Bryan's Mask
May. 2nd, 2006 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shankieOriginal fic; but Batman's in it. Kinda.
I thought I'd celebrate the last day of my Advanced Fiction class by posting some of my work from it, so voila!
Bryan's Mask
"You're kidding, right?" Bryan leaned down to re-tie his shoes, kneeling on the cracked pavement and fumbling with the knots and frays of the ancient laces. He shook his head, and stood back up.
"No, really, I saw him! It wasn't just some guy in a Halloween costume, either. He swooped down off the roof and kicked this mugger's butt! I swear!" Kyle was fairly jumping in excitement, animatedly waving his arms around.
The two kids were on their way home from school, along an overgrown sidewalk just outside the suburbs. They walked in silence for a few minutes, passing a sleeping homeless man snuggled up under a dumpster full of cardboard and a leering dealer on the corner. They passed the same men every day, although the men in the costumes would change from time to time. Bryan tried not to look, but Kyle was too busy watching the jagged skyline to notice.
"I suppose you're watching for Spider-man to jump out now, too?" Bryan's voice was harsh and had none of his usual laughing rumble.
"What?" Kyle asked, looking down from the rooftops and at his friend.
"Nothing, stupid!" Bryan spat out the words at Kyle, then took off at a run and ducked under a chain link fence. He was already gone before Kyle managed to reply quietly.
"I did see him, Batman saved me."
Bryan lived in brick apartment complex that once been a hope to reinvigorate the dilapidated neighborhood, but was now just another unkempt building in a forest of unkempt buildings. Kids that used to be his older brother's friends were huddled around the front steps, not bothering to look up as he wove in between them to the door. The smell of overturned garbage cans in the alley wafted up alongside him; sickening sweet rotting food and the vague odor of oil. Inside wasn’t much better, but accompanied by a soundtrack of rattling bass from upstairs.
The apartment door was ajar and he could hear his mother’s voice inside, screeching gossip at Sandra, visiting from across the hall. He pushed it open and saw her stub out a cigarette in the overflowing Texas-shaped ashtray. She let out a long breath of smoke and smiled at him.
“Your little friend isn’t coming over today?” She didn’t wait for a reply, and began fumbling in her pockets for another cigarette. “Good. Fuckin’ kid isn’t good for you, livin’ in la-la land like some idiot.”
He still said nothing, but put his backpack down and walked into the adjoining kitchenette. His mother followed him with her eyes, a cancer stick hanging out of the side of her mouth and a red lighter in the hand she had placed firmly on her hip.
“Not even a damn hello? I tell ya Sandy, school ain’t teachin’ those kids a thing useful.” She said, then took a swig from a bottle of Red Rose wine with the other side of her mouth. Sandra looked up from staring at her own cigarette, which was already burnt to the filter in her fingers, then thoughtfully put it out in the ashtray.
“Yup.” Sandra said, “sure don’t.”
* * *
In the next couple of days, Bryan said very little, a fact his mother ignored, his teachers begrudgingly accepted, and Kyle pretended not to notice, poorly.
The lunchroom at Richard Viedt Memorial Elementary was a din of children in knots and lines everywhere in the echoing room. Bryan and Kyle were eating in the corner, at a large blue fold-out table next to the row of windows. Kyle was reading a letter on the table, and Bryan was studying the paint handprints all over the glass while chewing on a hard piece of garlic bread. His determination to remain silent was wearing off, and finally he broke the silence.
“Who’s it from?” He strained his voice to be heard over the commotion in the background.
“My uncle.” Kyle put the letter away in his red backpack and smiled when he came back up to finish eating. “He’s getting out soon and wants to visit.”
“Oh, cool.” Bryan pulled his own pack out from under the long bench, and fumbled with the zipper before it sprang free. He pulled out a rolled up newspaper, peeling off a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sticker that had somehow come off on it. Pressing the sticker onto one of his notebooks, Bryan handed the newspaper over to Kyle.
