Archive: Ask first, please. Fandom: JLA current continuity, set 
directly after JLA 18-19. Disclaimer: All characters property of DC 
Comics. What I have done with them is mine. 

Thanks to Maelstrom, who made me think of it. 

Two Bullets
by Kerithwyn "'rith" Jade (kerithwyn@yahoo.com)

"...our dark knight no longer exists-because the gun that killed his 
parents misfired! That made all the difference! Remember, Bruce's whole 
life was changed by the course of two bullets..." -- Oracle, JLA 19

***

I'm trembling. 

J'onn's just left, and the silence of my apartment is becoming 
overwhelming. Oracle's lair, a sanctuary of information and control, the 
sanctity of which was nearly destroyed a few hours ago by a knock at the 
door. 

I tremble, and think of two bullets. 

It began with Julian September, a quantum physicist who split seven 
photons and fractured all reality in a terrifying chain reaction. A lever 
applied correctly can move the world; now, it seems, the splitting of the 
smallest element of matter can unmake the universe. All the possibilities 
came crashing in, what never was suddenly, terribly *real.* 

In that cascading wave two bullets were never fired, Dr. and Mrs. Wayne 
were never killed, and Bruce, Bruce never.... 

Even as we last seven remaining members of the JLA raced to repair the 
damage, I tried to keep it that way. I ran the numbers, desperately 
seeking to make it so that when we returned the world to what it should 
be, *his* two world-shattering bullets still would never have been. 

Not my one. 

J'onn believed I withdrew for my own purposes, so that the gunshot that 
shattered my spine might be undone by the changing tide. I'm human. Of 
*course* I thought of that. But that never-was headline-"Mugger's gun 
misfires," under a photograph of a family made whole-made me feel that I 
had to try. For him. So that they would not die, would never have died. 

I don't blame J'onn for thinking that of me. Who, given the power to 
rewrite Fate, would choose *not* to reverse such as had been done to me? 
But outside my door I heard a Bruce Wayne who never was call and tell me 
his parents were on the way up to visit, and he sounded...like a man. Not 
the Batman. 

For want of a nail... 

I want to scrub at the invisible blood on my hands like Lady MacBeth. 
It's not mine; I didn't pull the trigger. But what terrifies me is the 
"if." *If* I could have rewritten time and fate so that a mugger's gun 
jammed at the right moment. 

To *change* fate. Who am I, to think I even should? 

I told J'onn that I have to believe what happened, happened for a 
reason. That I had no real choice but to allow the world to reset as it 
always had been. Because to accept otherwise means there was no reason for 
their deaths, my pain, a million ordinary tragedies that I see through my 
screens every day. 

The reasons are clear. I can name a thousand in Batman's small triumphs 
in Gotham, in the dozen or more times the Earth itself owes him its very 
survival. He's irreplaceable, and it's the history that shaped him that 
makes him so. 

And still. 

I think of two bullets, and weep. 

End