DC – I am Batman

Julia arrived on a Wednesday without calling first.

He was in the study reviewing chemical compound simulations when Alfred appeared in the doorway looking like a man who'd just received simultaneously the best and worst news of his life.

"Miss Julia is in the foyer, sir."

He was on his feet before the sentence ended.

She was standing by the front door with one bag over her shoulder and her hair shorter than the last time he'd seen her, cut above her jaw in a way that was either fashion or field-practicality and with Julia the answer was always the second. Tan jacket, dark jeans, boots that had seen actual terrain. She looked tired behind the eyes in a way her body didn't show because her body had been trained out of showing it.

"Forty-eight hours," she said. "Between operations. I didn't call because I didn't know until this morning."

"You're here."

"I'm here."

Alfred was standing six feet behind them with the posture of a man who understood exactly what his daughter's presence in his employer's house meant and had decided to process it later. He took Julia's bag without a word and walked toward the guest room.

Julia watched him go. Her jaw tightened once. She turned back to Bruce.

"He'll adjust," she said. Whether she believed it or was performing belief for his benefit was a question he didn't have time to answer because she was already looking past him toward the study, toward the house, cataloging. She was always cataloging.

"I want to show you something," he said.

"The thing you've been building."

"How do you know I've been building something?"

"Because you've been ordering components through shell companies I set up, and I get flagged when the companies activate." She looked at him. "I didn't look at WHAT you ordered. I just know you ordered."

He took her to the study. Opened the grandfather clock.

The cave opened in front of them and Julia Pennyworth stood at the top of the stone stairs and didn't speak.

He let her look. The main chamber spread below: the console with its three monitors, the generator humming against the far wall, the vehicle bay with the car he was still building, the forensic station, the armory, the gym visible through the natural arch that connected the two caverns. The lighting was industrial, mounted to the limestone ceiling at intervals he'd calculated for coverage without shadow. The air was cool and carried the mineral smell of underground water.

She stood there for a full minute. He counted.

"The encrypted drives I sent you," she said.

"Used them."

"The shell companies."

"Active."

"The surveillance protocols."

"Implemented."

She walked down the stairs. Her hand trailed along the railing he'd welded himself, and her fingers found the seam where he'd ground down a rough joint. She paused on it. Ran her thumb across the smoothed metal. Nodded once.

The main chamber got the same treatment. She touched the forensic station, ran her palm along the monitor array, opened a drawer on the evidence table and looked at the labeling system inside. Pulled one evidence bag from the drawer, held it up to the light, read the tag, put it back. He watched her the entire time and she knew he was watching and didn't look at him because she was working.

The armory. The cases. The biometric lock on the weapons cabinet, which she tested with a tap. Then the computer console. Sat down in the chair and pulled up a terminal and typed three commands and the screen showed her the network architecture. She studied it for ten seconds, reading fast and structural, seeing the whole composition in the notation.

She checked the encryption protocols. Pulled up the firewall configuration. Leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling of the cave, which was natural limestone and stalactites and the dark shapes of bats roosting in the upper reaches.

"You built a spy agency in a cave," she said. She turned the chair around and looked at him. "Alfred let you?"

"Alfred adjusted the electricity bill."

She laughed. He'd heard Julia laugh maybe a dozen times total and each one had been earned and this one was earned too. It came from her chest and it made her shoulders move and her face opened up and the professional mask dropped for two seconds and the woman underneath was delighted.

She stood up from the chair and crossed the distance between them in three steps and kissed him.

It landed hard. Her hands on the sides of his face, pulling him down to her because he was taller, and her mouth was warm and she tasted like the coffee she'd had on the plane and her grip was certain. She kissed him like a decision she'd made before she landed. He put his hands on her hips and pulled her against him and she made a sound into his mouth that was approval and demand at the same time.

"I missed you," she said against his lips.

"How long do we have?"

"Forty-eight hours." She was already unbuckling his belt. "I'm not wasting them."

He lifted her and she wrapped her legs around his waist and he carried her backward to the console and set her down on the edge and she pulled him between her knees and the console was cold under her and she didn't care. Her hands were on his zipper and his hands were under her shirt and her skin was warm from travel, warm from contact, warm from the flush that was climbing her neck and coloring her jaw.