Kyle almost immediately laughed and pounded his feet against the floor a few times. The front page was dominated by a dark, slightly fuzzy photograph of a silhouetted man in a cape aiming a grappling hook gun. The figure was off-center, and it was clear the photographer had meant only to get a shot of a man with a bloody nose tied to a broken lightpole. The headline read:
“MASKED VIGILANTE HOSPITALIZES ATTEMPTED RAPIST”
And that was just above the fold. As Bryan got up to leave, he figured Kyle might not even read under the fold, where the headline was:
“FRIEND OR FOE: POLICE OFFER NO COMMENT ON INVESTIGATION”
Bryan went to the classroom early, sitting in the back and pulling out his math book. He tried to work on the problems on some scratch paper, but was distracted by a display book rack next to his desk. The cover for The Adventures of TinTin, a copy of Frankenstein with a green monster on the cover, The Scarlet Pimpernel with a cloaked figure painted on it; they all looked more interesting than math.
He’d never really sat back here before or looked at the books before. It’s what his teacher, Ms. Geofferies, thought as she came in the room and sat behind her own uncluttered desk. He immediately looked back at his figures, but she didn’t say anything. This wasn’t the first time he’d skipped lunch or recess to catch up on work. She could force him to leave, of course, and perhaps one days she would. She pulled out a bundle of worksheets and began humming as she graded them.
They were both quiet for a while, save for the scratching of pencils, Ms. Geofferies’ showtunes, and the squeals of children playing outside.
“You know Bryan, I can’t let you do this all the time. You should be outside catching fresh air.” She was smiling when he looked at her, creating a soft dimple in her right cheek.
“I know Ma’am.” He clutched at his pencil in his hand a little tighter.
“So, how’s your mom?” She straightened out her papers by tapping them against the desk.
He thought about the trash bag in the kitchen full of empty bottles.
“She’s fine.”
“You know you can talk to me about a problem, right?” Her face grew a little tighter with concern.
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
“Ok Bryan.” She drew up her lips in a half-smile and picked up another stack of papers. When the bell finally rang, she let out a sigh and stood up facing the board, fumbling around for a decently sized piece of chalk on the metal lip along the bottom. As the sound of returning crowds and tapping on slate filled the room, Bryan didn’t look up.
* * *
It took some convincing, but Kyle managed to get Bryan to come over to his house after school. His mom was waiting for them outside with the mail and cheerfully ruffled Kyle’s hair.
“How was school today?”
“It was ok.” They walked up a flight of stairs to Kyle’s apartment and he ran ahead to open the door. Their living room was dark blue, with forest green sofas, but brightly lit from the windows. A glass door was propped open onto a balcony full of potted flowers.
Kyle’s mother ducked under a hanging vine and into the kitchen when a pot of coffee had just finished brewing while the boys turned and went off down a short hallway to Kyle’s room. His curtains had been drawn back and the light seemed cold against the corners illuminated by lamps. The sunlight fell on a wall full of newspaper clippings and his own drawings of his masked hero.
Kyle sat on the floor and pulled out a pair of scissors from a jumbled box of art supplies and began cutting up the newspaper. He carefully made his lines straight, hunching over his work and biting his lower lip.
Bryan looked around the room before flopping on the bed next to a battered issue of Detective Comics. He flipped through it a little; he’d read it before. He stopped on a double-page drawing of Batman fighting some goons in an alley. When he put it aside, Kyle was taping the article under “WOMAN SAVED BY MASKED SAMARITAN”.
“So, you wanna watch cartoons?”
* * *
It was almost dark when Bryan got home. Despite his wearing skepticism, he felt a little better walking by himself. The street had lost some of it's edge and the lights were a little brighter.
Home was the same as ever, just darker as the night fell. The heady smell of burning weed followed him past the boys huddled on the steps and looked down as he passed. He heard them start talking again once he was inside the door, watching him leave through the glass.
His mother wasn’t home yet, so he had to dig around in his bag to find his keys. There was a dull thud from upstairs, which prompted him to hastily unlock the door and duck inside. He flipped on the light and shut the door behind him.
