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BATMAN LEGEND CONTINUES: LIVING MYTH OR SIMPLY RUMOR?
The Gotham Gazette runs an article on this so-called Bat-Man at least once a week, as reports from minor criminals and terrified witnesses filter in at rates they cannot discount. It’s mostly speculation — accounts are varied, tempered by fear and concussions, and no pictures nor footage has been recoverable about the vigilante.
Consistencies between the reports seem to make a terrifying figure: A person of deadly caliber, dressed all in black as dark or darker than the night, ears on their head and steel on their belt, a bat displayed across their chest. They strike hard and true, they are silent until the fight is already over, they disappear as fast as they appeared. They don’t stick around, they don’t speak, they strike with a violence that knows no bounds.
Brucine looks at the newspaper. There is perhaps more truth in the accounts getting out than she’d originally expected. Already blurry images of her silhouetted against the light pollution wrought sky has emerged, maybe she needs to make her cloak more grey than black. Already two, not just one, accounts have mentioned her open jaw. There are reports of her existence from reputable witnesses, and truly shame on her for believing the Gotham citizens would allow her to remain legend over flesh, for at least a time.
But well… there’s more than enough fake news out there for her to feel safe. They say she has fangs, she’s a vampire bat. They say she can teleport, or that she can glide, that she can melt into the shadows as easily as one born unto the darkness itself. They say she must be magical or metahuman or simply a giant bat, that there is no way for an average human to be as precisely violent as she.
Most.. intriguingly, they have named her, “The Bat-man.”
Not “The Bat” as she had been expecting, calling herself, and planning for.
Not “Batwoman” as she had considered getting called.
Not even “The dark” or something equally as inane.
No. They call her Batman. As if she were a man. As if she were that lucky as to be a man from the start.
The bat imagery was expected — she gave herself ears for godsake, she planned for this. But to call her a man? She has not spoken a single word during patrol, nothing within earshot at least, but it’s not as though she took great pains to hide her sex. Her armor is fit to her figure, not to some extreme version of femininity or masculinity — it’s just her body.
And, sure, her body isn’t really what defines her. She’s more of a personality person than a body person — she’s not as much of a ‘fan’ of her body as many are of theirs, but she doesn’t hate it either. It’s just sort of there.
Still, she doesn’t know what about her persona screams male.
Alfred brings her a cup of coffee. He’s always been better at this sort of thing, at understanding what the public is thinking and translating it for her.
Maybe he’ll understand.
“Alfred.”
He sets down her cup. “Yes, Master Wayne?”
“Why do they assume I am a man?”
Alfred purses his lips, scanning over her in her casual clothes — the large T-shirt, the sweatpants, her hair pulled back off of her shoulders. “The assumptions we make must often be challenged. They have decided it is most likely the Bat in their midsts is a man.”
Brucine considers. It’s not as though their assumptions are a bad thing for her. In fact, her secret identity is much more secure with the basics of their sex’s being directly opposed. “I guess I just… don’t know how to feel about it.”
“Perfectly reasonable. Why don’t you take some time to figure that out before you decide to have a press conference about it?”
Brucine snorts: as if Batman would ever have a press conference where he reveals something as personal as his gender. Or, uh, as her gender.
Maybe it won’t matter all that much. After all, she’s going for fear more than anything. Being mistaken for the wrong gender won’t change that at all, her legend status would be the same as Batman or as Batwoman.
It’s really meaningless, at the end of the day.
The media can say whatever they’d like.
…
It’s getting hard to ignore.
There’s a certain sense of euphoria that creeps in whenever Brucine sees the headlines say something like: THE DARK KNIGHT CAUSES PETTY CRIME RATES TO PLUMMET
There’s a sense of satisfaction when they speculate: GOTHAM’S NOTORIOUS VIGILANTE; FRIEND OR FOE?
It swells her with pride when they read: THE BAT OF GOTHAM SAVES SCHOOLBUS FROM A POTENTIALLY TERRIBLE FATE
The problem isn’t the headline itself. The problem isn’t even how she feels about the headline. It’s just that when the Gossip Rags start saying things about 10 SIGNS THE BAT-MAN IS GOTHAM’S MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELOR, she’s filled with euphoria, satisfaction, pride, and total, utter confusion as to why.
