DC – I am Batman

He woke up because her hair was in his mouth.

Zatanna was asleep on his chest with her face turned into his neck and her arm across his ribs and her hair fanned out in a black curtain that had migrated during the night and was now covering half his face. She weighed less than she should have for someone who took up this much of the bed. Her breathing was slow and steady and her fingers were curled loosely against his side and she was warm in a way that had nothing to do with blankets.

The warmth came from underneath. From her. It hummed when he breathed deep, a low thrum in his bones that he'd learned to recognize as residual magic. She carried it the way other people carried body heat, except hers had a frequency. He'd started noticing it weeks ago, the morning after she'd fallen asleep while testing a warding spell and her magic had been running hot. The thrum was still there when he woke up. It didn't hurt. It felt like standing in sunlight that had a sound, and the sound was her.

Fourth time this week she'd stayed over. They hadn't talked about it becoming a pattern. She'd come by to work on defensive ward designs, or to test a containment spell on one of his equipment prototypes, or to bring Thai food because she'd ordered too much, and each time she'd ended up asleep somewhere in his rooms and he'd gone to sleep near her and in the morning she'd make coffee with her feet on his kitchen counter and neither of them would mention that this was happening with increasing regularity.

Last night had been the Thai food excuse. She'd shown up at nine with two bags from the place on Sullivan and they'd eaten on the floor of his study while she explained why Nabu's psychic architecture made conventional telepathic shielding useless. She talked with her hands when she was excited about a topic, which was most topics, and the chopsticks in her right hand had been conducting an invisible orchestra while her left hand drew diagrams in the air that occasionally left faint trails of light because she forgot to turn the magic off when she was thinking hard. Around eleven she'd gone quiet in the middle of a sentence about sympathetic resonance and he'd looked over and she was asleep sitting up with a spring roll in her hand. He'd taken the spring roll. Put a blanket over her. She'd woken up enough to say "m'not sleeping" and then crawled into his bed still wearing her jacket and boots and that had been that.

Her boots were by the door now. Her jacket was on the chair, next to a stack of occult reference books she'd been lending him. One of them had a bookmark made from a torn queen of hearts, tucked between pages about sympathetic resonance.

He shifted carefully. Moved her arm. She mumbled his name into his neck, mostly consonants and breath, and curled into the warm spot he left on the mattress. He watched her settle. Her face relaxed against the pillow. Her lips moved once, silently, and she was gone.

He pulled a shirt on and caught himself in the bathroom mirror. The bite mark on his left shoulder, just below the collarbone. Zatanna had put her teeth there two nights ago during a moment he didn't need to think about right now with her asleep twenty feet away. The mark should have been dark purple for at least five more days. It was yellow-green at the edges, the center barely visible. Two days old, healing like it was a week old.

He touched it. Tender but fading. He looked at it, brushed his teeth, and went downstairs.

The cave wasn't finished.

The main chamber was functional: console, generator, the beginnings of a vehicle bay, the gym. But the eastern section was bare limestone with water staining the walls where springs seeped through, and crates of equipment lined the access corridor because each one needed the one behind it unpacked first and he kept running out of nights. The air smelled like stone and copper and the particular damp of underground water that never saw sunlight.

The gym had been the first section he completed. Heavy bag mounted to the limestone ceiling with industrial anchors. Speed bag on a reclaimed oak platform. Free weights, bench press, pull-up bar. Mats he'd dragged down the tunnel one at a time over a weekend while Alfred pretended not to notice the mud on his shoes.

He started with the bag. Wraps on, stance loose, first hits just waking up the chains. The bag swung. He settled in. Jab, cross, hook. The chains rattled against the ceiling mounts and echoes came back off the stone.

He'd replaced the bag's fill two months ago because he'd split the old one along a seam. The new fill was denser, packed tighter, heavier by about ten pounds. He'd noticed the difference immediately when he installed it. More resistance. Harder to move. Good.

Twenty minutes in and the bag was jumping on its chains and his arms weren't tired and his breathing was flat. He stopped and grabbed the bag to still it and the weight of the thing barely registered in his shoulder. He stood there holding it with one hand.

He let go. Watched it swing.

Two months ago this bag had given him a workout. Today it was furniture.

He moved to the bench.