Bryan turned on the news to drown out the knocking sound of muffled bass in the walls and listened to the horrors of the world while he made an egg sandwich for dinner. The blonde reporter smiled through her bright red lipstick as she related the story about firemen rescuing a local family, than introduced the weatherman and his map screen. Once he was done eating and had washed up his dishes, the reporter was wrapping up her newscast by reading a statement from a local police chief:
“. . . our system doesn’t have space for vigilantism. Despite his intentions, if caught he will be treated like any other criminal on assault charges. None of us are above the law. Our citizens must allow the justice system to work. Thank you.”
Bryan turned the TV off and drank a glass of orange juice at the table. He looked down into the lot next door, watching a pair of cats fight and weave in and out of the boxes and junk left to rot there.
When they were gone a few moments later, he noticed there was a letter addressed to him on the top of the pile of mail, already opened jaggedly. He unfolded the paper and glanced over the small, messy script. It was from his father. Some of his words were hard to decipher, but his son could read it, and indeed read it over several times. It ended with “I love you” and a large scrawl of a signature. What wasn’t in the letter was anything about coming back or what he was doing in California. He was still reading it when he heard his mother fumbling with the door, locking and unlocking it before she managed to come in.
“Hey honey, you want to grab the bags in the hall?” She lifted in two plastic bags of groceries and plopped them on the counter. “See? I can shop for food. Don’t let it be said that I’m a bad mother.”
Bryan stuffed the letter in his jeans and brought in the rest of the bags while his mother took her faux-fur lined jacket off and began putting cans and vegetables away. She rattled away about the troubles of shopping in big grocery stores and how impossible it always seemed to find anything, but he could barely hear her over the crinkling plastic.
She squashed the bags together in the trash can and lit up a cigarette that she held in her lips while unlacing her shoes.
“Grand.”
“What mom?”
“Nothing dear. How was your day at school?”
"It was alright."
"Nobody gave you any shit, did they?"
"No, mom."
Bryan thought of questions he wanted to ask her; stuff he'd always wanted to. About his dad. Why he'd left them, what he was like... if the "I love you" meant anything.
Before he could, they were interrupted by a sharp knock at the door accompanied by Sandra's irritating voice.
"Hey hey, you home?"
Bryan opened the door, not looking up. He wasn't greeted, but brushed past briskly. He let out a sigh, grabbed his blue jacket, and ducked out into the hall, not in the mood to listen to screeching gossip as they added more empty bottles to the kitchen trash. Like every night.
The flickering streetlights were a pale orange, casting a warm light that showed only highlights of the buildings and the shiny cars lining the streets. He could almost believe that the darkness, now actually hidden in shadow, didn't exist when the sun went down. Bryan was careful to stay under their light as he wandered, aimless, but giving himself the air of purpose and destination that kept off any ideas that he was lost in the people he passed.
There was a fire escape that went up the side of the public library; a climb he was very familiar with. Taking a quick look around to make sure he wasn't being watched, Bryan ducked into the alley and quietly climbed the metal ladder covered in chipping black paint that scratched his hands. Vaulting onto the roof, he ducked and huddled up against the night's chill in the shadow of an air duct.
Up here, he could imagine. What life would be like if his dad had stayed. If he really did love him, he would have stayed. Because that's what dads are supposed to do. Play catch, take him fishing, help him with his math homework. That's what the stories they told in school all said was the way things were supposed to be. Usually, he didn't care. It was easy to forget he even had one.
But not tonight. The headlights and taillights of cars pulling slowly through the streets, twinkling under the streetlights, edged by the glow of windows and signs, made everything so surreal and pretty that every part of him wanted it to really be that happy and wonderful.
"Hey kid, what are you doing up here all by yourself?"
Bryan turned around quick. His jaw dropped open as he saw the guy talking to him; freakin' Batman.
"You can't be real, because I don't believe in you."
"That so?"
The man who couldn't possibly be there was dressed in a long black coat and a mask. When he crouched next to Bryan on the roof, he could see a belt full of pockets and gadgets; black rope, a funny looking gun-thing, a flashlight, and some other stuff he couldn't make out. No bat-symbols or anything, no cape. Maybe he was real, after all.