She, Brucine, has been voted Gotham’s most eligible bachelorette numerous times now and she’s never felt like this before. It’s just a fact of life, it’s just how her public persona is, it’s how it has to be. She’s never felt any particular way about her sexualization: she is and that’s fine. It’s how the cookies crumble, she went one way on that little 50% chance at the very beginning and now she just has to deal with getting questions about children and sexualized and expected to deal with the utterly horrible feeling of makeup on her face.
But when she’s called the Bat-man? It’s like she sees herself in a totally new light.
She feels good about herself, when she’s called the batman. She would shimmy her shoulders in delight if outward displays of excitement wasn’t trained out of her at such a young age.
When she’s the Batman, it’s right, almost. Like it’s who she was meant to be. Like people see her how she wants to be seen.
It’s stupid.
And utterly confusing.
Maybe it’s because she’s helping people. She feels good that this persona that she created specifically to take out the bad guys and protect the innocent is being acknowledged and even liked by the public. Or it’s because it’s something entirely of her own. Her body was something decided by fate or chance, her company was given to her by her parents, her reputation is played up for safety reasons. But her identity as Batman? What she does to help the city, her city? That’s all Batman. That’s all her.
So it doesn’t have to do with being recognized as a bachelor rather than a bachelorette. Nope. That would be weird, that would be against nature, and that is simply not the truth of the matter. She likes being called Batman because that’s the name that was bestowed upon her.
It’s fine.
…
Brucine was invited to be on a Real Women talk show.
It was fine.
She went and smiled her brightest smile, laughed politely as she’d been taught, and pretended, as always, that she belonged there.
Her brain travels at 50 miles an hour in a hurricane round and round her head at all times; every thought she’s ever had has been thuroughly twisted and turned and examined, and she’s had so many thoughts. Her outward appearance is dictated through the eye, she acts according to the culmination of all of the best plans, and she is calm and composed in the center of a raging storm of information being spun together with plans and thoughts.
She played her role perfectly. She was a woman of near-perfect caliber. She was every woman she’s seen on TV, every woman she’s been raised to be, she was the perfect amalgamation of what she imagines a real woman to be.
But she couldn’t shake the thoughts that kept telling her that she doesn’t belong.
You see, real women don’t dress up as a man to go out and fight crime most nights. And, okay, most men don’t do that either, and also, okay, so she’s not dressing as a man she’s dressing as a bat and everyone just assumed she was a man. Yeah, fine, she gets the point.
Still, real women wouldn’t be perfectly content allowing the whole world to believe she was actually a man. She doesn’t think they would, anyway. It’s not like she can ask.
And real women wouldn’t be completely confused by other’s acceptance of ‘womanhood’ as a special little treat reserved only for them. It’s just a thing, just a flip of the coin. Like, Brucine doesn’t understand what’s supposed to be so great about it. Apparently, real women actually like being a woman.
Real women would choose to be a woman, apparently.
At least, that’s the vibe he she got on the talk show. That everyone there would choose to be there, if given the choice.
Maybe she’s just fallen too deep into her mission. She’s always been strange — playing in the mud, knocking the teeth out of the kitchen boy’s face, being both terrified and strangely drawn to the source of her terror. Maybe she’s just been Batman too much these days. She probably just feels out of place around normal people who don’t know what it’s like to break femurs.
Maybe that’s it. It’s not a sense of unreality due to her womanhood, it’s a sense of unreality due to her choice in hobbies.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
…
Alfred has only called her ‘Master Wayne’ since she got home from her training. She’s always wondered why.
When asked, Alfred has a strange look pass over his face. “I will call you whatever you wish. Do you have a preferred name?”
What a strange choice of words. She’s heard about that before — a preferred name.
Like a nickname. Only… not. Because it’s not just about shortening your name or adding humorous subtext, it’s about making yourself more authentic.
Or that’s what the pamphlet had said.
She’d funded a charity for the LGBT youth and she’d read over the pamphlets they sent over as research.
It was very… informative.
She’s known for a while that she doesn’t particularly care for the gender of her partners, and apparently that makes her pan. (Or bi, depending on what she’d prefer calling herself).
But also, she skimmed over the section on T; trans people. The obvious stuff, things she’s known about for years — ever since her father started ranting about them in front of her and she’d asked Alfred to explain it to her later. There’s the men, or, uh, ex-men who become women. There’s a whole section on the history of trans women in the United States, about Stonewall and the subsequent pride movement being spearheaded by them. Brucine feels a vague sense of pride, that these people were able to think about themselves deeply and fully, imagining themselves in other scenarios, scenarios where they weren’t accepted by most of the people around them, and still decided to be true to themselves and become the women they knew themselves to be. It makes Brucine question every part of the womanhood that she has never quite fit into — these people decided to make themselves fit. Maybe she can do it too. Make womanhood fit.
