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I was the match and
you were the rock,
maybe we started this fire
Bruce is 8 when his parents die in front of him. The love and pride he has basked in for so long ripped from underneath him, Bruce developes a hatred of guns, an irrational fear of the dark, and a dreadful habit of wetting the bed at night from terrors he can’t remember. Custody of Bruce is given to the kindly old butler that worked for his parents. That’s when it starts.
Bruce is 20 when he becomes a serial killer. It took 12 years before he gave in, before he allowed his broken fingers to be wrapped around a trigger. His infamy builds slowly, in whispers along dark streets, and then out in the open, in bodies hung and pinned, dripping blood and entrails. His first eight kills are Joe Gavin Killian Sam Evelyn Warren Candice Dave gunshots to the head, every single weakness of his exploited and designed into his character and costume so he can be reminded of them. He is salt on his own wounds. He is a child’s nightmare. He is everything he hates.
Master calls him Batman , another mockery. Bruce tries to suppress the flinch every time he’s addressed that way. By the time he’s 21, he doesn’t hide the flinch anymore. It makes Master happy.
Bruce is 23 when he sees the Flying Graysons fall to their death. Tonight was supposed to be a reward, and here it is, ending in twisted, too-still bodies again. Distantly, Bruce wonders if it’s just him. Maybe he’s carried death for so long now it follows him. Before he can stop himself, he’s out of his seat. It’s just that there’s a boy, there’s a little boy, his small body bent in agony and his voice wracked with that specific kind of wail that Bruce knows, he knows because it was his. The response to Bruce’s cries has been slaps, a jaggedly rising violence that has escalated into a prison. Sometimes he wonders what would have happened if he’d been given a hug instead. And there’s no one to do that for this kid, but he deserves to be given that chance. One Bruce didn’t have. He doesn’t speak, can’t make himself go that far, knows he’ll pay for this later, but he kneels next to the boy. The boy turns his head, looks at him, eyes wide and blue and honest, shining with tears. The gravity of grief is heavy, but maybe, just for a moment, Bruce can share some of this boy’s burden. He doesn’t deserve to comfort anyone, but it’s–there is no one else. Bruce chokes back the sound wanting to fling out of him, and instead puts a steady hand on the boy’s shoulder and as much reassurance channeling through his gaze as he can muster. The boy leans into it, and Bruce feels something he didn’t realize he had left in him, crack in two.
Then Bruce feels a hand on his shoulder - fingers digging in, warning, hard enough the bruise. Bruce draws back and keeps his head down, murmurs in a low voice, “I’m sorry.”
But Master isn’t looking at Bruce. His sharp, dark eyes are on the child, a thoughtful light in his eye. Bruce feels a thrill of horror tingle all the way through him.
Master brings the little boy home, and Bruce never forgives himself.
Bruce is 27 when he sees a small figure leaning over the wheel of the Batmobile, and he freezes.
“Approach, Batman,” says Master in his ear, his voice sharp, his tone amused. Bruce lets his foot crunch loudly in the snow to alert the person, who whips around. He’s brandishing the tire iron he was turning against the wheel seconds ago, his eyes narrowed, and he’s…he’s so young, probably a few years younger than Dick , no no no no—
The fear slowly fills his face after he sees Bruce, skin paling whiter than the dirty snow on the ground. Run, Bruce thinks.
“What are you doing?” He says. He’s stalling. He knows it and Master knows it, but Bruce isn’t going to do this without a direct order, he can’t—he doesn’t want to kill a child, only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He can already see so much life, so much fire, in this boy and he doesn’t—he doesn’t—he can’t—
“Nothing you can prove!” The boy spits shakily, and then swings the tire iron towards Bruce’s knee cap. The swing is wide, and barely manages to catch him, glancing along his bone with a sting, and making Bruce’s leg bow under him for a moment before he catches himself.
Master laughs in his ear. “I like this one!”
The strength the boy put into the swing has left him wide open, over extended and off balance. Bruce grabs the tire iron, pulls it gently from the boy’s hands (it takes almost no strength at all, even though the boy is tugging at it), and throws it away from them. The boy looks devastated.
“Pin him down,” Master instructs.
