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Brian stops dead in the center of the walkway as soon as he catches sight of the man on the bench. He doesn’t even know what it is that makes him stop—it’s not like he recognizes the guy (he’s long since given up on hoping for that). But something about the man makes something in his damaged brain sit up and pay attention.
“What is it?” Allison asks with a laugh, stopping a few feet ahead of him. “He doesn’t bite. A bit odd, but harmless, really. I just thought you might want to talk to someone who was going through the same thing as you.”
Brian looks past her to the man on the bench, who has taken no notice of them. He’s slouched with his ankles crossed in front of him, his head tipped back, staring up into the branches of the tree overhead. A cigarette, turning to ash, sits forgotten between two fingers. His hair is dark and a bit overgrown, as if he had a nice haircut at some point but didn’t bother with the upkeep.
“Come on, Brian,” says Allison, tugging on his arm. “Just say hi.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Brian replies, forcing himself into motion. He lets Allison drag him forward.
“Jack!” Allison calls.
The man lifts his head and squints at them. His eyes flick past Allison to Brian and fix there, studying Brian with unnerving intensity. Brian finds himself doing the same.
It’s almost like something’s missing from Jack’s face. There’s nothing wrong with his face—pointy features, heavy-lidded eyes, a mouth that’s slighter wider than average. Perhaps it’s the lack of deformity that’s so strange.
“Jack, this is Brian,” says Allison. “He doesn’t remember anything about his life either.”
“Hi,” says Brian, holding out a hand. Jack reaches out and shakes it. The corners of Jack’s mouth turn up.
“Have we met?” he asks.
##
Brian was born six months earlier, in a Boston hospital. The day of his birth was nothing special—in fact, he’d been reborn every day for the three weeks previous, waking up every ten or twelve minutes without any memory at all. The doctors could tell him who and where he was, but then the memory would slip away and he would wake up again, a clean slate. The thing that made his birthday special was that he simply stopped forgetting.
The doctors told him that he had been in a serious car accident and had sustained severe head injuries that resulted in post traumatic amnesia. It was a particularly severe case of amnesia. Brian couldn’t remember a single detail of his own life. He knew how to speak and walk and eat and read, of course, but anything relating to his own life was completely missing from his memory. He didn’t know his own name, or who his parents were, or where he had grown up.
They told him his name was Brian White. His mother had died of cancer ten years ago, and his father had died of a heart attack two years later. He had recently moved to Boston and hadn’t even had time to start his new job or make any friends before the accident. Really, the doctors told him, it was easier this way. At least he wouldn’t be surrounded by people who were upset that he couldn’t remember them. This way, he could start a brand new life in a new city with a new job and new friends. Not everyone gets a fresh start like this one, they said.
I’ve had enough fresh starts to last a lifetime, Brian thought. I don’t need any more, thanks.
Everything they told him about his past life seemed fake, but they told him that was normal. This wasn’t like the movies—learning about his past life wasn’t going to trigger a rush of memories. There was a chance he might recover some day, but there was no telling when or if it might happen.
His first night out of the hospital was terrible. The address where Brian supposedly lived was a brand new apartment full of brand new furniture, some with the tags still on. Apparently past-Brian hadn’t brought any furniture from his old life when he moved to Boston. There was a framed photo of a middle-aged couple on the dresser in his bedroom. They might have been his parents, or the picture might have come with the frame, for all Brian knew.
His new job involved working in the financial department of a medium-size company in the city. He seemed to have a good working knowledge of finances and had no problem doing the work, which was a relief. That was where he met Allison, with whom he had a few awkward dates before they mutually decided that it wasn’t going to work out. On their last date, he told her about his accident and his memory problem, and she told him that she had just met someone who had the exact same problem.
##
Allison tells them she’s going to get a coffee and then she leaves the two of them alone, ostensibly to get to know each other. Brian sits down awkwardly on the other end of the bench.
“So, ah…” Brian isn’t sure how to get the conversation started. “How do you know Allison?”
Jack studies the cigarette in his fingers and then tucks it into the corner of his mouth. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think brain damage is a good basis for friendship,” he says.
