No Christmas Until December
The Watchtower security system chimed — a soft, routine ping that no one paid attention to anymore. Access codes rotated on a strict forty-eight-hour cycle, known only to the founding members and a handful of trusted operatives who had undergone background checks so thorough that the FBI had once called them “excessive” and then been gently informed by Batman that the FBI’s own internal security had fourteen exploitable vulnerabilities and perhaps they should focus on those.
So when the zeta tube announced an unscheduled arrival on the observation deck at 8:47 AM on a Tuesday, every head in the monitoring station turned.
The security officer on duty — a woman named Lieutenant Vasquez who had served two tours in Afghanistan and once arm-wrestled Hawkgirl to a draw — pulled up the feed and stared at it for four full seconds.
Then she pulled up the secondary feed, because surely the primary was malfunctioning.
It was not malfunctioning.
“Sergeant Torres,” she said.
Torres leaned over her shoulder. Blinked. Blinked again. Adjusted the resolution, because the Watchtower’s cameras were designed to track interdimensional threats moving at relativistic speeds and surely they could handle one small person on an observation deck.
It was, in fact, a child.
Six years old. Three foot seven. Approximately forty-six pounds, though twenty of those pounds appeared to be concentrated in the sheer gravitational density of his personal disapproval.
He was wearing a charcoal peacoat buttoned to the throat — every button, all the way up, the top one straining slightly against a red scarf that had been wound around his neck precisely twice. Not once. Not three times. Twice. With the ends tucked in. The coat had been brushed. The scarf had been lint-rolled. The dark trousers beneath them bore a crease so sharp and so deliberate that it looked less like an article of clothing and more like a statement of philosophical intent.
He had polished them himself.
He had stood on a step stool in the manor foyer at six-thirty that morning — a full ninety minutes before the event that would necessitate this visit, though he did not know that yet — and applied black shoe polish to his oxfords with a rag and a level of focused intensity that Alfred Pennyworth, watching from the doorway with a cup of tea and an expression that could only be described as emotionally compromised, had later described to Dick Grayson as “the most dignified thing I have witnessed in forty years of service, and I once watched your father negotiate a hostage crisis in a tuxedo.”
But the shoes were not the important thing.
The important things were the glasses and the briefcase.
The glasses were round. Black-framed. Perched on the bridge of a small, slightly upturned nose with the practiced ease of someone who had been wearing them for months — adjusting them, pushing them up with one index finger, peering over the rims with an expression of learned skepticism that he had, though no one had been able to prove this conclusively, almost certainly copied from Alfred.
This had been established. Repeatedly. By medical professionals.
His vision was twenty-twenty. Possibly better. Dr. Leslie Thompkins had tested him twice, because after the first exam Jason had looked at her with those enormous teal eyes — magnified slightly and unnecessarily by the lenses he did not need — and said, “Dr. Leslie, I think you should test again, because I definitely can’t see the board at school,” and she had tested him again and his vision was, if anything, better than the first time, and she had looked at Bruce Wayne standing in the corner of the exam room and Bruce Wayne had looked back at her and the look between them had contained the following information:
He does not need glasses.
I know he does not need glasses.
Are you going to tell him that?
I already told him that. He said, and I quote, “Dr. Leslie, with all due respect, I need them for business,” and then he put them back on and asked if I had any lollipops.
Did you give him a lollipop?
The briefcase was leather. Real leather. Italian. The kind of briefcase that showed up in catalogs targeted at investment bankers and senior partners at white-shoe law firms, the kind that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, the kind that absolutely no six-year-old on earth had any business owning.
Jason Todd Wayne owned it.
He had seen it in a store. Not a children’s store. Not a toy store. A leather goods shop on the Upper East Side that Bruce had ducked into during a trip to Metropolis because he needed a replacement strap for his watch and Jason had been holding his hand and looking at everything with those big, round, serious eyes that missed nothing and judged everything, and then Jason had stopped walking.
Bruce had felt the tug — the sudden anchor-weight of a small person who has ceased forward motion because something important has happened — and looked down.
Jason was staring at the briefcase.
It was on a display shelf. Mahogany. Spotlit. The leather was a deep, warm brown, the color of old libraries and serious decisions.
“You don’t have work. You have kindergarten.”
Jason had looked up at him. The unnecessary glasses had caught the shop’s lighting. Behind them, those teal eyes — eyes that could communicate more emotional complexity per square centimeter than most adults managed with their entire faces — had gone very wide and very earnest and very quietly devastating.
“Daddy,” Jason had said again, and his voice had been low, and reasonable, and utterly, catastrophically persuasive. “Sometimes a man needs a briefcase.”
Bruce Wayne — the Batman, the Dark Knight, the man who had resisted Poison Ivy’s pheromones through sheer will and once stared down Darkseid without flinching — had bought the briefcase.
There was no other word for it and no other word was necessary, because the English language had, in this instance, provided exactly the right term for the way this forty-six-pound human being moved through the most secure facility in Earth’s orbit. His polished shoes struck the Watchtower’s reinforced paneling in a rhythm that was — and Lieutenant Vasquez would swear to this under oath — exactly the cadence of a military quick-march. Left, right, left, right. Shoulders back. Chin up. Briefcase in his left hand, swinging slightly with each step, the monogrammed initials catching the overhead lights.
He did not gawk at the viewports showing the curvature of the Earth below, or the weapons systems lining the corridors, or the various superhuman beings who stopped in their tracks as he passed. He did not slow down, speed up, or deviate from his path by so much as a single inch.
He knew where he was going.
The monitoring station officers watched him pass their window. One of them — a young man named Kowalski who had been hired three weeks ago and was still in the phase of his employment where everything about the Watchtower filled him with breathless, starry-eyed wonder — stood up from his console.
“Should we — should someone—”
“Sit down, Kowalski,” Lieutenant Vasquez said.
“He’s a child. In space.”
“He’s Batman’s child in space. There is a difference.”
Kowalski sat down. Then stood up again. “Shouldn’t we at least—”
The child paused outside the monitoring station window. He turned his head. He looked at Kowalski through the glass — looked at him, directly, with those big, round, unnecessary glasses and those teal eyes that contained, in Kowalski’s later description to his therapist, “the entire weight of a disappointment so profound it made me want to apologize for things I haven’t even done yet.”
Then the child pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one small index finger.
The gesture lasted approximately one point four seconds.
In that one point four seconds, Kowalski understood three things: that the child was supposed to be here, that the child had more authority in this building than Kowalski would ever possess, and that the child was on a mission and God help anyone who got in his way.
Jason turned away from the window and resumed marching.
He did not stand up again.
He turned left at the junction corridor.
Then left again, past the commissary — where two off-duty technicians who had been arguing about whether Superman or Captain Marvel would win in a footrace stopped arguing and stared — past the medical bay, past the armory, past a supply closet that he noted with a brief, dismissive glance contained improperly stacked inventory (he would address this later; it was not today’s priority), and around a final corner to the main conference room.
He had memorized the floor plan.
It had been in the briefcase for three weeks, ever since Jason had discovered that the Watchtower’s architectural schematics were stored on the Batcomputer’s tertiary server — the one Batman thought was adequately firewalled — and had downloaded them to a USB drive and printed them out on the manor’s color printer and folded them into precise thirds and placed them in the interior pocket of his briefcase, next to a granola bar (oats and honey, his preferred variety), two pencils (sharpened, because you never knew), and a laminated card that read, in careful handwriting:
He had laminated it himself. Alfred had provided access to the laminating machine without comment, because Alfred Pennyworth understood that some things were beyond the reach of adult intervention and the best one could do was ensure the lamination was even.
The Justice League was twenty-two minutes into a briefing on Intergang weapons proliferation in the Baltic states when the door to the main conference room slid open.
Superman stopped talking.
This was notable. Superman did not stop talking during briefings unless something required his immediate attention — a seismic event, an alien incursion, a distress signal from a League member in the field. He had once continued a presentation on Kryptonian mineral exports while simultaneously using his heat vision to disable a malfunctioning drone that had breached the Watchtower’s hull. He was, by any measure, a man capable of maintaining focus under extraordinary circumstances.
He stopped talking because a six-year-old in a peacoat walked into the room.
Wonder Woman’s hand moved toward her lasso. Instinct. The response of a warrior who had spent three thousand years on an island where unexpected arrivals were treated as potential threats until proven otherwise. She recognized the child in approximately point-six seconds and her hand stilled, but the instinct had fired, and Diana would later reflect on the fact that her combat reflexes had been triggered by a first-grader and find this both humbling and, in retrospect, entirely appropriate.
