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Now, here's the thing: Gotham City was not a kind place. It was not a gentle place. It was made of ashes and smog so thick out-of-towners choked on it, and everyone born in the city carried it in their veins, in their lungs, in their very DNA to the day they died regardless of how far they moved and how many oceans they crossed to get away.
Gotham City wasn't the place anyone imagined growing old in – most people were surprised if they even got halfway there – and it certainly wasn't an ideal vacation spot. If Europeans thought the US’ school shooter drills were weird, then they'd lose their minds if they learned about Gotham’s Poison Ivy Pollen of the Week Drills, or Joker Venom Drills, or Scarecrow Fear Toxin Drills. Gothamites learned to carry their weapon of choice in easily accessible ways and a gas mask in their bag every time they left the house – and sometimes inside too – from a young age.
Gotham City bred vicious people, where kindness was scarce because a smile was usually the prelude to the villain scheme to spite Batman of the week or a syringe filled with dubious drugs to the neck. The few circuses that even braved Gotham knew to cut the clown acts out of their program if they wanted to actually sell some tickets and after the famous Flying Graysons murders even acrobatic acts were on thin ice.
Bottom line was: trust was hard won in Gotham City. Kindness was rarer than a sunny sky. So when the people of Gotham imprinted on someone, when they deemed them worthy of their trust, their respect, their loyalty , it was usually there to stay. Not only that, but Gothamites protected their own. They didn't have much, but what they did have, they defended fiercely. There was a reason outsiders knew never to badmouth Gotham around a local – it may have been a hell city, but it was their hell city, and no Metropolis upstart was going to complain about the water quality around them . At least their billionaire wasn't Lex Luthor.
That being said, Gotham City's most prized people were, and had been for years and years, the Waynes. If Gotham were a constitutional monarchy, the Waynes would have been their very own royal family – largely useless but fun to keep track of in the tabloids. Really, though, the Waynes were something that Gotham loved almost as much as they hated Metropolis and their bougie air quality. They'd been there for so long it was hard to remember a time without them. When you said Wayne, you said Gotham, and vice versa. But more than their longevity and their place in the city's history books, the thing that made Gotham love the Waynes was how much that family loved Gotham in return.
There were other families that had been around for decades, if not more. There were plenty of other rich or influential names tied closely to Gotham's history and culture. But none of them did as much for the city as the Waynes did.
Because, the thing was, everyone eventually moved on from Gotham, right? When someone asked ‘what should I do while I'm in Gotham?’, the answer was usually a resounding ‘leave’. The city was a get rich quick scheme, every criminal's wet dream where the brave – or the reckless – took the risk of getting murdered daily for a few years or decades in order to fill their pockets before cutting ties and fucking off to greener pastures to enjoy the rest of their disgustingly wealthy years. Even the old money crowd tended to ship their heirs off to boarding schools and universities overseas, where most of them conveniently put down roots and managed their parents’ businesses from afar, never to set foot again in Gotham. Only the truly corrupt – who could never evade the justice system as easily anywhere else as they did there – or the most poor – who had no prospects and were given no chances, who, if they couldn't afford rent in Crime Alley , would surely die within the week in a city that didn't have acid rain alerts every other Tuesday – stayed in Gotham.
But not the Waynes.
The Waynes, against all reason and human instinct to be safe and sheltered, remained. Year after year, generation after generation. And they invested. They gave back to the city that tried to bury them alive every day just as much as they took from it. More than, sometimes.
Thomas and Martha Wayne had been the city’s darlings. They'd built and rebuilt and renovated virtually anything and everything they could get their hands on without going bankrupt. They'd twisted high society's arm and tricked them into helping the remaining ninety nine percent by dressing charity up in fancy galas and dazzling fundraisers. A Wayne birthday meant a new hospital wing being built or equipped with vital machinery, anniversaries took the form of cheques filled with exorbitant amounts of money handed over to public schools, libraries, or museums, and every holiday that held the tiniest amount of significance to the upper echelon of Gotham City came out the other end of an extravagant party hosted at Wayne Manor in the form of new shelters for the homeless or the victims of abuse, of more affordable housing for the financially vulnerable, of food banks and free clinics and employment offices.
The Waynes had built their generational wealth by profiting off of Gotham City. But unlike the rest of the rich and the powerful who only sucked the city dry and then some more and left behind only bloodless husks and rotting corpses, the Wayne family invested most of that profit right back into the people and the infrastructure as a thank you for the big fancy mansion they could afford to warm every room of every winter without fail.