For some reason the words relax Brian and he smiles. “It’s as good a reason as any. How’d you get yours?”
Jack eyes him. “Car accident,” he says shortly.
“Same here.”
Jack gives a rolling shrug of his shoulders. “So they say. Guess it could have been anything, for all I know.”
He has a peculiar way of talking that seems familiar to Brian. He’s not like the people that Brian knows at work, with their friendly, open smiles. There is a faint antagonism underlying his words, an undercurrent of challenge.
“Are you from the area?” Brian asks.
“Are you?”
Brian raises his eyebrows but decides to go with it. “No, actually. I just moved here from Seattle.”
“Nice city, Seattle,” Jack says. “Rains a lot.”
“You’ve been?”
“Memphis,” Jack says, raising one finger. “Reno, Oakland, Seattle, Duluth, Chicago, New York, Boston.”
“You’re from Memphis?”
“I woke up in Memphis.”
“Where are you from originally?”
Another shrug. “All I know is what they tell me.”
Brian smiles. “And you don’t believe them?”
There is a pause. Jack stares at him, gauging him.
“No.”
##
There have been people following Jack since Oakland. Probably earlier, probably since the beginning, but he wasn’t paying as much attention then. But he knows they were in Oakland, because he saw them. The car parked across the street from his apartment. The people that walked behind him on his way to the grocery store. Once, he came back to his apartment and knew from the second he stepped inside that there had been people in there, setting up cameras, bugging the walls, going through his things. So he left.
And he’s still running.
When he woke up in Memphis, they told him that his parents were dead and that he had recently moved to the city to start a new job. Fresh start, they said. Blank slate. Make this life count.
He showed up to his new job for one day. It was a piecework gig at a factory, putting together parts of air conditioners. It was tedious and mind-numbing and so far below his capacity that he knew that he never would have chosen this job. Maybe he doesn’t know his old self, or his old life, or anything about his past, but he likes to think that he wouldn’t underestimate his own intelligence so much. Whoever picked that job out for him knew nothing about him.
It’s the same with the apartment. Nice furniture. Full sets of plates and utensils. Nothing really expensive, of course. Everything’s second hand. But Jack couldn’t sleep the first night because the bed was far too big and the room was far too quiet. He finally tracked down a radio and set it up on the bathroom sink and climbed into the tub with a blanket and a pillow and spent the next week sleeping in there instead, listening to static. And after that, he broke into his neighbor’s apartment and stole all his cash and credit cards and then fled northwest.
Maybe that was when they started following him. Maybe the credit cards triggered it. Or maybe they’d been keeping an eye on him all along, and it was only when he showed signs of misbehaving that they went after him.
Right now, the only things he can be sure of are those things he has directly experienced. He is not a factory worker. He is not the kind of person who buys six piece dining sets. He was not in a car accident. He does not have a name, although he uses Jack because it’s not the name they gave him. He is someone who steals credit cards and sleeps in bathtubs and can’t stay in one city too long. And sometimes, in rare moments of clarity, he thinks that perhaps he’s a paranoid schizophrenic and all of this is a delusion, but then he thinks that he would never have that thought if he really was crazy, and so he takes that as a comfort.
##
At first it’s difficult to find a topic of conversation. It turns out that Jack doesn’t watch television except for the news, and he doesn’t read except for the newspaper. He has an almost fanatical interest in current events, and an opinion on everything, but since Brian doesn’t keep up with the news, he can’t really keep up his end of the conversation. Brian watches sports, and has been keeping up with the Bruins and their current mediocre hockey season. When he tries to talk about that, however, Jack doesn’t even know what sport the Bruins play.
In the end they start talking about, of all things, Gotham City. Neither of them have any memory of being there, but they must have gone at some point, because they both remember the excellent chili dog food truck at the corner of 87th and 5th.
Allison returns with her coffee to find them deep in conversation about the Gotham City construction project on the interstate and whether that was actually a waste of taxpayers’ money. It turns out that at some point Brian must have been interested in current events, even if he’s not anymore.