The Flash — Barry Allen, forensic scientist, fastest man alive, currently on his fourth cup of coffee and vibrating at a frequency that made the table hum — dropped the pen he’d been spinning. It hit the table, rolled, and fell on the floor. He did not pick it up because he, like everyone else in the room, had become temporarily incapable of voluntary motor function.
Aquaman leaned forward. His trident, propped against the wall behind him, caught the light.
Hawkgirl tilted her head. Her mace, resting across her knees, shifted slightly.
Green Lantern — Hal Jordan, test pilot, intergalactic peace officer, a man who had faced down the entirety of the Sinestro Corps and once flown a plane into the sun — blinked.
J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, did not move. He did not blink. He did not react in any visible way because J’onn had known the child was coming since the moment the zeta tube activated. He had felt the small, incandescent consciousness materialize on the station and had tracked it through the corridors with the passive attention of someone monitoring a weather system — not because it was dangerous, but because it was interesting.
The child’s mind was remarkable.
J’onn did not use that word often. He had lived for centuries. He had touched the thoughts of beings across galaxies, had drifted through psychic landscapes that would break a human consciousness like glass. He had felt minds that burned like supernovae, minds that whispered like deep-ocean currents, minds so vast and ancient that time itself bent around them.
This child’s mind was none of those things.
It was small. Compact. Dense. It burned like a coal fire in a cast-iron stove — contained, controlled, and absolutely, immovably certain of itself. It was a mind that had decided what it believed and organized those beliefs into categories and assigned them color-coded tabs and was prepared to discuss them.
It was the most structured six-year-old mind J’onn had ever encountered.
Jason Todd Wayne marched into the conference room of the Justice League of America, and he did not look at any of them.
Not Superman, who could see through walls and hear heartbeats from orbit. Not Wonder Woman, who had been sculpted from clay and blessed by gods. Not the Flash, who could evacuate a city in the time it took to blink. Not Aquaman, who commanded the oceans. Not Hawkgirl, whose mace could shatter magical barriers. Not Green Lantern, whose ring could construct anything his mind could imagine. Not the Martian Manhunter, who could read every thought in the room.
Batman sat at the head of the table. He always sat at the head of the table. This was not something that had been discussed or voted on or negotiated. It had simply happened, the way gravity happened, the way the sun rose in the east, the way certain forces of nature arranged themselves into hierarchies that everyone understood and no one questioned. Batman sat at the head of the table because the alternative was chaos.
The cowl revealed nothing.
It never did. That was the point of the cowl — to be a surface without features, a mask without expression, a wall of kevlar and ceramic plating behind which the most dangerous human mind on the planet could operate without broadcasting its conclusions to the room.
Beneath the cowl — in the space behind the white lenses, in the place where Bruce Wayne lived, where the father existed inside the soldier, where the man who had once sat on the floor of a child’s bedroom at two in the morning reading Goodnight Moon for the eleventh consecutive time because a small voice had said “again, Daddy” and he had been constitutionally incapable of saying no — something shifted.
Something so ferociously, devastatingly tender that it would have made every villain in Gotham reevaluate their life choices, their career paths, and possibly their entire philosophical framework if they could have seen it.
His son was wearing the business glasses.
His son had brought the briefcase.
The corner of Batman’s mouth — the only part of his face visible beneath the cowl, the two-inch strip of jaw and chin that criminal psychologists had written papers about — did not move. Did not curve. Did not so much as twitch.
But Clark Kent, sitting four chairs away with the benefit of superhuman vision that could detect muscular contractions at the cellular level, saw the jaw soften. Saw the tension leave it. Saw the microexpression that lasted a tenth of a second and contained, compressed into that fraction of a moment like a universe folded into a point, something that Clark could only describe as joy.
Jason reached the chair next to Batman.
This chair — the chair immediately to the left of the head of the table — was technically reserved for whoever was presenting threat assessments during the current briefing cycle. It had been occupied, at various times, by generals, intelligence directors, heads of state, and, on one memorable occasion, a Thanagarian ambassador who had later attempted to conquer North America.
It was currently empty because Superman had been presenting from the front of the room and no one else had claimed it.
Or rather, Jason attempted to claim it, because the chair — like everything else in the Watchtower — was designed for adult humans. Adults who were, at minimum, five and a half feet tall and possessed the leg length necessary to sit in a seat that was approximately three feet off the ground.
Jason was three foot seven.
He set the briefcase on the floor. Positioned it carefully, making sure the monogrammed initials faced outward, because presentation mattered. Then he placed both hands on the seat of the chair. Sized it up. Calculated the angle. Bent his knees.
He made it approximately halfway. His chest hit the edge of the seat. His little polished shoes dangled in open air, scrabbling against the chair’s base, finding no purchase. His peacoat rode up around his ears. His scarf unspooled slightly. He hung there for a moment — suspended, stranded, a small dignified person marooned on the cliff face of an office chair — and then slid back down to the floor with a barely audible fwump.
His glasses were crooked.
He did not look at any of the adults in the room, because looking at them would acknowledge that they had witnessed this, and acknowledging that they had witnessed this would be an admission that the chair had defeated him, and the chair had not defeated him, because Jason Todd Wayne did not get defeated by furniture.
This time he made it higher — his elbows hooked over the seat, his feet kicked in open air, his face pressed against the cushion. He grunted. It was a small sound, a determined sound, a sound that communicated effort and resolve and the absolute refusal to be condescended to. He kicked harder. His right shoe — polished, gleaming, scuffing — caught the chair’s pneumatic cylinder. He pushed. Gained an inch. Lost it.
His glasses were on the tip of his nose. His scarf was trailing behind him like a defeated flag. A curl of dark hair had fallen across his forehead.
The entire Justice League was watching.
Barry Allen’s hands twitched. His instinct — the instinct of a man who ran into burning buildings and caught falling children and moved faster than the speed of thought — was to help. To reach across the table at super-speed and lift the child into the chair before anyone could blink. It would take less than a millisecond. The child would barely feel it.
Not because he didn’t want to, but because Diana had placed one hand — very gently, very firmly — on his forearm, and the pressure of that hand communicated, in the universal language of people who understood children, do not.
Because there was something in the set of that tiny jaw — in the way it clenched, in the way the muscles along its miniature edge tightened — that said, with absolute clarity: I will do this myself. I will do this myself or I will die on this hill. And anyone who helps me will be dealt with.
Jason grabbed the armrest. Both hands. Set his feet against the chair’s base. Pulled. Climbed. His face went red. His glasses fogged slightly from the exertion. One shoe slipped. He recovered. Pulled harder. Got one knee on the seat. Then the other. Then he was kneeling, and then he was turning, and then—
He was sitting in the chair.
In the chair next to Batman.
At the table of the Justice League.
He was breathing hard. His glasses were askew. His scarf had come almost entirely unwound and was hanging off one shoulder like the aftermath of a wrestling match. His peacoat was bunched around his midsection. One pant leg had ridden up, exposing approximately two inches of a sock patterned with tiny bats.
The bat socks were new. Alfred had bought them. Jason had cried.
He did not know anyone had seen the bat socks. He would have been mortified.
Everyone saw the bat socks.
Hal Jordan bit the inside of his cheek so hard he tasted copper.
Jason straightened his glasses. Rewound his scarf. Smoothed his coat. Tugged his pant leg down over the bat sock with the swift, practiced discretion of a man who has just committed a social error and is correcting it before anyone notices.
Diana had noticed. Diana, who had been blessed by Aphrodite with the ability to perceive beauty in all its forms, looked at the bat sock and felt something in her ancient, immortal chest crack open like sunrise over Themyscira.
Jason reached down — a precarious operation that involved leaning sideways in a chair that was much too large for him, one hand gripping the armrest for stability — and retrieved the briefcase from the floor.
The sound echoed through the conference room. It was not a loud thunk. It was not the thunk of a heavy object striking a hard surface. It was a purposeful thunk. A thunk that said: I have arrived. I have materials. We are going to discuss things now.
Inside the briefcase — and Clark, who was trying very hard not to use his X-ray vision because the child deserved his privacy but who could not help the fact that his regular vision was operating at eleven times normal human acuity, saw everything anyway — was a composition notebook.