Bruce closes his eyes. Don’t make don’t make don’t make me and he takes the boys wrists and flips him on his back into the snow, kneeling over him. Immediately, the boy starts screaming and fighting. Bruce can’t do anything, because if Master gets even a whiff of an idea that Bruce is reluctant to kill this child, he’ll make it last for hours. “What’s your name?” Bruce whispers.
The boy slumps in his grasp, exhausted. “Just so someone will remember it, I’ll tell you! It’s Jason. I hope that name haunts you to the end of your days after you kill me, you monster!”
Bruce knows it will. He has a whole graveyard that lines the inside his rib cage, makes it harder and harder to breathe every stone that gets added. Jason.
There’s silence from Master, but Bruce can hear a keyboard clicking, clicking, clicking. Bruce imagines blood and the fire in Jason’s blue eyes dying. He doesn’t–he doesn’t–he doesn’t—
“I’d like you to bring him back, Brucie. I think I’d like to get to know Jason a little better.”
Bruce knows an order from Master when he hears one, and it’s entirely selfish, the wave of relief that sweeps through him. He hates himself for it. He grabs a syringe from the left side of his belt, sees Jason’s eyes widen just before it goes in, his high-pitched, terror-filled “No!”
And then the syringe empties and Jason slumps in his hands. He lets his fingers rest a moment longer against Jason’s bony wrists, surreptitiously feeling that pulse beating, beating. Jason is alive. He won’t have to kill him.
But Jason is right, it doesn’t change the facts: Bruce is a monster. And now he’s taking Jason to the one who made him this way.
Bruce is 28 when he kills Jack and Janet Drake. Master tells him they posed a threat to Wayne Industries. He breaks into the house three times before he manages to catch them at home. Four hours later, they’re dead, and the bathtub in the luxurious guest room is full of blood. Bruce is gathering his tools to leave when he hears muffled crying coming from the closet, and his stomach drops.
“Batman,” Master says.
Bruce opens the closet.
He’d assumed Jack and Janet had sent their son, Timothy Jackson Drake, 8 years old, to boarding school. There’d been paperwork for it. The house had been empty. They’d been gone for months with no sign of the boy. He can’t be here. What is he doing here?
His voice is high, childish. “Don’t touch me! I have evidence! I can send it to the police!”
Master chuckles, just a little bit, before seeing that the boy is holding a phone. His voice turns frosty. “I think you’d better bring the child to me, Batman. I want access to every device in that house.”
Bruce brings him. Tim has been obsessively tracking Batman and Robin’s kills over the last year. He had been moments from having tracking and maps and photos and carefully written data automatically sent to the Gotham Police Department when Bruce ripped the closet door open. He wishes he had waited just a few more minutes. He wishes Jason wouldn’t have paid for those minutes. He wonders what would have happened if he had.
Bruce brings Tim to the Manor.
The realization forms in his chest, burning, feels like smoke clogging his throat from the inside, that Master is–he’s not going to stop. This is the third kid that’s been dragged into this hell, because of Bruce, and it’s not going to stop. It’s not going to end when Bruce dies, and Master makes Dick become Batman. It’s not going to end with Jason. It’s not going to end–and Tim–Master is already training Tim, not as a replacement for Bruce, but for himself.
That’s when Bruce breaks.
It’s the first time in a year that he has allowed himself to think the word: no.
Bruce is 30 when Talia Al-Ghul roars away in a desert rover.
“I think she likes you, Brucie,” Master says.
Bruce can hear the tone of his voice shaped by Master’s thin lips curving slightly upward, a sight that, in person, never fails to send Bruce’s heart beating in anticipation of pain.
He knows better than to contradict the words. And a few months later, when Master tells him he’s sending Bruce to The League for some training, and “I believe there’s one Al-Ghul in particular who’s volunteered to be part of your training”, Bruce knows.
The training is brutal and mind-numbing and the only part of him that feels alive is the raw nerve that is his worry about what’s happening to Dick and Jason in his absence. The loss of them feels like a festering injury, a pain slower but sharper than any of the lashings he’s receiving in training.
He hardly even notices the extra haze over his thoughts when Talia drugs him. He hardly notices when she pins him to the bed. He notices when he feels her sharp, perfect nails tracing down his chest, around his neck, and he tries, pathetically, to struggle. Talia clicks her tongue at him.
