69Chapter Eleven: Thirteen
It shouldn't have held Tim's attention the way it did. But in his defense, it wasn't an ordinary thing for him to hear in the bell tower, the familiar sound of snapping bone oddly out of place among the barren stone walls and decaying, wooden floors.
The hazy noise had stirred him awake, and Tim wasn't sure if he was thankful for that or not, for something on the outside that had managed to free him from that evening's slumber—a rerun of a dream that was growing more and more common by the day.
It felt like any time he closed his eyes, he'd be tossed back in.
Tim knew that; it was why he hardly slept anymore. But somehow that night, he'd found himself back there anyway, back to falling from a bridge and being swallowed up by the darkness below. That was how it always was: a sequence that should have lasted all of thirty seconds but felt like hours until he'd be shocked awake, a jolt in his chest spurring his eyes open.
That was how Tim came to find himself in the tower that afternoon, letting his breathing fall back to a normal pace, questioning if he'd woken up outside of that darkness—or further inside of it—until comfortable apathy reclaimed control.
He blinked up at the support beams stretching above, counting each of them in a compulsive pattern he repeated every time he woke. There were always five; the number never changed. To be honest, he didn't know why he bothered counting them. But then again, he didn't know why he did a lot of things anymore…
It was in the middle of that thought that the sounds reclaimed his attention. There was a faint flapping of wings. A muffled shrill. Collections of quick patters that fell along one of the beams, footsteps of some creature or another that had made its way into the bell tower too.
That conclusion wasn't surprising. Tim had run across a multitude of different animals there, noting them with vague interest before going to sleep or heading out for an assignment; he wasn't in the tower often, but he'd seen more mice and rats than he cared to keep track of during his visits, and on rare occasions, birds would find their way in too, presumably to prey on the rodents scattered throughout the place.
Essentially, every animal that could be considered undesirable was there in one way or another. But Tim couldn't really complain. He belonged to the worst group of undesirables: the assassins.
But it was rare to see another Talon there in the bell tower. Tim had caught on to that fact quickly when he'd realized The Court had their assignments staggered. It meant only two would ever be there at the same time, waiting to receive new assignments. The setup was most likely to keep them isolated, keep them loyal to The Court and only The Court. From the moment he'd agreed to this, Tim knew they would seclude him like that, make sure he stayed in line and was useful, but he also knew that was better than the alternative: It was better than being useless.
Besides, Tim joining The Court, picking up where he'd left off… That's what Talon would've wanted, right?
Tim turned his attention away from that dangerous line of thought and back to the tower, back to epistemic thoughts and things that were safe and straightforward. All other emotions could be locked up and tossed over that nightmarish bridge, left to rot at the bottom of a black ocean where no one would ever find them—especially himself.
Meanwhile, the grinding noises had continued from up above, scraping and crunching like something was trying to break a rock with its teeth. But at least the shrieks had died off, leaving Tim with nothing more than a bored curiosity.
He moved smoothly from his spot on the floor, leaping onto the side of one of the muted church bells before maneuvering his way up to the beams. He'd been so quiet that he was certain the animal hadn't noticed him yet, whatever it was probably too engrossed in the poor creature it'd trapped. As he settled down a safe distance away, it struck Tim that hadn't seen that in the tower before, a tiger owl with its eyes glued to its newly-deceased prey.
The more Tim thought about it, the more he realized that he hadn't seen an actual owl for a long time, not since the last moment he'd been in the loft a year and a half before. But this bird wasn't kin to the snowy barn owls Talon had introduced him to years ago, instead speckled white and tan while prominent feathered horns highlighted the dark gleam of its eyes. It was busying itself crushing the wings of the rodent in its beak, slow and methodical like it was drawing some sick delight from it all.
It'd caught a bat.
There were reasons why Tim didn't like spending time in the bell tower.
It was always too quiet, leaving more room for self-reflection than he cared for, and even when it wasn't, when the walls swelled with a breath of whistling wind or the supports creaked under the strain of the secrets they held, it felt like the whole place was murmuring judgements, cursing its inhabitants before threatening to collapse on their heads.
It made Tim more than willing to give up on the idea of sleep that evening and slip down to the first floor, rows upon rows of dusty church pews and never-lit candles standing watch.
The paradox of the building was another thing: A cathedral had been the last place Tim had expected assassins to take refuge, but there it was, a rundown and sorry excuse for a building with ill-kept trinkets and mosaics so blurred with dust and grime that the angelic faces were beyond recognition. Tim admired the images sometimes when he couldn't sleep, and when it rained, he imagined they were crying.