The kind sold at every drugstore in America. Black and white marbled cover. Wide-ruled. Seventy pages. One dollar and forty-nine cents at the CVS on Robinson Avenue, where Jason had bought it himself with quarters from his allowance because “Daddy, if I use your money it’s not independent journalism.”
There were color-coded tabs along the edges — red, yellow, green, and blue — each one a precise rectangle of construction paper glued to the page edge with the meticulous care of a person who understood that organizational systems were the foundation of civilized society. The cover bore a label, handwritten in careful, slightly wobbly block letters that had been gone over twice to make them darker:
OFFICIAL RECORD — DO NOT TAMPER
PROPERTY OF JASON TODD WAYNE
Below this, in smaller letters, added later in a different color pen:
ALFRED YOU CAN TOUCH IT IF YOU NEED TO
Jason opened the notebook. Flipped to a red tab. Smoothed the page with the flat of his small hand — once, twice, making sure it lay flat, making sure it was right — and adjusted his glasses one final time.
Then he looked up at Batman.
And the expression on his face — the expression on that small, round, deadly serious face, behind those unnecessary lenses, above that overwound scarf — was one of such concentrated, focused, righteous fury that Clark Kent, who had once stared down Darkseid without blinking, who had held dying stars in his hands, who had stood at the edge of reality itself and not flinched, felt his throat close.
With the overwhelming, muscle-weakening, thought-destroying urge to laugh.
He could not laugh. He knew he could not laugh. Laughing would be an act of war. Laughing would be a betrayal of such magnitude that this child — this small, furious, bespectacled child who had traveled to space to have this conversation — might never forgive him, and Clark had the horrible, wonderful, dawning suspicion that Jason Todd Wayne’s forgiveness was not something a person could afford to lose.
“We have a problem,” Jason said.
His voice was high. Small. It had not yet decided what it would become — it was still a child’s voice, soft at the edges, prone to occasional cracks when it reached for emphasis — but the tone. The tone was a hundred years old. The tone had seen things. The tone had been let down by institutions and was here to discuss it.
The cowl regarded Jason. The white lenses — blank, featureless, designed to be unreadable — regarded the small person in the oversized chair with the briefcase and the notebook and the unnecessary glasses and the bat socks.
Beneath the table — out of sight of the room, out of sight of the cameras, out of sight of everyone except J’onn, who felt it happen in the warm, golden shift of Batman’s psychic signature — Bruce Wayne’s gauntleted hand moved from the table’s edge and came to rest, very gently, on the back of his son’s chair.
Just there. Behind him. Close enough to catch him if the too-big chair shifted. Close enough to steady him if he leaned too far. Close enough that the warmth of the hand, even through the gauntlet, even through the chair, even through every layer of armor and distance and performance, might reach him.
His voice was the same low, gravel-roughened rasp that made criminals confess unprompted and had once caused a seasoned Interpol agent to involuntarily stand at attention. But the timbre — the harmonic beneath the fundamental, the frequency only people who knew him could hear, the note that only sounded in the presence of his children — was different.
It was the voice of a man who would sit in this chair for the next six hours if that’s how long it took, who would listen to every word in that notebook regardless of what other global crises were unfolding, because the person speaking was the most important person in any room Bruce Wayne had ever entered.
The League had never heard this voice before.
Several of them would need time to recover.
Hawkgirl — Shayera Hol, a woman who had been trained from birth to suppress emotional responses in tactical settings — felt the bridge of her nose sting.
Jason looked down at his notebook.
There were bullet points — actual bullet points, drawn by hand, each one a small, careful circle filled in with pencil. There were underlined words. There were words that had been underlined and then circled, which in Jason’s organizational system denoted maximum urgency. There was, in the upper right corner of the page, a pie chart drawn in crayon.
Hal Jordan’s ring — which, among its other capabilities, could enhance his visual acuity to near-microscopic levels — confirmed the pie chart’s existence. It was divided into two sections. One section, colored in red, was labeled “BAD” and took up approximately eleven-twelfths of the circle. The other section, colored in green, was labeled “OK” and occupied the remaining sliver.
There was a title above the pie chart.
MONTHS WITH CHRISTMAS MUSIC
“This morning,” Jason began, and his voice trembled — not with fear, not with sadness, but with the barely contained outrage of a soul who has witnessed an injustice so profound, so systemic, so fundamentally offensive to the natural order that the English language groaned under the weight of expressing it — “Alfred was driving me to school.”
Batman nodded. Listening. His posture — the rigid, controlled posture of a man for whom stillness was a weapon — had not changed, but something about the angle of his head had shifted. He was leaning in. Slightly. Fractionally. The way he leaned in during interrogations when the suspect was about to say something important.
“We were on Robinson Avenue,” Jason continued. “By the bridge. The one with the gargoyles that you said look like Mr. Pennyworth.”
“I did say that,” Batman confirmed.
“Alfred said that was ‘flattering,’ but I think he was being sarcastic.”
Jason nodded, satisfied that the record was accurate, and made a small notation in the margin of his notebook. Then he looked up again, and the fury returned — it had been momentarily displaced by the gargoyle tangent, but it was back now, filling those teal eyes like a tide.
“The radio was on,” he said.
“WGOT. 97.3 FM. It’s Alfred’s preset number four. He listens to it for the classical hours on weekday evenings, but in the morning they do a general mix.”
“I’m aware of the programming schedule.”
“Good. Then you’ll understand why what I’m about to tell you is a crisis.”
Batman inclined his head. The room waited.
Jason placed one small index finger on the notebook. On a specific line. On a specific word that had been underlined three times and circled twice and starred.
“They were playing Christmas music,” he said.
The words entered the silence of the conference room and detonated.
Not loudly. Not with fire or force or the physical destruction that the people in this room were accustomed to confronting. They detonated the way a truth detonates — quietly, irreversibly, rearranging the landscape of the conversation so completely that everything said before them became preamble and everything said after them would be response.
“It is November third,” Jason said, and his small hand came down on the notebook, and the smack of skin on paper echoed off the walls and the ceiling and the reinforced windows that looked out over the slowly turning Earth, and Barry Allen — the Flash, the fastest man alive — flinched.
He would think about this later. He would lie in bed in his apartment in Central City and stare at the ceiling and think about the fact that he, a man who could perceive events at the attosecond level, had been physically startled by a six-year-old slapping a composition notebook.
“Halloween was four days ago,” Jason continued, and now he was leaning forward, one elbow on the table, his glasses sliding down his nose, his voice rising in pitch and volume and moral conviction. “Four. Days. I still have candy in my pumpkin bucket. The pumpkins on the porch haven’t even gone soft yet. I have glitter — glitter, Daddy — in my hair from my costume. I’ve washed it three times. It won’t come out. Alfred used the special shampoo. He used the conditioner. He used the thing with the comb. There is still glitter and we are still in Halloween and they—”
He jabbed his finger at the notebook. At whatever damning evidence he had transcribed there. At the record of the atrocity.
“—they are playing Mariah Carey.”
He said the name the way a prosecutor says the name of the defendant. The way a historian says the name of a tyrant. The way a very small, very angry person says the name of a woman who has, in his professional assessment, overstepped.
“On WGOT 97.3,” Jason specified, because he believed in citing sources. “At seven forty-two in the morning. ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’ The original version.” He paused. “Not even a remix, Daddy. Not even the one with the bells at the beginning where you have a second to change the station. The original. It just starts. You can’t escape it.”
He pushed his glasses up. They had slid to the very tip of his nose, which was slightly pink from the exertion of the chair climb, which made the glasses look even more ridiculous, which made everything worse and better at the same time.
“Seven forty-two in the morning,” he repeated, in case the temporal dimension of the offense had not been adequately registered. “I hadn’t even had my juice box yet.”
Batman’s mouth — the visible strip of jaw beneath the cowl — remained absolutely, perfectly, heroically still.
Clark saw the muscles in it contract.
He had never seen Batman’s jaw muscles work this hard. Not during the Darkseid invasion. Not during the Thanagarian occupation. Not during the eighteen-hour standoff with the Joker at Arkham when the building had been rigged with enough explosives to level midtown and Batman had stood in the dark with nothing but his voice and his will and talked a madman into surrendering.
This was the hardest thing Bruce Wayne had ever done with his face.
“That is early,” Batman said, and his voice was level, and controlled, and absolutely devoid of the seismic emotional event occurring behind it. “Walk me through the timeline.”
Jason walked him through the timeline.
