--------------------------------

In the end, the only thing I can think of to do is just walk in and see
what happens next.

My hands are jammed down into the pockets of my coat.  Not for warmth,
really, even though it's snowing outside, and it feels even colder than
that inside the morgue.  My hands are in my pockets because I'm nervous
and I don't know what else to do with them.  It's not a great plan,
really.  I'm not happy with it.  But I close my eyes and push against the
swinging door into the room where Dr. McKay is working, making a
preliminary observation of a corpse even colder than mine.  His eyes
flicker in my direction, and he immediately presses STOP on the tiny tape
recorder he's holding in his left hand.

We stand that way for a moment.  He's looking me over, I think, trying to
figure out what to say.  I guess it's not easy, because it takes almost a
minute.  I also guess that I don't make it easier, since I'm just standing
there, my shoulders tense, staring at some imaginary point on the floor
next to him.

He purses his lips.  "Back again, I see."  The room's echo steals away
whatever friendliness might have been in his voice.

"Yes," I reply.  There really isn't much else I can say to that.

There's a moment there when I'm sure he's going to ask me to go away,
either out loud or just by turning his back on me, or by starting up his
little tape recorder and going back to work with the dead bodies that lie
peacefully on their table and don't wander inexplicably back in whenever
they feel like it.  If I were him, I think I might do just that.  And then
he's putting the recorder on the instrument tray next to him and moving
towards me, muttering "My office," as he shoves the door open.

I follow him.  As soon as I get into the tiny box-like room he uses for an
office, he laughs.  A little nervous edge in that laugh, I think.  "I'd
heard you were killed," he says.  "Thirty-five stories straight down off
the roof of the Hotel Excelsior.  Then I heard they were bringing your
body, or what was left of it, in."  He pauses for a moment, turning on the
rusty desk lamp half-buried under the paperwork.  "And then, I heard that
the ambulance that was bringing it in got into an accident on the bridge,
and that the body was missing."

He's waiting for an answer.  All I can offer is "I heard that, too.  I
don't remember it, though."

"And here you are."

"Yes."

"You understand that when I heard your body wasn't going to be arriving
here after all, I assumed that one of your friends had decided to go back
into the grave-robbing business," he says, looking carefully at me for my
reaction.

My reaction is surprise, mostly.  "No," I reply, shaking my head quickly.
"Different situation entirely.  They didn't know where I went, either.
I'm told that there was a trail of blood leading to the edge of the
bridge."  My eyes are fixed on a wastebasket near the couch that hasn't
been emptied for at least a week, and the styrofoam cups piled in it are
about to fall out onto the floor.  My voice sounds distant to me, but
familiar.  I've tried explaining this before, and I'm not good at it.  "I
only remember beginning to fall," I say.  "I remember...being stabbed, and
knowing that it was fatal.  I remember starting to fall, and knowing that
even if there was something I could grab on the way down, that it was too
late."

Which is a lie.  I remember something else about falling.  I remember
Charlotte, her pale face with eyes like mine, her lips cold like mine but
then suddenly warm, just for that moment before she pushed my body off her
broadsword so I could fall the thirty-five stories to the street below.
But I don't tell him about that.  I haven't told anyone about that.

He settles heavily into his desk chair and arches an eyebrow at me.  "And
you came back...?"

"Last night, I guess."  Remembering two o'clock in the morning last night,
an alley at least three miles away from the bridge, blinking up at a
streetlight and suddenly wondering where the hell I was.  Like waking up
by being plunged into icewater.  Still wearing the tattered costume,
soaking wet from the sleet pouring out from the clouds above me.
Wondering where I can find a pay phone to call someone to pick me up, if
someone would pick me up at all.  "I don't really know how I got there.  I
don't really know where I was.  I mean, I don't know where my body was."

McKay takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly.  "You look like you've lost
some weight," he remarks.  "I guess we'd better get started on the
physical.  One of us, at least, isn't getting any younger."  He grins just
a little, and I know it's okay.

While he's making sure that I'm still normal, or at least as normal as I
was a month ago, he manages to extract most of the story from me, how the
monsters who murdered my family have been using my wife as some kind of
bodyguard, some kind of soldier, until Vincenzo Gigante came back to
Gotham City and she wandered back here on her own, to hack him and his
family into pieces.

He's very careful when he asks about Charlotte, which gives me time to
think about my answers.  Meanwhile, he continues his examination:  my core
temperature is still about a degree and a half too low, my heart rate
seems to have slowed a bit, I've lost nearly five pounds but it looks more
like ten, and I have a new scar on my chest, right where Charlotte's sword
went through my heart.  Right where I threw myself against the blade so I
could get close enough to whisper a few last words to her, to tell her to
remember that Ra's Al-Ghul killed us, not the Gigantes.  (And to kiss her,
for that one secret memory I could take with me in case my intuition was
wrong.)  The new scar is straight and shows up very clearly against the
large ragged one we've been guessing was caused by the steering column of
the Gigante's car going through my chest at several hundred miles an hour.

