Chapter Text
There was a gunshot. A burst of smoke. A burning blast stabbed the armor he had melded from spare parts; the armor that had been stained by blood, dried and darkened into imperceptible smears against the monochromatic metal; the armor that had been dinged by bullets, reduced to nothing more than scrapes and dents that had taken the place of the man beneath the suit. Now, another bullet accumulated to the two years’ worth of damage.
Batman had taken another bullet for Bruce Wayne.
His body slammed against the metal of the catwalk; toppled over, legs flailing helplessly in the air; rolling off the edge.
His fingers caught the railing.
People screamed from below him, from within the flames and chaos and the ruins of Bella Reál’s speech, the impending flood that would engulf them all. But he could hardly hear them above the thunder of his heart, hammering away from within the fragile sanctity of his ribcage, the flesh that composed his chest, his body, hidden deep within the suit.
Death had always lurked within the shadows of the Batman, within bullets and knives and aching pains that threatened to tear him down into a pathetic heap, but it was not until he was dangling above Gotham City, a rifled riddle of duct tape and clear glasses, that it had drawn this close. Chains rattled in the back of his brain. A secondary gunshot rang in his ears.
They stared at each other; the Batman’s black cowl obscuring the sweat that dripped from his forehead, drenching him in a silent cold dread, and the man with his awkward gait stepping to the side, nearer and closer, his hands fumbling over the rifle in realization of his clear advantage. He reloaded his weapon in a series of clumsy clicks, his eyes darting from the metal in his hands to the man who clung to the metal below him, dangling above the impending watery wreckage of Gotham.
Even with his glasses, he could not see beyond the suit of Batman. He could not see that, behind the scrap metal and the cowl, was Bruce Wayne, the lone survivor of the Wayne family and inheritor of their billions, foolishly attending Poe’s masquerade in the midst of devastation, so fatal, so hideous, plagued by the red horrors of blood that swirled and dissipated in the flooded waters; the sons of mothers and fathers whom he had failed.
Bruce wasn’t sure what he had expected to do. He thought he had been making a difference, but now his fingers ached, screamed, shrieked, as they desperately attempted to hold himself above Gotham. His body dangled behind him, each limb swaying in the suspension of midair like those of a ragdoll.
The man with his glasses atop his mask could not see that as his gawky figure swayed back and forth, gloves tightening on the rifle in his hands. He had the apprehension of a virgin to murder.
Bruce had been too late. The vans around the city’s walls had exploded, the Riddler’s warped pursuit of justice prevailed, gushing through the city, even as he was imprisoned behind bars. As he belted his deranged rendition of “Ave Maria” and threw his temper tantrum, his plan still succeeded because Bruce had been too late. The city still flooded.
The man with the duct tape mask, allowing just enough space for his nostrils to peek out and his nose to breathe, could not see the swaying subsiding, his sole intent drawing the rifle nearer and nearer to his victim’s head.
Bruce had been too late for Alfred, too. If he had been more efficient, more careful, more focused, perhaps he would have realized what was to happen in time. Perhaps he could have spared Alfred from taking the sins of the father as his own. He could have spared the poor man who had given him his cufflinks, the cufflinks his father had bestowed upon him; who had helped raise him and was still burdened with his caretaking; who had taught him to handle himself and had done so much for him only to receive an explosion and hospitalization in return.
The man in the duct tape mask was able to breathe, but Bruce couldn’t, beneath the suffocation of Batman and the lactic acid that seared through his fingers each second they remained on the bar. He aimed the rifle.
Bruce stared down the barrel, into the void.
The rifle shook.
His fingers shook.
The man’s hands shook.
His lungs should have shook—expanded and contracted, pumped oxygen through his body—but they had ceased to be useful.
The rifle would pierce both Batman and Bruce Wayne in a burst of flame that send both to the cold, hard pavement of Gotham with a crimson splatter where his corpse would lay until the sea inevitably tore down the makeshift walls and engulfed his flattened husk of a body, swallowing it into the darkness where he belonged. The final Wayne would be exterminated alongside the bat.