He had a timeline. It was on the next page of the notebook. It was drawn in pencil, with dates marked along a horizontal line, and it was, considering that it had been produced by someone who had been alive for approximately seventy-eight months, shockingly competent.
“October thirty-first,” Jason said, tapping the leftmost point on the timeline. “Halloween. A sacred holiday. A holiday about candy and costumes and the fundamental right of every child to dress up as something scary and receive chocolate from strangers.”
“November first. The day after Halloween. A day for eating leftover candy, sorting your candy, trading your candy, and recovering from your candy. A day of rest.”
“November second. Also still part of the Halloween recovery window. Acceptable activities include: more candy, watching the Halloween specials you missed, and taking down decorations at your own pace.”
“November third.” Jason’s finger stopped on today’s date. His voice dropped. “Today. Three days after Halloween. Seventy-two hours. The pumpkins. Are still. On the porch.”
He looked up from the notebook.
“And Mariah Carey,” he said, and the name landed like a gavel, “is on the radio.”
He flipped the page. There was more. There was so much more.
“But it’s not just today,” Jason said, and now his voice had shifted — from righteous fury to the deep, systematic anger of someone who has identified a pattern and intends to dismantle it. “This is a systemic problem, Daddy. I have been tracking it.”
“April fourteenth,” Jason read from the log, adjusting his glasses. “CVS on Robinson Avenue. Easter candy still on the shelves. Christmas wrapping paper appeared in Aisle Seven. April, Daddy. It was still Lent.”
“May second. Target on Brideshead. Memorial Day section: normal. Two aisles over: inflatable Santa. Five feet tall. In May. I measured it.”
“You measured the Santa.”
“I always measure the Santa. It’s getting bigger every year. I have a chart.”
He did have a chart. It was in the briefcase. It was labeled SANTA SIZE CREEP — ANNUAL TRACKING and it contained three data points — the only three years of Jason’s life during which he had been sufficiently organized to conduct retail surveillance — and the trend line, while based on a statistically insufficient sample size, was going up.
“July nineteenth,” Jason continued. “Hobby Lobby. Full Christmas aisle. Ornaments, garland, stockings. It was ninety-three degrees outside. I was wearing shorts, Daddy. I was eating a popsicle. And there was tinsel.”
He flipped another page. “September eighth. Costco. They had a twelve-foot Christmas tree. Fully decorated. Pre-lit. Next to the Halloween costumes. So you’d be standing there trying to pick out a Batman costume — which, by the way, none of them look like you, the ears are always wrong—”
“I’ve noticed,” Batman said.
“—and you turn around and there’s a Christmas tree. In September. While you’re holding a bag of fun-size Snickers. It’s — it’s psychological warfare, Daddy. They’re trying to make you forget what month it is. They’re trying to erase the seasons.”
He closed the log. Pressed both small hands flat on the notebook. Looked at Batman with the expression of a man who has presented his evidence and is waiting for the verdict.
“And now,” he said, softly, terribly, “they’re playing Christmas music on the radio. On November third. Before I’ve had my juice box. Before the glitter is out of my hair. Before the pumpkins are soft.”
“It’s not right,” he said.
The silence in the room was unlike any silence the Justice League had experienced.
It was not the silence of crisis — not the held-breath, coiled-muscle silence that preceded a battle. It was not the grim silence of bad news, or the respectful silence of mourning, or the tactical silence of a room full of people waiting for Batman to tell them what to do.
It was the silence of eight adults who were experiencing, simultaneously and without warning, an emotional event of such magnitude that their collective cardiovascular systems were under genuine stress.
Hal Jordan had stopped breathing.
This was not a metaphor. He had actually stopped breathing. His ring, which monitored his vital signs, had begun preparing a medical intervention before he remembered to inhale.
Diana’s eyes were shining.
Arthur’s hand had tightened on the table’s edge until the reinforced surface creaked.
Barry was vibrating. Not the normal, caffeine-enhanced vibration that was his baseline state — a new vibration, a resonant frequency that originated somewhere in his sternum and was, if he was being honest with himself, perilously close to what a less disciplined person might call getting choked up over a first-grader.
J’onn — who could feel every emotion in the room, who experienced the collective psychic output of the Justice League like weather — closed his eyes briefly. The emotional atmosphere in the conference room had shifted from “routine briefing” to “eight extremely powerful individuals trying not to cry or laugh or both simultaneously,” and the combined psychic pressure of that much suppressed feeling was, even for a centuries-old telepath, a lot.
Shayera had put her mace down. She never put her mace down.
Superman was looking at the table. Just — looking at the table. Examining its surface with the forensic focus of a man who understood that if he looked at the child right now, if he made eye contact with those teal eyes behind those unnecessary glasses, he was going to make a sound, and the sound was going to be audible, and his reputation as a stoic pillar of justice would be finished.
Batman picked up the notebook.
He read it carefully. Line by line. Word by word. The way he read forensic reports and toxicology panels and encrypted intelligence briefings from agencies that technically did not exist. He turned a page. Read the timeline. Turned another page. Read the retail surveillance log. Turned another page.
The pie chart — two colors, eleven-twelfths red, one-twelfth green, “MONTHS WITH CHRISTMAS MUSIC,” drawn in crayon on wide-ruled paper by a six-year-old who believed, with the unshakeable conviction of the genuinely righteous, that December was the only acceptable month for Mariah Carey — received the same analytical attention that Batman gave to Joker’s psychological profiles.
He studied it for nine seconds.
“You’ve done your research,” Batman said.
“I always do my research,” Jason said, and the faint offense in his voice — the slight narrowing of those teal eyes, the microscopic tightening of that tiny jaw — communicated, with devastating clarity, that his thoroughness was not something that should ever require acknowledgment because it should be assumed.
Batman set the notebook down.
He reached into his belt. Not the compartment with the batarangs. Not the one with the smoke pellets, or the encrypted comm devices, or the remote detonators, or the seventeen other instruments of precisely calibrated violence that made the belt a war crime in a cummerbund. A different compartment. A smaller one. One that no member of the Justice League had ever seen him open.
A regular pen. Black ink. Ballpoint. The kind you’d find on a desk in any office in any city in the world.
He had never seen Batman carry a pen. He had seen Batman carry batarangs in fourteen different configurations, grappling hooks rated for four thousand pounds of tensile stress, a rebreather that could filter oxygen from methane, a field medical kit capable of performing emergency surgery, and — on one occasion that no one discussed — a granola bar.
The pen had been in that compartment for three weeks. Since the day Jason had gotten the briefcase and the notebook and the glasses, and Bruce Wayne had understood — with the same clarity he brought to crime scene analysis — that eventually, inevitably, his son was going to bring him something to sign.
He had been carrying the pen ever since.
The petition — the handwritten, painstakingly formatted petition on wide-ruled composition paper, with a title in block letters that read PETITION TO BAN CHRISTMAS MUSIC BEFORE DECEMBER 1 — SUBMITTED BY: JASON TODD WAYNE, AGE 6 — SUPPORTED BY: EVERYONE WITH SENSE and numbered signature lines drawn with a ruler — received the signature Batman in sharp, angular script, on line two, directly beneath his son’s name.
“I’ll have my people look into the FCC angle,” Batman said, capping the pen. “But we should consider a multi-pronged approach. Public awareness. Social media. Direct engagement with station management.”
“I was thinking flyers,” Jason said, and reached into the briefcase — the briefcase — and produced a second notebook.
This one was smaller. Spiral-bound. It appeared to contain draft flyer designs. They were — and Clark could see this, because his vision was what it was — extensively illustrated. There were angry jack-o’-lanterns. There were turkeys holding protest signs. There was a drawing of what appeared to be a radio with a big red X through it, and beneath it the words: NO CHRISTMAS MUSIC BEFORE DECEMBER — IT’S THE LAW (IT SHOULD BE).
“I made these at school during free time,” Jason said. “Mrs. Henderson said they were ‘very passionate.’”
“They are,” Batman said, examining the flyers with the critical eye of a man who had designed fear-based psychological warfare campaigns and recognized solid instincts when he saw them. “The turkey with the picket sign is particularly effective.”
“That’s Gerald,” Jason said.
“The turkey. His name is Gerald. He’s the mascot of the movement.”
“The No Christmas Before December Movement.” Jason looked at his father as though this should have been obvious. “Every movement needs a mascot, Daddy. We learned that in social studies. Mrs. Henderson said mascots build brand recognition.”