The day Thomas and Martha died was a day of mourning for the whole city.
Every Gothamite, housed or homeless, driven to petty crimes to afford a loaf of bread or huddled together with their family in the living room of an apartment belonging to one of the many buildings bearing a well-known W on their front, watched the news or read the papers and ached for the stoic eight-year-old swimming in a police officer's heavy coat in front of the GCPD police station, whose only remaining family was a middle aged butler and the ghosts of his parents haunting a now too big manor on the outskirts of the city.
For a while there, Bruce Wayne was kind of forgotten. As a child with no responsibilities aside from attending school and eating his vegetables, he wasn't exactly in a position to make public appearances and organise charity galas to improve the city his parents had ultimately bled for. Then, he went abroad, disappearing altogether for a good few years, and everyone thought that might finally be the moment people would have seen the last of the Waynes. Frankly, few could fault the kid for cutting ties with Gotham and leaving it in the dust – they'd taken his family's money and generosity for years and it hadn't been enough; they'd had to come for his parents’ very lives in their greed and viciousness. It would have been entirely understandable for the kid to put his foot down and refuse to give any more. Disappointing, but reasonable.
But then he came back. Older, taller, broader, yet still so painfully young and kind – a ditz and a flirt, who didn't seem to ever care if he took home a skirt or showed up at an event with a tuxedo-clad body hanging off his arm, who made a fool of himself by drinking too much and taking a dive in a public fountain with an expensive, tailored Armani suit hugging his form, who threw money around like it was candy and talked the socialites into donating more than they had originally planned so skillfully it was hard not to see Martha's influence in his vapid smile but sharp, blue eyes – Bruce Wayne didn't take long to earn the title of Gotham's very own Prince.
He was silly and airheaded and an embarrassment, but he was theirs . He took care of Gotham, sometimes more fiercely than his own parents had, and it didn't take a genius to know why.
Bruce was a weirdo who did the most outrageous things every time he attended a public event but seemed to shut himself off behind the manor's ancient brickwork the rest of the time, who was consistently voted Best Corporate Employer of the Year despite missing nine meetings out of ten and somehow always showing up late and dishevelled the few times he did make it there, who asked things like ‘it's one banana, Alfred, what could it cost? Ten dollars?’ but went around the poorer parts of the city before the cold set in every year like clockwork and handed warm clothing to everyone he passed and gave up an entire afternoon of his rich boy life every Christmas Eve by spending it at a random soup kitchen in Crime Alley and serving people hot food with a smile and an envelope thick with cash.
And when he took in an orphaned circus boy and gave him a home? When he plucked a street rat right off the grimy corners of Crime Alley and slapped his name with a hyphen right after Jason Todd's legal name? The citizens of Gotham City knew that Bruce Wayne and that man's entire eccentric family would have to do something majorly fucked up to ever lose their possessiveness and loyalty.
Sure, Bruce Wayne wasn't perfect. He was, at the end of the day, a rich, white male who hadn't known real struggle a day in his life. He probably didn't even know how to make an omelette or turn the washing machine on when his British butler went on vacation twice a year. And taking on a ward in his early twenties had proven to be an actual challenge he hadn't been quite ready for, if the fact that Dick Grayson left home and was conspicuously absent from public events for a good few years was anything to go by. But he was earnest and kind and kept trying, again and again, to make Gotham into something more than a hive of corruption and his parents’ death sentence. When everyone else gave up, Bruce Wayne held tightly with both hands and refused to let go.
So when Jason Todd was pronounced dead, aged 15, it wasn't just the Waynes who mourned. It wasn't just Bruce Wayne who suffered a loss. But where Bruce looked drained – of hope, of life, of joy and love and laughter – Gotham City was furious . Everyone who wasn't in the one percent knew that boy or had heard stories from someone who did or had caught a glimpse outside their window or on the TV or in the Gazette. Many swore, to this day, that they had run into Jason right there in the streets of Crime Alley, while just as many tried to forget they'd beaten the kid for his shoes or hired him for small jobs around the area that needed a tiny stature or skinny, nimble fingers.
Jason Todd-Wayne was theirs and Gotham had lost too much – kept losing too much – to put up with another loss so soon. The fact that it was one of them , a true Gothamite who'd been hardened right there in the ugly, bleeding heart of the city, and a child to boot was only fuel added to the fire.
