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Gotham is not a city that people fall in love with.
She is not beautiful in any aesthetic sense. She had no sweeping skylines or picnic parks where a family could sit down and make memories. Gotham was a city of necessity; a tragedy in modern poetry that drove away every bright-eyed child who thought they could thrive in such a world and snuffing them out like a flame on a candle. The rot of the city took from them what she took from everyone. Innocence, merriment, a great too many things. Gotham is hard edges and wrong turns, muttered prayers and broken promises, not a place to cultivate wonder of any capacity.
She was not quiet in that dark night, she roared with it, consumed with it. Blood slipped through crack and concrete, drenching her waiting arms in remembrance of simpler times where blood was far from water and humans were far from rotten. Those days have passed her but even now she dances with the memories of them, innocence that warmed and burst with coloured streamers and painted ribbons, citizens hand in hand or hand in heart far from gun the days of reverence of their city. Reverence of her.
Reverence evolved into fear so quickly she barely had time to react. What was once coloured nights were turned grey, gunned white and stained red. Human red was rare once upon a time. She recalls a time when she barely saw it. It was easier then. She was newer, younger, and had less to lose. Now in the black corners where the light doesn't reach, every street of every road is lined with it, drenched deep into her bones and painting her red.
She believed herself heartless because to have a heart is to love and be loved in return. For a city quite like her, love was a fantasy that hurt too much to think about. It was impossible.
No, not impossible.
Dangerous.
To love her ivory buildings and bloodied streets was to fool oneself into believing these things should be indicators of beauty. That such affluent measures of man-made concepts of success, such grandiose, peacocking displays are to be rewarded as the cold and hungry grow colder and hungrier.
She killed them at night. Frost unfurling a righteous fist and stripping away layers of human whose only crime was being born poor and with little material to protect them from the elements. Those who deserved death, on the other hand, whose honey lemon promises and inky black truths, survived with rolling expectants and mild indifference. Stomachs full and hearts empty she dared not cast judgement on her citizens. She was too old to do so; too old and too compliant to atrocities to be so morally righteous. So instead she weeps for her failures, weeps for her citizens and her morbid streets as the ivory towers grow taller. Watching.
She did believe herself heartless until her heart, on a cold night in an alleyway surrounded by bodies, pearls and tragedy, started beating again.
Her heart was the moment at first. An alleyway, a family, a gunman, and a boy. Gotham was confused as to why this moment, one that was no different from the many similar moments that have passed, was so catastrophic to her. Curly rainclouds bled into the night weeping for the moment, for the family, for the boy.
Unfounded.
Ridiculous.
Yet, the boy still lived and, with him, her heart continued to beat.
—-
“Master Bruce, what is quite the matter? You have barely touched your food.”
“There’s more to do,” The boy says stone-faced and cold, “and I’m not doing it. Alfred, why aren’t I doing anything? I should be doing more but…”
“You are grieving.” Alfred’s voice carries wires of sorrow underneath his formalities. “There is little to do but grieve and wait for days to feel like days again.”
Bruce considers him briefly, searching for something other than what he see’s. He finds a great deal of many things in Alfred — sorrow like the mountains, loyalty unashamed, and a love with no equal measures — but nothing even vaguely shaped like mocking. Bruce throws out something under his breath, Alfred is quick to catch it.
“You were not raised to be someone who let their words drag onto the ground, Master Bruce. Now please, repeat yourself.”
His facade crumbles like cliff-face wrecked by sea, smoothing all the hard edges and turning the boy who grew up too quickly back into a child again. “What if they don’t?”
“Excuse me?”
“The days…they feel like–like they’ve just hidden the sun and painted the moon yellow and forced the world to see it as something else. Is this what my life is now? Waiting for the sun to be a sun again and waiting for a day to feel real again? I can’t live like that. I can’t live like this.”
His confessions faded into soundless sobs and Alfred went still, blending into the room like a light fixture. Every atom of his body urged him to move, to embrace and love but thin threads of something held him perfectly in place.
As well-prepared as Alfred Pennyworth was for a life of warzones and high society, nothing in him could provide clarity for the young boy lost in his grief. He hesitated longer than he should have and that little boy was hidden behind stone again before he could even move to talk.