McKay's face is all skepticism mingled with concern.  "Are you sure you
weren't just imagining that she understood you?" he says.  "Wishful
thinking?  I'm not just playing Devil's Advocate here, I just think that
considering the fact that she tried to kill you, and apparently succeeded,
that maybe you should think about whether it makes any sense for you to
get your hopes up."

There's no hesitation in my voice.  "No, I'm sure of it.  There's at least
part of her buried below whatever brainwashing went along with her
resurrection.  Part of her remembered hating the Gigantes, and remembered
enough to blame them."  I close my eyes for a moment, remembering her own
unnaturally pale blue eyes locked on mine, and the tiny flicker of
reaction there when I told her that our daughter was alive and well and
had been adopted.  "There's definitely something left," I continue.  "She
won't be going after the Gigantes again, but I think that she'll remember
enough to come back here, eventually."

McKay frowns.  "If you say so.  But you'll have to work harder to convince
me that it would be a good thing for her to come back.  And even if
there's a little piece of her left in there, is it enough?"

I frown right back.  "I don't know," I tell him.  "On Halloween, when the
Calendar Man and his hired guns shot and nearly killed me, you told me
that it shouldn't have been physically possible for me to even walk, that
I should probably have been hospitalized for at least a few weeks.  The
next night, I was able to go out and help catch him.  I only...kind of
remember it.  I was tired, I felt so distant from everything, and
then...it was sort of a dream.  I could recognize people, but only as
things that breathed or as things that could give me instructions for the
first moment or two."  I risk a brief glance at his eyes to see what he
thinks about this, and he's looking solemnly right at me.  He flinches a
little, so I shift my gaze immediately to the wall behind him.

"The thing is," I continue, "I think that must be a weaker version of what
it's like for Charlotte.  Like you're watching this body that looks like
the one you used to have, and this force is moving it, and you're
somewhere deep inside all of that.  A little shred of memory stuck inside
a force that's moving your body around."  I close my eyes, but I can still
feel him staring at me.  "I was pretty sure after Halloween that if I was
killed, that force wouldn't go away, and I'd be able to come back from it.
I honestly don't know if Charlotte can, if there's less of her in there or
if there's just too much for her to force her way past."

I can hear him putting away some of his instruments, all the things he
rarely has to use when he's just examining other corpses.  "You know what
I think?" he says finally, and his voice sounds strange to me.

I open my eyes and look at him.  He's leaning against the wall and looks
tired, or depressed, or maybe both.  He stares down at the floor for a
moment before continuing.  "I don't know what to make of you, half the
time.  But I think you're too infatuated with your own death.  Now wait a
second, before you interrupt me.  Yes, I know that you can't help but be
fascinated by how you died, and how you came back.  But you keep acting
like you can't wait to find something that will finally kill you.  You
jump off four-story buildings and slam into the ground, then stand up and
dust yourself off like this is normal behavior.  You get shot and ask me
to pull the bullets out of you without any anesthetics, like it doesn't
hurt or like the pain doesn't matter.  On Halloween, you nearly get
killed, and then talk about how you only 'kind of remember' what happens
after that, like this is okay.  And then, you get yourself stabbed and
thrown off a high-rise, because you /think/ you won't /actually/ stay
dead.  And meanwhile, I keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, you /want/
to be wrong about that.  That you're hoping that either the thing that
brought you back from the dead will go away and you'll never come back, or
maybe that it'll sink you as far down as your wife apparently is, and
you'll never have to make any decisions or really feel anything again.  Or
that you're hoping it'll at least hurt enough physically to make you feel
like you're actually in your body, and not just watching something else
move it.

"Well, that's shit, Alan.  Maybe you can't be killed, maybe you can.  But
you can't keep acting like this.  How many people do you actually /talk/
to, besides me?  Besides the other Ghosts?"  He hasn't moved, but it
sounds like he's standing right next to me, speaking directly into my ear.

The answer is no one, of course.  I can't bring myself to say it, but we
both know it's true.

Dr. McKay's voice gets softer, more gentle:  "Look, I'm just the coroner.
I'm not an expert in this, and I'm not a therapist.  I'm just worried
about you.  Well-adjusted human beings don't act like this."

I scowl at the floor, but I really just feel sad, and exhausted.  I'm
looking at the back of my hand, which is pale against the dark grey of my
coat and looks even more unhealthy than usual under the ancient
fluorescent lights in here.  "You know," I murmur, "a lot of people have
gone to a lot of trouble to remind me that Alan Monroe is dead, his wife
is gone, his daughter is gone, his life is gone.  And that I don't get to
have any of those things back."  I shove my hands back into my pockets
because just seeing them is making me feel worse.