And when a rumour started floating around that Jason had been killed by the Joker? The detestable clown who caused nothing but death and destruction for the hell of it and treated Arkham like it had revolving doors with how often he was in and out of the place? Who so many of the regular folk had fallen victim to his cruel schemes or had lost someone to them? Well. Gotham wasn't known for its kindness.
The Waynes didn't release details of Jason's death – but the funeral was private and the casket was closed and Gotham didn't need to know more than that to piece together that it hadn't been pretty and it hadn't been painless. And the truth had a tendency to come out, sooner or later, in various ways, so it wasn't long at all before proof started popping up of Jason Todd-Wayne having purchased a ticket abroad before his death, of his presence being confirmed in Ethiopia – coincidentally the very same place Joker was confirmed to have been in around the same time, funny how that works – and of the Joker conveniently becoming an ambassador for Iran, of all places, and just so happening to have gained diplomatic immunity right before news of Jason's death was released to the public.
The clown didn't show his face around Gotham for a while, naturally. Some thought he might have finally done humanity a service and died somewhere out there where no Gothamite would ever have to gaze upon the creature's hateful painted face, but most knew better than to believe in fairy tales. Good things like that didn't happen to people like them. So they bided their time. The Waynes mourned and suffered and closed themselves off for a long time, the Rogues squabbled like children to fill the vacuum left by the clown’s absence, and Batman – who seemed to have lost his little birdie sometime before Bruce Wayne lost his son – became more of a malevolent eldritch horror who could punch your kidney into your esophagus that was best avoided than a brooding shadow who protected the weak and scared off the criminals.
And in all that time, Gotham remembered. They sat, and waited, and sharpened their knives, and when the Joker finally stepped foot back within the city borders, they pounced.
When the GCPD finally chased away the mob of people gathered like hyenas in the middle of a concrete jungle, they could barely identify the corpse plastered to the pavement as having once been the entity known as the Joker. When they asked around, looking for witnesses, everyone seemed to have gone mute, blind, and deaf, as not one person could point at a single human and confirm that they were seen at the scene of the crime. Surveillance footage was curiously blank or straight up gone and nothing could be recovered no matter how hard the Commissioner tried – and it wasn't very hard, really, considering his daughter had been shot by the clown and he, himself, had been a victim of the creature's sick plots and schemes.
The rest of the Rogues started being a bit more wary of including innocent Gothamites in their plans after that – though not all, and not for very long – but they all learned a lesson they made sure never to forget: do literally anything you want, but do not touch a Wayne, if you value your continued subscription to life.
The Waynes never confirmed nor denied if the Joker had actually been the one to murder Jason Todd-Wayne. They didn't need to. Everyone with eyes to see could tell that Bruce lost some of the weight dragging him down and obscuring his soft smiles or playful grins.
Gotham's revenge didn't reverse anything. It didn't bring Jason back or take away Bruce's grief. It didn't fix the countless lives forever ruined by the Joker's cruelty. It didn't even make Gotham City all that safer. But everyone felt like one of the hundreds of dark clouds hanging over them had been dispelled and it was like a debt had been paid, if a life for a life could ever be weighed and valued and exchanged – Gotham had taken Thomas and Martha Wayne from Bruce and they couldn't bring them or Jason back, but they had removed his son's killer from his city's streets and ensured he would never take another citizen's child or parent or sibling away ever again.
In time, Batman mellowed out again – though he would never have the privilege of holding the same kind of trust from the city's people as he once might have done – and showed up with another bird at his side, a quieter one but still as quippy when it mattered, still as kind and good and light as the other two before it, just equipped with a staff this time around. And a year later, Bruce Wayne announced the adoption of yet another child with blue eyes and black hair, one of his this time around, whose name was Timothy Drake before a hyphen was added, and maybe the people of Gotham didn't know what to do with him at first – a rich kid who had probably never even stepped foot in Crime Alley let alone talked to a regular person in his life – but they soon came to realise that no one who bore the name Wayne could ever be anything other than a Wayne.
And just like they'd done with everyone else that came before him, Gotham claimed Timothy as their own, and vowed that what they did to the Joker would look like child's play in comparison to what they'd do to whatever poor sod ever thought to harm a single hair on that kid’s head in the future. Gothamites weren't terribly kind or warm or trusting, but they had their exceptions and the Wayne family was Gotham's through and through. Ditziness, eccentricity, and all.