“Mrs. Henderson sounds like a strategist,” Batman said.
“She has a master’s degree,” Jason said, with the reverent finality of someone invoking unimpeachable authority.
The conference room door slid open for the second time.
Dick Grayson came through it at a speed that suggested he had either sprinted from the zeta tube or had been fired from a cannon — and knowing Dick Grayson, either was equally plausible. He was twenty-two, Nightwing, currently in civilian clothes — jeans, a Gotham University hoodie, sneakers that had seen better days — because he had been in the middle of a late breakfast at his apartment in Blüdhaven when his phone had exploded with a priority alert from the Watchtower’s secondary monitoring system, which he maintained separately from Batman’s, which tracked specifically and exclusively the biometric signatures of his family members, because Dick Grayson had anxiety about his family and dealt with it through surveillance.
The alert had read: J. WAYNE — WATCHTOWER — UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS — VITALS NORMAL.
Dick had left his eggs burning on the stove. He would not remember them for six hours. By then, the pan would be unsalvageable, and his apartment would smell like charcoal for a week, and he would consider this a reasonable price.
Behind Dick, moving with considerably more composure — because Tim Drake moved with composure the way other people moved with legs, it was simply the mechanism by which he traveled — came Tim.
Thirteen. Robin. Also in civilian clothes: a black hoodie with the hood down, dark jeans, the kind of nondescript outfit that a thirteen-year-old genius wore when he wanted to be invisible and didn’t realize that the hypercompetent alertness in his eyes made invisibility impossible. His laptop bag was slung over one shoulder, because Tim Drake did not go anywhere without a computer. He slept with a tablet on his nightstand. He showered with his phone in a waterproof case on the shelf. He had once brought a laptop to a Wayne Foundation gala and worked on it under the table during the salad course, and Bruce had looked at him and seen himself and been so unsettled by this that he’d gone to the balcony and stood in the cold for ten minutes.
Behind them — behind the sprinting acrobat and the composed teenager, moving at a pace that suggested neither hurry nor delay but rather the precise speed at which Alfred Pennyworth had decided the universe should unfold — came Alfred.
On the tray: a teapot (bone china, because Alfred did not acknowledge the existence of inferior materials, even in space), five cups (matching), a small plate of shortbread (baked that morning, before dawn, because Alfred Pennyworth had somehow known — the way he always knew, the way he had known for forty years, through some preternatural butler’s intuition that operated on frequencies science could not measure — that today was going to be a day that required shortbread), and a juice box.
Jason’s preferred variety.
The juice box had a straw already punctured through the foil seal, because Alfred had done it in the zeta tube, because Alfred understood that when a man is in the middle of presenting critical intelligence to the most powerful people on the planet, he should not have to struggle with a juice box straw.
“Jay!” Dick was across the room in three strides — long strides, acrobat’s strides, the kind that covered ground the way a thrown grappling line covered distance — and dropped into the chair on Jason’s other side. His hands came up, hovering, not quite touching, performing the rapid visual scan that he had perfected over years of being an older brother: eyes clear, breathing normal, color good, no injuries, no distress, tiny bat socks, glasses he doesn’t need, oh God the briefcase, oh God the notebook—
He pulled Jason’s chair closer to him. The chair rolled — the small body in it swaying with the motion, the briefcase sliding slightly on the table — and came to rest with Jason positioned between his father on one side and his eldest brother on the other, bracketed, guarded, flanked by the two people who would, without hesitation and without limit, burn down anything that threatened him.
“Buddy, you can’t just — you can’t just beam yourself to space without telling anyone, you scared me half to—”
“I told Alfred,” Jason said.
“He did tell me,” Alfred confirmed, setting the tray down on the Justice League’s conference table. He positioned it between a holographic projector and a stack of classified Intergang files. He began to pour tea. “And I approved the expedition.”
“You approved — Alfred, he’s six, he’s in orbit—”
“Master Dick.” Alfred looked up from the teapot. The look was mild. It was always mild. It was the mildness of a man who had raised Batman from a traumatized child and could convey, through the slight adjustment of one eyebrow, enough emotional information to fill a novel. “The young master had a matter of some urgency to discuss with his father. I assessed the situation, deemed the Watchtower an appropriate venue, and provided transportation. The access code was entered by my hand. The journey was supervised. And if I may observe — you are currently standing in the same facility, having arrived by the same means, with rather less preparation.”
“What matter?” he asked, turning to Jason with the careful, focused attention of someone who had learned — through years of practice, through trial and error, through the slow and occasionally painful process of becoming the kind of older brother a child like Jason needed — that the only correct response to Jason’s concerns was to take them with absolute seriousness. “What matter, Jay?”
“Christmas music,” Jason said. “On the radio. Before December.”
Dick’s face performed an act of heroism.
It did not smile. It did not twitch. It did not crumble, crack, or in any way betray the thermonuclear detonation of tenderness and hilarity that was occurring behind it. It remained grave. Engaged. Concerned.
It was the single greatest performance of Dick Grayson’s career, and he had once convinced the Joker he was a corrupt cop.
“Tell me everything,” Dick said.
Jason told him everything. The timeline. The retail surveillance log. The pie chart. The Mariah Carey incident. WGOT 97.3. Seven forty-two in the morning. The glitter still in his hair. The pumpkins still on the porch. Gerald the turkey.
Dick listened to all of it.
“That’s — Jay, that’s messed up,” Dick said, and the conviction in his voice was so genuine, so complete, that Jason’s entire body relaxed by approximately fifteen percent — a release of tension that J’onn felt from across the room, a small internal unclenching, the psychic signature of a child who has been heard.
“It is messed up,” Jason agreed fervently. “It’s very messed up. And I think — I think we need to do more than just the petition.”
“More than the petition?” Dick leaned in. “Like what?”
Jason pushed his glasses up.
The gesture — the small index finger, the practiced motion, the slight adjustment of frames that did not need adjusting on a face that did not need glasses — was, in Dick Grayson’s professional assessment, the most adorable thing that had ever happened in the known universe, and he wanted to die.
“I think,” Jason said, “we need to organize a strike.”
The word landed in the room like a flashbang.
“A strike,” Batman repeated.
“A strike,” Jason confirmed. “A listener’s strike. Nobody in Gotham listens to any radio station that plays Christmas music before December. We shut them out. We hit them where it hurts — their ratings.”
He pulled out a fresh page in the notebook. He had already started drafting this. There were headers. There were action items. There was a section labeled DEMANDS in red marker.
“We make signs,” Jason said, ticking off points on his fingers. “We march. We get people to sign a pledge that they won’t listen to any station that plays Christmas music before December first. And we — we picket.”
“You want to picket a radio station,” Dick said.
“I want to picket every radio station that starts Christmas music before December,” Jason corrected. “But we can start with WGOT because they’re the worst offenders.”
Tim had his laptop open. He was already running numbers. “Okay, so WGOT 97.3 switched to a Christmas-adjacent format on November first,” he said, his fingers moving across the keyboard at a speed that suggested either exceptional typing skills or a mild dissociative state. “They call it ‘Christmas in November.’ They’ve done it for the past six years. Their ratings spike by twelve percent in the eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic, but — interesting — they actually lose about seven percent of their over-fifty-five listeners.”
“The over-fifty-fives are on our side,” Jason said immediately.
“Potentially,” Tim said. “And if I cross-reference social media sentiment—” He paused. Typed. Typed more. A graph appeared on his screen. “Yeah, there’s a significant negative response. Hashtag ‘TooEarlyForChristmas’ trends every year in the first week of November. Last year it had about forty thousand posts.”
“Forty thousand,” Jason breathed, and his eyes — behind those ridiculous, wonderful, heartbreaking glasses — went wide with the light of a revolutionary who has just discovered he is not alone. “Forty thousand people, Tim. That’s an army.”
“It’s a hashtag,” Tim said. “But yes, there’s a base of support.”
“We need a website,” Jason said. “Can you make a website?”
“With Gerald on it. Gerald has to be on the front page.”
Jason showed him the turkey with the picket sign.
Tim looked at it for three seconds. “I can digitize Gerald. Clean up the lines, vectorize him, make him scalable for different media formats. He’d work as a logo.”
Jason stared at Tim with an expression of such profound, luminous admiration that Dick — who was watching this exchange from two feet away with a hand pressed over his heart — made a sound like a punctured tire.
“Tim,” Jason said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. I’ll have a mockup in twenty minutes.”
