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Time isn’t passing in the regular way for Jason. There’s a staccato rhythm to his memories—he looks up, and the bodega on the corner’s closed. He looks up, and he’s never seen the President before. He looks down, and he’s in a pair of shoes he tossed over a telephone wire years ago. Or maybe he didn’t. Things circle back around or he anticipates them or both. Sometimes he looks in the mirror and he has aged and sometimes he hasn’t. It’s not very different from the way other people live—the experience of the expected interspersed with the unexpected.
The fact that Bruce’s case notes have been digitized is unexpected. Doing so wouldn’t have been a technological challenge, but would have been tedious—Jason remembers him writing hundreds upon hundreds of lines each night in tiny, psychopathically mechanical handwriting. It’s hard to imagine anyone with access to the details of Bruce’s nighttime wanderings ever had the time to not just scan in but validate and label entries. But then again, it’s not 1988 anymore. Maybe someone’s done just one or two or three a night since the last time Jason dug a manila folder out of a filing cabinet, before time slipped and went non-linear.
Maybe it was Dick, who sidles in with the pneumatic hiss of the records room door. He looks older—older than Jason by more than he used to, though that difference should have mattered less as time marched on. He has smile lines he’s using and a dress shirt that makes him look like he’s planning to pick a teenager up from private school and drive him to tennis practice at the country club.
“What year is it?” Jason asks. He needs to look back through the records every twenty-five years for a century, though he can’t remember why. He also wants to make an old man joke at Dick.
“2013,” Dick says, instead of fucking with him. Jason saw the newspapers this morning so he knows it’s true.
“Hm,” says Jason. There are records from 1988 and 1963, but not 1938. Strangely, Bruce does have notes from 1939. “Odds the passage of time is a cosmic joke that the old man is playing on me in particular?”
“Low, although I guess not none,” Dick says. He leans against Jason’s workbench, which has somehow-austere wrought-iron scrollwork spanning the struts. “He’s always been weirdly attached to the Clock King.”
“He has,” Jason realizes. “It’s like he wants people to be more impressed than they already are.”
Dick clicks his tongue. Tick-tock. It’d be cruel if Dick had any idea why it was cruel. Jason turns back to the monitor and scrolls far and randomly.
“What are you even doing here?” he asks.
Dick just looks at him, which causes Jason to look inside himself a moment. “I’m not always like this,” he realizes.
“Nah,” Dick says. “Usually you’re crystal clear. You tangled with Mr. Freeze a while back, though, and sometimes you get time-spacey when the weather shifts.”
“And so you, what, babysit?”
Dick shrugs. “I hang around. Weirdly, the whole thing mellows you out. And you always figure it out yourself, so why mess with your head anymore than we have to.”
It’s April 23rd, 2013. Time settles partway into place, and Jason remembers what he’s doing. The weather has just turned warm with intent, and there’s a quarter-themed villain who comes out of hibernation every quarter century whose next move Jason is trying to anticipate. “Damn,” he says. “Hasn’t Two-Face already done the coin thing to death?”
“I don’t actually know what you’re investigating,” Dick says warmly. “I’m moral support.”
“Gee,” Jason intones. He drums his fingers on the worktop. There are unlikely to be any notes on the Quartiler from the week of April 24th through 30th, 1988. At the time, Bruce was tracking the Joker in Ethiopia and Jason was dying there. Dick wasn’t answering his phone. “What are you dressed up for?” he asks.
“Tim’s got that fake cousin who he actually real-likes,” Dick explains, plucking at the military creases ironed into his shirt. “She’s got a violin recital.”
A violin recital for a fake cousin. Jason’s already used up Gee as a response, so he doesn’t say anything at all.
Dick’s way of leaning against the workbench is scrupulously polite; he’s at an angle such that Jason can see his face, but he can’t see Jason’s monitor. Jason scrolls again, landing somewhere in the middle of 1987 on the calendar view. Each day’s activities—his, Bruce’s, Dick’s, and Gotham’s—are noted down in separate text boxes and cross-referenced by case number. Jason’s notes were rarely more than a few sentences long, but stiffly formal. July 21st is strewn with painstakingly correct but embarrassingly earnest semicolons he can still remember agonizing over. Dick’s were terse and strained, but when looked at as a whole, communicative—a conversation that Jason hadn’t realized, at the time, he’d been having with Bruce.
