DC – I am Batman

Zatanna's apartment was on the fourth floor of a brownstone in the Bowery, and it smelled like sandalwood and old paper and whatever she'd burned last during a spell that had left scorch marks on the kitchen ceiling she hadn't bothered to fix. The shelves were books and candles and objects that shouldn't have been next to each other: a human skull wearing a party hat, a crystal ball being used as a bookend, a framed photo of her father performing at the Orpheum in 1987 next to a jar of something that moved when you weren't looking at it.

She'd let him in wearing an oversized GU sweatshirt that he was fairly sure had been his at some point and leggings and socks with rabbits on them, and she'd made tea by saying the word backward and pointing at the kettle and the kettle had boiled and poured itself and she'd caught both mugs without looking because she'd been talking about psychic architecture before he was through the door.

"The problem with conventional mental shielding," she said, handing him tea, "is that it's a wall. Walls have edges. A good telepath finds the edge and goes around it. What you want is depth. You want someone to push into your mind and find more mind underneath. Layers. Like an onion, except the onion also fights back."

"Appealing metaphor."

"I'm a performer. Metaphors are my thing." She sat cross-legged on the couch and tucked her feet under herself and the rabbits on her socks disappeared into the cushion. "So. You want to learn magical resistance. Which means someone or something is going to try to get inside your head, and you want to be ready."

"I want to be ready for a lot of things."

"You always do." She looked at him over her tea. Dark eyes, warm, the kind of look she'd been giving him since they were kids, except lately the warmth had a current running underneath it that neither of them talked about. "Can I ask what specifically you're preparing for?"

"Telepaths. Magical compulsion. Psychic intrusion."

"That's a broad threat model."

"Gotham has a broad threat landscape."

She didn't push. She drank her tea and he drank his and the kettle on the counter hissed once more and stopped and the apartment was quiet except for the sound of traffic four floors down and the faint ticking of a clock he couldn't see.

"OK," she said. "Here's how this works. I'm going to put my hands on your head and send my magic into your mind. Gently. Like a knock on a door. Your job is to keep the door closed." She put her mug down. "If you feel pressure, that's me pushing. If you feel warmth, that's my magic. If you feel like you're falling, that's normal. If you feel like you're drowning, tell me and I'll stop."

"And if I feel like I'm on fire?"

"Then I pushed too hard and you should definitely tell me." She stood up and gestured to the floor in front of the couch. "Sit. Cross-legged. Face me."

He sat on the floor. The rug was thick and old and slightly uneven where a burn mark had been covered with a patch that didn't quite match. She sat across from him, close enough that their knees were almost touching, and the apartment's light caught the side of her face and the shadows under her cheekbones and the dark of her hair where it fell past her shoulders.

"I'm going to touch your temples," she said. "Don't flinch."

"I don't flinch."

"You flinched when I healed that cut on your arm last month."

"That was a reflex."

"Bruce. I've been doing magic around you since we were seven. You still flinch when I light a candle wrong." She raised her hands. "Ready?"

Her palms pressed flat against his temples. Fingertips on the bone behind his ears, thumbs at his hairline, and her hands were warm and the warmth carried her magic, a hum that he felt in his teeth before it reached his brain. Her face was six inches from his. Gold flecks in her brown eyes. The small scar on her upper lip from a stage trick gone wrong at sixteen. The faint line between her eyebrows that meant she was concentrating.

"Closing my eyes," she said. "Keep yours open."

She closed her eyes. The magic expanded. He felt it like warm water pouring into his skull through the points where her fingers touched, and his first instinct was to push back and he caught himself and let it come. The warmth spread. It mapped the surface of his thoughts like fingertips running across a table in the dark, searching for edges. She was in there. Careful, precise. Her magic moved with the same grace she used on stage.

She found his first wall. The outer defense, the discipline built from years of training with people who could read body language like text. The wall was dense and organized and she pressed against it and it held.

"Good," she breathed. "You've got natural resistance. Better than most people. Now I'm going to push."

The warmth increased. The hum deepened. He felt the pressure build against the wall and he held it and the wall held and she pushed harder. His jaw tightened. The pressure moved from uncomfortable to heavy to actively difficult to resist, and the magic was looking for cracks, for seams, for the joint between one thought pattern and another where the mortar was thin.

"You're strong," she said. Her voice was quieter. Her breathing had changed. Faster. "Really strong. I'm at about sixty percent and you're not giving."

He held. The wall held. She pushed. Her fingers pressed harder into his temples and the magic was hot now, probing, insistent, and her frustration was bleeding through the connection because at sixty percent most people's walls came down and his hadn't moved.

