“And you’ll never have to,” Batman replied, the cape billowing in the chemical-scented wind.

“I never said thank you,” Gordon said.

Bruce looked at the man—a thief, a killer, yes. But a man. His hands, wrapped around the hilt of the blade, trembled not with fear, but with a different sickness: the memory of his father’s suture kit, the Hippocratic Oath, the scalpel that heals and never cuts for vengeance.

The burning temple. The drugged prisoner. The sword.

He stepped off the gargoyle, the cape catching the thermal updraft from the burning wreckage below. As he glided into the blind night, a child in a tenement watched from a cracked window. The child saw not a man, not a creature, but a shape against the moon—a silhouette of a bat.