225 pounds. Warm-up weight since he was nineteen. Smooth, locked out, racked. Added plates.

Comfortable. Five easy reps.

This had been his one-rep max six months ago. The ceiling. He remembered the session when he'd first hit it. A grinder rep that had narrowed his vision on the push and left his arms shaking for ten minutes. He'd sat on the bench afterward and his hands had trembled and he'd stared at the bar and it had felt like standing on a summit.

He pressed 315 for three reps. Clean, controlled, no tremor. On the third rep his arms locked out with room to spare.

He racked the bar and sat up and stared at the plates.

Six months. Same routine, same frequency. Same nutrition. He slept the same hours, give or take Zatanna showing up at nine with Thai food. Nobody goes from barely grinding a one-rep max to pressing it for easy triples in half a year on the same program. He'd studied exercise physiology. He knew the adaptation curves. This wasn't on any of them.

Added plates. 350. Two reps. The second easier than the first because his body recalibrated between pushes. That adjustment was too fast. Muscular calibration takes sets, not one rep.

Added plates. 400.

Lay back. Hands on the bar, knurling in his palms. Breathed out. Unracked.

400 pounds came off the supports and he pressed it. His chest expanded, elbows tracked, the bar rose. Slower than 350 but steady. He locked out at the top and held the weight above him and looked at it.

400 pounds. Eighty-five pounds above a max he'd barely hit six months ago.

Racked.

He sat on the bench with his forearms on his knees and looked at his hands. Same calluses from bag work. Same scarring on the right knuckles from Korea. He flexed his fingers and watched the tendons move under the skin.

400 on a bench was past what a human body was supposed to do without drugs or genetics. He'd been a regular person before the transmigration. The Wayne body was good stock, athlete's frame, but nothing that explained this. The training had been exceptional. The mentors had been the best alive. But the body he'd been training was human, and 400 pounds on a flat press wasn't human.

He walked to the console and pulled up the calibration data for the gym equipment. Cast iron plates, weight-stamped, verified. He'd checked them when he installed them.

The weights were correct.

Back to the bench. 425.

This was hard. He felt it in his chest and along his ribs and in the deep muscles of his shoulders. The bar rose shaking, jaw locked, arms burning. Everything he had. The bar reached the top. He held it. Racked it. Lay on the bench breathing hard for the first time this morning, heart rate finally elevated, the cave ceiling limestone and shadows above him.

425 pounds.

He sat up. Wiped his face. The bite mark was visible at the edge of his collar. Two days old, almost gone. His resting heart rate was fifty-four beats per minute. Shiva had measured sixty-two years ago and been suspicious. Recovery between sets was shorter than it used to be. He healed faster. The heavy bag that had challenged him two months ago barely moved him today.

When did this happen.

He sat on the bench in the cave and ran through the possibilities. The Lazarus Pit chemistry from Nanda Parbat. Years of proximity to Zatanna's active magic, sleeping near her, breathing the residual energy she carried into every room. Whatever the transmigration itself had done to his baseline, the thing nobody could explain because nobody knew it had happened. Any of those. All of those. He didn't know because he'd never checked because checking would mean stopping to look at himself and he didn't do that.

He could investigate. Blood panels, metabolic analysis, cellular comparison against his baseline from three years ago. Ask Zatanna about magical exposure effects. Ask Talia about Lazarus long-term biology. Sit in this cave for a week and run every test he was capable of designing.

He picked up his wraps and walked back to the heavy bag.

Patrol route to finalize. Woodrue file to pull. Three books from Alexis's list due Thursday. Ventilation flaw in the containment cell design. His body was doing things it shouldn't be doing. He added it to the list. The list was long. He was at the bottom. He was always at the bottom of his own list and he wasn't going to change that today.

He hit the bag. The chains rattled. The cave echoed.

Upstairs, the coffee maker Zatanna had programmed to run at seven-thirty was already gurgling. She'd be up soon. She'd put her feet on his counter and drink her coffee and do a card trick with one hand while she read the news on her phone, and she wouldn't ask about his morning because she didn't know about the cave yet. That was another thing on the list.

A bat detached from the ceiling near the eastern section and flew a wide circle through the main chamber and returned to its perch. He watched it settle, wings folding against its body, and then he turned back to the bag.

He hit it. Harder. The chains held.

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