Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time Bruce met them, they were a little boy, all in black, like a darker reflection of himself. Bruce was tear-streaked and silent, empty-numb-hurting-angry-broken after watching the pearls. The muzzle flash. The blood spreading between the cobbles. 

The little boy, the darker reflection of himself, stood beside Bruce in the police station, while the kind detective spoke with Alfred. 

The boy didn’t say anything, but at some point he reached down – and Bruce reached up – and they held hands. Bruce’s grip had to be too tight, but the boy never complained or fidgeted in Bruce’s grip. 

He was gone by the time Alfred returned to Bruce. 

Bruce didn’t remember him leaving, though. 

-- 

The next time Bruce saw them, they were the same little boy. Still the same little darker reflection of himself. 

It was the funeral. 

Bruce held his hand the whole service, but whenever he saw pictures of the event, there was no little boy besides himself, much less one that stood next to him. 

That was his first inkling that they weren’t just a little boy. 

-- 

Next time Bruce saw them was inside the Manor. 

It was dark. Lightning bisected the sky at irregular intervals, followed by rolls of thunder that lingered in Bruce’s bones. 

There’s been a bat trapped in the flue, earlier. It had gotten out into the sitting room when Bruce was trying to read. It was always bats for whatever reason. Bruce was incredibly over bats. 

But then the power went out. That was the real tipping point. 

Bruce called for his father. 

Remembered why his father wouldn’t come. 

Waited for Alfred. 

Realized Alfred hadn’t heard him. 

Buried his head in his close-gathered knees. 

And then he felt it. A hand, about the size of his own hands, placed on his shoulder. It wasn’t warm. In fact, the small hand was almost as cold as winter asphalt. But it was solid and comforting. 

Bruce raised his face. 

The little boy sat there, head cocked to the side. 

Bruce maybe hadn’t noticed, given the suits he’d been wearing both previous times he’d seen the little boy, but the boy must have been wearing exactly what Bruce had been wearing, only all in black. This time, he wore Bruce’s pajamas, but that Bruce’s pajamas were white and the boy’s pajamas were black. 

The boy smiled, but they smiled like it was unpracticed and unfamiliar, like their face was better made for frowning and scowling. 

“Why are you in my room?” Bruce whispered. 

“Everything in the City is mine, even your room,” the little boy whispered back. His voice was like a darker, more distant version of Bruce’s own. 

Bruce frowned dubiously. 

“Would you like me to leave?” the little boy asked. 

Bruce hesitated, then shook his head. 

The little boy gave a hesitant nod, almost in parody of Bruce’s response. 

Bruce curled up with the boy. The boy was there until Bruce fell asleep, but wasn’t there when Bruce was awoken the next morning by Alfred. 

-- 

The next time Bruce saw them, he was at school, for the first time since he’d lost his parents. 

They looked like his cousin – Kate – but darker, just like when they looked like Bruce. 

Bruce could tell it was them by the prickle of awareness that ran up the back of his neck. And by the unconscious wide berth everyone gave the child that looked a bit like Kate. 

Bruce was in the middle of ducking away from kids that were teasing him – calling him an orphan, telling him that he was going to grow up into a butler because his butler had custody of him, making fun of how long he’d been out of school while mourning. 

They walked up to Bruce, then stood between him and the bullies.  

They tilted their head to the side, slowly. 

“You are not mine,” they said to the bullies. Their voice was like Kate’s too. But darker, further away, and echoing off of shadows. They turned to Bruce. “You are mine.” 

The bullies shivered, looked at each other, then fled. 

Bruce felt almost at peace, for the first time in a long time. 

(Those bullies ended up leaving the school – Bruce later learned that their families had moved away from Gotham, though he never learned why.) 

-- 

The next time Bruce saw them, he wasn’t sure who they were supposed to be, or if they were meant to be a boy or a girl. He wasn’t sure if they knew, either. 

Maybe it was bits of the dark Bruce reflection and the dark Kate reflection, mixed together while they tried to find their own person in there. Maybe it wasn’t. It didn’t really matter, either way. 

It was just the end of the school day, Bruce waiting to be picked up by Alfred. 

They sat with him on a step, outside the Academy. 

On Bruce’s other side, Tommy and Harvey sat. Neither knew what to do with Bruce, but they were trying. Bruce appreciated it, but wished that they would pretend things were normal, at least, instead of sitting in awkward silence. 

The silence of the other one, though, wasn’t uncomfortable. 

-- 

Tommy’s dad died in a car accident. 

Bruce spiralled. His parents’ deaths were still fresh. 

Tommy and his mom moved away. 

Alfred took Bruce back out of school, hiring tutors to come to the Manor instead. It suited Bruce just fine, since he was back to square one with his own trauma and grief (and feeling like a horrible friend for not being able to be there for Tommy). 

