Summary

Bruce goes to the lab.

Chapter Nine

Bruce keys into the lab around eight o’clock. 

It’s quiet. The day shift is gone; a security guard passes by every forty-five minutes or so. Sometimes they poke their heads in. Fluorescent lights flicker on, painting the chemistry lab in stark shades of white. The benches are empty, wiped clean. Bruce leaves his coat by the door, sets his tape recorder up on a bench, and washes his hands. 

Click. The tape starts spinning. 

“January 9. The time is 8:13 p.m.” 

Bruce lifts the vial up to the light. “Subject is a sample of an unknown liquid. Approximately four ounces.”

He didn’t think to take more before it dried out. He doesn’t know what it would take to rehydrate the blood—if it is blood—after it dries. That might be an experiment for a later date. 

“I believe it may have similar properties to blood. The plan is to separate it using the centrifuge and examine its composites under an electron microscope.” 

The liquid is almost totally opaque. It looks thicker than it is. When Bruce tilts the vial, it sloshes against the sides with more force than he expects. 

Bruce sets the vial on the bench. He unscrews the cap and dips a pipette under the slick black surface. 

“Extracting fourteen milliliters from sample… and transferring to a fifteen milliliter tube.” 

Bruce holds up the little tube. Black liquid flows down into it. It doesn’t separate. Not a single droplet clings to the pipette. 

“Done,” Bruce narrates. “It transfers easily. Balancing with fourteen milliliters of water.” 

He uses a beaker and a fresh pipette for that. Then he opens the lab centrifuge and places the tubes opposite each other, at one hundred and eighty degrees. He secures them in place and closes the lid. 

“Starting at three thousand RPM for twelve minutes,” he says. “If it is similar to blood, that should be sufficient. Time is… 8:34. Starting centrifuge now.”

The centrifuge motor drowns out everything else. Bruce pauses the recording and goes to change his gloves. He leaves the tape recorder on the bench. 

While the centrifuge spins, Bruce turns on the electron microscope and checks that the computer program is online. He gathers fresh pipettes, carbon tabs, two silicon wafers and a set of stubs for the microscope. He lays everything out on the bench. 

The centrifuge hits its peak and starts to brake. When revolutions per minute have dropped to zero, Bruce starts the recording again and unlocks the lid. 

“January 9. Time is 8:47 p.m. Sample has been centrifuged for twelve minutes at three thousand RPM…” 

Bruce lifts the tube out of the machine. He holds it up and sees it separated into two components: black, at the bottom, and red, floating above it.

“It looks like blood.” 

One part of it, at least. The other part must be bile. Bruce doesn’t know what else it could be. Only that would mean Talon has some kind of bile running through his veins. 

Or he’s been throwing up blood. 

Bruce doesn’t record any of that. It’s all speculation, and right now he needs to be objective. “It seems to separate into a red component—maybe blood cells—and… something else. Something denser. It’s black. I don’t see any plasma.”

He sets the tube in a holding tray and grabs a few fresh pipettes.

“The goal is to examine each component individually. The unknown component will probably dry out the quickest, from what I’ve seen so far. I’ll start with that. Transferring approximately one milliliter to a pipette.” 

He dips a disposable pipette into the bottom of the tube and draws one milliliter out of the black. He sets the pipette down on the bench with the liquid suspended inside. He starts assembling the microscope sample: a stub, a sticky carbon tab, a slice of silicon. 

A door opens at the back of the lab. 

Bruce turns. He sees Lucius Fox closing the door behind him, with his coat thrown over his arm. 

“You’re being recorded,” Bruce says. He turns back to the bench.

“Working on something?” Lucius says. Water rushes in the sink. 

“It’s a personal project.” 

A short laugh. “I was afraid of that.”

The pieces are too small to manipulate with his hands. Bruce sets the carbon tab on top of the stub with tweezers. The silicon goes on top of that. Then he takes the pipette and gently—gently—taps a tiny bit of the liquid out onto the silicon. It sticks in place.

“Less than half a milliliter transferred to microscope stub,” Bruce says.

Lucius steps up next to him. He looks down at the microscope stub, and all the attendant pieces around it. 