“Look at you two,” Allison says with a laugh. “I haven’t seen you this animated since I met you, Brian. I have to head out. Did you want me to give you a ride?”
It’s a gracious way of giving him an out if he wants it, but Brian just waves her away. “I’ll grab a cab,” he says. She gives him a kiss on the cheek and gives Jack a wave and then she leaves.
“She’s your girlfriend?” Jack asks after she’s out of earshot, looking after her curiously.
“What? No,” Brian says with a laugh. “I’m gay.”
It isn’t until he says it that he realizes what he’s said, and he feels a rush of embarrassment, but Jack seems to take it in stride. “Want to grab some lunch?” he asks.
Brian agrees and they get up off the bench to walk, but inside he’s reeling. The doctors never went over his sexuality in his debriefing, for obvious reasons. He hadn’t really thought about it. And while he’s pretty sure that he has had sex with women before, he doesn’t seem to feel strongly about women in general. He is gay, of that he’s pretty sure, but he thinks this may have been the first time he admitted it to himself. Maybe having a clean slate has gotten rid of whatever sexual repression he had before.
Half an hour later they’re sitting in a booth in a diner over coffees. Jack is eating the filling out of an apple pie. Brian has a reuben. His eyes keep returning to the corners of Jack’s mouth, where his smile tucks up into his cheeks. It fascinates him.
“Look,” Jack says, nodding up to the television on the wall. “He looks like you.”
Brian looks. There’s a news story on about some missing billionaire from Gotham City. The man that they show is handsome and well dressed and very familiar. There is a certain resemblance to the face Brian sees in the mirror in the morning, but it’s not exactly the same.
“Who is he?” Brian asks, biting into his sandwich.
“You really don’t watch the news.” Jack looks amused and incredulous. “That’s Bruce Wayne. Billionaire philanthropist? Wayne Enterprises? You don’t know him?”
“He doesn’t look like me.”
“He does.” Jack rests his chin on his hand and transfers his gaze back and forth from the screen to Brian’s face. Brian, embarrassed by the attention, pours ketchup on his fries. “You have a different nose,” Jack says. “And your chin is different. But the same eyes…”
He trails off with a frown, as if that’s triggered some memory of something. Brian looks back at the screen. There’s footage now of an old, gray-haired man talking to the police. The man looks worried. The caption under his face says Alfred Pennyworth. For some reason, he reminds Brian of his father, although he looks nothing like the man in the framed picture in his apartment.
##
They end up in bed together. It doesn’t surprise Brian. He explores every inch of Jack with his hands and tongue and thinks to himself I don’t think I’ve ever done this before.
They both have scars they can’t explain, more scars than the average person has. Jack, like Brian, has the faint scars under his jaw and behind his ears that indicate plastic surgery, the kind you get after a horrific car accident or whatever incident it was that gave Jack his brain damage.
When they’re both spent, Jack climbs out of bed to pace Brian’s apartment, nude. “Your parents?” he says, touching the framed photo.
“Yes,” Brian says.
“Do they live in Seattle?”
“They both died a long time ago.”
Jack looks over his shoulder at him. “Mine too,” he says.
“I’m sorry.”
Jack starts pacing again. “You haven’t finished unpacking.”
“No.” Brian gives a sheepish laugh. “I’ve been living here a month now but I just haven’t gotten around to it.”
Jack nudges a cardboard box with his foot. “It doesn’t feel like yours, does it?” he says, his voice distant and distracted. “It feels like you ended up with a bunch of someone else’s stuff.”
“Yeah,” Brian says softly. He stretches a hand over the edge of the bed and finds a pair of boxers. “I keep thinking maybe I’ll just donate it to charity and buy new stuff, just so it can be mine, you know? But I haven’t yet.”
“Are you in touch with your old friends from Seattle?” Jack is watching him now.
“No…” Brian stands up and shrugs. “I don’t remember having friends. I guess there wasn’t anything to keep me in Seattle, really. Which was good, I guess. Like the doctors kept telling me, my life is just—”
“A clean slate,” Jack finishes.