"So if I'm not actually here, think you could tell me why you're up on a roof all by yourself?"
Bryan shrugged, keeping a suspicious eye on the stranger.
"I don't want to go home yet."
"That's a real shame. Why not?"
He shrugged again.
"So is that the gun you shoot people with, or the one you go swinging around on?"
The man laughed.
"I don't shoot anyone. I stop other people from shooting."
"Cops do that."
"Everyone needs help sometimes."
"Yeah, like from a shrink." Bryan said with a smirk.
"You're not the first one to say so, believe me." He chuckled. "You're pretty smart. So, what's your name, kid?"
"Bryan. What's yours?"
"A secret."
"It's Batman, isn't it?"
Another chuckle, and the guy shifted around, looking out over the roof.
"You can call me that, if you want."
"Can I ask you something, Batman?"
"Shoot."
"Why do you dress up like that and go around kicking people?"
"Well now... that's a long story."
"I got time."
"You should be getting back inside, is what you ought to be doing, Bryan. Heh, well... long story short... when I was a kid, some bad stuff happened to me. Got mixed up in things I shouldn't, thinking it'd make my problems go away, but it didn't. I guess I'm trying to make up for all that."
"They say on the news that you're as bad as the creeps you beat up."
"Cops have never been my friend, kid. Don't see why they should start now."
Bryan got quiet, and thought about that.
"But hey, I'm no role model. Now, you get home, ok?"
"Ok."
He got up and started to shimmy down the ladder. When he looked back over to say 'bye, there was nobody there. So he just jumped down to the road and walked back home.
Sandra was still there when he walked in and hung up his jacket.
"Mom?"
"Yeah hun?" She looked up from a magazine they were pouring over. For once... she actually seemed like she was going to listen.
"Can I talk to you?"
His mother quietly asked Sandra to come back later, and they watched her leave on unsteady feet with a wave. Once the door shut, he sat at the table and started fiddling with a bottle-cap that had been abandoned there.
"Tell me about my dad."
She got up and sat next to him, pulling him into a quick hug and putting a kiss in his hair. And then, she began to tell him.
I thought I'd celebrate the last day of my Advanced Fiction class by posting some of my work from it, so voila!
Bryan's Mask
"You're kidding, right?" Bryan leaned down to re-tie his shoes, kneeling on the cracked pavement and fumbling with the knots and frays of the ancient laces. He shook his head, and stood back up.
"No, really, I saw him! It wasn't just some guy in a Halloween costume, either. He swooped down off the roof and kicked this mugger's butt! I swear!" Kyle was fairly jumping in excitement, animatedly waving his arms around.
The two kids were on their way home from school, along an overgrown sidewalk just outside the suburbs. They walked in silence for a few minutes, passing a sleeping homeless man snuggled up under a dumpster full of cardboard and a leering dealer on the corner. They passed the same men every day, although the men in the costumes would change from time to time. Bryan tried not to look, but Kyle was too busy watching the jagged skyline to notice.
"I suppose you're watching for Spider-man to jump out now, too?" Bryan's voice was harsh and had none of his usual laughing rumble.
"What?" Kyle asked, looking down from the rooftops and at his friend.
"Nothing, stupid!" Bryan spat out the words at Kyle, then took off at a run and ducked under a chain link fence. He was already gone before Kyle managed to reply quietly.
"I did see him, Batman saved me."
Bryan lived in brick apartment complex that once been a hope to reinvigorate the dilapidated neighborhood, but was now just another unkempt building in a forest of unkempt buildings. Kids that used to be his older brother's friends were huddled around the front steps, not bothering to look up as he wove in between them to the door. The smell of overturned garbage cans in the alley wafted up alongside him; sickening sweet rotting food and the vague odor of oil. Inside wasn’t much better, but accompanied by a soundtrack of rattling bass from upstairs.
The apartment door was ajar and he could hear his mother’s voice inside, screeching gossip at Sandra, visiting from across the hall. He pushed it open and saw her stub out a cigarette in the overflowing Texas-shaped ashtray. She let out a long breath of smoke and smiled at him.
