DC – I am Batman

The laugh hit him from across the room.

He was standing near the bar at the Wayne Foundation Mental Health Initiative fundraiser, holding a glass of water that the bartender had tried to make into a gin and tonic twice, when the sound cut through the crowd noise like a window being thrown open. Full, loud, no performance in it. The kind of laugh that came from somewhere in the stomach and didn't care who was watching.

The woman who produced it was standing with Thomas Wayne and two members of the Gotham Medical Board, and she had her head thrown back and one hand on Thomas's arm and the other holding a champagne glass at an angle that should have been spilling and wasn't. Blonde hair, shoulder-length, catching the overhead lights. Petite. She was wearing a dark blue dress that looked like she'd bought it specifically for this event and still had the tags in her car, and she stood with the physical confidence of someone whose body did exactly what she told it to.

Thomas was laughing too. Genuinely. The medical board members were smiling the careful smiles of men who'd heard a joke they weren't sure they were allowed to find funny.

She said something else and Thomas bent forward with his hand on his chest and the laughter doubled and Bruce watched from across the room and thought: this is the woman the Joker will destroy.

His stomach clenched. Harleen Frances Quinzel. Dual doctorate. Gymnast. The funniest person in any room she walked into. The Joker would find her and take all of it apart and leave her thinking the wreckage was love.

He took a drink of water. Watched her. She was working the room and she was good at it. She made everyone feel like they were the most interesting person in the conversation. She remembered names. She touched people's arms when she talked to them. She asked questions and listened to the answers and her follow-up questions proved she'd been listening.

Martha appeared at his elbow. She was wearing silver and her hair was up and she smelled like the perfume Thomas had bought her in Paris.

"You're lurking."

"I'm observing."

"You're lurking, Bruce. At your own family's event." She followed his eyes to the blonde woman with Thomas. "That's Dr. Quinzel. She's the new psychiatrist at the campus. Your father poached her from a residency at Columbia."

"She's good."

"She's exceptional. She also told your father he had unresolved control issues during his own interview, and he hired her on the spot." Martha took a sip of her champagne. "Go introduce yourself. You look like you're casing the building."

He was, actually. Force of habit. He'd identified the exits, the security, and the three waiters who were serving drinks at uneven intervals because one of them was new. But he put his water down and walked across the room because Martha was right and also because she'd keep watching until he did.

Thomas saw him coming. "Bruce. Perfect timing. Dr. Quinzel, this is my son."

She turned. Blue eyes. Quick, assessing, warmer than clinical but doing clinical work behind the warmth. She scanned him the same way Shiva had, except Shiva was reading his body for combat potential and this woman was reading his mind for structural damage. The scan took maybe a second.

"You look like your dad," she said. Brooklyn accent, unpolished. "But you stand like a soldier."

Thomas blinked. Bruce kept his face neutral.

"I do a lot of martial arts."

"Yeah, that's not what I mean." She tilted her head. The blue eyes were bright and steady and she was smiling and the smile was doing two things at once. "Martial artists stand like they're ready. You stand like you're already in the room assessing threats before the door's all the way open. That's military posture. Or something like it."

"You got all that from how I'm standing."

"I got that from the first three seconds." She stuck out her hand. "Harleen Quinzel. My friends call me Harley."

"Bruce Wayne."

Her handshake was firm and fast and she let go before he did.

"Your dad's been telling me about the Wayne Foundation's plans for this campus. Expanded patient facilities, research wing, community outreach." She gestured around the room with her champagne glass. "This place could be actually good, you know? Most psych facilities in this city are warehouses with prescription pads. Your dad wants to build something that treats people. Actual therapeutic models, actual follow-up, actual give-a-damn." She looked at Thomas. "Those are my clinical terms."

"I'll put them in the brochure," Thomas said.

"You should." She turned back to Bruce. "So. What do you do?"

"I'm at GU. Engineering and political science."

"Poly-sci." She nodded. "And you're here at a mental health fundraiser looking like you'd rather be running laps. You got a helper complex?"

Thomas made a sound that might have been a cough.

"I'm here because my parents are here."

"Sure. But you're also here because you care about this stuff. You walked in and scanned the room for the most interesting person and then you stood at the bar for twenty minutes watching from a distance instead of talking to anyone. That's not shyness and it's not boredom. That's someone who's already figured out the room and is deciding who to engage with first." She took a sip of champagne. "I'm guessing you landed on me because I was the loudest."

"You were making my father laugh. He doesn't laugh like that often."

Her expression shifted. The brightness stayed but her mouth went softer, and she glanced at Thomas and then back at Bruce.

"Your dad's a good man," she said. Simpler than anything else she'd said. "This city needs more of those."