Then there was a section on trans men. People born as a female, raised as a girl, living as a woman, who then decide to become… a man.
It’s weird, Brucine thinks.
Against nature.
Because, you see, you can’t just do that. Take, for instance, Brucine. She’s nothing like the epitome of women; she’s strong, she’s crass at times, she finds wearing makeup to be awful and relating to other women to be some of the hardest things she’s tried to do. Her life experiences leave her lacking any sort of femininity other than what she is forced to project to the public. Do you really think that if a woman could just do something as crazy as become a man, that Brucine would still be a woman?
The T section also goes into a couple more terms. Nonbinary they call it, a spectrum they explain, a space for people who feel they are outside of the binary options of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. People who feel completely disconnected from the concept of gender, people who feel like they are both, people who move between any and all options on the day, people who simply are not the other two. There are more terms, more gender options, more weird feelings of Deja vu and nausea.
It’s pure statistics, you see? If there are this many options, then it’s incredibly likely that Brucine actually isn’t one of the two normal options. And if she’s outside of the correct option, which she’s statistically likely to be, then that makes her an outsider. She would be wrong. Just as wrong as she always knew she was, just as bad a woman, just as upsetting to the general populace as she’s already believed.
And what if she doesn’t think woman fits her?
What could she even do about that?
“No,” she says to Alfred when he asks her for a preferred name. “Continue as you were.”
…
It’s a bad day.
Two galas in two days, no time in between to suit up as Batman, to let out her aggression, to center herself in the mission and her identity as Batman. No time in between to even work on a case, to fiddle with her machines, to let out some of her pent up energy and emotions and thoughts. She’s understimulated, overstimulated, and angry.
And now, while getting ready for the second gala, she has to look at herself in the mirror. She has to prepare to be Brucine, the woman on the top of her city, the woman who everyone believes she should be and so she must be.
Now, right now, she has to look at herself and push up her boobs and smile in preparation and relax her shoulders and become every inch the woman she was raised to be.
And now, in anger and energy and with too little on her mind and nothing to distract her from her growing sense of self hatred, she throws a tube of lipstick at the mirror, shattering it. She sobs once, a sound of hatred and disgust and pain and anger that escapes because she can no longer keep it in. She grips onto the side of her bathroom sink and stares into a sliver of mirror that found its way beneath her; she stares at the broken face of a broken woman, a woman who is wrong, a woman who can find no sliver of womanhood within her for her to embody, a woman who is displaced within her own skin.
Her palms cut on some small shards and she welcomes the pain — Batman wasn’t able to bruise his knuckles yesterday, Batman wasn’t allowed to go out and fight, Batman couldn’t protect his city because she had to be at the gala last night and now she has to be at another one tonight and it’s all she can do to keep herself from falling to her knees, ruining both her dress and any ideas she might have about pulling herself together for tonight. She has to be okay, she has to pretend, she has to keep pretending and pretending and playing her role to perfection, just like always, just like she was taught, just like her father wanted her to and how her mother taught her to and how the socialites expect her to.
Another sound escapes her, this time a hitching of breath as she tries to control herself, tries to keep herself from breaking down, tries to stabilize herself once more into Brucine Wayne, playgirl, billionaire, philanthropist.
Alfred is there.
Alfred is always there for her, and here, now, physically, he enters her bathroom and takes her up into his arms.
“I can’t, Alfred, I- I can’t.”
He soothes her, running his hands over her hair, muttering small “shh”s as she grips back at him.
He’s always been something of a father figure to her. He’s always been the nice one, the one who she would go to with questions that was not becoming of her to ask to her parents. He took care of her long before her parents died and continued to do so even as all the others left. He patches up her wounds when she’s hurt, he schedules her favorite meals for when she’s likely to need it, he gives her advice and guidance, he’s someone who will understand her even when her words are hard to come by and her actions are performed rashly. He’s always been there, and he’s here now too.
“I can’t do it anymore, I just can’t Alfred,” Brucine cries, allowing her tears to flow now in the arms of her father figure.