Alfred set a cup of tea in front of Bruce. Another in front of Dick. A third in front of Tim, positioned precisely beside the laptop at an angle that would not risk the keyboard in the event of a spill, because Alfred Pennyworth had spent four decades anticipating catastrophe at every scale from geopolitical to beverage-related and he was not about to stop now.
He placed the juice box — apple, straw pre-inserted, foil seal punctured — next to the notebook of grievances, within easy reach of his youngest charge’s left hand.
Then he pulled out a chair.
He sat down at the Justice League’s conference table.
He poured himself a cup of tea.
The entire room. Eight members of the Justice League, three members of the Wayne family, and one six-year-old revolutionary with a briefcase and a turkey named Gerald — every single person turned to Alfred Pennyworth, because when Alfred Pennyworth said “if I may,” what he meant was “I am going to speak now, and you are going to listen, and this is not a request.”
“I believe Master Jason’s concerns, while expressed with his characteristic vigor, touch upon a broader cultural phenomenon that warrants serious consideration,” Alfred said. He sipped his tea. “The premature commercialization of the holiday season — the systematic erosion of seasonal boundaries in pursuit of consumer spending — has been documented extensively by cultural critics, psychologists, and economists. The phenomenon of ‘Christmas creep,’ as it is commonly known, represents not merely an inconvenience but a fundamental disruption of the natural rhythmic cycle by which communities mark the passage of time.”
“I raised Master Bruce in a household where Advent began on Advent and not a moment sooner,” Alfred continued. “Christmas decorations appeared on the first of December. Carols were sung in their proper season. The integrity of each holiday — Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas alike — was preserved as a matter of domestic policy. I see no reason to abandon these standards simply because a radio station in Gotham has decided that commerce supersedes tradition.”
“I have, in fact, taken the liberty of drafting a letter to the management of WGOT on Master Jason’s behalf,” he added. “It is in the car. I shall retrieve it presently. I believe the phrasing is — if I may say so — devastating.”
Jason turned to Alfred with an expression that could only be described as the face of a general who has just learned that his most trusted advisor has already outflanked the enemy, anticipated his strategy, and prepared the ground for total victory.
“Alfred,” Jason said, and his voice cracked — not with fury this time, but with the specific, overwhelming emotion of a small person who has found that the people he loves are on his side. “Thank you.”
Jason picked up his juice box. Took a sip. Set it down with the focused deliberation of a man who is fueling himself for a long campaign.
“Okay,” he said. “So here’s what I’m thinking for the strike.”
He flipped to a new page. He had drawn a map. It was a map of Gotham — crude, schematic, but recognizable — with X marks at various locations.
“These are the radio stations,” he said. “WGOT is here, on Fifth and Chambers. WGTH is here, on Robinson. WKGM is here, by the waterfront. I don’t know if they’re all playing Christmas music yet, but we need intelligence. Tim, can you monitor all of them?”
“I’ll set up an automated audio scraper,” Tim said, without looking up from his laptop. “It’ll flag any track that appears on a standard Christmas playlist database. I can have real-time alerts within the hour.”
“Good. Dick, I need you on flyer distribution.”
Dick blinked. “You — you want me to hand out flyers?”
“You’re Nightwing. You can cover the whole city in one night. I need flyers on every telephone pole from Crime Alley to the Palisades by Friday.”
“Jay, I can’t — I mean, technically I can, but—”
Dick looked at Bruce. Bruce looked back. The cowl was impassive, but somewhere behind the white lenses there was something that might — if you squinted, if you knew him, if you had spent twenty-two years learning to read a face that didn’t want to be read — have been amusement.
“Good. Alfred, I need the letter hand-delivered to WGOT’s station manager. Not mailed. Hand-delivered. In person. By you.”
“Naturally,” Alfred said. “I would not entrust correspondence of this significance to the postal service.”
“And Daddy.” Jason turned to Batman. His glasses caught the overhead lights. His jaw was set. His small hands were flat on the notebook, on the map, on the battle plan. “I need you to make a public statement.”
“A public statement,” Batman said.
“As Batman. On the record. That Christmas music before December is unacceptable and that the people of Gotham deserve better.”
Clark Kent — who had been holding his composure together with the psychic equivalent of duct tape and prayer for the last fifteen minutes — felt it slip.
Not much. A fraction. A microexpression. A slight widening of the eyes, a barely perceptible tightening of the mouth, the facial equivalent of a structural crack in a dam that was holding back an ocean.
He covered it by taking a sip of the tea that Alfred had somehow placed in front of him without his noticing.
“I’ll draft something,” Batman said.
“I already drafted something,” Jason said, and produced — from the briefcase, from the seemingly bottomless briefcase — a folded piece of paper. “You can edit it if you want, but I think the key messages are solid.”
It read, in careful block letters:
OFFICIAL STATEMENT FROM BATMAN
IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT CERTAIN RADIO STATIONS IN OUR CITY HAVE BEGUN PLAYING CHRISTMAS MUSIC IN NOVEMBER. THIS IS WRONG. HALLOWEEN IS BARELY OVER. THANKSGIVING HAS NOT HAD ITS TURN. MARIAH CAREY SHOULD NOT BE ON THE RADIO UNTIL DECEMBER.
I AM BATMAN AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE.
ALSO PLEASE SUPPORT THE STRIKE.
GERALD THE TURKEY SAYS: NO CHRISTMAS BEFORE DECEMBER.
Batman read the statement.
“I have some minor edits,” he said.
“That’s fine,” Jason said. “It’s a draft. I’m open to collaboration.”
“The core message is strong.”
“‘Gerald the Turkey says’ is a particularly effective closing.”
“Gerald resonates with people, Daddy. He’s relatable. He’s a turkey. Everybody likes turkeys. Turkeys are Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the holiday that Christmas is stepping on. Gerald is the voice of the voiceless.”
Barry Allen excused himself from the table.
He said he needed water. He said this in a voice that was approximately one octave higher than his normal speaking voice and that contained, compressed into two syllables, the entire desperate urgency of a man who was about to laugh so hard he would vibrate through the floor of the Watchtower and plummet through the vacuum of space toward the Earth below and he would welcome it.
He made it to the corridor.
The door slid shut behind him.
From the other side of the door, muffled but audible to Clark’s superhuman hearing, came a sound. It was the sound of the fastest man alive sliding down a wall, sitting on the floor of the Watchtower’s main corridor, pressing both hands over his face, and losing it.
It went on for some time.
Back in the conference room, the strike was being organized.
Tim had pulled up a spreadsheet. It had columns. It had categories. It was the kind of spreadsheet that Fortune 500 companies used to plan product launches, and it was being used to coordinate a six-year-old’s protest against premature Christmas music.
“Okay,” Tim said, turning the laptop so Jason could see it. “I’ve broken this down into phases. Phase One: Intelligence Gathering. That’s the audio monitoring I mentioned — we track which stations are playing Christmas music, when they started, what percentage of their programming is Christmas-related. I’ll have data within twenty-four hours.”
“Phase Two: Public Awareness. That’s the flyers, the website, the social media campaign. I’ll build the site tonight — GeraldTheTurkey.com, if the domain’s available—”
Tim checked it. “It’s available.”
Tim bought it. With a Wayne Enterprises corporate credit card that he technically was not supposed to have but that Bruce had never revoked because — and this was a level of parenting paradox that Bruce tried not to examine too closely — the things Tim purchased with the card were invariably either (a) crime-fighting equipment, (b) technology upgrades for the Batcave, or (c) domain names for his six-year-old brother’s protest movements, and none of these felt like things a responsible adult should discourage.
“Done,” Tim said. “Phase Three: Direct Action. That’s the picketing, the strike, the petition delivery. We need to coordinate timing, location, signage—”
“I have sign ideas,” Jason said, and pulled another notebook from the briefcase.
Dick leaned over to look. His face performed another act of extraordinary valor.
The sign ideas were illustrated. In crayon. Each one featured Gerald the Turkey in a different pose — Gerald holding a megaphone, Gerald on a picket line, Gerald standing in front of a radio station with his wings crossed and a speech bubble that read: “WHERE IS THE RESPECT FOR THANKSGIVING?”
“These are — Jay, these are really good,” Dick said, and his voice only wobbled slightly.
“Thank you. I’ve been working on Gerald’s character design for a while. He’s got range.”
“He does. He’s got real emotional range.”
