Batman 4 - Batman & Robin (31 page)

As the beams of sunlight hit the base of the observatory, the ice began to melt off it. The entire cliff was thawing, its frigid sheath running in rivulets down to the river.

Only then did Batman give a thought to Freeze. Turning, he saw his adversary lying amid the rubble, weak and gray with the growing heat. The villain was straining just to breathe.

Batman walked over and knelt beside him.

Freeze looked up at him with hate in his eyes. “Go on,” he rasped. “Kill me too . . . just as you killed my wife.”

Batman shook his head. “I didn’t kill your wife.” He pressed a button on his Utility Belt to provide proof of his claim. “Run Ivy evidence tape 001.40.”

Then he showed Freeze a tiny monitor in his gauntlet, which displayed an image of Poison Ivy. “As I told Lady Freeze when I pulled her plug,” Ivy was saying, “this is a one-woman show.”

Freeze’s eyes opened wide. He screamed his rage, his face streaming with frozen tears like tiny diamonds.

“But Ivy never killed her,” Batman assured him. “Your wife isn’t dead, Victor. She’s alive.”

Freeze’s eyes narrowed. “How . . . ?”

“We found her,” Batman said. “Just in time, apparently. And we restored her icy slumber.”

He spoke a new command and his gauntlet monitor switched images. Now it showed Freeze’s mate, sleeping once again in cryogenic peace.

“You see? She’s still frozen,” he told the former scientist. “Still waiting for you to find a cure for her disease.”

Freeze breathed a sigh of relief. “Still frozen,” he echoed, turning his face away. “Still alive.”

Batman saw his chance then. It was still a long shot. But it was also his
only
shot.

“I know what it’s like to lose everything you’ve ever loved,” he said.

Freeze regarded him, looking for a lie in his face. But he wouldn’t find one, Batman knew. After all, he
did
know what it was like.

“But vengeance isn’t power,” he went on. “Any two-bit thug with a gun can take a life. To give life . . . that’s true power. A power you once had.”

Freeze was listening to him. For now, that was all he could hope for.

“I don’t know if you’ll ever find a cure for your wife,” Batman told him. “But I’m asking you now, Dr. Victor Fries, to save another life. Show me how to cure McGregor’s Syndrome, stage one. And maybe you can also save the man your wife once loved—a man who’s buried deep inside you.”

Batman paused, hoping he’d been persuasive enough. He looked into his adversary’s eyes, into his soul, hoping he was right about what was buried there.

“Will you help me, Doctor?”

Freeze stared at Batman. Emotions moved across his face like summer storms. Finally, he unsealed his chest-plate, removed two glowing power orbs, and held them out in his hand. His smile was bittersweet.

“Take two of these,” he said, “and call me in the morning.”

Accepting the orbs, Batman made a call to the cops over his cowl radio. But Freeze stopped him and asked for a favor.

Knowing Freeze’s villainy had been broken, Batman was tempted to grant it. But he couldn’t.

Still, he had a feeling Freeze would find a way to get what he wanted all on his own.

P
oison Ivy sat in a barred square of moonlight in her cell at Arkham Asylum, considering the tiny flower she held in her hand.

She could hear the shrieking and cursing that came from the cells of her fellow inmates farther down the corridor. The Riddler, the Mad Hatter, Maxie Zeus . . . all of them thoroughly mad. All of them hollowed out by this place until they were devoid of hope.

Only the Scarecrow refrained from shrieking and cursing with the rest of them. But he was the maddest of all.

In the whole cellblock, perhaps in the whole asylum, only Ivy was able to cling to her sanity. And what made her different? she asked herself. What made her unique here?

The promise that still lay like a seedling in her breast. The anticipation of spring, lush and green and sweetsmelling, rolling over humankind like a mighty, flower-covered steamroller.

That, and a more personal hope.

She turned to the window, wondering how long it would be until winter arrived. Then she began pulling the petals out of the flower, one by one.

“He loves me,” she said, her words little more than a sigh. “He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me—”

“Not,” a voice interrupted, followed by a click as of a lock opening.

Ivy turned and saw a figure cloaked in shadows. It stepped forward, revealing itself as Mr. Freeze.

“It’s amazing what you can buy around here for a few dozen diamonds,” he told her.

He approached her. Coldly, she thought. But that was hardly a surprise. His aloofness, his hard-to-get quality was one of the things she found attractive about him.

“Freeze,” she said. “I knew you’d come to get me. The same way I came to get you.” Caught up in the nearness of him, she reached up as if to stroke his cheek right through his helmet.

Before she could touch him, however, he grabbed her wrist. His mouth twisted with rage.

“I didn’t have enough to buy my way out of here,” he grated. His eyes narrowed savagely. “Just
in.
”

“In?” she echoed. “But why . . . ?”

And suddenly, she knew. Somehow, Freeze had found out about his wife—the way she’d
really
died, at Ivy’s hands.

She became afraid.
Very
afraid.

“Prepare for a bitter harvest,” Freeze told her, his eyes glinting like daggers. “Winter has come at last.”

Ivy swallowed. This wasn’t the kind of cold embrace she’d had in mind.

Bruce watched morning break in the hills to the east, a glow of ruddy gold sandwiched between the horizon and an unbroken blanket of clouds. Then he turned away from the window to look back over his shoulder.

The living room of stately Wayne Manor was filled with pizza boxes, Chinese food containers, and articles of clothing strewn over the furniture. Barbara, who had been up half the night watching over her uncle, was dozing on the couch. Dick was pacing, red-eyed with lack of sleep himself.