“Yes.”
They look at each other. Jack seems troubled.
“You used to live a life somewhere,” Jack says. “You must have. Seattle. Memphis. Wherever. You live this life, but you don’t have any friends. Your family is dead. You get a new job somewhere else and on the way there, before you even finish moving, you get into a car accident. You’re in the hospital for months. Post traumatic amnesia, they say. They give you plastic surgery to give you a new face because your injuries are so bad. They tell you it’s a clean slate. The people you rented the apartment from never met you in person. The people at the job where you work only ever did phone interviews with you. No one in your new life has ever met you before, and no one in your old life even cares that you’re gone. It’s like—” He waves a hand in an angry gesture, clipped short. “It’s like some sort of fucking conspiracy, isn’t it?”
Brian says nothing. It’s obviously not a conspiracy—this isn’t a spy movie—but on the other hand, Jack has just described Brian’s entire life story and Brian hadn’t even told him most of it.
“Have you seen them yet?” Jack asks.
“Seen who?”
“The people following you. Bugging your house. Watching you at work and when you go to the store. Has anyone broken into your apartment yet?” Jack spins on a heel and turns to Brian’s desk, rummaging frantically around in the clutter there.
“Broken into my—what are you doing?” Dread is growing in the pit of Brian’s stomach. He puts his hands on Jack’s arms and Jack shrugs him angrily away. Well, shit. This is what Brian gets for letting strangers into his apartment. They turn into psychotic weirdos. At least Jack’s naked, so he has nowhere to hide a knife.
“They’ve been following me,” Jack says, squeezing away from Brian and going to his bedside table. He knocks the lamp to the floor and starts searching it.
“Who’s been following you? Calm down.” Brian stays where he is. The second Jack turns violent, he’s going to call the police.
“I thought maybe I knew too much about something,” Jack mutters. “I thought they wanted to keep me quiet. But you don’t make sense. Why would they do this to two of us? Do we both know something? Are there more blank slates running around out there?” His head jerks up and he whips around. “You thought I was familiar when we first met. I thought so too. We both know Gotham City far better than you know Seattle and I know Memphis, and yet we don’t remember being there.”
“So?”
“We knew each other in Gotham. We must have, have made some sort of enemy, or, or, or learned some confidential fact, or—”
“You’re crazy,” Brian says.
“I’m not crazy!” Jack shouts.
“Why didn’t they just kill us, then?” Brian shouts back. “Why go through all this trouble?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” Jack admits.
Brian snorts. “Because there’s nothing to figure out,” he says.
“Now they know,” Jack says. He picks up his pants from the floor and pulls them on. “They know that we know.”
“We don’t know anything.”
“They know I met you. Even if they haven’t bugged your apartment, they must know the danger in that.” Jack yanks on his shirt. “We need to leave.”
“Go, if you want. I’m not going anywhere.”
“They’ll come for you.”
“They won’t.”
Jack hesitates just a second, then slips on his shoes. “I’m going back to Memphis,” he says. “I want to see what I can find out about my accident.”
“Good luck,” Brian says. He means it. He really does.
Someone knocks at the front door of his apartment. Both of them flinch. Jack starts backing away to the bedroom window. Brian finds his clothes and pulls them on.
“One sec,” he yells.
“Brian?” his neighbor calls. She’s an elderly woman who’s been very sweet to him since he moved in. “Are you in?”
“Coming, Mrs. Aberforth.”
“There’s a car parked under the fire escape,” Jack mutters.
Brian heads out of the bedroom and passes through the living room to his front door. Jack hurries up behind him and grabs his arm, shaking his head. Brian shakes him off and then Jack comes up with a knife. Brian freezes.
“I can’t let you open that door.”
Brian glares at him. The knife, a switchblade, is against his throat. There is no regret in Jack’s eyes, no hesitation or unease. There is no sign that there’s anything human in there. Brian believes utterly that Jack will kill him if he has to.
“Brian?” calls his neighbor. There is, he notices distantly, a note of unease in her voice.
“Look at the shadows under the door,” Jack whispers.