Bruce even ignored Harvey long enough that Harvey called less. And less. And less, still. 

Everything was almost manageable. 

Then they started to visit him, inside his home, once more. They being the same child thing that showed up in Bruce’s worse or lowest moments. 

They showed up in their darker mirrored version of Bruce. Sometimes mirroring his clothing of the minute, sometimes wearing those pajamas from back when they first visited Bruce in the Manor. 

Mostly, they used Bruce’s face. Sometimes though, sometimes they used Kate’s face. Or a mix of the two. Or a face that looked peculiarly like the only picture Bruce had seen of a young Alfred. Once or twice, they used no face at all, and were little more than a shadow on the wall. A companionable shadow, but still a shadow. 

Bruce started to consider their presence normal. 

Alfred started to conceptualize them as an imaginary friend – a way for Bruce to work through his trauma or something. They didn’t mind being called imaginary, though. 

“Sometimes,” they whispered, in their everywhere-nowhere voice (it was part Kate, part Bruce, that day – as well as something else), “sometimes adults don’t understand. Sometimes, they come around. Sometimes, they never do. Best if they think it’s you’re imagination, in case they fall into that lattermost category.” 

Bruce let Alfred go on thinking they were imaginary, even though Bruce knew fully well that it wasn’t. He was pretty sure he’d never be able, at eleven years old, to conceptualize someone like them. 

-- 

It was a long while before Bruce learned who they were. 

Alfred was teaching him self-defense (under duress – Bruce had been adamant about learning). Bruce was learning how to turn his angry grief into something more productive. 

He wasn’t sure how that fit in with learning who they were, but it felt right to relate the two things. His own growth with their identity being entrusted to him. (Though they seemed to think either that Bruce already knew or that he should have known.) 

Gotham. 

It was Gotham themself. The City. 

And that made sense. Gotham was always a living thing to Bruce, even if he hadn’t realized that his living city was also the nameless friend that showed up, usually during moments in which he needed comfort or companionship. Really, it made sense, slotting together like a puzzle that had been waiting for that last piece. 

“What did you think I was?” they asked. Their mouth moved at the same time as the words, but the words themselves seemed to come from behind Bruce. They never seemed quiet able to master a normal voice. 

“I don’t know,” Bruce shrugged. “A ghost?” 

They breathed a laugh. It was everywhere and nowhere, in Bruce’s bones and outside the Manor windows. It was like being home and being asked to return home. 

Their laughter was always odd like that. Odder than their words. 

-- 

Bruce grew used to them. 

Maybe that was part of why he grew to want so badly to protect the whole of the City, and all the people of the City. Because they were his friend, and the City was his home. 

They certainly didn’t discourage Bruce. Though they were pessimistic about what one human could do. 

One human. 

That’s how they put it, even. One “human.” 

If Bruce hadn’t quite believed that they were Gotham itself, before, the way they separated themself from humans would have convinced him, because they were so casual about it. It was normal for them, natural. It was like the separation had always existed for them, even before they spoke about humans as separate from them; because it had. 

Bruce hadn’t ever wanted so badly to prove someone wrong. 

“If you protect me,” they mused, in a kaleidoscope of voices. “It would be fair if I protected you, in return.” The kaleidoscope of voices shifted and turned, changing slightly. Bruce wondered if it were just a selection of Gothamite voices, or if it were Gotham trying to find their own voice among the dozens, hundreds, of other voices. 

-- 

Bruce was too old for an imaginary friend. 

Alfred gently suggested that. And therapy. Both in the same conversation. Almost the same breath.  

Bruce had to tamp down his anger. 

Bruce had to tamp it down and act like it wasn’t entirely insulting to be told that his City was imaginary and that he should have outgrown them. 

He wasn’t all that successful, if Alfred’s worried gaze meant anything. 

But Bruce decided that it was as good a time as any to play at putting on an act. To separate parts of his life. 

Hopefully, it would put Alfred at ease, if Bruce stopped talking about them. If he didn’t speak to them except when they were in private. If he didn’t look at them too often when they appeared in the corner of his eye. 

And Gotham understood. They knew that adults were fickle. 

“You are one of the few not to have outgrown me,” they confided. The two of them were in the garden, in late spring, and Gotham’s voice buzzed with spring and bees and life – even cities have life, after all, and spring was still a time of life, no matter how great the asphalt and how little the green.  

“How can anyone outgrow you?” Bruce asked. 

And it was a bit odd, because Bruce was essentially asking his own dark reflection, once more. But it was his younger self that Gotham sat in the garden wearing, as their face of the moment. 

They leaned back, looking up at the sky. “Some are told, as you were, that I am imaginary. They believe it.” Their voice filtered down onto Bruce, still buzzing with spring life, but feeling a bit like a gentle mist of rain, rather than speech. “Some are told, as you were, that they should have grown out of speaking to me. Some grow unable to see me, in any form but that of my roads, my buildings, my topography. Some simply no longer wish to hear or see me.” 