“While that dries,” Bruce says, “I will transfer the same amount of red blood to a separate stub.”

“Blood?”

Bruce looks up from the bench. 

“Red blood cells,” he says. “Maybe. I don’t know for sure if that’s what it is.” 

“Right,” Lucius says slowly. “What kind of project did you say this was?”

Bruce takes a pipette and repeats the process, drawing red liquid out from the top of the centrifuge tube. 

“It’s personal,” he says. 

A microscope stub, a sticky carbon tab, a silicon wafer. Bruce’s hands are steady as he pieces them together. 

“Less than half a milliliter of red component transferred to microscope stub. Time is 8:56.”

“Do you know why I’m here, Bruce?”

Bruce looks up. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Yes,” Lucius says. “I’m here because no one has seen or heard from you in two days. You missed the board’s quarterly review. You’ve ignored every attempt to contact you.”

“I’ve been busy,” Bruce says. “Something came up. A personal matter.”

“That’s all well and good,” Lucius says, “as long as you tell someone you’re taking time off.”

He stands at an angle, facing slightly away from Bruce, but he looks straight at him as he talks. Lucius always makes eye contact when he talks to someone. It makes him an earnest, effective communicator. It also makes him slightly exhausting. 

“Well,” Bruce says. “Now you know.” 

“I did not mean me.” 

“I’ll call the office,” Bruce says. He does have a secretary. Gwen. A recent graduate from Gotham University. She majored in business, but her real interest is poetry. They haven’t talked much, but she’s competent. He should tell her, probably, that he’s going to be out of the office for the foreseeable future. Otherwise she might think….

He looks at Lucius with sudden realization. “You thought I got kidnapped again.”

Lucius sighs. “The thought crossed my mind,” he says. “Yes.”

“You were worried.”

“We all were,” Lucius says.

Maybe the rest of the board was worried, but Lucius is the one who sought him out. Lucius has always cared about Bruce far beyond his role in the company.

“You do have a penchant for vanishing off the face of the earth,” Lucius says. 

“Not this time,” Bruce says. 

“No. Alfred said there was a family emergency.” 

Alfred would phrase it that way. “Something like that,” Bruce says. 

“So you’ve been spending time at home.” Lucius looks around the laboratory. “So to speak.” 

“Yes,” Bruce says. Then—because Lucius does worry—“I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“And I will notify the board.”

Bruce checks the unidentified sample. The black liquid is dry, though it’s only been a few minutes. He moves the stub over to the electron microscope and sets it in place. Then he changes his gloves. 

The electron microscope takes several minutes to set up. A laminated checklist taped next to the computer helpfully informs Bruce of each step. 

“This must be a pretty interesting project,” Lucius says. 

Bruce chooses a detector and beam setting on the microscope control screen. Then the spotsize, and then, as the image begins to appear, he starts to refine the focus. 

“Sample is dry and placed inside the microscope chamber,” he says. The tape is still rolling. “Now setting video scope. And… adjusting focus.”

The image loads in greyscale, geometric and highly detailed. 

“It looks… crystalline,” Bruce says. He clicks across the image, bringing different sections into focus. “It’s not uniform. Some sections have a… jagged pattern. Angular. Some are more granular…”

“Bruce.”

“Hn.”

“What is this?”

“I don’t know.” Bruce moves to another section of the image, where the pattern changes yet again. “It almost looks like metal, but—here. These are droplets.”

“And where did you say you got it?” 

Bruce turns away from the screen. Lucius’s voice is serious, but not flat—he has an idea, a suspicion, and he’s looking at Bruce to confirm it. 

“I didn’t,” Bruce says. 

“Right.”

Bruce turns back to the computer. He scrolls across the electronic image, taking snapshots of anything that might be important. He sends the images directly to his personal email. He’ll erase them from the lab network once he’s done. 

“You think it’s some sort of metal?” Lucius says. 

Bruce hums. Some of the visual patterns suggest that, but they’re inconsistent enough that he can’t be sure. It could be metal—some sort of intravenous supplement, like iron—or it could be something else entirely. 