“I hoped it wouldn’t have to be this way, Beloved,” Talia tells him, getting up and tying his wrists, one at a time, to opposite sides of the headboard. She pouts. He’s breathing fast and wrong, his heartbeat pounding frantically in his ears. “Master,” he manages to gasp out. “I don’t have permission—“
Bruce is not dumb enough to think Master won’t find out, and when he does, he’ll be livid, and Bruce is not there, Dick and Jason are. Talia, Ras, everyone on this base knows that Bruce belongs to Master, she of all people should know Bruce wouldn’t, can’t, move a step without Master’s say-so, and Master hasn’t, he hasn’t said so.
Talia stops. “Oh, Beloved,” she laughs. She leans in close, so close he can feel her hot breaths on his face, the way her green, green eyes are widened with lust. “You may not have permission. But I do.”
And then she rips his pants away.
Bruce lets himself sink into numbness.
Later, he will dream about the way her loose, dark hair tickled his cheek as she bent over him. Later, he will remember the way she murmured to him in Arabic, voice full of ecstasy.
Later, he will wake up with his stomach churning and tacky tear tracks dried on his face.
When he gets home, Master lets him sleep on a bed, as if it were a reward and not a punishment. He comes in that night and tucks Bruce in like a child.
“Oh, my boy.” Master says, softly. He pets Bruce’s cheek. “How does it feel, to be a whore?”
He is 26–27–he is 8.
He is 30.
Master likes to play games, making him pick between the boys. Dick’s hands or Jason’s feet. Jason’s mouth or Tim’s eyes and ears. It’s drilled down into Bruce’s black, rotten heart that he can’t protect his children. Not all of them. He and Dick have a pact between them; with Dick being the oldest, he feels naturally protective over the younger boys.
Jason used to fight it. He used to throw up a fuss, screaming, misbehaving, anything to try to get Master to turn the punishment on him.
“I’m tough, Dickie,” he’d say. “Not pansy like you. I lived on the streets, you know.”
He sounded rough and proud, but Bruce knew Jason felt like he was worth less. Like he didn’t matter. That Dick and Bruce were special to have survived this long, and Jason was just—extra.
That was until Tim came along.
Tim loves Dick, but he idolizes Jason. And Jason starts being quiet when Dick is punished. He kneels there and he squeezes Tim’s hand until he nearly loses circulation, but he doesn’t purposefully draw punishments off Dick onto himself anymore. He has a smoldering, brittle anger in his blue-green eyes that Bruce feels a little bit of afraid of. Not of Jason–never of Jason, but of what Master will do with it. Bruce knows better than anyone how Master can take anger and twist it around on you until it’s eating you alive from the inside out. Jason’s anger will either help him survive (if Bruce gets him out), or be the death of him. Dick, Dick is too much like Bruce, caught by Master in his most vulnerable moment. Forced to kill the ways that he’s afraid of dying. It’s been too long, Dick is good in a way Bruce isn’t anymore, but he’s also…empty. Resigned. Caves in with a numb smile and martyrs himself for the chance of protecting one of the other boys. He and Bruce, they understand one another, understand Master, in a way Jason can’t after only three years, and Tim can’t because he’s only ten, and he’s so, so smart but he’s ten . He and Bruce, they figure it out together one night. Superman has a name. Clark Kent. Bruce thinks it sounds a little like salvation.
Master destroys the League of Assassins.
“I told her she could have you,” Master hums absently to Bruce. “I didn’t tell her she would get to live afterwards. They know too much, now, of course.”
Ras Al Ghul, dead.
Their bases, exploded.
Soldiers and assassins, dead.
The Lazarus pools, corrupted and destroyed.
Bruce’s teachers, dead.
Talia Al Ghul, on the run.
“Oh, we’ll find her eventually, Brucie, don’t worry about that. No one else gets to touch you and live, now.” Master looks at Dick and smiles. Bruce doesn’t let Dick or Jason touch him for a week after that.
Bruce is 31 when it
all
happens
at
once
Master comes downstairs and he’s carrying an honest-to-God baby . He looks at it with distaste, and says, “Talia is dead.”