He was going to reunite with his parents.
It didn’t sound so bad.
He could already smell the lingering of gunpowder, hear the shot as a bullet pierced through air, then skin and bone, feel the burning sensation as it struck; but then there would be nothing. He would no longer have to care.
The rifle drew nearer. The chains of death clanged loudly, constricting his lungs even more than they already had.
Then there was a black blur; a figure descending that he strained to make out, for his eyes were failing him now as well, his vision reduced to a haze of greys, reds, and blues, and the faintest notion of the black-clad figure slamming the bespectacled man against the wall with a metallic thud, the rifle falling with him.
The man buckled over and the figure, with a grunt of effort—a familiar grunt of effort, a woman’s voice he’d heard times before—shot out a leg and kicked him aside, sending him into the void of Bruce’s peripheral vision. As quickly as the figure—yes, a woman, her, Selina Kyle with her warm, tawny face and her dark hair, short and cropped and all familiar and willing him to force his eyes to focus—had kicked the man to the side, her hands had taken hold of his, one, then the other, and she had hauled him up, off the ledge, straining from the effort, each panicked groan stabbing daggers into his heart, and onto the catwalk with a thud while all he could do was stare at her.
His lungs refused to work. His limbs refused to move. His body collapsed onto hers as he hit the catwalk; but it was not the catwalk. It was Selina Kyle. His body collapsed again, this time to the catwalk itself as she flipped him over to the ground.
Her ragged breaths, quick, frantic gasps, cut through the pounding of his heart. Each tremulous breath reminded him he needed to produce his own. Her eyes—so dark, so vast and mysterious and full of possibility as the night itself, lined by dark lashes and shimmering grey eyeshadow that glinted like diamonds in the night—gazed deep into his, so deep and full of worry that he found himself incapable of holding her stare.
Yet, he found himself incapable of looking away from her. His eyes were drawn to the soft yet defined edges of her face, the warm bronze sharpened by a mother lost and the callous nature of the city that had ignited her vengeance, jaded her into cynicism, but protected the tenderness that opened her heart and home to strays on the very streets that tormented her so.
Bruce knew he should say something, do something, thank her, move, stand up, instead of lying there on the ground, but his lungs burned in defiance. Each desperate attempt at respiration produced nothing more than a feeble gasp.
He didn’t know if she could tell, if her eyes flickered around to ensure no other assailants would arrive, if her eyes flickered to study, parse his face, his figure, or if they flickered in mindless panic about the scene. Perhaps she could see the waters of the Riddler’s self-proclaimed justice bursting through the walls. Perhaps she was seconds from leaving, just as quickly as she had appeared.
Regardless, he needed to get up. He needed to do something, anything. The Batman needed to do his job, even as the armor suffocated the man underneath and the cowl clung to his skin as if preparing to peel it off like a mere fruit to be devoured, as if trying to squeeze him, burst his head until it was nothing but a splatter of red horror on the catwalk, in front of Selina.
He raised his head with a groan, attempting to get up, but her hand met his cheek. It was warm—so warm, so comforting—as she gently set his head back down. “No, no,” Selina said quickly, her voice soft. “It’s okay.”
He wanted to put a hand atop hers, to absorb the warmth beneath her long white nails and black gloves, but all he could do was try to breathe.
“It’s okay.”
Bruce could not breathe. He gazed deep into her eyes, hoping, praying silently to the God that had long forgotten him and abandoned him in the dark, that the Batman appeared to be breathing. He hoped the rise and fall of his chest was sufficient, even if his lungs were not truly working; for they seared him, stabbed him with each gasp that attempted to draw in air for the first time in what felt like hours.
“It’s done now,” Selina said with a faint, nearly imperceptible twitch of the head, a nod. “It’s done.”
He needed to thank her now. Now was the time to thank her, whether it be in one word or two or three or an entire monologue that would never leave his fatigued body, coming only in the night as he lay awake, granted he made it to the safety of a bed.
“It’s over,” Selina said.
It was over.
