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Gotham is the city of a thousand deaths.
Her every building was birthed in flame and, if lucky, grew into a scorched adolescence. You could count on one hand the properties lacking a single recorded weapon discharge. Most loom at the periphery, pokey low-rises tucked between swamps and interstates, half-forgotten by their landlords and spared the devastation of the earthquake. The rest are recent builds, the result of Wayne Enterprise investment. They have not yet faced the baptism.
Within the veins of Gotham lurk her history—the escalating warfare her children adapt to stroke by stroke. Her streets pounded into shape by attacks on an underlying utility mains, rampages re-opening barely scabbed over wounds. Her blocks still lack the grid sensibility of her sisters, months on from No Man’s Land’s close. She has made what she could out of it. To an outsider, she might seem the cobbled together remains of whatever survived the latest Rogue attack. But to her children, she is more.
That is to say—Gotham is a city forged by explosions. She’s used to a bomb or two.
What she is not prepared for, however, is this bomb.
Batman has seen many within his life. Rarely have they been harmless. Their scars are self-evident, sprawled across the sunken tenements and reinforced skyscrapers, carved into Gotham’s marshland and mayoral procedures, crying out from the imploded lives and scattered shrapnel imbedded in those rendered little more than collateral. As far as explosions go, this one operates like most others he has encountered. Upending life as he knows it, sending him crashing to the ground in a familiar dive surrounded by fiery debris.
And yet, this time, for the first time, as heat licks his ankles and a fiery tongue singes the back of his cape, Batman feels something other than helpless rage. Something other than grim resolution. Something like—
Hope.
His night begins within the skyline of Gotham. It always starts out this way.
New high rises claw their way into the skies, competing against one another to add a greater number of floors each month. Funded by the various subsidiaries of Wayne Enterprises, they go beyond the minimum legal requirements and outfit their residential and commercial units with amenities par excellence. The towers have so far vocalised their growing pangs through a near-constant chatter of construction noises. It may be a healthy sound—one he would not trade for the world—but Gotham’s ongoing transformation has brought about its own disadvantages. It’s only gotten more difficult to identify the sounds of crimes in progress, and frequent changes to the urban terrain have forced the city’s wildlife into a pattern of constant adaptation.
Since the dissolution of No Man’s Land eleven months ago, the Bat has dedicated time each week to re-learning the city as one might a long-lost lover. He traces her newest edges with his gloved fingers and remembers her penchant for grotesque flourishes, her blinding smiles beneath sunglass-tinted skyscraper panes and demure glances from behind corrugated iron fences. After each expedition, he sits, fingers bowed, catching his breath as he re-configures his schedule going forward.
He has, admittedly, fallen out of this habit of late. Following the murder of Vesper Fairchild, re-calibrating the patrol rota with its strategic division of districts fell much by the wayside as the Batman took a leave of absence from such efforts. Now that he is trying—again, a nagging voice reminds; always again—he has re-arranged his patrol to account for this study of the urban landscape. Time has been set aside for its communication. He now uploads his latest findings as voice memos onto the Bat-computer instead of harbouring them all within his mind. Oracle has already told him she appreciates it. Gotham certainly benefits. Violent crime has fallen by 8.3%.
Yesterday he overheard a rumour concerning a forthcoming arms trade between Penguin and an unknown seller, a shipment containing among other things a hundred Daewoo K11s. He stakes out the location of the deal and hovers above the meeting place half an hour prior to the agreed upon time. He tucks behind one of the gargoyles that survived the quake and prepares for the confrontation ahead.
His system already loaded with adrenaline, he senses more than hears Batgirl when she drops down behind him.
In the last week alone he has relied upon her more than any other save Oracle. Her dropping in on his patrols is a new development, but not unforeseeable. Her skill and commitment to the mission renders most of her encounters with crime short and most nights quiet. This unexpected appearance was to be expected, her curiosity winning out in a moment of boredom.
“Arms deal,” he tells her. “Penguin.”
It’s enough alongside his body language and the suspiciously cleared space beneath them to communicate the situation as he’s deduced so far. Perhaps she even notices something he does not. She glances down imperceptibly then faces him and nods. He leaves space for her to offer further observations but she remains silent, unmoving. “You should—” stay away from this and go patrol elsewhere, he wants to say, but she anticipates his intention and interrupts.
“Pushing away again.”
