"I don't believe it — is that Bruce Wayne?" Eyes dart across the room, to the bar where a man is sitting there, talking to someone else in a casual voice. He's a good looking man, tall, with dark features and very, very blue eyes. He makes for a handsome portrait, someone who clearly understands how good they look, puts effort into maintaining it. "I thought he went missing."

"That was almost," the companion pauses, "Five years ago? If he's thirty now, it was when he was twenty-two so more like eight. I remember, the police questioned me over it."

Bruce doesn't pay attnetion to them, slipping an arm around the woman at the bar, leaning in to whisper in her ear. She gives a giggle, grinning.

"They questioned you? Did you see anything?" Curiosity. Hunger for a lot more information from their date.

"Not really. All I remember is that we were all partying and then there was a flash and a boom—I didn't even know he'd gone missing until my interview." A low whistle.

Bruce is pulling his date away from the bar, leading her into a room that's extravagant, lovely.

In the morning he will be long gone, and she will collapse at the airport and die with a cigarette in her hand. They'll say she died of bad hash and never suspect the poison in her cigarette. They'll never suspect it was Bruce Wayne who'd done it, either.

His handler is waiting for him, as usual once he gets back to Wayne Manor. Alfred is patient, wizened and he always asks the questions in the right order: Was your date a blonde, sir? — Did you remember to kiss her good night? — Did you give her your number or shall I call her?

They're all code, of course. Did you find your target? — Did you kill them successfully? — Are there any loose ends?

Bruce always answers in that tone he has for dates: Of curse she was. — I was polite, Alfred. — No need to call anyone.

During the day, he does things for himself: organizes dates, calls other people, keeps his eye out on the next fun thing. Bruce Wayne is a playboy, not at all like his parents who were renowned geneticists, dedicated to the mutant cause. Even though there are photos of them in their lab suits, even though their degrees glitter above, he doesn't pay attention to them. Nor does he pay attention to the bruises he has sometimes or the length of his hair slowly getting out of control or the fact that sometimes he's scrubbing blood from under his nails.

Empty headed millionaire heirs don't worry about such things. The one time he does, the week is a blur, but his hair is cut and the bruises don't ache so bad.

even though alfred tells him it's nothing to worry about, bruce sometimes does worry about the time between parties, where he's called brucie! and is given drink after drink until he stops remembering what happened. he worries because the time is lenghtening between him getting out of a car at a place he doesn't recognize and the time of him seeing alfred after a night.

it's not something he's supposed to notice, he's sure; at some part of the night he always loses his watch and he's alwways relied on alfred to tell him when and where he was. sometimes alfred has given him looks about it before he's said it—once it was just three hours and bruce had felt embarassed to not have realized. sometimes though it's been days, and a month once before had him rattled.

alfred tells him not to worry yet every time he does start to note the time, he begins to have a though to check the paper to try and track his whereabouts. it's always there when he comes home and he begins to scan the headlines more, begins to look for clues as to everything he'd done, just to reassure himself.

for a long time it's just him finding mentions of friends he'd known at parties, the tabloid tales of the uppercrust.

then once, he'd found a headline about a woman being found at a beach, dead from an apparent gunshot wound to the throat. she had been near where he and a few others had partied, something about it putting a pit into his stomach.

the next time was when he lost three weeks of time, and the paper had mentioned that an extremist group had been picked off one by one in that time. their locatoin was close to where he and a few others had been out, and when bruce had checked in with one of them, she'd been surprised. "bruce, you ditched us the first day!"

that was when he'd voiced a concern to alfred. about the time.

alfred had told him it wasn't something to worry about.

and then he'd been sent to a vacation for two weeks, all of it a haze of bodies and booze.

he didn't check the paper that time. didn't have to: the markovian embassy had been in that same time, and two of their representatives had been killed.

he writes it down, what's happening. connects the dots, and he hides it beneath a mattress. something tells him that if he doesn't do this, things could go badly.

this time when he talks to alfred, alfred seems concerned. very concerned. he says, let's finish up breakfast and look into this.

bruce had agreed. three minutes after that, the world turned fuzzy.

when he wakes up again, there is no memory of the past year in his mind, and when he gets up, nothing is amiss to him.

nor will it be for another three months.

in three months time, there will be an emergency that has him brought back to the manor, in worse condition than usual. he will collapse on the steps, and when he is brought inside to his bedroom, the car that brought him there will explode with alfred in it. it will burn for almost five hours before anyone thinks to check up on him. it will take another two hours for men to walk inside and find bruce seemingly collapsed, half dead in the bathroom. they will haul him out saying, "we've located weapon ix!" into their walkies.

they will have no idea that for three hours, the abandoned asset had unlimited access to the manor—enough time to start a mutiny from the inside.

everyone know knows about the wayne murders. they know that both doctors had taken bruce out to the movies together, that someone tried to mug them and that bruce was the survivor. they don't know a few important facts though:

• that both of the waynes had been mutants working for the weapon plus program.
• that the waynes both had protested their work and had left the program a year before.
• that they both had intended to come forward to the public with what they knew.

bruce's awareness had been enough for an eight year old to know in simple terms. mutant parents. a government program. their leaving. he didn't know that they meant to come forward or that they had a fear that something would happen to them. all he understood was that someone had taken his parents. someone who didn't have to, someone that stole his life away.

he took a vow, at their graves. a vow that takes him to places no child should go to, places that a young man is vulnerable in when he hasn't completely mastered all of his skills. a vow that has him walking right into a trap.