"The problem is," I say without any real emotion in my voice, "I think
that's finally getting through to me."  Almost automatically, my eyes have
locked with his.  He takes a step back involuntarily.  "Maybe
well-adjusted human beings would do something else.  But how human is
this?  How human am I, really?  I just remember what it was like to be
alive.  And I don't think that's the same thing, at all."  I turn away
from him and close my eyes, suddenly ashamed and disgusted with myself.
"Look, maybe you're right.  I'm sure you're right," I say.  "I'm sorry," I
begin, and it sounds so feeble and inadequate that I can't bring myself to
say anything more.

In a moment, I think, he's going to leave.  I can't imagine any reason why
he would stay, so he's going to leave.  I count my slow heartbeats,
waiting to hear his footsteps exiting this room.

I don't hear anything for a long time.

When I finally get up the nerve to look at him again, he just nods at me.
His face is calm, but he's careful not to make eye contact.  "You know,"
he says in his best thoughtful-doctor tones, "by the time most people get
in here, all their little dramas are over."  He coughs like he's hiding a
laugh, and strokes his beard philosophically.  "I see a series of articles
in well-respected journals ahead of me.  'The Existential Plight of the
Reluctant Resurrectee.'  'Coping with Your Post-Death Issues: Is It
Suicide If You Can Do It More Than Once?'  Maybe I could get a spot on
Oprah," he muses.  "This could be a real breakthrough for me."

I smile.  I can't help it.  "I /am/ sorry," I start again, but he cuts me
off.

"If you're going to be sorry, keep it to yourself.  But if your guilt
leads you to bring coffee next time you come around to visit, I won't
complain.  And I'd like it if you'd at least try and think about this."
He tugs at my arm to guide me out into the hallway.  "Come on," he says.
"I've got work to do, and you probably do, too."


* * * * * *


Ronnie ducked back into her squad car, flipping on the windshield wipers
even before turning on the lights and siren.  "No way," she whispered.
"No.  Uh-uh, no way."  She'd only taken a ten-minute break, just enough
time to find a bathroom.  Just enough time to pick up the phone and check
her voicemail, which has been empty since Thanksgiving.

Until tonight, anyway.  One message.  Impossible.

But there it was, brief and barely recognizable over the cellphone static:
"We've caught four men burglarizing Harrison's Jewelry on eighty-third
street."

She called it in when she was just two blocks away, right when she spotted
the pair of people dangling from a lamppost by their feet.  The other two
were slumped against each other in the doorway, completely unconscious and
with sturdy plastic binding their hands and feet.  While giving them a
quick once-over to make sure they weren't going anywhere, she spotted the
Decedent approaching.  No doubt about it.  Same cloak, same scythe, same
pale skin, same eyes she didn't want to look at.

She took the offensive right away.  "The newspapers said you'd been
killed," she accused, daring him to refute it.  "Smashed on the pavement.
Body stolen on the way to the morgue.  But I guess you really didn't die,
right?"

His voice was just like she remembered.  Cold.  Flat.  "No, I died," he
responded.  "I definitely died.  But the body wasn't stolen, it just..."

"Just what?"

"...left," he finished.  "I don't think an explanation would make much
sense."

"Try me," she almost said, but stopped herself in time.  "Yeah, you're
probably right," she replied instead.  /Just be glad he's back,/ she
reminded herself.  /Doesn't matter how.  Doesn't matter if he's lying, or
wrong, or crazy.  I've got a druggie for a partner and I still don't trust
half the people in my precinct even with Harvey Dent in the DA's office
and Jim Gordon becoming a real contender for promotion.  And these are
four guys who might've gotten away with a ten-thousand-dollar heist if he
hadn't been here to stop them.  So just be glad he's back./

He held out a microcassette to her.  "Confessions," he said.  "They were
very specific about their plans, where they got their tools, where they
planned to sell the gems.  It should be useful for the investigation."

She took it from him, slipping it inside her jacket's pocket.  Nodded her
head at the two burglars dangling from the streetlight.  "Not your style,"
she commented.

"That was Shadowfox.  You might need to call some more people to help get
them down."

"Already called 'em."  She smirked.  "You weren't gone long enough for me
to forget."  If she didn't know better, she'd swear that he flinched at
that, but it was so hard to tell through the mask.  "I can take it from
here.  You better get out before we have to take you downtown to answer
questions."

He nodded.  After a short pause, he added, "Thanks.  Thanks for coming."
He stepped back one pace, then two, before turning and heading for the
alley across the street.

"You're welcome," she called after him.  The sky was clearing up some, but
it was still bitterly cold out, and she figured she'd better get the two
burglars on the ground into her car before they caught pneumonia.

When Caulfield and Tomazzo showed up, she refused to tell them what she
was smiling about.