“I know master Wayne, I know,” Alfred continues in his soothing British cadence. He rubs her back as she hiccups, spurting out words that no one could ever truly decipher. “It will all work out. I know it’s hard.”
“I can’t be her anymore. Please,” Brucine whimpers.
“You do not have to be anyone but yourself, master Bruce,” Alfred says, and the title makes Bruce shake.
Because he doesn’t know if he ever could have chosen a name for himself. The self hatred, self doubt, internalized transphobia, all of the above — it all would have kept him from choosing. He would have thought of his parents and their name ideas, but then, they knew they were going to have a girl. They knew they’d have a girl and any thoughts of her turning out to be a boy was abolished before they even started.
But Alfred — Alfred named him. Alfred could name him, as a person of honor in his life, as the father that he never had, as the one person that can see him as a whole person instead of a projection into the fog.
And he’s sure now, not of everything, of course, but as sure as he is of anything surrounding this topic, that he’s a he now. That all he needed, all he ever wanted, really, was his name given to him. He wasn’t begging for the name to be given to him, he’s not sure what he was begging for really, but now that it’s been given, it’s the best gift he’s ever had. It’s meaningful, it’s thought out, and most importantly, it’s his. It’s his and he’s claimed it. It’s his to keep.
“Yes, yes yes.” He whimpers into Alfred’s chest, hands still clutching the butler’s suit jacket, shoulders still shaking with emotion, voice still overwhelmed with exhaustion and pain and despair. ”I like Bruce,” he whispers, almost scared to say it aloud.
“Of course, master Bruce.”
Alfred slowly detaches himself from Bruce and takes his hands. He cleans and dresses the wounds, then leads him out of the bathroom and into one of the cozier lounges. He sits them across from each other, close enough that their knees touch, giving Bruce that rarity of human touch.
Slowly, so he can internalize every word, but firmly, so he can believe every word, Alfred says, “There is nothing wrong with you, master Bruce.”
The pained expression on Bruce’s face signals to Alfred to keep talking.
“I find pride within myself every time I am able to assist you as I believe no other could. I have found myself with the most important task in the known world, and that is helping you in every endeavor you may choose to partake in. I find joy in your joy, anger in your anger, and love in your love. To help you is to complete my life’s purpose. And that’s why, these last many months as you have struggled to find words and definitions for the things you have felt and been turned away from your whole life, I have felt the pain as you have.
“To me, you have always been my child. And you would continue to be my child whether a man, woman, or anything else under the sun.”
“How?” Bruce’s voice breaks, high pitched and weary and utterly broken in a way he doesn’t think he’s felt since the night his parents died. “How did you know?”
Alfred gives a little smile, solemn and dreadfully fond. “You asked me a long time ago why you were not born a boy. I answered to the best of my abilities, but I did not know, then, that you were not simply asking about biology. Through the years you have grown up, matured, become the person I always knew you could become — but you have not relaxed into your skin. I would be a terrible father, of sorts, if I could not tell.”
Bruce’s expression breaks. He’s open, vulnerable in a way he doesn’t think ever has been before. In a small voice, he asks, “what do I do now, Alfred?”
”Whatever you would like, Master Bruce.” He places a hand on Bruce’s knee. “I suggest giving it time to settle. Explore, see what you like. I have gathered clothes you may prefer. You are allowed to see what being Bruce would be like.”
Bruce flinches. Can he? Is he allowed to be a whole new person, a new gender, new pronouns, new name, and just… try it out? Is it not wrong to not be immediately convinced? Is it not wrong for any of this to have been an idea in the first place?
“As for tonight, I will cancel your reservation. I rather think you’ve come down with a case of the flu and will simply be able to send a check for the pound services. We will have a quiet night in, far from the mission, far from the crowds.
“Then, later… you can choose whether you wish to tell the public that you are Bruce or not. There is no rush, nor necessity. Your public persona was already an act; it will be no hardship to differentiate between Brucine in public and Bruce at home, if that’s something you’d like.”
Bruce bobs his head in multiple directions. “I don’t know,” he mutters, looking lost.
“You do not have to. Not now. Not within 10 years. You have plenty of time.”
Bruce smiles. It’s tearful and not at all practiced. It’s sad and hopeful and grateful all at the same time, and it’s so unlike anything Bruce has ever done before that Alfred immediately pulls the other man into a hug. “Thank you.”
“Of course my boy. Of course.”