It was over and he needed to say something. It mattered not if neither Bruce Wayne nor Batman was accustomed to speech or the management of emotions, he needed to say something because the burning in the back of his brain was going to roast and consume him whole if nothing left his mouth.
“I…” The single syllable came out in a hoarse whisper. His eyelids fell shut, succumbing to the will of his body rather than his brain.
“No, no, shhh,” she whispered, her voice soft, delicate, despite the ease with which she had taken out the bespectacled man, the ease she had fought and survived and done so much and somehow ended up here at the right place and the right time. “It’s okay. Just…”
“I can’t breathe.”
It wasn’t thanks. It wasn’t gratitude. It was simply a statement that consumed his mind and drifted his hands to his throat, the cowl that engulfed his neck in Batman, but there was no collar to pull away, only the mask and the overwhelming dread that he could do nothing as if he were a vampire pinned under the beam of the sun—not the sparkly teenage novel kind that glittered like a mirrorball beneath in the light, but the kind that was utterly incompetent in the daytime. Except it was not daytime and his hands wrapped around his throat in a futile attempt at freedom.
Selina put a hand over his. It was warm. Still warm, despite the impending surge of water that would tear down the catwalk and flood the useless sacks of tissue that were his lungs. “It’s okay,” she said again. “You’re okay.”
“I can’t—”
“You’re okay… just…” The hand that rested on his cheek moved up, grazed the leather mask of Batman, the mask that broke the chains confining Bruce to the desolation of Wayne Manor and freed him for twilight’s masquerade. The leather mask of freedom; of vengeance; of imprisonment.
The mask was suffocating.
Selina’s hand left his, still clamped around his throat, and went to the cheek that remained bare. She lifted his head from the catwalk.
The lift was nauseating.
“It’s okay. Just try to breathe—just breathe, baby,” Selina uttered, her hands moving with the tactful dexterity of thievery as they lifted the leather chains from his face. Her touch was gentle, innocuous. She was unaware how her fingers left invisible burns where her gloved hands touched his flesh, pale from the walls of the manor she despised, the architecture of wealth seen throughout Gotham City that stood as a constant, daunting reminder of the differences between them, even as it was soon to be overthrown by flood.
She would recognize which walls had separated his skin and the sun as soon as the mask disappeared: the walls of Wayne Manor. The ancient walls would erect themselves between them; yet they would tear down the leather walls of vigilantism he had crafted between himself and the night.
Between himself and her.
She would know. The knowledge was nauseating. Her touch was nauseating.
At least you’re not Bruce Wayne, she had said, or something like it, something with the same general message, the words shifted around—he didn’t know anymore. It wouldn’t be surprising if his brain had planted false memories as vengeance for him depriving it of repose. Yet, his brain still whirred with the ferocity of some overpriced motorcycle, something she would assume he possessed and something he did, in fact, possess.
His stomach churned with the violent instability of a broken washing machine, clanging and lurching and bashing against the walls and endangering the clothes inside its domestic whirlpool, except the clothes were the meager scraps of food he had forced down his throat despite being Bruce Wayne, the recluse billionaire, which Selina would find out as she lifted the mask over his face and his vision blacked out as the leather slid across his eyes.
It would have been easier if his vision remained black and empty forever. He wanted his vision to remain black and empty forever; but he rarely got what he wanted.
The mask slid up, his vision restored as leather scraped his face.
Selina in front of him, letting the cowl fall back behind his head, with her gloved hands and long, ivory nails. Selina in front of him, her lips just barely agape as she took in the face behind the mask, expanded beyond the lips she had pressed hers against. Selina in front of him, gears spinning beneath her inscrutable gaze.
Selina in front of him, the wall between them torn down.
“Nice makeup, Vengeance,” she said, a smirk playing on her lips.
“It’s to blend with the mask,” he said. “So skin doesn’t show.” He did not mention that it was greasepaint rather than makeup.
The corner of her mouth twitched upward. “Should’ve thought about that before having the bottom half of your face exposed.”