“I’ll need to cross-reference these,” Bruce says, more to the tape recorder than to Lucius. 

He still needs to look at the red component—the blood. When he’s captured everything relevant he starts the process of switching the samples out. It takes several minutes, and at the end of it, Lucius is still standing behind him. 

“Was there something else?” Bruce says over his shoulder. 

“Well,” Lucius says. “To tell you the truth, I was going to invite you to dinner.”

At that, Bruce actually pauses to look back at him. 

Lucius smiles at him. Bruce can’t be sure what his own expression looks like, but smiling seems like an inappropriate response. 

“Luke wants to talk to you,” Lucius says. “He’s thinking about medical school.”

“I dropped out of medical school.”

“That’s what I told him,” Lucius says. “I think he wants to ask why.”

There is no answer to that question. Or if there is, Bruce doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know how he could tell someone else. Why didn’t he drop out of medical school? He was grieving. He saw his father’s ghost everywhere. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t focus. He would avoid his classes for weeks at a time, only to finish a month of coursework in one miserable caffeine-fueled night. He went to parties. He drank too much. His advisor asked if he’d ever been diagnosed with a learning disability. He studied and listened and learned and volunteered and it was never enough. It was never anything. It never made a dent in the crime and sickness and desperation and need that he saw everywhere he looked. 

So Bruce dropped out of medical school. 

Luke Fox is a good kid. Smart. Hardworking. He’ll probably have an easier time. Sometimes Bruce thinks he has more in common with Lucius’s oldest son—the one shuffled off to military school in a hurry at seventeen, the one who never calls or writes.

“How is Timothy?”

A current of tension rises in Lucius’s shoulders. “He’s well,” Lucius says. “He’s doing fine. Tamara is thinking of interning with Wayne Enterprises. She wants to go into business.”

“Hm. The family business?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Lucius says. “It would just be an internship, to start.” 

He’s redirected the conversation away from Tim. The oldest son, the one he doesn’t like to talk about. 

Bruce lets it be. He readjusts the settings on the microscope screen. Detector, beam, spotsize, focus. The tape recorder is still rolling. 

“Moving on to the second sample,” Bruce says. “The red. Possibly blood cells.” 

The image loads in bars across the screen. Black and white and grey. It’s blurry at first. Bruce guides it into focus. Microscopic details come closer and closer. 

“It is blood cells,” Bruce murmurs. 

He knows this. He’s seen blood cells under a microscope before, plenty of times. He zooms in on the image, trying to tease out where each cell ends. The shapes.

“The shape is wrong,” Bruce says. He knows what red blood cells are supposed to look like. These are wrong. “The cells are deformed.”

Lucius says, “Bruce….”

“Look at that.” Bruce points out the edge of a cell, on the outside of the cluster. “It’s deformed. Look at the cell wall. That should be a curve, it should all be—smoother. These are not healthy cells.” 

He didn’t expect Talon’s blood to be healthy. Nothing about Talon is healthy. But he didn’t expect the evidence to be so sharp and clear. 

Lucius says, “Bruce—”

“This is a sign of mercury poisoning.”

Lucius reaches over and stops the recorder. “Is that human blood?”

“What?” Bruce says, and then, when the words register, “Yes, of course.”

“Uh-huh,” Lucius says. “Where did you get it?”

Bruce drags his eyes away from the screen. Lucius stares at him. Tension pulls taut his voice, his body. He has an idea. A suspicion. He wants Bruce to confirm it. 

“I can’t tell you that.” 

Lucius breathes out. He looks away. Bruce looks back at the screen, at blood cells deformed by mercury exposure. Is that what’s wrong? The metal in Talon’s bloodstream—could it possibly be—

“See, you tell me not to worry,” Lucius says. “And then you say things like that.”

It can’t be mercury. That’s impossible. Mercury in the bloodstream would kill a person—or cripple them, at the very least, and the shape of the blood cells on the screen suggests long-term exposure. Months. Maybe years. But that would cause muscular atrophy, nerve damage, brain damage, kidney failure, respiratory failure, death. It would kill a human being. 

But Talon might not be human. What if he’s not human?

Lucius says, “Bruce. Do you understand why this is a problem?”