“He’s angry but he’s dignified, Dick. That’s important. You can be angry and still be dignified. Alfred taught me that.”
Alfred sipped his tea. His eyes, above the rim of the cup, were suspiciously bright.
“Phase Four,” Tim continued, because Tim Drake did not stop until the spreadsheet was complete, “is Escalation. If the stations don’t respond to the petition and the strike, we go bigger. Press coverage. Open letter in the Gotham Gazette. And—” He hesitated. Glanced at Bruce. “—potentially a Wayne Enterprises corporate statement.”
“A corporate statement,” Bruce said.
“Wayne Enterprises is one of WGOT’s biggest advertisers,” Tim said. “If we threatened to pull ad revenue—”
“Tim,” Jason said, and his voice was hushed, and awed, and filled with the dawning wonder of a revolutionary who has just been handed a weapon of devastating power. “Tim, that’s brilliant.”
“It’s beautiful leverage.”
“I want it on record,” Batman said, “that I am not committing Wayne Enterprises to a corporate boycott of a radio station over Mariah Carey.”
Batman looked at his son.
The conference door opened for the third time.
Barry Allen came back in. His eyes were red. His face was composed with the fragile, careful composure of a man who had just experienced something profound and was not entirely sure he had survived it.
“I’d like to sign the petition,” Barry said.
Jason’s head swiveled toward him. The glasses caught the light. Those teal eyes — enormous behind the unnecessary lenses, framed by dark lashes, above cheeks still slightly pink from the chair-climbing exertion — swept over the Flash with an evaluative intensity that a less secure person might have found unsettling.
“You’re serious,” Jason said. It was not a question. It was a test.
“Dead serious,” Barry said. “One hundred percent. You want to know why?”
“Yesterday,” Barry said. “Yesterday, I was at the grocery store. In Central City. Buying Halloween candy. On clearance. Half-price Reese’s. The big bags. I had four bags in my cart and I was having a great day, and you know what was playing?”
“What,” Jason said, and his voice was barely a whisper.
“On November second,” Barry continued. “While I was holding Halloween candy. In Halloween packaging. Little pumpkins on the bag. And ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ was playing over the store speakers, and I stood there in the candy aisle and I thought — this isn’t right. This isn’t right. I’m holding a pumpkin bag and Bobby Helms is singing about jingle bell time and it felt — it felt wrong, Jason. It felt fundamentally wrong.”
“It is fundamentally wrong,” Jason said, and his voice had gone thick with the particular emotion of a person who has been alone in their conviction and has suddenly, unexpectedly, found a kindred spirit. “It is. That’s what I’ve been saying.”
He snatched the petition notebook. Flipped to the signature page. Slid it across the table with the precise, urgent energy of a man closing the most important deal of his life.
Barry caught it. Signed it with a flourish — The Flash, Barry Allen — and slid it back.
Jason looked at the signature. Looked at Barry. Looked at the signature again.
“You wrote your real name,” he said.
Jason carefully, reverently, added Barry Allen to the ALLIES section of his notebook. He wrote it in pencil first, then traced over it in pen, because allies of this caliber deserved permanence.
“Anyone else?” Jason asked, looking around the table.
He pushed his glasses up.
The glasses he did not need.
That he wore for business.
That he had purchased at a pharmacy for $9.99 with his own allowance money because “Daddy, I can’t use your credit card for these, it’s a conflict of interest” — a phrase he had learned from a courtroom drama Alfred had been watching — and Bruce had stood in the pharmacy aisle and looked at his six-year-old selecting reading glasses from a spinning rack with the focused discrimination of a jeweler examining diamonds and had fallen so far into love that he wasn’t sure he’d ever find the bottom.
Diana took the notebook next.
She held it for a moment. Looked at it. At the wide-ruled paper, the careful letters, the numbered signature lines drawn with a ruler by small hands. Then she looked at Jason, and her eyes — the eyes of an immortal, the eyes of a warrior who had walked the fields of ancient battles and held dying soldiers and seen empires rise and fall — were soft.
“I would be honored,” she said, and signed: Diana of Themyscira, Princess of the Amazons.
And then, beneath her name, in Ancient Greek, she wrote a notation that roughly translated to: The child speaks with the wisdom of Athena. The music shall wait. Let no man play carols before the first frost of December, or answer to me.
“What does that say?” Jason asked, peering at the Greek.
“It says I agree with you completely,” Diana said. “And that anyone who disagrees will answer to me personally.”
Jason considered this. “Can you put that on the website?”
“I will have it translated for Tim.”
Jason nodded, satisfied, and wrote in his notebook: WONDER WOMAN — ALLY — WILL FIGHT PEOPLE ABOUT THIS.
Clark signed. He signed Clark Kent and then, beneath it, added the Kryptonian symbol for El, and Jason studied it and asked what it was and Clark explained and Jason said, “So your whole family agrees?” and Clark said, “My whole house of El agrees,” and Jason said, “Good, that’s at least two more people,” and Clark did not have the heart to tell him that the House of El was, at this point, more or less just him and Kara.
Arthur signed. He used a pen that he had to be given because Arthur did not carry pens — he carried a trident and the authority of the seven seas — and he wrote Arthur Curry, King of Atlantis and then added, in Atlantean script, a formal declaration that the oceanic kingdoms stood with Jason Todd Wayne on this matter.
“Does the ocean have Christmas music?” Jason asked.
“The ocean has whale song,” Arthur said. “And whale song is seasonal. You wouldn’t hear a humpback singing its winter migration song in July.”
“See?” Jason said, turning to the room at large. “Even the whales get it.”
J’onn signed. His signature was in a script that was not of this Earth — angular, fluid, beautiful in the way that very old languages are beautiful, carrying in its curves the weight of a dead civilization’s written tradition. Jason studied it for a long time.
“What language is that?” he asked.
“It says: ‘The seasons must be honored in their time. To rush one is to dishonor all.’”
Jason stared at J’onn. His lower lip trembled — minutely, almost imperceptibly, a vibration of emotion that J’onn felt in the child’s psyche like a bell being struck.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” Jason whispered. “That’s exactly it. Mr. J’onn, that’s — can I use that? As a quote? On the website? Under Gerald?”
“You may use it,” J’onn said. “I am honored to contribute to Gerald’s cause.”
Shayera signed. Her signature was a sharp, angular mark — Thanagarian military shorthand, the equivalent of a commanding officer endorsing an operation — and she added a small drawing of her mace next to it.
“What’s that?” Jason asked.
“That means if anyone gives you trouble about this, I’ll handle it.”
Jason looked at the mace. At Shayera. At the mace again.
He added to his notebook: HAWKGIRL — ALLY — HAS A MACE — WILL USE IT.
He took the notebook. Held it. Looked at Jason over the top of it.
“You broke into the most secure facility in the solar system.”
“I didn’t break in. I had the code.”
“You had the code. You traveled to space. You walked past armed security personnel. You entered a classified briefing attended by people who could, collectively, restructure the planet’s geology. And you sat down and filed a formal complaint about a radio station playing Mariah Carey too early.”
“And now you’re organizing a strike.”
“With Gerald. And a website. And flyers. And a proposed corporate boycott of a major media company.”
Jason pushed his glasses up. The gesture was patient. The gesture said: I am aware of my age, thank you. My age is irrelevant. The issue is the issue.
“I’m almost seven,” Jason said.
Then, in parentheses, beneath his signature, he wrote: (This kid is going to run the world, and honestly, we should let him.)
Jason reviewed the signatures.
He counted them. One by one. Moving his finger down the list, his lips moving slightly, the way children’s lips move when they count — a small, unconscious, devastating detail that Dick Grayson watched from two feet away while silently perishing.
He cross-referenced the signatures with his ALLIES list. Made notations. Drew small check marks next to confirmed supporters. Added threat assessments — not of his allies, but of the problem, with annotations about which ally’s particular skills would be most useful at each phase of the campaign.
It was, in miniature, a tactical briefing.
It was exactly what his father would have done.
Bruce saw this. Saw the small head bent over the notebook, the unnecessary glasses sliding down the small nose, the careful hand making careful marks in careful categories. Saw the organizational system — the color-coded tabs, the cross-referencing, the instinct for structure that no one had taught him, that lived in him the way rhythm lives in a musician, native and inalienable.
And Bruce Wayne — the Batman, the Dark Knight, the most emotionally disciplined human being on the planet — felt something happen behind his eyes that had nothing to do with cowls or criminals or the fate of the world.