He could have remarked how makeup for his entire face would have been uncomfortably similar to a racial caricature or how having that much leather on his face during nighttime vigilante work, fighting and fleeing and lurking in the shadows, would have been uncomfortable to wear or something, but instead, Bruce said nothing. He had never been good at saying things.
With a gentle hand, the cat had got his tongue—stolen it, and tore it to shreds with the swift swipe of a single claw—as she thumbed the darkness around his eye. The smudges were unseen against her gloves.
He couldn’t tell if it could be considered stroking his cheek, a tender caress, or what it was. Cleaning his face.
Grooming.
Cats did that.
He couldn’t tell what she was seeing, what she was thinking, if the dots had been connected.
They had to have been connected.
Yet, even as he knew how the scene would play out, see the bristle of her movements, the scowl that sharpened her features, hear the staccato of agitation, sharp against his ears as she realized the identity of the man behind the mask—the man she’d worked alongside, the man she’d kissed—he couldn’t prevent his head from leaning into the warmth of her touch. It would only burn him later, he knew, but had they not been on a catwalk above Gotham City in the midst of a failed assassination attempt and impending flood, he might have closed his eyes, melted fully into the embrace. He might have been able to cherish the moment.
He knew it wouldn’t last long. Selina was not stupid. She was fiery and brash, but she was not in any way stupid.
She had looked into the eyes of the Batman. She could compare them to the blue eyes of Bruce Wayne on the television screen, and look now at the man in front of her, unmasked and trying in vain to look anywhere that wasn’t her with the very same eyes of blue, black smudged around the identical shade of ice. She stared at him, undoubtedly seeing the bedraggled mess of black hair, disheveled by sweat and cowl, and drawing the connection to the color and length of the man on the screen.
Bruce could not remember which one was the last. They all dragged, all drained; but Selina would have seen the news report on the bombing at the late Mayor Mitchell’s funeral. She would have noted the attention drawn to Bruce Wayne’s appearance and the speed at which Batman had shown up. She would have noted the similarities in their voices.
She had already drawn the conclusion that Batman was rich. Made a comment about it, even, without knowing the irony.
Then, she spoke. Her voice did not cease his panic’s progression.
“You…” Selina began, her voice trailing off. Her hand pulled away, ever so slightly, her fingertips centimeters away from his face and its black smudges, hiding both identity—its purpose now obsolete—and the penumbra of sleep deprivation.
He did not need to see how much of the makeup she had wiped off to know what he looked like, what her next words were. He could see it in the furrow of her brow and the frantic dart of her eyes about his face. He could hear it in the moment of hesitation.
She had come through the broken walls. It was only a matter of time before she turned away; for he was awful just to see.
“You’re Bruce Wayne.”
There it was.
The words left her lips slowly, trepidation seeping through the three words.
Yet, as he lay crumpled on the catwalk, Selina poised atop him now armed with the knowledge that the bedraggled man in front of her was both Batman and the reclusive billionaire Bruce Wayne, he was neither. He was not a vigilante of the shadows, nor the hermit tasked with handling the billions his parents had accumulated.
He was just Bruce. He was just a child seeped in black, reeling from the loss of mother and father, now glaringly, strikingly alone, helpless to do anything. He was powerless. Incapable of change, of mending the everpresent scars of murder that had stolen his parents, irrevokably demolished his childhood and bled still into his supposed adulthood, bled like the bulletholes against suits and silk that his armor was too late to prevent; that he was too late to prevent.
They had left him wealth, but millions and billions were insufficient in the frigid stare of death. Wealth could not revive the dead. Wealth could not bring back childhood. Wealth could not undo all the tears that had been shed, the time wasted on useless hypotheticals and distant memories that were nothing but self-inflicted stabs, reopening the wound of that baleful day until dark crimson seeped from the blade of futility, drip, drip, dripping, and staining everything.
Ultimately, wealth was useless; but it was his unwilling acquisition of it that allowed him this sentiment.
“Who were you expecting?” Bruce said. His voice was too quiet to belong to him; his expression too stiff, too fragile. Too vulnerable.