But somehow, despite the neglect, the windows still managed to fufill their purpose, as tendrils of light, the tragic remains of a sunset, filtered through the numerous tinted panes. They decorated the place with unfitting bursts of color, the beams discarded on the floor like unwanted change. He could never quite distinguish the hues through the hazel of his mask, but Tim followed them anyway, the colors weaving over him until he was close enough to grasp one of the mounted candle holders on the wall and jerk it upward.
Of course, that was exactly what he did, and the expected door grunted open, grinding against the porous stone until there was nothing but a torch-lit passage and—
There it was. The most glaring reason Tim didn't like the brief intervals between assignments.
There was only ever one other Talon in the tower. It was always the same person, and although Tim didn't really care, it would've been nice to have anyone else there instead; Tim wasn't afraid of him necessarily, but there was an ambiguously unsettling air about this Talon that Tim had noticed the moment they'd met, a feeling that made his fingers twitch where, once, an owl had left a scar.
"Be careful not to get too close."
Upon meeting the man, Tim had turned over the recollection like an interesting stone before letting it drop from his hand, and he did so once again, proffering a polite—if not reluctant—nod in the Talon's direction. The man didn't return the greeting, but at least he moved, taking in Tim skeptically before turning back into the corridor, swallowed up by the shadows.
He always arrived earlier than Tim, waiting like a spectral statue on a street corner, maybe even like death itself, until the door would shudder open and the night could be concluded without much fanfare. Or at least, that was how it went on all the nights so far, but with the man's watchful eyes on him, begging for him to slip up, Tim was always on his toes, always punctual, always aware.
He'd been the one to break Tim into the fold, after all. Tim hadn't forgotten that.
As always, it reminded him that when they'd had their brief introduction over a year ago, the man hadn't introduced himself with any name other than "Talon." It was a name everyone bared (Tim was no exception.), but "Talon" meant something different to Tim than just a dehumanizing title handed out by The Court, and he never called anyone by that name, not anymore—and least of all the person next to him.
Tim spared a careful glance to his side.
He hardly came up to the assassin's chest, having to crane his head back to look him in the face. Tim never needed to look, though: He already had the man's mask branded onto his memory, white-hot like iron, sharp enough to recall the sternness of it and the occasional bloodlust that flashed along the metalwork. It was those very features, the austere way the metal swooped over his mask's lenses, that reminded Tim less of an intelligent, patient owl, less of Talon, and more of a different species altogether.
Wren must have been able to feel Tim's eyes, as the man tilted his head in his direction, and Tim righted himself—just slow enough so as to not give himself away.
It wouldn't be another thirty minutes before he could be gone, Tim reminded himself, back out into the open air with a new directive to keep him occupied. He missed it, that challenge of learning another person, memorizing their habits, their goals, and their weaknesses in such private detail that there was nothing left but a human. Because no matter how deluded a person was in their apparent invincibility, they were always equally mortal as the next.
There was something fair about that, a consistent fact that Tim could hold on to, as real as the five beams he counted when he woke or sad mosaics that cried when it rained.
Dozens of shadowy eyes redelivered that mortal truth every time Tim stepped into the chamber, dim flames lighting enough of the room to make out The Court of Owls, a wealth of white masks that crowded the veranda looming above. They were always leaned forward as if they could taste the blood of a new victim on their tongues, ravenous and insatiable, but that was something Tim could overlook.
He came in with a new focus each time. Last month, he'd watched the woman on the far left, noting the pendant around her neck and the wrinkles on the backs of her hands. She was likely in her late sixties, and the pendant was a family heirloom, making it easy to distinguish who she was.
It'd become a game of sorts, nothing with any ill intent or larger motive, but something Tim did because he could. He'd already profiled the identities of two other people (one a banker, the other a businessman) by the time he'd reached the center of the room.
Wren always knelt in earnest, large and threatening in contrast to the name Tim had secretly foisted upon him, while Tim himself stooped down as if to check if his shoe was untied. But Tim did it regardless. Because that was what was expected of him, and this was all he had left.
He watched his shadow circle him on the floor, the candlelight tossing the imprint back and forth as it wandered as though dazed, and he waited, just like he always did.
There were a few formalities, someone keeping record to the side, penning the date and the affairs of the night, but it didn't take long for orders to tumble down from the balcony. When The Court Leader uttered them, the names of the next batch of equally-mortal victims, it always caused a few observers to crowd closer in anticipation like they were getting a glimpse of some dark, forbidden magic that was too powerful for humans to wield. And maybe that was what it was: something sinister, something evil. Something humans shouldn't touch.
Because as soon as the names were spoken, echoing in the chamber like the fall of a guillotine, they all knew what it meant. It might take days. It might take weeks.