“Why would they want that?” 

Gotham smiled, face still upturned. “Because normal people do not experience me the way you do.” They were using Bruce’s voice again, much as they were using Bruce’s younger face. The voice seemed to come from Bruce, too, though Bruce wasn’t speaking. “Some wish to be normal.” 

Bruce scoffed at that. 

Normal people were fine with Gotham being a cesspool of crime and corruption. He wasn’t. Why should he want to be normal if it meant losing one of his best friends? So that he could be like the people who would rather turn a blind eye to Gotham’s problems, rather than work toward solutions? Yeah, no thanks. 

“You are not other people,” Gotham said. “You’re different. Special.” 

“I guess I have to be, if I want to make a difference,” Bruce said. 

-- 

They started to appear in forms that Bruce found attractive.  

In fact, Gotham themself was how Bruce came to realize that he was bi. 

Somewhere between Gotham in a fitted black suit, dressed in the skin of a boy, and Gotham in a sharp black dress, dressed in the skin of a girl, Bruce realized that the dominant emotion he had – about the binary genders – was a universal “yes, please.” 

Nonbinary genders weren’t unappealing either, which Bruce found rather unfair, as it meant that his middle-teen hormones  wouldn’t calm down around any given gender. 

Bruce’s first kiss was Gotham, wearing the form of a woman and dressed in a dress normally only seen at a charity ball or gala event of some kind. They wore all black, of course. Gotham only ever wore back or dark charcoal grays. 

Bruce was sixteen and his first kiss was an eldritch, cursed city in human form. The human shadow that Gotham City cast. 

-- 

Bruce hopped between college courses at eighteen and nineteen. Dropped out at twenty. 

Left. 

Gotham saw him off, but it didn’t strike Bruce until too late to really do anything about it that Gotham wouldn’t be with him, not the way they had been, when he was away. 

They promised to look in on him. But they couldn’t promise to stay with him. 

“Why?” Bruce asked. 

“I’m Gotham, sweetheart,” they were in the guise of a darkly beautiful woman, dressed more nineteen-forties or nineteen-fifties glamour than for current trends. “I can’t very well leave myself.” 

-- 

Throughout Bruce’s journey, sometimes he glimpsed Gotham in his shadow, or the corner of his eye, or at the end of a dim hall. They couldn’t be much more solid or present than that, though. Not while Bruce was so far away. 

-- 

When Bruce stepped off the plane and back into Gotham, at the end of his journey and his training, Gotham was right there. This time, Gotham wore a masculine form. Something very like Bruce’s own form, but just different enough that Bruce wasn’t terribly thrown off to be kissed by the City. 

“Oh,” Bruce said. 

“I missed you,” Gotham informed him. 

“Oh,” Bruce repeated. 

Then Gotham had whisked themself away and Alfred was wrapping Bruce into a hug. 

-- 

The first night that Bruce donned the cowl, became the Bat, Gotham was his shadow. Gotham was second Bat, not quite there, but enough to confuse and unsettle anyone Bruce went against. Standing to one side, moving as a living shadow, or else standing right in the midst of everything. 

It was like having a decoy, but one which Bruce himself couldn’t predict the location of. 

Gotham had grown since Bruce had left. Not in that such an ancient being literally grew or matured, in the human sense. But in the sense that Gotham had practiced their human guise. Had practiced being real and solid. Had grown into a new ability. 

Things were such that Alfred, from his post in the Cave, started to notice the “second Bat.” Only, he was worried that a civilian, without Bruce’s extensive training, was tagging along. Obviously, a civilian had to be kept out of things, not least because someone with no training would be a liability to themself and to Bruce. 

“It’s Gotham,” Bruce said. 

Alfred heard that as someone who didn’t know that Gotham could be a person. “The City is singular, yes,” Alfred said, “But that does not mean a civilian’s presence can be allowed to continue.” 

“No, Alfred. It’s Gotham,” Bruce repeated. He attempted to put the right emphasis on it, to tell Alfred what he really meant. 

It didn’t work. 

Alfred frowned a bit more deeply. “You’re trying to save Gotham, and her people. Surely you can’t be okay with those people meddling in your cases. They’d cause more drawbacks than can possibly be acceptable—” 

“Their people,” Bruce corrected. 

“Pardon?” 

“You said ‘her people,’ it’s ‘their people,’” Bruce said. 

Alfred’s frown thinned into something much closer to concern. 

Gotham had pity on Bruce, though, and formed themself right there, a bit off to one side. It was first a spilling of the shadows, puddling and pooling and solidifying in its complete darkness. Then it was a shape that formed itself like clay. Then it was a person, leaned up against Bruce’s homebrew supercomputer. 