Brian looks. He can see the shadows of at least three people standing on the other side of the door. He doesn’t have a peep hole, so he can’t look out.
“Tell her you just got out of the shower.” Jack’s voice is just a breath in his ear.
Brian hesitates a second and the knife digs into his throat. “Let me get dressed first, Mrs. Aberforth,” he calls.
There is silence on the other side of the door.
“Is there another exit?” Jack asks.
“Just the fire escape,” Brian replies.
There is a sudden loud crack at the door as something smashes into it. Both Brian and Jack flinch back and the knife scrapes skin off Brian’s neck.
On the second crash, the door pops open and three police officers with guns drawn come through the doorway. “Freeze!” one of them shouts.
Brian doesn’t know what happens next. One second he’s standing a few feet from the door, his hand on the blood coming from his neck. The next, he has disarmed two of the police officers and is breaking the arm of a third. Jack whirls next to him and the last police officer lets out a strangled shriek, and then both Brian and Jack are in the hallway, passing Mrs. Abernathy, who is frozen in horror.
Brian is barefoot and doesn’t even have a coat, but he doesn’t slow down. At the bottom of the staircase, he shoves open the door to Mrs. Abernathy’s apartment. Jack shuts it behind them.
And now, past the ringing in his ears, Brian hears that Jack is laughing. He’s laughing so hard that he can barely stand up, as if this is the funniest thing in the world. Brian is shaking.
“I just attacked a police officer,” Brian says.
“Three,” Jack giggles.
“The police will be watching the exits.” Brian goes to the windows and pulls a curtain to the side. “But not the side of the house. We can get out this way.”
He heaves the window open and the two of them climb out, dropping to the ground into the driveway. Mrs. Abernathy’s car is parked here.
“Should have grabbed the keys,” Brian mutters.
“Give me a second,” Jack says. The car is locked, but Jack makes sort work of the window. They get in.
A minute later, the car engine roars and they bump down the driveway onto the street. There are three plainclothes police cars parked on the street. This was obviously a low-key raid.
Maybe the police were tracking down Jack. Maybe he’s a criminal. Well, that much is obvious. Jack put a knife to Brian’s throat and hotwired a car and now that Brian thinks about it, he can remember that fourth cop screaming. The point is, maybe they weren’t here because Jack’s delusions were true. Maybe they were here because Jack is a psychopath.
But that doesn’t explain how Brian was able to disarm those cops as if he were trained to do it. That was something Brian should never have been able to do. Not if he really is the harmless finances guy from Seattle.
“So, um,” he says to Jack, who is hunched over the steering wheel and squinting down the road as he drives. “Memphis, then?”
“Of course not.” Jack snorts. “I only told you that in case they got to you. We’re going to Gotham City.”
##
It’s a six hour drive to Gotham City from Boston. They stop for gas once, and when Brian pats his pockets, looking for some way to pay, Jack pulls out a wad of cash.
“No credit cards,” he says to Brian sternly.
Brian still has no shoes or coat. They pull into a strip mall with a Goodwill and Jack goes inside. He comes back with not only a pair of sneakers, socks and a parka, but also scarves and hats for both of them. Disguises, apparently.
“What exactly is the plan when we get to Gotham?” Brian asks him, pulling on his socks and shoes.
“I don’t really plan,” says Jack in a way that is completely not reassuring.
Gotham City is the first familiar thing, other than Jack, that Brian has seen since he woke up in the hospital. Driving over the bridge into the city is like coming home. Jack, too, seems at a loss for words. Brian is once again struck by the smooth skin of his cheeks, as if something is missing.
“Now what?” he asks.
“Tell me when something starts looking familiar,” Jack says.
“Everything looks familiar,” Brian says, and then he trails off, looking up, as the Wayne Enterprises skyscraper appears at the end of the street, silhouetted against the night sky.
Jack looks at him, then at the skyscraper. “You know, you do look like that Wayne guy.”
“Not close enough.”
Jack stretches out a hand and touches the scars behind Brian’s ear. “Not since your plastic surgery, no.”