They were afraid, all of them. Afraid that Alfred would be lost to them forever. But Bruce was afraid the
most.

After all, Alfred had been his world for a very long and very vulnerable time. In a way, losing the old man would be like losing his parents all over again. And he didn’t know how he would be able to endure that.

Bruce squinted as the sun blazed forth, revealed in all its glory. Then that glory faded as it rose out of view behind the clouds.

In the distance, he saw a V-shaped flock of geese. They were headed for warmer climes—unlike the bats in the caverns below the house, who remained all year long in their chittering darkness.

As he followed the geese’s flight, Bruce was reminded of a day long ago. He saw himself as a boy again, standing outside on the estate’s snow-dusted fields, trying to imagine what Alfred could be saying to the stout man in the living room.

It wasn’t until the following week that he realized the man was a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist, in fact, who meant to relieve him of the pain he was feeling as a result of his parents’ deaths.

There had been just one problem. Bruce hadn’t
wanted
to be relieved of the pain. It was all he still had of Martha and Thomas Wayne and he wasn’t about to give it up.

Of course, the stout man wouldn’t have accepted that. Even at his tender age, young Bruce knew that with grim certainty. There was only one way the stout man would leave him alone.

So Bruce opened up to him—or pretended to. He poured out his feelings of loneliness, of rage, of fear and resentment. Or rather, not his real feelings, but what he thought the stout man wanted to hear.

It pleased the stout man no end that he had cured the boy. He had gone into the arrangement believing Bruce was a hopeless case, but somehow he had drawn him out. In fact, he’d told Alfred that it was one of the highlights of his career as a therapist.

Of course, Alfred had known what was going on. But he hadn’t intervened to protest the boy’s behavior. It was as if he’d sensed that Bruce would need a clean bill of health one day. As if he’d known the boy would need to fade into the background, bland and uninteresting, so someone else could emerge and never be linked to him.

Before the eyes of the adult Bruce, the flock of geese vanished past the treetops. He sighed.
Alfred
. . .

Suddenly, he heard a harrumph. It had come from the vicinity of the stairs. By the look on his face, Dick had heard it, too.

Rousing Barbara, practically lifting her off the couch, Bruce and Dick made for the hallway. But before they could get there, they saw someone walking toward them from the other direction.

Two someones, actually. As Bruce watched, a lump taking hold in his throat, he saw that one of them was Alfred. The other was Doc Simpson, holding Alfred’s arm for support. But mostly it was the old butler, scowling as he went, who was doing the work of transporting himself.

Simpson let go of the man, and Alfred took the last few steps into the room by himself. And there was some color in his face, by God. He looked as if he’d gotten some of his old strength back.

Barbara blinked at the sight of her uncle. She peered at him with disbelieving eyes. Dick was staring, too, not daring to ask the question to which they all wanted to know the answer.

In the end, it was Bruce who asked it. Sort of.

“Alfred,” he said, despite the tightness in his throat. “Are you . . . ?”

The butler’s scowl deepened. “Rather disappointed at how poorly I seem to have taught you proper housekeeping?” He glanced disapprovingly around the room. “Why, yes, I am.”

Alfred allowed himself a bit of a smile. “And quite well, it seems. Thanks to you, Master Bruce. Thanks to you all.”

Bruce went over to him. So did Dick and Barbara. One by one, they hugged the man who was at the center of their family. The man who held it all together for them.

“Well,” said Simpson, “I ought to be going now. But I’ll stop by later to check in.” He paused for a moment to shake his head. “I don’t know where Wayne Industries had to go to get that antigen, Bruce—or who you got it from. But it’s going to save a lot of people a lot of misery.”

The billionaire smiled. “When administered by dedicated and caring physicians. Thanks for all your help, Doctor.”

Nodding, Simpson left. Alfred moved a pizza carton with thinly veiled repugnance and sat on the couch where Barbara had been sleeping. He eyed his niece with curiosity.

“You know,” he told her, “I had the most remarkable dream while I was convalescing. I dreamed that while I was asleep, you had hacked your way into the disc I specifically forbade you to look at.”

Barbara flushed. “Er . . . right. Well, you see, I—”

“And that’s not all,” Alfred said. “I dreamed that you took that proprietary knowledge and used it to create a suit. A
Bat
suit, of all things. And then you used your new autumn apparel to go after Poison Ivy.” He chuckled. “It’s amazing how foolish you can be when you’re dreaming.”

Barbara swallowed. “You overheard us talking, didn’t you? When we thought you were still asleep?”

Dick grunted. “Nothing gets past good ol’ Al.
Nothing.
”

Bruce moved the pizza box a little farther along the length of the couch and sat beside Alfred. “Welcome back,” he told his friend.

“It’s good to be back,” said Alfred.

Dick pointed at Bruce. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. When Barbara . . . er, Batgirl and I rolled off the telescope, you didn’t try to save us.” He tilted his head. “How come? It was the first time I ever fell and you weren’t there to catch me.”

Bruce shrugged. “I knew you could handle it,” he said easily.

“You did?” Barbara asked.

Dick shot her a look. She noticed it.

“I mean,” she added quickly, “of course you did.”

“Sometimes,” said Bruce, “counting on someone else is the only way to win.” He winked at Dick. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

Barbara appeared indignant suddenly. “Hey, I’m the one who kicked Ivy’s botanical butt. Personally. Me. I did.”