It is a disservice to the girl behind the mask, the girl they had christened Cassandra in absence of any other name, to look upon her and see nothing but her father, the man who had hurt her most. Yet in that moment, all he can hear is the taunting voice of David Cain.
I stripped your entire life away, kid, to show what you really are…a monster, just like me…and it worked, too. A normal man would’ve turned to his family for help, especially with the kind of family you have, but you pushed them away…you caved in on yourself.
Because you’re weak.
Though he yearns to shove that memory to the side, to pretend Cain was addressing a different man, a different protégé—he knows he cannot. Memory exists in the imagination. You may speak of a memory, a singular snippet to be viewed alone and put aside when convenient, but memory is inescapably plural; that designation for all which man remembers and the primordial pool into which one recollection spills over into another.
“You said you…would not. Not anymore.”
“I did,” he concedes, unable to re-cast the particulars of that recent conversation they both remember so well.
“You did,” she confirms with a wrinkle in her mask, the only sign of the knowing smile beneath.
He mirrors her and quirks the corner of his lip slightly.
Noticing his effort, Cass claps her hands together, silently, always silently, and the ripple on her face widens. He resists the long-buried instinct to return her expression with one of fond exasperation. All of the children he has accumulated take such perverse pleasure in outmanoeuvring him.
Children.
With that thought, he remembers burnt cloth against skin and hair follicles turned to ash and his face must fall because his mirror abandons all its joy.
Batman turns away from Batgirl and toward the street below. Henchmen have gathered in the adjoining alleyways, small markers of gang affiliation tucked into pockets, barely concealed weapons pocking out of holsters layered beneath their jackets. He senses Batgirl venture closer and assumes she intends to scope out the scene beside him until he feels two index fingers jabbed into his nasolabial folds.
He startles and jerks to the side but she stays on him, pushing his skin upward and outward until she has succeeded in mimicking a smile the width of which he hasn’t mustered in years.
“My case…now. Go practice…your smile.”
She taps the communicator in her ear, the one that provides a direct line to Oracle. I'll tattle first, she seems to be saying. He stifles his reaction. He had foregone his comms unit tonight, thinking it too... sensitive a date for Jim Gordon's daughter to be eavesdropping on him. He always does so on this particular night, and she has never before begrudged the act. Removing one of her many means of listening was always more placebo than cure-all, but it hasn't back-fired until this occasion.
He still attempts to argue the dismissal, but she silences him by jabbing his right ankle.
It tenses at the contact but he holds back the wince that would reveal his soreness. He’d recently slammed both legs into tempered glass to save the lives of a GCPD SWAT team from Floyd Lawton’s attack on David Cain. Such a stunt would usually garner no notice, except that after the rush to escort Cain to the courthouse and Lawton to a medical facility, he had neglected to ice his legs. There were no breaks, no bruising, only hairline fractures. Some time ago, he could have shaken even these off, but after the high intensity fights that had characterised his last two encounters with some of the deadliest men in the world, his ankle was showing its age.
“It will not slow me down," he insists.
“Hurt,” she says, the word utterly superfluous when they both know what is wrong with his body.
He supposes it is her way of telling him that if he continues to act obtuse, she will continue to treat him like an imbecile.
He casts another glance at the meeting place that is soon to yield yet another crime scene, several unconscious criminals, and no end of marked weapons for the GCPD to destroy. It bites at him, the need to oversee the operation. Even though he trusts in Batgirl’s skills, almost as much as his own, the fear that this will go awry has him open his mouth again.
This time Batgirl covers it with the palm of her hand.
That stops him. Arrests his mind. They have never shared as much bodily contact outside of a combat situation as they have this night. Even that ill-fated mission many months ago on the sinking ship had provided some pretext for their sustained exposure to one another’s bodies. Tonight, twenty feet up in the wind-tussled air, the Kevlar suits become skin and each touch elicits a stroke of bone-burrowed terror.
He forces his own discomfort aside and turns his thoughts to unpicking the one before him. He wonders if her actions aren’t just the product of her recent interactions with her father—her pleading in the Bat-cave for Cain to change his ways, the looming odds that he would not. He wonders if this entire conversation isn’t her using him as a substitute. A safer alternative for parental contact and reciprocation than an incarcerated assassin.
Perhaps it is not Batgirl, but Cassandra who is asking.
He nods after a beat, and she removes her hand. Good, she seems to say, though he does not know that it is. He makes a low grunt, a final protestation she waves aside with a determined jerk of her neck.