But either way, those people were as good as dead.
It was late winter in Gotham. The beginnings of March had just sprung up, and although Tim was used to the snow having melted away by then, that year's winter had been especially unforgiving, filled with blizzards that capped the buildings and sidewalks with white powder that had since turned to slush.
That fact reintroduced itself to Tim as he made his careful way through layers of snow, the rooftop patches the only bits that hadn't browned from car oil and soot, and the thick mounds sucked in his feet with every footfall, their harsh crunching solitary noises as they echoed across the buildings. On those nights, it was like being cradled by the sky, the pollution thin enough and himself high up enough that Tim could make out a faint stream of stars stretching along the curvature of the Earth, the anomaly disappearing in the glow of the city on both horizons.
It was too pretty a night for the work Tim usually did, and he was somewhat grateful that a different mystery had brought him Downtown, one other than the mission The Court had assigned. He'd already cracked the latter, actually, having tracked his target to a shoddy motel just outside town, but he couldn't act on the intel hastily: Batman had been in Europe for a while three months ago, but now that he was back in Gotham, Tim was guessing the man would be noticing his activity—along with the other Talons'—and unlike them, Tim didn't think he was good enough to handle Batman on his own yet. It'd be better to keep low, strike when he knew the vigilante wasn't looking and save himself the trouble.
That understanding had urged Tim to sneak into the GCPD headquarters the previous week. A particularly nasty storm had left few officers there, most of them either out on calls or stuck in their own homes without a way to come into the station. It'd made it the perfect time to slip through their security and swipe the reports Tim had wanted, ones from back when the GCPD had been looking into the Dark Knight, wondering who he was and if he was friend or foe.
They'd done most of the leg-work, actually, and as much as Tim could've done it on his own, the pilfered files had spared him that. All that'd been left to do was sift through a plethora of alibis that could have been staged, those and James Gordon's accounts. (He probably knows, Tim had thought, mildly impressed when he'd realized the GCPD Commissioner seemed to have been pointing detectives in all the wrong—although notably feasible—directions.)
Over the past month, Tim had taken to shadowing a handful of potential candidates, but he was fairly certain that night's one was correct. He didn't know why; it was just a gut feeling. But he'd learned to trust his instincts because, more often than not, they were right.
The radiance of a lavish dinner party caught Tim's attention, the glittery affair taking place a few buildings away. Knowing he'd reached his destination, he settled down in a place free of cameras and fiddled with the specs of his lenses, trying to get a closer look through the huge, garish windows.
It was the first thing that met his eyes, so he couldn't help but notice the recognizably-wrinkled hands and family-heirloom pendant of an aristocrat seated at the far end of the room. She was talking happily with some other benefactor to the charity event, and Tim was struck with how easily she continued on with it all, how unperturbed she was donating money to a hospital when she'd voted twelve people dead only the day before.
But the world has always been filled with people wearing masks, and who was Tim to judge? He was one of those masked people, and—even worse—he was one of the ones who carried out the most heinous deeds.
The thought reminded him he still had a deed right then that needed doing, and Tim continued skimming the attendants for a handsome face and black hair. It didn't take long to find him, the billionaire swamped by women and handling the conversations with gentle reservation. He must have cracked a joke, as the group surrounding him was in an uproar, probably more than the jest deserved, but everyone wears masks. Tim kept telling himself that.
Still, for whatever reason, he found himself pulled down onto the bitumen roof, head tilted to the side. Tim was so involved in watching the man, catching the calculating glance he shot at his watch—so quick no one saw, how he was holding a champagne flute that was strangely full for someone who was supposed to be an excessive drinker, and the quicksilver way he took in everything about whoever he was talking to, like he was snapping mental photographs to be observed later, before slipping an arm around a waist like the playboy he was said to be.
Tim was so caught up in it because, in part, he saw the same things in himself: He'd assumed he was the only person with those absurd, robotic behaviors, like he was alien and like, maybe, those quirks explained why he couldn't click with others, why being alone had always seemed the better alternative. But right then…it was like looking in a mirror, and Tim was so engrossed in it that he almost wasn't yanked back from the epiphany.
Almost.
The revelation had lasted only a second, because the instant he'd moved to sit down, there was that familiar tug across his chest, back again like fire, the feeling of skin stretched too thin. He was an assassin now. Tim was reminded of that often enough. Any time he moved his shoulders too quickly, anytime he breathed, there was always that pull, waiting for him like an old friend, that explained there were four distinct scars running parallel to his sternum, evidence of his training with The Court and that he wasn't his own person anymore.
Tim had lots of scars, now that he thought about it, and they were why he rarely took off his uniform—like somehow the cloth and armor would guard them and hide them, because they were the kind of scars he knew wouldn't heal.