“Not a sad, wet cat,” she huffed as pieces clicked together in her mind, as she saw the Batman—the dark vengeance of the night, Gotham’s ghost and protector—held in her fisted hand, and she saw the Prince of Gotham laying out in front of her, his wealth unable to protect him from the near-death initiated by his own crusade.
“...A sad wet cat,” he repeated, voice faint, fainter than it had been beneath Batman or through the television screen.
Her breath quickened as her fingers tightened around his cowl. She was seeing him—the true him, the true Vengeance—Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne, whose father had started the fund that would begin the death of the city. Bruce Wayne, a recluse in his ivory tower as a metaphorical overlord, watching ordinary people down below suffer and struggle in the indifference his inherited fortune had allowed.
Yet, here he was, in smeared makeup and pale, ghastly skin, dripping with sweat that stuck his dark hair to his face; sweat from running in the night, sweat from his attempts to clean crime firsthand while he himself remained muddied and disheveled from the city. Here he was, moments from dying for the city beneath the tower.
All while the Wayne fortune sat untouched in its manor.
And yet, she remembered the lingering kiss they had shared—that she had given him—atop that abandoned tower, his shock poorly masked by her initiative, the growled voice of “Selina” in her ear as his lenses allowed him to see through her eyes, the surge of instinctive protectiveness towards her strays— she pushed the cowl back over his head just as the masked man of duct tape seized her, a scream ripping itself from her lips, his fists pummeling her, her own movements pitiful and frantic.
Sounds of struggle crescendoed—grunts and clanks against metal and thuds and Selina struggling—the harsh forte forcing Bruce’s head up.
He blinked. Tried to force his eyes to focus, his head to cease its throbbing as it began.
But it failed. Selina was on the ground and the duct tape bespectacled man standing above her, fists striking her, limbs dark hazy lines that shot down toward her as she maneuvered on the ground in danger, life-threatening, fatal danger—a gunshot, a bomb, alarms, get up, get up get up get upgetupgetupgetup—
He felt the stab of adrenaline before he registered his hand grab the needle from his belt, thrust it into his leg, and shoot his heart into overdrive, racing against his ribcage, body trembling as it attempted to restrain it.
A strangled scream tore at his throat. He wasn’t sure if it was his.
He felt himself moving only from the sheer agony that wracked him as his muscles forced themselves to move, sit up, stand. His legs moved of their own accord, walking, running, charging at the duct tape and glasses above Selina who was pummeling her, killing her. Automatically, his hand gripped the thick flesh of his neck, the other clenched into a fist that stung as it swung down onto the lenses.
Glass shattered. The frames fell.
It didn’t matter. The duct tape still moved, still breathed, still capable of killing, twitched under his grasp. Mocking.
His fist went down harder and harder and harder until he felt a crack and something give and red trickled from the nose slit in the tape, but it wasn’t enough. The adrenaline shook his body, shook his thoughts loose and rampant in his head, smashing and crashing like his fist with the face. The punches were all he could do to keep from trembling, twitching uncontrollably on the ground and allowing the thunder of his head to overtake him.
He didn’t notice as she scrambled to the side, watching, staring as his rage overtook his body, fists beating into the masked man as if he were a black-clad baker and the masked man a mere lump of dough. She failed to reconcile the image of unadulterated vengeance with the images of the Wayne heir cringing away from casual conversation with fleeing eyes and muttered responses, the definition of social ineptitude.
At that moment, he was Vengeance, he was the phantom of Gotham City , with Bruce Wayne nowhere in sight. If not for the cowl in her hands earlier, his own quiet admission, she would’ve never thought—never even seen Bruce Wayne in Batman.
What she needed to do now was not to think endlessly, spiraling on a catwalk suspended above a building that would flood at moment’s notice. Later— assuming there was even a later—would be time for her to confront him, to say the things she wanted to say but couldn’t say as police, led by Gordon, swarmed the catwalk, sending her back into her default fight-or-flight.
“Hey!” A man’s echo cried out.
Bruce couldn’t hear over his heart and the frantic, steady thud of his fist against the face, more grounded than his heart as it assaulted his ribcage.