“Your little friend isn’t coming over today?” She didn’t wait for a reply, and began fumbling in her pockets for another cigarette. “Good. Fuckin’ kid isn’t good for you, livin’ in la-la land like some idiot.”
He still said nothing, but put his backpack down and walked into the adjoining kitchenette. His mother followed him with her eyes, a cancer stick hanging out of the side of her mouth and a red lighter in the hand she had placed firmly on her hip.
“Not even a damn hello? I tell ya Sandy, school ain’t teachin’ those kids a thing useful.” She said, then took a swig from a bottle of Red Rose wine with the other side of her mouth. Sandra looked up from staring at her own cigarette, which was already burnt to the filter in her fingers, then thoughtfully put it out in the ashtray.
“Yup.” Sandra said, “sure don’t.”
* * *
In the next couple of days, Bryan said very little, a fact his mother ignored, his teachers begrudgingly accepted, and Kyle pretended not to notice, poorly.
The lunchroom at Richard Viedt Memorial Elementary was a din of children in knots and lines everywhere in the echoing room. Bryan and Kyle were eating in the corner, at a large blue fold-out table next to the row of windows. Kyle was reading a letter on the table, and Bryan was studying the paint handprints all over the glass while chewing on a hard piece of garlic bread. His determination to remain silent was wearing off, and finally he broke the silence.
“Who’s it from?” He strained his voice to be heard over the commotion in the background.
“My uncle.” Kyle put the letter away in his red backpack and smiled when he came back up to finish eating. “He’s getting out soon and wants to visit.”
“Oh, cool.” Bryan pulled his own pack out from under the long bench, and fumbled with the zipper before it sprang free. He pulled out a rolled up newspaper, peeling off a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sticker that had somehow come off on it. Pressing the sticker onto one of his notebooks, Bryan handed the newspaper over to Kyle.
Kyle almost immediately laughed and pounded his feet against the floor a few times. The front page was dominated by a dark, slightly fuzzy photograph of a silhouetted man in a cape aiming a grappling hook gun. The figure was off-center, and it was clear the photographer had meant only to get a shot of a man with a bloody nose tied to a broken lightpole. The headline read:
“MASKED VIGILANTE HOSPITALIZES ATTEMPTED RAPIST”
And that was just above the fold. As Bryan got up to leave, he figured Kyle might not even read under the fold, where the headline was:
“FRIEND OR FOE: POLICE OFFER NO COMMENT ON INVESTIGATION”
Bryan went to the classroom early, sitting in the back and pulling out his math book. He tried to work on the problems on some scratch paper, but was distracted by a display book rack next to his desk. The cover for The Adventures of TinTin, a copy of Frankenstein with a green monster on the cover, The Scarlet Pimpernel with a cloaked figure painted on it; they all looked more interesting than math.
He’d never really sat back here before or looked at the books before. It’s what his teacher, Ms. Geofferies, thought as she came in the room and sat behind her own uncluttered desk. He immediately looked back at his figures, but she didn’t say anything. This wasn’t the first time he’d skipped lunch or recess to catch up on work. She could force him to leave, of course, and perhaps one days she would. She pulled out a bundle of worksheets and began humming as she graded them.
They were both quiet for a while, save for the scratching of pencils, Ms. Geofferies’ showtunes, and the squeals of children playing outside.
“You know Bryan, I can’t let you do this all the time. You should be outside catching fresh air.” She was smiling when he looked at her, creating a soft dimple in her right cheek.
“I know Ma’am.” He clutched at his pencil in his hand a little tighter.
“So, how’s your mom?” She straightened out her papers by tapping them against the desk.
He thought about the trash bag in the kitchen full of empty bottles.
“She’s fine.”
“You know you can talk to me about a problem, right?” Her face grew a little tighter with concern.
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
“Ok Bryan.” She drew up her lips in a half-smile and picked up another stack of papers. When the bell finally rang, she let out a sigh and stood up facing the board, fumbling around for a decently sized piece of chalk on the metal lip along the bottom. As the sound of returning crowds and tapping on slate filled the room, Bryan didn’t look up.
