Batman Reborn, a parallel story to The Unchanged Lock
Three years after losing Selina, eighty-year-old Bruce Wayne fell asleep in his study. When he woke, he was eight again, and the Orion constellation he’d crookedly stuck to the ceiling as a child was still there.
And it was the day his parents were murdered.
This time, he erased those two gunshots from history with an anonymous phone call, a roadwork barricade, and five grams of mustard powder. Then he began living his life over: the cape didn’t grow out of a grave, but was chosen by him; not one of his four children was missing, and some even came home two years early; the East End got a new clinic, someone kept watch all night over the tin box on Park Street, and the copper ring wasn’t lost.
He set himself only one ironclad rule: he wouldn’t touch her path, not even by a single step. She would still lose her mother, still climb rooftops, still become Catwoman, and still come to steal that necklace. All he could do was wax the window hinges in advance, then wait. He waited twenty years and acted out their “first meeting” for four, until one late night, a note on acid-free paper appeared beneath the desk lamp, bearing a sentence only the two of them understood.
He thought he was keeping it from her. What he didn’t know was that the only spectator in the room had been sitting in the audience since the very first act.
A parallel story to The Unchanged Lock, part of the same series as Where You Land. You can read this without having read the previous book, though readers who have will recognize all the little moments.
Theme: Fate can be relived, but it is our choices that define us.