23JUL1987 - BTMN - GTHM - …Note increase in overnight deliveries on the D. River traveling from the SE (BLHV area). Possible arms trafficking via alternate minor routes to avoid s&s vic. O. Lock… Note dk-colored (possibly blk) speedboats with rd and orng logo stamped on deck. Note NO logo on outer hull but consistent make/model. Note typical crew of 4 wearing dk grn jumpsuits w indiscernible embroidered logo. Armed with pistols, note possibility of addt’l large weapons stored onboard…
25JUL1987 - NTWG - BLHV - Patrol schedule altered to cover NW quadrant vic. river docks. Regular barge and tugboat traffic observed, security team on shift as expected and semi-alert. Departed 0127 to respond to alert related to Deathstroke (false alarm). Will return as available.
26JUL1987 - BTMN - GTHM - …See attm for img of logo identified on dk colored (note: navy bl) speedboats arriving regularly overnight from SE (BLHV area). Uniforms identify crew as asso’d w “Greg’s Luxury Watersports” (no co. registered as such in state (PA))... Note crew observed mtg w affil. of Charley Ponchatrase (see case #2843 for disc. of Ponchatrase affil. w/ Penguin)... Note Dthstrk recent sightings in Nepal, Bhutan (note LOW confidence). See case #3244 for disc. of recent observations on Dthstrk healing factor...
30JUL1987 - NTWG - BLHV - Patrol covered SE quadrant as scheduled. Mundane criminal behavior observed and interdicted. Research indicates “Greg’s Luxury Watersports” registered in state (NJ). No match on logo observed on speedboats traveling interstate. Recent notes on Deathstroke healing factor and location reviewed. Confidence level upgraded to reflect mutually supported independent observations.
On the page, Jason can watch ideas bounce back and forth between the two men—they’re born, grow, evolve, come to fruition, die on the vine or are crushed beneath a heel, but Dick and Bruce had been trapped together, it seems inevitably, in an intellectual circle of life. If Dick went a few days without responding to Bruce in word and in deed, it was to make a point.
Springtime must still be working on Jason, its long grasses growing up around his ankles and holding him in place. He feels slow, muddled, and unconcerned as a question he rarely acknowledges and never attempts to answer bubbles up through the swamp of his mind.
“Why didn’t you answer?” he asks.
“What’s the question?” Dick says, amused, and Jason realizes that they are, as ever, on completely different pages.
The question is: I called you before I died, Dick. I called you three times that week, and you didn’t pick up the phone at all. What were you trying to tell me by not answering?
The question is: It was a long shot, but it was about my mom, and I thought you’d understand that even if Bruce didn’t. What didn’t you understand?
The question is: Why is there time for fake cousins’ violin recitals, but there wasn’t time for me?
The last formulation is so maudlin and juvenile it pulls him up short. It’s been almost twenty-five years, and he wasn’t been a child for any of them. “What are they playing at the recital?” he asks instead.
“Steve Miller Band, I think.”
“Steve Miller Band?”
Dick hums a few familiar bars, which turn sad and strange in his voice. He has a decent ear, and the sound resonates, shivering off the stone of the cavern. Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’. Jason imagines the sound of a violin drifting through the space, slow and mournful.
April 27th, 1988. That was the day. Before he can overthink it, Jason follows the sound of the music to that date and clicks.
Jason’s own notes for the day are empty. Bruce’s are a single, clipped word by the mystery transcriptionist: [Illegible]. Dick’s read:
27APR1988 - NTWG - TMRN - Rest, refit and recovery.
The violins in Jason’s mind turn buzzing, angry. “TMRN,” he reads. “Where is that?”
Dick frowns. “Timor—no. Tamaran, I think. Pretty out of the way, even now. That’s Starfire’s homeworld. Need me to call her up?”
The angry cacophony building in Jason’s mind stumbles to a confused halt. “No,” he says, “I’m just reading—off world?”
“Yeah,” says Dick. There’s a pregnant pause. “It’s where I was when—” He stops, swallowing air. The muscles in his neck are tight where visible above the collar of his shirt as he course-corrects. “I’ve been before. If there’s anything I can do…”
“I’ll let you know.” Jason is watching Dick’s face, fascinated by the way he buries what was just visible there. He settles into a perfect regularity of expression that, like dirt smoothed over a new plot in a cemetery, indicates something grave exists below the surface. If I had a fake cousin I real-liked, he thinks, this man would attend her recitals or die trying. It surely isn’t true, but it’s how he feels.
“If I don’t remember this conversation once I’m mentally stable, tell me to check the notes again,” he tells Dick, and a crooked grin spreads across Grayson’s face.
“Good news for you there,” he says. “You always remember.”