“There’s more to do than grieve Alfred.” He said resolutely with hints of promise shooting dread up the older man's spine.
It was the last thing his boy ever said to him for a while. A long while. Alfred still wondered if that embrace would have changed anything or if their lives were already in motion, like their actions were set out for them before they even knew the choice.
Gotham’s heart left for some time, longer then the days, shorter than the nights, but with his reappearance eased all that built up tension away. He was older now and no longer a boy to Gotham's people. He would always be a boy to her. Acne scars had morphed into roughly healed and jagged tissue. Soft baby fat had vanished at the hands of strict diets, leaving behind a lean build that deceptively hid strong muscles. The inferno of irrational anger had smouldered down into a mask of patience that hid simmering rage.
He fooled most of them. Too many of them, in her opinion, but she knew the truth. Despite the roguish smile and rumbling tenor that promised a great many things, those diamond blue eyes looked the same as they did in that alleyway: lost and desperately, achingly alone.
“Bruce,” One of the rare moments where Alfred calls him by his first name, without the parody of social status they usually play along with. “What are you doing to yourself?”
Bruce's bruised and fractured fists twitched. They were wrapped with tight but haphazard curls of medical tape. The technique was hardly up to standard, but it seemed to have stopped the bleeding for now. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Should it be?”
They’ve gone through this dance before. No one wins but no one backs down either. It’s a never ending tango of mistrust and coverups. Alfred would bring up the years he thought Bruce had died in a foreign country alone and afraid. Bruce would in turn bring up his parents and all the things Alfred never bothered to explain to him: conversations about guilt and death, anger and duty, feelings they shared but had in the end became their downfall.
“I have to go.”
“No,” He nearly choked on the word, but managed to squeeze it out, ”you don’t.”
“Alfred-”
“If you walk through that door I will not be back when you return, Bruce. I am serious.”
Bruce comes undone in the ultimatum, fresh familial rage moves his arms, medical equipment is thrown, half of it’s contents slide on the vinyl floor of the med bay splaying out and making a mess. “I will leave at some point! I pray you warm to the idea before we both do things we’ll regret.”
“I will not allow you to continue doing this. If you can't stop for yourself, then stop for your parents.”
“You have no-”
“I have every right!” His voice boomed through the cave, stirring the bats nestled in the dark. The echo bounced up rocky pathways and climbed up to the highest stalagmite.
“I have every right.” He repeated this time in a whisper that was filled with a great deal of things. They stayed down there a while longer. At first, they stood still shuffling in awkward silence but, when Alfred looked down and finally noticed the makeshift hand-wrap, he tutted and strode over to firmly re-dress the wounds. It broke the stagnant silence.
“Is this the ‘more to do’ you were talking about that day?”
Bruce paused his typing and tilted his head back up to look at him. “If it was?”
Alfred sighs as something like shame curled in his gut. “Then I have failed you as a guardian.”
“You have given me everything I could ever need.”
Alfred let out a bitter laugh that sounded grating even to his own ears. “And even that wasn’t enough.”
There was silence.
“No, I suppose It wasn’t.” The truth felt cold on Bruce’s skin but the words have never felt more right. “It isn’t just me, Alfred. Gotham needs protection, they need a symbol: something to believe in again.”
“That’s you then?” It wasn’t a question.
Bruce didn’t have the time to defend himself as the makeshift police scanner he made from confiscated parts of decommissioned police equipment roared to life and did all the talking for him.
“I don’t support this.” Alfred said plainly as he sat in front of the large monitor to orient himself on it's functions. He spared the man behind him a glance. “But I will support you. I have since you were a child and I don’t see any reason for that to change now.”
“...I don’t deserve you, Alfred.”
“My dear boy,” He huffed good-naturedly, placing a warm hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “You deserve a great deal more than what you were given. The love of an old butler is hardly worth much.”
Bruce didn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, he placed his hand atop of Alfred’s and squeezed, reassuring the both of them that they were here together and, at least for now, that was enough.
He had been a silent murmur back then. He was but a rumbling of change no one but Gotham herself could feel coming. She could feel it in the ground, in her soul, in her heart. His murmur echoed with what could be and what she wished had been, and instead provided her with promises rather than smoke-filled fantasies.
