Everything's Eventual

The Mobius Strip

***

The end comes. It is just as the beginning. 

***

They whisper on the street corners. The pushers and the newspaper vendors and the businessmen alike, from uptown and downtown to crime alley and the east end, rumors in hushed tones are passed from person to person until the truth distorts and twists in on itself, coming out more dynamic than when it started.

The Batman retired, man, I heard the Batman retired.

Thought he fell off a building? When Killer Moth—

The Scarecrow—

—the Joker pushed him?

Nah, dude. He took one—

Three—

Five to the chest, I saw it!

The Batman is dead.

The Batman is dead?

Nobody's seen him for weeks, Millie. Weeks!

I thought I heard Killer Croc got him while he was saving some little old lady.

No, you idiot, it was during that fire—

When that car bomb went off—

When that LexCorp lab blew up! He saved all those scientists—

—a school bus full of children—

—a whole precinct full of cops!

He's dead, or gravely injured, or just...gave up. He's never coming back, he was never real to begin with, or he'd never leave Gotham unprotected. The story's tone changes depending on the teller, but ultimately, a thousand versions of the same fact circulates:

The Batman, for whatever reason, is gone.

There is no candlelight vigil when the Batman dies, if he really is dead. Instead, the Bat Signal haunts the sky every night for weeks without a sighting of the vigilante.

(Criminals still scurry like rats into the shadows when it shines.)

Soon, every night becomes every other night.

(They scurry a little slower.)

Once a week.

(And slower still.)

Once a month.

(A few don't scurry anymore.)

Once a year.

(Some begin to doubt the Batman ever really existed at all.)

Finally, the signal goes dark for good.

Three years pass. Jim Gordon retires—for real, this time—to an easy chair and a smoking pipe and a yellowed newspaper.

Six years on, Barbara Gordon makes detective.

Eight, she makes it to the altar—or at least, makes it close enough to leave Dick Grayson there.

Nine, Tim Drake gets out of graduate school. Goes into communications technology. Does pretty well.

Ten years after the signal finally goes dark, Alfred Pennyworth dies. He takes a would-be burglar or two down with him, using nothing more than a sterling silver dinner tray, but his heart finally gives out.