Gotham looked quite a bit like Alfred, there. But much younger. Like an Alfred Bruce had seen in phot albums. (Like an Alfred who had been plainly in love with both his employers, a third to their dynamic – a second father, even before Thomas ever died.) 

Alfred startled. “Who—” 

“Gotham,” Gotham said. “The City themself, Alfred, dear.” 

Bruce crossed his arms tightly, frowning. 

“I should think not,” Alfred said. 

In his body language, Bruce could see the inclination to call for a priest, or otherwise try salt and silver and holy water on the apparition. The impulse to prove, one way or another, that the being that had appeared in the cave was or wasn’t immediately dangerous. 

“Is it so hard to believe that Cursed ground can be sentient?” Where sometimes Gotham’s voice echoed unexpectedly, doubling and tripling on itself, this time Gotham’s voice defied the cavernous ceiling and distant walls of the Cave, refusing to echo beyond an underlying whisper that hissed sibilantly under their words. 

“It’s Gotham,” Bruce said, again. “The City has watched over me for a long time, Alfred.” 

Alfred turned to him. “Your imaginary friend...?” 

“Not imaginary, as it turns out,” Bruce shrugged. 

“And not a civilian,” Gotham agreed. 

-- 

Gotham was there the day the acrobats fell, dying in front of their son. 

“Why didn’t you save them? Warn them?” Bruce murmured. 

“They were not mine,” Gotham shrugged. Cities didn’t value life. They valued that which was theirs. “But he will be mine,” Gotham said, of the child orphaned on Gotham’s soil. Then Gotham was no longer by Bruce’s side, and a figure very like a ten-year-old Bruce had appeared over by the shellshocked child. 

Bruce went over, as well. 

“This is Bruce,” the child-Gotham whispered. 

The shellshocked child looked up with empty, empty eyes, barely seeing Bruce. 

“Bruce knows. Understands.” 

The boy turned to Gotham, then. “No one understands. How could they?” 

“Bruce does,” Gotham said. They turned to Bruce. “You understand.” 

“Yes,” Bruce crouched in front of the boy. “More than most. I was only your age when I lost my parents.” He offered the child his hands, “My name is Bruce.” 

“Dick,” the kid snuffled. He held his shock blanket closer, instead of shaking Bruce’s hands. “It hurts.” 

“I know.” 

“Will it stop?” 

“No, but it will soften with time, until you’re able to think of the good memories instead of just the bad ones.” 

Dick thinned his lips. 

Bruce withdrew his hand. 

“Bruce, you should take him to your home,” Gotham said. “If you don’t, he’ll run from the group home. He'll look for the perpetrator. He might even kill.” 

“I’ll kill him,” Dick snuffled. “He deserves it.” 

“He does,” Gotham agreed. “But innocent souls shouldn’t be drenched in blood so young.” 

-- 

Bruce never intended for Dick to find out about the Bat. 

He suspected that Gotham told that secret. He also suspected that Gotham led Dick right to the grandfather clock and showed him how to get in. 

Either way, the kid was in the Cave when Bruce returned one night. 

“Gotham said you’re Bruce,” was how Dick greeted him. 

Bruce grunted and crossed his arms. 

“Well. He said Bruce is the Bat,” Dick said. “And you’re the Bat, so that would mean that you’re Bruce.” 

“Do you believe that?” Bruce asked. 

“I wanna learn how to fight,” Dick said. 

“Why?” 

“Well. I wanted to learn to fight so I could get to Zucco. Get revenge, you know? But Gotham told me I’d feel even emptier afterwards – that it wouldn’t help. They said I should try something else – like stopping other kids from losing parents to people like Zucco,” Dick was slouched in Bruce’s computer chair. The computer was logged in, behind Dick, and open on files about Zucco and the people he worked for. 

Gotham had to have logged Dick into the computer. Which was... concerning. 

“You put a lot of stock into what the City tells you,” Bruce said. 

“Will you teach me how to fight?” Dick asked. 

Bruce took the cowl off. 

In spite of having been told so, Dick looked stunned when he realized that Bruce really was the person in the cowl. 

“I’ll teach you how to defend yourself,” he bargained. 

Gotham was, quite suddenly, standing beside Dick – and back to looking like ten-year-old Bruce – smiling a pleased-cat kind of smile. “This will be your partner, Bruce,” Gotham purred. “Someone to bring colour to your life. A son and apprentice.” 

“He’s ten,” Bruce scoffed. 

“He’ll grow.” Gotham aged himself, showing Bruce a vision of himself through the last decade. “You did, after all.” 

-- 

Gotham won, unfortunately. 

When the City thought Bruce’s “robin” was trained enough, Dick became a colourful, distracting partner to the Bat. 

Thankfully, the shadowy Bat that had been Bruce’s partner before became a shadowy Robin that kept a close eye on Dick, instead.