Brian slumps back in his seat. “This is fucking ridiculous. Who would kidnap a billionaire, give him plastic surgery, erase his memories and then stick him in a new house and a new job four hundred miles away? What’s the point?”
Jack chews the inside of his cheek. “I don’t think I’m a billionaire,” he says.
Brian says nothing, rubbing the back of his neck. This morning Allison had introduced him to Jack, and somehow in the ten ensuing hours he had come out, had sex with a man for what was probably the first time, beat up three cops, stolen a car and driven to Gotham City. The fact that he could also be the missing billionaire was unbelievable, but given the way his day had been going, it would seem to fit right in with the rest of the insanity.
“There was a man on the news,” he says. “Alfred Pennyworth. He looked familiar to me. If we can get in touch with him, maybe he can answer some questions.”
##
It’s actually difficult to get a phone number for Mr. Pennyworth, since billionaires tend to keep their phone numbers unlisted. But an hour later Brian stands at a payphone on a street corner while Jack keeps the car idling on the curb next to him.
The phone picks up on the fourth ring. “Wayne residence,” says the smooth voice.
“Um,” says Brian. “Mr. Pennyworth?”
There is a pause. “Yes, this is he,” says the man.
“Do you recognize my voice?”
The pause is longer. “Bruce?” Alfred says finally. Brian feels a lurch of something in his chest but he doesn’t know if it’s relief or dread.
“Can I meet with you somewhere?”
“They got to you, didn’t they?”
It’s Brian’s turn to hesitate. “They?” he says.
“I’ll meet you at the Eighth Street Cafe in an hour,” Alfred says brusquely. The calm competence in his voice is infinitely familiar and reassuring.
“Okay,” Brian says in relief. “Thank you.”
Alfred hangs up and Brian does too, his heart thumping. He slides back into the car.
“He knew me,” he says to Jack. Jack nods, as if he was expecting it.
“And he knows what’s going on,” Brian adds. This catches Jack’s attention.
“He knows? He told you?”
“I’m going to meet him in an hour at the Eighth Street Cafe.”
The look on Jack’s face is not one of relief. It’s of unease. “He could be involved.”
“Jack, he’s not. I know he’s not.”
“You can’t know that!”
“No, I can’t!” Brian exclaims. “But we have to start somewhere, don’t we?” He hesitates. “You don’t have to come with me,” he adds quietly.
Jack is silent for a moment. “I’ll come,” he says finally.
##
An hour later, Brian is sitting at a booth in the Eighth Street Cafe, a cup of coffee steaming between his hands. He has his eyes on the door, waiting for Alfred to show up.
Jack is sitting at a table by the front door, pretending not to know Brian. He’s within earshot but appears to be deeply engrossed in a newspaper. Before they entered the cafe, they checked out the back entrance. If things get bad, they’ll get out of the cafe however they can and rendezvous at the car, parked three streets away.
The door jingles and a man comes in. Brian recognizes Alfred immediately and feels that same rush of paternal affection that he did when he saw him on television the first time. Alfred looks around the room. Brian lifts his hand in a wave and Alfred focuses on him.
A few unreadable expressions flicker across Alfred’s face before he comes slowly across the room and slips into the booth across from Brian.
“What did they do to you?” Alfred says, his eyes moving across Brian’s face as if seeking out familiar details.
Brian takes a breath. He has been rehearsing this in his head since the phone call an hour ago, but he still doesn’t know what to say.
“I don’t know who you are,” he says finally. “I don’t have any memory of my life. I woke up in Boston six months ago. They told me I was in a car accident.”
“Plastic surgery?” Alfred asks, his eyes finding the scars on Brian’s neck.
“Yes.”
Alfred meets Brian’s eyes. “You are Bruce,” he says. “Your face may be different but you’re him. I would know you anywhere.”
A rush of emotion comes through Brian—Bruce?—and he has to swallow, trying not to let himself waver.
“Tell me what you know,” he says to Alfred.
