I own nothing. Nada, nyet. DC Comics own all.
Soundtrack: Faust.
Warnings for angst & implied sexual misconduct .

The Room
Jay Tryfanstone

There is nothing in this room. This room is empty. A space of emptiness. It measures, as best as I can judge, forty paces in one direction, twenty-four paces in the other. This space, however, seems to change, the walls moving, expanding and contracting to the rhythm of an infinite heartbeat, or with the suddenness of a speeding train. There is nothing in this room.

The room is black. Not painted black, not the living black of a room where the lights are down. There is no light, a total absence of light, such black non light that it is almost impossible to imagine that there has ever been light.

The ceiling is higher than I can reach. By the sound of my own voice, I estimate it to be twenty feet above this floor that I stand on. The echoes, I think, suggest that it is flat.

The whole room is made of a smooth, glassy substance. The absence of light does not allow me to guess the colour or form, but something about the way sound travels suggests that it too, is black. As far as I can feel, as far as these hands will reach up the walls, as minutely as I search the floor with the flat of my hands, with my feet, with my fingertips, there is no crack or join in these walls. But there is. I know this.

It's hard to judge the passing of time. I don't know long I lay here, unconscious on the floor, before I awoke. In this room. I have no idea if it is day or night. I cannot judge the time I spend asleep or the times I come to myself and realise that I have been awake, but absent. There was a time when I tried to mark these passing times, sleep and not sleep, but that small gift was removed.

When I sleep, when I cannot help sleeping, when it is impossible to push this weary body further in hope, someone cleans and returns the steel bowl in which I must deposit the waste from my body. They clean and replenish the two identical steel containers that hold water and thick gruel. At the beginning, these containers were of plastic, and there was a thick plastic spoon. But after I had torn the bucket and used the ragged plastic to scrape cuts into my legs, deep enough to feel the scar, they were taken away and the cold steel containers were used instead. I slept with the edge of plastic in my hand, under my body, for three spaces of time before I awoke to discover that I had rolled in my sleep and they had been able to remove it.

At the beginning I tried to measure time in periods of exercise, pushing my body to its limit, using the walls and floor in the most basic and the most complex routines that I could devise, a set rhythm and pattern of form. But I have found, as time passes, that I forget the pattern, its figures and repetitions slipping away. Now, I keep the exercises simple, fifty press-ups, fifty sit-ups, and that way I am not tormented by this uncertain memory that fragments time without my control.

I am certain that the gruel is drugged, although with what I do not know. Once or twice there was been a slight bitterness, or a catching grit, that suggests chemicals. There are periods of time that pass with infinite slowness, others when my thoughts travel so fast that I cannot grasp or comprehend the speeding images. If I could see, I am sure that there are times when I would not see this room but some blurred different reality. But I cannot see, and only the sick pain in my eyes tells me that I am looking at something other than the form of these four walls. I could choose not to eat. I could choose not to drink. But this body still craves food, waking to the gnawing pain of my own desperate mortality, and I allow it fuel. This choice to eat or not eat, to eat now or in four heartbeats or after the next sleep, this is one of the few choices I have left and it is precious to me.

At the beginning, the gruel turned my bowels to water, and I found myself, shamed, evacuating onto the floor, onto my own skin. Then the texture of this single supply they allow me changed, and after that I was well. I don't believe this was done out of kindness. I believe they did not want to clean up my mess, like one does after a sick animal.

The water seems to be unadulterated, although it has a dull, slightly metallic edge that suggests it is kept in storage, does not, like I, see the light.

There is colour only in my dreams.

I do not know what they want. Since I awoke, I have had no communication with anyone. The room is serviced when I am asleep. There is no sound, no indication of where I am, where this room is, not even the underground thudding of the Metro that I once hoped to hear. The sound of my own voice is strange in my ears, an unexpected and harsh intrusion. I don't speak.

At the beginning, I spent time trying to determine who or what held me here, in this room. One of the Joker's sick pantomimes? An invention of one of those madmen I have pursued and fought and delivered to whatever justice they deserve? Some unknown and completely alien form? I do not know. Speculation without intelligence is useless. But I cannot conceive any of these people capable of the sustained nullity that this room indicates. A complete absence. A total void. An absolute and unutterable cruelty.

The pain of not knowing spans my being. I do not know if Nightwing, whose trail I followed, is still alive, if he too lives out this living nightmare or is alive and searching for me. I do not know if this has been a strike against all I hold dear, if at this moment, somewhere, Robin and Alfred live in a fear and pain I have yet to encounter, or if this has been an attack solely against myself. I remember entering the dark warehouse. I remember the brief, total pain across my skull. And nothing more, until I awoke here with a taste in my mouth that suggested anesthesia and a faint ache across the back of my head. That faded.

Sleep is a retreat and a weakness. When I sleep, I lose the chance I have of seeing, of discovering who or what feeds me, cleans this space. Of discovering where and how they crack these solid walls and enter this room. Of, perhaps, creating some means of escape. They have been, are, very thorough in this: no break in walls or routine even allows such a thought. I am here until they decide to free me. Or until someone comes. It's this last that keeps me exercising, keeps me eating: this hope that somewhere, in an outside I am finding increasingly difficult to comprehend, my family is searching for me, throwing all the weight of their intelligence and tenacity and knowledge into discovering where I am. And rescuing me. The hope that, one day, or night, that hidden door will open and Nightwing, or Robin, or one of the League, or indeed anyone else will be framed in the doorway. Almost, I begin to fear rescue. What will they see? This naked, blind figure, this strained and altered creature that I have become, what will they think?