the third personality comes together in bits and pieces. notes of everything he's been doing shoved into the notebook in the mattress. five minutes of awareness here, ten minutes there, thirty minutes there. a blank space of nothing only to come to above a dead body and his own bloodied hands and then blankness again.

an hour. two hours. six hours.

it's long enough eventually that he is able to fully start to write entries that are longer than a page in the journal. long enough that he leaves other things for bruce around and long enough that one night he's able to enter one of the sealed off rooms of the manor.

it's a room he shouldn't be able to access, a room that's been abandoned since alfred has been gone. the new handler is almost never concerned with the veneer of being a servant and they underestimate him.

the room is filled with files, old equipment he manages to get up and running in secret, and eventually he puts together the information they have on him: the bat. experimented on until they could force him to stop being a borderline mutant into a full blown one.

they list his mutation as "fear inducement", yet as he flips through the information it doesn't seem entirely correct. there are reports of him managing to do things one should take weeks or years to learn that he does quicker than most, reports of him breaking previous collars to control his powers, of him picking locks in seconds and not minutes.

what matters most is that he now knows where the implant is on him that controls the fear, and the list of previous assignments matches up with what he found before.

it's the bat who sees the angel first, watching from a rooftop on a rainy day. he can see him arguing with other people, can see that he's upset and distressed. he's supposed to be at a party, on paper. in reality, he's been watching him for hours straight now, as he places phone calls, as people come in and out of his room.

for two weeks, he will be watching him go to battles, watching him don a costume, watching him with his girlfriend, watching as the angel's wings are pierced to a wall. watching as terror overtakes him, watching as he's wheeled into a hospital. watching as doctors are instructed to remove the vast white wings.

when he wakes up without his wings, distraught, the bat feels something for him, as he twists and turns and cries out in pain and despair.

a recognition of sorts.

it makes it easier, then, for him to execute the plan given to him. to help rig things for the explosion that will take place, make eveyrone think that the man has gone insane and suicidal without his wings.

they won't suspect that he's actually with the bat, on a boat he charts elsewhere.

his handler seems disinterested in him, telling him simply, you figure out how to handle the mutie.

"you don't remember me?" the angel asks him, lying on the bed of the warmest room of manor, voice rough. he doesn't seem as angry as he should be, to be kidnapped. the fire that he's put on keeps the warmth flowing, his face exchausted. "at all?"

"one of us might," he replies, aware that he's not the bat anymore, that he's this third person, sprung up between millionaire facade and assassin. "why don't you refresh me?"

the angel's eyes glimmer. even though his wings are gone — and he's changed his bandages enough times to clearly see where they've been surgically removed — there's something still not quite human about him, something about him that makes him wish he had a name, wish he wasn't still caught between identities. "it was a year ago. we were at a party together, in the bahamas." he frowns, pulling the blanket up on himself more.

that's the interesting thing about him no longer having wings. in the days he's been at the manor, it's as if the fight has gone out of him somewhat, combined with the impossibility of it all. it's as if his center can't be found, and even though he resisted at first, the angel had to be helped. had to thrown an arm on a stranger's shoulders, had to be carried up the steps because he'd wobble and fall.

"you kept coming to see me. for a week. then you just — disappeared. and when i saw you again you acted like you didn't know me." he pauses. "only, i'm guessing it wasn't an act, was it, bruce?"

he rocks on his chair, nodding. "it wasn't. bruce isn't my name, either."

"so what is it, then?" the angel presses. "you have to have a name."

he shakes his head. "i'm not supposed to have one."

he doesn't look happy at that, and when dinner is brought up, he says, "i have to call you something. how about — how about michael?"

"how long do you mean to keep me for, michael?"

"as long as i'm told to," he says, aware that the time is lenghtening between them. aware that with every passing day, he is doing things he shouldn't, whether it's helping the angel walk for an hour, going outside with him for a time, making meals that are less about something to consume and more about it being good.

"payment doesn't include this," the angel remarks, aware too that michael likes to press against him in bed, aware that there are things lurking behind his eyes that shouldn't be, aware that he can feel something stirring in his back again.

other reports filter through the news. there are bulletins about the missing heir that michael doesn't tell him about.

there are things that they learn about each other, michael able to recall memories of the waynes' research, of the quest bruce had gone on to avenge them. (it's never my parents or my house, it's bruce's parents or bruce's house or the bat killed her or the bat figured out how to break through). the angel asks to be called joe, and he tells him what it was like to have flown, what kind of pain it felt to be pinned to a wall by his feathers. in his voice there's a longing, a need, a burning desire to have what he's lost.

sometimes, time goes missing and joe tells him about the bat getting in touch with the handler or the bat leaving for hours only to come back with supplies or blood beneath his fingernails.

sometimes joe tells him that the blood is because he's been changing his bandages. sometimes he doesn't have an answer at all.

he never meets bruce.

the man who comes to retrieve joe is a mutant, too. he is tall, with grey skin and a figure that is huge, imposing. it's the bat who's there when he shows up, the bat who pulls up the angel, and carries him out to the tall mutant. on the manor grounds, the man is bigger than he should be, more terrifying than what he should be as he watches the bat bring joe down the steps. blood soaks the bandages on his back, worse than ever.

that his handler is dead at the man's feet doesn't bother him.

"what would you give to have your wings back?" the man says, his eyes laying on them both. "and to have them back, stronger than before?"

of course an angel wants to have his wings back again. he doesn't blame him for the hungry look on his face.

he isn't prepared for the walls to break down between him, the bat, and bruce. the violence, the pain, the anger all collide in him and for the first time in years, he understands the loss, the harm he's inflicted on others against his own will.

it's easier to bear, though, with joe beside him and apocalypse saying, this is only the beginning.