This is what passes for goodbye between them.
He takes the cue and grapples six blocks north to where he had parked the Batmobile earlier within the district colloquially known as Crime Alley. He had chosen a small back-alley, almost a private drive for an unoccupied block of half-demolished apartments, close but not too close to the stake-out site. He’d used it on only a handful of prior occasions, but he’s already well-practiced at tucking his vehicle into the long shadows stamped between the buildings. He’d spent enough time shining its paint and tuning its hubcaps that the vehicle’s aura frightens off any would-be opportunists, convincing them beyond doubt that this car belongs to the Batman and to tamper with it would mean piquing undesired attention. Every dusk, he sows these seeds of fear and every dawn he reaps his reward in the form of an unbothered car.
Nothing should have been amiss tonight. It's late November, the anniversary of when Thomas and Martha Wayne died thirty-two years ago. More than any other night of the year, the streets around Crime Alley are still and sombre, residents and sidewalk slabs holding their breath until his spectre has finished its annual haunt.
Everything should have been as it always was.
And yet, when he returns to the Batmobile, he finds himself wandering into a crime in progress.
Very little surprises Batman. He has helmed the defence of Gotham for fourteen full years and counting, and over that time he has faced all manner of threat. City takeovers, plagues, earthquakes, transportation hijackings, brainwashing—nights that canvass the entire spectrum of the human experience. Over time he has come to expect the horrors. Has learnt to brace in advance and prepare his stomach for the novel reveal of another sick trick.
But tonight it is not some new depravity that startles him.
It is instead the ingenuity of a figure cloaked in fabric imperceptible to his cowl’s thermal scanning. An invisible man creeping away from his car.
Batman laughs and the stranger whips his head in his direction.
Years of combat account for his pause, making up for his lapse by having him grab his bolas from his utility belt and launching them toward the unknown’s legs before he can even muster a single conscious thought.
As the figure jumps to the side, dodging the weapon, Batman has already executed his next move. Twin batarangs in each hand. He flings the projectiles to the left of the target, urging them to shy back away from the brick wall they were heading toward. Tit for tat, his adversary executes a back handspring and retreats toward the street.
Gymnastics training.
Batman updates his ongoing profile (5’10”, slender, androgynous build, access to high-calibre equipment) before pushing his advantage.
He darts forward and swipes a gauntleted hand at the figure. They dip out of his grip. He tries again. They repeat this, at a greater speed.
For a moment they stare at each other’s silhouettes, shadowed by the poor lighting in the alleyway. Then they fall into an improvised dance. A blur of attacks and evasions. Feints receive no more attention than the wind, nonexistent between the brownstones. Feet pass like mist over the trash-strewn ground. The figure anticipates his every motion before he makes it, understands his intent through the minutest of twitches.
It reminds him of his most recent clash with Nightwing. His prediction of Nightwing’s every move, born from years of close study. The frustration of every missed manoeuvre. Batman only experiences such agitation himself when he spars with Batgirl. But hers is a unique ability. The chances of him discovering another of her talents are infinitesimal. The chances of it happening once again in Gotham next-to-impossible.
They draw nearer to the sidewalk. Batman has to end this soon, before it spills out onto the road and endangers innocent civilians.
“Stop.”
The surging action falters. Batman has already fallen into his resting stance, prepared for all range of motion. His opponent takes a few moments longer to lower their arms. He adds cautious to his profile.
In the absence of movement, the alley falls silent. He waits for the other to speak, meanwhile collecting his own observations. Left foot dominant. Right eye dominant. Very likely alone. Familiar with Gotham.
It’s a time-tested method and does not take long to pay dividends.
“Why.” It’s delivered without inflection. Faintly masculine; not entirely developed. A winter branch still cracking beneath snow’s weight. “Feeling tired?”
“Never,” comes the unthinking lie.
Instead of rising to the challenge or abandoning the fight, the boy gives himself away with a downturned wrinkle in the fabric of his mask.
“Of course not,” he says, a frosting of bitterness sprinkling his words. “When has the Bat ever felt tired. Ever felt love, for that matter. He isn’t constrained by the same mushy feelings that damn the rest of us.”
