleek young man who silently occupied one of a pair of high-backed  winged chairs near the fire.  He had not joined in,  but sat listening.  With inherent grace he rose and leaning on the wolf’s head cane he carried, looked at her, his eyes a dark mask.

“And what should I tell them, my sweet?”

Nightstar’s fists were glowing violet, smoldering like her deep green eyes.  “I don’t believe you did this.”   

“Did what?”  Diana glanced at Clark and he shrugged, signaling her to wait. 

Bruce rose and walked towards his son, towards the young man who was a part of him and yet so much more a part of his power-crazed grandfather and his beautiful child, Talia.

“Son, what is it?”

Ibn tilted his head and ran thin fingers through shoulder-length black hair.

“Nightwing is gone.”

Bruce stood in the room, gripping the arm of the chair his eldest son had recently occupied.  The bones were white beneath his thinned skin. The great window before him stood open to the night.

“How long?”  He could hear his grand-daughter’s toe tapping behind him.  “Nightstar?”

She growled low in her throat.  Her hands were glowing powerfully enough to illuminate the room.  “Ibn?”

The young man shrugged.  His cape was thrown back over one shoulder and the gold watch-chain at his waist glinted like a cat’s eye.  “I do not know for certain.  When I arrived to retrieve him before the meeting started, he was gone.  The chair was empty as you see it now.  The bed un-slept in.”  He lifted his cane and pointed toward the table to Bruce’s left.  “As you can see, his food is uneaten.”

The older man fingered the chicken-salad sandwich and frowned.  “Two hours at least then.  Most likely more.”  Lifting his graying head, he glanced with concern at his half-alien grand-child.  “When did you bring this to him?”

Her mouth was set in a hard line.  The white teeth cutting into the rosy field of her lips.  “Four-thirty.”

He nodded.  “It’s past ten now.  I would imagine he left immediately after you did.”

Her nostrils flared.  “X’Hal,” she breathed as she began to tremble. 

“Almost six hours.”  Bruce added as he turned back to the open window.  “He could be anywhere by now.  And if he doesn’t want us to find him.  We won’t.”

Ibn stared at the woman he loved, aware that something was wrong.  She was furious with him as she had a right to be.  But there was something more.  He raised his hand and took a step toward her.

Out of the corner of his eye Bruce noted the familiar flare-up.  The light that had pulsed gently in the room began to throb like a carnival ride gone haywire.  He glanced at the center of the storm and saw Dick’s daughter, her lithe formed bathed in purple light, and then launched himself without thought in the boy’s direction.  A moment later a deep violet star-bolt split the air where he had been, bursting through the thick wood paneling to  shatter the large leaded window at the top of the stair.

Ibn lay on the floor beneath his father, shaken.  Bruce rounded on the girl, his blue eyes narrowed with fear and rage.  “Mar’i, there is no excuse for that kind of loss of control!  I don’t care what you think—”

He stopped.  She was sobbing like a child with a broken heart.  He glanced at his son who nodded, indicating he was well, and then rose to go to her side.  She had fallen to her knees and had her head in her hands.  Kneeling, he laid his hand on her shoulder and leaned towards her.  Through the heart-deep cries, he heard her speak, but couldn’t catch the words.

“What?”  Bruce petted her head like she was five years old.  “Child?”

As Diana and Clark appeared in the doorway, with the others trailing close behind, she fell into his arms. “You lied.  You son of a bitch, you lied!”  She beat Bruce’s arm with her fist, bruising it, and turned to stare out the open window into the anomalous night. 

“Dad, how could you lie to me?”

            Dick knew he was taking chances.  Big chances.  This was the first place they would hunt for him.  But he had to go back.  Back to where it had all started. 

Back to the warehouse where he had been shot. 

            Oh, he knew Bruce had most likely turned the place inside out, had undoubtedly been over it with something finer than the finest-toothed comb, but he had to see for himself.  The yellow police tape, seemingly quaint in this latter day, was still in place marking the spot where he had fallen.  He carefully stepped over it where it was sagging and examined the floor.  It was still blood-stained. Beyond his outline lay a pile of singed and blackened crates.  He advanced and turned a couple of them over with his gloved hands, sifting through the ashes of what seemed to have been a cargo of toys—something akin to a slinky or other metal gyro, though their fused skeletons were nothing now but twisted  unrecognizable scrap.  With a booted foot he pushed the last box out of the way and then stopped dead.

            Someone had left him a note.

             He sucked at his teeth and squatted beside the burnt debris.  Bruce had to have looked under the boxes.  If he had thought of it, then the Batman certainly had.  And that meant someone had to have returned and put them back in place, leaving this on the floor for him to find, knowing he would return.

            That was not a pleasant thought.  Whoever it was, they knew him.

            Really knew him.

            His blue eyes narrowed as his finger traced the letters on the floor, written in red as though to emulate the blood he had shed.

‘YOU ARE MINE,’ it said simply.  And it was signed not with a name but with a sigil or sign, something like a lop-sided smile or a two tossed on its side with an eye winking above it.

            Suppressing a shudder he wondered who it could be.  Who was alive who knew him  so well?  Most of his old enemies had perished in the Metahuman conflict or died of old age.  He looked at the sick grin and thought of the Joker.  But he was long dead.  There was always Two-Face, whereabouts and mental condition unknown…. but this wasn’t his style.

            Standing and stretching, he lifted his hands to the sky, glancing out the hole in the ceiling his wife’s starbolts had left.  Thinking of her brought a bittersweet smile.  If she hadn’t been so worried about him dying, she would have wanted to kill him for— 

A sudden explosion in his brain sent him to his knees.  He gasped and sucked in air.  Falling to the ground, he curled into a tight ball, resting his right temple on the hard cool cement as fireworks exploded behind his clenched eyes. 

            Somewhere, not very far away, someone was laughing.

            Nightwing coughed and a small trickle of blood ran from his nose.

Continued in Chapter Four