She pulled him free and her hand closed around his cock and he was already hard because he'd been hard since she kissed him, since before that, since she'd walked down the stairs and touched his forensic station with the focus of a woman reviewing intelligence product. She stroked him twice, efficiently, measuring, and then she shoved her own jeans down her hips and he helped and the denim caught on one boot and she kicked it free and the boot clattered on the stone floor and echoed.

"Now," she said.

He pushed her underwear to the side and slid two fingers against her and she was wet, had been wet, the heat of her against his fingers shocking in the cool cave air. She grabbed his wrist.

"I said now. Not in five minutes. Now."

He pushed into her. She took a sharp breath through her teeth, her head tipping back, her fingers digging into his shoulders. Tight. Warm. Her body adjusting around him, her thighs gripping his hips, the sound of her exhale bouncing off the limestone walls and coming back to them doubled.

"God." Her voice was low, bitten. She pulled him closer with her legs and he sank deeper and her eyes closed and her mouth opened and she was beautiful and focused and present.

He moved. She moved with him. The console shifted against the wall and something on the desk rattled, a coffee mug or a component tray, and neither of them stopped. His hands were on her hips and her hands were on his shoulders and the rhythm was fast because Julia was fast, because she had forty-eight hours and she wasn't performing, she was taking, and the directness of it was the hottest thing about her.

"Harder." Short. Clipped. British.

He gave her harder. The console creaked. She wrapped one arm around his neck and pulled his forehead against hers and their eyes met and held and her pupils were blown and her breathing was ragged and she was tightening around him in involuntary pulses.

"Right there. Right there. Don't you dare change anything."

He didn't change anything. Her breathing went staccato, short sharp pulls of air, and her hand on his shoulder gripped hard enough to leave marks and her thighs shook and she pressed her face into his neck and made a sound that was his name broken into two syllables with a gasp between them and she came with her teeth on his shoulder, the same shoulder where Zatanna's bite mark had just finished healing, and the irony of that was not lost on him even now.

He followed her over. Hard. The sound he made was rough and graceless and she heard it and her arm tightened around his neck and she held him there through it, her legs locked around his waist, her breathing slowing against his skin.

They stayed like that for ten seconds. Fifteen. Her hand moved from his shoulder to the back of his neck and she held him there and her fingers were gentle in a way the rest of her hadn't been.

"I missed you," she said again. Quieter this time.

"You said that."

"I meant it both times." She pushed him back gently and looked at him and her face was flushed and her hair was wrecked and her eyes were sharp and clear. "Hand me my jeans."

He handed her the jeans. She pulled them on sitting on the console, which was an operation that required balance and determination, and he watched her do it and zipped himself up and the cave was quiet except for the generator hum and their breathing returning to normal and the faint drip of water from the eastern section.

Julia hopped off the console and sat back down in the chair and pulled up the terminal and started typing.

"Your Falcone intel is two weeks stale," she said. Her voice was perfectly professional. As if the last ten minutes had been a separate operation, completed successfully, debrief later. "Let me fix this."

He watched her. Her fingers moving across the keyboard at the same speed they'd been moving across his body sixty seconds ago. Her hair still messy. The flush still visible on her neck. And she was already working, already inside his network, already updating files and cross-referencing sources and building a better intelligence picture than the one he'd had, and she did it with the casual competence of someone who'd been trained by the same people who'd trained him and had started earlier and finished better.

She caught him watching.

"Stop staring and get me coffee. I take it black. Your father makes it too sweet."

He went upstairs and made coffee. Black. The kitchen was quiet. Alfred's reading glasses were on the counter next to a half-finished crossword, seven across left blank. He made two cups and carried them down.

When he came back she'd reorganized his Falcone directory, flagged three surveillance gaps, and left a sticky note on his monitor that said Penny-Two was here with a small drawing of a bat that looked more like a moth.

"Your source on the docks is compromised," she said without looking up. "The reporting pattern shifted six weeks ago. Somebody turned him or he's feeding you what Falcone wants you to see."

"How can you tell?"

"The intel got better. Real assets get worse over time as the target adapts. When your intelligence improves without explanation, someone's improving it for you." She pulled up a second terminal. "I'll build you a verification protocol. Cross-referencing against open-source shipping data. If your source's reports diverge from the baseline by more than fifteen percent, the source is burned."

He sat down next to her and they worked. The cave was cold and the coffee was hot and Julia Pennyworth was typing with one hand and holding his coffee mug hostage with the other because she'd finished hers already, and outside the cave the sun was going down and they had forty-seven hours left and she was going to use every one of them.

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