The acidity knocks Batman off-centre. Rarely has a crook or a Rogue spoken to him like that. Dissected his attributes with an air of disappointment. The closest would be Rā’s, but he tends to make more ambitious proclamations at the same time, convinced that the image of a cold-blooded cobra he projects onto Bruce will eventually bear fruit.
Meanwhile this fruit is already rotten.
Batman notices an unusual movement—a hand swayed not quite naturally enough, fingers disappearing from sight, grabbing something, maybe, from behind his back—and launches himself forward. The boy reacts with speed but fails to defend himself the moment he expects Batman to go for his arm. Jabbing the celiac plexus with his fist, Batman winds his opponent. The boy doubles up instinctively and draws his hands to his epigastric region, releasing whatever he had reached for behind his back.
Batman catches it before it clatters to the ground. Turns it over to take a brief glance.
It’s a detonator.
Before examining it further, he grabs the boy by the lower arm and holds him in place, to be sure he won’t run off. The boy tries to escape his grip by squirming and yanking but he’s still gasping for breath and at this, Batman’s hands are practiced.
Batman looks over the device. Cylindrical, smooth, topped by an amber button and shaped to fit the palm of an adolescent. An impressive feat of engineering, to squeeze such complex wiring within such a small device. Another damned spot on Gotham’s soul for making ill-will all too easy.
He squeezes the boy’s wrist until he elicits a squawk.
“Where did you plant your bomb?” he growls, tightening his grip with every word. “How did you get your hands on the materials? Who were you trying to blow up?”
The boy gives a dry laugh, wheezing still. “Find out for yourself.”
Batman places enough pressure to feel the ulna fracture beneath his fingertips. The boy whines but resists yelling out.
“This is not a negotiation. The time for that has already passed. I am neither looking for a wild goose chase nor a Riddler copycat. Tell me where you placed the bomb, or—”
“You can break every bone in my body and I still wouldn’t tell you.”
It is as much truth as truth may be found on these sallow streets. Batman grunts. He withdraws handcuffs from his utility belt and incapacitates the would-be bomber before marching him towards the Batmobile. He considers depositing the uncooperative boy on Gordon’s doorstep and pursuing the lead alongside the police—to maximise the efficiency of his next task, the search for the bomb—but then he remembers Gordon’s retirement and his plans sour. Gordon’s much-lacking replacement, Akins, would not be able to handle a case of this magnitude. Would not even likely try.
Interrogation within the Batmobile it will have to be.
“Does the Great Dark Knight ever plan on sharing how far he expects me to walk? Are we headed back to your car? I’m afraid I can’t follow you there. My mama always told me never get into cars with strangers.” The boy clambers onto a hubcap he’d danced over before, making a ruckus. “Is this going to go like McCarthy’s the Road instead? You the good guy we take on faith, me the picture of innocence lost. On and on and on until everyone gets bored and we all give up?”
It is the boy who chatters on and on and on. Batman is not yet sure whether it is borne of nerves or malice. He tugs his opponent off of the hubcap podium.
“This is Gotham,” the boy tries again in a new tone of voice, sweet peelings struggling to contain a sour centre. “I’d prefer to know what I’m walking into before I literally walk into it. Cannibals around every corner and all.”
“There have been no reported cases of cannibalism taking place within the limits of Gotham’s metropolitan area since the close of No Man’s Land.”
The boy stops and faces Batman, his mask failing to conceal his shock. “What the hell does that mean?”
Batman ignores him. They are nearly at the Batmobile. This could only be a ploy to divert his attention.
“Hey, I asked you a question. Hello?! Batman? Come on, bossman, listen to me!”
This time Batman pauses. For a moment he hears a different voice, a younger voice; wood not yet shattered by the fall of a woodchopper’s axe. For a moment he can picture a child swinging his legs over the side of a nearby fire escape, ignoring Bruce telling him to get down, ears open only to the thrill of the caped crusade, the one his father drove him towards. For a moment it is all too real, a son alive, a bird’s warbling—a tragedy not yet set in motion. He can no more ignore his mission to clean up Gotham’s streets than he can stop himself from looking away from his quarry to search the sky above. As he does, the certainty of what is to come withers against the hope that uplifts him. Even in his darkest days, what he knows to be true could never conquer his weakest imaginings.
And he has imagined the world.
The rooflines are empty. The skies silent. His survey of the space above reveals its false promise. He tells himself for the hundredth time that it has always been that way. His soul fractures once more, fifty times past what he used to believe would be his breaking point. If Bruce Wayne has learnt anything across these many breakages, it is that hope is so much crueller than grief could ever fathom.