It had been some time since anyone had promised her anything, and she waited with curious interest. She was expectant but wary; awaiting the moment he would disappoint her like the others.
It does not come.
“Vengeance.” Her heart had whispered. His name was vengeance.
She felt that didn’t quite fit him, so much sorrow and agony wrapped up in an easily injured body made whatever claim of justice he worked for almost laughable. A man cannot personify an impossibility. Vengeance was a craving for justice, a demand for sense and a fight for righteousness; standards that were impossible for humans to adhere to.
He got battered and beat by the very people he protected. Pushing a rock up a hill that would actively push against him, carving slices into his palms. She would have rained hell fire had he asked her to. Yet ever through hail and storm he continued to push that rock up the hill and every day it got easier. No credit to the rock for getting lighter but for the man for continuing to push.
She could pinpoint the exact moment her dashing knight developed a heart himself. The circus rolled in town, tearing through the morose of the city and reclaiming carneys and clowns back to their origins of painted faces and festival costumes. For that little while Gotham allowed herself to be light. Such genuine laughter filtered through streets and lit up faces and there had never been a time she felt such joy before or after. She let herself be light and in result she let herself be weak. Weak to the elements and weak to the fates; a half second of movement that’s all it took. That slight slip of control, miscalculation of a grip on a hand rail and suddenly Gotham gained a new orphan.
“His name is Dick.” Bruce uttered over the phone, voice hoarse and bare.
“Is this the right cause of action Master Bruce?” Alfred’s tone was cold in it’s analytical dissection. “Raising a child is a responsibility that cannot be taken lightly. Especially one who has undergone such tragedy so early in life, you are no therapist Bruce and I am unsure if you are the best equipped at leading the young master to the other side of mental instability.”
“I haven’t scratched the surface of the other side myself.”
“So what makes you fit to lead anyone else through it.”
Silence is becoming a nasty habit of there’s as it stretches and folds through the air, diving in awkward dips of conversation and gnawing on tattered remains of small talk.
“Alfred I…I have to do this. I won’t let another orphans life get eating alive by this city and spit out the second they find something shinier, It’s not a way for a person to live- not a way for a child to live. I don’t know if I’ll be a good guardian but…” Bruce lets him take a moment to digest his choice, feeling sated that the conversation wouldn’t be turning sour anytime soon. “with you there I feel there isn’t anything we couldn’t accomplish.”
“...You accomplish goals,” Alfred grumbled half-heartedly admittingly moved by the speech. “Children are not your next project to pick up, they are a new way of living; it would do you well to remember the distinction.”
“I understand.” Bruce says after a long while. “I’ll whatever it takes to do this right Alfred, please trust me on that.”
Alfred allows himself a chaste indulgent smile. “I have no doubt in my mind that you will try. I suppose that is the best we can ever hope to do.”
Her vengeance did not stay vengeance for long. Shadows bend with weight of mass and body as her knight slinked from rooftop to alleyway window to wall, but this time with an important addition.
A bright light zipping close behind him.
The gold-spun light followed her shadow for as long as he could walk. Flightless little thing clamoring for adventure and brave enough to go catch it.
“Stay out of Gotham.” He had always said like a mantra, like a preprogrammed answering machine that had two functions, ‘don’t talk to me’ and ‘do as I say.’ The league barely bothered glancing at such as witless warning, they would let other heroes into their city with open arms all the time yet to turn around and have such a sharp rejection for something as lowly as Gotham wasn’t only insulting, it was delusional.
“No ones touching your city if they can’t help it you know.” Clark says dryly watching the man filter through surveillance footage of the borders around Gotham in the hopes of catching any activity. “I doubt anyone from the league would want to ‘let loose’ in such an…intense city like Gotham.”
“I’m not worried about the league getting out of hand.” The rest of the sentiment is implied.
“You really think your rogue gallery would pack that big of a punch?” Clark frowns in confusion. “Wait so all those times you told me to ‘stay the hell out of your city’ you thought- what? That I couldn’t handle it?”
“You can’t.” There is a glimmer of amusement from the other man who had not yet turned away from the monitor, but when Clark turned to see him he just caught the faint outlines of a smile before it settled into it’s classic frown.
