EPILOGUE

In the blood of Eden,

Lie the woman and the man…

- Peter Gabriel

I hate nights like this, when Gotham seems to be nothing but a great black gluttonous beast locked with me in a bloody and never-ending death struggle. There's a major power war going on between three different syndicates, all trying to move in on a vacuum left by our apprehension of the boss of the Cole Square crew. Take one out, three more move in.

I return from setting the microphones in the ceiling above the room where a tactical meeting is just beginning. Touching down silently, I move across the shadowed roof.

Robin doesn't move when I put my hand on his shoulder, staying focused and keen as a rapier, watching the windows across the street through binoculars. If I still manage to surprise him, I don't know it. He stopped showing it about a year ago.

We both switch on our audio and listen to the meeting. The street below us is busy. I pick out the undercover syndicate muscle stationed along the front of the building and am about to set it as a challenge for him to do the same, when I see from the movements of the binoculars that he already is.

I move to the far side of the building to see along the street on the other side of the building, following this person, then that one, examining each figure as he or she moves through the maze of bodies and cars. Packed so close together, they hardly even see one another. The ones who stop and talk are doing hard business, and so, focused on their own needs, they are as alone as the ones just passing by. Sometimes, I think this city was made only to harden and isolate everything and everyone in it.

Then, I catch a glimpse of the certain way a particular woman walks down the dangerous street, just a glimpse before she turns the corner, and I recognize something in the set of her body, the straight shoulders that will not bow, the courage born of a life lived under fire – I know I am reading into this, because just that momentary sight was enough to remind me.

Sometimes it doesn't take even something as small as this especially on nights like tonight. This is when she comes to me to bring back the knowledge that Gotham breeds more than loneliness and destruction, to remind me that I have things for which to be grateful to this city.

For if Gotham made her, then there is hope for anyone – even me.

I had seen my life stretching before me, a lonely battlefield, and I was more than prepared for it. I was certain it was my true and deserved fate, laid on me by Gotham. I had thought any ability I had to truly live this city had long ago taken from me.

And then Gotham finally gave a little back. It was really only a tiny concession, but it was enough for me to learn what I needed to know. The proof of it – he has just come to stand at my side.

Because I in no way doubt that if she had not said to me, "you heal," it would never have occurred to be me that I might have the power to do what I have done for him. Or that I could let him do what he has done for me.

I know it has an illogic to it, that I can see past the threat of losing him, sometimes I wonder at my own madness, putting him in harm's way… it is rare that I understand all of it. Why it makes so much sense that this is the way it should be. Taking that chance every night… I won't let it be about what I can stand. It is about him being what he has to be, and if I can heal him just a little then he can grow to be stronger than I ever could.

To this day it seems strange that with her memory comes this feeling of hope. Because these are not the only times she comes to me. Even now I sometimes wake in my bed reaching across emptiness – and I feel the sour taste of madness in my mouth because I know I am reaching for her, but she is not there. I don't know where she is. I don't even know if she is still alive.

Though she took the homing device with her, the monitor in the cave has remained silent year after year. Since she left before I could finish it, and before she finished telling me her plans, I have never had any way to find her. She never contacted me. I know what that most likely means. I have always known.

I stopped expecting fate to make sense a long time ago. Maybe that is why some stubborn part of me holds out. It makes sense, given what I know of the world, that she is dead. And there is no reason in the idea that one day as I travel the world on business, I will turn and she will be before me, alive and real and looking at me the way she did the last time I had seen her. There is no reason at all in believing Fortune could be kind.

But I look down to the boy at my side, and know that miracles do happen, even in my life. It may be foolish for me to hope for another. It is foolish. Foolish and futile and mad.

But I would never let that stop me.

finis