The baby has dark hair and green, green eyes. It takes Bruce sixty full seconds to connect the dots. The baby cries. Bruce doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. From the cells, there’s first a muffled, disbelieving noise from Jason, and then Tim’s quiet, “Is that…?”
“Master?” Bruce murmurs, to cover the sound.
Master turns, eyes cold. “Keep it quiet, or I’ll slit it’s throat.”
Bruce holds the baby. It screams, which was about the reaction Bruce expected. And then Dick is by his side. He gives Bruce a look, and takes the child. In a barely-there voice, Dick shushes it, holding it close to his chest and humming softly. “There, there, now, little one. You’re alright.”
A long time ago, Bruce used to be good with children. He was good with Dick. Until Master took every ounce of care Bruce had for Dick and made Dick pay for it.
Bruce still cares about the boys. He only cares about the boys. But he tries to pretend he doesn’t, because it’s better. It’s better that way.
The baby is Bruce’s. He names him Damian. One night he is hungry and they can’t keep him quiet, and Master sticks the baby in the refrigeration solitary chamber. Dick, Bruce, Tim, and Jason all listen as the baby’s cries get quieter and quieter. It happens so fast. When Master throws Bruce in with Damian, the baby is so cold Bruce thinks, at first, he is dead. But–he has a pulse. Slow, much too slow for a child this small; but there. Bruce strips all of his clothes off and wraps them around the baby, keeping one side skin-to-skin against Bruce’s bare chest. They survive.
Bruce is 31, and he’s not going to let Damian become just another child taken. This helpless, defenceless being is fully dependent on Bruce, and he can’t let another child down. He’s not going to let his care for this tiny tiny human be a weapon that is used to hurt Damian.
No.
Bruce is 31. He’s on the doorstep of a ridiculously average-looking apartment. He is clutching Damian in his arms, Dick has Tim clinging around his neck, and Jason is standing in front of Dick and pressed up next to Bruce. The door opens, and Bruce says, “Please.”
He curses his voice for cracking, it’s just that Bruce doesn’t know what he’ll do if Superman says No. If this–if this doesn’t work, it’s over. It’s all over, and it will end in the most horrible way Bruce could possibly conjure to his mind. For him, it doesn’t matter; he’s Batman. He’s going to die (and Bruce can’t imagine it being gentle) anyway. But he wants better for the boys. Better than punishment and pain and starvation and panic and dead eyes. Better than what Bruce had. Better than what Bruce is.
It doesn’t matter if Superman is good. It matters that he’s powerful. That’s what Bruce tells himself, has been repeating ever since he started looking into this as one of his many variables, a possibility. It’s not fully true, but it is a little bit true, and Bruce will take it. As long as he’s better .
Superman and Clark Kent both, after all, seem like the sort of people who might be kind to children.
He says, “Please,” again, and then–if he can just get his foot in the door, show Superman what he can do, show him what Bruce is useful for (anything. Absolutely anything to keep his boys safe)--”Can we come in?”
Superman says, “Yes”, and steps aside to let them file in. He shuts the door behind them. Bruce lets out a slow, even breath of relief as the tension in his body relaxes just that little bit.
He is suddenly so, so tired. He goes to his knees, can see the boys following his lead next to him. He hates that it’s nothing they haven’t seen before as he shuffles forward, keeping his head down, reaching for the belt. He remembers begging Master, “Please, not in front of them.”
He remembers afterward, Tim biting his lip, Jason’s hard blinking, Dick’s unsteady breathing. The way that if any of them looked away they were dragged in to participate. Surely–nearly anything would be better than that . And then Superman is stumbling away. He says, “No, I don’t want to–to have sex with you. Any of you.”
Bruce is trying to earn this one thing for the boys, to secure it, before anything happens, before Master finds out they're--and Superman isn't letting him. Bruce doesn't waste any time warning the man. It’s better to do it upfront. Master will come after them.
And Superman looks Bruce right in the eye and says, “He doesn’t know what I’m capable of.”
Something flutters in Bruce’s chest, a long-lost feeling he might call hope, if he dared.
Bruce is 31, and wonders, for the first time, if this might be what safety feels like.