A waiter passed and she swapped her empty glass for a full one without breaking eye contact with Bruce. The swap was practiced. Gymnast's hands.

"You wanna know what I really see?" she said.

"Do I have a choice?"

"Nope. Occupational hazard." She leaned in, half a step, and dropped her voice. Still Brooklyn. Still warm. But the professional edge was there. "You got a helper complex a mile wide and you don't sleep enough. You carry responsibility like it's oxygen and you don't delegate because you think you're the only one who can do it right. You're twenty-one and you carry yourself like you're forty. And you've got walls up that most people wouldn't even notice because they're built so clean, but I've been doing this since I was twenty-two and I notice everything." She leaned back. Took a sip. "How'd I do?"

His stomach had gone cold. He kept his face the same way he'd kept it through Shiva reading his pulse and Talia reading his emotions and Ra's measuring his ambitions. Neutral, warm, a little amused.

"You're good," he said.

"I'm great." She grinned. The grin was huge and fast and it transformed her face from professional to something younger, brighter. "Don't feel bad. I clock everybody. It's a curse. Ask my last boyfriend."

"What happened to him?"

"I analyzed his attachment style on the third date and he said it felt like dating a textbook." She shrugged. "His loss. I'm delightful."

Thomas was watching this exchange with the expression of a father who was enjoying himself and trying to hide it. Martha had drifted closer from across the room, champagne in hand, observing.

"Dr. Quinzel is going to be working with the long-term patient population," Thomas said. "Criminal psychology specialization."

"I wanna understand why people break," Harleen said. The lightness dropped a register. "Not just the diagnosis. The mechanism. What happens in a brain when someone goes from functional to destructive. Because if you understand the mechanism, you can build intervention models that actually work instead of just medicating people into compliance." She was looking at Bruce but she was talking past him, to the idea she'd spent her academic career building toward. "Gotham's got the highest per capita rate of criminal psychopathology in the country. This is where the work needs to happen."

"And you think you can do it."

"I know I can do it." No hesitation. No bravado. A fact about herself stated with the same certainty she'd used to describe his posture.

A man in a gray suit approached Thomas with a question about the capital campaign and Thomas excused himself and Martha went with him and Bruce was standing alone with Dr. Harleen Quinzel in a room full of donors and board members and the band had started playing something slow with a saxophone.

"You want my card?" she said.

"Are you soliciting clients at a fundraiser?"

"I'm offering a resource to a guy who needs one." She pulled a card from somewhere in her clutch and held it between two fingers. "In case you ever wanna talk to someone who listens for a living."

He took the card. White, plain, her name and number and the campus address. The card was warm from being inside the clutch.

"I won't use it," he said. Honest, before the filter caught it.

She laughed. The big one, the real one. The one the Joker was going to steal.

"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me all night." She pointed at him with the champagne glass. "You just proved my diagnosis. Helper complex, control issues, and a pathological inability to accept help from others. You're a textbook, Wayne."

"I thought your last boyfriend left because you made him feel like a textbook."

"I said he said that. I said his loss." She finished the champagne. "I'll see you around. Your dad and I are going to be working together a lot, which means you're gonna be in my orbit, which means eventually you'll tell me things you don't plan to tell me because that's what happens when you're around someone who pays attention."

She walked away. Fast, her heels clicking on the marble, her blonde hair swinging. A man near the bar said something to her and she laughed again and touched his arm and kept walking.

He looked at the card. Harleen Quinzel, Psy.D., Ph.D. He put it in his wallet behind his driver's license where he kept things he wouldn't use and couldn't throw away.

Three sessions. She'd figure him out in three sessions. Probably two. The transmigration, the mission, all of it, and she'd take it apart with a Brooklyn accent and a professional curiosity that wouldn't quit until she understood why people were the way they were.

He wasn't going to let the Joker anywhere near this woman.

Outside, a couple was arguing about where they'd parked. The man was insisting it was on Third and the woman was insisting it was on Elm and neither of them was going to check the parking app on their phone because the argument had become the point. A taxi honked. The night air was cool and he could still hear the saxophone through the venue's open doors.

He walked to the car. Alfred was waiting, reading a paperback in the front seat with the dome light on. He got in and Alfred put the book away and started the engine without asking how it went because Alfred could read a room from a parking lot.

"Good event?" Alfred said, pulling out.

"Dr. Quinzel analyzed my entire personality in sixty seconds."

"Did she get it right?"

He thought about it. Helper complex. Control issues. Pathological inability to accept help.

"Mostly."

"Then she's very good," Alfred said. "Or you're very obvious."

"Thanks, Alfred."

"Always, sir."

They drove home. The saxophone faded. The card stayed in his wallet.

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