* * *
It took some convincing, but Kyle managed to get Bryan to come over to his house after school. His mom was waiting for them outside with the mail and cheerfully ruffled Kyle’s hair.
“How was school today?”
“It was ok.” They walked up a flight of stairs to Kyle’s apartment and he ran ahead to open the door. Their living room was dark blue, with forest green sofas, but brightly lit from the windows. A glass door was propped open onto a balcony full of potted flowers.
Kyle’s mother ducked under a hanging vine and into the kitchen when a pot of coffee had just finished brewing while the boys turned and went off down a short hallway to Kyle’s room. His curtains had been drawn back and the light seemed cold against the corners illuminated by lamps. The sunlight fell on a wall full of newspaper clippings and his own drawings of his masked hero.
Kyle sat on the floor and pulled out a pair of scissors from a jumbled box of art supplies and began cutting up the newspaper. He carefully made his lines straight, hunching over his work and biting his lower lip.
Bryan looked around the room before flopping on the bed next to a battered issue of Detective Comics. He flipped through it a little; he’d read it before. He stopped on a double-page drawing of Batman fighting some goons in an alley. When he put it aside, Kyle was taping the article under “WOMAN SAVED BY MASKED SAMARITAN”.
“So, you wanna watch cartoons?”
* * *
It was almost dark when Bryan got home. Despite his wearing skepticism, he felt a little better walking by himself. The street had lost some of it's edge and the lights were a little brighter.
Home was the same as ever, just darker as the night fell. The heady smell of burning weed followed him past the boys huddled on the steps and looked down as he passed. He heard them start talking again once he was inside the door, watching him leave through the glass.
His mother wasn’t home yet, so he had to dig around in his bag to find his keys. There was a dull thud from upstairs, which prompted him to hastily unlock the door and duck inside. He flipped on the light and shut the door behind him.
Bryan turned on the news to drown out the knocking sound of muffled bass in the walls and listened to the horrors of the world while he made an egg sandwich for dinner. The blonde reporter smiled through her bright red lipstick as she related the story about firemen rescuing a local family, than introduced the weatherman and his map screen. Once he was done eating and had washed up his dishes, the reporter was wrapping up her newscast by reading a statement from a local police chief:
“. . . our system doesn’t have space for vigilantism. Despite his intentions, if caught he will be treated like any other criminal on assault charges. None of us are above the law. Our citizens must allow the justice system to work. Thank you.”
Bryan turned the TV off and drank a glass of orange juice at the table. He looked down into the lot next door, watching a pair of cats fight and weave in and out of the boxes and junk left to rot there.
When they were gone a few moments later, he noticed there was a letter addressed to him on the top of the pile of mail, already opened jaggedly. He unfolded the paper and glanced over the small, messy script. It was from his father. Some of his words were hard to decipher, but his son could read it, and indeed read it over several times. It ended with “I love you” and a large scrawl of a signature. What wasn’t in the letter was anything about coming back or what he was doing in California. He was still reading it when he heard his mother fumbling with the door, locking and unlocking it before she managed to come in.
“Hey honey, you want to grab the bags in the hall?” She lifted in two plastic bags of groceries and plopped them on the counter. “See? I can shop for food. Don’t let it be said that I’m a bad mother.”
Bryan stuffed the letter in his jeans and brought in the rest of the bags while his mother took her faux-fur lined jacket off and began putting cans and vegetables away. She rattled away about the troubles of shopping in big grocery stores and how impossible it always seemed to find anything, but he could barely hear her over the crinkling plastic.
She squashed the bags together in the trash can and lit up a cigarette that she held in her lips while unlacing her shoes.
“Grand.”
“What mom?”
“Nothing dear. How was your day at school?”
"It was alright."
"Nobody gave you any shit, did they?"
"No, mom."
Bryan thought of questions he wanted to ask her; stuff he'd always wanted to. About his dad. Why he'd left them, what he was like... if the "I love you" meant anything.
Before he could, they were interrupted by a sharp knock at the door accompanied by Sandra's irritating voice.