Bruce may not be good at talking to people, but he can tell when he’s being condescended to. He tears his gaze away from the screen—the important thing, the reason he’s here—and he locks eyes with Lucius. 

“I understand,” he says. “You think I’ve done something illegal.”

“I don’t know what you’ve done,” Lucius says. “I don’t think I want to know. All I need to know is whether or not this project of yours is going to affect WE.”

It’s hard to evade Lucius. Bruce forgets that, because most of the time he doesn't try. They have a common goal. They work together, for the good of Wayne Enterprises, and ultimately for the good of Gotham City. They make an effective team. So Bruce forgets how incisive Lucius Fox is, how skeptical, how determined to find the truth. 

He does not want to betray Lucius’s trust. But it’s not all his choice. What Bruce says now will affect not only him, but Talon. 

He does not want to betray Talon’s trust, either. 

What he says is, “This has nothing to do with WE. I am running these tests on behalf of a friend.”

“A friend,” Lucius says. His voice is level, calm, but it has a sharp edge. He doesn’t believe what Bruce is saying. 

“It would be a violation of his trust,” Bruce says, “and his privacy, to say any more. But I haven’t hurt anyone. This is not illegal. I am investigating using the resources at my disposal.” 

Lucius looks at him a moment longer. He always looks people in the eyes. Bruce forces himself to hold the eye contact. His fingers curl against the keyboard, tense, shaking, scrabbling against the discomfort that digs into his brain. This is how Lucius communicates. Bruce will meet him on his own terms. 

Lucius looks away. So does Bruce. He breathes in, once, and forces himself to hold it. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. He breathes out. 

His hands relax. 

“Alright,” Lucius says. “Fine.” 

He turns away. Bruce breathes in again. 

A few breaths later he remembers to look at the screen and document what he sees. To capture images of the deformed cells and route them to his personal email. Lucius stands next to the bench for a while longer.

“Just keep it out of our labs,” he says.

Bruce says nothing.

Lucius gathers his coat. He goes for the door. He turns back halfway through.

“It’s an open invitation,” he says. “If you have the time.” 

“To dinner,” Bruce says.

“Yes,” Lucius says. 

He stands in the doorway for a few seconds longer. Five seconds. Ten. Then he walks out. 

Bruce takes several more snapshots of the blood cells. He scrolls from one edge of the specimen to the other. He photographs every inch of it. Only then does he start the process of shutting down the screen, emptying the chamber, disposing of the microscope stubs.

He deletes the pictures from the lab computer and double-checks they can’t be recovered. He leaves the log of his activity; he has no reason to hide it. He has as much right to use the labs at Wayne Enterprises as anyone. He washes out the pipettes and tubes and leaves them dry on the bench. 

Mercury poisoning. There are three main causes of mercury poisoning: ingestion through eating fish, workplace exposure, and emissions from dental implants. They can probably rule out ingestion, in this case; Bruce is willing to bet that Talon has not eaten enough fish of any kind to cause the visible accumulation of mercury in his bloodstream. That leaves either environmental exposure—God knows Gotham has enough pollutants floating around to cause something like this—or some kind of medical implant. 

If it is mercury poisoning in the first place. They can’t be sure that it is. Talon’s red blood cells are deformed. They have evidence of that. The nature of the deformity is a possible symptom of mercury poisoning. Bruce knows that for a fact. He could make an argument for other symptoms—lethargy, memory loss, light sensitivity, insomnia. On the other hand, Talon shows no sign of vision loss or muscular atrophy. If anything, his coordination and physical strength are better than average. 

Bruce could make an argument, but he can’t prove anything. He doesn’t know what the metal component of the blood sample is. He doesn’t know if it is pure metal in the first place. He doesn’t know if there are factors here that won’t show up in lab analysis. He doesn’t know how to explain Talon’s almost bloodless skin, or his lack of a heartbeat, or his apparent physical strength despite incredible neglect and abuse.

There are too many unknowns.

Bruce gathers up his tape recorder and his coat. He checks his key card in his pocket. He turns out the lights. 

He takes the blood samples out with him and locks the door. 

⁂