He shakes his head with equal measure fondness and exasperation. “Whatever you say Bruce.”
An instant scowl. “Don’t use civilian names on the field.”
“What exactly counts as ‘the field’ because given our job title the world is our field.”
The scowl twitches up into a smirk. “How unfortunate for you.”
Clark rolls his eyes, playfully poking Bruce on his side. “Ass.”
The rest of monitor duty passes by in a flash and although they talk about a great many things since then Bruce was still drawn to what he had claimed about his city.
It wasn’t possessiveness, in his age that nasty emotion never helped anyone with anything, just another way insecurity could be shown with poison words and lashing actions. It wasn’t as if he thought his team were incompetent, he would had never allowed them onto the Justice League if that were the case. They were humanities best and he was proud of the things they could accomplish together. No It was something deep in his chest that compelled him to hiss those words, something in his gut telling him that if any of them even stepped a foot onto Gotham soil they would be lost to the rest of the world as her citizens were. A well kept secret being left out to dry and rung up to the scrutiny of the rest of the world.
Gotham wasn’t for the faint hearted not out of vanity but out of necessity; she did not foster the lives here, she took them. She ate away at any person foolish enough to go to places they were not welcome, places where they weren’t needed. He had seen it time and time again just how quickly his city turned on her citizens, some quicker than others, but the absolute worst cases when it was drawn out. There is no way to phrase this confounded fear to his teammates without sounding like a lunatic so he lets his warnings sound like whatever they needed to sound it, just as long as those warnings were respected he didn’t care how they saw him.
It was better they hated him alive after all.
Gotham has watched her heart grow blind in the highs and no longer swimming in his lows. She sees that the men and women of the stars had parts to thank for that, as well as the little flashing blight in neon yellow and vibrant green.
So many things outside of her arms had given all the things she had taken from him so freely.
“Another one I see.” Alfred quirks his eyebrow at the scene that is played out in front of him. A young boy with shaggy hair and crude words stuffs his face full as Bruce sat a little away checking over something on his laptop. Bruce is torn away from his screen to give his father figure a sheepish twitch of a smile before slinking over.
“I was gong to tell you,” Bruce says vaguely apologetic. “he was attempting to steal the tires from the batmobile.”
“Successfully.” A voice interrupts muffled by food. “I think you mean successfully stole the tires from the batmobile Mr. Batman.”
The two adults share a look laced with sentiment and warmth.“I see. And of course the best course of action was to reward the lad with greasy, fatty, hardly nutritious fast food. I do hope you know you’ll be the one putting those tires back on Master Bruce.”
“Yes I am aware.” There is the crackle of what sounds suspiciously like laughter somewhere in the room. Bruce refuses to acknowledge it.
Alfred nods. “Good. Now if you will excuse me, we have a guest who will not stay under this roof a moment longer eating that garbage. I will prepare dinner.”
“What would I do without you Alfred?”
The fast-food bag is very deliberately taken off the counter and swiftly moved to the trash can. “Very little I assume sir.”
Gotham seethed with a green jealousy as her heart cut himself into pieces and quietly gave them out to people without her permission- had she not provided all that her knight needed? What else was there!? She just needed to wait her turn. It won’t be long before her adoring heart makes a mistake and their makeshift family will tremble at the fault of a man they put so much expectation onto. She couldn’t even fathom the full scope of things his little lights put onto him, familial pressure, desperate approval, childish resentment; They’ll fold like playing cards she was certain.
It was cold.
“You’re not making any sense Master Bruce please-” Hands lock onto Alfred’s impeccably ironed outfit and dug.
“I failed him, I failed him, I failed him,” Another mantra, echoing through his mind and escaping from his mouth. “Oh God I wasn’t ready Alfred, you were right I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t-”
“I’ve got you my boy, it’s alright now.” Alfred’s voice is gentle and familiar but his words-
“Everything will be ok.”
His words were wrong.
She would wait as she always did. All it took was time and a little bit of patience.
Bruce screamed to the heavens, to hell, and to whatever dormant God in the world willing to do something. Anything. “My son Alfred please where is he!? Where is my son!?”
Afterall Gotham didn’t make hearts. she only broke them.