But when I sleep I dream. I dream in colour, vast, reaching sweeps of colour that are brighter than any I remember from the outside world. I dream sound, the textured, braided web of noise that constitutes voice, song, laughter. I dream in great, vivid landscapes of cloud and sky and sea, far more real to me than any dream I remember from before. In some way, I think the drugs have affected my sleep, this dream-sight more real than the black reality of this room.

In my sleep, my friends come to talk to me. Sometimes they take the form of birds, and I hear their voices cry against an empty horizon. Sometimes they appear shrouded in fog, the shape of clothing or the turn of head showing me that they are present. Sometimes they whisper to me in the night, and sometimes the noise is so great that I wake to echoes. I remember, so vividly, the first night that Nightwing came to me in my dreams. He came as himself, walking with precision across a shifting landscape. That first dream, he just sat beside me, not close enough to feel the heat from his skin, not far enough to miss the gentle, searing sound of his breath.

Later, he spoke to me. But first there was silence. He comes often, unexpected: I turn to see his still figure, see him walk steadily out of the rain, the blinding sunshine, sometimes, the street-lit city-scape that was my home. Most times, he comes as himself. Sometimes he will come as Robin, oddly, in the costume that I saw Tim wear two hours before I entered that warehouse, not his own. Once, shockingly, he came as Catwoman, with his face made up and the pale cream of silicon breasts shaping his costume. Most strange, most frightening, are the times he appears as myself, in the dull black kevlar and weighted cape that forms my own armour and skin. I cannot speak, in these strange moments. I sit and stroke the shape of this costume as if it were a pelt, my hands lingering on curve and form that were once mine.

When he speaks to me, he speaks with deliberation, with a careful and exact shaping of each sentence and question. He asks me questions about things I have long forgotten or tried to forget, his eyes holding and burning mine. He will press me for answers, the weight and breadth of his silent desire forcing me into spaces where I do not wish to go.

'What did it feel like,' he asks me, 'that evening in the alley way after the film? What did it smell like? Could you taste gunpowder in the air? Was the road gritty beneath your hands, or slick with oil? What is the sound of pearls falling?'

In my dream, I weep silently, but he does not stop.

'When you laughed with the Joker, what were you thinking? Did you ever dream of the smell of his blood? Did you want to wipe the white greasepaint across your skin, bury yourself in his flesh?'

I try to tell him that I am dreaming, but he laughs at me, a silent, iced laugh, and his open mouth grows, in blackness, to cover my vision and I wake shaking.

The next time he comes to my dreams he wears Selina's skin, his body laced and shaped into hers, his eyes strange in that black make-up.

'What was it with the women?' he asks. 'Why the restraint? Did you want to rescue them or fuck them into silence? At night, did you get off on the feel of their skin or the sound of their screams?'

I tell him that there were more important things, but he looks at me, through those blackened eyes, with angry frustration and leaves. I have failed him.

He doesn't visit my sleep again for while. When he does, I turn round in a landscape of emerald grass and see him seated. He wears a child's Superman costume, tattered and ripped, stretched across his bones: the small cape hangs limply from his shoulders.

'Did you want to be him or prove that you were the best?' he asks. 'Did you want to strip that power and have it for your own? When you decided how to kill him, were you sure you could do it?'

I shake my head, and he smiles at me so sweetly that I see the boy he once was. And then he leaves, fading, slowly, into a flight of green and turquoise seagulls.

When he returns, he comes in his own Robin's costume, the short trunks absurd on those muscular adult legs.

'Did you love us at all? When we left you, did you miss us? Was it me you saw, or just the costume?' He's carrying a half-full glass of red wine, and he hands it to me. I can't believe the rich scent, like blood, filling my senses, the intoxicating rich rush of flavour and taste sliding over my tongue. I take one small sip, overwhelmed.

'Was it our age? When we grew up, were we too independent, too old?' He looks out across this potted, volcanic horizon. 'In your dreams, did we come to you willingly or did you force us, pain urging that cold fire?'

I can't speak.

'What lies did you tell yourself?'

I lie in this darkness, silent tears running over my cheeks and onto the cold floor.

Finally he comes, walking silently out of a golden sky, as myself. This time he draws away from my touch. Wraps the cape around himself.

'It wasn't like this in the beginning, was it?' he asks. 'When you started, when I started, when the enemy was smaller and the stakes were so much lower.'

He looks at me.

'Didn't you realise it was you? When you watched, didn't you want to be like them, normal? But they became like you. Didn't you know Gotham was you? That darkness, that violence, that dark and needing power - it grew to be you.'

He looks at me sadly. 'I loved you,' he says. And leaves.

I wake screaming. I can't stop, this raw and desperate sound tearing my throat and lungs, gasping for breath. Sobbing, the harsh, racking sobs I can neither stem nor hold until there are no more tears and my voice is silent. I lie stretched out on this floor and let the empty silence fill me until there is nothing left. I am the room, this wide and waiting space, this absent, black light.

The scent of his body fills the room. I know the moment he is here, cannot believe it. With that scent, with the sound of his breathing, he takes up all the space in this room. Although I do not look up, I can feel the heat of the shaded lamp he carries on every part of my skin.

'Jesus,' he says.

His voice is massive, breaking against my body, a wave of threaded sound that carries all the notes in the universe. I crawl to him, rest my cheek against his feet. My fingertips cannot believe the wonder of fabric, the twist and weft of sensation. I am crying again, tears slipping down onto my fingers and the cool smoothness of his skin.

'Jesus Christ. You look so fucking beautiful.'

Fin.