It was so much pride it hurt.
“Okay,” Jason said, closing the notebook with a definitive snap. “Here’s the action plan.”
He stood up in the chair. Kneeling, really — one knee on the seat, one hand on the table, his full three-foot-seven commanding the attention of gods and kings and the most dangerous people in the solar system.
“Dick: flyers. Every telephone pole. By Friday. Use Gerald.”
“Tim: website. Social media. Audio monitoring. Data. All of it. I want to know every Christmas song played on every station in Gotham and I want to know it in real time.”
“Already building the scraper,” Tim said.
“Alfred: the letter. Hand-delivered. Tomorrow. Wear the scary suit.”
“I beg your pardon?” Alfred said.
“The dark grey one. With the thin tie. The one that makes people think you’re going to fire them.”
“Ah,” Alfred said. “The Saville Row.”
“That one. It’s intimidating.”
“I shall endeavor to be appropriately formidable.”
“Daddy.” Jason turned to Batman. Full eye contact. Glasses to cowl. Teal to white. Six years old to forever. “The statement. By Wednesday. And I want to review the final draft before it goes out.”
“You’ll have it Tuesday night,” Batman said.
“Good. And I want — I want a meeting. A real meeting. With everyone. To review progress and adjust strategy. This Friday. Here. Same time.”
He looked around the table.
“Everyone’s invited,” he said. “Bring your own juice boxes.”
He sat back down. Picked up his apple juice. Took a long, deliberate sip through the straw — the sound of it, the small slurp, the most mundane and childlike sound in the universe, echoing through the silence of the room where gods convened.
He placed the notebook in the briefcase. The flyer designs. The draft statement. The petition. He organized them — tap, tap, tapping the edges straight — and closed the briefcase lid.
He hopped down from the chair. It was a controlled descent this time — one hand on the armrest, a brief pause on the chair’s base, then a clean landing on both polished shoes. He straightened his coat. Adjusted his scarf. Pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose one final, ceremonial time.
He picked up the briefcase.
“Also,” he said, and his voice was quieter now, not softer but quieter, the way a voice gets when it’s about to say the thing that matters most. “I just want to say one more thing.”
“Thanksgiving,” he said, “is a holiday about being grateful. About being with your family. About pie, and stuffing, and going around the table and saying what you’re thankful for. And it doesn’t have a mascot — I mean, it has turkeys, but turkeys don’t have a song. Turkeys don’t have Mariah Carey. Thanksgiving is just — it’s quiet. It’s a quiet holiday. And quiet holidays need people to protect them, because nobody else is going to.”
His voice wavered. Just slightly. Just enough.
“So that’s what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re protecting Thanksgiving. We’re protecting quiet. And we’re telling Mariah Carey — with all due respect, because Daddy says you should always be respectful even when you disagree—”
“I do say that,” Batman confirmed.
“—we’re telling her: wait your turn.”
He nodded once. Sharply. The way his father nodded.
Then he turned, and he marched out of the conference room of the Justice League, his little shoes clicking against the floor, his briefcase swinging at his side, his unnecessary glasses glinting under the Watchtower’s lights, his bat socks hidden beneath his ironed trousers, his dark curls still — somewhere, probably — containing a fleck of Halloween glitter.
The door slid shut behind him.
The silence lasted fourteen seconds. Clark counted.
Then Clark said, “Bruce.”
Dick had his face in both hands. His shoulders were shaking. He was not laughing. He was not crying. He was doing something that existed in the space between those two things, a third state of emotional expression that had no name because it had never needed one until now.
Tim was still typing. But he was smiling — the rare, unguarded, full-faced smile of a thirteen-year-old boy who spent most of his life behind walls of composure and analysis and who had just watched his little brother march into a room full of legends and demand justice for Thanksgiving.
Alfred rose from the table. Collected the cups. Arranged them on the tray with the same precise, unhurried care he brought to everything — to ironing, to cooking, to holding a family together across decades of grief and glory and the small, bright, impossible joy of a child in a peacoat.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Alfred said. “Master Jason has school to attend. And I have a letter to deliver.”
“Also,” he said, turning back. “I trust no one at this table will mention the bat socks.”
“What bat socks?” Diana said.
“What bat socks?” Clark said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Barry said.
“I didn’t see anything,” Hal said.
“None of us saw anything,” Shayera said.
“There were no bat socks,” J’onn confirmed.
Alfred inclined his head.
And followed his grandson out of the room.
Three days later, Gerald the Turkey went viral.
Tim’s website — GeraldTheTurkey.com — launched at midnight on November fourth and received 1.2 million unique visitors in its first seventy-two hours. Gerald, professionally digitized from Jason’s crayon original but retaining every ounce of hand-drawn indignation, appeared on the front page holding his picket sign with the caption: “WHERE IS THE RESPECT?”
Below Gerald, in an elegant font that Diana had personally selected, was J’onn’s quote in both English and Martian: The seasons must be honored in their time. To rush one is to dishonor all.
The petition went digital. It collected four hundred thousand signatures in a week.
Dick distributed 11,247 flyers across Gotham in a single night, setting a personal record for non-combat-related nocturnal activity. He was spotted by three different security cameras, all of which showed a masked figure in black taping a picture of an angry turkey to a telephone pole, and the Gotham Gazette ran a story the next morning with the headline: “NIGHTWING JOINS ANTI-CHRISTMAS-MUSIC CAMPAIGN — OR DOES HE?”
Alfred delivered the letter to WGOT’s station manager in person, wearing the Saville Row suit with the thin tie. The station manager, a man named Douglas Fenn who had been in broadcast media for thirty-one years and had weathered FCC investigations and corporate mergers and the 2008 financial crisis, later described the experience to a colleague as “the most terrifying seven minutes of my professional life.”
Batman issued a statement. It was three paragraphs long. It had been edited seventeen times — twelve by Bruce, five by Jason, who had rejected the first draft as “too wordy” and the second as “not enough Gerald” and the third through eleventh on various grounds of tone and emphasis before finally approving the twelfth with the note “this is acceptable but next time let me write the first draft.”
The statement was projected on the Bat-Signal.
Not the regular Bat-Signal. A modified Bat-Signal, adjusted by Tim to project, beneath the bat emblem, the silhouette of a turkey.
Commissioner Gordon saw it from his office. He stood at the window for a long time. Then he went home and told his daughter, and Barbara laughed so hard she fell out of her wheelchair.
WGOT 97.3 did not stop playing Christmas music in November.
But they did receive, within a single week, four hundred thousand petition signatures, a seven-page letter of such surgical rhetorical precision that their legal team asked to frame it, a corporate inquiry from Wayne Enterprises regarding advertising standards, a formal diplomatic communiqué from the Kingdom of Atlantis (which their intern initially mistook for a prank and then, upon reflection, did not), and a handwritten note from Wonder Woman in Ancient Greek that they could not translate but that made the entire office feel, inexplicably, nervous.
They switched to a compromise format — fifty percent Christmas, fifty percent “seasonal autumn content” — and issued a public statement acknowledging that “the holiday season should be celebrated in its proper time and that all holidays deserve respect.”
Jason read the statement at the breakfast table on Saturday morning. Alfred had placed it next to his juice box. Bruce sat across from him, drinking coffee, watching.
Jason set the statement down.
He pushed his glasses up.
He was already drafting the follow-up petition. It was more ambitious. It addressed not just radio stations but retail stores, television networks, and streaming platforms. It proposed a formal “Holiday Integrity Act” — Jason’s term — establishing December first as the earliest acceptable date for Christmas content in any medium.
Gerald the Turkey was on the letterhead.
Tim had given Gerald a tie.
“I like the tie,” Jason had said, studying the updated design on Tim’s laptop. “It makes him look official.”
“It’s a power tie,” Tim said. “Red. Classic authority color.”
“Gerald deserves a power tie,” Jason said, with the quiet conviction of a man who understood that symbols matter, that presentation is substance, that a turkey in a power tie could change the world.
The follow-up petition was in the briefcase.
It was always in the briefcase.
On December first — at 12:00 AM, midnight, the exact first legal second of the first legal day — Jason Todd Wayne sat on the living room floor of Wayne Manor in his pajamas, surrounded by his brothers, with Alfred in the armchair and Bruce on the couch, and pressed play on the old stereo system.
Mariah Carey’s voice filled the room.
“I don’t want a lot for Christmas…”
“Now it’s time,” he said.
And it was.