“Hey!” the echo shouted again.
His footsteps clanged in his ears.
“Hey, man, take it easy!”
Bruce couldn’t take it easy; the man on the ground did not deserve easy. The man on the ground in his duct tape his misguided pursuit of justice, of chance, of revolution, deserved each blow as it struck him, deserved—
A hand grabbed his shoulder.
He whirled around. Fists up. Stanced to strike.
Lieutenant Gordon stared back at him, empty hands raised, face furrowed, mustache scrunched into stern apprehension. His glasses caught the harsh glare of the lights that beat down upon them. With slow, steady breaths, he lowered his hands, eyes fixed on him; not Bruce, but Batman and the air he forced down his lungs to steady himself.
The air did nothing. It did not soothe the painful, rapid palpitations of his heart, coursing with adrenaline. It did not quell the panic that had come when the cowl left his bedraggled face, allowing Selina to see who was underneath and bringing a new sense of suffocation to his already breathless body.
He turned around. Looked down to the man of duct tape and now broken glasses who lay on the ground, writhing, the face beneath his pitiful mask now red. He then rose to his unsteady feet.
Lieutenant Gordon’s steady gaze followed him as he turned now to Selina. Light flickered across her face. Her mouth was agape, gasping the same unsteady breaths as him, her gaze unwavering and inscrutable; full of unspoken words. Fear, most likely. Perhaps worry, concern. Caution.
All Bruce could do was speculate what was coursing through her head as her eyes stared into him, through him, burning and searing him beneath the cowl. Instantly, the speculation became too much to bear. The daunting uncertainty forced his head back to Lieutenant Gordon and the man on the ground.
“Jesus,” the Lieutenant breathed. He hesitated, then kneeled down to the ground, his dark tie dangling from his neck just as Bruce had on the catwalk mere minutes ago.
With one swift tear of duct tape, the perpetrator’s face was brought to light.
He took a step back, glaring down at him. “Who the hell are you?” His eyes burned through his glasses, smoldering at the plastic wrap that clung to the man’s receding hairline; at the crooked teeth that bore through his crooked grin; at the battered and bloodied nose, centered on a face ruddied from swelling bruises.
The man on the ground said nothing, his mouth open only to take in the breaths his nose was too fractured to take. Then, he spoke. “Me?” he asked, the rhetoric forming in one swift syllable. “I’m Vengeance.”
Bruce stared down at the man. Glowered.
He raised his head from the catwalk to meet his glower. Their eyes locked. An almost imperceptible smirk formed on his open mouth, challenging, almost, despite the wreckage of his nose and the shattered lenses of his glasses that lay beside his crumpled frame.
Then, the light vanished.
Screams rose from below.
The rush of water roared. Crashed through the makeshift sea wall that had been erected, consuming the stage where the mayor had been prior with an explosion of sparks. The stage collapsed in on itself. People attempted to flee, reduced to nothing more than black specks in the tumultuous chaos as they clambered up the bleachers of the stadium, scrambled to escape, only to be engulfed by the sea.
Police sirens flashed red and blue in the night. Their promise of safety and protection and justice had been broken long ago.
Sparks flew, a loose cable—a broken light fixture, a hunk of metal and electricity—dropping downwards, towards the rampaging water, towards electrocution and meaningless death.
He knew what he had to do.
It was instinct that he reacted, stirred by the screams that rose from falling debris as people were buried before his eyes.
Fingers closing around his grappling gun, he aimed.
He shot.
He leaped over the balcony, his mouth twisted in a roar that never let loose, swinging down, cape streaming behind him like a bat, like his namesake, as he closed around the cable, dangling from it with a shower of sparks lighting up the edges of his vision.
Bruce pulled the batarang from the centerpiece of his suit, the melted gun of his parents’ murder, the weapon that started it all.
He slashed the cord, the falling, falling, falling sensation taking him away, hanging onto what was now nothing more than a piece of metal, a useless, empty vessel for electricity.
He plunged into the water. Red and blue filled his vision.
Then, nothing.