"Hey hey, you home?"
Bryan opened the door, not looking up. He wasn't greeted, but brushed past briskly. He let out a sigh, grabbed his blue jacket, and ducked out into the hall, not in the mood to listen to screeching gossip as they added more empty bottles to the kitchen trash. Like every night.
The flickering streetlights were a pale orange, casting a warm light that showed only highlights of the buildings and the shiny cars lining the streets. He could almost believe that the darkness, now actually hidden in shadow, didn't exist when the sun went down. Bryan was careful to stay under their light as he wandered, aimless, but giving himself the air of purpose and destination that kept off any ideas that he was lost in the people he passed.
There was a fire escape that went up the side of the public library; a climb he was very familiar with. Taking a quick look around to make sure he wasn't being watched, Bryan ducked into the alley and quietly climbed the metal ladder covered in chipping black paint that scratched his hands. Vaulting onto the roof, he ducked and huddled up against the night's chill in the shadow of an air duct.
Up here, he could imagine. What life would be like if his dad had stayed. If he really did love him, he would have stayed. Because that's what dads are supposed to do. Play catch, take him fishing, help him with his math homework. That's what the stories they told in school all said was the way things were supposed to be. Usually, he didn't care. It was easy to forget he even had one.
But not tonight. The headlights and taillights of cars pulling slowly through the streets, twinkling under the streetlights, edged by the glow of windows and signs, made everything so surreal and pretty that every part of him wanted it to really be that happy and wonderful.
"Hey kid, what are you doing up here all by yourself?"
Bryan turned around quick. His jaw dropped open as he saw the guy talking to him; freakin' Batman.
"You can't be real, because I don't believe in you."
"That so?"
The man who couldn't possibly be there was dressed in a long black coat and a mask. When he crouched next to Bryan on the roof, he could see a belt full of pockets and gadgets; black rope, a funny looking gun-thing, a flashlight, and some other stuff he couldn't make out. No bat-symbols or anything, no cape. Maybe he was real, after all.
"So if I'm not actually here, think you could tell me why you're up on a roof all by yourself?"
Bryan shrugged, keeping a suspicious eye on the stranger.
"I don't want to go home yet."
"That's a real shame. Why not?"
He shrugged again.
"So is that the gun you shoot people with, or the one you go swinging around on?"
The man laughed.
"I don't shoot anyone. I stop other people from shooting."
"Cops do that."
"Everyone needs help sometimes."
"Yeah, like from a shrink." Bryan said with a smirk.
"You're not the first one to say so, believe me." He chuckled. "You're pretty smart. So, what's your name, kid?"
"Bryan. What's yours?"
"A secret."
"It's Batman, isn't it?"
Another chuckle, and the guy shifted around, looking out over the roof.
"You can call me that, if you want."
"Can I ask you something, Batman?"
"Shoot."
"Why do you dress up like that and go around kicking people?"
"Well now... that's a long story."
"I got time."
"You should be getting back inside, is what you ought to be doing, Bryan. Heh, well... long story short... when I was a kid, some bad stuff happened to me. Got mixed up in things I shouldn't, thinking it'd make my problems go away, but it didn't. I guess I'm trying to make up for all that."
"They say on the news that you're as bad as the creeps you beat up."
"Cops have never been my friend, kid. Don't see why they should start now."
Bryan got quiet, and thought about that.
"But hey, I'm no role model. Now, you get home, ok?"
"Ok."
He got up and started to shimmy down the ladder. When he looked back over to say 'bye, there was nobody there. So he just jumped down to the road and walked back home.
Sandra was still there when he walked in and hung up his jacket.
"Mom?"
"Yeah hun?" She looked up from a magazine they were pouring over. For once... she actually seemed like she was going to listen.
"Can I talk to you?"
His mother quietly asked Sandra to come back later, and they watched her leave on unsteady feet with a wave. Once the door shut, he sat at the table and started fiddling with a bottle-cap that had been abandoned there.
"Tell me about my dad."
She got up and sat next to him, pulling him into a quick hug and putting a kiss in his hair. And then, she began to tell him.