Alfred nods and folds his hands on the table top. “It’s not really something we can discuss in public, but if you come back to the flat…”
Brian is already shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just—”
“You don’t know who to trust. I understand.” Alfred looks wry. “Well, I can tell you a simplified version here, and you can decide whether to trust me.” He stops and lets out a breath, schooling his thoughts.
Brian sneaks a glance at Jack, who is emptying a sugar packet into his coffee. He catches Brian’s gaze and smiles very slightly before looking back down at his newspaper.
“You have never been one to resist a mystery,” Alfred says carefully. “And you’ve always wanted to, ah. Right wrongs, shall we say.”
“I’m a philanthropist,” Brian says.
Alfred inclines his head. “Something like that. Six months ago, you discovered that people were disappearing. It seemed to be a… rehabilitation program. The official story was that the people entering the program were going into a regimen of intense therapy that would greatly reduce their risk of recidivism. Except one they entered the program, they were never heard from again.”
“Recidivism?” Brian says blankly. “You mean, these people were prisoners?”
“Inmates, yes. At Arkham Asylum.”
At the table across the room, Jack has frozen. He slowly puts the coffee cup down.
“What about—what about other people?” Brian asks anxiously. “I mean, normal civilians? They were disappearing too, right?”
Alfred shakes his head. “I’m not sure. What I do know is that shortly after you started investigating, you disappeared.”
Jack shoves back his chair, spilling his coffee. He is out the door before Brian can react. Brian swears and slides out of the booth.
“Bruce—” Alfred says in alarm.
“I can’t—I have to go—” Brian says. “I’m sorry.”
Alfred grabs his arm and Brian pulls up short. Alfred is stronger than he looks. He meets Alfred’s eyes.
“Keep in touch,” Alfred says. There is emotion clamped back behind his calm expression.
“I will,” Brian says. “I promise. I just need to…”
Alfred lets go of his arm. Brian hesitates a second more, then hurries out the door.
##
He arrives at the car just as the engine is starting up. He manages to slide into the car before Jack pulls away from the curb.
“Inmates at Arkham Asylum,” Jack spits, hitting the gas. They lurch forward into traffic and horns blare.
“He could be wrong,” Brian says.
Jack turns and shoots him a look that is so empty of humanity that Brian freezes where he is.
“He’s not wrong,” Jack says.
Brian looks away. “They must have thought that if they just take away all the memories and influences that made you a criminal, that would change you fundamentally. But they didn’t trust it, so they kept an eye on us in case the rehabilitation didn’t take.”
“Not ‘us,’ Mr. Billionaire Philanthropist. You were just in the program because you were asking a few too many questions.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Brian is suddenly angry. “No matter what we did before the accident, we’re clean slates now, aren’t we? Whether you were some sort of murderer and I was some sort of, I don’t know, detective or something, it doesn’t matter because we’re not those people anymore.”
They idle at a stop light. Jack looks at him. The cold, empty look is gone, and now he just looks tired. “I don’t care about people,” he says. “I don’t care about being nice. I don’t care about doing the right thing. It means nothing to me. Whatever they erased, they couldn’t erase that.”
The light turns green and they move forward again. Brian doesn’t want to go back home to his unfamiliar apartment in Boston. It’s not his, he knows that now. At the same time, his penthouse in Gotham City isn’t really his anymore either. He likes Alfred and he wants to get to know the man again, but even though this city is more familiar to him than anything else he knows, it doesn’t belong to him like it used to when he was Bruce Wayne. Even the name doesn’t seem to fit him anymore.
“They’ll still be looking for us,” Brian says. “The people that created this program. They’ll be panicking.”
“I can drop you off at your apartment,” Jack says dully. “You can stop them, now that you know everything.”
“I can.” Brian pulls on his seatbelt. Jack glances over at him.
“But…?” he asks.
“Have you ever been to Florida?” Brian asks him thoughtfully.
“I don’t think so.”
“Me neither.” Brian straightens in his seat. “I haven’t seen any of the US at all, actually. Not that I remember.”
“You want to go on a road trip with a sociopath.”
“I want to see what the other blank slates are doing with their lives.” He smiles at Jack. “Let’s see if people really can change.”