He has only glanced away for a moment, but a second of lapsed attention is all the boy needs.
He slips his cuffs in half that time—practiced, practiced, practiced—and grabs the detonator from where Batman had slung its awkward oblong shape onto his belt. In a single motion, he tears off his mask and casts it to the ground. He smiles and seeing the face beneath, Bruce is utterly paralysed.
He might stand there for an hour, maybe two, taking in every detail, committing to memory every contour of flush cheeks, every mark and mole on undamaged skin, every twitching nerve, every eyelash, every dangling curl. Every fleck of colour in a boundless ocean. Every line scored beneath tired eyes. Every change and every similarity. Everything and yet not nearly enough before his son speaks.
“Whoops,” says Jason, squeezing the word out from between chapped lips and a painfully tight smile. “Didn’t expect that, did you, Bruce?”
“God…”
Patient fingers caress the amber detonation button. Once, twice, they circle the rim.
“Not quite. Wanna guess again?”
He remembers winding his thumb around a crying child’s palm, pressing soft circular motions against even softer skin. Some tragedy had struck—one of the many he had failed to prevent—and his hands were too large, too dwarfed by the responsibility lain at his feet to quell this child’s pain. In the absence of experience he had copied his father. A stroking thumb to say, I cannot change what happened. I can only show you that I am with you now. As the minutes wore on, the sobs turned to hiccups, then sniffles, and then, eventually, subsided.
Bruce remembers it now in all its clarity. He wonders why he never soothed his boys that way. Why this moment of their probable end should be the first time for him to consider it.
“Jason—” he starts. Not sure yet of what he plans to say, but desperate to say it anyway.
He doesn’t get the chance to figure it out.
The boy’s thumb jabs down.
Fourteen years of reflexes save his life that night.
After operating so long in America’s deadliest city, his body is well attuned to the frequency of bombs. He can detect and respond to an incoming explosion in a matter of microseconds. No matter the make or the size, he knows all their melodies. Even when he is flying blind, he can raise his arms at the exact beat the conductor will motion for quiet and the machine will initiate the process for which it was built. By this time, the cumulative sum of all the pauses he has heard could fill several symphonies.
On those rare occasions where his dreams lack sound, the quiet he hears is the city’s background noise; the deadness between the shift of the ignition key and the blooming of heat as every organism within a three block radius prepares the way for the would-be ghosts.
Fourteen years.
Fourteen years and nothing else are what save Batman’s life that night.
The fear sown by one charred day in Ethiopia is all that enables him to save his son’s.
Terror ignites his nerves. Lightning substitutes for the void his mind has become. Together they propel his body forward. His limbs work on instinct, springing forward from the ground and toward the chest of the boy before him, locking both arms around the child who bears his son’s face, even if it isn’t him, even if such miracles never happen to a man like him. Those doubts are discarded as Jason before him and the incendiary device behind him spur his sides.
He tucks the child’s head between his chin and chest and envelops every limb beneath the protective barrier offered by his cape. He clings to the form beneath him and pins it to the ground, using every pound of his full body weight to force the other down. The boy squirms against the hold but Batman’s mass is far too great to be shifted. He has almost succeeded in covering them both when the explosion bellows with the fury of the heavens and expels their conjoined selves from the safety of the dark.
Sound and fury, signifying everything.
The force of the bomb steals the wind from his chest. Its uproar deafens and its almighty fire blinds. Against the assault, he struggles to retain consciousness. The shockwave threatens to trample over everything he is and steal the boy away.
But Batman has not lasted as long as he has by relenting to such challenges.
His ears ring, but he holds.
His eyes burn, but he holds.
His feet crumple, losing purchase against a power that annihilates cement in a matter of seconds, but still, he holds.
Eventually the earth stabilises long enough to merit some movement.
His glove paws at the molten visual-processing unit on the side of his head. It stings his temple. He extracts it without decorum and crushes the machinery within his grasp. At this point he looks down; looks at the broken pieces of a once trust-worthy instrument, cradled in one dark palm; looks at the seared asphalt ground etched in the silhouette of a bat; looks at his arms, wrapped tight around the boy wearing his son’s face, the boy who cannot be here but is. Looks at what in the space of one hour has become his life.
Bruce Wayne prays this is a miracle.
Batman knows it is not.