"Eighty," she said. Her eyes were still closed and when her eyelids flickered white glowed underneath, the magic running through her irises. Sweat on her upper lip. Her fingers trembling against his skin. "Bruce, I'm at eighty percent and your mind is just... sitting there."

"Should I be worried?"

"I should be worried. You're not supposed to be this strong." She pushed. Ninety. He felt it in the base of his skull and behind his eyes and along the nerves that connected his jaw to his ears. The magic was deep now, past the surface wall, into the second layer, the organized structure that the transmigration had built, a mind laid over a mind, and the architecture was strange and she could feel it. Her hands tightened on his head.

"There's..." She stopped. Her breathing was fast. The white behind her eyelids brightened. "There's a structure I don't recognize. In the deep layer. It's not... it's not normal psychic architecture. It's like there's a foundation underneath your foundation."

His heart rate ticked up. He kept his face neutral and his body still and he held the wall and he thought about nothing. Specifically nothing. He emptied the center of his mind and he put stone around the emptiness and he made the stone thick.

She pushed into the stone. The stone held. She pushed harder. The magic hit the wall he'd built around the transmigration and it rebounded.

Zatanna jerked backward. Her hands came off his temples and she caught herself on the edge of the couch and she was breathing hard, her hair in her face, her eyes open and brown again and wide. Her hands were shaking.

"Jesus, Bruce."

He didn't move. "Are you OK?"

"I'm fine. I'm fine." She pushed the hair out of her face with hands that wouldn't stop trembling. "Your mental walls are..." She swallowed. "You have the most disciplined mind I've ever touched."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's terrifying." She laughed, short and breathless, the kind of laugh that happened when the alternative was admitting you were scared. "I can rewrite reality with a sentence and your brain just told me no."

"I've been training."

"That's not training. Training gives you walls. You've got something else. Something underneath the walls that I can't..." She stopped herself. Rubbed her hands together. The shaking was subsiding but not gone. "Your walls are impressive. Let's leave it at that."

She was leaving things out. Her mouth was tight at the corners and she wasn't looking at him. She'd felt the transmigration's architecture. She couldn't name it, couldn't identify it, but she'd touched it and it had pushed her out and now she was sitting on her couch with shaking hands and choosing not to ask.

He reached out and took her hands.

Her fingers were cold. They'd been warm on his temples and now they were cold and the trembling was still there, fading but present, and he held both of her hands in both of his and her fingers curled into his palms. She looked at their hands. Looked at his face.

"You're holding my hands," she said.

"You're shaking."

"I'm processing." But her fingers tightened in his. She didn't pull away. She was looking at him with the expression she got when a trick went wrong on stage and she had to decide in half a second whether to acknowledge it or keep going, and she was choosing to keep going.

"We should do this again," she said. "The training. I can build your resistance further. Weekly sessions. It'll..." She stopped. Looked at their hands. "It'll require regular contact. Physical contact. For the magic to interface properly."

"OK."

"OK." Her fingers curled tighter. "You're still holding my hands."

"You're still shaking."

"I stopped shaking two minutes ago."

He looked. She was right. Her hands were steady. She'd been steady for a while. He was still holding them and she was still letting him.

"I should go," he said.

"You should stay for dinner. I was going to make pasta." She pulled one hand free and gestured at the kitchen. "By make I mean I was going to say 'atsap' and see what happened."

"That's how you burned the ceiling."

"That was a soufflé. Pasta is safer." She still had one hand in his. Her thumb was tracing a line across his knuckles, an absent motion, and when she noticed herself doing it she stopped but she didn't let go.

"Zee."

"Yeah."

He didn't know what he was going to say. She was sitting on the couch in his old sweatshirt with her socks with rabbits on them and her hand in his and the apartment smelled like sandalwood and her magic was still humming in his bones from where she'd been inside his head and outside the window the city was going dark and the streetlights were coming on one at a time down the block.

"Pasta sounds good," he said.

She smiled. The warm one that started in her eyes and reached her mouth a beat later. "Go sit at the table. Don't touch the jar on the third shelf. It bites."

He sat at the table. She said a word backward and the kitchen came alive: cabinet doors opening, a pot filling itself, the stove clicking on. She hummed while she worked, a song he didn't recognize, and her hand was still warm from holding his and his hands were still warm from holding hers and he sat in Zatanna's apartment and watched the magic and thought about the thing she'd felt at the center of his mind and how she'd chosen not to ask.

She'd think about it for weeks. Run through every explanation she knew, and none of them would fit because the real explanation was impossible and she was too smart to consider the impossible and too curious to stop trying.

He watched her make pasta with magic and humming and socks with rabbits on them and he thought: I'm going to lose this one day. The secret or her. One of them.

The jar on the third shelf moved. He kept his distance.

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