The uniform was oddly protective like that.
Looking back on it then, it almost seemed impossible that Talon had been able to shed his armor, been able to remain human despite all the corpses he must've walked over to get home those mornings. It was a scary acknowledgement, but Tim was learning more of those scary things by the minute, more personally and in-depth than he'd ever wanted, as if he was getting a sacred glimpse beyond the grave at a person he'd been foolish to think he'd understood.
But everyone has something to hide.
Talon had probably been keeping something from Tim as well. He wasn't sure if that made it easier to move on, but if the sentiment was true, it stood to reason that Bruce Wayne was hiding something too. Whether or not he was Batman, Tim wasn't quite sold yet, but for a man who'd just lost his son, he was too content, too happy. He secretly hoped Bruce Wayne really was the Caped Crusader, if nothing more than to have an explanation as to how eerily unfazed the billionaire was.
His son had died in Europe a while back. A bombing in Sarajevo, Bosnia. It matched up with the time frame, and if the teenager had been Robin... Well, it would've filled in a lot of blanks.
Tim tilted his head to the other side, gaze fixed to the blue-eyed billionaire. He was chatting it up with a different group of high-class patrons by then, looking fairly harmless as he flashed a million-dollar smile. His drink had vanished somehow, and although Tim wasn't sure where else it could've gone, he doubted the man had drank it.
Bruce Wayne...He was an enigma all right.
Although Tim was certain he could've broken through one of the windows and found his answer pretty fast, uncovered if Bruce Wayne really was Batman, if his intuitions were true, he wasn't sure hand-to-hand combat was how he wanted them to be introduced. Tim was patient, though (It's how he usually uncovered things in the end.), and he settled back for the long haul, shaking off the unnerving knowledge that his own parents had probably attended those types of banquets quite often.
Everything went as expected concerning the extravagant affair. Eventually, everyone took their seats at snow-white tables, sipping at alcohol worth a week's pay for the average person, and they all clapped whenever anyone else did, like frauds desperately trying to blend in.
It was all expected, naturally, and Tim didn't mind. He liked mysteries and twists, but consistent and predictable—He'd always liked those more.
It was why he sat up so quickly when it happened.
Because there was no way. There were no cameras on him, Tim had made sure of it. And even the occasional footprint in the snow—There was more coming down in thick flakes by then, more than enough to cover his tracks within the time he'd been waiting. He hadn't been followed. He hadn't been seen.
So how was Bruce Wayne looking right at him?
It was like Tim had been shot, too stunned to move. He didn't know if he wanted to, because if the blue eyes followed him, Tim wasn't sure what he'd do next.
He ran through all the possible explanations, trapped under the gaze. The two buildings were too far apart for the man to have spied him without some kind of visual tech or enhancements, and with all the lights of the charity event, the reflections on the insides of the windows would be too overpowering to see much outside anyway. But…Bruce Wayne was holding his sight in place, more than could be excused as an innocent glance through the glassy panes, one that had wound up aimed directly at the assassin on the other side.
It was something extrasensory, something psychic. The phantom sense that comes when one hears their name spoken only to turn and find it hadn't been anything at all.
It added up to one conclusion: This man had to be him, had to be Batman. There was no other way to explain it. And as much as Tim knew the Dark Knight was well-rounded in both sleuthing and combat, Tim was beginning to think maybe he'd been brazen when he'd assumed he could beat him in the former, like they were on equal playing fields, staring each other down through a layer of glass. It told him he should be even more careful. It told him to stay away.
Because that night, even when Tim had covered himself from every angle, somehow, Bruce Wayne had seen him—and maybe not in the physical sense—but in the way that counted, the way that was dangerous for an assassin who wasn't supposed to feel.
The man's mask had disappeared, seeming somber and grave like he was grasping at something he knew was just barely out of his reach. Tim thought of a son that had died in Bosnia, and he realized there was a distant hurt there in that gaze: It was the thin mask of a mourning father, one that had been removed for just a second like maybe—maybe the man was trying to communicate those feelings to the spirit he somehow knew was watching. Tim knew that was what it was, probably some coincidence that he'd been the one on the receiving end of it, but for just that moment, Tim's mask was gone too; scars and thoughts alike were laid bare.
Those moments are dangerous for assassins, because in that instant, a heartless murderer vanished, leaving behind a thirteen-year-old who was a little lost, a little empty, and more alone than he'd ever thought possible.
But then, the man's attention was caught by someone else, back to glittery lights and things that are fake, the solemnity vanishing like it was never there at all.
And Tim—
Tim vanished too.